Trapped

4: TOBACCO SKYROAD

Annah checked her other girls. While she went from room to room making sleepy teenagers open their mouths and say, "Ahh!", I stuffed towels into the crack under Rosalind's door. However much I believed no microbes would ooze out, it was foolish to take chances. Eventually we'd have to incinerate Rosalind's entire room, preferably with the Caryatid supervising the flames… but that had to wait. If this was an OldTech bioweapon, we couldn't destroy the evidence until the Spark Lords had examined it.

We didn't want to upset the Sparks; they were a greater hazard to one's health than any disease. Besides, I truly didn't think the clotted-cream deposits in Rosalind's throat were overly contagious. Otherwise, I wouldn't have let Annah make the rounds of girls on her floor — I'd have locked us both into quarantine.

But I believed Annah and I were clean… thanks in part to the Caryatid's sort of a prophecy kind of thing. I was doomed to go questing — ergo, no illness would keep me home. In fact, the quest would almost certainly be a result of Rosalind's death; the only question was how that would come about.

I looked down the hall in Annah's direction. She was talking now to a seventeen-year-old named Fatima Nouri — a distant cousin of mine, though we'd never met before Fatima came to Feliss. (The Nouris controlled most of the power and money in Ka'aba province on the east side of the Red Sea, while my own family dominated Sheba on the west. Every generation, a diplomatic marriage was arranged between a Nouri and a Dhubhai as a gesture of goodwill… and as a way to plant spies in each other's camps.) I pushed the towels a little farther under Rosalind's door, then walked down to talk with my cousin.

Annah said nothing as I approached. Fatima grinned broadly, looking back and forth between Annah and me as if she was sure we were lovers — why else would we be together in the middle of the night? I could tell young Fatima was mentally composing a letter home: "Ooo, Cousin Philemon has a girlfriend. A dark and delicate houri." But let the girl gloat; let her flash her saucy grin as long as she could. She didn't know what had happened to Rosalind… and when my lascivious but decent-hearted cousin learned the truth, she would weep for days.

"Fatima," I said, "could you run an errand for me?"

"Now?" Her grin faltered. "Right now?"

"Right now. I'd like you to go into Simka and bring back the Steel Caryatid. Do you know where she lives?"

Fatima nodded. Her grin had returned in full — apparently she was tickled by the thought of sallying forth in the dead of night.

"Are you sure it's safe?" Annah asked. "A girl alone at this hour…"

"I'll take my sword," Fatima said. She turned back to me. "Can I take my sword?"

"As long as you don't stab the town watchmen. You'll recognize them; they're the ones asleep in the gutters."

Fatima laughed and whirled away — back into her room to get dressed. Annah looked at me reprovingly. "It's all right," I said. "Fatima can take care of herself." All the Nouri family, male and female, were trained from childhood in the Way of the Clever Blade. Fatima herself was Pelinor's prize pupil: fourth this year in the provincial fencing finals, better than any other academy student in the past two decades. She had nothing to fear from drunks, ruffians, or blob-eared aliens who couldn't hold their broadswords straight.

Annah continued her progress down the hall while I waited for my cousin. Third cousin? Fourth cousin twice removed? I'd never bothered to calculate the exact relationship; I'm sure Fatima hadn't either. We simply knew our families were connected, the same way we were connected with every other powerful clan from the Sahara to the Khyber Pass. Wherever people like us touched down in that region, we'd always have a great-aunt or nephew-in-law serving as deputy-something to the local governor… which explains why I fled to the other side of the planet as soon as I earned my doctorate.

Life wasn't so claustrophobic here. Fatima may have come to Feliss for the same reason, badgering her parents until they let her go to school on a strange foreign continent. When my cousin graduated at the end of the year, it wouldn't surprise me if she skipped going home and instead headed for Feliss City to join the governor's guard. Plenty of our relatives had done the same: third sons and fourth daughters who chafed under the omnipresence of family connections and ran off to new lands where they could breathe on their own.

Make your own mistakes. The story of my life.

Within minutes, Fatima emerged from her room in her version of street clothes (more slovenly than anything worn by the town's true poor). Her favorite scimitar hung in a sheath on her belt. The sword was an exquisitely functional weapon: no curlicues, no filigree, just a balanced blade in a solid grip. The Nouris always loved simple steel — simple sharp steel.

