Partnership (30 page)

They reached the bottom of the mountain and Blaize set off at a brisk walk towards the hut. Forister took his arm and gently urged him away from the hut, towards the edge of the mesa. "I'd like to get a closer look at this grain crop of yours before we go inside," he suggested.

But they didn't wind up standing in the best place to assess the grain; they came to the edge of the mesa just above the ugly volcanic mud hole that disfigured the basin, with its lazy bubbles roiling and tumbling just before the sticky surface of the mud.

Forister eyed Blaize warily. "You've been forcing the natives to work in a corycium mine owned by you."

"Persuading," Blaize corrected.

"They believed your promises to use the profits for their own good ?"

Blaize flushed. "I don't think they fully understood what I had in mind at the beginning. Most of them, anyway. Humdrum and Gargle got the idea, but they never believed it would work."

"Then... ?" Forister left the question dangling.

"I think," Blaize said almost inaudibly, "I think they did it because they like me a little."

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"Other reasons have been suggested," said Forister.

Blaize looked blank for a moment, then noticed the direction of Forister's gaze. He was staring down at the volcanic mud bubble.

"Oh. Fassa del Parma again?"

"And Dr. Hezra-Fong," said Micaya, "and DarneD

Overton-Glaxely. You've still to dear up their allega-tions of torture."

"I — I see." With a sudden leap, Blaize jumped away from Forister and Micaya to perch on a boulder sticking halfway out from the side of the mesa. "You want proof that I didn't torture Humdrum?"

"It won't do any good to produce some other native and claim he was the one you tortured publicly, and that he recovered," Micaya told him, "just in case you were thinking of that. You've no way to prove you didn't murder and bury the one witnesses saw you torturing."

"Well, it was Humdrum, all right, and he'll tell you so, but I see your point," Blaize agreed. He fumbled at the front of his tunic; die synthofilm sides parted and he folded the garment neatly. "My best tunic," he explained politely, "you'll understand I don't want to ruin it"

"What are you doing? Come back, boy!" Forister called, just too late; Blaize had skidded down a couple of feet and was clinging to a rock ledge barely out of reach.

iJust a minute," Blaize panted in between some strange contortions. His synthofilm trousers collapsed in a shining heap around his ankles; he kicked diem upwards and they snagged on a thorn bush.

"Blaize, don't do this." Micaya spoke in tones of quiet authority that seemed for a moment to weaken Blaize's will. He paused on the ledge, his milk-white skin almost glowing against the dull hues of the volcanic pool beneada him.

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"I have to," he said calmly. "It's the only way."

Before either of them could argue further, he leapt from the ledge in a spiraling, awkward dive that ended with a resounding smack in the center of the heaving mud. White arms and legs splayed out, red head still, for a moment he seemed to have been stunned or killed outright by the fell. Then he kicked and wriggled vigorously, sinking deeper into the bubbling glop with each movement.

"Hold still,'1 Forister called, "we'll get a rope to you

— we'll do something — "

Blaize turned over onto his back. A thick layer of mud coated his body, barely preserving the decencies.

He thrashed around in what Nanria belatedly recognized as an attempt at the backstroke.

"Come on in, Uncle Forister," he called up. "The mud's fine today!"

"Are you all right?" Micaya shouted while Forister, for once, struggled to find his voice.

"Couldn't be better. Mud's just at sauna heat today."

Blaize stretched and wriggled luxuriously and grinned up at them through mud-spattered cheeks. "I don't usually dive from that high up — knocked the breath out of me for a minute — but I thought you needed the demonstration. Care to join me?"

Micaya looked quizzically at Forister. The brawn kicked off his shoes and rolled his trouser legs up. "Oh, I'm going down, all right," he said between clenched teeth. "It's the quickest way to get my hands on that boy. And then I'm going to — to — " Words failed him.

"Torture him in a boiling mud hole?" Micaya suggested.

Nancia deliberately slowed her speed for the short hop from Angalia to Shemali. She needed time to check her records, time to access the Net and look for evidence of Polyon's scam. Somewhere in all the past five years' records of metachip and hyperchip transac-tions there must be some clue to his criminal activities

— for she could not believe he had totally given up on the plans he'd announced during her maiden voyage.

