Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014 (9 page)

Words,
he thought.

If my only weapons are words, maybe I should make use of them.

"Stop!" he shouted. "Thief!" He pointed nowhere, anywhere, everywhere—a nonspecific gesture of accusation aimed at nobody in particular. "There! Don't let him get away! Stop that thief!"

Sensation.

Confusion.

Milling vortexes of commotion formed within the crowd as attempts were made to apprehend the culprits. Three of them. As Baldwin had guessed, more than one pickpocket had been working the docks. Now they panicked and made frantic attempts to escape. They filtered through the crush like wisps of steam, dodging and weaving and eluding outstretched hands.

Baldwin selected a Dokharan at random—a ventriloquist who had been entertaining a knot of cubs on the sidelines—grasped his unencumbered wrist, and bellowed: "Here! I've got him! Help!"

His victim took a quick step toward Baldwin, elbow bent. He freed himself from Baldwin's grip with a sudden jerk of his arm, staggered back, and drew a knife, but the people who had responded to Baldwin's call closed in on him like an incoming tide. His arms were pinned to his sides. Other hands lifted him off his feet. He struggled futilely in their grasp, snarling and cursing fluently.

Baldwin stood perfectly still, allowing the center of the conflict to flow past him, then began edging toward Usiga's booth. The congestion hadn't been dispersed by the disturbance, but it had been redistributed, creating regions of lesser density and even one or two circles of open space. Baldwin squeezed through the press, shoving and elbowing, pushing and nudging, apologizing for his rude behavior without desisting from it, moving from one impact to the next like a pinball colliding with a succession of bumpers. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tumanzu emerge from the innards of the
Izanumi
and start down the gangway. Usiga extracted a dart from the hundreds of misses that were embedded in the backdrop behind the targets.
A good hiding place,
Baldwin acknowledged.
Very clever.
Not a needle concealed in a haystack but a needle concealed in a jumble of needles.

With a last gasp of effort, Baldwin bulldozed through the skirmish of bystanders that still separated him from Usiga. He assumed a position that blocked Usiga's view and spoiled Usiga's aim. Usiga gave him a glare of undiluted hostility.
Words,
Baldwin reminded himself.
Words are your weapons.
He leaned closer and raised his voice to make himself heard above the bedlam on the pier. "Tajok!" he yelped.

Usiga's eyes narrowed. His face curdled to a scowl.

"Tajok is dead!" Baldwin made a sweeping gesture of cancellation. "You have no employer! Your contract is no longer valid!"

Baldwin had been uncomfortable in the role of a hero rushing to the rescue. He was much more convincing as a newsman delivering the news. All he had to do was be himself. He fiddled with the controls of his comtote and offered it for Usiga's inspection. The screen displayed Tajok's obituary from the
Izmir Herald.
"See? It's true. You have no obligation to Tajok."

Usiga's only response was a curt nod. He turned, grasped the curtain at the back of the kiosk, twitched it aside, stepped through it, and was simply gone. Had he jumped into the water? Had he slid down a rope into a waiting boat? Baldwin would never know, but he had to concede that it was a remarkably effective disappearing act. Again, Usiga's escape had been well planned.

"Let me see it."

Baldwin and Tumanzu were seated opposite each other on the cushioned seats of a hozen— a water-taxi. The hozensu operating this trim little craft was its driver in both senses of the word: he not only steered it but also supplied its motive power. He was pedaling hard. The sternwheel was churning, pursuing itself in a delirium of neverending redundancy. They were making slow but steady progress, hugging the shoreline as they made their way around the curve of Kazunari Bay. The water slid past with a slither of sibilant mirth. The quivering phosphorescence of their wake diverged and spread behind them like a comet's mane.

As he had done on the wharf, Baldwin activated his comtote manually. He didn't want to call attention to Minerva by addressing her directly. The Dokharan authorities almost certainly knew that the "com" in "comtote" stood for "communications" as well as "computer," but they pretended otherwise. Here, in Dokhara, comtotes couldn't be used to make long-distance calls or—for that matter—short-distance calls. No telstars. No relay towers. No receiver dishes. That being so, the devices were grudgingly tolerated, but openly talking to Minerva would be pushing his luck. That could very well get Minerva confiscated.

