Kargil Linmax had insisted that Jama bring her and that it be she who arranged not only the evasive details of their journey but all their subsequent contacts—her expertise being that of an ex-officer of Naval Intelligence. When Jama did not move at her command, the Frightfulperson Katana of the Calmer Sea turned to catch his eyes. She threw out a glimmer of humor. “You’re not coming? Is an old man like you afraid to bunk with a free girl like me now that our flirtation is past its public stage?”
“I was thinking of the soulful eyes of your daughter as we said good-bye.”
“And”—beamed Katana—“I’m thanking Space that, for a while, my six-year-old Otaria is going to be tens of thousands of leagues beyond your ever-lecherous clutches. I’m appalled by how much she likes you!”
He rose with offended dignity. His special attention to the delightful Otaria was no more than a recognition that recruitment to the cause did have to begin when a candidate was young. Teaching her how to count kisses was hardly lechery. After all, she was only ten years away from being sixteen! His mind refocused upon immediate concerns.
Faraway was a convenient destination for Jama in that, once there, he would be within striking distance of Zural— albeit it was somehow a suspicious destination because of that proximity. Did the seeker-after-the-galactarium already know Jama’s purpose? He/she had deposited enough money in blind escrow at Telomere City to pay for luxury accommodation to Faraway, access conditional upon the production and demonstration of the ovoid in working order; only then would the guarantor reveal him-/herself and release the fares and the fee. Such a deal, sweet as it was, left Jama feeling ill at ease—too much was unknown, too much could go wrong. But maybe the deal wasn’t that unusual; the ovoid was, after all, an artifact of the ancient Faraway renaissance and was certainly of Faraway manufacture even if it did contain components alien to the early Faraway culture. One might expect the main interest in such an exotic galactarium to come from citizens of Faraway with historical sentiments.
Risks aside, how else was he to finance this expedition?
But it did make Jama paranoid to have to meet strangers at so distant a place from his own friends and protectors. Suppose he was robbed? But the Red Sun Bank brokering the deal had once been the most powerful bank in the Galaxy and had a ridiculously conservative reputation. And the sale (less the finder’s fee for Igor Comoras) would finance his expedition to Zural. Did it even matter if he were to be robbed of his jade artifact? He had made a copy of the important astronomical data contained therein. There was, of course, the matter of the undeciphered material embedded in a deeper layer.
They were wafted weightless through their boarding tube and asked to strip naked at a medical node bulked to the end of the tube, their clothes fed through a decontami-nator while they were routed along an assembly path where nanomechanical invasions, via painless injection, exterminated whatever unwanted and invisible hitchhikers they carried. At the end of their naked trek, their clothes were restored to them. Jama was embarrassed by the holes in his hose but at least he didn’t have to shake hands with the receiving purser while in the nude. The purser alternately checked off names and pointed passengers in a helpful direction.
After ducking under the pipes in the corridor that led to their cabin, the Hyperlord regretted aloud the third-class accommodations he had bought. Their contract specified first-class fares for the bearers of the galactarium, and first-class payment was in escrow, but Jama had always tended toward thrift in things which didn’t show and Katana had insisted on the anonymity. It was probably for the better. They had no way of knowing how much a charter to off-route Zural was going to cost them—and that expense was not in the contract. He bumped his head a fourth time.
Katana shrugged off the gray bulkhead barrenness. “I’m navy. I came up from the ranks. In fact, I think you’re brave to wedge into such a tiny berth with a murderess.” She guffawed innocently and when he didn’t share her amusement, she chided him. “You must laugh at my macabre sense of humor; I require it for a long journey. Otherwise, I transmogrify into a Jon Salasbee.” That was a reference to the popular drama Knife Alive about a lower-corridor medic’s fam&wetware struggles, Jon’s fam desperately trying to pass Jon off as a sane humanitarian, bringing surcease to the unfortunate, while, all the time, Jon is terrorizing his community with a knife in the darkness during his wetware’s
slow descent into psychosis.
“My dear, laughter should be no problem for a man of my fortitude.” They turned around, careful to avoid the overhanging storage space, and hunched down on the bunk. “I promise faithfully, on pain of death, to laugh every time you tickle my flesh with a knife.” Gossip held that she was a Jon Salasbee who had murdered her husband with a knife, perhaps slowly—though Kargil’s opinion differed.
“A man of my dreams. In such close quarters you should become hairless from your prolonged laughter before we reach Faraway,” she nudged.
This was a woman who enjoyed teasing men’s fears, thought Jama, and a woman to play along with if one could remember to flirt first and be afraid afterward. “All the better: if there is naught between you and me to cause you to itch in irritation, my sleep will be sounder!”
“I think we’ll do nicely.” She grinned. “I’ll sleep on top of you the first night and you can sleep on top of me the second. I suspect you’re safe even if you snore—it doesn’t seem that I’m going to have room enough to use my knife!”
“Do you suppose we’ll be able to move our hips?” he said, getting back to the important subject.
“We can try.”
The trip went uneventfully. They spent most of their cabin time exploring the capabilities of Jama’s jade ovoid. It projected the stars so well that it gave them the illusion of space—as long as they didn’t extend their hands into the starry blackness to feel for bulkhead or pipe. The Hyperlord was intrigued by the artifact’s obvious astrological versatility, though he didn’t have a clue how to use it to make a reading. Katana’s curiosity located the coordinates of thirteen once-secret military bases of the ancient Faraway stellarpolitical sphere and forty-nine of the false coordinates for Stars&Ship bases—cryptically annotated with their true coordinates ages ago in a Faraway military script that was obviously meant for use by someone’s naval reconnaissance teams. For what purpose? So much history had been lost! And why had their
benefactor been interested in military bases?
Frightfulperson Katana of the Calmer Sea, for all her bluster, turned out to be a good lover, efficient and affectionate. He decided that she only pretended to be fierce because of her overwhelming name. What a name to have to live with! Nevertheless he was happy not to be her husband.
Their transfer to a second and larger vehicle for the next jag of their journey was routine except that Hyperlord Jama lost all his wigs. That gave the Frightfulperson an excuse to shave his head and dress him in the black garb and silver buttons of a jackleg. She even slapped a neural fibulator on his backbone to change his walk. No one would remember seeing a fop. Jama had disappeared.
The third transfer, to an undistinguished short-run tramp, turned out to be a con racket in which they were gently informed that “an unfortunate mistake” had been made in their reservations and that therefore the ship was “reluctantly” forced to “drop them off’ at an “inconvenient location” unless an additional “service fee” was forthcoming to ensure their well-being. In his guise of jackleg Jama felt compelled to vent his rage. The skipper became appropriately apologetic—but remained uncooperative.