Starrigger

15

The throat was a yawning cavity that narrowed into an esophageal tube tunneling downward into the bowels of the island-beast. The walls of the passage were pale and sweaty, heaving with peristaltic motion. It was slippery going, but the rollers handled it fairly well. After a quarter klick or so the tube opened onto a vast dark chamber. There were hundreds of vehicles already parked here, many others in the process, their headbeams moving in the darkness a long way from the entrance. I followed the line of buggies heading toward them.

"I'll be…" Sam began. Then he said, "I can't think of anything that fits the occasion. I'm speechless."

We all were. It took a good while to get to the parking area, and we spent it in silence. Finally we could see sailors in white tops with red and white striped bell-bottoms directing traffic, slicing the gloom with powerful torches. I pulled alongside one of them, a skinny, baby-faced kid, and cracked the port. A faint odor of decayed fish came through, plus a whiff of brackish stagnant water, but the overall smell of the place wasn't hard to deal with. It simply smelled like the sea.

''Where to, sailor? Looks like you're running out of room."

"Over against the wall, starrigger!" the sailor yelled, playing the torchbeam against a glistening area of greenish-white tissue.

I eased the rig forward until the front of the engine housing kissed the wall. The tissue quivered and drew back slightly, then slowly came back to meet the rig and began oozing over the housing, then stopped.

"Drive into it!" the kid shouted over the din of engine sounds. "Push it back!"

I did. The wall receded before us, billowing out like a giant curtain. Before long I felt it resist, and I hit the brake.

"Go ahead," the kid told me in a high voice. "It'll stretch a klick before it tears a c-meter. C'mon, move that punkin' pigmobile!"

"Aye, aye, Cap'n!" I gunned it, and the wall shivered and yielded. I rammed the rig forward until I heard "Ho-o-o!"

"Are we the main course, or just the appetizer?" John wanted to know.

"There must be five hundred vehicles in here," Roland said.

"More," I ventured.

Somebody rapped smartly on the hatch. I turned to have a torchbeam stab my retinas. "Hey, swabbie!" I growled. "Want me to show you how that thing doubles as a suppository?"

"Take it easy, truckle." It was the same sailor who'd directed us. She was young, very young ― no more than sixteen or so. Antigeronics can't give you that kind of baby-skin. She wore her hair cropped short under a traditional Dixiecup hat, but the hat was gold, not white. And she wasn't all that skinny, either. She was blooming under that deckhand outfit.

"You can't stay here, you know," she said.

Blinking, I looked around. "What about non-oxy breathers?"

"Them we don't care about, but all humans go topside. Insurance regs." She started to leave.

"Wait a minute," I called after her. "Don't get testy, now. Just a few questions."

"Make 'em short. We're way behind schedule."

"Consolidated Outworlds ― is that a human-occupied maze?"

"Mostly."

"Hmm. Okay, now, are we actually in the stomach of this thing?"

"No, a predigestive sac. Fiona's got two of these and twelve stomachs, but we don't like to use those unless we have to.

Have to spray 'em down with gastric inhibitors ― and they smell bad."

"Fiona? It's a female?"

"Hard to say one way or the other."

"Huh? Oh…"

"Is that it?"

"That's it, except to ask if all the deckhands are as good-looking as you."

"Ah, shut up." She turned on her heel and stalked away.

"Hey! One more thing."

"What?" she answered impatiently.

"How do we get topside?"

"Elevator!"

"Elevator?"

Elevator.

And there it was, a circular metal-framed shaft rising through a hole in the roof. The juncture of frame and roof was sealed by a white spongy collar that seemed to be there to protect the surrounding organ-tissue. The elevator car was bullet-shaped and transparent, suspended by thick metal cables.

"Any construction you'd do inside this beastie," Roland said as we boarded the car, "would be more like a surgical procedure."

"Yeah, but the patient's sturdy enough to withstand it," I said, then added sotto voce, "Did you plant that transponder?"

"Yes, at the base of the frame."

"You agree it'll shoot Sam's signal up this shaft?"

"Don't see why not. But how do you get it out of the shaft and through the doors? ― if there're doors."

"We put another one up top, of course."

The car was filling up, and we got scrunched to the back. A tall, blue, webfooted alien trod on my instep as he backed up, then turned his piscine head and wheezed something that sounded apologetic.

