by John Barnes
“Well, my narrow escape has made me reflect on eternal questions,” I said. “Why do I have so much talent in addition to my physical beauty? Why do I keep a horrid brat on my team instead of buying Raimbaut a sheep? Things like that.”
“Bravo, you ancient monster of ego. I’d score that a tie.”
“Me too, evil child,” I said. “We’re at the top of our form tonight.” I glanced at the clock. One minute.
“There. You look good. Touch one hair or garment on your way to the stage, and there won’t be enough of you to blot off the clothes.”
“All right, I’m on. But I warn you, I’m about to drench these clothes in the damp lanes of nostalgia.”
For the last set, I invited people to sing along—since it was one long medley of my old hits, people would anyway. Don’t ask me why, but the invitation makes the singers-along less annoying to their neighbors.
As I started my last song—“Never Again Till the Next Time,” my most-covered song according to my agency—the Ixists rose from their seats en masse, and came down the aisle toward the stage in what looked for all the world like a procession of monks. I was in such an expansive mood that the Ixist robe did not irritate me as it usually did. Ix had never worn any such thing; he and his followers, Tamil and Maya, on Briand, had worn plain black trousers and white, tuniclike shirts, with black broad-brimmed hats, to blend in—the opposite of the effect achieved by those community-theatre-Friar-Lawrence robes.
With the house in half-light and stage lights not much brighter, I could see Raimbaut, Laprada, and the auxteams scuttling frantically. No one had told them that this was about to happen. I didn’t know myself, but I kept on playing—there might be another assassin among them, but their loyalty did not deserve any less gratz and merce from me just because an enemy had borrowed their costume.
Each Ixist held up a red rose and lightly tossed it onto the stage. The rest of the crowd applauded and sang louder; the Ixists filed back to their seats and joined the group singing as well, and the whole thing turned into one great soggy, corny lovefest, with me on stage surrounded by heaps of roses. At the final chorus of “Never Again Till the Next Time,” the house was singing loud enough to drown me out.
I don’t suppose I could persuade you that I was embarrassed by it all.
Coming off stage, I was exhausted and satisfied. In a perfect world, all work would make you tired that way. It had all worked out. We had new leads in two of our active cases. I had pleased my most devoted fans. The new Ix Cycle had been well received. My team had improvised together brilliantly—there was nothing I valued more than that—and I would get to write another commendation for Raimbaut, who really should be starting a team of his own soon.
Also a commendation for Paxa, which would piss off my ex in a way I enjoyed.
Raimbaut and Laprada were waiting just offstage, smiling broadly. Raimbaut took my lute as if it were a holy relic and said, “Your best ever. I am honored to be your companhon.”
“I’m glad you’re mine, since it means I’m not dead.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “Now that they have psypyxes working right, dying is not so permanent—”
“I insist on being grateful anyway. Many things that aren’t permanent really hurt.”
“But you only remember what happened up to the point where your psypyx was recorded,” Raimbaut said, “so nobody ever remembers getting killed.”
“I would know.”
Laprada held up a finger in an ah-ha! “So if a tree falls on an ancient monster of ego—”
“Then two bratty kids have to find someone else to work for, and no sane person would tolerate them,” I said. “Not to mention your having to write a complete report on the tree’s known political associations—Margaret would insist.”
Raimbaut handed my lute to a robot, and they walked with me through a springer-to my pleased surprise, into the bridal suite at the Marriott Trois-Orléans. “Birthday gift from Margaret,” he said. “She’s overdoing guilt as usual after losing her temper. She said some really stupid things about Paxa, over that note in your dressing room. Sort of a peace offering.”
Laprada held up a hand to stop me from expostulating. “Your father and I already made her apologize.”
“Rightly so,” Raimbaut said. “Anyone who can get into a room that secure, and get out again, is somebody that Shan himself couldn’t have stopped. Anyway, expect company soon—Paxa just had a few things to wrap up.” He slapped my shoulder lightly. “Atz fis de potemz, fai!”
