Chaining the Lady c-2

by Piers Anthony

  The magnet’s field flexed momentarily. He understood. Like Yael back on her farm, he had been balked by appearance as much as by fact. And he had lacked the ingenuity to devise an alternative.

  But Melody wondered how intelligent the magnet was. Slammer understood every word she said, and since it was a nonlinguistic creature, that suggested a very adaptable intellect. Limited by silence and by dependency on metal, the magnets seemed like animals; but granted the resources of the sapient creatures of the galaxy, why wouldn’t they be comparable?

  Yes, they could be smart enough. If a magnet slammed through the wooden barrier, his act would soon be known. So it would not do any such breaking without excellent reason. And how could anyone be sure the magnets were not linguistic? They could have their own magnetic language that no human had bothered to learn. Also, it would be the least intelligent magnets who would be lured into spaceship duty; the smart ones would stay clear. Unless they chose to come, and play dumb, until they knew enough to build and operate their own spaceships.

  All speculation, probably without foundation. But she would keep working on it. She had to understand the magnets if she wanted to win them over.

  They came to a second detour in the wooden hall. This one incorporated dips and rises in the floor, so that a magnet trying to roll through would be trapped. Melody’s arms were hurting now, and she staggered along; she would have to exercise more to build up the human tissues. “Next time, I’ll roll you!” she gasped. The magnet could not roll himself up a slope, but she could push him.

  Then the metal hall resumed, to her relief. As they came into it, Slammer’s weight abated. Finally she loosened her grip, and he floated free. “We made it!” Yael exclaimed, as if it had been a great adventure. “But, oh, my arms!”

  Now Slammer led the way with impetuous haste. He moved up a ramp, then up another. The passage branched, but the magnet seemed to know exactly where he was going. Melody had to run to keep up.

  Abruptly Slammer stopped. Melody drew up, her chest heaving in a fashion she knew would have been an impregnation hazard in the presence of a male Solarian, and looked about.

  They were in a storage chamber. Cartons of supplies marked in code were stacked in tall columns. They appeared to contain military hardware. This was deep within the ship, several levels above their starting point. The gravity had diminished slightly as they moved nearer the center. This made it good for storage, as the boxes could be stacked higher with less danger of breakage, were easier to move, and could be delivered to other parts of the ship readily by chute. So this was a well-protected spot, suitable for bombs, laser guns, and such. And isolated from magnets.

  Now Slammer hovered nervously. When placid, he was unmoving; here he was doing little spins about a tight axis. What was bothering him? Surely he couldn’t be afraid!

  Then another magnet appeared. “Oh-oh,” Yael said, suddenly worried. “If magnets can’t get in here, how come—?”

  Melody wondered the same. “Slammer, are we in danger?”

  But Slammer had already shot out to meet the strange magnet. The two banged together resoundingly, flew apart, and clanged together again. The sonics were deafening.

  Melody covered her ears. Not since leaving Sphere Mintaka had she experienced clangor of this magnitude! But it hurt the less-sophisticated human auditory apparatus.

  “They’re fighting!” Yael cried. “We’d better get out of here!”

  At first Melody was inclined to agree. But several things nagged at her. If Slammer were protecting its human companion, it would not be politic to desert him. And if no magnet could cross the wooden barrier, what was the other magnet doing here? Slammer had evidently known where he was going, and expected to be met like this. But why would he go to all this trouble for a fight? What was so precious that he had to search it out and fight for it? “That other magnet did not attack us,” Melody pointed out. “It’s smaller, and not brightly painted. Not a warrior-type, I think. This is a magnet-magnet affair; we’re probably safe.” She was hardly sure of that, but she also doubted her human body could get away fast enough to escape an aggressive magnet. “And I want to see exactly what they’re fighting about. It might be important.”

  “And you say you don’t like adventure!” Yael said admiringly. “You’ve got nerves of steel!”

