by Dave Duncan
“I didn’t know you played the guitar!” she said.
He grinned. “I don’t, really, but—”
He pursed swollen lips and kissed her cheek. Again she wondered where he would sleep. She was badly bruised, as he was. Bruises could be used as an excuse for a night or two, maybe, but after that she might well be gone, never to see him again. A man who had saved his lover’s life might reasonably expect more than a peck on the cheek for thanks.
“Call for Deputy Director Hubbard from Dr. Quentin Peter of 5CBC,” System announced.
Cedric shied like a startled horse. “Yugh! Of course!”
Fish had already reached the outer door.
“Wait!” Cedric yelled, and lunged over to grab his arm.
“Correction,” System said. “Calls for Deputy Director Hubbard from Dr. Quentin Peter of 5CBC and Dr. Goodson Jason of NABC.”
“They’ll all want to come!” Cedric yelled.
Fish gazed up at him in opaque silence until Cedric released his grip. “I expect so.”
“What am I going—”
System interrupted. “Correction. The following five persons are standing by on calls…Correction. The following eight…”
Cedric howled. Fish made another attempt to slip out the door, and Cedric squeezed in front of him. Alya, impressed, wondered if the reptilian little man was surprised by the sudden new assertiveness he had provoked.
Cedric glared down at the chief of Security. “Not so fast, Doctor! You cooked this up! Why let Eccles Pandora have the scoop? What’s the purpose? We can’t take the entire world media along on—”
Ping!
System’s mindless recitation of celebrated names was ended by an override and the furious image of Devlin Grant. One look at the inflamed beefy face, and Alya could imagine sparks flying from the moustache.
Devlin roared. “What the hell is going on? Hubbard, what right have you to make announcements about me going to visit Nile?”
Cedric put his arms akimbo, completely blocking the doorway. He stared down darkly at Deputy Fish’s shiny black hair, as if hoping to see through it to whatever sinister brew seethed within. “I was given to understand that it was all arranged.”
“Oh, you were, were you? Lyle?”
Fish looked from holo to Cedric and back again in surprise. “Has there been a misunderstanding? I assumed, Grant, that you would wish to handle the matter yourself, but I certainly suggested that Cedric check with you before making any announcement.”
Cedric’s expression showed that he might be recalling the conversation differently.
“Did you, now?” Devlin said through his teeth. “Well, I hadn’t even been advised that there was going to be another mission to Nile at all.”
“We must try to recover the body. We promised Gill’s next of kin that we would make the attempt.” Fish looked very innocent, very shocked by the disagreement. Doubts were already gathering in Cedric’s face like mud rising in a stirred pond…
And Devlin still resembled a volcano in the most unpredictable stage of an eruption. “I was not aware that my authority over operations had fallen into question.”
“Of course not!” Fish sighed. “Well, I surely do hope we don’t have to start going to formal memoranda and requisitions in this organization after so many years of striving to minimize red tape. As chief of the investigation into Gill Adele’s death, I requested that an attempt be made to recover her body. I would have sworn that the matter was discussed at our first board meeting after the tragedy. And I’m sure that Agnes told me she’d mentioned it.”
Devlin chewed his moustache. His tunic was unzipped, his hair awry, and the room behind him was a very frilly, pink bedroom. “She may have,” he admitted cautiously.
“Well, then!” Fish beamed. “And all I told Cedric was that he would make a good independent witness, since he had never had a chance to tamper with the equipment that killed the three victims, and that I was sure that you would not mind him coming along, but that he should check with you. He may not have heard me clearly. Well, the man’s had a busy day; we shouldn’t be too hard on him.”
“I—” Cedric said.
“What exactly are you demanding, Lyle?” Devlin asked.
A string of glowing words floated along past his knees: 16 INCOMING CALLS WAITING FOR DEPUTY DIRECTOR HUBBARD CEDRIC—CORRECTION: 21 INCOMING CALLS WAITING FOR DEPUTY DIRECTOR HUBBARD CEDRIC. Cedric stared at them angrily and began gnawing his lip. Even if he could not read fast enough, the voice coming through his earpatch must have been making the message abundantly clear.
