The Gentle Seduction

by Marc Stiegler

  I winced. "Even playboys contribute more to mankind than I have of late," I whispered.

  "Hmph." She started to soften; then she thought better of it. "And you came all the way to Forma for surcease?"

  "The Federation is such that I cannot rest, no matter where I go."

  "I see." Her voice chilled so deeply that my frostbite returned. "What crimes did you commit in the Federation that forced you to flee? Besides stealing a space-yacht, that is."

  My jaw dropped. "Unkind maiden!" I protested. I suppose this wasn't the time for bantering, but I couldn't help myself; I was a Shakespearean actor in my first lifetime, and the style still haunts me. "An' do thou wound most deep with thy unjust accusations!"

  As it happened, my approach was precisely right. Her icy expression somehow caught the light in a new way, and her smile sparkled. "Nay, sad sir. Excuse me my distrust, but pray tell me in truth thy purpose in the lands of Winterform." Her eyes, dark and beautiful in contrast to the smooth whiteness of her skin, held me in trance. As her expression changed and changed again, I perceived depths to this person, layers like an onion, of closeness and distance, compassion and ruthlessness, warmth and coldness.

  I was in love.

  Perhaps I should explain. In my first lifetime, and even my second, I sought my mates in the normal manner of mortal men. But after a few lifetimes I developed an eye for the woman who was just right for this life. In short, I became capable of recognizing love at first sight. It has never failed me since.

  In my seventh lifetime, which had just ended prematurely, I had known who my mate should be. I had never touched her. I could see her in my mind's eye now . . .

  No! I shook my head; memories only serve if they are not overloaded with emotion.

  I jerked as my newfound love clapped her hands in front of me.

  "Are you all right?" she asked.

  "At last, at last." My laughter rang with joy for the first time in a lifetime. I knelt before her, taking her hand in mine, kissing it. "My lady," I crooned, "please, please marry me."

  Perhaps this was rushing things a bit, but I couldn't help it. Ihope has always been my master.

  Besides, I believe you should always be honest, because the truth is usually unbelievable. If the truth doesn't work, you can follow it up with a good lie and people will believe that.

  Sadly the truth in this case was quite unbelievable. And though I may recognize love at first sight, my mates-to-be do not always recognize it with equal facility.

  She drew back, looking stern, shaking her head, and laughing all at the same time. Clearly, she did not perceive Fate's handiwork here. "You don't even know my name!"

  "It matters not, my rose who would smell as sweet. I have held a thousand names, yet I am who I am, though the river of labels flows onward."

  That was the wrong thing to say; when I mentioned having held a thousand names, she became very suspicious.

  She drew her gun. "You seem to have recovered some feeling in your hands. Hold them out, slowly."

  "No, you don't understand," I started to explain. "I have the power to recognize love at first sight. We are destined to spend this lifetime together."

  "We are, huh? I have some disappointing news for you, mister." She circled my hands with a pair of force cuffs. "Wait a minute." She moved in front of me, looking me in the eye. "You said 'this lifetime.' " Her eyes narrowed. "Have you had Transfer? Did you waste a mindshifter's time and ability?"

  "No, you don't understand," I continued, "I am a mindshifter! I have saved thousands of lives! Come with me, I can give you lifetimes beyond measure as well."

  She froze there, a statue of hatred. "I see. So that's why you've come to Forma, the only world where there's never been a mindshifter. You'll milk us dry before we join the Federation." Her fists clenched. "Then let me tell you something. It is a felony to try to buy a government official. And it is . . . immoral to try to buy a woman."

  She slammed the hatch that connected her cockpit to my compartment.

  Thus ended the honest approach; she thought I sold my services to the highest bidder. Unfortunately, there was just enough truth in her opinion to make it hard to disprove.

  Mind transplant surgery remained a true art. Oh, it required extraordinary engineering abilities too, in everything from complex connectivity theory to axonal counterstimulus. But if Transfer had just been an engineering problem, Man would have programmed a computer for it. Safire could perform other kinds of surgery more quickly and more accurately than I. Her powers of pattern recognition and reconstruction were superb.

