by Glen Cook
Men like me make deals with devils. The choice wore three faces after I died straightening the mess on Helga’s World: I could go ahead and die:
I could request salvage, which meant being ego-scrubbed and cyborged in as control brain of some googol-bit data system somewhere; I could earn a new body recruiting colonists for my homeworld. Old Earth would purchase my contract from the Corps.
Didn’t take much thought. I remembered Old Earth and how, when I left its squalor and hopelessness, I swore nothing would make me return. I remembered the driving need to escape its eternal smog of despair that, in the face of a cultural agoraphobia that was almost psychotic in its rejection of the starworlds, had led me to enlist in the Marines. I remembered all the things I’d fled, I’d thought, forever — then opted for life with a whole personality. I’d been gone long enough to forget how bad it really was. Old Earth seemed better than death. Those Psychs knew how to choose.
The light canyon began showing promise as its walls closed in. My electronic ears detected whispers and scurryings. Not rats. My ancestors had somehow managed to rid the world of those. Probably ate them all during the chaos following the collapse of World Commonweal in Century Twenty-Three. They ate everything then, including each other. Could be dogs. They’d been reintroduced from offworld. But more likely potential recruits. The sort I hunted frequented tight and shadowy, places. And their infra-red suggested people.
They seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, from places you couldn’t have hidden a roach and shadows thin as their Social Insurance cards. Children. One of those gangs that enlisted no one with hair below the neck, vicious as piranha in their collective rage against anyone and everything. There were at least twenty of them, the females more feral than the males. The latter just wanted to hurt me, the starman who — I could no longer remember the convoluted logic that even I had once accepted — was responsible for the pointlessness and hopelessness of Old Earth life. But the females went for the groin, to destroy the hook on which the offworld man hung his ego. Probably been exploiting some soul-abandoned hooker with it anyway …
I had the hardest time recruiting the children. They weren’t yet people, weren’t really as lost as a man or woman who had survived to maturity in that bleak environment. Though they didn’t know or believe it, for them there was still hope. I hated taking that from them.
But they hurt me. And the recruiter body was programmed to react even when the brain wouldn’t. Down in the chest cavity there was a little solid-state auto-pilot/mechanical conscience whose sole purpose was to make sure the fallible driver up top didn’t blow a potential recruiting situation through some vagary of compassion. Its methods were simple. When I didn’t get on the job soon enough to suit, it opened pain circuits. Then I felt what my attackers were doing as deeply as would any starman stupid enough to get himself in a similar situation.
They hurt me and I screamed; audio-tape agonies echoed off walls and down canyons generations along the path to ruin. A girl child made for my eyes with hammer and rusty finger of iron while pot-belly, starveling boys pinned my arms and legs in rubbish and rubble. I had to act. They meant I should die.
Servo strength surged in my limbs, voltage coursed my titanium skin. There were yips and shrieks and, humble-jumble, the little killers jumped or were hurled off. The fingers of my right hand were my arsenal, stunner, needier, gas gun, pinky a dainty beamer that could slice recruits up then as cold cuts and cook the blood into the slices. I sprayed a lot of gas, used the stunner on those observing, then the needier on a few trying to get away. In seconds I was the only upright form on the floor of that slash of shadow. “Twelve, thirteen,” I counted. A nice baker’s dozen. A lot of retirement points. The young ones were always worth more. Had more man hours left in them.
These would mean a substantial reduction in my remaining obligation — if I could get them to the Station without help-yelling. If I called a pickmeup, I’d have to share with the driver and defense-tech, and surrender most of my portion to repay the cost of fuel, maintenance, depreciation … Welcome to the company store.
One solution was to take only those I could lug, three or four, but greed now completely obscured compassion. Despite all the paper stall thrown up like flak in my flight path, I was so near retirement I could smell it. St. Louis had been good recruiting.
