Darkship Renegades (20 page)

FRATERNITE

So I’m vain enough, or perhaps just proud enough to stop and wash my face in the creek, a few feet away from where Simon stood, talking with voluble gestures to Doc. Doc and Zen saw us approach, and saw me wash, but Simon had his back to me. Probably on purpose, since he was as much a Mule as I or Kit, meaning he would have more acute hearing than the average homo sapien.

But he waited until I was just a few steps behind him, to turn around and extend both hands at me, “Thena!”

“Simon,” I said, and managed a smile. He gave me a peck on either cheek, which was good, because the last time he’d seen me, he’d planted a full open-mouth kiss on me by way of goodbye, and Kit had not liked it then. Now Kit, with his own problems, was wont to like it even less. And I didn’t even want to think of what Jarl, with his hatred for Simon’s original “twin,” his lack of self control might do.

Simon stepped back. “You’re looking very good for someone who has been communing with nature. What a strange thing to find Thena sleeping au plain air.” He grinned, sharing the implicit joke that my love for nature had never been great.

But even as he talked to me, I noticed his eyes straying over to Zen with fascination, then he looked back at me, and smiled again, “As I told your friends, we don’t have the time to dally because I had to plot both courses coming and going, and if we wait longer, there will be another front in this not quite civil war we’re facing, and next thing you know, we will be stranded and shot at. Or perhaps captured and shot at. You know my horror of dying by laser. It’s so unsightly and leaves such a mangled body for the public obsequies.”

I could see Zen’s eyes widening, as Simon slipped into his patented patter. It was as though she were considering whether to run into the night because he was completely insane and she couldn’t trust him. Weirdly, it wasn’t like the hard expression of distrust and vigilance she aimed at Jarl when he was in control. Instead, it was something stranger, more fluid, part expectancy, part hope and part…what was it? I couldn’t even tell. Interest, curiosity perhaps, but all of this overlaid with fear of this odd creature and a vague suspicious expression, as though she suspected him of putting her on.

She was right at that, or she was right to an extent. Simon was putting her on, putting all three of them on. But it wasn’t a deliberate deception, and I didn’t even think he knew when he did it.

When he was young, Simon had inherited, de facto, his father’s responsibilities and honors, after his father had been rendered comatose by an accident. He was brain damaged and unlikely to be able to recover, ever.

Though Simon was the Good Man, even in name, and he fulfilled the function of a Good Man and did all the work of one, he was never treated quite as a Good Man. This had been a source of confusion to us, but at least now I understood that part of it. He wasn’t treated as a Good Man, because he wasn’t one of the Mules who’d first taken power. And he’d found they suspected him, and any display of intent or intelligence on his part brought resistance and attempts to stop him. So he’d learned to play the inconsequential fool and the clothes-obsessed fop. Only I knew better. I knew how he ran the broomers’ lair.

“If you will pardon me,” he said, as he opened the door to the large size flyer, “I’d like to tell you this was the best flyer money could buy, but clearly it is not, since it’s last year’s model, and pardon the distressing color, but they seemed to think this was red, and I was so sad for them I didn’t want to have to explain their eyes had gone awry.” He continued with voluble nonsense, as we climbed in and strapped on. Kit—or Jarl, I couldn’t even tell who was in control—was tightening his jaw shut so hard that it must hurt. Doc looked amused, leading me to wonder if Simon’s father had had similar mannerisms. I didn’t remember much about him, since I hadn’t been very old when he’d fallen comatose. Zen, on the other hand, was frowning at him as though he were a problem that she—personally—must solve and rectify.

Not that he gave her much chance. His flyer was even more comfortable inside than the air-and-space. There were sofas, all well-upholstered. He waved us to the sofas; we sat down and he took the controls. He proceeded to demonstrate that not only was he bioed with extra gifts of speed and control and movement, but also that he had experience with aerial vehicles. Which I already knew from the way he handled a broom.

I didn’t have feelings for Simon. At least not beyond the feelings one has for a childhood friend and teenage lover. I think both of us had assumed we’d be married someday. Then had come the trip to Circum, and Kit and Eden and…finding out what I was.

