The Iron Maiden

by Piers Anthony

  Spirit stepped in. “I am his sister. We have a place for you. Let’s get your baggage.”

  “This is all,” Forta said, hefting her single suitcase.

  They went to their rented car. Hope drove while Spirit and Forta talked. Spirit arranged this, knowing that he needed a pretext to keep to himself. She had to fathom the rationale, to find out why Megan had sent this seeming disaster of a female.

  “We have been very busy,” Spirit said. “We have been reorganizing Saturn industry, and that entails a great deal of research. My brother interviews the personnel, and I see to much of the implementation. Are you trained in this area?”

  “I regret I am not,” Forta said. “I do, however, have secretarial skills.”

  “We already have a secretary,” Spirit said. “We really had not thought of you in that capacity.”

  “Naturally not,” Forta said, smiling. The mystery of this woman was growing.

  “Are you trained in diplomacy?”

  “By no means.”

  Spirit was somewhat at a loss. “Perhaps if you would fill us in on your background.”

  “Gladly. I was found on Mercury thirty-two years ago, during one of the civil-rights altercations there. My parents may have been killed by the authorities of South Mercury, or merely driven out and prevented from returning. It is possible that I was left for dead, because of the injury done my face. I was picked up by a relief mission and taken to the Amnesty Interplanetary office in Toria. I understand they tried to investigate my background, but of course things are difficult for those of mixed race in that part of the System, and they had no success. So I was christened Fortuna Foundling, being fortunate merely to have survived as a foundling.”

  “Apartheid,” Spirit murmured. “I understand that torture is employed in that region. But why a baby should be subjected to—”

  “There is no proof of torture,” Forta said. “It could have been a mining accident. The conditions in Mercury’s sunside diamond mines—” She shrugged. “I was well cared for by AI. My face healed, but of course they lacked the funds for plastic surgery. I have spent my life with AI; when I became adult I joined as one of their agents. That has been the story of my life, until this point.”

  “I wonder if there has been a misunderstanding,” Spirit said. “We are not engaged in the investigation of human rights. We are on assignment for Chairman Khukov of the Union of Saturnine Republics, being in exile from Jupiter. I should not think that you would care to be connected to this enterprise.”

  “I did not come as an AI representative,” Forta said. “I volunteered as a woman.”

  Spirit was guarded. “You volunteered—for what?”

  “To be your brother’s mistress.”

  There was a silence. Then Hope spoke, not looking at her. “How well do you know me?”

  “About as well as any person not of your family or prior staff knows you,” Forta said. “I have made a study.”

  “Then perhaps you know that I do not have relations with strangers.”

  “True. And you seldom have relations with unpretty women. I intend to be the exception. I think that once you come to know me, you will appreciate my qualities.”

  “I do not wish to give offense, but—”

  “If you care to read me, you will see that I am confident of your eventual satisfaction.”

  “Show me your power,” he murmured under his breath, in the old Navy idiom, with irony.

  “Read me,” she repeated firmly. It was definitely a challenge.

  Hope met that challenge. Spirit took over control of the car, and he spun his seat around to face Forta, who sat in back. He read her, using his talent.

  “You are confident,” he murmured, perhaps unconsciously. “You believe in yourself. I have known hard women, and talented women, and combinations of the two, but none harder or mere talented than you, except my sister.”

  That startled Spirit. She did have a scarred face and hands, because of her use of the rocket-propulsion unit to wipe out the pirates. She had never had restorative surgery because she wore her marks with pride. Forta was evidently of this nature, though her scars were far more apparent. But Hope was not looking for an emulation of his sister as a romantic object.

  “Strange,” Hope said. “You are changing.”

  Changing?

  “Helse,” he whispered, amazed.

  Spirit had to look. She glanced briefly back. Forta’s ravaged face remained, but there was indeed a suggestion of Helse about it, as if the scars covered a fair young Hispanic face. Spirit lacked the ability to read human signals her brother had, but there was definitely something. How could this be?

  “Megan,” he said, awe in his tone.

  Spirit looked again. Now the scars covered the suggestion of Megan. It was apparent that Hope saw the effect much more strongly than Spirit did.

  Forta had shown him her power. She a signal chameleon: She could emulate the facial and body signals of other people. Her talent was, in a fashion, akin to Hope’s: she could generate the signals he could read. Thus she could emulate, in a rather subtle but fundamental manner, those people she had studied-and she had studied his two loves. She could be all things to all men, in a fashion.

  They reached their apartment, amazed by this manifestation. When Forta unpacked, it turned out that her suitcase contained not a wide variety of clothing but a most versatile array of costumes and masks. These were not crude plastic; they were contour-clinging, lifelike things that could readily be mistaken for living flesh when animated by her expressions. In fact Forta was an accomplished mime: she could don mask and costume and mimic her chosen character so cleverly that the resemblance was startling.

