Six thousand miles before approach orbit our escort changed course so as not to blow our cover. A few minutes later we saw the Estrella Rom loom ahead, right where the radar said it should be, blossoming from a blurry, flickering glow into a small ring and finally a large, not quite geometrically correct wheel. It looked so fragile and was spinning so fast on its axis I thought it was a miracle it didn’t go to pieces.
“You’re flying too fast—and why won’t you use the automatic approach system? Don’t forget, my special authorization isn’t valid on Earth,” I reminded Vasily one more time while his hands danced across the controls, working to synchronize our shuttlecraft’s angular momentum with the ramshackle docking bay of this unlikely independent orbital station.
The idea of flying in on a broken-down space jalopy confiscated from a ring of spice smugglers—not a nice new police frigate—was Vasily’s, of course. He said it was the only way we’d meet the mysterious Old Man. From the little he’d told me, this guy knew everything about dirty business. Giorgio Weekman’s business in particular. More than likely he had even heard something about Makrow 34. But he wasn’t the sort of guy you could approach in an official capacity, that much was obvious. He didn’t like to connect to the Web either. Our best bet was interviewing him in person, old-school style, on his own turf.
Muhammad coming to the mountain. No surprise there. If the mountain tried coming to Muhammad there’d be a landslide.
“Chill. The orbital ain’t planet Earth, Raymond,” he reminded me in turn, using my name for the second time since we’d met. He hadn’t been exactly communicative during our two days flying from the Burroughs to this terrestrial orbital. He seemed to think spending all his time on the Web, getting up to speed on current affairs, was more urgent than wasting it talking to me. For my part, I worried that even with a couple of police frigates escorting us, he’d stop helping me if I got in his way. The one time I did try, he called me Dick Tracy again. “Anyways, you know your problem ain’t the limits they put on you, it’s the xenophobe crazies. I’m docking manual because we look suspicious enough coming here in a practically brand-new ship. You mighta found something older, more beat-up. Ain’t too many automatic control shuttlecraft—or pilots in their right mind—who’d get anywheres near this piece-of-shit station. Except pigs. Earthling police. I don’t wanna make an old friend feel sorry ’cause he shot me down—especially as it’s been so long since we seen each other.”
I took a long, uneasy look at the clumsy patchwork of junkyard scrap they called a space station and shrugged. There was no sign of a defense system, which didn’t mean there wasn’t one. They could keep antimatter minicannons hidden behind any of those sheets of old metal. Or worse. From what I’d heard, these independent stations had exceptionally effective protective mechanisms.
“I guess they don’t get too many visitors. At any rate, I’m not too crazy about coming to a station that could fall to bits just from docking with it. I really hope they haven’t forgotten you. And let me remind you that everything up to 10,000 miles above the planet’s surface is considered its sovereign territory, under the laws of the Solar System. Besides, can you guarantee that somebody crazy enough to live in a heap like that isn’t also a rabid xenophobe with an itchy trigger finger?” I felt especially satisfied to be able to slip that old Chandlerian slang into my speech. That’s what Marlowe might have said in my shoes.
Vasily didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Docking a shuttlecraft by hand isn’t the sort of thing you can do without giving it your full attention—if you’re a human and organic, not a pozzie with a high-powered computer for a brain.
But I have to hand it to El Ex-Afortunado: he managed it pretty well, even though the anti-Psi collar kept him from using his powers. Especially considering he’d just spent three years imprisoned, unable to handle a shuttlecraft control panel except in simulations. We docked on our fourth attempt, just a few scratches on the hull the worse. Instead of the soft click that a similar maneuver with any normal ship would have caused on the Burroughs, the racket ringing across the cabin sounded more like a meat grinder trying to sing opera, off-key. Under any other circumstances I would have rated it “extremely worrisome,” but one look at Vasily convinced me that, here, this must be the ordinary routine.
The builders and residents of the Estrella Rom apparently had the same careless attitude toward systems maintenance as they did toward space engineering and everything else. I remembered the warning that flashed on-screen before the start of at least half the detective videos Spillane loaned me: The film you are about to see is a reconstruction based on a number of worn copies. They should inscribe that over this whole station, in capital letters.
If anybody on board knows how to read and write, I mean.
