Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (2 page)

“Oh, we think he was there. An EABI transport Metasensory Division-went out there on your tip. Their last transmission was that they had him. Then nothing. And the transponder in the transport went quiet.”

“No!” Garibaldi exploded.

“Who the hell did they send out there, the three stooges?”

“Sir?”

“Nothing. We should have known better than to trust the Bureau, especially their telepaths. We should have sent our own team. Hell, I should have gone myself.”

“We didn’t have anyone in the area. By the time we could have got there…”

“Yeah, yeah. I just don’t trust them. Half the people in the Metasensory Division were folded in from the old Psi Corps.”

“From the side that split against Bester. Nobody wants Bester more than they do.”

“Nobody? Nobody? Man, you don’t know me very well, do you? Hendershot, Bester trained most of those guys who are chasing him. He knows everything about them, and I don’t doubt he still has men on the inside. I don’t doubt it for a second. Old Psi Corps, no Psi Corps, rotten-to-the-Corps- you can’t trust telepaths, not when it comes to one of their own.”

He put his head in his hands and smoothed back hair that wasn’t there. It had been receding since he was twenty and he had finally figured, why wait? Beat it to the punch. Now he had almost grown into it. Yep, he was getting old, like it or not. Which meant Bester was older. The thought that that son of a bitch might die in his sleep was the worst thing he could imagine. He could almost hear the Psi Cop’s triumphant, cynical last laugh.

“Listen, Hendershot. I’ve had it with playing coyote to this guy’s roadrunner. I run one of the ten wealthiest corporations on Mars, and I don’t ask for much. But-I-want-Bester. Make me happy.”

“I understand.”

“And next time, I want to be there, capisce? No more tips to the Psi Corps hunt squads or whatever nicey - nice name they’ve given them now. Surface cooperation, yeah-they can still be useful. But I want to be two steps ahead of them, which oughta put me only two steps behind Bester.”

“Yes, sir.”

Garibaldi closed the link and stretched. Tortured, feverish muscles complained. Bester! The trick was not to be even one step behind your quarry. The trick was to figure out where he was going, and be one step ahead. To do that, you had to know what he wanted. He stood and went to the window, opened the metal shield so he could see the beautiful, stark landscape of Mars. The sun stood just above the horizon, throwing all of the shadows on the plain toward him.

“What do you want, Bester?”

PART I: HOME-COMING

Chapter I

“I want to go home,” Bester said.

“I’m tired.”

He took a sip of the red wine, resisted making a face, and set the crystal flute back on the stand next to his chair. He managed a smile for his host, a narrow-faced woman with ebony skin and a barely managed shock of gunmetal hair. Her eyes widened.

“Mars? Mr. Bester, I don’t think…”

“Not Mars. Earth.”

“Earth? Even worse. Mr. Bester, you’re wanted on every world and station in Human space, and on quite a few beyond. To return to Earth it self would be…”

“Unexpected,” Bester finished.

“It’s how I survive, always doing what no one expects. They’ve done their best, tried every trick in the book, but I wrote the book. Still, I’m sick of all this. I’ve never been able to stay on a colony world for more than a year or two. How can I? In a population of hundreds or thousands, I tend to stand out. But Earth has billions. It’s easier to hide in a crowd.”

“Yes, but things are more lax in the colonies, too, Mr. Bester. Earth! The risk of getting you there of forging the necessary papers, of passing you through quarantine phenomenal!”

“What quarantine? The Drakh plague is gone.”

“Oh, indeed. And EarthGov has no intention of letting another one slip through, intentionally or accidentally. Traffic to ancient and little-known worlds has increased tenfold in the wake of the Excalibur’s explorations. Public opinion and a lot of scientists claim it’s a disaster just waiting to happen.”

“Fine. So I’ll go through a screening. What of it?”

“They’ll discover you’re a teep. They’ll have your DNA-everything they need to identify you. You think all off world teeps aren’t compared to the tribunal lists?”

“I am confident of your ability to manage it, Sophie.”

“Mr. Bester-the risk isn’t just to yourself.”

