There was a sound like the ocean in his ears.
Shen came to him and said, “She’s better. Gonna live. Cancel Rescue?”
He looked at her helplessly. Somewhere in his slow brain he remembered learning something that made canceling Rescue a good idea. He could not remember what it was, though, and he said, “No.”
“She doesn’t need ’em.”
“Does she?” he asked Theo.
“Need Rescue? Maybe not. I’d feel better if somebody else looked at her, though, and she’s so weak she could get worse again, or get sick with something else. Anyway, you said yourself we can’t keep this quiet. She’s got to be identified sooner or later.”
“Later!” Shen said.
“How long to rendezvous?” Michael said. He was dizzy.
“Two days now,” Theo said, “You slept a long time.”
Sleep still sounded good. “Stay on course,” he said.
Shen said, “Wish she’d died.”
“I don’t.”
He eyed the space beside Hanna with longing. Lise said from the corner, “Wish she’d died.”
Emma Maurello was an assistant to Valentine’s chief liaison official in Admin’s External Trade Affairs Department. That department was a cell of a larger congeries that dealt with nuances of trade within and outside of the Polity. Somewhere there must be a clear organizational chart, but in two Standard years Emma had not found out to whom, in the long run, External Affairs answered. In any event Emma’s offices ordinarily did not care. It was enough, said the transplanted citizens of Valentine in Liaison, to go along at a quiet clip, maintaining routine without expediting it unnecessarily. The work was easy, the surroundings comfortable, there was more talk of leisure than of work, and Emma lived a quiet life which had nothing disturbing in it.
Today was different. Today was an uproar. And Emma, when she had found out what it was about, got away. She slipped away from the towers of Admin, not without frequent glances over her shoulder; she skulked (or felt that she did) through the walkways, the parklands, the structures that housed services for Admin, to a public message center looming against the hazy autumn sky. Here she took a cubicle, placed a call to Valentine, and watched the charges mount against her credit. Private interstellar calls were expensive and Emma was not rich. There went a dress she coveted; there went all her luxuries for a week, and for another week—
She took her eyes from the racing figures. It was a hot morning, though in the fall of the year. The message center’s environmental system was poorly programmed and the cubicle was hot, too, so that her hair stuck to the back of her neck. She looked anxiously behind her again, because she was doing (or supposed she was doing) an illegal thing for the first time in her life.
In Shoreground it was (she remembered too late) the middle of the night. When Kareem Mar-Kize answered, there was no video and she knew from the sound of his voice that she had gotten him out of bed. He sounded as if she had better have a damn good reason for this.
“It’s about Mike,” she said, and in the silence she heard the unspoken answer: Reason enough. Because her voice must give it away, and her face, which Mar-Kize could see though she could not see his.
She plunged into her story with no other preamble. Halfway through it he activated video and she saw the bronze face, the intelligent black eyes robbed of sleep. He asked questions. She answered them as best she could for her nervousness. She was not used to listening for footsteps behind, or waiting to be caught in an illegal act.
At the end he said, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I know Mike—”
She felt herself blush. Mar-Kize had been at Mike’s house that night, must have seen some of the evening’s long flirtation. Mike was not easy to get: as if she had ever thought in those terms before! As if she would! Finally the others left. She went with Mike into the garden, helped him extinguish the glittering starpoints of light in the big old trees, and he kissed her just as she began to think she would have to start it herself. They stayed outdoors. The sea pounded distantly, the wind sighed through the long night hours, the thick moss was soft on her bare skin. Near dawn she said, “I must go.” “Dear Emma, stay and rest. You’ve had no sleep.” But she went, not wanting to face the mid-day light later, the disinterested courtesy of the persons of his house, the amicable acceptance of the animals (who had come to the trees from time to time to see how they got on)—
“—very good of you,” Mar-Kize was saying.
“I can’t believe he’d do what they say. Can you?”
“Good God, no. Does anyone know you’ve called me?”
“What? Oh. I don’t think so, I’m at a public call center, I don’t think I was followed or—they don’t tap these places, do they?”
“Not routinely. Do they know you know Mike?”
“Everybody knows Mike. Don’t they?”
“Seems like it. All right. Thank you. I’ll try to get a message to him.”
“Can you? Do you think you can? The I&S people, I heard they said they’ve got the ship’s access codes tagged, so if the relays pick up any transmission for Mike it can be stopped. Can you do it anyway?”
“I’ll try,” Mar-Kize said neutrally, but Emma did not know how much hope he had.
The call was over. Emma sat in the heat, afraid to find out what it had cost her but not regretting it. It was the right thing. Even if the affair had been brief, even if Mike had not been her lover for long; because better than that, he was her friend.
A hand fell on her shoulder, and when she looked up she was more afraid than she had known she could be. The man behind her wore the uniform of Admin Security. Behind him was a woman, not uniformed but with the look of I&S; and behind the woman was a robot with a Domestic Enforcement patch where its head should be. It was the end of Emma’s future. Maybe Mike will give me a job.
She went with them without protesting. She thought that if she were docile, what happened to her could not be as bad as anything that would happen if she fought.
She was wrong.
