The Albino Knife (21 page)

Oh, man, he thought. She sure enough was mad, all right. Maybe he ought to try to explain it to her. It wasn't her fault.

Then again, given how upset she was, maybe he'd better wait a while before he said anything.

Chapter Eighteen

VEATE'S ANGER STILL bubbled in her, but it was more a simmer thana roil when she happened across Sleel in the hotel's bookstore. He was in the philosophy section looking at a holoprojic display when Veate found him. For just a heartbeat, he looked embarrassed to be discovered there.

"How's it going?" Sleel said. He edged slowly out of the philosophy display, past the racks of marble-sized stainless steel recording spheres in their soft rubber sockets, trying to seem as if he hadn't had any real interest being there.

"Tell me about Saval Bork," she said.

Sleel laughed. "What's to tell? He's a big mue, got muscle he'll never use and more testosterone than a ball transplant bank."

"Then why won't he have sex with me?"

The comment obviously caught Sleel off guard. "Huh? Uh, well, if you're looking for somebody to, uh, fill in, I, uh—"

"I'm not," she said, snapping out the words. "What about Bork?"

Sleel shook his head. "Let's go to the bar. This might take a few minutes."

She followed him from the bookstore. She was not fond of puzzles and she wanted to solve this one, now.

"Can I ask you something?" Bork said to Geneva .

The blonde was watching the metroplex's traffic from the balcony outside Khadaji's room, as Bork stepped out to stand next to her. Below on the surface streets, wheeled vehicles rolled past; in the air above the ground, computer-controlled carts stayed in their tightly defined lanes, carrying passengers to and fro. None of the lanes inside the city were stacked high enough to reach the level of their rooms.

"Sure," Geneva said."About Veate, right?"

"How did you know?"

"Come on, Bork. How long have we known each other?Ten, eleven years?"

"Yeah, well, I can't figure out why she's so mad at me."

"Let me guess. She wanted you and you turned her down?"

"What, you taken up mind reading? How'd you know that?"

Geneva turned and flashed her smile at him. Even though most of her attention was focused on him, he could see her scanning the air and hotel facade, much as he continued to do. "I can't think of anything else that would piss off an albino so much. She'd be more than used to getting proposals; turning somebody down would be as easy as breathing for her. Butgetting turned down isn't something she'd have much experience at, if any.Especially by you."

"Why would I be anything special?"

"Because even a blind woman could tell you wanted to go somewhere and roll around and break furniture with Veate. Chang, anybody who tried to walk between you two would have bounced off the lust like it was a force field."

"Yeah.But it wouldn't be right," he said. "She's Emile's daughter. And besides—"

"You don't love each other," Geneva finished.

Bork shook his head. "You could get work in a carnival or something, you know?"

"Bork, Bork, Bork. I can see. Back at the Villa, you remember how I looked when I fell for Dirisha?"

He grinned."Yeah.Dopey."

"Nomore dopey than you did whenever Mayli was around."

He turned and stared out at the city.

After what seemed like a long time, he said, "I really miss her, you know."

She laid a hand on his arm. "I know. We all miss her. And some of that is going on now with Veate."

He shook himself out of the memory. "Still doesn't explain why she got so mad."

"You took away her power," she said. "Look at it like this: suppose you went into a weightlifting contest against somebody, and he could somehow wave his hand and reduce your physical strength to, oh, say, my level. He's over there pressing half the planet overhead and the best you can do is maybe fifty kilos.

How do you think that would make you feel?"

"Pretty bad," Bork admitted. "No offense, Geneva ."

She laughed. "No offense taken. But you see my point? Your physical strength is something you take for granted. It's a part of you. If it suddenly disappeared, if somebody couldmake it disappear, you'd probably resent the hell out of them."

"Yeah, I expect you're right."

"That's what you did to Veate. Her attraction is something she's always had. She was born with it, it's her power, and when you turned her down, you raised a doubt in her she probably never had to deal with before. I imagine it scared her worse than anything else you could have done."

Boric sighed. "I wasn't looking to do that."

