Fall of the White Ship Avatar

[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

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FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

Brian Daley

This tenth, as the first, for Judy-Lynn Del Rey

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

My thanks to L. Neil Smith, Vivian Waters, and Suezy Kim for their counsel
CHAPTER 1—ITS ALWAYS DARKEST BEFORE THE BLACKOUT

Floyt sighed. "We're just going to have to give up wine, women, and song, Alacrity."

"I vote we start with song."

As he and Alacrity Fitzhugh made their way to the customs counter in the odd, crane-mating dance of lunar walking, Floyt persisted. "But we're not going to get very far with so little money, you do realize that, don't you?"

"We sure as
scheisse
can't turn back," Alacrity pointed out. Off to one side, the crew chief of the Terra-Luna shuttle
Mindframe
was turning over Floyt's Webley revolver and Alacrity's big energy handgun to a customs inspector.

"Name?" asked the senior inspector, looking Alacrity square in the eye. His nameplate said he was Inspector Grissom.

You oughta remember!
Alacrity thought at him silently.
You got a big enough bribe out of me last time
we blew through here!

Floyt, standing behind Alacrity, tried to maintain a certain aloofness and not look worried, guilty, or pursued. He was 175 centimeters tall and a shade more, compact and bearded and more than twenty centimeters under Alacrity's height.

The shuttle crew was passed through without so much as a perfunctory check, but the two weapons still lay on the counter. If the Lunie customs folks didn't recognize Alacrity, they'd doubtless recall the Captain's Sidearm, his pistol. The crewchief and his mates were happy; the squeeze Alacrity'd paid them for helping Floyt and himself escape Earth was more than healthy, and tendered in flawless novaseed file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...y%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (1 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:11

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gemstones. The two partners in adversity weren't simply in reduced circumstances; they were just about broke.

"I said, 'Name?' " Grissom repeated tightly.

"Dr. Attila Von Cribdeath," Alacrity snapped.

"Professor Manglewords MaLarkey," Floyt supplied, deadpan, trying to stay in form with Alacrity, but despairing. The formerly sedate, law-abiding Earther hadn't nearly as much experience fibbing as his young friend, or in fraud, unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, and impersonating an innocent party, but the last few months had been an accelerated course of study.

The customs inspector gave them a gimlet stare. "Let's just see your documentation, please." Customs officers were watching, as were two guards who were rocking back and forth and swinging their nunchaka nonchalantly.

Floyt tried not to feel panic. It wasn't the tightest spot his young companion had gotten him into. Still, as a former Earthservice functionary, Floyt dreaded and feared bureaucracy. More, it couldn't be much longer before their hasty escape from Terra was noticed. A message to the Lunar authorities calling for their detention was a disaster not to be contemplated.

"Yeah, y'see, we're applying as undocumented persons," Alacrity announced.

Which was ridiculous right on the face of it and had the guards hooking their thumbs over their pistols, since Alacrity and Floyt had just come up from Earth, where every action—and particularly travel—was attended by endless red tape.

Except that, in their case, it was true. They'd landed on Terra under fire in an outlawed spacecraft, stayed long enough to help bring down the Earthservice government and shake the foundations of worlds human and nonhuman across known space, then taken flight with very little forethought.

"Well,"—Inspector Grissom grinned—"this looks like it's going to take a little paperwork, eh?"

When Alacrity nodded emphatically, the man gave the other customs officials the eye. They made sure no one else was around to interrupt. The two guards wandered off so as not to take notice of what was about to happen. They'd get their cut later.

God bless Lunar flexibility,
Floyt implored. Grissom turned out to be very understanding that Dr. Von Cribdeath and Prof. MaLarkey came from a place with no formal travel documentation, a world Alacrity specified as Sweet Baby's Arms, which might or might not exist. The fact that Alacrity was dressed in the outfit of a breakabout—a working interstellar spacer—and Floyt wore an ancient-style Terran file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...y%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (2 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:11

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tuxedo, white tie with black tails, didn't seem to shake the inspector's faith in them one whit.

Until, that is, Alacrity, leaning across the counter and speaking privily, could produce only a few dozen ovals and a handful of Spican ducats, plus small-denomination odds and ends.

Customs inspector Grissom then frowned. "Are you being cute, boys?"

"Uh-uh! We can get you more," Floyt heard Alacrity murmur as the other officials pressed closer.

"Good," Grissom said. "You can wait right here in the holding pen while somebody fetches it on down."

A woman inspector had her finger close to a call-button, ready to summon back the guards. Floyt's gut suddenly tightened. He knew Alacrity would do just about anything to avoid being dragged back to Earth, but Floyt wasn't sure he was really up to dodging, dashing, and fighting his way through Lunar customs, and was painfully aware that Alacrity rarely consulted him on such matters before throwing the first punch.

"Well, it's not exactly like that," Alacrity admitted, and Floyt saw him casually glance to the inspector who held the guns. Floyt found his heart beating very fast. The man was some distance away and, moreover, had the two pistols. Alacrity's had been called a "dinosaur gun," while Floyt's Webley was loaded with Chicago Popcorn, dum-dums notched all the way down to the case mouths.

"But it'll really be worth your while," Alacrity maintained. "Believe me, it will; you know me. Look, we'll go get it for you, be back inside an hour, and you can hang onto our guns."

Grissom considered that for a moment. The reproduction Webley and the Captain's Sidearm—passed down from Alacrity's father—were plainly valuable, but the inspector had several coworkers and a couple of guards to satisfy, and maybe a superior or two to grease.

