CHAPTER 9
“Thomas, you have saved the day!” Nell said, giving me another fierce hug as we sailed down in a spiraling orbit toward Counterweight’s surface. She and my cousins had accepted the presence of the bodyguards without a second thought.
“Well done,” Xan admitted. “I’m perfectly happy to add this lovely lady to my dinner party. We shall have a wonderful time.” He bowed to Plet, who looked nervous and wary. My cousin had a reputation with women, and Plet knew it, but he was also no fool. An unwilling partner was an unwelcome one. If she had shown interest, he might have pursued her. As it was, he would not even exude innuendo in her direction, not that she trusted his reticence. Knowing Xan, I didn’t blame her. He had only left his three current inamoratas at home because one of them had to return to her job as chief broadcaster on one of Taino’s popular news networks, and the others had to return to their master’s degree studies. Two of the others had come along, though they had been forced to remain aboard the Jaunter during this excursion.
Nell eyed Lieutenant Dorr Stover, who was to be her second throughout the jungle expedition. Since the guards were to wear mufti, she had insisted he don riding clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. He looked awkward in both.
“You’re sure you can ride an elephant?” she asked.
“I’ll hang on as best I can, my lady,” he promised.
“Hmph,” Nell snorted, clearly unconvinced. “We’ll see.”
Jil took the offer of an escort better than most of the others. After all, she had flown with my crew all the way to the Uctu Autocracy and back. During that time, she had struck up a friendship with Oskelev, the pilot of the Rodrigo and the finest helmsWichu in the Imperium. Oskelev had on her finest off-duty harness. I knew that hidden within her thick white fur was an analog-powered arsenal. I need fear nothing for the safety of Jil or the others in her coterie. Besides Sinim, Jil had brought along a naturalist from Taino’s top wildlife preserve, which occupied an entire small continent at the equator; a musical trio, and a reflexologist. They wore beach attire. Quite some persuasion had been required in order for her to bring them to the surface with her. The rest of my cousins had security personnel from the Jaunter’s crew as their seconds. I could tell that Nalney’s escort was going to have to keep track of all his many garments and accessories on the go. He was absentminded about property to the point of absurdity, capable of returning home wrapped in a towel because he had forgotten where he had placed his outerwear when he went swimming. His pocket secretary was programmed to remind him whenever he put something down. He was clad in his favorite emerald green.
My party of three was dressed for hot weather. Contact had been opened over secure channels with Dr. Derrida, changing frequencies again and again whenever a breach was detected. She informed Parsons that she and Proton Zang would meet me in the complex of whistling sandstone caves complex three hundred kilometers south of the main city, Nerk. Redius wore a desert robe that he had obtained during our sojourn to the Autocracy and looked suitably mysterious with the hood pulled almost down to his short, blunt muzzle. I wore light, loose-fitting stone-gray clothes of natural fabric that provided ease of movement, and a broadbrimmed hat. Because my mission was unofficial in nature, I had to suggest to my relatives that I was looking for inspiration among the remains of humanity’s ancient history on Counterweight. My promised pub crawl and other activities would follow, once I had gained sufficient enlightenment. In a way, that part was true. I would return to the ship knowing what it was like to meet a Zang. Madame Deirdre wore thin, moss-green leggings under a knee-length caftan. Her long silver hair was knotted up on the top of her head underneath a wide sun hat.
“I have a list of some of the most interesting ruins,” I said. “I have arranged for a guide to take us around to some of the best, including the Temple of Sport, the Government Labyrinth, the Corporate Citadels, a number of enclosed marketplaces, and a few castles. We’ll end at a magnificent wilderness site that I long to see. All of those ought to inform my understanding of my ancestors and provide marvelous material for new performances. And I look forward to seeing what inspiration Madame Deirdre will gain from the same places. I anticipate that they will have little in common but the source, but that is the joy of interpretation. To each one’s own.”
Deirdre’s eyes shone. “I can’t tell you how delighted I am!” she gushed. “I couldn’t have afforded a trip to Counterweight on my own. The grandchildren are going to be so excited! I have to find them something special as mementos.”
“We shall,” I promised her, “if I have to commission something from a local craftsman to make them.”
“Stand up, please, my lord.” I rose to my feet and held my arms out from my sides so Lieutenant Plet could scan me. She took her duties seriously. She checked with each of the guards one at a time to ensure that no one was carrying any devices that could be detected or corrupted by Kail transmissions. Nearly all my relatives complained about the lack of cameras and other recording devices with which to take pictures or videos of our sojourn that could be uploaded to the Infogrid, but as I pointed out, Infogrid booths and freelance photographers abounded across the planet. They would not lack appropriate documentation for bragging rights among our relatives who had not made the journey. And, no limits had been placed upon souvenirs they might choose to bring back with them. Parsons had also provided us with mechanical cameras that made passive images, which would have to do.