Fish shrugged. “Just that you send out a skiv fitted with those grapple things for collecting samples. The body must be lying where she fell. Even if there are predators, they will not have destroyed the suit. Theories of cave men we can forget, but Eccles Pandora will not believe us unless she sees with her own eyes.”
“That slut!”
“Exactly. I thought we might make her eat a little crow, that’s all. Now, if you are too busy with the princess’s affairs, I see no reason why some junior ranger can’t drive the equipment. You must have some young lunk you can spare?”
Devlin’s image scowled, obviously thinking hard.
“There are twenty-one—no, twenty-seven—calls waiting for me,” Cedric said. “Every other network wants to send someone along, too. What do I tell them? And when? Can we have a press conference in the morning? Dr. Fish? If I let them all come up to Cainsville, can you handle the security?”
Fish beamed paternally. “Certainly! You have promised Eccles the seat, so the rest will have to be content with watching you leave and watching you return. Grant, what do you think?”
Devlin ran his fingers through his hair. “Damn you for a sly, creeping toad, Lyle! Well, I am very busy, but this won’t take too long.”
Alya mused that Devlin’s fondness for headlines was no great secret.
“But, as senior investigator,” Devlin added darkly, “you probably ought to come along with us yourself.”
“My doctors have advised against excitement,” Fish said sadly. “You will have Cedric.”
Devlin’s eyes narrowed. “I think maybe Baker Abel, also.”
Certainly there was some cryptic undertone there. Alya wondered why the glib-talking Ranger Baker should be significant. Cedric had not noticed—he was scowling at the visual message as it came around showing 32, then dropping back to 31. Someone had gone away mad.
“Your decision,” Fish said with a shrug. “We’d better let Cedric answer his mail, here. By all means, let them all come.”
“I’ll handle the press conference!” Devlin snapped.
Either Cedric’s assertiveness was not yet developed enough for a head-on confrontation with Devlin, or he just did not care. “Fine!” he said. “You can have ’em. 0700?”
Devlin grunted, then vanished.
System spoke at once: “Calls for Deputy Director Hubbard from the following thirty-one persons…”
Fascinated, Alya moved back out of the field of view as Cedric stepped to the com, biting his lip and tugging his cuffs down. Fish vanished out the door.
“Collective reply,” Cedric said.
“Go ahead.”
He took a deep breath, ran a hand through his hair, and then put on an extremely convincing little-boy smile. “Hi! Sorry I can’t take your calls one at a time, but you’re all stacked up like firewood. There isn’t another seat available on the skiv, but anyone who wants to come to Cainsville to see us leave and then see us come back is welcome to do so.” He paused and gulped for a moment, then forced the smile back. “You’ll be able to watch us on monitors, I guess. Dr. Devlin will be available for questions both before and after…Let’s say 0700 hours? And we’ll provide breakfast. Thanks for being so patient. That’s all. Oh—no, I don’t know why Dr. Eccles got preferred treatment. It just happened that way. Good night. Com end.”
Bagshaw had neither moved nor spoken throughout the Devlin-Fish argument
, but now he broke the ensuing silence. “You know, Sprout, there are times when you don’t act nearly as stupid as you look.”
“Like now, for instance!” Cedric said, wrapping Alya up in his arms and starting serious kissing procedures. He began as if he were planning to go a full three-minute round with her, but he broke off halfway through, gasping for air.
“Damned nose!” he said thickly.
“I’m bushed!” he said as the two of them climbed into a golfie.
Perhaps he was going to be tactful and considerate.
No, he was not. “I’d like to go to bed very early,” he added, and hope was written all over his face in flashing neon. “Columbus Dome!” he told System, wrapping Alya in an arm like a garden hose.
“I’m tired, too,” she said, and they fell to arguing over who had had the least sleep lately. It seemed they had both been missing out.
