Epochal changes are usually scary and seldom go according to plan—especially when they involve a whole new kind of thinking...
Professor Glenn: Your assertion that the chamalian race is driven to destruction by forces it cannot control and the xenophobic texts you cite-link in its defense smack of nothing more than rank Social Darwinism. You claim that biology is destiny and that history is written in our genes. Those ideas are the reified prejudices of the closeted academic—the mindless worship of idols, idols made of outdated rationalizations.
The truth is that chamalians are self-conscious actors—as are human beings—and they will be the authors of their own history. They will do what all self-conscious beings do—struggle with the circumstances in which they find themselves, with what knowledge they have available, in order to chart their own course, wherever it may lie. They will make their own destinies.
As will we all. (With the exception of some deterministic elitist academics who need to extract one of their extremities from one another).
The text continued with a series of cite-links to relevant texts, a list that included Spinoza, Mill, Fromm, and Lukacs. It ended with the standard signature: David Wu, History Department, War College of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh, Chamal.
Pog reached out a long finger covered with fine white fur and ending in a rounded yellow nail and pressed the pad that sent the message on its way.
Oh, if Dr. Wu knew what he was up to, he would be in big trouble. Double-big trouble, for certain fact.
But Dr. Wu did not know.
At the moment, Dr. Wu was sprawled across the divan in the bungalow’s front room. His body had assumed an almost spherical shape, matched by his head, which was smooth and hairless except for a long, drooping mustache and a patch of dark hair at the crown. His snoring had stopped, but earlier in the evening it had rattled the timbers above. Dr. Wu never had gotten used to Chamal’s eighteen-hour day and tended to come loose from its diurnal tyranny.
In addition, he was prone to experimenting with the various alkaloid concoctions that chamalians found stimulating, intoxicating, or hallucinogenic—experiments that often left him in this posture. Often for many hours.
Nevertheless, Pog quickly cleared the screen of Dr. Wu’s mindpad and returned to his regular duties. He rushed around the room, gathering up the doctor’s scattered clothes, which he threw into the hamper. He collected the pots and cups and glasses that had accumulated beside the divan and across the nearby table, holding some of them at arm’s length as he dumped their contents down the drain in the kitchen.
Dr. Wu was not on the faculty of the War College, but worked for the University, a much newer institution created by the angels and chamalians who worked with them.
From time to time, Dr. Wu would refer to Pog as his “native house boy,” but they both knew that their relationship was something entirely different. Dr. Wu was an angel, not of this world. He had come from the stars to study Chamal and report to the other angels on their world. His studies were much too important for him to waste time trying to manage the details of ordinary life on an alien world—especially one as alien as Chamal. Pog’s mother before him, and now Pog himself, had the unique honor of managing Dr. Wu’s household and acting as go-between with the world outside its gates.
It was not employment. This was no wage work. Pog and his mother were agents of the War College and honored for their service.
Though there were times when Pog would rather forgo the honor.
Dr. Wu was not an easy creature to live with—and Pog had lived his entire life in this household, so he should know—for certain fact. He could be stubborn, demanding, unreasonable, unyielding, and inflexible. He was no angel.
But he was quick to transform himself into exactly the opposite. He could be solicitous, gracious, nimble in thought and deed, and generous. He was a man.
Few on Chamal knew what that meant. But Pog had learned.
Dr. Wu lived a rich life of the mind—always questioning, always searching, always investigating. His questions probed deep into all that Pog knew about his own world and how he knew it and why he thought it was so and what if it wasn’t. And he was always talking, lecturing, deliberating, pontificating—even if no one was listening.
Though most often someone was listening. Pog listened. And he learned. Learned well. Learned much. Perhaps too much.
Certainly too much for the few duties that kept him busy around the house.
He hurried out to the kitchen and found the broom, then began sweeping the dust and dried leaves out the door. He cleaned up the counters and wiped down the food processor—a special piece of angeltech with ceramic containers that produced the odd substances and liquids that Dr. Wu cooked up on smooth stone surfaces that turned hot on command. He washed out the cookware, keeping the more toxic-smelling compounds at arm’s length and dousing them with a blast of steaming hot water from the hose in the sink.
In the office, he gathered up a scattering of chamalian books and reports and letters, sorted them roughly, and piled them on the desk. He looked wistfully at the mindpad, but resisted the impulse to check for a reply from Professor Glenn. It was much too soon.
He wanted to provoke a response. The Earthman was arrogant and narrow minded, but he argued well. It was far too easy in a textwar to draw intractable lines of dispute that ended all discussion. Glenn kept the conversation going despite his opposition, always responding to actual comments instead of imagined “straw men.” (Pog always laughed at that term, for which there was no precise equivalent in his own language.)
But lately, this thread had prompted purely emotional outbursts from the man. Outbursts that revealed much about the weaknesses of his argument. Another poster in the discussion had been goading him on, deliberately antagonizing him.
Pog wanted to see if he could do the same—but by pointing to texts that attacked the weakness of Glenn’s worldview, undermining the very context from which he argued.
He knew he shouldn’t expect a reply until tomorrow, given the time it took to relay messages through the wormhole link to Earth, but he couldn’t help the anticipation.
He did, however, take the time to return to the mindpad and quickly compose a love note to his sweetheart, Mally.
This night, as she had for many nights, Mally made her bed in a tent at an archaeological dig hundreds of leagues to the west of the Meshkar Sea—down in the lowlands, where the rainforest met the grasslands that led north to the world-girdling desert. It was there that the University was digging through the fossil record of chamalian evolution, seeking the source of all wisdom. She was part of a team led by Deldred, the chamalian field director, excavating the fossil remains of earlier chamalians.
They had found promising evidence of the earliest children of wisdom—hands that grasped and mouths that spoke. They were hoping to find skulls that had once contained minds that thought and reasoned and desired and sang.
Mally had grown up in the villa next to Dr. Wu’s. She and Pog had grown up on opposite sides of a stone wall, speaking to each other through a crack at the far end of the yard, meeting only after years of separation, soul mates bound in a way that few chamalians could know.
The love note was long on poetry, lifted nearly intact from Shakespeare (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and Browning (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”), and written in English, which he had taught her, to keep it from the prying eyes of Deldred. And to be certain that she would know it was from him, he signed it with his secret nickname—Pogo.
He pushed the SEND button and the message went off on its way, coursing through the world-straddling information network built by the wizards in the high vastness of Kwikorak in the years since the angels had arrived.
He returned to his chores. He swept the floor in the office and moved on to the bedroom, where he piled Dr. Wu’s dirty clothes onto the bed and wrapped them in the bedsheets. He carried the bundle through the kitchen and out the back door, crossing the dark courtyard to the laundry. A cool night wind blew through the trees in the corner of the yard and set the cardboard paddles on the luck-spinner flapping. The tall cylinder of colored panels squeaked on its axle as it turned, generating good fortune for all who believed in it. Few chamalians actually did believe in it, but they were all willing to pretend they did in front of their neighbors.
He dumped the clothes into a basket and was crossing the yard, his neck craned up to appreciate the handful of sharply twinkling stars overhead, when the world exploded with noise and fire.
First came a barrage, BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! from the street in front of Dr. Wu’s villa.
That was followed by the whoosh-smack of a dart-cannon’s payload, cutting through the air and anything else in its path, ending against a solid wall or on the ground.
Then an assortment of ordinance flew into the house with a CRACK-CRACK-CRACK or flashed into eye-popping bright blue light.
He realized suddenly that if he’d been inside, he would have been dazzled by the lights and disoriented by the sounds and would never have been prepared for the assault that followed.
As it was, he had the presence of mind to start climbing the nearest tree, scrambling to find a purchase at first, then almost flying up the branches—as at that very same moment the team of assailants burst through the doors and windows of Dr. Wu’s home.
