The Iron Maiden

by Piers Anthony

  There were intractable problems to handle, and no easy solutions. Every proposed reform led to immediate complications, requiring modifications elsewhere in a chain of effects that all too often completed devious circles and came back to knock down the original reforms. It had been easy to see the flaws of the old system, but it turned out to be difficult to fix them. Taxation was an example: nobody wanted to pay, but everyone wanted to receive governmental benefits such as law enforcement, retirement income, medical care, and bubble maintenance. The intangible strengths and weaknesses of the economy determined much of what was feasible, regardless of the competence of the proprietors. The trick was to work out acceptable compromises. It didn’t seem to matter whether the administration was liberal, conservative, or radical; the compromises had to be hammered out.

  Spirit tackled the problems with a will. This was similar to the administration of a growing battalion in the Navy. This was her element. Hope was the front man, putting his face on the Tyrancy, handling the myriad people involved, but though he had a keen understanding of matters, his heart was not in the dull details. Spirit’s heart was; they were not dull to her.

  Still, there were special problems. There were attempts to assassinate Hope, some of them clever enough to get past Coral and the secret service. Most of them never came to his attention; Spirit handled them and left him innocent. But some could not be hidden, like the laser beam from a floodlight when he made a public address in Nyork. He had been delayed a few seconds by a trifle—a child had begged for the touch of his hand, and he had obliged—so had approached the lectern late. The very precision of the trap’s timing defeated it. He was unharmed, but much aware of the nearness of death. This made him nervous, understandably.

  He mentioned this to Spirit. “I am being channeled into the trap of inadequate feedback from the people. Yet, if I don’t isolate myself, sooner or later an assassin will catch me. What can I do?”

  “I face the same problem myself,” she said. “I am now too public a figure to employ my male disguise. There have been more attempts on our lives than I have bothered you with; we are all hostage to our position.”

  “There has to be an answer,” he said.

  She quirked a smile. “Go to Q.”

  It was perhaps a joke, but he took it seriously. He donned a disguise and went to see Reba Ward. She, like all women with whom he had contact, was smitten with him, if not actually in his orbit. She would help him, but he would have to pay her price, and that meant sex.

  He returned evidently somewhat shaken, and the girls teased him unmercifully. “Did she teach you anything, Tyrant?” Coral inquired.

  “Um.” He evidently preferred to avoid the subject.

  “Are you limping, sir?” Shelia asked.

  He straightened up. “Num.”

  “I hear those older women can have a lot of experience,” Ebony put in.

  “Um.” He actually seemed to be blushing.

  The four women exchanged a meaningful glance. Reba had evidently worked him over well.

  Now it was Spirit’s turn. “Did she answer your question?”

  He spread his hands. “She never spoke!”

  They all laughed. Then Shelia tapped her armrest. “She sent a message, sir: There will be an alternate identity created for you.”

  So he would have not a place but an identity in which to hide. That answer was obvious in retrospect.

  But there was another problem he did not yet know about, and Spirit was not at all sure how it should be handled. It was the girl Amber. Hope, with marvelous insight, interviewed her and fathomed the riddle of her gemstone. It was a mechanism that put her into a spot trance state and changed the language she could fathom. She could understand more languages than most of the others had heard of, but speak only Spanish—when set in that mode. He tuned her to Spanish, and suddenly she was completely communicative. But much of her mystery remained, because she did not fully know her own nature, so could not answer all his questions. In the course of their first full dialogue, the subject of Hopie came up, and Amber naively confided that Hopie blamed herself for Hope’s separation from Megan. He hastened to clarify that this was not the case, but had also to clarify that sleeping in the company of a grown person of the opposite gender had a different meaning than what Amber experienced sharing a room with Hopie and Robertico. He was open about his relationships with other women. Amber was silent, assimilating that.

  Technically, Amber was a member of the class sometimes called idiot savants. Her brain was in effect miswired. The material was there but could not be properly applied to the ordinary concerns of normal folk. Her intelligence, in Spanish, was low-normal; in other languages, she was technically a moron. But she could remember a certain amount of what she heard. That made her extremely useful when Hope was dealing with other planets; he took her along as a nominal servant or clerk, and she picked up on comments that others assumed Hope did not understand.

  Coincidentally, Roulette had a dialogue with Hopie, and educated her on the military and pirate way of love, and told her that the one person Hope truly loved was Hopie’s mother. Spirit of course could not say anything; Hopie and the Solar System believed that Hope was her father, and her mother anonymous. That was only the half of it. But the two girls surely had an intense exchange of thoughts about romance, love, and sex soon thereafter.

