The Management Style of the Supreme Beings

by Tom Holt

  Sell up? Make a fast buck and move on? It was an intriguing idea and something of a novelty. The Venturi Corporation didn’t sell planets, it bought them, skyfuls at a time. Some wiseacre in one of the trade papers had speculated that the Venturis wouldn’t be satisfied until they had the complete set, and he wasn’t being nearly as funny as he thought he was. On the other hand … Snib leaned across his desk, switched on his screen, accessed the planetary CCTV and set the cameras on wide-angle pan. It was all right, he decided, as planets go, but it was nothing special. It had mountains, but so did Draconis Prime and Gamma Orionis IV, and theirs were translucent and glowed pale green. It had forests, but they were shrubberies compared to the vast o’oolk groves of Snoovask, and the trees just stood about all day looking feckless—a bit like the dominant species, come to think of it. The Earth had seasons—four, which was a good number—and oceans, nice big ones, but they were blue, which clashed with the deserts and showed the dirt awfully. It had parakeets, which was one of the best things about it, but it also had spiders and earwigs and centipedes and woodlice. The music was mostly poor, and the architecture was boring, and the people … Well, quite. Early on in the first month they’d been here, he’d had Finance cost out a full-scale flood to get rid of the lot of them, start again with a clean slate. But it was prohibitively expensive—you could buy two uninhabited M-class planets for what a decent flood would cost—and besides, he’d always considered major restructuring of that kind as an admission of failure. The same went for ice ages and nuclear wars. Always better to start with a greenfield site, and in an infinite Universe the one thing there’s no shortage of is real estate. No, if the people are no good, you might as well cut your losses and move on. Or, better still, find a mug who’ll buy it off you, cut your profits and move on. And there was also the Grand Design to think of. If Venturicorp was seen to sell off a planet it had only just recently acquired, the market would jump to the obvious conclusion, the share price would fall still further, the big galactic financial institutions would be looking to dump Venturicorp stock at any price, and he could really clean up. Logic suggested, therefore …

  He stood up, crossed to the window and focused the eyepiece of the big telescope. No need to adjust its position; it was permanently aligned to point at one thing only—Mars, the next planet on the block, that unsatisfactory ball of rock and red dust that had once been home.

  They could never go back there, not after the unfortunate incident. It was a fact he had to face. It was ruined beyond reclamation, beyond terraforming. Nobody could ever live there again. Which was why he’d done the next best thing, the only thing, and bought the house next door. It wasn’t the same, of course. Everything was the wrong colour, the gravity was different, the days were forty minutes shorter, there was only one moon and it was ridiculously big and bright, so you had to sleep with the curtains drawn or wake up moontanned. But a man could sit on a bench in his garden after sunset and look up at the sky and see roughly the same stars as he’d seen as a boy, when gazing up at the stars was his favourite thing of all.

  No, damn it; not for any price some mom-pop-and-holy-spirit outfit could afford. Ab had asked him what all the money was for. And he’d replied honestly, because he could never lie to Ab. But apart from that he’d never indulged himself the way the other big players did when they’d made their pile. No mountaintop palaces with rainbow driveways for the Venturi boys, no chariots of fire, no cherubim and seraphim with nothing to do all day but stand around looking pretty. They lived much as they’d always done—good plain food, a few suits of good-quality clothes (because quality is made to last; you save money in the long run), a few bits and pieces of really first-rate art because there’s no better investment. But no conspicuous consumption, status symbols, comets with personalised plates, monograms picked out in flaring supernovas. Practically every cent they’d ever earned was safely in the bank, put aside for a rainy day. So, if he wanted this stupid little planet just for the view, why not? He’d worked hard; he’d earned it, and no hayseed trinity or semi-literate bush-league thunder god was going to take it away from him.

  But that was no reason why the sucker shouldn’t pay to clean up the mess he should’ve cleaned up before he put the planet on the market. Most of Snib Venturi’s success had come from sheer hard work and determination, but not all of it. From time to time there had been brief flashes of joyful serendipity, and this was clearly one of them. He picked up the phone and pressed 1 for Security.

  “Rocky,” he said cheerfully. “Go buy me an army.”

  39

  Jenny had asked for a transfer. According to her application, she felt drawn to the challenge of filing the monthly fuel consumption reports, which she believed would assist in her emotional and spiritual growth as a member of the admin team. Even when she was a little girl, she’d written on the form, she dreamed that one day she’d have her very own filing system, while fuel consumption had been her driving passion for as long as she could remember.

  Well, you have to put stuff like that on application forms, but he could read between the lines. She didn’t want to work with Bernie Lachuk any more, and who could blame her? Certainly not the guys in DR. They’d given her the transfer, double-expedited and effective immediately. Meanwhile, if Bernie wanted anything typed, he had a choice between the Pool and his right index finger.

  Fine, he thought, because the secret mission he’d been entrusted with was not without a certain element of risk, to the same degree that a containerload of pistachios may contain traces of nuts. If he didn’t come back, there wouldn’t be a tear-stained face behind the back-office desk or a waste bin full of wet tissues. Just as well, really. There’s enough unhappiness in life as it is without making it worse.

