The City Who Fought (26 page)

Amos looked quickly from Simeon's column to Channa and said in mild dismay.

"I have caused offense. Please, forgive me. This was not my intention." He smiled ruefully down at Channa and sighed. "I clearly have more to learn than I had imagined. Even my speech—the more we talk, the more I am conscious of how old-fashioned I must sound to you. And, forgive me, we of Bethel are not used to dealing with people of strange—of different customs. That was one thing I disliked about my home, the insularity."

Hell, Simeon thought. He's not stupid. Adaptable, in fact.

With a smooth professional smile, Channa gestured for him to take one of the seats at the table.

"Then let us begin," she said.

To his back she made a small moue of distaste, which quickly turned into a smile as he held out her chair and looked at her expectantly. She grinned and waved him to his seat.

"First," she said, "you must learn that we're much less formal here. We reserve our 'company manners'

strictly for company."

"But," he said, smiling as he took his seat, "a beautiful woman should always be treated like a treasured guest."

Channa served herself from a platter and passed it to him, letting go of it almost before he'd gotten a grip on it.

"Flatterer. I'm not ugly, but I'm no great beauty, either."

He almost dropped the hot platter in surprise, its contents tilting alarming close to the edge and burning his thumb. He put it down hastily and sucked the injury for a moment.

"No, truly," he said, flapping his hand to cool it. "I think you are most attractive." There was no doubting the sincerity in his wide, gentian-blue eyes. The lashes, she noticed, were long and curled. His gaze grew playful. "In a strange, foreign, exotic fashion, of course."

"Well, you're very attractive, too, Amos," she said seriously.

"I like attractive women," he said, and his gaze was subtly challenging.

"Mmh, I don't like attractive men," she said positively.
Actually, I don't
approve
of them, which is not
exactly the same thing,
she amended to herself. "They tend to be spoiled and self-centered and in general much more trouble than they're worth. Now, let us eat before the food cools. We have a great deal of work to do and not much time and energy to spare." She gave him a direct stare. "I'm sure we're going to have an excellent business relationship, manager to manager."

"Of course," Amos said with a neutral, social smile.

"Shouldn't you start calling Amos Simeon-Amos, Channa?" Simeon broke in, before the atmosphere got any cooler.

"Good idea," Channa said.

Amos, as far as Simeon could tell, was sulking slightly.

Aha, Simeon thought.
With those looks, plus brains and charisma and high position, he's probably
used to women succumbing to his every ploy.
And, he noted charitably, the Bethelite was only in his early twenties. All the textbooks said softshells were highly subject to hormonal influences at that stage in their pitifully short development spans.

Nine gets you ten,
he told himself,
that there's a worn-down track in the carpet between their doors
within a week.
The notion was oddly unpalatable. He put it aside and launched into some of the nineteen million things Amos would have to become familiar with about station management.

Ahhha,
gotcha! Simeon crooned to himself. "Channa? You awake?"

"You can always tell when I'm awake. Why ask?"

"Because it's
polite,
" he replied.

"What is it?" Her tone noted that the sleep period was three hours gone and, in barely five more, she would have to be awake for more of the interminable meetings and briefings.

"I've found out something about our expected and uninvited guests," he went on.

That brought her alert, sitting up in bed and reaching to key up the lights and switch off the soft fugue she had been playing to court sleep.

"Couldn't sleep anyway," she said. "Let me have it."

"Got a download from Central. Had to burn some butts to get it released. It's not much. Planet named
Kolnar,
settled way, way,
way
back. Quite a ways from here, too, as such things go. About forty times as far as the sun Saffron, further in on the spiral arm."

Channa frowned. "That's really out in the boonies, settled in the second or third waves."

"Uh-uh. It was
first
wave."

She pursed her lips in a silent whistle. "Right at the beginning of interstellar colonization."

