Mutant Star (2 page)

Hawkins shifted in his chair, wincing as pain stabbed at him where his arm implants met real flesh just below his right shoulder. He took a deep breath and slowly counted each breath that followed. He made it to twenty before the pain eased.

It took a king’s ransom to pay for implants—and he was wealthier than five kings, as he often liked to point out when there were other wealthy men in the room. But cost was incidental. The implant had been a gift, given several years ago. Even then it wasn’t perfect: just the best that medical bionics could offer.

The arm twinged again, and as it did, his screen lit up. A suave face, olive complexion, twinkling brown eyes. A thick head of curling brown hair topped by a red cap. His virtual assistant, Leporello. A computer simulacrum programmed to his specifics.

“Colonel Hawkins?”

There was rhythm in the title, the cadence of marching feet, the flourish of drums. He’d been Colonel Hawkins ever since that nasty Marsbase landing when he’d lost his right arm saving the life of Lee Oniburi, a rich Japanese space entrepreneur. Lose an arm, gain a promotion. And enough multinational industry connections and media notoriety to fill five kings’ coffers. To build five satellites and ring the Moon with them. Not a bad trade-off for one arm. He could almost accept the exchange rate. Almost.

“Yes?” Hawkins’s voice was a deep, ringing basso. But he had chosen space over an operatic career. He had wanted a broader stage, needed more room and more challenges than Verdi, Mozart, and Wagner could offer. And he had found them, yes he had.

“Jasper Saladin on screen two.”

Leporello had a thin tenor voice. If he had been flesh and blood instead of software, he would never have made it into the chorus, let alone have achieved a principal part on the main stage of an opera house. But he was a good electronic spear carrier. Yes indeed. And Hawkins had need of spear carriers. Now more than ever.

The craggy, sallow face of Hawkins’s chief of operations took form above the holoscreen on the other side of his desk.

“More delays on Pavilion Two, Ethan.”

“Damn! What now?”

“Oniburi’s factory changed the specs on the baffle couplings—getting them seamlessly mated in vacuum is making us crazy.”

“Tell them to order the old parts.”

“They don’t make ’em. I told you to retool your own factory last year—if you’d listened, we wouldn’t have this problem now.”

Hawkins paused. Ordinarily he tolerated little insubordination. But Saladin was a good man working the equivalent of three jobs at once. He just needed to blow off steam. “I’ll have Fac-3 retool immediately. In the meantime, is there anything else we can do?”

Saladin pointed a holographic finger at him. “If you could get Construction a couple of telekinetics, we might be able to fuse the seams and force the seals. Those mutants are better than the best equipment.”

“Will that speed things up?”

“With the mutants, we might make the deadline. Without them, forget it.”

“Surely the union …”

“We’ve tried already. There are only a few mutant vacuum welders, and they’ve got work leading into next year. Besides, the rest of the welders resent the hell out of them.”

“So if we hire mutant talent from outside, we make the regulars unhappy.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, Jasper, you’ve certainly handed me a conundrum. But I’ll see what I can do.”

Saladin faded from view.

Hawkins switched to his interoffice screen. “Leporello, what was the name of that Cable News producer so eager for an interview?”

“Melanie Akimura.”

“She’s mutant, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Send her a message telling her I’ll be Earthside shortly and would like to meet with her concerning the feature she proposed. Tell her I’ll do it on one condition: that I be invited to a Mutant Council meeting, preferably in California. And even more preferably, soon.”

“Yessir.”

Hawkins’s arm was almost numb from pain. He swallowed a betaprofin tab and chased it down with coffee. Outside the window, the Moon floated into the frame of his window once more.

“Colonel, your spaceplane’s ready.”

A new pain-free implant awaited down on Earth, courtesy of the perpetually grateful Mr. Lee Oniburi. But first, a few business meetings. If he was going to stay on schedule with construction, he had to enlist the help of some mutants. He needed them. What’s more, the future of space development needed them.

