by Nancy Kress
“Yes,” he said. “I’m escorting the visitors from Gofkit Tramloe here early tomorrow morning.”
“Guard duty, um?” she said, making it sound menial. “I suppose it’s necessary. But maybe you can answer me a question. Is one supposed to give this child a present at the ceremony? I certainly don’t want to commit a social gaffe.”
Kaufman studied her. Sarcasm, and under it … more sarcasm? Or did she actually want to know? He couldn’t read her, not even after a lifetime of dealing with politicians and military and corporations with hidden agendas. No wonder she was such a formidable force. She was far more complicated than the average general. Deviousness and brains and beauty.
Beauty?
Yes. Still. Despite.
He played it straight. “I believe a gift is in order, yes. Marbet and I are giving the child something.”
“What?” she said, and Kaufman saw that she knew he didn’t have the faintest idea what Marbet planned as a present. Magdalena tossed him a knowing smile and sauntered off. Against his better judgment, Kaufman watched her until she was out of sight.
* * *
I could have him, Magdalena thought. However, it would be a lot of trouble. Decent men so frequently balked at first. Or maybe she couldn’t have Kaufman, maybe he’d remain faithful to that genemod mind reader of his. Once, the mere uncertainty and challenge would have excited her. Now, it just didn’t seem worth the effort.
No one understood, not really. They thought her predatory, cold. And she worked to maintain that illusion, to keep hidden and safe her real self. Only hidden things were safe.
She wanted—had wanted all her life—to feel safe.
That’s what the money was for, what the men had been for, what the endless covert deals were for. Why couldn’t the fools understand this basic fact of life? Only power kept you safe. If you had enough of it, you could control any situation that threatened you, and then you were safe.
Growing up, she had never felt safe, not for a minute. She didn’t remember her mother except as a cloud of sickening fear, a giant who hurt her over and over. Her mother’s name could still make the back of her neck go cold. Catalune.
May Damroscher hadn’t even felt safe with Sualeen Harris, although Sualeen had been the only person she’d ever loved, until Laslo. Sualeen had lived down the block from May and Catalune. She noticed that six-year-old May was often in pain, and she examined the bruises and burns and cuts. She didn’t call any authorities; these people never did. She merely informed Catalune Damroscher that May lived with her now and if Catalune set foot anywhere near the kid, she was dead. Catalune knew Sualeen Harris meant it. She turned May over to her and never saw her adopted daughter again.
Sualeen Harris had a huge sprawling family of ill-defined; kin of no namable ethnicity. They were walking examples of genetic warfare: black, white, Hispanic, Vietnamese, Punjab. Some were criminal and some were not, some were marginally less impoverished than others, some were literate and some were not. They were all, under Sualeen’s energetic bullying, kind to May. When she turned twelve, Sualeen lined up all the males in her family from eleven to seventy and told them that if any of them laid a hand on May, they were dead men walking. Like Catalune six years before, they believed her, and the men who had been eyeing May’s developing breasts averted their eyes.
Sualeen’s great regret in a life filled with hunger and cold and death was that she could not afford carved, real-granite headstones for her family’s graves. She tried to save for these, but always the money was needed for something: a new baby, bail money, payoffs to cops, something. Often Sualeen visited the great sprawling public cemetery a four hours’ train ride from the city and mourned that her loved ones’ graves were marked only by anonymous numbers on cheap foamcast. When the tumors finally got her, unchecked by any medicine, she knew that foamcast was all she would get, too.
Two days before she died, lying in a fetid sweltering room in great pain, she called May to her. “Go … May, go…”
“Where, Sualeen?” May said.
“Go … where the rich men are. It gonna come to you, honey … however. Get what you can out … out of it.”
May didn’t ask what “it” meant. She knew.
“Money … backyard … buried under tree…”
“I love you,” May said, for the first and last time in her life.
“Go…”
May didn’t go. She stayed for the coma, holding Sualeen’s hand, and the death, and the funeral. At the graveyard there was only a foamcast marker with an anonymous number. Two days later, alone in Sualeen’s house, a Harris uncle raped her.