He went on. "Involuntary colonization. Translation program running . . . Okay, a whole bunch of bad-hat groups; the
Khimir Reddish Rice Cosmetic,
the
Temil Large Striped Felines,
the
New Council Men,
the
Resurrected Aryan-Germanic Statewide Associationist Employees Party,
the
Sons of Chaka,
the
Luminescent Footway,
the
Darwin-Wilson Society,
the—"

"What's so amusing?" she said as she caught the laughter ripple in his voice.

"You'd have to be a historian to understand, my voluptuous popsie," he said cheerfully. "Anyway, according to the records, they sent out about ten thousand of these oscos, and about three thousand reached their destination."

"Bad voyages?"

"Internal fighting in the holds," Simeon said. "With fists and teeth and soft plastic cups, since they didn't have anything else. Then when they got there, they realized they'd have to interbreed, like it or not."

"What sort of planet
is
Kolnar?"

"Nickname was 'Hell's Orifice.' They picked it because it was easier on tender consciences. Society could pretend the planet killed the convicts, who deserved it, from the records. One-point-six gees, hot sun, enormous heavy-metal concentrations, thick but low-oxygen air, superactive and largely poisonous biosphere. No ozone layer. Vulcanism, unpredictable climatic shifts . . . the whole nine yards! Not much visited since. When the Grand Survey went through a few centuries later, they were fired on. Evidently the locals have a nuclear war about once every forty years or so, and the ship got in the way of one.

Their descriptions of the physical type match what Amos and the others say. There's been some contact with them since. That incident with the survey seemed to remind them that the rest of the universe was still there, unfortunately."

"Unfortunately?"

"Well, I've got cross-references under piracy, brigandage, police actions, war crimes and aggression.

Also entries in the anthro files under genocide, slavery, cultural pathology, xenophobia and societal devolution. There are apparently pockets of the descendants of the original social aberrants scattered through a number of systems in the area nowadays. Little asteroid colonies, freebooter dens, unsurveyed worlds."

"Urk. Characteristics?"

"Apart from not being very nice? Dark skin is a climatic adaptation—all that UV—and the hair and eye color genetic drift you'd expect in a small initial population. They breed like, hmm, rabbits, though.

Puberty at eight, all children twins or triplets. Overall, the Kolnari subrace seems to have very efficient immune systems. They're extremely strong and fast. You'd expect good reflexes on a planet like that—those with bad ones didn't survive. They can see in the dark like cats, and they've got an amazing tolerance for ionizing radiation. There's so much fallout and natural background radiation on Kolnar that they've genetically adapted to it. The scientists seem to disagree whether their paranoia is inbred or just cultural."

"Hard to get rid of, I'd expect."

"Like cockroaches," Simeon said, deliberately misunderstanding. "One Space Navy type a few generations back said the only way to solve the Kolnari problem would be to drop antimatter bombs from orbit. Even then, you wouldn't be really sure of destroying them all."

"Very depressing, thank you, and now can I get some rest?"

* * *

"You should be sleeping, Channa."

"I know, but I've got to clear my mind first. Will you talk with me?"

A pause hung in the air. She took a breath and went on. "I know I haven't been as good a brawn as—"

"Ancient history," Simeon said. "You've been handling a hellacious emergency better than most anyone could. I can certainly listen. What's on your mind?"

"
He
is," she said, as if the two words covered the problem adequately.

"Ah. Not what you expected, huh?"

She sighed, "No, the opposite. Too much what I expected. He's . . . I'm afraid I won't be able to work with him."

Why am I not surprised?
Simeon thought. "Why? What's wrong?"

"Aside from his being a smug, pushy, egotist, you mean? Well, he doesn't have any faith in my competence and I expect to have to fight to keep him from trying to usurp my position. He's very much a take-charge kind of person, you were right about that. And he has no respect for women."

"What makes you think that?"
Let's hear how you came to that difficult conclusion.
Simeon enjoyed the challenge of following the workings of her mind.

"For crying out loud, Simeon, he expected me to
cook
for him! Oh, yes, he got over that. He's always ready with an apology for 'different customs.' But, deep down, he doesn't really
believe
it. He thinks

'customs' is whether you sit on the floor or on a chair, stuff like that. He doesn't grasp the difference in fundamental cultural views."

