Authors: Robert Buettner
NINETEEN
Clang.
The physical sound of metal scraping metal awoke Mort as he lay curled on the deckplates in his nest within the nest of
HUS Gateway
. He sprang up, four down, claws out, as he probed the space beyond the opening hatch in the bulkhead that separated him from
Gateway’
s forward decks.
Humans were creatures of habit, and on his previous starship voyage, visits from humans at nonhabitual times had proved threatening.
Mort knew this was a nonhabitual visit partly because the level of artificial lighting in his space was lowered, but more because most of the five thousand intelligences that drifted just ahead of him within
Gateway
normally emitted a vast drone, but were now dormant.
The few immediately ahead, the staff who attended to his personal needs, rarely conveyed much beyond dissatisfaction and fatigue. Of the remaining thousands further forward, the few awake were either engaged in coitus or fantasizing about engaging in coitus.
In his waning prepubescence, Mort still found coitus distasteful and disinteresting, human coitus all the more. So distasteful and disinteresting, in fact, that he had reversed his sleep patterns from a predator’s normal largely nocturnal habits.
He shook his head to clear it of sleep, and saw his visitor before he felt him. The human male carried, in one forepaw, a tidbit of frozen woog, perhaps as large as the man’s torso. From the other foreclaw, six connected metallic cylinders dangled like a plucked bunch of berries.
“On the way back here, I wheedled the cooks for a six-pack for me and a snack for you.”
“Jazen!” Mort cocked his head to convey curiosity. “You are sad.”
Jazen dropped the woog portion onto the deckplates, then folded himself onto one of the little metal frames with which the humans had furnished Mort’s space.
“No, I’m bewildered, unjustly accused, flummoxed, insensitive and monumentally stupid.”
“I do not understand fully. Your mood resembles your mood the time when you informed me that you were totally fucked.”
Jazen cocked his own head, in his case to convey contemplation. “Actually, this is more the opposite.”
“Now I understand even less.”
Jazen picked one of the cylinders off the bunch, then drank from it. “Kit and I were close until we split for a couple years. Remember?”
Mort nodded his head to prompt continuation.
Jazen audibilized, “The split was Kit’s idea, mostly, and it hurt. I came here to Mousetrap to start over. Then I met this other woman, Syrene. And Syrene was wonderful. Is wonderful. Then when Kit was in trouble, Howard finagled me back to the service. And I saved Kit’s life, which pretty much squared things with Kit. But I sort of didn’t tell Syrene I was leaving. Which was stupid. And so today I just went back to Syrene to try and square things with
her
. But I didn’t tell Kit. Which was also stupid. Not that I was gonna square things, you know,
that
way. But Kit thinks it
was
that way. Now they both hate me. Hell, I hate me.” Jazen lowered his head, shook it slowly.
The dizzying deluge that marked streaming human consciousness during times of agitation and stress often defeated Mort. He plucked the emotional essence from Jazen’s thoughts as he plucked the zesty pituitary from a brain.
Then Mort carefully patted his human’s diminutive shoulder with a claw tip. “Ah. You fear you will now be unchosen as a mate. But do not worry. Even at this moment Miss Jan Wofford of Blackpool, England, in cabin two four two zero, is thinking that she is so randy she would shag a goat. Jazen, I believe
many
women would consider you a more viable mate than a goat. Many.”
“You’re not just saying that?”
Mort sat back, waved his forepaw, palm out. “No. I am quite serious.”
“Mort. I
know
.”
“Ah. Sarcasm is so complex.”
Jazen sighed. “So is human mating. I don’t
want
many women. I just want the right one.”
“Ah. Your situation resembles mine in the moment when I have cut the two fattest undiseased woog from a herd. Each flees, and I must choose the more desirable.”
