Blade of p’Na Read online

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The Daintiest Thing Under a Bonnet”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The House of Eichra Oren

  CHAPTER THREE

  Cafe Atlantis

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Ze Beeg Squeed”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The House of Eneri Relda

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lethal Legacy

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lornis Adubudu

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Across the Forge

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Center of the Web

  CHAPTER TEN

  Road Warriors

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Garden Club

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Aphidsss…”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Unnatural History

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Test Tube Truth

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Death in the Morning

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Father of the Bridegroom

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Horrors of the Deep

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Taken for a Ride

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Lanternlight

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Recruitment

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Semlohcolresh

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Jakdav Hoj and Mikado

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Wheels Within Wheels

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Pushing the Evidence

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Assessor’s Sword

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Liberty

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Nightcrawlers

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Council of War

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Out of the Abyss

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A Dream of Romance

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Treemonisha

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The Seas of Other Earths

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Normalcy

  ALSO BY L. NEIL SMITH

  BLADE

  OF

  P’NA

  by

  L. Neil Smith

  COPYRIGHT

  Blade of p'Na by L. Neil Smith. Copyright © 2017 by L. Neil Smith.. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Science Fiction Classics, Phoenix Rider, The Stellar Guild Series, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor, LLC, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  ISBN (DIGITAL): 978-1-61242-219-0

  ISBN (PAPER): 978-1-61242-218-3

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  DEDICATION

  Dedicated to the memory of

  DAVID F. NOLAN

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The Daintiest Thing Under a Bonnet”

  SHE SWEPT INTO THE OFFICE, A VISION OF SHIMMERING loveliness, glossy, golden-haired, bright-eyed, with a little clutch-purse and tiny hat and veil that did nothing to conceal her features. Letting the door swing shut behind her, she crossed the room and planted herself delicately on a brown leather backless chair in front of the desk.

  She had everything any healthy male looks for in a female: beauty, poise, grace. Well-turned out, I thought. What she was wearing represented my salary for a year. And she smelled even better than she looked.

  Too bad she was a spider.

  A medium-sized spider, if you limit it to sapients, of the general “jumping” variety, about four feet wide, a little less than that from front to back, and hip-high to a human being, covered with that blond fur I mentioned. Six of her big black eyes, two large and four small, glittered in a horizontal line behind that veil. I had no idea where the others were, or even if she had them. Probably at the back of her head.

  It’s hard to sneak up on a spider.

  “I am Shaalara of the Alteen Zirnaath,” she said, extending a well-maintained palp. Her voice was just as pretty and polished as the rest of her, with all of the usual annoying arachnid clicks and tiny wheezes trained out by an excellent finishing school. “You are Mr. Eichra?”

  “Pleased to meet you.” I gave her palp a polite touch, remembering to use a paw instead of my nose, a reflex among my own kind that might be misunderstood. “It’s Mr. Oren, except that he’s out of the office on a case. I work for him. My name is Oasam, but most folks call me Sam.”

  That’s right. I’m a dog—at least the organic part of me is—and not a particularly big one, either. As cute as Shaalara was, our prospective client was at least twice my size, a fact it was far too close to lunchtime to ignore altogether. I went around behind the boss’s desk, climbed up into his chair, and from there to the top, where I settled down on the self-cleaning blotter with my legs tucked under.

  “My boss should be back any minute, now—or maybe not until next week.” Given his profession, there was no way I was going to interrupt the man on the job. What he does mostly requires a lot of headwork, but sometimes there’s blood—sometimes there’s a lot of blood—in colors ranging from straw transparency, to an opaque purply black, through various shades and saturations of green and blue, to bright, smoking red like his and mine. “Is there some way I can help in the meantime?”

  Shaalara’s winsome mandibles gave off little involuntary clicking noises which, among her kind, were a sign of anxiety and sadness. It almost tore my heart out to listen to her. “Please forgive me,” she finally said, apologizing for what she considered her breach of etiquette. “But you see it’s my fiancé, Meerltchirt of the Fronzeln Zirnaath.”

  “Your fiancé?” I knew the Zirnaath were communal spiders, among the first appropriated by the Elders. I knew nothing of their marriage customs.

  “My fiancé.” She chittered, this time without apology. “We were to have wed in three days, but he has disappeared, and I believe I know why…”

  In most of what you might call garden variety spiders, there’s a lot of difference, physically, between males and females. Compared to the latter, the former are tiny, relatively feeble, and have to resort to all kinds of strange ploys to do their reproductive job as males, like tying their enamorata up, or stroking them to sleep. Even so, most fail to survive their wedding night. The groom is literally the little guy on the top of the wedding cake (if spiders had wedding cakes).

