Burning Bright

by Melissa Scott

  “ Ts’taa.” The word was untranslatable, carrying contempt and impatience and a concise statement of relationship, superior to inferior. Chauvelin raised his eyebrows, hoping that ji‑Imbaoa had finally made a mistake–he and the Visiting Speaker were too close in the hierarchy for that to be anything but a deliberate and deadly insult–and realized with regret that ji‑Imbaoa was addressing the woman servant.

  “You are careless, and slow, and I am diminished by your habits.” Ji‑Imbaoa glanced sideways then, toward Chauvelin, and added, “ Chaoihave so much to learn.”

  He had used the shortened term, the one that had once meant “slave.” The woman’s shoulders twitched once, but she mastered herself, and bowed deeply. “I abase myself. I beg my lord’s forgiveness.”

  Ji‑Imbaoa waved a hand in dismissal, and the woman turned away, but not before Chauvelin saw the bright spots of color flaring on her cheekbones. It’s not wise–it’s downright stupid–to abuse your servants to get back at your enemies. He said, in his most neutral voice, “And yet the All‑Father commends the practice.”

  Ji‑Imbaoa’s head lowered, suspiciously, but he said nothing. Chauvelin waited, running a quick and appraising glance down the Visiting Speaker’s mostly humanoid body. Fingerclaws and spurs were painted a vivid red, the spurs protected only by a small cap of filigree‑work. The bright ribbon clusters that flowed from bands around his upper arms, forming his only clothing, were badly crumpled, and Chauvelin glanced lower. The salmon‑pink tip of ji‑Imbaoa’s penis was only just visible at the opening of the genital sheath: still drunk enough to relax some inhibitions, but sobering.

  “I’ve summoned you because I’ve been hearing worrisome news,” ji‑Imbaoa said abruptly. News you should already know about, his tone implied.

  Chauvelin murmured, “Indeed?” They were close enough in rank to omit honorifics in informal speech, and ji‑Imbaoa had used the common forms.

  Ji‑Imbaoa’s hands twitched, as though he regretted his choice, but he could not change modes without losing face. “You have an agent in the city, a houta, Ransome, it’s called.”

  “Ransome is under my patronage, yes,” Chauvelin answered. “He’s been min‑haofor some years.” The gap between houta, nonperson, and client‑kinsman was vast; Ransome needed the respect and protection of min‑haostatus.

  Ji‑Imbaoa flicked his fingers, dismissing the difference. “Decidamio Chrestil‑Brisch is showing a great deal of interest in him. I wonder why.”

  And so do I, Chauvelin thought. He said aloud, “There are a number of reasons that Damian Chrestil might be interested in Ransome, not least that Ransome’s an imagist of some note in the city.”

  “That may be,” ji‑Imbaoa said, “but what I have seen is that Damian Chrestil–or that woman, his whore–wants very much to lure your agent back into the Game. Why would that be?”

  “I don’t know,” Chauvelin said.

  “Such pressure against an agent of yours, I’d think you’d want to know what’s going on. They leave lures on all the nets, hints and pressures. It’s not like Damian Chrestil to care about the Game–”

  “Cella, his mistress”–Chauvelin laid the lightest of stresses on the word–“is a well‑known Gamer, however, and Ransome was a notable for a long time.”

  Ji‑Imbaoa flicked his fingers again. “I think it’s worth investigation.”

  Chauvelin sighed. “So do I.”

  “And I also think,” ji‑Imbaoa went on, as if the other hadn’t spoken, “that it would be worth doing what Damian Chrestil wants, if only to find out what’s going on.”

  “If it seems a reasonable risk,” Chauvelin said softly. “I don’t send my people into difficult situations unprepared.”

  “Of course, if he can tell you what they want,” ji‑Imbaoa said, equally softly, “it wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “As you say.” Chauvelin got a grip on his temper with an effort, knowing his anger was sharpened by fear. “Will that be all? I have business this morning–”

  Ji‑Imbaoa cut him off with a gesture. “There is one other matter. This Ransome: you say he’s not houtabut min‑hao?”

  “Yes.” Chauvelin gave no other explanation, uncertain where this would lead.

  “Then there is a matter of charges lodged against him on Jericho, which are actionable if he is min‑hao.”

