Empire's End

by Chris Bunch

  "No," Tamara said. "This time… this time you'll just watch." She unwound the scarf, and began knotting it at intervals. "Next time… that's yours."

  Mars became a shadow, a blur. The center of the world was Tamara's body. Nights were a swirl of movement, ecstasy, a sudden flash of sweet torture. Days were exploration and daring, making love anywhere and everywhere. Tamara's passion seemed to increase the greater the risk of discovery or embarrassment. Particularly if the discovery might be made by a member of the family. Not that Kea came to Tamara's bed as an innocent. She learned from him, as well. She wanted something new. And so, reluctantly, he showed her some of the techniques he'd heard of or even, once or twice, had demonstrated in the cribs of Maui.

  She learned well and then eagerly practiced those dexterities. She combined them with other skills she was already familiar with. The style of lovemaking she preferred was prolonged, exotic, and would have a lightning-shock of pain/pleasure at the climax. Kea felt as if he were a bit of wood, floating at the edge of a maelstrom, and then being drawn down, deep into its center.

  He was in love with Tamara. That could mean disaster. Ruin. But it was a fact. What made it worse—or, perhaps, better—was that Tamara seemed to be as besotted, as passionate and overwhelmed, as Kea. Kea allowed himself to dream of a future—a very different future than he had conceived of before. One which would be for two people.

  Kea was amazed. Anything he wanted to do, Tamara seemed delighted to oblige him in. It was as if he were the ruler, instead of… His mind shied away from the rest. Once, they went to the dockyards at Capen City. He was fascinated by the array of ships of varying types. Here, torchships were landed in great aboveground cradles rather than ported in water, and Kea could even walk under their bulging enormity and fully realize just how huge they were. Tamara, not terribly interested in the ships themselves—"Darling, we own half of them"—was fascinated by the color, squalor, and lurking danger. Several times she told him how safe she felt with him.

  Something was bothering Kea. Why were the spacecrews dressed in such a slovenly manner—very different from the heroic posturing of the vid that still occasionally dealt with space travel? Why were there so many notices tagged outside the local hiring hall? And why were the notices so weathered, as if they'd been posted for a long time, with no one desperate enough to answer them?

  Tamara and Richards found seats in a crowded dive that called itself a cafe, drinking some terribly sweet concoction Tamara'd ordered from the barkeep, and he tried to think it out. Ignoring the groundpounders, almost everyone they had seen was a spaceman(woman). High vacuum and all that. So, why were all of the conversations he overheard about drink or drugs and how iced they had been the previous night. Or else how terrible the conditions were aboard ship, and which was the least ghastly hellship to sign aboard on. Their language wasn't that of science or engineering, but the lazy-palated monotones or drunken sudden rage of the poor and desperate. It sounded like Wino Row. Why were the eyes of these brave space pioneers so dull? So dead?

  He heard, for the first time, of Barrier Thirty-three, the term used as if it were some sort of gateway to Hades. He asked—and found it was the standard bulkhead division between the crew/engine spaces and the cargo/passengers. Something was very wrong. But he didn't know what. He drained his glass and took Tamara's hand. She was staring, entranced, at a woman down the bar whose tattoos covered every inch of skin that could be seen outside the stained cut-down shipsuit. The woman seemed as interested in Bargeta.

  Tamara frowned when Kea said he wanted to hat up—but didn't say anything. She gave the tattooed spacewoman a long smile—and Kea remembered that smile from other, private times—as they left the bar. That night, he slept alone, not wanting to disturb Tamara with his dark mood, still disturbed by what he had seen and still wondering what it meant. She laughed away his apologies the next day. She had gone back into Capen City. And looked up some "old friends."

  The end came in bright sunlight, on the deck of the trimaran where it had begun, about an Earth-week later. Kea had spent the morning preparing himself. Making sure he had the correct words. Then he was ready—as prepared, he hoped, in this matter of the heart as if it were the most important examination he would ever take. Which it was.

  Tamara listened quietly to his stammer that grew into fluency. Then he was finished. Kea waited for her response. It came as a giggle. Then a full laugh. "Kea," she said, when the laugh died away. "Let me understand. You're saying that you think the two of us should… be together? When this summer is over? Back on Earth, even?" Kea, feeling his guts writhe, as if he'd just stepped into a gravshaft and the McLean power was off, nodded.

