Whipping Star Read online

  “I don’t like what I think you’re thinking,” McKie said.

  “That’s the most convoluted statement I’ve ever heard you make,” Tuluk said. “Its meaning is clear enough, however. You believe I’m considering the possibility of time travel or . . .”

  “Impossible!” McKie snapped.

  “I’ve been engaged in a most interesting mathematical analysis of this problem,” Tuluk said.

  “Number games aren’t going to help us.”

  “Your behavior is most un-McKie,” Tuluk said. “Irrational. Therefore, I’ll try not to burden your mind with too much of my symbolic construction. It is, however, more than a game for . . .”

  “Time travel,” McKie said. “Nonsense!”

  “Our habitual forms of perception tend to interfere with the thinking process required for analysis of this problem,” Tuluk said. “Thus, I discard these modes of thought.”

  “Such as?”

  “If we examine the series relationships, what do we have? We have a number of point-dimensions in space. Abnethe occupies a position on a specific planet, as does the Caleban. We are given the actuality of contact between the two points, a series of events.”

  “So?”

  “We must assume a pattern to these point-contacts.”

  “Why? They could be random examp—”

  “Two specific planets whose movements describe coherent patterns in space. A pattern, a rhythm. Otherwise, Abnethe and her crew would be attacking with more frequency. We are confronted by a system which defies conventional analysis. It had temporal rhythm translatable into point-series rhythm. It is spatial and temporal.”

  McKie felt the attraction of Tuluk’s argument as a force lifting his mind out of a cloud. “Some form of reflection, maybe?” he asked. “It doesn’t have to be time trav—”

  “This is not a fugue!” Tuluk objected. “A simple quadratic equation achieves no elliptical functions here. Ergo we are dealing with linear relationships.”

  “Lines,” McKie whispered. “Connectives.”

  “Eh? Oh, yes. Linear relationships which describe moving surfaces across some form or forms of dimension. We cannot be sure of the Caleban’s dimensional outlook, but our own is another matter.”

  McKie pursed his lips. Tuluk had moved into an extremely thin air of abstractions, but there was an inescapable elegance to the Wreave’s argument.

  “We can treat all forms of space as quantities determined by other quantities,” Tuluk said. “We have methods for dealing with such forms when we wish to solve for unknowns.”

  “Ahhh,” McKie murmured. “N-dimension points.”

  “Precisely. We first consider our data as a series of measurements which define the space between such points.”

  McKie nodded. “A classic n-fold extended aggregate.”

  “Now you begin to sound like the McKie familiar to me. An aggregate of n dimensions, to be sure. And what is time in such a problem? Time we know to be an aggregate of one dimension. But we are given, you’ll recall, a number of point-dimensions in space and time.”

  McKie whistled soundlessly, admiring the Wreave’s logic, then, “We either have one continuous variable in the problem or n continuous variables. Beautiful!”

  “Just so. And by reduction through the infinity calculus, we discover we are dealing with two systems containing n-body properties.”

  “That’s what you found?”

  “That’s what I found. It can only follow that the point-contacts of our problem have their separate existence within different frameworks of time. Ergo, Abnethe occupies another dimension in time from that of the Beachball. Inescapable conclusion.”

  “We may not be dealing with time travel phenomena in the classic fictional sense,” McKie said.

  “These subtle differences the Caleban sees,” McKie said. “These connectives, these threads . . .”

  “Spiderwebs embedded in many universes,” Tuluk said. “Perhaps. Let’s assume individual lives spin these web threads . . .”

  “Movements of matter undoubtedly spin them, too.”

  “Agreed. And they cross. They unite. They intersect. They combine in mysterious ways. They become tangled. Some of the web threads are stronger than others. I have experienced this entanglement, you know, when I placed the call which saved your life. I can imagine some of these threads being rewoven, combined, aligned—what have you—to re-create conditions of long past times in our dimensions. Might be a relatively simple problem for a Caleban. The Caleban might not even understand the recreation the way we do.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  “What would it take?” Tuluk mused. “A certain poignancy of experience, perhaps; something which imparts sufficient strength to the lines, threads, webs of the past that they can be picked up, manipulated to reproduce the original setting and its contents.”

