Shadow Man (Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction)

by Scott, Melissa

  So that was what this was all about, Tatian thought. Wiidfare was playing trade--not for the first time, either--and playing the game rather crudely. Tendlathe's people didn't usually participate, but then, Wiidfare was in a position to make serious money, metal money, out of it. He said, "I understand. The permits are expensive, though, and we're not projecting bringing in anymore staff for at least a couple of years. Under the circumstances, I'll have to pass."

  "It wouldn't be that hard to find someone to split the costs," Wiidfare said. "I know, oh, at least a dozen people who have been trying to get permits for years."

  And all of them are players, Tatian thought. And probably high-paying players, too. He hesitated for a moment, considering his options, and then smiled widely. "Mir Wiidfare, let me be blunt. We've had a good relationship in the four years I've been on Hara, and I don't want to do anything to jeopardize it. But you know my boss's position on trade. I appreciate the opportunity, but I have to refuse."

  "There are other companies," Wiidfare said.

  "I know," Tatian said. "But thank you for thinking of me."

  There was a silence, and for a moment Tatian wasn't sure if he'd gone too far. Then Wiidfare leaned back in his chair and laughed, and the off-worlder released a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.

  "All right, suit yourself," Wiidfare said. "Three exploration tags and three residency permits, one a semi-permanent for Shan Reiss, who was born in Irenfot of off-world parents." His hands were busy on the desktop as he spoke; an instant later, a disk writer whined to life on the far wall. "Though if your boss so disapproves of trade, I'm surprised Mir Reiss has lasted this long."

  "Really?" Tatian said, and made his voice as bored as possible. Reiss was hardly a player, except by the Haran definition; he was omni, but that was all--and he'd been raised as a Haran and, could be excused a little confusion. More to the point, he didn't profit from his games.

  Wiidfare snorted, and pointed to the diskwriter. "The forms are there, if you'll sign them."

  Tatian collected the disk and, at Wiidfare's impatient gesture, spun a secondary reader to face him on the desktop. He fed the disk into it and paged quickly through the files, making sure all the codes were correct. "Thank you, Mir Wiidfare, this looks perfect." He touched the locking sequence as he spoke, fixing the text and signing his name and various identification numbers at the same moment.

  Wiidfare nodded, his expression sour, and accepted the disk. "I'll need payment within twenty-four hours."

  "I'll transfer the--processing fees--this afternoon," Tatian answered. He did not need to add that they would include a sizable payment for Wiidfare himself.

  "Excellent," Wiidfare said. "Then, if you'll excuse me?"

  "Of course."

  Tillis Carlon was no longer in the outer office, and Beivin was cloistered behind is view lenses, fingers busy on an analog pad. For a moment, Tatian was tempted to interrupt him, to demand to know where Carlon had gone, but controlled his anger. Haran corruption was like nothing else in human space; one paid what one had to and put up with the side games. But he would call Carlon and find out what he had been doing here.

  The rain was still loud in the main hall, and Tatian was not surprised, as he pushed his way through the doors onto the narrow porch, to find the two indigenes still waiting, both looking out into the rain. One was definitely male, legally and in reality, a tall man, light-skinned for a Haran, with close-cut black hair and a beak of a nose that dominated his profile. The other, the one he'd run into on the stairs, was shorter and darker, and the loose silk shirt and vest and soft trousers effectively hid the relative sizes of hip and breast and shoulder. Deliberately hid? Tatian thought, and wondered again about a Haran who would conceal legal gender. Haran law and custom demanded that everyone belong to one of the two acknowledged sexes; society enforced that artificial distinction rigorously. It was even rumored that there were still mesnies, along the southern coast toward Fariston and in Pensemare on the Southland, where children born mem, fem, or herm were surgically altered to conform to the parents' wishes. That seemed unlikely--even on Hara, the child's health was usually considered paramount--but the thought was discomfiting. It was almost as odd to imagine a Haran embracing ambiguity of body.

  The stranger saw him looking then and smiled. Tatian smiled back, but the expression was cut off by a sudden static pain in his wrist. It ran quickly up the molecular wires and reached his elbow, spreading a tingling numbness before he could grab the controlpad and shut the system down completely. The stranger had been watching, curious as a cat, and Tatian felt himself flushing. To his surprise, however, it was the other indigene who spoke first.