I roped them together and woke them up. I’d quick-march them in with all senses combat-ready. Snipers would haunt the trek. Recruiters were damned unpopular. Before departing I used the laser to fire the canyon-bottom detritus. That would protect my rear and draw the attentions of those gutty enough to be outside. The periodic canyon fires were big events in lives otherwise pale on random stimuli.
There is just one word which fits the condition in which the typical Old Earther exists: Poverty. Poverty of resources, of goods, of spirit, of morality, of intelligence, of courage. The brightest and richest and bravest got out generations ago; the moral were destroyed. The billions who remain are the descendants of those who hadn’t the guts and off-your-ass to dump their welfare security and go where they could create something of their own. Rogues like myself turn up and opt out, commonly through the services, but we grow fewer in every generation. Old Earth is selectively breeding itself toward a whimpering Armageddon.
Station was a fortress I made steps ahead of a mob, with eleven resisting kids still trailing and one slow club-wielder worn as a stole. The door groaned shut behind us. Such hopelessness and despair filled their twenty-two little eyes. All would rather have died than face a real frontier. Old Earth was soul-desolation in human jungle, eye-deep in human-created horror, but to them it was secure, known, comfortable emotionally in its decay and deadliness, and required little of body or mind. The loathed starworlds would take care of tomorrow.
The door groaned shut and bodies smashed against it. It held long enough for me to herd my catch into a citadel room. Processing began immediately. Fingerprints, retinals, id established. Move along now to the lictor. I’d seen it too many times before. The faces of the damned bore the resignation of Jobs by their God abandoned. I watched the relay of the mob breaking in to liberate them.
St. Louis hadn’t been recruited much. In other zones the dullards knew better than to enter a door that gave. Station crew watched with greedy glee as a crowd surged in before the lictor’s eyes, breaking and entering. The trap closed. A little gas dropped gently in. They screamed, they trampled one another in an effort to force the door again. Futility.
Chuckles behind me. This meant points for everyone.
“Your lucky day, Klaus,” I heard. “Big bonus on prepubescents today. Four points per.”
Had I had a forehead of flesh I would have frowned. Sounded like …
Whir. Communications printout coming in with our point credits as per now calculated at Recruiting Central in Geneva.
“Let’s see … You lucky Spike. You made a killing, Klaus. You only got two points to go. Two lousy points. Man.” Envy there. The man had been in recruiting two years longer than I. Wasn’t hungry enough to work the streets and canyons. Takes a special kind to stay with it long enough to get out.
I thought about those bonus points again. Suspicious. I checked the holocomm following processing. As I feared. Downdeep, two levels, my plunder was running through Medical, not for a Med-check. They were being anaesthetized and fed to a battery of surgical Frankensteins, solid-state all, that opened heads like muskmelons and scooped brains into support/travel tanks for shipment to commercial wholesalers. Down the line little bodies were being salvaged for transplantable parts. Must be a big brain order in from one of the cryocyborgic data processors.
Old Earth’s got to stabilize that balance of trade.
Engineering had seen to it that there were no distracting glands in my body. Couldn’t get into a really fine, shaking rage. It’s hard to be mad when it’s all in the mind, but I tried. I couldn’t really stomach the brain snatching. But what could I do? We all do what we must t
o get what we need.
The choice was as simple as off-on. Stand by and not die, or revolt and joint the children on the disassembly line, enroute to computer interface consoles somewhere in the outworlds.
Someone popped to my moral crisis. The holo portrait changed. The new scene showed a clone tank percolating in a remote corner of Medical. My soon to be brain-home, the prize for which I’d jackboot-Pied Pipered the children to their ego-deaths. It was ready for occupation. They kept the clones near so we could be reminded whenever we caught a dose of conscience.
I wondered what it would be like to feel again (pain was the only sensation my metal horse could relay), to smell. I hadn’t smelled anything but imagination since I died. The thoughts calmed me a little, but not enough. The old tin man suit’s monitors must have been playing quisling.
