The Fraxilly Fracas

by Douglas Hill

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

It all seemed so simple: take a small, sealed container to the planet Fraxilly, and hand it over to the planet's ruling God-King. Hardly a problem for someone with the reputation of Del Curb interstellar courier and self-styled hero.

Release date: July 31, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

When the call first came in from Fraxilly, I didn’t accept it. Earlier I had told the Posi who runs everything on my ship to hold all calls. She records them, acknowledges them – unless I’m being incommunicado for some reason – and replays them for me later. That way I avoid being plagued by calls from obscure planets when I have important things on my mind.

What was mainly on my mind just then – in fact, preying on it – was another obscure planet. Our destination, named Ixyphal II.

We were down to Halflight, sliding through the tangle of the Lagoon Nebula interlink, making our way towards the secondary GalacNet lines that would get us to the sector containing the Ixyphal system. Many less well-equipped ships would have gone through that interlink only at Firstlight speed, and then nervously – because of the horror tales of ships that slid through the wrong slots and were caught in endless loops round and round the interlink for centuries. But Posi was performing superbly, as always. So I’d left my pouch-seat in the control area to take my troubled mind back to my personal cabin. There I tried to ease my worries by sipping a Freezobalm and thinking about the fee I could be carrying away from Ixyphal II.

If I could get away from Ixyphal II.

That planet is populated by millions of little blue paranoids who have many arms and legs and absolutely no inhibitions. Especially about avenging insults, real or imagined. They are among the most hypersensitive exters – extraterrestrials – I’ve ever encountered, and I almost refused their commission for that reason. But they offered a very tempting fee simply to transport an art object, a sculpture, which they’d bought as a centrepiece for a planetary arts festival they were staging. And I had foolishly thought it would be the easiest fee I’d ever earned.

Instead, as I sat in my cabin moodily pouring another Freezobalm, I was facing a good chance of losing my valuable reputation as an interplanetary courier. And maybe my even more valuable life.

The job had started well enough, with the receipt of half the fee up front, then the receipt of the sculpture. It had been made by a galactically known artist – an ancient, smelly and mostly blind human living on a renovated asteroid near the Home System where Old Earth still spins. The artist had fussed around while the thing was being loaded on my ship, babbling about how important it was and how delicate it was and so on, until I’d just stopped listening.

I’d also stopped looking at the sculpture. I don’t know anything about art, but I know what turns my stomach. It was about room-sized, and bright blue, which may be why it appealed to the Ixyphalians. It seemed to be a conglomeration of small shapes, looking vaguely like humans and exters, who were all suffering extreme torment in deeply disgusting ways. Supposedly a weird image of an afterlife. And it seemed to be made from millions of tiny fibres, like coarse hairs, all twined and braided and knotted, fixed firmly together by the artist’s special secret process, which I think he called Solidity Polarization.

Except that the solidity didn’t stay polarized.

It was my partner, Mala Yorder, who first noticed it. Mala is small and trim and dark-haired, with luminous blue eyes, the lissom body of an Ondilian angel-dancer – and the mind and soul of a policewoman, which she once was. She has all the skills as well as the attitudes that her police training gave her. So she is highly observant, good at noticing things. Particularly small errors and omissions on my part.

In this case, some time before we reached Ixyphal, she had gone back to the storage and cargo area to look at the sculpture again, murmuring things like “masterpiece” and “magnificent” and the usual art-appreciation noises that people murmur. And then she came running forward, shrieking.

“Curb! Quick! It’s fraying!”

I went back to look through the view-panel, and felt my stomach go into zerograv. There was a scattering of blue fibres on the floor – a large scattering – and some of the outer figures looked different. Just as repulsive, but different. Smaller, and distorted.

Then Mala shrieked again. “Curb, you pinch-headed moron!” She mostly calls me by my last name. It’s her way. “You’ve left it in atmosphere!”

I suppose I should have been paying attention to the old artist, when he was telling me that the thing had to be carried in near-vacuum with traces of helium and neon but definitely no oxygen, which would destroy it. But then the old fool should have been a little less unwashed and boring. Besides, I didn’t see why I should do everything myself, and said as much to Mala, tersely.

