From alt.pub.dragons-inn Wed Dec 8 11:22:13 1993 Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Path: netcom.com!netcomsv!decwrl!olivea!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!eff!news.kei.com!ssd.intel.com!chnews!ornews.intel.com!ibeam!hutch From: hutch@ibeam.intel.com (Steve Hutchison) Subject: Re: [LH][Colony] Catch a Falling Star Message-ID: Organization: Intel Corp., Hillsboro, Oregon Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1993 18:57:38 GMT Lines: 324 [ADMIN] This appears twice on some systems because I put the wrong [ident] string in the header. I've cancelled the original one but you still might see it. [ADMIN] This happens sort of during all the other LH party stuff, and just before a certain celestial catastrophe. Lady Ale appears by permission of Penny Hutchison. This post is copyright 1993 by Stephen Hutchison, permission granted to distribute via the usual Usenet channels and for archival. All other rights reserved. =*==*= "Aww, come on, please? It doesn't even have to be the best looking." "Rikki! If you so much as taste one of my guests or _any_of my staff, especially the cuddleboys and girls, I will personally see to it that you are fined and stripped of your Travel papers, as expensively and as painfully as possible." Lady Ale lit her pipe and drew a long slow breath from the end. She blinked, slowly, then exhaled. "Nobody here is due to die soon, dear friend, and you may not arrange for them to be in that condition. I disapprove of your cavalier way with the Hunter's Code. Go out to Low Town if you want a snack. There are hundreds there who are are on the menu." She dismissed him with a languid wave. "Go glut yourself." The ugly man frowned. "Ale, you are just no fun." "I'm not going to argue with you." She blew a big gust of smoke into his apelike face; he coughed and parted the smoke around his head. "Saroya was never this stuck up." She laughed. "Saroya let you charm her far too often. You go look for dinner somewhere else, you weasel!" "Otter. Not weasel." He grinned, showing gorilla teeth. "Have a drink and then go elsewhere. I'm very busy here at the moment. Why aren't you up at the party?" "I was gonna stop by there later." "Do that." She dismissed him with a langorous wave, returning to her place behind the big oak desk that filled the far end of the office. "Sascha, show him to the door, please. The exit door." A tall imposing human male in black bowed to Lady Ale and opened the door. When Rikkitani didn't move, he loosened the belt of his coat, showing the black wand he carried against his skin. "All right, I'm goin'. Whatta grouch. Lead on, Sascha. C'ya later, babe," Rikkitani dodged around the outstretched hand of the bouncer, winking lewdly at Lady Ale. He ran ahead to the door, and vanished as he jumped through the frame. "Shall I pursue him, Mistress?" "No, he's gone -- and I will torment him later, I think." ==**== Looking out over the city used to be a favorite pastime. Back in those days he could see things. Now the tunnel around his eyesight, the veil of smoke and mist, was too thick. He could barely see to cook. Once he had a cook. The old woman left years ago. She had promised to cook for him forever, and she didn't. And she never gave him any children, either. This city, for all its other flaws, put value on having heirs, as commodities to trade like all others. And in the end that was what he ran out of. Commodities. Trade goods. Knowledge. Contacts. The influence in high places. When Melwiss took power, it was the beginning of his fall. Hoshei no longer traded here. There were some who scorned his claims, that said the country itself never existed, that the people he was describing had to be from E'Tarusia and that he was no more than an escaped servant who had drunk too much and thought he was the master. There were some who thought that he made a good mark for con games and that they could terrorize him into giving them what little of his treasure remained. He showed them wrong, in that at least. He still remembered the hard lessons taught by the monks in their mountain lairs, the first of his five apprenticeships. His father had wanted him, a worthless tenth son, to be trained in the monks' tricks until he could be sold as a guard. Father never expected him to take holy orders, to become a monk himself. But the monks had taught him obedience as well as combat, and he obeyed his father's wish and took his second apprenticeship, indentured to the merchant prince Han. That had been his downfall, because Han was the first of his people to visit Generica, and the old man, then a young man called Chenmin, was the great Han's personal guard. They had made great profits. His indenture ended and he was returned to his father, and Han died at the hands of an assassin before he could return for a second time of service. Great Han's funeral was in the old style. Han was a pragmatist, though, and would have been displeased at the waste of good wives, his number one wife sending