Brother to Dragons

by Charles Sheffield

  Stella stared. “What’s that for?”

  “Sleeping on. Maybe you. More likely me.”

  She snorted at some secret joke. She was opening the second bottle of wine and pouring. Job took a glass and leaned back in his chair.

  Stella was talking, to him or at him. He must have been answering, but his own words vanished from his mind a moment after he spoke them. At last she came over and touched his face, and then his neck and chest.

  “You’re a sweet man, you are. What’s your name, sweet man?”

  “Job Salk. Job Napoleon Salk.” Eight years of self-discipline, dissolving into the night.

  “Well, then.” Her face was an inch away from his. “Where are we, Job Salk? Not there, for sure.”

  She was laughing at him as he failed to remove clothing, either hers or his own. She had to do it for both of them. He felt huge satisfaction when he saw her body naked. He had been quite right; the clothes she wore had been designed to conceal beauty, but beauty was there in abundance.

  He forgot his aching arms and face. He felt wonderful. She felt wonderful.

  And as she lay down beside him and took him in her arms, everything felt wonderful.

  From their languorous awakening the next morning until almost midday, it was a contest with lovemaking as the prize: Who could think of the best new reason why Stella should not leave yet, or contact her cousin?

  After noon neither mentioned it. Job watched Stella, touched her, and listened to her, and was watched and fondled in return.

  Everything about her pleased him. She yawned, and he admired the strong and regular white teeth. She scratched her thigh, and he watched an after-blush of pink blooming on her fair skin. She ate, with an appetite three times Job’s, and he touched her face, feeling the contraction of strong muscles in her upper jaw as she bit and chewed and swallowed.

  In the late afternoon Job began to wonder what they would eat for dinner. Stella had exhausted the best of his own and his Brazilian landlady’s food supplies, and he wanted to give her something special.

  He took his jacket. There was a street market a mile away, and a liquor store in the same direction.

  “Wait here.”

  “But I want to come with you.”

  “I’d like you to. But they’re bound to be looking for you. Once you’re seen, they won’t let you stay any longer. I’ll only be a couple of hours. Maybe less.”

  “But there’s nothing to do here.”

  “Read a book.” Job glanced at the shelved walls of his room as he left. Books were like thoughts, they crept up on you. When he looked with a stranger’s eye, he saw a room where books were as numerous as in Professor Buckler’s study.

  “Read!” Stella grimaced at him and flopped down in a chair. “Who reads?”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Less than two hours.”

  But it was closer to four. The nearest food market was already closed. After grocery shopping, and a long wait at a beer and wine store, he had continued to the magazine shop. He wanted to buy the government daily broadsheet, and see if it said anything about Stella. And she had been complaining about the awful quality of the soap he gave her (the very best he had), so he needed to buy something out of his usual interest or price range. After the second food market that meant another long walk.

  It was almost dark by the time he reached home. He was loaded with groceries and supplies, enough to eat for a week without ever going out. It was a struggle to open the door while balancing bags, and then to turn and close it the same way.

  Stella had not come out to help him, although she must have heard him fumbling around in the doorway. She had not even thought to put the light on, even though the room was now dark. That no longer surprised him. She was used to having things done for her. It never occurred to her that others might need help.

  But she was wonderful, all the same. He turned around, arms still full of bags and boxes. “I’m back, love.”

  “So you are, love,” said a man’s voice in the darkness. “And not before time. You said two hours. What kept you, Job Salk?”

  • Chapter Eleven

  “So twice ten miles of sterile ground,

  With walls and towers were girdled round.”

  Matt and Daniello. Hunting him down and looking for revenge.

  Before that thought was fully formed, Job was hit by another. His name! The man, whoever he was, knew his name. So it couldn’t be Daniello and friends.

  The light went on as Job flattened against the wall. The intruder was sitting at ease in Job’s only good chair, hands folded in his lap. Before Job could move, one hand lifted to show the tiny gun it was holding. There was a soft popping sound and the wall a couple of feet from Job’s head began to smoke and crumble.

