by Janet Morris
“There will be an inquiry, of course.”
“My guildmaster has already confiscated the log,” said the pilot without a hint of guile.
“Then there will be two inquiries.”
The pilot sat a little straighter. “Might I remind you, sir, that I took your service formally, and an oath to that effect, that I almost lost my life in your service, in pursuit of that oath. I could be as dead as your secretary.”
“If the sabotage had been less selective?” Teasingly.
“You think I did this? Why?”
“I do not think anything yet, young man. As a matter of fact, you may have done me a greater service than you know. Still, until all is examined, until you are formally cleared of complicity, I am going to have you confined to your guildhall. You understand.”
The pilot did not look away, or look surprised, or do anything at all which Parma felt he should, but said: “Then I am relieved of your service?”
“No. As a matter of fact, we will make the scheduled rendezvous in Shechem, as soon as the Bucephalus and yourself are pronounced spaceworthy.” That got the pilot’s attention. He sat up straight, objecting that it would be more than forty-eight hours before the Bucephalus could be checked out sufficiently to suit him.
“So anxious to be relieved of your command? I have heard that there is a saying among you, that the only cure for space-fright is space-flight.”
The pilot did not sputter, or even speak, just met Parma’s gaze, waiting.
“Ah, young man, I cannot seem to rattle you. Do you not think that is odd?”
Spry shrugged.
“Since you are not going to ask the right questions, I suppose I will have to do all the work myself. Had you come less highly recommended, I must admit, I would not be so polite. But you are, after all, a close friend of Marada’s.” The pilot gave an almost imperceptible blink. “So,” continued Parma, letting his voice take an edge, “I am not going to revoke your citizenship and fine your guild out of hand. What in the name of Chance were you doing with my daughter on level seven?”
“Shebat? I took her there because . . . this is going to sound funny. . . .”
“I promise, I will not laugh.”
“—Sir, I am not sure that I understand what is going on here. And if what I am about to detail to you occurred by your orders, then you cannot blame me for misconstruing their intent.” Spry looked at Parma challengingly. With a faint smile, the consul general motioned him to speak his piece. This was more amusing than he had dared hope. And bemusing. What was the boy trying to do?
“First of all, after taking her guild oath, Shebat seemed to drop out of sight. I left messages for her that she did not answer. I contacted your office, which informed me that her whereabouts could only be ‘probably determined.’ Would you not have thought that odd, were you I?”
Parma agreed that he would have thought that most odd.
“Then I determined that her bodyguard had been reassigned.” The pilot peered in what was a most obviously assessive manner at Parma. “Sir, if you yourself gave that order, then all I did after guessing that you had not will make no sense. I am no creature of platform politics. . . .”
Parma allowed that he had given no such order, asking the pilot just what that piece of information had led him to construe.
“That something was going to befall Shebat: an accident, most likely. I took it on myself to find her and warn her, believing that I could get no message through to you that would not alert whoever had pulled the bodyguard.”
“You took it on yourself to do this?” Parma snarled suddenly.
“Sir, if the subterfuge were far-reaching, as it seems now to be, considering the sabotage of the Bucephalus, I did not have time to make an appointment.”
“Do you know what you have done?”
“Sir?”
“The Marada is gone: logged out with no destination, into spongespace. Shebat, also, is gone. What would that lead you to conjecture. Oh amateur sleuth?”
“What?” interrupted him. Then: “Did you send a pursuit ship?”
“No. I did not want to chase her. But now I know what scared her enough to make her run. You idiot! I . . .” Then, controlled once more, he added: “Of course, we are assuming that it was Shebat in that ship. . . .”
“So, this is about Shebat, not your secretary. She and I parted company on level seven, if that is what you want to know.” He jerked his head toward the window, beyond which officials still scurried. “That explains your bodyguard’s less than polite attitude. Are you accusing me of something? Am I under arrest for causing Jebediah’s death? Or for saving your life? Or in point of fact, for trying to help the girl? Was it your game I fouled, rather than some nebulous saboteur’s?”
