Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014 (6 page)

"Never again," Escoli was saying. "It will never happen again. No doubt we'll witness other sunsets, and I'm sure they'll be lovely, but
this
sunset is unique. This is a fleeting moment of glory that won't be repeated—not ever, not in all of eternity. We'd be fools if we failed to celebrate it."

Baldwin pointed to the pix-shooter that was strapped to Escoli's forearm. "So take a picture. Preserve it for posterity. What kind of a photojournalist would miss an opportunity like this?"

Escoli made the snorting sound that was the Bukkaran equivalent of laughter. "You Terrans!" she chided. "You have no appreciation for the ephemeral. Preserve it? How? Take a snapshot of it? Ask it to smile for the camera?" She dismissed the suggestion with a flit of her f ingers. "No! Impossible! The evanescent can't
be
preserved. That's what makes it rare. That's
why
it's valuable."

Baldwin responded to this unsought spate of information with a sigh of resignation. He didn't need Escoli to tell him that he was unenlightened. He wasn't such an ignoramus that he was ignorant of his own ignorance. Even now—after twenty years on Bukkara (closer to twenty-four by Terran reckoning)— he had learned just enough about Bukkaran psychology to know how little he knew. Their fascination with the transitory, for example. He had an intellectual grasp of it—assuming you
could
get a grasp on an elusive wisp of nothing-much that ceased to be as soon as it came into being—but he didn't feel it in his bones the way Bukkarans did. The most popular art form on Bukkara was the water sculpture. They were everywhere—fountains with randomized sprays that never formed the same pattern twice. Gardens, parks, plazas, arcades, atriums—no open space was complete without a water sculpture. They were deeply, profoundly meaningful to Bukkarans. Baldwin? He just thought they were kind of pretty.

Escoli rose to her feet. "Here he comes," she said, stating the obvious as if it wasn't.

A tall Bukkaran was approaching, his walk not so much a sequence of strides as a series of shuffles. Bukkarans didn't ordinarily pick up their feet and set them down—not unless they were running. Then they advanced in a succession of lurching bounds that covered a lot of ground very quickly indeed.

Switching from Terran Standard to lisping Menduli, Escoli said: "Gregory Baldwin—permit me to make you acquainted with Tumanzu: my rulf hjulke." This identified Tumanzu as Escoli's first cousin: a male of the matrilineal moiety.

Baldwin acknowledged the introduction and muttered an apology-in-advance for his faulty Menduli. His command of the dialect was actually fluent, but he still made occasional mistakes. He was firmly of the opinion that Menduli-speakers were endowed with an infallible defense against boredom. If nothing else, they could always contemplate the idiosyncrasies of their own irregular verbs.

Tumanzu took the seat on Baldwin's left, settling into the embrace of the cushions hesitantly, as if testing to make sure that the chair would support his weight. Baldwin cleared his throat and inquired: "Is this your first visit to Izmir?"

Tumanzu responded with a vacillation of his hand that meant both yes and no. "It might as well be. I have no recollection of being here before."

"But you were?"

"Yes. As a cub. My mother brought me with her when she came to Izmir on a business trip. Or so I'm told. I was too young to remember."

"Let's hope that your stay will be more memorable this time. Escoli seems determined to make it so."

Tumanzu inclined his head in Escoli's direction. "Yes. She has agreed to be my guide. It's good of her to do me this favor, and good of you to let her... what is the word? Vacation? Take a vacation?"

"That's right. Think of it as a holiday that doesn't coincide with a holiday."

"A leave of absence?"

"Yes. Work is suspended for the person who's on vacation, and the people who aren't on vacation will soon need one because they have to work twice as hard to compensate for the work that isn't being done by the person who's vacationing."

Escoli rolled her eyes. "Pay no attention to Greg," she smirked. "He's just vexed because he won't have a staff photographer at his beck and call. He doesn't want to admit that he can't get along without me."

"I'll
have
to get along without you," Baldwin grumbled. "You're deserting your post. You're jumping ship."

"The
Izmir Herald
isn't a ship, and—if it were—it would be in no danger of sinking." Escoli dispelled nonsense with a sweeping gesture. "Stop complaining. Paying workers not to work isn't one of
our
customs. A policy that foolish could only have originated on Terra. Don't blame me for taking advantage of it."

