Norstrilia

TRAPS, FORTUNES AND WATCHERS

We all know that no communications systems are leak-proof. Even inside the far-reaching communications patterns of the Instrumentality, there were soft spots, rotten points, garrulous men. The MacArthur-McBan computer, sheltered in the Palace of the Governor of Night, had had time to work out abstract economics and weather patterns, but the computer had not tasted human love or human wickedness. All the messages concerning Rod’s speculation in the forward santaclara crop and stroon export had been sent in the clear. It was no wonder that on many worlds, people saw Rod as a chance, an opportunity, a victim, a benefactor, or an enemy. For all know the old poem:

It applied in this case too. People ran hot and cold with the news.

Commissioner Teadrinker tapped his teeth with a pencil.

Four megacredits FOE money already and more, much more to come.

Teadrinker lived in a fever of perpetual humiliation. He had chosen it. It was called “the honorable disgrace” and it applied to ex-Lords of the Instrumentality who choose long life instead of service and honor. He was a thousandmorer, meaning that he had traded his career, his reputation, and his authority for a long life of one thousand or more years. (The Instrumentality had learned, long ago, that the best way to protect its members from temptation was to tempt them itself. By offering “honorable disgrace” and low, secure jobs within the Instrumentality to those Lords who might be tempted to trade long life for their secrets, it kept its own potential defectors. Teadrinker was one of these.)

He saw the news and he was a skilled wise man. He could not do anything to the Instrumentality with money, but money worked wonders on Earth. He could buy a modicum of honor. Perhaps he could even have the records falsified and get married again. He flushed slightly, even after hundreds of years, when he remembered his first wife blazing at him when she saw his petition for long life and honorable disgrace: “Go ahead and live, you fool. Live and watch me die without you, inside the decent four hundred years which everybody else has if they work for it and want it. Watch your children die, watch your friends die, watch all your hobbies and ideas get out of date. Go along, you horrible little man, and let me die like a human being!”

A few megacredits could help that.

Teadrinker was in charge of incoming visitors. His underman, the cattle-derived B’dank, was custodian of the scavenger spiders — half-tame one-ton insects which stood by for emergency work if the services of the tower failed. He wouldn’t need to have this Norstrilian merchant very long. Just long enough for a recorded order and a short murder.

Perhaps not. If the Instrumentality caught him, it would be dream-punishments, things worse than Shayol itself.

Perhaps yes. If he succeeded, he would escape a near immortality of boredom and could have a few decades of juicy fun instead.

He tapped his teeth again.

“Do nothing, Teadrinker,” he said to himself, “but think, think, think. Those spiders look as though they might have possibilities.”

“Put two converted police cruisers in orbit around the Sun. Mark them for charter or sale, so that we won’t run into the police.

“Put an agent into every liner which is Earthbound within the time stated.

“Remember, we don’t want the man. Just his luggage. He’s sure to be carrying a half-ton or so of stroon. With that kind of fortune, he could pay off all the debts we gathered with that Bozart business. Funny we never heard from Bozart. Nothing.

“Put three senior thieves in Earthport itself. Make sure that they have fake stroon, diluted down to about one-thousandth, so that they can work the luggage switch if they have the chance.

“I know all this costs money, but you have to spend money to get it. Agreed, gentlemen of the larcenical arts?”

There was a chorus of agreement around the table, except for one old, wise thief who said,

“You know my views.”

“Yes,” said the chairman, with toneless polite hatred, “we know your views. Rob corpses. Clean out wrecks. Become human hyenas instead of human wolves.”

With unexpected humor the old man said, “Crudely put. But correct. And safer.”

“Do we need to vote?” said the chairman, looking around the table.

There was a chorus of noes.

“Carried, then,” said the presiding chief. “Hit hard, and hit for the small target, not the big one.”

“He is coming, father! He is coming.”

“Who is coming?” said the voice, like a great drum resounding.

E’lamelanie said it as though it were a prayer: “The blessed one, the appointed one, the guarantor of our people, the new messenger on whom the robot, rat and Copt agreed. With money he is coming, to help us, to save us, to open to us the light of day and the vaults of heaven.”

“You are blasphemous,” said the E’telekeli.

The girl fell into a hush. She not only respected her father. She worshiped him as her personal religious leader. His great eyes blazed as though they could see through thousands of meters of dirt and rock and still see beyond into the deep of space. Perhaps he could see that far… Even his own people were never sure of the limits of his power. His white face and white feathers gave his penetrating eyes a miraculously piercing capacity.

Calmly, rather kindly, he added, “My darling, you are wrong. We simply do not know who this man McBan really is.”

“Couldn’t it be written?” she pleaded. “Couldn’t it be written?” she pleaded. “Couldn’t it be promised? That’s the direction of space from which the robot, the rat and the Copt sent back our very special message, ‘From the uttermost deeps one shall come, bringing uncountable treasure and a sure delivery.’ So it might be now! Mightn’t it?”

“My dear,” he responded, “you still have a crude idea of real treasure if you think it is measured in megacredits. Go read The Scrap of the Book, then think, and then tell me what you have thought. But meanwhile — no more chatter. We must not excite our poor oppressed people.”

On this day Ruth thought nothing at all of Norstrilia or treasures. She was trying to do watercolors of the breakers and they came out very badly indeed. The real ones kept on being too beautiful and the water colors looked like watercolors.

“All the riffraff of all the worlds. They’re all going to make a run for that silly boy of ours.”

“Right.”

“If he stays here, they’ll come here.”

“Right”

“Let’s let him go to Earth. I have a feeling that little rascal Redlady will smuggle him out tonight and save us the trouble.”

“Right.”

“After a while it will be all right for him to come back. He won’t spoil our hereditary defense of looking stupid. I’m afraid he’s bright but by Earth standards he’s just a yokel.”

“Right.”

“Should we send along twenty or thirty more Rod McBans and get the attackers really loused up?”

“No.”

“Why not, Sir and Owner?”

“Because it would look clever. We rely on never looking clever. I have the next best answer.”

“What’s that?”

“Suggest to all the really rum worlds we know that a good impersonator could put his hands on the McBan money. Make the suggestion so that they would not know that we had originated it. The starlanes will be full of Rod McBans, complete with phony Norstrilian accents, for the next couple of hundred years. And no one will suspect that we set them up to it. Stupid’s the word, mate, stupid. If they ever think we’re clever, we’re for it!” The speaker sighed: “How do the bloody fools suppose our forefathers got off Paradise VII if they weren’t clever? How can they think we’d hold this sharp little monopoly for thousands of years? They’re stupid not to think about it, but let’s not make them think. Right?”

“Right.”