Spacebread Read online

  Then, with a dull roar, a tongue of flame rose from the hills to the east. A ship. Spacebread made a note of its direction and started off at a run for her craft.

  The hatch to the ship’s interior slid soundlessly aside and the rough dusty air of the planet mixed with the filtered cool air inside. Spacebread pushed into the ship calmly but breathing heavily from her sprint.

  “Rig for lift-off immediately, Votal,” she said in between gulps. “Plot a course as close as possible to the ship that just lifted off about a mile to the southeast.”

  The computer stirred without hesitation. “Aye-aye.”

  Lights flashed on across the control panel, instruments buzzed into life. Spacebread cast her sword and pack angrily into a shelf along with her gun, then settled into the control chair and strapped in.

  “Ready, Votal.”

  She chased the thin traces of the craft’s exhaust into orbit around Fomalhaut 6. When she rounded into the day side, the traces headed off at an acute angle out of the system. Votal picked up the remains of gasses high in powerful granthite fuel. It was a very special ship they were chasing. People who could afford granthite fuel didn’t need to steal gaudy belt buckles. Spacebread sighed and unknitted her brows. She did not believe in wasting energy pondering or worrying or regretting, but there was a dull ache in her for Gramlin. It set her mind like steel. She was now on a mission again, a mission to recover what had been stolen from her and to bring Gramlin’s killer to justice. But the fiend had interrupted her sleep, and she needed her strength.

  “Keep on the trail, Votal.” She sighed. “I’ll be in my bunk. Wake me as soon as you get in instrument sight of the thing. Try to keep up with it.”

  “Aye-aye.”

  She settled into the cushions of her bunk. Her shoulder throbbed from the Ralphian’s blow, and the suddenness of her grief was numbing; but gradually, by relaxing her mind and body, she drifted to sleep.

  It was nearly three hours later when Votal awakened her. She sat up and shook her head to clear the exhaustion and sleep from it.

  “I have the ship on the scope now, milady. It’s headed nowhere.”

  “You mean it’s headed nowhere on your charts.” She yawned and strapped into the control seat. “If we can see them, they can see us. Try to dampen their perceptors.”

  “I have already taken the precaution.”

  Spacebread looked idly at Votal’s eye-sensor on the panel. She smiled faintly. “You were right this time. Watch your independent decisions in the future.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think they’ve noticed us?” she queried, watching the ghostly blip on the limits of the scope.

  “Not that I can tell …”

  The blip disappeared. Spacebread snapped upright and jabbed at the perceptor’s regulators. But as they approached the point where the ship had vanished, Votal picked up unusual spacial distortions.

  “There seems to be a warp here, or a fold, or perhaps a hole.”

  “Not on the charts, not even the ones we got from the Rigellian smugglers last year?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then get the coordinates on the scope and an XR lock. If you can figure out their launch course, we’ll follow them in.”

  The Ralphian’s ship had gone into a special place in the substance of space: a doorway. It could be opened with the aid of a Foldover Box, which can manipulate subtle variations in cosmic magnetic fields and pass through vast distances immediately. The Foldover Box was small, not much bigger than a matchbox. Spacebread’s ship also had one.

  “I’ve got it. It’s a class II warp, and the XR is locked in.”

  “Very well,” Spacebread said after a pause, during which Gramlin’s jovial face flashed in her memory. “I’ve got a promise to fulfill. Let’s go after it.”

  Votal made a few adjustments, and then Spacebread’s ship vanished. The jump between space lasted only a fraction of a second, but it was like falling for an hour. The Foldover Box folded their reality over and spliced it with a reality on the other side of the galaxy. There was a blinding burst of pure white light, and the ship hurtled headlong between existence and nonexistence. After a seeming age it popped back into space with a bolt-rattling thump.

  Below them, barely two million kilometers away, a huge blue planet swam in space. Spacebread couldn’t recognize it.

  “Where are we, Votal?”

  It took the computer a minute or two to sight in on key stars and make a spacial check. “We appear to be in the system Ontagon, and the planet beneath us is known as Ralph.”

  “Is this on the Rigellian charts?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Spacebread smiled wanly. “I knew they would pay for themselves someday. Can you trail the craft down to the planet? And print me off a map of the surface.”

