"Armand."
It was not a question, but he nodded anyway.
"Do you plan to try this on him?"
"No."
She grinned without humor. "Smart boy. He'd take it even worse than I did. But what aren't you telling me, Ethan? Drugging an unsuspecting victim is first-degree assault and battery, even if no permanent harm comes of it. A halfway competent advocate could strip you to the bones for it. What's important enough about my psi powers for you to risk being taken to court and attached for every deka you make above bare survival for the next fifty years?"
He started to speak, and halted when she raised her hand.
"Remember: one chance."
He stared at the floor, breathing slowly and composing his thoughts.
"Well?"
He met her eyes again. It wasn't as hard as he'd expected.
"The world is dying, Victoria, and you're our hope of saving it."
Her eyes widened. " 'Our' hope?"
He nodded. "The Cabal."
Chapter 18
Teresza awoke slowly, riding dark currents of sleep toward the glimmer of the morning sun. Her eyes went at once to the shaft of light that pierced her window, glittering upon the engagement ring she'd left lying on her desk. She realized she was fully dressed in her clothes of the previous day, struggled up onto an elbow and turned to find Armand, also fully dressed, sound asleep beside her.
Memories of the night before surged back at a painful intensity.
"I won't hold you to your promise," she said.
He sat on her bed, unspeaking, hands on his knees, eyes light upon hers. She couldn't imagine what he was thinking, until he relieved her of the need.
"I did have to think about it," he said slowly, "but all that thinking was done before I invited you home. I haven't thought about it since. I've just been...waiting."
"For me to bring it up?"
He nodded.
"Did you think I would?"
He nodded again. "I knew you would."
She was shorn of all words. She gaped at him, speechless, until he beckoned to her to sit beside him, settled his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him.
"I know I'm young. I know I can be hard to figure out. But I know what I want, most of the time. I was never in doubt that I wanted you. The only question was, once your father told you the score, whether you would still want me." He squeezed her gently. "You made up your mind a long time ago too, didn't you?"
Tears welled in her eyes. She nodded.
"Then let the other stuff go. There are enough fertile couples in the clan to keep the Morelon name going for a million years. We don't have to be one of them." His face clouded briefly. "Unless it's a big deal to you all by itself?"
"It..." She choked momentarily on her tears. "It was, sort of. I did want children. I've always wanted them. Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer, Armand, if you only knew how much I wanted to have yours!"
He said no more. Presently he stretched out full length and pulled her down beside him, arms tight around her. She sobbed gently against his chest as he caressed her back and shoulders.
They'd fallen asleep together that way, not like the randy youngsters they had every right to be, but like an old married couple too weary from the day's trials to do more than enjoy one another's warmth.
She reached down to touch his face and stopped, all at once reluctant to wake him.
He'd spoken the truth. If she had to choose between Armand and barrenness or some lesser man and fecundity, it would be Armand. Not because of her genetic gift. Not solely because of it, anyway.
A beam of sunlight touched his face. His eyes opened, and he smiled. She let her hand descend upon his cheek.
"Awake long?" he said.
She shook her head. "It's still pretty early. Want to sneak out before the rest of the dorm wakes up?"
He sat up, yawned, and rubbed his eyes. "Doesn't matter to me. Is it important to you?"
She pretended insult. "Are you suggesting that I might not want to show off my nice new engagement ring and matching fiance at any hour of the day, to everyone on Hope?"
He chuckled. "Well, when you put it that way..."
She giggled, pushed him down onto his back and stretched out on him. His arms went around her automatically.
"I have a two hour session with the psi people at ten hundred," he said.
She wrapped herself around him. "Time enough. It's still early. Say, do you have any interest in taking a ride down to Sun Tzu and making a weekend of it? They have a famous preservation society. The gardens around their commons area are supposed to be fabulous."
"Sure. Pack a weekend bag. We'll head out after lunch."
"You know," she said, "I don't think you've ever told me that you love me."
"Oh?" His eyebrows rose. "Well, I know you've never told me that you love me."
"I didn't want to swell your head, you big lump." She propped herself up and stared into his eyes. "What's your excuse?"
He became serious.
"It was never necessary, was it, Terry?"
She shook her head. "No, it never was."
***
Victoria writhed on her bed. She'd scattered the covers to all the points of the compass, and her nightclothes had followed them. Sixteen hours had passed, and she could still feel the effects of Mandeville's hormone pomade. If anything, they'd grown stronger than when she was first exposed.
It wasn't entirely unpleasant. The world seemed brighter, all the lines sharper, all the colors deeper and more vibrant. Background noises she'd learned to ignore as a child urged the life of the dorm upon her like a mechanical symphony. Her feet and fingers reported continuously, all their tactile nerves singing whether she touched anything or not. Her breakfast, ordinary corn grits with cream and sugar, the same thing she'd eaten every morning for twenty years, had been an orchestral fanfare of creamy sweetness. Her coffee had been a dark olfactory tapestry that seemed still to be wrapped around her head. She hadn't yet dared to attempt lunch.
None of it was unpleasant, except for the unending alarum from her loins.
