Shadowplay sq-1

by Jo Clayton

  "Yes, sir. Your Luck will smooth it over."

  Bossman dipped again, brought up the metal check from the Customs locker. "Now this is different, I think." He touched the timer on, read the display. "Yes. Something less than an hour left before the alarm goes and triggers a Station scan along with a check on MEMORY. That we do not want. Take. this, Lute. Fetch the girl's luggage here." He blanked the display, tossed the check to his second. "Please wait until I have finished with the bag before you leave."

  He brought out a letterpak, unsealed it and ran the message. (Shadith was furious at this intrusion, but found Swardheld's voice comforting right then):

  //Aslan aid Adlaar/University/Institute of Xenoethnology

  Aslan-who gives you this is a friend of mine by name Shadith. She plays a mean harp. Introduce her to all the ancient songs you can dig up and point her to the better teachers, you'll know who once you hear her play. Me, I confess an utter Ignorance. Might as well confess, you say? Hahl All right, I build harps, I don't play the things. Favor for favor, teach. Ask and you will get. I'll be along In a year or so to see how things are going. If you're not off somewhere recording the tweedles of noseflutes or something equally stimulating, perhaps we can find a way to pass sometime. Should you be agreeable to this, leave a message with my housekeep. See you. Swar Quale/Cluale's Nest/Telfferll

  Bossman dropped the spent pak on the floor. "Who is this Quale?"

  "He's a friend of my guardian. A Freetrader. He hauls and fetches a lot for University."

  "I see. A year or so. He does not seem overly concerned about you though he calls you friend."

  "He's just being polite, doing me a favor because my guardian asked him to."

  "Will this Aslan be expecting you?"

  "No." She was running on instinct, there was no time to think out her lies and she couldn't have explained to anyone, even herself, why she said NO rather than YES. "Quale was leaving and the times were wrong for a comcall. The letterpak was instead."

  "No message? He asked this Aslan to leave one."

  "He doesn't like leaving messages about, he says his business is his business.and he wants to keep it that way.

  Too many snoops around reading other people's mail."

  "I trust you are not referring to me, child."

  Shaddith put a stubborn look on her face and said nothing.

  He didn't push it, in fact he seemed pleased with her; she'd guessed right this time, but the need to watch every word, every act was putting knots in her gut.

  He felt around the smallest of the compartments and

  Jo Clayton found the tiket from the shop, frowned as he read it. "Sent to Aleytys of Wolff, Hunter. How do you come to know her?"

  "Aleytys is my guardian and guarantor." Shadith tapped the credit bracelet. "It was her dropped me off here."

  He inspected the tiket again. "A personal message enclosed." He smiled. "That was clever of you, child."

  "Clever? What do you mean?"

  "You understand me very well."

  Shadith reknotted her fingers. "All right. I wrote her about the guard who was after me. I was angry, sir. Scared, too. If I couldn't get away from him, I wanted her to come here and erase the slime. She's fond of me and she's very loyal to people she's fond of, she doesn't like people who mess with people she's fond of and those people end up very sorry for themselves if they're still alive to feel sorry."

  "Ah yes, child." He was amused at her clumsy threat, but it was no time to get complacent. Just because she'd been sliding her lies past him without being called on it didn't mean that old monster was any kind of fool. He lifted the coinpurse, put the tiket under it, set the purse back with a prim finality that was probably some kind of parable meant for her enlightenment. "Yes, that does make complications which we had better deal with immediately. Shadith, describe the beast, please.".

  Shadith wiped her palms on her trousers; she could feel sweat gathering in her hair again and trickling down her neck. "I don't like to think about him."

  "Describe him for us now, child, and you won't ever have to think of him again." Riiight, so much for the creep.

