The Musashi Flex (24 page)

“The dead needles are acidic,” he told her. “Kill just about any kind of plant trying to grow, and most animals that might try to eat them. Bark is poisonous to most pests, too.”

There were many wide paths leading into the forest, and the widest and most used led to the biggest tree. Mourn and Sola followed other visitors along this trail, which was merely earth, but packed into plastcretelike density by the footsteps of all the trekkers.

The air was heavy with the scent of the needles, a sharp, piney, citrus smell. Methusalahs bore a reddish, flaky bark, brighter in color where the outer layer had peeled away, and the live needles were a dark blue-green, ten or twelve centimeters long. Some of them had seed cones, some didn’t. Aside from the paths, the dead brown needles covered the ground knee deep on a small child. The largest fifty or so trees had names, and the biggest of all, called God’s Umbrella by the locals, was thirty meters around and a hundred and twenty-six meters tall.

Standing at the base of that tree and looking up made you feel very tiny.

“Jesu damn,” Sola said, her voice quiet.

“It gets better,” Mourn said. “Come on.”

He took her hand and led her on a meandering path away from the tree. The path wound along for another klick or so, then up a long and gradual rise. When they got to the top of the hill, he turned to watch her reaction.

Her eyes went wide at the sight, and he remembered the first time he had seen it himself, at the age of ten.

The Pit was three thousand meters deep in the middle, and thirty kilometers across, a more or less perfect circle, looked as if somebody had taken a giant scoop to the land, leaving a hemispherical hole softened and worn smooth around the edges by eons of time and weather.

It didn’t take her more than a few seconds to realize what it was:

“It’s a meteor crater,” she said. “This isn’t a hill, it’s the splash lip of the crater.” Her voice was still full of awe.

“About ten million years ago, a big something fell from the sky and hit here,” he said. “Scientists say it probably was a comet, and it wiped out most of the plant and animal life locally when it landed—there would have been a big blast, and a lot of dust in the atmosphere, enough for an impact winter that changed life all over the planet. Hot enough to fuse most of the ground along the crater wall into a kind of very hard glass. They say there was some kind of residual radiation that lasted a long time, and that the Methusalah forest was a mutation that came from it. The only place the trees grow is the rim of the crater. They’ve found fossilized Methusalah wood going back at least eight million years.”

She was held by the sight. “This is amazing. How come I’ve never heard of it before?”

“The locals try to keep it low buzz. Nobody here wants millions of tourists dropping round like they do at the Grand Canyon or the Deep Rift. It’s not advertised, either here or offworld. I’d never heard of it, except from childhood friends who had seen it, until my parents brought me here as a boy. Not like it’s some kind of state secret—there are offworlders who know about it and find their way here—but it is downplayed. ‘The Methusalah Forest? Oh, yar, some old woods on an impact crater rim, I’ve been there, no major deal. You want to flit five hundred klicks to the middle of nowhere to look at a hole in the ground and some
trees
?’

“Plus, it’s not exactly a tourist planet anyhow. As you have pointed out to me several dozen times, watching cows make meadow muffins isn’t the most interesting of activities.”

“I still can’t believe somebody hasn’t done an entcom on this.”

“They have. Pictures don’t do it justice. You’d need a real big holoproj image to give you the feel.”

“I can see why. It’s—it’s . . .”

“Yeah, it is.”

She turned to him. “Thank you for bringing me here, Mourn. Really.”

“So, how, uh, grateful are you? One of the big trees that died has been hollowed out, and there’s a public fresher in it.”

She smiled. “You keep telling me what an old man you are, how you are ready to retire, and yet you seem to have plenty of energy in that arena.”

“Blame yourself, fem. You call, I but answer.”

“Well. I do need to go pee. Which way is this fresher?”

“Let me show you.”

The door’s chime rang, and Azul went to open the portal.

“Fem Azul,” Shaw said. “Are you ready for dinner?”

