She tried to follow him. “You write—plays? Books? Cyber experiences?”
“All of the above,” he responded with a smile and a shrug. “It’s a lot more complicated these days in some ways, but the professional storyteller remains the oldest profession of humankind!”
“I thought something else was the oldest profession,” she noted.
He chuckled. “That’s what they all think! But, listen, it wasn’t just animal lust that got the first whore in bed with the first man. No, ma’am. It was because that first man, and first woman probably, and maybe even the first whore, all had fantasies. The fantasies came first, then the act, then more storytelling afterwards as the first man tried to explain it away to the first woman. It doesn’t matter. We storytellers sometimes get shot but we generally don’t starve. One of the earliest tales is of Scheherazade, who was supposed to be executed for something or other but got to telling stories the king found fascinating. She knew when she ran out of stories she’d lose her head, so she kept telling them, a thousand and one, until the old king forgot or dropped dead or whatever. And thousands of years later and on worlds hundreds of light-years from Old Earth, they still remember her name, the storyteller’s name, while nobody knows who that king was.”
“So you lie for a living, so to speak?”
“Well, not really. I entertain, or I’m at the start of the entertainment chain. Without me there’s nothing to watch, nothing to see, hear, or experience. It’s not a lie if you know it’s not the truth, but it entertains you. You mean you never saw any of the big productions? Never walked into a cyberworld story or even had a favorite story or poem you read as a kid?”
She gave a wry smile but decided not to mention her lack of reading skills. “No, not really. I’ve done some cybersex stuff and I’ve heard a lot of stories in my time, but I never was anywhere where you could see the kind of stuff you’re talking about. The most I ever saw on that score was a play once, with one real actor interacting with a bunch of cyber characters on a stage. They all looked and sounded real enough, but it was kind of boring. The language was so weird you could hardly follow it, but it did get bloody now and then.”
He shrugged. “Sorry about that. That’s kind of a lowbrow, low-budget cousin to the kind of things I do. Still, we might be able to put together a package that would make us all a little money. What do you say about that?”
“I can use it. They’re gonna be coming after me real soon for the ship rental. How much are we talking about?”
He gave a low, apologetic cough. “Well, not much up front, but once we get a script and studio deal and then start production there’ll be more. Most of it would be in royalties, percentage of the net, after the thing’s released and the money comes in. That can take a while.”
“How long’s a while?”
“Oh, a year or two. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But it goes on and on.”
“I don’t have a year. I need some money in days, or weeks,” she told him honestly. “The kind of people who’ll be coming to look for me to collect don’t like waiting around.”
“Huh! Too bad! What kind of money you talking about? That you owe, that is?”
“Rental of the Stanley for sixty days, which is sixty thousand, and repair of damages and losses to equipment, maybe another twenty or so.”
He whistled. “Eighty thousand? That’s a bit steep for what you’d get up front on this deal, although you might well make much more than that down the pike. Wonder if they’d accept your percentage in payment?”
“If they would, it would solve everything, but, truth to tell, if they didn’t I’d be a dead woman, and I don’t plan to have to stand there while we find out. No, my best bet is to try for a smaller amount and just screw it. For under ten grand I could become somebody else. Somebody they wouldn’t recognize even with a genetic scanner.”
Norman Sanders leaned back thoughtfully in his chair and said nothing for a while. Then he reached into his inner coat pocket and removed what appeared to be a small jewel case. He opened it, and carefully removed a huge gem from its custom holder inside, then leaned forward and held it out to her.
“Ever see one of these?” he asked her.
It was, apparently, a natural gem almost as large as a hen’s egg, colored in a translucent emerald-green color with a clearly visible center of some different substance that, when viewed from different angles, seemed to form pictures or shapes of some sort. She had never seen anything like it.
Staring into it, she was startled to see that the pictures inside seemed to congeal into images of strange, bizarre landscapes peopled with real, familiar figures from her own past, glimpsed only fleetingly. It was like watching tiny bits of past experiences in her own life against a backdrop of lavalike motion creating the shapes and swallowing them almost as fast as the act of creation had made them.
“I—how does it do that?” she asked, mouth agape, watching the increasingly personalized visions, many of which were becoming quite disturbing.
“Nobody knows. It comes from your own mind, though. I don’t know what you’re seeing, but it wouldn’t be what I see, or what anybody else would see in it. It’s a Magi’s Stone, sometimes called the Magi’s Gift. There are fewer than a thousand known, and they all pretty much look alike and do that sort of thing, although some are colored more like rubies, others sapphires, running through the gamut of gem colors. It’s quite rare. In fact, there are a lot of folks around who’d kill for that thing, even though they couldn’t sell it. They’re all registered, their owners known, and the insurance boys would make the ones after you look like teddy bears when they hunted for it.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off it. “Where—where did it come from?”
“Nobody is really sure. The name comes from the general belief that it comes from the Three Kings. Ever hear of them?”
