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Page 2.

Part I

1. Summer Planet

Jared Fallon, a young star fleet officer on vacation, found the beaches of Alda Meina III crowded as always, despite rumors of war. The millennium year, 5000 OC, was about to break.

You could stand in your surfing shorts and enjoy warm sunlight on a crowded beach, where little sugar curls of surf rolled up under palm trees and the sand curved out forever to the horizon and the sea.

You could lie on a mat and watch beautiful young people from a hundred nearby worlds strolling past, and if you made a girlfriend, you’d share drinks and conversation at a cabana, or rent a room for an hour of raging brief passion. You were on vacation, and could forget so much chaos and distress at home.

Jared had come to the so-called Summer Planet for ten days to get away—alone except for his beautiful assistant Stella—a Platonic relationship, because she was a construct, neural salvage, most commonly called djia (for diaphanous, or see-through). Djia felt solid, but were visible mostly as an electron cloud inside their clothes and veils, with vague facial features that were constantly re-sketching like pencil cartoons as you looked at them. Stella was a gift from the beautiful, selfish young Princess Lyxa, who had made Jared into one of her personal staff pets, derailing his career. His entire life, though he made the best of being a handsome young play toy with limitless credit, was one gigantic 2BD (2-B-Determined). He sometimes wondered if he wasn’t part djia himself, and longed to escape.

An Olympian runner just a few years ago, he still had a trim, hard physique to show for it. Slightly above average height, he kept exercising the hard muscle cords in his arms and legs and on his abs. His short dark hair curled slightly at the edges over smoothly tanned skin with an underlying beard shadow like fine coffee dust that wouldn’t go away, no matter how he tried with razors, lotions, and depils.

He had piercing dark blue eyes, a strong jaw, and a finely chiseled nose and lips. His features had always drawn the attention, desire, and envy of women. He’d learned to avoid all those attentions because they almost always led to unforeseeable consequences. At the same time, he picked the women who interested them and spent hours, days, weeks, until the realities set in and he was adrift again until the next fling. Whatever his next young woman’s realities that caused her to move on, his reality bore the name Lyxa. He was a kept man, which was both good and bad. His mistress, who was just about his own age, twenty-something not much, was a young princess, the heir apparent to the extinct House of Mercury. When Lyxa had seen him run the Victory Arch with his torch in hand, she’d pointed to him and told her courtiers: “I want him.”

Lyxa had burned herself out, as she always did with men and her other interests. Then she’d begun to lose interest, before Jared had time to register that the love of his life, the reward for his hard work and Victory run, was an ephemera. The princess was a public media queen, and privately the manipulator of fortunes and power. She let him down, set him down, but never let him go. So now at the beach on Alda Meina III, Jared sat looking stony behind his sunshades. As always, he was contemplating escape. Call it running away, yes. It was complicated. He’d lose a lot, and it might cost him his life, which was why he stuck with his current existence—always for the moment, he thought. It was always for the moment.

The capital city and world were a brief journey across the Aldeb System (Old Aldebaran). For the moment, he’d managed to escape his duties as a staff officer in the capital, and was making a temporary escape here to the vacation world.

The beaches were crowded, but he was staying in a first-class hotel on the government tab, and he wasn’t complaining. Yet he felt a deep discontentment, because he had so much, but he wanted to little, and his dreams had been stolen from him by a selfish though beautiful and sexy princess back in Mercury City—Lyxa (Li Sha, Elizabeth).

“Pardon us,” a man’s voice said.

Jared lifted his sun shades and gave a dark-blue look. An elderly man, obviously wealthy and dignified, with short white hair and a too-festive summer shirt in red and yellow geometry, stood holding the handle of a beach chair with one hand, and the hand of his companion. The other must be his wife, Jared thought, because she seemed too matronly to be a mistress. The lady favored Jared with the sort of interested eyes and flick of the tongue wetting her lips that he was accustomed to. Ignoring her sort of appetizer stare, he rose to his feet and bowed slightly. “You can have my chair if you need it.”

“That’s very gallant of you,” she said. She looked stately in a frilly lavender bathing dress that hid more than it revealed. Underneath, as the fashion dictated nowadays, would be a one-piece bathing suit of some modest shade, unlike her husband’s loud attire.

“Thank you; we’ll just grab these two,” said the man. “Please, stay relaxed.” He pulled a beach chair close for his wife, and held it while she swung into it. “I’m Franjek Hordibay and this is my wife Iada.”

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Jared Fallon, lieutenant first class in the Mercury star fleet.”

Ohh, they both said admiringly with raised eyebrows. She said: “You seem so young for such an advanced rank.”

Little do you know, Jared thought. Savvy woman. Hit it right on the head.

“Very impressive,” said Hordibay. “Academy?”

“Yessir.” It was true. He’d come from a poor family on a farming planet, excelled in his studies, and had been accepted into the top military academy on his athletic strength.

Hordibay, a slender man with bluish veins beginning to show in thinning arms, ordered drinks for himself and Iada. The waiter, a pale man who looked more like a boy with his short blond hair and a slight harelip in a baby face, wore a white suit with gold braid and the hotel’s livery (all first class). The waiter, holding a tray, bowed and hurried away through the throng of tanned or tanning bodies of all ages and configurations.

“You look familiar,” Hordibay said, folding his hands over his sunken stomach in that bright shirt.

“I carried the torch a few years ago.”

“No,” Iada said with open mouth and shocked eyes. “How sublime.”

“I do remember now. Jared Farland.”

“Fallon.”

