Julian May - Perseus spur: an adventure of the Rampart Worlds

Perseus Spur

The Rampart Worlds

Book I

Julian May

A Del Rey Book

CONTENT

It's a given: if the Hundred Concerns are determined to destroy you, fighting back is hopeless. But I was a proud and pigheaded man. I never doubted that I'd be vindicated, because justice and righteousness were on my side; so I fought. And of course I lost.

When my final appeal to the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat disciplinary tribunal was denied and I was Thrown Away, some important part of my personality shattered, plunging me beyond despair into a deadly apathy. My marriage to Joanna DeVet had ended, and I'd managed to alienate most of my family, my few remaining friends, and the handful of colleagues at the Secretariat who had stood by me during the scandal. I had no money left, no possibility of earning an honest livelihood, and as a Throwaway, I was eligible for only the most meager public assistance. My spiritless inertia made even the obvious solution impossible.

Finally, the only one who ever believed that I was not guilty as charged, my older sister Eve, offered to pay my passage to a planet in the Perseus Spur, a perfect T-i world where subsistence living was feasible and human predation at a minimum. I said: Why not? It made sense for me to keep decently out of the way until I found the courage to do what most people seemed to expect of me.

Improbably, I kept on living. Odder still, justice and righteousness did ultimately prevail. It took a while.

But I'm still convinced that the Hundred Concerns would never have come tumbling down, changing the course of human civilization in our galaxy and defeating the Haluk invasion, if the sea monster hadn't eaten my house.

* * *

The aftermath of a big storm had left the skies of Kedge-Lockaby overcast and windy that morning, hiding the comets and turning the normally gin-clear waters of the Brillig Reef murky with stirred-up sediment. The five sport divers who had hired me and Pernio, my aging submersible, for a holo-cam outing were noisily disappointed. Their names were Clive Leighton, Mario Volta, Oleg Bransky, Toku Matsudo, and Bron Elgar. They were a demanding and uncongenial bunch, a referral from an expensive hotel on the BigBeach.

All of them were fit and under forty. All were outfitted with the most sophisticated and expensive cameras and diving gear. All except the one named Bron (who was very quiet and in some indefinable way seemed to be the leader of the pack) were charter members of the "been there, done that" club of smartasses. Clive, Mario, Oleg, and Toku described themselves curtly as Rampart Starcorp executives, and I assumed that close-mouthed Bron was another one, perhaps their boss. Even under the best of circumstances the quintet would have been difficult. On a below-par diving day like that one promised to be, they were a total shuck.

My first mate, Kofi Rutherford, and I worked our buns off trying to please, but we bombed every time. We led a tour through the famous castle corals with their normally hilarious mome rath coloniesand the damned critters sulked in their holes. We moved on to my guaranteed crowd pleaser, the underwater forest of multicolored slithy tovesbut their beauty was dimmed by the excessive amount of crud in the water. The albino borogoves drooped wanly and didn't sing a note. With the divers getting glummer and glummer, I tried to demonstrate the firecracker defense behavior of the brillig spongids at considerable risk to my own neck. Kofi coaxed a very pissed-off bandersnatch dodecapod partly out of its shell by offering himself as bait.

The clients kept their cameras going, but they were not impressed.

At the noon break, the diver named Bron was uncommunicative, while the other four complained that the buffet spread I had provided was not up to their gourmet standards. Furthermore, they groused, my watersleds were clunkers, my sub's head was out of toilet paper, and perhaps the trip should be cancelled and their card accounts credited.

I smiled a whole lot and pointed out that the charter agreement they had signed clearly stated that my fee was nonre-fundable. But heythings would be much better when we moved on to this great new location I had in mind. With luck, we'd even see the fabulously rare giant cometworms!

I drove Pernio to the Isle of Rum-Ti-Foo, where dramatic underwater cliffs, eroded lava formations, and rippling white laceweed usually made a striking backdrop for abundant schools of attractive piscoids. The water was a lot clearer when we went back down, but the cometworms were unfortunately still out to lunch, and so were the other spectacular varieties of marine life. All we encountered were small groups of cluckers, flame-vipers, and glass scorpionscommon species that the divers had already bagged back in the tourist-trappy pools at the BigBeach. At 1500 hours they decided they'd had enough, reboarded the sub, and ordered me to return to port as soon as possible.

Was I really surprised when Pernio's temperamental magnetic-field guidance system chose that golden moment to crash?

I spent nearly an hour trying to fix the thing while the fuming sports peered over my shoulder and made unhelpful suggestions. Finally admitting defeat, I announced that since we were incapable of navigating underwater, I would have to crank up the sub's flybridge and drive us back to Eyebrow Cay on the surface. The exasperated clients demanded to be flown off the boat at my expense, but I politely referred them again to our charter agreement, Clause 7, where they had acknowledged that all activity aboard a Throwaway-owned vessel was undertaken at their own risk.

Then Bron said he'd pay for the lift-out. Double, if necessary. The other four perked up. But when I called Eyebrow's little skyport no local hoppercraft were available. The island's two rattletrap jetboat taxis were also engaged, so the sports were stuck with Pernio and a tedious seventy-kilometer slog home through rough seas.

The delay meant that they would miss the 1720 express shuttle back to Manukura on the Big Beach; and if we didn't get into port before the last shuttle flight at 1845, they'd be forced to spend the night at one of Eyebrow Cay's spartan guest houses. The men were staying at the Nikko Luxor, the best hotel on Kedge-Lockaby, and were in no mood for roughing it.

I smiled some more and told them I'd do my doodly damnedest to make knots. Then I ordered Kofi to break out the champagne that I keep aboard for special celebrations and disasters. He led the passengers below to the glasswall cabin, the snotty foursome still bitching bitterly and taciturn Bron looking like he'd swallowed a bad pup-oyster. I stayed topside on the extruded bridge, brooding, hoping nobody got too seasick.

Some submersibles moved decently on the surface, but old Pernio isn't one of them. She wallows, especially in the kind of ugly chop we had that day, and she is very slow. Feeling none too swift myself, I wondered how much it was going to cost to repair the broken MFGS. It was newer than the sub but still twenty years obsolete, and I doubted that even my handy pal Oren Vinyard would be able to find parts for it. I also wondered if the unhappy clients would badmouth me to the tour booker back at the Luxor, ensuring that Cap'n Helly's Dive Charters would be purged from their referral d-base.

I had long since kissed goodbye any hope of a decent tip.

Kofi came up after about ten minutes and we were able to talk privately for the first time since setting out that morning.

"They calm down any?" I asked without much hope.

He grinned at me. "The bubbly helped. Nobody's queasy. Better than that, the storm must have disturbed the thermo-cline. We just passed into Blue Gut, and what d'you know ? An upwelling of abyssal water brought up a swarm of ruby prawns doing their mating dance. Prettiest goddamn sight you could ask for. All of the clients except Brother Bron grabbed their corders and started shooting their tiny brains out. Acing the rubieseven through the windowwill give them something to brag about back at Manukura. No way anybody can tell they didn't make a wet shoot."