"Very well," said Khryswhy, "so you have access to the information you stole. What if we force you to give us your private retrieval codes?"
"You can't do that." Loo-Macklin told her softly.
"Want to bet?" Nubra was starting out of his chair again.
"Idiot," Khryswhy looked bored with him. "I told you to sit down."
He hesitated, half pleading with her. "But Khrys, let me have him for half an hour. Give me Mule and Pioptolus. We can make him talk." He looked nastily at the unmoving Loo-Macklin. "He'll tell us everything he knows and wish he had more to tell us when we've started on him."
"Don't you see what we're dealing with here?" she said exasperatedly to the younger man. "Don't you see that he doesn't care? You can't make somebody like that talk. And if you go too far and kill him, which I wouldn't put past you, Nubra, the information will stay hidden permanently. And then where would we all be?"
"Broke," Loo-Macklin told her. "You might even have to go legal, and that would mean starting at the bottom, status one hundred."
She ignored that. "Anyway, he's right about one thing. Business is good. I'd like to keep it that way." She turned to him. "What is it you want, kid?"
"To begin with, you can remember never to call me kid again." He strolled over to the table, pulled up a free chair, and sat down facing them, folding his hands on the smooth surface.
"I intend to keep the syndicate running profitably and efficiently. Within a year's time we will see its income tripled."
Amoleen burst out laughing. "Now how do you propose to do that?"
"By having my orders followed explicitly."
"Your orders?" Nubra was so furious he was shaking. "If anyone should give orders around here, it might as well be me. I'm a thirty-third-class illegal, I've been in the organized underworld for ten years. I've been . . ."
"Loud, abusive, and stupid, most of that time," said Loo-Macklin, cutting him off. Nubra ground his teeth and glared at Loo-Macklin, but didn't reply. Not with Khryswhy staring him down.
"If you need proof of that," Loo-Macklin continued pleasantly, "there's the undeniable fact that you've spent the last ten years of your life being ordered about by a pig. Because of my build, I've often been called an ape. I consider that a step up in class. There's no shame in pigs taking orders from an ape."
"You're asking a lot," said Khryswhy. "We're doing quite well right now." She lit a dopestick and he noticed a flicker of real interest in her eyes. "You really think, though, that you can triple the syndicate's income within a year?"
He nodded slowly.
"You know what I think?" she continued, puffing away on the thin red smoke. "I think you're a bold liar and a dangerous maniac."
Here was a woman he could use, Loo-Macklin thought. "Does that really matter to you?"
"Not if you can do what you claim. If you can't, well, we have a year in which to puzzle out a way to learn those new codes. Then we can steal our records back and have you put in your proper element, say, six meters of foundation stone. Time will be working against you, not for you."
"But consider," he said calmly, despite the threat, "what if I succeed?"
"In that case," she told him, "I could give a damn what you've done with the records. You can keep 'em a secret forever if you want, and I'll do everything in my power to assist your efforts."
"Khryswhy!" exclaimed the fat woman, shocked.
"We may as well give him his chance, Amoleen," was the resigned reply. "We have no choice. Be philosophical. Sometimes the insane can accomplish more than the sane. I'd rather be ordered about by an efficient madman than a mediocre sane one."
"But he's dangerous." Amoleen avoided Loo-Macklin's eyes. Such sleepy eyes! Would they never know for certain what was going on behind them?
"To himself, maybe," said Khryswhy, "but I don't think to us. Where would you like to begin . . . boss?" She looked around the table.
"Nubra?" The younger man's anger hadn't subsided, but he nodded reluctant agreement. "Basright?" The older man shrugged, said nothing. "Amoleen?"
"My dear Khrys," the fat woman said, "this all goes against my better judgment. However," she sighed dramatically and glanced at Loo-Macklin, "as you say, whatever our personal opinions, we've not been given much of a choice."
"None whatsoever," said Loo-Macklin firmly.
"Then that's settled." Khryswhy leaned across the table and extended an open hand. Each of her fingernails glowed with a different shade of polish.
