Prissy took hard money or barter for payment, either way. He kept the skins locked away in the most sophisticated vault Polity technology could provide. He liked to count the cash, though, especially on Market Day, when it poured in. He counted it in a locked room behind the all-around, where a window that from the other side looked like a wall let him monitor the sensory generators running the show.
On the night of this Market Day he counted his money while the show went on. He did not look at the video monitor, but he heard the sounds: screeches and moans and sometimes a shout, rattles, screams. It was a new show. Not all the performers in it had survived it, neither the women nor the men, and they had died in peculiar ways. While the taped agonies played out, Prissy counted his money and a girl sat at his side and watched. She was a child on the edge of adolescence, very fair and pretty. Her face was bruised and she was sulking. Her name was Lise.
Something hit the door from outside and then it fell in without much noise, not enough for the crowd behind the other wall to notice. Prissy had a disruptor in his hand before it finished falling, but there were three of them running in, two men and a woman, and he didn’t decide fast enough who to aim for first. He fell over his money, stunned. The girl was out a second later.
They laid Prissy out like a dead man. The fair man unstrapped a case from his waist and took out instruments. He began to feed a yellow liquid through a tube into Prissy’s right arm. The woman glanced at a monitor, where numbers were superimposed on the action. She looked at the convulsed bodies without expression and focused on the numbers. “Twenty minutes,” she said, and set herself to face the broken doorway, stunner at full power. Dark hair licked with bronze, taut body cased in black: her face might have been carved in stone.
Michael Kristofik looked down at the pair on the floor and waited. He also wore black. Theo the medic had known him six years, but looked up now and was struck as if by a stranger’s face, the tension and the concentration. Theo thought: Portrait of a Man Waiting.
Theo said, “He ought to be ready, Mike,” and backed away in a crouch. Michael knelt and took hold of Prissy’s flabby chin and turned it. The woman moved a little, still watching the door, to shield Michael’s back.
The eyes of the unconscious man opened, focused on nothing. Michael said, “Prissy. That’s what they call you, isn’t it? Prissy?”
“Yeah…” Barely a word.
“You had a meeting,” Michael said, “two weeks ago, here, with a man who called himself Chrome. Remember?”
“Remember,” Prissy said obligingly, slurring it.
“Where was he going from here?”
“Val’ntime.”
“Valentine?”
“What I said.”
“Christ…”
The woman with the stunner made a hissing sound. Michael looked up and met Theo’s eyes. He made a wry face. “Might as well have stayed home,” he said.
“Shit.”
“Prissy. This Chrome. What’s he calling himself on Valentine?”
“Maz’well.”
“Mazwell?”
“Max. Well.”
“What Maxwell? Where?”
“Shor’ground.”
“Shoreground. Maxwell of Shoreground. They’re having a festival in Shoreground. It’s packed. How long was he going to be there?”
Prissy heaved. It was a whole-body shrug.
“You have any way to get in touch with him?”
“Gran’ Square Inn. Just ask. Maxwell.”
“What about after that? What if he’s left the inn?”
“Won’t. Be there a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Just said a while.”
Theo said, “We have to get back to Valentine.”
“Yeah. Now. Six days home, Christ! Our timing’s bad. He’s up to something and on the move. If we lose him now, we start all over. All right. Knock him out.”
They grouped at the door a little later. The sounds still went on from the all-around. The screams were steady now, and terrible, and the crowd roared.
“Mike…” The woman touched his sleeve. She pointed at the girl whose bruised face in sleep was that of an angelic child. The woman said, “You hear in there? Around here today, I heard this Prissy’ll do a new show, the fatal kind, like that. She’s in it. Doesn’t know it. Kill her slow, she doesn’t know.”
Michael’s arm twitched. His face, alive and expressive the moment before, went dead. He said, “Where’d he get her?”
“Don’t know. Some mother some father some poor sick colony place sold her. Thought, better life for her, maybe. Innocent, maybe. Maybe not so innocent. Maybe they knew.”
