Grisgoff Gerrwold sat in the office of the Planetary Interloper Commissioner on the Moon Mayaco, neck-deep in a pile of decaying trash, gagging and fuming. He’d been crawling through the odd corners of the galaxy for months—exactly four and a half Tardani months, to be exact--the slums and startups and misfires, the decommissioned, the dissolving, the unincorporated, the unfashionable, and it had literally led him to the bottom of the galactic garbage pile. He stared at a series of nefarious little markings on the ancient display in front of him, silently cursing, incredulous. He just couldn’t believe it. She’d been right ahead of him all along, invisible with her connections, resources, and raw cunning, and at the last impossible second, he’d missed her. She just slipped off the grid. It was starting to become comical.
He waved his arms, snagging and staining sleeves on broken machinery, cardboard boxcorners, and globs of goo, to clear a space to sit and think. The long days on Vesixoo were already starting to wear on him, and Mayaco was worse. Unlike several of his friends who had also made it off his birthplanet of Tardan before the exodus, Gris couldn’t let go of his native time zone, and his body refused to adjust. They had drugs for that if you were merely relocating to a different axis of rotation for a substantial period of time, but Gris’s job was to travel, and no drugs in the galaxy could make you readjust over and over again in short succession. They hadn’t outlined the—ahem—challenges of this job before offering it to him—oh, no. They merely told him he had no choice. He believed them.
Specifically, his job was to find the Number 57 Aggravated Interloper, birth name Victoria Christmas, alias Celia White, alias Victran Noelia, alias Noahnn Christopher, alias Scarlet Victory, and on and on--it wasn’t in the job description that she would skip from planetary body to moon to loading dock to satellite to planetary body as if she were a child playing hopscotch, leaving Gris spacelagged, sleep-deprived, and perpetually constipated from spinning round countless gravitational fields at various speeds of light and partaking of a dizzying variety of local and interstellar cuisine. No, it wasn’t in the job description, but people like Gris simply could not be picky. So when Vicky, as he liked to call her, traveled, Gris traveled. Gris ate bobcocks and greaseworms, Gris slept in bone-crushing sleep pods, Gris crawled through trash.
It would have been more worth it knowing she was doing the same thing. But no. Vicky Christie somehow managed to extract funds from thin air (literally, there wasn’t much air on most of the manufactured, overpopulated planets), bribe Commission officers, fool locals, stay in top accommodations, and travel on the most oxygen-, sedative-, and nourishment-adjustable transports possible. Vicky ate auroshelles, botbutter, and pastriches. Vicky slept on feathers. Vicky laundered her frocks and petticoats, her smoking jackets and lace, her riding pants and collars, in expensive Extraxic soap, perfectly formulated for the female humanoid body, while Gris stank and itched. Vicky stayed beautiful, mysterious, and perfectly skin-toned for the locale. He knew this, because he had the receipts. The records. The witnesses.
What he didn’t have was the Interloper herself. Which was why he had come directly from lurking in the kitchens of the upscale Amosh Startel on Pixan Moon, where she’d slept under a new alias for the previous 10 hours, to the Café Adartoc on Bixass, which had required a translator, to the dilapidated Commission for Languages where the translator was engaged and promptly abandoned to pursue a report of a sighting in the city on the Moon of Mayaco, which he needed a written pass to enter, which he intended to do as soon as the Mayaco branch of the Interloper Commission granted him one. The Commissioner welcomed Gris into his office (which, given the type, variety, and level of decomposition of the trash, the Commissioner had been living in for the past two weeks), and excused himself to track down the necessary signatures.
Mayaco was an industrial moon, populated by an expatriate band of refugees from a crumbling planet. Their culture had deteriorated to the point that there were only a few thousand of them to relocate, but they had kept their sense of community, adapting their own language to be able to converse with residents and travelers who spoke only Comm. They had thrived as a unified workforce in their new home, bolstering the population of Mayaco and interacting successfully with the Commission. Gris didn’t like them, because they had eventually crowded out the other residents of Mayaco, monopolizing the industry of the moon with no one to challenge their abrasive personality styles and territorial neighborhoods. Gris grumbled when he had to deal with them, but so far they had remained neutral in his chase for the Interloper.
