The Sea is Full of Stars

Wallinchky Compound, Grabant 4

“Pisses me off that I got to hide away some of my best stuff for this asshole,” Jules Wallinchky grumped. “You’re sure he can’t be bought?”

“Our contacts say he can’t.” In fact both men knew that anybody could be bought, although not always with money, but that the price was often far too high to be worthwhile. “And he’s supposed to be very good at his job.”

“Anybody coming with him?”

“It doesn’t say, but the odds are he’ll have one assistant with him. If you were in his shoes, what kind of assistant would you bring?”

Wallinchky spat. “A damned telepath. Well, there ain’t a telepath I haven’t jammed, and you’re pretty set there as well. Beta! Have the Kharkovs fitted with A and K band telepathic scramblers. Make ’em get a warrant and haul somebody in to get anything more than surface pleasantries.”

“It has been anticipated and already installed, Master,” Beta told him.

That seemed to bring the big man up short for a moment. He tried to decide if he liked that or not, finally decided that it just showed the kind of anticipation of his wishes he told them he demanded, and let it go. “What about the final treatment for you and Alpha?”

“It can be done today, Master.”

“Then do it, and let me see the result when it’s ready. Go ahead now.”

She bowed, and made for the medlab, as Alpha, waiting just outside, did the same.

“What’s that about?” Ari asked him.

“One final piece of insurance. I’m presenting them as androids.”

“Isn’t that illegal? Androids in the shape of a known race?”

“Not if they’re properly identified as such for all to see. Not much sense in making them, but so long as responsibility lies with the owner, it hardly matters. Remember, androids are considered computers, just like more conventional robots.”

Later that day, when they were determining that all was in readiness for a brief inspection and deciding exactly what to say, the two came back. Each now had a Regulus Corporation flat hologram embossed, appearing permanently as part of their foreheads. Regulus was the holding company Ari technically worked for, and it was wholly owned by Jules Wallinchky. The entire skin area, in white and bright red, was now dyed uniformly, and the design was abstract yet somewhat erotic. The skin, even on the faces, seemed to have the same sort of consistency as the artificial limbs and continue from them, as if they were essentially made of the same stuff all over. It was quite an effect. What caught Ari’s eye, though, were two very glaring differences.

Although not the same height, the two of them seemed much closer than they had. And they seemed to have no vaginal and rectal cavities, only model-like semblances representing them.

“You neutered them?” Ari said, appalled.

Wallinchky laughed and lit a cigar. “No. It’s really a suit that just looks like that.”

“And the height?”

“That’s even easier. Both the arms and legs can have all sensation switched off, then they lie down in the molds and the things are recast. About seven and a half centimeters less leg but still proportional and Alpha comes down to a less noticeable height. Add five to Beta, and she comes up close to Alpha. The arms we adjusted proportionally, and I added a great deal of inner support and heavy motor as well, now that they’re mine, all mine. They’re now about the fastest runners and strongest women you ever did meet. The skin sheen on the face and neck is a gel that sets like that and is used by actors in Kalachian theater, which basically is stylized and makes everybody look artificial anyway. Both the body suit and the gel are porous, so there’s no threat of suffocation or anything like that. Gives a nice effect, and the holograms make ’em legal.”

Ari went over and ran his finger down Alpha’s neck and then across her cheek. She didn’t move or seem to notice. It all felt… well, kind of rubbery, but while the effect was dramatic, the stuff was very thin.

Their voices had also been retuned—a simple command, Wallinchky told Ari. Female, but very deep and now with an ever so slight reverb that gave them a slightly mechanical sound. It was clear that Jules had thought this out closely, and also that he was thinking of taking them on the road. It would have been easier to just hide them out on the surface someplace. This wasn’t merely to fool the Inspector—this was a test of whether or not they were viable beyond housemaids here on Grabant.

“They can exist outside of the control of this computer?”

“Sure. They’re gonna be perfect. The ideal aide, confidante, and bodyguard. Smart, obedient, devoted, strong, and programmable—all the best of people and computers.”

“Master,” Alpha interrupted. “The Inspectorate’s ship is in orbit and requesting final clearance.”

“Give it,” he told them. “Come on, you two—and you, too, Ari. Let’s go meet the coppers.”

In the back of his mind, like somebody turning on a music player, Ari could hear an incessant little tune of no consequence but with a series of notes and a refrain you couldn’t get out of your head once you heard it. The little neuromachines were kicking in at the point and on the wavelengths that a telepath, even a strong telepath, used. You weren’t supposed to be able to do this legally, but the Realm never enforced it and it was only affordable to the very powerful.

