“I’d kill the bastard. But Jazz hasn’t even been on Capitol in forty years!”
“People are getting those promotions, Hop. Somebody’s controlling the somec review board the same way they’re controlling the Cabinet. And Jazz Worthing is involved. Do you want to see the proof? I’d love to show you.” Farl Baak walked to a looperone of the incredibly expensive home modelsand slipped in a loop. Immediately on a small viewing stage a half-size replica of Jason Worthing stood in full starpilot’s uniform. Baak punched the start button and adjusted the volume.
“Fellow soldiers of the Empire,” the holocene of Jazz began, and the speech went on, an eloquent reminder of all the ways that the troops and the fleets had been trodden on and ignored by those in high places in the government. The speech, if played before soldiers, would have had them ready to tear apart the entire civil service after only ten minutes. And then the holo of Jason Worthing dropped its voice and said, “But, brothers, none of this amounts to anything. It amounts to nothing at all. You haven’t suffered a bit, compared to this one outrage:
“You are not on somec, my friends.
“Except when they dump you in the belly of a ship and send you off to die in some forgotten colony, somec never reaches the common soldier. These friends of ours in the civil service scramble in their petty departmental squabbles in order to get five years, ten years, twenty years on somec at a time. What do you get? How long does a soldier live?
“In this Empire there are men and women who live forever! And youif you’re lucky, you’ll see a century. And you’ll spend the last fifty years of it on a pension that isn’t enough to buy a bottle once a month.” And so on. Until any soldier seeing it would be ready to kill anyone who kept him from somec. And the speech ended when Jason Worthing raised both hands above his head and cried out, “But there’s one manno, not meone man who can stop this, one man who can give you eternal life, if you’ll only help him, if you’ll only reach out with him and strike down the vipers who strangle you! And that man is here with me today!”
The holo of Jason Worthing turned and extended an arm, waiting for someone to appear.
And then the loop ended.
They all sat around the room in silence. Arran looked at Jason Worthing with loathing. Baak glanced at both the starpilot and his agent with an amused half-smile. Jason looked at Hop. Hop looked at Jason. “Jason, you’re a bastard,” Hop said.
4
“THE LOOP is a fake, Hop,” Jazz said, with feeling.
Baak chuckled. “Should we enlarge the image for you? Show you the fingerprints? It’s not fake. Jason Worthing is up to his ears in a plot to help someonethis mysterious person who controls the Cabinettake over somec, and with it the government, not in the subtle way he now controls it, but openly, overtly, taking the reins of power himself. And I don’t think I’m the only one who objects to someone playing around with my somec. I like the thought of being immortal. So does everybody else.”
Jason said again, now sounding more tired. “The loop is a fraud.”
Hop shook his head. “You can’t fake a loop, Jazz. I know you. And that was you.”
“You know me, but you don’t know what that loop means,” Jazz insisted.
Baak swung himself off the bed again, where he had reclined during the playback of the loop, and walked over to Jason. “Actually, Jazz, Arran’s little cup didn’t contain enough to kill you. Remember, the ritual she offered you required only a little sip. It would have put you to sleep long enough for us to get you here, where I can find out from you the one thing that nobody knows right now.”
“I don’t know anything that you don’t know,” Jason said wearily.
“You know one thing, Jazz. You know who is supposed to walk out when you hold out your arm in that loop. You know who our enemy is.”
Jason shook his head.
“Don’t worry, Jason. We don’t expect you to volunteer the information. When the probe gets through with you, you’ll have so little mind left that you won’t even notice when we kill you.” Baak waved to the guards and they pulled Jason out of the room.
Before the door slid closed behind them, though, Jason called out, “Don’t believe it, Hop!” Then silence.
Farl Baak looked at Hop with raised eyebrows. “He must value your opinion very highly, Mr. Noyock, to want so badly for you to deny the evidence of your own eyes.”
“Maybe,” Hop said.
