CHAPTER 11

Halvorsen restrained himself. Another talent he had developed over the years. While suffering impatience waiting to receive payment from a client was perfectly understandable, he knew from experience that it would do no good to rush such people. He’d worked hard to build a reputation not only as an independent contractor who could be relied upon to perform a job in an efficient and unobtrusive manner, but also as one who would not tiresomely dun a patron for payment. Usually there was no need to do so. Those who failed to pay up invariably found that in the absence of the payment of timely and agreed-upon compensation, Halvorsen’s reputation would sooner or later be followed by Halvorsen himself, with predictably dire results for the tardy.

Of course, on those rare occasions when a client was situated offworld, implied threats carried correspondingly less weight. Only once had he been forced to travel to another system in order to collect on an overdue payment. The mayhem he had delivered on that occasion remained as a clear warning to any others who might entertain thoughts of trying to stiff the contractor from Gestalt.

Anticipating no problems with his most recent contract, he was therefore surprised to find waiting for him when he returned home that evening a terse coded communication from the individual representing the so-called Order of Null. Conveyed via space-minus to the core receiver at Tlossene and thence through the planetary Shell to his home subox, it arrived in lieu of the anticipated fiscal deposit. If not to boiling, the unexpected substitution at least raised his emotions to simmer.

Easy, he told himself. Sometimes critical information, such as a single key for unlocking and facilitating a monetary transfer, could arrive encrypted in such communiqués. But no matter how many times he ran the message through his personalized, advanced decoding system, no such propitious revelation proved forthcoming. If funds were being sent to him, the means for accessing them was not provided in the newly received message.

Fuming in his seat, his temper held preternaturally in check, he settled down to read the words that had been sent to him in lieu of money.

The half-meter-high, fully dimensionalized avatar that appeared above his scuffed, well-worn desk was that of an attractive middle-aged woman. Her attitude, however, was as cold as the domesticated photons of which she was spun. She wasn’t hostile, Halvorsen decided as he listened to her. Just distant. At least she did not equivocate.

“The information provided together with the imaging included in your last communication have been thoroughly examined and analyzed,” the lambent avatar declaimed, “and have been found wanting.” The fingers of Halvorsen’s gnarled right hand slowly clenched into a fist, tight enough so that the knuckles began to turn white. He stared at the hovering, orating image, listening intently.

“It is clear from the evidence that you have succeeded in seriously damaging a nondescript transport skimmer somewhere in the wilds of the world known as Gestalt. Beyond that, nothing conclusive is established. The nature of any passengers on board the assaulted craft in question cannot be ascertained even from an enhancement of the image-by-image breakdown of the recording you supplied. Your assertion that the individual of mutual interest was aboard this particular vehicle and perished with it cannot be proven. Your word, while it has been found to carry weight in certain circles, is insufficient to justify disbursement of the amount of credit under discussion.”

Halvorsen very badly wanted to place his hands around the neck of the woman who was dismissing him in such cool, dispassionate terms. His grasping fingers would only pass through the avatar, of course, and would have no effect on the actual speaker, who had stood for the recording on a world distant in truspace and time. That was the trouble with dealing with clients over interstellar distances: swindlers and their ilk were immune from something as straightforward as a kick to the kidneys. He could only sit and listen and take it—a posture he found worse than infuriating.

The avatar was not finished. “You will doubtless argue,” she continued, “that given the damage inflicted by you on the craft in question and the rugged, uncivilized terrain where it presumably went down, no one could have survived the inevitable crash. You further state that for reasons unknown to you but suspected by us, the individual of mutual interest who rented the transport caused its integrated tracker to be removed prior to his departure from the nearest town. This more than anything else, more than the rental documentation and visuals you have provided, leads us to believe that the individual of interest to us all was indeed on board the skimmer you attacked.”

Hearing this grudging assessment somewhat muted Halvorsen’s distress. At least they weren’t dismissing his claim utterly. Leaning forward in his seat, he waited for the avatar to conclude.

“While we are not willing to transfer the specified funds on the basis of the limited information you have thus far provided,” the female projection went on, “we have agreed to initiate the necessary preliminaries. On receiving satisfactory proof of the demise of the individual in question, monetary disbursement in full will transpire without delay.” Shifting her position, she momentarily must have stepped out of range of the recorder. As a result, the subsequent message was somewhat disconcertingly delivered by only half a woman.

