Strings (25 page)

“I want to come, Alya,” Cedric said. “Even if you—if I—if we are only friends, I want to come to Tiber with you.”

Oh, those enormous, innocent, round eyes!

How could she explain? Last night she had been driven by the
buddhi
. It had been completely unscrupulous, telling her to bind this unusually tall, agile young man to her as a lover, so that he would be at her side and willing to risk his life for her. She had gone to his bed. She had accepted his lovemaking. She had even pretended to enjoy it, just to hurry him along.

So she had fashioned Hubbard Cedric into her devoted slave. When the time came, he had leaped to her rescue without a second’s pause to weigh the risk. He had been fast enough and tall enough to catch hold of her, strong enough to keep her away from the core of the rope plant while Devlin closed the window, and tough enough to endure the punishment involved. Cedric had been available and malleable, lanky and steadfast—nothing else.

And now?

Now the need was past. She felt no more than casual friendship for him. They were the same age; they had known the most intimate contact possible, the most potent experience that two people can share. He had been a virile performer. Nothing more than that.

But just because the
satori
had been completely amoral did not mean that she could be. “Cedric, I have no say in who goes to Tiber. Yes, I’d love to have you come with us, but you’ll have to ask Devlin, or Baker, or your grandmother.”

He swallowed hard and nodded.

He handed her courteously into the spiralator and followed. Even when he was standing one step lower, his eyes were still much higher than hers. With a hard squeeze, he could encircle her waist with his hands, middle finger to middle finger, thumb to thumb. He had discovered that last night, and it fascinated him. He did it now.

“Ouch!”

“Sorry!”

“I’m very bruised, Cedric,” she said.

He pulled a face, then nodded. She thought of whipped dogs.

“Tiber on the eleventh?” he asked.

“Day after tomorrow,” she agreed. Two more days only. Of course, in theory it all depended on what the overnighting expeditions had discovered, but Alya had no doubts. Tiber it would be. Probably Jathro was already off somewhere, organizing the first planeloads.

The spiralator brought them to her floor, and they stepped out. Cedric walked her to her door in hopeful, attentive silence.

She had used him as unscrupulously as Fish had, or his vixen grandmother, or several others. Was she no better than they? Why did everyone
use
him? He deserved any reward she could give.

She opened the door and paused. “How’re your bruises?”

Smiles dawned again. “I could cope. Yours?”

“I’m not sure. They should be looked at, I think.”

Relief! “Very closely?”

“Very! There’s a whirlpool tub in my suite.”

His eyes widened. “There is?”

“Have you ever made love in a hot tub?” She never had.

Cedric moaned and reached for her.

She slipped from his grasp and headed across the room without looking to see if he was following.

Cedric took less than five seconds to unzip, tug, balance on each foot in turn a few times, tug some more, and then he was in the water, waiting for her. He was as badly roped by bruises and welts as she was, and they showed up far worse on his milky skin, but obviously they were not going to dampen his fires.

Alya took longer. Then she sank down beside him and pushed his hands away. “Wait awhile. Just soak.”

He had probably never soaked in a whirlpool tub before. It eased the aches, but he would not know how enervating it was.

After a while she let him fondle her, but then he began to grow urgent. “How do we manage this?” he muttered into her ear. “I’ll drown you!”

“Like this!” She slid into his lap. “My turn to drive!”

She had never been so blatantly aggressive at lovemaking. It was obviously a new experience for Cedric also, and Alya found a strange wild joy in her power to take a being so much larger and stronger than herself and almost immediately reduce him to a gasping, spasming, slack-jawed jelly. She worked him savagely, until he was drained and spent and yelling for mercy.

They cuddled longer in the sensuously swirling water, but soon his eyes began to wobble out of focus. She sent him off to dry himself and wait for her in bed; and she took her time. When she went to him, he was stretched out like a major highway, fast asleep.

Easy.

She slid in beside him, and for a while she lay and studied his astonishingly innocent face, his battered nose, and the spread of his hair on the pillow, shining bronze in this light. Then she whispered for dark to come and turned over to go to sleep herself.

She, too, was spent. It had been a hell of a day.

But sleep did not come rushing down on her as she had expected. That mean little seduction had been too cheap and easy. Certainly he had no cause to complain that the brave had not received the fair, but she knew he would have wanted more. He meant well, but he was clumsy, inexperienced, and altogether too rampageous. In her present condition he would hurt her without meaning to—he had done enough of that the previous night.

