The Kassa Gambit (22 page)

“You shouldn’t have,” she admonished him. “Especially for only three people.” There were no other guests.

“But I wanted to. Even my doctors admit it no longer makes any difference. Their only complaint is that I’m spending my money on something besides them.”

“Is that rice?” she asked. Real rice, in tiny, fluffy grains, not cultured rice-protein. You could tell the difference because the fake stuff melted into a gluey mess when you cooked it.

“It’s imported. Real broth, too, from an animal.”

Prudence frowned.

“Indulge an old man. Decadence is all I have left. You can nurture your morals when I’m gone.”

She could hardly object while she was wearing those ridiculous shoes. “Don’t explain it to Jor.”

Jandi took the lid off of another dish. Formed, pressed protein cakes, fried in synthetic oil, still in the instamatic wrapper. Junk food for kids.

“I thought he might prefer this.”

He did. There was something comical about an admiral eating star-shaped crunchies with his fingers. No, Prudence decided, not comical. Sweet.

A strange family gathering, between the old man and the boy. Prudence wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to be mother, daughter, or sister. But she had learned to take her family where she found it.

“Ah, that we could eat like this every day.” Jandi was immensely satisfied with his feast.

“On Kassa, they did.” Kassa grew their grain outside. Prudence had always been confused by that. Surely washing the contaminants off had to be harder than just growing food in a vat. “I didn’t notice that they were any happier.”

“Altair grows happiness in vats, too. Not as enjoyable as the real thing, but cheap enough for everyone. It’s the secret of our success.”

She cut into her fish, waiting for him to satiate his love of being cryptic.

“Seriously, my dear. Though I’ve not been to as many planets as you, I’ve been to many, and Altair is the blandest of the bland. That blandness is the source of our wealth. Nothing particularly succeeds on Altair, but nothing ever fails. On this blank canvas we can project whatever we want. We might as well grow people in vats. Altair is like one giant people-vat.”

Jorgun laughed.

“Most would say that’s a good thing,” Prudence commented.

“And so do I. So do I, my dear. Still, I enjoy the fish. How do you find it?”

“Marvelous.” It melted in her mouth, leaving an exotic tang she could not identify. So many times today she had said nice things that were true.

“It’s a rare planet that does not force man to adapt to it in some way. And we all struggle against that current. Like salmon, we refuse to spawn in any other stream than our own. Change is universally recognized as bad, and so evolution is dead, killed by our technological prowess and cultural stubbornness. On Altair, we didn’t have to fight that battle, because there’s nothing here to fight against. Instead, we built a society that mimicked our fantasies of home. People flocked to it, and here we are. An empire of nondescription.”

“An empire under attack.”

“Indeed,” he said. “Kassa is a muddy little world. If our spidery friends wanted it, they could have bought it for less than the cost of their bombs. No, they must have a larger goal, and that goal is Altair. For the same reason we chose it: its blandness will support the spider’s dreams as easily as it supports the monkey’s.”

“So you accept that the alien threat is real?”

“Not at all,” he said, and stuffed his mouth with salmon.

She had to wait until he was finished.

“The
aliens
are real, yes. The blood you gave me does not match any genotype in our catalogs. Of course, we can’t unwrap the genetic code and reconstruct the creature, despite what the popular vids would have you think. Genes express over time and through environment, and we have no clue what gene does what. Or, for that matter, which bits are actually genes. The blood sample could be from a brainless mite or a philosophically inclined walrus. All we can say for sure at this point is that it is verifiably alien, which tells us nothing new.”

“But…” because she knew there was one coming.

“But the
alien threat
is not.” He grinned, at this moment happier than she had imagined that tired old face was capable of. This must have been what he looked like when he was tearing poor Mauree to shreds, or when he was thrashing out some scientific conundrum in a hall full of academics. He had found an anomaly and battled it, man to mystery, in mortal combat. Now he was as proud as a warrior who had killed the enemy captain with his bare hands.

