The Pillars of Eternity

3

Gare Romrey left Karti’s in a hurry, leaving his friends there feeling decidedly less friendly. Outplanet in a rented Stardiver, he paused within call range just before going into hype, and dialled through. Being what he was, he was quite unable to resist this last look back.

Karti’s Dive Infee Club came up on the cage plate, sour light from the ceiling strips falling on stained walls and tattered furniture. The bar was sticky with spilled drinks to which adhered ash from waft sticks. Only about half a dozen people were visible – the others had decamped in an effort to stop Romrey from reaching the ship ground. They crowded the screen when they realized who was bleeping them.

Up front was the thin-faced redheaded kosher pimp with the archaic cognomen of Jericho Junkie. Romrey flashed him a quick smile.

‘I thought I’d just explain, boys—’

‘He’s offplanet,’ someone behind Jericho muttered. The purveyor ponce (he supplied a specialized sexual taste involving a rare genetic type of woman, a certain drug and a specially treated aphrodisiac food) glared at Romrey with hot eyes. ‘One chance, Romrey. You’ve got one chance to get back here with the cube. Otherwise—’

‘This, you mean?’ Romrey held up the half-inch-sized memory cube which Jericho had been selling by lottery and which he had filched just before the numbers were about to be called. ‘You’ve got to trust me, boys. I thought of a better plan, that’s all. I asked myself what would happen if one of you won the cube. What would you do with it? Go out there and try to land on Meirjain?’ He shook his head. ‘It would be a fiasco. Me, now—I can handle a job like that. When I get back I’ll split the incomings with you.’

Snorts of indignation expressed a general disbelief in his last pronouncement. ‘Whoever won the cube could have sold it,’ Jericho said.

Romrey shook his head again. ‘Negative thinking. This way I – we – strike big.’

A bull-shouldered alec shoved Jericho aside and thrust his jaw out at Romrey, who recognized him as Ossuco, a carcass dealer. ‘We know where you’re going, you rat, and we’ll catch up with you. I got a feeling I would have drawn that ticket. I’d like to know what makes you think you could get away with it.’

Romrey picked up the pack of cards lying on the control board and fanned them open, holding them up before the cage screen. ‘These told me to do it.’

He let them gawp for a moment at the numbered picture cards, before he cut them off.

Then he swivelled his seat to face the engine controls. He gripped the manual handles and pushed them forward. Energy spurted from the fuel rods as the Stardiver put on speed. With a shudder he hit c; then he was riding smoothly, heading for the centre of the Harkio region where it nearly touched the Brilliancy Cluster.

He was grinning with pleasure when he switched to auto. He always enjoyed going through c on manual.

The journey to Sarsuce would take a few days. He picked up the memory cube again and plugged it into the ’diver’s starmap. The Brilliancy Cluster came up on the navigation screen. The view was from Sarsuce, or rather from Sarsuce’s sun, the Econosphere planet nearest to the cluster. A red arrow blinked on and off, pointing out the spot where Meirjain was due to make its appearance. At the bottom of the screen ran boxed lines of figures, including a date.

Absentmindedly Romrey reached into the larder chute and took out a pinana. He peeled off the orange-hued skin while he studied the screen. It was his favorite fruit: a banana into which the flavor of pineapple had been delicately, genetically blended.

The cluster was, to be sure, a beautiful if familiar sight. Romrey’s attention focused on the red arrow, surrounded as it was by piles of vari-colored stars. He read the data box, making a rough estimate of times and distances.

How many other people had this data? It was supposed to be rare, but—

Jericho Junkie claimed to have got it during a trip to Sarsuce, from the Meirjain tracker himself. Romrey turned from the screen. One hand picked up the deck of cards again, and expertly laid out a row while he bit into the pinana. He frowned as he tried to interpret the sequence. The Inverted Man reversed, followed by the ten of laser rods, followed by the eight of ciboria…. He stopped, puzzled. Deceit, leading to fulfilment.

Reading the future was not his forte. Reading a course of action, though, was easier – and in that regard what he had told Jericho was true. The cards had instructed him to rob the lottery, although the idea, of course, had been in his mind already.

Romrey, in recent years, had hit upon a practice which relieved life of much of its anxiety. Whenever he came to a point of uncertainty, he consulted the cards, and he did whatever he believed they were telling him to do. If the issue could be reduced to a simple yes or no, of course, then so much the better.

There was a heady, almost delirious pleasure in not being responsible for his own decisions anymore.

He thought of the poor cruds in Karti’s. Planet-huggers for the most part, scarcely been off Kleggisae. A ponce, a carcass dealer, assorted alecs who had found ways of living off the Econosphere Welfare Bureau. Not a prospector among them.

Strictly speaking Romrey wasn’t a prospector either. He called himself ‘a trader with wide interests.’ But the thought of landing on Meirjain the Wanderer didn’t frighten him, and neither did the competition. Neither did he necessarily think of himself as a liar. Would he be generous to his erstwhile friends and colleagues in the Karti Dive Infee, as he had promised, if he made out on Meirjain? Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t.

He would let the cards decide.

And if they decided against, Ossuco could look for him in every sextile of the Econosphere for all he cared.

Thoughtfully, self-indulgently, he munched the pinana.

In half a standard day Captain Joachim Boaz’s business in Harkio was completed. He delivered his cargo, collected the small tail fee, and took off again for Sarsuce, the natural jumping-off point for the Brilliancy Cluster.

