by Laer Carroll
The screens showed a spaceship crewman grinning at the camera from his hospital bed, flanked by two nurses with a hand on each shoulder, good-naturedly pretending to fawn on the hero.
Which he was. He was the crewman who had talked about tangoing down to the store to get a replacement for a bad communications module. He wouldn't be tangoing for a while. He'd been out of his crash seat desperately working to repair the electrical wiring of the attitude controls aboard the spaceship before it crashed rather than landed. The abrupt correction Leoni had been forced to make at the end of flight had pitched him into equipment which had broken both legs.
"...lucky it wasn't my head...taking good care of me..."
Sylvia let her hearing's sensitivity drop back into normal hearing range. There was too much noise in the bar. Magnified mashed-together sound was just loud mashed-together sound.
Besides, she knew from newspapers and personal contacts in ArgenSpace what had gone wrong with the landing of Spaceship Two. All parts and construction information for the spaceships was stored in GCM, Gillian Corcoran Monaghan, supercomputers. A correction of an electrical problem had been accidentally uncorrected and a problem reinstated.
Luckily the injured crewman had intuited the cause when orange warnings had first alerted the crew to a problem, confirmed it with Downside Control, and rigged up a temporary fix just barely in time.
The TV image changed to one of a TV journalist and the sound cut back to barely audible. Over inane commentary the video showed Leoni Campbell surfing. She'd given only a brief interview from the flight deck while the spaceship was being towed to its aquatic dock, saying she'd only done the job expected of any pilot.
This had annoyed some ArgenSpace execs, but others felt this dovetailed with a "space flight is routine and safe" approach they wanted the public to take. Sylvia guessed that Leoni's laconicism would not hurt her career. She was after all a real-live hero.
Sylvia finished one drink and called to the bartender to bring her another. While he was mixing it she pretended to be surveying the crowd but watched him keenly. She was still hoping to encounter the bartender who she thought had drugged her three years ago, but it was always possible this one would do the same. She would have to catch him drugging her to know when to pretend helplessness.
After drinking much of the new drink she was mildly unhappy that no kidnapping accomplices had come up to her to lead her off by the hand as if she were a robot. One man, then another, did come up to chat her up, but when she looked blankly at them as if drugged they had left, one angrily.
A flicker of motion at the bare limits of her side vision alerted her to some action near her drinks. She pretended not to notice it. When several seconds had passed she swung back around to the bar. A glance showed a faint rainbow iridescence on the surface of one drink which had not been there before .
Triumph blooming inside her, Sylvia took a sip and felt a sheen of slime on her lower lip when she put the drink down. A drug had been deposited in her drink and had been rejected by her esoteric filter. She delicately dabbed her lips dry and, a few moments later, had to dry it again when she took another drink.
She leisurely finished both her drinks, letting her body go still and her few movements mechanical, letting her eyes focus on infinity. Once she slumped a bit and let her body jerk upright.
Her acting efforts were rewarded. Two young men dressed in nice jackets came up to her. Smiling and speaking as if old friends each took an elbow and helped her down from her seat, one of them grabbing her blue clutch bag and looping its strap over her shoulder.
Outside crowds were busy at the entrance to the club and the surrounding streets. They angled across a street to a parking lot and opened the doors to a late-model red sports car. They got her into the back seat with some trouble, Sylvia playing the part of someone chemically lobotomized. With happy malice she "accidentally" elbowed one of them in his crotch as they folded her into the car.
Half-lying, half-sitting she memorized the route the car was taking. Its destination turned out to be student apartments near the university. Pretty audacious, she thought. Or maybe not. Perhaps seemingly drunken visiting females were a usual sight here.
They didn't seem to be officially allowed in the men's apartment. The two took her in through a side entrance and were very quiet when they led her up three flights of stairs. Pushing her inside an apartment they breathed a sigh of relief and slapped hands.
