Needed a midweek post before my big vacation, went with another installment of Chelsea. This has one more character who went with Percy all along, except he started out as a guinea pig. As usual, there's a table of contents at the end.
Chelsea and Diane ended
up at the Arcostate Zoo. It lay beneath the city center, directly south of the
Trilon complex where they worked, laid out as a ring 1.8 kilometers wide. Frank
was waiting. He whistled as they got off the train. “Who’s the hot blonde?” he
said.
Chelsea stroked her newly golden hair. “A lady who will kick you where it hurts the most if you do that again,” she said with a smile.
They went down a passage to the zoo. The sounds of the terminal were quickly dissipated, until the noise became indistinguishable from the soft sounds of running water, distant rain and chirping insects. Instead of cages, the zoo had clusters of ecologaria, ranging from tiny glass boxes to enclosures with a volume of thousands of cubic meters. Spiraling sidewalks and tramways ran from one area to another, lined with trees, monitors, lesser exhibits and shops. Visitors could and did spend days wandering the zoo without completing a circuit, as testified by the occasional capsule kiosk. “I came here when I was a girl,” Chelsea said. “It hasn’t changed at all…”
The entrance went by one of the largest exhibits, a habitat that held a sauropod dinosaur. At the moment, it was lit as bright moonlight. Chelsea squinted without seeing anything, until she double-checked the camera and realized that a stand of trees she had been looking among were in fact the dappled pattern of the creature’s hide. She still could not guess its size, until she further realized that the birds foraging between its legs were as tall as she was. “It’s a little one,” Frank said. “18 metric tons. It’s from the same place the oviraptors came from. They say they went extinct, but the birdbrains figured out how to clone them from DNA in old bones. Shad would tell you about it if he was here. You’d probably have to tell him to shut up.”
“The Department manual says to call them Oviprotectrix,” Chelsea said without really thinking. “The other name was because of a fossil somebody found next to a nest. It turned out, they were its own eggs…”
Frank soon went his own
way. “Are you really staying with him?” Chelsea mused as he left.
“No,” Diane said. “We’re separating. But the therapy’s too good to quit.”
Chelsea and Diane took a tram to the prize exhibit at the heart of the zoo, an entire old-growth tree from the jungles of a world that had never known human nor ape. Staircases and elevators ran hundreds of feet above and below, all the way up to the park above where the topmost branches broke the surface, allowing guests to peer in at everything from the highest branches to its roots. There wasn’t a lot to be seen in the dim light. Still, there were glimpses to be had of leaping rodents, darting lizards and a huge, glowering tree toad. Monitors showed night-vision and infrared camera feeds that captured everything in far more detail; Chelsea gave them no heed. She laughed at the shining eyes of a bushbaby that seemed to stare back at her. Diane smiled back at her as they descended. She started to laugh again as she bumped into someone. It was Diane who said, “Oh, my… god.”
It was only as Chelsea stepped back that she saw the red hair and piercing green eyes. “Shad,” she
said, “Shad…”
“Blue Bell… you went
blonde…” He had barely begun to speak before she threw her arms around him.
“I love you,” she said
between kisses. “I love you I love you I love you…”
Diane met the stares of a
red-haired woman and two escorts, frozen in mid-stride on the stairs. “I just
got her a dye job,” she said. “What’s your excuse?”
Hours later, Chelsea and Shad were still racing around the zoo, chattering about nothing. Diane and the red-haired woman watched. Percy stood with them, clearly uninterested in intervening. Shad tried running through a hall of arthropods with Chelsea on his back. When she was dissatisfied, they ran back through with her carrying him. She veered aside at the last moment as they almost ran down a pair of oviraptorosaurs. They careened off a railing and came down laughing.
“He really does love
her,” the red-haired woman said to Diane. She had introduced herself as Dhalia,
Shad’s great aunt. “This was his favorite place as a child. He hadn’t been here
in a while. We brought him here to give him peace of mind.”
“I think you did,” Diane said.
As they watched, Shad grabbed for Chelsea’s leg. She screeched as he pulled her to him, then flushed as he murmured in her ear. As they got back to their feet, Chelsea said, “What’s got into you? And since when are you the one who wants to go straight to a therapy booth?”
“All this was my mother’s
idea,” Dhalia said. “She’s the one who made sure Shad never got into too much
trouble. I told her to talk to your friend. She said a government girl was the
same as a harlot.”
Diane turned to Percy. “Just how much trouble are we in?” she mused.
The law enforcement AI shrugged. “They met by chance in a public place, so it’s not a violation of the protective order,” he said. “Technically, they’re supposed to leave separately, but there would only be charges if the filing party makes a complaint. Oh, hey, Spike.”
Diane looked to an
approaching fourth figure, a tall and muscular man with long hair and a beard
just starting to go silver, dressed in an outfit dominated by black leather and
metal studs. He shifted from foot to foot, looking embarrassed. “Who are you?”
she said.
“You’re looking at the president of Spike’s Southside Motorcycle Gang,” Percy said. “Of course, they’re a completely legitimate hobbyists’ club that branched into security contract work, they just keep Gang in the name for tradition. How’d this happen on your watch, Spike?”
“Hey, look, we work with
the family,” Spike said. “I sent a couple of my guys to keep an eye on things.
I just told them, call if a lady with blue hair showed up. Huh. Blonde…”
Chelsea and Shad romped
by, with him now on her back. “Hey, Spike,” Shad said.
“They can have tonight,”
Dhalia said. “We’re all going to pay, but it’s what they deserve.”
A while later, Percy and
Spike were conversing freely. “Sure, Plato’s theory of Forms implies that God
is unknowable, if He or She or It exists at all,” Spike said. “But the whole
point is that we can infer the nature of the Divine from the material world…”
“Yeah, and we can infer a titanosaur from a pile of kaka,” Percy said. “That still doesn’t get you anywhere…” Diane just shook her head.
