Impersonations

by Walter Jon Williams

“I understand.”

  “And the Lord Harbormaster is a civilian official, a political appointee of the Governor of Upper California, and handles everything else in the port—tariffs, berthing, warehousing, environmental issues, and so forth.”

  “Very good.”

  “Now, the Lord Captain has heard quite a few complaints about the Manado Company from other shippers. Some have complained that the Manado ships get priority in loading and unloading. Everything is expedited for them in ways that it isn’t for other companies. And Manado ships always seem to get choice berthing.”

  Sula laughed. “Like in a Fleet dockyard?”

  An ironic buzz tinged Parku’s words. “Yes. Yes, indeed.”

  “But none of that is in the Lord Captain’s purview, yes?”

  “Correct, my lady. It’s the Lord Harbormaster or his assistants who make those decisions.”

  “It sounds as if the Manado Company has a very special arrangement with the Lord Harbormaster.”

  “Very likely.” That ironic buzz was still present. “Now, there have been some criminal complaints.”

  “Yes?”

  A tone of eagerness entered Parku’s voice. “There was one ship that had its berthing assignment taken away in favor of a Manado ship. The captain claimed that she hadn’t understood the garbled radio order, steered her ship into the berth anyway, and then claimed engine failure prevented her leaving. She prolonged her engine failure until her ship was unloaded and had taken on her new cargo.”

  “Very clever.”

  “Well, she paid for it. Beaten within an inch of her life by a group of thugs, and ended up spending a few weeks in the hospital.”

  “Any indictments?”

  A chime of negation. “No, the attackers were never identified, and no connection with the Manado Company ever surfaced. And the Lord Captain said there were other violent incidents of a similar nature from people who ‘crossed Manado’s hawse,’ as he put it. The Lord Captain is itching to bring a prosecution, but he simply has no evidence.”

  Sula considered the news for a moment. “Lord Peltrot acted as if he has a habit of getting what he wants.”

  The melodious voice turned solemn. “The Manado Company doesn’t shy at violence, my lady. Perhaps I should have Lieutenant-Captain Koridun contact you regarding your safety?”

  Sula smiled. “I hardly think the Manado Company is likely to assault a Fleet captain. It would cause them too much trouble. There would be an investigation they couldn’t control.”

  “But still—”

  “Besides,” Sula added, “I travel with a pair of very accomplished killers.” And, she thought, I’m not so bad at that sort of thing myself.

  “Very good, my lady,” said Parku. Then, after a short pause: “One rather minor issue—I received a notice from the Disaster Relief Agency that the Karangetang volcano may be on the verge of erupting.”

  Sula frowned. “How does that concern the dockyard?”

  “Karangetang is on Api Siau Island, just north of Manado. A large eruption might endanger the Tambu elevator or its facility.”

  Amusement twitched the corners of Sula’s eyes. “We can’t escape Manado, can we?”

  “No, my lady.”

  “Very well. Keep me informed.”

  “Very good, my lady.”

  Sula and Goojie left Yoshimitsu at the Arch, and Spence drove them back to Otautahi on the other side of the Banks peninsula.

  “The miniature warrior!” Goojie cried. “What a terror!”

  “I can see where it might be intimidating with a lot of people chanting at once,” Sula said. “But Mister Yoshimitsu—”

  “Whose ancestors ate our ancestors!”

  Sula sighed. “Ah, well. We have better weapons now than chants.”

  “And better food to eat.”

  Sula turned to Goojie. “What shall we do tomorrow? The west coast is supposed to be spectacular; we can take a train . . .”

  “No no no. We’re going to do something I want to do.”

  Sula looked at her in surprise. “It was you who wanted to go to the Arch.”

  “We’re going to a spa in the morning, then shopping in the afternoon. But I’ve got a dinner with the local Kan-fra people tonight; you’re on your own.”

  “I—”

  “It’s your vacation! Pamper yourself!”

  Sula sighed. She might as well.

  Who was Sula now? Cousin Goojie’s comic sidekick, apparently.

