The Last Master Read online

  The sharks congregated around the mass. At first they merely fed. Then, abruptly—so abruptly that Ett suspected that some drug or chemical had been introduced to the water around them—the sharks went into a feeding frenzy, a mad swirl of sinuous bodies in which they bit and tore not only at the food but at each other.

  And finally the barrier between the two sections split open, drawing aside to left and right into the sides of the pool.

  It took a moment or two for the sharks to discover the dolphins. But by this time the original quantity of meat had already been gulped down, and shortly the frenzy became pool-wide. Swifter than the sharks, and many times as intelligent, the dolphins evaded the thrashing appetites for some minutes. But soon one of them was slashed, then another—and the beginning of the end was on hand.

  Looking away from the pool at the people in the bleachers around him, Ett saw—or thought he saw—the same faces he had seen staring down at the gym floor where the two fencers dueled with sharpened weapons in the Sunset Mountain. A kind of nausea twisted inside him.

  He got up and walked away from the bleachers. After a few moments—as he neared the wall—he felt a touch on his arm. Rico was with him.

  “He’s still at the—show,” Rico said. Only the slight pause showed that he had any reaction at all to the scene they had just witnessed.

  “Good,” said Ett, turning to face him, in a position from which he could see any approaching person. “Is he your contact?”

  “He’s the one,” Rico said.

  “He’ll be a problem.” Ett paused a moment, then continued.

  “If he can tell us what we need to know, he can also tell the Auditor Corps what we’re interested in.”

  “That’s true,” Rico said. “And we don’t have any hold on him.”

  “No,” Ett said. There was silence for a moment. Then the fat man appeared in the mouth of the passageway through the bleachers.

  “Follow my lead,” Ett said quietly.

  “We can talk now,” the fat man said from a distance. “Come on.” He waved them onto an intersecting course which brought them all together near a door at the end of the pool area. The toothless man opened the door—another of the locks always to be found in an underwater establishment—and led them through it and along another tubular corridor.

  At the end of the corridor they passed through another lock and into a single large room, which was evidently the entire inside of a small dome. The room contained a pool, and at poolside was the furniture of a fairly complete office, including desk, office equipment and terminals, and several grav-float seats.

  The pool here was partitioned into eight sections by transparent dividing walls that went down to the bottom and rose out of the water a good twenty feet—higher than a bottle-nose dolphin could jump, particularly with no more than three meters of water below them in which to make its preliminary dive. At the far end of each section was a metal gate leading to a water lock and the open sea.

  Each section of the pool held a dolphin. Several of these surfaced as the humans came in and swam forward to push their heads onto the near edge of the pool by the desk. The twittering of their voices lifted in the air of the poolside office.

  “How do you like that?” said the fat man, waddling forward to drop onto a grav float behind the desk. “Sit down. No, I say, how do you like the way they come up to the edge for me like that? They’ve got a pretty good idea I’m going to end up shifting them into the other tank and that for some reason they’ll never come back. But they still like to be talked to. And if I fell into one of those pool sections, do you think the one in there would hurt me? Never. Probably he’d try to hold me up instead, until I could climb out at the edge.”

  He broke off, fastening his eyes on Ett.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, adding, with a blubbery twist of his lips, “Mr. R-Master?”

  Ett said nothing.

  “Didn’t think I’d know, did you?” said the man. “But that’s my business, knowing things. That’s why you’re here, because I know things. Well, let me tell you, Mr. R-Master, you don’t impress me. I don’t need you or your money or your special position. None of it makes any difference to me. All the same, I’m willing to do business.”

  “Good,” said Rico, calmly and quietly. “Your name is Shu-shu, I’m told? And you’re a free-lance ombudsman, as well as being manager of this place?”

  “You know what I am,” said Shu-shu. He was still watching Ett. “See that brown stud on my desktop, Mr. R-Master? One touch and the gates at the far end of the sections’d be open, and the water lock would let them out. All these little prisoners of mine, they’d go free. Wouldn’t you like to push that stud? But of course I can’t let you do that—not for any amount of credit.”

  Rico’s voice was still as soft and polite as the voice of an answering service.

  “I must ask for your attention, Mr. Shu-shu.”

  “Just Shu-shu. Never mind any titles.” The fat man turned his attention finally to Rico.

  “Shu-shu.” Rico’s voice went on as if he had never been interrupted. “It’s unusual for a freelance ombudsman to have another occupation, if he’s any good at free-lancing.”

  “I’m pretty good.” A little bit of spittle moistened Shu-shu’s lips with the effort of pronouncing the p. “But this is my hobby, this place with its dolphin-shark fights. Anyway, if you don’t want to trust what I can tell you, you can stroll on out of here.”

  “Of course,” said Rico, “of course. But an F.L.O.—a free-lance ombudsman—is someone who hires himself out to help other people, to stand in line for them, to pound on official desks for them. To help them. Naturally, he’s paid, but you assume there must be some basic kindness in such an individual. You, on the other hand, seem to enjoy putting on your shark-dolphin fights.”

