CROWELL

1 The client met me in my office on Western Avenue, in downtown Seattle, just blocks away from the pier. My partner and I had opened my business right after the first Ultra scare, and in the quiet rundown atmosphere of the decaying city, we managed to eke out a living.

The office was about the size of a small kitchen, and in one corner was a sink, small fridge, and microwave. My living quarters lurked behind a plywood wall I’d put up temporarily when I moved in.

“Dave Crowell,” I said, when he sat down at my desk. I extended my hand and he shook it.

“My name’s Morgan.”

He was a big man, wide in the shoulders, seemingly all muscle, and taller than me by a good six inches. He had close-cropped brown hair. A hint of gray ran through it. He wore a nice suit, a three-piece, but it didn’t cover up the fact that he was built like a jump slot mechanic. Seriously. You had to have some heft and power to manipulate slot beams and wheels.

He wasn’t bigger than my alien partner Tem Forno, of course, who was hiding on the other side of the plywood wall. Forno was a Second Clan Helk, and I didn’t like him scaring away potential customers. I had a feeling, though, that this guy wouldn’t blink at the presence of a Helk. But it often worked better to keep my trump card tucked up my sleeve.

“Morgan. Is that a first name or a last name?” I asked.

“Just Morgan.”

“I’ll need more than that if I take on your case.”

“Seriously, it’s just Morgan. My legal name. You can look it up when you need to. I’ll give you my residence, identification, and all that.”

“Okay, Just Morgan. Go on.”

He pulled at the vest of his suit, trying to get comfortable in my less-than-comfortable chair. “I need you to find someone for me,” he said.

“And do what?”

“Bring him death,” he said.

I stared at him, surprised. “I’m sorry?”

He shrugged. “You’ll do what you need to do, and then I want him back here. It doesn’t matter how you do it, or what condition he’s in when you do.”

“Use whatever means necessary, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“You have a general idea about where I should look? And don’t you fucking dare say ‘The Union.’”

“You don’t want to know who?”

“Not yet. Where?”

“Barnard’s Star.”

The hardest colony to get to, naturally. That is, other than the alien world of Helkuntannas, which took an arm, a leg, a special visa, and more red tape than it took to wrap up a clan of Helks to get to. My survival skill of saying “no” to jobs off world kicked into gear, and I said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t—”

“—do off world jobs, I know.” He pointed an index finger at me. “But this one’s different.”

“No.”

“Your most famous cases have been off world, Mr. Crowell.”

“I find it a lot easier to stay alive when I keep myself at home.”

“I will make it worth your while.”

“That’s what they all say.”

He pointed again. “But this one’s different.”

“Will you stop saying that?” I leaned back and rubbed my eyes. “You don’t even know my fees. Retainer, expenses, cost per day—”

“And off world fees.”

“—cost per jump-slot station, TWT fares, VIP class. You have enough for all that?”

“Is this where your Helk partner comes in from behind the wall there and starts making me look small?”

So Morgan knew about Tem Forno. Good for him. Regardless of Morgan’s size, Forno would make him look small. “He had a hard night bashing heads. He’s taking a nap.”

“I can give you information. As a means of payment.”

“Not a chance.”

“You’re the only person for this job, and the only person who could use this information.”

“Information doesn’t pay the bills, Morgan.”

“Then I’ll cover all the costs, too.”

“No, I can’t—wait. You will?”

He nodded.

That made me pause. Morgan was slick, and I didn’t just mean his dapper suit and imposing presence. He was pushing all the right buttons. Except for the off-world button.

“You want to know the information?” Morgan asked.

“I assume you don’t mean all of it, or I wouldn’t be motivated to find your missing person.”

“You assume correctly.”

“Spill.”

“Are you in?”

“Not until I hear some of the information.”

A wisp of a smile crossed Morgan’s face. “Only fair.” He reached into his inside suit pocket and pulled out an object.

A card. Not just any card, but a Tarot card. He placed it on my desk with a snap, as if he’d dealt the last card of an important poker hand.

It was The Fool.

I widened my eyes. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

Morgan sat back and said nothing. He crossed his arms, not an easy feat in his fancy suit.

“Really nice,” I said. I opened my desk drawer and pulled out a stack of cards from the same Tarot deck. I was not as deliberate as Morgan had been and slapped the whole thing on the desk. The backs of these cards featured two hemispheres of planets top and bottom, thin stylized lines connecting them like wires, the color palette a deep purple. “I’ve got about thirty cards of my own. How does yours help me?”

