The Path of the Four

Joe drank right out of the bottle. Jafari paced at a dizzying rate.

“The participants in this conversation mentioned Human Security and the Friendship Bureau. It’s common, procedural courtesy to forward records of relevant conversations,” Babe said.

“Guys, relax,” Ariana said.

“Isn’t there a way to re-program, or rewire, Babe, or something?”

“If, Joe, I could set aside a week, I could alter the Babe a.i. program to a way that would be more convenient under these new circumstances,” Ariana said.

“‘Relax’? So you have a way out of this?”

“Yes, Jafari. Babe--you pick one of five hundred and eighty-three levels of security review methods before forwarding material outside Vertex?”

“Five hundred and ninety-two choices,” corrected Babe.

“Thank you. You’re, as of now, using what security review level?”

“Level twenty-two.”

“Takes you how long to do a security review clearance before you forward surveillance material?”

“Point zero zero six eight nine percent of a second.”

“Change the parameters of this operation. Use security review method five hundred and ninety-two.”

“Working -- Done.”

The office was silent.

“So, when this conversation ends, how long?” Joe sounded like he needed to know the answer yesterday.

Jafari studied the ceiling, and looked like he tried to remember.

“A little more than seventy hours,” Ariana said. “Before Babe blabs to people we want to leave alone for a while. It will be that way with all surveillance/security data that our a.i. program gathers.”

“Fine, since that applies to what we have to do now,” Jafari said.

Joe nodded. “OK. One problem down. Jafari?”

“Yes?”

“You got some type of contacts among the Zah-Gre for your intelligence network, if I remember right?”

“Some native employees in the Terra Hotel, and some Outer Clan stalls in some of the other Lands.”

“Use your informants to set up a meeting between all of us here, in this room, and the Side Clan. And I guess the Inner Clan. Ariana, you got the story on Ab-Druh’s funeral?”

She pulled an antique pocket watch out.

“It will be in five hours.”

“OK. I guess we need to get out of here and get to work. And how long have you had that thing?” He pointed at her pocket watch.

“Long time. Since I came through a Corridor. But now I have to be concerned with what time it is.”

She put the watch back in her pocket.

“Joe, Voh-Heem won’t let me get hurt at that funeral.”

“I appreciate that, Ariana.”

“But you want to be there anyway,” she said.

“Right. I do.”

“Because you have the best idea how he, Hargrove, thinks.”

“Well, yeah.”

Another pause.

Ariana and Jafari looked at each other.

“Yeah, I know,” Joe said. “Don’t kill him. We need answers.”

“Whatever answers this trigger man has,” Jafari said.

“So maybe he doesn’t know enough,” Joe said. “I’ll be sure to ask him real nice who might.”

In a shuttle down to Zah-Gre, Ariana asked, “What type of thing did Hargrove do in the League?”

“Assassination,” Jafari replied. “Joe already said.”

“Wasn’t just that. Babe, automatic pilot.”

“Done,” the a.i.’s voice said from a speaker on the shuttle’s floor.

Joe took his hands away from the navigation panel and turned to Jafari and Ariana, sitting behind him.

“It wasn’t just termination. Explosives, vehicle management, message drops. The kid was good at just about everything.” Joe turned in his seat and looked out the bubble-shaped window this shuttle had, and he seemed to focus his attention on the cool vastness of outer space. “Of course, twenty years on, he’s not a kid now.”

Ariana asked, “‘Vehicle management’? You mean like a getaway driver?”

Joe snorted.

“Yeah, Ariana. Like a getaway driver. That’s just what I mean.”

“I’m sorry.” Ariana lowered her eyes. “That was uncalled for.”

“Forget it.”

Jafari put on a startled expression. He dug into a pocket in the front of his uniform.

“Something feels quite weird in there.”

“Jafari, what are you doing?”

“Remember that weird chess set, Joe? I’ve been carrying around the blank-faced piece.”

