Meanwhile, Loaf asked, “How far beyond a purse?”
“Without a buyer, who can say? A pounce at least. But who in this People’s Republic has wealth enough to buy it, or would admit it if they did, knowing it would just be taken from him?”
“Why is this a problem?” asked Rigg. “The jewel merely has to be sold privately, to someone who would value it without declaring to any other what he had.”
“But the price would be drastically discounted. Instead of fifty purses, no more than five, and in all likelihood less than that. Perhaps only two.”
“What about a consortium?” asked Rigg. “Would the three of them together undertake the purchase and the sale?”
“They might, if I suggested it. Perhaps a partnership among the three, with me as well.”
“Thereby converting your commission into a share of profit?”
“Unless your lordship disapproves,” said Mr. Cooper.
“I’m not a lord—or at least if my father was, he never told me so. Please call me Master Rigg and nothing more.”
“Of course, sir,” said Cooper.
“I see we’ll have to stay here longer than I intended. But I expect you to make this happen as I have described. I imagine that a jeweler in Aressa Sessamo will secretly sell the stone for a bargain price of three purses to a private party, and pass along two-and-a-half purses to this partnership you speak of, and you will credit me with two purses, telling me that you’re each making only a spill apiece.” Rigg said it with a smile, and shook his head at Mr. Cooper’s protests. “I have no quarrel with everyone’s taking a profit that makes their fortune, Mr. Cooper,” Rigg replied.
“I can hardly agree to this no matter how much I might make,” said Cooper. “The jewel is beyond price.”
“And yet I must have a price for it.”
“Even if it all works as you predict, Master Rigg, you will be getting only one twenty-fifth the true value of the stone.”
“My father certainly knew it would be hard to sell when he passed it on to me. If he had valued it more highly than the price the thing will fetch, he would have taken it with him.”
They all looked at him in shock and consternation.
“I was making the joke my father would have made. He could not take the jewel, so he left it to me. I cannot use the jewel for anything but money, and I need that money. So this precious ancient artifact will bring its money value, not the value of its fame. Meanwhile, I’ll have to wonder how the hero’s prize found its way into my hands, for my father cannot tell me now. Get busy, Mr. Cooper, and make this happen as quickly as you can. Here’s your incentive for speed: You will pay our lodging costs out of your personal profit from the sale, and not from mine.”
Cooper smiled. “I was already going to propose that.”
“I thought you didn’t like that three-quarter percent,” said Rigg, still smiling.
“You were generous to a fault, by normal practice, sir,” said Cooper. “It was yourself proposed the consortium, and I saw no reason that the jewelers should make a fortune, while I made do with my three-quarters of a point—which would have been a lovely sum, if I hadn’t known of others profiting much more.”
“I know of profit, too,” said Rigg, “and I begrudge you none of it. I only ask that these terms be kept as secret as the buyer’s name, so I don’t get a reputation for gullibility. And be sure of this: I will find out, in due time, what the private buyer paid, and if my portion is less than two-thirds of the amount, I’ll be back to see you, and if all I bring are lawyers, you’ll be fortunate.”
Rigg said it all so cheerfully that one might almost miss the fact that it was a threat of bloody retribution. Cooper responded just as happily, but he missed no part of the threat.
After he left, Rigg turned to Loaf at once and said, “Your fee, too, will be higher.”
“My fee will be what we agreed on,” said Loaf.
“If I had known what these jewels were worth, I would never have agreed to pay you so little.”
“And if I had known what the one jewel was worth, I would never have agreed to take you here at all,” said Loaf. “I know now that I was out of my depth before you ever showed Mr. Cooper the stone. This is all too high for me. The fee we agreed on was fair, and it’s still fair today.”
Rigg made no further protest, for he was reasonably sure that when they eventually discussed this with Leaky, she would agree instantly that a much higher fee would not impoverish Rigg—and was justified by the greater risk Loaf had incurred without knowing it. Why argue with Loaf now, when Leaky could do the arguing with him later?
In the end it took nearly two weeks for the consortium to be formed. Meanwhile Rigg, Umbo, and Loaf became more familiar with the taverns, restaurants, galleries, shops, parks, bookstalls, libraries, and other recreations of O than any of them had wished. But the wait seemed worth it when the sale was made for more than Rigg’s rough estimate, for his portion was three purses for himself.
On the last day, Rigg came from Mr. Cooper’s bank with a glimmer and twelve lights, one of which Rigg had asked him to convert on the spot into 120 fens—the rate of exchange in O between the River coinage and the People’s coin.
He also had two documents, signed by witnesses. One was a letter of credit for two purses, which Rigg would put on deposit in a bank or banks in Aressa Sessamo, whereupon the funds would be transferred—probably without ever actually passing through O or Cooper’s bank at all.
The other document was a certificate of deposit for one purse at three percent, secured against all of Mr. Cooper’s personal assets, which were partly enumerated. In effect, Rigg had bought the bank and leased it back to Cooper at an annual rate of return of three percent; if he demanded any portion of it back and Cooper could not (or declined to) pay, this document gave Rigg the right, without court action, to seize by force any and all of Mr. Cooper’s possessions.