Michael went to the girl and picked her up. He slung her over his shoulder without difficulty. He touched one thin arm; there was an old scar on the back of it. He said, “Come on, Theo. He’s yours, Shen. I don’t care what you do.”
Theo said in a strangled voice, “What’s wrong with you?”
“Look,” Michael Kristofik said. He jerked his head at the monitor but did not look at it himself. Theo did. He turned away quickly; a second later, as if squeezed by a violent hand, he vomited.
“Somebody else just pick up what he leaves,” Shen said.
“I know. I hate this place.”
Theo whispered, “He wouldn’t have remembered a thing.”
“I know.”
Michael and Theo slipped out. Shen followed a minute later, flexing her fingers. She said, “Anyway this Prissy might have warned him. Nobody’s looking at us. Gotta keep it that way.”
They melted into the night, the girl still unconscious and so light she was little burden.
Now they were on Willow. The five worlds of the Interworld Polity had among them most of humanity’s people and nearly all its wealth. Willow was the only one Hanna found tolerable.
Earth, oldest and first, was too crowded. Flying above its knots of light at night she longed for darkness, caught in the cities’ ceaseless noise she wanted silence, met at every turn by servos she was conscious as nowhere else of the power in her own slim strong body, the talents of her hands. The planet also was too ancient, groaning with the weight of its past. Hanna was a child of the colonies, none of whose histories went back more than seven hundred years. (Yet she thought of seven hundred years because that was how long it was in Standard years, and Standard was synonymous with Earthly.) Earth furthermore was the seat of Polity Administration, and Hanna’s whole experience of humankind’s first home was colored by her work for and with and sometimes against that triumph of committees and bureaucracy. Earth was where she had learned to navigate the currents of power, more dangerous and deceptive than the tides between the stars.
On Co-op the air changed erratically and sometimes was hard to breathe. Some years the wind scraped the best lands clean of growth. Coopers taught their children early how to shoot; they had good reasons; a boy of eight had once saved Hanna’s life there, shooting by reflex before she turned and saw the toothed shape behind her. Coopers did not like D’neerans. Their ancestors had not wanted to go to Co-op in the first place. The Founders of D’neera also had been outcast from Earth, but more justly, Coopers thought. It is one thing to engineer a populace to telepathy, another to live with the results. Why had true-humans gotten Co-op, and the telepaths lush D’neera? It was not fair. It ought to have been the other way around.
Hanna didn’t like Coopers any better than they liked her.
Toward Colony One she was indifferent. It sought to be another Earth and disregarded what Earth should have taught it. There were towns without beauty, one much like another, forests falling, air dark with grit, machines carving the land, a maddening buzz of change. Colony One, Hanna thought, lacked character.
Heartworld had character, but she did not like what it had. That was Starr Jameson’s home, and while she lived with him—though she had lived with him only on Earth—she had learned all she needed to know about Heartworld’s character.
(“I could not take you home with me. Not permanently. As a visitor, of course—”
“As mistress you mean, then. Never the partner of your life.”
“Impossible for many reasons. We should not even talk of this.”
“I know there are other reasons. But this is the only one to cause me bitterness. I am not good enough for the aristocracy. That is what you mean.”
“You are good enough for anyone. But appearances.”
“Are more important than the love I bear for you.”
“Yes. You cannot reproach me with dishonesty, at least. Yes.”)
So when she went to Heartworld (because she had to go; as unofficial ambassador to true-humans she went everywhere), she stayed in the cities and never saw the lands where a family estate might take up an appreciable part of a continent, and Starrbright not the least; never saw the silent wilderness or the harvests that fed much of the human race. And he was right, of course. H’ana ril-Koroth of D’neera was an important person everywhere—except on Heartworld. They made her feel it, too, and they did not even mean to.
