The Merchant's War (24 page)

I guess old married couples go through times when both are tired or fretful—or, like me, strung out—and what they do, they do because they don’t have anything better to do at the moment.

Actually, it seemed we did have something better to do. We talked. We talked a lot, pillow talk but not
that
kind of pillow talk. We talked because neither of us was sleeping very well and because, after some seldom very satisfactory sex, it was better to talk than to pretend to be asleep and listen to the person next to you pretending the same.

There were things we didn’t say, of course. Mitzi never mentioned the secret bulk of the iceberg, the mysterious meetings I was not allowed to attend or know about. For my part I never again mentioned my doubts. That the Veenie conspirators were floundering in a ramshackle plan was clear. I’d known that from the moment Des Haseldyne began asking about limbic compulsion. I didn’t discuss it.

I did, now and then, think about brainburning. When Mitzi cried out and twitched in her sleep, I knew she was thinking about it too.

What I talked about mostly was confidences I could betray. I told Mitzi everything I could think of that might help the Veenies out, every Agency secret I’d ever heard, every Embassy covert operation, every detail of the Gobi Desert strike. Each time she’d sniff and say something like, “Typical merciless huck tyranny,” and then I’d have to think of some other highly classified datum to betray. You know Scheherazade? That’s what I was, telling a story every night to stay alive the next morning, because I hadn’t forgotten how expendable I was.

Naturally it handicapped me in more intimately important areas.

But it wasn’t all like that, really. I told her about my childhood, and how Mom made my uniform with her own hands when I joined the Junior Copysmiths, and my school days and my first loves. And she told me—well, she told me everything. Well, at least everything about herself. Not so much about what my coconspirators were up to, but then I didn’t expect that. “My Daddy-san came to Venus with the first ship,” she would say, and I would know that she was telling me these things to avoid the risk of telling me something more risky.

It was interesting, though. Mitzi had a thing about her Daddy-san. He’d been one of old Mitchell Courtenay’s gang of self-righteous revolutionary Conservationists that so hated the brainwashing and people-manipulating of the mercantile society that they jumped from the frying pan of Earth into Venus’s pure hellfire. When she told me about Daddy-san’s stories of the early days, it sounded like a clone of hell itself, all right. And her father hadn’t been any big wheel. Just a kid. His main job appeared to be digging out holes for them to live in with his bare hands, and carrying slop outside of the ship to bury between work shifts. While the construction crews were putting together the first huge Hilsch tubes to tap the biggest asset Venus had—the immense energy in its hot, dense, wild winds —Daddy-san was changing diapers for the first generation of kids in the nurseries. “Daddy,” she said, wet-eyed, “wasn’t just an unskilled kid, he was also a physical wreck. Too much junk food when he was little, and something wrong with his spine that never got fixed—but he never let that keep him from doing his best.”

Along about
_t
he time they began nuking tectonic faults to make volcanos, he took time enough to get married and have Mitzi. That’s when he got promoted, and subsequently died. The whole idea of the volcanos, of course, was that they were the best way the Veenies had of getting the underground oxygen and water vapor out where they could use them. That’s where all the Earth’s oceans and air came from, but Venus couldn’t squander them the way the early Earth did because they couldn’t afford to wait four billion years for the results. So the volcanos had to be capped. “That was hard and dangerous work,” said Mitzi, “and when something went wrong and one of the caps blew, it blew my Daddy-san along with it. I was three years old.”

Strung out, exhausted, worn as I was, she touched my heart. I reached out for her.

She turned away. “That’s what love is,” she said into the pillow. “You love somebody and you get hurt. After Daddy-san died I used up all my love on Venus—I never wanted to love another
person!”

After a moment I got up unsteadily. She didn’t call me back.

Dawn was breaking; might as well get into this next bad day. I put some of her “coffee” on and stared out the window at the smoggy, huge city, with its teeming hucks, and wondered what I was doing with my life? Physically the answer was easy; I was wrecking it. The faint reflection in the glass showed how every day my face got thinner, my eyes brighter and more hollow. From behind me she said, “Take a good look, Tenny. You look like hell.”

Well, I was getting tired of hearing that. I turned. She was sitting up in bed, eyes fixed on me. She hadn’t put her contacts in yet. I said, “Mits, honey, I’m sorry—”

“I’m getting tired of hearing
that!”
she snapped, as though she’d been reading my mind. “You’re sorry, all right. You’re about the sorriest specimen I’ve ever seen. Tenny! You’re going to die on me!”

