The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories (44 page)

Katarina rose to embrace Tonio. I watched as she molded her body to his.

"I am primed, lover mine," Tonio said.

"So am I."

I showed them to the door. "Thank you, Captain," Andrew said, and with an expression like someone passing gas at a funeral, handed me a tip in an envelope.

I looked at the envelope.
This
had never happened before.

"See you later, compeer," Tonio grinned.

"You bet."

I watched them walk toward their waiting transport, arms around each other's waists. People stared. Wary guards circled them. Eldridge and his people were long gone.

I decided it was time to buy and stow a lot of rations. A year's worth at least.

For two fools, running.

 

But first I wanted to celebrate the fact that I now possessed more money than I'd ever had in my life, even if you didn't count my tip—which was two thousand, by the way, an inept attempt to buy my silence. I couldn't make up my mind whether Eldridge was going to be a problem or not—if I were him, Katarina would have scared the spleen right out of me, but I didn't know Eldridge well enough to know how stubborn or stupid he was.

While I considered this, it occurred to me to wonder how many years it had been since I'd had a planet under my feet.

Too many, I thought.

I opened my safe and put Tonio's emerald ring in my pocket—no sense in leaving it behind for people like Eldridge to find—and then I followed in the footsteps of Tonio and Katrina and took the next ride down the grapevine to Downside. I looked for tourist resorts and exotic sights, and though I discovered there were none of the former, there were plenty of the latter. There were mountains, gorges, and colossal wildlife—the chemical bonding of the local Probability led to plants, even those with Earth genetics, running amok. I saw rose blossoms bigger than my head, and with a smell like vinegar—chemistry not quite right, you see. Little pine trees grew to the size of Douglas firs. Socorro's internal workings had thrust huge reefs of nearly pure minerals right out of the ground, many of which the miners had not yet begun to disassemble and carry away. For a brief time, wearing a protective raincoat, breathing apparatus, and crinkly plastic overshoes, I walked on the Whitewashed Desert that surrounded Mount Cyanide. I bathed in the Red Sea. Then the Green Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the Winedark Sea. The Yellow Sea stained my skin for days. It looked as if I were dying of cirrhosis.

I kept the ring in a special trouser pocket that would open only to a code from my personal adjutant. After a while I got used to the feel of it, and days went by before I remembered it was there.

I'd brought my aurora. Along the way there was music, bars, and happy moments. I met women named Meimei, Sally June, and Soda. We had good times together. None of them died, went crazy, or slit their wrists.

Carried away by the sheer carefree joy of it all, I began to think of going back to the
Olympe
and sailing away on the sea of Probability. Tonio was probably still happy with Katarina, and I could leave with his blessing.

I would be safe. Shawn wasn't after
me
. And Tonio, provided he stayed put, would be as safe as he ever was, probably safer.

I contemplated this possibility for a few too many days, because one morning I woke from a dense, velvety dream to the birdlike tones of my adjutant. I told it to answer.

"Compeer," said Tonio. "Wherewhich art thou?"

"Shadows and fog," I said, because the voice seemed to be coming from my dream.

"There's a party on the morrow. Come and share it with me. Katarina would be delighted to see you."

I'll bet
, I thought.

 

The hotel looked like a hovership that had stranded itself on land, a series of swoops and terraces, surrounded by cypress trees the size of skyscrapers, with gardenias as long as my leg tumbling brightly down from the balconies. Katarina had installed Tonio and his rucksack in a five-room suite and given him an expense account that, so far, he'd been unable to dent.

Tonio greeted me as I stepped into the suite. His blue eyes sparkled with joy. He looked well-scrubbed and well-tended, and his hair was sleek.

"Did you bring your aurora, Gaucho?" he said. "Let us repair to a suitable location, with drinks and the like, and partake of heavenly music."

"I thought we were going to a party."

"That is later. Right now we've got to have you measured for clothes."