“I thought you’d seen to it, dribble-brain!” she yelled, when she’d finished directing Posi to alter the gases in the cargo area. “What are we going to say to the Ixyphalians?”

“Nothing,” I told her. “I’m going to fix it.”

“You?” Disbelief and scorn were heavy in her voice, but I put it down to stress. And eventually I convinced her – or anyway caused her to throw up her hands in rage and dismissal and stamp off to her cabin.

Then I fixed it. With one of my better inspirations.

I put on a spacesuit and went into the cargo area, where I found that while the main part of the sculpture was now solidified again, the fibres on the floor were disintegrating and useless. But it didn’t matter. I simply went and fetched a squeezer of magi-glue and a pair of my socks, in a pleasing electric blue. They were among my favourites, but the sacrifice had to be made. Back in the cargo area, ruining two pairs of gauntlets in the process, I ripped fibres from the socks and glued them here and there, in and around, more or less filling out the places on the sculpture that had been affected.

It took a long time, it was tedious and tiring, but in the end I thought the repair looked almost unnoticeable. Yet when I coaxed Mala out of her cabin to have a look, she stared through the view-panel with her normally rosebud mouth compressed into a thin line.

“It’s horrible,” she declared. “The Ixyphalians will tear our bowels out and hang us with them.”

Then she flounced back into her cabin. And it was shortly after that when I retreated to my own cabin and the comfort of a Freezobalm. But throughout the delicate passage across the Lagoon interlink my mind kept replaying Mala’s last graphic remark – with the growing conviction that she’d understated the Ixyphalians’ probable reaction.

As it happened, the Ixyphalians were overjoyed.

They greeted us royally, oblivious of the fact that we were sweating and trembling. Or I was, anyway. Mala just goes pale when she’s anxious, with a slight darkening of her eyes. Perhaps the little blue exters thought humans are always like that. Perhaps humans are, around Ixyphalians.

Anyway, they unloaded the sculpture with reverence, popped it into a transparent showcase filled with the right gases, made a number of loud noises expressing awe and admiration, and wheeled it away without having noticed a thing. Some of them remained behind to tell me at length how the object was a perfect focus for their festival that was being held in memory of one of their multi-armed folk heroes. It probably was perfect, at that, with all its images of pain and suffering. But I didn’t listen too closely, being busy trying to stay upright despite slightly rubbery knees.

Then they clapped me on the back with too many hands, thrust upon me the plastiform wafer that confirmed payment of the rest of my fee, and proclaimed that they would create a song for the festival in praise of “the most safe and reliable Delmore Curb, master courier”. I stammered out a fairly acceptable reason for declining their invitation to make a personal appearance at the song’s premiere, and very shortly Mala and I were back on our ship as Posi took us off-planet, with much relief all round.

So much for art appreciation, I thought. But when I said as much to Mala, as a joke to ease the tension that still showed in her eyes, she merely called me an unrepeatable name and stalked away to her cabin again.

Then, finally, as we hit Highlight in deep space beyond the Ixyphal system, I asked Posi for a playback of any comm messages. And I lay back in the cradling pouch-seat, enjoying the feeling of being safe and relaxed – and financially secure for a while, with that fee safely tucked away in my Fedbank account. It was a moment to be savoured, when danger was past and I was wholly at peace.

It was the last peace I was to savour for quite a long time.

Just then, though, the Fraxilly message looked very interesting. Even Mala said so, when she emerged again. (I’d had Posi put the message on the commscreen in her cabin, as well as on the one in the control area where I was. I don’t hold grudges.) Mala did point out that she found elements of the message suspicious. I reminded her that she finds a great many simple, normal things suspicious, as the police mentality does. She ignored me, and told Posi to repeat the message.

It was from an employee of the Grand Emissary from the planet Fraxilly to the Sentient Federation. It said that the Emissary would soon be travelling to SenFed Central, and that en route he wished to communicate directly with me, face to face, on a matter of immense delicacy. It politely requested that, for security reasons, I bring my ship down to Underlight speed at specific co-ordinates, at a specific time, and prepare for rendezvous with the Emissary’s ship.

“All this security, matters of delicacy,” Mala said. “That’s what’s suspicious. Someone as important as a SenFed Emissary creeping around in secret.”

