Wild Thing (31 page)

So for the next hour, through a judicious blend of persuasion, misdirection, and extremely subtle magic, he would satisfy the Professor without really letting him learn a single solid fact about his work.  Or, for that matter, revealing the true application of certain expenditures, like the holovid feed from the gym to his desk.  Thanks to the privacy shield, the feed could only be viewed from Harmon's position.  He casually redirected the projection out of sight to the floor at his feet, while appearing to casually place his MetaStylus on his desk.

At that moment, Sara entered the gym and crossed over to the vid set he had installed in there.  He dragged his attention back to Sanders.

The Professor was basically a kindly man: it showed in the deep laughter lines round his eyes and mouth and in his often-mischievous expression.  His own area of interest lay in the use of magic to heal the mind, and Harmon had to admit he was indeed good in that field.  If the man had been more than marginally active magically, it would have made things impossibly difficult for Harmon.

The gentle battle of wits commenced.

Some time later, Harmon was momentarily distracted from his vague explanation of the long-term nature of his project when he noticed Sara had frozen, absolutely still, in front of the gym's vid screen.  He couldn't see what she saw, but whatever it was had paralyzed her in mid-action.

And then she began to dance.

But what a dance!  It was both wildly unlike her – he had never seen her do much more than sway or bounce in time to her music – and yet seemed to express the essence of what he sought to mold her into.  It was at once a primitive hunting dance, a controlled explosion of pure action – and strangely erotic.  He could only catch the most frustrating glimpses of the vid screen she was watching in the gym, as his feed tracked her while she stalked, spun, and tumbled before it.  Intriguingly, she seemed to be watching a very old black and white, grainy, 2D image.

Suddenly, he realized he had been silent too long.  He wrenched his gaze from the dancer, to see the Director looking at him curiously.

'What is it?'  Sanders asked.  'Something certainly seems to have caught your interest.'  He started to come round the desk.

Harmon thought quickly, glad of the holo's privacy shield.  Canceling the gym input he called up a mandelbrot tour instead.

'Here, I'll show you.  I use this as a sort of meditation aid, and sometimes it generates ideas.'  He blathered on, even as he inwardly cursed, consumed with curiosity as to what had so caught her interest.

At dinner that evening, Sara was quietly excited, but seemed to be trying to hide the fact.  Intrigued, associating this with her dance, Harmon cast a mindmeld on his young charge.  Her mind opened with the easy susceptibility he had come to expect.  But as he penetrated her surface thoughts, they seemed to dart and scatter like a school of fish.

No doubt due to her unusual state of mind.  He went deeper, taking her mind toward the gym earlier in the day, but her focus kept slipping – a trampoline session, a bout with the punching bag – she had recently become interested in fighting, and was trying to learn skills from holo trids, spending hours applying what she'd learned to the Wing Chun dummy that she and Shanahan had built.  There was a strong sense of guilt, there, before her thoughts shifted and she was remembering a swim she'd taken the day before, in the lake at the back of the Institute, in the nude…. He wrenched the stream of thoughts back on course, but to no avail: they kept skittering away.  Almost as if….

Sara had stopped eating.  Was staring down at her food.  Then he noticed the white knuckles of the hand holding her knife.

She's blocking me!
  The revelation staggered him.  Not only did she have a secret from him; not only had she noticed the invasion of her thoughts; but she had successfully held him off! 
No wonder progress has stalled.
  How many other times had she held a secret from him?

Despite his shock he gave no outward sign of noticing anything unusual.  The rest of the meal passed in silence.

He waited for some time before preparing to try again, shifting his senses to the Imaginal to monitor her emotions before recasting the spell.  But he'd made no more than the first gesture to anchor himself in the pattern before her whole tone shifted to one of anger and defense.  Instantly he aborted the attempt, and spoke to distract her.  'What do you do, Sara, to challenge yourself these days?'

She sat tensely, expecting some other comment, he saw.  He watched her defenses shift to counter the assumed new threat.

'I work on stuff,' she said.

'Good,' he smiled, carefully concealing his growing concern.  'Good.'

