Crashlander

GHOST: ONE

We had wonderful seats ten rows back from the glass.

Two hundred feet below the ocean's surface sunlight flooded down through seaweed forests in a thousand flickering golden beams. Players swirled in shoals among the forest roots like half a hundred color-coded fighting fish.

Grandstands had been set against the city dome. Beyond the glass was the playing domain for ten color-marked teams, each team being five humans and a dolphin. Sixty players, down to fifty now, the humans using breathers and oversized fins.

The prey were local life-forms, three flattened turtles armed with hind flippers as wide as wings. Their painted shells glowed like captured suns, red, yellow, violet. The point was to move the prey through the arches, paraboloids painted in the same blazing colors. A player might pull a prey against his chest to swim with it, or hold it at arm's length and steer by the strength of his arms while the prey did the work, or even leave it swimming toward the sand during a melee, hoping a teammate could get it before it disappeared.

Sharrol was entranced. When a swarm of Entertainment Guild Players carried the violet prey through the violet arch, she bellowed with the rest.

I don't understand water war. She watched the game; I watched her.

Sharrol was dressed Shashter style, a fancy cloak over a body stocking with windows in it that would serve for swimming. She was small even by flatlander standards, beginning to bulge with our second child. Strong jaw, pale skin, straight black hair: the real Sharrol. On Earth she'd worn many fantastic images, in flatlander style.

For too long fear had lurked beneath her surface emotions. Sharrol wasn't made for this world. But we'd lived beneath Fafnir's world-spanning ocean for a year and a half, we'd conceived and birthed Jeena and started a sister for her, and we'd come to see this place as our own. Gradually the fear had been etched away. I saw no sign of it now. Sharrol was at home.

Light beams danced down through the water and played over the wonderful landscape of Sharrol Janss. But I'd missed brunch. I nudged her and said, «I'm going for provisions.»

She didn't turn. «Good! Handmeal, red, yes on veggies. Popcorn. Juice, any.»

I left my backpurse in the seat. I glanced back when I reached the aisle. Sharrol was lovely in profile, and entirely absorbed in the game.

The stands didn't include food stalls. You had to go under the stands and all the way across the Strand, by elevated slidebridge, and into a fair-sized food court.

Or you could walk twenty yards along the glass, use a transfer booth, and save fifteen minutes.

I flicked in on the second-floor balcony. I looked over the railing at several long lines. The longest was a window for handmeals. My attention snagged on a face below.

He caught me looking.

Or not. I didn't wait to be sure. I stepped to the lone phone booth at the end of the row of transfer booths. Found a coin and dialed. I did not want this call registered on my pocket phone.

We might have had a whole lifetime, I thought. We'd been promised that, but it had been a lie. But we'd had our year and a half.

The glass at the back of the booth reflected the top of the slidestair if I held my head right. I watched while Sharrol's phone chimed six times.

She was looking past her phone, watching the game.

«Bey? What?» She showed flat in one of the walls. Her pocket phone wasn't sophisticated enough to give me a hologram.

I said, «I saw a face.»

«Who?» Now she looked at me. «Not her. Tell me it's not her.»

«No, of course not, but it's not good. He was my ghostwriter —»

«Bey? Your what?»

«Dear one, I'm short of time. Ander Smittarasheed shouldn't be here. I think he knew me —»

«Unlikely!»

«I was looking over a balcony. He saw just my head and shoulders, foreshortened. But maybe he doesn't know about you. So book a single for me at the Pequod as Persial January Hebert.» It was a name I hadn't used in a while, but she knew it, and we'd stayed at the Pequod once. Furnish the room a little? Luggage? No, but — «I left my backpurse on my seat. Leave it in the room. Nothing else.»

«Next?»

The man I'd seen hadn't appeared yet.

She was taking it all in, but muscles were flexing at the corners of her jaw and her eyes were wide and frightened. I asked, «How tough are you?»

Her eyes slid away, watching the game, because someone might be watching her. She said again, «Next?»

«If you can. Get Jeena. Go to Shasht. Get Outbound Enterprises to freeze you for transfer to Home, sign me in, too, and pay the extra to ship Jeena. I'll be there when I can.»

Her jaw set. Sharrol was a flat phobe, and the continent Shasht wasn't just halfway round the world; it was the surface. I couldn't guess whether she was strong enough to get through this. I said, «If you can't do it, leave word —»

«When can you join us?»

«If I'm not on the same ship, go to Carlos. I'll get to you soonest.»

«You'd better have one tanj of a good story for me when you do,» Sharrol said, and then a head came into view, reflected in the glass. With my head still turned away. I flicked off the phone, my back blocking the action, and wiggled out my pocket phone.

It was him. Square face, thin blond hair, jaw like a prey turde, muscles rippling under the shirt. He was puffing a little. Ander was born of Earth, and he'd kept a flatlander's wild taste in dress and appearance. Today his drawstring pants were a miracle of wriggling colored lines. He wore a tunic in solid colors, green and brown with a jagged black line across chest and back. Classical cartoon characters kept peeking over the black line, chattering to each other about what they saw, then dropping back. He wore a backpurse, disappointingly drab.

He was taking his time, looking puzzled but determined, coming right at me.

So I let him see me pocket my unused phone as I turned and stepped out of the booth and right into him. I yelped. «Aghh!»

«Sorry. Beowulf, how you've changed!» He looked me over, visibly shocked, blocking me in the booth.

I shied back, wimp intimidated by a street thug, a bit offended and a bit afraid. «Sorry, man, I didn't mean to nudge you.»

