The Summer Thieves Read online

  Piloting the skysled with long-established competence, Johrun guided them successfully to Lake Akinmusire. From the shoreline first encountered, no other shore could be seen, so broad were the pearlescent waters. The craft sped out over the mild waves. Soon it reached an expansive island: Faybo. In the middle of Faybo occurred another lake: Villet. And in that lake was the island known as Nesiotium Neomeniarum.

  “On an island in a lake on an island in a lake on a moon of a moon. A songwriter could have a field day with this situation!”

  Lutramella brought up a shaped-light enactment of a singer serenading an audience. Her lyrics chronicled this very scenario.

  “Lina Lool, performing ‘My Heart is an Island with a Lake on the Lake of Your Island Heart.’”

  The Bricker mansion occupied the center of a large landscaped clearing. The structure exhibited a fashionable minimalism, consisting of severe aluminum and glass boxes cantilevered out from a central mass that appeared to be a tumbled mass of unpolished boulders, but which resolved itself into a series of grottoes.

  Johrun set the skysled down on an appointed pad. Unsure of where they would be heading from here, they had taken their luggage with them. Johrun now activated the sled’s security to protect their meager possessions.

  A human receptionist awaited, an elderly man with a seamed face and an enormous rick of white hair. Johrun had seldom seen anyone displaying such obvious traits of aging, and the look seemed something of an affectation to him, a flouting of convention. The man was busy with some sort of construction toy of blocks and rods and connectors, but put it aside to help them.

  “Yes, yes, you’re to see Calleia Suttles. I’ve sent the path-marks to your vambrace.”

  Johrun waited until they were around a turn and out of earshot to comment. “Obviously a form of charity employment. Give the decrepit codger a simple job to make him feel useful.”

  “That was Lubero Varadkar himself, or one of his clones. He maintains an army of thirty thousand, so the chances of encountering him personally wherever you go in the Quinary are not as astronomical as you might imagine. Especially if you visit a Bricker facility.”

  Past abstract artworks and glossy plants in large ceramic pots. The high-up room housing the inquestorial mesh system proved to be bare of anything but a chair and the probe device, the latter seemingly nothing more than a simple opaque homeostatic tank with a hinged lid.

  Calleia Suttles loomed over the visitors at two-point-five meters tall, but certainly weighed less than Johrun. In a loose smock and leggings, patterned in orange splotches on a black background, the willowy, wide-eyed, pale-faced technician resembled one of the serpentine creatures said to lurk right here in Lake Villet.

  “Please take your seat, Vir Corvivios.”

  Johrun was strapped down in the chair, arms and legs and torso. The technician’s slim, very long fingers applied grey paste from a canister to Johrun’s hair and the back of his neck. The concoction smelled not unpleasantly of exotic spices and unidentifiable organic essences. Without further ado, Suttles raised the lid of the tank. From it surged a wet gelatinous black hairy mass, all curling tendrils and no body, like some ensorcelled wig. It swarmed up Johrun’s back like a gecko up a wall and enwrapped all its fibrous self around his head and face. Johrun managed to strain against his bonds and give out a muffled “Glimph!” before he sagged back and went quiet. His chest seemed to register no breaths.

  Lutramella moved to go to Johrun’s rescue, but yielded to calm restraint from Suttles.

  “There is no danger. The engineering of the Pollys is impeccable. From a creature related to the ultra-dangerous phagoplasms of Irion, they have crafted a simple ‘eater’ of âmago. The mesh resonates psychically with the subject’s numinous qualities, and transmits the results to my vambrace. Now, let me see what question I am to ask . . . Ah, yes. ‘Johrun Corvivios, were you a participant and witness of the deed transfer of the planet Verano from Honko Drowne to the Soldevere and the Corvivios clans?’ We should see the telemetry in just a moment . . . Yes, all done!”

  Suttles took a generous dollop of paste from her can and dumped it as a reward and lure in the tank. The creature quickly retracted all its parts into a compact nucleus and scampered back to its habitat. Suttles closed and locked the lid. She freed Johrun from his straps.

