by Bill Adams
“So Larkspur took an easy way out, is that what you’re saying, Hans?” Condé’s voice didn’t boom, but it did carry. Tanned, taut, and energetic, he could have passed for eighty years old, but a closer look said a hundred, the end of middle age; the great shock of white hair was no clue, probably dyed from a duller gray. “But surveys weren’t short private hops in those days, remember. Only big navy ships like the Barbarossa could control the scoop-fields. You had to sign up for a five-year cruise with only twenty mates for company. Suspend-sleep most of the time, and sixty or seventy years passing for the folks you left behind—relativity effect. You try kissing that much of your background good-bye. Don’t forget, too, that many ships still just disappear, like Larkspur’s. Not an easy way out, when you don’t come back.”
“But Larkspur still could,” said the blonde suddenly, and the childishness of her drunken voice seemed fey, oracular. “He could come back tomorrow, couldn’t he? If the Barbarossa had just…overshot a few months, that would be another few decades, our time. He could come back tomorrow, still in his early twenties…find himself appreciated at last…”
“Not for long,” I said—all too easily. “A century has been kind to the seven plays you have. It’s glossed over their faults, and quoted all the best lines into your ears from childhood. If Larkspur came back, all his new plays would only seem thin by comparison. And once Larkspur started showing off at the same parties as your other writers, stealing the prettiest girls from your critics—they’d have to tear him down to human size.”
“But the quality is there,” the brunette insisted. “The talent behind the legend. He could start over from scratch, under a pseudonym. If anyone could write like that now—”
“We’d tell him to stop imitating the sentimental style of a hundred years ago,” Hans insisted, and when someone playfully booed, he added, “Tell me you don’t see that phrase twice a month in the reviews!”
Only I could know how right he was. Objectively, it was a funny scene—but no fun to play. God is one of the more heavy-handed ironists.
“He couldn’t conceal his identity anyway,” Condé said. “Not if he cashed in the Barbarossa’s data record. It would be one of the largest fortunes in history, even split twenty ways after the navy’s cut. Look how many planets Del Mehta and I discovered with only a ten-light-year baseline. If anyone ever did make it back from a hundred-year circle, tangent to the fringe like that, they’d be able to fill in the p-space access data for thousands of stars. The revenues would be fantastic. Unimaginable.”
“But I wonder if Larkspur cared much about money,” the brunette said.
“That much money cares about you,” Condé said with conviction. “Ever hear of ‘selfish genes’—humans just the vehicles that genes use to perpetuate themselves? Well, a fortune is selfish, too. It doesn’t want to be broken up, so it buys its owner a defensive arsenal of banks and lawyers and senators. And you use them. Because by then you’re in the arena, and the only way out is on a stretcher.”
“Oh, poor Sir Max,” Hans said, and everyone laughed again. The scene was breaking up, I suddenly knew; God is also pretty pacey. “These self-made men—who would have thought? I can assure you that when the fortune comes with the genes, one doesn’t feel so insecure.”
“Just twice as selfish?” I asked—just the pull of the ad lib.
“And the representative of Art scores in the final round,” the blonde concluded dully. “…Where can I throw up, anyway?”
“She’s all yours, Hans,” Condé said. “Anyway, I was hoping for a private talk with my fellow peasant here.”
They didn’t wheel away at his word, of course, but a few minutes later we were alone with the mask. He gestured toward it. “Can’t expect a worm like Hans to identify with a man like that. Not even sure why I do, sometimes. But Larkspur and I were born the same year. And there’s Odysseus in Phaiacia; I think I understand that character better than any man alive…Terrific likeness, isn’t it?”
I tried to shake the illogical feeling that he was on to me. After all, if a shrewdie like Condé did suspect my real identity, he wouldn’t coach his friends to play cat and mouse with me in public. No, he’d do what half the powerful men in the galaxy would be willing to do, given a clue—take me to some very private place and have me torn apart brain cell by brain cell until I answered the questions: Where is the Barbarossa and her crew? Why haven’t you used her data? What’s the big secret?
