by Manda Benson
The only thoughts to have crossed her mind, Jed thought, had been of Wolff’s acts of valiance.
At that moment the memories had not occurred to her, say, of his hijack of the Shamrock with Taggart, or how he had made off with her conurin supply as insurance. No, she had thought only of the time he’d saved her back on Satigenaria, how he’d leapt to her side in battle, and how he’d persuaded Taggart to spare her life. But this man, she had seen from the beginning, was a selfish chancer who acted only in the name of his own wellbeing, and somehow conurin and fear had made her forget that. Spare the Archer, spare the ship. The Shamrock was his one reliable mode of transport. Only Jed could pilot it. Wolff’s part in her life stemmed only from his own conceited plight, and the events of last night, well, they had been but mere gratuitous acts of flippancy—to reassure her, or to reassure Wolff, whichever was irrelevant. She had defiled her ship, and she had insulted her heritage.
He shifted, clasping her to him in the half-light of her sleeping quarters.
“Does the Shamrock keep vigil and observe its course?” Lying against him, Jed felt the deep thrum of Wolff’s voice in his larynx.
“It does.”
“Then be still.”
Jed exhaled in a short sigh, settling her head under his chin. She felt the steady rise and fall of his chest, and the regular thump of his heartbeat in syncopation with her own. There was something in Jed that she knew she should neither desire nor welcome, and yet it was there and it was having an effect on her. The primal comfort of knowing she was not alone had been taken from her many years ago, and as an Archer it was her duty to stand apart. All throughout Jed’s life there had been the cold steadfastness of the Universe, the monolith of Physics, unchanging, and somehow empty and oddly disturbing through the years spent in isolation. It was a relief, for once, not to have to face it by herself. In this warmth and unpredictability lay the same wonder in a less sublime beauty. Jed didn’t have to be in awe of Gerald Wolff’s body. His pulse was just a crude mechanical process that supplied oxygen for his physiology, and the infra-red he gave out was just a product of an inefficient metabolism mediated by enzymes needing an inconvenient temperature. He was part of a Universe where not everything was of Steel and Flame, and his closeness made Jed wonder how she’d become so divorced from all that was so natural as the comforts of the biology of her own species.
She tried to stop herself. She was an Archer, and it was not her business to think these things. These feelings were for peasants, not men of the Blood. It was something in the expression he’d made that called up the forbidden memory. She didn’t want the memory, but already she had delved too far and it came and could not be blocked. It was her father, who used to make that expression. She remembered him doing it. There was a long flight of steps up a hill from Jed’s parents’ estate, leading to the ancestral crypts in the side of the mountain, and she used to go there alone sometimes, just to sit and watch the effects of the sun and shadows on the land, and he’d found her there, sitting on a tomb and staring into space, concentrating intensely. He’d made that face of forlorn despair, as though he knew Jed was already lost to him, and nothing he could do, however hard he tried, would make it otherwise.
Already her throat had constricted. She must not think of these things. She forced herself to take regular breaths and concentrated on the Shamrock’s navigational feed. She craved conurin, but she knew to take it in this state of disequilibrium would be to invite disaster.
Wolff’s arm was around Jed’s waist, and he tightened it briefly, but Jed swam against an overwhelming tide. She didn’t want to feel like this, and, in a way, the force of the emotions of the previous night had drowned out the unease. She wanted to understand the affection behind Wolff’s actions, but she could not. Why did she feel so cold inside? Why could she not lower the gate and let him be a part of her, emotionally instead of physically?
“Your...” Jed searched for a polite way of putting it, and couldn’t find one. “...dick is digging in my back.”
Wolff suddenly roared with laughter. “Would you have me dig it somewhere else, then?” He put his weight onto his hands and straightened his arms so he was straddling her with his chest. When Jed looked at him he was grinning like an idiot.
“You are making slime all over everything.” Jed made a dismissive motion toward his loins. “It’s disgusting.”
“Some of the slime’s yours,” Wolff chided. “Surely all this slime is too great in volume to have been made by one man?”
