Starrigger

22

We waited.

Conversation was desultory. Vance and Darla sat at a table at the other end of the room, drinking coffee brought in by another of Wilkes' bodyguards. At various intervals they all popped pills to keep up their immunity from the wand's effect. Wilkes told me it was still on low power.

At one point, Darla came toward me, bearing a cup and saucer.

"No, Darla," Wilkes told her.

She stopped. "You said he was your guest," she said sarcastically.

"Don't want you slipping him any tranqs."

"Do you think I would?"

"I don't know, and don't care to take the chance. But I don't want to be inhospitable. I'll pour him a cup." He got up and went to the table and did, then fetched it over to me. "Enjoy, Jake."

"Thank you." I sipped it and found that it wasn't coffee but some kind of grain beverage, with a bitter aftertaste.

"Corey," I said, "there's one thing that's been bothering me since the start of this thing."

"What's that?"

"Why didn't you just kill me?"

Wilkes looked over the newssheet he was reading. "Good question. You can't say I haven't had plenty of opportunity." He folded the sheet and put it aside, then went back to tapping on his lips with his fingers. "This damned Paradox thing set me to thinking. If I just up and killed you, it very well could have turned out that nothing would have changed. You'd be dead, and the map would still be in circulation, brought back from the Great Beyond by the 'you' that never died. Paradox. Or maybe there's really no Paradox and somebody else brought the map back ― one of your religious friends, for instance. They could be in on the whole thing."

"They're not," Darla said emphatically.

Wilkes shook his head sadly. "Another statement that I can't accept at face value. For all I know, they could be part of your dissident network. Maybe they brought the map back and pumped Jake's image up into a legend. Who knows? No, I came up with a plan of sorts. I had to nab you, and I wanted to wait until you shot a potluck to be certain you had the map. After all, none of the stories about you say exactly when you got it."

"So you herded me through a potluck."

"Right, and it wasn't pure luck that you chose the Splash portal. If you think back over all the options you had, you'll find there were few. You could have gone elsewhere, however, which is why the mrrrllowharrr was necessary."

"Back at the motel ― you sent your crew to flush me out of there?"

"Yes, to keep you running. Knew you'd find a way to escape, and you did. You're slippery, Jake." He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs in a compulsive, jerking movement. "Anyway. I had to get that punking map, find out… no! First I had to find out if it even existed, then find out where it came from." He looked uncomfortable. "And I still don't know."

"I'll tell you where it came from, Corey," I said. "You created it."

"How so?"

"If you'd have let me alone, I never would have hid out in that motel, never would have met Winnie, etcetera, etcetera."

He laughed. "The irony hasn't escaped me. Believe me, I've thought about it. But what was I to do? Talk about having few options. No matter what I did seemed doomed from the start…." He trailed off and looked at the ceiling. "Well, that's neither here nor there," he added offhandedly.

After a pause, Vance said, "I wish you'd finish that, Corey. I'm still in the dark as to how getting the map now will alter reality or in any way change the fact that the dissidents have it." He got up from the table and walked over to Wilkes, stood over him, and said pointedly, "I really wish we could clear that up once and for all."

My head was beginning to congeal a little, but it had taken me the better part of an hour to think through what I said next. "There's nothing to clear up. Van," I blurted out. "Can't you see that your little drug scheme is going right out the port?"

He slowly brought his eyes around to me. "What do you mean?"

"He means to drive a wedge between us, Van," Wilkes said mildly. "Oldest trick in the book. Don't fall for it."

"Suddenly I'm very interested in what he has to say. What exactly did you mean, Jake?"

"First, tell me a few things. How did you get in on this, and why?"

He was annoyed. "Doesn't strike me as pertinent."

"Then we don't play."

He went over and sat on the bed, picked up the revolver and absently fiddled with it, looking at me.

"Thinking of shooting someone?" I asked.