She smiled at him. She moved closer to where he stood in her doorway, leaned forward, and kissed him on the lips, probing a little with her tongue. He returned the kiss with passion.

After a moment of increasing heat, she leaned back. “What say we skip dinner and get right to the dessert? Unless you are really hungry?”

He smiled. “I’m sure we can find something to eat here that will satisfy us.”

The trip to the bed involved a rapid removal of clothes, made easier in her case, since she had dressed with that goal in mind, and it took only three motions to go from clad to nude. They fell on the bed, he on his back, and she swung one leg over and settled down on him, already wet and ready. He slid into her smoothly to his base as she sat up on his crotch. She squeezed him with very fit muscles she kept toned for this very purpose.

“Oh,” he said. “Very nice!”

She rode him, and he was quick, his first orgasm coming in less than a minute. She squeezed him until he stopped throbbing, then rolled off and lay next to him.

“Too fast,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You’ll make it up to me.”

He laughed. “Oh, yes, I will.”

He moved down her body and began to use his lips and tongue on her mons, moving deeper, and he was good enough so that her first orgasm didn’t take much longer than his.
Ah.
It had been too long.

As they lay facing each other and resting up for more of the same, she stroked his shoulder.

“I checked you out. I know who you are.”

“I would hope you did,” he said. “When?”

“Before we had dinner that first night.”

“Ah.”

She could see that pleased him. If what she said was true, she’d known how rich he was when she’d turned him away from her bed before. Which should mean that his huge fortune didn’t matter that much to her. And the truth was, it
didn’t
matter, not to Azul the operative nor to Azul the artist. For the op, it was a job, for the artist, it was the man himself. Had it been Azul on her own, playing neither part? The money wouldn’t have mattered to her, either.

She saw the synthetic flesh patch on his arm. “What happened?” She touched the bandage with one finger.

“That? A woman cut me.”

“Really? By accident?”

“On purpose. She had a large knife. You recall telling me about your brother? Well, as it happens, I have begun to play the same game he did.”

Azul the op knew this. Azul the artist would not. And the next question could have come from either of them:

“What happened to her? The woman who cut you?”

“I killed her,” he said.

Here was another crux. The artist could be repelled by this, taken aback that she was pronging a killer. Or she could be excited by it. Given that she had a brother who had been a ranked player, she would have more experience with such stories.

“Did it bother you? To kill her?”

“Some. I gave her a chance to surrender. She chose not to take it. She was trying to kill me.” He shrugged. “It was on her head.”

Excited, she decided. She moved her hand down his belly to his groin. He was ready. She scooted down and took him into her mouth.

She saw his triumphant grin as she began fellating him.

He had conquered her, so he thought.

But now, he was hers . . .

On the way back from the forest, with a most enjoyable and exciting stop in the public fresher before they left, Mourn sat and watched Sola as she drove. She had a light touch with the flitter, which was a middle-of-the-lane sedan, not a particularly racy transport.

“That was fun,” he said.

“What, peeing?”

He laughed.

“So, this is where I came from,” he said after a moment of silence. “What do you think?”

“Everybody has got to be from someplace, so the man said. Better than some, worse than others,” she said. “It’s not where you were born that matters, it’s where you end up. Only one you can control.”

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“You came from somewhere. Want to share that with me?”

She thought about it for a few seconds. “Sure. Why not? I was born at a very young age,” she said.

He shook his head.

“Sorry, old joke.”

He waited, and she began to tell him her story.

 
There was never any question but that Cayne was going to be a medico, just as her father, uncles, and grandfather had all been, and as her older sister was training to become. It was the family tradition, and on her homeworld of Tembo, in CinqueKirli, tradition was no small part of the culture. The caste system was not legally enforced, but it was customarily observed, especially if you were of the upper classes, which full medicos were. If you were born working-class, you would almost certainly stay working-class, barring some stroke of fortune. If your father or mother dug shinies at the Strother diamond mines, then when you got old enough, you would, too—unless you found enough spare time to go prospecting in the Big Sands and happened across a vein nobody else had found. If you could circumvent all the obstacles in your way and file a valid claim, the Strothers would immediately buy you out, and you would be one of the storied people:

“Y’heard about Thistlewaite? Hit a meterwide seam two hundred meters long out past Dry Wells, sold out for six million stads.”

