She had a seat alone at the rear of the passenger chamber, with plenty of legroom. After securing her luggage, she activated the privacy hood and swiftly fell into a deep sleep. When she woke, they were already out past the orbit of Uranus, eleven hours into the voyage with another thirty to go.
Ship time was midafternoon, but she ordered a substantial breakfast of scrambled veg, wolfing it down with two big mugs of fragrant Melisandean tea. Then she slipped the tapeworm into the midriff of her seat interface.
It was blonde-haired Cibylle who filled the optic, three children in her arms, two of them Shivaun’s own by Kovec, one of three men she and Cibylle had married. Cibylle had opted for childcare, raising her own year-old triplets along with Shivaun’s pair of three-year-olds. She had by far the strongest parental instincts of the five of them.
“Greetings from the slough of despond,” Cibylle began in her hearty manner. “I don’t know where you are, but I hope all’s well and that you’re taking care of yourself. The little ones are missing you, and everyone sends their love.”
There was a pause, and the children went coy, burrowing their faces in Cibylle’s breast. They were responding to a prerecorded hologram of Shivaun which she knew would be making funny faces at them.
Cibylle then related an anecdote about their neighbours, a monogamous couple who had scandalized local opinion by keeping a merecat as a pet in their compartment. Left alone one evening, the cat had gnawed through the compartment’s main water artery, flooding their own kitchen below.
“I woke to these awful spluttering sounds,” Cibylle told her. “The food processor and the launderer were in a terrible state of distress. We had to call the intestors out in the middle of the night, and they ended up having to tranquillize half the appliances! You should have seen the mess!”
More gossip followed, about incidents dating back further than the three days Shivaun had been gone. Shivaun let them wash over her, watching the children, who seemed lulled by the very sound of Cibylle’s voice. When they had first married Cibylle had been a vox box, providing summaries of local issues for citizens during public votes; now it was all domestic trifles.
“I hope you’ll be back before too long,” she went on. “I’m coping, but I think a holiday would be nice, don’t you?”
She hoisted the children into a more comfortable position, effortlessly encompassing them in her broad arms.
“The others are out. Vy and Kovec have got a new commission. One of the big mansions up on Palleas. They’ve been over there the past two days.”
She proceeded to give Shivaun the details. The two men ran a thriving interior decor business, specializing in hand-reared furniture and custom wallcoverings. Cibylle had aspirations to wealth and a bigger habitation for their growing brood.
“I hope you’ll find time to call,” Shivaun heard Cibylle say presently. “Don’t worry, I’m not nagging. I understand the difficulties in your line of work. It’s just sometimes I miss a bit of adult company, you know?”
One of the children began to giggle, while another flexed its fingers at her. No doubt her hologram was giving them her friendly monster facial: it was one of her best.
Cibylle registered it too, with a kind of weary tolerance. Then she became serious. “I wasn’t going to mention it because I know you’ve probably got other things on your mind, but you might as well know.” She unloaded the children into the playpen beside her; the pen fluffed its walls and nuzzled them. “Imrani’s gone AWOL again.” A big meaningful sigh. “The last time I saw him was the day before you left, and he hasn’t been seen since. No message anywhere, nothing. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s gone off on some impromptu tour.”
Imrani worked in the Organ Supply Department of Melisande General; he was a talented tissue fabricator, but he also liked to moonlight as a pipe player with various bands in the city. It was Shivaun who had persuaded the others to let him join their marriage contract only two years before: at twenty-three, he was considerably younger than the rest of them. Cibylle had never approved.
“I know you’re fond of him,” she was saying, “but I think we’re going to have to consider his position when our contract comes up for renewal. He just hasn’t been assuming his share of the responsibilities. You know what he’s like. Always off on some spur-of-the-moment thing.”
For no obvious reason, Letty, one of Shivaun’s children, began to cry.
“I’m going to have to go,” Cibylle said. “I hope you’re taking care of yourself. Don’t let them work you too hard or do anything too unpleasant. And get in touch when you have a moment. Bye.”
Her smiling face faded to grey as the optic blanked. Shivaun took the worm out of the slot and put it away. It was an unspoken rule among her partners that they never discussed her specific duties, yet Cibylle was always making indirect reference to them, like a child who knows a swearword and is forever skirting the boundaries of actually saying it.
She recorded a brief return message filled with local Ganymedean colour and making no reference to anything specific in Cibylle’s. Then, against her instincts, she put in a call to Niome, her daughter by a previous marriage who lived on Triton, six hours’ call-time distant. It was several years since they had last spoken and Shivaun kept the message brief, informing her that she was en route to Charon in order to pay her respects to Niome’s two departed brood-brothers. Niome lived and worked in one of the big nomadic ménages favoured by Tritonians, her own five children being raised communally. So far the Dementia had not reached there. With luck, Niome would have time to return her call before she reached Pluto.