"Huh?" Aware now that he had picked it up, he. said, "No. Don't even know how this thing works." He tossed it aside, then glanced at Wilkes and looked back at me. "All right, you win. A little history. Word has been out for a year or two that I'm to be purged. Oh, it's an outdated word, of course. They want to ship me back to Terra for 'evaluation and reassessment.' Fortunately the mills of the Authority grind slowly, and I had some time. But where would I go? Easy. Someplace like the Outworlds. But the cost of living's pretty high here. And strictly cash, no Authority vouchers. I had no gold socked away to speak of. Of course, here you can go up into the hills and pan for it ― they actually do that, you know ― but I'm not the prospector type. Corey approached me about this drug thing. Sounded good, cornering the market and all that. He needed me, he said, to work out all the details about diverting raw material from Hothouse and secreting it out here." He shrugged. "I had no choice, really. I went along."

"Why the raw stuff?" I asked. "Why not the finished product?"

"Actually," Wilkes said, "that was my original idea. Van talked me out of it."

Vance nodded. "The controls are just too tight. The Authority guards its monopoly well. When you get right down to it, it's the source of their power."

"Okay," I said, "so you got the idea to process the stuff here."

"A big investment on my part," Wilkes reminded him. "You should keep that in mind. Van."

"I will. We have a small factory and lab near Seahome, about ready to become operational."

"And what about the Reticulans? What's their motivation for letting you truck gold back through their territory?"

"Same as anybody's," Wilkes answered. "They need gold as much as any race does for intermaze trade. I know it sounds mundane, but their economy is royally screwed up. Their social structure is top-heavy with nonproductive ruling classes who're preoccupied with quaint pastimes like hunting and riding eight-legged beasties around in the woods. They won't stoop to getting their hands dirty. Most technological things are left to slave clas,ses. Beside, Reticulans think it more honorable to take by conquest rather than to create. Only the Roadbugs have prevented them from running amuck, taking over every maze in sight. So, they're hard up for cash." He extended a hand deferentially to Vance. "Sorry. You were saying?"

"I was about to say that when we heard the Roadmap rumors, we knew that it was only a matter of time before the Authority would come barging into the Outworlds. Anyway, that was my fear. I'd have no place to hide." He picked up the revolver again and began to twirl it on his finger. "Now. Tell me about how the whole plan is null and void."

I drained my cup and tried to put it on the lamp table next to me, but I misjudged and sent it clattering to the carpet. "Sorry. Could I persuade you to turn that gadget off? I'd rather have a gun leveled at me, or be tied up."

Vance looked at Wilkes tentatively, but Wilkes shook his head. "I'm a little shorthanded. Van. Jake has a habit of brutalizing my bodyguards." He gave me a grouchy look.

"No? Okay. Van, it looks to me like you're going to be up merte creek without a paddle. Wilkes doesn't want to change reality, he just wants the map. Once he has it, he'll sell it to the Authority. Or to the Ryxx, or the Hydrans, or to the highest bidder."

"Beautiful, Jake, beautiful," Wilkes marveled.

Vance lowered his eyelids in deep thought. When he came out of it, he exhaled noisily. "I'm getting the distinct feeling that I've been very, very stupid."

The hatch opened, and Wilkes' bodyguard showed Pender-gast in.

"Where the hell is the Peters girl?" the Captain bellowed at Wilkes.

It was the first time I'd seen Wilkes slightly embarrassed. "George, just a moment."

"She's a crewmember, Wilkes. You may be running the drug thing, but I'm still captain of this ship. If you've done anything to―"

Wilkes got up and hastened toward him, extending a placating hand. "In the hall, George, please…."

"Oh, Captain? May I have a word with you?"

Pendergast spun around. "Who the bloody hell was that?"

Even I had forgotten that Sam's key was still silting on the coffee table.

Wilkes motioned to his bodyguard. 'Turn that thing off." To the Captain he said, "It's nothing. An open circuit to McGraw's rig computer."

