Science Forums 2

[Pyrotex]

Okay, boyz und girlz, I have a surprize for you! Another SF story! One that I wrote back in 1999. It takes place in the same solar system as the story "Child of Privilege".
Enjoy!


Bogart Reprise

by Nelson Thompson


Maggie Robearson was working in commissary 38 of the Windowbox o’neill, changing filters in the food vats, when she received a message that a package had arrived, one that demanded ID verification. At the end of her work shift, and after arranging with her surrogate to meet near the postal center, she hopped the nearest slideway.
In a barren room dominated by the ‘wreath and eagle’ logo of the Daltravian Postal Service, she waited in line to thumb her ID. She was given a small package that had come first class from another star system. Extremely unusual. But even more inexplicably, it turned out to contain merely a cheap pair of earrings wrapped in foil. There was no message, nor indication of sender.
Having little interest in accumulating trivials, she stuffed it all back in the box, and tossed it into a trasher.
Thirty meters from the mail center, two men approached her on the public slideway. As they drew abreast, they jumped her, and forced her into a deserted side chamber. When she struggled, they hit her with powerful blows that betrayed their training in illegal martial arts.
They said, “Give us the package or die!”, accompanied by a blow from fist or foot. They threw her across the floor, which afforded her a few seconds of relative peace, enough for her to drop in on Onyx, her surrogate, and mentally scream for help.
They searched her thoroughly, and when they didn’t find the package, they backed away from her. Maggie looked up to see one nod his head. The other drew out a weapon and pointed it at her just as the door burst open.
Onyx had arrived with a postal datacop.
In the confusion that followed, the two strangers burst past Onyx and the datacop and fled down the slideway. Onyx helped Maggie to her feet. She was bleeding, and swayed unsteadily on bruised legs.
The datacop looked up from his instrument and spoke with perplexity, “Are you Maggie Robearson and her surrogate Onyx Robearson?”
The two women nodded.
“Most strange! I show no trace of anyone but the three of us having been in this room! Most strange, indeed!”
Maggie found her voice. “I will want to file a charge of assault against those two, whoever they are!”
The datacop shook his head, lines of astonishment engraved deeply into his face. “The evidence of a calibrated chipscanner is final, mam, and this one indicates quite clearly that there was no one in this room but you, when I and your surrogate entered. Even though I witnessed your two assailants with my own eyes, it will do you no good. I’m sorry, mam Robearson, but according to this chipscanner, and the law, your assault never happened!

- - = = - -

“But is it newsworthy?”
“Hunh?” Malarka Swade, looked up from his holoscreens and turned towards Editor-in-chief Rana Smythentropp. “Is it what?”
“I said,” she drawled, doing an excruciating job of affecting an old Terran accent, “is it newsworthy? Are the readers going to care? If they won’t care, then we don’t print it.”
“Rana! An entire planet was wiped out! Nearly two billion people. Dead. Dissolved down to their amino acids. That’s news – isn’t it?” His eyebrows arched up in that peculiar, pleading way they did when he anticipated he would be overruled. As he usually was.
“Come now, mister Swade, they just died of a runaway smartvirus. Industrial accidents like that happen every week. ‘It’s A Big Galaxy,’ you know.” Rana made it a point to quote the masthead motto of the Daltravian Gazette at least once a day in mundane conversation.
“It’s not as if the planet blew up,” she continued, with a flourish of hand gestures, “or that the inhabitants were anybody special. Besides, puddles of amino acid do not make good pix, and XenoCol will have its ecosystem rebuilt before you know it, and stocked with another billion eager puppies who think that elbow-room is the key to happiness.”
Malarka stared at his holoscreens and said nothing. In the center was the write-up he had done on the demise of Bernadette-258’s population. In the upper right screen was the standard five sentence planetary obituary sans pix. In the upper left screen was a pix of the planet itself in all its verdant glory. Of course, Malarka thought to himself, when you’ve seen one Terran class planet, you’ve pretty much seen them all. And there were billions of them in the Milky Way. Why, there were over three hundred alone named ‘Bernadette’!
His right screen was tied to an infonet channel. Currently it showed a detailed map of the upper northwest hexadecant of radial zone seven of the Milky Way (McNally MegaStar Softmap, version Omicron/835). A trio of gossamer red lines intersected at the position of Bernadette-258. With a twitch of his hand, the view zoomed in, going through a scale factor of two every second, until there were fewer than a dozen stars in the screen. With tiny squints of his face muscles and subtle finger gestures, he overlaid commerce routes, defense zones, rad barriers, energy grids, and arcana (which included gravity spikes, WR-eddies, Herbigs, Hawkings, gamma storms, exogradients and all other navigational hazards).
He called up symbols for inhabited planets. A twiddle of his left thumb caused the entire display to rotate deftly so that Bernadette-258 could be seen through the dense network of lines, dots and symbols he had created.
There it was, a tiny blue dot touching the larger yellow dot that represented its sun. The ‘late’ Bernadette-258. Malarka leaned forward to read the text under it.
And in that instant, the tiny blue dot disappeared.
That’s odd, he thought, wondering if perhaps it was a software glitch.
“Swade!” The voice had lost all pretense of genteel (if phony) Terran charm. “Are you surfing again? You know we have a deadline to meet! Bern gets a standard obit, and nothing else!” The only gesture she was using now was a raised fist. “I need a sidebar story for page delta-three, two meters, and I want some blood and mud in it! Now!! Use that Krishnamurti item!”
Malarka let out a slow, silent sigh. With due haste, he saved his Bernadette-258 story, and called up the Krishnamurti-15 story.
He hated novas. They happened so often, and killed or injured over a hundred million people every year. Nova prevention technology was still centuries away (if ever). And the rad barriers were often ineffective, even when they were in the right place and charged up at the right time. Sometimes, as in this case, they made a bad situation horribly worse.
Nova 4994-BX had flared two standard years ago in the upper northwest hexadecant of radial zone six. There had been plenty of warning. Nearly a square parsec of rad barriers had been energized to protect the fifty or so planets that were within range of the nova’s gamma storm. But one rad barrier failed. (Officially, the failure was due to ‘hideochronic fluctuations in an energy hypershunt refractor.’) Rather than reflecting and absorbing the gamma wave front, the barrier actually focused much of it on Krishnamurti.
Of course, the ‘official’ story from Vitriox-1 was that no one knew of the hypershunt failure until the following day, when Krishnamurti’s sky suddenly blazed with radiation-induced auroras that had probably been bright enough to blind. Malarka looked at the holos taken from low orbit by the first ship to arrive on the scene. The bodies were piled three deep in the streets of Californ, the capital city, and they looked... melted. Ah! Here was a mag view – you could see the half-charred and bubbled bodies of a mother with child in arm. Perfect!
“This ought to be enough blood and mud for you,” he thought grimly.
He flexed his right index finger – the holo was dumped into his central screen layout. With subtle movements of his hands, he directed his display to shorten the dead woman’s skirt, enhance her cleavage, add more char and ooze to her exposed flesh, and insert a pool of blood under her head. With a furrow of his brow, the changes were added to all frames of the ten second clip. He zoomed in and out, running the pan forward and backward, checking the view from all angles, deleting non-essential details from the background. A green icon flashed in the corner to confirm that the altered image was still legally “authentic” for journalistic purposes. Malarka grinned sardonically.
He added six more carefully edited vid clips and a simplified Milky Way regional map. With hands extended, he began to mentate the text of the Krishnamurti-15 disaster for the evening edition:
“VITRIOX RAD GUARD BUTCHERS 1.7 BILLION! Krishnamurti-15 Subject of Vicious Attack by Space Tyrants! The gentle and peace-loving folk of Krishnamurti-15, an Edenic paradise 270 parsecs from the Vitriox Cluster, and the last bastion of democracy in the tyrannical ‘Vitriox Exclusion Zone,’ had no warning yesterday as a wave front of deadly gamma from the 4994-BX nova was intentionally focused on their planet, nuking millions in their tracks, and dooming another billion to a protracted and agonizing death. This is just the latest incident in a pattern of malevolent ‘accidents’ that can be laid at the feet of the Vitriox Radiation Corps, the so-called ‘defenders’ of the... ”

- - = = - -

Malarka squeezed his walker handles as tightly as he dared. Traffic was heavy on the concourse this time of day, and if he went any faster, he was likely to hit someone. He didn’t need another 5-Daygild fine. Skillfully, he dashed ahead of a couple in matching plaid shiorts, executed a tight turn and jockeyed into the queue just ahead of a large Badorian, who gave him a dirty look. The Badorian’s walker lightly tapped into the rear of his own, an intentional signal of the other’s displeasure at being beaten into line.
Malarka ignored him. “Tough tarpoons,” he thought as he reached into his pocket for his thalstimmer, “If you can’t surf a walker, then stay the hell out of my way, skeezer – ’cause I can.” He pressed the chrome thalstimmer into his right nostril and pressed the thumbstud. His tension and anxiety ebbed away.
A buzz in the walker’s handle let Malarka know that it was now under automatic control. Smoothly, the line of walkers passed through the blue faux-marble portal under the watchful eyes of surrogate datacops, and lined up in a neat row behind other rows of walkers in front of a pale blue wall emblazoned with the ‘wreath and rocket’ symbol of the Daltravian Shuttle System. Through the translucent departure decks, he could vaguely see other arrays of walkers above and below him. There was a muted klaxon, a short pause, then all three thousand walkers simultaneously folded down to become seaters. The wall shimmered and disappeared. As a single unit, the packed formation of seaters moved into the cavernous interior of the shuttlecraft.
The commute to Windowbox was uneventful. Malarka usually slept or strapped on his reader. Some of the commuters (mostly males) had on readers and lappers, a sure sign they were simsexing. Malarka couldn’t get into simsex, even with the advanced interactive features. The same biolectronic actuators implanted in his face and fingers that allowed him to compose his columns every day, surf the infonets, or alter a pix with focused mentation could also control the actions of a simulated sex partner.
Malarka sighed. He used that technology every day to get paid. He refused to use it to get laid.
For a while, he looked at the shuttle’s windows, but the ubiquitous flurry of holographic navigation aids against the starry backdrop of space was quickly boring. The only views he really enjoyed were those of planets, with their glistening continents, variegated blue oceans, and that white, swirly stuff in their atmospheres. But views of Daltrave-6 could only be had on the morning shuttle, when he went to work dirtside.
Malarka pulled out his reader and slipped it on. He twitched his brow several times, paging through the index of storycubes, until he came to a bogart called, ‘Sam Spade and the Treasure of Sierra Watergate.’ The story dated to the early twenty-second century, though the cube itself was nowhere near that old. His roommate, Brilson, who liked to rummage through antique and curio shops, had found it for him. With relish, Malarka started the cube, and a scene opened in a dingy office with a single window overlooking a bleak city. The hand-lettered sign on the door read, “Sam Spade, Investigative Reporter.” Music swelled.
It was his second viewing of this storycube. He loved historical novels, especially those relating to crime, a social phenomenon which eventually disappeared after the invention of the thumbchip. Of all the historical novels, bogarts were his favorite.
Twenty minutes later, he slipped off the reader and picked out Windowbox, one of the low cost o’neills in the 4500-kilometer residential orbit. It was painted a cheery green, with its name monogrammed in a jauntily scripted font around its immense circumference. Low cost, but not cheap, he rued. His two-room flat with metered water and open commissary cost him 3520 Daygilds! Nearly ten Yeargilds for a two-year contract! Just so he could live near a planet!
With dizzying speed, the shuttle yawed to the left and aimed directly for a small circular opening at the axis of the o’neill. For an instant, Malarka was visually blitzed by the interior of Windowbox flashing by. In the next instant, the shuttle was at rest in its docking cradle. The windows turned off. The forewall of the shuttle swung silently up, and as a unit, the formation of seaters slid out onto the arrival decks.

- - = = - -

“Yo! Lark! Over here!” The yell was just loud enough to be heard at the entrance of Windowbox commissary 22 over the din of a thousand diners.
Malarka turned toward the voice without breaking stride, and headed for a small round table next to a window showing a slow panning view of the gardens of the Daltravian Planetary Park and Arboretum. His roommate Brilson and a woman, dressed in matching striped shiorts, each had an arm up to catch his attention. They were already working on their meal.
The two men had met on Brilson’s home world, Palastine-88 (actually, on an o’neill around it), some thirty standard years ago, and had been best friends ever since, traveling together when they could afford it, and working when they had to. They were currently rooming together until Brilson could find employment.
The woman, Onyx, was a surrogate pleasure-pet, and Brilson had been hanging out with her for a couple of weeks. As with all surrogates, she wore a tiny silver crescent icon inlaid in her forehead. She was legally a ‘sentient,’ even when not mentally occupied by her prime, or owner. At such times, surrogates expressed their own capacity for independent thought, which might or might not be substantial. Most pets were really vapid on auto, although he had to admit Onyx was pretty sharp as surrogates went.
Malarka had kept company with any number of them over the years. They were all right as long as you forgot that someone else was looking through their eyes and speaking through their mouths – if they spoke at all.
He sat down hard on the pedestal, uttering a small grunt. Onyx giggled politely. She always giggled politely.
“Joy, Lark!” Brilson reached out and slapped Malarka on the shoulder, a common greeting on Palastine-88. Malarka returned the slap.
“Joy, Bril. What’s to eat?”
“Well... you got your choice of coneapples and yeast,” he held up a damp, pink cube delicately poised between his chopstix, “or congealt and rice.” He nodded at the plate in front of Onyx.
“Noooo... contest,” drawled Malarka, mocking one of Rana’s more absurd accents. He poked the stud in the center of the table, and crisply spoke two words, “coneapples, beer.” Onyx giggled around a large stixful of rice.
Malarka smiled at the attractive, dark-skinned surrogate, noticing that the crescent on her brow was dark. She caught Malarka’s gaze and smiled back, putting down her stix.
“I gotta hit the fresher, Lark, but I want to hear all about your day when I get back!” She departed.
Malarka leaned over to Brilson. “She still checked out?”
Brilson’s grin turned down a bit at the corners. “Yeah. She’s been on auto for three days now. The last time her prime dropped in, I took her to Orbital Park 14. Wow, did we have some fun. But I guess it’s over. I wonder if I did something wrong.” He looked quizzically at Malarka then lapsed into silence until he had consumed another bite of food.
“I really thought it was true love this time, Lark. When she was primed, I was never so happy in my whole life. Man, the talks we had. What fun.” A reminiscent pause. “She’s still a lot of fun, even checked out, but it’s not quite the same. Nothing’s as good as the real thing, you know?”
“Yeah, I know, Bril. I know.” A food tray descended to the table, and Malarka reached for his chopstix. “What did Onyx set you back – if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Thirty Daygilds,” came the glum reply.
Malarka’s first bite of coneapple halted in midair. “Thirty!? For the Blessed Pain of Fornax, Bril, you don’t have a job and you’re running short. What are you doing wasting that kind of Time on a pet?”
Brilson leaned forward on his elbows, hunched his shoulders and smiled wanly. “I really love her.”
“But still... ” Malarka put the cube of coneapple back on his tray. “At this rate, you’re going to do the ‘Final Flush’ yourself, and pretty soon.” Brilson said nothing in reply.
The bite of coneapple made it all the way to Malarka’s mouth. He chewed for a moment while his friend stared morosely at the table. Malarka took a swig of beer.
“Bril, my best friend, how much do you have in your account? No lie.”
His voice was flat and low. “Forty-eight Daygilds. And some change.” Brilson rubbed his hands over his face as if he were suddenly exhausted. “But it’s okay, Lark, you know what they say, ‘see a dozen planets and die’.” Brilson grinned but Malarka wasn’t amused.
“So, maybe it’s time for me to check in to one of the rimprojects. I have eighteen days before I have to make the decision to move, or... or stay here and take the Final Flush. And Onyx is paid up through the month, so I won’t be lonely.”
Bril glanced up as Onyx returned and took her place at the table. He admired her soft brown curves as she cheerfully picked up her stix and attacked the last of her congealt and rice. He reached out and put his arm around her, pulling her towards him affectionately. She nuzzled his neck.
The sadness in Brilson’s eyes broke Malarka’s heart. No mention was made of Malarka loaning Brilson some more Time. His own account wasn’t in much better shape. He was just managing to stay out of Final Bankruptcy with the job at the Gazette, and that was none too secure. He had really done all he could and they both knew it.
“Really, Lark, I’m fine. Listen,” Brilson leaned over the table and spoke in a whisper, “I’ll check in to the rimproject and you keep slugging it out at the Gazette. You’re a damn good journalist. The economy will pick up, you can bail me out in a year or so, okay? And until then, I don’t want you going bust trying to help me out. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid. Okay?”
Malarka cleared his throat. “Okay, Bril. I understand. I’m just sorry, that’s all.” He took a really big pull at his beer.

