The Galaxy Game (25 page)

‘For me?’ he said, reaching for the bowl before him. ‘What new delicacy is this? More plant matter?’

‘It’s a Cygnian drink, a regional speciality. Fermented sucrose flavoured with aged dark wood. Be careful, it’s strong.’

He drank, squeezed his eyes shut, pushed his lips out and shook his head vigorously. ‘Ahh,’ he exhaled, smacking his lips. ‘No chlorophyll flavour. I’ll try this again. Yes, my friend, what do you need?’

‘Information. I know you’ve been involved in setting up some kin contracts lately, especially between off-worlders and—’

‘And those of twisted name, yes. It is becoming a very popular pairing of mutual benefit to both parties. I’m surprised you haven’t considered it. Unless . . . there is someone waiting for you on Cygnus Beta?’

A memory flashed briefly – Serendipity’s face on a rare occasion when she was at peace with me rather than irritated by me – and left no greater pang than wistfulness. My expression must have showed enough of my mind, for Damal’s face was highly amused.

‘Ah, perhaps and perhaps! But there’s more to the tale, I gather?’

‘She didn’t want me,’ I said brusquely and tried to turn the topic back to business.

‘You did not persuade her?’ he pressed on, with a tone of half-mocking surprise. ‘You accepted the rejection placidly? So civilised, so extremely Ntshune of you to bow to the woman’s whim! I can think of a kin contract that would suit you very well.’

I was too dumbfounded to be insulted. ‘Why?
My
name isn’t twisted. I’m Cygnian, Damal, don’t get confused. My padr has not disowned me, nor is my birth irregular. But for those outside the family fold, yes, I can see how kin contracts with Zhinuvian entrepreneurs might be a useful strategy. Have you had any unregistered Hanekis pass through?’

Damal inhaled the fumes from his hand-warmed bowl and chuckled. ‘Tshalo, of course. He is the most persistent, but he has no head for business and some consider him to be on the wrong side of sixty Standard years.’

‘What about Hanekivaryai? Is the name known to you?’

Damal stopped cuddling his bowl and straightened up. ‘Oh. Oh yes, well known, but not for kin contracts. She’s a shifter – she takes contraband and converts it to Punarthai credit.’

‘Social or financial?’ I asked.

‘Both! She has a powerful backer in the family and connections to the Academes. Imagine: the cartels have raised the price one too many times on some product essential for an ongoing experiment, or worse, ceased importation entirely due to lack of demand. Does the dedicated researcher end project, shut down channel, pack up apparatus and call it a day? She does not. She finds something from the black market that will do as well. The Academe records may never know that such a replacement occurred, but a little Galactic credit and a lot of gratitude flow our way. Financial and social credit gained, and the Board of Credit Assessors none the wiser.’ Damal grinned, his tone almost loving – clever swindles always excited him. But I was less thrilled. I couldn’t see how Rafi factored into this scenario.

‘Is that all she does?’ I insisted.

He began to speak, stopped his words with a little ‘aha’ breath and exhaled in brief contemplative silence. ‘That is an interesting question,’ he said at last. ‘You’re the second person today to ask me that.’

‘Well, what did you tell the first person?’

He hid his face with a long sip from his bowl. ‘I didn’t tell them anything, but I did start asking elsewhere. Let me ask for a few more days.’

*

I left it there and almost forgot about it until one day at a Wallrunning session, I went behind the screen and noticed Rafi all confidential and close with Feidris, that sober-minded semi-pro player who felt so passionately about the Game. At first I blinked and backed up a step, afraid I had disturbed Rafi in a rare moment of intimacy, but before my eyes averted fully my brain made sense of what I was seeing and I swung back inside, furious.

‘Give me that,’ I snarled, gripping Rafi’s wrist to make him open his hand.

If it hadn’t been for my time with the shadow networks I wouldn’t have recognised it, but when I prised apart his fingers far enough to get a good look, it was unmistakable. Feidris dithered between flight and fight, but as soon as I got my glimpse I backed off, momentarily nonplussed. Rafi quickly flicked the diamond case to Feidris, who caught it and glared at me threateningly for a moment. Then two other Wallrunners came behind the screen and we all quickly assumed relaxed expressions and postures. They weren’t fooled; they noticed the strange tension immediately, but Rafi’s reputation had been set and their curious looks at the three of us quickly became smirks. I guessed the day’s gossip would be about the stunted Ntshune trying to control his gifted but fast Terran friend. Which, in a manner of speaking, was an accurate assessment of the actual situation.

