Denice said carefully, "I knew you'd met Trent the Uncatchable; it was in your bio."
Lan blinked. "Ring shared my bio with you?"
"No, no, of course not. Your PKF bio."
Lan Sierran blinked, then grinned in delight. "The PKF has a bio on me? They're keeping track of me? I didn't think I was important enough for that."
"It's a small one."
The smile vanished. "Still." Lan paused, said, "I helped Trent boost the LINK, back in '69." The words were spoken with such complete lack of emphasis that Denice could tell he was immensely proud of it. "Well, my sister and I did. And--um, I shouldn't tell you his name. A man loaned to us by the Syndic, or maybe it was the Old Ones--I forget. It doesn't matter anyway; the man was a professional thief, like Trent. We helped Trent kidnap a group of Peaceforcers, and then held them while Trent boosted the LINK, the Lunar Information Network Key. The three of us kept watch over them until Trent was safely away." Lan sighed. "I was going to kill them, but Callia wouldn't let me on account of she promised Trent we wouldn't. We let them go after Trent got away."
Denice nodded. "Callia impresses me. I think honor matters to her."
Lan laughed. "I like the way you say that. You don't think it matters to me too?"
Denice spoke carefully. "I'm not sure, Lan. You've planted bombs that have killed a lot of people."
The humor drained from him. "Yeah. Yeah, I've done that."
"Some of them were PKF, and some of them were civilians."
"Yes."
"How do you justify that?"
Lan said slowly, "Trent the Uncatchable told me once that I hadn't thought through who I was. That's not exactly how he said it, but it's what it came down to. And he was right, I hadn't." Lan sat silently for a long moment, then said abruptly, "What things would you kill for, Denice?"
Denice shook her head. "I don't know, Lan. I've never killed anyone."
Lan nodded. "You know, it's strange. People who can tell you in a minute what they would kill for can't tell you what they would die for; and people who know what they would die for can't tell you what they're living for. And it's weird because they're all the same thing. When you know what you'll kill for then unless you're a sociopath you have to know what you'll die for; a life equals a life. And we're all going to die some day, so whatever you spend your life doing, that is what you died for." He shook his head quickly. "I think most people don't think about things like this. If they did they'd have to live different lives than they do. I can't imagine dying at a hundred and at my funeral they say, 'Lan gave his life to increasing FrancoDEC's market share.' I don't mind dying or living, but by Harry I intend to have some say in how."
"You didn't answer my question."
Lan studied her through the gloom. "How do I justify it? I think I did. Sometimes I have nightmares about it, about the people who died in those explosions. But they weren't random bombings, not any of them. They served a purpose." Lan said abruptly, "You think honor matters to Callia, and you're right. But there's nothing I've done she wouldn't have."
"Oh."
"Does that change how you feel about her?"
"Perhaps--no, I don't think so. I like her well enough." Denice shrugged. "She's very attractive."
Lan grinned abruptly. "That's a conceited thing to say."
"How so?"
"She looks just like you. An eye job and five minutes with the makeup key, you could be twins."
Denice laughed. "Okay, yes, I think I'm attractive. If that's conceit, it's based on the way men and women react to me."
Lan looked at her curiously. "Do you sleep with girls?"
"I have."
Lan nodded. "Me too."
"I prefer men."
Lan grinned. "Me too." He paused. "You have really nice hair."
Denice laughed. "Nice hair?"
"Yeah. I love long hair. You have really great hair."
"You don't want me to put a hat on?"
"What?"
"Never mind."
Lan did not ask; he reached out one hand, ran his fingers across the surface of the glossy black hair. He put down his cup, stood and came close to her; touched her gently on the forehead, ran his hand back through her hair, dragged her hair free, left it hanging down the side of her face, obscuring her features slightly. He moved slowly, almost sleepily, pulling her hair back from her face, and ran the fingers of both hands through her hair, thumbs brushing against her cheeks. Denice closed her eyes, sat in the darkness with the touch of his hands, feeling the fine silk of her hair being combed through by the gentle fingers.