  "Live together? Or—do you mean like a covenant? Kea, darl', you sound like an oldie, talking about marriage! Oh dear. This is delicious. You? With me? Oh, my, my." And she dissolved into laughter. Kea got up, and walked numbly across the dock, and found the elevator up to the clifftop.

  Sometime later, he found himself in the main house. It was dark. Kea had not eaten, nor gone back to his room. He had tried to be invisible, especially to any of the Bargetas. A couple of the retainers asked if he needed anything. Kea shook his head. He saw one woman's eyes soften. She started to say something, but just put her hand on his arm. Then she looked frightened and hurried away.

  He didn't know what he would do next. How could he stay out of Tamara's way for the rest of the summer, a summer that had gone from paradise to purgatory? He couldn't just leave. Austin was his friend. All he wanted was a secret, hidden place, to crawl into and lick the gaping tear Tamara had ripped.

  He heard laughter. Austin. "Oh dear, oh dear," he said. "Was he serious?"

  "If not, he's the best japer on Mars." Tamara.

  "I guess it shouldn't be unexpected," another voice said thoughtfully. Bargeta senior.

  "I'm sorry, Father," Tamara said. "But I thought—"

  "You needn't bother with an apology," her father interrupted. "I'm hardly concerned that you found the rustic to be handsome. Nor how you chose to scratch an itch. It would be most hypocritical for me to suggest my daughter behave as if she were a Renunciant, when we know the family has always had a taste for the… rawer side of life, eh?"

  There was laughter. Shared laughter. Family laughter at the casual mention of a minor secret.

  "So it's my fault." Austin.

  "Not really," his father explained. "You've just been reminded of a lesson you perhaps let slip from your mind, when you rewarded this young man's assistance by letting him into your life. But it's not a new lesson. Remember how hard it was when you realized your nannies weren't Bargetas and had to be treated a certain way? Or the children we allowed the servants to have, so you'd have playmates, and how you cried when it was time for them to be sent away? So don't chastise yourself, Austin. It's a lesson we have to learn and relearn."

  "So what do we do?" Tamara. "I mean, I can see that letting Kea sulk around for the rest of the summer like some moonstruck swain out of a poem will be really dullity."

  "Don't worry," Bargeta senior said. "Perhaps he'll simply vanish. Or jump off a cliff. Or sail off into the sunset. Moonstruck yokels do things like that."

  The clink of glasses as someone poured a drink. Then, Austin's voice: "Actually, Father, when you stop to think about it, this whole thing is very funny. Isn't it?"

  Tamara's titter. A chuckle from Bargeta. And then all three of them were laughing very hard. Harsh, unrelenting laughter. Kea heard no more. Their mirth vanished. As did the Bargetas and Yarmouth itself. The only thing in the entire universe was a tattered, yellowing PLACES AVAILABLE notice, on a spacecrew hiring hall.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Alva Sector, A.D. 2193

  THE PINLIGHT WAS a frantic red pulse on the monitor. "There it is again, Murph!" Vasoovan twittered. "At one o'clock."

  Captain Murphy "Murph" Selfridge squeezed into the navigation cubicle. He was a big, formerly athletic man, gone to seed. He bent over his first officer.
The light pulsed back at him. Kea Richards watched his commander's broad features take on an oxlike look of puzzlement as he studied the winking light. "I don't get it," the captain finally said. "Same damn coordinates?"

  "Same damn coordinates, Murph," Vasoovan said,

  "Sure you didn't make some kinda screwup?" Murph asked. "Maybe you better run it through again."

  The Osiran sighed the martyred sigh of the constantly incompetent. "If you say so, Captain," she twittered. Slender pink tendrils moved swiftly over the com unit. Touching sensor pads. Spinning dials.

  Richards and the two scientists kept silent. Their card hands forgotten on the tiny rec table of the cramped instant-bucket-of-bolts some corporate sales veep had misnamed Destiny I. There was no Destiny II. The first model was so poorly designed and built that only the ten ships had been completed. And those had been sold for kiloweight. Richards's skinflint company had bought two and put them into service. For the past five E-months, it had taken all of Richards's skills as chief engineer to keep the Destiny I in one piece and headed for the mysterious signals emanating from Alva Sector.