The trip up was a long one. The outer door at the top of the shaft was an ornate gilt folding gate which opened onto what looked like the plush lobby of an ancient Terran hotel. There were red leather settees and armchairs, matching ottomans, coffee tables, freestanding ashtrays, and potted plants. The walls were done up in red and gold fabric. It was a scene out of the past ― tastefully done too, nothing like the usual quickie/functional decor you see back in the Maze. It was a big place, packed with sentient flesh.

"Ah, atmosphere," John said.

I turned to Darla. "Spot anybody?"

She took a long look around the place. "No."

"Yeah, but they're here, or will be. Everybody who was chasing us. Maybe even Wilkes."

"He'll be here," she said, as if she knew. Maybe she did.

Another long wait, this time to get a cabin, and that was after standing in line at the purser's office. I gave Darla back her coins and traded about a quarter of my gold stash for consols, paid C-38.5 for the fare, and gave John some cash in partial payment for the hospital bill he'd picked up back on Goliath. When it came time to register for the cabin, I had my fake ID in hand, but the clerk waved it off.

"Don't need your ID, sir, just your name. This is a free society."

I looked at the plasticard, which stated that I was one T. Boggston Fisk, Esq., and I thought, there's a time to run and a time to stop running. Time for the fox to turn and face the dogs, come what may. I put the card away.

"Jake McGraw, and friends."

He bent over the keyboard, then straightened up quickly and looked at me. "Did you say… Jake McGraw?"

"That's right."

"Glad to have you aboard the Laputa, sir."

"Glad to be anywhere right now. Tell me, when do we get where we're going? And where are we going?"

"We should make Seahome by tomorrow afternoon, sir. That's the biggest town here on Splash."

"Splash? That's what the planet's called?"

"Well, it isn't really called anything officially, and every language group seems to have its own name, but in Intersystem it's called Akwaterra."

"Straightforward enough. I take it there are large land masses then?"

"Big enough, but not continent-size."

Welcome to Splash, but don't go near the water.

The Laputa?

Carrying my bag only (Darla had opted to keep hers), a steward led us to another elevator. We went up to B Deck, where we followed him through a maze of corridors. Roland lagged behind, planting more transponders at various strategic and inconspicuous locations.

Our adjoining staterooms were lavish, the crappers positively palatial, with sunken tubs made of a gold-veined stone that looked something like marble. There were few modern conveniences, but the charm more than made up for the lack. I tried to think of the last time I'd used a bathtub.

John knocked on the connecting hatch and stepped in. "I haven't seen plumbing like that since I lived in London," he said.

"Really?" I said, distracted. I still wasn't sure whether I liked having the Teelies next door, for their sake more than mine. Time for them to start disassociating themselves from me. I had wanted at least half a ship between us, but Roland had insisted on keeping nearby.

"Don't want to lose you now, Jake. You're our ticket home." "Home? Where's that?"

He acknowledged the point. "You have me there. But our people are still important to us. We must get back somehow."

"Sorry. I understand." Maybe Roland was right. They'd be more vulnerable away from me.

Susan walked in, looking depressed. She had her shirt back on and was wearing her tan bush pants, but she was barefooted, having left her sandals in the Chevy.

"There are shops on board, Susan," I told her. "You should pick up some footwear. John has money."

"Yes, I will," she answered dully and slumped into a velvet armchair.

John went over to her. "What's wrong, Suzie?" he asked, massaging her shoulders.

"Oh, I was just thinking of Sten back there in the hospital. He's probably worried sick, wondering what happened to us." She looked at me. "We were on the way to the hospital when you…" She lowered her head and began crying softly.

It made me feel just great. Darla took her by the hand, led her to the other room, and closed the hatch.

"Does she have these mood swings often?" I asked John. "Suzie's emotional and changeable, it's true. But you must realize, Jake, this whole affair's been a nasty shock for all of us."

"Sorry, sorry…." It struck me that I'd been apologizing a lot lately. I had to reach down deep into my resources to remind myself that I had done nothing to deserve any of this, nor was any of it my fault. A sense of guilt for unspecified and probably imaginary offenses is a load that gets dumped on you early on. Most people spends lifetime looking for a place to set it down.

"John, would you excuse me for a moment? I want to talk to Sam."

"Of course." He went to the hatch and opened it, turned to say something, but thought better of it. "We'll talk later," he said, then went out and closed the hatch. He had his own guilt to deal with.

Winnie was on the couch, huddled up with her arms wrapped around her knees, looking at me with wet, questioning eyes. I winked at her, and she gave me a grimace-grin in return. Funny that she responded to a wink. I couldn't remember ever seeing her eyelids close except in sleep; she never blinked them.

