My eyes widened as I craned my neck.
Today the walls and ceiling gleamed like a cathedral dome paved with museum-quality Trueborn pennies. Maybe it was true what they said about a woman’s touch.
In the bar’s center a lone figure bent on hands and knees with her back to me, scrubbing the floor tile. Based on my two years doing the same, she was cleaning up spilled beer and vomit. Which tells you all you need to know about the glamour of bar ownership.
A successful bar, even when empty of customers, still needed an owner there working his, or her, ass off. And in this case, the ass was as lovely as I remembered it.
I dropped my chin and lowered my voice to deep bass. “Y’all serve infantry, Ma’am?”
She kept scrubbing, but waved a hand. “Only the ones with charming accents! Always two for one for GIs at Jazen’s.”
Syrene Dessele stood, hands on her waist, stretched and moaned.
She turned, scrub cloth in one hand, and combed ebony hair back from her eyes with the long fingers of the other.
“So, soldier, what’ll it—” Her enormous brown eyes widened and she stiffened as she recognized me. “Be?” It came out a squeak, and she cleared her throat.
A courtesan-class Marini dressed to scrub floors outglitters any ten New York runway models on an opening night. And that was when the courtesan was vertical and not even trying. Syrene’s outfit was glistening black, jeweled at the throat and wrists, and covered her neck to toes. It looked painted on because it was painted on, then peeled off and sewn to fit. Marini courtesans had been dressing that way since some unsung genius had discovered a way to thicken Bren tree sap six hundred years before. Fashionable Trueborn women at the time were wearing layered pantaloons. Look it up.
I said, “Got Trueborn single malt?”
Her voice quavered. “All out, I’m afraid.”
I drew a breath, scared my voice might crack, too. “Small batch bourbon?”
She pointed at an empty spot on the top shelf and her finger trembled. “Run on bourbon last night.” She thrust one foot forward while she swung her arm at the bottles glistening behind the bar. “Have a look. Maybe the gentleman will see something he wants that we do have.”
I stepped toward her, smiled. “Maybe the gentleman already did.”
Before I reached her she blinked, and her eyes narrowed. “God damn you, Jazen!” She pegged the wet scrub cloth and it slapped across my nose and mouth and stuck.
I mumbled through beer and vomit, “Great to see you, too.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I peeled the cloth off, dropped it, and scrubbed my face and hands with a Sani.
Hands on hips, chin out, her eyes burned me. “Three years! Not a word. Not a note.”
“There was the contract from the solicitors.” I glanced round at the new decor. “You’ve done well here.”
“Up three hundred ten percent. I assume you got the check.” She paused, crossed her arms. “Why? Why like that, Jazen?”
“Long story.”
She stepped to the taps, drew two lagers, then motioned me to sit with her at a two-top. “Bore me.”
I stared into my beer before I answered. “I went back to my old job. I can’t talk about my job any more now than I could before.”
“You went back to the blonde.”
I sighed. “It wasn’t that simple.”
“She’s very rich. And Trueborn royalty. I call that simple.”
“We worked together before. We work together now.”
Her lip curled, and she turned her head away. “You lie worse than you make love.”
“I never told you it was only work. Not before. Not now.”
Syrene stood and walked to the bar, her back to me, and leaned, arms out and head bowed for a long time. “I should have known it would happen sooner or later. Most girls like me don’t even get two years.” She sobbed.
I went to her, laid my hands on her shoulders, and rubbed them. “Don’t give me the ‘girls like me’ crap, Syrene. On Bren it’s ‘girls like you’ who’re the royalty.”
She reached her hand up, took my fingers and kissed them. “I know. There’s no shame in being a courtesan. But the Trueborns don’t see it that way, and you grow more Trueborn every time I see you.” I felt her warm against me, closed my eyes.
“The sign says open. Guess it depends on open for what.”
At the sound, I spun away from Syrene toward the door as my heart sank toward my navel.
