Other Rhodes

Sarah A. Hoyt

Rhodes

There was someone in the airlock. Someone or something.

This wouldn’t normally have been an issue, except for the fact that I was alone in the ship.  We were docked in Elysium, a world in the Veiled Sisters system which was – mostly – home to a non-profit devoted to the care of seniors.

There were several cities in Elysium, large and small, where your loved ones could find comfort and solace in their final years, or, frankly, move to in the middle of their second century when modern life became difficult to cope with.

We were not docked at any of the major spaceports, those that catered to the visiting relatives or to the travels of the wealthier residents. Instead, we’d picked a small, out of the way spaceport, one used by the manual laborers and repairmen and others who catered to the residents. 

It was a sleepy place – I gathered most of the personnel who worked here didn’t travel much – set at the edge of a small island, with just a hundred docking berths, most of which were empty.

We’d picked it precisely because it was inconspicuous. My husband, Joe Aster, was an itinerant private investigator and we were in the midst of perhaps the most difficult case of his career.  He thought that keeping quiet was the best part of valor.

And I agreed, because I knew nearly nothing about the business, except what horse sense told me, and back then I’d never even seen an equine. Metaphorically or in fact.

As out of the way as we were, the chances of anyone being in the airlock were remote. Or rather, the chances of anyone being in the airlock accidentally.

Joe had been gone twenty-four hours.  At the first beep from the airlock, I stopped and froze, halfway between the entrance and the stairs that led to our private quarters.  I thought it was Joe coming back. 

But the beeps multiplied, chaotic, and I couldn’t imagine Joe missing the entry code that often.  Not even if he were drunk. Or wounded.

I swallowed hard, setting the reader I’d been carrying down on the edge of the steps.

Our ship – the West 35^th Street – was a third hand utility interstellar, that Joe had modified to accommodate housekeeping.  The bottom floor comprised the office, and the kitchen.  Upstairs were two sleeping rooms. There wasn’t much space, and – for an interstellar – it wasn’t very well insulated against sound.  Well, not sound from the airlock.

The clank, clank, and frantic beeps could be heard all over the bottom floor.

I took a deep breath, as the hair rose at the back of my neck.  If it were Joe at the door, by now I’d expect to hear some of the fluent cursing for which he was known. But there was not a word.

I scurried near the door, in a bit of bravery, and punched the button for the trid pick up on the camera. It was normal for clients to arrive that way, and when they did, we usually got an eye-full of them first, before we decided to even admit them.

When I pushed the button, there was a sound like “Sfooo” and for just a second something like a grey mist showed where the 3-d image of whatever was in the airlock was supposed to form.

That was it.  But our camera was first class. Had to be. Tool of the trade as Joe said.  If it failed—

The hair rising at the back of my neck was joined by a feeling of cold down my spine. The only way for the camera to fail was that it had been disabled.

That meant—

That meant I was in deep trouble.  You see, I am not a very large woman: all of 1 meter sixty-two and fifty kilos. Soaking wet. Carrying luggage. Worse, I wasn’t trained in any form of fighting. That was Joe’s pidgin, part of his private investigator training.

As far as I did anything for the business it was typing and very good bookkeeping.

I had the briefest and most futile flash of anger at Joe. He was supposed to be here. He was supposed to protect me.

But it was nonsense, of course.  Of course, he tried to protect me, but his job was hazardous, and he had to do his job.

On the edge of the anger came acceptance. Well, then. Joe had left me something to protect me, an equalizer, the type of weapon that could make even a small, slim woman the equal of anyone.

It was on the third drawer of my desk in the office. A small zapper, that fit in my hand: one of the curious weapons we’d got from Kyre ruins and Kyre technology.

Joe said it wasn’t actually a ray gun, and it didn’t fire energy rays.  Fine. Whatever it was and whatever it did, I knew – had practiced with it enough – it had enough power and generated enough heat to fry whatever it was aimed at 20 feet off.  It was one of the reasons Joe had given it to me. He said unlike projectile weapons, it was effective even against humans in armor or most kinds of mechanized attackers.  

It was also illegal in most planets of the human sphere.  But that was quite beside the point.  Joe had explained – and I agreed – that it was better to be alive to be arrested.

So, with the background sounds of beep, beep, beep, followed by curious bangs which gave the impression of something very large and very hard bumping around in there, I turned and ran for the office.

I’d only just reached into the drawer and grabbed the little yellow weapon, when a voice came over the com from the airlock, almost making me jump out of my skin, “Stella?”

It was a strange voice, grinding and mechanical, and I took a deep breath.  All right. So, the audio part of the pickups in the airlock worked.