  “That is to discourage action, not to suggest it.” The man let his hands fold again into his lap. “Before you are tempted to folly, let me assure you that whether or not I could kill you before you reached me—and I would bet heavily in my favor—there are men guarding each exit. You would never make it out of this building.”

  “Stella,” said Job, glaring around the room.

  “Is not here. Obviously.” The man smiled. He had a fair-skinned and cherubic face, and was almost totally bald. With his short stubby arms and legs, and a belly that protruded far out over his belt, he gave the impression of a huge and good-natured dwarf. “You don’t know our Stella very well, do you? Telling her to sit down and read a book! Might as well ask her to grow wings and fly. You hadn’t been gone more than fifteen minutes before she got bored and decided to take a look around outside. We had five hundred people searching for her. She was spotted in half an hour.”

  “You’re her cousin, Reginald Brook?”

  “Good lord, no.” The fat man laughed. “My name is Wilfred Dell. Reginald Brook would be truly appalled at the idea that I might be mistaken for him. But don’t just stand there—take a seat.”

  The tone was joking, but it was an order. Job sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Before we begin,” went on Dell, “let me tell you some ground rules. I don’t want you to have the wrong idea about your own situation. Stella Michelson belongs to a very old and wealthy family. Should a street basura like you even try to touch her hand, the men of the family would want him castrated or executed. What they want, they usually get.”

  Job was making his automatic assessment of the man’s voice. It was standard English, with the open vowels and clipped consonants that he had noticed in Stella. But there was a subtle difference, a suggestion that this was not Wilfred Dell’s first language.

  “What makes you think that I would ever try to touch her hand?” Job threw the question in rapid chachara-calle.

  Dell pursed rosebud lips. “Mmm. Very good.” He replied in the same argot of the central city. “And quick. It’s nice to know that not everything in the data banks is rubbish. We’ll get to that later. How do I know about you and Stella? I don’t know, in the sense of absolute proof. I cannot ask her, and if I could she would not tell me. But I do my homework, and I make good guesses. When Stella arrived at the Mall Compound she went to the bathroom. By that time the central data bank had turned up some interesting material about you, so I made sure that we obtained a urine sample as the toilet she used was flushed. And what do you know? There was semen in it. Now, I’ve known Stella for a long time, and I’d be the first to admit that if you put her lovers in line, you’d have enough men to fight a fair-sized war…”

  Wilfred Dell shook his head at Job’s expression. “I’m sorry if I’m upsetting you. But I must go on. If I were to take a specimen of your semen and do a DNA mapping, I might find that it was nothing like the sperm sample we took from Stella’s wee-wee. Or I just might find that you and Stella have been playing rub-the-rhubarb. That’s my guess. Stella’s not above plucking a wildflower, even if it happens to be growing in a dung-heap.

  “So let’s take the next step. Reginald Brook is delighted that Stella has b
een found. He knows that she has no idea of danger. He’s not surprised to learn that she wandered off through the city and stayed away overnight; it’s just the sort of thing she would do. End of episode. The matter goes no further. Unless someone were to put the evidence of what really happened right under poor Reggie’s nose. Now, it’s not my job to cause Reginald pain or discomfort. I wouldn’t dream of showing him what you did…if your name was not Job Napoleon Salk, and if I did not have other needs.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “From Stella. No, don’t have any silly thoughts that she ‘betrayed’ you. If you don’t want something passed on to others, you don’t tell it. You know that rule as well as I do. But once I had your name, I thought I’d run it through the data banks, just for the fun of it. From your address I didn’t expect much. Maybe a little petty theft, or an addiction or two. But instead I got this.”

  Wilfred Dell reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a sheaf of paper. “Job Napoleon Salk, aged eighteen. Born in the Aeterna Lux charity ward of the L Street hospital. Should have been stillborn, and nearly was. Birth report shows numerous physical problems.” Dell looked up. “You seem to be managing them pretty well, but they’ll cause trouble later. If you have a later. Let’s continue: Raised in Cloak House until age ten. One of just a handful of children who did not die in a contaminated food incident there.” Dell raised his fair eyebrows. “Smart?”

