A message was waiting on his computer screen. A call from Coptor. The big man's face was creased with a certain amount of real concern. "Jon, I got a complaint here, full pink docket, come down from the Center Court. Names you as defense in a suit for an awful lot of credit. The Baltitude Gas Company wants your hide, baby. Call me tomorrow about it." Coptor blinked out.
The vindictive oaf Baltitude! Just what he needed, a big lawsuit from a paranoid megabuck.
He slipped off his jacket and took out the silver cube, which he set down on the small sidetable.
The cube shimmered most strangely, moire patterns disrupting whatever images might be forming on those faces, but the shimmering appeared at odds with the surrounding light patterns as well. He weighed it again in his hand, squeezed it lightly to no effect. Recalling Fara's efforts with blowtorch and drill, he squeezed it harder between two hands. No effect whatsoever could be detected.
What in the heavens was it? Fara claimed the material was inert and had so far resisted all attempts at investigation.
He set it down and went in and showered and shaved. Later, with a clean shirt and a black top coat and a pair of shoes with adjustable magnets in the soles that he'd purchased for a low-grav pursuit years before, he set out.
He headed for the up platform, paused briefly on the platform and then, as a train came in, he turned and jogged lightly back the way he'd come and down onto the other platform. On the way he passed a plump little man whose expression and strong fear signal marked him as a Superior Buro agent. Jon rode the next train to Octagon Seven and took a roundabout route through the dense crowds until he could get to the back service corridor and then down to Meg's.
"Well, look who's so cheerful," Meg remarked when he walked in. "What did you do, come to your senses and drop this horrible job?" She was working with Daisy.
"No, I think we might see an early conclusion to the case and a check for ten thousand in the morning. Will five thousand credits help?"
"Bah! Sha3 is in the hospital. He will cost five hundred to rebrain, with nothing for all that personality I poured into him." She gestured savagely at the door.
"Since I've been back here the Superior Buro has tried three times to load us with bugs. First it was a fake team from Compubiopsy. Daisy wouldn't let them in, that's how bad they were. Then there was a biodisk salesman—a heavenly-looking young man—and then there was a goddamn Newchurcher. 'Let us beseech the Prophet!' he started wailing outside the door. While he was doing it they tried to drill through from the airshaft. Daisy took that out with a voltage surge, burned somebody's blueskin fingers, I hope. We heard stuff falling down the shaft."
"They're on the case all right." He told her of his own brushes with the Buro. "'Subtle they are not!'"
They laughed bitterly.
"Come on, Meg—five thousand in the morning. You'll have Sha3 back eventually, and that's easy money, wouldn't you agree, for what? Twelve hours we've spent on this case."
She grew more serious. "I don't know, Jon, it makes me uneasy. It's blood money. We ought to let him go, leave him be. Why should we catch him and send him to die for the laowon?"
He shrugged. "We have no idea what he may have done. It may have been a senseless slaughter. What difference does it make anyway? If the Superior Buro wants someone they're going to find him in the end. They didn't want us to find Eblis Bey, but we know where he's bound to be hiding. We found out despite them and we found out really easily. So, we have to balance it out."
"It's still blood money. Let the old man go. You don't need the money."
"That's news to me. I have to move again. That means another bribe to another landlord who won't want to have a laoman operative for the Mass Murder Squad in his or her property. I'm afraid I do need the money, besides, he could just as easily have killed them for money himself."
She turned away, a disappointed expression on her face.
After a moment he frowned, put his hands in his pockets. "But I do agree that working around the Superior Buro is getting incredibly tedious. Always the heavy hand with them, always being tailed and bugged. I'm not going to accept any more jobs that involve them."
She smiled then. "Thank you, Jon. I appreciate that." She seemed to brush away a tear. "By the way, here's a little precaution of my own." And she showed him a purple Masque module. "Our Elchite information is now hidden in here. Just in case something breaks in here when I'm not around."