Gun in hand, I returned to the entrance hall, just off the airlock.

There the noises – bang, bump, knock, beeeeep – were deafening, being on the other side of an air-tight door.  I pushed the com button and said, “Stella who?”

There was a pause in the sounds, an impression that the person – thing? – was thinking, and then, the same grinding, faintly mechanical voice, “Stella D’Or, of course.”

The name seemed familiar, with that feeling I would know it if my heart weren’t pounding deafeningly in my ears.  But I knew one thing for sure, “She’s not here.”

Pause.  “She must be.”

“She isn’t.”

Something much like a scream – if you can imagine a scream emitted by an assemblage of gears and mechanical apparatus – “She must be.”

Beep, bomp, crash.  And then beep, beep, beep, with a will, as though whoever – whatever? – had remembered the code.

I could run forward and press the override on the door. But if it slammed open while I was there, I’d be within reach of the intruder.  Or I could—

I stepped back very fast, holding the gun, pointed at the airlock’s sliding door.  I stood at the door to the office.

And the door slid open.

How do I describe the intruder?  To begin with he wasn’t human. To continue with, he was mechanical.

He was made of some gleaming material, and six feet tall.  Perfect features had been molded into the material, the kind that put the images we inherited from classical Greece to shame.  Lights gleamed blue on either side of its nose, where eyes should be. There were no visible joints in molded legs or arms, or shoulders, but it bent and walked as a human, even if more stiffly, like a young child only learning the art.

A borg. My ship home had been invaded by a borg.

Borgs, common parlance for cyborgs, were even more illegal than my gun. Monstrous creatures consisting of a human brain and a robotic body, they were forbidden in every human world, even though it was rumored that the Qan Empire had long since borged all its subjects and only created new brains when the old ones wore out.

The main reason for borgs being forbidden was humanitarian.

Few borgs were created with voluntary acquiescence of the brain donor. Most people whose brains were used for that purpose had been kidnapped, killed, their brains taken by force.

And most of them didn’t survive the process.  Their brain just didn’t find its way to the neuro-mechanical linkages of the borg body. They never recovered consciousness.

Those were the lucky ones.

Most of those who survived, just couldn’t communicate or move the body, were forever entombed in the mechanical creature. Their makers usually disposed of the brain then, to make way for a new one.

Of the twenty percent or so that made it and learned to move and communicate, most were hopelessly insane.  Maybe five percent adapted enough to their circumstances to be able to function.

Those five percent made the process worth it to those who needed borgs badly enough to flout the laws. Because there were planets too inhospitable to humans to be mined, occupations too difficult for humans to accomplish. And those who made money for such things simply didn’t care.

Which was why the laws – including the one that said anyone finding a borg and not destroying it was an accomplice to borging, and to be executed – had no teeth.  Because sufficiently insistent demand will get supply, not matter how difficult it is to arrange. Joe had said a vast network of shadowy corporations and governments pretended to see nothing while borging went on.  All the law could do was keep it small scale.

And now you’re asking, given all this, why didn’t I fry the creature as soon as it came in the front hall?  The zapper could do it. It was part of the reason Joe had picked it. It would cook the brain inside that glassteel carapace, before it could harm me?

I wanted to. I was going to. I pointed my zapper at it.

And it said, its voice infused with extreme relief, “Stella, there are you are!”

I swallowed hard, before I could find my voice, and my finger didn’t seem to obey me when I told it to push the zapper trigger.  There was something very familiar to the accent and the way the words were said, if not to the voice. I couldn’t have shot, right then, to save my life. Instead, my own voice sounded raspy and odd as I asked, “Who are you?”

It– He smiled, and the smile too was familiar, horribly and heartbreakingly familiar, “I’m Nick, Stella. How can you not remember  me, Nick Rhodes? We work together.”

I remembered Nick Rhodes. And that was the problem. Because neither Nick nor Stella nor, in fact, the address after which our ship was named existed.

They were all part of a mersi to which my husband was addicted.

My throat was now so tight that I could not speak. Nor resist.  The thing walked towards the office door, gaining a sort of ease in its movement, and I scurried out of the way as it walked all the way past my desk and to the large, wood desk that Joe used to impress clients.

When he lowered himself into Joe’s chair, the poor abused seat creaked like it would break, but it held fast.  It held fast as it reclined back, turned its now low-burning blue lights towards me.  The baffling smile moved across the sculpted features.

And then it put its big, sculpted feet on the desk.

Just like my husband always did.  And I had a very bad feeling; one I could not quite tell myself was just a nightmare.