Trust between friends was a good thing in business, but nice tight legal documents helped keep the friendship true despite long absence or far distance.
And in Rigg’s mind, as surely it was also in Loaf’s and Umbo’s, was the knowledge that he still kept tied to a ribbon around his waist another eighteen gems of whatever value they might be. They could not all be famous relics of the ancient past. Rigg might have chosen, by random chance, the only gemstone in the bag with a value greater than a spill or two. But even that would be enough to buy every stick of property in Fall Ford without even noticing the expenditure. It was wealth beyond their ability to calculate. If Rigg wanted to spend it all he wouldn’t know where to begin; he thought he could spend a fortune every day for his whole life without exhausting it.
Then again, his definition of “a fortune” had just undergone a change, and he was sure that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably waste it all. That’s what Father said: “There is no rich man so unfortunate as to lack for friends who are eager to spend his money for him.”
But so far, at least, Loaf and Umbo were not that kind of friend. The money frightened them. They still joked with him, yes, and they laughed together; but they also kept apart from him at odd times, and seemed surprised and even grateful when he paid ordinary attention to them.
Talking about this change in them would only make it worse, because they’d feel he was judging them now and finding them wanting; it would make them more awkward, more eager to please.
All Rigg could do was be himself and never speak to them in the way he had spoken to Mr. Cooper and the jewelers and the lawyers he had worked with to make the deal come through.
Truth be told, Rigg had come to enjoy his pose as a man of wealth and power, and to watch these men treat a thirteen-year-old boy with ridiculous deference. It occurred to him that if he really was of royal blood, as Nox had said, and if that still meant something under the People’s government, he would probably have grown up thinking he deserved the treatment he was getting.
But he knew—had Father not warned him
?—that he must never value himself for the money he owned. “It can all be swept away,” said Father. “Money only retains the value that society places on it. Many a man has thought he was wealthy, only to discover that in the collapse of his nation or the inflation of the currency, his money was now tinscrap, and himself a beggar.”
Since that very thing had happened to thousands of noble families after the People’s Revolution, Rigg took the lesson to heart. Money is a thing separate from a man, Rigg knew. “I wasn’t born with it, I won’t have it when I die, it’s all temporary.”
Yet even as he told this to himself, he felt the warm glow of knowing that he would never have to worry about money again. That separated him from most people in the world. It was impossible to have wealth like this and remain unchanged, and he knew it. He could only try to make sure the changes were neither too extreme nor all to the worse.
CHAPTER 8
The Tower
Ram thought about it sitting, standing, walking, lying down. He thought about it with eyes closed and open, playing computer games and reading books and watching films and doing nothing at all.
Finally he thought of a question that might lead to a useful bit of information. “The light of stars behind us—blue or red shifted?”
“By ‘behind us,’ do you mean in the spatial position we occupied moments ago? Or in the direction of the stern of this vessel?”
“Stern of the vessel,” said Ram. “Earthward.”
“Red shift.”
“If we were moving toward Earth, it should be blue-shifted.”
“This is an anomaly,” said the expendable. “We are closer to Earth with the passage of each moment, and yet the shift is red. The computers are having a very hard time coping with the contradictory data.”
“Compare the degree of red shift with the red shift when we were in the same position on our way to the fold.”
The expendable didn’t even pause. It was a simple data lookup, and to a human mind it seemed to take no time at all.
“The red shift is identical to what was recorded on the outbound voyage.”
“Then we are simply repeating the outbound voyage,” said Ram. “The ship is moving forward, as propelled by the drive. But we, inside the ship, are moving backward in time.”
“Then why are we not observing ourselves as we were two days ago on the outbound voyage?” asked the expendable.
“Because that version of ourselves is not moving through time in the same direction as we are,” said Ram.
“You say this as if it made sense.”
“If I started crying and screaming, you’d stop taking me seriously.”
“I’m already not taking you seriously,” said the expendable. “My programming requires that I keep your most recent statements in the pending folder, because they cannot be reconciled with the data.”
“It’s really quite elegant,” said Ram. “The ship is the same ship. Everything about it that does not need to change remains exactly as it was on the outbound voyage. It occupies the same space and the same time. But the flow of electrical data and instructions through the computers and your robot brain and my human one, and our physical motions through space, are not the same, because our causality is moving in a different direction. We are moving through the same space as our earlier selves, but we are not on the same timestream, and therefore we are invisible to each other.”
“This is an impossible explanation,” said the expendable.
“Come up with a better one, then.”
This time the expendable waited a long time. He remained completely still while Ram deliberately and without hunger pushed food into his mouth and chewed it and swallowed it.
“I do not have a better explanation,” said the expendable. “I can only reason from information that has already been reasoned from successfully.”
“Then I suppose that’s why you needed a human being to be awake after the jump,” said Ram.
