The Pillars of Eternity

‘He’s offplanet,’ someone behind Jericho muttered. The purveyor ponce (he supplied a specialized sexual taste involving a rare genetic type of woman, a certain drug and a specially treated aphrodisiac food) glared at Romrey with hot eyes. ‘One chance, Romrey. You’ve got one chance to get back here with the cube. Otherwise—’

‘This, you mean?’ Romrey held up the half-inch-sized memory cube which Jericho had been selling by lottery and which he had filched just before the numbers were about to be called. ‘You’ve got to trust me, boys. I thought of a better plan, that’s all. I asked myself what would happen if one of you won the cube. What would you do with it? Go out there and try to land on Meirjain?’ He shook his head. ‘It would be a fiasco. Me, now—I can handle a job like that. When I get back I’ll split the incomings with you.’

Snorts of indignation expressed a general disbelief in his last pronouncement. ‘Whoever won the cube could have sold it,’ Jericho said.

Romrey shook his head again. ‘Negative thinking. This way I – we – strike big.’

A bull-shouldered alec shoved Jericho aside and thrust his jaw out at Romrey, who recognized him as Ossuco, a carcass dealer. ‘We know where you’re going, you rat, and we’ll catch up with you. I got a feeling I would have drawn that ticket. I’d like to know what makes you think you could get away with it.’

Romrey picked up the pack of cards lying on the control board and fanned them open, holding them up before the cage screen. ‘These told me to do it.’

He let them gawp for a moment at the numbered picture cards, before he cut them off.

Then he swivelled his seat to face the engine controls. He gripped the manual handles and pushed them forward. Energy spurted from the fuel rods as the Stardiver put on speed. With a shudder he hit c; then he was riding smoothly, heading for the centre of the Harkio region where it nearly touched the Brilliancy Cluster.

He was grinning with pleasure when he switched to auto. He always enjoyed going through c on manual.

The journey to Sarsuce would take a few days. He picked up the memory cube again and plugged it into the ’diver’s starmap. The Brilliancy Cluster came up on the navigation screen. The view was from Sarsuce, or rather from Sarsuce’s sun, the Econosphere planet nearest to the cluster. A red arrow blinked on and off, pointing out the spot where Meirjain was due to make its appearance. At the bottom of the screen ran boxed lines of figures, including a date.

Absentmindedly Romrey reached into the larder chute and took out a pinana. He peeled off the orange-hued skin while he studied the screen. It was his favorite fruit: a banana into which the flavor of pineapple had been delicately, genetically blended.

The cluster was, to be sure, a beautiful if familiar sight. Romrey’s attention focused on the red arrow, surrounded as it was by piles of vari-colored stars. He read the data box, making a rough estimate of times and distances.

How many other people had this data? It was supposed to be rare, but –

Jericho Junkie claimed to have got it during a trip to Sarsuce, from the Meirjain tracker himself. Romrey turned from the screen. One hand picked up the deck of cards again, and expertly laid out a row while he bit into the pinana. He frowned as he tried to interpret the sequence. The Inverted Man reversed, followed by the ten of laser rods, followed by the eight of ciboria…. He stopped, puzzled. Deceit, leading to fulfilment.

Reading the future was not his forte. Reading a course of action, though, was easier – and in that regard what he had told Jericho was true. The cards had instructed him to rob the lottery, although the idea, of course, had been in his mind already.

Romrey, in recent years, had hit upon a practice which relieved life of much of its anxiety. Whenever he came to a point of uncertainty, he consulted the cards, and he did whatever he believed they were telling him to do. If the issue could be reduced to a simple yes or no, of course, then so much the better.

There was a heady, almost delirious pleasure in not being responsible for his own decisions anymore.

He thought of the poor cruds in Karti’s. Planet-huggers for the most part, scarcely been off Kleggisae. A ponce, a carcass dealer, assorted alecs who had found ways of living off the Econosphere Welfare Bureau. Not a prospector among them.

Strictly speaking Romrey wasn’t a prospector either. He called himself ‘a trader with wide interests.’ But the thought of landing on Meirjain the Wanderer didn’t frighten him, and neither did the competition. Neither did he necessarily think of himself as a liar. Would he be generous to his erstwhile friends and colleagues in the Karti Dive Infee, as he had promised, if he made out on Meirjain? Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t.

He would let the cards decide.

And if they decided against, Ossuco could look for him in every sextile of the Econosphere for all he cared.