But there aren’t enough answers to satisfy them. So Larkspur must remain a hollow name, and I a nameless man.
“Terrific likeness,” I agreed solemnly. “Didn’t know holograms came that sharp.”
“Oh, it’s not a holo.” He reached out and rapped his knuckles against what I had taken to be the empty air between us and the mask. “A simulacrum. One of the Blue Swathe’s local industries. A column of luminotrope glass. The outer layer has the same index of refraction as air. The rest of the mix casts an image whose sharpness always optimizes to the ambient light—no projector or display lamps necessary. Unfortunately, the volume of glass necessary to cast an image is much greater than the size of the image itself, and heavy as hell—that’s the export drawback. You and I prefer more portable wealth, don’t we?”
There it was again—or no, of course; he was just talking about the bracelet.
“That’s old business. I’m happy.”
“But so am I, Park. Always happy to find someone I can do business with. And I have a new proposition for you—if we could talk about it now, before more people arrive?”
He raised one hand to a blank wall in the shadow of the mask; it changed color and slid aside. I followed him through the portal, glad for the change of scene. I’d had enough exposure to the public for one night.
The next room was a large office, all dark reds and browns, smelling of leather, cigars, and the oddly peppery local wood. The door became solid wall behind me as I backed into it, trapped.
Before me stood a tall young man in a crisp white Column uniform. His expression was uncertain, but the pistol in his hand was definitely aimed at my head.
Chapter Two
When everything falls apart, I don’t panic. Not any more; it happens too often. In this case the cop—or whatever he was—looked as trapped as I felt, and that made it easier to keep a poker face.
Condé seated himself behind an impressive desk and mocked us with an introduction. “Freeman Lars Park—Citizen Bunny Velasquez, of the Commission on Non-Human Artifacts. As you may know, Freeman Park, local governments have to yield all alien relics they discover to the care of the Column.”
I adopted an expression of courteous boredom and took a chair. Velasquez shifted his feet nervously for a moment, then followed suit, handling the pistol as though it were a prop he hadn’t rehearsed with yet. He was as thin as he was tall, pale-haired, pink-faced, and blue-eyed, with an overbred look—somewhere between petulance and bafflement—that brought back my Nexus University days. He appeared to be just out of college himself, and the white tunic’s upright collar bore no silver tabs of rank; probably just an aide of some sort.
With hammy slowness, Condé pulled something from the top drawer of his desk. I was not surprised to see the bracelet I’d smuggled for him.
“Some weeks ago,” he said, “this artifact was stolen from an official repository on Woodvyl. Soon Citizen Velasquez of the Artifacts Commission heard that the thieves were offering it for sale. He asked a local citizen known for his archaeological pursuits—myself—to pose as an interested buyer. Ten days ago, my agent contacted the gang’s middleman—that’s you—and bought back the item.”
His fingers were hovering over a small console on the desk, but I took an actor’s deep breath—the kind you can’t see—and cut in before he could activate it.
“You can skip the replay of whatever recording your agent made,” I said. “I’m sure it does sound as if he were making a purchase from a thief. So what? We both know bett
er. Velasquez isn’t an investigator, he’s a flunky. And you’re no honest citizen. You must have heard of me through the Hermes Line, and if you have any ownership in that, I can tie you to their smuggling operations. It’s a nice try at a frame, Sir Max, but I’d make you unhappy if it actually came to a Column court. Why don’t you simply tell me what you want me to do, minus the blackmail? Maybe you can afford to just pay me.”
Condé barely hesitated. Then he laughed. “Nice try yourself. But I calculated the value of this bracelet carefully. Your DNA would be checked against outstanding Column warrants, I suppose, but then you’d be remanded to a local court—where I have influence. Slandering me there would only add years to your time, believe me.
“Still—what do you say, Bunny? Didn’t I tell you he’d handle himself well? You’re right, Park. The Hermes Line disposes of troublesome pilots through my labor exchange, which screens them for talents I can use. I’ve discovered a number of exceptional employees that way, over the years. To our mutual benefit. As you said, I can afford to pay.
