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The man sitting at the
dining table looked like an aesthete or an ascetic. He was
rail thin, with chemically smooth, melanin tanned skin drawn
close over the hollows of his temples and jaw. Regen-treatments,
cheap and freely available, had made traditional old-age,
with its decrepitude and bodily decay, a thing of the past
but there was still an air about the terribly old, the sense
of thwarted entropy hanging around their shoulders. His
narrow elegant hands - such a contrast to the fat
sausage-fingers that he sported in old news pictures -
picked fastidiously at the simple meal of broth and water
and laid out in front of him.
It was not the Onasis
Lane that Tunley had expected to meet.
"I dislike
disappointment," Lane said. He took a sip of water,
grimacing as it went down like it was sewage. Tunley,
served from the same jug, had never tasted water so sweet
and pure. Lane dabbed his lips with a handkerchief and
looked around at his assistant. "What happened to the last
man who disappointed me, Karen?"
Karen consulted her
datapad.
"You had him bisected
and each half sent to opposite sides of Federated Space,"
she said. "Perhaps two of them would find what one of them
had not. You have promised to reunite them if they
succeed."
Land spooned a mouthful
of broth between grimacing lips.
"Really? I was feeling
merciful that day."
Karen closed the file on
her datapad and opened another with a tap of a wire-enhanced
nail. "He had been a reliable source in the past," she
said. "You didn't want to waste him."
"Unlike this gentlemen.
I'll have to think of something...impressive. We wouldn't
want people to imagine I'd softened."
A bubble of sourness
burst in Tunley's belly. He glanced at Karen quickly,
hoping for support. She just stared back at him with cool,
green eyes in a narrow, unexceptional face. He gulped
water, washing the taste of bile down into his stomach.
"You won't be
disappointed," he said.
Land lifted a spoonful
of broth, turned the spoon and let the pale liquid splatter
back into the bowl.
"Be sure of that," he
said, leaning back. "There's little that doesn't disappoint
me of late."
Tunley caught himself
rubbing his sweat-damp hands together and made himself
stop. He breathed in and out.
"A bottle of Eridian Ice
Wine," he said.
His heart stalled in his
chest. Everything hung on this moment. Everything. If
Land wasn't interested after all...
Land raised his head and
stared at Tunley with glittering eyes. That familiar,
legendary smile stretched his mouth till it threatened to
split the tender skin.
"Tell me more," he
breathed.
Onasis Lane was not a
rich man. Rich men were a dime a dozen after the diaspora
from Earth. They owned companies and cruise-liners,
spaceships and governments; they appeared on lists that
graded just how rich they were and scrabbled to keep the
press from finding out their dark secrets for fear it would
destroy the base of their wealth. Onasis Lane owned planets
and he owned the rich men who owned the governments. And he
didn't have any dark secrets that he feared exposing to the
world, his depravities were public knowledge and there was
nothing to be done about them.
One hundred and fifty
years ago it had been Onasis Lane who had perfected the
space-drive that made the diaspora possible. A controllable
dimensional rift generator that shunted space ships along
dimensional fault lines where the laws of time and space ran
differently. Space travel was possible without it, but slow
and by the time you got where you were going Lane's ships
would have already been there.
His competitors tried to
create their own of course. So did the Federated Earth
Council, reverse-engineering the technology in hidden
black-ops bases around the world. They all failed. A lot
of them died too - in explosions and gas leaks and after
setting off dimensional mines that - blorp - swallowed up
the scientist, the lab and roughly a mile of the surrounding
countryside.
"The generator itself is
surprisingly simple," Lane said in an interview. He sat
opposite the pretty blonde interviewer and smiled toothily
at the camera. A handsome man with his wavy blonde hair,
ascetic features and half-moon glasses for that scholarly
air. It was only his smile that spoiled it: aloof, soulless
and hungry as a manticore. "It was ready five years before
I revealed its existence."
The interviewer blinked
her wide, shiny eyes and waited for the auto-cue to catch up
with the sudden change in topic.
"Five years?" she gasped
suddenly. "Why wait so long?"
The shark's smile
widened until it seemed certain he'd reveal a second,
hidden, set of teeth. Lane leant forward as if he was about
to confess something.
"The booby traps," he
said cheerfully. "I made sure that anyone trying to find
out how the generator worked wouldn't live to talk about
it."
A year later he married
the interviewer in a quiet registry office on the moon. She
lasted five years, until she was nothing but a shell of
flawless skin and practised smile with her insides all eaten
out. Her death at one of the Land factories in Brazil got
higher ratings than any of her other TV appearances. No-one
knew exactly what happened, anyone close enough to see was
dead, but the likeliest explanation is that she deliberately
opened up a rift and just left everything fall through it.
Brazil was missed, but
in a rare charitable gesture Land gave any survivors an
already terraformed planetoid for their nuBrazil.
He didn't marry again.
The ennui that plagued him had already begun to set in. His
appetites were vast and obscene. Even the least of them
would have kept a normal man occupied for a lifetime in
attempting to explore and sate it. Land, however, could buy
whatever and whoever he wanted. The opposition to him
drugging the nuns of Cahron IV and indulging in a six week
orgy with them was easily bought off. When no civilised
planet would permit his genetics lab to set up and create
his designer mythoforms he simply bought and terraformed an
asteroid, populating it with centaurs and gorgons and sad,
simple things that thought they were gods.