“Only two more points, Klaus,” someone reminded. Trying to tell me not to blow it now. Tradition is, everyone helps the man who’s short. For some reason the fellow with the best excuse for playing hoyle is the most likely to break. Maybe because they’ve been at it so long. It builds, like strontium-90 deposits in the bones. “Two points. God, I envy you.”
When I thought about it, I envied me too. I could get out of the baby-stealing business almost any time. I just had to go catch a couple more. A week later I’d wake up a whole, free man, off Earth in Luna Command, credit in hand and passage to any frontier world available as soon as I learned to manage my new body.
Two points. Today one more kid would do, with points left over for friends. Friends? I hated them all, for what they were, mirrors in which saw myself. They probably hated me. There’d be no reunions for this outfit. We were all predators devouring the weak.
I hated Old Earth and the cesspool of sub-humanity it had allowed itself to become. I wanted to pull cork and blow my fusion generator, myself, and the Station into the hell where we all belonged. I looked at that beautiful, virgin, scarfree young body in its clone tank and hated myself most of all.
Two points and it was mine.
I turned on a view of the hangers-round outside. Still a few children there. No one, not even Mr. Untouchable, Perfectly Just and Honest Lictor, would yell foul if I … Points for him, too, you see. The lictor was still in flesh, but he was old. Youth was the one way to reach him.
I looked at the clone body, looked at the street. Time to make a choice.
I did.
What choice was there, really?
Some people will do anything not to die.
The Seventh Fool
Glen Cook was born in 1944 in New York City and moved to Indiana in I 94& He began writing sf in 1967 and published a novel The Heirs of Babylon, in 1972. He writes that he is employed by General Motors, ‘lives in a very old three story house with a wife and five cats and 10,000 books, own a farm I manage on weekends and get very little time to write, though it is a pursuit of love.”
Cantanzaro sang as he walked along the road to Antonisen. Occasionally, he glanced back, smirked. The road remained an empty, meandering scar of brown on springtime’s green. The Maniarchs of Kortanek hadn’t yet picked up his scent.
Then he frowned. He had been compelled to flee without the Jewels of Regot.
He grinned again. The thousand gayly colored spires of Antonisen pricked the sky ahead. The man who had flummoxed Regot’s pragmatist priests could, surely, make his fortune in a city ruled by a Council called The Seven Fools.
Springtime was spreading through Zarlenga like a happy disease. The Hundred Cities were opening like bright flowers. Travelers buzzed among them like bees. His reception at Antonisen’s Harlequin Gate wasn’t the least unfriendly.
Serendipity! he thought moments after penetrating the dusty streets. He had arrived just in time to witness one of Antonisen’s fabled elections. A Fool had retired. Half the men of the city were vying for his Chair.
A clever man should be able to find an avenue to profit in that.
Antonisenen reasoned that, since government was evil but necessary, it ought, at least, to be entertaining. Those who wished to become Councilors, therefore, had to convince the voters that they could provide the most amusing show.
There was a clown on every corner. Antoniseners were partial to humorists. The more inspired were winning votes with scandalous libels on the retired Fool’s manhood.
Cantanzaro ventured from clown to clown, observing fingers and toes. Theft was the swiftest path to wealth. And in Antonisen it was the custom to flaunt one’s fortune in the form of rings.
His natural impulse was to palm a few while shaking hands. But that, he noted, could be tricky business. Antoniseners seemed preternaturally sensitive to such maneuvers. Whenever a foreigner made a try-there were a good many in town for the election-the victim would shriek, a gang would fall on the thief, pummel him senseless, hoist him by the arms and legs, run him to a nearby low, shadowed archway, and chuck him in with a cry of “Hornbostel!”
Whatever it meant, Cantanzaro had no curiosity. He had had his encounters with the mysteries of the Hundred Cities before. Few had been pleasant.
He needed a better idea and one came.
Cantanzaro seldom lacked for ideas, only for means.
He dug into his tattered purse. Still only four green-tinged copper alten of Kortanek, and one useless map.
So he sought a market with an antiquary. All Zarlenga was deep in the rubbish of its tenthousand year history. Every city had its junk men.
