The Crystal Variation (87 page)

“I don’t know it’s exactly ‘gainst their wills,” Cantra said judiciously. “There’s books and ‘quations and agreeable work to be had inside, nor Wellik isn’t shy of sharing. Last time I saw your brother, for an instance, he had six scrolls open and a notepad to hand. Can’t remember when I saw a man look so content.”

“I can scarcely,” the Uncle said, letting the reference to Arin pass with no more than a hard look, “knock on the gate of that garrison and offer myself up for arrest.”

“‘Course not,” she said soothingly, and looked up as a shadow moved in the side of her eye, expecting to see the bartender.

What she did see was less welcome.

One of the patrons who had been so politely tending their own business at the center table was staring hard and ugly at the Uncle—or say, Cantra amended, putting her glass down and pushing slightly away from the table—at his shirt.

“Smartstrands,” she growled, in just that tone of revulsion an honest trader reserves for the announcement of pirates on the for’ard screens. She snatched, the Uncle twisted, shoving his chair back and away, surprisingly quick—and a good move it would’ve been, too, if the chair hadn’t got snarled up in his cloak.

Over he went with a clatter and a bang while Cantra was up and spinning, figuring that now looked like a good time to leave, except there was the offended woman’s mate planting himself in front of her, and the shout going up behind—

“Smartstrands!
Kenake
spies are among us!”

YOU DID WELL
, she murmured at the core of their shared being,
to bind the lines
.

Ah, no, credit me not
, he answered with a ripple of green-and-ebon laughter.
Merely, I aligned conditions. The lines bound themselves.

A quibble, but you may have the point. Now the question: Is it enough?

He opened their awareness, allowing them to fully experience the galaxy: the luminescence of the ley lines, the singing of the spheres; the warmth of life; the encroaching, echoless perfection of the Iloheen’s desire.

We will know the answer
, he whispered;
soon
.

“Cantra yos’Phelium?”
The lawkeeper behind the fines desk spared him a single disinterested glance before looking back to his screen.

“Ah, yes . . .” He murmured after a moment, and there was slightly more interest in his eyes when he honored Tor An with a second glance. “Bail is set at two flan.”

Great gods. With an effort, Tor An kept his horror from reaching his face. He inclined his head, buying time, congratulating himself, that he had thought to bring the pouch containing the astonishing amount of money Captain Wellik had assured him was the sum of the gambling debts he had owed to Jela.

“The amount,” he said, with perfect truth, “is significant. With what crime is the pilot charged?”

The lawkeeper grinned, and tapped his screen with a finger-tip, as if it held a most excellent joke.

“Brawling in a public place,” he read, with relish. “Damage to public goods. Damage to private goods. Damage to the person of one Kellebi sig’Ralis. Swearing in a public place. Resisting detention. And,” he concluded, “creating a nuisance.”

“I . . . see.” He sighed to himself, slipped the required coins from their pocket and placed them on the counter in front of the lawkeeper. The man glanced down, then up, holding Tor An’s eye with an insolence that set his teeth on edge.

“Of course,” he murmured, and added a qwint to the sum. The lawkeeper grunted, perhaps not best pleased, but the qwint disappeared, and the two flan were deposited into a slot in the counter.

“The claim against Cantra yos’Phelium has been retired,” he said into the air. “Pray escort her to the bail room.” He gave Tor An a squint. “She’ll be up directly,” he said, and turned back to his screen.

Tor An looked about for a chair, then spun as a door in the wall to the left of the counter opened to admit a guard leading a woman in damp and rumpled trade clothes, a cut across her left cheek, her right eye swollen shut. Her hands were bound together before her, her knuckles raw. The guard stopped, blinked, and spoke over her shoulder to her captive.

“
This
is your co-pilot?”

“That’s right,” Cantra yos’Phelium said, her as voice easy and warm as if she were in the best of health and surrounded by friends.

The guard frowned. “He doesn’t look old enough to hold a license,” she objected. Cantra considered her, one-eyed and bland.

“Looks deceive.” She raised her bound hands suggestively. “Bail’s paid, is what I heard. That means I’m no longer your bidness. Unlatch ‘em.”

The guard looked to the lawkeeper behind the counter, who shrugged.

