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ONE


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My name is Larn, and because it was my name day, I hadn't had to go to school. Instead I'd gone hiking, with a little fishing thrown in.

A name day, in case they don't have them where you are, is—Well, each day of the year has one or more person's names assigned to it. The day your name falls on is special for you. You get presents, and the day off from school. My major present had been a fishing gun—a small belt model that can shoot a lure out as far as eighty feet.

I didn't realize how special, or what kind of special, this name day was going to be for me.

Actually, when I was born they'd named me Lanar, Lanar kel Deroop, but that was before we came to Evdash. On Evdash we took the name "Rostik." And Larn can be either a given name or, on Evdash, a nickname for Lanar, so I'm known as Larn Rostik.

There's a reason for the name changing. I was born on Morn Gebleu, about 1,100 parsecs[A parsec is a unit of distance 3.258 light years long, or 19.18 trillion miles. Units of measurement, such as years and miles, are ordinarily given here in Earth equivalents instead of Standard.] away. But after we ran away to Evdash—I was four years old then—our whole family took Evdashian names.

And as soon as we all learned to speak Evdashian without an accent—the languages are really pretty much alike, especially in writing—we moved to a different district and changed our names again. There we pretended we'd always lived on Evdash.

The false birth records, identification documents, and things like that were expensive, but dad didn't want us known as Federation refugees. There was always a chance that Federation agents would come looking for him. His family had been prominent in Federation politics and government for generations. Then, when he was eleven, the Glondis Party took over the government and forced through a bunch of what they called "constitutional reforms," which meant they canceled a lot of the people's rights.

So he'd studied business instead of government, with a lot of science on the side.

When he was twenty-five, the Glondisans threw out the constitution entirely and did whatever they pleased, which meant putting people they didn't like in jail. And there were a lot of people they didn't like.

Then dad became a leader in an underground group that published an illegal newspaper. I've always suspected that he and mom had done other underground stuff, too, that they never mentioned to us. Anyway, he bought a used space cutter, which was illegal. He also bought a whole data cube on habitable planets outside the Federation—old colonies, a lot of them. Then he loaded us all in and took off for Evdash.

It was pretty risky, of course, what with the patrol ships around Morn Gebleu, and pursuit ships ready to scramble and lock course with any fugitive. But my baby sister Deneen and I didn't know that. I was busy with my box of toy space marines, while Deneen was into stuffed animals, as I recall.

So almost all of my memories were of Evdash, almost three hundred parsecs outside the Federation boundary.

Anyway, this was my name day, and I came out of the hayfield behind our house carrying a couple of fish on a stringer—a long twig of brush with the side twigs trimmed off. I noticed that the family floater wasn't parked on its pad by the back door, but that didn't mean anything to me. Dad might have gone to see a client (he was a business consultant) or mom could have flown into town to shop.

Actually I was thinking about how we were going to wipe the field with Welser Academy in our banner game the next day. I was the goalie, with the quickest moves in the district.

I went into the house through the utility room, hanging my daypack on its hook and dumping my fish in the utility sink. I figured to clean them after I'd had a cold drink.

"Hi!" I called when I went into the kitchen. No one answered, so I assumed that mom and dad had left together. I opened the fridge to take out the margel pitcher, and the pitcher wasn't there. It was in the sink, empty. Now that got my attention. First of all I wanted some, and there wasn't any. Also, our family has certain agreed-upon rules, and each of us takes responsibility for them. Whoever uses the margel down to below the cup mark mixes a new batch, puts ice in it, and puts it back in the fridge. Deneen and I rarely forget, and besides, we'd been away all day. And I could hardly imagine mom or dad forgetting.

I mixed a new batch, had some on ice, then went into dad's office. He often leaves a message on his computer screen when he goes out. And there was the second strange thing—the computer was off line! It's usually left on continuously unless we leave for several days.

Somehow I felt strange about that—goose-pimply strange. I invoked it and asked if there was any message. It didn't seem to understand, so I switched to keyboard memory—still nothing. It was completely erased except for the basic, built-in functions! Then I yanked open the cabinet door, and all the program and data cubes were gone!