Through a hazy atmosphere and what seemed an untypical drove of traffic, he descended onto the ship ground at Wildhart, Sarsuce’s largest city – though not the capital, since Sarsuce had none. It was the kind of town he seemed to have spent half his life in, with an atmosphere that did not give him the feeling of being in an authentic place at all, but more like a transit district, a place at the junction of other places, a boom town that had somehow outlived its usefulness so that even to claim a name for itself smacked of fraud. The deception was never more transparent than now. The ship ground was uncommonly full, and Boaz was hard put to squeeze a place for his ship in it. The port proctor’s clerk took his fee with an unfriendly brusqueness, as though Boaz were forcing him to connive in something immoral. And when he walked into Wildhart itself the excitement was palpable.

Boaz scowled. All these strangers. He did not like to be one of a crowd, and it was certain they were mostly after the same thing he was – though for different reasons.

The sun slanted from the west. But overhead there hung what appeared to be a giant bauble in the sky, like a lantern hung from a festival tree; a hundred times larger than the sun itself, and glowing palely with a multihued mass of point sources, even in broad daylight. That was the Brilliancy Cluster, with its estimated eight thousand closepacked stars, the place where pure prospectors went. It had no settled planets, no properly mapped interior – in fact not a lot of planets at all, since nearly all its stars had quirkishly opted to form planetless double, triple and quadruple sun systems.

But it did have one very famous planet, a planet of fable that until now had been seen only once: Meirjain the Wanderer, a planet which had no sun of its own but which instead swung from star to star like an interstellar comet, weaving an apparently random path within the cluster.

On average the stars of Brilliancy were only light-hours apart, allowing Meirjain to steer a miraculous, sinuous course which gave it an equable climate for nearly all the time. This remarkable feat was taken as evidence that the Wanderer’s motion was the result of artifice, though not everyone thought so – the astronomer Ashojin had calculated that Meirjain followed a thermal isocline due to the competing geodesics of surrounding stars. In fact very little could be stated of the Wanderer with certainty. It had been discovered three centuries ago. Men had landed on it, had sampled its treasures. Then, through the carelessness or ignorance of its discoverers, it had been allowed to disappear again, melting untrackably into the Brilliancy Cluster like a molecule of sugar in coloured water.

And now, three centuries later, word had it that the Wanderer had been sighted again; its course tracked to the point where it would emerge on the edge of the Cluster in the gravisphere of a particular star. Which star, and when, was what all these people were here to find out.

Boaz pushed his way through a jostling crowd of naked nymphgirls, purveyors, vendors, steer narks and modsuited shipkeepers – some of them cargo carriers like himself, perhaps, but more likely prospectors. He ignored the overhead adholo flashes which tried to beam enticing images into the retinas of his eyes. He moved down the avenue – it seemed that every town he stopped in had an avenue just like this one, as though there were only one town in the whole galaxy, capable of manifesting itself everywhere – until he came to the arcaded entrance of a rest room.

He turned into it. The room was large and dome-shaped. It was as if he were back in Hondora, except that this place was busier. He found an empty table and sat down, signing a robot to bring him a drink while he surveyed the people around him.

Information was being offered here, his ship told him. Sipping the milky cocoin the robot delivered, he became aware of someone at his elbow. A small man, his body swathed in buff and orange bands, slipped into the chair opposite. Boaz disliked him immediately. His smile was too ingratiating.

‘Good day, shipkeeper!’ the stranger said jovially. ‘Looking to land on Meirjain?’

‘What is it to you?’ Boaz became aware that the man had followed him from the ship ground.

‘Most people who come in are looking for it. You know what the hottest property around here is, I suppose?’

‘No.’

‘The hottest property is numbers. Co-ordinate numbers. That tell you where and when Meirjain will appear.’

The swathed man turned to indicate a table in the centre of the room where a dumpy, togaed individual sat talking desultorily with two others and toying with a set of gambling cubes. His eyes were downcast. Boaz recognized him as a person who spent most of his time waiting. Waiting for the right customer to come along.

‘See that alec over there? He has the numbers. He’s one of about ten people on Sarsuce who have them. But it’s information that costs a lot.’

‘Why should it? Meirjain will become visible soon.’

‘Not soon enough. Haven’t you heard?’ The other raised his eyebrows. ‘The Wanderer’s been put off-limits. An econosphere cruiser is on its way. Nobody is going to get down on Meirjain that isn’t able to jump the gun and get to the co-ordinate point ahead of that cruiser. So you see, it’s the co-ordinates or nothing.’

‘This is a wild story. I don’t believe you.’

The man sighed. ‘How blunt. It’s almost quaint, really. You needn’t believe me.’ He reached into a swathe and placed a news card on the table, tracing his finger round the dial. ‘See for yourself.’

Boaz picked up the thin wafer. The holoflash hit his retinas. In urgent, colored script, he read: ALL CITIZENS ARE ADVISED AND WARNED THAT THE PLANET KNOWN AS ‘MEIRJAIN THE WANDERER’ AND ASSOCIATED WITHIN THE LIMIT OF THE BRILLIANCY CLUSTER IS BY ORDER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF LOCATIONAL AFFAIRS PLACED UNDER ABSOLUTE PROHIBITION. NO LANDING IS TO BE MADE ON SAID PLANET NOR ANY SCAN CARRIED OUT EXCEPT BY OFFICIAL ORDER. PENALTIES WILL BE POSTED IN THE AMOUNT OF TWENTY YEARS LABOUR OR FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND PSALTERS….

Thoughtfully he laid down the card. The penalties were largely bluff. The econosphere, as the great rambling empire of man-inhabited space called itself, was in a state of semi-disintegration; spasmodically tyrannous, but just as often unable to impose any effective government whatsoever over innumerable worlds. The government would depend on the arriving cruiser to enforce the edict….

