Balance Point (15 page)

TWENTY-THREE

In the course of
Iwo Jima
’s journey to Yavet, and my journey to find Orion,
Iwo
made her scheduled layover at her halfway port, which was Foundationally Earthlike 117. At FE 117 cruisers drifted all the way down to surface.

They did this because they sometimes offloaded cargo vital to the economy of FE 117, which cargo was too large and too fragile to downshuttle. So the instant Ya Ya and I stepped out through
Gateway
’s main hatch, we stepped from canned atmosphere into sea-level local.

FE 117 was as far as Ya Ya was going, his vacation destination, and he was accordingly decked out in a tiny Trueborn tuxedo and matching eye patch. He had made me rent a tux too, because he insisted I go with him wherever he was going during our layover. I suppose the pair of us resembled one of those carnivale organ grinders with his monkey.

As Ya Ya waddled down the gangway alongside me, he breathed deep. Then he turned his face up at me, grinned, and beat his barrel chest with both fists. “Feel that? Today Ya Ya win many bets, pork many women. This I promise on my mother’s grave.”

I did feel that, “that” being something in the air. And it made me grin just like it had on my one prior stopover at FE 117 when I was a Legion skinhead.

FE 117 was relegated to “foundationally” Earthlike status because it differed from Earth in one seemingly inconsequential way. FE 117’s Planetary Oxygen Concentration at sea level measured plus-six above Earth normal. Not enough to make humans go blind, which too much oxygen can do, just enough to make them giggle. The locals acclimated to the elevated POC, but it turned offworlders into party animals at breath one.

And FE 117’s locals stood ready to feed the animals. Ya Ya and I stepped off the gangway onto the boardwalk that led to the ground transportation roundabout. A smiling redhead, wearing a chauffeur’s cap, sparkly high heels, and nothing in between but what looked like a yard of dental floss, stepped alongside us and held up a printed card. The card offered prospective fares assistance with the other thing that Orion had warned me would make a human go blind.

I stopped and gawked at the girl, until Ya Ya grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. “No need quick chick. Sporting Club car meet us.”

At the roundabout’s closest approach to the boardwalk, a gasoline powered limo as blacked out, sleek, and almost as long as a Scorpion fighter rumbled past a double line of cabs and electrovans. The chartered limo cut them all off and muscled up to the curb.

Its driver, a knockout brunette wearing disappointingly complete chauffeur’s livery, sprang out, dashed around to the passenger door, held it open and smiled at Ya Ya. “Welcome back, Mr. Cohon.”

Ya Ya tucked a bill roll as big as a baby cabbage into the back pocket of her uniform trousers and copped a feel. “You been working out, sweet Juju. What you lose, four pounds?”

“Three.” She smiled again as she closed the two of us into the limo’s rear compartment. Through the one-way window glass I tracked her baby cabbage until it swayed around the limo’s front fender and vanished.

Pop
.

As I swiveled myself into the compartment’s rear-facing jump seat, Ya Ya, stretched out across the red velvet rear banquette, pressed his mouth over the champagne bottle he had just uncorked, and contained most of its overflow foam.

The compartment was lined floor to ceiling in red velvet, even the headliner, which looked and smelled brand new.

“Let me help you with that, Mr. C.” One of the two rear-compartment hostesses tugged the bottle out of Ya Ya’s hand and sucked off the remaining foam while she stared into his eyes.

These two young ladies obviously worked out as productively as Juju did. Probably more often, too. Because they had apparently just showered down and hadn’t had time to get dressed.

The other hostess crawled forward toward me, and blinked. Her eyelids were made up in silver and black, like snakeskin. It was a terrific grabber, not that she needed more grabbers than nature had already provided her. “Been here before, Mr.—?”

“Parker. Jazen Parker.” Not my scrub name, but what the hell. Girls like this were paid to forget. I swallowed. “Once.” But Legion liberty hadn’t been like this.

She curled alongside me on the adjacent jump seat, traced my ear with her fingertip and whispered, “Well, Mr. Jazen Parker, welcome back to Funhouse.”

Funhouse. The day I fell in love with Kit Born, which was the first day I ever saw her, she was a mud-smudged tomboy in khakis who gave me a lift from the spaceport on Mort’s home world, DE 476, into Dead End’s human “capital city.” The “city” was a mud hut cluster that the colonists had misnamed “Eden.”