- - = = - -

Malarka closed the door between the rooms of his flat, wanting some privacy and time to think. The possibility of losing his best friend was something he had never thought of, not that is, until two local years ago. That was when they arrived in the Daltrave-6 system with just enough Time for a pair of hostel bunks and some local travel vouchers. The planetary economy was booming and they both landed good jobs, and bought contracts in Windowbox, as close to planetside as they could afford. Then the economy went sour.
Brilson was laid off, and then a few months later, the news bureau that Malarka worked for suddenly folded. They hustled as they never had before. Malarka eventually landed a job at the Gazette, which was hardly more than an interactive vid tabloid for ‘skeezers,’ a commonly used term referring to rimproject residents. And the pay was half what he was used to. But it was enough to save his flat.
Brilson’s luck went from bad to worse. His technical specialty was microbial programming, a fledgling industry on Daltrave-6, and one of several that went belly up after the crash. He sold his contract back to Windowbox Corp at a loss and moved in with Malarka.
And now he had forty-eight Daygilds left. And counting. You could move in to a rimproject if you had thirty Daygilds for the welfare fee. Getting out was another matter entirely. But if you allowed your account to fall to zero...
Malarka caught himself staring at his right thumb. Inside was the ticking time bomb that all humans carried: the thumbchip. The only thing that stood between the individual and immortality. It was identification, credit card and policeman all rolled into one. Coded into its silicon and protein interior was his name, ID number, retina scans, fingerprints, every address he had ever lived at, his education and work experience, a list of his implants and skill levels, his military and medical history, DNA genome summary, legal records, ten-generation family tree, location trace, medical monitor, smartvirus generator, and most important, his account balance.
Many humans worked because they wanted to. Most worked because they had to. And in all of human society across the Milky Way, the standard unit of currency had become the ‘Daygild.’ You were paid in Daygilds of life. You exchanged Daygilds for luxuries, and sometimes for necessities. And every 24 standard hours (unless you lived in a rimproject), your account was automatically debited one Daygild.
If it ever dropped to zero for more than 24 standard hours, the thumbchip released an enzyme that blocked the creation of pheronomine transferase in the brain – quick and painless death. It had become the most common cause of death in the Milky Way for two thousand standard years. In fact, barring acts of passion and unusual accidents (such as novas and renegade viruses), it was nearly the only cause of human death anymore.
He was tired. He set his window to rooster at 0600 and went to bed. Darkness washed over his mind like heavy surf on a lonely beach.

Malarka arose and switched his bedroom window from a simulated view of the morning sun rising over majestic mountains to mirror mode and inspected his reflection. There were no obvious signs of aging. No wrinkles, no skin splotches, no hair loss. He had stopped changing at about the age of thirty, and that had been over two hundred standard years ago. Nor did he really expect any. The smartviruses that infected every cell of his body saw to that. Disease and old age only happened in historical dramas.
But he still habitually examined himself in the mirror every morning. Smartviruses did mutate on rare occasions, and go awry. Sometimes horribly awry. He remembered with a shudder the billions on Bernadette-258. Smartviruses were often used for industrial processes, like fabricating nano-structures from animal proteins. If one of those cybernetically ‘intelligent’ molecules ever escaped confinement, and hybridized with normal prophylactic smartviruses, the result could be a plague that would sweep a planet and all its satellites in a matter of days. He shuddered again at the mental image of human beings ‘melting’ into pools of amino acid ooze.
Shaking himself clear of the dreadful vision, he picked up his shiort. Malarka slipped his legs and arms into the garment, fastened the control-buckle at his waist, and touched its top button. As if by magic, the seam that ran from crotch to neck pulled together and closed. He touched the middle one, and the shiort began losing its bagginess, until it was just the firm fit that he preferred. He adjusted the shiort’s color with the bottom buttons and inspected his image in the mirror. Pearl gray suited him fine, and the vermilion trim matched his hair and eyes. He opened the door and stepped into the other room.
“Joy, Lark.” Brilson was already up and dressed, presumably searching the infonets for suitable offers of employment. Onyx was dialing through a variety of vids on the window. She stopped at one showing people engaged in gravity sports against spectacular planetary scenery.
“Joy, Bril.” He nodded his head quickly in Onyx’ direction, and raised his eyebrows in a question.
“Well,” began Brilson, who seemed as puzzled as Malarka, “she never got a comeback call, and I guess I...”
“But you know the visitor’s clause in the contract,” Malarka said. “Limit of three persons for ten hours during any twenty-six hour period.”
“I know, Lark. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. It’s just that I kept expecting her prime to call her away, like usual, and – ” He gave an apologetic shrug, “she never did.”
Onyx turned around and smiled. “Good morning, Lark. Look at what I found. I think this one is ‘valleyball,’ isn’t it? Don’t you play valleyball?”
“Hmmm... that’s ‘volleyball.’ Yes, I’ve played it. Bril and I both have. Uhh, Onyx, I see you spent the night.” The statement left a question in its wake.
“Yeah.” She stood up and stretched. “Maggie told me to stay. She said something was going on and I should stay with Bril until she got here.”
Malarka was slipping on his backpack. “Did Maggie say – hunh?” The backpack fell to the floor. “She’s coming here?!”
Brilson jumped to his feet. “What? Onyx, you didn’t say anything about this last night. What’s happening?”
She gave the sweetest and most charming little smile. “I’m not sure. But Maggie has been very upset all week. I just know that she said... ”
The change that came over Onyx was subtle, but unmistakable. A slight straightening of the spine. Her forehead icon lit up. Maggie had dropped in. Onyx was primed.
“Bril. And you, too, Malarka. Please don’t leave yet. I’m on my way there right now. Wait for me. Please.”
The icon dimmed and the sweet smile returned. “See? I told you. Maggie’s coming.”

- - = = - -

Maggie Robearson would not be mistaken for Onyx’ identical twin. The surrogate had slightly darker, almost maroon-black skin, a larger bust, and brilliant blue eyes as opposed to Maggie’s brown eyes. Primes often ordered cosmetic changes in their clones.
“I hope this is important enough to make me late for work.” Malarka was distressed at the intrusion into his schedule, but curious at the same time. This was altogether unusual behavior for a prime.
“I think it is.” She leaned her back against the wall, shut her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and blurted out, “someone is trying to kill me.”
She had come to Daltrave-6 twelve local years ago after reading about the impending boom in the local economy. The planet was being moved closer to its primary, which would vastly improve its climate, and more than double the legal population limit. She saw this as her big chance to actually live on a planet. She almost made it.
Just before the crash, she owned a suite at the Fontainebleu, in the 400-kilometer financial and recreational orbit, and ten percent of a one room time-share, dirtside. She owned two small businesses and twenty employees. In another two local years, she would have had the hundred thousand Daygilds for a probationary planetary residence certificate.
And now she was facing Final Bankruptcy. After the crash, she sold her businesses, defaulted on her loans and moved into Windowbox. Her family helped out at first, sending her Time when they could, but about six months ago, all communication from them suddenly ceased. Her messages went unanswered.
Without financial aid, she had to endure the indignity of retraining Onyx as a pleasure-pet. And yesterday, Maggie’s contract on her flat expired, and she had been kicked out – that was why she had told Onyx to stay the night with Brilson. Her account was under sixty Daygilds.
Silence filled the room like ten kilos of congealt in a five kilo sack. Maggie and Onyx were sitting on the floor holding hands, their faces damp.
Brilson whispered into the gloom, “Do you know what happened to your parents?”
She shook her head, then nodded, then broke into sobs. An instant later, Onyx did too. “Last ... night,” she managed to blurt between the sobs, “I... I found out... they... they're dead. My whole... my whole family... my... whole world... they’re gone... all gone.” She and Onyx hid their faces in their hands, and sobbed in unison.
Malarka had to bite his lip to maintain his composure. He could feel his own tears welling up.
When the sound of crying had subsided, he spoke as gently as he could, “Maggie. I’m afraid we’re in much the same boat as you. I’ve got a job dirtside, but it’s all I can do to support me and Bril.” The two men locked glances for a long moment. “In fact, we’re losing ground. You’ve listened through Onyx. You must know that we can’t help you.”
Maggie sniffed loudly. “Yes. I know. It’s just that I don’t have any friends left, and Bril is the only client I’ve got. Onyx isn’t exactly in hot demand, you know. She wasn’t designed to be a pet. She has hardly any sex implants.”
Malarka offered his hand to Maggie, and helped her to her feet. Brilson gave a hand up to Onyx, and asked, “Is this why you’ve been checked out? Or was it something I did wrong?”
Maggie gave a ragged smile and shook her head. “No, no, Bril. You’re sweet. You really are. And you don’t know how much you’ve helped me.” She touched her palm to his cheek. “After all I’ve been through this week, I just lost it, that’s all. I couldn’t drop in. I’ve been a basket case for days.”
Brilson relaxed just a bit. “Good. I mean... I’m glad I didn’t offend you or hurt you. Uh... if you don’t mind me asking, how did your family die?”
She wiped the last of the tears off her face and said, “Some kind of smartvirus disaster. Apparently, it wiped out the whole planet. I couldn’t find out any details. There was just an obit in the Gazette.”
In a strained voice, Malarka blurted out, “Maggie! What’s the name of your home planet?” But as the hair stood up on the back of his neck, he knew that he already knew the answer.
“Bernadette,” she said. “Two fifty-eight.”
Six pair of eyes focused on Malarka in the uneasy silence. He could feel the blood draining from his face.
“So,” he said, clearing his throat, “is that your story? Is that it?”
“Well, not quite,” she offered timidly. “I know you’ll think I’m just being crazy, but... I swear, last week someone tried to kill me.”
Malarka nudged his backpack to the side and sat down, cross legged, to hear the rest of Maggie’s story, of being attacked outside the postal center.
When she had finished, Brilson piped up, “What about the package?”
Maggie shrugged, “I went back to the mailroom with Onyx and the guard to get some first aid. I fetched the box out of the trasher, and I… well, I remailed it.”
“To where?” asked Malarka.
“I didn’t want it coming back to me here at Windowbox. I’ve lost touch with my old friends in the Fontainebleu. And Bril had told me about your job dirtside. I didn’t know who else to trust, so I sent it to you, care of the Daltravian Gazette. I hope you don’t mind.”
Malarka picked up his backpack. “No prob. But I have to go now, or I won’t have a job at the Gazette. Bril, keep an eye on these two. Get out of the apartment for a while. See you all at twenty-four hundred.”

- - = = - -

The commute to Daltrave seemed oppressively unending. Even the view of the approaching planet’s dayside couldn’t distract Malarka from his thoughts. Maggie’s story had hit him hard. He couldn’t put his finger on why he believed her, but he knew he did.
Maybe it was the tie-in to Bernadette-258. From the moment he read the story on the newspipe, he felt there was more to it than just an industrial accident. For instance, there should have been at least one o’neill out of hundreds to survive the plague. Or a shuttle in transit that had enough warning to quarantine itself. And there were plenty of warnings. Paris-699 monitored several translight emergency broadcasts, pleas for help, warnings not to land planetside until the virus was contained, etc. Then silence. The newspipe mentioned no survivors.
Or maybe it was just because he wanted to believe her.
He even believed the part where someone tried to kill her, which was a flying tarpoon in these days and times! With a thumbchip in every human, it was possible to monitor the whereabouts of everyone. To think that someone could attempt murder and not be automatically caught in the act (or soon thereafter) was ludicrous. And no one, not even the mighty Sam Spade could wander around an o’neill, or even a planet, for an hour without a thumbchip, before his lack of ID would alert the ubiquitous datacops.
No, it had been quite impossible to commit serious crimes for over two millennia. Oh, there were the occasional acts of passion, impulse and stupidity, all right. But murder? Only in old historical novels.
Like the bogart in his reader.
Malarka, pulled it out, slipped it on, and restarted the Sam Spade storycube. Perhaps it was only the distraction he wanted, but there seemed to be something calling to him. Something in the story. He watched it with an intensity that startled him. It began with a dingy office and a window overlooking a bleak city. On the door was a hand-lettered sign...

- - = = - -

“Rana, sit down! This is not just another tall tabloid tale for skeezers!”
The editor-in-chief of the Daltravian Gazette turned away from her largest layout window where she had been half minding, half ignoring his insistent overture. Finally, at the note of anger in his voice, she turned, gave him a grimace, and walked toward her chair.
“Okay, Swade, you’ve got ten minutes. And if I’m not on the edge of my seat by that time, I’m docking your wages.” The autochair swiveled around automatically at her approach. Without breaking her eye-contact with Malarka, she casually propelled her lithe frame backwards. The well-trained chair caught her with a soft ‘plop.’
Malarka stared silently at the floor for a long moment, then back up at Rana. His track record at persuading her of anything was pretty slim. And yet, his face broke into a smile for no apparent reason. “Rana, have you ever heard the phrase ‘Investigative Reporter?’“ Her quizzical expression gave him the answer he expected.
The words spilled from him in a rush. The odd touches in the Bernadette plague, including the apparent total lack of survivors, Maggie’s parents going incommunicado six months prior, the mysterious package, the apparent attempt on her life, and the meaning of those two words hand-lettered on a fictitious door in an ancient bogart.
“And then there’s this, Rana.” With a sweep of his hand, he called up his McNally Softmap in his largest holoscreen. A flourish of gestures, and the map zoomed in on Bernadette 258’s primary. “Yesterday, Bernadette-258 was on this map right here. Today, nothing. Something very weird is going on, and I intend to find out what it is.”
“And you want me to do what?!” The phony Terran accent had vanished.
“You heard me.” Malarka was still standing in front of her, his shiort getting hot and damp from his exertions. His hand went to his buckle and dialed some slack. “I want to ‘investigate’ this Bernadette-258 story. And I want you to back me. I got this hunch that there’s something big going on, something that someone wants to keep secret. Enough to commit murder for. And I mean really investigate it, Rana, not just tap into the newspipe and hype blood and mud.” He paused, raising his hand to keep Rana from speaking into the silence. “And for that, I’ll need access to your private translight channel and your pass codes.”
This was the point of no return. Malarka kept his eye-contact and gritted his teeth. Rana stared blankly at him for so long that he would have given up in the next instant. But suddenly her mouth opened and she was asking for details, asking how he was going to ‘investigate’ this story, how he was going to use her channel.
She was sitting on the edge of her seat.