Raimbaut and I exchanged forearm grips, and Laprada gave me a little air-hug. In the mirrors on every wall, we looked like a youngish jovent and his entendendora, talking to his grandfather. They vanished into the springer.
In the vast gaudy bathroom with its high vaulted ceiling, the ubiquitous gilt and bronze frouf was unmistakable evidence that I was in either a high-end Trois-Orléans hotel or a low-end Freiporto brothel. Somehow the faucet handles shaped like penises and sconces shaped like breasts failed to arouse me, but it wasn’t for their lack of frantic effort; plumbing just isn’t one of my kinks, I suppose.
I did my best to ignore the visual implications of the shower gushing from between the thighs of a nude life-size female bronze on the ceiling above the bathing pool, and reveled in the first glorious hot rinse. With my muscles relaxing and the room filling with warm clouds of steam, I opened my shower bag to the medical section, and used my mucous membrane rinses to kill or at least discourage any upper respiratory viruses that might have moved in that evening (stressed tissues, hundreds of infection sources, certa que infernam some had). I spat and snorted into the torrent of hot water rushing down the drain.
I shampooed and rinsed my hair and beard, and said, “Fill the tub” to the room aintellect.
Water stopped pouring from between the thighs of that improbably busty nymph overhead, and began flowing from four surrounding bronze cherubs, each about half a meter high, who appeared to be joyously urinating into my bathing pool. So this was the bridal suite. I resolved never to get married here.
“Make it warmer and scent it,” I said. “Dior Tropical Suite.”
The water gushed into the wide bronze pool, steaming with vanilla, cinnamon, coconut, and cardamom. At the sink, I applied depilatory everywhere on my lower face that wasn’t beard, and wiped it all off carefully.
The pool was full, and bathwater stopped flowing from the cherubs. I half expected them all to shake off drips, but I suppose someone must have told the designer that would be in bad taste.
I slipped into the almost-too-hot water and let tension dissolve like sweat. As I drifted close to sleep, I half hoped Paxa would take her time—
The springer pinged. Oh, well. “I’m in here, Paxa,” I said.
Maybe it was the heaviness of his tread; when Paxa walked, she never made an unintentional sound, even in high heels on a hardwood floor.
Maybe, down in the brain centers where hearing shades into ESP, I heard his windup breath.
I think it was the difference from Paxa’s rhythm. The three footfalls were too intent, too insensitive—too wrong, like on Briand, when Tzi’quin stepped from the crowd to shoot Ix. Like in the Council of Humanity when the assassin rushed up the aisle and burned Shan down at the podium. Like here in Trois-Orleans, twenty stanyears ago, when the groundcar reversed across a sidewalk toward Margaret.
I thought of none of this at the time. I didn’t think. I knew.
Grab long-handled bath brush, right hand. Side-roll from the bathing pool to the dressing area. Left hand, snatch up clothing steamer wand. Look at the controls, place thumb, click to instant-on-high-heat.
One more big stupid foot-thud, then a maser at the end of a short, burly, hairy arm came past the half-open door, pointing toward the bathing pool where I had been. In the two seconds or so I had been moving, I must have sloshed to rouse every dead sailor in Fiddler’s Green, but he had paid no attention to it, too intent on the mission as rehearsed.
&
nbsp; I was crouched low, on the side of the door away from the tub, as his head came in.
He saw me just as I reached full extension with a lunge, my aging ankles and knees protesting but cooperating. With the whole force of my legs and right arm, and the weight of my body solidly behind it, I jabbed the bath brush handle deep into the sweet spot where the doctor presses when it says “turn your head and cough.”
I snatched it back and clopped his jaw shut with an upward strike, interrupting his inhaled shriek, continued the motion into a roll of my right arm around his neck, and drew him toward me, the brush handle across the back of his neck.
Dazed and in pain, he tried to bring the maser around. I stroked the steamer nozzle along his knuckles, pushing his aim to the side, and squeezed the button. The jet of steam probably startled him more than it hurt—the real pain would have come a few seconds later, a bad burn is like that—but he dropped the maser.
