HE WANTED THE MUSIC TO COME BACK
1562 4D
Andrew Luce. That was it. Luce had stonewalled Arlen‘s properties staff when they’d approached him about buying his land, the land lying above an extension of the great vein of actinides. Luce‘s brothers were slowly yielding to the misfortunes Arlen had arranged for them, but Andrew Luce was a fighter. Arlen smiled. This might be fun.
“Arlen, look at this.” Carchesme beckoned frantically.
“Wait.” Arlen waved her off. “Superintendent, have Luce brought up here to me. Go with him, you two, and make sure it happens.”
“Yes, Arlen.” The superintendent, flanked by the two guards, headed out to the tunnel entrance.
“Arlen, it’s going wild. Something big is hitting it here, and it’s getting bigger.” Carchesme‘s eyes were wide; she hand-combed her shock of hair and straddled the fender of the detector’s transport track.
The datascreen showed a high swell of yellow, sinusoidal ripples cascading from its peak down toward the flat areas of the display. The display scale had deepened to cover a ten-times-higher range of energies. The whole contour and complexity of the display matched, exceeded the holo of the music. Arlen leaned closer, excited. “Can you get a direction on it?”
“We have a low-resolution dipole between here and here.” Carchesme aimed her arms in opposite directions, one through the tunnel’s inner end and the other out through the tunnel entrance.
Arlen swiveled to the stoneshaper. “We need that for drilling, right now.” He pointed at the inner end of the tunnel.
“No, Arlen, that’s the weaker end. The strong end is out that way.” Carchesme pointed out the tunnel entrance again.
“It’s coming from space? Thin air? Is that damn thing working or not?” Arlen confronted Carchesme. This bitch had better make her brains live up to her looks.
She backed away a step. “It’s working. Remember, we can be as much as thirty degrees off. It might be in the mass over the tunnel, or under it. In an hour we’ll have a fifteen-degree fix, and in two hours more it’ll be seven degrees.”
He shrugged, frustrated. “By then the source might be gone. Stay on it.” Silhouetted against the tunnel entrance, four men approached him. They must have brought Luce. Arlen strode to meet them.
A man of medium build, well-muscled, stood between Arlen‘s two guards. His face, lined and weathered with the exposures of mountain farm life, carried a frown; black hair tumbled across his brown forehead. He didn’t wait for an introduction, but started speaking in a resonant, City-accented voice raised to penetrate the noise of the mine. “Your runoff is killing my cattle.”
“No one sold you clean water. You get what’s there.” Arlen smiled.
“What was there was fine until you redirected your drainage, just the way you did with my brothers.”
Arlen shrugged. “I offered you plenty for your land.”
“I like my land.”
“And I like my mine. I’m not changing anything for you. Deal with it. My offer was good. It’s not extended to you any more.” Arlen waited to see what Luce would say to this. The reply did not please him.
“I filed a complaint with Regional Oversight.” Luce glared into Arlen‘s eyes. “They’ve notified me they’re sending an audit team here. In the meantime I’m asking you to redirect your used water away from my land.”
This would mean some heavy expense in bribes and legal maneuvering. Regional Oversight reported directly to the Regional Minister, and Arlen had no leverage in the ministry. Arlen fumed silently for a heartbeat. A hand touched his left arm. He turned.
“Arlen, it’s going crazy.” Carchesme turned her back to the group, drawing Arlen with her. “It’s him.”
“What?”
“This guy who just came in. The signal readout correlates with his movements too well to be accidental. Inverse square law as he approached.”
“He’s no ore body.”
“I know that. But the detector is almost at overload, and he’s still fifty meters away.” Carchesme‘s hands trembled.
“All right. Go back and tend it, track him. I’ll try an experiment.” Arlen turned back to Luce and the others. Maybe there was a simple answer to all this, right here in his hands. This man had come all alone. “Luce, come with me. I want to show you something.”
“I’m not interested in your mine. I’ve got a family and a farm to keep me occupied.” Luce folded his arms.
“It’s definitely relevant to that,” Arlen said. It would be too bad if he had to treat this man like an andro. Better to offer him a hint of hope, and watch him seize at it. “Humor me. This is important. At least give me some room to show you why things have gone this way so far.”
“As long as it’s relevant to what I’m asking,” Luce said, uncrossing his arms.
“Come on.” Arlen led Luce past the detector, nodding with feigned calm as Carchesme gestured madly from high on the tank‘s side, warding them away. What was this man carrying?
They passed into a side tunnel, then down a spiral stair to a short tunnel, passing a steel door into a round chamber, domed to five meters, and seven meters across, pillared across its center. A water line and sink were connected in through a small borehole. To the left of the sink was an indentation in the wall where Arlen‘s miners had dug out the stone with the microscopic culture.
Arlen leaned to the superintendent and whispered, “Tell Carchesme, the tall woman on the detector tank, that we’re in the T-chamber. Have her get a reading on direction and intensity. Don’t come back down here — we’ll be back up shortly.” Anticipation swelled — maybe the music would return.
The superintendent nodded and left. Luce surveyed the chamber, lighted dimly by fibercable. Arlen closed and locked the door, and gestured to his guards. “Luce, this will be relevant to your farm and your hopes. What have you found on your land that makes it so valuable?”
“Were you going to show me something?”
“Just answer my question.” The guards drifted over to flank Luce. They did this so well.
Luce said, “Oh, I see. This is your answer. You want me to give up.”
“Not at all. You’re different. I don’t care if you give up about the farm. I just want an answer to my question: what have you found? New ores?” Hard to keep the eagerness out of his voice. This kind of pursuit had such a sexual feeling to it: slow pressure building, building, to where there would be sudden breaking, yielding, and then… Arlen shifted in anticipation.
“What? No. I had a couple of old cores assayed, but there was nothing.”
“You’re lying.”
“You can check the records at the land office. Now let me go.”
“When you tell me why you refused to accept my offer.”
“You mean I’m a prisoner?”
“You still hold the key.” But he wouldn’t take it, Arlen knew.
Luce shrugged, then lashed out so quickly that even Arlen‘s guards were taken by surprise. A foot in the left one’s groin, a pair of fingers in the right one’s eyes. Perfect. Arlen let a flash of anger fuel his own reaction: a kick that caught Luce under the chin as he returned to stance, throwing him onto his back.
As Luce lay at his feet, Arlen said, “We will have a long conversation about this, elsewhere, at leisure.” He placed his second kick squarely at the side of Luce‘s head.
His guards came slowly to their feet, massaging afflicted spots. “Get to the superintendent’s office and wait for me,” he told them. “Tell Doctor Progarnes I would like to get a tissue sample from a subject up here.”
What was in Luce‘s body? Arlen wanted the music to come back; he felt in his pocket for the lengths of fine wire he carried. Tying this man’s hands and feet excited him, and he didn’t want to be disturbed.
