The Borders of Infinity

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  They didn't tell me she wept.

  He pulled out his regulation handkerchief, an archaic square of cloth. He'd never understood the rationale for the idiotic handkerchief, except, perhaps, that where soldiers went there would be weeping. He handed it to her. "Here. Mop your eyes with this."

  She took it, and blew her big flat nose in it, and made to hand it back.

  "Keep it," Miles said. "Uh . . . what do they call you, I wonder."

  "Nine," she growled. Not hostile; it was just the way her strained voice came out of that big throat. ". . . What do they call you?"

  Good God, a complete sentence. Miles blinked. "Admiral Miles Naismith." He arranged himself cross-legged.

  She looked up, transfixed. "A soldier? A real officer?" And then more doubtfully, as if seeing him in detail for the first time, "You?"

  Miles cleared his throat firmly. "Quite real. A bit down on my luck just at the moment," he admitted.

  "Me, too," she said glumly, and sniffed. "I don't know how long I've been here in this basement, but that was my first drink."

  "Three days, I think," said Miles. "Have they not, ah, given you any food, either?"

  "No." She frowned; the effect, with the fangs, was quite overpowering. "This is worse than anything they did to me in the lab, and I thought that was bad."

  It's not what you don't know that'll hurt you, the old saying went. It's what you do know that isn't so. Miles thought of his map cube; Miles looked at Nine. Miles pictured himself taking this entire mission's carefully-worked-out strategy plan delicately between thumb and forefinger and flushing it down a waste-disposal unit. The ductwork in the ceiling niggled at his imagination. Nine would never fit through it. . . .

  She clawed her wild hair away from her face and stared at him with renewed fierceness. Her eyes were a strange light hazel, adding to the wolfish effect. "What are you really doing here? Is this another test?"

  "No, this is real life." Miles's lips twitched. "I, ah, made a mistake."

  "Guess I did too," she said, lowering her head.

  Miles pulled at his lip and studied her through narrowed eyes. "What sort of life have you had, I wonder?" he mused, half to himself.

  She answered literally. "I lived with hired fosterers till I was eight. Like the clones do. Then I started to get big and clumsy and break things—they brought me to live at the lab after that. It was all right, I was warm and had plenty to eat."

  "They can't have simplified you too much if they seriously intended you to be a soldier. I wonder what your IQ is?"

  "A hundred and thirty-five."

  Miles fought off stunned paralysis. "I . . . see. Did you ever get . . . any training?"

  She shrugged. "I took a lot of tests. They were . . . OK. Except for the aggression experiments. I don't like electric shocks." She brooded a moment. "I don't like experimental psychologists, either. They lie a lot." Her shoulders slumped. "Anyway, I failed. We all failed."

  "How can they know if you failed if you never had any proper training?" Miles said scornfully. "Soldiering entails some of the most complex, cooperative learned behavior ever invented—I've been studying strategy and tactics for years, and I don't know half yet. It's all up here." He pressed his hands urgently to his head.

  She looked across at him sharply. "If that's so," she turned her huge hands over, staring at them, "then why did they do this to me?"

  Miles stopped short. His throat was strangely dry. So, admirals lie too. Sometimes, even to themselves. After an unsettled pause he asked, "Did you never think of breaking open a water pipe?"

  "You're punished, for breaking things. Or I was. Maybe not you, you're human."

  "Did you ever think of escaping, breaking out? It's a soldier's duty, when captured by the enemy, to escape. Survive, escape, sabotage, in that order."

  "Enemy?" She looked upward at the whole weight of House Ryoval pressing overhead. "Who are my friends?"

  "Ah. Yes. There is that . . . point." And where would an eight-foot-tall genetic cocktail with fangs run to? He took a deep breath. No question what his next move must be. Duty, expediency, survival, all compelled it. "Your friends are closer than you think. Why do you think I came here?" Why, indeed?

  She shot him a silent, puzzled frown.

