The Albino Knife

by Steve Perry

  "His name was Arl, and he was maybe fifty T.S. He had been my mother's lover a couple of years past, and she had picked him for me then, against the day when I was old enough. He was from Spandle.Old enough to be my grandfather."

  "Arl was a teacher. It was his job, his avocation, his reason for being. He lived to teach. He made me feelcherished, he spent weeks preparing me, weeks, so that when finally we breached my virginity, it was but one part of the total experience. As a lover, he was kind, gentle, and expert. It was a beautiful thing, my first time."

  "On most worlds, sleeping with a twelve-year-old human or mue is a crime—and rightly so. But an Albino Exotic is not made the same way normal humans are, and twelve is old by our standards. Many of us start years earlier. We reach puberty, on average, at nine. I was sexually mature at eight. But I was protected by my mother, who wanted me to have an experience most of us Exotics do not have time to enjoy."

  "Arl was patient, he was careful, and he showed me how good lovemaking could be, if one took the time and effort to make it so. I have been with scores of partners since— men, women, humans, mues—and some experiences have been better, though not many. I have learned more about myself; it is not bragging to say I've become skilled to the point of artistry. It is what my kindwere created to do. It's something wehave to have, to feel whole."

  She looked up at him, locked her gaze to his, and he could feel her willing him to see and understand her.

  "You said that it isn't about technique for you. That it is about love. It is beyond my understanding that a person could, for some abstract principle, give up something around which my life and the lives of my kind are based. That you would refuse my offer, something that many have fought for and at least one has killed to have, impresses me. Especially since Iknow how much you want me."

  Her voice, when next she spoke, was quieter still, and he heard the quivering undercurrent in it.

  "Arl taught me about sex and until now, sex has always been enough. I know what there is to know about technique, I know the ways of pleasure, and—I don't know why—it suddenly isn't enough anymore. That scares me. I never worried about love. I don't know about love. Before, it didn't matter, I didn't need it; but now, Ineed to know."

  She took a deep breath. "Will you teach me about love, Saval Bork?"

  And in that moment, she had no defenses; he could see her for what she was: a young woman who only pretended to be hard and invulnerable. And one who had just opened her heart to him.Just as Mayli had done, so long ago. You can't force it, she had told him. Love comes as it will and it may leave just as quickly. You must be in the moment or you will lose it. You can't define it, but you will know it when you see it.

  Now, in this moment, Bork saw something he had never expected to see again. It was like a hammer to his solar plexus. He felt weak. He felt blessed. He felt cursed.

  Damn.

  He sighed. There was really only one choice. "Okay," he said.

  He gathered her into his arms and huggedher, that was all. Not quite like a father holds a child, but not like one lover holds another. Not yet.

  She started to cry. After a little bit, Bork did too.

  Damn.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE BUS FANNED to a stop in front of the Presidential Office Building in Brisbane , settling to the safety wheels in a blast of dusty air. The three-side doors slid open and the passengers, all dressed in billowy green robes, began to pour from the bus like off-world tourists discovering a historical marker.

  Only instead of cameras, these tourists carried weapons. Some bore modern carbines, some had military wands, others brandished antique rifles or handguns. A few in the small mad sea of green even waved swords. There were fifty-seven of them, all human men or women. They screamed and chanted as they began to move, yelling "Death to the Evil One!" and "Carlos must die!" and "For the Glory of the One True God!"

  They rushed the nearest entrance gate, which the security computer immediately closed and locked.

  The attackers began firing at the control mechanism.

  Three of the green-clad people were splattered by ricocheting bullet fragments seriously enough to be knocked down bleeding, while several others were wounded but not incapacitated.

  Eight of the more impatient leaders leaped into the densethorn hedge, trying to bull or cut their way through to the grounds beyond. It was like trying to shove through a nest of fishhooks. All eight were impaled upon the brambles, held fast as bugs in amber.

