The Last Master Read online

  “And the black-haired lady?”

  “I don’t believe I know who she is.”

  “Who’s St. Onge?” Ett asked. “I suppose I should say, what’s St. Onge?” He watched Rico closely.

  “An auditor, Mr. Ho. For the Earth Council. Auditors are responsible only to the Accounting Section Chief.”

  “You mean Wilson?”

  “Mr. Wilson, yes,” said Rico. He looked at Ett a little strangely. “You certainly know that the EC Auditor Corps has the responsibility of uncovering and arresting offenders against the guidelines of the GWP forecasts. For that matter, the black-haired young lady could also be a member of the Auditor Corps—open, or undercover. But as I say, you must know all this.”

  “No. How would I? I’ve lived on minimum subsistence almost all my life.”

  “The work of the EC auditors is necessarily classified under Security,” said Rico. “It’s good manners not to refer to the fact that a person is an auditor.”

  “Oh?” said Ett. “As an R-Master, how do I rank compared to an auditor?”

  Rico laughed a little. “Of course there’s no such thing as rank,” he said. “But naturally, there are always people capable of being trained as EC auditors, and the few R-Masters in the world are the result of accident.”

  “Fine,” said Ett. “Do me a favor. Step over to those three people and ask them if they’d do me the kindness of joining me at my table. Explain that I’m a brand-new R-Master and that the occupation of EC auditor fascinates me.”

  Rico got half to his feet, then hesitated.

  “Mr. Ho,” he said. “If I might suggest—”

  “Don’t suggest,” said Ett gently. “Just do it.”

  Rico nodded, straightened up all the way, and went off to a corner where small floating aircars nuzzled the edge of the dining pad, waiting to convey diners from the pad to the elevator at the base of the bubble, or from pad to pad. A second later, Ett saw him in one of the cars, sliding across through the open air to the pad on which Maea Tornoy sat with Patrick St. Onge and the unknown girl with the black hair and the face of a cameo beauty.

  Rico landed on the outer edge of the pad and walked across toward the three. Before he had quite reached the table, though, Maea stood up abruptly and left the other two, hurrying off in the opposite direction from that in which Rico was approaching, and vanishing among the leaves of a jungle garden in the middle of the pad. Thus, when Ett’s secretary reached the table, only the two were left there. Ett watched as Rico stood and spoke to them, and their heads turned in his direction. He smiled and beckoned. Their heads nodded—at least St. Onge’s did—and turned back to Rico. There was a little more conversation, and then, somewhat slowly, they both got up and followed Rico back to his aircar.

  A few seconds later, Rico had them at Ett’s table and was introducing them.

  “Mr. St. Onge, this is Mr. Etter Ho,” said Rico. “Miss Cele Partner, Mr. Ho.”

  “Good of both of you to come over and talk to me,” said Ett, when they were seated around the table. “I wouldn’t have imposed on you, but I saw you were friends of Maea Tornoy—”

  “Tornoy? Oh, yes, that was her name, wasn’t it?” St. Onge said, looking at Cele Partner. He glanced back at Ett. “I’m afraid I hadn’t met her before today, myself.”

  “Maea,” said Cele Partner, in a soft voice as attractive as the rest of her, “was working on the societal impact of deep-level gold mining in the Philippines at a time when I was there, and we got to know each other. I ran into her today in Lucerne and brought her along to lunch with Patrick.”

  “But she’s an old friend of yours?” St. Onge asked Ett.

  “Of my brother’s. He’s dead,” said Ett. He smiled at both of them.

  St. Onge smiled back. He was a lean, handsome knife of a man with a level mouth and level dark eyebrows over shadowed eyes that seemed as devoid of depths as the eyes of a hawk or an eagle.

  “It seems something almost like a misunderstanding has brought us together,” the auditor said.

  Cele Partner, who was sitting between St. Onge and Ett, reached out and laid a hand gently on Ett’s arm.

