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the se-
nior pilots who were reluctant why they had to come.
You walked among those doomed, helpless bastards like some brainless consular
fop, nodding at this and scowling at that, even taking notes about what needs
they had.
"Now, you may have fooled them, but you don't fool me: you know damn well that
three pilots are missing from the roster, and why they're missing, and you
haven't said a word to me about it. You also know why
Harmony refused to come, and why those pilots couldn't let her stay, and what
they did to her to get her aboard.
That two-ton, spotted, dream dancer's madam was so nasty to you that / got
angry, but you just smiled and walked away. Every pilot on this ship is
expecting David
Spry to swoop down at any moment and liberate the lot of them! How can you be
so excruciatingly calm!"
Chaeron reached out, patted Penrose's stubbly jaw.
"There, there, dear. All's well that ends well. You wanted your pilots back,
now you've got them. If you cannot control them, don't worry your pretty head
about it I can." He stood up, arched his back, put his palms
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JANET MORRIS
there. "As for those missing, I'll overlook the obvious if you will. We're
running a log slate here, I must assume?"
Penrose, chewing his lip in consternation, did not even nod. "Marada is going
to have your ass for this. Or can you control him, too?"
"Rafe!" Chaeron put his arms on the acceleration couch he had just vacated,
leaned on them. head out-
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thrust, staring Penrose in the eye. "Let me worry about these things, please?
Marada is out of bounds, take my word for it. Law, order, and the Kerrion way
have parted company, all three, under his administration. I've a pen-
ding arbitration against my consul general, a vindictive mother who will not
give up trying to manipulate me into some foot's role, a headstrong wife who
cannot forget that when she was fifteen years old she had a crush on my
lunatic brother, and four siblings on this ship who have just seen altogether
too much of the real world.
"To balance that, I've only what crumbling personal fortitude I can still lay
claim to. Bitsy's hero worship, and some semblance of a normal friendship with
you. Now, I
don't care if you doubt me, or disrespect me, or even
disbelieve me, but right now I would deeply appreciate it if you would not
question my sanity, my motives, and my vanishingty small leadership abilities
to my face where everything we say is being slated!"
His fingers dug into the padding of the acceleration couch so fiercely they
turned white and red and blue and sick, yellowish green. "Now, I hate to throw
you out of your own control room, but since Danae'f, inboard com-
puter still loves me, and you're having some second thoughts, why don't you
take them outside and share them with those of a similar persuasion and leave
me here where I can get some old-fashioned support, even if it is
computerized. I promise I won't rape your cruiser while you are gone. Go!
Move!"
Clumsily, bereft of words, Raphael got up and headed toward the lock. At it,
he turned back: "I've never seen you like this. I don't even know what it was
that I said."
The hurt in his voice was something he could not stifle.
The man whose back was to him replied, "Go disabuse
Baldy and our new pilots of their swashbuckling fan-
tasies. I'm just in need of some peace and quiet. Give me
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an hour, and come back with dinner for two. By then 1
will again be that smug insouciant creature we both know and love."
The lock, hissing open behind Penrose, admitted a tumbling gabble of sound:
laughter, shouts of welcome, a pilot's blue protestations of undying love.
There was nothing to be said that would do, nothing possible at the decibel
level needed to be audible over the passageway's commotion. Feeling that he
had failed in some complete and irrevocable way, Rafe Penrose stepped through
and dosed the door behind him: it was the only thing he could think of that
might show his good faith.
Chaeron had his private hour with Danae's inboard computers. During it, he
called up every recollection the cruiser had stored, in any mode, of space-end
since their arrival, six days before, looking for views of the space-
breathing "sirens" that paddled naked, blowing blue bubbles through
translucent mouths into the void. Only at space-end, a sparse ring of failing
stars encircling an inexplicably hot, featureless black sink in spacetime, did
sirens flourish. Once they had been deemed mythical, space-enders' mass
hallucination come of prisoners'
maunderings, their collective unconscious' attempt to in-
ject something exciting into lives consisting of bleak sur-
vival in ancient oil-drum-shaped habitats and daunting stints downside mining
silicates on the forbidding surface of the penal colony's premier
anchor-planet, Scrap.
It would have been kinder if this were the case, if
every legend of friendly, curious sirens towing in newly arrived prisoners'
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capsules or rubbing curiously against the hulls of space-anchored frigates
were false. But si-
rens Chaeron stopped the display monitor's fast-for-
ward chronicling where graceful blue-glowing mannish forms cavorted were very
real.
He punched up a close view of the pair of sirens Danae's camera caught. Their
purple mouths seemed to smile, their phosphorescent skin glowed with an eerie
translu-
cence: through their bodies, starlight gleamed. The gen-
eration of all sirens was uncertain. The generation of some was clear:
occasionally, when a person was cast adrift in space, under just the right (or
wrong) condi-
tions, the energy-transduction mechanism called mil
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JANET MORRIS
which all platform dwellers maintained sprayed upon their skin and coating
every internal cavity went awry, phosphorylating tight from the entire
spectrum. Mil-
hooding was meant to do just this very thing for short periods of
depressurization, preventing premature black-
outs, allowing the fifteen seconds of unprotected con-
sciousness in vacuum to be extended to a minute or more, long enough for a
platform dweller to reach an emergency air supply. But no medical expert, no
genetic engineer, had ever meant mil to transmogrify its wearers.
No one liked to think about the vacuum-breathers, the sirens. They existed
nowhere but space-end. But
Chaeron thought about them, examining each siren face he saw in Danae's
monitors one of the sirens, farting bubbles as they dived in space-end's warm
plasma, might be his brother, Julian, lost to sirenhood in the Shechem war.
The children had been told simply that he had died;
Ashera knew better, as did every physician in Draconis who had examined the
Julian-siren when Shebat had re-
trieved it. Chaeron had not been consulted about any of it not the capture,
not the study, not the decision to return the siren, who could not be made
back into a man, to its native habitat. Chaeron had been under house ar-
rest in Draconis throughout the siren's stay, at the end of which Julian had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]