  As the gate continued to withstand the barrage of small arms fire, four more of the screaming fanatics set themselves as human catapults, using their interlaced hands to launch others of their fellows into tumbling flights over the living barrier. Two of these pseudoflights fell short, ending in falls into the hedge, trapping securely the would-be birds. Two fliers attained the grounds. Of these, one broke her left tibia upon landing, and the other sprained his ankle. The one with the sprained ankle continued to hobble toward his goal. The one with the broken leg crawled.

  The gate, not designed to hold up under the concentrated hammering of more than a dozen weapons at once, finally sprang open. The remaining attackers boiled through the breach and charged the building.

  The grounds' automatic zap fields triggered, and thirty-one of the running figures were immediately knocked sprawling, unconscious.

  The remaining group, it would be learned later, were pumped so full of analgesic and psychedelic chems that the zap field only stunned them slightly, a thing known to be possible but seldom seen in practice.

  With the partial failure of the zap field, the security computer automatically heated the antipersonnel lasers and brought them online, and the high-wattage beams of coherent orange light fanned across the grounds in three-quarter-second pulses, at a preset height of just under a meter.

  Two of the running attackers, both of whom were later found to be wearing stolen class-three military armor under their robes, continued moving, as did the crawling woman with the broken leg. The rest of those not already flattened by the zap field were cut down by the lasers. Only two would die from massive shock when major arteries and organs were severed. All the others would be treated in time.

  Thus far, the security computer recorded, eighty-eight seconds had elapsed since the arrival of the bus.

  Of the three remaining attackers still moving toward the building, the two in armor reached the door first.

  Each fired the better part of a full magazine of AP slugs at the carbonex, which ate the metal pellets as if they were so much popcorn. When the pair stopped to reload their weapons, the door snapped open and two of Rajeem Carlos's personal matadors leaped out and shot the fanatics. Tam Slaver's spetsdod dart caught his target on the forehead, slightly above the right between the eyes, knocking the man unconscious almost instantly. Beryl li Rouge put three shocktox darts into her target, one smack on the chin and one into each of his bare hands, dropping him.

  The crawling woman with the broken leg managed to get one wild shot off from her handgun before both matadors put darts into her. The woman's shot hit the building wall two meters above the front door and did no damage. Even so, Staver and Rouge were very unhappy that the fanatic had managed that much.

  Elapsed time, according to the security computer, was one hundred and seventeen seconds.

  In the largest of his rooms, Khadaji waved a hand and the holoproj faded. The others looked at him with varying degrees of disbelief and wonder.

  "Pretty stupid attack," Sleel said. "They could have had three or four times that many and still gotten chopped into slaw."

  "They could have all gotten into the building and never reached Carlos," Veate said.

  "Why'd they do it?" Bork asked.

  "Their god told them to, according to the survivors," Khadaji said.

  "Who really told them?" Geneva asked.

  "Well, the inner sanctum of their temple was wired into a mainframe computer.That give you any ideas?"

  "Whoever
is doing this could have taken a page from your book," Dirisha said. "You used to do the same kind of shit to the Confed."

  "I wasn't the first," Khadaji said. "It was an old tactic, guerrilla hit-and-run. Stir up enough dust, your enemy won't see what you are really doing."

  Sleel said, "Anybody notice that there'salways a computer involved in these things somewhere?"

  Veate, sitting next to Bork, pressed her leg against his, just to watch him blush. She said to Dirisha,

  "What about the information you got from Black Sun?"

  Dirisha held the info disc up."Right here." She walked to the computer and adjusted a control, then fed the disc into the reader.

  A face shimmered into being above the comp, a close view of a man, the POV then pulling back for a full-figure shot.

  Veate gasped. "That's the man in the recording from my mother's cube!"

  Khadaji nodded.

  A chunk of stats lit under the image, listing a name and personal physical information about the man.

  "Cteel," Khadaji said. "Where do I know that name from?"