  “We’re just tossing words back and forth,” McKie objected. “How could you reweave an entire planet or the space around . . .”

  “Why not? What do we know of the powers involved? To a crawling insect, three of your strides may be a day’s journey.”

  McKie felt himself being convinced in spite of native caution. “It is true,” he agreed, “that the Caleban S’eye gives us the power to walk across light-years.”

  “Such a common exploit that we no longer even wonder at the enormous energies this must require. Think what such a journey would mean to our hypothetical insect! And we may be getting the merest glimpse of Caleban powers.”

  “We should never have accepted the S’eye,” McKie said. “We had perfectly adequate FTL ships and metabolic suspension. We should’ve told the Calebans to go jump in their collective connectives!”

  “And deny ourselves real-time control of our universe? Not on your life, McKie. What we should have done was test the gift first. We should have probed for dangers. We were too bedazzled by it, though.”

  McKie lifted his left hand to scratch his eyebrow, felt a prickling of danger. It rushed up his spine, exploded in a blow against his arm. He felt pain there; something bit through to the bone. Despite the shock, he whirled, saw a Palenki arm upraised with a glittering blade. The arm came through a narrow vortal tube. Visible through the opening were a Palenki turtle head, beside it, the right side of a Pan Spechi face—purple scar on the forehead, one faceted emerald eye.

  For a suspended moment McKie saw the blade begin its descent toward his face, knew it was going to strike before his shocked muscles could respond. He felt metal touch his forehead, saw the orange glow of a raygen beam stab past his face.

  McKie stood frozen, locked in stillness. It was a tableau. He saw surprise on the Pan Spechi face, saw a severed Palenki arm begin its tumble to the floor still clutching a shattered metal remnant. McKie’s heart was pounding as though he had been running for an hour. He felt hot wetness spread across his left temple. It ran down his cheek, along his jaw, into his collar. His arm throbbed, and he saw blood dripping from his fingertips.

  The S’eye jumpdoor had winked out of existence.

  Someone was beside him then, pressing a compress against his head where the metal had touched . . .

  Touched?

  Once more he had prepared himself for sudden death at a Palenki’s hand, a descending blade. . . .

  Tuluk, he saw, was bending to retrieve the metal remnant.

  “That’s another nick of time I’ve escaped,” McKie said.

  Surprisingly, there was no tremor in his voice.

  Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments founded in wishful thinking.

  —from The Wreave Commentary

  It was midafternoon on Central before Tuluk sent for McKie to return to the lab. Two squads of enforcers accompanied McKie. There were enforcers all around in augmented force. They watched the air, the walls, the floors. They watched each other and the space around their alternate numbers. Every sentient carried a raygen at the ready.

  McKie, having spent t
wo hours with Hanaman and five of her aides in Legal, was ready for down-to-dirt facts. Legal was moving to search every Abnethe property, to seize every record they could find—but it was all off there somewhere in the rarefied atmosphere of symbols. Perhaps something would come of it, though. They had a telicourt order, reproduced thousands of times, giving the Bureau’s enforcement arm sufficient authority for search on most worlds outside the Gowachin pale. Gowachin officials were moving in their own way to cooperate—exonerating sufficient enforcers, clearing the names of appropriate police agencies.

  Crime-One police on Central and elsewhere were assisting. They had provided enforcers, opened files normally not privileged to BuSab, temporarily linked their identification and modus computers to BuSab’s core.

  It was action, of course, but it struck McKie as too circuitous, too abstract. They needed another kind of line to Abnethe, something connected to her which could be reeled in despite any of her attempts to escape.

  He felt now that he lived in a flushed-out spirit.

  Nooses, blades, gnashing jumpdoors—there was no mercy in the conflict which engaged them.