A chime came on and Meg hurriedly set up her Masque entry for a late-evening game, a new challenger for the prime-time entry slot, before "Hidden Notebook." The game was called "Louis Quatorze" and was set in a remote time in Old Earth. All historical details had to be correct for entries to get on the main screen. Meg had entered a serving girl/hunchback duo. Her opening that evening involved an effort by her serving girl, Danielle Lebrun, to entice the elderly Comte D'Aillou into his four-poster bed, where a faction would murder him, thus prompting a change in the keeper of the king's chocolate provision.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she picked up a lot of the telling little details that the DAex Ram was just too slow to handle. Fortunately these were group scenes. Meg was responsible only for the image and dialogue of Danielle, a saucy trollop of quite traditional mode. With the Bioram, of course, things would have been much easier.
But with judges and audience watching critically, every nuance had to be perfect if the action was to get much play on people's main screens. A competing scene was set in the winecellar and another in the queen's bedroom. Meg's fingers drummed the keyboard.
She had won control of the scene lighting now. She tightened focus on Danielle's face, noble peasant of French stock. There was an appealing graininess in her lighting. Now came a long steady shot of her cleavage, then her breasts moving inside her fresh white blouse.
Meg had main screen in more than 50 percent of viewer screens now. The Comte D'Aillou was removing his breeches and indicating the four-poster with considerable excitement on his rouged and powdered features.
Danielle's skirts came down and she bent over seductively for the comte's twitching fingers.
"Wow!" Jon said. "Seventy percent now, Meg."
It was true, Meg was pulling the whole audience of "Louis Quatorze" over to her hot little seduction scene. The much more genteel posturing in the queen's bedroom was down to a mere 15 percent while the spanking of a cellarmaid was holding a calculated 15 percent share of mostly male viewers.
Danielle went to work inside the four-poster and the curtains were drawn over the rest, leaving Meg with 72 percent share and a complete triumph over the opposition.
The game switched focus. The king was returning from the hunt with the court in train. A grand tableau scene was coming up in which Meg had no part. She rose for a cup of instacaf.
"What's the prize money like for this one?" Jon asked, watching in fascination as hundreds of perfectly crafted video characters, each operated by a different video artist, was molded into a tremendous "big screen" image. The palace of Versailles, the clouds, the mud of the courtyard, barking dogs, children—everything was in place, including even the hum of the flies.
"Six thousand for the gold, four for the silvers. Pretty good for the timeslot."
Jon knew that Queen Alice in "Hidden Notebook" regularly won the ten thousand prize for top of the top show.
"By the way," Meg said, remembering something, "Clawenton Ravenish called. He found something else for us. Apparently there's a long-held belief on the watermoons of William that the Elchites were founded by the surviving members of the crew of the Testamenter battleship Winston Churchill. The crew ditched their ship and came to Nocanicus. They landed on the Ginger Moon and the Mooners helped them to get fast NAFAL back to the Hyades stars."
Jon snorted in disbelief. "Just because there are Testamenters in the Nocanicus system and a lot of them on the watermoons of William, that doesn't mean the Winston Churchill still exists."
"I haven't told you everything w
e've done around here though. I used my probability software to go through the Elchite case."
"And?"
"And I think you should seriously consider dropping the case."
"Not more crazy Testamenter stuff?"
"It's not crazy! There's nothing crazy about it at all. It fits the few facts we have quite perfectly. Assume the Churchill fled to one of the nearby dwarf star systems and the crew came here on the lifeboats. From here they went fast NAFAL to the far side of the Hyades and the inner hegemony. A few hundred years later the Elchite cult springs up in the inner human sphere; panhumanist, explicably antilaowon and violent."
"The Elchites were in business before that."
"Yes, but it's clear they were in decline, just one of thousands of small eccentric sects. They got a big boost about the right time."
His expression made her indignant.
"Remember, Jon, the Baada drives weren't like laowon gravitomagnetics. They could have fled a long way from Testament without the laowon being able to track them. Those drives could take you across the Galaxy on one fueling. They used the gravity potential of the stars themselves."
