Wildeblood's Empire

by Brian Stableford

  I knew that I wasn’t offering him much. I was encouraging him all I could, but I didn’t really have a lot to bargain with. On the other hand, he’d already taken the risk. He’d passed me the message arranging the meeting. If he didn’t give me anything it was his loss, his wasted efforts.

  “You’ve only scratched the surface so far,” he said. “You don’t know what’s underneath Wildeblood’s rule.”

  I stayed silent. Maybe I didn’t. Very probably, in fact.

  “You have to help us,” he said. “When you know, you’ll see that you have to help us.”

  I still didn’t answer. There was no answer.

  “I’m going to give you two things,” he said. “I’m taking a big risk. But it’s important—to you as well as to us. I’m not going to say too much. If they find what I’ve given you it’s nothing to do with me. I deny everything. They’ll believe you if you turn them over now and have me arrested—but once you’ve started to look into them on your own account, to find out what they are, you’re guilty too. I advise you not to tell them.”

  After that long and rather unimpressive speech he reached into his coat and brought out a small package about the size of a folded finger. He passed it over to me while he transferred something else to his other hand.

  “It’s not much,” he said. “The stuff’s precious. Analyze it. Find out what it is, what it does, where it comes from. And find out what you can do with it.”

  “That’s rather a lot of things to find out,” I commented.

  “Can you do it?” He seemed anxious.

  “I can try,” I conceded. Privately, I was fairly confident. The lab had the facilities to do just about anything in that line.

  Then he passed me the other item—a piece of paper. It was a domestic product, thick and handmade.

  “There are numbers on it,” he said, and I made to open it for inspection. “Don’t look now. The numbers are a code. I don’t have the key. If you can crack it, you may find the contents interesting. If you do, then it may be possible to trade. We need the key—and we have the rest of the message. I don’t know whether you can crack it or not...but try. It’s important—to us, and maybe to you as well.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t like the idea of coded messages. It seemed a bit stupid—so close to melodrama it had to be a joke. But he was serious. And this was Wildeblood, and something more like the Middle Ages than the twenty-fourth century.

  “Can’t you tell me any more?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. He was lying. He was holding something in reserve. It made sense, from his end. He had to keep something. Maybe he’d already given us too much.

  “I take it you’ve tried to crack the code yourself?” I said.

  “For a long time,” he said. “For a very long time. But what do we know about codes?”

  What do we? I asked myself. Somehow, the UN hadn’t felt it necessary to attach a cryptographer to the crew. But Nathan had a devious mind. Maybe he could do it.

  “How do I contact you?” I asked.

  “You don’t,” he said. “Don’t ever try. It’s too dangerous. If you started asking questions.... They’re too careful. I’ll get to you again. Soon. Don’t waste any time.”

  “I won’t,” I assured him. “But don’t expect miracles. No miracles of any kind.”

  He knew what I meant. It didn’t make him happy, but he was a realist. A hopeful one maybe, but a realist. He’d had to take the chance of approaching us, just in case there was an opportunity for him, but he wasn’t expecting any messiahs, or armies of liberation either.

  It was all a rather sorry mess: meetings in graveyards, cautious interchanges of semi-promises. But under the circumstances....

  I couldn’t help thinking of it as crude melodrama, but to him it was normal. A way of life....

  We parted. He disappeared into the gloom, carrying no light. I made my way carefully through the maze of stones the way I’d come. It was going to be a hard day tomorrow—not the sort of day I’d have preferred to face without a good night’s sleep. But needs must when the devil drives.

  And I had the feeling that on Wildeblood/Poseidon there was a devil, somewhere, doing some hard driving.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Next day, when I went back to the Daedalus after breakfast, I was, of course, followed. It wasn’t Elkanah, my appointed guide—he was a servant, but one of some status, above such menial tasks as the daily spying detail. It was, in fact, a younger man with blond hair. He would have been easy to spot in a crowd, and he didn’t take any trouble to conceal either himself or his purpose.

