Tangled Up in Blue

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Why didn’t you tell the Police about me?” she asked softly.

  He shook his head. “I didn’t even know your name.”

  “But you found me.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, then finally looked away. “The Special Investigator, Jashari—”

  Her breath caught.

  “You know him?”

  “Yes,” she said faintly. Her hands twisted in her lap. “He questioned you?”

  Tree nodded, taking a breath that made his chest hurt. “That bastard questioned me every day, every fucking day! He made me look at pictures of body parts, lying in pools of blood—” his voice began to tremble, “and he said—he said those were my friends. What was … left of them.” He clenched his teeth, and tasted his own blood.

  “Oh, gods.” Her words were like a whispered prayer in the silence.

  “Jashari—” the name forced its way past his lips as if he were possessed, spitting out demons, “he said that I had no right to be alive, when the rest were dead. He told me their deaths would be on my head, if I didn’t tell him everything I knew … when he knew I couldn’t tell him anything! He made me want to rip out all the tubes and wires and just stop breathing—”

  He shut his eyes, as pain and remembered pain closed their hands around his throat. “Dancing with you … that was the only thing I had left that didn’t make me wish I was dead. I wouldn’t have given him that, even if … even if…” He pushed to his feet. “Forget it. I’m sorry. I have to go.” He started unsteadily for the door.

  “Go where?” she asked.

  He stopped, speechless.

  She rose and came to his side, drawing him gently around. He followed her, unresisting, back to the couch. “Thank you,” she whispered, “for protecting me.” She sat down again, closer this time. “He had no right.”

  He looked at her. “How do you know?”

  She touched his bandage-covered cheek, brought her hand away with fingertips that were wet and glistening.

  He reached up, and discovered that tears were running down his face again, he had no idea for how long. He wiped them on his sleeve. “Somebody … somebody searched my place while I was in the hospital. They tore it apart, and I don’t even know why. What the hell did they want from us?”

  “Us?”

  “Me and Staun. We had a place together.”

  “He was your friend?”

  Tree nodded; shook his head. “He was my brother.”

  Her face pinched. “And he was with you, that night…?”

  He nodded again, looking at his hands.

  “What can I do?” she murmured at last. “Is there anything I can do, to help you…?”

  “You speak Klostan, don’t you?” It was the language he and Staun had grown up speaking, on Newhaven.

  “A little.”

  “Do you ever … can the sensenet … image a man?”

  She looked startled. “That’s not a request I’ve had before. Why?”

  Tree pulled Staun’s ID from his pocket, stared at the holographic image of his brother’s face before he held out the card. “This is my brother.”

  She averted her face as if he had set off a flare. “No,” she whispered. “Oh, no—” Fumbling blindly, she closed his fingers over the image and pushed his hands away. “I can’t. Please, don’t ask me that. I can’t—”

  He put the ID away, blinking too much.

  She looked back at him again, finally. “Would you … like another drink?”

  He shook his head.

  She glanced down at herself. “This isn’t … it’s not what you want, either, is it?”

  He stared at her, the beauty of her face, her perfect body. He shook his head again and looked away.

  “What, then…?” she asked softly, touching his shoulder.

  He shut his eyes, thinking that there was no answer he could possibly imagine making to that question. But there was. “I want you to be real with me … I want to see who you really are.”

  Her touch disappeared. “No,” she said, folding her fingers into a knot. “No … I don’t do that.”

  “Why?” he asked, sitting up, leaning forward. “Why not?”

  She moved her head from side to side. “That’s not playing by the rules.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it over a noise of pain as the gutworm of loss twisted inside him. Finally he said, “I don’t want a drink. And I don’t want sex. I want … I need … somebody I can just … talk to. Please.”

  As he looked into her eyes, he realized suddenly that she was afraid of him—of what he wanted—in a way that she hadn’t been afraid of his anger, or his physical strength. “You’re never just … yourself … with anybody?” He read the answer in her silent stare. “Never…?” he whispered. “Don’t you have any friends?”

  Her expression was a void, but her eyes were suddenly too full.

  Hating his weakness, afraid of her pity, he blurted, “Don’t you ever need to just … be real … with someone?”

  Her hands rose to her mouth. She sat motionless, staring at him.

  He looked on, bewildered, as the color of her brimming eyes began to change.

  And then her skin began to change, and her hair, and the shape of her face … until she sat before him as nakedly vulnerable, as real, as he was.

  “You’re Tiamatan…” he murmured, not sure why that surprised him. He reached out tentatively to touch her arm. The gray sleeveless tunic and pants she had been wearing were still the same, like the blood-red jewel at her throat. But her eyes were gray-blue, sea-colored. Her hair—still long, falling in waves—was the color of sand, with a hint of copper. Her skin, paler now than his, bore a tracery of synthetic filaments so fine that they were almost invisible, except where they caught the light, shimmering like an aura.

  Aside from that, her face reminded him of faces he passed every day in Carbuncle without really seeing them; her features were no longer so perfect that they took his breath away. He realized that he was actually relieved.