A tailor with a double chin and a pony tail stepped out of a side room, had me take off my jacket, and got my measurements with a laser scriber. He vanished. Tonio led me out of the apartment and down a confusing series of stairs and lifts to a sub-basement garage. Empty space echoed around us, supported by fluted pillars with lotus-leaf capitals. Tonio whispered a code into his adjutant and turbines began their soft whine somewhere in the darkness. Spotlights flared. A blazemobile came whispering toward us on its cushion of air. I felt its breath on my face and hands. The colors were grey and silver, blending into each other as if they were somehow forged together. The lines were clean and sharp. It looked purposeful as a sword.

"Nice," I said. "Is this Katarina's?" I had a hard time not calling her
Miss Pryor.

"It's mine," Tonio said. "Katarina purchased it for me after, ah, the incident."

I looked at him.

"There was a misunderstanding about another vehicle," Tonio said. "I thought I had the owner's permission to take it."

Ah, I thought. One of
those
misunderstandings.

"Are you driving?" I asked.

"Why don't you drive? You're better than I am."

I settled into the machine gingerly. It folded around me like a piece of origami. Tonio settled into the passenger seat. I drove the car with care till I got out of town, then let the turbines off their leash, and we were soon zooming down a highway under the system's fluorescing, shivering smear of a sun, huge jungle growth on either side of the road turning the highway into a tunnel beneath vines and wild, drooping blossoms.

"There's another car behind us," I said, looking at the displays. I was surprised it could keep up.

"That would be Katarina's security," Tonio said. "It is a mark of her love. They follow me everywhere, to render me safe."

And to prevent, I thought, any of those misunderstandings about who owns what.

A blissful smile crossed Tonio's face. "Katharine and I are so in love," he said. "I sing her to sleep every night."

The thought of Tonio crooning made me smile. "That sounds great," I said.

"We wish to have many babies, but there are complicatories."

"Like her husband?"

"He is obstacular, yiss, but the principal problem is legal."

It turned out that Katarina did not legally own her own womb, as well as other parts, which were part of the Pryor family trust. She could not become pregnant without the permission of certain high-ranking members of her line, who alone knew the codes that would unlock her fertility.

"That's . . . not the usual problem," I said, stunned. I don't know much about how the big corporate gene lines work, but this seemed extreme even for them.

"Can you hire a surrogate?" I asked. "Use an artificial womb?"

"It's not the same." He cast a glance over his shoulder. "Those individuals behind us—mayhap you can outspeed them?"

"I'll try."

I set the jets alight. My vision narrowed with acceleration, but oxygen still blazed in my blood. Alarms began to chirp. The vehicle trailing us fell back, but before long we came to a town and had to slow.

It was a sad little mining town, covered with the dust of the huge magnesite reef that loomed over the town. Vast movers were in the process of disassembling the entire formation, while being careful not to ignite it and incinerate the entire county.

Tonio pointed to a bar called the Reefside. "Pull in here, compeer. Mayhap we may discover refreshment."

The bar sat on its tracks, ready to move to another location when the last chunk of magnesite was finally carried away. I put the blazemobile in a side street so as not to attract attention to ourselves. We climbed up into the bar and blinked in its dark, musty-scented interior. We had arrived during an off-peak period and only a few faces stared back at us.

We huffed some gas and shared a bag of crisps. After ten minutes the security detail barged in, two broad-shouldered, clean-cut, thick-necked young men in city suits. After they saw us, one went back outside, and the other ordered fruit juice.

The regulars stared at him.

I asked the bartender if it was all right to play my aurora.

"You can if you want," he said, "but if the music's shit, I'll tell you to stop."

"That's fair," I said. I opened the case and adjusted the sonics for the room and put the aurora against my shoulder and touched the strings. A chord hung in the air, with just a touch of sourness. The bartender frowned. I tuned and began to play.

The bartender turned away with a grudging smile. I made the aurora sound like chimes, like drums, like brass. Our fellow drinkers began to bob their heads and call for the bartender to refill their glasses. One gent bought us rounds of beer.