numbers two and three to attend him while she remained behind to guide his sons. Chenmin was sent on to his third apprenticeship with a maker of fine lacquered boxes, but he had no feeling for the delicate painting that went under the half a hundred layers of varnish. He returned home at the first appointed time to find his father sunk into the trap of the lotus and poppy. He found also that he had been sold again, his fourth apprenticeship, to the doctor who had addicted his father to the drug. The doctor proved a competent teacher, at least. He gave Chenmin a new mystic name, Wanderer in Wild Places, to use when making his medicines. The doctor was more than just an herbalist and knew more than simply the places where the needles went, where the dung and incense were to be burned to restore health to his patients. He knew secrets of magic, the hidden and currently illegal Way of Wisdom. The old man stopped in his reminiscences. He had been a poor pupil, preferring the outer to the inner, but he was still good enough to sense the spirit-flow of the thief who lurked outside the range of his poor vision. The fifth apprenticeship was one he found himself, with the Blue Lotus; the proof that he was master of the art had come when the doctor died of an overdose of the drug that he had used to destroy Chenmin's father. It had taken surprisingly little effort to do the job. The doctor went to his death in the mistaken belief that he had died of his own foolish mistake, but trusting his student to see to his proper burial. He was still waiting, half a hundred years later, for that proper burial, and his spirit could not go on to the judges of karma until the magical writings binding it to the poppy-dreaming were gone. Wanderer in Wild Places had been careful in the preparation of those writings. They were well protected from damp and from insect, from rat and decay, and it should be a very long time before they were gone. A fast strike to the left with his walking stick made the thief regret his brashness. Even though the mark was blind, a good thief did not stand with the light behind them in the frame of the window, and the thief remembered this lesson as the blow sent him reeling backwards, through the open frame. The ground was only three stories down, he wasn't killed, was hardly injured at all. Just a sprain and the next four weeks spent hungrier than usual from the loss of agility. The old man had already forgotten him. His fifth apprenticeship. He had found the assassin who killed Han, entirely by accident. She had taken up religion, become a monk of the wandering homeless variety, and when the young doctor cured her of a skin disease, the traces of her old tattoo, poorly erased, were uncovered. The assassin agreed, then, to teach the doctor all she knew of the arts of the assassin, the thief, and the mendicant. The doctor was an apt pupil. They wed in the old style. Five apprenticeships served, mostly with distinction. And here in Generica, where his skills as a doctor had grown useless in the face of his loss of vision and his growing palsy, where the pulses in his own hands and ears drowned out those of his patients. And his skill as a trader, that had failed him long ago, as the upstart Melwiss and his cronies had taken over his businesses while their business partners back home had conquered his homeland. Leaving him here, with only the life of a guard, or a beggar. He was too old to be a guard, and he was too proud to beg. He made boxes. True, they lacked the high artistry and delicate fine brushwork of his third master. But they were pretty enough, and the local people had nothing like them, and no taste to know there was something better, so the old man had made enough of a living to get by. Until lately. He wandered half dreaming, half awake, lost in the past and the future. He wondered if his mind had started to fail him, and fumbled for the pot to put on water for tea. He sat, staring, the water on the stove and the fire unlit, waiting for it to boil. The dreams came. Dreams of fire and stone. If he had some of that drug, the one which killed his teacher and ruined his father, he would have been able to use it to spirit-travel, to enter the world of the dream and see what it was trying to tell him. Instead he stayed in the attic of his small house, where the lacquer boxes dried around him, and listened to the wind and talked to himself. == * == There is plasma on the outer fringes of the gas-sheath around this ball of semi-molten rock. The nearby liquid mass screens some of the sensation, but the careful observer can still feel the rock as it becomes superheated, ionizing and burning. Rikkitani is one of those careful observers. He moves from one building to another, screened by words that draw on the transparency of gas and the inertness of the solid mass. A second sense begins to warn him -- there is an Event here, very soon, that warps the lines of time and space and sucks them all into a single thread. A twist that strong