* * *
Kareem Mar-Kize placed Emma when the call was finished, not before. He had met her at one of the parties Mike occasionally gave for a handful of old friends and new acquaintances. Maurello was one of the recent acquaintances. She had had a hard time keeping her eyes off Mike; that was not unusual, though hers was a worse case than most. What was unusual was Mike’s response. It was (Kareem had decided then) sweet innocence that did the trick. Mike was adept at dodging the predators, the sophisticates with hungry eyes, but Emma had made him helpless for a while.
Kareem’s wife, who had waked near the end of the conversation, said, “What’s wrong?”
“Mike’s in a little trouble.”
“Trouble? What kind?” She sat up in bed suddenly. “It’s not that old thing, is it?”
“It’s related. Never mind. Go back to sleep.”
“I won’t be able to now. Where is he?”
“Somewhere in space in that flashy toy spaceship. I’ve got to get in touch with him—and the Polity’s fixed it so I can’t.”
He told her everything Maurello had told him, on the principle that two heads were better than one. He was right; she said immediately, “Some of those luxury craft scan all the newsbeams and flag the crew if there’s something interesting. Does GeeGee do that?”
“Of course. That’s common for a ship that class. Why?”
“Well, will what the Polity’s doing prevent Mike from getting information that way?”
“Shouldn’t, but I don’t see—Wait a minute. One of the things she scans for is his name. He set her up that way. I told him it was paranoia. He said he was being realistic. This is top secret, though. It’s not out on the ’beams.”
“Not yet,” said his wife, “and wouldn’t any ’beam service just love to get it first?”
He gave her a hearty kiss and made a call. It only took one.
Shen shook Michael awake. He came up out of
a deep sleep, without dreams this time; it was a black cave, and it sucked at him. The tension in Shen’s hard right hand was a warning. He turned to Hanna in anxious reflex. The room was dark, but there was a soft glow near the bed. It showed Hanna’s face and he saw that she slept in peace, her breath coming easily.
“Gotta hear something,” Shen said. Her mouth was tight. He got out of bed reluctantly and found that his knees shook. So Theo had been wrong and what he had done with Hanna had hurt him somehow after all, at the least had drained him.
Someone had relieved him of his shirt and boots. He found them in the dark, fumbling, and put them on while Shen waited impatiently. Lise and Theo had disappeared.
“What time is it?” he said.
“Fourteen hundred hours. GeeGee’s back on Standard time. Another day to Rescue. Rescue!” she said bitterly.
“What’s wrong?”
“Come on.”
He followed her to Control. The brighter light outside his room hurt his eyes and the climb up the spiral stairs seemed long; his strength was not at norm. Lise was in Control, her nose almost touching a display surface as she scowled at the words there. She could read, but not well. Shen flipped a switch and a perfectly modulated voice (robo, he thought automatically) said, “Rigorous identification procedures are in effect for incoming traffic to Nestor and Lancaster as well as Valentine. Private vessels approaching Polity ports should be prepared for security checks and possible boarding.”
Shen stopped it and said, “Newsbeams.” He didn’t know what it meant; he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He looked at Shen, baffled. She touched another key and he saw a face that made him blink; it was gaudily painted and the eyes glowed with artificial light. It was human, though. He had seen it on the ’beams before, slashing at more or less deserving targets. It said, “My contacts inside I&S admit Kristofik is the man who robbed a Polity vessel in deep space of a fortune in ’23. They don’t say why he’s been allowed to spend it unmolested all these years. They say there was advance warning of danger to the Far-Flying Bird. They don’t say why Kristofik wasn’t detained before the Bird started her flight.”
Shen shut that off, too. “More?” she said. Michael shook his head, a reflex action; he was dazed. What he had heard percolated and sank in slowly. So they’d found out what had happened to the Far-Flying Bird and—
His head was stuffed with dust. He needed to think clearly and could not.
He said, “They thought I was going to do it ahead of time. They don’t know about him.”
Shen said incredulously, “You knew? About this?”
“No. Yes. I mean, I should have realized what it meant.”
Shen stared at him; so did Lise. He could not be making sense. Shen said to Lise, “Go wake Theo up.”
“No. Wait—” A connection made itself without his volition. He picked words carefully. “They knew somebody was after the aliens, I don’t know how. They’d made up their minds if anything happened it was going to be me, and they don’t know anything about B. So now they’re after us. How long to Rescue?”
“A day. Told you. Was a day. Changed course soon’s I heard this. Good thing I didn’t kill her.”
“Huh?”
“Witness. Tell ’em we didn’t do it.”
“Yeah. All the same. They’ll want to know what we know about B, why we were after him, how we knew he was on Revenge, lots of questions. Questions I don’t want to answer. Don’t want to get near it, Shen. Too good an excuse to shove me under probe.”
His mind was working better. Shen relaxed. She said reflectively, “Can’t go home. Or anywhere.”
“Right. Until she’s in condition to talk.”
