Modern Classics of Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  The child struggled and Benjacomin realized that the boy was putting up a fight to comply with the orders, not a fight to get away. He let the child slip through his hands and the boy put out a finger and began writing on the wet sand. The letters stood out.

  A man’s shadow loomed behind them.

  Benjacomin, alert, ready to spin, kill or run, slipped to the ground beside the child and said, “That’s a jolly puzzle. That is a good one. Show me some more.” He smiled up at the passing adult. The man was a stranger. The stranger gave him a very curious glance which became casual when he saw the pleasant face of Benjacomin, so tenderly and so agreeably playing with the child.

  The fingers were still making the letters in the sand.

  There stood the riddle in letters: MOTHER HITTON’S LITTUL KITTONS.

  The woman was coming back from the sea, the mother with questions. Benjacomin stroked the sleeve of his coat and brought out his second needle, a shallow poison which it would take days or weeks of laboratory work to detect. He thrust it directly into the boy’s brain, slipping the needle up behind the skin at the edge of the hairline. The hair shadowed the tiny prick. The incredibly hard needle slipped under the edge of the skull. The child was dead.

  Murder was accomplished. Benjacomin casually erased the secret from the sand. The woman came nearer. He called to her, his voice full of pleasant concern, “Ma’am, you’d better come here, I think your son has fainted from the heat.”

  He gave the mother the body of her son. Her face changed to alarm. She looked frightened and alert. She didn’t know how to meet this.

  For a dreadful moment she looked into his eyes.

  Two hundred years of training took effect.… She saw nothing. The murderer did not shine with murder. The hawk was hidden beneath the dove. The heart was masked by the trained face.

  Benjacomin relaxed in professional assurance. He had been prepared to kill her too, although he was not sure that he could kill an adult, female Norstrilian. Very helpfully said he, “You stay here with him. I’ll run to the hotel and get help. I’ll hurry.”

  He turned and ran. A beach attendant saw him and ran toward him. “The child’s sick,” he shouted. He came to the mother in time to see blunt, puzzled tragedy on her face and with it, something more than tragedy: doubt.

  “He’s not sick,” said she. “He’s dead.”

  “He can’t be.” Benjacomin looked attentive. He felt attentive. He forced the sympathy to pour out of his posture, out of all the little muscles of his face. “He can’t be. I was talking to him just a minute ago. We were doing little puzzles in the sand.”

  The mother spoke with a hollow, broken voice that sounded as though it would never find the right chords for human speech again, but would go on forever with the ill-attuned flats of unexpected grief. “He’s dead,” she said. “You saw him die and I guess I saw him die, too. I can’t tell what’s happened. The child was full of santaclara. He had a thousand years to live but now he’s dead. What’s your name?”

  Benjacomin said, “Eldon. Eldon the salesman, ma’am. I live here lots of times.”

  3

  “Mother Hitton’s littul kittons. Mother Hitton’s littul kittons.”

  The silly phrase ran in his mind. Who was Mother Hitton? Who was she the mother of? What were kittons? Were they a misspelling for “kittens”? Little cats? Or were they something else?

  Had he killed a fool to get a fool’s answer?

  How many more days did he have to stay there with the doubtful, staggered woman? How many days did he have to watch and wait? He wanted to get back to Viola Siderea; to take the secret, bad as it was, for his people to study. Who was Mother Hitton?

  He forced himself out of his room and went downstairs.

  The pleasant monotony of a big hotel was such that the other guests looked interestedly at him. He was the man who had watched while the child died on the beach.

  Some lobby-living scandalmongers that stayed there had made up fantastic stories that he had killed the child. Others attacked the stories, saying they knew perfectly well who Eldon was. He was Eldon the salesman. It was ridiculous.

  People hadn’t changed much, even though the ships with the Go-Captains sitting at their hearts whispered between the stars, even though people shuffled between worlds – when they had the money to pay their passage back and forth – like leaves falling in soft, playful winds. Benjacomin faced a tragic dilemma. He knew very well that any attempt to decode the answer would run directly into the protective devices set up by the Norstrilians.