Tumanzu had been listening to this exchange with mounting concern. "I don't want to be the cause of trouble," he said.

Baldwin made calming motions with flattened palms. "You aren't. Escoli is quite right. As an employee of a Terran newspaper, she's entitled to a paid vacation." He shrugged. "Her absence will be a minor inconvenience—to me and to the other two reporters who gather news for the
Herald
—but we'll just have to make do with amateur photographers while our professional photographer is busy being an amateur tour guide."

Escoli's expression was calculating. "I had no idea that my services were so indispensable," she drawled. "Remind me to ask for a raise when I return."

Searching for a dexterous change of subject, Baldwin made the obvious choice. "We'll discuss it later," he said. He pointed. "There's the sight we came to see. Why don't we look at it?"

The sunset was a wild extravaganza of kaleidoscopic colors. Baldwin felt as if they were watching a slow-motion film of a stained-glass window being shattered.

Izmir was justifiably famous for its glorious sunsets. This was what observers gathered on the observation deck of the Mazabashi Inn to observe.

To build a permanent platform from which to witness a spectacle cherished for its impermanence was typical of the Bukkarans. Like human beings, they weren't so much rational as rationalizing creatures. They frequently contradicted themselves, and would have been quick to contradict anyone who accused them of it.

Escoli's pix-shooter wasn't really Escoli's. It didn't belong to her. It was the property of the
Izmir Herald
—a professional rig that had been issued to Escoli by her employer. When the shokiku—the constables—had completed their preliminary investigation, the camera was returned to the offices of the newspaper.

Baldwin called it that—a news
paper
—even though it wasn't printed on paper and never had been. The
Izmir Herald
was actually a newscast. The text was transmitted daily and received by the
Herald's
subscribers on their comtotes, wristcoms, or voxviews. Be that as it may, Baldwin and his colleagues still referred to themselves as members of the "press," they used expressions like "go to press" and "stop the presses," and they spoke of "cameras," "photographers," "snapshots," and "capturing images on film"—terminology that should have been obsolete and would have been if journalists like Baldwin had abandoned it. But they hadn't. Some traditions die hard. As far as Baldwin was concerned, Escoli's digiscopic imager was a "camera," she'd used it to take "photographs," and he was, at present, examining the photographs stored in the camera's memory—the pictures Escoli had taken of her vacation.

Escoli had evidently conducted her cousin to all of Izmir's standard tourist attractions. Here was a close-up of Tumanzu with the Awoji Observatory in the background. The big telescope had the condescending air of a skywatching instrument unaccustomed to the contemplation of less exalted spectacles. And here was an image of Tumanzu standing at the entrance to the Cave of the Winds, his fur ruffled by the breeze. Tumanzu had fed the hujos at the Gyoki Marina, attended a nubenga concert at the Yokadu Auditorium, dined sumptuously aboard the floating restaurant that sailed between Shuzanjo and Myshina twice daily. And so on and so forth. Baldwin recognized all of the stops they had made. The sole exception was a residential district that could have been located almost anywhere on the island. Modest cottages, sturdily constructed. Walls of the reddish stone that was quarried from the cliffs on Izmir's north coast. Convoluted streets paved with cobblestones from the same source. Big tachibina trees with their feather-duster leaf-clusters. Steeply sloping roofs designed to shed rain. Typical Izmirian dwellings. Nothing about them was extraordinary except how extra-ordinary they were.

"Take a look at this, will you, Dave?"

David Collins was the juniormost of the
Herald's
three reporters. He knew the island like a native for the simple and sufficient reason that he
was
a native. He'd been born here. His parents were career diplomats: under-secretaries on the staff of the Terran Embassy.

Baldwin transferred the photo to Collins' comtote. A single glance at the screen, and: "Kroydhun district."

"West shore?"

Collins nodded. "See the tachibana trees? They aren't fussy. They'll grow in sun or shade, in moist soil or dry, but they don't get as tall as that—not unless they were planted when your great-grandpa was still a zygote. Kroydhun is one of our older neighborhoods."

Baldwin's expression was puzzled. "Why would sightseers want to go there?"