“You must understand,” the semi-figure declared earnestly, “that we hold this individual to be capable of certain exceptional feats of the mind. The one opportunity we had to kill him ourselves, we failed. The experience that resulted from that encounter was most enlightening, however. It is this enlightenment, of which you are unaware, that leads us to exercise caution in light of your claim to have accomplished the requisite task. This person is not one to expire easily.”

What kind of proof will satisfy you? Halvorsen found himself muttering silently. The question was anticipated.

Shifting her stance again, the woman was once more visible in full figure. “No transfer of credit will be initiated by us without incontrovertible physical proof of the death of the subject under discussion. In addition to unmanipulated visual confirmation, a DNA analysis from an established autolab is required. Until such documentation is provided, I and my colleagues must reject your request for payment. This is a more serious matter than you can imagine, Mr. Halvorsen. Substantiation must be incontestable. We look forward with great interest to your next communication.”

The avatar vanished as the message ended, leaving Halvorsen’s desk once more empty and bare above the concealed projector. He sat staring at it in silence for several moments. Capable of certain exceptional feats of the mind, the woman had said. What did that mean? What did it imply? Thinking back to the confrontation, he remembered the still-baffling mental collapse he had suffered. It had been severe enough to cause his skimmer to automatically break off the clash and return home. How to explain what had happened? How to explain the inexplicable? By a feat of the mind? Or perhaps something equally subtle but far more reasonable had been involved. Maybe he had been hit with some kind of undetected gas projectile that had affected his skimmer’s internal environment.

He was in no mood to waste time trying to diagnose incomprehensible absurdities. Attempting to make any sense out of the female avatar’s outlandish warning was making his head hurt. Any effort at analytical thought found itself drowned by his escalating anger. Rising from the chair, he cursed, turned, picked up the piece of furniture, and heaved it against the far partition. It bounced once off the floor before slamming into the barrier. Molded of liquid composites, the chair did not break. It did, however, leave a sizable dent in the less robust wall.

How did they expect him to come up with that kind of information? he fumed as he donned outdoor gear and stalked down the stairs. Hadn’t he shown them the damage that had been done to the quarry’s skimmer? Were they blind? Didn’t they look at the recording that had accompanied his message? If the target hadn’t been killed outright, he surely would have died in the inevitable crash. And if he hadn’t perished immediately, the icy and inhospitable mountains of northern Gestalt would surely have finished him by now.

As a matter of course, the ever-cautious Halvorsen had monitored every transport report and transmission subsequent to his limping return to Tlossene. Plentiful cargo and numerous passengers had come in and gone out of the city since then, but neither a communication nor a manifest had contained mention of anyone matching his quarry’s description. It was unlikely a gypsy transporter would have misdescribed a young redheaded offworlder nearly two meters tall.

No, the intended victim was “intended” no more. He was dead, finished, properly deceased, somewhere up in the northland. How did his clients expect him to provide further proof of that? He did not know where the fatally wounded skimmer had gone down. It might have stuttered along for a considerable distance, in any direction, before finally coming down among the trees. Absent its intentionally removed tracker, there was no way to find it. Even if he somehow managed to do so, any bodies not carbonized in the consequent wreckage would by now have been dismembered and consumed by wandering, foraging fauna. The ever-hungry and grimly efficient scavengers of Gestalt would leave not even bones, ingesting them down to the last knuckle in order to obtain their marrow and calcium.

Safe on their far-distant, civilized world, these naïve Nullites wanted proof he could not supply. How was he supposed to obtain DNA from a nonexistent corpse—let alone images of a dead body sufficiently clear to provide indisputable visual evidence? Downstairs, he waited impatiently for the temperature to equalize in the building’s semi-lock exit. Storming out into a light snowfall, he headed straight for Tlick’s Tlounge. The occasional Tlel he encountered paid no attention to the stocky, purposeful human in their midst, but those humans who saw him coming and noticed his expression made it a point to cross the street, temporarily change direction, and avoid eye contact at all costs.

Tlick’s Tlounge had no class. Certainly far less than those establishments that catered to the city’s elite, its healthy middle class, or visiting travelers. It did, however, make available honest rations of often illegal stimulants without judgment or comment. It also welcomed nonhumans including Tlel, a fact that on more than one occasion had almost induced him to switch to another dive. Instead, he continued to direct his patronage to Tlick’s because its prices and portions were peerless. As was ever the case with Halvorsen, money invariably trumped principles.

