When Toby came close to Hobbes he would bark at him a few times, as he'd recently taken to doing. Hobbes would watch him sail by, thoughtfully, as if trying to make up his mind. One bite, or two? Swallow him tailfirst, or head-first? Decisions, decisions.
Toby had always been as spry as a snark in zero gee, but I was surprised at how well the tigers bore it. Not that cats aren't innately more graceful than dogs, but I'd once seen a house cat twisting endlessly, knowing he was falling but unable to figure out where he was going to land. Shere Khan and Hobbes just hooked their claws in the thick carpet and walked around as usual. I suppose they had been made fearless and maybe a little stupid by the same treatments that had left them free of aggression and the urge to hunt.
When Hal warned us we were about to boost again the tigers immediately reclined on the floor. I snagged Toby and held him in my lap. The weight, when it came, was about one gee, and didn't last very long. When it was over, Jupiter had swung around behind us and was shrinking rapidly. One twist of the dial on my console would have brought it around front again, in the false image we were watching, but Poly was tired of it and I had no desire to watch anymore. So we were weightless for another half hour until Hal put spin on the ship again, and then things continued as before.
But not quite. Poly and I started sharing a bed, and I began to spend a lot of time in the library, researching the Charonese.
I don't know what decided Poly, why she finally forgave me. I never asked, because I rather suspected it was mostly loneliness. Not that I wanted a burning love affair, but who needs to know that any male body would have served her as well? Poly was not the sort to go to bed with a guy she didn't like simply to scratch an itch, but she made it clear to me before we made love that she wasn't looking for a life companion at this point in her career. Hey, at this point in my career, neither was I. So that was understood. But we were affectionate with each other. She didn't come to my bed simply for sex. She stayed to cuddle, and eventually to sleep.
It had been a long time since I'd been able to awaken in the morning with a warm body at my side. A girl who didn't mind when I reached over and stroked her thigh, her hip, who would turn over and be in my arms. I've formed few long-term relationships in my life. This one wouldn't be long, either, but while it lasted it was good for me. No hot, sweaty details here, my friend. Let it stand that she was an inventive and enthusiastic lover, able to adjust to whatever mood seized me, and more than capable of bending me to her own will, if the mood suited her. We had some jolly, slippery times.
But the universe compensates. If something good comes into your life, the odds are something bad is not far away.
In this case, it was as near as the library.
After Jupiter, I was no longer satisfied to fish from my hammock. At least not all day long. I began thinking about Isambard Comfort, his dead sister, and the whole race that had spawned them. I had no illusions about Izzy. He might not be waiting for me on Luna, but if he was alive—and I felt sure he was—he'd be there soon. It made sense that the more I knew about his people, the better I'd be able to survive a third encounter with him. What did I need to do, for instance, to square things with them? Was it possible? Everyone had heard of the Charonese tenacity, of their reputation for always fulfilling a contract, no matter what. Was it really that bad?
It was worse. Much worse.
The first thing that struck a researcher—me—was the paucity of information. Hal had a UniKnowledge module, which was the nearest thing we'd ever get to summing up all human information collected since the days of the Cro-Magnon. It held all the libraries of Old Earth. All the movies, television shows, photo files. Billions of billions of bits of data so obscure a researcher might visit some of it once in two or three hundred years, and then only long enough to find it no longer had any reasonable excuse for being. But it wasn't thrown out. Capacity was virtually infinite, so nothing was ever tossed. Who knew? In ten centuries the twenty years of telemetry from Viking I might be of use to somebody. A vanity-press book, published in 1901, all about corn silage in Minnesota, of which no hard copy existed, might be just the reading you were looking for some dark and stormy night. The UniKnowledge held thousands of books printed in Manx, a language no one had spoken in a hundred years. It held Swahili comic books teaching methods of contraception. It contained cutting-room debris saved from a million motion pictures, discarded first drafts of films never made. A copy of every phone book extant at the time we began to record data by laser, and every one printed since. Fully half of the information in the UK had never been cataloged, and much never referenced in the centuries since its inception, and most of it was likely never to be cataloged. That would be taking the pack-rat impulse too far. Librarians had other things to do, such as develop more powerful search engines to sort through the inchoate mass of data when somebody wanted to find out something truly obscure.
But it was all in there. And if you set it for CHARONESE: Search, it began to spew out mountains of information. Or at least it seemed like mountains, at first glance. However, if you set it for ALBANIAN NAVY, 1936, it would spew out a mountain of information as well. You had to keep it in perspective.
So the first thing was to set the UK to sorting, organizing, comparing. It produced helpful graphs, statistical analysis, suggested routes of exploration. It spotted anomalies, pointed out the unexpected. The first thing it showed me was that, for an entire inhabited planet, there was practically no information at all. Economic data was very skimpy. Social analysis was sketchy. And most striking, items written by actual Charonese were unknown. Zip. Zero. Not one manuscript. The Charonese were not contributing information to the universal human database. They were hoarding their holdings like a paranoid poker player. Why?
The UK could help me with that, too. It searched for things written by ex-Charonese, expatriates. There had been a few, over the years. The bulk of these had spent their lives trying to make themselves very, very small, but a few had spoken out in print.
For a short time.
The UK produced a graph showing average life expectancy of an ex-Charonese. Ten months. Ninety percent were dead within one month of defection. The tougher ones lasted a little longer; one fellow was thought to be alive twenty years after leaving his home planet, but no one had seen him in five years, so it was anybody's guess.
They tended to die in accidents. In the same way that a boot crushing an ant might be seen as an accident.
Some of this stuff I knew, or had been told was probably true, but it was interesting to see it confirmed. Charonese didn't abide traitors. They kept their business secret, at any cost.
I could spin you quite a detective story about how I tracked my facts down. It's all in there, all in the UK, but finding it, putting it together, drawing conclusions, that's something else. As usual, there were reams of references from the Net, and they were about as useful as you'd expect, which is not much. Unattributed tales, anecdotal evidence, wildly contradictory accounts of How I Survived an Encounter with a Charonese. I spent more time than I usually would have with this material, because reliable sources were rare. The authors of such material were usually to be found in the obituary column a few weeks after publication. Venues that published anonymous articles about Charonese tended to announce new editorial staff for the next issue. Even printers and broadcasters had been assassinated.