“Would you like to go butterfly riding?” she asked hesitantly.
In the full glory of New Sonora’s blazing sun, Rebona was more than just pretty—she was beautiful. And until I came up with some other idea I certainly had nothing better to do.
“Absolutely,” I said.
The butterfly stable was tucked away in the circular space inside the base of a medium-sized saguaro on the city’s outskirts. Beneath a huge gauzy awning seven or eight of the enormous butterfly-like creatures lay torpidly in the inky shadows, their blue and green wings wrapped around scarlet and blue bodies so that only the tips of their torpedo-like heads were visible. From each of the motionless beasts a dull red tube protruded into a stainless steel cask. Their huge yellow and black eyes seemed as inanimate as dinner plates.
“Sugar syrup,” explained Rebona. “As long as it’s supplied, the ’flies won’t move an inch.”
A leathery-skinned New Sonoran, who seemed nearly as torpid as his colorful charges, reluctantly emerged from a leg of the cactus and lackadaisically manhandled the nearest butterfly away from its feeding station. As its long proboscis slowly withdrew into its head, the ’fly’s wings began to unfold. Tapping it on the side of the head with a heavy orange prod, the butterfly handler maneuvered the creature away from its companions and through an opening in its huge mesh cage. Rebona Myking took me by the hand and led me up onto the butterfly’s surprisingly sturdy back.
When we returned to the stables several hours later I watched appreciatively as Rebona climbed gracefully down from our mount, her long slim legs filling her trousers to perfection. The air was almost too dry to feel myself sweating, but I knew that in this terrible heat we must have been rapidly evaporating our liquid reserves.
I waggled a finger in the general direction of the spaceport. “Rather than offering you a glass of the terrible local beer, if you’ll fly me back to my ship I think my galley can dispense something more civilized.”
A few minutes later we entered the Venture’s tiny salon and Rebona sank into my comfortable old red leather chair. The galley produced tall glasses of lemonade for each of us.
“I like your ship,” she said warmly. “It’s very… homey. But don’t you get lonely out in space all by yourself? What if something broke down?”
“That’s something spacers don’t think about, let alone say aloud. And in theory the ship’s smart enough to repair almost anything that goes wrong, as long as the problem is with the equipment.”
“What else could it be?”
“The problem could be nullspace itself.”
“You mean planets slipping away?”
I nodded. “If entire systems can fall out of congruence, why not spaceships? I personally think there’s now enough statistical evidence about missing ships to indicate that sometimes that actually happens.”
Rebona frowned into her lemonade. “That’s why I don’t like traveling very much. Suppose you got stuck on some really terrible planet like Piggoty’s Place or Sandalstone III? That would be awful!”
“Yes,” I agreed, perching myself carefully on the arm of her chair. “It’s a sobering thought. But what about your own profession? I’d bet that in every system that’s ever slipped away there’s been at least one or two visiting scholars who’ve been trapped there forever.”
Rebona uttered a little sigh. “There’s actually a marble plaque at the Peabody Museum at Harvard with a whole list of them. They update it regularly.”
“I know—I’ve seen it. And, unfortunately, that’s the least part of the problem.”
“How do you mean?”
“Unless you live within a planetary system that you never, ever intend to leave, there isn’t an investment or bank account anywhere in HOS that’s completely safe.”
“There are the UC’s. They’re guaranteed safe.”
It was true. Universal Credits were guaranteed to hold their value no matter how many systems fell out of nullspace. Centuries before, when the first systems began to slip away, the central banks of Earth, Telos, and New Zurich had agreed to jointly issue a currency called Universal Credits. All three planets would have to fall out of congruency simultaneously for the credits to be rendered worthless. Like everyone with any sense, I kept my own modest supply of emergency funds in UC’s.
“Small change,” I pointed out. “That guarantee is limited to a maximum of a million credits per customer. Fine for individuals, but worthless for real business. The effect on commerce of planets slipping away is already massive, and it’s getting worse.”
“Well, you’re a facilitator. I suppose you ought to know.”
“Ex-facilitator—there’s a considerable difference between the two.”
“Why are you an ex, if I’m not being nosy?”
“I don’t mind, but it’s a long story.”
Nineteen months earlier I had been on Mathison’s World on the opposite side of Human Occupied Space, about to conclude the most important transaction of my career. Senior Facilitators arc basically polymaths trained to recognize and correlate obscure relationships between vastly disparate types of information. We can discern, extrapolate from, and, of equal importance, articulate, apparently non-existent relationships.
In consideration of a suitable fee, we can reconcile seemingly irreconcilable pieces of data to often arrive at solutions for everything from quarreling spouses to warring planets. For certain types of adjudicating and expediting within specifically defined parameters, only licensed facilitators can legally charge a fee. And, of course, only licensed facilitators are given any credence in the first place by the major businesses and governments with which Human Occupied Space’s several hundred Senior Facilitators normally deal.
Purely by chance, I had been gifted at birth with certain talents that years of training had eventually brought to fruition as a Senior Facilitator. And as befit my biblical name of Isaiah, the motto on my letterhead and business cards read: Come Now, and Let Us Reason Together…
But reasoning together on Mathison’s World had led to a tangled nightmare of a disaster for which an arbitrator on Westerworld had designated me the official scapegoat. When all was said and done, my license had been suspended for five years, just at the time that all my savings and investments vanished when the financial haven of New Gibraltar fell out of congruency.
I had a choice: I could take every last penny I could scrape up and appeal the Arbitrator’s decision knowing that the chances of overturning the judgment were slim at best, or I could take my few remaining assets and put my skills to use in the interstellar shipping business.
Eventually, by leaving my pancreas as collateral with the flint-hearted bankers of New Zurich and having it replaced with an artificial one programmed to require servicing within two months of every annual payment date, I was able to purchase a mortgaged spaceship in reasonable working order.
Meeting my mortgage payments subsequently took on an urgency that the average borrower seldom experiences…
Rebona Myking smiled encouragingly. “That doesn’t seem—” but she was cut off by two loud clangs from the Venture’s hull.
“Ship, what’s that?”
“Someone has just pounded on the hull with a metal implement.”
“Thanks for being so informative,” I grumped, and strode to the main hatch. Looking up at the monitor I saw three Bagpipes standing before the lock.
One was Tall And Thin. The other two were strangers. The lighter colored one I dubbed Almost Gray. The third had a peculiar tube in the middle of his body that was thicker and more muscular than those of the others. He became Trunk Like An Elephant.