Rift (24 page)

He and Marie were coaxed to the table, where the entourage was making short work of a roasted half pig, eating with their hands and gulping wine. Gobs of grease trickled onto the velvet of Isis’ gown, which at this closer view appeared badly stained.

“Now we feast!” proclaimed Dante. “Time enough later to start the engines!”

Isis looked up, managing to lisp even with her mouth full of food: “Fixth the dome home?”

“Yes, my queen,” Dante replied with great tenderness. “So we can live forever.”

Marie glanced at Reeve, her expression frozen in place. At her urging, and with a sinking heart, he joined her as she raised her glass to toast Lord Dante.

•  •  •

In the exact center of the dome a great throng had gathered. Raised faces strained to see Lord Dante atop the tank, a gigantic drum at least a hundred feet high, with a flattened top the size of a small gym. Reeve and his companions stood alongside Dante and Isis as the pair received the cheers of their followers. Between Kalid and Bunyan stood the Whale Clave women, on the opposite side of the drum. On catwalks and scaffolding at two levels above the floor, Dante’s people crowded, some cheering, some silently observing with the demeanor of slaves.

“My jinn!” Dante cried out, holding his arms in front of him and stalking the perimeter of the drum. Reeve hoped he might topple by misstep.

“You will welcome my exalted visitors among you!” bellowed Dante, his voice echoing through the metal labyrinth of the machinery. He gestured for Spar to be brought to the edge next to him. “This one,” he said, gesturing at Spar, “will be known as Quixote!”

“Quixote, Quixote!” the crowd thundered.

He nodded at Marie and she stepped forward, standing next to Spar. “She shall be Medea!”

“Medea!” came the response from below.

Reeve’s turn was next, as he stepped to Dante’s side. “Spaceman!” Dante proclaimed.

A roar of laughter. “Spaceman go home!” someone shouted.

At this Dante frowned, holding up his hands for silence. “No! This
is
his home. The dome home!”

“Dome home,” came the echo from many throats.

Dante turned to Loon. As the guard shoved her forward, Dante edged away from her slightly, as though he did not want to accidentally touch her. She approached the edge of the drum and gazed out at the dome, her nose twitching, as though she was actually thinking about smells, even at a time like this.

Dante shrugged. “Loon!” he pronounced.

“Loony!” someone called, eliciting laughter all around.

“What they ask, you shall do!” Dante said, in deep oratory style. “Whoever harms them dies. Whoever offends them dies. Whoever …” Here he paused, and grinned boyishly. “Ah well, you get the picture!” The crowd, warming to their king’s performance, laughed heartily.

Dante turned to Kalid. “Now the others.”

Kalid brought the Whale Clave group forward, the three women and the child, hands behind backs.

“These four love the orthong,” Dante told his jinn. A strong murmur moved like a wave below. “They fled their clave to give body and loyalty to the invader!” He raised his arms in supplication. “What is the punishment for such?”

“The fire,” someone growled from below.

“The rope,” another suggested.

And another: “Toss them down!”

The big woman raised her chin defiantly, while the one with the child pulled her daughter closer, her face wild.

Pacing back and forth along the edge, Dante received these suggestions. Then he turned to Kalid. “What says my captain of ships?”

Kalid shrugged. “I care not, my lord.” He added: “But let the young one live. She is a child, no traitor.”

Great boos greeted this notion. And the shout came: “Traitors breed traitors!”

Acclamation erupted from the throng. Dante strutted upon his ramparts until the shouting died down. He leaned close to Kalid and said in a genial manner, “They wish for blood, Kalid. What can one do?”

Reeve stepped forward. “Lord Dante …” In his mind, he saw the bodies swaying from the timber outside Dante’s room. Kalid frowned at this interruption, and Dante swung to glare at him. “Lord Dante,” Reeve went on, “I ask for their lives.”

A peeved expression bloomed on the great lord. Beneath them, the crowd growled its discontent. Dante said in an undertone, “Bother.” As the jinn grew unruly, he snarled, “Ask for something else, Spaceman.”

Kalid walked over to Reeve, a thin smile tightening his face. “You make my lord look ungenerous, Reeve Calder.”

Reeve bit into his cheeks and gazed past Kalid at Dante.

Then Dante’s face brightened. He turned to his jinn. “My exalted visitor has asked a favor.” He turned to Reeve, his face sliding into a scowl. “I grant
one
favor.” Facing the crowd again, he said: “We want no traitors in our midst! But I will release one woman in a boat, to fend for herself.” He turned back to Reeve. “That is my
one
favor.”

Kalid whispered harshly, “Take it, and be grateful!” At Reeve’s hesitation, Kalid snarled, “Another moment, and you will fly from this tower.”

Reeve bowed toward Dante, saying in as steady a voice as he could muster, “Thank you, my lord.” He stared down at the rusted metal cap of the great drum, trying to think.

“So then?” Dante’s voice came.

Kalid nudged him. Dante was speaking to him.

“So then?”

Reeve frowned in confusion.

“Choose.”