  “All Mintakans do. Oh—you meant that figuratively! No, I’m extremely uncomfortable. But I honestly don’t think we’re in immediate danger. Slammer can protect us, and it would not have gone to this trouble to lead us into danger.”

  So she poked around while the noise of the clashing magnets became even more intense. The ship must be sound-conditioned, otherwise the commotion would already have attracted attention, even from sleeping off-shift officers. The two globes were striking each other faster now, and with unerring accuracy, though they moved so swiftly they were only blurs. What a battle!

  Suddenly Melody froze. She had peeked into an alcove in which some electronic equipment had been set up.

  It was the retransfer unit, supposedly destroyed in the shuttle sabotage blast. She had been instructed in its use, back on Planet Outworld, because of the importance of her mission. There was no question about its identity; there was only one such unit in the fleet.

  Captain Boyd had to have known the unit was safe. Why had he deceived her? Had he also salvaged the mattermitter?

  Abruptly the noise stopped. Melody looked around nervously. Had one of the magnets destroyed the other?

  Slammer shot into view. His, colors were dulled, but he seemed to be in reasonable health. “So you outbanged your opponent,” Melody said. “Congratulations. What next?”

  The magnet dodged toward the hall through which they had come.

  “Time to go home, it seems,” Melody remarked. “Didn’t seem like much of a relaxation for you, though.”

  They returned through the passages, Melody verifying her memory of the route. Now she had a special reason to know the way! The other magnet must have been assigned to guard the retransfer unit—it was certainly valuable enough to warrant that!—and somehow Slammer had known. And had shown her.

  Why? Why should the magnet care? It didn’t quite make sense. A Solarian or Mintakan might have done it because of her interest, in appreciation for what she had done in the hullside fiasco, but the magnets had evinced no signs of such sentiments.

  Could Slammer have acted on the Captain’s orders? But Dash could have told her directly. Why go through the charade of deceiving her?

  Melody shook her head as they arrived back at her cabin. It was tempting to draw easy conclusions, but she was too old and experienced to do that. She lacked sufficient information.

  But it certainly made for marvelous speculations!

  Melody reassembled the manual Cluster Tarot deck thoughtfully. She did not use the elegant cubic deck Dash had given her; that was too precious to share with strangers, and there was always the risk of breaking the delicate mechanism. Suppose some dolt dropped it on the deck while shake-shuffling?

  But the manual deck sufficed. She had just identified yet another hostage. That brought the total to nine—of nine tested.

  Was the entire upper-officer cadre of this ship hostage, except for the high-Kirlian Captain himself? What a nest of subversion she had shuttled into! And back on Imperial Outworld they didn’t know.

  So many hostages! Could one of them have salvaged the retransfer unit, planted the sabotage bomb, and then made a false report to the Captain? That seemed likely. But that meant the retransfer unit was under the control of the hostages—hardly a reassuring situation!

  Could the hostages know about her? No, for if they had been aware of the threat she posed to them, they would have acted against her before this.

  Slammer moved closer to her, now that she was alone. It was his way of asking for attention. That provided her with one reason she had not been bothered: she had a very able bodyguard!

  Melody was becoming more adept at playing
the game of twenty questions, as Yael described it. In moments she had identified the magnet’s concern.

  He needed to take another walk.

  They used a different route, but ran into the same type of wooden barrier. She rolled Slammer through it with dispatch. She was getting a fair picture of the geography of the inner labyrinth of the ship, though that seemed to be regarded as a military secret.

  As before, this was the off-shift for the majority of the officers, so there were few circulating. Also, she now realized, Slammer selected the route to avoid people. His mission, such as it was, was his own secret.

  The other magnet was hovering at the far side of the wooden passage. “Ouch!” Melody said, rendering the human equivalent of a chord of alarm. “Must we go through this again?” But she decided not to interfere. If Slammer and the other magnet got their kicks by bashing each other…

  But this time there was no banging. Instead, Slammer moved aside, and the smaller magnet came close. Melody concealed her alarm. “What can I do for you, Slimmer?” she inquired brightly of the stranger.