The Airlock Chimes

It all started as most of our cases started, with a chime from outside the airlock of our ship: a client to see Joe.

My name was Lilly Aster nee Gilden. I’d married Joe Aster three years before.  Since then, we worked together.  I’d joined in his business in the sense that I acted as his receptionist, accountant and general office help, as he went from world to world solving the common but not inconsequential puzzles and problems of private people for moderate fees.

Whether a woman wanted to know if that hot asteroid cowboy courting her was already married in a dozen other worlds, a father wanted to check on the mode of life of offspring who had moved to Far Itravine and never communicated, or a businessman needed to figure out if his small but plucky enterprise was being used to launder money from the Ivory Empire, Joe Aster was the man to call.

Joe had a few self-imposed restrictions on what he would and would not do. He stayed away from divorce cases, because it was easy to sink untold amount of time in investigation and then have the client to decide to reconcile and never pay.  He also stayed away from murder cases, because – he said – they tended to be complicated and keep him for too long in a single world. But also, because it could get you crosswise with jurisdictions where murder was protected by custom or affiliation, by ethnic or national right.

We didn’t know it, but that chime at the outer door of our spaceship would change everything. If there are inflection points in our lives, events and times after which nothing will be ever the same, that was one of them.

Our ship was docked in a regional spaceport outside the obscure city of Nysa, in a world called Pycontero, in the Seven Spinners system. We’d just finished a lucrative case, even if the client had left in tears because—

Never mind. The client had left. We were in the office, which was, arguably the most luxuriously furnished room in our fifth-hand interstellar, and by far the best decorated. Mostly because it was important to project stability and permanence to clients.

My desk was to the right of the door, as you go in, and it was a wood desk – Joe insisted – into the top of which the tridcomp has been built in such a way that it didn’t show at all when not activated.  That morning, I’d just pushed the button to activate it, and set my hands on the desktop, ready to type.

My otherwise fairly useless education had left me with impeccable typing and accounting abilities.  I looked at Joe, who sat behind his vast, polished wood desk, his chair reclined back, his blue eyes staring at the ceiling as though it contained something amazing and unfathomable. For the record it didn’t. It was just silver glassteel, the only part of the room we hadn’t bothered disguising as more traditional materials.

“What do I bill for?” I asked again.

“The usual,” he said, staring at the ceiling.

“But Joe, we had five different interstellar calls and—”

“The usual,” he said, with finality. And then, with a deep sigh, as he took his feet off the desk and sat up straight.  “I hate it when things end badly for the client.”

I didn’t say anything, because, well… what could you do when your investigations led you to inform your client that she wasn’t precisely legally married and, in fact, that the man she thought she had married didn’t exist, but was a construct flitting from world to world and taking wealthy widows for all he could get? 

“Ever think that there has to be a better way to make a living, love?” Joe asked very softly.

And the door chimed, saving him from a sharp reply. 

I got up and took a turn left out of the office, to the hall where the controls of the ship squawker were.

I didn’t want to answer Joe, anyway. There was no payload in it. Sure, there were a million other ways to make a living, but either they tied us to some back world, or they required training which neither of us had.  

My assets were a face — not ugly — a body — not unattractive — beautiful manners and a mastery of most fashionable dances. Throw in typing and accounting and it didn’t amount to much. As for Joe, he was a trained and licensed investigator. Expensive training and lucrative, but it meant he knew a lot of laws pertaining to private investigation and privacy in various worlds and was licensed to poke his nose in other people’s affairs. Add to that a natural charm of manner and a brilliant mind, and he was good at the PI business. You could say he’d been born to it.

I sympathized with his feeling of being dragged through the underbelly of the galaxy, and his occasional wish to do something else. But this is what we were, and the skills we had. What did he think we could do? Gengineering? Time Geometry?

My voice still frosty over my husband’s blue-sky dreaming, I slapped the squawker on and said, “Joe Aster Investigations. How may we help you?”

There was a hesitation, and I thought I’d frightened some poor spaceport worker come to confirm our date of departure, and then a polite, rich voice that sounded familiar said, “I wish to speak to Mr. Aster. I… I might have a job for him.”

Right. As per protocol, I slapped the trid viewer and a hologram of our caller formed, just inside the door between the hall and the airlock.

And I jumped back. You’d have too. No, there was nothing horrific about the client. He was a jovial-looking middle aged man, maybe on the leeside of eighty, hair going white and of the kind that will fluff out, giving one a halo, grey eyes full of bonhomie and a round reddish face.  It was the rubicund countenance that smiled out at viewers throughout the Galaxy from trid broadcasts while explaining some point of culture or history, whenever the News Aggregators needed to trot a learned person onto their cast sets.