  And therein lay the mischief. Amber, as it turned out, was actually fourteen, and though her body was just developing, her emotion was running well ahead. She was already in Hope’s orbit, and now he had educated her on the sexual nature of adult interactions. She was suddenly in love with him, and every contact with him intensified her emotion. This was independent of her talent with languages. Hope himself was oblivious; he thought of Amber as a child, and assumed that the intensity of her attention to his words was because of the difficulty she had mastering new concepts. He did not recognize total adoration. He could be quite stupid when his own emotion was engaged, and it was. Amber in certain key ways resembled Helse, and that blinded him. He thought he liked her as the friend of his daughter, and for her linguistic usefulness to him, and he did, but that was hardly the limit of it. The two were together often, and this further strengthened her devotion to him.

  Spirit discussed it with Shelia. “What will happen when he catches on?”

  Shelia smiled. “We are not jealous of other orbiters.”

  “You and Coral and Ebony may not be. But what of Hopie?”

  Shelia paused. “Suddenly I feel stupid. That aspect never occurred to me. She’ll go nova.”

  “And we can’t have that.”

  “We can’t have that,” Shelia agreed, knowing that when Hopie novaed, so would Spirit, and Hope. There could be a dangerous chain reaction.

  “Can we send one of them away?”

  “And break Robertico’s heart? They are like two little mothers to him.”

  “And Hope is like a father to the three of them. But if he connects with Amber–”

  “And he will connect, in time,” Shelia agreed. “I don’t think we can stop it. She is after all a woman-child. We shall have to facilitate it.”

  “Facilitate it!”

  Shelia nodded soberly. “It is the only way. To guide it so that it happens in a way that Hopie can accept, if that is possible.”

  Spirit didn’t like this, but knew Shelia was right. “You have a way in mind?”

  “Not yet. Give me a day.”

  In a day—Shelia was ever prompt in performance—she had it: “A feelie.”

  “A feelie will hardly substitute for the real thing!” Spirit protested. “Amber loves Hope, not some sexy actor, and Hope likes real women.”

  “I know,” she agreed with half a smile. “But at present Amber does not know what to do with her passion, and Hope does not know she exists as a woman. Let her make a feelie for him: an anonymous female admirer with little experience.”

  “She can have no experience, and be a complete woman with
him in an instant.”

  “Anonymous,” Shelia repeated. “So he takes her for a stranger. He will follow up by feelie, because he’ll have no other way. They can go as far as they want, and by the time it turns real, maybe Hopie will be ready to accept it.”

  Spirit considered. “A series of feelie exchanges. That might even prolong the courtship, as it were, giving us more time. Time is what we need.” But then another aspect occurred to her: “But suppose she gives it away early?”

  “I will impress on her that it won’t work unless she remains anonymous. For one thing, she can present herself as any type of women she wishes. She is not yet grown, so may be conscious of that lack.”

  “And it will end only when he catches on and names her in the feelie,” Spirit said. “I think you’ve got it, Shel!”

  “I hope so. I will get her started.”

  So it was that Amber made a private feelie, edited by Shelia, and Shelia delivered the anonymous message from a female admirer. It was, Spirit understood, extremely simple, with a glowing man figure resembling Hope approaching a croaked, veiled woman. He glowed because he was lovable; it was a feelie convention. She was completely anonymous, but obviously the one who loved him. That was all; Hope would have to respond by making his own feelie, and lifting the woman’s veil. Then whatever face Amber had chosen would be revealed, but not her own.

  Hope did respond. His feelie showed him embracing the veiled woman. That was all.

  Over the course of three months, the feelie romance became intense. Shelia quietly apprised Spirit of each stage, and Spirit found herself fascinated in the manner of a person watching a scripted romance. The anonymous woman lifted her veil, and revealed a completely blank face, leaving it to him to define. He defined it as Helse’s face. Thereafter they proceeded, at intervals, to kissing, nakedness, and finally sex. Hope was glad to instruct his innocent paramour in the variations of sex, and she was glad to learn; the action became phenomenally hot. And still he did not catch on.

  Then, almost a year after the first feelie, Hope was with Amber in a zoo, and there was an assassination attempt, and the two of them had to hide, soaking wet, clinging together, and he recognized her body from the feelie experience.

  He braced Shelia, because he knew she had known all

  along. “Then you know why she wouldn’t tell you,” she said. “Yes. I would have cut it off at the outset, before—”

  “Before you loved her,” she agreed. She didn’t make the point that he would have loved her soon regardless. “She needed you—and you needed her.”

  “But she’s a child!”

  “Not any more.”

  “What do I do now?”

  “Why, you love her, Hope.”

  “But she’s younger than Hopie!”

  “Helse was sixteen,” she reminded him.

  “Helse was a woman!”

  She nodded agreement. The age of the woman had not really changed; Hope’s age had. He recognized the validity of the affair. But he knew he had to clear it with Hopie first.

  Hopie did not take it well. “Sex? As in the Navy?”

  “Yes.

  “With her?”

  “Yes.”

