"You were five years old," he pointed out. "That's an age to get funny impressions."
Mavra wanted to break off the conversation, partly because it was hitting too close to home but also because of Renard's increasing trouble with large words he was obviously used to using. He was starting to think out his sentences in advance, using different words than he normally would. His difficulty wasn't really that apparent, but his speech was slower, more careful, more hesitant than it had been.
Tomorrow, she thought glumly, those words just might not be accessible to him at all. But, he still wanted to talk, and, she told herself, if that was the case it was best she do most of the talking.
Renard took up the theme and thankfully took the subject away from the mysterious Nathan Brazil.
"You said you were on your own at age thirteen," he noted. "Wasn't that kind of rough?"
She nodded. "There I was, on a strange world, looking like an eight-year-old, with nothing but a few coins that maybe would buy a meal, and I didn't even know the street language. At least it wasn't a Comworld. Kaliva, its name was. Kind of exotic and primitive. Open bazaars, shouting peddlers and salesmen—a noisy, grimy, people-filled kind of place. I knew that in such a place you needed money and protection. I had neither, so I looked around. There were a lot of beggars, some just poor, some con men, some cripples who couldn't afford the med service. There were enough of them that they weren't hassled by the local police, and people did give. I walked around, watched who was making money and who wasn't, and where, and saw what I had to do. I used the last little bit of money I had to bribe a little girl to give me her clothes—really dirty, grungy, ripped, and tattered. Nothing really but a foul sheet that could be tied like a sari. Some water and a little mud, and I really looked like a horrible little street urchin. Then I went to work."
Renard thought that maybe she was a horrible little street urchin at that point, but decided not to mention that aloud.
"I really hustled those first couple of weeks. I got fleas and occasionally worse, and I slept in doorways, alleys, and such. I worked the good corners. Beggars have territories, you know, and run off others who want to compete for the business, but I learned how to make friends with some of the best, did favors, gave them a percentage. I guess it was also because I looked so very young and so very down and out—the model for those charity pictures they always take, the poor, starving, angelic faces—that everybody kind of adopted me. I did pretty good. Even on the worst days I made enough to eat, or somebody who owned a food stall would slip me something."
"No trouble with rape or gangs?" he asked, amazed.
"No, not really. A few really nasty incidents, but somebody always seemed to come along or I managed to get away. Beggars kind of stick together, too—once you're accepted. One of them put me on to an old shack out near the city dump, and I lived there. It was pretty gamey, but after a while you get so you don't notice the smells, the flies, or anything. Some charity medical clinics were around, so we got sick a lot but never for long. Everybody kept trying to get me out of there, but I conned them. I didn't want anything I didn't earn myself. I didn't want to owe anybody anything."
"How long did this go on?" Renard prompted.
"Over three years," she answered. "It wasn't a bad life. You got used to it. And, I grew up, developed a little—as much as I ever did, anyway—and dreamed. I used to go down to the spaceport every day when I'd made my quota or just couldn't do it any more—begging is hard work sometimes—and look at the ships and peer in the dives at the spacers. I knew where I wanted to be again, someday—and finally I realized that begging would always get me by but never get me anywhere. Some of the spacers were real big spenders, since they had no home but the ships and little to spend anything on."
Renard was shocked. "You don't mean you—"
She shrugged. "I was too small to be a waitress, and I couldn't reach over the bar. I never learned much about dancing, I didn't have much in the way of social graces, and no real education. I talked like a wharf rat, and while Maki had taught me reading and writing and numbers, I hadn't done much of it. I had only one thing to sell, and I sold it, learned how to sell it just right. Male, female, once, twice, ten times a night if I could. It got pretty boring after a while, and none of it meant anything, but, lord! How the money rolled in!"
He looked at her strangely in the near darkness, feeling slightly uncomfortable. It wasn't what she was saying, but how she was saying it that affected him so. He wasn't sure what to say. He was certain that she hadn't told this to anyone, particularly a stranger—maybe not at all—in years. The fact that she was telling it now, and to him, meant something even his increasingly cloudy brain could fathom. Deep down, she was as scared as he was.
"You certainly speak well enough now," he pointed out. "And you said you were a pilot. Did you make enough money to do all that?"
She laughed dryly. "No, not from that. I met a man—a very kind and gentle man, who was a freighter captain. He started coming around real regular. I liked him—he had some of those qualities I mentioned in my long-ago rescuer. He was loud, brash, cynical, detested the Com, and had the most guts of any man I'd ever known. I guess I knew I was in love with him, looked forward to seeing him, to meeting him, going out with him. It wasn't like with the others. It wasn't sex. I doubt if I could do that with any feeling with anybody. It was something else, something better than that. When I found out he was diverting often just to see me, our relationship grew even deeper. We complemented each other. And he owned his own ship, the Assateague, a really good, fast, modern job."
"That's kind of unusual, isn't it?" Renard commented. "I mean, those things are for corporations, not people. I never heard of a captain owning his own ship."
"Yes, it is unusual," she admitted. "It took a while to find out why. He finally asked me to come with him, move onto the ship. Said he couldn't afford all these side trips. Well, that was what I'd always wanted, so of course I did. And then he had to tell me how he had so much money. He was a thief."
