by Jo Clayton
It was a simple plan: Whether it was raining or clear, Lylunda always went home the same time and the same way; her second turn took her through a short alley between two small manufactories, no windows, no foot traffic, lots of debris up against the walls. He could do the watcher there, roll the corpse into the debris, catch up with the woman, shoot a dose of Zombi into her, good stuff this time, walk her through the Wall and around to the safehouse, put her in the flikit, and take off for his ship.
He considered the four who guarded her. All other things equal, it’d be best to choose one of Baliagerr’s shifts. He was big, but he was also lazy and rather stupid.
Worm tapped on the second screen and began replaying the flakes that had Baliagerr on them, watching how he moved, where his eyes went.
When he was satisfied that he’d worked things out as much as he could, he began thinking about the date; he erased the recording from the second screen, called up the duty roster and picked out the days between now and Grinder’s Nameday when Baliagerr would be on duty. When to do it?
Not too close to the Nameday. According to Bug, Grinder was putting pressure on Lylunda to move into his house. Bug thought it was a great.idea; he liked her and bragged to Worm about how he was getting that idea across to her. If it was going to happen, it’d be a on the Nameday, that was as sure as anything Worm knew.
She was getting really fidgety. She didn’t show it much, but he could tell.
The snatch probably should be a night in that last week, though. Bug said the Warehouse all but shut down then, meant fewer people hanging about. One of the Baliagerr dates was five days before the Feast. That felt about right. “I’d better fix a backup date, though. Vlees is on the day before. No. He’s too spooky. He’d never let me get close enough to do him, not without more noise than’s safe. Day before that, Rodzin. He’s bored with this guard business, not paying much attention. Good enough. So nine days from now max, seven min. Then it’s done and I’m out of here.”
He leaned back, rubbed burning eyes. “Bokh! I’m-tired. No call tomorrow night. That’s good. Better go see Tank about the knife, he should know where there’s something good. And let Grinder know I’m shopping, keep him happy.”
8
Head thick with too much sleeping, Worm came yawning into The Tank. He collected beer and crackles at the bar and went to a table in a back corner with them, to sit in the shadows crunching and sipping and trying to wake up enough to keep up his front with Tank.
The sound of plucked strings drew him from his mind haze. He looked up. Dark and undefined hecause the lumins hadn’t been turned on yet, a figure sat on the stage at the end of the bar, tuning a small harp. That’s something new. Wonder what happened to Musha and his lot?
The lumins brightened slowly, catching glimmers from the sequins on the woman’s dress. She stopped tuning and started playing a simple melody that grew more complicated under her fingers as her form grew more and more defined, warm brown skin and glitter-ing white dress, opals in her ears, her nails painted to match.
“Time is a wheel,” she sang, her voice a rich, fluid contralto. He shivered with pleasure, pushed the glass aside and leaned forward, his eyes fixed on her.
Time is a wheel that steals our loves away
Lost and gone in yesterday
Time is the necromancer’s terrain
From the black plain of vanished years
He summons the pale dancer
She sways in swirls of moire silk,
His tears are opals in her ears
The pyrelights of dead suns burn
In the hollows of her eyes
Turn by turn
He treads with her a languid pavan
dead and gone, dead and gone.
Time is a while a whorl a wheel
It steals our loves away,
Buries them in yesterday.
As she sang, her words came alive for him; he was the dead dancer, called from his rest, star sprays shining in the empty eyes of his skull, his feet treading suns to oblivion. The image was so powerful that for a moment the room, the table, even his body vanished. Nothing existed except the dancer…
When the song changed to a wordless croon weaving around the harp’s mellow notes, he dropped into himself with a jolt and a shapeless grief from something without a name that had been lost.
She played with the melody a moment longer, then slid into a new tune, a rapid bubbly thing as if the harp were laughing.
“Howl, said the honeybear,” she sang. “Nose in the honeyjar, tail in the air…”
She leaned into the harp, rocking back and forth with the lilt of the song-and for the first time Worm saw the other side of her face, saw the drawing of a hawk etched in dark brown lines on the light brown skin. The description from the Kliu list flashed into his mind, the brand on her face and that gift for song. Digby’s agent. How long has she been here? Has she spotted the target and what’s she doing to do about it? What am I going to do about her…?