Yes, Gulbahar Felix. That Gulbahar Felix. He wore a casual grey suit and managed to look both amiable and hesitant. Oh, also worried as though he had some great concern on his mind.

But perhaps I read more on his countenance than others would have. You see, he was a friend of the family, and I’d known him since I could toddle around my father’s house. He’d always been Uncle Gul to me. I had no idea how he felt about me, since dad had disowned me for marrying Joe. Or perhaps putting it that way was doing daddy an injustice. After all he’d said he’d disown me if I married Joe, and we’d registered our union in the Galactic archive that same day. So, you could say it was a choice, and I’d disowned myself.

As for Uncle Gul—I wondered if he’d been sent by Dad to take me back home. But that made no sense. For one, Dad, who owned most of Elfenheim in the Seer system, could get people much more adept at such operations than an absent-minded academic.  For another… well, I knew Uncle Gul, and he didn’t look like he was hiding anything. More like he was really, really worried. 

I decided to chance it. First because, when Joe got in the mood to contemplate other ways of making a living, he could spend weeks reading up on jobs and possible training before he got back to actually, you know, earning money. 

And second because I had no idea at all what Uncle Gul would be doing here, so far from New Oxford where he made his home. And I was curious.

I pushed the button that opened the airlock, saying, “Please come in.”

As he stepped in, I closed the outer lock and opened the inner one. The precaution wasn’t needed in Pycontero, whose atmosphere was almost an exact match for Earth’s, but I’d learned early that living shipboard was all about habits. Breaking them might mean a fatal mistake at another time.

When I opened the inner door, it was Uncle Gul’s turn to do a double take.  He stood, between the two retracting halves of the door, looking at me as though he were seeing a ghost. And while I’ll admit that I had let my beauty regime go somewhat – I didn’t have an army of beauticians to apply creams or makeup – and was wearing a casual grey one piece, I hadn’t changed enough to cause that reaction. 

I smiled back at him “Hello, Uncle Gul.”

He behaved as if he had gone blind. He put his hand forward, as if he needed to touch me, to make sure I was there, but dropped his hand before touching me.  “Lilly!” he said. He sounded shocked. “What are you doing here?”

My smile widened. I couldn’t help it. “I live here,” I said. “In the ship.  I’m Mrs. Joseph Aster.”

Uncle Gul’s mouth dropped open.  The door started beeping, because he stood in between the two halves that wanted to close.  He gave himself a little shake, as though waking up, stepped forward, and snapped his mouth shut. The door closed behind him, “Well. Well. Your father said you’d married a fortune hunter, a gigolo, a man of no account. Not Joe Aster.”

I felt that slight twinge I always fought when Joe was in one of his blue-sky what can I find to do that’s better? periods.  Had I married a man of no account?

Look, it’s nonsense. What’s more, I know it’s nonsense. If Joe had wanted to marry me for my money, he wouldn’t have gone ahead when I told him that if he married me, my father would cast me off with the clothes on my body.

What is more, if he’d married me because he thought Daddy would relent, he’d have divorced me when Daddy didn’t. Instead, he’d told me again and again that he needed only me. And hadn’t even acted upset when all I could do for the business was typing and accounting. I was more upset about that than he was. But still, now and then the twinge came up, that feeling like I’d put my foot down on what should be solid ground, and it wouldn’t hold me.

“Well, Lilly,” Uncle Gul said. “You know what your father is.”

“I do, Uncle Gul.”

He seemed…. Hesitant. 

“My husband really is a very good investigator,” I said.

“Oh, I know. I know. Famous for it,” Uncle Gul said. “That’s why I never thought…  But you see, I’m not sure…”

“If you speak to him,” I said. “He can tell you whether or not he wishes to take the case. He’s very good at judging where we can help and where we can’t.”

“Well… yes, it’s just…. It might be very dangerous,” Uncle Gul said.

“We’ve taken dangerous cases before,” I said. And it was true, though to be fair, we’d never taken a case we knew would be dangerous. What usually happened is that we thought we were investigating a common grifter or swindler and suddenly found ourselves facing an armed spaceship on attempting to dock, or perhaps a madman shooting pellet guns at us while we were out for dinner.

Uncle Gul frowned and compressed his lips.

I moved ahead, and opened the door to the office, “If you’d come in, Doctor Gulbahar Felix.”

I was aware, by the corner of my eye, of Joe taking his feet off the desk, sitting upright and snapping me a startled look.

I didn’t have time for that. Both Joe and Uncle Gul were acting hesitant. I decided to give neither the opportunity to weasel out of business.