“They always screw up the little things. It’s hard making a really good fake, because it’s hard making anything good. To be fair, they could not have expected you to bring me that little sliver. Nor would they have expected me to test
the glass.
But I did, because I am an obsessive. I want to know everything. What I found out in this case is that anti-radiation materials work off a common physical principle. Salts are impregnated in the substance. The energetic particles strike these heavy molecules, transforming themselves into harmless heat instead of deadly penetration. A necessary technology to a star-faring race, naturally.”

He refilled his wineglass.

“Like anything good, these salts are not easy to manufacture. They require stellar furnaces. It is much cheaper to simply mine them from planets in the old parts of the galaxy, where nova after supernova has poisoned the worlds with heavy metals. But stars are not factories. They are not vats, controlled for purity. They contaminate everything they make with their own private signature, their own particular concentrations of trace elements. From an analysis of these traces, we can conclusively state that the shattered glass of your little alien ship was first formed on an industrial planet not too far from here, by the name of Baharain.”

An unpleasant place. Prudence had visited it once, but couldn’t afford to buy a trader’s license. A few large fleets had a monopoly on the traffic, and the local government seemed content with the situation. “What does that mean?”

“It means that someone on Baharain is equipping the enemy. It means I was right. There may be aliens, but the only threat is people. As always. And, as always, I already know who those people are. Or at least, one of them.”

How could he get all that from a sliver of glass?

“Did you know our prime minister is an immigrant from off-world?” Jandi asked, as if it were relevant.

“I heard as much,” she said, thinking of the cabbie’s rant.

“I’ll give you exactly one guess which planet he’s from.” Jandi smiled, a sad, crinkled comment on the relentless duplicity of mankind.

Prudence put down her wineglass. “Who do we tell?”

“We?” Jandi raised his eyebrows. “You don’t tell anyone. They will kill you, Prudence. They will kill me, too, but that hardly matters now. I will go public with your splinter, pretending that I received it from one of the scientists studying the wreck. They will disavow everything, of course, calling me a foolish old man merely seeking attention, and trot out their own experts to contradict me. The leak will justify increased security, leading to a purge of anyone not wholly in their pocket. Eventually they will replace the glass in the wreck so they can release public samples, thus proving that radicals like me can’t be trusted. And of course, at some point in these events I will have an unhappy accident.”

Jandi’s catalog of futility was impressive.

“Then why try?”

“Because, my dear, it’s what I must do. Having to discount me will cost them credibility. Purging their staff will cost them competence. Releasing a public sample will set a precedent. That is the problem with these people. They have no principles to guide them, merely a destination. They will paint themselves into a corner, eventually, and then the rest of the world will have one chance to fully see their destination is a dead end. Historically speaking, the people are unlikely to utilize that opportunity to protect their freedom, but that’s not my problem. I’ll be dead by then, even without the League’s helping hand.”

“Unlikely, but not impossible.” She needed to believe that.

He smiled at her again, repeating his earlier sadness at self-deception, but his voice was gentle. “Have you joined the Cult of Transcendence, too? Do you think that somewhere out there, human beings have finally found a technological fix for human nature?”

She had never shared the hidden nature of her medallion with anyone. Her father had passed it to her as a sacred trust, a secret he had kept for sixteen years. Sometimes she hated him for that. If he had sold the damn thing, he might have been rich enough to escape before the cataclysm devoured his world. But once it came, no amount of money was enough. In a sea of madness, even hard cash sunk without a trace. The medallion, unable to change reality, had become merely a symbol that a better world was possible.

Now she needed help in believing the dream.

“I know they’ve found something, Jandi.” She opened the wire locket, taking the medallion in her hand. Professionally interested, he watched her with eyes like microscopes.

Pressing on the medallion, she extended the blade. Gently she moved it across her ceramic plate. The dish did not change, still holding a puddle of carrot juice. Only a thin line through the white pottery testified that she had done anything at all.

Jandi reached out and gently tapped one half of the plate. Disturbed, it jiggled, the crack widening into reality, no longer watertight. Bright orange juice dribbled onto the table.

