by Jack Dann
They could have, too. It was the Third Dynasty that acted without regard to local custom, which made it liable to local laws. Over the years, no interstellar court had overturned a ruling in instances like that.
"Carson agreed to it," she said. "He agreed so no one else would suffer. Then we got me out."
"And no one came looking for you until I did."
"That's right," she said.
"I don't think Anetka's going to stop," I said. "I suspect she wants her father to change the will—"
"What?" Sylvy clenched her collar with her right hand, revealing the wrist-top. It was one of the most sophisticated I'd seen.
"Anetka wants control of the Third Dynasty, and I was wondering why her father hadn't done a will favoring her. Now I know. She was probably hoping I couldn't find you so that her father would change the will in her favor."
"He can't," Sylvy said.
"I'm sure he might consider it, if your son's life is at stake," I said. "The Wygnin treat their captives like family—indeed, make them into family, but the techniques they use on adults of other species are—"
"No," she said. "It's too late for Carson to change his will."
She was frowning at me as if I didn't understand anything. And it took me a moment to realize how I'd been used.
Anetka Sobol had tricked me in more ways than I cared to think about. I wasn't half as good as I thought I was. I felt the beginnings of an anger I didn't need. I suppressed it. "He's dead, isn't he?"
Sylvy nodded. "He died three years ago. He installed a personal alarm that notified me the moment his heart stopped. My son has been voting his shares through a proxy program my husband set up during one of his trips here."
I glanced at the wrist-top. No wonder it was so sophisticated. Too sophisticated for a simple administrator. Carson Sobol had given it to her, and through it, had notified her of his death. Had it broken her heart? I couldn't tell, not from three years' distance.
She caught me staring at it, and brought her arm down. I turned away, taking a deep breath as the reality of my situation hit me. Anetka Sobol had outmaneuvered me. She had put me in precisely the kind of case I never wanted.
I was working for the Tracker. I was leading a Disappeared to her death and probably the death of her son. "I don't get it," I said, "if something happens to your son, Anetka still won't inherit."
Sylvy's smile was small. "She inherits by default. My son will disappear, and stop voting the proxy program. She'll set up a new proxy program and continue to vote the shares. I'm sure the Board thinks she's the person behind the votes anyway. No one knows about our son."
"Except for you, and me, and the Wygnin." I closed my eyes. "Anetka had no idea you'd had a son."
"No one did," Sylvy said. "Until now."
I rubbed my nose with my thumb and forefinger. Anetka was good. She had discovered that I was the best and the quickest Retrieval Artist in the business. She had studied me and had known how to reach me. She had also known how to play at being an innocent, how to use my past history to her advantage. She hired me to find her Original, and once I did, she planned to get rid of him. It would have been easy for her too; no hitman, no attempt at killing. She wouldn't have had to do anything except somehow—surreptitiously—let the Wygnin know how to find the Original. They would have taken him in payment for the Third Dynasty's crimes, he would have stopped voting his shares, and she would have controlled the corporation.
Stopping Anetka wasn't going to be easy. Even if I refused to report, even if Sylvy and her son returned to hiding, Anetka would continue looking for them.
I had doomed them. If I left this case now, I ensured that one of my colleagues would take it. They would find Sylvy and her son. They would find Sylvy and her son. My colleagues weren't as good as I was, but they were good. And they were smart enough to follow the bits of my trail that I couldn't erase.
The only solution was to get rid of Anetka. I couldn't kill her. But I could think of one other way to stop her.
I opened my eyes. "If I could get Anetka out of the business, and allow you and your son to return home, would you do so?"
Sylvy shook her head. "This is my home," she said. She glanced at the fake adobe walls, the southwestern decor. Her fingers touched a blanket hanging on the wall behind her. "But I can't answer for my son."
"If he doesn't do anything, he'll be running for the rest of his life?"
She nodded. "I still can't answer for him. He's an adult now. He makes his own choices."
As we all did.
"Think about it," I said, handing her a card with my chip on it. "I'll be here for two days."
XI
They hired me, of course. What thinking person wouldn't? I had to guarantee that I wouldn't kill Anetka when I got her out of the business—and I did that, by assuring Sylvy that I wasn't now nor would I ever been an assassin—and I had to guarantee that I would get the Wygnin off her son's trail.
I agreed to both conditions, and for the first time in years, I did something other than tracking a Disappeared.
Through channels, I let it drop that I was searching for the real heir to Carson Sobol's considerable fortune. Then I showed some of my actual research—into the daughter's history, the falsified birth date, the inaccurate records. I managed to dump information about Anetka's cloning and her sex change, and I tampered with the records to show that her clone mark had been faked just as her sex had. Alterations, done at birth, made her look like a clone when she really wasn't.
I made sure that my own work on-line looked like sloppy detecting, but I hid the changes I made in other files. I did all of this quickly and thoroughly, and by the time I was done, it appeared as though Carson Sobol had hidden his own heir—originally a son—by making him into a daughter and passing him off as a clone.
At that point, I could have sat back and let events move forward by themselves. But I didn't. This had become personal.
I had to see Anetka one last time.
I set an appointment to hand-deliver my final bill.