I may be retired from the Shuttle Corps, he thought. But once a spacer, always a spacer. And colonization of the solar system is one way to stay aloft.

“On my way,” Hawkins said. As he walked toward the door, the white-faced Moon spun away, out of sight.

***

White, then red. Green and blue and violet. Silver flashing to yellow melting into orange oozing into red and violet and blue. Julian Akimura rode back and forth across the spectrum, and as he rode, he wept. It was like the wild, late-night skimmer ride, random-dial, that he had taken with his twin brother, Rick, at Neon Park during high school. But high school was seven years past. And no skimmer ride had ever been like this.

Spectral, kaleidoscopic colors assaulted his optic receptors. His golden eyes wept, tears trailing down his cheeks to spread the dark purple stain at the collar of his blue lab coat. He’d grown accustomed to the pain, the tears, even, God knew, to the fragmented, iridescent flashes. But wait—what the hell was that?

A woman wearing a white gown that fell to her ankles walked up the steps of a great floodlit room toward an altar. She was a figure out of some antique storybook: long white hair, pale face, full red lips. A bewitched princess. But her eyes! At once gold and prismatic, reflecting green, blue, purple, like a thin layer of fine cloisonné enamel over gold wash. Those dazzling eyes seemed to be looking right at Julian. The woman smiled. Then she vanished in a hail of blinding particles.

“Image,” Julian said loudly, then remembered that the inductor mike at his throat could pick up the mildest whisper. Could it pick up the excited pounding of his heart as well? “Fifteen seconds duration. Woman in white, white hair, mutant with some sort of iridescent mutant eyes, walking up the stairs of a large hall. End image.”

A soft alto voice whispered from the inductor headphone in his ear. “Any clue to date or place?”

“Negative.”

“Relax, Julian,” Dr. Eva Seguy said, chuckling. “A simple ‘no’ will do.”

“Sorry.”

“And I’m sorry. I forgot, this is your first sighting, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Julian felt his cheeks growing hot. He had been at the UG Berkeley lab for two months, had ridden three other subjects before this, but only today had he seen his first image. Of course he was excited.

“Congratulations,” Dr. Seguy said warmly. Julian could imagine her elfin face, green eyes dancing. “How I envy you the chance to ride along on these flares. But that’s a privilege reserved for mutants—telepathic ones.”

“Some privilege,” Julian said. Privately, he agreed with her, but he took care to keep his response light. Eva Seguy might the boss of the flare research lab at Berkeley, but she was also nonmutant. She could record observations but never make them herself. “My nose runs, my head hurts for hours afterward, and I have to wear dark glasses to protect my eyes from sunlight.”

“And it’s worth every minute, isn’t it?” There was laughter in her voice, laughter that Julian had come to enjoy, to listen for, to induce whenever possible.

“Absolutely. Just have a fresh lab coat ready for me when this shift is over. And a shot of brandy.”

“For medicinal purposes?” Eva Seguy said. “It’ll be waiting.”

Julian sank back down into the link with his tranquilized subject. In his grandfather’s time, mental flares had been feared as incapacitating illness. Now they were viewed as fascinating psychic phenomena: possibly the key to precognition. Mutants still suffered from the flares, but at least medication allowed them to function normally with a minimum of discomfort. And be studied like lab animals by other, luckier mutants.

He had half an hour before Rick came to collect him for the meeting. And knowing his brother, that meant an hour and a half, at least. Time for another flare ride. What would he see next? Marsbase? The Tower of Babel? Wiping his wet face, Julian closed his eyes and braced himself.

***

Narlydda! Alanna! We’re late and you know it. Dammit, why am I always the timekeeper for this family?

Dad sounds impatient, Alanna thought. Nothing new about that. She turned back to her screen for a moment.

“Cage of bone in which the red bird flutters …”

She leaned closer, squinting at the amber words. She couldn’t decide if the line was terribly bad or terribly good. She often felt that way about her poetry. Her mother, of course, suffered no such doubts. If Narlydda saw this lyric she would praise it, call her agent, maybe even engrave it into her next sculpture. Meanwhile, Skerry would nod, stroke his beard, and say, “Nice, Teenie. Real nice.”