Yet she found that she was fighting a fierce desire to wake him up and tell him to do his damndest. That was her conscience speaking, not her intuition—the
buddhi
no longer seemed interested in Hubbard Cedric, tall or not. There were lots of good men around.

Partly she was feeling her own unslaked lust. Partly she was feeling guilty for being a selfish, conniving slut.

And partly, she knew, she was wondering in a purely cerebral fashion whether she would be an idiot to let this one get away.

Cainsville/Nile, April 9

“GOOD MORNING, MY lady.” Baker Abel’s voice was sickeningly cheerful. “I wish I could say that you were looking well, but I’m not looking at all, if you follow me. I’m sure you are, anyway.”

His cocky, impudent face peered out through the holo, but Alya had specified voice-only reply. Beside her, Cedric moaned softly and pulled the covers over his head.

“What’s the time?” She rubbed her eyes. Lord, but every bone in her body ached.

“Just before 0600. Your judgment on Orinoco was confirmed, so we let you sleep. The lab reports show something badly wrong there. The mice are growing tumors. Grant’s decreed complete embargo.”

Orinoco had already been overnighted and given a provisional Class One rating before Alya had even reached Cainsville. So her intuition had a range of several days—but was it reliable on a scale of years? When would human colonists on Tiber start developing tumors?

She prepared to throw off the covers and then decided not to. People facing blank screens usually had a fixed, glazed look about them, and she was not sure that Abel’s sparkly eyes were quite glazed enough. There were a lot of sneaky override codes in the Cainsville System.

He babbled on. “So you have the rest of the day off, Your Largesse, at least as far as Operations is concerned. Quinto and Usk show up tomorrow, then decision time for Tiber. I wouldn’t have called you now, but we seem to have mislaid a couple of meters of deputy director, and I wondered if you might have seen any, er, lying around?”

Smartass! “You could ask System.”

“Ah, well, I did. Never mind, but if you do happen to…lay your hands on him, tell him the media are on their way. Nice room you’ve got there.” Baker Abel vanished.

“Saints have mercy!” a male voice groaned from under the bedclothes.

“He’s a kindergarten dropout. I swear it.”

Cedric rolled over with grunts of pain. “Oooh! Pity the poor cripple, beautiful lady. I’ll never walk again.”

Nothing wrong with his hands, though. Alya removed them and rasped a fingernail over his cheek. “Sandpaper! And you have work to do.”

He wailed. “Sadist! I hadn’t finished—I just took a rest at halftime.

“Tough.”

“You’ll make me wait until tonight?”

“Abstinence makes the lust grow stronger.”

Tiber was due just after midnight the next day. Tonight would be his last chance.

Evidently Cedric had pandered to his ambitions when ordering his Cainsville wardrobe. He returned from his own room bedecked in ranger denims, grinning and strutting like a kid with a private moonship as he escorted Alya to breakfast. She wondered what the real rangers would think, and concluded that a deputy director need not care about their opinions.

When they reached the cafeteria she saw no rangers around, but she did notice people sending Cedric nods and small smiles of acknowledgment. His performance against Eccles Pandora had apparently met with approval. She was surprised, for he was still the boss’s grandson, who had been brought in over everyone else’s head. Yet he was doing astonishingly well. Was it possible that Hubbard Agnes had been serious in giving him the job? What other destiny did that sinister madwoman have in mind for him?

They ate and then still had time to spare before the lev arrived with Eccles and the rest of the media stars. Cedric suggested a quick inspection of the equipment. He was bubbling with excitement over his coming exploration. In Alya’s opinion, considering what she knew of planet Nile, he was nutty as a palm grove.

“
De Soto Dome
,” Cedric told the golfie, adjusting Alya in the crook of his arm, where he preferred her.

“Access to de Soto Dome is restricted at this time,” he was told.

Cedric frowned.

“Devlin’s probably being careful,” Alya said. Someone in Cainsville was a murderer—or so Fish had said. “The last skiv was booby-trapped, remember.”

“Right, so it was!
Override
!”

In a moment Cedric’s easy grin vanished. The reply had been through his earpatch, and Alya did not know what it said. She could guess.

