Meeting at Infinity

by John Brunner

  He was playing a hunch in hoping that it was powerful enough.

  The sages were waiting for him when his heli sliced down out of the evening sky and purred to a landing on the level sand of the beach. They might just have come out to sit and watch the sunset, but Lyken felt that was not so. They were waiting for him.

  They were such a friendly people! As he came towards them over the sand, Lyken remembered how he had had to press them to accept anything in exchange for the perceptor. They had agreed at last to take some musical instruments, and nothing more.

  They exchanged greetings, and indicated that he should join the group. It was in the form of a shallow horseshoe, facing the sunset; the place they assigned to Lyken was in the opening of the curve. They had been waiting for him When he sat down, they were facing him without having had to move.

  He had never been able to establish which of them was a leader, or indeed if they had a leader at all, and while turning over in his mind what he had to say he wondered which of them he should address his appeal to. Before he had decided, a plump man with a perpetual smile, whom he had met before, cleared his throat and spoke up.

  “Beware of Allyn Vage,” he said pleasantly.

  The others chuckled, a rippling, rich sound. Bewildered, Lyken shook his head. There was no possibility of his having misheard; the people of Akkilmar had learned the language of the intruders on their world with astonishing speed and perfect accuracy. Allyn Vage. A name. It meant nothing to him, and he apologized and said so.

  “Never mind,” said a woman sitting next to the man who had spoken. Her hair was going gray, and her almost bare body suggested that she was childless. There were rather few children in Akkilmar, and that was another unsolved problem about this culture.

  “We know why you have come,” said a man sitting on the first speaker’s other side. “Of course we will help you. You have been friendly to us, when you might have been brutal and exploited us through your strange powers. Go in peace and we will follow.”

  Lyken had not been prepared for this; he had expected a long discussion and a hard task of persuasion. Taken aback, he glanced around the assembly.

  “But how do you know?” he demanded. “How do you know what I want?”

  The first speaker put out his hand and scooped up some dry fine sand from the beach. Letting it trickle between his fingers in a thin stream, he traced a symbol with it. All of them chuckled again.

  “Go!” said the first speaker, and to his own amazement Lyken found himself obeying. It was much later, when he was almost back at the trading post, that he was able to ask himself why.

  9

  WHEN GAFFLES came back to the Octopus, he found Jockey de-briefing a group of runners—yonder boys with tinted hair and jackets as wide across the shoulders as a cruiser’s nose. He cued them with a straight forefinger, hearing each of the runners out before shifting the finger like a clockhand. Gaffles whistled sharply at him; he glanced up, read the look on his aide’s face, and dropped his hand abruptly.

  “Out!” he said. “Come back in three minutes.”

  The runners got up and scrambled out of Gaffles’s way with a clatter of high boots. “You caught up with Curdy?” Jockey demanded when they had gone.

  “Got close behind him. But I broke off. This was too hot to hold on to.” Gaffles dropped into a seat and recounted what he had found out, about Nevada having lodged in the same block as Erlking.

  “That’s good clean long string,” said Jockey approvingly. “Where’s Erlking? You find him?”

  Gaffles shook his head. “He moved. He had money from someone and didn’t leave an address. And it’s going to be hell scouring town for him tonight, no free fall about that. It’s rough out there!”

  Jockey plucked at his lower lip, dubiously. “I heard. I was just getting the breakdown when you showed. But if he’s going to be useful, we’ve got to get him now. Lyken will have had it from Nevada that Erlking’s hypnolocks aren’t fast—if Nevada did get his news from Erlking, and that’s most likely. Lyken will go after Erlking and drag him through into his franchise, or just blot him. That’s what I’d do on his spot.”

  “You can add a fact to your breakdown,” said Gaffles. “I came through a bad riot on the way. The police are taking in four ’cruiters to every cultist, where they can. I heard, too, that sometimes they’re turning cultists loose on the quiet, running ’em around the corner and tipping ’em out the paddy wagon.”