Jazen dropped his empty cylinder, and it tinkled atop the full ones he had placed on the deck plates. “It’s not like picking steak or lobster, Mort! Well, it is. I mean, Kit’s blonde and athletic and incredibly alluring, and Syrene’s brunette and seductive and incredibly alluring. And they’re both so far out of my league that I pinched myself every morning I woke up beside either of them.”
“Sometimes I bring down both woog.”
“Huh?”
“I have noticed in Kit’s thoughts that she believes you are an insatiable horndog. That means—”
Jazen raised a foreclaw. “I know what that means.”
“Clearly, then, you have the physical capacity to service each of them in turn.”
Jazen’s tiny eyes widened. “Polygamy? You’ve never even gotten to first base. But for
me
you recommend
ménage a trois?
Mort, one of these women is a trained killer. I’d be dead before the proposal left my mouth.”
Mort sat back. “Oh.”
Perhaps he understood humans less well than he thought.
“Grezzen mate to make life, Mort. Humans, at least when we’re true to our better natures, mate
for
life.”
Mort nodded. “An emotional bond.”
Jazen nodded. “Kit and I have been through wars. I’ve saved her life. She’s saved mine. She laughs at my good jokes and tolerates my bad ones.”
“Then you have made your choice.”
Jazen shook his head. “But Kit and I inhabit different worlds. Even though both our parents were Trueborns. Syrene and I come from the same side of the tracks. And she laughs at my jokes too.”
“Can’t humans track from either side?”
“Idiom. Doesn’t matter.” Jazen bent to reach another cylinder from his bunch, then grunted and touched his torso with a foreclaw. “Forgot to open all my mail.”
He withdrew tiny leaves from a pouch in the ventral side of his integument. “Let’s see what—”
Mort felt Jazen’s shock as he stared at one leaf, tapped its outer surface with a foreclaw tip. “Look at all these pay marks. This has to be from Yavet.”
Jazen tore at the leaf, plucked an even smaller one from it.
Mort felt emotion swell within Jazen. “The news is happy?”
The skin above Jazen’s eyes wrinkled. “It’s from Orion.”
“Your life mother?”
“She says she’s alive . . .” Jazen’s respiration became ragged and for a moment he stopped audibilizing his thoughts. “. . . Very excited I’m doing so well—how the hell did she hear? How the hell did she get my P-mail address?”
“You have said she was resourceful.”
“Yeah. Keeping me alive can’t have been . . . oh God.”
Pain spiked through Jazen’s consciousness as he reached a point further into the message. His whispered words sank until they were barely audible, although they screamed in his mind. “A year or less. From now, six months.”
“Orion is dying?”
Jazen nodded without sound. “Mort, it’s not fair.”
Mort’s own head sagged.
Every grezzen was a part of a single, anarchic family. He knew all his cousins, their thoughts, their whereabouts. Yet he, like every grezzen ever born, bonded and felt love only for the mother who bore him and suckled and trained him throughout his growth to independent size.
Mort’s mother had been old when Bartram Cutler’s henchmen had abbreviated her life. Yet Mort had felt her loss as though she had been taken from him while he was a cub.
“Jazen, whether death is fair or is not fair, it is inevitable. It is part of life.”
“That’s not what I meant, Mort. It’s not fair that life’s making me break my promise to her. When I left Yavet, I told her I would see her again. She said no, that would get me killed. So I promised.”
“When Orion dies, you will have said that which is not?”
Jazen tilted his head forward and back. “Yeah. It won’t be a prediction like saying Cutler wouldn’t get pardoned. It will be a lie.”
“But Orion is your life mother. She did not ask you at this time to keep the promise. A mother will not love her son less if a promise is unkept.”
“Exactly.” Jazen’s small eyes began to leak. “That makes it worse. Mort, did you see your mother before she died?”
Mort dropped his head. “I did not.”
“But you don’t feel bad about that, do you? I mean, you’re a grezzen. You were in her mind.”
“Yes, that is true. If I had not been in her mind my grief would have been unbearable. Even so, failing to reach her before she died haunts me even now.”
