“I should think not,” I said.
As if on cue the ivory woman danced her way back to us. She was a vision to relieve the darkest hour of the night, certainly, sinuous and sleek, her narrow face intent on the genetic construct by my side. She spread her arms wide as she descended into a neatly turned succession of hip thrusts, and blatantly beckoned to him with a little glissando of her fingertips.
I felt the body beside me turn to stone. I remembered the unpleasant moments in the medbay, the terrifying control he had exerted when shackled. Almost I could feel sorry for him, poor bastard, being teased like this.
And what would he do with our temptress once he got her? How long would he take in killing her? The human body holds five litres of blood, which is a lot to clean up when splattered all over carpet, tiles, furniture.
On the forest floor it made no difference.
I leaned across the Beast—he actually flinched away from me—and handed my beer to András. Then I was on my feet, hands politely behind my back, and I stepped right into her next spine-slinging move, spoiling it.
“Watch it, Citizen,” she snapped.
“I am, beautiful one, and so’s he. Go trawl somewhere else.” Find someone who doesn’t care whether you’re dead before or after he rapes you.
“He’s with you?” She looked me up and down. “What a waste. He’s too much man for you.”
I blamed what followed not on her words, but on the music. Even as I stepped onto the floor, it permeated me, every membrane, until at her too much man I burst into laughter. “Get out of my way,” I said. I pulled off my shoes, tossing them to András. And I danced.
I looked into the Beast’s eyes and he looked into mine, while the music possessed me; while my hips became all serpentine roll and swivel, my belly ceaseless undulation, my arms fluid invitation. Test me, said the weight of my breasts; taste me, said my parted lips; thrust into me, said the cradle of my pelvis. Sweat bloomed on my skin. I willed him to feel each movement as if I rippled naked against his body.
For all the sign he gave, he had turned to sandstone. Oh, no, you don’t, I thought. Dimly I was aware of András and Z. Ismail staring. I shimmied up to him, laying siege to the depths of his immobile gaze, my fingers describing riverine patterns up and down my torso, and, hands still a-flutter, sank to my knees and bent my body back into an arch of submission.
Seize me, slay me, I thought. I prayed. Prayed to get his attention, land the hook, distract him from any other prey items he might have in mind.
And then from the corner of my vision I saw him shift and cross his legs, in the eternal gesture of a man with an erection to hide. What I perceived as victory burst through me. I felt my own promise burn up through my scalding muscles. I felt my belly become a golden heap of grain. Lilies, grapes, wine; every nerve a flower, every vein and artery a font of intoxication. Nothing else existed save the drums’ feverish pulse and my triumph. My body demonstrated the attitude of the fallen warrior, but both bow and archer I would become.
In viciousness and despair I wove the shimmering net of sex to ensnare my enemy; I did not see, then, how I myself failed to escape the trap.
CHAPTER NINE
At dawn we left.
Once more: a measure of waiting, of anxiety about packing, of expectation and worry and postponed exhilaration. It seemed a repeat of the previous day, except instead of traveling beneath the surface of the planet, like children sneaking past a parent’s open door, I led my guests up the Long Stairs and out onto the crest of the cliff.
Ubastis had not yet turned the last degree necessary to reveal her sun. The air held the resonance of a just-damped oud string. This was my favorite time of day, always portentous for me, ever since my foot had taken the step from alloy gangplank to kind earth. The sky blushed rose at the northern horizon, demurred to amethyst and then to sapphire above us. To the south piles of indigo cumulonimbus sailed like ancient ships, crimson at their keels.
A glorious morning, and all we cared about for the moment was enough air. Bearce doubled over, hands on his knees, and concentrated on gasping. Zhádāo fared better, but wore a particularly unfocused frown. I smiled to myself. A non-working elevator—helpfully rigged by one of my friends among the techs—always revealed character. I myself was breathing a little heavily, but I disguised it as bracing inhalations. Only the Beast seemed unfazed by the climb.
I had anticipated a level of embarrassment on my part after last night’s ignominy. Every time our eyes met—which, thank God, happened only a few times—I reminded myself that what I had done had been out of necessity, not lechery.