XII
This time she was wearing emeralds, an entire sheath covered with them. I had heard that there would be a gala event honoring one of the galaxy's leaders, but I had forgotten that the event would be held in Armstrong, at one of the poshest restaurants on the Moon.
She was sweeping up her long hair, letting it fall just below the mark on the back of her head, when I entered. As she turned, she stabbed an emerald haircomb into the bun at the base of her neck.
"I don't have much time," she said.
"I know," I closed the door. "I wanted to give you my final bill."
"You found my sister?" There was a barely concealed excitement in her voice.
"No." The room smelled of an illegal perfume, I was surprised no one had confiscated it when she got off the shuttle and then I realized she probably hadn't taken a shuttle. Even the personal items bag she wore that first day had been part of her act. "I'm resigning."
She shook her head slightly. "I might have known you would. You have enough money now, so you're going to quit."
"I have enough information now to know you're not the kind of person I relish working for."
She raised her eyebrows. The movement dislodged the tiny emerald attached to her left cheek. She caught it just before it fell to the floor. "I thought you were done investigating me."
"Your father's dead," I said. "He has been for three years, although the Third Dynasty has managed to keep the information secret, knowing the effect his death would have had on galactic confidence in the business."
She stared at me for a moment, clearly surprised. "Only five of us knew that."
"Six," I said.
"You found my mother." She stuck the emerald in its spot.
"You found the alarm. You knew she'd been notified of your father's death."
The emerald wasn't staying on her cheek. Anetka let out a puff of air, then set the entire kit down. "I really didn't appreciate the proxy p
rogram," she said. "It notified me of my insignificance an hour after my father breathed his last. It told me to go about my life with my own fortune and abandon my place in the Third Dynasty to my Original."
"Which you didn't do."
"Why should I? I knew more about the business than she ever would."
"Including the Wygnin."
She leaned against the dressing table. "You're much better than I thought."
"And you're a lot more devious than I gave you credit for."
She smiled and tapped her left cheek. "It's the face. Youth still fools."
Perhaps it did. I usually didn't fall for it, though. I couldn't believe I had this time. I had simply thought I was being as cautious as usual. What Anetka Sobol had taught me was that being as cautious as usual wasn't cautious enough.
"Pay me, and I'll get out of here," I said.
"You've found my mother. You may as well tell me where she is."
"So you can turn your Original over to the Wygnin?"
That flat look came back into her eyes. "I wouldn't do that."
"How would you prevent it? The Wygnin have a valid debt."
"It's twenty-seven years old."
"The Wygnin hold onto markers for generations." I paused, then added, "As you well know."
"You can't prove what I do and do not know."
I nodded. "True enough. Information is always tricky. It's so easy to tamper with."
Her eyes narrowed. She was smart, probably one of the smartest people I'd ever come up against. She knew I was referring to something besides our discussion.
"So I'm getting out," I handed her a paper copy of the bill—rare, unnecessary, and expensive. She knew that as well as I did. Then, as soon as she took the paper from my hand, I pressed my wrist-top to send the electronic version. "You owe me money. I expect payment within the hour."
She crumpled the bill. "You'll get it."
"Good." I pulled open the door.
"You know," she said, just loud enough for me to hear, "if you can find my mother, anyone can."
"I've already thought of that," I said, and left.
XIII
The Wygnin came for her later that night, toward the end of the gala. Security tried to stop them until they showed a valid warrant for the heir of Carson Sobol. The entire transaction caused an interstellar incident, and the vidnets were filled with it for days. The Third Dynasty used its attorneys to try to prove that Anetka was the eighth clone, just as everyone thought she was, but the Wygnin didn't believe it.
The beautiful thing about a clone is that it is a human being. It's simply one whose heritage matches another person's exactly, and whose facts of birth are odder than most. These are facts, yes, but they are facts that can be explained in other ways. The Wygnin simply chose to believe my explanations, not Anetka's. It was the sex change that did it. The Wygnin believed that anyone who would change a child's sex to protect it would also brand it with a clone mark, even if the mark wasn't accurate.
Over time, the lawyers lost all of their appeals, and Anetka disappeared into the Wygnin culture, never to be heard from again.
Oh, of course, the Third Dynasty still believes it's being run by Anetka Sobol voting her shares, as she always has, through a proxy program. Her Original apparently decided not to return to claim his prize. He acts as he always planned to, secretly. Only Sylvy Sobol, her son, and I know the person voting those shares isn't Anetka.
After Anetka's future was sealed, I stopped paying attention to the business of the Third Dynasty. I still don't look. I don't want to know if I have traded one monster for another. Some cold-heartedness is trained—and I can make myself think that Carson Sobol never once treated young Anetka with love, affection, or anything bordering on civility—but I am smart enough to know that most cold-heartedness is bred into the genes. Just because Anetka is gone, doesn't mean the Original won't act the same way in similar circumstances.
And what is my excuse for my coldheartedness? I'd like to say I've never done anything like this before, but I have—always in the name of my client, or a Disappeared. This time, though, this time, I did it for me.
Anetka Sobol had out-thought me, had compromised me, and had made me do the kind of work I'd vowed I'd never do. I let a front use me to open a door that would allow other Trackers to find a Disappeared.