"It worked! Hot damn! Look at this bitch. All ours." Roughly they pushed her onto a couch. She artistically let herself sprawl so that her legs were apart and her dress showed most of one thigh.
One of them went to a tiny kitchen, took two beer bottles from a refrigerator, and popped off their tops. While he was doing that and returning to his companion that man had kicked off his shoes and taken off all his clothes. Completely naked except for socks he accepted a beer in one hand and continued masturbating with the other.
"Not a bad looking bitch. You think her pussy hair is blonde, too?" He took a swallow of his beer.
The other had set his beer bottle on a low table in front of the couch and was taking his clothes off.
"We'll find out, won't we?" He laughed, a little breathlessly.
Sylvia had come to realize that she was not going to get a lead on a ring of kidnappers. She decided to cease pretending to be helpless and triggered several changes in the appearance of her body, beginning with her eyes.
Changing eye-color was her latest discovery in how to shapechange. She'd been brushing her teeth and idly musing about the appearance of eyes. Irises looked black because they let light into her eyes, while sclera looked white because they reflected back all light. Could she make the "whites" look black without letting the light she needed to see leak out of her eyes?
Very carefully experimenting she found she could, as well as make them look other colors, including blue, green, yellow, and red. She was delighted with the last. It made her look like a demon.
She changed her eye color instantly but kept her eyes slitted and veiled with her eye lashes. She let hair turn bright green and her skin blood red, but slowly .
"Uh, Gabriel? What's happening?" The masturbating man quit that activity. He stared at Sylvia as the green and red colors deepened on her hair and skin.
The undressing man was naked except for socks and the pants he was just about to strip from his ankles. He looked up at his companion and then at Sylvia.
His eyes widened. Sylvia popped open her eyes and stared at him with red demon's eyes.
He shrieked and tried to run away from her. His pants tripped him and he fell, shrieking still.
Sylvia slowly, slowly sat up. She turned her eyes toward the man with a now badly limp member. Her voice came out as a croaking sound.
"So you thought you were going to rape some helpless girl?" Slowly she stood, her unhumanly flexible body unfolding like a snake standing upright on its tail.
His scream came out as a sandpaper hiss as he dashed toward the nearest window.
Sylvia leaped after him, catching him by the back of his neck before he could leap through the window and fall four stories to his death. She swept him off his feet as easily as she would a kitten, whirled, and threw him to bowl over his companion, legs now freed from his pants and nearly at the door.
The two fell, thumping heavily against a wall and bringing down a spindly table beside the door holding mail and keys. Mail, keys, and men scattered, the table shattered, the men sprawled. One lay sprawling, stunned. The other lay on his side, rocking, hands clamped around the flesh of a thigh pierced by a big splinter from the table, tears of pain coming from his eyes.
Sylvia walked over to them, stood looking down at them.
Shit. She couldn't find it in her to kill them .
But frighten them and punish them she could.
She laid a hand on the pierced one and esoterically probed within him. The splinter was near an inch deep but had not pierced an artery. As she had
learned to probe bodies she had also been learning to affect them. Now she deadened the pain a bit, enough so that the man would be able to pay attention to her words.
A probe of the stunned one showed a concussion but no serious brain damage. She started his body rapidly healing the concussion and sat back on her haunches to wait for him to regain consciousness. Watching the two of them she considered how best to handle them.
She also let the fangs in her mouth mature. Quick growth left them only strong enough to rend flesh. Slower growth made them harder than steel because, she had theorized, the bone in the teeth was made up of very long-chain, almost monomolecular strands of carbon. Coupled with jaws of the same material and jaw muscles of the very dense fiber of all her muscles, she could bite through thin-gauge steel.
Not that she intended to bite anyone or anything. She only wanted her fangs to make her appear more horrible.
It was long minutes before both men were awake enough to attend to her. They must have seemed like hours to the men, in pain and fear as they were. To her, able to relax completely into the moment from years before her death, they seemed more like seconds, or maybe an infinite now.