  I didn’t like that. I didn’t care for being watched so closely, but even more I didn’t care for the carelessly blatant way it was done. It became a kind of insult—almost an intimidation. I had complained once, but the way the complaint was received had simply supplemented the insult. Zarnecki—Philip’s right-hand man and the one who seemed to hand out all the orders—had simply said that it was for our protection. When I’d expressed a desire to be responsible for my own protection he’d said—very smoothly—that we were on his world and that he and Philip were responsible, and that there was no way he could square it with his own conscience to let us roam around unprotected. He hadn’t used precisely those words, but that had been the gist of his meaning.

  I didn’t like Zarnecki. I didn’t like any of them, but Zarnecki least of all. He was tall and slim, olive-skinned and black-haired but with strangely colored eyes—deep blue around the pupil’s rim shading to gray-brown at the iris’s extremity. He gave the impression of being extremely fond of himself while not thinking too highly of others—any others.

  He was, of course, fairly closely related to Philip. Just about every member of the upper crust—whether they lived in the house or elsewhere—was a cousin a couple of times removed. I got the impression the aristocracy had been formed entirely by the marrying of the early Wildeblood children. James had had four—two of each.

  I generally thought of Zarnecki as the opposition, although I wasn’t really sure we had grounds for conflict with Philip’s coterie—not, at any rate, grounds which Nathan and standing orders would recognize. Zarnecki was the front man—the executive arm of the dictatorial clique. It was him who set the men to watch us and report our every move, even though he acted in Philip’s name and, undoubtedly, with Philip’s full approval.

  It was, therefore, Zarnecki I cursed as the blond youth ambled along the dirt road in my wake. In the early days I had occasionally stopped and let my shadow catch up, hoping that the irony of the gesture might discourage them. But it didn’t. The closer they got, the better they seemed to like it. So now I let them keep the full distance of their ungenerous discretion.

  Pete Rolving and Karen Karelia were aboard the Daedalus, having been appointed to look after the baby for the duration. Nathan and I were staying at the house—guests of the State—and other members of the expedition—Mariel, Conrad and Linda —had gone to the mainland on a special project. Unlike Floria and Dendra, where we’d previously called, Poseidon had intelligent indigenes. Mariel had gone out to exercise her special talents and make contact.

  Pete and Karen were both up and about when I got there—he overstaying the end of one shift and she up early for another. They kept the routine religiously, with what seemed to me to be ridiculous untiring devotion to the letter of their duty. Karen, I knew, would have been grateful for a chance to get out and into whatever action there might be, but with the personnel shortage there was little chance. Pete didn’t mind. He got separation anxiety if he stepped outside the airlock.

  Pete made me a cup of coffee. It was one thing that the colonists didn’t have and didn’t have any reasonable substitute for.

  “I contacted the bad guys last night,” I told them. “Or the good guys, depending on whether or not you’re a Robin Hood fan.”

  “How?” asked Pete.

  “Slipped out after dark. Met him in the cemetery in response to his hoarsely whispere
d invitation. Cloak-and-dagger all the way. He’s a dead ringer for Cyrano de Bergerac, but he also plays guitar.”

  “And you signed an agreement in blood, no doubt?” contributed Karen.

  “Not exactly,” I replied. “I wasn’t in my best conspiratorial mood. Couldn’t really enter into the spirit of the thing. But he tried hard. Gave me a message in code.”

  They didn’t know whether to believe me. I took out the piece of paper and showed them. I also had the package and I dropped that on the table too.

  “What’s that?” asked Pete.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Karen studied the numbers on the piece of paper. Pete peered over her shoulder.

  They went: 688668.585775.971875.7.74.679234.1145874.16831. 598589966.

  “Not exactly a long message, is it?” she said.

  “That’s just a sample,” I told her. “He says we might get the rest if we crack it.”

