Infinite Stars Read online

  “I rarely find that I need one,” said the speaker, causing Valentine to chuckle.

  “I’m a historian,” said Valentine. “I have all the top clearances from MinCol and the I.F., and so I would appreciate being given access to all the documents of the Tarragona colony.”

  Dabeet smiled. “Oh, surely a historian has little interest in our tedious little colony. It’s our predecessor, the rogue colony of Fancy, back in the days when this world was called Whydah, that most researchers are interested in.”

  “What you say is correct, but it doesn’t apply to me. There are already a dozen reasonably good histories of Fancy. I’m here for Tarragona. I’m here for Kenneth Argon.”

  Again, Dabeet felt himself inwardly reeling with surprise. “Miss—Doctor? Professor?—Valentine, surely you know that Kenneth Argon is dead.”

  “Since it’s Argon’s death you invited me here to speak,” said her brother, “that fact could not possibly have escaped her.”

  “Ken wrote very little,” said Dabeet. “I’m surprised you would think him worth writing about. Because—forgive me if I presume too much—it seems to me that you were already coming here for Kenneth Argon before I asked for someone to speak his death.”

  Valentine smiled cheerfully. “Very good,” she said. “Yes, I thought he might be worth a biography. So much easier to do when he was alive. And my brother consented, for once, to let me choose the itinerary, since Catalunya was isolated and strange and would doubtless have no shortage of dead people for him to study and speak for.”

  “Isolated enough that there has never been a speaker for the dead here,” said Dabeet. “But let’s stop entertaining the locals with our conversation. I have a hover waiting outside the terminal, which is the most comfortable transportation available in our rather spartan colony.”

  “You say ‘spartan,’” said Valentine as they began walking, “but I hope you have plenty of retail establishments. I travel without luggage, because I prefer to buy my clothing locally, so I’m not so obviously a stranger on the streets.”

  “There are a few retail clothing stores, but they sell clothes for working people. You might think that’s a good thing, but from your speech and your profession, Doctor Valentine, it will make you seem condescending and false. You have money and status, and should dress according to your station, here in Tarragona.”

  “Surely there’s not a uniform,” said the speaker, with an arched eyebrow.

  “There are uniforms everywhere,” said Dabeet, “at every level of society, and none are so rigorously required as those which pretend not to be uniforms.”

  The speaker laughed out loud. “Well observed, sir.”

  They took only a few moments to enter the hover, because Valentine had no luggage and the speaker would not let his single bag out of his possession. “It’s a diplomatic pouch,” the speaker explained, with some appearance of embarrassment. “I don’t let it out of my personal possession.”

  Of course Dabeet was curious about why a speaker for the dead would be carrying diplomatic correspondence—and why his entire suitcase would be given the highest security Starways Congress had to offer. But then, if this speaker was the person that Dabeet believed him to be—and he was, he certainly was—it might make a kind of sense. If there was anyone to whom Starways Congress owed extraordinary privileges, it was this astonishingly young man.

  “I remember you now,” said the speaker, once the hover was sealed shut and began the journey. “We talked by ansible when we were both children.”

  Dabeet shook his head. “We were young and small, sir, but we were never children.”

  The speaker smiled. “Perhaps so, considering the responsibilities thrust upon us at such an early age. But we were also sequestered to such a degree that we were even younger than our ages, knowing little of human society outside of the military schools we attended.”

  “They shaped our reality however they wished,” said Dabeet. “And we made all our decisions surrounded by their arcane mysteries.”

  “We shape reality now,” said Valentine.

  “Dabeet Ochoa,” said the speaker. “I should have recognized your name. But Ochoa isn’t a rare name, and I don’t remember if ‘Dabeet’ was written anywhere.”

  “It wasn’t,” said Dabeet. “But I hope that you’ll use that name, and dispense with the title of ‘governor,’ since my primary goal in life is to get rid of that title.”

  “I know the feeling,” said the speaker. “When we spoke by ansible, I was on my way to my first stint as governor of a colony.”