  "I came for you. I'd heard of you. I'm . . . recruiting. Or I was. Things went wrong, and now I'm escaping. But if you came with me, you could join the Dendarii Mercenaries. A top outfit—always looking for a few good men, or whatever. I have this master-sergeant who . . . who needs a recruit like you." Too true. Sergeant Dyeb was infamous for his sour attitude about women soldiers, insisting that they were too soft. Any female recruit who survived his course came out with her aggression highly developed. Miles pictured Dyeb being dangled by his toes from a height of about eight feet. . . . He controlled his runaway imagination in favor of concentration on the present crisis. Nine was looking . . . unimpressed.

  "Very funny," she said coldly, making Miles wonder for a wild moment if she'd been equipped with the telepathy complex—no, she pre-dated that—"but I'm not even human. Or hadn't you heard?"

  Miles shrugged carefully. "Human is as human does." He forced himself to reach out and touch her damp cheek. "Animals don't weep, Nine."

  She jerked, as from an electric shock. "Animals don't lie. Humans do. All the time."

  "Not all the time." He hoped the light was too dim for her to see the flush in his face. She was watching his face intently.

  "Prove it." She tilted her head as she sat cross-legged. Her pale gold eyes were suddenly burning, speculative.

  "Uh . . . sure. How?"

  "Take off your clothes."

  ". . . what?"

  "Take off your clothes, and lie down with me as humans do. Men and women." Her hand reached out to touch his throat.

  The pressing claws made little wells in his flesh. "Blrp?" choked Miles. His eyes felt wide as saucers. A little more pressure, and those wells would spring forth red fountains. I am about to die. . . .

  She stared into his face with a strange, frightening, bottomless hunger. Then abruptly, she released him. He sprang up and cracked his head on the low ceiling, and dropped back down, the stars in his eyes unrelated to love at first sight.

  Her lips wrinkled back on a fanged groan of despair. "Ugly," she wailed. Her clawed nails raked across her cheeks leaving red furrows. "Too ugly . . . animal . . . you don't think I'm human—" She seemed to swell with some destructive resolve.

  "No, no, no!" gibbered Miles, lurching to his knees and grabbing her hands and pulling them down. "It's not that. It's just, uh—how old are you, anyway?"

  "Sixteen."

  Sixteen. God. He remembered sixteen. Sex-obsessed and dying inside every minute. A horrible age to be trapped in a twisted, fragile, abnormal body. God only knew how he had survived his own self-hatred then. No—he remembered how. He'd been saved by one who loved him. "Aren't you a little young for this?" he tried hopefully.

  "How old were you?"

  "Fifteen," he admitted, before thinking to lie. "But . . . it was traumatic. Didn't work out at all in the long run."

  Her claws turned toward her face again.

  "Don't do that!" he cried, hanging on. It reminded him entirely too much of the episode of Sergeant Bothari and the knife. The Sergeant had taken Miles's knife away from him by superior force. Not an option open to Miles here. "Will you calm down?" he yelled at her.

  She hesitated.

  "It's just that, uh, an officer and gentleman doesn't just fling himself onto his lady on the bare ground. One . . . one sits down. Gets comfortable. Has a little conversation, drinks a little wine, plays a little music . . . slows down. You're hardly warm yet. Here, sit over here where it's warmest." He positioned her nearer the broken duct, got up on his knees behind her, tried rubbing her neck and shoulders. Her muscles were tense—they felt like rocks under his thumbs. Any attempt on his part to strangle her would clearly be futile.

  I can't believe this. Trapped
in Ryoval's basement with a sex-starved teenage werewolf. There was nothing about this in any of my Imperial Academy training manuals. . . . He remembered his mission, which was to get her left calf muscle back to the Ariel alive. Dr. Canaba, if I survive you and I are going to have a little talk about this. . . .

  Her voice was muffled with grief and the odd shape of her mouth. "You think I'm too tall."

  "Not at all." He was getting hold of himself a bit; he could lie faster. "I adore tall women, ask anyone who knows me. Beside, I made the happy discovery some time back that height difference only matters when we're standing up. When we're lying down it's, ah, less of a problem. . . ." A rapid mental review of everything he'd ever learned by trial and error, mostly error, about women was streaming uninvited through his mind. It was harrowing. What did women want?

