by Jo Clayton
Before Shadith had time to get bored, Lute came in. The Pet fidgeted nervously and kept a wary, myopic eye on the slight tigerish figure. Number One was just behind Lute, hauling the harpcase and her travelpouch. The mere dumped his load on the floor beside the pilot and left immediately. Lute dropped into the Co's seat to the left of the Chair and waited for Bossman to acknowledge his presence.
Bossman finished his task at the sensor board, frowned at what he saw on the screen, swung round to face the Lute. "Well, Puk?"
"Couldn't help it, Ginny. That kaak was chargin around like his tail on fire and maybe it was. He had a herd of his lodge bros huntin with him. Took me a time to get him off by himself. I blew a leech on his neck and soon's he was out of it, I tipped him down the nearest incinerator chute. He's sludge brick by now. No trouble showin when me and the merc connected, but I got a feelin we sled leave soonest. What you think?"
"Your instincts are infallible, my friend. Ajeri tiszteh, is it possible?"
The pilot lifted her eyes from her magazine. "We have a window in half an hour, then one after that every fifteen minutes for the next hour. You name it, you got it."
"We will leave soonest as Puk suggests. When you have completed the necessary arrangements, Jeri, I would like you to look through the girl's baggage."
Ajeri the Pilot set the magazine reader aside, thumbed the sensor that sent the prerecorded message; she waited for the acknowledgment, then looked around. "What for, Ginny? She's just a kid."
"I wonder. She was quite calm when she did not think someone was watching her. And there is that association with the Hunter."
Puk the Lute stirred, "Playin games," he growled.
Ajeri slid from the chair, went to poke at the travelpouch with her boot toe. Over her shoulder she said, "Some of the Cousins look like babes until they turn into little old people. What's MEMORY tell you, Ginny? The lbexines like that?"
"I do not believe so." He glanced at the screen, turned back to the Pilot. "Although there is very little information available about Ibex. Except for the trade enclave Yastroo, it is a closed world."
"You think the girl's been feeding you lies?" Ajeri was squatting beside the harpcase; she looked up, raised her brows.
Puk stirred. "Sure she was. They drop from the womb, women lie, the first breath they take, they lie. It's their thing."
Ginny the Bossman ignored him and answered the
Pilot. "Not exactly, Jeri tiszt, I think it more likely that she is not telling the whole truth."
That sent chills through Shadith because it was too close to what she'd actually been doing. He kept having them, those flashes of insight. Spooky. And frustrating. It was impossible to fight because you never knew when it would strike and undo all your plotting. He had an exalted view of his Luck and maybe he was right to have it.
Ajeri had the harpcase open; Shadith winced as the Pilot plucked the loosened strings at random, then heavyhanded a muddled arpeggio. "Maybe you ought to dump her, Ginny. She sounds like trouble we don't need."
"No, Jeri, she is a gift from my Luck; to throw her away would be a stupidity and dangerous. Would Luck stay if I rejected her and her gifts? Think of it, my friend. Without my looking or seeking, the girl came to me, a musician who knows old songs, old music. A child, virginal and pure. She is the last ingredient in the mix, Jeri. The third in the holy triad, Nataminaho the Hunter, Opalekis-Mimo the Holy Dancer, and now NikamoOskinin the Virgin Singer. We can proceed immediately to Kiskai, inject them into the mix, and let it ferment. There is more time for the news of their arrival to spread and stir the people up, it will have a wider impact-and we will have time to extend the drama to an explosion of blood and rage at the Culmination of the Pakoseo. Think of the intensity we can get, Jeri, what a grand finale. Ahhhhh. We will burn our candles to Luck this night, my dear, we will…" He stopped and pulled himself together. "Jeri tiszt, the harp seems harmless enough. Please continue looking through the girl's impedimenta and tell me if you find anything that troubles you."
