Brother Death (16 page)

"Da" was her father. She hadn't ever really related to them as people other than her parents. They must have had lives before she and Saval had been born, before they had met and married, but Ma had never talked about it. .

Until the day Taz got her first menstrual flow.

Taz had taken sex edcom, she knew the physical manifestations and what they meant, but the actual event had been a surprise.

It was on Kaplan, in the Beta System, where her da had signed on with an ore extractor in the outback for a six-month job. They lived in one of the prefab everlast cubes the company provided for its workers; there were whole neighborhoods of them, all the same. Square, faded green blocks, evenly spaced along access roads, identically constructed inside and out. Some of the permanent workers had decorated the outsides, splashed them with color or planted fast-growing trees so they'd stand out, but you could still get lost easy unless you knew your row and cube number.

She'd been out playing with some of her friends, two of them were mues, two of them basic stockers, a complicated game that involved touching three people in a changing sequence for each tag. The day was springlike, even though it was still late winter, the sun shining brightly, the sky blue green and cloudless.

Taz had made a touch and darted between two cubes and hidden under a mandrill bush. The boy chasing her had run past, missing her.

She'd grinned, but then felt something running down her leg under her skirt. Put her hand down to wipe it away and brought up bloody fingertips.

For a moment she thought she'd cut herself on the bush when she'd dived under it, but a quick examination showed the flow wasn't from a wound.

The cramps she'd put down yesterday to the green plums she'd eaten and the sense of nervousness she'd felt suddenly made a different kind of sense. Her flat breasts had been sore, too. She'd read about the signs of hormonal changes in the sex edcom; she was quick enough to know what had happened. Only last month Shev had started her cycles, and Taz had heard her bragging about it enough. So it wasn't a big deal, but even so, she suddenly found she wasn't interested in the game of digit tag any more. She pulled off her sockshoes, used the top of one to wipe her leg, then tucked it into her underwear to catch the blood.

She headed for home, hearing her friends yelling as they ran chasing each other. She felt . . . different.

She had crossed over from being a child into some other realm. She wasn't a woman, not in the sense she thought of adult women, but she wasn't a kid any more, either.

Ma was working on the inside of the cube, stringing a thin and close-mesh net across the main room wall behind the holoproj. The net had moved with them for the last few years and Ma would attach different things to it as decoration in whichever temporary shelter they occupied. There was a holograph of her ma's mother, who had died before Taz was born. An air plant she'd gotten when they'd lived on Farbis. Two streamers of blue silk, ribbons Saval had won in singing contests. A poem Taz had written for Ma's birthday two years ago, so crude as to embarrass Taz whenever she saw it but which Ma refused to let her daughter throw away. Other little things that had some meaning to her.

Ma smiled when she saw Taz come in, then blinked and said, "Tazzi? Are you okay?"

Taz wanted to keep it a secret. But she also wanted to tell somebody who knew what it was like. That urge won out.

"Yeah. I-my cycle started!" She couldn't keep the excitement from her voice, even though she wanted to keep it matter-of-fact no-big-deal in tone.

Ma's smile came back, but with something new in it. Almost sad. "How wonderful," she said. "How wonderful." She came over and hugged Taz, and while that usually bothered Taz when her friends were around these days, right now it felt great.

People sometimes said they looked just alike, Ma and her, but Taz couldn't see it. Sure, Ma had the same dark hair on her head. And the wispy pubic fuzz Taz had recently sprouted was the same color, too, only it couldn't ever possibly get as thick as Ma's. She hoped it wouldn't; when Ma went swimming or lay on the beach, she looked like she had a furry animal curled up on her belly. Da thought it was great, he liked to tease her about it, but people would sometimes walk by and stare at Ma's crotch like it was weird and Taz didn't want that.

Too, Taz was big-boned like both parents, and she had that little cleft in her chin like Ma, but that was about it, as far as she could tell.

Well, until now. Now they had something else in common.

"Come on, I'll make you a fizzie," Ma said.