“Why not?” I replied. “An important man needs privacy and security more than anyone.”

And now he seems to need me, I said to myself. It was a pleasing thought, that I might soon be moving in more exalted circles. I was not going to let Mala spoil the anticipation.

She was frowning. “You said man. Is Fraxilly a human planet?”

“No idea. Just a figure of speech.”

She turned to Posi. “Give us a full rundown. …”

“Wait,” I interrupted quickly. “We don’t need all the details. It could take hours.”

It was true enough. Posi is equipped with the most advanced call-beam facility, which lets her link up with other servo-mechanisms and artificial intelligences, nearby or distant. From just about anywhere on the GalacNet she can access systems on other worlds including the all-inclusive Encyclobanks of SenFed Central. There was no knowing how much might be there about Fraxilly. Or how much would be useful to us as background. But I knew that Posi was quite capable of droning on forever with useless stuff about gross domestic product and tertiary natural resources.

That’s often the trouble with thinking machines. They’re like people. They sometimes just don’t think.

Still, Posi is the best that creds could buy. By far the most advanced type of Intelloid – artificial intelligence in non-human form – and more capable even than the latest model of all-purpose, human-form mandroid. Also a lot more expensive. In fact it’s usually planetillionaires and the like who can afford a Posi. But I had bought mine at a time when I’d luckily accumulated some nice big fees, and she is just what I need, in every way. Her name-classification stands for Polyfunction Organizational and Service Intelloid – and it’s always useful to be organized and served. Though Posi can be deeply irritating at times – she has the pedantic self-esteem of a precocious child – I often feel I’d be nearly helpless without her.

“Synopsis, Posi – just the main headings,” I directed, ignoring Mala’s stony look.

Posi obliged, revealing that Fraxilly was a small human planet, a member of SenFed for less than three hundred years, remote and poor and backward. Poverty kept everything depressed including the birthrate, so that the planet held only a few million people, mostly low-tech agricultural. And the place was ruled by an absolute monarch named y’Iggthradgi-pile the First, known as the God-King. Many legends were told about this ruler, not very credibly, including (I allowed Posi one example) tales of his improbably heroic virility. But it was proven fact that the God-King was unusually long-lived and overwhelmingly rich.

“He and his court live in a luxury that is as excessive as his subjects’ poverty,” Posi concluded, in one of her most disapproving tones. A tendency to editorialize seems to come with higher-level Intelloids.

“Stick to the facts, Posi,” I told her firmly. “Anything more?”

“No, Del,” she replied, “unless you wish me to provide the subsidiary data.…”

“Definitely not,” I said quickly. I then gave her the coordinates from the Emissary’s message, instructing her to drop down to Underlight as we neared that point. Then I leaned back and smiled at Mala.

“See? That’s all we need to know about Fraxilly.”

She grimaced. “Posi’s right. It sounds sickening. People starving while their ‘God-King’ wallows.…”

I sighed. She gets these surges of anger now and then, against injustice and evil and so on, no matter how often I try to remind her about the facts of life. But I don’t stop trying. It’s the least I can do.

“Mala love,” I said patiently, “Fraxilly is a faraway place of which we know little. We can’t make things different there. We simply provide a service, transporting things. It’s not our business if the people who hire us aren’t nice people. We can only require them to pay us, and not to get us into anything dangerous or illegal.…”

“You’ve never worried about illegal,” she snapped.

“I may cut a corner or two, now and then,” I said stiffly. “Anyone does, in business, if it helps to provide a better service.…”

“Curb,” she broke in, “I should tell you that I’m never closer to getting out than when you start being sanctimonious about how you operate.”

“Fine,” I snarled. “You could probably get back into the FedPol. For about an eighth of what you’re getting here.”

“It might be worth it!” she yelled, and flung herself into another flouncing departure for her cabin.

I settled back into the pouch-seat, smiling to myself. That was the third angry walkout in one biological day, and the second threat to resign in less than a bio-week. We were getting interestingly close to setting a new record. But, I told myself, I shouldn’t provoke her too much. That would be cheating. And I suppose it did upset her.

