DarkShip Thieves (16 page)

Most of the time he didn't even talk to me, just waited till I changed out of my coveralls and then took me home. Home was very quiet just now, since Kath and Eber had kept their word and gone on an early run. Leaving me with Kit and his father, who seemed to speak in monosyllables when at all. There was—I gathered—an intimation that Joseph had tried something against Kit again.

Neither told me what. But Kit's father alluded to it, and Kit shrugged and said he'd never been in any danger.

The second week he took me to a concert at the music center, a performance of Listz. It was done with real, live instruments, and it could easily rival any of the performances on Earth. People dressed up for it too, the men in dark tunic-and-jacket-and-tailored pants look, the women in dresses. I wore the red dress I'd worn the first dinner with the Denovos.

No one approached us even at intermission, and I realized the bubble of solitude that Kit moved in. I realized I was unable to refuse his other invitations. Not that they came often, and they were mostly music-related. Other than home, he seemed to live at the music center.

I discovered other things about him, such as that he played the violin, though I'd never seen him do it in the Cathouse and he didn't do it at home—or at least not in front of anyone. But his father said he played it and used to play with the orchestra at the music center—all of the musicians were amateurs, with other employment. He'd stopped because it made other players uncomfortable. The reason it made them uncomfortable was never mentioned, but I understood. As a rule, people don't play well, thinking they have a murderer in their midst.

It turned out his room was right next door to mine and sometimes late at night I'd hear snatches of music drifting in through the doorless entrance tunnel—curling, twisting scraps of sound like something or someone crying musically.

I didn't ask. I just wanted to work at my job, learn the strange rules of this place—which seemed to be mostly based on a complex form of codified tit for tat—and become a free woman after which . . .

My imagination failed at this point, but there were many things I could do after this. Such as, for instance, stealing one of the newer ships and making it to Earth. I didn't want to hear, and I didn't want to know anything about Kit Klaavil. But as I said, it was almost impossible to avoid the people who wanted to tell me.

One of them was Darla, a blond girl who reminded me of a mid-twentieth century cartoon, probably because she wore her short hair in mannered curls, painted her lips into a cupid's bow and unnaturally darkened her eyelashes and the way her work suit was tailored to emphasize her breasts and her tiny waist. None of which should be taken to mean she did anything inappropriate or that she was in any way bad at her job. As far as I could tell she was very good at her job. And frankly her manner of dressing had at least the advantage of being charmingly retro. People could come to work in anything or nothing at all, and though the use of work suits was strongly encouraged for safety and identification reasons, we had at least two gentleman and a lady who worked stark naked. Or rather, stark naked with a tool belt. No one seemed to care, and I wasn't stupid enough to mention it.

But Darla was—besides a good mechanic—the designated local gossip. I never got along with women. Probably comes from the fact that my breasts came in at eight and that I had what could be called a womanly figure long before anyone else in my age group. The other thing of course was that my mother had left when I was very young. And that there weren't many women among the children of Patricians. All of which amounted to the fact that most of the women I knew or met at boarding houses or reformatories were not predisposed to like me, and that they were besides my social inferiors, which always caused some grit in the social machinery.

But Darla was friendly like a kitten is friendly. Friendly for her own sake, not caring on whom her bouncy interest and babbling conversation was bestowed. She started talking to me about simple things, coming by to check how my work was going, offering a hand here and finding a difficult to find piece there.

And then about three weeks after I'd started working there, we were going over a Thule-collector ship together and she came right out into the subject she'd skirted many times before. "So, Kit Klaavil," she said, sitting back on her heels, as she pulled the lid off the panel that controlled air purification and looked at the entrails, comparing them to a diagram. "Are you two an item?"

"What?" I said.

"Well, you know," she said, as she took tweezer like tools to the strange bio-wires inside. "Are you friends, bundling, or going to get married eventually?"

