Furthest Page 2

  There had been nothing there. Nothing at all. Just the great dome, fully big enough to cover the city of three hundred thousand people it was supposed to house, and the bare expanse of rock and water, and that’s all there was of Ta Klith.

  Now why in the name of all the swirling attendants of the Holy Light would anyone build a citydome over nothing at all, name it as a city, claim three hundred thousand citizens for it, and forbid people to enter?

  Coyote was mournful. Things just weren’t going very well, and a lot of people were going to be very unhappy with him, and the magnificence all around him had lost its glory and gone tawdry garish port-city vice strip. He kept his head down and ignored it, and when a jeebie lit on his shoulder he didn’t even move.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

  what a ball of gas you are…”

  (from an old nursery rhyme)

  When the Fish called him in to give him the assignment on Furthest, Coyote went in with his customary reluctance. He could not remember a single occasion when the Fish had called for him that he had not managed to make the comsystem ring at the single most inappropriate moment possible, generally when Coyote had just managed after a great deal of effort to make some beautiful woman absolutely ready to be absolutely happy. Then the comsystem would ring, with that blatant triad that meant an official—hence, not ignorable—call. He didn’t know exactly how the Fish managed to time things so perfectly, but no doubt this was one of the spinoff benefits of being head of the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service.

  He had stared at the Fish and the Fish had stared back, until Coyote had gotten tired of the game and said abruptly, “Oh, shit, man, come on—what did you call me in for?”

  “Shit, Mr. Jones?”

  “Archaic. Twenty-fourth century term for human excrement.”

  “I see. It is amazing how much really useful information one can learn by specializing in ancient folk-music.”

  Coyote ignored him. The profession of folk-musician was as good a cover as could be had these days, and the Fish knew it as well as he did.

  “For what, your Porscineness, did you call me in?”

  “You were busy?”

  “I was busy.”

  The Fish smiled at him, and Coyote seethed. “I’ll count to ten,” he told the Fish. “One. Two. Three―”

  “All right, all right. I need somebody to go to Furthest, Mr. Jones.”

  “To go to where?”

  “Furthest.”

  “Where the bald-headed hell is Furthest? And is it?”

  “Is it what?”

  “Furthest.”

  The Fish made a small sound of indignation. “Look here, Mr. Jones,” he snorted, “Is Earth Earth? Is Mars Mars? Is Alpha Centauri—”

  “I don’t mean that,” said Coyote, shaking his head. “Furthest is a word, not just a name. Antique variant for ‘farthest.’”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  “No charge,” said Coyote. “And is it?”

  “Farthest? Yes, it is. It surely is. Let me show you.”

  The Fish pushed the button activating the great map on the wall beside them. It took the whole wall, and at that it was on not only a small scale but a distorted one. Vast areas of empty space had simply been deleted and replaced with small black dots indicating vast deleted empty area. If it hadn’t been for that convenient mechanism, it would have taken half a dozen walls to put the map up.

  The Fish pushed the pointer stud and a bright green light came on, out in the upper right-hand corner.

  “See that?” he said.

  “That’s Furthest?”

  “That’s right.”

  Coyote whistled. “I didn’t know there was anything out there.”

  “Furthest is.”

  “That’s beyond the Extreme Moons.”

  “Right.”

  “Well,” said Coyote, “I’m impressed.”

  “No charge,” murmured the Fish, and Coyote smiled.

  “So what am I supposed to do?” he asked.

  “Go live there.”

  “How long?”

  “However long it takes, up to the eighteen-month maximum they’ll let us have, and believe me it took an unholy amount of pressure to get them to give us eighteen days. They don’t like offworlders out there.”

  “Live there.”

  “Right.”

  “What’s it like?”

  The Fish shrugged. “I don’t know. Want to see the threedies?”

  “If you would be so kind.”

  The map on the wall flicked out and immediately the wall clouded slightly, cleared, and disappeared. In its place was a street, curving off into the distance, flanked by houses. The houses were all precisely three stories high and very narrow. Each had a central door with two windows on each side on the first floor, five windows on the second floor, and the third floor had no windows at all. The houses all seemed to be connected by a sort of pipe or tube that ran from the third story of each one to the house next to it. All were built of an unprepossessing gray stone.

  “What is that?”

  “That’s K’ith Vaad, capital of Furthest.”

  “Ugly.”

  “Of an ugliness seldom seen,” the Fish agreed. “Sort of an ugly-specialist’s ugly.”

  Coyote glanced at him, instantly suspicious. If the Fish was making jokes—sodden jokes, but jokes—there was something nasty about this assignment.

  “Okay,” he said. “What else?”

  The street disappeared and was replaced by a vast unending expanse of gray rock, like lava wastes, broken by small creeks and humps of the rock.

  “Mmmmm.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And what else?”

  “That’s all.”

  “That’s all!” Coyote sat up straight and glared. “Come on, I don’t believe it. How could that be all? Where are the tourist threedies?”

