“… dumped with just the clothes we were wearing, and no warning that anything funny was going to happen. One minute we were standing in one of the main chambers, the same one where we rolled the Zardalu into the transition vortex—”
— and where we had the biggest pile of loot pulled together that you’d see in a dozen lifetimes. I know, At, I’m not going to say that. But it’s hard — fifty new bits of Builder technology, each one priceless and ready to grab. Two and a half months’ work, all down the tubes. Well, no good crying over what might have been —
And may yet be, Louis. Surrender wins no wars.
Mebbe. It’s still hard.
Graves and E.C. Tally were staring at Nenda, puzzled by his sudden silence. He returned to human speech: “Sorry. Started thinkin’ about it again. Anyway, all of a sudden Speaker-Between, that know-it-all Builder construct, popped up right behind us, quiet like, so we didn’t know he was there. He said, ‘This is not what was agreed to. It is unacceptable.’ And the next minute—”
“May I speak?” E.C. Tally’s voice was loud and off-putting.
Nenda turned to Julian Graves. “Couldn’t you stop him doing that when you gave him a new body copy? What’s wrong now, E.C.?”
“It was reported to me by Councilor Graves that you and Atvar H’sial were left behind on Serenity not to cooperate, but to engage in single combat. That is not at all the way that you are now describing matters.”
“Ah, well, that was somethin’ me and At worked out after your lot had left. Better to cooperate at first, see, until we understood the environment on Serenity, an’ after that we’d have plenty of time to fight it out between us—”
— as indeed we would have fought, Louis, once we were home in the spiral arm with substantial booty. For there are limits to cooperation, and the Builder treasures are vast. But pray continue…
If anyone will let me, I will. Shut up, At, so I can talk.
“ — so Atvar H’sial and I had been working together, trying to figure out where the Zardalu were likely to have gone after they left Serenity—” And making sure we didn’t finish up anywhere near them when we left Serenity ourselves. ” — because, you see, there was this little baby Zardalu who had been left behind when all the others went ass-over-tentacle down the chute—”
“Excuse me.” Julian Graves’s great bald, radiation-scarred head nodded forward on its pipestem neck. “This is of extreme importance. Are you saying that there was a Zardalu left behind on Serenity?”
“That’s exactly what I said. You have a problem with that, Councilor?”
“On the contrary. And by the way, it is now ex-councilor. I resigned from the Council over this very issue. The Alliance Council listened — perfunctorily, in my opinion — and rejected our concerns in their totality! They do not believe that we traveled together to Serenity. They do not believe that we encountered Builder sentient artifacts. Worst of all, they deny that we encountered living, breathing Zardalu. They claim we imagined all of it. So if you have with you a specimen, an infant or a dead body, or even the smallest end sucker of a tentacle—”
“Sorry. I hear you, but we don’t have even a sniff. It’s Speaker-Between’s dumb fault again. He accused me and Atvar H’sial of cooperating, instead of feuding; and before we could tell him that he was full of it, he made one of those hissing teakettle noises like he was boiling over, and another one of them vortices swirled up right next to us. It threw us into the Builder transportation system. Just before the vortex got us it grabbed the little Zardalu. He went God-knows-where. We haven’t seen him since. Atvar H’sial and I come out together in the ass end of the Zardalu Communion, on a little rathole of a planet called Peppermill. But my ship was still on Glister, along with all our major credit. It took our last sou to get us to Miranda. And here we are.”
“May I speak?” But this time Tally did not wait for permission. “You are here. I see that. But why are you here? I mean, why did you come to Miranda, where neither you nor Atvar H’sial are at home? Why did you not go to some other and more familiar region of the spiral arm?”
Careful! Councilor Graves, whether he be Julius, Steven, or Julian, can read more truth than you think. Atvar H’sial’s comment to Louis Nenda was more a command than a warning.
Relax, At! This is the time to tell the truth. “Because until we can return to the planetoid Glister and to my ship, the Have-It-All, Atvar H’sial and I are flat broke. The only valuable things that either of us own” — Nenda reached into his pants pocket, pulled out two little squares of recorder plastic, and squeezed them — “are these.”
Under the pressure of his fingers, the squares began to intone simultaneously: “This is the ownership certificate of the Lo’tfian, J’merlia, ID 1013653, with all rights assigned to the Cecropian dominatrix, Atvar H’sial.” “This is the ownership certificate of the Hymenopt, Kallik WSG, ID 265358979, with all rights assigned to the Karelian human, Louis Nenda.” And to repeat: “This is the ownership certificate of the Lo’tfian, J’merlia, ID—”
“That’ll do.” Nenda pressed the edge of the plastic wafers, and they fell silent. “The slaves J’merlia and Kallik are the only assets we got left, but we own ’em free and clear, as you know and as these documents prove.”
Nenda paused for breath. The hard bit was coming right now.
“So we’ve come here to claim ’em and take ’em back to Miranda Port, and rent ’em out so we’ll have enough credit to travel back to Glister and get the Have-It-All.” He glared at Graves. “And it’s no good you gettin’ mad and tellin’ us that J’merlia and Kallik are free agents because we let ’em go free back on Serenity, because none of that’s documented, and these” — he waved the squares — “prove otherwise. So don’t give me any of that. Just tell me, where are they?”
Graves was going to give him a big argument, Nenda just knew it. He faced the councilor, waiting for the outburst.
It never came. Multiple expressions were running across Graves’s face, but not one of them looked like anger. There was satisfaction and irony, and even what might be a certain amount of sympathy in those mad and misty gray eyes.
“I cannot deliver J’merlia and Kallik to you, Louis Nenda,” he said. “Even if I would. For one very good reason. They are not here. Both of them left Delbruck just two hours ago — on a high-speed transit to Miranda Port.”
MIRANDA PORT
“If you wait long enough in the Miranda Spaceport, you’ll run into everyone worth meeting in the whole spiral arm.”
There’s a typical bit of Fourth Alliance thinking for you. Pure flummery. The humans of the Alliance are a cocky lot — no surprise in that, all the senior clade species think they’re God’s gift to the universe, with an inflated view of the importance of their own headquarters world and its spaceport.
But I’m telling you, the first time you visit Miranda Port, you think for a while that the Alliance puffery might be right.
I’ve seen a thousand ports in my time, from the miniship jet points of the Berceuse Chute to the free-space Ark Launch Complex. I’ve been as close as any human dare go to the Builder Synapse, where the test ships shimmer and sparkle and disappear, and no one has ever figured out where those poor bugger “volunteers” inside them go, or why the lucky ones come back.