Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck (20 page)

Now it was my turn to pause.

“Because I have about one heart attack a
month, usually in the mornings, and I can’t stand up on my own without them.”

He looked at me momentarily in the face
but then dropped his gaze and headed out my front door.

I was waiting on the first floor of a
building in the southeast for the owner to come down.

All around me, Po servants twirled and
flipped and scuttled.

Po were the slave species of the
Boranjame, who were the most powerful empire in the galaxy. At this point,
though, that wasn’t saying a whole lot.

Po looked like a big pile of spaghetti.
They were about five feet tall, had no torsos, heads, feet, no anything really.
They were just arms and hands. They moved so erratically that it was dizzying
to look at them.

I wasn’t sure if slaves were legal on
Belvaille. I suppose if it started becoming an issue we’d have to make some
decision. But I wasn’t about to tell the only Boranjame on the station and
within light years he couldn’t have his attendants.

The Boranjame, for the most part, lived
on ships. They didn’t actually have any planets they called home. As they
continued to grow in physical size, each Boranjame would make its ship larger
until it had a world-ship that rivalled planets.

Flying around on a ship the size of a
planet that was capable of destroying and strip mining other planets tended to
make you a species that no one messed with.

Fortunately, during our war, the
Boranjame didn’t take advantage of the galaxy-wide chaos and mostly sat in
their region of control, which was the entire outer rim. When a solar system
had been decimated by the civil strife, they poked in, gave everyone a chance
to leave, and tore the planets apart to upgrade their ships.

Belvaille’s only Boranjame, Zeti, had
sent a Po messenger to come get me. The Po, having no mouth of its own,
communicated by manipulating sound boxes with its many hands.

We had a lot of species on Belvaille.
But most of those species were just as bad off as the Colmarians and I didn’t
feel much need to be nice to them. I believed it was in the best interest of
all life everywhere that I be at least courteous to Zeti. Just in case he had
any influence over his larger brethren.

I’d been on a world-ship in the past. If
the Boranjame simply felt like conquering the galaxy and destroying every
inhabited planet, there was really nothing to stop them at this point. It would
just take a long time.

Back in the vestibule, a group of Po suddenly
scuttled forward and then parted, showing Zeti floating in their midst.

Zeti was hard to describe. He was about
four feet long, three feet high, and three feet wide. He hovered a small
distance from the ground, how, I’m not sure.

He was crystalline. An insanely complex
series of interlocking, rotating, spinning, crystal disks and plates and
pieces. He was colored a light blue and translucent at the edges. Like the Po, he
had no features at all. He was almost like a million dancing snowflakes of
sizes ranging from inches to feet.

If the Po were disturbing to watch
because of their movement, the Boranjame was hypnotic. He was quite beautiful.

I didn’t actually know if Zeti was a
male or female. I had met a Boranjame prince, so presumably they had genders,
but I wasn’t going to ask and risk offending Zeti.

To my slight alarm, I noticed Zeti was
maybe a foot larger than when I had last seen him. Boranjame never stopped
growing as far as I knew. In some theoretical future, Belvaille would be too
small for him.

“Hi,” I said good-naturedly.

The Po finished setting up speakers and
other electronic devices which the Boranjame used to speak. I wasn’t sure if he
also used them to hear, so I repeated myself.

“Hi.”

“I would like to vote,” Zeti said.

His voice, which was purely synthesized,
was masculine and sounded like a young man’s.

“Vote for what?” I asked, confused.

“For City Council and Governor,” he
replied.

Did he call me out here for this?

“Sure,” I said. “I don’t think that will
be a problem. Anyone on Belvaille can vote…I guess. I haven’t thought about the
restrictions yet. Maybe you have to be a certain age? But you would qualify.”

“I would like to vote now.”

“Now? Well, we don’t have the final candidate
list. And I don’t even know when the elections will be held. And we don’t have
the voting machines.”

“I do not have hands.”

Oh, yeah. How are the Keilvin Kamigans
going to vote? They’re gas clouds. Maybe attach a kite to them?

“You can tell me your choices at the
election. Will that work?”

“I would like to vote now.”

“But the list isn’t ready. And I don’t
know all the names off the top of my head.”

“I know the names.”

I patted my chest, ruffling my guns. As
if I expected to find a pen and paper there. As if I had carried a pen and paper
in the last forty years. As if my fingers were capable of using a pen and
paper.

“I don’t have anything to write on,” I
apologized.

“Here are my votes.”

One of the Po was suddenly undulating in
my face. It held a form out to me in its tendril. I took the page and looked it
over as the Po retreated to its original position beside Zeti.

Names were listed in exquisite cursive
handwriting.

“This is Garm’s list,” I said.

“What is a Garm’s list?” Zeti asked.

“These candidates are all dead,” I
explained.

“They are?” There was no great
inflection in the voice but the voice wasn’t really a voice. It was generated
from speakers and wasn’t biological in origin. For all I knew he could really
sound like a puppy and be trying to bark at me and those Po practical jokesters
made his voice sound like this instead.

I felt like I was missing something. I
decided to hazard a guess.

“Have you spoken to Garm?”

“No,” he said immediately.

“Have you spoken to her people?”

“No.”

I was out of ideas. Maybe Boranjame liked
dead politicians. But it wasn’t really my job to question why people cast their
particular votes. That was the whole point of an election, right?

