“Six inches of vanadium wire?”
The Baron smiled. “His fingerprints and retina pattern, he can alter at will. A little neural surgery has made all the muscles of his face voluntary, which means he can alter his facial structure drastically. Chemical dyes and hormone banks beneath the scalp enable him to color his hair in seconds, or, if necessary, shed it completely and grow a new batch in half an hour. He’s a past master in the psychology and physiology of coercion.”
“Torture?”
“If you will. He is totally obedient to the people whom he has been conditioned to regard as his superiors; totally destructive toward what he has been ordered to destroy. There is nothing in that beautiful head even akin to a superego.”
“He is…” and she wondered at herself speaking, “beautiful.” The dark-lashed eyes with lids about to quiver open, the broad hands hung at the naked thighs, fingers half-curled, about to straighten or become a fist. The display light was misty on the tanned, yet near-translucent skin. “You say this isn’t a model, but really alive?”
“Oh, more or less. But it’s rather firmly fixed in something like a yoga trance, or a lizard’s hibernation. I could activate it for you—but it’s ten to seven. We don’t want to keep the others waiting at the table now, do we?”
She looked away from the figure in glass to the dull, taut skin of the Baron’s face. His jaw, beneath his faintly concave cheek, was involuntarily working on its hinge.
“Like the circus,” Rydra said. “But, I’m older now. Come.” It was an act of will to offer her arm. His hand was paper dry, and so light she had to strain to keep from flinching.
4
“CAPTAIN WONG! I AM delighted.”
The Baroness extended her plump hand, of a pink and gray hue suggesting something parboiled. Her puffy freckled shoulders heaved beneath the straps of an evening dress tasteful enough over her distended figure, still grotesque.
“We have so little excitement here at the Yards that when someone as distinguished as yourself pays us a visit…” She let the sentence end in what would have been an ecstatic smile, but the weight of her doughy cheeks distorted it into a porcine pastiche of itself.
Rydra held the soft, malleable fingers as short a time as politeness allowed and returned the smile. She remembered, as a little girl, being obliged not to cry through punishment. Having to smile was worse. The Baroness seemed a muffled, vast, vacuous silence. The small muscle shifts, those counter communications that she was used to in direct conversation, were blunted in the Baroness under the fat. Even though the voice came from the heavy lips in strident little screeches, it was as though they talked through blankets.
“But your crew! We intended them all to be present—twenty-one, now that’s what a full crew consists of.” She shook her finger in patronizing disapproval. “I read up on these things, you know. And there are only eighteen of you here.”
“I thought the discorporate members might remain on the ship,” Rydra explained. “You need special equipment to talk with them and I thought they might upset your other guests. They’re really more content with themselves for company, and they don’t eat.”
They’re having barbecued lamb for dinner and you’ll go to hell for lying, she commented to herself—in Basque.
“Discorporate?” The Baroness patted the lacquered intricacies of her high-coifed hair. “You mean dead? Oh, of course. Now I hadn’t thought of that at all. You see how cut off we are from one another in this world? I’ll have their places removed.” Rydra wondered whether the Baron had discorporate detecting equipment operating, as the Baroness leaned toward her and whispered confidentially, “Your crew has enchanted everybody! Shall we go in?”
With the Baron on her left—his palm a parchment sling for her forearm—and the Baroness leaning on her right—breathy and damp—they walked from the white stone foyer into the hall.
“Hey, Captain!” Calli bellowed, striding toward them from a quarter of the way across the room. “This is a pretty neat place, huh?” With his elbows he gestured around at the crowded hall, then held up his glass to show the size of his drink. He pursed his lips and nodded approvingly. “Let me get you some of these, Captain.” Now he raised a handful of tiny sandwiches, olives stuffed with liver, and bacon-wrapped prunes. “There’s a guy with a whole tray full running around over there.” He pointed again with his elbow. “Ma’am, sir—” he looked from the Baroness to the Baron— “can I get you some, too?” He put one of the sandwiches in his mouth and followed it with a gulp from his glass. “Uhmpmnle.”
“I’ll wait till he brings them over here,” the Baroness said.
Amused, Rydra glanced at her hostess, but there was a smile, much more the proper size, winding through her fleshy features. “I hope you like them.”
Calli swallowed. “I do.” Then he screwed up his face, set his teeth, opened his lips, and shook his head. “Except those really salty ones with the fish. I didn’t like those at all, ma’am. But the rest are okay.”
“I’ll tell you—” the Baroness leaned forward, the smile crumbling into a chesty chuckle—“I never really liked the salty ones either!”
She looked from Rydra to the Baron with a shrug of mock surrender. “But one is so tyrannized by one’s caterer nowadays, what can one do?”
“If I didn’t like them,” Calli said, jerking his head aside in determination, “I’d tell him don’t bring none!”
The Baroness looked back with raised eyebrows. “You know, you’re perfectly right! That’s exactly what I’m going to do!” She peered across Rydra to her husband. “That’s just what I’m going to do, Felix, next time.”
A waiter with a tray of glasses said, “Would you care for a drink?”