Jafari held the blank-face chess piece in the open palm of his hand.

Something was happening to the chess piece. It lost form and substance, dissolving into impossible blurs -–

-- And became something else. The chess piece was now a carved figure of a wide-eyed man, with a Roman nose, sunken cheeks, thin lips, and a jutting jaw.

Jafari held the chess piece up to Joe and asked.

“Peter Hargrove?”

“Just about, yes.”

“I have to be right about Brother Chaos,” Ariana said. “If we just didn’t see an example of an advanced form of extraterrestrial technology, then what did we just see?”

Joe stared at the chess piece. “I know that Hargrove is a killer. So why does Brother Chaos scare me more?”

The funeral for Ab-Druh happened less than forty-eight hours after his murder, in the village of his birth, in the village of Kah-Zee.

By Zah-Gre law and tradition, natives had to hold Ab-Druh’s funeral rite in the place of his birth, despite the distasteful fact that it was also the place of his assassination.

Everyone agreed, for the moment, the cave openings in the mountain had to go. Despite grumbling from some of the Outer Clan, the Side Clan and Human Security did a security sweep of the caves in the mountain. The combined Zah-Gre/Human effort then sealed off the cave openings with a new mixture of concrete and plastic.

It was a fashion among some Outer Clan in Kah-Zee to wear robes so long that they scraped the ground, and to have hoods they stitched onto the top, sometimes wearing them up, covering their heads, and part of their faces, or just often wearing the hoods down.

Joe would use a robe like this to pass as an Outer Clan Zah-Gre. The funeral would start as the sun began to set, and the Zah-Gre lit torches. In theory, the low, confused lighting and robe would let Joe maintain his disguise (in the front of Joe’s robe, somebody in the Side Clan had sewn on the Outer Clan insignia--a black dot, surrounded by six lines, like a black sun) and keep an eye out for Hargrove.

Joe stood with a small group of Outer Clan, associates of Ab-Druh, from the Old City.

Under his robe, Joe had two antiques he maintained well. They were two automatic pistols, made by Earth industry in the twentieth century manner.

Ariana dressed in a Zah-Gre robe. Around her neck, she wore a piece of native jewelry that displayed the black-dot insignia of the Inner Clan, adding it to the cross and pentagram.

Jafari was still up on Vertex. Somebody in authority had to stay up there. The three of them--Ariana, Joe, Jafari--had lost some control over the crew during this time of duress by all of them going down to the planet together. This had been a move that, in hindsight, was foolish.

Human Security had a presence at the funeral, but not as big as the large group of Side Clan, including Voh-Heem. Ariana, Joe, and Jafari, working with the Side Clan, stuck to their plan not to mention their suspicions about Peter Hargrove to H.S., since somebody, singular or plural in Human Security, wanted to keep “the Alpha Covenant,” whatever that was, a secret.

It would have aroused suspicions for anyone to exclude Human Security as well. After all, there was the question of the Human community on Zah-Gre making a symbolic gesture of support at the funeral of an important native figure. Furthermore, with a Human now filling the post of a slain native, and the killer still at large, the Friendship Bureau insisted, with diplomatic finesse that H.S. officers armed with their little silver laser pistols be there. Therefore, Roselle was there, and a freckle-faced H.S. officer with his uniform baggy on him, and a third H.S. man, who had a scar under his left eye. As the sunlight dimmed and Side Clan members lit torches and held them aloft, Roselle’s prominent brow cast his whole face into a deep, intense shadow.

According to tradition, the villagers stayed in their po-zahs, their tents.

Moreover, the two-headed birds, the fah-teens, circled in the sky and sang. In the distance, Ariana thought she saw the tiny, chameleon-like da-gons leaping, staying low to the ground.

The air smelled of the salt from the sea just beyond the hill, and beyond the maze of rock that stood at the beach.

The funeral party stood around a large fire, a fire just outside the collection of tents that made up the village of Kah-Zee.