  She wriggled in the chair, wondering if she were laying it on too thick. It seemed to be working so she stopped worrying for the moment and let the words gush out. "Well, he's a guard. An ordinary guard, not an officer or anything. There's nothing different about his clothes and he's pretty average size, all of them are about the same size, I suppose they have to be to get hired. Dark hair, sort of medium skin, his face is just… oh, just a face face, nothing special about it. Urn… he… he looked kind of… I don't know… kind of soft, doughy, the way some men get when they lie around a lot, there was this wobble over his belt, he wasn't even close to fat, but you could see he might be in a few years. He was… he was thick in the shoulders, front to back and side to side. Long arms, kind of extra long, I think he was maybe ashamed of them because he hooked his thumbs in his belt a lot even when he was walking around. Um… that reminds me, on his left hand he only has three fingers, a thumb and three fingers, I mean. His pointing finger is the one that's gone. That's all I can remember."

  "I think that will be sufficient. Lute?"

  Lute drew his thumb along the side of his face in an arc that followed the boneline; he smiled, a tight anticipatory gesture of a mouth with the clean curves of a wooden angel despite the muffling of the flesh mask. "It'll do."

  "We do not want that beast in a position to give information to the Hunter when she comes looking for her ward, do we, Lute?"

  "Certainly not, sir."

  "It would be a service to everyone to cleanse the Station of that sink of evil. It would also be well to bear in mind, Lute, that however noble our ends, they are susceptible to misinterpretation. Be quick and be discreet."

  "I am always discreet, sir."

  36 Jo Clayton

  "Of course you are. One minute." He touched off the barrier field. "Number One, go with Lute and bring the child's baggage back. Number Two, take out your neural whip, please, and point it at the girl. Use it if she seems inclined to give trouble."

  Shadith let her surprise show, but hoped her dismay was pushed too deep for him to catch; she could swear she'd fooled him tip to top, that he really did see her as a helpless girichild. So what was he doing treating her like some death-and-glory terrorist? That old viper, he double-knots everything. How do you fight someone like that? Wonder how far he'd go if he knew what I really am?

  When Lute and the merc were gone, Bossman looked at her then said, "Now now, child, there is nothing for you to worry yourself about. Sit and be patient like the good little girl you are." Blast the man, if he were trying, he couldn't do a better job of provoking me. Gods, maybe he is. Maybe he's been leading me by the nose all this time.

  When she touched at him, she read satisfaction like dusty dried flowers. And a general complacency. No. I couldn't be THAT wrong.

  She squeezed her hands into fists, then forced them open and stared into her palms. I've got to do something. Transit Authority keeps the gnats away from the condors, this shuttle, it's one of the small ones, Lee's was about the same size, we couldn't be far from where she dropped me off, there was a jit park just around the bend, what bend? who the hell knows? Five minutes to the freighter tikkaboro if I pick the right turn, five minutes to dead if I don't?

  She used her thumb to push the ringchron around so she could read it without turning her hand over. Sixteen twenty-five. Twenty minutes. All right, Shadow, let's see what you can finesse.

  She lifted her head. "May I… may I have my things, please?"

  His little birdclaw hand tap-tapping on the thick, scarred leather of her shoulderbag, Bossman chewed that over. After several minutes of heavy silence, still without saying anything to her, he dropped the bag on the floor, swung round and darked the console, tied it off and slid from the chair. He crossed to the lock, stood where Lute had been. "On your feet, child, but do not move until I tell you."

  She s
tood up, struggling with a sense of futility that came close to despair. To get out of here she'd have to go through him. His hands were empty, his tunic hung smooth and unwrinkled over his skinny body. No sign of a weapon anywhere, but she wouldn't trust that old viper an antiquated inch. With his over-value of his withered hide, he'd be bound to have something nasty to put down threats.

  "Go down on your hands and knees," he said. "Yes. That is correct. Now, proceed to the chair. Stop when you get there. Stay on your knees. Do not touch anything."

  As she crawled across the gritty stained carpet, she put anger and fear on hold and settled to a grim waiting.

  There was no point in regretting lost opportunities-which were most likely illusion anyway. Fly in a spiderweb, the more you struggle, the tighter the strands wrap round you. Wait. Keep your head down. Wait. Your time will come. He hasn't a notion what you are, what you can do. Wait.

  "You may begin," he said. "Touch only your own things."