A volley of loud shots—Pog recognized them as handguns—rang out, echoing off the neighboring houses and the cliffs that rose from the far side of the street. Pog’s heart sank. Dr. Wu was still inside.
The squad spilled out into the courtyard below Pog’s feet. There were five of them—mist-apes, with big pistols in their big hands.
From his perch, he could look over the top of the house, and what he saw made his hearts squeeze in fear.
A black steamwagon.
He realized with a halt that he’d heard its hissing and clanking engine in the moments before the attack. If he’d known what he was listening to, he would have flown into action. He didn’t know what action, but it would have been something.
No one stood still when a black steamwagon full of assassins came your way. He could scarcely believe it himself. They were the stuff of fable and fiction—some of it his own. But they were real, and every time they struck, the stories raced from one end of the city to the other before lunchtime.
The mist-apes spilled across the yard, into the laundry and out again, just in time to meet their leader—a short fox with high pointy ears and long snout full of sharp teeth.
“He’s not here,” one of the mist-apes said.
“He was here,” said another. “I can smell him. He’s not long gone.”
“That’s bad,” said the leader. “We don’t get paid if he’s not here.”
“Should we wait?” asked a mist-ape.
“For what?” the leader asked. “The Public Vendetta?”
He turned and walked back into the house. The mist-apes looked at one another, then abruptly lurched into action, filing out behind him. Pog heard the steamwagon puff itself up, then whistle away down the street. From his vantage point, he watched it rumble and spit as it rolled down the road to where it curved away out of sight.
Then he waited another ten minutes to be sure they were really gone before climbing down the tree and venturing into the house.
There were splinters and shredded upholstery everywhere, all over the floors and walls and across the furniture. Pog treaded carefully across the room to the divan, dreading what he knew must await him.
In the yellow light of the angel-tech lamps, Pog could clearly see the bullet hole in Dr. Wu’s chest. A drop of blood had trickled down across his pale skin, leaving a narrow trail.
His eyes were already closed, his body already in repose, his soul already fled. There was nothing more Pog could do to serve the only master he had ever known.
But there was much that he had to do and do quickly.
He rushed over to the mindpad, swept it up, and stuffed it into a rucksack he pulled from his own closet. He tossed in the few personal items he would need for the next few days. In the kitchen, he gathered some fruit and frogpies, wrapped them in marketpaper, and stuffed them in with the mindpad.
Then he returned to the courtyard and began climbing a tree. This one was closer to the wall, and midway up its branches grew entangled in those of a mate on the other side of the street. On the far side, the tree gave access to the cliff face itself.
Pog climbed the rocky wall, stepping from one rough block of basalt to another, higher and higher, until he reached a street above Dr. Wu’s. He peered up and down the roadway, then hoisted himself up onto the pavement.
Then he began walking. Quickly. There was so much to do now, and so little time.
Jonas Winston, visiting professor of genetics at the university of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh, was sleeping when the message came in. His AI evaluated it and sounded the gentle chime that woke him.
“Dr. Wu is dead,” the AI said. “Violence was involved. They need your help.”
Winston rubbed his eyes until he could open them enough to see and exercised his ankles until they were limber enough to walk on. He went first to the lavatory, squinting into the bright light that helped rouse him from lingering slumber, ignoring the old man’s face that peered back at him from the mirror. It wasn’t really his face. Not the one he’d been used to for a great many years. He had a hard time thinking of himself as any older, and wearing that disguise of age felt odd and unsettling.
He ordered a cup of coffee from the autochef, and when it was ready he made the call.
“What happened?” he asked when the duty officer on the
Cousteau, Lieutenant Janet Cloud, responded.
Lieutenant Cloud was young and pretty but kept her hair pulled back tightly and kept her face stern and military. She reminded him of his granddaughter, who was about the same age. And like his granddaughter, she made him feel his years, something he vowed not to hold against her favor. “No one knows,” she said. “His AI called it in. But there’s something wrong with the unit, so it couldn’t give a report.”
“Who knows about it?”
“Just us, right now,” she said. “There’s been no activity to suggest that the chamalians are aware of it.”
“We should let them know,” Winston said.
“That’s why we called you. The survey team would like you to handle it, since you’re already in the city.”
Winston felt his shoulders slump with the sudden weight of responsibility. He was senior scientist in Kar-Kar-a-Mesh and he would be the natural one to take on this duty.
“We need to know right away what happened,” she said.
“Do you think the chamalians did it?”
“Did you do it?”
“No!” Winston said, his mouth hanging open in surprise. “Of course not.”
“Then most of the remaining suspects are chamalians, aren’t they?”
“I suppose so.”
“So that means we have to tread very carefully,” Lieutenant Cloud said.
“None are so aware of that as those of us who live down here on the ground,” Winston said.
His back began to itch as his imagination rose to the occasion, offering up images of catastrophe. No, the crew up on the survey ship had no appreciation of just what kind of place Chamal was.
A race of creatures who could all interbreed. As a geneticist, Winston was enthralled by the whimsical way in which the chamalian genetic code proved its versatility and universality. Every warm-blooded furry creature on the planet shared the gene pool—from the mice in the woodwork to the great beasts in the forest.
And intelligence took every form and shape that nature offered. As a neighbor, Winston was always fearful of what that intelligence might do.
When the first survey team arrived, they had found a whole gamut of creatures capable of industrial production, technological innovation, scientific inquiry, and political intrigue—all at each other’s throats in a rising war of all against all, the competition of nature raised to the level of Armageddon. That arrival had put an end to the war, but the tensions still remained, many years later. Perhaps they would never go away.
The chamalians at first considered the visitors from human space to be angels, messengers from a god that had turned his back on the race shortly after its creation. A race of purebreds, whose children were untouched by the curse of Chamal’s inbred heritage.
What worried Winston most was that the only thing that held them at bay was the moral force of the survey team itself—as weak and unreliable a thing as he could imagine. That and the fear that the humans would destroy their race if it ever appeared that they presented a threat.
And now they’d killed an angel.
Pog was stopped three times before he got downtown.
The street above Dr. Wu’s villa was just another notch cut into the face of the cliffs that rose steeply up from the Meshkar Sea, much like the one below it, with houses and villas jutting out to overlook the city and the water on one side and an uneven wall of gray and brown stone blocks. At the townward end it was blocked by a sturdy gate, closed at dark. Kar-Kar-a-Mesh worked hard to earn its reputation as the City of Locked Doors. The door to the gate was manned by two sturdy, if not overly wise, badgers with bristly silver fur, straw hats, and military-issue blunderbusses strapped to their shoulders. They each wore the medallions of war veterans—the white stripes in their fur marked them as old enough to have earned them—and members of the neighborhood watch.
They challenged him.
“What’s your name, pilgrim?” asked the larger of the two doorguards.
“Pog. Pogopurkaptic.”
“Is he on the list?” the guard asked.
“Do you want me to look it up?” said the other. “It’s not like he’s coming in. He’s just leaving.”
“Everyone gets checked. And written down. It’s the committee’s rule. The admiralty’s rule too. For all we know, he could be the Scarlet Starflower.”
“Don’t bother,” Pog said. “I’m on the other list.”
“The other list?”
“The list of those who may pass through any gate,” Pog said.
“Is there such a list?”
“Ask your captain,” Pog said.
“And what puts you on that list?” the larger guard asked.
“I’m the servant of the angel Wu.”
“Are you now?”
“This is the medallion of the War College,” Pog said. “You can see for yourself.”
The guard examined the medallion while his shorter companion shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. He looked at Pog with his head tilted, then said: “Don’t you belong down on Commodore Keln’s Lane?”