Rana left the room to get the equipment he needed. Rather than work in her private office, they decided it was easier to move the channel into his work area. It was a four-person room, but with three writers laid off, Malarka had it to himself.
He was busy at his everyday work screens, composing the queries that would go out over the local infonets. Of course, he was still limited to commercial transactions with established (and restricted) ‘public’ data management services, but it was the best he could do until he could get on Rana’s personal channel.
And besides, it was necessary groundwork, he told himself. An ‘investigative reporter’ couldn’t know ahead of time what was valuable and what was trivial. He had to cast a wide net, and trusts his instinct that he would find what he needed. And so, he had to determine all available sources of data on Bernadette's recent history, data traffic, economic trends, etc. and any personnel directories, industrial indices, planetary libraries, cultural infonets, and the like that might be accessible and useful.
He didn’t know what he was doing, but he knew that it was what an ‘investigative reporter’ ought to do. That is to say, it was what the fictional Sam Spade would do. Now if he only had some secret ‘contacts’ like Sam Spade did, folks with connections to the ‘slimy underbelly’ of Bernadette’s (now deceased) population.
His hands paused for a moment over the interface deck. Maggie was all he had.

- - = = - -

Daltrave’s sun was setting redly in the window that dominated his office when he and Rana decided to call it quits. The spectacular view was being shot from some height, perhaps from the top of one of the planet’s arcologies. Perhaps from the top of this one.
The speculation only made a fleeting distraction in his fatigue and disappointment. He and Rana had issued hundreds of queries and counter-queries over the past three days, with no results. From the local infonets, anyway. They would have to wait till tomorrow for answers to the queries placed on Rana’s translight channel. But locally, all they got was zilch and tarpoons:
‘Queries pertaining to prior-residents of Bernadette-258 now on Daltrave-6 are being delayed until notification of next of kin... ’
‘The names of survivors of Bernadette-258 cannot be released at this time. Please redirect your query to... ’
‘XenoCol cannot make public the future disposition of ecological cleanups without Theta level clearance from planetary security and authorization... ’
And so on, ad infinitum. Perhaps they would have better luck with the queries made on Rana’s private channel, but he was beginning to doubt it. With a tired thanks and goodnight, he took his leave of Rana, left the office, stepped into a lift, and descended to the arcology’s public access level.
As he departed the lift, he stuck to the green carpeted thoroughfare, which was the only one that permitted him, an off-resident, to travel freely on his own feet. As on most planets, certain small privileges were reserved to certified planetside residents – privileges like unrestricted travel, communication, shopping, recreation and going ‘outside.’
At the end of the green concourse was a rack of walkers - small, self-powered, contragrav strollers.
He hopped aboard the nearest one, and grabbed the handles. The access gate fastened behind him with a reassuring click, and a cushioned pad came up against his butt. A hum wafted from the engine housing under his feet, and he was lifted a centimeter off the floor. A squeeze of the handles and the walker moved out onto the pink concourse. With a twiddle of his fingers, he put the machine on automatic, and directed it to the Daltravian Shuttle System.
He was within sight of the Shuttle concourse, when his eye was caught by a familiar logo on a spacious office front: The XenoCol Corp – “Terraforming, Colonization, Custom Ecologies, and Planetary Detox.” Though he was bone tired, it occurred to him that Sam Spade wouldn’t pass up this opportunity. He squeezed the walker handles, and aimed for the ornate doorway.
“Hello, may I help you?” She was very attractive, very professional and a surrogate. Her hairdo and cosmetics were lightyears beyond anything Malarka could afford. The neckline of her tight white shiort was dialed about as low as it would go and still maintain the illusion that she was clothed. Her breasts were awesome. Her voice was molten honey.
Malarka brought his walker to a graceful stop at the receptionist’s counter. “Yes, I’m investigating the Bernadette-258 disaster, and would like to interview someone who knows something about... that.” He intended to emulate Sam Spade’s tough, no-nonsense delivery, but the receptionist’s charming smile and impressive cleavage flustered him. She smelled wonderful – almost intoxicating. She had him stammering like a school boy with a crush.
“Yes, certainly. Will you hold?” It was a non-question. She moved her hand subtly over her datadeck, paused, her crescent glowed softly, and then she looked up with an entirely new expression.
“My name is Wanda. What may I do for you, mister, ah... ”
“Malarka. Malarka Swade, off-resident, and journalist... I mean I’m an investigative reporter for the Daltravian Gazette.” He recomposed himself, hoping to presence an intimidating professional bearing. “I’m writing an in-depth article on Bernadette-258. Can you give me any leads on the nature and origin of the killer smartvirus, and how XenoCol is going to clean it up?”
“Uh, mister Swade, I’m sorry, but that information is rather confidential right now. What authorization do you have?” Her fingers glided discretely over the datadeck.
“I’m an investigative reporter, doll. That’s all the authorization I need. I’m working on a really big story that’s going to blow the top off this case. If you can give me some solid answers, I’ll see to it that you get your pix in the Gazette.” He smiled his most winning smile, and took another quick glance down at her voluptuous ‘public relations.’
“Well, mister Swade, that sounds fascinating.” Her finger waggled over the datadeck, and she poured on the charm. “If you put it that way, maybe I can get some little answers for you. Would you mind coming into my private office over there?” She pointed demurely, and a doorway opened.
“Sure, doll. Do you mind if I park the walker here?” He took her adoring smile to be a yes, gave her a wink, and did his best Sam Spade saunter into the next room.
The door whispered shut behind him as he saw Wanda (with her neckline dialed all the way up) turn around in an overstuffed autochair behind a very expensive desk showing more polished brass than he had ever seen in his life. She made eye contact and smiled broadly. “So, mister Swade. You’re the one asking all those very annoying questions on the infonets.” Her smile disappeared. “I don’t like being annoyed!” she spat.
There was a soft ‘pththft’ from his left and a small sting in his arm. A man in a maroon shiort with a small, police-style airgun stepped out from behind a display case.
Malarka’s knees turned into soft putty, and his tongue into a bag of marbles. “Wha? Wha’z diz?”
“This is just a precaution, mister Swade. Until we find out who you are and how much you really know.” The stranger in the maroon shiort was helping him sit down on the couch. “If you don’t know anything, you’ll wake up from this as good as new. And if you do know something... well... ”
The voice became a meaningless buzz in his ears. The room disassociated into unrelated planes of color and texture, and his consciousness took a much-needed vacation far, far away.

- - = = - -

“Lark!” The sound was barked by an insect, muffled by infinite echoes, yet possibly meaningful. If only he could concentrate on where it had come from, and what it had to do with the fuzzy swirls of light that were trying to attract his attention.
A slab of cold congealt traveling at near lightspeed collided with his right cheek, detonating beautiful multi-colored starbursts. He traced the impact with some interest as the shock wave slowly traversed his head, causing his cheeks to wobble and his eyes to open wider. As the shock wave reached his left ear, the fuzzy swirls coalesced into something he recognized: a face.
“Lark! Wake up or I’ll slap you again.” Sure enough, there next to the noisy face was an open palm, presumably attached to the face in some important way.
“Bruh? Ril?” His own noise-making capabilities needed adjustment.
“Lark! Are you okay? Speak to me!”
“Bril? Ah... what’s going on? Where am I? Ah... no, cancel that. I see where I am. Where have I been?” He looked around the arrival deck platform of Windowbox, at Bril and a dozen others whom he did not recognize. He was still strapped into a seater.
The big man in the chartreuse shiort with the ‘wreath and rocket’ logo on his chest leaned in closer. “Mister Swade, I’m a datacop. You just arrived on the 1080 shuttle from York Platz, in an illegal state of intoxication from – ” he glanced down at the chipscanner in his hand, “beta-numbital. Medically, you appear to be okay. I’m turning you over to the care of your primary contact, a mister – ” he glanced down again, “Brilson Trout. You will be notified of your day in court, and fined twelve Daygilds.” He turned and stepped out of sight.
Brilson helped Malarka out of the seater, and led him to the public slideway.
“Where have you been, Lark?”
Malarka shook the remaining dizziness from his head. “I think I asked you first. How long have I been gone?”
“Thirty-two hours. You didn’t answer your beeper. Did you go on a crocker or something?”
Malarka told him everything he remembered up to the point where he was headed for the shuttle station and decided to take a quick side trip into... into... and that’s where his memory ended.
“Somebody did this to me, Bril. I was coming straight home. Then I saw something, and I... I went into a place. There was somebody there, maybe more than one. I remember being surprised. Afraid. That’s all. Somebody did this to me, and I don’t have a clue!”

They entered Malarka’s apartment. Maggie and Onyx looked up, saw Malarka and smiled. After hugs were passed around, and everyone was assured that Malarka was okay, if a bit famished, they adjourned to the commissary.
“Wow! It must be a planetary holiday!” There were three available meals posted at the table, not the usual two. Onyx continued in a cheerful voice, “We can have spam croquette with bluebeans, meatcake number four with potatoes and greens, and congealt with potatoes and bluebeans. Yum! I’m having the congealt.”
Three groans went up as they took their seats. Maggie said, “Onyx, how can you eat that stuff? It smells like sweaty socks.” Onyx just smiled and said, “I must have a more enlightened palette than you do.” This started another round of teasing. Onyx put up with their jokes good naturedly.
Their food descended to the table. Two spams, a meatcake, and a slimy, writhing jelly.
“What the tarpoon is that?!” blurted Malarka.
“It’s supposed to be congealt!” cried Onyx.
“It’s moving off the plate,” said Bril with obvious fascination.
“What it is, is uncooked fiberscillium,” answered Maggie. “It looks like the food proc is on the fritz again.”
“Fiberwhat?” asked Bril without taking his eyes off the gray-green translucent jelly that had crawled onto the tabletop.
“Fiberscillium. It’s the main ingredient in congealt.” Maggie picked up her chopstix and attacked her croquette. “It’s a naturally occurring slime mold down on Daltrave. They say it usta grow wild by the megatons before they drained the ice-swamps. Now it’s cultivated in all the local o’neills as a source of protein. The ‘Dirt’ – ” she pronounced the word with a capital D, making it clear that she meant the planetside residents of Daltrave-6, “won’t touch the stuff, of course.”
Bril was quite excited, and had been poking his finger into the slowly flowing flank of the critter while Maggie was talking. “This is great! An autolocomoting, ectomorphic species of slime mold. Do you know its PI?” He looked up at Maggie.
“PI?” A stixful of bluebeans disappeared into her mouth.
Malarka broke in, “Bril, what are you talking about? ‘Ectomorphic?’ ‘PI?’ Whatsit?”
“This,” said a beaming Bril, “is not merely the raw material of congealt, but also the raw material of my profession. I am, or at least was before I arrived here, a microbial programmer. Lark, you know that. Well, this is the stuff I usta work with. Come here little buddy.” Bril gently scooped up the quivering blob, and placed it carefully in a pocket. “Onyx, you better order something else.”

- - = = - -

They returned to the apartment. Malarka called Rana and tried to explain his unexcused absence. Rana wasn’t buying much of it, but he could keep his job if he hustled down to the Gazette immediately. Hundreds of responses from their queries had arrived, and she couldn’t read them all. The next edition was due out in nine hours. After some negotiation, he agreed to leave for Daltrave in one hour.
Meanwhile, Bril had gone burrowing into his travel trunk and pulled out a small, well-used case filled with high-tech. He slipped one device over his eyes. The next was an oversized datadeck, marked with a ‘For Professional Use Only’ icon. The largest device sat on the table, and from its side, a transparent tray slid out. Into this tray, Bril carefully placed his blob of slime mold.
The tray retracted behind a small window. Through it, one could see tiny probes and needles inserted into the blob. Strange colors of light bathed the slime mold. Galaxies of tiny blinking lights on the front of the control box generated whirling patterns. Maggie and Onyx – watching intently – thought it was the strangest thing they had ever seen anyone do. All this fuss over uncooked congealt!
Malarka turned from the comm and joined the silent and curious crew huddled over the table. For all the years that he had known Bril, he had never fully understood what Bril did for a living. Sure, it had to do with microbes, and it had to do with programming. But it certainly had never been a hot topic of conversation between them. They talked about their travels, the things they had seen, and what they dreamed of doing. Mostly, they talked about gravity sports. And when they weren’t talking about gravity sports, they were doing them: volleyball, soccer, phrendo, tennis, trak tao and running, chiefly.
That was unusual in itself. Planets where gravity sports were popular were few and far between. Palastine-88 was one of them. Sure, lots of people like to watch sports, that’s why you could still find volleyball vids playing on windows nearly anywhere. (Of course, the fact that the vids showed the game played in the nude probably had something to do with their popularity.)
But Malarka and Bril shared a rare obsession: they loved to actually play volleyball and all the other games. With or without an audience. The game itself was the joy. And it was the bond at the core of their friendship.
So it was with a certain sense of surprise and awe that he watched Bril doing something so novel, and apparently doing it well. Bril was totally absorbed in whatever images were coming through his headband. His hands rested lightly on the datadeck, his fingers and several of his facial muscles twitched feverishly. The control box gave a single beep.
The needles retracted from the blob, the tray extended from the control box, and Bril took off his headset.
“Incredible! This stuff has a PI of seven! It’s no GERM, but it’s smokin’ goo!”
Bril instantly saw the three puzzled expressions, and began to explain before they could ask. “PI means programmability index. Any microbe with a PI over one point oh can theoretically be programmed to do anything you want, but practically speaking, MPs... ah, microbial programmers, aren’t interested in anything under a five or six. Back on Palastine-88, we use Genetically Enhanced Reprogrammable Microbes, or GERMs, the industrial version of this stuff. It has a PI of twelve.” Carefully, he scooped up the blob and held it in his hand. It nestled down into a flattened egg shape.
“Now watch this.” Bril flexed his free hand briefly over the blob and twiddled his fingers. Apparently, he had programmed the blob to receive standard micro-affector signals from his tech implants just as a datadeck did. A small bubble formed on the top of the blob.
“Okay, Lark. Now say something.”
“What do you want me to say? That I’m totally confused by all this?” He gave a puzzled look.
Bril smiled. “That’s enough. Hold on... ” His free hand twiddled again.
“Okay, Lark. Now say something. What do you want me to say? That I’m totally confused by all this? That’s enough. Hold on... ” The sound was tiny, of poor clarity, but clearly recognizable as Malarka’s and Brilson’s voices.
They all started talking at once, asking question on top of question, until Brilson waved them quiet.
“Hey, this is nothing – a parlor trick. On Palastine-88, we have a few hundred blobs this size managing an entire factory. Give me a few hours, and I’ll have our gluppy little friend here running for senate.”
“Bril,” asked Malarka, “how did you manage to program it so quickly?”
“Well,” replied Bril, sheepishly, “that wasn’t really programming. After I determined its PI, I injected some micro-sensor plasma into it and downloaded one of the standard test engrams stored in the datadeck. I got lots more,” he grinned.
The women begged for more. And Bril was more than pleased to comply. But Malarka excused himself and headed for the fresher.

