The 97th Step (24 page)

"I know about hand weapons. I know what they can do."

"It is required."

He stared at the air pistol. It was an innocuous weapon, probably capable of stinging, but unless its projectile hit an eye, not dangerous to a human. Even so, he felt a chill dance over him as he considered the gun.

Pen drew in a deep breath. "I'm sorry. I don't handle guns. A wand, a slap cap, those are okay. Not guns."

"Why?"

Ah, there was the question, the one neither Dindabe nor anyone at the order had ever asked. "It's…personal."

After what seemed a long time, Moon said, "I have a lot of flexibility in my teaching, but there is an overall curriculum. You must demonstrate a basic proficiency with this"—she waved the gun gently—"to gain rank. If you cannot progress in rank…"

The rest need not be said. Failure at any rank for more than three tests meant expulsion from the order. It almost never happened, but it had. And, it seemed, would happen at least once more.

Pen sighed. "Then I guess I'll have to leave."

"What?" Her surprise seemed potent, he wished he could see her face. More than anything, he wished at this moment to be able to see Moon's features. "You would leave over something like this? You were a thief, Pen. Surely you did worse things than fire a gun."

Her surprise and disturbance bothered him almost as much as the sight of the gun. Almost. He did not want to upset his teacher. He would do anything for her. Almost anything.

"No. I never did anything worse than firing a gun."

"Then you are familiar with them?"

"Yes." All too familiar.

A long time elapsed. Half an eon, at least.

"All right," she said. "I will take your word for it. You need not show me. I'll pass you on this test."

The rest of the eon ran past. Pen blinked, understanding what it was that Moon was doing. True, she was the Elder Sister and her word carried much weight; still, he understood that she was risking herself by her words and actions. If she lied for him, was willing to trust him on this, she would be putting herself into jeopardy. It might be small, no one might ever know, but the thought of it further filled him with dread.

Why would she do this? Take his statement at face value? He was not someone to trust.

Emotions warred within him. Memory and loathing fought against respect and devotion. The old fortress stood firm against the new attack. The last time he had carried a gun, it had cost him everyone he had ever loved. It had destroyed the life he had built. Intellectually, he understood it was the hand that fired the weapon, the mind that moved the hand, those things were responsible. But his gut clenched at the sight of the gun, because that was the external object upon which he could hang the blame. He knew this with his brain, but his belly would not accept it. It might never accept it.

As time ran down, entropy and energy exchanging their souls, Pen/Ferret/Mwili took a deep breath, knowing what he had to do, what he
must
do, were he to survive as anything other than a shell of his old self.

He could not allow Moon to cover for him.

"Give me the pistol," he said.

"You don't have to—"

"Please."

Moon tendered the weapon.

The plastic handle was warm from her hand. He hefted the gun, felt the balance and point of it, and checked the mechanism. The safety, there by his thumb, the trigger, the power pack charge reading. In an instant, he knew the weapon, instinctively felt the heart of it. It was his talent, one he despised, but also one he could not deny.

To his left, ten meters away, was a small citrus tree, a
yemlat
. The fruit was a yellow-green obloid, similar in size and shape to a lemon, but thinner skinned and juicier. Pen snapped the pistol up into firing position, thumbed the safety off, and started shooting, as fast as he could pull the trigger. The first two pellets clipped one of the
yemlats
from its branch; as the fruit fell, the next half dozen rounds smacked into the fruit, spraying pinkish juice in all directions. The ruined
yemlat
hit the ground, and Pen continued firing, moving his wrist slightly, sending a stream of pellets into the squishy mass. He fired until the pistol ran empty, clicking several times. He raised the weapon, twirled it in his hand, and extended it butt-first to Moon.

The
yemlat
was little more than a pulpy spot on the ground, pounded flat, as if smashed by a hammer.

Silently, Moon took the weapon.

