Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09 (20 page)

Bleys came back and stood on the sidelines where he had stood before. Dahno had disappeared and Bleys stood waiting, feeling a little overwhelmed—almost a little,
shy in the presence of this group.

The
sensei
paid no attention to him for a short while. The other students were going through a grappling
kata
that Bleys did not recognize, working in pairs. Most of them were down on the mats after taking a formal, stylized throw and struggling there for an advantage. None of them seemed to look at him directly, but Bleys caught momentary glimpses directed at him; and he felt very strongly the feeling he had felt when he had first stepped into the front room of this establishment. Those in training here felt no kindness toward him. There was an obvious aura of resentment from them.

If the
sensei
felt this too, he completely ignored it. After a while he called a halt to what was going on and beckoned Bleys toward him. When Bleys came up to him he led him to one of the men wearing a brown belt, a tall man not quite Bleys' height but clearly in his early twenties at least and obviously outweighing Bleys by something upwards of twenty pounds.

"This is James," said the
sensei
to Bleys, "and, James—this is Bleys. I want you to work with him for a while."

James was a broad-shouldered man with a shock of blond hair and a square face. He did not smile at Bleys, but inclined his head in a bow. Bleys matched the bow.

The
sensei
went back and addressed the class.

"We'll work on combinations now. Easy throws followed by either
katame-waza,
joint-lock technique, or
shime-waza,
strangle technique. Don't fight your partner's throws. The throw is just an entry into the arm-bar or the choke."

"Hajime!
"
It was the command to begin.

James smiled at Bleys and bowed. It was not a particularly welcoming or friendly smile.

Bleys remembered to return the bow before reaching for James' sleeve and lapel. The fundamentals came back naturally. Don't grip the lapel too tightly; don't pick up your feet, slide them—but not too close together. It was almost a dance.

Tentatively, Bleys stepped into position for a basic hip throw. James' arm on his lapel suddenly became rigid, and Bleys stumbled backward, momentarily off balance. He looked at his partner inquiringly. The
sensei
had said not to fight the throw. James' face was innocently impassive.

Bleys relaxed. All right, he, Bleys, would take the first fall. James made no attempt to throw him, but worked his right hand up Bleys' lapel so that he now gripped the collar behind Bleys' neck. Bleys could feel the knuckle of his partner's thumb against the base of his skull. With his own hand no longer snugged against James' chest, he could not stiff-arm the other and keep him away. Once again Bleys twisted his body sideways and slid forward to attempt a throw.

As he did, James shifted his left hand from Bleys' sleeve to the left lapel of his
do-gi
and snaked his right forearm over Bleys' head, while keeping his grip on the collar. The brown belt scissored his crossed forearms, pressing them against Bleys' carotid arteries. Bleys remembered the technique—
gyaku-juji-shime,
reverse cross strangle.

Bleys was turned away from James and half bent over. When he jerked to straighten up he felt his legs swept out from under him. He was too startled to remember to slap the mat to break his fall, and the painful impact knocked the last of his air out of his lungs.

Bleys made up his mind to hang on for as long as possible in hopes that he might at least make a good impression upon the other trainees and the
sensei.

Very swiftly, however, he felt his senses leaving him. His peripheral vision clouded with a red haze as his brain, deprived of blood through its two main arteries, became starved for oxygen. At the edge of unconsciousness, he released James' sleeve and tapped lightly on the other's arm, the signal of surrender.

But the pressure was not relaxed. He tapped again, more urgently. But still the pressure remained.

Then, as he began to slide completely into unconsciousness, Bleys found awareness coming back to him. James had released the hold momentarily. Bleys was just beginning to feel a sense of relief when the pressure was resumed; and once more he began to slip into unconsciousness.

Again, he went almost into, if not completely into it before James let him up. This time, as soon as Bleys was able to do so he gasped out one word.

"Dahno."

Almost magically, it was so instantaneous, the hold was relaxed completely.

Bleys lay where he was for a moment, simply recovering. His mind had saved him from what promised to be a very rough initiation indeed. James had been taking this opportunity to express the group's resentment against Bleys' supposedly favored status. But he had obviously not thought it through that .Bleys had Dahno's ear; and might tell the huge man of what had been done to him. In which case, James himself might suffer.

After a bit Bleys stirred, pushed himself up on one elbow and then got to his feet. James rose with him.

Following that, James offered only token resistance to Bleys' throws and performed his own throws with suitable restraint, following them with grappling techniques that were quickly applied and released on Bleys' signal. At all times now, James' handling of him was considerate, not to say delicate. This went on for another fifteen minutes or so, when the exercise class was at last dismissed by the
sensei.

Bleys walked over to his locker to hang up his
do-gi
and change back into his ordinary clothes. He was a little disappointed that the
sensei
had shown no sign of seeing what had happened. He felt sure that if he had, he would have put a stop to it right at the very beginning. On the other hand, perhaps his treatment had actually been instigated by the
sensei
to test him.

