The Iron Maiden

by Piers Anthony

  “Sit there. Put your arm around the young lady.”

  “That spic?” he demanded angrily. “I wouldn’t touch her with—”

  Spirit’s laser tube swung around to bear on his nose.

  “Uh, yeah, sure,” he said, disgruntled. He took the seat and moved his left arm.

  “Keep your filthy Saxon hands to yourself!” the girl snapped in Spanish.

  “Suffer yourself to be touched by this man,” Hope told her in the same language. “We want to show the crowd how tolerant their leader is.”

  Her eyes widened as she caught on. She smiled sweetly. “Come here, you Saxon tub of sewage,” she said in dulcet Spanish tones. “Put your big fat stinking white paw on me, snotface.”

  It went on from there, with the publicity cameras watching. Hope exerted his genius and in due course got the labor leader and the Hispanic girl to agree on a city program for the mayor to implement, that would bring more jobs for both factions. And the two natural enemies actually began to warm to each other.

  “Know something, Captain?” the mayor said to Hope. “You’re a born politician.”

  And that profession was exactly what Hope had in mind. It wasn’t that he craved notoriety or power, but that he had a woman to win and a score to settle. Spirit would support him in both quests.

  They took a shuttle flight to the state of Sunshine and the city of Ybor, and to the suburb of Pineleaf, which was a small spinning bubble reminding her of their early life in Half-cal and the disaster of the refugee bubble.

  “Do you still have your finger-whip?” Hope asked her as they explored it.

  “I can get one,” she replied, laughing. It was good to laugh; she was beginning to reorient on the new reality, putting the pain of the Navy betrayal half a step behind her.

  Within a day they discovered racism: an anonymous neighbor did not like the fact that they were Hispanic. But a non-anonymous neighbor went out of her way to counter it, and they were made welcome. As Hope put it: “Prejudice, racism, and unprovoked hate do exist in our society, though normally they are masked; they do their mischief in darkness. But they are more than compensated by the elements of openness, tolerance, and fairness that manifest in light.” When it came to conceptual expression, Hope was the one.

  They had funds from their Navy retirement to sustain them for some time, so did not have to obtain paying work immediately. Instead they oriented on Hope’s next objective: Megan, the woman he believed he could love. He was a dreamer in his fashion, but that was all right; Spirit had enough practical sense to keep him functioning. She envied him his fancy; he had lost his first love, but at least had hope of a second one. Spirit had no such hope. She was not about to delude herself that any other man could ever take the place of Gerald in her life and heart.

  Gerald. She hoped he was satisfied with Roulette. It had been a marriage of convenience to salvage what the Beautiful Dreamer had dreamed and Hope had made, but the girl was smart, nervy, beautiful, and passionate, and had essential connections. They would be having sex, of course, with or without love, because it was the Navy way, but Gerald was so gentle and Rue so masochistic that it was probably perfunctory. Spirit hoped they found some viable compromise. She discovered that she was motivated not by jealousy, but by the wish for Gerald to be happy. Maybe Rue could fake it, letting her unparalleled body carry the onus. Maybe Gerald could fake brutality with a feather whip, making The Ravished come truly to life.

  But for now Spirit could sublimate her core of grief by focusing on her brother’s prospective romance. “Call Kife,” she told him once they were settled in.

  He needed no second urging. He put in a call to a code he had memorized. The letter Q appeared on the screen. “This is Hope Hubris.”

  In a moment the screen lighted with a silent schematic of the Pineleaf apartment complex, with one apartment briefly highlighted. Then it faded, and the connection broke.

  He looked at Spirit. “Here?”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “Yes. I thought they’d just arrange to print out the data—”

  “She’s a woman, Hope.”

  He laughed. “She’s interested in my career, not my body!”

  “So am I.”

  He glanced at her, for a moment fathoming the farther reaches of that statement. Spirit was interested in his career, as hers was bound to his, but that was hardly the limit of their association. The JYV woman, Reba, had recommended that Hope get into politics, and hinted that she, and therefore QYV, would lend its potent subtle support; he would be expected to reciprocate as convenient and/or necessary. But no woman was immune to Hope’s magnetism, and so it figured that however coldly ambitious Reba was, she also had at least a small worm of desire for his favor gnawing in her core.

  “But it is to locate Megan that I need Kife,” he said.

  “You haven’t located her yet.”

  He got the point: therefore he was not yet committed. So he could exercise his charm on this smart, tough, ambitious older woman, and perhaps gain by it.

  He went alone, taking along his manuscript of Navy experience to give her for safekeeping. Reba had obtained the Refugee manuscript, and there was no reason to doubt her sincerity in protecting it.

  He returned some time later, visibly awed. “She’s young—my age,” he said. “And she does have an interest.”

