THE DECEIVERS

by Alfred Bester

  Triton entertains curious superstitions which they take very seriously. They believe that wicked people are struck and killed by the God of Thunder for secret crimes. The lightning that usually accompanies thunder is an arrangement of mirrors by which the god can see his victim. All this on Terra, you understand, the only habited planet which has thunder and lightning. The Jinks are convinced that all Terrans are monstrously wicked and keep the god pretty busy.

  Paper men and paper animals are a great source of dread on Triton. They believe that magicians can cut figures out of paper, slip them under doors or through windows, and then bring them to life to obey their iniquitous orders.

  The “Mirror and Listen” mystery is used to solve perplexing problems. Wrap an old mirror in a cloth and then, no one being present, bow seven times toward the Spirit of the Hearth. Then the first words heard spoken by anyone will give a clue to the solution of the problem.

  Another method is to close the eyes and take seven steps. Open eyes at the seventh and the first object seen in the mirror held in the hand will give some hint, along with the first words heard spoken. This is used in the attempt to keep a step ahead of fate, which the Jinks believe is liable to be altered without notice at the whim of heaven.

  Heaven or paradise is t’ien-t’ang, which is also metonymy on Triton for valuables. “To be poor in t’ien-t’ang” means to have only a few jewels, ornaments, and only a few valuable pieces of clothing. This is only used by upper-class women who never appear in public without full makeup and expensive costume. Slave girls, lower-class women and old women don’t even try.

  All overlords and underlings are unpaid on Triton and make what they can out of their position. In most Domes the various official warrants and subpoenas are distributed to runners who squeeze the victims handed over to them. For a small bribe they will go back and report “Nobody home.” For a larger bribe they will report “Has absconded,” and so on. Jailors take bribes to allow prisoners to remain at large until wanted. Clerks of the court take bribes to use their influence. All servants share equally in tips.

  Government officials holding posts from the highest to the lowest are entitled to a nominal but actually a totally inadequate salary, but none of them ever takes the money; they all live by what they can gouge out of their office. It’s customary to refuse acceptance of the salary on such humble grounds as “Want of Merit” or “Unworthy” and to refund it to the Imperial treasury.

  The stately accompaniments for these high unpaid officials are gongs, red umbrellas, and lackeys carrying a huge wooden fan and boards on which the official’s titles are inscribed in large letters. Collateral branches of the Imperial family wear a red sash as a distinction.

  The everyday colloquial language of Triton is the Japanese-Chinese Jink. All schoolchildren are required to master Jink as their first language, no matter what particular mother tongue or dialect is spoken in their home Dome. Sometimes the home speech is so different that Jink has to be taught as a foreign language.

  The formal classic tongue is pure Japanese and is used only by scholars and dignitaries, although many Jinks will drop a classic word now and then to show that they’ve had an expensive education; e.g., the Japanese Koe rather than the Jink Sei for “voice” or Toshi instead of Nen for “year.” This creates a good deal of hostility, somewhat like that of the English toward William the Conqueror and his successors who only spoke Norman French.

  Winter had a smattering of Jink but didn’t bother with it. He’d drafted Oparo for the role of the “Wandering Jew” because Oparo was the chief of the Maori Mafia and fluent in Jink. He would act as interpreter. Instead, when he and Oparo were admitted through the Cathay main lock, to the office of a magnificent official wearing crimson robes over steel armor, he launched into a vaudeville act, waving a toy tomahawk, war dancing and singing a gibberish song from his school years:

  “We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.

  Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea.

  She’s my Annie and I’m her Joe,

  So listen to my tale of WOE!

  ANY ICE TODAY, LADY?

  NO!

  GIDDYAP!

  Rack ‘em up, sack ‘em up, any old time.

  Match to the gas tank.

  BOOM! BOOM!”

  The official stared, then turned to an aide. “T’a shuo shen-ma yang-ti hua?” (What kind of language is that one speaking?)

  Winter motioned to Oparo, who stepped forward and delivered the tso-i formal bow to one’s superior; right fist clasped in left hand, deep bow, and clasped hands brought up to the nose twice. The following will give you some idea of the Jink way of doing business.

  OPARO: Tsen-ma ch’eng-hu t’a-ti chih-jen? (By what title does one address you?)

  CAPTAIN: Shang-wei men-k’ou. (I am Captain of the main gate.)