This one was typical, an old man whose place of business was a filthy blanket spread in the square, piled high with history’s leavings. He probably went home to a palace. Zarlengans were suckers for anything ancient.
“Your wish, Grace?” The old man wrinkled his nose at Cantanzaro’s shabbiness, but at election time one was rude to no man. That he himself was grubbier didn’t faze the man. Poverty was part of his act too.
“A book.”
“Ah. Yes. I’ve got a dozen. A hundred. Cook books, romances, histories, journals, magic by the right hand, magic by the left....”
“It should be unreadable.”
“Unreadable?” A live one, the merchant thought, rubbing his hands together. “Li Chi.” He held up a scroll. “Got caught in the rain....
“No. In a forgotten tongue.” Cantanzaro smiled. The old man kept gawking at his ringless fingers.
“This, then. A genuine antiquity, recovered at great personal risk, by a tomb-miner working the Mountains Dautenhain.”
Cantanzaro considered the tide. It was in no alphabet he knew. But he found the tomb-miner story doubtful. The tome was in too fine a shape. Stolen, likely. “Good enough.” He tossed a copper, started off.
The merchant shrieked like a scalded cat. A dozen men closed in, already arguing over the quickest route to the nearest low black archway. Cantanzaro turned back, pretending bewilderment.
A half hour later he thundered, “But you admit you can’t even read the thing!”
“Can’t read anything.” The old man went on to mourn about being cheated, robbed, losing money on the deal, but settled for Cantanzaro’s remaining three alten.
The most desperate candidate, street talk said, was one Ablan Decraehe, son of a retired Fool who claimed the youth was a bad joke on legs.
While waiting to obtain audience with Decraehe, Cantanzaro worked his map into his scheme. It was a crude thing, but would do.
He had a low opinion of the intellect and morals of anyone who wanted to get into government.
The best system, he thought, was that practiced in Immerlagen, where they seized a man off the street, carried him screaming to his inauguration at the Mayoral Palace. As soon as he showed signs of enjoying his post, the Aldermen had him stuffed and put into the City Museum.
“The book is the rare and famous Tales of Arabrant, of which great humorists have whispered for generations. A man of your stature has doubtless heard of ft,” Cantanzaro told Decraehe, a slim, snobbish man who affected an unnecessary monocle and would not have been ca
ught dead entertaining a commoner outside election time. “The ultimate collection of humorous tales, some with such magic that men have been known to die laughing on hearing them. I heard you tell a censored version of ‘The Bureaucrat’s Revenge.”’ It was the youth’s obvious favorite and most successful story and the brightest spot in his leaden monologue. “I thought you’d be a man interested in the original.”
Decraehe frowned suspiciously.
“It’s always good to have a friend on the Council when one changes cities. One hand washes the other.” He made the motions with slim, uncalloused fingers.
Cantanzaro had chosen his mark well. Decraehe was the sort who could admit no shortcoming, especially ignorance. “I’ve heard of it, of course.” He tried to look conspiritorial. “How’d you come by a copy?”
Cantanzaro glanced around, leaned closer. Wishful thinking was doing his convincing.
“Accidentally. Gambling with a thief. He left it. as security for a debt. When I saw what I had, I hurried to Antonisen.” A mark, he had long ago learned, often could be disarmed by an open admission of knavery. Forewarned, he would relax, sure he could not be had himself.
“Hardly proper, my dear fellow.” Decraehe glanced meaningfully at a dark archway.
The things seemed to be everywhere.
This was the tricky part, getting past being robbed and chucked through the opening. Cantanzaro handed him the book.
“But... but....”
“Yes. It’s in Old High Trebec. All the copies are. And the Brothers of Allgire guard the three known copies of translation dictionaries with unbreachable spells. But my victim... er, debtor, also knew what he had. And lately had come into knowledge of the whereabouts of a fourth dictionary.” He produced the map. “He had taken this off a tomb-miner in the Mountains of Dautenhain, who mentioned the dictionary as he was dying.”