In the shower, Malarka’s thoughts flashed back to his recent mishap. Why had he been blacked out for 32 hours? And by whom? Would they do it again? What had he done to trigger such a reaction? The only answer that came to him was Bernadette-258. Maybe he had asked the wrong question. Or the right one! Either way, somebody now knew who he was and what he knew about Bernadette-258 – which was next to nothing. Surely, he had no facts, no evidence, nothing ‘they’ would want.
When he climbed into bed for a short nap, he felt a tiny sting in his left arm. He got up and went to the window, waving it to mirror mode. Sure enough, there was a tiny red welt just above the elbow. It wasn’t there yesterday morning. He was sure that the welt had something to do with his disappearance.
He returned to bed. A derm, or perhaps an airgun. Yes! That seemed to be it. Not that he could remember anything, but there was a certain certainty that settled over the issue even as he thought it. He had been shot with an airgun. For some reason connected with Bernadette-258. And that thought smoothly morphed into a dreamscape filled with sinister figures in ancient trench coats trying to sell him vaccines to protect him from monster viruses with phony Terran accents.

- - = = - -

When he awoke, he became aware of two things. He had fourteen minutes to catch the shuttle to Daltrave, and there was gleeful giggling coming from the next room. He jumped into a clean shiort and stepped into the next room.
“What’s going on?”
“Oh, Lark! You gotta see this!” Onyx was ecstatic. She held out a hand in the direction of the blob and wiggled her fingers ever so slightly. The blob crawled away from her at a speed that surprised him. Then she uttered, “Come on back,” her fingers wiggled again and the blob stopped and immediately reversed its gelatinous movement. She sent it to the left and then to the right, each time accompanied by peals of laughter from Maggie, and a big, self-satisfied grin from Bril.
“Isn’t that just frantic?” Onyx squealed.
Malarka was impressed. “Wow, that’s real thunder,” he answered, using a phrase he had picked up dirtside. “What else can it do?”
“Lots,” replied Bril. “I’ve downloaded engrams that let you enter up to a megabyte of mentation text, that give it light sensitivity and a primitive vision – there’s the voice recorder, of course, I’ve enhanced its motility, and after I feed it, I’m going to see if I can squeeze in some tactiles. Pretty slick, hunh?”
“By the Blessed Pain of Fornax! I had no idea you could teach a mold to do tricks! Is this new technology?”
“Nah.” Bril watched the blob as Onyx made it spin like a slow-motion top. “It’s ancient stuff, actually. But still useful. Most planets dropped GERM-tech in favor of faster, but much more expensive bioplastic over three centuries ago. Last time I checked, fewer than five million planets had economies based on GERM-tech.” He sighed. “I was hoping that Daltrave would be one of them. Oh, well.”
Unwilling to pursue that conversation, Malarka said some quick good-byes, accepted hugs from Onyx and Maggie, dialed some extra thickness on his footware, gave himself a quick shot from his thalstimmer, and raced out to catch his shuttle.
He had no sooner entered the door to the Gazette, when the receptionist looked up and caught his attention. “Mister Swade! Rana Smythentropp is wanting you most urgent! Please to find her in office!”
“Thanks, Trinka.” He detoured past his office, and poked his head into Rana’s. “Rana? You home?”
The autochair spun around revealing his editor with a very disturbed look. “We’ve had a visitor, Swade. And I’m scared.”
Malarka paused, then took a seat, giving Rana his full attention.
“A man showed up an hour ago, a third level datacop from Daltravian Planetary Security carrying a proper holobadge. He said that we were to cease and desist our investigation into Bernadette-258, or there would be... unpleasant consequences.”
“Is he still here?” Malarka asked. Rana shook her head.
“He didn’t stay long. And he was all smiles and politeness and euphemisms. He wasn’t specific about why we had to stop. Said something about our interfering with an InterPlanetLaw investigation. Nor was he specific about the consequences, except that they would be severe and... unpleasant.” She looked up into his face. “What do we do now, Swade? I guess we have to drop it, hunh?”
After a moment’s silence, he answered, “Rana, this is a news rag. Casting the news is our biz, even if we have to dig to find out what the news is. At least, that’s how I feel about it. And I never heard of InterPlanetLaw shutting down any newspaper for any reason. Not on this world, not on a million. This ever happen to you before?”
She shook her head again. “But he was so convincing, Swade. He talked like someone who has power and is comfortable using it. He seemed... evil.”
He stared at the floor for a moment. “Do you have his name and ID?”
“Yes. Rodriguez Hasaleem. Here’s his holobadge.” She turned slightly and twitched a finger at her datadeck. The previous holo was replaced with a close-up of a holobadge against a jet black shiort with white piping. It bore the ‘wreath and daggers’ logo of Daltravian Planetary Security, the name Hasaleem, and the number 214-alpha-trid-3.
“Wow!” Malarka exclaimed, “Alpha-trid. I think that’s the enforcement arm of extreme security. Those guys play really rough, I hear.” Malarka stood up. “Rana, did he say we couldn’t broadcast this story, or that we couldn’t even research it?”
“The latter,” she said without emotion. “We can’t even make inquiries.”
“Tarpoon! That makes no sense at all. I can see not casting a story to avoid panic or something, but there’s no reason to keep us from sending mail to folks!” He walked over to Rana’s comm window. “I’m gonna get some answers to this.” He activated the window and began scrolling through the York Platz chart of organizations.
“What are you doing, Swade? Don’t make trouble!”
“I’m doing what Sam Spade woulda done. The best defense is a strong off... ”
A man’s face had appeared in the window. “Daltravian Planetary Security, InterPlanetLaw. May I help you?”
Malarka heard Rana gasp behind his back. “Yes. This is the Daltravian Gazette. We just had a visitor from Alpha-trid, one Rodriguez Hasaleem, who ordered us to back off a story that we are in our journalistic rights to investigate. I want to speak to mister Hasaleem’s supervisor.” Malarka’s voice was full of restrained anger. “And I want to speak to him now!”
The face in the window was unperturbed. “There must be some mistake, sir. Alpha-trid is an ad-hoc enforcement wing of the Emergency Corps of Daltravian Planetary Security. Daltrave-6 is not currently in a declared state of emergency. The last Alpha-trid wing was disbanded twenty local years ago.”

- - = = - -

There were over two thousand replies to the queries that he and Rana had sent out. Eighty percent were flat negative. Some were requests for authorization, others demanded his reasons and/or motives for inquiring about Bernadette-258, some promised him information if only he would transfer a large number of Daygilds to such-and-such an account, and a few appeared to contain real information. In fact, several of the latter were huge datasets that he had no time to peruse.
The replies that looked even remotely useful he downloaded into a cube and slipped it into his pocket.
Then it was hard to work writing and laying out his twelve column-meters of news, pix and commentary for the next edition of the Gazette.

“There!” Malarka snapped his fingers, and all but his primary holoscreen went dark. “That’s it Rana! The tarpoon is in the flusher! It’s short on length, but the quality is lousy!”
From the next room, a female voice said, “Great! I got it on the sponder. It looks good! We got the green, and... there! It’s on the net! We got a paper!”
A moment later, Rana entered Malarka’s office, grabbed one of the surplus chairs and sat down heavily. “Godfrey Daniel, Sweet Mother of Pearl, that was close! Another two minutes, and we woulda missed our infonet slot.” They were both exhausted but smiling. “Swade, you’re good. You drive me batty sometimes, but you. are. good! You write, doctor pix, and pump mud as good’n fast as any three journalists I’ve ever had.”
He grinned back. “As good’n fast as any ten, you mean. So, when do I get a raise?”
Her smile faded. “You know I can’t pay any more, Swade. Ever since the crash, this paper has just barely survived. I’ve laid off half my staff, lowered the price for subscriptions, put ads in all the windows, worked everybody like slaves, and I’m still losing Time. Fact is, if I want to keep the Gazette going for more than another year, I’ll have to move off planet. And if I don’t, I’ll lose the Gazette anyway and wind up in a rimproject.” There was not a hint of phony accent in her voice. She was telling the truth.
After an uncomfortable silence, Malarka said, “Is there anything I can do to help? Work more hours, or... ” He shrugged and raised his eyebrows in a question.
“Thanks, Swade. You’re one of a kind. You’re... responsible. That’s pretty damned rare these days.” She pulled out a custom, opal-inlaid thalstimmer and took a quick shot in each nostril. Her lips pursed, and her breath rushed out in a single woosh. She held out the thalstimmer to him. “Wanna taste?”
He accepted, took a single shot, and nearly fell out of his chair. “Wow! That’s real thunder! What the hell is it?” His eyes felt lit up like flares.
She retrieved the thalstimmer. “Edoxy-endorphin-17, with spearmint and clove. It’s my private blend. If I have to leave dirtside, I’m gonna miss this stuff.”
Her expression changed, an exaggerated smile appeared, and when she spoke, it was in one of her god-awful Terran accents. “Reminds me of the time I spent a year in the Hot Kwizine (naming the purportedly best, and certainly the most expensive, restaurant in the entire system). All I had to live on for a month was food and water. It was terrible.”
As usual with one of Rana’s jokes, Malarka was not sure he understood it. He smiled politely, then asked, “Rana, where do you get your silly accents. You weren’t born on Old Earth, were you?”
“Hunh? Oh! Of course, not. I was born on Jefferson-1, though, which is only sixty parsecs from Old Earth. And I mean born planetside. My parents were residents.” She trailed off, staring wistfully at nothing for a moment.
“No, I get my silly accents from fieldies. Ever see one?”
“W. C. Fields storycubes? Yeah, I’ve seen one or two long ago. They’re funny as homemade tarpoons,” he chuckled. “But they’re awfully rare now. Haven’t seen one in a hundred years. I really get into bogarts – have ever since I was a kid. Where do you find your fieldies?”
“I don’t. I really wouldn’t know where to go look for stuff that old. But my great-grandfather does. He’s been around a long time. He collects them, and every now and then he mails me one. I must have nearly a hundred by now.”
They talked on for an hour, passing her thalstimmer back and forth. They talked a lot about how they got to Daltrave-6. They talked about old stories, old heroes, and how grand Old Earth must have been. Then, she slapped her hands on the arm of her chair and stood up, tipsily.
“Tell you what, Swade. We survive this economy, and I’ll invite you down for a week dirtside. You can watch all the fieldies you want.”
Malarka had never seen her so friendly and so... vulnerable. It suddenly occurred to him that without all the accents and professional role-playing, Rana was actually quite likable.
“Good night, Swade. And good luck with that Bernadette mail. I expect a summary of it by ten hundred tomorrow, and a preliminary outline of your story.” She took three steps toward the door, then turned around. “Here.” She tossed a small brown object to him. “This came in the ground mail yesterday while you were... uh... indisposed.”
Malarka said his final good-byes and shut his door. He looked down at the box wrapped in flimsy. There was his name, the words, ‘Daltravian Gazette office, York Platz,’ and a fourth class stamp. When he removed the top wrapper, he saw another one underneath. It bore the name Maggie Robearson.
Off came the box lid. Inside was a wad of fuzzy, white stuff and a crumpled piece of iridescent foil. As he picked it out of the box, it gave off dazzling rainbow reflections of the ceiling lamps. He unfolded it to reveal a pair of earrings with large, transparent pendants, each containing an embedded flower about the size of a fingernail. Tossing the packaging aside, he laid an earring on his desk scanner and tried to wave it on. When his first attempt failed, he realized that he was crocked. With a grin, he waved again a bit more deliberately, and the scanner came to life.
He turned on a holoscreen and selected the scan and magnification icons. Floating serenely over his desk was the flower, nearly a meter across. As hard as he looked, he couldn’t see anything but the flower in those earrings. And yet, someone was willing to kill Maggie for them. He examined them from every angle but found nothing. He concluded that whatever the killers were looking for, it was too small or too subtle to show up on his desk equipment.
With a grunt of disappointment, he tossed the earrings into his pocket, and started to shut off his desk. On second thought, he called up his McNally MegaStar. Bernadette-258 was still missing, both from the map itself, and from the master index. Very strange, he thought. Of course the map itself was automatically updated over the infonets – that wasn’t so strange. But having a planet entirely disappear was inexplicable.
On impulse, he called up the table of contents and jumped to product information. He scrolled through copyright dates, the usual legalese, and found... ’McNally is a wholly owned subsidiary of The XenoCol Corp.’ The hair stood up on the back of his neck. A memory scratched frantically at the wall of his mind.
He shut off the desk and left the office.

- - = = - -

Traffic at the shuttle station was unusually heavy, and Malarka found himself waiting in a long line that extended to the wall of the concourse. He wished he had his reader with him. In fact, he didn’t even have his backpack. He must have left it at the Gazette. Damn! Rana’s thalstimmer packed one hell of a punch!
Angrily, he squeezed the walker handles and whirled around. And collided solidly with a person just leaving one of the office fronts on foot. His walker steadied itself automatically, but the other person was knocked to the floor. Double damn, he cursed silently. This was sure to be a 5-Daygild fine!
He shook his head clear, and turned to the person on the floor, who had slowly propped herself up on her elbows, and was just now looking up at him.
Malarka’s heart froze and his throat seized up. There was something about her that hammered at the wall of his mind. Their eyes locked, and she snarled, “You bastard!”
With those words, the mental wall cracked and collapsed – the memory flooded in. He snarled back, “You again!”
Her tight white shiort was still dialed down past her navel.
Had Malarka been clear headed, he would have bolted as soon as he recognized the woman he had knocked down. But he impulsively started blurting out questions and accusations. Before he realized it, other hands had gripped him from behind, and he and his walker were firmly led back into the XenoCol office.
“It was lucky for you that we found you in such a spectacularly public way, mister Swade. Instead of dealing with you immediately, we’ll have to wait.” Wanda, her well-endowed surrogate, and the man in the maroon shiort were all in attendance in Wanda’s swank office. Only this time, it was Wanda holding the airgun.
“Deal with me? What do you mean!?” Malarka had difficulty swallowing. “I mean, why?!” Some tiny, objective part of his mind calmly informed him that he was panicking.
Wanda grinned and made a snorting noise. “Because I want you out of my way, that’s why. Or maybe because you’ve become an even bigger annoyance, mister Swade. Does the name, Maggie Robearson, ring a bell?”
“Maggie?” He gulped again.
“Yes. The twit you’re hiding up there in Windowbox. She got something in the mail – a pair of earrings I believe. We eventually determined that she remailed them. Since her circle of friends has become quite small, there’s a good chance she mailed them to you. Have you seen them?” The pleasant smile on Wanda’s face did nothing to alleviate his fear.
“Uh, earrings?!” He grabbed his walker handles and lurched to the left, but not as fast as the man in maroon grabbed him and twisted his arm. “Ow! That hurts!”
“Behave yourself, mister Swade. Jasper. Search him.”
The man in maroon went through his pockets and quickly handed the earrings over to Wanda.
“Ahh, here they are.” She smiled up at Malarka, “You have no idea, you worthless skeezer, what trouble we have gone through to get these.” She held them up to the light as if to admire them, then handed them to her surrogate. “Stickybear, get these analyzed, pronto. Jasper, what about the package they came in? Does he have anything else?”
“No package, boss. Nothing else but this datacube.” He tossed it to Wanda.
“Okay, Jasper, take him outside. The plan is to get him to Punkt Zieban without drawing any attention to ourselves. So don’t use any unnecessary violence on him before you get there.”
Her emphasis of the word ‘unnecessary’ did not reassure him.
Malarka panicked. He blurted out, “Wanda, wait! What are you going to do to me?! I have to know!”
She took several steps closer, appraising him with icy indifference. Then she turned to Jasper.
“As soon as you get to Punkt Zieban, eliminate him.”