"I'm copying you fine," Sam said when I keyed him. "How'd you do it?"

"Roland engineered it, but those button transponders did the trick. We have them planted all over the ship. What have you got for me?"

"Well, when I went down to the basement, I got quite a shock. There's tons of stuff from years back. I checked a list-out of that news-recording subroutine. The way it's coded is all goofed up. It tells me to erase all the junk I've kept for the last thirty days, but allows me to keep what I've recorded that day, the day I houseclean. What the subroutine does then is give everything that's left in the workfile a PROTECT tag. Then, when I erase again, all that stuff gets dumped into the reference library. As a result, there's all kinds of random crap down there from years back."

"I'll have to stop buying that cheap off-the-shelf software and do my own coding for a change. You find anything interesting?"

"Yes, very. Like this item in Pravdu from about three years ago." Sam snorted. "Never fails to amuse me that they thought the change of one letter makes a Russian word into an Inter-system one."

"Makes it easier for them. Go ahead."

"Okay. Quote, Tsiolkovskygrad, Einstein, October 10, 2103. The season premiere of the New Bolshoi was well-attended this year, as it is every year, but last night standing-room-only crowds packed the house to see a daringly innovative staging of, blah blah blah blah, etcetera. Skip six paragraphs. Among the notables attending were Kamrada Big Cheese, Kamrada Head Whatshisname, your mother's Uncle Pasha, and ― here it is, get this ― Minister of Intercolonial Affairs Dr. Van

Wyck Vance, daughter Darla Petrovsky-Vance, and some prominent friends of the Authority, including labor leader Kamrada Corey Wilkes, unquote. I'm multiplexing the 2-D image. Are you getting it?"

I put one end of the key to my eye and peered through the pinhole lens. The microscreen showed a loge full of bored faces, one of them belonging to Corey Wilkes. He was seated next to ― yes, it had to be ― the same patrician-looking gentleman I'd seen at Sonny's and thought I recognized. Van Wyck Vance. Next to him was a blond woman with her head turned, talking to the woman behind her. The face was hidden, the hair was longer and probably its natural color, but…

"Sam, zoom in on the blonde."

"How? Like this?"

"Little closer, screen right."

… But the port-wine mark on her bare right shoulder told me it was Darla.

"Now we know who 'Dar-ya' is."

"More than that, Sam. It's Darla. And I saw her dad at Sonny's."

"How can you ―? Oh, you mean the little mark on her shoulder? I missed that, but now I remember. More advantages than you'd think in women running around naked, aside from the obvious ones."

I stretched out on the silky bedspread and put the key on the nightstand, leaving the circuit open. I closed my eyes.

"What's it mean, Jake? From what you've told me, it looks like all along she's been Petrovsky's agent. Now we know she's his LC. But if she's Vance's daughter, and Vance is in cahoots with Wilkes… where does that put her?" I didn't answer right away. "Jake?"

"I don't know. We need more information."

Sam sighed. "Damn it, sometimes being a machine is hell."

I picked the key up and held it close to my mouth. "Sam, everything they've done has been to make us run. And we tucked tail and ran. The scuffle at Sonny's was to start things off, and also served the purpose of setting me up to be tracked by a method I haven't figured out. They knew exactly where we were when we hid out at Grey stoke Groves. But did they surprise us? No, they flushed us out of there and followed us, dogging our every step, somehow anticipating our every move while staying a planet or two behind. And all for one purpose: to watch us until we ducked into a potluck. We did. To them that meant we had the Roadmap. And we do. We've had it all along and didn't know it." "Uh-huh. And what is it?" "It's a who. It's Winnie." "What?"

I told him about the sand drawings, then went over my reasoning concerning why the drawings could qualify as the 'convincing forgery' Petrovsky had mentioned.

"Convincing? Who'd be convinced by scratches in the sand?" "Apparently everybody. That's the only way it figures. Remember, they might not know that Winnie's knowledge is based on myth. And furthermore, we don't know it either, for a fact. That line may be real, or they may not be. I haven't had time to find out for sure. I tried back on the beach, but Darla's the only one who seems to understand her."

"How did Wilkes and company find out about Winnie? Through Darla?" 1

"I don't know. We know she reported to Petrovsky at the station. Wilkes may have a spy in Petrovsky's intelligence unit. Another thing that isn't clear is whether Darla knew about Winnie's abilities when she reported. The drawings didn't show up until we got here, but Darla's been talking to her all along, so she may have reported on the possibility earlier. Left some kind of message, secret radio, something." "And the Reticulans?"