“Well, I guess that’s it, unless you
have anything else. I’ll save your votes for the election and make sure they’re
counted. Thanks, Zeti.”

“And thank you, Supreme Kommilaire, Hank
of Belvaille. May you riddle through your current tribulations lest your
species be shackled in an age of despair for ten thousand years.”

The Po swarmed on Zeti and they all retreated
as quickly as they appeared, leaving me standing there stunned.

http://www.belvaille.com/hlh3/zeti.gif

“Who wants taxes?” a man asked on the
loudspeaker. “What I earn should go to my family.”

“
Our
family,” a woman’s voice
chided. “We’ve survived the civil war.”

“And Belvaille is growing better with every
passing day,” the man continued.

“Why would we want to change what is
working?” she asked. “Return to the old Colmarian Confederation and its abuses?
Our children don’t deserve that.”

“Garm’s Choice candidates are endorsed
by the owner of Belvaille, who has seen the city through the worst times the
galaxy had to offer,” the man said.

“All the candidates pledge to increase
public works projects, increase employment, increase law enforcement, and keep
Belvaille the shining star of the universe.”

“Vote Garm’s Choice for me,” a little
boy said.

“And me!” A little girl added.

I stood in my living room listening to
it.

Can they do that?

Did they have a real family hanging
around talking about the election on the loudspeakers? No, they must be paid
actors. But who paid them? And why?

I opened my door and saw MTB and Valia
waiting for me.

“Boss, did you hear the commercial?” MTB
asked.

“Is that what they’re called?”

The loudspeakers had advertising. Buy
your clothes here. Eat your breakfast there. But advertisements for people—dead
people—seemed really unusual to me. But I guess this was New Belvaille.

“What are we doing, sir?” Valia asked.

“Stuff I used to do.”

We were in the storeroom of a large
club.

Three gang bosses were with us. We were
standing around a crate of goods that was under a tarp and that was the source
of their disagreement.

“So let me get this straight,” I said, “your
partner woke up today, the day this shipment came in, and decided to die?”

“He was murdered,” a woman said angrily.

She was an attractive lady whose beauty
had faded a bit with age, but she could still pull off some charm. She was the
wife of the deceased and her name was Lisedt.

“He’s gone is the point, Hank,” one of
the other bosses, Dimi-Vim, said. He was the boss I had worked out the club
music issue with some time ago. He still wore his quarter inch of brown hair
all over his body.

“I’ve got this contract proving that I
paid for half of this. That makes me majority holder,” aRj’in said. He was
still in good physical shape and still none too friendly.

I looked at the contract.

“Get me some light, I can’t see what I’m
looking at,” I complained.

“Hank, that’s an old contract,” Lisedt
said, “and it doesn’t matter because he was murdered anyway. By one of these
two!”

Valia hunted around for lights.

“What do I have to gain by killing him?
He owed me money,” Dimi-Vim demanded.

“If the contract is old or not it
doesn’t matter unless there was a new contract,” aRj’in said.

“They’re trying to take over my business
and want to strong-arm me. I’ve been through more gang wars than both you pukes
put together,” Lisedt fired.

“Just…all of you shut up for a second,”
I said.

I looked over at Valia, who was making
an awful lot of racket in the back but wasn’t shedding any light.

“Boss, you got a torch on your back,”
MTB offered.

“Oh, yeah. Get it.”

He rummaged around through my various
packs and containers and found a handheld flashlight.

He put it on the tarp and turned it on.

“Damn, that’s bright,” Dimi-Vim said,
moving away.

It was a gang contract, but not like any
I had ever seen and I had seen thousands. I couldn’t make sense of it.

“What is this?” I asked.

“I told you,” Dimi-Vim said to aRj’in.

“Look here, this part,” big aRj’in leaned
in.

I read it.

“This is like, legal crap,” I said.

“That’s what I told them,” Dimi-Vim
reiterated.

“Shut up,” aRj’in fired.

“It’s old, anyway,” Lisedt repeated.

“He got an adjudicator to write it,”
Dimi-Vim explained.

I handed it to MTB to see if he could
make sense of it.

“Adjudicators aren’t even allowed in the
Athletic Gentleman’s Club,” I said, confused.

“We…made the contract somewhere else,”
aRj’in said weakly.

This was just breaking so many
protocols. I spoke my frustrations out loud.

“How am I supposed to settle this? This
isn’t a gang contract. It’s some adjudicator thing. Adjudicators only apply to
us Kommilaire and I completely ignore them at
least
half the time.
Belvaille’s been doing gangs and gang business for over two hundred years. Why
would you try and change that?”

The gang bosses looked uncomfortable.

“My husband said he didn’t want to,”
Lisedt chimed.

“But he signed it. You all signed it.
Besides, we’re not just ‘gangs,’” aRj’in said distastefully.

I took the contract from MTB and tore it
in half and then half again.

“Split it three ways evenly,” I
concluded.

They all started to protest loudly, but
I was louder.

“You wanted me to settle this, I’m
settling it,” I barked. “You want to go to an adjudicator and get him to throw
a lot of fancy words around then do that and stop wasting my time. You guys
don’t touch each other for six months after the separation. Lisedt takes on all
the assets—and liabilities—of her husband.”

Everyone was a little unhappy.

Another successful negotiation.