Usiga had merely scanned the headline. Tumanzu wasn't satisfied with that. He read the entire article, giving it his undivided attention, studying each sentence so intently that he might have been trying to commit the text to memory.

"Bowajiru!" Tumanzu didn't speak the word so much as spit it. Coming from him—ordinarily so polite and restrained—the obscenity was shocking. He aimed a.45 caliber forefinger at the screen. "Is
that
correct?"

"Is what correct?"

"Tajok is to be makeevasukku?" Realizing that Baldwin might not be familiar with the term, Tumanzu backtracked and rephrased. "It says here that Tajok's body is being returned to Dokhara. It says he's scheduled for absorption by a makeeva."

Baldwin shrugged. "I assume it's true. Luhor released an official statement saying so. He made mention of it to me, too."

"To you?"

"Yes. I interviewed him. He wasn't sure if he'd be attending Tajok's funeral."

Tumanzu's eyes grew reflective. "He probably didn't anticipate the opportunity to do so."

"Why not?"

Tumanzu's hands spread wide in an isn't-it obvious? gesture. "Luhor didn't emerge from the shiroz mines in a robust state of health. Of course not. Nobody does. He couldn't have expected Tajok to predecease him. The reverse must have seemed more likely. If I were him, I'd have bet on it."

Baldwin snorted a laugh. "That's a sucker bet if there ever was one. If he won, how could he collect?"

Tumanzu grudged him a faint smile, but it was a mirthless quirk of his lips. He wasn't sincerely amused. "I've been told," he said, "that Terrans consider our obsequies gruesome."

"Some do."

"And you? How do you feel about it?"

Baldwin made a sour-taste mouth. "Consigning the dead to flesh-eating plants... well, I can't deny that I find the concept a little creepy."

"More so than burial?"

"Maybe it's just a question of the rites to which we're accustomed, but yes—burial seems more dignified to me. More compatible with an eternal resting place."

"Don't kid yourself. An eternal resting place?" Tumanzu gave an emphatic head-shake. "There is no rest for the dead," he asserted. "They aren't at peace. No. I assure you—the dead are kept very busy. They're swarming with parasites. Worms slither between their lips and down their gullets. Larvae breed and squirm in their bellies. The bacteria that abetted digestion while they were alive are now engaged in digesting
them.
They twitch. They writhe. They are defiled by vermin, reduced to decay and corruption. Only when their bones have been picked clean are they permitted to rest."

Baldwin's face underwent strange convulsions, as if he were swallowing medicine that left a bitter aftertaste. "I take some consolation from that thought that Escoli isn't really there. She vacated the premises before demolition began."

"The point I'm trying to make," Tumanzu insisted, "is that
your
funeral ceremonies—and those of the Izmirites—seem disgusting to
us.
"

"The eye of the beholder," Baldwin muttered.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's an old Terran aphorism," Baldwin explained. "'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' The reverse, I suppose, is equally true. Ugliness, too, is subjective."

"Just so. To a Dokharan, the makeevana tradition is solemn and venerable. This is how we say farewell. This is how we cope with bereavement. When our time comes, this is how we achieve unity with our homeland. We rejoin the ancestors from whom we came and we go forth to the eternity that awaits us. It is-n't just a custom. It isn't just a formality. It is a final act of consummation. It completes us. It makes us whole."

A final act of consummation, or a final act of consumption? Gobble. Gulp. Gone. Burp. Excuse me.

This was the irreverent thought that, unbidden, went capering through Baldwin's mind. Baldwin made a determined effort to maintain a sober expression. The imps of the perverse were attempting to commandeer his consciousness. He must stand ready to repel boarders.

So this is how it ends—not with a bang but a belch.

That was no better. Baldwin suppressed an urge to grin.

Tumanzu was staring at him earnestly. "Do you understand?"

"The idea is a little hard to..." Swallow? Baldwin resisted the temptation to say that and substituted: "... accept, but yes—I'm beginning to get a handle on it."

Tumanzu's face was clenched like a fist. "Then perhaps you can appreciate what an abomination this is! A traitor to his country cannot be makeevasukku! You don't confer honors on a mass-murderer who has no honor. Tajok cannot be accorded the same respect due to people who deserve it."

