Changing Vision (19 page)

By the time Sidorae and I had examined almost all of his display, I had to be meticulous in responding to the meanings contained in the comspeak uttered by the machine, no matter how some jarred against what I heard him say. Still, our time had been profitably spent. Cameron & Ki Exports now had some prime merchandise with which to tease our clients; I’d acquired a workable grasp of the modern Feneden tongue, as used by these representatives anyway; and, perhaps most importantly, I’d had a crash course in their culture. The latter I didn’t think would have pleased Sidorae, had he known, but it was unavoidable. The art of a culture was always a revelation of its heart, a sampling of its scope and interests. While I couldn’t conclude much about the Feneden themselves from these pieces, I did have a better idea of what affected the group represented by Sidorae and the others on Panacia.

They were thieves.

A FULL day and a half wasted. There had been no records.
Or no records to be had,
Lefebvre reminded himself dourly, following the path of a stray bubble as it launched itself from the inside of his beer glass and wobbled its way to join the froth on the surface.
Another dead end.
He’d had enough to drink to find that funny.

It had been the same story at every other system. No genetic material, not even the quickcopy routinely made by customs. What rested in Lefebvre’s concealed pocket was the closest to the real Paul Ragem he’d been able to come without breaking into a Commonwealth data vault: a painstakingly complete collection of genetic markers from every biological relative he’d been able to track down, blended with some scientific hocus pocus and wishful thinking into what might be a key.
Might be.
First, he needed to match it to some Port Authority record for Ragem, some documented sighting. Then, he could be sure he had the right key to unlock where Ragem had been during those last fateful weeks.

Confirmation would have been ideal, but Lefebvre was prepared, as always, to proceed without that reassurance.
After all, why should his search be any easier than Kearn’s?

The beer poured cold and bitter down his throat.

“Hom Captain? ’cuse me. Hom Captain?”

This bar—Lefebvre couldn’t recall its name at the moment: something about
Flashy Gills
—was in the All Sapients’ District, a narrow ring of non-Panacian development
around the ever-changing shipcity itself. As such, its clientele could be any being, of any oxy-breathing species—rooms for the other sort were behind a plas wall, allowing at least visual interaction between those who otherwise couldn’t survive each other’s company without wearing an environmental suit, or e-rig. There was a hot and heavy game of rummy at the far end, a tentacle showing through a blue fog held a set of fluorescent cards, while the pair of Humans at the facing table glowered at those in their own hands.

So Lefebvre wasn’t surprised to be accosted by an Ervickian here. He was slightly surprised to be accosted by an Ervickian in its ept-morph, an age at which barhopping was barely legal even on non-Ervickian worlds. The Human expression, wet behind the ears, applied nicely, the nervous young being standing too close to Lefebvre’s side having a steady drip of sweat passing down the slick yellow sides of its head. Two pairs of overly-earnest eyes stared up at him, all four eyeballs on the beady side. The body was a fair match, skin and bones within a too-large Human sweater, an extra hole cut from the chest area so the being could shovel food into its secondary mouth without lifting its garment.

“Captain Lefebvre. My name to Humans is Able Joe. You can remember that, yes?” this with a wink that passed through all four eyes in sequence. Ervickians tended to assume one-brained species were all slightly simple. “I know it’s you, Hom Captain. I have an ident right here.” Able Joe began waving around a large, purple card. With more coordination than he’d have credited himself with, Lefebvre snatched it before the youngster attracted the wrong sort of attention. It wasn’t a particularly upscale bar.

The card was his, all right: a plas version of a notice he posted every time the
Russell III
came insystem. This hadn’t been a place he’d expected a response, but Lefebvre had long ago separated his expectations from his quest. A grubby, eight-fingered hand stole it back. “Says here you want information on another Human. Named
Megar Slothe.” The words were delivered in a whisper likely overheard by anything in the bar with auditory organs and still conscious.

“Don’t waste my time,” Lefebvre said, turning his back on the annoying creature. Any Ervickian off its world was a con artist, the species congregating translight wherever a fast credit could be made. Their moral system was, to be kind, pliable.