“He paid two flan for her, so he must want her.” He sent a slow, insolent gaze up and down the pilot’s slim, bedraggled shape, and shrugged again. “No accounting for taste.”

The guard muttered, touched the control on the restraints and whipped them off the pilot’s wrists. It must have hurt her, Tor An thought, but her battered face revealed nothing.

“Let’s go,” she said to him, and walked toward the door, limping slightly off her left leg. Perforce, he followed, nose wrinkling as he caught the odor—the near overpowering odor—of liquor.

THE PILOT WALKED
briskly, despite her limp, and acknowledging his presence at her side by neither word or glance. Tor An kept pace, taking deep breaths to calm his temper—a strategy doomed to failure, as every breath brought him the stench of liquor, which reminder of her lapse only made him angrier.

He told himself it was his place to hold his tongue; that she was his elder in years and in skill; that her reasons and necessities were her own—and hold his tongue he did, until they were at last well away from the lawkeeper’s station, and she turned suddenly aside to enter a public grotto, bending to sip from the elaborate stone-faced cat gracing one of a multitude of fountains.

The grottoes had bemused Tor An in his first days on the planet: who could imagine a place with so much snow and clean water that it could be shared freely—even extravagantly—with casual passersby? Who would have spent the money to build such things?

Curiosity being a pilot’s curse, he’d pursued the question through the amazingly self-centered Solcintra Heritage Library, where events of galactic importance lay near-forgot in favor of High Family histories and genealogies, which was, after all, where the answer was found: The grottoes and fountains were the result of a bitter rivalry between the Families, each bent on showing how much they could do for the public good.

And here, of all things, a
kenake
pilot was using a beautifully hand-carved grotto to wash off the stench of a stay in the jail which had also been funded in that orgy of building.

Cantra straightened, slowly, and looked about her, as if she did not understand where she was or how she had arrived there.

“You are most welcome, Pilot,” he heard himself say, in a voice as cool and formal as anything Aunt Pel might muster to scold an errant younger. “I wonder, though, that you thought to call me to stand your bail.”

Pilot Cantra spared him a one-eyed glance over her shoulder. “I thought you had it that you sat my co-pilot.” She eased herself, carefully, down to sit on the ledge of the wishing pool.

“And I thought you had it,” he snapped, “that I was not!” He glared at her; she raised an eyebrow, and sighed lightly.

“Boy—”

“I am not a boy! And, indeed, Pilot, I believe you have the right of it—I have no ambition to sit as co-pilot to a heedless, drunken, brawling—”

“That’s enough!”

“—who cares so little for those who wish her well that she does not bother to thank them for their care of her!” he finished, ignoring her shout, and more than a little appalled at the words he heard tumbling out of his mouth.

Silence.

Pilot Cantra turned and put her hands into the pool up to the elbow, heedless of her sleeves, and held them there for the count of twelve. That done, she raised water in her cupped hands and splashed her face, sucking breath noisily through her teeth. The worst of the blood and grime rinsed away, she finger-combed her tangled, reeking hair. She did these things with great concentration, as if each task were of the utmost importance. Tor An bit his lip and watched her, ashamed of his outburst, and yet—

She sighed, folded her hands into her lap, and sent a serious one-eyed look into his face.

“Forgive me, Pilot. Manners tend to slide on the Rim, and mine never were shiny. I do appreciate your timely arrival and the payment of the fine on my behalf. I’ll be reimbursing you when we get back to the garrison. I’d make it right between us now, excepting the law on the spot thought to relieve me of my ready-cash before she took me in to the station.”

Tor An drew a breath—she raised her hand, and he bit his lip.

“Now, that list of yours. Heedless, drunken, and brawling, was it?”

“Pilot, I—”

She speared him with a glance. “I’m talking, Pilot.”

He inclined his head. “Forgive me.”

“Right,” she said after a small pause. “Now, it happens I’ll admit I was heedless in this case, and—with stipulations—I’ll even allow that I indulged in some brawling, as you’ll see I did throw a punch or two—” she half-lifted her raw-knuckled hands off her lap— “but drunken I will not have.” She looked down at herself, then back at him, her nose wrinkled slightly. “Despite the evidence. For I’ll not have you believing, Pilot, that I’m so lost to everything civilized as to use Kalfer Shimni in such a wise.”

