She was hurrying along the street that first night they chanced to meet, the light drizzle as damp as his eyes were now, her light robe soaked and clinging to her in a way no wetproof Lagerian cloth ever would. He simply stared at her. She was the first outworlder he had ever noticed. When she passed by she observed his gaze and smiled at him before she looked away.
"Focus on that trick," he said spellbound, nudging his young Engineer friend.
"Exotic!"
"Let's pick her up. It'll save us a trip." They were waiting for a robocar to take them to the Pleasure Basin.
"Maybe she's not horny. This is the business district."
"Tzom!" he exclaimed. "Did you see that smile!"
"She's an outworlder, Jotar!"
"Same race. Women are the same the galaxy over, ready to go nova at the flick of a neutron. They know a good stud when they see one. How could she do better than us? She knows what an Engineer is by now. Look at yourself in the mirror sometime, joker. You didn't get to be where you are by being a weakling. And besides, I want to do the picking for once." Their robocar had arrived, enveloping them. "Follow that woman," Jotar commanded.
The friend was disturbed by this extreme aggressiveness. "There's two of us," he protested.
"That'll make her wheels go round twice as fast. She'll love it." He leered.
"Women like subtle men."
"Grumble, grumble, grumble." The robocar slid to a stop, cutting off the raven-haired exotic but stopping short of enveloping her. Jotar smiled his smile which had been known to send the bank account of a woman flickering in the last two digits. "We've fallen in love with you," he said.
She looked at them without comprehension and her hand went to the hilt of a dagger in her wide belt.
"That's a dagger," whispered Jotar's friend with urgency.
"Perhaps you don't speak Anglish?" added Jotar hastily.
"Excuse myself for speak your language poorly. I hear barbarous intent. I certain I am mistake." Gently she began to edge around them.
"Our intent was to offer ourselves to you for an entire evening of pleasure. Any way you like it."
Her eyes narrowed. She glanced about for possible escape routes, computing the swiftness of the robocar, then looked Jotar in the eyes with great poise and some small trembling. "It would be small pleasure for you rape one as homely as me. Not beautiful at all."
Jotar was taken aback. It wasn't her self-effacement that surprised him, it was her choice of thrill. On a grade F solidio once smuggled into the Monastery when he was a student he had seen an implausible story about a girl who liked to be raped—but he had never heard of such a thing in real life. Maybe they were pretty odd out there among the outworlds. How would he know? "We're pretty good at rape," he said, nudging his friend, and faking a menacing look. Anything to please such a lovely woman. "And I think you are very beautiful."
"I struggle hard." She was paling. "I bite."
"Oh, that's no problem. We can hold you down so you can't do any damage," he said, trying to get into her fantasy.
"Please not to harm me."
Jotar smiled broadly. "Harming you would be letting art get out of hand, of course, of course. No bruises. Get in; I know just the place to take you."
She fled, dagger in hand—a short run, then a leap down a staired passage where the robocar could not follow. They watched her disappear into the forested ground floor of a soaring hotel, her graceful stride a composite of motions unknown on Lager.
Tzom turned on Jotar. "I told you; I told you! You'll never get anywhere that way! You have to entice them to approach you."
"Yeah, yeah." Jotar stared after the lost beauty absently, a remarkable emotion of infatuation puzzling him. "I didn't follow her script."
"You dummy. It was because you overdid it. You've got to remember how women think. They've got to be in control. If a woman wants to be raped, you can't just rape her. You have to be subtle. She has to provoke being raped or she's not going to enjoy it. Everybody knows that about women but you, dummy!"
"Yeah, yeah. I guess it is the Pleasure Basin for us."
They instructed the robocar to take them to the village of dim bawdy houses and terraced restaurants and gaiety. "How about dancing?"
"Naw," said Jotar, "I'm shorted-out tonight. How about just touring the cafes and getting picked up?"
"Too dull." complained Tzom. "I'd rather get auctioned off at a dance. Get into some clothes flashier than this uniform. Get a sweat up."
"Yeah, but at an auction you have to take who you get. That can be all right except that I'm not in the mood. In a cafe there are easier ways to say no. Go ahead, I'll see you in the morning."
"No, no. We're together tonight." No youth who entered one of the Engineering Orders stayed a celibate Monk—he either mastered the rigorous mental and physical training and graduated into the ranks of the Engineers or he failed and became a Technician and married if a woman proposed to him. The Engineers were forbidden to marry lest a hereditary caste develop and so an Engineer's name died with him. But not his genes.
All over the planet there were places of rendezvous where any woman might go to meet those men who were the physical cream of the planet and have her sexiest fantasy made real. No matter that she was a simple data clerk, or ugly, or old, the Engineers were hers to buy for an evening of pleasure. Only one out of every thousand citizens of Lager became an Engineer but eight percent of all the children born were seeded by Engineers. And engineering talent abounded on Lager and Lager made its name throughout the human galaxy with its engineering marvels.
