“Very flimsy file?” Bruno asked.
“Extremely flimsy…for such a professional investigator,” he admitted.
“Maybe she kept it all in her head?” Bruno suggested.
“Unquestionably.”
“Whereas she was herself quite flexible,” Bruno said, and smiled a bit.
“Your eyes are pale green,” Blue said. “That doesn’t show in photos or videos. There they look gray or blue. Is that color natural?”
“Completely,” Bruno said. “Do you like green eyes?”
“On you, yes.”
“You are the same size and general muscular build as the First.”
“Does that satisfy you?” Blue asked.
“Yes.”
“Let’s order,” Blue said. “I’m hungry.”
Again Bruno’s smile. Blue’s predecessor had been as frank.
The dinner proceeded with discreet little references back and forth. Before dessert, Blue said, “I meant it before. I have no claim on you or your family at all. I died. And the fact that I’m alive again is merely a product of our inborn physiology, and has nothing to do with your previous engagement.”
“So you believe that theory that existence under double suns provides for double lives,” Bruno asked. “Bi-Vividism, you called it.”
“It seems irrefutable, at least among the higher vertebrates. And it seems to apply both to us and to the Albergrivians.”
“How scientific and how philosophical of you.”
“Isn’t it? So if you leave after dinner and I never hear from you again…well, that’s fine with me.”
“Is it, truly?” Bruno asked.
“I said it was.”
“Except, my dear Second, the spy camera my attorneys had placed under the table to ensure that you carried no hidden weapons also reveals something else.” Bruno froze the picture and passed the phone-pad to Blue.
“Oh that! Well, I’ve got an excuse. This body is new, and I never exactly know how it will respond to any specific stimulus.”
Bruno did something with a foot under the table and then froze that and passed the phone photo to Blue.
“I, on the other hand, have been in this body for many years. And I’m even more surprised to see this reaction.”
The photo he showed now was of his own lap.
Their desserts arrived: tottering cream and cake towers of deliciousness threaded with platinum candy.
“As my predecessor might say,” Blue looked at Bruno closely, searching for anything resembling an imperfection, “I’m pretty much ready for anything. Lead the way.”
“You see, Second. That’s new,” Bruno said. He picked up Blue’s hand and brought it to his mouth, where he nibbled on the edge of Blue’s palm before saying, “Your predecessor would have led the way…I think I’m going to like this change.”
*
The address Aptel Movasa had sent over was in the River Heights section of the City, and quite upscale. The Lanscro Vidis Air-Skimmer Showroom was a sixtieth-floor penthouse, all the better for off-the-roof test-drives, Blue assumed. It was quietly posh, with the fountain and gardens he’d come to expect with well-to-do Albergrivian business offices. A dozen of the luxurious Black Hawk and Silver Hawk models were strewn about the lawns and flower beds: ranging from the sportier four-seaters to the deluxe seven-door, fifteen-window limos with separated brougham-style driver pods, only available in muted colors. Blue’s eye, however, was immediately drawn to a tiny, quietly glowing, low-cut, cobalt blue two-seater, identified as a Thunder Hawk.
“The upholstery matches your eyes,” he heard behind him and turned to the voice belonging to a middle aged Albergrivian gentleman who was taller, stouter, and better looking than any off-worlder he’d ever seen.
“Zha-Kas Lascro Vidis?” Blue asked.
“None of that is needed. It’s Mr. Vidis to you. What do you think? Stunning, isn’t it? Brand new. We have the first three Thunder Hawks off the robo-assembly line in the entire City.” He continued on with specifications, speeds, handling and maneuverability reports. “Mr…?”
Of course the Vidis dealership would have the first three of the model. This was probably the highest-end and most successful air-skimmer dealer in town.
“Andresson.”
“Mr. Andresson. Well, should we wrap it up for you, Mr. Andresson?”
“Let me think about it. Meanwhile, I have come on a slightly less mercantile matter.”
“Ah.”
