The Sardonyx Net (55 page)

The steward stepped forward to kiss her cheek. She smelled of soap. “Welcome back, Rhani-ka.” Immeld echoed the greeting. Timithos trotted toward the hangar to unload the luggage from the bubble. Three dragoncats swung around the corner of the house, tails waving, and she stood quite still and held out her hands for them to sniff. Recognizing her scent, they rubbed their heads against her hips. One of them—Thoth, she thought it was—licked her left palm.
 

“Where's my brother?” she said.
 

Cara looked at Immeld. “In the garden,” Cara said, “with
her
.”
 

Rhani bit her lip. She had deliberately put the image of the girl on the platform out of her mind. She wondered if she should wait, and let Zed come to find her—no. “Tell Dana to come find me when he is through in the hangar,” she said. She went into the house. It was little changed, she thought—she amended that as she passed the dining alcove. The cushions on the floor looked comfortable. Resisting the impulse to go to her bedroom, she walked through the kitchen and out the back door to meet her brother and Darien Riis.
 

She found them under the bitter-pear. Zed lay with his head in the girl's lap. She stroked his forehead. He was saying something about the Net; his hands formed and reformed a circle in the air. His eyes were closed against the sunlight which came spattering through the bitter-pear's leaves.
 

The girl saw her first and said a soft, swift word to Zed. He turned his head and then rolled to his feet. “Rhani-ka,” he said. Darien Riis rose, and he gripped her hand. Rhani waited for Zed to come to her, to hug her. He didn't move. The girl watched them, an expression of bland interest on her uncanny face.
 

“How did the meeting with U-Ellen go?” he said.
 

Rhani said, “It went well.”
 

“You can speak in front of Darien,” Zed said. He smiled at the girl, a loving, gentle look. “Was he of any use whatsoever?”
 

“Some,” Rhani said.
 

“Good,” Zed said. He smiled again. “Wonderful.” His hair was loose and tangled; he ran his fingers through it. A dried leaf dropped to the grass.
 

Rhani said, “He wants to sell me a part interest in the dorazine trade.”
 

“Are you going to buy?”
 

“I don't know.” She waited for him to ask the questions she expected—what does U-Ellen know about the dorazine business? Who owns it? How much does he want? She waited for him to say: Have they found Michel A-Rae?
 

He asked none of these things; he said nothing. He was not even looking at her. As a starving man watches food, he was watching Darien.
 

Something had happened; she did not understand it. She felt as if the ground beneath her feet had turned to sand and was changing, shifting, blowing across the lawn. Dana called her name and she turned toward him with relief. “I'm here!” she called.
 

He appeared around a flower bed. He had put on a clean shirt; he looked sturdy, solid, unchanged. He came to stand beside her—and then Rhani saw his face whiten. She glanced at her brother. Zed's eyes were wide and smoky, and his free hand was curling, long fingers crooking into claws.
 

He took a step toward Dana, and was checked by Darien's grip on his wrist. Rhani whirled on Dana. “Go to the house,” she commanded. Dana backed and ran. Zed relaxed. Darien disengaged her hand from his and flexed her fingers, smiling at nothing. He reached up and caressed her cheek, as if Dana had never appeared.
 

He said, “Rhani, I'm leaving Chabad.”
 

Dry-mouthed, she answered, “Are you?”
 

“Yes. Darien and I are going to Nexus. Darien's never been there. You don't need me—Jo can command the Net for you. She'll make a better commander than I was. Nivas is easily competent to be the chief medic. We'll leave—” he shrugged, and touched the girl's red hair—"I don't know. In a while.”
 

Rhani's legs felt unsteady, as if she had just climbed a mountain. She licked her lips. This isn't real, she thought, this is an illusion.... Summoning up her energies, she stretched her hand out. “Twin!” she said.
 

Zed was looking at Darien. He had not even heard her. The girl murmured to him, soft words that Rhani could not catch. She swallowed back sickness and left them together beneath the bitter-pear tree.
 