"Channa-my-sweet, back on Bethel, there
aren't
any fundamental differences. This quarrel he had with the Elders, it's hard to grasp exactly what it was about . . . but it seems overwhelmingly important to
them.
"

"Oh, I
understand
why he's that way," Channa said, striking the pillow with a frustrated fist. "And it's not as if he's stupid. He's intelligent and he notices things, but that makes it more irritating, not less. You could ignore what a stupid person does. What's more, suddenly he's living in my pocket. I'm just a little surprised he didn't ask to see the other rooms in order to choose the one he preferred." Her face suddenly flushed a becoming rose.

Simeon noted that. After all, he could see in the dark, too. "And he came on to you like the colony ship he flew in on, didn't he?"

"Damn right he did," she muttered, half under her breath. " 'I
like
attractive women,' " she said in exaggerated imitation of his manner and accent. "What do you suppose he does when he has to deal with an
un
-attractive woman? Carry a bag to put over her head? I hate men like that!" She thumped the bed with both fists for emphasis.

"I thought you were attracted to him," Simeon said in a calm and mildly curious tone.

"I am," she said with exasperation. "I hate that part of it the most."

"I'm a little confused here. How can you be attracted to someone you can't stand?"

"I don't know," she said grimly.

"Pheromones?" Simeon asked slyly.

"Maybe. It happens." She sighed.

The mysterious pheromones strike again, he thought. There are times I'm extremely glad I'm a shellperson. At least I can adjust my own hormone feeds. The thought of having his biochemistry unpredictably mucked about by emotional factors was nerve-wracking.

"You mean," he said carefully, "this has happened to you before?"

A look of annoyance crossed her face. "Not just to
me.
It's happened to a great many people."

He waited expectantly and patiently.

With a resigned sigh, she went on. "He was a professor of economics, of all people! I fell for him like a stone. And the weird thing was, I never liked him. Quite the opposite. He was attractive enough, but he was sarcastic and lazy and snide—ugh! Never to me, but it bothered me to see him doing it to other students. One day I was sitting there and I looked up at him and I said to myself,
I'm in love with him.
"

She widened her eyes and held out her hands in a "go figure" gesture and let them flop back onto the bed. "Hmmp."

"So . . . you're in love . . . with Simeon-Amos?"

"No! Of course not! I said I was in love with my professor, not Simeon-Amos. They're two different cases." She started to laugh. "I'm older and wiser now, Simeon-Simple."

"As long as you're not sadder, love."

She chuckled. "No, not sadder."

"Naturally you and Simeon-Amos will have to undergo a bit of a period of adjustment," he said seriously, "but he really wants to help. And he's going to be very busy helping. That'll go a long way in curbing any ardent tendencies he may have. Try to cut him a little slack, Channa; he's the victim of an inbred culture. Besides which, we're all under threat of death."

"Mmm. Tell that to the subconscious—it interprets threats of death as a reason to get
more
interested. I do wish this crisis wasn't so immediate." She sighed again, wearily. "Maybe they're not out there. Maybe they gave up and went back to Saffron, to Bethel. All we'd have to do is file a report, while the fleet floats by us."

"I wouldn't bet on it, babe."

"I must be mellowing," she observed, "I've allowed you to call me 'love' and 'babe' and . . . I actually let you get away with 'luscious popsie,' didn't I?"

"Yeah. I'm counting coup. Maybe you
like
me?"

"I wouldn't count on it," she said grinning. "Goodnight, Simeon."

"'Night, Channa."

* * *

In one hand, she held the notescreen she was studying and, in the other, a cup of coffee. Hot as hell, black as death, sweet as love:
not
the way she generally drank her caffeine, but the proper dose to jolt a body into action after inadequate sleep. For something stronger, she would have to go to Doctor Chaundra.

"Why meetings?" she continued to herself as she stumbled into the lift at the end of the corridor. "Why can't I just send memos?"