Double Solitaire

by George R. R. Martin

  "You may believe me when I tell you that at this moment my cousin has nothing to fear from me,"

  Zabb was walking toward the door, and Mark said to his back, "Because right now you need something from her."

  The alien looked back. "Quite astute of you, groundling."

  "Wait a minute." Mark knelt, snapped open the case, and removed five of the vials. Slipping them into the leather pouch at his belt, he crossed to where Tis was expostulating with Jay Ackroyd.

  "Hey, man, watch this for me. Okay?" He handed the case to Jay and hurried back to join Zabb.

  On this walk, with only a pair of guards as escort, and without the accompaniment of a frenzied explanation from Tachyon -- Tisianne -- Mark had the leisure to inspect his surroundings. Judging from the striations in the stone walls of the audience chamber, it was located in the ancient section of the house which had been carved from the rock of the cliff. Now they had entered the newer sections of the sprawling villa. The range of decorations was bewildering to the eye, and jarring to the mind. In some areas paintings and tapestries adorned the walls; in others just the polished stone; in still others there were inlaid mosaics.

  "I take it that Takisians don't believe in a coherent decor."

  Zabb laughed. "To understand Takis, you must first understand how territorial we are."

  "Yeah, I know. All the different families and Houses..."

  "Yes, but that extends in-House as well. Each breeding line stakes out a section of palace for their own, and that includes the corridors."

  "So they get to decorate it as they please."

  "And maintain it at their own expense. It's a way for the Raiyis to cut costs."

  That raised a new thought for Mark. "Money. How do you get it?"

  "Investments, taxes, theft." The alien laughed at Mark's expression. "No, nothing so romantic as you are thinking. When we battle, the winner doesn't cart away the treasures of a House. Our theft is of the electronic variety."

  "But when you absorb a smaller House --"

  "It happens very rarely. Nothing fights like a cornered Takisian, so out-and-out victories are costly. Also, if we reduced the number of Houses..." He paused, considered. "Well, it wouldn't be as interesting or challenging."

  "Then you like to fight." A wealth of flower-child disapproval was ladled onto the words.

  Zabb's quick pace slowed, and he cocked his head curiously at Mark. "Yes, we're a warrior culture. There's glory in warfare, very little in peace."

  "That's a lot of crap. A sincere and dedicated pacifist is braver than any soldier. Look, I don't particularly like the Network -- too profit oriented, and money's never meant much to me, but, like, they've got the right idea. You don't squander your energy in war, you direct it out -- for exploration, scientific research. You've had space flight for a hell of a long time, and you've got only a few colonies and no alien allies. I think that's sad, and really wasteful."

  Zabb stopped before an elaborately carved door. He laid a hand on the cut-crystal knob and quirked a smile up at Mark. "One could argue we are even now forging a unique alliance with you humans."

  Mark stared seriously down at him. "No... you despise us."

  There was the briefest of pauses, then Zabb nodded abruptly. "Yes."

  As Mark watched the alien step through the door, he had to admit to a certain grudging admiration. A human would have expostulated, temporized, weaseled. Takisian honesty was as brutal as their politics.

  Mark checked just on the threshold. "This is your room," he said.

  "Very perceptive."

  Mark surveyed the collection of weapons on the wall, the series of paintings featuring animals that resembled a cross between giraffes, horses, and impalas. A large stained-glass window depicted a hunt, but the riders were mounted on enormous flying creatures of a genus so alien that Mark couldn't even think of an earthly comparison.

  "Nobody touched it in five years?"

  Again that flashing smile. "They knew better."

  "And the Doc's? Is his... her room still intact?"

  "No." Zabb turned from where he was fiddling at the contents of an elaborate desk with etched crystal fronting each of the drawers. "I made sure it was assigned to others... oh, it must have been twenty or so years after my little cousin's precipitous departure."

  Mark seated himself on the corner of a table and swung a leg. "Are you so shitty to the Doc because you're trying to bury the fact you really do like her?"

  The Takisian had a funny expression. "Very... very perceptive. Is that why you agreed to accompany me and leave my cousin with only a single protector?"

