by Janet Morris
But reasonable men could do wonders tpgether. Croft held his hand out to the mullah, and said, "I'm so pleased to have this time alone with you, Ayatollah Forat. Shall we begin our tour with the hajj facility?"
"It's the hajj facility only if I say so, Secretary Croft," growled the squat, bearded man, who sniffed through his hooked nose before he took Croft's hand.
"We hope you'll find it to your liking," Croft said with more aplomb than he felt. Forat's hand was rough and the grip was challengingly, almost painfully, tight.
"Inshallah," said the daughter softly, which made Croft turn his head.
"Excuse me?"
"Inshallah—it's the hajj facility, Secretary Croft, only if God wills it. Surely my father remembers that."
Fire in those eyes. Shoulders back. Mickey Croft had to remind himself of what a good diplomat he was, to get his mind back on business. But he couldn't help worrying that a young girl such as this was bound to get into trouble on Threshold if someone didn't take her in hand. And obviously she was looking for one or the other—either some trouble to get into, or someone to take her in hand.
Casting about for a way to assure the young woman's safety without seeming overly interested, Croft maneuvered them toward the outer office.
There was always Dodd. He was young, and discreet, and available.
But Dini Forat's lip curled when she looked at Dodd, and Croft was too good a diplomat to force matters obviously.
Still, nothing ventured nothing gained. As he always did, he introduced his assistant formally, and said, though his heart wasn't in it, "Mr. Dodd will be available to show you around this evening, Ms. Forat, if you choose."
To his surprise, the girl looked up at him and said, "With my father's permission, I'd enjoy that very much."
The mullah sized up pasty young Dodd, nodded, and said, "This is acceptable, with a bodyguard, of course."
Croft's eyes squeezed shut of their own accord. It was too early to discuss bodyguards. "Perhaps your schedule will permit you to let me show you around this evening, sir."
"Sir" obviously wasn't sufficiently honorific, but Croft needed to assert at least parity, if not primacy, here on his home turf.
The little mullah said, "Of course, with a bodyguard." And smiled, showing big, yellow teeth.
Croft wasn't the only one in this room who knew that the bodyguard matter was about to become an issue. Well, Croft would consider it research. Having seen for himself what the bodyguards were like and how they were treated, he'd be in an authoritative position, not a compromised one.
So he said, "That would please me greatly." And the battle was joined.
This was going to be one marvelous evening. For a moment Croft had a vision of changing places with Dodd, and escorting the teenage temptress to some of Threshold's more exciting nightspots. But it just wasn't in the cards, not for him.
And Dodd's father, whether he knew it or not, now owed Mickey Croft one bottle of fifty-year-old Scotch when next they met.
CHAPTER 4
Pilgrim's Progress
Dini Forat was sure that Threshold was paradise. It was full of bright lights and dizzying, glorious vistas. Everywhere was beauty, everywhere was excitement and luxury and bright-eyed, young people with unveiled faces and marvelous clothes.
Nowhere was dirt. Nowhere was squalor. Nowhere was pain or misery or want. Here beggars did not sit with their bowls beside your palace. Here people were never without an eye or a hand. Here it never rained or snowed, the wind never howled with the wrath of Allah. Neither frogs nor hail pelted from the sky.
And here were the men of Threshold, like Secretary Croft, pale-skinned and blue-eyed and tall, so tall. Trailing along in the wake of her father and the Secretary, she found herself wishing that Croft was her parent, that she had been brought up in the secular, decadent world that Croft inhabited, a world of colored lights and turbo lifts and shiny electric cars.
Even the watchdog beside her, first in the car and now on the streets, didn't bother her. Much. This Dodd was short and squat and dark and ugly, like everyone she knew at home.
Dini wanted to get away from the other pilgrims so much that she could taste it. As their party encountered another made up of turbaned men and veiled women, she lowered her eyes in shame. She wanted to pretend she wasn't one of them. She wanted freedom. She wanted to cast off every veil and run about in pants, alone, wearing neon jewelry and carrying a bag full of wonders the way the laughing blond girls she saw on the streets were doing.
