The 97th Step (26 page)

Pen felt sweat running down his back under the dark clothing. This didn't sound good, not in the least.

"I am sorry, sir, but we cannot—"

"Listen, holy-roly, you can do exactly as I tell you!" He turned slightly, to face the soldier on his left.

"Lars!"

The trooper, a tall blond man of twenty-five or so, stepped toward Pen, stopping two meters away.

"You heard the rep," he said. "Strip. Now, you pross?"

Pen and Spiral glanced at each other. Things had gone sour awfully fast. What the hell were they supposed to do here? How much trouble was this guy? Should they comply, and avoid the hassle? That would be the easy thing.

Pen thought about what Moon would do. She wouldn't back down from this toad and his warts. She'd tell him to stuff it. Then again, he was not Moon.

"Pen?" Spiral's voice was low, almost a whisper.

Pen looked at his friend and fellow sibling. He shook his head slightly. "I think maybe it's time we left," he said, keeping his voice low.

The rep heard this, and his grin increased. "You weren't thinking of going yet, were you? Take a look at your cart."

Pen tried to keep the rep and his two troopers in his peripheral vision as he glanced back over one shoulder at their GV. His stomach fluttered suddenly as he saw the other two troopers standing by the vehicle, weapons held loosely but pointed more or less in Spiral and Pen's direction.

The rep said. "Lars, why don't you and the troops show these clowns how the Confederation's finest takes care of recalcitrants?"

Lars smiled at this. He unslung his Parker carbine and for a brief moment, Pen thought the man was going to shoot them. But no, he lowered the weapon carefully to the road, and indicated for his fellow trooper to do the same.

Lars said, "The rumor is you dark sheets learn how to fight as part of your training. Suppose we see how that stacks up against Confed hand-to-hand?"

As he spoke, Lars edged to Pen's left, and the other soldiers moved to the right. Pen was aware of the other two troopers, a man and a woman, moving in to encircle them.

Quietly, almost under his breath, Spiral said, "Oh, man."

Pen said, "Honored Representative, we don't want any trouble-"

"Well, you
got
it, boy. You think a few drinks and some smoke buys me? You priests are getting too big for your covers.You don't move when I say move! Do it, Lars. Hurt them. And then strip 'em naked."

He seemed a lot more sober than he'd been. They had been set up, Pen realized. Given an option, he would have run, but those two by the GV had been sent there to prevent it. And it took a really fast man to outstep a bullet. Something was going on here. Pen wasn't sure just what, but he and Spiral had been trapped, and altogether too neatly for it to be a drunken lark.

Pen only had a second to worry about this when Lars lunged, a quick shuffle step in, followed by a powerful straight punch at Pen's face.

Almost absently, Pen twirled to his left, around the incoming punch. Lars, expecting the resistance of Pen's nose against his knuckles, overbalanced and stumbled past.

"Fuck!" the quad leader said as he recovered his attack stance. He spun a quarter turn to face Pen again.

Pen tried a final time. "Listen, we don't have to fight—"

One of the other troopers screamed in fear. Pen shifted his gaze a hair. The trooper seemed to be trying to learn in a fraction of a second what it had taken birds millions of years of evolution to accomplish. The man's flight began well enough, but judging from his glide path it was certainly going to end badly. He flew past the startled rep, aided by Spiral's execution of the middle steps of The Flower Unfolding, the second dance of the Ninety-seven Steps.

The startled soldier slammed into the ground, hard.

Pen had time to notice that while the throw was effective. Spiral's form was off, and his left foot was a good five degrees aslant to where it was supposed to be. He would have to rag Spiral about that—

Lars, bellowing, charged again. This time, he fired two punches, left and right, followed by an elbow strike and a knee at Pen's groin. This was probably his best shot, and no doubt had worked well for him in bars around the galaxy. Not this time, though. Pen shifted, danced, twisted, and launched a spinning hammerfist. The tightened edge of his hand smashed into the base of Lars' skull, straightening the man into a racing dive. Lars hit the street outstretched, skidded on the hard surface, and abraded his nose and chin to the bone. He was going to have one hell of a road tattoo, Pen thought. When he woke up.