Jed looked him in the face. “Stupid fool,” she said, and looked away, noticing the simple black pattern where his tattoo wrapped around the underside of his arm. “Why have you let someone draw all over you?”
“That?” Wolff leant to his side, and pointed to the image of the snake with its tail in its mouth etched around his bicep, made from a simple pattern of converging and diverging lines. “That’s an ouroboros.” He removed his hand from behind Jed’s back, and sat facing away from her. Another snake stretched down the length of his spine, its hood spreading between his shoulder blades. “That’s a cobra. Rogan copied it from a picture in a book. I did an eagle on him.”
“Why would you allow someone else to make indelible marks on your skin?”
Wolff shrugged, the movement of muscle under skin creating a writhing motion through the snake on his back. “I suppose it’s a bonding thing. We trusted each other not to mess it up.”
His hair had made itself untidy where he’d slept, and Jed reached up and pulled out the tie holding it at the back of his neck. She stroked the patterned image of the snake down the length of his spine. The texture of the skin was unchanged. If she had been unable to see it, she would not have been able to tell the snake was there. “Why did you choose snakes?”
“I don’t know.” Wolff shrugged again. “I just liked how they looked. What would you pick?” He looked different with his hair loose from the way Jed knew him.
“Well, I suppose I would have to pick the insignia of hortica, or the symbol of the Pagan Atheist.” As a punitive brand, Jed thought, for being disloyal to her clan, and for not being of Steel and Flame. She turned away from him, to lie on her side facing the door.
“How about a chimaera?” Wolff suggested. His finger stroked up her nape. “They’ve got bits on the front, haven’t they?”
“Sensory antennae,” Jed corrected.
“And then, it’s got a head, like that. And wings.” He used both hands to describe a delta shape that sent weird sparks racing up the nerves in her flanks toward her spine. “Then the rest is all tail.” With a slow, firm motion, he traced a line down toward her buttocks then began to add on imaginary vanes.
The feelings that had reassured her the previous night returned. This felt right, and even if it wasn’t right, it should be of no consequence. She turned back toward him, pressing her face into his neck and shoulder so he couldn’t look at her. He reached his hand up to her throat and ran his hand down over her larynx and the midline of her ribs, and past her navel, and slid his knee over hers. She tensed without thinking when she felt him sinking into her again, but it was not as uncomfortable as she remembered. All that mattered was this and now—not the Code, and not those who sought her ship. Instinctively she wanted conurin again, wished to lose herself in the intensity of the moment, but again it was unwise, and perhaps it would even offend him. She had never considered the feelings of another above her own, but perhaps Wolff would be affronted by the knowledge that he was better with a concentration-enhancing drug.
He reached his arm under her neck, his hand spreading on her back. His other hand was wedged between his groin and hers, and when he moved he started up strange electrical throbbings chasing down her back and up the insides of her thighs, which became more and more intense, until every nerve in her sang like a tuning fork. A hissing wall of deafness blocked her ears, and she felt as the Shamrock did as it chased ever faster toward the fabled limits of physics—the speed of light—just be
fore the chimaera drive would engage and take it through the upswing, the thunderous crescendo as the Alcubierre wave broke. The Shamrock’s navigational data suddenly came to her—the center of the galaxy many light years away—and for an instant she saw it, and she remembered what lay there, and it was fear and horror and delight and anticipation all at once, and her sight blurred and insane sensation exploded through her. She dug her fingers hard into Wolff’s back, gripping his hips with her knees, as every muscle in her body tensed. “Steel and Flame,” she managed to grunt through the rictus that had forced itself on her face.
Wolff’s pace slackened, his face contorting into a combination of pain and foolishness, comical, almost childish, and he grabbed at her and redoubled his momentum as he crested the glory tide. Jed’s unease and disequilibrium was again washed away by the intensity of the moment.
Wolff collapsed against her, sated. Jed twisted in his grip, sweat thick on her back and sides beneath his hands. She wanted to eat, and it was a natural hunger for a solid feeling inside, not a craving through unnatural habit. “We should rise now.”