‘If you still don’t believe me,’ his informant said softly, ‘there’s a public announcement on every two-hour.’

‘In these circumstances,’ Boaz pointed out, ‘no one is going to land on Meirjain.’

‘Some people reckon they can. Econosphere law doesn’t count for a lot in this neck of the woods; that cruiser has a long way to come. Word has it that those who know in advance where the Wanderer is due will beat the law to the drop.’

Boaz’s mind turned to what might be behind the ban, which bore all the hallmarks of official panic. There was uncounted wealth on Meirjain; its dead civilization was a treasure house. But most valuable of all, of course, were what Boaz was after – time-jewels, gems able to refract light through time as well as space. It was the only known example of time modification by physical – and probably artificial – means.

Something about these gems frightened the econosphere government, Boaz reasoned. He had tried to track down some of the jewels that had been taken from the Wanderer on the first landing three centuries ago. To all intents and purposes they had vanished from existence, hidden away, secreted – perhaps even destroyed, he suspected – by government agencies.

His conclusion gave him hope. If the authorities feared the gems, then they had a use….

‘The alec’s name is Hansard,’ Boaz’s informant was saying. ‘Do you want me to talk to him?’

‘I don’t have money in the amount he would probably ask.’

‘You have a ship. A fine ship.’

Boaz grunted. ‘Without a ship, what good are coordinates?’

‘Leave it to me.’

While Boaz watched, the swathed man walked to Hansard and leaned over to talk to him. Hansard glanced at Boaz, a perfunctory, predatory glance. He nodded, as his eyes returned to the table.

The swathed man beckoned. The others left the table as Boaz stepped over and took the seat that was offered. Hansard’s gaze flicked up to him and back to his cubes again. He was smiling to himself.

‘A fine ship you have, I’m told. What’s its name?’

‘It’s my ship; it doesn’t need a name.’

‘Well, never mind….’

Hansard scattered the play blocks and reached in his pocket. He pulled out a memory cube and held it up. ‘I had four of these. I’ve got two left. I paid good money for them and I’d like to make a profit, but I’m not adamant about it. I place it in the lap of the gods.’

‘That’s normal commercial practice.’

‘Correct. I’m a gambler. Double or quits. One throw. If you win, you have the numbers and you still have your ship so you can use them. If I win, I take your ship. You won’t have any use for the numbers then, anyway.’

‘I guess not,’ Boaz said. The idea that he would gamble with his ship as a stake caused him a wry amusement. He had known this was all wrong from the outset, and now the beam that stretched out to him from the ship ground confirmed it.

He cheats; the blocks are loaded, his ship whispered to him. And then: Also, his merchandise is worthless.

As a thief, Hansard was stupid. He piled cons on top of one another, multiplying the risk to himself.

‘You’re overdoing it,’ Boaz said aloud. ‘A good swindle doesn’t need redundancy.’

He rose and strode away. Back in the avenue the public announcement was beginning. CITIZENS ARE ADVISED AND WARNED…. Passersby paused, glanced up to let the flashing letters strike their eyes the better, then walked on unconcerned.

Boaz had the picture now. Wildhart would be crawling with dealers offering fake coordinates. And the real coordinates? How many people had those? Half a dozen? Two or three? Or only one?

He felt little doubt that the story of the race with the government cruiser was true. Otherwise there would be little demand for co-ordinates at all.

It was beginning to look like a problem.

Romrey had forgotten how kinky the fringe planets were. In former empires depravity had festered first in the central urban areas. In the econosphere, it seemed instead to arise in the nearly lawless peripheral provinces, working its way inward to eat steadily away at the fabric of morality.

The girl had picked him up at an eatery on the night of his arrival. The eatery served spicecrab, a dish banned on many conservative worlds whose flesh contained compounds related to L-dopamine and alpha androstinol. Romrey had damned the expense. In his euphoria at arriving on Sarsuce he had wanted to try something new.

But what the girl, whose name was Mace, hungered for was too new as far as he was concerned. The alpha androstinol had done its stuff (that was why she had gone there: to find a man whose pheromones excited her). But later, when they rented a play room not even the L-dopa could carry him through the scene she wanted. She wanted him to kill her.

Romrey had never done that before. The idea repelled him. And he told her so. Perversely (maybe it was the spicecrab again) his refusal excited her even more.

Since then, she had been pursuing him. In eateries, in drinking houses, in the street, hanging around outside the door of his lodging, she would sidle up to him. ‘Kill me,’ she would whisper in his ear. It was a determined kind of seduction he found horrifying. As if he were the one who was to be defiled.

In one way, he supposed, he could see some sense in it. On the night of their first meeting Mace had told him she was a bonewoman. Bone people were usually colonnaders, and colonnaders believed that consciousness – mind-fire, as they called it – was not limited by space or time. She probably had no real conception of personal extinction; she thought her same consciousness would awaken in the clone body she had somewhere.

A colonnader had once explained it to him in terms of the death and rebirth of the universe, ‘We never die, really,’ he had said. ‘When we are resurrected in the next turn of the wheel, it’s our own same consciousness that lives again.’

Romrey was sceptical. He wondered, though, whether Mace’s clone also had silicon bones. That would mean she had a lot of money….

He had resolved to ignore her until she eventually wearied of the game, but he had not reckoned on a deadly trick she had up her sleeve. He awoke one night and became aware that someone was in his room, moving clumsily.

He waved his hand at the service panel, flooding the room with light. Mace was there, naked, her voluptuous breasts flopping (she did not follow the breastless nymphgirl fashion). As the light came on, her hand went to her hair and pulled out what appeared to be a strand. The strand stiffened and went silvery. It was a paraknife.

