Take No Prisoners (30 page)

~

Makreed was shocked out of his reflections. Instinctively he moved towards her, but she was crouching against the far wall, her eyes fixed on him with feral intensity, her narrow chest moving in time with the harsh sounds of her breathing. He remembered once having come across a motto that read "Touch not the cat, but with a glove." He eased himself back out of range.

"Are you OK?" he said after a while, carefully modulating his voice so that it was as unobtrusive as possible.

"Sod off."

Another extended silence between them. She wasn't any longer panting in those great tormented gusts, but she was still breathing more loudly than he was. He remembered her admonitions to him about the need to conserve the air in this confined space, and found that his lips were beginning to curl into a smile.

Eventually he spoke again.

"Did the box give you some kind of a shock? Are the boxes dangerous?"

"No. Yes."

"Ah ..."

"No, it didn't shock me. Yes, they're dangerous. Not dangerous to you, perhaps. I would guess you don't dream very often."

"What are you talking about?"

"The boxes are dangerous to me. At least, that one is. I don't want you here. Go away."

"If I could do that, neither of us'd be here at all." He gestured with his torch at the walls surrounding them. Then, in an attempt to reassure her, he manoeuvred himself on hands and buttocks until he was an extra meter or so further away from her.

She moved her hands in a small gesture of gratitude, an empty recognition of courtesy. He could still feel the hatred radiating from her.

"What happened?" he asked softly. "It wouldn't hurt you to tell me what happened."

"I don't want to talk about it. Only ... could you please turn your torch away so that the light doesn't reflect on your face?"

Puzzled, he obeyed, directing the beam into what he thought of as a neutral corner.

"Is that better?"

"Much. Thanks."

There was just enough stray light on her that he could see her shudder. He shifted uncomfortably on the hard floor.

"Can I help?" he said.

"No. No one can. For now. Maybe later – I just don't know that. But not now. Certainly not now."

~

She didn't know what she could say to him. She had always been fairly good at reading body language, so that she usually had a reasonably clear idea of other people's unspoken thoughts. Sometimes she got it wrong, of course, and that could be embarrassing, but most often she was uncannily accurate. On several occasions she had had very good reason to be grateful to the ability.

She pulled her spectacles off her nose, and the poorly lit chamber became a reassuring dim blur. For a few moments she let all knowledge of Makreed's existence drop out of her awareness and appraised her situation.

This was worse – much worse – than anything she could have imagined. The box, with its intrusive "closeness" to her, had made new linkages in her mind, or maybe they'd always been there but she'd consciously or unconsciously left them neglected, like a dark alley down which, although it would shorten the journey, one chooses not to go. Now she had no option but to go down all the alleys.

Makreed changed his position again and, even though the movement represented just a tiny change in the fuzz of her vision, it conveyed to her precisely his emotions and to a great extent also his conscious thoughts. There was bafflement, of course – but she could have guessed that much; she must, as far as he was concerned, be acting in a completely irrational, inexplicable way. There was also a fair measure of irritated impatience, directed both towards her and towards the situation in which he found himself trapped. Fear; there was no obvious indication that they'd be able to escape from this place before the air ran out. And then there was ... her mind recoiled. He was also wondering, in a curiously unwilling affectionate way, how to suggest to her it might be good if the two of them made love.

Now?

Here?

With
him
?

Was he nuts?

And then she found herself smiling. She didn't want to make love with Makreed – here or anywhere else – but the mere fact he was thinking along these lines was oddly cheering. And there was sufficient genuine affection in his thoughts that it might be possible for her to explain to him the changes the box had wrought in her mind. It had been a very long time since she'd wanted to share any part of her burdens with another human being. It would be a relief to do so now. She could have been stuck here with companions a lot less sympathetic than Makreed.

"No," she said abruptly, "I don't want us to make love."

He made a small startled movement. There was a little guilt in it, and she regretted that. There was no reason for him to have to feel guilty.

She explained as much to him, and then went on to tell him all the rest of it.

~

"Telepathy," he said at last. He'd taken yet another shot of the painkiller, and his speech was beginning to slur a little.

"No, I don't mean that at all," she snapped, then wished she'd been able to keep the worst of the acerbity out of her voice. As if to divert attention, she picked at the nails of her foot, fastidiously discarding the detritus on the floor beside her. "No," she said more calmly, "it's not at all like telepathy. Shine your torch into your face – just for a moment – and I'll tell you why this is so different."

Makreed found himself reluctant to obey. Had she asked him to strip naked he would have felt the same sort of reluctance. He was aware he had already come to regard Mouse as a person who was very special; only an hour ago he had rather disliked her, and until a few hours before that he'd dismissed her as a nonentity. He was by no means confident she'd experienced the same shift in affection towards him. She might look at his nakedness and not like what she saw – not have the willingness to forgive the fleshly bulges. She might be unable not to laugh at him.

He was aghast at his insecurity; he thought it was something that he'd lost long ago, after the first time he'd slept with Direna and he'd been for once impotent from nerves, and it hadn't mattered. The women he'd slept with since the split with Direna had never produced this sort of reaction; he guessed, now, that he hadn't really cared about them enough as people to worry what they thought about him. But Mouse was a person. And she was asking him to bare himself to her in a much more intimate way than sheer physical nakedness. He didn't know if he could.

He decided the issue by pointing the torch so briefly onto his face that the light scarcely had time to touch his features. He let out a great sigh of relief as his eyes tried to accommodate to the gloom once more.

"If I were a telepath," Mouse was saying, "I'd be able to tell you the name of your ex-whilemate. No. Hang on. She's still your whilemate. The two of you haven't got round to divorcing each other yet. Anyway, even though there's no way I can tell her name, I
can
read that you're still missing her – not to mention the child, I'm pretty certain it's a son, you had with her. You liked kicking a football around with your child and generally being a father; that's the main thing you miss about your child."