“I will ignore that last. Two of my men are dead on a seventh level street corner. My private secretary has been murdered, under your aegis if not more than that. My heir is missing. My ship is incapacitated. Her ship has disappeared, though everyone who saw you and Shebat leave the Marada’s slip swears they did not see her, or anyone, go back aboard. Exactly,” Parma glanced at his desk-top display, “ten minutes ago, a large explosion, either ship’s fire or ship’s destruction, occurred along the flight path the Marada was traveling. We had a double reading, very briefly, lasting three seconds. Then we had no reading whatsoever. Empty space, the bulk of the planet, nothing more.”
“And you do not think she just dark-sided?”
“What?”
“Took the ship around behind the planet, where she could not be tracked?”
“I am not sure,” Parma thundered, “that she was in the ship.”
“What else?” queried Spry.
“Indeed, or rather: where else?” He let the question hang between them, excavating in the pilot’s face for signs of duplicity. Behind the cover of flaking mil, it was impossible to tell what the man might be thinking.
Parma sighed, “All right, then, Spry. Perhaps, coming on Marada’s recommendation, you are replacing him as the millstone about my neck. At the very least, you have stretched your guild immunity to the breaking point. At the most, you are a walking dead man, lawful punishment being too gentle to suit me should I discover you are lying, that any of this was your doing. Do you hear me? I will strangle you with my bare hands! Now, to avoid that rather strenuous exercise, I suggest you tell me everything: where you took Shebat; what was said between you; how you came to leave her unescorted when you knew she had no protection.”
“Leave her . . . you just told me I had overstepped my oath. She’s a Kerrion; I am employed by Kerrions. She dismissed me. I had other things on my mind, like the Bucephalus, I had done my guild-duty by warning her.”
“And I suppose she said nothing to you about being forbidden the lower levels.”
“As a matter of fact, she did; she was worried you would take the Marada away from her. But we were already down there. . . .”
The desk was bleating like a sheep. Parma punched a button; the guildmaster’s demands for entry reached him; he fingered the button briefly. “Then, you did take her downunder and leave her there.”
“Yes, I did that. I do not see what was wrong. . . .”
Parma ignored him, speaking into his desk’s blinking recess. “Guildmaster? Take this pilot of yours and run your inquiry. I, also, will run mine. When we are both feeling less emotional, we will decide what to do with him. When that moment comes, I want him fat, happy and well-basted. If he disappears, I’ll have your carcass instead.” Parma broke the connection, leaned back in his chair, and said to Spry: “Go rest secure in the arms of your guildfellows.”
Then, when Spry only stared incredulously at him: “Move!”
When the pilot was gone and he was alone but for the chiming, beeping, buzzing solicitations of his console, Parma Kerrion put hands behind his head and let out a long sigh. There was no use in any of this, really: if Shebat Kerrion had flown away or been blown away, or not, he would still have to proclaim t
hat such was the truth of it. It was too near elections to take the risk of having the girl used against him. Chance, or good luck, had given him the perfect out.
And also, the only help he could give the girl was to express emphatically his disinterest in her.
He leaned over his desk and rubbed his eyes, trying to rub away the feeling that there was something here he had missed.
Then he called his secretary and dictated three orders.
He called Chaeron to Draconis from Lorelie, effective immediately.
He instructed the investigators of these murky events in the outcome he wished made official: Shebat Kerrion was logged missing in space, presumed dead; the three-year waiting period was unilaterally waived; a successor was designated in her stead.
The third missive informed Marada Seleucus Kerrion of all that had taken place.
Parma sat back once more. Then, as an afterthought, he called off the search he had earlier ordered. If Shebat were down there, she would either come up on her own, or not. In such teetering command of his pinnacle, he could hardly afford to bend over in an attempt to haul another up.
Almost, then, he wept, feeling suddenly thwarted and ancient and bowed by his labors.
