Fir Li grinned and turned full face to Greystroke. “I knew. One who’d not dare that journey first is no Pup of mine.”
When Greystroke had reached the door to the boardroom, Fir Li stopped him with a word. “Pup?”
“Aye, Cu?”
“They send them out in pairs, so that if one is caught, the other might get through.”
Greystroke nodded. “Of the second courier, we learned nothing.”
“See that you do,” the Hound said as he read the report on sick call, “before he learns of you.”
Two days out along the Silk Road, near the approaches to Last Chance, Greystroke realized the full depth of his master’s humor. He had entered the pantry to make a cup of his favorite blend—a tea from the slopes of Polychrome Mountain on Peacock Junction, where the variegated soils and the judicious splicing of selected fruit genes had achieved the nirvana of teas. There, he paused and reflected.
One who’d not dare that journey first is no Pup of mine.
Indeed. Had Greystroke’s mind numbered the two choices otherwise, his master’s orders would have sent him across the Rift into the CCW, in cold likelihood to his doom.
And, so, no longer a Pup of Fir Li.
He completed the preparations and secured the tea canister in the cabinet. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
Greystroke’s mobile field office, Skyfarer, was a comfortable vessel, streamlined for atmospheric flight, and as gray a ship as he was a man. Her name was unremarkable; her appearance, ordinary. A hundred thousand other private yachts possessed the same lines, the same colorings; some, indeed, the same registration number on the hull. And yet, beneath her ordinary exterior lay an extraordinary ship. Her sensors were of surpassing fineness; her Newtonian engines of matchless power. Her intelligence was more supple than that of many of the passengers—and prisoners—she had carried. Her alfvens could brake her unaided by any ground-based decelerators. She contained facilities for exercise and recreation, storage rooms, a refectory and library, a bay for the dũbuggi, another for the collapsible flitter—but all of it so cunningly laid out that no interior volume was wasted.
More extraordinary still—and despite or because of this utilitarianism—her furnishings were richly decorated. No comfort had been neglected; nothing plain had been permitted. Art filled odd spaces; color emblazoned panels. The decor extended from the visual to the audible to the other senses. Intricate ragas and concertos played subtly over speakers. Incense burned; the larder bulged with the most savory of faux-creatures. Nor were the inner senses neglected: the library, both physical and virtual, was of unsurpassed variety. The most ordinary of fittings had been milled and chamfered and routed into elaborate vines and grotesques. Control knobs bore the heads of beasts. The ship’s interior was as ornate as its owner was not, as if every bit of ostentation that had been squeezed from his person had been applied to his vessel.
In this comfort, Greystroke spent the twenty-two metric days from Sapphire Point to Jehovah Interchange. He planned a brief respite at Peacock Junction to secure more of his preferred tea, but otherwise he settled into his shipboard routine. He read from Còstello and other favorite philosophers; he enjoyed—and sometimes participated in—simulations of great battles or great fictions; he sparred with the onboard intelligence in games of thought. He sparred, too, in his gym, which, while smaller and less well appointed than Fir Li’s, provided ample scope to hone his skills.
He researched the various costumes of the Terran Corner in Benet’s Sumptuary Guide to the Spiral Arm, and programmed his anycloth to emulate them. A flick of the wrist, and the plain, gray bolt became a tartan mantle that he draped around his shoulders. A shrug, and the microfibers shivered into a knee-length kurta with embroidered borders; a tug at the collar and it opened into a dhoti, which he tugged down to his waist. A whispered command and the colors faded and the edges grew ragged. Satisfied, he pinched the seam and it opened up once more into a simple bolt of gray fabric.
From time to time he scanned the yellow-white blur that marked the shoulders of the Silk Road, and tried to tease out the images of long-gone ships from the subluminal mud. The walls of a Krasnikov tube consisted of lamina whose “speed of space” decreased steadily from the channel itself outward toward the Newtonian flats. Where the lamina were thin and “packed close,” the shoulders were said to be “steep” or “tight,” and no ship could pass through them without some portion of her structure crossing a contour line faster than the speed of space on the other side. The resulting Cerenkov “blink” could rip the vessel asunder or destroy it completely. Even at rest in the channel, a ship might be traveling many times faster than Newtonian c. Elsewhere, usually at certain resonance distances from suns, gravity broadened the lamina into “ramps” more easily negotiated. The Silk Road was well charted, but Greystroke and the ship’s intelligence kept a wary eye out when the shoulders grew tight by sounding them at intervals with a molecule or two.
But one curious consequence of the lamination was that the images of passing ships were trapped, for they moved always at the speed of light and so the deeper into the shoulder one peered, the older and slower those images were. There were ships that had passed by centuries before whose fossil images were only now reaching this point. With luck and skill and with instruments of exquisite fineness, one could sometimes tease these images from the blur of countless others. It had become something of a hobby with Greystroke. He had secured a picture of City of Chewdad Roy just as it was breaking up along Sweet Love Road to New Tien-ai. He had captured another of the Great Fleet that the Second Tyrant of Gladiola had launched against Ramage. Once, but only once, and this was years before, he thought he had seen a prehuman ship, an odd, misshapen vessel unlike any other he had ever seen. But those images, thousands of years old, were like pictures left too long in the sun, bleached and faded and indistinct. They had had millennia to sink through the shoulders of the road and now wafted pale and ghostlike across the Newtonian flats.
The ancient god, shree Einstein, the scarred man says, has not forbidden that two things might happen at the same time; but he has clouded men’s minds in such a way that they can never know that they have. There is no universal time, nor even absolute space. Even if one clocks off the revolution of the galaxy, as men once clocked off the revolution of Old Earth, that motion seems different from different parts of the Spiral Arm. The Constant Clock on Friesing’s World is no more than an agreement and ships and worlds synchronize with it through complex incantations prayed to Lorenz and Fitzgerald and Rudolf.
So if synchronicity has any meaning on worlds so far apart, Greystroke left the Rift at about the same time that the Fudir rescued Little Hugh in the back alleys of the Corner, and was still en route when the Brotherhood arranged to smuggle the pair off-planet. A cargo was booked on New Angeles for delivery on New Eireann, realistic certificates of competency were provided to Hugh and the Fudir, Mgurk dropped from sight in the Corner, and a debilitating substance was introduced into the mulligatawny consumed by Micmac Anne in the Restaurant Chola. The stomach cramps might not have prevented her from shipping out with the others, but the frequent and odious diarrhea proved too great an obstacle for her shipmates.
So it was that January was two hands short with departure imminent. Maggie B. could move up to Number One and Tirasi was qualified to sign the articles as astrogator; but that still left a hole for an instrument tech. There were worlds from which he could have departed shorthanded—January thought that Maggie and Bill between them could cover all three berths, and Malone could double up on the scut work—but Jehovah was a stickler for the literal interpretation of texts, legal texts no less than others.