Ari, for one, wanted to see what a Genghis O’Leary would look like.

There were two passengers on the shuttle, as expected. The foursome watched them emerge on a screen above the airlock, so they could get an advance look at their unwelcome visitors. One was a huge man—not fat, but a giant, well over two meters, with shoulders that seemed enormous as well and a big barrel chest. Nothing was wasted on him; it was all tight as a drum. His head was either shaved or naturally barren, but he had eyebrows thicker than many people’s hair and a huge walrus-style mustache, both natural flaming red in color. Dressed as he was in colorful clothing, including a flamboyant red-lined cape, in earlier centuries he might have been taken for a professional wrestler. He definitely didn’t look like Sherlock Holmes or the administrative type, either, but his square jaw and almond eyes nonetheless fit a man who might be named Genghis O’Leary.

Beta looked over at Wallinchky. “Master, this large man is very dangerous. He is a master of arcane fighting skills and also very powerful, but he is a Doctor of Forensic Science and is known to possess as close to a true photographic memory as is known to be possible.”

“You know that mountain?” Jules Wallinchky responded, a bit awed at the sight himself.

“Master, yes. He was a teacher in the Realm Police Academy.”

“Interesting. But the name wasn’t one you recognized?”

“Master, names were not used for the teachers, lest they be compromised for later police work. Students nicknamed him ‘Doctor Big.’ ”

“Would you kill him if I asked you to?”

“Of course, Master,” she responded without a moment’s pause, almost as if she were hurt that he’d question her devotion. He liked that.

“Well, don’t unless I do ask you, or my life or liberty are at stake. Say nothing and don’t betray that you have ever known him. Do you recognize the other one?”

“No, Master.”

The other one was more normal-sized, much detail concealed in a long robe and by a gauze mask and integrated hood, so nothing at all of the face could be recognized, not even the gender.

“Master, the other is not a telepath. I am sensitive to the bands,” Alpha told him. “The subject is, however, attempting to conceal something from us.”

That much was obvious. “Male or female?”

“Male, Master,” Beta answered. “His walk betrays him.”

“Analysis?” They were getting close to the airlock and time was running out.

Beta didn’t hesitate; she had all of Ming’s old skills and memories available from Core, and Core’s speed of thought. “Master, the large one is obviously here because with his mind he knows original Beta and can recognize her. It is probable that the other knows original Alpha and they are disguising him until after identification is made. Recommend both units not meet them.”

Wallinchky thought it over, but as the airlock hissed and the lens twirled to reveal the newcomers, he said, “No, let’s play their game.”

The big man had to bend down slightly to get into the area through the portal, but he straightened into almost military bearing once he did so, and his eyes took in all four as if examining four suspects in a terrorist raid, missing no detail. He clicked his heels and gave a slight bow. “I am Inspector O’Leary. My associate is Brother Bakhtar, who is along to assist me in some specialized examinations. He doesn’t talk much and has religious beliefs that prohibit him showing his face to strangers, but he’s a great aid to me. I know that you are Jules Wallinchky, and that this is your nephew, Ari Martinez. The ladies…?”

“Are not quite ladies,” Jules responded with a smile. “Androids, Inspector, linked directly to the central computer that is the god of this whole complex. I find it useful to have some humanoid units around the place, since we’re mostly containing and restoring great classic art here. Later on I can introduce you to the Kharkovs and they can show you what the work is here. They are known throughout the Realm as experts.”

“Androids. Fascinating. They are so very humanlike.” He sighed. “Well, can we go someplace more comfortable and sit down and talk?”

Wallinchky nodded and smiled. His uncle was quite smooth, but Ari Martinez knew that neither O’Leary nor he could mistake the tension in his own body language. It was disappointing; he was usually a better actor than this.

They went into the study. Wallinchky said to Alpha, “Bring us some good wine and some decent munchies. Beta, help her out.”

They both bowed and scampered out.

The huge inspector sank down into a padded chair, and the chair seemed almost to collapse from his bulk. “I hope I don’t kill your furniture,” he said apologetically. “I was born and raised on a rather high gravity world, and thanks to adaptation genetics I am, I’m afraid, a bit… well, dense.” It was supposed to be a joke, even though probably true, and he smiled as he said it.

Brother Bakhtar, still a jumble of dark brown, sat comfortably in another chair. He wore brown boots and high socks, surgical-type gloves, and not a single part of him that was real showed.

