THE DECEIVERS

by Alfred Bester

  Ahmet’s the Number One, the gantze macher of the Turks. He owes me heavy, we both know it, and I’d better explain. He’s great in his office, a brilliant bey, an artful governor who’s put the Turks into a position almost as powerful as the Jinks; but if what I know ever got out, he’d be impeached, epaulets torn off, sword broken over his head, dismissed in disgrace, and—worse than disgraced—a laughingstock. At least that’s what we tell each other.

  Because years ago when I was doing a full feature on his father, the distinguished Tröyj Caliph, (this was long before his strange, sad death) ambassador to a dozen capitols, papa Tröyj decided he needed new lens transplants for his eyes. Off he went to the chirurgeon with his son, Ahmet, for company, and me tagging along hoping to pick up intimate background color. Ahmet was maybe sixteen at the time. In the chirurgery papa thought they might as well check his son’s eyes, too. They sat Ahmet down before an eyechart and discovered that he was eagle-eyed, but didn’t know how to read.

  Fact. He’d been schlepped around the diplomatic circuit all his life, picking up sophistication, charm, and expensive tastes, having a glorious time, and it never occurred to the ambassador’s entourage that Ahmet wasn’t getting any basic training in the three Rs. They all took that for granted and nobody bothered to check.

  Naturally Ahmet never snitched on himself; what kid wants to go to school? By the time he was sixteen it was too late for readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic. To this day he can’t read or write. Years of concealing his illiteracy have developed a hundred clever ruses and a fantastic memory. Fortunately for the governor they use voice prints for signatures in the Turkish enclave.

  Can you heel, can you toe?

  Can you help your sister sew?

  Can you read, can you write?

  Can you help your brother fight?

  Ahmet gave me a huge hello, not because I’ve got the goods on him but because we really are friendly. He’s in his late twenties now; chic, suave, swarthy, already balding, and stammering slightly because Terran English is his third or fourth language and sometimes he has to hesitate while he gropes for a word. I won’t reproduce the stammer.

  “Ahmet, I’ve come to beg a favor,” I said, presenting him with a ginseng ampule I’d begged from the chef.

  “Faire des demandes,” he grinned. “Go ahead. Twist my arm. I defy you. I’m prepared.”

  “You are?”

  “A. B. C. D. E. F. G. How’s that?”

  “Ahmet! Ahmet! Is this any way to treat your friendly neighborhood blackmailer? You’ve been studying behind my back.”

  “It’s one of your Maori numbers. She blew in out of nowhere last month. Teaches me in bed. Uses her scallop shells for the alphabet.”

  “Scallop shells!”

  “Silver. Wears ‘em as a ceinture around her hips. How d’you say ceinture in your rotten Yank? Oh yes, girdle. They go jingle-jangle-jingle when— She’s got one hell of a hickey on her ass. Tukhas? Derriere? Ass. What’s the favor, Rogue?”

  “What’s your Meta scam, Ahmet?”

  “Simple. We pay the Jinks with skag and horse. Pound for ounce.”

  “Jigjeeze! Sixteen for one?”

  “But at least we’ve got a counterthreat. They don’t dare cut our Meta allotment. If they do, we cut their happy-dust shipment.”

  “What’s your allotment?”

  “Three-four hundred ounces of Meta a month.”

  “That much?”

  “Hemp and poppies eat heat and humidity like there’s no tomorrow.”

  “And you ship them five-six thousand pounds of dope. Refined?”

  “No, crude. The Jinks prefer to purify it themselves.”

  “It’s still a hell of a lot of junk.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot of people. ‘Pepper, salt, mustard, cider; combien peuple live in China?’ I’m pretty sure they use a lot of the crude to keep the coolies happy in the mines. From all reports it’s hell down there.”

  “I’ve never seen natural Meta, Ahmet. May I see some of yours?”

  “Is this the favor?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You use it. Why haven’t you ever seen it?”

  “How many people who use silver have ever seen the natural ore?”

  “Sans réplique, as ever, Rogue. Come on.”

