Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [159]
"Never mind," Alpha told him almost kindly, "it's better than Angalia. Actually the full name is Angalia! with an exclamation point at the end. It means Watch out!"
"Dare I ask what that means?" Blaize inquired.
"It means," Alpha told him, "that the scenery—unlike that of Bahati—doesn't stay put."
Blaize and Polyon stared at one another, briefly companions in misery.
Polyon was the first to recover himself. "Oh, well," he said, turning back to the game screen, "you see the value of information, Darnell—and the fact that it isn't always in the Galactic Datasource. And some of the information that isn't—ah—publicly available—is the most valuable of all." With delicate gestures he nudged the joyball while the fingers of his left hand tapped out codes to enlarge and strengthen Thingberry's magical net. "You need to think of ways to trade for that kind of information. For instance, your shipping company—such as it is—could offer discreet transport for parcels that don't get on the cargo list, or that go by a slightly misleading name—in some cases, disinformation or the lack of information is as valuable as actual data."
"Who'd want that?" Darnell objected. "And who cares, anyway? Can't we just play the game?"
Polyon favored him with a dazzling smile. "Dear boy, this is the game—and a far more rewarding one than SPACED OUT. Why, I can think of any number of people who might want a—suitably discreet—cargo carrier service. Myself, for starters."
"Why you?"
"Let's just say that not all the metachips going off Shemali are going to be in the SUM rationing board's records," Polyon said.
"So? What's it worth to me to oblige you?"
"I could pay you back with Net contacts. I can work the Net like no hacker since the days of the first virus breeders. It's an unsecured hedron to me. How soon could you rebuild OG Shipping if you knew ahead of time about every big contract about to be let in Vega subspace . . . and what your opponents' sealed bids were?"
Darnell's pout vanished to be replaced by a look of stunned calculation. "I could be rich again in five years!"
"But not, I fancy, as rich as I could be from selling metachips," Polyon murmured. Thingberry's web glistened on the screen above him, strings of jeweled light looping and floating above the play icons on the surface of Asteroid 66. "What would you say to a friendly wager? The five of us to meet and compare notes, once a year—to see how we're each doing at making lemonade out of the lemons of assignments our dear families have landed us with? Winner to take a twenty-five percent share in each of the losers' operations—business, goods, or cold credits?"
"When do we decide to stop and make the final evaluation?" Darnell asked.
"Five years—that's the end of most of our tours of duty, isn't it?"
"You know it is," said Alpha quickly. "Standard tour. And," she went on under Polyon's firm gaze, "I think it's a marvelous idea. I've got my own plans, you know."
"What?" Darnell demanded.
Alpha gave him a slow, lazy smile. "Wouldn't you like to know?"
"I'm sure we would all like to know," Polyon put in. A deft twist of the joyball set Thingberry's jeweled web spinning over the top half of the display screen. "Will you enlighten them, Alpha, or shall I—er—contribute my own scraps of information?" He crooked his finger, beckoning to her, and she moved closer to his control chair.
"Nothing much," Alpha said. "But . . . Summerlands is a double clinic. One side for the paying customers—mostly VIPs—and one side for charity cases, to improve their SUM rating. I've got some ideas for an improvement on Blissto—something we can give addicts in controlled doses. They won't get locked into a cycle of craving and ever-increasing hits of street drugs."
"Hey, I like Blissto," Darnell protested, "and I don't get into that cycle."
"Good," Alpha told him. "You're not an addictive personality. Some people aren't that lucky. You've seen Blissed-Out cases? Big enough doses, over a long enough period