Rediscovery (38 page)

indeed. Lorill said something about
kireseth
pollen upon your clothing, and that pollen was probably the cause of everything.”

Ysaye looked at him as if
he
had gone crazy. “Ghost Wind?” she asked. “Pollen?”

“Ah, I forget,” he shook his head. “I have spoken to a few others of this, but not to you; only the ones who were to go with me out into the lands beyond Caer Dorm.

Sometimes, when the weather gets hot—that is, relatively speaking—bringing a kind of short summer out-of-season, the pollen of the
kireseth
flowers is blown about on the wind. It happens in the lowlands and valleys more often than in mountains, such as Caer Donn, of course. The pollen is quite intoxicating, makes one see visions, and—ah—

stimulates mating. Anyone caught by a Ghost Wind tends to go a bit mad—and there are generally quite a few babies born seven months later.”

“Oh,” she said, many inexplicable things coming together to form a nasty picture.

“No one seeks to be caught in a Ghost Wind,” he continued, “Because the visions

can make a person do things he would never do in his right mind. Because of that, there are prohibitions about the handling of the flowers that no one I know would flout.”

“Never?” she asked sarcastically.

“Never. Only the
leroni
can handle the flowers safely; that is the word from the Towers. Truly,
domna,”
he added earnestly. “If you were caught in pollen, what happened is no disgrace, no one will blame you for any of it, and it is no reflection on your normal behavior.”

“Kireseth.”
Ysaye stood quietly, as the pattern settled into place. She closed her eyes briefly against the red haze of anger that crossed her vision, and forced herself to speak softly and carefully. “Are those the flowers that Evans was growing in the greenhouse at his lab? The ones with the little blue bell-shaped flowers?”

“Yes, those are the ones,” Kadarin confirmed. “I have warned him about how the

pollen carries and he had them under glass when last I saw them; that may even be where you were exposed to it, if they bloomed before he expected them to. He has quite an impressive crop of them; it is amazing how well they do in an artificial

environment.”

“Of course,” Ysaye said as casually as she could manage, “if they got too warm,

they would all die.”
The fires of hell would not be warm enough for Evans,
she thought grimly.

Kadarin shrugged. “I don’t know, I am not a grower of plants. Probably. But that is not ever likely to be a problem upon this world.”

“No,” Ysaye replied automatically. “Of course not.”

“Kadarin?” Zeb Scott appeared at the end of the corridor. “There you are! Come

on, the shuttle is this way. If you want a chance to go up before you take Elizabeth and David into the field, you’d better catch this one.”

He rushed up, took Kadarin by the arm, and started to tow him down the corridor.

Ysaye looked after them for a moment, then headed for the outside, the Science

building, and the xenobotany lab.

Ysaye stood looking down at the lovely blue flowers beneath their sealed cover—

a cover she had last seen standing open, with Elizabeth on the floor next to the plant bench. A locked cover; one that would need a specific fingerprint to unlock. Kadarin had spoken the truth; it was an impressive crop.

The monstrous little things were positively thriving, Ysaye thought.

But not for long.

There wasn’t a computer in this complex that she couldn’t override—or lock up,

once she had put in the override commands. Every bench in this greenhouse was

controlled from the lab computer, and the greenhouse itself was completely controlled by the computer as well. She returned to the lab, and ordered the computer to put quarantine seals on the greenhouse. Above her, the door swung shut with an audible
thud,
and the hiss of the seals clamping in place made her smile.

Ysaye, what are you doing?
Leonie demanded in her mind.
Your anger reached
me even through the Veil!

Briefly, Ysaye explained, and felt Leonie’s startlement and her answering anger.

That is sacrilege!
the girl exclaimed.
Only the Tower workers can touch kireseth
flowers safely! So that is what happened to you and Lorill! Why, that filthy beast
—

Will be taken care of by the Captain as soon as I finish here,
Ysaye told her, grimly. The scent of the blossoms filled the air throughout the lab, even after the greenhouse had been sealed, so Ysaye told the computer to seal off the lab from the rest of the complex and set the air recycler to run at maximum, with full detoxification protocols.