I dragged him away from practice early and took him the only place I knew we would not be overheard, up in an aerolight over the Metropolis. It was a double pleasure to discover that flying made Rafi uncomfortable.

‘You see, this proves you should be working on your three-dimensional sense,’ I said, happily taking a sharp bank around an Academe tower. At the edge of my vision, I saw him go taupe with fear and nausea, and I levelled off quickly so that any gastric ejecta would fall on his side of the aerolight, preferably in his lap and not on the windscreen.

‘Do you know what you gave to Feidris?’ I asked him when I was sure he could safely open his mouth.

He grimaced. He didn’t want to talk but he knew he would have to or never walk the ground again. ‘Payment.’

I froze. I didn’t expect that. ‘What?’

‘Payment. Feidris did three full runs in a turn.’

I hit him across the head. ‘That was an etched fullerite diamond! That’s not bonus pay for a pretty bit of Wallrunning, that’s speculation pay. Betting.
Illegal
. Who gave it to you? Who are you running for?’

Rafi winced, but there was no space to cringe away in the tiny cockpit. ‘It goes to his coach and the whole team. Not just Feidris.’

‘That’s
still
not bonus-level pay. Answer me!’

He folded his mouth and I lost my temper. I let the aerolight stall, fall and spin, recovered with ease and waited patiently for him to stop screaming.

‘You’re going to kill us both over something like this?’ he managed finally, his voice still in the upper register.

‘The Galactic League doesn’t like speculation, Moo.’

‘The Galactic League is
running
the speculation, Tinman! How are you so stupid?’

I went silent and sullen for a couple of minutes, then my curiosity overruled my irritation. ‘Keep talking.’

He explained it all. I could not believe I had been wasting my time feeling sorry for this boy. He was using the Wallrunning training and his connection to Syanrimwenil to let rival coaches (by which I mean coaches other than Baranngaithe) know who to check out, who could consistently deliver fast, full runs, eye-catching acrobatics and spectacular falls. They recruited accordingly, even drafting up short-term contracts, and came up with bet scenarios. Rafi took the information back to Ixiaral, who let Varyai spread the word to her shadow network. When the speculators got the result they wanted, they paid a cut of their winnings to Varyai, and thus to Ixiaral, to Rafi, the coaches, the players and everyone involved in the whole mess. I suspected that Ixiaral got the largest portion and I told Rafi so with great cynicism.

‘Yes, because she needs it,’ Rafi said. ‘They all need it. And before you ask me what it’s needed for, you speak to Ixiaral. And you’re no better than us, with your below-ground shadow-market dealing, so don’t pretend to lecture me on what’s illegal.’

After indulging in a quick roll to take the edge off his insolence, I relented and flew us home, giving him a gentle landing in semi-apology. He was right, after all. I had my own back-door doings, and although I wasn’t hurting anyone, it could look suspicious if certain facts were presented in a particular way to the authorities. We held the power of disclosure over each other; it made no sense to quarrel. Even my leverage over Rafi as his essential could be weakening if Ixiaral was paying him under the blanket for little errands run and other favours. I had to be careful. I could already feel a shift in the balance of credit between us, and that shift was not in my favour.

*

Rafi told Ntenman, swearing on his word and his credit, that he would take him to see Ixiaral within two Standard days, then made himself scarce for several hours, privately furious at his friend’s aerial antics. He sent a message to Second Lieutenant Lian, who kept to roughly the same sleep-wake cycle as he did, and the reply made him smile and relax slightly. A quick journey on the Slowline and he was in the courtyard of Academe Bhumniastraya. There, the staff relied on the indigenous succulents, scrub and rock-based fungus to decorate their exterior gardens. The inner pathways were crafted in patterns of rock, sand and firm-packed earth, and the walls of the tower were the same material as the outer shell – grey and fully opaque at first glance, layered like shingles or armour on closer inspection.

