“I guess no one told that to the Bagpipes.”
I shook my head groggily. “How many of the others ran into it?”
“Just one. You were a little bit ahead, so we had some warning.”
“Now I see why you brought me along.” I looked at him grimly. “What about Rebona?”
Mouers jerked a thumb in the direction of the giant cactus. “She’s still in there, I suppose.”
“You don’t know?”
“How can I? My men have been walking around, and flying around, this damned thing for fifteen minutes but we haven’t found a way in. It goes all the way around and up over the top.”
The chief was only partially right, I discovered a few minutes later. My own left hand went easily through the forcefield with only a slight tingling until the edge of the field encountered my wristphone. Then my hand stopped abruptly. I removed the phone and tried again. This time my arm penetrated to the edge of my shirt sleeve. As the Colonel looked on skeptically, I removed my shirt. This time my arm went in as far as my shoulder. I didn’t feel like sticking my head in.
“Organic matter seems to pass through,” I pointed out, “while anything artificial seems to be stopped. If anyone in HOS still wore pure cotton or pure wool instead of these synthetics I’ll bet they’d go through too. As it is, it looks like all we have to do is take off all of our clothes.”
“And go in after them stark naked? With no weapons and them fully armed? What would we do once we found Xerxes and Myking, throw rocks?”
“Are you just going to sit out here and do nothing?”
Colonel Mouers gave me as hard a look as I was giving him. “I always knew Xerxes was going to get into trouble fooling around with those crystals. He’s gotten himself into this mess and I don’t intend to make things worse by taking my people in without a plan that has a chance of succeeding. Those aliens are armed, you said.”
“What about Rebona Myking?” I repeated between clenched teeth.
“What we’ve got here is a classic hostage situation. The book says that when you have a barricaded suspect you sit back, let him get tired, and then you negotiate a solution. You don’t go running in without a plan. That will only get people killed. The Bagpipes aren’t going anywhere and neither are we. We can wait longer than they can. I suggest that you go back to your ship and leave the law enforcement to the professionals. If we need you we’ll call you.” Mouers clenched his jaw and pointed me toward one of the civilian aircars. “Cal, take this guy back to town, will you.” It wasn’t a question.
As we flew away, I watched the police settle in to their positions around the cactus. They seemed to be getting comfortable for a long stay.
Half an hour later, as I was sitting in the same chair in the ship’s salon that Rebona Myking had graced so recently, my wristphone rang. To my astonishment it was Rebona.
“Are you all right?” I half-shouted.
“More or less. Having been married to an ethnologist, this isn’t the first time I’ve been in… peculiar circumstances.” She uttered a faint sound that might have been an attempt to laugh. “In spite of everything, the Bagpipes still need me to translate for them. I’m sure that’s their only interest in me. I’ll be fine.”
“What are they doing?”
“I think they want to trade Xerxes and me to you for the crystals in your ship, but first they say that Xerxes must resonate with the crystals so that he can empathize with them.”
I ran that through my mind two or three times.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think it means anything good for Xerxes. The last time I saw him, he was being strapped into a tangle of their equipment and they were attaching pieces of crystal to his head.”
I uttered an exasperated sigh. “I’ll worry about him later. Where are you right now?”
“Just outside the room in the center of the cactus where you first talked with them. Once I finished translating for Xerxes they lost interest in me. They don’t think like we do at all.”
I thrust myself to my feet. “Don’t move,” I ordered. “I’ll come and get you.”
Standing in the ship’s hatch on the edge of the boarding ramp, I stared up at the unfamiliar constellations that filled the night sky. Easy to say that I’d come and get her. But how?
I was, I knew only too well, a facilitator, not a warrior. But unfortunately, I now had little choice. I didn’t much care what happened to Xavier Xerxes, any more than I did about Dolf MacKay. And while I most certainly did care about Rebona Myking, even that was peripheral to my main concern.
A facilitator’s gift is a curse as well as a blessing. Sometimes it forced me to read the future as clearly as if it were scrolling down my monitor, circumscribing my freedom of action as surely as if the doctrine of Predestination really was driving the Universe.
And I now saw the future very clearly.
The Bagpipes didn’t, apparently, understand the concept of the transfer of property, or perhaps even of “property” at all, at least not in the human sense. Unless this mess got cleaned up right now, it was inevitable that someone was eventually going to ask one too many questions about the Bagpipe’s interest in the crystals or, after he was killed, would buy Xerxes’s mine from his estate and sooner or later discover what the crystals could do.
Then we would end up at war with the Bagpipes as surely as I was standing here. Given what I had seen of their technology, it was a war that the mysterious and disquietingly confident aliens might well win. Gritting my teeth, I marched back into the ship. It was time to find out as much as I could about the Demon Lover’s narco-flowers…
The most salient thing I had learned from my crash course in New Sonoran flora and fauna was that the giant butterflies of New Sonora wouldn’t fly at night. So I had had to wait impatiently for first light. Now, as I cruised through the dawn sky with Icarus just above the Dragontooth Mountains, the air rushing across my bare skin was still somewhere between chilly and cold. And in light of the Bagpipes’ forcefield I was, of course, not only unarmed, but also totally naked.
My only accessories were a small set of leather saddlebags draped across my thighs. The saddle on which I sat was composed entirely of leather. Any non-organic straps and metal fittings had been removed, including my safety harness. If I was wrong in my reasoning, the Bagpipes’ field would knock me off the ’fly and I would find myself tumbling several hundred feet to the desert floor, this time without airbags. I gripped the saddle even tighter with my knees.
Just ahead and to my left I spotted the Bagpipes’s cactus, its blunt tip bursting with its crop of enormous flowers. Gently I jiggled the butterfly’s control-bone. My mount made a lazy turn and angled obediently towards my destination.
As we neared the cactus the fly began to zero in on the flowers. I held on tight and waited for us to hit the field. When the moment came it was totally anticlimactic. If the butterfly even noticed the Bagpipes’ barrier it gave no indication. I myself felt nothing but a momentary tingling across my skin.
My mount settled into the gentle concavity of one of the flowers, extruded its feeding tube, and began to probe for nectar. With one hand around the saddle’s leather handle I leaned out as far as I dared and began tearing fragments from the yellow petals. In a few frantic seconds I had my saddlebags filled with pieces of the pulpy blossoms. Finally, by dint of several kicks and a few sharp jabs on the butterfly’s control-bone, I managed to tear my mount away from the flower and into a descending spiral around the cactus.
A quarter of the way down the far side we drifted toward the shadowy mouth of the chamber we had entered the day before. The butterfly’s wingspan was far too great to fit through the opening but through creative gardening and the use of growth hormones the plant’s skin had been persuaded to bulge out into a small landing terrace. My ’fly fluttered to a gentle halt on the edge of the pad. I slipped from the saddle and, after wrapping the creature’s leather halter around a cluster of spines, threw the saddlebags over my shoulder and hurried into the tunnel.