The woman trooper darted in at him. Pen shifted and caught her outstretched leg at the ankle as she kicked at his crotch, continuing the move upward, so she sprawled flat on her back. Her head bounced from the road's surface as she hit, and she went boneless, out cold.

As Pen turned to see what Spiral was doing, the last trooper stumbled into a fall that ended when he smacked into the Confed rep's horrified grasp, knocking them both flat.

The rep managed to untangle himself from the soldier, only to begin vomiting…

"I think maybe we'd better leave," Pen said to Spiral.

"I copy that, brother…We sure stepped in it this time. What are we gonna tell Moon?"

Pen shook his head. Hell if he knew. Maybe these guys would just forget about it and go home. Sure.

Well, at least they didn't see our faces.

The Confed rep and his troops were less than ten minutes behind Pen and Spiral, but that was enough time to prepare Moon. She hadn't asked a lot of questions, but had listened to Pen's report, nodding occasionally.

"It seems too pat," Pen said. "Like they had planned it all along. Maybe all that cover the Siblings are supposed to have bought is wearing thin. I got the feeling they wanted to do more than just-pound on us a little for kicks. I think maybe they might have wanted to ask us some questions after we had been tenderized a little."

"All right," she said, when he finished. "I'll handle it."

He would have questioned her further, but she turned and swept away in a swirl of her cloak. For a moment, Pen felt a deep sense of dread, watching her. He shrugged the feeling off. He was just coming down from the fight, he figured.

Pen watched, along with the other assembled siblings, as Moon told the man she could not identify the two assailants.

"You and this whole pack of dustcovers will be fucking sorry!" the rep yelled. "I am going to have this place razed and planted in sugar cane! I'll have all of you jailed!"

Moon was unmoved.

The man foamed and raged some more, but in the end, left.

Later, when he and Moon were alone, in bed, Pen asked her about it.

"It was an unfortunate event," she said. "You couldn't have known it would happen. We'd just as soon the Confed didn't know how well sumito works—we try to avoid using it under official surveillance."

"Nobody told me."

"That usually gets covered later. I guess we'll have to start teaching it sooner."

"Can he do that?" Pen asked. "Can he wreck the order here?"

"Possibly. But he won't."

"Can we blackmail him? About the bribes?"

"No. That's a standard method of operation for backrocket reps. Everybody does it, and at worst, he'd get a few months' suspension."

"Then how do you know he won't give us a hard time?"

"He won't. Take my word for it."

Pen had been content to do just that, snuggling up against her and putting the incident from his mind as he thought about more pleasant things.

A few days later, Pen was crossing the compound when he saw Spiral approaching, wearing the new garments that showed he'd passed his next level test.

"How you do in the score pool?" Spiral asked.

"Not too bad. Got beat by Shell. She guessed eighty-four on the nose."

"Yeah, what'd you pick?"

"Eighty-seven."

"No shit? Hey, thanks for the confidence."

"After you heaved that trooper into the Confed rep, how could I do less? Even though your foot
was off
on the first throw."

"So
you
say. Urn. Got to run, I don't want to be late for history." He started off, then paused. "Too bad about what happened to the rep and his troops."

Pen shook his head. "What happened to them? Something nasty, I hope?"

"You didn't hear? Their ship crashed into the Pacific on the way back to Port Moresby."

Pen stared at Spiral. "What?"

"Blew a repellor or something. Hit the water just under cruising speed, splashed the ship over a two-klick area. Everybody died."

Spiral started off, and Pen stared at his retreating back, stunned. He remembered lying in bed with Moon, his naked body pressed against hers. The rep wouldn't cause them any trouble, she'd said. How did she know that?

Take my word for it, she'd said.

No, he thought, it was an accident.

Fortunate timing, wasn't it?

Pen shook his head. It had to be an accident.

But—what if it wasn't? What if Moon—?