- - = = - -

They were traveling on a beige concourse in two walkers, with Jasper in the lead by two meters. Malarka’s walker was slaved to the other’s with a small device that he was not familiar with. When Jasper’s walker turned or sped up, so did Malarka’s. The access gate wouldn’t unlatch and his handles would take no control commands.
They had traveled deep into an area of York Platz arcology that Malarka had never seen before. He suddenly realized that soon he would be so lost, there would be little chance of him finding his way back again without assistance.
They entered an area where the concourse expanded to become a mall. Fifty meters to his right, Malarka saw a large arcology map, and... a green concourse! If he could get to it, then he could make an escape without setting off alarms.
Malarka glanced ahead at Jasper’s back. The guy was strong – nearly broke his arm – but he’d never make it at volleyball or trak tao. Like most people, Jasper obviously was not into sweat sports.
Sports! The outline of an idea formed in his mind. His own sports training and experience might be just the edge he needed. He dialed his footware for maximum rubber and flexibility.
Silently, Malarka pressed down on his walker handles. Harder still, until his feet left the walker base. Balanced on his hands, he raised his body as much as possible, until the restraining strap slid below his hips.
Adroitly, he bent forward so that he could leverage more of his body out of the strap. The people in the mall took little notice of him. The few who did seemed to dismiss him as a show-off.
His upper body was nearly horizontal, and threatening to overbalance the walker. He could hear the whining of some mechanism deep inside attempting to keep it upright.
He nodded his head violently down, thrusting his buttocks up as high as he could. There! His knees lifted a half meter and were clear of the access gate. He bent his legs up, and pushed his center of balance back over the walker. The whining ceased. He straightened his legs, and rocked backwards from his handstand. With hardly a sound, his feet contacted the floor.
He turned around and broke into a run towards the arcology map. He was within ten meters of it, when an alarm sounded. A thousand pair of eyes focused upon him. He glanced over his shoulder. Jasper was doing a fast U-turn and heading back at top speed.
Malarka glanced at the huge map, easily finding the “You Are Here” icon and the green concourse. It was headed in the wrong direction, but there was no helping that. Malarka jumped a row of waist-high benches that separated the beige carpeted mall from the green concourse, and started the breathing rhythm that gave him his best speed for the two hundred meter dash.
He didn’t look back. He had seen that Jasper would have to go forty meters out of his way to get around the benches, and he reckoned that Jasper, a typical arcology dweller, would never think to get out of his walker and run. It wouldn’t matter if he did. On foot, he would be no match for Malarka.
However, his troubles were only beginning. He was a non-resident in a huge planetside arcology. There was no guarantee that he could find green concourses that would return him to the tiny area of York Platz that he knew. There was a killer on his tail. And he was lost.

Half an hour later, he was still lost.
Malarka leaned against a palm tree and took deep ragged breaths. Sweat dripped from his chin onto the soil. His legs screamed, his heart was a trip-hammer. He had a sudden thought, “I’ll be two hundred and forty-two on my next birthday – I’m getting too old for this sort of thing!” His face broke out in a big grin even as he fought for breath.
He was deep in the upper floors of a low-security industrial area. He knew it was low-security because the carpet was green. Though he had encountered few people in the back passways, one of them had shouted at him. He took turns walking and running. Listening for footsteps. Ducking out of sight. Changing levels at random. Sprinting for cover. Chewing up distance as fast as possible.
He was hidden in a small atrium on a level that appeared deserted. He sat down in the dirt between the palm tree and a flowering shrub. Ten minutes later, his metabolism near normal, he went exploring for a public fresher.

- - = = - -

He approached the main office of the Daltravian Gazette on tiptoes. Even though it was night on this part of Daltrave, he knew there was likely to be several people working the shift. A quick glance through the door revealed no one in sight. He slipped in and headed for his office.
Somebody had been here. Equipment cabinets and desk drawers were ajar. Numerous personal articles were scattered about. He checked his desk for damage, but there seemed to be none. The main holoscreen came on with a list showing the last twenty things he had done. The last item on the list was downloading datasets to a datacube.
In sudden panic, he checked the status of his files. With a sigh of relief, he saw they were undamaged. Whoever it was that had been here hadn’t tried to delete his files, or couldn’t. They were searching for something physical. The package! Wanda had wanted the packaging the earrings had come in.
He remembered tossing the box onto his desk, but a thorough search turned up not a trace of it. They must have found what they had come for. Wait! What was that? He saw a pale rainbow shimmer on the floor behind a leg of his desk. He reached down and pulled out a wadded piece of iridescent foil. The one the earrings had been wrapped in.
Malarka tossed the foil on his desk and took off the gray laboratory coat he had stolen from the public fresher. It would have been worthless had he encountered anybody with a chipscanner, or if an all-points thumbchip scan had been made. But he felt better knowing that his clothing couldn’t visually identify him from a distance. He slipped off his shiort and threw it on the coat. He really needed a shower, but there wasn’t time for that now. First, find his spare shiort he kept in one of the cabinets, then download another copy of the responses to his inquiries on the Bernadette-258 disaster.
“Swade, there you are! I was hoping you... you... ”
Rana was standing in the doorway staring at his naked figure with speechless wonder. Malarka froze for a moment, then figured, what the tarpoon -- he had bigger problems just now. He turned, opened a cabinet and pulled out a bright blue and black striped shiort, and slipped it on.
“Hello, Rana. What has you here so late this evening?”
“I, uh... that is... I’m sorry I... burst in like that. I didn’t know you were... ” She still hadn’t moved from the doorway. “Swade, I came back to the office tonight, because... my house has been broken into and searched. Hell, it’s been wrecked! I tried to reach you at Windowbox. Then I called the datacops, and when they went to examine my security chipscanners... ”
Malarka interrupted, “there was no trace on them.”
“Er,... ” she froze for an instant, “uh... how did you know?”
“An educated guess,” he sighed. “Come in and shut the door. We have something urgent to discuss.” He sat at his desk, activated his scriber and told her of his encounter with the agents of XenoCol, his escape, his return to the office, and the disappearance of the earring package. As he spoke, the text of his story built up in his holoscreen.
“There.” He waved a finger, turning off the scriber. “If I disappear, at least there will be a record of what happened.”
“Disappear? Do you really think that might happen? How could they possibly kill you and get away with it? That’s just not possible!”
Malarka turned in his seat and met her gaze. “Rana, I have a theory about that. Do you remember Maggie’s story of being jumped in Windowbox? And the datacop from the mail room that showed up just in time? His chipscanner caught no trace of those two guys. I believe... ” he paused and stared at his right hand for a moment, “I believe the two that jumped Maggie didn’t have thumbchips. Or at the very least had a way of shielding thumbchips.”
Her mouth flew open and shaped the word ‘what?’ but no sound came out.
“That’s right. No thumbchips. And that’s why Wanda and Jasper seemed so confident they could dispose of me. I’ll bet Jasper has no ordinary thumbchip. Maybe Wanda, too.”
Rana’s voice return. “That’s crazy, Swade. Everybody has one! There’s an automatic chipscanner every hundred meters in every direction on every level. How could they... and... how could they have them removed? Tampering with a thumbchip is automatic instant death. It’s just not... no... it’s crazy, that’s all.” She stood up and began pacing.
“I don’t know how they could have no thumbchips! I haven’t figured that out yet. There’s a lot going on I don’t understand!”
“Lark, there was a message on my private datachannel. It’s from my half-sister on Paris-699, which is just seven parsecs from Bernadette-258.” Her voice got as soft as a whisper. “She says that I’m in danger. There are people who don’t like inquiries being made about certain... industrial accidents. And I... we... have made a lot of inquiries.”
Malarka sat up a little straighter. “How does she know this?”
A long pause. “She’s a dataflow theorist at the University of Veritas. She monitors and studies the large scale flow of data all over this sector of the galaxy.” Rana pulled a datacube out of her pocket. “I sent an inquiry to her because she has access to so much industrial and business data in the region around Bernadette. She says her AI has seen strange patterns in the nets just before certain industrial accidents.” She looked up at Malarka and offered him the datacube.
Malarka took it. “Does she know who these people are that don’t like inquiries?”
Rana shook her head. “The text of her message is on there, along with some data from her library. I’ve decrypted it. Lark... we’re in danger, aren’t we?”
He nodded his head. “Yes, and they know who we are, and where we work and where we live and who our friends are. I think we are all in real danger. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t know why. But here’s what I think we should do... ”

- - = = - -

“Anybody home?” The lights in the apartment were off, an indication that there were no moving bodies about. Maybe they were asleep. Malarka took half a step into the room when he saw the piece of paper stuck to the wall next to the door frame. He pulled the paper down and stepped back into the passway, letting the door close. ‘Lark – we’ll be in canteen 32 until 2500 then in canteen 17 – Bril.’ It was written in the curly, right-to-left script common on Palastine-88.
He had jogged about ten meters when a noiseless concussion threw him violently to the floor. Harsh, metallic odors assaulted his nose. He struggled to his knees. Alarms were going off, and yet he could barely hear them – something was wrong with his ears. He looked back over his shoulder. Where his apartment had been was now a gaping and surgically precise hole in the passway wall. He staggered to his feet and ran as fast as he could.
Canteen 32 was a good six kilometers from his apartment, and on the diametrically opposite side of Windowbox. It took him half an hour to get there, even using the slideway. He found Brilson, Onyx and Maggie in a booth in a back corner.
“Lark, what happened to you? You’re bleeding! Here, sit down!”
He waved away their attentive hands and sat down. “I’ll be okay. The bleeding is stopped already, it doesn’t hurt anymore. Really, I look worse than I am. Order me a beer.” Then he told them about the explosion.
Their faces were stunned at the news.
Maggie said, “Then somebody really is trying to kill us.”
“Right.” Malarka’s glum answer needed no commentary. “And speaking of which, why are you guys so far from home?”
“It was your editor,” replied Brilson. “She called and said her place had been broken into and trashed, and asked me to warn you to watch yourself. We decided it was safer to be evasive. I left you a note that I figured no one on Daltrave could read.”
“Your note saved my life! I think the explosion was triggered by the motion sensor lights. They would have come on a few seconds after the door opened.”
After a moment of silence, a small voice with a fearful tremor spoke up, “Where do we go from here? How do we keep from being killed?”
“I don’t know, Onyx,” Malarka replied. “But Bril’s idea of evasive tactics is a good start. I think we should stay on the move as much as possible. Don’t visit the same place twice.”
“Damn! All my clothes are gone!” interjected Maggie.
Brilson moaned, “My MP gear! I’ll have to go back to Palastine-88 to replace it!”
“But we still have Gluppy!” Onyx placed a gray-green blob on the table. With a pass of her hand, the blob pulled itself into a perfect sphere. Slowly at first, and then quickly taking on altitude, it began to bounce in place on the table – pok, pok, pok, pok... The four silently watched it pretend to be a rubber ball for a long moment, and then the beer arrived.
“Ahh, give that here.” Malarka took a big pull. “So what do we have left friends? We have to assume that everything in the apartment was destroyed. Except for my backpack which is still in my office.”
Brilson had his notepad and a small pouch containing yeast powder for Gluppy. Maggie and Onyx each had a cosmetics kit, and Maggie had a wallet of holos. Malarka searched his pockets and pulled out a thalstimmer, two datacubes and a crumpled square of iridescent foil. That and the clothes on their backs was all they had left.
Brilson reached out and picked up the foil. “Where did you get this? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this stuff.”
“Hunh? That? It was part of the packaging in that box that Maggie got.” Malarka’s brows furrowed. “What do you mean? You know what it is?”
Brilson nodded. “Sure, it’s holofoil. What do you think is inside a datacube?” He held the foil up to the light, causing rainbow fire to spark between his fingers. “This is a thirty centimeter square – you find ‘em in hundred terabyte datapacks. Those you got there,” indicating the tiny dominos in front of Malarka, “have a sheet of the same material inside, only one centimeter square. The cases are nearly indestructible so most people never see this stuff.”
The pok, pok, pok of Gluppy’s bouncing stopped. The blob was resuming its normal gelatinous appearance on the table. Onyx looked quizzically at Brilson. “Does that mean there could be a message on that foil?”
It took them ten minutes to reach the nearest library, but their excitement was squashed when it became obvious that the readers only took intact datacubes. There was no way to scan a naked piece of holofoil.
“We could break open the datacube on one of these, and slip our foil in,” offered Onyx, holding up a thin pane of bioplastic with the Daltravian Gazette logo.
“No – on two counts,” replied Brilson, holding up a finger. “You can’t open a datacube without special tools.” He held up two fingers. “Those Gazettes take a one centimeter foil, just like a standard datacube – this one wouldn’t fit.”
Four glum faces sat around the table.
Maggie spoke up, “Hey, Lark. What about those datacubes you got? Anything on them?”
He picked them up. “Yeah, I think so. They have all the responses to the queries I sent out on Bernadette-258. Some of the files are pretty large. It’ll take weeks to plow through them.”
Maggie reached over and took the cubes from his fingers. “Nah. It won’t take Onyx and me that long.”
Malarka’s eyebrows shot up. “What do you mean?”
Maggie smiled. “Because that was how I made a living at Fontainebleu before the economy tanked. Data reduction and analysis. Onyx here,” she put her arm around the surrogate, “is just about the best math intuiter you’ve ever seen. Plus, she can read sixty thousand words a minute. Unless you guys got something better to do, let’s pop these little jewels in a reader and see what we can find.”
Brilson stood up. “Great idea. And I’ve got another one. Let me have this.” He picked up the crumpled foil. “I’ll be back here in a coupla hours. Wish me luck!” He turned around and dashed from the library.

- - = = - -

Four hours later. Onyx pushed herself back from the reader and turned around to face Malarka. Maggie paused her examination of some readouts and faced the other two. “Well?”
Onyx cleared her throat. “These cubes have a lot of unrelated data on them. Most of it doesn’t mean much – rumors, opinions, random facts, anecdotal information and the like. But some of the files contain records of large-scale planetary industrial smartvirus accidents over the last hundred years. There have been some sixteen thousand or so, resulting in nearly six trillion casualties. Normally, these accidents claim from two to twenty percent of a planet’s population, but fifty-five accidents were near total extermination events. They killed everybody on the planets and nearly everybody in the o’neills around them.”
“That’s incredible,” exploded Maggie. “How could this happen and nobody notice?”
“‘It’s a Big Galaxy,’“ drolled Malarka. “Six trillion would be... ” he screwed up his eyes, “about fifteen millionths of one percent of the galaxy’s population. That’s nothing.”
Onyx continued, “There are some odd things about these total-extermination events. There was a sudden rise in certain formats of interstellar communication to those planets prior to the accidents. Fifty-three events occurred to planets in star systems having only one populated planet. Fifty-one events occurred to planets that were economically depressed. And all of them had recently been renovated, terraformed, or moved by XenoCol.”
“What are the chances of those conditions being happenstance – ” asked Maggie, “unrelated to the smartvirus accidents?”
Onyx smiled sadly. “Given the population size, I would say about one chance in ten power twelve.”
Malarka gave a long, low whistle. “So those fifty-five planets weren’t really accidents, were they? Is that what you’re saying?”
Onyx nodded gravely.
“Wow,” Malarka said, “Except for that rise in communication, your description fits Daltrave-6 pretty good.”
“I’m sorry, Lark,” Onyx said in a faint, little girl voice, “but one of the files from Paris-699 shows a distinct rise in just those formats of interstellar traffic to Daltrave-6. It began about two months ago.”
Not a sound was uttered for a slow count of ten. Then Malarka whispered, “Tarpoon!”
A pause and then, “What’s so special about that message traffic?”
“Well for one thing, the messages are very large. They have a non-standard encryption scheme. And they all come from the Vitriox Cluster.”
“For the Blessed Pain of Fornax! We’re gonna be number fifty-six!”

