Having sex with him was worth fourteen million Highton credits? How did one respond to such a statement? Apparently it didn’t matter; she was already falling asleep again.
His eyes drifted shut. After a while, when his body had cooled off, he reached for the sheets to cover himself. Then he realized they were all on the floor. He hadn’t even noticed. He couldn’t believe he had made love to a Highton Aristo and enjoyed it. But then, so far, she hadn’t acted much like an Aristo.
That was when the realization hit him. He knew what was wrong. Or not wrong, but absent. He sensed no cavity in her thoughts, no chasm waiting for his pain, feeding him terror instead of pleasure. In the auction he had thought it was difficult to separate the minds of the bidders because he couldn’t define Tarquine. But he had known Marix, Mirella, and Heeza with no problem. Just never Tarquine.
He turned onto his side to look at her. Watching him with half-closed eyes, she said, “Hmmm?”
“You’re not an Aristo,” he said.
She gave a lazy yawn. “Really? I had no idea.”
She puzzled him, not what she said, but her emotions. He picked up her fundamental sense of self, including a strong identification as a Highton. She thought like an Aristo, felt like one, plotted and prospered like one. Yet she wasn’t an Aristo.
“Why haven’t you made me provide for you?” he asked.
She gave a drowsy laugh. “What do you call what we just did?”
“Sex. It’s not the same thing.”
“Ah, well.” She stretched out, long and languorous, her body undulating in a distracting manner. “It’s all part of the same thing.”
He shook his head. “You can’t compare a consensual act of love to what Aristos inflict on their providers.”
“Love?” She rolled onto her side and propped her head up on her hand. “I like that. Do you love me, beautiful man?”
Kelric flushed. “I meant it wasn’t forced.”
A lock of glittering hair drifted into her face and she pushed it back, her fingers trailing along its white streak. That she let it stay white puzzled him, given how Aristos turned the pursuit of physical “perfection” into an obsession.
Tarquine smiled. “I like this word. Lovemaking. But why do you call it that?”
He spoke carefully. “Because you can’t transcend.”
She froze. A muscle jerked in her cheek. “Don’t be a fool.”
“I’m not. But I am a psion. A strong one. That’s why you paid so much for me.” Concentrating on her, he said, “Isn’t it a waste of your wealth when you can’t take advantage of this phenomenally high-rated provider you bought?”
She turned icy. “I repeat, gold man. Don’t be a fool.”
Kelric felt the alarm she hid under her cold exterior. Hope surged through him. Maybe he could bargain with her. What would happen if your peers knew you couldn’t transcend? Wouldn’t that make you a pariah?”
Her voice went dangerously quiet. “Of course, I would be forced to prove you are lying. In fact, I would share the experience with these peers of mine. We would need a provider to achieve our transcendence.” Her gaze glinted. “You would do well.”
Kelric understood her threat. But he had no intention of letting this astonishing discovery go. “I’m sure you can hide your inability to transcend from other Aristos. But you can’t hide it from an empath. I can make people doubt, Finance Minister. No matter what you do to me, how much you hurt me, I can make them doubt. And if they doubt, it will ruin you.”
She gave him an unimpressed look. “I do believe you are trying to blackmail me. To trade. It’s rather odd, considering that if this outrageous claim of yours actually had truth to it, you would be the one who benefited.”
“Let me go and you won’t have to worry about my telling anyone.”
“Ah, Kelric.” Tarquine stretched her arms. “You are bold, I must admit that. But do you honestly think I would let you go? That’s absurd.”
It startled him to hear her use his name. He hadn’t thought she knew it. He had expected her to give him a new one. Although he could tell she wasn’t worried, he didn’t intend to give up until he found her weak point. If she had one.
“You’re the one who will be ruined,” he said.
She rolled onto her back. “As long as you keep your silence, I won’t hurt you. Why should I? It no longer affects me. But if you make trouble, I will be forced to prove you wrong.” Her voice went hard. “And believe me, I will make you pay for your betrayal. Please me, pleasure slave, and you will have a life as agreeable as you wish. Offend me and your life will be hell. The choice is yours.”
He shook his head. “Threats like that may work with your other providers, but not me. Let me go or pay the consequences.”
“I think not.”
“This isn’t a bluff.”
“I’m sure it isn’t.” She paused. “How old do you think I am?”
The unexpected question caught him off guard. “I don’t know. Anywhere from forty to one hundred forty.”
She smiled slightly. “Not one hundred forty. None of us are older than Corbal Xir, and he’s only one hundred thirty-two.” Then she said, “I’m one hundred four. Old enough to have seen many things.”
He wondered what she was trying to tell him. “Such as?”
“My peers and I used to play a game.” She waved her hand. “Thirty, forty years ago. We picked out Skolians we wanted to make providers. It was a way to release anger, I think, to channel the dismay of seeing our lives and people ground down by this unending war with your people. We picked the most notorious of your leaders and imagined them in chains.”
“Why are you telling me this?” It surprised him to hear her admission that Aristos found the hostility between their empires as crushing as his own people. The Aristos had always seemed invincible to him, set in their Highton palaces and unyielding views. It surprised him that for all their power and advantages, they might feel the same way about Skolia’s leaders that his people felt about them.