Victoria was no stranger to lust. As with all her other appetites, she'd mastered it completely, from copious motivation provided by her mother and an extreme personal fastidiousness she seldom thought about. Until that morning, she could have counted the times she'd masturbated on the fingers of one hand.
Since the previous night's experiment in endocrine-amplified psi, she'd gone through all her uncounted fingers, and most of her toes besides. Yet the pulsing tingle in her mons would not abate. She could hardly think of anything else. It took everything she had to keep her hands to themselves.
Will this ever stop, or will I have to get used to it?
It wasn't desire but need, a discomfort to be relieved, an itch that demanded to be scratched. Whether she indulged it or resisted it, it yielded no pleasure.
If that crap ruined my sex life before it's even started, I'll have Mandeville's ears for trophies.
Even thinking about the night before made her hand drift toward her crotch. As frightening as the original experience had been, this was worse. It had lit a fire that infused her whole sensorium. She didn't mind the hyper-acute vision and hearing, or the enhanced senses of smell and taste, but the tactile over-stimulus threatened to drive her insane.
Or worse. How would she react to the proximity of a man now?
But a man -- Ethan Mandeville -- held the key to her relief, if it existed at all. There was no way out of that one.
She glanced at her bedside clock. Nine-forty. She'd already missed her botany class. She was supposed to be at the Genet Center in twenty minutes. She wasn't sure she dared even to rise and dress.
Crap. If this is the price for being God of Hope, I don't think I want the job.
A knock sounded at her door.
She sat up, started toward the door, and stopped.
Who's calling for me at this hour?
The social life of h
er dormitory was mostly in the evening hours. During the day it was all but deserted. It was unlikely that one of her hallmates had come to beg a cup of sugar.
She grabbed at a corner of sheet and pulled it around her in a makeshift robe, checked quickly to see if anything critical was exposed, went to the door and pulled it open.
Armand stood there.
Circuits dormant in her backbrain snapped closed. In one motion she dropped her sheet, yanked him fully into her room, and kicked the door shut. Before he could protest, she was grinding herself against him and growling from deep in her chest, a lioness in heat who would not be denied.
His face bloomed with shock. He took her tightly by the shoulders and forced her away. He stared at her as if she were something other than human.
"Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer, Vicki," he whispered. "What's gotten into you?"
He scanned her surging body as if he could see the lust that flamed in it. His eyes came back to hers and locked there. Their black depths compelled the one element of her anatomy that wasn't already mad from sexual frenzy with a need to obey his will.
Seconds later, the hurricane of lust had ceased.
The transition drained her of all her strength. She sagged and would have fallen, but Armand caught her beneath the arms and helped her back to her bed. He lowered her gently onto her back and pulled a blanket over her before sitting alongside her.
They stayed just so, neither speaking, for a measureless time.
"What did you do?" she whispered. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.
He shook his head and smoothed her hair back from her forehead. "What was it? Did I interrupt -- "
She shook her head jerkily. "It started last night." She gasped once as a cramp spike traveled up her torso. "It...has something to do with the psi. I'm not sure what."
"Vicki, did they do something to you?"
There was a unique note in his voice. It was something she'd never heard from him before, but from the new tension in his face and hands and the intensity in his eyes, she knew what it had to be: the overture to a battle cry.
He'd rebuffed her most cleverly contrived advances. He was firmly glued to another woman, whose dislike of Victoria was sang through the air between them whenever they met. Yet the thought that someone might have violated her had called forth his inner alpha male. He was ready to seek out whoever had done it and punish him.
She hesitated a moment more, then shook her head.
He stared down at her a moment longer. "I was headed over to Genet, and I thought I'd offer you a lift. I brought the family motorcycle back with me last Spoonerday."
"Huh? Two hundred miles? Why?"
He displayed the hint of a blush. "Grandpere Alain wanted me to have it with me."
She tried to smile. It almost worked. "Thank you for the thought, Armand, but I don't think I'll be going to Genet today. You have a good session and I'll see you again soon."
Even with her new prospects glittering before her, his solicitousness was something she couldn't help but try to exploit.
"Do you think you could...look in on me this afternoon?"
He laid his hand against her cheek. "Sure."
***
Armand parked his motorcycle just off the concrete apron before the Genet Center. After he'd killed the engine, he remained in the saddle, partly because he still relished the luxury of personal transportation, and partly because the storm in his skull would not abate.
Victoria had lied to him.
Mandeville had done something to her in the previous night's tests, something that had unhinged her and set her ablaze with indiscriminate lust. It had been far beyond her power to control. His psi sight had glimpsed a network of glands white-hot with biochemical fury.
He'd soothed those glands back to normality without thinking. Relieving her had taken only seconds. She had to know it was his working. It wasn't an ability he wanted others to know about, but he hadn't been able to resist. It had been a spontaneous reaction, an automatic decision to end her pain coupled to the unarticulated knowledge of how to do so.
He pushed the personal aspect of the matter to the back of his thoughts and concentrated on the foreground conundrum. What had Mandeville done to Victoria, and why had she concealed it from Armand?
Was it something Dmitri planned to do to him?