  “Mr. Erm,” said Shu-shu, leaning far back on his float, “I think you’re beginning to bore me. I don’t believe I want to tell you what you and your pet R-Master want to know, after all. The door’s right behind you. Good-bye.”

  Rico, however, made no attempt to get up. Instead he turned to Ett.

  “Sir,” he said in the same polite voice, “this individual is obviously a sadist. I assume he keeps his vices within regulations or the EC would have picked him up long ago. But I think we can safely assume he wants to do business more badly than we do, not for the dividend units involved, but because he receives a certain stimulation from the purveying of information, just as he received stimulations from managing the slaughter of sea creatures that are all but human in their own right. On the other hand, our own schedule is rather tight and he’s already wasted some minutes of our time. I suggest we leave.”

  Ett stood up.

  “Wait,” said Shu-shu, himself rising behind the desk. “Just a minute.”

  “Perhaps, sir”—Rico glanced at Ett—“we could give him another two minutes, no more?”

  Ett sat down. Shu-shu dropped back onto his own grav float, almost panting.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “All right! Of course, I don’t break regulations. I don’t have any information I shouldn’t have. But I don’t have to. Being an ombudsman I hear things, from my clients and from others—”

  Rico glanced at the chronometer on his left wrist.

  “All right,” said Shu-shu hastily. “Here it is. It seems to me I’ve heard of certain constructions, originally done very quietly about thirty years ago but added to at intervals since, under the Museum of Natural History buildings in Manhattan, New York City. Of course I’ve entirely forgotten how that information came to me. It might have been part of something I dreamed one night.”

  Rico and Ett got to their feet.

  “Now, if you’d like to retain me for possible help as a free-lance ombudsman, my retainer is five thousand units.”

  “A voucher will be sent to you. Not from one of us, of course,” murmured Rico.

  “Just as long as I get paid,” said Shushu. He
reached out and touched a white stud on his desk. “Now, just for the record, if I could record the purpose of this consultation—the purpose for which you needed me as ombudsman?”

  “Yes,” said Ett, leaning forward. “I’d like to promote a regulation to make dolphins a protected species as far as their use in any shows are concerned.”

  Shu-shu laughed—and broke off laughing suddenly as Ett reached over to press down the brown stud the other man had pointed out earlier. The button went down under Ett’s finger. The gates at the far ends of the section began to open.

  Shu-shu reached with both hands for Ett’s finger.

  “Don’t try it,” Ett told him, “unless you want to get your face rebuilt.”

  Shu-shu looked into Ett’s brown eyes and sagged backwards into his seat, lips pressed tightly together. Ett was no longer concerned with what the man might see or think, and he felt his own lips draw back from his teeth as he stood up and leaned over the desk, reaching for the fat man behind it.

  Ett was breathing fast now, and his skin felt slightly warm. The fires he had buried so long were coming to the surface, rising in his head like volcanic lava, burying his restraint. He saw what was coming, in a vision flashing at the back of his brain—an anger that might very well consume the man before him—and he found himself welcoming it, eager for the release.

  The fat man fell from his grav float chair, onto the concrete surface, and, propping himself up with both arms, stared up at Ett. A large drop of spittle formed on his lower lip and began to run down his chin—Ett saw it clearly as he moved to the side and then around the desk.

  Suddenly Rico was there, between them, obstructing Ett’s view of Shu-shu—looking up into Ett’s eyes, saying nothing. Ett moved sideways as if to get around the smaller man, grasped him by the shoulders, and lofted him lightly over the desk. It seemed to Ett as if everyone were moving in slow motion, and in a preternatural silence; he could feel the play of the muscles under the skin of his shoulders, and it exhilarated him. He laughed.

  Shu-shu had already arisen, and when Ett broke his silence the sound seemed to galvanize the fat man. He turned and ran towards the door by which they had entered. But when he had gone three steps he blundered into a small wheeled table that held a terminal. Before he recovered, Rico had gotten beyond him and was blocking his access to the door itself. Shu-shu stopped, looking at Rico.

  “I’m afraid we can’t allow you to leave us, Shu-shu,” Rico said. His voice was as smooth and polished as ever, but now his eyes seemed to glint. “We have to make sure you won’t go to the Auditors, you see.”

  Shu-shu turned to face Ett again, and his face seemed to crumble in on itself, the blubbery lips twisted in now, in a parody of a large infant about to bawl. Then the fat man sank to the concrete floor, closing his eyes and covering his ears with large, doughy-fingered hands; and lay curled up there, quivering.

  Ett found himself standing over the man, not really remembering how he had moved there. His gaze lifted to the pool, and he saw the last of the dolphins flash out through the gate and into the water lock that would take it to freedom. He sighed, and looked back down. Rico now faced him on the other side of the supine Shu-shu.

  After a silent moment Ett stepped around Shu-shu and headed for the door, Rico following—after a short stop at the fat man’s desk and some button-pushing there. Neither spoke, until they were through the door and into the tube, heading back to the main dome.

