The Killing Machine by Jack Vance

This is the second a of a five-book series; if you decide to read it, you already know you'll be in for the duration.

Well, originally, it wasn't as clear. The Killing Machine followed The Star King only seven months later, at the end of 1964. And readers knew that Kirth Gersen was chasing the five Demon Princes - the ganglords or pirates or monstrosities that teamed up to destroy his childhood home and enslave its people - and assumed that there would be five books to cover them all. They couldn't know it would take another seventeen years for Jack Vance to write the books and get them published.

But, then, revenge always is a longer, more twisting road than we expect, isn't it?

I covered the series set-up, as well as the glories of reading Vance, when I wrote about Star King, so I won't repeat that: as usual for Vance, this is a big, complex universe, full of characters and institutions with their own goals and schemes, full of quirky details that arise from emergent properties of the universe.

For example: personal spacecraft are common, perhaps only slightly more expensive than a car was to a 1964 reader. And ships using the Jarnell intersplit FTL drive can't be directly tracked or followed - pursuers can go where they think the ship is heading, but could be wrong. Therefore fleeing the civilized Oikumene to the lawless Beyond is simple: Vance does have port-control operations on some worlds, but there doesn't seem to be anything like orbital-level patrols and ship tracking, and worlds are big enough to find some rural district to use as a convenient landing place.

Because of that, the law is weak. Criminals can escape quickly, unless response is very swift, and the major activity of the law we see is entirely reactive: secretive operations in the Beyond, to find the worst malefactors and bring justice to them. (I put it that way specifically; it seems more common than the reverse.)

In particular, kidnapping is fairly easy. Just grab someone, get them to a spaceship, and fly away. It's so common that a major operation in the Beyond is the quasi-corporate Interchange, a banking operation and secure location where kidnappees are kept, in more or less comfort, until the "rescission" of their "fees." Or, if their friends and family don't have the cash, until someone else buys them into slavery or the cost of keeping them outweighs their potential value and they are reluctantly released (which seems to happen only very rarely).

In Star King, Gersen is trying to find a way to the second Demon Prince, Kokor Hekkus. All five are mysterious and little-known, hiding behind false identities when they travel in the Oikumene, as well as being famously violent and mercurial in their own ways. Through a series of events, Gersen finds himself a guest of Interchange, one of a large number of people Hekkus has kidnapped to raise a massive sum of money.

Gersen learns that Hekkus is trying to "redeem" Alusz Iphigenia Eperje-Tokay, a beautiful woman who claims to be from the lost planet Thamber - mostly a legend in the Oikumene, a locus for fables that's generally assumed to be fictional. And that Hekkus himself is from Thamber, which actually does exist. Eperje-Tokay put herself in Interchange, with the highest "fee" she could convince the owners to allow, as the only way to protect herself from Hekkus's unpleasant attentions back on their homeworld.

It was the only reasonable way to stop Hekkus, but it may only delay him: he's already paid in more than half of the total fee.

For Gersen, this is an opportunity. The secretive Hekkus will need to come to Interchange to redeem Eperje-Tokay - or would chase her if she were to be "redeemed" by someone else. Even better, Eperje-Tokay might be able to help him find Thamber, where he could search out Hekkus and kill him there.

But to do any of that, Gersen must first raise a small fortune for his own freedom - and then another, vaster fortune, the size of a small planetary economy, to free Eperje-Tokay.

He does. They do get to Thamber, and confront Hekkus there. As with Killing Machine, there's a substantial section where a character may be the Demon Prince in disguise, and Gersen needs to find out the truth. (He wants revenge, but he also wants the Demon Princes to know why they die before they die, so he can't just shoot down anyone who might be Hekkus indiscriminately.)

Two elements here, as I remember them, change the plots of the series going forward: the presence of Eperje-Tokay, and the vast sums of money Gersen can now access after freeing her. But I'll leave any discussion of that to The Palace of Love, the third book in the series. I expect to get to that in another couple of months.

(Consumer note: the Vance-family-run Spatterlight Press has an edition of Killing Machine in print, which I linked above. I read it in the omnibus The Demon Princes, Vol. 1, which contains the first three novels of the series, and which I recommend as a more economical and capacious collection of Vance.)