  He shifted around and took her hand, earnestly. She stared back equally earnestly, waiting for . . . instruction. At this point the realization came over Miles that he was facing his first virgin. He smiled at her in total paralysis for several seconds. "Nine . . . you've never done this before, have you?"

  "I've seen vids." She frowned introspectively. "They usually start with kisses, but . . ." a vague gesture toward her misshapen mouth, "maybe you don't want to."

  Miles tried not to think about the late rat. She'd been systematically starved, after all. "Vids can be very misleading. For women—especially the first time—it takes practice to learn your own body responses, woman friends have told me. I'm afraid I might hurt you." And then you'll disembowel me.

  She gazed into his eyes. "That's all right. I have a very high pain threshold."

  But I don't.

  This was mad. She was mad. He was mad. Yet he could feel a creeping fascination for the—proposition—rising from his belly to his brain like a fey fog. No doubt about it, she was the tallest female thing he was every likely to meet. More than one woman of his acquaintance had accused him of wanting to go mountain-climbing. He could get that out of his system once for all. . . .

  Damn, I do believe she'd clean up good. She was not without a certain . . . charm was not the word—whatever beauty there was to be found in the strong, the swift, the leanly athletic, the functioning form. Once you got used to the scale of it. She radiated a smooth heat he could feel from here—animal magnetism? the suppressed observer in the back of his brain supplied. Power? Whatever else it was, it would certainly be astonishing.

  One of his mother's favorite aphorisms drifted through his head. Anything worth doing, she always said, is worth doing well.

  Dizzy as a drunkard, he abandoned the crutch of logic for the wings of inspiration. "Well then, doctor," he heard himself muttering insanely, "let us experiment."

  Kissing a woman with fangs was indeed a novel sensation. Being kissed back—she was clearly a fast learner—was even more novel. Her arms circled him ecstatically, and from that point on he lost control of the situation, somehow. Though some time later, coming up for air, he did look up to ask, "Nine, have you ever heard of the black widow spider?"

  "No . . . what is it?"

  "Never mind," he said airily.

  It was all very awkward and clumsy, but sincere, and when he was done the water in her eyes was from joy, not pain. She seemed enormously (how else?) pleased with him. He was so unstrung he actually fell asleep for a few minutes, pillowed on her body.

  He woke up laughing.

  * * *

  "You really do have the most elegant cheekbones," he told her, tracing their line with one finger. She leaned into his touch, cuddled up equally to him and the water pipe. "There's a woman on my ship who wears her hair in a sort of woven braid in the back—it would look just great on you. Maybe she could teach you how."

  She pulled a wad of her hair forward and looked cross-eyed at it, as if trying to see past the coarse tangles and filth. She touched his face in turn. "You are very handsome, Admiral."

  "Huh? Me?" He ran a hand over the night's beard stubble, sharp features, the old pain lines . . . she must be blinded by my putative rank, eh?

  "Your face is very . . . alive. And your eyes see what they're looking at."

  "Nine . . ." He cleared his throat, paused. "Dammit, that's not a name, that's a number. What happened to Ten?"

  "He died." Maybe I will too, her strange-colored eyes added silently, before her lids shuttered them.

  "Is Nine all they ever called you?"

  "There's a long biocomputer code-string that's my actual designation."

  "Well, we all have serial numbers," Miles had two, now that he thought about it, "but this is absurd. I can't call you Nine, like some robot. You need a proper name, a name that fits you." He leaned back onto her warm bare shoulder—she was like a furnace; they had spoken truly about her metabolism—and his lips drew back on a slow grin. "Taura."

  "Taura?" Her long mouth gave it a skewed and lilting accent. ". . . it's too beautiful for me!"

  "Taura," he repeated firmly. "Beautiful but strong. Full of secret meaning. Perfect. Ah, speaking of secrets . . ." Was now the time to tell her about what Dr. Canaba had planted in her left calf? Or would she be hurt, as someone falsely courted for her money—or his title—Miles faltered. "I think, now that we know each other better, that it's time for us to blow out of this place."

  She stared around, into the grim dimness. "How?"