Pushing his head down with the brush handle braced on the back of his neck, I thumbed the switch on the steamer and dragged the nozzle across his eyes. When he screamed, I thrust the hot nozzle through his teeth, as far in as it would go, and held the switch on.
Maddened by pain, he broke backward through my grip and fell into the outer room, clutching his face and screaming through the ruined flesh of his throat.
I shouted, “OSP Eight Eight Eight,” the override code that every aintellect in human space relays as top priority—“OSP agent under deadly attack, confirm by voiceprint, send backup to nearest springer right now.” Reinforcements would arrive at any second.
Overnight bag—neuroducer epée? Usual place—perfect.
The millimeter-width, meter-long thread of the “blade” emerged and stiffened with a loud pop, the tip glowing dimly.
The man was curled with his knees almost to his chest, keening and holding his face. “Hands down to your sides, stretch out on your back,” I said, “and I will make it stop hurting.”
He groaned but did it. I did my best not to look at what I had done; if he lived, it could all be regrown. A firm stroke of the neuroducer tip from ear to ear, pressing hard, and then a hard push over his heart, and he was in a coma. The neuroducer had convinced his nervous system that his throat was cut, he was stabbed through the heart, and he was dead. They could revive him at a hospital.
Except for a deep, hideous thud I felt through my feet.
Another brain bomb.
The face had been bad enough; now the head was misshapen.
I was just pulling the cover off the bed to throw over the poor bastard when the springer pinged. I whirled to face it.
Paxa walked in wearing the outfit we always called “Fetishist’s Dream.” How could anyone walk at all in shoes like that, let alone as gracefully as she did? And the very little red leather of the rest of the costume clung to her deliciously. “Happy Birthday,” she said. “I see you’re already dressed for the occasion, but let’s not start on the bed.”
It took me a moment to realize that she meant I was naked. “Um, uh—”
By then she had seen the body and started to ask, “Were there any more—” when it got kind of noisy.
Three other OSP agents on Roosevelt had been attacked, as part of a diversion, so all the local rescue teams had been dispatched. That was why it had taken almost a full minute for the OSP dispatcher to locate a ready-to-go squad of Council Special Police (since we don’t officially have wars or actually have ships anymore, that’s what we call marines). Once located, the CSPs had been dispatched to the nearest springer, i.e. the one just behind Paxa.
Which is why eight CSPs, and their sergeant, came through so perfectly according to the manual that they looked like a recruiting poster, pointing weapons in all directions, their intelligent goggles doubtless (since they didn’t shoot us) identifying me and Paxa as friendlies.
Then they got a real look at the scene:
One corpse in gym clothes, head squashy, face partially cooked.
One petite blonde gamine, facial features of an angel, dressed like a Freiporto streetwalker without the subtlety.
One naked me, gray shoulder-length hair still dripping, holding a coverlet and a still-extended neuroducer epée, as if I had taken up nude bullfighting in my hotel room.
The sergeant came to attention and said, “Seniormost Field Agent Giraut Leones, you requested assistance?”
“I did,” I said. “We need to be moved to secure quarters, the enemy dead there needs to be recovered for OSP study, and we need to keep this room secure—another attack could arrive through that springer at any time-while we’re doing that. And I need some pants, but I can take care of that part myself.”
The sergeant made a swift set of hand signs. Four CSPs guarded the springer while the rest expertly bagged up the body. I pulled on trousers, shirt, and sandals, and Paxa put on a robe. Our robots were very experienced with grabbing stuff after me when I had to be moved suddenly, so they would take care of clothes and baggage.
“We’re ready to go,” I said. That didn’t seem like quite enough. “I suppose you’re wondering how, uh, all this happened to happen.”
The sergeant said, “Sir, I will admit to some curiosity.”
“It started out as a birthday party,” I said. I don’t always say the smartest things when I’m drained after a concert, or after a fight. “I just turned fifty.”