  “Do Megan,” Hop said.

  Forta donned her Megan set, as she called it, and in a moment it was as though Hope’s wife entered the chamber. The mask-face, the hair-wig, the walk, the gestures, the subtle body signals—Spirit was shaken despite her comprehension of the device.

  Then she spoke—and with Megan’s voice, complete with the nuances. “Why, Hope—it is so good to see you again,” she said, and extended her arms to him, in exactly the way Megan had done when their marriage was active.

  Hope stepped forward and took her in his arms. He kissed her—and did not seem to feel the mask. It looked like a living face, despite their knowledge.

  “Can you do me?” Spirit asked.

  In moments Forta donned a new mask and wig. “Can you do me?” she inquired, exactly as Spirit had. Hope’s jaw dropped.

  They stood before a mirror, and Spirit’s own jaw dropped. There were two reflections of her, in different clothing. “You look just like me!” she said—and the other image said the same words at the same time. The woman had known exactly how she would react, and emulated it.

  Spirit shook her head as Forta removed her mask. “If I had not seen it ...” she said. “What else can you do?”

  “I can also serve as a courier, and as translator.”

  “You know other languages?”

  “Not exactly. I have translation apparatus that facilitates the limited ability I have in that regard.”

  She demonstrated. She had a pocket multi-tongue language computer, with capsules for the individual languages. An earplug enabled her to hear the ongoing translation in Afrikaans, her native language and the one she thought in. It developed that she had been using the translator for English, though she did speak that language, because it was easier for her to hear words in her own language, then translate her reply, than to deal completely in English.

  “English is not your language—yet you have been speaking it,” Spirit said.

  “I have a prompt,” she explained. This was a plug in her other ear, that fed her the words she subvocalized. She demonstrated it in Spanish and Russian.

  Spirit had little doubt that this was the most remarkable woman they had encountered. But Hope did not immediately take her as a mistress. His knowledge that she was not the women she emulated coole
d his ardor.

  Meanwhile, they had a heavy schedule. Forta became part of their party, along with Tasha and Smilo, and was quite useful as an additional secretary, translator, and assistant. Her time would come.

  CHAPTER 17

  PLANETS

  The heat did not let up; the nomenklatura remained determined to eliminate Hope. Khukov reluctantly concluded that they could not safely remain on the planet. If Hope showed his face in public, one of their assassins would go for him first, then if caught would commit suicide, and the body would have no ties to the employer. If he remained in hiding, eventually they would ferret out his location, and send in a bomb. They were no longer interested in being careful; he had to be eliminated, for it was obvious that they were otherwise doomed.

  “But you have proven yourself,” Khukov said on the private holophone. It looked just as if he were sitting in their chamber. “The procedures you have instituted will carry through to their completion, perhaps more slowly without you, but inevitably. You can now be spared for greater things. I want you to negotiate with Rising Sun.”

  That was Titan, Saturn’s greatest moon. In the Solar System, Titan was a satellite of Saturn, and this did not accord with their social perspective, any more than their ancestors considered Japan to be an island satellite of the continent of Asia. So they preferred to call themselves the Empire of the Rising Sun.

  “Rising Sun,” Hope agreed. “But can the Occidental Tyrant speak for the oriental aspect of Saturn?”

  “In many respects, that moon is closer to your planet than to mine,” he reminded them. “Remember, it was Jupiter who occupied it, after System War Two, not Saturn. Now it is an industrial giant in its own right, and we would like to establish better trade relations.”

  “I’m sure Titan will trade,” Hope said. “But it sells finished products, and your interplanetary credit is weak. What can you offer?”

  Khukov told them what the USR had to offer. Hope nodded. “I believe I can handle that.”

  “And it will keep you safely off-planet, while the disturbance here dies down,” Khukov concluded.

  Thus they undertook their mission as liaison between Saturn and Titan. It promised to be an intriguing challenge.

  Titan bore a certain resemblance to their planet of origin, Callisto. Khukov had termed it moon, but as he had noted, the folk of the satellites preferred to call them planets in their own right.

  Titan had a substantial atmosphere; its solid surface was completely hidden from exterior view. Critics referred to that atmosphere as solid smog; the natives referred to it as the basic stuff of the origin of life. Certainly it represented a rich chemical environment from which the natives processed many products, and its pressure of one bar (the same as Earth’s) facilitated the operation of city-domes in the surface. It was the only planet besides Earth itself whose atmosphere was dominated by nitrogen.

  Politically, it was another matter. Titan was colonized by the Japanese of Earth, and they maintained their rivalry and often enmity with huge Saturn. Because Titan’s position in space was far superior for the direct launching of ships, Titan’s Navy became more formidable than Saturn’s. She had turned her energies to commerce—and shortly became a System leader in the construction of merchant ships, and in computerized technology. Titan had beaten its swords into plowshares, and was now stronger as an economic power than it had been as a military power. Jupiter itself imported so much from Titan that it had a sizable trade deficit with that planet.