“Ram,” said the expendable. “What will happen to us when this ship reaches Earth?”
“At some point,” said Ram, “either the two versions of the ship will separate and probably explode, or we will separate from the ship and die in the cold of space, or we will simply reach Earth and continue to live backward until I die of old age.”
“But I am designed to last forever,” said the expendable, “if not interfered with.”
“Isn’t that nice? Expendable yet eternal. You’ll be able to go back and observe any part of human history that you wish. Watch the pyramids being unbuilt. See the ice ages go and come in reverse. Watch the de-extinction of the dinosaurs as a meteor leaps out of the Gulf of Mexico.”
“I will have no useful task. I will not be able to help the human race in any way. My existence will have no meaning after you are dead.”
“Now you know how humans feel all the time.”
• • •
They were at the docks, all their new clothes packed and the trunks ready to be loaded onto a much better grade of boat, when Rigg looked back at the city of O. From here, he could barely see the tops of the white stone buildings over the ramble of houses and warehouses near the wharf. But he remembered what he would see again as the boat pulled farther and farther from O.
“We’d be fools, wouldn’t we,” said Rigg, “if we spent these weeks in O and never visited the tower.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Loaf. “But you were determined to go as soon as the money came in.”
Rigg wanted to say: Then why didn’t you advise me to see it? But then he remembered two things: First, Loaf had said, in a hinty kind of way, things like, “All these pilgrims heading for the tower—what do they care for the city?” and “People live here in O all their lives and never visit the tower.” This was not at all the forceful way Loaf used to give advice, so Rigg didn’t hear it as counsel, he heard it as mockery of the pilgrims and the locals.
And second, this was exactly the kind of change that Rigg dared not criticize for fear of making it worse. Loaf was treating him now the way he treated wealthy customers who by some bit of ill-fortune were reduced to stopping at his tavern. Deference bordering on cringing was the order of the day—Rigg saw it in the people who served him in his lodging house, and he saw it in Loaf as well, a side of him that had never surfaced before, not even when he and Leaky found the jewels.
They had known they were worth a lot of money, but had not been able to conceive how much; nor had they really believed that Rigg was capable of holding on to his wealth. Hadn’t Loaf come along precisely so Rigg would not be cheated? He had said more than once, “Looks like I wasn’t needed after all, you handled them just fine,” and each time Rigg would reassure him that without Loaf there, no one would have taken Rigg seriously at all—he would have lost everything as soon as someone reached out to take it. “I’m not a fighter, Loaf—you are. So they’d look at you, and then they had to listen to me.”
But Loaf only believed it for a moment, if at all. He was in awe of the negotiating skill Rigg had shown. “You sounded like an officer,” he had said.
Well, if sergeants gave such limp, irresolute advice to their officers, it’s a wonder anybody ever won a battle!
So Rigg made no argument with Loaf’s mild I-told-you-so. “You did say it was worth seeing, didn’t you,” said Rigg. “Well, let’s see it now.”
It took only a wave of the hand to have a coachman bowing to Loaf, who was still as forceful as ever when dealing with people he regarded as his equal or lower. In a minute Rigg, Umbo, and Loaf were inside a coach, their luggage left in the care of the boat’s captain.
It took two hours to get to the Tower of O—one hour to get through a mile of maze-like streets leading to the nearest city gate, and the second hour to go the five miles along the road to reach the base of the tower. The road they took was really the cleared area outside the city wall, intended to force an enemy to come uphill, fully exposed to projectiles from the defenders of the city, so they stayed s
o close to the wall that they could not see the tower at all until suddenly they rounded a bend and there it was, looming over them, looking as tall as Upsheer Cliff.
“But it’s not as tall,” said Umbo, when Rigg said so. “We’re two miles away, and the cliffs don’t look like that until you’re five miles back.”
“It’s the tallest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Loaf.
“You need to come upriver more,” said Umbo. “Become a true privick.”
“The ambition of my life,” said Loaf.
The stream of pilgrims coming and going made it impossible to bring the coach as close as they might have wished. “Just as well,” said Loaf. “You need to let me and Umbo go ahead and make our offering for three people, or the keepers of the tower will get one look at you and triple the price. Or more.”
“Then I’ll pay the coachman—I’ll pay him enough to wait for us. How long does it take in there?”
“Never long enough,” said Loaf.
“Enough for what?”
“To see it all, or understand what you’re seeing,” said Loaf.
Loaf and Umbo alit from the carriage—that is, Loaf stepped and Umbo fairly leapt from it and ran on ahead. Rigg talked to the coachman, who kept saying, “I’ll be here waiting, young master, see if I’m not,” and Rigg kept saying, “But let’s agree on a price or you’ll think I cheated you,” not adding “or vice versa,” and the coachman would reply, “Oh, young master is generous, I seed that right away, I trust in young master’s generosity,” which was enough to make Rigg crazy. He looked over and in the near distance saw Loaf and Umbo talking to one of the extravagantly uniformed tower guards, and wondered if they were having half the trouble he was having getting a price set.