“Well, here we are.” Vasily wearily took his hands off the controls and strapped on a cartridge belt so full of ammo it would have embarrassed a professional twentieth-century mafia hit man. I watched him with resentment. He’d insisted on getting back his whole personal artillery stockpile, and when I refused he threatened to trash the deal. I had to give in. But two masers, an infrasonic stun gun, a mini-rocket launcher, a pocket crossbow, and especially his old large-caliber chemical-munition revolver with the laser scope seemed a bit over the top to me. “I hope his damn hypertrophic osteopathy hasn’t done in Slovoban, that old fossil. And I hope the Old Man will understand he has to give us a couple pieces of information if he wants to get to know his great-great-great-great-grandchildren. Follow me and don’t open your mouth any more than you have to. They don’t like guys poking around here asking too many questions.” I was about to say something, but he stopped me with a commanding gesture. “Zip it. The rules here ain’t the Burroughs rules. If you can say there’s any rules at all.”
He was the criminal (or “former” criminal), the one who knew his way around the place, so I kept my mouth shut and followed. But I had a huge pile of questions I was dying to ask. Hypertrophic osteopathy? The only thing I had about it in my data bank was a brief mention of a rare pituitary disease—and no cases of it had been reported since the aliens revolutionized human medical care. Was the Old Man one of those fundamentalist diehards who refused to accept any technology that had non-human origins? And… great-great-great-great-grandchildren? The surprisingly spare information about the Estrella Rom stored in my database said Slovoban was the name of the Romani chieftain who had founded the station, in a drunken stupor or a fit of madness, it was unclear which—but that was ninety-six years ago. Could this mean—?
The lack of gravity around the central docking bay didn’t surprise me. The Estrella Rom had been constructed (so to speak; “agglomerated” or “amassed” would be more accurate) using the oldest and cheapest design capable of simulating something like gravity: a wheel.
Okay, that was the basic design of the Burroughs, too, but there the similarity ended. The Estrella Rom spun like crazy on its axis to generate enough centrifugal force to keep all the calcium in its inhabitants’ bones from leaching out. No cutting-edge alien tech here. No gravity generators, no variable acceleration zones to facilitate coupling with arriving ships. There’s no way to know whether the designer intended to add those things later on to his gypsy paradise but ran out of funds, or whether he simply didn’t give a damn that the residents of his little world would have to choose between weightlessness and being dizzy all the time.
We passed through an airlock that Yuri Gagarin would have found old-fashioned. The Estrella Rom looked even more makeshift on the inside than it did on the outside. Now hanging on by a metal ring that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Bronze Age museum exhibit, now pushing off with one foot from a tin plate on which I could still read the faded letters of an antediluvian earthling soda pop ad, Vasily floated and rebounded with simian agility. If I hadn’t known he’d been locked in an anti-Psi cell for the past three years, I would have assumed he’d spent his whole life leaping like a mountain goat. Jump, rebound, push off—until, as we moved farther from the center, his feet began to be attracted, only weakly at first, by one of the bulkheads.
I imitated him, silently startled to find seams joined with rivets, superglue, solder. I had read of such things only in history surveys. In the Burroughs, as in all the ships that docked there, they only used universal joints and molecular diffusion seams. When I noticed a pair of ancient plates joined with staples and waterproofed with something that looked exactly like a wad of used chewing gum, I decided to stop getting astonished, to avoid short-circuiting my positronic net.
I couldn’t help it, though. The farther Vasily and I went into the labyrinth of passageways and forking paths in the station (it turned out to be much larger on the inside than seemed possible), the looks of the people we passed made the improvised architecture appear almost normal by comparison.
When I first heard this was an independent Romani orbital I may have had the naïve impression that I’d find it full of campfires, mustachioed fiddlers with polka-dotted bandannas around their heads and daggers in their belts, barefoot dancers, knife fights, trained bears—who knows what I was expecting. Anything but this outlandish exhibition of space suits, each more worn-out and patched-up than the last (even the best of them would never have passed muster on the Burroughs; some EVA suits didn’t even appear to have oxygen tanks), and almost without exception virtually coated in monograms, stickers, and buttons from every imaginable source, from ancient Russian stamps celebrating the prehistoric Interkosmos program to logos for the ephemeral Asteroidal Republic of Ceres, not to mention flags and national emblems for every country past and present, from New Botswana to the Valles Marineris Federation on Mars.