People disappear because they want to. They disappear to escape a bad life, or a mistake they've made, or they disappear to save themselves from a horrible death. A person who has disappeared never wants to be found.
I always ignored that simple fact, thinking I knew better. But one man is never a good judge of another, even if he thinks he is.
I tell myself Anetka Sobol would have destroyed her Original if she had had the chance. I tell myself Anetka Sobol was greedy and self-centered. I tell myself Anetka Sobol deserved her fate.
But I can't ignore the fact that when I learned that Anetka Sobol had used me, this case became personal, in a way I would never have expected. Maybe, just maybe, I might have found a different solution, if she hadn't angered me so.
And now she haunts me in the middle of the night. She wakes me out of many a sound sleep. She keeps me restless and questioning. Because I didn't go after her for who she was or what she was planning. I had worked with people far worse than she was. I had met others who had done horrible things, things that made me wonder if they were even human. Anetka Sobol wasn't in their league.
No. I had gone after her for what she had done to me. For what she had made me see about myself. And because I hadn't liked my reflection in the mirror she held up, I destroyed her.
I can't get her back. No one comes back intact from the Wygnin. She will spend the rest of her days there. And I will spend the rest of mine thinking about her.
Some would say that is justice. But I have come to realize, in a universe as complex as this one, justice no longer exists.
TIME BUM
C. M. Kornbluth
Some of the details in this story, first published all the way back in 1953, may be a bit dated today, but the idea behind it is as fresh as it ever was. In fact, it's likely that this con would work better today than it would have in 1953, here in an age when dismayingly large portions of the population believe in angels, astrology, and alien abductions, and it wouldn't be surprising if somebody was running it on the internet even as you read these words—so keep a wary eye on your spam!
The late C. M. Kornbluth first started selling stories as a teenage prodigy in 1940, making his first sale to Super Science Stories, and wrote vast amounts of pulp fiction under many different pseudonyms in the years before World War II, most of it unknown today. Only after the war, in the booming SF scene of the early '50s, did Kornbluth begin to attract some serious attention. As a writer, C. M. Kornbluth first came to widespread prominence with a series of novels written in collaboration with Frederik Pohl, including the Space Merchants (one of the most famous SF novels of the '50s), Gladiator-at-Law, Search the Sky, and Wolfbane; he also produced two fairly routine novels in collaboration with Judith Merill as "Cyril Judd," Outpost Mars and Gunner Cade, that were moderately well received at the time but largely forgotten today, as well as several long-forgotten mainstream novels in collaboration with Pohl. As a solo writer—in addition to several mainstream novels under different pseudonyms—he produced three interesting but largely unsuccessful novels (Not This August, The Syndic, and Takeoff) that had little impact on the SF world of the day.
What did have a powerful impact on the SF world, though, was Kornbluth's short fiction. Kornbluth was a master of the short story, working with a sophistication, maturity, elegance, and grace rarely seen in the genre, then or now, one of those key authors—one also thinks of Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, Algis Budrys, and a few others—who were busy in the '50s redefining what you could do with the instrument known as the science fiction short story, and greatly expanding its range. In the years before his tragically early death in 1
958 Kornbluth created some of the best short work of the '50s, including the classic "The Little Black Bag," "The Marching Morons," "Shark Ship," "Two Dooms," "Gomez," "The Last Man Left in the Bar," "The Advent of Channel Twelve," "MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie," "With These Hands," and dozens of others.
Kornbluth won no major awards during his lifetime, but one story of his, "The Meeting," completed from a partial draft by Pohl years after Kornbluth's death, won a Hugo Award in 1972. Kornbluth's solo short work was collected in The Explorers, A Mile Beyond the Moon, The Marching Morons, Thirteen O'Clock and Other Zero Hours, and The Best of C. M. Kornbluth. Pohl and Kornbluth's collaborative short work has been collected in The Wonder Effect, Critical Mass, Before the Universe, and Our Best. Until recently, I would have said that everything by Kornbluth was long out of print, but, fortunately, in 1996 NESFA Press published a massive retrospective Kornbluth collection, His Share of the Glory: The Complete Short Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth (NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203, $27.00 plus postage). True to its title, this collection assembles almost everything Kornbluth ever wrote under his own name, and it belongs in every serious SF reader's library.
Harry Twenty-Third Street suddenly burst into laughter. His friend and sometimes roper Farmer Brown looked inquisitive.
"I just thought of a new con," Harry Twenty-Third Street said, still chuckling.
Farmer Brown shook his head positively. "There's no such thing, my man," he said. "There are only new switches on old cons. What have you got—a store con? Shall you be needing a roper?" He tried not to look eager as a matter of principle, but everybody knew the Farmer needed a connection badly. His girl had two-timed him on a badger game, running off with the chump and marrying him after an expensive, month-long buildup.
Harry said, "Sorry, old boy. No details. It's too good to split up. I shall rip and tear the suckers with this con for many a year, I trust, before the details become available to the trade. Nobody, but nobody, is going to call copper after I take him. It's beautiful and it's mine. I will see you around, my friend."