He immediately turned Blue away, heading him toward a two-story high, glassed-in office area.
“Zha-Kas Aptel Movasa believes you might be able to help me in locating…someone.”
“Aha. You see, my dear.” He turned to a woman in her late thirties, less slender than most of her race, with bright eyes and the typical straight black hair. She was dressed well, if very quietly. “I was telling my wife, Mr. Andresson, the minute we noticed you arrive, that you would be someone special. You know Movasa?”
Blue reached to take her hand but she bowed slightly and moved backward out of reach. He noticed she wore dark laced gloves. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Blue said.
She immediately and wordlessly withdrew as the two men sat on facing if not matching love seats, but she seemed to Blue to hover, and even listen in on their conversation. For all he knew she might even be recording it.
Blue explained his purpose and said that Movasa had somehow or other gotten word that Zha Martila might have worked in some capacity for Vidis.
The Albergrivian denied it, politely enough, and turned to just behind Blue to ask his wife if she remembered any such named worker either here or at their other showroom. Evidently not. She then said something and Vidis told Blue she had another appointment.
Blue then explained why he needed to find Zha Martila for his client. Vidis sympathized and assured him he would put out the word among those who worked for and with him for this fellow off-worlder.
They drank more of the purple tea, iced this time, with little pale yellow flowers crushed over the surface for a slightly spicy flavor. It was a pleasant, if inutile half hour, and Blue left relaxed but frustrated. Of course Movasa had promised, but then perhaps that promise was less substance than off-world formality.
Even so, as he stood in the lift dropping through the open courtyard of the center of the building, Blue felt odd, as though something were not quite right.
He’d come to realize in this short period since his renewal that his intuition was actually quite useful. It had worked with the meeting with Bruno last night; it had worked with Movasa, and now he explored it a bit more.
The problem wasn’t Vidis, who seemed about as straightforward an Albergrivian as any he’d encountered—one reason, Blue guessed, for his success in the City. The problem was Mrs. Vidis. She looked slightly off; she acted oddly, and those black laced gloves…Definitely something wrong.
He’d begun going to the exercise club in his office building, so he was both confident and ready for most anything when he stepped out of the lift and into what he only now saw with one step out was not the glittering lobby he’d entered from before, but instead a lower floor, possibly a basement.
One glance at the lift’s inner panel showed him he was two floors below the street. Not where he had signaled: so someone had brought him here.
Blue immediately flattened himself to a side wall, and thus missed the thrown kris that embedded itself into the lift’s back wall, as the doors closed. He dropped down and tumbled to the other side of the little corridor while a second kris embedded in the wall he’d just been at, and he rolled forward in a zigzag pattern hearing two blades more whizz by him.
He was inside a shallow doorway when he saw a figure in his peripheral vision and dropped down to miss the fifth and he thought last blade, then he exploded out and into the corridor, where he used his martial arts knowledge to jump atop the figure, wrapping his legs around its midsection, pummeling it with the sides of his hands as the fi
gure fell down sideways and tried to escape.
It was Mrs. Vidis, as he’d suspected, And as she lay upon the corridor floor, he held down first one hand, then the other, and tore off the lace gloves.
Each thumb was deformed, thinner than normal, and artificially padded: often the sign of a recent, voluntary, Heal-All experience.
She turned to him, her eyes blazing with fury. “How could you possibly know?”
Blue wrapped her hands in a silk handkerchief and knotted it twice, then stood up and pulled her to her feet.
“Know what, Zha Martila?” Blue asked. “That you were my murderer? Or that you had undergone a gender transformation in a Heal-All?”
“Either,” she said, softly. “Both?”
“Surely you’ve already learned what an advantage it is being both genders? Take you, for example, ruthless as a man to hide your secret, and yet in the end with inefficient upper body strength to throw me off just now. Your trade-off worked against you, Zha. And mine worked for me.”
“Stop calling me Zha!” she pouted, not prettily at all, then said, “So now what? You turn me in?”