  “Is that … all right?” she murmured. Her hands moved restlessly, as if she were weightless, and unsure of what to do with her body. “Am I…”

  He nodded, still looking deeply into her eyes; left without words by the unexpected gift of her trust.

  She relaxed visibly as he went on gazing at her, smiling at her; until he felt as if he was in the presence of a different mind and soul, as well. The inscrutable mistress of a game he would never know how to play had vanished. The relief that filled her face made the fact that it was a Tiamatan’s, and not Newhavenese, meaningless. Relief eased his own expression, eased his entire body, until he felt as if he had come to be sitting next to someone he had known forever.

  “Tell me about you, and your brother,” she said, resting her arm on the back of the couch, beginning to smile again at last. “Tell me about your life, when you were boys back on Newhaven.”

  He pulled Staun’s ID from his pocket again, and sat looking at the picture. “He was my half-brother. Our mother died when I was twelve. Staun took care of me after that; he was just fifteen. He used to say, it was ‘us against the world’.” Tree laughed softly, biting his lip.

  “What about your father?”

  “Ma never talked about him.” He shook his head. “Once I overheard her say he was a bastard.… I don’t know what he did, to make her hate him that much. Staun said his old man abandoned them, just got on a ship and never came back. Ma had lousy luck with men—‘except for us’, she used to say. She had lousy luck, period.…”

  “How did your mother die?” she murmured.

  “Freak accident. She worked at the starport. One day a … a…” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. She died.” He gazed up at the ceiling, finding a white and empty vision of eternity.

  Her hand extended further, just far enough to close over his unbandaged one. His fingers twined with hers, tightened; he looked at their joined hands, and away again. “Staun had to work two, three jobs somet
imes, just so we could eat … and still try to keep me out of trouble, besides. Gods, I had a real mad-on at the universe, back then. We lived in Miertoles Porttown; they called it the Hellhole, and I raised a lot of hell—” He grimaced.

  “Then how did you ever end up in the Hegemonic Police?” She looked incredulous.

  Tree’s mouth twitched. “When I was fifteen, the Police arrested me. For vandalism, at the starport. Staun thought he’d lost me for good that time. But when he came down to the lockup and begged them to spare my miserable ass—not to press charges, not to let Social Reform take me away from him—somebody actually listened to what he said.” He shook his head. “Some Blue officer I never saw again took great pains to scare the hell out of me about what they’d do if they ever caught me again … and then he let me go. He said … he said it was because my brother needed me so much.…”

  Tree made a sound that wasn’t really a laugh. “‘He needs you,’ he said. ‘Don’t let him down.’ I couldn’t imagine why he’d even say something like that. Like I didn’t need Staun ten times as much—” He broke off. “But somehow after that, everything I did began to feel different to me. Not like I became a candidate for sainthood or anything, but.…”

  “But you became a Blue.”

  “Staun did.” Tree shrugged. “He was smarter than anyone I knew. He could have done anything, if someone had given him a chance. Or if I hadn’t always been.…” He looked down. “Anyway, the Blues were the only ones who ever did give us a break, and believe me, that was the last place either of us expected it to come from. That was what made him decide to join up. By the time I was old enough to join the force, all I really wanted was to be like Staun.…”

  Memory’s half smile faded as he traced the Hegemonic seal on his belt buckle, realizing that he had never really understood how much he had wanted it—any of it—until now, when it was too late. “Now he’s gone. And my badge is gone. My whole goddamn life, gone with the Boatman. Only, I’m still breathing.…” He stared at the layers of synthetic skingraft and bandage that hid the half-healed burn on his hand. They had told him there wouldn’t be many scars—

  He made a fist, brought it down on the arm of the sofa. “I don’t want it to stop hurting!” he said fiercely, as her hands rose in protest. “The less my body hurts, the more losing him hurts! I mean, I don’t even hurt for him; he doesn’t feel anything, anymore.” He stared at his bandaged fist. “But I feel like … like he was ripped out of me whole,” his voice faded to a whisper, “and that he was the only part of me that was real.” His throbbing hand loosened, as he covered his eyes. “Everything I see, everyone I know, reminds me … I don’t know what to do, without him. What the fuck am I going to do? Goddamn it! It’s not fair—!”

  He looked up again, into the blurring watercolor of her gaze. “That’s all I can think about. Is that selfish? Am I a selfish bastard?”

  “No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I think … I think that’s grief. The sorrow you feel because you’re left behind. The sorrow you feel because you’re all alone. Life is all about loss…” she glanced away suddenly, “loss … and pain. Pain tells us to do something, when sometimes it’s all we can do, just to remember we’re alive—”

  He held his breath. She looked back at him, and he saw in her eyes that she knew.

  “Sometimes it’s all you can do,” she said softly. “But that’s all right.”

  He nodded, taking a deep breath as the pain inside him finally began to ease.

  “Do you … have family here?” he asked then, wondering what her words had just told him about her own life. He knew almost nothing about Tiamatans, beyond how to speak their language. He had been force-fed an indoctrination tape when he arrived, like all the other Blues assigned to Carbuncle; it had left him with no interest whatsoever in learning more about the natives’ traditions, customs, or behavior—except when their behavior kept him from doing his job.

