The Gist Hunter (37 page)

The child gestured with the gun. "This is a device we use on adults who pose a danger to themselves or others. It's harmless to them, but we're not sure how effective it would be on your nervous system, so it's set at maximum. I advise you not to do anything unreasonable."

As the child spoke, his two companions came through the undergrowth to triple the number of weapons now surrounding me at a discreet distance. Moments later, face down in the K'fond soil, I was efficiently stripped of everything but my jumpsuit. Then the children herded me out of the park and into a no-nonsense vehicle that had pulled up at the curb. I had the last of the three rows of seats to myself. The kids sat forward, facing me with weapons aimed.

"I suppose my disguise was pretty obvious," I said.

One of them replied, "The disguise was fine. At first we thought an adult had wandered into that meat transport. Then we took a closer look when you were on the road. But you could never have blended in here."

"Why not?"

For an answer, the child waved at the cityscape unrolling beyond the car's windows. What I saw told me that, of course, they had to have spotted me immediately, disguise or not. To blend into this city's population, I would have had to make myself over as a small, pink, sexless doll with big eyes. The streets were full now, and not one of the K'fondi was an adult. It was a city of children.

"Where are you taking me?" I asked.

"To a place where some of us will talk to you."

I couldn't read the inscription on the building we arrived at, but it had government written all over it. The council chamber I was ushered into could have passed for the ECS seat of power in Belem—if everything hadn't been half-sized. But there was nothing diminutive about the authority of the K'fond children gathered around the gleaming, crescent-shaped table. I knew power when I met it.

They gave me a large enough chair and sat me down in the middle of the space enclosed by the crescent. For a few seconds, the K'fond world council looked me over in silence. Then the child at the center of the table's arc leaned across the glossy expanse. The voice was thin, but I didn't doubt the note of command it carried.

"Welcome to K'fond, Mr. Kandler. We've been looking forward to meeting you. Your personnel record told us more about the Earth Corporate State than a month's subspace communications."

"You've read my record? But how?"—then I got it—"You've been using the survey orbiter's com link to listen in."

"True, Mr. Kandler. We went up and got your probe shortly after it alerted your sector base. We don't mind telling you, its technology fascinated our scientists. And of course we were overjoyed to learn that interstellar travel is in fact possible.

"Which brings us to the point of our meeting. Mr. Kandler, what can you tell us about the Dhaliwal Drive?"

Three days later, the station com center received and recorded a signal from the project's missing exo-soc. I reported that I had penetrated to the core of K'fond society and was "making progress." Then I signed off without waiting for a reply. It was my last direct communication with the station.

Two days after that, Sector Administrator Stavrogin arrived to take charge.

If Livesey was everything a by-the-book Bureau chief should be, then Yuroslav Stavrogin was a sector administrator to delight the book's authors to the lowest flake of their flinty hearts. Pinch-faced and slim, with the eyes of a bored shark and the delicate hands of a Renaissance poisoner, he perched primly on the edge of a K'fond chair and waited. Beside him, Livesey looked nervously around the alien reception room and sweated. Through the open window came the sounds of Maness at play.

I watched through a concealed aperture as the brass cooled their heels. I remembered Stavrogin. Back at sector base, he had once made me rewrite a lengthy field report from scratch—a week's pointless work imposed on me for no discernible reason. When I was bold enough to ask why, he had coolly replied, "Because you need to be reminded of who I am, and of what you are not."

I closed the spy hole, picked up my new briefcase, and stepped through the door. Livesey's face opened in surprise, but Stavrogin knew better than to show his. Still, I was not what he had expected.

Yesterday, with the station in an uproar over the sector boss's arrival, a signal had come in. In clear Basic, a K'fond voice had specified that Livesey and Stavrogin, identified by name and rank, were instructed to present themselves at the Maness district office of the planet's government. Once again, detailed directions followed, and these had led the two Bureau officers to the building. A robot major-domo had shown them to the reception room and left them to stew a while. And then in walked their missing exo-soc.