Dana was in her bedroom. He rose when she came in. Walking to him, she slid her hands beneath his shirt and they clung together. His heart thudded and finally steadied. Her own was racing.... She tugged at the shirt. “Take this off,” she said. He drew it off and she held him, pressing herself into his warmth, fingers moving over his skin.
 

Finally she let him go. Dana pushed her into the wing chair. He pulled the footstool across the room and sat on it, holding her hands. “Do you want to talk?” he said.
 

She pressed his fingers to her forehead. “No. Yes.” She drew a deep breath. “I don't know what to say. He's leaving Chabad, he and Darien. He's taking her to Nexus.” She gazed around the room; it was smaller than her memory of it. “He said, ‘
You don't need me
.'”
 

Dana said, “He needs to believe that.”
 

“Don't be glib!” she snapped. “How can you know what's happening in his mind?”
 

Dana's mouth crooked. “I know him pretty well,” he said. “Not the way you do, though. Differently.” He freed his hands from hers. Deliberately he rose and walked a few paces from her, toward the terrace doors. “I think he's crazy, Rhani.”
 

“Don't say that.” She clenched her fists on her thighs. “Insanity is a clinical, chemical disorder, detectable by blood test. Zed's a medic. They'd know if he were crazy.”
 

“I'm no medic,” Dana said, “but I know that blood chemistry changes in reaction to environmental conditions. The entropic imbalance between space-time normal and the Hype drove the early hyperspace explorers nuts. Zed's been commander of the Net for how long? A long time. Test his blood. He's crazy.”
 

Rhani said, “No. I won't accept that.”
 

Dana shrugged. “There they are.” Rhani went to him. Through the terrace doors, she saw Zed and Darien walking across the lawn. Their hands were linked, and they were laughing.
 

“No,” she heard herself saying. Whirling from the sight, she sat in the wing chair, chin on her fists. Zed was not mad. Something—had changed in him, that was all. He had found a lover, for one thing, an event neither he nor she had thought was possible. She thought: I should be happy for him.
 

She said, “The sight of you seems to trigger him to violence.”
 

Dana exhaled. “Yes. It has to go somewhere.”
 

“What does that mean?”
 

Dana said, “He's a violent man. He's had years to create patterns for himself—” he hesitated, and then went on, “sadistic patterns around sexual acts. That girl looks so like you—and he would never hurt you, Rhani. He won't hurt her either. But the sadism is in him now, and it has to go somewhere.”
 

Her breath jammed in her throat. “Could he know—”
 

“That we're lovers?” Dana finished. “I hope not. Oh, stars, I hope not, Rhani.”
 

She heard footsteps on the stairs, and a woman's laughter echoed through the corridor. “I don't see how he could,” she said. “All the same, you'd better keep well out of his way.”
 

The house fissioned. Zed and Darien spent a lot of time in Zed's room. They ate in the dining alcove; they walked in the gardens. Except for momentary glimpses from the terrace, Rhani rarely saw them. She heard their laughter on the stairs, though, and sometimes in the night, through walls which had unaccountably thinned to paper, she heard their lovemaking. Finally, she admitted to herself that she was listening. She spent most of her time in her bedroom. She ate there. Though he slept in the slaves' hall, Dana stayed with her during the day. When he left her side, he went warily; he would stand at the door of the room, waiting, and she realized that he, too, was listening. He went to great trouble to avoid Zed. Once, he came into the bedroom trembling. She went to him. “Are you hurt?” He shook his head. “What happened?” He would not talk about it. She felt as if she were living in a puzzle, like the toys the Abanat street vendors hawked. She was the little ball scuttling and bouncing through the shaken plastic maze.
 

Dana spoke to Darien when they met on the stairs or in the kitchen, the rare times she appeared without Zed. Rhani asked what they said to each other. Dana shrugged. “Not much. She comments on the weather. Sometimes she asks how you are, and doesn't seem very concerned with the answers.”
 