When the set was finished and the singer had retreated to the back rooms, Worm gulped down the rest of his beer and sat a moment longer at the table. Between recognizing the agent and the effect her song had on him, he wasn’t sure of anything any more-except that he’d better think real hard about moving up the snatch to this week and consign the old plan to The Harman’s deepest Hell.
“New singer. Known about her, I’d a been back sooner. How long you had her?”
“Three days now. Off the worldship. She was traveling standby-and-work-it, got bumped. Heard it’s Bug keeping you busy these days.”
Worm shrugged. “Likes my name, what it is.”
“Make sense. So what you want?”
“Bug was saying I need to get a Nameday present. I figure he’s got the dump on that, but I don’t wanna step on toes if you know what I mean.”
“Hunh. You been this way before.”
“Been and done and learned the hard way about overplaying it. Bug says a knife. I figure not fancy but nice. Who’s got?”
“Go see Old Henry. He has a shop in the Izar down by the Gate. Anything else?”
“Yeah. The singer. She do more’n sing?”
Tank let out a roar of laughter, slapped his hand on the desk. “Gonna have to lay down razor wire about that stage if this keeps on.” He coughed into his hand, gulped water from the jug on the shelf by his, head. “No, she don’t do. With the talent she’s got she don’t have to. Anything other than that?”
“Nah, guess that’s it.”
Worm left The Tank and walked back to his official residence, new plans whirling in his head.
10. A Day Late and a Synapse Short
1
Shadith strolled along Hutsartes Star Street, past doss houses and taverns, beggars and street performers in a thousand shapes and colors with varying degrees of skill in whatever it was they did. The street was wide (one of the aspects of being on a newish colony world with plenty of room to spread), the center strip given to loaders trundling lumpishly along, heavy with cargo containers. The air was steamy, sweat beading on her arms and never drying, just getting stickier. And it stank.
– She breathed in the sickly sweet aroma of rotting meat, rotting vegetation, the sour effluvia of inadequate plumbing, over it all the iodine bite of the wind from the sea, even though the water was several miles off and at least a mile lower in elevation.
Amazing, she thought. Live for a few months in ships and transfer stations and you forget how saturated in bodily sensation a world can be. Hm, maybe a song in that…
Playing with rhymes and images, threading automatically through a crowd of hawkers, players, and crewfolk of the sort who milled about every Star Street she’d seen, she nearly crashed into a man who stepped from an alley in front of her.
“Hey, watch where you going.”
“Sorry.” She started to circle round him, but his hand clamped on her wrist and stopped her. “I wouldn’t do that,” she said mildly as she turned to face him.
He dropped her arm as if it were hot. “I know you,” he said.
“What?”
“Shadow’s your name, isn’t it? I heard you sing. Nightfair. Bogmak. Maahhhh nanna! How you do that?”
She backed off a step. His words weren’t slurred and he stood straight enough, but the liquid gleam of his greenish eyes most likely came out of a bottle and he carried the stink from the contents of that bottle in a fine mist around him. “The singing was me, the rest was someone else. We broke up a while back.”
“Huhn. Too bad. Yah hai, come along and have a drink on me.”
“Why not.” Might as well use this one to start spreading her cover story. “Where? I just got here and don’t know places yet. You know my name. What’s yours?’
“Meddlyr Trych. Cargo master on the Free Trader Timik. Just got here, you said?”
“Off the worldship that left yesterday. I was riding standby and working my keep, singing this ’n that. They unstood me. Some Muck from the High City up there wanted space for his bodyservant.”
“Still singing, then?”
“What I do.”