  “And how are we supposed to crack it without the rest?” asked Pete. “How the hell can we do a frequency analysis with only nine words—if they are words? Could be a string of telephone numbers for all we know. Or co-ordinates. Map reference to Treasure Island.”

  I shrugged. “You two have damn all to do all day,” I said. “Take copies and start thinking. Use your intuition.”

  It wasn’t really true that they had nothing to do. In fact, they had all the boring work that Nathan and I begged out of on account of being in the field—collating the data we brought in, storing it in the computer, analyzing samples I picked up virtually everywhere I went—soil, crops, blood, and less p1easant things. Nobody really had so much free time that they could spend hours at a time staring at a row of figures and hoping for a blinding flash of insight. The wandering minstrel had hinted that his cronies had spent a good deal of their time working at the whole thing without any significant inspiration. The fact that they were ill-educated didn’t really handicap them all that much. They knew the alphabet.

  But Pete took a couple of copies anyhow. It didn’t take long.

  The airlock alarm sounded again, and Karen went to let Nathan in. He’d come back at my signal, to check with me before he went about the day’s business.

  “Your shadow keeping mine company?” I asked, as he came in.

  He shook his head. “I rode out in the carriage,” he said. “With Miranda. She’s my guardian angel for today. We’re going to Farina.”

  Farina was an island to the south, one of about forty in the archipelago that had a significant settlement. I’d only seen six so far, and Nathan had visited about the same number. If there were any dread secrets that Philip wanted kept, there were plenty of hiding places.

  “Can you get some soil samples?” I asked him. “And sea-water close to the shore? The usual?”

  He nodded. He leaned forward and picked up the paper from the table. He glanced at it idly, expecting it to be nothing worthy of his attention, but suddenly snatched it up in surprise.

  “Where did you get this?” he demanded.

  “That’s what I wanted to tell you,” I said. “The guy with the guitar playing in the market yesterday—he asked me to meet him last night. I got out of the house okay and met him in the cemetery. He gave me that—also a packet of some foul-tasting white powder. He’s playing his cards close to his chest but I think there’s something significant in it somewhere.”

  “I’ll bet there is,” he muttered, still looking at the numbers. “Who is he?”

  “He didn’t give his name. But he’s no friend of Philip’s. I guess he’s as close to opposition as we’re likely to find. A bandit, maybe, or a rebel. Impossible to say what might be behind him.”

  “And you slipped out of the house in the early hours to meet him?”

  “What was I supposed to do?” I asked. “Report him to the gendarmes?”

  “It was a risk. If they find an excuse to get mad with us they might just take it, you know. We’re not exactly popular. If they figure out a pretext to tell us to get the hell out we’ll be in a difficult situation. If they only knew how much authority we don’t have they might do it anyhow.”

  “They won’t do that while they still think they stand a chance of persuading us that everything in the garden’s roses,” I said. “And besides which, they don’t know. Nobody saw me. So tell me about the paper. What’s it mean?”

  “As to that?” he said. “I haven’t a clue. But what I have got is another copy of the puzzle.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a very similar bit of paper. He gave them both to me and I compared them. They were both handwritten in black ink, but neither the writing nor the ink was the same. The only difference was that Nathan’s copy had one more number on it. Just a pair of digits: 16.

  “They obviously think you need more help,” I said. “They’ve given you an extra one. Who was it?”

  “Miranda,” he answered, pensively.

  That was a surprise. Miranda was one of the legions of cousins. Her surname wasn’t Wildeblood, or even Zarnecki, but she seemed well in, especially with Zarnecki. She seemed to have been assigned to Nathan in much the same way that Elkanah had been assigned to me—something which seemed to me to be monumentally unfair. Not only was she one of the masters while Elkanah was a servant but she was pretty and he was not. They seemed to have an altogether mistaken idea of the relative status of myself and Nathan.

  “Why would Miranda be passing you bits of coded message?” I asked.

  “The obvious answer,” he said, “is that she wants the key to the code. That, after all, is what she asked me, in her guileless fashion.”

