Mindworlds Read online

  One flash of thought: Willson, wife, children, hopes—and his livelong partner the Other, of the pair the Lyhhrt travel in to keep their sanity, an empty reverberation.

  And another voice called, “Hullo? Hullo?” That was Greisbach, hurrying; she’d been diverted, probably, not killed at least, the enemy hadn’t bothered with her, yet. The Lyhhrt wanted to be moving away quickly, and far, but not to make himself suspect by his absence. He had lost everything and he had nothing to tell her, except that Brezant and his brass and bronze Lyhhrt had made a tentative agreement. He did not even know where Brezant’s ten thousand troops were stationed—some expert had locked that byte deep into Brezant’s mind for him.

  The Lyhhrt set his silver workshell on self-repair and pulled on his rotten beggar’s rags, listening to Greisbach’s heel-clicks on the marble. Knowing that when he left this uneasy moment death was waiting to follow.

  Before Greisbach could begin to comprehend what he told her he had gathered the strange belongings that Lyhhrt carry with them and was pushing them down the cobbled streets in a beggar’s barrow. His mind was blank.

  ONE

  Khagodis, Burning Mountain:

  Hasso Deconstructs an Archive

  “ … and as my first example I offer you in all humility my own dissertation …”

  Hasso son of Evarny leaned harder on the lectern to ease his wasted leg, and faced the hundred-odd other Khagodi men and women squatting on their circled places in the Hall of Learning. The Hall was a beautiful structure in the shape of a Kylkladi bower, and in fact had been erected by Kylkladi to house Galactic Federation’s Interworld Court. But its heat in Khagodis’s equatorial summer had been detested by so many other Interworld jurists that it was finally being given up.

  The students, young and healthy as they were, did not worry about heat in this winter season, when cooler winds hushed through the bower’s leaves; they tilted their heads eagerly toward Hasso’s lectern, the scales glistened over their massive bodies in colors that were bright and fresh, and their heavy tails were tightly wrapped around them.

  Hasso hated public speaking, and in his law studies had carefully avoided any direction that led to open court. But he was determined to make his own young generation as passionate as he was about creating archives. Now he was proud to be standing in this historical setting and, bracing himself for a new and scholarly endeavor, he stood tall, gulped air three times—“but before I build the structure, I will show you the building materials,”—and launched himself into the great work of his life, speaking at times by swallowing air, at time by esp, sometimes with gestures, occasionally rubbing down his scales to keep them from rising in the heat of his passion and devotion:

  On the world Sol Three that they call Earth the people are born one by one, and kept together in a jumble of sexes and ages crowded into only one single dwelling where they can barely breathe, and whatever faults or flaws they have are intensified. Where there is goodness they beget wonders, and where there is evil they grow demons. I thank all of the Saints that I have dear friends among Earthers, but when I think of the Zamos family my head begins to steam! We grow bad eggs enough but we keep them carefully apart from the healthy.

  Two hundred years ago Zamos and his clutch of families became a Corporation specializing in fraud, money laundering, extortion and prostitution, and eventually bought a company called NeoGenics that created specialized human clones for serving on worlds with extreme conditions. They began a special branch of that company to manufacture clones for sexual exploitation and built hundreds of brothels-legal brothels-on seven worlds—and even on this world!

  —a pause to settle the little stir of shame— —and all who worked in them were slaves! And there were those of us—of us!—who became slave masters.

  For Zamos discovered gold in the waters of our Isthmuses and dropped down its cloned undersea workers to collect it. It was Chief Justice Skerow, then wife of my father Evarny, who first discovered this horror. At that time, the Saints preserve us, I suppose we were smug enough to think no such evil could touch us … but we were slavers in the Isthmuses and brothel-masters even here in this city of Burning Mountain!

  While all these evil things were happening two more worlds had come to haunt us, and these were Lyhhr and Iyax. The Lyhhrt we have known long and been uneasy with because their telepathic power is so much greater even than ours, and they are so frightened of being separated from their equals. The Ix nobody knew, nor wanted to when they did—

  —everyone knew someone who had known someone who had seen an Ix and its specter rose up before them in chitinous black six-limbed horror, its sting-smell of hallucinatory pheromones and the spaceless black-flaming sparklings of their aura, and all shivered—

  —because they were egglayers who had so fouled their home world that they could not produce the nourishment to incubate their young … and by exploration of other worlds they found this in the bodies of Lyhhrt.