The robocar let them off at a cafe called the Lion's Loins. Real male lions greeted you with a snarl at the door. But they were lazy. It was the lioness who pounced from her perch above the door that startled unsuspecting clients. Sometimes a menacing lion or two would grab a shy woman by the wrist and herd her over to an Engineer who would chase the lions away after a mock battle. The animals had computer implants, of course.
There was a central lighted bar which acted as a focus because it was the only place where drinks and food were served. The women could appraise a man here before deciding to approach him. Surrounding the bar were dark junglelike alcoves where privacy was at a premium if you weren't upset by an occasional sniffing lion.
"You'll never guess who picked me up the last time I was here," said Jotar grinning.
"Is she here tonight?"
"No, no. Gail Katalina." Katalina was the Third Director of all Lager.
"You're pulling my ear! What's she like?"
"We ended up spending a ten-day together on her yacht. She keeps herself in good condition for her age. She's always busy. It was like being plugged into a thousand volt line."
"I hear she's kinky."
"Naw. You know gossip. She resonates on photography, that's all. She's a good lay. I felt my innocence, but she wanted to keep me. She was going to set me up in Dronau Hills."
"And you said no?"
"I'm busy."
"You're a brave man to turn down that kind of political connection."
"Come on, Tzom, power is warming but it doesn't rub off. You know that. Once you believe it does, and start chasing powerful people, you end up as a moon, and if you get too close you end up as part of their mass. What do you want to drink?"
Jotar was acutely aware of the women around him. He had to be; Tzom never paid attention until a woman spoke to him and by then it was often too late to control what was happening. One dazzler with bare shoulders stared at him from across the bar. He smiled at her but she turned away and he knew he wasn't going to attract her.
Once they had their drinks he settled on a lady with twinkling eyes who looked like she had had enough of a past to be interesting. She was with a young girl, probably her daughter from the facial resemblance, perfect for Tzom. He smiled at the woman with extra warmth when her eye caught his, and winked at the daughter.
But his mind hardly took the flirtation seriously. While he followed Tzom
to a table his imagination put him in the villa of some outworld where his robed stranger was expected. This time he would take her arm gently and be careful not to frighten her.
Their table was equipped with a monitor which, when switched on, indicated to a woman that they were free and allowed any woman to view them and listen to their conversation from the privacy of her table. The two Engineers kept their conversation simple. Jotar's attention wandered.
In the semi-light one distant face seemed to be his mother and he lingered on it for a moment—his beloved, brilliant, crazy, naive mother who had met his genetic father in a place like this and had foolishly preserved her love for him in some corner of her mind beyond reality. She had illusions about the beauty and luxury of an Engineer's life based on one ten day experience. In real life she was a Gardener who was responsible for the ecology of 3000 hectares of land in the Miner's Hills and mother of four children, two of them by her husband. Jotar's only sister was also the daughter of an Engineer.
It was his mother who had decided that he was to become a shipwright. He remembered. When he was not yet two kilodays old she'd taken him for a night hike in the hills and they had slept on the grass beneath the brilliant stars.
"People build ships to go to the stars," she said, cuddling him in the sleeping bag. She fastened electronic binoculars on her eyes and slave goggles on his. "See that bright one there?" Cross hairs appeared and disappeared. "That's Goosing. We trade with Goosing in ships we build. See that tiny one there?" The cross hairs reappeared briefly. "Just above Goosing? That's Al Kiladah 43, so far away that no ship yet built has ever reached it. Even though they appear close to each other in the sky, stars may be far apart in space. Someday someone will build a ship that will reach Al Kiladah 43."
"Could I do it?"
"If you became an Engineer."
"Why can't we go there now?" he asked.
She explained to him the problems of the kalmakovian drive in terms a child could understand. "If a starship travels at 200 light speeds, the machinery ages 200 times as fast as normal to fool the gods into thinking it is traveling slower than light so they won't get upset about one of their laws being violated. In fast-time the machinery wears out if you go very far. Engineers have to make it very very reliable. If you aged as fast as a starship, you'd be grown up in thirty days."
"Then I would be old enough to run away from home before I'm old enough!"
"Where would you run to?"
"Al Kaladah 43!"
"Oh my. That's far away. I don't think you know how slow 200 light speeds is, young man."
"Some more stars!" he said. "Show me the farthest one we've reached!"
"Hmm." His mother talked to the binoculars and symbols began flashing across the goggles. "Well, I can show you one of the farthest." It took her awhile to find Akira. "It's on the Frontier."
"Who went there?"
She smiled. "I don't know. Our binoculars are very stupid. Not much memory."