  * * *

  Sula was reluctant to credit Parku’s warning about the danger from Manado, but then she remembered Lord Peltrot’s ranting, and she decided that she hadn’t gone on vacation to get beaten up by thugs. That night, she told Spence and Macnamara that there had been a warning, and that they should be on alert and carry sidearms. And that she’d carry a sidearm herself.

  Not that she spent much of the next day in uniform. In the morning, Goojie brought her to a spa on the Banks peninsula just outside Otautahi, and while Cree musicians played soothing music in the background, there were a steam bath, massage, facial, manicure and pedicure, and she had her hair styled while a cosmetician painted a new face over her old one. She looked at the result in the mirror and blinked; the image showed a new person who looked just enough like the old Sula to seem uncanny. The cosmetician had darkened her pale complexion and created a kind of smoky effect in the eye sockets that made her eyes blaze like green fire out of some exotic extraplanetary twilight. She turned at Goojie and seemed to be looking into another mirror.

  “They made me look like you!” she said.

  Goojie smiled. “We’re twins now.”

  Spence, uniformed and with her pistol, hovered in the waiting room, to the apparent distress of the Torminel manager, who didn’t want such a lower-class servant in her establishment. Sula put on her captain voice and told her to lump it, and she did.

  Macnamara stayed with the car to make sure someone didn’t put a bomb in it. Sula thought that was a bit extreme, but at least that meant there weren’t two guards standing around to torment the manager.

  Leaving the spa, Sula noticed that her hair bounced more than it usually did.

  From the spa, they went to an arcade filled with boutiques. The shop assistants clustered around them, polite and attentive and as beautifully painted and arrayed as dolls. Perfumes floated gently in the air. Dresses, gowns, sheaths, jackets, skirts, and pantaloons blossomed around them like exotic flowers. Goojie selected treasures for herself and for Sula, pushed Sula into the dressing rooms, and critiqued the result. She made Sula buy a jacket, a kurti-and-skirt combination, and a floaty gown in shades of green, similar to the blue one Goojie had worn at their first meeting.

  “And is that the best underwear you’ve got?” Goojie asked.

  Sula considered the question cautiously. “Possibly,” she said.

  So, then it was off to a lingerie shop, and then another stop for shoes, and then another place for jewelry, where Sula was urged to indulge in a ridiculously expensive pair of silver bracelets inset with black and red coral.

  “Stop bullying me,” she said.

  “It’s for your own good.”

  “Where would I wear them?”

  “You could wear them tonight. At dinner and afterward.”

  Afterward? Sula thought, and then decided not to buy the bracelets. Goojie, having accomplished most of her objectives, let the bracelets go with a sigh. “You can come back tomorrow if you change your mind.”

  Sula changed to the green gown at the hotel, then Goojie carried Sula off to the C___C___ restaurant, the name of which was inscribed above the door in old Terran script. Sula asked the Lai-own hostess what the letter stood for.

  “Christchurch,” she said. “It’s the old name for Otautahi.”

  “Christchurch,” Sula said. “Two words you can’t use any more.”

  “Why is that?” Goojie wanted to know.

  Sula explained as the hostess showed them to their table in the Terran s
ection. Macnamara was stationed in the lounge, which had a view of the dining room, and this time, Spence stayed with the car—bombs were more her specialty, anyway.

  The transparent walls of the dining room overlooked Diamond Harbour, with the lights of the ships shining like rubies and emeralds against the darkness of the bay, and the craggy peaks of the Banks Peninsula still aglow with the light of the setting sun. Wearing a new face, her body oiled and relaxed and scented, a silken gown floating around her, Sula felt a strange world of possibility shivering open like a pair of trembling wings. It was, she thought, a world where she was no longer at war, where she could settle into the comforts of peace and pleasure.

  A world she had never known.

  Goojie ordered cocktails for the both of them but was disappointed when Sula ordered soft cider instead.

  “You’re on vacation!”

  “I still don’t drink.”

  “Everyone’s looking at us.”

  Sula looked at her gown to make sure something hadn’t spilled on it.

  “We look like twin sisters, that’s why,” Goojie said. “Gorgeous twin sisters. And people are wondering if a couple of gentlemen are going to join us.”