“It’s a long story,” Pog said. “You haven’t seen a black steamwagon tonight, have you?”
“Ha! Course not,” the guard said gruffly.
“But we heard the shots,” his companion said. “And the explosions.”
“Didn’t hear anything,” the guard said. “We didn’t hear a thing.”
They opened the door and let Pog through, writing his name in their book.
The names would go onto lists at the end of the watch. The lists would be transmitted to the Committee on Public Movement, along with lists from all the gates on all the streets of the city. The committee would keep the lists for all those who might need to see them.
Of course, there were always ways to keep your name off the lists. The fees were sufficient to maintain the neighborhood watch—and then some. Often that only meant your name went onto another list, with higher fees to remove it. Usually, the lists were never seen by any creatures wise or wild. But they were always there.
Black steamwagons, however, were never listed. Guards opened their gates and hid behind them when they passed. They kept their own lists—for their own eyes.
Pog walked on down to the avenue and sat down on a low wall. Every minute or two, a car would come down the avenue from the canyon and slow as it made the curve into the city, some hissing steam, others humming with electric axles, and one reeking of burning alcohol. He pulled the mindpad out of his rucksack and tabbed on the e-mail.
To: University Archeological Expedition, Pog typed.
From: Dr. Wu, he added with a shiver. Dearest Mally: It is urgent that you return to Kar-Kar-a-Mesh immediately. Use quickest possible transportation. Tell no one else about this message.
He pushed the SEND button and sighed. He wished Mally were here already. He needed someone to talk to, someone who would help him understand what was happening, and she was the only one he could trust completely.
It would take several days for them to reach Kar-Kar-a-Mesh. A long drive would bring them to the railhead in the rainforest. And that would be followed by at least three separate train rides, the last up the steep slopes that led to the high inland sea. It had been a month since Pog had seen Mally last, since he had held her hand and smelled her perfume.
But there was no time for those thoughts now.
He put away the mindpad and headed down the avenue toward the waterfront, where he was stopped for the second time.
The gate to the Old City was still open to vehicle traffic, but there was a line backed up on the sidewalk of pedestrians passing through the walker’s entrance. The queue offered a random sample of the varied wildlife-turned-wise that inhabited the high Meshkar littoral—martens and fishers, badgers and hounds, nightcats and treebats, cave bears and mist-apes, all flapping their mouths as if they had something to say.
Pog kept his head down, showed the gateguard his medallion, and passed on through.
A few blocks into the maze of hotels, shops, taverns, fishhouses, and inns, he was stopped for the third time.
“Revkat, Committee of Purity of Thought,” said the dark creature in the dark coat, his dark eyes covered by the brim of a wide felt hat. Behind him, a trio of ferret-faced toughs sneered, but said nothing.
“Greetings, citizen,” Revkat said. “As you know, an exchange-based economy depends on the support of educated citizens who understand how it works. It is our commission to ensure that all citizens of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh participate in their economy to the maximum possible—and that they understand their roles in it as well as the principles behind it.”
He paused, drew a deep breath, and smiled. Pog smiled back—his best innocent, naïve, hayseed-from-the-lowlands smile.
“Now I’m going to ask you a few questions to be sure you know the basics of our exchange-based economy.”
By now, the three toughs had surrounded him, blocking the light from the bars and clubs that lined the street.
Ordinarily, Pog would have made the correct responses, working hard to remain as invisible as possible. But this was no ordinary night.
“What event marks the beginning of the modern era of Meshkar?”
“Why, that would be the creation of the Exchange itself, Mr. Revkat,” Pog said. “And the banks and the lesser markets and the whole system of finance that has made our city the most powerful on the Meshkar rim. But I wonder, you know, how those things all came into being at once. I can’t imagine it happening without a long and historic struggle. The Exchange couldn’t have been created instantaneously. There must have been much, much more to it than that. I wonder if it was not the creation of the bankers and the traders themselves, to enlarge their own power over the rest of us.”
Revkat caught his words in his throat, reared back a step to regard Pog more carefully, then asked:
“What’s the highest value of the exchange system?”
“Efficiency, of course. Thanks to the exchange, money and goods flow to wherever they are needed as fast as they can. When work disappears in one place, additional work appears elsewhere. The increase in wealth benefits us all.”
“Very good.”
“But I don’t understand one thing. What about the individual workers whose work disappears? Do they have to travel to the new work? Do they learn the way it is done quickly enough? What about the obligations and rents they leave behind? Don’t you ever ask yourself these questions?”
“I am asking you the questions tonight. And the last one is this: What is the basis of all economic activity?”
“The rational economic actor,” Pog said. “By making the best decisions for himself, he makes the best decisions for the whole. And that’s the part that I understand the least. This rational actor makes no errors of judgment or understanding. But in all the wide world have you ever seen wisdom act thus? Isn’t it our fate to be overcome by the wildness within us? No wise creature I have ever known has acted rationally. They are all beset by untamed appetites. They covet possessions for their own sake. They are terrible at judging the risks and gains in an exchange. And they live lives full of regret and sorrow.”
Revkat’s shoulders sagged and the light went out of his eyes. “What is your name, citizen? I must enter it on the list.”
“And what list is that?” Pog asked.
“The list of those who ask impertinent questions.”
“I am Pog, servant to the angel Wu.”
Revkat backed away as Pog presented the university medallion. “And now I must enter it on another list,” he said. “The list of those who know better.”
Having ensured that he would leave a clear and unmistakable path through the lists of the evening, Pog now undertook to disappear.
He wended his way through the crowd of variegated chamalian breeds, all of whom shared a common trait—more money in their pockets than they needed to feed themselves. One advantage of the cessation of war on Pog’s world was the improvement in local economies and standards of living. This section of the Old Town had once been the turf of fishermen, privateers, and stevedores, where rough characters with coins won from rough struggles indulged in rough pleasures.
But in the years since the arrival of the angels, the rising tide of prosperity in Kar-Kar-a-Mesh had transformed it into a consumer’s market for easy sins. Dark streets had become illuminated with garish colored lights offering a wide range of intoxicants and bright windows full of females hawking their charms. Music filled the air—the pipes and horns of the lowlands mixed with drums in a driving, incessant beat.
Pog ignored the lights, the females, the crowds, the music, and even the occasional crackle of fireworks lit off by mischievous younglings—though the latter made his hearts squeeze with brief panic. He entered an eatery that tonight catered to a clan of flipper-footed fishermen, with long whiskers poking out of their short pointy snouts. He passed them all by, continuing on into the rear of the establishment and out the back door into an alley.
A few doors down, he entered another door into the bustling kitchen of another restaurant. He nodded to the head cook, a tall, long-eared fellow who was munching on an orange root. The cook nodded back, and Pog went into a small closet. He unlocked a wooden cabinet and pulled off his sleeveless striped singlet, replacing it with a black shirt and collarless jacket. He put his university medallion into a box on the shelf and donned a slouch hat before locking the cabinet back up.
Then he returned to the kitchen and continued on out through the dining room and back onto the street.
A few minutes later, he stood before a large tavern with a small sign above the door that read: “The Maltese Frog.” He opened the door and stepped inside.
A monkey on a stool in the corner playing a lowland horn spotted him first, broke off in mid song, and played the opening bars of “Harlem Nocturne.” It was no saxophone—as far as Pog knew, the only one of those on the planet belonged to Dr. Wu—but it was close.
“Evening, Mr. Hammet,” the bartender said. He was heavyset old walrus with worn tusks and graying fur. He wore a stained apron and he was wiping off glasses with a bar towel. “What’ll it be?”
Pog took a stool and looked over the crowd. The place was packed. Cats in black-and-white striped jerseys, dogs in yellow doublets, bushy-tailed tree pups in dark eyeshades, and boars in stretch pants were drinking, smoking, inhaling, and, most of all, talking at a frantic pace.