“Now we have a problem, Hop. What to do with you. You’re a witness, unfortunately, and there could be serious legal repercussions to what happened today. Shimon Rapth and I have a lot left to accomplish, even after we find out from your ex-client who our enemy is.”
“My enemy, too,” Hop said.
“I’m glad you feel that way. Unfortunately, Hop, there’s always the risk that you might suddenly feel a rush of loyalty to the bastard whom you’ve served so well during the last few centuries, and we can’t afford to have you wandering around, able to tell people what you know. You understand?”
“I’d rather you didn’t kill me,” Hop said, amazed to discover that he could say that calmly. Baak laughed.
“Kill you! Of course not. You’ll just be my guest here for a few days. We aren’t animals, Hop. At least we try not to be. Arran will show you to your room. Unfortunately, we’ll have to lock the door behind you, but that can’t be helped. We happen to know that you’re a wily old devil, and there’s a strong risk of you sneaking out if we don’t bar the door.” Baak laughed again, but it was a friendly laugh, the kind of laugh that a good man laughs when he’s been worried for days, but now knows that things are going to work out well for him. Hop found himself feeling almost at ease.
Arran led the way down a short hall to another room. It was almost as plush as Farl Baak’s own. The guard waited outside as Arran went in with him. She touched his arm as he stood surveying his surroundings.
“Hop, I’m sorry I almost killed you there in the hiding place. I was fighting for my life.”
“All in a day’s work,” Hop said. “You aren’t the first.”
“What I’m saying, Hop, is that we were both forced into doing things we usually wouldn’t do. By Worthing. I don’t think we have to hate each other.”
“Are you looping this?” Hop asked.
“No,” she said, looking a little angry.
“Well, I am,” he said, and smiled. “I have an exclusive. I’ll give it to you for your birthday.”
She smiled back. “I was never born. Friends?”
Noyock shook his head. “Let’s just say, temporarily not trying to kill each other. Let me decide what to believe about Jazz.”
She looked ceilingward, but turned to leave. As she did, it occurred to Noyock that these people were basically decent. But, he reminded himself, they were also dangerous. (Never trust a woman who knows where to kick, my father always told me.)
“Can I ask you a question,” he said.
She turned and faced him, and waited.
“What is a probe? What will it do to him?”
She shook her head. “It’s fairly new and completely illegal and I don’t know much about it. A scientist who is with us invented it.”
“Who is us?”
“Just a few of us who believe that somec should be shared fairly. According to law. And this may not sound very plausible, coming from me, but we think it should be given only by merit. Not for money at all.”
“Damned stupid idea,” Noyock said. “I’d be dead now if that were the system when I came up out of the slime.”
“Well, there are some advantages to the system now, that’s true. But the main thing is that we’ve got to stop this man, whoever he is, from getting control of the Sleephouse. He’d have us all, then.”
“So it does boil down to self-preservation, in the end.”
“Who said it didn’t?” she retorted. “But you may be surprised to learn that sometimes even the rich and famous have consciences.”
“Ja
zz Worthing has a conscience, too,” Hop mused.
She laughed at him.
“I know him,” Hop said. “You don’t. Something doesn’t fit in all this.”
“Well, believe what you want, Hop. All I know about Jazz Worthing is that he’s sadistic and a traitor to humanity. Sorry if you like him, but when the probe finds out who the enemy is”
“Jason won’t tell it. He can take more pain than”
“It isn’t pain”
“He’s immune to all the drugsthey do that the week they enter the Service”
“It’s not drugs, either. The inventor told me that it’s like bright, dazzling lights that suddenly come and go from many directions. Only instead of lights, it’s brain waves, like the recorders in the sleephouse. It’s like pouring different mindsets into your brain, distracting you, driving you crazy, breaking down all will to resist. You tell anything. You respond to anything. It’s just too many surprises inside your own head.”
“And does anybody recover?”