  Jockey grunted. “There’s a knot here,” he said. “Unless Athlone is plain blind, he may have got the news about Erlking. He was right in the lodging block, you said. He saw Clostrides this morning, recall? Then the news may get to the Directors as well, and that’ll mean two parties we have to get to Erlking ahead of. Gaffles, go through to the Venus, will you? You’ll find about thirty runners hanging around. They’re tonight’s strategic reserve. Get them out after Erlking. Promise them the moon if they find him ahead of the competition.”

  It was a blow to Curdy Wence to get so close to Erlking and then to lose the trail. He paid the landlady of the lodging block fifty, and she still didn’t know Erlking’s new address, so either she was telling the truth or someone else had got to her first. Curdy wanted to assume the latter—there was something peculiar about her reactions, he thought—but on his first Rate One job he didn’t want to get involved with a beating-out. There were plenty of pugs around who could beat out the news, but Curdy thought it was unsophisticated. Philosophically, he went back to his previous method of procedure, which, in this Quarter where everyone knew about Jockey Hole, worked tolerably well. Frown to look older; hand in side of jacket to suggest a weapon; relaxed tone to indicate absolute confidence, and—

  “I’m from Jockey. He wants a man called Erlking. Used to be Ahmed Lyken’s Remembrancer. Where is he?”

  And the answer would take the form, “Sorry, I don’t know. But cuddy! Try so-and-so. He should know, I guess.”

  He could tell that the technique worked because after a further half-dozen calls he started to have people giving him Erlking’s old address, the one he’d moved away from. And he kept on getting more numbers to try.

  What he didn’t know was that after seven calls the half-hour waiting period laid down by Ahmed Lyken expired. And after eight calls he walked around a corner into the arms of a ’cruiter who picked him up, clobbered him, and slung him in the back of a wagon, which then had its full load of involuntary recruits, and took off howling down a sidestreet with police in full pursuit.

  The ’cruiter who picked Curdy up knew his business; his clobbering was scientific and precise. Not so hard as to leave a lasting ache and incapacitiate him for the work he had to do tomorrow; hard enough to stop him from being any kind of a nuisance on the way to Lyken’s base. He woke up before the wagon actually got there, but his head was ringing like a bell and ached abominably, and he could barely get his eyes open. During a few seconds of consciousness he viewed the dark interior of the wagon, saw the lights of a street through the rear opening, heard groans from all around him, and felt a heavy limp weight—the weight of an unconscious body—across his legs and feet. Then he lapsed back into the dark.

  He regained consciousness a second time when his shoulder was seized and shaken violently. This time his head was clearer, and his eyes focused at once instead of after two false attempts. He saw a pug in Lyken’s company uniform, his cap tipped back on his shaven head, leaning over and saying something as though through a long, long pipe. The gurgling words sorted themselves out in Curdy’s muddled brain, and made sense.

  “On your feet, yonder boy.”

  He didn’t move. He said, “What?” And felt that the limp weight on his feet had gone. Beyond the opening in the back of the wagon he could see that there was a large, lighted yard, with people milling about. Someone was shouting orders over an amplifier.

  “Yurd me!” the pug growled, and reached for Curdy’s shoulder again, intending to pick him up and throw him bodily out of the w
agon.

  Curdy waited till the pug was off balance. Then he swung his feet, quickly and together, to the floor, and bounced upright. It was good and measured, all smooth and falling free.

  Taken aback, the pug blinked at him. He chose his insults carefully, and said, “No Tacket-loving company pug tells me what to do, gasbrains.”

  The pug’s face twisted with rage, and he clawed a baton loose from his belt where it swung on a long thong. Curdy kicked his wrist before he could raise it out of reach; in the same moment, before his foot dropped back to the floor, he caught the end of his whangee stick and pulled it out of the side of his boot. He cracked it across the pug’s face.

  The pug would have brushed aside a punch with a closed fist; the stinging pain of the whangee stick made him grunt and close his eyes, cursing foully. Behind him, another captive slumped on one of the racks stirred and groaned.

  But Curdy had no time to think of rescuing anyone but himself. He seized his chance while the pug was distracted by the pain, and spun round, intending to jump over the back of the wagon and run off.

