A gritty floor, dim light, towering, dirty fa‡ades. Procyon had no idea how he had come to be lying in discarded plastic in system twilight with a hellacious headache, but he was.
Suddenly remembering cleaning robots-stupid robots that couldn't tell him from the trash-he scrambled up.
He got as far as his knees before the pain in his forehead dropped him onto his elbows, momentarily blind. He crawled over against the wall to let his heart settle down and his vision clear. It did, and to his horror he found himself in a service nook facing a cleaner slot, one of those little gates where the service bots went back into the secret places of the station. He'd never paid attention to them. Now he remembered being dragged off inside. If things couldn't fit in the slots, bots took them apart, ripped plastics, shredded metal.
But they weren't supposed to take dead bodies, let alone living people.
Had it happened at all? Or was he hallucinating the whole thing?
He didn't know how he'd gotten here. He felt heat in his face, heat running through all his body.
That wasn't right. Like when he'd taken the Project dose, that was what it felt like, when he'd first acquired the high-tech tap and the visual machines. Beyond the fever, his head hurt, back to front and side to side, a lancing pain that slowly centered on his forehead.
He felt of his forehead, expecting blood. There wasn't. Just a welt. And in a self-preservative moment of clear thinking, he wanted away from that cleaner slot, as far as he could get, in case he passed out again.
He got a knee under him, hands on the wall, and levered his way up to his feet.
There. Nothing broken. Hell of a headache. General sick feeling, from gut to diaphragm.
Then he remembered Gide.
He remembered talking to Luz.
And the Ila.
He immediately tried to make the blood shunt to contact the office. The effort sent pain through the roots of his teeth, total disruption of vision and sense that dropped him where he stood. He tried again, ignoring the pain, and it just wouldn't happen. All he heard was the distant, constant noise of the street.
Then:
"Procyon."
Luz. His heart jolted in panic and he braced himself for the white pain that was the Ila.
But the next sound was a man's voice, a familiar, welcome voice.
"Procyon."
"Marak-omi." Relief and terror at once. He was on his rump in an alley in fear for his life and his continuance in the program, and Marak had found him again, through Luz-Marak, who had every reason to be upset with his absence in this crazed mess. He staggered to his feet. "I'm very sorry, sir. I've been trying as hard as I can to get back to you." As if he'd just missed a phone call. Fool. And his voice was shaking so he didn't know if Marak could even understand him. "I have a small problem." Twice fool. He'd promised Marak he'd be back before now. Before.
He couldn't remember.
"I'm still trying to get home, sir."
"Are you in safety now?"
"I think I'm fairly safe now, yes, sir."
"What is Brazis doing about your situation?"
"I don't know, sir." He didn't know how much Marak actually knew about Brazis, about the station, or by now, about the craziness that was going on. Marak's question, What is Brazis doing? ricocheted off the completely unrelated fact that flashed into his mind, that some tremendous force had come past him in a doorway, from the outside, from the garden. Not his apartment. The ambassador's.
Security had suffered a massive lapse-if it was an accidental lapse. Gide hadn't just blown up. Someone had fired past him. He'd tried to help Gide. And it wasn't his fault.
Very big events were sailing over his head, and one lowly tap, even if he was Marak's, wasn't on that high a priority for survival-not in the scale of governments having an argument. Brazis assuredly wouldn't risk the Project for him.
But Marak, who didn't give a damn about most that existed up here. Marak was contacting him, like the Ila, through relays he was sure weren't part of the public system.
"I think I'm in trouble," he confided to Marak, trying not to shiver. "I think I'm in very serious trouble."
"Explain," Marak said, an order from a man for unthinkable ages used to being obeyed; and just as quickly, in the tones of any man having found something lost: "Hati, I have him. He says he is away from home and in trouble."
Hati said something. There was a faint rumble.
"What was that, sir?"
"Thunder," Marak said.
His own pain dimmed. "Have you shelter? Are you in danger?"
"Dismiss concern for us. Listen. You never should have been involved with this Earth lord. Now the Ila has found a way to reach you, Brazis knows it, others in the heavens may know it, and Ian and Luz certainly know how it was done. This is a dangerous situation."
Another rumbling of thunder. He heard beshti call out, that rare and eerie sound, as he sat shivering next to an ominous gateway in an alley nook. His teeth chattered shamefully. But it was a comfort to hear those sounds, to settle his mind down on the world. "I am safe at the moment, omi."
"Take no chances," Marak said. "Avoid all disputes with the Ila."
"Yes, sir," he said. The tap had never hurt, not since his first days on the system, but now it ached from the base of his skull to the roots of his teeth, and his forehead stung as if he'd been burned. The relays out here seemed at the point of overload. So did he. He bowed his head into his arms, intending to follow Marak's advice and not budge or use the tap until he had guidance.