- - = = - -

Another hour went by. Malarka and the two women searched for anything they could find in the library, which wasn’t a whole lot, since o’neills typically didn’t have the sophisticated data access to be found planetside. But they did find something in one of the cyclopedias on XenoCol. The Corp had been around in one form or another since 2930 AD, over two thousand standard years! And for nearly two hundred of those years, its galactic administrative headquarters had been on John Wayne-16. Five hundred years later, John Wayne-16 changed its name to Vitriox-1... the heart of the Vitriox Cluster!
XenoCol owned partly or outright over a billion companies galaxy-wide, including the Daltravian Shuttle System, two of the three commercial infonets that serviced Daltrave-6, and several o’neills. In fact, there were nearly a hundred companies based on or servicing Daltrave-6 that were subsidiaries of XenoCol.
“Hmmm,” mused Malarka, “is Windowbox on that list?”
“No,” said Maggie, “why?”
“Well, that would explain why they haven’t done an all-points chipscan and picked us up already. Even then, I suspect our hours are numbered.”
Both women gave Malarka a nervous glance, then returned to their displays. Maggie gasped and pointed to one of the company names listed on her data window: MINI, Morgant Intelligent Nano Industries, a large interstellar company which had a branch on the outskirts of York Platz.
“My parents worked for them on Bernadette-258.”
“Oh?” asked Malarka. “What did they do there?”
She shrugged, “My parents specialized in factory turnover and retooling. Production start-up planning. That sort of stuff.”
Onyx spoke up from where she sat over another window, “I have here a reference to the MINI branch on Daltrave-6. They were established here eleven local years ago, employ 300 people, have an annual commerce of forty million Daygilds, and their chief product is... hybrid industrial smartviruses.”
Conversation ground to a halt.

“I’m hungry.” It was the third time Onyx had spoken those words into the otherwise palpable silence that surrounded the three. And then, “If we don’t get some food soon, I’m gonna cook Gluppy, and eat him. I love congealt, you know!”
Malarka lightly squinted his left eye and read the time that briefly seemed to appear about two meters in front of his face. “Bril has been gone nearly seven hours. Where the tarpoon is that skeezer?” He stretched and yawned and turned toward Onyx and Maggie who sat morosely at the next table. “What did you say about Gluppy?”
Onyx had her head propped up on her hands. “I said I’m gonna eat him.”
“No, that wouldn’t be nice. Besides, that reminds me – I think I may need him for something. Where is he?”
“It’s a she, and she’s sleeping right here,” she said, gently patting her stomach. “She likes the warmth and the salt.” Onyx discretely dialed open her shiort, reached in and peeled a thick, greenish sheet off her skin. She lay it on the table where it sluggishly pulled itself together into its normal blob shape.
“What are you gonna do with Gluppy?” asked Maggie.
“Well, for starters, I want you two to show me everything it, uh, she can do – all her tricks. And show me how to feed her.”
In half an hour, Malarka put Gluppy through all its paces. They had just put it back to sleep when Brilson entered the library. He was accompanied by two men in maroon shiorts. One of them was Jasper.

- - = = - -

The four were alone in the shuttle craft. The two thugs in maroon shiorts had bound them securely to seaters, ensconced them in a small 400-place craft, turned off all the windows and sent them off without visible escort.
“Where are we going?” said Maggie.
“I dunno,” replied Malarka, but it’s probably not planetside. I’m guessing that we’re outbound.” He gave another useless tug at his fastenings. “How’s Bril?”
Maggie leaned as far to the left as she could, where she could get a glimpse of Brilson’s eyes. “He still looks to be a little tranked, but he’s coming down.” She straightened up and screamed, “Bril!!”
“Hunh?” His head turned a bit. There was a brief pause, and then a light seemed to come on in his glazed eyes.
“Hunh? Wha? Whas... am I? Lark?”
“Yeah! It’s me, Bril! Wake up!”
“Ouch! I have such a headache. Wait a minute. What are these cuffs... ” He struggled with his fastenings for a long second, and then his eyes flashed wide open. “Lark! They were chasing me! Those guys from XenoCol you told us about, they... ”
“Yes, Bril,” Onyx interrupted him. “We know. They brought you back to the library and got all of us. You were tranked.”
Malarka asked, “Can you remember anything at all?”
Brilson closed his eyes and shook his head to clear it. “I... I’m not sure. Wait. I was leaving Spud’s Fixit Shack over on the Dragonwing... no, I had gotten aboard a shuttle and was arriving back at the Windowbox! Yeah, that was when they tried to snag me – as I was getting off the shuttle. I ran for it, then everything went murky.”
“Tarpoon!” muttered Malarka. “That’s how they tracked you down. You rode one of the shuttles – they all have chipscanners, and XenoCol owns the shuttle system. What were you doing over on the Dragonwing?”
“Spud’s Fixit Shack. Spudlum Hirosawa. Great guy. Best biotronic repair shop in the entire orbit. I took the holofoil to him, and he was able to read it! There was a message on it!”
Three voices rang out at the same time, “What did it say?”
Brilson turned to Maggie, “It was from your parents. They’re still alive. They’re in hiding and wanted you to leave Daltrave-6 as fast as possible. They said you might be in grave danger because of their ‘business relationships.’ And there was mention of some Time deposited in an account, a deep space travel voucher, and a cyber-key. That was all. The message was repeated on the holofoil over and over, trillions of times.”
Without making a sound, Maggie began weeping.

- - = = - -

“Well, well, what have we here. If it isn’t our lovely miss Robearson. You’ve been so hard to track down, sweetpants. But not as hard as your foolish parents. Be a dear and tell me where they are.” The lovely voice gave Malarka the impression of silk over rusty razor blades.
“I have no idea, and I wouldn’t tell you even if I did.” Maggie’s defiance was as authentic as it was self-controlled. “I don’t even know where we are.”
Wanda arose from her seat, smiling down upon her prisoners. “Well, miss Robearson, I’m feeling generous. You’re in the Garden Estates rimproject, about six billion kilometers from Daltrave, in one of our laboratories. There! Feel better?”
Garden Estates, the outermost, the biggest, the most austere of Daltrave’s constellation of wellfare rimprojects. Population: ninety million. It was said that a ticket to the ‘gray garden’ was always one way.
“What are you going to do with us?” asked Maggie, calmly.
Wanda looked upward and made a face. “I really don’t know just now. Perhaps I’ll ship you someplace where you can’t possibly get in my way. That would be the simplest solution. Or, maybe I’ll keep you here a while and then let you go. We’ll just have to see, won’t we?”
“But why?” Malarka spoke up. “What have we done to you?”
“Not much, actually.” Wanda sat back down. “It’s just that we were arranging... well, a surprise. Blabbermouth writers have a way of spoiling surprises.” She turned her chair to face Maggie. “The real problem is miss sweetpants, here, or I should say, her two doting parents. They have something of ours and we intend to get it back. And you’re going to help us, aren’t you, sweetpants?”
“My name is Maggie, and if you want anything from me, you had better not harm my friends. Or my parents.”
“Ooohhh! Such a toughie. Okay... Maggie. I won’t hurt your friends or your parents. Promise! But if I don’t get full cooperation from you, they,” she jerked a thumb at Malarka, Brilson and Onyx, “get recycled, understand?” She stood up again, and headed for the door.
Maggie stopped her. “You can’t kill us. The chipscanners would know immediately. They would catch you.”
Wanda’s smile only increased. “My dear, I have a premonition that the chipscanners will be much too busy to notice the demise of your friends.”
Onyx chimed in, “Is that because of... that ‘surprise’ you spoke of... are you really going to kill everyone on Daltrave-6 with a smartvirus?”
Malarka, Brilson and Maggie turned to stone, the blood draining from their faces. Wanda turned around slowly, her hands on her hips, a huge grin on her face. It wasn’t a nice grin.
“My, my, my, aren’t you the smart one,” she chuckled. “You just had to go and figure out my little ‘surprise.’ Well, I guess we can stop pretending that any of you will ever get out of this alive, can’t we?”
“When are you going to release the smartvirus?” asked Malarka.
Wanda looked as if she were surprised to find Malarka there. “I don’t suppose it’ll hurt to let you know. It’s already been released. Weeks ago. You’re already infected. Everybody is. Another few days and pffft, Daltrave-6 is ours.”
She turned to Maggie, and with unconcealed venom spat, “And you will cooperate in finding your parents, sweetpants – and maybe I’ll let you and your friends have the antidote. Or you can refuse – and you all will die more horribly than you can possibly imagine!”
Wanda spun on her heel as if to leave. On second thought, she reached over to a control panel next to the work station and slapped it. The room dimmed as all illumination but the emergency light over the door faded away. She stormed out, the heavy door thudding shut behind her, leaving them alone with their shock and fear.

- - = = - -

For the seventh time, Malarka tested his constraints. For the seventh time, they allowed no weakness of design or function. His limbs were snugly bound with sheets of transparent bioplastic to the lightly padded arms and legs of his chair, and it felt to be solidly attached to the floor.
He took another look at the chair – it was strangely lacking any interactivity or automation that he could detect. It ignored his attempts to command it to adapt for his comfort. He was sorely tempted to conclude that it contained no interface, no sensors, no actuators, no adjustments of even the crudest mechanical variety. Who, in their right mind, would design such a useless monstrosity?
He cursed Wanda. He cursed the chair. He cursed his own stupidity.
“That won’t do any good,” offered Bril.
“Yeah. I know. But it makes me feel better. Damn, I wish I had my thalstimmer.”
Bril chuckled. “Me – I wish I had a glowgun and a ticket out of here.”
Onyx was sobbing and sniffling. Her crescent glowed as Maggie dropped in, perhaps to comfort her as only a prime can comfort a surrogate. A few seconds later, Onyx relaxed and closed her eyes. Her breathing became regular and slowed. The crescent faded.
Malarka tugged against the bioplastic, knowing that it was futile. “Can you believe these flushin’ chairs?” he spat angrily.
Bril nodded. “Sure. This is the furniture you get in rimprojects. You don’t waste tech on skeezers. I was in a rimproject once, back before we met.”
“Yeah, I remember you telling me.” Malarka said morosely.
Maggie spoke up, “How did you get out? Did someone bail you?”
Bril shook his head. “Nah. I got out the old-fashioned way. I spent nineteen local years in their sorry excuse for a library – taught myself microbial programming – found a position in life support maintenance where they let me practice my budding skills – kissed a lot of ass – eventually got a salaried position – earned enough Daygilds to buy some priority on my ID and a travel voucher. And they let me go.”
Maggie looked impressed. “Gosh, Bril, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who climbed out of a rimcan, before. That’s awesome!”
Indeed it was, thought Malarka. He had seen statistics that nearly one fifth of Humanity was classified as ‘economically challenged' and forced to live in the huge rimprojects, or ‘rimcans,’ that circled the outskirts of every inhabited star system in the galaxy. Of course, the alternative was to let them die when their Time ran out. (And many chose to do just that.) But in a universe of virtual immortality, it was considered humane and compassionate to allow the misfits, the uneducated, the lazy, the obsolete, the incurably irresponsible and the tragically unlucky to continue their lives, albeit at a primitively reduced state.
Their incarceration was euphemistically called ‘the eternal second chance,’ but the fact was, life in a rimcan was effectively permanent for all but the most determined, or those with wealthy contacts on the outside.
Malarka chuckled. “Can you appreciate the irony of it? At the beginning of the age of space travel, only the wealthiest could get into space at all. In fact, space travel could only be financed by wealthy governments. The desperately poor were forever condemned to live on the same planet surface they were born on. Today, you have to be dirty rich to afford even a planetary timeshare. Even the word ‘Dirt’ has become synonymous with wealth and those who have it. And the poor live in deep space where they can be housed and fed as cheaply as possible.”
Bril and Maggie stared at him blankly.
Bril cast a glance at Onyx who appeared to be sleeping, then queried softly, “Why do you suppose they sent us out here? Why didn’t they just confine us in Windowbox, or at their headquarters in York Platz?”
Maggie responded, “You remember that data we scanned? York Platz is just one of their branch locations. Their system HQ is here in Garden Estates.”
Malarka screwed up his face. “By the Blessed Pain of Fornax, why would a galactic corp put their head office in a rimcan?!”
“Cheap labor, cheap real estate,” answered Bril. “Skeezers rarely get the chance to work for Daygilds, but they do work for benefits – better food, cleaner air, larger apartments, beer, windows, implants, you name it. The common belief that skeezers are non-productive is a myth. It’s just that the jobs they can get in a rimproject are usually menial, tedious, unpleasant or dangerous.”
“Like what?” asked Maggie.
“Like low-tech manufacturing, chemical processing, detox, waste recycling, chip milling, that sort of thing.”
“Hunh?” interjected Malarka, “thumbchip mills?”
Bril nodded. “Sure. Where do you think thumbchips, chip phages and smart viruses are made? Those are dangerous industries. The ‘Dirt’ don’t want that stuff on their sweet smelling planets. They just want the final product.”
“Thumbchips... ” mused Malarka.
With a loud clang that made them flinch, the door opened and in stepped Wanda’s surrogate, Stickybear, barely constrained bosoms bouncing, with an armload of boxes and an airgun. Onyx woke up.
“Okay, skeezers, it’s food time! One down and eleven to go! And then we clean you off the floor with mops!”
One at a time, she twiddled her fingers over their bioplastic restraints, and released them, escorted them to the tiny fresher at the rear of the room, then escorted them back to their chairs. The bonds were adjusted to permit their hands to reach their faces. Then each was handed a green bioplastic box that opened on command to reveal... congealt cubes with yeast sauce!
Three voices moaned simultaneous echoes of disgust.
“Shut up and eat, skeezers! It makes no difference to me if you starve!”
They ate.
Stickybear was collecting the boxes and tightening their restraints when her crescent icon faded. Wanda had checked out. The surrogate paused for a moment, sighed, looked around, then continued her chores in a noticeably less antagonistic manner.
Malarka coughed. “Uh, Stickybear? Could you tell us what’s going on? What’s going to happen to us?”
In a tired voice she said, “I’m not supposed to say anything to you. Unless,” and she nodded at Maggie, “she tells us how to find her parents.”
“I see,” he said. “Stickybear, we’re not going anywhere. Can’t you tell us why XenoCol wants to kill us? Why they want to wipe out Daltrave-6?”
She ignored him and turned to the door. A trick that Sam Spade used in one of his bogarts came to mind. Malarka had nothing to lose.
“Well, I guess you wouldn’t know – you being just a pleasure-pet and all.”
She whirled around and slapped him. There was murder in her eyes.
“You think I chose to look like this?! You think I want to be a walking pheromone factory?! You think I enjoy... ” she struggled to find just the right invective, “... thumbslaves like you ogling my body?!”
Her eyes were damp. “I’ll have you know I’m a level two comm-psych, and I’m good at it! I just... I just can’t work around men. They get one whiff of me, look at my chest, and all they can think about is... is... ”
Words failed her.
“Yeah. I know what they think about. Is ‘Stickybear’ your real name?”
She sniffed back a tear. “No. Well, yes, that’s what Wanda named me. I wouldn’t have chosen that either. When I have friends, I have them call me ‘Stereo’.”
He proceeded cautiously. “Well... Stereo, that’s a pretty name. Does it mean anything?”
She wiped her nose. “I’m not sure. I got it from an old storycube. I think it has something to do with music. I like music.”
“Stereo, I’m sorry I offended you. When you’re on auto, you seem like a very nice person. Too bad we don’t have time to really get to know you. You sound like you could use some friends.”
She retrieved the food boxes from the floor where she had dropped them. “I’m gonna lose most of friends in a few days. That’s what hurts. It’s not easy for a ‘gate like me to make friends. Either the women get jealous and resentful, or the men get... you know.”
Malarka was thinking furiously. There had to be some way to keep her talking. Some key. Perhaps...
“Are any of your other friends thumbslaves, too?”
She nodded, then did a tiny double-take. “You know about ‘thumbslaves’?”
He did his best Sam Spade casual.
“Well, we’re not totally ignorant. How about you? Are you... one, too?”
“No, of course not. Wanda had me cloned a ‘freethumb’ back at ‘the Duke.’ Otherwise, I couldn’t help her convert planets. My job is make sure the local male gendarmes and politicos don’t interfere with the conversion. Trouble is, a few of them are really nice, and sometimes I get to like them a lot. Then I... ”
Her voice faded and the waxing glow in the middle of her forehead declared that Wanda was returning. Stereo’s body glared at them, gathered the trash and left.
The room was dim and quiet again. No one uttered a sound for about a minute.
“Good try, Lark,” proffered Brilson, “you got her talking, but we didn’t learn much.”
“Yes, we did, Bril. We learned that we are thumbslaves and she is not. My guess is, a ‘thumbslave’ is someone with an ordinary thumbchip, like us and everyone we know. And that Wanda, Jasper, Stereo, and maybe all of XenoCol, have modified thumbchips. They're 'freethumbs'. That’s why they don’t show up on police chipscanners.
We learned that killing off an entire planet is called ‘conversion.’
And finally, we know where they’re from. The name ‘the Duke’ was a nickname for a storycube hero from the twentieth century called John Wayne. Dukes are some of the most popular storycubes around. They eventually named a couple dozen planets for him, but only on one of them did the residents commonly refer to themselves as ‘the Duke.’ That was John Wayne-16. Today, we know it as Vitriox-1”
Maggie gasped. “The Vitreox Cluster?! They’re behind all this?”
Brilson let out a long, low whistle. “We’re flushed for sure, now.”
Silence settled back upon the fettered foursome until it was broken by Onyx giggling.
Three pairs of eyes turned to her, their faces questioning masks of wonderment at the surrogate’s obvious amusement. She was twiddling her fingers purposefully, and yet, what could she possibly be commanding?
She let out another burst of laughter, writhing in her seat. “Gluppy! That tickles!”
A gray-green jelly slowly oozed out of one leg of her shiort and crawled up to a waist pocket, which it filled.
“Wow,” muttered Malarka, “for a minute there, I thought you’d lost your mind, Onyx. I guess they didn’t search you very well, hunh?”
She tossed him an imperious grin. “They searched me the same as they did you! But I wasn’t going to give up Gluppy! She was easy to hide. But now she’s hungry.”
Brilson chimed in, “What are you feeding her? They took the yeast powder.”
Onyx grinned again. “What do you think they gave us to eat? I figured that cooked slime mold might make good food for a live slime mold. So I put a couple of cubes with lots of yeast sauce in my pocket when Stickybear wasn’t looking.”
Brilson nodded, “That was good thinking, and you’re right. Gluppy probably enjoys it more than we did,” he said, making a disgusted face.
Maggie rolled her eyes. “We might die soon, but at least we’ll have a toy to play with while we’re waiting.”
Brilson added, “Yeah, we can play with slime until we become slime.”
That provoked a few wry grimaces but no laughter. The conversation ground to an uncomfortable halt.

