by Mel Keegan
“I tell myself this.” Mark’s hands spanned Marin’s hips, holding him there. “I’ve tried to explain the facts of it to him, but he won’t hear, or won’t understand. Warrior that he is, he can’t imagine being responsible for a broken ship full of sick old people and half starved children, all of them hollow-eyed with fear.”
“Then, the humans have an expression, very coarse, very accurate.” Marin’s hands stilled once again, fingers laced at Mark’s nape. “Fuck him. It’s Emil Kulich’s privilege to believe what he wants to believe, but he’s dead wrong, and you and I both know it. You’re not answerable to him. You don’t owe him any explanations. What about the other one, Midani?”
Mark wore a very gentle, lopsided smile. “Midani is a lot less opinionated, much less voluble. He usually defers to Emil because, as you’ve seen, Emil is the more powerful personality.”
“And Midani is the one with the brains,” Curtis observed. “I was watching him trying out new words, trying to pronounce them properly. He’s the one who wants to know about humans, learn from us, deal with us. Emil? Are you really going to give him the Freyana?”
“Loan,” Mark corrected. “There’s a number of the older Resalq who’ve never liked what we became, and a body of our scientists who would slug it out with each other to get places aboard to research our living history at the same time as hunting for the Raishenne.”
“Wild goose chase,” Marin warned.
“Probably. I know. But it’s something they have to do, and along the way they’ll return a lot of useful data about new worlds on the course broken by the Aenestra. If they want to found a new colony, I won’t stop them. We’ll always know where the Freyana is.”
“And you can repossess it any time you like, after they’ve found a world and put down sustainable roots,” Marin finished. He leaned closer, kissed Mark’s forehead, the bridge of his nose, his lips. “You have a lot more patience than I have. I’d have put something in Emil Kulich’s food to knock him out, and shoved him headfirst into a cryotank to keep him quiet, and then done business with his brother – and yes, I know it’s the wrong word!”
Mark actually laughed, and gave Marin a push. “Live as long as I have, Curtis, and you learn patience, if nothing else.” He leaned back heavily against the bench. “So. What’s it to be for you and Neil? Harrison’s mission, or ours?”
The question was too vast for Marin to grapple with. He was still struggling to find any coherent way to phrase what he felt when footsteps announced Travers, and his nose picked up the drifting scent of coffee before Neil stepped into the lab.
“We don’t know. Not yet,” he admitted. “Shapiro’s going to need people he can trust.” He waited as Travers handed a mug to Mark, took a swig from the second and passed it across. They would share the second mug; Marin did not even think about it.
“The truth us,” Travers said pointedly, “Shapiro needs you.”
“My people also need me,” Mark said quietly.
“They do,” Travers agreed, “but they need you where you’ll do the most good. And that’s not working yourself to death in some lab, analysing air and soil samples from some potential colony world while you try to keep the peace. Tor and Emil are going to work their way to flashpoint and wind up beating each other bloody! Dario and the others are trying to keep between them, but it’s inevitable. And babysitting the show is a total waste of your talents.”
The flat statement took everything Marin had felt and thought for days now, and placed into focus so sharp, it was brutal. Mark’s eyes widened for a moment before he chuckled.
“If only it were so simple, Neil.”
“You mean, it isn’t?” Travers demanded.
“Not quite.” Mark drank a little coffee and listened to the sound of muted voices from the living rooms. “These people need a leader, someone they trust enough to follow orders. Someone who can hold them together, make them pull in harness.”
“Do they?” Marin was less sure. “The Resalq are already moving. The ships are in orbit, loaded, ready to get out to a safe distance where the Zunshu can’t hurt them, even if Borushek goes the way of your old homeworlds. There’s no rush to disappear, and this time around the Zunshu are up against a people whose whole history has been warlike.”
“They’re also going to be looking right down the barrels of their own weapons,” Travers added. “The Zunshu mines that’re ready to be turned on the Confederate battle groups will destroy the Zunshu themselves just the same.”
