Praxis def-1

by Walter Jon Williams

  Caro brought her breakfast from the cafe and hovered around her until Gredel wanted to shriek.

  If you want to help, she thought at Caro,take your appointment to the academy and get us both out of here.

  But Caro didn’t answer the mental command. And her solicitude faded by afternoon, when she opened the day’s first bottle. It was vodka flavored with bison grass, which explained the strange fusil-oil overtones Gredel had scented on Caro’s skin the last few days. By mid-afternoon Caro had consumed most of the bottle and fallen asleep on the couch.

  Gredel felt a small, chill triumph. It was good to be reminded why she hated her friend.

  The next day was Caro’s phony Earthday.Last chance, Gredel thought at her.Last chance to mention the academy.

  But the word never passed Caro’s lips.

  “I want to pay you back for everything you’ve done,” Gredel said. “Your Earthday is on me.” She put her arm around Caro. “I’ve got everything planned,” she said.

  They started at Godfrey’s for the full treatment-massage, facial, hair, the lot. Then lunch at a brass-railed bistro south of the arcades, bubbling grilled cheese on rare vash roast and crusty bread, with a salad of marinated dedger flowers. To Caro’s surprise, Gredel called for a bottle of wine, and poured some of it into her own glass.

  “You’redrinking, ” Caro said, delighted. “What’s got into you?”

  “I want to toast your Earthday,” Gredel said.

  Being drunk might make it easier, she thought.

  Gredel kept refilling Caro’s glass while sipping at her own, then took Caro to the arcades. She bought her a summer dress of silk patterned with rhompe birds and jennifer flowers, a jacket shimmering with gold and green sequins-matching Caro’s hair and eyes-and two pairs of shoes. She bought outfits for herself as well.

  After taking their treasures to Caro’s place, where Caro had a few shots of the bison vodka, they went to dinner at one of Caro’s exclusive dining clubs. Caro hadn’t been thrown out of this club yet, but the maitre d‘ was on guard and sat them well away from everyone else. Caro ordered cocktails and two bottles of wine and after-dinner drinks. Gredel’s head spun even after the careful sips she’d been taking; she couldn’t imagine what Caro must be feeling. Caro needed a jolt of benzedrine to get to the dance club Gredel had put next on the agenda, though she had no trouble keeping her feet once she got there.

  After dancing awhile, Gredel said she was tired, and they brushed off the male admirers they’d collected and took a taxi home.

  Gredel showered while Caro headed for the bison vodka again. The benzedrine had given her a lot of energy, which she put into finishing the bottle. Gredel changed into the silk lounging suit Caro had bought her on their first day together, and put the two vials of endorphin analog into a pocket.

  Caro was on the couch, where Gredel had left her. Her eyes were bright, but when she spoke to Gredel, her words were slurred.

  “I have one more present,” Gredel said. She reached into her pocket and held out the two vials. “I think this is a kind you like. I really wasn’t sure.”

  Caro laughed. “You take care of me all day, and now you help me to sleep!” She reached over and put her arms around Gredel. “You’re my best sister, Earthgirl.” In Caro’s embrace, Gredel could smell bison grass and sweat and perfume all mingled, and she tried to keep a firm grip on her hatred even as her heart turned over in her chest.

  Caro unloaded her med injector, put in one of the vials of Phenyldorphin-Zed and used it right away. Her eyelids fluttered as the endorphin flooded her brain. “Oh nice,” she murmured. “Such a good sister.” She gave herself another dose a few minutes later. She spoke a few soft words but her voice kept floating away. She gave herself a third dose and fell asleep, her golden hair falling across her face as she lay on the pillow.

  Gredel took the injector from Caro’s limp fingers. She reached out and brushed the hair from Caro’s face.

  “Want some more?” she asked. “Want some more, Sister Caro?”

  Caro gave a little indistinct murmur. Her lips curled up in a smile. When Gredel fired another dose into her carotid, the smile broadened, and she shrugged herself into the sofa pillows like a happy puppy.