Pendergast shouldered past him into the room. "What do you want? ― wherever you are," he said looking around the room.

"Tell Mr. Wilkes what happens to the gizzard of a whale when it gets perforated by a floater missile. Go on, tell him."

Pendergast's brow furrowed into dark lines. He turned slowly to Wilkes. "You say this is a computer?"

"Entelechy Matrix," Wilkes murmured. "On the table there."

The Captain's eyes finally found it. "Let me tell you what happens," he barked at Sam. "The entire GI tract of the beast goes into convulsions. You wouldn't survive―" He halted, tongue-tied with the absurdity of what he had said. "Son of a bitch," he muttered.

"I might even stop breathing, huh?"

"What do you want?" Pendergast said evenly, walking toward the table.

"First, I want this hold cleared of your crew. Everyone. And I mean up the elevator and out of scanner range. Second, I want my son and his companions delivered down here safe and sound."

"Your son?"

"McGraw," Wilkes supplied.

"It'll he done," Pendergast said.

Wilkes walked back into the room. "Captain, we can't, not just yet. He's bluffing."

"You know me well enough to know I'm not, Corey."

"I won't take chances with this ship!" Pendergast shouted.

"Sam," Wilkes said. "You'll have them when we have the creature."

"I said I wanted my son and his companions, and I meant all of them."

"You'll have them," Pendergast said, "and you'll have safe conduct to debark this ship. But I guarantee that you'll never make it off Splash."

"We'll take our chances."

"George," Wilkes said soothingly, putting a hand on his shoulder. "You forget that we don't have the creature to give. Another thing ― the Reticulan's tracking technique is inoperative at this point. We could lose him for good."

Pendergast's eyes widened, and he turned his head sharply to the connecting hatch. "Is she in there?" he breathed. "With them?"

"You don't have to worry. Captain," I broke in, as things began to lose their dreamlike quality. I now realized why the coffee had tasted bitter. 'They won't rip her apart. She's not sacred quarry."

Pendergast strode to the connecting hatch and threw it open savagely.

"No, but you are, Jake," Wilkes said darkly.

The Captain lunged at Wilkes, but the bodyguard got in the way. Pendergast elbowed him aside, but the boy brought his gun up menacingly. Pendergast stopped, his face dark with fury. "You think you can threaten me?" he growled at Wilkes.

"George, take it easy. I thought she was hiding something when you talked to her, and she was. Jake paid her a lot of money to hide the creature. I had to question her myself. She was in no danger."

Pendergast put a hand to his forehead, his rage suddenly ebbing. "What's going on?"

"The wand, George. You haven't taken the antidote."

The ship's warning siren keened again.

"What is it, George?"

"The pirate mega," Pendergast said, his voice detached.

"Pirate?"

"Yes. We've been tracking her. We're expecting an attack at dawn." He shook his head to clear it and rubbed his temples. His communicator began beeping inside his pocket, but he ignored it. "I've got to get out of here. I'm needed on the bridge." There was a distant look in his eyes, as if none of us were present. "Winds must have changed," he mumbled, then walked unsteadily out of the room.

"Jimmy, close the door," Wilkes said. He went to the coffee table and picked up Sam's key. "Sorry, Sam. He probably won't remember your threat, not for a while anyway."

"Corey, sometimes I have trouble understanding how you could be the same person who founded TATOO with me."

"We all change, friend."

"It's all unraveling, Corey."

"Not just yet," Wilkes said tightly, and shut the key off. "Tell Twrrrll to release the girl," he told Jimmy. "And the other one, too."

"Is it true, Corey?"

Wilkes turned to face Vance. "Is what true?"

"That you'll sell the map to the highest bidder?"

"No." Wilkes sat in the armchair. "Not to the highest bidder. I'd be a fool to sell it to nonhumans. What do you think homo sap's chances would be in a galaxy dominated by some alien race that got hold of the Roadbuilders' technology? What if, for instance, they" ― he pointed toward the adjoining stateroom―"got hold of it? No, I'll give it to the Authority."

