The Last Master

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Perhaps,” said Ett. “I’d been suspecting that Medical and Accounting weren’t together on everything, and I rather suspected what we found out about Dr. Garranto.”

  “Then maybe you’d tell me what it has to do with what we’re trying to do,” said Rico. “We’re just trying to get the RIV-VII drug loose and out to people, aren’t we?”

  “Not exactly,” said Ett. “We’re trying to get RIV-VII loose and out to people—but under conditions where it’ll do some good.”

  “I’ve been taking that particular qualification of yours for granted,” said Rico.

  “You shouldn’t,” retorted Ett. “What if we got the drug into production and some new R-Masters made, only to have it and them suddenly swept up by the EC and quietly eliminated? What you tell me about Medical and Accounting backs up the way the whole picture’s been fitting together. If the feud between even two EC Sections is serious enough, we can’t trust these zero-zero files completely.”

  “But these files are the one thing none of the Section Chiefs would monkey with,” began Rico.

  “It wouldn’t take monkeying with the files themselves,” said Ett. “Suppose these files are only… incomplete? We don’t know there aren’t other secret files elsewhere in the world—isn’t redundancy a bureaucratic habit?” He stopped.

  “But never mind that now. You’d better get the RIV-VII information to Malone as quickly as possible. But don’t transmit it.” Ett stopped to think a moment.

  “Didn’t I see Al around here last night?” he said.

  “You could have,” Rico said. “I sent the helicopter for him yesterday, figuring we might need him now. The security men and Hoskides are still on the yacht, without working communications, and will have to bring the ship back by themselves. That’ll take a while.”

  “Good,” Ett said. “Take him with you in the flyer. You get some sleep on the way to Malone’s. When you reach him, tell him to pack up his necessary lab equipment and clear out—he’d better use his more militant MOGOW connections for hiding places and keep on the move, if he can do it while making the new RIV. You understand?”

  Rico looked at him for a moment as if about to speak, and then apparently changed his mind. He nodded.

  “Leave Al with Malone,” Ett continued. “I particularly don’t want the EC getting their hands on him. Meanwhile, I take it Wally’s been brought along by the response therapists to the point where he can put on a fair imitation of me, as long as he doesn’t have to talk to anyone?”

  “Not yet, but he’ll be there soon,” said Rico.

  “When I give you the word, it’ll be up to you to set Wally to face the Section Chiefs, without anyone else knowing about it. You’re sure you can handle all that without trouble?”

  “Mr. Ho,” Rico said, “I’m not going to let that remark irritate me. I know you’re suffering your usual discomforts, and you’re under pressure as well.”

  Ett sagged a little.

  “All right,” he said. He wiped his hand across his forehead and it came away wet. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I trust you, Rico, of course. We have to trust each other. Tell me again, though—you’re sure nothing can ordinarily be smuggled into a meeting of the EC Section Chiefs?”

  “Believe me, it can’t,” said Rico. “Everyone coming in is searched to the skin by guards, as well as by detectors.”

  “All right. Then I’ll get going,” said Ett. “I—Wally, that is—had better leave the island tomorrow, after all. Time’s short. Have that make-up man come to my room and fit me with my fake mustache, early, would you? I suppose you’ve already spoken to Al about the boat?”

  “Yes,” said Rico.

  “Good,” said Ett, opening the door from the room to the outside and the warm island early evening. “In twelve hours Pixie and I are going to be in open water.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ett, now wearing the persona of Wally, sailed the Pixie to Fort-de-France, and left her there, moored in a public marina on the Madame River. He had Wally’s citizen card, to the credit account of which he, as Ett, had deposited a healthy amount of dividend units, to reinforce the arrears of Wally’s own allowance, which had been automatically reactivated on his revival. Thereafter, he took a private room on an intercontinental to London and began to wander, tending eastward, around the globe, drinking, gambling, scattering units about—and making it a point to get into arguments and fights wherever he went.

