Crashlander

Meanwhile, Beowulf Shaeffer waits patiently for word. Let him stew long enough, paying hotel rates when he clearly can't afford it, and he'll settle for much less than his hundred thousand. Monitor his phone; we wouldn't want him looking for a better offer from the Shashters, let alone the Patriarchy. At least we know he'll wait.

The thing is, Shaeffer knows too much. A man who has seen Julian Forward's miniature black hole and the tools he used to make it a weapon should not be running loose. (Feather Filip had told me that, but I believed it.) The money is trivial … well, trivial given that it will never be paid. But Shaeffer needs the money; he won't run away from that.

I watched the eternal show of Fafnir's sea life for a time in case I was being watched myself I fished my flat portable out — less advanced than Ander's, purchased locally — and tapped at it idly. Addresses popped up, with transfer booth numbers. Some I filed, filling in a map.

People went in and out of the booths. Maybe one was an ARM planting cameras. Maybe not.

So I strolled into the near booth. Got to kill some time — right, Ander? — or the waiting will drive me nuts. My card in the slot. Look at the wall, watch the advertisements flow past (discreetly small, by city law), and presently tap out a number.

There were places a single might visit. They advertised on the walls of transfer booths. I'd never been in one — honest, Sharrol! But when the booth flicked me in, I didn't see anything surprising.

It was noisy and close. They were dressed to catch the eye, in those bodysuits with windows, men and women both. The dim light favored them, and holograms of real and fantasy worlds made a distracting magic. Eyes looked me over, judging, not liking what they saw.

On every world some singles nodes welcome the tourist trade; some don't.

How they knew me I can't guess, because Shashters are a varied lot. But I was not welcome here. One or two men were preparing to tell me so. I retrieved my Persial January Hebert card, stepped from the booth, and walked straight to the door faster than they could decide, and then out.

Any flatlander who followed me through might well be delayed.

I was hoping to see a restaurant or juice bar, but I didn't. Around the nearest corner, then, and here was a public booth. I didn't use the card. I used coins.

My ears felt the pressure drop. What I saw as I stepped from the booth was a patchy cityscape. These were the Disneys, a cluster of ten coral peaks linked to another dozen by slidebridges. It was still night. A shadow blocked a patch of stars: a wedge-shaped dirigible just departing from the Flying Island terminal.

You wouldn't find more than one dirigible company to an island. Why risk dirigibles floating into each other when any customer can take a booth to the next island over? There were four terminals in the Disneys, all on outlying islands.

From the Flying Island terminal I began walking.

Daylight would have fried me before I reached my target. But the night was a gorgeous display of stars, and the waves crashed down in spectral blue and yellow flashes of luminous algae. In this light an albino would look no weirder than anyone else.

* * *

If I had a trick worth trying, it was unpredictability. Ander might trace me as far as the singles node. What he would learn there might set him to searching hospitals for a battered P. J. Hebert. He couldn't follow coins, I thought, but if somehow he did, he'd find I had reached the Flying Island dirigible terminal, then –

Then? Somewhere else, with the same haste I'd shown up to now. Possibly I'd boarded a dirigible; more likely I was on Shasht via instantaneous booth.

But for most of an hour I rode slidebridges toward Beast Island.

On Aladdin Island I found a tourist section and a hairstyler with a wide range of settings. Nobody but a flatlander would want his hair colored. I turned it sandy and curly and short. I stopped again to buy fresh clothing and a bigger backpurse, again for a steam bath and massage and to ditch my old clothing. Ander could have left any number of cameras on my person. Well before dawn I walked into the Grail Hunt terminal, where I bought my dirigible ticket as Martin Wallace Graynor.

If Ander knew that name, he'd have Milcenta Graynor, too: Sharrol. But he didn't have Feather, and Feather was Adelaide Graynor. We weren't caught yet.

I boarded the Wyvern. I settled into a hammock chair and fell fast asleep.

GHOST: EIGHT

The Core. Ashes of supernovas: plasma thick and glowing among millions of neutron stars. Lighter stars still glowed, still retained their retinue of planets.

Automated spacecraft streamed out from a pentagon of blue and white worlds. Terraforming began on a vast scale. Would they all be farming worlds to feed one homeworld with a population approaching quintillions? The surface would be lost. A hollow world would form and swell to Jovian size.

Tens of thousands of years away. Would anyone remember the Pierson's puppeteers?