May lay quietly, not struggling, knowing it would be futile. Penetration hurt her, and blood stained the floor. Afterward the uncle, caught somewhere between defiance and shame, didn’t look at her as he pulled up his pants and swaggered out the door. She was sixteen years old.
May pulled up her own pants, Her body shrieked, from vagina to the base of her spine. Leaving the blood unwiped on the floor, she stumbled out to the backyard tree—there was only one, dying of some blight—and dug with a fork until she found the box with the pathetically small number of money chips. But it was enough for a train ticket to North Carolina and a monokini when she got there.
She walked up to a guard outside the elite enclave she had seen simulated in holomovies. The guard’s eyes widened, then narrowed. May smiled. Despite her vaginal pain, she let him do what he wanted in exchange for entrance to the beach. She noted, with detachment, that afterward he wore the same look of mingled defiance and shame as the Harris uncle.
May went onto the beach and slowly walked up and down the water’s edge, looking for shells. That was how she met Amerigo Dalton, who became the third man to penetrate her in twenty-four hours. May bit her lip and endured it. She needed Amerigo Dalton, and even then she’d known that he was going to be only the first of many.
But not, she decided, Lyle Kaufman. At least, not right now.
Walking into her pathetic primitive hut, Magdalena batted at a flying insect. The two bodyguards, whom she noticed less than she noticed air, trailed her and took up their posts at the door. She sat down on one of the laughable native cushions and tried, yet again, to fight off the daily despair.
Laslo. Where was he? Who had taken him? What effect would the coup d’etat on Mars—assuming that fuckhole Pierce actually brought it off—have on the capture of Laslo and Capelo?
She knew very well that Laslo was her … what had that professor called it, so many years ago? Somebody’s heel. Some Greek. The place she could be hurt.
So many sweet memories. Laslo clambering onto her lap with a toy: “See, Mommy!” Laslo laughing at a puppy. Laslo saying, with a four-year-old’s artless pleasure, “What a pretty day today!”
Laslo, in later years … No. Not those memories. All adolescents were difficult, look at that alien terror Essa. Laslo was just going through a normal rocky phase, he’d grow out of it. This was no more than another of Laslo’s maddening, cruel “escapes” from his mother. But maybe this time he’d learn a real lesson from his misadventure, kidnapped and cooped up with a famous physicist for months. Laslo hated being cooped up and he wasn’t much good at science.
When his captors came to move both him and Thomas Capelo to a more secure location—exactly what Magdalena would have done in their place—Laslo must have thought they were letting him go. Time he learned better. Only his mother could release him, and maybe after she had, he’d have a greater appreciation of the life she worked so hard to give him. Yes, this whole thing might have a beneficial effect on Laslo.
Cheered, Magdalena rose gracefully from her pillow. She had to find some sort of suitable gift for that alien brat of Enli’s. What did you give a primitive native child? It wasn’t like she could just order a toy from F.A.O. Schwartz-Mars. Well, there had to be something suitable in her ship. Time to check it out anyway.
She snapped her fingers to summon the bodyguards to her skimmer.
> THIRTEEN
GOFKIT SHAMLOE
The next morning, Kaufman bicycled to Gofkit Tramloe in the company of Enli’s mate, Calin, to escort the visitors back to Gofkit Shamloe for the flower ceremony.
“Are you sure you can still ride a bicycle?” Marbet had asked him the night before, lying wrapped in each other’s arms in their hut.
“Isn’t it supposed to be something you don’t forget?”
“That’s what they say.”
He’d chuckled. “You can’t ride a bike, can you? You never learned.”
“No. I never did. God, it’s dark here. I’m used to Luna City; we never go completely black. And Earth. I’ve only lived where there’s city lighting.”
Kaufman had seen darkness this deep, in combat situations. He preferred not to talk to Marbet about those. And he welcomed the impenetrable blackness for another reason. Sometimes it seemed that Marbet actually read his mind, so good was she at interpreting his tiniest body gesture or tone of voice. In the blackness, silently making love, she could detect neither. Try as he would—and he had tried hard—Kaufman had been unable to keep Magdalena out of his mind while he caressed Marbet.