In almost the same instant she flung herself toward the bed. Romrey rolled aside. The knife stabbed down where he had been and sliced his shoulder. He hardly felt it at first. Then the stinging pain and the sight of his dripping blood brought his senses to a furious awakening.

‘You bitch!’

They stood facing one another over the bed. She still pointed the paraknife at him, her shoulders hunched. Her face was slack. Her lips drooped, in a way that made him imagine something lascivious was dripping from them.

Then she began to giggle. ‘I’m going to have you,’ she told him. ‘You’ll have to kill me, because if you don’t I’m going to kill you! It’s you or me – get it?’

Gasping with passion and fright, she lunged at him again. He retreated, but she clambered over the bed to get at him. ‘You’d better do it,’ she breathed. ‘You’d better do it now. Or I’ll get you sooner or later. Creep up on you – stick it in – bet you got no other body to wake up in. Right?’

‘Right,’ he said harshly. He caught her wrists in his hand, holding the knife away from him, while she kicked desperately at his crotch with vermilion-painted toes. A rage was boiling up in him to think how close to death he might have been, accompanied by a feeling of heat and a pounding in his ears – an unfamiliar reaction he would not have guessed he could make.

‘All right.’ His words came thickly. ‘If that’s how you want it—’

He twisted her hand, forcing her to drop the knife. He punched her in the stomach. She folded up on the bed. He fell on her. A mist was before his eyes as he felt his hands go round her throat.

Passing on the avenue a few yards distant, Captain Joachim Boaz paused.

The ship’s beams were sweeping the district, searching for information. What they brought him in this instance was far from what he sought, but it caught his attention just the same.

The scene was the distasteful kind he had glanced at on many occasions and then turned away from. He would have done so now except for one extra piece of information. The beam told him: She has no replacement body. Then: He believes she has.

Boaz hesitated, of a mind to keep to his own business and pass on, but his colonnader training told on him. He turned into an alley that ran through a small maze of rented rooming shacks. His ship told him when he had come to the right place; told him what was happening behind the lithoplast wall. The entrance was on the other side of the building, and he judged there was no time to go looking for it.

He called on the ship to flood his tissues with toughness and strength. He attacked the thin wall with the edge of his hand, chopping right through it in three sharp blows. Then dust and frayed fragments were raining down about him as, like some kind of demolition engine, he burst through the partition and confronted the startled pair.

Romrey rose slowly from the bed. To him, Boaz must have been a frightening sight, and he began to edge toward the cupboard where he kept his gun.

Boaz raised a monitory hand.

‘You should be warned that you are laying yourself open to a charge of murder,’ he rumbled.

Romrey huffed, momentarily overcoming his surprise. ‘What are you talking about? It’s legal here.’

‘Only when the terminated party has a working linked-up clone.’

‘What?’ Romrey murmured. His eyes sought Mace’s. ‘But don’t you have…?’

Mace was rubbing her neck. She winced. Then she shrugged.

‘So I’m tired of life. So what?’

‘And what about me?’ Romrey’s anger returned. He bent over her, his fist raised in her face. ‘I would have gone to the chamber for you!’

‘Be gallant. Say I’m worth it.’

Mace slipped from under him and stepped to where she had dropped some clothes near the door. Deftly she slipped into a shiftlike robe, smoothing it down. She pulled up her hair and tied it in a snood.

Boaz stared at her. Through her ostentatious unconcern, certain facts were visible. First, very fine white lines in the skin, unnoticeable by most but discernible to Boaz, told him she had silicon bones. But that did not mean she was a colonnader – though still rare, bones were being acquired by more and more people these days, not all of them colonnaders.

Boaz did not think she was a colonnader. The stoical quality of ataraxy was not in her face. In his judgement she was pure epicurean, and lived for the senses.

And, yes, she was tired of life. She had chosen an exotic style of suicide without a thought for the consequences for her victim – something a colannader would never do.

While she dressed momentary looks of concentration came to her face, suggesting to Boaz that she was switching off her bone functions one by one, detumescing from a plateau that had never been reached. Was she relieved – or just disappointed? He tore his gaze away as the man spoke.

‘Are you law enforcement?’

Boaz smiled faintly. ‘Not the law you are talking about. No, I am nothing official.’

The man was peering through the hole Boaz had made in the wall, as if expecting to see something there. ‘What other kind of law is there?’

‘He’s talking about cosmic ethical law,’ the woman said acidly. ‘He’s just a goddamned busybody. A fully boned, paid-up, stuck-up ethical pain in the neck.’ Boaz realized she took his supernormal strength for evidence that he, too, wore silicon bones in his body, and she had put two and two together.

‘I’m surprised you ever got replaced, with your attitude,’ he told her. ‘Replaced’ was how bone people referred to their transformation.

‘The surgeon wasn’t a colonnader either. See, busybody? The ethic is disintegrating.’

‘Perhaps that is why you wish to end your life? Those who devised silicon bones intended them for people with philosophical training.’

‘Maybe.’ The tiredness in the girl’s eyes struck Boaz. The man, meanwhile, looked from her to Boaz in bewilderment.

‘Look here,’ he said to Boaz, ‘thanks for saving my neck, but why don’t you two lunatics just clear off and let me get some sleep?’

‘As you wish,’ Boaz said. He made for the door, but then the ever-present ship beam, emanating from a processing load that all this time had been sifting and guessing with the data it was collecting from the scene, made a suggestion.

Both of them could be useful to you.

He turned. ‘Could it be you are here on Sarsuce waiting for the Wanderer?’

Romrey made a wry face. ‘Sure. And I’ve got coordinates, too.’