Fatima struck a pose, one hand resting oh-so-casually on the sword's pommel. "Do I pass, teacher?" she asked.

"Provided you don't go asking for trouble. Your job is to carry a message, not tangle with the thugs of Simka. Take the safest streets, straight to the Caryatid and back, all right?"

Fatima gave an indulgent smile, humoring a timid old fuddy-duddy. "What's the message?"

"Tell the Caryatid to come right away. To, uhh…" I considered where Annah and I would go after we'd finished here. "To the chancellor's suite," I said. "If not there, to Professor Khan's room."

"And if she asks why?"

Oh no, dear cousin, you don't get the juicy details that easily. Fatima must have realized something out of the ordinary was happening, but I could tell her thoughts ran to conventional scandals: a girl caught with a boy… or with liquor… or both. She was grinning too widely to suspect anything more sinister or tragic. "If the Caryatid asks what's going on," I said, "tell her the dog's tongue was speaking the truth."

"The dog's tongue?"

"The dog's tongue. Now get going."

Fatima hesitated a moment longer; then she favored me with one last grin and pounded a fist to her chest in a passable reproduction of my family's house salute. "Hail the Dhubhais!" she said, then giggled. She left at a gallop, scimitar bouncing against her side.

I'd said we'd be with the chancellor. When Annah completed her throat inspections, that's precisely where we went: to the penthouse atop the school's dormitory wing, the home of Chancellor Opal Quintelle.

Opal was the one person at the academy who knew as much science as I did; possibly more than I did, though she was too polite to make it obvious. From time to time, however, when we were discussing plate tectonics or the evolutionary effects of human emotions on other species (why do we find mammal babies appealing? perhaps because our hunter ancestors were more likely to kill animals that didn't engage our sympathies, so that, over the millennia, looking sweet and cute to humans became a useful survival trait)… from time to time, as Opal and I were conversing about such things, she would suddenly stop as if afraid of revealing too much and bite back whatever words she'd intended to say.

How did she know so much? I couldn't tell. She never talked about her past or her upbringing, and her accent didn't fit with anyplace I knew: as elegant as British nobility, but with different intonation on the long vowels. Her appearance gave no clue to her background; her face was unnaturally smooth and devoid of ethnic characteristics, with the waxy look of someone who's had extensive plastic surgery… either to remove signs of age (Opal claimed to be sixty-two, though she could have passed for much younger) or to correct some conspicuous disfigurement: scars or perhaps a birthmark.

As I was climbing the stairs to Opal's room, it occurred to me that plastic surgery was the stock and trade of Mother Tzekich's group, the Ring of Knives. Backstreet beautification. Was Opal a Ring of Knives customer? Or more than a customer? No one in the faculty lounge knew anything about Opal's life before she arrived in Feliss… so perhaps it wasn't mere chance that delivered Rosalind to our door. Perhaps some prior association had convinced Mother Tzekich that Opal could be trusted to keep her daughter safe. After all, there were plenty of schools like ours in the world, and a woman as shrewd as Knife-Hand Liz wouldn't pick one out of a hat. She'd want somebody in place to keep an eye on the girl; didn't that make sense?

Or was I inventing complications when we had enough real trouble to handle?

With such thoughts filling my mind, I knocked on the chancellor's door.

Opal answered the knock within seconds… and as always, she was turned out ready to meet royalty. Her silver hair hung loosely below her shoulders, but she was clad in an impeccable gown of subdued red suede. She must have kept the dress beside her bed, an outfit she could shimmy into without wasting time on buttons or hooks, so she could quickly and chicly present herself to whoever came calling at one-thirty in the morning. Perhaps in her youth, she'd belonged to some crack military unit that had to be ready at an instant's notice; or perhaps I was really letting my imagination run away with me.

When she saw who was calling, Opal raised an eyebrow. "Crisis?"

"Crisis."

"Serious?"

"Severe."

"Inside."