Malarka watched idly as Onyx resumed her twiddling, sending Gluppy on a journey down to her left ankle, where it halted, and then began quivering. Onyx sighed contentedly.
“What’re you doing, Onyx?” Malarka asked curiously.
“I’m making Gluppy scratch my ankle. I got an itch.”
Malarka’s eyebrows rose. He turned to Brilson. “Can she do that?”
Brilson shrugged as best he could. “No problem. I gave Gluppy some tactile engrams.”
When he saw that Malarka didn’t understand, he continued. “That’s how I could teach her to bounce like a ball. Basically, it’s a primitive sense of touch and a modification to its normal autolocomotion capability that enables it to... well, it now has the equivalent of finger muscles.”
Malarka was thinking furiously. “Is there anything else you taught Gluppy that you didn’t tell us about?”
Brilson pursed his lips. “I don’t think so. There’s the sensor/actuator plasmas, of course, the audio record/playback, text storage, a timer, a variety of directional commands, enhanced motility... what else,” he mused, “... no, that’s about it. I didn’t do the voice recog. PI wasn’t high enough.”
Malarka countered, “But those are general capabilities. Bouncing and scratching are specific skills. Are those all, or can we command Gluppy to do... other things?”
“Sure. Anything within the bounds of those general capabilities and its physical limitations... ”
“Did you say actuator plasmas?” Malarka interrupted.
“Sure. Without it, the slimemold wouldn’t be able to operate machinery or control...”
Malarka tensed in his chair. “Aha!”

- - = = - -

“Okay. Gluppy is in position. Try again,” said Brilson tensely.
Maggie had her back to the wall, but she was nearest Gluppy. A meter behind her head, the blob of jelly was fastened to the face of the master power panel. She twiddled her fingers. A wet sounding ‘plok!’ issued from Gluppy and the lights came on. Unlike appliance controls, power panels required physical contact to operate. It had taken Brilson half an hour to train the slime mold to exercise the precise mechanical force required to flip the power switch.
Four ecstatically happy faces beamed at one another.
“Okay,” interjected Malarka, “now send her over to me.”
Gluppy began its gelatinous journey down the wall.
“What are you going to do, Lark?” asked Onyx.
“I’m going to activate the work station and try to contact Rana at the Daltravian Gazette. But first, I’m going to wave the lights off. We don’t want Wanda to realize something’s wrong if she surprises us.”
He twiddled and the lights dimmed to their original level.
In the near dark, Malarka explained that as a registered journalist, he had access to certain restricted comm paths. Even from a rimproject, he should be able to send encrypted messages to his newspaper and charge them to a business account. As soon as Gluppy got close enough, he would transcribe his message and download his chip ID.
Then they would send Gluppy over to Bril where he would program it to interface with the workstation deck. It would be slow, but theoretically, it should work.
Gluppy was halfway across the floor, when the door opened with a metallic ‘clang.’ Wanda stormed in furiously.
Illuminated only by the light pouring in from the passway, she grabbed Maggie’s hair and pulled her head back.
“Okay, sweetpants! That account and cyber-key your dear parents sent you are phony! What gives!”
Maggie could barely speak in a hoarse whisper.
“How the tarpoon should I know! They sent the message! Go ask them!”
Wanda turned loose of Maggie, then slapped her.
Gluppy oozed across the floor with geologic torpidity towards Malarka.
“We got confirmation of the account and the travel voucher on Ming Tsao-2! But the flushing key from that flushing holofoil is invalid! What’s the real key! Now! Or I’ll break every bone in your face, and you’ll never see the inside of a cyberdoc!”
Maggie began to cry uncontrollably. Wanda took a step backward toward the middle of the room, her shoe landing centimeters from a greenish shadow on the floor, and aimed another broadhand across Maggie’s face.
Maggie screamed, then choked on her sobs. “I don’t know, I tell you! Perhaps they sent the real key in another message. Maybe it’s waiting for me at the Windowbox post! I don’t know!”
Wanda stood there breathing heavily. Then she whirled around, took two steps and slapped Malarka. He saw stars.
“That’s for getting Stickybear talking! You stupid thumbslaves already know too flushing much!”
Malarka composed himself. He prayed that Wanda wouldn’t notice his twiddling fingers. The slime mold came to a stop mere centimeters from her left foot. A small bubble formed on top.
He sent his mind back to the only resource he had, the memory of his bogarts. He had watched them so many times, he had most of them memorized. If only he could do a perfect Sam Spade. If only he could do it now.
“Listen, doll-face, you’ll never get away with this. If you think we’re the only ones that know what you’re trying to pull, then you’re as stupid as you are beautiful. You can’t just blow off four billion folks and not expect it to raise some eyebrows. How did a gorgeous dame like you get involved in this in the first place? Somebody got you by the short hairs, sister?” He allowed a hint of smile to curl up one corner of his mouth.
There must have been something in his calm, smooth demeanor, or his noticeably archaic use of standard galactic english. She wavered.
“No. Nobody is forcing me to do this, skeezer. You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never believed in anything in all your short, pathetic life, I bet. You have no idea what Humanity has given up. Sacrificed – for these!”
She stabbed her right thumb under his nose.
“Humanity gave up Freedom and Liberty so that we could live forever! Ha! Like rats in cages! You’re a helpless slave, Malarka Swade! A slave to a demonic technological tyranny that tracks you wherever you go, whatever you do! And relegates the Common Man to live out immortality far away from the home environment that gave us birth! And we surrendered our birthright, the planets, to the lazy ‘Dirt’ who were rich enough to buy them out from under us!
“We sold our birthright! And for what! Endless years of artificial air and artificial food in artificial cans! Well, no flushing thank you!
“Some of us are taking back our birthright any way we can!
“We’ve gotten away with it before, and Daltrave-6 will be no different! And after you’re all retched puddles of decomposing body fluids, the survivors here in Garden Estates will go down and take our rightful place on our own world!”
She was backing toward the door. He was going to lose her.
“Sure, sweetheart, anybody can kill twenty percent of a system with a smart virus. But how do you propose to kill everybody at the same time? Or didn’t your bosses figure you were smart enough to be told that?”
She sneered at him with a contempt born of innate superiority.
“Fool! I told you once before, everybody is already infected. Weeks ago. System wide. But the virus attaches itself to your precious thumbchips – which all have clocks! At precisely 2600 on Stalvember six, everybody dies!”
Malarka nodded coolly, just the way Sam Spade would have.
“Now, that’s a clever plan, doll face. And I suppose you and the rest of XenoCol are immune because you’re... freethumbs, right? And then after you impose a system-wide quarantine, your Vitriox buddies step in and take over. Neat plan. Sounds like you got all the angles covered. Except for one. What about the residents who get infected, then leave Daltrave before Stalvember six? Having millions of people all dying at precisely the same time on a hundred different planets would give away your little secret.”
Wanda chuckled malevolently. “We’re not nearly as half-witted as all that, Swade. And you’re still going to be dead in three days. Oh! And don’t expect any help from your girlfriend Rana Smythentropp. We have her sequestered where she can do no harm.”
Wanda whirled and grabbed Maggie by the hair again.
“You’re real fond of your ‘gate, aren’t you? How would you like to see her dissolve right before your eyes. It takes about twenty minutes and it’s very painful. I can arrange that. I will arrange that, if you don’t come clean with that key by supper!”
Wanda stormed out. The heavy door clanged shut.
Malarka began twiddling with ferocious intensity. The bubble on top of Gluppy shrank and disappeared.
Much later, the little blob of jelly mounted the workstation deck.

- - = = - -

“Tarpoons!” exclaimed Maggie angrily. She was twisted in her seat so that she could read the holodisplay over her right shoulder.
“The Daltravian Gazette datapath is locked! And we can’t get at your company account!”
Onyx whimpered, “What’re we going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” said Malarka. “Rana and I arranged the master account to be accessible remotely by either of us. We figured we might not be allowed to physically return to the office. This way, we could send and receive data through the Gazette, and even put out a paper without having to be there. We also set the Gazette up to automatically monitor her private translight channel, but to use that, I need Daygilds, lots of ‘em. Private interstellar channels don’t come cheap.”
A long silence ensued. Then Maggie brightened up.
“I know where we can get some Daygilds!” She twiddled. Gluppy’s pseudopods quivered over the deck.
A few minutes later, the display changed. Maggie leaned to her right.
“It worked! I got into the account my parents set up! Thunder! It’s over fifty thousand Daygilds! Will that be enough?”
Malarka nodded eagerly. “Yes! How did you do it?”
She smiled. “Dad taught us years ago to doubly encrypt our cyber-keys to each other. It’s simple. I just used the nines-complement of the key in the holofoil.”
“Hunh?” retorted Brilson.
“I just subtracted each digit of the key from nine. So a one becomes an eight. Six becomes three. And so on. Wait a sec, I’m transferring the Daygilds now to a temporary local account. There! Done!”
Malarka’s heart was pounding so loudly, he was afraid the others could hear it.
“Quickly! It’s almost time for supper! We’ll have to use Rana’s private translight channel.” He gave her the pathname and key.
“Transmit! We don’t have much time!”
Maggie twiddled.
Gluppy quivered.
The display flickered.

Wanda and Stereo entered the room. Jasper was not far behind. He was holding a medical derm. He casually walked over to Onyx and put the derm against her shoulder.
“Okay! Time’s up, my little sweetpants! We have our agents crawling all over Ming Tsao-2. Nothing. Your parents aren’t there. So, give me the correct key or you get a preview of how we eliminate unwanted populations. Well?”
Maggie swallowed hard. All eyes were on her.
“And you’ll promise to let my parents live? And the four of us?”
Wanda smiled sweetly and shook her head. “Maggie, Maggie. This is a big organization you’re dealing with. We didn’t get to where we are today by being sadistic or unappreciative. Your parents have something we want. And we have something you want. Let’s trade. Granted, you, your parents and your friends would have to be confined until we felt you were no longer a threat to us. Perhaps here on Daltrave-6. We could even arrange for permanent planetary residence for all of you, pending your good behavior, of course.”
Malarka sucked air through his teeth. Bribes didn’t get any bigger than that.
“You promise? You won’t hurt us?”
“Yes, Maggie Robearson. I promise.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you... if you tell us what my parents have that’s so important.”
Wanda pondered that for a moment.
“Okay. Your parents were entrusted with retooling a smartvirus factory around Bernadette, and then making some new arrangements for distribution. Their payment was to have been quite substantial – enough to buy a full planetary residence certificate. Just as the retooling was complete, your parents disappeared with copies of the smartvirus template, and the ‘freechip’ that we use to avoid detection by local datacops. We want those items back. At any cost.”
“But,” Maggie sniffed, “why did you have to destroy my whole world?”
Wanda appeared to be losing patience.
“I’ve given you your answer. Now give me mine.”
Malarka said, “Isn’t it clear, Maggie? They were using a non-Vitriox planet for covert operations. Highly illegal operations. They had to assume that your parents would soon blow their cover. They had to wipe out Bernadette-258 to destroy the evidence, probably hoping that it would kill your parents, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that XenoCol has mastered the ability to trigger their own novas.”
Wanda looked him up and down as a carnivore in a zoo might appraise a slab of synthomeat.
“You continue to surprise me, Swade. If I were you, I’d be extremely careful not to overdo that.” She turned back to Maggie.
“Last chance.” She raised a hand to Jasper.
Maggie nodded, and in a small, tired voice, rattled off the correct string of digits.
Wanda smiled and lowered her hand. Jasper pocketed the derm.
“Good girl. I hope you all enjoy your supper. Stickybear, take care of our guests.”