has to involve loss of life -- this is the right place. He drifts up the stairway into the single room of the attic. There isn't much left in the house, all the furnishings are long gone, stolen or sold for a food, maybe. Fire up there, the weak sense of the plasma... ah, a lifeforce. Human, male, and a fairly long timeline in the back direction. He lets the words of transparency and inertness flow back into the elements, and appears, a sort of lumpy fellow, gnarled and ugly. The old man hears him breathing and whirls, defensively. "Who is it?" His voice is querulous; two thieves in one night is too much to put up with. "Just a traveller, in search of a meal." The voice is quiet, friendly, inviting confidence. The old man frowns; the single candle in the room does not light the trespasser well enough for him to see clearly. "You go away. I don't have any food." "How about sharing mine then? I have some dried red soup in my travel pack." Rikkitani gestures and the fire lights under the pot of water. The old man's eyes go wide, and he looks around in confusion. "What was that?" "What?" Rikkitani gestures again, and the candle begins to burn less hot but more brightly. "That. I thought ... it's been years since I felt that sensation. Someone is using the Way magic." The old man brightens. "Are you one of the enlightened ones?" "No," Rikkitani laughs. "Not me. Are you?" "Who are you?" the old man demands, but less strident this time. "The water's hot, let me make us some soup," Rikkitani says in deliberate non-sequitur. The old man says nothing but he does lean back into his chair. Rikkitani pours a part of the contents of a small pouch into two teacups, and pours hot water into the cups afterwards. He moves the liquid around in the cup with another gesture, stirring in the soup base until it is a uniform amber-brown and the aroma begins to waft around the room. He places one cup on the low table beside the old man, and sips from his own. The old man hesitantly does the same, and smiles wide. He still has all his teeth, though a few are worn flat. "Traveller, you still haven't told me your name," the old man says. He jabs his walking stick at the intruder. "Rikki," the ugly man answers. "What's your name, honorable grandfather?" The old man laughs, a cracked wispy sort of laugh. "I ran out of names fifty years ago, traveller." "You want mine? I'll share." "What would I do with such a thing? I'm too old now, I have no children, and my brothers or sisters do not know me, there are no children who will remember me and send me hell money, nobody who will raise my status before the gods. I will be just an honorless ghost, poor and with no standing, just as I am in life." "What a dismal future. How's this, old grandfather? You come travelling with me, and I'll make sure you have at least as much honor and status as I have myself." "Huh. And what kind of honor and status does a vagabond like you have? Or are you high in the court of the monkey king?" the old man says in that peculiar scornful way that only the very old have mastered. The ugly man lets a smile cross his apelike face, making it even more simian. "There's nothing dishonorable in being a traveller, grandfather. You were a merchant yourself once, were you not? The paper on that wall says Licensed Trading Agent, does it not? Well, I'm a kind of trading agent myself." "And what do you trade?" The old man suddenly notices the bowl of red soup in front of him, and lifts it to his lips, sipping noisily. "All sorts of things, grandfather. Anything that makes profit without hurting anybody." The ugly man shifts nervously. "Grandfather, you must decide soon. Disaster is coming on us, and I must take you away from here before it hits." "Will you keep me fed? I'm tired of starving, and that was good soup." "I'll feed you as if it were my very self," Rikki replies, showing his ape teeth in an unpleasant grin that the old man's blurred eyes do not see. "Good. Hand me that box, then." Rikki picks up the lacquer box, and hands it to the old man. He feels the approach in the outer reaches of the planetary gas sheath of the plasma surrounding the crystal, moving towards them faster than it should if it were simply dragged by the mass of solid beneath their feet. It veers, up, and over, magic and gods interfere with its movement. Only seconds -- the Opener of Ways is standing there by the door, looking a little irritated. He shrugs, apologetic, as she leaves, and then he opens his heart, dissolving the room and all within into plasma and solid and gas and liquid, emotion and logic and transcendence and will. The old man gasps in surprise as he comes apart, and is drawn close, and they step sideways and away from that Place as the rock from beyond the sky smashes down into the room, exploding the building and spawning a shockwave that crushes the two on either side. Plasma sprays, igniting the surroundings, and phases shift abruptly as kinetic energy is converted to heat. A small part of Low City burns.