  At a side-lock we got into vacsuits so heavily insulated that they made us look and move like spastic polar bears. Ahmet tapped my helmet and pointed to the shortwave antenna. “Are you switched on? Do you read me, Rogue?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Then do exactly what I tell you, and for God’s sake don’t touch anything, unless you want to generate yourself into a nova.”

  “No thanks. I’ve got too much burn inside me as it is.”

  Out into the lunar terrain and still feeling like a polar bear hopping from ice floe to ice floe, only this was from crag over crevice to rock. About a quarter of a mile out, Ahmet stopped at what seemed to be a natural tufa carapace, and deafened me over the shortwave hollering in Turkish, not one of my languages. The carapace slid aside eventually, revealing a hatchway and stone steps leading down. We descended into a small vault with a stone door at the far side, guarded by four armed polar bears.

  More jabbering in Turkish. The guards swung open the stone door which was on pivots, and we went through. The door closed behind us. “Tight security,” Ahmet told me. “Not because Meta’s précieux; because it’s dangereux. Can’t have civilians playing with these matches.”

  We were in a spherical ice cave. “Cryogenic helium,” Ahmet explained, “in the solid crystal state. Inert, like argon and neon, only more so. It’s just about the only Substanz that can’t be catalyzed by Meta. It’s used for shipping and storage containers, but it isn’t easy maintaining a temperature of two degrees Kelvin.”

  “Ahmet, you and your Maori popsie have been reading up on the subject,” I said, looking around. “What’s that pile of jewelry doing here? Précieux goodies to protect from a rip?”

  “My dear Rogue, that’s your Meta.”

  “What! Those opal buttons?”

  “Aber natürlich.”

  I took a step for a closer look, wondering whether this Playboy of the Solar World was indeed zigging me on. They appear to be tiny iridescent buttons, round, rimmed, shallow-domed on both sides, but not perforated. The opalescent fire in them was live, sparkling and dancing.

  “This is really Meta? Seriously, now, Ahmet; no fun and games. Meta?”

  “Oui.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Oui.”

  “But these jewels look so harmless.”

  “Actually they are, in the normal state. I’m being quite serious now, Rogue. They’re tektites, extragalactic meteorites from deep space. You can still find ordinary tektites on Terra; black glassy buttons just lying around, harmless, minding their own business.”

  “Then what made these so different?”

  “Ah! These are primal numbers out of the cosmic past. It’s theorized that a shower of tektites, shot from elsewhen, saturated Triton during its volcanic era. They were subjected to titanic thermal and radioactive pressures and transformed into Meta. Each of these buttons is a cauldron of compressed transformation energy.”

  “They look it, by God!”

  “That’s what enables Meta to kick atoms into a quantum jump and release energy. When they lapse back to their normal level they absorb the lost radiation quanta from the Meta and jump again. All this at ‘c’ speed. De Broglie must be spinning in his grave.”

  “Who de Broglie? What de Broglie?”

  “Louis Victor. He perpetrated the quantum mechanics caper back in 1923, and never knew what it would lead to.”

  “Ahmet Tröyj, Ahmet Tröyj, you have been reading up.”

  “The genesis is just speculation, Rogue, but it’s known that Meta is found in prehistoric lava, rather like African diamonds which are found in ancient volcanic ‘pipes’ or necks. The Jink coolies have to mine
it the same way the African Blacks used to.”

  “How’s the stuff handled?”

  “Tools with solid helium tips. Think of a blacksmith handling white-hot iron, then reverse it and you’ve got a whitesmith handling Meta.”

  “I will be damned. Thanks for the guided tour, Ahmet. I really am grateful and I won’t even beg for one teentsy-weentsy tektite as a souvenir.”

  “Couldn’t carry it anyway.”

  “Yeh. No pockets in these suits.”

  “Is this the favor, the whole faveur, and nothing but di toyve?”

  “No. To tell the truth, I came here with a strategic idea, but you’ve given me a better tactical one. Come back to your office and I’ll synergize the scam you’ve inspired. I want you to build me a Tröyjan Horse.”

  Of course our TerraGardai section had Perted the Meta Mafia operation. Here’s the empiric flow chart of the trading. See if you can spot the joker in the Critical Path. No reward.

  (1)

  The Maori hunt them with modern weapons.

  (2)

  The shellfish that produce Imperial Purple. The Maori pretend they use the dye for tattooing.