“Many of the merchants below make their living selling digitavids of the sights,” he had pointed out. “It would be courteous to peruse their offerings and enrich the locals.”
“Well, we can afford it,” Nalney had said, heartily. “Why not? As long as I can get my picture taken in the giant waterfall up in the Fanbrel Mountains, I’ll be happy. It’ll make Nole as green as an emerald that he didn’t come, too.”
“If you don’t lose the pictures on the way home,” Xan said, with a mischievous grin.
“I won’t! Not with this responsible fellow to look after me!” Nalney tapped his security guard in the chest with the back of his hand.
I smiled to myself, knowing that his brother could not be too far behind us, and might even have drawn ahead. I would keep my promise to Nole in any case, but it was rather fun to know something that no one else did. On the other hand, Parsons probably had a trace on Nole’s new ship and could tell me where it was to the microparsec. In fact, I would have wagered a large portion of my next quarter’s income that he had seen it, explored it, and installed listening devices throughout. I glanced toward the rear of the shuttle, where Parsons sat alone, black-clad and black-haired, monolithic, like an obsidian statue of a benevolent deity watching over us. His dark eyes met mine for a brief instant, then shifted a few degrees upward, disconnecting from my gaze. The man was uncanny. It felt almost as though he had switched off and become inert like the statue of my fancy.
Nell stared dreamily out of the port at the planet, which grew nearer and nearer with every pass. Eight continents, two large and the rest small, were arrayed in a rough pattern that approximated an infinity symbol set in an ascending angle that wrapped from well below the equator to well above. The rest of the planet was winking blue ocean studded with green and brown archipelagoes, and topped and tailed by white ice caps that stretched out 15 degrees from each pole. Glaciers straddled the heights on the most northern and southern reaches of the continents. We would be landing on the third-largest continent, which featured active volcanoes, vast jungles and the longest river on Counterweight.
“It’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “I wonder how much like Earth it is.”
“We’ll have to take our ancestors’ word for it,” Xan said. He leaned toward us confidentially. “Some people say this is Earth itself, but terraformed after a cataclysm of some kind.”
“If this was Earth, wouldn’t they have found a billion tons of artifacts?” Nalney said, scornfully. “I’ve heard too many tales of the plastic continent in the Ocean of Serenity and the Cities of Rust.”
“It probably is Earth,” Jil said, with a toss of her magnificent waves of caramel-toned hair. “I would like to think so. All those artifacts were probably sold to tourists and museums thousands of years ago! Otherwise, it’s just pure carelessness that our ancestors mislaid our homeworld like that. If you ask me, they only want us to think it’s somewhere else so we won’t flock here like vultures and ruin the place.”
“It’s too hard to get to,” Rillion said, yawning. His long red hair was braided into a queue under his sun hat. “Actually, you make a good case, Jil. Thomas, doesn’t your father say that his brother lives on Earth?”
“Uncle Laurence?” I asked. I laughed, perhaps a little too loudly. Nell joined me. “He loves to travel. Perhaps he said once that he was looking for Earth, and Father likes to keep up the joke.”
“That’s it, surely,” Rillion said, looking ashamed of himself. I was defensive about my father’s mental fragility, and the others usually refrained from making comments that would point at it. “If you find Uncle Laurence here, be sure and introduce us.”
“I certainly will,” I said. After all, this lovely blue world was as good a place for him to be. I reached for my viewpad to send him a message, then remembered that it was back in my cabin. Ah, well, there were public portals I could use on the surface. “What if it is Earth, after all?”
The idea began to percolate through my mind. Before I knew it, I was starting to believe it. It resembled the ancient three-dee images that had survived from the ancient times. If Earth had not been destroyed in the cataclysm that drove humankind into space, it might look like this now. History had become such a muddle in the last ten millennia. What, after all, was the truth?
“Look out, all!” Xan called, bracing himself against the port to watch. “We’re landing!”
We all cheered as the shuttle hissed onto its landing strip.
Parsons left the ship unobtrusively while officials hustled the young nobles and their escorts into the VIP area of Customs and Immigration. There had been a few small complaints about the lack of personal technology, but there was simply no need for any. Their identities were easily verified through biometric matching and DNA scan. Payments for purchases would be carried out in the same way. Plet was fully briefed on every process that any of the Imperium family might need while on Counterweight.
From a pocket in the back of his tunic, he shook out a bright green caftan and slipped it on. The massive hood concealed his face from onlookers, though the fabric was woven so he had perfect visibility through it in all directions. The thread also distorted biometric scanners. No one would recognize him, nor, he reflected as he left the building by a side door and slipped out into the street and joined the brightly-clad mass on the move under the warm summer sun, notice him at all.