Everybody carried their helmets dangling carelessly from their belts, or at best in place but with the faceplates raised. All the same, they seemed ready and able to respond in a matter of seconds if the aging and over-patched station hull suffered a loss of structural integrity.
Some casually nodded at Vasily in passing. A pair of guys, one shaved bald and one with dreadlocks floating like a halo around his head, even exchanged a couple of words with him. It sounded like Standard Anglo-Hispano but with an exotic syntax and substandard pronunciation, and half the words weren’t even in my vocabulary. At least, not with the meanings they seemed to give them.
“Hey, gachó, fresh from the tank?”
“Me likes tu tail, Vas, buratino palsie now?”
“Salve, Jor, what kinda cachorros?”
“Tough monga, Vas, take care tu greenshell. The Old Man te espera.”
During a pause I asked him about this curious language and about the second-rate space suits I saw everywhere, almost all of which looked incapable of doing their job.
He shrugged. “Oh, that. I forget you’re a greenshell. A novato, I mean. A newbie, a newcomer. That’s the old Rom jargon mixed with prison slang. Every subculture creates its own language, and these guys are real good at it. But luckily I speak a little of their dialect, and there’s always a sub-lingua franca that all the sabandijas in the system speak, like Anglo-Hispano for misfits. They’re on top of what’s happening. News spreads faster than light here—not only because of the illegal Web. They already knew I got sprung, and they can see you ain’t just a greenshell, you’re a pozzie—what they call a buratino. And the space suits? Of course they work, believe it or not. Good thing, too. Everything you see here has been holding up to micrometeorites for nearly a century, and they’ve never given it a good maintenance check or overhauled it como Dios manda. Plates are always failing, joints lose their seal, solder splits,” Vasily muttered with another shrug. “Oh, space isn’t what it used to be. But if Magellan could cross the old oceans of Earth in a leaky boat, why should these guys worry? If the hull springs a leak they hold their breath, plug it, and celebrate with home brew. Till it’s time to plug the next leak. At least they’re free here; they don’t pay taxes or serve in any army but their own.”
I didn’t think freedom could make up for some sorts of deprivation, but I didn’t say so. We continued making our way through chambers and corridors until the minutes seemed to turn into hours. The farther we got from the axis, the stronger the centrifugal pseudogravity. The vagrants in space suits began to alternate with small family groups, settled more or less permanently in scattered cubicles on either side of the route we were taking. Now I did begin to see campfires, polka-dot bandannas, and here and there even a pet that seemed to feel as much at home as its masters, both adults and children. I was thankful now that the aliens hadn’t given me a sense of smell. If they smelled anything like as bad as they looked, it was a miracle Vasily’s stomach hadn’t turned inside out like a sock.
Rank-smelling or not, they were all busy with their own affairs (so it seemed) and didn’t give us more than the occasional sidelong glance.
At last we reached a door that had a pair of guards posted in front. With its burnished sheen and solid, mass-produced appearance, the door stood out in that run-down setting.
I recognized the model. I’d have to have been blind not to, given my photographic memory. It was a B-378 reinforced diaphragm hatch from the armored passageway of a Tribuno-class interplanetary destroyer. Knowing this did nothing to help me understand what it was doing here. Even in the chaos of Earth, as we’d always heard it described in comparison to the Burroughs, you assumed a civilian wouldn’t have access to military-grade equipment. Especially not anything this sophisticated.
In the same way, it made no sense to have two sentinels outfitted in Grendel-class combat armor, the flawless finish of their polished mimetic polycarbon contrasting implausibly with the pitiful caricatures of space suits worn by the other station occupants. But in an odd way, standing in front of that door made the two armored giants look more congruous.
The door did not open and the armor-bearing behemoths did not move one nanometer when we showed up. But their array of servo-assisted weapons turned and pointed straight at us. I didn’t find this reassuring.
“Entrance to the Old Man’s quarters,” Vasily whispered nervously. “They’ve always let me through. But now they see me with you—anybody can smell the alien-flunky on you from ten miles away. I really don’t know—”
“Before you say it: don’t even think of trying to give me the slip,” I warned him. “I don’t care if my shell is green or ripe or rotten. I’m your shadow. If they don’t let you in—well, I always thought it was a crazy idea to come all the way from Titan to an Earth orbital to check out a possible lead from some space Methuselah about a hidey-hole in the asteroid belt.”