Pen felt the adrenaline surge ebb, and he felt himself shaking slightly. What he had feared had happened: the lure of the gun was as strong as ever. It was almost mystical in its power, calling hypnotically to him:
This is what you were destined to do, man. Your fate is with the gun. Admit it. Enjoy it. Glory in it
!

No!

But it wouldn't go away, the feeling. And the fear had an insistent voice, telling him what he wished he could not hear.
Did you do it for Moon? Or did you do it because you lusted after it? We know the
truth you and I. You can't fool us
…

"I'll see you later," Moon said quietly. And she left him there, staring at the fruit he had slaughtered.

It was just as well. He had a lot to think about.

Twenty-Three

THE REST OF the afternoon passed without Pen's seeing Moon again. He trudged away from the pulped fruit he'd slaughtered with the air pistol, and attended a live-teach lecture on Confederation history. The information rolled over him in the instructor's monotonic drone: A sixty-year stretch starting in the year 2195 was known as the Expansion. It was a period of intense colonization and galactic exploration. Such things continued after the Expansion, of course, but much abated. The next historical block, lasting from 2295 to 2375, was generally known as The Consolidation.

Pen sighed as the teacher paused for breath. What would Moon think of his display? She had been subdued when they'd parted, he could see that—

The lecture began again:

During the Consolidation, the Confed settled into control, forming a galactic association whose membership was mandatory. Power was centered on Earth, and those in power gave up none of it willingly. A large space-going Navy was built, and a larger Army conscripted to fill the troop carriers and ships-of-the-line. To draw the Confed's ire was to find oneself in very deep excreta, indeed. Those in control had no qualms about using military force to quell even the slightest deviation from official policy.

The planets and wheelworlds either toed the line or had their feet cut from under them, as simple as that.

After a time, a kind of status quo evolved; don't rock the boat and draw attention and you can do what you want—within limits. Make too much noise, however, and you get squashed. Squeaky wheels got replaced and not lubricated.

And, the instructor continued, while no official publication listed it as such, the recent turn of the Twenty-fourth Century marked what the Siblings considered the beginning of a time to be known unofficially as the Declination. No one could say for certain, but according to integratic predictions, this phase of galactic history would mark the fall of the Confed, and either chaos or some interim form of voluntary planetary association would exist until a new system came to power. History, the teacher said, is as cyclic as a sine wave. What rises eventually falls.

Pen listened with half his attention. Before coming here, he had never paid much mind to politics, and while he had been becoming more and more interested, the incident with the gun loomed over him with the intensity of one of the afternoon tropical storms. The intricate dealings of power theory paled against the hard plastics and spun fibers of a gun in one's hand. Besides, the practice of integratics was restricted to those in Full Shroud, a state which had, before today, lain years ahead of him. After today…?

Eventually, the class ended. Pen hoped it was recorded somewhere so he could restudy it later, for he retained only a small part of the teaching. Assuming, of course, that he would be around to study anything after today.

Outside, the last rays of sunshine were fading into a fast-arriving tropical night. He didn't feel much like eating, so he went back to his room. He carried a sense of foreboding with him, as tangible as the mask he wore.

The door was open, as he'd left it, but as he approached, he felt the presence of someone inside.

It was Moon.

She stood at the window, back to him, but he knew it was her. Despite the shroud, he could have picked her out of a dozen other siblings in full array, simply by the way she held herself while standing still.

Moon turned, sensing or hearing him arrive.

He was surprised to see her. She had never come to his room before.

"Your door was open," she said.

He nodded. "I leave it that way most of the time. An old habit."

"Would you close it, please?"

Uh-oh. She wanted this private, and that made his scrotum shrink and ridge, going cold. The gun. It had to do with the gun. Was she going to throw him out of the order for his reluctance to use it? Or, worse—for his ability to use it so
fucking
well?

When he had closed the door and turned back to face her. Moon said, "We know all about your past, Pen."

With that, she reached first to her side, then her neck, and unfastened the closure strips that kept her
manto
, the outer cloak, in place. She unwrapped the sheetlike garment and allowed it to drop onto the floor.