The pain became too much. He lost whatever Marak had said. He lost Marak. He was blind, beset with flashing lights that floated in his vision.
"Procyon. Answer me. Where are you?" Marak again.
"Trying to figure that out, sir. A street-near where I live. I have a terrible headache. I'm trying to get home."
"How far is that?"
"Not that far." Complications in his situation recurred to him. The lost coat. The dark place. Earther authorities were looking to get their hands on him. "I think it's night." Night was when they took the lights down on the streets, to satisfy the human need for night, for change in the day. White light went down and neon came up, and then a person trying to get home could be a little less conspicuous.
Unless police happened to be watching his apartment. Police had been following him. He thought they had been following him. He had a memory, a quick flash, finding blood on his coat. He'd lost the coat, thrown it away, to avoid detection. What else had he done?
"Procyon, are you safe?"
"I think so, sir. It hurts. I want to let the headache go away. It's hard to think. Give me an hour, sir. About an hour. I'll get on home. I promise you I'll be all right."
An hour on, the attempt at contact died in a confused flutter of noise and lights, and Marak, sitting cross-legged on the ground, gave Hati a worried look.
"I cannot find him."
"Brazis?"
"I have said all I shall say to Brazis."
Twilight had come down, deep and strange. The contact he attempted kept fading out.
But the storm was coming on. Even near the relay, the signals might grow chancy.
They had not overtaken their fugitives, who had remained elusive and skittish with the weather. Cloud covered most of the sky now, flashing with lightnings, rumbling with thunder. The prospect of the oncoming gust front was what had persuaded them they should drive down the deep-stakes in the last of the light and take what rest they dared. The strange smell on the wind increased with surface air sweeping out of the west, a smell like old weed, wet sand, heated rock. It would be a blow. It would be a very strong blow.
"He is injured, whether by the goings-on with this man from Earth, or by the Ila's recklessness." He was angry at the entire situation. He clenched one hand over the other wrist, arms about his knees, gazing out into the murky distances of the basin below them, the spire-covered descent of sandstone terraces. "I will try again before we move."
/> The beshti, double-tethered with deep-irons right beside their sleeping mat, grazed on sweetweed that grew in a drift of sandy soil, as content as beshti could be, in this isolate, dangerous place, with the skies muttering warnings and the wind rising.
Their legs ached from their long, generally downward ride, constant jolting against one bracing leg or the other. It should have been a profound relief, too, finally to reach Procyon and prove that he was alive.
"Perhaps we should tell Ian," Hati said. "If not Brazis."
"Neither," he decided. "Neither, until I have some indication where his safety may lie. He claimed he was going home, which by no means sounded safe, if enemies were looking for him. An hour, he said. Now the contact fails. Perhaps the weather. But we have nothing from him. We have nothing from Ian."
"Husband, we have to look to ourselves. Time to go up."
Events pressed hard on them. They had come within hearing of the herd, and lost them. They camped now right at the crest of the rocky slant that was the herd's last and most frustrating escape. Contact with the Refuge had gone. Their terrace was broad and well away from overhangs, which protected them from quake. But that was not saying what layers of soft sediment underlay it, and what the rain might do.
Worse, they were about to lose the tracks, once rain came coursing down the myriad channels that laced across the slopes. They might pick them up after, in wet sand, but that was hoping the rain would stop before the flood overtook them.
"Shut your eyes," Hati said, hugging him in a little shiver of the earth, so slight even the weary, feeding beshti were indifferent to it. "Rest for what time we can, and hope the fog holds off. If we have to climb in a hurry, we climb, and hope the fool beshti out there do the same. The boys will meet us up on the ridge. For now, rest. We have done all we could. We cannot fight the rain. Shut your eyes. Half an hour. Then we climb out of this."
He put his arms around her and they lay down together, he lapping his robes across her, and hers across him.
In the dearth of information from the heavens, who alone had a comprehensive view of the situation, it became the only sane choice: get as much rest as they could before the weather turned, then pack up and climb back to relative safety. They would have to find the boys and walk down off the ridge, at the best speed they could manage, with their two beshti to carry canvas and supplies. They might see their new sea. They only hoped not to see it yet.
11
The Halcyon said it didn't take credit cards, which was just crazy. Every place in the universe took credit cards. But the Halcyon said it didn't, wouldn't, or maybe the manager just meant this card, which could be risky to raise a louder fuss about, Mignette thought, if her father had finally put a limit, or worse, a trace, on it. So she shut up, near to tears.
She was tired, she'd had a drink, she felt a little sick, and scared, and she and Noble were going to do it together if she could get a room at all, which at this point didn't look as likely as before. Michaelangelo's had turned out to be shut to anybody but current tenants. She was sure her father had done that, likely looking for her and making an untidy amount of noise about it.