"The pig is dead. Long live the ape."
Loo-Macklin noted that she had a very firm handshake. He would watch her carefully. He would watch everything carefully.
Chapter 4
The heavily muscled body had not grown any softer. The haircut was still the same. Half-lidded eyes still gave him that perpetually sleepy expression.
But around Loo-Macklin there had been many changes in the five years that had passed.
The conference room was on the uppermost level of G tube, not far from the offices of the city and planetary government; an irony, which Loo-Macklin appreciated. The name of the false corporation, which fronted for the syndicate, appeared in bold iridium letters outside the double doors: Enigman, Ltd. That was as close as he ever came to true humor.
There were no tables in the conference chamber. Loo-Macklin disdained tables. They separated people, put a barrier between personalities and conversation. They also made it difficult to quickly jump anyone pulling a weapon on you.
Instead, there were numerous couches and chairs scattered casually about. They were made of flexglas and a plushdown fungus from one of the Arilian worlds, a nonchlorophyllic growth that was springy and molded itself to every nook and cranny of the body. To sit in such a chair was to experience the sensation of being held in the gloved hand of a giant. The chairs never had to be cleaned, only cropped. They were very expensive.
Loo-Macklin could afford them.
Khryswhy entered. She was eight years older than Loo-Macklin but her figure had remained trim and there were no additional lines in her face. Only in her mind. She pirouetted for him and the new dress danced.
"What do you think, Kees?"
He admired the emerald and yellow creation, a combination of several diaphanous layers of thin material held apart by electrostatically charged layers of air. She seemed enveloped by several ghosts instead of clothing.
"Very aesthetic," he told her.
She stopped twirling and shook a scolding finger at him. The first two years had been awkward, but she'd softened considerably in the last three. She'd warmed to Loo-Macklin and tried to soften him, too.
He was damned if he could understand why. He never encouraged the attentions of such women and for the life of him couldn't understand why so many of them seemed to find him attractive. It was a puzzle.
Not that he denied normal bodily urges or saw any virtue in celibacy. That was for stoics and Athabascans. It was simply that he had neither the capacity nor desire for emotional entanglement.
He quite enjoyed sex, much as he did good food, entertainment, and especially reading. He also continued his education through privately constructed computer tutorial programming. And the more he learned, the more ignorant he became.
The sign of a truly wise man, which only another wise man could understand.
Coyness was lost on Loo-Macklin. Khryswhy walked over to his chair and stepped behind it, put a hand on his shoulder.
"It took three weeks to make this dress. The electronics for maintaining the layer separation cost five thousand credits by themselves. The least you could do is say that it's pretty, Kees. Aesthetic sounds so damn distant."
He looked back and up with one of his carefully modulated smiles, which no one else seemed to realize was as artificial as the fabric of her caftan. The effect, however, was equally brilliant.
He permitted her the familiarity of using his first name because it allowed her to think she had some kind of personal bind on his thoughts, when in
actuality the opposite was true.
Look at her, he thought admiringly as she stepped away from him. Difficult to believe she is one of the more ruthless illegals on Evenwaith. Or anywhere, for that matter. She ran all of the Enigman, Ltd.'s illegal prostitution operations and did so with a cool, businesslike hand. She was familiar with every perversion favored by man and woman and knew how best to satisfy them.
If not for her face and figure, he could certainly admire her for her efficiency.
Basright joined them in the conference room. He spared a glance for the revealing dress Khryswhy was displaying, looked away disapprovingly. The older man's tastes ran to the peculiar and difficult, which one in his position could always manage to satisfy. It was a weakness he regretted, but he never let it interfere with business.
Loo-Macklin was aware of it, of course. He admired Basright's control. The man had a center, which few humans did.
"I guess we can get started," he told Basright.
The woman stopped cavorting, hesitated. She looked toward the doorway, then back at Loo-Macklin, and frowned.
"Wait a minute, Kees. Where're Nubra and Amoleen?"