  He’d dictated a short note, to be opened in the event of—well, the event—and sent it down to the Pool. It had come back in an envelope marked To Whom It May Conserve. They have predictive text software in Hell; they also have the people who designed it.

  He dropped by the quartermaster’s office. “What I need,” he said, “is some small, utterly deadly weapon I can conceal about my person, preferably contained in or indistinguishable from a harmless everyday object.”

  The quartermaster nodded. “Don’t we all?”

  “Have you got anything like that?”

  The quartermaster thought for a moment, went away and came back with a seven-foot pitchfork. “It’s an everyday object,” he pointed out. “Or at least it was a couple of hundred years ago. Still is in remote parts of eastern Europe.”

  Bernie pushed it gently aside. “All right, then,” he said. “How about a revolutionary new concept in body armour, absolutely proof against all known conventional weapons but so light and thin you hardly know it’s there? Some kind of bulletproof sunblock cream, maybe.”

  “Great idea.”

  “Have you got anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Right. In that case, I guess I’ll have to settle for a subcutaneous homing beacon that lets you know exactly where I am and what’s happening to me, so that elite forces can go in and pull me out at a moment’s notice.”

  The quartermaster thought for a moment, then beamed suddenly. “Stay right there,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  And some time later back he came, lugging a small crate behind him. In it were two pigeons.

  “That’s George,” he said, “and the other one’s George W.” He waited, then added, “Worth two in the bush? Oh well. Anyway, look after them. A handful of millet first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and plenty of fresh clean water.”

  “No thanks,” Bernie said firmly. “And I’m guessing a rocket-powered backpack or a collapsible autogyro that folds down and goes in your wallet is out of the question.”

  “Good guess.”

  Bernie sighed. “It’s like this,” he said. “I’m going on an incredibly dangerous mission into the very heart of enemy territory. It’s practically a done deal that I
’ll be captured and viciously interrogated at some point. I’ll have no back-up and anything remotely resembling a weapon will be taken from me the moment I arrive. Now, have you got anything at all that might possibly come in useful?”

  The quartermaster gazed at him for about ten seconds, then reached under the counter and produced a small pack of chewing gum. Bernie gave him a polite smile and left.

  The most direct route from the quartermaster’s office to the hellmouths doesn’t actually go through central archives, but Bernie wasn’t in a hurry. Jenny was at her desk, collating fuel requisitions by date order. She looked happy, then she saw him. “Oh, it’s you.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing. I was just passing. On my way out.”

  “Oh.”

  “On my way,” he said, “to undertake an appallingly dangerous mission on behalf of the senior management. Of course, I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

  “Mphm.”

  “And even if I was,” Bernie ground on, “I wouldn’t, because I’d hate you to be worried sick about me, in case anything, you know, happened to me.”

  “I can set your mind at rest on that score.”

  “Ah. That’s all right, then.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Well, I’m going now. I can’t stay any longer. My top secret method of transport’s probably waiting for me at an undisclosed location.”

  She didn’t look up from her work, but she waggled a couple of fingers. He left her and drifted slowly down to the main gate, where the sentry was playing a game on his LoganBerry.

  “I’m going outside now,” Bernie said. “I may be gone for some time.”

  “Right you are.”

  A car (a small green Toyota with one brake-light cover missing) was waiting to take him to the landing strip, where he boarded the helicopter. It was piloted by a large friendly middle-aged woman who told him about her aunt’s medical problems all the way over the Greenland Sea.

  “Here we are,” she sang out as the helicopter touched down on a featureless plateau of ice. “This is where you get out.”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course it is, silly.”

  “What time will you be picking me up?”

  She put on her reading glasses and consulted her schedule. “Nothing here about that, dear. You’ll have to ring the office.”

  Bernie looked out of the window and shivered. “Right. Thanks.”

  “My pleasure. Wrap up warm.”

  The helicopter roared away into the clear grey sky, leaving Bernie alone on the ice. He looked around. No sign of anyone or anything anywhere. That didn’t signify, of course. Venturicorp’s spectral warriors would, naturally, materialise out of a window in thin air the moment the target showed his face. There was absolutely nothing to worry about. This was, after all, a trap. So what could possibly go wrong? He wished he’d accepted the quartermaster’s chewing gum. It’d be something to do to pass the time.

  “Bernie?”

  He spun round. Directly in front of him was a short young man in a red robe with white trimmings and a fake white beard poking out from under the hood. “That’s me. Is that you under all that cotton wool?”

  He got no further. All around him the ice erupted into flying splinters the size of roof tiles. He ducked, and someone grabbed him. He opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, surrounded by goblins.

  “Sorry, Bernie,” Jersey said. “It’s a trap, you see.”

  “Yes, I know, but … Oh. You mean for me.”

  “ ’Fraid so. All right, lads, hit it.”

  The ice floe on which they were standing groaned horribly and sank like a freight elevator. A moment later it came back up again, completely bare and empty apart from a single sprig of holly. A moment after that several hundred windows opened in thin air. Stormtroopers in white plastic spilled out onto the ice, glanced around, scanned the holly with their thermal imagers and stood about in small groups, looking rather foolish.