Now nothing more remained of those vague intentions of marrying Simon someday than a wishful feeling that life should be that simple. But I didn’t want Simon. I wanted Kit. And I might not have the choice about getting him back.

I don’t remember the trip, partly because the sofa was comfortable, and I’d spent the night on hard ground. I think we all fell asleep.

I woke up as we landed on Liberte Seacity, thereby having missed the excitement of whatever revolution was going on. That was something I had to ask Simon as soon as possible, as well as what had happened with Syracuse Seacity and my father’s mansion.

Liberte Seacity is not as vast as Syracuse and it is mostly devoted to algie cultivation, so, by comparison to Syracuse, a bucolic paradise. Their beaches are white and unmarred by factories or construction. Don’t take that to mean that Liberte was the seat of a caring and enlightened Good Man. I think Simon’s—for lack of a better word—father simply liked pretty beaches. Liberte Seacity was the administrative center of territories that included vast portions of Old Europe, as well as the narcotic-producing city of Shan-gri-la. But Liberte resembled a more carefully—artistically—planned work than Syracuse ever could be. I guess Simon’s father was more of an aesthete than mine.

There were personnel waiting for us.

When we stopped, Simon got up and glanced at Kit. “Er…keep your eyes down. The hair could be a dye job.” Then he walked past and opened the flyer. Onto rows of waiting people.

I felt Zen tense, and tried to signal her that this was not an arrest. I doubted that Simon had even paused to think. We were guests and he was receiving us in the grand style that Good Men hosted friends and equals. He smiled at the six or so men and women waiting. “Ah, I don’t believe my guests have luggage, but if you lead them to the rooms you’ve prepared for them, I’m sure they will give you instructions on what changes of clothing to procure them.” He smiled, his disarming, seemingly confused smile. “I’m sure there’s clothes in their sizes in house stores, or fabric that can be vibroed or…something like that. If you’ll lead us to where you set up their rooms, I’ll be by, in case they have complaints.”

Zen looked from my slight head shake to Doc and, I suppose because Doc looked calm and a little amused, relaxed.

We were led up a vast corridor to a staircase, and from the staircase to what I identified as their best guest wing. I’d been here before, of course, with Daddy Dearest for occasions of state and meetings of Good Men. If you were put on this wing of the house, you knew you were in the good graces of the Good Man, or possibly vital to his plans. I didn’t think this applied, since we were probably the only guests.

I got a room I’d got before, actually the last time I’d stayed here, without Daddy Dearest. Kit got the room next to mine, Doc the room after that, and Zen the room to the other side of mine. It wasn’t till Simon had left and the help—two women—were drawing me a bath and bringing in armfuls of clothes I could choose from to wear, that I realized that not only had I been put in a separate room from my husband—not that rare in my class on Earth, but not the normal arrangement—but that there was no connecting door.

Of course, this was entirely appropriate, since I never knew who was in that body at the moment and I was emphatically not married to Jarl, or even to any strange blend that might emerge. On the other hand, I hadn’t told Simon this. In fact, I hadn’t told Simon anything about Jarl—or the fact that Kit was his clone—beyond telling him we were looking for his notes. And yet I knew, had known for years, that what might be a casual, absentminded slip in another man was usually done for a reason with Simon.

Why had Simon separated me from Kit? Was it his lecherous nature and hopes that I would indulge in a little adultery? This was also not unusual in our class, but I didn’t think that Simon had missed me so much he would go to the trouble of setting this up. But what other reason could he have?

I looked for a moment out the broad window of the room, at the ocean beating down below the window, and wondered if the Edenites would find the sight disquieting. Perhaps only Zen. Jarl knew the ocean, and had lived in Seacities most of his life, if his biography was right.

The tones of the sea were picked out in the room, from the elaborate shell-like structure around the bed, designed to maintain an exact microclimate of humidity and warmth in that area, to the soft rugs on the floor. Yet the rugs felt harsh to me, used as I’d become to the bio-rugs in Eden. As did the bed, and the sofa, when I touched them. I couldn’t explain why, but biofabric was more yielding, infinitely adaptable.