As a child Alya had been allowed to run wild in the Residence grounds, often unattended. With the buddhi, no guardian was ever necessary. For as long as she could remember, she had trusted her intuition to see that she came to no harm. Thus she had been an unusually vulnerable thirteen-year-old when a thickshouldered, broad-smiling gardener twice her age had led her into a dusty, cobwebby summerhouse and taken her virginity. That had been a shock—but not truly harmful. In fact he had been a very slick performer and the education likely valuable.
There had also been a rather wild party when she was sixteen, and the captain of the school basketball team—but she preferred not to remember that.
Since then she had been more discriminating, but she had paired briefly twice; and she had terminated both affairs as soon as they began to turn serious. She had known what her kismet was, and neither man had been the sort to take along on a oneway journey to another world.
So she’d had experience of four men before Cedric, but none of them had been as boisterous as he. He was big and powerful, and last night he had been extremely enthusiastic. She still felt sore inside, and her later encounter with the rope plant had left her bruised all over outside. She was not in the mood for love.
Cedric obviously was.
“Let’s eat,” she suggested, and they stopped at the cafeteria. He ate four times as much and as fast as she did, but he never took his eyes off her.
“Window to Orinoco at five,” she said. “I have to get up early.”
“I’ll nudge you,” he said, and waited hopefully.
She let that one go, but her conscience was squirming: He had saved her life, and paid for it with a smashed nose and all-over bruises. Injury deserved compensation.
They walked back toward the spiralator. “When you go to Tiber,” he said, “then you won’t be a princess anymore, will you?”
She agreed, automatically thinking of Jathro. She did not know where Jathro had got to, but his absence was a welcome improvement. It was true that the people of Banzarak had a strongly held belief in the infallibility of their royal family. Alya was not going to be a princess, but her opinions would continue to carry much weight with at least the ten percent of the colonists who came from her homeland. That was a good start on having a lot of influence in a society that would of necessity be fragmented and lacking overall leadership. That was Jathro’s assumption.
“I want to come, Alya,” Cedric said. “Even if you—if I—if we are only friends, I want to come to Tiber with you.”
Oh, those enormous, innocent, round eyes!
How could she explain? Last night she had been driven by the buddhi. It had been completely unscrupulous, telling her to bind this unusually tall, agile young man to her as a lover, so that he would be at her side and willing to risk his life for her. She had gone to his bed. She had accepted his lovemaking. She had even pretended to enjoy it, just to hurry him along.
So she had fashioned Hubbard Cedric into her devoted slave. When the time came, he had leaped to her rescue without a second’s pause to weigh the risk. He had been fast enough and tall enough to catch hold of her, strong enough to keep her away from the core of the rope plant while Devlin closed the window, and tough enough to endure the punishment involved. Cedric had been available and malleable, lanky and steadfast—nothing else.
And now?
Now the need was past. She felt no more than casual friendship for him. They were the same age; they had known the most intimate contact possible, the most potent experience that two people can share. He had been a virile performer. Nothing more than that.
But just because the satori had been completely amoral did not mean that she could be. “Cedric, I have no say in who goes to Tiber. Yes, I’d love to have you come with us, but you’ll have to ask Devlin, or Baker, or your grandmother.”
He swallowed hard and nodded.
He handed her courteously into the spiralator and followed. Even when he was standing one step lower, his eyes were still much higher than hers. With a hard squeeze, he could encircle her waist with his hands, middle finger to middle finger, thumb to thumb. He had discovered that last night, and it fascinated him. He did it now.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry!”
“I’m very bruised, Cedric,” she said.
He pulled a face, then nodded. She thought of whipped dogs.
“Tiber on the eleventh?” he asked.
“Day after tomorrow,” she agreed. Two more days only. Of course, in theory it all depended on what the overnighting expeditions had discovered, but Alya had no doubts. Tiber it would be. Probably Jathro was already off somewhere, organizing the first planeloads.
