Reality Dysfunction - Expansion nd-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Are you talking to them?”

  “No.”

  “Sir!” Garrett yelled.

  Murphy swung round. The people on the shore were standing in a ring, holding hands. A large ball of white fire emerged from the ground in their midst and curved over their heads, soaring out across the river.

  “Down!” Murphy shouted.

  The fireball flashed overhead, making the air roil from its passage, bringing a false daylight to the boat. Murphy ground his teeth together, anticipating the strike, the pain as it vaporized his legs or spine. There was a clamorous BOOM from behind the wheel-house, the boat rocked violently, and the light went out.

  “Oh shit, oh shit.” Garrett was crying.

  “What is it?” Murphy demanded. He pulled himself onto his feet.

  The boxy wooden structure behind the wheel-house was a smoking ruin. Fractured planks with charred edges pointed vacantly at the sky. The micro-fusion generator it had covered was a shambolic mass of heat-tarnished metal and dripping plastic.

  “You will come to us in time,” Jacqueline Couteur said calmly. She hadn’t moved from her sitting position. “We have no hurry.”

  The Isakore drifted round a bend in the river, water gurgling idly around the hull, pulling the fire from view. A duet of night and silence closed over the boat, a void surer than vacuum.

  Ione wore a gown of rich blue-green silk gauze. A single strip of cloth which clung to her torso then flared and flowed into a long skirt, it forked around her neck, producing two ribbonlike tassels that trailed from each shoulder. Her hair had been given a damp look, it was bound up and held in place at the back by an exquisite red flower brooch, its tissue-thin petals carved from some exotic stone. A long platinum chain formed a cobweb around her neck.

  The trouble with looking so elegant, Joshua thought, was that part of him just wanted to stare at her, while the other part wanted to rip the dress to shreds so he could get at the body beneath. She really did look gorgeous.

  He ran a finger round the collar on his own black dinner-jacket. It was too tight. And the butterfly tie wasn’t straight.

  “Leave it alone,” Ione said sternly.

  “But—”

  “Leave it. It’s fine.”

  He dropped his hand and glowered at the lift’s door. Two Tranquillity serjeants were in with them, making it seem crowded. The door opened on the twenty-fifth floor of the StOuen starscraper, revealing a much smaller lobby than usual. Parris Vasilkovsky’s apartment took up half of the floor, his offices and staff quarters took up the other half.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” Joshua said as they stood in front of the apartment door. He could feel the nerves building in the base of his stomach. This was the real big time he was bidding for now. And Ione on his arm ought to impress Parris Vasilkovsky. Precious little else would.

  “I want to be with you,” Ione murmured.

  He leant forward to kiss her.

  The muscle membrane opened, and Dominique was standing behind it. She had chosen a sleeveless black gown with a long skirt and a deep, highly revealing V-neck. Her thick honey-blonde hair had been given a slight wave, curling around her shoulders. Broad scarlet lips lifted in appreciation as she caught the embrace.

  Joshua straightened up guiltily, though his errant eyes remained fixed on Dominique’s cleavage. A host of memories started to replay through his mind without any assistance from his neural nanonics. He’d forgotten how impressive she was.

  “Don’t mind me,” Dominique said huskily. “I adore young love.”

  Ione giggled. “Evening, Dominique.”

  The two girls kissed briefly. Then it was Joshua’s turn.

  “Put him down,” Ione said in amusement. “You might catch something. Heaven only knows what he got up to on Norfolk.”

  Dominique grinned as she let go. “You think he’s been bad?”

  “He’s Joshua; I know he’s been bad.”

  “Hey!” Joshua complained. “That trip was strictly business.”

  Both girls laughed. Dominique led the way into the apartment. Joshua saw her skirt was made up from long panels, split right up to the top of her hips. The fabric swayed apart as she walked, giving Joshua brief glimpses of her legs, and a pair of very tight white shorts.

  He held back on a groan. It was going to be hard to concentrate tonight without that kind of distraction.