“She don’t want one of them little tiny ones,” Calli said, gesturing toward Rydra. “Get her a big one like I got.”
Rydra laughed. “I’m afraid I have to be a lady tonight, Calli.”
“Nonsense!” cried the Baroness. “I want a big one, too. Now let’s see, I put the bar somewhere over there, didn’t I?”
“That’s where it was when I saw it last,” Calli said.
“We’re here to have fun this evening, and nobody is going to have fun with one of those.” She seized Rydra’s arm and called back to her husband, “Felix, be sociable,” and led Rydra away. “That’s Dr. Keebling. The woman with the bleached hair is Dr. Crane, and that’s my brother-in-law, Albert. I’ll introduce you on the way back. They’re all my husband’s colleagues. They work with him on those dreadful things he was showing you in the cellar. I wish he wouldn’t keep his private collection in the house. It’s gruesome. I’m always afraid one of them will crawl up here in the middle of the night and chop our heads off. I think he’s trying to make up for his son. You know we lost our little boy, Nyles—I think it’s been eight years. Felix has thrown himself totally into his work since. But that’s a terribly glib explanation, isn’t it? Captain Wong, do you find us dreadfully provincial?”
“Not at all.”
“You should. But then, you don’t know any of us well, do you. Oh, the bright young people who come here, with their bright, lively imaginations. They do nothing all day long but think of ways to kill. It’s a terribly placid society, really. But, why shouldn’t it be? All its aggressions are vented from nine to five. Still, I think it does something to our minds. Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don’t you think?”
“I do.” Concern grew for the weighty woman.
Just then they were stopped by clotted guests.
“What’s going on here?” demanded the Baroness. “Sam, what are they doing in there?”
Sam smiled, stepped back, and the Baroness wedged herself into the space, still clutching Rydra’s arm.
“Hold ’em back some!”
Rydra recognized Lizzy’s voice. Someone else moved and she could see. The kids from Drive had cleared a space ten feet across, and were guarding it like junior police. Lizzy crouched
with three boys, who, from their dress, were local gentry of Armsedge. “What you have to understand,” she was saying, “is that it’s all in the wrist.” She flipped a marble with her thumbnail: it struck first one, then another, and one of the struck ones struck a third.
“Hey, do that again!”
Lizzy picked up another marble. “Only one knuckle on the floor, now, so you can pivot. But it’s mostly from the wrist.”
The marble darted out, struck, struck, and struck. Five or six people applauded. Rydra was one.
The Baroness touched her breast. “Lovely shot! Perfectly lovely!” She remembered herself and glanced back. “Oh, you must want to watch this, Sam. You’re the ballistics expert, anyway.” With polite embarrassment she relinquished her place and turned to Rydra as they continued across the floor. “There. There, that is why I’m so glad you and your crew came to us this evening. You bring something so cool and pleasing, so fresh, so crisp.”
“You speak about us as though we were a salad.” Rydra laughed. In the Baroness the “appetite” was not so menacing.
“I dare say if you stayed here long enough we would devour you, if you let us. What you bring we are very hungry for.”
“What is it?”
They arrived at the bar, then turned with their drinks. The Baroness’s face strained toward hardness. “Well, you…you come to us and immediately we start to learn things, things about you, and ultimately about ourselves.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Take your Navigator. He likes his drinks big and all the hors d’oeuvres except the anchovies. That’s more than I know about the likes and dislikes of anyone else in the room. You offer Scotch, they drink Scotch. You offer tequila, tequila they then down by the gallon. And just a moment ago I discovered—” she shook her supine hand—“that it’s all in the wrist. I never knew that before.”
“We’re used to talking to each other.”
“Yes, but you tell the important things. What you like, what you don’t like, how you do things. Do you really want to be introduced to all those stuffy men and women who kill people?”
“Not really.”
“Didn’t think so. And I don’t want to bother, myself. Oh, there are three or four here whom I think you would like. But I’ll see that you meet them before you leave.” She barreled into the crowd.
Tides, Rydra thought. Oceans. Hyperstasis currents. Or the movement of people in a large room. She drifted along the least resistant ways that pulsed open, then closed as someone moved to meet someone, to get a drink, to leave a conversation.
Then there was a corner, a spiral stair. She climbed, pausing as she came around the second turn to watch the crowd beneath. There was a double door ajar at the top, a breeze. She stepped outside.
Violet had been replaced by artful, cloud-streaked purple. Soon the planetoid’s chromadome would simulate night. Moist vegetation lipped the railing. At one end, the vines had completely covered the white stone.
“Captain?”
Ron, shadowed and brushed with leaves, sat in the corner of the balcony, hugging his knees. Skin is not silver, she thought, yet whenever I see him that way, curled up in himself, I picture a knot of white metal. He lifted his chin from his kneecaps and put his back against the verdant hedge so there were leaves in his corn-silk hair.
“What’re you doing?”
“Too many people.”
