Meeting at Infinity (9 page)

T
HE SHOCK
of the explosions at Lyken’s base seemed to act like the shock of cold water to the rioters. It seemed that for the first time it occurred to many of them what they were actually doing; they saw clearly the barricades in the avenues and the scars of the energy bolts, and heard the cries of the injured. Almost shamefacedly, the rioting died away.

Nonetheless, it was a huge task that faced the police as they wiped up the mess, and as they came back in small groups of one or two cruiser loads at a time, to their headquarters, the rumors began to run.

In the night watch room, surrounded by the flickering telltales which plotted—among other things—the location of the cruisers out on street patrol and the site of suspicious events reported by nosy officers, Technical Sergeant Lofty Ingle was
one of the last that the rumors reached. He had been alone since the start of his shift. He was four inches under regulation height for general duties; it didn’t stop him from being a good forensic electronics man.

He was staring absently at the huge grid-lined screen on which in theory illegal application of Tacket’s Principle anywhere in the Quarter would show up when it happened—it had not happened since he joined the force, and he thought gloomily that it never would—when Sergeant Carr came in, limping slightly and with dressings on his scratched face. Carr was the duty general service sergeant, Ingle’s partner for the night watch.

Ingle glanced up at him and pursed his lips. “You look to have had it rough!” he said.

“Rough!” Carr tried to curl his upper lip into a sneer, but it was puffy and the attempt made his face twist up in pain. He hooked his foot under a chair, dragged it towards him, and slumped into it. “Rough!” he repeated sarcastically. “You could say that, I guess. One day, one sweet day, someone’s going to loose off his gun, and just by accident that bastard Athlone is going to be in the way of the bolt. And I won’t be weeping at his funeral!”

Ingle took a chair for himself. “Spit the string!” he invited. “I didn’t get a grip on it yet.”

Carr looked disgusted. “Listen!” he said. “It’s one thing for him to cherish this pet hate of his and hound that number Luis Nevada. I’m not saying Nevada did it, I’m not saying he didn’t. That’s one thing, Lofty, and no one can say I’m not trying to be fair. But when he—”

He almost choked with the violence of his rage, and put his hands up in the air before him, squeezing them together as though around a human throat.

“That riot tonight!” he exploded. “We’d have had it canned and labeled inside a couple of hours—by nine at latest. But oh no! It seems that Luis Nevada managed to get himself
invited into Lyken’s franchise, where Athlone can’t touch him. So what does Athlone do? He takes advantage of his rank, and he orders us to foul up Lyken’s ’cruiters and turn the cultists back on the street. Can you wonder that Lyken’s men got nasty when they saw what we were doing? Can you wonder they started shooting? So we get a mess swilling through the whole blasted Quarter and a casualty list longer’n my arm!”

Ingle didn’t say anything. Carr ploughed on.

“I don’t mind the fancy woman he keeps. I don’t mind him going after Nevada. But I mind like hell when he gets us poor bastards fouled up in his private quarrels!”

And then, as suddenly as it had burst out, his rage drained away, and he sighed, passing his hand gingerly over the dressings on his face. He said, “Well, there’ll be an investigation, shouldn’t wonder. He went too far this time. Let his head roll.”

Sightless and immobile within her cocoon, Allyn Vage had become so dependent on the rho function field perceptor that when the sound came to her without warning she tried at first to dismiss it. Everything in the exterior world—visits by Athlone, the comings and goings of Knard and the servant—was reflected in the weaving threads within the grey world of the perceptor. Heavy footsteps with nothing to foreshadow a visitor within the perceptor was wrong. Illogical.

But she could not dismiss the click of the door latch when it snapped back. She could not dismiss the characteristic hissing of the room lights as they started up, and their sixty cycle hum once they were on. Her artificial hearing was extremely sensitive.

Bewildered, she fired a harsh question through the voder that served her for speech.

“Who is it? What are you doing here?”