Now that made my hair stand on end! It was totally crazy. And what popped into my head was Federation agents. Dad and mom were both gone; they'd left deliberately and didn't expect to come back. And dad had wiped the computer and taken or destroyed the cubes so agents couldn't learn anything.

And where did that leave me?

I started to look around for a written message, then realized that didn't make any sense. If they'd expected agents to come along before I got home, they wouldn't leave a message that agents could read.

About that time I heard the front door and almost had heart failure. But then my sister's voice called out. "Hi, everybody, I'm home!" I went into the living room just in time to see her start to tell someone's number to the vid. I lunged at the manual off button. She stared at me like I was a lunatic.

"What," she challenged, "is that all about? I'm supposed to call Narni when I get home from school today."

"Something's happened," I said, "something serious. We can't use the vid."

For a 14-year-old sister, she was pretty easy to get along with, compared to lots of guys' sisters. Dad and mom didn't mind it when we argued about something real, up to a point. But since they wouldn't tolerate either of us sniping at the other, we hadn't developed a big brother-sister hostility. So when I said that something serious had happened, her expression went from irritation to skeptical interest. I told her what I'd found and what I'd figured out as the reason.

"The agents may have our channel tapped and be monitoring our phone," I concluded.

"Federation agents?" she said. "There's got to be a less dramatic reason than that." Then, before I could say "such as what?", she turned and walked rapidly into our parents' bedroom. I hurried behind her, wondering what she was doing.

What we found was that their closets were about thirty percent cleaned out. All their rougher clothes, boots, and sport shoes were gone. A few things were even on the floor, as if they'd just grabbed stuff and run! I got the notion they'd scattered them on purpose, to make sure we would realize that something had happened.

Then Deneen went to her own room, again with me trotting along behind. Her closet was in the same shape as theirs. When I saw that, I realized what she'd been thinking, and hurried off to look in my own closet. The only difference was that they hadn't taken as much from ours, and had left the stuff we liked best.

"You're right," she said, "and they wanted it to look as if we'd all left. Have you seen Cookie?"

That clinched it. Cookie is our house felid—about twenty pounds of altered, overweight kitty. He was too lazy to go any farther than his "garden patch" behind the house, where he went to poop and pee. He could be depended on to nag you for a snack if he'd been left alone, but I hadn't seen or heard a thing from him. So he was gone, too.

I shook my head. "They took the pets," I said. That's when I really realized what had happened: we'd been abandoned! At that moment I discovered what forlorn means. The key things that made life seem safe and predictable and pleasant were gone.

But we didn't have time for a pity party, because then it hit me. "We've got to get out of here!" I said urgently. "Agents could come barging in any minute."

"What makes you think they haven't been here already, and gone?" Deneen said reasonably.

I hadn't thought of that. "Maybe they have, maybe they haven't. We'd better get out anyway. They might come back, you know."

We started for the back door. I'd just opened it when she stopped by the utility sink. "Are you going to leave those there?" she asked, pointing to my fish.

That would be dumb, all right. The fish were too fresh. And if agents had been there and came back, they'd know for sure that one or more of us were still around, collectible. Muttering to myself, I shoved the fish and the stringer into the composter and flushed them through. Then I trotted back into the kitchen, washed the contents of the margel pitcher down the drain, and left it in the sink where I'd found it. Then I ran back into dad's office and turned off the computer again. Finally, I grabbed my daypack off the hook and we left, Deneen trotting after me to the barn.

"Why the barn?" she asked.

"We can sit in the cupola and talk—figure things out. We've got to decide what to do."

We climbed the ladder into the hayloft, then another into the cupola that stood like a stubby little tower above the barn roof. Three or four years earlier, I'd nailed a stout plank up there to sit on, like a bench, and we sat down on it. No one could see us up there, but we could see out in any direction. The cupola had been built to ventilate the hayloft. Each of its four sides consisted of a louver, with down-slanting slats that let air between them freely but kept rain from coming in and wetting the hay. We could see at an angle downward—see the ground for a couple of hundred feet around.

"Any bright ideas?" Deneen asked.

