"It's difficult to get any worse. They drink, steal, and make the newcomers do the same. There are gangs among them. Two of them were caught yesterday — they sold an anti-corrosion paint box. How much do you think they sold it for? They sold it for a rice vodka crock! Yesterday, one guard shot at another guard — he was boozed up. They arrested him, started an investigation and discovered that he was wanted in the capital for robbery and murder. Everybody who wants to escape the capital after screwing something up there, go here."
"Yes," Ashinik said, "it's not easy. I have never had to own people that drink, steal and eat meat. A master is like a seed and his subordinate is like grass that grows out of the seed. Grass follows seeds. It's not surprising that the demons' servants steal anti-corrosion paint from them."
Bemish was so upset by this comment that he lost his self control. His true nature emerged and Ashinik noticed at once that Bemish's head was really just a meat egg. Ashinik felt himself very uncomfortable. "What if he asks now — do you really think I am a demon?"
But Bemish didn't ask anything like this, he shook his meat egg and said.
"The village is just beyond this hill. Would you be uncomfortable entering the village in my car? Would you like to get out at the turn?"
"Not a problem at all," Ashinik said.
In the evening, the whole village listened to their new prophet's stories about riding in the chief demon's car and seeing a meat egg on the demon's shoulders.
Bemish was not exaggerating the problems in his conversation with the future zealots' guru. The construction situation worsened every day. The worsening, however, was reflected neither in the balance books nor in the profits and expenses reports and the most meticulous auditor would not be able to enter the locals' feelings into the company's debits column.
It was also partly Bemish's fault. As an ardent player who felt better next to a computer screen rather on the construction site, Bemish visited the latter only occasionally, being engrossed completely in the capital business maelstrom.
He started up a hedge fund acquiring Weian stocks — it was quoted in the intergalactic system. Trevis raised money for him, a sum unheard-off for a developing market — five hundred million dinars. He acquired the broker house DJ securities and used it to conduct the hedge fund operations; he also acquired 12 % shares of the bank that Assalah Company had an account in.
Together with Idari, Shavash and two other useful people, he founded a local Assabank and soon, by a special sovereign's law, all the budget funds allocated by the government for the construction of the roads, communications and the other Assalah infrastructure passed this bank.
Bemish swam like a fish in the market where the quotes often fluctuated 30–40 % a week, where even relatively liquid shares had an 8 % spread and where trading based on insider information was not a crime but a norm. He had disposed of almost all the stocks a week before the government announced the new tax regulations that caused a market crash and by the year's end his fund was the only one showing a profit gain of 36 % compared to the other funds' losses fluctuating between 14 % and 86 %. The real profit was even higher, but as it had already been agreed on, Shavash obtained one third of it.
However, while Terence Bemish hung out in the capital, bought and sold accordingly to Shavash's hints, opened new banks, had fun with Kissur and gave an interview to Galamoney as the head of the company in charge of the most successful fund of the year, other people controlled the construction, most of all the company vice-president Richard Giles. Oh, of course, Bemish received the construction and money flow reports every day. A minor financial glitch, not even close to larceny, would not remain unnoticed.
"Why do you have this leftover at the active accounts?" angry Bemish screamed at the receiver. "Couldn't you place an overnight credit?"
And the leftover was only five thousand dinars.
But the peasants and workers' attitude was not reflected in any way in the financial reports and increasing theft was at first written off by Bemish as the bad heritage of two thousand years of socialism.
As Bemish realized looking back, a lot of things would have been different if the construction had started not when the peasants had been planting rice and when every pair of hands had been precious. But the construction started right in the spring — the peasants didn't let their lads go to the construction site and the guys who came later met with a construction lifestyle already in place — the lifestyle of lost city dwellers, bums and simply bandits that stole watermelons from the fields, trampled rice down, fought the village lads en masse and considered hard porn with stereo effects to be the highest achievement of the alien culture.
At one point, Bemish ran into a ceremony of Following the Way on a road and the sect's head, a tall old man with a grey beard, pointed his finger at him and started calling him a sorcerer of the basest type. Bemish inquired what exactly his sorcery was and received an answer.
"All your flashy labels and commercials, cigarettes and movies — they are all your dirty magic and rituals. You use all this to get people together."
Bemish objected.
"I am sick of these commercials no less than you are."
"This is even worse," the old man grinned. "It means that you have one culture for small people and another one for big people. This is ill-conceived because everything can be different for small people and for big people — what they own and what they wear — but their culture should be the same. The spring day is celebrated by a farm hand and in the palace. And if your workers go to see The Triple Strike and you don't… What's the point of talking about it?!"
He thought and added with curiosity.
"Is it true, that you live underground just like the wild people in the North who change their ruler every four years and, having changed him, eat him?"
"We change a ruler," Bemish admitted, "but we don't eat him."
The old man died then, Ashinik arrived to take his place and the situation worsened. Whatever Bemish did, it came out wrong. They delivered a worker to the hospital with appendicitis for surgery and Ashinik made everybody believe that the demons from the skies cut the guy's corn off and attached a goat's equipment instead and now only goats would be born from him.