“I guess everyone celebrates their own way,” the sergeant said. “Me, when I turned thirty, I climbed a mountain with two buddies, and we got drunk and watched the sun come up.”
4
I refrained from throwing a tantrum like a cranky two-year-old. They moved us to the bridal suite of another hotel. Since you can’t block an address on a springer, they just clamped another springer over ours to automatically forward any would-be assassin into an armored holding cell in an OSP space station. Normally the Council uses setups like that to guard antimatter weapons and the dedicated processors of ultra-high-security aintellects, so I felt very special on my birthday.
The rest of the team were too experienced to rush over to see whether Paxa and I were all right; they knew we would have called them if we needed them.
“Well,” Paxa said, when we had made sure our things had come through, and checked one more time to make sure security forwarding was on, “I would like a quick shower. Then I would like you to get into the tub, and wait till I tell you to come out for a surprise.”
She took her shower with the door open, and while she did, I stripped out of the pants and shirt again, and sat down in the middle of the bed to meditate, to let all of it fade away, into the universe and into my bones.
My meditating didn’t go very well, at least not as meditating. Not so much because I had monkey-mind as because I had horny-monkey-mind, and I was watching Paxa standing in the cascading hot water in the middle of the bathing pool. She was slim, pale blonde, and athletic, with long smooth legs and everything taut and firm, the fantasy object of three-quarters of the straight men in human space, and though I had a distinct fetish for heavy, soft bodies like Margaret’s, I had the same training by decades of advertising as any other male in human space. I liked Paxa’s body because it would be difficult for a straight male not to, because I enjoyed the envy of other men, and because it was Paxa’s, and for the last of those reasons, I could have overlooked fangs and scales. So I admitted I wouldn’t be getting much meditating done, and just enjoyed the view.
Paxa stretched and luxuriated in the warm spray, and turned the shower off. I walked in to the bathroom, lifted her, and carried her to the bed.
“The bed’s going to be a mess.”
“Set it to dry and change while I’m bathing.” I kissed her to close off further conversation.
When we were both reasonably happy, I said, “Room aintellect, start my tub, get the settings from my chamberlain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you weren’t such a romantic you’d have started your tub before carrying me to the bed and r
avishing me.”
“If I were the type to do that, I wouldn’t be much of a ravisher,” I pointed out. “And is ravishing something you can do to the willing?”
“I hope so, because while you’re re-bathing, I’ll be dressing to be re-ravished. Anything you’re really dying for, or surprise you?”
“I love surprises and I hate dying.”
“That’s extremely portentous to say on your fiftieth birthday, and portentous is within a short walk of morbid.”
“It’s not my fiftieth birthday anymore,” I pointed out. “It’s past midnight. So if we’re both tired—”
“Tostemz tropa joy, ilh’st ilh lei prim de con,” she quoted. “At least ‘always total joy’ is the first law of my con. We can rest when we’re dead.”
I settled into the tub. Behind me I could hear rustle and fussing. Hedons treat clothing like cuisine—most of the time plain old cooking will do, but when it’s time to show off, it’s time to show off. They also think sex is both the purpose of life and a trivial minor pleasure, and that stress of any kind is pure evil. So they dress to be comfortable, beautiful, or sexy, they have sex like it’s the best thing in the world but entirely for fun, and they try to live in a state of deep relaxation.
I often think that among all the Thousand Cultures, only the Hedons chose to go sane.
Pillow talk, snacks, and some kissing and stroking that verged on starting another round took up enough time so that Paxa and I didn’t actually fall asleep until Epsilon Indi, the local sun, was already flooding the skylights. We agreed that this was far too early for sunrise and poor planning on someone’s part—at least that’s what I meant when I said “mmmph” and I assumed Paxa meant the same thing when she said it into my shoulder. So I croaked an order to the room aintellect to opaque the windows, dim the lights to complete darkness, and set the airconditioning cool enough for us to enjoy being under an extra blanket. We slept till there was just time to groom and dress for dinner.