He shrugged. “Well, for starters, you don’t have this one.”

“How do you know?”

“Because there’s only one deck like this one, as I’m sure you and Tem Forno have figured out by now. If I have this card, you don’t. You’ve been actively looking for these, with a purpose in mind.”

I had been, and his card did indeed match my own deck. How much should I tell Morgan? I could sum it up briefly and explain how my dad had gone missing when I was sixteen; that I’d found out after all these years where he was; that the means to get to him had been lost forever. Okay, not a nutshell. A complicated cornucopia of space and time, alternate universes, matter and antimatter. He’d been stuck with the Ultras—a dying breed of aliens living in an antimatter universe. The Ultras had tried to invade our own universe to extend their lives. A portal of sorts had helped them do this, but it was now destroyed, and the universes were nowhere close to one another.

Yeah, it sounded unbelievable whenever I thought about it. It didn’t end there, though. It’d all started with body morphing and secret conspiracies, and ended with sleep, phases of memory, and quantum travel.

Complicated. The death of a best friend, a former partner, figured into the weariness I’d come to know.

And then there was the Tarot card in the possession of an alien client, Terree—a Memor who had undergone an intersexual assignment and morphed male—given to him by his dad, Greist Sahl-kla, who’d been involved in the whole thing. A card that had offered unknowable questions and promised impossible answers.

The Chariot.

Terree had given me the card in much the same way Morgan now offered The Fool. There was no way to get to my dad, according to known science, but thinking there might be significance to this card, I tasked Forno to find the rest of the deck. And he did find a whole bunch of it. We did. Except—there were 78 cards in this Tarot deck, and we only had twenty.

“Who are you, really?” I asked Morgan.

He leaned forward again and put both elbows on my desk. “I’m retired.”

“Retired what?”

“Envoy.”

“You’re an Envoy?” That was interesting. A year ago, I’d found out my dad was a full-time Envoy before he disappeared. Terree’s father Greist had also been an Envoy.

“Retired,” he said. He pointed to The Fool on my desk. “You don’t need too many more cards. You only need the Major Arcana, and a couple more.”

“What?”

“Major Arcana. Twenty-one picture cards, all numbered, except for The Fool, which is unnumbered.”

I rolled my eyes. “Jesus, I know what they are. But I need a couple more cards . . . to do what?”

Once again, he leaned back. He spread his hands in a gesture that said he’d given me all he was going to give me about that.

“But I have to find this guy on Barnard’s,” I said.

He nodded.

“And kill him.”

“Not exactly.”

“How do I not exactly kill him?”

“You bring him a Tarot card.”

“Which one? A poisoned one or something?”

“One you don’t have yet, but you will.”

“Which one?”

“Death.”

Well, shit. That made sense. I was wavering, and he knew it. I wanted him to get rid of the smug smile on his face. “If I take this on, I’m taking Tem Forno with me. That’s extra expense.”

“Of course. Believe me, you’ll need him.”

“He’s going to check you out in every way possible first. Your information, your claims—everything about your story before I commit to the job.”

“Whatever he can find.”

I looked at The Fool more closely. From my view, he was upside down because Morgan had set it there that way. In that position, it signified reluctance. The fool was dressed in bright clothes, like a harlequin, and carried a stick on his back with his possessions. A white rose was in one hand and a white dog by his side as they approached the edge of a cliff. I’d researched this card and all the others. I knew more about Tarot than I wanted to know, to be honest.

The fool’s journey.

The Fool was the protagonist of the story. I guess that was me. It meant I was about to abandon every commitment I had and ignore every excuse I had made, make a leap of faith, and begin anew the search for truth, wherever it took me. A search for my dad.

I picked up the card and turned it upright. I frowned. “I bring Death to this person. But you want him back. Why?”

“I made a promise.”

“Promise to whom?”

He didn’t offer up a name.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll need to know as much as I can about this person I’m bringing back.”

“There’s very little known, in some respects. He’s a mystery. A secret. You know more about him than I do. You know how to find out more about him, too.”

“Who is he? Do I know him?”

His smile widened. “Oh, you know him.”

“Have I met him?”

“That’s a very interesting question with no easy answer. Yes. And no.”

“Shit.”

Morgan reached into a jacket pocket—an outer one this time—and withdrew a crumpled photo. You didn’t see too many of those anymore, unless they were antiques, or someone was as nostalgic as I was about our lost past. He put it on my desk in the same spot The Fool had been, but he spun it around toward me.