Feats of mind indeed. They were stringing him, these cold, colorless Null folk. Using every trick and elusion they could think of to avoid paying him his rightful due. Satisfying their request had caused his skimmer to suffer serious, expensive damage. How was he going to pay for that now, when the credit transfer he had expected and had been counting on was being unjustly withheld? Carrying out the contract had nearly cost him his life. Didn’t that count for something? Did they really believe he was so stupid and incompetent that he would put his life on the line and nearly get himself killed hunting down the wrong man, or failing to do a proper job of it?

It was an unfair universe indeed, and Halvorsen hated it with a passion few could equal.

The interior of Tlick’s Tlounge was dark and warm, two qualities much prized by Tlossene’s human inhabitants. Though a great deal of what institutions such as Tlick’s provided was available for enjoying within one’s own dwelling, since the beginning of human civilization people had congregated in places where they could also indulge in the company of their own kind. This gregariousness was shared by many other sentients. While some sought out establishments that catered solely to their own kind, others were generalists who chose to patronize a specific business on the basis of ambience, price, and offerings rather than species exclusivity.

So it was that Halvorsen found himself having to compete with non-Gestaltians for a place in the crowded circular main room. Ingrained xenophobia combined with recent infuriating circumstances to raise his blood pressure. Most of those nonhumans present he merely disliked. Hatred was a stronger emotion he reserved for the native Tlel. There were no thranx among the crowd. Thranx he liked. Thranx and humans. Bugs and apes. All the rest, he thought, could head for the giant black hole at the center of the galaxy and take the fatal final protophysical plunge. He wouldn’t miss a one of them.

How could the eponymous Tlick allow natives inside? Bad enough one had to encounter them on the street, but at least outside one could avoid the bulk of their stench. In an enclosed, heated establishment such as Tlick’s their stink was inescapable.

The bar that was his intended destination might well have been recognizable to a human visitor from several thousand years ago, but sight of the automatons working behind it would have sent them fleeing in fear. His order arrived in chilled glass that had been formed in the shape of a pyramid. As red-orange lights danced within its transparent substance, he sucked liquid through a pressure-activated siphon and stared moodily at the crowd.

He didn’t really hear the music that was being played or the soundscapes that accompanied it. Music, he felt, merely filled up synapses more profitably occupied dealing with problems. The noise added to his anger and did nothing to lighten his mood.

He drained the pyramid and had it refilled, drained it again. The potent blend of alcohol, locally manufactured deinhibitors, and imported stimulants soon had him feeling better. Much better. When the automaton that was filling his orders suggested he take a break and accompany it with a shot of moderator, he waved it off. So what if the crazies who had refused to pay up wanted more proof? He would find it or, failing that, he would find a way to fake it. If he, Norin Halvorsen, couldn’t get the money due him out of a bunch of fish-faced, stiff-spined, otherworldly cranks, then he might as well pack it all in and start a small specialty store. Norin Halvorsen, shopkeeper.

Not likely, he growled softly to himself. Dead first.

What bothered him was that someone else was already dead first, and he was not receiving credit for it. The gangly youth he had pursued was properly demised. Halvorsen was sure of it. It was only a matter of returning to the scene of the confrontation and collecting the necessary corroboration. A smidgen of DNA, that was all that was needed. Surely the scavengers had left that much. After paying for his pleasure, he started for the pulsating portal that marked the distant doorway.

The performance floor was lit by effervescent luminants whose shapes morphed from those of naked men, to naked women, to unclothed creatures whose assorted pulsating extremities and orifices repulsed rather than interested him. Making a face, he pushed and shoved his way through a drifting chartreuse chanteuse. Her disembodied head continued to croon at him in some obscure Terran tongue that was equally melodic and incomprehensible long after he had walked on past. Disappointed, the light fixture recongealed rapidly behind him.

Distracted by the luminant, which if he had lingered would have tried to sell him something, he failed to see the pair of Tlel who were in the process of crossing his path. As he stumbled into them, one straightened and thrust its eyeband in his direction.

“Forgiveness is made, since yu are so clearly inhibited by ingestments.” It added something deeply laryngeal in its own language.

“Go forgive yurself!” Halvorsen growled warningly as he sought to go around the couple. He added something colorful in unaccented Tlelian.

The pair looked genuinely shocked. If they had simply bagged their outrage and continued on their way, the exchange would have ended there. But being duly stunned by Halvorsen’s response and sufficiently concerned that they somehow might have offended, they persisted. Both scuttled sideways to block his path.

