The Sardonyx Net (2 page)

And why not? His grin widened. He could try it. He'd never been to Chabad; he might as well see it. It could be fun. He pulled his jumpsuit back on. The comine, still wrapped, sat snugly in its hole in a wall panel. Grabbing it, Dana palmed the inner door of the lock, pushed the bagged powder through, closed the door, and punched the button which released the outer lock door. He turned on the vision screen to watch the comine go: transparent bags bursting, comine floating, granule by granule, into vacuum, wreathing the ship. With no drugs onboard, he should have no trouble landing on Chabad's moon and passing the inspection which he knew they would subject him to in Port. Clean as a cop or a tourist, he would ride a shuttleship to Abanat, well ahead of Tori Lamonica taking the tortuous overland route from her concealed ship in her bubblecraft. When she arrived in Abanat, looking for her dealer, he, Dana, would be waiting for her.
 

He wondered if he should jettison the dorazine cooler. Its very presence on the ship would tell a cop what he had really come to Chabad for. But, damn it, he'd paid five hundred credits for it, and besides, he would need it if—when—the doublejack worked. They would suspect him, but they might do that anyway, and so what if they did? Intent to commit a crime was not by itself criminal.
 

He touched a button on the computer console. Clear music lilted through the ship, obliterating the hum of machinery. It was old music. It had been written by a man named Stratta during that strange and joyful time after the Verdian ships touched on Terra. Dana had heard it on a street corner in Nexus. He had practically had to shake the composer's name out of the startled street artist. He had never paid much attention to music before, but this music was—different: clear as a theorem, stirring and haunting. He carried with him in
Zipper
a collection—perhaps the best collection that existed—of Stratta's pieces, on musictapes. They perfectly complemented his solitude.
 

He told the computer to find him the fastest course to Chabad. It blinked figures at him. The course took three standard days: two in the Hype, a Jump from this into another hyperspace current, another half a day in hyperspace, half a day through spacetime normal to Chabad's only moon. He told the ship to use the course. He settled into the pilot's chair; the Drive came on. Spacetime normal went away. Dana cleared the vision screen; from rainbow it darkened into the brutal, mind-capturing blackness of the Hype. At an unimaginable distance, red dust glittered, the dust of dying stars, or of stars not yet born.
 

Ikoro smiled as the music wove its melody around him. His young, rather stern face relaxed. His dark eyes lost their angry gleam. Lamonica had a start on him, but it would take her at least a day to fly from the wilds of Chabad to Abanat. He tapped his fingers to the complex, familiar tune. Even if the Hype cops boarded him, which they might not do, since he had only a minor reputation, even if they did, they would have only a shred of evidence on which to hold him.
 

“To Domna Rhani Yago, from...”
 

Rhani Yago sat in the alcove of her bedroom, sifting through her mail. The hot, bright light of Chabad's sun drove through the panes of glass, reflecting sharply off the papers and lightening the color of the deep blue walls. A few elegantly calligraphed missives dignified the day's scattering of computer-printed reports. The topmost letter was from the manager of the Yago-owned kerit farm in Sovka. Respectfully hysterical, he informed her that kits from the last four litters of Prime Strain kerits had been found dead in their cages, apparently from massive internal hemorrhage. He enclosed the post-mortem analyses from the Sovka laboratory. Rhani examined them: translated from their jargon, they said: “
Sorry, we don't know what this is
.”
 

The next letter was from Sherrix Esbah, Family Yago's principal drug dealer in Abanat. Apologizing, Sherrix stated firmly that she could not possibly supply her usual quarterly shipment of dorazine. The drug runners were bringing in comine, nightshade, tabac, zimweed, but the pressure was on in Sector Sardonyx, and no one was carrying dorazine.
 