  "Well, that's what we have to figure out, eh? I confess, ducts rather spring to my mind." Not the heat pipe, obviously. He'd have to go anorexic for months to fit in, besides, he'd cook. He shook out and pulled on his black T-shirt—he'd put on his trousers immediately after he'd woken; that stone floor sucked heat remorselessly from any flesh that touched it—and creaked to his feet. God. He was getting too old for this sort of thing already. The sixteen-year-old, clearly, possessed the physical resilience of a minor goddess. What was it he'd gotten into at sixteen? Sand, that was it. He winced in memory of what it had done to certain sensitive body folds and crevices. Maybe cold stone wasn't so bad after all.

  She pulled her pale green coat and trousers out from under herself, dressed, and followed him in a crouch until the space was sufficient for her to stand upright.

  They quartered and re-quartered the underground chamber. There were four ladders with hatches, all locked. There was a locked vehicle exit to the outside on the downslope side. A direct breakout might be simplest, but if he couldn't make immediate contact with Thorne it was a twenty-seven-kilometer hike to the nearest town. In the snow, in his sock feet—her bare feet. And if they got there, he wouldn't be able to use the vidnet anyway because his credit card was still locked in the Security Ops office upstairs. Asking for charity in Ryoval's town was a dubious proposition. So, break straight out and be sorry later, or linger and try to equip themselves, risking recapture, and be sorry sooner? Tactical decisions were such fun.

  Ducts won. Miles pointed upward to the most likely one. "Think you can break that open and boost me in?" he asked Taura.

  She studied it, nodded slowly, the expression closing on her face. She stretched up and moved along to a soft metal clad joint, slipped her claw-hard fingernails under the strip, and yanked it off. She worked her fingers into the exposed slot and hung on it as if chinning herself. The duct bent open under her weight. "There you go," she said.

  She lifted him up as easily as a child, and he squirmed into the duct. This one was a particularly close fit, though it was the largest he had spotted as accessible in this ceiling. He inched along it on his back. He had to stop twice to suppress a residual, hysteria-tinged laughing fit. The duct curved upward, and he slithered around the curve in the darkness only to find that it split here into a Y, each branch half-sized. He cursed and backed out.

  Taura had her face turned up to him, an unusual angle of view.

  "No good that way," he gasped, reversing direction gymnastically at the gap. He headed the other way. This too curved up, but within moments he found a grille. A tightly-fitted, unbudgable, unbreakable, and with his ba
re hands uncuttable grille. Taura might have the strength to rip it out of the wall, but Taura couldn't fit through the duct to reach it. He contemplated it for a few moments. "Right," he muttered, and backed out again.

  "So much for ducts," he reported to Taura. "Uh . . . could you help me down?" She lowered him to the floor, and he dusted himself futilely. "Let's look around some more."

  She followed him docilely enough, though something in her expression hinted she might be losing faith in his admiralness. A bit of detailing on a column caught his eye, and he went to take a closer look in the dim light.

  It was one of the low-vibration support columns. Two meters in diameter, set deep in the bedrock in a well of fluid, it ran straight up to one of the labs, no doubt, to provide an ultra-stable base for certain kinds of crystal generation projects and the like. Miles rapped on the side of the column. It rang hollow. Ah yes, makes sense, concrete doesn't float too well, eh? A groove in the side outlined . . . an access port? He ran his fingers around it, probing. There was a concealed . . . something. He stretched his arms and found a twin spot on the opposite side. The spots yielded slowly to the hard pressure of his thumbs. There was a sudden pop and hiss, and the whole panel came away. He staggered, and barely kept from dropping it down the hole. He turned it sideways and drew it out.

  "Well, well," Miles grinned. He stuck his head through the port, looked down and up. Black as pitch. Rather gingerly, he reached his arm in and felt around. There was a ladder running up the damp inside, for access for cleaning and repairs; the whole column could apparently be filled with fluid of whatever density at need. Filled, it would have been self-pressure-sealed and unopenable. Carefully, he examined the inner edge of the hatch. Openable from either side, by God. "Let's go see if there's any more of these, further up."