The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (75 page)

“Right. I guess I’d better go and work on plan B, huh?”

George shook his pipe at him. “You do that. But make sure you’re back here after lunch. We need a hand to get the sled down off them blocks.”

“Sure.” Ozzie took a couple of paces, then looked back. “George, you don’t happen to know any good chat-up lines, do you?”

George took a moment to examine his pipe. “If I did, I wouldn’t waste them on the likes of you.”

Ozzie left the workshop and headed back down to his rooms. George had made him remember the worst days of high school, the times when he wound up outside the principal’s office. The talking to that was always worse than any possible detention.

He could never tell George, or Sara come to that, but the reason he’d been considering the mass escape was Orion. The simple fact was, he couldn’t be sure about getting out if he took the boy with him. On his own it wouldn’t be a problem. He could ski, he’d even started carving himself a pair out of bone. No Silfen was going to get away from a human on skis no matter how fleet of foot they were. And he had his packaged food, and energy drinks, and lightweight equipment; all of which he could carry. But Orion … the boy hadn’t even seen snow before they got here, let alone knew how to move through it.

And all the while, when he was putting plans together, there was that one thought coiled up at the back of his mind: how much simpler it would be to leave Orion behind. There might even come a day when he didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like he’d come searching for enlightenment or fulfillment like George and most of the others. He was on the paths for a reason. And God only knew what was happening back in the Commonwealth right now.

Ozzie walked across the main chamber and into the passageway that led to his cluster of rooms. The tochee was there, just coming out of the cavern they used to sleep in. It was the alien Ozzie had mistaken for a young Raiel the day he’d arrived at the Ice Citadel. At first sight it was a reasonable error. The tochee had a similar blunt body, like a squashed egg about three and a half yards long, and coming up to the middle of Ozzie’s chest. Its hide was a kind of bristly fur, a dark caramel in color, which looked as if it was about two sizes too big, the whole body was covered in wrinkles and creases, like a bulldog’s face. Strange little wizened black fronds grew out of the folds, as if it were sprouting seaweed.

The eye, or what people believed was its seeing organ, was a curved pyramid a yard or so behind its mouth, made up from three oval sections of translucent black flesh, with the one at the front twice as long as the other pair, curving down so it could follow the body-profile.

But it was the way the alien moved that was most interesting. Two fat ridges of rubbery tissue ran along its underbelly, for all the world like sled skis, except these rippled like snakes to push it along. The surface of the ridges was mottled, gray and bruise-brown, with some cracks oozing rheumy body fluid. Sara had said the tochee was in bad shape when they found it out on the edge of the crystal tree forest. Although the ridges were a sophisticated biological method of locomotion, their nature meant it couldn’t wear protective cladding. Its ridges were badly frostbitten from moving over the icy ground, where they suffered constant contact with the sub-zero soil. That was over two years ago, and the flesh still hadn’t grown back properly.

A second pair of ridges protruded from its back. They were shorter, extending only a little farther than its eye, and they were more bulbous. Ozzie had seen them swell out to grip cups and plates, or help lift objects too heavy for human arms, like giant amoebas shaping themselves into chubby tendrils or jaws. As tool users went, it was a high evolutionary concept.

In fact, it was only its manipulator flesh, along with a few high-technology artifacts it was carrying on a utility belt, that convinced the other Ice Citadel residents that it was sentient at all. In the whole two years it had been here, nobody had managed to communicate with it at all. It didn’t make any sound with its mouth, let alone speak. As far as they could tell, it was deaf. They’d tried chalking pictures on a slab, but it didn’t seem to understand them. All they had left were simple arm gestures: come, stay, go, lift, put down. It cooperated most of the time, as if it were a well-trained sheepdog.

They didn’t even know its true name, the
Korrok-hi
had named it the tochee, which in their language of hoots and whistles meant big fat worm.

“So what were you looking for in there?” Ozzie mused out loud as he stood in front of it.

The tochee’s snout waved slightly from side to side, putting Ozzie in mind of some animal awaiting castigation. To his eye it had the attitude of a whipped dog, but then, he supposed, if all he did every day was carry buckets of water from the fountain to the kitchen, on frostbitten toes, unable to talk to anyone, or know what was going on outside, he’d be seriously depressed, too.

“Okay, let’s go see.” He walked around the flank of the tochee and pushed the door curtain aside. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the security mesh had been moved around slightly, as if something had gently prodded it. “Come on then.” He beckoned the tochee with an exaggerated gesture. The big creature turned smoothly in the passageway, and slithered into the sleeping room. Once again, Ozzie was impressed by how agile the alien was; for something that size it could move quickly and precisely.