Gris studied his hand-held device, which had downloaded the report of the sighting. He immediately mashed the location up with others that were confirmed, and analyzed it for the hundredth time to see if this new one suggested a pattern. It did not. Whatever Vicky was doing, it apparently did not require her to be present in any one location. The other possibility was that it did, and Vicky did it wherever she went. Her mobile lifestyle had no apparent home base, and was not funded from any one source. She was a gypsy, for all anyone knew, and yet she managed to make large sums of money that immediately disappeared. Yet, she seemed able to access it on a moment’s notice. There was no institution on this level of the galaxy that fit the bill for what she was doing. There was no Interloper like her, which was why she was hard to catch. She was reinventing crime. Though, to be fair, the galaxy was so big, so diverse, and so overwhelmingly Commission, that new crimes seemed pop up every day. Trade crimes, hate crimes, immigration crimes, sex crimes. There were so many rules that it was all but impossible to carry out the duties and ablutions of an average day without breaking them.
Most people didn’t have to worry about officers knocking down their door, until they made big enough waves to be noticed, like Vicky had. Then they could grab you on almost anything. They had a bevvy of lawyers, new ones graduating every day, to pin people to the law like struggling insects if the Commission so chose. So far, the Commission had chosen pretty justly; it was run by the United People & Prospers, after all, adequately represented. And since the whole galaxy fell under the Commission’s reach, there were no war crimes: there hadn’t been a real war in living memory. Not since the Commission. The system worked. At least, it was working for Vicky. But Vicky, perhaps unbeknownst to her, was actually beginning to fit the profile of an upstart warrior. A trade warrior, a silent warrior. Enough Vickys would eventually erode the system. Most people didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a warrior. Everyone kept their Drone status, and filled their slot in the system. But the Commission remembered, and therefore Gris knew. The Commission had whole warehouses full of studies of previous wars, warriors, and war crimes, and tracked down those that fit the profile with ruthless precision. Only for questioning, of course, and in rare cases, re-education. Some rehabilitation. Some reprogramming, relocating, reshaping. There were no relapses.
But Vicky resisted. Grist thought she must enjoy her lifestyle, or else have something else driving her, something nobody knew about. Vicky had a secret, and that’s what kept Gris motivated. Secrets abounded in the Galaxy. But not secrets that made money. These were not secrets, they were Practices, and they were published for the knowledge of everyone. Being secret made them illegal.
Though not of the lucrative kind, Gris had a few secrets of his own.
Even ones that the Commission knew nothing about. He intended to keep it that way. The problem was, Vicky seemed to know his deepest secrets and his fears, and used them at every opportunity to outwit and elude him. She picked restaurants perched over a cliff ledge for the view. She went places only accessible by water tunnel. She visited a brothel notorious for its blood diseases (it became popular to those refused elsewhere and enjoyed a steady clientele). And she had a picture of his girlfriend, which she made known to him one night in a very sneaky way; the night he almost caught her. At least, he thought that it was her who had the picture. Perhaps it was the Commission, sliding into corruption, threatening him. He didn’t know if this threat was real, or merely a bluff; it didn’t matter, since without the success of catching Vicky he would rot away in a rehabilitation colony for the rest of his life and never get to see his girlfriend again anyway. Still, the thought of something bad happening to her was unpleasant.
Gris stared at the riddle on the display in front of him and sighed. He was too tired to think about it; any of it. He’d been chasing her for three Tardan days without any sleep, and he wanted a pod to stretch out in and disappear for a few hours. He needed a dip in one of Tardan’s pomegranate pools, and maybe one of Tardan’s tentacled ladies. He’d tried all the other kinds. Gris would have to look up an information booth on Mayaco for the local regulations on intercourse. He hoped he’d get lucky and this would be a moon with light customs.