“Who hasn’t? Paradise, the Joys of Heaven. Three worlds nobody knows the location of that will give you your heart’s desire. Never much believed they really existed, though. Maybe now I do, sort of. But if this thing’s so valuable, how do you dare carry it with you? Particularly on a world like this?”
“Well, because I’m fairly well armed in spite of what you see, and in its case it’s so booby-trapped that it would kill anyone trying to get it. Better hand it back. I know it’s endlessly fascinating, but the images get darker and darker as you look, and eventually—”
She suddenly gave a cry and dropped the stone onto the table. He was prepared and quickly reached out, grabbed it on the first bounce, and put it back into the case, closed it, then put it back in his pocket.
“There was— something. Somebody…” she managed, in something of a whisper.
“Yes, I know,” he replied.
“Something that knew, and instead of me seeing it through that thing, it was seeing me!”
“Oh, yes. He always shows up, sooner or later.”
She stared at him, genuinely shaken as even the worm had never bothered her. “He?”
“Well, I call it a ‘he,’ but it’s probably not a he, or a she, but more of an ‘it.’ I just feel more comfortable calling it a he, that’s all. Gives you the willies, doesn’t he?”
She nodded. “Is he— real? I mean, is he actually looking at me when I’m looking in there, or is it just an illusion, like the personal visions?”
“Nobody knows. He doesn’t show up all the time, or at any given interval, either on this one or in the others, but he’s always around somewhere. That’s why you don’t stare too long. They’ve never been able to synthesize these, not the real ones. Some neat-looking imitations, but nowhere near the real thing. You know the real thing the moment you look into it, whether he shows up or not. They’ve never figured out what triggers the images in the mind, either. Best guess is some sort of natural force or radiation, but they’ve never been able to measure and identify one. They can’t really get inside one, either. The word is that they tried when the first batch was discovered. Eve
ry time you try and cleave it, and I mean every time, it shatters into a million tiny fragments, nothing more than powder, that analysis shows have some unusual chemical bondings, but nothing so alien as to explain the effect or give away its secrets. There are, however, people who won’t look into them. Not just superstitious types, real smart and powerful people. They think there’s a possibility that the thing works in some unknown, alien way as a receiver and transmitter.”
“How’s that?”
“That while you look at it, the thing’s reading all your memories and broadcasting them in some way, through a medium we can’t understand, to his data banks.”
She felt a slight chill. Just the idea that that… thing inside there that she’d touched on some plane for just a few brief moments was doing some kind of mental readout made her feel more violated than a physical rape. It was that disturbing a sensation when she’d connected with it.
She began to understand just what the Doc had been feeling locked in the C&C talking to that worm.
“Why did you show me this, Mr. Sanders?”
He gave her a wry smile. “I thought you might be tempted to do a little prospecting.”
She stared at him. “Where? And with what?”
“I’ve been using some of my off-time for several seasons looking for just the right combination of people to do this sort of job,” he told her. “I told you I was going to look you up if we hadn’t met here, and I meant it. You and your people seem almost uniquely qualified for this sort of thing.”
“And ‘this sort of thing’ is what, exactly?”
He took a deep breath, then said, “I am almost positive I know how to reach the Three Kings. No kidding, no joke, no fake theatrical gimmicks. I’m too rooted in reality to believe in all that paradise guff, but I do know this: just a handful of these Magi’s Stones and you could buy yourself your own paradise. There are other things as well that are associated with the Kings that could be worth even more. It’s not a salvage job exactly, but that’s why I came here. Salvage people might be able to go get these riches, figure out what was what, and do something nobody else has so far managed to do: get back in one piece.”
“I was wondering about that,” she told him. “Everybody’s heard of this magical realm, and there are all sorts of stories about wrecked ghost ships being discovered with treasures from them inside, and even one in good shape with nobody in it, but I never heard anybody who claimed they’d been there and come back, even the drunk and stoned braggarts of the universe. It’s a deathtrap, if it exists at all. And now that I’ve met your little buddy in that green hellstone, I think the Kings are probably a scam. Not our scam, maybe. His scam, maybe. Send pretty little baubles to the barbarians so a few would come and become his pets or lab experiments or something like that. That’s a one-way trip, mister.”
“Perhaps. But the stones are real. The artifacts are real. The detailed scouting reports from the Three Kings’ discoverer, with the locations unfortunately damaged in transit, were real enough to prove that these are real worlds. Moons, most likely, from what I can tell. Big, planet-sized moons around a massive gas giant. Three of them warm enough and with atmosphere enough to support life as we understand it. I’m pretty sure I know how to get there, and I’m just as sure I know why nobody’s made it all the way back yet, at least why most ships are wrecked if they try. You have to get there using a wild hole. No wormgates, and a wild and totally uncharted and unpredictable ride there and back. Not many ships could take the punishment, and even fewer captains could. But nobody since the first scout so long ago has been a cybernetic ship, a living ship, and I think your captain, the Stanley’s captain, is uniquely qualified to do it successfully. She’s ridden a couple of wild holes before. I looked up her history. And you, you and your current crew, they’ve met an alien intelligence and they beat it. You all beat it. You know salvage, you know value, you’ve got the guts, and you’re virtually unique in having outthought and outfought an alien mind. If this ship and crew couldn’t make it in and out, then I don’t know who could.”