  “They’ll be disappointed,” Sula said, and then looked at Goojie with a suspicious eye. “Unless you arranged that, too?”

  “No, but there are some single men here who look as if they might want to meet us. And I’ve got a list of clubs we can visit later, and we’re bound to meet people there.”

  Sula nodded in the direction of Macnamara, who was visible thirty paces away, drinking fruit juice in the lounge. “Can we bring our guards?”

  Goojie laughed. The idea that they might be attacked had amused her all day.

  “He should frisk anyone who wants to dance with us,” she said.

  “That’ll make us popular.”

  Cree music drifted through the air. The appetizers arrived on a cloud of basil and mint. Goojie ordered a chilled bottle of wine.

  “I won’t help you drink it,” Sula warned.

  “I’ll order a demi, then.”

  They laughed and chatted through the meal, as easy as if they were actual sisters. Sula, for whom rapport hardly ever came easily, wondered at the effortlessness of it all. Perhaps she had made a friend.

  Goojie poured herself a glass of wine, then paused.

  “Does it bother you that I drink?” she asked.

  Sula was surprised “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I mean, I don’t have to drink,” Goojie said. “If it bothers you—if you have a hard time not drinking—I’m perfectly happy not drinking myself.”

  Sula shrugged. “No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  “So, why don’t you drink? You weren’t—addicted?—or anything?”

  “I genuinely don’t care for it. And also there were some people in my life who drank too much, and they wrecked their hopes and became a danger to everyone around them.”

  And so I killed them, she thought, and suppressed a shudder.

  And then, in a moment of awareness that fell on her like a great thundering waterfall, she realized why she had so successfully bonded with Goojie. She was reenacting her life with Caro Sula, who had pretended to be her sister, who had bought her things, who had swept Gredel along on her sad and aimless life, from spas and boutiques to restaurants and bars and clubs, careening from one bottle to the next, one injection of endorphin analogue to another. . . . Instead of proving an opening into a new life, Goojie was an excuse for Sula to fall back into an old pattern, one that felt too much like home. One that had led to disaster.

  The revelation stunned her for a moment. “What’s wrong?” Goojie asked.

  “I—” She stared, rubbing the pad of scar tissue on her right thumb. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”

  “You look terrible. What—”

  The insight had staggered Sula, and Goojie’s interruption had sidetracked her mind, and so she almost missed the Naxid. Naxids were out of place in the Terran dining room, not because there was any formal segregation but because humans sat in chairs and Naxids reclined their centauroid bodies on little divans set around low tables. All the species under the Praxis required different conditions: no one wanted to be around Daimong because of the smell; the Lai-own needed a chair that cradled their keel-like breastbones; the diet of the Torminel made other species uneasy; and the Cree liked to congregate in large, noisy groups. So, in large, polished restaurants, species were seated in separate dining rooms.

  The interloper scrambled into the room with the scurrying gait of the Naxids, a gray overcoat draped loosely over his quadruped frame, and his flat head swung left and right as he peered at the diners. The Naxid had come in through the back of the building, and Macnamara wouldn’t have seen him. Sula’s mind teetered for a moment at the sight, caught between the Naxid and Goojie and the impact of her own revelation, and then alarms began to clatter up her nerves. But by then it was too late, and the Naxid had produced a pistol . . .

  After which, finger poised on the trigger, the Naxid hesitated.

  Because he had two targets. Two blond Terran females with near-identical faces, flowing gowns and flowing pale hair and green eyes, and neither was in the viridian uniform that would have provided a clear identification; so it took him a second or so to reach the obvious conclusion, which was to kill them both. . . .

  Sula kicked the table at him just as the pistol fired. The table struck the Naxid above his forelegs and threw off the second shot; and before he could line up for the third, Sula had thrown Goojie’s wine bottle at his head. There was no brain in the Naxid’s skull to concuss—the Naxid head was a sensory platform, and the brain safely stored in the torso—but still the bottle scrambled the assassin’s perceptions long enough for Sula to launch herself from her chair.