Jazen remained folded and silent for a long period. His thoughts were a scrambled and conflicted mass. Finally, he stood, and walked toward the hatch as his thoughts became clear.
“You’ll still have Kit to keep you company all the way to Dead End. You don’t need me.”
“That is true. But Jazen, what about Kit and Syrene? And what is in your mind will break many rules.”
“Taking leave from a cush job like this is bending rules, not breaking them. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll square all that later. If the plan goes wrong, I won’t need to.”
“But you have no plan.”
“True. I also have no time. A minute late in this is late forever. So I also have no choice.” Jazen resumed his walk toward the hatch.
Mort considered bounding past Jazen, and blocking his exit. What Jazen was planning could result in Jazen’s own death. And would certainly create sorrow and anxiety for Kit.
But Mort stood motionless and watched Jazen disappear through the hatch.
Perhaps if he, Mort, had said that which is not, had refrained from sharing his remorse that he had not reached his own mother, Mort’s human would not be attempting this foolish and dangerous thing. But, as a mother’s son himself, he knew he would do exactly the same. It would not matter what others said or did not say.
TWENTY
I disembarked
Gateway
after I left Dr. Mort’s Mojo Restoration Clinic, then rode the tuber north again, to Shipyard, then walked straight to Jazen’s.
As I entered Jazen’s I bumped shoulders with a departing het couple. They had to hold one another up, and giggled while whispering unprivately about what came next. Given their condition, they would be disappointed when they found that what came next was catatonic sleep followed by the mother of all hangovers. The night had slipped away to that time in bars when it was no longer young, and the pair turned out to be Jazen’s last remaining customers. But Syrene wasn’t alone.
She stood behind the bar, side by side and heads together with a very slightly younger and very slightly thinner version of herself. The other courtesan wore the scarlet of a senior apprentice, and propped a handheld on the bar top with one hand so Syrene could read its screen.
The two looked up, saw me.
Syrene whispered a single word to the young lady in red, who closed down her handheld, and carried it as she passed me on her way out. As far as she knew, I was a potential customer, and the look she gave me almost made me one.
I turned and watched until she disappeared out the door, as she returned to Salon Dessele next door, where the night was young all day.
Syrene said, “That one’ll have her own salon inside three years. She’s got a head for business.”
“Not just a head.”
On Bren, a senior Marini courtesan isn’t regarded so differently from the way the Trueborns regard, say, a matron of registered nurses. The therapies differed, but each society respected the practitioners for their professional detachment as well as their ability to improve the human condition. A big part of Syrene’s job now was mentoring up-and-coming talent, and managing the business. Although she still kept her hand in.
“You’re back because of what I said. Forget what I said, Jazen. You know the whisky talks for me.”
And for me. If I didn’t get to the point of this visit, I’d be thinking too much about Syrene keeping her hand in, and that way lay trouble. “No. I didn’t come back because of that.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh? I don’t know whether I’m relieved or disappointed.” Tonight she had her professional detachment armor strapped on tight, which made the conversation easier for both of us.
I said, “I need to disappear.”
“What?”
I leaned on the bar, keeping it between us, and told her about the P-mail from Orion.
When I finished, Syrene’s eyes were wide. “You can’t go back to Yavet.”
“I’m not an Illegal now.”
“No. Now you’re a spy for Yavet’s blood enemy.”
“No. I’m just a relative visiting family.”
“Don’t be delusional. Jazen, even scrubbed, you’ll still be a spy.” Syrene laid her hand over mine. “Jazen, trust me, I know men. Stupidity is part of the equipment. But of all the men I’ve ever known, you’re the best stupid. I know you’ll take any risk for Orion, without a blink of consideration. Just like—”
Syrene looked down, scrubbed with her fingertip at a nonexistent drop on the bar, as her armor slipped for an instant. She was about to say just like I had gone to Tressel to save Kit, without settling up with another woman who I had come to love.
Syrene looked up. “Just like you did for those other soldiers so many times.”
