She hit the control for null gee.
Kira levered herself up as Tallis commenced a rhythmic thrusting. She giggled. “It looks like he’s trying to put his nacker into orbit,” she gasped, provoking snickers from Luri. They both choked with laughter as they strapped him down to keep him from floating off the bed. Luri touched Tallis’s face just under his new eye. “Oh. That’s much better.”
A thought hit Kira. She reached over and tapped the console, activating the imagers. She needed something to balance Tallis’s command of the logos. Fortunately his pride was very fragile.
Now Tallis was almost singing his ecstasy. The breathy moans, rising and falling to some tune known only to him, caused Kira and Luri to clutch each other, laughing helplessly in amusement that soon mutated into something far more satisfying, while Tallis rocked helplessly next to their interlocked bodies.
Then Luri screamed in abject horror and twisted away, propelling Kira in the opposite direction. Kira twisted back to look and surprised herself with a hysterical snort. This image would be priceless.
Above the helpless, thrusting, worm-like spasms of the naked man, and Luri curled in midair with her knuckles jammed into her mouth, a blue eyeball hovered disembodied, observing the scene with inanimate dispassion as a vagrant air current carried it in a slow circuit over the bed.
While Tallis’s utterances slowly turned to moans of pain, Kira captured the offending orb and put it away. Luri carefully removed the Emasculizer, and Tallis slumped into unconsciousness.
Kira looked aghast at the man’s inflamed and shriveled nacker, then grinned. She’d have Luri to herself a while longer, it seemed.
SEVEN
ARES
Eloatri received the Panarch in the Cloisters garden. In the aftermath of the riots, the authorities had advanced the oneill’s weather to High Summer, which was gradually transforming the sense of exhausted lassitude that pervaded Ares into one of lazy well-being.
The air was heavily scented with jessamine and jumari; a chimeblossom tree tinkled in a vagrant breeze, counterpoint to the plashing of the fountain springing from a gargoyle’s mouth in an ancient stone wall. In the bushes nearby, an unseen flock of small birds quarreled, cheerfully shrill.
Brandon could have summoned her, but had instead requested permission to visit. As she sat waiting, she ran her hand up and down the vine-covered support next to her chair as she reflected on her vision.
Then Tuan appeared and announced the arrival of the man whom that vision had led her to betray.
Brandon looked tired and stressed. She rose and bowed deeply, not in the mode to which she was entitled, but in the simple subject-to-sovereign mode. That abjuration of her prerogative was as close to an apology as she could honorably come.
His bow confirmed his understanding, for the deference he returned was the unique Royalty-to-Numen mode paid only to the High Phanist. This time, however, there was no modulation of implied doubt, as had been the case at their first meeting, on far-away Desrien.
A steward brought a tea service with a selection of small seed cakes. The Panarch accepted a cup and inhaled deeply of the fragrant brew. “I’m not familiar with this. What is it?” He sipped.
“Oolong’s Child. It’s cultivated in Heaven’s Mandate on Desrien.”
“Ah.” One sip, then he set the cup down on the table. The musical ching evoked memory; Eloatri let it wash through and past her as the Panarch continued. “How did you divert the inspections on the Telvarna?”
“Sedry Thetris is a Christian, worshiping the face of Telos I now serve,” she replied. “She confessed her complicity in the Srivashti plot to me some time ago. When the time came, she was willing to employ her noderunning talents to make what restitution she could.”
“She confessed treason to you and you said nothing?” She knew he was angry; his expression remained shuttered but his entire body radiated tension.
“Her confession to you was her penance. But even had she refused that, the matter of Confession in a religious context may not be revealed for any reason.” He knew that, surely; it was common to many religions in the Thousand Suns.
“Yet you used it for your own ends.” He picked up a seed cake then set it down again on his plate.
“They are not my ends, Your Majesty.” The memory of the taste of blood tightened her throat. “I have not had such liberty since my third hejir commenced, back on Desrien.” She rubbed the image the Digrammaton had burned into her palm after its mysterious leap from Arthelion. It had still been searing hot from the nuclear atrocity, meant for Brandon, that had killed her predecessor. The Panarch’s eyes followed the motion, but he showed no reaction.
