involved in such shenanigans. But it’s ludicrous that a professional of my skill should still be assigned to the night shift of an emergency room. Either I have proven myself obedient to the League, in which case it must cease crippling my career, or I have aided an agent who will destroy the League and eventually achieve the same effect.”
But now Kragen had said too much. He clearly wasn’t that naive. The League wouldn’t stop harassing him just because he did what they asked. They wanted obeisance, not merely obedience. Which meant that he was telling Kyle he really was anti-League. But only if Kyle was wise enough to understand it, which would imply that Kyle really was anti-League.
Kyle nodded in agreement. He couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make his head hurt.
“Naturally, I can’t be held responsible for the theft of Mr. Wilson’s identity cards from his room. That’s a matter for the police to look into.”
With that, Dr. Kragen threw a sheet over him and spoke a command. “Attendant … take this patient to room 715.” And then the rolling journey again, as Kyle, protected only by cloth this time, waited yet again for someone else to take him somewhere else.
An elevator ride and several turns later, Kyle was left alone. Unable to remain passive any longer, he tore off the sheet.
The room was dark and empty, but he could hear voices coming. He hid behind the bathroom door, leaving it half-open so he could still see.
Two attendants rolled another gurney in, and spent a few minutes transferring a comatose old man to the bed. They puzzled over the second gurney for a moment, but unable to solve the mystery, settled for solving the problem. When they left, they wheeled both gurneys away.
Just as Kyle thought it was safe to come out into the open, Dr. Kragen strolled in.
With businesslike efficiency, he switched charts.
“Sorry about your grandfather, Mr. Wilson.” Kragen spoke to Kyle without looking at him. “He’ll be more comfortable here for the next two days. At most.”
“Thank you,” Kyle said again, but to Kragen’s back as the doctor walked out of the room.
A brief fishing expedition through the hospital bag next to Mr. Wilson’s bed yielded cards and papers. Kyle dropped them into his pillowcase.
Another elevator ride, this time under his own power, and he walked out the front door. It was amusing to think he might have passed some of the same people on the way down as he had on the way up, and they were completely unaware of it. Such were the dubious amusements of secret identities.
Outside, in the cool air, he thought about how Prudence and he had passed each other, buried under their own secrets. Dubious amusements, indeed.
NINE
Speculations
Zanzibar was a very fanciful name for such an unremarkable place. The spaceport was painted in bright colors that clashed, with tassels on overhanging awnings and faux crenellations on the shop fronts. But the colors were faded, the awnings threadbare, and even the stonework had holes and scrapes revealing the stucco underneath.
It was supposed to produce an exotic but personable impression, like an open-air market where travelers from faraway places mingled with friendly locals. A place where rules and regulations took a backseat to fun and adventure, and the import taxes were as lax as security.
The impression it always left on Prudence was that she should double-check the security settings on the
“Are you going to let me find some real cargo?” Garcia was complaining, for good reason. He got paid a percentage of the profits. She’d left Altair with a full hold, but it had been merely contract shipments, the only thing he could arrange in eight hours. They paid a flat fee per tonne, barely enough to cover the cost of fuel. She couldn’t really compete with the big freighters for economies of scale. Instead, she made her money speculating: buying goods outright and reselling them on other worlds. Garcia was generally very good at sniffing out deals and hawking wares.
And Zanzibar was the kind of place Garcia worked best in. Not because it lived up to its amusement-park hype of exotica, but because it was so disorganized that market inefficiencies abounded. Altair had huge computers listing every commodity and service imaginable, with inventory backlogs and appointment calendars updated continuously. Zanzibar was lucky to get the current temperature right.
“Sure, Garcia. Take your time.” She’d already broadcast her news, from space, and now the sense of urgency was gone. She had spent the last two weeks running fast and hard, making four hops with no more than a day in between. At Altair she’d only delayed to refill her fuel tanks. Garcia had found them a contract shipment literally sitting on the docks.
She had cast her news out on placid worlds, like pebbles in a pond. Then she had fled before they could think to start asking hard questions. On Altair she hadn’t even dared to inform the local spaceport authorities, just the dozens of free-trader captains that conglomerated there. Fleet already knew, and would tell the rest of Altair when they felt ready to. They wouldn’t appreciate Prudence spoiling their surprise. And it didn’t matter. She’d told the people that needed to know.
The news would spread like waves, as the independent freighters rushed to take advantage of it. Any day now she expected the overlapping splash, a fellow captain dropping out of a node and breathlessly telling her of the disaster on Kassa. Such was the nature of communications that had to be carried by hand. Radio didn’t travel through nodes.
This had an unappreciated effect on social development. You could get anywhere on a planet in a few hours with a low-orbital flight. You could reach anywhere on a planet with vid comm instantly. People grew up that way, thinking of their whole world as one small place. That made the several-day trip through a node into a hurdle that most never bothered to leap. Unleapt, it was unthought-of. Nothing had done more to still-birth stellar empires than this reflexive laziness. Prudence had read stories of old Earth explorers, who had spent months or even years traveling just to make one journey, often under the most grueling circumstances. That spirit was dead, snuffed out by telecommunications and padded chairs.
It was an ironic fact that it could take longer to travel in-system from one planet to another than it did to travel through a node. But people didn’t think of it that way. In-system, you were still in contact. An hour delay on radio chatter was not the same as absolute silence. So the frontier, the wilderness, was made up of other planets and moons, asteroid belts and periodic comets. The worlds on the other side of the nodes were not distant; they were imaginary.
Prudence had been to several hundred worlds. Every place she went, they asked her about her last port of call. But no one ever asked about her
Melvin wandered past her, a glazed look on his face. She’d taken him to a dozen worlds, and he’d gotten stoned on all of them. Zanzibar was a good world for him, too.
“Keep your comm on,” she called after him. He’d spent the last two weeks more incapacitated than usual. She was beginning to think about replacing him. He might be permanently broken.
“Can we go see the castle?” Jorgun liked Zanzibar too. He couldn’t see through the illusion. To him, it was an exotic and mysterious bazaar.
Prudence finally confronted the fact that she was the only member of her crew that didn’t like the place.
“Sure, Jor.” It would probably take Garcia days to line up something profitable, and Melvin at least that long to decompress. Prudence could stop running now, and let her crew catch their breath.
Herself included. Of all the local worlds, Zanzibar was the least likely to accede to an Altair extradition request. So it turned out she could find something attractive about Zanzibar’s slipshod security, after all.
She made herself wait three whole days, until her news had been confirmed by other captains coming out of