In either case, the episode would have to go unreported. It went against Bleys' grain to actually complain to Dahno. Besides, Bleys was sure doing so would not raise him in his brother's eyes. And it was not beyond possibility that the incident had been Dahno's idea. Plainly, he would have to conquer the trainees' dislike of him on his own.

Dahno had reappeared by this time, as if he knew—which probably he did—when the class was due to end. He led Bleys back out.

"Tomorrow, you'll start joining them not only in the exercise classes but in the classroom sessions," he told Bleys as they walked toward the front of the building and the door that would let them out to the elevator.

"You'll find that the sort of thing they're being taught is something you could learn on your own in a fraction of the time, given someone experienced to work with and the necessary books. But I want you to spend some time with them anyway and get to know them. Above all, they've got to get to know you. We aren't going to emphasize from the first that you're destined for a higher position with me than any of them are. They've probably guessed it; but I want it to sink in as a fact on them gradually."

He smiled at Bleys; and Bleys heard the unspoken order. He would have to dominate these men before Dahno would publicly acknowledge any superiority in him.

He had begun talking as soon as they were outside the apartment and beyond the earshot of anyone within. They had taken the lift down and were back in the car before he spoke again.

"I've got things to do," he said, "but I'll drop you off at home. Undoubtedly, you'll find something there to amuse yourself with."

"Yes," said Bleys.

Dahno smiled again, looking at the road ahead. Curiously, Bleys thought, in his smile this time there was something like a touch of genuine pleasure.

CHAPTER
18

Dahno did not
even come up to the apartment with Bleys; he merely reached across, opened the door and said, "I've got to get going." He drove off.

Bleys rode up on the elevator, his mind still full of the problem of settling in with the other trainees at the
dojo.
He had considered the possibility, in fact the certainty, that sooner or later he would have to arrange to dominate in his own right all those whom Dahno could dominate. This, before he could think of possibly coming to any kind of a conclusion with Dahno himself. He had not thought confrontation with one of the trainees would come quite so soon.

There was a classic Exotic pattern for this sort of situation normally. It consisted first of making friends individually with everybody concerned; and then gradually allowing his natural superiority to show until he was accepted by all in a leadership position. A problem in this instance would be the fact that he could not start making friends until he had first mended matters between himself and James. Otherwise with each new friend

he made James would be pushed further and further into dislike and enmity.

Dislike could be a reaction, not only toward those who had acted unfairly toward you, but those to whom you had acted unfairly. In the latter case, dislike served as an excuse to yourself for what you had done. What James would need would be some excuse for what he had done that would remove his need to personally dislike Bleys.

By the time he had reached this point in his thoughts, Bleys had also let himself into the apartment. He put the whole matter of James, the
do jo
and the rest of the trainees out of his mind. He had learned early that one of the most valuable abilities to cultivate was that of being able to concentrate exclusively on any problem he wanted to solve. To put out of his mind absolutely what he did not want to intrude on his thoughts. It was the habit of dividing different problems into compartments where they could be forgotten while others were attended to.

Now there was other work to be done.

He searched around the apartment until he found in a writing desk a pile of sheets with Dahno's letterhead on them, obviously there for correspondence purposes. They were of a plastic so well made that it had the very feel of paper itself, an expensive version of such to find on one of the Younger Worlds.

He took a stack of these back to the dining table with him and sat down, placing the stack upside down so that he had the blank back of each sheet to work on. With this and the desk pen in hand, he concentrated on the blank sheets; and began to key in his memory of the messages he had looked at in Dahno's office.

Bleys did not have a natural eidetic memory. But both of his own intention, and with Exotic techniques he had been taught at his mother's insistence, he had cultivated into permanence the extremely tenacious memory of early childhood; and supplemented that with a version of autohypnosis, so that in nearly all cases he was able to summon up a visual picture in his mind of what he wanted to remember.

He envisioned the first message he had scanned in Dahno's office and copied down the symbols and letters that had been there. Then he put that message from his mind and went on to copy the next, until all were written out.

He ended up with some twenty sheets of coded messages. He compared these and made counts of the number of times of reappearances of the same symbols, and particularly the same symbols in conjunction with other symbols, and began to try breaking the code.

It turned out not to be extremely difficult. Bleys liked doing puzzles; and the code was a simple commercial one, not meant to stand up under intensive decoding efforts. Within a little more than a couple of hours he had reduced all the messages to plain ordinary Basic, the language spoken on all the Younger Worlds; and understood, if not spoken by, a majority of the people on Old Earth.

He took a break, made himself a sandwich, got a glass of juice and brought these back to the table where he could eat and drink while studying the messages.

The interesting thing was that the messages were cryptic in themselves. They were all very short. Their contents meant nothing to Bleys in most cases because he did not know what use Dahno had for the information in them.

He could make guesses and that was all. For example, the first one he looked at said briefly:

"V.
(That could stand for
variform
—there were almost none of the New Worlds on which an edible plant, fish or animal existed that was not originally of Old Earth and had needed to have been genetically tailored to the planet's non-Earth environment)
winter wheat up twelve points."