The arguments were sound, and Sherratt was not about to dismiss them lightly. He weighed every word while Travers and Marin waited, and Marin thought he could literally hear the cogs and gears of Mark’s mind ticking over.
The mug was empty, and Sherratt handed it back before he spoke. “Let me sleep on it. Lai’a won’t be finished fitting for the mission for some time yet, and Harrison won’t leave the Deep Sky until the Colonial Wars have been resolved, one way or another. Barb and Richard will be here tomorrow. I want to talk to them before I make any decision.”
“Jazinsky’s going with Lai’a,” Marin said quietly.
“No surprise there!” Mark smiled tiredly. “Harrison wants to look some Zunshu general in the face, demand to know why, and get answers. Barb just wants to see the inside of Elarne with her own living eyes. Imagine it! A place where gravity surges like the ocean, space behaves like a body of water, and time … time is neither constant nor predictable. It eddies around massive gravity wells, changes speed, direction, as if time itself were a tangible thing.” He shook his head, still bemused by concepts he had been wrestling with all his life.
For Marin, even the ideas were difficult to grasp. Like any living thing trapped in three dimensions and linear time, he could not conceive of any world where time was not constant, where day followed day and cause presaged effect. Lose the constancy of time, and reality shattered apart – yet Mark worked in theoretical realms where time followed spiral patterns, nested globes, anything but the straight-arrow flight living creatures understood.
“You need to get some sleep,” Travers said wisely. “We all do. What are you doing here that wouldn’t be done easier in the morning?”
“It’s the Orpheus data.” Mark gestured vaguely at the machines behind him, “as always. So many questions, so few firm answers, and too much theorizing. I can theorize any scenario into or out of existence. With the Orpheus data, I can show you watertight mathematics to prove the three dimensional universe you think you know so well doesn’t even exist – and since you know it does exist, you know the sums are wrong somewhere … but I’ll be damned if I can work out where.” He drew both hands back through his hair and mocked himself with a chuckle. “And Barb thinks of me as the teacher with all the answers!”
“He’s right,” Marin said softly. “Sleep.”
“In an hour.” Sherratt waved them off. “I’ve a few things to complete, and then I’ll close my eyes. I must clear a certain amount of data to make space for the next challenge. Vaurien and Jazinsky are following you down, tomorrow, with the item they collected on Celeste.” He massaged his temples hard. “Barb transmitted the scans.”
“And you know what it is?” Travers guessed.
“I … think I know,” Mark said carefully. “I’ll need to see it, image it, look inside of it. Hence the extra work to be done now, to clear enough processor power to handle the rest, tomorrow.” He gave Marin a wry smile. “And yes, I know I need to rest. And I will. Sleep is another question.”
“Then, we’ll let you get on with it.” Travers slid an arm around Marin’s back and steered him away. “You said Richard and Barb are coming down tomorrow?”
“In the morning, I think.” Mark had already turned his attention back to the flock of tiny drones. “Time enough to hammer out decisions then. They opened up the last bedroom on the west side for you, as usual. Sleep well.”
From the long, interconnected living rooms came the sound of music and voices. Marin stopped for a
moment to listen, and heard Roy Arlott going over a range of words, intonations, pronunciations – with Midani Kulich, not with Emil. Either the elder Kulich was ominously silent or he had retired for the night, scorning the idea of learning enough of the human language to either understand them or make himself understood by them.
The Resalq language was elegant, filled with patterns, weaves and textures which made sense when one understood them, but not one syllable of it bore any commonality with any human language, and many of its phrases were drawn from cultural references. To learn it well, a human student had to also study the culture, history and mythology of the people. No such thing as a simple translation cipher existed, and a coherent dictionary was almost an impossibility The task of speaking it well was so daunting, Marin had long ago set aside the ambition.