He pouted. “I was told my grade was the highest there was. Little did they know…Well, let’s think about arranging the party.”

He should have been thinking of that anyway, Alya decided. He was obviously annoyed at being refused by System, but the extent of his authority over it had always seemed extraordinary to her. Indeed, she suspected that the rating he had been granted might have come automatically with his nominal rank of deputy director and was an oversight that Hubbard Agnes would surely correct as soon as she discovered it.

Alya left him jabbering to a comset and went back to her room, feeling oddly unneeded. Her intuition seemed to be content with the way things were progressing. Tiber still felt right, and none of the other names did. Cedric was no longer important.

Moala had not returned. She had gone off in full war paint the previous evening, admitting with much giggling that she had somehow contrived dates with no less than three handsome young rangers—because of the language problem, she claimed. That was not a very credible excuse when System could translate anything. Alya had advised her to choose the largest and let him worry about the other two, but she was curious to know how things had turned out. Moala would certainly tell her, in brightly embroidered detail.

And Jathro’s continued absence was odd. Alya settled herself before the comset and called him. There was a noticeable delay before he appeared, looking annoyed and even more self-important than usual.

“I am in conference, Your Highness.” The view around him was masked, but Alya could see a corner of the table at which he was seated. It was not rectangular—probably pentagonal, for the director and her four horsemen. Most likely Hubbard Agnes had the same sort of office in Cainsville as she did at HQ in Nauc.

“I am so sorry to intrude,” Alya responded. “Do let me know if I can help in any way. Rinse your socks, maybe.
Com end
.”

She glared angrily at the blank screen. Two-anna conniver! Slimy tub thumper!

Now what? Well, it was about the time that Cedric would be welcoming Eccles and a trainload of reporters from all the other networks and media, a real invasion. Alya did not particularly wish to watch.

Kas!

She had been neglecting Kas. This would be early evening, Banzarak time. She placed the call.

He answered at once, as though he had been waiting for her there, in his familiar, shabby old office with its book-strewn desk and battered leather chairs of unknown antiquity. She saw at once the ravages of strain on his face, and she could have believed that his beard was grayer than it had been two days before.

Was it only two days? It felt like a lifetime.

“Little sister!” His smile was forced. “How do you fare?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Kas, darling! I’m fine.”

“The doubts have gone?”

“Yes! Yes!” She could barely recall the anguish that had racked her when they parted. “Oh, yes. I’m fine. It’s beautiful, Kas!”

“You’ve seen it, then?”

“Tiber. It’s called Tiber. And yes, I’ve seen it, briefly. Glorious! So many butterflies!”

“No more regrets?”

“Only about you…and Thalia and the kids.” How could she have been so selfish as to forget them? Thalia was a distant cousin; she also had the
buddhi
. So did all their children, so far as could be told. They would still be suffering, feeling the siren call of an open door, a safer, finer world available. “Kas, is there no chance that you, too—all of you?”

She thought he shook his head—she could not be sure. Then he said, “This is your kismet. Maybe next time.”

“But this—” She recalled what Jathro had predicted about Hubbard Agnes after her folly at the press conference. Jathro, a shrewd politician for all his sleaze and pomposity, had said then that the director could last no more than a week before the hounds pulled her down. Alya had been overlooking the scheming and intriguing that must be under way. “This one may be the last, Kas dear.”

He coughed meaningfully—there could be listeners on such a call. “I saw you on Thursday.”

Kas was no mean twister himself when he wanted to be. He must have been sorely puzzled, though, by Alya’s appearance on the holo. None of her brothers or sisters or cousins had ever gone public like that.

“Oh…I don’t know what came over me.”

“Then I am sure it was the right thing to do. I would only worry if I thought you were trying to be logical.”

She laughed. “Beast! But—I think it was because I had to meet someone.”

“Tall, dark, and handsome?”

But she dared not try to explain about Cedric. He was not relevant anyway. His grandmother had other plans for him. “Tall, fair, and looks lost?” she tried.

“Then I can guess. He was impressive, Alya. Don’t stop to think, whatever you do.”

Her mind whirled. Kas…and Cedric. Damn! Maybe that long string of innocence was important, after all. She wished she dared confide in Kas.

“But is this farewell?” he asked. “I’ll get the others—”

“No! I’ll call again.” She thought quickly. “Thirty-six hours from now?”

“We’ll be waiting,” he promised.