“Just what is all this about, Inspector?” Jules Wallinchky asked him. “I am a busy man—in fact, I planned to leave here later today. My art collection is very well known, and precisely cataloged. This part here is usually not seen by most people in this setting, but it’s loaned to museums and on special occasions piecemeal, and a holographic walkthrough is available to anyone who wishes it. In other words, I have the receipts for them.”

The Inspector chuckled. “I’m not involved in that sort of work in any event,” O’Leary assured him. “Right now I am operational director of Internal Security and work directly under the Ministry of the Interior.”

“I’ve been accused of just about every crime in the book, as you may know,” Jules Wallinchky admitted, “but never has anybody accused me of treason. Many of my companies do business with the military, as you well know. I’d be a fool to risk all that I have—and for what? It was the Realm that made all this possible!”

The two “androids” returned with trays, served drinks to each of them and then offered trays of hors d’oeuvres around before taking position on either side of the doorlike guards, although if anyone needed a refill, they were quick to move to offer it.

Both Jules and Ari noted that it wasn’t above Brother Bakhtar to drink wine, although the glass was moved up under that mask and little was revealed. Wallinchky could hardly wait to get to a computer terminal alone and see what the probes revealed about the mystery man.

“No one has accused you of treason,” the Inspector assured him. “However, the City of Modar was struck by a known and powerful Enemy of the Realm, Josich Hadun— or, at least, it was under his orders. Two of his family members were in the saltwater section traveling under assumed names. We assume they were in charge of murdering the Captain and coordinating the whole thing. There is no question of the perpetrators. The question is, rather, why.”

“We gave our statements, Inspector. We were just happy to escape with our lives. I gather this Hadun doesn’t usually feel so generous.”

“Not without an ulterior motive, no. That’s one of the reasons why I’m here. The other concerns some subsequent events since that you almost certainly would not yet be aware of.”

“Yes?” Jules Wallinchky didn’t like this. Information was constantly coming in to him wherever he was, but with the vast distances of space, it was always quite a bit behind, which didn’t stop him from not liking surprises.

“First, I am certain you remember Captain Kincaid?”

“Yes, more or less. We didn’t see much of him after the first day, of course. I assumed he was in one of the lifeboats or had perished with the ship.”

“Captain Kincaid is too single-minded to die. He was already outside of the ship when it was attacked. In fact, he attached himself to your lifeboat.”

Both men almost jumped in their chairs. “What!”

“Indeed. He seemed to think you had something to do with it, I’m afraid, and he suspected that you would be meeting the perpetrators. And a ship did arrive, and blow up the engine and passenger modules, and then it sent a shuttle to your lifeboat. This was a matter we hadn’t remembered you or anyone else in your lifeboat mentioning.” The irony in his tone was obvious. “Well, you see, Kincaid simply switched from your lifeboat to theirs and rode it back to their ship. They weren’t water breathers, so once he recognized the ship type and operated an emergency airlock, which was being used off and on by work crews after your departure, he got inside and managed a more comfortable ride. It’s quite a large vessel, those frigates. A shave and a uniform and the Captain could pass himself off easily as one who belonged there. The only ones likely to recognize him were the water breathers from the ship, and he wasn’t likely to meet them.”

“Then he infiltrated them and got to their headquarters?” Ari asked, amazed at Kincaid’s daring.

“He did. Indeed, he once got within sight of a Hadun dome that almost certainly had Josich inside. The problem was, he couldn’t get any closer without going through a security ring that nothing could pass without all the requisite codes and authorizations. He could do nothing more alone, so he managed to get off that world and send its coordinates to us.”

“So that’s how you know the story!” Wallinchky commented. “Kincaid sent it.”

“No, he told it to us. We got there, all right, and we caught them web-footed, as it were. Everyone but Josich and his immediate imperial family guard. They happened, by sheer luck, to be on a nearby world not unlike this one. A world with ruins of the Ancient Ones, where they were doing experiments with the thing they stole.”

Wallinchky was more upset at this implication than in being caught in a plot. “You mean it wasn’t junk?”

O’Leary smiled, knowing he’d scored a major blow to the big man’s ego and gotten at least a start of a confession all in one. “Yes, Citizen Wallinchky, it was not junk. For quite a while we didn’t have sufficient power; we spent a fortune getting power to a dead world just so we could at least tickle the Ancient Ones’ artifacts and see if they would scratch. There was finally reaction, but we didn’t get much further. The data stream that thing at the core sends, its pervasiveness, and its complexity, are beyond anything we have or know, and we have no key. In the end the thing was being packed up until we could solve the cryptography problem, if ever, and sent for mothballing.”

