Meeting at Infinity (6 page)

F
OR REASONS
that outsiders were ignorant of, Ahmed Lyken had his office low down in the great tower dominating the complex of buildings which formed his base of operations. To one of his rivals, the knowledge might have been significant, or simply an example of eccentricity. Usually, the merchant princes preferred to look down on their domains, and Clostrides was copying them when he looked down on The Market.

Looking through the window-wall of the office, Lyken could not see much of what he controlled. But he could hold it in
his mind, and what he saw there pleased him. It had doubled its size since he took on his franchise. When he won, it would double again. He promised himself that.

Somehow, it was no longer quite as easy to think
“when
he won.” “If he won” kept creeping back.

He turned as a casual beep sounded on the door speaker, and the panels slid back to admit his baseman, Shane Malco, his hands full of documents, his face set in an expression of defeat. Lyken had his answer before he asked his question; he uttered it nonetheless.

“Did you get him?”

Malco shook his head. He dropped his documents on Lyken’s huge desk and stepped back. “That’s the finance and equipment report you called for,” he said parenthetically. And shifted to the main subject.

“We got the address where he was last living, and went to it. It was a dreg’s lodging block on the edge of the Quarter. The team I sent spent almost an hour working the landlady over. All they got was that Erlking got money from somewhere, enough to pay off his back rent, and moved out. He left no address.”

“Sure? Beyond doubt?”

“There isn’t room for doubt.” Malco passed a tired hand across his face. “You shouldn’t just have fired him, Ahmed. You should have—”

“Shot him?” interrupted Lyken with deceptive gentleness. “Pensioned him off in the franchise? I hope you were going to suggest the latter, Shane. Erlking had given me long and good service, and I wouldn’t have killed him off. Know that, Shane?”

Malco licked dry lips and nodded. He said, “But you’re staking so much on this place Akkilmar!”

Lyken shrugged. It cost him a lot of effort to make the shrug casual. “He was properly hypnoed,” he said shortly. “The fact that one of his locks was opened was a million-to-one
chance. And it didn’t seem to have been opened very far, to judge from what truth serum dug out of Nevada’s mind. What have you done with him, by the way?”

After a pause, Malco said, “Nothing—yet. What do you want done with him?”

“Was his money good? Did you get the half million?”

Taken aback, Malco nodded. He pointed at the documents on the desk. “You’ll find it there, under ‘contingencies reserve,’ ” he said. “It’s good, all right.”

“Then take him through to the franchise, the way he asked to be taken,” said Lyken, and gave a curiously bitter laugh. “No one can say I don’t keep my bargains.”

“Will do,” agreed Malco.

“What else are you doing about Erlking?”

“What can I do? I’ve got all the agents I can spare out scouring the city for him. But it’s getting very difficult.”

“Trouble?”

“I came mainly to tell you. Rioting. Started a few minutes ago. Several of our ’cruiters have been set upon by gangs of cultists. All the avenues leading to the base have been effectively blocked by crowds. I suspect that some of the cultists
aren’t,
if you get me. They’re trained rabblerousers. Someone we took in for questioning says he heard rumors of our having imported a new strain of the White Death. He said he didn’t believe it. I think he half did.”

“I wondered how long they’d wait before turning that one loose. Damn that grain fungus! It’s given them just the opening they needed.”

Malco said nothing, but waited for instructions.

“Give it half an hour,” said Lyken suddenly. “If the police haven’t cleared the streets by then, kidnap ’em. I’m going to get my twelve thousand through before midnight come hell or high bailiff!”

“You think Clostrides is behind it?” Malco prompted.

“Who else?”

Lyken turned one more time to stare through the window-wall. While he had been talking to Malco, the lights had come on all over the tangle of buildings. Scarcely aware that he spoke aloud, he said under his breath.
“Twice
as big!”

“What?” Malco looked confused.

Lyken laughed again, this time without sounding bitter. He said, “Nothing, Shane. Can you handle things on the lines I indicated—for say two or three hours?”

“Well, I
could,
I guess, but—!”

