When it was over, Calandrx had said, he tended to remember only the skills he’d displayed in surviving the flight itself. But his message was clear: What went on inside the thirteen could do a real head number if the racer was not ready for it. Though he never said it aloud, Hunter shuddered to think that being assigned to this cold, dark, and weird place was a way of getting him prepared for what was about to come.
But that certainly appeared to be the case.
He climbed out of the cockpit now and began removing the fasteners that held his machine’s nose cone in place.
Calandrx passed him a cup of slow-ship and they did a quick toast. “May I rephrase my last question?” he asked Hunter, draining his wine in one long gulp.
“Sure. Go ahead…”
“You say you want to do this,” Calandrx said with a drawl. “But can you tell me why you want to do it?”
Hunter pulled the nose off his craft and confronted the gaggle of electronic stuff inside.
“You mean other than the fact that if I didn’t do the race, I’d probably be a fifth-level recruit, cleaning the beam tubes on an S-Class cruiser by now?”
“Yes, of course,” Calandrx said. “There always is a reason behind the reason…”
Hunter began sorting out the mess of wires in the nose cone.
“I just have a crazy notion, I suppose,” he said. “When I was back on Fools 6, I used to tell myself that if I ever got off the damn place, I’d do everything I could to find out who I was and where I came from.”
“A noble ambition,” Calandrx said.
Hunter stopped work for a moment and wiped his hands on the sides of his work uniform. “Well, what better way to find out if someone out there knows you than to take part in the biggest event in the Galaxy? You’ve told me that the winner’s name is on everyone’s lips the next morning, correct? Right across the Empire?”
“Word true,” Calandrx replied.
“Then it should come to the lips of someone who knows who I am — and why I got dumped on the last planet in the Galaxy you can hit before you fall off the edge.”
Calandrx pulled his chin in thought. “Fascinating,” he said with a whisper. “And if no one steps forward to greet you, then that would mean you are from someplace else. Which would make you very unique indeed…”
He let his voice trail off for a moment. Hunter went back to his nose cone.
“This is shaping up not unlike some of the epics written about the great warriors of the First Empire,”
Calandrx went on, pouring them another drink, “fighting not just to fight, but to win a noble cause. Going into the unknown, the uncharted, not just for the thrill, but also to learn something, to bring something back. The unselfish approach to heroics. It’s actually rather refreshing. Perhaps you are a reincarnation of one of these people of yore. Perhaps you were a great warrior in the First Empire, four thousand years ago, flying this very machine. Or something like it…”
Hunter laughed. “I doubt that…”
“Why so?”
Hunter indicated the whole of his unusual aircraft. The walls began to scream again.
“Look at this thing,” he said to Calandrx. “We know it can go fast. But does the design look only four thousand years old to you?”
Calandrx scanned the strange aircraft up and down one more time, then nodded slowly.
“You can bingo that, my brother,” he finally said. “It sure doesn’t.”
With thirty minutes to go before race time, Calandrx was finally allowed to leave the subterranean holding bay.
He had to make two substantial wagers, one for himself, one for his very unlucky friend Zap Multx. As the final minutes ticked away, the rules allowed for the contestant’s handlers to go free to do just such things. So he and Hunter made one last toast, and Calandrx promised him he’d be the first to greet him in the winner’s circle. Then they shook hands, a hole opened in the side of the bay, and Calandrx began the long climb up to the surface.
In their six days together, he’d never told Hunter his theory on why he thought the flying machine was able to dash around the world in less time than it took to strike a match. They’d tried it just once in the garden that night. That’s all Calandrx needed to be convinced that Hunter’s aircraft was so speedy because of the black boxes he’d salvaged from the wreck of the Jupiterius 5. Just how Hunter knew to combine them to produce such vast amounts of propulsive power was still a mystery to both of them.
Pure chance? A Galaxy-shaking revelation? A favor from God? There was no way to tell. Hunter had randomly connected the boxes from the Kaon Bombardment system, and the result was a velocity that seemed so fast it defied the definition of speed itself.
There was a rub, though: The technology in those boxes made up one of the most closely guarded secrets in the realm, something right up there with the miracle of Supertime. As an officer of the Empire, Calandrx could not even speak of it, simply because discussing state secrets was an offense punishable by prison or even death.
So instead he’d told Hunter, just as Erx and Berx had earlier, that in this world, some things were better off not being known or spoken about. There was no regulation that said the winning pilot had to reveal what he had under his hood, ever. Historically, many winners did not, adding an air of mystery to the proceedings that everyone just loved. Hunter could fly the race, win the race, and never have to tell anyone how he was able to do it. Already hip to the way the Empire protected its secrets, Hunter couldn’t disagree with the logic. True, they were as thick as thieves. But that didn’t mean anyone had to know about it.
And in his heart, Calandrx knew there was no real disloyalty in this act of disloyalty. Besides, he had ulterior motives that went deeper than his oath of honor or the politics of the bulging galactic empire. In his chest beat the heart of a poet. Of course, the Galaxy was lousy with poets, but Calandrx considered himself to be better than most. As such, his eyes were always open, looking for signs only a poet would recognize. The way a married woman smiles. The way the clouds formed over a sunset. The way the wind blows on the coldest, darkest night. Much about life could be told from these things and more. You just had to know how to look.
He had been walking through downtown a few months before. It was a gray winter day, but with just the faintest whiff of spring in the air. He found himself on a nondescript street that was so old, its roadway was still made of bricks. It was in the least populated part of downtown downtown, over by the docks.
On this street there was a wall, and on that wall someone had written something in dull red paint.
Now, this was a strange thing because Calandrx had traveled the Galaxy for more than a century and in that time, he’d seen much graffiti. Some planets were absolutely covered with it. Some of it personal, some of it political; the farther one got away from Earth and out toward the Fringe, the more graphic and edgy the graffiti would become.
But never in all his years had he seen graffiti here on Earth. He didn’t know why. Maybe because Earth was so damn clean and the people who lived here had it so damn easy, no one had ever come up with anything clever enough or poignant enough or obscene enough to scrawl on a wall.