“Alright. Then we agree there’s a profession where
I’m
the expert. Do I tell you how to smile at men?”
She smiled at me. Once I got her to smile, things were always okay.
Syrene shook her head. “But can you even do this? You
are
a soldier. You can’t just leave. And a scrub costs the moons.”
“Compassionate leave in case of immediate family illness? Routinely granted when you’re on admin assignment. Especially leave from spook central. Kit always says Howard runs the teams like one of her graduate-school seminars. Cut class now, tell me later. And I’ve got leave accumulated clear out
past
the moons.”
“But the money?”
I grinned. “I’ve got a check from a business that’s up three hundred ten percent. Remember?”
She smiled, nodded. Then the smile faded. “The princess is going with you?”
Why hadn’t I seen that one coming? “Uh, no.”
“But you’ve made peace with her? And she approves this thing you intend to do? She’s a bigger soldier even than you. If she thinks it’s too risky, I won’t help you.”
Orion was dying. There wasn’t time, even if Kit and I were on speaking terms. And “go fuck yourself” wasn’t precisely an invitation to make peace. Well, Orion told me once, after she had spoofed a vice cop she snitched for, that if the truth won’t set you free, lie your ass off.
“Of course.”
Syrene frowned.
And if lying your ass off still doesn’t get you where you need to be, just play off two women you love one against the other, like a total jerk. An overriding noble cause earns one get-out-of-jerk-free card. Doesn’t it?
“Kit thinks it’s risky, too, but she says she supports me in my decision because she loves me. Do you disagree with her?”
Syrene looked away for a minute, looked back at me. “Okay.”
I don’t think she believed one word I said. But maybe she told herself it was all for a noble cause, too. Or maybe she had also finally decided I could go fuck myself.
I said, “I haven’t kept up. Who do I need to see these days?”
“To get to Yavet clean? That hasn’t changed, Jazen. Cohon controls all the contraband that moves between Mousetrap and half the outworlds, especially Yavet. Girls, guns, opiates, janga, alcohol, OB and drug paraphernalia, even the silly stuff like porn . . . everything but P-mail.”
Everybody knew Ya Ya Cohon by reputation. Nobody admitted to ever having seen him.
I asked, “You know how to reach him?”
Syrene blinked.
It was only a blink, but it didn’t need to be more than that between us. It only stood to reason that Shipyard’s most notorious gangster would know its most professional professional, uh, personally. If you can’t deal with a courtesan’s work, don’t fall in love with one. Or with an assassin, for that matter.
She said, “I can arrange for you to get to Ya Ya. Jazen, he’ll drive a hard bargain. Don’t cross him. And don’t lie to him. He’ll test you, even at times when you don’t know he’s still testing. And if you ever fail one of his tests, he’ll have you killed in a heartbeat.”
“A sweetheart. Anything else?”
She touched my cheek. “Remember me.” She turned away, straightened bottles behind the bar. “I’ll text you in clear with contact information as soon as I get it.” She shooed me with one hand. “Get out of here.”
In that moment, I realized that Syrene had done the thinking for the both of us.
Syrene knew, even though I hadn’t until that moment, that, despite the gulf in backgrounds that separated Kit from me, that would
always
separate Kit from me, I loved Kit. I had loved Kit from the first moment I saw her, and I always would love her, even if I never saw her again.
Syrene had the foresight not only to perceive that truth, but the courage to decide that it was a truth neither Syrene nor I would be able to live with in any future we might share.
I wanted to hug her. I wanted to thank her. I wanted to praise her wisdom and her nobility and her strength. But for once I had the wisdom and nobility and strength to know that would just make this ending worse for both of us. The best thing I could do now for both of us was to remember her.
When I got to the door I looked back. She still hadn’t turned around, but I saw her raise that hand she had shooed me with to her face, as though she were wiping her eyes.
Emotional armor’s hell to keep in place.
I wiped my eyes, too.