Psychohistorical Crisis

37

DEATH HAS MANY DISGUISES, 14,810 GE

Beware if you try to stay neutral in a dispute when both sides need you as an ally—for you can be sure that two nets have been cast out and two stake pits dug to ensure your cooperation.

—Emperor Ojaisun-the-Adroit, 3231-3245 GE

When the Personal Capsule began to erase itself, Rigone the Scav activated his own office disintegrator with a code-gesture; its petals opened, and to make doubly sure there would be no trace of communication he dumped the smoldering ashes into the opal turbulence. Spacedamn! His past was catching up with him. He glanced at his den of quantronic tools. Emergency! He stuffed surgical clothing in his bag. After passing through his forcecurtain, he reset the curtain to block a running man, then opened the vault door. Its teeth were still closing behind him with a hiss while he bounded down the stairs into the Bistro.

"I'll be back," he said to his bartender.

The tables of the Teaser’s Bistro were half full. These students were too young to have known Eron Osa, but they had been talking about his execution—the execution of the fam Rigone had meddled with. Space help me if that item ever enters police files! Perhaps it already had. He cursed the hour he met Hahukum Konn. He cursed the hunch that had guided him to the Helmar Rift. I was forced to do it! Not really. From the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift he had brought back equipment he knew he could not have resisted. Because of it he had been at the top of his quasi-legal racket for twenty years, rich even. Where on Splendid Wisdom was his competition? But such dark possessions encouraged a man into borderline operations that give him a police record. Would even Second Rank Konn be able to protect him now? The man from the Thousand Suns had come back to haunt him.

Down the entrance stairs he raced, almost sliding down the carved snakes, up the alley to the Olibanum’s Deep Shaft. And then he stopped. He had to take a pod; at that distance there was no other way. But he had never been sure that the police didn’t keep a record of every pod journey. It wasn’t likely, but he decided to use a false identity anyway. Petty crime didn’t matter beside treason against these Emperors in Pscholars’ Clothing.

The pod took him to a mixed neighborhood of clerks and retirees, with a significant population of transients. He hesitated outside the robohotel. By the bells of every holy place in the Galaxy, why wasn’t he turning this man over to the police? Informers did well. The answer was simple; to cover up one’s minor crimes one committed major crimes! He had modified Osa’s fam and didn’t want the police to know! Why wasn’t he just ignoring the whole matter? The police wouldn’t, that’s why! He was scared. Inside the hotel the robostaff ignored him just as Murek Kapor had promised, if Murek was that shadow man’s real name. This was a prepared safe house, so he claimed, and knowing the tech of the Thousand Suns, Rigone had no doubt of the truth of those words. As ordered, he put on his surgical gloves and mask.

The door didn’t open—wasn’t expecting him. No obvious comm. The robowalls were there to do that, and they had been programmed not to see him. He knocked. No answer. Frustrated, he tried the door. It opened, unlocked. Inside there was a corpse on the bed on top of the covers. He looked into the dead eyes. But the chest still breathed. There was blood in the hair. “You all right?” Silly question.

The corpse’s lips moved. “Rigone? Can’t see. Can hear. The body... coma... you’re talking to a fam...hard to control body... brought it here unconscious... take fam... get out.”

“That will kill you. Your fam is all that’s keeping you alive!”

“Body already brain-dead... checked.”

“What happened?”

The corpse was almost angry at the delay. “Didn’t predict this... take fam... get out!” The body shuddered, a gasp in its breathing. “... accident... running from police.. .jumped out of pod...police at other end...only chance...got whacked... bad mistake... take fam...Eron will come... you liked him...hurry...body on last legs...take fam... destroy body... hurry...”

The room came equipped with a Personal Capsule terminal. How had a man in a coma managed to use it? Zenoli training? There was no easy way to destroy the body. He wasn’t going to do that. That was too much like a murder rap. And taking the fam was too much like stealing evidence from the scene of a crime, but he did it, turning Murek slightly off his shoulders. He didn’t have the heart to kill the body nor the means to dispose of it. He left it breathing, comatose.

When he arrived back at the Teaser’s, his bag and mask and gloves had already been disintegrated at a convenient dispozoria, and he was his usual jovial self on the outside, but he retreated to his upstairs apartment, barricading himself. He was glad to be living alone, between women with nothing to explain. Women were always too curious. Then he spent time cleaning the blood off the fam, so thoroughly that even a police scan would find nothing. He had half of a man’s soul for his shelf, a poor ghoul trapped in a place without sight or sound or smell, nor voice, nor arms, nor legs. He set it behind his virgin fams and various fam parts.

The worst wasn’t over. A mindless Eron Osa was going to turn up to claim the ghoul. Maybe. And how would it be of any use to him? No man could use another man’s fam—each uncrackably coded by its own unique experience with life.

You don’t put on a fam—you grow up with it. Might as well try to read the memories out of a man’s wetware. Kapor was dead. He wondered what had been in the boy’s fam that had made it so dangerous to others as well as himself. What was in the modification he had installed in that aseptic room on Neuhadra? He would never know.

He smiled. Rector Hanis, out of rage or fear, had destroyed the evidence. Thank Space for the small cushions provided by a major disaster.

The Scav had regrets. He had liked the boy, liked his drive. When he had goaded Hahukum Konn into taking on the boy as an apprentice—feeling good that he had influence with a Second Rank—he hadn’t been doing the kid’s career a favor. He remembered the mature Eron. After putting down roots at the Lyceum and finding his way around, Eron had been a lively fixture at the Teaser’s. Hadn’t seen much of him since the boy had gone to work for Hanis, hadn’t thought of him. Now fear was doing funny things to his head. Rigone thought about selling the Bistro and retiring— if he lived that long. What in the name of Splendid Wisdom was going on?