Nowhere she had ever been was as cosmopolitan as Threshold's Rec Level One, where Croft had seen—must have seen—the gleam in her eye when he turned in the car to see how she was faring, and allowed that they could walk instead of ride.
She could shop, so Croft said. Her father fumed, but his conversation with Croft took precedence: low, diplomatic fencing, not meant for her ears. She didn't care. She would shop, with the watchdog Dodd in tow like any bodyguard.
She treated him as one, handing him packages that Dodd would pay for, showing a credit card her father had sourly handed him—not her—when it became clear that not shopping would be a sticky matter, if not a breach of protocol.
Dini Forat had never felt such power. At home, she was hardly ever with her father, let alone with him in a situation where her good behavior must be bought. Their own bodyguards, she saw when she turned and looked past a rack of scandalous clothes, were on their heels, nostrils wide, dumb eyes shifting from possible danger to possible danger, always ready to leap upon their charges with superhuman speed and shield them from harm with their bodies.
She hated bodyguards. They were horrid machines who thought they were human, and bled like humans, and yet had no souls or even the will to live.
Like the warriors she had met at home, the right death was all that really mattered to the bodyguards.
Dini Forat was committed to the right life. Life coursed in her more demandingly than ever, tingling up and down inside her as she strode to a fitting room with a handful of garments that, at home, she never would have dared to buy.
Her father was glowering at her, when she came out clad in tight white pants and a shirt with ballooning sleeves that cupped her breasts and thrust them forth, unveiled.
She said pointedly to Dodd, "Do I look like a Threshold resident of good breeding?" and turned around once as if she were still in belly-dancing school, arm above her head and hips swaying.
Dodd said, "You look . . . amazing. Perfect. I could take you to a club I know, a private club," he added hastily. "Very chic. Later. If your father and the Secretary are going to be talking all night . . . ?"
She said (nearly squealed, playing dumb but knowing exactly how to put her plan into action), "Oh, yes! I'd love that. Here, have them wrap up my old clothes and I'll wear these. And this." She reached over and grabbed a sling bag, into which, as she followed Dodd to the counter, she put everything she thought should go there: a little portable phone, an electronic makeup artist with a cosmetic pack, a wallet, and a Guide to Threshold Nightlife.
Dodd paid, and when he had, she took the card from him and put it in her new wallet, smiling.
The dizzy watchdog was too excited at the prospect that later he might get his nose between her thighs to realize how outrageous it was that any of this was happening.
She snuck a look at her father, who was talking animatedly to Croft. Was his face darker than usual? Suffused with rage? She didn't know. She didn't care. Threshold awaited.
"Let's go now," she said, when Dodd came up with her old clothes. (She was veilless in free society! Her head was totally uncovered, her throat and neck and breasts as well!) "They're just talking government, as old men will always do. Show me a place to get music, and vids, and then let's go find a coffee, and pastry, and ..."
Little, fat, dark Dodd was giggling. "Well, that's a tall order, but let me see if I can't prevail on the two of them to turn us loose now on my recognizance."
She pretended t
o be looking at yet another outfit while Dodd, unknowingly, asked the impossible. Her father would not wish to seem parochial, nor to offend by questioning the propriety or the security of Croft's hospitality. Dini had been waiting for such a chance so long she had thought out every nuance.
Off she would go, with a bodyguard or two behind and this short, ugly—but free—infidel beside, into the wondrous world of Threshold. And beyond.
She had her credit card in her own purse. She had clothes that made her unremarkable. She had, for the first time, a chance to let some of the urgency in her body and in her soul escape.
Dodd had a mole on his lip and those lips were not thin enough for Dini's taste. She wanted a man like Croft, but younger. A bold, tall, fair stranger who believed in nothing at all but life and living it, a techno-wizard, an outlaw baron of the sort she saw on vid shows.
