The Summer Thieves Read online

  Declining his help, his father said, to Johrun’s chagrin, “No, sir, you can take off the rest of the day until our departure this evening. The lusty groom needs some idle time to anticipate the marital rigors ahead. Human partners are more demanding than chimeric ones, after all.”

  Grandpa Xul chuckled at the risque jab, and Johrun was perforce made to ponder his father’s admitted dalliances with the more nubile of the splice work force, assignations that had continued intermittently from Landon’s adolescence down to the present day, with Ilona’s tacit consent. Johrun himself had never adopted the habit of using the splices that way. Except for one lone instance, when he had lost his virginity to a young pantherine girl named Hylana who worked as a domestic, he had steered clear of their musky charms. Of course, he and Minka had been enjoying sex with each other since they were both thirteen, a release that Landon, raised alone or in tandem with his rough-and-tumble “cousin” Arne, had not benefited from.

  Johrun wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t exercised any of his very adequate libido on the splices. Perhaps the familiarity of having a splice—Lutramella—as his wetnurse and nanny (again, a status not shared with his father, since Grandma Chirelle had been much more hands-on motherly with her boy than had Ilona with hers) had disinclined Johrun from such practices. But in any case, since that onetime bout with Hylana, Landon had simply assumed that his son Johrun was carrying out the family tradition, and the older man would josh about it now and then.

  Grandpa Xul seconded the dismissal. “Go and finish your packing, boy. If you absolutely want more work, you can ask your mother and grandmother if they need any help closing down the house.”

  By vambrace, Johrun tracked down Grandma Chirelle in her greenhouse, a large attachment on the south wing of the ranch. In truth, the ambiance inside the glass room hardly differed from the clime outside. But here Chirelle safely raised those exotic plants she did not wish to become invasive species on Verano.

  Grandma Chirelle looked up from feeding a wriggling medusa shrub. Her milk-chocolate centenarian’s skin betrayed hardly any wrinkles, giving her a countenance beyond even the youthfulness one normally associated with a top-notch anti-aging regimen. Her wide mouth registered a big welcoming grin.

  “Johy dear! Give me a hug!” Extending her arms wide made batwings of the drapery of her oversized aquamarine spidersilk gown.

  Only Grandma Chirelle called him “Johy.” From anyone else, the nickname would have grated, but from her it conveyed boundless love.

  “Is there anything I can do for you before we leave, Grandma?”

  She put finger to lip. “Let me think . . . Yes, one thing. Move this heavy pot of butter roses out from under the shade of the taliesin tree.”

  Grandma Chirelle had Johrun shift the rose pot’s new vantage a half-dozen times—each spot no different from the others, to his eyes—until he was sweating profusely. Then, finally satisfied, she signalled she needed him no more.

  Ilona Corvivios lurked in her office. Although all her multifarious business for the family was conducted via vambrace and the Indranet, and could be accomplished anywhere, retreat to her office signalled the need for no disturbances—an incontravnable signal, even by her husband.

  Johrun got permission to enter this familiar room via vambrace.

  An extravagantly enormous chamber that featured a life-sized fabbed model of a herple, but colored in a rainbow of non-realistic shades, the big room also displayed in one corner a lab bench at which Johrun’s mother continued the kind of subatomic researches she had been trained in by the Smalls. Emergency suppression and containment mechanisms ringed the island of activity to quash any rogue constructs eager to chew their way through person, house, and planet.

  Ilona slid off a stool at her workbench and crossed the room to greet him. Raising her face shield, she offered one cool cheek for a kiss. Still an inch taller than her son, the woman wore a yellow duster, belted and buckled tight, fashioned of some sort of glistening silicrobe-resistant active material. A transparent smart shield like a welder’s mask had protected her face. The faintly apprehensible smile on her handsome, sharply planed face, delivered upon Johrun’s appearance, was equivalent, he knew, to Grandma Chirelle’s hearty embrace; the maximal response from differing personalities.

  When Johrun had first taken notice of his mother’s somewhat distant nature toward him—mainly by contrast with the warmth exuded by Uncle Arne and Aunt Fallon toward their girl Minka—he had felt confused and sad. Confiding tearfully one day to Lutramella that he felt unwanted by Ilona, he had been heartened by the splice’s simple response.

