Juggler of Worlds (2 page)

There were recessed handholds in walls, floor, and ceiling.

Panic struck. He was on a
spaceship!
Was gravity a hair higher than usual? Lower? He couldn’t tell.

Plasteel chains clattered dully as Sigmund sat up. He had watched enough old movies to expect chains to clink. Even as the room spun around him and everything faded to black, he found the energy to feel cheated.

COLD PLASTIC PRESSED AGAINST Sigmund’s cheek. He opened his eyes a crack to see the same spartan room. Cell.

This time he noticed that one link of his chains had been fused to a handhold in the deck.

Had he passed out from a panic attack?
Where was he?

Sigmund forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply until the new episode receded. Fear could only muddy his thoughts. More deep breaths.

He had never before blacked out from panic. He could not believe that
this
blackout stemmed from panic. Yes, his faint had closely followed the thought he might be aboard a spaceship. It
also
had occurred just after he had sat up. Sigmund remembered his thoughts having been fuzzy. They seemed sharper now.

He’d been drugged! Doped up and barely awake, he’d sat up too fast.
That
was why he had passed out.

More cautiously this time, Sigmund got into a sitting position. His head throbbed. He considered the pain dispassionately. Less disabling than the last time, he decided. Perhaps the drugs were wearing off.

Some odd corner of his mind felt shamed by his panic attacks. Most Earthborn had flatland phobia worse than he, and so what? True, he’d been born on Earth, but his parents had been all over Known Space. Somehow they took pleasure in strange scents, unfamiliar night skies, and wrong gravity.

On principle, Sigmund had been to the moon twice. He had had to know: Could he leave Earth should the need ever arise? The second time, it was to make sure the success of that first trip wasn’t a fluke.

He listened carefully. The soft whir of a ventilation fan. Hints of conversation, unintelligible. His own heartbeat. None of the background power-plant hum that permeated the spaceships he’d been on. Gravity felt as normal as his senses could judge.

Recognizing facts, spotting patterns, drawing inferences… he managed, but slowly, as though his thoughts swam through syrup. Traces of drugs remained in his system. He forced himself to concentrate.

If this was a ship, it was still on Earth. Someone
meant
to panic him, Sigmund decided. Someone wanted something from him. Until they got it, he’d probably remain alive.

They
.

For as long as Sigmund could remember, there had always been some
they
to worry about.

But even as Sigmund formed that thought, he knew “always” wasn’t quite correct.…

IN THE BEGINNING,
they
were unambiguous enough: the Kzinti.

The Third Man-Kzin War broke out in 2490, the year Sigmund was born. He was five before he knew what a Kzin was—something like an upright orange cat, taller and much bulkier than a man, with a naked, rat-like tail. By then, the aliens had been defeated. The Kzinti Patriarchy ceded two colony worlds to the humans as reparations. In Sigmund’s lifetime, they had attacked human worlds three more times. They’d lost those wars, too.

Fafnir was one of the worlds that changed hands after the third war. His parents had wanderlust and not a trace of flatland phobia. They left him in the care of an aunt, and went to Fafnir in 2500 for an adventure.

And found one.

Conflict erupted that year between humans on Fafnir and the Kzinti settlers who had remained behind. His parents vanished, in hostilities that failed to rise to the level of a numeral in the official reckoning of Man-Kzin Wars. It was a mere “border incident.”

Everyone knew the Kzinti ate their prey.

So
they
, for a long time, were Kzinti. Sigmund hated the ratcats, and everyone understood. And he hated his parents for abandoning him. The grief counselors told his aunt that that was normal. And he hated his aunt, as much as she reminded him of Mom—or perhaps because she did—for allowing Mom and Dad to leave him with her.

The same year his parents disappeared, the Puppeteers emerged from beyond the rim of Human Space. A species more unlike the Kzinti could not be imagined. Puppeteers looked like two-headed, three-legged, wingless ostriches. The heads on their sinuous necks reminded him of sock puppets. The brain, Aunt Susan told him, hid under the thick mop of mane between the massive shoulders.

