Transgalactic (27 page)

On the first deal he lost. On the second, he doubled his bet and won. He won ten consecutive hands before he folded his cards, withdrew his hand with its winnings recorded on it, and stood up. This was taking too long. The man who was sitting beside him, who had been winning a few hands and losing a few and generally coming out a bit ahead of the game, rose with him. He was middle-aged, with blue eyes and blond hair and an appearance of worldly wisdom.

“Don't get overconfident,” he said to Riley. “This may not be your lucky day when it's all over.”

“What do you mean?” Riley asked.

“You saw the sign outside: Everybody wins. That's the way it is. This is a happy place, where people come to relax and enjoy a risk or two. It wouldn't be very happy if they lost.”

“The games are fixed?” Riley said.

“Not fixed. Just friendly. When these buildings were built, before they were reconstructed from historical records, the odds favored the house. Now they favor the bettors.”

“Doesn't that make it hard to stay in business?”

“Well now, that's not the system, is it? These days everybody's got enough of everything, but there's no excitement. Some people get it from risks in personal relationships or extreme sports or adventure. But not too much. That's the system: Raise the adrenaline but don't damage the organism.”

“I'd think the recent war with the Federation would be excitement enough,” Riley said.

“But that's over now, isn't it.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Riley said, and moved on to a table where gamblers were rolling cubes marked with different numbers on each side and laying down bets on which would come up first. That offered an interesting possibility, but the players were throwing the cubes themselves, and their unpredictable muscular contractions made anticipating their results impossible, though clearly they did not think so. He could, of course, control his own when the cubes came around to him, but that might take too long. He moved to a table marked in numbered squares. It had a wheel at one end and a mechanical arm that cast a small ball into the wheel as it was spinning. The players placed colorful plastic disks on the table squares, and when the ball settled into the same numbered pocket on the wheel they collected their winnings.

Riley watched the proceedings for a couple of minutes, placed a small bet on a black rectangle and won, and a larger bet on a similar red rectangle and won. Then he placed a big bet on number twenty-three. The ball on the wheel settled into pocket twenty-three. He moved his entire winnings to number eight. The ball settled into number eight. The wheel stopped spinning and the arm, poised to cast another ball, froze in place. The other gamblers at the table frowned and turned to look at Riley. He shrugged and felt a tap on his shoulder.

The man who had spoken to him earlier was standing in back of him, along with two much larger men, one on each side. “Maybe this is your lucky day after all,” the man said. “The manager would like to speak to you.”

*   *   *

The manager was a woman sitting at a large glass-topped desk. Pictures and numbers flickered across its surface. The room was large, paneled in a light-colored wood, and carpeted in pink. The woman was dark-haired and blue-eyed, like Asha, with a face that was strikingly beautiful, though it was a beauty that seemed more manufactured than natural, and the expression on it was unfriendly.

The two large men left the office. The man who had spoken to Riley in the gaming area remained, standing behind Riley and leaning against the paneled wall.

“You seem to have a knack for this sort of thing,” the woman said. Her voice was uninflected but Riley thought it carried a note of disapproval.

“It is a game of chance,” Riley said.

“Not for you,” the man behind him said. “You're a card counter.”

Riley didn't look at him. The woman was the decision maker. “What's that?”

“You keep track of the cards remaining in the deck and bet accordingly,” the man said. “That increases your chances of winning.”

“That's the point, isn't it? To calculate the odds of cards coming up and bet accordingly?”

“Yes,” the man said, “but some methods of calculation tilt the odds too much in favor of the bettor.”

“That doesn't seem fair,” Riley said.

“It's okay to win,” the man said. “But when you never lose—”

“I'll try to lose more often,” Riley said.

“That isn't the point—” the man began, but the woman cut him off.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I'm just a poor, broken-down ex-soldier from the human/Federation war,” Riley said. “Just released from a Federation prison-world and returning to my home system for rest and recreation.”

“And yet you have a large credits balance,” the woman said.

“Back pay,” Riley said.

“We could understand the black-jack business,” the man said. He sounded as reasonable as he had in the gaming room. “What we couldn't figure out is how you managed to pick out consecutive winning numbers at the roulette table.”

“You mean the one with the spinning wheel and the table with numbers on it?”

“You've never seen one before?” the woman asked with a note of disbelief.

“I was raised on Mars,” Riley said. “But there's nothing to return to there. And we didn't have the luxury of idle time or idle games.”

“You don't have any apparatus on you to control the wheel,” the man mused. “You were scanned when you came in, and you don't have anything like that on or in your body. And yet you were able to pick out two winning numbers in a row. Do you know the probability of that?”

“Pretty small,” Riley said, “if it's just a matter of chance. But if you include a bit of science—”

“Science?” the woman said.

“You know,” Riley said, “the rate at which the wheel spins and the force with which the ball emerges from the automated arm—”

“You calculated that?” the woman said.

“When you've spent ten years calculating the speed of enemy ships, the speed of projectiles, and the angles at which they both are moving, it becomes second nature,” Riley said.

“I find that difficult to believe,” the woman said.

“Maybe you aren't trying hard enough.”

“In any case,” the woman said, “we think you might be interested in an employment opportunity.”

“Working in the casino?”

“No. We've been asked to identify people with unusual skills or exceptional luck for a research project.”

“What kind of research?”

“That isn't included in the information we were given. But it ought to appeal to an ex-soldier without skills or prospects.”

“So,” Riley said, “am I free to go?'

“You are,” the woman said, “and a much richer man that we don't want to see here again, or anywhere else on the Strip. You will find an address and an invitation on your identity implant. It also includes your winnings. It would be in your interest to investigate.”