Why was the pilot so calm?
Softa slept an uneasy dream in which Parma reversed all things: sent him after Jebediah, at which point he broke cover, brought the Bucephalus up beside the Marada, tandem-guided them both through the sponge. Only when he reemerged into spacetime, it was not his confederates who awaited him, but Marada Kerrion, hovering between the platform and the stars with a glittering knife and fork in his hands and a napkin around his neck. As he was being devoured, Softa made no struggle, could not even cry out. He had left the little girl helpless and stranded, had he not? Then he would wake, shivering, to a hand or a word spoken by a concerned vigilant who had seen him toss or heard him cry out. Then he would go back to sleep. And it would start all over again.
Chapter Six
Shebat would never forget those first few days in the graffiti-strewn, peeling warren of the dream dancers. Only the first few hours were sharper-honed in her memory, with the initial moments of those seared so deeply that she winced whenever she thought of them, which was as infrequently as possible.
Which was not to say never. Back the memory would come, when her guard was down, when she was drowsing. It even leaked into one of her first, tentative dream dances. Thusly, to her embarrassment, the pall of her regret overflowed into public domain.
There it had been: Softa’s arms sliding around bespangled buttocks, enfolding, pulling her up and against him. Only the “her” was Shebat, not Lauren, the dream dancer who had played that role in reality. And it was to Lauren that the dance had been tendered. Perhaps because it was Lauren, this lamentable indiscretion had occurred.
But it had been done, nothing could change it. Lauren had felt Shebat’s distress, had heard “murderess” ringing in her head; had seen all the clawing hands outreaching toward her from every side; had seen Softa wink as he pulled the Shebat/Lauren close, while the Lauren/Shebat watched in disdain; in astonishment; in anguish. “That is hardly a dream dance,” had said Lauren afterward, pulling the fillet from her brow, although Shebat had thought she had reclaimed control rather well, turning bad to better, at least.
But the girl whose beauty was excruciating, who had said to David Spry with only the hint of an arch smile: “Is she not a little young for you?”, was not thereafter willing to forget what she had seen, though Shebat was a novice in the extreme, and thusly excusable.
Of the twelve in the dream dancers’ company, it was Lauren who made life most difficult for Shebat.
Aside from the shock of so many far-reaching changes, the loneliness, and the slant-eyed beauty’s sly obstructions whenever it came time for Lauren to take a turn as Shebat’s instructor, she was doing well enough. Almost happy, she could say on those occasions when all was going right. Then the dream dance ceased to become an intensely complex labor. Transmuted into a living, breathing entity like a supernal visitation, it fired her soul.
It was all of enchantment, every bit of the numinous chant she had heard pealing glory when Marada had come to Bolen’s town and whisked her off, laughing: “You can be Enchantress of all the Earth.”
There were two powers in the Consortium, two potent magics to sate the metaphysical longing of the most ardent seeker; there were the ships, and there was the dream dance.
She recollected her fright that it might not be so, that the Consortium would prove as dry and lifeless as Marada had proclaimed to her that it was: all is science, he had reaffirmed endlessly.
And she had been saddened, holding tenaciously to her meager spells, looking for their like in Ashera’s dragon-breath or Chaeron’s expediencies, and not finding anything more than human passion.
But she had not known the truth of the matter, one so much accepted by Marada that he had never thought to mention it: science and magic were one. Enchantment equals enlightenment.
Howsoever great the human divisiveness against whose currents she endlessly struggled, that light shone in her distance like a cheery beacon.
With it, she staved off dreams of the lion-maned Chaeron, whose wrath when she had gone to him to beg his backing for her leave-taking had seemed to be a terribly controlled declaration of war.
Where was Softa? she wondered endlessly the first hours, less and less as hours became days. The dream dance consumed her, as she hoped it might, so that she had less time to worry about her status or her fate.