  On the fifth day he was in the Istanbul area, in a pleasure hotel in Galata, sitting on a grav lounge by the huge interior swimming pool of the hotel, when he heard his—or rather Wally’s—name called.

  “Wallace Ho?”

  Ett was half-asleep. The strain of appearing to lead the sort of dissipated life that a physically healthy Wally was supposed to be leading had brought him close to a state of exhaustion, for all that he spent most of his time, when out of the public eye, sleeping. But the voice that spoke to him was that of Cele Partner, the woman he had first met with St Onge, and the recognition galvanized him, bringing a surge of adrenaline that woke him thoroughly. He kept his head down and his eyes half-closed, however, so his reaction would not show. She spoke again.

  “Aren’t you Wallace Ho?”

  He looked up and to his right, and saw her sitting at a table under a pool umbrella—only ornamental here inside—just a few feet away. She was not dressed for swimming, however, but for the street, in casual skirt and half-blouse. Hair bound in a red kerchief, she nonetheless managed to look as impossibly beautiful as a dream out of the Arabian nights.

  “Who’re you?” Ett said.

  “I know your brother—slightly,” Cele said. “I passed by his island and stayed to talk to a Dr. Morgan Carwell. I saw you. You were sleeping at the time. But Dr. Carwell told me all about you.”

  “Very damned interesting,” said Ett. “But you still haven’t told me your name. That was my question—who’re you?”

  “Cele Partner,” she said. “Morgan Carwell never mentioned me?”

  “He never mentioned anything,” said Ett.

  She laughed a warm, low-pitched laugh.

  “Maybe he was a little jealous,” Cele said. “I told him you fascinated me. Someone who’d been brought back not just from the dead but from a bad reaction to RIV. Do you know that you’re unique?”

  “Being unique doesn’t do me any good,” said Ett. “It’s my brother who gets all the advantages—just for being lucky. But then, I never was lucky.”

  “Aren’t you?” said Cele. “I’d have thought you would be. Now, your brother Ett didn’t impress me at all.”

  “Oh?” said Ett. “That’s a change. Women used to fall all over him. None of them ever fell all over me.”

  “Maybe they didn’t have the sense to appreciate you,” said Cele.

  He sat up in his chair. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re actually telling me you get some kind of lift out of me. You’ve got strange tastes.”

  “Why don’t you join me?” she said.

  He got up from his lounge and sat down at her table.

  “Actually,” she said, “I’d heard you’d left the island. I’ve been looking for you. I’m glad I finally found you.”

  They were together for the next five days, an experience that threatened to shake Ett loose from most of his certainties. This Cele Partner was entirely different from the one he had met as Etter Ho. The former Cele had been aloof and seemingly preferring to stay on a pedestal, rather than stepping down to common earth with any man. This new Cele was just the opposite. The less Ett, in his guise as Wally, tried to please her, the more attentive she became to him. There was a fire in her now that he could not have imagined before. In spite of himself—though he was careful to hide the reaction—his own feelings toward her were kindled by it. He was absolutely certain that he did not love her. But acting as she did, how could he fail to want her as he constantly did?

  But what was real about her and what was not? Was the
Cele he had first known the true Cele Partner? Or was this present woman the true version? Was what he now saw an act put on at the orders of Patrick St. Onge, or someone else? Or had the earlier Cele been acting a part?

  Meanwhile, he was moving them both eastward to his destination, which was the same gambling area around Hong Kong that he had visited before as Ett. Once more he gambled, and this time he made sure to lose steadily. Two days after they got there, his credit was exhausted, and he turned to Cele for units.

  For the first time, she refused him something, though the refusal was given sweetly enough. She sat in his lap and ran her fingers through his hair, begging him to understand that she lived almost on a day-to-day basis as far as her GWP allowance was concerned. It was a slightly better allowance that the basic level for her job, because she had once written a play that was still being performed, but it was barely enough to keep her going.

