Jordan’s voice swelled with triumph. “That smell like the new boss-man, pig. I guess we walk after all.”
There was a long pause, and then Collaci sighed disgustedly. “I guess you do.”
Throughout all this I had been listening with imperfect attention and no sense of personal involvement. It had been a day so full of changes that my mind was numb. Since breakfast I had (a) been interrogated, (b) been condemned to death, (c) lost weeks of peachy rationalizations about Dad’s murder, (d) discovered I loved Alia, (e) discovered Alia loved me, (f) discovered Alia was pregnant, (g) seen a good friend’s brains splattered on the floor, and (h) taken a stink bomb at close range. An overloaded brain seized on the last of these as a perfect excuse to retreat from reality, into a warm, dark, safe place altogether to be preferred. Being head-down probably didn’t help either.
At a command from Jordan, the man carrying me began jogging again. This made things hurt, and I decided to retreat that last little bit. I turned out the lights behind me and left the world.
It all got sorted out somehow while I slept. I woke clear-headed and alert, cataloging bruises and contusions before I opened my eyes. When I did, they were little help—it appeared to be midnight in the coal cellar. Alia was near. Save for her, my nose said it was an empty coal cellar, in which used sweatsocks, diapers and sanitary napkins had been stored for the last forty years. My ears, when I moved, said it was a cave. Except for the shoes, the clothes I wore were not my own.
I was ravenously hungry.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a cave. Your eyes just don’t adjust—it stays dark. I used thrown pebbles to define the size and shape of the place—walking around seemed entirely too much trouble. It was about the size of Gowan’s study, shaped (and scented) like a wedge of limburger, with a roughly ten-foot ceiling. There appeared to be an exit tunnel at one corner, and I didn’t smell a guard. But with the background stench, that wasn’t too surprising—I assumed there was one out there somewhere.
Alia began making waking-up noises a few feet to my left, and I surprised myself a bit by dropping my survey of the tactical situation and rolling over at once to throw an arm over her. I didn’t want her to wake alone in a strange place.
It didn’t seem to help much—as soon as she came fully awake, she began to sob quietly. I found myself completely at a loss, so I tightened my grip and held on. “Cry it out, baby,” I heard myself whisper, “Cry for me, too.” I guess she did; it lasted awhile. It came to me during that time that spinning helplessly in a maelstrom is not as bad if someone else is spinning with you. It was a new and profoundly interesting thought, to me, and I took time to taste its fullness. You’re not just you anymore. Perhaps you never should have been.
With the end of tears came the beginning of desire, and we made love with the quiet, purposeful intensity of people in bomb shelters, sinking ships and cul-de-sacs before us. It was, as has been noted, a way of telling Death to get fucked, a desperate and defiant affirmation of living. It made an enormous difference somehow that there was already a baby planted and growing in that womb—we felt its presence, and welcomed it.
“One of the startlingly many nice things about being dextrous as opposed to ambidextrous”—I said a long time later—“is that you can lie on your side holding your lady without your left arm going to sleep.”
She snorted and made a face (which I knew in the dark only because our faces were touching). “But you won’t be much help changing the baby.”
“Gee whiz, that’s a shame.”
“That’s all right,” she decided. “I’ll rig a clamp over the toilet for the dirty diapers, and let you scrape them off into the bowl. I don’t want you to feel left out.”
“Gosh, hon, you’re a brick. Still, if I’m going to be in a partnership, I don’t guess I want to be any more than an equal partner, at that. If it’s all right, though, I’ll leave nursing to you.”
Alia nodded, and we both rose into sitting position by unspoken agreement (another one, that is). “How do you feel?” I asked.
“Oh.” Her hands left my shoulders. “I wish you hadn’t asked me that.” Her voice was odd.
“Eh?” She was gone. From a far corner came the sound of retching. “Oh, my god! Morning sickness.” I wanted to laugh, but nothing much struck me funny. “Can I help?” She managed to convey a negative, which left me feeling even more helpless.