"So why does the Elchite come here then?"
"That's what we were wondering, Daisy and I. Since we didn't have old Sha3 to work it out with I called up the Jumbo at Hyperion U. No lock on Bioram use, there appear to be a few shreds of freedom left to us. Anyway, this is what we came up with."
On screen the king was getting closer. Dozens of grandiose personages in elaborate costumes were riding in and dismounting. In the near distance horns were blowing. A few big, spotted hounds came loping into the courtyard. It was uncannily realistic and Jon had to remind himself that it was all image creation by Masque nuts like Meg.
"There must be another alien race. Out beyond the nearside galactic arm. Perhaps in the opposite side of the Galaxy, but there must be another advanced species, a spacegoing species that the laowon are frightened of. Someone that we can appeal to for help." She grew passionate. "Someone's out there. We don't have to be all alone with the laowon, trapped in their Galaxy, doomed forever to be their slaves."
He wondered a moment. Was it possible? Objections rose immediately to mind.
"The Galaxy is vast. There may be other races but the laowon have been exploring for millennia and have yet to find anything more advanced than us. Nothing else has even had spaceflight."
"Of course, that's what they tell us. But how can we really know? You know perfectly well that very few humans have ever come back from the laowon centers. Our ambassadors, our scientists, the talented psi-able, all those who go to the Golden Court stay there. We don't hear very much from them. We know, therefore, only what the blues tell us."
He hesitated to say anything. She was insistent.
"Look, it fits the patterns we have. The Elchite apparently visited a laowon habitat crammed with noble bloods. What were they there for? Couldn't they have been gathered to meet with these aliens? Perhaps there is an emissary from the other side of the Galaxy. Or perhaps they simply had information about this other race. He killed them all to keep the information secret, and he came here because of the Elchite-Mooner connection that goes right back to the whereabouts of the Churchill."
"Here?"
"No, nearby, silly, like the Mooners say."
Then it was time for Roq, Meg's hunchback character, to make a move in the stable setting where he lurked. Meg had planned for Roq to press forward to kiss the royal stirrup and beg for alms. Roq's grotesque face was capable of the most pitiable textures.
On the main screen the king was refusing to dismount in the courtyard because there were too many people and assassins lurked everywhere. Soldiers were pushing forward to block the stable doors. The king rode in. Roq was ready to perform.
Suddenly the screen crackled and an alarm light flashed from Daisy. The word "override" in huge letters was followed by some code in laowon digits, and then the face of the Morgooze of Blue Seygfan appeared on the screen.
Meg cursed and pressed the dump switch, but the override continued. The main screen stayed tuned to the Morgooze's call.
"Damn you!" yelled Meg.
The young Morgooze was unused to being spoken to in such a manner. "Silence!" he bellowed. His mane stood out stiff and his eyes seemed to glow.
Iehard was genuinely afraid at the sight of that anger.
Trembling slightly, he said, "Please switch to another screen, Morgooze. You are committing an act of gross discourtesy, breaking into a Masque scene that my colleague has worked on for weeks." Jon struggled to keep his voice level.
"Get the fuck off my screen!" Meg screamed, desperately hammering an emergency patch code to take her out of phone transmission momentarily and onto another standby line.
"Discipline that female!" the Morgooze shrieked turning visibly purple.
Meg finally got Daisy back under her own control and switched the Morgooze off the main screen and onto a screen that swung up to Jon on an extensor.
The scene in the stable was over. Roq had stood sullenly by while the king passed. The stablemaster had ordered the miserable hunchback to be whipped for presenting such a sad spectacle to his majesty, not to mention a million viewers.
With a cry of disgust, Meg dialed out of the game, then got up from the pit and went in search of instacaf. She lit a syntabac and puffed it angrily.
The room crackled with anger; onscreen the Morgooze was having a tantrum in laowon. "That female must be..."
