Meeting at Infinity, Page 3

  Of course, the strain was considerable; Dismar Grail had served Clostrides for six years now and was nearing the end of his useful life. A successor would have to be found for him soon.

  Clostrides cut short his reflections. He said, “A man by the name of Luis Nevada, Dismar. He’s said to be a killer.”

  The Remembrancer looked doubtful. He said in his odd, off-key voice, “There was a Luis Nevada in the Eastern Quarter who made the newstapes about four or five months ago …” He let the last word trail off, waiting for encouragement.

  “That’s right,” said Clostrides.

  “I have complete court reports,” ventured Grail. Clostrides shook his head.

  “Just the essentials, Dismar. You’re very good at giving the essentials, aren’t you?”

  The Remembrancer gave a nod; he liked to recite verbatim, which was his greatest pleasure because it was his only accomplishment. Nonetheless, Clostrides’ compliment partly made up the deficit. He said, “He was a man called Luis Nevada. He was thirty-two years old. He was a distributor and speculator in imported goods, with special ties with Norrogood and Baleground. He’s married to a woman called Allyn Vage. There was an accident with the heating apparatus in their apartment; a Maxwell demon had its governors fail and shunted localized heat into the wife’s bed. There was a fire. She was burned and disfigured. She accused Nevada of trying to kill her. The case was conducted by the vice-sheriff of the Eastern Quarter in person, Kingsley Athlone. There was no evidence except the word of the wife. The courts said accident. Provisional verdict. Athlone appealed. Statute of limitations is relevant, year and a day period. A month later Nevada obtained an injunction against Athlone, claiming persecution and slander. He stopped Athlone from publicizing his identity in places where he lodged. That’s about all.”

  “So in fact he hasn’t killed anyone?” Clostrides said.

  “That’s right.” Dismar Grail waited, his mouth working as though he were repeating what he had said under his breath, double-checking for errors.

  Clostrides shrugged. He had expected something of the sort from the way Athlone behaved. Still, he wasn’t concerned with law-enforcement; he wanted to know about Lyken.

  He said, “Dismar, what was the substance of what Nevada said to Lyken outside The Market about an hour ago?”

  “The words that he said were: ‘Lyken, remember Akkilmar!’ ”

  Clostrides frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “Restricted information,” said Grail smugly.

  Clostrides glanced at the calendar on his desk, and ran down the list of hypnokeys in his mind till he fell on the words appropriate for today’s date. “Ah—‘water is dry.’ ”

  Grail gave a weak smile. He always smiled at the non-senical hypnokeys. He said, “Akkilmar is the name of a tribe, and a country ruled by that tribe, and its capital city, in the franchise assigned to Ahmed Lyken.”

  “Is it now?” said Clostrides. Automatically, Dismar Grail began to sob, because it was the worst kind of cruelty to him to have the accuracy of his information questioned, even inadvertently. Clostrides’ words were absent-minded; he took them literally, nonetheless.

  Clostrides comforted him with a few exaggerated compliments, and thought the information over. He said at length, “Did Nevada have any trade connections with Lyken?”

  Grail shook his head mutely, his protuberant pale eyes bright with tears.

  That was peculiar, then. Clostrides mulled it over. For Nevada’s shout to have such an effect on Lyken, it must have been significant. If it concerned something in Lyken’s franchise, the chances were a good hundred to one in favor of it being a trade secret. He said, “Water is dry, Dismar. How is it that we know what Akkilmar means?”

  “Uh—preliminary inquiries turned it up before the franchise was assigned to Ahmed Lyken.”

  So within the franchise, it was pretty well known. Had to be. Preliminary scouting of a new franchise was necessarily not very thorough, whatever the public was told. However that might be, Clostrides decided, this would bear investigation.

  He began to give the orders at once.