Then I began thinking about the few times I had ever been nauseous and alone, with no one to hold my head while I vomited, and scuttled across the rock floor to her side. She protested weakly, but gave in so quickly I knew I had chosen rightly.
So then I started thinking about just how few times I had ever been nauseous and alone. It came to me all of a sudden that although Dad had never given me a lot of emotional support (my memory banks claimed “none”), still one way or another throughout my childhood he had always been right there when I really needed him—even in emotional matters. For the second time in a couple of months I flashed on the day I’d watched a chicken being slaughtered and, remembering Izzy’s death struggles, freaked out. Although Dad had never in his life cared for touching or being touched, when I woke from my coma it was to find myself in his arms. And he had made a point of bringing me back to the same farm to witness another hen’s death, so that I could learn the difference between that and my memory-trauma. Change the records. The accused has been found innocent of one count of the charges against him. Posthumously.
That did strike me as funny, but laughter didn’t seem appropriate. To cover my confusion I went back to my assessment of strategic considerations—mildly startled at how long it had been since I’d given them a thought—while a part of my mind kept stroking Alia’s forehead and brushing the hair back from her face.
I took a quick inventory of my assets. I had (a) a pregnant woman, (b) a radio transmitter in my right heel which ought to set off any radio-detonated explosives that happened to be on the right frequency for two miles in any direction—with no warranty, (c) a collection of peachy lock-picks, in case I ran across a lock, (d) teeth, (e) toenails, (f) one fist, and (g) the strength of ten because my heart was pure. My nose plugs were gone, and my coil lighter was probably with the rest of my clothes—wherever they were.
As an afterthought, I struck (g) from the list.
I went over it again, looking for components with which I could build a death ray and a flashlight, and found slim pickin’s. I had neither the tools nor the equipment to either boost the transmitter’s range or alter its frequency (so that increased range might accomplish anything more useful than blowing the loading dock off the Tool Shed back home). For that matter, I wasn’t sure the thing was still in working order. Something had been rattling faintly as I walked on it for the last twenty-odd miles, making me limp so theatrically. Nor had I been anxious to make the only test possible.
Alia’s spasms had subsided while I pondered, the sour reek hanging almost motionless in the air and expanding slowly to fill the available space. We both returned to the spot where we had made love and reclaimed our borrowed clothes, dressing in silence.
“Say, Alia?”
“Yes, Isham?”
“Will you marry me?” Some agreements ought to be spoken.
“Yes, Isham.”
Well at least that’s one thing settled. You’re just a romantic at heart. There was silence again for awhile.
“What are you thinking about Isham?”
“Wondering.”
“About what?”
I sighed, and came all the way back from my thoughts. “Oh, about where I’m going to get you pickles and ice cream. Where Wendell is, and what progress he’s made getting through to the High Muskies. Where Dad is these days, and how soon I’ll be joining him. Where I am.”
“I can answer the last one. We’re in Agro Headquarters—the old abandoned mine-cave network at Salt Mountain. About twelve miles from home.”
“I know—that isn’t what I meant.”
<
br /> “Oh.”
“But you raise an interesting point. I believe we’re the first Technos Jordan has ever invited home. I hope we’re invited for dinner. I’d clean up afterward and do the dishes. I’d even put on a tux and wash my hand. Say, did you ever try to wash one hand? Easier to clap.”
“Isham…you don’t have to wisecrack to keep my morale up.”
“I know that. It’s my morale I was thinking of.”
“Oh again. Well, I’ve got a better morale builder than silly cracks.”
In spite of the distraction her feathery fingers began to produce in my trousers, I was about to make a terrible pun in reply—when my nostrils flared. I rose to a crouch, back hairs bristling. There was a ghost in the coal cellar.
The ghost-glow brightened gradually, solidified, became the lantern-lit far wall of the tunnel that curved away to the right from the exit. Footsteps and spoor arrived roughly simultaneously: Jordan and two others. Plug-uglies seem to come in pairs. Must be a union regulation for spear-carriers. These two gave off the attack-pheromones of angry, frightened bumblebees, a faint acrid smell. But Jordan literally exuded confidence. His spoor again reminded me of Collaci, and, not being dazed this time, I was disturbed. He was a dangerous opponent. At the same time I was eager to see him in the flesh, to see for myself if all the stories were true. “Let me do the talking, hon,” I whispered, and she nodded. (I spared a second to enjoy having light to see her by again.)