  "Yeah. And she would have stopped me if she'd thought it was wrong."

  "Tis and I each have a mission to accomplish."

  "And you need me if you're going to succeed."

  "I could probably achieve it alone, but remembering how difficult you... er, your friends can be, I thought your involvement might simplify matters."

  "What is it you want me to do?"

  "Help me kill a man."

  Hands up, palms out as if the words alone had the power to damage him, Mark backed off. "No, oh no, no way."

  Zabb pressed in, driving Mark around the opulent room like a drover with a skittish horse. "Then she's dead."

  "That can't be true. She's got guards, she's got us. Besides, there's no reason to kill this kid. The Doc is the Doc, and once her bona fides have been established, the kid will just get shunted aside." Zabb didn't answer. He just began filling a pipe from a twisted blown-glass humidor, never taking his sardonic, cold eyes off the sweating ace. "Killing that boy won't accomplish anything," Mark continued. "There'll always be a replacement waiting to..." Marks voice trailed away.

  The images parading past his mind's eye were those from human mythology. Of dragons' teeth being sown into the plowed earth, and soldiers springing up like foul weeds.

  "Precisely, which is why I want to remove Onyze in a way that will implicate Egyon and sow the seeds of distrust among the remaining members of that line. It's a very effective way to discourage pretension and treachery. And it will work. Oh, not for all time, but for a score of years, perhaps there will be peace."

  "The peace of fear," Mark said defiantly.

  "The best kind I know," was the imperturbable reply.

  "Then I'm sorry for you." And he found that it was true.

  Zabb hunched one shoulder. He picked up a lighter and drew on his pipe until he had it burning to his satisfaction. "Tisianne understands the harsh necessity that presently drives us. Even now she is taking an action that tears her soul. But she will act. Will you?"

  "Not this way."

  Zabb tried another tack, still in that same sweetly sane tone. "Have you never in your life acted to defend the helpless?"

  Indignation edged the words. Mark sounded as harsh as an old crow next to Zabb's mellifluous arguments. "This is not a case of self-defense, and all the sophistry in the world isn't going to make it self-defense!"

  "Perhaps I failed to express myself clearly. It is not incumbent upon either you or your 'friend' to kill Onyze. I will handle that, but I need full intelligence to succeed. I need a -- in your culture I believe it is called a 'bug' -- planted."

  "It makes me an accessory to murder, and I won't do it!"

  "Does your friend also share in your charming if totally unrealistic belief?"

  Suddenly wary, Trips asked, "Which friend?"

  "That blue fellow who can walk through walls." In a burst of regretful reminiscence he added, "By the Ideal, he nearly drove my poor Hellcat mad."

  "Traveler." Mark turned away, wrapped his bony arms around himself as if the act could somehow comfort. The scent of the alien tobacco was sweet in his nostrils.

  Zabb was continuing. His voice was low, calming, eminently reasonable. "You have chosen a philosophy for yourself. A foolish one by my lights, and one I cannot understand, but you are the one who must face the shame of your descendants, and the rage of your ancestors. But ho
w can you make the decision for this other individual? He might be willing to help me. To help Tisianne."

  With a tongue suddenly too thick for his mouth, Trips managed to mutter, "I do care... and he won't help. He'll be too afraid." He paused, considered. "Maybe he'll even believe it's wrong."

  "How nice for you if he does. How fatal for Tisianne." Zabb dropped the pipe into an ashtray with a clatter. "And then there's the infant..."

  Trips found words beyond him. He let out a sound that was half curse, half sob, and pulled out the small vial of blue powder. Downed it. As the transformation began to take hold, he faintly heard Zabb saying, "Don't take it so to heart. You can always ease the conscience with the comforting argument that it wasn't you. You were right, sophistry is the other great Takisian art."

  "Made any more progress?" Tisianne asked, as she shut off the computer and turned to face Taj. They were in the medical labs of House Ilkazam.

  Not by the flicker of an eyelash did the older Takisian indicate that he read the wealth of fury and sarcasm behind the four words. "A little. It hurt us when we lost our two best researchers."