"Just questions, for now. First of all, where did they go? Are they apt to come back looking for us in a day or so, when the agents have had time to leave? Have they left Evdash completely, or are they somewhere fifty miles away?"

"Off-planet," she answered without hesitating. "Obviously." Then, seeing that it wasn't obvious to me at all, she went on. "The only way Federation agents could have found us was if someone informed on us. Apparently someone took the time and expense to go back to the Federation and tell. So if dad and mom came back here again, the same someone would probably know. Dad would have figured that out."

"They could come back, pick us up, and take off again. There's no reason that wouldn't work."

She shrugged.

"What I'm trying to figure out," I said, "is, do we stay put or go off somewhere? If we stay here, we'll have to keep hidden, or the informer might find out we're still around. And when we don't show up at school tomorrow, someone is apt to come around to ask questions when they don't get anyone on the vid. They're sure to within a couple of days. The sheriff could even have men out here looking around in a day or so."

Deneen frowned. "Maybe when it gets dark," she said, "we should walk to the Carlinton aerospace port and see if the cutter's still there. If it is, they haven't left the planet. They're still around somewhere."

"They could have used the old cutter we came from Morn Gebleu in," I said. "It's closer. And as far as I know, it's still operational. I never heard dad say it's not."

"I doubt if it is, though," said Deneen. "Otherwise, why would they have bought a new one?"

"Because they didn't want anyone to know we had a Federation-built cutter. That would really mark us as foreigners. And remember how sneaky dad was, bringing it here late at night? Maybe we'd better check it out before we walk six miles to Carlinton."

I'd just said it when a floater came curving smoothly in, looking just like ours. For a second I had this thought that it was mom and dad, and they were coming home from somewhere. That there was another totally different, ordinary explanation for everything, and we were all going to have a big laugh over how worried I'd been.

But it wasn't ours. When it slipped onto the parking pad beside the house, we could see Budget Rental on the side. Three men got out and went in the house without knocking. They were inside for about twenty minutes. When they came out, they stood by the floater for a minute or two, talking. They were only about seventy or eighty feet from us, and not trying to be quiet, so we could hear pretty much everything they said.

"No, they've left for Fanglith," said one of them. "Somebody warned him. That's the only explanation."

"If he was warned, maybe he also knows we know about Fanglith," said another.

"I doubt it. What I'd like to know is how he knew we were coming."

"Maybe he didn't," said the third. "Maybe he just happened to leave today. Maybe he'll be back."

"He took his cutter, didn't he? Use your head, Talley! Grabbed his family and some clothes, his data cubes, left the power on, food in the fridge, and took off. Probably for Fanglith. Let's get going. We'll report to the captain and see what he wants to do. He'll probably have to go to Corlus Base for orders."

They got back in their floater and left. Deneen and I looked at each other. "Thanks," I said to her.

"For what?"

"For reminding me about those fish."

She nodded. "That's all right, Larn," she said. "We're even. Thanks for spotting that something was wrong and realizing what it was." She looked at me. She's really got direct eyes, and no flinch at all that I ever noticed. "It hasn't always been easy," she went on, "being the little sister of the smartest kid in school. Sometimes I've tried to cut you down a notch, which is not all right, but just now I'm glad you're a hotshot."

"Me?" I said. That surprised heck out of me. Intellectually I've always been aware that I'm pretty darn good. But at an emotional level—the level of feelings—I've often felt like a bit of a dummy. As if the appearance of being smart and able was false—that I was really not all that good. And I'd always felt like she could see through me.

"Huh!" I said, "it never occurred to me that you thought I was all that smart. I've always thought you were the smart one. Dad said once, when you were maybe eleven or twelve, that you had the eye and the analytical mind of a stress engineer or a tax lawyer, he wasn't sure which."

She grinned at me for a moment—I'm not sure I'd ever seen her look just like that before—then sobered. "We'd better be smart," she said, "because we've got a problem."

It struck me right then that while we had a problem all right, I wasn't really worried. The forlorn feeling was gone, and somehow it seemed to me at that moment that everything would work out just fine.