  “I wouldn’t have missed the chance to meet an R-Master on any terms,” she said. “There’s only a handful to begin with, and they seem mostly to be recluses. I’ve never met one—well, except for Malone, and he doesn’t count.”

  “Malone?” Ett said.

  “Lee Malone,” put in St. Onge, smoothly. “He was one of the first of the R-Masters. Actually, he’s more of a recluse than any of them—of you, I ought to say, Mr. Ho—but he shows up at World Council Center every so often to agitate for some wild idea or other that couldn’t possibly be put into effect.”

  “He’s not right in the head, then?” Ett asked.

  “Well… you can’t really say that,” St. Onge smiled. “His ideas aren’t impossible—just impractical. He’s eccentric, rather than… something else. And he is an R-Master, so the Council always listens to him.”

  The tall man’s note was light and amused, but Ett’s alert perceptions—for some reason they seemed keyed up for this encounter—caught what he felt was a shade too much casualness about the explanation. He also found himself wondering why this other R-Master’s name should come up in conversation between strangers so quickly. Was he being probed to see if he was also likely to be—what St. Onge termed “eccentric”?

  “Never mind Malone, though,” said Cele. “As I say, he doesn’t really count. They mustn’t have had the RIV properly developed back in his time. I want to know about you. Tell me, what’s it like being an R-Master? What does it feel like?”

  “Truthfully,” said Ett, “I haven’t been able to notice any difference in feeling so far.”

  He smiled back at her. It was not the first time someone of the opposite sex had seemed to take an immediate interest in him—but something inside him stood on instinctive guard in the case of Cele Partner. He felt—for what reason he could not say—that the interest she showed was not to be counted upon. At the same time, the touch of her hand, the scent of her perfume, and her startling beauty stirred him, made him breathe a little faster and more deeply, in spite of the instinct for caution inside him. It all served to push the low-level physical discomforts he was still feeling out of his consciousness.

  “Tell me about yourself—about yourself before you took RIV,” she was saying.

  And he was complying…

  Chapter Six

  It was probably an hour or more, but it seemed only a few minutes before St. Onge reminded Cele that it was time for both of them to leave. Her black hair shook in rich, thick waves as she protested the need to depart—she was enjoying Ett’s company thoroughly, she said—but she allowed Ett and St. Onge jointly to pull back her chair, and stood up.

  Parting ceremonies took a few minutes more, but then the dining pad was the sole province of Ett and the ever-silent Rico Erm. And that made the whole vast cavern of a room seem rather dull, Ett thought, though in fact the highest of beautiful society glittered on the pads all across the Tower.

  No sound from those tables could penetrate the pressure walls that separated them one from another. Ett picked at his meal, which he’d hardly touched while Cele and St. Onge were with him, but realized he had less than no appetite—in fact, the food seemed rather distasteful. Another RIV side-effect? he wondered.

  The clink of his silverware on the china seemed offensively loud in the silence, and he threw down his napkin atop his plate, shoving his chair back from the table a bit. Across the table from him, Rico Erm looked ready to depart at any moment, but not eager—of course, never eager, thought Ett. That would hardly be competent.

  Ett looked across the table at the secretary, wondering how much the man had read of Ett’s reactions—to Cele, to St. Onge, to being an R-Master—and what he made of it all. Or perhaps he hadn’t seen it, or didn’t care, for there was no sign on the other man’s features to show he understood that anything more than a pol
ite and pleasant lunch-table meeting had taken place.

  Ett watched Rico Erm a few minutes longer, but gained no information from the bland face, not-quite-smiling before him. And it occurred to him to wonder just who Rico Erm was here to serve.

  Pushing his chair back and sideways, Ett punched at the service button. Then he addressed Rico.

  “Now,” he said, “I’d like to go to Hong Kong for a little gambling.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ho,” said Rico.

  When the secretary returned Ett was lounging back in an easy chair, several meters from the table, with a wide-mouthed bell glass of cognac in his hand and his feet on an overstuffed hassock. Ett looked relaxed and comfortable. He had barely touched his drink, though, and his eyes were focused out the window.