  Gredel turned from her and reached for Caro’s portable computer console. She called up Caro’s banking files and prepared a form closing the account and transferring its contents to the account Gredel had set up. Then she prepared another message to Caro’s trust account on Spannan’s ring, instructing any further payments to be sent to the new account as well.

  “Caro,” Gredel said. “Caro, I need your thumbprint here, all right?”

  She stroked Caro awake, and managed to get her to lean over the console long enough to press her thumb, twice, to the reader. Then Gredel handed the injector to Caro and watched her give herself another dose.

  Now I’mreallya criminal, she thought. She had left a trail of data that pointed straight to herself.

  But even so, she could not bring herself to completely commit to this course of action. She left herself a way out.Caro has to want it, she thought.I won’t give her any more if she says no.

  Caro sighed, settled herself more deeply into the pillows. “Would you like some more?” Gredel asked.

  “Mmm,” Caro said, and smiled.

  Gredel took the injector from her hand and gave her another dose.

  After a while she exhausted the first vial and started on the second. Before each dose, she shook Caro and asked if she wanted more. Caro would sigh, or laugh, or murmur, but never said no. Gredel triggered dose after dose.

  After the second vial was exhausted the snoring started, Caro’s breath heaving itself past the palate, the lungs pumping hard, sometimes with a kind of wrench. Gredel remembered the sound from the time Caro had given herself too much endorphin, and the memory caused her to leap from the sofa and walk very fast around the apartment, rubbing her arms to fight her sudden chill.

  The snoring went on. Gredel very much needed something to do, so she went into the kitchen and made coffee. And then the snoring stopped.

  Ice shuddered along Gredel’s nerves She went to the kitchen door and stared out into the front room at the tumbled golden hair that hung off the end of the couch.It’s over, she thought.

  Then Caro’s head rolled, and Gredel’s heart froze as she saw Caro’s hand come up and comb the hair with her fingers. There was a gurgling snort, and the snoring resumed.

  Gredel stood in the door as cold terror pulsed through her veins. But she told herself,No, it can’t be long now.

  And then, suddenly, she couldn’t stand still any longer, and walked swiftly over the apartment, straightening and tidying. The new clothes went into the closet, the shoes on their racks, the empty bottle in the trash. Wherever she went the snores pursued her. Sometimes they stopped for a few paralyzing seconds, then resumed.

  Abruptly, Gredel couldn’t bear being in the apartment. She put on a pair of shoes, went to the freight elevator and took it to the basement, where she looked for one of the motorized carts they used to move luggage and furniture. There were a great many objects in the basement, things that had been discarded or forgotten about, and Gredel found some strong dedger-fiber rope and an old compressor, a piece of solid bronzework heavy enough to anchor a fair-sized boat.

  She put these in the cart and pushed it to the elevator. As she approached Sula’s doors, she could hear Caro’s snores through the enameled steel. Gredel’s fingers trembled as she pressed codes into the lock.

  Caro was still on the couch, her breath still fighting its way past her throat. Gredel cast an urgent glance at the clock. There weren’t many hours of darkness left, and darkness was required for what happened next.

  Gredel sat at Caro’s feet and hugged a pillow to her chest and watched her breathe. Caro’s skin was pale and looked clammy. “Please,” Gredel begged under her breath. “Please die now. Please.” But Caro wouldn’t die. Her breaths grated on and on, until Gredel
began to hate them with a bitter resentment. This was sotypical, she thought. Caro couldn’t evendie without getting it all wrong.

  Gredel looked at the wall clock, and it stared back at her like the barrel of a gun. Come dawn, she thought, the gun goes off. Or she could sit in the apartment all day with a corpse, and that was a thought she couldn’t face.

  Again Caro’s breath hung suspended, and Gredel felt her own breath cease for the long moment of suspense. Then Caro dragged in another long rattling gasp, and Gredel felt her heart sink. She knew that her tools had betrayed her. She would have to finish this herself.