“We’ve got a few minutes,” I said, unshouldering my pack. “Set your stuff down and relax until the VeeTOL gets here.”
Bearce dropped, then rolled over to his side, heedless of his load. He did not, however, forget to aim the retinal cam. “Will we . . . have to do this sort of thing . . . often?”
Could the Source techs realign my image, or would they want Bearce’s sixty-degree angle? Gritty immediacy, I believed, would be the proper way to go. “Not really. I’ve got the course picked out, and while there are a few climbs, there’s nothing so extreme as that. We’ll have enough to deal with when we go into the arboros.”
“Why didn’t . . . you people put in another elevator?”
Zhádāo descended less precipitously and slid her arms from the straps. After a moment she began rummaging through her pack and took out sunglasses and what looked like an air mask on lanyards.
Out in the bush I shed every sartorial constraint my fellow Ubasti adopted, and today I wore a sleeveless shirt, snug pants tucked into the high tops of my boots, topped by a similarly tight jacket with tied-down cuffs. If I’d caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, my first thought would have been offworlder. Immodest, but where we were going I cared nothing for such nice politics.
It would be a long flight to the site. The thought of four hours spent sitting made me twitchy. Being stiff while I had two clients and God knew what to keep an eye on would be a bad idea. Upper body stretches first, while I pretended not to notice being watched; then I tucked my leg up and grasped my ankle, stretching my quadricep muscle. In front of everyone I teetered and had to hop. The Beast held out his ungloved left hand to steady me.
Harsh words kicked at the back of my teeth, to tell him to back away, fuck off. I was going to kill him, I didn’t have to invite courtesy to join us on our little appointment.
But how often courtesy among people is simply a matter of survival . . . if I had neither my life nor the Beast’s to think of, still there were two others to consider.
Under Bearce’s gaze I twisted my expression into something pleasant and let my hand ascend to the Beast’s. Dry, hard, coarse with calluses, it was not unlike my own. The blatancies of the previous night sparked in my memory yet again. Without looking at him any more than I had to for the next thirty seconds I finished my stretch.
“You made good time on those stairs,” I said, moving away from the Beast. “That was well done. I’m glad we got here when we did.” I nodded to the east.
It was as if the sun wore Medusa’s face. The three of them stood transfixed as the first lance of her gaze pierced us. I found myself not watching the sunrise, but my three charges. Bearce propped himself up, the lens of the retinal cam refulgent. The corners of General Zhádāo’s mouth tensed and her lids drooped against the solar onslaught. She put on her sunglasses. And my enemy—the sun spilled into his eyes, drowned the pupils to pinpricks, flooded the irises until they glowed like agates, like river water held to the sky.
Thousands of sunrises had I seen since that first one; with every client I made sure to share one at the beginning of our journey. Here is Ubastis. In a way it felt like sacrifice as well, my offering. Thousands of sunrises had I seen, but the thousands that rooted my impulse weighed in years, not days. Four thousand years ago my ancestors had depicted, as I had seen in stone made light, the sun disc rayed in splendor; each ray tipped wi
th a caressing little hand.
I turned away from the others to the sun and shut my eyes. The touch of warmth felt like fingertips.
It turned out that Zhádāo had been rummaging through her pack looking not only for sunglasses, but also a gift. After the initial radiance of the sunrise had dissipated, she returned to her pack and drew out a small bottle, about fifteen centimeters high, and three shot glasses.
“This seems to be the most appropriate time, after a sight like that,” she said. She cupped the glasses in her hand with a clink and held up the bottle. It blazed green-gold. “The very best, from Alicante Enterprises.” She deftly uncapped it with a shove of her thumb and filled the glasses halfway. The liquid flowed thickly, and even from meters away I smelled it. Olive oil.
She handed glasses all around, but when I indicated she had left none for herself, she shrugged and smiled. “Can’t stand the stuff. Ironic, isn’t it? I have a connection to one of the two stations successful in growing olive trees, and to me it tastes like coolant.”
I made a noncommittal reply and tried to think of an appropriate salutation, but the Beast broke my line of thought by handing his glass to Zhádāo.