"They wouldn't. It's pleasant enough, but not exactly scenic."

"It seems to have been high on Tumanzu's must-see list. This was the first place that he and Escoli visited."

"Really?" Collins digested this tidbit of information and seemed to consult inwardly. "It might not have been a question of
what
he wanted to see so much as
who,
" he speculated. "If an old acquaintance of his lives there..."

"That's it!" Baldwin seconded Collins' suggestion with a fingersnap. "Escoli told me that Tumanzu intended to pay a call on a sugami."

Collins quirked a dubious eyebrow. "A sugami?" He shook his head in bemusement. "No wonder Escoli wanted to keep company with this guy. How often do you get a chance to hitch a ride on a time machine?"

Baldwin's forehead sprouted extra furrows. "Talk sense. A time machine?"

"You'd need one to find a sugami. You'd also need to be an expert swordsman—an ikumo."

Baldwin wasn't well acquainted with Bukkaran history, but he knew what an ikumo was. Past tense. The
distant
past. Ikuma had been professional duelists—sword masters who fought matches to the death to settle disputes that the courts couldn't.... A time machine. Yes. A Terran who wanted to meet a Roman gladiator and a Bukkaran who wanted to meet an ikumo would be confronted by the same fundamental problem.

Anticipating Baldwin's next question, Collins said: "A sugami was an opponent deemed unworthy of respect. Not a coward. Few ikuma were guilty of outright cowardice. But an ikumo would occasionally resort to a tactic that was considered dishonorable. A defeated adversary who had fought fair was dispatched with a single thrust to the throat. That's assuming, of course, that he hadn't already received a mortal wound. A sugami could expect no such courtesy. The victor would do a little dance around him, taunting him, mocking him, refusing to grant him the dignity of a quick and painless death."

"Adding insult to injury."

"More like heaping humiliation on defeat, but yes—that's the general idea."

Baldwin scratched his head. "Now—in the present day—is the term 'sugami' ever used metaphorically?"

"Tumanzu used it that way, didn't he?" Collins shrugged. "He
must
have done. If he said he was going to pay a call on a sugami, he couldn't have meant it literally."

Baldwin lapsed into a moment of reflection....
Okay,
he thought, trying to put himself in Tumanzu's place.
I'm a Dokharan. I'm visiting my cousin on Izmir. I'm unfamiliar with the island. I want to locate a specific individual—a "sugami." Maybe I already know where to find him, but probably not.I'm relying on my cousin to act as my guide. That being so...

"Minerva," said Baldwin, addressing his comtote by name.

"Yes, Greg."

Baldwin was a fan of classic movies. One his favorites was
Gilda.
He'd given Minerva a voice that was a reasonably good impersonation of Rita Hayworth.

"At any time in the past ten days, did Escoli use the
Herald's
database to conduct an address search?"

"On three occasions, yes."

"Did any of her searches yield an address in the Kroydhun district?"

"Yes. Kroydhun Ankurda 12-16. That is the residence of Tajok."

"The Dokharan war criminal?"

"That is correct."

Baldwin whistled aloud. "Nasty customer," he mused. "A grand slam redoubled in bastards if there ever was one."

The traditional enemies of the Dokharans were the Ambulans.

The bones of contention over which they quarreled were many and varied, but foremost among them was the Chajin Channel—the un-straight strait that linked the Hokata Gulf with the Myoski Ocean. Whoever controlled the Chajin narrows had a stranglehold on a major trade route. It was both a geographical and a psychological line of demarcation. Centuries of conflict, bloodshed, and implacable hatred had made it unbridgeable in every sense of the word.

The Ambulan invasion of fifteen years ago had been an unqualified success.

Or—if you happened to be a Dokharan—it had been an unmitigated disaster.

The Ambulans met little resistance at first. A Dokharan traitor—Tajok—had given them the recognition signals. Outpost after outpost was taken by surprise. The coastal defenses soon acquired more gaps than a hockey player's smile.

Why did Tajok betray his kith and kin?

According to Tajok, they
weren't
his kin.

His family had been members of a persecuted—and prosecuted—religious minority. His parents, his siblings, his cousins—all of his relatives had been tried for heresy and executed.

And now their oppressors had become the oppressed. Tajok rejoiced.