An atmosphere of doleful sobriety prevailed in the passenger chamber, few people talking, many enveloped in privacy hoods networked to the ship’s shrine. This was unsurprising, given the nature of the voyage. Shivaun scrolled through the optic channels. Normally she favoured educatories, but she was possessed by an unfamiliar sense of the fragility of things, the thinness of the barrier between herself and the vastness beyond the ship’s hide. The worlds of the Solar System, where the human race scuttled like ants on boulders, were no more than a wisp of smoke in a radiation-soaked void. There were so many ways in which its blind imperatives could deal out death, heedlessly, in the spasm of a heartbeat.
She found herself watching an episode of Lords of the Nether, another space opera. One of the lords had gone back into the past to become queen of a tribe of Amazonals who rode fire-breathing dragons into battle against the hideous hordes of Ampyrea, whose eyes flashed lightning bolts. She entered the interactive mode, became the queen herself. She slaughtered thousands and reduced their citadels to rubble and cinders.
When it was over, her frustration remained. She disliked inactivity, the tedium of passenger travel, any sense that she was not in full control of her life. She paged a flight attendant, inputted Bezile’s authorization letter, then asked for the use of a lifecraft for a “recreational flight”.
Somewhat to her surprise, the request was granted. She went down to the bays and found one of the lozenge-shaped craft already primed for her. She clambered aboard and overrode its controls, opting for full manual. She gave it maximum acceleration out of the bay.
For the next few hours, Shivaun indulged herself in feints and skirmishes with the pilgrimage ship itself, darting at it, spiralling around it, testing the lifecraft’s capacities to the full. She was an excellent pilot, having served a five-year stint as a ferry operator in the Equatorial Rifts on Mercury before she became an expediter. She had restrained the impulse to take control of the transporter during the first leg of her journey out from Venus; but now, awash with adrenalin, it was sheer bliss to express herself.
Only when the pilgrimage ship began to page her did she reluctantly return to it. The lifecraft spontaneously thanked her for the exercise as she was leaving the bay.
She went straight to the recreation deck and played an hour’s solo scootball before finally returning to the passenger chamber. She slept again, and when she awo
ke the overhead display showed a fantailed craft intersecting their flight path. This was the Chiron ferry, bringing the last batch of pilgrims to join them.
At length the ferry docked, and there was a series of asthmatic exchanges as airvalves opened and closed. She had her seat dilate its viewer and direct its gaze so that she could see the ferry as it drifted away again, tail rising and falling as it began to pick up speed for the return to the small and isolated outpost whose few inhabitants were always outnumbered by travellers going elsewhere.
Presently the new passengers entered the chamber. One of them was an olive-skinned man with black hair over his chin and cheeks. He was carrying a struggling bioform that looked like a leathery sac attached to a pile of long bent sticks. The chitinous legs clicked together in agitation as he tried to hold it securely and manoeuvre his way down the aisle.
With some effort he managed to subdue the creature before finally slumping in the seat beside Shivaun. He folded its legs up beneath it and massaged its stubby neck until its head dropped into its body and its eyes closed.
“What’s that on your chin?” Shivaun asked.
The man fingered his thick stubble. He grinned at her. “I had my chin repilated while I was waiting for the ferry. It’s a beard.”
“I know what it’s called.”
“There was a big craze on body hair. That, and tattoos.” He looked contrite. “I had one of those, too.”
She did not hide her disapproval. In a quieter voice she said: “Any problems?”
He was continuing to fold the creature’s legs under its bloated belly and did not appear to hear her.
“Imrani,” she said. “Have you got it?”
He nodded. “It’s safe.”
“With you?”
He patted the sac. “Right here.”
She activated the privacy hood. Then she made him put the creature aside before stripping him. They made fast and furious love in the cramped seat, Shivaun astride him, riding him uninhibitedly.
When it was over, Imrani gazed up at her from behind his beard like a man dazed. She knew he enjoyed her sexual rapaciousness, but it never ceased to amaze him.
“Where is it?” she asked.
He reached down and hauled up the creature. There was a wide curving flap in its backside. Imrani prised it open with his fingers.
Inside was the womb.
• • •
I woke from the dream like erupting from a nightmare. My heart was pulsating in my chest, my body filmed with hot sweat.
A faint light came from somewhere unidentifiable. Around me the room was dim and silent. It held only the bed.
I realized I was moving my head without difficulty. I could flex my fingers, too, and my feet. I could shift my arms and legs.
I ran my hands over my body. I couldn’t detect any damage, any dressings or scars. I felt my face. It seemed normal. The hair on my head had been cropped to a stubble.
Slowly I sat up on my elbows. Then I pushed my hands down and heaved myself to a sitting position. I still felt groggy, light-headed, but the dreams were beginning to unnerve me. I didn’t want to let myself slip straight back down into them.
Though I was sluggish, everything seemed to be functioning. I swung my legs down. It felt as if I had never done this before. I inched myself forward, letting my legs and feet slowly take the weight. They were weak, but they supported me as I pushed myself upright.
Blood swam in front of my eyes. I had to hold on hard to the bed until my vision cleared. I took a step forward. Then another, flattening both hands against the wall.
Like something ancient and decrepit, I began to edge my way towards the window. I knew I wasn’t old, but I doddered along like an invalid.
