Wildeblood's Empire. Brian Stableford
any way no matter what. The haggling couldn’t be cut short, under those circumstances.
“Our future here depends on the outcome of your visit,” he said. “Isn’t that so?”
“Could be,” I said, with truth enough. He was jumping to wrong conclusions, but I let him. Never let the other man underestimate you. Always encourage him to credit you with more than you’ve got. It oils the wheels of negotiation. Nathan had taught me that.
“You scare Philip,” he went on. “He thinks you may be a threat to his power. Are you?”
That was a more specific question, and a deadlier one.
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t go on. Anything I added would only lead into deep water.
“We’re prepared to help you,” said the tall man, coming to the point at his own chosen speed. “We’re prepared to show you things that Philip wouldn’t permit you to see. But in return, we want your help.”
“I can’t promise anything,” I said. “If you think the information you’re offering will change our attitude to Philip then it may be in your interests to let us have it. But we aren’t here to start or support a rebellion. We can only act within our own brief. But if Philip is concealing something which is a threat to the health and prospects of this colony, then we ought to know.”
I knew that I wasn’t offering him much. I was encouraging him all I could, but I didn’t really have a lot to bargain with. On the other hand, he’d already taken the risk. He’d passed me the message arranging the meeting. If he didn’t give me anything it was his loss, his wasted efforts.
“You’ve only scratched the surface so far,” he said. “You don’t know what’s underneath Wildeblood’s rule.”
I stayed silent. Maybe I didn’t. Very probably, in fact.
“You have to help us,” he said. “When you know, you’ll see that you have to help us.”
I still didn’t answer. There was no answer.
“I’m going to give you two things,” he said. “I’m taking a big risk. But it’s important—to you as well as to us. I’m not going to say too much. If they find what I’ve given you it’s nothing to do with me. I deny everything. They’ll believe you if you turn them over now and have me arrested—but once you’ve started to look into them on your own account, to find out what they are, you’re guilty too. I advise you not to tell them.”
After that long and rather unimpressive speech he reached into his coat and brought out a small package about the size of a folded finger. He passed it over to me while he transferred something else to his other hand.
“It’s not much,” he said. “The stuff’s precious. Analyze it. Find out what it is, what it does, where it comes from. And find out what you can do with it.”
“That’s rather a lot of things to find out,” I commented.
“Can you do it?” He seemed anxious.
“I can try,” I conceded. Privately, I was fairly confident. The lab had the facilities to do just about anything in that line.
Then he passed me the other item—a piece of paper. It was a domestic product, thick and handmade.
“There are numbers on it,” he said, and I made to open it for inspection. “Don’t look now. The numbers are a code. I don’t have the key. If you can crack it, you may find the contents interesting. If you do, then it may be possible to trade. We need the key—and we have the rest of the message. I don’t know whether you can crack it or not...but try. It’s important—to us, and maybe to you as well.”
I hesitated. I didn’t like the idea of coded messages. It seemed a bit stupid—so close to melodrama it had to be a joke. But he was serious. And this was Wildeblood, and something more like the Middle Ages than the twenty-fourth century.
“Can’t you tell me any more?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. He was lying. He was holding something in reserve. It made sense, from his end. He had to keep something. Maybe he’d already given us too much.
“I take it you’ve tried to crack the code yourself?” I said.
“For a long time,” he said. “For a very long time. But what do we know about codes?”
What do we? I asked myself. Somehow, the UN hadn’t felt it necessary to attach a cryptographer to the crew. But Nathan had a devious mind. Maybe he could do it.
“How do I contact you?” I asked.
“You don’t,” he said. “Don’t ever try. It’s too dangerous. If you started asking questions.... They’re too careful. I’ll get to you again. Soon. Don’t waste any time.”
“I won’t,” I assured him. “But don’t expect miracles. No miracles of any kind.”
He knew what I meant. It didn’t make him happy, but he was a realist. A hopeful one maybe, but a realist. He’d had to take the chance of approaching us, just in case there was an opportunity for him, but he wasn’t expecting any messiahs, or armies of liberation either.
It was all a rather sorry mess: meetings in graveyards, cautious interchanges of semi-promises. But under the circumstances....
I couldn’t help thinking of it as crude melodrama, but to him it was normal. A way of life....
We parted. He disappeared into the gloom, carrying no light. I made my way carefully through the maze of stones the way I’d come. It was going to be a hard day tomorrow—not the sort of day I’d have preferred to face without a good night’s sleep. But needs must when the devil drives.
And I had the feeling that on Wildeblood/Poseidon there was a devil, somewhere, doing some hard driving.
CHAPTER TWO
Next day, when I went back to the Daedalus after breakfast, I was, of course, followed. It wasn’t Elkanah, my appointed guide—he was a servant, but one of some status, above such menial tasks as the daily spying detail. It was, in fact, a younger man with blond hair. He would have been easy to spot in a crowd, and he didn’t take any trouble to conceal either himself or his purpose.
I didn’t like that. I didn’t care for being watched so closely, but even more I didn’t care for the carelessly blatant way it was done. It became a kind of insult—almost an intimidation. I had complained once, but the way the complaint was received had simply supplemented the insult. Zarnecki—Philip’s right-hand man and the one who seemed to hand out all the orders—had simply said that it was for our protection. When I’d expressed a desire to be responsible for my own protection he’d said—very smoothly—that we were on his world and that he and Philip were responsible, and that there was no way he could square it with his own conscience to let us roam around unprotected. He hadn’t used precisely those words, but that had been the gist of his meaning.
I didn’t like Zarnecki. I didn’t like any of them, but Zarnecki least of all. He was tall and slim, olive-skinned and black-haired but with strangely colored eyes—deep blue around the pupil’s rim shading to gray-brown at the iris’s extremity. He gave the impression of being extremely fond of himself while not thinking too highly of others—any others.
He was, of course, fairly closely related to Philip. Just about every member of the upper crust—whether they lived in the house or elsewhere—was a cousin a couple of times removed. I got the impression the aristocracy had been formed entirely by the marrying of the early Wildeblood children. James had had four—two of each.
I generally thought of Zarnecki as the opposition, although I wasn’t really sure we had grounds for conflict with Philip’s coterie—not, at any rate, grounds which Nathan and standing orders would recognize. Zarnecki was the front man—the executive arm of the dictatorial clique. It was him who set the men to watch us and report our every move, even though he