Opal beckoned us into her sitting room. It was a spacious place, decorated with the sort of bric-a-brac that accumulates in the chancellor's quarters of a school two centuries old: gifts from parents and grateful students. Jungle masks that were taller than me shared wall space with an ermine-covered cricket bat and several painted portraits where both subjects and artists had long ago faded from memory. On one table, five music boxes were stacked atop each other in diminishing order by size; the housemaids kept them free of dust, but no one bothered to polish the tarnished little plaques that told what tunes the boxes played. Another table held an assortment of plaster figurines, all of them kittens or puppies or chubby-cheeked children in dirndls and lederhosen. These trinkets were "the artistic heritage of the academy" passed from one chancellor to the next, like some pox nobody could cure. Opal sometimes talked about throwing everything out… but she never did. It seemed inevitable the next chancellor would inherit the same regrettable collection, plus whatever new "riches" would arrive during Opal's administration.

Annah and I sat ourselves on a "genuine-Inuit" couch upholstered in scratchy caribou hide. Our Esteemed Chancellor took a seat opposite us on a faux-Chippendale chair painted white with green vines twining up its legs and around its frame. She said nothing — Opal seldom wasted words — but she cocked her head to show she was ready to listen. Since Annah showed no sign of speaking, I took the lead. "Rosalind Tzekich is dead. In her room. Almost certainly murdered."

Opal's expression didn't change, but she shifted her gaze and murmured, "That's what 'expendable' means." When I stared at her in surprise, she focused back on me. "Sorry. Where I come from, that's a type of prayer for the dead."

She fell silent again. I waited a few seconds, then said, "There's more bad news. I think the killer used an OldTech bioweapon — the kind we should report to Spark Royal."

Opal looked up sharply. "Are you sure?"

I described what I'd seen: the white curds clogging the girl's airways. I also told about the Caryatid's sort of a prophecy kind of thing, and the ghostly harp music that led me to Rosalind in the first place. Annah verified that Rosalind had been in perfect health at dinner, and that none of the other girls on the floor showed any signs of sickness… which argued against a natural disease, if any such argument was necessary.

Opal nodded as she listened, asking no questions, taking it all in. When I finished, she remained silent for several more heartbeats; then she settled back into her chair, lifting her gaze to a window that looked out on darkness. "So," she said, "here it is."

"Here what is?" I asked.

She didn't answer. Instead she rose and walked to the window, as if expecting to see something outside… but instead of looking down at the campus four floors below, her eyes were turned to the sky. "I'd hoped they were wrong," she said, facing the stars, "but of course they weren't. It sure is a bitch living in a universe where so many species are smarter than you."

I wanted to ask, "What are you talking about?"… but some inner voice said I didn't want to know. Despite all the horrors I'd experienced, I hadn't reached the true edge of the precipice until this moment: half-drunk, surrounded by ugly knickknacks, with our chancellor speaking in riddles. I'd been thinking my responsibilities would soon be over — that Opal would take charge of everything and absolve me from further decisions — but I suddenly realized with icy dread that Opal would offer no salvation.

In the end, it was Annah who spoke the words: "Opal… what do you know?"

"Can you keep a secret?" Opal asked.

I knew I should leave, but I didn't. I just nodded. Annah did too.

Opal turned back to look at us. "Promise?"

We nodded again.

"All right," Opal said. "All right." She paused, then muttered, "Where the fuck do I start?"

I'd never heard her use such strong language… and her accent had grown more pronounced, as if she were slipping back into habits from some unladylike former life. "Oh, what the hell," she said. "Once upon a time…"

Once upon a time, a baby girl was born far, far away. She grew up clever and strong, but not pretty; she was as far from pretty as you could get. So the people who decided such things told her she would be trained for special work in out-of-the-way places where her appearance wouldn't bother "decent folk."

[Annah shivered and drew a bit closer to me. I tried to guess which country Opal might come from… but my guesses were so utterly wrong, there's no point writing them down.]

In time, the little girl became an Explorer: a person sent to unknown places to see what was there. Sometimes the work she did was important; sometimes it was pointless; often it was hard to tell the difference. But she took great personal pride in her accomplishments, even on missions that achieved nothing useful… and her greatest pride was always coming back alive.

One day, her superiors assigned her to the service of a man named Chee: an aged and aging admiral full of whims. Some of his whims were inspired — his unconventional attitudes made Chee valuable on occasions when orthodoxy couldn't cope. Other Chee whims were just harmless or quaint, but occasionally… occasionally it was unlucky to be the subordinate of a man who was famed for caprice.