“So it’s still junk,” Wallinchky pointed out. “You can tickle but it ignores you.”

O’Leary cleared his throat. “That’s not quite what I said. We can’t talk to it. It doesn’t or can’t talk to us. But it noticed. Oh, how it noticed. Even as we were closing in on them, they had our device set up with a respectable power supply and one hell of a master computer. Josich was there because he was too insecure to risk them actually tapping that godlike power and not needing him anymore. His family unit was there, and it’s a pretty extensive and bloodthirsty lot, because he didn’t like them out of his sight for long periods. They were gearing up for a major test, all of them, when our ships came in. We blew his yacht to Hell, targeted his dome and camp so he’d have nowhere to go, and then came in to wait for the surrender.”

“Then you’ve got Hadun, Inspector?” Wallinchky asked calmly, his mind weighing hundreds of options and moves.

“No, sir. No, we don’t. You see, just at the moment we penetrated the planetary grid, the damnedest thing happened.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small message cube. “Here. Play this and you’ll see just what I mean. It’s from the command ship theater camera.”

Ari, who had a sinking feeling that he was seeing a long, long series of sessions in corrective therapy or worse, took it, almost dropped it, then turned and inserted it into a small cavity in the study computer station. After a few seconds for processing and analysis, Core began running the recording.

The world did look an awful lot like Grabant 4—amazingly so. The Ancient Ones had been consistent in their taste in planets, which back then were probably a lot more livable. Even here they saw signs of seas, rivers, ancient life in sediments, much more, back when there was something to breathe and water to use instead of these barren, sterile deserts.

The shots, six different point-of-view observations that pretty well covered things, were very clear if a bit small on the study screen. Still, it was easy to see the burning domes of the camp, the shattered and still smoking luxury yacht, and tiny little dots running every which way, while something larger and pulsing a white energy was in the center of what was almost certainly an Ancient Ones ruin.

Then, suddenly, visible lines of force, pencil thin, appeared to ooze from the ground at mathematically fixed points and flow together, forming a grid of hexagonal shapes.

“What the hell is that?” Wallinchky wanted to know.

“Just wait,” O’Leary told him. “Coming up is what the full planetary view saw. There!”

The six views were momentarily interrupted by a full screen of the entire planet. It seemed alive with crisscrossing lines not just on the surface, but also above it, creating a complementary canopy of hexagonal energy patterns 150 or more kilometers up and surrounding the world. The proliferating lines, resembling a fuzzy engineering wire-frame view, eventually obscured all detail.

And then, just as abruptly, it switched off, and the central close-up view of the encampment and the ancient city returned.

“Where is everybody?” Ari asked, feeling uneasy as he watched.

The camp, the smoldering yacht, the ancient ruins, all those remained, but there was no sign of any energy pulses at all, and no sign, either, of any living thing.

“It took guts for the Marines and Special Police to go down there, I’ll tell you,” the Inspector said in what had to be an understatement. “But go down they did.”

They now had a view from one of the squad leader’s environment suit cameras. It came down very near the yacht, and was carrying a nasty rifle clearly designed not just to singe, but to deep fry.

“There are a number of dead bodies around, but you can identify them as having been hit in the assault,” the Inspector noted. “They all have clear breaches in their e-suits, or show signs of explosion damage. The half-dozen or so figures you saw running, though, are not there. Watch. You can see that the sergeant is following the grid the computer made during the attack so that he can trace precisely the route of those who fled. Now look—there! See?”

The picture was of a body. The creature was definitely non-Terran, and appeared to be somewhat squidlike. It wasn’t a familiar shape, but anybody looking at the suit could interpolate the contours. And interpolate they would have to do, since it was sheared, at a diagonal, all the way across.

“You can see the suit’s been cut completely in two,” O’Leary noted.

“But where’s the other half, and whatever that thing was?” Ari asked.

“Where, indeed? We suspect it’s with Josich and the other Hadun who completely and utterly vanished at the same moment. Where did they go? Vaporized, perhaps, but why? And why only the living ones? Swallowed? Again, perhaps, but there is no cavity below and we surveyed to over thirty kilometers down. Not even a shaft. Solid rock, mostly basalt at that point. But there’s one other possibility.”

“Yes?”

