by Janet Morris
I turned from the featureless star-steel doors. About one of the hover’s six couches the men clustered, all but the gray-eyed one, who sat with a leg thrown up on the hatch-side console, arms crossed watching me.
“So you’re what all the fuss is about,” he drawled, insolent.
“And who are you?” I asked him. The muttering from the couch tinged angry. I could have taken two M’ksakkans. “You seem no M’ksakkan.” It came out ill-phrased in Silistran syntax.
“No M’ksakkan I am,” he mimicked me. “As for my planet of origin, you have never heard of it.”
“I doubt that,” I said, thinking that I was going to be sick. I pressed my palms against my stomach. The vibration coming up through my feet increased. The ceiling, lighted squares, flickered, steadied. The gray-eyed one turned and slapped three toggles, punched up a visual display.
“No input! Maref, let’s see your stuff! Manual till they cut in from their side.” A red light was blinking angrily. The hover bucked, shuddered. I sank down upon the springy floor, my stomach distraught. Twisting my head, I saw more red lights glowering. At a console beneath a grid viewer, Liuma’s killer lifted a panel, clucked, held up a reel, bent-flanged, from which a chewed tape edge dangled.
“Splice, my ass,” I heard him mutter. “I knew this would happen. You can’t mix systems.” Another, blond, with two boxes in hand, came to aid him. The brown-haired one hurried toward us, turned a couch to face the console upon which the gray-eyed lounged, set to work there.
“I’ll have lock for you in a minute,” said the man at our console, fingers flying over the input keys, replugging buses, cursing softly. Near the gray-eyed’s shoulder, a reel began to whirl, jerkily. The brown-haired, slight man leaned back in the couch. It wriggled under him. “Got it,” he sighed, a green light igniting to uphold him. All across the console, green replaced red. The brown-haired man laced his hands behind his head. “Shouldn’t you tie her up or something, M’tras?”
The gray-eyed one took his eyes from the display grid across the hover. “Why? She won’t be any trouble. Will you?”
“No,” I said, curling my legs under me, leaning upon one arm. I wished my stomach would cease its rolling.
“Stand up,” M’tras said. I complied shakily. He grinned, let his eyes rove me. He snapped his tongue loudly. I could imagine what it meant. The brown-haired one chuckled, leering, and made some comment in a slang unfamiliar to me.
“Now, Maref, you can’t do that,” he admonished. “At least, not yet. Me first.” He slid off the console’s edge. “Would you like to take a couch—a seat, that is?” I thought of the numerous ways I could have killed him if I had been free of Khys’s band of restraint.
“No, thank you,” I said, feeling the hatch’s star steel cold against my back. I wished I had worn, this day, more than the short length of white and silver silk. Green blinking shot sick shadows over my skin, colored the neutrals of the hover, turned the white silk upon me sky green. Then it ceased.
“What’ll we do with M’kinlin?” asked Liuma’s killer, raising his head from the guts of the console.
“Let him decide, M’as! You can stand it until we dock,” snapped the brown-haired man, in the tone of a superior. The black-haired one who seemed to have my charge had called him Maref, no contraction, which put him either very high or very low by birth in the M’ksakkan hierarchy.
“Where are you taking me?” I directed my question to him.
He held up both hands, palms toward me, as if to ward me off. “Ask M’tras,” he suggested. “I can’t even talk to you. I never saw you. I’m not really here. I’m vacationing on the moons of Dyriyiil. Wish it were true!” He chuckled, leaning back.
I turned once more to M’tras, whose belt had come to many-eyed life. He quieted it with a touch. Then he reached over the console to slip a headrest from its housing. Holding the spidery wires to his ear, he spoke into the distended mouthpiece, his other hand raised to me, that I keep silent. I turned away, my eyes circling around the hover. My fingers ached, those of my right hand. The nails throbbed. I might, I thought, have cracked a carpal, from the way my arm felt. I rubbed it with my left palm. The two blonds, archetypically M’ksakkan in their pale slightness and their skin-fitting black uniforms, had swung the black contour seats toward the display grids. They lay upon them, talking low together. Upon the seat to our right was the dead one. The next seat of the circle lay empty; the one upon its left held the brown-haired Maref; the next, closing the circle, was also empty. None of their uniforms had any familiar insignia; nothing but the belts, whose meaning I could not read. By omission, then, this was not a Bipedal Federation Liaison Unit.
