To Honor You Call Us (39 page)

The banker considered briefly.  “Agreed, provided that our understanding is not of unlimited duration.  It shall apply only to transactions taking place within the next year.  Is that acceptable?”  The doctor nodded his acceptance.  Hamani keyed a complex set of instructions into his terminal, turned to the doctor, and smiled.  “Our understanding has been entered into the records of this bank and accepted by management.  May I have your ID cube so that we may know with whom we have dealt in this matter?”  The doctor handed over the cube, and the young man put it into a reader, ejected it a moment later, and handed it back.  “It has been a pleasure transacting business with you, Doctor Sahin.  A porter will arrive momentarily to deliver your currency and collect our gold.” 

* * *

Two hours later, the doctor, Fahad, and a third man were sitting in the shady courtyard of a sprawling house about a dozen kilometers from the spaceport drinking Earl Gray tea with sugar and lemon and listening to the voices of three blue-tiled fountains murmuring in the background.  Sahin was enjoying the interesting sensation of carrying on his person what he regarded as a huge sum of money, enclosed in a money belt strapped to his belly under several layers of robes, defended by an M-1911 pistol and a curved sword of moderate length in the fashion carried by honorable merchants on this world.  Under local laws both weapons were perfectly legal for him to carry and under local custom perfectly accepted and normal.

The currency amounted, in fact, to the equivalent in local bank notes of nearly three quarters of a million Union Credits.  He could, of course, have deposited the proceeds of the gold sale in an account which the amiable young man at the bank would have been pleased to set up for him, but credit chip transactions always left a data trail whereas cash did not. 

“Here, Cousin, is a list of the items I require.  They need to be loaded on standard cargo palettes, and packaged for long term storage on board ship,” said Sahin.  “I will pay the current market rates, in cash, in Rashid Dinars, plus a fee of five and an eighth percent for your trouble, as has always been our family custom.” 

“That is very generous,” said the other man evenly.  He took a sip of his tea, and then set it down gently.  “However, business conditions are not what they were when you left the family concern.  The handling fee is now ten percent.”

The doctor took a sip of his own tea, stirred it with the exquisitely engraved sterling silver spoon in his cup, took another sip, set it in its saucer, and regarded the dark liquid.  He briefly mused upon the curiosity of two Turks sitting in a Moorish courtyard on a mostly Arab planet drinking a British blend of a Chinese beverage flavored with a fruit domesticated in India sweetened with the sap of a plant from Southeast Asia crystallized by a process invented in Louisiana by a man born in Illinois and educated in France.  Truly, he thought, the civilization being spread by humans through the galaxy was the product of the whole Earth and all her children. 

All men are brothers, but business is business.  “Cousin Yassir, I believe in generosity and fairness in all dealings with members of my family, but that does not mean I intend to treat you with outright philanthropy.  I am very familiar with business conditions in this sector and they are not as treacherous as you make them out to be.  Given that the merchandise I am purchasing is entirely ordinary and is sitting in your warehouse right at this moment, further given that some of what I wish has been collecting cobwebs in that same warehouse for more than sixty days and you are already looking for secondary buyers to take it off your hands at a discount, and even further given that you will be paid in Standard Chartered Bank Notes rather than in electronic credits or currencies which you will have to exchange at highly voluble rates, I think that a handling fee of six percent is entirely fair.”

“I would be interested in knowing how you became aware of my inventory situation.”  The doctor had gotten his information because the communications section on his ship had intercepted Cousin Yassir’s communications with prospective buyers and had needed only about nine and a half seconds to break his commercial level encryption.  Yassir had no idea that his communications were so vulnerable. 

“You want information.  Like any other commodity, information has a price.  I assure you that you will find
this
information very valuable.”

“Eight and a quarter percent, and you tell me how you found this out.”

“Six and one half percent.  The price of the information to be separately negotiated.”

“Seven and three quarters, including the information.”

“Seven.  And we
trade
information.  I tell you precisely how I know about your inventory, and you tell me what you know about certain transactions going on in this sector, without giving away any proprietary information about your own business.”

