The Diamond Moon (7 page)

 

Lim followed Blake to the counter. “Did I hear you say you were paying, my friend?” He was talking to Blake, but he couldn’t resist a final, over-the-shoulder leer at Mar-ianne.

Hawkins watched them go. “Extraordinary!” He seemed genuinely astonished. “Before today I couldn’t have imag-ined Redfield behaving in other than the most exemplary fashion. Perhaps things aren’t going well for him—Forster seems to have put the fear of God into him.”

“He was certainly being obscure,” said Marianne.

 

“Yes, as in some cheap spy novel. When really, there’s no mystery. The professor plans a thorough exploration of Amalthea. I know he counted on acquiring an ice mole—a mining machine—here on Ganymede. That must be Item A.”

 

“Item A, Item B. Worse than this menu.”

 

Hawkins took the hint. “May I order for both of us?”

 

“Why not? If we were in Manhattan, I’d do the same for you.”

 

But Hawkins paid no attention to the menu. Instead he absently studied the fish swimming in the huge aquarium. “I suppose Item B would be a submarine.”

 

“What would Professor Forster want with a submarine?”

 

“Only guessing.” He waved for the waitress. “Those gey-sers, you know . . . could be that under the ice, there’s liquid water.
Well
, let’s see what this place has to offer.”

Marianne glanced toward the doorway through which Blake and his friend Lim had disappeared into the throng. Depending on one’s mood, all this could be viewed as intensely mundane or intensely exciting. Why not hope for the best? Marianne moved perceptibly closer to Hawkins.

If anyone had said to Marianne that she might someday blossom into an intellectual, she would have been shocked; she thought her own record of academic failure proved nothing but the opposite. But in fact she had a powerful hunger for information, a powerful attraction to schemes of organization, and a sometimes too-powerful critical sense that kept her hopping from one such flawed scheme to another. And they were all flawed.

Sometimes her lust for knowledge got mixed up with her liking for people and her own physical wants. At the begin-ning of any relationship, people see what they want and hear what they want and take as clues what may be nothing more than accidental gibberish or cant. She knew that. On the other hand, it did help that Bill Hawkins was big and strong and nice looking. She allowed her warm thigh to brush his as he made a great show of studying the menu. Marianne was no intellectual yet, but she was a young woman of ambition, at a stage of her life when men who knew something she didn’t know were the sexiest men of all.

VII

All afternoon, after their awkward luncheon with Blake Red-field and his odd local friend, Hawkins and Marianne wan-dered through the corridors of the exotic city, unburdened by an itinerary. They visited the more famous tourist sights—a stroll through the crowded ice gardens, a ride on a sampan through steaming-cold canals lined with tourist shops—and they talked about what Hawkins knew of the worlds: about his earliest desire to be a full-fledged xeno-archaeologist, his vacation trips to Venus and Mars, his studies under Professor Forster. The history of Culture X was virtually a blank, he told her, although it was known that beings who spoke—or at least wrote—their language had visited Earth in the Bronze Age, while other references made it seem they had been around at least a billion years before that.

And the language of Culture X presented far more dif-ficulties than the layperson would believe, in this day of computer translation. For the computer translated according to rules that had been programmed into it, no matter how well it might understand what it was saying (and some com-puters were bright enough to understand a lot); different rules based on different assumptions yielded different meanings, and thus each translation was like the invention of a new language. What relationship Forster’s program for the speech of Culture X bore to the lost language, and es-pecially to its sounds, was a matter of continuing discussion.

“Forster discusses it?” Marianne asked shrewdly.

 

“Other people’s discussions,” Hawkins said, smiling. “He, of course, considers the matter closed.”

 

Evening came. Miraculously, they were both staying at the same luxurious hotel, and Marianne had not let Hawkins run out of things to talk about by dinner time, or even afterward.

 

“Come upstairs with me,” she said, when they’d put down their empty coffee cups.

 

“Well, of course I’ll ride up with you. Aren’t we both staying on the . . . ?”

 

“Oh shut up, Bill. Think about it a minute, if you want to—that’s all right, that’s the kind of person you are. Then say yes or no.” She smiled wickedly. “I prefer yes.”

 

“Well, of course.” He blushed. “I mean, yes.”