I didn’t bother with stand-beside-the-doorway-and-clobber-them-as-they-step-through routines. For one thing, such gambits don’t work so well against three people. For another, if Alia and I weren’t both in plain sight when they arrived, Jordan could simply throw rotten eggs through the entrance until I capitulated.
Sure enough, he had one in his hand when he appeared. He pocketed it when he saw me and stepped into my parlor. The two goons that followed him carried enough ordnance to make my corpse weigh twice what it did at the moment, but I had the notion that he’d only brought them along out of respect for tradition, or that union reg.
Jordan Washington was purely the most impressive man I have ever seen in my life.
He was gigantic, just impossibly tall and broad, like something out of one of Dr. Mike’s lovingly preserved comic books. You could have hung a saddle over each massive shoulder without impeding his arms. Those arms looked like legs, and his legs looked like fifty-year oak. He moved all this with a whiplike speed and precision that made me wonder if he ate coal and drank kerosene. He made Shorty look like a dwarf. In the harsh lantern light he looked coal-black; his skin was at least three shades darker than mine. His head was shaved bald. He wore handmade black leather boots, extremely baggy pants, and a handmade white tunic. He looked like a sultan, and the long knife at his hip (his left hip, my tactical computer noted) supported the image.
But the single most striking feature, aside from his sheer bulk, was the wide white mask that fell from the bridge of his nose, obscuring his entire lower face.
I’d heard it described, of course—but it had an impact that words won’t carry. There was a deep horizontal indentation in the nose for the upper edge of it, for one thing—gruesome hint of the horrors beneath. It was pure, dazzling white for another, in stark contrast with the skin of his forehead and throat. Another part of the impact had to do with the fact that I customarily watch people’s mouths more than their eyes. I find a mouth much more expressive of inner emotion than eyes are said to be in books—to be confronted with an antagonist whose mouth I couldn’t see was somehow uniquely disturbing.
But these things were trimmings. The real impact of the mask was that it said the twisted ruin underneath was so horrible that it could not even be made worse by covering it up.
Jordan was a Faceless One.
His eyes were wry and wise, vastly amused by something. I tried to look as though I shared the joke, but I don’t think I pulled it off. Although you usually don’t notice your own spoor, I was aware that I smelled battle-ready—and afraid. When you’re keyed up enough to betray it in your spoor, you’re in trouble. When you betray it enough to notice it yourself, you’re in bad trouble. I ordered my medulla to calm down and start regularizing my breathing, and both the fear and its effluvium began to subside.
“Hello, Isham,” he said, in a deep baritone that no other chest could have produced.
I showed him my wisdom teeth. “Howdy don’t.”
“My, my.” He shook his great head. “My, my. Lots of confusion in my mind, son. Got me puzzlin’ for sure. They say you off your daddy, an’ I say whee, we got us a brother in the smelly place. Then they say you get busted, get dragged back from the graveyard to get shot, an’ I say woo-ee, gotta go spring my man from the smelly place. Then I come to the smelly place, an’ you burn my friend Sylvester while he tryin’ to set you free. Make me use a stink bomb on you, when I was lookin’ to be your friend. You know all of us had to burn our clothes? Yours too. Where’s that at?”
“I thought you were someone I owe money to.”
“Why you kill your daddy?”
“He snored.”
“Pretty heavy way to kill a man. Hear tell he looked like me when they buried him—only all over. Closed coffin.”
“What?”
“That chlorine gas, it’s a mean mother. Eat skin like boilin’ water on a snowman.”
I’d known that chlorine gas was deadly poison, and how to produce it, but I hadn’t known that. Dad always said your education was incomplete. I felt sick to my stomach. “He snored loud.”