Makreed couldn't stop a thin little hiss of pain. He'd thought he'd finally persuaded himself to forget about Branden except as a sort of abstract fact. Now he saw a moving portmanteau image composed of freckles and bruised knees and shitty nappies – that had been a
long
time ago, surely – and, yes, just like Mouse had said, kicking a ball around. He wanted to see Branden's face, but the image vanished too swiftly.

He wished he could remember for himself what Branden's face looked like.

"I'm sad for you," Mouse continued, not looking up. By now she'd moved on to the toes of her other foot.

"In what sense?" he said at last. Keeping the words calm hurt him more than his injury had done.

"Oh, I don't know. In your attitude toward me. In your attitude toward other people – especially women. I was able to read from your face that you still yearn after your lost whilemate, even though nowadays you never let yourself think so. That's a pity. You've been like an alcoholic or a junkie ever since, except it's been with sex. Each new fix is vaguely pleasurable but it doesn't give you the kind of transcendental high you think it
ought
to, so you keep on going, taking another fix and another and another, each time expecting that
this
time it's going to be everything you ever hoped it might be."

She wasn't looking at him now.

"If you want my advice," she added, "I suggest you try to get things together with your whilemate again."

"Direna," he heard himself say. "That's her name."

For several long seconds he toyed with vivid fantasies of killing Mouse. She'd said the boxes were dangerous to her, not to him. Then the anger ebbed, leaving behind it a glow of some emotion he couldn't readily identify.

"Why did the box affect you this much?"

"Because it brought me to the edge of what I am," she said, very quietly. "Because it made me face up to the fact that we're extremely unlikely to get out of here. You. Me. The cusp of the two of us."

"The box has given you something?"

"Too true."

"Could it maybe give you that something again? More than that. Could it tell you how we might get out of this fucking place?"

He picked up a handful of dust from the floor and threw it away from him – a pointless gesture that made him feel better. He was cleansing himself of the memories of Direna, and Branden. Direna hadn't just left him, she'd left him for somebody else, with whom she was manifestly much happier. In a moment of honesty, before the memory died, he admitted to himself what Mouse had been unable to read in his face: that he'd rather Direna had died.

"Yes, I think it might," said Mouse. It took him a second or two to realize she was talking about the box. "But I don't want to try."

"Aw, for ..."

"It
touched
me," said Mouse.

He snorted theatrically, consciously revitalizing the fading embers of his anger. "And that's more important than getting us out?"

"In some circumstances, yes."

Her voice was very small, but he chose to ignore that.

"You're so kind," he said. "If you want to die, that's your affair. I'd rather like to try to keep on living. Do you think the box would speak to me?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because the box loves me, and it doesn't love you."

"Thanks."

"Sorry."

"Do you think," he said with heavy sarcasm, "I might be permitted to ask the box's opinion?"

Makreed hauled himself forwards, letting the beam of his torch wander where it wanted to. He threw himself onto the box beside Mouse, wrapping both of his arms around it, and waited for it to speak to him.

Nothing.

The box was an inert lump of metal, just as he'd known it would be. It was like all the other boxes he'd touched down here in the complex.

"All right," he said resentfully, after a long while, "the only way we can hope to get these doors open is if you speak to the box a little while longer. I can't do it."

"Yes."

"So go on."

"No."

"Why not?" Makreed saw the torchlight beginning to whirl around his head. He was so weakened by the cumulative effect of the throbbing from his foot and the liberal shots of painkiller that it had become difficult for him to concentrate any longer on the argument. Frustration with the box's muteness – he realized this was sapping him as well. All he desired in the universe was to be a long way away from here and never to have to come back again.

"I think I'd rather even screw with you than go near that box again," said Mouse matter-of-factly.

"Wow. Thanks again. Really flattering. A nice thought to take with me into the afterlife."

"You don't believe in the afterlife," she said. He noticed she was wearing her spectacles again. Her eyes seemed very alive. Her face was crumpled with what he recognized as pain. It must be hurting her to look at his undiluted emotions.

"No," he said. "I don't."

"Neither do I."

"Then aren't you as frightened of death as I am?"

"No. Believing there isn't an afterlife makes me quite a lot
less
frightened of death."

He gave an odd, coughing laugh. "So death's less frightening than the prospect of having sex with me."

"Quite significantly less frightening," she said. "I'm not trying to insult you, or hurt you in any way: it's just a truth. For me. The lack's in me, not you. And both of them are as nothing compared with touching that box again – letting it touch me."

Then he saw the lines of her face distort yet further as she continued to read his face.

"Oh, hell," she whispered. "I didn't realize anybody's life could be that important to them."

And:

~

It had been very atavistic of her; she had realized this even at the time, but it was just the fact that Daan had been screwing around that had made Qinefer flee from him, throwing him right out of her life. If she'd thought about it for a little while longer she might have recognized that he was one of those people who simply wasn't monogamous. This wasn't any particular failing in him; it was simply the way that he was – and the way she had herself been before she'd met him. Thereafter she'd assumed their whilemateship involved a sexual fidelity that even at the time she'd known was logically indefensible; for his part, he'd assumed that it was a spiritual fidelity they'd promised. And he'd kept his promise, but she'd ignored this in her strictly unnecessary preoccupation with the fact that he'd found a need to have sex with another woman – even just as "a scientific experiment."

Now, as she reached for the box, she began to accept that, in a curious kind of a way, it had been her who'd been the adulterer, her who'd broken the oath of fidelity.

But now, a fraction of a second later, as she actually touched the box she realized how that was all wrong. Daan had been one of life's shits. She'd been well rid of him.

Her new lover, she suddenly began to understand, was herself – and always would be.