“Nutbrew,” Pog said. “Black, no syrup.”
The bartender set down a mug and pulled the nutbrew pot out from beneath the bar, splashing the steaming liquid into it.
At the front of the room, a bespectacled desert kit with a short braided queue stepped up to the microphone and tapped on it to see if it was on. Pog relaxed for a moment as the crowd quickly hushed.
“My name is Norm and I have a tale to tell,” he said.
The patrons tapped on their tables with mugs and coins, then fell silent.
“It was a dark and stormy night,” Norm said. “A shot rang out. The one-armed bear ducked into the alley just in time to miss taking hot lead in the cold rain.”
Pog smiled. He liked one-armed bear stories. The old bear was a well-known character—a war veteran who’d been framed for the murder of a surgeon’s wife and who spent his nights tracking down murderers. But somewhere after the setup, Pog lost track of the story, caught up in his own mysteries.
Dr. Wu would have liked the Maltese Frog. He was a connoisseur of the gritty film noir detective movies of an earlier age, and Pog had learned to appreciate them himself. He had been inspired by Wu’s love of the genre to create this unique venue for a uniquely chamalian rendering of the hard-boiled detective story.
His first tale-telling was a shameless plagiarism and it had given the tavern its name. He had adapted “The Maltese Falcon,” of course, for a world in which there were no birds. He had even adopted the author’s name as his own nom-de-plume.
Something about the black and white world after the angels’ age of war resonated with the inhabitants of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh. The cynicism, the threat of betrayal, the romantic struggle of a lonely figure over moral questions.
Norm brought his tale to a close with the one-armed bear’s confrontation with a would-be killer and brought Pog back from his ruminations. “The weasel was too busy looking at the hand that wasn’t there to notice the pistol in the hand that was,” he said. The patrons of the Maltese Frog hooted mildly, the dogs in the back barking out approval.
When they were done and Norm had taken his seat, wrapped in self-satisfaction, Pog made his way to the mike.
“I have a tale to tell,” he said, peering into a dark corner where a dark-coated ram sat before a smoking brass bowl. “I see you over there snorting up the incense, Boyd. Who else is here from the Society for the Detection of Horse Thieves and Robbers?”
A pair of cats in the front looked up lazily and waved. A rockhound in the back howled at the rafters. Others around the room made themselves known in a similar fashion.
“This tale’s for you and it’s a true one, so you know what that means,” Pog said. Indeed they did, since spinning a good hard-boiled mystery in Kar-Kar-a-Mesh meant knowing how to solve one. (The Society was another of his creations. “What’s a horse?” Boyd had asked when he first explained it.)
“It’s a black steamwagon tale,” Pog said, his voice wavering just the slightest bit. “And it happened tonight up the hill. It’s a big tale and by tomorrow, the whole city will have heard it, but you’re the first. And it’s only the beginning, because there’s no solution to it. Not yet, at least. We’ll see if that changes once you’ve taken to the streets.”
The members of the Society murmured supportive sounds as Pog paused before beginning.
“This is the tale of a black steamwagon crew that killed an angel.”
And he went on with the telling in a room where the only sound besides his voice was the slow bubble of root tea and a squeaking fan spinning slowly overhead.
Winston clutched the safety bar in the dashboard as the car careened past the statue of a long-forgotten naval hero (a thick-faced chamalian with a set of bull’s horns).
He ducked involuntarily as three small carts rattled out of the darkness to the right, but he still kept his grip on the safety bar and the car’s headlight—the single, unattached headlight that was all that illuminated their way through the streets of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh.
They raced down a wide boulevard lit by moonshine and little else. He tried to keep the headlight focused on the road so that Neerat, the driver, could navigate.
The sky held three moons tonight, so that was to their advantage. But Neerat was a chamalian groundhog—what they called a “digger”—and he wore thick goggles to correct his limited vision. He was probably going no more than fifty kilometers an hour, but it felt like a hundred.
The car swung from left to right as the road wound around a rock outcrop. Winston was jolted along with it—and the headlight with him.
“If there were any traffic out here tonight, we’d be dead,” Winston said.
“Everyone must have known we were coming and gotten off the road,” Neerat replied.
A regular system of streetlights would have been too much to ask. Chamalians didn’t do regular systems. It wasn’t in their genes.
Winston knew that for certain, being a geneticist by education and profession. A lot of other things were in their genes, however.
Universal fertility, for one, with all its risks and benefits. Windows in Kar-Kar-a-Mesh had metal grates to keep out the twin threat of incubi—which every female child feared—and succubi—which every male child craved. Changelings were more than a fairy tale here.
That meant that Neerat’s parents were just as likely to be tree foxes or moonbats or rock badgers as diggers. And his offspring could just as easily be grain mice or cliff goats or gargoyles.
You could not look at any of those as individual species. You had to see it in its totality as a vast system of genetic diversity. Individuals inherited whole suites of traits from their forebears, a handful of them found expression in their physical form, and the rest remained hidden, to be passed on to their progeny.
And the traits that marked intelligence—self-awareness, speech, the ability to make and use tools, the capacity to develop and transmit culture—floated freely throughout the vast natural population of Chamal.
In the course of history, intelligent chamalians had come together, in their own fashion, and created all the apparatus of history: political states, military organizations, commercial systems, philosophical regimes, sciences and technologies.
When the human survey ship Cousteau had arrived, they were behaving as intelligent creatures were prone to behave—locked in a doomed cycle of international conflict, a war of all against all, where life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Hobbes had said.
That had come to an end. The humans had insisted. Organized political violence was a thing of the chamalian past. But the disorganized violence was not.
Four times since the arrival of the first survey ship at Chamal, the residents of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh had poured out of their houses, their lofts, their caves, and their burrows and rioted in the streets for several days. The survey team called them “economic disturbances” and did not consider them to be serious threats to world order.
Winston thought they were full of crap—but then, he’d lived here during the last economic disturbance. The smell of burning rubble still clung to some of the fabrics in his rooms, bringing unprompted memories of nights without sleep worrying if a survey lander could get there in time if they called right now.
But no. The survey had banned organized group violence, the Space Corps was on hand to enforce the ban, and anything that happened that they didn’t feel inclined to notice was not going to be considered organized group violence. Else there would be all those questions back home.
Personal violence was another story entirely.
For a moment, Winston wondered if enduring another night of rioting might be easier than enduring the survey’s inquest into David Wu’s death. He’d already received a complete set of instructions from the survey team up in the Cousteau.
Neerat managed to find his way to Commodore Keln’s Lane. The neighborhood watch examined his medallions and opened the gate to let them pass. They rolled down the lane to a villa marked by bright electric lights being hastily placed on the pavement by a squad of heavyset bruins working out of an open-backed truck.
Winston climbed out of the car and walked unsteadily to the villa’s gate. No one stopped him from passing through it, though he expected to be challenged at some point.
Instead, he was greeted by a tall chamalian just inside the gate, a blue-furred canine with a long, square snout, long floppy ears, a low forehead—and a trench coat.
The chamalian spoke and the AI’s voice in Winston’s ear translated: “I’ve been waiting for you, Angel Winston. I am Inspector Mag’Rrrruff of the Public Vendetta. Your loss is our loss, and your vengeance is ours.”
The blue glare of the vendetta’s lights gave the room an unreal glow that took away some of the shock. But there was no way to avoid a sudden chill. A comfortable den where Winston had enjoyed stimulating conversation had been transformed into a shattered manger of death. Splintered wood, spalled plaster, shredded upholstery, shattered glass and crockery. One wall was grated by gunfire.
And beyond it lay Wu’s body.