  "Are you all right?" His voice, cultured and almost accentless even in creole, held nothing but a mild concern, but Tatian felt the color deepen in his face.

  "Fine, thanks." That was patently a lie, and he added reluctantly, "I've got a loose connection in my implants, that's all. It stings a little sometimes."

  "I would imagine." That was the first stranger, the ambiguous one. The voice was as indeterminate as the body and clothes, in the midrange that could mean almost any gender. He could just see the swell of breasts beneath the silk, not quite concealed by the drape of the vest, but the stranger was too wide through the shoulders, too narrow-hipped, to be a woman. Probably a herm, then, Tatian thought, with regret: 3e wasn't busty enough, or long legged enough, to be a fem. Ȝe probably passed for male, though--most herms did--but it was still hard to be sure from 3er clothes. It was too bad; 3e would have been a striking woman.

  "Do you think the rain bothers it?" 3e went on, and Tatian shook his head.

  "I doubt it. Though anything's possible."

  "There's a woman over in Startown," 3e said, slowly, and tilted 3er head to one side. In that position, 3e looked more than ever like a cat, pointed face and wide-set eyes framed by a mane of coarse black hair. "She does some work on implants."

  "Oh?" Tatian said, without much hope, and the indigene nodded.

  "Starli--Starli Massingberd, her name is, she's no kin of mine. But she works the kittereen, the jetcar circuit, cars and racers. You might talk to her."

  That sounded promising, after all, and Tatian nodded. "Starli Massingberd--in Startown?"

  "She has a shop there. She'll be on the rolls."

  "I'll look for her," Tatian said. And I'll also check her out with Reiss. Shan Reiss raced kittereens, when he wasn't driving for NAPD. "Thanks."

  The indigene smiled again. "I'm Warreven." Ȝe nodded to the other indigene. "And Malemayn. We're both Stillers."

  "Ser Mhyre Tatian." Tatian held out his hand in automatic reflex, lulled by the Creole, and Warreven took it gingerly. Assimilated 3e might be, but the handshake was still unfamiliar.

  "We were heading out for lunch," Warreven went on, releasing the other's hand. "Care to join us?"

  Behind him, the other indigene--Malemayn--made a soft noise that might have been laughter or disapproval, or both. Tatian considered for an instant. It wasn't a proposition, exactly, more of a first move, but the hints of interest, of trade, were unmistakable. "Thanks," he said, "but I've got to get back to the office."

  "Maybe some other time," Warreven said, and Tatian nodded. The rain had almost stopped, and watery sunlight was beginning to show through the clouds. Curls of steam rose from the puddles in the plaza, and the air smelled suddenly, violently, of seaweed.

  It wasn't a long walk from the courthouse to the Estrange where NAPD had its offices, but the sun was fully out by the time Tatian reached the arcade that led to Drapdevel Court. All but the largest puddles had evaporated, leaving wet shadows that shrank as he watched, and his shirt clung damply to his body in the revived heat. The old woman who owned the rights to the vendor's pitch at the mouth of the arcade nodded to him, but didn't stop rearranging her stock, disordered when she'd covered it against the rain. Tatian knew better, after four years on Hara, to hope for much that he could comfortably eat or drink, but he scan
ned the trays anyway. She had dozens of braids of feel good, some in sheaths, the rest coiled for the smoking pot, and sticks of sourcane soaking in liquertie, a pottery jug heating over a candle flame, and, at the base of the cheap clown-glass statue of Madansa, the spirit who controlled the markets, a plug of odd fibrous stuff he didn't recognize. That was worth investigating--he could name four proprietary drugs that had been discovered as an unknown plant in a marketwoman's tray--and he paused to examine it. Up close, it seemed to be a web of close-growing, hairy cords wound over an inner object the size of a child's fist. He picked it up curiously, turned it over in his hand. The cords were leathery to the touch, the hairs prickly in his palm; the dark brown skin seemed almost warm to the touch. He sniffed it warily, and grimaced at the familiar musty odor. Hungry-jack, he thought, and in the same instant found the cross-shaped mark at the tip of the ovoid where the pod's pseudomouth had been. He pried back one lip, using the corner of a fingernail, and found the scarlet flesh of the inner pod. The old woman was watching him narrowly, and he handed it to her, saying, "Hungry-jack, grandmother?"