After a bit Lan spoke, in a quiet murmur. "Would you like me to brush your hair for you?"
"That would be--" Denice's tongue felt thick; she had difficulty speaking "--very nice."
Lan Sierran was an artist.
In her life Denice could not recall having been to bed with anyone with such a remarkable talent for bringing her pleasure. Perhaps it was partially by comparison with Ripper, the only person Denice had slept with in over a year; Ripper tended to be oriented toward his own pleasure rather than hers.
Once in the course of their time in bed together Lan whispered to her that he wished he had a third arm, so that he could touch her in more places at once.
Denice barely heard him; she was having an orgasm.
Perhaps it was his preference for men; he approached the matter differently, more slowly and with more attention to detail, than Denice had ever experienced with anyone except another woman; in many ways it was like being in bed with a woman. Lan was alternately gentle and then rough; he used his tongue and his fingers and his cock all at the same time. He licked her toes and fingers and kissed the lobes of her ears and the back of her neck, stroked and teased the lips of her vagina with one hand while a finger of the other hand rubbed around the edge of her anus and his tongue stabbed at her nipples. He inserted himself into her and pulled her over on top of him, kissed her softly while stroking the backs of her thighs and buttocks with the soles of his feet, rubbed her clit with one hand until she came while bouncing up and down on top of him and then rolled her over and pulled out and went down on her, touching and probing and sucking and licking until she found herself coming over and over again. He pushed her knees back toward her chest and brushed his lips against the incredibly sensitive skin on the inside of her thighs, fingers stroking her first in one spot and then another while he alternately licked and sucked her clit, pushed two fingers deep inside her while another penetrated her bottom, and she found to her distant amazement that she was coming again for the third time in not quite an hour and a half.
He lay next to her, still hard, after she had relaxed slightly, and whispered in her ear. "I don't want to wear you out."
"I'm in fine shape," Denice informed him around a huge yawn. "We can do this for," she paused to yawn again, "hours and hours." She closed her eyes a moment, murmured, "You are insanely wonderfully good."
He kissed her earlobe, ran the tip of his tongue into her ear. "We can try again after we've slept for a while, but right now," he said, removing his tongue so that she could hear him more clearly, "I think I would like for you to go down on me."
Denice rolled over on her side, lifted herself up on one elbow and looked at his drowsy brown eyes through her own drowsy green eyes. "I could do that. Are you sure you wouldn't rather come inside me?"
He shook his head, looked for a moment slightly embarrassed. "I can't."
"Oh. What are you going to do, pretend I'm a boy?"
Lan looked straight into her eyes. "Yes."
"Oh." Denice considered it, and then smiled. "That's okay. For you I'll be a boy." She closed her eyes, slid down toward his erect penis, kissing his stomach as she went. After a moment she felt Lan's hand touching the back of her head, and a bit later heard him groaning.
Not five minutes later they were both asleep.
He never did brush her hair.
Lan was gone when Denice awoke, about nine. She showere
d and changed into the pseudo-military fatigues, and went down to the cafeteria for breakfast. She felt pleasantly drowsy and relaxed, and wondered briefly, with distant amusement, if her stress and tension for most of the last half year was due in some measure to the fact that Douglass Ripper, Unification Councilor for New York Metro, was such a lousy lover.
Over a hundred people filled the cafeteria, most of them in the same pseudo-uniform Denice wore, already seated and eating. Denice waited patiently in line, placed her order at the window, picked up a cup of coffee from the table where the drinks had been set up, and looked around for a place to sit. She saw Callia seated at a table near the entrance and joined her, sitting across from her. "Good morning."
Callia worked on her grapefruit and corn flakes, auditing text on her handheld. She glanced at Denice and said politely, "Good morning. Sleep well?"
Denice smiled. "Very."
Callia nodded without expression and returned to the text in her handheld's display.
Denice looked at Callia curiously, with a mild twinge of concern. "Are you upset?"
"Not at you. Only a little at Lan."
Denice shook her head. "Why?" The waitbot approached and laid down her breakfast, fresh fruit with dry rye toast, and left.
