"Matthew Hughes - The Meaning of Luff" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Matt)

The Meaning of Luff by Matthew Hughes
Matthew Hughes has been one of our most prolific--and most popular--contributors in recent
years. His stories are all set in the penultimate age of Old Earth (one eon before Jack Vance's
Dying Earth). Most of his stories have featured either Henghis Hapthorn or Guth Bandar, but
here we meet a somewhat shady fellow by name of Luff Imbry. (Fans of Henghis Hapthorn, take
note of the forthcoming novel, Majestrum, which is due out later this year.)
Welliver Tung had owed Luff Imbry a sum of money for longer than was advisable. The amount was
more than five thousand hepts, Imbry's commission on the return to their owner of certain items that had
gone astray late one evening when Tung found herself in the objects' presence while passing through the
private rooms of the financier Hundegar Abrax while he and his household slept.

Abrax had not wanted the nature of the missing items to become public knowledge. He knew people
who knew people who knew Imbry. Overtures were made, inquiries carried out, the items located and a
finder's fee agreed upon. Neither Tung nor Imbry had thought it wise to attend the transfer of the goods
to Abrax's agent, in case the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny had somehow caught a whisper of the doings.
They sent a young man experienced in such assignments who did not mind having all of his
memories--except for the time, place, and terms of the handover--temporarily misplaced. Their
restoration was never complete, and always brought on headaches and double vision, but the fellow
considered himself adequately paid.

The operation was carried out with smooth precision on a busy corner in the ancient City of Olkney,
capital of the incomparably more ancient world of Old Earth. But Welliver Tung did not keep her
appointment the next day at Bolly's Snug, a tavern where Imbry often liked to conduct business; its back
reaches were a warren of private rooms, some with ingenious exits known only to those who paid the
owner, Bashur Bolly, handsomely for that knowledge.

Imbry waited until it was clear that Tung was not coming, then returned to his operations center--a
concealed room in a nondescript house in a quiet corner of Olkney--to consult his information retrieval
matrix. He soon ascertained that Tung had not been taken up by the scroots overnight, nor had she been
fished out of Mornedy Sound with heavy objects fastened to her person--an occasional occupational
hazard of her profession.

Imbry placed the tips of his plump fingers together and rested his several chins upon them. He thought
through the situation. Tung knew him well enough to understand the danger inherent in pulling him when
he expected a push, as the expression went. If she was withholding the fat man's commission it was
because she needed the funds. If she needed the funds to pay a debt to someone whose collection
methods might be even more appalling than Luff Imbry's, he would have heard of it. Therefore, she
required the five thousand hepts to take advantage of some opportunity to earn even more, out of which
she would seek to mollify Imbry with a bonus.

He returned to his research matrix and made inquiries that spun off from Welliver Tung's several fictitious
identities, which he knew about though she did not know that he knew. Data flowed his way and he soon
snapped up a telling mote: under the name Harch Belanye, Tung had that morning placed a deposit on a
derelict house in Ombron Square, in a district that had once been fashionable but had now fallen into the
disrepute that hangs upon desperate poverty.

He conducted more research, this time centered on the property, and acquired further facts. After careful
thought, he decided to equip himself with a needler, a police-issue shocker and an elision suit. The
garment was made of a material that bent light around its wearer, making him unnoticeable except to the
well-trained eye. He retrieved the items from a concealed closet that was well stocked with the tools of