  3

  POPULAR TRADITION afterwards endowed Tacket with the attributes of a rat—snipy nose, projecting teeth, shifty eyes, sallow complexion probably garnished with pimples. In fact, he was a moderately good-looking man with bushy fair hair and a determined chin—a feature which amateur physiognomists ought to class more often among danger signs.

  But the worst danger sign of all was abstract. Tacket played with number, and with physical analogues of number. He was not a practical man, yet he was clever with his mind and his hands. Up till the time of his great discovery, his main accomplishment had been devising mechanical puzzles.

  The great discovery—that of his celebrated Principle, which changed the world—was the fruit of an examination of pi. It fired his mind; his mind was explosive; the explosion came near to destroying everything.

  Pi, it seemed, was invariant. However, certain deductions from curved-space mathematics indicated conditions under which it would assume values different from the familiar 3.1416. It would remain an irrational number of course. But the physical conditions for altering its value could be described. Tacket’s preoccupation with analogues of number did the rest.

  The point was that to apply his Principle Tacket needed only power and a comparatively simple, inexpensive device for controlling that power. He built the device. It generated a field within which the value of pi altered. So did other characteristics of space. Tacket looked through his new toy. He didn’t intend it to be much more than a toy. Then he went through it. Then the news burst upon the world that there were hundreds—possibly thousands—of sister Earths circling old Sol. While the world was still going “ooh!” and “aah!” over the discovery, other people built the same device, powered it, went adventuring.

  Those were Tacket’s Expeditions.

  Of course, Tacket himself never knew about the majority of them. It was even questionable whether he personally had anything to do with the most infamous expedition of all, the fatal one—though tradition later insisted that he did.

  News came pouring back. Civilizations! All different from one another! Almost all founded on the same root that was later to underpin the thousand-story tower of The Market: greed. Where there was greed, there was trade. People began to trade immediately, randomly, and the word “imported” suddenly reappeared in languages from which the century-old World Economic Union had banished it.

  Even in the first frenzy of discovery and exploitation, some hard facts were established. There were probably thousands of adjacent Earths in which other Tackets had made similar discoveries. There, however, the value of pi—used as a convenient basis for identifying and cataloguing the sister Earths—differed from the familiar one only after some hundreds of decimal places. The world accordingly decided that time would take care of the difference; meanwhile there were about a hundred thousand worlds more or less readily accessible, and there was business to be done.

  For a short while, the world shared Tacket’s elation and jubilation. For a long while, it cursed his name and all he stood for.

  The White Death was a virus disease—that was established—which originated beyond the Tacket threshold, and killed by the millions.

  It rose apparently simultaneously in scores of places, though afterwards all the outbreaks were traced to a common source. It raged for the better part of a year without check. The first signs appeared at the extremities; the toes and little fingers paled and lost all sensation. Within forty-eight hours, symptoms similar to GPI set in—the victims staggered, spoke with difficulty, suffered fits of causeless rage. Eyesight began to blur. Then the limbs paled like the toes and fingers to deathly whiteness, and at about the time motor co-ordination failed completely—a week or two after the onset—the brain tissues started to degenerate.

  About a hundred million people died. So completely did the White Death disrupt communications and government
that registration of deaths broke down over whole states. It was more certain that approximately a thousand million people were more or less badly affected, from paralysis and insanity to apparent complete recovery. The ones who recovered were infected late, when the virus appeared to have mutated into a less lethal strain.

  No cure had been found when the death toll dropped to nil.

  In the chaos of the White Death, many things happened. Tacket was killed, for instance. Fanatical avengers blew his laboratory up, with him in it, and his portals. Innocent explorers returning from innocent Tacket trips found welcoming parties waiting for them with noose, gun or knife. Their equipment was usually smashed or burned.

  Certain cults appeared. Some vanished quickly; some endured.

  And the economy of the planet threatened to fall to bits.

  When the worst was over, and government was being restored, the governors found themselves faced with a terrible paradox. On the one hand, it was known that the White Death had come from one of the sister Earths, and that Tacket’s Principle had let it in. On the other, it was seen that unless outside aid was siphoned in, the economy was going to dissolve in famine, rioting and maybe warfare.