Not Polyon de Gras-Waldheim.

Even Net access was not always instantaneous, particularly when one was gathering and collating all the public records on sale, transfer or use of hyperchips in the known galaxy. Nancia idled and hoped that her passengers would not notice how long the voyage was taking.

Fortunately, they all seemed wrapped up in their own concerns. Fassa, Alpha and Darnell were all being held in separate cabins, dealing with the long spells of solitary imprisonment in their own ways. Alpha requested medical and surgical journals from Net libraries and studied the technical material Nancia downloaded for her with intense concentration, just as if she thought she would be permitted to practice her chosen profession again. Not if I have anything to say about it, Nancia vowed silently. But the truth was, she didn't have much to say. She could record her testimony and the images she'd received via contact buttons, and those depositions would go into evidence at Alpha's trial. But after that, all would be up to those softpersons who controlled the high courts on Central.

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Most of them were High Families; half of them had some connection, kinship or financial, with the Hezra-Fong clan. Alpha might very well be free — not immediately, but in five years or ten or twenty, a mere blip in the life of a High Families girl with fewer than thirty chronological years behind her and access to the best rejuv technology to expand her life span dose to two hundred years.

Not for me to decide, Nancia reminded herself, and turned her attention to the other two. As a safety precaution she kept sensors in all their cabins active at all times, but she tried not to pay too much attention unless the sensor receptors flashed to indicate unusual activity.

DarnelTs activities were usual enough, Nancia supposed, for someone enslaved to a softperson's pitifully limited array of sense-receptors. He had requested Stemerald, Rigellian smokefowl and an array of Dorg Jesen's feelieporn hedra; Nancia had supplied nonal-coholic nearbeer, synthobird slices, and the hedra which Forister told her were the nearest things to porn in her library. Darnell spent most of his time reclining on his bunk, washing down synthobird and candied brancake with the nearbeer and watching a remake of an Old Earth novel over and over again. Nancia couldn't understand what he saw in the datacorded adventures of this Tom Jones, but then, it was none of her business.

Blaize was confined in the cabin opposite Darnell's.

After hah0 an hour's furious argument about who would look after "his" Loosies while he was being shipped back to Central, he'd accepted Nancia's promise to see that her sister Jinevra personally over-saw whoever was sent to replace him on Angalia. "One thing about the Perez line, they're hopelessly honest,"

he said in resignation. 'Jinevra may not be creative, but at least she won't let that swine Harmon get his hooks into them again. You do realize that if this year's harvest foils, all my work will be wasted?"

"I realize, I realize," Nancia told him patiently.

"Trust Jinevra." And as she sent out a general Net call to Jinevra and explained the situation to her sister, she wondered guiltily just how different she was from the rest of the High Families brats. Daddy had pulled strings to get her sent on this assignment. Now she was calling in favors owed her in Courier Service, and making her sister feel guilty, so that she could interfere in what should have been left to the normal channels of PTA administration.

But "normal channels" left the Loosies without the kind of aid they needed. Nancia sighed.

"Will there never be a bureaucracy that does what it's supposed to without sinking into corruption and inefficiency?'* she asked Forister.

"Probably not," he replied.

"You sound like Simeon — advising me to accept corruption because it's everywhere!"

Forister shook his head. "Not in the least. I'm advising you not to waste energy being surprised and shocked about the predictable. No system, anywhere, is proof against human failings. If it were — "he forced a tired smile — "we'd be computers. Your hyperchips may be foolproof, Nancia, but the human pan of you makes mistakes — and so do all of us. Fortunately," he added, "humans can also recognize and correct mistakes—unlike computers, which just go on until they crash. Now if you'll excuse me, I'd like access to your comm system for a while. I want to see what I can do to prevent Blaize from crashing."

While Blaize's explanations had satisfied all of them on an emotional level, he still had some legal problems to face. No matter how excellent his motivation, the feet remained that he had falsified PTA reports, sold PTA shipments on the black market, and transferred 240

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the profits into his personal Net account To leave him on Angalia while the others were shipped back for trial would have seemed like the worst kind of favoritism.

All Forister could do was to make sure that all the facts were on record for the trial — not just how Blaize had obtained the money, but what he had done with it and how he had improved the lives of the people he was sent to aid.