“Oh, that I understand, Sophie. If I’m caught, I doubt I can stop them from finding out whatever they want to. I would never turn in an associate, but they have ways. Yes, if I’m caught, I doubt very much that I shall stand trial alone.

You and I know that everything we did was justified, but in any conflict, the winners have the privilege of writing its history. We did not win, you and I, and history does not look kindly on us.”

“Are you threatening me, Mr. Bester? That isn’t very gracious, considering all I’ve done for you. And as you know, I am not wanted by the tribunal. Unlike yourself, I didn’t commit any acts that can be construed as war crimes.”

Bester broadened his smile a bit.

“Ah, truth,” he said, taking his glass and studying the play of light in the burgundy fluid.

“It’s all so… relative. Once I was a patriot, an example of everything that was good about the Corps. Now they say I am the most terrible criminal who ever lived. And who better than me to tell them who the other criminals were? After all, I was the evil mastermind.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Sophie, I want to go to Earth. Get me there with a secure identity. Get me through or around this quarantine. I’m asking nicely, right now. But as I said, I’m weary, and cranky, and I’m tired of cheap off world wine. Once I’m there, I doubt very much that you will see or hear from me ever again. Oh, the occasional postcard, maybe…”

He thought she would relent there, but she went for another round.

“I’ve heard you still have the black ships,” she said.

“The ones EarthGov and the Corps couldn’t admit existed. What about them?”

“Your information is a little outdated,” Bester countered coldly.

Then he softened his voice.

“Sophie, you were a good intern. And I was good to you, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I there for you when things got tough at Kerf?”

Her eyes darted about, like those of an animal seeking escape. But there wasn’t any, not from him, and she knew it.

“Very well,” she said at last.

“I’ll do what I can.”

“I knew you’d see things my way.”

“Mr. Bester, you have a way of making certain there’s no other way to see them.”

He nodded condescendingly.

“Another thing,” he said as he rose.

“I’ll need a supply of choline ribosylase - untraceable, of course.”

Her face suddenly transfigured, and he felt a hint of pity.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I didn’t know.”

“Save your sympathy for someone who needs it, Sophie,” he replied, more brusquely than he intended.

Not much later he retired to his room, but found that he wasn’t tired enough for sleep. He decided to take a walk. After all, he had never been to the Maui colony, and if things went well he would never be back.

He selected a suit of black silk twill and a caudric shirt the same color, fastening the top button with a brass-colored over-cap. He studied himself for a moment in the floor-length mirror. His hair was almost white, as was his beard, though his eyebrows still kept a reddish brown tinge. His face seemed to have more lines each time he looked at it, but all in all he looked pretty good for a man of eighty-two.

Except for his hands, which jarred him every time. Pink, gloveless-naked. He flexed his right hand, the good one. When he was a teenager, he’d had nightmares now and then that he was out in public, without his gloves.

Telepaths didn’t wear gloves anymore, so he couldn’t either, not without being noticed. It made him feel dirty. But, he mused, one adapted.

A few moments later he stepped from Sophie Herndon’s rambling abode onto a quiet street. A few natives were out walking, too. The air was cool but not cold, very pleasant except for the faint smell of the sea-fishy, but subtly different from any ocean on Earth. Maui was mostly water-from space you couldn’t really see anything else. From what he had seen of it, it was rather charming. It had character.

The original settlers had been mostly Polynesian romantics, bent on recapturing a lost past. Of course you couldn’t really do that. And children rarely inherited their parents’ infatuations, especially when it meant living in grass houses on a planet somewhat chillier, even at the equator, than Earth.

Still, the architecture had certain South Sea touches, and the streetlamps resembled paper lanterns made in fanciful shapes, a legacy of the second wave of mostly Chinese immigrants. The people seemed pleasant enough and minded their business. Not a bad place to settle for a while. Until they found him again.

Maybe Sophie was right. Maybe going to Earth was too dangerous. The street took him to a dockside stretch, and as he walked up that, he felt the tickle of minds around him. Somewhere near, tentative lovers were embracing. A man on a boat was silently cursing his mangled nets. An old woman was remembering that the nights had been warmer when she was a girl.