The next letter was grimy. Rhani opened it with care, read the ugly threat within, and put it away. Beneath it was her house steward's report. She laid that aside too, for later. She had no doubt that it would be accurate; Cara Morro had run the Yago estate for twelve years, since before the death of Rhani's mother Isobel, and her reports were unfailingly accurate. The last letter lay sealed. It bore the Dur crest: a stone axe, raised to strike. “
From Ferris Dur
,” read the superscription, “
to Domna Rhani Yago
.” Rhani touched the beautifully textured paper with her fingertips. Paper was one of the few things that could be manufactured out of the tough, orange, thumbsized grass of Chabad. A month ago the lettering would have read, “
From Domna Samantha Dur
.” But Domna Sam was dead. Half of Abanat, it had seemed, had joined the twilight procession that had taken her coffin to its grave. It would be hard for Ferris to succeed her. He was waiting out the forty days of respect before he took the title Domni. Family Dur was the First Family of Chabad and they never let you forget it; everything they did or said or owned had style. At least, it had been so when Domna Sam was alive.
 

Rhani broke the seal on the letter. She read it in growing puzzlement. “...Demand to speak to you on business of import to Chabad ... reply without fail ... hope this will be convenient for you...” Such phrases did not belong in a letter from the head of one Family to another. This was how she might write to the manager of the kerit farm. She controlled her annoyance and laid this communication, too, aside. She turned in her chair to look at Binkie, her secretary. “Do I have to go on?”
 

“You might want to look at the PIN reports.”
 

PIN stood for Public Information and News, Chabad's wonderfully redundant news system. It catered mostly to the tourists. Rhani glanced at the headlines. “WHAT TO DO AND SEE AT THE AUCTION.” “Feh,” she said disdainfully. “THE LIFE-CYCLE OF A KERIT.” “They only print what we give them.” She touched the threatening letter. “There have been more of these lately than usual, haven't there? Some steps should be taken to find their source.”
 

“I'll see to it.”
 

“Tell Cara I'll see her here this afternoon. And one last thing. Send a communigram to my brother.”
 

Binkie's training held, his face and voice did not change, but his long pale hands fisted at his sides. “What message?”
 

“Send a précis of these letters. Let me see it first. Include the report from Sovka, the letter from Sherrix, and the one from Ferris Dur. And you'd better include the threat. The Net should be off Enchanter. Send a message capsule with a ‘For-Your-Eyes-Only' seal. The whole sector doesn't need to know our business, so leave the Yago crest off the capsule, and omit the place of origin. Zed will know.”
 

“As you wish, Rhani-ka.” He took the letters from her, and went to the compscreen to draft the précis. Rhani gazed out her window. The familiar image of the breedery in Sovka—white buildings, orange grass broken by the bleak wire fencing of the kerit runs—superimposed itself upon the even more familiar green. The death of eighteen Prime Strain kerits was going to hurt the breeding program. The manager sounded badly flustered. At least he had been able to keep the news of the deaths from leaking out to PIN. He had been her mother's appointment to the position; Rhani had been planning to suggest to him that he should retire.
 

And something was wrong with Ferris Dur, if he thought he could order her to meet him, as if she were his employee or his slave, and not in fact his equal, and head herself of the Third Family of Chabad. She remembered him vaguely from the last few months when Domna Sam had been so sick, giving orders to the house slaves; he had struck her then as an arrogant, impatient man. She wondered what he thought was so important that she would drop her work to see him, and why he didn't simply tell her what it was. Eventually he would.
 

The veins in the polished marble of her desk gleamed in the sunlight. That was something else Chabad produced: stone. But there were few quarries on the planet: workers and machines could not endure the glare of Chabad's sun, and the breakdown rate for both was ridiculously high. Rhani traced the patterns with one finger. The marble was lovely and cool. The drying up of the drug supply worried her badly, and she hoped it would not go on long. It had never happened this severely before.
 

Chabad had to have dorazine. It was the glue that held the slave system together; without it, the men and women who did most of the labor on Chabad would grow sullen and angry, resentful of their penitential status; they would plan and scheme and ultimately rebel. Without dorazine, Chabad would need an army to keep them at their jobs; with dorazine, all it needed was the drug. It often struck her, the irony of the Federation statutes that made transport of dorazine to the sector illegal. The law was a sop thrown to those who felt that slavery (unlike prisons, brain-wipe, forced therapy, etc.) was immoral, and yet the moralists could not see that dorazine was the one element that made slavery endurable for most of the slaves, that kept them docile and sane, most of the time. It was the moralists who had created The Pharmacy and the drug runners, not Chabad.
 