  You can’t bury knowledge. You can only bury the people who possess it. There was just one answer ready to hand, and The Market stood as its symbol.

  They rebuilt the economy of the world as a middleman’s economy. They banned indiscriminate use of Tacket’s Principle. They leased franchises to reliable parties—to skilled entrepreneurs or to hastily formed syndicates—sold them power, and guaranteed their rights. They had to give guarantees. In those years directly following the White Death, anyone meddling with Tacket’s Principle was liable to be hung on a handy tree.

  Then they begged to be saved from scarcity.

  Some people rebelled. They wanted no more truck with Tacket’s Principle, no matter how efficient the safeguards might appear. The concessionaries ignored these people’s objections. They found other people who were too hungry, cold or weary to care, and formed bodyguards. They occupied their franchises; they policed them; they exploited them.

  A good franchise was the richest investment in history.

  Those who still objected found refuge with the most viable of the cults, and sought to save their souls by refusing to buy “imported” goods. They seldom kept that up for long, unless they were fanatics. Pretty soon, the concessionaries had found out how to get almost anything that was needed by cross-trading between the Tacket worlds. Some few items—heavy engineering, means of transport, and other things essential to advanced civilization—could not be got from the comparatively backward Tacket worlds. But food and fibers and furniture, and every sort of raw material, could be got aplenty. By and large, the world adapted itself to living off the traders’ commission rather quickly.

  If it had not been for the White Death, it would not have happened quite so quickly and smoothly.

  There were obstacles. There were problems. What automation had failed to do two centuries before, Tacket did without the least intention—rendered full employment inconceivable. The dregs of society went to the bottom. Half the world’s population became pensioners of the other half, and hated them for it. The other half engaged in distribution. Compared with the volume of imports, manufactures dropped to a trickle. The major home industry was power—power for the huge portals through which the merchant princes brought their goods.

  There were occasional scares and scandals. Half a dozen franchises had to be closed because of unidentified disease. Others, however, yielded incredible antibiotics; the two canceled out and left only the screeching of the fanatical cultists.

  In general, then, people liked the setup. The emergency systems of government improvised after the chaos of the White Death persisted, simply because no one got around to changing them. Thus Clostrides was high bailiff of The Market, and the most influential man on Earth. Thus new ranks solidified; thus status became something tangible, to speak of as though it could be weighed and measured. Almost, it could be. Meantime Tacket’s name degenerated to a casual obscenity; hatred diminished, but was not allowed to die. The new lords of the new Earths were jealous of their rights.

  For that reason there were still, after all these years, departments in every law-enforcement agency charged with detecting unauthorized application of Tacket’s Principle. They had simple instruments as convenient as radiation counters.

  For an extension of that reason, Ahmed Lyken was being driven into a corner. The new lords of the new Earths were sometimes jealous of their colleagues’ rights—and Ahmed Lyken had never taken pains to make himself popular.

  Unaware of the passage of the hour of noon-for-doom, Luis Nevada sank back on the inflated cushions of the luxurious cruiser and stared disbelievingly at Lyken. The relief which overwhelmed him was as violent as the blow the pug had given him in the face.

  He had never really expected it to work. He had just had to do something more than wait passively and skulk in corners. He had sustained himself on a hope he did not believe, and the strain of lying to himself for weeks on end had sapped his energy to the point of collapse. Now that the gamble had come off, he found dismayingly that he had no plan prepared, no scheme for survival past this crucial point. And he was too weak to prepare one now.

  Nonetheless, illogical elation started to possess him.