“Before you were brought to Desrien I was shown Vi’ya, and others. I was left no doubt that they were a Hinge of Time, a pivot of great affairs.” She sipped at her tea to wash away the remembered taste of blood. This present moment, too, was part of that chalice.
The Panarch remained silent as his long, slender fingers crumbled the seedcake. He tossed bits of it out onto the lawn, where small birds, red, blue, yellow fought greedily over them. How could she explain to him the inevitable interlocking of events and people that announced, more clearly than sight or touch or any physical sense, the movement of the Hand of Telos?
“Have you ever body-surfed, Your Majesty?” she asked.
He glanced up at her. “Yes.”
“Then you know how the wave picks you up and bears you forward irresistibly. You can choose your direction, to some extent, but you cannot go back.”
He nodded, brushing his hands together. The seedcake was gone.
“That wave is the summation of countless currents and winds and storms of which you have no knowledge. It is such a wave that impels me.” She hesitated, reluctant to commit personal trespass. “I do not know Vi’ya as well as I would have liked, but I am certain of one thing. No one could have kept her here against her will. She would have kept trying to escape until an attempt killed her.”
Brandon sat, head bent, then stirred at last. “Do you think that she can activate the Suneater and wrest it from Eusabian?” he asked finally, and she knew he had accepted her reasons, if not her actions.
She stared down into her cup, sorting impressions, words.
“You said once there was another in your vision that you never found,” he added when she didn’t answer immediately. “If the Unity is incomplete . . . .” He paused, leaning forward to pick up his cup again. She sensed the motion was a sublimation of his intense hope that the missing person was not part of the Unity. That Vi’ya could succeed.
Eloatri remembered Anaris’s sneering face from the vid of the Gehenna action. The Panarch’s enemy, more even than Eusabian. This might seem the worst part of her betrayal.
“The last member of the Unity is already on the Suneater, Your Majesty.”
Brandon raised his head to look directly at her, the delicate chinois cup forgotten in his hand.
Eloatri returned his gaze without flinching. This was her own penance. “It is Anaris, Eusabian’s son.”
SUNEATER
Lysanter personally assisted the dazed tempath back to his quarters, exulting in his first success. Norio had survived!
The gray-uniformed ordinary lowered the tempath onto his bed. “Be careful!” Lysanter said, mangling the harsh Dol’jharian consonants. It was one of the few phrases he knew. There was so little time for anything but Urian science, and he really disliked the Dol’jharian language.
Dismissing the guard, he then stooped and lifted one of the tempath’s eyelids. The eye glinted out at him in rapid motion. REM sleep. The Negus was catching up with him.
Lysanter was fascinated by the mix of drugs that Norio had concocted; the man had an interesting cookbook mind. But it was apparent from the minimal effects of the tempath’s first contact with the Heart of Kronos that they would have to cut down the dose in careful increments, to find the balance between control and insanity or death.
Lysanter
lowered the neural monitor into range and tapped it; a flicker connected it to the dataconsole. Then he pulled the portable leads off Norio’s head and neck, the skin affinity of the plasflesh sensors puckering the tempath’s sallow skin over the neural nexi. The man’s dreaming mind apparently incorporated the stimuli and his loose, petulant mouth pursed in a prurient sigh. His hand groped, grasping Lysanter’s.
Lysanter yanked his hand free and jumped back, prickling all over with intense disgust and under that shame, although no one was there to see. He hated being so polar, which had led him to flee the sexual sophistication of his Douloi upbringing as soon as he came of age. Perhaps that was why he was comfortable enough among Dol’jharians, even if he couldn’t talk to most of them. They were rigidly puritanical and at least theoretically heterosexual—a word with only clinical meaning in most of the Thousand Suns—as their four-times-yearly sexual ritual was expressed only in terms of procreation.