The Interplanetary’s rooms were small but lavish, with piles of soft cotton carpets covering woven-reed floors and screens of pierced sandalwood in the corners; warm yellow light, turned low, came through the myriad openings in the fretwork like patterned stars. In a gossamer net of light, wearing nothing, her limbs long and smooth and muscular, with glistening darkness flowing in her hair and shining in her eyes and touching the mysterious places of her body, Marianne was so beautiful Bill Hawkins could think of ab-solutely nothing more to say.
But much later, she started murmuring questions again. They passed the night in bouts of mutual interrogation.

“You are Mrs. Wong?” Randolph Mays asked the woman in the high-collared green silk dress.

 

She gave him a hard stare, then forced a sincere if un-accustomed smile. “Sir! I am very honored making your ac-quaintance, Sir Randolph Mays.”

“The honor is
mine
,” said Mays, taking her small, mus-cular hand. “Do I understand that you are the owner of this handsome establishment?” He threw his hands wide, indi-cating the interior of the Straits Cafe. At the midmorning hour it was empty, except for a girl sullenly mopping the floor.

“Since my husband died almost ten years ago, I am sole proprietor.” She crushed out a half-smoked, lipstick-smeared cigarette that had been perched on a thick glass ashtray on the counter. Smoking was a rare habit in controlled environments, banned in some, but Mrs. Wong owned the air inside these four walls.

“Come, sit down.” Her manner betrayed an edge of im-patience. “I will have tea brought. We can talk.”

 

“Delighted.”

 

“What kind do you like?”

 

“Darjeeling,” Mays said. “Or whatever you might rec-ommend.”

Mrs. Wong said something in Chinese to a girl at the charge machine. She took Mays to a round table in front of the aquarium wall. He and the ugliest fish he had ever seen stared at each other; Mays blinked first, and sat down.

Mays’s unannounced arrival at the Ganymede Interplan-etary Hotel had thrown the local gossip mongers into a fury of speculation, but they quickly realized he must have traveled on
Helios
under an assumed name, presumably in dis-guise. Having registered at the Interplanetary under his own name, wearing his own face, it had taken only hours for the news to circulate throughout the community.

The hotel’s bolder guests approached him for autographs whenever he appeared in public; he obliged them and an-swered their questions by explaining that it was his pur-pose—no, his sworn
duty
—to investigate Professor J. Q. R. Forster and every aspect of the expedition to Amalthea. Word of Mays’s intentions traveled as fast as the news of his arrival.

For show, Mays did make one or two attempts to contact the Forster expedition, who had set up official headquarters in the town’s Indian quarter, but no one answered their pho-nelink except the office robot, who always claimed everyone was out. As Mays quickly learned from his acquaintances among the interplanetary press corps, Forster and his people hadn’t been seen since their arrival; most of the reporters had come to the conclusion that Forster wasn’t on Gany-mede at all. Perhaps he was on some other moon, Europa for example. Perhaps he was in orbit. Perhaps he’d already left for Amalthea.

Mays was unsurprised and unperturbed. His fame was a magnet, and sure enough, people with information to offer soon began calling
him
. . . .

Mrs. Wong lit another cigarette and held it between fin-gers that boasted inch-long, red-lacquered nails. “They were sitting right at this table,” she told him, leaning back and blowing smoke at the cod. “Mr. Redfield, I know he works for the professor, he was talking with that Lim person. They were talking in Chinese. Mr. Redfield speaks very good Can-tonese.”

Although Mrs. Wong considered this an unusual feat, Mays showed no surprise. “Who is that Lim person?” he asked.

 

“Luke, son of Kam, Lim and Son Construction. Long hair, dresses like cowboy. No good.”

 

Mays lifted an impressive eyebrow, inviting more, but Mrs. Wong was either reluctant to give examples of Luke Lim’s bad behavior or had none specific to give. “What were they talking about?” he asked.

 

“From what they said, I think Lim sold Mr. Redfield their old ice mole.”

 

“Ice mole?”

“Tunnelling machine designed special for here—where ice is very cold, gravity very low. And they talked about something else the professor is buying someplace. I didn’t hear what. Then two others came in.” Mrs. Wong picked at a tobacco crumb on the tip of her tongue.

“Please go on.”

 

“A Mr. Hawkins, I think he works for the professor too, and a young girl named Marianne. Just visiting.”

