Ethan of Athos (5 page)

“Mm,” Janos, judging from his brief grin about to try to turn Ethan's anger with an obscene joke, took in his dark face and thought better of it.

The struggle was suddenly too much for Ethan. He let his empty beer bulb drop to the floor from slack fingers. His mouth twisted in sardonic resignation. “You can have the lightflyer, when I leave.”

Janos paused, shocked white. “Leave? Ethan, I never meant --”

“Oh. Not that kind of leave. This has nothing to do with you. I forgot I hadn't told you yet -- the Population Council's sending me on some urgent business for them. Classified. Top secret. To Jackson's Whole. I'll be gone at least a year.”

“Now who doesn't care?” said Janos angrily. “Off for a year without so much as a by-your-leave. What about me? What am I supposed to do while you're ...” Janos's voice plowed into silence. “Ethan -- isn't Jackson's Whole a planet? Out there? With -- with -- them on it?”

Ethan nodded. “I leave in four -- no, three days, on the galactic census ship. You can have all my things. I don't know -- what's going to happen out there.”

Janos's chiseled face was drained sober. In a small voice he said, “I'll go clean up.”

Comfort at last, but Ethan was asleep in his chair before Janos came out of the bathroom.

Kline Station was an accretion of three hundred years; even so Ethan was unprepared for the size of it, and the complexity. It straddled a region of space where no less than six fruitful jump routes emerged within a reasonable sublight boost of each other. The dark star nearby hosted no planets at all, and so Kline Station rode a slow orbit far out of its gravity well, cresting the Stygian cold.

Kline Station had been full of history even when Athos was first settled; it had been the jumping-off point for the Founding Fathers' noble experiment. A poor fortress, but a great place to do business, it had changed hands a number of times as one or another of its neighbors sought it as a guardian of its gates, not to mention a source of cash flow. Presently it maintained a precarious political independence based on bribery, determination, suppleness in business practice, and a stiffness in internal loyalty bordering on patriotism. A hundred thousand citizens lived in its mazy branches, augmented at peak periods of traffic by perhaps a fifth as many transients.

So much Ethan had learned from the crew of the census courier. The crew of eight was all male not, Ethan found, out of regular rule or respect for the laws of Athos, but from the disinclination of female employees of the Bureau to spend four months on the round-trip voyage without a downside leave. It gave Ethan a little breather, before being plunged into galactic culture. The crew was courteous to him, but not so encouraging as to break through Ethan's own timid reserve, and so he had spent much of the two months en route in his own cabin, studying and worrying.

As preparation, he'd decided to read all the articles by and about women in his Betan Journals of Reproductive Medicine. There was the ship's library, of course, but its contents certainly had not been approved by the Athosian Board of Censors, and Ethan was not really sure what degree of dispensation he was supposed to have on this mission. Better to stock up on virtue, he reasoned glumly; he was probably going to need it.

Women. Uterine replicators with legs, as it were. He was not sure if they were supposed to be inciters to sin, or sin was inherent in them, like juice in an orange, or sin was caught from them like a virus. He should have paid more attention during his boyhood religious instruction, not that the subject had ever been anything but mysteriously talked around. And yet, when he'd read one Journal edited of names as a scientific test, he'd found the articles indistinguishable as to the sex of the author.

This made no sense. Maybe it was only their souls, not their brains, that were so different? The one article he'd been sure was a man's work turned out to be by a Betan hermaphrodite, a sex which hadn't even existed when the Founding Fathers had fled to Athos, and where did they fit in? He lost himself, for a while, imagining the flap in Athosian Customs should such a creature present itself for entry, as the bureaucrats tried to decide whether to admit its male-ness or exclude its femaleness -- it would probably be referred to a committee for about a century, by which time the hermaphrodite would have conveniently solved the problem by dying of old age....

Kline Station Customs were made nearly equally tedious by the most thorough microbiological inspection and control procedure Ethan had ever seen. Kline Station, it appeared, cared not if you were smuggling guns, drugs, or political refugees, as long as your shoes harbored no mutant fungi. Ethan's terror and -- he admitted to himself -- ravenous curiosity had mounted to a fever when he was at last permitted to walk through the flex tube from the courier into the rest of the universe.