  "It's pretty common," Dirisha said.

  Geneva said, "Probably an alias."

  "Nah," Dirisha said, "who would deliberately choose a name that sounded like some kind of sea creature?"

  "Funny," Sleel said."Very funny."

  "He was spotted here, on Earth," Bork pointed out. "Look."

  The others fell silent as they read the information.

  "Do you think my mother is here?On the same world?"

  "The guy who took her is," Bork said. "If she's still with him, that'd make sense, wouldn't it?"

  Khadaji didn't say what he knew at least some of the others were thinking. Traveling from Vishnu to Earth with a kidnap victim wouldn't be the easiest thing anybody had ever done. The kidnapper might not have brought her, and if he left her, maybe she wasn't alive.

  He didn't want to think about that. He'd walked away from Juete once; he didn't want to lose her again, not like this.

  "He was seen in New Rio de Janeiro. Computer, give us a map of Rio de Janeiro , and five hundred kilometers around it."

  The air lit with the map.

  "Oh, yeah, the country that looks like somebody's nose.Southern Hemisphere, right?" Sleel said.

  "That's the place," Khadaji said.

  "So, what do we do? Go down and cruise the streets looking for this guy?"

  Khadaji looked at Sleel. "I'm open to other suggestions. If Black Sun spotted him there once, they must have people who can spot him again. I can get Rajeem Carlos to send some of his people."

  "Maybe not," Dirisha said. "We don't want to muck up the water too much.Might scare our fish off. If a few of us went down and were discreet, we might do better."

  "You have a point."

  Veate said, "He could have left."

  "True," Khadaji said, "but a cold trail is better than none at all. If we can find this guy, we might convince him to tell us about Juete."

  "Oh, no doubt about that at all," Sleel said.

  Bork and Veate went to rent a long-distance vehicle. What they found was a ten-passenger hopper with a cruising range of eight thousand kilometers. Bork piloted the craft from the rental agency back to the hotel, handling the chore with an offhand expertise. They could take commercial transportation and rent flitters locally, he explained, but the closer you got to a quarry, the more careful you had to be, so better that they had sure transport sooner than later. There was no way to tell if the guy they were hunting had connections where he was, and maybe somebody might tip him. Better safe than sorry.

  Veate had mixed feelings. She very much wanted to find her mother. She also wanted to stay next to Bork and continue learning what he was teaching her.

  She watched the muscles play quietly under his orthoskins as he adjusted the hopper's controls, still somewhat amazed atherself . They had not become lovers. They talked a lot, they sometimes touched, but the connection lacked the carnal heat to which she was accustomed. The fires were there, but banked and in control. He wanted her, but he would not do it. Not yet. They didn't know each other well enough, he'd said. And maybe that would happen and maybe it wouldn't. It was rattling Veate no end.

  Bork told her about himself, things he kept private, and she still wasn't quite sure why he was doing it.

  During one session, he spoke of his father.

  "Yeah, we didn't get along too well, my da and me. He was big, bigger than I am now, and strong. He was a lug-hauler, he did physical work all day, and he liked it. Our kind of mue, we were originally designed for heavy-gravitywork, our bones are denser than yours, our ligaments levered better, our blood richer. Course by the time I was born, my parents had lived on four worlds. I started out to be a lug-hauler, so'd my sister, but neither of us turned out quite like Da wanted."

  "You have a sister?"

  "Yeah. Four years younger. She's a local cool on Tembo."

  "Street police?"

  "Detective."

  Veate tried to imagine what a female version of Saval Bork might look like.And how she might appear to some wrongdoer as she collected him.Impressive, no doubt.

  "Anyway, my da kept order the old way, the back of his hand. One day I blocked the slap. I was about seventeen T.S. He beat the crap out of me; he was still twenty-five kilos heavier and a lot stronger. So I started working out harder. When I hit nineteen, I was almost as big as he was and I was pretty sure I was stronger."