  “That was very impressive,” said Rico. “I believe you may have frightened him into something close to catatonia. And by the time he’s likely to come out of it, we’ll be on our way with our plans.“ He paused, but Ett remained silent.

  “You even had me scared, for a while there,” Rico said, watching him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The red-and-white intercontinental craft fell to the pad on the island at precisely 10:13 a.m., local time, and two minutes later the lean, balding figure of Dr. Fernando James Garranto y Vega emerged, glittering in full transparent oversuit and moving at a good eight-kilometers-an-hour walk.

  “Mr. Ho?” he asked briskly as Ett stepped forward to meet him. His voice echoed a little, coming through the breathing filter of the hood. “Come along, take me to the patient. We can talk as we go. I’m due back in Sao Paulo early tomorrow.”

  “I appreciate you coming,” Ett said.

  “I’m glad you do. I say that not for myself but in the name of my other patients.” They entered the refurbished wing of the estate’s main building, where Wally’s capsule was housed. “I can appreciate—I say appreciate—the fact that you have good private reasons for asking me to come here for the revival rather than bringing your brother to me. But the time coming to your island here is spent at the expense of someone else who also needs my services.”

  “I repeat,” said Ett, “it had to be this way, and I thank you.”

  “Very well. Through here?” said Garranto, stepping into the outer antechamber to the operating room. “Good-bye. I’ll talk to you later.”

  The door closed behind the physician. Ett quickly moved up and around to the panorama window which gave a full view of both the antechambers and the revival arena beyond. He saw Garranto standing in front of the microwave plate which was disintegrating the oversuit that had kept him germ-free during his walk from the intercontinental to this operating theater. Dr. Carwell could be seen off to the side, saying something to the specialist while avoiding contact that might contaminate his clothing. The suit gone, Garranto nodded to Carwell and stepped quickly into the inner antechamber, where six other gowned figures waited for him. Carwell moved to another door, which led to another view window.

  “Gentlemen, I know you all, I think?” Garranto’s voice could be heard now from the main theater—someone must have turned on the audio system. “Yes, Keyess, Tuumba, Martin… there’s no one who hasn’t worked with me before? Good. You all know your positions, then. There is no change from the situation I outlined for you all earlier. Shall we get to it?”

  He led the way into the large, metal-and-plastic revival arena, and his team followed him, moving to their places without a word. They spread themselves out at the posts of their equipment, looking for all the world, Ett thought, like mysteriously-hooded priests of some arcane ritual. The idea made him uncomfortable, and he could draw no relief from the sight of the shiny metal cylinder that held Wally—which held the place of honor, the center of attention, like an alloy altar.

  Three of the men removed the upper surface of the cryogenic chamber, while Garranto watched aloofly. The other team members moved in to help with the long process of thawing the body, and removing the special cryogenic solutions from it—and still Garranto only watched. Only when the process of locating and repairing physical damages to the body began, did he step forward—and then not as obvious director, but rather as merely one member of the team. At some point in the process the sound from the arena was cut off once more, but Ett, watching, did not notice.

  For a long while there was little for him to see, yet still he kept to his post at the window. He could not be sure when the actual process of reactivation of Wally’s bodily processes would begin—the heart of the effort—but he felt he had to be there. He was in the grip of an obscure penitential feeling that somehow demanded that he remain on watch, sharing the time with Wally—as he had shared so little before? he wondered.

  Finally the now-warm shape of his brother, once more breathing though in the care of a variety of mechanical aids, was floated out of the arena. It would remain in the next room during the initial recovery period. This was the time when they would discover how much remained of the Wally that had been before the RIV, and before death and suspension.

  Ett turned away from the window and almost fell over. Abruptly, all the fatigue, the aches and pains that he had forgotten as he stood watching what was being done to Wally, came swooping back to possess him, multiplied by the strain of his unrelieved watch, and by the cold and the stra
ins of his trip to the domed city—a trip he had returned from very nearly unconscious. He tottered like an old man and almost fell, but a hand went around his waist, and an arm steadied him, strong and sure. He looked down, expecting to see Al’s hand; but it was Maea.

  “Where’d you come from?” he asked thickly.

  She looked at him strangely.

  “I’ve been here watching, with you,” she said.

  She was helping him now, down the hallway and around the corner, as he made his heavy, uncertain way out of the wing and back to his own room and his own bed surface. It was a long trip, and neither of them said anything, until at last he fell on the bed and lay staring at the ceiling.

  “You stood there too long,” she said.

  “Yes.” He heard his own voice, talking now from a long way off. “Too long. I’ll get a little sleep now—a little sleep.”

  He heard her footsteps going away. The room dimmed, and there was the sound of a door closing. But he did not go immediately to sleep. Instead he hung there, on the precipice edge of slumber, realizing finally that his determination to bring Wally back to life had been more than a mere desire—it had been a compulsion. If the world had been allowed to get away with killing Wally, it would have proved itself a real enemy after all, and Ett would be deeply guilty of letting it conquer his brother while he stood aside. But now everything would be all right. He had paid back… what? His exhausted mind could not form the idea of what he had accomplished. It was something like paying an old debt. Something like that…