It was very obviously a bit of news that Dahno could somehow put to use in counseling one of the people he advised here on Association. It was also obviously a quotation from a commodities market report of the world it came from.

Bleys looked at the point of sending, printed at the top of the letter; which, uncoded, now read
"New
Earth."
He could think of nothing in common between the climates and growing conditions of New Earth under
the star of Sirius A, and
Association under Epsilon Eridani, that would make agricultural information from one valuable on the other—but undoubtedly there was a reason that lay beyond the area of his present knowledge.

It was the same with the rest of the messages. They were all now comprehensible; but they were also obscure. None of them asked questions, all of them reported facts. Facts which Dahno would certainly be putting to use in the sorting and computing equipment of that research-equipped room off his own personal office, that he had shown Bleys on their first trip to that location.

Struck by a sudden thought, Bleys went through the pile again, this time paying attention to the places from which the messages had been sent.

He found the result interesting.

Of the fifteen New Worlds over half were represented as sources from which Dahno was getting mail. Mentally Bleys compiled a list of Newton, Cassida, New Earth, Freiland, Harmony, Ste. Marie and Ceta. That made, with the addition of Association, the world he was on right now, and which was obviously Dahno's headquarters, a total of eight of the fifteen Younger Worlds, on which Dahno had connections.

This plainly revealed a much larger organization than Bleys had imagined his brother to control. It was also pretty good evidence that this set of trainees was not the first that had been sent out.

Bleys decided that the whole intent of Dahno's activities called for further investigation.

He did not have a key to the office as he had one to the apartment. He glanced at the wrist monitor that Dahno had given him, and asked it for the time. The answer came back—twenty-seven minutes after three of the afternoon. Provided Dahno himself was not using his office right now, there should only be the two women on duty; and Dahno had already established Bleys' right of entry and action to them.

Accordingly, Bleys called an autocar service and thirty minutes later an automatically programmed hovercar delivered him to the front door of the building in which Dahno's office was located.

He went up to the office and entered, smiling, through the door, waving at the two women at their desks as he passed and heading for the entrance to Dahno's private office.

"We're closing up in about five minutes, Bleys Ahrens," the one called Aran called after him. He checked and turned about, still with his smile.

"You go right ahead," he said, "I'll wait for Dahno in his office."

Tu
rning, he went on through the door into Dahno's office and closed it behind him.

It was not at all the office he was interested in, however, but the equipment room beyond its one wall. He let himself into this, and went about examining the various computing and other equipment that was there. Sitting down before a screen, he pressed the button that summoned the machine's attention and began asking questions.

It was not a quick process. It took him nearly an hour merely to establish the limits of the area in which Dahno had stored sensitive information. But there remained available a wealth of information that was peripheral to what was held secret, and from which Bleys' quick brain could deduce much.

In the next three hours he was able to establish that the organization Dahno controlled called itself the
"Others."
It had apparently grown spontaneously out of an essentially social association among people who were the result of intermarriage between individuals from the three largest Splinter Cultures in the New Worlds—the Friendlies, the Exotics, and the Dorsai. Dahno had joined this organization and effectively taken it over, turning it into a business tool.

Following that, he had begun gathering more recruits from the mixed-breeds, although non-mixed were by no means excluded if they were useful; and started educating class after class of these, like the group of trainees Bleys had already had to do with. On graduation, these were then sent to one or other of the New Worlds, to spread out individually to the larger cities of these worlds and set up their own satellite organizations which now sought influence there and useful information to channel back to him.

The organization had something of the old-fashioned information network about it. The sort of pattern that had allowed eighteenth and nineteenth century banks to make fortunes by communicating special information before it was received by other, slower routes. Also, it had something in common with the networks of spy cells during the turbulent times of the twentieth century when the large nations of Old Earth struggled and fought with each other on a massive basis. However, they were in fact much more tightly organized than either of these prototypes; kept tightly in Dahno's grasp by the fact that the organization's aim and purpose was to make use of, not wealth, but information—information that would give the organization—and particularly Dahno—power on these worlds.

It was Dahno's thesis, which he always announced to the graduating members of his group just before they left for the worlds of their destination, that wealth and power would come automatically if the information was first found. He further emphasized the point that the information would be useless unless it was processed by a central mind of unusual quality— which was his.

The structure would not have worked, Bleys thought, if anyone with abilities less than Dahno's had tried to run it.

In fact, his abilities made possible something otherwise impossible for more than a single world—a network that potentially allowed him to simultaneously influence the leadership of Association, as well as other Younger Worlds.

This had only been made possible by Donal Graeme, a century before, forcing these worlds to join peacefully in a community with a common economic base. This allowed the individual world to specialize safely in the type of specialists it trained; and trade these for the other specially trained people they needed from other worlds.

This in turn was possible because it was cheaper than trading anything else, given the high cost of interstellar travel. Also it allowed a world, by specializing, to devote only a small