Frantically, she searched the perceptor; Knard lay in his
room presumably asleep, the servant had gone home, Athlone was out clearing up the riot. Someone else had come into the room. Someone else was looking at her in her obscene shapeless cocoon. Someone whose coming had not been foreshadowed to her. It was as though he were worse than invisible.

A vague stirring of fright began within her mind.

The same heavy footsteps which she had heard in the foyer now advanced from the door; five paces, halt. The stranger would be facing her, looking at her, seeing her. Allyn felt suddenly terribly cut off without her eyes and hands. The isolation which the perceptor had staved off all these months began to etch its way into her like acid. For if this man did not show on the perceptor, was everything she had sensed and achieved through it no more than a fantasy of her lonely brain?

There was a fat chuckle from in front of her—a masculine chuckle, not pleasant.

“So that’s who you are!” said a thick voice on the verge of wheezing. “A solitary blind cripple! We were beginning to wonder.”

“Who are you?” Allyn wished that the voder could reflect the violence of the emotion she felt; its breathy artificial voice, though, was capable of only a narrow range of changes. “What do you want?”

“I came to take a look at you,” said the thick voice, and dissolved into another chuckle. “As to the first question—why, yes, I’ll tell you. I’m one of the people you got your perceptor from, of course. Didn’t that occur to you? You’re all worked up because you didn’t sense that I was coming, with your perceptor. Why, then, what’s more logical than to conclude I must know more about its workings than you do?”

Allyn started to activate the voder, and changed her mind. It gave a kind of grunting squawk as commands crossed in its circuits.

“I have to admit,” the thick voice continued, “that you’ve acquired a good knowledge of the perceptor’s abilities. We called it a perceptor, of course, to mislead you. It does a great deal more than just perceive things!”

“I know,” whispered Allyn.

“You think you know,” corrected the thick voice. “So you thought you’d take a hand. And it’s true to say that we were concerned about you—so much concerned that I came to take a look, as I said. What do I find? I find a cripple! Well, we don’t have anything to worry about after all. Because all I need to do is kick in the sides of your perceptor, and the fields will be destroyed. Even if they give you another one, it’ll take you as long again to get adjusted to the new fields that come with it. Understand me?”

“You wouldn’t!” The words were wrung from Allyn in a kind of moan.

“Perhaps I won’t. Not this time. After all, you’re a helpless cripple. So this time I’m only going to tell you to remember that you’re a cripple, and act like a cripple, instead of trying to take a hand in things too big to concern you! You’re going to stop your meddling, and you’re going to stop it now. If I see any sign that you’ve started again, I shall come back—and I can come back whenever I want, without giving any warning—and I shall do just as I said. Do you understand?”

Allyn was desperately twanging at the string which was Jome Knard, driving him to wake up, driving him to hear the thick voice in the room next to his. She said, “Yes! Yes, I understand!”

It was working. She could sense that Knard was waking up.

“Goodbye for this time, then,” said the thick voice, and added a final sinister chuckle.

The footsteps crossed the floor again. The lights went out. The footsteps continued into the foyer and stopped. They crossed with the lighter, well-remembered steps of Knard as he came from his room and into hers.

“Are you all right?” Knard’s voice came out of darkness, and as though she had suddenly been given sight again Allyn knew thankfully that reality and what she knew from the perceptor did correspond.

She said, “Someone has been here, Jome. Someone came in and threatened to wreck my perceptor. Didn’t you see him in the foyer?”

“I saw no one,” said Knard uncertainly.

“Someone was here.” Allyn heard her artificial voice steady and level; there were some compensations in having to use a voder, after all. “He said he would come back. Set some alarms, Jome. I dare not be surprised like that again.”

But she could tell from his answering silence that he did not believe her.

Strictly, the Tacket detector was Ingle’s province, not Carr’s. But the sound of the alarm shocked Carr immensely. He said, “Lofty! Aren’t you going to check that?”

“Why?” Ingle didn’t raise his head. “It’s bound to be Lyken’s outfit, as usual. That’s the only place we ever get a Tacket signal from in this Quarter. And Lyken’s authorized.”