Jon broke in suddenly with the hunting tongue. "She is inconsequential to our great purpose, Morgooze. Perhaps mercy would be the best aspect of radiance to shower upon her?" He employed only a hint of rebuke, exactly as it might have been phrased by a trusted adviser of the same caste. No human had ever addressed the Morgooze thus. He stared, speechless.
"How may I assist you?" Jon asked, trying to be gracious and helpful. Laowon could be so prickly and difficult sometimes.
The Morgooze visibly struggled to control himself. The purple faded. The eyes continued to stare but the harsh orders of command did not leave his lips. He had to remember that this was not Lao the Golden, this was a frontier system in the back of beyond and that it was impossible to get anything done unless one remained on civil terms with the humans.
"What progress have you to report?" he finally snapped.
Jon spread his hands. "Actually, very little so far. The Superior Buro denies access to most of the relevant data. We have barely begun to search as a result. You should ask the Buro why they don't want your mission to succeed. They will listen to you, of course."
The Morgooze snorted, gave Jon an ill-tempered look. "Bah, these are excuses. I want results and I want them quickly. Get out and find this man. Unless you achieve something soon, I shall demand your head when I return to Lao." The Morgooze abruptly cut the contact.
Jon dimly heard Meg give a whistle behind him. "That really ices your cake, now doesn't it?"
Jon rolled out of the computer pit, sat down, and poured some instacaf. "Trouble is he really means it."
"All this for five thousand credits each; is it really worth it?"
Jon wondered how the Nocanicus authorities would handle such a request by the Morgooze. Somehow he doubted he would get that much protection; Blue Seygfan represented a vast power. "We'll find the Elchite, everything will be all right."
Meg threw up her hands in exasperation. "This is incredible. You're saying that unless you jump at this blueskin's command and find something, somehow, with no recent information about the Elchites other than that picture, he'll kill you and take your head back to Lao?"
"Well, he will try, and he can afford to send a lot of killers. I don't know that the Grandee cops would even put up much of a struggle on a laoman's behalf either."
"Now, Jon! You're human. They wouldn't let an alien get away with that."
"Meg, this particular alien is the space-damned Morgooze of Blue Seygfan! Do you understand what that means? He controls a milli
on laowon shock troops, a fleet of three hundred battlejumpers. Blue Seygfan directs the affairs of ten thousand solar systems. Above this young Morgooze are only the Urall and the male offspring of the Urall, if any, beyond the age of seven years. The Urall of Blue Seygfan is third in line to the Imperiom itself!"
Meg shuddered and then began to cry. Somehow this weakness in her was more appalling than anything else. He put his arms around her and she wept on his shoulder.
"Oh, Jon, I can't stand this. I can't stand it that we're not free. That the damned laowon are taking over, snuffing out human freedoms forever."
They sat together for a long time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Out on the dorsal extension the gravity was low, humans were rather rare, and the warehouse corridors were severely utilitarian.
Before he reached the section he sought, a strip of bonded warehouses sealed behind steel gates, Jon had pulled himself down the handpole set in the center of the cavernous passageway for what seemed like hours.
When he saw the Baltitude Security Company logo, he halted and started counting. At the fifth tier of gates he found the one designated by Clawenton Ravenish, No. 45b. Here was supposed to be a locked gate, a hidden Elchite temple.
Instead Jon found an open gate and an open warehouse that was completely empty. Momentarily stunned, he floated inside the perfectly bare interior. The 10,000 credit units suddenly seemed light-years away again. And poor old Clawenton would have to forget his Elchite ceremonial vestments and altar of Earthstone. Whatever the Elchite trader had left there long ago, the Elchites following had already taken away.
With brows furrowed, Jon hurried back to the gravity zones.
When he finally got home it was only an hour before midnight and he was exhausted. He kicked off his spaceboots and dumped his jacket, yelled at the TV, and poured himself a shot of fuelas incentivos victorios.
He was determined that in the morning he'd tell Petrie he was quitting the job. His chest hurt. The fuelas tasted good but did horrible things to his stomach. He belched.
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