Ariana didn’t want to think about the smell of Ab-Druh’s body (and his possessions, wrapped up by Ab-Druh’s Morg-Zah, his family, into a cocoon made from his tent from the Old City) when a group of Side-Clan placed it in the fire to burn, at the conclusion of the funeral.

For a second, Ariana felt like a little girl standing with many grownups, since she was so much shorter than almost everybody else in the funeral party.

Kre-Nan, Inner Clan of the West Land, skinny, officiated at the funeral.

At last, Ariana lost all shameful desire to laugh at his squeaky voice.

Without Ariana asking him to do so, Voh-Heem stood next to Ariana and whispered an English translation of Kre-Nan’s oration, spoken in North Zah-Gre, into Ariana’s ear. The always-scowling Voh-Heem almost smiled just before he started his translation:

“Our fellow being Ab-Druh has now left his shell. It was home for a while, but now he has gone on. Let us free the shell from this corner of the universe and everything else. As his shell was the temporary home of our departed fellow, so also was his tent. Therefore, we free it also from this time and place. We are warmed, for a while, before the fire of life, so sing no sad songs here. Each death is only one of many, but also the first one ever. As with everything, everything about death is and is not. In the proper view, a rainy sky blots out the sun, but also eases the thirst of grass and plants. Once we know birth and death, we are ready to know everything else. All are joined in the One. All move in the Turning. As it is.”

A group of five Side Clan approached, carrying Ab-Druh’s wrapped body, the tall, corpulent shape underneath the wrapping distorted here and there by what Ariana took to be the few possessions that, in life, Ab-Druh had owned.

They placed the wrapped body in the fire, and eased back.

For a while, everybody watched, lost in their own silence, peppered with the crackling of the fire, the singing of the fah-teens, and the sound of the unseen tide beyond the hill.

In the secret meeting to set up a trap for Peter Hargrove, the Zah-Gre were vague about the length of the part of the ceremony after the carriers of “the shell” had placed the corpse on the fire. How long for the meditation and private thoughts of the funeral party? “The ceremony is over when it is over,” someone from the Upper Clan had said, impatient with the question.

After a while, the disguised Joe eased over to Voh-Heem.

“Boy, you aren’t taking any chances,” Ariana heard Joe whisper to Voh-Heem. “Seventy-eight Side Clan? Wow!”

Voh-Heem’s head snapped in Joe’s direction and he fixed Joe’s chubby, hooded face with an iron, alarmed stare.

“Seventy-eight?” Voh-Heem’s whisper was harsh. “I ordered seventy-seven!”

Voh-Heem whispered orders to four of the Side Clan who then formed a tight ring around Ariana. Through a small gap between the bodies of these four, now her nearest protectors, Ariana watched Voh-Heem and Joe. They walked among the other Side Clan, their eyes probing, searching, and hunting. After a moment of that behavior, Ariana heard, close to her, a quick series of clunks and thumps, which, she guessed is what a Human hand-held weapon sounded like when somebody smashed them on flat Zah-Gre heads.

An arm clothed in the sleeve of a Zah-Gre robe snaked out from behind Ariana and snapped around her neck--but it was a five-digit, fur-less Human hand that emerged from that sleeve.

Another hand, from behind Ariana, clutched a large, black laser pistol, the Krink-Gaffin Two Thousand.

Peter Hargrove.

Although the gunman was taking her captive, she at least was starting to get a look at him.

The hand holding the gun was large enough so Hargrove could clutch the large weapon, and claw and tear at his disguise. The fake turquoise fur, fake flat head, fake black glassy eyes, all came away in Hargrove’s hand. He tossed the facial disguise away, sputtering and muttering as he did so. Underneath the mask were the wide eyes (brown, and bloodshot), Roman nose, sunken cheeks, thin lips, and jutting jaw in their fleshy, human reality.