He smelled something cooking, and his stomach reminded him he hadn’t eaten in a while. The lights of a restaurant appeared ahead, welcoming, and on impulse he entered. Inside, it was warmer, in temperature and in mood. The walls were of polished, reddish wood-or, no, maybe coral, or whatever passed for it here. Candlelight provided the only illumination.

A girl at the door asked him to remove his shoes and showed him to a long, low table with mats on either side-no chairs. He sat cross-legged, an act his bones protested a bit. There were others farther down the table, who nodded at him as he sat. He nodded back. The girl brought him a sweet, mildly alcoholic drink that tasted like sake with a green-tea aftertaste. It wasn’t bad, so he took a few sips.

“Something to eat?” she asked, in lilting Anglic.

“Please,” he replied.

“Whatever’s good.”

She nodded and left, but returned a few moments later with a young man, whom she seated across from him.

He figured it was probably the custom here to seat together strangers who came in alone. But he wanted to be by himself. He smiled at the young fellow, and was just about to say so, when all the hairs on the back of his neck prickled up.

The man was wearing a Psi Corps badge. No, that wasn’t right. It looked like the old badge, but there was no Psi Corps anymore. This badge merely identified a telepath who was working professionally within some other organization.

“I—ah-guess this is how they do it here,” the fellow said hesitantly.

He couldn’t be more than twenty, a square-faced boy with auburn hair and an infectious smile. He was wearing an EarthForce uniform. Bester felt nothing alarming in his surface thoughts. Could this be a coincidence? He didn’t really believe it. Carefully, carefully, he tightened his blocks while at the same time extending his senses.

“My name is Derrick Thompson,” the fellow offered.

“Nice to meet you,” Bester replied.

“I’m Fred Tozzer.”

“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Tozzer. Are you a native?”

Still not even a whiff of deception. It would take more than a P12 to hide that from him.

“No, actually,” he replied.

“I’m a tourist.”

“Where from?”

“Oh, Mars originally, but I suppose you could call me a citizen of… name is the galaxy. I’ve traveled all of my life, and now that I’m retired, I find that I can’t break the habit.”

“What brought you to Maui?”

“Oh, I heard the fish was good.”

Derrick laughed politely.

“And you? I assume you aren’t from around here.”

“Nope. Earth, Kansas City. You might have guessed from my uniform that I’m in EarthForce. I’m stationed here, on the base at Bue Atoll. Right now I’m on leave and thought I’d take in the sights.”

“You must be pretty disappointed to be seated with an old man rather than a young girl. And me not even a local.”

He shrugged.

“I have a girl already, so this’ll keep me out of trouble. I-ah-saw you staring at my psi badge. Telepaths don’t make you uncomfortable, do they? I won’t take offense if you want me to sit elsewhere.”

“No, not at all, it’s just-well, I’m an old man. I’m not used to seeing that badge on that uniform. And I haven’t been back to Earth since before the-crisis, did they call it?”

“Yep. Well, things are different now. Better. Before the crisis there were a lot of things we weren’t allowed to do. Be in EarthForce, for instance. Now the world is wide open.”

The waitress arrived with their food, one big bowl and two small plates.

“That looks like boiled shrimp,” Al said.

“It is. They farm it off the coast.”

“I was hoping for something native.” Derrick smiled.

“You want a bowl of plankton? The native life is all microscopic. Anything big enough to see came from somewhere else. But you’ll find the shrimp has a unique taste, since they feed on the native stuff” Al tried one.

It was unique, if not exactly good. A bit sulfury, like the yolk of a boiled egg. Derrick smiled at his expression.

“Takes a little getting used to. How long are you staying?”

“A few days.”

“And where next?”

“I’m not really sure. Just playing it by ear.”

“Well, that must be the life.”

He lifted his cup.

“To seeing the universe.”

Bester raised his cup. They clinked and drank. As the night wore on, Derrick and Bester talked of the places they had been and the things they had seen. Bester had more stories, of course, and Derrick listened with fascination. Bester kept buying the younger man drinks but sipping his own, so that by the time the place closed, Derrick was more than a little tipsy. They left together, ostensibly to find someplace that was still open.

Derrick stopped outside, stood swaying slightly and looking at the stars.