He went through unchallenged; he was known and he knew where to go. The Academe had felt familiar from his first visit, entirely Cygnian/Terran in design. Their work section was divided into communal spaces and closed-room offices with actual desks, shelves and cabinets, plus screens that hung from the ceiling and displayed flat images on their surfaces or holos in the space between two screens. There were fewer chairs than he expected – desk height varied to suit those who would stand and those who preferred to sit on the floor. Lian was a floor-sitter and had a dedicated spot in Dr Daniyel’s office. Rafi stood before the office door and lingered for a while reading the notices and news on its screen, some of them referencing Cygnus Beta.

Lian put a stop to it by opening the door. ‘Why didn’t you speak to the door so it would let you in?’

‘Sorry, I got distracted,’ Rafi said, crossing the threshold and unconsciously looking around for something else to read as Lian got resettled behind the desk.

‘I’ve offered to lend you a handheld,’ Lian reminded him, sliding one across the desk.

Rafi sat down and took up the handheld, considered for a moment, but finally shook his head. With so many screens and surfaces available to plug into, he had grown accustomed to travelling light. His datacharm now held everything from Cygnus Beta, his audioplug channel gave him access to all he needed for Punartam and the still-useless comm on his wrist remained for purely sentimental reasons.

‘Well, before you leave, write something to your aunt,’ Lian said sternly.

Rafi composed his message and Lian returned to work. Several minutes passed quietly.

‘Finished,’ Rafi said. ‘How soon can you get it to her?’

Lian took the handheld from him and tapped the screen with a stylus, both avoiding Rafi’s eyes and failing to suppress a smirk of secret knowledge. ‘I can’t say exactly. It depends on the route. She’s probably got your first and third messages by now. Not the second, not yet.’

Rafi pretended to be unconcerned. ‘I’m not going to beg you to tell me.’ He had a fair idea; Lian’s connections with Academe Maenevastraya pilots meant unorthodox ways to send messages but also unreliable timing. He had a vague idea that some of them were involved in the same kind of experimental travel that Naraldi had pioneered, in which case he could only hope that his messages were reaching the Aunt Grace who actually shared a timeline with him.

He changed the subject slightly, looking for an opportunity to put Lian on the defensive. ‘What do you do exactly when Doctor Daniyel is away?’

Lian gave a strangled laugh and cast a weary eye over the several text displays attached to the desk and a handful of planetary holos hovering in mobile suspension between the desk and the ceiling. ‘Organise her messy notes. Prepare background briefs so she’ll know what she’s doing. It keeps me busy enough to get Maenevastraya off my back.’

Rafi forgot he was pretending not to care. ‘The pilots at Maenevastraya want you to travel with them?’

Lian looked startled, as if the idea had never come up, then thoughtful, as if unexpectedly interested by the possibility. ‘No, they want my help with some of the New Sadiri refugees. I used to be a trained medic and war trauma counsellor back on Cygnus Beta. Not the highest level – I didn’t have Galactic Patrol experience then . . .’ The words trailed off as Lian’s face grew even more thoughtful.

‘But now you do, so . . .?’ Rafi prompted.

Lian grimaced. ‘I said
used
to be. I’m not one now and I’ll never be one again, Maenevastraya pressure or no.’

‘I’m sure you have your reasons,’ Rafi murmured placatingly. Once more he found himself revising his opinion of Lian. The symptoms were the same: forced sociability, secrets half-hinted, abrupt lapses into silence and long periods of no contact counterposed by sessions of almost desperate amiability. Now, however, instead of blaming introversion and mild xenophobia, or clumsy Punarthai networking, Rafi wondered if the answer was the pure, simple, chronic stress of keeping too many secrets for and from too many people.

He changed the subject, relating a carefully edited version of his falling-out with Ntenman, not wanting to burden Lian with more secrets but so vexed that he needed to tell
someone
. Lian watched him speak with a quizzical frown.

‘Your friend is angry at you because you have friends that aren’t his friends?’

‘More or less,’ Rafi hedged, squirming slightly at the missing facts.

Lian did not press further but the frown became sceptical. ‘Include him if he’s feeling left out. Do you need more credit? Have you quarrelled to the point where you have to pay him back?’

It was a practical question, but it only made Rafi feel more ashamed, as if he were slandering Ntenman with his half-truths, and uneasy, because he was not in a position to discuss certain other sources of income. ‘I’m fine.’

The two stared at each other, almost friends, far from confidants.