  “Your mother loves you to the fullness of her own special heart, and no one could love or be loved more than that measure.”

  Accepting his nanny’s analysis, Johrun found that with the supplement of Lutramella’s unstinting warmth and constant attention and encouragement, he and his mother could have a quite fond relationship.

  “Do you want to see my latest trick with the lakecrabs, Johrun?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Ilona conducted him to her workbench. In a sizable terrarium a half-dozen of the native golden ten-limbed crustaceans were secreting not the foundation of one of their normal towers, but rather some kind of broadcasting antenna.

  “I’ve figured out how to turn each colony into a computational engine. The nodes will communicate via their antennae. It should be possible to employ their distributed machine power to hack the futures market for herple meat. Theoretically, we could increase our revenue stream by five percent.”

  Johrun regarded the laboring crabs. Somehow, despite having no features that could convey emotions, they looked morose.

  “But, mother—is this strictly necessary? Aren’t we wealthy enough already? And these crabs, a natural part of the ecosystem— Shouldn’t they be left alone?”

  Ilona regarded her son soberly, as if he too might benefit from nano-manipulation of his cellular functioning. “The dynamical heuristics of the Quinary are ever-shifting, Johrun, and what suffices today might not serve tomorrow. We always have to keep our edge.”

  Johrun knew better than to argue this point. “I suppose.” He paused, then said, “Is there a last-minute task other than subverting the planet’s baseline species that I could help you with? Any customer complaints that need the personal touch perhaps?”

  Schooled in all aspects of the family business, Johrun enjoyed some chores more than others, and he liked dealing with the faraway customers who bought the produce of the ranch. He would imagine their exotic, faroff planets, the kind of lives they led, so different from his own. Often, after business was settled, Johrun would attempt to engage the clients in idle, transmissions-lagged talk about their worlds—really just quotidian stuff that yet seemed alluringly strange. The contemplation of such non-Veranonal lives gave him a whispery sense of the vastness and range of the Quinary.

  Of course, such knowledge could be easily gleaned from the Indranet, which featured countless encyclopedia entries on the half-million settled worlds of the Quinary, as well as colorful documentaries and virtual tours. But in Johrun’s estimation, there was nothing that compared with actual interaction with these far-flung fellow citizens, even at a remove.

  And yet he had declined the offer of a University education or a Grand Tour such as Landon and Arne had once undertaken in search of their mates. Both options had been proposed to him when Minka had upset the applecart of their marriage with her decision to study offworld. But when it finally seemed possible for him to actually set out into the galaxy, he had felt disinclined. His bonds with Verano were too strong. Thoughts of spending even a night or a week away from this bosom of this perfectly welcoming world to which he was spiritually attuned filled him with instant homesickness. He guessed he was by nature, and would always remain, an armchair traveler, eager to dream of foreign lands, but happiest by the hearthside.

  Ilona seemed affronted by his last question. “Complaints about the legendary Corv
ivios herple meat? Not since we discovered the trouble with that bloom at Lake Squill. I never experienced a parasite with such a long latency period before. It even survived passage thru the herple gut. And for it to persist through all the post-slaughter safety protocols! But in the end, I learned a lot from dealing with that plague and the recall. No, all the accounts are up to the minute, all our bills are paid and our receivables indrawn, and our customer relations are fine. You can go get ready for our leavetaking without a worry about any of that.”

  In his room—a palimpsest of the transient concerns of all his ages, from a youthful mineral collection through handmade models of famous braneships to a collaged poster of Pondicherry dream queens, including the pillowy Pinki Luxmeade—Johrun finished the task of packing that had been ongoing for several days. He paid particular care to his wedding garments: jacket and trousers of supple swamp-bamboo fabric from Venex, in seaberry blue, with much silver braid and frogging; white, high-necked shirt of Gilike gauze; and low boots of quagga leather.

  By the time he finished, he was feeling hungry. That simple scant sandwich many hours ago had done its job and retired. Memory of lunch brought back his blaggardly treatment of Lutramella, and he flushed afresh. He would show her solicitous deference during the next week, whenever he should have time from being with Minka.