"Kandler, where the hell have you—" Livesey spluttered, but was cut off by a mere lifting of Stavrogin's finger.

"Specialist Kandler," rustled the dry voice, "we can plot your recent itinerary later, but we are shortly to meet the K'fond trade negotiator. You will therefore advise us forthwith of the results of your fieldwork."

There was a desk and chair. I walked over and sat down. From my briefcase, I pulled a sheaf of paper and tossed it onto the desk. "My report," I said. "I won't give you the full details now; you can read it at your leisure. I'll just summarize.

"The K'fondi are a highly sophisticated culture, with a well advanced technology. They have been a unified planetary state for some centuries, long enough for the administrative apparatus to evolve into a kind of cooperative anarchy."

Stavrogin sniffed, but I elected not to notice.

"They are very interested in trade," I continued, "a great deal of trade, but only on rational terms."

Livesey burst in. "They're as rational as a bunch of spacers on Cinderella liberty. Drunken, fornicating . . ."

"Oh, those are just the adults," I laughed. "I'm talking about the kids."

Stavrogin's voice could have cut glass. "Tell it."

I leaned back in my chair, and put my feet on the desk.

"Well, it's that missing piece of information we were looking for. K'fond adults really are just about as useless as Livesey says. All they want to do is enjoy their retirement and make more little K'fondi. The eggs are almost a by-product, since they don't even tend their offspring after they're weaned.

"But the kids do all right," I continued. "Childhood is long here, very long. K'fondi reach intellectual maturity quite early, but puberty doesn't come along until thirty or forty years after. And they have drugs to hold their glands in check for another decade if they want to keep putting off sexual maturity.

"That gives them a whole working lifetime without distractions. They don't waste their youth in adolescent turmoil and fruitless rebellion, because adolescence comes at the end of life, not the beginning. They aren't bothered by sex or any of its complications, like jealousy or getting up to change diapers. The infants are cooperatively raised by older children.

"And when their glands finally get to them, and the hormones reduce their mental acuity to the level of alley cats, they settle into a place like Maness: a retirement community out in the country, with plenty of beds and bars. A few children stick around to patch up cuts and bruises, and protect the newborns until they can be shipped off to the nurseries."

Livesey snapped his fingers. "They're like those extinct fish, the ones that didn't mate until they were ready to die. What were they called?"

"Salmon," I said. "We didn't figure it out because the K'fondi made sure we didn't see their cities full of children or the few kids around Maness. So we kept looking at it from our own perspective, from the chicken's point of view."

"Chicken?" asked Livesey.

"Sure," I said. "To a chicken, an egg is just a means of getting a new chicken. But to an egg—or to a K'fond child—an adult chicken is just something you need to get a new egg."

"Fascinating in its place," Stavrogin cut in, "but we are about to negotiate a trade deal. You will advise."

I smiled. "Sorry, Mr. Sector Administrator. Appended to my report is my resignation from the Bureau, and appended to that is my surrender of citizenship in the Earth Corporate State. And these," I produced a document covered in cursive K'fondish script, "are my credentials as adviser to K'fond's economic committee. Shall we open negotiations?"

"You can't do that," Livesey said.

"He has done it," Stavrogin said, "though little good it will do him. Very well, 'Mr. Adviser' Kandler, you may rot among your alien friends in this backwater. But trade—if there is even to be any trade—will be on Bureau terms; only Earth has the Dhaliwal Drive."

I smiled. "Not for long, Stavrogin. These people—
my
people, now—have had near-space travel for generations, but until now they've had nowhere to go but up and down. They've always dreamed of reaching to the stars, but didn't know how or even if it could be done. The survey ship's passage answered the second question; and I had enough of a layman's grasp of the Dhaliwal Drive to sketch an answer to the first."

I put my hands behind my head and stretched back in my chair. "They're smart and they have no distractions—they'll roll out a prototype starship within a year."

Stavrogin's face went paler, while Livesey's grew dangerously red. I held up a hand to forestall an outburst.