“That’s right. You were in the news with… er…”

“Princess Lyxa.”

Hordibay brightened. “Ah, yes—Li Sha. You two were the envy of civilization.”

Iada added with a scholarly smile: “Princess Elizabeth. We thought you were quite an item.”

Jared smiled acidly. “Fame is short-lived.”

“What have you been doing since? Protecting us all, Lieutenant?” He meant it kindly.

“After a fashion,” Jared said.

Running the victory lap had been the crowning moment of his life. He’d carried the famous Olympic torch over the great arch in Mercury Free Port City, capital of the free worlds. At the time, he’d bathed in the cheers and adulation of a thousand worlds. The run had been a victory lap for Mercury FPC, which had taken more honors than any of her allies or opponents in the United Galaxy Organization or UGO. After running strenuous klikz in the actual competition, the run had been an easy ramble that had not cost him any breath. As he ran, he’d assumed he would qualify for an assignment of his choice, which was to be with a first order battle fleet on the frontiers. The academy had prepared him to eventually reach flag or star rank. He could have been an admiral or a general. All of that had been derailed by the selfishness and power of one spoiled young woman. Lyxa was beautiful, fabulously wealthy, highly educated, and poised. Her task in life was to be the star guest at important public events, accept flower bouquets from knicksering school children, give short scripted speeches (always the same; she’d memorized the text) praising local statues and fat mayors and wealthy donors; and reward herself with sex, opium, and dazzling young men (throw in a few dazzling young women as the occasion proffered). That would have been the concise reply to Franjek Hordibay’s question.

“I am a civilian supply manager with the armed forces,” Hordibay said blandly. Jared was sure Hordibay must be highly placed to merit luxury like this vacation world.

“We love watching the Olympic games and we’re always so proud when Mercury takes the torch,” said Iada still brimming about his achievement, while eyeballing his lean, muscular frame with obvious appetite, which her husband ignored.

The three of them together sat so their chairs pointed toward a common point, with crowds roiling around them. They sat by the pool on a concrete deck at the hotel, and the waiter arrived with a laden try. Soon, they were sipping the famous local Sea Tea.

“Oh this is good,” said Iada, sipping gingerly but eagerly.

“Careful,” Jared said, “two or three of those, and you could be carried back to your room for the night.”

“What is this stuff? It’s divine,” Hordibay commented as he looked at his tall, frosty glass full of amber liquid with a decorative baby frond of a local micropalm standing up in it.

“Lucky for you I’ve been here for ten days and I’ve learned what needs to be learned. That is Sea Tea, as they call it here in the colonies. It contains equal amounts of a peppery, cinnamony spice, plus a dollop of raw brown sugar, and a potent but smooth white alcohol that’s sort of like wood varnish with the edge removed. The spice makes it velvety, and two or three of these could be more than you want to tackle.”

“Sort of sneaks up on you,” Hordibay commented. “Love it. Iada, you can carry me to the room. I’m having another.”

“So am I,” Iada giggled. Her rouged features and quivering neck already looked a bit flushed and redder.

At that moment, Iada rolled her eyes with delight, as a diaphanon walked up. He was like Jared’s own pet, only male. The diaphanon, so-called because he was partly invisible, was what someone important had once called the ultimate evolution of personal electronic and digital assistants. “Thank you, Edzar dear,” Iada gushed, as the djia leaned over her in a slight bow and presented her with a big, perfect dark red rose.

“Come sit down,” Hordibay said patting the edge of his deck chair. The djia, who moved like a shadow in water, complied as if he (or it; that was a great debate) were a pet. He was about the same height as his master and mistress, perfectly apportioned like an ideal young man. He moved in smooth, articulated motions whose angular moments were normalized by wetware algorithms. He was a creature of electrons, a memory of someone’s nervous system, and clothed in the illusion of skin to make him not look like a complex spider web of underwater rillfeed. Some djia were like that—graceful, smooth, beautiful to look at for what you could see—while others were stocky and some could have passed for beasts of various types. The ideal djia for a wealthy couple, in any case, was a walking pen and ink sketch of perfection.

At that moment, Jared’s own djia chose to return from her assignment which had been to gather some contact information for him from the hotel’s register cloud in the lobby. He’d seen her fine shape, apparently dressed in the illusion of a white short gown, as she stood before a high desk in the rotunda lobby under glass ceilings and alien skies floating with wine-colored fire.

“Well,” Hordibay said gruffly as Stella’s jazzy shape drifted close. One saw the white curvature of a luxurious dress, the poetic motions of fine legs on high heels, the swinging motions of silvery wrist bracelets in the air, the phantom movements of her beautiful arms, her long neck and finely apportioned face, the suggestion of a hanging fall of glowing blonde hair. Her eye color, in that ink sketch face drifting in balmy evening air under palm trees, was a light blue, in contrast with Jared’s dark blue. The engineers who conjured such expensive djia or PETs (Personal Electronic Taskmates) usually programmed key features to order. If a pet had to be sold or otherwise transferred, those same peripherals (eye and hair color, overall proportions, etc) could be retweaked without harming the djia. Stella’s source was Lyxa; that much Jared knew and accepted. He was fond of Stella, as her source, the Princess of Mercury, had once been the great love of his life. No longer, a let-down of cosmic proportions, like everything else that had happened since Lyxa had used her power and wiles to take over Jared’s life as if he himself were a diaphanon. He had learned to live with his bitterness, but now sought the right moment to make an escape, once he could figure out what that might be.

Jared held out his hand. “Come, Stella, meet our nice new friends.”

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