Winston picked his way carefully through the debris. He recognized a small jade elephant that had once sat on a shelf nearby. The vendetta had rigged a light in this room, too, and Wu was sprawled across the divan in incandescent glory.
He had seen Wu like that before. It usually meant it was time to go home.
“Well, David, we seem to have gotten into the local culture a little too deeply, haven’t we?” Winston said.
He took his phone out of his pocket and recorded the crime scene with a slow wave of his arm. He walked around the divan at a meter’s distance. The recording would help the forensics team, but this was the only chance any human would have to examine things. If only he knew what he should be looking for.
Only the most obvious details captured his attention. The far wall was covered with bullet holes. A carafe of wine on a table had been hit, shearing off the top and leaving the wine. And David Wu had taken one in the chest.
He looked around once again. The table was tall. The bullet holes were high, about 150 centimeters up. There were a lot of them. But there was only one hole in Wu.
“That was a bit of bad luck, wasn’t it, David?” he said. “All those bullets managed to miss you but one. Of course, one is all that’s necessary. ‘’Tis not so deep as a well . . . but ’twill serve.’”
Winston completed his circuit.
“Not much blood for a man of appetite like you,” he said. Just a trickle on the side of his chest.
Did that mean something? What did detectives look for when they were detecting? What was the chamalian doing?
“It is difficult living in a world where every creature is an alien, a stranger,” the chamalian, Inspector Mag’Rrrruff, said. “But for us, for chamalians, it is the same, you know.”
“I imagine it is,” Winston replied. Then he laughed at an errant memory. “David once asked me what I thought of chamalians. I told him I thought of them as if they were Chinese. A completely foreign civilization—with its own history and character—that I really knew nothing about.”
Mag’Rrrruff made no response, but barked at one of his agents, who was panting at the doorway.
“A moment,” the inspector said. “We have company.”
A second agent escorted three chamalians to the doorway, then stopped them at the threshold. Lined up were a desert cat wearing a small knapsack, a rockhound with gold crowns on his teeth, and a mountain kit with a short braided queue. They introduced themselves quickly—the desert cat was Boyd, the rockhound called himself Klavin, and the kit smiled and said: “I’m Norm.”
Mag’Rrrruff sniffed, then spoke a few words to Norm. “They are detectives,” he said to Winston. “That is what they call themselves, at least. They say they are from the Society for the Detection of Horse Thieves and Robbers. They want to look around.”
“Is that customary?” Winston asked.
“No,” Mag’Rrrruff said. “But it is not forbidden. They are asking your permission.”
“Detectives?” Winston said. “Why not? The more, the better.”
Mag’Rrrruff barked and his agent waved a paw. But rather than enter the house, the three detectives rushed off to examine the yard.
“Will you be taking the body?” Mag’Rrrruff asked.
“Yes,” Winston said. “And some other things as well. Some of his personal possessions.” The instructions from the survey team were emphatic on that point. No transfer of technology.
Winston knew the rules well, even without the reminder. He had arrived on Chamal after the incident with Jerome Murphy, the poor devil. Kidnapped by the Red Monkeys, he’d given them cloning techniques. It was only to save his own skin, but the survey team was strict about technology transfer.
So he gathered up everything on the list, and Neerat carried them out to the car. The control module of his autochef. His readers and players. His AI.
The AI was special, of course. It had shut itself down. When Winston tried to get it to talk to him, it just burped: “Protection fault.” Back at the university, he would plug it into the commlink and the team could find out why it had “gone mad.”
After half an hour, he had everything on the list—except for one item: the mindpad.
At first, he was unconcerned. He was sure it was around here somewhere. But it wasn’t on the desk, where Winston had seen him use it in the past. And it wasn’t in the desk drawers. Or next to David’s bed. Or on the floor covered with shards of glass. Or next to the divan. Or anywhere else. Not even under David’s body (he had Neerat help him shift the corpse to do the inspection).
Mag’Rrrruff set his agents to looking for it, and they even called in the three detectives from the Society for the Detection etcetera. But there was no sign of the mindpad anywhere.
The survey team wasn’t going to be happy about that.
They might have searched until dawn, but the truck arrived from the university to collect Wu’s body. Mag’Rrrruff had completed his meager investigations, and he offered a brief report to Winston.
“It was a black steamwagon job,” he said. “Professional assassins. Always the same procedure. They come in the front and shoot everything and everyone. Then they leave.”
“That’s what I gathered,” Winston said.
“There’s one odd thing, however. Dr. Wu’s aide, a possum by the name of Pogopurkaptic, is missing. No body. No sign of violence against him.”
“I guess that leaves two possibilities: He escaped or the assassins took him with them.”
“Indeed,” Mag’Rrrruff said, “And now we have to ask: Who would hire professional assassins to kill an angel? That would be a matter of grand speculation. Personally, I’d put my bets down on the Scarlet Starflower.”
“The Scarlet Starflower?”
“Yes, sir. He is agent of anarchy. A blackguard. He leads a band of pirates who prey on our pirates. He is a master of disguise and a dealer in intrigue. If there is mischief and misery about, he is most surely behind it.”
“And do you have any idea where to find this villain?” Winston asked, anticipating the inevitable answer.
“Not at present,” Mag’Rrrruff said. “But we will round up the usual suspects and interrogate them.”
“Good luck on that,” Winston said. He made one more sweep of the room as Mag’Rrrruff rounded up his crew, but there was still no sign of the mindpad, and that left a dreadful sense of foreboding gnawing at his conscience.
He was on his way across the yard when the trio from the Society for the Detection of Horse Thieves and Robbers rushed up to him.
“See what we have found,” said Boyd, the desert cat.
Klavin, the rockhound, flashed a smile full of gold and produced a small white cloth that held a few large lumps of dark, odiferous organic matter.
“Is that what I think it is?” Winston asked, waving at the air with his hand to dispel the scent.
“Mist-ape scat,” Klavin said. “One of the steamwagon gang took a dump before leaving.”
“Very interesting,” Winston replied indulgently.
“And look—there are little bits of tazelnut shell in it. Like he ate them whole, cracked them with his teeth, and swallowed the pieces along with the meat of the nut.”
“And that’s useful because?” Winston asked.
“We can look for a mist-ape with a fondness for tazelnuts,” Norm, the mountain kit, said, flipping his long braided queue significantly.
“Well, if you find one,” Winston said, “be sure to let me know. I’m at the university. My name is Jonas Winston, and if I’m not in, my AI will be happy to take a message.”
And with that, he stepped out into the night, ready to meet whatever fate held for him.
Barkinflas, the old boar who ran the Committee of Dockworkers and Loadmasters, sipped his tea, rubbed a brown-stained tusk with his thumb, then looked straight across the table at Pog and asked: “The question isn’t why anyone would want you dead. It’s which one of you would they want dead.”
“I suppose that is one of the questions that comes to mind,” Pog said. “It’s not any harder to answer than the other obvious question.”
“And that would be?”
“Who wanted Dr. Wu dead?”
“Someone who could hire a black steamwagon,” Barkinflas said. “And someone who would profit from the death of an angel.”
“Which of the black-hearted buffoons who flies an admiral’s flag would that most likely be?” Pog asked.
“Not necessarily an admiral,” the boar said. “These days, plenty of people carry enough gold to meet the price of a steamwagon.”
“Dr. Wu was working on a new text. One that involved the admiralty and the exchange. ‘The Secret Understandings of Bankers.’ I never got a chance to read any of it and now it’s beyond reach. I can only wonder if it contains the key to his death.”
“Perhaps,” Barkinflas said. “Would you like some more tea?”
Pog pushed his chair away from the table, took the teapot, and carried it to the pump. He filled it with water, stuffed black leaves into the sieve, dropped the sieve into the pot, and set the pot onto the iron firebox in the corner. The box gave off enough heat to dispel the clammy night fog that had crept into the waterfront and filled the great warehouse where Barkinflas made his home.
