Reading the future was not his forte. Reading a course of action, though, was easier – and in that regard what he had told Jericho was true. The cards had instructed him to rob the lottery, although the idea, of course, had been in his mind already.
Romrey, in recent years, had hit upon a practice which relieved life of much of its anxiety. Whenever he came to a point of uncertainty, he consulted the cards, and he did whatever he believed they were telling him to do. If the issue could be reduced to a simple yes or no, of course, then so much the better.
There was a heady, almost delirious pleasure in not being responsible for his own decisions anymore.
He thought of the poor cruds in Karti’s. Planet-huggers for the most part, scarcely been off Kleggisae. A ponce, a carcass dealer, assorted alecs who had found ways of living off the Econosphere Welfare Bureau. Not a prospector among them.
Strictly speaking Romrey wasn’t a prospector either. He called himself ‘a trader with wide interests.’ But the thought of landing on Meirjain the Wanderer didn’t frighten him, and neither did the competition. Neither did he necessarily think of himself as a liar. Would he be generous to his erstwhile friends and colleagues in the Karti Dive Infee, as he had promised, if he made out on Meirjain? Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t.
He would let the cards decide.
And if they decided against, Ossuco could look for him in every sextile of the Econosphere for all he cared.
Thoughtfully, self-indulgently, he munched the pinana.
In half a standard day Captain Joachim Boaz’s business in Harkio was completed. He delivered his cargo, collected the small tail fee, and took off again for Sarsuce, the natural jumping-off point for the Brilliancy Cluster.
Through a hazy atmosphere and what seemed an untypical drove of traffic, he descended onto the ship ground at Wildhart, Sarsuce’s largest city – though not the capital, since Sarsuce had none. It was the kind of town he seemed to have spent half his life in, with an atmosphere that did not give him the feeling of being in an authentic place at all, but more like a transit district, a place at the junction of other places, a boom town that had somehow outlived its usefulness so that even to claim a name for itself smacked of fraud. The deception was never more transparent than now. The ship ground was uncommonly full, and Boaz was hard put to squeeze a place for his ship in it. The port proctor’s clerk took his fee with an unfriendly brusqueness, as though Boaz were forcing him to connive in something immoral. And when he walked into Wildhart itself the excitement was palpable.
Boaz scowled. All these strangers. He did not like to be one of a crowd, and it was certain they were mostly after the same thing he was – though for different reasons.
The sun slanted from the west. But overhead there hung what appeared to be a giant bauble in the sky, like a lantern hung from a festival tree; a hundred times larger than the sun itself, and glowing palely with a multihued mass of point sources, even in broad daylight. That was the Brilliancy Cluster, with its estimated eight thousand closepacked stars, the place where pure prospectors went. It had no settled planets, no properly mapped interior – in fact not a lot of planets at all, since nearly all its stars had quirkishly opted to form planetless double, triple and quadruple sun systems.
But it did have one very famous planet, a planet of fable that until now had been seen only once: Meirjain the Wanderer, a planet which had no sun of its own but which instead swung from star to star like an interstellar comet, weaving an apparently random path within the cluster.
On average the stars of Brilliancy were only light-hours apart, allowing Meirjain to steer a miraculous, sinuous course which gave it an equable climate for nearly all the time. This remarkable feat was taken as evidence that the Wanderer’s motion was the result of artifice, though not everyone thought so – the astronomer Ashojin had calculated that Meirjain followed a thermal isocline due to the competing geodesics of surrounding stars. In fact very little could be stated of the Wanderer with certainty. It had been discovered three centuries ago. Men had landed on it, had sampled its treasures. Then, through the carelessness or ignorance of its discoverers, it had been allowed to disappear again, melting untrackably into the Brilliancy Cluster like a molecule of sugar in coloured water.
And now, three centuries later, word had it that the Wanderer had been sighted again; its course tracked to the point where it would emerge on the edge of the Cluster in the gravisphere of a particular star. Which star, and when, was what all these people were here to find out.
Boaz pushed his way through a jostling crowd of naked nymphgirls, purveyors, vendors, steer narks and modsuited shipkeepers – some of them cargo carriers like himself, perhaps, but more likely prospectors. He ignored the overhead adholo flashes which tried to beam enticing images into the retinas of his eyes. He moved down the avenue – it seemed that every town he stopped in had an avenue just like this one, as though there were only one town in the whole galaxy, capable of manifesting itself everywhere – until he came to the arcaded entrance of a rest room.
He turned into it. The room was large and dome-shaped. It was as if he were back in Hondora, except that this place was busier. He found an empty table and sat down, signing a robot to bring him a drink while he surveyed the people around him.
Information was being offered here, his ship told him. Sipping the milky cocoin the robot delivered, he became aware of someone at his elbow. A small man, his body swathed in buff and orange bands, slipped into the chair opposite. Boaz disliked him immediately. His smile was too ingratiating.
‘Good day, shipkeeper!’ the stranger said jovially. ‘Looking to land on Meirjain?’
‘What is it to you?’ Boaz became aware that the man had followed him from the ship ground.
‘Most people who come in are looking for it. You know what the hottest property around here is, I suppose?’
‘No.’
‘The hottest property is numbers. Co-ordinate numbers. That tell you where and when Meirjain will appear.’
The swathed man turned to indicate a table in the centre of the room where a dumpy, togaed individual sat talking desultorily with two others and toying with a set of gambling cubes. His eyes were downcast. Boaz recognized him as a person who spent most of his time waiting. Waiting for the right customer to come along.
‘See that alec over there? He has the numbers. He’s one of about ten people on Sarsuce who have them. But it’s information that costs a lot.’
‘Why should it? Meirjain will become visible soon.’
‘Not soon enough. Haven’t you heard?’ The other raised his eyebrows. ‘The Wanderer’s been put off-limits. An econosphere cruiser is on its way. Nobody is going to get down on Meirjain that isn’t able to jump the gun and get to the co-ordinate point ahead of that cruiser. So you see, it’s the co-ordinates or nothing.’
‘This is a wild story. I don’t believe you.’
The man sighed. ‘How blunt. It’s almost quaint, really. You needn’t believe me.’ He reached into a swathe and placed a news card on the table, tracing his finger round the dial. ‘See for yourself.’
Boaz picked up the thin wafer. The holoflash hit his retinas. In urgent, colored script, he read: ALL CITIZENS ARE ADVISED AND WARNED THAT THE PLANET KNOWN AS ‘MEIRJAIN THE WANDERER’ AND ASSOCIATED WITHIN THE LIMIT OF THE BRILLIANCY CLUSTER IS BY ORDER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF LOCATIONAL AFFAIRS PLACED UNDER ABSOLUTE PROHIBITION. NO LANDING IS TO BE MADE ON SAID PLANET NOR ANY SCAN CARRIED OUT EXCEPT BY OFFICIAL ORDER. PENALTIES WILL BE POSTED IN THE AMOUNT OF TWENTY YEARS LABOUR OR FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND PSALTERS….