She nodded, watching him press his shoulders downward, watching his triceps leap on the bone, then still. With each breath in the young gnarled body, the tiny movements sang to her. She listened to the singing for nearly half a minute while he watched her, sitting still, yet always the tiny entrancements. The rose on his shoulder whispered against the leaves. When she had listened to the muscular music awhile, she asked:
“Trouble between you, Mollya, and Calli?”
“No. I mean…just…”
“Just what?” She smiled and leaned on the balcony edge.
He leaned his chin to his knees again. “I guess they’re fine. But, I’m the youngest…and…” Suddenly the shoulders raised. “How the hell would you understand! Sure, you know about things like this, but you don’t really know. You write what you see. Not what you do.” It came out in little explosions of half-whispered sound. She heard the words and watched the jaw muscle jerk and beat and pop, a small beast inside his cheek. “Perverts,” he said. “That’s what you Customs all really think. The Baron and the Baroness, all those people in there staring at us, who can’t understand why you could want more than one lover. And you can’t understand either.”
“Ron?”
He snapped his teeth on a leaf and yanked it from the stem.
“Five years ago, Ron, I was…tripled.”
The face turned to her as if pulling against a spring, then yanked back. He spit the leaf. “You’re Customs, Captain. You circle Transport, but just the way you let them eat you up with their eyes, the way they turn and watch to see who you are when you walk by: you’re a Queen, yeah. But a Queen in Customs. You’re not Transport.”
“Ron, I’m public. That’s why they look. I write books. Customs people read them, yes, but they look because they want to know who the hell wrote them. Customs didn’t write them. I talk to Customs and Customs looks at me and says: ‘You’re Transport.’ ” She shrugged. “I’m neither. But even so, I was tripled. I know about that.”
“Customs don’t triple,” he said.
“Two guys and myself. If I ever do it again it’ll be with a girl and a guy. For me that would be easier, I think. But I was tripled for three years. That’s over twice as long as you’ve been.”
“Yours didn’t stick, then. Ours did. At least it was sticking together with Cathy.”
“One was killed,” Rydra said. “One is in suspended animation at Hippocrates General waiting for them to discover a cure for Caulder’s disease. I don’t think it will be in my lifetime, but if it is…” In the silence he turned to her. “What is it?” she asked.
“Who were they?”
“Customs or Transport?” She shrugged. “Like me, neither really. Fobo Lombs, he was captain of an interstellar transport; he was the one who made me go through and get my Captain’s papers. Also he worked planetside doing hydroponics research, working on storage methods for hyperstatic hauls. Who was he? He was slim and blond and wonderfully affectionate and drank too much sometimes, and would come back from a trip and get drunk and in a fight and in jail, and we’d have to bail him out—really it only happened twice. But we teased him about it for a year. And he didn’t like to sleep in the middle of the bed because he always wanted to let one arm hang over.”
Ron laughed, and his hands, grasping high on his forearms, slid to his wrists.
“He was killed in a cave-in exploring the Ganymede Catacombs during the second summer that the three of us worked together on the Jovian Geological Survey.”
“Like Cathy,” Ron said, after a moment.
“Muels Aranlyde was—”
“Empire Star…?” Ron said, his eyes widening. “And the rest of the ‘Comet Jo’ books! You were tripled with Muels Aranlyde?”
She nodded. “Those books were a lot of fun, weren’t they?”
“Hell, I must’ve read all of them,” Ron said. His knees came apart. “What sort of a guy was he? Was he anything like Comet?”
“As a matter of fact, Comet Jo started out to be Fobo. Fobo would get involved in something or other, I’d get upset, and Muels would start another novel.”
“You mean they’re like…true stories?”
She shook her head. “Most of the books are just all the fantastic things that could have happened, or that we worried might have happened. Muels himself? In the books he always disguises himself as a computer. He was dark, and withdrawn, and incredibly patient and incredibly kind. He showed me all about sentences and paragraphs—did you know the emotion unit in writing is the paragraph?—and how to separate what you can say from what you can imply, and when to
do one or the other—” She stopped. “Then he’d give me a manuscript and say, ‘Now you tell me what’s wrong with the words.’ The only thing I could ever find was that there were too many of them. It was just after Fobo was killed that I really got down to my poetry. Muels used to tell me if I ever would, I’d be great because I knew so much about its elements to start. I had to get down something then, because Fobo was…but you know about that, though. Muels caught Caulder’s disease about four months later. Neither one of them saw my first book, though they’d seen most of the poems. Maybe someday Muels will read them. He might even write some more of Comet’s adventures—and maybe even go to the Morgue and call back my thinking pattern and ask, “Now tell me what’s wrong with the words’; and I’ll be able to tell him so much more, so much. But there won’t be any consciousness left…” She felt herself drift toward the dangerous emotions, let them get as close as they would. Dangerous or not, it had been three years since her emotions had scared her too much to watch them. “…so much more.”
Ron sat cross-legged now, forearms on his knees, hands hanging.
“Empire Star and Comet Jo; we had so much fun with those stories, whether it was arguing about them all night over coffee, or correcting galleys, or sneaking into bookshops and pulling them out from behind the other books.”