  Neither world belonged to Galactic Federation. The Ix had been unknown. The Lyhhrt were neutrals with some Federation ties, and they begged GalFed for help but no one would risk the money and the manpower.

  Zamos came to their rescue.

  In their laboratories they created an artificial egg-hatching medium, and from the Lyhhrt demanded their service to Zamos for one Cosmic Cycle, one hundred and twenty-nine of their years. The Lyhhrt had no choice, except to destroy themselves. Zamos gained the use of Lyhhrt robotics, surgical techniques and telepathy, and the Lyhhrt took away nothing but shame. Though Zamos’s fall came as that Cycle was ending, the Lyhhrt had spent what seemed to them an eon of slavery helping Zamos create slaves and monsters to serve on ten score worlds … sacrificing their souls to save their lives … and when that reign was ended and they were freed they helped to save our world and got little thanks … .

  Another Mysterious Stranger

  Hasso thought there was no place on the world Khagodis, or in the whole universe for that matter, so pleasant as the rooftop of his house in the city of Burning Mountain. The white winter sun, faintly gilded with mist, hung between afternoon and evening; its light fell softly on the rainwashed pastel walls of the stuccoed houses and shops clustered on the slopes down to the river.

  At the other corner of the sky two alabaster moons were launching themselves, and the brightest stars and worlds were flaming in the deep sky. The air was wonderfully warm, not the choking heat of summer, and several of his neighbors were out on their roofs enjoying it with him. Hasso could just hear the peaceful tink! of the goldbeater’s hammer from the jewelsmith’s across the way.

  He was waiting for his stepmother Skerow, who always came down from her home in the Northern Spines to celebrate the Green Wreath Festival with him on her way to the Raintree Island Poetry Conference. Both had been invited to attend the Consecration of the New Interworld Court, a recently finished complex, now based deep in among the cold mesas of the Southern Diluvian Continent, that would replace the old bower, and house World Government as well. But Skerow, recently and gratefully retired from the lectern and from power, had declined.

  “I do wish you would come and enjoy the occasion with me, goodmother.”

  “I am coming to your warm land to be with you, Hasso, and though I love my own cold desert I needn’t go to another one.” She was stubborn as always, and Hasso tilted his head and gave up.

  The chimes rang at the entryway downstairs as he was brewing a pot of sprigwort tea for himself. He had bought a jug of white-thorn essence for Skerow, who liked something stronger; the grill was fired up, a good shank of crockbull waiting on its platter … .

  Skerow would never ring: this was a stranger. With a spit of annoyance Hasso set the teabowl down. His servant was gone for the day after lugging all the crockery up to the roof and helping him set up the grill, he’d left his impervious helmet below in his kitchen, and, weary from his stint propped on the lectern in the Hall of Learning, he did not want to crawl all the way down the stone stairs an
d up again for someone he didn’t know.

  He felt no telepathic emanation, and no ordinary citizen in the street goes about wearing a damned heavy scratchy helmet only to be fashionable. Stranger …

  “Eh.” Not good news. An alien perhaps. After the trials that brought the Zamos Corporation down at last, the ranks of jurists and packs of journalists had diminished offworld toward the newest sensation, leaving a few tourists, clusters of diplomats and the merchants supplying them to maintain the alien contingent.

  Hasso sucked in a bellyful of air, said, “I will be with you in one tick of a stad!” and picked up his staff. He began limping his way toward the top step of the long downward passage.

  “I will come up if you permit,” the low resonant voice said boldly.

  Having no better answer, Hasso said, “Come.” The street was in shadow and no light came from the entrance below. He settled back on the broad base of his tail and waited as the dark shape rose.

  Its edges were not quite clear. Khagodi, whose sight and hearing are slightly duller than those of non-ESPs, depend on each other to verify them. Now the neighboring roofs seemed to be empty, and the goldbeater’s hammer had fallen silent.