  Vasoovan rebooted. The monitor blanked, then came back on. The light was still blinking. But this time at six o'clock. "What the hell's goin' on, Vasoovan?" Murph demanded. "How come the sucker keeps movin' around on us?"

  "Don't blame me," Vasoovan protested, anger building. "I just do my job. Same as anybody else." She turned her large oval face full on the captain. Vasoovan had the permanent grin of a carnivore. Even after five months in close proximity with the ET, Richards found the face unsettling. He watched two of Vasoovan's eyestalks check out Murph for signs of argument. The other two craned over Murph's head to study Richards and the scientists.

  One scientist pretended not to notice. She stroked a straying dark curl from her eyes. The other—the man—turned his handsome profile away. But Kea stared back. He knew better than to give the Osiran an edge. "What're you looking at, Richards?" Vasoovan's twittering was shrill.

  "Apparently not very much," Kea said. "In my book, watching my captain and his first officer doing tight twirls around their backsides hardly qualifies as entertainment."

  "You've got no cause to gripe," Murph said. "You're getting triple time for this trip, with some pretty hefty bonuses all around if we come up with something."

  Richards pointed at the wandering light on the nav board. "If that's our bonus, Captain," he said, "I wouldn't be making plans for any big spending when we get back. From where I sit, the company's money is pretty damn safe."

  "Come on, Kea," the captain urged. "Let's not be negative. We got a good team, here. And, by god, we're gonna take this thing all the way over the top."

  Kea shrugged. "Sure, Murph. Whatever you say."

  "It's their fault," Vasoovan said, indicating the scientists. "This whole thing was their idea. Know what I think? I'll tell you what I think—"

  Dr. Castro Fazlur—chief scientist of the expedition—broke in: "It actually believes it has a thought process, Ruth. Amusing, isn't it?" He crooked his lips into a smile of nonamusement.

  Dr. Ruth Yuen, Fazlur's assistant and lover, ducked her pretty head. Trying to stay out of the line of fire. "Oh, come now, Ruth. Be honest," Fazlur pressed. Handsome gray-fox features pushed forward. "Don't you find it tragic that the only sign of allegedly intelligent life mankind has found is this tentacled thing?"

  "Watch it, Fazlur," Vasoovan hissed.

  The scientist ignored the warning. "I'd say it was the eye-stalks," Fazlur said. "What IQ exists in an Osiran is mostly consumed controlling that primitive biological function. This would explain its limited language capabilities. You will note, Ruth, dear, that it speaks the argot of a common ship rat. Obviously, its mental powers are too taxed to achieve a civilized person's vocabulary."

  Vasoovan's features turned from pink to parboiled. A powerfully muscled tentacle reeled out, searching for a heavy object to hurl. Then snatched back as the captain slapped at it. "Come on, guys. Lighten up. I got enough problems without you piling on more." Murph pleaded.

  It was at this point that Kea felt a warm, shapely foot press against his calf. It rose up his leg, caressing higher… higher. Ruth's dark eyes flashed. A red tongue tip licked an upper lip. It was that Tamara kind of look. Suddenly, the already-cramped world of Destiny I slammed around him. He tossed in his cards. "I'm going to catch up on some sleep," he said. "When you figure out where we're going… be sure to wake me." He rose, avoiding Ruth's hurt look, and stalked out. The too-familiar sound of quarreling voices faded as he made his way down the corridor.

  Surprisingly, he found the fresher room unoccupied. The rest of the crew, fifteen in all, was either at work or bunked down. This was a rare opportunity to scrape off some of the grime the overtaxed atmosphere system aboard the Destiny I kept spewing out. He peeled coveralls from his greasy body, then groaned as hot spray needled his flesh. No one ever got really clean aboard Destiny I. For months, they had all been walking around in the thickening miasma of their own smells. Eating stale packets of heavily manufactured chow, since scarce water also meant a crimped supply of fresh vegetables from hydroponics.

  The needle spray cut off as his hot water allotment was used up. Kea suffered zed guilt as he punched the button and the shower resumed. Crap on those company pinchcredits. A delicious fog filled the room. He spread the soap on thick and lathered up.

