THE DECEIVERS

by Alfred Bester

  “Avaunt!” he cried and crossed his arms before his face.

  “Caught in the act.” The sorceress grinned and transformed into the fiery Sierra O’Nolan.

  “Not her!” Winter cried, remembering screaming brawls. “For God’s sake, Demi…” And then, as she dropped the role, he grumbled, “So you Titanians aren’t infallible after all.”

  “Of course not. Who is?” she said composedly. “And will you please stop using ‘you Titanians.’ It’s not ‘you’ and ‘us.’ We’re all part of the same joke in the Cosmic caper.”

  He nodded. “But sweetheart, you have to understand how tough it is to cope with mercurial love.”

  “Oh is it? Look, Rogue, have you ever made a connection with an actress in your raunchy private life?” She began to resemble Sarah Bernhardt.

  “Alas! Yes.”

  “And how many roles did she play, onstage and off?”

  “A jillion, maybe.”

  “So with us it’s the same damn thing.”

  “But you change physically.”

  “Isn’t makeup the same damn thing?”

  “You got me, you got me,” he surrendered. “I guess I’ll never know who I’m in love with. Who? Whom? I busted grammar at the Höhere Schule,” he confessed, “owing to a surfeit of adverbs.”

  “You are a genius,” she crinkled, “and I’m going to learn from you.”

  “I’m afraid I’m a father image for you.”

  “Then we’ve been incestuous.”

  “Well, I’ve broken most of the Ten Commandments, so what’s another? Brandy?”

  “Perhaps later, please.”

  Winter got a bottle of cognac and two claret glasses, put the stemware down on the coffee table, opened the bottle and had a belt from it. “I’ve broken another.”

  “Which?”

  “Isn’t Marymount a Catholic-type college?”

  “More or less.”

  “Did les Jeroux raise their changeling kid a Catholic?”

  “More or less.”

  “Then this may shock you. The sixth.”

  “Thou shalt not—? No!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re trying out a story on me.”

  Winter shook his head. “It happened in the Bologna Dome, my last day there.”

  “But—But—” She leaped up, looking like one of the avenging Furies, and Winter imagined he could see serpents twined in her hair. “Rogue Winter, if you’re zigging me on, I’ll—”

  “No, no, no,” he interrupted. “Would I joke about a thing like that, Demi?”

  “Yes you would. You’re a wicked liar.”

  He patted the couch. “Sit down, love. It’s a story all right, but I didn’t invent it. It happened, and I have to talk it over with someone I can trust.”

  She sat down, still suspicious. “So? Tell.”

  “I came across the tail end of a peculiar pattern in Bologna which involved the Meta Mafia. You know the Triton Jinks have a lock on Meta, and they’re tough. They set prices and quotas, and if they don’t like the Inner Barbarians for any reason, they cut your quota. So naturally there’s a Meta Mafia smuggling the stuff out of Triton. Their prices are outlandish but they deliver, no matter who or what you are. Sort of nice-guy goniffs. Clear so far?”

  “Except Meta,” she said slowly. “I know it stands for metastasis, which produces energy, but how?”

  “It’s kind of complicated.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Well, start with atoms and charged particles. They can be kicked from their normal state into an excited state by Meta. This absorbs energy from the Meta. Then they flop back into their normal state, releasing that energy, and that’s the metastasic process. Dig?”

  “No. Too scientifical, and I’m not going to try to look like Marie Curie.”

  “She was no looker anyway. All right. You tried talking chemical to me; I’ll try talking pattern to you. I want you to think of a laser beam that can drill a hole through steel or carry a message across space…”

  ----------------------------------------------------

  “Got that?”

  “No pattern yet. Just a straight line.”

  “Ah, but how’s that line produced? Think of a cloud of particles in their normal rest state… sort of like a gang of zeros…”

  “Now we stimulate this crowd into an excited state by pouring energy into them. That kicks them up into particles-plus…”

  “But this isn’t a natural stable condition, it’s a sort of nuclear hysteria, and they start to quit and go back to their normal, comfortable zero rocking chairs… Got the pattern?”

  “Continuez. Continuez lentement.”

  “They’re not freeloaders, so a particle gives up the energy it’s received, which coaxes a couple more of its chums back into their normal rest state, giving up their energy, which cues four more, and then eight take the hint, and sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and it builds until you’ve got all that energy emerging as a beam.”

  “All in nanoseconds and all in phase, which is what gives it its power. Got the picture?”

  “Yes, but where does Meta come in?”

  “Well, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to stimulate atoms and particles into the excited state, more than they give back; so when you balance profit and loss, you wind up in the red. But when you use Meta to excite them, you’re in the black. You spend one and get back a hundred.”

  “Why? How?”

  “Because that freak catalyst is a powerhouse of stored energy fighting to get out. There’s stored energy in everything, Demi, and all it needs is an electron transfer system to be released. Think of a match. You’ve got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it’s like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It’s the chess legend for real.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he’d get it, no matter what. The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much.”