The last room on the west side of the house was comfortably familiar, with its polished redwood floor, the scatter of rich green rugs, the reproduction of a classic triptych from Saraine, the vast windows with the view of Mount Kepler. The sky had been fully dark for hours now. The stars burned, and the snow-clad heights of the mountains were silver-gray, outlined in starlight. According to the threedee which idled in the corner of the room, the temperature right outside the window was thirty below zero, with a wind out of the northeast at 20kph, and snow flurries expected in the early hours as the wind rose and picked up drifts from the near mountains and cast them over the town. A fine, mild night for Riga.
For some time Marin stood, hands in the pockets of his slacks, looking out at the mountain without actually seeing it. Memories possessed him – images of many years before, in this house and also in Mark’s house in the Eternal City on Saraine, where he learned the secrets of Dendra Shemiji. He knew he was only the third human ever to master enough of them to graduate. Mark Sherratt had achieved so much, done so much to be proud of, and a thread of anger stitched sharply through Marin, prickling him like a dozen needles, as he considered Emil Kulich.
Part of him wanted to tell the man he had no right to judge Mark Sherratt or any Resalq. Another part wanted to see the argument come to blows, in which case his money would have been on Tor Sereccio. Tor was as tall as any Pakrani, as muscular as Michael Vidal had been, and he was trained in every Dendra Shemiji martial art Mark could teach. Tor soaked up physical skills, taking great delight in them. He also played aeroball, and had a deep ocean diving armor license. Emil Kulich might he a warrior, and arrogant about it – too arrogant – but Marin’s wager would be on Tor.
If the ancestrals and the aged Resalq, those who were much less human than people of Dario’s and Tor’s generation, wanted to take the old Freyana and find their own space in regions the Aenestra had charted, Marin would be glad to see them go.
But if the rest of the Resalq, and Mark among them, wanted to take a fleet of private vessels headed off by the Carellan Djerun and more than likely the Wastrel, the lure of that freedom was powerful. New worlds, a rich future, the opportunity to build something fresh which had never been tainted by Confederate politics, or shadowed by the ancient threat of an enemy that had no name.
“Penny for them,” Travers offered. He had been moving around the room, laying out a pair of scarlet and black silk kimonos, adjusting the heat and humidity to his liking, turning down the bed.
Now his arms circled Marin from behind, and Curtis saw them both reflected in the window glass against the night sky. “They’re not worth a penny,” he told Travers. “I just met an ancestral Resalq, and I’d like to black his eye – how’s that for a revelation? I thought it would be some great, quasi-mystical experience, meeting them!”
“And instead you find they’re ordinary, mortal, fallible, brimming over with all the same foibles as any of us.” Travers’s grip tightened on him, and Marin was glad to lean back heavily into the embrace. “Kulich will have his uses,” Neil said, a warm draft against one ear. “He and his brother survived a lot of fights against Zunshu automata. I’m going to pick his brains tomorrow. I’ll get Roy to translate, and I’ll pump Emil for everything I can get out of him about the machines, how they operate, how to disable and kill them. You know Mark’s got one in the cyber lab?”
“What, the unit they disabled on Kjorin? They brought it here?” Marin turned into his arms.
“Mm. Dario wanted to show it to me, but I said – tomorrow. It’ll keep. I had a coffee in either hand at the time … and here we are.” Travers was drawing his lips across Marin’s forehead as he spoke in a deep, almost hypnotic voice. “The machine’s dead, they tore the central cortex out of it, smashed the transmitter, blew the power cells into about twenty pieces. It’s not going anywhere.” He hunted for Marin’s mouth, covered it with his own and kissed him searchingly. “You know what you need, don’t you?”
Marin drew his cheek across Neil’s with a rasp of whiskers on whiskers. “I know what you think I need.”
“You going to let me give it to you?” The blue eyes danced with amusement.
“Oh, yes.” Marin shrugged out of his jacket, dropped it at his feet, and held open his arms. It was Travers’s physical strength he craved, his body heat, the scent of him, even the soft texture of his lips and the way he had of looking at Curtis from under long, black eyelashes.