  There was a man waiting for him as he jumped, who shot out a leg to trip him and helped him on his way down with a shove in the small of the back. Curdy went sprawling on hard concrete pavement.

  “A yonder boy with skill and guts!” said the man who had tripped him in a sarcastic tone, bending down and snatching Curdy’s whangee stick from him. Curdy feigned a grab for it, and instead dived for the speaker’s legs, but just in time the man stepped back. There was the snicking sound of an energy gun being cocked, and Curdy looked up, his heart sinking, to see its snub muzzle in the man’s hand.

  After that, there was nothing to be done.

  In the big bright yard there were at least a dozen paddy wagons being unloaded. Uniformed teams were ordering the occupants out, and, if they were unwilling, dragging them. Curdy felt he owed it to his self-respect to be dragged, but the energy gun lined on him convinced him otherwise. The man wielding it made him stand to one side while the other captives from the wagon which had brought him in were assembled in a rough line. Then two pugs came up, one bearing an armful of clinking chain, and Curdy saw how things were to be arranged.

  The pugs paid out the chain in front of the line of captives. Attached to this chain at intervals were shorter chains each terminating in an oval metal ring. The pugs picked up the rings one by one, seized the right wrists of the captives, and snicked the rings on like handcuffs. Curdy was the last to be treated; when the others had been secured, the man with the gun motioned him into line, and he submitted, seething. There were a couple of empty rings still; as the line of captives was herded across the yard, with the two pugs hauling on the front end of the chain, these rings clanked on the ground behind Curdy like insane tambourines.

  On the opposite side of the yard was a travolator leading into a lighted tunnel. There was no hint where it might lead. As Curdy’s group approached, another group was being loaded on. The chain binding them was locked on to a hook on a belt moving at the same speed as the travolator, and they had to go with it like a team playing pop-the-whip, staggering as they were dragged forward.

  What in Tacket’s name had driven Lyken—Lyken of all the merchant princes—to such desperate measures? Curdy’s head spun as much with the problem as with the aftereffects of the blow he had received.

  His group was just about to be hooked on to the conveyer belt and dragged on to the travolator, when a man to whom the pugs gave respectful salutes came out from behind one of the empty paddy wagons. With him were two more pugs, straggling to control a wide-eyed man in a brown coverup, who shook and struggled, uttering little moaning cries.

  “Hook this one on with the others,” ordered the newcomer, his voice sounding tired and strained. He jerked a thumb at the man in the brown coverup. The pugs grinned and nodded. In a moment, their struggling victim was chained behind Curdy, and the whole group was being snatched forward on to the travolator. Dimly, there was a sarcastic remark from the newcomer.

  “You’re getting where you asked to be taken, you fool!”

  Curdy had visions of the wide-eyed man causing trouble on the travolator, and as soon as they were on it and steady on their feet, he turned to him and prepared to warn him to keep still. But a shock of recognition prevented him.

  “But—but you’re the man who spoke to Lyken outside The Market at noon!”

  The other didn’t seem to hear. Instead of struggling and pulling on his chain as Curdy had feared, however, he began to curse. It discomforted Curdy to hear such fluent obscenity in an accent with status to it. Some of the other captives, who seemed to have been shocked into numb acquiescence by the fate that had overtaken them, half-turned and looked incuriously back.

  The travolator began to spiral upwards at a steep angle, so that they almost slid backwards on its rough surface. The man behind Curdy stopped cursing and began to shout in a high, hysterical tone.

  “Do you know what’s happening to you? I’ll tell you! A bastard called Lyken wants us for cannon fodder! They’re throwing him out of his franchise, and it’s more than time—he’s a cheating lying filthy Tacket-loving scoundrel who lies and smiles and isn’t fit to breathe!”

  Someone higher up the line cried out in an anguished voice. Curdy felt fear go through him like a frozen wind.

  “I want to get hold of Lyken and pull off his fingers!” The man behind him screamed. “I want to put oil on his beard and hear him yell while it burns off his face! I want to—”

  “Shut him up, can’t you?” bellowed a voice from higher up. Curdy gulped. The raw savagery in his neighbor’s tone was churning his guts. He hesitated. Then he bunched his fist.