Shad and Chelsea finally
approached. “So, Aunt Dhalia, I’m ready to end the separation,” he said. “We
want the protective order lifted, too.”
“It won’t be that
simple,” Percy said. “It would have to be reviewed by a judge. You’ll be lucky
to get that in less than a month. But I suppose we could get a waiver, if you
can find a Level 3 Administrator at 11:30 at night…”
Chelsea and Diane looked
at each other. “Deve,” they said simultaneously.
They found the
administrator sitting in the petting zoo, feeding a dozen dicynodonts. “Ah,
there you are,” he said. He stood up, still holding one of the rabbit-like
creatures with three of his six visible arms.
“Hey, I know you!” Spike said, stepping forward. “I shoulda kicked your-!” He fell silent as a thick, almost trowel-like triangular blade sprouted from the bronze knuckles of Deve’s upper right hand with a metallic crack. It reached a full 46 cm length just short of Spike’s throat.
“I wasn’t actually expecting you, Spike,” Deve said. The strange multiple shoulders on his left side shifted as he raised what had been his middle hand. There was a second crack as another blade sprouted from his knuckles, a curved shape that looked half-way between scimitar and scythe. The dicynodont looked up, then resumed feeding from his last free hand. He held the points of both blades under Spike’s nose “I can appreciate that our first meeting left an unfavorable impression. But these are my subordinates and acquaintances, my `gang’, as it were. If you would try to harm them or interfere in their affairs, it would therefore be a challenge to me, to my authority and my power. I would then have no choice but to challenge both you and your own gang. Or, of course, you could ask the Special Inspector to arrest me, but that wouldn’t be the Code, would it?”
“Look, I’m here to
represent certain interested parties,” said Spike, quite calmly. “Our
instructions are not to do anything rough. Maybe we can reach an
understanding.”
“Indeed,” Deve said. His blades retreated back to wherever they had come from. Percy had already gone to a public data terminal, and returned with a form the administrator quickly filled out.
“Everything should be in order,” he said. “Now, Mr. Feaghan will still need to return to his designated treatment facility at the end of his release period. I’m sure that was settled before this little outing. While he is free, however, he and Ms. O’Keefe may spend time together as they please. If you will just sign here…”
Chelsea and Shad
scribbled in their signatures. She then turned to Spike. “Now what do they
want?”
“Lady Feaghan is ready to make an offer,” he said. Shad scowled at that. The biker waved in the direction of the nearest exhibit. “Now, what you have to understand is, the Arcostate maintains research stations in other time-space lines. The kinds of things you see here, they study first-hand. It’s the work of a lifetime.”
Shad looked intrigued,
for only a moment. “Yeah, but the catch is, it’s a one-way ticket,” he said.
Chelsea looked to Percy.
“Is that true?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“It’s complicated,” Percy said. “The way it works is, we take people who come here through Immigration and Quarantine. The ones who go the other way go in with a temporal transceiver that sends in reports of what they find. It doesn’t have to be scientists, either. Really, anybody with the right temperament can operate the equipment. We’ve sent convicts before.”
“Sure,” Spike said. “They
also send a full automated life support module, complete with a medical suite.
It’s a good deal. So, the family has connections. They can get the two of you
to the top of the list with one phone call.”
“All right,” Chelsea
said. “Could we come home?”
Percy sighed. “Yeah, that’s the thing,” Percy said. “Most every place has some version of the saying, `You can’t cross the same river twice.’ What they are really doing is going upstream from where two rivers meet.”
Her eyes widened, then narrowed again. “After
they leave, our timeline branches into other timelines,” she murmured.
“And so do theirs,” Percy said. “It’s not quite the same for immigrants who want to go home, because all we really have to do is zero in on a timeline where they left. Even that’s dicey enough we try to talk them out of it. But once we try to take back one of ours, who’s to say which version of us takes them in? We might end up with two, or three, or ten versions of the same person begging to come, and what happens if we try to take all of them in?”
Shad looked to Chelsea.
“What about children?” she said, already guessing the answer.
“We’ve sent couples
before,” Percy said. “But they have to take precautions beforehand. Permanent
precautions. We can’t do it any other way. Our laws forbid colonizing. The
geneticists all say it wouldn’t work, anyway. Besides, if it did lead to a
sustained population, who’s to say that sooner or later, they don’t find a way
to come looking for us.”
“No deal,” Chelsea snapped. “And it takes a real piece of kaka to offer that as a compromise!”
“Hey, I’m just the
messenger,” Shad said. “Take it or leave it, it’s not our call.”
“Well,” Percy said. “That
gets you a security detail, for what it’s worth.” He hastily departed.
“I can live with that,” Chelsea said. “Now I’d like to be alone with my husband for a while.”
As they walked away, she
said to Shad, “You know, everybody says I boss you around. So why don’t we do
it your way this time?”
Shad nodded. “I picked up
a few new things,” he said. “It would really depend on where we go.”
“All right, I can see
that,” Chelsea said. "How about we both give our choice. Go!”
Shad turned to her with a
wicked grin. “The Hellas!” he said.
“The Terminal therapy
booths!” Chelsea countered. They both laughed as they ran.
“Then good luck finding someone else,” Spike said indifferently.
“Oh, you will worka with us,” the figure said. “Justa wait tilla you are called.” When Spike turned, no one was there.
Table of contents
Part II: The parking violation!
Part III: Capsule hotel destruction!
Part IV: The Kelsiraptor, and Harryhausen monster bureaucrat!
Part V: The restraining order!
Part VII: The trial, part 2, with the King Kong Moral Contraband film!
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