There came a time when Chee wanted pipe tobacco; and no tobacco would do except the very best leaf, fresh from the finest farms on Earth. So Chee commanded his flagship to set sail for an isle where tobacco grew most sweet and rich… but alas, due to old political enmities, Chee and his people were hated on that island. They couldn't land openly and purchase leaf in the market. Therefore Chee directed his ship to lie off at a distance, while the young woman Explorer landed under cover of darkness and stole as much as she could carry.

["Stole?" Annah asked. "You robbed some poor farmer?"

["Oh," said Opal, "each year, Chee had his Explorers leave a generous amount of gold as payment; but I don't know how many farmers dared to pocket it. There was a treaty in place that forbade all interaction between my people and the islanders. If the farmer kept the gold and was found out later… well, being robbed isn't half as bad as getting caught trading with the enemy."]

So in the deepest hour of night, the Explorer found herself in a field full of half-picked tobacco. At the edge of that field stood six tarpaper shacks — the curing kilns or "kills" where harvested leaves were baked until they were golden brown and ready for market. The plan was to check each kill to find one whose leaves were nearly finished curing. Those were the leaves Chee wanted, the ones the Explorer would steal.

But as the Explorer approached the kills, a man stepped out from the shadows between two of them. He was quite possibly the most handsome man she'd ever seen: young, virile, shirtless, barefoot, smiling as if he was about to greet a lover. The Explorer thought perhaps that's why he'd been waiting in the darkness; perhaps this man had planned a midnight rendezvous with another man's wife, or some sly-footed girl sneaking away from overprotective parents. He might have heard a noise and came out expecting to see his paramour… so what would he make of a stranger in odd foreign clothes?

The man smiled. "Good evening." Which the Explorer found surprising — on this island, the greeting should have been "Buenas tardes." But she didn't let herself dwell on that oddity. Instead, she reached (regretfully) toward a holster on her belt.

The Explorer carried a weapon, a pistol of sorts, which fired hypersonic waves on a range of frequencies that disrupted neural functioning. Her orders from Chee were explicit: shoot any witnesses immediately. One shot was sufficient to render an adult unconscious for six hours, but the effect left no permanent damage.

[That caught my attention; I'd never heard of such a weapon. The Spark Lords occasionally produced big bulky rifles with a "hypersonic stun" setting, but never anything as small and convenient as a pistol. The OldTechs had never used hypersonics either. If Opal's people had the technical expertise to create such weapons, it was something they'd learned on their own. Which suggested a flabbergasting degree of scientific sophistication.

[I've already said Opal knew more science than me; where could she have come from that was so much more advanced than the rest of the world? My alma mater, the Collegium Ismaili, was the finest university on Earth.

[On Earth.

[Another chill went through me. Opal had started with, "Once upon a time, a baby girl was born far, far away." How far was far?]

The Explorer raised her pistol. The man's smile never wavered; he made no move to duck or dodge, though in the darkness he couldn't possibly tell what kind of gun was aiming at his face. For all he knew, it was a normal flintlock, or even an OldTech weapon with enough power to stop an elephant. Yet the man continued to smile.

How odd.

The Explorer pulled the trigger. The pistol made a soft whir — an extra sound added to the gun's mechanism so the shooter would know it was working. (The hypersonics themselves were beyond the range of human hearing.)

Yet the man did not fall down. He whispered, "Surprise, Explorer. Your toy doesn't work on me."

Without conscious thought, the Explorer dived to one side, like a woman throwing herself from the path of a runaway horse. It was an automatic action, instilled by her training — whenever something caught her completely by surprise, combat reflexes took over. Dive, roll. As she landed, she crushed a dozen tobacco plants beneath her weight; but that barely registered on her consciousness. Her mind was occupied with more pressing concerns. How did the man know she was an Explorer? And how could he have been waiting for her?

She knew Chee had come to this place before — every year at this time, he sent one of his Explorers on a tobacco raid — but it was a big island, and Chee never targeted the same farm twice. How could this man be in exactly the right place at the right time to meet her? How could he resist the hypersonics? How could he know to call her "Explorer"?

From a few steps away, the man laughed. He was coming toward her through the tobacco, intentionally trampling plants as he passed. It wasn't easy — tobacco grows tall, with a tough thick stalk — but the man stamped hard, apparently from sheer spite. He seemed to relish the destruction.