One hundred years ago,
his every lust indulged till it disgusted him, he retired to
Land's End, the space ship that orbited Olympus. For a time
his scientists amused him by dredging up every book on
mythology they could find and creating increasingly bizarre
beings for him: little orange men with tentacled limbs,
hollow women with their limbs on backwards.
Even that palled in
time.
His appetites, once
prodigious, became refined. Quality instead of quantity.
The most obscurely skilled courtesans, men and women who
specialised in the erotic potential of the spine or the
fingertips, were brought from across Federated space. He
cultivated a reputation as a epicurian, eating only the
rarest and most difficult to prepare foods. To enable his
new hobby he purchased the tongue of the foremost gourmet
his researchers could track down. For doctors used to
tending the ills of hollow women and faux-gods it was a
simple matter to transplant a tongue. Or later, when he
interests included wine, a palate.
Yet, as with his baser
hungers, it was too easy for him to acquire even the most
bizarre of gourmet delicacies. Cannibalism was a taboo with
little force when his geneticists could force grow mindless
hunks of flesh. An entrée of lightly braised immature
Morciosin nymphs, a life form suspected of being on the cusp
of sentience, sated him for only one meal. The protesters
in their ancient, jury-rigged crafts were little obstacle to
men whose employer knew the codes to set off the booby-traps
in the ship's engines. His procurers ranged throughout
Federated space and beyond into the unexplored territories,
bringing back ripe purple fruits that wept when pierced and
things that looked like humans on the outside but were full
of a crisp green flesh. And even if you returned alive from
your adventures, bearing some new fruit or flesh to braise
or sauté or roast, there was still Land to contend with. It
was not enough for his meals to be odd or unique, they must
also be a delight on the tongue. Success was generously
rewarded; failure was inventively punished.
One month later Karen
led a limping Tunley from the station's docks and up through
the levels. The stink of sweat and singed flesh filled the
narrow metal tunnels, caught and circulated through the
vents. It had not been difficult to acquire the wine - a
susceptible wife, a set of unguarded keys and a fast ship
were all he needed - but pursuit from the previous owner had
been dogged.
They ended up in the
same dining room with the man himself sat waiting at the
table. Karen nodded politely almost a bow, and slipped
away.
From the looks of Land
he could have been sitting there since Tunley had left; his
eyes were bruised and sunken, his lips parched and peeling.
He had fasted for his
treat.
"You have it?" he asked.
Tunley reached into his
pocket and pulled out a small bottle. It fit neatly into
the heart of his hand, barely larger than a perfume bottle.
The glass was dusty blue, bubbled through with flaws, and
the cap held in place by layer of lead stamped with the
Eridian winery's seal.
"That's it?" Land's
voice was hoarse. His hands flexed against the desk,
fingers flattening against the wood.
"Yes." Tunley handed it
over. "Eridian Ice Wine, vintage 2201."
Land lifted the bottle
reverently, turning it between his hands. The thick liquid
within was just visible within the bottle. Even before
their competitors had released the virus that would destroy
the Eridian winery vines that bottle would have gone for
over a million credits. It had always been rare. Now, this
was likely the last bottle in existence. It was priceless,
or would be but for men like Land.
"My money?" Tunley said.
His question was
dismissed impatiently, a swipe of thin fingers dismissing
such concerns as secondary.
"Soon." Land ran his
nail over the lead, scraping it across the stamped seal.
"Once I've tasted it."
Karen came back into the
room with a silver tray set with a crystal glass and bowl,
flowers of frost blooming on the carved thin sides. She set
it reverently in front of Land and stepped back, exactly two
paces.
The seal cracked under
the pressure of Land's nails and peeled away from the bottle
in brittle strips, discarded on the ground. He carefully
twisted the cork free and raised it to his lips, sniffing
and then tasting the stained surface. Tunley held his
breath.
"It does not seem
spoilt," Land said.
That was enough to twist
a sigh of relief from Tunley. His throat closed up again as
Land poured a dribble of sweet, maroon wine into the frosted
glass and drank swirling the sweet liquid over his stolen
tongue and pressing it against his bought palate. He closed
his eyes. Tunley bit his lip hard and Karen leant forwards,
watching the reaction. Land's eyes opened, wide and he
spat, splattering priceless wine and clots of blood over the
table.
Too late.
"You..."
He clawed at the table,
sending glass and wine crashing to the floor, and tore his
nails down to the quick. Veins bulged in his forehead and
spit frothed at the corner of his mouth. His lips peeled
back in a grimace that showed his teeth all the way to their
bloodless gums and his throat bulged in a desperate attempt
to push a scream over paralysed muscles.
The poison was quick but
not painless.
Land went limp and
slumped over the table, head hitting the seasoned wood with
a crack. A fortune in wine soaked the floor.
"How did you poison the
wine?" he asked.
Karen knelt and lifted
the glass, the frost patterns melting under the warmth of
her palm. Her smile twisted through the crystal.
"I didn't. I poisoned
the glass." |