  "Ansata's death was his own choice. A simple surrender was all that was required."

  "Or you could have released his ship."

  Tis wasn't going to buy one instant of guilt. She buried the brief flash that tried to surface. "That was never an option. I weighed fifteen lives against the thousands on Earth. Ansata lost. And as for my absence -- I was unavoidably detained."

  Jay surprised Tisianne by speaking up. Obviously he understood Takisian better than he spoke it. "If your ship hadn't been damaged, would you have stayed?"

  Slowly she said, "Probably not. I was very young, and I was making a grand gesture in the best and grandest Takisian style. You were just faceless masses who were going to be so very, very grateful. Only later did I learn to love you."

  "You have reason to be grateful, groundling," Taj said. "You obviously have received some great and potent power, or you would not be a companion to Tisianne."

  Jay didn't have to climb down the alien's throat, Tis did it for him. "Grateful! Grateful! The Ideal curse you and leave you childless. Is Jay's power worth tens of thousands of lives? Is it worth the damage to his life, concerned as he must be over the fate of any children he may sire? Is it worth the loss of all that I am? What was conceived in this room I am now carrying to fruition."

  She spun away and tried to regain control of her ragged breaths. The fury, the anguish helped propel her to a cabinet. It kept her from thinking too much about the purpose of the drug she was loading into an epispray.

  "I see you haven't lost your flare for impassioned speeches. Do you still favor desperate causes?" Taj asked.

  He was trying to fathom the mind of a person who would run off to save the inhabitants of an alien world. Trying to see if she regretted throwing away her birthright and her future. Tis thrust the epispray deep into her pocket and looked her uncle straight in the eye.

  "I'd do it again... in a second..."

  His expression softened. "That's my Tisianne. Your father would be proud."

  "Did he ever forgive me?"

  "No... but he missed you to the end."

  "It's time I saw him."

  The infirmary was almost empty. There was one young man floating in a biogerm bubble. The bubbles hung from the ceiling by long filaments that monitored the injured body, but it did look as if the patient had been swallowed by a Portuguese man-of-war. Tis also thought of them as placenta pods. They served the same function as the womb, growing a healthy body, and the individual floating in their soothing soup often seemed to revert. Like the man before them, curled on his side, his thumb in his mouth, eyes squeezed shut, and nutrient feeds stabbing his body at a hundred different points.

  "Gross," Jay said, but Tis wasn't certain whether he was reacting to the bubble or the horrendous wounds that raked the man's flesh, laying bare the various levels and colors of a Takisian body.

  At the far end of the ward lay a pair of heavy plasteel doors like the entrance into a security vault. And it was a safe of sorts; it was designed to protect the most precious and powerful of the House Ilkazam as they healed. The guards took up positions at the door to the infirmary, and about the vault doors. Taj stood before the access panel, an abstract piece of applique art with multicolored silicon crystals, each of them flashing with white lights. Taj sent the telepathic code, and order became chaos. Crystals flashed with clashing and discordant colors, and then the doors slid slowly open with a soft whine.

  "Do you want me to wait outside with the hired help?" Jay asked.

  Tis couldn't force words past the lump in her throat. She shook her head and entered. Jay followed.

  Shaklan was also floating in a biogerm bubble, also curled into a fetal position, but there was no sense of the healing infant. This was a breathing, excreting husk. Rollers had been placed in the palms of each clawlike hand to prevent them from closing into permanent fists. The hip bones thrust like knife blades against the gray skin of the pelvis, and the bones of the rib cage fell away to a shrunken belly. Long, long hair floated like seaweed about the shriveled body.

  Tisianne evaluated the vital signs being constantly monitored from the control panel. The monitors certainly supported the general consensus that the mind and soul of Shaklan brant Fleva sek Agem had fled.

  "You still want the scan?" Taj asked.

  "Yes."

  She keyed the panel, and the nutrient bath began to drain away. An examination table rose out of the floor and gently received the desiccated body. Pulling aside the gelatinous bubble, Tis stared into the face of this half-dead thing and tried to reconcile it with the face of her father. It had the proper shape. That was all.