The Explorer had rolled to her feet and was trying to put some distance between herself and the man; but the clothes she wore were bulky, and would slow her excessively if she tried to run…

[I had the vision of Opal in some kind of cumbersome spacesuit. Did that make sense? Yes. If she came from a world beyond our own, she might want to avoid exposure to our local microorganisms… and to prevent her own microbes from infecting Earth. Therefore she'd wear some airtight outfit like a perfectly sealed cocoon. It would be heavy and need its own oxygen supply — an unfortunate weight to bear if you wanted to flee from a threat.]

Meanwhile, the man just laughed and slashed through the tobacco after her. She tried to shoot him again, but the gun had no effect. Then he grabbed her and knocked the pistol out of her hand.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"Everything," he said. "Your weapon. Your equipment. You."

She tried to break free, but her clothes impeded her movement. The man held on. She stopped her struggles and asked, "How did you know I'd be coming here?"

He said, "Because I arranged it."

"That's not true."

"You're naive. How did you find your landing site? You followed a beacon you sent ahead of time. What would happen if someone activated a much more powerful beacon? You'd land where he wanted you to land." The man laughed. "This is the time of year you always come. I've been waiting every night for a week… but in the end, I knew you'd come to me."

[I was frustrated at the details missing from Opal's account. How did she actually land on our planet? A small flying ship? Some means of teleportation, like the ones described in OldTech fantasy fiction? What kind of beacon would that involve? As a scientist, I wanted to know… but the gist of the story was clear, despite the lack of specifics. Opal had been decoyed from her intended landing site to the place where the man was waiting. I grudgingly admitted the precise mechanism didn't matter.]

"Why do you want my equipment?" the Explorer asked. "If you're smart enough to build a beacon to lure me, can't you build other things too?"

"This is a primitive place," the man said. "Advanced materials are hard to find. Attempting to produce or procure such materials can draw unwanted attention from the Spark Lords."

"And you're hiding from the Sparks?"

"Until I'm ready." He glanced at the stun-pistol lying in the dirt. "Spark armor can resist normal weapon fire; but that's not a normal weapon. It might give me an advantage — when the time comes."

"I don't want you shooting people with my gun." And the Explorer drove her knee into the man's testicles.

He didn't try to evade it. [No automatic reflex to avoid groin attacks.] The Explorer's knee struck hard into flesh… and kept on going, like plunging into soft yielding sand. Immediately, she pulled back. Bits of the man's lower abdomen clung to the clothes around her knee. The scraps of flesh quivered for a moment, then shriveled into small dry grains reminiscent of gunpowder.

The man said, "Full of surprises, aren't I?"

His hand shot forward… but it had ceased to look like a human appendage. It was black and crusted, each finger thinning to a spikelike tip. They stabbed through the Explorer's special uniform like rusty nails driven through paper; they pierced her shoulder, bringing a gush of blood and pain.

"What are you?" the Explorer whispered, trying to pull away but too deeply impaled.

"What do you think? An alien. A shapeshifter. Trapped on this insufferable planet, forced to flee from the Spark Lords, trying to stay one step ahead…"

"And failing miserably," said a new voice.

The Explorer and shapeshifter snapped their heads toward the voice. A woman stood among crushed tobacco plants, only a pace away. She wore armor of bright yellow plastic, a shell that covered her completely from head to toe; the visor of her helmet was a blank plate showing nothing of the face beneath. In one hand, she held a long sword. She tapped the pommel against her thigh and the blade shone forth with a buttery light.

"War-Lord Vanessa of Spark," she said. "The introduction is for your benefit, Explorer. Your companion knows who I am. I've been chasing him a long time… and I finally caught up." She chuckled. "He gives off a stink that Spark Royal can smell — especially if he stays in one place for a while. Isn't that right, monster? I heard you say you've been waiting here every night for a week. Bad planning, BEM-brain. You should have stayed on the move."

As a response, the alien twisted the talons still imbedded in the Explorer's shoulder. The Explorer winced in pain. "If you come any closer," the alien told Vanessa, "I'll kill this woman."

"Feel free," the War-Lord answered. "You'll save me the trouble later. And do it as messily as you can. We have to make an example of her… for any other intruders who think they can come here in defiance of the treaties." Vanessa lifted her sword. "Here's a plan: you keep ripping the crap out of that shoulder while I decapitate the bitch. Or maybe I'll chop off her hands — that's the traditional punishment for thieves, isn't it?"

