ABLE (Jim Able: Offworld Book 1) by Ed Charlton (13 inch ebook reader txt) 📗

they do and what they purchase, and making sure they aren’t going to do anything stupid that will adversely affect everyone else.”

“Ah!” she said, smiling. “You’re a spy as well as a bureaucrat!”

Jim smiled back. “The official term for me is ‘officer of information.’”

“Got it. Maybe you’re not so dull after all.”

She made Jim feel comfortable with his choice of contact. The scientist and her visitor amicably talked most of the night away.

As dawn approached, Jim said, “I would rather take off again before anyone notices where I parked. As I said, I don’t want to be delayed by a media event.”

Madhar shook her head. “No one will see your ship here. This is all my property around us. I discourage uninvited visitors. My life is all too much in the public gaze. I retreat here when I can and keep my privacy.”

“For all our talk, I still don’t know who to contact next about my lone trader.”

“Come with me, and we’ll concentrate on just the one problem.”

Madhar led Jim out to the dock. She reached down for a line and drew up from the water a cage filled with writhing, shiny black bodies. She unhooked the line and brought the box and its squirming contents up to a low table set under the extended eaves of the house. She lit a small fire and put a long rectangular pan over the flames.

“Blancar,” she told Jim, “are the real reason I come here. You have to eat them now or they spoil.”

She tipped them all into the pan and splashed a purple liquid over them. The sizzling and popping were too loud to talk over for several minutes.

“Let’s go over what you know about him again.”

“Sure. He called himself ‘Edward.’ We refer to your star as Turcanis Major. Once he knew that, he called himself ‘Edward of Turcanis.’ He wanted, and eventually bought, a high-definition infrared scanner and associated equipment.”

“Okay, what does ‘Edward’ mean?”

“It’s a name. I suppose it does mean something; I don’t know that I remember. Maybe ‘guardian’ or something like it. ‘Prosperous guardian,’ I think.”

Madhar shook her head. “Doesn’t help. Okay, what good is a high-definition infrared scanner?”

“It’ll pinpoint small heat sources, potentially over long distances.”

Madhar shook her head again. “Perhaps we could survey our world from a satellite and learn something from such a device, but it’s not something we’ve needed yet. I can’t see why he’d want one.”

After a few more minutes of gently frying, the blancar were ready. Jim’s apprehension gave way to delight. They were a sweet and tangy fish with no discernible bones. After several helpings, he began to wonder if they were not more worm than fish.

“I have an image of Edward.”

Madhar gave him a sly smile. “There are nearly two billion of us. I don’t think I’ll recognize him.”

Jim showed her the picture. The effect was startling. Madhar laughed, and half a mouthful of blancar sprayed over the table.

“He’s a Regdenir! Why didn’t you say so? He’s a Barottin Regdenir!” With one hand she was hitting the table as she swept the bits of blancar off with the other.

Still laughing, she said, “You’ve come a long way for nothing, I’m afraid.”

Chapter Three

“What is a Regdenir?” Jim asked.

“You don’t want to bother with them. That lot! They’re tree-climbers!” Madhar replied.

“Tree-climbers?”

“Yes. Dreamers. Crazy people. You don’t need to bother.”

Jim had so many questions he became momentarily inarticulate.

“Look,” said Madhar, “they are...an embarrassment. They all dress like that, with the hooded blue cloak. They’ve done it for centuries. They’re throwbacks to our past. They live in their own little world, clinging to ancient beliefs. They worship Mainworld. Literally. It’s a god to them. It’s very embarrassing that he’s become our first representative to the galactic community.”

“You call the planet Mainworld?”

“Sure, what else would you call it? I suppose the only other name would be Magg, but that’s archaic now.”

“Okay. Slowly now, he’s part of a religious community?”

“Yeah, it goes back a long way. They don’t allow intermixing. They despise the general population. They have been...aggressive about it in the past. They all live out in the tidal marshes on the west coast.”

“The marshes?” Jim said, sitting up suddenly.

“What about them?”

“I saw something on a comedy show. A kid put on a blue cloak, and his father said something about ‘not going to the marshes.’ It was funny, apparently.”

Madhar smiled. “Well, yes, it is. They’re symbolic for us. If we didn’t have the Regdenir, we’d have to invent something like them. They are the ‘them’ that makes us ‘us,’ you understand? It doesn’t help that they are incredibly rich.”

“How so?”

“It’s the marshes. When the Regdenir migrated out there three or four centuries ago, it wasn’t good. Many of them died. You see, Mainworld gives us enormously powerful tides. There are vast underground lakes under the west coast. At high tide, much of that water percolates up through caverns and cracks and floods the marshes. The valleys out there are never dry, even at low tide. If it were just the seawater, it wouldn’t be so bad, but all that extra subsurface water makes it an extreme place to live. Well, anyway, they survived and began to build conduits for the water, learning to harness the latent power of it all. They set up vast electricity generators. They got their own back on us; our technological revolution was founded on that power. And they make us pay for it. Literally.”

“So it’s not that they don’t take part in modern life?”

“No, they pick and choose, in ways that make no sense. They won’t use television, but they have one of the biggest computer networks that has ever existed. What do they do with it? I don’t really know, but I know they’ve loaded all their Holy Scriptures into a vast database. As I said, they’re crazy.”

“So, Edward is a Regdenir.”

“A Barottin Regdenir. There were other varieties of Regdenir, but these are the only ones who didn’t intermix.”

“Okay. Let’s redraw the question. What does a Barottin Regdenir