  “Didn’t she tell you what it was or why she was asking? Hell, she must have said something.”

  Nathan shook his head. “She treated it as if it were a game. A kind of coquettish challenge. I thought it was a game. Something silly. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Zarnecki put her up to it,” I said. It was just an opinion formed out of prejudice. But I would have backed it with money.

  “But why?” he said. “If your man doesn’t know the key, it can’t be his secret message. And if Zarnecki doesn’t have the key, it can’t be his. So whose is it? Or who’s lying to us?”

  “Everybody’s lying to us,” I said tiredly. “Leave the damn thing until you’ve a spare moment. It may be important, it may be just something stupid—hell, it may even be a device to distract us. I’m going to concentrate on the package. That I can handle.”

  Nathan took back his copy of the conundrum, and returned to more mundane considerations.

  “What did you promise this man you met?” he asked.

  “Not a thing,” I assured him. “I was the perfect diplomat.”

  “Is he dangerous?”

  “How would I know? Dangerous to whom? That’s a stupid question if ever there was one!”

  He didn’t seem offended. He was too preoccupied to be offended. “You’re going to be aboard all day?” he asked. I nodded in reply, and he turned to Karen. “Are you going out?”

  “Later maybe,” she said. “When my shift ends.”

  “Be careful,” he said.

  She shrugged, but he wouldn’t let it go.

  “I mean it,” he said. “There’s something in the air. Things are beginning to happen. They’re making moves. They aren’t going to stick a knife in your back—yet. But be careful.”

  “Something is rotten in the State of...,” she said, sarcastically.

  He didn’t reply. But they were both right. Something was rotten in this pretty little dictatorship which seemed to be working so well. I felt it. I knew it. There had to be something rotten...it wouldn’t be natural otherwise. If there’s one thing we has learned so far it was that all worlds had little surprises up their sleeves—for the colonies, for us.

  “James Wildeblood must have been one hell of a clever bastard,” I commented, letting the stream of thought carry me on. “To take over a colony from scratch, come to total dominance, and establish a hi
storical pattern that could hold perfectly for over a century. And he did it all in 33 years.”

  `Well,” said Karen, “if anyone can figure out how, it ought to be you. On the survey team, he had your job.”

  It was intended to be a simple nasty crack. But it was also true. It was a joke that pleased them all—Nathan, Karen...even Conrad. James Wildeblood and me. Evolutionary ecologists both. Ecologists and biochemists. He’d had experience like mine, a job not too dissimilar to mine.

  And he’d also built an empire. Not to mention founding a dynasty.

  You just can’t tell what kind of potential some people have.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I spent most of the day tracking the sample carefully through the standard series of analytical tests and a few extra ones. It was a complicated molecule belonging to a class of biological products not uncommon on Poseidon—prevalent, in fact, throughout the life-system. It was a kind of super-steroid. Simpler molecules in the group were used by the local organisms as reservoir molecules for nutrient storage, the more complex ones were usually physiologically active as hormones or as catalytic fellow-travelers in enzymic manufactory processes. My specimen was one of the largest molecules of the family, about eighty-percent pure—most of the pollutants being breakdown debris. Whatever process had been used to extract and isolate it had also knocked it about a little bit. That was only to be expected. The colony had nothing that could hold the faintest candle to the Daedalus lab. They were pretty clever to get eighty-percent—but then, James Wildeblood had been the man for the job.

  Because it was such a large molecule the procedures took time. They practically ate up the day. It wasn’t exactly strenuous work but don’t ever let anyone tell you that computer-aided analysis with automatic measurement at every stage is labor-saving. It may save your fingers and it’s freed us forever from the embarrassment of the pipette, but you need eyes like a hawk and a brain in overdrive if you hope to keep up. I always tried to keep up—in the course of a couple of thousand mechanical operations something always slips a cog, and if you don’t catch it as and when you might as well start all over.