“Didn’t the news get to you?” said Carr. “Lyken blew his base up! Nothing was left but rubble!”

The words jolted Ingle upright like an electric shock. He mouthed the beginning of an answer; before it started to make sense, he had dashed across to the detector to isolate the fading green blip on the co-ordinates of the grid.

“But that means it’s a strike!” he said vacantly. “And I never heard of a strike in all the time I been here! By Tacket’s Expeditions, it
is
a strike! It’s at least a mile from Lyken’s base, in any case!”

Incredulously, because people simply didn’t meddle with Tacket’s Principle without authorization, Carr came and stood by Ingle as he fed the co-ordinates off the grid into a small computer which would convert them into a street address
and a height above ground level. The computer took only a few seconds before coughing out its square of printed plastic with the information on.

“Yah—no, that’s impossible!” said Carr, and snatched the square from Ingle almost before he’d had time to read it. “And yet it is!” A sort of unholy joy came over his face.

“What’s hit you?” demanded Ingle stupidly.

“The address, Lofty! The address! And the height above the street! That means the penthouse, around there. Don’t you
recognize
the address?”

Ingle shook his head.

“Why, it’s Athlone’s lovenest, the place where he installed Nevada’s wife! Don’t you understand? This gives me the perfect excuse to pay back Athlone for some of the hell he put us through tonight!”

Ingle’s face went slowly white. He started to utter objections, but Carr cut him short.

“The hell with whether he’s vice-sheriff or not! We got a strike on the Tacket detector, and I’m going down there right this moment to raise as much hell in Athlone’s boudoir as I possibly can! Get the duty squads round there—fast! Get orders to the radio room! Lofty, this is worth everything I went through tonight to square the accounts with Athlone!”

T
HE MORE
comforting the illusion of power becomes, the more disturbing it is to find it limited. That check-and-balance proposition was presenting itself more and more squarely to Clostrides as the night moved on.

Power. The high bailiff of The Market had it. That was never disputed. Men spoke the name of Manuel Clostrides with respect and admiration. In particular, they admired the skill with which he dominated the situations created by the tempestuous clash of personalities between the Directors.

And that was true, so far as it went. Tonight, Clostrides knew it had not gone far enough.

He sat alone in his huge office atop the Market’s tower, and moved his hands across the arms of his chair as though he were fumbling for his reins of power. As though, one by one, they were becoming greasy and slipping away.

He had a sensation that a world which he had painfully mastered, had learned to know in all its intricacy, was changing faster than he could adjust.

Pragmatic, possibly dogmatic, but capable of rapid decision and untiring control over his troublesome Directors: that was the way he was accustomed to regarding himself. He had never thought twice about the notion of premonition—although occasionally he had cracked a passing joke about it, saying how useful it would be to him to possess such a power. Now he had a premonition he could not pin down: a foreboding aura in his mind.

He could only side with a majority in administering The Market. He therefore had every interest in assuring the fall of Ahmed Lyken, and the victory of his rivals. Yet at their final meeting before the showdown, he had said nothing of the word Nevada had spoken to Lyken, the name which had so strangely affected him: Akkilmar!

Again, why? To retain for himself a potentially valuable secret? To guard his ascendancy over the Directors? But even assuming knowledge of Akkilmar to have value, how could it be of much use to himself alone? The echoing questions tormented him.

The hours were passing. Some time around dawn, probably, the technicians would open the portals into Lyken’s franchise
and the invasion would commence—with it, a long-drawn-out war of attrition rather than savagery. It would be won and lost not by a clear-cut single victory, but successful hampering of the opposing side. If Lyken could render the invaders’ beachheads untenable except at prohibitive cost, he won. If the invaders made his continued possession impossible, he lost. No more than that.

The signal for an outside call went up on the communicator panel. His voice tired and spiritless, Clostrides activated it by vocal code, and the face of one of his aides appeared on the screen.