The rest of the universe was disappointing at first glance, a dingy chilly freighter docking bay. The mechanical working side of Kline Station, to be sure, like the backside of a tapestry that probably made a fine show from some more intended perspective. Ethan puzzled over which of a dozen exits led to human habitation. The ship's crew was obviously busy, or out of sight; the microbial inspection team had dashed off as soon as its task was done, like as not to another job. A lone figure was leaning casually against a wall at the mouth of an exit ramp in the universal languid pose of idleness watching work. Ethan approached it for directions.

The crisp grey-and-white uniform was unfamiliar to Ethan, but obviously military even without the clue of the sidearm on the hip. Only a legal stunner, but it looked well-cared-for and not at all new. The slim young soldier looked up at Ethan's step, inventoried him, he felt, with one glance, and smiled politely.

“Pardon me, sir,” Ethan began, and halted uncertainly. Hips too wide for the wiry figure, eyes too large and far apart above a small chiseled nose, jaw thin-boned and small, beardless skin fine as an infant's -- it might have been a particularly elegant boy, but...

Her laughter pealed like a bell, entirely too loud for the reddening Ethan. “You must be the Athosian,” she chuckled.

Ethan began to back away. Well, she didn't look like the middle-aged scientists portrayed in the Betan Journal. It was a perfectly natural mistake, surely. He had resolved earlier to avoid speaking to women as much as humanly possible, and here he was already -- “How do I get out of here?” he mumbled, darting cornered glances around the docking bay.

She raised her eyebrows. “Didn't they give you a map?”

Ethan shook his head nervously.

“Why, that's practically criminal, turning a stranger loose in Kline Station without a map. You could go out looking for the commode and starve to death before you found your way back. Ah ha, the very man I'm looking for. Hi! Dom!” she hailed a courier crewman just now crossing the docking bay with a duffle slung over his shoulder. “Over here!”

The crewman changed course, his annoyance melting into the look of a man eager to please, if slightly puzzled. He stood straighter than Ethan had ever seen him, sucking in his gut. “Do I know you, ma'am -- I hope?”

“Well, you ought to -- you sat next to me in disaster drill class for two years. I admit it's been a while.” She ran a hand through her dark cropped curls. “Picture longer hair. C'mon, the re-gen didn't change my face that much! I'm Elli.”

His mouth made an “o” of astonishment. “By the gods! Elli Quinn? What have you done to yourself?”

She touched one molded cheekbone. “Complete facial regeneration. Do you like it?”

“It's fantastic!”

“Betan work, you know -- the best.”

“Yeah, but -- ' Dom's face puckered. “Why? It's not like you were so hard to look at, before you ran off to join the mercenaries.” He gave her a grin that was like a sly poke in the ribs, although his hands were clasped behind his back like a boy's at a bakery window. 'Or did you strike it rich?”

She touched her face again, less cheerfully. “No, I haven't taken up hijacking. It was sort of a necessity -- caught a plasma beam to the head in a boarding battle out Tau Verde way, a few years back. I looked a little funny with no face at all, so Admiral Naismith, who does not do things by halves, bought me a new one.

“Oh,” said Dom, quelled.

Ethan, who found his enthusiasm over the woman's facial aesthetics a trifle baffling, had no trouble sympathizing with this; any plasma burn was horrendous -- this one must have come close to killing her. He eyed the face with a new medical interest.

“Didn't you start out with Admiral Oser's group?” asked Dom. “That's still his uniform, isn't it?'

“Ah. Allow me to introduce myself. Commander Elli Quinn, Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, at your service.” She bowed with a flourish. “The Dendarii sort of annexed Oser, and his uniforms, and me -- and it's been a step up in the world, let me tell you. But I, sir, have home leave for the first time in ten years, and intend to enjoy it. Popping up beside old classmates and giving them heart failure -- flashing my credit rating in front of all the people who predicted I'd come to a bad end -- speaking of coming to a bad end, you seem to have turned your passenger here loose without a map.”