It was at this moment that Reeve realized the import of this word. He opened his mouth to protest and met Kalid’s fierce stare.
Choose
? Despite the clear warning on Kalid’s face, Reeve said, “I can’t.”

“Choose Anar!” Nerys shrieked.

Dante waited, along with the horde below, in deepening silence.

The ghastly decision would be forced on him. He glanced at Marie, who raised an eyebrow as if to say,
You got yourself in this one, now get yourself out
. Sweat
threaded down his sides as he waited for inspiration. By rights, he knew, he should choose the child, but she wouldn’t survive, cast adrift alone. He guessed her to be eleven years old, no more.

Dante sighed noisily and gestured to his men, who lined the women and the girl up on the very edge of the drum.

“Wait!” Reeve shouted.

Dante turned to face Reeve.

“The mother,” Reeve whispered. “I choose the mother.”

Nerys howled. “No! My daughter! By the Lord, she is only a babe!”

Reeve met her eyes. They were chaotic and black. He had to break his gaze, and looked down at the floor, whispering again, “The mother.” Then, looking up at Kalid, he said with venom, “Take her away, now.”

Kalid strode forward and grabbed Nerys, as another guard grabbed the child from her arms. The woman struggled fiercely, planting her feet firmly as she came even with Reeve. “Please,” she whimpered. “Lord above us, choose Anar!”

Reeve’s voice rasped out, “She’ll die left on her own. This was not my doing, by the Lord of Worlds!”

Assisted by two guards, Kalid dragged the woman off. Her screams could be heard all the way down the ladder, and longer, as they took her away. Far in the distance he heard her cry out: “May you be damned in hell, Reeve Calder! Damned in hell!”

Reeve shuddered, hearing her curse, feeling the truth of it. The shudder visited him again as Dante lifted his hand, then chopped it down through the air before him.

Amid the tumultuous roar of the jinn, the guards firmly grasped each of the three victims, and, as though they were sacks of trade goods, shoved them from the edge of the platform, where they plummeted from view.

7
 

1

Day fifteen
. A touch on Reeve’s shoulder startled him to wakefulness. By the light of the guttering candles at his bedside, he saw that it was Loon.

He slept in a great bed so high off the floor that he had needed a box to climb into it. Loon stood on that box, reaching over to trace her finger down the side of his face. Her short yellow hair stuck out on every side in a glowing corona around her face, and she wore a green velvet riding habit, pulled from the jinn’s storehouse of costumes.

“Loon?” He raised up on one elbow and tried to shake off sleep.

She put her finger in her mouth and sucked on it in her habitual way, with a casual eroticism that succeeded in waking him thoroughly.

“Loon?” At his second query, she backed down from the bed and receded into the darkness of the great room.

“Spar is unhappy,” her voice came.

“His wounds? Is he sick?” Having slept in his clothes, he sat up, swinging his feet over the bed rail.

“Unhappy.”

He admitted to himself that he would forsake sleep if Loon were to share his bed, but that he’d rather save minor issues for the morning. The horror of the day’s events had chased his thoughts late into the night, and he couldn’t have slept long. But as he had noticed before, Loon seemed indifferent to times of day.

A large spider was crawling down the canopy of the bed. Reeve swatted at it, reflecting anew that he disliked sleeping in the jinn’s grimy and sumptuous bedding. In fact, the covers stank of sweat and grease and had hardened in places, from spills of one sort or another.

Loon was pulling on his hand. He relented, hopping to the floor and following her. As he passed the enormous gilded mirror leaning down from one wall, he saw the two of them pass, Loon dressed in her fine riding habit and he in his regulation Stationer jumpsuit. The flickering light registered their passing like an old vid in which an unwashed young man with a patchy beard followed a beautiful young woman into a world of dark, tattered elegance. His growth of beard made him look older. As Kalid had said, in this world, people matured quickly. Here, a twenty-four-year-old was at his peak, a ruler of jinn. And soon to decline.…

The guard at his door followed them, but made no comment on their night foray. Perhaps he remembered that he who offended them would die. Or perhaps the jinn were curious about what he might do.

Now that he was up in the middle of the night, Reeve accepted Loon’s lack of explanation and simply followed her. Gas lamps lighted their way among the industrial innards of the dome. It made Reeve uneasy to think of the barbarians running pipe for gas, and he could only hope their skills were up to the task. At the least, the jinn had devised a primitive gas extraction process, perhaps a remnant system of the original terraform functions.

Once leaving the edge of the dome, where quarters were fashioned against the angle of the wall, they quickly found themselves walking a metal grid among the inert machinery of the dome. They passed great tanks and cylinders and gigantic mains punctuated by meters. The Jupiter Dome had been one of the first colonial habitats, serving not only terraforming, but providing a refuge during the first years of settlement, when the colonists had needed shelter from Lithia’s poisons. This dome was one of the largest of Lithia’s many chemical recycling plants, pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, transforming it, and trapping it as calcium carbonate while changing Lithia’s seawater into basic elements and pumping improved mixes into the air through the outflow stacks, long since rusted and toppled.