“Take real good care of her,” Shen said warmly, and the turnabout should have been funny. It was not. With Hanna dead the only way to prove his innocence would be to go under probe. If they got him under probe, they would not be content with his ignorance of the present crime; they would go on to the Pavonis Queen and that would be the end. Without Hanna there would be no escape. Not even Valentine would shelter him from this; surely Rescue had cooperated in a trap. So all his life had hung on the thread of Hanna’s, and in saving her he might have saved himself; though he had done it for no charitable motive and almost in spite of himself, because of Lise and Theo. Left to himself he might have killed her, he would have killed her in a frenzy of rage or obsession—Hanna who was part of him now.
Shen misinterpreted the look on his face. She said, “Big trouble.”
“Not so big,” he said, although it was; but also there it was, and there was no point thinking about the size of it. He looked for ways out. Best would be a way that did not mean running, a way to sidestep I&S. He said, “I want her to talk to the Polity as soon as she can. We stay lost until then. See if she can keep them off our backs. If she will. Maybe she’ll do it. She’s not interested in us. She never used to care about anything but her work, although— But maybe she’ll want to get back to Contact and the hell with I&S.”
He saw that Shen was astonished by the implied knowledge of Hanna, and became tongue-tied. Shen said, “Maybe. Can she do it?”
“I don’t know,” he said after too long a pause. “It’s worth trying. She’s got influence. The council of magistrates on D’neera gives her anything she asks for. In the Polity there’s the Contact director. Jameson. He knows all the commissioners. Some of them are holdovers from when he was on the Commission. He knows everybody in I&S, too. And he owes her. God, does he owe her! But he won’t care about that.”
Michael sat down suddenly and put his head in his hands. He wondered if Hanna knew as much about him as he knew about her.
* * *
She had forgotten. She woke without strength, still fevered, and alone. She was not altogether awake. With enormous effort she propped herself on her right elbow, swaying. There was something on her left wrist and she lifted her hand, which seemed heavier than rock, and looked at it intently. It was close to her face, brown and out of focus; it seemed to have floated there. She examined it as well as she could for the blurring. A medical monitor bracelet gleamed at her, silvery. She reached suddenly for the chain at her throat, lost her balance, and fell back.
The bracelet had done its job and signaled someone. She was lifted and there was a steady arm behind her back. A hand held a cup to her lips. She swallowed clear water, the sweetest draught she had ever drunk. Her mouth was sand-dry and she sucked at the water greedily. Pieces of the world came back one by one. She looked into Michael Kristofik’s unmistakable eyes. She remembered doing it before—but the memory slipped away. I will help you, she thought. Or was it, Help me!
He moved so that her head, which she was not strong enough to hold up, lay against his shoulder. Fogged with fever, unsure where she left off and he began, she felt his pleasure in holding her. She thought that was odd. And sorted through the broken pieces of the recent past that came back a little at a time. And remembered.
“God. Oh, God.”
“What? What is it?”
Awnlee. Rubee. I must contact—
She made pictures of Awnlee and Rubee dead and alone in the Bird, and the hive of Admin waiting for her call. He said, “They’ve found the ship. They know.”
There were tears in her eyes. She had not cried for a long time and the wetness was strange and awkward. She cried for Awnlee, her friend, and Rubee, who had extended kinship to her. It seemed the event had happened a moment ago. She knew it had not, time had passed, and there were things she must do, if only she could stop crying. But she could not, it was beyond her strength, and she was angry. Michael held her and made sounds of consolation. She remembered that he was connected with Castillo. She tried to push him away; she hated him. She made him feel it, and knew it wounded him.
He said in distress, “Oh, no, I had nothing to do with it, I only came later and found you,” and it was the truth, but how could it be? He knew Castillo. He had known the monster for lifetimes, the beast of fl
ame.
Don’t touch me, don’t touch me! she cried, and heard him swear. He let her down gently and leaned over her, painfully anxious. It added to her confusion; he treated her as an intimate might.
Short as the episode had been, she was exhausted. She could not lift a hand again, not even to wipe the tears from her face. He did it, uncannily responsive; then he kissed her eyes, each in turn. She was paralyzed with rage; she threw it at his head like a weapon. It hurt him. She did not know why. How could he do that to a stranger and then be surprised by her fury?
She could not sustain anger; she drifted away. She wondered if she would ever again in her life be strong enough and well enough to do anything besides sleep.
Michael stayed beside her until he knew she had gone back into the dark. It only took a minute. He thought that he would keep away from her. Perhaps when she was stronger and rational, he could explain. Perhaps by then he would be himself again.
When it was “night” he slept in the lounge. He dreamed of Claire, Claire of the moonlit hair and milky skin, Claire who had agreed to marry him. Then he dreamed a dream that was an accurate memory, except that he was in a dark, threatening emptiness instead of the comfortable dome-mounted flat he had occupied ten years ago.
“I disobeyed a direct order,” Kareem said. “You can do what you think best about that.”
He looked so peculiar that Michael was alarmed. “It’s that serious? I’m poor, or something?”
“You told me not to run confirmation on Claire’s background. Because if she found out someday, she’d be hurt.”
A light answer died on Michael’s tongue; he looked at Kareem’s face and could not say a word. Kareem said, “I did it anyway. You have to know. She’s an I&S agent.”
When Michael could speak again he said, “She can’t be.”
The D’neeran Factor Page 59