  “At the time, he was houta, and served sentence on appropriate charges,” Chauvelin said. Not now, he thought, not now, of all times, to bring that up. Christ, it was fifteen years ago, and he spent time in jail; that ought to be over and done with. But it had been a matter of an’ahoba, a game that Ransome played with regrettable skill and no status to match it– and I should have known this would come up at the worst possible time. I can deal with it.

  “The larger matters still stand, in court record.” Ji‑Imbaoa made a small gesture, almost of satisfaction. “But I trust you will handle these matters appropriately.”

  “Of course,” Chauvelin said, in his most colorless voice. Twice in one day–that’s twice someone’s threatened me, and it’s not yet midmorning. Not one of my better days.

  “I am sure,” ji‑Imbaoa said, and gestured polite dismissal. Chauvelin bowed his thanks, and let himself out into the hallway.

  He made his way back to the breakfast room through corridors that were slowly filling with people, responding mechanically to the respectful greetings of his household. Three things, he thought, three things I have to do. Find the weaknesses in ji‑Imbaoa’s household so that I can counter his threats, find out who leaked this report of mine, and then find out why Damian Chrestil wants Ransome back in the Game. And why it should worry ji‑Imbaoa so much. Which means I will have to talk to Ransome: it doesn’t do to have him keeping secrets from me. He paused in the door of the breakfast room, mentally reordering his list, then went in to give orders to the waiting steward.

  Day 30

  High Spring: Canal #291, Fisher’s

  Isle District, Burning Bright

  Damian Chrestil woke to sunlight and the steady sway of the john‑boat against the forward mooring. The stern tie had parted in the night. He was certain of it even before he stopped blinking, and moved his head out of the thin bar of sunlight that shone in through the gap between the snuggery’s canvas top and the side of the boat. He was angry even before he remembered what lay next to him in the bunk. It was his fault, the stranger’s–he had been the one to place the stern tie–and he propped himself up on one elbow to study the situation, and the body beside his. He couldn’t remember the stranger’s name, nor very clearly why he had picked him up the night before; whatever had been interesting or endearing had vanished with his clothes. Slumming, certainly–and the stranger turned over onto his side, dragging the thin sheet with him. That was quite enough, especially now that the inevitable headache was starting behind his eyes. Damian kicked away the rest of the sheet and reached for his discarded clothes, wriggling awkwardly into briefs and shirt and trousers. The stranger– whoever he is–was lying on top of the storage compartments. There was nothing useful in them, not in a borrowed boat, but Damian added the extra inconvenience to his account anyway, and crawled out of the snuggery to deal with the stern tie.

  Luckily, he had had the sense to pick a quiet lay‑by. The john‑boat was swinging only sluggishly, the soggy impact of the hull against the piling barely audible over the gentle slap of the water, not even enough to bruise the paint. He made his way aft along the sun‑warming decking, and as the boat swung in against the pilings, caught the dangling ring and made the tie fast. He stood there for a moment, balancing automatically against the deck’s gentle heave, and blinked up at the sky and the white‑hot light. The john‑boat lay at the bottom of a blue‑toned canyon. Shadowed factory buildings rose six stories high along either bank of the canal, their unlit windows showing only blank glass. This was not a deliveryway; there were no lesser docks or vertical line of gaping doors beneath an overhanging cranehead. It was just a traf
fic alley, not much used–it might even once have been a natural stream, by the gentle curve of its banks. The rising sun was pouring down from the near end of the channel, a wedge of almost solid light that turned the murky water to liquid agate. No one was moving on the narrow walkways that ran alongside the factories; no one else was tied up to the mossy pilings, or tucked under the cool shadow of the piers. He made a face–the heavy sun was doing nothing for his headache–and went forward again, shielding his eyes from the shards of light that glinted off the water.

  The stranger was still asleep in the snuggery, face now turned to the empty pillow beside him. Damian Chrestil squatted in the entrance to the cavelike space, staring into air turned honey‑gold by the worn cover, and felt a detached malevolence steal over him. Why should hesleep, when Damian himself was awake, and feeling unpleasing? There was nothing in the round face and showily muscled body that aroused the least compassion; his thin mustache was intolerable. I must give up slumming, he thought, and leaned sideways to release the lock that held the cover’s frame erect. He caught the nearest hoop as the wind took it, guiding it down onto the deck. The frame folded neatly, as it was supposed to, with only a soft creak from the well‑oiled mechanism, and the cover collapsed into a rumpled U‑shape at his feet. The stranger slept on.