He walked beside her without talking for several steps. She glanced at him again, but she was sure she didn’t know him, he was just one of the crowd at the Nightfair and anyway that was over five years ago. He was an inch or two taller than she was, a compact man, not lean but no excess fat on him. His head was shaved and densely tattooed in patterns she recognized as luck signs, blue lines on the bright amber of his skin, the framework filled in with crimson, emerald, and gold. There were intricate fate knots between the middle two knuckles of his fingers and no doubt more needle paintings were covered by his shipsuit. His ears were pointed and flicked nervously as he walked and the pupils of his eyes were almond shaped rather than round. Meddlyr Trych. A Cousin, she thought. Wonder what part of the Diaspora produced his branch?
He pushed open a door and stood aside to let her precede him through it into the dimly lit room beyond, then escorted her to a table by the wall. “And what would you be having, Shadow? This trip I’m trying out a brandy they distill from some kind of local fruit, I don’t know what it’s called. It’s smooth and tasty and warms you up lovely.”
“Sounds good. I’ll go for that.”
He brought back two bell glasses with half an inch of a dark reddish-gold fluid puddled in the bottom.
She took a small sip, rolled it on her tongue, and smiled. “I like it.”
“Me, too. So. You lookin’ or movin’ on?”
“Looking. Till I build up my stash a bit and can talk my way onto a ship heading the direction I want to go.”
He tilted the glass, watched the brandy slide, then slip back, leaving a faint film on the curve of the bell. “I always wanted to tell you what it meant, that time you played your harp and wove dreams for me. Well, you and your partner. Didn’t have time then, don’t have words now. Except there was a hole in my heart, and after you sang it was gone.”
“I’d say you weren’t so bad with the words.”
“Ah, you should hear my cousin. Now there’s a man who can string word with word to make the stones themselves weep with the glory of it.”
“Mayhap I’ll come by his way some time if you don’t mind telling me what world it is.”
“Ah. Parcoshry is the name of that poor place and it is out beyond the Saber Worlds. A long and lonely way from here.”
She lifted the glass. “To traveling, Meddlyr Trych. To finding what lies beyond the next star.”
“To Home, Shadow Singer. Wherever that may be.” Though she only sipped at the brandy, he drained his glass. His eyes went blank for a moment, then he was grinning at her. “Ol’ Tank…” He stopped, stared past her as he ran his tongue around his teeth. “Ol’ Tank,” he went on, speaking with slow care. “He owns this place. The Tank, he calls it. He is not a man of words. He fired the last act. They were good, but two of them were Dusters and sometimes they just did not show. Even if you can’t do the dreams any more, you sing good. I come here a lot. I could tell him you sing good. If you want.”
“Why not. Got to work somewhere.”
2
For the next two nights Shadith sang in The Tank for tips, then Tank added a base fee; he was pleased by the custom she attracted.
More cautiously than she had at Marrat’s Market, she began building, a web of acquaintances, the question she asked confined to the ins and outs of surviving here. Meddlyr Trych came round to listen to her for the first three days, bringing his mates with him, then they were gone, the Timik heading for its next landfall, but that chattering man had given her a solid background, so she marked down in her mind that she owed him a favor if ever she came across him again.
At the time Trych left, she’d absorbed a lot of information about the place, but had picked up no trace of Lylunda Elang. She wasn’t too disturbed about that; all she’d learned in the millennia of her peculiar existence told her that this wasn’t a place to ask blatant questions, perhaps not to ask questions at all. And how she’d get around that, she wasn’t quite sure.
So much simpler just to march up to the Hall of Records or whatever they called the thing round here and start a name search working through the files. Or find some local sources and buy the information from them. Except Digby had ordered her to keep her head down and do this on the sly. That suited her just fine; she did not want to lead the Kliu to the arrays, no indeed. Still, it certainly made life harder.
3
Shadith patted a yawn, folded her arms on the counter at the cook shop, and gave the woman who ran it a sleepy smile. “Stiff enough to climb out of the cup,” she said. “I will not not not drink any more rikoka brandy.”
“Ha! That’s what you said yesterday, Shadow.”
“Curses on ol’ Meddlyr’s head, he chattered round to everyone and told them all that’s what I liked so now that’s all the clotheads buy for me.” She took the cup and sipped cautiously at the scalding liquid.
“And it’s such a horrible duty, eh? Sing me another. Shadow, maybe I’ll believe it. And what’ll you be having to sop up that kaff?”