  But beyond the facts and the formulas and even the patterns, mindshifting required a special gift. It required the ability to know, for this one unique human being, which neurons needed to be transplanted, which needed to be replaced, and which needed to be reconnected. Each Transfer was a new challenge, a labyrinthine problem in both pattern recognition and learning. Each Transfer offered the surgeon a million tiny moments of indecision, a million chances to fail. If his gift were strong and pure, the surgeon might be able to do four Transfers in a day.

  This special gift, the oddball genius demanded for mindshifting, belonged to a tiny handful of men. Even on Earth, there were too few mindshifters to go around. Even on Earth, they commanded huge prices for their labors.

  And of the handful of mindshifters in the universe, only a spoonful of the most dedicated, adventuresome, foolish mindshifters ventured to the Frontier. Each took a star sector with dozens, even hundreds, of scattered planets, and bounced from place to place in a desperate race to save human lives. They did not necessarily save the wealthiest, or the most powerful, but they tried to save the best, and the most needed human beings they encountered.

  Of course, sometimes saving the best people is akin to saving the wealthy and powerful: the best often achieve wealth and power. And those who received Transfer inevitably became wealthy and powerful in their second or third lifetimes.

  I could understand why my lady thought I had come to Forma to squeeze her people. What she didn't understand was that the price I could command on Forma would be equally great wherever I went. I offered the gift of life itself; it was beyond price.

  Re-educating my loved one would have to be postponed. My current situation needed to be changed.

  I contemplated the matter from every angle. I was, after all, a mortal god; I would find a way to escape.

  I owned a lockpick toolkit, but it was on my slipjet. I had my laser ring, but it was powered from Glitter, and I had no way to light it since my captress removed my wristcom.

  Eventually I realized I was trapped. All I had left was my guile.

  "Queen of my life!" I yelled into the cockpit through the closed passage. "Please grant me the kindness to know thy name!" She did not answer. Guile would have to wait.

  Eventually we landed. There was little I could do, with my wrists in the forcecuffs, except stumble into my lover-to-be as we went out the hatch.

  "My name is Keara," she answered my question of hours ago.

  I stumbled.

  "Can't you even stand up on your own?" She propped me up and pushed me forward with a grunt.

  "Keara." I smacked my lips. "Keara is a beautiful name." I had the keys to the cuffs in my right hand, plucked from the lady's clothing in our moment of ecstatic embrace. "How do you think it will look on a marriage license?"

  She shook her head. "You are impossible!"

  "Of course," I cried, slipping the cuffs from my arms. I cut her legs out from under her; she cut my legs out from under me. We wrestled in the snow. My greater size, and my black belt in modkido from 6 lifetimes earlier, gave me a great advantage.

  I was deeply annoyed when she pinned me and refastened the cuffs. "Perhaps you're not impossible after all," she chuckled. "Perhaps you're just difficult."

  The snow numbed my cheek. I grunted, staggering to my feet. "How'd you do that?"

  "I keep fit," she muttered.

  I nodded my head. I st
ill had the reflexes and physical strength of a lush.

  We walked toward a sleek, black building that stretched to the horizon. "What city is this, by the way?" I asked.

  "You're in Whitepeak." Keara rolled her eyes. "You really are lost, aren't you?" She laughed. "Well, a jail is a jail, I imagine."

  It was ridiculous, being jailed because of a bunch of aerial skeletons. "Say, what are those skeletons?" I asked.

  "Skeletons?"

  "Yes, my lady. The ghosts of aircraft which followed me."

  "Oh." Keara laughed softly. "Those are weather sensors. Solar powered."

  "Fascinating." It was also obvious, for a colony that had started as a weather research station.

  A flash of sky-flooding lightning blinded me for a second. "Wow, that lightning is beyond belief!" I told her.

  She pushed me into the building. "Hurry," she cried.

  "What's wrong?" I asked as she rushed me down a descending corridor.