Pen could not have been more stunned if she had sprouted wings and flown around the room. She stood there in jacket and pants, with the pouched utility belt, the
yuyo obi
, wrapped around her waist. After three heartbeats, she untabbed the belt and lowered it to the floor next to the cloak.

"We know about the killings. Your lover, your partner, your ex-friend."

With that, she untabbed the
gi
jacket and shrugged it off.

"We know all about your days as a thief, and your travels as a laner. We also know how hard you tried to help Bennet Gworn after he was captured."

She pulled the scoop-necked long-sleeved shin over her head and tossed it aside, then bent slightly and removed her long pants. Now, she was dressed identically to Pen, in First and Second Layer Undershroud: a short-sleeved shirt and short pants, boots, an undertunic, briefs, and
zukin
, the thin and silky hood. As he watched, she continued to remove these articles of unique, almost alive fabric. It was as erotic as anything Shar had ever done in her strip dances, and his erection throbbed against his belly, feeling like a block of wood. What the hell was going on here? His excitement was tempered with dry-mouthed fear. What was she
doing
?

"We have all the psyche reports on you since you arrived, plus the deepsleep and narcoscan tests. We suspected how you would react to a handgun. We were prepared for you to refuse to use it."

She was down to tunic, briefs and hood, now, the boots just having joined the pile of clothes on the floor next to her. Her legs were shapely, and he could see the muscles slide and dance under the skin when she shifted her weight. Her skin itself was so pale veins made blue lines under it. Most of her body hair had been depilated, and she looked as smooth as a newborn baby.

Dry? Pen's mouth was sand and ashes and the dust of centuries when he tried to speak. "Th-the gun. It was a test? The order was checking to see if I could overcome my revulsion for it?"

She pulled the tunic off over her head. Her stomach was flat and hard-ridged, her arms well denned, her breasts small and underlaid with thick pectoral muscle. She hooked her thumbs into the briefs and slid them down, stepping out of them and letting them lie in a black pool at her feet. Her undepilated pubic hair was jet, tight curls that made a stark contrast to her white skin, a dark and willowy nest.

Save for the hood, she now stood naked before him.

He wanted her more than he had ever wanted anybody, anywhere, any time.

She reached up and caught the fastenings on the left side of the hood. "The test was personal," she said.

"It was to see if you would be able to overcome your distaste of the weapon to avoid compromising
me
. And you did."

Moon unfastened the closures on the hood and unwrapped it from around her face. Her hair was cut short, but it was as dark as her pubis, black and curly. She smiled. His eye for detail catalogued her features and they were less than perfect: her nose was thin and slightly askew, as though it had once been broken and not repaired. Her teeth were straight and white, but her mouth was a trifle wide. She had high cheekbones, almost an Oriental cast, and laugh lines crinkled deeply the corners of her eyes. Nothing about her was classically beautiful; taken together, however, the overall effect of her facial features was striking. Whatever objectivity he might have had fled when first she had removed her cloak. Staring stupidly at the nude woman now in front of him, Pen could not recall ever seeing anyone more lovely, not even Shar. Beauty came in different forms, and Moon's was unique.

She dropped the
zukin
, took a deep breath, let it out, and smiled. "You have the potential to be the most extraordinary sibling in a long time, Pen. And I know you want me." She turned and walked to his bed, sat on it, then lay down.

Later, when he thought about it. Pen thought he must have surely set some kind of record for getting undressed. It seemed that one second, he was standing there feeling a mixture of awe, lust, stupidity and absolute surprise, and a second later, he was lying naked next to Moon, grinning like a wirehead on full pulse current. He thought about that later—when his mind returned.

Moon lay next to him, propped on one elbow. She idly stroked his shoulder. Pen responded by leaning over to kiss her, feeling her mouth flower beneath his again.

After a time, he leaned back and smiled at her.

"So, I take it you enjoyed yourself?" she said.