  “So the rajah said. He’d expected a request for gold and jewels and stuff. This, he thought, was too modest until he discovered that all the rice in India and China wouldn’t be enough to fill that last square. That’s geometric progression for you, and it’s what Meta does for energy.”

  “How did it get that way?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to do a full feature on it but never could get started because the Jinks on Triton refused to cooperate. The only thing our local physicists can tell me is that it reverses entropy, and good luck to them.”

  “What’s entropy?”

  “Didn’t they learn you nothing in that high-class collitch you took from?”

  “The foreign-language department didn’t offer any courses in entropy.”

  “It’s not a language, it’s Decadence 101. Entropy is decay. If you leave a physical system alone, its entropy increases, which means that it runs down and flakes out and its energy available for work peters out too. The stored power in Meta reverses that with one hell of a shot in the arm.”

  “Zig wow! It is complicated.”

  “Yeah, it’s a race apart.”

  “What does Meta look like?”

  “I’ve never seen it. The engineers protect it like eunuchs defending a harem. No visitors. No sightseeing. They say it’s too dangerous— Stop that, Demi!— I can’t say I blame them. There’s been too many damnfool accidents in the past.”

  Demi abandoned her transformation into a naked concubine and said, “Now go on about the Sixth Commandment.”

  “Now?”

  “Please.”

  “But I want to talk about the wonderful thing th
at’s happened between us.”

  “Later.”

  “It may be too late. Love is not a faucet,” he sang, miserably. “It don’t turn off and on…”

  “Yes, your voice is beautifully entropic, in four flats. Now what about the Sixth Commandment? Please, Rogue, it’s blocking what’s between us.”

  “It is?”

  She nodded. “I can feel it when you love me… a tiny thundercloud hanging over you…”

  “My God,” he whispered, half to himself, “you’re fantastic… To sense that… even while you were ravishing me…”

  “Please, darling, be serious.”

  “Just trying to shift gears,” he said uncomfortably. “Give me a moment.”

  Demi lapsed into a sympathetic silence. He drummed his fingers softly, staring into the past, and once murmuring, “Don’t bother me now,” to whichever picture or piece of furniture that was intruding with a subsonic soliloquy. At last he looked at Demi.

  “You know that Venucci isn’t exclusively Italian,” he began. “It’s more Mediterranean; Greek, Portuguese, Algerian, Albanian, and so on. They all cling to their own traditions and lifestyles, and the Italian Domes hold on to regional cultures and local subcultures, too; Sicilian, Neapolitan, Venetian, and even New York Little Italy. They speak Slum-Italo-English and the Saint’s Day festivals in the Mulberry Dome are a riot.”

  She nodded again, still silent, wondering where he was headed.

  His quick eye caught her expression and he smiled. “Wait for it. Wait for it. Once a Soup-Kwik company asked me why Bologna was the only Italian Dome that would buy their product. I had to explain that Italian wives were traditional homebodies who took pride in preparing their own soups. The Bolognese were the exception because their women preferred careers, you know, down with Kinder, Kirche und Küche, and they all came home and slapped packaged dinners together.”

  “I’m with them.”

  “I’m not against. Bologna is the hot center of the Women’s Movement on Venucci. Most of their polizia are women; big, tough ginzo dykes you wouldn’t want to mess around with, but there was one remarkable exception, a delicate little thing and—here it comes—she was a Jink.”

  “What? On Venucci?”

  “In the Bologna Dome, and that gave me furiously to synergize, particularly because she was in heavy money—expensive tailored uniforms, posh restaurants, luxury transport, that sort of thing—so you can guess what I was synsensing.”

  “She was a Mafia rep.”

  “And a possible lead to their operation on Triton, which was a pattern I’d been yearning to expose. I didn’t sense that this was the wrong end. I turned on the charm and finally dated her to meet me in the central gardens when she came off duty. That was my last night in the Bologna Dome.”

  “And you killed her?” Demi was horrified.

  “I got there early to case the gardens—it’s a wild playground for Lib women cruising for studs; dark, misty, shadowy—and on the very spot where she’d promised to meet, this gorill came crashing out of the bushes and hit me with everything he had.”

  “Holy bolido! And…?”

  “And I broke the Sixth.”

  “But— But how?”

  “Demi, I’m not going into details, but if there’s one thing the Maori hammer into a future king, it’s how to defend and kill in hand-to-hand.”

  “Who was he? I mean, could it have been a mistake?”

  “It wasn’t any mistake, and that’s why I’m having fantods… because he was carrying a Slice Knife—that’s a kind of knife the Maori use to cut out the heart of a brave enemy to eat for its courage—”

  “Ugh!”

  “Yes, and his I.D. papers read: Kea Ora—Ganymede. He was a Maori killer.”

  “My God! My God! And did the Mafia girl come?”

  “I didn’t wait to find out. I took the knife, left the bod under a bush, and got lost. So now you can understand what’s zigging me into zags. Look at it. Had I slipped and given the Jink a clue to what I was really after? Did her Mafia turn me over to a hit man? And why pick a Maori soldier, one of my own people, and what the hell was he doing on Venucci anyway? Will their polizia find out that I’m the alleged perpetrator and will they come after me? Does the Mafia still have a contract out on me? Oi veh! Shlog’n kop in vant!”