Kit stood silhouetted in the open doorway, hands on hips and feet planted.
I said, “What are you—?”
“Howard bumped the meeting. I figured I’d find you up here, drunk and lonely.” She shook her head, snorted at the beer glasses on the table. “I see I was half right.”
I held up my hand, palm out. “Kit, this isn’t—”
She looked sleek, brunette Syrene up and down. “I’m blonde, Jazen. Not blind. And I was stupid enough to think—” Kit pivoted back into the corridor.
“Kit! I—”
She was gone.
I started for the door but Syrene caught my arm. “Let her go.”
I pulled away, but by the time I reached the corridor, Kit was nowhere to be seen.
I ran out to the square, stood on tip-toe, and peered across the crowds swirling in front of Lockheeds. Not a blonde head anywhere.
“She’s more beautiful than I imagined.” Syrene stood beside me, arms crossed.
“Jesus. Could I screw this up more?”
“Yes. That’s why I tried to stop you. Apologizing too soon to a woman who’s in no mood to take crap just makes you both say even more that you can’t take back.”
I looked down into those enormous eyes. Then I smiled and nodded. “How many times did I forget that in two years?”
“Too many.”
She threaded her arm through mine and turned me back toward Jazen’s. “Buy you a drink, soldier?”
“You wouldn’t take advantage of a sensitive guy when he’s vulnerable, would you?” I smiled as I said it, but I pushed her hand away harder than I had to.
She spun me to face her. “No, Jazen. I wouldn’t. And at the moment I think you’re wise enough to be neither. But we should talk.”
“About?”
“Your future with the blonde princess.”
It turned out Syrene had a single malt in the back. She tabbed the sign to closed, locked the door, and we sat again with the bottle between us, no glasses. Like the old days.
She swigged, passed the bottle across. “Did you tell her about us?”
I took a pull, let the liquor burn all the way down. “Yes.” I felt my face flush. “Well. Not, you know, about the thing with the thing.”
She smiled. “That’s not what I meant. Technique is trivial. I mean did you tell her it was more than that?”
I raised my eyebrows. Technique hadn’t seemed trivial at the time. Speculating on the technique of Kit’s old boyfriend, Brad Weason, he of the perfect hair and teeth, didn’t seem trivial when I thought about that. “Well. Yes. I mean, I told her the truth. Why?”
Syrene tilted her head back, swallowed, pushed the bottle across to me. “It may take longer for the princess to forgive you.”
I paused, blinked, shook my head. I’d forgotten. Canned atmosphere like Mousetrap’s caused the human body to assimilate alcohol faster. “Huh?”
“A woman can accept a man following his prick in the wrong direction better than she can accept him following his heart there.”
“But you and I didn’t even—”
“It’s not whether we did. It’s whether you still wanted to. And why you wanted to.”
“Men always want to! If we didn’t, you and your grandmothers and cousins would have been sewing quilts for the last six hundred years.”
“True.” Syrene smiled.
Marini courtesans have perfect teeth, by dint of six hundred years of breeding. So did Kit, by dint of Trueborn orthodonture. So did B
rad Weason. I was lucky I had all of mine.
We drank in silence for ten minutes.
Finally, I swigged, then tilted my head against my hand as I felt the scotch. “You know what else is true? Kit’s father hates me. I have ordinary teeth.”
Syrene’s head wagged like one of those dolls the Trueborns give away at baseball games. Six hundred years of breeding hadn’t enabled Marini courtesans to hold their liquor any better than I could. When Syrene and I drank together, the experience was frank, but brief.
Syrene said, “An’ you’re a crinimul. They hate me, too.”
“I’m not an Illegal anymore. And they don’t even know you. So how can they hate you?”
“They know what I do. They define a person by what they do. ‘S a fact.”
I tilted the bottle and peered at the golden contents. Not enough left to rinse a glass.
“I make people happy and the Trueborns call me a whore. Your blonde kills people she’s never met and they call her a hero. That’s fucked, you know?” Syrene laid her head on the table.