‘False ones?’

‘Probably. But how would I know? I brought them back in Iridan.’

‘They are fake. It is almost certain.’ Boaz turned to Mace. ‘And you?’

She tossed her head. ‘Why would someone with a yen for extinction be searching for anything – except death?’

Boaz waited. She relented. ‘All right. Not me, I don’t give a damn for anything. I belong to a man called Radalce Obsoc. One more collector’s item. He wants to get down to Meirjain. He wants it bad.’

Boaz picked out only what was relevant from her cryptic comments. ‘You belong to him. Is that why you want to die?’

‘Maybe. I’ve been with him a long time. I just felt tired.’

‘Your will to live has been drained away through indulgence in the senses.’

‘Maybe. But then I’m into pleasure, not power like you.’

It was understandable that she should misjudge him. Boaz surveyed them both. They were an unlikely pair.

‘There might be some benefit in our working together.’

Romrey had worked his way through bewilderment and incredulity. Now he was merely puzzled. ‘How?’

‘You are aware that it is going to be very difficult to land on Meirjain without knowing the position of its appearance beforehand. We can take it that all those co-ordinates offered here in Wildhart and elsewhere are false, and indeed in such circumstances it would be impossible to identify the real ones among the fake. Special talents are needed to track down who has the real ones. A detective could do it, perhaps….’

‘Obsoc already hired a detective,’ Mace said. ‘He got nowhere.’

‘So what are these special talents, and why do we have them?’ Romrey asked acidly.

Boaz stood motionless. He had no answer.

‘You can read the future, maybe?’ Romrey persisted.

Seriously, Boaz shook his head. ‘By no means.’

‘I can read the future,’ Romrey said.

Boaz watched carefully as he reached into a drawer in the bedside table. ‘I read the future with these,’ he said. ‘And I’m going to read it now.’

He had taken out a deck of cards and proceeded to lay out ten of them on the table, after a quick shuffle. ‘The issue is a simple one. Do I throw in with you, or do I not?’ Romrey’s lean face was intent as he laid down the cards. ‘A positive answer is a score that’s above average. Negative, below average.’

Briefly he reckoned up. ‘Well, that’s fairly positive. A hundred and one. It looks like we’re partners, whoever you are. And who the hell are you, anyway?’

‘I am Captain Joachim Boaz.’

‘Shipkeeper?’

‘Yes.’ Boaz was gazing at the cards with interest. As Romrey swept them up and laid them down, he stepped over to examine them, glancing at Romrey for permission.

‘They’re colonnader cards,’ Romrey told him.

Boaz thumbed through them. ‘Not colonnader,’ he stated. ‘This is a perverted set, muddied with occultism.’

There were in fact many variants on the original colannade pack (itself reconstructed from a pre-scientific pack of great antiquity), most of them produced by deviant philosophical or arcane sects. This one was typical. Artistically it was very accomplished, but the images were altered and adorned with additional symbolism which was often incorrect and also tended to obliterate much of the carefully inculcated subtlety of the original. The Priestess, for instance, a simple but enormously potent figure in the true colannade version, was here cluttered with a number of extraneous signs – in her hair, in her right hand, under her left foot. These symbols were drawn from the aberrant occultism of the sect that had construed them, and in that sense had meaning. But to a colonnader they were simply irrelevant.

‘So you base your decisions on simple chance?’ he said to Romrey. ‘Play cubes would be sufficient for that.’

‘Not on chance, no.’ Romrey shook his head. ‘That’s no ordinary deck of cards. Look closely at the material. The cards have adp in them.’

‘All such cards do – these, for instance.’ With a slow movement Boaz brought out his own deck. ‘To make the pictures move.’

‘No, no, these have much more. They are all adp.’

The cards had a micalike finish. They were, as Romrey had said, made of adp substance, much like silicon bones.

‘These are magical cards,’ Romrey said. ‘Mystic cards. They respond to events going on around them. They are never wrong. In fact, they can create events too.’

‘Yes, if you are improvident enough to let them guide all your actions,’ Boaz remarked.

He had to admit that the cards had a charm all of their own. Even the aberrant symbolism added up to a certain bizarre profundity. And he reminded himself that some of the deviant sects, as they passed down the hidden lanes and by-ways of thought, often made surprising discoveries.

Just the same, his background made him sceptical of Romrey’s claims, so much so that his lip curled.

However, his ship had presumably, during its surveillance of the city over the past few days, seen this man using the cards for divination – something which true colonnaders looked upon as pure superstition. If his ship took it seriously, then so did Boaz.

Romrey began pulling on some garments. Boaz turned to the woman. ‘And what can your man Obsoc contribute?’

‘Him?’ She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Money. He’s rich. He’s got his own big yacht orbiting up there, and it’s armed, pretty heavily. Probably it could even take on that government cruiser that’s coming.’

‘Can you arrange a meeting with him?’

‘If he thinks you can do him any good.’

Boaz nodded. Events had changed rapidly for all three of them in the past few minutes, he thought. But people were used to fast transitions, in this modern world.

Radalce Obsoc was a tall, stooped man with bulging eyes. His nose was small and hooked, exactly like an owl’s beak, and his thin-lipped mouth was equally small.

His appearance was in curious contrast with the red-haired sensuous-looking Mace Meare, as Boaz had come to know her. Their relationship, however, was not hard to fathom. She was a paid pleasure girl, on permanent contract.