  The visitor was an outworlder, likely an Earther, Hasso thought, from his hominid form. No shorter than Hasso, he was wearing black clothing, with a dark wide-brimmed hat, and seemed to pull in light without illuminating himself.

  Hasso did not have time to open his mouth before the stranger said: “You are Citizen Hasso known as Master of Archives for Sector 706.394 inclusive of systems Fthel and Darhei.” He spoke very standard unaccented lingua.

  Hasso would not have claimed so great a territory for himself; it included his sun’s worlds and also those of Galactic Federation Headquarters. He forced himself not to step back from this aggressive speech and said, “Citizen Hasso, yes.”

  “I have been advised by the world Lyrrh to inform you that you will be called as a witness in an action being brought against your government for negligence in refusing to support and defend Lyhhrt action against the attack of the world Iyax in local year 7514.”

  Hasso drew a slow depth of air. “Who are you, citizen, and what is your authority?” Whoever he was he was not a guest, now, but an opponent. “There is no Lyhhrt ship in orbit, and Lyhhr no longer has a permanent embassy on this world. Show me identification.”

  “My genitors are Lyhhrt.” The stranger’s hand flashed the gold disk: the Cosmic symbols of Lyhhr swarmed on it. Hasso’s scales rose, and for a moment he thought he was going to be hypnotized. But in an instant the emblem vanished somewhere in that body or its clothing, and Hasso knew that his visitor was truly a Lyhhrt. In anyone else’s hand the disk would have turned ash-white and crumbled.

  “I will presume you are satisfied that I am Lyhhrt?”

  But Lyhhrt, those brain-sized lumps of protoplasm, walk the streets of alien worlds encased in brilliant workshells of beaten gold and bronze, not imitations of Earthers’ flesh and cloth. “Yes, but not that you have authority.”

  “I live on this world with the permission of your government, and my people have made use of my citizenship to send you a message. They have certainly begun this action. They will arrive on Khagodis within three thirtydays to bring it to Interworld Court. The message is from them, not me. I have had unofficial information that if Lyhhr is not satisfied there will be an actual attack. Although I am an exile from my world and I can find fault with it, I cannot believe it would ever bring any kind of army or armada to any world.”

  “Are you warning me, citizen? I have no personal authority. You ought to tell this to World Government, and I must tell you, it is well documented, that all of this world’s council offered to sacrifice themselves to save the Lyhhrt. So why come to me?”

  “You may have that dangerous frailty, a withered leg and only one heart,” the Lyhhrt said calmly. “But I am the only Lyhhrt on Khagodis and I have no power or influence.”

  “But how do you exp—”

  While Hasso was drawing in another of those deep and angry bellyfuls of air the chimes jangled a warning, and Skerow’s telepathic voice said, :He doesn’t mean to insult you, Hasso.:

  “That is quite right,” the Lyhhrt said abruptly, “I meant no harm. Lyhhrt rarely do.” To emphasize the words he shrank his height, and his long coat pleated on the flooring.

  While Hasso struggled to find sense in what the Lyhhrt was saying—Lyhhr attacking Khagodis!—Skerow was mounting the stairs with unusual speed. The Lyhhrt turned to meet her, rose in height and extended a hand to help her up the last step. “Sta’atha Amfa Skerow, the respected Justice and distinguished poet,” he said.

  “My fame precedes me ever.” Skerow’s tone was both gracious and wry. The breath was whistling harshly in and out of her gill-slits. She did not need to tell him that she was a retired Justice.

  Nor did Hasso bother introducing her to the nameless Lyhhrt. “Citizen,” to the Lyhhrt, “I hope you will be able to tell me more clearly what Lyhhr intends, and what I have to do with it.” He said this much more civilly than he had intended.

  “No, Archivist, I have spoken enough. You know all that is necessary for now.” He turned in a swirl of cloth without any hurry and … flowed down the stairs, gone. The sky brightened, and Hasso saw that his rooftop neighbors were enjoying their meals.

  “Eki, goodmother, what a strange one.”