  Saying “I do” is the same as saying “bon appétit”.

  Sapient spiders, on the other hand—those intelligent enough to have developed technology on their own, to have created civilization, and to have evolved to become the dominant lifeform in the several and diverse alternative realities they came from—manifest the least sexual dimorphism of all spiders. The Elders’ an
cient adage, “The brighter the spider, the bigger the male,” can generally be counted on.

  The Zirnaath, however, are an exception. A very bright and agile species descended from tiny little jumping spiders (among which, ironically, males and females are more or less indistinguishable to anyone except other jumping spiders), they display the most sexual dimorphism of all sapient spiders. This missing Meerltchirt mook would have been my size, more or less exactly, meaning about half of lovely Shaalara’s.

  Among all the Zirnaath, Shaalara explained, the Alteen were most conservative, being late to abandon what she called “the old ways” they had practiced in their home world before they were Appropriated. Some radicals among them openly advocated a return to those old ways now.

  Which is why, Shaalara assumed, Meerltchirt had galloped. Those old ways included making a wedding feast of the groom, something that sapient spiders had all supposedly been talked out of thousands of years ago, by the Elders, but which some among them—the “Old Matriarchs”, Shaalara called them—were starting to look back on nostalgically.

  And with growling stomachs.

  Shaalara, who held advanced degrees in poetry and engineering, and considered herself a progressive and a romantic, did not agree with the Old Matriarchs, the principal leaders of whom were her mother (a widow), her grandmother (another widow), and several dozen widowed aunts.

  “So what,” I asked her, “do you want Eichra Oren to do?”

  She chittered pitiably again. “Please find my Meerltchirt for me. Persuade him to come back to me, to marry me—following the customs of his own people, the Fronzeln, if necessary. Tell him I’m a modern girl. I promise I won’t eat him, even if my family were to disinherit me. I love Meerltchirt and I want—Sam, I need—to have his babies.”

  Yeah, I thought, about forty of them at a time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The House of Eichra Oren

  “YOU REALIZE,” I SAID, “THAT IN THE END, SHE’S GOING TO eat him.”

  I looked around, in one of those rare instances when you’re suddenly conscious of things all about you that you usually take for granted.

  It was a wonderful room, Eichra Oren’s office, elegant in its simplicity. Its ceiling, floor, and walls were polished ivory, sawn from thick planks obtained from trees in which elephant tusk genes had been implanted. It was a major industry here on the western north coast of the Inland Sea. Nothing sounded quite like the wind, clattering through the leaves in a grove of ivory trees. The stuff was beautiful, responded well to lighting, and always seemed warm to the touch.

  Easy to keep clean, too.

  The ivory floor was covered with a thick, colorful carpet of cloned caterpillar fur, grown for the purpose on the surface of enormous vats of nutrient. The stuff looked impossibly delicate, but it was more durable than well-tanned sheepskin, and capable of self-repair.

  He said, “I’m not so certain of that, Sam. If I were, I wouldn’t try to find him for her. What a deep and hideous moral debt that would generate!”

  Eichra Oren had only missed Shaalara by a matter of minutes. Now he sat in the swivel chair behind his desk and I lay in the meatloaf position on the backless chair the spider lady had occupied. I could still detect her fragrance drifting in the air, but that was okay. I am a detective, after all, a private nose. I had filled my boss in on my interview with her—thanks to cybernetic implants on the surface of my doggie brain, I have a perfect memory for things like that, not to mention a sparkling personality—and we were considering our options.

  “You know, something I’ve always wondered, Boss…”

  He was abstracted, glancing through some communications—mostly advertising—that had been sent to his desk throughout the day, and which he’d just allowed to download into his own cerebrocortical implants. He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Yes, what’s that, Sam?”

  “Why is it,” I asked him, “that you’re the one of us who goes out and faces the public every single day, witnesses all of the faults, failings, and frailties of every sapient being, often in a close-up and personal way,” I pushed my muzzle at the corner of the room where he’d leaned his Assessor’s sword when he’d returned to home base, “yet I’m the one of us who tends to be cynical about everything and everybody?”

  “This is a rhetorical question?” he asked.

  I said, “It isn’t meant to be.”

  “Then the answer is, I don’t know.”

