scuppernong - 1

This post comprises the first part of Scuppernong (working title - got a suggestion?).

There's a nickel for you if you recognize who I'm stealing from. Please comment.

25 November 2410 13:20 GMT, Stockholm at Earth

The office of the college president looked like the lobby of a prosperous Reaganesque whorehouse. It had brown sisal carpets on a glazed red-tinted concrete floor, and stainless steel counters behind a chrome-legged Atomic Age dining table. There were heavy hemispherical frosted glass lamp shades hanging on thin woven wire cables, and a cast-iron spiral staircase with perforated treads leading up to a mezzanine. The office was much nicer than the public areas. Maybe I should have worn a shirt.

Magnus Q. Perpindik, the president, was appallingly thin - sparse headhair, spotty yellowish beard and teeth, strands like tiny black rebar rods sticking out of his concrete-gray eyebrows. He wore a pink custom-tailored silk sari with a gold Phi Beta Kappa key hanging from a chain onto his incongruously convex belly. His shoes were high-gloss black leather lace-ups, and his gray wool knee length socks had tiny pink starbursts to match the silk.

Perpindik spoke Swedish with a strong southern accent. As he talked, he tilted back in a red chrome and vinyl chair and watched his reflection in a porthole window. Flakes of the season's first snow fell outside, melting against the glass and trickling down to the circular bolted window housing. It was gray twilight out, a drab November grayness unique to Stockholm in late fall. The autumnal dark seemed to fit Perpindik's drone.

Perpindik was telling me about the sensitive nature of a college president's job, and he had a lot to say about it. I'd been there listening to him for ten minutes and my brain was beginning to buzz. I wondered if I should tell him his office reminded me of a whorehouse.

"You do see my position, Herr Boldt," he said, and swiveled to face me, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table and his palms to the sides of his head. His nails were pink too.

"Yes sir," I said, "we integs see really deep."

Perpindik frowned and went on.

"It is a matter of utmost sensitivity, Herr Boldt" - he'd turned to see his reflection again - "requiring restraint, gentility, circumspection, and a high degree of professionalism. I don't know the kinds of people who usually employ you, but -"

I interrupted. "Look, Herr Perpindik, I went to college, I won't spit in the soup. If a link comes along and bites me, I grab it, I'm not a Buddhist nun, I'm a private integ. Are there things you'd like me to integrate, or are you warming up for a board meeting?"

Perpindik put his head back and inhaled deeply through his nose. "District Vigilant Larsson said you were sarcastic and arrogant. Tell him, Herr Slott."

Slott stepped away from the wall where he had been leaning and opened a fold. He was short and thick, with a werewolf cosmet - long, coarse sideburns, toothy grin, and a velvety black nose. He wore buckled biker boots and a tan safari jacket with epaulets and bone buttons. He put one boot up on a chair and indicated the fold: an image of a book cover. Dark black hair showed between his khaki trouser cuff and the upper edge of his elevated boot.

"Karl Slott, head of college security," he said. "Fifteen hours ago, a valuable twenty-first century graphic novel was stolen from our library."

"What's a graphic novel?"

"An illustrated book with colored pictures which augment the narrative, sometimes drawn by the author. This book is in English, and contains a rare contemporary allusion to Jude King, the twentieth century American facilitator. It was discovered seventy-two years ago under the wooden floor of a ruined fuel station in California. It's thought to have been hidden there during the pillage of the universities that followed Swaggernegger's break with Washington." He nodded to the fold.

"Aha," I said, "that's a graphic novel."

"Right," said Slott briskly, "I'll fill you in with case load, right now we want to sketch the general picture. This morning President Perpindik received ping from someone purporting to represent an off-world chimera organization. The sender said they had the graphic novel and would return it if we would give a million crowns to a chim school at New Berkeley."

"Why not give it to them?"

Perpindik answered. "We don't have a million crowns, Herr Boldt. We don't even have a million bucks."

I looked around. "You could rent out the first floor of your office as off-street housing," I said. Slott stifled a snort, and Perpindik inhaled again, noisily.

"I think I can take it from here, Herr President," Slott said. "I'm used to dealing with people like him. We'll go to my office." Perpindik nodded silently. Slott shut the fold and indicated a door to my right. As we left, Perpindik was staring out the porthole, watching the snow fall.

The security wing was made of concrete cubes with gray lynol floors and bile green wall paint. The temperature was inadequate for a man with no shirt. We walked down a corridor faced with frosted glass doors. Slott's office was one-piece, in padded beige plastic. Slott bent to get into his seat and began to work through his head hair with an itchpick. I could smell his gamey cologne.

"It's really manly how you can charm a patron," said Slott. I sat on the visitor seat and didn't reply. "He's long-winded, OK, but he's good peep, and a fine admin."

"Sure," I said, "he's awesome. The very model of a modern major gentleman. What about the graphic novel?"

"Right," said Slott. He opened a fold to show me a striking hand-drawn book lying on a table. The words were in English and the pages were paneled into subfolds of stark black, white, yellow, red, and green. There were ymen with guns and naked xmen and cars and blood and drugs and smoke and strange gargoyle monsters. Twentieth century realism.

"It was taken fifteen point six hours ago from the rare book room. The watcher looked in at two and again at two five, when it found the case open and the book gone. It couldn't be positive the book was there at two, but we assume it would have noticed. It's hard to prove a negative. The log's in the load, you want to look at it?"

"No, that's routine inforensics, leave it to the snouts. Got any suspects?"

"Chimera Libra," said Slott at once. "I think it's them. That's who the ping was from. They're speesh in New Berkeley. The membership shifts quicker than sand, but they're all troublemakers, committed libers, and some are students here. They've got support from the literalist Cretiens in the New Berkeley hills. It's all in the load." He tossed me a pellet.

Great, I thought, religious libers. Ever since New Berkeley had freed its chims, the libers had been agitating and lobbying at Earth, but here chims weren't even beings in the eyes of the law, never mind in the eyes of the people - or the chims themselves.

We discussed my fee. Slott agreed, with one condition. "We want one of our chims on the job with you. It's a tang, smart for a chim, teaches combat here, but of course it'll slave to human. You don't mind working with an apeman, do you? It can carry your bags."

"Some of my best friends are hominids," I said. I swallowed his load pellet.

Slott laughed uneasily. "You're not a chigger-lover, are you?"

I stood up. "I'll talk with your chim," I said, "and with Leet Larsson. You'll get realtime accounts receivable while I'm at Earth, and daily by messenger if I'm at another world. I'll report when I know something."

I leaned over Slott's desk and pointed at the itchpick. "And Karl," I said, "real men don't use flea combs."