  “Indeed so, Hasso—a full complement of Lyhhrtish tricks! But let us have our dinner before your tea turns sour and the sun cooks that delicious cut of meat.”

  “I must know of that Lyhhrt in some recorded source if he is a genuine citizen.”

  “You will remember eventually. But don’t brood now, Hasso dear. I am delighted to be with you and ever so hungry.”

  And for a little while Hasso and Skerow did no more than share a dinner with pleasure and affection. Although there would always be a shadow standing between them, however faint: Evarny, who had been Skerow’s husband for twenty years, until he divorced her for infertility when their young daughter died. The woman he then married to give him his Lineage had been able to bear only Hasso, and Evarny had died before knowing his wife and son would ever meet. Or that they would form a powerful bond.

  Skerow dipped her tongue into the bowl for the last drop of the fiery essence. : You know that Lyrhht, Hasso. I am sure you know him.: Then, on taking thought, Unless, perhaps, a robot … :

  “No no! The Lyhhrt would never send a robot in the shape of an Earther on Khagodis! They are far too esthetic—and that awkward clothing was ridiculous—”

  “That’s true. He seemed to realize he was ridiculous … you know, Hasso, I believe that fellow was probably very frightened, and that clothing was meant to make him inconspicuous.”

  “Yes, goodmother, only it didn’t work very well! If he truly is the only Lyhhrt on Khagodis, most likely he—eh, I have got him now! You and I both know of the Galactic Federation agent who was present when he was born—helped him to be born! Eki, I suppose I should not expect to keep everything in the top of my brain. The agent was that Earther fellow Ned Gattes that you must remember.”

  “I certainly do. I know no more Earthers than I have fingers!”

  Hasso’s mood darkened even further; the long and agonizing history still flickered in his mind as darkly as the Inland Sea of Pitch on whose shores he had spent his youth. At that troubled time five years ago when the orbiting Ix had demanded the subjugation of Khagodis, the two Lyhhrt who were on the world then had given their lives and their ship to destroy the vast and lowering Ixi vessel, the greatest one of its kind. But before they did so they had conjugated to produce one descendant who would tell their story.

  “Yes, we know who this Lyhhrt is now.” :But why come to me, and in an Earther-shaped workshell, why anyway is he a citizen of this world?:

  “Perhaps he became too well known on his own,” Skerow said. “An individual, and one who drew too much attention to himself.”

  “
A heretic in the minds of others, then. He ought to have been honored on his world, and able to find all Others … no use thinking of that, I suppose. But why come to me?”

  “No insult. Most likely he wanted to warn someone he respected, and whom he felt was as vulnerable as himself.”

  “You believe he was really trying to be friendly? I wish he would not have spoken in riddles! I cannot believe the Lyhhrt could want to stir up any kind of war. I must find out whether the Ministry knows of this.”

  “I’m sure he meant for you to tell them.”

  “He left me a heavy burden. I hope he finds himself lightened of it.”

  :Poor fellow, I hope so too.:

  Crouching with joined minds in the last of the reddened sunlight as the shadows rose and the rising night wind sparked the fading coals in the firepot …

  Fthel IV, Cinnabar Keys: Crawlers

  Around the time Hasso was giving his lecture on archive construction, Ned Gattes was just about to step off the train in a place he wasn’t sure he wanted to be. Three days earlier a voice on his comm had told him to come to an arena in Lisboa today at fifteen hours, there was money in it.

  Lisboa was a town on a local rail line about a hundred and fifty kilometers from his home in Miramar, and he’d fought in the arena occasionally to earn a few cred. But he hadn’t been there, or even fought seriously for years, just in exhibitions and giving lessons for not much money, and this call promised a good handful.

  Since Zamos had collapsed there hadn’t been much of it for a used-up pug with a wife and three kids. Galactic Federation had left him alone, and he wasn’t calling them either. In the past he and Zella had made most of their living fighting in Zamos arenas on five worlds; Zamos’s corruption-riddled empire had given work to millions upon millions, and with its disintegration the vast realms of gambling houses, arenas and brothels had shrunk and devolved into small businesses and private clubs.