  "So you clobbered him the next time he tried to hit you?"

  Bork shook his head. "No. We used to arm wrestle, when he was in a good mood. Course, he'd always beaten me. When I was nineteen, one night after dinner, we arm wrestled again. That was when I knew I was stronger. I could feel the power of his grip and his arm, but I knew I could win.No doubt at all."

  "Ah, a symbolic victory.So what happened when you won?"

  "I didn't. I let him win."

  She blinked."But—why? You could have defeated him and made your point. He'd have known you were capable of defeating him in a real fight, or at least of giving him real competition."

  Bork shrugged. "I knew I could, so I didn't need to. My da was fairly limited in what he could do. His strength was all he really had. I didn't want to take that away from him. I left pretty soon after that anyhow."

  Veate shook her head. She'd been right about one thing. Bork wasn't stupid. He did have the soul of a poet. How many people were content to know a thing aboutthemselves without having to prove it to others? How many men had she known who would have let their enemy escape when they had the advantage?Few. If any—

  "Landing in a minute," Bork said, breaking into Veate's memory scan. She smiled at him. He was going to look for her mother and she was not. Her father had told her that having another Albino Exotic running around down there, one who was the image of the kidnapped woman, might throw grit into the machine.

  Better she should pursue other avenues. But she was sure going to miss Saval. Every time she found out something about him, she learned something about herself. It was, in its strange way, quite amazing.

  Impulsively, she said, "I'm going to miss you."

  He grinned."Yeah. I'll miss you, too."

  That simple statement gave her more pleasure than the best lover she'd ever had.Which made no sense at all.

  "Progress, Jambi?"

  The doctor nodded at the holoproj of his employer. "Yes. My assistants, men of not inconsiderable talent, have begun to come up to speed. Our new biogens are nearly ready to go online. The computations and nanomachinery programming are in synch. At this rate, we can hope to test in four months."

  "And if you skip, as you said, the primate studies?"

  "Perhaps nine weeks."

  "Very impressive, doctor.Have you written your acceptance speech for the Kothar Prize yet?"

  This drew a small smile from Jambi. "One must not count embryos before the ova are fertilized. Still, it is not an impossibility to consider the Kothar within reach."

>   "Succeed in this and that will be the least of your glories, doctor."

  Jambi tried to keep his face neutral, but Wall had no trouble at all watching the dreams play across his features. It would indeed be a biological miracle and one of which any scientist could be rightly proud.

  Perhaps the visions would keep the good doctor blind to the dangers until it was too late. Wall hoped so.

  Part Three

  Point Death

  C

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THE HOPPER HAD more than enough room for the four of them. Bork piloted the vehicle, as he usually did whenever he was on a mission. The big man had a way with aircraft. Must have been a bird in some past incarnation, Dirisha sometimes said.

  Sleel was asleep in the back row of seats, sprawled and obviously comfortable, since he hadn't moved much in the last couple of hours.

  Geneva peered through the thin sheets of denscris that made up the double window next to her seat, watching the ground far below. They were over the giant farming complex of central Nor Am, east of the Rockies and west of the Mississippi River. Vast overlapping circles of greenery dotted the land, robot-tended fields of various crops too far below to be distinguished as to a particular kind. Some of the circles had to be several kilometers across and there were hundreds of them. The world's bread-basket, they called it. Ten decades past, the entire area had been replanned, and many of the cities had been deserted and eventually plowed under for more cropland.

  Dirisha herself sat staring into nowhere, remembering the adventures of years before, and realizing how much she had missed the action. After the fall of the Confed, an enemy she'd never really thought they'd defeat, life had shrunk somewhat. Sure, she and Geneva had good times together; love was always a major factor. They'd toyed with the idea of having a child, maybe a couple, but it hadn't ever gotten beyond the wouldn't-it-be-interesting? stage. Geneva would make a good mother, but Dirisha had her doubts about her own abilities in that direction.