It was surprising that the fury of emotions Halvorsen was generating was not enough to whisk them aside. “Get out of my way.”

“There was no call fur that language, no call at all,” the male declared straightforwardly. “We cannot demand, but can only request, an appropriate apology.”

“Apology?” Very slowly, Halvorsen turned to fully confront the native. Its odor filled his olfactory sense to overflowing and threatened to leave him dizzy. “I’ll give yu an…” Before he could finish, the Tlel did something. It was the wrong thing.

He put his hand on Halvorsen.

Or rather, dozens of soft, gripping cilia fastened themselves to the human’s thick upper right arm. It was a gesture intended to simultaneously reassure and restrain, an indigenous means of physically punctuating the request for an apology. Another time, another place, Halvorsen might well have interpreted it appropriately. Doubtless he still would have responded with harsh language. Given his current mental condition and emotional state, it was not surprising that in this particular instance he reacted physically.

By Halvorsen’s standards it wasn’t much of a shove. But in his moderately impaired state, it was more forceful than he might otherwise have intended it to be. Furthermore his right hand, the one that pushed, instinctively assumed a fighting position: fingers drawn back, heel of the hand thrust forward. More by misfortune than intent, it struck the politely protesting Tlel at its most vulnerable point.

The thin neck snapped like a twig. Instantly the male’s eyeband darkened. The flattened head flopped loosely to one side. Though Halvorsen had lived on Gestalt for some time, the female was making sounds he had never heard before. It struck him that he had just killed. Not, as was commonly the case, for something honorable such as money, but out of foolish anger. However briefly, he had lost control. Knowing that upset him far more than the actual killing.

It was an accident, pure and simple. He could claim, rightly, that the native had put its cilia on him first. He could claim, wrongly, that it had done so roughly and with hostile intent. He had only been defending himself. Looking around wildly, he fought to clear his mind. They were alone on the luminant-infested corner of floor. There did not appear to be any other witnesses.

So he killed the female.

The prim and proper Tlel-loving authorities might accept a plea of self-defense and they might not. What they were certain to do was fatally delay his attempt to collect on the debt due him from the Order of Null. He could not afford that. In addition to the repair work being done on his skimmer there were other arrears outstanding. He was not the only disagreeable self-employed entrepreneur on Gestalt. Before long, others to whom he was in hock would come looking for him. He had been counting on the Null payment to take care of that. He had been counting on the Null money to take care of a great many things.

No, he had no time to waste, especially on explaining his actions as they concerned the now deceased pair of Tlel. Hastily he cleaned the scene, wiping away or removing anything that might be traced back to him. Surely any investigation would not last long. They were only natives, after all. Stinky, smelly, gag-inducing natives. Two fewer of them made for a cleaner world.

By the time he stepped out of the transport pod halfway across the city, he felt much better about the annoying inconvenience to which he had been subjected. The authorities would conduct an investigation. Finding nothing, they would hypothesize. Only the clan to which the deceased belonged were likely to press for an extended inquest. By that time Halvorsen would be long gone from the city. He would do nothing to conceal his departure, of course. Nothing would be more certain to draw attention to himself than to try slipping out of Tlossene or offworld while a murder investigation was under way.

He could, however, reasonably be excused for making another trip to the northlands. A slow, unhurried journey. Relaxing, even. Nothing out of the ordinary for someone such as himself. He was not fleeing, exactly. Not hiding out, quite. Simply finishing a job he had begun earlier.

If he did not finish it, to the satisfaction of his clients, then the entire effort would turn out to have been for nothing. The tracking, the hunting down, the chase, the fight, and his subsequent survival—all for nothing. An unforgivable waste of time. Halvorsen had done many things in his life, but wasting time could not be counted among them. He would return with all the proof the cheery scions of Null demanded.

As he cautiously and methodically worked his way back to his residence, he did his best to stay inconspicuous. Snow that was falling more heavily helped to mask his movements. Meanwhile, in the absence of credit, he had his anger to drive him onward. He made something of a game of it, trying to decide whom he hated more: his quarry, who had been inconsiderate enough to fight back and to die somewhere chill and distant, or the otherworldly mooncalves who by refusing to pay him had set him on his present path.

He did not wrestle overmuch with the distinctions that existed between them. There was plenty of time and energy with which to hate them both, he reassured himself.