They went into the tiny kitchen and Ma opened the pantry and produced a cannister of the bubbly drink, shook it and squeezed the cooler ring. In was ready in a few seconds. Taz sipped at the icy fruit taste.

"I remember when I started," her mother said. "I was a year older than you. My ma never talked about it and my sex edcom was kind of spotty, we moved around so much. I thought I was sick, that I was dying."

"Funny," Taz said.

"Yes, it is, isn't it? Right away my breasts ballooned and my hips grew. In six months I had boys and girls calling for all kinds of new games." Ma shook her head. "Such a long time ago. I met your da not a year afterward. We got married in a few months. Saval was born a year later. I was fifteen T.S."

Taz did the math in her head. That would make her ma thirty-one T.S. now. Old. Real old.

"I can't complain. You and Savvie are the lights of my life. And your da, well, he used to be really something before work wore him down so much. Used to laugh a lot, bring me little gifts, take me to concerts and fests."

Da? Her da did that?

"I could have had a job, I had the right genetics for it, but my family was old-style, just like Cemer's."

For an instant the name didn't mean anything. Oh, Da, of course.

"You don't see much of that any more, old-style contracts. Not much tradition left today, but our families would have curled up and died if they thought we were going against it. Most contracts today are open-marriage, non-trads, group or limited-term or whatever. Not the Borks and the Takstines, though. We sign on for lifetime contracts. All or nothing, that's us."

Her mother sighed. "You miss a lot that way. But there is a strength there you don't get with a renewable or communal. It's hard, but. . ." she trailed off.

Taz felt a great sadness welling from her mother, a deep and painful flow that washed over her. She didn't fully understand it, but later she would determine that the single word which described it best was . . . regret.

"But it has been worth it," her mother said. "Really."

The hormones surging through her system must have been affecting Taz, she knew that later, too, but in that moment, what she felt from her mother was that her marriage to Taz's father had been anything but worth it.

"Someday you'll see," Ma said. Then, "Come on, we need to get you some insert buttons until we can get your implant and suppressor. Back when I was a girl, we had to go through this bleeding every month."

That seemed pretty unreal to Taz. Everybody just got a suppressor and that stopped it, unless you were allergic or something. How messy it would be otherwise, having to put in buttons and change them when they got soaked. Yuk.

And the conversation about her mother's youth and marriage was overshadowed by the importance of what was happening to her. She didn't think about it until years later. And by then, it didn't really matter any more.

Looking at the rosebush, Taz shook her head. No. She wouldn't call Ruul. Damned if she would. She had a murderer to catch, a life of her own. If Ruul wanted to sulk and feel bad, that was his problem. Not hers.

Really. It wasn't.

Chapter SEVENTEEN

IT CAME To Kifo as he sat meditating that the war against the unbelievers needed to escalate. Thus far he had merely been picking the worst offenders off one by one. Most probably had not known what they had done, or to whom they had done it, and that was part of the original strategy. First he had to create a fear so deep that when he finally did reveal to the next victims what he wished and why he wished it so, they would be terrified enough not to spill the information to the authorities. It would not do that the police realized too much too soon. Not until the gods were ready to assume their places.

Now, however, he could see that his chosen path was too narrow. It must be widened, turned into a twelve-lane travelway, and that meant removing a great number of obstacles in a hurry. It was time to move, and if that required hundreds or thousands or even millions of people had to be crushed under the machineries, then so be it. Nothing could be allowed to thwart the will of the gods, no heart among the Few allowed to be faint, regardless of the cost. Still, he could hardly hope to be so ambitious with only one Hand at his disposal. One could only do what one could.

Kifo smiled. The price for becoming a god might be high but certainly he was willing to pay whatever it took. A pity he did not have godlike resources at his beck. To wave his hand and remove hordes would be fine indeed.

Bork was in Taz's gym, but he couldn't seem to get his workout going. The weights seemed heavier than usual; the kiloage he normally handled with ease he could barely move today. He kept thinking about his failure.

