Romrey made a brief salutation, raising his hand perpendicular to his face in a cryptic sign. ‘To the force that orders events.’
Slowly Romrey began to lay down cards, speaking as he did. ‘This deck was issued by the Carborundum Order, which I don’t think exists any more. Anyway I was never a member of it – I’m a straight sort of alec, really. I don’t even know what carborundum means.’
‘It is a carbon compound once used for polishing,’ Boaz supplied quietly. ‘The Carborundum Order taught a technique they termed “polishing the mirror”. The mirror being the mirror of mind.’
‘Is that so? Well, to get down to it, in the Carborundum deck the four suits stand, among other things, for the four points of the compass on planets that have a magnetic field. So we ought to be able to locate which part of the city to look in.’
‘If our man is in Wildhart at all,’ Mace pointed out.
Romrey had dealt five cards. ‘He is,’ he said, pointing to the first, which was the Vehicle, showing a gorgeous chariot-like ship surging through space, sometimes dipping into planetary atmospheres, past shining cities or even under oceans.
‘This is the perfect card of assent and victory,’ he said. ‘It tells us we are right in our assumption. Now, we have two picture cards and three suit cards – two wings, and one cubes. Wings predominate, and stand for north. Therefore he is in the north of the city. But cubes are also present, and they stand for west. So he’s in the northwest, or more probably the north-northwest.’
He peered thoughtfully at the other picture card, as though hoping for some extra clue in its motions. It was the Inverted Man. ‘Note that his head enters a deep shaft. It could mean that our target is underground.’ He darted a look at Boaz. ‘Can your beams reach down there?’
‘It depends how deep,’ Boaz said. ‘Shall I begin?’
Romrey hesitated, fingered the next card in the deck, then pushed it back. ‘OK.’
Boaz slumped, his fist falling to the table with a thump.
He called on his ship, and down below them the innards of one of the big casings geared up, sending beams lunging softly forth. Out, out, up into towers, down into basements, sorting through a collage of Wildhart’s innumerable private scenes.
As on previous occasions, Boaz noted to himself how repetitious were those scenes. Human life centred around only a few activities. People ate, drank, slept, quarrelled, fought, made love, gambled, studied, worked. It was like a number matrix in which nearly all the numbers were the same. But of course this was Wildhart, a border town. In a hundred places around the city men and women were submitting to sex death. There was much robbery, as well as murder – a crime cheapened today by its erotic associations. As well as debauchery in all its most inventive forms.
After getting his bearings, Boaz followed Romrey’s suggestion and concentrated on the substreet levels, muttering a monologue to which Romrey listened intently while laying down more cards, trying to interpret them into suggestions as to which direction Boaz should veer in.
Such a rapid, bewildering overseeing of the life of the city was tiring. And frustrating. After an hour Boaz stopped, exhausted. They had got nowhere.
‘This is no use,’ he said. ‘We are making fools of ourselves with those cards.’
‘I don’t reckon so.’
‘It is ridiculous. I grant they have a lot of adp. So what? How can that affect their order when shuffled?’
Romrey frowned. ‘I heard something about that once, but I didn’t understand it. These cards are locked into the structure of the world somehow. They are never wrong, provided you trust them. But sometimes you have to do a rerun.’
Boaz snorted, glancing scornfully first at Obsoc and then at Mace. Romrey was shuffling again. ‘We’ll start from the beginning,’ he decided stubbornly.
Once more he laid down five cards. The first was the Vehicle. ‘Again the Vehicle!’ he announced triumphantly. ‘Again the Inverted Man! But look here.’
The hand was uncannily similar to the first one, so much so that Boaz suspected sleight of hand. There were two picture cards and three suit cards. And two of the suit cards were wings, as before. But the other was laser rods, not cubes.
‘The first reading misled us,’ Romrey muttered. ‘Of course – the cubes had a low value, and was not reliable. Here we have the nine of rods, which is more definitive. The co-ordinates are to be found in the north-northeast, not north-northwest.’
Wearily Boaz took up the hunt again. And suddenly he seemed to go in rapport with Romrey. He was telling him where he was and what he saw, and Romrey was slapping down card after card, telling him which way to move and whether he was getting closer or farther.
Romrey himself seemed to go into a daze. He held each hand of five fanned before his face as if playing one of the old games like poker or gin-rummy. And he talked, spinning a story out of the cards, sometimes seeming to be ahead of Boaz. Like an invisible spirit, the shipkeeper moved into a semi-derelict area, drifting past broken walls of HCferric that inadequately hid the derelict human beings who sheltered behind them, gliding over dusty unused roadways littered with urban detritus.
Again and again the Inverted Man was turning up, like a flashing locator signal. It told them that Boaz was warm. Then he went through the wall of what appeared to be a deserted warehouse. The ship had found something there, he knew. Mouldy abandoned bales of some sort of fibre were stacked to one side. Without pause, the floor rose up to him. He went through it, down into a series of cellars.
One of them had been converted into makeshift living quarters. On a low couch lay a sleeping figure. Beside it, on the floor, was a dish containing a white powder.
Boaz scanned the rest of the room. There was little furniture. The one door bore steel bonds and at the four corners of the room were antennaed boxes. These were guard devices which, to the credit of his ship, the search beams did not appear to have triggered.
This is the man, the ship told him, who went into the Brilliancy Cluster and detected Meirjain. He has the data.
‘I’ve found him,’ Boaz said out loud.
The other three leaned close. ‘Have you fixed the location?’ Obsoc asked.
‘I can find it again.’
‘Who is he?’ asked Mace curiously.
‘A prospector. He’s drugged right now. I think he’s an addict. It looks like plutosnow.’
‘Oh, by the Fire,’ Mace said, unconscious of using the colonnader oath, ‘no wonder he didn’t make it to Meirjain first time.’ The effects of plutosnow were erratic. It produced bursts of unusual energy and ability, interspersed with an almost total lack of will. Anything achieved by its use usually had to be finished by somebody else.
‘Perhaps the whole story is a fantasy he started,’ Obsoc suggested worriedly. ‘Perhaps Meirjain is not due to appear.’
‘I doubt it,’ Boaz said. ‘One side effect of plustosnow is an aversion to untruth. This character may have opened his mouth too much and then holed up for his own protection. Or else he gave the numbers to a few people and then holed up.’
‘If the econosphere takes it seriously, so can we,’ Romrey said.
Boaz nodded agreement. He looked at Obsoc. It was now up to the trillionaire to play his part and organize the seizure of the needed information. In the circumstances it scarcely seemed necessary. Boaz felt he could take the cellar on his own.
Obsoc’s grasp on realities, however, betokened more than a nodding acquaintances with such operations. ‘We must move carefully,’ he said with a grave air. ‘There are men in Wildhart whose interest in this matter matches our own, and they are totally ruthless. Did you know that the Hat Brothers are here? Also Father Larry and his girls. Perhaps you do not know of these people. I assure you they are very resourceful and they will be watching to see if anyone is about to make a move. Yes…. Then of course the econosphere undoubtedly has agents here, though whether they command any resources worth speaking of is a different matter.’ He pondered. ‘I take it he has defences?’