“In a moment.”
For the time being, Jed surrendered herself to inaction, unheeding of any memory of her training or the ship’s input. She ran her hands through Wolff’s long hair, breathing deep and saturating herself with the rich scent of his body.
Wolff stroked her hair back, running his fingers along the solid edge of her interface band. As he touched the metal on her brow, she saw the puzzlement in his face, and felt him grip its edge between finger and thumb—felt the sudden experimental tug. Fear came upon her—an abrupt feeling of things escalating beyond control and rearing up above her. “Do not put your fingers there!” she cried out, and lunged, snapping at his hand with her teeth. Wolff retracted his hand fast, and the instant evaporated.
An awkward distrust descended on both of them. It was as though something had come between them, and reminded both they were separate creatures. The Code of the Archers and Jed’s training flashed before her, and she imagined something comparable paid homage to Wolff’s memories.
Jed realised she did want him back, wanted to recapture what had made its precipitate departure, but he’d frightened her, and for a moment she wasn’t sure. Her hand tried to find his, and she opened her mouth to say something.
A loud scraping sound came from somewhere in the vicinity outside the door. Jed tensed. “That is your urchin,” said she. “Get rid of it.”
The scratching sound came again.
“Go away, Arrol!” Wolff shouted at the door. His arms were rigid, and Jed knew that his fear was her desire, that they would part and forget this situation, in word and deed if not in thought, and eliminate any chance of reoccurrence.
Another scratch, and morran mutterings emanated from the door. With an expletive, Wolff disentangled himself, made a halfhearted attempt at dressing while the interruptions continued, and opened the door. “What is it?” Jed heard him demanding. “No, you may not come in here. What do you want?” The man sighed then followed Rh’Arrol out into the corridor.
Jed shut the door behind him with a thought.
For about a quarter of an hour she remained, but Wolff did not return, and nothing of the Shamrock’s feedback disturbed her.
Eventually she rose and ate bread and dried fruit, and more than she could remember having eaten before at any one time. In the shower she locked the door, but she left the neutron gun lying on the polished obsidian-topped table at the foot of the bed. She tarried there longer than she would normally, letting the hot water cascade over her skin, her mind wandering among myriad small matters and unable to settle.
When she emerged from the sleeping chamber, Wolff wasn’t on the bridge. The Shamrock told her he’d gone down to the armoury with Rh’Arrol. Instead of pursuing him, she went down into the lower levels through the access port in the sleeping chamber, and from here descended into the dissection room.
She sat against the wall in the wavering aquamarine light, and watched the chimaera drifting in their bays. She picked up some tools and tried to work on one of the unprepared ones, but she couldn’t divert her line of thought. If only she hadn’t made the connection between Wolff and her father, she thought as she hacked at the chimaera’s antenna, this would have remained forgotten.
She threw down the scalpel so hard it bounced on the dissection table and fell on the floor. She raised her hands to her face and stared at the chimaera in disgusted recognition, at what she had done to a living creature capable of suffering. She leant against the wall, her knees slowly collapsing in a descent to the floor. She shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears, but the flashback was already in motion, and it was as in a dream, when Jed could close her eyes but the inevitable sequence would continue to play out.
She remembered the violence of her origins—the time when the ship had come for her, with vivid clarity how she’d lain that night, for some reason unable to sleep, and staring into the mysticism of the open sky through the wide window. The breeze had breathed into that room, bringing the scents of the balmy night with them and playing with the voile curtains. The blank silver orb of the alpha-moon had risen, and Jed felt its watery light, and the touch of the air on her hair and face. To perceive the delicacies of this world with these five senses, before she had known the forced starkness conurin could lend her.
