Too Like the Lightning (15 page)

Dominic smiled as he saw her dark eyes catch upon the sword, and he caressed its black hilt. “When I catch the perpetrator, you can petition to have them tried under Humanist Law, but
Black Sakura
has already recommended a Romanovan panel. I would go with that, if I were you, their penalties tend to sting much more than yours. Shall I begin downstairs?”

Lesley shook herself to fight off the surreality of it all. “What do you mean you keep the peace among the gods?”

Dominic gave a deeper smile, with a soft sound, almost like a purr, deep in his throat. “I mean that, when the Seven-Ten lists are printed, there will be no name in top seven whose house and office I do not frequent. I mean that your President Ganymede is quick to call me when a crisis needs declawing, and all other Hive leaders do the same. I mean that I am how these sensitive matters are settled, are always settled, and I shall settle this one. Martin is the partner of my labors, but is too gentle to impress on people what it is we really do. We keep the peace among those gods who govern those of you who choose to have a government.” Again he grasped her like a dancing partner, caressing the small of her back and using her weight for his own spin as he bounded toward the steps, lithe as a show horse. “I'll start downstairs, shall I? Out of your way?”

Lesley charged after him. “Hold on. I need to know exactly what you'll be doing, step by step.”

He paused on the top landing. “The carpet is torn on this stair. You should have that seen to, someone could trip and fall.”

“What will you be doing? Imaging? Scanning? Viewing files?”

“Sniffing about, I told you. I'm here for the smell and taste of things. Have you any enemies?”

“No,” Lesley answered instantly, then paused. “You asked that before. What do you mean?”

“Anyone who would like to see your lives disrupted for personal reasons, rather than the obvious financial and political ones? A jilted lover? Family of a crash victim who blames you? A hobby competitor, perhaps? Sport? Someone the famous Sniper keeps defeating?”

Sane questions calmed her. “Not that I can think of. No one's been particularly upset by any crashes in the last few years.”

He darted back up toward her, testing a vent with his fingertip, and in the same motion trapped her between his body and the wall. “No old rivals? No one wronged in an affair?”

Lesley's eyes went wide, the change exaggerated by their Chinese contours. But something kept her from shoving him back. “No.”

Dominic leaned even closer, caressing the grating above Lesley's head, his chest not quite brushing hers. “Your spouse is work-obsessed.” He smiled, tasting her breath and letting her taste his. “Have you had affairs?”

Blush bloomed on Lesley's cheeks. Is it a sin in your morality, reader, for a married person to admire the body of a stranger? Is she less entitled to recognize the beauty of firm buttocks, or the motions of a practiced hand? And, if you do consider it a sin, then am I right that this scene—virile Dominic with Lesley's small frame pressed against his, breast to breast—is more exciting for you because it is forbidden? Confess, reader. Something in you hungers for transgression here.
Show me, Mycroft! Strip that antique costume from the flesh beneath. Show me whether this she-man wears a strap-on, and if so have him use it! This woman Lesley, doomed from childhood to be the prize for rivals Ockham and Ojiro, let her revenge herself on them by cuckolding the victor here. Let them do it against the wall, or upstairs, with
Mukta
looking on! And, for contrast, throw in limp Eureka and Sidney lounging in the background, blind in their permanent masturbation with the computer!
It was in your mind, reader, was it not? Complete with my ‘he's and ‘she's which have infected you by now. But feel no guilt. It was in Lesley's mind as well, placed there by Dominic, who can summon more of the heat of pornography with a single gesture than I could with a thousand words. Like Princesse Danaë, reader, he trains.

I have no time, Mycroft, for these, thine interruptions, thy speculations, thy Patriarch, thy Hobbes. My fantasy is not thy business; give me truth. What did they do?

Lesley pressed herself back against the wall, gaining an inch of breathing room. “As a matter of fact, I haven't.”

Dominic's eyes did not believe. “This is an open bash', yes? How many of your unmarried ba'sibs date outside the bash'? Any angry ex-lovers?”

