The Beauty of Our Weapons

by Jilly Paddock

  “Why indeed? If we could solve that mystery, we might be a whole lot closer to finding Chandre and the child.”

  “A blood-thorn?” He appeared not to have heard me. “Then I was lucky you found it. Those little devils kill within days and often escape discovery, even under a high-tech scan. Ever thought about going into medicine, Anna? You’ve a talent for it.”

  “Perhaps when I’m too old to play games for EI, I’ll fall back on it.” As I watched, the telepath picked at the edges of his salad, although he didn’t seem hungry yet. “You’re bouncing back fast. When I first set eyes on you, you were seriously ill. You can recover as quickly as you like, but you’re staying here, in bed, and not even having one stray thought about helping out in the field. If I have to, I’ll confine you on board my ship and handle this affair on my own, you understand?”

  Lyall nodded slowly. “I want a part in this mission, of course, but not if I’m excess baggage. Did Meeka tell you exactly what happened?”

  “Yes, and gave me your map. I followed the trail.”

  “Come up with anything new?”

  “Nothing that you didn’t find.”

  His face clouded. “Did you get to the tree?”

  “Yes.” I unfurled the blue ribbon, dropping it into his hand. “The bough didn’t fall by accident, but you knew that. Somebody lased it down, camouflaged their handiwork rather badly and added the props afterwards.”

  “And the bloodstains?”

  “I’m reliably informed that it wasn’t human blood. It came from a bird, probably a chicken.”

  Lyall’s eyes narrowed. “Where the hell did you magic up an instant analysis on an anti-tech world like this?”

  “I stole the hardware a long time ago. I expect Delany’s forgotten that I’ve got it by now. It has its uses, but it gets us no nearer to finding Chandre. Meeka told me that you believe she’s safe.”

  “I’m certain. I’d know if she died.” Misery crouched in his grey-green eyes. “That’s our curse, isn’t it? We know just enough to be useful to EI and too much to sleep easily at night.”

  I recalled my premonition of Lewis’s death and how often I’d wished that the gift of foreknowing would desert me. Did Lyall share that gift and pray in the dark despair of midnight for the same thing? “It’s only a curse if we let it be. To some extent I feel it too. Chandre hasn’t been hurt, although I can’t be as sure about the child. I don’t know her and she means little to me. She’s just a name.”

  “And one that you happen to hate.” He paused and took a measure of my reaction. “Jansen.”

  “It doesn’t matter who she is. If I can find Chandre, the child will be with her. I don’t suppose you’ve any idea where I might start looking?”

  “When I realised they were missing, I tried a scan. They aren’t within the city, but more than that I can’t say. I’m not strong enough at present to reach much further than the walls of this room.”

  “We can lend you strength. With your emotional ties to Chandre you’ve far more chance than I have of finding her.” I stretched a hand out. “Link?”

  Lyall looked dubious. “I’m not sure I want you in my mind, Anna.”

  That hurt. “You don’t trust me? After all this time?”

  “I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”

  “I know exactly what you meant,” I said. “I can spot a mismatch between words and surface thoughts, and even if I couldn’t see it in your aura, I can smell your fear.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.” The telepath lied. “It’s just my natural caution, that’s all, and a perfectly reasonable dislike of mental invasion, even by a friend.”

  “I can feed you energy without invading your head. Don’t refuse, for Chandre’s sake.”

  He took my hand reluctantly and I felt his inward quaking. Zenni and I supplied energy for him to draw on and he needed a considerable amount, being a great deal weaker than he appeared. Lines of concentration dented his brow over his tightly-clenched eyelids, as he maintained the search for several minutes. At last he let his breath out between his teeth in a hiss of frustration and broke the link. “Nothing! She might as well be dead!”

  “Perhaps she’s unconscious or drugged into a deep sleep. You couldn’t detect her then.”