The alien growled in anger, or perhaps confusion at the War-Lord's response. In that moment, as the creature hesitated, Vanessa swung her weapon… but not at the Explorer. The glowing blade twisted at the last instant and bit deeply into the shapeshifter's neck. The trick maneuver didn't have as much strength as a full-motion swing, but it still came close to lopping off the creature's head. Furthermore, the sword's yellow shine caused as much damage as the blade itself: while the blade severed flesh, the shine seemed to wither surrounding tissues to the same black gunpowder the Explorer had seen after ramming the alien with her knee.

The force of Vanessa's blow threw the alien's head forward, nearly smashing it against the Explorer. The head lay tilted for a moment; then it suddenly shot upward, wrenching free from its body and hurtling several paces across the tobacco field. Before it landed, it had already sprouted legs from its severed throat: black spider-limbs on which it began scuttling for the shadows.

"Hold on to the body," Vanessa shouted to the Explorer; then she ran off after the head. Almost immediately, the rest of the alien began breaking into pieces too. Both legs and arms detached themselves from the torso; one arm remained stuck in the Explorer's shoulder, but the other parts fell to the ground and extruded spider-limbs of their own. The Explorer snatched up the alien's right leg before it could escape, and threw herself down on her knees to pin the torso. However, she had no way to stop the other leg and arm from scurrying into the night.

The arm that was still dug deep into the Explorer's shoulder began to writhe, trying to break free… and perhaps also trying to cause enough agony that she'd release her grip on the leg or the torso. Too much more, and the Explorer knew she'd pass out from pain; but before that could happen, Vanessa returned.

Instead of a glowing sword, the War-Lord now carried a small slim rod, as wide as a pinkie finger but three times as long. She tapped a button on the end of the rod and suddenly glitters of red and green light sparkled into life up and down the rod's length. Quickly, she slapped the rod's tip onto the arm that was speared into the Explorer's shoulder. The alien limb vanished with a soft ‹BINK›: collapsing in on itself, twisting and turning until it folded itself entirely out of this plane of existence. Two more slaps on the torso and leg, ‹BINK›, ‹BINK›… then all evidence of the alien was gone, leaving nothing but a salad of trampled tobacco.

The Explorer remained on her knees, trying to keep from vomiting. Vanessa crouched beside her. "You'll have to come to Spark Royal. That's the only place with facilities to clean your wound — it's sure to be infected with alien tissues."

"I thought you intended to kill me," the Explorer said. "For breaking the treaty."

Vanessa shrugged. "Usually we do kill outsiders… but your damned Admiral Chee has friends in high places. Very high. Each year the smug old bugger sends someone to steal tobacco, and each year he goes off thinking he caught Spark Royal with its pants down. It never occurs to the bastard we let him get away. Chee has no clue he's part of something larger — a long-term plan by forces far beyond him, or any other human."

"And you Sparks have to obey those forces?"

The War-Lord growled. "Sparks don't obey anyone. But we've come to an agreement with certain allies, and part of the deal is we don't kill Chee… or any other member of the Explorer Corps."

"So I'm safe," the Explorer said.

"No. You'll be dead in a week if I don't treat that wound. And don't get any stupid ideas about your own doctors dealing with it; that alien is way out of their league. Or League."

"What was that thing you killed?" the Explorer asked. "Was it really an alien? A shapeshifter?"

"Yes," Vanessa said. "I don't know the species's real name, but Spark Royal calls them Lucifers. Like a lot of advanced races, they're actually hive minds made up of millions of smaller units." She pointed to the gunpowder specks on the Explorer's knee. "Each one of those grains is a cellule, a separate organism… but it's in mental contact with almost every other Lucifer in the universe. Put a million cellules together and they can modify themselves to look like anything. Lucky for us, they don't reproduce quickly; it'll take years for those parts that got away to grow enough mass to impersonate humans again. But they're evil little shits who love to cause pain and death. I guarantee you've got at least one cellule still burrowed into your shoulder. It'll do its damnedest to kill you, just for spite… and as a shapeshifter, it's got a lot of nasty tricks at its disposal."

The Explorer tried to stand. Her legs were too weak to support her. Vanessa picked her up as easily as she would a child and started walking across the field.

"Chee expects me back," the Explorer said.

"Give him a radio call. Tell him you refuse to go home. The Explorer Corps treats you like shit and you've decided there must be better ways to spend your life."