- - = = - -

They sat expectantly in the ruddy glow of the emergency light. All was silent. That is, until Onyx began to giggle. “Okay, Bril, let’s see if our little buddy did her job,” she said.
Bril grinned and twiddled. His sleeve slowly writhed. Out came Gluppy, who proceeded to the spot on the bioplastic sheath that contained the microsensors. Gluppy quivered. The bioplastic sagged and released him.
“Yea, Gluppy!” squealed Onyx, “I knew you could do it!”
Malarka grinned at her. “Pretty sharp idea, Bril, having Gluppy hide under your wrist and record the bioplastic release command. Let’s just hope they used the same command for all of us.”
“The answer is yes, so far,” said Brilson, who shortly arose from his chair and set Gluppy down on Maggie’s arm. Gluppy quivered on command and Maggie’s arm constraint fell away. In moments, they were all free.
Correction. They were all free within the boundaries of a small suite of rooms. The only door to the passway remained immutably locked.
After two hours of brainstorming, they finally collapsed into resignation. Brilson sulked and kicked things. Maggie appeared catatonically reconciled to their fate. She held Onyx in her arms and stared at a small window showing a documentary on butterflies from Old Earth. Onyx wept quietly.
Malarka was thinking, what would Sam Spade do? In one of his bogarts, Spade turns to a sidekick and says, “C’mon Watson, let’s go find us some clues.” He got up and investigated the three small rooms for clues, but if he saw one, he didn’t recognize it.
That brought him back to the workstation. It was unreasonable to expect that it would hold any magic way out, and in fact it didn’t. Everything but its standard public functions were locked under heavy security. There was no point in trying to talk to the local gendarmes. Most of Garden Estate’s critical bureaucracies would be part of the conspiracy, or so Wanda had hinted.
He tried to call up the external comm directory. It was locked, too. Without a specific pathname, there was no way to contact anyone on Daltrave-6. And the only pathnames he knew by heart were the one to the Gazette, and the one Rana had given him.
There was nothing to do except see if Rana had responded to his first message. Imbedded in that message had been the audio recording that Gluppy had made of Wanda’s confession.
There was no response.
Malarka wished there was something he could do. Anything. But when he got right down to it, his only real talents were volleyball and tabloid journalism. It looked like he was a total bust at investigative reporting.
Out of boredom, he began a diary.

The next meal came and went. Everyone resumed their places, and Gluppy reinstated the constraints. After their captors left, Gluppy released them again.
Malarka stretched, then sat down at the workstation and got busy.
“Watcha doing, Lark?” asked Maggie.
“Hmmm,” he grunted, “I can’t just sit here and do nothing. So, I’m writing down everything that’s happened to us and everything we’ve found out and everything I suspect, and sending it over the translight channel that my editor gave me. Maybe somebody will find it there.”
She watched in silence for several minutes as Malarka’s hands flew, fluttered, twiddled and twitched over the featureless gray slab of the interface deck.
“Hey, you’re pretty good. And fast, too.”
“This is nothing. With a professional workstation, two decks, half a dozen displays and enough hyperRAM, I’m as fast as a New Jersal racerat. If it weren’t for all the advertisements and other crap that make up half the paper, I could probably publish the whole thing by myself.”
She gently rubbed his back as he worked.
“Well, why don’t you? You said it could be published remotely.”
His hands froze over the deck.
“Why didn’t I think of that? Yes! YES!” His voice raised to a shout.
Then his face sagged in. “No, the master account for the paper is locked. You can’t put a rag on the wire without payment through the corporate account. Tarpoon!”
It was with a certain amount of shock that they heard the preliminary scratches and clicks at the door that heralded Wanda’s return.
Brilson shouted, “Quick! Back to your chairs!” Malarka made a last stab at the deck – and missed, then leaped for his own chair. Two seconds later, the door opened. Wanda and Jasper stepped in. She palmed on the lights and closed the door.
“Well, it seems that we have another blind alley, sweetpants. The message from your parents doesn’t give away their location, or the final destination of your travel voucher. And something very funny – the credit account was emptied yesterday. Do you know anything about that?”
Wanda was about to say something else when her attention was caught by a display of text floating over the workstation.
“What?” She whirled back to Maggie and looked down at her arms. Then at the crumbled sheets of transparent bioplastic littering the floor.
“Jasper!” she screamed in the same instant that Brilson’s foot shot out and caught Jasper in the knee. The thug shrieked in pain and went down without a fight. Not so Wanda. It took three of them to subdue her and hold her down.
But this hardly left them any better off than they’d been before. After pleading with Wanda, and threatening her, and trying everything else within the limits of their moral compunctions, it was clear that Wanda would not open the door for them. They were still trapped.
Maggie pointed out that Wanda could drop in on Stereo and warn her – they might have unwanted company any minute.
Brilson ran to the door and manually activated the emergency safety latch.
“There! It’ll take them a couple of hours to get through now,” he said.
Wanda, pinned to the floor by the combined weight of Maggie and Onyx, growled, “You idiots! You’ve still lost! I never gave you the antidote. In less than twenty-six hours, you’ll be dead unless you let me go!”
After some deliberation, the foursome acknowledged that their predicament had not improved. But they were unwilling to trust Wanda. There seemed to be nothing they could do except wait for the game to play itself out. Jasper and Wanda were bound to two of the chairs with strips of cloth ripped from a bed in the next room. They couldn’t use the bioplastic because their captives both knew the release codes. A few minutes later, there was some scratching and banging on the heavy door, but whoever it was soon gave up.

Hours dragged by. Malarka returned to the workstation and continued writing and transmitting what he believed to be his final opus. He had already sent the facts as he knew them. Each transmission began with a statement of their predicament and a plea for rescue. Now he pondered his feelings about dying, about the value of giving one’s life for a purpose or cause, however remote it might be from his selfish day-to-day interests.
He waxed philosophic about death itself, as viewed from within the gestalt conversation of a society jaded by everlasting (or at least, indefinitely prolonged) life. No, scratch that. Not everlasting life, but merely everlasting breathing, eating, laboring, searching. He reflected on the universal ennui and resignation that pervaded the galaxy, as a direct consequence of the lack of resources, the lack of opportunity.
The lack of Death.
Meanwhile, Jasper moaned, his thumbchip having partially sedated him to prevent pain and shock. Wanda ranted. And threatened. And pleaded. Malarka had Gluppy record most of her articulations, especially the ones where she attempted to persuade him of the validity of the Vitriox way of thinking. She was seriously trying to convert him!
He debated with her, giving her just enough agreement to keep her talking. He included the conversations into his transmissions.
He deliberated on what he now knew about the core belief system that empowered the Vitriox Cluster, and how it could inspire half a trillion people to accept mass planetary murder as a solution to their (purported) needs, how it could animate them to blithely create a private society marked by crime and accidents and inevitable death by old age for themselves and their children as a reasonable price to pay for... a planetary Home.
What price to pay for a world?
What price to pay for immortality?
How it felt to know that he was going to die in ten hours.
In three.
He did not sleep or eat or pause except to relieve himself in the fresher. He had given up all hope of rescue. There was only the satisfaction of knowing he was exchanging the immortality of his flesh for the immortality of his ideas. There was nothing so important now than to pour himself into the translight channel. And he did it with a manic single-mindedness that he had never known before. Except perhaps for playing volleyball. Or making love.
He knew that... perversely... he had never felt so alive.
He got up and headed for the fresher – for the last time, he told himself. Brilson and Onyx had long since disappeared into the next room. They were facing death in their own private way. Maggie was laying on the floor, apparently dozing. At second glance, he recognized the fragile trance of priming her surrogate. Perhaps she was participating. Perhaps only watching or comforting.
Wanda was in the same trance, conversing with or through Stereo. As he past her, her eyes fluttered open and she snarled at him, “You have less than an hour to live, you stupid skeezer!”
On his way out of the fresher, a chime sounded from the workstation. He dashed over and punched the deck. The image of an officer of InterPlanetLaw appeared above the deck.
“I must speak to Malarka Swade! Put him on at once!”
Malarka trembled with relief. “I am he.”

- - = = - -

The petite woman with the flaming red hair was meticulously putting the finishing touches on the hand lettered sign on Malarka’s office door at the Daltravian Gazette. It read, “Malarka Swade – Investigative Reporter.” She put away her brush and briefly glanced at Malarka with an expression that was half awe, half adoration.
Rana Smythentropp nudged him and quipped, “Now are you happy? Now will you come with me?”
He smiled into her beaming face. “Sure. Anything you say. Are Bril, Maggie and Onyx coming, too?”
“Of course. Their shuttle should be landing soon. I’ve arranged an escort to protect them from the adulating throngs and take them directly to my place.”
Rana and Malarka descended to the public concourse and took a slideway. It was with some apprehension that he disembarked with her onto a beige concourse – for planetside residents only. He had just been granted an honorary residence certificate the day before, and he still wasn’t used to the idea that he could go anywhere he wanted. In fact, he truly had no idea where he should even want to go.
They acquired a sleek ground vehicle topped by a bubble of bioplastic. And then they were... outside! At Malarka’s request, Rana adjusted the bubble for maximum transparency.
He felt fear. He felt exhilaration. Sure, he had seen vids of planetary surfaces all his life, but that didn’t prepare him for the actual experience of being there. It took all his effort to keep from hyperventilating.
He had never experienced speed so intimately before. He was sure they would crash into something, but miraculously, they never did. He asked Rana how fast they were going. Her answer of two hundred kilometers per hour left him dumbfounded. That was nothing! And yet...
Huge arcologies drifted by on the left, the Daltravian Planetary Park and Arboretum on the right. Past that, they took a side road, and after ten minutes of winding through an exotic labyrinth of manicured forest and flowering shrubs, they came to a sequence of small structures. Rana pulled in at the third one and stopped.
“Here we are. This is where I live.”
They got out. Malarka was too excited just yet to enter the house. He was entranced by the natural beauty around him, the sound of wind rustling through living trees, the smell of ozone and wildness in the air, the unbelievable expanse of the sky over his head, the incredible chaotic loveliness of the shifting patterns and subtle colors set against the deep blue of that sky.
She offered him a seat in her front yard. He pointed up at the swirling white and gray drifting over their heads.
“Is that the same stuff you can see from orbit? The white swirls in the atmosphere?”
She grinned so extravagantly he thought her face would split.
“Yes, Lark. Only now you’re seeing them from below.”
“What are they called?”
“Clouds.”
“Ah,” he muttered. “Clouds. They’re beautiful beyond anything I ever imagined.”
They sat in rapt silence for a long time.
“Lark, perhaps you could answer a question for me. When I was being held prisoner by those XenoCol thugs, they told me about the smartvirus, and even told me the precise time that I and everyone else would die. But the deadline came and went and nothing happened. Then when the InterPlanetLaw agents rescued me, they seemed totally unconcerned about the smartvirus. So... what happened?”
“Well,” began Malarka, “It seems that Maggie’s parents were undercover agents for InterPlanetLaw. The trouble with stopping Vitriox was that InterPlanetLaw could never tell when another planet would be exterminated. Or which planet. Or how it was being done.
“Maggie’s parents supplied the how. When I broadcast my articles over the translight channel, I supplied the where and the when. InterPlanetLaw had been monitoring millions of interstellar infonets for just such a clue, and was prepared to jump at a moment’s notice.
“Their agents contacted me at Garden Estates shortly after they entered the system. And I told them what they had to do to stop the smartvirus. I had them send a command to the Daltrave-6 senate to change the name of the planet.”
She stared at him goggle-eyed. “What? Change the name of the planet?!”
He grinned, “Yeah, to Humphrey Bogart-1. You see, XenoCol didn’t want anybody catching the virus in one system, then dying later in another, or in transit, or spreading the virus elsewhere. It would raise suspicions, or even start an interplanetary epidemic. Furthermore, they didn’t want to leave any evidence behind.
“So, I figured out that the smartvirus had been designed to access the victim’s thumbchip location trace to determine whether it was still in the target system. Then, when the deadline arrived, the virus would either kill the victim if they were still in the target system, or self-destruct.
“But when the deadline came, the Daltrave senate had already broadcast the name change through every chipscanner in the system to every individual. Nobody was in the quote, Daltrave-6, unquote system anymore! They were on Humphrey Bogart-1. So the smartviruses simply went ‘poof!’ Gone!”
Rana sat stunned, then chuckled. “Now I’ve got another question for you, Lark. What are you going to do with the Pulitzer Prize award? Have you thought about that?”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m still in shock, Rana. I had no idea that your private channel was being piped into a main galactic trunk line. I had no idea that Old Earth and so many other planets offered prizes for journalism. I never heard of a Pulitzer before.”
“I imagine it doesn’t happen often, Lark. There are damned few pieces written like the one you wrote, or read by as many people. You moved quintillions of people on billions of planets to think about the value of life and the value of death. You even described the Vitriox belief-system with... well, with compassion.”
She paused. “Do you believe their ideology has any validity, Lark?”
Malarka slowly shook his head without ever taking his eyes off the rapidly gathering clouds.
“Mass murder? No. And yet... there’s something valid in their viewpoint about death itself. Maybe death should be a part of the natural order of things again. And I don’t think I’ll ever take for granted the idea that planet surfaces should be reserved only for those who can afford it.
“We humans, as always, create the very circumstances that torment us so intensely. We buy something we want – we pay a price we bitterly regret.”
He lapsed into thoughtful silence.
“So, my chief writer and official planetary hero is also a philosopher. Hey, you didn’t tell me, what you’re gonna do with your ‘nouveau-dirt.’
He took a deep breath and turned away from the weather’s enthralling dynamics.
“I dunno. I’ve never had more than a few thousand Daygilds in my account at one time. Now I have sixteen billion. Tarpoon! I don’t even know where to begin!”
“Well, you could get a permanent residence certificate here on Daltrave-6. Uh, I mean Humphrey Bogart-1. And you could become my partner on the Gazette. You’d make a damned good Investigative Reporter and Senior Editor.”
He gave her his best Sam Spade double-take. “Really, shweetheart?”
“Really. And you could buy a home down here. Or... if you’re not sure, yet, you could... you could stay with me. For as long as you like.”
He looked into her face and blinked. He blinked again and there was no trace in his face or voice of anything but Malarka Swade. “Really?”
There was no trace in her face or voice of anything but Rana Smythentropp. She nodded. “If you want to. I would really love it if you would.”
He was about to accept her offer when the massive cloud bank overhead was split by a jagged streak of blinding light. One second later, he was nearly bowled over by a crashing wall of angry, rumbling noise. His adrenaline levels shot through his skull.
“By the Blessed Pain of Fornax! What was that?!”
She took his hand and squeezed it.
“That was just thunder, Lark. That was real thunder. Oh, look! Here’s your friends! Let’s go meet them!”
As they walked hand-in-hand toward the newly arrived vehicle, Rana looked back over her shoulder at the sky.
“And then we should go inside. I think your first experience of a rainstorm would be far more pleasant from under a roof.”

--------------------------------------