Puk the Lute sat up with a jerk. "Ginny, we need more of a buffer. I think you should get hold of Betalli and turn him lose on makin fuckin damn sure we can't be traced backward forward up down any which way. I don't like that. Hunter bein involved with the girl. She'll be nosin after every ship that leaves here around the time the little bitch disappeared. Spotchals, I knew it was goin to be trouble, they a herd of needlenosed assholes wind you up so tight with their fuckin rules you strangle y'self. We're not deep enough covered, Boss. Luck or no luck, that's the truth and you know it."
"Puk, I've told you before, I will not have Language in my ears. You will be Penitent tonight in our Praisesong."
"Yeh yeh, I hear you." When Ginny scowled, Puk got hold of his impatience and spoke more soberly. "I apologize, sir, but I must respectfully remind you of the gist of what I said. Buffer, sir. Betalli, sir. Hunters Inc, sir."
"I will consider the matter, Puk. And your apology is accepted; I understand you spoke from the heat of your anxiety, but courtesy is a virtue that must be assiduously cultivated. Cultivate, my friend, cultivate. Ajeri tiszteh, have you finished? Is there anything in that pouch that I should see?"
"Only that the girl's hauling along a young arsenal. Seems an odd lot to be carrying to University of all places, makes me wonder what she was thinking. There's a stunnertype I've never seen before, looks hand-built. And this." She held up a tiny needier; it almost disappeared in the palm of her hand. "I'd swear it's a Pa'ao special. I know the Pa'ao Teely don't make weapons for everyone and they charge an arm and a leg, but she's got such high-powered friends, it probably is. Can I keep it, Ginny? It's a beautiful thing."
"We are not thieves, Ajeri Tiszteh. Put the needier away."
Mumbling under her breath the Pilot tucked the weapon back where she'd found it. "I tell you again, Ginny, singer or no, virgin or whatever, I think you should dump her."
"I will not so question my Luck, Ajeri tiszteh. You displease me by your lack of faith. You will join Puk as Penitent. Do you accept?"
"Yes, sir; I acknowledge my failing, but remember, dear sir, it is grounded in my affection for you and my respect for the artistry of your productions."
In her cell Shadith blinked, so startled that she temporarily lost touch with the Pet's brain. She finally decided it was some kind of game they were playing. Weird.
Shortly after that she felt the ship come alive and knew they were on their way.
Chapter 4. Crazy in a can
It was a small oval room, womblike, warm, almost claustrophobic. Shadith saw it through the Pet's eyes; they seemed to work better in semidarkness-as if his brain reconfigured the shape of his retinas to eliminate his myopia once the sun went down.
The curved walls were a matte black that sucked up light with an avid hunger, even the ghastly blue-purple glow from lusotorches programmed to sink near extinction at random intervals, then flame up into a painful glare, all the while producing gouts of illusory gray black cottoncandy smoke without stink or sting. Incense wafted about on programmed drafts, pungent and not quite pleasant. When a drift came his way, the Pet sneezed and scrubbed at his nose with his forepaws. The small sounds he made were lost in swelling sonorous music that set Shadith's teeth on edge and made him fold his ears tight against his head.
Bossman knelt in the center of an elaborate mandala, lines of silver laid into the tarblack floor, raying outward from a silver disk with words and obscene drawings written in silver wire between the rays, shimmering alive and sinking into murk once more as the torchlight shifted. He chanted in a high thin voice, supported by Ajeri the Pilot who knelt at his right hand and Puk the Lute who kept at his left. The Pet was chained high on a wall beside one of the flambeaux; between attacks of incense, the beast sank into a lethargy that came from too much familiarity with the room and the goings on there. Shadith had to keep pinching at him to wake him up so she could look through his eyes and follow what was happening.
The chant went on
and on, but the music changed; the smoke spun into dancers-slender, childlike female forms hidden and revealed by drifting draperies of black gauze. Flinging themselves through a turgidly erotic dance, they dipped and bowed, leaped, turned and twisted round and round the mandala.
For some time Shadith couldn't see their faces. When she did, she gasped.
They had her face. All of them.
They were her. Deliberately her. Holo-shapes programmed to repeat HER over and over, called into being by that… that obscenity of a man. He was using her, using her body, her face for… for… She writhed on the cot, then forced herself to calm. She was losing the link with the Pet.