Renard had to laugh. It was a ridiculous climax to her story. "What did he steal, and who from?" he asked.
"Anything from anybody," she replied. "The freighter was a cover and afforded mobility. Jewels, art, gold, silver, you name it. If it had a high value, he stole it. Rich people, corporation heads, party leaders on Comworlds were a particular target. Sometimes there were break-ins, sometimes he did it with electronics and a fine knowledge of bureaucratic paperwork. After we got together, we became a team. He got all sorts of teaching machines, sleep learners, hypno aids, and the like for me, and he coached me and rehearsed me until I sounded educated and acted properly." She giggled. "One time we broke into the master storage area in the Union of All Moons treasury building, exchanged some chips, and had the next three days' planetary income automatically diverted to dummy interstellar units accounts in Confederacy banks, and even after we closed down, withdrew the stuff, and transferred it far away, they never caught on. I wonder if they ever did?"
"Your man—what happened to him?" Renard asked gently.
She turned somber again. "We were never caught by the police. Never. We were too good. One day, though, we lifted two beautiful little solid gold figurines by the ancient classical artist Sun Tat, and they had to be fenced to a big collector. The meet was arranged in a bar, and we had no reason to suspect anything was wrong. It was. The collector was a front for a big syndicate boss we'd hit a year or so earlier, and the whole thing was a set-up. They cut him into little pieces and left the figurines with the remains."
"And you inherited the ship," Renard guessed.
She nodded. "We'd gotten a traditionalist ceremony a year or so before, just in case, I didn't really want to, but he'd insisted, and it turned out he was right. I was his sole heir."
"And you've been alone ever since?" he added, fascinated by this strange little woman.
There was acid and cold steel in her voice. "I spent half a year tracking down his killers
. Every one died—slowly. Every one knew why they were dying. At first the big boss didn't even remember him!" Tears welled up in her eyes. "But he remembered at the end," she added, with evident satisfaction.
"Since that time, I have continued the family trade, you might say," she went on. "Both of them.
"I've paid for the best the underworld can offer, and kept myself in top shape. Surgeons have turned me into a small deadly weapon, with things you wouldn't believe built in and deep-programmed. Even if I were ever caught, the story I just told you couldn't even be gotten by deep-psych probe. They've tried."
"You were hired to get Nikki out, weren't you?" Renard said.
She nodded. "If you can't catch a crook, set her to catch other crooks. That was the idea. It almost worked."
He grunted at the last. It brought everything back to the present situation, although now he could understand why she believed they would get out of this. With a life like hers, miracles were a common, everyday occurrence.
"There's nothing really to tell about me," he said wistfully. "Nothing violent or romantic."
"You said you were a teacher," she noted.
He nodded. "I was from Muscovy. A Comworld, yes, but not a really serious one. None of that genetic-manipulation stuff. Traditional family structure, prayers five times a day—There is no God but Marx and Lenin is His Prophet—and testing to see where you fit into the communal structure." He was audibly straining for the words. They came hard to him. He didn't appear to notice.
"I was smart, so I was put in school. But I never was interested in anything useful, so I studied old literchur"—that's the way he pronounced it, as best he could—"and became a teacher. I was always kind of effinate"—he meant effeminate—"in looks and acts, but not inside. I got a lot of fun poked at me. It hurt. Even the students were mean. Mostly behind my back, but I knew what they were saying. I didn't like the men who liked other men, and the women all believed I didn't like them. I kind of withdrew into my own shell, in my apartment with my books and vid files, and came out only for classes."
"How about a psych?" she wondered.
"I went to a bunch," he replied. "They all started talking about all sorts of wild things, did I love my father and all that. They put me in some kind of drug training that was supposed to change my mannerisms, but it didn't work. The more they tried and failed, the more unhappy I got. Finally, I sat there one night and considered how little I had done. I hadn't really directly touched one other life—even for the worst. I thought about killing myself, but the psych probes out-guessed me there, and the People's Police came and got me before I could do it."
"Would you have?" she asked seriously.
He shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. I sure haven't since, have I? No guts, I guess. Or maybe they deep-programmed me not to." He paused a moment in thought—or trying to organize his thoughts.
"They took me to the political asylum. I'd never been there before. They seemed kind of upset that I was thinking of killing myself. Took it personally, like because I failed, the system had failed. They thought about wiping me clean, maybe converting me to being a woman and doing a new personality that would match."
"Why not just kill you and be done with it?" Mavra asked. "It would be cheaper and less trouble."
He looked shocked, then remembered her own background. "They just don't do that on Comworlds! Not Muscovy, anyway. No, I was kept there for a long time—I don't know how long. Then somebody came by and told me that some bigwig wanted to talk to me. I had no choice, so I went. He was from a different Comworld, a real far-gone one—true hermaphroism, genetically identical people programmed to love their work, and so on. He said he needed, of all things, a librarian! People who could read books, and be familiar with them, were rare—that was true! Even Muscovy had a ninety-two percent ill—nonreader rate." The big words got him, and he either badly mispronounced them or couldn't handle them.
"Trelig," she guessed.
