“I’m not going to repeat anything you say, if that’s worrying you.”
“Then I’m going to tell you the truth about the smuggling business before you fall into the trap the rest of us did.” Slowly Darrow continued, “The government knows all about it. They know who’s involved. And they let us alone as long as we toe the line.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Because they want the income. We pay out nearly all of what we get.”
“To corrupt police officers, you mean?”
“No. To official collectors. The government’s treasury relies on interstellar trade.”
“I thought they didn’t want any interstellar contact,” Terry protested, confused.
“That’s what the public is supposed to think. They don’t want to let any subversive ideas in—you and your friends are playing with fire, and you’re getting away with it only because it hasn’t occurred to the government that anyone bothers to smuggle them. But the economy couldn’t be sustained if Ciencia wasn’t manufacturing stuff to export.”
“If it’s illegal and you don’t profit much, why do it?”
With bitterness Darrow said, “Isn’t it obvious? Once we’ve broken the law, they could arrest us if we ever refused to cooperate. And the penalty for visiting a starship is life in prison.”
“Oh, my God,” Terry said. “How many of you have been caught?”
“All of us—all the independent ship owners. The big mining companies aren’t involved.”
“You mean there weren’t any captains who didn’t start smuggling cargo in the first place?” He himself might be willing to act as a go-between, but he wasn’t planning to smuggle with his own ship.
“You don’t understand. When someone acquires a ship, he gets a visit from a collector and he’s told what’s expected of him. He doesn’t get a choice.”
“But what hold do they have over someone who’s hasn’t done it yet?”
Darrow sighed. “If you can’t guess, you don’t want to know.”
“Oh.” There were plenty of threats they could use, against both the captain and the ship itself, if they didn’t have to worry about sticking to legal tactics.
Terry thought about it. If the law against smuggling wasn’t enforced, it would be just like ordinary commerce, wouldn’t it? There might not be much profit in it, but what he wanted was to fly; he’d be willing to carry cargo for free if necessary. And it would mean contact with a starship, possibly even a chance to bargain for passage on a starship—he might yet escape from Ciencia!
“I guess there’s no reason to refuse,” he said, “if the illegality of it’s just a technicality.”
“That depends,” Darrow told him grimly, “on how good a price you get for what you sell. You have to do your own negotiating. And if you don’t bring in enough, they’ll switch you to a more lucrative product.”
“Like what?”
“Like psychoactive drugs. The government labs produce drugs and other stuff developed by the advanced biochemistry here, nasty stuff that’s not manufactured on any other world. Not all the starship captains will deal in it; if they’re approached they give us a wide berth in the future. But those that do pay ten times what they’ll pay for anything else, and very little of it goes to the dealer—which is okay by me because it’s dirty money. Some of that stuff is suitable only for warfare.”
“The government is in the drug business?” Terry gasped. Whatever illusions he had had about Ciencia being merely an unpleasant place to live evaporated. “Nobody,” he said firmly, “could make me carry harmful drugs. And if you all agreed to refuse, they’d have no ships available to carry anything.”
“You couldn’t refuse if you were addicted,” Darrow said, “and you would be, after a few weeks in their prison. Effectively, ship owners are slaves.”
~ 57 ~
Terry did not sleep that night. The precarious balance he had developed on Ciencia had been thoroughly shaken; in addition to his personal hatred of his confinement here, he now found the evils of its society impossible to ignore. For some time his indignation over the suppression of ideas had been growing. He would not have been surprised to learn that its government was corrupt as well as misguided. But the revelation that it manufactured damaging biochemicals for distribution to other worlds was more horrifying than anything he had imagined.
Had the Elders known? he wondered. They’d had an agent here, and they appeared to be incredibly skilled in ferreting out information. Had they chosen this world as his prison in the knowledge that there was a final, insurmountable barrier to his ever owning a ship? Laesara had suggested that the obvious reasons for sending him here were not the only ones—“Think about it,” she’d advised—but that hadn’t seemed to be a warning of something even worse than the deprivations he expected. What if he hadn’t met a friendly captain to clue him in?
He had believed that he would do anything necessary to obtain his own ship, however illegal it might be. But there were limits. He would not sell hard-core porn; he would not commit murder; and he certainly wouldn’t risk being forced into drug dealing.
Ironically, he had learned that ships were relatively cheap. Darrow had told him that when one became available through the death or illness of its owner, it was put up for auction. No informed pilot would want it, so the only bidders were young ones employed by the mining companies, who didn’t have much money, and winning bids were therefore low. After a few years’ work as a cargo courier he could probably swing it.
Couriers were not required to deal in biochemicals, as they were not involved in cargo price negotiations beyond carrying messages and government agents in disguise delivered the drug shipments. So long as he didn’t have a ship there would be little if any danger in becoming a go-between. But why should he bother, if he couldn’t buy one with his profits?