It worked on Uncle Gul, too.  Perhaps because the way I said it was so official and like I expected him to follow through, he bowed his head to me, just a little more than a nod, said, “Thank you,” and walked past me and into the office.

When I went in, he was advancing on Joe, hand extended, and there was nothing for it, but for Joe to stand up and offer his hand in return, for one of his patented firm handshakes and reassuring smile.  “Doctor Gulbahar Felix,” my husband said, sounding stunned. I could almost see his eyebrow twitch, as he longed to raise it at me.

Uncle Gul smiled as he shook Joe’s hand and said, “Mr. Aster.” He stepped back and dropped into the comfortable red armchair that faced Joe’s desk squarely. There were five other chairs and even a sofa against the wall, and at various times we’d used every seat available in the office, so that we could accommodate groups of clients. But the red chair was the logical seat for a single client. I took my place behind my desk and pushed the button that made my holo-screen private, so only someone sitting where I sat could see it.

I didn’t know if Joe would want me to stay and take notes. Sometimes clients preferred if I left. But procedure was for me to stay unless told to leave.

“You come highly recommended, Mr. Aster,” Uncle Gul said. “My friend Velibor Magro said you helped him track down the missing cargo on his—Well, his missing cargo.  And my friend Alcides Carson said you plugged the data leaks in his enterprise back in Emia.”

Joe actually blushed. The fact that Uncle Gul had picked not just two of our most famous clients, but also two of the most difficult cases Joe had solved was flattering, of course, but Joe’s embarrassment also probably had something to do with the fact that it was Uncle Gul saying it.

For a moment they sat, looking at each other.  It was normal. The client was evaluating Joe, and Joe was evaluating the client. The client’s evaluation of Joe mattered, of course, because the last thing you wanted was an unwilling client. Evaluating a client was part of the skills at which Joe excelled and which he’d taught me. 

But in this case, my acumen was blunted by familiarity. I’d grown up with Uncle Gul, so I wasn’t absolutely sure what Joe would make of him, nor even if just being familiar with Uncle Gul from a thousand holo transmissions made it hard to evaluate the man now.  I knew what Uncle Gul saw though.  

My love for Joe was new enough that it was easy to remember what first impression he made: Uncle Gul saw a tall man, with lean features, a mop of blond hair, and direct, clear blue eyes.  Joe had been dressed to see the previous client, in a one-piece suit in startling blue, which was all the fashion in this part of the galaxy. He looked professional, intelligent and eager.  The puzzled look he cast me was the only crack in the façade.

Uncle Gul must have decided Joe was trustworthy.  You could tell from the way he leaned back on the red chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “I have… a puzzle,” he said.

“We like puzzles,” Joe said, and smiled at me, “Don’t we, Lil?” His eyes still posed a question, the question being why I’d let the client in without warning.

I nodded and kept my gaze as blank as I knew how.

Uncle Gul frowned.  “This one…”  he splayed his hands on his thighs, as though trying to assure himself of solidity and reality. “Well, this one is either a mare’s nest, or it will be very difficult.” He made a face. “I’d pay you in either case, of course. But if it turns out to be… well, it could be life-endangering. It might also blow up some of the biggest–  It could go very high up.”

The startled look came and went in Joe’s eyes. It wasn’t that we hadn’t similar warnings from other clients, but it must have seemed strange to get it from a gentle Academician like Uncle Gul. Joe leaned forward, in an attitude of perfect attention.

Uncle Gul sighed, “What… what do you know about borging?” he asked.

Joe sat up and straightened his shoulders but made no sound. It left me to say in a startled voice, “But it doesn’t happen, does it? It’s just a horror story, right?”

I saw Joe shake his head minimally, while Uncle Gul turned to look at me full on, then said, “Perhaps… er…. Perhaps Lilly shouldn’t be here for this discussion?”

“No,” Joe said. “She stays.” Which is the reason he’d had me get a first-level investigator license. It actually didn’t qualify me to investigate anything – we didn’t have the money for the full training, much less for not working for the year I was taking the training – but it allowed me to know details of his investigations.

“Hardly the proper—”

“She’s my partner. She stays. If she leaves, I’ll just have to tell her everything later.”

Uncle Gul looked doubtful. “Well, if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”  He told Uncle Guhl all he knew about borging, from the battery tech found in Kyre ruins, to the materials like glassteel, and how it allowed everything from tiny guns to…. Borging.

Uncle Gul inclined his head.  It wasn’t so much a nod, as though bowing under the weight of things he didn’t want to think about or admit.

