Darkship Thieves-ARC

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  "An ELF," he said.

  "Bio improved?" I asked. "The navigators? They're ELFed?"

  "Oh, of course," he said.

  "Of course?"

  "Well," he shrugged. "The ELFing is less costly than for a Cat, so more likely to happen if a family is strapped for cash, but . . ."

  "But they too are improved?"

  He'd explained to me that the designation for his function had started out as pilot but had over the centuries changed to Cat because people couldn't overlook the eyes.

  "Oh yes."

  "But . . . no eyes, no . . ."

  "No. For sense of direction. Ability with mechanics, and the . . . "

  "Speed?"

  "Not normally." He frowned. "Cats are. But I can see a Nav passing on Earth, never a cat. Which is part of what confuses me about your speed. But Navigators usually have very good visual memory and even better spacial reasoning. It allows them to remember cul de sacs if their pilot gets blinded. In that way they're invaluable backup. On person, alone in a ship is dangerous. A pair with the same abilities—they'd both be incapacitated at the same time. So the navigator is a . . . redundant system to the cat, with some . . . modifications."

  "I see," I said. "But how could I have inherited my abilities from my parents? Even if my parents were . . . a nav or something?" I couldn't imagine how it could possibly be, since Patrician lines were fairly well guarded and certified. I couldn't imagine how Father, with his line of ancestors that had all been Patricians of Syracuse Seacity stretching back to the twenty first century might have been replaced. True I'd never seen him in a fight, and I'd never seen him fix anything, so there was no telling whether he had mechanical ability or super speed. And mother . . . I knew next to nothing about mother, only that she must have been sane, because she left about when I was six. And no sane woman could have endured any longer with Father. "And what would super speed have to do with it? You said that's not a nav thing. And anyway, didn't you say that the . . . ELFING costs money and needs to be introduced via a virus in gestation?"

  He shrugged and frowned, the expression of a man deep in thought. "Yeah," he said at last. "It doesn't make a lot of sense, but there have been cases—rare—where ELFing passes on a generation. Or some characteristics of ELFing. And particularly your ability to mind-talk with me, since the Cat and Nav telepathy is of a specific type, and normally has to be trained between a couple, makes me think that—"

  I jumped, suddenly, in a perfect leap, which is difficult when you start from a standing position, but which was good enough for me to hit first his left knee, then as I fell, the right.

  His eyes widened, then he grimaced and went down on his knees. I smiled. I hadn't hit him hard enough to break his kneecaps—not only was that nearly impossible from a stand, so that if I had truly been in a fight with him, I'd have needed to now hit him, quickly, with something heavy, like one of the barbells that went with the exercise machine, but also I had no intention of permanently maiming him and then having to spend I didn't know how long in there with him, before we got to his home where, unless I were very wrong, I was going to need his indulgence and good will.

  He knelt and folded over, and then fell on his behind, and stretched his legs, rubbing at the knees. "Very funny," he said. His expression was closed and grave, even though his voice came lightly.

  "You said there were more than one sensitive zones on a male," I said. "Although I'd like to point out that it's not as effective as hitting you where it mainly hurts. Because that would disable you longer."

  He gave me a look, part guarded part considering. "Somehow, princess, I suspect if you had it hit me on the knees as hard as you could, it would have done for me fairly effectively too. I suspect your hitting where you normally do is psychological."

  I set my hands on either side of my waist. "Freudianism was a discredited religion that led to—"

  "Uh. And that's all you ever heard of psychology, is it?" He said getting up. He made a show of flexing his leg, that I expected was exactly that, show. "Remind me to give you a couple of data gems later."

  And that was par for the course and again confirmation that he was a completely normal human male. In the times when I wasn't causing instructors and trainers at various academies to hide in fear, I was earning their respect trust and good will by allowing them to lecture me. It must be something set deep in the human male from the time the first one of them crawled out of the cave. Doubtless the first thing a man did after learning to speak was to explain to the nearest woman that Ooog was not the same as Ooooog.

  I'd learned the darkship thief was only very much human in that he delighted in giving me history gems and music gems and literature gems.

  The music gems hadn't been a surprise, or not exactly. At my social level, I was expected to have a decent, classical education, no matter how many schools were left torched, in my path. I had learned all the classical composers, though I can't say I mastered the passion with which he spoke of Hayden and Listz. History and literature and even science seemed completely different from what I'd learned. And not in the obvious way. You'd expect them to speak of the time of Mules as a golden age, of course, a time when Earth was well ruled. Strangely it wasn't so. Rarely referred to, and when at all, it had the tone of an embarrassing time. It was called the time of Earth Authority or the Time of Servitude.

  Other things too had a different weight in those books. Take the Usian experiment. All the analyses I read back from primary program on talked of it as a failed experiment and everyone agreed it had been doomed from the very beginning, where it had put the emphasis on private rights and individual decisions about government. Eden's books . . . well, it wasn't that they had never heard about Marx, or Pseudo-Gurion, and they seemed to have a startlingly low level of respect for Moore, though his work was referenced in passing once or twice, mostly as an example of what not to do—it was more that they looked at everything I'd learned from the other side.