  The expedition to the Alva Sector had been a bust from the get-go. Kea had signed on against his own good sense. Being chief engineer of a bucket of bolts had never been his idea of a life's work. He'd had big dreams, once. Dreams that seemed to be worth achieving. Then he had thrown it all away over that inbred, high-society woman. If it had happened to somebody else, the situation would be laughable. But the memory of the other, harsh laughter on Mars would be with him for years. He was so young and dumb he didn't ask why the first deep-space company he had hit up leaped on him as if he were solid gold. Sure, he had aced their aptitude test. And gone through the exams in a third the allotted time. Kea had half expected to be rejected, despite his high test scores. After all, he had no experience. He had also assumed the competition would be fierce for something so exotic as career in deep space. Especially now that private companies—sniffing fat profits and guaranteed monopolies—were venturing out on the few bridges to the stars that had been built with government money.

  He started getting an idea how wrong he was in his first job as a wiper aboard a cargo hauler making the jump out to Epsilon Indi. His fellow crew members were as stupid as his chief engineer. And his brain cells numbered fewer than the fingers on his mangled left hand. What the crew members lacked in intelligence, they made up for in greed and sloth. Any time the ship ported, it was all the captain could do to rouse them from the drinking and narco dens to make the next flight.

  His next job—a long jump out of Arcturus—proved the first ship was no exception to the rule. If anything, the feebles making up that crew and officer staff were less competent. That journey had ended in near disaster when the captain ignored the clearly charted meteor belt and wound up hulling his ship. Four crew members had died before Kea had jockeyed a patch into position and sealed the hole. His knowledge of Yukawa drive had been tested when it was discovered the engine was damaged. And no one aboard had the skills to repair it. There had been a lot of praying for the next seventy-two E-hours as Kea jury-rigged the stardrive into some kind of working order. The jump home went without incident.

  It was then he had been recruited by his present company—Galiot Inc., a division of the megagiant SpaceWays. "Galiot's a brand spankin' new division, son," the recruiter had boasted. "You'll be seein' places and doin' things folks are just startin' to dream about. Our mission's to come up with new ways and ideas for SpaceWays to make money. They're puttin' big credits behind us. If you join, son, you'll be joinin' quality. Nothin' but the best for Galiot Inc. Cuttin' edge all the way." Kea had hired on at a two-grade jump in position. And it wasn't long before he'
d worked his way up to chief engineer.

  Yeah, he thought, as the needle spray soothed tension-knotted muscles, the road might not have been long, but it sure was torturous. It wasn't the risk that made it so. Hell, risk was spice. Here he was getting his chance to act out his boyhood dreams.

  Starships bound for adventure in the beyond. But the company did its best to spoil all sense of wonder. They hired and bought cheap, making intellectual companionship minimal and turning the most routine labor into knuckle-busting frustration for lack of quality machines and tools. The company had a knack for turning any assignment into boredom—interspersed with fear of a pointless death as shoddy equipment failed at a touch.

  What the bejesus are you doing here, Richards? Stuck on a one-E-year-minimum expedition. Surrounded by the sorriest, most cantankerous, ill-mannered employees of Galiot Inc. You could have stayed at Base Ten. Waited for another contract. Okay, you were bored out of your skull. So, what's new about that when you work for Galiot Inc? You could have guessed. Hell, you knew, Richards. Knew at the time you had best tell them to put that contract where the sun doesn't shine.

  He heard the fresher door open. Through the clouds of steam he saw a lush, female form slip out of tight-fitting coveralls. The warning bells hammered. Dr. Ruth Yuen smiled through the mist, then slowly lay down, on the fresher's small changing bench. "Mmmm," she said. "I like my men nice and clean."

  The last time she had left his bunic, Richards had sworn to himself that was it. The end. The woman was more dangerous than anything aboard the ship or outside in cold, cold space. A guaranteed knife in the back. So, tell her no, Richards. Tell her no. Send her back to her full-time lover and boss, Dr. Castro Fazlur.

  Go ahead, Richards.

  But his feet were moving forward, taking him out of the shower. Ruth's smile grew broader. She looked up at him, eyes half-closed. Her hand reached up. Caressed Kea's stomach. Slid downward. Her left leg lifted off the deck, knee bending, and she put her foot on the bench. She let her leg fall open, then reached down and touched herself, stroking.