It was fucked. I lay my own head on the table and stared across at Syrene’s porcelain cheek as she breathed soft and even there.
What “they” should know about her was that she was an innocent child who couldn’t hold her liquor, even though she knew how to do the thing with the thing. That she was smart and hardworking enough to grow a new business three hundred ten percent annually even while she made payroll running another business that kept fifty employees and their dependents fed. And that she was tough and honest and funny and didn’t take crap.
She reached across the table, touched my hand and mumbled, “People like you and me, we’re alike, Jazen. We’ll never be like the Princess and her kind. Not ever.”
My eyelids weighed five pounds each. I saw my hand beneath Syrene’s, turned my palm up, and closed my fingers around hers. She cooed in her sleep.
She was right. We were alike. In a way that Kit and I would never be alike. I meant to tell Syrene so, but I slept instead.
I woke still seated and slumped across the two-top table with my cheek in a drool puddle. The evening shift bartender stared at me as he wiped a glass. He was new. To him, I wasn’t Jazen, himself. I was just another drunk left over from the early shift. Syrene was gone, but the bottle we had emptied remained.
I stared at the bottle without moving so my head wouldn’t fall off.
In single malt veritas.
With a lurch I stood, stiff and aching, begged a headache cap from the barkeep, and visited the restroom before I returned to the ship. Whether I felt like it or not, and whether Kit felt like it or not, we were going to talk this out. In the past, my failure to confront my issues with Kit had bought both of us nothing but trouble.
And she had probably cooled off by now.
When I stepped off the elevator at our stateroom’s deck, the passage lights were dimmed to evening level. When I got to our door, the “Do Not Disturb” light glowed blue.
I thought about knocking, then quietly punched into the code pad D-a-1-s-y. The DND light still glowed. I tried again. No dice. I got a bad feeling, turned and walked down the passageway to the deck steward’s desk.
The evening duty steward looked up, smiled. “Ah! Captain Parker!” He reached under his desk, drew out a note-sized, sealed ship’s stationary envelope, and slid it across the desk to me. “Colonel Born left this for you.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Did she go somewhere?”
“I don’t believe so, Captain. But I just came on at the hour. I understand from the turn-down steward that the Colonel took the evening meal in your stateroom with an excellent Bordeaux, then left the note and turned in.”
I slid the notecard out of the envelope.
Dear Shithead,
Changed the door password. Try to break in and I will have you thrown in the brig. Go fuck yourself. Or whoever.
Me
Maybe it would be best to postpone our talk after all.
“Everything alright, Captain?”
“Perfect.” I pointed at the note. “She just had a little headache so she turned in early. Actually, I’m not feeling tired, myself.” I pumped my arms as though I was running in place. “Think I’ll take a stroll,” I pointed down the corridor at our stateroom, “Before I, you know, turn in, myself.”
“Of course, sir.” The steward started to turn away, turned back. “By the way, Captain, the poolside chaises on deck twenty-four are made up with sheets, blankets and pillows every night.”
The purser turned his back discreetly and resumed his business, his screens flickering in the dim light like colored gauze as he whispered them on and off until he found what he needed.
What I needed to find tonight was a fellow bachelor with a sympathetic ear and time to spare.
Fortunately, I knew where to find one.
NINETEEN
Clang.
The physical sound of metal scraping metal awoke Mort as he lay curled on the deckplates in his nest within the nest of HUS Gateway. He sprang up, four down, claws out, as he probed the space beyond the opening hatch in the bulkhead that separated him from Gateway’s forward decks.
Humans were creatures of habit, and on his previous starship voyage, visits from humans at nonhabitual times had proved threatening.
Mort knew this was a nonhabitual visit partly because the level of artificial lighting in his space was lowered, but more because most of the five thousand intelligences that drifted just ahead of him within Gateway normally emitted a vast drone, but were now dormant.