They had killed Liuma.
“You had best get away from the hatch,” said M’tras, pointing firmly to the unoccupied seat before me. I sidled past him and sat upon its edge. It sought to clasp my buttocks. I sought a solid surface. I wiggled, it writhed. I sighed and made my hips still. It quieted. M’tras laughed, seated himself beside me. The lounge quivered, reformed under me as it added his comfort to its task.
“Now, if you’d lain down, you would have been better off,” he commented, resting his elbows upon his knees, regarding me sidelong. He reminded me of Dellin, though he was lighter-muscled. His hair, unruly, harth black, was cut to the nape of his neck. His skin carried a gray-green tinge beneath it darkness.
“This is a large hover,” I observed.
“This,” he corrected me, “is a special hover. Show her.” Maref grunted, but raised a hand to his belt. The grid before him disappeared, to be replaced by the coldest black I had ever seen, in which few stars attempted a desultory sparkle.
“I am going to be sick,” I warned them, doubling over. From somewhere into my swimming vision came a white receptacle. A hand held it against my mouth while I heaved. Very little did my stomach give up, but it was long before it ceased trying. I was no longer upon my planet. I was in a tiny craft adrift in space. I conceived every catastrophe I knew possible in such a situation. My skin slicked with fearful sweat. The bag was gone from my sight, replaced by a lined palm upon which two tiny spheroids rested.
“Take these.” I managed to swallow them, holding the proffered sack of water in both hands, squeezing it up through the nipple.
“That’s enough, or you’ll lose it,” advised M’tras. I handed the water sack back, first squeezing some into my palms, that I might cool my burning cheeks with it.
“You might have said you get star-sick,” he admonished me.
“I did not know,” I said shakily, shifting upon the undulous couch. I must have blanched.
“Look at me,” he snapped. I did so. He had a webbing of tiny lines around his eyes. “Good. Ask me questions or something. Keep your mind busy till the pills work.”
“Who are you?”
“I am”—and his lips curled—“Trasyi Quenni-saleslor Stryl Yri Yrlvahl. Most call me M’tras, in the B.F. worlds. You might say I am an adopted M’ksakkan.”
“And in what function do you serve the Bipedal Federate worlds?” I asked. He had been right: I was not familiar with any world that named its male children in such a fashion.
Nor did I know a speech that rolled off the tongue so musically; I had never heard such a language. I would have remembered. The reels upon the data-graph of the hatch-side console twitched, rolled, stopped. The board chattered. Hot, dry machine breath filled the air. Insulation, carbonized, tickled my nostrils. I hoped this ailing beast in which we rode would make it whither-bound. “What are you?” I asked again, risking a turn upon the blessedly quiescent couch to face him.
“A mechanic.” He shrugged. “When the machine that runs the B.F. malfunctions, I fix it. However I choose.” His eyes flicked up, caught mine. I arched my back, rubbing my arm.
“How did that bring us both here, now? What do you want with me?”
“Now, that is very complicated,” he said, sitting up. He raised one arm over his head, bent at the elbow. The other he
twisted behind his back, grasping hands between his shoulder blades. He flexed, pulling hard. He repeated the actions, exchanging the positions of right and left arms. Such muscular casings are universal among those who use their bodies. He took a deep breath, judging the effect. “You know anything about politics? Most Silistrans, I’ve been told, don’t.”
“What kind of politics?” I said suspiciously.
“Interworld. Silistra and M’ksakka, for example?”
“No,” I said. He made that clicking sound; two click, two notes.