  All her anger was gone by now, all hatred, all emotion except a sick weariness, a desire to get it over. The pillow was already held to her chest, a warm comfort in the room filled only with Caro’s racking, tormented snores.

  She cast one last look at Caro, thought,Please die at her one more time, but Caro didn’t respond any more than she had responded to any of Gredel’s other unexpressed wishes.

  Gredel suddenly lunged across the sofa, her body moving without conscious command, the movement seeming to come from pure instinct. She pressed the pillow over Caro’s face and put her weight on it.

  Please die,she thought.

  Caro hardly fought. Her body twisted on the couch and both her hands came up, but the hands didn’t fight, they just fell across Gredel’s back as if in a halfhearted embrace.

  Gredel would have felt better if Caro had fought. It would have given her hatred something to fasten on to.

  Instead, through the closeness of their bodies, she felt the urgent kick-kick-kick of Caro’s diaphragm as it tried to draw in air, the kick repeated over and over again. Fast, then slow, then fast. Caro’s feet shivered. Gredel could feel Caro’s hands trembling as they lay on her back. Tears spilled from Gredel’s eyes.

  The kicking stopped. The trembling stopped.

  Gredel leaned on the pillow awhile longer just to make sure. The pillow was wet with tears. When she finally took the pillow away, it revealed a pale, cold thing that bore no resemblance to Caro at all.

  Caro was weight now, not a person. That made what followed a lot easier.

  Handling a limp body was more difficult than Gredel had ever imagined. By the time she got it onto the cart, she was panting for breath and her eyes stung with sweat. She covered Caro with a bed sheet and she added some empty suitcases to the cart as well. She took the cart to the freight elevator, then left by the loading dock at the back of the building.

  “I am Caroline, Lady Sula,” she said aloud, rehearsing her story. “I’m moving to a new place because my lover beat me.” She would have the identification to prove her claim, and what remained of the bruises, and the suitcases plain to see alongside the covered objects that weren’t so plain.

  Gredel didn’t need to use her story. The streets were deserted as she walked downslope alongside the humming cart, down to the Iola River.

  The roads ran high above the river on either side, with ramps that descended to the darkened riverside quay below. Gredel rode the cart down the ramp to the river’s edge. This was the good part of Maranic Town, and there were no houseboats here, no beggars, no homeless, and-at this hour-no fishermen. The only encounters she feared were lovers sheltering under the bridges, but by now it was so late that even the lovers had gone to bed.

  It was as hard getting Caro off the cart as getting her on it. But when she finally went into the river, tied to the compressor, the dark waters closed over her with barely a ripple. In a video drama Caro would have floated a while, poignantly, saying good-bye to the world, but there was none of that here, just the silent dark submersion and ripples that died swiftly in the current.

  Caro had never been one for protracted good-byes.

  Gredel walked alongside the cart back to the Volta. A few cars slowed to look at her, but moved on.

  In the apartment, she tried to sleep, but Caro’s scent filled the bed, and sleep was impossible there. Caro had died on the sofa, and Gredel didn’t want to go near it. She caught a few hours’ fitful rest on a chair, and then the woman called Caroline Sula rose and began her day.

  The first thing she did was send in the confirmation of her appointment to the Cheng Ho Academy.

  She packed two suitcases, took them to Maranic Port and the hovercraft ferry that would take her across the Krassow Sea to Vidalia. From there she took the express train up the Hayakh Escarpment to the Quaylah Plateau, where high altitude moderated the subtropical heat of the Equatorial Continent. The planet’s antimatter ring arced almost directly overhead.

  Paysec was a winter resort, but the snowfall wouldn’t begin until the monsoon shifted to the northeast, so she found good rates for a small apartment in Lus’trel, and took it for two months. She bought some clothes-not the extravagant garments that were sold in Maranic Town’s arcades, but practical country clothes, and boots for walking. She found a tailor, and he began to assemble the extensive wardrobe she would need for the academy.