But before I could say so, we heard a "woof!" It was outside the barn, and it could only be Bubba, our family canid. Deneen and I looked at each other, then scrambled down out of the cupola and then the hayloft. It was Bubba, all right, all 120 rock-hard pounds of him. Either our parents hadn't taken him with them, or they were hiding out somewhere nearby and had sent him to get us.

Bubba read my thoughts on that, of course. He's an espwolf—one of the telepathic canids of a backwater world on the far side of the Federation. Life on their planet got more or less wiped out by a collision with some large wandering asteroid, but the pioneer colonists there got off ahead of it and took some of the espwolves with them. Dad says there are a few breeding pairs around, back on Morn Gebleu.

You can't own an espwolf, or you didn't used to be able to, because they're sophonts—they have intelligence like people, more or less. It's hard to say if they're fully as intelligent as human beings, because they're quite a lot different. I'm sure that Bubba is smarter than lots of people; he's more sensible than most of them. But his mental processes seem to be simpler. He's usually not much for planning, but he takes quick logical actions.

But while you can't own an espwolf, if you're lucky, you can make a working arrangement with one of them. If one of them likes you, and you like him or her, then he or she can become part of your family. On their own planet, they lived and hunted in packs, which are extended families, and they really aren't ever very happy unless they're part of a family. So if you're a bachelor, forget it. They're not interested in families that small, except maybe as a temporary arrangement, I suppose.

Anyway, when we came down out of the hayloft, Bubba said, "Dad and mom gone to sky. Me take Larn and Deneen somewhere for dad. Come!" And with that he trotted out of the yard and started across the hayfield, Deneen and I trailing behind.

Now it's not that he said it just like that, but he really does talk. First of all, he can read our minds but we can't read his. And his mouth and throat weren't designed for human speech. So being both logical and telepathic, he'd come up with a system of his own sounds to talk to us with. Actually, in a way, he uses Evdashian words, but substitutes sounds he can make in place of the Evdashian sounds, and our family can understand whatever he says.

Getting out the necessary variety of sounds is awkward for a wolf's mouth, of course, so he doesn't talk more than he has to, and leaves out words he doesn't need, but he has a good enough vocabulary.

Anyway, it's a good relationship, with respect and affection both ways. We like and admire him and he feels the same toward us.

One thing for sure, he could run a lot faster than we could. He crossed the hayfield at, for him, an easy trot, but it had me breathing hard and deep. Deneen was really puffing. Her sports are gymnastics and, privately, martial arts, not cross-country. Back of the hayfield was a big woods of large old trees that connected up with the river forest. When we got to it, out of sight of any possible floater that might fly over, Bubba slowed up a little but still kept trotting.

Back of the woods was a big abandoned field, growing up with thorny bushes and lots of tree saplings. In another ten or fifteen years it would be a young woods. When we came to it and Bubba kept going straight, I realized where he was taking us.

Near the middle of the old field was a big corrugated iron shed that had been built there by the previous owner to house farm machinery. That was one reason dad had bought this particular place. This old shed, well out of sight of any public road, was plenty big enough to conceal the old space cutter—the one we'd come in to Evdash.

Only the shed would be locked and so would the cutter; I'd have to go back and see if I could find the key. But Bubba knew what I was thinking, and woofed, "No, it okay," so I kept trotting along behind him. And sure enough, the shed was unlocked and the cutter was open, waiting for us.

Inside the cutter, Bubba stood on his hind legs with his somewhat handlike front paws by the computer. It was already turned on. "Push Bubba," he said.

For a moment I didn't understand what he meant, then typed B-U-B-B-A on the keyboard. Dad's and mom's faces appeared on the screen.

Dad's voice came from the computer's speaker. "So far, so good," he said. "By the time you see this, your mother and I will be outsystem at warp speed. We hate to leave you, but we have no choice. Not long after you left this morning, we were warned that a Federation police corvette had been intercepted and boarded by an Evdashian picket cruiser. The corvette's captain showed a warrant for our arrest, and apparently either a bribe was passed, or more probably a Federation military threat. At any rate, they were given permission to land agents, although their warrant didn't have any authority on Evdash.