“Our computers monitored a sudden energy surge, very tight, a series of bursts and then nothing, shooting out from that very spot like a heavy particle beam weapon out into space. We are missing five people after inventorying them and their records. There were five pulses. The beams vanished—not dissipated, mind you—just beyond the energy shield you saw and not near any of our own ships. This has been reported before on or near these worlds. Normally just legends, or just a few people or even single individuals vanishing on or near these. This is the first time we actually observed and recorded it.”

“And what do you think you saw, Inspector?” Jules Wallinchky asked him. “I’ve been here for years and have never seen nor experienced anything at all, let alone that sort of stuff.”

“I think, possibly with the device, possibly in spite of it, we had our first confirmed contact between an Ancient Ones planetary brain and sentient life as we know it. There can only have been one thing in any of their minds at that moment—escape, flight, even panicky flight. Get away, go anywhere but here and we’ll work out the details later. They all were almost screaming in that energy grid or whatever it was they and we summoned up, and the desire was so clear, so simple, so basic, so unambiguous, and so in the data stream, that it could not be misinterpreted. The computer understood it on that level and got them out of there.”

“But to where?” Ari asked him, aghast. “And how?”

“Matter to energy is easy. We’ve been doing that since the discovery of fire,” O’Leary replied. “Energy to matter is a trick we’re still only playing with in the lab in very basic ways. Of course, plants do it all the time, and, to some extent, other living organisms do as well, but again, it’s not on the level of creating a new Adam and Eve, and certainly not on the level of turning, say, one of us into energy instantly, recording the code to reverse it as some kind of energy header, then shooting it somewhere else via some sort of dimensional gateways we can’t imagine, and reassembling, probably perfectly, on the other side. There’s chaos, y’see. Just enough randomly goes wrong to create either an imperfect copy or almost always a dead one. Add to that the losses inherent in any transmission and reception procedure, and you see why we’ve not come close. They figured it out, somehow. Got around chaos mathematics, got around transmission losses. It’s why you see their cities and such all over but you never see any sign of spaceports and the like. They didn’t need ’em. They just gave their world computers the address, no matter where it was, and it digitized and squirted them there easy as you please.”

Jules Wallinchky sighed. “All right, Inspector, you’ve had your fun. You didn’t come here to show us that, which I have little if any interest in, or to give us lessons in physics and archaeology.”

O’Leary smiled. “In that, sir, you are only half right. I did indeed come to tell you that story, and by it to illustrate that we’ve had little trouble getting Hadun’s people at their base world to speak volumes to us, even more when they see him disappear. Much of the computer record is currently still beyond our reach, but they recorded that little fling they had with the City of Modar, and they’d not taken the time to delete it from the frigate’s storage. More importantly, we have a nice view of the transactions with certain Rithians of the Ha’jiz Nesting. A fellow of your acquaintance named Teynal hadn’t yet had the time to have his mind laundered. There was considerable confirmation left in there, and we knew the codes to get at it from the Hadun tapes. They had to be in full possession of their faculties, y’see, to make the swap in the boat. In other words, sir, you finally overstepped yourself. I’ve no doubt you can prolong things, but if you can beat this one, then you are what Josich wanted to become and we might as well have it out in the open. I don’t think you are that powerful, though, as mighty as you are, or you’d never have let us land.”

“I’ll destroy this, and my other collections, before I’ll allow anyone else to own them,” Jules Wallinchky warned, his mouth dry, his mind still calculating.

The Inspector shrugged his massive shoulders. “Go ahead. I’ll lend you a knife right now and you can slash away. Or you can just order your two pretty androids there to do it. If, indeed, they are androids and not broken, mutilated, and reprogrammed people. If it’s discovered that they are not what you say, then nothing in the Realm can save you.”

Wallinchky hardly heard his threat. “You would actually allow the utter destruction of all those works?” he said unbelievingly. “Those—Those are immortal. The sum total of genius and beauty from Old Earth for thousands of years past. Your heritage as well as mine. What do mere mortal lives mean compared to them? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have died to preserve or to capture them. Wars were fought in ancient times over some of them. And you can so casually dismiss the likelihood of them being now gone forever?”

O’Leary shrugged. “Well, now, I wasn’t the one who said I was gonna destroy ’em. Most of them are legal. All the ones out here now, I wager, have good, solid bills of sale. That’s how you can flaunt ’em. That means I can’t stop you doin’ anything you want with your own property. But, y’see, most folks will never see the real things. If they’re interested at all, they’ll see them in holographic viewings or purchase perfect copies. Most are too fragile to keep moving, particularly over these distances and worlds and conditions. So, go ahead.”

“You think I won’t do it?”