Sara stared down into her cereal bowl and took another spoonful, her whole attention really focused on her peripheral vision.  Watching his fingers was best, she had learned.  There was a special kind of dance of fingers that went with the spell he used to slide into her; before his spying presence crowded inside her head.

Sara took care to slump casually in her chair so he wouldn't know she was ready for him.  She saw she'd clenched her fists, and relaxed them.  Then, lightly alert, she waited with the memories of her swim, the day before, suppressing a smile.  Those kinds of images worked best to distract him, to keep her true self private.

She couldn't keep him out, but she could control her own thoughts enough to ensure he mainly saw what she let him.  It had been hard, learning how to “plan out” thoughts in advance, lightly holding them ready to think when the need arose.  She wondered if this was a test, some kind of training.

Whatever it was, Sara didn't like it.  She found it creepy.

Harmon saw little of her the rest of the day.  Was she actively avoiding him, or merely spending a lot of time outdoors?  The former, he suspected, after monitoring her in the gym.  He headed down there, only to find it empty, a climbing rope still gently swaying.

He didn't want to attempt the spell again as they ate together – he hardly wanted to condition her to be alert for such things at every mealtime – so instead, he requested a search for a list of music videos that had played between twelve and one the day before, and which were black and white.  The list had about a hundred entries, but one stood out as being by far the most likely choice.  A broadcast of a pre-Unfolding recording from some group called
The Troggs
, with a title that gave it away.  He called up the lyrics and studied them.  Some of the words were quite archaic.

Later that day, when Sara asked casually if he knew what the word “groovy” meant, he was certain.  He, equally casually, explained it was a very old word meaning something was “right” – “on track” or “in the groove.”  She had nodded and looked pleased.

A small victory for him, too, although he was unsure precisely how to use it.

He spent the next two days discovering it was remarkably difficult to sneak up on Sara.  In growing desperation, he dug into the little published research on invisibility spell constructs.  For the next two weeks he worked on the problem, exploring and creating the pattern for an appropriate and believable certainty he could use for such a spell.  He soon came to realize it was an intrinsically difficult task, but pushed doggedly on.  At the end of the period, though, when he tried the spell for the first time, his fears had been justified – the spell required so much concentration to maintain, that performing a simultaneous mindmeld of any worth would be impossible.  Sara, meanwhile, had acquired a decidedly smug air.

Two weeks wasted.

And now, with those weeks passed, she had grown relaxed in his presence.  Bordering on insolent, really.  He chose an evening meal when she was tired from her physical activity of the day, clearly exhausted.  Once more, he watched her without seeming to, slowly and carefully casting the mindmeld.  With a rigidly controlled joy he completed the spell without her noticing it, and slipped into her thoughts.  It had been so long, it was like rejoining an old friend, and he probed deeper.  But suddenly the mental terrain shifted, altering in an instant from a warm autumn sunset to a glaring summer's day.  He found himself trapped in canyons of inconsequence, stupid repetitive patterns of pointless activity and foolish thought. 
She's blocking me again!

Worse, her blocking was not the deceptive and fragile technique she'd used before, it was a confrontational and stubborn resistance.  He could break through that resistance, he knew – but also knew without question that such a show of force would likely provoke her to respond with a direct confrontation.

He broke off, and without a word, stalked from the room.  The Imaginal reverberations of her triumph felt like invisible lashes against his back.

Sitting on the edge of his bed one night soon after, he mused darkly.  He'd been careless.  Treating her almost with contempt, making little attempt to conceal what he did.  He'd let her see too much, and now he was paying the price.  Now, all his work teetered on the brink.

Not only had she become able to recognize the subtle physical signs of his spellcasting, not only had she taught herself to parry his mental examinations, but the longer this situation remained unresolved, the more it eroded his position of authority.  He
had
to find a solution. 
Think!
  He had realized something was happening to her, something he hadn't planned, the day he'd seen her wild dancing when she thought herself alone in the gym.  Rock and roll.  That thought triggered another.  What was the old saying? 
Sex and drugs and rock and roll.

Psychotropics!