Callia shrugged. "It gets tedious. My brother's a nymphomaniac. He sleeps with everyone, and it's gotten worse, not better, as he's gotten older. It's reached the point where I'm reluctant to take someone to bed myself; Lan seems to regard my lovers as common property."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It has nothing to do with you." Callia turned off her handheld, pushed her breakfast back, and rose. "Physicals this afternoon. Don't forget."
Denice ate her breakfast alone, only mildly disturbed by Callia's comments.
Maybe Lan was a nymphomaniac.
She shivered slightly, remembering, and thought to herself, the world should have more nymphomaniacs in it.
Denice sat nude in the examination room and, while Bennett Crandell took blood and tissue samples, listened to the man talk.
She knew his voice.
She had met him once before that she knew of; he was the Reb who had listened while Callia interrogated her. That was not where she knew his voice from; the way he spoke, the sound of his words, awoke a memory in her of something long gone from her life.
Crandell was a mature man of indeterminate age, with dark hair and blue eyes. His features were slightly African, and Denice thought his skin was probably naturally black, not the work of a makeup key and implant.
"Essentially," said Bennett, "what you'll be getting, once we've mapped your genetic structure, is an otherwise normal immune booster on which we've considerably pumped up the volume. The nanovirus's on-board processors have about fifty times the computing power of a normal immune booster; even a self-altering virus can't mutate fast enough to fool this bad girl. Mitsubishi developed this in-house; whatever the PKF uses on us, and they will use some remarkably smart viruses, this immune booster, tailored to your genetic map, should handle it." He finished with a skin scraping, taken from her shoulder, placed it inside a small ceramic dish and added a squirt of some liquid. The dish closed itself around the scrap of Denice's skin.
Denice did not worry about the gene mapping; any competent geneticist would be able to tell that she was a genie, but no one outside of the Bureau of Biotechnology could possibly have recognized the map for that of a Castanaveras. And despite the fact that they were illegal, there were a lot of genies in the System today. "What's Mitsubishi's--what's Japan's interest, for that matter--in aiding the Rebs and the Claw?"
Bennett shrugged. "I don't know. I don't need to. There aren't any Japanese in my organization, though I understand there are some in yours. Stand up, please, we're going to slowscan now." Denice did so; Bennett had her stand in front of a lead-lined section of wall and wheeled a body-length device in front of her. "Close your eyes." A rolling bar of brilliant light descended from the top of the device; Denice felt a vague warmth as it covered the length of her body. "Presumably," said Bennett, "the Japanese don't like the Unification any better than the rest of us."
Denice spoke with her eyes closed. "What do you mean by my organization?"
"Aren't you with the Claw?"
"No."
"You're a Reb?" Bennett looked surprised. "I--well, never mind. A lot of new people through here, lately. I don't know all of our own people any more; I used to. You can open your eyes."
Denice did not correct his assumption that she was a Reb. She blinked a couple of times, sat down again on the examination table. "How long have you been with the Rebs?"
"Twenty years, supporting. Core, about three. I was one of 'Sieur Obodi's first recruits." The device to Bennett's left--it looked like an oven--beeped once, and Bennett opened it and withdrew a small vial. "Here's your vaccination; we'll do it in a second." He turned away from Denice, watched as a multi-colored image of her body slowly assembled itself in midair. "Nice," he murmured after a moment. "Gorgeous bone structure, no vermiform appendix, no wisdom teeth, overlarge heart, abnormally large lungs, preponderance of quick twitch muscles--somebody did a nice job with you." Denice did not comment; Bennett did not seem to expect a reply; he was looking at something in her pelvic region. "You'll have children easily," he said after a moment, and turned back to her. He gestured. "Turn around. This injection goes in the buttock. You'll be sore for about two hours, that's normal." Denice turned, waited for the injection. A slight stinging sensation; it faded rapidly.
"Are we done?"
"Yes. You can get dressed." Crandell went into the next room while Denice dressed, came back in as she sealed her shirt. "You're a Reb, you say?"
"I didn't say that, no."
"But you're not Claw?"