He sat on the cot, staring at the tochee, and gestured around expansively. “Go ahead.” The alien didn’t move. It kept its great front eye perfectly aligned on the human.

“All right then.” Ozzie went over to the security mesh and clicked the padlock’s combination code, covering the motion with his body. He still wasn’t that trusting. With the mesh open, he pulled out various articles, food, clothes, a kerosene lamp, his sewing kit, a handheld array, and set them down on the floor in front of the alien. The tochee’s locomotion ridges flattened slightly, lowering it down; then its manipulator flesh on the left side flowed out into a slim tentacle that picked up the array. The tip pressed each of the five buttons on top. But the unit remained dead.

“Ah-ha,” Ozzie said. Only someone familiar with technology would understand a button. “So you understand technology, but we can’t communicate. Why not?” He sat back on the cot and looked at the tochee again. It might be a human interpretation, but the alien seemed to slump in disappointment at the array’s failure. It slowly replaced it on the floor, little black fronds rustling like autumn leaves in a breeze.

“You don’t use sound, so what does that leave us with? Telepathy? Doubtful. Magnetic fields? Bees and trokken marshrats can sense them, but the Silfen are probably damping them here. Possible, then. Electromagnetic? Ditto for radio waves, the array is dead. Shapes? You’re visually perceptive, so that’s another possible. I can’t match that shapeshifting arm trick, though, and Sara said you didn’t understand pictures.” He cocked his head to one side. “Make that human pictures. I wouldn’t understand yours. That’s if you draw them. Now there’s a culture difference. Do you have art?” Ozzie stopped. He was feeling mildly foolish talking out loud to an alien that couldn’t hear. The tochee was still facing him, the front eye perfectly aligned. Ozzie shuffled a few inches along the cot. The tochee’s front body moved slightly, tracking him. “Why are you doing that? What can you be trying to say.”
No, not what. How?
Ozzie stared at that elongated oval of shiny black flesh that was pointing right at him. Not sound, but an emission of … “Shit.” He switched his retinal inserts to infrared, and the tochee’s body crawled with strange thermal signatures, hinting at the location of blood vessels and organs hidden below the flesh. He slowly worked up through the visual spectrum, until he reached ultraviolet. “Fuck!” Ozzie jumped backward in reflex shock, and fell off the cot.

The tochee’s forward eye was alive with complex dancing patterns of deep purple light shining straight at him.

When Orion returned to their rooms a couple of hours after lunch he found the tochee almost blocking the doorway. Ozzie was sitting on his cot, sketching furiously with a pencil on one of his notebooks. The rock floor was littered with scraps of paper, all with the weirdest patterns on them, like flowers drawn by a five-year-old, where every petal was represented by a jagged bolt of lightning.

“George Parkin’s been looking for you,” Orion began. “Why is that in here?”

Ozzie gave him a manic grin, his crazy hair fluffing out from his head as if he’d been hit by a big static charge. “Oh, me and Tochee here are just having a little chat.” He just couldn’t keep the smugness from his tone.

“Uh?” was all Orion managed.

Ozzie picked up one of the pieces of paper torn out of the notebook. The pattern was like a rosette of fractured glass, but there was a word scribbled on the top corner. Ozzie’s other hand held up a leather shoe. Half of the contents from their packs were scattered around. “This is its symbol for shoe,” he said jubilantly. “Yes, look, it’s repeating it. Course, it might just be the symbol for violated dead animal skin, but who the hell cares. We’re getting there. We’re building a vocabulary.”

Orion looked from Ozzie to the tochee. “Repeating what?”

“The symbol. There are other components to it, but they move the whole time. I can see them but I can’t draw them. So I’m just sticking to basics. I think the moving parts might be grammar codes, or context information.”

“Ozzie, what symbol?”

“Sit down, I’ll tell you.”

“It talks in pictures?” Orion asked ten minutes later.

“That’s the simple explanation, yes.”

“What’s the complicated one?”

“The pattern it projects is the visual language of the picture, sort of the same as we give names to objects. I imagine when two of them communicate together it’s extremely fast. There’s a lot of information in a pattern like that. I’m sure I’m only getting the fundamentals of it. In fact, I’m going to try and teach it the human alphabet. But I’m not surprised it didn’t understand the pictures Sara tried to draw for it, like the difference between drawing a stick man, and seeing a fully fledged color hologram of a man. Tochee will have to learn how to think down to our level, I’m afraid.”

“That’s good.”

“So why do you sound like it’s the world’s biggest bummer?”

“Well, it’s nice for Tochee, and everything, but writing notes isn’t going to get us off this stinking world, is it?”