  Johrun looked dazed but unharmed. “That was . . . That was uncanny. I seemed to travel up and down the timestream in search of lost knowledge. However long that took, it seemed an eternity.”

  “You may clean up in the room right next door. I will process the raw results into my official report and send it to your vambrace. There is no need to return here. Goodbye, and good luck.”

  His face and hair and neck freshly washed and dried, Johrun exited the lavatory. The expression on Lutramella’s face told all, but she let him read the report.

  “Subject disseminates no âmago traces consistent with primary credibility regarding the formal topic, although strong secondary echoes of affiliation to those with primary knowledge do register. His testimony thus fails to resolve the central dispute . . .”

  Neither Johrun nor Lutramella said anything until they were back in the skysled and returning to the Bisko spaceport. Johrun spoke first.

  “Where does this leave us, Lu? I can see no fresh avenue.”

  “No? I do. Our only hope.”

  “And that is?”

  “We need to find Honko Drowne.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The various lodgings clustered around the spaceport in Quadrant Ninety-five Hundred on Bodenshire ranged the gamut from luxurious to louche. Gauging their funds, the estimated length of their stay, and their tolerance for noisy midnight altercations or drinking parties in adjacent rooms, Johrun settled on an establishment called Botofogo’s Chambers of Amenities. The hostel’s motto—”The most gracious and pampering accommodations for their price in the entire Laniakea Supercluster”—made an extravagant claim of which the actual rooms fell rather short. But Vir Raymonde Botofogo himself, a heavily muscled and outrageously mustachioed fellow with the air of an ex-brawler, proved to be an honest innkeeper who could maintain peace and quiet and get fresh towels not much later than two hours after they were requested. He also ran the small seedy estaminet next door, where Johrun and Lutramella could take their meals at a discount, given their tenure at the Chambers. (Although after two weeks, the specialties of the place, including capercaillie pie with a side of mashed maca-oca, began to pall.)

  But since dry, safe, cheap quarters with a mattress of sufficient thickness to shield backbone from the bed’s armatures was all Johrun wanted while engaged in his quest, he was quite content with his choice.

  Johrun and Lutramella had returned from the Brickers’ outpost on the moonmoon to their original point of entry on Bodenshire for three simple reasons: lodgings on the exclusive satellite Bisko would have been too expensive; any location was as good as any other for their purposes; and they had a glancing acquaintance with the spot where Braulio had deposited them, a chance familiarity that seemed to lend the place an irrational tinge of home, especially in comparison to any other unknown spot on the enormous planet. (And at the back of his mind, Johrun always harbored a dim hope that maybe Minka would have a change of heart and return for him, and where else would she look but here?)

  And so from Whetstone the ninth moon they had wended their slow way with other commuters and tourists and voyageurs and couriers and business types past all the partnered eight moons until they had set foot again on Bodenshire. But they had used the tedious journey to best effect, as they began to study up on Honko Drowne.

  At the start of their investigations, en route to Bodenshire and then once settled there, Johrun experienced a queer new feeling of being a stranger to his own family history. The name of Honko Drowne had been a byword among the Corvivios and Soldevere clans for Johrun’s entire life. Wasn’t there even a monument to the man? And the one anecdote about how Xul and Brayall had wrested owne
rship of Verano away from Drowne was well-polished from many tellings. A simple game of chance where Drowne had gambled his planet and lost. But all the rest of that man’s history—both contemporaneous with the youths of Xul and Brayall and afterwards—had been a locked closet to Johrun, a repository of knowledge in which he had never thought to rummage. Now he marvelled at his old incuriosity, and felt somewhat ashamed. He said as much to Lutramella.

  “It’s never too late to mend our ways and improve ourselves, Joh.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You always know the right thing to do.”

  Lutramella chitter-hissed her denial. “Not so! It’s only that the life of an indentured splice is simpler than that of a free sapient—as I’m just beginning to learn. And so with fewer choices possible, the correct action is often more clearly displayed and selected.”

  “I’d like to attain that simplicity.”

  “And I’d like to attain a sense of the human multitude of pathways.”