  The dining-room had two oval windows to show Mirchusko’s dusky crescent—south of the equator two huge white cyclone swirls were crashing, in a drama which had been running for six days. Slabs of warmly lit coloured glass paved the polyp walls from floor to ceiling, each with an animal engraved on its surface by fine smoky grooves. Most of them were terrestrial—lions, gazelles, elephants, hawks—though several of the more spectacular non-sentient xenoc species were included. The grooves moved at an infinitesimal speed, causing the birds to flap their wings, the animals to run; their cycles lasted for hours. The table was made from halkett wood (native to Kulu), a rich gold in colour, with bright scarlet grain. Three antique silver candelabras were spaced along the polished wood, with slender white candles tipped by tiny flames.

  There were six people at the dinner. Parris himself sat at the head of the table, looking spruce in a black dinner-jacket. The formal evening attire suited him, complementing his curly silver-grey hair to give him a distinguished appearance. At the other end of the table was Symone, his current lover, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose geneered chromosomes had produced a dark walnut skin and hair a shade lighter than Dominique’s, a striking and delightful contrast. She was eight months pregnant with Parris’s third child.

  Joshua and Dominique sat together on one side of the table. And Dominique’s long legs had been riding up and down his trousers all through the meal. He had done his best to ignore it, but his twitching mouth had given him away to Ione, and, he suspected, Symone as well.

  Opposite them were Ione and Clement, Parris’s son. He was eighteen, lacking his big sister’s miscreant force, but quietly cheerful. And handsome, Ione thought, though not in the mould of Joshua’s wolfish ruggedness; his younger face was softer, framed with fair curly hair that was recognizably Parris’s. He had just returned from his first year at university on Kulu.

  “I haven’t been to Kulu yet,” Joshua said as the white-jacketed waiter cleared the dessert dishes away, assisted by a couple of housechimps.

  “Wouldn’t they let you in?” Dominique asked with honeyed malice.

  “The Kulu merchants form a tight cartel, they’re hard to crack.”

  “Tell me about it,” Parris said gruffly. “It took me eight years before I broke in with fabrics from Oshanko, until then my ships were going there empty to pick up their nanonics. That costs.”

  “I’ll wait until I get a charter,” Joshua said. “I’m not going to try head-butting that kind of organization. But I’d like to play tourist sometime.”

  “You did all right penetrating Norfolk,” Dominique said, eyes wide and apparently innocent over her crystal champagne glass.

  “Hey, neat intro,” he said enthusiastically. “We just slid into that subject, didn’t we? I never noticed.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him.

  “You got off lightly, Joshua,” Parris said. “Me, I get lumbered with her subtlety all day every day.”

  “I would have thought she was old enough to have left home by now,” he said.

  “Who’d have her?”

  “Good point.”

  Dominique lobbed a small cluster of grapes at her father.

  Parris caught them awkwardly, laughing. One went bouncing off across the moss carpet. “Make me an offer for her, Joshua, anything up to ten fuseodollars considered.”

  He saw the warning gleam in Dominique’s eye. “I think I’ll decline, thanks.”

  “Coward.” Dominique pouted.

  Parris dropped the grapes onto a side plate, and wiped his hand with a napkin. “So how did you do it, Joshua? My captains do
n’t get three thousand cases, and the Vasilkovsky line has been making the Norfolk run for fifty years.”

  Joshua activated a neural nanonics memory cell. “Confidentiality coverage. Agreed?” His gaze went round the table, recording everyone saying yes. They were legally bound not to repeat what they heard now. Although quite what he could do about Ione was an interesting point, since her thought processes were Tranquillity’s legal system. “I traded something they needed: wood.” He explained about the mayope.

  “Very clever,” Dominique drawled when he finished, though there was a note of respect in amongst the affected languor. “Brains as well as balls.”

  “I like it,” Parris said. He studied his cut-crystal glass. “Why tell us?”

  “Supply and demand,” Joshua said. “I’ve found a valuable hole in the market, and I want to fill it.”

  “But the Lady Macbeth hasn’t got the capacity to do it by herself,” Clement said. “Right?”

  Joshua had wondered how smart the lad was. Now he knew. A real chip off the Vasilkovsky block. “That’s right. I need a partner, a big partner.”