"Uh," I said. I wanted to ask what business it was of hers, but it hit me that if I said that then it would be all over centre by the next day that Kit and I were indeed bundling, an idiom whose meaning I could guess all too well. And it wasn't even that I had a reputation or cared for it, but I could imagine half of these people waiting for me to be found dead or something. Better answer Darla's questions now, as much as possible, and maybe avoid having quite so much curious prying into my life. "We're acquaintances," I said.

"Oh, come on," she said. "you're staying at his family compound and he's taking you places. And he signed for you. As his ward."

I shrugged. "He felt responsible for me, I guess. He gave me asylum when I was escaping from some trouble in the power tree ring."

She gave me an appraising glance, as if she was dying to ask me about Earth but knew that would be pushing too far, then sighed. "His wife was very nice, you know. So sad."

I didn't say anything. I'd started taking apart the navigation system. The Cat who piloted the ship had complained that it pulled right. Only by milliliters, but enough that it could cost them their life in a tight spot.

"They say he spaced her," she said. "Just you know, got her to go out to fix something on the outside of the ship, and then didn't let her back in. He never brought the body back. He says she committed suicide, but you know, with the training and all, everyone knows everyone, and Kit Klaavil has a foul temper. He used to get in fights all the time when he was young. More fool of Jane Klaavil to marry him, I say. But she was the first in her family to be Elfed and I guess her people didn't know any better."

I continued not saying anything and went on with my work, but in my mind was that moment I'd been out of the airlock, on the skin of the ship, and felt like Kit would not open the airlock for me. Had it been like that? Had she stepped out and screamed in his mind and he refused to let her in? I thought of him glaring ahead, when his family tried to discuss things with him. I thought of him as he pinned me to the wall of the cat chamber after I tried to garrote him.

Oh, I was quite willing to concede this wasn't the normal Kit, the man who teased me—as he still did—over my fear of traffic in the downtown Eden, the man who could laugh at silly things and joke with Waldron. But Kit in a fury? Yeah, he could lock a woman away from air and life. He'd regret it afterwards, but it would be too late.

This was in my mind a week later, when Kit picked me up at the center and said, as I stripped my work suit to emerge in the silver jacket and pants I'd worn in the morning. "I though we could go to the half-g gardens." He had his hands stuffed deep in his pockets and an almost sulky look.

I looked over at him and thought that his father must have been talking to him about the situation with Joseph Klaavil, or perhaps something else that Kit didn't wish to discuss and that Kit was trying to avoid going home. Part of me wanted to tell him to forget it.

First, I'd been uncomfortable around him since listening to Darla's confidences. More uncomfortable than I'd been before, which is to say very. Second, I was exhausted after a full day of work and wanted nothing more than to go home, allow myself one of my baths—I took them rarely because Kit's father insisted on not letting me pay for them—and fall into bed.

But there was something to Kit's face behind the sulk, a sort of anxious loneliness around his cat-like eyes, and I thought of the disquieting music winding out of his room late at night, and I said, "Half-g?"

He smiled, though the anxiety remained around the eyes. "It's exactly what it sounds like. Though it's not gardens, or not exactly, except around the picnic grounds. It's an area that's been carved, with huge rocks forming outsized stairways and caves and . . . that sort of thing. And the whole area is a playground. Families tend to go there a lot, for picnics and to let the kids hop around. But on a weekday and after work hours, there will be fewer people there. Because it will be dark soon."

Though Eden used a combination of piped in and simulated sunlight—depending on where Eden was on its erratic orbit—it kept to a standard Earth day and a standard Earth week, with Friday, Saturday and Sunday the days off when everyone did family things or played. On week nights the type of amusement was more likely to be of an adult sort—bars or dancing—and not what sounded like a kiddy attraction.

I wondered why Kit wanted to go there and tried to work up some alarm over the fact that he wanted to take me to a half- deserted place, just the two of us. But the thing was, while I was willing to consider and even to believe that Kit might have killed his wife in a fit of temper, even with the worst will in the world I couldn't bring myself to believe he would plan anyone's murder. Not even mine.