“It’s a waste, but there’s nothing I could do to stop you anyway. But if these things are as precious as you say, then it’s on your head that they’re destroyed, and yours alone. I’d say that those who do appreciate or envy these things would do one thing for you if you did. Even the best crooks and villains fade into oblivion, along with the heroes, too. But the man who destroyed half the great art of Old Earth for spite—now, that’s a name that would go down despised and disgusted till Judgment Day. What sort of a barbarian, they’d ask, would destroy all that in a fit of frenzy? How he must have hated beauty, too.”

Jules Wallinchky looked the giant cop right in the eyes. “You bastard,” he said.

“The two most fierce barbarian conqueror races of our kind were the Mongols and the Celts,” O’Leary replied with a slight smile. “And I’m the worst half of each one.”

“I assume that the two of you didn’t just walk in here alone, either,” the boss said, probing.

“Well, yes and no. Let’s just say that you could probably stay here quite a while, but you can only go where we wish you to go. That goes for everyone here, by the way. Since your planetary defenses are extremely good, you could, of course, remain here in some comfort, but we’ve blocked communication and we’ll interdict anything in and out, and you’re very much off the beaten path, so any attempts to come here will be noted. You can kill yourself, and everyone else including us, I suppose, although what would be the point of it? And if we didn’t come out, then they’d eventually be forced to lob things into this compound whether we were killed or merely prisoners, and that would again destroy all this art and culture. I could be wrong, but I rather think you don’t have much choice.”

“But I don’t need to decide my course of action immediately, and they’ll do everything to keep from blowing up this artwork,” Jules Wallinchky responded, thinking very analytically. “Since the trigger is doing something to you, then we have to show them that you’re all right. There are weapons on both of you sufficient to knock you cold, and those sweet little girls over there are strong enough to get even you back to your ship, perhaps with a maglev trolley we use to move sculpture and other heavy objects. I think you can spare us all by going back there of your own accord. Transmit and receive all you like, but don’t try taking off. The defense grid will prevent it.”

“But what good will this do?” O’Leary asked him.

Wallinchky was a great poker player. “That, Inspector, is for you to dwell on. But I will have no enemies inside here who can transmit or see what if anything I do decide to do, and you will be in contact with your people so they won’t come in. Now, sir—if you need anything, provisions, blankets, whatever—feel free to ask one of the girls or call it in. It might be a while before we go further.”

Genghis O’Leary obviously had thought through almost every angle except this one, and his cheeks were getting red from anger, while his eyes looked as if they could drill holes in the others. Still, he and his silent, masked companion got to their feet and moved toward the door and the long hallway back.

“Oh, Inspector—I should warn you. If the girls have to take either or both of you out, you’ll be delivered to your ship stark naked, the both of you, and with your knees smashed. It’s an old custom.”

There was another glower, but they went, the two “androids” following intently behind, ready to do their master’s bidding.

Ari wasn’t impressed. He was scared to death. “I told you we couldn’t get away with this! You should have let surrogates handle it like always!”

“Like you? Stop your knees from knocking, boy. They’re telegraphing nonsense to your brain. There was no way I could permit third parties to get hold of the Pleiades. No way. No, son. Take heart from that old bastard Kincaid. If he could escape us and Hadun’s boys, get them to take him where he wanted to go, then get out and call for reinforcements in the middle of a planet of enemy psychopaths, then this isn’t any big deal. They’ve tipped their hand, nephew. They blew this one. Right now they created their own stalemate, just to get a couple of guys inside to size up the situation. They saw little, and had to bluster. Now we have to examine our possibilities.”

“But—you know they’re going to find out what you did to the two girls, and you know the penalty for that. They’ll have us taking their places! They’ll turn us into slaves for some other rich old fart, but unlike them, we’ll know!”

Jules Wallinchky grinned. “Son, this old fart’s not nearly there yet.” He turned to the console, not having either of the women with him. “Identity of the man in the robe and mask?”

“Unknown. I have no data on which to identify him.”

“Does anything correlate with anyone in your memory?”

“There are no perfect or close approximations that I can find,” Core informed him. “The mask and robe are lined to prevent the usual scans from getting precise information. I have no fewer than six different heights, the range being as great as 7.6 centimeters. Weight is 102.05 kilograms, but how much of this is in the cloak and mask cannot be determined, either.”

“Can you determine anything about him?” Ari asked it.