  Old North Australia was immensely wealthy. It was known the length and breadth of all the stars that they had hired mercenaries, defensive spies, hidden agents and alerting devices.

  Even Manhome – Mother Earth herself, whom no money could buy – was bribed by the drug of life. An ounce of the santaclara drug, reduced, crystalized and called “stroon,” could give forty to sixty years of life. Stroon entered the rest of the Earth by ounces and pounds, but it was refined back on North Australia by the ton. With treasure like this, the Norstrilians owned an unimaginable world whose resources overreached all conceivable limits of money. They could buy anything. They could pay with other peoples’ lives.

  For hundreds of years they had given secret funds to buying foreigners’ services to safeguard their own security.

  Benjacomin stood there in the lobby: “Mother Hitton’s littul kittons.”

  He had all the wisom and wealth of a thousand worlds stuck in his mind but he didn’t dare ask anywhere as to what it meant.

  Suddenly he brightened.

  He looked like a man who had thought of a good game to play, a pleasant diversion to be welcomed, a companion to be remembered, a new food to be tasted. He had had a very happy thought.

  There was one source that wouldn’t talk. The library. He could at least check the obvious, simple things, and find out what there was already in the realm of public knowledge concerning the secret he had taken from the dying boy.

  His own safety had not been wasted, Johnny’s life had not been thrown away, if he could find any one of the four words as a key. Mother or Hitton or Littul, in its special meaning, or Kitton. He might yet break through to the loot of Norstrilia.

  He swung jubilantly, turning on the ball of his right foot. He moved lightly and pleasantly toward the billiard room, beyond which lay the library. He went in.

  This was a very expensive hotel and very old-fashioned. It even had books made out of paper, with genuine bindings. Benjacomin crossed the room. He saw that they had the Galactic Encyclopedia in two hundred volumes. He took down the volume headed “Hi-Hi.” He opened it from the rear, looking for the name “Hitton” and there it was. “Hitton, Benjamin – pioneer of old North Australia. Said to be originator of part of the defense system. Lived AD 10719–17213.” That was all. Benjacomin moved among the books. The word “kittons” in that peculiar spelling did not occur anywhere, neither in the encyclopedia nor in any other list maintained by the library. He walked out and upstairs, back to his room.

  “Littul” had not appeared at all. It was probably the boy’s own childish mistake.

  He took a chance. The mother, half blind with bewilderment and worry, sat in a stiff-backed chair on the edge of the porch. The other women talked to her. They knew her husband was coming. Benjacomin went up to her and tried to pay his respects. She didn’t see him.

  “I’m leaving now, ma’am. I’m going to the next planet, but I’ll be back in two or three subjective weeks. And if you need me for urgent questions, I’ll leave my addresses with the police here.”

  Benjacomin left the weeping woman.

  Benjacomin left the quiet hotel. He obtained a priority passage.

  The easy-going Sunvale Police made no resistance to his demand for a sudden departure visa. After all, he had an identity, he had his own funds, and it was not the custom of Sunvale to contradict its guests. Benjacomin went on the ship and as he moved toward the cabin in which he could r
est for a few hours, a man stepped up beside him. A youngish man, hair parted in the middle, short of stature, gray of eyes.

  This man was the local agent of the Norstrilian secret police.

  Benjacomin, trained thief that he was, did not recognize the policeman. It never occurred to him that the library itself had been attuned and that the word “kittons” in the peculiar Norstrilian spelling was itself an alert. Looking for that spelling had set off a minor alarm. He had touched the tripwire.

  The stranger nodded. Benjacomin nodded back. “I’m a traveling man, waiting over between assignments. I haven’t been doing very well. How are you making out?”

  “Doesn’t matter to me. I don’t earn money; I’m a technician. Liverant is the name.”

  Benjacomin sized him up. The man was a technician all right. They shook hands perfunctorily. Liverant said, “I’ll join you in the bar a little later. I think I’ll rest a bit first.”