  “That’s true.” His fear surfaced again, sharp and acid, flavoured from a different source. “I couldn’t bear to lose her, Anna. Part of me would die with her, we share so much—”

  As if it were a sudden, icy gust of wind, the precog hit me and I lost touch with the city, the mountain, the whole world. In their place was a small room, cool and full of shadows. Dark velvet curtains and a cone of sunlight with dust motes dancing in its heart. White rose petals falling to a cold marble floor. Chandre dead, her hair frosted to grey, her face deeply wrinkled; Chandre alive again, a young slip of a girl. Lyall angry, hostile, too proud to let me see his grief, and tangled into the dream a whiff of poison and the unseen hand of the Sisterhood of Grace. I shook my head and the fragments slipped away.

  That was all your own work, girl! Zenni whispered, a chill in his voice that summoned goosebumps on the back of my neck. The unit stayed dead. You didn’t use it for that sneak preview of the unknown.

  “Anna?” Lyall touched my wrist. “What’s wrong? You look so far away.”

  Far enough—eighty years in distance and twenty in real time. “Do you ever get flashes of the future?”

  “Prescience? No, that’s not one of my skills. Have you seen something bad?”

  “I’m not sure what it was. I wish these snapshots of the yet-to-be came with a guide-book.” That wasn’t true; I’d seen enough to guess that my vision had no bearing on the now. “Forget it.”

  He nodded weakly, lacking the tenacity to pursue the point. I took the plate out of his hands before he could drop it and set it aside, scarcely touched.

  “Where’s Meeka?” Lyall asked.

  “I sent her away and I doubt she’ll be back before morning.” I cast my psychic net and found her, safe enough, close by in the restaurant. “I’ll watch over her and make sure she comes to no harm.”

  “A regular guardian angel, and I always had you pegged as one of the other sort myself!” His laugh was brittle, nervous. “Are you going to stay there all night, perched like a vulture on the end of my bed? Haven’t you got a room of your own to go to?”

  “Yes, I’ve a room, just along the hall. I thought you’d feel safer with someone watching over you while you slept.”

  The walls of his mind were so like glass that he might as well have projected the words outside it; yes, but not you.

  I rose slowly to my feet with as much dignity as a girl can muster in an oversized hotel bathrobe. “I was on vacation too, before Collins landed me in this shit. Meeka doesn’t want me here and, apparently, neither do you. Well, I don’t want to be here either, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt about working for the Eye, it’s that nobody ever gets what they want. The bottom line is that you can either put up with me or wait six days for another pair. Which is it going to be, Mister Marshall?”

  “There’s no need to lose your temper, Anna.”

  “I haven’t lost it—yet. Make your choice. Do I go or do I stay?”

  He was milk-pale again, a nugget of anger glowing in his heart. “Fine friend you are, if you’d desert Chandre when she needs you most! Don’t make empty threats, girl, because I don’t believe you can walk away from this!”

  Zenni coughed. It pains me to say it, but he’s right.

  Damn him! I shuffled down from stalemate. “I’ll stay. If you should happen to need me during the night, if, perchance, another maniac breaks in here to kidnap you or if you wake up to find a blood-crazed assassin pressing a dagger to your throat, take comfort from the fact that I’ll only be a thought away.”

  A negligible jump took me back to my room and as an afterthought, my clothes materialised on the floor beside me. Zenni held a diplomatic silence as I worked off my irritation in a brisk
spurt of unpacking. It was finished too soon, so I rearranged all the items of furniture that weren’t carved out of rock until the room was to my liking, then threw open the balcony doors and paced up and down my section of the terrace. A slight breeze came up from the forest, salt-kissed and scented with jasmine, cool against my flushed cheeks.

  They take me for granted! I complained.

  They do.

  It’s always good old Anna, trusty and true, on call twenty four hours a day, year in, year out, to bail them out of trouble! They expect too damned much!

  They do.

  All they do is whistle and I come a-running, like any obedient dog! I leaned against the balcony’s guard rail and tilted my head back until I could almost see the city’s peak. I’m overreacting, aren’t I?

  No, Anna, of course not.

  You would tell me if I was, wouldn’t you?

  When you’re in this kind of mood? He paused, his timing that of a comic genius. No, Anna, of course not!

  I joined in with his laughter. Sorry for the tantrum, partner.

  You needed to vent a little steam, I think.