  “Affirmative. The ship appears to have already made landfall. Near a large city named Black-Black on one of the median continents.”

  Votal spun off a copy of the Rigellian map of the planet.

  After an hour or so of travel, the ship swung into orbit around Ralph. Spacebread gazed out the ports at the emerald seas and continents of the planet. She wondered for a moment what she was going to do when they made landfall. The exhaust traces of the other ship would probably be dissipated in the atmosphere already.

  Spacebread sighed. “What is the status of the Planetary Power here?”

  “Well integrated. It has been awake for five hundred years. The planet has been civilized for several millennia. I read a high technology about a thousand years ago, but it has long since degenerated. Now there is little technology except in the largest urban areas.”

  “Very well. Hail the Power and plug it into audio.”

  The Planetary Power was a thought-system that ran through the magnetic and telluric currents of all large bodies. In more advanced planets it was a consciousness that amounted to a flight control authority. It examined the motives and purposes of traffic arriving on a planet, and most experienced cosmonauts took the precaution of contacting it before descending to the surface. With all the planetary forces—magnetic, electrical, atmospheric—at its disposal, the Power could generally resist any meddling in planetary destinies. In fact, it was the mind of the planet, able to foresee and shepherd destiny.

  It spoke to the computer in electrical signals, which Votal then translated and piped through the audio equipment. The sound of it was broad and calm and sober.

  “WHY DO YOU COME HERE?” it said.

  “I seek the return of an artifact stolen from me and justice to the man who stole it. He is a murderer.”

  “DO YOU SEEK TO ALTER THE BELIEFS, GOVERNMENTS, OR TECHNOLOGIES OF THE NATIVES, AND DO YOU SWEAR NOT TO INTERFERE IN ANY OF THESE SUBSTANTIALLY?”

  “I have no such intention. I will find my artifact, punish the guilty, and depart without any effort to change the systems you speak of.”

  “DO YOU SWEAR TO THIS?”

  “Yes. Do you have any stipulations for my presence?”

  “ONLY THIS: YOU SHALL LAND YOUR CRAFT ONCE AND TAKE OFF AGAIN ONLY ONCE. ALL OTHER TRAVEL ON THE SURFACE SHOULD BE BY LOCAL MEANS. THERE IS TOO MUCH INFLUX OF ALIEN TECHNOLOGY AT THIS TIME.”

  “Very well.”

  “PASS, THEN, BUT REMEMBER YOUR OATH.”

  Only a hissing sound remained on the audio. Spacebread respected the right of the Planetary Power, who might be unknown to the natives, to regulate foreign travel, and she fully intended to stay out of all Ralphian affairs.

  “Begin orbital sequence in the ship’s tracks, Votal,” Spacebread commanded, and switched off the audio.

  [2]

  Bazaar at Black-Black

  THE DARKNESS was an impenetrable dark green blanket, velvety, cool, lying across the jungle world. Silence spread and stillness grew before the coming of the sun as if the various night creatures were a temple congregation waiting for the priest. Slowly, seemingly without change, a corner of the forest acquired definition, then con
trast, tunnels of faint light boring through black shapes. A few minutes more and the day animals began waking, a slight stirring in the brush. A day-bird trilled. The sky brightened. Now there were colors: yellow of the sky, green of the trees and brush. A predatory lizard awakened and belched a great warning to the world.

  An amphibian tree-borer with bright orange eyes dashed across a clearing and stopped in its tracks. It blinked. There was a stand of bamboo where there hadn’t been one before. Deciding to investigate, the tree-borer hopped onto one of the stalks … and immediately slid down plop in the grass. It blinked at the strange bamboo, then leaped up to try again, with the same result, try as he might to hang onto the sections of the stalk. The predatory lizard barked again somewhere in the murk. Nervously, the borer tried to dash between the shoots. He bumped his head severely against the shadows. Finally surrendering, the beast slunk around the perimeter of the solid wall of phoney bamboo. The bamboo, which was really a disguised spaceship, started to hum imperceptibly.

  “It’s time, milady,” Votal intoned gently. “The sun is up.”