  “Then we’ll teach each other.”

  “As we always have!”

  In the matter of Honko Drowne’s vitagraph, their learning moved in parallel. And it brought unwelcome, and even life-upsetting revelations.

  Over one hundred and fifty years ago, three bold lads who had grown up together on the world of Hodak—Honko Drowne, Xul Corvivios, Brayall Soldevere—had formed a surveying and prospecting concern: Green Hills Unlimited. Their massed savings had been just enough to purchase and outfit three small patched-up second-hand braneships. The Bumming Around (Drowne), the Cast a Wide Net (Corvivios) and the Be Prepared! (Soldevere). Off they had flashed from Hodak to three scattered points of the galactic compass, with a vow to rendezvous back on Hodak in a year’s time and pool their finds and cash out their conquests in life-changing riches.

  Thanks to long-ago Harvester interventions, so thick with fine lovely worlds was the galaxy that despite millennia of human exploration and colonization there remained many untapped planets—although nowadays one had to go farther and farther afield to find the best. And by common practice, all it took to claim an entire uninhabited world for one’s own was to land on it and register its coordinates with the Brickers.

  Honko Drowne’s daring resolution to probe the tricky crowded stellar neighborhoods of the M68 globular cluster paid off well.

  Back on Hodak, the three foragers disclosed their finds.

  Xul Corvivios had discovered an abandoned congeries of Lagrange-point habitats in the Corsino system. They were leaking atmosphere and their vegetation had run wild.

  Brayall Soldevere returned with title to a very small ring-world at whose center hung a strange artificial star. But the orbit of the ringworld was decaying, irreparable by current technics, and it was fit only for quick salvage.

  And Honko Drowne, of course, had come upon Verano.

  Exulting, the trio calculated that the three properties combined and sold would give each of them a nice payout, with Drowne’s input constituting the richest part. But such inequality of contributions meant nothing among good friends. To celebrate, they paid a visit to the pleasure world known as Nil Sequelae.

  The next thing Honko Drowne knew, he was awakening on Soldevere’s doomed ringworld. He managed to escape on the Bumming Around just before the construct grazed its primary and began to violently disintegrate.

  Once his Indranet connection was reestablished upon his return to civilization, he discovered two things.

  He had apparently deeded over Verano to his partners exclusively, renouncing all his shares in the world, although he had no memory of doing so.

  And he was a wanted criminal, accused of a campaign of murder, theft, and moral turpitude on Nil Sequelae. Journalistic accounts, already eagerly viewed across the Quinary by billions, painted a vivid portrait of his mad depredations, complete with recorded scenes of vault-breaking, kidnapping, wild skysled chases that endangered innocent bystanders, and the unprovoked abuse of harmless splices.

  Even as he learned of his new infamy, Honko’s ship began to register pings from a variety of law enforcement vessels eager to have a word with him. Realizing he could never defend himself against such an elaborately contrived misrepresentation and frameup, he fled. His mind and soul wrenched by this betrayal, Honko Drowne vowed to become what he had been libeled as. He embarked on a life of interplanetary crime, soon aided by a crew of allied malcontents.

  At this point in their researches, which had amassed and collated many facts from both primary and secondary sources which had never heretofore been assimilated into a gestalt, Johrun looked up from Lu’s vambrace and into the splice’s sympathetic eyes with an ocean of sick feeling in his gut.

  “Grandpa Xul, Grandpa Brayall—is it possible they cheated Drowne of his earned wealth? Is all our family history built on this horrific crime? Did they steal our summer world from its rightful owner?”

  Lutramella’s sober voice and expression confirmed Johrun’s own worst fears. “Although these ancient accounts never make such a claim, we can read between the lines. It does appear as if your ancestor and Minka’s finagled the deed away from a man temporarily not in possession of his right mind, due to drugs or other impositions, and then placed him in such a fix that he could never protest.”

  Johrun began softly to weep. He could only picture the shining, noble faces of his family as they climbed aboard the Against the Whelm on that day when his life came crashing to pieces. How to reconcile his lifelong love and admiration of his people with these new horrors? Did there remain anything to his legacy that wasn’t tainted?