Then he looked up. “Well, if this isn’t a nightmare, conjured up by my imagination, it is a borging case. What’s more. For the borging to go on, it would require the cooperation of several Galactic oversight boards, and what is supposed to be at least one humanitarian organization.

“If you take this case, you’ll be going up against some of the most dangerous and powerful people in the Galaxy.”

Uncle Gul

Uncle Gul spilled it. Altogether, it was almost nothing, and I was inclined to agree with him that it was all a nightmare.

Uncle Gul’s friend, an older but less successful academic, Narkissus Humel had retired a few years ago.

Because of the costs of living in New Oxford, most retiring academics moved out of that 

 world.  Narkissus had looked around long and hard for a place to live out his golden years. Because of his age, nearing the middle of his second century, he thought he might need assistance with everyday tasks soon, so he’d picked a planet, Elysium, which was run by the West Islands Organization, a charity that devoted itself to keeping elderly people comfortable and happy to the end and took only nominal payments.

“I hear it’s a beautiful world, much like Earth, but going through a warmer phase so its climate ranges from moderate to tropical, with no true frigid zones,” Uncle Gul said. “And it’s been cultivated like a garden.  People, from the end of their first century on, may choose to live there, and they have all kinds of housing, from cities, where people get to live independently, to skilled nursing facilities, if they require specialized care.” He pursed his lips. “I visited with Narkissus when he went to give it a look over. He asked me to. I saw nothing wrong with it. Beautiful place. I thought I might very well consider it when my time came. So Narkissus moved there—”

He took a deep breath.  “Narkissus said–  He sent me something. Well, he sent me many recorded messages and letters.  He was very happy there for some months, but after about six months, he said that he suspected there was something wrong. The pattern of deaths was wrong, he said. People were dying who were in better shape and younger than others.”

“But that happens, doesn’t it?” Joe asked. “I mean, mere happenstance. No one has ever been able to quantify the dying process or eliminate uncertainty in human lifespan.”

“Sure. But he thought there was too much happenstance going around to be mere. I think he decided to investigate. He used to be a professor of criminal jurisprudence. The last message I got from him indicated that he suspected something big was going on… And then communication stopped.”

“Where does borging come in?” Joe asked.

Uncle Gul shook his head. “It comes afterwards,” he said. “When I tried to investigate what had happened to Narkissus, I was just told he had died unexpectedly. No details. When I visited, no one could tell me what had happened. All his records were lost.” He paused a long time. “I decided to leave. There was nothing to do. I suspected incompetence, not malice. I assumed that someone had failed in taking care of Narksisus not that there was anything nefarious. But when I got on my ship, it had been tampered with.”  He seemed to anticipate our arguing with him on that.

“I’m quite sure,” he said. “I set a course, but it took another.” He shrugged. “I can’t prove it, but I think it was designed to make me either precipitate into the system’s sun, or perhaps just end up in space, unable to do an interstellar jump or com anyone.” He gave a sudden feral grin. “They didn’t know that I was a pilot in long haul courses in my youth. It’s not the normal occupation for someone who becomes a mind-worker. But it’s how I earned money for my education. So, I fixed the drive, and the auto pilot, but not so fast that I didn’t come dangerously close to the sun and the world closest to it. A place where no ship would go that didn’t have to. I swear to you, though I can’t prove it, that there were borgs working on that surface. I couldn’t get more than a glimpse as I was trying to save my ship. Yes, it might have been a trick of my eyes. But there was movement and human-shaped forms. I went back to New Oxford, not sure if I hadn’t just had a nightmare. And then…

“And then?”

“And then I started investigating. The inner planet of that system does in fact have the kind of minerals used for the Kyre batteries, and cannot easily be mined by humans, but it can be mined by robots. However, every time I looked into it, talked to someone about it, every time I came close….  There was an attack on me or my possessions. My house was broken into and all of Narkissus’ electronic letters were erased. My house was vandalized, and a lot of my research taken. My flycar was tampered with to crash, and it could have killed me. And that convinced me—”

“That there was something criminal behind this? But surely not borging, as such? I mean—”

“I know, I know. It’s why I said it might all be a nightmare. But my feeling… I had a strong feeling there was more there. And I have learned to follow my feelings.”

Joe didn’t say anything. He didn’t have much room to say anything. He, himself, often operated on such principles.

“And so,” Uncle Gul said. “I thought I’d talk to a professional about it.  I asked around my circle of acquaintances, and your name kept coming up.”

Joe nodded.  “It won’t be cheap.”

“That goes without saying, Uncle Gul said.  “No one who is an expert comes cheap.  I…. I took the liberty of bringing a credgem with me?” He got up and put it on Joe’s desk.