The pleasure, it was undertood, was to be hers. Obsoc himself was not a sensuous man: he was a collector, his passions cerebral, who required to have among his possessions a beautiful woman who could plumb the depths of erotic delight. Silicon bones gave Mace that, and Obsoc’s enjoyment was the voyeur’s one of watching her attain the transports of that delight – with whom, or what, or by herself (Obsoc had a complete collection of sexual appurtenances) did not matter. Boaz doubted if he ever actually touched her himself.

Obsoc collected many things, but his real passion was for jewels. He practically raged at Boaz when he spoke of them. He possessed, he said, specimens of all but one of the nine thousand and thirty-four known gem classifications, including the largest natural diamond ever found, weighing over half a ton (this was a mere curiosity, since single-crystal diamonds of up to twenty tons had been synthesized). His cold store contained the complete range of low-temperature gems, including rare varieties of ice of surpassing beauty, produced only under the freak conditions of isolated sunless planets (and far exceeding his half-ton diamond in value). He had an impact technetium sapphire – one of the only two specimens ever found. No price could be put upon his collection; it was unique. He had stipulated that it was to remain intact after his death, and he doubted if any individual would be wealthy enough to buy it. It would, perhaps, become a trust to the glory of the econosphere.

‘There is but one gem, sir, that I do not possess,’ he said in almost ferocious tones to Boaz, ‘and that is a time-gem from Meirjain the Wanderer. The lack of it makes an intolerable gap in my collection, and I am determined to repair it. Furthermore, the fewer are in circulation the better pleased I shall be. Present circumstances, therefore, meet with my approval to some extent – if all goes well.’

‘You’d like it better if you could be the only one to land on Meirjain, I suppose?’ Romrey interjected.

‘You grasp my meaning quite correctly. But you need fear no treachery on my part. I have an unbending sense of probity, and will deal loyally with all members of our little party.’

They were in the main cabin of Boaz’s ship. He strongly disliked entertaining strangers, or indeed anyone, within this, his private domain (it was like inviting someone into his own body), but the proposed exercise called for it.

He sat next to Romrey at the small circular table. To his left was Mace, and opposite him was Obsoc. Romrey was expertly shuffling his cards. ‘Are you ready, Captain?’

Curtly Boaz nodded.

‘Then we must all concentrate. You especially, Captain. Concentrate on what it is we’re looking for.’

For Boaz that was easy, despite his feeling slightly ridiculous about the proceedings. He had been obliged to swallow his scepticism in order to make the experiment, which consisted of marrying the cards’ reputed function with his ship’s special data-gathering ability. Also, he had been obliged to divulge something of that ability. The other three now had some idea – though not a complete one – that it was the ship that kept Boaz alive.

Romrey made a brief salutation, raising his hand perpendicular to his face in a cryptic sign. ‘To the force that orders events.’

Slowly Romrey began to lay down cards, speaking as he did. ‘This deck was issued by the Carborundum Order, which I don’t think exists any more. Anyway I was never a member of it – I’m a straight sort of alec, really. I don’t even know what carborundum means.’

‘It is a carbon compound once used for polishing,’ Boaz supplied quietly. ‘The Carborundum Order taught a technique they termed “polishing the mirror”. The mirror being the mirror of mind.’

‘Is that so? Well, to get down to it, in the Carborundum deck the four suits stand, among other things, for the four points of the compass on planets that have a magnetic field. So we ought to be able to locate which part of the city to look in.’

‘If our man is in Wildhart at all,’ Mace pointed out.

Romrey had dealt five cards. ‘He is,’ he said, pointing to the first, which was the Vehicle, showing a gorgeous chariot-like ship surging through space, sometimes dipping into planetary atmospheres, past shining cities or even under oceans.

‘This is the perfect card of assent and victory,’ he said. ‘It tells us we are right in our assumption. Now, we have two picture cards and three suit cards – two wings, and one cubes. Wings predominate, and stand for north. Therefore he is in the north of the city. But cubes are also present, and they stand for west. So he’s in the northwest, or more probably the north-northwest.’

He peered thoughtfully at the other picture card, as though hoping for some extra clue in its motions. It was the Inverted Man. ‘Note that his head enters a deep shaft. It could mean that our target is underground.’ He darted a look at Boaz. ‘Can your beams reach down there?’

‘It depends how deep,’ Boaz said. ‘Shall I begin?’

Romrey hesitated, fingered the next card in the deck, then pushed it back. ‘OK.’

Boaz slumped, his fist falling to the table with a thump.

He called on his ship, and down below them the innards of one of the big casings geared up, sending beams lunging softly forth. Out, out, up into towers, down into basements, sorting through a collage of Wildhart’s innumerable private scenes.

As on previous occasions, Boaz noted to himself how repetitious were those scenes. Human life centred around only a few activities. People ate, drank, slept, quarrelled, fought, made love, gambled, studied, worked. It was like a number matrix in which nearly all the numbers were the same. But of course this was Wildhart, a border town. In a hundred places around the city men and women were submitting to sex death. There was much robbery, as well as murder – a crime cheapened today by its erotic associations. As well as debauchery in all its most inventive forms.

After getting his bearings, Boaz followed Romrey’s suggestion and concentrated on the substreet levels, muttering a monologue to which Romrey listened intently while laying down more cards, trying to interpret them into suggestions as to which direction Boaz should veer in.

Such a rapid, bewildering overseeing of the life of the city was tiring. And frustrating. After an hour Boaz stopped, exhausted. They had got nowhere.

‘This is no use,’ he said. ‘We are making fools of ourselves with those cards.’

‘I don’t reckon so.’

‘It is ridiculous. I grant they have a lot of adp. So what? How can that affect their order when shuffled?’

Romrey frowned. ‘I heard something about that once, but I didn’t understand it. These cards are locked into the structure of the world somehow. They are never wrong, provided you trust them. But sometimes you have to do a rerun.’