“Buratino, sometimes the longest way is the only practical one,” Vasily whispered, glancing from the corner of his eye at the guards’ impassive armored hulks. “Man, they’re taking their time checking us out. If all this is just to tell me I’m not welcome around here, they might as well speed it up.”
All of a sudden the two doorkeepers stepped aside with a choreographic precision that displayed their excellent training (one more incongruence: Storm Troopers on the Estrella Rom?). The diaphragm-door yawned wide, its blades overlapping one another as they spun to the outer perimeter of the circle, revealing a long tunnel with a fixed rail along the ceiling from which dangled a number of hold bars. Without hesitation, Vasily passed through and grabbed onto one of the bars with both hands. Again I copied him. The door circled shut behind us. I was not at all prepared for what happened next.
Without any warning, the hold bars began to run along the rail, sweeping us through the tunnel faster and faster. Instead of running straight, the route described a broad spiral. Somebody had modified the hell out of what had originally been a short reinforced passageway on a destroyer, making it at least a hundred times longer. Holding onto the bar was no problem for me, but judging by the tension in Vasily’s neck and shoulder muscles this jungleland express couldn’t have been easy even for someone who was used to it. After a couple of seconds we hit an acceleration of nearly 4 g, and only then did we begin braking, coming at last to a complete stop. The weightlessness told me we’d returned to the center of the great wheel, taking less than five seconds to undo all the work we’d done to get to the door. Start at the center, take a million detours, end up in the same place.
The Old Man was very concerned about security, that much was obvious. But I was surprised to discover that he also knew something about history. The ancient Mycenaean labyrinth-fortresses were built on the same principle, largely forgotten in the later history of fortifications on Earth, but neatly adapted here to space.
We emerged from the tunnel and swam in the air through another diaphragm hatch, this one unguarded. When it closed behind us we found ourselves floating in an enormous, bare, hemispherical chamber. The curved wall seemed to be made of composite ceramic armor, but I couldn’t see any furnishings or anything special in it except for a circular mirror, almost thirty feet across, which covered the entire flat side opposite the entrance.
“Slovoban didn’t get to be his age by being careless,” Vasily snorted, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Hell, I’ve made this trip at least a hundred times, but he keeps making me go through all this shit. If I didn’t think the Old Man was the only one who could help us find the damn Cetian, I would have saved myself the trouble. When he understands that keeping this space dump in one piece depends on how cooperative he is, I hope he’ll tell us everything. If not, the frigates we left back there can use the Estrella Rom for target practice.”
“What makes you think that this senile gypsy, even if his home depends on it, can tell us where—” I was beginning to splutter, spinning in midair to face Vasily, when a third voice stopped me cold.
“We’ve been friends a long time, Vasily. You don’t have to threaten me with the ridiculous pair of frigates you left behind if you want to ask for a favor. Asteroid G 7834 XC. It doesn’t even have a name. The orbital data are in the old registers of the Asteroidal Republic of Ceres Mining Company—though they never got around to settling there. And rightly so: there’s no mineral wealth on that asteroid; it’s just a ball of dust and ice, too dirty for even the water to be usable. But that’s where Weekman kept his smuggling base, ten years ago. If you hurry you might still find him holed up there with Makrow 34 and their overgrown reptilian friend, counting their loot.”
The voice was soft but booming, with an indescribable, almost liquid quality to it. I spun about so abruptly that, forgetting the weightlessness, I crashed into the wall.
The mirror had turned transparent. Two-way: an old but always effective trick. Looking through it, I saw another hemispherical room, the twin of the one we were in. But that room was crowded with things.
Its decor was… striking. The walls were entirely covered with two basic motifs.
The first: complex, advanced, modern-looking electronic devices that ten minutes earlier I would have thought entirely out of place in a junkheap orbital like the Estrella Rom. I can’t call myself anything like an expert on the subject, but to me they appeared to be highly sophisticated life-support systems. I should have been surprised to see them there, but after the two Grendel-class Storm Trooper outfits, the armored diaphragm hatch, and the spiral tunnel, I felt ready not to be shocked if I found out that one of those contrivances was capable of generating a hyperspace portal.