  She didn’t want Lady Sula’s disappearance from Maranic Town to cause any official disturbance, so she sent a message to Caro’s official guardian, Jacob Biswas, telling him that she found Maranic too distracting and had come to Lus’trel in order to concentrate on her preparation for the academy. She told him she was giving up the Maranic apartment, and that he could collect anything she’d left there.

  Because she didn’t trust herself to impersonate Caro with someone who knew her well, she didn’t use video; she typed the message and sent it print only.

  Biswas called back almost immediately, but she didn’t take his call or any of the other calls that followed. She replied with print messages, saying she was sorry she’d been out when he called, but she was spending a lot of time in the library cramming.

  That wasn’t far from the truth. Requirements for the service academies were posted on the computer net, and most of the courses were available in video files, and she knew she was deeply deficient in almost every subject. She worked hard.

  She only answered one call, when she happened to be home, listened to the answerware, and realized the caller was Sergei. She answered and called him every filthy name she could think of, and once her initial anger was spent, she began to choose words more carefully, flaying him alive with one choice phrase after another. By the end he was weeping, loud gulping honks that grated over the speakers.

  Serve him right, she thought.

  Lamey had her worried more than Sergei or Jacob Biswas. Every day she half expected him to burst down the door and demand that she produce Earthgirl. He never turned up.

  On her final day on Spannan, Biswas insisted on meeting her, with other members of his family, at the skyhook. She cut her hair severely short, wore Cheng Ho undress uniform, and virtually plated her face with cosmetic. If she looked to Biswas like a different girl, no wonder.

  He was kind and warm and asked no questions. He told her she looked very grown-up and was proud of her. She thanked him for his kindness and for looking after her. She hugged him and the daughters he’d brought with him.

  His wife, Sergei’s sister, had the sense to stay away.

  Later, as the skyhook carried her to Spannan’s ring, and its steady acceleration pressed her into her seat, she realized it was Caro’s Earthday, the real one.

  The Earthday that Caro would never see.

  Sula jerked awake from a shivering dream, and for a moment Caro’s scent seemed to fill the pinnace. There were tears in Sula’s eyes, and when she wiped them away, she saw something new on her displays.

  Five somethings, swinging around from the far side of Barbas. Five ships were burning hard gees, coming around the big planet at an unusual angle. Sula wondered if they were heading for Magaria. No-they burned well past that point.

  “Ah. ha,” she said.

  They were looping around Barbas to fly toward Rinconell. And now Sula saw what they intended.

  They were going to come between Wormhole 1 and the six survivors of the Home Fleet. There
would be a blazing collision as their paths crossed, and the last of the Home Fleet would be annihilated. The five Naxid ships might die as well, if the loyalists had enough missiles remaining, but in any case the last of the Home Fleet would be destroyed.

  Frantically, Sula began calculating trajectories. Her own missiles were a third of a light-minute ahead of her, and it would take time for her instructions to reach them. She didn’t want them to maneuver where the enemy could see them, and the only way to do that was to fire their engines when they were behind the huge gas giant Rinconell.

  It took Sula almost three hours to calculate the trajectories, triple-check the work, and transmit the missiles’ instructions via communications laser. Then she calculated her own trajectory and her own burn. Because she couldn’t pull the massive gees of her missiles, she couldn’t lay herself on the same track-she’d be a spectator again, whatever happened.

  And then she waited. It was nine hours before the tawny gas giant Rinconell became a great crescent on her displays, before her eighteen missiles executed precise pivots and made the furious burn that set them on their new trajectories. And more seconds passed before her own engine punched her and dropped her into nightmare sleep.

  But the wait was worth it. On their mad swing around Barbas, the Naxid ships emerged with a velocity of nearly half the speed of light. The missiles coming at them were traveling in excess of.7c. The closing velocity was so enormous that the Naxids were probably never aware of what was coming at them and had a few seconds’ warning at most, not enough to activate their defenses.

  Wild, angry joy sang in Sula as she watched the eighteen missiles explode in and among the Naxid ships. Nothing was left of the enemy but stripped ions that glowed fiercely and briefly in the deep, empty night, and then went out.