  The instructors at the Fleet’s personal combat course had emphatically advised against jumping on an enemy’s gun, but in this case there was little choice—Sula had to get control of the weapon before the assassin could get off another shot. And so she grabbed the Naxid’s dry, scaly forearm with both hands, yanked the arm away from the body, and threw her shoulder into the enemy, low into the centaur’s upper body.

  Despite his four legs, the Naxid was off-balance, and he and Sula crashed to the ground with Sula on top of the gun, trying desperately to point it anywhere but at herself. The Naxid’s four booted feet flailed, kicked the table, sent glasses and dinnerware clattering to the ground. There were screams. Diners jumped and scattered.

  The gun went off with a deafening crash and Sula felt hot gasses flame against her cheek. The sound so jolted her nerves that she almost lost her grip on the enemy, but the Naxid wasn’t fast enough at snatching his arm away, and Sula bore down with all her weight and got hold of the gun itself—hot metal scorched her fingers—and she fought to bend the wrist back, back so the Naxid would face his own weapon . . . and then she saw the Naxid’s other arm had yanked a big knife out of his overcoat, and that it was poised to stab her. Frantically, she kicked at the Naxid, felt pain as her toes jammed into the enemy torso.

  And then Macnamara was standing over them, his own pistol out. A star of the Fleet combat course, he put four shots into the Naxid, hitting brain, heart, lungs, and brain again, very professionally placing each shot so there was no danger to Sula.

  Sula got the Naxid’s gun out of his limp, scaled fingers and hurled it into a corner. Then she scrambled to hands and knees and groped her way to where Goojie lay dying on the wooden floor, her blue gown turning brilliant crimson with arterial blood. There was wild desperation in the jade eyes, and her bloody hands made frantic gestures in the air. Breath panted past the painted lips. Sula reached for a slightly soiled linen napkin lying next to Goojie’s overturned chair and stuffed the napkin into the wound. It turned red almost at once.

  “Doctor!” Sula shouted. “Ambulance!” Hoping to restore some sense of order to a room that was now pandemonium.

  She applied a
s much pressure as possible to the napkin and stroked Goojie’s head with the other hand. Goojie’s hands clutched at her. The air smelled of chypre and blood.

  “The ambulance is on its way,” she told Goojie. “The ambulance is on its way. Only a few minutes out.”

  The desperation in the green eyes grew more frantic, the gestures more frenetic. Goojie’s breath heaved. The napkin soaked up more red. Goojie’s heels drummed the floor. The hands grabbed Sula’s arms, her hair, her face. Sula remembered bending over Caro’s body like this, except that she had wanted Caro to die, and now she wanted Goojie to live.

  There was a clattering and Sula was aware of Spence dashing in, her own pistol ready. Sula remained focused on the victim, and Spence knelt down to join her, trying to restrain the flailing limbs. Goojie kept fighting, her eyes ever more desperate until they flattened and the color faded, until the last heaving spasms shivered through her. The clutching hands fell away.

  People did not, in Sula’s experience, die as easily and cleanly as in a video drama.

  Sula looked into the dead face and saw Caro Sula looking back at her. Through her shock, she heard the sound of weeping and looked up to see some of the diners standing in a half-circle around the body, as helpless as Sula to alter the presence of mortality once it had entered in the room.

  Sula rose tottering on her new heels, cleared a nearby table, and swept off the tablecloth to put it over Caro’s blank, bloody face. She found a chair and sat in it and stared out the window at the glittering harbor, the dark volcanic peaks of the Banks peninsula looming above the water. Her heartbeat surged, faded, surged again. She could feel blood drying on her face. The emotions that had burned through her in the last few minutes seemed to have settled down into something like disgust.

  Macnamara was still standing guard in the center of the room, pistol in hand. The air tasted of propellant and the coppery scent of blood.

  Burly uniformed Torminel marched in carrying a folded-up stretcher, and the tablecloth was removed so that they could confirm the death. Sula didn’t want to look, and didn’t. From Goojie, the Torminel went to the assassin, confirmed his death as well, and then left the bodies for the police. One came up to Sula and asked if she was injured.