“Carry on, then.” Lyken moved towards the door. “I have things to straighten out in the franchise itself.”

“Are you going to Akkilmar, perhaps?” Malco asked after a pause.

“That’s right.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Ahmed. That’s all I can possibly say. I just hope you
know.”

So do I.

The thought kept wriggling, naggingly, through Lyken’s mind, like a worm. For a long time he had expected a showdown with the Directors; he knew well enough that he was not liked, that his franchise was too successful, that he had taken a larger slice of the available market than any other concessionary except the Directors themselves. Fair enough. It was in the rules, the unwritten rules. And he had banked on two things to protect him.

One was implicit in the fact that he had his office low down in the main tower of his base, and the portals through to the franchise on floors high above. You could never predict the geography—or the geology—of a Tacket franchise, and although you would go through and see the sun or the stars unchanged, at the same angle above the horizon as they were when you set out, you could not be sure of the ground underfoot.

In Lyken’s franchise, a naked pillar of rock almost a thousand feet high and two hundred feet thick coexisted with his
home base. His trading station perched on this pillar like the eyrie of an eagle, and it was invulnerable. The Directors would not be satisfied with simply closing his franchise. They wanted it—operating. And to save them from having to re-explore it expensively, bit by bit, they would also want the precious data stored in the trading post.

That was one kind of insurance he had. And Akkilmar was the second.

He was not absolutely sure, because you could never be sure about what some other franchise might hold, but he was almost sure that nothing like Akkilmar existed in any other franchise but his own.

The first time he had seen the place, he had been misled by appearances. It was a sizeable small town, a long way south of his base, in a subtropical area and close to the sea on which it largely depended for food. It had been reported numerous times by scouts, and accurately described: a town of wooden buildings, with streets as smooth and green as good lawns, well populated by tall people whose complexions ranged from copper to gold, apparently without mechanical aptitude—even without the wheel. There were few civilizations in the franchise at all, on this continent; the Old World, as usual, had a near monopoly.

Therefore it had gone long uninvestigated. Lyken had to repress a shudder when he thought how nearly he had overlooked the place altogether.

Once, however, a scout had been lost while exploring natural resources—his heli had been struck by lightning during a storm, and his locators were out, so they had to search for him over thousands of square miles. Someone dropped in on the people of Akkilmar, to ask if they had seen the scout. They had not, they answered gravely, but they knew where he was and gave directions.

The scout was within a mile of the spot they indicated, and after that Lyken looked into Akkilmar. He had no cause to
regret the decision. Except, perhaps, that the people there made him feel inferior.

Once his attention had been drawn to the place, he did not take long to realize that he had perhaps the most amazing and valuable prize in any known franchise: a society that by some process other than scientific logic, by intuition or direct perception, had arrived at scientific principles. And could make them do tricks.

He had, even now, only a vague picture of what they could achieve. He had had nothing commercially useful out of them apart from the rho function field perceptor—and to date, no one had succeeded in making that work except for cocoonees cut off from the outside world. He had visualized it being employed as a kind of transmitterless television, and it was fairly certain that in Akkilmar it was used as such, but no normal person who had tried it had succeeded in interpreting its data properly. It would take a long time to understand Akkilmar’s nonscience. But it existed, and it was powerful.

He was playing a hunch in hoping that it was powerful
enough.

The sages were waiting for him when his heli sliced down out of the evening sky and purred to a landing on the level sand of the beach. They might just have come out to sit and watch the sunset, but Lyken felt that was not so. They were waiting for him.

They were such a
friendly
people! As he came towards them over the sand, Lyken remembered how he had had to press them to accept anything in exchange for the perceptor. They had agreed at last to take some musical instruments, and nothing more.

They exchanged greetings, and indicated that he should join the group. It was in the form of a shallow horseshoe, facing the sunset; the place they assigned to Lyken was in the opening of the curve. They
had
been waiting for him When
he sat down, they were facing him without having had to move.