  “You—she—Daddy, she’s younger than I am!” Then she blacked his eye. Coral was near, but did not interfere; she knew this was punishment he had to take.

  “And what of Megan?” Hopie screamed.

  “Your mother and I are separated. She understands.”

  “She’s not my mother! I don’t know who my mother is! Sometimes I hate her for being secret—and for making me a bastard! Why did you have to do it, Daddy? What was wrong with your wife? You just had to—”

  “You misunderstand—”

  She slammed him in the nose. The blood flowed from a burst blood vessel. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If you would talk to Amber—”

  “I’ll talk to her!” she cried. “You bet I will!”

  Only then did Coral come to clean him up. Soon she reported the whole thing to Spirit. “Will it pass?” Spirit asked.

  “I think so. Hopie loves him, and Amber.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “That’s the answer.”

  She was correct. Hopie braced Amber in a linked feelie session, savagely, but Amber set her back, showing sheer, inchoate, encompassing emotion, such total longing, need, desire, passion, and love that it swept aside all considerations of age, sex, propriety, legality, status, and doubt. Her body might be marginally adult, but her feeling was the essence of womanly abandon.

  That ended Hopie’s objection. As Coral had said, she did love them both. The two girls embraced, and Amber went from child to lover. No one was more relieved than Spirit. Shelia’s ploy had given them time to work it out.

  And how would Hopie react when she finally learned the nature of her own genesis? She had cursed Hope for making her a bastard, when it was supportive Aunt Spirit who had done it.

  There remained one difficult chore for Hopie to do, however: telling Uncle Thorley. He later messaged Hope, in his eloquent fashion.

  I feel it incumbent upon me to advise you of a private interview I had most recently with your adopted daughter, Hopie Hubris. She advised me that you had required her to inform me of a private peccadillo: your passion for a rather young woman in your charge, by name Amber. Now it is your intent to make of this young woman a mistress, she being amenable. The secret passions of any man, I suspect, would embarrass him were they made public. I will keep your secret. I am sure you would do the same for me. Hopie inquired why she had had to be the one to perform this office of notification. “Because, my dear young woman, the Tyrant wished to advise his leading critic in a fashion which could not be doubted that the object of his amorous intention was not yourself.”

  At that point Hopie fled in chagrin. But at least she understood the rest of it. Had news leaked out of the Tyrant taking a young woman of his household as a mistress, the hostile critics could have raised a ruckus that threatened the Tyrancy itself. But that news would not leak out. Thorley did indeed understand.

  But it was time for Hope to get out of the public eye, especially while he was with this particular mistress. Reba Ward had carefully set up a viable alternate identity for him, and now he became Jose Garcia, an ambitious Hispanic who was smart enough but not necessarily patient enough. He had been eased out of his company for being a whistle blower, and was now being given another chance at a new company. He was accompanied by his underage girlfriend. Such liaisons were now approved by the Tyrancy, provided they were verifiably consensual. They would search for natural bubblene bubbles in the atmosphere of Jupiter, hoping to strike it rich with a good discovery.

  And, of course, they would indulge in the reality that their feelie romance had emulated. Spirit smiled, thinking about it; Hope had an endless sexual interest in women, and Amber had an endless emotional passion for him. They would work it out.

  Meanwhile, Spirit would get on with the effective business of the Tyrancy. She threw herself into it, because she had to remain constantly busy to keep her mind off her desire to have a similarly endless liaison with Thorley. She still got to see him on occasion, but their connections were months apart. It was not nearly enough, but both of them were too prominent to keep many secrets.

  CHAPTER 15

  SHELIA

  During Hope’s absence, Spirit effectively ran the Tyrancy, and the loyal staff served her. There was no formal declaration, of course; they all knew the situation. Theoretically the Tyrant was nearby, in his office, meeting with a dignitary, seducing a secretary, sleeping—whatever. He did check in regularly, and when his physical appearance was required he put Jose Garcia away for a time and acted as if Hope had never been absent.

  Amber maintained similarly private contact with Hopie, who reported that the girl was deliriously happy, had performed sex more ways than she could count, and loved being known as Garcia’s ward. Everyone knew what that meant, and she loved having them know. “
You must get a man,” she told Hopie. But open and expressive as Hopie was on every other subject, she never commented on that aspect of her life. She did not know about Spirit’s affair with Thorley, but had evidently learned how to keep a secret when she had to.

  Hopie was also active in the reform of education, evidently getting advice from renegades. One little example made the whole office dissolve. Shelia got hold of a sample first grade reader and read it aloud, as if she were a child practicing. “See Dick run. Run run run.” She turned the page. “Dick runs to Jane’s house. Jane says, ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.’ Dick says, ‘Great!’ Then Jane lifts up her dress. Dick looks. Look, look, look!” She looked up, trying to stifle her mirth. “And that’s only the beginning!”