  “Lucky. They wanted to starve me, not poison me.”

  “We all need luck. But then you escaped, and the record is blank for a month or so until you were caught running drugs to the Mall Compound. Taking a bit of a chance, weren’t you?”

  “I was. But I didn’t know it.”

  “Just like today. Were you a virgin, by the way, until the fair Stella came along?” Wilfred Dell nodded at Job’s sick look. “Well, never mind. One consolation, virginity is a one-off deal. You can’t get fooled again that way. Let’s go on. J-D’d, and sent back to the Cloak House detention center. But you escaped again.” Dell laid the papers in his lap. “No one ever escaped from the Cloak House detention center before, and they couldn’t figure out how you did it. Like to give me a hint?”

  Job shook his head.

  “Well, no matter. You can tell me later. But at the next point in your record I became very interested. After Cloak House there’s another gap, almost nine months. Then your name appears in a roundup of dissident scientists. One of them had tested you as a possible recruit. So far as he was concerned, you failed. But the results of the test are in the files, and it’s obvious that your scientist friend must be a bit of a moron. He was so busy looking for what he wanted to see, he missed the most important point: you were only ten years old, with next to no education, but you spoke seven languages fluently. More than that, the tests showed you had absolute pitch, a near-perfect word memory, and an amazing ear for language.” He looked up at Job. “You still have that, I assume?”

  Job had nothing to lose. “I think that would be a fairly safe assumption.” He spoke as Wilfred Dell spoke, the same broad vowels overlaid on the faint residue of a street accent. “I also do my homework. And in the area of language, at least, it is not necessary for me to make many guesses.”

  The other man listened closely. “Do it again. Some more.” And then, after another few sentences from Job, “I’ve heard enough recordings of myself to know how accurate that is. Do you realize how useful you could be in the right situation?”

  “I’m in the wrong situation.”

  “We’ll see. How many languages do you speak now?”

  “I’m not sure.” Job frowned. “I’d have to sit down and count.”

  “Some other time. Let me continue. There was a scientist roundup—but no sign of little Job Salk. Where did he go? How did he know to run for it, when the others didn’t? How could he disappear so cleanly? None of the prisoners could tell, even when they’d been dosed with drugs that squeeze your memory like a wet sponge. So. Job Salk disappears again. And this time he stays vanished. For nearly nine years. Until this afternoon.”

  “I was a fool. I deserved to be caught.”

  “Perhaps. But you would prefer not to be killed? Or even castrated? Then let me spell it out for you. You can assist me with one of my current little problems. Or I can give these records”—Wilfred Dell tapped the papers resting on his paunch—“to Reginald Brook, together with the results of a comparison between your semen and that taken from Stella’s pee. And then I can walk away and busy myself on other matters.”

  Job stepped closer, peering into Dell’s eyes. “Who are you?”

  “I am Wilfred—”

  “No. You know what I mean.” Job studied the chubby face, in repose like a Buddha in meditation. “Who are you?”

  Wilfred Dell stood up. “I will give you an answer. But not here and now. Come on.”

  “Where are you going to take me?”

  “To a place where our conversations can have more meat. And where you can see how the other half lives—or rather, one-tenth of one percent.” Wilfred Dell was smiling his half-smile. “We are going to the Mall Compound.”

  One persistent rumor of the city concerned the true size of the Mall Compound. The aboveground area, with its barricades and watchtowers and searchlights, was little more than a mile long and less than half of that wide. But the Compound was said to continue underground, stretching its tentacles out through subterranean tunnels of unknown extent.

  Job had seen the evidence long ago, when he was taken from inside the compound to Bracewell Mansion. But he had been too young and too overwhelmed to note much of what he saw or where he went, and his underground journey had been mainly in darkness.

