'Your lock's broken,' she told them. 'You should complain to Eddie.'
'It isn't broken,' said Grace. 'We switched it off.'
Lakey looked around, the Veronica Lake fall of gold hair swinging. She didn't seem as surprised to see the state the place was in as Sara the bot had been.
'Can we help you?' inquired Grace. 'I'm here because we want to talk to you.'
'Everybody wants to talk to us,' said Orlando. 'Is your chair in this?'
'My chair has the brains of a hamster. I mean, some of us.' The chair hissed. Lakey leaned from it to peer at drifted socks. 'You two disappeared this morning. You left the sys-op screen. We think Eddie took you through the Wall, and now you know something that will cost you your sweet little tourist skins, unless you get some help.'
'What is the Fulcrum?' asked Grace.
Lakey's body was a wreck, but she still had the remains of tough, old-fashioned natural beauty in her dropsical face and in the way she smiled.
'You just spilled all the noughts and ones, little lady.'
'I truly don't know what you mean.'
'Give me a place to stand,' said Lakey, 'and I will move the world.'
'What are you talking about?'
'To me the Fulcrum means nothing. To you, it means life or death. You guys had a nerve, coming out to the Pan. Do you even care what non-local has done to our culture, to our heroes? This is our fucking patch, the only one we have left. There's a maintenance bay, one junction centerwards of the observation deck, where the food machines go to get pulled apart when they die. You better be there, at oh-four-hundred hours standard, or else. Do you know what burial at sea means?'
Burial at sea meant when Deep Spacers chuck some miscreant out of an airlock, naked into hard vacuum.
'Okay,' said Grace. 'We'll talk. But we want our bicycles back.'
Lakey grinned in appreciation. 'I'll see what I can do.'
Six hours later, the Panhandle was deep in its night cycle. Dim nodes of minimum light glowed along the dark corridors, each node surrounded by a halo of micro-debris. The air exchangers sighed, the aliens bounced toward the rendezvous with barely a sound. As they hit the last junction, Orlando touched Grace's arm. She nodded. They had both heard the crisp tread of velcro soles. Some adept of the spaceways was sneaking up behind them, and it definitely wasn't Lakey. Without a word they jumped up, utilizing their low-gravity gymnastics practice, kicked off from the wall, flew, and kicked again.
Not daring to grab at anything, they tumbled into the bay, narrowly avoided colli-son with the hefty carcass of a meat synthesizer, and hit the industrial carpet behind it. The crisp footsteps came on, like booted feet walking lightly on fresh snow. They tried not to breathe. The maintenance bay was pitch dark, but it did not feel safe. They were surrounded by the shadow operators, disregarded life support, as if by a dumb and blind and suffering malevolence. Then something shrieked. Something fell, and a human voice started up, a series of short, horrible, choking groans -
'That's Lakey!' gasped Grace, mouth against Orlando's ear.
Silence followed. They crept forward until they could see, in the dim light from the junction, the fat lady's power chair upended and crippled. Lakey was lying beside it, her golden hair adrift, her great body as if crushed at last by the knocked-down gravity that had ruined her bones and swamped her lymphatic system.
'Lakey?' whispered Grace helplessly. 'Hey, er, are you okay?'
Something whimpered. Jack Solo's bot was crouching beside the body, like a painted shadow on the darkness, wearing her usual grubby nightdress, 'jack didn't do it,' whined Anni-mah. She rubbed her bare arms and cringed from a blow that existed only in the virtual world. 'It wasn't Jack! He wasn't here! Oh, hit me harder, yes-'
The legendary pilot's wrist knife was on the floor, covered in blood. Orlando and Grace went over to the strange tableau. Lakey'd been stabbed, many times. Blood pooled around her, in swollen globules that stood on the carpet like grotesque black bubbles. Their eyes met. The madman must be very near, and in a highly dissociated state. He was certainly still armed. Jack Solo didn't carry just the one knife.
'Anni?' whispered Grace, trying to make it gentle. 'Where's poor Jack?'