An appreciative grin slowly spread across Yassir’s face.  “We have an agreement.  You bargain like your father.”

“And you bargain like yours.  We should have been brothers.”

“Many have died in both our families.  Perhaps, now, we are.”  They embraced.

***

Eight hours later, the doctor and Spacer Fahad were walking through a bustling marketplace in Amman, the third largest city on Rashid IV, nearly a thousand miles from the spaceport.  As in Sidon, the city on whose outskirts the spaceport was located, they blended in with the locals and moved through the sea of people as though they had been raised in the city, the doctor because he had spent many years of his life traversing marketplaces such as this, and Fahad because he had a pilot-athlete’s natural gifts for moving in a comfortable, easy manner and for copying the movements of others.  Neither of them noticed another man, just as unobtrusive, making his way through the same crowd at a discrete distance. 

The doctor’s cousin Yassir had given him the names of five people who, according to rumor, had been operating as middle men, purchasing various heavy metal ores, bulk foodstuffs, and machine tools for sale to yet another set of middle men who, in turn were believed to be selling them to individuals who were striving greatly to remain anonymous.  All did business out of Amman, which was the city out of which one did such business.  While Sidon was the shiny, upright face that Rashid IV showed to the galaxy, Amman was the rough and gritty side known mainly to the natives and to those outworlders who needed to engage in certain kinds of transactions:  the kinds of transactions that, although in most cases not strictly illegal, were best kept in the shadows.   

The doctor had already spoken to four of the five middle men and was on his way to see the fifth.  As was typical, these men were far more perceptive and intelligent than the people with whom they did business credited.  While the off-world middle men thought they had never tipped their hands, all four of the Rashidians knew that the goods were all going—very indirectly, of course—to Philistos, a prefecture of the Romanovan Imperium that was waging a low-intensity rebellion seeking its independence.  As Rashid IV and the Romanovans had close trade relations and a strong mutual defense treaty, the parties had a strong interest in preventing the sales from becoming known to the Romanovan government.

These four men also knew that the fifth middle man, the man whom Sahin was about to see, was not dealing in goods bound for Philistos.  Rather, they believed he was supplying another buyer whose need for secrecy was even more compelling—so compelling, in fact, that the fifth man’s buyer had succeeded where the other buyer had failed.  The fifth man did not know the ultimate purchaser’s identity.

The Navy men walked into a shop, closing the heavy door behind them.  The interior was dim and cool and, as their eyes adjusted from the sun-lit glare of the marketplace, they could see that the shop was much larger than it looked from the outside, extending far back from the street and widening into what had probably once been the back spaces of the adjoining establishments.  The merchandise appeared to consist of glassware.  Exquisite glassware.  Hand-blown, brilliantly tinted, intricately shaped glassware that even the rudest eye could see exemplified the highest order of artistry and could be purchased only by those whose resources allowed them to gratify the most discerning tastes.

The doctor’s attention was held by one piece, in particular:  a vase, standing by itself on a simple Doric pedestal of the purest alabaster marble.  Nearly a meter tall and ten or twelve centimeters wide, its living lines flowed with no trace of symmetry, yet with the seductive, sinuous shapeliness of cascading waters or a desirable woman.  It called to the doctor’s mind a succubus, an enticing female demon that insinuated itself into a man’s dreams to tempt him to dark acts of sinful, sensuous abandon.  He stared at it, thinking it the most beautiful creation ever made by the mind and hands of mortal beings.  Just as Sahin thought he could not be more captivated, Rashid IV’s slow rotation moved a sunbeam from a skylight high above, like the almost imperceptibly advancing minute hand of a great cosmic clock, into contact with the edge of one of the object’s impossibly graceful curves.  In an instant, the vase burst into heart-stopping glory as it bent the light to its will, making every perfect sweep radiant with swirling, glowing currents of luminescence painted from a palette such as God Himself would wield—cool ceruleans evoking the crisp sparkling afternoon skies of autumn, the infinite blues of the fathomless ocean depths, the shimmering turquoise of a shallow coral sea on Midsummer’s Day, purples to make the richest emperor’s robes look like rude rags, and violets to cast clear midwinter’s star-birthing twilight as a poor, pale imitation.