  Damian stood for a moment longer, glaring down at him, automatically tugging his own thick hair into a neat queue. He remembered perfectly well howhe’d acquired the stranger–he was a bungee‑gar, and C/B Cie., the holding group that managed the Chrestil‑Brisch import/export interests, had successfully received a shipment of red‑carpet, the fungus that fed the family distilleries. Red‑carpet was expensive enough on its own, especially on a world that had few native sources of alcohol, valuable enough to justify employing bungee‑gars, but it had also served to cover the two capsules of lachesi that had traveled with the declared cargo. Oblivion was made from lachesi, and Oblivion was legal inside the Republic, but the Republican export taxes on drugs were deliberately high. Evading those duties not only increased his own profits, but allowed him to do favors for two important parties, one in the Republic, the other in HsaioiAn. And that was how Burning Bright had survived free of control by either of the metagovernments: the web of favors given and received that made it entirely too dangerous for strangers to interfere in Burning Bright’s internal politics. It was never too early to start collecting favors, either, not when he intended to be governor in five years.

  The stranger shifted uneasily against the mattress, drawing Damian out of the pleasant daydream. His head was really throbbing now– Oblivion and bai‑red rum, not a wise combination–and he wondered again why he’d invited the stranger aboard. He was decent‑enough looking–a dark man, young, canalli dark, with coarse waves in his too‑long hair, heavy muscles under the skin, and buttocks Damian could vaguely remember describing as “cute”–but not cute enough, not with that silly mustache shadowing his full mouth. He hadn’t been that good a fuck, either: if the previous night’s performance had represented his sexual peak, his future partners were in for some serious disappointment. Damian slipped his foot under the sheet, flipped it nearly away. The stranger rolled over, groping blindly for it, mumbling something that sounded regrettably like darling, and fetched up with his shoulder resting on the edge of the boat. Damian Chrestil smiled slowly, and stepped onto the bunk beside him, his feet sinking only a little way into the hard foam of the mattress. He dug his foot under the stranger’s rib cage, saw him start to roll away automatically. The stranger’s eyes opened then, a sleepy and entirely too cocksure smile changing to alarm as Damian tipped him neatly out of the boat. Instinct kept him from yelling until he surfaced again.

  “What the hell–?”

  “Rise and shine.” Damian smiled, some of his temper restored, and turned his attention to the mess in the snuggery.

  The stranger trod water easily, shaking his hair out of his eyes, but knew better than to try to climb back aboard. “What’d I do?” he asked plaintively, and pushed himself a few strokes farther down the channel, out of reach of the cargo‑hooks racked along the gunwales.

  Damian paused, the stranger’s clothes in one hand. He had them all now, except for one crumpled shoe, and he found that almost in the instant he realized it was missing, tucked in between the mattress and the bulkhead. He rolled them all together into a compact ball, and tossed it, not into the canal as he’d intended, but up onto the walkway between the pilings. It was not, after all, entirely the stranger’s fault.

  “I have work to do,” Damian said.

  For an instant it looked as though the stranger might protest, but Damian scowled, and the other lifted both hands in dripping apology, the water drawing him down for an instant.

  “Fine.” The stranger stopped treading water, lay back, and let the current take him, exerting himself only when he spotted the splintering ladder nailed to one of the piers.

  Damian turned away, his mood lifting, and stepped out onto the narrow bow platform to loosen the tie there. His headache was fading now, in the morning air, was just an occasional pang behind his eyebrows. He could hear splashing as the stranger hauled himself up out of the canal, but did not bother to watch, walked aft instead and loosed the stern tie. He pushed hard against the piling, edging the stern toward the main current, and stepped down into the shallow steering well to hit the start sequence. The engine whined, then strengthened as the solar panels striping the deck woke to sunlight and began feeding power to the system, supplementing the batteries. The john‑boat had already caught the main current, was drifting stern first toward the shadow of the factories. He swung the wheel, felt the rudder bite, tentative at first, then more solid as the propellers came up to speed, and eased open the throttle. The john‑boat slowed even as the stern, the steering well, slipped into the wall of shadow. He felt the sudden chill on his shoulders, was blinded, looking out into the light, and then the propellers hit the speed that counteracted the current. The boat surged back into the sunlight, the water churned to foam in its wake. On the walkway, the stranger was shivering even in the sunlight, stamping his feet to let the worst of the water run off before he pulled on his clothes. Damian Chrestil wondered again, briefly, precisely who he was, and opened the throttle further, letting the pulse of the engine reverberate between the factory walls.