  “If you don’t stop it,” he said in his roughest manner, “I’ll break your nose for you.”

  The man stopped, crouching a little against the rise of the travolator, and stared at Curdy with tear-bright eyes. “I’m Luis Nevada,” he said inanely, in a voice that had dropped suddenly to a conversational level.

  Curdy answered him with a grunt, and there was silence for a while, until the travolator flattened out again, and they emerged into a great hall. One by one they turned and stared at what they saw there. They all recognized it. Pictures had been published often enough. It was a Tacket portal in full operation.

  “What did I tell you?” howled the man behind Curdy. “Rot Lyken’s soul in hell!”

  10

  IN THIS, the latest of Hal Lanchery’s three franchises to be opened up, the traders’ domain was within an island of green forest surrounded by open plain, thickets of shrubs and wide, meandering streams. Tonight was clear and rather bright, with a very white quarter-moon in the sky.

  Under a tall tree, surrounded by his aides, Hal Lanchery finished briefing Fearmaster through an interpreter. Fearmaster was tall, muscular, and courageous. But when he was with the traders, he showed fear. He could not help it. And it was better that way.

  Lanchery had taken this franchise for the sake of its furs and skins, which were superb and plentiful. It had not at first occurred to him that the G’kek’s mastery of wild animals could be put to use. He shifted in his chair as he thought of how the idea had come to him, and felt a stir of uneasiness, wondering if he was doing right or not.

  He was in his way a handsome man—lean, young to be of such eminence, with a fair beard. Most of the merchant princes wore beards, and their followers also, because of the aura of frontiersmen which hung about them. Not that there was much of the pioneering spirit in franchise work. Sometimes, though, an ugly look would cross his face, and it would seem suddenly Savage, barbaric.

  Fearmaster, skilled in reading nonverbal communications, saw such a look now, and gave a grunt as though he had been struck in the belly. Lanchery came back from his private thoughts and snapped at the interpreter.

  “Well? How’s it going? You’ve been talking a long time.”

  The interpreter shrugged. “I had difficulty making sense of something he said. It
seems they’re developing taboos against referring to our equipment directly—they use circumlocutions which get harder and harder to follow. But as I understand it, they’re doing all right with the animals. Only the portal we’re setting up smells so strongly of man and of electricity they doubt whether they’ll get the beasts right up to it.”

  “Ask him if there’s any way of covering up the smell, then.”

  “I did. Apparently the portal will have to be smeared with bruised leaves and animal droppings. Then it might not be too bad.”

  “Get him to attend to it, then. Or if he doesn’t like the smell himself, get him to show the technicians the right sort of leaves and so on.”

  The interpreter rattled off the order; Fearmaster bowed and darted away among the trees, glad to be off. When he was gone from sight, Lanchery rose, sighing heavily.

  “I’m going to walk round the perimeter by myself for a while,” he said. “I want to think over the plans. I’ll be back in a quarter-hour at most.”

  This was definitely the most pleasant of the trading posts he operated, he reflected. It was all set among trees; much of it—the portals themselves, and all the technical stuff—was underground, buried in the slowly rising hill on which the patch of forest grew. At ground level, it was possible to be quite alone among the trees, seeing no one, hearing practically nothing but nature’s noises. And yet there was no danger of intrusion because of the heavily guarded perimeter.

  Correction. Almost no danger of intrusion. There had been one intruder. But he found it ridiculous to think of her as a source of danger.

  A bluish glimmer shone between two of the stark black trunks, and by its light he caught sight of her face. Forgetting everything else, he dashed forward calling out her name.

  “Allyn! Allyn!”

  And she was there again.

  The bluish glimmer came from the substance of her clothes: a cloak with a high stiff collar that framed her head like a numbus, a tunic and slacks which as they glowed seemed to pour liquidly around her body and legs. She turned slumberous-lidded eyes towards him, but otherwise remained immobile.