Heedless of the mess, dumping food onto his tabletop, he picked up the plate and critically examined the cut.

“Don’t touch it,” she warned. “It could be sharp.” The molecular edge of her knife made even ordinary objects dangerous.

He dragged a napkin across the edge. The cloth fell in two pieces. But when he repeated the experiment, nothing happened.

“I’m afraid I’ve just polished my atomic evidence out of existence.” Picking up the other half of the plate, he did the same. “Let me get you another plate, dear. Don’t bother to clean it up, just move to a new chair.” The table was large enough to seat a dozen people. “Remarkable,” he said, when he came back from the kitchen with a clean plate. “All those years I wasted flying around in space to find alien artifacts, and the only one I’ll ever see walks through my front door.”

“It’s not alien,” she said defensively. “I got it from my mother.”

“Did she say where she obtained it?”

Prudence bit her lip. “I never met her. She died when I was an infant.”

“May I?” he asked. Prudence put the medallion in his open palm. “Can you show me?”

She touched it delicately, with one finger. “Here, here, and here. Not anywhere else. It’s very hard to do, though.”

Jandi fumbled with the medallion for a moment, and then the blade slid out. Prudence caught her breath in surprise.

“A misspent youth,” he grinned. “I used to hustle vid games in bars, when I was a boy. I’ve kept up the dexterity through constant practice. On the odd chance I could win a bet, or impress a pretty girl. But I agree: it is not alien. It is too perfectly designed for the human hand. So somewhere out there a world is making nanotech pocket knives. And your mother…?”

“I don’t know. My father was a baker. He never went more than fifty kilometers from the apartment block he was born in. She was a traveler…”

She had been a spacer, a wanderer, a free spirit that flitted unanchored through the galaxy, working her passage on an endless succession of stray freighters and liners. Something about Prudence’s father had caught her, and she had fallen for the last time into the gravity well of a planet, to bud and seed like a tumbleweed taken to root.

Within a year she was dead.

Prudence had been the only thing her father had left of his beautiful star-crossed bride. He had married again, because that is what people do. He had loved his new wife, and the children they made; he had been a dutiful husband, a loving father, a good man. He had built a normal life. When he tried to tell Prudence the stories her mother had told him, the places she had been and the sights she had seen, it was as if he was relating a fairy tale that he had read in a book. Only when he had shown her the medallion had it become real to her. Only then had she seen the memory of grief in his eyes.

A few stories, a medallion, and the legal status as half off-worlder were all the inheritance he could pass on to Prudence. The thing she envied the most, the time that he had spent with that wonderfully exotic person, could never be shared.

When his homeworld of Strattenburg had burst into self-immolation, Prudence had fled in helpless despair. Only her status as half off-worlder had let her escape the clutches of a mad bureaucracy. Only the invisible beacon of her mother’s world had given her direction, kept her moving on an uncharted course instead of drifting aimlessly.

“You found Baharain, from a sliver of glass. Can you find her world from this?” Prudence didn’t dare hope, but she had to ask.

“No,” Jandi said. He put a data cube on the table. “I was going to trade you this, for your sliver. It is a copy of the university’s star compendium; every fact, observation, and rumor we’ve collected over the last hundred years. To buy it would cost a fortune, and undoubtedly break a law in the process. So I thought it would be a fair trade, but now I am in your debt again. The most I can tell you is that nothing vaguely like your artifact is described in that cube. I cannot guess how the medallion came to you, yet no other technology followed.”

Prudence had thought long and hard on the problem. “Maybe a node failed. Maybe we’re cut off now, the
okimune
split in half. Or still connected, but by a roundabout way, and it’s just taking this long for knowledge and tech to work its way through node-space.”

Jandi shook his head sadly. “There are a thousand maybes, Prudence. War, disease, stellar collapse, or even aliens could have nipped this flowering in the bud. Or maybe they just don’t care. Maybe the gods are jealous. Prometheus is still bound to his rock; perhaps no other chose to join him.”