When he was assured that Norio’s vital signs were stable, he left, hurrying back to his datacenter. He spent so much time there that they’d had to install more stasis clamps. Other offices weren’t tenanted long enough to animate the station’s substance. In fact, only the top Bori bureaucrats had offices; all others were condemned to circulate through open-space work centers. Lysanter had noted how unhappy they looked.
Barrodagh was waiting in the datacenter, dwarfed by the towering data arrays that the cims were laboring nonstop to replicate. The station was so complex! Two things that he would never have enough of, Lysanter thought, were quantum interfaces to gather the data and compute arrays to analyze it.
“What were the results?” Barrodagh looked haggard, and one side of his face was twisted oddly, almost as though he’d had a stroke.
“We’re still analyzing them,” Lysanter replied in what he hoped sounded like a soothing, cooperative tone. “It will take hours, although a preliminary report is ready for you to download.” They wouldn’t even have that if it weren’t for Tatriman, the little Bori noderunner Morrighon had brought with him. She was a marvel.
“But,” he added as Barrodagh frowned, “It was a resounding success. Norio lived through it, and remained sane!”
Barrodagh’s cheek twitched. “Was there any augmentation of the station’s power?”
“Apparently not.”
Obviously unsatisfied, but apparently, finally aware of his, Lysanter’s, near-equal power when dealing with the Avatar, Barrodagh launched into a familiar litany of complaint.
This was the difficult part of dealing with Dol’jharians and their minions. They thought only in terms of power and control—which had to make the Suneater a very uncomfortable place for them. He stifled the flutter of humor in his throat. That was one of the few pleasures in which he indulged aside from his work: watching Bori and Dol’jharian reactions—never the Avatar, of course—to the organic and ingestion archetypes the station evoked. And ghosts and spirits, not that there was much opportunity for those metaphors here.
Although Morrighon didn’t seem as much in thrall to such fears as the other Catennach Lysanter came in contact with. Was that due to his service to Anaris, who had been partly raised as a hostage on Arthelion, and who thus might himself be less subject to discomfort here on the station? Well, he could never know: the only way of falsifying the hypothesis had the mindripper at the end of it.
As Barrodagh began winding down toward his usual threats and exhortations, Lysanter nodded, but he heard scarcely two words in twenty. Thinking over his last communication with Ferrasin at Arthelion, he wondered what was happening in the Mandala: had the mysterious computer phantom really become flesh? Surely not.
All things considered, as uncomfortable as the Suneater was in many respects, he was glad not to be responsible for dealing with something the Dol’jharians called The Mask.
Barrodagh saw that Lysanter had drifted off again. He was always tempted to take advantage of it, but the scientist had demonstrated the futility of that on more than one occasion. His reveries were not lapses of alertness.
“What about the drugs?” Barrodagh asked in an abrupt change of subject. Time to wake up, idiot.
Lysanter started, his eyes flickering, causing an acidic spurt of triumph in Barrodagh. “We’ll cut down Danali’s dosage incrementally until we find a safe level for manipulation of the station.”
“No,” said Barrodagh impatiently. “I meant, what are they? Have you had them analyzed yet?” His cheek twinged again through the numbness; this was the most vitally urgent question, though he dared not let anyone suspect why.
“Oh, yes. You’ll find that in my report. Basically a complex polysaccharide from a Vilarian plant, plus a number of other compounds: some desensitizers, mod stabilizers, anxiolytics, REM-sleep moderators, that sort of thing.” Lysanter dismissed the slapdash chemistry with a wave of his hand.
Barrodagh suppressed a snarl of frustration. He’d be up all night datadiving to figure out what the compounds would do, and if any would help him. He certainly couldn’t ask Lysanter; the word would get back to Morrighon immediately, perhaps even the Avatar.
Barrodagh moved to the next vexing subject: cims. He hated being so obvious, but directness often seemed to work better for getting information out of Lysanter than threats, though the increasing impatience of the restless Avatar was all too real.