In any case, I found the second decor element even more intriguing.
Suits of armor.
Not just titanic composite Grendels and other modern, sophisticated, super-costly servo-assisted combat systems, but also genuine historical relics. I’m not an expert on armor either, but photo-recall does have its uses. I recognized an armored samurai suit, probably fifteenth-century, and medieval European armor that I thought might be of Burgundian make. The others I could only speculate about with the boldness of a dilettante: one might have been Mongol, or perhaps Burmese; another Roman legionnaire or maybe Scythian; the next was either Celtic or Viking. A fine collection.
They all looked authentic, except for one detail suggesting that, though one or another of them may actually have been genuine antiques, most had to be mere reproductions (and splendid ones) made on order for the eccentric collector (I wondered that Vasily hadn’t mentioned this curious side of the Old Man to me).
The detail was their size. The medieval armor looked a bit large, and as far as I know Roman legionnaires weren’t known for their height, nor were most medieval Mongols six and a half feet tall. But even a Colossaur would have found the servo-assisted Grendel suit cumbersome. Nobody under eleven feet could have used it comfortably.
“Your friend Slovoban’s a funny sort of guy,” I said to Vasily, turning to him with my most ironic expression. “Setting aside his paranoia, did he have some of these suits of armor made for his collection in size XXL to impress his visitors? Doesn’t strike me as necessary, given the pair of gargantuan doorkeepers we passed back there.”
Vasily’s sudden silence, but above all the look of reverence that came over his face, told me that the Old Man must have entered his own reception room. I turned back, and indeed, there between the life-support systems and the enormous historical suits of armor, a man had just made his appearance.
Or something that had once, long ago, been a man. Because Adam wouldn’t have readily recognized this stick-thin cross between a spider and a snake as one of his descendants.
Okay, no need to exaggerate. He wasn’t all that ugly. I’ve seen mutant eel larvae that looked uglier and moved with less grace.
Not many, though.
One look at him and I understood that Vasily’s term, hypertrophic osteopathy, was right on the money. The largest suits of armor weren’t oversized, as I’d thought. Unbelievable as it was, they were the small ones that had sadly become too short.
In his heyday, Old Man Slovoban must have already been a fairly tall man, maybe six, even six and a half feet tall, judging from the oldest suits in his collection. Living in weightlessness for so many decades, the expansion of his intervertebral discs and articular stretching due to the weakening of his skeletal structure through calcium loss might have added another four inches. But this thing stood more than eleven and a half feet tall from head to toe.
He had not merely grown taller.
Many years of weightlessness could have made his muscles atrophy a little—but not to this extent. He was hardly more than skin and bones. His ribs, having lengthened and softened through some teratological process, seemed to have folded and interwoven themselves around his shrunken torso, within which his heart and lungs, freed from the struggle against gravity, also seemed to have shrunk. The intravenous feeding tube emerging from his neck gave me a clear idea of what had happened to his stomach.
Beyond this, he was pale to the point of translucence, and his arms, long and noodle-thin, were quietly folded into impossible angles, as if they had more joints than any normal human limbs—or were a veritable showcase of fractures. Perhaps osteoporosis and osteochondritis as well?
Even his facial features had changed drastically. The cartilage growth typically seen in old age had reached such an extreme, whether because of the lack of gravity or the horrible hypertrophy, that the enormous bat ears and the nose curved like a crow’s beak made him look more like a wicked goblin than a Homo sapiens. And his entire cranium, if that was still the right word for the enormous, vaguely globular form, barely confined by impossibly flexible bones, reminded me more of the soft, shapeless head of an octopus than a hominid.
The worst, most monstrous part of it was that behind all these extreme transformations you could still recognize the original human form, little of which remained now beyond this grotesque spectral parody.
I stared as if hypnotized. And used all my self-control to refrain from shooting him. Hypertrophic osteopathy or not, the mere existence of this being was a terrible crime according to the aliens’ laws (which I was sworn to uphold). If I were to fulfill my duty to the letter, I’d have to administer euthanasia to him without delay. Such extreme variations on the human biotype were categorically banned, not only on the Burroughs but throughout the Solar System.