Their clothes were strewn between the window and the bed, where Marin let himself be tumbled, and he scissored Travers with both legs before he could escape. He looked up into the face he knew better than his own now, and admired Neil’s good looks, which the lights only accentuated with tones of gold from the lamps on one side and blue from the idling threedee on the other.
Then Travers got his knees onto the bed, physically shoved Marin aside to make space, and covered him, heavy, hot, welcome. Marin’s arms closed around him, hands charting the curves and ridges from nape to buttocks and back. The hard, solid column of Travers’s cock thrust against Curtis’s belly, leaving him in do doubts as to where it wanted to be. He shuffled flat, locked his legs around Neil’s waist and held him there.
The mattress molded beneath the bent-bow curve of his spine as he hunted for Travers’s mouth. When he had it, his fingers knotted into Neil’s hair to hold him to a kiss that was a ravenous clash of teeth and tongues.
When Travers lifted his head at last he was breathless, dark eyed, surprised. “That was … damn, what’s gotten into you tonight?”
“Nothing yet, but you’re about to remedy that,” Marin told him.
“You not getting enough?” Travers rolled aside and drew a one-palmed caress from Marin’s face to his groin, where his hand curved about Curtis’s own shaft and began to work in a languid rhythm which refused to be hurried.
In fact, the flight in from Freespace had been a week of rest they had both needed, and they had made love often. A man got used to opportunity and availability, Marin thought, and he took badly to the drought when life returned to a muddle of duty, schedule, hazard. He arched his head into the pillow, eyes closed, and let Travers play him as if he were an instrument, make music upon him, until every nerve ending sang. And then Travers took his hands away, and Marin’s eyes opened to find him kneeling on the side of mattress, nursing an erection that looked as bemused as the rest of the man.
“I don’t know what you’re on,” Travers said ruefully, “but I want some.”
Marin rolled over and snaked both arms around his waist. “I’m not on anything. It’s just occurring to me…” He paused to lick a path from hip to hip, leaving Travers shivering. “Occurring to me that in a week, ten days, we could be free as a couple of birds.” He dropped a kiss on the salt-moist tip of him. “We could also be dead.” And before Travers could say a word, he dropped his head and set his mouth to better uses than talking.
Many of the sensual tricks of the Resalq would also work for human males, and even now Marin delighted in doing things to Travers that he had never felt before, never imagined. He listened to Neil’s yelps of surprise, and the lush groans as nerve endings he might not even have known he posse
ssed were fetched to life.
At last Travers threaded trembling fingers into his hair to stop him. His voice was hoarse. “If you want any more out of me, know when to quit.”
They had stayed in this very room several times, and Marin knew he would find their things in the top drawer of the antique chest at the bedside. A green glass tub of priceless gel from a sexshop so uptown in Elstrom City, the next address up the line was parked on Arago fields, ten kilometers in the sky. A pack of tissues that smelt of cedar and felt like damp silk. He lifted out both, slicked his fingers and dealt Travers a careful, delicate caress which inspired wounded moans.
And then Neil leaned back, weight propped on both flat palms, and Curtis straddled his lap. Coherent thought fled from Marin’s head, as it always did when his body was hazed in its own heat, his senses were full of Travers, his nerves overloading with fierce sensations that were as raw, as overwhelming to a man in this century as to the ancestral humans who hunted the mammoth.
A long time later, spent, exhausted, with his head on Travers’s chest and the slow, heavy beat of Neil’s heart against his ear, he heard raised voices from downstairs. They were arguing – it was Tor and Emil, speaking loudly in Resalq. The disagreement between them could be coming to blows even then, but Marin was too spent, too comfortable, to go down and see, and Neil was sound asleep. He listened for a while and recognized Leon’s voice, moderating, trying to talk sense into them. He shouted for Roy; feet thundered down the stairs and the human’s lighter, higher voice cut across the deep Resalq voices like a knife, though not in any language Marin could understand.
Not tonight, then. If the fight were going to happen, it would be in a time, a place, where no one would get between them. And Marin hoped he was there to see it.
Chapter Nine
Riga, Borushek