“You can can the flattery, but I’m beginning to see your point here. The question is, first, why should we chance it? The odds were almost nil that we got back in one piece this last time. The odds on this one are much, much smaller.”
He gave a Cheshire Cat-type grin. “You’ve got only two choices. You all find whatever little menial jobs you can and dream of what might have been, or you do this and maybe wind up owning a world or two. You are certainly holding the bag if nobody else is. You won’t get the money for that ID change here. It would take months driving a tug to make that kind of money, and on a place like this, one of the universe’s assholes, selling yourself would bring in even less. You don’t even have passage to anywhere the syndicate goons won’t find you in a matter of days anyway. You know what’s going to happen. If you don’t kill yourself or make them kill you, they’ll take you back, jack into your brain, and make you a conspicuous slave to feed their egos, with decades of public exhibition and humiliation as an example with no way out. But you’ll make them kill you first, if you can, won’t you? I’ve heard excerpts of the conversations you had ship to ground on that ghost world. There’s only room for you in your universe; you’d have let them die if they’d tried to get out without bringing back all the shit, or if there was any chance of bringing up the worm. If the computers had given you any odds at all of success you’d have tried to salvage that anyway, even if it meant all their lives. Excuse me for being blunt, but you’ll do it because you’ve got nothing left to lose.”
All at once she hated him. She’d killed once for not much more of that kind of smug assholery than he’d just given her. The problem was, in his case, he was trying to make her do a deal on his terms, and in that she almost admired him for that same insulting toughness. It was so much like, well, her.
“So, if we could make a deal, what makes you think I could get the others?”
He smiled broadly. “Let’s all meet for lunch tomorrow in my suite at the Stellar. I can be very persuasive.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” she warned him.
He nodded sagely. “You do that. You think about it a great deal.” And, polishing off his beer, he got up and left, saying no more.
VI: A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
They had all come.
Somehow, that had surprised An Li, although it didn’t seem to surprise Sanders at all. She had an idea that very little surprised the slimy weasel.
Just overnight, she’d discovered a lot about him. That he was, in fact, a rich producer of thrillers, and that a percentage of the net was a joke in his industry about akin to saying “when pigs fly.” With some good accounting even the most successful productions somehow never saw a profit; nobody, it seemed, ever had produced a single thing that had made one single penny. Funny about that. Buy cheap, make a fortune, and, through creative bookkeeping, keep said fortune. Show business sounded like the same sort of thing as the kind of folks who’d loaned her the money for the earlier expedition, only Sanders and his types were always legal. What a racket!
She’d also fingered his traveling associates, a young, muscular guy and a woman with a face and body to die for. She hadn’t put them together until she saw them both at Sanders’s hotel suite, setting up things for a working lunch, as it were.
All the time she’d spent sizing him up as a mark, and they were already on her tail and reporting to the boss on her movements. He dangled his bait and she’d taken it, thinking she was conning him.
The penthouse of the Stellar was sumptuous, even for Sepuchus. There probably weren’t but one or two like this on the whole planet, and they were here only for the kind of people who were outfitting a city or a fleet. Its sheer opulence was testament to what a knowledgeable designer could do even with salvaged parts.
The table was real polished wood, not synthetic, polished so perfectly that you could use it like a mirror, and the chairs were firm but plush, made of wood an
d natural fabrics. Sanders himself had not yet made an appearance, but they expected him to emerge from behind massive bronze doors at some point. The two assistants were now acting as host and hostess; the man, who seemed barely out of boyhood, introduced himself as “Jules, Mister Sanders’s personal assistant,” whatever that meant, and the sexy young woman with more than ample everything and a voice that was higher than An Li had ever heard before said she was Mister Sanders’s secretary, Suzy. Neither spoke or revealed very much, but they didn’t have to. The few present who hadn’t seen these types in their natural habitats still knew what they were. Randi Queson had tired of rolling her eyes, Lucky seemed amused by them, while Sark and Jerry Nagel betrayed their hormonal directions even as they pretended to be strictly business.
An Li had already briefed them on the basics, but left out the Three Kings part for the moment. She had also warned each of them that, if they had anything at all in their wallets, they should grip them tightly in Sanders’s presence.
There was a buzz at the main door, and Jules answered it. It turned out to be a small army of men and women dressed in white pushing carts full of what had to be food into the room and towards them. They proceeded to set the table and then place the food on it in containers that preserved the proper temperatures. It looked and smelled wonderful.
An Li wondered how much it cost to tip this kind of mob to do what two machines could have done just as well, but she kept quiet. Any man who could waste this kind of money just feeding his ego by showing off human service was somebody who certainly should be listened to.
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