"I think your Rikki friends got the idea of going after the map a long time ago," I said.

"No doubt they did," Wilkes conceded.

Vance was struggling to understand. "But… you realize that to return with the map you'll have to travel through twelve thousand kilometers of Reticulan maze?"

"I'm not going back that way."

Vance was baffled. "How?"

"I'll go back by Ryxx starship."

"What?"

"Yes, they've got the time dilation down to three years, ship time. A long haul, but they have cold-sleep technology. Surprised? Didn't you know that the Ryxx don't mind taking

human passengers? It's expensive, and they don't get many takers, but…"

"Yes, I knew. But the Ryxx want the map too!"

"Yes, but they don't know I have it ― or will have it. They're after Jake, not me. They don't know me from Human One. And as far as I can tell, they don't know about Winnie either. How could they, if what Darla says is true?"

"What makes you think you can sell anything to the Authority?" Vance asked, disbelieving. "The Authority takes, it doesn't buy."

"It'll buy from me. You must know that yours isn't the only friendship I've cultivated in high places. Some of them are your friends, or were before you became an unperson. The transaction has already been arranged. And part of the price will be immunity from prosecution."

Vance paled. "What?"

Wilkes spoke to me. "You may remember that I mentioned something about your queering deals I had set up. I got word that our drug operation had been compromised. I really don't know who was responsible. As Sam said, things tend to unravel. Van, you didn't get wind of it for obvious reasons. But the deal was null and void long before any of this."

"So the Authority does know about the Roadmap," I said.

"Of course they do, and they've given up trying to get it from the dissidents ― or rather, they're having a hard time. I told them I could get it for them."

"But you'll be gone for twelve years!" Vance said. "More!"

"Think again. Most people never consider the backward time displacement you undergo when you shoot a portal. But when you go back through normal space, you eat all that time back up. I should get back to T-Maze almost exactly at the same time I left. No Paradox, and it all works out very neatly." Wilkes licked his lips, his eyes focused somewhere in the air, "Or…" he went on abstractedly, ".. or I just might try to find that backtime route. You did, Jake ― or will, or shall… damn it, these verb tenses give me a headache! Anyway, if you can, I can, once I have the map."

"What about the Reticulans?" I asked.

Wilkes' face split into a gray-toothed grin. "We'll part company in Seaborne, where I'll rent a long-distance vehicle and floor it for the planet where the Ryxx launch their ships. You can be sure I'll scour the buggy for mrrrllowharrr. I'll fumigate the punking thing."

Silence.

Vance was deeply depressed. Finally, he said, "Pendergast is going to be very interested in hearing this."

"But you won't be telling him. Van." Wilkes took out Darla's gun from under his jerkin. "Sorry, but until your last dose wears off, this will be necessary. Darla? You'd better come over here and sit with your dad."

Darla got up and began to walk over, but stopped when a knock came on the hatch.

"Get it," Wilkes told her.

Just then Jimmy came through the connecting hatch, shoving a sleepwalking Lori before him. He pushed her onto the bed, where she sprawled, naked and still out cold.

Darla threw the door open. It was John.

"Darla! Are you all right? You vanished… oh, dear." He saw Lori and stood there gawking.

"Come in!" Wilkes called brightly.

John averted his eyes from Lori, then smiled nervously. "Mr. Wilkes, I presume. I've heard a great deal―"

Jimmy reached out, grabbed'him by the collar, and yanked him into the room. He checked the corridor and closed the hatch.

"And you are…?"

"John Sukuma-Tayler. A friend of Jake's."

Wilkes rose. "John, it's a pleasure, but you caught us at a bad time. Won't you join your friends there on the bed? Jimmy, check him over."