  He shoved her away, onto the floor.

  “You’re no good to me,” he said and stalked out.

  Once beyond the door of the hotel suite, he went down to the main bar and drank for a while, using what little credit remained to him. After a bit, he went to a phone booth. Luckily, communications, like local transportation, were free, a fact he had taken advantage of in the old days when operating the Pixie took most of his basic allowance.

  After some little delay, the face of Rico looked at him out of the phone screen. Across a satellite communications circuit that was sure to be tapped and recorded by the EC—unlike bugging of homes, that was legal—they exchanged glances.

  “I don’t want to talk to you!” Ett snapped. “Get me that brother of mine. He’d better talk to me, or he’ll be sorry he didn’t.”

  “Mr. Ho,” said Rico, “Master Ho has asked me to tell you that not only won’t he talk to you now, but he doesn’t want to talk to you at any time in the future; and he also says that it’ll do you no good to keep calling, because that decision is final.”

  “All right,” said Ett thickly. “You give him a message for me then. He can shut me out all right, if he likes; but he’s not going to go on living like a king while I have to scrape along on a basic allowance. He can sit on his island and pretend I don’t exist, if he wants, but he’s going to have to pay for the privilege. I can be trouble for him. Wait and see if I can’t.”

  “What are you going to do, Wallace?” Rico asked.

  “Never mind what I’m going to do. Maybe I’ve got a friend. Maybe I’m going to have more friends. Maybe things’ll start working for me; then he’ll wish he hadn’t acted so damn high and mighty.”

  Rico sighed.

  “Do you want me to tell Master Ho that?” he said. “I don’t think it will improve the way he feels toward you at the moment.”

  “I don’t care how he feels,” Ett said. “He and his feelings can go to hell. All I want is some funds to make life livable. He’s got all the credit in the world.”

  “But he can’t use it to give to other people, even to his brother. That’s one thing the Auditor Corps has already told him they won’t allow any more.”

  “Don’t tell me that. He could sneak all the units I want and they’d never know it, let alone complain about it.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “How much can I get?”

  “I… it’s not for me to say, of course,” said Rico. Once more in the screen, his glance held Ett’s, meaningfully. “It would depend on how soon you wanted it. The best estimate I could give you would be that in a week you could have, say, a couple of thousand units.”

  “A week?” said Ett. “How about three days from now? How about tomorrow?”

  “I’m afraid,” said Rico, slowly, “that if it had to be tomorrow or even three days from now, it would have to be nothing. It’ll require at least a week to get you anything. But then you could have two thousand. If you could wait, say, three days longer than that, it might be possible to make it four thousand.

  Ett inclined his head, almost imperceptibly.

  “Go to hell!” he said, and punched off.

  He got up and left the phone booth. He did not have to pretend to be half drunk, because the drinks he had had at the bar were affecting him heavily. But in spite of this, his R-Master mind was able to consider the information he had just gotten. The request for funds had been set up ahead of time with Rico as a code to allow Ett to discover what Lee Malone would be able to do in the way of producing doses of RIV-VII. The answer from Rico that it would take another week to produce the first two thousand doses was not encouraging. Even two thousand new R-Masters was a tiny assault force with which to threaten the bureaucratic organization tightly controlling every technological service and every source of supply for a world whose population was nearly six billion people—all thoroughly controlled, whether they knew it or not.

  But judging from Cele’s refusal to feed him more units to gamble with, things were moving to a climax in a game he was playing with her, St. Onge, and those behind him.

  Well, if they had to make do with two thousand doses, they would have to make do. He went unsteadily back up to the hotel suite he shared with Cele and found her gone. He collapsed on the bed in the bedroom and let his drunken stupor pull him down into heavy sleep.

  ***

  He was awakened by hotel employees who had roused him in order to evict him. Cele was still absent. He allowed himself to be put out into the street, although he put up a show of protest. It was a new day; half a block down the street was a bank where he could draw one more day’s worth of his basic allowance. It would not be enough to regain the hotel suite he had just left, but it would be enough to feed and house him in a more reasonably-priced hotel.