  OPARO: Lao-chia. (Thank you.)

  CAPTAIN: Shih. Chao shui? (Yes. Now what do you want?)

  OPARO: P’an-wang che shih yu wan-man-chieh-kuo. (Only the hope that our business will have a most happy conclusion.)

  CAPTAIN: Ch’ing-pien. (Be at ease.)

  OPARO: Lao-chia. (Thank you.)

  CAPTAIN: Pu-hsieh. (You are welcome.)

  OPARO: I-ke pa-chang p’ai-pu hsiang. (It takes two to make a quarrel.)

  CAPTAIN: Chih-li pao-pu-chu huo. (Fire cannot be bound up in a paper.)

  OPARO: Kuei-ti pu kuei, chien-ti pu chien. (Expensive things may often be cheap and cheap things expensive.)

  CAPTAIN: Pu p’a man, chih p’a chan. (Don’t fear progressing slowly, but beware of stopping.)

  OPARO: She-mien. Mei-shu-shih. (Pardon us. We are humble actors.)

  CAPTAIN: Chih jen, chih mien, pu chih hsin. (Knowing what a man is, is not knowing what is in his heart.)

  OPARO: [Offering slug of pink gold with cupped hands] Erh t’ing shih hsü, yen chien shih shih. (What the ear hears may be false, what the eye sees are facts.)

  CAPTAIN: Ah! [Hefting weight of gold in palm] Pu-kan-tang. (I cannot dare assume your courtesy is deserved by myself.)

  OPARO: Ni t’ai ch’ien-la, Shang-wei. (You are too modest, Captain.)

  CAPTAIN: Kuei-ch’u? (From what honored place do you come?)

  OPARO: Ti-ch’iu. (Terra.)

  CAPTAIN: Kuei-hsing? (What is your honorable name?)

  OPARO: Pi-hsing Hsing-chün Yu-t’ai-chiao. (My humble name is Marching Jew.)

  CAPTAIN: [Eyeing the “Wandering Jew” costume and makeup] Kuei-chia-tzu? (What is your honorable age?)

  OPARO: San-chien i-pai-ling-i. (Three thousand one hundred and one.)

  CAPTAIN: [Bursting out laughing] Hsin-hsi hsin-hsi! (Happy birthday!)

  OPARO: Lao-chia. (Thank you.)

  CAPTAIN: Pu-hsieh. Kung-kan? (You are welcome. What is your business here?)

  OPARO: T’o-fu t’o-fu. Yen-p’ien ma-hsi-t’uan. (Thank you for asking. We wish to put on our circus show for all of you.)

  CAPTAIN: Ah? So. I jen nan ch’en po hito no aida. (By trying to please everybody one ends by pleasing no one.)

  [But note his classy substitution of the cultured Japanese “hito no aida” for the final Chinese colloquial “jen i.”]

  At this point Winter broke into his lunatic version of the #2 Chief Rainier’s fake Red Indian, delivered with dramatic passion.

  “Whafoh you Chinky Chinamans alla samee chop chop? Ugh! No, no, no! Hit trail. Go aways. Vamoose back to rising sun. Ugh! Me takeum my circus show everywhere sun he shineum. Ugh! Nobody say vamoose. Everybody smokeum peace pipe. Ugh! Me payum all license cold cashly wampum. Me kowtow to all rules your great Manito hand down. Ugh! What you want, Chinky Chinamans? Wampum from Red Man? Me pay. Cashly. Got plenty in startepee. No talk with forked tongue.” And here Winter thrust another pink gold slug into the astonished Captain’s hand. “Smokeum peace pipe, yes? Ugh!”

  The Captain of the main gate looked at Oparo. “What is that?” he asked.

  “A foreigner from Terra,” Oparo answered. (Wai-k
uo-jeu ti-ch’iu.) “A red man.” (Hung ti jen.)

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Chief Rain-in-the-Face.” (Ta-yüan-shuai pei yü lun-che lien. Literally: “Generalissimo to-be-rained-upon face.”)

  The Captain couldn’t help laughing. He knew it was phony but it was wonderfully entertaining, and he now possessed one pound (Troy) of the rare Callisto pink gold, so the #2 Company of Chief Rainier’s Indian Carnival was permitted to enter the Cathay Dome. It had become the Triton capital mostly because it had been built over the volcanic Meta mother lode. It was Winter’s plan to search out the carefully guarded entrance to that lode. He had a volcano of his own in mind.