  (3)

  The only organic substance which can produce a bright green color in fireworks; also a Callisto art form.

  (4)

  A sort of voluntary slavery. The Maori girls make lovely and most obliging models, and anything to get away from that damn macho Dome.

  (5)

  The rare pink gold which the Belgians refuse to sell to the Solar.

  And have you spotted the joker?

  How the hell do you heist something that can’t be touched?

  In the 20th-century African mines, diamond theft by workers was a constant problem. The shifts had to submit to an exhaustive medical examination when they came up from the Blue Ground depths, and yet a few still managed to get away with raw stones. Five or ten carats of the rough, and a Black was set up for life; land, cattle, wives, luxury by native standards.

  No such problem on Triton. After a cursory physical search of the shifts coming out of the lava deposits, they passed the coolies, one by one, through a thermal chamber. If the probes registered a temperature below zero centigrade they knew the dreamer was carrying some sort of concealed subzero container, and zap! And yet— And yet— Damn it! Meta was being stolen from the mines. How?

  Diamond stones can be held in the mouth or swallowed; thrust into ears, up nostrils or the anus; hidden in the hair; very small stones can be concealed under eyelids; deliberate wounds can be slashed in the skin and diamonds implanted; u.s.w., but never with Meta. That compressed cauldron would turn the bod into a slow burning at the stake which would make an auto-da-fe seem pleasant by comparison.

  When you Pert an operation, the weak joint in the Critical Path is called the Negative Slack. That joker was our Negative Slack, and we couldn’t puzzle it out. It wasn’t any comfort to us that Jinks couldn’t either. But the Synergist did. He was headed from A. to B. and he stumbled on X. Good old reliable serendipity, it never lets you down.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Hunter v. Hunted

  Hou hsi ‘cheng ‘chien pen. “They have a thousand monkey-tricks.”

  —Ancient Chinese proverb

  When Ahmet Tröyj’s merry men had costumed the Maori, tested the props, and sprayed the jet into a lurid totem pole with CHIEF RANIER’S INDIAN CARNIVAL—#2 TOURING COMPANY emblazoned on the flanks in P.T. Barnum caps, they jig—after wishing Winter and his merry men good luck on an impossible mission—jagged back to their skag and horse farms.

  Winter reviewed his cast; clowns, tumblers, acrobats, wrestlers, ring-shouters, sword-fighters, Hindu magician, one snake-charmer (played by Barbara, who’d gone to the Maori Dome for a consultation with Jay Yael after Winter gave her the slip) plus boa constrictors (loan from the Brazil Dome) stoned out of their skulls with amatol, and one Egyptian mummy contortionist. A contorting mummy! Would you believe it?

  Also a non-Ecumenical belly-dancer played by the zapette who’d tired of Ahmet’s ABCs—Winter was growing rather fond of this obliging teeny-zapper—a hairy fire-eater, and a three-thousand-year-old “Wandering Jew” offering the advice of the ages for a modest quarter-Syce.

  (I’d best interject here, me, Odessa, because Jink money was crucial to Winter’s wild chase. The Solar uses paper money, of course; banknotes, drafts, bills of exchange, &tc., but hard cash is used for small transactions. Triton uses the “Syce,” short for the Sycee silver ingot. Sycee is from sai-see, meaning “fine silk,” because the silver is so pure that it can be drawn out like silk threads when it’s molten. It’s shaped like the sole of a shoe, which is not unusual. The Solar worlds cling to traditional ingot shapes; gold in rings, copper in flat, round cakes, double-ax shape for bronze, tin in bars.

  The Sycee or Syce ingot (symbol, SS) = approximately $20 Terran.

  The half Syce, S, = $10 Terran.

  The half of a half Syce, ½S, = $5.

  The half of a half of a half Syce, ¼S, (that’s how the complicated Jink mind operates) = $1.

  I’ve Englished the Jink currency for you. Actually, SS, the Sycee is yüan-pao, the half Syce, S, is liang fen-chih yüan-pao, and most typically Jink, silver coins less than ¼S in value, the equivalent of Terrain nickels and dimes, are called i-mao-ta-yang or “Big Money.” All the coins from the full Syce ingot down to the Big Money are shoe-shaped.)