"They had our address. I'm sure my informant intended to delay them as much as he could without being obvious about it, but at best, we didn't have much time."

That's how the message started. They left Bubba to see that we got it. They'd only be gone for a few months—a year, at most. Long enough to decide where to settle next. Then they'd come back and get us. They'd planned earlier for the possibility that something like this might happen, he went on. Dad had set up a bank account for us in another town, and had also arranged for us to live with a family there, under assumed names.

But Deneen and I had information that mom and dad didn't seem to: Not only had someone leaked where we lived to the Federation government, but the government thought they knew where dad and mom might go from here.

And would the leak also know about this new family? Maybe the new family was the leak. Deneen and I talked it over, Bubba sitting on the deck with his knowing eyes moving from one to the other of us as we talked.

Deneen put her finger on the real situation, though. If the political police thought they knew where mom and dad were going, then presumably they'd follow them there—to Fanglith, wherever that was.

Neither of us had ever heard of Fanglith.

I looked the computer over. It didn't look much different from those that Deneen and I were familiar with, and presumably it worked about the same. I mean, computers have been computers since before the historical era. They didn't invent them independently on Evdash. The colonists had brought them with them from the Federation a few centuries ago, back when the Federation was the Borgreen Empire.

There was a key marked ops ind—that should be operations index. I touched it and a series of operating instructions rolled slowly up the screen. In half a minute I had accessed the information on Fanglith, what information there was. It was obviously on a contraband data cube because the data wasn't preceded by an approval code.

Fanglith, it said, was a planet, perhaps fictitious, supposed to have been known from the legendary Ninth Dynasty. About 18,000 years before the historical era, it was supposedly used as a prison planet by the legendary mad Emperor Karkzhuk, founder of the Bloody Dynasty. In fact, the word fanglith was supposed to have meant prison in the slang of that time.

Karkzhuk was said to have rounded up several thousand writers, artists, actors, and others who had satirized his government or offended him in some way or other. He also supposedly arrested a number of key political activists, and scientists accused of doing research on unapproved subjects. They were all mindwiped, according to the story, put on an imperial troop transport, shipped to the uninhabited planet Fanglith, and just dumped there—left on the surface with nothing, not even clothes. Not even memory.

The information on Fanglith referred to the Ninth Dynasty survey records. The computer index listed two cubes that had something to say about them. One was a standard encyclopedia entry. The other was a contraband data cube. I accessed the encyclopedia entry first. It was pretty interesting.

There may or may not have been an actual Ninth Dynasty, but there definitely seems to have been a survey made earlier than 24,000 years ago. Supposedly, it listed hundreds of habitable planets outside the empire, now the Federation. But it had been lost before the beginning of the historical era, which started 5,213 standard years ago. All that was left of it now were jealously guarded copies of copies of individual sectors that various merchant explorers, adventurers, and pirates had been interested in at one time or another. Fakes had also been made to sell to them, and most of the existing copies were thought to be fakes. The planets listed on most of them were imaginary.

But some of the copies were real. During recorded history, re-exploration in some sectors showed that the worlds described on certain copies actually existed.

After that I accessed the contraband data cube and asked the computer for its data on Fanglith. All we got was a set of time-corrected galactic coordinates—the designation of a uniformly moving point in space—and a few words I couldn't read. Real or phony? I had no idea.

"I'll bet Fanglith is for real," Deneen said as we stared at the figures. "I'll bet something's going on there. Maybe it's a staging world for rebel activities against the Federation!"

I raised an eyebrow. "Unlikely," I said, shaking off the spell of the coordinates. "Fanglith is supposed to be way farther out than this." My fingers touched some keys, and the figures appeared on the screen. "It's more than 700 parsecs outside the Federation border zone! There's got to be a hundred million star systems outside the Federation that are within 700 parsecs. The odds that the survey found and looked over planets that far out has got to be close to zero."

While I was saying this, I'd instructed the computer to tell us how far from Evdash the supposed coordinates for Fanglith were. In round numbers it was 646 parsecs.

