“What do they want here on New Sonora?”
“It definitely has something to do with those crystals, but I’m not sure exactly what. They told Xavier Xerxes pretty much what they just told, you, that he should leave the crystals alone, that the sale of the crystals was forbidden.”
“Sale? Did they really use that word?”
“Well, no. Distribution, sale, dispersion, dissemination—it might be any one of them.”
“Do you think Xerxes understood what the Bagpipes meant any more than I do?”
“I don’t think he cared what they meant. But I’m only guessing. You could always ask him yourself.”
“I think I will. Will you be my guide? How about tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll pick you up at nine,” she said, nodding vigorously, as if she were glad to have something to do, just as we dropped down to the deck of the cactus/restaurant where I had just met my first Bagpipe.
Xavier Xerxes was clearly a man with an obsession. It was equally clear why the locals called him Xerxes the Zany. He was tall and gaunt, with a long, lustrous, milky beard. Enormous glittering green eyes smoldered beneath almost non-existent eyebrows. In the middle of his flowing white beard was a large red circle, as carefully crafted as if it had been laser-printed there earlier that day. What purpose it served was not immediately obvious. All in all, he looked like a particularly mad biblical prophet.
“So you’re interested in my crystals, are you?” Xerxes muttered suspiciously, his glittering eyes fixed intently on one of my old business cards. “What exactly do you want with them?”
Xerxes, Rebona Myking, and I were in a hideous dank chamber hollowed out of the Hormagaunt Hills just north of the spaceport. It hadn’t been cleaned since the day it was dug and we were perched on makeshift pieces of furniture that hadn’t been dusted since the turn of the century. The walls exuded a stench powerful enough to be used as insect repellent against the man-eating triple-teeth on Think Again.
“I’ve got a shipload of crystal, so I thought it might be a good idea to find out what it’s good for.”
“You admit it, then? You want to find out what I’ve discovered about my crystals so you can make your own fortune from them.”
“I’ve only got the one shipload. Certainly not enough to threaten your position with a whole mountain at your disposal. After all, you control the source of supply. Still, I’d definitely like to find some way to sell them. What have you learned, if I’m not asking you to reveal trade secrets.”
Xerxes’s incandescent gaze moved from me to Rebona Myking, who squirmed uncomfortably beneath it, then back to me.
“All right. It’s no secret, I suppose. At least most of it isn’t. Here, follow me.”
We trailed Xerxes through the back of the cave into a narrow passageway hewn from the mountain’s interior. “The main diggings are up this way.” A hundred yards into the mountain the tunnel widened into a good-sized chamber with a ceiling at least twenty feet above our heads. “Here,” said Xerxes, gesturing at a glittering rock face of yellow, green, and azure crystal identical to that in my cargo hold.
I tried to stifle my disappointment. “This is where you’ve been doing your research?”
“Yes. Anyone on the planet will tell you the crystals have got some damned unusual properties. I’ve bombarded them with magnetic fields and high-voltage electron beams with amazing results. In fact—” Xerxes’s mouth snapped shut and he glared at me defiantly, as if I had almost tricked him into revealing too much.
“What sort of results?” I prompted.
“Well… hallucinations, I guess you’d say, astral displacements, far visions, OBE’s, Dunesian epiphanies, stuff like that.”
“No teleportation or spontaneous human combustion?” Rebona asked sarcastically.
“I don’t understand how nullspace generators work either, lady, but they do, don’t they?” Xerxes jabbed a long, bony finger painfully into my chest. “They’re real, all right, I just don’t have the quantitative data yet. And the results vary from time to time. You’d have to see them for yourself to understand why they’re so remarkable.”
I pursed my lips as I considered his words. “If you pass a laser beam through a crystal impressed with a holographic etching you’ll see a three-dimensional image in front of you. It’s totally illusory—but you still see it.”
Xerxes shrugged. “Explain it however you like. All I know is that it works.”
“But you can’t make the effects reliably repeatable?”
“Not yet. It’s all hit or miss—so far.” Once again his mad eyes glared at me. “But I’ll get it, sooner or later I’m going to get it. And when I do, I’ll be the richest man in the sector!”
“Who else knows the crystals have these properties?”
Xavier Xerxes uttered a harsh bark of bitter disdain.
“You think the petalheads care? They’re all so stupefied from chewing on those damned flowers they wouldn’t notice if my crystals picked them up and threw them over the tops of their Demon Lovers!”
“Some of them notice,” Rebona interrupted. “Everyone in Saguaro says you’re bringing in experts from the Museum of Man to help you.”
“The petalheads are saying that?” The mad green eyes grew crafty and Xerxes lowered his voice to a pensive whisper. “Well, maybe for once they’re right about something.”
“You think they can help you turn the crystals into some sort of entertainment device?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that!” Xerxes glared suspiciously.
I shrugged. “It seems obvious. What else could you use them for?”
“I guess you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”
I nodded. “But remember,” I reminded him, “I have a load of the crystals, too. I want to see you succeed as much as you do.” I turned towards the tunnel, then paused. “I understand you were approached by the Bagpipes,” I added as if it were an unimportant afterthought. “What did they want?”
“The Bagpipes? More damned nonsense!”
“What do you mean?”
Xerxes laughed. “They want me to give up my project—if I’m understanding them right.” He gave me a hard stare. “If you’ve got hold of my shipload of crystals why don’t you go talk to the Bagpipes? Maybe you can get them to tell you why they’re so interested in them.”
“As a matter of fact, they’ve already contacted me, but they didn’t seem to make much sense—something about disturbing the crystals being forbidden. Do you think we should take them seriously?”
Xerxes twitched his lips contemptuously. “This is a human planet, Mr. Senior Facilitator Howe, run by our laws, not theirs. The crystals are legally ours. I don’t care what they want.”
“Reasonable enough, but we don’t have any idea of what the Bagpipes can do.”
“Here on New Sonora there are a dozen of them and a quarter million of us.” He hefted his beard’s luxuriant length and waved its bright red circle at me. “I’m from Kingfire, a Dominie Second Class from the Seventeenth Cube Removed. I would have thought a big-brain ex-facilitator like you would have known that. Which means I’m not afraid of a collection of half-sentient garden hoses. Nobody’s taking my crystals away from me!”
Half-blinded by the late-morning sun, Rebona and I stood blinking beside the adit that led to Xerxes’s mine. The prospector’s battered blue aircar lay in the windswept dust not far from Rebona’s.