“Can you tell what she's like?”
 

He spread his hands. “She looks like you. Sounds like you.”
 

“Does she—does she care for him? Really?”
 

“How the hell do I know?” Dana said. “She seems to.”
 

It makes no sense, Rhani thought, no sense. How can he care for her and shut me out? She listened, but they were in the garden, and she couldn't hear them.
 

She had intended, once she was settled in the estate, to call the proper agency and engage a secretary, maybe two. But she did not. The first few days in the house, she did nothing but sit at the com-unit. Her fingers regained their keyboard speed and skills. The load of work was soothing; it meant she did not have to think about anything else. Dana screened the mail for her. She read the PINsheets: the referendum seemed certain to fail, they said. The petitions were still gaining signatures only on Belle.
 

She spoke with Imre and with Theo Levos by com-line. In conference, they agreed that the Upper House of the Council could rest easy for a time. The dorazine shortage remained critical. Rhani wished that she could talk about Loras U-Ellen's offer with Zed. After several nights of pouring over her financial records, she ascertained that, assuming no emergency drain occurred on Family Yago funds, she could just come up with fifteen million credits. It was somewhat sobering to realize that The Pharmacy probably spent that much money every Standard month.
 

The fourth day, the mail bubble arrived at the estate. In the bag was a letter from Loras U-Ellen, reminding her that she had seventeen more days to make up her mind. Scowling, Rhani tossed it in the disposal. The knowledge that she was pregnant seemed to make every decision difficult. Rising to think, to pace, she heard laughter from the garden, and clapped her hands to her ears to shut out the sound.
 

She wondered, lying alone at night, if she should arrange to miscarry. She did not want to; she had gone to such trouble to conceive—and besides, in the small hours of the morning she would wake to see a small, heart-shaped face in the darkness, a face with wheat-colored hair and topaz eyes. Sometimes the child's eyes were black. She thought about Dana. She should free him now, she knew.
 

But if she freed him he would leave, and then she would be wholly alone.
 

She looked up Cat Graeme in the com-net. Catriona Graeme, born in Foralie on Dickson's World, age thirty-eight, trained as a soldier—which, Rhani discovered, was an ancient Terran word that seemed to mean both a mercenary and a police officer—took part in four major actions including the one on China III, three children, one grown and commanding his own unit—what, she wondered, was a unit? Reading about this woman, whose life was so different from her own, made her realize how many of the Living Worlds she had never heard of, dreamed of.
 

A second reminder from Loras U-Ellen drove her from her lethargy. She wrote a letter to Tak Rafael at the Yago Bank. In it she informed him that Family Yago was about to embark upon a new manufacturing endeavor, product unspecified, and that for it she would need investment capital of fifteen million credits. She sealed it and gave it to Dana to put in the mail bag.
 

Sitting at the com-unit, he was reading the PINsheets.
 

“What do they say?” she asked.
 

He shook his head, knowing what she wanted them to say. “Nothing about Cat Graeme.”
 

“Nothing about Michel A-Rae?”
 

“Only that the Abanat police haven't located him yet.”
 

“They're all fools,” Rhani said. She rose, strolled to the terrace doors, and back again. Zed and Darien were in the garden, and Dana could see her trying to look elsewhere, anywhere but out.... She was rigid with tension—had been for over a Standard week. After eight days in close proximity to her, Dana felt as if the webbing of his nervous system had frayed.
 

In thirteen days, he knew, she would respond to Loras U-Ellen, one way or another. And in ten days, he would be off Chabad. He had put the message—directed to Russell O'Neill and in navigator's coding—into the com-unit two days back. His principal fear was now that Zed would catch him in the hall or in the garden and do something, Dana did not know what, which would keep him from ever getting off Chabad. He had begun to dream of the Net, which did not make the situation any easier. Once, he had walked into the kitchen and interrupted Zed and Darien with their arms around each other. The look Zed had turned on him—horrifying, feral anger—was like nothing he had experienced on this or any other earth.