He had to remind himself to breathe.  Some inner sense told him that the art object in front of him was not stratospherically expensive.  It was priceless. 

“I have never seen its like.”  A cultured voice, carrying just a trace of what would, centuries ago, have been called an Oxford Accent, gently but irresistibly returned Doctor Sahin to the world of mundane light and ordinary colors.  “It is the work of a Pfelung Vitreusist named Farnim-Shee 121.  He worked on it full time, night and day, for nearly a year, to the near exclusion of sleep, nourishment, social contact.  His wife was so desperate to regain his attention that she laid a clutch of eggs, which he refused to fertilize.  He nearly died twice from lack of, shall we say, ‘congress’ with his mate.  I could stand here contemplating it for hours on end.  We have other works of his around the shop, of course, even some with the same color set, but nothing quite like this one.  It is called, ‘Birth of the Waters’ and is considered the greatest work of its kind ever created in Known Space.  It is, without exception, the most beautiful art object I have ever seen.  And, it can be yours.  Good day to you, my name is Wortham-Biggs, Ellington Wortham-Biggs at your service.”

The man was dressed like a stereotype of a British art dealer whose clients came from the upper Nobility:  perfectly tailored dark wool suit, vest complete with pocket watch, silk tie with matching handkerchief in the pocket of his suit coat.  He even smelled of pipe tobacco.  His skin and hair, though, were anything but British.  He seemed to be descended from blended Middle Eastern and East Indian stock, with skin nearly dark enough to be African, black hair, nearly black eyes, and finely-chiseled features featuring an almost hawk-like nose.  He appeared to be just on the far side of middle age, but had not begun to gray or wrinkle or add weight to his lean, athletic frame.  He came to a sort of loose attention, brought his heels together not quite briskly enough to click, and bowed slightly, a salutation used widely (either now or before falling to the Krag) on Avalon, Woolcombe, Victoria Regina and other British-influenced worlds. 

Sahin returned the bow in the same manner.  “Ibrahim Sahin at yours, good sir.  May I introduce my associate, Muhara Fahad?”  The Able Spacer perfectly, and with no prior practice, copied the bow he had just seen performed.

“Ah, yes, Doctor Sahin, I have been told to expect you by certain mutual acquaintances
with whom you have recently met.”  He reached into his vest pocket, apparently activating some discrete device.  Within five seconds, another man dressed similarly to Wortham-Biggs appeared through a door which, if not hidden, was certainly not obvious.  “Giles, I will be taking tea with these gentlemen.  If you would . . . .”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Please come with me, if you would.”  He led them through the shop, through a carved wooden door marked “Private” in three languages, and into a room that resembled nothing more than a gentleman’s study from a 19
^th
Century English Manor House, complete with leather-bound books, a large desk of dark and deeply oiled wood, paintings in muted colors of various scenes drawn from English country life, and an enormous Apricot-colored Mastiff sleeping (and snoring loudly) in front of the currently fire-less fireplace.  The dog raised his head from the floor, regarded the two newcomers placidly, quickly and accurately assessed that they posed no threat to his Master, and promptly went back to his noisy sleep.

“I invited you for ‘tea,’ to which you are certainly welcome, but I prefer coffee.  What would you gentlemen prefer?”

It was coffee, of course, which was promptly and expertly served by a young lady, wearing a simple white silk blouse and a dark, knee-length skirt.  She had dark skin and features that echoed those of their host, but with less severity.  Her long, glossy black hair hung loose, just below her shoulder blades.  A belt made of engraved gold and silver links glittered in the room’s subdued light, accentuating her narrow waist and the womanly curves that flowed from it in both directions.  Exquisite knees met perfectly sculpted dancers’ calves which narrowed sublimely to shapely ankles.  The woman smiled as she poured the coffee, parting her full lips to reveal teeth as white as piano keys.  She was the most beautiful creature the doctor had ever seen.  She looked up at him and he spent a breathless eternity, lasting for less than two seconds, gazing into the warm, liquid depths of her dark eyes before she blushed, blinked, and turned away.