  “No tourists.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, Mr. Jones, I’m not. No tourists are allowed on Furthest. You get on with a permit, on official business only, and you get off almost as fast as you get on. And they’re damned choosy about what they consider official business. Those two slides are all we’ve got.”

  “Incredible.”

  “I agree with you.”

  “Well, what do you know about it? There must be some facts.”

  “Surely. Planet Furthest, dimension such and such, settled in the year 2083 by an Amerindian, a Europer, and two idiots from a Jupiter colony, plus a handful of unspecified other colonists. A very small handful. They were some kind of extremist cult, fleeing what they claimed was religious persecution.”

  “In 2083? Moonspittle.”

  “No, apparently that was still possible.”

  “Amazing. Go on.”

  “Climate is temperate, no dangerous wildlife or plants. No industry. No export except a plant called ‘hwal’ that’s used as a base for perfume, and two or three rather esoteric musical instruments made of a kind of fiberglass. Almost no imports… coffee and sugar, I think. Government is paternal oligarchy, religion listed as something called the Holy Way. People are human, naturally, since they started out human and have been completely isolated ever since. Must be very inbred by now, however.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s about it. Some eyewash about ideals, a picture of a building, just trivia. That’s all we’ve got.”

  Coyote sighed. “Well, I’m afraid I don’t see it. Here’s this godforsaken planet at the end of nowhere, completely anti-social, bothering nobody—”

  “They’re bothering somebody, Mr. Jones. They’re bothering the Tri-Galactic Council.”

  “Ah, now we’re getting to the point.”

  “Yes. You see, a… dear heaven. Mr. Jones, I have a problem.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What does one call these people, Mr. Jones? Furthestanians? Furthestites? There’s always ‘citizens of F
urthest’ but that’s awfully awkward for extended discussions. Just a minute.”

  He punched his intercom and the secretary machine, this year’s absolutely newest and fanciest Amanuensis Mark IV model, gave out an attentive soft tone.

  “Please check for correct spelling and pronunciation,” said the Fish, “for the citizens of the planet called ‘Furthest.’”

  “Yes, sir,” said the Amanuensis, and Coyote blinked.

  “Yes, sir?” he marveled.

  “Damn right,” said the Fish.

  “Now, how did you get a robot programmed to say yes, sir instead of ‘yes, citizen’?”

  “Custom-made. It will say ‘yes, most gracious master’ if I want it to.”

  Coyote chuckled and the Amanuensis gave out with its tone again.

  “Furthesters,” it said with an intonation of the most dulcet competence. “F-U-R-T-H-E-S-T-E-R-S, Furthesters.

  “Very good,” said the Fish. “Fine.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said the Amanuensis. “Will that be all, sir?”

  “That’s all,” said the Fish, and the light went out on the Amanuensis, leaving behind in Coyote’s mind an image of quivering eager pleasure. The thing looked as if you ought to pet it and scratch it behind its ears.

  “I don’t like your secretary,” observed Coyote. “It’s sickening.”

  “Irrelevant,” said the Fish.

  “You were saying?”

  “Yes. I was saying that the Furthesters were annoying the Tri-Galactic Council. You know how, Mr. Jones? I’ll tell you how. The next person to hold the office of President of the Tri-Galactic Council will be the delegate from Furthest.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Let me see, I’ve got it written down here… oh, yes. One Bressthen Hkwylle’e. I have no idea if I’m saying that right. The Panglish for Bressthen is Andrew, no equivalent listed for Hkwylle’e.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Well, why should you have? With 20,393 delegate worlds how could you possibly know any individual delegate, unless he’s done something that’s made him known? But the situation with Furthest is a little special.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “In the first place, it’s only been three years since Furthest finally consented to join the Federation, which means the delegate has had very little experience. Not only that, he belongs to a religious group which damn near keeps him in total isolation. He’s got seven hours of obligatory ritual meditation a day. He’s got three hours of obligatory ritual isolations, and I don’t remember what else. He’s not allowed to leave Mars Central, and so far as anyone knows he’s never been seen anywhere except in his quarters and at meetings of the Council.”

  “He doesn’t sound to me like a very good bet for President.”

  The Fish shrugged his shoulders. “Bureaucracy, Mr. Jones. The Presidential succession goes in alphabetical order, and Furthest is next on the list, never mind how unlikely the result may be. Bressthen Hkwylle’e takes office twenty-four months from next Thursday.”

  “All right,” Coyote said, “I can see that this might not be the ideal situation. But I’m damned if I see what my role is supposed to be. Were you suggesting, for example, that I use mass projective telepathy and convince the Three Galaxies that ‘F’ comes last in the alphabet?”

  “Be serious, Mr. Jones.”

  “Then explain.”

  Coyote walked over to the wall behind the Fish’s desk and pushed the button to make it transparent. He stared out for a moment at the sea of green trees one hundred and thirteen floors below and silently thanked the deities that kept him from having to spend his days in one of these rabbit warrens. It was better than it used to be on Mars Central, he supposed; at least there were trees now. But who would want to be cooped up all the time in block after block of identical two-hundred-story office buildings? Yecch.“

  “Yes, it causes a problem.”