“I'll think about it,” Riley said and turned to leave, brushing past the man with the worldly wise expression.

Maybe the news of his odds-defying winnings would reach Asha, he thought. But it had certainly reached the Pedia, and it was apparent now that the Pedia was searching for people with unusual abilities and talents. But for purposes that, as yet, were unclear. He had an invitation to find out.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The ride through the night of the island nation once called Sri Lanka (and before that Ceylon, Taprobane, and Serendib) passed in silence except for the remarks by Latha's son describing the spectacular waterfalls that they could see if they ventured off the highway—Bopath Ella, Katugas Ella, Rajanawa, and particularly Kirindi Ella, the seventh-highest waterfall in the world—and if it were not night and they did not need to reach Ratnapura before Latha discovered that Asha was gone.

“She seems so pleasant,” Asha said. “It's hard to believe she would send people after me—even if she could.”

“She is a wonderful woman,” her son said, “and she has the serenity of a river, but like the waterfalls that stream so beautifully from on high, they splash with great force when they reach bedrock.”

They passed wildlife preserves in the night with only the ancestral trumpetings of elephants and the screams of panthers testifying to their existence along with the smells of forests and decay that wafted from their depths. Finally they descended into the valley that held the ancient city. The early-morning light in the valley revealed irrigated plantations of tea plants and rubber trees, although these days cultivation was performed by machines. Ratnapura, however, was named and best known for its gems, Latha's son told her. The name meant “city of gems.” The plentiful rainfall and the streams that threaded through the surrounding fields brought gems down from the mountains, and generations of Sri Lankans had panned rubies, sapphires, and cat's-eyes from the riverbeds, and merchants sold them in the street of gems.

“The gem seekers still come,” Latha's son said, “even though the market for gems of all kinds has fallen to almost nothing now that gems can be manufactured. Tourists still search the streams of Ratnapura province and visit the street of merchants to haggle over purchases that amount to little more than nostalgia on both sides.”

At last, in the early morning, the broadcast-powered two-wheeled vehicle pulled to a stop in front of a coffee shop in Old Ratnapura. “Here is where I drop off the recording of Latha's comments,” Latha's son said. “There are hotels and rebuilt old homes nearby that accept guests. I don't want to know where you plan to stay, if you choose to stay at all. Then I will not need to lie to Latha, only tell her that you wanted to leave and I took you, as an act of hospitality. She will be angry, but she will forgive me because I am her son, and it will pass if she does not find a way to bring you back into her embrace.”

“Don't worry,” Asha said, dismounting stiffly after the long discomfort of the ride. “But does her reach extend so far?”

“Farther than anyone suspects.”

“Even the Pedia?”

“Her connections are never called upon until they are needed and then only for specific tasks.”

“Very clever,” Asha said, “and yet—”

“The Pedia is clever, too. I know that. And yet we try. I pass Latha's recorded comments to a coffee-shop attendant who does not know what they are, and they are poisoned with a code that seems as if it had been inserted by some troublemaker after the comments were posted.”

“The Pedia is cleverer than that,” Asha said. “It understands all subterfuges because it is the master of subterfuges.”

“We know that,” Latha's son said. “We have a bargain, the Pedia and the Anons: We pretend to sabotage the machine, and it pretends not to notice. But it makes Latha happy, and when Latha is happy we all are happy.

“Stay out of Latha's reach, and we all will remain that way.”

Asha nodded and walked away down the street of gems, admiring the jewels displayed in the windows. Created by machine or the long process of nature, they were remarkable distillations of chemistry and color. A few minutes later, she returned to the coffee shop, ordered a cup of coffee and a Sri Lankan breakfast pastry, and logged onto a coffee-shop connection, using an identity card she had never used before. She scanned the major news items. Now that the human/Federation war was over, there was little news labeled major; in a Pedia-organized world the Pedia kept anything disturbing within its own circuits. She switched to human-interest news and comments, like those that Latha had told her about. At last she came upon an item from a restored city in the ancient state of Nevada once known for its gambling establishments. Someone—a former soldier in the war with the Federation whose identity and location were presently unknown—had placed bets on consecutive spins of a roulette wheel and won a considerable amount of credits.

Asha went through the comments section again. The postings were endearingly personal and trivial. Among them now was the material that Latha's son had brought. It seemed innocuous—a description of Latha's just completed visit to research establishments on the moon and their progress in finding new uses for antimatter and discoveries about the Higgs boson, dark matter, and dark energy; progress on immunizing space travelers against alien bacteria and viruses; and developments in genetic treatments for human ailments, including genes that limit the human life span. And, at the end, Latha's description of her trip in the climber back to the mountaintop in her native Sri Lanka and her comparison of the old and the new, side by side. The comment did not mention Asha.

It took only a few moments for Asha to insert, at the end of Latha's comment, a brief description of the remarkable person Latha had met on the climber's return to Earth—a survivor from the
Adastra,
the first generation-ship voyage into interstellar space.

And then she booked passage from Ratnapura to the ancient sea-coast city once known as San Francisco, which was now totally inundated by the rising ocean and the city moved inward to the place once called Oakland.

*   *   *

The mid-morning sun had broken through the clouds by the time Asha left the coffee shop, and she had only two hours before her supersonic air vessel departed. With the Pedia, it was best to move rapidly, and she hoped to have arrived in the ancient seaport city before the Pedia had pieced together the bits of information that she had been compelled to drop, like scraps of a love letter, along the way to reunion with Riley. But fate, as it often does, had other plans. Outside the coffee shop, six men were waiting for her, four of them large, muscular, and bearded, two of them not much more than slender striplings, but all of them looking at her as if she were prey.