It wasn't because of their eroticism that she found the dance and dancers so deeply disturbing. Reacquiring the capacity for sensual pleasure of all sorts and degrees was one of her strongest reasons for abandoning disembodied immortality. No, the dance and the dancers were troubling because their-eroticism was so distorted.
Ginny Bossman, Puk the Lute, Ajeri the Pilot, they shaped the dance and the dancers, bled their own lubricity into the smoke, their passions were there under the surface, seething and burgeoning-and distorted and denied, denied, denied in their hatred and fear of those passions. Watching simulacrums with her face and body
52 Jo Clayton moving through that dance made her sick. Yet she couldn't look away, she couldn't bring herself to break the connection with the Pet.
The dance grew more and more intense.
The lusotorches blew out more gouts of smoke, thickening the dark; the light sank to a vague purple glow and stayed low for several minutes-then flared in a blast of harsh brilliance that seared the Pet's eyes and started him whimpering.
Puk and Ajeri were bound face inward to a pair of X-shaped bodyframes.
Ginny Bossman threw off his robe and stood naked in blinding, blue-purple light that turned his skin corpse white, his lips black, and sunk his eyes into bottomless holes. The flesh mask stripped off, he had a gaunt, deeply lined face; the lines were wounds, the shadow in them a harsh black like dried blood. He stripped fauxskin from his left hand, baring the metal beneath, twisted his thumb and extruded razor claws.
The music swelled, the dancers sang a wordless howling song and pressed in on the mandala.
Tumescent and sweating, Ginny walked with heavy slow steps to the X:frames. He sank his claws into the black cloth of the Pilot's robe and tore it away, exposing her narrow back, drawing lines of black blood on the pallid waxy flesh. He dropped the swatch, took a step to one side, and repeated with the Lute's robe. "Praise Her," he cried out suddenly, his voice a strident screech. He manipulated the metal arm just above the wrist; a limber metal-cored whip at least two meters long unreeled • from inside the arm. He closed his metal fingers about the stock, swung, the whip up. "Praise Her," he cried again and opened a long cut in the Pilot's back. "Praise Her." He flicked the tip across the Lute's hard taut shoulders.
The dancers had whips in their hands, lines of light, force lines; each time Ginny cut at Puk and Ajeri, they laid into him, back and belly, thigh and shoulder, the holo-whips raising real welts on his body. When the dancers with Shadith's face and form beat him, it was as if SHE beat him. For a few minutes she laughed and cheered them on, then she understood what was really happening in there and the elation drained out of her. Her smoke clones were pleasuring him, whores of pain.
She broke away, deeply dismayed by her reaction to that ceremony and insulted by Bossman's use of her-and she was frightened by the implications of what she was seeing. What's he mean to do with me? He said something about drama. If that's his idea of drama, that, that thing! Gods! There's no way m going to… Kiskai. I've never heard of it. I suppose it's another of those out the back of beyond places where they grow weirdness like a cash crop. I'm supposed to be something called the Nikamo-Oskinin, the virgin singer. Virgin. Talk about your wasted opportunities, I should've teased Swar into… well, it's too late for that now. Besides, that gorbellied old goat doesn't really give a shit about a meensy flap of flesh, it's my bodyage that's got him dizzy, that blasted twitch he's got about girls. You better watch your feet, woman. It could be you in that blackroom playing the penitent if he gets snarky about something you do. Penitent. Gods!
Her mind in turmoil, it was several hours before she managed to sleep.
Chapter 5. Crazy in a can 2
Day slid into day and no one came to the cell.
Every eight hours a red light blinked; a pleasant run of chimes broke the humming, stifling silence, and a tray arrived in the slot above the extensitable. The meals were ample but bland. Dull. Monotonous. The same four meals in the same order, over and over and over.
She still couldn't read. The lighting seemed designed to prevent it. When she tried, nose an inch from the page, the strain brought on a roaring headache.