 

“Ah, Marianne,” Mays said.

 

“You know her?”

 

“Not well,” he said. He leaned back in his chair to avoid a new emission of asphyxiating cigarette smoke. “What did the four of them have to say to each other?”

“Mr. Redfield was unhappy, I think. Didn’t want to talk at all. In a few minutes he left with Lim. Then Mr. Hawkins was trying to impress the girl. He said probably the profes-sor wanted to buy an ice mole to explore under the surface of Amalthea. Also a submarine.”

Mays’s expression stiffened for a moment—“Ahh?”—then he nodded judiciously. “
Submarine
, of course. Then what?”

 

“Then they ate. Talked about sightseeing, other things. About you and your video programs.”

 

“Really.”

 

“Mr. Hawkins did not like your programs. He talked so much about how you are wrong and the professor is right, after a while he bored the girl. I think he is not very suc-cessful with girls.”

Mrs. Wong went on a few minutes longer, but Mays soon realized he had gotten everything she knew worth repeating. When he left the Straits, a pile of well-worn, old-fashioned North Continental paper dollars—in denominations of hun-dreds and thousands, untraceable through the credit net—stayed on the table behind him.

A Buddhist festival was in progress in the corridors. The town seemed to hold a festival of some sort every other day, and most were not for tourists; the place crawled with re-ligionists. Mays made his way through passages echoing from strings of exploding firecrackers, through air thick and blue with acrid smoke; wreaths and garlands of smoke were sucked into the laboring exhaust fans. Excited children coursed past his long legs. He reached the central square. A sea of saffron-robed monks parted before him, and suddenly there was the fake stone facade of the Interplanetary, bris-tling with finials and encrusted with ponderous statuary, an imitation Angkor Wat.

The lobby was a cooler, quieter place, but not by much. He ducked past the concierge and into the lift, dodging a pride of businessmen with autograph-lust in their eyes to seek the privacy of his room. But no sooner had he let his door lock itself behind him than his phonelink chortled.

“Randolph Mays here.”

 

“Mr. Von Frisch, sir, of Argosy Spacecraft and Industrial Engineering. Shall I put him through?”

 

This Von Frisch person had called twice before, but he was as elusive as Forster, and they had not yet made contact. “By all means put him on.”

 

The voice on the phonelink was distorted by a oneway commercial scrambler; the screen remained dark. “We meet at last, Sir Randolph.”

 

“Under the circumstances that’s putting it rather
strongly
, Frisch . . . I beg your pardon, Mr. Von Frisch.” “Yes, well. A hard world, Sir Randolph. Better safe, and all that.”

 

“What’s your business, sir?”

 

“Argosy are equipment brokers, among other things.”

 

“With
me
. Your business with me.”

 

“I’ve lately participated in a rather interesting transfer of property to someone who is planning an expedition to Amalthea. I think it might be worth your while to learn more about it.”

 

“Let me
guess
. You’ve sold the professor a submarine.”

 

Von Frisch, obviously no amateur, managed to contain whatever surprise he may have felt. “Guess if you like, Sir Randolph. If you want facts, we should talk.”

 

“All right, then. Where and when?”

The arrangements made, Mays keyed off. He leaned back on the bed and lifted his large feet onto the cover. With his long fingers knitted behind his head, he stared at the ceiling and considered his next move.

From Mrs. Wong, Mays had learned that Hawkins had been told to take a room in this very hotel. It wouldn’t be long before the mediahounds got hold of
that
. Indeed, For-ster and friends had very likely thrown Hawkins to the hounds deliberately—the professor’s people evidently didn’t have a lot for him to do, except deflect attention from themselves. Mays was a few hours ahead of his, mm,
colleagues
with these tidbits, but he was playing a deeper game than they were. And he was after bigger game than Hawkins.

Nothing he knew suggested that Hawkins was any but the least important member of Forster’s team, a former stu-dent of the professor’s who’d most probably been recruited primarily for his family’s wealth and connections—and perhaps secondarily for his strong back—but only incidentally for his knowledge of the language of Culture X, which he’d learned to read from Forster himself. Hawkins, naturally, believed that his linguistic ability and scholarly acumen were the reasons for the honor his former teacher had con-ferred upon him.