  Nothing he did slowed the dark hurricane that hurtled toward the sentient universe. His nerves punished him with sensations of rough, grasping inadequacy. The universe returned a glassy stare, full of his own fatigue. The Caleban’s words haunted him—self-energy . . . seeing moves . . . I am S’eye!

  Eight enforcers had crowded into the small lab with Tuluk. They were being very self-effacing, apologetic—evidence that Tuluk had protested in that bitingly sarcastic way the Wreave had.

  Tuluk glanced up at McKie’s entrance, returned to examination of a metal sliver held in stasis by a subtron field beneath a bank of multicolored lights on his bench.

  “Fascinating stuff, this steel,” he said, lowering his head to permit one of his shorter and more delicate mandibular extensors to get a better grip on a probe with which he was tapping the metal.

  “So it’s steel,” McKie said, watching the operation.

  Each time Tuluk tapped the metal, it gave off a shimmering spray of purple sparks. They reminded McKie of something just at the edge of memory. He couldn’t quite place the association. A shower of sparks. He shook his head.

  “There’s a chart down the bench,” Tuluk said. “You might have a look at it while I finish here.”

  McKie glanced to his right, saw an oblong of chalf paper with writing on it. He moved the necessary two steps to reach the paper, picked it up, studied it. The writing was in Tuluk’s neat script.

  Substance: steel, an iron-base alloy. Sample contains small amts manganese, carbon, sulfur, phosphorus, and silicon, some nickel, zirconium, and tungsten with admixture chromium, molybdenum, and vanadium.

  Source comparison: matches Second-Age steel used by human political subunit Japan in making of swords for Samurai Revival.

  Tempering: sample hard-quenched on cutting edge only; back of sword remains soft.

  Estimated length of original artifact: 1.01 meters.

  Handle: linen cord wrapped over bone and lacquered. (See lacquer, bone, and cord analyses: attached.)

  McKie glanced at the attached sheet: “Bone from a sea mammal’s tooth, reworked after use on some other artifact, nature unknown but containing bronze.”

  The linen cord’s analysis was interesting. It was of relatively recent manufacture, and it displayed the same sub-molecular characteristics as the earlier samples of rawhide.

  The lacquer was even more interesting. It was based in an evaporative solvent which was identified as a coal-tar derivative, but the purified sap was from an ancient Coccus lacca insect extinct for millennia.

  “You get to the part about the lacquer yet?” Tuluk asked, glancing up and twisting his face slit aside to look at McKie.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of my theory now?”

  “I’ll believe anything that works,” McKie growled.

  “How are your wounds?” Tuluk asked, returning to his examination of the metal.

  “I’ll recover.” McKie touched the omniflesh patch at his temple. “What’s that you’re doing now?”

  “This material was fashioned by hammering,” Tuluk said, not looking up. “I’m reconstructing the pattern of the blows which shaped it.” He shut off the stasis field, caught the metal deftly in an extended mandible.

  “Why?”

  Tuluk tossed the metal onto the bench, racked the probe, faced McKie.

  “Manufacture of swords such as this was a jealously guarded craft,” he said. “It was handed down in families, father to son, for centuries. The irregularity of the hammer blows used by each artisan followed characteristic patterns to an extent that the maker can be identified without question by sampling that pattern. Collectors developed the method to verify authenticity. It’s as definite as an eye print, more positive than any skin-print anomaly.”

  “So what did you find out?”

  “I ran the test twice,” Tuluk said, “to be certain. Despite the fact that cell revivification tests on lacquer and cord attachments show this sword to have been manufactured no more than eighty years ago, the steel was fashioned by an artisan dead more thousands of years than I care to contemplate. His name was Kanemura, and I can give you the index referents to verify this. There’s no doubt who made that sword.”

  The interphone above Tuluk’s bench chimed twice, and the face of Hanaman from Legal appeared on it. “Oh, there you are, McKie,” she said, peering past Tuluk.

  “What now?” McKie asked, his mind still dazed by Tuluk’s statement.