"Do you know what I am?" she said when they appeared to be alert. The fangs made some sounds difficult. Her question came out "Do you 'oh wha' I am?"
The pierced one said, "A...a demon?"
Rational, then. Good. She turned her red eyes on the no-longer-stunned one. "Do you t'ink so?"
When he only stared at her in fear she repeated her question and got an answer.
"Yes."
"Wha' am I?"
"A demon."
She nodded.
"I would enjoy killing you." She held up a clawed hand. "Slowly. A cut here, a stab there. I could keep you alive for hours." I 'ould 'eep oo a'ive 'or hours .
"And I will unless you do something. Call the municipal police. Tell them all you know about who sold you the drug you tried to use on me. And all their customers. Do you understand me? Repeat what I said."
Going back and forth between the two she made sure they understand their orders, despite the muddle her fangs made of her speech.
Then she retrieved her high heels and purse, walked to the window, opened it, and stood for long moments checking if anyone was near.
Detecting no one she slung the strap of her purse around her neck, put the straps of her heels into her mouth, leaped into the emptiness, twisted in the air to face the side of the building, and used the claws on her hands and feet on the wooden sides of the house to descend as easily as she would stairs.
She took one last comprehensive look around, then disappeared into the night.
Chapter 13 - Language Lessons
Florida, Miami
Puerto Rico, southwest coast
Sylvia's niece Rissa sighed and snuggled more comfortably into the child's bed in her room in her parents' home in an upscale Miami suburb. Sylvia straightened from placing her there and laying a light blanket over her. Then she stood for a minute or two, looking down at Rissa.
How different her niece was today than when her sister-in-law had asked her to try helping Rissa. Then her niece's muscles had been lax and her nerves unable to control them, slowly dying as they were in an Alzheimer's-like illness. These days she was athletic, curious, full of energy, and hardy of constitution.
Sylvia smiled down at her. They'd had a full day with Rissa's friends at a large coastal water-themed amusement park, along with two of the friend's mothers. The mothers had stayed a bit in the background, often out of the bright sunlight from the blue sky, dutifully watchful. Sylvia had worn a modest bikini and splashed along with the girls, as agile as a dolphin even in her airform. Rissa was near as agile, and her four friends were all adept in the water. Water sports were a big deal along the Florida coast.
Rissa was very proud to have an Everglades Champ for an aunt and claimed she wanted to be one too. Or maybe a 'rine b'ologist like Sylvia.
Sylvia dimmed the lights and left, smiling still, leaving the door to Rissa's room cracked a few inches so Sylvia could easily hear her niece if she needed something during the night.
Rissa and she had cuddled together on the living room couch watching kid's programs. Sylvia turned off the TV and the lights there, walked to the kitchen for a glass of chilled rosé, and retired to her brother's office. While he and his wife were in France on a two-week holiday Sylvia was staying in their house and babysitting. This not only gave her a chance to spend time with her niece and her mother but also to play with the latest computer equipment that her brother owned. A very successful investor, he needed to stay in touch with all the latest news and he was plugged in to that new phenomenon, the Telenet.
As with many technical innovations for the last hundred years it had been invented in Ireland and spread in that country even faster than railroads had a century earlier. Soon it spread further, to England and the rest of the British Empire, the most powerful polity in the world, made so in part by that industrial dynamo, Ireland.
The latest development Sylvia appreciated very much, the picture interface, which made "surfing" Telenet as simple as waving one's finger at pictures on a screen, or typing on an imaginary keyboard laid on a tabletop. Sylvia was a bit old-fashioned and preferred an actual keyboard, but someday not too far away she would have to bite the bullet and learn to use a virtual keyboard.
For the last few days she had been searching back issues of the Ponce Daily News and the San Juan Post. She was studying the city and national police of Puerto Rico, how they were organized and who worked in them. She was researching detailed information on international South-American sex-slavery rings going back almost ten years.