  “Of course.”

  “She says I am potentially Jupiter’s next president.”

  Even Spirit was floored by that. “President! I thought some state office, maybe mayor of a city.”

  “She is ambitious, and means to use me to further it. I am daunted by the power of her mind and her grasp of reality. If we associated, I might orbit her.”

  Instead of the woman orbiting him in the usual manner. Any woman could impress Hope with her body, but few impressed him with their minds. If he was shaken, Spirit needed to take warning: Reba was dangerous.

  “I kissed her,” he added.

  “Then you set her back.”

  He nodded. “I had to. She is too strong not to counter in some way.”

  Spirit nodded. That worm of desire would now be a snake. Reba might have power to affect Hope’s career, but she would have a continuing hunger for his embrace. That would mitigate her sternness in dealing with him.

  “She gave me something.”

  It was a case similar to the one he had had containing his Navy manuscript. That hinted at the woman’s research; she had been prepared even in that detail. It was filled with material relating to Megan. They studied it together.

  Megan had a considerable history. In her youth she had been an excellent singer; then she had entered politics and run for Congress. She had served as congresswoman, then run for senator—and been sabotaged by a completely unscrupulous opportunist. Megan was a liberal, concerned with human values and the alleviation of poverty and oppression on the planet, and her political record reflected this. Her opponent, an aggressive man named Tocsin, was a creature of the affluent special interests. He promptly denounced her as “soft on Saturnism,” that being the dirtiest political accusation it was possible to make. Theoretically the government of Saturn represented the comrades of the working class; actually it was a leftist dictatorship that suppressed the working class as ruthlessly as did any other system. Megan certainly had not supported that; she believed in human rights. It was a scurrilous tactic, an open smear campaign—but it worked. Tocsin won the election. Megan had supposed that competence, experience, and goodwill should carry the day; she had been brutally disabused.

  “That woman was raped,” Spirit murmured.

  Megan was five years Hope’s senior, a pedigreed Saxon, but that would not matter when he got close to her. She was beautiful, and as Reba had said, she dwarfed Helse in intelligence and competence, though Spirit did not bring that up. She did indeed seem like an excellent match for him, and not merely because of his fixation stemming from her slight physical resemblance to Helse. Hope needed a woman t
o take care of him, and Megan could certainly do that. With Megan in his life, Spirit would have greater freedom to focus on other matters, as had been the case when Emerald handled his career.

  Megan had probably never heard of Hope Hubris, but he intended to marry her. And Spirit would do her best to make it happen.

  Megan lived well around the planet from Sunshine, in the state of Golden. So they traveled there, and went to her residence without an appointment. They asked for her by intercom. And Megan declined to see him.

  “She was a singer,” Spirit murmured.

  He grasped at that straw. “Tell her Captain Hubris will sing her his song!” he exclaimed. “She need only listen, then I will go. Surely she will grant this much to one who has crossed the planet to meet her.”

  The gatekeeper, plainly impatient with this nonsense, nevertheless buzzed her again. “Ma’am, he is insistent. He promises to depart if you will listen to his song.” There was a pause, then he repeated, “Captain Hubris. He says he has crossed the planet to meet you. There is a woman with him.” He paused again. Then he glanced at Hope. “Sing your song, sir.”

  Hope sang his song: Worried Man Blues. “It takes a worried man to sing a worried song…I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long.”

  Now Megan spoke directly to Hope. “Who is the woman with you, Captain?”

  “My sister, Spirit Hubris.”

  “Does she also sing?”

  Startled by this unexpected interest, Spirit sang her song: “I know where I’m going, and I know who’s going with me; I know who I love, but the dear knows who I’ll marry.”

  When she stopped, they heard Megan’s voice clearly. “Miss Hubris, you love your brother, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Spirit agreed, bemused by this interest in her.

  Megan agreed to see them.

  Megan’s beauty of youth had not paled; it had matured. The more recent pictures in the material QYV had given Hope had suggested it; life confirmed it. “It is not often I am visited by military personnel,” she remarked.

  “Retired,” Hope said. “We are civilians now.”

  “So you knew Uncle Mason,” she said.

  “Only briefly,” Hope said, surprised. Evidently they were not complete strangers to her. Perhaps the scientist had mentioned the episode before he died. “I was with—Helse. She—looked like you.”

  “Of course,” Megan said, as if it could have been no other way. She had that certain presence that facilitated this. “But that was some time ago.”

  “It’s still true,” he said, gazing at her. The sight of Megan was casting a spell over him; Spirit could see it happening.

  “You still identify with the working class?”

  “I do.”

  She nodded. As a politician she had sponsored social legislation; she was a friend of the working class, though she had never been part of it herself. “Yet you achieved a certain notoriety in that connection as an officer in the Navy, I believe.”