"Saval?" came the voice over the house intercom.

"Yeah?"

"The computer has got something for us."

"On my way." He was glad for an excuse to shortstop his session. Had the decay of age he sometimes worried about set in? Was it the depression from his encounter with the hooded giant? Or something as simple as the crack on the head? It didn't matter. He had something to do and that was his main focus now, finding the assassin.

Because when he found him, Bork would get a chance to even the score.

Taz voiceaxed the computer and called up the stats. Graphs and charts and lines of data lit the air over the console. Next to her, Saval scanned the material while she talked.

"The cruncher came up with this," she said, waving at the holoproj. "Nine of the thirteen victims, plus Celona Jorine, all gave money to the Center for Tolerance and Reason."

"Which is . . . ?

"A kind of unitarian think-tank HQed on Simba(.)Numa. They espouse some encompassing faith, all people are brothers and sisters, all religions are paths up the mountain and equally valid, like that."

Saval nodded. "Okay. So ten of fourteen gave these people money?"

"According to the records uncovered so far. Now that we know what to look for, the computer is trying to find if the others might have contributed. Could have done it anonymously, maybe."

"It must mean something," Saval said. "But what? Who would be pissed off enough at them for doing this to kill them? If this is the real reason?"

"I dunno. Let's talk to somebody there and see can we find out."

A few minutes later they had a line to the Information Chief of the CTR on the next-door-neighbor planet. The chief was a florid-faced, heavyset woman of sixty, hair worn long and in a swept-forward breaker-style that threw a shadow over her forehead and nose. Because it was close insofar as White Radio distances went, there was almost a tensecond time lag in transmission.

"Who," Taz asked, "would dislike your patrons enough to consider killing them?"

After the back-and-forth delay, the woman said, "Militant factions in any one of thirty or forty religious denominations I can think of might go that far. We preach tolerance here, and universality. Those who consider themselves upon the only true path can be threatened by the idea they are only one of many."

"Hard to believe," Saval said.

"M. Bork, throughout history the bloodiest wars have always been religious ones. Holy men who would turn the other cheek over property or national boundaries, who would not lift a hand to protect the life of a brother, will sometimes cheerfully slaughter a room full of newborn babies in the name of their god. If you know you will go straight to your version of paradise to sit at the hand of your deity when you die, you might happily charge barehanded and naked an army-you have everything to gain if your faith is strong enough."

"Yeah, I guess I knew that."

"We preach a kind of unconditional love. Most religions attach a lot of strings to their rewards. You toe the line or you lose the prize. We tell people they don't have to do it. Those who preach otherwise think we're calling them liars, or worse, that their gods are false ones. We don't, but they sometimes choose to see it that way."

After the connection was sundered, Saval and Taz looked at each other. "It's a break," she said. "I'll have comp central pull a list of all the established religions on Tembo. We can eliminate the mild ones right off-I don't see the Buddhists or the Trimenagists or the Jains lopping off the heads of their enemies. We should be able to find this kind of fanatical organization pretty quick."

"It could be just one twisted arrow," he said. "Might not be official church policy."

She shrugged. "Better than what we had before. It's something to run down."

"Yeah, you right about that."

While they waited for the download from comp central, Bork sat staring at the wall. Even if the assassin was a religious fanatic of some kind, that didn't explain how he had gotten into the locked and guarded rooms. Teleportation wasn't possible, unless somebody had made a breakthrough in physics and kept it to themselves. Somehow, however, somebody had defeated all the state-of-the-art sensors Bork had set up, bypassed the wards and gotten inunless they had already been there. That seemed as impossible as materializing out of the air, given the scans and direct searching Bork had done. Teleportation and time travel, maybe.

Yeah. Right. That didn't seem real likely.

But they had gotten in, so it was possible; start from there.

But-how?

Before the information she'd requested was finished loading into her portable flatscreen, Taz got a call from the earlyshift WC.

"Your friend the Guillotine sent in more threats," the WC said.