Two days later her brother and sister-in-law Amber returned from France, tanned and healthy. That night, a Sunday, they had a big backyard barbecue and feasted and opened all the presents. They'd even thought of getting one for their mother's boyfriend, Meyer .
Rissa was near delirious with joy. All her favorite people were around her, and she got presents. She danced around, got in the way, asked innumerable questions when they showed slides from their trip on the side of the house, climbed the big oak tree and speculated about acrobatics on the big tree limb. Her mother declared that she would spank her butt if Rissa tried it. At that Rissa pouted—for all of thirty seconds.
The slides were not the usual boring shots, though many were of conventional subjects. Amber was a talented photographer with an unerring eye for composition and for a revealing view of a subject. Her slide show made Sylvia want to cover the same ground. Were the Provençal hills and valleys really that green, the air so clear, the villages of grey stone so beautiful?
The new dolphin's sonar tickled and vibrated her insides, telling Sylvia that it had changed from looking at her outsides to her insides. A tightness in her tonsils told her that her body was about to shapechange them into a matching sound transceiver, an ability that she had acquired more than a year ago with only a wish that she could talk to dolphins. She stifled the impulse.
Instead she floated just below the surface of the sea in her little private bay on the southwestern corner of Puerto Rico and used her eyes to look it over. The late-afternoon sun which gilded the green of the water and the plants waving from the bottom gave her plenty of light. She did not have to increase the sensitivity of her eyes at all.
The dolphin was somewhat larger than most dolphins who made these P'Rican waters part of their hunting grounds, a mature male, probably a scout for a pod which was migrating in this direction .
The migration might be random. Or it might be because Sylvia's habitual presence off the west and south coasts of Puerto Rico had made these waters safe from sharks. She still did not understand how sharks, unsocial and with little more intelligence than an insect, knew to stay away from these areas.
She tended toward the theory that her scent had stained the plants and bottom of the sea here too indelibly for easy dissolution, and that it gave them chills of fear a
nd panic that cried out stealthy preying horror .
That description was the truth. Sylvia had a taste for shark, and regularly ripped one to pieces and devoured much of it, leaving what she didn't gorge on for lesser predators. Her dense powerful muscles used a good deal of energy when she exerted them beyond the average. And when she 'changed that also used a lot of energy.
This was especially so when she formed her diamond-hard fangs and claws. Changing them back to normal bone and flesh recovered some of the energy that created them but only a fraction. Her solution had been to make her claws permanent and retracted until she unsheathed them. Unfortunately this did not work for her fangs; there was too little real estate in her jaws to hide them there. But then she rarely used them except for threats, and usually her claws were quite enough for that.
Satisfied she might be a threat but not to him, the dolphin politely approached her and gently bumped noses with her. Since dolphin's noses were dangerous battering rams, this was the equivalent of shaking hands to declare peaceful intentions. Sylvia bumped back, but with her forehead. The tiny noses of humans would not be considered a threat.
Backing off a bit, the dolphin broached above the surface and squeaked at her. This was dolphins' way of politely speaking the language of humans.
Sylvia broached also, loosened her snorkel enough to take a deep breath of air, then submerged. She intended to test out a new invention for talking to dolphins. She was fluent when she used the sound transceiver made of flesh at the back of her throat, but this invention would let all humans talk to dolphins.
She flicked one hand in a way that snapped a special keyboard into place near one hand and locked it there. Invented by an ArgenSpace engineer, it was played the way a piano keyboard was, up to five keys at once, one for each finger. It would be used eventually to "talk" dolphin fluently by spelling out sounds, but for now it just contained triggers for a few dozen phrases.
"Say baby talk. Not say good. This swimmer Sylvia."
Actually SYLVIA was a collection of dolphin sounds that a human would not hear as "Sylvia," but which a computer could transliterate as the sounds of her name. Thus dolphin and human sounds could be translated back and forth.