The spiralator brought them to her floor, and they stepped out. Cedric walked her to her door in hopeful, attentive silence.
She had used him as unscrupulously as Fish had, or his vixen grandmother, or several others. Was she no better than they? Why did everyone use him? He deserved any reward she could give.
She opened the door and paused. “How’re your bruises?”
Smiles dawned again. “I could cope. Yours?”
“I’m not sure. They should be looked at, I think.”
Relief! “Very closely?”
“Very! There’s a whirlpool tub in my suite.”
His eyes widened. “There is?”
“Have you ever made love in a hot tub?” She never had.
Cedric moaned and reached for her.
She slipped from his grasp and headed across the room without looking to see if he was following.
Cedric took less than five seconds to unzip, tug, balance on each foot in turn a few times, tug some more, and then he was in the water, waiting for her. He was as badly roped by bruises and welts as she was, and they showed up far worse on his milky skin, but obviously they were not going to dampen his fires.
Alya took longer. Then she sank down beside him and pushed his hands away. “Wait awhile. Just soak.”
He had probably never soaked in a whirlpool tub before. It eased the aches, but he would not know how enervating it was.
After a while she let him fondle her, but then he began to grow urgent. “How do we manage this?” he muttered into her ear. “I’ll drown you!”
“Like this!” She slid into his lap. “My turn to drive!”
She had never been so blatantly aggressive at lovemaking. It was obviously a new experience for Cedric also, and Alya found a strange wild joy in her power to take a being so much larger and stronger than herself and almost immediately reduce him to a gasping, spasming, slack-jawed jelly. She worked him savagely, until he was drained and spent and yelling for mercy.
They cuddled longer in the sensuously swirling water, but soon his eyes began to wobble out of focus. She sent him off to dry himself and wait for her in bed; and she took her time. When she went to him, he was stretched out like a major highway, fast asleep.
Easy.
She slid in beside him, and for a while she lay and studied his astonishingly innocent face, his battered nose, and the spread of his hair on the pillow, shining bronze in this light. Then she whispered fo
r dark to come and turned over to go to sleep herself.
She, too, was spent. It had been a hell of a day.
But sleep did not come rushing down on her as she had expected. That mean little seduction had been too cheap and easy. Certainly he had no cause to complain that the brave had not received the fair, but she knew he would have wanted more. He meant well, but he was clumsy, inexperienced, and altogether too rampageous. In her present condition he would hurt her without meaning to—he had done enough of that the previous night.
Yet she found that she was fighting a fierce desire to wake him up and tell him to do his damndest. That was her conscience speaking, not her intuition—the buddhi no longer seemed interested in Hubbard Cedric, tall or not. There were lots of good men around.
Partly she was feeling her own unslaked lust. Partly she was feeling guilty for being a selfish, conniving slut.
And partly, she knew, she was wondering in a purely cerebral fashion whether she would be an idiot to let this one get away.
17
Cainsville/Nile, April 9
“GOOD MORNING, MY lady.” Baker Abel’s voice was sickeningly cheerful. “I wish I could say that you were looking well, but I’m not looking at all, if you follow me. I’m sure you are, anyway.”
His cocky, impudent face peered out through the holo, but Alya had specified voice-only reply. Beside her, Cedric moaned softly and pulled the covers over his head.
“What’s the time?” She rubbed her eyes. Lord, but every bone in her body ached.
“Just before 0600. Your judgment on Orinoco was confirmed, so we let you sleep. The lab reports show something badly wrong there. The mice are growing tumors. Grant’s decreed complete embargo.”
Orinoco had already been overnighted and given a provisional Class One rating before Alya had even reached Cainsville. So her intuition had a range of several days—but was it reliable on a scale of years? When would human colonists on Tiber start developing tumors?
She prepared to throw off the covers and then decided not to. People facing blank screens usually had a fixed, glazed look about them, and she was not sure that Abel’s sparkly eyes were quite glazed enough. There were a lot of sneaky override codes in the Cainsville System.