Able Joe didn’t object out loud. Instead a small holocube slid along the bar’s surface to kiss Lefebvre’s beer glass. Lefebvre glanced down at it, then stared, mesmerized.

The cube contained an image taken, from the look of it, from a store’s internal security vid. It showed two beings.

One was Panacian, by her color and size, a member of the Ambassador caste. Even in this still, her proud bearing implied she’d been trained on D’Dsel itself.

It was the second figure that held Lefebvre speechless. Human. Tall, slim, that face he almost knew better than his own, despite not having seen it for over fifty years.

Ragem.

Lefebvre reached for the cube, but Able Joe’s hand was there first to snatch it back. Lefebvre tapped his credit chip on the bar, then beckoned the Ervickian to follow him. The little being was quivering with anticipation—or was starving, something Lefebvre would rather not know. The remnants of former meals decorated most of the sweater as it was; Ervickians weren’t famed for their table manners. The taller Human led the way to a private booth, tapping his chip on its entry panel.

Once inside, Lefebvre straightened, willing to reveal he was much less drunk than he’d appeared while nursing his beer at the bar. “An interesting image. What makes you think this Human is Megar Slothe?” He felt as taut as a wire about to snap.
It couldn’t just fall into his lap like this—or could it?

“You gonna pay me or what?” Able Joe said, feigning
outrage. Lefebvre held up his credit chip but refused to touch it to the being’s receiver.

“Prove it.”

“Sure. Sure.” The youngster’s bushy paired eyebrows drooped at the edges. “The vid’s from a store my créche operates on Ultari Prime. Every member of my litter carries a copy. We don’t forget cheats—everyone knows that about us; you know that, right?—and this Slothe cheated our family in a big way. He’s gonna pay.” A pause while four eyes examined Lefebvre in the gloom of the booth and the receiver was lifted hopefully. “So, are you? Gonna pay me?”

“Cheated you how?”

“Bought a load of stuff from my créche parent—a starship, supplies, high-tech stuff—all prime, high-end goods. Nothing shabby, y’know? Then there was a cancel sent by remote to reclaim every credit paid. Just about ruined my parent, that did.” This with a note of almost sanctimonious pride.

“Slothe sent the cancel?” When the Ervickian’s primary mouth remained closed in a stubborn oval, Lefebvre touched his chip to the being’s receiver, tipping in a generous amount without result. He repeated his donation.

A gleam from vestigial teeth—the really useful ones resided lower down and Lefebvre was as glad not to see them. “Yeah. My sibs and me, we think so,” Able Joe said cheerily. “Who else?”

“That depends. When was this image taken? The exact date—standard time, not local.”

The Ervickian held up the holocube, pressing a control to bring up the security vid record. Lefebvre scanned it. An older model but still in use today, being as tamperproof as such things could be.

Lefebvre’s lips moved soundlessly as he repeated the date to himself.
A full week,
he calculated numbly. A full week after Paul Ragem had been reportedly killed on Artos—his death activating the emergency warning from
the implant under his skin before its signal inexplicably cut off—this vid captured him on Ultari Prime.

Kearn was too blinded by his obsession with monsters and shapeshifters to see what had been under his nose all along. Lefebvre had always suspected Ragem’s death as too convenient, especially when Artos became a closed system immediately afterward, preventing any retrieval of a body or investigation.

And Councillor Sandner had gone to such pains to emphasize that point.

The Ervickian might have slipped him a stim shot, from the way Lefebvre felt his heart pounding more heavily and quickly, until his pulse rushed in his ears like ocean waves.
Paul was alive?

So much for hunting the truth of his final days, digging out scraps of evidence, following leads that vanished in his fingers as rapidly as the whorls of smoke in the bar.
This,
Lefebvre realized,
changed everything.

With a supreme effort, Lefebvre kept his hands off the small box.

“Do you have a list of the goods he bought?” When Able Joe hesitated, Lefebvre went on persuasively: “Look—I know some things Slothe had with him before he disappeared. That way we can settle if this is the same Human. If it is—” Lefebvre waved his chip suggestively.