“Don’t deny yourself, General,” he said. He plucked my own glass from my fingers. “We’ll share with the commander.”
It took her a second to smile. She handed me the bottle. “I’m honored to give this to you.”
The bottle in my hand was cool, surprisingly heavy. On the paper label spiky calligraphy spelled out the name of the station company which had grown the trees, pressed the olives, bottled the oil. Below the name, watercolors detailed a gray-foliaged tree against a background of stars. I unscrewed the cap and held the bottle just below my nose. The fragrance that seeped upwards put me in mind of summer heat, green grass. People still used olive oil in foodstuffs, but only in small quantities, and never simply to fry foods. Such was its value now that it was served as medicine, or a beverage, in minute amounts. Mergers were concluded, deals celebrated with an ounce of olive oil all around. Briefly I wondered how the olive would do, here on Ubastis. Probably disrupt an epoch or two of evolution. Pity.
“An amazing gift,” I said. “Shokrun.”
The Beast lifted his glass. “To peace.”
I shot him a glance; the others echoed him and drained their cups. After a moment to recover from the surprise of that toast from that mouth, I lifted the bottle to my lips and sipped. The oil slicked the inside of my mouth with a peculiarly sullen sweet flavor—like rebel fruit.
“Interesting,” I said. Sometimes honesty succeeded more than pleasantry. “I’m not sure what to think of it; I’ve never tasted it before.” That pleased her, as I’d suspected it would. Never mind thank you, she was a woman who liked to break virgins.
“I missed it,” Colin said. “I don’t suppose you could take another swig, could you?”
I smiled and shook my head. “You’ll just have to come up with another surprise for me.”
The whuff-whuff-whuff throb of the VeeTOL’s rotors encroached on the edge of hearing. The Beast, first to see it, nodded to the north. The sun’s rays caught the white speck and turned it to a firespot against the phoenix-egg green of the warming sky. Three of us watched it, but Bearce, after establishing a glance at what held our attention, trained his cam on us. Like to see where he’d point that cam if a besora charged, I thought.
VeeTOLs, like the magrails, were another piece of indulgence granted Ubasti colonists. Unlike the magrails, however, they had been donated by a private entity. The corporations who had involved themselves in our well-being had done so out of prudent and conscientious concupiscence. A private entity usually meant some eccentric heir whose ancestors’ twenty-third century stock had finally matured, or the head of a company who hoped to give her or his descendants a space on Ubastis’s quota lists. UBI took due note of each donation, distributed such where it was deemed to be the most needed, and made no promises.
Members of the Integral learned early the arts of placation and pacification. My husband had wielded such art as second nature; I had acquired it as a sightless Earther comprehends a strange room’s arrangement. Well, my shins were used to it.
Children made little distinction in drawing a VeeTOL and a flat shoe. A fleet of VeeTOLs on the wall of the Children’s Center looked like nothing so much as a bin-full of footgear on the escape. The stubby lines of the VeeTOL swept back from a broad nose, past the cockpit and cargo hold (small, but who on Ubastis ever carried much gear?), and then sharply up to the engine nacelles and the horizontal rotors. From above it looked like a solar-paneled ray with pretensions. It was not an elegant craft, like the skipjack—which looked as if it were traveling at the speed of sound even when it lay in port—but a good pilot, who ate, breathed, and dreamed the computer system, could coax both vertical and horizontal rotor systems to maneuver like a yellow-throat.
The VeeTOL checked above us and hovered. Against a sky lit by full day, it would be difficult to distinguish a VeeTOL from the surrounding blue, painted as the underside and all vertical rotors were. As it descended, though, one could make out the blades spinning within their housings, curiously hypnotic if not for the assault of displaced air.
We shielded our eyes, Bearce cupping his lens with a hand, until the VeeTOL settled on its discoid feet at the landing pad some thirty meters to the west.
I clapped a cheery hand on Zhádāo’s shoulder. “You sure about this?” I said it teasingly, but half in earnest, too; there had been a couple of clients who had backed out at this moment. And at others.