  Spacebread meowed loudly in her bunk, fighting not to hear the blasted machine. But it was no use. She was pulled from the brink of dreams by the voice a second time. And then she awakened.

  “Very well, very well!” she snapped. “Fix me a cup of coffee.”

  She stood slowly and stretched her snowy limbs luxuriously. The muscles rippled beneath her fur. By the time she had donned a new belt and boots and clambered into the control pod, there was a steaming flask of coffee on the dash. She sat with unfocused, circled eyes and watched the star Ontagon burn its way into the sky. She blew on the coffee and then took a sip. The yellow western sky grew streaked with veins of silver.

  “It’s a beautiful world,” she said in a half-to-herself, half-to-Votal voice she often fell into. “When we see the end of this matter we shall have to take a few months off on one of our hideaway worlds. Perhaps Sarkenlly, or Oxondof. There are a few friends there.”

  “Yes, friends. You have been lonely of late, milady.”

  Spacebread did not answer. She sipped the coffee, her pink nose twitching at its fumes.

  “Yes,” she finally said, “I am lonely. It would be nice to have another creature to talk to occasionally. That will come when it comes. The best course is to do what one has to do today. And today I will go into the city and acquire a room for my stay. You’ll have to tend the ship alone for a while, Votal. And then I must find my lost buckle and its possessor. Do you have any ideas where to start?” She swiveled in the seat to face Votal’s audio outlets.

  “Since we know nothing of the culprit’s motive or his whereabouts, I would suggest we start with what we know.”

  “His ship,” Spacebread commented.

  “Exactly. It was an outlaw since it carried no identification buoy or letters. But even outlaw ships have to dock and be serviced.”

  “Yes, the docks in Black-Black. I must assume the ship did not moor in the wilderness as we have done. Then it’s off to the docks.”

  She drained the rest of the coffee in a gulp and prepared to leave the ship. Her new belt was outfitted with a scabbard for her sword. She wore the same purple cape she had worn on Fomalhaut 6, with the same black pack strapped beneath it. The airlock door swished shut behind her, Votal pressurized it, the Ralphian air hissing in around Spacebread, and then the exit hatch slid away. Votal wished her good luck as she climbed out into the dazzling light and clambered down the ladder onto the planet’s surface.

  The ladder withdrew and became an indistinguishable part of the towering stand of bamboo in the clearing. Spacebread smiled. What the ship lacked in speed and beauty it made up for with Votal and an excellent camouflage unit.

  With little difficulty she located a well-worn trail that stitched its way between huge violet-skinned trees and thorn thickets like lengths of rough red yarn. The flora of the planet was similar to that of a thousand planets she had known, though it tended to be a bluer green, almost verging on turquoise. There were many lizards, frogs, salamanders, yekkosts, and reptilian-looking multi-hued birds, but few well developed mammals.

  The path brought her abruptly to a sharp bluff. Beneath it were the beginnings of the town, a ghetto of grass huts clumped about the road like buffalo around a stream. Beyond, Black-Black itself rose in ruddy stone towers. Some climbed audaciously skyward, others ended in sandstone spurts; the space between was occasionally bubbled with contemporary energy domes and steel structures and crowded with dots of people. The city bustled, shoved, murmured and toiled beneath the rising eye of Ontagon.

  A few of the peasants in the huts greeted Spacebread as she passed, then quickly stretched out their blue palms for alms. There were too many to give what little change she had, so she passed on hurriedly into the growing throng crowding the road to Black-Black.

  The Ralphians were slight, timid creatures, a little shorter than Spacebread, with luminous gray or green eyes, darting hands splayed with four suction-tipped fingers and a brief crest atop their heads. They had a reputation for being mild and unassuming to the point of being backward. Their planet was just now beginning to bring in appreciable trickles of foreigners.

  The clot of Ralphians that Spacebread walked among prattled constantly in their musical tongue. Presently, as the city gates loomed into view, the traffic slowed and Spacebread found her patience burning low. There seemed to be far more people crowding the roads than usual, to hear the peasants around her jabber disgruntledly. Deft hands tried to pick her money pouch twice. The third time she felt the tugging at the pouch, she grabbed the offending hand and snapped one of its fingers backwards. A cowled peasant squealed and pushed away.