The aide said, “Progress on the Akkilmar question, Bailiff.”

A cloud seemed to blow away from Clostrides’s mind. He shot a glance at the clock. 2:10
A.M.
Not bad, all things considered. He said, “Well?” And tried not to let too much excitement show.

The aide glanced at notes out of sight below the screen. “We decided to follow Nevada’s trail back,” he said. “It got us as far as a lodging block mainly used by dregs, where he’d been living under an assumed name. Here’s where coincidence goes too far. Another of the tenants—until a week or two ago was a man called Erlking, who used to be Lyken’s Remembrancer.”

Clostrides jerked forwards in his seat. He said hungrily, “You got him?”

“We’re after him, Bailiff. He’d left without giving a new address, but we’re after him. Only thing is, it’s been hard going because of the riots. The police finally got them under control just a little while back. But Bailiff! I think you should know that other people have been on the same trail—at least one and maybe two after Erlking, as well as two looking for Nevada!”

“Who were they?”

“Athlone, the vice-sheriff of the Quarter, came asking for Nevada and searched his rooms. There may have been someone
else; we aren’t sure. And a man came looking for Erlking, and before him what sounded like a typical yonder boy on the same errand.”

“Lyken’s people?”

“We think so, Bailiff. Frankly, I don’t see who else can be so interested.”

Clostrides frowned. “Do you mean to say you haven’t caught up with Erlking yet? When there are so many other people after him who may get there first?”

The aide looked uncomfortable, but contrived to sound reassuring. “Not quite, Bailiff. This has been sheer luck, and I don’t think the competition can have had so much of that. We got news from one of our contacts in the city police who’s been out tonight on riot duty. The wagon he was with picked up a load of cultists who were attacking Lyken’s ’cruiters. They turned the cultists loose again later—they seem to have had orders from somewhere, maybe from Athlone, rumor says—anyway, though, we’re almost sure that one of the cultists was actually Erlking.”

Clostrides pursed his lips. “What are you doing now?”

“Going after all the cults in the city. Most of them are holding big meetings on the street and elsewhere, now they’ve been driven off from the area near Lyken’s base. I should imagine they’ll want to parade someone like Erlking, who’s been into a Tacket franchise and has reformed, or seen the light.”

“When you catch up with him,” said Clostrides urgently, “get him to me at once! Hear?”

“Right, Bailiff!” said the aide, and broke the connection.

Things were reverting to normal along Holy Alley. Gaffles was on his way back from a short survey of the locality when he encountered something that wasn’t quite as normal as the rest, however: a cult meeting on a corner. It seemed to be just starting up. There was a speaker with amplifiers, on a
plinth beneath a larger than life-size statue in wood, the head of which was so covered in nails that you had to guess it was meant as an effigy of Tacket. There were tract sellers and testifiers and peddlers selling nails to be driven into the statue. Gaffles went around the outskirts of the group the speaker had attracted—about forty or fifty people, mostly yonder boys with their girls, laughing and jeering.

He was almost past when a hand tugged at his arm. “Nail for Tacket, cuddy? Nail for Tacket?” a whining voice implored him.

He shook off the grip without glancing down. The voice wheezed, tinged with a chuckle, “Nail for Tacket, Gaffles?”

At the use of his name, Gaffles did glance round at the importuner. Recognition dawning, he said, “Fleabite! How long since you were brought to salvation, then?”

The nail peddler was a twisted, shabby man, with an enormous stupid grin across the big round face which topped his scrawny body and spindly limbs. No one ever called him anything except Fleabite; he had been around the Quarter since anybody could remember.

Now he gave a conspiratorial leer. “Buy a nail and “I’ll tie string to it,” he said, little above a whisper. “Cost you twenty!”

“A long piece of string?” said Gaffles skeptically.

“I hauled in a bit myself the other hour,” Fleabite shrugged. “If Jockey’s looking for someone called Erlking, it’s his string I have.”

