Voyage Across the Stars (5 page)

“Beverly, my dear, please,” the handsome man interrupted. “After all, we’ve known each other all our lives.” He too stood, dropping the flaccid stim cone back into the waist pouch from which he had taken it. There was a trash chute in the pedestal table beside him. Using the chute would have permitted others to examine the container, to penetrate a facet of the disguise in which Dyson wrapped himself.

“Councilor
Dyson,” retorted Marilee Slade. “Look, if you want me to treat you as a human being, then you’ve got to stop this nonsense about appointing yourself guardian for Edward. He’s not a child, he’s almost twenty—and if he
needs
a guardian, it can be me!”

The tall woman pivoted back to the window. Beverly Dyson permitted his face to lose the mobility he maintained when others were watching him. “I don’t appoint anyone guardian, Marilee,” he said. “That’s what the Council meeting is being held to discuss. Though of course I won’t deny that many of the Council do believe there should be—a—I’m sorry, but facts are facts—a strong male hand at the helm of the Slade Estate during these troubled times.”

When the woman did not respond, Dyson stepped carefully closer to her. He had been beautiful as a child and as a youth. When he reached adulthood, Dyson had been wise enough to eschew the cosmetic treatments that would have frozen that youthful beauty. Twenty-odd years of natural ageing had left Councilor Beverly Dyson ruggedly handsome. He was as attractive to men as to women, and he had none of the smooth cuteness that destroyed respect when power was being discussed.

There was a mark on Dyson’s left forehead where age had begun to undo some expensive plastic surgery. The skin there was a trifle shinier than the rest, and there was a path that could be traced back in whorls along Dyson’s short-cut hair. “You know, my dear,” he went on in a carefully modulated voice, “there’s a simple solution. We were friends when we were younger. I still want to be your friend, and more than friend.” His hand reached out toward the woman in a gesture that deliberately stopped short of her arm.

The curving crystal surface of the window had been treated during extrusion to permit no reflection on the inner side. There was obvious awareness of the outstretched hand in Marilee’s voice, however, as she said, “If you want a strong male hand running the Slade Estate, then wait for Don to return. It can’t be long, now that Friesland says they’ve traced him.”

“Marilee,” said Dyson sadly. “Even if I believed that weren’t one of your little games to delay the Council, my dear, I scarcely think that Mad Dog Slade is what is required on a world already having difficulties with violence among the
lower
orders.” He had difficulty keeping his tone light, and his arm lowered slowly.

“Mad Dog,” the woman repeated with seeming amusement. She continued to face the activity in the courtyard below. “You know, I knew Don Slade pretty well, Bev . . . and I never knew him to lose his temper.”

“I’m the wrong one to tell
that
silly lie, lady!” shouted Councilor Dyson. His fresh, bubbling anger drew Marilee’s gaze as his attempted tenderness had not. Dyson touched the scar on his forehead. “I’m not going to forget, you see, what he did to
me
for a childhood prank!”

Marilee smiled. His rage was her victory. “I haven’t forgotten that either Bev,” she said. “It must have been quite a surprise when Don popped to the surface after you thought you’d bolted the escape hatch over him. But I really don’t think he lost his temper when he came for you with the wrench. I think he had just decided the world would be a better place with you dead. Don was never the one to leave dirty jobs for other people when he could handle them himself.”

Laughter pursued Councilor Dyson as he strode from the room.

“We had a bad one,” Don said without preamble as he opened the door of the Terzia’s chamber. “I left all the harvest so we could get back quicker with the wounded. Brought the dead; I know it didn’t matter, but I did and I don’t care cop what you think about it.”

The big man paused for the first time since he entered the room. He swallowed and said, “There were two missing. We searched, but there’s two missing.”

“That doesn’t matter, Don,” said the Terzia from the bed itself. “Come—come sit by me while I talk.”

The poison burns on Slade’s upper body were white with the SpraySeal which now covered them. Besides the sweat-streaked dust on his skin and trousers, Slade’s hands had a black patina. He had changed the barrel of his powergun as soon as he entered the Citadel. The one he had used on the giant carnivore was by no means shot out; but there was no reason to skimp on equipment, and a millimeter’s tighter focus on a bolt might mean a life.