She wanted a life. A real life, with real risk and real pleasure. She didn't want to hurt Dodd, not his feelings or his career, but living life meant breaking rules. She had been living by rules long enough to know that for a certainty.
When the fat lips told her, "Okay, but we have to stay in touch. Your father's insisted on sending a bodyguard, of course, but I imagine he'll stay out of the way. I have to get you back to your rooms by eleven—by twenty-three hundred —but that doesn't mean we can't have fun, even before the dark clubs open."
"Dark clubs?"
"Places that open at Zero Zero Zero time: nobody knows how they got their name exactly. Remember, Threshold was military, at first. Sol Base Blue still is, really—all the Blue North to Blue South modules on the Central Stalk are ConSec, ConSpaceCom, Peacekeeping and Administration, and military slang's probably the best place to look for the term's derivation. Spacers still say oh-dark-thirty when they mean half past midnight. . . ."
The watchdog rattled on, and Dini made interested noises without really listening. She was watching a miracle, the first real miracle she had ever seen.
Her father and Secretary Croft—looking so ill-matched, tall and short, dark and light, fat and thin—were getting into their car and pulling away; behind them, all but one bodyguard, Ali-4, followed.
And so it was done. So she had dreamed it, but never had she expected to succeed.
She turned in a full circle: There was not a pilgrim on this street, nor one for as far as her eye could see. Everywhere were gleaming windows full of wonders and lighted squares towering into a bright hologram of ceiling that seemed to go up forever, though she knew it did not.
"And now, Ms. Forat, your wish is my command," said Dodd, sticking out his arm, bent at the elbow. Ali-4 was watching attentively, so she took it.
"Wish?" she smiled. "What may I wish for?"
"A tour of more shops, a go at the galleries, a VIP look at Sol Base Blue, a museum or two, something to eat or drink—"
"Drink. I would like a drink. Somewhere there is music and dancing."
Dodd raised a too-thick eyebrow. "It's a little early, here, for music and dancing, but I'll do my best. We can certainly find prerecorded music, and later I'll get a concert schedule. ..."
Dini Forat went arm in arm through a nearby doorway with the ugly young man, who was beginning to seem less ugly because he was so worldly and wise. There was nothing within but a great twirling escalator, with a shining rail that wound its way out of sight. "You'll like this place. Best on this level for French wines."
Praise be to Allah, she heard herself think, and stopped the thought with a superstitious chill. She was going to have her first taste of alcohol. She was going into a bar, unveiled, with a man she hardly knew. Her knees shook as she stepped onto the escalator with the stranger.
Her life was beginning. She'd known she would find a way.
When, at the head of the stairs, an implacable robotic headwaiter demanded a club card for entrance, she knew she was truly free: the bodyguard, Ali-4, had no such card.
He was discreetly behind, and Dodd didn't think to bring him past the robot-attended barrier.
The door closed, and Ali-4 was outside it, while she, cut off from all restraint, faced a room full of young, sophisticated people who did not know the heavy burden of sin that she always had, and were laughing because of that.
When she found a way to shake off this Dodd, this watchdog of her father's friend, then the transition would be complete.
Dini Forat was never going back to Medina. Never. Not if she had to stow away on a ship bound for a new colony. This had been in her mind forever. It had been the reason she'd contrived to accompany her father, while making sure he could not guess her motive.
It was the reason that she had not killed herself long since. Her body knew what she needed, and knew that on Medina it was not possible.
Here she would find all she had been denied: she would taste wine, and freedom, and love.
Somewhere among the men of Threshold, she would find a man. The right man. A pale, fair man who would teach her of love and fall in love with her and marry her and then her father would not dare to try to force her home, deflowered and disgraced.
The most important thing had been getting free of her father. The next most important thing had been getting free of Ali-4. Now the most important thing was getting free of Dodd, the lackey watchdog. Then the most important thing would be getting free of her virginity.
With that gone, she could begin to make a life on Threshold, or even among the stars.