  This time he was in a better position to observe, but again he was distracted. His mind ran far afield. He noted that he and his guards walked eight long blocks to the gaudy heart of the bordello district, entered a red brick building, and descended for many seconds in an elevator before emerging in a brightly lit tunnel. He climbed into the car that waited there, sitting silent next to Wilfred Dell. The man did not try conversation. He sensed that Job needed time for his own thoughts.

  The sheer stupidity of it, that was what Job could not get over. It seemed that the moment he had set eyes on Stella Michelson, every thinking part of his brain had turned to mush. He had lived totally in the present, like an animal, with no thought of future consequences. And the idiocy had not finished yet. He knew that Stella had behaved without a shred of responsibility, doing exactly the opposite of what he had asked her, and leading Wilfred Dell and his assistants straight to Job’s home.

  But with all that, he could not feel angry with her. He felt anger at himself, for forgetting the lessons that had shaped his whole life. She had never pretended that Job was her first or her only lover. He had just invented the idea that he was and acted as though wishing made it so.

  Job’s brooding ended when they left the car and began a journey through the labyrinth of the Mall Compound’s interconnected buildings. Useless as it might be, he began to study the path they were taking, counting turnings and noting coded wall colors. The buildings had once been discrete units, each with its own external wall. There must still be doors that led to the outside.

  Wilfred Dell watched Job with that little smile on his face. “Never say die, eh? I like that. But this is not Cloak House. The chance of escape from the Compound is quite negligible.” He glanced at the guards and switched to chachara-calle. “Negligible, chico-terco, without my help. Believe me.”

  They entered a glass-sided elevator and went slowly up, higher and higher in a tall, square-sided tower that rose above all other structures of the Mall Compound. Job had seen it many times from far away, wondering what it was and how it came to be there. He had never in his life expected to be inside it. The windows that they passed in their ascent faced southwest. As the car rose, Job saw the dark and quiet river, then the lights of airport runways. Beyond that, the dimly lit city went on foreve
r.

  “After you.” The elevator finally stopped. Wilfred Dell had the gun in his hand again. He gestured to his armed assistants to descend in the elevator, and directed Job forward through a heavy wooden door. “You will sleep up here tonight, in guest quarters. Turn around.” He watched closely as Job turned to face him. “How are you? Exhausted?”

  “I’ve felt better. But I’m all right.”

  “Lively enough to absorb information? If not, we’ll postpone this until morning.”

  “Try me.” Job was tired, but he was taking in everything around him. Dell’s office was furnished with a luxury that Job had never seen, not even in the most opulent chambers of Bracewell Mansion where only senators and congressmen were received. This room reeked of wealth: massive wooden desk, discreet recessed ceiling lights, coffee tables with delicate cups and saucers and glasses upon them, oil paintings on the walls that subtly enhanced the rest of the furnishings…

  “You can look around some other time.” Dell seemed to see and understand everything. “I brought you here,” he went on, “because I want you to do a job for me. To be specific, I want to send you into the Nebraska Tandy.” He smiled. “There. Now you’re awake, right?”

  Job was very much awake.

  “The Nebraska Tandy,” repeated Wilfred Dell. “You know the jingle?”

  “T - A - N - D—”

  “Not that one. That’s the kiddy version. This one’s a bit more grown up:

  “So twice ten miles of sterile ground,

  “With walls and towers were girdled round.

  “In Xanadu, the sky burns black.

  “If you go in, you don’t come back.

  “How much do you know about the Great Nebraska Tandy?”

  “Enough. I’d be better off handed over to Reginald Brook, right now.”

  “He might send you there anyway. And if he sentenced you, you wouldn’t come back. Whereas if you go for me, the whole point of your trip is that you will come back, or it’s not worth your going.” Dell gestured to a white chair built of strips of stout cloth and metal bars. “Sit down. It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks. I can see you’re baffled, and you should be. Why would anyone care what’s happening inside a Tandy?” He sat down behind the desk, opened a carved jade box that sat on the corner, and pushed it towards Job. “Help yourself.”