"Why would dad buy the cube if he didn't think it was any good?" Deneen asked reasonably. She has this talent for looking past details and grabbing key points. "And apparently he talked about Fanglith to someone, probably the informer. Anyway, the political police seem to believe in it."

"You know what dad says about the political police," I answered. "They love rumors. He might have started one about Fanglith himself, just to throw them off."

"Um-hm," she said thoughtfully. "Or maybe he didn't. Maybe Fanglith is out there, right where those coordinates say it is. And maybe he and mom are on their way there right now. I'll bet the Federation corvette will probably get orders at Corlus Base to go there and hunt for them. And they won't even know it unless we tell them.

"We've got the coordinates," she went on, "and Fanglith is either there or it's not. If the flight and life support systems on this cutter are okay for a two-month flight, or however long it is, we'd better go out there and check before the police do."

She turned to Bubba then. "You've been awfully quiet. What do you say? Were mom and dad going to Fanglith?"

As usual, Bubba was as direct as Deneen. "Don't know. They going somewhere, not think name while I with them. We go find out."

"Okay, you guys," I said, "let's see if this thing can make the trip." I keyed in the ops index again and found out how to call up a status report on the ship's systems, including life support. All systems were operational. The fuel slugs were no problem, of course; they'd outlast the cutter. It took a couple of minutes to get an analysis on existing food stores and water quality, but they were okay, too. And the supplies were plentiful, as though dad had replenished them before he put the cutter in storage.

"You guys realize," I said, "that once we get there, if there is such a world, our job has just started. Unless it is a staging planet with a big rebel base. And we don't even know there are organized rebels anywhere nowadays. Can you imagine hunting for a 24-foot cutter down somewhere, no one knows where, on a wild planet?"

"What makes you think it's wild?" Deneen asked.

"There was no one there at all 23,000 years ago. Then they took a few thousand people there, so the story goes, mindwiped yet, so they didn't remember anything. They must have been like a bunch of confused apes. There was no one there to help them get started—no tools, no fire, nothing.

"Probably most of them died the first year, so maybe there were a few hundred to carry on from there. They'd look up at the stars and wonder what those were. They'd see a little fire from a lightning strike and probably run away from it.

"I hope to heck it is a staging planet, because otherwise I don't see how we'll ever find them."

"We've got Bubba," Deneen said reasonably.

I'd entirely overlooked that! I've read that epswolves can find packmates telepathically at distances up to fifty miles, so we had a parent-detector! Things suddenly began to look more hopeful. If Fanglith would just be there!

We tried to think of everything we needed to consider before leaving, and it looked perfectly feasible to do it. With a cutter, the trip was no big deal except for the time it would take. You could go to any set of galactic coordinates. The problem was that not one set in trillions was close to a star system, let alone to a planet.

Bubba wasn't worried, though. He thought the trip was a great idea. He didn't say anything, but his tongue was hanging halfway to the deck from his grinning mouth.

We did need more clothes, so Deneen and I jogged home, leaving Bubba to guard the cutter. We also got our lightweight sleeping bags, and stuffed our trek packs with everything we thought we might need. We didn't know what to expect—deserts, swamps, icy mountains, or what. Maybe some of each. When we left the house, we not only carried our packs, but a big pillowcase each, filled with stuff.

Back at the machine shed, it was all the two of us together could do to push the big machine doors open so we could get the cutter out. They were designed to be opened by hand all right, but they acted as if the running wheels had corroded in the track. But finally they gave, and we got them open enough that the cutter would fit through.

That's when I discovered that the operating instructions said nothing about handling in and out of small openings. It didn't have the same kind of controls that a floater does, and I had no experience at all with it. So I had Deneen raise it a foot or so above the dirt floor and I got out and pushed. In a couple of minutes the cutter was outside.

It was starting to get dark then, and in the gathering dusk I keyed in our destination—Fanglith—and the Standard date to the nearest minute, of course, assuming our watches were right. That would continually correct the coordinates to present time.

Deneen looked pretty serious, and Bubba wasn't grinning as big as he had been. I closed the go switch, and the cutter began to rise, accelerating smoothly, the computer in charge now.

We were on our way to a world whose name meant prison, or maybe to no world at all.

 

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