He had never been able to establish which of them was a leader, or indeed if they had a leader at all, and while turning over in his mind what he had to say he wondered which of them he should address his appeal to. Before he had decided, a plump man with a perpetual smile, whom he had met before, cleared his throat and spoke up.

“Beware of Allyn Vage,” he said pleasantly.

The others chuckled, a rippling, rich sound. Bewildered, Lyken shook his head. There was no possibility of his having misheard; the people of Akkilmar had learned the language of the intruders on their world with astonishing speed and perfect accuracy. Allyn Vage. A name. It meant nothing to him, and he apologized and said so.

“Never mind,” said a woman sitting next to the man who had spoken. Her hair was going gray, and her almost bare body suggested that she was childless. There were rather few children in Akkilmar, and that was another unsolved problem about this culture.

“We know why you have come,” said a man sitting on the first speaker’s other side. “Of course we will help you. You have been friendly to us, when you might have been brutal and exploited us through your strange powers. Go in peace and we will follow.”

Lyken had not been prepared for this; he had expected a long discussion and a hard task of persuasion. Taken aback, he glanced around the assembly.

“But how do you know?” he demanded. “How do you know what I want?”

The first speaker put out his hand and scooped up some dry fine sand from the beach. Letting it trickle between his fingers in a thin stream, he traced a symbol with it. All of them chuckled again.

“Go!” said the first speaker, and to his own amazement
Lyken found himself obeying. It was much later, when he was almost back at the trading post, that he was able to ask himself why.

W
HEN
G
AFFLES
came back to the Octopus, he found Jockey de-briefing a group of runners—yonder boys with tinted hair and jackets as wide across the shoulders as a cruiser’s nose. He cued them with a straight forefinger, hearing each of the runners out before shifting the finger like a clockhand. Gaffles whistled sharply at him; he glanced up, read the look on his aide’s face, and dropped his hand abruptly.

“Out!” he said. “Come back in three minutes.”

The runners got up and scrambled out of Gaffles’s way with a clatter of high boots. “You caught up with Curdy?” Jockey demanded when they had gone.

“Got close behind him. But I broke off. This was too hot to hold on to.” Gaffles dropped into a seat and recounted what he had found out, about Nevada having lodged in the same block as Erlking.

“That’s good clean long string,” said Jockey approvingly. “Where’s Erlking? You find him?”

Gaffles shook his head. “He moved. He had money from someone and didn’t leave an address. And it’s going to be hell scouring town for him tonight, no free fall about that. It’s
rough
out there!”

Jockey plucked at his lower lip, dubiously. “I heard. I was just getting the breakdown when you showed. But if he’s
going to be useful, we’ve got to get him
now.
Lyken will have had it from Nevada that Erlking’s hypnolocks aren’t fast—if Nevada did get his news from Erlking, and that’s most likely. Lyken will go after Erlking and drag him through into his franchise, or just blot him. That’s what I’d do on his spot.”

“You can add a fact to your breakdown,” said Gaffles. “I came through a bad riot on the way. The police are taking in four ’cruiters to every cultist, where they can. I heard, too, that sometimes they’re turning cultists loose on the quiet, running ’em around the corner and tipping ’em out the paddy wagon.”

Jockey grunted. “There’s a knot here,” he said. “Unless Athlone is plain blind, he may have got the news about Erlking. He was right in the lodging block, you said. He saw Clostrides this morning, recall? Then the news may get to the Directors as well, and that’ll mean two parties we have to get to Erlking ahead of. Gaffles, go through to the Venus, will you? You’ll find about thirty runners hanging around. They’re tonight’s strategic reserve. Get them out after Erlking. Promise them the moon if they find him ahead of the competition.”

It was a blow to Curdy Wence to get so close to Erlking and then to lose the trail. He paid the landlady of the lodging block fifty, and she still didn’t know Erlking’s new address, so either she was telling the truth or someone else had got to her first. Curdy wanted to assume the latter—there was something peculiar about her reactions, he thought—but on his first Rate One job he didn’t want to get involved with a beating-out. There were plenty of pugs around who could beat out the news, but Curdy thought it was unsophisticated. Philosophically, he went back to his previous method of procedure, which, in this Quarter where everyone knew about Jockey Hole, worked tolerably well. Frown to look older;
hand in side of jacket to suggest a weapon; relaxed tone to indicate absolute confidence, and—

“I’m from Jockey. He wants a man called Erlking. Used to be Ahmed Lyken’s Remembrancer. Where is he?”