  “Why? Is he some kind of lunatic?”

  “That’s the problem. We don’t know. We don’t know anything about him. We don’t know what kind of lunatic a Furthester lunatic would be.”

  “What does the psychological profile show?”

  “At Computer-Central, you mean?”

  “Sure. What does it show?”

  He went back and sat down across from the Fish. “That’s the problem, too. It shows nothing.”

  “You mean to tell me there’s no psychological profile.”

  “Wait a minute, Mr. Jones,” interrupted the Fish., “I mean no such thing. By law there has to be a psychological profile, one male, one female, for the citizens of any people within the Three Galaxies. But that profile is made up by the psychcomputers on the basis of data fed them by those same citizens, and that’s what was done in this case. And in this case there’s something wrong.”

  “How bad?”

  “We don’t know. The routine measure is always the same. Every time a new President is two years in the offing there’s a routine check. We have the Presidency about as nearly safe-guarded as is possible, but nonetheless it is a position of great power. It has to be. The President of the Tri-Galactic Council is the only person with full access to the Central Computers, for example. There are checks on him, but still he has full access. He is the only person with instant access to all of the other delegates. He is the only person with authority to act should there be—”

  “I understand all that,” said Coyote. “Of course he’s powerful. How could an official over better than twenty thousand worlds be anything else? I’m not an idiot.”

  “Well, then. The routine check is to look up all existing information on the upcoming President, his people, his homeworld, and so on, and submit it to the computers for review. When we did this for Furthest we came up with some disturbing information.”

  “What?”

  “Everything is average. Everything without exception. There is no smallest deviation from the mythical norm in even one statistic, in the data we have. The psych profile for a Furthester citizen is the ideal Mr. Human Being and his wife, Mrs. Human Being. It’s too average. The computer says it can’t be genuine.”

  “Maybe out of all the worlds there are it was bound to happen that there would be one average one.”

  “The computers say no. They say it’s too perfect. There are very impressive and convincing figures about the odds against it. There just can’t be any such Perfect Average World in this universe, Mr. Jones. Therefore, something is wrong. Therefore, something is being covered up. Therefore, something has got to be done, and well before the succession comes around. We’ve got to be able to judge the new President. We have to be able to make an accurate estimate of his behavior. If the things he is doing constitute abnormal behavior for a Furthester, if they mean that he is under strain or pressure, we have to know that. We have to know what the signs would be of a Furthester about to crack under a burden he could not bear. The safety of those twenty thousand worlds you mentioned depends on our having that information.”

  “And I’m supposed to get it?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Jones. Like I told you, they don’t like offworlders. We had to exert every bit of pressure this office can muster, which is considerable, to get you permission to go there, let alone to stay eighteen months, and they may get sorry and retract it any time. Therefore, you are to assume while you’re there that you have twenty-four hours to do the job. Just keep assuming it.”

  “Oh, lovely,” Coyote muttered.

  “And guess what?”

  Guess what? The Fish was being arch, and that tore it. Coyote quickly considered alternatives.

  “The women are all eight inches tall,” he said.

  “Not quite,” chuckled the Fish, ‘“But knowing your appetites I think you should know one thing. Of all those many thousands of planets there are only five left, in all the Three Galaxies, where sexual prudery still exists. Furthest is one of those five.”

  “Prudery?”

  “Look it up,�
� laughed the Fish. “In your dictionary of archaic terms.”

  Then he stopped laughing and went on, “You were the best possible agent available for this job. In the first place you’re not especially sociable yourself, which makes you a good choice for an anti-social planet. In the second place, you’re our most experienced man in exotic planet sorts of things. And in the third, and most important place, you are the strongest mass projective telepath we have. If anybody can convince the Furthesters that he is innocent, well-meaning, one hundred percent pure, you can. All you have to do is just put out clouds of psi good will, Mr. Jones, full strength.”

  “That’s all I have to do, huh.”

  “Right. And find out what they’re hiding. Convince them to let you in on their little secret. Fast. Without offending anybody.”

  “When do I leave?”

  “Immediately. Top priority, federal rocket, warp drive, suspended animation for top speed. It’s a long way out there.”

  Coyote stood up and turned to leave, grabbing the envelope of instructions that the Fish was holding out to him, and he headed for the door. Two steps from it he thought of something and looked back.

  “Oh, by the way…” he said.

  “Yes, Mr. Jones?”

  “What’s my cover? Traveling minstrel again? I’m a bit tired of that.”

  “Not this time. This time will be different.”

  “Different how?”

  The Fish laughed again. He was a positive comedian today.

  “This time, Mr. Jones,” said the Fish with glee, “you are going to stay put. You are going to be the proprietor of a MESH. And how do you like that?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Mary had a little rocket,

  tried to put it in her pocket,

  met a telepath who told her,

  ‘A pocket’s not a rocket-holder.’

  Lucky, lucky little Mary!

  if she’d met an Ordinary,