  A much smaller object circled the strange magnet, like a satellite around its primary. It hovered right before Melody.

  Suddenly, like a splendid symphony of meaning, it burst upon her: a baby magnet! Slammer had had a tryst with his lady-friend, Slimmer, and now they had offspring. “Hello, Beanball,” she said.

  The mother-magnet withdrew. Slammer indicated the barrier.

  “So you just wanted to see your bud,” Melody murmured. “Well, I’m glad I was able to help, even if it was contrary to regulations. Here I thought you two were fighting!”

  Yael laughed. “Slimmer got banged up!”

  Again, Melody had to delve for the interpretation. A Solarian bang or bash was an old-style party at which too-free leeway was fostered by consumption of mind-affecting substances. The kind of thing she might have been involved in, had the hullside emergency not interrupted it. Thus a female could get impregnated: banged up. With magnets, the banging was literal; it was their mode of copulation.

  “Or maybe balled,” Yael added.

  Balled: reference to the Solarian male’s reproductive apparatus. “Where do you pick up all this information?” Melody inquired teasingly.

  “What information?”

  The girl did not even know the derivation of her terms! Melody had been drawing on her own knowledge and Tarot insights to understand the Solarian situation. “Never mind. We’d better go home.” Aloud she said: “Come on, Slammer. We’ll visit again when you want to. Goodbye, Beanball.”

  But the little magnet hovered close. When Melody put her arms around Slammer to start him down the hall, Beanball remained in orbit about them.

  “Now, wait,” Melody protested. “Once we cross the barrier, you can’t return to your mother, Beanball. You’d better stay here.”

  The ball did not go. “Slammer, can you explain—?”

  Then she realized: The little magnet was too new to travel on his own power. He was controlled by the fields of his parents. He had gone to the father when the mother had departed, probably to resume her guard duty before some officer checked on it. The presence of the baby would be certain evidence of dereliction of duty. Slammer was better able to conceal and protect his offspring. So he had come, summoned by some magnetic communication, to assume his familial responsibility.

  Melody sighed. “Very well. I enabled this to occur; I must carry through.” Feeling a bit jealous, as she had never gotten to raise a bud of her own, she picked up Slammer and walked down the wooden hall.

  Beanball hovered before them, held firmly by the large magnet’s field. Slammer could not move himself here, but he could still act strongly on any metal in the immediate vicinity.

  At the barrier she set Slammer down and let him roll to the foot of the hollow. Beanball remained poised in air, not affected by the rotation of the larger form. Very precise magnetic control! At the far end of the barrier they resumed normal motion. Soon, unobserved, they were back at the cabin.

  But Melody discovered her responsibilities had only begun. Beanball needed to be fed, and could neither forage for itself nor report to the refueling station for a handout. It was plain that the human officers did not know of the little magnet’s existence—and should not be informed. Melody had seen no other little magnets; obviously the wood barriers were intended to segregate the sexes and prevent inconvenient trysts. Magnets were indisputably loyal to their masters, but their primary loyalty had to be to their own kind, especially their children. That was the nature of any sapient or near-sapient species. Culture could be fostered only by close parent-offspring ties. The magnets obviously had a culture of their own, and interpersonal ties—which the officers of this cluster fleet chose to ignore or suppress.

  Melody did not believe in slavery. The situation of the magnets made her increasingly uncomfortable. She could not blame this on the hostages, for they were obviously carrying on a tradition that was well established in the fleet. Captain Boyd himself had his magnet, and the Captain did not object to the system.

  Well, she objected! At such time as she acquired the power of decision, she would free the magnets and give them self-determination. But at the moment she hardly had control of her own life.