But I was certain this deformation must have been caused by disease. It couldn’t possibly be a case of genetic modification. No human could have wanted to have turned into… that.
And when the aliens kept a close eye on a thing, like they did with genome stability, you didn’t want to mess around with it. The terrestrial police might allow an “independent” enclave like the Estrella Rom or the Angel of Zion to orbit their planet and traffic in contraband replacement parts, pirated software, drugs, things like that, if they felt like it. But they’d never risk reprisals against their entire species such as the aliens threatened if they discovered some crazy person playing at genetic manipulation with human DNA.
All Vasily said was, “Thanks, Old Man.” He touched me softly on the shoulder and whispered, “It’s done. And stop staring at him, he’ll get annoyed. We know where to look for them now. We can go.”
“Don’t worry about it, Afortunado, I’m used to being seen for what I am: a freak.” The old man’s voice spoke out once more in the spluttering, underwater tone that characterized his toothless mouth. “No need to be in such a rush. Ah, Vasily. How long’s it been since we met—five years, no? Aren’t you even going to ask me why I gave you the info you came for before you had time to ask? Or what it is I want?”
“In the orphanage I learned not to abuse my good luck, Old Man,” Vasily said, smiling. “But I admit to a certain curiosity.”
“I admit to a certain curiosity. How your vocabulary has grown in that cell, Vasily,” the Old Man joked as he snaked past his collection, caressing some of the suits with his impossibly flexible arms. “And your buratino friend is very curious as well. He’s thinking: it must be illegal for a human monstrosity like me, unable to withstand Earth’s gravity for even a second, to exist.”
“Oh, not at all,” I began, feeling even more uncomfortable, if possible. Could this monster be a telepath, too?
But the Old Man stopped me with a majestic wave of his hand.
“I knew I’d live to see this day.” He smiled, if the catfish yawn of his toothless mouth could be called a smile. “I knew he’d break every limit one of these days. You can fool the human police, but not the aliens, or their robot bootlickers. Afortunado, I gave the information because I wanted to make you the instrument of my revenge.”
“Oh,” Vasily said simply, looking uneasy. “Well. My pleasure.”
“I am Slovoban. The Old Man. I founded the Estrella Rom. I dreamed of a space in space for those who had no space. Such as my people. That was ninety-six years ago. My brain is the only part of me that I’ve kept in perfect condition, but it makes up for everything I’ve had to renounce. Because for forty-four years I was the invincible patriarch of all space tramps. No man could beat me in a one-on-one fight. No cheat could catch me up with any of his tricks. Perhaps no one recalls it today, but fifty-two years ago I was not this pitiful shapeless thing.”
The eyes of the living mummy closed, dreaming, covered by almost transparent lids, and his arachnid fingers ran along the feathers on his Aztec (or maybe Inca, I’m not sure) breastplate.
“No; when I had this place built, I was Slovoban El Rayo. Six foot four, weighed two hundred ninety pounds. Reflexes of a wildcat. I had forgotten more things about hand combat than you’ll ever learn, Vasily. I was the best. With a knife, a cudgel, exotic weapons, or my bare hands. In duels I killed twenty-three men who challenged my authority, until there were none left who dared take me on. I was the chief, the present day was my fiefdom, and the future my kingdom. The aliens had just arrived in the Solar System with their faster-than-light ships and all the rest of their omnipotent technology. I saw the troubled waters and thought I’d try my hand at fishing, too, forgetting that sometimes troubled waters are full of sharks. I went in on a deal involving smuggled universal energy crystals with some Cetians….”
I listened transfixed, knowing where the Old Man wanted to take us. Just like one of Marlowe’s investigations: it always turns out everybody has business to settle with the bad guy. Fifty-six years is a long time in human terms, but barely a blink of an eye in a Cetian’s life cycle; they only look like humanoids. They hatch from eggs in litters of up to fifty clones and can live for five millennia.
Fifty-six years. Of course. I hadn’t heard anything about that little gap between the date of Makrow 34’s criminal activity and his capture and escape, thanks as always to the aliens’ love for compartmentalizing information. In this case I was up against three enemies and loads of traitors. And I still didn’t really know which side to count Vasily El Afortunado on.