In fact—strangely—given my record of making people loathe me on sight and exactly how badly our acquaintance had begun, I'd started to believe Kit Klaavil liked me. Oh, nothing romantic like Darla would no doubt think, but he enjoyed my company. He had worse social habits than I. At best he was reserved, at worst sullen. But when he was showing me some place he loved—like the music center—or talking about some memory of childhood, he could be animated and almost fun. And, disquieting though it might be, we seemed to have similar senses of humor. I could look up after hearing Waldron or one of the other children say something that struck me as funny and find the like amusement in his eyes.

"All right," I told him, and it seemed to me there was a look of relief in his eyes. He grinned. "I got dinner packed."

And so I'd let him fly me out of the confusing traffic downtown and down a tunnel we'd never taken before, then up and up another level. I remembered his threatening to dash the Cathouse into the half-g gardens and realized it must indeed be quite close to the surface.

We parked in an almost deserted parking garage. The parking attendant made me flinch, because she was obviously mentally deficient. I'd seen mentally deficient people on Earth before, of course, but none with six arms, one of which collected Kit's money, another of which handed him a token for retrieving his fly and yet another of which locked a curved bar over the fly which could only be open with the token.

As we walked out of the garage, I was silent, filled with horror at what had been done to this poor woman. Given the ability to bio-engineer your children in the bio-womb, why have a deficient one at all? And if you chose to have one, why have her so grotesquely . . . dehumanized?

"You're very silent," Kit said, as we emerged into what looked like a meadow with trees and picnic spots consisting of flat ground and very even grass. The gravity was normal there, the grounds being just a convenience provided for patrons of the half-g gardens.

I fully expected him to ridicule me, but I stammered out my horror at seeing the poor girl bioed to resemble an octopus and at her obvious mental deficiency. "I think it's that sort of thing," I told him, "that caused people to rebel against the bio lords."

He stopped. We had been walking towards one of the picnic spots and a rather retro picnic basket dangled from his left hand as he turned to face me. "She's not bioed. Her family is probably one of the religious people who do not believe in bioing or elfing. Otherwise they would have corrected her problem in utero. In fact, she was probably born in vivo and not in a bio womb."

"But I thought everyone was born of bio wombs?"

"Oh no. One of my grandmothers was staunchly against it for religious reasons. A Gaian naturist, you know, and my mother was born in vivo."

"But then . . . how come this girl has eight arms?"

Kit blinked. Then he laughed. "She was wearing a bioed vest, Athena. Well, probably part biological and part mechanical, like our server bots." He looked at me and smiled. "I know it's not exciting, but it allows the poor thing to earn a living."

"Oh," I felt my cheeks heat.

He touched my arm, very lightly. "It's all right," he said. "I take it you don't have anything like that on Earth and so you were justified in guessing . . ." he shrugged.

"I only hear about bio-wombs and no one seems to carry their children . . ."

"Well, those who choose to do so are a small minority," he said, and shrugged. "Though there are people who believe the bio wombs are wrong, the vast majority of women enjoys the freedom and being relieved of the reproductive price."

I didn't intend on ever having children, but if I did, I could certainly see the advantages of letting a bio-womb carry it. Kit said that the wombs were provided with caretakers, who simulated the sort of environment they would have had in the mother's body, and the people I'd met seemed neither better nor worse than those on Earth.

Kit and I had our picnic, and then he returned the basket to the fly and led me into the half-g gardens proper.

"We came here a lot when I was little," he said. "It's very safe. The only time there was an accident at all was when the gravity got full-forced in a freak malfunction. My mom said she used to play here as a child."

I can't really describe the half g gardens. As best I can try to give you an idea, they were a vast area filled with the sort of constructions one expected in fairyland, or perhaps in children's book illustrations. Impossibly tall spiral towers rose, pale, encircled by gleaming staircases. Inside, spiral slides made of white dimatough led one by gentle stages back to the bottom. Then there was the stepping stone area. It was exactly what it sounded like, except that there was no river—just a series of spires ending in round footholds. By jumping just right you could hop from spire to spire. And if you missed and fell—which I did quite a bit at first—the ground beneath, while looking exactly like normal ground, was actually a soft, spongy substance.