  “I remember wondering whether being who you are would make that task easier or harder, considering your age at the time,” said Dabeet.

  “Isn’t relativity wonderful?” asked Valentine. “We still look barely older than children, since we’ve spent most of the last five hundred years near lightspeed, skipping through the years without letting them leave many tracks on us.”

  “Apparently I’ve spent more of my years in realtime on a planet’s surface than either of you,” said Dabeet. “The tracks are plain enough on my face.”

  “I would guess your absolute age to be about thirty-five,” said Valentine. “If you’re older, the years rest lightly on you.”

  “No, your guess is about right,” said Dabeet. “I have a reputation as some kind of troubleshooter, so I get sent to problem colonies.”

  “But it takes you longer to shoot the trouble than it takes me to speak a death, I imagine.”

  “I hope so,” said Dabeet. “Because I sent for a speaker in order to help me deal with the Kenneth Argon problem.”

  “Dead, and still causing problems?”

  “When he was alive, my job was to keep him from provoking the colonists, since it was by his actions alone that Tarragona was kept from achieving continuing status, let alone independence.”

  “And his death was a mark that your efforts had failed?” asked the speaker.

  “Even that is still unknown,” said Dabeet. “There may have been dangers I could not have anticipated.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Abrupt cessation of life,” said Dabeet. “You’ll have to speak to the E.S. medical officer, who also serves as coroner here.”

  “Where are his loyalties?” asked the speaker.

  “The exact question,” said Dabeet, “that bends all my attempts to assess information I’m given.”

  “Everything is tentative,” said the speaker.

  “Everything that comes from other people,” said Dabeet. “I have to trust my own observations and memories.”

  Valentine cocked her head. “You regard yourself as infallible?”

  Dabeet grinned. “My observations and memories are, or I have to treat them as such, because they’re all I’ve got. But the conclusions I base on those observations and memories are far from infallible. I know that I have limitations like any other person. And, like every other person, I don’t know where those limitations are.”

  “But you have to act as if you did know,” said the speaker.

  “What should I call you, sir?” asked Dabeet. “Neither you nor Doctor Valentine has bothered to provide me with any guidance.”

  “All my work is published pseudonymously,” said Valentine. “My pseudonyms have been awarded quite a number of honorary degrees from many planets. Personally, I’ve never received any college degree or teaching position. So perhaps you’d be kind enough to call me Valentine, and introduce me to people as Valentine Wiggin.”

  “Never married?” asked Dabeet.

  “Tactfully phrased,” said Valentine, “but I’m married to my work, and for now, at least, it’s a comfortable arrangement.”

  “And you, sir?” Dabeet asked the speaker.

  “Andrew Wiggin,” said the speaker. “Some people call us ‘speaker’ as if that were a title, but it isn’t. I’m simply Andrew Wiggin, though if you need to explain who I am, there’s no problem with your calling me ‘Andrew Wiggin, a speaker for th
e dead.’”

  “But not Ender,” said Dabeet.

  “Not in public, and not in private, if you’d be so kind,” said Andrew. “It’s a name that raises too many eyebrows.”

  “After the war, millions of children were named ‘Ender,’” said Dabeet. “Because you had saved the human race.”

  “And when The Hive Queen appeared,” said Valentine, “all those children had their names legally changed—either by their parents or on their own, as soon as they were old enough to do it. Because Ender Wiggin was now notorious for having wiped out a beautiful sentient species that was not planning to attack us again.”

  Andrew grinned at Valentine, and she smiled sadly back.

  “How ironic that you now practice the profession that was named for the anonymous author of The Hive Queen,” said Dabeet.

  “Irony is in the eye of the beholder,” said Andrew. “That book took away my name. It seems appropriate that it gave me a new one. Now let’s move on to housekeeping issues. Where will we be staying?”

  They went back and forth about whether they should stay in the fully protected E.S. compound, the I.F. barracks, or the MinCol guest quarters. Valentine argued for staying in a local hotel, which Dabeet had to veto for the simplest of reasons.