  She picked up the bag, turned the flap back, found her comb and dropped it in. Working slowly, deliberately, keeping her movements unmistakably innocent, she collected her belongings and put them in the bag. When she was finished, she sat on her heels and waited.

  Bossman contemplated her, his tar eyes gone dull. "Go back to your chair, young Shadith. No. Do not stand, go on your hands and knees. Yes." He waited until she was seated, then took his place at the console, bringing it up again. Over his shoulder, he said, "Number Two, come sit behind the girl, use your whip if she thinks of moving. We will not wait for Lute or Number One, they are taking longer than I am comfortable with. I will send you back with the shuttle later."

  Shadith sat with her hands folded, her eyes down. Wait. Nothing ever goes exactly like anyone plans it, not'even his schemes, old monster. There's always a breakdown somewhere. Wait and watch. Your time will come. Be patient. Not like a good little girl, meek and obedient. Never! Like a cat at a mousehole. Wait.

  Chapter 3. Riding the flying spiderweb

  The door whooshed closed behind Bossman, expanding as it moved to fill the whole space of the opening as if it erased itself to underline the futility of trying to escape the cell. Hands clasped behind her, Shadith scowled at the seamless wall. "Mashak! Dafta! Your soul smells like dogshit."

  There was no response. She didn't really expect one and shrugged off her depression as she began inspecting her new home-from-home. Four walls and a floor with warts. All the'comforts of hell. Sari

  She kicked at a wart, stretched out on the cot' that unfolded from the wall and contemplated the gray monotony of the place. If Prissface left her in here too long with nothing to do, hallucinations would be the least of it.

  Time.

  In the diadem she was essentially immortal. She'd abandoned all that when she had Aleytys decant her into this body. I must have been out of my alleged mind.

  That struck her as funny and she giggled, but the spurt of humor was quickly dissipated. Time meant more now. In a century or two she was going to die; she'd accepted that, but the idea of wasting any part of those counted hours in a hole like this with nothing to see, nothing to do, made her wild. She spent some hot, passionate moments loathing Bossman and all his satellites, then she took another minute to curse the Transit Guard's disembodied soul-Lute had to've shucked him from his body by now. If it hadn't been for him she wouldn't be in this mess.

  Still muttering imprecations and incantations, she fished in her bag and pulled out the battered book, but when she tried to read, she found the light in the cell so se and dim it was like looking through a frosted screen. It made her eyes burn, her head ache. There were poems that book she'd read over and over, sucking the flavor from them one by one as if they were the sweets she was far too fond of, but when she looked at a page this time, she couldn't make sense of the marks on it. Besides, she was too upset to concentrate, especially on multi-layered poetry in outmoded and esoteric word forms. She gave up, dropped the book beside the cot and began searching through the bag for her box of lemon drops.

  No box. She must have missed it when she collected her things. She swore, threw her bag across the cell, glared at it as it bounced off and plopped onto the floor. She rubbed at her eyes, got herself calmed down. All right, Shadow, let's not sit round whining. Well, lie around. Funny, why should whining sound worse lying down than sitting up?

  She folded her hands over her stomach, wriggled around until she was as comfortable as she could get on that narrow cot, then she closed her eyes and reached, searching for other eyes, single or compound, large or small, anything she could look through. Somewhere, somehow, Bossman must have left a crack she could 'worry at until it was big enough to let her crawl out of this.

  She touched down, looked through one set of eyes, moved on to another, then on and on through a bewildering progression of sense structures, insect compounds, arachnid multiples, vertibrate bi-and tri-polar vision, her brain struggling to adjust to and make sense of the data pulsing into it from such wildly varying sources.

  In a small second hold she found the two captives that Bossman called Avatars (of what? for what? not knowing gave her an hitch in the psyche). They were lying prone on tatty mattresses and tethered to the wall by thin almost invisible cables of Menaviddan monofilament. She slipped from a spider weaving a web beneath a catwalk into the body of a small furry like a rat but not a rat that was nosing at the big man's foot. The furry nibbled at a boot, but didn't like the taste of polish; he spat out the fragment of leather, scrubbed at his tongue with supple forepaws. Ears twisting like radar dishes, he moved along the man, nipping at him, sniffing at him, put off by the tough cloth of his trousers and tunic. The man's hand was far more interesting. The furry patted a forepaw at short silky hair that ran in a vee up the back of the hand, pale hair like wood ash in his eyes-his vision was sharp at short distances but he saw mainly in shades of gray with a few stark patches of black or white. The man's palm was broad, the fingers long and tapering, with stiff curved claws rather than the fiat nails more common to bipeds.