At his desk, he paged through the information the net so readily offered up.  He needed something that would improve her suggestibility.  It took hours of research to find the ideal candidate: di-hydro lysergic scopolamine.  “Scope.”  Discovered only recently, but apparently already being used illicitly.

Illicitly.  Hmm.  Certainly, obtaining it that way would avoid awkward questions; and he could analyze it here easily enough, to ensure its purity.

Browsing around those areas turned up mentions of other street drugs, too: notably, “beep” – a contraction of BP, from beta-phrodisia, presumably.  Harmon remembered the excitement at the time, when Gunter Kerr published her breakthrough work on the chemical intermediaries of the sexual drive.

That
would certainly distract Sara.  He put the idea aside, however.  “Scope” was his main need.

So, in what sort of dives did one hunt this sort of thing?  The rhythm of his tapping finger sped up.  Yes, this could be quite educational.

He called a cab and an hour later was headed into the city with an annoyingly-chatty driver.  A real pity that the Institute was considered a “use-caution” destination.

The talkative driver was especially unwelcome tonight.  How strange to be visiting clubs and bars at his age.  The very thought made him uncomfortable.  He had little idea what to expect.

Three bars later, he had found and mind-read a sleazy and very likely CID-less character by the ridiculous name of “Quicksilver” to find, finally, a lead to obtaining the illicit substance he needed.

By the first bar, it had become clear he could not simply
ask
any of the denizens.  For some reason, they assumed he was some kind of ham-fisted agent of the law.

By his fifth bar, he still could not help being somewhat fazed by the erotic gyrations of the girls on stage.  He kept picturing his wild little Sara using her athletic talents the same way…. With an effort, he tore his gaze away and hunted for the man he'd been advised to seek out.  From deeper in the gloom he caught the mirror glint he'd been searching for, and headed in that direction.

He forced himself to saunter over in a semi-slouch, trying not to look too out of place, yet he still had the uncomfortable feeling that half the patrons watched him with amusement.

The fellow was dressed in crushed black velvet, a barely-dressed woman draped against each side.  Both women seemed entirely rapt by the man, who looked quite accustomed to such attention.

Harmon eyed the dark-haired girl on the left appreciatively, before looking back at his contact.  Eyes chromed from some ocular modification gleamed steadily back at him.  This was the one, certainly.

'Maestro?'

The head inclined slightly, and Harmon took it as an invitation to sit.

'I believe you can help me: “Quicksilver” recommended you.'  Which was a small lie.  However, Quicksilver's mind had been surprisingly easy to scan, and adjust, and the fellow would, if now asked, confirm Harmon's trustworthiness.  A
most
useful spell, Suggestion. It would not be a wise move to try on this fellow, though, something told him.

'Speak.'

Bristling at the terse air of command the man assumed, Harmon swallowed his natural response and answered instead with equal brevity.

'Scope.'

The man nodded.  'Quantity?'

He had determined his requirements.  Had taken into account Sara's lower-than-adult mass, and the advisability of minimizing such forays as this one, as well as the desirability of a slow buildup.  Fifty doses, he'd decided, to be on the safe side.

'Ten milligrams.'

The man blinked.  'Planning an Event, are we?'

Harmon only smiled.

'I can do that.  And for a bulk order I guess I can give you a discount.  Ten thousand creds.'

Harmon avoided gulping – but only just.

'Meet me here, then, midnight.'

Harmon nodded.

Later that night, carefully nursing a drink, Harmon followed the stage show as he waited.  He pulled at his collar.  The little vixen serving drinks winked at him before bending well forward as she served another patron his order, the deep cleavage of her formidable breasts outlined and lit by carefully-placed golden glow-cords.

She looked up, caught him staring, then saucily strutted past his table on her way to the bar, a heart-shaped glowing outline highlighting her swaying rear end as she smiled back at him.

As graceful as Sara, but using it for
such
a different purpose.
  Then he spotted Maestro approaching, this time with only a single woman.  But the woman was naked, he belatedly realized.  And desperate, too, for something.  As they arrived at his table, Harmon noticed another thing: the woman was on a
leash
.  Maestro sat, tugging the leash down.