  “Tarragona has not been granted continuing status,” he said, “so this remains the only city. It’s rather a large one, and we have a significant footprint on the land, but people visiting the city from outlying agricultural settlements stay in the homes of friends and family, in rooming houses, or in taverns.”

  “Then one of those,” said Valentine.

  “Why don’t you make a decision after you’ve had a chance to get a feel for the public mood?” said Dabeet. “Once it becomes known that you have any interest in Kenneth Argon, you’ll find yourself very uncomfortable in any of those unofficial dwellings. Mostly because I don’t think any of them will allow you to stay.”

  “What if we simply buy a house?” asked Andrew.

  “People don’t buy houses here,” said Dabeet, “because people don’t sell them. If you want a house, your friends help you build one. You don’t have any friends, and you won’t get any.”

  “You said that in such a kindly way,” said Valentine, “that it almost sounded hopeful.”

  “I hope you’ll come to regard me as a friend, but if you succeed in your work, then I’ll succeed in mine, and we’ll all be off-planet as quickly as possible.”

  “Unless everyone loves the outcome of our work,” said Andrew. “Then they might insist we stay.”

  “No one will love any conceivable outcome of your work or mine,” said Dabeet, “and the only permanent residence you’ll be offered is to enter the ecosystem as a heap of protein being digested by the local fauna.”

  “Now, wait a moment,” said Valentine. “What if our work results in a recommendation for continuing status and independence for Tarragona? Or for the whole of Catalunya?”

  “You mean, what if we discover that Ken Argon was a loon, and we overturn all his recommendations?” asked Dabeet. “That’s what I personally believe we’ll find, and no, they won’t love us for it. They want independence so they can get rid of us. They want my title to be Legate or Ambassador—but they would be happier if my title were Ex-governor and Former Resident.”

  “So your charms haven’t won their hearts,” said Andrew.

  “I believe you remember perfectly well that from my childhood on forward, I am famously charmless,” said Dabeet.

  “You’re thirty-five. You’re brilliantly intelligent. Surely you’ve learned how to fake being a regular guy.”

  “I have,” said Dabeet. “A charmless regular guy. But here we are. Tonight, at least, stay in a couple of the rooms at the E.S. compound. I’ll be within easy reach, since I live there, too, and perhaps we can plan how we’ll all go about our various investigations.” To Valentine, he added, “Our library and archive, such as they are, reside on the E.S. computers. For safety.”

  “Backed up where?” asked Valentine.

  “Everywhere,” said Dabeet. “By ansible. The E.S. takes no chances with records of exploration and colonization. No disaster is allowed to erase the knowledge gleaned from any planet.”

  “So I could have done my research from any library, on any planet?”

  “With your security clearances, from any E.S. outpost or office. Public libraries don’t get any of this until the information is old and therefore safe.”

  “And when it comes to Catalunya…” said Andrew.

  “None of the E.S. information is old yet,” said Dabeet.

  “Which explains the paucity of information about Kenneth Argon and his work with the llops,” said Andrew.

  Dabeet nodded slightly. “The llops. Everything comes down to them.”

  “The early reports compared them to hyenas,” said Valentine.

  “Not really a fair comparison,” said Dabeet.

  Valentine grinned. “Which is it unfair to? The llops or the hyenas?”

  “It depends on what you favor,” said Dabeet. “Hyenas are pure predators. The llops—they’re omnivores, but in winter they hunt. Not in packs, but fairly effectively. From the vids of hyenas that I’ve seen, they’ll take down an animal and eat its bowels while the victim is still alive and alert. That’s hard to do unless you hunt in a pack, so your companions can hold the victim immobilized.”

  “How do llops do it, then?” asked Valentine.

  “They have serious jaws.”

  “Hyenas are only joking?”

  “Long jaws,” said Dabeet, “and massive muscles at the fulcrum of the levers. The lower jaw is solidly anchored to the shoulders and breastbone, so it’s the upper jaw that does the clamping.”