It was enough to keep him sitting on his motorcycle, oblivious to the stream of passers-by and their quizzical inspections, for ten full minutes.
If it was likely to have a similar effect on him, he wanted no part of it. The only way to know that was to ask. But Victoria's unwillingness to speak of it made him dubious that a straight question, whether put to Dmitri or to Ethan Mandeville, would garner a trustworthy answer.
There was one other thing he could try, and he was in a good position to try it.
He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and set his viewpoint free of his body.
Drifting through the halls of the Genet Center to the narrow back stairway that led to the psi group's labs was harder work than he'd expected. His other forays into the extension of his special senses had all been in quiet, static environments. This was anything but. Hundreds of students and faculty populated the halls, talking, gesturing, and walking in all directions. The sense of so many bodies and so much dynamism had him "ducking" and "leaping" reflexively every few feet. He was unable to quell the urge even though he knew intellectually that it was unnecessary. When he reached the back stairs and found himself "alone" to descend them, the sense of relief was considerable.
Down the stairs, a few steps and turns through the nearly deserted hallways put him before the un-numbered, un-legended door of the room in which he and Dmitri had always worked. He paused momentarily there, sensed no one within, and pressed on.
Even without pressing his psionic ear to the door, he could tell that the second psi lab, where Vicki and Ethan had worked, was occupied. The shouting from within was almost loud enough to be heard upstairs. He firmed his resolve, pushed his viewpoint through the door, and found four men shouting and gesticulating wildly: Dmitri, Ethan Mandeville, and two others of whom he knew nothing. The words were flying so fast that he could seldom make out who'd spoken them.
"You might have eliminated our only hope with that stunt!"
"You had no other suggestions last night. Are you saying that --"
"Peace, Ethan. We both know --"
"You know nothing except that this young cretin spilled our innermost secrets to one of the only two candidates we have, before she was irrevocably committed!"
"You agreed to --"
"Shut up, Einar. What happens if she tells the Morelon boy? And then decides she wants no further part of us? Where will our options be then?"
"Charles, she hasn't --"
"Don't call me Charles, you simpering moron. I'm --"
"ENOUGH, Charles! If he's Ethan, I'm Dmitri and Einar is Einar, then you can swallow your pretensions too!"
There was a brief silence.
"So what now?" said the one who'd objected to being called Charles.
"What else?" Dmitri said. "Hope is still dying, and we still need a new God. We press on. The Peterson girl won't back out without giving plenty of advance warning. Ethan told her just enough truth."
"And if she divulges what she knows to the Morelon boy?"
"Little chance of that. That girl is a walking monument to cupidity. She'd rather die than allow anyone else a shot at this prize."
"Some prize," the one who'd been called Einar muttered.
Dmitri smiled broadly. "But that's still our little secret." He turned toward Mandeville. "It is, isn't it, Ethan?"
Mandeville's eyes were so wide that they threatened to fall out of their sockets.
"We're going to tell her," Einar said.
"What? Be reasonable, Einar," Charles said. "If --"
"Shut up, Charles." Einar was a very large man. When he stood and moved to loom over Charles, the smaller man cringed involu
ntarily.
"We're no better than cannibals," Einar said, "except that instead of tying the guest of honor hand and foot and throwing her into the pot, we're hoping to seduce her into it. We've countenanced this sort of subterfuge for too long. I will stand for it no longer. We told D'Avenire, and we're going to tell her. Dmitri, it will be you who'll do it."
Dmitri's face was stolid, but his hands had closed into fists. He spread his fingers carefully and laid them against his knees.
"Don't fear too greatly, Dmitri. You're the right one to do it. You grasp the tragedy of the thing," Einar said. "Give her to understand it. If she runs, there's still Armand Morelon. If she stays, perhaps we can make amends for our crimes of the centuries past."
Dmitri inclined his head. "I've never been quite this frightened before, Einar. Perhaps age is finally catching up with me."
"You're the youngest of us but for Ethan."
"Age is relative," Dmitri responded. "You're as old as the sum total of your disappointments, frights, and regrets. Speaking of which," he said, glancing at the wall clock, "shouldn't we wind this up? Our young friends were supposed to be here five minutes ago."
All four men turned toward the lab door as if it were about to open.
Armand reeled his viewpoint back to his skull and shook himself out of his psi trance. He jerked the motorcycle around, kicked the starter, and roared down the road back to the dorms before he could think any further.
Chapter 19
Victoria had almost fallen asleep in the noon warmth when the second knock arrived at her door.
Crap. Well, I did ask Armand to look in on me.
She forced herself awake, shrugged awkwardly into her bathrobe, and went to answer the door.
It wasn't Armand. It was the last person on Hope she'd have guessed it could be.
"Mom?"
Her mother seized her by the shoulders and walked her backward to her bed. She sat heavily as her thighs struck its edge.
"Did you think," Elizabeth Peterson said tonelessly, standing over her, "that you could broadcast all over Alta like that for sixteen hours and I would fail to notice?" She snorted. "If there are any sensitives on Sulla, they probably caught it too. What on Hope were you doing? Juggling houses?"
Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1) Page 13