“He is male, he is trusted by the Inspector, and he has had serious medical treatment recently. He is old, but in excellent physical condition, barring the recent injury, which appears to have involved replacement skin. He also has earlier replacements, including some to skeletal structure. He is not a telepath but does appear to have some abilities in the paranormal bands, if weak. He was not particularly worried or angry at the exchange here. General circumstantial evidence suggests he is a spacer by profession, either military or civilian. There is nothing more I can give you on him.”

“Could he be Kincaid?” Wallinchky asked.

“He could be Kincaid. Or he could be several million other Terran men past middle ages or into rejuves,” the computer responded pragmatically.

“Why didn’t you have one of the girls lift off that mask or just hold ’em both?” Ari asked his uncle. “We couldn’t be in any worse shape than we are now.”

Jules Wallinchky gave his nephew a slight smile. “And that question is why this O’Leary is a nervy but smart detective and you would not be first in line as an heir,” he responded. “As he said, you don’t come in like this, and announced, without backup. Enough backup to blow us and the whole complex to hell if need be. The thing that keeps them from doing that is being able to see and remain in communication with the Inspector. So long as he’s here, they won’t come in because we have no escape, apparently, so why not be patient and reclaim the artwork as well? And he knew I understood that, which is why I couldn’t touch him. He knew I could never allow such beauty, such genius, to be blown to bits. No, we’ve bought time. Ah! Here are the girls, back from escort duty! Alpha, Beta, you may go and remove that mock android costume and makeup and then return here. We’ve suitably confused them, but from this point it’s moot.”

They turned and left, leaving Ari, sweating in spite of the perfect climate control, staring out into nothingness.

“Cheer up, nephew!” Jules Wallinchky said. “You miss the point! I very much hope that this is Kincaid. In fact, I’m going to base my future plans on it.”

Ari halfway came back to reality from imagining being under the brain scrambler at a Criminal Treatment Center. “Huh?”

“Kincaid has lived only to destroy Josich. Josich wasn’t among the bodies, but he and some close family members cum bodyguards vanished. Where did they go? How? And why?”

“I dunno. Vaporized? It looked like they activated some defense grid from ancient times. I never even believed that these places still had anything working on them. Incredible. But they’re dead.”

“Ancient,” Wallinchky repeated, chuckling. “A billion years or more… Humanity wasn’t even a mathematical possibility back on Old Earth, there might not even have been dinosaurs—I’m not too clear, but it’s that far back. Volcanoes and dark seas and chemical muck that might one day become life. They were already colonizing the stars back then. Had colonized, probably. Had cities and a vast interstellar civilization. They’ve been everywhere we’ve ever looked. Imagine that, Ari—a billion years or more! And their greatest machine still works!

“No spaceships, no spaceports, no art or sculpture or furniture. Just some very ugly, basic structures, to our eyes, and a layout that’s lasted because some of their old worlds are devoid of anything that might wear them down. There are probably others now, so cratered or eroded there’s no sign. Like gods of ancient Greece and Rome—just think of your creation and there it is. Energy, some sort of limitless energy source we haven’t found, converted to whatever they desired. But not by magic, nephew. By a science so advanced it just looks like magic to us. And the damned super computer that did it still works!”

“So? What good does that do us?” Ari asked, wondering if his uncle was finally cracking under the strain.

The big man snapped his fingers and had another cigar placed in his mouth and lit. He settled back in his chair, looking oddly younger, somehow, than he usually did.

“If their world’s computer was still turned on, want to bet that the one that’s under our feet now isn’t still on, too? I’ve thought so for years. Alpha, what are the odds that the great machine of the Ancient Ones that’s in the center of this world is still alive?”

“One hundred percent, Master. We can feel it and sense it doing things quite often.”

Ari was suddenly doubly unnerved. “You mean it’s still alive?”

“Not as you think of it, sir,” Beta responded. “It is artificial in nature, but the tissue that fills the planet was grown, not manufactured. Researchers have theorized that it performs much like a monster organic brain, one with near infinite capacity.”

“You mean it’s alive?”

“In the broadest definitions of that word, sir, yes.”

Jules Wallinchky blew a huge cloud of smoke and said, “Don’t be such a yellow dog, nephew! It’s a grander scale of the road we’re traveling now! The computer that runs this place is a hell of a lot smaller, but it’s still huge, its capacity is enormous, it is self-aware and it makes decisions, and it is self-repairing and self-expanding. It also feeds us and gives us breathable air and all the rest by basic energy to matter and matter to energy conversions. I can’t wave my hand and say ‘Let there be light’ and then direct where the moons and planets might go, but I can already order up an excellent filet mignon you can’t tell from the finest cuts of real meat, and both you and I have had the real thing. Look at what it did with these two! One day we’ll have the same sort of thing the Ancient Ones had. It probably will be done differently, and who knows what we’ll do with it or how we’ll handle it or whether we’ll get that kind of power too early and use it to wipe ourselves off the galactic map, but it’s coming. That’s not for us to see, though, nephew. But that shot of the attack on Josich was a real eye-opener.”