“Is this my last chance?” She looked amused rather than alarmed.
“Hell, no. You can change your mind when we’re halfway there. When we land. Or two days out, when you can’t find any dry socks.”
The cockpit shield slid back with a nasty squeak. Up popped the helmeted head of the pilot I trusted most on all Ubastis, Joop Al-Mansur. He waved, a broad arc of his arm, and I waved back. “Move your ass, Loren! Gotta get this thing back to the hangar for service!”
I waved. Bearce was murmuring into his recorder again. The general was readjusting the straps and buckles of her gear from top to bottom. “Good setup,” she said. “Hapshidah suppliers? I’ve used them before.”
I stepped closer to Bearce and pitched my voice over his. “They donate,” I said. “Hapshidah’s seconds are good as some companies’ prime merchandise.” I’d make sure Bearce uploaded that to the Source sooner rather than later. That would cover another half year’s worth of webbing, clasps, storage, bottles. If I’d smiled and flashed some cleavage, maybe a whole year. Better save the honey for Caspian’s soy business. Younglove Unlimited didn’t need any help from UBI, but since his company supplied the entirety of Ubastis’s soy products, it still behooved us to play the game.
It took a short while to load everything. Everyone’s packs, my guns in their cases, spare ammunition, the three rolling boxes that we’d hauled up the flights of stairs—Joop helped with none of it, letting Zhádāo and Bearce horse their own stuff up into the passenger section. Only the Beast he worked with, the two of them maneuvering the rest of the gear into the hold with admirable efficiency. Not a step wrong, as far as I could tell, and I was watching them like a theropod.
Joop slammed the bolt on the cargo door home and sauntered away without hesitation. Instead of following him, the Beast sank to his knees for a moment. Adjusting a show? Scratching an itch?
No. Touching the grass; rather, the ash left by the heat generated by the VeeTOL’s landing. Then rubbing his fingertips together. When he saw me watching him he froze.
In daylight I saw how much he’d changed since he’d emerged from the vectragel. Hair growth had kicked back in, stubbling his jaws and chin, standing up in brown-blonde tufts. Gone were the donated dress clothes and he wore a simple thigh-length white kurta with a brown vest, dark pants tucked into boots. For a moment he looked like any other Ubasti—maybe a little brawnier than most—but of us and in us a
nd belonging here.
What if I just stop fighting?
The day you stop fighting is the day you die.
To titillate the clients, Joop left the shield open. Our take-off was like being lifted in a giant hand, an exhilarating vertical rush, leaving stomachs hovering somewhere in the middle air. Hardened space traveler that he was, Bearce grabbed his shoulder bar. Even Zhádāo widened her eyes. The Beast wore the tiniest of smiles. I whooped.
“Take us over the drop,” I shouted.
Joop gave the thumbs-up. Beneath my feet the floor trembled as the rotors shifted in their housings, and the VeeTOL took us over the cliff. The windshear caught us, bouncing us about in our seats, but Joop pushed the VeeTOL up and past the turbulence, turning in a wide, shallow bank like the curve of a lover’s arm, and the whole of the Big Tawny spread before us.
Kilometer after kilometer of graminoids, like enough to certain earth grasses that (uneasily) we called them poaceae. At this time of year, early summer, the brief spring burst of chlorophyl was on the wane, a green shadow retreating to the root now. Above the last pulse of green, the seed heads rippled in silvery eddies of fawn, rust, lavender, and the amber that gave the plain its name. One could imagine combing fingers through it as if through an animal’s pelt. Where the wind itself walked, the grass trembled and shimmered all the way to the horizon where the blue burned down to join it.
The flight to my chosen point took the whole morning, a quiet, sleepy affair once Joop brought up the shield and settled down to flying. With the shield up, our harnesses released, we could stretch and move about as we pleased, to watch the scenery, talk, eat, sleep, use the head. Bearce again positioned himself advantageously, near the rear, while I sat closest to Joop. Zhádāo chose a seat at a polite distance from me, close enough for conversation, but at the limits of personal space. The Beast must have been feeling much more comfortable, long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankle.
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