  “Where’s the brain?” asked Andrew.

  “Directly behind the jaw assembly. Part of it is in the upper jaw, part in the lower. The upper jaw clamps down, then slides forward. Clamp, slide, slide back, and the head or limb plops to the ground.”

  “Gruesome,” said Andrew.

  “Effective,” said Valentine. “Andrew’s a little squeamish. He just didn’t torture enough animals as a child.”

  “Why didn’t Kenneth Argon certify these killing machines as non-sentient and let things move forward?”

  “He felt sorry for them,” said Dabeet. “I don’t know if that was his reason, because he didn’t explain himself. But he did say that he was sorry for them.”

  “Because they never got to eat prey with its head attached?” asked Valentine.

  “The story here isn’t the llop, that’s what everybody misses— including, I think, Ken, though he certainly knew about it.”

  “What’s the story, Dabeet?” asked Valentine.

  “It’s the cats,” said Dabeet.

  “Oh, yes. The pets they kept on the pirate ships.”

  “Cats are never pets,” said Dabeet. “They’re sport killers, and they’re out-hunting the llop.”

  “Housecats taking down the same prey as the llop?” asked Andrew skeptically.

  “They’ve gotten bigger, but no, they go after much smaller prey. All the smaller predators are starving—the E.S. operates four sanctuaries, and half our work is keeping housecats out of them. We have no idea how many species we’ve lost. We’re preserving thirty or so that we know of.”

  “I read that the colony pays a bounty on cats,” said Valentine.

  “Cats reproduce faster than the Tarragonans can kill them,” said Dabeet. “Besides, for everyone bringing us cat heads for the bounty, there’s somebody feeding cats at the back door. If we catch them, they say they’re luring them so they can collect the bounty. How can we disprove the claim?”

  “The cats are wiping out smaller predators,” said Andrew. “But you’re saying that they outcompete the llop.”

  “They harry the herds of the llops’ natural prey. They leap on their backs and ride them, claws dug in. They keep working the claw in, in, in between the vertebrae. About a quarter o
f the time, their sharp little probes sever the spinal cord and the animal drops. Far more often, the prey animal collapses from blood loss or exhaustion or both.”

  “So they do hunt the big prey animals,” said Andrew.

  “Hunt them, but they don’t eat them. They walk away from the corpse.”

  “Why aren’t the llop following the cats around, eating what they leave?”

  “They won’t eat any prey that cats have touched,” said Dabeet.

  “Have to kill their own?” asked Valentine.

  “No,” said Dabeet. “They have no problem with scavenging. Except when a cat made the kill.”

  “So the cats eat the smaller prey animals, starving out their small and midsize competitors,” said Valentine. “Then they kill the large prey animals and leave the bodies to rot, and the llop won’t touch the carcasses.”

  “Kenneth Argon didn’t have a theory?”

  “About this? It wasn’t a theory; it was a fact. Because they won’t eat cat kills, the llop are about the only major land species in the wild that isn’t affected, one way or another, by Toxoplasma gondii.”

  “The psychoactive protozoan that can only reach adulthood in the gut of a cat,” said Valentine.

  “She’s coaching me,” said Andrew. “She thinks I don’t remember.”

  “I think you never knew,” said Valentine. “You weren’t on Earth long enough.”

  “Incurable, yes?” asked Andrew.

  Dabeet shook his head. “We have several cures that work on some people some of the time. Prevention is the best policy, though. I can assure you that the human population of Tarragona is toxoplasma-free. Because we don’t keep cats indoors, so we don’t share breathing space with cat poo, and the only meat we eat comes from flocks and herds kept in complete cat-free isolation.”

  “So the cats have Toxoplasma gondii,” said Andrew.

  “T. gondii doesn’t kill or damage the cats,” said Dabeet. “It does make them reproduce frantically and hunt incessantly, but since that’s pretty much what cats do even if they don’t have T. gondii, I don’t think the cats are suffering. The toms just get lucky when they’re dating at a higher than normal rate.”