“So let’s start over. You seem to be a sharp operator. I’ll put my problem to you as a paid consultant, and we’ll see if you can come up with a better solution than I have. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough.” On the one hand, he was more scared of a Column investigation than he’d let on; I could smell it. But on the other and heavier hand, I could never afford to call his bluff. The Column’s Shadow Tribunal would almost certainly match my DNA to my old navy file. And then they’d cheerfully break me to extract the secrets Evan Larkspur would be expected to have—not just the star data, but the location of a missing navy ship as well.
I hadn’t trusted the First Column a hundred years before, when it was just one group of powerful worlds within the Federal Alignment, and I hadn’t been astonished, when I returned to the human sphere four—or rather, ninety-two—years later, to find the word “Column” synonymous with the new central government. I was still puzzled as to how an outside Consultant had come to hold dictatorship over the Column-world oligarchs, but that addition in no way improved the picture. The civil liberties of Alignment days were gone, at least in the central sphere. I wouldn’t plead my case there.
But it could have been worse. Condé would have put me through the wringer himself, if he’d had an inkling who I really was. Blinded by his own secrets, he went on blandly.
“My story is simple. You heard some of it a few minutes ago. Ninety years back—in standard time scale—I was a young kid of thirty. An engineer, fresh out of the new navy, which didn’t make me very popular, even though there hadn’t been much resistance to the Column out this way. I had plans in my head for the best deepspace war machines anyone had ever seen, but no way to finance their construction, no family connections. All I had was brains and guts and a few ex-navy friends my own age. One of these was Delip Mehta, second son of a big landowner on Woodvyl. He was ambitious and—in those days—pretty honest. I let him bankroll a scheme I had in mind…What do you know about nearlight surveys?”
“Nothing,” I said—a protective reflex.
“Well, you’re a sunplunger. You know that when you squeeze yourself out of the plenum, you have to reappear someplace, someplace where the mass-energy pattern of your inertia and shield distortions will ‘mesh’ with local space-time. It almost has to be within the curved space near another star, but which one? You pilots don’t have to worry about it; you feed the right access data to your computer, and field adjustments automatically fit you to the target sun. That access data is what makes interstellar civilization possible.
“But a star’s access data is its mass, density, composition, output, Main Sequence stage—a hundred factors. Only a tiny fraction of all stars reveal that much to a one-point observer; the first sunplungers were restricted to those systems. To fill in the blanks and get access to all the skipped regions between, you have to take repeated readings along an extensive baseline. Since we’re talking about distances in the light-years, you want to push as close to lightspeed as you can handle. That’s a survey.
“And for more than twelve centuries, only big governments could run them, with big, clumsy ships. They’d travel many light-years. Home worlds would wait decades for their return, but the crews would only age three or four years. Relativity, you know. The time displacement was murder on the crews, but they were always paid enormous bounties. Kept them from taking their data treasures elsewhere, for one thing. You with me so far?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, the next generation of hydrogen drives didn’t require as much shielding. Suddenly you could build a much smaller, more maneuverable nearlight ship—make money on shorter surveys. My idea: run out a quick ten light-years toward a neutron star, and use its gravity to double back tightly along the same course. A short baseline, but twice the data along it. Make your trip in the skipped-over part of an area like the Swathe, unusually high in Sol-like stars and Earth-like planets.
“That’s what Del Mehta and I did. I had the plan, and knew how to modify the ship. He had the money. Dropped out of history for twenty years and came back the discoverers of two hundred worlds. Eighty exploitable, fifteen terraformable. The Column took a bigger cut than we expected, but it was still a bonanza. We’d reopened our own home region, and we settled down as the two richest men in the Blue Swathe. Happy ending, right?”
“No?”