“You think?” Ozzie grinned. “Know what the first thing tochee asked me?
Can you get me out of here?
That means we can team up. We’ll make a great team, the three of us.”

“How come?”

“Tochee is strong, and fast. And that’s what we need to keep up with the Silfen.”

“It can’t go outside, Ozzie. It freezes!”

“I’ve got some ideas about that. I’ll talk to George about them tomorrow.”

Orion gave the big alien a curious look. “You really think you can do that, get it to come along?”

“Hope so, man. We’ve just been fooling around so far, letting each other know we can talk. Now we’ve got to build a real communications bridge. I’ve got some programs in my inserts that are still working, kind of; they’re translation and interpretation routines, the type CST use when they encounter a new species for the first time. They’ll take you all the way from ‘the cat sat on the mat’ up to discussing metaphysics. Damn, this would be so much easier if my array was working.”

“Lucky your inserts are.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Ozzie, look!”

Tochee extended a thin tendril from its manipulator flesh, and picked a piece of paper off the floor. The pattern was close to a spiral of snowflakes, in the corner Ozzie had written array, or electronics in general?

“Why that one?” Ozzie muttered. He stared at Tochee’s forward eye that was flaring with fast-moving lavender patterns. “Ah, could be ‘communications device.’ I think Tochee wants me to get on with it.”

“Can I watch?” Orion asked excitedly. “It’s got to be better than the stables.”

“Yeah, you can watch. It might take a while, though.”

SEVENTEEN

It had taken days to cajole her father into supporting the weekend. Not that Justine Burnelli actually wanted him there, not as he was right now, barely six months out of rejuve. He was impossible at the best of times, but add his natural brute stubbornness to youthful vitality, and it made him damn near inhuman. However, she had to concede, his presence made the weekend a valid event; without him, the necessary players would never have turned up.

They’d chosen to have it at Sorbonne Wood, the family’s West Coast retreat, a big estate outside Seattle, with fast-flowing rivers and extensive woodland hemmed in by mountains. She would have preferred a weekend at the Tulip Mansion, the family’s primary home over on the East Coast. It was so much more civilized than this rustic sanctuary. But the informal gathering that the Burnellis were hosting was to be discreet above all else.

People started arriving midafternoon on the Friday. Justine had been there a day already, overseeing the personal preparations, something she never quite entrusted to her staff for get-togethers at this level. Sorbonne Wood consisted of a large main house, originally of stone and concrete, which was now thoroughly covered by drycoral, one of the oldest examples on Earth. It had been planted over two centuries ago. The two native colors of lavender and beige that grew up the walls and across the roof seemed insipid compared to the modern varieties that GM had made available. Their braided fronds also suffered from poor texture, with older sections susceptible to crumbling; so the groundstaff encouraged constant growth. By now the fronds were a foot thicker than the house’s original walls, which made the big picture windows appear organic they were so sunken. The UFN’s Environment Commissioners would doubtless impose a removal order and a hefty fine on anyone else who was impudent enough to cultivate the alien plant to such an extent, but no mere EC official was ever going to get through Sorbonne Wood’s security perimeter.

The interior of the main house was made up of various reception rooms, relaxation facilities, and the dining rooms. Family members and guests stayed in any of the dozen lodges arranged in a semicircle around the rear gardens, and linked to the main house by rose-covered pergola walks. On the outside at least these satellite buildings made an attempt to conform with local heritage. They had log walls and bark-slate roofs, although the interiors were strictly twenty-fourth century in terms of furnishings and convenience.

Gore Burnelli was the first to arrive, driving up under the wide gull-wing porch canopy in a huge black Zil limousine. Even though it was electric, Justine thought the six-wheeled monster must surely violate some kind of environmental laws, it was so heavy, and twice the size of her own current Jaguar coupe. Three other big sedans pulled in behind it, carrying members of her father’s retinue; and her e-butler told her another two had gone straight to the estate’s little staff village.

Justine stepped forward to greet the old tyrant-king as the Zil’s rear door opened and its ground steps slid out. Two assistants doubling as bodyguards emerged first, looking like traditional mobsters in their sleek black suits and silver-band glasses. Justine showed no emotion at their appearance. They weren’t needed here, and her father knew that, in fact he was probably wetwired to be a lot more lethal than they could ever be. His last rejuvenation at the family’s biogenic center had taken longer than usual.

Gore Burnelli appeared in the Zil’s doorway, sniffing the air. “Goddamn Seattle; goddamn raining again,” he grunted. A light drizzle misted the sky, making the edges of the gull-wing canopy drip constantly over the conifers planted around it. “Don’t know why we don’t just move this fucking place over to England. Same weather, better beer.”