A pulse was throbbing in my head by the time I reached the window. A plain white blind enveloped it. I searched for its edges, for a purchase. The blood-rush hit me again, and I gripped the sill. It seemed to yield under my fingers.
When the mist receded, the blind was up.
The window looked out over a lake that shone silver in the darkness. It was backdropped by a curving line of hills under a clear night sky. The stars were brilliant.
Nothing moved on the lake, and no lights were shining. The entire scene was completely tranquil. It made no register on my memory. How I had come here, and why, remained a blank.
I must have gone into another fugue, because I felt as if I had been staring at the lake for some time even as it began to tilt away from me. I tried to grab the window sill, but my legs had gone and I blacked out before I hit the floor.
Five
“What do you think?” Imrani asked Shivaun.
He had split open his shirt and bared his chest to her. A purple and gold spider was hologrammed around his right nipple.
“Couldn’t resist it,” he told Shivaun. “Woman who did it said it was a steelweb, only found on Oberon. It moves when I do, see?” He tried to ripple a pectoral. “See? It twitched.”
Shivaun was staring at him with what he took to be weary affection. Imrani widened his eyes. “There was nothing else to do there except wait.”
Shivaun reached up and tentatively touched the beard, prodding it with her finger. “Any other alterations I should know about? Did they give you a tail or a third eye?”
“Strictly cosmetic stuff, I promise.”
“Doesn’t exactly make you look inconspicuous, does it?”
“On Chiron it’s nothing special.”
“I hate it.”
Truth was, he didn’t much like the feel of the hair on his chin himself; he’d had it done on a whim, and had only kept it to surprise her.
“They’ve got it sprouting everywhere. Armpits, chest, genitalia. Eyebrows and nostrils as bushy as you like. Rings and tufts wherever you want them.”
She shook her head. “It’ll have to go.”
He fastened his shirt. “You’re the boss.”
She asked her seat to order a depilant. One of the flight attendants delivered it soon afterwards on a silver tray. It was a creamy gel which he had to smear over his cheeks. It smelt spicy and tingled on his skin. When he wiped it off, his chin was smooth again.
“You did a good job,” Shivaun said. “Venzano took it for the real thing.”
When she’d delivered the womb to the recuperatory and told him she wanted as exact a copy as possible, he’d worked through the night to get it done because she wanted it urgently. Of course in Emergency he was used to rush jobs—limb rejuvs, organ replacements, you name it—but this was the first time he’d had to concoct something without a tissue sample, without even knowing exactly what was inside it. Shivaun had sworn him to secrecy, warned him not to harm an atom of the original.
“It was fun,” he said. “I don’t often get to freelance. Or work blind.”
The original was opaque to every scanner at his disposal, and the biosynthesizer had complained bitterly at the lack of detail on internal structure. He’d had to override the usual systems analysis and build the thing from scratch while at the same time ensuring that no details of what he was doing were lodged in its long-term memory. He’d used undifferentiated tissue throughout, making the cell nuclei radiation sinks to preserve its opacity. Then, on Shivaun’s instructions, he’d booked a tourist flight to Triton, only switching instead to the pilgrimage ship after his sojourn on Chiron.
“I’m not sure the pipes were such a good idea,” Shivaun said.
“They were perfect!” Imrani responded with mock outrage. He stroked the sac. “I’ve been tranquillizing them to keep them quiet, poor things. It’s not every day a musical instrument gets a womb stuffed up its rear.”
Shivaun was stern. “This is no game, Imrani, you know that, don’t you?”
“That’s about all I know.”
She hadn’t explained anything, telling him only that she really didn’t want to involve him in the first place but that time was short and there was no alternative. He’d trusted her completely, done everything she’d
asked. He said as much. Still she was quiet.
“You going to tell me?” he persisted.
“Later.”
Imrani pouted.
“Don’t be offended,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“It isn’t that I don’t trust you. It’s just that you’re better off not knowing until we get there.”
“Pluto?”
“Be patient.”
He didn’t press it; sooner or later he’d know. In fact, the mystery was a large part of the excitement. The shadowy side of Shivaun was one of the things that had attracted him to her in the first place. To be with her out here in space, and he only a youth really—well, he’d always craved adventure, never stayed long in one place, yet had never travelled off Venus before. His friends had warned him that he was mad to involve himself with an expediter twice his age, but the past two years had been terrific and he’d never had one regret.
“Cibylle called,” Shivaun said. “She thinks you’ve sneaked off on another unofficial tour.”
“I never could do anything right in her eyes. What did you tell her?”
“Nothing. As far as she’s concerned, I haven’t seen you.”
“I think she’ll be happier with just Kovec and Vy.”
She didn’t respond to this; he felt as if she was looking straight through him.
“You did say we wouldn’t be going back in a hurry.”
She nodded. “I was thinking of the children.”
It was typical of him to have overlooked this; he’d never fathered any himself.
“Cibylle’ll take good care of them.” He tried to read her face. “How long are we going to be gone, anyway?”
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