Lesley is herself uncomfortable with the fact that her very sensible impulse to kick this Blacklaw in the nuts did not recur. “Cato's not interested, but Thisbe has some angry exes, yes, and the twins might too. It's hard to track what the twins get up to, but they're always dating at least two people between them, usually more.”

“I see.” Dominic shifted his stance, just brushing the side of her thigh with his half-hidden scabbard. “And are there rivalries within the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash'?” he asked. “Everyone's content with who does what work, who takes what shifts, who sleeps with whom?”

“Everyone's content. Ockham and I monitor it all very carefully.”

His smile widened as he leaned close enough to savor her shampoo. “All nine of you get along perfectly all the time, like little angels?”

Perhaps one as strong as Lesley did not tremble. “Bash'mates squabble, it's healthy. I said we monitor it carefully.”

He retreated a few inches, testing whether her flesh would follow his. “You and Monsieur Sidney Koons are exceptions, but the other seven were all born in this bash', yes? Seven children, and none of them wanted to go form a new bash' with Campus friends like a normal twentysomething? That's very unusual.”

Her flesh did follow his, though possibly just to ease away from the wall. “We like our work.”

“And who's the weakest link in your bash'?” His fingers brushed the soft underside of her forearm. “If I were a criminal, whom would I want to grab and torture? Who would break first?”

The touch of skin on skin was too much, broke the spell somehow, and Lesley scowled, pressing him away. “I thought you said you were going to look at the house before you asked us questions.”

“That I did, Madame. My apologies.” Dominic darted back at once, down the steps quick as a dragonfly. “I'll start down here, shall I?” He threw wide the door of Thisbe's room before Lesley could reply. “There's someone in here, Madame, did you know that? Not one of your bash'.”

“What?”

Dominic grasped his sword hilt as he filled the doorway. “Explain yourself.”

“I'm waiting for Thisbe,” came a timid voice from below. “I'm their sensayer.” It was Carlyle, reader, mercifully it was Carlyle, back again with a fresh round of questions. But it could as easily have been the child.

“Right!” Lesley cried, “I'd forgotten they were back again.”

“Sensayer?” Dominic repeated.

“Yes. Can I help you?” Carlyle approached, his pale face beaming energy, for he had risen full of strength that day, since March the twenty-fourth was the feast of the Norse god Heimdall, a day on which men had honored their Creator in ages past, and still do today.

Dominic read Carlyle's body as a butcher scans the contours of a pig. “You're a sensayer?”

“You too, I see.” Carlyle nodded to the scarf on Dominic's shoulders. “Are you a set-set specialist? Eureka Weeksbooth was hoping for one.”

Dominic stared, eyes marking the contours of Carlyle's face, the sharp blue of his eyes. “What's your name, Cousin?” He pronounced it like the French feminine
cousine
.

“Carlyle Foster.”

“Carlyle Foster?”

“Yes. Is something wrong?”

“How old are you?”

Carlyle is—like Dominic and Lesley—in that medically extended stretch of youth that makes it impossible to distinguish eighteen from thirty-eight. “Twenty-eight. Why do you ask?”

“And … you're a sensayer?”

“Yes.” The Gag-gene dug his fingers into his wrap, patterned today with abstract elephants in white on blue. “Is something wrong?”

Dominic's laugh is complex. It begins with silence, a stare which drags out for a few seconds before the first breath comes, almost a hiccup, then more silence before the next, the next, staccato gasps closer and closer until finally the voice and bitter smile arrive together as Dominic throws his head back into a climactic thirsty gasp. Carlyle shivered when he described the experience to me, and compared it to how he imagines John Calvin might have laughed as he witnessed some atrocity, smug at finding proof that this fallen world was truly as despicable as his sermons taught. Carlyle tried, he said, to ask what was so funny, whether he had done something wrong, but the horror of the laugh kept killing his words before they could take wing. In the end Dominic answered only with the merciful command, “Get out.”

“What?”

“Get out of this room. You're distracting me from my investigation, Carlyle Foster.” He laughed again, as if the name revealed some new double entendre on second hearing. “Get out before I change my mind. You can wait for your Thisbe upstairs.”