  However, when he got to the bank, he discovered that an almost unheard-of thing—a debit—had been charged against his account. The bank had somehow discovered charges of his which, through some sort of error, had not been placed against his account earlier—and now these charges had to be paid. In fact, they would be drawn from his basic allowance until they had been paid, which would take the next thirty-nine days. He would get no more during that period.

  It was a step Ett had expected. There was one stage lower than that of someone on Minimum Basic Allowance. That was to become an occupant of the Earth Council Free Shelters—generally, last refuges for people who because of mental or physical deficiencies could not take on even the small responsibility of drawing a daily allowance and using it correctly to maintain themselves. Ett looked up the nearest Free Shelter in the local directory and went to it.

  He was given a small cubicle of a room and a filling, if unremarkable, breakfast, in a general dining room where he was surrounded by the incapable, the aged and the infirm of both sexes. This meal over, he made his way to the Sunset Mountain, the same sprawling hotel and casino he had visited shortly after becoming an R-Master. He took his time, wandering in apparent aimlessness, until he found himself at the hotel.

  Inside, Ett searched out the desk of the Director of Services.

  “People say,” he said, “there’s a fencing school here at the Mountain.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the woman behind the desk. “Wing Forty-four of the hotel, and follow the signs.”

  Ett made his way to Wing Forty-four of the hotel and found, as he had been advised, plaques on the wall pointing the way to Fencing. These brought him eventually to what looked like the outer lobby of an athletic club.

  “Sir?” said the male attendant behind the desk, smiling politely.

  “I heard,” Ett said, “that a man in need of money could earn some here, if he could fence, and volunteered for bouts with unbuttoned weapons.”

  The politeness dropped from the man like a discarded mask.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said coldly. “You’ve been listening to one of the stories that circulate around the gaming tables.”

  Ett started to turn away.

  “However—” said the clerk.

  Ett turned back.

  �
��However,” the other repeated, looking sour, “we do have gentlemen sometimes willing to sponsor amateurs in bouts with unbuttoned weapons. I could put you on a list. You do fence?”

  “In secondary school I was on the school team,” said Ett.

  “All right.” The clerk reached under the counter separating them and came up with a sheet of paper and a plastic tab on which was printed a number. “You’re now number eight-seven-three in priority. Sign this release; then go in to the aid station. Tell them to give you a physical. After that, come back here and wait. Your number tab will give you credit for food and drink while you’re waiting.”

  Ett followed the instructions. It was a good three hours after he had been given a cursory going-over by the medical technician in the aid station before he heard his number called over the public-address system.

  “Number eight-seven-three,” said the bored female voice which had been reading various announcements steadily for the last hour, “report to Gym Twelve-B. Number eight-seven-three to Gym Twelve-B immediately.”

  Ett consulted a map of the hotel wing he was in and found his route to Twelve-B. When he stepped through the door of its entrance he found himself on a gym floor in a room with a balcony—very much like the one in which he had witnessed the sword fight once before, except that in this case the balcony seats were empty. In fact, there was no one visible in the room at all, except a man holding a pair of weapons, very like fencing sabers, but with sharpened points.

  “Are you—” Ett was beginning, when the man cut him short.

  “Of course not. Here, take one of these. Your sponsor will be in directly.”

  “Are you the one I’m supposed to fight?” Ett insisted, taking one of the blades. “Where’s the crowd?”

  “No, I work here. And there isn’t any crowd, just you and your sponsor.”

  “But if he’s sponsoring me to fight someone—”

  “Don’t be more of a damn fool than you have to be,” said the other impatiently. “He’s sponsoring you to fight him, of course. He specified no crowd, and as long as he’s willing to pay for privacy it makes no difference to us. As far as your own terms with him go, you work those out with him yourself; we don’t even want to know about it.”