  But he discovered, to his disgust, that the Captain of the main gate had had the last laugh. He had assigned the Hsing-hsing-ch’ang, the Cathay execution ground, as the location for the carnival. It was a square surrounded on three sides with some fifty arched brick gallows. On the fourth was a ramp leading up to the gibbet. The carnival was forced to set up surrounded by thirty corpses in various stages of grisly decay. A curious large iron box with what appeared to be a covered manhole on top stood in the center of the execution ground, serving no discernible purpose. Winter decided to use it as his huckster’s podium.

  And yet the grand opening of the carnival was turned into a gala by an execution. When the taped fanfares sounded but before Winter could mount the podium to exhort paying customers to “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Come one! Come all!” in Solaranto (Hetzen! Hâter! Macht’s schnell! Avanti unico! Bi istigh todos!) the carnival filled with an excited mob of Jinks, men, women and children, all behaving as though they were anticipating a Mardi gras. But they looked every which way except at the sideshows.

  There came a shrilling of birds. Winter looked up, expecting to see a flight of swifts or swallows (many of the Solar Domes contain birds, either by design or accident) but instead saw a flight of whistling arrows lofting overhead. The mob shouted, laughed, and did a sort of deadly tag game as the arrows fell. There were hoots when an unlucky received a razor slash. The execution grounds reeked of cruelty.

  Then a thunder of gongs and rattle of wooden dragons announced the procession to the gallows; archers in black-lacquered antique armor and sallet helmets, musicians with their noisemakers, heralds bearing huge placards painted with crimson ideographs.

  “Name, rank, and serial number of the executioner,” Oparo whispered to Winter in Terran. “It’s an honor every official gets, along with the Jink idea of a flourish.”

  “Doesn’t sound like ‘The Mikado’ to me,” Winter muttered, “or look it. Koko never made an entrance like this.” He stared at the crimson-gowned executioner, borne on an open red palanquin, holding the free end of a noose garroted around a naked victim’s neck. The man was dragged on all fours like a feral beast.

  “Probably got busted for something big,” Oparo said. “That’s why they’re hanging him.”

  “Christ! This is a bloodthirsty crowd.”

  “Wait ‘till you see them at a Man-Shoot or a breaking on the wheel,” Oparo grunted.

  “I hope I never see it.”

  The procession went up the ramp, paraded around the gibbet to a vacant arched gallows where the executioner knotted the free end of the noose overhead. He stepped back and nodded to the warriors, who notched arrows into their antique bows and began whistling shots at the victim’s extremities, feet, knees, arms, while he danced and dodged, and the crowd howled into a final roar when the piercing agonies drove him off the edge of the gibbet into a last dance in space with his hands frantically clutching the rope while the archers shot them away. At last he shuddered and was still.

  “Hai!” the mob exulted and turned to the lesser entertainments of the carnival. And yet, as the show went on hour after hour, they clued Winter in to the lead he was on the alert and hoping for. He noticed that the biggest spenders, the most carefree spenders, were men and women who all had one thing in common; each was missing a hand. He pointed that out to Oparo.

  “Small-time goniffs,” was the Mafia chief’s judgment. “If you don’t thief big, the Jinks settle for a hand. They chop the one you heist with. That’ll be Big Money for the advice of the ages, turkey.”

  Winter nodded in amiable silence. He’d made his own unconscious judgments and entered the belly-dancer’s tent where his teenyzapper was performing—not badly—for a score of lusty enthusiasts. He made lethal Maori sign to her. She flashed her eyes in answer, danced off the stage, and began enticing the paying customers one by one until Winter gave her the gig sign. When the performance was over, the audience left, not without coarse remarks to the turkey who was alluringly led into the teenyzapper’s dressing room. Winter came out wearing the Jink’s clothes, his face neutralized with the zapette’s makeup. He hadn’t bothered to discover whether she’d slugged the sucker unconscious or killed him. He really didn’t care.

  He paid his way into the snake-charmer’s show, pleased that the box-office gorill didn’t recognize him. He was even more pleased when Barb failed to recognize him when the performance was over and he remained in his seat. When she ordered him out, he knew he had passed the test and drifted out into the carnival but not on a random walk. “Pointer” was searching for his own i-Shou, which does not mean “pointer” in Jink; it translates as “one-hander.” Winter was tightening up; his tactics were one long critical path.