“Then I can’t explain it to you. I’m not going to kill you, I don’t think. I’ll probably make some kind of deal with your people that’ll get you back home.” He frowned, running his thumb over his lower lip. “But you can’t tell, with Silistrans. Yours is not the most rational of races.” And I caught the change in speech pattern, the musical inflection of his last sentence.
“How did you hide your hest?” I asked him, using the Silistran word, for M’ksakkan has none.
“What?” he said, one brow, the left, diving downward.
“How did you implement your plan, without Khys, who sees and controls a great amount of owkahen, the time-coming-to-be, finding out and obstructing you?”
“I don’t know.” He grinned, a flashing of teeth. The commander, Maref, rolled upon his side, facing M’tras’ back.
“Come on, tell her. I’d like to hear it. Craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life—and in broad daylight!”
M’tras shot the other a warning look. His gray eyes were chilled when they returned to me.
“I got a little help. And that”—he turned his head, speaking over his shoulder—“is all I’m willing to say. Do not continue to question me!” Music, once more.
“Khys will surely reduce you to component atoms for this,” I said.
“Your playmate?”
“Couch-mate,” I corrected him.
“That’s why I went after you, not him. All our calculations say that he will deal, with you among the stakes. The probability of me getting in there, killing him, and out with my life, was minus—less than nil.” His eyes were black-ringed, like frozen clouds. I thought I needed nothing less than one more assignation, but his whole bearing screamed that determination.
“Probability.” I laughed coldly. “What know you of such things?”
He laughed also. I marked it strange, as he shifted, slid closer. “I’m a stochastic improviser. My planet is provisionally entered in the Federate, the provisions upon our side being that some aspect of the B,F. prove itself to be more than tonally boring. I’m part of the test group.” He leaned forward, toward me. “I’m doing what might be akin to discharging chaldra, if I understand the concept.”
“Are you telling me you sort?” I asked, my fingers at my throat, at the band beneath the silk.
“I guess,” he said. “Musically, mathematically; I have a talent for asking the right questions of a very specialized computer. I interpret that output. Then I hear it, and I guess. I’m an aural symbolist. But sort? If what Dellin and M’lennin have reported is accurate, we don’t do anything like it.”
“Had Dellin a hand in this?” I demanded.
“No.” He clicked once, sharply. “He didn’t know. He is due for a lengthy rest. Those last reports we got from him had a great deal of misinformation in them. Men don’t last long upon Silistra.” His wandering fingers found my thigh, climbed it. I wondered why he did not simply use me and have done with it.
“What kind of misinformation?” I asked dully.
“That you were amnesiac, helpless, little more than a vegetable, an easy score. That you would be there alone.” The light flickered. I flinched, staring around anxiously. The M’ksakkans lay quiet, undisturbed.
“It’s nothing, just their remote commencing docking procedure,” he assured me.
“It was not nothing the last time,” I said, still with an effort as his arm went around my shoulders. Maref, from the adjacent couch, made derisive noises.
“I brought that reel with me from home. The tolerances, capstan tensions, weren’t close enough. It happened in the trial run. We spliced it and made a copy. But you lose clarity in a copy, so we went with the spliced tape. It held pretty well. You saw the difference, felt it, running on the second-generation mix. You’ll realize it now that the Oniar-M has us remote.” And indeed, I could feel the lessening of vibration. The lights were steadier.
“What is the Oniar-M?” I adjudged him agitated. The pulse beat under his jaw, hasty.
“Our transportation to M’ksakka. That’d be a big trek for this sailless boat.” His finger, thick-nailed, touched Khys’s device. “That’s permanent?” he asked.
“It is the dharen’s mark,” I said, throwing my shoulders back. “Shouldn’t we lie down, strap in?” I had, I noted with satisfaction, properly contracted.
“You didn’t answer me,” M’tras observed, his lips drawing tight, removing his arm.
“The device,” I said, “is permanent.” I met his eyes, which I had been long avoiding.