She turned on her side to look at him. “Your great military heroes, those who inflicted the most damage on Eube, were popular targets. Several of ESComm’s top operatives became involved in the game.” Quietly she said, “They took it seriously. Eventually they succeeded in removing one of their targets.”
He tensed. “Who?”
“An admiral. Corey Majda.”
He felt as if she had shot him in the stomach. Knowing Corey died by assassination had always torn him apart. To learn the plot had grown out of a game made it even worse. Tarquine was opening a wound he had thought healed long ago.
“Admiral Majda,” Tarquine said. “I paid particular attention to that escapade. Would you like to know why?”
“No.” His voice rasped. Corey.
“Her husband,” she murmured. “Her spectacular golden Ruby prince. You see, he was my choice for a provider. Not because he was a war leader. I just wanted him. But do you know, he died eighteen years ago.”
Kelric couldn’t take any more. He rolled off the bed and onto his feet. Without thinking, he went to the bathing chamber, the one place in the suite that would put him elsewhere than Tarquine. He closed it behind him and sank down onto the white tiles. Drawing his knees to his chest, he crossed his arms on them and laid down his head. When his eyes grew hot, he bit the inside of his cheeks to hold back his tears. Damned if he would cry.
The chamber activated on its own, probably prodded by his weight on the floor. Sprays rinsed him, misted with fragrant soaps. He lifted his head and leaned it against the wall while the cleansing warmth enveloped him. When it finished, puffs of air dried his body.
After a while the door shimmered open. At first he thought it was an automatic response to the shower’s completion. When the shimmer faded, he saw Tarquine standing in her black shift. She knelt next to him.
Softly Kelric said, “I hope you rot in hell.”
“I had nothing to do with her death.”
“You
might as well have.”
She regarded him evenly. “Do we have an agreement?”
He forced out the words. “Yes. I will say nothing to harm your standing among the Aristos.” How could he? One word from her would reveal his true identity to all Eube.
“Kelric, listen to me.”.
“Why do you call me Kelric?” he asked bitterly. “Don’t you Aristos take away your slaves’ names and give them ones you’ve picked yourself?”
“I like Kelric.” She exhaled. “For your own protection, I will choose another to call you in public.”
“Fine.” He made himself stop gritting his teeth. “I’m listening. What do you want to tell me?”
“It was my choice to stop transcending.”
He stared at her. “What?”
She sat against the opposite wall and stretched out her legs, her toes scraping the wall by his side. “The older you get, the more your mind evolves.”
“It’s called wisdom. So what?”
“Sometime in my eighties, I can’t say exactly when, I started to feel uneasy.”
“Why?”
“It was hard to say.” Her voice softened. “I had a favored provider then. I liked being with him even when he wasn’t doing anything, just sleeping or sitting while I worked. I don’t know why.”
Kelric spoke through his pain. “How kind of you, to let him sit around with nothing to do while you worked.”
“I suppose I loved him.”
He wondered if she even knew the meaning of the word. “What happened to him?”
“I sold him. About ten years ago.”
“You couldn’t have loved him that much.”
“You’re probably right.” She paused. “But it bothered me.”
“What? Loving him?”
“No. Hurting him.”
For a long time he just looked at her, certain he had heard wrong, that she would qualify the statement. When she didn’t, he said, “It should bother you.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps my brain has aged and muddled my powers of reason.”
He made an incredulous sound. “Learning compassion ‘muddles’ your powers of reason?”
She wrapped her arms around her body. “You can’t know what it is like to transcend. Imagine the greatest pleasure you’ve ever had with a woman and multiply it ten times. But it’s more than that. It is as if you ascend to a higher plane, one of sheer, enlightened joy. It truly is transcendent.”
Kelric stared at her. “You reach this ‘higher plane’ by hurting people.”
Tarquine shifted position. “Your suffering elevates you. Inferior beings can only achieve an exalted state through their pain.”
“That’s sick.”
Anger simmered in her thoughts. “And to us, your wish to claim elevation without earning it is sick.”
He just shook his head. Her reality was too different. Too alien. “If you feel that way, why did you give up transcendence?”
It was a moment before she answered. “As the years went on, it bothered me more and more to be the agent of that pain. But I knew the pleasure wouldn’t go away. As long as I could transcend, I would.” Softly she said, “So I made it impossible. I had the Kyle Afferent Body in my brain removed.”
He had no idea how to respond. She was still an Aristo. She subscribed to their philosophies, kept slaves, and saw herself as a superior form of life. Yet with all that, she had voluntarily undergone brain surgery to prevent her from exercising what she considered her innate right, a decision that put her in constant danger of discovery, and destruction, from her peers.
Finally he said, “It’s a start.” New hope washed over him.
“A start?”
He leaned his head against the wall. “Maybe someday, if more Aristos come to feel as you do, your people and mine might find a measure of peace.”
“If.”
He thought of Taratus, with his glimmerings of compassion. The admiral was about the age when Tarquine said she had begun to question her way of life. “Are you the only one?”