"They are people," Forister reported to Blaize with satisfaction.

"Of course they are! Couldn't you tell that?"

"What I thought, or what you thought, is beside the point," Forister told him. "What counts is CenDip's decision. And there must be at least one intelligent man in CenDip, because your report has already been received and acted on. The Loosies have ISS as of yesterday. And the decision's palmprinted by no less a person than the CenDip Secretary-Universal, Javier Perez y de Gras."

Nancia heard that with great satisfaction and turned her attention to her last prisoner. Fassa was spending most of this voyage just as she had spent the trip from Bahati to Angalia, crouched on her cabin floor, arms around her knees, staring at nothing and ignoring the food trays Nancia extruded at the dining slot. Untouched bowls of soup, baskets of sliced sweet bread, tempting fruit purees and sliced synthobird in glow-sauce went back into the recycling bins to be synthesized into new combinations of proteins and carbohydrates and fats. To all Nantia's gentle suggestions of food or entertainment Fassa replied widi a dull

"No, thank you," or "It doesn't matter."

"You must eat something," Nancia told her.

"Must 1?" Fassa seemed obscurely amused. "No, thank you. I've had enough of men telling me what I must do and what I must be. Who cares if I get too skinny to appeal to anybody?"

"I'm not a man," Nancia pointed out "I'm not even a softperson. And my only interest in your body is that I don't want you to get sick before..."

"Before my trial," Fassa finished calmly. "It's all right You needn't be tactful. I'm going to prison for a long time. Maybe forever. As long as they don't put me on Shemali, I don't care."

"What's the matter with Shemali?" Nancia asked.

Fassa clamped her lips together and stared at the cabin wall. Her creamy skin was a little paler than usual, tinged with green shadows. "Nothing. I don't know anything about Shemali. I didn't say anything about Shemali."

Nancia gave up on Fassa for the moment After all, there were other ways to find out what was up on Shemali. Reports on hyperchip production and sales should soon be coming in over the Net. A few in-vigorating hours of compiling evidence against Polyon would calm her and leave her better able to cheer up Fassa.

She felt a sneaking sympathy for the girl after reading her records. Growing up in the shadow of Faui del Parma couldn't have been easy. Losing her mother at thirteen, spending the next five years in a boarding school with not a single visit from her father, then sent out to Bahati to prove herself.... Nancia thought she understood how Fassa might feel. But I didn't turn criminal to impress my family, she argued with herselt Your family, she replied, wouldn't have been impressed.

Besides, she'd had it better than Fassa. Daddy and Jinevra and Flix had dropped in regularly during the eighteen years Nancia spent at Laboratory Schools. It was only after graduation that Daddy had lost interest in her progress....

Softpersons could cry, and it was said that tears were a natural release of tension. Nancia looked up the biomed reports on the chemical components of tears, 242

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adjusted her nutrient tubes to remove those chemicals from her system, and concentrated on the Net records of hyperchip sales and transfer.

There was absolutely nothing there to incriminate Polyon. Two years after his arrival at Shemali, his new metachip design had been approved for production and christened the "hyperchip" in tribute to its improved speed and greater complexity. Since then, production of hyperchips had increased rapidly in each accounting quarter, so rapidly that Nancia couldn't believe Polyon was siphoning off any of the supply for his personal use. The manufactured hyperchips were subjected to especially stringent QA testing, but no more than the expected ratio failed the test...

and all the failures were accounted for; they were sent off-planet for disposal and destroyed by an independent recycling company that had, so far as Nancia could discover, no links whatsoever with Polyon, the de Gras or Waldheim lines, or any other High Families. The hyperchips that passed QA were installed as fast as they were released, and every sale passed through the rationing board. Nancia knew from personal experience how difficult it was to get them; ever since her lower deck sensors and graphics coprocessors had been enhanced with hyperchips, she'd been pushing without success to get the hyperchips installed in the rest of her system. Micaya Questar-Benn, when questioned, told Nancia that her liver and heart-valve filter and kidneys all ran on hyperchips, installed when the metachip-controlled organs began to fail. But she, too, had been unable to get hyperchips to replace the smart chips in her external prostheses; that wasn't an emergency situation, and the ration board had refused to approve the surgery or the supplies.