The Side Clan surrounded Ariana, hostage, and Hargrove, hostage taker.

Roselle and his two officers had their weapons drawn and pointed at Hargrove.

The assassin glared at the whole lot of them. His arm still tight around Ariana’s throat, he used his weapon to send a thundering blast of yellow-white energy into the air.

“I walk away with her or I burn her head off!”

Joe stepped out from behind a group of Side Clan, his hood down, an automatic pistol in both hands.

“Joe,” Hargrove said, bland and flat.

“Pete,” Joe replied. “Been a long time. So what you been up to?”

Sarcasm some other time, Joe, Ariana thought. Please.

“Whitney?” Captain Roselle sounded outraged. “Is this some type of amateur cop routine? And you know this person?”

“I should have guessed how you would play it, Peter,” Joe said. “Have a disguise, do the job up close, slip away in the confusion. Like San Francisco. Remember the San Francisco operation? This isn’t as working out as well, is it?”

Hargrove’s brown eyes slid back and forth in his ugly head, taking in his circumstances, and his surroundings.

Ariana fought an internal battle between playing limp, cooperative puppet and screaming somebody get this bastard off me now, right now!

“Say Joe,” Hargrove said. “If you got any pull with your friends here, tell them I’m not kidding about my threat.”

“You came here to kill her,” Joe replied. “What’s your plan? We let you take her away so you can kill her at your leisure some place?”

“Why did you kill him--kill Ab-Druh?” Ariana didn’t care if it was the right or wrong time for the question; she was asking it anyway. “And why do you want to kill me?”

“OK, everybody, we’re taking our first step out of here,” Hargrove said, ignoring Ariana, putting her more distant from fear and nearer to anger.

Hargrove took a small step forward, forcing Ariana to move with him.

Voh-Heem shouted a short phrase in North Zah-Gre.

Then Voh-Heem, and seventy-seven Side Clan, reached into their robes and pulled out small silver laser pistols.

Roselle’s face reddened. “This is outrageous! Why didn’t anyone brief me on--?”

Hargrove saying fuck, ten times, each time with more volume, drowned out the rest of Roselle’s complaint.

“Voh-Heem,” Joe said. “I don’t see any reason to wait. Let’s keep the surprises right on coming.”

“Watch this one, asshole,” Ariana hiss-whispered at Hargrove.

In the village just beyond, thirty-four Zah-Gre stepped out of their tents, and turned to the funeral party, and the hostage situation.

Each villager wielded a Reynolds/Hume 67. The battlefield laser cannons were long metal and plastic tubes with radical/neo-crystal focusing elements at the front, and front and rear pistol grips.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” If Hargrove’s weapon didn’t kill her, the volume of that surprised shout would.

“Where did all these weapons come from?” Roselle looked torn between concern about Hargrove and Ariana and concern about how much nobody had told him. Ariana wasn’t sure, as well, sure where the weapons the Zah-Gre where brandishing had come from. All she knew was that the Outer Clan had arranged for them.

Roselle wasn’t done with his sputtering. “All this is hardly a good sign for human and Zah-Gre co-op--”

Hargrove didn’t let the Human Security chief finish saying cooperation. Moving quicker than thought (so it seemed to Ariana) the assassin backed her and himself to the hill and up it.

Hargrove, Ariana guessed, gambled the speedy, frantic backwards trek of hostage taker and hostage would startle the Side Clan standing in the way to the hill and make them give ground and allow passage--and so they did.

At some point up the hill, Ariana’s feet couldn’t keep up and, for handfuls of seconds here and there, the killer carried her.

Before she knew it, they were at the top of the hill and over it, and headed toward the maze at the beach.

The Side Clan and the others couldn’t be far behind. Jostled, dragged, and carried as she was, she could only see what was going on in snatches and flashes of vision. The flickering, confused lighting from the torches was still with her, providing the only illumination.

The maze waited--for her, her captor, and the others.