"That's what I've decided, is it?"

"Yes," Vanessa said. She hugged the Explorer's body a little closer.

"And how will I spend my life in a place like this? I don't fit in; I don't know how people live here."

Vanessa chuckled. "Spark Royal will give you something to do. We're bastards that way. Once we save your life, you'll be in our debt and we'll exploit you shamelessly."

"How?"

"I'll have to think about that. If Explorers are as clever and resourceful as I've heard, there are lots of ways you can make yourself useful." Vanessa laughed. "Working for Spark Royal is just as dangerous as being an Explorer, but it's a hell of a lot more fun."

And the War-Lord was right. The Explorer felt no regrets at abandoning her former life. She radioed Chee and told him where he could put his missions and his tobacco; she returned to Spark Royal with Vanessa, where she received training, friendship, and a new face… this time an attractive one that didn't make "decent folk" avert their eyes; and she had many, many adventures with Vanessa all around the world.

In time she got too old for rough action; but Spark Royal had use for her, even in retirement. The Sparks controlled a network of spies in every part of the planet — not just placed at random, but in locations where trouble was expected. When Spark Royal told the Explorer she would become chancellor of an undistinguished school in Simka, she asked how such a place could possibly be considered a hot spot. "Haven't a clue," Vanessa answered, "but we've got it on good authority."

"What good authority?"

"Some high hoity-toit in the League of Peoples… an asshole who specializes in advance knowledge of where things will go wrong." Vanessa sighed. "Just between you and me, I hate the way aliens can predict the future. It's fucking spooky."

"How do they do it?"

"According to them, superior brainpower. One of them gave me this analogy: suppose you see a rock perched on the edge of a cliff. You're smart enough to know the rock will fall sooner or later; a wind will blow it over, rain will erode the ground underneath, some kid will shove it off just for kicks… however it happens, you have no doubt the rock will plummet eventually. But lesser intelligences can't make that connection — a dog or a cat or something similar just can't see what's bound to happen."

"And these aliens compare us to dogs? We're surrounded by rocks on the edges of cliffs and we're too stupid to recognize the inevitable?"

"Exactly," Vanessa said. "Also too stupid to recognize our limitations. When someone else says, 'This is obvious,' we don't believe it. We think it's a trick. We call it unfair or illogical… when really, it's ridiculous to regard ourselves as the ultimate judges of what intellect can do. Our brains are only a few million years ahead of a dog's; and some alien races evolved billions of years before we did. On the ladder of intelligence, we're barely off the ground — but it sure is a bitch living in a universe where so many species are smarter than you."

So the Explorer went where she was told. To the Feliss Academy. She didn't believe anything important could happen in such a backwater… but one should never bet against the Spark Lords.

Opal spread her hands, then let them fall into her lap. "And that's the end of my story. Or the beginning of someone else's. Take your pick."

Annah and I didn't speak for several seconds after Opal finished. I was overwhelmed by the thought that this woman I knew had come from outer space; but when I considered her scientific knowledge — and those moments during past conversations when she'd catch her breath to correct me, then fall silent like someone afraid to reveal too much — I could believe she had been born on some world more advanced than Earth.

Even more boggling was the idea that she'd been assigned to our school in anticipation of some crisis. Five years ago, when Opal became chancellor, how could anyone foresee Rosalind's arrival and the use of a bioweapon? Could Spark Royal's alien allies really be that smart?

It was Annah who finally broke the silence. "It's an amazing story, chancellor," Annah said. "But I'm… it's… why did you tell us?"

Opal gave a humorless laugh. "Because I've been dying to tell someone for years. And because a sort of a prophecy kind of thing says Phil is going on a quest. I was an Explorer once; I don't like people heading into danger when they don't know all the facts. So I thought I should tell you what I could." She paused. "But remember, Phil; it's still secret. Don't go blabbing to those drinking buddies of yours."

"I'll keep it quiet," I said, "unless it really becomes necessary to tell my friends."

"Fair enough," Opal agreed. "And let's hope that never happens. Maybe your quest will go in some completely different direction."

"At the moment, we don't have a quest," I said. "What great deed needs doing? What sacred treasure has been lost?"

"I suppose we'll find out eventually." Opal shrugged. "Meanwhile, our next move is obvious."

"What is it?"

"Call the Sparks," she said. "Let them sort out this damned mess."