"A Snatchgang working for Wilkes, but why Rikkis would work for humans, and for what compensation, isn't obvious."

"You can say that again. Okay, okay, but I don't understand two things." He laughed. "What am I talking about? I'm fuzzy about a lot of things. Put it this way. There are two main confusions. One: How the hell did these stories about us get started in the first place? And how come we never got wind of them until recently?"

"Sam, how long were we off the road before this run?" "Christ, I don't know. Couple of months. Why?" "Couple of months to bring in the harvest back at the farm, right? And to do some necessary business. Before that, where were we?"

"Hydran Maze, pleading with those waterbags not to tear up the Guild Basic and go over to Wilkes." "How long?"

"Don't remind me. Seemed like years, waiting three weeks at a time for some bureaucrat to get over her estrous cycle so we could get an appointment. How long? Another three months, all told."

"Sam, your antialien prejudice is showing."

"Not at all. I'm just pissed, is all."

"Six months off the road," I said. "Okay, here's Crackpot Theory Number One. Somehow, we get out of this mess. With Winnie's help, we find our way back, but we do a Timer. We luck onto a backtime route and return to T-Maze before we leave… about six months before we leave. Word gets around somehow. There's a map; get the map, everybody says. Everybody wants the goddamn thing. And some combination of Wilkes, the Authority, the Reticulans, and the Ryxx is aiming to get it… somehow. Our future selves stay low until the heat's off. They know better, leaving us to get chased."

"You'd think they'd have the decency to fill us in."

"They may have their reasons. Anyway, we run, find Winnie, leave the Maze, get into a mess, get out of it, go back in time, etcetera. That's the Paradox. Somehow, it all has to work."

"How many somehows was that? I lost count."

"Too many, but I'm ready for Crackpot Theory Number Two, if you've got it." '

"I don't. I've got one more big confusion, though."

"Which is?"

"Why the hell didn't they just grab us back in T-Maze and beat the merte out of us until we handed it over? We didn't have anything, but they didn't know that."

"They're smart. They're aware of the Paradox. Wilkes as much as pointed it out to me back at Sonny's. They're reasoning that I got the map at some point along the journey, but they don't know exactly where. So they wait until it looks like we deliberately slip through a hope-to-Jesus hole." I took a deep breath. "Well, what do you think?" I asked, knowing he'd been playing devil's advocate all along.

"Well, I've never knowingly bought a crock of excrement before, but I'll buy yours if you answer one more question. To wit: if we have the map already.. 1 mean our future selves, of course… if we've already returned six months ago with the thing, or with Winnie or whatever, why in the name of all that's holy are they trying to get it now? It's done, finished. How can they hope to change what's happened?"

"That's a tough one. Would you still buy my crock if I told you I had no idea?"

"Yeah, but I'm gullible."

"Got anything else from the file?"

"Well, under 'Colonial Assembly' I got the usual pile of nonnews, except for one item that cross-referenced with 'intelligence.'"

"Give it to me."

"I'll digest it. It's about two Assemblymen ― actually a man and a woman ― being suspended by the Authority pending an investigation into their part in activities which've been deemed by the Authority to be outside the bounds of the Assembly's proper sphere of concern. Probably wanted to wipe their asses without having to petition the Authority in writing first."

"How did it cross-reference with 'intelligence'?"

"The information was based on Militia intelligence reports."

"Sounds like a smoke screen ― the story, I mean. Got any background on it?"

"A bit. If you remember a while back, there was some roadbuzz about a secret intelligence cell within the Assembly. Undercover operatives, special operations, that sort of thing. The funds for it were supposed to've been disguised as temporary staff salaries for a couple of investigative committees."

"Wow. Who leaked all that?"

"Authority plants in the Assembly, of course. They carry on a loose-lip campaign in cocktail bars and bedrooms; and when the story gets widely circulated, the Authority acts. That way the plants don't blow their cover. For good measure, the Authority may have had a spy right in the cell."

"Double agent?"

"Right."

"Okay." I sat up on the bed. "Sam, you did a good job. We have one more piece of the puzzle. Right now I don't know where it fits, but it's a big one. Talk to you later."

"Report in regularly, will you?"

"Sure." I got up and went to the connecting hatch, put my ear against it. Roland, John, and Darla were talking quietly next door.

I turned to Winnie and said, "Let's you and me go for a little walk, honey."