“The Avatar has left me no leeway there, serach Barrodagh,” replied Lysanter, formally, paralleling Barrodagh’s thoughts in an unsettling way. Deliberate provocation? “The last batch of stasis clamps went to Norio’s cabin, and you know that the Lord of Vengeance has instructed me to hold a number in reserve should he request more. The next batch is not scheduled for four days. I forget the precise schedule. It’s in Delmantias’s report.”
Barrodagh’s jaw ached. No, not deliberate—again, Lysanter seemed oblivious to anything outside of his own interests. Except when the Avatar’s orders were direct, as they had been in this instance. Infuriated by his impotence, Barrodagh forced himself to listen as Lysanter went on.
“You really should let me try tuning them. If you’re willing to accept a little movement, especially in the floor, most of the other manifestations can be controlled easily.”
Movement? Barrodagh tensed to control the ache behind his sternum that presaged a shudder. How could Lysanter stand it? He had very few clamps in his quarters. Barrodagh had been there only once. The occasional heaving underfoot had terrified him.
He left. As promised, the preliminary report was waiting on his console. He ignored the rest of the data and tabbed straight to the report on the drugs.
An hour after that he had his answer. Some of the compounds were useless to him: only a fool would take euphorics around Dol’jharians. But two of the compounds were more effective on tics and similar neural disorders than anything he had. And they didn’t have the side effect of trigeminal numbness; the semi-paralysis that caused was far too revealing. He cross-referenced their physical properties until he found largely inert equivalents. The next time Norio was in the Chamber of Kronos, Barrodagh would pay his cabin a visit. The tempath had more than enough to spare.
o0o
Morrighon DL’d the report into his compad while he watched Anaris slowly recover from the heavy tranquilizer he’d taken before the scheduled experiment. The leaden prose lulled him, slowly walling away the near-terror he’d felt when the Suneater again trembled, the lights flickering as the station’s struggle against the stasis clamps taxed the lighting circuits. And even though Anaris had been unconscious, his t’kinetic power had again animated the furnishings of his cabin.
Morrighon had reached the section concerning Norio Danali’s drugs when Anaris sat up slowly, then massaged his temples.
“What did you observe?” he asked. “It feels like there was a manifestation.”
“Very slight, lord.” Morrighon swallowed. “Papers and small objects. They seemed to be attempting to form a pattern. I could not make it out.” He tapped his compad
and held it out, replaying the t’kinetic display that had resulted when Norio made his first contact with the Heart of Kronos.
Anaris took it, stared, then dropped the compad on the bed. “The tempath?”
“Alive and sane. He was apparently heavily drugged. They will reduce the doses incrementally to see what happens. I have the proposed schedule for the next few experiments.” He picked up the compad and retreated. “There will be no more surprises.”
Anaris made no comment, merely asking, “What drugs were used?”
Morrighon read off the list. Each compound had a brief description of its activity appended, with links to the main databanks. Anaris took the compad back from him and tabbed it, apparently following a reference.
“Euphorics.” He snorted. “Might as well kiss a numathanat.” He looked further.
Numathanat? In a world where an inappropriate smile could be fatal, Morrighon was convinced that a numathanat—whatever that was—could hardly be more dangerous than a euphoric.
Anaris stopped tabbing. “Negus.” His gaze diffused. “Some of the citations note that it mutes tempathic sensitivity. I wonder if it would work the same on the other gifts of the Chorei?”
“I will obtain samples, lord,” Morrighon said promptly. “The manifest indicates he has more than enough to spare at his present dosage levels.”
o0o
Several days later, Norio relaxed in the privacy of his cabin, looking fondly at the hangings that disguised the numerous stasis clamps that kept it stable.
“Your quarters are nearly as heavily stabilized as the Avatar’s,” Lysanter had said.
He toyed with the vid control. He had brought all his treasures with him, memories of especially savory emotional eruptions fixed in vivid detail by vids, or even, in a few cases, holos. He brought up his examination of Naigluf, back on Charvann’s Node, remembering avidly the taste of the skinny Rifter’s sufferings as he watched, his eyelids paralyzed and held open by clamps, the evocation sequence of images that Norio had identified as his deepest fears. Spiders and falling—oh, what a splendid stew of anguish that had been!
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