  It was good to be back on the canals again, if only for a few hours, and he gave himself up to the pulse of the steering bar and the kick of the deck beneath his feet. You never really lost the skill, once learned; would always be able to run a john‑boat, but it was good to feel the old ease returning. He grinned, and gave his full attention to the delicate job of bringing the boat out of the alley and into the feeder canal that led down to the Factory Lane and the Inland Water. There wasn’t much traffic yet, none of the swarming mob of gondas that would fill the lane and the service canals in an hour or so, carrying midrank workers to their supervisory jobs. The water buses that carried the ordinary workers to the assembly lines had been and gone, were tied up in the parking pools along the edge of Dry Cut to wait for the evening shift change. He reversed the propellers, cutting speed, and slipped the john‑boat into the buoyed channel, bringing it neatly into line behind a barge piled high with shell scrap.

  A light was blinking amber in the center of the control panel, had been for a few minutes, since before he left the feeder canal. He eyed it irritably, but knew he could not ignore it any longer. “Checkin,” he said, and the screen lit, the compressed in‑house iconage skittering into place in the tiny display. He scanned it quickly, still with half an eye on the traffic in the channel, saw nothing that required his instant attention. He was about to switch off when the string of messages vanished, and a second message replaced them: Jafiera Roscha received third endangerment citation; please instruct.

  Damian Chrestil stared at the message for a long moment, all his attention focused on the tiny characters, and had to swerve sharply to avoid a channel buoy. He knew Roscha
, all right: one of C/B Cie.‘s better john‑boat drivers, competent, aggressive, not one to ask awkward questions when she had a job to do. She was also what the canalli politely called accident‑prone, except that she usually caused the accidents. He shook his head, said to the speaker mounted just below the screen, “Check in, direct patch to the wharfinger. Authorization: Damian Chrestil.”

  There was a moment of silence as the system hunted for an unused uplink, the hissing static barely audible over the engine and the rush of water along the hull, and then the day dispatcher said, “I’m sorry, Na Damian, but Na Rosaurin’s on another line. Can I give her a message, or will you hold?”

  “Give her a message,” Damian said. “Tell her to find Roscha and bring her in. I want to talk to her. And get me a copy of this endangerment complaint.”

  “Absolutely, Na Damian.” The dispatcher’s sharp voice did not change, but Damian could imagine the lifted eyebrows. “I’ll pass those messages to Na Rosaurin, and put out a call for Roscha.”

  “Thanks, Moreo,” Damian said, and added, to the system, “Close down.”

  The system chimed obediently, and a string of icons flickered across the screen, their transit too fast to be read. Damian glared at the now‑empty screen for a moment longer, then made himself concentrate on the increasing traffic as he came up on the buoy that marked the turn onto the Inland Water. He would deal with Roscha later.

  The Water, the massive deep‑water channel that bisected Burning Bright, was as crowded as ever. Enormous cargo barges wallowed along in the main channel, warned away from the faster, lighter john‑boat traffic by lines of bright‑orange buoys. Dozens of tiny, brightly painted gondas flashed in and out of the double channels, day lights glittering from their upturned tails. Damian swore at the first to cross his path, matching his words to the jolting rhythm of the swells, and felt the john‑boat kick as it crossed the gonda’s wake. He lifted his fist at the gonda driver, and got a flip of the hand in return. He swore again, and swung into the lane behind a seiner, its nets drawn up like skirts around the double boom. It wallowed against the heavy chop–Storm was only two days away, and the winds had already shifted, were driving against the current, setting up an unusual swell. The seiner’s holds were obviously full: on its way back from the sequensa dredging grounds off the Water’s Homestead Island entrance, Damian guessed, and throttled back still further to clear its heavy wake. It was likely to be the last cargo they’d see for a few weeks, until Storm was past.