Dodd and she sat at a mirrored table and wine was brought in tall, graceful glasses, wine with bubbles in it, which tickled her nose.
Soon enough, he had drunk and she had drunk and everything was beginning to seem much sillier than life had ever seemed before.
But she held firm to her purpose. She had read about alcohol. She had watched vid. She knew that if you became too drunk, you could not think.
And she must think, to make good the rest of her escape.
But first, she must find a place to relieve herself. She stumbled over her tongue, asking Dodd for the "woman's room."
"Oh, yeah—waiter." And he asked a man where such a place might be. She was truly shocked. She felt herself flush.
Dodd squeezed her hand as she got up to leave and she was astounded at his forwardness. She'd shaken off the touch before she realized he meant no harm. Nor was he trying to restrain or detain her.
He was just ... a person of Threshold.
She said, trying to be clear because the drink had befuddled her tongue, "I am going to relieve my water like any other person of Threshold. Right back, I'll come."
"It's fine. Take as long as you like," said Dodd.
She would do just that.
And when she found the place marked for women's use, in it was another woman.
This woman had a white-and-black outfit and was very helpful, telling her "The back door's easy to find, honey, if you want to just go through the kitchen."
The woman asked no questions about why she wanted to find a different way out of this place.
Dini volunteered nothing, used the stall, and then left quickly.
Her heart was pounding. Would Dodd see?
It seemed he had not, when she reached the kitchen and hurried through it, eyes down to avoid catching stares from cooks in white.
Then she was out of the place and climbing down manual stairs, and going through a door that opened before her, so that she was on a street.
And it was not the same street on which the building fronted, not the same street at all. This street was an interior place, with no dazzling lights, just many back doors.
A sign to her left said LOADING ZONE/FREIGHT ELEVATOR.
She walked down it, and a door opened.
She got in the lift and punched a destination at random, too excited to take out her Threshold guide and try to figure out where she might be.
The freight elevator door closed. She hugged her arms. When it opened again, she would be somewhere Ali-4 could never find her.
She would be alon
e and abroad on Threshold, with a credit card and a new life ahead.
She knew that using the card would give her away, eventually. But before then, she intended to fall in love. And after that, everything would be different.
With luck, she would find a credit machine right away, get scrip out of it, and not need to use the card again for days, perhaps not until it was too late for her father ever to be able to drag her back to the prison world of Medina, among the pilgrims.
Perhaps she could evade him until after the hajj!
The lift settled, sighed, and opened its doors. She blinked at a dark street with a less pleasant sort of light, bars of it, illuminating hulks of ships and huge trailers and cargo modules.
But then she heard laughter, and saw a man and a woman unsteadily climbing the steps to a place called BAR.
This would do. This would certainly do for a start.
CHAPTER 5
A Little Courtesy
Normally, the Hangers that Richard Cummings III was bringing to Threshold would be quarantined by Customs for three weeks, no matter how much clout Cummings, the heir apparent to NAMECorp, tried to apply.
But these weren't normal times. The Hangers were man-sized chimpanzee-faced marsupials newly discovered on Olympus, a planet under NAMECorp administration. The species was being considered as possible med-experiment replacements for terrestrial animals. This made having some samples available during Croft's Life-form Rights conference a North American Exploration Corporation priority.
Aboard the Beau Vista, Rick Cummings had three Hangers, two females and a male, comfy in his cargo bay. As the ship he'd leased from his father's company powered down and settled into its docking slip, the freighter's AI did all the work. So Cummings had plenty of time to worry about whether his scam would work.
He'd ram the Hangers through Customs, he was almost sure. He hadn't trekked all the way from Pegasus's Nostril (the space habitat NAMECorp had put in orbit around Olympus) to fail in the eyes of his father, Richard Cummings, Jr.
No, the Flangers weren't what was worrying him. That agenda was overt and arguably to the benefit of everybody on Threshold, including NAMECorp, one of Threshold Terminal's major stockholders.