“Give me the end of it, and you’ll get your twenty.” Gaffles took out a wad of crisp cash invitingly. Fleabite’s eyes almost snatched it away.

“And me having to sell nails for a two-faced cult to get—ah well. Listen, Gaffles. Your Erlking number turned cultist—not with this lousy crew, but with one of the biggest. In fifteen minutes they’re holding a meeting in one of the small halls of the Pleasuredrome. Cults are doing this all over because they
want to make a profit on the riots. Know who’s the star example? The reformed Tacket-lover himself, see?”

“Twenty you said, twenty you get,” Gaffles said promptly. He thrust the money on to Fleabite’s tray. At once the man’s high whining voice resumed its normal tone.

“Take your nail, cuddy! Take your nail!”

“It’s for Tacket, not for me!” said Gaffles loudly, and hurried down the street.

Jockey was, as always, in the Octopus Bar, and for once not surrounded by his eyes and ears. Gaffles dropped into the seat next to him, and passed on the news.

Jockey grunted. “I surprise myself,” he said. “I just was through telling twenty yonder boys to interest themselves in that same meeting. Suppose you make it sixty, huh? And go along yourself. I want Erlking fished out of the middle of it intact. Let’s see where to put him. No, leave it to you. I shouldn’t try getting him out of the ’drome, though.”

Gaffles grinned slowly and got to his feet.

It had to be done quickly. He just made it. With three minutes to go before the start of the meeting, he stood in an aisle of the hall in the Pleasuredrome, surveying the audience and listening with half an ear to one of Jockey’s dependables.

The hall was one of several under the gigantic dome of the Pleasuredrome which the proprietor let out to private showmen for live variety, animal shows out of the Tacket worlds, and so on. There were benches in a horseshoe shape around a low stage, enough for about a thousand people. The place was unexpectedly full, that was true. The ’drome was a good venue, and this was a good time, when people who had spent most of their cash and didn’t want to go home yet could be drawn in for something free of charge. That was what most of the audience seemed to be here for, anyway—most of them young, a lot of them heavy with drink or drugs, not a few couples petting all over the benches. How the hell would anyone expect to sell people like this a serious
message? Maybe the cults were satisfied to put up with what they could get, and this was the best they could get.

He cut short what the other was saying. “I spoke with the boss, Tad. He’ll play. Now I’m going out around the stage to the back. He’s fixing it with the lighting crew to shine a green light on Erlking when he shows, right? You see that light, you start a distraction, gold? Somewhere at the back, where you’ve got a bunch of a dozen or so all together, gold? The numbers planted in the front row move on to the stage, gold?”

“All gold,” confirmed Tad. He was old for a yonder boy—past twenty, possibly, but still dressed and mannered like a typical specimen.

“Now make this real measured!” said Gaffles warningly. “I want Erlking delivered in back of the stage intact and unbeaten, gold? After that “I’ll show you where to take him. Let the row in the hall cool off; let ’em finish the meeting if they can. That’s it, Tad.”

“It’s free falling all the way,” said Tad with confidence.

“You see to that,” said Gaffles, and made for the side door of the hall.

He glanced back once more over the audience before going out, and a tiny frown creased his forehead. Among the audience there were two small clusters of people who didn’t fit his assumptions about why the ’drome’s customers had come in to hear the speakers. There was a line of six pugs not far from the front, who sat expressionless, like dummies. They were already staring at the stage although it was empty.

And besides them, he was puzzled by a group of eight or nine in the same row near the front but at its opposite end. They looked too well off to care about the cult. They didn’t look as though they had ever denied themselves anything on principle, least of all imported goods. Their gaze likewise was fixed on the stage.

Gaffles hesitated, wondering whether to warn Tad about
his impression. But weight of numbers was on Tad’s side anyway, whatever the interest of these problematical intruders might be. The pugs might be here out of sheer stupidity; the other group might have come to argue, or jeer. He shrugged, seeing that the speakers were coming out, and went behind the stage.