  She nodded, weighing the pod in her hand. "They clean the pods when they take them in the seraals. This is the whole thing, dried in the sun on a sand bed."

  "Is there a difference?"

  The woman shrugged. "It's different--milder, but you'll still fly, my son."

  There was no point, Tatian thought, trying to explain off-world physiology to the indigenes. Harans used the full pharmacopeia almost from the cradle; they grew up chewing poppinberry for a stimulant and drinking nightwake and sweetrum to relax, and a ten-year-old was as likely as an adult to throw a braid of feelgood on the kitchen fire after a hard day's work. An off-worlder couldn't hope to match that inbred tolerance. "I'll take it."

  The old woman looked him over. "Three megs a decigram. Or all of it for fifty grams of metal."

  Hara was metal-poor, and the little that lay close to the surface tended to be tied up in the ironwood trees that grew along the slopes of the central mountains. It was hard, sometimes, for Tatian to imagine the relative worth of the off-world coins in his pockets. And Warreven, he thought suddenly, had been wearing metal bracelets--not glass or carved and painted ironwood, but bright, silver-colored metal. And so had Malemayn: they were Important Men, then, in the Stiller clan. He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of coins. The old woman set up her scale--placing it politely in front of the statue of Madansa, though, equally politely, she made only a perfunctory invocation--and set a fifty gram weight in the seller's pan. Tatian counted out coins, six quarter-dollars from Joshua, and then five copper hundredths stamped with the Ansonia Corporation's monoglyph to bring the scales into balance. The woman eyed the scales and took her weight away.

  "Enjoy the hungry-jack, my son."

  "Thank you, grandmother," Tatian answered, and tucked the pod into his trousers pocket with the remainder of his coins. He hadn't saved much, given the exchange rate, by paying in metal, but then he could afford it.

  He went on into the arcade, grateful for the fugitive cool of its shadow, and came out into the sudden brilliance of the court. The bricks that paved the central space were still a centimeter deep in water, and the sunlight glanced from its surface as if from a mirror. The walls of the surrounding buildings were patched and flecked with the reflected light. Tatian sighed, anticipating a flooded cellar, and waded through the blood-warm water, scattering the sky's bright image and making the shards of light dance across the red brick walls. He fetched up gratefully on the low doorstep of NAPD's office and stooped to free himself from his wet shoes, peering in through the open door. Stane Derry--Derebought Stane, the office's only full-time botanist, looked back at him from the door of her own office, her broad face eloquent in its lack of expression.

  "How's the cellar?" Tatian asked, and stepped barefoot into the building, leaving his shoes to dry on the stone sill.

  "Don't ask," Derebought answered, and then relented. "The pump's screwed up again. Reiss is down there now, trying to get it going. We've got a couple of centimeters of water wall to wall."

  Tatian nodded, already relieved of the worst of his worries. The backups and other records were stored in watertight cases that stood a quarter of a meter off the stone floor: there would be no real damage from this flooding. "I thought Reiss was in Irenfot for the races."

  "He was," Derebought said, and shrugged. "But I guess they got a bad storm, and it washed out the track. So when he showed up here, I figured I'd put him to work." She looked down at her desktop. "Did you get the permits straightened out?"

  "I think so." He reached for the secretary cube that stood inside the doorway and ran his hand over the input strip to trigger the output nodes. Images blossomed in the air before his eyes, mixed icons and text, nothing of immediate importance, and the failing connection surged again, sending a wave of cold down his arm. "Have you heard anything about Norssco moving into any of our areas?"

  Derebought shook her head. "Not a thing. Why?"

  "Tillis Carlon was in Wiidfare's office when I got there. I thought maybe someone was sending a message."

  "I wouldn't have thought so," Derebought said, and shrugged. "Then again, maybe Wiidfare's dabbling in trade again."