I looked out of the window to see if anybody in the dirty, old city was going to offer me an answer for that. Nobody did. Since what she said actually seemed like a likely possibility, the best plan appeared to be to let her remark alone.

Mitzi wouldn’t let it alone. “You’re going to die of those damn pills,” she said furiously, “and then I’ll have goddam
grief
to go with my goddam
worry
and goddam
fear.”

I moved back to the bed to touch her bare shoulder soothingly. She wasn’t soothed. She glared up at me like a trapped feral cat.

The anesthesia was wearing thin.

I reached for my morning pill and popped it down, praying that this once it would give me a lift instead of a numbness, that it would give me the wisdom and com ission to answer her in a way that would ease her pain. Wisdom and compassion didn’t come. I did the best I could with what I had to work with; I said, placatingly, “Mits, maybe we better get dressed and go to work before we say something we shouldn’t. We’re both pretty ragged, maybe tonight we’ll get some sleep—”

“Sleep!” she hissed. “Sleep! How can I sleep when every fifteen minutes I wake up thinking the Department of Fair Commercial Practices goons are breaking the door down!”

I winced; I had had the same nightmares; I thought about brainburning a lot. I said, my voice unsteady, “Isn’t it worth it, Mits? We’re really getting to know each other—”

“I know more than I want to, Tenny! You’re an addict. You’re a physical wreck. You’re not even good in bed—”

And she stopped there, because she knew as well as I did what that meant. That was the mortal word. There was nothing to say after it but, “We’re through.” And in the special circumstances of our relationship there was only one way to terminate it.

I waited for the next words, which had to be, “Get out of here! Get out of my life!” After she threw me out, I thought abstractedly, the best plan would be go straight to the jetport, fly as far as my money would take me, lose myself in the seething mass of consumers in Los Angeles or Dallas or even farther. Des Haseldyne might not find me. I might just sit out the next few months, while the coup either succeeded or didn’t. After that, of course, it got nasty— whichever side won, the winners would surely come looking for me …

I noticed that she hadn’t said those words. She was sitting up in bed, listening intently to a faint sound from the door. “Oh, my God,” she said despairingly, “look at the time, they’re here!”

Somebody was indeed at the door of Mitzi’s apartment. It wasn’t being broken down. It was being opened with a key, so it wasn’t the Fair Practices stormtroopers.

It was three people. One of them was a woman I had never seen before. The others were two people who, I would have bet everything I owned, would be the last possible people to come into Mitzi’s apartment in that way: Val Dambois and the Old Man.

When I saw them I was only startled. They were thunderstruck and, besides, furious. “Damn it, Mits!” raged Dambois, “you’ve really torn it now! What’s that Moke-head doing here?”

I could have told him I wasn’t a Moke-head, exactly, any more. I didn’t try. I was spending all my shocked and horrified thoughts on what their presence here meant. I wouldn’t have had a chance to tell him, anyway, because the Old Man held up a hand. His face was like granite. “You, Val,” he ordered. “Stay here and keep an eye on him. You others, come with me.”

I watched them go, Mitzi and the Old Man and the woman with them—short, dumpy, and what she had muttered when she saw me seemed to have had an accent. “She’s RussCorp, isn’t she?” I asked Dambois, and he gave me the answer I expected. He snarled:

“Shut up.”

I nodded. He didn’t have to confirm it. Just the fact that he and the Old Man were sneaking into Mitzi’s apartment that way told me all I needed to know. The conspiracy was a lot bigger than Mitzi had admitted. And a lot older. How had the Old Man got his stake? From Venus. From a “lottery” that he had “happened” to win. How had Mitzi got hers? From a “damage settlement” for the “accident.” How had Dambois? From “trading profits.” All from Venus. All uncheckable by anyone on Earth.

All used for the same purpose.

And if RussCorp was in it, it wasn’t just America; I had to assume it was worldwide. I had to assume that for every little crumb of information Mitzi had so reluctantly leaked out there was a whole hidden loaf behind. “There’s some evidence you can trust me,” I mentioned to Dambois. “After all, I haven’t said a word to anybody so far.” And, of course, he only replied with:

“Shut up.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Well, do you mind if I get myself some more coffee?”