“Lady,” Slade said, “the harvest’s all over the trail and beside it. I’m going out with another gang. I’ll be back as soon as we’ve gathered up the copper-pods—”

“They don’t matter, Don. Sit down.”

“—and found the bodies; Terzia, it matters to me,” Slade concluded. His weariness was no veil over the angry determination in his voice.

The Terzia lay on a glade-green spread in a pool of light muted to duplicate forest shadows. Slade had never been sure of the process by which Terzia controlled the light. At other times, it had seemed to him to be extremely sensual.

“Don,” the Terzia began. Then she lowered the hand with which she had beckoned him. In a changed, business-like voice, she said, “Both the bodies are with the carnivore, as you call it, some three kilometers from where it was shot. A party of workers has been sent out to retrieve the remains from the seventeenth-segment limb on the animal’s right side and from its gullet. That business does not require you. This does. Sit down, please.”

Slade’s lips worked—silently, because he could not decide quite what words he wanted them to form. His left hand, smudged already with carbon and metal, touched the fresh and gleaming barrel of his powergun for reassurance. “I don’t . . .” Slade said without the haste or hostility of a moment before.

“Don, come here if you think you might ever want to leave Terzia,” the other said. She held out her hand again.

Slade moved as he would have moved to mount his tank in an alert: quickly, but with the caution that kept haste from being a danger. He laid his weapon on the table that had held it in the past and stepped toward the bed. He wiped his palms nervously on the dirty fabric of his trousers. Slade was not fit to see a woman, to make love on a sleek, resilient bed to a beauty herself so sleek and as capable of innovation as of response.

He did not hesitate, because he knew by more than words that the Terzia cared for the customary graces only as it pleased her lover to provide them. Slade had made love in alleys and in trenches, once even on his own stretcher in the casualty holding station as an affirmation to himself of his intention to survive. The Terzia was a jewel, not some fellow-swimmer in the maelstrom as those other partners had been. Or again—

Slade’s groin was quickening with new excitement as he slid onto the bed.

“Is . . .” he said as his hands cupped her left shoulder and right buttock, calluses over smooth skin and the muscles supple beneath each. “Is there word of a ship coming in?”

“And any ship would be enough,” said the Terzia sadly. Her arms circled him, drawing her naked chest against the big man’s. His body quivered with a vibrancy she had not drunk from it in months. “You want to leave me so badly.”

“Lady,” Slade said. He squeezed her tighter in unconscious reaction to the words he was framing. “I don’t want to leave you, but I want to go home. I’d. . . . You’re a princess here, a queen.” He arched back slightly so that he could look at the Terzia’s face. “It’d be crazy for you to leave all this to come to Tethys. Gravel and sea, that’s all it’d be to you. But it’s my home.”

“No, I couldn’t leave my world, even with you,” the Terzia said. Her eyes were on Slade’s chest, on the black, springy delicacy of the hairs that doubled by their shadows on his skin. “I’ll arrange for you to leave, then, Don. I think you should know—” she looked up to meet his puzzled expression— “that matters on your homeworld are very unsettled. You might find yourself safer—and happier—if you chose some other destination in which to settle down. If not here, then—” the assumed humanity of the Terzia caused her voice to catch— “perhaps back on Friesland. Your friends there have not, have not forgotten you.”

Disbelieving, as tense and as careful as when he disarmed booby-traps, Don Slade said, “Lady, I thank you, but . . . it’s been a long road to get here, and I don’t think I’ll turn back now. If there’s trouble on Tethys, then I guess there’s trouble anywhere, one way or the other. I’m as used to it as the next man. And I’d—” he bent forward again and nuzzled the Terzia’s hair— “really like to go home.”

“You will,” said the almost woman. She shifted her body to free Slade’s trouser catches. “You will very soon, my darling.”

There was a bay concealed in the Citadel’s flank. Its doors slowed, then latched open. Slade stared at the vessel hangared within. Then he looked back at the Terzia. He was not sure whether she had made a mistake through ignorance or whether he was the butt of a joke grim even by the standards of mercenary soldiers. “Terzia,” Slade said in a voice that he worked to control, “this is only a lifeboat. It can’t carry me back home.”