Rhani contemplated, for a few moments, making the formal request of the Federation of Living Worlds that the sale of dorazine to Chabad be made legal. Legalization would slash the black market price. It might even force The Pharmacy, whoever and wherever it was, to sell her the dorazine formula. For five years, Sherrix—and Domino four years before her—had sent a message through the drug network to The Pharmacy: “
Name a price. Family Yago will buy
.” They had never answered; Rhani did not even know if the offer had reached them. There
was
precedent for a Yago to approach the Federation. But she shook her head; only for an emergency would she consider bringing Chabad to the attention of the Federation. It was easier for them all to buy the euphoric/tranquilizer on the illegal market than to subject Chabad to the presence of and problems created by outsiders.
 

Pushing back her chair, she walked the few steps to the glass doors that led onto the terrace garden. She slid the doors open and walked out onto the balcony. Amri knelt there, watering the fragile dawn plants that nestled in the brickwork. Seeing Rhani, she stopped work. Rhani smiled at her and gestured at the pale blue blossoms. They looked random, stuck in the cracks of brick. She remembered Timithos digging around the bricks with a trowel, setting each tiny plant into a crack by hand. Nothing green grew accidentally on Chabad. “Go on, Amri,” she said. Amri picked up the watering can.
 

The lawns lay below the balcony, green and lush, pretending to be a countryside. The estate was eighty years old. It had been built by Orrin Yago, Rhani's grandmother. Rhani dimly remembered Orrin: an old, bent woman with silver hair who leaned on a black cane. Beyond the estate wall lay orange hills. West of the Yago estate by ninety-seven kilometers lay Abanat, Chabad's capital and only city, set like a bright jewel by the shore of a warm and sluggish sea. North of Abanat lay Sovka; south of it, Gemit, site of the Dur mines. White-and-black roofs and bits of green marked where the colonists of Chabad lived. Elsewhere on land it was hot, red-brown, and dry. Nobody lived there now.
 

Once someone had. Rhani leaned on the balcony wall, looking over the green of the estate to Chabad's terra-cotta hills. She knew her planet's history rather better than the tourists who swarmed the streets of Abanat. At the end of the twentieth century, Old Earth reckoning, the Verdian ships had landed on that planet, bringing the hyperdrive equations and access to the galaxy to the human race. Repossessed of a frontier, humans set out with great energy to colonize the stars. They founded New Terra, and New Terrain, and Enchanter and Ley and Galahad and Summer and colonies on planets all over the Milky Way. The center of their universe became Nexus Compcenter, where the starship fleet was based. A colony might be no more than several thousand people. Some were less. They survived, fighting heat and cold and disease and famine and the venalities of humankind.
 

In most colonies, criminals, however the colony defined them, were either killed or ostracized. In one sector of space, the colonies—who were light-years away from each other in spacetime normal but a few days' flight from each other in Hype time—decided to create a prison planet, on which criminals could be dumped to work out their salvation or damnation apart from those they had harmed.
 

They chose an uncolonized, largely lifeless world circling an AO dwarf star, and named it Chabad. Its seas were salty and warm, its land masses regular and dry and covered with orange plants whose stalks were thick as an average human thumb. It had no birds, no bears or seals or tigers or horses or trees, no maize growing wild. It had beetles and snakes and clawed vicious, furry predators named
kerits
. The colonies in Sardonyx Sector sent their criminals there, with tents and tools and packets of seed.
 

Most died. More arrived every year, to burrow and thirst and mostly die. At the end of the first century after the opening of space, a group of investors came to Chabad from Nexus. There were four of them: one of them was Lisa Yago, Rhani's great-great-grandmother. They mined and tested and scanned. They discovered huge cores of silver and gold. They developed techniques to breed the truculent kerits for their incredibly beautiful fur. They realized that Chabad's inhospitableness itself could be exploited, and they built Abanat on the seashore. They watered it with towed icebergs from Chabad's small poles. They turned it into paradise, a feast of color and light and music, and beyond paradise lay the barren rusty hills of Chabad.