Boaz snorted, glancing scornfully first at Obsoc and then at Mace. Romrey was shuffling again. ‘We’ll start from the beginning,’ he decided stubbornly.

Once more he laid down five cards. The first was the Vehicle. ‘Again the Vehicle!’ he announced triumphantly. ‘Again the Inverted Man! But look here.’

The hand was uncannily similar to the first one, so much so that Boaz suspected sleight of hand. There were two picture cards and three suit cards. And two of the suit cards were wings, as before. But the other was laser rods, not cubes.

‘The first reading misled us,’ Romrey muttered. ‘Of course – the cubes had a low value, and was not reliable. Here we have the nine of rods, which is more definitive. The co-ordinates are to be found in the north-northeast, not north-northwest.’

Wearily Boaz took up the hunt again. And suddenly he seemed to go in rapport with Romrey. He was telling him where he was and what he saw, and Romrey was slapping down card after card, telling him which way to move and whether he was getting closer or farther.

Romrey himself seemed to go into a daze. He held each hand of five fanned before his face as if playing one of the old games like poker or gin-rummy. And he talked, spinning a story out of the cards, sometimes seeming to be ahead of Boaz. Like an invisible spirit, the shipkeeper moved into a semi-derelict area, drifting past broken walls of HCferric that inadequately hid the derelict human beings who sheltered behind them, gliding over dusty unused roadways littered with urban detritus.

Again and again the Inverted Man was turning up, like a flashing locator signal. It told them that Boaz was warm. Then he went through the wall of what appeared to be a deserted warehouse. The ship had found something there, he knew. Mouldy abandoned bales of some sort of fibre were stacked to one side. Without pause, the floor rose up to him. He went through it, down into a series of cellars.

One of them had been converted into makeshift living quarters. On a low couch lay a sleeping figure. Beside it, on the floor, was a dish containing a white powder.

Boaz scanned the rest of the room. There was little furniture. The one door bore steel bonds and at the four corners of the room were antennaed boxes. These were guard devices which, to the credit of his ship, the search beams did not appear to have triggered.

This is the man, the ship told him, who went into the Brilliancy Cluster and detected Meirjain. He has the data.

‘I’ve found him,’ Boaz said out loud.

The other three leaned close. ‘Have you fixed the location?’ Obsoc asked.

‘I can find it again.’

‘Who is he?’ asked Mace curiously.

‘A prospector. He’s drugged right now. I think he’s an addict. It looks like plutosnow.’

‘Oh, by the Fire,’ Mace said, unconscious of using the colonnader oath, ‘no wonder he didn’t make it to Meirjain first time.’ The effects of plutosnow were erratic. It produced bursts of unusual energy and ability, interspersed with an almost total lack of will. Anything achieved by its use usually had to be finished by somebody else.

‘Perhaps the whole story is a fantasy he started,’ Obsoc suggested worriedly. ‘Perhaps Meirjain is not due to appear.’

‘I doubt it,’ Boaz said. ‘One side effect of plustosnow is an aversion to untruth. This character may have opened his mouth too much and then holed up for his own protection. Or else he gave the numbers to a few people and then holed up.’

‘If the econosphere takes it seriously, so can we,’ Romrey said.

Boaz nodded agreement. He looked at Obsoc. It was now up to the trillionaire to play his part and organize the seizure of the needed information. In the circumstances it scarcely seemed necessary. Boaz felt he could take the cellar on his own.

Obsoc’s grasp on realities, however, betokened more than a nodding acquaintances with such operations. ‘We must move carefully,’ he said with a grave air. ‘There are men in Wildhart whose interest in this matter matches our own, and they are totally ruthless. Did you know that the Hat Brothers are here? Also Father Larry and his girls. Perhaps you do not know of these people. I assure you they are very resourceful and they will be watching to see if anyone is about to make a move. Yes…. Then of course the econosphere undoubtedly has agents here, though whether they command any resources worth speaking of is a different matter.’ He pondered. ‘I take it he has defences?’

‘There is a guard system. I didn’t see anything else.’

‘I will hire some people who know how to deal with these things. Meanwhile you’d better give me the exact location.’

The collector attended closely while Boaz drew a rough map and described the warehouse. ‘Good. Well, our work here would seem to be finished. Are you coming, Mace, my dear?’

The girl looked almost appealingly at Boaz. ‘I’ll follow you a little later, Radalce. I’d like to rest here a while longer – if you don’t mind, Captain Boaz.’

Though he would have preferred her to go, Boaz shrugged his consent. Obsoc looked his craggy body up and down, an obvious thought dawning on him. ‘Well, enjoy yourself, my dear. I’ll send the runabout back for you.’

He and Romrey left. When Boaz came back from seeing them down the flowrail she was still sitting at the table. As he came close her hand glided up and gently stroked his leg.

He drew back. ‘You must not do that, Mace. You cannot expect to entice me into dalliance.’

‘You’re not that much of a colonnader!’

‘So to speak.’

‘But you have bones. How can you refuse such pleasure?’

‘I never use my bones, Mace. They have been switched off for many years.’

‘A stoic indeed!’

‘Pleasure is a poor thing to me. My life is set in one direction.’

‘Oh, you’re a mystic, bent on self-transcendence,’ she said, misunderstanding him. ‘But that puzzles me. Here you are going all out after time-gems. It could only be for the money. Greed for money doesn’t square with sensual abstention – does it?’

‘It is not for money.’

‘Then what?’ She frowned.

‘Never mind.’ Boaz waved his hand in annoyance. ‘You wished to end your life.’