From up here in the loft, Pog could see the warehouse floor, covered in part by crates and barrels, amphorae and trunks, loose nets and full ones, gaffs, spikes, and hooks, and dark shadows mixed with pools of yellow light from harsh electric bulbs. And he could see the kits and steplings scampering and skulking in and out of the shadows—some with more serious purpose and clear design than others. The clever ones were most likely from litters sired by Barkinflas—or his sister. And that made them cousins or closer to Pog, since Barkinflas was his father.
As the tea came to a boil, a dark shape in one corner of the loft drew itself up off the floor, circled once, then flopped down again. It was the Old Sow—Barkinflas’ sister and Pog’s natural aunt—large and meaty, with a shaggy coat of yellow and brown fur that thickened at the shoulders and spilled over her ears.
“How is the Sow?” he asked.
“She’s getting on in years,” Barkinflas said. “No more litters from her, but she still mothers the kits.”
The Old Sow had no name of her own and no words ever spilled from her tongue. She lacked true wisdom, but she had a protective nature and a sharp eye, and Pog had grown up with her maternal attentions.
“While we wait for answers to our questions, we still must act,” Pog said.
“I’m with you on that,” Barkinflas said.
“If this is indeed an admiralty plot—or the plot of a single flag officer—then there will be more intrigue to follow. Whatever it is, we must be in a position to block it. And to see it before it unfolds.”
Barkinflas gestured his agreement by clenching a large fleshy fist.
“And that means we must be in the streets by morning muster,” Pog said.
“A general strike?”
“A general strike. Or as much of one as we can put together tonight.”
Barkinflas rose from his chair. “We must move quickly. There are many souls to wake from good sleep. Will you rouse the other committees and leagues? I’m not sure they’ll come out for only me. The machinists had a bloody brawl with us only three days ago over matters of doctrine and resentments are still strong.”
“Matters of doctrine?” Pog asked as he poured tea into his mug.
“They were presenting a new line,” Barkinflas said. “They said that an exchange-based economy demands wars of conquest to open new exchanges.”
“Did they now?” Pog said. “And how did your stevedores respond?”
“They resisted a new idea from a rival clan,” Barkinflas said. “How else would chamalians respond?”
Pog felt a rush of pride mixed with guilt. He hadn’t told the machinists about Rosa Luxemburg or her ideas—they’d derived that theory on their own from what he’d taught them. But he felt guilt over the same fact—that what he had taught them had turned into a physical struggle over theory.
“Well, the machinists were right,” Pog said. “If the admiralty doesn’t find someone else to buy their goods—if all the admirals of Meshkar don’t find someone else to buy their goods—then the exchange doesn’t expand. They’d just be trading their own products. And that would lead to a crisis of overproduction, falling profits, and another turn of the Great Wheel.”
“That would mean that the peace imposed by the angels is bad for the exchange, wouldn’t it?” Barkinflas said.
“Yes, it would,” Pog replied. “And thereby hangs a motive for murder most foul.”
“It would be nice if you’d give us a lesson for the day that would trump the machinists,” Barkinflas said.
“It would be nice for you,” Pog said. “Not so much for the machinists. We need them, too, you know. We need all the committees, all the leagues, all the bands and clans and gangs. We need them all if we’re going to change Meshkar. There was an angel once who spent many years in prison for trying to change things. In his confinement he saw that you couldn’t sweep away old institutions without new ones ready to take their place. I fear we are not yet ready.”
“Then make it a good enough lesson to please everyone,” Barkinflas said.
Pog paused for a moment and reflected. There were so many lessons he could offer, so much of the wisdom of the angels that Dr. Wu had taught him, so much he had learned on his own. And then a thought struck him.
He reached into his purse and pulled out a coin.
“You know the lesson of the thing-in-itself,” he said.
“Yes,” Barkinflas replied. “Wisdom can only know what wisdom apprehends—concepts, not the thing-in-itself. That the thing-in-itself is forever beyond the grasp of wisdom. But you said that was a flawed lesson—and left the rest of the lesson for another time.”
“This is the time,” Pog said.
“In trying to pin down the thing-in-itself, wisdom chases its own tail—as the concept keeps changing. The thing-in-itself keeps shifting from one aspect to another, never giving wisdom a chance to grasp it.”
He flipped the coin into the air, watched as it caught the light and flashed it over and over as it fell.
“Here is the thing-in-itself of the exchange,” he said. “Cold hard cash. Forever beyond the grasp of wisdom. The driver of war and empire.”
“Indeed,” said Barkinflas.
“Well, here is the secret of the angels,” Pog said, snatching the coin out of the air and flipping it up again. “The thing-in-itself is a social relationship.”
“A social relationship?”
“Like a kinship bond or an admiralty commission or a workers committee. We create it. We bring it to life in history. It exists because we maintain it. And we can transform it from a thing-in-itself to a thing-for-us.”
He flipped the coin again, and this time Barkinflas reached out and grabbed it as it fell flashing through the air.
“The thing-in-itself is a social relationship,” he said. “That is a good lesson.”
Pog smiled. Gyorgy Lukacs would be proud of him, he thought.
“And one more thing,” he said, as he looked about for his pack to make ready his departure.
“And that is?”
“On Chamal, the social relationship is distributed and interactive.”
The ride back to the university was much easier than the trip to David Wu’s.
Winston and Neerat followed the truck with David’s body, passing slowly through the gate at the end of the avenue and then at a respectfully slow ramble down the avenues and through the city squares to the campus.
Winston followed the truck into the garage—once upon a time it had been a stable—and then watched as the university workers transferred the body onto a gurney. They rolled it down the long stone halls, into the newer section of the complex with fiberglass and plastic walls, into an elevator and up a few floors to the laboratories.
There he left David to the tender attention of the scientific staff—four chamalians and a human technician, a serious Nigerian girl who seemed a little bit in shock over the incident.
She would guide the chamalians as they examined the body. They would follow her instructions without knowing how the technology worked. It wasn’t necessary for them to know—in fact, there were strict controls in place to prevent them from learning. The tiniest pieces of knowledge could give away much more than anyone realized.
Technology transfer was the biggest fear of the survey team and the Space Corps military types that protected them.
He really didn’t want to discuss the issue with anyone at the moment, but he knew that putting it off would only make things worse. He dragged himself down to the elevator, up a level, and then halfway across the campus complex to his offices to make the call.
Lieutenant Cloud was still on duty. That made his task slightly less dreadful.
“David is in the lab,” he said. “They’re giving him a full forensic body scan. It’ll take a while for all the results to be integrated. You’ll probably get the report before I do.”
“We’ll let you know when it comes in,” she said.
“And I’ve collected all of David’s personal kit,” he said. “His AI, his readers and writer and autochef.”
“We’ll need to do a full diagnostic on the AI,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I left it down in the lab with everything else.”
“It can wait until tomorrow,” Cloud said. “You’ve done enough for now.”
He sighed, then confronted the dreary truth. “And I have a bit of bad news. David’s mindpad is missing. Along with his houseboy. I think the boy took it with him.”
Lieutenant Cloud’s face went through a quick series of expressions—surprise, puzzlement, then that confidence that military types were so quick to adopt whether it was justified or not. “I think you’re getting ahead of me. David had a houseboy who’s missing?”
“Yes. He’s not really a houseboy. Or even a boy. He’s David’s chamalian aide. Much more responsibility than just keeping house. He was his connection to the city.”
He spent a few minutes describing the attack by the black steamwagon gang—or the evidence they’d left behind and what appeared to have transpired.
“And you think the houseboy has the mindpad?”
“They’re both missing.”