Alacrity saw him thinking it through and about to discard it. He turned to Floyt. "Ho, gimme your Inheritor's belt."

Floyt hesitated for a moment, then unclasped the Inheritor's belt from around his middle. It was a heavy ring of red-gold plaques. He and Alacrity had chanced across light-years to claim it and the inheritance it represented, becoming friends in the doing, through hardship, misery, and intermittent glory, after starting out as near enemies. The belt meant a lot to Floyt and had a much higher value than its intrinsic worth, if the two could get to the right spot to use it, since it gave Floyt the prerogative of asking favors of other Inheritors.

But it was useless if they were detained at customs and dragged back to Earth. Floyt set it on the counter, the plaques chiming.

They saw from Grissom's face that it was nearly a deal, but it was quite a chance that the Inspector was file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...y%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (3 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:12

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taking. "Tell you what, men: one of you stays, the other goes and gets the rest of the money. That's all I can do for you."

How long can it be before the Terrans raise the howl?
Alacrity agonized. They were on borrowed time already.

Earthservice had dragooned him into shepherding Floyt across interstellar space, costing him months of irreplaceable time, just as he was about to embark on the mission that centered his life. To achieve his purpose was worth any risk to him; to be chanceried on Earth would be ruin, worse than death. Without seeming to, he took a fix on the customs man with the handguns, getting ready to move.

"Umm, does anyone have something I can read while I'm waiting?" Floyt solicited, setting himself between Alacrity and the guns to forestall any rash moves.

"I'll stay," he added to the gangly Alacrity, whose mouth was slack. "After all, you have a few details to look after.
But don't dawdle
."

Alacrity understood what he meant:
keep going and don't look back.
Floyt was saying farewell.

Just then a comset birred. One of the inspectors leaned to a hush-speaker while Grissom got ready to take an identity affidavit from Alacrity and issue him a temporary visa.

"Chief? Word from upstairs," the comset-answerer said. "They got a twix from Terra, an all-points for two guys named Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt."

The inspector with the guns held Alacrity's on them. Another grabbed the Webley and leveled it. The woman with her finger by the summoner waited for word to touch it.

"I'll stay," Floyt told Grissom again. "And the pistols and the belt … they're yours."

Alacrity wanted to scram the idea, at the same time feeling a desperate hope, the opening of a bolthole.

The purpose he'd set himself in life was so much more crucial than any Grail that he compressed his breath to a silence, face burning with shame, but praying and hoping he'd be free to go.

"Which one're you? Damon or Pythias?" Grissom asked Floyt with a facial twist. The place was silent for an attenuated, white-hot moment.

Then Grissom turned to an underling. "Tell upstairs we got nobody by those names offa
Mindframe.
Just a coupla undocumenteds from Sweet Baby's Arms off one of the O'Neill runs, filling out affidavits."

As that was relayed, Grissom smirked at the dumbfounded duo. "You're
them,
huh? The ones who broke the news about that Camarilla thing and shittubed the Earthservice? And got the Spicans and Srillans cleaning house too?"

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Alacrity cleared his throat. "That'd be us," he owned up, with nothing to lose.

"Mm-hmmm." Grissom nodded. "Y'don't either of you look like the covers of those books about you."

Floyt coughed on the back of his hand. "Those are really just a very embarrassing mistake, those books."

He smiled.

"I'm not surprised," Grissom drawled, motioning to his assistants and handing Floyt's belt back to him.

Thunderstruck, Floyt and Alacrity accepted their weapons.

"Y'know, I never did like Earthservice, or those Spican bankers either," Grissom went on. He shoved the little handful of cash back across the counter at them. "And with things freeing up on Terra, Luna's looking way up there in the pilot's chair these days. So let's just say this one's on the Moon, all right?"

Five minutes later, Floyt and Alacrity were standing once again in the vast rotunda called Billingsgate Circus, a honky-tonk commotion of dives, drug dens, casinos, and the rest that went with starportside life. The kaleidoscope of holosigns and lightshapes reminded Floyt of a trove of garish costume jewelry.

The place was four times as busy as the last time they'd been there, even more clogged with robobarrow-boys, even more choked with thronging out-systemers.

Nearby sauntered a young hetero couple from Ashram, that unfailingly pacific world. They flaunted the distressing "Shock-Trauma" look, complete with synthetic lacerations and compound fractures, sucking chest wounds and other horrible injuries. Instead of pain, the boy and girl showed hostile condescension.

A little farther along came a young woman in silver lace domino, dressed in a wandering boa of rolled, silver-taupe fabric bound with intricately knotted silver twine, giving off a delightful fragrance they could smell from ten paces. Her lovely haunch bore the membership brand of the very militant Professional Chessplayers' Guild.

Alacrity and Floyt had temporary visas in their chosen aliases and permits for the guns. Alacrity wore his in a hip holster on a reddish-brown leather Sam Browne belt that also carried pouches and cases of various sizes and shapes; Floyt carried the Webley in a shoulder holster under his tail coat. They'd tucked the Inheritor's belt into Alacrity's warbag; a token from the late Director Weir might attract attention.

Alacrity drew out the shoulder straps of his warbag, adjusted them, converting it into a backpack, and made sure his umbrella was secure. "Listen, Ho, about what happened back there—"

"
Fap
; if we start trying to figure out who's done more for whom at this point, we'll only drive ourselves rammy." Floyt gazed around Billingsgate Circus as if he'd put it out of his mind, but he was actually feeling pretty damn good about himself. "What now?"

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