Why bother with anything? he thought in despair. Every time he believed he could break free of this world’s dreary surface, his hope was dashed—and each time it was worse than if he had never hoped at all. Yet how could he live year after year without any prospect of escape? He was only twenty-six. He might well live to be ninety-six—another seventy years! He could never go home, and Ciencia would never seem like home to him. He would never be able to fly, never even see the sun or the stars. . . .
And he wasn’t making use of his mind training. What had it all been for, all he’d gone through and all he’d achieved, if he couldn’t do anything important with it? It was useful in minor ways, such as protecting his body from the freezing climate and, he supposed, maintaining his general health. He wouldn’t have to worry about physical pain. But there was no opportunity here for psi. He could sense emotions telepathically but not connect with anyone, and there was nothing on the planet worth remote viewing. He could provide reading material about the paranormal but to offer any sort of demonstration would merely get him treated as a fraud or a madman.
When he got to work the next morning he was unable to put on a brave enough face to keep Alison from seeing his depression. “You’re often sad, Terry,” she said hesitantly, “and I’ve never asked why. But if there’s anything I can do to help—”
“There’s nothing anyone can do,” he replied evenly. “Something happened to me that I can’t tell you about, and I’ve got to live with it, that’s all.”
“Do you have a family?”
“No,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“Oh, Terry.” Evidently she assumed his family had died, for she said, “Grief is normal—I can’t tell you you’ll get over it right away. Sometimes, though, it does help to talk.”
He felt the wave of her sympathy, almost as if she too were telepathic, and suddenly he knew that to talk about it would help, at least temporarily. But she probably wouldn’t believe him, any more than Elrond and Nina had. She was a psychotherapist; she would think he was delusional. And even if she did believe, there was no way she could change his situation.
Day by day he went o
n with his work, and there was some satisfaction in that, for neurofeedback did interest him and, seeing that it did, Alison began allowing him to operate the computer during her sessions with clients. He had modified the software so that its screen displays were larger and more colorful than the original version, closer to what he was used to despite their lesser complexity. “It’s an improvement over what we used in the university course,” Alison said, “and I think people respond to it faster. I didn’t realize when I bought the system that I’d be getting an advanced version.”
“I changed the standard displays,” Terry admitted. “I hope you don’t mind; it just seemed—more effective.”
She was obviously impressed. “Have you ever used neurofeedback with anybody, besides just trying it out yourself, I mean?”
“No,” he lied. There was no way he could explain where.
“I’d like to experience it personally with the new displays,” she said. “Do you think you could conduct a session with me as subject?”
He did so during her lunch break, regretting the limitations of the scalp sensors that couldn’t reveal much detail about state of consciousness. But Alison was profoundly affected. “I never felt so—good after it before,” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought visual effects could make that much difference.”
They hadn’t, Terry perceived with surprise. Unconsciously he had communicated the state shift telepathically, as he would have with the young trainees he’d worked with on Maclairn, and Alison had picked it up.
That wasn’t really strange, he realized. He had known since Aldren’s first explanation that everyone was capable of telepathy on an unconscious level. If Alison were to experience extreme stress under the direction of a mentor, the ability to use it consciously might be awakened in her, as it had been in some members of Shepard’s crew. If only that were possible here. . . .
But at least there could be communication of emotion between them. He would not be as totally isolated as he’d been so far. That might, he thought, become his lifeline to sanity.
It was barely two weeks later that, coming abruptly into Alison’s office, he caught a glimpse of her tablet’s screen before she realized he was there. She had found one of the easter eggs.
He sensed her dismay at his having seen, and decided that there was no reason why he shouldn’t reassure her. “It’s okay,” he told her quickly. “I read those, too.”
“Really? I should have known, you’re so good with computers. How many are there?”
“A lot. You have to follow a trail. I’ll show you, if you want.”
He did not reveal that he put them there, but bit by bit over the next few weeks he led her to excerpts from some of the most important books dealing with the mind’s effect on the body. She took to it with enthusiasm and an avid desire to keep reading; she was discovering many of the same ideas that she herself had secretly believed.
“Where did all this come from?” she asked in awe, not really expecting him to know. “It contradicts everything we’ve been taught. How could there be so many people who’ve thought it through on their own?”
“The texts come from other worlds, Alison. From Earth, mostly.”
“But how could they? No ships come near except the ones that buy from criminals.”
“Exactly. They buy, but they also sell, which of course is illegal, too.”
“But then the people who put the texts on the Net are breaking the law.”
“Yes. That’s why the pages are so carefully hidden.”
“Why do they risk getting caught? What do they gain?”
“They care what the rest of us gain. They believe ideas shouldn’t be suppressed the way they are here. On other worlds all this knowledge is public.”
Alison looked at him, confused. “You must have read a lot more than you’ve shown me, if you’ve learned that.”
“Quite a lot,” he agreed. “I fool around with it in my spare time.”
He was continuing, of course, to make pickups and request specific ebooks; so when a few days later Alison mentioned one she’d seen referred to, he got it for her and pointed out that the reference was now hotlinked. “But how strange,” she said. “It wasn’t, last week. What a coincidence that the people who buy the texts happened to get the particular ebook I asked about—” She broke off, appraising him with awe. ”Oh. Oh, Terry. Are you in touch with them personally?”