She recalled the commotion and clamour down in the rooms below, standing on the top stair on the dark landing and trying to see what was afoot—her father down there, resisting the intruder. His shoulders blocked the doorway, something about a ship outside. Jed not understanding, but feeling, knowing, that it had something to do with the steely gaze and quick reflexes she’d inherited from him, something that had always set her apart from the other children of this land, something that filled both her parents with sorrowful anticipation. As he turned away from a shadowy figure, whose stare locked on Jed’s, he caught sight of her standing up there. “Jed!” he shouted, his eyes and voice setting off her instinctive alarm in the way every child picks up urgent danger vibes from its parents. At that instant, the gun in the intruder’s hand sounded a muffled thud, and he fell, not as if he’d passed out, but as if every muscle in his body had involuntarily relaxed. The stranger was in the hallway and advancing up the stairs, her feral eyes boring straight through Jed, looking too much like a part of the sky and the stars to be here in the no-nonsense house Jed had known all her life. She feared this strange, stormy female who came for her like some ancient legend, but she was petrified on the stair by what had happened to her father, and by a strange, compelling recognition of the aggressor.
As she’d been dragged past her father’s inert form, she’d at first thought him dead, but later she’d figured out he was more likely stunned. As a male homozygous for the Blood genes with a Blood wife he was too valuable alive. Perhaps they’d had more children, and their daughters were among the stars as apprentices. Perhaps they’d had daughters before Jed, and they’d been taken. She would never know. In the early stages of her training she’d spent hours wondering, imagining, if there had been others. The Archers always got word. The Archers always snatched their victims at a young age. Even if the parents hid their prodigal children in remote parts of the galaxy as hers had tried, the computers would know, and the computers would talk, and the Archers would still be lurking like shadows in the background, demon vultures waiting for the time. The life of the Archers was one of birth, not of choice.
Outside Jed had taken her last look at what she was to look back upon as normality. The moonlit garden, with its stone walls and statues, appeared as a great tract of fossilised landscape. And the otherworldly, spiny, dart-like body of the huge ship parked on the hill...
In many ways it had seemed to Jed as though she had fallen into a nightmare and had still not awoken.
Jed had first learnt two things about the Archers. Firstly, that they were incapable of reproduction, and secondly that their lifespan was bounded by th
eir addiction. After about a hundred years or so, long before the two-hundred year expectancy of a man of the Blood, a combination of conurin abuse and loneliness would drive them mad. Jed had heard tales of insane Archers breaking loose in stations and killing scores of men before someone managed to finish them off, and of ships discovered in the Outer Reaches by bounty seekers, their lone occupants found frozen in an airless, icy rigor mortis, the atmosphere jettisoned. Those Archers had stopped eating, stopped living. Jed feared this, and doubly so because she related to their situation, understood how one’s mind could go around in solitary, futile circles so many times one might buckle under the monotony, lose the will to go on, and how the oblivious darkness which lay beyond this world of Steel and Flame might beckon.
Mathicur had not been of entirely solid sanity, and Jed had not been her first apprentice. Jed still had scars on her thighs and buttocks left from brutal lashings. Mathicur had never hit her about the head or arms or abdomen where it could have done serious harm, but she remembered being held down by the neck and screaming for it to stop as Mathicur took too much relish in her punishment. The beatings were always for disobedience, and the disobedience always stemmed from fear or simply being incapable of the task Mathicur had set her. Mathicur could have maimed or killed her, and no justice would have been done. She imagined many older Archers had killed their apprentices through frustration, or simply venting the acrimonious, pent-up anger their own training had left on them.
And soon, Jed would be expected to exact her right as an Archer and inflict this same cruelty over a child feeling the same terror as she had. If she didn’t seek out an apprentice herself, Mathicur would find her and make sure of it. It was every Archer’s obligation to perpetuate her own clan.
The time was high, and Jed had even quizzed the computers of the last several settled systems she’d visited. There had even been one on the Satigenaria circumfercirc, a girl of eight from mixed hortica and insectidae bloodlines, whom Jed knew she had a rightful claim to, but she had held back. She had thought, hoped, that perhaps the girl would remain unnoticed, that she might be missed and go free. After all, there must be some the Archers missed. What had happened to the child? It was unlikely the computers would have allowed her to perish in the disaster.