Baldwin could think of no reply to this and made none. Opting for a change of subject, he said: "Your hatred for Tajok seems to have been reciprocated. His immediate reaction to your visit was to hire an assassin."

"Our reunion," Tumanzu drawled, "wasn't exactly congenial."

"It wasn't meant to be, was it? After all, you went there to taunt him."

"I did. Yes."

"Congratulations. Mission accomplished. You must have infuriated him."

Tumanzu was dubious. "If so, he gave no outward sign of it. Not that I expected one. You'd be more likely to get an emotional response from a stone statue. Tajok rarely changed expression. He sent thousands of his 'experimental subjects' to their deaths without blinking an eye."

"Terrans would describe that as 'a poker face.'" Baldwin mimed shuffling and dealing cards. "We play a game," he explained, "that can sometimes be won by convincing your opponents that you're holding better cards than you really have. Controlling your facial features is part of the strategy. You want to remain as inscrutable as possible."

"Tajok wasn't exactly known for playing games," Tumanzu retorted, "but if you could have coaxed him into playing that one, he'd have been good at it. High stakes wouldn't have bothered him. He was accustomed to gambling with Dokharan lives."

"And he didn't mind losing."

"No. He most certainly didn't." Tumanzu's eyes had become narrow slits. They weren't focused elsewhere so much as elsewhen, contemplating horrors from his past that only he could see. "Come to think of it," he said, "the stakes probably
weren't
all that high—not if you measure them by the value Tajok himself placed on them. The loss of other people's lives was a misfortune he bore with equanimity."

The hozen had almost completed the circuit of the bay and was approaching the dock. Baldwin made an all-inclusive gesture that embraced all of creation. "What next?" he inquired.

"I told you. My house has a guest room. You're welcome to use it. Stay as long as you like."

"I appreciate the invitation, but that's not what I meant. Tajok is dead. Usiga's contract is void. You're no longer in f light mode. So what's next? You can do as you please. What will that be?"

Tumanzu returned Minerva to Baldwin. "I'd have given you a different answer before you showed me that. Now that I've read it, my most urgent priority is to prevent that bowajir from polluting the soil of my homeland. Tajok betrayed Dokhara. Loyal Dokharans haven't forgotten. I assure you: we have not. We never will."

Again, Baldwin refrained from expressing the thought uppermost in his mind:

These Dokharans could have taught Captain Ahab a thing or two about holding a grudge.

Tumanzu had said that his house had a guest room, and it did.

More than one.

Escoli hadn't introduced Tumanzu as her "rich" cousin, but if she had, she wouldn't have been exaggerating. One look at Tumanzu's home convinced Baldwin of that. It was a palatial, two-story structure perched on the edge of a precipice—a sheer drop that fell like a false promise to the breakwater a hundred meters below. Land's end. There—at the foot of the cliff—sea confronted shore, their ancient quarrel unresolved. The surf boiled and foamed, shattering on the rocks in explosive gushes of white spray.

The house itself looked like it had been constructed by the same firm that did Stonehenge. The walls were of heavy stones, thick and almost as solid as the promontory on which they rested. An array of all-seeing windows insisted that Baldwin admire and appreciate the vista. The panes had been polished to a state of transparent invisibility. They admitted bright boasts of sunlight that banished the shadows and conferred cheerfulness on a dwelling that would have been otherwise dour and fortresslike.

The centerpiece of Tumanzu's garden was an elaborate water sculpture. The nozzles rotated at random, never repeating themselves, each pattern unique, without precedent or duplicate—a display celebrating the haphazard and unpremeditated, perpetually reminding onlookers that the only universal constant was change.

Adopting such a luxurious lifestyle was tempting. Adapting to it should have been easy. But it wasn't. The metamorphosis from dedicated journalist to sybaritic parasite couldn't be accomplished overnight. Baldwin doubted that he would be Tumanzu's pampered guest long enough to become thoroughly corrupted.

He had nothing to detain him. His primary objective had been achieved. Usiga had abandoned the chase. Tumanzu's life was no longer in jeopardy.

That being so, Baldwin would actually rather go than stay. He wanted to get back to work and couldn't—not as long as he remained incommunicado.