“…but I miscalculated.” Old Man Slovoban tried to shrug, but with his softened skeleton the gesture was reduced to a semiliquid amoeba-like tremble. “I had met somebody tougher than me. Behind the Cetian’s delicate body and doll face, there was a real demon.”
Here came laughter that sounded more like a hoarse cough.
“He pulled one over on me; he challenged me to a knife fight in zero gravity. I accepted. Nobody handled a knife better than I did. But I don’t think any human ever made so many clumsy mistakes in a fight that his life depended on. I don’t know how it could have happened. Every time I was about to get him, something went wrong. I ended up with two wounds—I, who had never been touched by an enemy’s blade. One I gave myself, in my arm, when it cramped up inexplicably. The other was a disaster. My knife hit the metal wall, sparks flew, they blinded me temporarily—and just then he threw his dagger and hit my thigh, right in the femoral artery.”
The Old Man’s dim eyes flashed.
“At least I was lucky enough not to lose the leg. Incredible aim, skill, or luck. You know how hard it is to throw a knife in zero gravity and hit what you aim for?” He sighed. “I’ve never understood how I had so much bad luck that day. And there’s not much else to tell. Makrow 34 ran off with all the contraband while I was unconscious. Also, his stiletto was laced with poison. My doctors couldn’t even figure out what kind of venom he used. I had to spend a mountain of money and hire a Grodo biochemist, who finally identified it, though he was unable to counter it completely. All he could tell me was that it was a toxin from an exotic Rigelian anemone. A strange recombinant substance with no known antidote. Completely illegal throughout the galaxy. Not lethal, but insidious. Its curious effects have turned me into this thing that I am now.”
He waved his long, boneless limbs.
“Hypertrophic osteopathy and muscular degeneration, its primary effects, aren’t fatal if you take good care of yourself, though they are extremely inconvenient. But every sword has two edges: the effects of the genetic venom have also extended my life long enough for me to see the day when the aliens themselves avenge me.”
My pity for this man who had never forgotten his first, last, and only defeat prompted me to reveal the one piece of information I should have kept the most secret. “It wasn’t bad luck, Old Man. Makrow 34 had Psi powers.” And I explained what a Gaussical is while Vasily wrung his hands nervously and kept glancing sidelong at me.
“Ah.” The Romani centenarian’s eyes shined brighter than ever and his toothless mouth twisted into another parody of a grin. “A Psi. A damnable probability manipulator. Interesting, I didn’t know such things existed. That explains my clumsiness, his luck, his good aim, everything.” He cough-laughed again and ran his hand distractedly over another of his suits of armor. “That explains—everything,” he repeated.
For a few long seconds an uncomfortable silence hung over us all. At last Vasily broke it, nervous. “Well. It’s been a long time since we met, and I’m really sorry, Old Man,” he said simply. “But we’re in a rush. You wouldn’t want that monster to get away, would you? Rest easy. I won’t tell anybody about this, you know? And I’ll bring you his heart—if the Cetian has one.”
“Cetians have two, in their abdomens,” I explained, and felt ridiculous for having done so.
“Better—one for you, one for me,” Slovoban joked. “Good luck to you, kid, and to your positronic friend, too. And be careful with that Makrow. I knew he was dangerous, but if he’s a Psi, you’ll have to keep all your eyes on him—and more than four eyes would be better. I’d say, more like ten. May God and a loaded maser always be with you.” With that, the hatch reopened and the interview was over.
We retraced our entire route through the tunnel and the filthy labyrinths of the Romani space station back to our shuttle in silence. It was only when we had left the Estrella Rom behind us that El Ex-Afortunado spoke again. “Thanks, Raymond.”
“For what?” His thanks had taken me by surprise. My train of thought had already moved on to the idea of asking for reinforcements to take Asteroid G 7834 XC. Two police frigates should do it, but only if they were carrying at least a couple of anti-Psi field generators. I hadn’t done any….
“For what you did,” Vasily said. “For giving Slovoban back some of his pride. And especially for not telling him I’m a Gaussical too.” He gulped. “I never dared to tell him. I know it’ll sound weird, but if I’ve ever had anything like a father, it was him, and I’d hate it if he associated me in any way with the guy who reduced him to that.”
I looked at him with curiosity, but I guessed that this was not the right time to ask for explanations. The mysteries of human nature. Sometimes I think the more I know them, the less I understand them.