Inferno

There had always been something hunted-looking about him, however much he might try to hide it with charm and smiles. These days, the charm was as strong as ever, but the hunted look was getting easier and easier to see. Chanto Grieg was a man who heard footsteps behind him, and was trying to pretend he did not.

And Alvar Kresh heard the footsteps just as loudly-and he could not afford to pretend otherwise. Dammit, he had to try one more time. He had to. “Sir, a word, just a quick word. Can we go back to your office for a moment?”

Grieg sighed and nodded. “Very well. It won’t do any good, but very well.”

“Thank you, sir. ” Kresh took Grieg by the arm and led him back up the stairs, back toward Grieg’s office. At least it had a proper armored door. No one could get in or out unless Grieg let them in.

Grieg put his palm on the security plate and the door slid open. They stepped into the room, a handsome, if spartan, chamber. Alvar Kresh looked around with more than passing interest. He had only been in here once before, briefly, years before, during some sort of signing ceremony Grieg’s predecessor had put on. It was, after all, a famous room. A lot of historic occasions in the life of the planet had happened here-back in the days when Inferno had history. The island of Purgatory had been the first part of the planet to be settled, centuries ago, and there had been some sort of Residence for the Governor on the island ever since. The current building was only a century or so old, but it still had the resonances of a planet’s biography.

A desk with a black marble top sat at one end of the room, the desk’s surface completely empty, not so much as a fingerprint on it. A vaguely thronelike chair stood behind the desk; facing the desk were two slightly uncomfortable-looking audience chairs, just a trifle lower than standard height.

Amazing. Alvar thought. Even here, in the private working office of the Governor’s winter vacation home, they had played the game.

A game that was a relic of the past, of the last century, as much as the room itself. Back then, Inferno’s architects and craftsmen were still at least willing to play up to the cultural mythology of the Spacers, even if they did not, strictly speaking, believe in it anymore.

Infernals were Spacers, and, the myths told them, Spacers were a proud and mighty people. in the vanguard of human progress. It was therefore fit and proper for the Governor who represented a planet of such splendid people to appear a little larger than life. Put him in a higher chair, arrange things so he looks down upon his visitors.

This place had been designed and built in the last century. These days, no one would even bother with all that nonsense. No one had the confidence, the arrogance, to pull it off anymore. No, that’s not quite it, Alvar told himself. It’d be closer to the truth to say they could no longer bring themselves to go through the motions. Back then they could still brazen it out. Even a hundred years ago, no one had believed the myth anymore, but they had all played along. Now, no one could even pretend to believe. And yet Inferno was covered with buildings of that era, palaces of thundering arrogance, constructed to demonstrate wealth and power and influence that had already been ebbing away when their first stones were being set in place. Inferno was full of rooms like this, symbols of power that had shriveled away, become no more than memorials to power.

There were other clues to show how much the state of affairs had changed, some of them in the form of things that were no longer there. No fewer than four robot niches lined the wall behind the Governor’s chair. Time was, the Governor could not be seen in public with anything less than a full quartet of robots in attendance. Now the niches stood empty. Governor Grieg rarely used even a single personal robot.

But the biggest clue was no doubt off in the far corner of the room, as far as possible from the Governor’s desk, as if no one wanted to put the terrible truth of the future too close to the glorious fictions of the past. It was a simglobe unit, smaller than the one back in Government Tower in Hades, but still sleek and impressive. It was a holographic display system that could display the planet’s appearance and condition as of any moment in its recorded past, or any moment in its future, projecting planet Inferno’s response to varying circumstances. The main projection unit was a metal cylinder about a half meter across and a half-meter high. It could display the globe of Inferno in hundreds of different ways, from short infrared to a false-color image of the projected humidity at two thousand meters above sea level a hundred years from now.

It was a Settler-built simglobe, of course. The Settlers made all the best terraforming and terraforming computation gear. In fact, they pretty much made the best of everything, these days. Except robots, of course. Robots were the only thing Spacers did better, and that was by default. No Settler wanted anything to do with robots.

Spacers were on the way down. The Settlers had passed them by, leaving them so far behind that they didn’t even consider the Spacers a threat. These days, Spacers were charity cases.

After all, the Settlers were here to help reterraform Inferno, supposedly out of the goodness of their hearts-though Alvar doubted that. And, most galling of all, the government of Inferno had no choice but to accept their help-or watch the planet die.

Grieg stepped into the room, turned his back on the grandiose desk, and sat down in the center of a low couch near the simglobe. Choosing the real future over the imagined past, Kresh thought. Grieg seemed to be putting on a show of being relaxed and at ease. He stretched out his legs in front of him and put his hands behind his head.

Alvar sat down in an easy chair facing the couch, but there was nothing easy or relaxed about his posture. He sat down on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, his arms resting on his knees. Donald followed a discreet distance behind Kresh and stood at the back of his chair, just far enough off so as not to seem to be intruding.

“All right, Sheriff,” Grieg said. “What’s on your mind?”

Kresh didn’t know exactly how to begin. He had already tried all the logical, sensible approaches, produced all the subtle, vague bits of intelligence that told him something was wrong without telling him what. None of it had worked. Tonya Welton’s vanishing attackers, and the false SSS agents, were the most concrete things he could point to-but even they were maddeningly unclear.

The hell with it, then. Nothing careful or reasoned. No recourse to rumor or vague whispers of threat. Just blurt it out. “Sir, I have to ask you once again to think about a lower profile here. This island-this whole planet-is in chaos. It is my professional judgment that you are placing yourself in extreme danger by attending this function. ”

“But the reception has already begun,” Grieg objected. “I can’t cancel out now.”

And up until now, you’ve put me off by saying you could cancel at the last minute if things got out of hand, Alvar thought. Typical of the man that he would try to have it both ways. But there was no point in saying that. “Plead off with a headache or something,” Kresh said. “Or just let me come out and take the blame. Let me cancel the whole party right now, blame it on a security alert. Blame it on the attack on Welton. I could say there was a threat to your life. “ That much at least would be true. Alvar Kresh’s desk was overflowing with threats against the Governor-half of them linked to this visit.

“But what in Space does an attack on Welton have to do with me?” the Governor asked.

Kresh told him about the bogus SSS agents whisking away the attackers. “It’s a very strange circumstance,” Kresh said. “It’s the sort of thing that seems like it should be a diversion-but a diversion for what? What is the direction we weren’t supposed to look in? I have to assume that it was related to you in some way.”