It didn’t seem possible. How could a psion pass, and no one ever suspect it? Jule had been driven out of her home, driven half out of her mind, by the untrained psi she’d been born with. She’d even told me there were no others … that no one in the family knew why it had happened to her. But what had just happened to me wasn’t my imagination, and it wasn’t an accident. I’d been doing a good job of looking like a jerk without even trying. But for somebody here, that wasn’t enough. They wanted the new boy completely humiliated. I wouldn’t even have known it wasn’t my own stupid fault … except that I wasn’t just another deadhead. Someone with a sick sense of humor must be wondering right now why the trick hadn’t worked this time. I looked at Elnear.
She glanced at me, her faded blue eyes intent. “Did you want to ask me something?”
My eyes scanned the table, flicked back to her. “Ah … can I have your roll? Ma’am.”
She passed it to me without comment, and looked away again.
She didn’t tell me there were still three courses of dinner to go.
I kept picking at my food to keep from seeming stranger than I did already. Nothing more happened. After what seemed like hours, and was, people began to leave their seats around me. As I got up from the table Jule’s brother Daric was suddenly there in front of me, so close that I nearly stepped on him. I didn’t, but it took an effort not to look like I was trying. Argentyne came up beside him, shimmering like a mirage.
“So this is your new aide, Elnear.” He wasn’t impressed. “Where did you find this one?”
“I know your sister,” I said.
“Many men have known my sister. That hardly seems like the sort of experience that you’d be looking for, Elnear?” He had such a toneless voice that it took a second to realize what he’d actually said.
Before I could do anything, or Elnear had to, Jardan said, “Your father chose him. For security reasons.”
“Really?” He looked at me again, still deadpan. “And what special equipment or skill qualifies you for that important duty?”
For just a second I was still thinking about kicking him in the balls. Instead, I reached out and found the nerve inside his elbow. I pressed hard. “I fight dirty,” I said.
He gasped and went white. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. Argentyne looked at us with an expression I couldn’t put a name to. Everybody else stopped breathing, including me, as I suddenly realized what I’d just done. I’d just hurt a taMing.
But then the color came back into Daric’s face in a red rush. “Good…” he whispered, shaking out his hand. “That was just perfect.” The look in his eyes was so strange I almost thought he meant it. He began to turn away; turned back. “You’re the first interesting person Elnear has ever brought into this house.” He flipped me a salute. And then he was gone again, leading Argentyne after him, with a jerky swagger that made no sense at all inside the clothes he was wearing.
I looked back at Elnear and Jardan, with my guts full of jelly.
“What in the Nine Billion Names of God do you think you’re doing—” Jardan started.
Lady Elnear held up her hand. “His job,” she said, sounding surprised.
And then Jiro was at her side. Lazuli trailed behind him, looking exhausted, carrying Talitha, who’d fallen asleep somewhere after the second course. We moved away through the crowd, taMings scattering and regrouping like fragments of a stellar explosion. As we walked Elnear suddenly stumbled. She would have fallen if I hadn’t been following closer than I was supposed to, and reached out to catch her. She thanked me, more embarrassed than grateful; nothing important. Except that I couldn’t see any reason at all for her to have stumbled like that.
* * *
When we finally reached the manor house, I went straight to my room and put on another patch. By the time it had taken, I knew that I was the only one still awake in the entire house … and that I probably wasn’t going to sleep at all that night. My body felt like it didn’t know where it was, what time it was, what year. My brain was going around like a caged rat, going back and back over everything it had seen the last day and a half, all the data Braedee had fed me, every random flicker of dream it could suck up from the surrounding rooms. And still none of it could make me forget that I was lying in the hollow silence of a room as big as a house, alone in a bed that could have slept four, staring at the darkness with a stranger’s eyes … that I was utterly lost here, afraid to touch anything, eat anything, even say anything, because everything I knew was wrong.…
I pulled my knees up against my chest, pulled the covers over my head against the darkness of a world that was nothing like the darkness of the world I’d always known, and lay there trembling.
After a long time I let go of myself again; stretched out my knotted muscles, pushed back the covers. I got up and took a leak, ate some of the leftover fruit I’d stuffed into my pockets, went to the glass doors that opened onto a narrow balcony. The stars were out, their millions crowding the night sky—that dead black nothingness that was so much greater, and stronger, and more permanent than any of them.
I recognized a pattern suddenly, the constellation called Orion—recognized it in a stolen memory of Jule’s. This sky looked totally unfamiliar when I matched it against my own memories. So did any night sky I ever saw, even Quarro’s. Growing up in buried Oldcity, I’d never seen the stars.
As I stood there, I realized suddenly that I wasn’t the only one awake in the house any more. I caught the candleflame of someone else’s thoughts wandering the same night sky, invisible to my eyes but not to my mind, watching the same stars, the same black emptiness between them … thinking like I had that no one else ever saw them that way. I let myself weave a little deeper into the strands of unguarded thought: Doubts and longings, unnamed fears, memories of death, loss, emptiness … a sadness so deep that when I reached it I broke contact, because it was too painful. It was a mind I’d seen once before. One I’d never expected to hold the kind of things I’d just found there. It was Lady Elnear.