So
they
came to include these other aliens, these harmless-seeming newcomers, because Sigmund didn’t believe in coincidence. And then
they
came to include
all
aliens—because, really, how could anyone truly know otherwise?

That was when Aunt Susan took him to a psychotherapist. Sigmund remembered the stunned look on her face after his first session. After she spoke alone with the therapist. Sigmund remembered her sobbing all that night in her bedroom.

He had a sickness, or sicknesses, he couldn’t spell, much less understand: a paranoid personality disorder. Monothematic delusion with delusional misidentification syndrome. He didn’t know if he believed the supposed silver lining: that it was treatable.

What Sigmund did believe was the other consolation Dr. Swenson offered Aunt Susan—that paranoia is an affliction of the brightest.

In time, Sigmund understood. Trauma can cause stress can cause biochemical imbalances can cause mental illness. A day and a night asleep in an autodoc corrected the biochemical imbalance in his brain. But a single chemical tweak wasn’t enough: Knowing the world is out to get you is its own stress. Three months of therapy with Dr. Swenson addressed the paranoid behaviors Sigmund had already learned.

Dr. Swenson was right: Sigmund
was
very smart. Smart enough to figure out what the therapist wanted to hear. Smart enough to learn what thoughts to keep to himself.

TREMBLING, SIGMUND TRIED AGAIN to shake off the drugs. Reliving old horrors served no useful purpose—especially now. He needed to focus.

Start with
them
. They weren’t Kzinti: The room was too small. Kzinti would have gone crazy.

They
wanted something from him; how he responded might be the only control he had in this situation. Who might
they
be?

Others might see in him only a middle-aged, midlevel financial analyst. A United Nations bureaucrat. A misanthrope dressed always in black, in a world where everyone else wore vibrant colors.

Sigmund saw more. All those years ago, Dr. Swenson had been far more correct than he knew. Sigmund was more than bright. He was brilliant—in the mind, where it counted, not in gaudy display.

Who were
they?
Probably somebody Sigmund was investigating. That narrowed it down. The bribe-taking customs officials at Quito Spaceport? The sysadmin at the UN ID data center who moonlighted in identity laundering?

Sigmund’s gut said otherwise. It was his other ongoing investigation: the Trojan Mafia. The gang, known by its reputed base in the Trojan Asteroids, engaged in every kind of smuggling, from artworks to weapons to experimental medicines. They killed for hire—and, more often, just to keep the authorities at bay. They were into extortion, money laundering… everything. Every other analyst in Investigations refused to touch them.

Surely that was
who
.

How
was more speculative. A “chance” encounter in the pedestrian mall near his home, he guessed, by someone with a fast-acting hypo-sedative. He stumbles; his assailant, to all appearances a Good Samaritan, helps him to the nearest transfer booth.

Where? Other than somewhere on Earth, Sigmund wasn’t prepared to guess. On a world bristling with transfer booths, he could have been teleported instantaneously almost anywhere.

And when? Blinking to de-blur his vision, Sigmund raised his hands. His left wrist hurt—not much, but it hurt. The time display had frozen. Ironic that, since the subcutaneous control pips felt melted: tiny beads beneath his thumb. Clock, weather, compass, calculator, maps, all the utility functions he normally summoned by fingernail pressure… all gone. He guessed his implant had been fried with a magnetic pulse. It fit the program of disorientation.

They weren’t as smart as they thought. The room had no sanitary facilities, not so much as a chamber pot, and so far he felt no need to pee. His black suit was clean, if rumpled. It wasn’t an ironclad case, but Sigmund guessed he had been snatched from that pedestrian mall no more than a few hours ago.

Footsteps! They approached along the unseen corridor beyond the out-of-reach door. The door flew open.

A tall figure, easily two meters tall, stood in the doorway. A tall fringe of hair bobbed on an otherwise bald head: a Belter crest. And did not Hector, mightiest of the Trojans, famously wear a helmet with a plume of horsehair?