  It just hurts that Lyall still won’t trust me. It’s been so long since we were supposedly enemies.

  Perhaps it isn’t in his character to be as forgiving as Chandre. He seems to be the sort who’d bear a grudge beyond any reasonable timespan.

  Senseless. I shook my head and the heavy curls swung slowly around my face. I, of course, have never been known to bear a grudge for a single microsecond.

  This time he stretched the pause further. No, Anna, of course not!

  Chapter Five: Visited by the Djinn

  The evening drew out in front of me like a thread spun to infinity. I dressed Caron in the most demure item of her working wardrobe, a loose shift affair with dropped waist and cap sleeves in a sober pattern of tiny white flowers on a bottle-green ground, buttoning it primly all the way up to the neck and down to the hem. I chose a pair of flat sandals to go with it, and with my hair scraped back from my face, held in place by a knotted scarf, and a touch of make-up applied with an amateur hand, I judged that I could almost pass for sixteen. I repaired to the hotel’s bar and was greatly amused when the staff demanded proof of my adult status before serving me with an alcoholic drink.

  I found an isolated table on the terrace and sipped the banana-flavoured slush, moving its fruit garnish around with the sharp end of a tiny paper umbrella. The view from here was spectacular, a riot of colour and light, and scent too, as garden after garden tumbled down the mountainside and was lost in the distant black void of the forest, but the conversation was banal, a dull background music that I dipped in and out of. As much as I wanted to be left alone several of the guests had other ideas, drifting over to my table and forcing me into being sociable, some just trading simple greetings and well wishes, some sitting to talk for longer. I let Caron giggle a lot, but say nothing of consequence. Three drinks, two botched pick-up spiels and a depressingly tedious account of the ‘funny’ side of life as a troubleshooter in the construct production lab later, it was midnight and the bar shut. I went back to my room and dragged a chair out onto my fragment of balcony. The Opal Garden settled into silence as all its occupants found sleep. After an hour there were only three minds awake—mine, the Tambou on the reception desk and Meeka, who wept incessantly into her pillow.

  Not sleepy? Zenni asked softly.

  Not in the slightest. I don’t agree with the locals—my body clock says that it can only be suppertime at the latest. How are things up in orbit?

  Jeb’s awake.

  I shut my eyes and took a disembodied tour through Brimstone’s staterooms, finding my new husband in our cabin. He sat on the edge of the bed, curled over his battered skin drum and singing quietly to himself in counterpoint to the intricate rhythm summoned from the bodhran. It was an ancient song, one culled from his store of folk ballads. I’d often teased him over his obsession with ancient lyrics, he kept so many of them stored away in his memory. This was one I hadn’t heard before.

  “... I’d rather rest on a true-love’s breast than any other where.”

  It’s called Searching for Lambs. Zenni prompted. ‘For I am thine and thou art mine—no man shall uncomfort thee.’

  How do you know that?

  I let Jeb back-up his archive of reconstructed lyrics in part of my data bank. It’s text-only. It takes up very little room.

  What other guy-stuff do you two get up to when I’m not looking?

  That would be telling!

  I listened in to the rest of the ballad, with only the merest frisson of guilt at spying on Jeb’s private performance. He finished, laid the drum aside with a sigh and then glanced up. “Anna?”

  I’m here, in spirit at least. Jeb had spoken aloud; I slipped my words into the periphery of his mind. How did you know?

  “The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.” He shrugged. “I have my own magics—small, perhaps, when measured against yours, yet useful.”

  I don’t doubt it. Busy?

  “Lonely.”

  Likewise. Want to come down here?

  “That allowed?” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of Zenni’s spy-eye, a tiny sensor embedded in the far corner of the ceiling.

  My partner sketched a sly smile in the link. I’m no chaperone. Shall I cover my eyes and ears until morning?

  I don’t want you off-line, not in the middle of a mission, but perhaps you could take the surveillance down to a minimum?

  Consider it done.

  I brought Jeb back into the conversation. Zenni promises not to tell and who else is here to forbid it? Come ahead, towards my voice, and take my hand.