“We’re not altogether sure. We’ve only used it a few times, and nobody has, if they stayed under for very long. If Jazz Worthing resists for very long at all, then he’ll lose his mind.” She patted Noyock’s arm. “Think of it this way. Your friend won’t even notice when he’s killed.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Sorry, old man.” It didn’t even sound like an obscenity when she said it. She left, and the door was locked behind her.
Hop went to the bed and lay down. The probe worked by surprise. It really would have a tough go with Jason Worthing, thenHop couldn’t remember ever seeing Jazz surprised at all. It was the same in all the loopswhatever the enemy did, Jazz always seemed to know just a hair in advance. He always spotted the ambush at the last moment. It made for great loops.
Even today. Even last night. Jazz had known the drink was drugged. He even seemed to know without asking
Hop got up and turned on the loop recorder’s playback. It was an excellent model, and the figures were almost a quarter sizeexcellent for a portable. It started with the duel. Hop jumped it forward. The crowd, panicking. Jazz picking up Arran. Knocking Kapock aside. Hop stopping to pound Kapock into the ground, then following Jazz to the exit.
Noyock watched closely, then. He tried to see when Jazz heard the answer from Arran about where the hiding place was. He couldn’t find it.
Breaking down the door. The library, and Jazz throwing Arran down and breaking her rib. Then. It had to be right then, and Hop took the action at tenth-speed, volume on full, close-up on the two heads, now larger than life-size. Jason, incredibly slowly, saying “Where’s the door?” Hop moved around, stared at Arran’s lips.
They did not move. She was nearly unconscious. She did not make a sound at all.
He shifted back to normal size when the holo showed Jazz walking away, straight to the two books. The door opened as Jazz pulled on something.
Arran hadn’t told him a thing. Hop sat, numbed, as the loop went on; turned down the volume when it became annoying; flipped off the machine when it finally stopped. Jazz knew things that hadn’t been told to him. The only place he could have found out about that door was from Arran’s mind.
(Be reasonable. If Jazz really is a traitor, he’d have sources of information.)
But he knew other things. The poison in the glass. How could he have learned about that forty years ago, before he left? And Hop knew for a fact that Jazz found out nothing after he came back to the planet. Unless he found it out in the ship before he disembarked. He might have… .
Jazz as a traitor or Jazz as a Swipe. If I can choose between them, Hop told himself, I’d rather he were a traitor.
Or would I? Hop remembered all his association with Jazz, from the beginning. The young starpilot, eager, enthusiastic, itching for battle. That couldn’t have been an act. And what change had there been since then? A gradual maturing. There was no time that Jazz seemed to show any change at all. When did he turn traitor? When did he start to plot? Noyock couldn’t believe it.
But Jason Worthing a Swipe? That was even harder to believe. But the glass, the door, the inside information he seemed to pluck from midair. Even the battle with Kapock, seeming to know every motion before he made it.
And Jazz had even told him he was a Swipe. Noyock had assumed he was joking. Wasn’t he?
Back and forth, back and forth, like a tennis duel, Noyock thought, and eventually he slept.
He awakened to the sound of the door opening. His first thought: they’ve come for me. He stiffened on the bed, prepared to struggle, though he didn’t know what he could hope to accomplish.
But the hands that touched him were gentle. Insistent, but gentle. And the voice saying, “Hop, wake up,” was Arran’s.
“Is it morning already?” he asked.
“Shut up. Come with me, fast. Don’t talk.”
She sounded frightened out of her wits. Hop got up and followed her as she led him out into the hall and through a large meeting-room. She stopped only long enough to say, in a barely audible whisper, “Do you know how to kill an armed man?”
“Sometimes,” Hop answered, wondering if he still remembered how. It was one thing to take Fritz Kapock from behind and by surprisequite another to face a man who was pointing a cockle at you.
“Now’s the time,” she said. She pushed a button and a door slid open. A guard was standing on the other side, already turning to see why the door behind him was opening. There was a laser in his hand. Hop didn’t stop to wonder why Arran was having him kill one of the men on her side. He just let the reflexes from his boyhood take over.