"I know. Eventually she'll figure it out, too. But her first reaction was from fear. Her very best, her most potent trick suddenly didn't work anymore. Her first thought probably was that something was wrong with you. But her second thought would have been that something was wrong withher .Had to be pretty scary."

"Yeah, I guess it must have been." He reached out and hugged Geneva, being careful not to hold her too tightly. "Thanks," he said.

She beamed at him. "Sure. What are friends for, if not to point out when you do stupid shit?"

The hotel bar was like a dozen Veate had been in before; the colors were too bright, the sounds too loud, the decorator's taste less than superb. She sipped at the small beer she'd ordered,then shook her head. "Mayli Wu was a whore?"

Sleel nodded. "Best I ever had. They called her Sister Clamp; we all met at Emile's pub on Greaves, back when he was doing his one-man war against the Confed. We didn't know it, what he was doing, but that's where Dirisha, Bork, Sister and I first got together."

"Mayli was a medic, full M.D., before she went into the pleasure business. Applied research, she called it."

"Later, she was at Matador Villa with us.Taught a course in love. She and Bork, they wound up partnered, and it was something to see them together."

Veate felt an irrational stab of jealously. "So, what happened to her? Why'd they sunder, if this was such a cosmic connection?"

"She got killed. We hit a power station on Earth, during the Revolution. We lost Geneva's father, Red, there too."

Sleel rubbed at his shoulder, as if it suddenly pained him. "I was wearing a prosthetic arm at the time. It ate a couple of explosive rounds and got blown away; I also lost a foot. Wound up having to regrow the stupid damned foot along with the arm. Anyway, I went down, looked like I was gonna be a war history footnote."

"Bork was right next to Mayli and Red when they got hit. He grabbed them both up, carried them to our transport, then came back and collected Dirisha and me like we were toys. I'd have been dead otherwise."

Sleel laughed. "Hell of a business, revolution. Maybe I'll skip the next one, run an ammo concession or something. Anyway, that's Bork.Always saving somebody's ass."

"So that you don't take things personally, you ought to know that I don't think Bork has been with anybody since Mayli died. He took it hard.Real hard."

Veate stared at Sleel. "He's been celibate for more than five years?" Such an action was beyond anything she could personally imagine. Oh, sure, she knew it was possible. Not for an Albino Exotic, but for tintskins; there were religious reasons and like that, it sometimes happened.

"That's what I'd bet on."

Buddha. How could she compete with a ghost? And this Saval Bork was getting more complex every time anybody said anything about him. Maybe it wasn't her. Maybe she had been right when she'd felt him want her. But now what was she going to do? Sure, there were billions of lovers out there; she could just walk away and do what she had always done, pick the lucky ones from the lines waiting. Somehow, though, that didn't seem as satisfying as once it had. She wanted Bork. He intrigued her as no one else ever had. She had never wanted a lover she couldn't have. It was a painful feeling. Was that what other people felt like when she refused them?

Damn, she wished she'd never gotten mixed up with her father and his crew of misfits.

No?came the truth seeker in her. When have you ever been more stimulated, had a more interesting time? Don't tell me, sister. That ship won't fly.

On Rift, after having escaped death when a boxcar from orbit unexpectedly lost power and plowed into the building next to his, Full Professor Steven Manning Thromberg received a job offer from Earth. The offer was accompanied by a certified credit cube worth an amount equal to three years' salary, for

"incidental expenses." It took Thromberg all of five seconds to make his decision. If Elbu ra Jambi had this kind of money to throw around, he'd be unstoppable, and Thromberg wanted to be there. He started packing his travel case immediately.

Chan Li disliked Elbu ra Jambi as much as he did anyone, but he respected the man's abilities. The communication and the stads attached convinced Li fast enough. If Jambi said he was close to full implant, you could put that in the bank and draw interest on it. Li wanted very much to be on the winning team when that biological miracle happened. Better a part of the credit than none. You didn't have to be a meteorologist to ascertain wind direction. He left within hours.

"Salinas Biogentics," the bored salesman said. "What? What?! Hold it a second." The man on the com waved his hand and put the call on hold. He turned to the other order board salesman and said, "Heysoo Damn,Flint , I got somebody on the com who says he wants to buy three biogens in the billion-kay range! Yes, I think he's serious."