“But you’ve got everything else?”
“Everything.”
“That’s no problem,” Lieutenant Cloud said. “It’s low-risk technology. All completely integrated molecular tech, so there’s not much chance of reverse engineering. It’s mainly an interface to other things. And if anyone powers it up, it’ll ping us, and we’ll know exactly where it is.”
Winston drew a deep breath and felt the weight of an alien world lifting from his shoulders.
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s a load off my mind.”
“Who do the authorities think is responsible?” Lieutenant Cloud asked, changing the subject quickly now that the housekeeping details had been taken care of.
“They have their theories,” Winston replied. “The official in charge of the investigation thinks it’s the work of some shady character he calls the Scarlet Starflower. Sort of a general scoundrel who conveniently gets blamed for everything that happens in Kar-Kar-a-Mesh.”
“Speculation up here is that there’s some political motive behind it,” Lieutenant Cloud said.
“I wish I knew,” Winston said. “The only one who could tell us for sure was David.”
“That’s too bad.”
“You know, Lieutenant Cloud, I can tell you a tremendous amount about the way chamalian evolution works,” Winston said. “Genes are just an excellent chemical system for storing and passing along information. Our Mendelian genes are simple binary systems for dominants and recessives that produce marvelous diversity, capture useful mutations, mix and match traits and pass them along. But Chamal has a much more complex system—a double-jointed kind of information-storage scheme. Instead of a two-by-two matrix, it’s based on a four-by-four matrix. And that means sixteen outcomes for every allele, and that multiplies out and cascades down. The mind boggles at the complexity.
“I can tell you root and branch of how different phenotypes weave and wend their way through the population. Their histories and pedigrees. Where each phenotype picked up self-conscious intelligence. How it spreads. Nature is much more clever than we give it credit for. The planet’s entire population of warm-blooded creatures all belong to a single species, but nature manages to sort it out so that there are stable populations of each genomorph for every ecological niche over evolutionary time—and despite the most strident efforts by the intelligent genomorphs to interfere.
“But David could do something much more amazing. This city down here is a one big slice across the skeins of inheritance that make up that vast chamalian pedigree. A cross-section. A moment of evolutionary time. The political economy is a mosaic of competing eugenics. A series of overlapping Venn diagrams. A web of intrigues and rivalries. A struggle for advantage and profit.
“And he knew how it all worked. Who the players were. What the rules were. How the games were played. What happened to the winners and the losers.”
Winston caught himself. He was lecturing again. This wasn’t a classroom. This was a conversation with a pleasant young woman who happened to be a Space Corps officer. He had let his professorial habits get the better of him.
Then the awful truth of David Wu’s death spilled over.
“And now it’s all gone. Like a discarded memory card. All that knowledge just erased. So many neuronic pathways turned back into acids and sugars.”
“What a waste,” Lieutenant Cloud said.
“What a waste indeed,” Winston said.
* * *
After a while, when he was done talking to Lieutenant Cloud, Winston returned to his apartment. He went into the kitchen and rummaged around in the cabinets until he found the brown bottle with the gold label that David had given him as a birthday gift. Irish whiskey. Real, not synthesized.
As he recalled, it was like drinking firecrackers and razorblades. But that seemed appropriate.
“To you, David Wu,” he said as he poured a small amount into a glass. “May we remember all the good and forget everything else.”
He swallowed quickly. It was just as he had remembered. He poured another small amount into the glass and carried the bottle and glass into the salon, where he dropped into an easy chair.
He knew he wasn’t going to be sleeping for a while. His mind was full of memories of David, pouring out of some wellspring of grief.
A few hours later, his AI alerted him to a call from Lieutenant Cloud.
“The forensic report is in,” she said.
“What’s it say?”
“Dr. Wu was already dead when he was shot.”
Winston was thankful he’d had a few drinks to keep the shock from knocking him over.
“Already dead? That would explain why there wasn’t more blood. So what killed him? Was it something he drank? He was always trying exotic chamalian concoctions.”
“Maybe. Some kind of toxin. The AIs are still working on it. They’re going to wait for a datadump from Earth to nail it down.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he said. “Good-bye, feet.”
Pog was still awake when the sun leapt up out of the Meshkar Sea with tropical suddenness and splashed golden sparkles from the horizon to the harbor. His vantage point—in a guard tower in the forestfolk slum—allowed him a view of the waterfront and the water on one side of the city and the high mountain cliffs on the other.
Kar-Kar-a-Mesh—the jewel of Meshkar.
The sun burnished the rows of whitewashed villas that lined the high bluffs at the base of the mountains. And it blazed off the ice and snow that capped the peaks high above the morning clouds.
It flashed off the copper domes of the city center, polished by early rising crews of halflings with abrasive clothes who scampered across their heights. It caught the flags and the hulls and the deckhouses of the Red Fleet as it sailed outbound past the breakwater trailing black smoke behind it—the admirals were not about to be caught unprepared if the assassination of an angel was the opening move of a play for power by Shemrak, Mar-Kesh, or the lesser states that ringed the great bowl of Meshkar.
The shore of Meshkar curved in great arcs to the north and south, where, unlike Kar-Kar-a-Mesh, the mountains plunged steeply into the turquoise water with no purchase for landholders. The mountains that cradled the great sea had been thrown up, the angels said, by a small moon falling from the sky. The resulting caldera filled with water in some vastly ancient time, forming a sea that stood two full leagues above the surrounding soggy rainforest astride the chamalian equator.
Tropical rains kept the basin filled, despite great rivers that carried the water through clefts in the mountain ring, cascading down in colossal waterfalls.
And in the niches of flat ground around its six-thousand-league circumference, chamalians had created cities and city-states and mercantile bands. In typical chamalian fashion, the cities and states and mercantile bands formed and reformed constantly changing arrays of alliances and rivalries. Each turn of the Great Wheel brought new permutations of friend and foe and new combinations of economic and political winners and losers.
Through it all, the great cities, Kar-Kar-a-Mesh and her sisters, maintained their fleets and their banks and their trading companies in the face of constant battle and conflict.
In the last few centuries, the desire for wealth and power had sent the cities down from their mountain fastness into the rainforests. The need for more and more resources and more and more markets had fueled an imperial expansion as armies from Meshkar conquered the boundless patchwork of warring states that stretched out across the tropics between the desert belts that circled the planet. Beyond the reach of the armies, their commercial tendrils invaded bog and marsh, ridge and hilltop, with the more seductive and irresistible power of currency and exchange.
But since the arrival of the angels put an abrupt and unappealable end to chamalian military operations, things had changed.
The struggle continued, but through the political economy of tropical Chamal instead of the military matrix.
One result was the flood of workers into the cities of Meshkar from the rainforests below. Cheap labor, easily controlled, readily exploited, rode the cog trains up the steep slopes to find new homes in shanty towns that filled the interstices of old and new Kar-Kar-a-Mesh.
The xenophobic myths that the new migrants spawned among the old inhabitants of the city depicted the forestfolk as a lawless, undisciplined, uncontrolled mob. But the myths only existed to serve the political ends of the city’s masters.
In truth, they had brought their own mechanisms of social control, their own militias and guards, their own committees of public order and safety. Many ramshackle towers—all much like the one where Pog had taken refuge for the night—rose above the slums, holding guards who protected the forestfolk against their new neighbors and against one another.
Pog had asked Barkinflas to find a safe place for him until daylight, and his father had sent him here. His companions, a pair of pointed-ear nighthunters armed with spring-powered dartguns, had welcomed him into their post without hesitation. They had cousins who worked the docks, and that meant a favor to Barkinflas would be repaid one way or another.
Below the guard tower, Pog watched as a four-legged shambler with shaggy black and yellow fur lumbered up the alley behind a row of shops and eateries. A dozen steplings scampered for cover at his approach, scrambling under boxes and behind trash bins.