  “By the time we reach the intercontinental they’ll be ready to go, Mr. Ho,” Rico said.

  Ett nodded and pulled his gaze from the lights of Italy which dotted the night—except for parts of the ocean—as far as he could see. He arose and they went.

  In less than an hour they were back in the intercontinental liner—at least Ett presumed it was the same vessel they had come in, although it could certainly have been switched for an identical one—and rising into the night on a Hong Kong trajectory. Once more Rico had vanished and Ett was left alone. He closed his eyes and leaned back.

  The image of Cele Partner as she had laughed and watched him came before him, her cameo face white against the frame of black hair. He frowned and shook his head slightly, without opening his eyes, wondering how she could do this to him. Perhaps this was another thing that RIV had done to him—certainly he had never been swept off his feet by any woman before the treatment…

  Of course, he had never encountered anyone like Cele before RIV, either. In fact, he had never imagined that a woman like that could exist in real life.

  Well, he told himself, it had been part of his reason for going to the Tower, that he see what the uppermost part of the social body was like, that upper part he had always ignored but now was going to have to live with, since he had become a part of it.

  And the other reason for his travels was to test the extent of the demands he could make on the funds and services of the World Economic Council—the Earth Council. So far, evidently, he had not stretched things to the limit. Well, Hong Kong might bring some reaction…

  A small sound nearby made him open his eyes, and he saw Rico in the act of putting down on the service table beside him a glass filled with some yellowish liquid that effervesced slightly.

  “Try this, Mr. Ho,” Rico said. “It should make you feel better.”

  “What makes you think I’m not feeling all right?” demanded Ett. In truth, he was slightly dizzy, and there was a small headache behind his eyes, which would not go away. Altogether he had a general physical feeling of cranky uncomfortableness. But he could not believe any of this had shown.

  “Merely a guess,” said Rico. “You had a bit to drink at lunch.”

  “To drink?” Ett stared at him. He had had two cocktails and part of a bottle of some sparkling German wine, which he had divided with Cele and St. Onge—Rico himself evidently did not drink. “What are you talking about? I’ve handled half a liter of rum between six p.m. and midnight and still gotten up at dawn to take my sloop across open ocean, without trouble.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ho. I’m sure. But that was before you had the RIV treatment.”

  Ett found himself glaring at the secretary. Even as he glared he had to admit what he felt now was at least very like the few rare hangovers he had experienced.

  “All right,” he said at last. “Is this part of being an R-Master, too?”

  “It seems to be common among R-Masters to react like that, Mr. Ho.”

  “Even if there’s something to what you say,” Ett said, “I don’t like medicines. I’ve told you that.”

  “It’s only an analgesic.”

  “No,” said Ett. He closed his eyes again.

  There was more faint movement. When he lifted his eyelids once more, a few minutes later, the glass had been taken away.

  He tried to sleep. But again, as on the flight from Hawaii, the easy slumber he had been used to all his life would not come to him. He barely dozed, fitfully running from memory to memory again. It was almost a relief when Rico spoke to him again.

  “We’ll be landing in two minutes, Mr. Ho.”

  ***

  The most elaborate, and therefore glamorous, gambling colony of the mid-twenty-first century was maintained in and about what had been for a long time the British crown colony of Hong Kong, and for a brief time an autonomous member of the short-lived Chinese Federation. Naturally, their presence meant that the area also had the best-supplied stores, the most expensive health clubs and spas, and—on the island of New Macao—the most fashionable beaches in the world. It was a place to get rid of dividend units, pure and simple.

  Biggest, and most famous, of the gambling establishments was the Sunset Mountain, a multi-level complex that climbed the sides of the 280-meter-high feature for which it was named, on Lan Tao Island. The complex included stores, health clubs and pools, and a great deal of hotel, restaurant, and theatre space, but they were merely sidelines to the main business of the Mountain.