  "Oh, he's doing that." Tatian reached for the keypad, used it to move to the next screen of messages, not wanting to risk his implanted control pad. "Reiss is downstairs?"

  "Yes. Are you all right?"

  Tatian lifted his sore arm. "The damn connection's getting worse. I'm going to have to get it looked at."

  Derebought nodded. "Good luck finding someone."

  "Yeah. Ask Reiss to stick his head in my office when he gets through in the cellar, would you?"

  "Sure."

  "And I bought this on the way in," Tatian said, and pulled out the uncleaned pod. "It's hungry-jack, dried whole. Have you ever heard of preparing it that way?"

  Derebought frowned. "I don't think I've ever seen it dried like that. I've seen it whole when it was fresh, but I always thought you had to clean it before you could use it. We always did in my mesnie, anyway." She held up her cupped hands. Tatian tossed it across to her, and she turned back into her office. Tatian followed, leaned against the door frame. Derebought set the hairy pod on her desk, pulling her maglamp down over it, and peered down through the lens. "Interesting, though."

  "Run a full analysis on it, covering and all," Tatian said. "See if anything turns up."

  Derebought mumbled agreement, already probing the web of cords with a blunt glass rod, and Tatian sighed, recognizing her absorption. He flicked a toggle on the secretary, setting the sys-tem to forward calls to his desk. "I'll be in my office," he said, and pushed open the door.

  The desk woke at his approach, sensing his presence, and Tatian flinched as the recognition pulse tingled through his skin. The desktop lit, producing half a dozen working screens scattered through the clear surface, and Tatian scanned them as he sat down. Most were old business, and none was urgent; he reached for the shadowscreen, splaying his hand across its virtual surface to fit his fingers to the current control configuration. He flicked a "button"--a literal hot spot, a bump of warmth under his finger--and a new screen appeared, offering access to Bonemarche's communications system. It was primitive by comparison to the systems current on most of the Concord Worlds--even now, a hundred years after contact had been reestablished with the rest of human-settled space, most indigenes who lived outside the urban areas didn't have access to the planetary net; it had only been last year that all the mesnies had gotten a terminal--but it was at least adequate for communications within Bonemarche itself. He ran his fingers over the shadowscreen's shifting spaces, summoning contact codes for Norssco and then for Tillis Carlon. That matter needed to be settled now: Carlon needed to be disabused of the notion that he could poach on NAPD's territories.

  A panel slid aside on the wall, revealing a meter-and-a-half-square flat screen. A red dot appeared, indicating the camera p
osition; Tatian slid his finger down another control, fading it to near-invisibility, then flicked the control away. Glyphs swam across the base of the screen, and then a face appeared, a stocky, dark-skinned woman with a Norssco badge at her collar, the camera dot centered like a misplaced caste mark between her eyes.

  "Can I help you, ser?"

  "Ser Mhyre Tatian, for Tillis Carlon."

  "Ah." The woman's eyes flickered as she consulted some internal display. "I'll patch you straight through, ser."

  That was a good sign. Tatian waited while the screen went blank and then reformed to reveal Carlon sitting at a desk that very nearly matched his own. A line of icons flickered in the upper left corner of the screen--security programs currently running, save-file protocols in effect, nothing out of the ordinary--and Tatian noted them with one corner of his mind, intent on the image in front of him.

  "Tatian." Carlon sounded distinctly relieved.

  "You said I should call."

  "Yes. I thought I owed you an explanation."

  Tatian nodded once, and Carlon gave a smile that was almost a grimace. "Wiidfare asked me to come in then, said he'd had some one cancel an appointment. We--I've been having a little difficulty with our residency permits lately."

  From Wiidfare, or from ColCom and the IDCA? Tatian wondered. Norssco had always had a reputation for doing trade in a big way. Not that people of Carlon's rank were involved--at least, not that much--but Norssco employed a good seventy-five or eighty junior staff, secretaries, technicians, backcountry brokers, most of whom supplemented an inadequate income by selling permits to players. But that was none of his business, as long as Carlon wasn't interfering with NAPD. "So have we," he said, voice neutral, and Carlon's smile widened briefly.