  They both lay down then and said very little while the momentary flash of planoform went through the ship. The flash passed. From books and lessons they knew that the ship was leaping forward in two dimensions while, somehow or other, the fury of space itself was fed into the computers – and that these in turn were managed by the Go-Captain who controlled the ship.

  They knew these things but they could not feel them. All they felt was the sting of a slight pain.

  The sedative was in the air itself, sprayed in the ventilation system. They both expected to become a little drunk.

  The thief Benjacomin Bozart was trained to resist intoxication and bewilderment. Any sign whatever that a telepath had tried to read his mind would have been met with fierce animal resistance, implanted in his unconscious during early years of training. Bozart was not trained against deception by a technician; it never occurred to the Thieves’ Guild back on Viola Siderea that it would be necessary for their own people to resist deceivers. Liverant had already been in touch with Norstrilia – Norstrilia whose money reached across the stars, Norstrilia who had alerted a hundred thousand worlds against the mere thought of trespass.

  Liverant began to chatter. “I wish I could go further than this trip. I wish that I could go to Olympia. You can buy anything in Olympia.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Bozart. “It’s sort of a funny trading planet with not much chance for businessmen, isn’t it?”

  Liverant laughed and his laughter was merry and genuine. “Trading? They don’t trade. They swap. They take all the stolen loot of a thousand worlds and sell it over again and they change and they paint it and they mark it. That’s their business there. The people are blind. It’s a strange world, and all you have to do is to go in there and you can have anything you want. Man,” said Liverant, “what I could do in a year in that place! Everybody is blind except me and a couple of tourists. And there’s all the wealth that everybody thought he’s mislaid, half the wrecked ships, the forgotten colonies (they’ve all been cleaned out), and bang! it all goes to Olympia.”

  Olympia wasn’t really that good and Liverant didn’t know why it was his business to guide the killer there. All he knew was that he had a duty and the duty was to direct the trespasser.

  Many years before either man was born the code word had been planted in directories, in books, in packing cases and invoices. Kittons misspelled. This was the cover name for the outer moon of Norstrilian defense. The use of the cover name brought a raging alert ready into action, with systemic nerves as hot and quick as incandescent tungsten wire.

  By the time that they were ready to go to the bar and have refreshments, Benjacomin had half forgotten that it was his new acquaintance who had suggested Olympia rather than another place. He had to go to Viola Siderea to get the credits to make the flight to take the wealth, to win the world of Olympia.

  4

  At home on his native planet Bozart was the subject of a gentle but very sincere celebration.

  The Elders of the Guild of Thieves welcomed him. They congratulated him. “Who else could have done what you’ve done, boy? You’ve made the opening move in a brand new game of chess. There has never been a gambit like this before. We have a name; we have an animal. We’ll try it right here.” The Thieves’ Council turned to their own encyclopedia. They turned through the name “Hitton” and then found the reference “Kitton.” None of them knew that a false lead had been planted there – by an agent in their world.

  The agent, in his turn, had been seduced years before, debauched in the middle of his career, forced into temporary honesty, blackmailed and sent home. In all the years that he had waited for a dreaded countersign – a countersign which he himself never knew to be an extension of Norstrilian intelligence – he never dreamed that he could pay his debt to the outside world so simply. All they had done was to send him one page to add to the encyclopedia. He added it and then went home, weak with exhaustion. The years of fear and waiting were almost too much for the thief. He drank heavily for fear that he might otherwise kill himself. Meanwhile, the pages remained in order, including the new one, slightly altered for his colleagues. The encyclopedia indicated the change like any normal revision, though the whole entry was new and falsified:

  Beneath this passage one revision ready. Dated twenty-fourth year of second issue.

  The reported “Kittons” of Norstrilia are nothing more than the use of organic means to induce the disease in Earth-mutated sheep which produces a virus in its turn, refinable as the santaclara drug. The term “Kittons” enjoyed a temporary vogue as a reference term both to the disease and to the destructibility of the disease in the event of external attack. This is believed to have been connected with the career of Benjamin Hitton, one of the original pioneers of Norstrilia.