"No."
He shook his head. "Odd."
Denice studied him. "You think you know me?"
"Hmm? No, not really. I think you remind me of someone I used to know, that's all."
Denice said simply, "I know you. It's your voice, as much as anything. Your voice is familiar to me."
Bennett shook his head. "I don't think it's possible. The person you remind me of--" Crandell hesitated, and Denice knew. A shiver touched her and the skin at the back of her neck prickled. Impulsively she reached out and Touched--
--the image leapt at her; his memory of the girl, at sixteen or seventeen, standing in the sunlight on a beach somewhere in New York; wearing a pair of white shorts and nothing else, long black hair moving gently with the wind, and dominating the memory, the girl's brilliant emerald eyes.
That's how I looked when I was her age. That's exactly how--
She became aware that she was staring at Bennett.
Bennett looked oddly embarrassed. "You remind me of someone I knew once. But she's been dead for a long time." His voice trailed off into wistfulness, and then he smiled at her with sudden genuine warmth. "You remind me of her, that's all. A remarkable woman I once knew. Possibly the finest person I ever knew." Bennett paused, and then said firmly, "We have never met."
Denice nodded, thanked him for his time, went back to her room and sat quietly. They had met before, and she knew where; knew of whom she reminded him.
The woman of whom he spoke so fondly was her mother, Jany McConnell. And Bennett Crandell thought he knew her because Bennett Crandell was not his name.
His name was Gary Auerbach and it had been at least fifteen years since Denice had seen him last.
He was a Peaceforcer.
It took Nicole Lovely and Chris Summers less than four hours to arrive.
There was a moment's silence when Denice was done speaking.
Nicole Lovely's features hardened, set into something resembling cast ferrocrete, into something that looked very much like the rugged features of the ex-PKF Elite sitting next to her. "You're certain?"
Eyes fixed on the ugly blue shag rug in the office they had taken her to, Denice said softly, "No, 'Selle Lovely. I am not certain."
She could barely hear her own voice. The ex-Elite's presence made her nervous. She had had biosculpture, but it had not been major; with her makeup key turned off she knew that she looked like an Asian version of her mother. And she did not doubt Summers remembered Jany McConnell at least as well as Bennett. "If he's who I think, his name is Gary Auerbach."
Summers' thoughts were elsewhere, though. Summers said softly, "Auerbach. I knew him slightly; he was attached to Project Superman at the same time I was."
Lovely said, "Would you recognize him?"
"After twenty years and a bout of biosculpture? Not likely." The rogue Elite fixed a heavy, skeptical gaze on Denice. "'Selle Daimara, you've been here what, three days?"
"Four, sir."
"And already you've uncovered a spy who's eluded our detection for better than three years. I must admit I'm impressed."
Denice met the cyborg's hard, skeptical gaze without flinching. "He came to several of the shows I danced in when I was with Orinda Gleygavass, back in '69 and '70. He was at five or six different performances of Leviathan." It was simple truth; there was no need to tell them she did not remember Auerbach from those attendances, that she only knew he had been there because she had taken the memory from him. Her mouth was dry and she had trouble continuing. "He said I reminded him of a woman he used to know, but I think he was covering for having recognized me from when I danced. And I don't know why he would need to do that, unless he's who I think he is, who he was introduced to me as." She spoke swiftly, staring at Chris Summers: "I don't know his face but I recognize the voice."
Chris Summers said heavily, "We have an option here. We can braindrain him and see what we get."
"It might damage him," said Nicole Lovely mildly, watching Denice.
Denice Castanaveras took a deep breath. "The voice is the voice of Gary Auerbach. I think he's a Peaceforcer."
Sometime after 11 p.m., Christian Summers stopped by Denice's room. He spoke as the door rolled aside for him. "Come with me," he said brusquely.
"Where?"
"The basement." Denice flipped her handheld off, tossed it on the bed, and followed him.
In the maglev on the way down, Summers said broodingly, "I drained him myself. I was as gentle as I could be, but he's still a mess; I haven't run a probe in twenty years."
The Last Dancer Page 20