He finished with the guard by breaking his neck. In retrospect, Hop had the sickening knowledge that he had won only by a hair. Oh well, he thought. Better close than not at all. Still, when this was over, he’d have to lose weight. Get back in shape. This could kill him.
“Come here!” Arran hissed at him, and he came.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“There’s no time.” He followed her down the corridor. They went into a bathroom and closed and locked the door.
“Who’s chasing you?” Hop asked.
“We only have a couple of seconds,” she said. “In the shower, the ceiling light. Can you reach it?”
He could reach it. She told him to push it up. It gave fairly easily, then swung back, out of the way. Arran immediately stepped into the shower and reached for the opening. Hop helped her up. When she was through the trap, she hissed down at him, “Come on up, quickly, they’ll be here any minute, and I don’t know how many people know about this way.”
But Hop didn’t go into the trap door. Instead he stepped to the bathroom door and unlocked it.
“Hop, don’t!” she hissed, frightened. But he didn’t leave. He just left the door unlocked and climbed back into the shower and, with a great deal of difficulty hoisted himself up into the opening in the ceiling. Once there, it was hard to find a way to get his legs up through the opening. He could hear shouting down the corridor the way they had come. Arran heard it, too, and started pulling and tugging at him. “You’re not helping one damn little bit,” Hop said impatiently, and she left him alone as he finally got his weight up far enough to let him turn around and pull his legs up.
The moment he was clear, sweating and panting from the exertion, Arran pushed down the trap. Now an innocent-looking lighting fixture hung over the shower again.
“Why did you unlock the door!” she whispered angrily.
“Because a bathroom door locked from the inside with nobody there is an advertisement that there’s another way out.”
Worklights here and there provided a dim light, and soon they could both seea little. The crawlspace they were in was only a meter and a half highneither of them could stand up. Structural beams were hard to tell from air conduits, wiring frames, and exhaust shafts. Hop leaned over from the catwalk they were sitting on and pushing on a ceiling tile. It gave easily.
“Wonderful. Do you know your way around in here?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Not right here, anyway. Capitol isn’t the same anywhere. Nobody planned the remodeling over the last few thousand years. Good luck to us. Now will you tell me who the hell we’re running from?”
She nodded. But Hop noticed that she was breathing too heavily, and her hands were trembling. She didn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong?”
She just shook her head and started to cry. Hop had seen her cry several times before, in pain, for effect, a play for sympathy. But this looked like real honest-to-goodness little-girl tears. Nothing controlled. She wasn’t even beautiful or seductive as she cried. Her fans would be shocked. Hop reached over and touched her arm. A little human contact, he decided, might help. It didn’t. She recoiled, turned away from him.
“Go ahead and cry, then,” he said. “Just do it quietly.”
“I am, dammit,” she said. “Farl is dead.”
And that explained it, at least well enough for Hop, well enough for right now. Farl Baak was the one relationship that Arran Handully had never looped; therefore it wasn’t for sale to the public; therefore it must be real. And now he was dead, and her grief was also real.
“I’m sorry,” Hop said.
She nodded, acknowledging his sympathy, and began to get control of herself. “Sorry,” she finally said. “Sometimes things actually happen that aren’t in the day’s scenario,”
“Yeah. I’ll spill a few tears for you sometime and we’ll be even.”
“Don’t hurry,” she said, and managed a faint smile. “From now on I promise to cope. I don’t know where to go now, you know. I knew how to get here, but from here I have no idea.”
“Who killed him?”
“A man, just one of the guards. I didn’t know him. I went to watch thequestioning. With the probe. I couldn’t believe it, Hop. Jazz Worthing lasted an hour and a half. No one has lasted fifteen minutes. An hour and a half. It was terrible. Like waiting for a deal to close in the other room, you know at first that it’ll be simple, but when it takes longer, and longer, and longer, you begin to think that it’s gone sour, that it’ll never happen.”
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