Loo-Macklin swung the small computer monitor up out of the arm of his chair and around in front of him on its flexible arm. He looked sleepily at her.
"Amoleen died yesterday, Nubra just this morning."
Basright took a chair, suddenly nervous. "What happened, Kees?"
Loo-Macklin smiled at him. "I think you know what happened"
The older man's thinness exaggerated his shaking. "No. No, I didn't . . . ."
Loo-Macklin continued smiling at him, his eyes fully open. Basright always had to look away from that opaline stare. It was nothing to be ashamed of. Stronger men and women reacted the same way.
"All right, I admit it. I knew what was going on."
"You didn't tell me about it," said Loo-Macklin, his tone mildly accusing.
The man turned back to him, pleading with his eyes. Off to one side, Khryswhy was dividing her attention between the two men. She looked thoroughly dumbfounded.
"I . . . I didn't know what to do, sir," Basright mumbled. "They put me in a very difficult position. They wanted me to go in with them at first. I said no . . . ."
"Go in with them on what?" wondered Khryswhy aloud. "What's going on here, Kees?"
"Be quiet, Khrys. You'll find out."
"Find out, hell! I want to know wh . . ."
She broke off. Loo-Macklin turned and gave her a particularly sharp look. "Khrys . . . ."
She'd heard that tone before—harsh and devoid of compassion. The pretense of familiarity that had existed between them prior to Basright's entrance vanished. She was now merely another employee, nothing more.
Slowly she took a seat, the folds of her dress collapsing beneath her, while above her body the chiffonlike material continued to drift gently in the air.
Loo-Macklin returned his attention to the now sweating Basright.
"They said they'd kill me," he remonstrated with his boss, "if I didn't go along with them. I didn't know what to do . . . ."
"Why didn't you come to me?"
"They were on me all the time, clockabout, sir. I'm not into violence. I've always been interested in the ledger side of syndicate operations. You know Nubra, what he was like. Always ready for a fight. He never liked me, that wipsipper. He would've killed me right there if Amoleen hadn't intervened. Said they couldn't do anything until after they'd . . . taken care of you.
"So . . . I told them I'd cooperate, but passively. Nubra wanted more than that, damn him, but he wasn't sure what. They hadn't finalized their plans yet. I didn't want to go in with them . . . I didn't want to see you replaced. You've done everything with the syndicate you said you would. You've been fair with me. And I'm neither jealous nor power-hungry, like Nubra and Amoleen are . . . were."
"That's always been one of your greatest qualities, Basright," said Loo-Macklin approvingly. "You're not terribly smart, but you're smart enough to recognize when someone's smarter than yourself. You're a plodder, not an innovator. Talents in themselves."
The man's shaking stopped. For the first time since the announcement of his colleagues' deaths he started to relax. But only a little. He wasn't sure he was safe yet.
"Well, anyways, sir, that's why you haven't been able to reach me for the past two weeks. I made myself lost. Vanalatan Islands in the southern ocean, actually. I hoped that if I didn't help them or hinder them, they'd ignore me until I came back. I could always plead bad nerves. Amoleen would've accepted that, I think. She needed my financial skills to run the syndicate's business end."
"And conversely, if they failed, you could simply have told me you badly needed a vacation. So you covered yourself with both sides, right?"
"It wasn't like that at all, sir!" Basright protested.
Loo-Macklin waved him down. "I'm not mad at you for looking out for yourself, Bas. Survival's nothing to be ashamed of. But lying isn't one of your talents. I think you know that, too."
Basright hesitated, then let out a nervous little half-chuckle. "No, sir. But I did the only thing I could think of. And I sure as hell needed the vacation, though the last couple of days before I came home weren't very relaxing." He managed to meet the younger man's gaze.
"I'm not in your class, Loo-Macklin, and I know it. Nubra and Amoleen couldn't see how well off they were. They wanted control more than they wanted success."