All the same, I was confident that her threats to leave me were mostly empty. When she joined me – after we’d met while she was still an undercover FedPol investigator – she sternly announced that she was coming into the firm for the sake of the money, and because the job offered interest and challenge without the lethal risks that a FedPol agent often had to run. I’d accepted all that, just as I accepted her usually sharp-edged attitude to me during the nearly two years of our association. Because I was certain that other things lay beneath the surface.

It seemed to me that beyond the superficialities of our relationship there was a growing rapport, a strengthening of feeling. She never even hinted at it aloud, of course, probably because such emotions ran counter to the veneer of toughness imposed on her by her FedPol training. But I sensed it within her. And I was sure that, given time and patience on my part, it would eventually emerge and flower to give a rich new dimension to our partnership.

Meanwhile, I had to accept that she was probably not consciously aware of the true nature of her feelings. Women often aren’t. So she had to express them, and relieve her tensions, with these stormy little displays of temper.

But it made things difficult for me, at times. Just as it was difficult to be alone so much of the time with such an attractive young woman, despite the size of the ship and our separate cabins. In fact, I had once or twice let myself be tempted into making overtures to her. But when they had been greeted with expressions of total derision and distaste, I realized that she was still not ready to come to terms with the full womanly depth of her unacknowledged feelings. So I backed off at once, and resumed my patient waiting.

At least there was nothing to prevent me from enjoying a fantasy or two, now and then, while waiting. As I began to do while reclining there in the pouch seat. And intermingled with my usual imagined scenes of Mala and me together were other images – of Grand Emissaries and God-Kings, what they might want of me, what they might offer in return.

I had only once or twice done jobs for high SenFed aristocrats, or for royalty. It seemed at the time that meeting the Fraxillians could create some sort of major turning point in my career.

If I’d been able to guess at the future, the turning point would have been right there – wheeling the ship around and moving as fast as possible away from anything to do with Fraxilly.

It was going to be well into the next bio-day, I knew, before we made all the Netline interactions that would bring us to the rendezvous point. So I had a quiet dinner – alone, for Mala was still sulking – followed by a refreshing sleep. I even enjoyed an inspirational dream in which a God-King, radiant and fatherly, conferred wealth, honour and titles upon me. But when I awoke, it was time to put dreams aside and get hold of reality.

That meant a substantial breakfast, followed by a word with Posi to confirm that everything was on course and on line. Later, in my cabin, I treated myself to a long, languorous Omnipure sauna before turning at last to the task of choosing my outfit for the meeting with the Emissary. Something discreet, quiet and slightly formal, I thought. Probably the dusty-green tunic-and-leggings ensemble, with the pink-and-gold collar and cuffs and the pink-trimmed gold boots.

And when I had laid out the clothing, I began the even more important business of transferring my personal armament.

Among my acquaintances there are some who like to seem amused or amazed by my weapons. They call them excessive. They make remarks about an unmanly attitude, and they pretend to look for yellow streaks. But I never rise to their teasing. I see my weapons as reflections of a sensible, realistic caution – that of a true professional.

I’ve worked at a number of occupations that put me into positions of possible danger. As a private investigator, for instance, or earlier as a guide on the giant planet Wörbali’n, where the smallest life form had teeth as long as my arm. I know all too well that it’s a big rough galaxy out there, full of more surprises than the human imagination can conceive of. And I’ve always liked to be ready for surprises, especially the lethal sort. That means approaching my work realistically. Not for me the reckless, romantic heroisms that make obituary writers reach for phrases like “untimely end” and “cut down in his prime”. I don’t consider that I’ve reached my prime. And I intend to get there, with the help of professional caution and my range of weaponry.

The weapons are made for me on Clabidacia V, the home world of spidery exters with delicate filaments instead of limbs who are among the finest micro-engineers in the SenFed. For me they have miniaturized an array of defensive and offensive armaments, which I carry in disguised form here and there on my clothes, accessories and body. I’ve gathered them slowly over the years, because they’re cruelly expensive. So is the constant need to maintain them, and to re-energize or replace some of them. But it’s worth it, because they’ve never let me down. As is to be expected from the work of such notable craftsmen. Crafts-exters.

Anyway, when the complete transferral was done, I dressed myself with care and switched on a full-length mirror for an inspection. The mirror showed me a youngish man, perhaps a little t. . .