“Not directly,” agreed the Terzia off-handedly. For the first time since Slade had met her, she had not dressed before leaving her chamber. Intellectually, Slade knew that there was no more reason to dress for the autochthones than there was to dress before being seen by so many dogs . . . and there was no more reason to dress for one’s lover than for one’s mirror. Terzia’s nonchalance surprised Slade, however, and the fact that nudity was a change bothered him. “It has a range of forty-five Transit seconds, though,” she continued. “That will take you to Elysium.”

Slade had stepped into the bay to touch the boat’s nose. The hull’s spongy coating was perfectly fresh. The only marks on the vessel’s white surface were consistent with jostling during loading and shipment. The boat had very clearly never been moved under its own power. “I don’t recall an Elysium in this sector,” the man said as he paced cautiously along the vessel’s seven-meter length. Like “Tethys,” Elysium was a name of some frequency among the scattered human settlements.

“It’s not in your indices,”said the Terzia. Something she did caused a motor to whine. The lifeboat began to ease out of the bay on its docking cradle. The low sun stained the ablative coating a pinkish color as the nose inched into the light. “The inhabitants are human, though they have no open traffic with the rest of the galaxy. They’ll help you home for my sake; and perhaps for your sake as well.”

Slade let the vessel slide past him. He stepped around its stern. He continued to examine the boat, even though his expertise would scarcely have let him discover gross damage to the structure. Slade was no rocket jockey. The thought of leaving in this contraption frightened him even against his hopes of escape from plush captivity. Only the fact that lifeboats were designed for use by the ignorant gave him any confidence at all in the coming operation.

The Terzia stood in the open. To Slade, she was framed between the bulk of the vessel and the doorpost. Her waist tucked in above hips that felt firmer than their fullness suggested. The shadow of one breast lay across the cone of the other. Her nipples were dark and still erect, though the Terzia’s face was in repose as she met Slade’s eyes.

The motor’s whisper died back into silence. The lifeboat halted, now clear of the bay.

A tendril of vine squeezed a switch in a control box. The boat’s hatch began to clamshell open. The Terzia had no non-mechanical control over machinery or other inanimate objects. Mechanical control was not limited to that exerted by her humanoid body, however. The result had to it a touch of magic or implanted electronics. It was new to Don Slade; and it was being shown him now only because the whole mime was ending.

“It’s programmed to Elysium,” the Terzia said. She was facing Slade, smiling at him as he walked slowly out of the building. “Food and water for twelve, there’ll be no difficulty that way. You will have to bring her down yourself, though; there aren’t any over-ride docking facilities on Elysium.”

“I . . .” said Slade. His eyelids lowered as he stepped back into the sunlight. “Lady, I’ve never landed one of these. I guess you’re sure that there’ll be no freighters down soon?”

“That’s beyond my control,” said the Terzia coolly. “I can prevent ships from landing, but I can’t make them come. And I can’t be sure how much time I have. How much time your friends will permit me. I must consider the risk to Terzia now, you see.”

“Of course,” said the man, though the words made only grammatical sense to him. Something had changed, but Slade could not imagine what.

A year on Terzia had not rotted Slade’s mind, but the year had its own parameters, as did any long time spent in a habitat. Slade was somewhat disoriented by being faced here with a sort of urgency that was familiar when he was a mercenary soldier. “Well, I’ve hit dirt on the likes of these before, so. . . .”

“At first I thought the ship itself was alive,” said the Terzia with her face turned up to the sky. It was still blue in the west, but it shaded imperceptibly to magenta on the further rim of the horizon. A few bright stars waited there, above the gently-waving jungle canopy. “Then I learned it was the men, not the ships; but it was very long, very long indeed before I realized that the men were different among themselves in such a way.”

“I’m not—Via, I don’t understand what you mean,” Slade said.

A ladder began to extend from the open cockpit. It was swinging wide enough to clear the hull’s soft coating. Half-deployed, the ladder began to jerk as the motor protested. Burrs on an untested cam or lubricant congealed in the step-down gears were hanging up the system. Slade jumped, caught the bottom rung, and let his weight jerk the ladder over the rough spot before he let go.

The Terzia had still not answered him. It was becoming clear that she did not intend to do so; and the man’s words had not precisely been a question, anyway. “You will be able to land it?” she asked.