He nodded. "Right. I was taken away on his ship to New Pompeii, given a huge overdose of sponge, and I was stuck. The OD did crazy things to me in the weeks and months that followed. My girlish manners were made a hundred times worse, and my features became more and more like those of a woman, even to the breasts. But—it was funny. My male organs actually grew, and, inside my head, I was still a man. I finally had my first real sex experience on New Pompeii. I really was his librarian, too—and I was also one of the guards for special prisoners, like Nikki, there. Everybody on New Pompeii had psych problems of some kind plus a skill Trelig needed. He recruited from the best political asylums in the Com."
"And now here you are," she said to him, very gently.
He sighed. "Yes, here I am. When I shot Ziggy and helped you get out, I felt it was the first really important thing I had ever done. I almost felt that I was born and existed only for that one moment, that one act—to be there to help you when you needed it. And now—look what a mess we have!"
She kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Go get to sleep and don't worry so much. I haven't lost yet—and if I haven't, you haven't either."
She wished she believed that.
Uchjin, Northern Hemisphere
"A hell of a mess," Ben Yulin said, looking over the landscape. With no power to the air-renewal system on the ship, they had been forced to don their spacesuits. The largest aboard was almost too small for Zinder in the body of his rotund daughter, but the things were made to form-fit a variety of sizes. You got into them and they were all tremendous, loose, and baggy. But when you hooked up the air supply, which was, fortunately, a manual rebreather type, the material acted like something alive, constricting until it became almost a second, very tough white skin.
"How much air do we have?" Trelig asked, looking around at the barren rocky desert in which no sign of life appeared anywhere.
Yulin shrugged. "Not more than a half-day's supply at best without the special electrical system in the rebreather."
"We aren't far from that next hex, where there appeared to be some water," Trelig noted hopefully. "Let's try for it. What have we got to lose?"
They started off, following the marks of the giant skid the courier ship had made in its belly-landing.
They hadn't gone far before twilight set in. Yulin felt that something was wrong, and he tried to put his finger on it. There seemed to be shapes around, kind of half-shapes, really, that appeared at the corner of your eye but weren't there when you turned around.
"Trelig?" he called.
"What?" the other snapped.
"Do either you or Zinder notice anything odd going on? I'd swear we have company of some kind."
Trelig and Zinder both came to a halt, although they didn't want to, and looked around. Yulin found they were easier to see the darker it got.
They seemed to exist in only two dimensions—length and width—and even that was variable. From the side, they seemed to vanish. They were flying, or floating—it was hard to tell which—all around them. Yulin was reminded of paint spilled on a sheet of clear plastic. There was a thick leading edge, and it flowed—not necessarily down, but up and along as well. As it did, the edge seemed to spread out so that it was sometimes a meter wide and almost two meters long. That was the limit for them—when they were fully extended, the rear edge seemed to slowly flow back into the leading edge until it was just a meter-wide lump of paint, only to start spreading out again.
They were different colors, too. Almost every color they could think of, although never more than one. Blues, reds, yellows, greens—of every possible shade and hue.
"Are they intelligent?" Yulin wondered aloud.
Trelig had been thinking the same thing. "They sure seem to be clustering around us, like a crowd of curious onlookers at an accident," the syndicate boss noted. "I don't see how, but I'd bet money that these are the people who live here."
"People" was too strong a word, Yulin thought. These creatures were the stuff of artists' dreams, not real, tangible things.
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"I'm going to try and touch one," Trelig said.
"Hey! Wait! You might—" Yulin protested, but got only a laugh in reply.
"So I do something bad," the boss responded. "We're dead anyway, you know." With that he reached out and tried to grab the one nearest him. Nothing he'd ever seen had ever reacted that fast. One moment it was there, all stretched out, the next it just seemed to be somewhere else, a meter or two out of reach.
"Wow!" Trelig exclaimed. "They sure can move if they want to!"
Yulin nodded. "Maybe, if they're intelligent in any way, we can talk to them," he suggested.
Trelig wasn't so sure. "So what do you say to a two-meter living paint smear, and how?" he asked sarcastically.
"Maybe they can see somehow," Yulin suggested. "Let's try some gestures."
He made sure of his audience—and he did have the funny feeling that they were looking at him—and pointed to Zinder's air tanks. Then he put his hands to his throat, made choking motions, and fell to the ground.
The flowing streaks seemed to like that. More of them arrived, and they seemed to become much more agitated. Yulin repeated the act several times, and they became increasingly agitated, sometimes almost touching one another in their eagerness to get a better view.
Enough acting, Yulin decided. It used up air. He got up, faced them, and put out his hands in what he hoped would be a gesture of friendship and supplication.
This action seemed to excite them even more. He had the strange feeling that he was the subject of a furious debate that none but these strange creatures could hear.
But were they debating whether to help, how to help, or what was the meaning of this strange creature's actions? That last was definitely the most unsettling—and the most likely.
A couple of the creatures floated over, seemed to examine his air pack from a distance of fifty centimeters or so. He remained still, letting them. That was a good start. They might be getting the idea. Or they might be wondering why he was pointing at that funny thing.
Exiles at the Well of Souls Page 17