I looked down at my hands, clenched over the railing of the balcony. The fight scars on my knuckles showed silver-white in the moonlight. I remembered how even before I’d met her, I’d figured the Lady had everything anybody could want; everything I didn’t have—money, power, family. But she felt lost, helpless, trapped inside the motion of things she couldn’t control—surrounded by enemies and strangers. I’d never imagined that someone like her, living in a place like this, could feel that kind of helplessness … a helplessness as total as my own. I let go of the railing, let my hands fall back to my sides … touched her mind again, just enough to keep contact, not enough to intrude.
I waited until she left her window at last, drifting silently back to her bed, still thinking that she was alone. The aching awareness of her life had been made small again, bearable again, by her awareness of the night, so that she could try to sleep.
I went back to my own bed and lay down again, finally, and slept.
FIVE
ABOUT THREE SECONDS after dawn somebody came crashing into my sleep like a bolt of lightning. “Are you still sleeping—?” It was Jiro taMing. His voice took a sudden broken leap of about an octave in the middle of the sentence.
“Not any more.” I pushed my face up out of my pillow, feeling like shit. “What do you want?”
“I want you to fix my hair like that. And that thing you did to Daric, that was really a fanged move, I want that too. Why don’t you have any pajamas?”
“Jeezu.” I let my head drop back into the pillow. “I’m too tired.”
He jerked my arm. “You work for Centauri, you take orders from me.”
I sat up, so fast that he didn’t have time to move. My hand clamped around his arm, just over the elbow: “You want to know what I did to Daric—?”
His mouth fell open, and he almost fell over himself trying to pull away. I shoved him, letting him go. “Get the hell out of my room.”
He scrambled ba
ckwards toward the open door, his mind a tangle of asinine awe and terror. The door slammed shut.
I lay down again, and tried to go back to sleep. But adrenaline was dumping into my veins now as I remembered where I was, and why. Finally I pushed myself up again and stumbled into the bathroom. I stood in the fresher for a long time, letting it needle my skin numb and loosen up my muscles, my brain.
I stopped to look at myself in the mirror when I stepped out. My eyes still looked like somebody else’s. My hair still looked the same, standing up in soft fingers, even after I’d slept on it. I touched it; good stuff. I wondered if I’d have to shave my head to get rid of it.
I went back out into my room, still feeling a little dazed. I picked through the clothes I’d brought, hating the sight of them, the company logos and what they stood for.
“Where’d you get all those scars on your back?… Are you a merse? Were you in a war?”
I looked up. Jiro was in the doorway again, staring at me. “No. Yeah … sort of.” I caught up the first shirt I could get my hands on, and jerked it over my head.
“I wish I was you,” he said, dreamy eyed.
“No you don’t.” Stupid little bastard.
“Is that a tattoo—?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you have Draco’s logo tattooed on your butt?”
I looked down at the blue lizard slithering up my hip, the holoed collar of feathers or flames shimmering around its head. I could never see the thing well enough to tell which it was, feathers or flames. “It’s not Draco’s logo.”
“Yes it is, the dragon and the sunburst—”
“It’s just a lizard.” I saw the tube of gel Braedee had given me lying in a tangle of clothes. I picked it up and threw it at him. “Here. Put this on your hair and let it set.” Hoping that would get rid of him. But instead he came on into the room. He planted himself in front of my bathroom mirror like it was his own. I finished dressing, as quickly as I could.
“Hey, this doesn’t work—!” Jiro stuck his head out of the bathroom as I was starting for the door.
I stopped, looking back at him. His shoulder-length hair stood up and then flopped down again over his face, like black curtains. I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “Your hair’s too long.”
He pushed it up and back again, squinting. “Well, what am I supposed to do?”
I shrugged, “Cut it off,” and left the room.
Everyone else was still asleep, even the servants. I went downstairs, moving as softly as I could, relieved to be alone. I wandered until I found the kitchen, which was as big as a warehouse. At least it was cleaner. I went from counter to counter, nervous but hungry, querying systems until I’d gotten what I needed from the hot and cold units. On the far side of the room there were doors opening into a small courtyard. I went outside and sat down on a wooden bench, gulping black coffee and listening to birdsong, waiting for the sun, or whatever happened next.
“I’m hungry.” I felt the bright, tangled web of a child’s mind behind the words; looked up as Talitha came shuffling out into the courtyard, dragging a blanket and wearing bugs on her feet.
“Ask your mother,” I said, damned if I was going to be a servant for every taMing who looked at me.
“She’s asleep.” She stopped in front of me, pressing the blanket against her face.
“Ask your brother, he’s not.”
“Jiro woke me up.”
I sighed. “Me too.”
“He said I didn’t get any dessert yesterday.…” Her gray eyes filled with sudden tears. “He said I didn’t get any dessert because I was a bad girl, I fell asleep at the table. He ate all my desserts.”