  40

  Snib Venturi closed the CCTV portal on his screen, counted to ten and broke a pencil.

  His line, he knew, was, Why am I surrounded by idiots? A devotee of action movies across five galaxies, he’d seen this scene more often than he could remember. It was just that he’d never cast himself in the role of Baffled Villain before, and it was annoying him unbearably.

  The telemetry from the stormtroopers’ scanners was coming in. They showed nothing: no life signs, heat signatures, EM resonances, nothing to suggest that there was anything under the ice except more ice and, eventually, rock. The squad leader respectfully suggested packing the site with high-yield explosives and blasting a great big hole, to see if that would help. Failing which, could he please have permission to withdraw his men because bits of them were starting to fall off.

  Twelve hundred kilos of ultra-high explosive, at AND$2,999.99 a kilo. Still, he wasn’t paying for it, was he? “Go ahead,” he said. “Cook it up real good.”

  Which they did, bless them, and, sure enough, when the rocks had stopped falling out of the sky and it was safe to get a camera down there, it revealed a vein of ice ten yards deep and a hole in the ground rapidly filling with seawater. Outstanding.

  Never mind. He still had the young female, and the same clichéd narrative trope that had just made him break a perfectly good pencil in baffled rage would unquestionably bring the young idiot bustling down here as soon as he found out about it, and on Venturi turf without the reindeer guy to back him up it would be a very different scene, written, produced and directed by Snib Venturi, who would most definitely not interrogate the prisoner while sipping fine wines and stroking a white cat.

  The section leader was still on the line. “We could blow up a few glaciers while we’re here,” he said hopefully. “I mean, they could be under a glacier, couldn’t they? It’s where I’d be.”

  “I bet,” Snib said. “Sure, go ahead. Why not?”

  The section leader looked as though he couldn’t believe his luck. “Really?”

  “Really. Do a proper job. Blast right down to the magma layer if you have to.”

  A slow smile crept across the section leader’s face. “We’ll have to use triple charges.”

  It occurred to Snib Venturi that in all likelihood they’d be using BlastSure from Venturi Chemical Industries. Sales had been sluggish recently. “Go ahead,” he said. “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly. And even if it’s not.”

  “Sir?”

  “What are you using down there? BlastSure?”

  “BlastSure XD1000 Pro. It costs a bit more but—”

  “Go for it, Section Leader. And that’s an order.”

  A thought struck him as he put the receiver down, and he went to a filing cabinet and pulled out the planetary insurance policy. It was good cover (should be—it had cost enough); they were insured against everything that could possibly happen to the planet, excluding only deliberate sabotage and Act of God.

  “Get me that idiot back right now.”

  The section leader was a bit hard to understand, mostly because he had a length of fuse between his teeth. “We’re getting on with it, sir. You should have telemetry in—”

  “On second thoughts,” Snib said, “don’t use the XD1000. Stick to the conventional stuff.”

  “Oh. OK, sir. We’ve got some BlastMaster PPP Limited Edition, if that’d be better.”

  “No, definitely not. Just dynamite. Got that?”

  The section leader looked sad but resigned. “That’s a copy, sir. Telemetry in five.”

  41

  it’s a little-known fact that you can get blisters walking on water. True, there has to be a perfect storm of contributing factors: shoes just a bit too tight, especially where the backs bear on the Achilles tendon; waves just the right degree of choppiness, due to just the right level of wind; most of all, distance travelled and pace travelled at. But it can be done.

  Kevin trudged up the
beach at Ibiza, flopped down on the sand and took his shoes and socks off. He’d started out some time earlier from Alicante. It would be unfair to say nobody had taken any notice of him. Some kids in pedalos had waved as he set off; people in speedboats had yelled at him to get out of the way; some sardine fishermen in a small boat had crossed themselves and looked the other way. A passing yachtsman had glared at him, then ostentatiously poured the contents of his glass into the sea. Because of the time the crossing had taken, he’d arrived on the island at five in the morning, and there was nobody about. Face it, he told himself, as he wrapped strips of torn-up handkerchief around the soles of his feet, it hadn’t worked

  Why hadn’t it worked? When Jay did it, he’d been a sensation. Crowds had followed him home, instantaneously converted. Curious, that. Kevin had never quite managed to figure out why being able to get across a lake without a boat had convinced people that Jay’s proposed moral and ethical system was superior to anyone else’s. After all, boats aren’t that expensive, and most people in a fishing community would know someone who had one that they could borrow, if they didn’t own one themselves, and the logical leap from this guy doesn’t have to worry about caulking and teredo beetles to this guy must be right about the immortality of the soul struck him as tenuous. Still, Jay had wowed them with it back in A.D. 30. Maybe that was it: simpler times, simpler people, and if you saw someone striding confidently across the waves, you wouldn’t automatically assume he’d just bought the latest thing in ultra-compact jet skis.

  He looked around, and over to his right saw a vast building, terraced like a hillside, reminding him somewhat of the ziggurats of ancient Babylon, which in these parts could only be a hotel. In an hour or so they’d probably be serving breakfast. He tried to get his shoes back on his feet, but they no longer seemed to fit.