Kit had smirked and asked me whether I had ever seen an outworld planetary capital with a name that fit. I had told her “Funhouse.” I think she had agreed with me.

Nobody who saw the capital of FE 117 disagreed that the name “Funhouse” fit this planet. In the years since that day, my tomboy and I had disagreed as often as we had agreed. But there had never been a day when I had loved her any less.

“Hel-
lo
! Jazen whatever-your-name-is.” My hostess had her hand inside my tuxedo shirt, and she smelled of cut lemons and jasmine. “Am I boring you?”

Syrene had counseled me that a woman forgave a man who followed his prick easier than one who followed his heart, but I was in no position to press my luck.

“No. Not at all.” I shrugged. “It’s been a long flight.”

“No problem. But just so you know, I’m included in high-roller service for the duration of your stay. And Mr. Cohon is a
very
high roller.”

She uncoiled from her jump seat and pythoned aft to assist her work-out partner, who was helping Ya Ya keep the back half of the promise he had just sworn on his mother’s grave.

My voyeuristic cup of tea isn’t
troll a trois
, so I stared out the window watching Funhouse roll past while the limo rocked side-to-side down Lucky U Parkway.

The world that rolled past looked a lot like the lushest parts of Earth, the roadside riot with outsized trees that perpetually blazed pink, purple and cantaloupe orange. The trees rose from flower carpets studded with turquoise and lemon-yellow blossoms the diameter of dinner plates.

Funhouse’s vegetation swayed in breezes that never seemed too brisk or too still, too cool or too warm. The few buildings visible from the road were resorts and casinos that curved and soared up above the treetops like alabaster yacht sails. The Funhouse tourism bureau even claimed it rained on Funhouse only after the last floorshow and before the breakfast buffets opened.

The planetologists say all those trees and flowering plants are bigger mostly because they get more carbon dioxide. They get more carbon dioxide because the animals breathe more of it out. The animals breathe more carbon dioxide out because they’re bigger. A lot bigger. The animals are a lot bigger because the Planetary Oxygen Concentration lets them breathe so much more oxygen in.

“Titanopods ahead on the right.” Juju’s voice dripped like honey through the speaker set in the forward partition.

Three heartbeats later the limo slowed momentarily as it passed by a half dozen fawn-colored, droop-snooted quadrupeds as they pruned treetops like living maintenance ‘bots. Except titanopods stand twenty-six feet tall at the shoulder. If Mort’s biochemistry had allowed him to digest Funhouse animal protein, I expect he would have given his left tusk to retire here.

That’s why I described Funhouse’s elevated POC as
seemingly
inconsequential. Funhouse’s megafauna tentpoled Funhouse’s core business.

That business was gambling. Not poko or traditional Trueborn casino gaming, though Funhouse offered bags of both. So did Shipyard, and most nations on Earth. And of course, so did every cruiser.

Gambling was fun for plenty of people. Funhouse gambling was fun for all those people and plenty more people besides. Betting on contests of power and speed between and among monsters combined spectacle with gambling.

“Funhouse Trust, Mr. Cohon.” Sweet Juju announced our first stop as she swung the limo off the Parkway and down an underground ramp into a gated drive-through monitored by a mini-gun-equipped security ‘bot.

As the gate rolled up into the ceiling to admit us, Ya Ya disentangled himself, tugged his tux pants back on. Then he buzzed down the side window and leaned out. From the drive-through window a big-eyed girl in a low-cut gold lamé jumpsuit leaned out and pipped Ya Ya with a handheld retinal.

Ya Ya’s withdrawal came back in seconds. It arrived as crisp bills tightly wrapped by a gold lamé band that matched the teller’s jumpsuit. I thought that was good customer service. It was such a large packet that it required her to lean
way
out of the window in order to hand it to Ya Ya. From where I was sitting, I thought that was extraordinary customer service.

So far this trip, every customer-service job on Funhouse was held down by a seductress. It made me wonder who shoveled up behind the titanopods.

Ya Ya tore the gold band from his bills, peeled off a handful for each of the hostesses, then folded the rest and stuffed the wad down his pants.

Three minutes later, we stopped briefly beneath the portico of the Funhouse Grand Luxoriana, waited while our hostesses slithered into gowns, then we dropped the pair of them off at the hotel.