  Eventually Johrun regained his equilibrium.

  “Forgive my weakness, Lu. It’s just—”

  “You need not explain. I understand completely.”

  Johrun realized that only by speaking aloud his new sad determination would it register as reality. “The only correct course of action is to return Verano to Drowne. Abandon all our stake in the planet. Let him assert his claim against the mysterious Redhook Combine, without interference from us.”

  “That might not be possible. He is still an object of fraught pursuit in the Quinary. The man responsible for the Starvation Blockade of Scharpling, the Harrowing of Bergen V, the Great Swampworld Scam of Fifteen-ought-nine, and the Impossible Museum Vanishment of Hailstone City might not be well received in the placid examination room at Nesiotium Neomeniarum.”

  “But surely a readout of Drowne’s âmago would clarify everything.”

  “Yes. But getting him to cooperate and bringing him here is a dicey enterprise, even if the promised outcome is to his benefit. Title to a wonderful planet would mean nothing to someone imprisoned in the Smalls’ Hell Matrix. And he is apparently quite content in his retirement.”

  In his most recent years, as he had aged out of high-risk and high-energy plundering, Honko Drowne had taken his booty and established himself on the faraway world of Itaska, becoming the “Red Lion of the Spires” and the chief of the local natives surrounding the Spires, who were known as the Arnapkapfaaluk. With such a sedentary, well-advertised lifestyle, it might have seemed an easy matter for the Quinary authorities to roust out Drowne and return him to justice. But one fact intervened. Drowne had chosen his hideout wisely.

  Itaska was a Supressor World.

  The long-gone Harvesters had embedded engines and nanomites in the planet’s very bones which rendered all higher technics useless. Subject to realtime quantum interventions by omnipresent smart agents, all the vaunted tools and weapons of modern civilization and warfare, from gunpowder on up, simply refused to function on Itaska. With one exception. There was an invisible high-technology zone, basically a kilometer-wide column of atmosphere from the ground to orbit, in which a braneship might continue to function, landing and taking off at will. That single zone existed over one thousand kilometers away from the Spires.

  Taking Drowne by force from his redoubt would have involved waging an overland campaign of imported cavalry or footsoldiers armed with edged weapons
against fierce and basically innocent tribesmen who regarded Drowne as their hetman. This was not a bloody excursion the Quinary could justify. Thus, so long as Drowne restricted himself to Itaska, they would leave him alone.

  Johrun acknowledged Lutramella’s logic. “Drowne is happy where he is. Dragging him away by coercion seems impossible. Nonetheless, it’s now my moral duty to follow through. I feel that if I could only talk to him and convey my shame and sorrow at how my family cheated him, he might consent to make at least a flying visit here to Bodenshire to resolve the matter. Perhaps he could get in and out fast, before his presence was known to the authorities. He must have methods of dissimulation. And then, with Verano officially registered in his name, maybe—well, maybe I could return as a kind of caretaker. It seems the best possible outcome.” Johrun paused for a moment, with a new hope suddenly gleaming in his eyes. “Although perhaps under the meshes, Drowne might reveal that the original deed transaction was legitimate! Maybe Verano really does belong to the Corvivios and Soldevere clans . . .”

  Lutramella rolled her eyes. “And there’s a slim chance I am the Lost Princess of Golden Perdolomo. Still, if you desire to carry this scheme to a conclusion, despite knowing what you do, and if you admit to yourself that all the future you once assumed will probably be cast aside by your actions, then I am with you.”

  Johrun hugged the wiry splice. “Wonderful! Truth be told, I never would have wanted to go on without you, Lu! Now, since we can’t communicate with Drowne through the Indranet, we’ll have to voyage there and present ourselves humbly and hope for the best. We haven’t money enough to buy a ship, so we’ll have to seek some enterprising hireling to ferry us there— and possibly back, if Drowne declines our offer to return. Even such a limited contract will take most of our remaining cash. But if we can find someone daring and adventurous enough—a kind of freebooter or corsair for whom bragging rights about such a trip would matter—then we could do it.”