That should make sure he hasn’t contaminated the whole building,
she told Leonie,
And that will make sure there are no more pregnant crew members.

She coded in the last of the tasks—to elevate the temperature in the greenhouse to well over the highest recorded temperature of the most arid of Terra’s deserts, and to run the dehumidifier as well. That should kill every flower in there, and yet preserve the evidence she needed to convict Ryan Evans of some very specific charges. Intoxication without consent, cultivation of a controlled substance, administration of an unknown drug without prior approval, assault by pharmaceutical, and attempted rape. He wasn’t going to get out of this one. Just to make certain, she set all the cameras in the lab to record what happened there. When Evans discovered what had happened, he might say or do something to incriminate himself further.

She sensed Leonie’s approval as she put in the lockdown code. Now the only

people who would be able to enter the greenhouse section of the lab were herself and the Captain. And she was the only person who could unlock the lab computer. She started to turn to go find the Captain, feeling a little like one of the Valkyries of legend.

Then the lab door slid open and Evans entered.

He looked surprised. “What are you doing in here?” he asked.

She didn’t—quite—snarl at him.

“Sterilizing your unauthorized experiment,” she replied through clenched teeth.

“No!” Evans dove across the room and shoved her away from the terminal and

into the opposite wall. He began punching frantically at the keys. “You can’t do that! Do you have any idea what these plants are worth? They have properties you can’t even imagine!”

He does not know you were here that night?
Leonie said in surprise.

Evidently not,
Ysaye replied, and answered him grimly, “Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea.”

She rubbed her shoulder, which had absorbed most of the force of the collision

with the wall. But she remembered the watching cameras, and asked, “Just what did you plan to do with those—plants?”

She couldn’t for a moment imagine how he had managed to work in the lab

without being affected by the flowers—or had his brains been so scrambled by

everything else he’d indulged in that he didn’t even notice?

Evans was still trying to override her lockdowns, talking rapidly about the

commercial possibilities for the pollen on Keef, in the brothels and drug-dens. “The Madams are going to pay through the nose for this!” he said, frantically. “It’ll lower their training and spoilage costs, and the girls and boys could start working earlier, which would increase their useful lives —Ysaye, what did you do here? How can I turn it off?”

Useful lives?
Leonie said, puzzled.
What does he mean? How can there be such a
thing as a useless life?

Ysaye thought that Evans’ own life might well qualify in that category, but she

said only,
Believe me, Leonie, you don’t want to know what he means.

Aloud, she said to Evans for the benefit of the cameras, “Did you really expect

Captain Gibbons to hold still for any of this?”

Evans gave up trying to get into the computer, and turned big, mock-innocent

eyes on her. “Why do you think this experiment isn’t in the computer? Be a sport, Ysaye,” his tone turned wheedling, “I’ll make it worth your while. How about five percent of the profits and eight grams for your own use.” He leered at her. “It would even make a cast-iron virgin like you loosen up and enjoy life. Just get over here and cancel what you did.”

Was this supposed to convince her? She was still linked with Leonie who was

shocked into speechlessness by this attitude.

“Only over my dead body do you get your damned drugs. In fact, just thinking

about this makes me want to kill you,” Ysaye said flatly. She wasn’t sure how much of the anger was hers and how much Leonie’s; both of them were outraged.

Evans blinked, taken aback by this unexpected show of aggression, particularly

from such an unexpected source. Then he took a bullying stance. “Don’t be a stupid bitch, Ysaye. You couldn’t hurt anyone. You’re a tech, not a killer.”

“Not a killer?” Anger burned all of the sense out of her. “You bastard. Thanks to you and your damned drugs, that’s exactly what I am! Didn’t you ever wonder how

Elizabeth found her way out of your greenhouse the night of the Festival? I was the one that got Elizabeth out of here when you drugged her and planned to rape her! And I’m going to make damned sure that you end up in a prison for the rest of your unnatural life!”