  "It's a blizzarcane, you fool—" the building shook as the thunderclap arrived.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw another blast of lightning tear through the ceiling to the floor. The sound deafened me. I was thrown toward a widening seam in the concrete. Hunks of roof fell all around, and Keara slid with me toward certain doom. "Keara!" I cried, though I could not hear my own voice.

  She held her hands over her eyes, scrabbling against the floor. She had been looking in the direction of the bolt when it struck.

  I tried to pull her aside, away from the heaving edge of the disintegrating floor, but she fought me.

  I had no choice in the matter if I was going to save her life: I kicked her until she stopped moving. I couldn't pull her effectively with my hands behind my back, so I knelt beside her and used my teeth to drag her farther from the hole. More chunks of roof fell around us. I regained the cuff keys from her pocket, and released myself.

  She was awfully quiet. Her eyes . . . her current body was probably permanently blinded. Her pulse fluttered. I might well have hurt her badly in my haste to save her life.

  Two men in uniforms like Keara's came running down the hall; I waved frantically. "She's hurt!" I yelled, "Get a doctor!" I could almost hear what I was saying again.

  One held back as they came up to me; the other pushed me aside as he stepped forward. "It's Keara," he said grimly, "the spy must have knocked her out when the attack started." He felt her pulse. "He may have killed her."

  The other soldier lifted his lazegun; not coincidentally, it had been pointed at the ground beneath my feet when they arrived.

  My reaction time improved with the excitement: as his weapon steadied I leaped to the side, putting the other man between myself and the gun. He fired; I smelled the smoke of burning flesh as the man who had examined Keara took the hit. With a moment's struggle, I pulled him into my arms, and his weapon into my hands. The man who had fired circled to get a clear shot, but I shot first. With a scream he went down.

  Looking up, I saw four more men running down the hall.

  I looked down at Keara. There was nothing I could do for her here. Angry at myself and my situation, I jumped away and headed outside.

  Stepping through a breech in the wall, I quickly learned to appreciate the meaning of "blizzarcane." Gale winds blew snow in my nose and mouth so fast that the snow caked up, choking me. I stepped back toward the shelter, wondering what to do when they found me again.

  Abruptly the weather cleared. The wind died, though I could see snow swirling in every direction. Dazed, I concluded we were in the eye of the storm. I raced to the shipyard with Keara's keys still clenched in my hand.

  On most worlds I would have been doomed to hang around outside the locked vessels, waiting for someone to recapture me. But on Forma, retinal patterns hadn't yet replaced more primitive safeguards. One of Keara's keys opened the hatch. In seconds I was at the controls of Keara's ship. In minutes I was airborne.

  Taking off might have been the stupidest decision of my life, had I not so recently made so many stupid decisions.

  There was no way out of the storm's eye; at all altitudes the wind buffeted the ship back to the center, or down toward the ground. All I could do was watch the holocaust.

  And holocaust it was. The blizzarcane ripped through the city, sleek, buried, and invincible though Whitepeak seemed. Nothing would have been left had the storm continued for over an hour.

  But before that happened, a soft, glowing aurora settled around the blizzarcane. A last blanket of snow fell, as though the storm had collapsed to the ground. The sun appeared, throwing long shadows across the jagged pieces of the city.

  Whitepeak was in trouble, and I did not even know if Keara was alive. I wanted to return, to help rebuild.

  But if I returned I would probably be shot. First I would need to make some preparations on board Glitter. Keara had left my wristcom on board this ship; with some digging I finally found it. With guidance once more, I headed for Glitter again.

  A skeleton wafted through the air, in my direction. I sank low, and maneuvered around it. Another one appeared.

  In my efforts to keep out of view, I was herded, slowly but surely, away from my ship.

  II I couldn't go back to Glitter, I figured I better at leust grt out of Winterform. That was easy enough since the skeletons were forcing me Eyeward. Moreover, I would feel more comfortable if I had some mountains between me and the skeletons, so I also flew clockward, toward Hayes' Rift.