  In their view the Usian state had collapsed not because it had reposited too much confidence and too great a power in the individual; not because it had allowed private citizens to own dangerous weapons; not even because it had enforced the right of the individual to associate and trade with whomever he pleased, but because it had, by degrees slid into the same sort of oligarchy that governed most of the world at the time. It was—the darkship's people's treatises said—because the Usians had surrendered, intellectually, to the older ways of doing things that they had lost their place as the most advanced and powerful state of the early twenty first century. And it was because of that that it had eventually become just the North American protectorate of Earth's government.

  If only the Usians had restricted their government, if they'd kept it small and powerless, the world might still eventually have united under the Bio-Lords and led to the debacle and disorder and the current government of the Good Men, but probably not.

  I'd learned soon to keep my mouth shut about how strange these ideas were. I'd tried arguing once, after a week in the ship, when I'd read only a few gems. "It's not true, you know," I'd told my captor over lunch.

  We rarely ate lunch together. In fact, he seemed to avoid me as much as he could, almost as much as Father did, only with less reason. Or perhaps not. I had never tried to strangle Father. But this one time, I'd come in, with the small gem reader he'd loaned me in one hand, reading my fourth history book of the week—more than I had read in my entire educational career.

  He looked up from what he was eating—something that smelled and looked like fish over rice—and gathered his eyebrows over his eyes. "What is not true?" he asked.

  "That the government of the Mules collapsed not because of the Mules but because too much power was concentrated in the hands of too few individuals. The Mules were different—They weren't human. They didn't think—"

  "Perhaps," he said, and lowered his eyelids a little, whether to think better or to hide his eyes from me, I did not know. "And perhaps because they
were different the system survived longer than it would have with normal humans."

  "Uh?"

  "Well, think about it. What is the rationale for having all the power concentrated in the hands of a few individuals?" he asked.

  "That . . ." I thought about it and fished from my imperfectly remembered lessons the answers I'd learned. "That governing can then be done by experts. It is too much to hope for, too much to believe that regular individuals, concerned with their families and their work and . . . daily life, will have any interest in the government of the Commonweal beyond the marginal interest in enacting what they will benefit them, but which might be disastrous for the country, region or world."

  "And why shouldn't they enact what's in their best interest?"

  "Because they don't always know what's in their best interest."

  Kit Klaavil waved the whole thing away, as if it didn't matter. "I must remember to give you Gilbert's The Election of the Few. What you're reporting is a fallacy caused by whoever interpreted history to write the books you read. They had assumptions a-priori and—"

  "In the twenty first people believed the zaniest things. That there are no gender differences in the human brain; that race predetermines culture. That—"

  "Granted. That whole period was psychotic. It could be argued that it was a psychosis from which the Earth as a whole has yet to recover. But the thing is, unless the analysis I've read got it grossly wrong—and they investigated electronic documents of the time—mostly the mass psychosis was pushed from the top down. Yes, people came to believe it, but it was taught in colleges, by professors trained in the best universities."

  "But how could the common man not notice reality right in front of his eyes?"

  "They did. The masses as a whole made jokes about these notions. But they weren't truly given an option not to apply them. By that time, government was already too divorced from the common man."

  I was lost. This was such a complete contradiction of everything I'd learned, that he might as well have announced that the sky was normally green, or that this spaceship was made entirely of fish. "I suppose," I said. "If what you say is true . . ." Part of me was trying to adjust to the idea that anyone could say it was true—that this anarchic vision of individuals ruling themselves could in any way be the work of a sane human being.

  The rest of me, meanwhile, wanted me to back away from the dangerous madman, before he reached out and stabbed me with his fork.

  He grinned at me, as though reading my mind—which he might very well have—"Patrician Athena Sinistra," he sad. "Tell me—who is better equipped to decide what you should be doing with your life? Yourself or your father?"

  "Myself," I answered without thinking.

  "Then what makes you think that your father is better equipped to decide what's best for total strangers?"

  I hesitated. "People would say he's best qualified to say what I should be doing," I said. "They would say he knows how the world at large works and what I will have to do when I inherit."

  "Does he?" It was a mild enquiry.

  "Like hell he does," I'd tried to constrain my response, but it wasn't going to happen. "All Father cares about is the Sinistra name, not me. Given enough time, he'd have found me a nice Patrician husband, probably the younger son of a ruling Patrician, and he'd have me marry, have the man take our name and then . . ."

  "And then?" He looked half interested, half horrified.

  I shrugged. "And then I become a broodmare," I said. "To make sure the Sinistra name never comes to this point again." I looked up and couldn't read his expression. "I know it sounds childish. Yes, I'm aware that forced marriages have occurred in every culture and place, throughout history. And it's not like anyone will force me to choose a man I hate. It's just that I . . . ah. Never mind."

  He didn't say anything for a long while, then put his empty plate in the cleaning area of the cooker. "Let me show you the gym," he said. Which is how we'd started our habit of exercising through mock fights. At least most of them were mock, though sometimes our discussion got more than a little heated and it extended into the exercise room.