“The hell you are!” Evans screamed, and lunged at her, grabbing her by the

throat.

Ysaye found herself blacking out as she tried unsuccessfully to throw him off.

How
dare
you lay hands on us?
Leonie’s voice screamed in fury, as her Keeper’s reflexes took over Ysaye’s mind and body.

Fire crackled along their nerves and into the body of the man holding them. The

three of them dropped, convulsing, to the floor, thrashing about on the cold vinylite.

Evans screamed as he burned—Ysaye screamed as power surged through her

overloaded nerves, meeting resistance and burning it away. Leonie screamed with the pain of Ysaye’s body. They were nose-to-nose with a charred corpse, and still the power scorched Ysaye’s soul, as fire alarms sounded, and emergency fans pumped air through the decontamination filters at the maximum possible speed.

The mingled scents of burned flesh and
kireseth
pollen faded away as the Tower monitor bent over their twitching body, and they sank thankfully into darkness.

“I wish we could have made that shuttle,” Zeb Scott said wistfully, urging his

horse up a rise as only a born rider could. Elizabeth envied him that; she still felt she sat her horse like a sack of grain. “It’s going to be a while until we can get another pair of seats up to the observation station on that moon.”

“Ah, well, all things in their time,” Kadarin replied philosophically as his horse mirrored Zeb’s. “And our loss is the Lornes’ gain, is it not?”

He grinned wickedly at David and Elizabeth. David just grinned in return, but

Elizabeth found herself wishing that she could have been alone with David. After all, they both knew how to ride, they had the best maps that Survey could provide, they were as good at
casta
and
cahuenga
as Ryan Evans, and they were only going to one of Lord Aldaran’s remote villages. They really didn’t need a guide.

Given that the Captain had not permitted them any kind of leave for a real

honeymoon, this would have made a good opportunity for them to be alone together.

You just couldn’t be “alone” for long when someone was always activating your beeper for something or other. She’d even been beeped twice the night of the Festival—or so David said. She didn’t really remember that, and since no one had thought it important enough to leave a message, she didn’t have any record of it.

Well, at least, they had this little trek, with only two others with them instead of the whole crew. So she contented herself with what little she had, instead of fretting for more.

David smiled over at her, as if he had sensed her thoughts.

Kadarin rode a little ahead of them. He had said so little thus far that she might as
well
have been alone with David. Perhaps he, too, had sensed her wish for some privacy, and was giving the newly-married couple the best illusion of it that he could. Kadarin could be amazingly sensitive that way.

And Zeb, while not a
good
friend, was someone they both knew and trusted. So in a sense, it was nearer than she had thought possible to the honeymoon she had wanted.

But despite the pleasant way the journey had begun, by late afternoon, she was

plagued with a growing sense of disquiet. They camped without any incident—and Zeb and Kadarin pitched their travel shelter far enough away to give her an illusion of privacy. Yet throughout that evening and night, she continued to feel restless and somehow afraid, as if something horrible was going to happen. Her dreams were full of nightmares, and she woke up once during the night with her heart pounding with terror.

The morning dawned clear and relatively warm, and it seemed that her disquiet

was nothing more than night-fear. They packed up and returned to the trail. But halfway through this, their second day, an odd wind began to rise.

Elizabeth sniffed, as an odd perfume, resinous and faintly familiar, wreathed

around her.

“Ah, now this is likely to cause some delay,” Kadarin said at the same moment,

his strange eyes lighting with some kind of emotion Elizabeth couldn’t put a name to.

Amusement? “This is a winter blooming; we must take care to be within walls before the wind can reach us.”

“Wind?” Zeb Scott laughed. “Kadarin, I’m an Arkansas boy, I’ve been through

tornadoes there and sandstorms in the Arizona desert, and I’ve never been afraid of a wind yet!”

Kadarin smiled, a little scornfully. “You would do well to fear this wind, even if you are one of the Terrans whose technology can overcome all difficulties. Even your Captain should learn to fear the wind of a winter blooming.”