Jimmy patted him down and pushed him toward the bed, made sure his boss was covering everybody, then went back into the Rikkis' stateroom. A moment later he returned, herding another zombie. It was the Chevy kid. Jimmy sat him down, and the kid keeled over onto a pillow.

"Couldn't you have dressed her?" Wilkes scolded his bodyguard.

"Ever try dressing a corpse?" Jimmy retorted.

"Check out the hall one more time, then go get her clothes, for God's sake."

"Right."

The pills Darla had dissolved in the coffeepot were taking full effect, but I couldn't be sure if I was free of the wand completely. Nevertheless, I was ready to make my move when Jimmy left ― but a split second after Jimmy cracked the hatch, Vance stood up suddenly, pointing the revolver shakily at Wilkes' back.

"Drop the gun, Corey."

"Van, sit down," Wilkes said irritably over his shoulder. "You'll hurt yourself with that old… Van!"

Wilkes' jaw dropped as Vance's finger jerked against the trigger. Vance clenched his teeth, finding it harder than he had thought to bring the hammer back without cocking it first. His left hand came up to help.

Surprised, Wilkes was slow to bring his pistol around, but Jimmy was quick. His shot sent a bolt scorching through Vance's skull, the mass of white hair exploding into flame. But the hammer came down. A thunderous explosion shook the room, and a weird dance of bodies began. Wilkes was spun around and yanked up and back like a puppet on strings, went lurching back toward the table. Vance's body marched backward like a ghost with a fiery head, hit the wall and rebounded, then teetered over. I was on the floor going for the dropped.44, trying to get furniture between me and Jimmy, but by the time I got to the gun he and Roland ― who had come bursting through the hatch ― were waltzing arm-in-arm into the room, each holding the other's gun arm, until Darla cut in with a chop to the back of Jimmy's neck, sending him down. Wilkes hit the table and the top part of it flipped up from the base, sending cups and silverware catapulting across the room to crash and ricochet off the walls. I was on my feet, rushing toward him. The gun was still in his hand, but I reached him just as he brought it up, and kicked it away. The fight was over. I picked up Darla's pistol and stood over him. Darla tore the blanket off the bed, sending Lori flopping to the floor, and rushed to Vance. Wilkes looked up at me, his face blank and stunned, a red flower blooming on his pretty white blouse.

"Roland!" I called. "Close the hatch!"

"Wait." He went to it and peeked out, then beckoned to someone. Susan poked her head in, and Roland pulled her through, then shut the hatch. Susan saw that John and everyone she knew was all right, then burst into tears and flung her arms around Roland.

John was picking himself off the floor. I went to the connecting hatch and turned the mechanical lock, then took John's arm and slapped the grip of Darla's pistol into his hand. "Keep an eye on that hatch," I told him. "If you so much as hear something, shoot." He nodded.

I went for the wand, picked it up off the floor. It throbbed faintly in my hand, and I rotated the silver band until it stopped. Lori began screaming, rising to her feet with her arms flailing at phantoms. I ripped the sheet off the bed and covered her, wrapping her in my arms. "It was all a dream, honey, all a dream," I whispered in her ear as I walked her over to the overturned coffee table. I scooped up the key and called Sam.

"Sam, it's Jake."

"Jesus Christ! What's going on up there?"

"Everyone's okay. How's your situation?"

"What the hell's all that caterwauling?"

"We're all okay, never mind. What's happening at your end?"

"Everybody left. Went topside, I guess. Something's going on up there."

Just then I heard shouting come from out in the hall. "Yeah, the ship's being attacked. Exactly by what, I don't know. Can you get free down there like you said you could?"

"Sure."

"Then do it and wait for us. We have to find Winnie, and―"

"Winnie's here."

"What! How in hell did she…? Never mind, never mind. Good. Okay, listen." I thought fast. "We'll try to make it down there somehow. Be ready to roll."

"Fine. Where to?"

"We're going to find a place to hide until we can negotiate our way off this tuna hotpak dinner."

"But where?"

"Pack plenty of antacid."