  After she’d taken in as much of Winter’s head-banging as she could absorb, Demi asked, “You have that Maori Slice Knife?”

  “Still in my travel tote.”

  “May I see it, please?”

  He brought the knife and she examined it cautiously. It looked like a pointed straight razor, hollow-ground, glittering and deadly. There was no guard. The handle was natural walnut, much worn from long use, blotched with red smudges.

  “I killed him with it. That’s why I had to take it. Prints.”

  “So it’s true, what you told me.” She put the knife down very carefully.

  “All of it.”

  “I think I need that brandy now, please.”

  He filled both claret glasses and they drank together in a long, silent meditation. Then the cognac seemed to restore his poise. “Cheer up, love,” he grinned. “I’ll come out of this smelling like roses. You’ll see.”

  “Please make that ‘we’ll.’ I want to be in it with you,” she said earnestly.

  “Thank you. Instant dumb loyalty. You’re a right Titanian tootsie.”

  She had to laugh. “Damn you, Winter! You’ll joke in your coffin. What fantastic things happen to you. I wonder why.”

  He refilled their glasses. “I don’t know. Maybe because I invite them without meaning to. After all, you’re a fantastic thing that’s happened to me, and I swear I never invited it.”

  She finished her cognac and announced, “I’m going to make a confession,” beginning to look like Saint Joan of Arc. “It wasn’t any accident. When I realized I wanted you, I set out to get you. I looked up everything about you, talked to people who knew you, spent days going through everything you ever wrote… You didn’t stand a chance. Don’t hold it against me.”

  “Your halo’s showing,” he murmured.

  She slopped another cognac into her glass. “Why did you say you needed a girl?” she demanded. “You must have hundreds.”

  “No.”

  “How many?”

  “You ask the damnedest questions. What’s Demi short for, Demon?”

  “Neh-neh-neh-neh-NO. Fifth Amendment.”

  “Now, Demi…”

  “Never.”

  “One call to payroll and you’re doomed.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “I have you in my power.”

  “You won’t hold it against me?”

  “Second Amendment.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Right to bear arms.”

  “Well… I told you I was raised down south. Typical fine Virginia family, so I’m a typical fine Virginia girl…” She gulped. “W-with a typical fine Virginia name.”

  “Consisting of?”

  “Demure,” she whispered.

  “What!” He began to break up.

  She responded with hauteur. “My full name, suh, is Demure Recamier Jeroux, and ah defies y’all.”

  “Why Recamier?” he asked faintly.

  “Madame Recamier is mama’s hero.”

  “I see. Now listen, my stoned sprite, you’ve got a kid’s idea that I’m a Casanova with like a Women’s Corps at my beck and call. That just isn’t true of myself or any man. Women are always in control and they make the decisions.”

  “Saying that I seduced you. I knew you’d hold it against me.”

  “Damn right you did. So now you’ve had your Titanian will of me, what?”

  “I still want to know why you said you needed a girl when I made my move in the conference room.”

  He took a long beat, then, “Isn’t it obvious? I’m not always jaunty-jolly under the gun. ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.’ ‘You may fire when ready,
Gridley.’ There come times when I lose my cool and I’m upset and confused and frightened like I am now. Then every instinct makes me turn to a woman for comfort and support.”

  “Ssss.”

  “What are you sissing about?”

  “Because I’m your mother image,” she said with delight. “It’s double incest.”

  “All you southerin types love decadence. Or is it the Titanian in you?”

  “I was pure, sir, until I was dépravée by a surfeit of Maori.”

  “How dast you steal my type line?”

  She put her glass down firmly. “What time is it?”

  “Fourish.”

  “I’ve got to get dressed.”

  “What’s the rush? Where are you going?”

  “Home, silly.” She arose from the couch. “I’ve got to change to block gossip at the office. There’ll be scam enough as it is. And I have to feed my cat.”

  “Cat!” he exclaimed. “A fine Virginia girl like you wasting herself on a cat?”

  “She’s special. She chases the spots you see before your eyes. She’s a psycat and I love her.”

  “I will be damned. I’ll see you home, of course.”

  “Thank you. What are we going to do about your problems?”

  “Cool it and wait for the next move.”

  “Are you in any danger?” she asked anxiously.

  “Not really.” He looked up at her with love, pulled her close and nuzzled her belly.

  “No fair,” she giggled. “You’re tickling. Get up, Starpooped. Let’s get dressed.”

  “You meant that to sting.”

  “Yes, now that I’ve robbed you of your manhood I’ve no more use for you. That’s the Titanian way.”

  “I’m bowlegged,” she called from her dressing room, not complaining. “Are you always so passionate?”

  “Only the first time around. Showing off. We all do that.”

  “I’ll make sure it’s always the first time around with us.” She poked her head out. “Why aren’t you exhausted, too?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’ve stolen your Titanian essence. Rogue, the Vampire, they call me.”

  “Why on earth are you blinking like that?”