“I’m not free to answer that,” he said gravely. She deserved to be told and he was sure she was trustworthy, but he would have to clear it with Elrond.
“Then I know the answer,” she said. “I’ve always felt you were hiding something, and I won’t ask you about it again. But I’ll help, if there’s ever a way I can.”
Between working with Alison, picking up deliveries and hacking the Net, Terry kept busy enough to fill his time. The days went by with nothing to distinguish one from another, and he was glad not to have to think about the future.
Then late one night as he was about to go to bed there was a loud knock at his door. Startled, he opened it to Nina. She had evidently been to the spaceport, for she was disguised in her hooker’s outfit. It was just as well, he thought, in case anyone saw her enter his room at this hour; he was wary of someday implicating people known to be his friends.
“Terry,” she said tensely, “I came to warn you. Elrond has been arrested.”
~ 58 ~
Shaken, Terry got her to sit down and offered her a hot drink. “Tell me how it happened,” he commanded.
“He was making a pickup—I waited for him in the parking lot. I saw the police go into the hotel, and then Elrond didn’t come out. So I changed clothes in the back of the car and went in. Everybody was talking about it; they said a smuggler and his cargo courier had been taken.”
“A smuggler? Do you know who?” Not Darrow, he was pleading inwardly.
“Elrond was supposed to meet Captain Guroff.”
Thank God, Terry thought. Guroff didn’t know him, but more than that, Darrow had become a friend he cared about. “We can’t find out any more tonight,” he said, “but the man I’m meeting tomorrow morning may know the details.”
“You can’t go out there tomorrow! They could be watching you.”
“That’s exactly why I do have to go. They know I always meet Captain Darrow’s ship. If I don’t show up, they’ll make a connection with the arrest.”
“They know you meet it?” Nina was horrified.
“We’re all watched, Nina. They may think Darrow and I are lovers, or they may assume I’m a cargo courier; either way is okay. But it wouldn’t be okay if they read Elrond’s chip and connected me with him.”
“How could it be okay if they assume you’re a cargo courier?” she demanded.
He decided she had to know the reason, so he summarized, warning her not to repeat it and leaving out the part about the drugs. “It’s why we’ve gotten away with buying data this long,” he explained. “They don’t want to stop cargo smuggling. But if they’ve arrested Elrond, it may mean they’ve found out what else is going on. Hopefully they’ll think it’s just a fluke, that nobody else is involved. Captain Darrow may know.”
Terry remembered what texts were scheduled to be in the pickup from Guroff and spent the night with his tablet, carefully removing from the Net all easter eggs to which investigation of their subject matter might lead. That would be some protection if the authorities suspected that the content of Elrond’s chip was destined to be posted on the Net. He prayed they would think it was just private reading material. Everything already on the cloud servers would remain safe even if they suspected conspiracy; as the cloud contained all the stored data for the whole planet, it was far too large for anyone to examine, even apart from the fact that he had distributed fragmented files. But if he had to remove the easter eggs related to all subjects, public access would end—and with rising anger Terry resolved that he could not let that happen. It was no longer a game.
Darrow, when they m
et the next day, thought there was no immediate danger. “They were watching Guroff, not Elrond,” he said. “They suspected he was holding back part of his profits, which may have been true; Guroff isn’t too sharp. So they’re making an example of him. Elrond was caught in the net and if they know he wasn’t dealing in cargo they won’t admit it, because his presence is part of the evidence against Guroff.”
“But it’s not evidence. He didn’t have any money with him, and the credit transaction, if it was made at all, is in the wrong direction.”
“They’ll manufacture what they need,” Darrow said grimly. “Your people aren’t the only ones in the world who know how to hack. There’ll be a backdated transfer from Guroff to Elrond in the bank records by tomorrow morning.”
Appalled, Terry protested, “He’ll go to prison for something he didn’t even do!”
“Would he rather go for what he did do? This way at least the rest of you are out of it, and even if the police have read the chip there’s a chance they won’t bother to investigate.”
Terry felt a sudden chill. He hadn’t fully taken it in before—what was happening to Elrond could just as easily have happened to him. It still could happen at any time; Darrow was too smart to invite arrest as Guroff had, but he wasn’t sure about the other captains he dealt with.
“Though whether they look into it depends on the content,” Darrow added. “Some of your stuff might be called subversive.”
“This was mostly fiction,” Terry said, “and part of a twentieth-century book on ESP.”
“Then you’re probably safe.”
“Elrond’s not safe. And what if they try to make him name associates?” Elrond had no mind training, Terry thought miserably. He would suffer terribly if they used harsh methods. “I’ve got to get him out,” he declared. “How do I contact a good lawyer?”
“You don’t,” Darrow said. “There are no lawyers who’ll take on a smuggling case. If it were murder you could find one. Murder suspects are sometimes acquitted. With smugglers it’s all for show, and they do their time.”
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 35