  Back to the #2 company of the carnival. Rogue Winter was in the role of Chief Ranier himself, resplendent in war bonnet and breechclout, with spectacular war paint masking the telltale sunbursts scarred on his cheeks.

  “Now we’re going to perform exactly as rehearsed,” he told the company. “Nobody takes the initiative. Nobody zags off on a promising lead. You do exactly what I tell you, no more, no less. I make the decisions. You follow orders. Above all else, we do not speak word one… repeat, not word one in Maori. Understood?”

  They nodded obediently, even the tough, independent Maori soldiers who make up half the company. After all, he was their double-kill King R-og. He was speaking a mish-mash of Terran English, Polynesian, and Solaranto, the lingua franca of all the Solar worlds, which sounds like this: Sieurore Hiver, avant nach oifigg eolais, favor. (Mr. Winter, please come to the information desk.) It’s not exactly the ethereal “Music of the Spheres,” so you’ll have to settle for translations.

  There are scores of principal Domes on Triton occupied by the pure lines and blends of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Malayan, Philippine, Annamese, and even descendants of the Cuban Chinese who still speak Ku-Pa-Kuo, an odd Asiatic-Spanish. The capitol of Triton is called the Cathay Dome by the rest of the Solar. The Jinks insist on calling it Chung-kuo which, if you please, means all China itself, and you’d better believe it.

  As has been pointed out before, they’re not famed for modesty, and Chung-kuo also stands for “The Middle Kingdom.” This from the Jink tradition that Cathay is situated in the middle of a square solar system which it rules by divine decree. Triton is surrounded by four spaces to protect its purity, and beyond them lie islands like huo-hsing (Mars), yüeh-liang (Luna), and so forth which are inhabited by the savage barbarians who are rarely permitted to visit and sully the Heavenly Kingdom.

  Since Triton is a blending in various proportions, its first spoken language is Jih-pen-chung-kuo, Japanese-Chinese, or Jink. Here are some social aspects of Triton, taken at random from the files which our agents are required to study in order to avoid a faux pas when dealing with Jinks. It will give you some idea of how archaic their feudal structure is.

  The Jinks, who are the soberest people in the Solar, think it complimentary to get pleasantly drunk on festive occasions. People who are physically unable to do so often use substitutes to do it for them. Mandarins who are obliged to drink with all guests employ a sort of “Big Foot” who solemnly makes the rounds until the last guest has collapsed.

  The Jinks distinguish between five kinds of drunkenness. According to them, wine fl
ows to the:

  Heart—

  Producing maudlin emotions

  Liver—

  Producing pugnacity

  Stomach—

  Producing drowsiness and flushed face

  Lungs—

  Producing hilarity

  Kidneys—

  Producing desire

  A bride and groom drink wine together out of cups joined by red string. Red is the lucky color, emblematic of prosperity and joy. All letters, dispatches and documents invariably have something red about them.

  However, the Jinks believe that each man is so constituted by nature that he’s able to absorb only a given quantity of luck. More than your quota will recoil on your head and do you harm. Frequently when the Jinks feel they’ve received their quota they’ll give away the benefits of further good fortune.

  And on the subject of marriage a la Triton, a husband has the right to kill his adulterous wife but he must kill her lover also; it’s a case of all or nothing. Otherwise he lays himself open to prosecution for murder. It’s a principle of Jink jurisprudence that no sentence can be passed until the prisoner has confessed his guilt, and there have been some lurid “confession” stories concocted.

  Volumes have been written by Jink doctors on the pulse which is considered of enormous importance in diagnosis. They claim to distinguish twenty-four different kinds and make a point of taking the pulse of both wrists.

  Now a Jink man may never touch a woman (of his class or above) and many philosophic treatises have been written on the problem of whether a man should rescue a drowning woman if it involved touching her. Of course doctors are forbidden, in the name of propriety, to touch their female patients, much less see them naked.

  Consequently, doctors on house calls bring a small statue of a woman’s naked body with them. This is passed into the patient’s curtained bedchamber with instructions how to mark the trouble spots. The statue is then handed back and the doctor makes his diagnosis on the basis of the markings.