An hour later, and three months’ pay lighter, Lefebvre left the bar a much happier Human.
And why not?
he told himself, one hand possessively over the cube in his pocket, a cube containing an eccentric and expensive shopping list including a mammoth comp system, a portable greenhouse, and sufficient exotic salad greens to feed—or more likely poison—an army.

Best of all, it contained the sales slip for a starship—a used taxi designated Speedy InterSys Transit No. 365, registered to a Megar Slothe—the very same ship found abandoned by Kearn fifty years ago on the former Inhaven colony, Ag-413.

Lefebvre smiled to himself in a way that made an approaching
pair of spacers choose the other side of the walkway. Ag-413 was the location of the final recorded sighting of the Esen Monster, and its supposed destruction by the Kraal.

Now a Kraal Protectorate—perfect Kraal logic: if you’ve saved a planet, why not keep it?—Ag-413 had also been the source of a mysterious message Kearn received from an unidentified Human, a Human claiming to know all about the monster and possessing the right emergency codes to demand immediate rescue. A rescue, Lefebvre learned, Kearn had delegated to some civilian freighters named Largas with typical cowardice. The Largas crew had maintained they’d found no one, returning to their course and ultimately leaving Commonwealth space for the outskirts of the Fringe, well beyond reach of authority.

Lefebvre felt pieces falling into place all around him. All those years of fruitless searching—he could almost be grateful to Kearn for bringing him here now.

And in his other pocket, an image of the not-so-dead Paul Ragem and his accomplice.

A Panacian who traveled outsystem with a Human?
Not common. Not common at all. Even the Ervickians had realized that; Able Joe, tongue well-lubricated by Lefebvre’s credit chip, admitting to being the fifth in its créche litter to journey to D’Dsel to try and find her, without success.

They’d been fools to try,
Lefebvre judged. Ervickians, like most of the intelligent species encountered by Humans thus far, were constrained in their dealings with others by biology and temperament. Any one species managed to communicate very successfully with a few others, muddled through somehow with several more, and were hopelessly confused or offended by the rest. With each new species encountered for the first time, the Human Commonwealth became even more of a glue to hold the loose, yet expanding, economic association of various species together. Only Humans seemed to possess the right combination of optimism, open-mindedness,
and a surely species-specific obstinacy to work with just about any beings if necessary.

Of course, there was that saying, that Humans had thicker skins than Ganthor.

The shipcities that sprang up wherever starships docked, and their associated All Sapients’ Districts, were very often hosts to planned or unplanned mediation by whatever Human could be found by the aggrieved non-Humans trying to understand one another. Since these usually involved bar bills or trade disputes, it didn’t seem to matter that the Humans involved were occasionally semiconscious.

There were rumors that the more diverse limb of the Commonwealth, months away translight and so effectively its own entity, had abandoned its Human-centered government system altogether and moved toward some sort of pact between trading species.
He’d believe that one when he saw his first shapeshifter in person.

The truth remained, the Ervickian needed a Human to communicate with the Panacians and help find those who had cheated its parent. Lefebvre and Able Joe hadn’t so much formed a partnership as arranged to share information in the future, Able Joe quite clear on the advantage of credits on its chip as opposed to chasing them in the street. Lefebvre left the quivering being with a prepaid menu and a mutual promise to keep in touch.

Not that either of them planned to honor that promise,
Lefebvre thought contentedly.

Finders, keepers.

“EVERY piece?” Paul asked, brows lifting almost to his hairline.

I tilted my head up and down in the Human gesture. “Most of it. There were a few items in the collection I’d say were Feneden, but no guarantees how they were obtained.”

“And the rest were Iftsen. You’re certain we’re dealing with theft? They’re neighbors, after all.” His lips curved up, as if to acknowledge the irony of the Feneden learning they were not the only intelligent species in the universe, simultaneously with the discovery their particular corner of space was the most crowded in the quadrant. Had the Feneden wanted to colonize within a day translight, they would have had to rent something small.

“Sidorae claimed all of it was from his homeworld,” I told Paul, “but last night I handled two hundred and forty-four pieces of art from the First Citizens’ Gallery of Brakistem, on Iftsen Secondus. I don’t recall hearing the Gallery had closed and broken up its collection.”