“What do you mean?”

“How’d those gods get from world to world? If you were a god, you wouldn’t want to have to travel on a ship like we do. You’d want to simply wish yourself where you needed to go and then go there, your brain instantly reconnected to the local computer so you remained a god. Now, Josich had that doohickey gadget we stole as some kind of interface to the Ancient Ones’ local god machine. It was on and working when they attacked. Odds were, they hadn’t done much with it, but now there’s an attack while everything’s boosted. Now everything’s getting blown to Hell. Josich is running for his life in panic, since there was no escape running that way. Suddenly the machine snaps on, there’s this disappearance, then a beam is shot into nothingness. I think the big machine got the message. Probably not in words, probably in sheer panic. Something like, ‘Get me outta here!’ The sheer emotion of that is picked up and understood. The thing, well, gets him outta there.”

Ari turned and looked again at his uncle. “To where? Where would it send him? To another world like this, with no ship and no supplies, so eventually supplies run out? Or—something else?”

“I have no idea,” Jules Wallinchky responded. “But, considering we’re in an almost velvet-lined version of Josich’s state, I’m game to find out.”

“What?”

“There have always been a lot of mysteries in space, nephew. Ships found in perfect condition but with no captain or passengers. Colonies where people simply vanish even though there’s no place to go. Lots of legends, stories, some true. If I can’t keep all this, son, I’ll give it back to posterity and take a chance at a new start. I haven’t had a real adventure, a real challenge, in a very long time. I’ve been so bored I just had to go on this job, and I’m paying for it. Maybe it’s a good thing, though. I felt better, younger, more alive than I have since I was clawing my way up.”

“You—You have another of those things?”

Wallinchky grinned. “I have the original. Hell, if Josich got the duplicate we had built from specs to work, then the original should do the job even easier!”

“How do you know they aren’t vaporized? Or integrated into that—that thing in the same way these two are integrated with your computer here? Or are now dead, out of power and water and food on some godforsaken ancient ruin? All those are as probable as this, particularly my first idea.”

“My gut says they’re not,” Wallinchky replied. “And I don’t think our guests from the Realm think so, either, or they wouldn’t have bothered to come down here in person. O’Leary’s smart. He’s already got the analysis of the machine they recovered from Josich’s operation, probably in pieces, and discovered it isn’t the same materials. That’s what they’re after, nephew. They blew the other one up. Now they want their original gadget back.”

“Then all this is from an analysis of you? They already figured out that you’d haul it out and try and use it?”

“Why do you think they showed us that recording? Of course they know. And they also know that, like some of the most precious loot in the collection, they couldn’t get it by force.”

“Even if you use it, though, you’d have to go to the city. That would put you out in the open in an e-suit and easy to pick off,” Ari noted.

“Not me, nephew. Us. All four of us. Then they’ll be stuck with a few people here who haven’t any power over the computer or takeoffs, landings, defense, you name it, and they’d be dealing strictly with the true master of this place. It probably will cause them a monstrous problem. And, if that other one is Kincaid, I suspect we’ll have company. Remember, he wants to go where Josich went, no matter where it is. And O’Leary wants his gizmo back intact. They’re not going to hit us, nephew. They don’t give a damn if I get the thing working or not. If I go, they’re free of having to deal with me, my organization, my resources, all of it. If I don’t, well, I’m going to have to do the other thing.”

“The other thing?”

“Download myself into the computer core here and probably merge with it. There’s no other way. Either way it goes, this could be very, very interesting.”

Ari was frightened. “I’m not going to do it, Uncle! I’m not ready for that!”

“Son, you got no choice at all,” Jules Wallinchky told him. “You can do it as a volunteer, you can do it like those two girls, or you can die. You got no future anyway. You know too much, and no matter what I do to your head, the Realm’s got stuff that can recover some of it. No, nephew. You come with me or the girls take you down to the med-lab.” He sighed. “But not right now. I’m starved and I could really use a good dinner, the best wine, all the best stuff. We’ll get the computer working on the problem now. Will you join me?”

Ari Martinez sighed, but nodded slowly. He was wondering what the odds were of knocking off his dear old mother’s brother and getting away with it.