She couldn't write. She tried scribbling words and phrases she couldn't read, but seeing what she wrote was so much a part of her way of working she couldn't make anything come out right and that built up so much rage and frustration in her that she screamed and threw the notebook and stylus at the wall, flung herself on the cot, and beat her fists on the pillow. And felt like a fool once she calmed down. -
The cell was gray. Everything in it was gray. Even the light was gray. She looked at gray until it seeped so deep in her she felt her bone marrow turning gray. It was like living in a fog. A small fog. When everything was folded away, the cell was barely six paces wide and seven long.
At times she plunged round and round for hours, driven by the clamor of her body for exercise, for some way to vent the restless energy that built up in her.
Day slid into day. The ship plowed on through the insplit. There was nothing to break the slow passage of the hours; transit time was time out from life. Nothing to do but wait.
One week slipped away. Two.
Shadith paced and raged and slept, glared at the food with loathing when the trays arrived on their unvarying schedule with their unvarying menus.
"I want someone to talk to," she yelled into the slot, knowing it was futile. "I want something to do." She kicked at the wall where the door had been, hammered at it with the heel of her boot. "Talk to me, you turds. Say something. Anything!" The only response she got was the dull thud of leather against unyielding steel. And the equally adamantine silence from her captors.
Even mindriding lost its charm; there was nothing new to look at, no matter how diligently she searched-and, more than that, not a single crack in Bossman's security, no hope she could dig her way out of this mess.
Most days Bossman Ginny was busy at a workstation, but the Pet was never close enough to let her read the screen and there wasn't a lot of interest in watching a man play with a sensorpad when she couldn't inspect the result. When he wasn't at the workstation, he sat in the Blackroom, meditating, which was even less interesting.
She avoided that room during shipnight or any other time when Puk or Ajeri were in there with Ginny. She was afraid of it. She had enough strains on her sanity without dredging up more of her own darkside.
After Ajeri the Pilot went meticulously through her daily check on the ship's position and condition, she ate a substantial breakfast, read her magazines until she con 56 Jo Clayton sidered the meal sufficiently digested, then she shifted to the gym where she ran a series of tests on her body; she marked the results on a pressboard, pulled up a chart and inspected that, then worked her way through interminable exercise programs, doing the stretches, kicks, and the rest with obsessive concentration. After the first week Shadith got so bored seeing the same thing over and over and over again that she didn't bother tuning in on the Pilot and her solitary cavortings.
Except for his daily visits to the hold where he pumped high-energy concentrates into the prisoners and renewed the drugs that kept them unaware of where they were and what was happening to them, Puk the Lute stayed in his quarters, wandering through the labyrinths of his mind with the help of a small pharmacopoeia of pidram
ins. After watching him sweat and make faces for a while, Shadith sighed and left hint to it. Because his drug-fantasies were probably the most interesting things happening on the ship, she wished for a moment or two that she could take a walk through them, wished that she were one of those rare full range telepathy the universe threw up to make life a bitch for students of psi who swore that true telepathy was a phantasm created from the yearning of the powerless for an ultimate kind of power. But she wasn't and she couldn't, so she went on searching for some other distraction to boot her out of her growing lethargy.
The three mercs knew each other too well, they'd exhausted the entertainment in old exploits; whenever one started up a story the others had heard too many times before, they stopped him with howls and thumps. The little bit they did talk, it was about women. She listened now and then, but generally tuned out after a short sample, either bored to the point of ossification or furious to the point of indigestion. She went back a number of times, hoping to catch them speculating on the purpose of this expedition, but even among themselves they didn't discuss the affairs of their employer. Their reticence was either principle or prudence or both (knowing old double-knotter Ginny like they must, they had to suspect their quarters were EYEd). So they spent their time bragging about their women, going over their equipment, exercising almost as fanatically as Ajeri, reading or sleeping. She got some amusement out of inspecting their equipment, what the well-dressed merc was wearing these days, but somewhere around the twentieth time she watched a merc break down and polish his needier, the last motes of interest were wiped away with the last infinitesimal motes of dust.