Justine gave him a gentle hug. “Stop it, Dad. This weekend is going to be tough enough for me as it is, without having to keep you in order.”

He made an attempt to grin back at her. It wasn’t an easy gesture for him, not with that face. She could still see his native human features; as a normal twenty-year-old he would have been strikingly handsome. His thick fair hair was already starting to curl mischievously as it sprouted vigorously from the short crew cut he’d come out of the tank with. But the sheer number and complexity of his OCtattoos meant that they had merged together and now completely covered his face, giving him 24 karat golden skin like the sarcophagus mask of an ancient Egyptian king. “Like I’d dare complain with you riding my ass.”

“How’s Mom?”

Gore rolled his eyes; they at least appeared normal. “How the fuck should I know. You tell me who she was, I erased the memory centuries ago.”

“Liar.” Justine saw the bodyguards stiffen slightly; they probably weren’t used to anyone talking to their boss like this. But then Justine was Gore’s firstborn, conceived and born entirely naturally, unlike the fifty-odd children that had followed her and her brother. Back then Gore had been a mere billionaire, inheriting the wealth of two distinguished old-money American families as his parents joined in dynastic union. With some astute judgments and predictions, and not a little political influence, his original extensive portfolios had grown in tandem with the human expansion into phase one space. The Burnellis, like all of Earth’s Grand Families, were living proof that money breeds money. Dawson Knight, the legal, accountancy, and management firm that was the core of the family financial empire, was staffed almost entirely by family members. Its raison d’être was accumulating more wealth, and protecting that which already existed. The Burnellis had holdings on every planet in the Commonwealth, from acres of strategic real estate around the outskirts of phase three space capital cities to entire blocks of manufacturing capacity on each of the Big15, from transport and retail companies to banks, utilities, and cutting-edge start-up enterprises. Anything that did or would one day turn a profit, they took a slice early in the game.

Justine had played a huge part in building the family fortune over the centuries, performing nearly every role from troubleshooter in the early decades, to chief acquisition negotiator, and more lately a subtle political broker. Not that she ever favored the more public political role her brother took. But despite all that, all the dealing, the maneuvering, the manipulation that she’d carried out over the long centuries, it was Gore who remained the sacrosanct heart of the ever-increasing Burnelli family.

“Well, I saw Mom a month ago,” Justine said. “She sends her love.”

“She’s not coming here, is she?” Gore suddenly shifted his focus. As always, his virtual vision surrounded him with financial displays, news précis, and market reports from Dawson Knight, looking to buy options, futures, land, currency. If there was an opportunity to advantage the family, he’d take it.

“No. You’re safe here,” Justine said.

“Good. I’m going to my lodge. But I want to see you and your brother before any of the horse trading starts this evening.”

“I’ll tell Thompson when he gets here.”

Gore and his retinue of bodyguards, assistants, and aides walked into the main house. A couple of beautiful Oriental girls brought up the rear of the procession, wearing tight white microdresses. They were twins, or reprofiled to look identical. Both of them bowed respectfully as they passed Justine, who just managed not to scowl back at them. In some respects, her father could be terribly predictable. The girls would be slotted into his schedule the same way as a finance conference or a meal. Every minute of his day was worked into his personal agenda weeks in advance. She knew a lot of people speculated that he’d received illegal psychoneural profiling to turn him into an obsessive compulsive about work and the family. But she still possessed the memories of her early childhood, when he was rarely home from Wall Street before ten or eleven in the evening, spending every weekend in his study with computer screens as his only companions. He’d always been single-minded, keeping human requirements to the minimum. As technology advanced, so he acquired more and more interface and processing functions to keep him attuned to the great pan-Commonwealth financial markets.

Half an hour after Gore arrived, Campbell Sheldon drove up to Sorbonne Wood. Justine greeted him with a genuine enough smile. He was one of Nigel’s great-great-grandchildren, the youngest of three brothers from a direct lineage granddaughter. That gave him a lot of seniority within the Sheldon family, and as he’d chosen a CST career he’d achieved a high-ranking position as the Director for Advanced Civil and Commercial Projects. Though Nigel was quite adamant that being family only ever got your foot on the bottom of the ladder, from there you had to move up on merit.

Campbell had a couple of aides with him, but that was all. Justine remembered enjoying that no-fuss attitude the previous time they’d met. Today, Campbell was halfway between rejuvenations, giving him an apparent age in his forties. A trim mouse-brown beard covered cheeks that were slightly chubby; he definitely had inherited some of Nigel’s characteristics: the deep eyes, small nose, darkening blond hair. A few discreet platinum OCtattoos spiraled behind and below his ears.