  The furry darted away when a finger twitched, edged warily back and nipped at the thumb.

  A thready beam of light shot from a lens set some two meters high on the nearest wall, tapped the furry on the nose. He squealed and scuttled away, heat flaring through his body; he wasn't hurt but he was startled enough to keep away from the captives after that.

  The big man had large semi-mobile pointed ears that twitched continually even though he was sodden with comealong. His hair was thick and rather coarse, a dread-locked mane that reached his shoulders, middlish brown as far as she could judge, several shades darker than his skin. His eyebrows were darker yet, extravagantly tangled angular arcs with a few white hairs shining in the brown. His mustache was dark as his brows, like them, threaded with white; it hid most of his upper lip and drooped in long, thin tails at the corners of his wide mouth. He had broad shoulders, long sleek muscles; his sleeves were rolled up, showing thick wrists and powerful, hairy forearms. A Dyslaeror. And an alpha at least, Ciocan maybe. Pippon on a crab! Tippy muh toesies in a ocean o shit. Bossman, oooeeehhh, he's coot crazy and sliding for hell.

  No sane being would play games with the Dyslaera, they had a history of blood feuds that went back over a thousand years. They weren't a hasty people, they didn't take umbrage lightly, but family bonds were strong and they never gave up till they got whoever injured one of theirs. Especially the females never gave up, the Dyslaerin. If Bossman loped off so casually with an alpha male, a Ciocan, the chosen mate of a Toerfeles, a Clanmother, well, that didn't say much for Shadith's chances of surviving this game of his, whatever it was. Or of getting away from him.

  She gathered less about the other man because the local life walked wide around him; they didn't like the way he smelled, there was something dangerous about it. He was short and slight, with a smooth pebbly skin; she thought it was a dusty gray-green but it was hard to be sure, it might be memory overlaying present image, he reminded her of
the small busy lizards that ran about her mother's garden.

  His tabard was made from coarse thread the color of clean sand, thread almost thick enough to qualify as cord, knotted rather than woven into a complex pattern whose flowing textures had a subtle beauty that intrigued her, a design that resonated with her soul in ways she couldn't put into words despite her cultivated facility. She didn't recognize his species and the comealong was still smothering his mindpatterns so she couldn't get a feel for who he was that way-except for a fugitive impression of a strangeness unlike anything she'd come across before. Odder even than the vegetative Sikkul Paem doublet Kinok-Kahat who lived in Swardheld's ship and worshiped the stardrives.

  She'd stayed away from the Bridge until she'd prospected the rest of the ship, now she went jumping from mind to mind until she ended inside the head of a small simi chained to the high back of the immense Captain's Chair. His was the most intelligent of the animal brains she hitched a ride on that day; he was also nearsighted and bad-tempered. He chattered noisily as she tried to shift-his head, went into an angry dance back and forth along his perch. She loosened her grip, afraid Bossman would notice his pet's agitation, have one of his unpre dictable flashes of insight and shut her down before she knew what was happening.

  The Pet gibbered some more, then he folded his long skinny arms and gloomed at the woman seated on his right.

  She was a small dark woman, wiry, athletic; she wore a black allbody shipsuit and a loose vest that fell in graceful folds about her, black suede, soft and supple as silkvelvet, with black zippers everywhere. She sat at the pilot station, legs crossed, one foot swinging as she flipped through the pages of a magazine, the reader on her knee, her thumb dancing on the jak button. The swinging foot bounced now and then as she came across something that interested her, orPasionally she read a snippet aloud to Bossman who was sitting at a com station on the far side of the Bridge pulling up data on a screen. He ignored her except for a meaningless mouth noise he produced at irregular intervals.