"We may decide not to deal with the ECS," I said. "After all, there's a whole galaxy of civilized races that the Bureau has been robbing. I'm sure they'll be interested in what we have to offer."

Livesey looked to be on the verge of detonation. But Stavrogin was struggling to recover. "I'm sure we can come to some mutually satisfactory understanding," he said. "As you say, there's a whole galaxy dependent on the trade made possible by the Drive. There's still plenty for both of us."

"You don't understand." I took my feet off the desk, leaned over its polished surface, and said, "Go tell the Phoenicians: beads and trinkets won't cut it anymore.

"K'fond's main export will be starships."

He would kick and yell his way out of dreams where the bear was after him, his chest cold and sweat-slick, breath bellowing. When he was little, the noise brought Mom or Dad to check on him, tuck him back in, kiss the bad stuff away.

At fifteen, he didn't want his parents coming to his rescue—well, maybe he wanted it a little, but it would have bent his self-image. So it was enough if Mom called out, "Are you okay, Mike?" from across the hall, and he would call back, "Yeah, I'm okay."

He would hear them mumbling about him, but in the morning nobody made a big deal about it.

He'd been having the bear dream for as long as he could recall, although it didn't start out as a bear. Back when he was a kid, it had been dinosaurs: dagger-toothed tyrannosaurs hopping through the patio doors, hunting him across the family room at the old house in Ottawa.

Another time, a golden-eyed tiger glided after him into the garage, and once, when he was really little, the Cookie Monster had shadowed him around the day care, all goggle-eyed and blue-shaggy, peering at him from behind the activity centre.

But, by the time he was into his teens, it was the bear. It would come for him every five or six months; not that he could count on it to keep to a schedule, so sometimes it could be twice in the same week. The settings would vary, but never the sequence of events.

He'd be doing something ordinary—getting off a bus, walking up his front steps—when he would catch a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye. He'd turn, and there'd be a glimpse of something dark sliding around a corner or dipping down behind a wall.

The glimpse always shot him through with a bolt of white terror. He would back up, turn around, edge off in another direction. But if he fled the house, it would be lurking in the yard. Get back on the bus, and it would come snuffling at the automatic door. Try to outrun it, and he would feel its breath bursting hot on the back of his neck.

At the end he would be trapped, hedged in, the bear stalking closer and closer. That was the worst part: it seemed to
enlarge
itself towards him, like a dark balloon swelling across his field of vision, or as if he were a lost spacewalker falling into a vast black planet.

And then, the instant before it touched him, when he was sprung tight as a musical saw, there'd come a high-pitched whine, loud enough to make his teeth buzz, and he would burst out of the dream, sweating and gasping, his muscles weak as blue milk.

He'd once asked the school counsellor if she knew anything about dreams.

"Well, of course, I'm influenced by Jung," said Mrs. Skinner, interrupting her perpetual search for order in the jumble on her desk, which was crammed into a former supplies closet beside the washrooms. Mike stood, because the visitor's chair was buried in books in which an adult explained exactly what you had to do to be a successful teenager.

"Okay," Mike said.

She located a form printed on blue paper, lifted her eyeglasses to squint at it, then tucked it into a yellow file folder. "That means I view the psyche as being fundamentally fragmented," she continued.

"Okay," he said again, edging toward the door.

She closed the yellow file, then reopened it. She took out the blue paper, peered at it again, then slipped into a red folder, and looked up at Mike.

"How do I put this? Jung's idea was that each of us is a collection of different people inside our heads—like your personality is made up of different pieces that mesh together, well, more or less. When they don't mesh properly, that's trouble."

"Trouble like scary dreams, like where something's chasing you?"

"Uh huh," she said, picking up a green form, and frowning at it as if willing it to change color. "A monster in a dream might be some part of you that frightens you, some fear that your unconscious wants you to deal with, maybe, and so one part of you is trying to get in touch, to get you to look at the problem. But you don't want to, so you run from it, but you can't get away."

"So what do I do?" Mike asked.