Don't even think it, he told himself. But the thought would not go away. He recalled the feeling of dread he'd felt before the rep and his quad had arrived. At the time, he'd paid it little mind, but now, it felt as if maybe his HSP had kicked in somehow, as if maybe he'd somehow sensed their doom. Impossible, of course, even HSP couldn't foretell the future. He couldn't have picked that up, unless… unless maybe he was somehow reading something from Moon. Moon, who was the focus for his odd insights more often than not. When it worked, it usually worked around her. Could he maybe have been picking up her thoughts or feelings? He had thought that kind of thing had happened a time or two before.

No. Because that would mean that Moon… he turned away from that thought, feeling a hollow sensation, and the flutter of something trying to escape from deep inside his belly.

What had Moon done?

Twenty-Five

FUGUE.

In the order, as in other parts of the galaxy, the word had taken on a different meaning from the musical term from which it had come. An adept in conversational fugue was an expert in, literally, double-talk.

When a fugue master spoke, it would mean something else entirely. Like a game of
Go
, fugue could be as complex as the speaker's ability allowed. The simplest of phrases could carry worlds of meaning, and a fugue player used not only words, but inflection, tone, body language and gestures to enhance his play.

Two experts ostensibly talking about the weather could well be carrying on a conversation about particle physics—not that anybody of lesser ability in the art could understand them.

Fugue had arisen partially in response to the technological advances in lie-detection gear. When multi-channel stress analyzers and electrophy equipment were brought to bear, it was nearly impossible to prevaricate and not, be detected. Since such machineries could be utilized without the subject's knowledge in many cases, those in the public eye had learned to speak a thousand shading, of the truth.

Even, a simple yes-or-no question might be fielded, as one wished by a skillful rendering of strict truth.

"Do you know, where this, wanted criminal is?" could be answered negatively, by using precise thought patterns: "No," and the unspoken tag line, "I don't know where he is
at this moment
." Such questions required more precision on the part of the questioner: "Did you know where he was at seven hundred hours local time this morning?" to be countered by, "No."
Not exactly. I knew about where, but you
didn't ask that
…

This kind of exacting dance became more and more difficult. Like trying to pin a blob of mercury to a table with a knife point, the ascertaining of truth turned into a slippery devil indeed when questioning a fugue master.

Such uses of fugue were limited, of course. And it quickly became more a diplomatic tool than a resource for criminals. Proper fugue wasn't easy to learn, after all, and a better player could almost always best a lesser one. Most of the real experts eventually wound up in Confederation service, and that tended to stop the use of fugue by most in trying to fool the Confed.

Eventually, the complicated double-speak became a toy of the upper classes, much as certain uncommon languages had been for years; still, even the most esoteric of recorded languages could be translated by a properly programmed viral matrix computer. No one had yet devised an artificial brain that could play fugue with the best. Some were trying.

Pen listened to this lecture, as he had countless others, but with more interest than usual. Fugue was part of the Siblings' training, and there were things he wanted to learn to say without doing so directly.

In the six months since the Confederation rep's ship had gone down, killing him and his quad of soldiers.

Pen had yet to find the courage to speak to Moon about it. He was afraid—not of her reaction—but of what he would learn.

Had she coldly had them killed? Five people, just like that? Moon, his oh-so-gentle lover?

Pen's reaction was, he knew, absurd. If she didn't say it aloud then it wasn't real? Foolish. Certainly Moon was capable of it. He had seen her cripple the spacers back in Dindabe's pub. How long ago was that? Three years? Gods, how the time had flown.

He loved her. No doubt of that. That she might have killed to protect herself or the Siblings shouldn't change his feelings. But he was afraid it would, somehow, especially if he confronted her with it. He both wanted to know for sure, and he did not want to know. It could have been an accident. A coincidence that she had said what she said. The galaxy was full of things more coincidental than that, they happened every day, didn't they? Certainly.

So… fugue. Perhaps if he learned it well enough, he could ask without asking, and she might answer without answering. A poor solution, perhaps, but it was better than none.

And maybe better than the bare truth.

"So, Pen, how are you feeling?" That was the teacher's statement. Cube was one of the older siblings at the order, and the highest of them in fugue ability. Watching the man's hands, listening to the tone of his voice and his inflection of the words, Pen made the fugue-analog out to be:
Something is bothering you,
is it not
? Easy enough.