Loo-Macklin nodded, rose and approached the old programmer. Basright cringed, then relaxed and positively beamed when Loo-Macklin patted him on the shoulder. Save for the fact that his tongue wasn't lolling out, Basright looked for all the world like a gratified dog.
Hard to think that he presided over, among other things, a squad of twelve professional collectors whose methods were less than courteous. Highly efficient, was Basright, but absolutely devoid of imagination. Dutiful and unchanging as the programs he entered into the syndicate's computers. A born administrator.
"That's why you and Khrys are still here," he told the older man, "and the other two are not." His gaze traveled across the room to Khryswhy. "Basright here is smart enough to know how stupid he is, whereas you, Khrys, are smart enough to know how smart I am."
She fiddled with the airborne folds of her dress, uncertain what to say. "You certainly have a low opinion of yourself, Kees vaan Loo-Macklin."
"Have you ever known me to suffer from false modesty?"
"No."
"It's not a question of opinion but of fact. I'm here. Other people who were careless are not."
"I'd be redundant then," she continued, lighting up a blue dopestick of legal manufacture but laced with highly illegal hallucinogens, which the Ninth Syndicate imported to Evenwaith, "in saying that Amoleen and Nubra's passing was accidental."
He nodded once.
"How come no one in my section reported any of this to me?" She glanced over at Basright. "What about you?"
He shook his head violently. "None of my people knew about it or had anything to do with it. At least, none that I know of, sir." He frowned at a sudden thought. "They've all been busy with their regular work, and Nubra was responsible for any stronger 'coercive measures' business required. Who did you get to vape him and Amoleen? If something major like that was afoot I should have heard rumors of it, at least."
"Five years," Khryswhy was murmuring. "They worked for you for five years."
"They got tired of me," he said bluntly, folding his hands across his enormous chest. His eyes dropped to study his interlocked fingers.
"I knew they were plotting against me as early as two years back, but they were valuable people. Within their own sections they performed with great efficiency."
"If you knew all this time that they were out to get you," she asked him curiously, "why didn't you ever let them know that you knew? Maybe none of this would have happened."
Loo-Macklin shook his head. "That's not how people's minds work, Khrys. I know a little a
bout human nature. I've been forced to learn. If I'd confronted them with what I'd learned they would have denied everything. Then they would have bided their time and hatched some new plot, which I might have been lax in uncovering.
"Five years ago I told them, as I told you, that within a year I would triple the syndicate's earnings. Well, we're now the largest, most prosperous illegal enterprise on Evenwaith. We've absorbed four of the original twelve syndicates. With some more hard work and perseverance, I think that within another year we will control more than two thirds of the underworld commerce on this planet. That will put us in a dominant fiscal position vis-à-vis any possible competitors." Basright nodded agreement.
"I've also initiated expansion operations on Helhedrin and Vlox. Quietly, of course, and in such a way that the small local syndicates there are as yet unaware of our intentions."
Khryswhy gaped at him, half-rising from her chair. "But otherworld expansion by syndicates is . . ."
"Illegal?" He laughed, as he rarely did, a high-pitched sound almost like barking.
"Sometimes I wonder at the way our galactic society is structured, let alone how it manages to muddle along so effectively. Crime syndicates are illegal by definition and are supposed to restrict themselves to a single world. To prevent them from attaining a dangerous amount of power, I presume.
"Meanwhile, legal corporations and syndicates, which destroy the surfaces of whole worlds with their operations, are permitted to expand wherever they're able. I see little enough difference in our activities." There was unusual passion in his voice, and Basright and Khryswhy watched in fascination as he paced the room.
"We will expand. It's vital to our continued security. I see no reason why we can't."
"You'll find out why when word of what you're trying to do reaches the Board of Operators on Terra and Restavon," Khryswhy told him. "But you didn't answer my question or Basright's." She gestured at the older man, who'd finally regained his composure now that he was reasonably sure Loo-Macklin didn't intend to have him join Amoleen and Nubra. Actually he was quite pleased at the way things had turned out. He couldn't have been comfortable in his dotage with Nubra as syndicate chief.
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