  Taj gathered her hand in his, physical contact helping him to capture and augment her own feeble mental powers. They went searching and found nothing. The flesh breathed, the mind was gone.

  She paced, felt as if something were battering at the top of her skull. Found her hand thrust deep into her pocket clenching the epispray. She marched all the arguments through her head. The conclusion was inescapable.

  She forced herself back to her father's side. Laid a hand against a hollow, stubbled cheek.

  "Daddy..." She was a little embarrassed using the human word, but she had always liked it. It spoke of warmth and affection, and the Takisian High House equivalent didn't suggest intimacy, much less love. "I've come home. I'm sorry for the things I said. I... love you..." sound died as if strangled, and she walked away.

  Taj followed and laid a hand on her shoulder. "Do you want me to...?"

  "No!"

  Tis held out her hand, and Taj laid a pair of tiny golden scissors on the palm. The hair was lank and wet as she separated out a strand and snipped it off. Carefully she wrapped this token of her father around one wrist.

  Shaklan's lips held a hint of warmth, and it almost shattered her resolve. Then courage, pragmatism, love, and selfish need spurred her, and Tis pulled out the epispray. Laid it against her father's arm.

  Jay's fingers closed on her wrist, and the pain forced her to drop the epispray.

  "What are you doing?" The enunciation was ice careful.

  Tisianne's eyes fluttered up to meet his. What she read there made it impossible for her to speak.

  "Freeing him," Taj said softly as he gently freed Jay's fingers from around Tis's wrist. "From a death in life."

  "You're going to put your own father to sleep?"

  "I have to," Tis said so quietly that she wasn't even sure the words were audible. "He's been kept alive as a pawn. Now his presence is no longer necessary. In fact it's a hindrance."

  "That's what Zabb was laying on you. Remove that last life standing between you and your goddamn throne. Jesus, I can't believe you."

  His scorn hurt. It struck her skin like a lash, and she almost quailed. She went searching for anger and found a thimbleful. It would suffice in lieu of courage. "I expect neither your understand
ing nor your approval. I expect you to do the job I hired you for," Tis spat out.

  Jay's face shut down like shutters slamming closed. Jammed his hands into his pockets and turned away. Tisianne sucked in a deep breath, held it, and depressed the key. Twenty seconds later Shaklan's chest seemed to collapse with the exhalation of his final breath.

  Sweeping up her hip-length hair, Tis flung it across the body to form a golden shroud. From deep within her a shriek formed, drove upward, punching through her throat like a geyser of acid. The sound that emerged was like nothing human or Takisian. It was the cry of a wounded and dying animal.

  For Shaklan, Raiyis of the House Ilkazam, was dead.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  If God is a woman, She looks like that grand old dowager seated in the center.

  It was an irreverent thought, and it sent Mark back to an embarrassed contemplation of his thumbnails. Jay Ackroyd was sleeping, supported only by his tailbone and the back of his head in the uncomfortable little chair. Mark figured he'd let the detective sleep unless he started snoring.

  While this might be the most critical hurdle Tisianne had yet scaled, for the humans it was stone-cold boring. The entire affair was being conducted in Ilkazal in the private mode, so that an audible word exploded into the tense silence maybe only once or twice a minute.

  The hall felt like a rococo courtroom. A mosaic tile floor showed some glorious scene from Ilkazam history, and a skylight faceted like a giant diamond formed most of the roof. The moonlight streaming through those facets broke into its component colors, and rainbows danced and clashed with the assembly's gaudy clothes.

  The seven old crones stared down from their curving dais at Tisianne. They should be passing an eye back and forth, Mark thought, for their gray hair and cold expressions reminded Mark of the Greek legend of the Graeae. Mark wondered why the Doc didn't collapse beneath the weight of that hostile scrutiny, but she remained a proudly erect little figure with a rainbow snagged in her pale blond hair and dyeing the fabric of the elaborate clothing that had somehow been produced in only a few hours. Mark had a feeling there was some heavy nanotechnology at work here.