Willow, though: all its meanings to Hanna were good. She was in love with the sky-capped trees that gave the world its name. They did not grow in a wide range, so that many citizens of Willow had never seen them close up, but they grew where the first settlers had proclaimed a capital city. The sinuous branches came to the ground in cascades of delicate green, and to stand within the hollow space they made when the sun shone was to feel that you rested inside the peace of a single leaf, so sweet a green was the light.
Unlike Heartworld or Earth or Colony One or Co-op, Willow had a single government and one capital, the city of Ducelle. It was named after one of the explorers who had come upon this jewel in the night of space, and its buildings were fair and commodious. Many were built of a pink-tinged stone quarried nearby, and the rosy facades were impudent against the willows’ green.
Hanna had spent some weeks in one of them, before she was famous. She remembered Ducelle’s good wines and its strong young men with pleasure. When she went to Willow she did not feel thirty-one and official. On Willow, sometimes, she could forget what she had gone through to get that way.
* * *
Now that Hanna was famous, when she came to Willow she lived comfortably in private homes. She and Rubee and Awnlee were lodged in the home of Willow’s Commissioner, bright-eyed Andrella Murphy.
On the party’s last night in Ducelle, which was not supposed to be its last night, Hanna and Rubee and Awnlee dined in Murphy’s home. There were no visitors, Murphy’s husband had gone out, the meal was informal, and Rubee and Awnlee were relaxed. They had taken many meals among humans now, but they had not learned to like being stared at while they ate. Hanna was too used to the pair and their foods and their habits to stare, and Murphy was too polite. The four shared the evening companionably, Awnlee doing most of the talking and bubbling about the willows, which were so famous that many persons had forgotten they were named after an Earthly tree instead of the other way around. The wines of the region were as good as Hanna remembered. She became a little light-headed. She wished to learn to speak and understand the major language of Uskos without a translator and so she had switched it off; but she was not yet proficient in the tongue, and resorted automatically to telepathic receptivity, so that Awnlee’s excitement, imperfectly understood, entered her blood with the wine and aroused her.
She stopped listening to Awnlee and drifted with the lavender evening and the blushing stone, thinking of Uskos. Hers would be the first human eyes to see it, as they had been the first to see Zeig-Daru. This time the privilege would cost much less. Rubee’s folk were not like the People of Zeig-Daru. Probably nothing was, anywhere. The People were almost a good enough reason to give up space. But this time there would be no horror to face. “I promise you,” Starr Jameson had said when he first told her of the envoys, “that this time there is no threat, no hostility; you will be guarded and protected until you are satisfied; if you find the slightest cause to fear them, you can stop at once. No pain this time. No torture or danger or fear.”
Only excitement. Only the work she loved best. And the long voyage, longer than any human had yet taken, to a civilization that next to those of Zeig-Daru and F’thal seemed blessedly comprehensible.
Into Hanna’s reflections, and the gentle lights that twinkled in her head and kissed every part of the room, there came from somewhere in the business part of Murphy’s home an aide. He bent low and spoke in Murphy’s ear. She excused herself and left with a look of surprise. Awnlee rambled on: “—and the horses possessed by D’neera, but they came from Earth, you said. But we saw none there. You ride as one with them, but I fell off. Did it take you long to own that skill—?” He did not wait for an answer, but went on. He liked humans’ wine, if not their food; his ready speech was stimulated.
Murphy returned. She sat down and said to Hanna, “I have just talked with Starr. I have news for you.”
Everything seemed agreeable to Hanna. She anticipated no anxiety. “What news?” she said.
“Your visit is to be curtailed. You are to return to Earth, all of you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. He said he will speak of it when he sees you.”
“Should I call him?”
“No, no, it won’t do any good. He means: when he sees you. Not before.”
“Is something wrong?”
After rather a long pause Murphy said, “Perhaps.”