  Ett swept through the lobby of The Dragon, the most exclusive of the hotel sections of Sunset Mountain, without stopping to check in. Rico had already arranged that, and they went directly to the best suite of rooms in the building, high up on the Mountain with a striking view of the new archipelago, aglow in the warm noon sun on the turquoise sea.

  Still feeling out of sorts, Ett proceeded to the health club for a short workout and a few laps of the pool. The exercise seemed to refresh him, but when he returned to his room to try to nap, he found himself in the same sort of mental treadmill he’d begun to grow all too familiar with. Finally he gave up and dressed once more.

  “Have you arranged credit for me?” he asked Rico in the suite’s main lounge.

  “Yes, Mr. Ho.”

  “And how much credit have I got?”

  “As much as you need,” said Rico.

  “Unlimited?” Ett looked more closely at his secretary.

  “For all practical purposes.”

  “Well,” said Ett, “let’s go see.” He’d decided that he might as well proceed with his experiment, regardless of the fact that the most popular hours for gambling activity had not yet arrived.

  The was the specialty of Sunset Mountain, renowned throughout the world. The size of a very large ballroom, it contained only one piece of gambling apparatus—which was a single vertical shaft, upon which were mounted, one above the other, a dozen transparent, crystalline roulette wheels, ten meters in diameter. The wheels rotated independently, two meters apart, and players could bet on the play of one wheel, in the ordinary fashion of roulette, or on more than one. Sociable players could bet and watch the play on vid sets, from booths and tables around the hall; but the more serious players rode in grav chairs directly above the wheels, looking down at and through them while a tote board on each chair kept track of wins and losses. The ultimate bet was on a series of numbers to come up in sequence on all twelve wheels.

  Ett went immediately to a grav chair and rode it up to the top level, while Rico came behind him in another chair. Floating above the wheels, looking down through the layers of crystalline plastic, Ett began to play. He went right to complex sequential plays, and bet heavily; and even though he was riding above the wheels, his attention was soon totally engaged by the displays of the tote board on his chair.

  The perversity of luck ran true to form. Ett, who had come just to see how much money Earth Council would let him throw away, began by winning. Ignorant of the various alternative bets he could make, he’d bet a series of numbers and hit the button for “Show.” And on his fourth wager, the numbers he punched in all showed up on one or another of the wheels—he had won; and because the odds in this room were so very large, he won an incredible
amount.

  He stopped his play for a moment while he consulted the Directory as to the rules of the play here, and determined that for his purposes he should be playing for a strict sequence of appearance of the numbers he chose. He returned to play.

  For practical purposes this roulette room had no house limit on the size of the bet, but that turned out to be only because the house limit was so large. Ett quickly found out that his tote board would not let him wager more than 50,000 dividend units at a time, although he could see the manager for an override. But he decided he preferred not to make his purpose as obvious as that; and continued, playing 50,000 units each time.

  By the end of a couple of hours word of his playing had spread through the casino, and a large crowd was on hand. Most of the other gamblers on the wheels had withdrawn from play, although a few began to try to ride with his bets. In those next hours he bet and lost an incredible sum of money—but twice in six hours he won an immense amount by hitting a partial sequence on the wheels.

  After the second of those wins the room was full of onlookers, although no one was betting now except the few who were still trying to ride his luck. At the moment he had won more than he had lost, by a small margin—but that was enough to strike up the rumor that he might in fact break the bank in the roulette room.

  The local gaming laws forbade the breaking of Sunset Mountain as a total entity. Other gamblers in other rooms had to be protected in their own right to win. But he would be allowed to break the bank in this room, if he could do so—and the bank in this room was estimated to be worth more than the combined total of the banks in all the other gambling rooms combined.

  Each time Ett had won on a partial sequence wager, it had taken him over two hours to get rid of those winnings again. Those two partials alone, and the size of his wagers, were enough to set the crowd buzzing; for a while they bothered him, but eventually he had shut them completely from his mind.

  And shortly after midnight, when he was almost two million dividend units into his credit balance, the buzz turned to a dead silence, quickly followed by a full-throated roar. Ett had hit the jackpot—won a full-sequence wager.