The portrait was a little dark, but I could see perfectly that he was a Helk. My heart skipped a beat as I shot a pained look at Morgan. “What the fuck! Are you serious?”

He nodded.

The Helk in the photograph showed no discernable emotion, but I believed his face was mocking me. Challenging me.

The next evening, I waited for Forno out on the old ferry terminal, darkness shrouding Elliot Bay, and the few weak lights from one of the taller buildings did little to improve my mood, even if I did have an antique flask in my hand. In my other hand was Morgan’s old photo of a familiar face that also didn’t fill me with cheer.

Continuing the search for my dad had become a possibility. Too bad he was in a different universe traveling away from ours at cosmic speeds. The information Morgan had given me suggested I might end up figuring something out about it and lead me in his direction.

Also, shit would likely blow up in my face, maybe rip a hole in our universe, and risk the destruction of the Union of Worlds.

Well. I’d been there before.

Seattle, 2115, first world of the Union, now a backwater, since the seven colonies offered new thrills and chills to humans and aliens alike. This migration to the stars made it difficult to keep my detective agency afloat.

Seattle had never felt as quiet as it did during the Fourth of July in 2115. Occasionally, some cheap mortar firework sputtered in the night sky, but it wasn’t anything to oooh and ahhh about. During better days, nonstop pyrotechnics would’ve made the city look like a war zone.

Those days were long gone.

The holiday hadn’t travelled well, either. Fireworks, flags, and parades didn’t follow colonists to the colony worlds, where the idea of independence was quite meaningless. Well, okay. There’d been that incident on Temonus, but I preferred not to remember those days.

A firework thumped and a thin trail snaked upward above the deserted Smith Tower. Oh, the anticipation. There was a light retort at the top of its trajectory and a handful of weak green and red balls appeared fitfully, floated for a few seconds, then disappeared.

“Oooh,” I said.

I tipped the flask to my mouth and took a long sip of an expensive brandy I’d managed to procure thanks to friends in high places. It was pretty stupid to drink a fine brandy like that from a flask. It should be sipped from a real brandy glass, but who else besides me even knew about that in this day and age? Mention Helk ale or the blue poison, however, and folks couldn’t shell out enough money for that experience.

The most important thing about a VS fine brandy from France was to enjoy it. Savor it. Even cherish it. I didn’t have a fine library or a crackling fire to sit in front of in an overstuffed leather chair. There wasn’t a piano bar down the street I could hang out in and misquote Casablanca, another relic from our past that most people would have no knowledge of. Just nostalgists like myself. “Play it again, Sam.” Sip from the brandy glass. Relight my cigar. At best I might be able to power up a stupid neon holostick.

Technology was not concerned with the finer things. It wasn’t concerned about nostalgia. In much the same way, the Union didn’t concern itself with much of anything related to Earth. At least in Seattle, a polite infrastructure remained to make life comfortable. Well, mostly comfortable.

I was older now. A little less spring in my step. I mean, granted, only a year had passed after the defeat of the Ultras and the destruction of the portal between our universes, but I came back from it aged, a side effect of quantum travel. A plus to the side effect was that I could get a senior discount at Zola’s. 

Where was Forno?

He was supposed to check out Morgan’s personal information. Because Forno was a Helk, he was good at scaring information out of people. I wanted to know if the guy was telling the truth about the job he wanted us to take on. It was a job I hadn’t wanted to take on, because lo and behold, it would take me off planet, but he’d promised he would make it worth my while. Famous last words.

I took out the photo the client had handed me yesterday during our meeting at my office and stared at it.

“Crowell?”

I came out of my reverie on the ferry dock. The night had darkened considerably. Tem Forno had called my name and I didn’t like that I hadn’t heard him approach. It wasn’t like a Second Clan Helk could creep.

“Everything checks out,” Forno said. In the dark, his leathery face was as featureless as Morgan’s photo. It wasn’t like there were any bright fireworks displays to light up the bay. “I mean, we’ll need to follow up on some things, but basically, the Morganism is legit. Retired Envoy, no black marks, long career.”

“Morganism? Jesus, Forno.”

“You like it? Me too. That’s what I’m calling him from here on out. So do you want to do it? Shall we get this show on the highway?”

“On the road, Forno.”

“Oops.”

I looked at the photo in my hand, at the image of a First Clan Helk that had become famous and infamous all at the same time.

“Yeah, let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s go find him.”

Of course it was him:

Terl Plenko.