He kissed her lightly on both cheeks and said, “You’re looking fabulous.”

“Thank you. I think I was just about due for rejuve the last time we met.”

“The party on the Muang Senator’s yacht, if I remember rightly. The Braby bridge opening ceremony. They had airfish floating over the yacht like yellow balloons.”

“Oh, Lord, you are terribly well briefed. I can see I’m going to have to spend all night updating myself.”

“I hope not all night. That would be a waste of an evening.”

“Ah. I remember this part of you very well.” Her gesture invited him into the hall.

“What can I say? I’m a Sheldon. I have a reputation to keep up.”

“Weren’t you with that rock singer that time on the yacht?”

“Ah, the dear Calisto. We parted company not long after, I’m afraid. She left me for a drummer.”

“She named herself after a moon?”

He shrugged. “It was fashionable back then.”

“So what is now? Asteroids? Comets?”

Campbell laughed, then paused to look at the house. “Is that really drycoral? On Earth?”

“Yes. Please don’t report us to the Feds. It’s older than most of our family members.”

“I’m easily bribed. A quiet late-night drink. Bathing together in romantic candlelight. Making love in a four-poster bed.”

Justine smiled back. “I’ll certainly consider a plunge in a mountain stream with you. We have several in the grounds.”

“My God, you’re a sadist. In Washington state in springtime? Do you have any idea what water that cold will do to a man?”

“I’m game to find out if you are.”

“Okay. But I certainly expect that drink later on. What’s the form for the weekend?”

“Strictly informal. The main decision on the starflight agency has already be taken by the ExoProtectorate Council. All that’s left are a few policy shakedowns to get things working smoothly before the Senate confirmation. If I might suggest … This gives you an excellent opportunity to explore options with Patricia Kantil.”

“Huh,” Campbell grunted. “She’s coming, is she?”

“Oh, yes.”

Patricia Kantil was actually the next to arrive. Stepping out of a mid-price-range Ford Occlat, wearing a neat office suit, also off-the-shelf, and classic black pumps. She kept an apparent age in her mid-fifties, mature enough to be trustworthy, not so old as to be losing any intellectual capacity. A web of silver OCtattoos radiated out from her eyes, so thin they were invisible most of the time. Her hairstyle and makeup carefully emphasized her Latin ethnicity. Justine could tell she spent a lot of money on that salon styling, but voters wouldn’t be able to tell that as she stood one pace behind her boss, Elaine Doi.

The fact that Doi’s chief political advisor was spending a weekend in Seattle barely ten days after the Vice President had announced her candidacy was a telling point to Justine. For Patricia these two days would be a major lobbying exercise. She’d brought her secretary with her, a studious young man, dressed in the kind of designer casuals an urban type always wore in the great outdoors. He stood attentively behind his chief, only ever speaking when spoken to.

Justine was busy welcoming them when a third person emerged from the Occlat. A young girl with long blond hair, actually taller and slimmer than Justine. Her clothes were unashamedly expensive, a short skirt and shiny gold V-necked top that highlighted her figure. She glanced around the grounds with the unique bubbly exuberance that spelled first-lifer, smiling broad approval at what she saw.

“And this is Isabella,” Patricia said. “My companion.”

“Hi there. You have a lovely place here,” Isabella gushed. She stuck her hand out eagerly, wanting to make friends.

“Thank you,” Justine said. “It took a while, but we’ve gotten it how we like it.” It would be so easy to shower Isabella with sarcasm and irony, the girl would never notice. But that would make her a bitch, and this weekend didn’t need any ructions. “Get me a full file on her,” Justine told her e-butler. Something about her features was familiar enough to make Justine cautious. Isabella was obviously from a Grand Family or an Intersolar Dynasty, but which …

“Isabella Helena Halgarth,” Justine’s e-butler reported. “Aged nineteen. Second daughter of Victor and Bernadette Halgarth.” A small file printed down inside her virtual vision, detailing Isabella’s schools, academic achievements, sports, interests, charitable causes. The usual PR crap the family released on its own.

Damnit!

As soon as she’d shown Patricia to her lodge, Justine put a call through to Estella Fenton. “I need some information.”

“Darling, I’m humbled and honored,” Estella said teasingly. “What on earth do I know that your family doesn’t?”

“It’s about this girl.” Justine’s virtual finger touched an icon, sending Estella the small file on Isabella. “You’re the queen of gossip, I need to know what her true standing is in the Halgarths.”

“If it was anyone else asking, I’d resent that,” Estella said.