“Miss,” Attendant Number One said, looking out of the bathroom. And I followed her to find they’d run the tub and filled it with bubbles of what had been my favorite fragrance the last time I visited. I thanked them, then chased them from the room as politely as possible. It shocked them, of course. Patricians had attendants bathe them. But I had spent a lot of time bathing myself; I had never really liked having strangers around that much; and besides, I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and to mull everything going on.

I wasn’t even surprised by the time I came out of the bath—fortunately wearing a bathrobe since, unlike Edenites, I wasn’t comfortable with casual nudity—to find Simon sitting on my bed and the two attendants nowhere near me. The fact that Simon was still fully dressed, and sitting with one leg drawn up and his arms around it—with his boot on the bed, because some men cannot be housebroken—meant he probably wasn’t there for amorous purposes. The expression on his face, pensive and puzzled, was not at all seductive.

“Simon,” I said, in reproach, “do you wish to set all your employees talking?”

He shrugged. “My employees know better than to talk.”

I suspected he was wrong, but it didn’t matter.

“At any rate, I didn’t tell them who you were, so they can’t really talk about you. Oh, you, maybe, personally, but frankly the way the world is just now, with rebellions, and assassinations, demonstrations and…” He grinned. “Even your scandals will be old news. Besides, they always knew what we were up to, didn’t they?”

“I wasn’t married then,” I said.

He put his leg down with deliberate slowness and looked at me intently. “I see. And are you now?”

I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I see,” he said again, and I was very much afraid he did.

He paced to the window and opened it, letting in the deafening sound of the sea and the smell of salt, then he turned around, leaning back, posing, framed by the sea, his red shirt against the intense blue green of the sea, his hair dark against the luminous sky. There were creamy lace ruffles, I noted, emerging from the cuffs of his red shirt. Sometimes all you could do was try not to scream at Simon for being Simon. “Don’t be afraid to talk,” he said. “There’s a hush shield outside the window.”

I almost told him about the spy cameras that Jarl had set up, but since that compound was now deserted, I didn’t bother. “Simon,” I said. “I don’t want to talk.”

This got me the raised eyebrow again. “Thena, my dearest—”

I must have snorted because he suddenly looked long-suffering. “I said, Thena, my dearest, I don’t think you ever realized how much I was in love with you. When I understood, really understood you were married and gone for good, it broke my heart.”

“You don’t have a heart. You have a Swiss metronome.”

He gave me an apologetic smile. “Fine, then it caused the metronome to skip a beat. You know that’s not good. We Gallic people have a very passionate nature and—”

“You forgot the ‘r’ in ‘garlic,’ you fraud. You don’t have any Gallic background. Liberte was founded by a conglomerate of Swiss bankers escaping Old Europe taxes and intrusion, and if I understand properly, your…your father was created from spare parts from all Swiss cantons. At best you’ve got some old European passions or something. Warn me before you start to beat up on yourself.”

He sighed. We’d always bantered like that, but he wasn’t entering into the spirit of the thing. “I was saying,” he said, “that I cared a great deal for you. Perhaps more romantically than you thought, but when you left I assumed I’d never see you again.” He examined the lace ruffles on his sleeve. “I’m not going to pretend I didn’t…well, accept it. I did. And I’m not going to pretend I want to be involved with you. I don’t. It’s clear you never viewed our relationship as I did. I thought, when I saw you with your Cat man that it was very obvious you were right for each other. You fit, as we never did. So I kissed you goodbye”—a feral grin as the so-and-so probably too well remembered the nature of that kiss—“and let you go. But Thena…there’s something wrong now. Something wrong between you and your husband and, if I had to hazard, something wrong with your husband, and I would not like to guess what. I’d like you to tell me, so I can help you, if possible.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

Spotting the customary refrigerated tray on one of the low tables, away from the window, set with various beverages, I ambled over and picked a fruit juice. I’d just pulled off the top, converting the small bottle into a glass, and taken a sip, when Simon said, “First, your husband is a clone of Jarl Ingemar, isn’t he?”

I spit juice across the room, to find Simon slapping my back as I coughed and spluttered. As soon as I could talk, I jumped away from him, “How can you…how do you…how?”