  So she kept the secret, and helped provide for the baby. She visited the magnet dispensary and acted like a foolish girl, asking for a big chunk of coal as a souvenir. It was against policy, but a little heaving of her healthy bosom caused the man in charge to overlook policy. She took the chunk to her cabin, and watched Slammer pound a fragment of it to dust. Beanball floated through this dust, guided by his father’s field, and sucked it in through almost invisibly small vents.

  Then Melody picked Beanball up and set him in the nestbox she and Yael had fashioned. Yael, of course, was thrilled with the whole thing, and proved to be quite helpful with the mundane details. She cleaned up the films of ash that formed in the nest, the magnet’s waste product, and labored to locate usable metals for Beanball to ingest and grow on.

  Melody appreciated these services. She tended to get bored with the routines of daily existence, and she had more philosophical matters on which to dwell—such as how much of the segment fleet was infiltrated by hostages?

  Still, it was a novel development. She had set out to gain the loyalty of a magnet—and had become foster-mother to a little magnet. Some bearing that had on the situation!

  8. Skot of Kade

  COUNCIL INITIATED PARTICIPATING * / :: oo

  :: where is dash? ::

  *indisposed*

  :: require election of new leadership the bird has been stalling ::

  *there have been cautions a resistance movement has been discovered in segment etamin this could have caused much trouble dash feels that premature action can negate the effort, as it did in the prior case*

  :: the prior case was under dash coordination! a thousand years were lost by that bungling! put the issue: new leadership now ::

  *concurrence?*

  SILENCE

  :: (fools!) ::

  Llume the Undulant succeeded in bringing in another client. They were getting harder to fetch now, as the cooperative ones had been accounted for first.

  This was a young, handsome officer, a mere 0-3 lieutenant, lowest in the command section of the ship. His aura was in the range of forty to fifty.

  “I am Skot of Kade,” he said formally. “Major Llume of Spica requested me to attend.”

  Melody smiled and leaned forward enticingly. She had her most effective outfit on: a front curvature that fairly popped out the eyeballs of the average male Solarian, and a posterior tautness that made him pop further down. She’d have to be careful not to overdo these effects with so young a man, lest it distort the reading. The cards were adept at reflecting emanations of lust.

  Sure enough, Skot gawked and reddened slightly. “Do you understand the nature of the Tarot?” Melody inquired, shrugging so that less cleavage showed.

&n
bsp; “Some. I understand you’ve been doing readings on all the men. They’ve talked about it, some.”

  “I’ll bet!” Yael muttered. “They talked about who could see farthest between two breasts.” But she seemed pleased. Female objection to male perception was never very deep.

  “I hope they were satisfied with what they perceived,” Melody said aloud.

  “Oh, yes!” Then he flushed a bit more. “That is—they found it very interesting. The Tarot, I mean. Views, revelations… uh…”

  “Of course. The Tarot is fascinating.” Melody could not resist flexing the muscles of one shoulder to make the mammary on that side twitch. She was playing a game— but the irony was that behind the cynical manipulation of the flesh, she rather liked this innocent-seeming young man. There were differences of personality among hostages. In fact, they were just about like other transferees, except for their alien-galaxy culture and their need to hide this. Were the two galaxies not at war, she would have been able to get along very well with them.

  She reviewed the cards, then gave them to him to shuffle. Finally she laid them out, providing a facile spot analysis for each card that had nothing to do with her real observations. She was having trouble with Skot’s responses; they were subtly wrong at key spots. Was she losing her touch?

  As the reading concluded, she realized: She had been anticipating the response pattern of an Andromedan transfer from Spheres *, —, /, ::, or oo. Skot had not matched any of these. If some of the hostages were from unknown lesser Spheres, she would have extraordinary difficulty identifying them. But she finally concluded that this man was not a hostage. In fact, he was not even a transfer. He was exactly what he seemed to be: a young, friendly, naive Solarian male of high-Kirlian aura.

  He was perhaps the only nonhostage among the officers of the Ace of Swords. Apart from Llume and the Captain, of course.