  For the first few minutes of the humming journey, Lyken seemed to have forgotten his new passenger. He drew the face-piece of a transceiver from a concealed panel in the side of the cruiser, put it on, and spoke and listened with intent concentration. Nevada judged that he was giving orders. Although he had spent his working life successfully speculating in the products which men like Ahmed Lyken had imported, he had no very clear picture of their world. Sometimes people had suggested to him that if he went about it the right way he might get a franchise of his own in ten years’ time. But he felt temperamentally ill-equipped for the task, and had never considered the idea seriously. Now, therefore, his mind filled with vague impressions of vast trading deals—buy this, sell that, send another team into unexplored country, trace the source of those strange textiles—which Lyken might now be setting in motion.

  He waited passively till Lyken was through.

  Suddenly eyes hard and penetrating seemed to slap his face as Lyken detached the transceiver and thrust it back in its compartment. A brittle voice betraying no real interest demanded of him, “What do you know of Akkilmar?”

  “Where and what it is,” said Nevada promptly. It was at least half a lie. Erlking’s ramshackle mind had released little more than the simple name and a hint of its importance. But he had staked his future on that; he was willing to ride his luck a little further.

  “I see.” Lyken’s tone was brusque. “What do you want?”

  “Refuge,” said Nevada, letting the words come as they would. “I’ve been hounded for months by the vice-sheriff of the Eastern Quarter, for attempting to murder my wife. He says: She says. I didn’t do it. I’ve been told that once on the territory of a franchise, no one can touch you without the concessionary’s permission.”

  “True,” said Lyken bleakly. “So—?”

  “So I want six months’ refuge in your franchise. I’ll do anything useful. And what’s more, I’ll pay.”

  “How much?”

  “Half a million,” he said. He would find that.

  “How soon?”

  “Today, if you like.”

  “Done,” said Lyken, and the ghost of a smile crossed his face. He put the transceiver facepiece back on and went on talking to his unseen correspondent.

  The blood had dried on Nevada’s face. He mopped at it with a kerchief and let his mind blank out with utter weariness.

  4

  CURDY WENCE was in the front rank of the crowd when Nevada got taken up into Lyken’s cruiser. He was seventeen years old, born rankless, determined not to stay that way, and as measured as anything, as measured as a foot-rule, as measu
red as time. He was everything the yonder boys admired about themselves. And he was on the way up.

  So far, working for Jockey Hole was the only upward path he’d found. And that was strictly piecework. Still, if you were good at it, it paid all right. Curdy Wence was better than good at it. He was born lucky. That was why he, and not another of Jockey’s hangabouts, was in this particular crowd at this particular time.

  There were dozens like him assembled to watch Lyken’s departure—young dregs in artificially broad-shouldered jackets of dull gold, maroon or sage green and high boots decorated painstakingly by hand with chrome appliqué work. Their barberclips were personalized with tints of carrot-red or white; they moved with a gangling gait designed to suggest huge reserves of strength. Some of them actually had strength. Not many of them were measured the way Curdy was. Thinking was what counted. Everybody knew there were people working for Jockey Hole who could take him to bits one-handed, but it was Jockey who figured out things to be done. That was where Curdy was going. He’d made up his mind.

  Now this little event here, this minute. That was curio, it was indeed.

  The commotion died slowly; Lyken’s big cruiser hummed away down the Avenue Columbus, bound for his base. Curdy waited, changing occasionally from foot to foot and chewing on a pad of tranks. Everybody knew that Jockey Hole had got where he was because he was measured like anything. He never got flustered or worked up about anything. Maybe to him that came naturally. Maybe not. Curdy thought he probably used tranks like everyone else.

  Waiting, he let the words he had heard revolve slowly in his mind. Had the pug got anything to do with it? Curdy knew him by sight, had heard accounts of him from places. Thickhead, was the account. Stupid like stone. All that connected him with the affair, odds were, would be the baton Lyken’s bodyguard had used to crack his head. Also to be weighed: whether Breaker Bolden would be capable of talking any other way than with his fists just now. Curdy could look after himself. Most of the yonder boys had to know how. Difference was, Curdy reflected, that a pug of Breaker Bolden’s kind didn’t care about looking after himself at all. What he wanted was to take care of the other guy.