Jordan shook his massive head and chuckled indulgently. “Well, you had your reasons, I expect. Like to’ve offed that man myself—he was the whitest nigger I ever saw. What I wonder, what is it you really don’t want to tell me?”
“Say what?” He couldn’t suspect—could he?
“I ask you a little thing, and you got nothin’ to say. I think you got a big somethin’ you don’t want to talk about, an’ you jus’ gettin’ in training. Somethin’ about your eyes say so. You evade all my questions, I don’t notice which particular questions you evade.”
What a canny son of a bitch. As a wolf senses a trap, he had sensed that I was holding out on him—which told him the terribly damaging fact that I had something to hold out on him. The Council hadn’t been that bright; they’d thought I’d told them the whole truth. My fear-sweat came back—which was all the proof he needed. Shit!
“Yeah, you a boy with a secret, all right. Somethin’ big. Damn big. Got something to do with the sky devils; hear you talk with them fuckers.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Was there…ahem…a nigger in the woodpile? How had he learned that chlorine gas killed dad?
He ignored the question. “So let’s play poker, boy. I got all the aces—but I’m a reasonable man.” His eyes smiled. “Tell me somethin’ heavy.”
So I tried a couple of lies, and they didn’t work worth shit, and after a while I tried half-truths and they worked worth half a shit, and when Jordan inevitably got around to pointing out that the white lady smelled to be pregnant and pregnant ladies often have accidents, and my bluff of disinterest about that didn’t work, I finally got around to telling him the truth. Not the whole truth—but he got as much as I’d given the Council, which was a lot. A damn lot. I felt like a rabbit conversing with a snake, off-balance and scared, and sorely hampered by the presence of my mate.
But it took him so long to get that much (even after he had given his word to let Alia go in exchange), and my reluctance was so obviously genuine, that he decided he had the whole package—at which I was very careful to feel no relief; that tricky bastard would have smelled it.
It was not hard to project dismay. The story of Dad’s treachery was just the P.R. angle Jordan needed to drive a final wedge between Fresh Start and the surrounding community, if not the world at large. Oh, I could refuse to corroborate the story publicly, and it’s hard to force a man to be a good material witness against his will—but all
he had to do was demand a public exhumation to see whether Dad had died with adenoids in his head. I wished I hadn’t been such a clever murderer.
But I had to give Jordan something, something I could plausibly be very reluctant to tell him. The only other secret I had on me was too dangerous to tell anyone, just at this point in history.
And so I gave him Dad.
He was gleefully triumphant. “I knew it! I knew that nigger was a liar! Whoo Lord, but I never figured him for that much of a liar. Set the whole thing up to make himself a big frog in a small puddle, an’ his karma came back on him. Lord, lordy-lord, I—am—avenged!” He rocked with gargantuan laughter that beat at the walls of the small cave, and his plug-uglies grinned with him.
I was salty; I’d been psychically outgunned before my woman, maneuvered into disclosing more than I’d wanted to, and it rankled. “Look, Jordan, you came to us looking for work. We put you to work at an honest wage. You volunteered for plugged work, for the high pay, and your number came up. My father didn’t blow off your face—you did.”
I didn’t see the fist coming. It felt like a home-run clout from an oar, and it lifted me clean off my feet. Being shy one wing loused up my aerodynamic stability and I landed badly, cracking the back of my head. The ceiling peeled off the cave and the stars fell in on us. Alia screamed, and there was the sound of a scuffle that didn’t last long. Steady, boy. She’s all right.
“Don’t you ever talk about my features again, boy.” There was a curious emphasis on the last word that I didn’t understand. “What happened to me was my karma, for associatin’ myself with them nature-killin’ Technos! I’m straight with Pan now, and I don’t take no shit from no Fresh Start Stone boy. I reaped what I sowed—an’ now I’m gonna plow the mothafucka under!”
I blinked up at three of him, decided to deal with the one in the middle. “You really believe all that Pan stuff, don’t you?”
His voice and manner changed dramatically. He squatted down and sat before me in lotus. “Isham, what do you know about Pan?”
Telempath Page 15