The shambler stopped at a pile of frog bones, picked a tiny femur from the pile with his teeth, and approached one large trash bin. He dipped his head, threw the bone at the bin, then leapt back into a crouch, ready to spring into action at whatever issued from the bin. What emerged was a family of purple stingers, which rushed off with bits of fruit rind in their mouths.
Pog was impressed by the presence of mind that the shambler obviously possessed. He had formulated a plan, had an expectation of consequences, assumed a stance based on that expectation, and executed the whole operation. There was true wisdom there, even in the least of Chamal’s creatures.
He was nevertheless surprised when the shambler made a hooting sound that could have been words if there were only a bit more modulation to it. In response, the steplings came out of their hiding places and surrounded the bin—which the shambler brought down by putting his forepaws on its rim and pulling hard.
The shambler and the steplings dived into the feast of discarded food with energetic appreciation.
Not just wisdom, but a social order. Pog couldn’t have done better himself.
He looked up at the two militiamen and saw that they had watched the scene unfold with him and were smiling in admiration. He thanked them for their hospitality and climbed down the ladder.
He had much to do today and far to go.
He walked quickly through the slums of the forestfolk, down dusty paths to the cobblestone paving that marked its boundary. He strode down a broad plaza of steps to Admiral Preekat Square, where a clot of green-furred diggers wearing tool belts and orange hardhats were assembled.
The broad avenues of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh were already teeming with the ranks of the various leagues and bands and committees of workers that he had ordered into action. Before leaving Barkinflas, he had drafted orders to the machinists, the factory leagues, the transport crews, the telephone and telegraph switchers, and a dozen other organized groups.
They had prepared for this day for a long time, but had never had the opportunity to put the plans into action. There were details of timing and positioning that had to be worked out—details that he had never had the chance to spell out.
But with typical chamalian insight, the various groups were sorting things out on their own. They were already on the march.
The raucous sound of their voices shook the stones and rattled the windows of city.
They had come equipped with signs and banners. The slogans had nothing to do with the day’s business—which wasn’t exactly clear to anyone at this point.
“Factory working together!”
“Dockworkers united!”
“Information wants to be free!”
The general strike he had always envisioned was meant to be part of a larger struggle, the capstone of a more complex plan. It was not an emergency measure designed to hold ground while unseen plots unfolded.
But theory and practice were never meant to coincide, something that one learned early on Chamal.
At the center of the square stood a statue of Admiral Preekat, twice lifesize. The admiral stood before the splintered remains of a ship’s mast, rendered in bronze, a sword in his hand, wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a belt and a buckle around its crown with sprig of larkleleaf marking his rank. Pog took up station atop a stone bench in the admiral’s shadow, looking for a trio of arms-men he was meant to meet.
“They seek him here.”
“They seek him there.”
“The admirals seek him everywhere.”
Each voice called out from a different quarter.
One belonged to Albrett, a scaly creature with large eyes, a wide snout, and a long, thick tail. Another to Kurch’ll, a shorter fellow with a long neck, no chin to speak of, and a thick leather shield strapped across his back. The third was that of Porkle’pi, a bearish beast of middle height, rich fur that made his face seem to blend into his chest without pausing for a neck, and a plaid cap atop his head.
“Is he in heaven? Is he in hell? That damned elusive Starflower,” Pog replied. In the street language of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh, the verse rhymed, as it was intended.
“Well met, mates,” he added. “We have weighty work before us today.”
Albrett grinned and brandished a sword. “I’m ready.”
Kurch’ll pulled his head down beneath his shield and nodded. “I’m with you.”
Porkle’pi flexed his muscles, bringing an array of nasty quills that lay hidden in his fur up to the surface. “Bring them on.”
“Then let’s go,” Pog said. “The Scarlet Starflower has an appointment to keep at the War College.”
“A walk across town,” Kurch’ll said. “What could be easier?”
“On a day like this,” Porkle’pi said, “what could be more difficult?”
By midday, they had conducted a biopsy on David’s liver.
And after spending the night draining the bottle of Irish whiskey, Winston felt like they’d done the same thing to him. He didn’t know how his friend had done it. He was always drinking potions and poisons from chamalian grog shops. And when he wasn’t, it was fast-cultured wines or quick-distilled spirits from his autochef. Winston had come to appreciate a fine pinot noir that David had managed to crank out of the machine, but the rest were just nasty tonics.
And David Wu’s liver told the tale of them all.
The liver was where toxins went to die—or to keep you from dying. And the list of toxins in David’s biopsy went on and on. The forensic analysis had flagged most of them as unfamiliar.
“That’s useful,” Winston said aloud.
The forensic module didn’t have any experience with chamalian vintners and was unable to identify David’s manifold self-medications.
He could try to fill in the gaps, but the task seemed immense. He would have to collect samples, have them analyzed, compare them to the list. It could take days. Weeks.
Where would he begin?
He was about to call for Neerat to ask him for suggestions when his phone rang.
It was Inspector Mag’Rrrruff.
“My suspicions are being borne out,” he said.
“How so?” Winston asked.
“I have serious questions about the role of Dr. Wu’s houseboy in his murder,” the inspector replied. “Under ordinary circumstances, Dr. Wu’s houseboy should have appeared by now. He has not.”
“Kidnapping by the steamwagon gang isn’t a viable theory anymore?”
“We went through the booklets from last night to see if we could track the boy down. He clearly escaped the steamwagon. We were able to track him through the street up the hill, down to the city center, into the waterfront district, and through an encounter with an agent for the Committee of Purity of Thought. But there his trail ends. We are searching the district now, but under the circumstances, that’s a slow-going detail.”
“The circumstances?”
“We’ve got a general strike going on,” Mag’Rrrruff said. “Demonstrations, marchers, protestors, streets full to overflowing.”
Winston felt a chill run up his spine.
“So what do you think about the houseboy?”
“I am beginning to believe that he was an agent of the Scarlet Starflower, and that he helped arrange the attack by the black steamwagon gang.”
Winston was slow to reply, turning over the idea for a moment in his mind.
“Well, there’s a problem with that theory,” he finally said.
“And that problem would be?”
“The steamwagon gang didn’t kill Dr. Wu. He died from poison.”
There was silence on the line to match his own thoughtful pause.
“The houseboy could have poisoned him,” the inspector said at last.
“True,” Winston said. “But then what about the steamwagon?”
“What about it?”
“If he poisoned Dr. Wu, why would he arrange an attack by the steamwagon?”
“To cover his tracks?”
“Possibly,” Winston said. “But things aren’t adding up. And as a scientist, I can tell you that when things aren’t adding up, you aren’t asking the right questions.”
“Very well,” Inspector Mag’Rrrruff said, “I will try to come up with better questions. When I do, I will be in touch with you again.”
“We’ll talk later,” Winston said, and then he hung up.
Winston sighed. It was a seriously unsatisfactory discussion.
And then there was the news of social unrest. He didn’t look forward to living through that again.
He went to the window and opened it to look out. The square below his office was full of students, marching toward the courtyard gate.
They were chanting a rhythmic, repeating chant. A chant that made Winston’s blood suddenly run cold.
“Mr. Memory?” he called to his AI. “Could you translate what they’re saying down there?”
“Simple transcription or full etymological analysis?”
“Just the simple meaning,” Winston replied.
“‘Wise creatures—united—will never be defeated,’” the AI reported.
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
Winston was old enough to remember the chanting students in the streets of Chicago as the world turned itself upside down. “The people—united—will never be defeated!” And he remembered the fires and the guns and the riots.
“Damn it, David,” Winston spat out. “Talk about your technology transfer. What have you done to us? What have you done to us all?”