“Not necessarily. After all, I’m coming to like this body. Like your own new body, it feels a lot more natural to me than the other one ever did. I take it Zha Vidis knows nothing of this?”
“Nothing at all. He only knew that I needed an operation before we could marry. I paid for it myself.”
“I have recorded this entire encounter, Martila. This is what I’ll need, to keep your secret.” Blue outlined it: 1) a death notice for Dusk Martila. 2) a signed confession for the murder of Blue Andresson, the First, and 3) “appropriate compensation.”
“The confession is so that I won’t ever try this solution again?” she asked. “Yes. Yes. Of course, yes to all three of terms.”
*
He’d heard about and once, too (in another life, he believed), had even seen videos of the Bruno’s family’s in-City estate. It covered the rooftops of three buildings, in a giant L, those connected by various hundred-story-high transparent, enclosed galleries.
He’d driven into a large lift and had been lifted to a valet at a parking area, one floor beneath the penthouse itself opening to a large open to the sky garden. A young usher checked his face against the list, seemed impressed, and handed him off to an usherette, all of them clad in the bronze and teal family colors. She brought him to a raised deck opening onto several four-story-high, half-open rooms: scene of Bruno’s birthday party. People he assumed were family members were streaming across the galleries from other buildings onto the deck. Blue immediately spotted the two attorneys from last week, both of whom smiled, and one of whom even raised a glass in a toast.
As he stepped onto the top step of the deck and stood looking over the hundred or more guests, he heard a voice speak out, “Blue Andresson. Fiancé to Bruno Thomasson.” All heads turned to him, and a stylishly slender young woman with dark hair, closely encased in a platinum-threaded gown, sprang to take Blue’s hand, saying, “I’m Claudia, Bruno’s younger sister.”
When the meetings and greetings died down, Bruno appeared, casually dressed, unlike the others, in an iridium-threaded open-necked blouson and slate gray slacks. He was barefoot and bareheaded and he cut through the crowd to kiss first his sister and then Blue. Applause greeted him and even greater applause greeted these gestures.
An hour later, Blue had met most of the immediate family as well as a score of nephews and cousins and great aunts. He felt enveloped by all but perhaps Bruno’s mother, the family matriarch and current CEO of most of its holdings. She’d been polite but cool, and Blue thought he could live with that.
They had come to the toasts and well-wishings and the gifts, when they were all startled to see a Thunder-Hawk air skimmer approach and settle upon the roof, just beyond the deck. Its large, multicolored ribbons signified that it, too, was a gift.
Partygoers dropped down to look it over, and it was wonderful to see.
Blue heard the matriarch, Marcella Thomasdotter, saying to someone, “It’s not from me! I wish I’d thought of it as a gift for him.”
Bruno pulled Blue along and over to the skimmer, where someone had found a tiny gift card. He immediately turned and threw his arms around Blue, kissing him again and again. The applause rose and died down.
Sometime later on, Blue was just coming back to the party after a visit to freshen up when an usher intercepted him and led him to one edge of a large chamber where Marcella was seated. She swanned out a hand, which he took and kissed and then sat down across from her.
“I didn’t like you the first time I met you,” she said.
“I’m afraid I can’t remember that meeting, although I’ve tried,” he honestly told her.
“His adjustment is a wonderful proof of his continued commitment,” Marcella said.
Bruno, she meant.
“Yes, it is. And I’m grateful.”
That somewhat mollified her.
“And the bauble?” she waved in the direction of the air-skimmer. “I hope it didn’t set you back too much? That would be imprudent.”
“No. Not at all. It turned out that someone owed me,” he said with a casual shrug. “It was merely a piece of business.”
“He looks good in it,” she said; Bruno was in the driver’s seat and waving to them indoors.
“Diamonds always shine brighter for their setting,” Blue said. “That was one thing I learned—the first time around.”