Bemish had loaned some money to the village, at the previous village headman's time, and Ashinik started a rumor that they tricked the headman using his poor knowledge of English and made him sign a paper permitting the Earthmen to demolish the whole village. There was another rumor also contrived by Ashinik that Bemish had a black cord. One end of the cord was in a table drawer, in the villa, and the sovereign himself was tied to another end. If the Earthman pulled on the cord, the sovereign would toss and groan and hail would start coming down from the sky.
Slowly, bypassing official district authorities and official construction management, underground organizations started to form in the village and at the construction site. The sect grew quickly in the village. The number of zealots increased from the starting few as quickly as a crystal grows in a saturated solution once a seed crystal is submerged there. As for the construction… let's be honest, mafia started to rule the construction.
At some point, a name appeared among the private cofounders of new import-export companies — O'Hare — the same O'Hare who had been introduced to Bemish in the thief's tavern and who had taken care of the presentation.
Bemish crossed the cofounder's name out with red ink commenting that such a company would end up selling drugs and that would be really disgusting. Giles, as an Intelligence employee agreed with the company director wholeheartedly.
Only now Bemish realized how horribly he had been tricked by the small official Shavash when he agreed to take the construction out of the local authorities' jurisdiction. The district officials were corrupted and unceremonious. They could have managed both the bandits and zealots and happily ignored any humanitarian issues. They could have relocated the whole village to, say, Chakhar in three days or just burned it to the ground.
Unlike them, Bemish would not be able to drive a tank over the village or land in the middle of it, "as a miss", a sixty thousand ton space freight ship — as Shavash suggested to him altogether seriously. And not a single international legal system existed that would ban planet dwellers from singing songs and going nuts en masse.
Now, Bemish found himself in a classical chess fork — if he started arresting the zealots himself, even the most pro-Earthmen officials would be indignant. If he asked for the authorities' help, it would be a sign of his utter powerlessness.
The tipping point for the village and construction confrontation was the following. They started to dig the foundation pits for service buildings on the northern hill and dug out old temple complex remnants.
Having checked it out with archives, they found out the remnants were the old temples of Adera-benefactor goddess that had prospered almost two thousand years ago when the capital officials hadn't dared to force their way into these surroundings calling the local dwellers "bandits" but not, however, making any attempts to eradicate them.
This Adera lady had quite an irritable disposition, she had a tendency to appear in people's dreams extorting gifts and even human sacrifices, threatening with floods; indescribable orgies took place at her celebrations. The sovereign Irshahchan obliterated the temple mercilessly, recognizing this cult to be a crime against humanity and disobedience to the authorities.
Having being trained to respect any ruin, Bemish stopped all the construction there and asked Shavash and Kissur what he should do. Kissur told him to clean up the damned temple and recycle it for construction materials, if needed. Shavash took a look at the altar where boys were rumored to be offered as a sacrifice and said that the altar was not impressive as a cultural monument since carving was too crude.
The newspapers did hear about the temple however. The newspapers demanded the Earthmen to take their dirty hands away from the national heritage. Bemish snapped back tactlessly that the Weians themselves had destroyed the temple while the Earthmen actually found it.
Soon, the most unbelievable myths related to the temple riches emerged. They had dug out a large two hundred meter deep well in the temple, and a rumor emerged that every local dweller had thrown his most valuable belongings down this well as a sacrifice to Adera for centuries. Half-drunk construction workers and deranged religious peasants believed every inch of it and were climbing over the fence built around the temple twenty four hours a day. Bemish ordered an exploration of the well's bottom and, in the presence of the authorities and the journalists, loads of flint arrowheads, brass round handles and clay female figurines with huge bellies was extracted. There was a possibility that the local denizens had indeed thrown their most valuable belongings down the Adera well but, during these times, flint arrowheads had been the most valuable things here.
That, of course, didn't hurt the myth. Everybody saw how much equipment was thrown at the well and that a hundred men spent three days around it! No need! The rumors assured that the well appeared to be empty because the managers had robbed it earlier. The money amounts, the names of the spaceships used to transport the treasure to Earth, the names of the museums, the name of the construction director and Shavash's name were specified.
The morning of the eighteenth, Bemish found himself in the capital at a conference dealing with developing countries investments issues. Bemish was presented there both as a speaker and an exhibition object.
Bemish conversed with the relevant people and, immediately after the talk he left for the spaceport, having picked up a man named Born — a United Galactic Fund representative who was observing the situation with the stabilization credit allocated for the Empire.
A flock of local journalists waited for Bemish at the helicopter and attacked him with their questions.
"Mr. Bemish, is it true that when an old catalpa was ripped out at your construction, blood appeared at its roots? Doesn't this omen foretell misfortunes?"
"No."
"Is it true that a she-goat nearby changed to a he-goat?"
"A she-goat didn't change to a he-goat."
"Is it true, that they dug out a rock that had been buried during White Emperor's times and it had words written on it, "In a month after this rock is extracted the construction will perish."
"It is true. The words were, however, written with phenyl paint developed and set in production five years ago. If the zealots decide to counterfeit the White Emperor's words again, I would advise them not to buy paint in the nearest kiosk."