“No feke?”

“Yar, a lucky bastard, him.”

Yar, indeed. The lucky bastards were, however, few and far between on Tembo.

Being part of the elite was the chance of birth, and one of the advantages of high caste was that you had access to things the poor did not. Sure, everybody got basic entcom and edcom piped to their dwellings, and everybody had a shot at a mandated Confed-primary-level education. But if your father and his father were doctors, your caste got the perks: best neighborhoods and housing, high income, prestige. Plus access to First Tier education and full entertainment ’proj. More width, more depth, and that was what did it for Cayne.

At thirteen, she realized that the galaxy was a much bigger and grander place than even the highest castes on her planet could achieve there. There seemed to be no limits to what was possible away from her two-planet outback system.

By the age of fourteen, she was focused on the
possibility
of leaving her world.

By sixteen, she
knew
what she was going to do with her life. She was going to travel the galaxy as a reporter, go places, see things, taste foods that nobody in her family had ever eaten or even had the opportunity to consider. Her life was not going to be an endless ministering to miners coughing and wheezing from militant silicosis; nor delivering babies; nor doing cloned liver transplants on rich alcoholic retirees. No way. That didn’t call to her in the least.

She began taking journalism and video-production courses via edcom, keeping them secret from her family. She found time to talk to people who worked in the news industry locally, made media contacts, all surreptitiously. The more she learned, the more interesting it became.

For a year, she got away with it.

Two months after her seventeenth birthday, her father came to her room. He closed the door behind him, and Cayne knew that she was in trouble.

Her father had never been one to dissemble, he came right to the point: “What the hell are all these edcom classes you have been taking, Cayne?” He waved a printout.

“They don’t cost anything,” she tried.

“That isn’t the point! You should be studying premed science by now—anatomy, physiology, pharmacology—not wasting your time on such trash.” He held up the printout as if the sight of it would wilt her into helplessness, like some entcom vampire confronted by a holy relic.

And in truth, she felt like wilting. On some level, she had known her parents would find out about her plans sooner or later. She had rehearsed what she would tell them, gone over it in her mind a hundred times, but she wasn’t ready to deliver that speech yet. She had it in her thoughts that she would be eighteen, legally able to do as she wished, and that by then, she’d have a job waiting on a planet far away from this one. They’d be upset, but eventually, they’d accept it. That had been the plan.

“Baba—” She stopped.

“Go on.”

“I want to be a reporter. A documentarian.”

He blinked. Then he tried to put her statement into a framework to which he could relate: “Medical or surgical? There’s not much call for medical cataloging or training vids here. Perhaps on the surgical end, but you’d need at least a fourth year of residency to become a good enough surgical diagnostician to know what to record—”

“No,” she cut in. She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to practice medicine. I want to report
news
!”

He stared at her as if her hair had burst into flame. “What? Don’t be stupid, of course you’ll practice medicine!”

She had never been particularly confrontational with her parents.

Her sister, Terah, had gone through a phase in which she and their mother were so irritated with each other over Terah’s low-caste suitors that they barely spoke. And Terah and their father had yelled at each other about it more than once, full-volume shouting matches that sent Cayne scurrying to hide in her room, afraid her father would do something violent. Even so, those waters had calmed. Her sister’s choice in male companions had provoked anger, but she had come to see the light about that and found a young man in the proper caste. Being
mated
to one of the elcee trash was not the same as using him to piss off her parents. And, of course, Terah had gone off to do her internship and residency at Tembo Medical on schedule, too—
that
had never been in question.