It all fit with the Trojan Mafia.

Sigmund blinked in the suddenly bright light, unable to make out details.

“Good,” the Belter said. “I see you’re awake. There’s someone who wants to speak with you.”

“YOU SEEM UNSURPRISED, Mr. Ausfaller.”

An eerie calm came over Sigmund. “Someone had to put through all the requests for reassignment. Someone had to tolerate one unproductive investigation after another.”

“Your boss,” his captor said.

“Someone had to authorize those transfers. Someone had to accept the department’s persistent failures.” Sigmund mustered all the irony he could. “Sir.”

“Meaning me.” Ben Grimaldi, Undersecretary-General for Inspections, leaned casually against the wall. Body language somehow added, Your suspicions make this easier.

That was self-justifying nonsense, of course. Grimaldi would not have shown himself had there been any chance Sigmund would be let free.

Grimaldi broke a lengthening silence. “I need to learn what you know. More importantly I need to know how.”

Once I reveal that, Sigmund thought, I’m dead. He shifted position, his chains clicking dully. Change the subject. “Why the Trojans?”

Grimaldi smiled humorlessly. “We prefer Achilles. The Trojans were losers.”

The Trojan Asteroids fell into two groups, those orbiting the L4 Lagrange point, 60 degrees ahead of Jupiter in its orbit, and those orbiting the L5 point, 60 degrees behind. The Greek Camp and the Trojan Camp, as they were sometimes called. Achilles was among the largest asteroids in the Greek Camp. Of course Hector
also
orbited there, so named before the labeling convention began.…

Sigmund pinched his leg, desperate to unmuddle his thoughts. “How much dope did you give me?” he demanded.

“Enough.” Grimaldi looked pointedly at his wrist implant. “I must be going soon. Your stay here will be much more pleasant if you answer our questions voluntarily.”

More pleasant, perhaps. Also shorter? Did buying time matter? “Why the Trojans?”

“Why would you think, Ausfaller? They made a generous offer for my assistance. Official scrutiny is bad for their business.

“You’re an odd one, Sigmund, but I admit you’re capable. Persistent. I truly wish I thought we could buy you. Sadly, you inherited piles of money. You still chose to work for a pittance at the UN.” Grimaldi shook his head. “You live like a monk. You dress like a monk. Why offer you money when you ignore the wealth you already have? It seems too likely you have principles.”

And there it was, the memory Sigmund had struggled for. Money. He tried and failed to blink away the fuzziness. “Perhaps
I
can pay
you.”

A reflexive flash of contempt—and then, more slowly, an expression of low cunning. Grimaldi said, “You’d still have to tell everything you’ve learned about me and my associates. And every detail about
how
you learned. It won’t do for someone else to discover what you did.”

“Understood.”

“You wouldn’t try to trick me, now would you?” Grimaldi asked.

“Of course not,” Sigmund answered.

Grimaldi smacked his hands together; strangely, that assurance had sufficed. “Stet. There will be no negotiation. One million stars, transferred into the numbered Belter account I will give you. Don’t bother to protest. I know you’re good for it. When your weekly reports began to show
progress, I made it a point to learn about you. Here’s the deal, Mr. Ausfaller. You pay. You tell all. Then we let you go.”

He’d never be let go, but Sigmund acted as though he believed. Anyway, the million-and-change he thought Grimaldi could trace was merely the fraction of Sigmund’s wealth he intended to be visible—and it wasn’t as though there were anyone to leave his money to. At worst, the charade might make his final hours less unpleasant.

Sigmund raised his arms, clanking on purpose. “For a million stars, I want these off. I want a nicer room. A suite with plumbing would be good.”

“We’ll see about that after the funds clear. Until then, maybe a pot.” Grimaldi took a sonic stunner and a handheld computer from pockets of his bodysuit. He whispered inaudibly into the handheld, set it on the deck, and then slid it with his shoe tip toward Sigmund. Handheld and foot never came within Sigmund’s reach. The sonic stunner was fixed on him.