  After three more exhausting hours pushing and jostling through the throng from inn to inn, she found one with a vacancy. It was huddled in a deep alley beneath a stairway, dank, unwholesome, and out of the way. The manager was a gruff, gnarled Ralphian with a long scar over one eye.

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “I’ve been saving a cubicle for a merchant from up Samowin way, and he hasn’t made it.” He swept a disgusting multi-legged insect off the register with a familiar motion and handed the pen to Spacebread.

  She signed an alias, Yashir Govonon of Dangsen’s Planet, and asked casually, plunking the night’s rent in coin on the counter, “There is much commotion in town. What’s the occasion?”

  The manager looked at her as if she were daft. “You mean you don’t know? Why there’s a festival in honor of the new regent, Prince VolVarnix, who was just crowned last week. Old King Gallwort’s getting too feeble to go about any more, so he’s appointed VolVarnix regent in his stead, until the coming of age of the king’s nephew. The kid’s only six, you know. Yeah, been a big fireworks display and everything. The queen and her court just flew back to King’slsle last night. Plenty of offworlders in for the show. I figured you was one of ‘em.” The manager beamed a snaggled grin.

  “No, I’m not,” Spacebread said absently. “I’m a prospector. Um … which room did I draw?”

  Plucking a dusty cylindrical key from a cubby, he said, “Eight. It’s one of the more comfortable ones.”

  Spacebread nodded. “I won’t be needing the room just now. I’ll be back later.” She paused to shake off whatever was crawling up the back of her cape. “Can you tell me in which direction the spaceyard lies from here?”

  He jerked a finger eastward. “Just in back of the next row of warehouses. Can’t miss it.”

  The spaceships stood in rows in the spaceyard shed, some in docks being unloaded, a few up in halters being serviced. There were only about a dozen, mostly beat-up freighters, and the yard was a poor one. It was useful mainly for non-Foldover ships. Spacebread spotted an overalled figure standing in a shadowed aisle of the shop and approached him. He was inspecting some exterior piping on a black freighter.

  “Excuse me,” she said, waiting for him to look up, “but I was expecting some friends in from Fomalhaut sometime last
night, but they haven’t called. Could you tell me if anyone disembarked?”

  The Ralphian mechanic looked haggard. He was covered with coolant stains.

  He shrugged. “I can’t say. The only interstellar traffic we had last night was that big starduster over there”—he indicated a sleek, modern fighter—”and that’s the property of the Regent’s Guard. I wouldn’t be knowing where it been to.”

  “Are you sure that’s the only one?”

  He was.

  As she gazed up at the anonymous black ship with its typical Foldover configuration, Spacebread pondered the situation. It was possible the other ship had landed in the forest as she had, but she did not think it had noticed her following it. For what other reason would it hide? No, there was something about the crowning of this regent, VolVarnix, coinciding with the landing of one of his personal guard vehicles from an interstellar voyage that smelled interesting. Spacebread had learned long ago to follow her intuitions in vague situations of this sort. She determined to look into the matter of this new court in Black-Black, and this new regent. A royal visit was in order.

  And so, departing the meager spaceyard, she packed herself once more into the congestion of the streets. She must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, for she soon found herself on an unfamiliar avenue crowded with gaudy booths and displays.

  “New garbanthe seedlings from Northwil!” shouted a hooded Ralphian from a canopied booth.

  A Rigellian-accented voice barked out, “The latest fabrics from the Home Worlds! Very reasonable.”

  She had wandered into a huge bazaar (at least huge for Ralph) packed with gawking peasants taking their first astounded look at various samples of galactic goods. Fruits and sweetmeats from Spica, battered but serviceable farm machinery from the foundries of Capella, cloth, rope, tools, magical talismans, swords, and hundreds of other oddments spilled over the counters of a dozen different species of merchants. Children waved paper kites shaped like gnordas, half mythical beasts out of Ralph’s past. Ralphians were exchanging small farm beasts and produce for bolts of unusual cloth and tilling contraptions that would likely fall apart in a month. Spacebread smiled knowingly to herself. A culture growing up swirled all about her.