  Their party was transferred in space to a Rising Sun merchant vessel and conveyed to the surface of the planet. This was an interesting experience in its own right. The atmosphere was deep, and developed a brownish hue as they descended. It was not stormy, but very thick; soon it obscured anything that might have been at any distance.

  They cruised along a highway that curved around mountains of methane ice, and beside ponds of liquid methane from which methane vapor ascended slowly back into the sky. Brown methane snowflakes drifted down to coat every solid surface. This just happened to be the spot in the System where the temperature was at the “triple point” of methane-where it could exist simultaneously in solid, liquid, and vapor states.

  Kyo loomed as a huge dome, girt by many lesser domes. Spirit knew that the main city had more than ten million people, and the region as a population center was much greater. They entered the lock and were treated to another marvelous sight: the oriental splendor of the culture of Rising Sun. Spirit saw a shrine with multileveled upward-curving roofs, diminishing in size as they ascended. There were dwarf trees growing in a special little park. The civilians wore brightly colored sarongs or pajama-type suits, and the petite women had their hair ornately dressed. This was, indeed, the heart of the Orient.

  But elsewhere the city was intensely settled, looking quite modern. Evidently the citizens of Rising Sun valued their cultural heritage but did not let it interfere with practical matters.

  They were conducted to an elegant apartment complex, where they were abruptly left to their own devices while their hosts prepared for their diplomatic encounter. They enjoyed themselves at the heated pool-sized bath, and had a fancy multi-course banquet. Smilo, released to roam the sealed region of the suite, condescended to tear apart a realistic-looking steak. His presence, perhaps, was another reason they were being left alone.

  Forta did not actually enter the bath; she remained clothed, politely aloof. But Tasha did, and her body was spectacular in the bathing suit. That bothered Spirit, for two reasons: it reminded her that she was no longer in her glamorous twenties, and it provoked desire in Hope. He liked them young and soft and sexy and not too intelligent. Forta was none of these; Tasha was most of them.

  Hope grimaced as he sat at the rim and dangled his feet in the water. He was trying to resist temptation, and he had never been good at that. But Spirit could not intervene; this was his private fight, with or without pun.

  Tasha swam up. “I will purchase handcuffs,” she murmured.

  “Thank you, but I do not care to be cuffed,” he said.

  “For me,” she said. “For my hands and feet, and you will have the key.”

  Oh. The woman was in his orbit, of course. But he demurred. “I am supposed to be through with you,” he said. “I have another woman now.” He was giving lip service to it, at any rate.

  Spirit glanced at Forta, but she seemed unconcerned.

  Was she so sure of her eventual victory, or masking her woe?

  “That is why I must have you soon,” Tasha said. “Once you go with her, you will never again go with me.” She turned her face to him beseechingly. “Oh, please Tyrant—I want you so much! Bind me, rape me, anything, only take me one more time.”

  How could he resist? He obviously did desire her, dangerous as she was to desire. “Buy the cuffs,” he said.

  “Oh, thank you!” she exclaimed, flouncing out of the water to embrace him.

  Forta did not react, but Smilo did. He jumped up and growled, forcing Tasha to get quickly clear.

  On the following day they were granted a holo interview with the Shogun, the principal dignitary of the planet.

  “So good to meet you, Tyrant,” he said, lifting his hand in the greeting that was accepted as equivalent to a handshake on such occasions. “I have long admired your management of Jupiter.” He glanced to the side. “What a beautiful Smilodon! Have you any of those for export?”

  This was a surprise, but Hope picked right up on it. The Shogun really did admire the tiger. “Perhaps a matched pair. Breeders.”

  “Breeders,” the Shogun echoed longingly. Titan had a long history of martial arts, now stifled by the terms of the treaty, and admired superior fighting animals.

  Hope signaled Tasha. She nodded and went to their interplanetary phone. It was possible that they would be able to confirm the assignment of a pair of Smilodons before this interview was concluded. Saturn would not want to let them go, but would do so in a case like this. They desperately needed t
he good graces of the Shogun, and with him, Rising Sun.

  The Shogun had been coolly formal. Now he warmed noticeably. He had known Hope as the Tyrant of Jupiter, and was clearly pleased to be interacting with him, despite the changed circumstances. They got down to business.

  “Chairman Khukov of Saturn and I share a dream,” Hope said. “It is to alleviate economic and political conditions by opening the final frontier to man: that of the colonization of the galaxy.”

  The Shugun picked right up on the implication. “Therefore no further need for war.”

  “No need of war,” Hope agreed. “How much better it would be to use our resources in the effort to colonize all space. Saturn has raw resources, but lacks proper industrial capacity to exploit them efficiently. This project will be phenomenally expensive, even in the pilot stage.”