Dom eyed the mercenary officer suspiciously. “That wasn't intended as a pun, was it? I've been on this run four years, and I am so damned tired of coming back to a lot of half-witted bend-over jokes --”

The mercenary woman's laughter burst against the overhead girders, her head thrown back. “The secret of your abandonment revealed, Athosian, “ she said to Ethan. “Should I take him in hand, then, being by virtue of my sex innocent of the suspicion of, er, unnatural lusts?”

“For all of me, you can,” allowed Dom, shrugging. “I have a wife to get home to.” He walked pointedly around Ethan.

“Good-oh. I'll look you up later, all right?” said the woman.

The crewman nodded to her, rather regretfully, and trod off up the exit ramp. Ethan, left alone with the woman, suppressed an urge to run after him begging protection. Recalling vaguely that economic servitude was one of the marks of the damned, he had a sudden horrible suspicion that she might be after his money -- and he was carrying Athos's entire purse for the year. He became intensely conscious of her sidearm.

Amusement livened her strange face. “Don't look so worried. I'm not going to eat you,” she snickered suddenly,” -- conversion therapy not being my line.”

“Glck,” blurted Ethan, and cleared his throat. “I am a faithful man,” he quavered. “To, to Janos. Would you like to see a picture of Janos?”

“I'll take your word for it,” she replied easily. The amusement softened to something like sympathy. “I really have you spooked, don't I? What, am I by chance the first woman you've met?”

Ethan nodded. Twelve exits, and he had to pick this one....

She sighed. “I believe you.” She paused thoughtfully. “You could use a faithful native guide, though. Kline Station has a reputation for travelers' aid to uphold -- it's good for business. And I'm a friendly cannibal.”

Ethan shook his head with a paralyzed smile.

She shrugged. “Well, maybe when you get over your culture shock I'll run across you again. Are you going to have a long layover?” She pulled an object from her pocket, a tiny holovid projector. “You get one of these automatically when you get off a proper passenger ship -- I don't need mine.” A colorful schematic sprang into the air. “We're here. You want to be here, in the branch called Transients' Lounge -- nice facilities, you can get a room -- actually, you can get most anything, but I fancy you'd prefer the staid end of things. This section. Up this ramp and take the second cross-corridor. Know how to operate this thing? Good luck --” She pressed the map module into his hand, flashed a last smile, and vanished into another exit.

He gathered his meager belongings and found his way to the transients' area eventually, after only a few wrong turns. He passed many more women en route, infesting the corridors, the bubble-car tubes, the slidewalks and lift tubes and arcades, but thankfully none accosted him. They seemed to be everywhere. One had a helpless infant in her arms. He stifled a heroic impulse to snatch the child out of danger. He could hardly complete his mission with a baby in tow and besides, he couldn't possibly rescue them all. It also occurred to him, belatedly, as he dodged a squad of giggling children racing across his path to swoop like sparrows up a lift tube, that there was a 50% chance the infant was female anyway. It assuaged his conscience a little.

Ethan chose a room on the basis of price, after an alarming teleconference between the transient hostel's concierge, the Kline Station public computer system, a Transients' Ombudsman, and no less than four live human officials on ascending rungs of the station's governing hierarchy about the exchange rate to be assigned to Ethan's Athosian pounds. They were actually quite kind in computing the most favorable translation of his funds, via two currencies of which Ethan had never heard, into the maximum possible number of Betan dollars. Betan dollars were one of the harder and more universally acceptable currencies available. Still he ended with what seemed far fewer dollars than he had had pounds before, and he passed hastily over the preferred Imperial Suite in favor of an Economy Cabin.

Economy proved more cabinet than cabin. When he was asleep, Ethan assured himself, he wouldn't mind. Now, however, he was wide awake. He touched the pressure pad to inflate the bed and lay on it anyway, mentally reviewing his instructions and trying to ignore an odd myopic illusion that the walls were pressing inward.