  Which is how we'd got to the point where he was making a great show of flexing his legs. The pity-mongering worked. "You may have the fresher first," I told him.

  He flashed me a half surprised smile and went past me and down the hallway. The only fresher in the place opened off the bedroom—in keeping, I supposed, with the idea that the ship was supposed to contain a married or otherwise bonded couple.

  I walked after him, far enough to see him go into the bedroom. And then I turned and went back to the virtus closet where he slept.

  It was normal for a full-size unit—not like the little holo projectors that I used to watch the gems he gave me and the ones I found on my own but real virtus, the kind where you can live through an experience—a little longer than seven feet, a little wider than five. It contained a single bed and the apparatus, which consisted of helmet and a sort of blanket you could pull over yourself while experiencing the virtus—unlike the ones on Earth which had rigid gloves and leg enclosures as well as a mid-body shield.

  Here's the thing. While the virtus closet was the logical place for someone to sleep if your bedroom was taken up by an unexpected guest in an otherwise bedless ship, to be honest, the virtus closet was the most logical place for the guest, herself, particularly when she was half your weight and a little over five feet.

  Even conceding he'd given me his room out of courtesy and the kindness of his ELFed heart, I knew for a fact that every time I'd chanced to glance in the closet—as I walked by when he opened the door for example, I saw him removing the helmet or turning off the unit. From that and from the general over-neat look of the bedroom, when this man was just as likely to not vibro his clothes or not pick up after himself, I got the impression he'd been sleeping in the Virtus.

  All right, you'll say it was none of my business. If he wanted to lock himself in and have vivid dreams, instead of sleeping normally, it wouldn't make any difference. Except for two things. First, I, just like everyone else for the last hundred years, had heard the horror stories of people who used virtus instead of sleeping and who went completely insane within weeks. I figured I'd been here for just over a month, and if he were going to go berserk, I'd like to know and be ready. Second, if he was living through vivid experiences of, say, dismembering and eating female guests . . . It would be good to know.

  He had the gems pre-loaded into a chute and fortunately the virtus had a little preview chamber next to it, which showed—I flipped through it rapidly. He had maybe twenty gems. The preview chamber didn't show the events happening in motion, of course, nor the sensations and feelings while they were happening. Instead it showed still holograms of various scenes in the virtus gem.

  They were all variations on a theme. Birthday parties and celebrations. Family dinners and picnics. Children and butterflies. All right, I'm making up the part about the butterflies, though there might have been some in the scenes that didn't preview. In all of them the young blond in the family picture showed, in various poses and moods. Sometimes in a uniform that matched his, sometimes in a dress, sometimes in nothing at all. But it wasn't the kind of virtus you'd expect a man to review about his girlfriend or wife. It wasn't intimate moments, or sex. It all seemed to be fairly innocent scenes.

  I previewed virtus gem after virtus gem, watching the amber-colored balls sparkle into the chamber and the scenes form. They were all the same.

  Behind me, a throat cleared, and I just about jumped out of my skin. I turned around, ready to defend myself, expecting him to look disapproving or upset or perhaps angry. Perhaps he would lash out.

  But when I turned around, he looked perfectly normal, except that the closed gaze was back. He stepped back to avoid me, as I emerged from the virtus.

  "The fresher is free," he said. And as I nodded and started to walk down the hallway, my face—I'm sure—burning red, he added to my retreating back,
"If you wish to use the virtus, you may ask me any time."

  I called thank you and went into the fresher, my cheeks stinging. I removed the suit I was wearing. All my suits—three, which he had vibroed and programmed in alterations for—were his suits, which he allowed me to wear. He'd even picked—possibly out of consideration—the most sedate of the suits. A solid color blue, which was what I was wearing, a gray one and a black one.

  I stripped the suit off in brisk movements, tossed it into the vibro, then stepped into the fresher. It was the normal fresher deal, a little smaller than even those in Father's space cruiser. Just about large enough to hold me—I had no idea how Kit Klaavil stuffed himself in it—it had the normal pressurized water and air-jets. It ran for precisely timed periods, and turned off promptly and without my intervention. And I supposed the water was recycled, of course. Some days like right then, I could have killed for the free flowing water back home in Syracuse seacity, but I was aware that as it was I was probably straining my host's resources. There were times I noticed his reprogramming things and I suspected he went without meals to provide for mine—I couldn't be sure, but on weight alone, the spaceship wouldn't be outfitted for two people, would it, at least supply wise? So my food must be coming from somewhere. And while I resented him for not having taken me back to Earth, I also knew that, once Circum had proven inhospitable, I could not ask him to commit virtual suicide just to take me back where I belonged.

  I'd gotten out of the fresher, dried, and was pulling on the grey suit, when there was a polite knock on the door. I pulled the grey tunic down and said, "Yes?" in the general direction of the door.

  He opened the door just a little and said, "The alarm has gone off. We're approaching Eden. I thought you'd like to see the approach."

  Twelve

  Kit changed into his uniform while I waited outside his room. Then he led me along the hallway to the Cat Cabin, which was what he called the place from which he controlled the piloting and harvesting. The same place where I'd tried to strangle him.