  He waited for her to tell him that her personal life was none of his business. But she nodded, surprising him again. “They live in the outback, on a plantation. We don’t have much in common anymore. Maybe we never did.…” She glanced down. “I don’t see them a lot. I suppose we take each other for granted.”

  “Maybe we all do.” He sighed. “Does it bother them, what you do for a living?”

  “They don’t care.…” She hesitated. “As long as I’m happy.”

  He realized that she wasn’t meeting his gaze. “No. That’s too easy. I don’t buy it.” He shook his head.

  She did look at him then, and raised her eyebrows. “What do you think about what I do?”

  “Me?” he said, blinking. He shrugged. “I don’t have any problem with it, if that’s what you mean.”

  She gave him a skeptical look.

  “As long as it’s really your choice,” he said. “As long as you really have a choice.…” He saw the question lingering in her eyes. “I’ve been a Blue for a while; it kind of changes your perspective on some things.”

  “So does Carbuncle.” Slowly her smile came out of hiding. “Because everything happens here. I love this city! I like meeting people from other worlds, hearing about their lives. I like having a beautiful home, and the money to buy anything I want. And I like sex; I like having it often, with new people, and in new ways. We’re a lot more comfortable here with what human beings naturally need than you offworlders seem to be. Sex is like air: it’s only important when you aren’t getting any.”

  His mouth quirked; he felt his face redden unexpectedly. “How long have you had the sensenet?”

  “For about five years.” She ran her hand along her arm. “I also like being inside someone else’s skin … trying on how it feels to be somebody new.”

  “What are you going to do after the Departure? You’ll have to give it—all of this—up.”

  “Oh, maybe by then, I’ll miss the outback.…” She glanced away as if she was considering the room around them; he realized that she was just avoiding his eyes again. “Or maybe I’ll marry and go offworld with someone. I’ve had a few proposals. What about you?”

  He felt all the expression drain from his face. He forced himself to acknowledge her question, and answer it. “If they let me back on the force, I guess I’ll be here till the Departure. Then, I’ll be sent somewhere else. If they don’t … If they don’t, I don’t know.” He shook his head; his hands tightened into fists. “Either way, I have to get the bastards who killed Staun. If I can’t do that, if I can’t even pay the Boatman’s Due, then it doesn’t matter what happens to me because my being alive is meaningless.” He stared at the ceiling again. “Goddamn it, I just want to remember—!”

  His hands unclenched. “Oh, gods…” he whispered, looking down at the floor, “I just want to forget.…”

  “I can help you,” she murmured, caressing his face, “for a little while, at least. If you let me.”

  He raised his hand, covering hers; his newly healed skin tingled with real or imagined sensation as he traced the delicate web of the sensenet. Her fingers gently brushed his lips. He kissed her fingertips, sliding his arm behind her, drawing her closer. “Tell me who you are—?”

  She closed her eyes. “Devony,” she murmured, her hands tightening over the cloth of his shirt as she pressed up against him, “Devony Seaward…” Her hands slid down his body, beginning to loosen his clothes.

  Sudden, breathtaking arousal relieved him of all pain. He put his arms around her and began to kiss her. She drew him back and down, and her body was like a warm sea.…

  10

  Gundhalinu started awake from a doze. He glanced at his watch, yawning, and up at the sign that marked the entrance to Azure Alley. Looking down again, he realized that the well-dressed citizens passing on the Street were beginning to stare at him, even though he was in uniform. He pushed away from the building wall, shaking his head; admitting to himself that his body had finally won its unrelenting war with his brain. He had to rest.…

&nbs
p; Earlier today he had followed LaisTree to the Closed Doors club, and then to the Upper City. LaisTree had entered Number 23 Azure Alley exactly forty-seven minutes ago. Gundhalinu had checked the time every few minutes since then, with growing impatience.

  He knew that the tracer they had planted in LaisTree’s bandages at the hospital was working; he could follow LaisTree’s movements no matter where in the city either of them were. He didn’t have to stand in the Street for hours on end. His remote would notify him when LaisTree’s location changed.

  He sighed and started back downhill into the Maze, almost turning in at Blue Alley … except that he had no real reason to go to the station house, or any duties to attend to there. He almost stopped by Jerusha PalaThion’s apartment, which he did daily to fetch her things she needed from the market … except that she would want to talk about how the investigation was going, and he couldn’t talk to her about that, because until he got some sleep he didn’t trust himself not to say too much.…

  If he could only get some sleep. He arrived at the alley and finally the building where he lived. Resigned to facing his room, his own bed, he opened the front door and went inside. Making his way along the hall as quietly as possible to avoid his oversolicitous Tiamatan landlady, he let himself into his flat.

  He crossed the ordered space of his bed/sitting room, listlessly shedding his helmet and jacket as he went, and collapsed onto the daybed. His limbs twitched and quivered as he tried to settle into the quiet rhythms of adhani breathing. At last he felt his exhausted body growing dim and heavy; his fatigue-deadened mind began to let go of consciousness one reluctant finger at a time, slipping over the brink into the peaceful depths of sleep.…