  “Why not go to a bank?” Dominique asked. “Charter some ships for yourself.”

  “There’s a loose end which needs tying up.”

  “Ah,” Parris, showing some real interest at last, leant forward in his seat. “Go on.”

  “The power mayope has over Norfolk lies in keeping it a monopoly, that way we can keep the price high. I have a provisional arrangement with a distributor on Norfolk who’s agreed to take as much as we can ship in. What we need to do next is pin down the supply to a single source, one that only we can obtain. That is going to take upfront money, the kind which can’t be explained away to bank auditors.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Parris, I have never been on a planet more corrupt than Lalonde. It’s also very primitive and correspondingly poor. If you, with all your money, went there, you would be its king.”

  “No, thank you,” Parris said sagely.

  “Fine, but with money pushed into the right credit disks we can guarantee that no one else gets an export licence. OK, it won’t last for ever, administration people move on, traders will offer counter-bribes when they find what we’re doing; but I figure we ought to get two of Norfolk’s conjunctions out of it. Two conjunctions where your ships are filled to capacity with Norfolk Tears.”

  “Every ship? I do have quite a few.”

  “No, not every ship. We have to walk a fine line between greed and squeeze. My Norfolk distributor will give us most favoured customer status, that’s all. It’ll be up to us to work out exactly how much we can squeeze them for before they start to protest. You know how jealously they guard their independence.”

  “Yes.” Parris nodded thoughtfully.

  “And what about Lalonde?” Ione asked quietly. Her glass was dangling casually between thumb and forefinger, she rocked it from side to side, swirling the champagne around the bottom.

  “What about Lalonde?” Joshua asked.

  “Its people,” Symone said. “It doesn’t sound as though they get a very good deal out of this. The mayope is their wood.”

  Joshua gave her a polite smile. Just what I need, bleeding hearts. “What do they get at the moment?”

  Symone frowned.

  “He means they get nothing,” Dominique said.

  “We’re developing their market for them,” Joshua said. “We’ll be pumping hard cash into their economy. Not much by our standards, I admit, but to them it will buy a lot of things they need. And it will go to the people too, the colonists who are breaking their backs to tame that world, not just the administration staff. We pay the loggers upriver in the hinterlands, the barge captains, the timber-yard workers. Them, their families, the shops they buy stuff from. All of them will be better off. We’ll be better off. Norfolk will be better off. It’s the whole essence of trade. Sure, banks and governments make paper money from the deal, and we slant it in our favour, but the bottom line is that people benefit.” He realized he was staring hard at Symone, daring her to disagree. He dropped his eyes, almost embarrassed.

  Dominique gave him a soft, and for the first time, sincere kiss on his cheek. “You really did pick yourself the best, didn’t you?” she said challengingly to Ione.

  “Of course.”

  “Does that answer your question?” Parris asked his lover, smiling gently at her.

  “I guess it does.”

  He started to use a small silver knife to peel the crisp rind from a date-sized purple fruit. Joshua recognized it as a saltplum from Atlantis.

  “I think Lalonde would be in capable hands if we left it to Joshua,” Parris said. “What sort of partnership were you looking for?”

  “Sixty-forty in your favour,” he said amicably.

  “Which would cost me?”

  “I was thinking of two to three million fuseodollars as an initial working fund to set up our export operation.”

  “Eighty-twenty,” Dominique said.

  Parris bit into the saltplum’s pink flesh, watching Joshua keenly.

  “Seventy-thirty,” Joshua offered.

  “Seventy-five-twenty-five.”

  “I get that percentage on all Norfolk Tears carried by the Vasilkovsky Line while our mayope monopoly is in operation.”

  Parris winced, and gave his daughter a small nod.

  “If you provide the collateral,” she said.

  “You accept my share of the mayope as collateral, priced at the Norfolk sale value.”

  “Done.”

  Joshua sat back and let out a long breath. It could have been a lot worse.

  “You see,” Dominique said wickedly. “Brains as well as breasts.”

  “And legs,” Joshua added.