He stepped forward and took my hand in both of his, despite lack of encouragement, and pumped it and hung on. He bellowed over the crowd noise. «Ander Smittarasheed. We made two travelogue vids together. Beowulf, all I can say is you must have a hell of a tale to tell.»

He had no doubts: he knew me. I said, «Hide. Hell of a tale to hide, Ander.»

«Not anymore.»

I shouted, «Yeah. Right. Are you with anyone?»

«No, on my own.»

«Come watch the game with me. I think there's an empty seat next to mine.» There'd better be.

He was still staring. Whatever he'd known, whatever had brought him here, he hadn't expected what he was seeing.

I hugged that thought to me. He was seeing me for the first time in twelve years. I dared to hope that Ander hadn't prepared for this meeting. There was no backup. Just him.

As we passed the booths, his hand closed on my upper arm. He might not think it likely that I'd dive into a transfer booth and vanish, but he wasn't risking it. He shouted, «Why a phone booth to use a pocket phone?»

And I showed myself astonished at his stupidity and bellowed, «Noise!»

Then the crowd roar drowned out any hope of conversation, we moved onto the slidebridge, and I had a few moments to think.

There's only one spaceport on We Made It, and the ships don't land every day. Some of us kids used to watch them take off and land. I'm the only one who became a pilot.

What I noticed about the tourists was muscle.

I wasn't undermuscled for a local. Some of the tourists hailed from worlds no more massive than mine, but we got Jinxians and flatlanders, too. They walked like they expected us to shy away from their moving mass. We tall, narrow, fragile crashlander men and women did as they expected, and resented it a little.

Nakamura Lines ran their ships at one Earth gravity. I had to train hard just to walk around on my own ship. Thus trained, I was a superbly muscled athlete by We Made It standards. It was still true that too many passengers looked at my albino pallor and tall, skeletal frame and saw a sickly ghoul.

I'd gotten used to that. Maybe it had left me touchy.

Visceral memory had come flooding back when Ander's hand closed on my arm like a predator's jaws. I hadn't known Ander well. I'd seen him twice in fourteen years, for periods of intense activity of a few weeks each. Now I needed a story to tell to Ander Smittarasheed; but what I remembered best was that I'd disliked him on sight.

Sharrol's seat was empty. Ander settled into it. «You really like these water wars? What guild do you favor?»

«No, Ander, it's not like that. You've seen my homeworld. There's only one ocean on We Made It, and it's all one storm. Nobody swims.»

«So what are we doing here?»

I had come here following a woman's whim, but Ander shouldn't know that. «I don't care who wins. I just get a kick out of watching how good they are.»

But I'd listened to enough of Sharrol's prattling. Water war derived from a game the kzinti played on the continent, on land. In both forms the game is local to Fafnir. No offworld tourist would know of it. I need only open my mouth and let Sharrol speak.

«They all swim like dolphins, don't they? But the dolphins can't grab the prey, they can only push the other players around, except that the Structure Team dolphin has hands. It's an option. But the rig is slowing her down; can you tell? Do you know anything about strategy? They're down to seven teams, looks like —» I saw that he was only waiting for me to stop talking. «Ander, what are you doing on Fafnir?»

«Looking for you.»

«Yeah, I always thought so. You're with the United Nations police.» I need not pretend to like it.

Ander frowned. «Not … exactly. I'm not an ARM. I'm with Sigmund Ausfaller, and Sigmund is an ARM, but he has his own agenda. By which I mean to say I'm not here to bring you back, Beowulf.»

«That's good. I don't want to go back.» I didn't have my story yet, but it would not include wanting to return to Earth. «Why, then?»

«Can you tell me what happened to Feather Filip?»

«It's long and ugly.»

«No problem. I'll take you to dinner.»

«Thanks.» It might help me, now or later, if Ander thought I was short of money. Better yet — «There's an item of great value involved, Ander. One I can't touch myself. That, and Feather, and the way I look: they're all linked.»

«Yes. Good,» he said absently. «And, though he never said so to me, Sigmund may have wanted you to know that if you outsmarted the ARM, you did not outsmart Sigmund.»

«I expect he did. Anything else?»

«Oh, yes. I got into this because we were talking about Pierson's puppeteers. Sigmund and I decided that you, Beowulf Shaeffer, know as much about these aliens as any ARM.»

«Hah. Were you sober?»

«And then we worked out where you must be. No, not sober then, but we talked the next morning and didn't change our minds. Beowulf, how did you first learn of the puppeteers?»

«School and the holo cube. We watched a lot of travelogues when we were kids. And we hung around the spaceport, so I knew they make the General Products ships.»

«And your first contact?»

«We wrote that up together. Oh, tanj, Ander! You're recording, aren't you?»

He said, «Yes,» giving me an instant to object, daring me. Who was he recording for? Who was involved in hunting Beowulf Shaeffer? If it was Sigmund Ausfaller … I'd never outguessed Sigmund yet.

Ander said, «We'll pay you a consultant's fee. Ten per hour, Beowulf. Will you accept?»

«How many hours do you need?» It was generous, but my yes would be a verbal contract. I'd be his prisoner.

He waved it off. «Until midnight. Then we can renegotiate. I need the recording for Sigmund.»

Ouch. «Until midnight,» I said, «present time being ten to noon local.»

«Your first contact with Pierson's puppeteers?»

Fifteen years flying passengers between the worlds. Then Nakamura Lines collapsed, and I was on the street … on We Made It, because the bankruptcy courts allowed us transport home. Two years later I was ready to accept an offer from anyone. Anyone …