She knew his real identity, or she didn't.
Pamir strangled his paranoia and put on a wide grin, shoulders managing a shrug while a calm voice inquired, 'And why should I do this errand for you?'
Miocene had a cold way of smirking. 'My request isn't reason enough?'
He held his mouth closed.
'Your neighbors didn't ask for your aid. Yet you gave it willingly, if rather secretly.' She seemed angry but not entirely surprised. Behind those black eyes, calculations were being made, and then with a pragmatic tone, she informed him, 'I will not investigate your past.'
'Because you already have,' he countered.
'To a point,' she allowed. 'Maybe a little farther than I first implied. But I won't use my considerable resources any more. If you help me.'
'No,' he replied.
She seemed to flinch.
'I don't know you,' he lied. 'But madam, according to your reputation, you are a bitch's bitch.'
In any given century, how many times did the First Chair hear an insult delivered to her face? Yet the tall woman absorbed the blow with poise, and then she mentioned a figure of money. 'In an open account, and at your disposal,' she continued. 'Use the funds as you wish, and when you've finished, use some or all of the remaining wealth to vanish again. And do a better job of it this time, you should hope.'
She was offering a tidy fortune.
But why would the second most powerful entity on the ship dangle such a prize before him? Pamir considered triggering hidden machines. He went as far as activating a tiny nexus, using it to bring a battery of weapons into play. With a thought, he could temporarily kill Miocene. Then he would slip out of the apartment through one of three hidden routes, and with luck, escape the pursuing soldiers. And within a day, or two at most, he would be living a new existence in some other little avenue… or better, living alone in one of the very solitary places where he had stockpiled supplies…
Once again, Miocene confessed, 'This is a confidential matter.' In other words, this was not official business for the First Chair.
'More to the point,' she continued, 'you won't help me as much as you will come to the aid of another soul.'
Pamir deactivated the weapons, for the moment.
'Who deserves my help?' he inquired.
'There is a young male you should meet,' Miocene replied. 'A J'Jal man, of course.'
'I'm helping him?'
'I would think not,' she replied with a snort.
Then through a private nexus, she fed an address to Pamir. It was in the Fall Away district-a popular home for many species, including the J'Jal.
'The alien is waiting for you at his home,' she continued.
Then with her cold smirk, she added, 'At this moment, he is lying on the floor of his backmost room, and he happens to be very much dead.'
Every portion of the Great Ship had at least one bloodless designation left behind by the initial surveys, while the inhabited places wore one or twenty more names, poetic or blunt, simple or fabulously contrived. In most cases, the typical passenger remembered none of those labels. Every avenue and cavern and little sea was remarkable in its own right, but under that crush of novelty, few were unique enough to be famous.
Fall Away was an exception.
For reasons known only to them, the ship's builders had fashioned a tube from mirrored hyperfiber and cold basalt-the great shaft beginning not far beneath the heavy armor of the ship's bow and dropping for thousands of perfectly vertical kilometers. Myriad avenues funneled down to Fall Away. Ages ago, the ship's engineers etched roads and paths in the cylinder's surface, affording views to the curious. The ship's crew built homes perched on the endless brink, and they were followed by a wide array of passengers. Millions now lived along its spectacular length. Millions more pretended to live there. There were more famous places onboard the Great Ship, and several were arguably more beautiful. But no other address afforded residents an easier snobbery. 'My home is on Fall Away,' they would boast. 'Come enjoy my view, if you have a free month or an empty year.'
Pamir ignored the view. And when he was sure nobody was watching, he slipped inside the J'Jal's apartment.
The Milky Way wasn't the largest galaxy, but it was most definitely fertile. Experts routinely guessed that three hundred million worlds had evolved their own intelligent, technologically adept life. Within that great burst of natural invention, certain patterns were obvious. Haifa dozen metabolic systems were favored. The mass and composition of a home world often shoved evolution down the same inevitable pathways. Humanoids were common; human beings happened to be a young example of an ancient pattern. Harum-scarums were another, as were the Glory and the Aabacks, the Mnotis and the Striders.
But even the most inexpert inorganic eye could tell those species apart. Each hu-manoid arose on a different life-tree. Some were giants, others quite tiny. Some were built for enormous worlds, while others were frail little wisps. Thick pelts of fur were possible, or bright masses of downy feathers. Even among the naked mock-primates, there was an enormous range when it came to hands and faces. Elaborate bones shouted, 'I am nothing like a human.' While the flesh itself was full of golden blood and DNA that proved its alienness.
And then, there were the J'Jal.
They had a human walk and a very human face, particularly in the normally green eyes. They were diurnal creatures. Hunter-gatherers from a world much like the Earth, they had roamed an open savanna for millions of years, using stone implements carved with hands that at first glance, and sometimes with a second glance, looked entirely human.
But the similarities reached even deeper. The J'Jal heart beat inside a spongy double-lung, and every breath pressed against a cage of rubbery white ribs, while the ancestral blood was a salty ruddy mix of iron inside a protein similar to hemoglobin. In fact, most of their proteins had a telltale resemblance to human types, as did great portions of their original DNA.
A mutation-by-mutation convergence was a preposterous explanation.
Ten million times more likely was a common origin. The Earth and J'Jal must have once been neighbors. Ages ago, one world evolved a simple, durable microbial life. A cometary impact splashed a piece of living crust into space, and with a trillion sleeping passengers safely entombed, the wreckage drifted free of the solar system. After a few light-years of cold oblivion, the crude ark slammed into a new world's atmosphere, and at least one microbe survived, happily eating every native pre-life ensemble of hydrocarbons before conquering its new realm.
Such things often happened in the galaxy's early times. At least half a dozen other worlds shared biochemistries with the Earth. But only the J'Jal world took such a similar evolutionary pathway.
In effect, the J'Jal were distant cousins.
And for many reasons, they were poor cousins, too.
Pamir stood over the body, examining its position and condition. Spider-legged machines did the same. Reaching inside the corpse with sound and soft bursts of X-rays, the machinery arrived at a rigorous conclusion they kept to themselves. With his own eyes and instincts, their owner wished to do his best, thank you.
It could have been a human male lying dead on the floor.
The corpse was naked, on his back, legs together and his arms thrown up over his head with hands open and every finger extended. His flesh was a soft brown. His hair was short and bluish-black. The J'Jal didn't have natural beards. But the hair on the body could have been human-a thin carpet on the nippled chest that thickened around the groin.
In death, his genitals had shriveled back into the body. No mark was visible, and Pamir guessed that if he rolled the body over, there wouldn't be a wound on the backside either. But the man was utterly dead. Sure of it, he knelt down low, gazing at the decidedly human face, flinching just a little when the narrow mouth opened and a shallow breath was drawn into the dead man's lungs.