That meant all the people that might have been partying late at Michaelangelo's, where they were supposed to meet Tink and Random as a last resort, were all scattered out all up and down Blunt, maybe competing for other rooms, which could mean there weren't that many to be had up and down the street. Someone said all the other places with rooms had raised the single night rate, because of Michaelangelo's shutdown. And they'd only found this one room, here, in a place they ought to be able to afford, a place that wasn't too dirty, and now the stupid asses who ran it decided they didn't want to take her card. She just wanted to scream, and didn't dare. It was only her self-restraint that brought her close to tears. It was pure temper, and the effort not to curse them up one side and down the other.
They had no actual cash, she and Noble. She'd never handled cash in her life, beyond a few chits for street fairs, and here she and Noble were trying to have their romantic night, which was supposed to be so special, and now she was so upset from arguing with a fool with disgusting cologne about a not-very-good room that she felt like throwing up. Now Noble was mad about the room situation-he was scowling and looking off at the bar, with his hands in his pockets. He was about to sulk and get rude to everybody around him, she saw it coming, and he had no sense when he got mad. He scared her.
Desperate, she left Noble and went back to the front desk to try again. "We've just got to have a room," she said, and burst all the way into tears. Tears sometimes worked. They did with her father.
"Well, I could do something for you," the man at the desk said, "if you do something for me."
"What's that?" she asked, and the man got off his stool and moved over to the office door.
"Come in here," he said.
She was stunned. "No!" she said, not half believing she'd just been propositioned by an old man in a cheap sweatshirt. She was outraged. Her face burned.
"Then get out of here," the man said. "Out!"
She was embarrassed to death to be crying in front of this man. "Come on," she said to Noble, and he still stood there like a lump with his hands in his pockets. She grabbed his elbow hard and tried to pull him out onto the street. He stood like a piece of the scenery and resisted going anywhere, being an ass.
"So what are we going to do, walk the streets all night?" he asked her.
She was furious. "I don't know what we're going to do, but I'm not going to sleep with that pig to get us a room!"
Noble took his hands out of his pockets and looked back at the front desk, as if he'd just waked up to the world.
He didn't, however, offer to go back to the desk and beat hell out of the pig.
"So where are we going to go?" he asked her.
"Well, you don't blame me, do you?" Her face had gone embarrassingly red, she knew it had, and people were staring at them, watchers all around the shadowy lobby with its imitation plants and its invitation wood. They'd become the show of the evening. People were sniggering. "They don't take cards, they won't talk, and when my father hears about this, oh, I promise you, that bastard is going to be looking for a ticket to Orb!" She said the last so the bastard would hear, but when she turned around, dragging Noble toward a dramatic exit, she ran straight into a living shadow, one of the Stylists, it had to be, that she had nearly bumped into. One of the beautiful people. Her embarrassment was complete.
"Well," this vision of beauty said.
Male voice. Silken voice. The face was red as blood on the left side, black as space on the right, with tendrils wandering actively between. The eyes glowed with red, inner fire.
And this person, this Stylist, took her hand and held it, a warm, a wonderful touch. "A genuine damsel in distress."
"Just a little trouble," she said shakily, letting go of Noble. She was unwilling to admit to this vision what an embarrassing financial trouble they were in-out of money and out of ideas.
"Do you need a place to stay tonight, lovely?"
"Myself-" She didn't want to admit to this gorgeous creature that she was attached to the sullen, unstylish teenaged lump sulking behind her with his hands in his pockets, but she had come here with Noble and she found herself standing by that fact. Maybe it was a sense of honor, even if it drove this gorgeous being away. Maybe it was fear. Noble was her safety, her barrier against transactions she didn't altogether understand. She said shakily: "And him."
"Oh, well. One, two, no difficulty." An ink black, fire-shot hand lifted to brush an airy touch across her cheek. "He can come along, too. But who are you, pretty thing?"
"Mignette." A Stylist thought she was pretty. Her heart raced, fluttered, raced. "I'm Mignette. He's Noble."
"Algol," her vision said, and flourished a gesture toward the outer door.
She walked with him out onto the street. Noble slouched along at their heels.
"An inconvenience, this disturbance up and down the
street."
Algol said, "but not to those of us with forethought and connections. You tried Michaelangelo's."
"It's shut," she protested.
"Oh, not to those of us who live there. You're new to the street, aren't you?"
She had to admit it. "I just arrived. Noble and I-"
"Oh, well, and the police have to show their authority now and again, darling girl. It's this Earth visitor that has them buzzing about. But their orders don't apply upstairs, to private apartments. Dear girl, we who have the keys to the place do as we please. We always have, always will. Such pretty eyes you have."
The contacts were just commercial, off the rack. She didn't feel constrained to blurt that out. She looked really good. She hadn't known how good. Her heart skipped and danced as they walked, together, in beautiful company.
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