  The Council of Thieves read it and the Chairman of the council said “I’ve got your papers ready. You can go try them now. Where do you want to go? Through Neuhamburg?”

  “No,” said Benjacomin. “I thought I’d try Olympia.”

  “Olympia’s all right,” said the Chairman. “Go easy. There’s only one chance in a thousand you’ll fail. But if you do, we might have to pay for it.”

  He smiled wryly and handed Benjacomin a blank mortgage against all the labor and all the property of Viola Siderea.

  The Chairman laughed with a sort of snort. “It’d be pretty rough on us if you had to borrow enough on the trading planet to force us to become honest – and then lost out anyhow.”

  “No fear,” said Benjacomin. “I can cover that.”

  * * *

  There are some worlds where all dreams die, but square-clouded Olympia is not one of them. The eyes of men and women are bright on Olympia, for they see nothing.

  “Brightness was the color of pain,” said Nachtigall, “when we could see. If thine eye offend thee, pluck thyself out, for the fault lies not in the eye but in the soul.”

  Such talk was common in Olympia, where the settlers went blind a long time ago and now think themselves superior to sighted people. Radar wires tickle their living brains; they can perceive radiation as well as can an animal-type man with little aquariums hung in the middle of his face. Their pictures are sharp, and they demand sharpness. Their buildings soar at impossible angles. Their blind children sing songs as the tailored climate proceeds according to the numbers, geometrical as a kaleidoscope.

  There went the man, Bozart himself. Among the blind his dreams soared, and he paid money for information which no living person had ever seen.

  Sharp-clouded and aqua-skied, Olympia swam past him like another man’s dream. He did not mean to tarry there, because he had a rendezvous with death in the sticky, sparky space around Norstrilia.

  Once in Olympia, Benjacomin went about his arrangements for the attack on Old North Australia. On his second day on the planet he had been very lucky. He met a man named Lavender and he was sure he had heard the name before. Not a member of his own Guild of Thieves, but a daring rascal with a bad reputation among the stars.

  It was no wonder that he
had found Lavender. His pillow had told him Lavender’s story fifteen times during his sleep in the past week. And, whenever he dreamed, he dreamed dreams which had been planted in his mind by the Norstrilian counterintelligence. They had beaten him in getting to Olympia first and they were prepared to let him have only that which he deserved. The Norstrilian Police were not cruel, but they were out to defend their world. And they were also out to avenge the murder of a child.

  The last interview which Benjacomin had with Lavender in striking a bargain before Lavender agreed was a dramatic one.

  Lavender refused to move forward.

  “I’m not going to jump off anywhere. I’m not going to raid anything. I’m not going to steal anything. I’ve been rough, of course I have. But I don’t get myself killed and that’s what you’re bloody well asking for.”

  “Think of what we’ll have. The wealth. I tell you, there’s more money here than anything else anybody’s ever tried.”

  Lavender laughed. “You think I haven’t heard that before? You’re a crook and I’m a crook. I don’t go anything that’s speculation. I want my hard cash down. I’m a fighting man and you’re a thief and I’m not going to ask you what you’re up to … but I want my money first.”

  “I haven’t got it,” said Benjacomin.

  Lavender stood up.

  “Then you shouldn’t have talked to me. Because it’s going to cost you money to keep me quiet whether you hire me or not.”

  The bargaining process started.

  Lavender looked ugly indeed. He was a soft, ordinary man who had gone to a lot of trouble to become evil. Sin is a lot of work. The sheer effort it requires often shows in the human face.

  Bozart stared him down, smiling easily, not even contemptuously.

  “Cover me while I get something from my pocket,” said Bozart.

  Lavender did not even acknowledge the comment. He did not show a weapon. His left thumb moved slowly across the outer edge of his hand. Benjacomin recognized the sign, but did not flinch.

  “See,” he said. “A planetary credit.”