Well, they had to do that, didn’t they? After all, they were her parents. But was she really any good? Did she have any talent? Would anybody ever see her as someone other than Narlydda’s daughter? Or tell her if she had a tin ear?

I am going to leave you folks behind. Better yet, I’m going to find a family where somebody else knows how to read a clock besides me.

Skerry’s mindspeech echoed thunderously.

Alanna smiled, shut off her screen, and took a quick look in the mirror. Long dark hair curled down over her shoulders, over the tight black velvet spandex halter, almost to the top of her black leather pants. The dark hair against the pale skin, slightly green, a pale echo of her mother’s deeper celadon hue, made a pleasing contrast. Sparkling golden eyes didn’t hurt the effect, either.

Dark colors made her seem older. Now that she was eighteen, Alanna would be able to vote at the Mutant Council meeting and she wanted to look the part. She gave her reflection a final once-over and hurried down the stairs.

Her mother, Narlydda, followed on her heels.

“We’re not late, Skerry,” Narlydda said. “You’re always in a hurry.” She didn’t bother to respond in mindspeech: hers was too weak, as Alanna knew.

With an imperious gesture Narlydda brushed back her thick dark hair sparkling with silver threads. She used a purple crylight pin to secure it at the neck of her lavender stretch suit.

Alanna envied her mother’s confident, dramatic style. The flash of white hair at her temple. Maybe she should have her own hair frosted that way. But with a shock of gold added. Or green.

Skerry stood waiting, arms crossed, in the center of the main room. His gray hair was pulled back, as usual, into a ponytail, and his beard was neatly trimmed. He wore a dark blue kimono and leggings shot through with gold threads. “Good thing I am in a hurry,” he said. “Otherwise we’d never get anywhere.”

Narlydda kissed him on the cheek. “Relax. Half an hour more or less doesn’t mean anything at the annual meeting. Besides, nobody gets to the really good gossip until after dinner.”

“I know,” he growled. “That’s when I usually fall asleep. And don’t tell me to relax, Lydda. If I didn’t keep us on schedule, you two would primp until I fell asleep right here, standing up. And then you’d miss all the fun.”

“Who’s going to be there?” Alanna said.

“Everybody.”

“Including the Akimuras,” Narlydda said. “I haven’t seen Melanie and Yosh in quite a while.”

“I wonder if the boys will come.”

“Boys?” her mother said. “They’re men. Julian and Rick are at least twenty-five. Julian’s almost finished his doctorate.”

“And Rick’s probably graduated from being a part-time breen-runner into a professional dealer.” Skerry’s expression was sour. “You’d think Melanie would have checked out the sperm bank donors more carefully before she got herself impregnated. She could have had two Nobel scientists instead of one good egg and one bad.”

“Skerry!” Narlydda’s eyes flashed. “You know she took random choice. Besides, the records were lost in that fire.”

Alanna started laughing.

“Enough character assassination,” Skerry said. “At least until after the meeting.” He hefted a large parcel near the door. “I’ll load this.”

“Don’t be silly. I can do that.” Narlydda began to levitate it out of his hands.

Skerry glared at her. “Don’t treat me like an old man, Lydda.”

“All right. You do it. But don’t put my wallpiece in the van wrong side up or I’ll trade you in for two thirty-year-olds.”

“Wait a couple of years and the Akimura boys will be ripe.”

It was Narlydda’s turn to glower. The sight seemed to cheer Skerry immensely.

“Why doesn’t the Mutant Council pay for the transport of a donated work?” he said. “Especially if it’s going to hang in the Council chamber? They’re lucky to get it.”

Narlydda softened. “Remember to tell them that.”

“Think I won’t?” He grinned at her wolfishly. “One of the few joys remaining to me in my declining years is the opportunity to make myself as big a pain in the ass as often as I can to as many mutants as possible.”