Hanna looked at her silently in the candlelight. It was clear that Murphy had some knowledge connected with this matter, yet had not expected the call. She felt Murphy waiting suspiciously, waiting for Hanna to search out the current of thought withheld. Ordinary humans, true-humans, nontelepathic, thought such currents were crystal to D’neerans, and easily accessible. In the usual way of things, though, they were murky as the mudpits of Nestor. It took effort to bring them to light.
Hanna let it go. How like Starr to summon us so; a trip of days through space without explanation, and worry at the end.
She smiled at Murphy, poise unflawed. And changed the subject.
Rubee and Awnlee had understood the words they heard, but the nuances of human communication were beyond the translator. They could not hear what happened between the words. Hanna talked of something else, and that was enough for them. The night passed quietly to its end. Next day they were traveling again.
Her mouth was soft and delicious. Oh, blessed desire. He did not wake all at once. Body first: yes yes yes. Skin painfully smooth, hair drifting on his hot cheeks like cool tangled cloud. Mind was slower. There was no one here to do this, no one who should be doing this. Trapped between alarm and lust he called for light. Lise smiled down at him. The smile faded when she saw his face.
“There she is…” Shen stood in the doorway. She leaned against it with folded arms. “Interrupting?”
“No. Not. Take her,” he said with regret, “out of here.”
His bed was on a platform, not very high. The wall at his head was cut away to show the stars. He turned and they spun; he buried his head in thick cushions.
“C’mon,” Shen said from close by. “He doesn’t want you that way.”
Michael muttered, “Don’t bet on it.”
A hand slipped under the single cover and trailed down his back. His skin quivered and the fine hairs stood up. Lise said to Shen, an edge in her soft voice, “Are you his woman?”
“I’m nobody’s woman. Come on. Mike? Some help.”
He came out of the cushions long enough to say, “Go with her, Lise. That’s not what I brought you along for.”
“You like boys?” she said dubiously.
“Not especially. Tomorrow I’ll try to explain. Again. Go on, now.”
She let Shen take her away. When they were gone Michael got a time readout. Still early, Shen’s watch, but he wanted no more sleep. He got up and discovered that the burst of longing so painfully
ended had left him feeling physically sick. Self-congratulation on morality was no consolation. He had gotten little Lise mixed up with the women who came to him in dreams, perfect, elusive. While he dressed the room sang to him sorrowfully.
Dear, when I from thee am gone
Gone are all my joys at once.
I loved thee, and thee alone;
In whole love I joyed once…
The sweet harmonies belonged to an age a millennium gone. A lute kept them company. Michael sang along with the voices, fluent in the archaic language. His voice was an excellent baritone, not untrained but unself-conscious. He stopped singing when Shen came back.
“Put her to bed,” Shen said. “Maybe stay there this time. Thought you told her yesterday.”
“I did. And the day before that and the day before that. I thought she understood.”
“Doesn’t understand much. Thought about what she’ll do?”
“Not much. I don’t have any idea what to do with her, to tell you the truth.”
Shen waved at the bed. “All she knows. Since eight, nine, maybe sooner.”
“Don’t tell me about it. I’ll get sick. How old do you think she is now?”
“Eleven Standard, maybe? Tried talking to her. School, home, like that. Blank. Like I said—all she knows.”
“So we keep her a few years and when she’s old enough she can be a Registered Friend. If that’s what she wants. We couldn’t leave her there.”
Shen did not answer. Perhaps she was thinking they might very well have left her there. Michael said finally, “All right. What?”
Shen said, “Bad time, Mike. No room for a kid.”
“Wasn’t room for you, Shen Lo-Yang.”
The green eyes snapped. “Not fair.”
“You talk fair to me? Never mind fair. Listen, when we get home I’ll talk to Flora. She’ll come up with something.”
“She want a baby girl? Dump her back in your lap. Be gone a long time, Mike. If we catch up this time.”
It was a long speech for Shen. When Michael did not answer she added, “Long time maybe before a start. ‘Maxwell of Shoreground.’ Say he’s not at the inn. Then?”
The D’neeran Factor Page 44