And the answer would take the form, “Sorry, I don’t know. But cuddy! Try so-and-so. He should know, I guess.”

He could tell that the technique worked because after a further half-dozen calls he started to have people giving him Erlking’s old address, the one he’d moved away from. And he kept on getting more numbers to try.

What he didn’t know was that after seven calls the half-hour waiting period laid down by Ahmed Lyken expired. And after eight calls he walked around a corner into the arms of a ’cruiter who picked him up, clobbered him, and slung him in the back of a wagon, which then had its full load of involuntary recruits, and took
off
howling down a sidestreet with police in full pursuit.

The ’cruiter who picked Curdy up knew his business; his clobbering was scientific and precise. Not so hard as to leave a lasting ache and incapacitiate him for the work he had to do tomorrow; hard enough to stop him from being any kind of a nuisance on the way to Lyken’s base. He woke up before the wagon actually got there, but his head was ringing like a bell and ached abominably, and he could barely get his eyes open. During a few seconds of consciousness he viewed the dark interior of the wagon, saw the lights of a street through the rear opening, heard groans from all around him, and felt a heavy limp weight—the weight of an unconscious body—across his legs and feet. Then he lapsed back into the dark.

He regained consciousness a second time when his shoulder was seized and shaken violently. This time his head was clearer, and his eyes focused at once instead of after two false attempts. He saw a pug in Lyken’s company uniform, his cap tipped back on his shaven head, leaning over and saying something as though through a long, long pipe. The gurgling
words sorted themselves out in Curdy’s muddled brain, and made sense.

“On your feet, yonder boy.”

He didn’t move. He said, “What?” And felt that the limp weight on his feet had gone. Beyond the opening in the back of the wagon he could see that there was a large, lighted yard, with people milling about. Someone was shouting orders over an amplifier.

“Yurd me!” the pug growled, and reached for Curdy’s shoulder again, intending to pick him up and throw him bodily out of the wagon.

Curdy waited till the pug was off balance. Then he swung his feet, quickly and together, to the floor, and bounced upright. It was good and measured, all smooth and falling free.

Taken aback, the pug blinked at him. He chose his insults carefully, and said, “No Tacket-loving company pug tells
me
what to do, gasbrains.”

The pug’s face twisted with rage, and he clawed a baton loose from his belt where it swung on a long thong. Curdy kicked his wrist before he could raise it out of reach; in the same moment, before his foot dropped back to the floor, he caught the end of his whangee stick and pulled it out of the side of his boot. He cracked it across the pug’s face.

The pug would have brushed aside a punch with a closed fist; the stinging pain of the whangee stick made him grunt and close his eyes, cursing foully. Behind him, another captive slumped on one of the racks stirred and groaned.

But Curdy had no time to think of rescuing anyone but himself. He seized his chance while the pug was distracted by the pain, and spun round, intending to jump over the back of the wagon and run off.

There was a man waiting for him as he jumped, who shot out a leg to trip him and helped him on his way down with a shove in the small of the back. Curdy went sprawling on hard concrete pavement.

“A yonder boy with skill and guts!” said the man who had tripped him in a sarcastic tone, bending down and snatching Curdy’s whangee stick from him. Curdy feigned a grab for it, and instead dived for the speaker’s legs, but just in time the man stepped back. There was the snicking sound of an energy gun being cocked, and Curdy looked up, his heart sinking, to see its snub muzzle in the man’s hand.

After that, there was nothing to be done.