“Live and learn. Then live again and learn even more,” Marcella quipped. She stood, and when he did, too, she took his arm and began to lead him out to the party. “Of course you’ll both live here in one of the residences when you’re in-City. But we really must find something unique for you in the countryside. Do you like the beach?”
“Does Bruno?”
“I think we’re going to get along, just fine, Blue. Just fine.”
Hunter
It was sunset when Ben Après drove up to the hanging shingle that read “Sagoponauk Rock Writers Colony,” and on a smaller, added-on shingle, “Visitors see Dr. Ormond.” An oddly autumnal sunset despite the early summer date and no hint of dropping temperature, as Ben stepped out of the ten-year-old Volvo that hadn’t given him a bit of its usual temperament on the long trip, as he urinated on a clump of poison ivy until it was shiny wet, as he surveyed what appeared to be yet another rolling succession of green-humped New England hills.
The muted colors of the sunset fitted Ben’s own fatigued calm following a week of torment, his final uncertain decision to come, and his more recent anxieties since the turn off the main road that he’d never find the place, that he’d driven past it several times already, the directions had seemed so sketchy.
He found himself gaping at the sky as though it would tell him something essential, or as though he’d never see one like it again. Then he made out some houses nestled in a ravine: the colony. He’d made it!
*
Dr. Ormond was easy to find. The paved road that dipped down into the colony ended at his front door in a shallow oval parking lot radiating dirt roads in several directions. Two cars with out-of-state plates were parked next to a locally licensed beat-up baby-blue pickup.
The active, middle-aged man who stepped out of the house chomping an apple introduced himself, then looked vaguely upset when Ben introduced himself and asked where he would be staying.
There appeared to be a mix-up, Dr. Ormond said. Another guest—and here Ormond threw the apple down and went on to mention a woman writer of some repute—had unexpectedly accepted the colony’s earlier invitation, thought by them to have been forgotten. She’d taken the last available studio. They hadn’t been certain Ben was coming this season either. Victor Giove hadn’t heard from Ben in weeks. Of course, Victor hadn’t heard from Joan Sampson either, and she’d come too, though naturally they were all delighted she was here.
Ormond motioned behind himself sketchily. Ben saw a white clapboard, pitched-roof ho
use standing alone on a patch of grassy land. He supposed that was her studio: the one he was to have lived in.
Before he could ask, a plump, middle-aged woman—her apron fluttering, her hair in disarray—was waving to them from the doorway. She’d already telephoned Victor, she called out. He was on his way. Mrs. Ormond, Ben supposed.
He leaned against the Volvo. Darkness was quietly dropping into the ravine. One or two lights were turned on in the Ormonds’ house, other lights appeared suddenly in more distant studios. Ben wanted to wake up tomorrow morning in this enchanted little glen, to spend sunny and rainy days here, long afternoons, crisp mornings, steamy nights. He would not allow the mix-up to affect his decision. After all the inner turmoil, he was glad he’d come. He wasn’t leaving.
Above all, he was grateful to Victor Giove, who was jogging toward them now, accompanied by a large, taffy-colored Irish hound, the two racing, skirting the big oak, circling Ben and Dr. Ormond, the dog barking, then nuzzling Ben’s hand for a caress; Giove hardly out of breath, glad to see Ben. He took Ben’s hand, clasped his shoulder, smiled, and was as openly welcoming as Ormond hadn’t been.
Victor was tan already. His curly, dark head already sparkled with sun-reddened hair. He looked healthier and more virile than he’d ever looked in the city: an advertisement for country living with his handsome, open-featured face, his generous, beautifully muscled body that loose clothing like the old T-shirt and corduroys he was wearing could never disguise. Ben felt Victor’s warmth charge into his own body as they touched, and he knew that all things were possible this summer: even the impossible: even Victor Giove.
“There’s no place here for Ben to stay,” Dr. Ormond protested, once they’d gotten inside the Ormonds’ living room.
“What about the little cottage?’ Victor asked. “That’s empty.”
“What little cottage?”
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