  She licked her lips provocatively, and took a long drink. “We’ll get the legal office to draw up a formal contract tomorrow,” Parris said. “I can’t see any problem.”

  “The first stage will be to set up an office on Lalonde and secure that mayope monopoly. The Lady Mac has still got to be unloaded, then she needs some maintenance work, and we’re due a grade-E CAB inspection as well thanks to someone I met at Norfolk. Not a problem, but it takes time. I ought to be ready to leave in ten days.”

  “Good,” said Parris. “I like that, Joshua. No beating around, you get straight to it.”

  “So how did you make your fortune?”

  Parris grinned and popped the last of the saltplum into his mouth. “Given this will hopefully develop into quite a large operation, I’ll want to send my own representative with you to Lalonde to help set up our office. And keep an eye on this upfront money of mine you’ll be spending.”

  “Sure. Who?”

  Dominique leaned over until her shoulder rubbed against Joshua’s, a hand made of steel flesh closed playfully on his upper thigh. “Guess,” she whispered salaciously into his ear.

  Durringham had become ungovernable, a city living on spent nerves, waiting for the final crushing blow to fall.

  The residents knew of the invaders marching and sailing downriver, everyone had heard the horror stories of xenoc enslavement, of torture and rape and bizarre bloodthirsty ceremonies; words distorted and swollen with every kilometre, like the river down which they travelled. They had also heard of the Kulu Embassy evacuating its personnel in one madcap night, surely the final confirmation—Sir Asquith wouldn’t do that unless there was no hope left. Durringham, their homes and jobs and prosperity, was in the firing line of an unknown, unstoppable threat, and they had nowhere to run. The jungle belonged to the invaders, the seven colonist-carrier starships orbiting impotently overhead were full, they couldn’t offer an escape route. There was only the river and the virgin sea beyond.

  The second morning after Ralph Hiltch made his dash to the relative safety of the Ekwan , the twenty-eight paddleboats remaining in the frightened city’s circular harbours set off in convoy downriver. Price of a ticket was one thousand fuseodollars per person (incl
uding a child). No destination was named: some talked about crossing the ocean to Sarell; Amarisk’s northern extremity was mooted. It didn’t matter, leaving Durringham was the driving factor.

  Given the exorbitant price the captains insisted on, and the planet’s relative poverty, it was surprising just how many people turned up wanting passage. More than could be accommodated. Tempers and desperation rose with the brutal sun. Several ugly scenes flared as the gangplanks were hurriedly drawn up.

  Frustrated in their last chance to escape, the crowd surged towards the colonists barricaded in the transients’ dormitories at the other end of the port. Stones were flung first, then Molotovs.

  Candace Elford dispatched a squad of sheriffs and newly recruited deputies, armed with cortical jammers and laser rifles, to quell this latest in a long line of disturbances. But they ran into a gang ransacking a retail district. The tactical street battle which followed left eight dead, and two dozen injured. They never got to the port.

  That was when Candace finally had to call up Colin Rexrew and admit that Durringham was out of control. “Most urban districts are forming their own defence committees,” she datavised. “They’ve seen how little effect the sheriffs have against any large-scale trouble. All the riots we’ve had these last few weeks have shown that often enough, and everyone’s heard about the Swithland posse. They don’t trust you and me to defend them, so they’re going to do it for themselves. There’s been a lot of food stockpiled over the last couple of weeks. They all think they’re self-sufficient, and they’re not letting anyone over their district’s boundary. That’s going to cause trouble, because I’m getting reports of people in the outlying villages to the east abandoning their land and coming in looking for a refuge. Our residents aren’t letting them through. It’s a siege mentality out there. People are waiting for Terrance Smith to come back with a conquering army, and hoping they can hold out in the meantime.”

  “How far away are the invaders?”

  “I’m not sure. We’re judging their progress by the way our communications with the villages fail. It’s not constant, but I’d say their main force is no more than ten or fifteen kilometres from Durringham’s eastern districts. The majority are on foot, which should give us two or three days’ breathing space. Of course, you and I know there are nests of them inside the city as well. I’ve had some pretty weird stories about bogeymen and poltergeists coming in for days now.”