This was, frankly speaking, dirty pool. Joe could get all philosophical about things, and he might spend some time lamenting the harsh realities of the field we made a living in. But when push came to shove, he knew we had to live, and he knew living involved money.

Money was also security and more time to spend daydreaming of other things he could do.

Joe picked up the gem and slid it over the hidden reader on his desk, then pushed the also hidden mechanism that relayed it to my screen.  And I blinked. A thousand Lyrs.  Lyr was the one currency that didn’t need to have a notation on conversion. Eurilia was to banking as New Oxford was to education. While every government in the galaxy had its own currency, Eurilia had currency that all the other currencies were pegged to. And it was based on something solid and rare, though I could no longer remember what, if I’d ever learned. All I remembered was father talking about its being the only currency in the Galaxy worth a damn.  And a thousand Lyrs…  Well, you couldn’t buy a mansion in daddy’s neighborhood with it. But you could buy a small home by the sea, in a very pleasant and easy-going world – say Far Itravine – and spend the next ten years daydreaming, if you so wished.

Uncle Gul must have misread our expressions. Which made sense. I supposed in his – and my father’s – world, that amount was nothing.  “A down payment, of course,” he said. “I presume the fee would be ten times more and whatever expenses you incur.”

“Of course,” Joe said, sounding as though he dealt in that kind of cash every day and twice on Sunday.

I knew him well enough to know what ran through his mind right then: this was enough money for one or both of us to get different training, or merely to settle down and live a carefree life. Perhaps, at last, time to have children. We’d both talked of children, and both of us wanted them, but it would be hard to manage on our budget and while living as itinerant investigators.

Joe got up, “I’ll leave you with Lilly.  Give her all pertinent facts about Mr. Humel, if you would, and I’ll start the investigation. I have some important work to attend to.”

I kept my face impassive, even after Joe had closed the door. But it was hard, because my husband was a rat.

Look, I didn’t know for sure he wasn’t working elsewhere. We had a spare room upstairs, to the side of our bedroom. And it had a tricomp which was linked to Galacticom as these were.

But we only had this one case. If Joe were going upstairs to start investigating, he probably would have waited till he had a few other facts.

No. I knew exactly what Joe was going to do. The same thing he did whenever he was tired, nervous, or restless.

You see, there was this series of mersis. They were a mystery series, set in the early twentieth century in New York City, on Earth.

Ten thousand years later, it was hard to reconstruct the city, but this series was as accurate as it could be made. Historians consulted with the creative team, and other historians talked about how amazingly accurate it was.  Sometimes revisions were announced and all those who’d bought the episodes before were sent the revised ones.

It was about a detective named Rhodes, a veteran of the first Earth War. He’d been disfigured in some way and wore a ceramic mask to hide his face.  He never went forth to investigate, either. That work was left to his assistant, a blond bombshell, named Stella D’Or.

I’d never taken an episode, but I knew all about it, because Joe loved the stories and the world, and always told me about them.

It was hard to behave professionally and not make a face, when I knew Joe would be upstairs, living an episode in our mersi machine, being some detective in a lost city in the cradle of mankind.

But I’d learned some stuff since I’d stopped being the very rich and pampered Miss Gilden.  One of the things I’d learned was how to be professional even while Joe behaved like an artiste. I smiled at Uncle Gul, “Go ahead,” I said.  “Tell me all you remember about Narkissus Humel.”

Uncle Gul cleared his throat and spilled it all.  I only had to ask a few questions, and those only because Uncle Gul didn’t realize what I wanted was the deep background of Narkissus Humel, not just his background as it related to his final misadventure.

And because Uncle Gul didn’t know as much about his friend as he would like.  “You see, he was much older than me,” Uncle Gul said. “A full-fledged professor for a good fifty years by the time I was invested.  So, some of this will require quite a good deal of thought.”

What he came through with at last wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to start with.  Narkissus Humel had been born in Guniarr, the capital city of Beccara, a world of little importance in the Flame System.

“I think his father might have been a fisherman,” Uncle Gul said. “Or a dealer in fish. Something like that. Something manual, relating to fish. I remember Narkissus refused to eat fish because he said he’d had his fill of it before he grew to maturity. Even the smell annoyed him, and he used to make faces if I ordered it when we were out eating together.”