‘And you interfered. That was very sanctimonious of you.’

‘It was not because of you. You tried to implicate someone else, in a way that would have had harmful consequences for them. That was unfair.’

She looked unabashed.

‘Do you still intend to end your life?’

She smiled self-consciously, as though wanting to avoid the subject. ‘There’s no such things,’ she said flippantly. ‘You’re a colonnader, you know that. The world returns, and we return with it. There is no death.’

‘You are not a colonnader.’

‘I don’t have to be. Everybody knows it’s true. Science has proved it.’

‘Yes, that is so.’ He paused, deliberating, before he spoke again. ‘But as a consideration, it is too abstract an idea for most people. Even if they take it seriously, the prospect of dreamless sleep for the next nine hundred trillion years is sufficient inducement for the intended suicide. So I ask you again: is it still your intention?’

‘I don’t know.’ She dropped her eyes to the table. ‘When you came bursting in like that, it sort of broke my rhythm.’

‘Is death really the only thrill left?’

‘Well it’s one thrill anyway.’ She glanced up at him again. Her eyes were mischievous. ‘Want me to tell you what it’s like?’

‘Not now,’ Boaz said. ‘Not now. And leave Romrey alone, as far as that is concerned.’

Approaching the warehouse unseen was a problem. Obsoc’s hirelings had picked out a route which minimized the open ground to be crossed, and they carried gadgets which were supposed to keep the guard devices silent, but it was still debatable whether the party would enter undetected.

It was night and Sarsuce was moonless, but the placing of the Brilliancy Cluster was such as to send a glow through the whole atmosphere, so that every solid object was surrounded by a haze of shadow. Boaz stirred, crouching behind a low wall, and watched the three raiders as they edged into the light of Brilliancy.

Romrey was crouched stock-still beside him, peering over the wall with the intentness of a stoat. Obsoc was not present; he awaited their report back in his apartment.

The raiders raced suddenly across the stone-strewn ground to fetch up like shadows against the warehouse wall. As they went, something caused Boaz to look to the right of the building. He saw a human figure in a close-fitting catsuit flit away, loping with head down. ‘Look,’ he whispered to Romrey. But then it was gone.

A billow of fine dust expanded from the base of the warehouse as the team disintegrated a hole in it. ‘They’re going in,’ Romrey whispered hoarsely. Boaz could feel his excitement. They watched as two men went inside. The third man paused, waited, then beckoned to Boaz and Romrey. They scrambled over the wall and ran lightly to join the team.

The interior of the warehouse was as Boaz had already seen it. Obsoc’s men, wearing light energy armour, moved across the floor, holding out ring antennae parallel to it. They were looking for the trapdoor entrance. One of them, a bland-faced, plump man, abruptly stopped and held up a hand.

‘Here it is,’ he murmured, ‘but it’s too well protected.’

‘We’ll dust in through the floor,’ one of his companions said, referring to the disintegration process. He pulled out a grenade.

‘Wait.’ The other was listening to his readings through an earphone. A look of surprise crossed his face. ‘It’s already been opened. We can go through.’

‘He forgot to lock it?’

Already Boaz could guess how events were turning out. But he said nothing while the three cautiously opened the thick hinged plate, alert for traps, and lowered themselves into the cellar below. He followed, and then Romrey. It was as he expected.

The plump man was inspecting a prone body on the matted floor. ‘He’s dead,’ he announced. ‘Sonic gun.’ It was the prospector Boaz had seen asleep on the couch.

‘I saw someone run off just as we got here,’ he informed.

‘Damn. Somebody beat us to it.’

‘Maybe they missed it,’ Romrey said anxiously. ‘Look around. Look for a memory cube.’

‘We’ll look. But we won’t find it. This was an official killing.’ Another of the hirelings picked up a card from the floor. It bore a silver eagle – the emblem of the econosphere. ‘A government agent was here.’

‘Most likely there never was any external record,’ the third raider said. ‘He probably carried the data in his adplant.’

‘Can you be sure that card’s genuine?’ Boaz asked querulously.

‘It’s genuine.’ The hired raider sounded resigned as he examined the document, tilting it in the light to read ingrained patterns. ‘These are pretty difficult to forge. And eco agents always leave them after an enforcement job.’

‘It’s a way of displaying the long arm of the ecosphere,’ the other raider said in all seriousness. He flipped open a communicator. ‘Shall I report to our employer, or will you?’

‘I’ll do it.’ He took the communicator and began to press out Obsoc’s code.

Romrey was standing over the body of the murdered man, shaking his head. ‘The government certainly does want to keep Meirjain off limits, to just wipe this poor alec out like this. I wonder what they’re afraid of?’

The leader of the hirelings shrugged. ‘It beats me. The people who got down last time didn’t find anything so dangerous, from what I’ve heard. They all came back in one piece.’

Boaz got through to Obsoc. On the matt-like surface of the screen he could see the lounge of his apartment, though Obsoc did not show himself. His dry, petulant voice came through. ‘Yes? How is it?’

‘This is Captain Boaz, Citizen Obsoc,’ Boaz said politely. ‘I’m afraid it isn’t any use. A government agent got here before us. Almost certainly the data has been wiped out. It probably doesn’t exist anywhere now.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Obsoc’s voice said. ‘Not in the least. Something has happened in the last few minutes.’

He paused. ‘There’s a blanket broadcast coming out of Brilliancy. It must be from Meirjain. It gives the emergence co-ordinates. They’re common property now.’

‘But that doesn’t make sense!’ exclaimed Romrey, striding over. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means,’ said Obsoc, ‘that something on Meirjain wants people to go there.’