“I don’t know.” She wound her hair around her fingers, gazing at the white streaks. “I’ve wondered once or twice.” She suddenly sat up straight. “You can tell!”
“How could I miss it?” He grimaced. “You talk of how I can never appreciate the ‘sheer, enlightened joy’ of transcendence. Well, think on this, Tarquine. You can never appreciate the sheer, horrific despair your minds inflict on us. The stronger the psion, the stronger the reaction. You know what I am. I could no more miss the lack of that horror than I could stop breathing.”
“No other of my providers is that sensitive.” She leaned forward. “You can tell if any other Aristos are like me.”
“On a one-by-one basis, maybe. But not in groups.” He thought of the auction. “Even with drugs to blunt my reception, I can hardly bear the minds of just three Aristos.”
Tarquine frowned. “I expect more than fifty Diamonds at the banquet. It’s a meeting for the finance leaders in various sectors.”
Kelric stared at her. Fifty? Diamond Aristos attended to commerce, production, and banks. In the Aristo hierarchy, their caste ranked below Hightons, who controlled the government and military. The Silicates, who ran the entertainment industries and supplied providers, were the third of the three Aristo castes, also below the Hightons. But for all of them, their defining characteristic—their ability to transcend—was the same. The massed impact of fifty would be more than he could endure.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Of course you can.”
“No.” He tried not to think of the auction. “Why do you want me there?”
She settled herself against the wall. “I want you to pick up what you can from their minds, in particular about the upcoming finance meeting on Glory. Also let me know if you detect other Aristos like me. Not only today, but anywhere.”
That wasn’t what he expected. “You want me to spy for you?”
“Of course. Who else has a Ruby psion at her disposal?” She gave him a satisfied smile. “They will know I’m bringing my new provider for more than show. With your barriers so patchy, all will feel your power. But none will guess the true extent. As far as the rest of humanity knows, Kelricson Valdoria is dead.”
“You knew who I was.”
She regarded him with satisfaction. “How could I forget? You lived in my fantasies for years. Decades. I’m older than most Hightons. After thirty-five years, I doubt anyone else will suspect. The idea would simply be too absurd. Even I wasn’t sure when I saw the holos that Taratus sent us. But I wondered. He said he would take the four highest floor bids. So I put in one for three million.”
He couldn’t believe it. “The bidding started at three million?”
“Actually, it was four. That was Marix’s ground bid.”
Kelric didn’t know which stunned him more, that they could waste so much wealth on one person or that they would go to such lengths to own another human being. But it changed nothing. “If you put me in a room with fifty Aristos, I’ll go catatonic.”
She sighed. “Some of my more sensitive providers react this way also. But you will cope. You’re strong.”
He wondered if she had any idea what she expected him to “cope” with.
14
Diamond Banquet
Tarquine reclined in a cushioned chair, watching while a techman studied the collar around Kelric’s neck. Resplendent in a black-diamond jumpsuit, the Minister glittered.
The techman straightened up. “It’s solid gold, ma’am.” He set his gauges on the table next to the stool where Kelric was sitting and turned to Tarquine. “The collar has no picotech at all, nothing anyone could use for surveillance on you or your ship. The gold is high quality, however.”
“So Taratus just threw it in as a gift.” Tarquine snorted. “That is unlike him.”
Kelric could guess why Taratus had included the collar. Anything to alleviate Tarquine’s anger when she discovered he cheated her. H
e doubted it would help.
The techman picked up his tools and went to work again. He tested Kelric’s wrist guards, then knelt to examine his ankle guards. “These are completely different. They’re almost a thousand years old.” He rose to his feet. “You did well, most honorable Minister. The guards are far more valuable than the collar. For their antiquity.”
Tarquine considered Kelric. “Did Taratus give you those?”
He shook his head. “My ex-wife.”
“If she is your ex-wife, why do you still wear them?”
He started to give a nonresponse, then changed his mind. He wouldn’t dishonor Ixpar with any answer but the truth. “Because I still love her.”
“Oh.” Tarquine obviously neither expected nor understood his reply. Her reaction washed over him. She surprised herself with her anger. Why would she begrudge one slave the devotion of another slave? For her to envy his ex-wife was like envying an animal.
“Shall I remove the collar and guards?” the techman asked.
“Yes.” An edge came into her voice. “Melt down the guards.”
Kelric held back his protest. He had already known she would remove them. Without picotech, they had no use as restraints. He would rather she melted than sold them. Better they become ingots than end up on display in a Eubian museum or worn by someone else.
“He will need a collar with picotech controls,” she told the techman. “The same for his wrist and ankle cuffs. After we reprogram his biomech web, I want it interfaced it with the restraints.” She rubbed her chin. “That will take a while, though. For the banquet, install a temporary collar, one that suppresses his enhancements. Make it gold. You can leave the guards for now.”
Kelric knew he was running out of options. As a Jagernaut, he had studied these massive Highton cylinder ships. Once the techman installed the permanent picotech collar, Kelric would become part of the ship, so intertwined with its systems that he couldn’t leave without Tarquine inputting an authorization to his redesigned biomech web. If he meant to escape, it had to be soon. But how?
Ascendant Sun Page 19