'Jack is right here,' said a voice they didn't know.
They spun around. White lights came up. Out from among the defunct service machines loomed the gangling man, with the visor and the crooked bones of many fractures, whom they had called Blind Pew. The popeyed fellow they had nicknamed Joe Cairo was beside him, supporting his arm. Other figures joined them: one-armed Dirty Harry, a swollen-headed woman they'd called Jean Harlow for her rags of platinum-blonde hair, and two support staff in their drab coveralls. Right now they were supporting Jack Solo. The pilot stared vaguely at the aliens, as if hardly aware of his surroundings, and muttered, 'Jack didn't do it.'
'Did he kill Lakey?' asked Grace. 'We heard a struggle.'
'Lakey?'
'The lady in the chair.'
The tall man nodded, indifferent. 'It looks like it.'
'We were supposed to meet her here. She said she could get out bikes back.'
'Ah, the bicycles. Come along. Leave that.' He jerked his chin at the corpse, 'The robotics will clear it away. Her name was Lana. She was my wife,' he added, casually, as he led the way toward the observation deck, leaning on Joe Cairo's arm. 'For many years, when I was a pilot. But we had grown apart.'
The halfdome was still filled by the vast, silent majesty of the nebula, studded with its glorious young stars. The other prospectors and the two support staff grouped themselves around the tall man. Jack Solo was still muttering to himself.
Anni-mah hovered in the background, like a troubled ghost.
The tall man turned his back on the astronomy and propped his gangling form against the rail, his visored face seeking the aliens. 'My name… is immaterial. They call me L'Hibou, which means the owl. I was Franco-Canadian, long ago. These good folk have made me their spokesperson. We have to talk to you, about the information you have concerning the Fulcrum and what you plan to do with it.'
'Lake -Lana used that term. We don't know what it means,' said Grace.
'A fulcrum, my young friends, is the fixed point on which a lever moves. The un-moving mover one might say. But reculons-nous, pour mieux sauter. Eight hundred years ago, explorers set out across uncharted seas, and the mighty civilization that still commands the human world was born. Four hundred years ago, man achieved space flight. What happened?'
Orlando and Grace wondered what to say.
L'Hibou provided his own answer. 'Nothing,' he said, with infinite disgust. 'Flags and footprints in the dead dust! Eventually, yes, a few fools managed to scrape a living in the deep. But the gravity well defeated us. We could not become a new world. There was nothing to prime the pump, no spices, no gold: no new markets, never enough materials worth the freight.'
The Spacers muttered, in bitter assent.
'Buonarotti science has changed everything,' continued L'Hibou. 'It makes our whole endeavor look like Leonardo da Vinci's futile attempts to fly. Touching, useless precosity. Pitifully wrongheaded! But what will non-local transit, of itself, give to the human race? Prison planets, my young friends. Sinks for Earth's surplus population, despatched out there with a pick and shovel and a bag of seed apiece. That's what the International Government intends. And so be it, that's none of our concern. But something happened, out here on the Kuiper Belt station fifteen years ago. In one of the first Buonarotti experiments, a dimensional gate was opened, and something came back that was not of this universe. There were deaths, human and AI. Records were erased. No witnesses survived, no similar experiment has ever been attempted, non-local exploration has been restricted to the commonplace. But we have pieced together the story. They were very afraid. They ejected the thing from the Hub, wrapped in the force field that still contains it. The Knob was built around that field and connected to the Pan, so that the jailer would have some relief and some means of escape. And there it stays, weeping its precious tears.'
'Thanks,' said Orlando. 'We've read the guidebook.'
'It is the scorpion,' hissed the popeyed little man. 'The scorpion that stings because that is its nature, the scorpion that will fell the mighty hunter.'
The tall man smiled wryly. 'My friend Slender Johnny is as crazy as Jack. He's convinced that the silver tears will ruin the world below, the way Mexican gold felled the might of Spain. It seems to be a slow acting poison.'