Carlyle was quickly herded out into the stairwell, and almost tumbled into Lesley as Dominic sealed Thisbe's door behind him. To my knowledge, not even Martin has ever witnessed Dominic searching a room, so powerful is his preference for solitude. How does he work? By simple sight and touch? A concealed machine? By scent perhaps, the insanity of his devotion driving his mind to develop that sense which feels most right for such a creature? Can you imagine him, reader, on his knees, boot-leather creaking as he sniffs the carpet centimeter by centimeter? He answers happily enough to
Canis Domini,
Hound of the Lord, the old pun on Domini-cani, the Dominican monks who hunted truth and heresy in Heaven's name and that of their great founder. Whatever Dominic's technique, it misses nothing, not a hair, not a stain, not the handprint of a five-centimeter soldier on the barrel of a marker I forgot to wipe.

“Who was that?” Carlyle asked outside, still staring at the door.

“Dominic S-something.” Lesley was still short of breath, but she turned a smile on Carlyle, as the two found themselves united by mutual bewilderment. “Is it just me, or is that the weirdest person you've ever met?”

“I'm something of a specialist, so I meet some odd people, but that was certainly in the top ten for weird.”

She chuckled as she offered him a hand. “We haven't met. I'm Lesley Saneer.”

He matched her smile. “Nice to meet you, Member Saneer.”

“Lesley, please.”

“Lesley,” Carlyle repeated. “I think … I think I remember hearing about a Blacklaw sensayer called Dominic. You don't forget a name like that.”

“What did you hear about them?”

“Not much. I think they're well thought of by the Conclave.”

She stared. “Why?”

“I could ask.”

“Please do.”

He started composing a message through his tracker.

Lesley too shot off quick messages, to Ockham, Martin, two security captains, and her President's office, to make sure this improbable creature really was dispatched by Romanova. All would answer yes. “I don't know whether it would feel normal for another Blacklaw, but I don't want someone like that as my sensayer.”

“My guess is they're a gadfly specialist. Some sensayers practice a special, aggressive style so you can do a one-time session with them if you really want to be pushed to the core, and then you and your usual sensayer work on the new questions it raises. The Blacklaw mystique would certainly work to enhance the feeling of danger.”

Lesley, who had tasted more deeply of Dominic's ‘aggressive style,' frowned.

Carlyle mustered his most energetic smile. “Speaking of returning to your usual sensayer, would you like to talk about whether or not there's some kind of divinity or divine force in the universe?”

Lesley laughed, a warm and healthy laugh, healing for both of them. “Sure, why not. We're supposed to have a session soon anyway, we can get it over with. Good way to pass the time while we wait for that creature to get out of my house.” Her feet strayed kitchenward. “Come have some figs. One of the twins was on a crazy fig kick when they programmed the tree last month, so we've got a zillion more than we'll ever eat.”

Together, armed with kitchen warmth and metaphysics, the two spent a good hour erasing the after-chill of their encounter. They did not see Dominic again, they said. Nor did the others in the bash'. He might have searched just Thisbe's room, or he might passed through the whole house, silent as a plague. Either way, he vanished without another question.

 

C
HAPTER THE
EIGHTH

A Place of Honor

Martin:
“Mycroft, thanks for calling back. Supposedly there was a device you had, that you used to disrupt the trackers and make it seem you were one place when you went another.”

I:
“I know the one you mean,
Nepos.
The Gyges Device, called Canner Device by many.”

We spoke Latin, reader, or rather its gentled grandchild, Masonic neo-Latin, stripped of irregulars, but close enough to its imperial progenitor to invoke grand capitals and ancient marbles. I always cringe when I must translate Hive or strat tongues into common English for you, but it is worse with Martin, knowing that he thinks so differently in the two tongues, and cringes himself when he sees his words, conceived in the Imperial tongue, mangled by the vulgar. I will translate, to help you understand, but I have begged permission to leave in Latin words whose English sense is intolerably wrong. Take for example
Nepos,
this title of honor which marks Martin as the student, servant, intimate, and protégé of his Emperor, trusted even to sign laws and contracts in the Emperor's name. To render
Nepos
as ‘Nephew' for you would be one part translation, three parts lie.