"Turn up the power and we'll see them!"
"That's a tall order for ten credit binoculars. We wouldn't see them anyway. We'd see Akira before men got there."
"I'll build some good binoculars when I grow up."
"Would you like to be an Engineer?"
"Yes."
"Would you like to build ships? Would you like to build the greatest ship that has ever traveled space?" Her words were more of an order than a question.
She began buying him models of ships to build. He got a modular computer for his birthday and every birthday thereafter it became larger. Its memory eventually held the best private collection of starship materials on Lager. Just to manage the horde of data his mother bought for him obsessively, Jotar eventually developed a cross-indexing system unique in starship design history.
Since physical agility was as strong a criterion for graduation from an Engineering Order as intellectual ability, his mother saw to it that he went to dance school. They were country people looking after forest and grasslands and the nearest dance group was 160 kilometers away but she shuttled him there regularly. She overlooked nothing. Most children could play tag with their robogoverness—Jotar's played mathematical games with him.
Sometimes he had to escape from his mother. He'd put on his waldo leggings and jump across the hill meadows with 20 meter leaps pretending he was on a light gravity planet, or he'd leap to the tops of trees and be an animal. Even then he couldn't always escape her. He'd be pursued by thoughts about stardrives.
Before he entered the Black Horse Monastery, before he was full grown, he already knew what mankind's greatest starship would be like.
Jotar finished his drink. He knew exactly how long it took a woman with a gleam in her eye to make up her mind. Then he ambled back to the bar. It did not surprise him that the lady and her daughter also chose that moment to refill their glasses.
"Would you care to join our table?"
"Delighted," he said.
Tzom never knew why the handsomest women always invited them when he was with Jotar.
They chatted together over a second drink. The daughter had been recently married and was being educated into the wilder side of city night life by her flirtatious mother. The girl hovered between fascination and shyness while the mother decided where to take them to dinner and when they were going to retire for more serious amusement. Two lions blocked their way as they tried to leave. Jotar made the mistake of kicking one of them, and was slapped to the ground. The lioness stood on his chest and licked his face.
"Do you need help?" asked the girl.
"Damn animal show," he said.
Jotar got stuck with the young one. He never let his boredom show: it would have been unprofessional. They went to his apartment and he tried to please her. He let her hold him after their lovemaking while she drowsed, though he was inclined to push her away. To pass the time he thought of his crazy mother's illusions about the life of an Engineer.
She at least had a conscientious husband, a tolerant man who had created a stable home life for his children and generally ignored his woman's waywardness or at least seldom spoke of it. He would just shrug and say, almost with a smile when their mother disappeared for days at a time, "Women have more lust than men." She had the luxury of knowing her husband and sharing with him in a way that is only possible after long contact.
Damn. Jotar couldn't even remember the name of the girl who had picked him up last night. And a week ago he'd been to a pre-wedding party given by the bridesmaids, and the bride and five bridesmaids had had him, one after the other between drink and lavish food and fun—and he couldn't even remember their faces.
It was something he could get angry about. Like he was angry right now at this girl with her legs around him. She'd get pregnant. She'd tell her husband and they'd celebrate. But she'll never bother to tell me. Not a chance. Sol's Blazes, it makes me angry! He was human. He liked children. He'd cherished his younger brothers and sister. Probably he had seeded thirty children already but he'd never know. They used you and they never came back.
I'll never hold a tiny baby in my arms. The tears were running down his cheeks in the dark and he was furious at his bed partner but he caressed her tenderly. Little baby girl.
When she finally went to sleep, he displaced her arm, slowly, carefully, and sneaked out of bed to his workroom. Without really being aware that an earlier meeting was on his mind, he sketched the outworld woman's robe onto the surface of the workroom's computer terminal, rotating and modifying it, until it matched his memory. Then he sketched the peculiar racial characteristics of her exotic face. While he worked, he smiled, wondering what it would be like to be loved by an outworld woman, pleased to know already that she was not like Lagerian women.
He put the computer into its pattern recognition mode. It overprinted his drawings from time to time, asking for clarifying lines, details. It paused for one hundred seconds before burping out a list of probable worlds. All of them, it turned out, belonged to a class of sol
ar systems which could be traced back to the ancient Japanese race of Terra through a philosophy called the Mishima tradition that placed strong emphasis on old values and had advocated going into space to preserve them.
Jotar spliced the list into the immigration and trade records for an intersection-sort. Only one group matched the available data: a trade mission from Akira, an obscure Frontier sun. They were here to buy heavy automatic machinery and starships. Such a trade mission did not make much sense—Akira was too far away for direct trade. A detailed examination of the papers of the trade mission members gave Jotar what he wanted. The beautiful flower who had dominated his senses was called Misubisi Kasumi and she was the mission linguist.
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