  He looked tired, but then he often did after a long day’s work. At least his tunic wasn’t bloody, and he hadn’t had to clean his sword. Those days could be really bad, afterward, and he couldn’t afford the luxury of alcohol or drugs to ease the pain. All they did was postpone it. That didn’t mean he didn’t drink, just that he didn’t drink to forget.

  Eichra Oren was about average height, as human beings go, slender and wiry, but well-muscled through the arms and shoulders, thanks to many hours spent exercising with the sword and practicing other lethal arts. His hair was short and sandy-colored. His eyes were a brilliant blue.

  How old Eichra Oren was, I couldn’t tell. I’d never asked; he’d never volunteered. He looked about thirty, but you never know with any of the beings, human or otherwise, partaking of the Elders’ culture. That I was not the man’s first symbiote I knew. I could find traces of them lingering in his memory whenever we communicated directly. All of them were canine, naturally. At least one had died in action, which he avoided thinking about, but I kept uppermost in my own mind at all times.

  For whatever reason, the females of several humanoid species found him attractive. I would have thought he’d seem just a little boring to them. For the most part, he liked them, as well—sometimes it became a problem—but Eichra Oren seldom had time to spare for what he referred to as “social relations”, thanks to his semi-sacred avocation as the keeper of that damned sword. Give the man a couple of hours in the gym he maintained downstairs, a good meal (he was partial to lobster, but then, so am I), and a decent night’s sleep, and he would be fresh and ready to undo all of that good therapy in the name of p’Na.

  Suddenly, he stood, grabbed up the sword that identified his profession, and spoke. “Let’s go for a walk, Sam. I need the fresh air.” He strapped the sword-belt around his waist, and off we went together.

  There was nothing wrong with the air indoors. The building, a simple four-up and four-down with a flat roof we sometimes used as a spare office or dining room, was a quasi-organic edifice, grown from a seed the size of one of my front paws. Without being overly obtrusive about it, the place breathed deeply and often, filling itself over and over again, every few minutes. But I knew exactly what the boss meant. I’d been cooped up here all morning and was feeling the need for a stretch.

  Outside, it was one of those impossibly beautiful days we have so many of in this particular corner of the planet. I sniffed the air, as always laden with sage which grew in wild abundance everywhere in a climate that was usually hot and dry. Here and there, other people of various species were visible, working at country chores, tending to their animals, running errands, taking a stroll, none of them close enough to spoil a feeling of near-solitude under incredibly vast blue skies.

  The place was a great favorite of landscape painters in a hundred different alternaties. Wisps of icy cirrus drifted overhead, looking like gigantic feathers. Somewhere, something like a meadowlark was singing.

  Sunny and tranquil as the present setting seemed, the atmosphere was full of energy and action. Down by the shore, a mile or so south, gruff, rough-handed beings were hauling in freshly-caught fish in big nets, supported by antigravity pods, from the holds of small vessels onto processing tables on the docks. There were other, cheaper ways of getting food. This was an ancient artform where some of the Elders’ “guests” came from, practiced in this very spot in many realities, and the paying customers enjoyed the handcrafted aspect of it.

  At the same time, far across the Inland Sea—which lent a salty tang of its own to th
e air all around us—in what I’m told was once a trackless, sandy desert, and is still referred to as the “Ocean of Sand”, clever farmers cultivated and harvested items like artichokes, avocados, pineapples, prickly pears, carambola, and furniture. Eichra Oren’s desk had come from over there, carefully teased from the vine when it was ripe and ready to cure, as had my favorite seat in his office.

  We headed down a narrow, rock-lined pathway, paved in asphalt, thickly embedded with tiny seashells, toward the village at its foot. The boss was intent, I believed, on getting us some lunch. But that wasn’t at all what he’d had in mind. When we were about a hundred yards from the building that served us both as home and office, where it stood surrounded by wild grasses, he stopped, and turned to face me.

  Pulling a short, fat cigar from his tunic pocket, he let it light itself, rolling it so the low flame was distributed evenly around the front end. Drawing deeply on it, then exhaling with a kind of sigh, he said abruptly, “I suspect so much, Sam.” It was rather like starting a conversation with the word, “however”. “So much. I had to get us both out of there because I’m all but certain our house is ridden with spy devices.”

  I could have raised my eyebrows, but it would have had no effect, since both they and my face-fur are white. “Visual or auditory?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Drawing on the cigar again, he let a light breeze whip the smoke away. I caught the edge of it going by. I’ve always liked that smell.

  “And you want to leave them in place,” I suggested, nodding, “so that whoever planted them won’t know you’re onto their nasty little game?”