In the big bright yard there were at least a dozen paddy wagons being unloaded. Uniformed teams were ordering the occupants out, and, if they were unwilling, dragging them. Curdy felt he owed it to his self-respect to be dragged, but the energy gun lined on him convinced him otherwise. The man wielding it made him stand to one side while the other captives from the wagon which had brought him in were assembled in a rough line. Then two pugs came up, one bearing an armful of clinking chain, and Curdy saw how things were to be arranged.

The pugs paid out the chain in front of the line of captives. Attached to this chain at intervals were shorter chains each terminating in an oval metal ring. The pugs picked up the rings one by one, seized the right wrists of the captives, and snicked the rings on like handcuffs. Curdy was the last to be treated; when the others had been secured, the man with the gun motioned him into line, and he submitted, seething. There were a couple of empty rings still; as the line of captives was herded across the yard, with the two pugs hauling on the front end of the chain, these rings clanked on the ground behind Curdy like insane tambourines.

On the opposite side of the yard was a travolator leading into a lighted tunnel. There was no hint where it might lead. As Curdy’s group approached, another group was being loaded on. The chain binding them was locked on to a hook on a belt moving at the same speed as the travolator, and they
had to go with it like a team playing pop-the-whip, staggering as they were dragged forward.

What in Tacket’s name had driven Lyken—Lyken of all the merchant princes—to such desperate measures? Curdy’s head spun as much with the problem as with the aftereffects of the blow he had received.

His group was just about to be hooked on to the conveyer belt and dragged on to the travolator, when a man to whom the pugs gave respectful salutes came out from behind one of the empty paddy wagons. With him were two more pugs, straggling to control a wide-eyed man in a brown coverup, who shook and struggled, uttering little moaning cries.

“Hook this one on with the others,” ordered the newcomer, his voice sounding tired and strained. He jerked a thumb at the man in the brown coverup. The pugs grinned and nodded. In a moment, their struggling victim was chained behind Curdy, and the whole group was being snatched forward on to the travolator. Dimly, there was a sarcastic remark from the newcomer.

“You’re getting where you asked to be taken, you fool!”

Curdy had visions of the wide-eyed man causing trouble on the travolator, and as soon as they were on it and steady on their feet, he turned to him and prepared to warn him to keep still. But a shock of recognition prevented him.

“But—but you’re the man who spoke to Lyken outside The Market at noon!”

The other didn’t seem to hear. Instead of struggling and pulling on his chain as Curdy had feared, however, he began to curse. It discomforted Curdy to hear such fluent obscenity in an accent with status to it. Some of the other captives, who seemed to have been shocked into numb acquiescence by the fate that had overtaken them, half-turned and looked incuriously back.

The travolator began to spiral upwards at a steep angle, so that they almost slid backwards on its rough surface. The
man behind Curdy stopped cursing and began to shout in a high, hysterical tone.

“Do you know what’s happening to you? I’ll tell you! A bastard called Lyken wants us for cannon fodder! They’re throwing him out of his franchise, and it’s more than time—he’s a cheating lying filthy Tacket-loving scoundrel who lies and smiles and isn’t fit to
breathe!
”

Someone higher up the line cried out in an anguished voice. Curdy felt fear go through him like a frozen wind.

“I want to get hold of Lyken and pull off his fingers!” The man behind him screamed. “I want to put oil on his beard and hear him yell while it burns off his face! I want to—”

“Shut him up, can’t you?” bellowed a voice from higher up. Curdy gulped. The raw savagery in his neighbor’s tone was churning his guts. He hesitated. Then he bunched his fist.

“If you don’t stop it,” he said in his roughest manner, “I’ll break your nose for you.”

The man stopped, crouching a little against the rise of the travolator, and stared at Curdy with tear-bright eyes. “I’m Luis Nevada,” he said inanely, in a voice that had dropped suddenly to a conversational level.

Curdy answered him with a grunt, and there was silence for a while, until the travolator flattened out again, and they emerged into a great hall. One by one they turned and stared at what they saw there. They all recognized it. Pictures had been published often enough. It was a Tacket portal in full operation.

“What did I tell you?” howled the man behind Curdy. “Rot Lyken’s soul in hell!”