  Dinner would be waiting for them at Danger Acres tonight. So after sending his luggage to the ship with a lagomorphic house splice named Dowpook, Johrun grabbed only a snack, before joining his assembled family members outdoors at the ship.

  The main family branecraft owned by the Corvivios clan was a lush and sprightly Devilbuster ketch named Against the Whelm. With comfy cabins for a dozen, as well as cubbies for splices and a capacious hold, it easily served all their needs. Little runabouts, such as the Golden Branch that had ferried Landon and Arne in search of mates, constituted other options.

  The sun was dropping faster, painting long mauve shadows across the landscape, and everyone eventually hustled aboard in the usual dithering of leavetaking. Chirelle had forgotten some jewelry, Xul needed to give one last instruction to Arbona, Ilona stood stockstill reading via her vambrace the latest updated figures from the central bourse on Halting State.

  On the ship, Johrun caught up with Lutramella as she turned away from the portion of the ketch devoted to human use and toward the splice cubbies. Those compartments were empty this trip, since the human employees at Danger Acres would attend to the needs of the visitors, and no Sweetmeats retainers were needed.

  Johrun took his old governess by the elbow. “You ride up front this time, Lu. Not only is the trip only four hours, but I want you by my side.”

  Her chimerical face, which Johrun had long thought he knew how to read, betokened neither delight nor injury. “That will be a pleasure, Joh.”

  The festively decorated lounge sported equipment that drove a high-resolution shaped-light diorama. When the normal cabin lights were extinguished, the effect was as if the hull of the ship had gone transparent. At the moment, the wraparound display showed only pretty wallpaper, stock footage from various Quinary worlds. Johrun shivered as a pink ice whale smashed its way through the slushy crust of an ocean on Rana III.

  Claiming seats and drinks, the family finally registered their unanimous appearance. No one made mention of Lu’s presence, as she and Johrun had always been inseparable. Casting his approving eye over his clan, Grandpa Xul commanded their takeoff via vambrace.

  The ship would be following an exo-atmospheric ballistic trajectory, mostly suborbital, under simple fifth-force power. Exiting and entering the brane made no sense for such a short journey. In fact, mappings between the branes of less than ten Gaian AU or so were very tricky and almost impossible, not to mention dangerous. The old human dream of short-hop teleportation remained just that.

  The lounge display shifted to a realtime view. Johrun felt as if he were floating in the middle of the air.

  As the ship climbed, the sky darkened beyond accountability by the sun’s mere setting, and soon the stars of the globular cluster leaped into magnificence. This stratospheric view of the cluster far outshone even the spectacular night sky of Verano as seen from the ground. Capricious lanes of russet dust limned the Simurgh Nebula. Densely packed in a chaotic array, the orange, blue, white, green, yellow, and purple suns of a dozen sizes and color gradations seemed, synesthetically, to emit an actual roar like a conflagration big as the galaxy. Crowding prominence to prominence almost, they beckoned the humans with their unimaginable riches and variety, as if to say, Among us you will find every desire of your hearts.

  Johrun heard a sob and sniffle and turned to see Lutramella in tears that snailed her fur. He realized with a start that this was her first time in even suborbital space.

  “You like it, Lu?”

  “I feel—I feel that I could die now in peace—but that I have so much to live for!”

  Johrun grinned. He patted her paw and fetched her one of the mango-kiwi lhassis she favored.

  The hours necessary to traverse half the planet sped by quickly, and Against the Whelm put down at Danger Acres during that timezone’s late afternoon. While luggage was trucked by the lodge’s human bellhops (jobs at Danger Acres were filled by offworld recruitment, and were considered highly desirable), the two clans that owned Verano—Soldevere and Corvivios—exchanged hearty greetings.

  Uncle Arne and Aunt Fallon, his soon-to-be father- and mother-in-law, a matched pair solid as beer kegs, practically squeezed the breath out of Johrun. Grandpa Brayall and Grandma Fern, somehow seeming as if they were calmly fording a rushing river under pursuit of a herd of angry bellhorns, even while standing still, delivered a more dignified welcome.