"Hello, still there? How, ah, soon would you need these units, mister—ah—?"

"DoctorElbu ra Jambi,"came the crisp reply. "I need them yesterday."

"And on what terms…?"

"Full payment on delivery."

The salesman was already punching in a credit code request. J-a-m-b-i… Holy Mother Wesaw's Left Tit! Look at that stad balance! The guy was worth billions!

The Vice-President in Charge of Sales came running in, having noticed the conversation on his monitor.

He waved his hands excitedly at the salesman. "Tell him they'll be in the air in an hour! Get an address for delivery! Get a jet; if he's out of the hemisphere, charter a suborbital boxcar!"

The size of his potential commission was making the salesman feel giddy. "If you're on Earth, you'll have them before dinner time, doctor. Is that fast enough?"

"It'll have to do, I suppose."

"Here's an idea," Sleel said to Dirisha, as they took an early evening stroll along the walkway next to the hotel. "Let's leave Bork and Emile's daughter alone in a room with the door locked."

"Anybody ever tell you what a nasty man you are?"

"All the time.Hell, Bork's got his spetsdods. He can always shoot her."

"I'm glad I never slept with you, Sleel."

"Aw, come on. Don't talk tome about being nasty. You were just afraid I'd spoil you for any other lover."

"You got me. That was it, all right." She punched him lightly on the shoulder. They both laughed.

A bomb went off in the sub-basement of the Office of the Galactic Census Bureau, destroying a cross-index computer. This in itself would not have been so bad, except that the back-up data for that particular computer was destroyed in a mysterious fire inside a shielded vault only moments after the explosion.

The information could be reconstructed, of course, since it had been gathered at the planetary level by field workers and subsequently logged into local computers, but it would take two things always in short supply in any bureaucracy: time and money. Certain political boundaries that would have shifted because of population changes therefore stayed the same, since system-level reappointment had to be approved by official Republic sanctions.

On Mwanamamke, where a put-upon and heretofore patient minority of ethnic Mtuans had been held in check only by the promise of better representation in the Bibi Arusi System Council, riots killed a hundred and eighty-eight people when the Council vetoed Mtuan reparations for injuries offered the Mtuans during the last days of the Confed's reign.

The White Radio relay station orbiting Ago's Moon in the Faust System malfunctioned, tapped somehow into the local comnet, and scrambled a hundred million communications in ways beyond anyone's experience. The most interesting example of the misrouted calls came when a shop owner in the Bom Chu shopping complex inBootCity on Bocca called his wife from his business, a distance of some nine kilometers, to tell her he would be late for dinner. The local toll call was picked up by the Galactic Net, bounced from the Faust System out through the Mu, Nu, and Tau Systems, sent through nineteen substations, at a distance/station charge of some one hundred and six light years, before being sent back to the intended spouse. What should have been a call amounting to a cost of less than two demistads was billed to the shop owner's account at seven hundred and fifty-nine standards. The mistake was caught and apologies tendered later, of course, but not before the shop owner punished his teenaged daughter.

A weathersat weighing over a thousand kilos orbiting Aqua took leave of its ellipse and came down through the roof of the galaxy's largest indoor aquarium. Fortunately, the aquarium was closed for the evening. Nearly a quarter of the marine animals died when the largest of the exhibit tanks, a one-of-a-kind denscris display holding more than eighty million gallons of seawater, was ruptured.

Several workers drowned in the resulting flood. Since the aquarium was the only building complex onRenfrewIsland and the island itself the only land mass for two hundred kilometers in any direction, the satellite could not have picked a more precise location to which it could have done more damage.

Wall found that he was enjoying himself more and more. It was not so much what damage he couldeffect that interested him, but the style and manner in which he could manage it. He had only himself with whom to compete, after all, and his limits and imagination allowed him much leeway. They were such easy creatures to manipulate, he realized. Trapped bytheir own technologies and at his mercy.

And Marcus Jefferson Wall had little mercy left in him.Very little indeed.