Now he checked his arms and mounted his bicycle. Calin, too, was armed, with tanglefoam and a high-powered laser gun. Ann didn’t know about the latter; she wouldn’t have approved. But Kaufman was not going into combat—if you could dignify spear-throwing with that word—with a lieutenant armed only with tanglefoam. Tanglefoam range was far less than spear range. And Calin was the steadiest and calmest native he’d met on this planet. Despite Calin’s speaking no English and Kaufman no World, Calin had easily mastered the laser settings during the secret training session Kaufman had given him yesterday. Kaufman, an experienced judge of soldiers, trusted him.
Calin held Enli’s hands against his stomach for a long moment, then released her and got onto his own bicycle. Kaufman kissed Marbet and they set off for Gofkit Tramloe, leaving behind them a predawn village already frenzied with preparation for the flower ceremony. Food smells drifted after them on the air. People shouted; above the general noise Kaufman could hear Essa’s excited, irritating laugh. Dieter had already left for Gofkit Mersoe, farther away.
It was obvious that the road between villages was little used. Unpaved, it had apparently once been so traveled that the dirt became hard-packed. Now weeds poked through the ground, in places so thick that he and Calin had to dismount and walk their bicycles. The encroaching underbrush would make good cover for attackers. Kaufman stayed alert, glancing every few seconds at his heat sensors, but the only thing they registered, or that Kaufman saw, were the ubiquitous rabbit-analogues called frebs.
What he mostly saw were flowers. All over again Kaufman was astonished at the floral life of World. No one tended these roadside beds anymore, yet they burst with the color and scent of hundreds of species of spectacular flowers. Beyond the roadside beds, wildflowers bloomed in almost equal profusion. If the marauders at Voratur’s old compound did indeed succeed in introducing war to this part of the planet, it would be a war fought among endless gardens. Blood on the allebenirib.
It would be so easy to take out the entire compound. One burst of proton beam. And, Kaufman admitted to himself, it would make him feel less guilty. But he would abide by Ann’s wishes. She was going to live here; he was not. Thank God.
They reached Gofkit Tramloe without incident. There Calin exchanged long, fulsome speeches, accompanied by flowers, with the seven natives journeying to Gofkit Shamloe. Kaufman hung back, knowing that these people were not used to humans; even Calin seemed foreign to them since the cessation of shared reality. Children darted peeping glances at the strangers from behind bushes and walls. This town, too, had a stockade.
The journey back was much slower, and on foot. By prearrangement, Kaufman and Calin left their bicycles at Gofkit Tramloe. Two of the visitors were old. One, in fact, was a shriveled crone with bright black eyes who looked older than rocks, apparently a very honored state. (“They are bringing a grandmother’s mother!” Enli had exclaimed excitedly, which meant nothing to Kaufman.) She rode in a crude cart pulled by two strong young men, serene and majestic among the flowers, food, bottles, and presents being sent by the village. Kaufman hoped she wouldn’t die of old age on the way.
He put Calin at the front of the procession and himself at the rear. If bandits were going to attack, it would be on the way back: more loot, more slaves. The natives all sang, making more noise than Kaufman would have liked (rule out detecting an enemy by sound). But no one attacked. They saw no one until they were in sight of Gofkit Shamloe, when the official delegation paraded out to meet the visitors.
Instantly Kaufman knew that something was wrong.
Ann was among the greeters. Kaufman could not read alien expressions very well, but Ann’s was clearly disturbed. Dieter? Kaufman ran over his options for a hostage situation within the Voratur compound. Although it was difficult to see how Dieter’s group could have been captured. Dieter was as well armed as Kaufman.
“It’s Essa,” Ann whispered to him when the procession had wound into the village. “She’s missing!”
“Doesn’t she do that periodically?” Kaufman asked.
“She wouldn’t have done it this morning. She wouldn’t have missed this for anything, it’s the most excitement we’ve had in a year.”
“What do you want me to do?” Kaufman said, hiding his irritation.
“I don’t know. Enli’s very upset. She—”
“Has anybody looked for Magdalena? Essa seems fascinated by her. Maybe she’s with Magdalena.”