I stood up as the damp wave of her misery rolled into my brain. “Your brother’s a croach. Here.” Reaching into my pockets, I emptied out the candy and nuts I’d brought back from dinner last night. “I saved dessert for you last night. Eat this first.” I pointed at what was left of my food.
Her eyes went wide. She scrambled up onto the bench and began to eat, still looking at me. “You’re my special friend, right?”
“Right.” I smiled, and touched her hair. Maybe she said that to everybody, but what the hell. I needed to hear it; it felt good. I went back into the kitchen and began to get myself some more breakfast.
Someone’s surprise caught me from behind—surprise so sharp it was almost anger. I turned around and Lady Elnear was standing across the room. She wasn’t expecting to see anyone, especially not me.
I felt my expression turn guilty as I saw her face, as if she’d caught me stealing food, instead of just preparing it. I forced myself to meet her eyes, to remember that I had a right to eat, at least.
“You’re up very early, Mez Cat,” she said. Not happy about the fact.
“So are you,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. “Ma’am.”
“I’ve always gotten up very early.” She came slowly into the kitchen, and began to call up some tea. “I value this time alone before the day begins, before anyone else is about, to disturb me.” She had her back to me, but I could feel the sharp edge of every word. “Do you always get up so early?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I like the night. It’s what I’m used to.” My second breakfast slid up onto the counter in front of me. I picked it up, before I let myself look at her again. I could feel her eyes on me, questioning. “I didn’t plan on getting up so early. Couldn’t sleep. Guess I’m still a little timewarped. I didn’t figure you’d be up this early either.”
“Oh? Why not?”
Without really thinking about it, I said, “Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, and you were…” I broke off, too late, as she suddenly knew what I meant. All the expression disappeared from her face, but her mind recoiled as if I’d seen her naked.
I set my food down again. “Maybe I’ll go back to bed.” Realizing with a kind of sick frustration that I’d just completely destroyed any trust that might have been starting between us yesterday. Not looking at her now, I headed for the door.
“Please be ready to go into the city with me in three hours. I’m going to the Arm today,” she said, her voice resigned and cold. “I’m told you will accompany me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I nodded, still without looking at her, just wanting to get out of there. As I went back along the hall I heard Talitha’s voice, “Auntie look! Dessert!”
* * *
When it was time, I went back down. The Lady and Jardan were waiting together at the entrance, side by side. They looked like they were waiting for the enemy. Or for me. I felt my face settle into a frown.
A mod that was larger and more plush—and a lot more secure—than any I’d ever been in carried us back toward the coast. After a while N’yuk began to take on reality in the distance, rising above the sprawl of the surrounding urbs; a manmade mountain range of peaks and valleys, one solid block fused from the skeletons of the countless ancient corporate towers that had squatted there on the bedrock of an island between two rivers. The rivers were bridged by arcing buttresses of more structure.
The dully-gleaming mass of it swallowed us at last, down through a crevice and into its hidden nervous system. We took some kind of shuttle from the garage. It sucked us through transparent tubes toward the destination that Elnear gave it—gliding, slowing down, shifting our track; guided by some invisible master plan that shuffled the moving vehicles like someone juggling at the speed of light. I caught glimpses of storefronts, offices, restaurants. People did everything here, spent their entire lives here, all of them pulled into the gravity well of a government center a lot of people wanted to believe was as obsolete as a human’s appendix. Somewhere in the middle of all this the Federation Assembly and the FTA Security Council both met, and tried to outmaneuver each other.
And somewhere else, in the real, hidden heart of the city, was the brain that made it all work: the communications and data core that was one of the brightest stars in the invisible universe called the Federation
Net. One perfect telhassium crystal no bigger than my thumb was able to store all the information, contain all the mindboggling manipulations of it that kept this city’s systems from collapsing of their own data density. They only needed a few thousand more in order to calculate hyperspace jumps for most of the ships leaving this mainline port. Telhassium made the kind of computing power the Federation had to have cheap and easy to use … and as long as the FTA kept control of it, the Council would never lose its influence over how the Federation ran.
Finally we entered the government complex. The blue logo of a slowly turning Earth, which the Federation Trade Authority had decorated with wings and claimed for its own, watched me like a shining eye from datascreens and wallways as the shuttle car slowed for its final stop. We exited into the velvet-covered fist of a security station. Lady Elnear and Jardan waited patiently while my databand was doublechecked, while I was bodyscanned, retina- and finger-printed, holoed, filesearched, and registered.
The FTA didn’t take any chances here; they couldn’t afford to. The vulnerability of the Council, and the massive concentration of city around it, was enough to make a stone paranoid—and the FTA had at least that much imagination. It was hard for me to imagine how even a flea ever got this far without someone noticing it, somewhere in the overlapping layers of security they must have crusting this place. I was real glad the commendation I’d been given after the FTA had finished with me had gone on record for the data check to spit up … and that because of it my criminal record had been sealed. Now that I had a databand I wasn’t a nonperson; I was real to the Federation Net. The only problem with not being invisible any more was that too many people got to see you naked.
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