  He spotted a possible at last by the awkward way she received her change with her right hand from the hairy fire-eater. “Must be a natural lefty,” he thought. “Let’s see.” It was difficult because she wore long, concealing sleeves. She was a squat woman, strong, beautifully dressed but without cosmetics, showing that she was unashamedly lower-class. (The Jink gentlewoman would rather die than appear in public without full makeup.)

  Winter got his chance at last when she stopped at the Hindu magician’s booth where the tired old hat bit was in progress. Out came rabbits and doves, and one bird fluttered directly at her. She threw up her hands automatically to protect herself, and the left was missing.

  So he followed her when she left the carnival. His idea was that if she was a thief, connected with the Jink underworld, he could probably locate the Meta mine entrance through them. Their grapevine would be most likely to know, and he was prepared to buy the information with the irresistible pink gold.

  You’re wondering why he was operating solo and around Robin Hood’s barn, so to speak. There were two reasons. The price he’d been required to pay for the cooperation of the Maori Mafia was the solemn pledge that he would do nothing to endanger their Meta connections on Triton. In fact, Oparo had refused to give him any information that might have been helpful. The second reason will be made manifest shortly.

  He lost her in the streets and alleys crowded with hustling coolies, hawkers, merchants and gentry, and lined with ramshackle shops and hovels so rickety that they made him think of Sam’l Pepys’ London and the Great Fire, when they tried to contain it with breaks by pulling houses down flat, merely using billhooks. She was going up an alley which could have been pulled flat, came to a crowded five-way intersection, and suddenly wasn’t there.

  Winter squirmed to the intersection and tried to look in five directions at the same time. They were warrens and she wasn’t tall enough to be easily picked out in the crowds. “Zolst ligen in drerd!” he muttered bitterly, feeling the critical path tightening around his neck like a garrote. His wildly scanning eyes examined everything, searching for a clue, from a sophisticated tailor-shop where foreign style clothes were made (hsi-fu-chuang) to a group of coolies playing “Guess-Fingers” alongside a one-armed bandit.

  The Jinks are notorious gamblers, all the way from guess-fingers through fan-tan, dice, cards, and roulette, to computerized Go. The authorities can’t stop it, even if they wanted to, so they compromise by taking an enormous cut as a tax and the promotion of public gambling machines to compete with floating games. You can almost always get your percentage out of a locked coin box.

/>   “Almost,” because the Jinks are also notorious goniffs and can gaff any apparat. A host of slot machines kept being ripped off for payments without the correct percentage return; nothing in the coin box, not even counterfeit slugs. In desperation the Gambling Commission posted a “Thousand-Syce-No-Prosecution-Honest-To-God” reward if the ripper would step forward and tell all. The Rippees had to protect their cut. The perpetrator appeared, grinning, collected and revealed the scam. He was using ¼Syce shoes cast in frozen CO2 which evaporated within minutes.

  Another corruption of their machines, unknown to the Commission, was synergized by Winter’s unconscious phane sense. His reward was painful.

  He couldn’t stand still in the middle of the intersection; he didn’t dare run the risk of attracting attention. He crossed to the one-armed bandit and started dropping ¼S coins and yanking while he thought hard. Keep on, chasing in all directions, hoping for a lead? Go back to the carnie and try all over again? Address these clowns shooting fingers at each other for Big Money in Solaranto, “Say, have you guys seen a one-handed woman lately?” Yeah. Sure.

  He glared at the slot machine which displayed flower symbols instead of fruit; shih-chu (carnation), pai-he (lily), ch’iang-wei (rose), pansies, daisies, etc. He was in no mood to appreciate Jink aesthetics, but then he noticed that rosemary turned up on the right third dial at every turn and cancelled payoffs like the Vegas lemon.

  “Machine’s been gaffed,” he muttered, dropping another ¼S and pulling the arm. Rosemary again. “Never give a sucker an even break. The Commission must be very happy with this number. All profit. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance… but where the devil’s Ophelia i-Shou? To hell with it!” He dropped one more coin. Rosemary again. He took a last five-way con before returning to the carnival and, mirabile visu, spotted his Ophelia at the far end of the righthand alley, still talking to someone.