“Sit still,” he snapped, then thought it over for a moment. Reluctantly he added, “I’ll get it for you, but you stay there.” He went over to the pot, but he never took his eyes off me—heaven knows what he expected. I didn’t move. I sat still, as ordered, listening to the rise and fall of furious voices from Mitzi’s bedroom. I couldn’t make out the words. On the other hand, I didn’t have to; I was pretty sure I knew what they were discussing.

When they came out I searched their faces. They were all serious. Mitzi’s was impenetrable. “We’ve made a decision,” she said gloomily. “Sit down and drink your coffee and I’ll tell you about it.”

Well, that was the first ray of hope in a sunless situation. I listened carefully. “In the first place,” she said slowly, “this is my fault. I should have got you out of here an hour ago. I knew they were coming for a meeting.”

I nodded to show I was listening, glancing around to gauge their expressions. None of them were informative. “Yes?” I asked brightly.

“So it would be wrong, morally wrong,” she said, every word coming out at spaced intervals, as though she were weighing each one, “to say that any of this is your fault.” She paused, as though looking for a response from me.

“Thank you,” I said, nervously sipping my coffee. But she didn’t go on. She just went on watching me and, funny thing, the
expression
on her face didn’t change, but her
face
did. It blurred. The features ran together. The whole room darkened and seemed to shrink … It took me all that time to realize that the coffee had tasted just a tiny bit odd.

And, oh, how I wished I had never written that suicide note. I wished it hard and with all my being, right up to the point where my wishes stopped functioning entirely and so did my eyes, and so did my ears, and so—in the middle of a silent scream of terror, pleading for one more chance, begging to live one more day—so did my brain.

The world had gone away and left me.

Even then Mitzi must have fought hard for me. What they slipped into my coffee hadn’t been lethal after all. It had only put me to sleep, deeply and helplessly asleep for a long time.

In my dream somebody was shouting, “First call—five minutes!” and I woke up.

I wasn’t in Mitzi’s apartment any more. I was in a tiny, Spartan cell with a single door and a single window, and outside the window it was dark.

Once I had come to believe in the odd fact that I was alive I looked around. I wasn’t tied up, I found to my surprise, nor did I appear to have been recently beaten. I was lying quite comfortably on a narrow cot, with a pillow and a light sheet thrown over my somehow undressed body. Next to the bed was a table. On the table was a tray with some kind of cereal and a glass of Vita-Froot, and between them was an envelope like the tricky kind you use for top-secret Agency messages. I opened it and read it fast, working against the time limit. It said:

Tenny, dear, you’re no good to yourself or us as an addict. If you live through the detox we’ll talk again. Good luck!

There wasn’t any signature, but there was a P.S.:

We’ve got people in the center to report on how you’re doing. I ought to tell you that they’re authorized to take independent action.

I mulled over what the words “independent action” might mean for a moment—a moment too long, because the trick paper scorched my fingers as it did what it was supposed to do and began to self-destruct. I dropped the smoldering ash hastily and glanced around the room.

There wasn’t much information there. The door was locked. The window was shatterproof glass, and sealed. Evidently this center didn’t want me walking away from this detox thing. It was all pretty ominous, and there wasn’t any long green pill to numb the feelings. Still, there was food and I was starving. Evidently I had been asleep past a couple of mealtimes. I reached for the Vita-Froot just as all hell broke loose. The screaming voice from my dream was no dream. Now it was yelling, “Last call—everybody out!” It wasn’t alone. There were sirens and klaxons to make sure I heard; the door lock snicked open, and running feet in the corridors accompanied a banging on every door. “Out!” yelled some individual live human being, glaring in and jerking a huge thumb.

I saw no reason to argue with him about it, since he was at least two sizes bigger than Des Haseldyne.

He was wearing a blue jogging suit. So were about a dozen others, the ones doing all the yelling. I had found a pair of shorts and grabbed them at the last minute, feeling desperately underdressed—but not alone; besides the jogging-suit tyrants there were a couple dozen other human beings streaming out of the building, all as inadequately clothed as myself and looking at least as unhappy. They chased us out into the sweaty, smoggy air, still dark although now there was a discouraging reddish glow in one corner of the sky, and we huddled there, waiting to be told what to do. It was, I thought, like the worst of basic training.