  I cruised low until I reached the Rightcut Mountains, which separated the Rift from the rest of the continent. I hopped over Rightcut with no skeletons in sight and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Two cruisers, utterly unlike the one I commanded, popped over the mountains just behind me.

  An alarm sounded as my ship shook and spun out of control.

  There weren't any jumpbelts on Forman ships, I discovered; but there were glidechutes, another relic of past lifetimes. With some trepidation, I grabbed a purple one (I would have chosen something more discreet had I had time to be selective) and popped the hatch.

  The ships sailed overhead. My old one left a trail of bright orange flame and dark brown smoke. It made quite a beautiful color stroke against the crisp blue sky. It crashed far down the side of Rightcut, into thick forest. The two other ships curled around, and came back for me.

  I was already looking for a way down that was quick but not hard. This is always a difficult combination to find on planets that are not made of foam rubber. Still, I did well enough; as I passed over a lake I slipped from the chute harness and prayed the water was deep but not cold. The chute drifted onward, attracting attention to its graceful, confident descent.

  The water was deep as I had hoped. It was also cold. I swam for the shore with enthusiasm.

  I dragged myself out of the sucking mud on the bank and lay with my teeth chattering, watching the cruisers that had nailed me as they watched the glidechute. With the flick of a ship's beam, the chute turned to purple smoke. The cruisers departed.

  How delightful! Now I could die of hypothermia in peace. I shook quietly, though violently. "Safire," I stammered into my wristcom, "I don't suppose you can get Glitter to me within an hour, can you?"

  "No." Safire had such a way with words.

  I tried to put myself into an autohypnotic state where I could be more comfortable, and failed. I opened my eyes again.

  Clearly, it was autumn here: the leaves were multicolored, red and yellow and green and auburn, and I could smell the pulp of the leaves decaying as I lay upon them.

  Yet, it couldn't be a real, Earth autumn. Here in Fallform it was always autumn. There was no change of season, no reason for the trees to change colors. The trees had to be like this all the time.

  Closer inspection showed that each tree and each type of leaf had a distinct color. They were not changing with the season; they were that color forever.

  A pair of mud-spattered boots appeared before me. Looking up, I saw a reddish leather jacket and a
yellow scarf. Looking higher still, I saw bright blue suspicious eyes. "Hi," I said with a smile, trying to look harmless for the lady staring down at me.

  "He looks harmless enough," one of the men accompanying the brown boots said.

  "At the moment, sir, I am so harmless that I may die of exposure. I hate to ask favors of strangers, but do you have dry clothes I could borrow for a day or two?"

  "I don't like it," said another voice from the shadows, "He's from Winterform. He's still not a friend of ours. Kill him."

  "Wait." The woman in brown boots knelt beside me. "What's that?" she asked, pointing at my wristcom.

  Telling the truth seemed easiest. "It's a communicator that lets me talk to my ship."

  "Your ship just got blown out of the sky."

  Silence seemed more appropriate than too much truth.

  She touched me. Her mouth widened. "Jurn, get a fire started, and bring a sleeping bag." She stretched out next to me and held me close, bringing me into her win mth. "You were serious about the exposure."

  "I intend to survive," I muttered, still shaking, though her cheek was warm against mine.

  They bundled me up and fed me hot soup, and I did in fact survive. The lady sent the others away. "Who are you?" she began the interrogation. "Why are you here?"

  Never ask a person two questions simultaneously: the person will answer the question of his choice, which will be the one that gets you the least information. "I came here to escape from Winterform. I fear the authorities are eager to preside at my funeral."

  "I see." She smiled. "Did you come seeking help from the authorities of Fallform?"

  Her smile seemed out of place; I realized I was standing on the brink of a cliff. Calmly, very calmly, I shrugged. "Not particularly. I guess it's too late to ask, but: weren't those Fallform ships that fried my ship?"

  "Every vicious bit of them." She trembled with anger, then touched her hand to the side of my head. "You must sleep. In a few hours we must travel fast, and deep, before they come looking for you."