Status was of great moment here in the lower levels, where citizenship was bought in fractions, or forged, or stolen. What had come first as an indication that Spry had neither abandoned nor forgotten her were packets of falsified credentials in the hand of a junior pilot who stared open-mouthed all about him.
They had been “one reading only” hard copy, which crumbled away within minutes after the oils of a human finger touched them: She was Sheba Spry, Softa’s full sister. She was from the Pegasus colonies. Her data pool keys and ship-key were thus-and-so. She was newly apprenticed to her brother. . . .
The bristle-haired junior with his wispy, wishful beard insisted on staying until she had read and recited back to him the information, until the hard copy was a sprinkling of dust on the floor. Then he gave her, solemn-faced, a packet full of program-cards, saying as if by rote that she was to continue her lessons on a full schedule and that no exceptions were to be made in her original timetable.
“That is impossible! I do not think any of this will work. And I certainly cannot learn two trades at once!”
The junior flushed rubescent as an X-ray star map, saying: “I am not anything but a messenger, lady,” and Shebat realized that he thought her a fully fledged dream dancer, which also explained his reluctance to leave.
He dug in the case he was carrying and came up with two identical packages sealed in opaque foil. “He said you were to open these alone. . . . Look, I mean . . . can I get a discount?”
Shebat counted to ten and said she was not the one to ask. Then she ushered the youth firmly to the door, saying: “Did he say anything else? Is he coming soon?” She did not dare ask what she would have liked.
Evidently, the junior dared not answer what he would have liked, so he hemmed instead, at last getting out: “No, I do not know. He has his own troubles.” The last of which he mumbled while backing into the hall. There he collided with Lauren, stumbled, and as he began apologizing she smiled and spirited him off, saying she had a message for him to take back to the guildhall.
Shebat closed her door and leaned upon it, trying to sort out her feelings. She had not felt this way about Softa previously; she had not felt any way about him at all. When Lauren had greeted him so longingly, she had seen him differently, as a man for the first time. But it was not jealousy she felt, she told herself, merely dependency. Softa was the only hope she had of getting off Draconis. Lauren hated her, and would do anything to make he
r suffer.
She remembered the two packets. Sitting on her narrow cot in her narrow gray womb in the crowded warren of the dream dancers, she opened the first one, then the other.
In the first was a large sum of scrip, and instructions as to its dispensing. Even a schedule of payments to be made was included. Feeling better—if he intended to abandon her, he would not have sent so much or designated its dispensation—she opened the second.
And hurriedly attached all her concentration thereto: a second set of credentials lay in her lap, casually thumbed before their meaning came clear. She raced the oxidization of the treated paper. When she had a little pile of dust in her lap, her upper lip was beaded with perspiration. Her mind tried uneasily to deal with two adjacent overlays of data, combinations numerically succedent. It would be difficult to keep them straight. The price of a mistake would be her criminality unmasked. She shivered. She knew why the combinations were so similar: all conversation with computers, be they data pool, private source, even ships’ intelligences, was based on tuning the mind of machine to the mind of man. Within the parameters of specification were a finite number of frequencies to which her own intelligence code could be assigned.
If anyone ever checked to see how close the code-ins for Shebat Kerrion, Sheba Spry, and Aba Cronin were, she would be found out: they were nearly identical.
One thing troubled her more than that: if Softa had gone to all this extended trouble, the stay he foresaw for her here was equally extended. And though she was already half-enthralled by the beauty and the rectitude of the dream dancers’ art, she feared it.
She feared it almost as much as she feared discovery, but for diverse reasons.
It sang more sweetly than any but the Marada’s song.
She understood why it was prohibited by Kerrion law, and why that law was unenforceable, as well as why, in some spaces, that prohibition had been repealed.
Whereas Parma Kerrion’s wrath would come from what she had done in life—murder, theft, illegal impersonation being only the latest—dream dancing exacted its tax from what was not done in life. If Parma killed her outright, would she be less dead than the most-accomplished dream dancer, whiling away years unlived?