The shift changed at the diggings and miners spilled in, their clothes dusty, their respirators hanging loose around their necks. Some were highly specialized gene types, with sleek skin and implants for remote control of heavy equipment. Others were generalized humans, like us. One woman had lost an arm in an accident, and they were growing it back—it was a formless pink bud on the end of her shoulder.

I played my aurora. I played fierce, then slow. The miners nodded and grinned and tapped their boots on the grainy plastic floor. The security man clung unhappily to his glass of fruit juice. I played angry, I played tender, I played the sound of birds in the air and bees in their hive. Tonio borrowed a cap from one of the diggers and passed it around. It came back full of money, which he stuffed in my pockets.

My fingers and mind were numb, and I paused for a moment. There was a round of applause, and the diggers called for more refreshment. A few others asked who we were, and I told them we were off a ship and just traveling around the country.

Tonio had a blazing white grin on his face. "It is
spectacular!"
he said. "This is the true joy!"

"More than with Katarina?"

He shrugged. "With Katarina it is sensational, but she is terribly occupied, and I don't know anyone else in this coincidence of spacetime. People fear to be in my vicinity, and when I corner one they only speak to me because they are afraid of Katarina. I have nothing in my day but to wait for Katarina to come home."

"Can't she give you a job? Make you her secretary, maybe?"

"She has Andrew."

"Her social secretary, then." I couldn't help but laugh at the idea.

He gave a big grin. "
She
knows the social rules, yiss. I am signally lacking in that area of expertise."

"You could be a prospector. Travel around looking for minerals or whatever."

"For this task they have satellites and artificial intelligences." He gazed for a long moment off into nowhere. "I am filled with gladness that you came to see me, Gaucho."

"I'm glad I came." Though I'm not certain I was telling the truth.

Tonio was getting bored with his life with Katarina. A bored Tonio was a dangerous Tonio.

We talked and drank with the miners till Tonio said it was time to leave. Our guard was relieved to follow us out of the bar. His partner had been guarding our blazemobile all this time.

We were both too drunk to drive, so we got in the car and told the autopilot to take us home. Once we arrived, I had a fitting from the tailor, who had run up my suit while we were off enjoying ourselves. I had this deep blue outfit, all spider silk, with lots of gold braid on my cuffs.

"What's this?" I asked Tonio.

"You are my captain," he said, "and now you are dressed like one."

"I feel ridiculous," I said.

"Wait till you see what
I
am compelled to wear."

The tailor adjusted the suit, then gave me the codes so that I could alter the fit of the suit if I wanted to, or add a pocket here or there. In the meantime Tonio changed. His suit was the latest mode, with ruffles and fringes that seemed to triple the volume of his thin body. He looked unusual, but he carried himself with his usual jaunty style, as if he wanted it made clear to everyone that he was only
pretending
to be the person in the suit.

Katarina arrived and wrapped herself around Tonio without caring if I was there or not. I was reminded of my little limpet-girl Étoile.

Katarina began tearing at Tonio's ruffles and fringes. They went off to the bedroom for a lust break. I went out onto the balcony and watched the sun set over the jade forest. The sweet smell of flowers rose on the twilight air.

Tonio and Katarina returned. She wore a dark lacy sheath that was as simple as Tonio's suit was elaborate. Gemstones glittered sunset-red about her neck, and a languid post-coital glow seemed to float around her like a halo. I could feel sweat prickling my forehead at her very presence.

"You're looking very well, Captain Crossbie," she said.

"You're looking well yourself," I said. There was a bit more regard in her glance than I usually got. I wondered if Tonio had been telling her stories that made me seem, well, interesting.

We went to the party, which was in the same building. It celebrated the fact that some production quota or other had been exceeded, and the room was full of Pryors and their minions. Katarina took Tonio's arm and pressed herself to him all night, making it clear they were a couple.

The place was filled with people who were perfectly perfect, perfect everywhere from their dress to their genetics. All the talk I heard was of business, and complex business at that. If I'd been a spy sent by the competition, I would have heard a lot, but it would have been opaque to me.

Don't let anyone tell you that people like the Pryors don't work for their riches and power. They do nothing else.