  “I helped make peace between the migrants and the farmers,” Hope said defensively.

  “Indeed you did,” she agreed. “At one stroke you forged a settlement and set a precedent none of the rest of us had been able to arrange in years.”

  He was surprised again, and so was Spirit. “You—were watching that?”

  She laughed. “My dear Captain, it was the headline of the day! I knew that you would be going far.”

  “You were aware of me before then?” Hope asked.

  “Uncle Mason had mentioned you. He said it was like seeing me again, as I had been in my youth ... that girl with you. I was then in my early twenties”

  Spirit made a half-humorous sigh of nostalgia: the notion that a woman in her twenties was beyond her prime. Megan responded with a smile. Spirit found herself liking the woman.

  “Then when you showed up at Chiron,” Megan continued, “which I know was a very ticklish situation, I recognized you.

  Naturally I was curious. But I hardly thought you were aware of me. You caught me quite by surprise, coming here like this. Perhaps I should have realized that a military man normally takes direct action.”

  “But if you recognized my name why did you refuse my letter?”

  “Did you write? I’m so sorry. I refuse all posts from strangers because of the hate mail.”

  “Hate mail?” Spirit asked, surprised. It turned out that Megan still received nasty letters from conservatives.

  “Yet you refused to see me,” Hope said.

  “Captain Hubris, I have put that life behind me,” she said firmly. “I knew the moment I heard your name that you were here on a political errand. I shall not suffer myself to be dragged into that mire again.” She grimaced in a fetching manner. “Then you sang, and it was a song of the working class ...”

  “But you were wronged!” Hope protested. “You should not let one bad experience deprive you of your career!”

  “Didn’t you, Captain?” she asked, scoring.

  Soon Hope got down to his real business: he wanted her to guide him in his forthcoming political career.

  “My dear man, whatever makes you suppose I would do such a thing?”

  “I’m sure you are loyal to your principles and your family. Therefore—”

  “But we are not related!”

  “Not yet,” Spirit murmured.

  “What are you trying to say, Captain?”

  “I want to marry you, Megan.”

  Her mouth actually dropped open. “Have you any idea what you’re saying?”

  “You are the only living woman I can love,” he said.

  She was stunned but rallied quickly. “Because I once resembled your childhood sweetheart? Surely you know better than that!”

  Hope tried to explain, but for once failed to get through. Megan looked at Spirit. “You are his sister, and you love him more than any other. What do you make of this?”

  Spirit shook her head. “I’m not sure you would understand.”

  “I suspect I had better understand! Describe to me his nature as you appreciate it.”

  Spirit dropped her gaze, frowning, but made the effort. “Hope Hubris is a specially talented person. He reads people. He is like a polygraph, a device to record and interpret the physical reactions of people he talks with. He knows when they are tense, when they are easy, when they hurt or are happy, when they are truthful and when lying. He uses his insight to handle them, to cause them to go his way without their realizing this. He—”

  “You are describing the consummate politician,” Megan exclaimed.

  “So we understand,” Spirit agreed. “But that’s not what I’m addressing at the moment. Hope—is loved by others because he understands them so well, in his fashion. The men who work with him are fanatically loyal, and the women love him, though they know he can not truly return their love. But he—his talent perhaps makes him inherently cynical, emotionally, on the deep level. On the surface he is ready to love, but below he knows better, so he can not. Except for his first love, Helse. She initiated him into manhood, and there was no cynicism there. But having given his love to her, he could not then truly give it elsewhere—with one exception. The woman who looked like Helse.”

  Megan dabbed at her forehead with a dainty handkerchief, as if becoming faint from overexertion. “But he doesn’t even know me.”

  “He doesn’t need to,” Spirit said. “This has nothing to do with knowledge. It has to do with faith.”

  “It is also true that I need your expertise in politics,” Hope said. “So there is a practical foundation. Marry me and it will make sense.”

  Megan, naturally enough, resisted the notion. She did not want to return to politics, and was not about to marry a stranger.

  “Convince her,” Hope said to his sister.

  Spirit made the effort. “Megan—may I call you that?—I must argue that your life has indeed developed toward this union. You are a fine person, an outstanding political figure, and a lovely woman, though my
brother still would have come for you had you been otherwise. You deserve better than what the maelstrom of Jupiter politics has given you. You deserve to wield power, for you do know how to use it, and you have a social conscience unrivaled in the contemporary scene. You did not lose your last campaign because you were inadequate but because you were superior. You refused to stoop to the tactics your opponent used. As with money, the bad drove out the good, and you lost your place in the public eye, while your opponent flourishes like a weed. But whatever the politics, the bad remains bad and the good remains good, and this my brother understands.”