  Brayall took Xul one side for a private conference, and Johrun was struck, not for the first time, by the air of oldtime roguery that somehow sprang up instantly between them. Their shared history prior to taking possession of Verano was stuffed with wild deeds and bold assaults on destiny. A legacy not always obvious when each man was sedately catering to whimsical tourists or herding giant snails.

  The immediate reunion over, the families repaired to a private dining room in the grand lodge, whose halls and lobbies and gamerooms thronged with guests. The feast was extravagant, featuring such rarities as roast Drummeran cuckoos and pâté of tundraworm, and Johrun hoped he would not wither under a steady assault of such rich collations during the upcoming week.

  Finally, on the way to retiring for the night, Johrun tracked down Lutramella. Although the splices did not wear vambraces —the Indranet was not open to them, although, Johrun realized, Lu could now legally participate—they were chipped with locators.

  He discovered her in her assigned room, more attic than penthouse.

  “Lu, come sleep in my suite. I’m sure there’s suitable accommodations.”

  She accompanied him without assent or demurral.

  In the room, though, she spoke.

  “I am very sorry I hurt your feelings earlier today, Joh.”

  “And me as well. But all that’s easily forgotten between two old friends, no?”

  “That’s what I had hoped. You do know, Joh, how much I want you to be happy.”

  More than a little drunk and weary, Johrun wanted to bring the conversation to a close. “Of course, of course. Now let’s get our rest.”

  In the morning, after a breakfast buffet of two-score dishes, the two families haunted the landing field where Minka’s ride would soon set down. The University ran a very dependable homegoing service for its students.

  The ship broached the atmosphere with a boom and grew quickly larger. But at some point it became apparent that this was not the regular shuttle from the establishment of Saints Fontessa and Kuno. It was a private pinnace of the Utopian Turtletop class, painted in eye-boggling polychrome fractals.

  Johrun pinged the craft’s transponder and it identified itself as the Bastard of Bungo, the name of the protagonist of a popular picaresque adventure. />
  Down onto the invulnerable glascrete pad the gaudy craft settled. Door open, ramp down—

  Minka appeared. Dressed in a revealing blouse and skirt ensemble of black wispaway fabric that left her midriff bare, she looked flushed, hectic, and disheveled. She traipsed lightly down the ramp as if her entrance were utterly condign, and close behind her lollygagged five other young men and women, wearing foolish hats and hefting half-empty bottles, from which they continued to swig.

  CHAPTER 3

  Attempting to conceal his lingering peeved perplexity, Johrun contemplated his bride-to-be as she sat across from him at the long dinner table, a green cloth river on which the best silver-rimmed red china and palladium flatware that Danger Acres provided seemed to float like pleasure boats. She was chatting gaily with the man on her right, the High Serendip Eustace Tybalt, ranking member of the Diminuendo Aleatorics and the fellow who was to marry them a week from now. Tonight’s banquet was not limited to the family, and in fact included those of the invited wedding guests from across the Quinary who could manage to attend the whole seven days of festivities. (Many others would arrive on the wedding eve.) On Minka’s other side sat Strategos Raymour Honeycombe from Banoff’s World, longstanding patron of Danger Acres, and the sole hunter ever to bag a Crandall’s Gorgon with only his soliton pistol after his ceegee rifle malfunctioned.

  Under the shaped-light cressets that illuminated the hall, tuned to mimic colored flames, Minka looked both alluring and demure, her blonde hair assembled into delicate whorls, her subtly painted lips inviting as an oasis in the desert. Catching Johrun’s fixed inspection of her, she half-turned towards him for a second without interrupting her conversation with the Serendip and flashed Johrun a short wink. Johrun experienced a disconcerting mix of desire and wariness.

  Most of a day had passed since Minka’s disturbing arrival, and whatever agitations she had undergone on the voyage home that had rendered her so slatternly had been remedied. With the aid of the lodge’s superb spa facilities, including a long cleansing purge in the sauna, followed by massage, pedicure, manicure, and all the other technics of the beauticians and nutraceutical wielders, she had reemerged as the radiant and self-possessed young woman who, four years ago, had set out for Loudermilk III.