  “We’ve managed to get those injunctions,” she said. “They lock up Abnethe’s wealth and production on every sentient world except the Gowachin.”

  “But what about the warrants?” McKie demanded.

  “Of course; those, too,” Hanaman said. “That’s why I’m calling. You asked to be notified immediately.”

  “Are the Gowachin cooperating?”

  “They’ve agreed to declaration of a ConSent emergency in their jurisdiction. That allows all Federation police and BuSab agencies to act there for apprehension of suspects.”

  “Fine,” McKie said. “Now, if you could only tell me when to find her, I think we can pick her up.”

  Hanaman looked from the screen with a puzzled frown. “When?”

  “Yeah,” McKie snarled. “When.”

  If you believe yourself sufficiently hungry, you will eat your own thoughts.

  —Palenki Saying

  The report on the Palenki phylum pattern was waiting for McKie when he returned to Bildoon’s office for their strategy conference. The conference had been scheduled earlier that day and postponed twice. It was almost midnight at Central, but most of the Bureau’s people remained on duty, especially the enforcers. Sta-lert capsules had been issued along with the angeret by the medical staff. The enforcer squad accompanying McKie walked with that edgy abruptness this mixture of chemicals always exacted as payment.

  Bildroon’s chairdog had lifted a footrest and was ripple-massaging the Bureau Chief’s back when McKie entered the office. Opening one jeweled eye, Bildoon said, “We got the report on the Palenki—the shell pattern you holoscanned.” He closed his eye, sighed. “It’s on my desk there.”

  McKie patted a chairdog into place, said, “I’m tired of reading. What’s it say?”

  “Shipsong Phylum,” Bildoon said. “Positive identification. Ahhh, friend—I’m tired, too.”

  “So?” McKie said. He was tempted to signal for a massage from the chairdog. Watching Bildoon made it very attractive. But McKie knew this might put him to sleep. The enforcers moving restlessly around the room must be just as tired as he was. They’d be sure to resent it if he popped off for a nap.

  “We got warrants and picked up the Shipsong Phylum’s leader,” Bildoon said. “It claims every phylum associate is accounted for.”

  “True?”

  “We’re trying to check it, but how can you be sure? The
y keep no written records. It’s just a Palenki’s word, whatever that’s worth.”

  “Sworn by its arm, too, no doubt,” McKie said.

  “Of course.” Bildoon stopped the chairdog massage, sat up. “It’s true that phylum identification patterns can be used illegitimately.”

  “It takes a Palenki three or four weeks to regrow an arm,” McKie said.

  “What’s that signify?”

  “She must have several dozen Palenkis in reserve.”

  “She could have a million of ’em for all we know.”

  “Did this phylum leader resent its pattern being used by an unauthorized Palenki?”

  “Not that we could see.”

  “It was lying,” McKie said.

  “How do you know?”

  “According to the Gowachin jurisdictum, phylum forgery is one of the eight Palenki capital offenses. And the Gowachin should know, because they were assigned to educate the Palenkis in acceptable law when R&R brought those one-armed turtles into the ConSent fold.”

  “Huh!” Bildoon said. “How come Legal didn’t know that? I’ve had them researching this from the beginning.”

  “Privileged legal datum,” McKie said. “Interspecies courtesy and all that. You know how the Gowachin are about individual dignity, privacy, that sort of thing.”

  “You’ll be read out of their court when they find out you spilled this,” Bildoon said.

  “No. They’ll just appoint me prosecutor for the next ten or so capital cases in their jurisdiction. If the prosecutor accepts a case and fails to get a conviction, he’s the one they execute, you know.”

  “And if you decline the cases?”

  “Depends on the case. I could draw anything from a one-to-twenty sentence for some of them.”

  “One-to—you mean standard years?”

  “I don’t mean minutes,” McKie growled.

  “Then why’d you tell me?”

  “I want you to let me break this phylum leader.”

  “Break him? How?”

  “You any idea how important the mystique of the arm is to the Palenki?”