“What else, Cara? Egg, easy, some of your tatta hash, and a nice bloody hunk of meat.”
“What is it to be young.” Cara chuckled and went to cook the breakfast.
Shadith chewed on her thumb and tried to work out a plan for what was left of the day. She’d managed to see most of Star Street, she’d been out to the Landing Field with Meddlyr Trych and used Digby’s spyshot to flake the images of the ships parked there. Lylunda’s was not among them. Nor was it anywhere in the tie-down up by the transfer station. If she was here, she must have cached the ship somewhere, presumably close enough for-her to walk into Haundi Zurgile. Hm. Might be worth looking at those islands north of here… if I were stashing a ship, that’s where I’d park it. I pulled the boat trick on Ambela. maybe I should start nostalgic reminiscences of dear old daddy and his fishboat… all that metal should show up on Digby’s patented prospector’s detec. if it does, I pretty well know she got here… if it doesn’t… can’t prove a negative… maybe she parked the ship on the Wild Half and cut across the ocean in her lander.
When she’d finished breakfast and complimented Cara on her way of searing cow, she strolled out and stood looking up at the clouds thickening overhead. The wind that plucked at her hair was heavy with the smell of brine.
“Lookin’ for rain, Shadow?
She turned. “Oh, good morning, Getto. No, just smelling the sea on the wind. Anybody got boats around here?”
He tugged at the flesh loop that had been an earlobe before he had it stretched to hold his dari-mirror; the mirror pulsed there when he played his drums at his pitch on an alley corner near The Tank. “No fishing here. No reason to spend tokens on boats. The Bellies go where the tokens heap highest.”
“Tsa! My da ran a fishboat, and when I light on a world with salt water I always go for a sail. And here I’m got some free time, and I was thinkin
g I’d like to get out on the water a while.”
“Kemros the Tinkerman, he rents out your open top flier, you could take one of those down low ’nough to skim the waves, suck some skempt, and dream a day sailer.”
“Huh. That’s a good idea. Thanks, Getto. Owe you one.”
“Easy ’nough to get straight. Fetch you harp to m’ pitch when you get back, and we play duo an hour come two.”
“A’ right. Why not.”
She smiled with affection as she watched hiin ambling away, stopping every few steps to speak to a shopkeeper or a street player or just someone whiling away a moment or two staring at bugs on the pavement. Then she shook her head at her own obtuseness and went to find Kemros the Tinkerman.
Stupid not to grasp what an ocean full of poison water and poison fish would mean to the economy of a recently colonized world. And she knew about it, too; it was one of the warnings she had to thumbprint in the declaration of intent for temporary residence. I UNDERSTAND THAT ALL WATERLIFE AND A HIGH PERCENTAGE OF THE VEGETATION ON Hutsarte IS POISONOUS TO AIR BREATHERS WITH HEMOBASED BLOOD AND THAT ANY ATTEMPT TO LIVE
OFF THE NATIVE PRODUCTS OF Hutsarte COULD RESULT IN IN MY DEATH OR DISABILITY. No fishing industry, the colonists concentrated into one city and scattered ranches, not much heavy industry, the other landmasses of the world left untouched so there was no commuting to and from what they called the Wild Half. Result, no boats. “I wonder what else I’m missing. Focus, Shadow, focus.”
“Talking to yourself, Singer?” Berm leaned from the door of Meerti’s Dosser, his voice purring, his eyebrows humping up and down as if they had a life of their own. “You can come talk to me anytime.”
“My daddy always said, you want to talk to somebody smart, talk to yourself. No thanks, Berm.” She moved hastily on before he worked that one out. The Berms of the universe were one of the reasons she’d passed on making music a career. She sighed. So how is that different from what I’m doing now? Hm. No managers, I suppose. Hah, Shadow. How it’s different is you can get killed in this job. Killed on purpose, I mean. Five hours left before I’m due at The Tank. Should be plenty of time to get in a cruise and do my set with Getto. Move those feet, Shadow. You’ve wasted enough time setting up your cover.