“Somebody did that to me, I’d kill him,” he said.
“I do not think the dharen would even consider you,” I said archly.
He put his elbows on his knees, regarded the floor between his feet. “You’d think someone in your position would be grateful to be gotten out of it. I thought you would. Logic pointed to it. Instead, you kill one of my people. I play a sus-chord, and you respond with a dissonance.” He chewed upon the inside of his cheek.
“If you want me grateful, remove the band at my throat with your formidable technology,” I suggested.
“And what would your playmate say, if we did that?” he asked innocently.
He knew, then, exactly what he was about. Either he was intending to return me to the dharen, or for his own reasons wanted me tractable. I sighed, letting my fingers play in my chald. His body, relaxed, gave me no clue to his temper. I had no sense of him, talentless degenerate though he doubtless was. All his disarming banter had been just that—and of no consequence. Yet he had taken me, out from under the care of Khys, with Chayin and Sereth close at hand. They had had no inkling. Liuma, in her weeping, had known something. She would never know anything again.
Maref, with a grunt, sat up in answer to the blinking console’s summons. He put his ear, then his mouth, to the headset. Then he ripped it off his head, eyes slitted, and brought it to M’tras, playing the cord out behind him. “For you.” He grimaced.
Rising, M’tras received it. The two blonds sat up, diving for their own receivers.
“Let him,” M’tras said into the mouthpiece, chin tucked in, his body an S-curve of defiance. His fingers drummed upon his belt, sharp taps in the silence. I stood. M’tras motioned Maref toward me. He came, fingers to his lips.
“Lick it, for all I care. We can’t afford to further implicate ourselves.” Pause. “No. Let me talk to him.” He clicked an intricate pattern, three times. I decided, watching him, that when Khys destroyed him, I would like to be present.
“Look, man, this is no time for nerves.” He snarled into the headset, his eyes closed. “I don’t care what he said. Don’t worry. He couldn’t.” Pausing, he tapped his belt in a definite sequence. The hatch-side console came alight. A geometric graph showed there in green. Across it grew two root systems, one red, one white. Where they intersected, numbers flashed, changing as fast as heartbeats. “Some kind of illusion. People don’t just appear out of thin air. All right, sparkling air. No, no such thing. Wait ...”
He lifted the phone away from his ear. The two blond M’ksakkans were crouched at the foot of the far console, sputtering with suppressed laughter.
“Look,” M’tras continued. “I will, if you do not calm down, disconnect.” A short pause. “I’ll push the papers through, if that is what you want. But if you’re right, you’ll be safer there.” His tone had lost its sureness. His gaze, rapt upon the ever-changing numbers, grew shadowed. His frame straightened up. The
M’ksakkans were no longer amused.
“The situation has altered markedly,” he said. “I’ll send someone for you. No, nothing urgent. Just that since you know, now, you’re useless. We might as well save what we can. Two hours, at the port.” Smile. “How long is that in real time? It’s close. Try.” He took off the headset, extended it to the empty air, his attention on the graph, whose white lines had taken on a tinge of blue.
Maref took it from him, waving his hand before the larger man’s abstracted face. “We don’t read minds, M’tras.”
Clicking, M’tras lowered his head, quieted the console from his belt. “Call Oniar-M. Have them pick up Dellin at Port Astrin.”
“I could go back and ...” Maref offered, broke off, shrugged, and hastened to the board. M’tras, who had turned his back to him, glared at me, crossing the distance between us in three strides. He grasped my arm urgently, turned me toward the seat I had so gladly vacated. Meekly I let him push me toward the half-sentient black couch.
“What occurred?” I asked, coming to terms with the soft, ever-moving plush of the seat. His left leg pressed mine. Again he balanced his elbows upon his spread knees.
“I’m not about to tell you,” he said angrily, his head in his hands.
“Let me tell you,” I said, joy making me careless, smug.
“Don’t! Don’t make me covet what information you have. You wouldn’t enjoy our methods of extraction.” His reproof was sharp.