There was more, all told in hints and half truths in case of listeners, mingled with unimportant precious things. The hibiscuses were dying, Kas said. She told him she had been given a flower with two heart-shaped red petals. Afterward she sat and wept for a while. The future could wait; the past deserved tribute.

“So that’s SKIV-Four,” Frazer Franklin pontificated. “Can you tell us exactly what that means?”

“Well, ‘SKIV’ stands for ‘self-contained investigatory vehicle,’” the tame expert explained. “The ‘Four’ simply means that it will support four people.”

Everyone knew that, Alya thought. Not wanting to leave her room with her eyes still red, she had turned to WSHB to see what was going on. The expedition ought to have been on the move already, but obviously there was some delay, and the anchor was filling in. His guest was a vague, dried-out ancient. Not impressive.

“For how long?”

“Well, if needs be, almost indefinitely. I admit recycled solids and water don’t sound appetizing, but as long as you have power, then you can distill…”

Alya changed channels—and got more filler.

“Impossible to tell. Certainly one stone hand-ax is not very impressive evidence on which to presume sentience.”

“And this cuthionamine lysergeate that we’ve all heard so much about—it can produce homicidal mania?”

“Oh, very definitely. The regression to an innate stone-working behavior is more speculative, but there have been reports of…”

She tried yet another channel and was rewarded with a shot of de Soto Dome and the skiv.

“…sometimes known as ‘beetles’ because of the three sections.” The female voice was nasty, like fingernails on silk. “The front is the driver’s cab. The middle section is the living quarters, and the rear portion the working part—the lab, and so on. Of course they’re modular, and in this case that rear part is quite small, because they’re only going out to retrieve the, er, body. Those tongs on the back are very remarkable tools—sensitive enough to pick up a hecto coin, yet strong enough to lift a house. Now, if we could get a close-up…”

Alya went back to WHSB.

“And we do seem to have some action now,” Frazer remarked with ill-concealed relief. But the great dome remained deserted. In the center the metal object plate of the transmensor was as blank as a skating rink, while the giant three-module skiv brooded alone in a stark puddle of light beamed down from the impossibly high roof. The only action that Alya could see was that one of the gantries was trundling back into the shadows, as if to leave room.

Likely Frazer had been tipped off, for suddenly the window was open. The object plate had become a circular void, pure darkness. Nothing more happened.

“I expect they’re adjusting Contact,” Franklin commented off-stage. “As you can see, the surface of Nile is dark. That’s normal—the sun never penetrates the—Ah…did you notice that, Jimmy? There’s quite a wind blowing down there, and I’m sure that was a cloud of dust we just saw coming up through the pit.”

Open the champagne, Alya thought.

“More likely a cloud of spores,” someone else said. “There’s a circulation—spores and dust carried upward to fertilize the cloud tops, and the fallout—”

He was cut off by a burst of excited chatter from Franklin as a ramp ran out from the edge of the pit and settled down into the dark. There was no mistaking the swirl of dust.

Covering another pause in the breathtaking activity, Franklin began asking his expert witness about decontamination. Nothing simpler, he was told—the Institute was meticulous. The dome would be opened afterward to a stellar corona and washed with high-energy plasma and hard radiation.

Alya switched channels.

But every station seemed to be carrying the same picture, and variations on the same talking heads.

At last the skiv began to move. Looking very much like a giant insect on its outstretched wheels, it flexed over the lip of the pit and rolled smoothly down the ramp. She sent a silent blessing after Cedric. She could imagine few things she would enjoy less than a visit to such a hell planet, but he was probably having the most exciting experience of his young life. She wished that her intuition would guard other people as well as herself. She told herself that he could come to no harm, that such feats were commonplace to the wizards of Cainsville.

And then there was a tap at the door and Moala was back, bubbling over with good humor and bursting to recount all her adventures. Alya was surprised at how good it felt to have some female company, and Moala was always good company. She was much less stupid than she liked to pretend, and could certainly not be one-tenth as debauched. But she told a good story, and after recounting her arduous experiences with a hairy-chested ranger named Al, she went on to invent sequels, introduce new characters, and turn her evening into a continuing saga of unbridled lust. How much came from her own imagination and how much from other sources Alya could not guess, but the end result was both mind-boggling and side-splitting. Moala especially approved of hairy chests.