  I’ve always thought that seeing someone teleport in should be far more spectacular, maybe having them appear inside a halo of rainbow glitter or to a fanfare of brazen horns, but all you get is a sudden vertical line suspended in mid-air that stretches out into solidity faster than the untutored eye can follow, as if a figure has just pushed its way through a tear in a rubber sheet, and a faint, dismal ‘pop!’ as the air is displaced. Jeb didn’t hesitate, taking one step forward through limbo and finding himself on my balcony. He squeezed my hand hard and I felt the shiver go through his fingers. “Wow, scary!”

  “More so when you wing it on your own that very first time.” I mirrored his shrug. “After that, you get used to it.”

  He smiled and hugged me, but the gesture was awkward, forced. “As I’ll have to get used to you changing faces on me. I’m looking at a stranger.”

  “Shallow illusion, nothing more. I’m still Anna inside.” I stuck out my lower lip, pouting like a sulky child. “What’s wrong with Caron anyway? Don’t you like her?”

  “She seems a sweet enough kid, but isn’t she a little young for me?” He grimaced as I trod on his foot. “On second thoughts, I like ’em young!”

  “Just as well. What do you think of Tambouret?”

  Jeb turned slowly, surveying the dark forest under its bright net of stars and drinking in the warm, scented air. He didn’t need to answer me as I shared in his delight. “I can hear the ocean. Can we take a walk by it?”

  I found us an empty beach with the requisite crescent of perfect silver sand, the full gamut of gentle, murmuring foam-crowned waves and even an impossible fringe of palm trees. Tambouret’s twin moons bowed low over the sea as we left a double row of footprints along the edge of the tide, two souls amid the millions on this world, yet seemingly the first to ever walk here and strike the impression of humanity on the virgin sand.

  “Something’s swimming out there.” Jeb nodded towards the horizon. “A dolphin, I think.”

  My awareness brushed against a non-mind. “It’s only a simulacrum, the coastguard maybe.”

  “Couldn’t we get the roles right, just this once? I should be the prosaic scientist and you the fey romantic.”

  “Did I read for that script? I don’t recall the auditions.” I saw a protest rear up in his mind and con
tinued before he could voice it. “I’m not prepared to argue tonight. Speak softly, or not at all. Walk. Enjoy.”

  We did just that for a while, until the siren call of the waves at our side became too seductive to ignore.

  Jeb raised his eyebrow. “Swim?”

  “I thought you’d never ask!”

  We left our clothing in an untidy heap and surrendered to the blood-warm sea, chasing each other out into cooler, deeper water. Wherever either of us broke the surface it flickered with fragments of blue luminescence, as tiny denizens of the plankton burned with micro-anger at our disruption of their decent midnight business. Sapphire witch-light flared over our skins, streaming out in our wake and leaving eerie trails as we ducked and dived. We shattered the night’s silence, laughing as we splashed each other with showers of radiance.

  “Do they think of everything here?” Jeb asked, pausing for breath, a glory framing his shoulders and hair.

  “They’ve had all of two centuries to iron out their problems. This eco-system is perfect, perhaps a little too much so—”

  Jeb caught my hair and pulled me under for a submerged kiss. We surfaced in an explosion of glowing bubbles. “Girl, are you ever satisfied with anything?”

  “Very seldom. My standards are very exacting.”

  “Perfectionist, eh?” He traced a bright line along my cheek. “I understand such people, I have to guard against being one myself—”

  I clasped my hands behind his neck and used my dead weight to duck him, returning the favour, and as we sank the dolphin swam between us, using its body as a wedge and parting us with its sleek flanks. It nudged me up into the air, surfacing itself and facing me with a sharp whistle of concern.

  “No, this man isn’t bothering me!” I grinned at the simulacrum, guessing that our horseplay must have triggered a rescue program. “We were only mucking about, honest!”

  “Both of us are strong swimmers.” Jeb agreed, matching my poor attempt at looking innocent.

  The dolphin opened its jaws in a wide, toothy smile. “This unit regrets its intervention,” it said, in amiable alto tones. “It will depart, leaving its apologies. It wishes you a pleasant remainder of the night.”