The one who had stuck her hand down my shirt spun a disc-shaped, pink business card into my lap. Then she said, “Remember. For the duration,” blew me a kiss, and disappeared.

I held the card under my nose. It smelled of cut lemons and jasmine. As the limo pulled back out onto the Parkway, I turned the card round between my fingers while I looked out the window. Then I folded the card and stuffed it as far down into the limo’s side door pocket as Ya Ya had stuffed his tip money down his pants.

I muttered, “I’m either the smartest man in the universe or the dumbest.”

Ya Ya frowned across the compartment. “What you said?”

“Nothing.”

The discarded gold cash wrapper at my feet read “Funhouse Trust.” FT was the biggest numbered-account bank on Funhouse, but far from the only one. Big gamblers needed big money, needed it fast and needed it quietly. In fact, only Rand hosted more, and more discreet, numbered-account banks.

In addition to petty cash accounts in various locations, Spook Central maintained a numbered account that Kit and I utilized in the field to collect pay and allowances. However, our main account was on Rand, rather than on Funhouse. Not because Rand’s banks were more numerous and more discreet, but because Funhouse banks charged higher administrative fees to their high-rolling depositors than the pucker-butt yodelers on Rand charged to theirs. And when it came to admin costs, Howard Hibble threw coins around like hatch covers.

Ya Ya waddled forward, hitching up his pants while easily standing straight in the rear compartment, until he stood alongside me. Then he tapped the sliding panel that separated us from Juju.

She slid the panel open, and spoke back over her shoulder. “Another stop, Mr. Cohon?”

“Usual. Drive good, Juju.”

Ya Ya waddled back to his seat, screwed his butt down into the cushions like he was a human lag bolt, then cinched his seat belt tight and pointed at my dangling seat belt.

The shrinks said that risk-averse personalities, like they said that I was, compensate by developing faux-risky fetishes. One of mine was that I forgot my seat belt most of the time.

A heartbeat after I tightened my belt, the limo broke right like a Scorpion dodging a heat seeker and roared down an unpaved trail that led away from the Parkway at a pace that no run-of-the-planet electric could match.

Ten minutes of road ping pong later, the limo rolled to a stop in the middle of forested nowhere.

Juju spoke back through the still-open bulkhead slider. “Clean, Mr. C.”

Ya Ya nodded, then undid his seatbelt and stuck his hand farther down his pants than he had when he stashed his tip money. A lot farther. When his hand came out, it clutched a white, non-metallic capsule the size of a Trueborn dill pickle, sheathed in an old-fashioned birth control latex.

No wonder Ya Ya had paid to travel first class, where body cavities weren’t searched.

Ya Ya opened the car door, peered up and down the road, then listened to silence broken only by the limo’s gasoline engine and brakes, crackling as they cooled.

Finally, he hopped out and walked to a tree that had a lower limb snapped, but still hanging. He held his nose, searched around until he found a stick on the ground, then used the stick to pry up and lift something that at first resembled a discarded toupee, but turned out to be a dead local rodent. Very dead.

Ya Ya poked the cylinder into the ground like a tent stake, stomped it flush with the surface, then dropped the carcass back on top of it. He broke the hanging limb completely off the tree, then backed away, hands to the ground like a lazy Tassini praying half-ass, and stirred fallen leaves across his tracks until he reached the car.

As soon as he closed the door behind himself and plopped into his seat, Juju accelerated away without a word.

Dead drops had been staple ways to pass tangible objects probably as long as there had been spies and smugglers. They were still used because, when done right, they worked.

The literal “dead” drop variant that Ya Ya had just employed, using a rotten carcass both as an identifying lid and to discourage random discovery by passersby, had been popular with the old Soviet Union’s agents during the first Cold War. If the passed objects were small, like microfilm canisters, they were sometimes actually sewn into the carcasses.

As with most techniques, how well it worked depended on local conditions and timing, and actually it was a pretty lousy variant. In tidy urban neighborhoods, the technique stunk, not only literally but figuratively, because of conscientious concierges and diligent street cleaners. In ghetto neighborhoods, dead rats were viewed as windfalls, too often hauled home and boiled down for dinner. Ditto in natural areas like this one, where a carcass left too long would be dragged away or consumed by scavengers.