The few immediately ahead, the staff who attended to his personal needs, rarely conveyed much beyond dissatisfaction and fatigue. Of the remaining thousands further forward, the few awake were either engaged in coitus or fantasizing about engaging in coitus.
In his waning prepubescence, Mort still found coitus distasteful and disinteresting, human coitus all the more. So distasteful and disinteresting, in fact, that he had reversed his sleep patterns from a predator’s normal largely nocturnal habits.
He shook his head to clear it of sleep, and saw his visitor before he felt him. The human male carried, in one forepaw, a tidbit of frozen woog, perhaps as large as the man’s torso. From the other foreclaw, six connected metallic cylinders dangled like a plucked bunch of berries.
“On the way back here, I wheedled the cooks for a six-pack for me and a snack for you.”
“Jazen!” Mort cocked his head to convey curiosity. “You are sad.”
Jazen dropped the woog portion onto the deckplates, then folded himself onto one of the little metal frames with which the humans had furnished Mort’s space.
“No, I’m bewildered, unjustly accused, flummoxed, insensitive and monumentally stupid.”
“I do not understand fully. Your mood resembles your mood the time when you informed me that you were totally fucked.”
Jazen cocked his own head, in his case to convey contemplation. “Actually, this is more the opposite.”
“Now I understand even less.”
Jazen picked one of the cylinders off the bunch, then drank from it. “Kit and I were close until we split for a couple years. Remember?”
Mort nodded his head to prompt continuation.
Jazen audibilized, “The split was Kit’s idea, mostly, and it hurt. I came here to Mousetrap to start over. Then I met this other woman, Syrene. And Syrene was wonderful. Is wonderful. Then when Kit was in trouble, Howard finagled me back to the service. And I saved Kit’s life, which pretty much squared things with Kit. But I sort of didn’t tell Syrene I was leaving. Which was stupid. And so today I just went back to Syrene to try and square things with her. But I didn’t tell Kit. Which was also stupid. Not that I was gonna square things, you know, that way. But Kit thinks it was that way. Now they both hate me. Hell, I hate me.” Jazen lowered his head, shook it slowly.
The dizzying deluge that marked streaming human consciousness during times of agitation and stress often defeated Mort. He p
lucked the emotional essence from Jazen’s thoughts as he plucked the zesty pituitary from a brain.
Then Mort carefully patted his human’s diminutive shoulder with a claw tip. “Ah. You fear you will now be unchosen as a mate. But do not worry. Even at this moment Miss Jan Wofford of Blackpool, England, in cabin two four two zero, is thinking that she is so randy she would shag a goat. Jazen, I believe many women would consider you a more viable mate than a goat. Many.”
“You’re not just saying that?”
Mort sat back, waved his forepaw, palm out. “No. I am quite serious.”
“Mort. I know.”
“Ah. Sarcasm is so complex.”
Jazen sighed. “So is human mating. I don’t want many women. I just want the right one.”
“Ah. Your situation resembles mine in the moment when I have cut the two fattest undiseased woog from a herd. Each flees, and I must choose the more desirable.”
Jazen dropped his empty cylinder, and it tinkled atop the full ones he had placed on the deck plates. “It’s not like picking steak or lobster, Mort! Well, it is. I mean, Kit’s blonde and athletic and incredibly alluring, and Syrene’s brunette and seductive and incredibly alluring. And they’re both so far out of my league that I pinched myself every morning I woke up beside either of them.”
“Sometimes I bring down both woog.”
“Huh?”
“I have noticed in Kit’s thoughts that she believes you are an insatiable horndog. That means—”
Jazen raised a foreclaw. “I know what that means.”
“Clearly, then, you have the physical capacity to service each of them in turn.”
Jazen’s tiny eyes widened. “Polygamy? You’ve never even gotten to first base. But for me you recommend ménage a trois? Mort, one of these women is a trained killer. I’d be dead before the proposal left my mouth.”
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