He cleared his throat. “What happened?” he asked, which is what he should, he told himself bitterly, have said at the first. “If it can be told.”

“I met the Uncle on the port, and I thought he might divert me from an unhappy line of thought,” she said. “Happens he was wearing smartstrands, and a local spied them, whereupon the bar rose up, and the peacekeepers were called to quell the riot.” She grinned, one-sided. “By which time, the Uncle had got himself gone, which I might’ve known he would. And I only got but three sips of my drink.”

“Your uncle left you to—”

She raised a hand. “Not
my
uncle,” she said; “
the
Uncle. Which is more than a pretty, mannered boy from a nice legit family has any need or desire to know about the underside of the galaxy.” Putting her palms flat against the ledge, she pushed herself to her feet, and took a deep breath.

“Let’s go home,” she said. “Pilot.”

Twenty-Six

TWENTY-SIX

Solcintra

HER APARTMENT
within the garrison included a steam-cleaner, which fabulous luxury she was happy to avail herself of, once she’d shaken the kid off her arm, and failed to notice the open amusement on the hall guard’s broad face.

It took three cycles to steam the booze and the sweat and the mad out of her pores, and a fourth to melt the worst of the sting from the various scrapes and bruises. Wasn’t any reason beyond sheer hedonism to trigger the fifth cycle, and she stood there with her eyes closed, picturing the steam easing in through her ears and unkinking what passed for her brain.

Were you bored, Pilot?
Jela asked from too near and too far. She sighed.

“Wasn’t bad enough when I only had one ghost,” she said, trying for cranky and failing notably.

And truth told, he had a point. She knew better than to drink with the Uncle, and she
damn’ well
knew better than to be doing him any favors. Viewed from that angle, it was a rare blessing the local’d took exception to the ‘strands and cried pirate before she’d taken coin whereby to sneak Dulsey and team out from under Wellik’s nose.

The whole of which seemed pointless and worse, with the Enemy’s works increasing exponentially, and nothing mere humans—be they Batch-grown, Series, or natural—might do to say them nay. The sheer numbers of them . . .

She shivered despite the steam, seeing them again, coming up out of the mines in an unending line of black, exultant death; for all their might, the most human—and by their counting, the least—of what the Enemy might field.

She’d seen a world-eater, up close and more personal than anyone’d sane ever want to; she knew the sick feeling in the gut when the ship fell out of transition, light-years short of a port that would never be raised again.

Jela insisted that the Enemy’d been human, once, but even if so, they were something other now. Something powerful and all-encompassing.

Something unbeatable.

Even Jela’d admitted that—and she’d seen plain on his face what it cost him to say so.

Come right down to it, she thought, as the cycle clicked over and the steam began to thin—what was it made human-kind particularly worth preserving and continuing? If the Enemy manufactured biologics and smartworks to do their heavy lifting, how was that different, or worse, than those same things performed by the so-called natural humans of the Spiral Arm? If the Enemy dealt harsh with its creations—well, examine the life of your typical Batcher. And if the Enemy was cruel—measure the cruelty that bred a man alert, sharp, and able, with a taste for life as wide as the Deeps themselves, while making sure and certain he’d die before he could reason his way into damaging his makers in the style they most deserved . . .

She shivered. The steam was gone, the tiles cooling. She had the robe out of the cabinet and shrugged into it, relishing the feel of plush against her skin.

Tying the sash ‘round her waist, she moved from the bath to the great room—and stopped, the hair raising along her arms, breath-caught and heart-clutched—all and any of which was nothing more than missishness.

“You,” she said, and slipped her hands into the robe’s pockets, feeling the ache in her abused knuckles as the fingers curled into fists.

Rool Tiazan turned from the window and bowed, deep and respectful.

“Lady.”

He straightened, lissome and sweet, the red ringlets tumbling across his shoulder, his face ageless and smooth.

“
You
,” she said again, voice harsh in her own ears. She took one deliberate, foolish step forward. “You let him die.”

The dark blue eyes met hers, and she saw there honest sorrow. His voice when he made answer was soft.