He had no idea of the composition of Humel’s birth family.  “I think he had a brother?” he said.  “And maybe a sister.  But I can’t be sure. It’s very hard, you see, because—” Uncle Gul shrugged. “Our acquaintance and later friendship was as fellow professors in the university. We understood each other in that realm, and talked of things that were important in New Oxford. University policy, discoveries in our respective fields, perhaps a new administrator, or the changes in a restaurant down the block. So, all I know about his background are dropped references, which this far past don’t immediately come to mind.  Yes, I think a brother.  Almost for sure a sister, but not as certain of that.  It might have been a female cousin. He said something about his brother being a ship’s captain once, when I was talking about my days flying interstellars.”

Humel had been married twice or maybe three times, so about average. “I was the oddity, never having been brave enough to tie my life with another person’s for fifty years or so,” Uncle Gul said and smiled ruefully. “It seemed too close, too exposed. Anyway, I knew Narkissus’ second, or perhaps first wife well. She was the one he was married to when we became friends. A hologram artist, Idelle Zay? You might remember her; I think she visited your father once when I was there. No? Well, you might have been too young to remember. That was the last time I saw her, long after her marriage to Narkissus expired, and to be honest, I don’t remember now whether she might still be alive. She was Narkissus’ age or thereabouts, and so many people choose to voluntarily end it before turning 150. You know, she was a lovely woman. Oh, tall and elegant, one of those slim blondes that seem to be made out of blown glass with touches of gold. All flowing lines, and sparkle. But she was lovely as a human being, too. She was a fast friend, and amusing to be around. If I’d had a little more courage…  But that’s neither here nor there.  Anyway, their contract expired a good fifty years ago, and I don’t remember if she had a new one, or what she was doing when I met her at your father’s. There were so many people there, and it was such a large party we barely exchanged two words.

“After their contract expired, Narkissus married a much younger woman, probably no more than 25 at the time.  She was like Narkissus, short and olive skinned, with curly dark hair. Like Narkissus too, in that she preferred not to have a very active social life.  So, I saw her a lot less than I did Idelle. Instead of meeting Narkissus at his home or attending dinners and parties given by his wife, I met with him at various restaurants and clubs.  Their contract expired just before he decided to go to Elysium, or at least to seek a place for his retirement.”

At my prompt he shook himself. “Oh, you’ll want her name, of course. That is Raine Chlo. She—” He stopped, as though startled.  “You know, I don’t have the slightest idea what she did for a living?”

Narkissus had no children, or at least no children that Uncle Gul had ever heard of.  “I really think his life had no space for children. He was so interested in his field, you see, and spent so much time working that he barely had time for a wife.” A smile broke Uncle Gul’s seriousness but for only a moment. “Well, neither did I. Which is one reason I never married, I suppose, and why Narkissus seemed to marry women who had busy lives of their own.” He frowned. “It does bother me I can’t remember what Raine did. I mean, she seemed busy and successful. There’s a certain way women carry themselves. But I don’t remember what she did. It might come to me later, and if so, I’ll call you.”

I agreed to this and prodded him for more facts about the – presumably dead – Narkissus. What I found out, all put together didn’t amount to much, or at least not much I could use for anything.  For instance, I found his favorite book was The Edge of the Knife by Lombart Orli and that he spent his free time trying to solve past crimes.  That he liked fishing, but hated hunting, despite the fact that he didn’t like eating fish. That he always drank tea, not coffee, and a long list of things that really had nothing to do with anything.

I suppose when all is said and done, it’s all that’s left of a long friendship: a collection of little moments, shattered under the impact of time and forgetfulness, and a bagful of facts and incidents that don’t amount to much at all, but which are important to an individual because they are tied to an important friendship.

I have it all saved on the tricomp. If you want to see it, and you come across me in real life sometime, ask me for it. I doubt it will be of more use to you than it was to us.

Uncle Gul looked sad as I walked him to the airlock, as though talking about his friend made him even sadder than he’d been before.

Just before he entered the airlock, he turned around, and seized hold of both my hands for a moment, “Lilly,” he said. “Listen, I was serious about what I said. This might be a very difficult job, and I’ll never forgive myself if something should happen to you.  So…. So, if it seems like you’re going to get in trouble, you or that husband of yours, don’t do it.  Just…. Just drop it. You’ll be able to keep the down payment, of course.  After all…. Well, Narkissus is dead, and I wouldn’t like it to be—”  He shrugged.  “You get to be my age, and you start thinking that you don’t want to cause any more problems in the world.  That’s all.”

His hands were dry like twigs, and he held a little too hard.

I managed to extricate one hand and used it to pat his hands, still holding on to my other hand, in what I hoped was a reassuring manner.  “We’ll be careful, Uncle Gul,” I said.

And then he cycled out of the airlock and was gone.  And Joe was coming down in the elevator.

© Sarah A. Hoyt