“No such thing.” He looked meditative, and cracked his knuckles—one by one, too. “I don’t know, maybe we just built that ship too small. Three subjective years in each other’s company. No privacy. No relief. Give you an idea: there was this disgusting noise Delip used to make instead of blowing his nose like a normal human being, a sort of hawking sniffle…Well, just saying that, just remembering it, makes me want to…smash him, to obliterate even his memory. That’s how intense it gets. And he has the same hatred for me, of course. Didn’t cheat me on the initial split, we had a contract. But he’s kept the lid on me ever since. He can build, he can grow, he’s Senator Mehta now and the liaison between the Swathe and the Column. Not that he represents the great families who settled the area—he’s always pandering to the mob and their ‘rights.’
“Meanwhile, I can buy citizenship and a knighthood, I’m allowed to spend my money, but make a mark? Never. The only active position I was ever allowed, reserve admiral in the Swathe’s militia navy, was stripped from me this year. Mehta’s doing; he was open about it. But Newcount Two is the last straw.”
“Newcount Two?”
“It’s a small Earthlike planet, uninhabited. Mine, I always believed. One of the first I scouted out personally, after Del and I filed the data claim.
“A peculiar, haunted place. Must have had its own unique biosphere once, but sometime in the last twelve hundred years other humans touched down there, contaminated it. Part of the first wave of settlers in this fringe, I would guess; they must have passed it up for a larger world, more surface area. Anyway, we gave it a full-scale life bombing forty years ago, and now it’s a green little Terra, with exotic offshoots.
“And there are the Stone Huts. Alien spacefarers—one of the extinct kind we call Titans—touched down on Newcount Two eight or nine hundred thousand years ago. Left a few temporary structures behind. Archaeologically, the find is worthless; the Column’s experts declassified it long ago. But to an amateur like me—a little hobby I picked up from Del, as a matter of fact—the site is still interesting. Every now and then I’ve camped out there and poked around the Stone Huts…And somehow, Del got word that I valued this little place. So he decided to take it—build a summer palace and maybe retire there. And rub our mutual hobby in my nose, too…Right now he’s got a team of archaeologists picking through the Stone Huts to find decorative motifs he can build into his palace. Get the picture?”
“Sure.” His reference to an entire empty planet as “this little place” had boggled my mind only slightly. “But you say that Newcount Two isn’t really his?”
&nb
sp; “That’s right, he’s misreading the Column’s record of our claims. And I’ll have proven that, within a month or two. They will evict him. The trouble is, he might find the barrow first.”
“The barrow?”
“An underground extension to the Stone Hut site. Just a small supply cache, but archaeologically priceless! I stumbled onto it only a month before Del’s invasion. Park, it’s my one chance of going down in history; and without even knowing it’s there, Del is trying to take it away from me.”
“You couldn’t just lift it?”
“Load the artifacts into a shuttle, you mean? No, of course not; remember how ancient it all is. It would take months to remove everything safely. And it would take only minutes to destroy it.”
“What do you mean?”
“If he found it before he’s forced to leave. He’d destroy it to spite me. Even if I could prove it, he can pay any fine the commissioners name. He’d do anything to keep me from making a mark, especially in his own precious field.”
And I believed him. It may have been the detail about Mehta’s way of sniffling; that crazy hate sounded real, and if it was, any sort of craziness could follow from it.
“But he doesn’t know the barrow’s there.”
“No, not yet. The entrance was originally disguised, and I restored that. But with all those archaeologists on the site, one of them will stumble across it eventually. So that’s my problem. To keep them away from my barrow for a lousy six or eight weeks.”
“Sounds hopeless,” I said. “I mean, if you found it, working alone, you have to expect a team of professionals will.”
“But they’re not!” Condé said eagerly. “Even if you could interest professionals, Del wouldn’t have hired them. They would have taken all the fun out of it, don’t you see; they wouldn’t have let him participate. No, my spies tell me that these are just more amateurs, enthusiasts he’s met at parties, amiable cranks. Court jesters for his palace. An easy group to infiltrate, if only I’d known in advance, but it’s too late for that now. There has to be some other way to get at them, stall them away from my find.”