“Lyle, Magdalena’s at the ceremony. Everybody is, except Essa. Look, here comes Dieter.”
A dust cloud floated on the horizon in the direction of Gofkit Mersoe. Ann and Kaufman brought up the rear of the first procession, which was supposed to have entered the village green and have completed all its speeches before the second procession arrived. It wasn’t dissimilar, Kaufman thought, to an admiral’s inspection.
Inside the stockade, the impression was even stronger. The communal green had been transformed. Pillows and low tables were scattered thickly over the ground. Every hut was hung with flowers. Plates mounded with food almost hid a long trestle table built while Kaufman had been gone. The Gofkit Shamloe villagers, dressed in carefully preserved festival clothing from before the Change, sat in rows on fallen logs at the edge of the green, the children preternaturally quiet and stiff. Gofkit Shamloe’s old piper, Solor Pek Ramul, played softly.
Kaufman caught sight of both Marbet and Magdalena, standing together near the back of the seated villagers. Marbet, very short, wore a gown Kaufman had seen before, a modest drift of pale green fabric so light that the whole thing rolled up smaller than his fist and weighed a mere three ounces. She looked beautiful. Magdalena looked … Why the hell would a woman in exile, or whatever she was supposed to be, travel with a dress like that? And did she wear it at Enli’s child’s ceremony out of respect or mockery?
The dress was at least part holo, part heavy fabric in fantastic streaks of color that kept subtly changing as the holo played over the cloth. It was studded with jewels that may or may not have been real, or holo, or something else. The bodice, cut very low, dung to Magdalena’s breasts and waist before flaring into a stiff long skirt. She had pulled her hair into shining loops on the top of her head, strung with more jewels. Her lips and eyelids were gold. She held herself proudly, and next to her Marbet, a foot shorter, suddenly looked insignificant. Kaufman looked away.
Enli and Calin, parents of the honored child, were making long speeches to the grandmother’s mother, still in her overladen cart. Kaufman resigned himself to several hours of singing, flowers, and talk in a language he didn’t understand. Ann’s comlink shrilled, startling them both.
“What … Dieter knows better than to call now, unless something’s wrong,” Ann said. She moved behind Kaufman’s bulk, pulled out her comlink, and switched the message from stored to li
ve. It wasn’t Dieter.
“—have me oh come quick they’ll hurt me again come—” The link went dead. Essa.
Kaufman glanced around. Incredibly, no one else had heard. He damped a hand on Ann’s wrist and drew her back between two huts until he could pull her behind a wall.
“Is there a location indicator on Essa’s comlink?”
“Yes. She’s in Voratur’s compound. Oh, Lyle!”
Kaufman thought rapidly. “I need Dieter, and two Worlders. Young, calm men who can take orders. Calin can protect Gofkit Shamloe, I’ll give him more arms. But post lookouts, because Essa will have told them what’s going on here today. She won’t have been able to help herself. And I want Magdalena’s skimmer. You get Dieter aside as soon as he gets here and tell him to unobtrusively meet me at the skimmer. I’m going to circle around the back of the huts and talk to Magdalena.”
“Lyle, you and Dieter can’t go now! It’s the start of the ceremony!”
He took her hands. “Ann, the marauders want information about the villages. They may torture Essa. I think I can get in and trade for her without anyone of ours dying. But I have to go now.”
She nodded. Kaufman trusted her to find two steady young alien males and to inform Dieter. Kaufman slipped around the back of the huts, along the slope to the river bank. He wasn’t really surprised when Magdalena met him halfway; she would have seen Ann reach for her comlink and then Ann and Kaufman withdraw. There wasn’t much Magdalena missed.
She looked wildly incongruous beside the crude wooden huts, on the rough grass-analogue, in her magnificent jeweled dress, her full breasts on display. Kaufman told her briefly what had happened. “I need your skimmer, please.”
“Only if I go with you.”
“No. This is a military action, however tiny. I don’t want to have to look out for you.”
“It’s probably going to be a trading action, after an initial scare to the natives, and you know it. I drive the skimmer or you don’t have it.”
