Take No Prisoners (29 page)

And come back again. It was after they'd got home, having made love in an apartment that breathed the passage of time, that Daan had confessed to her about the "little accident" that had befallen him in one of the sun-battered parks of the Anonymous City. In the normal way it mightn't have worried her too vastly, but like all Daans he was in some ways an honest man, some of the time, and felt he had to explain himself.

"It wasn't exactly
her
in any way," he'd said, standing at the window, "and it's not that I don't love you very much. It was just she'd got these really big boobs. Monsters. Like in the holos. I've always wanted to know what it was like getting laid by somebody like that, and she was sort of ultra-available. It was just, you know, the spirit of scientific inquiry."

Qinefer had never thought too much about her breasts before: like the rest of her body, they'd just been
there
. Now she wanted to laugh derisively at him – or maybe herself – but found she couldn't muster the necessary derision. Instead she'd discovered to her astonishment that for the first time in her life she felt ashamed of the shape of her body. She'd known the embarrassment was ridiculous, based on a farcical perception of someone else's perception of herself, but she'd anyway grabbed a towel to cover up the suddenly offensively small curves. They'd always been average-sized curves before ...

After she left Daan that day, Qinefer erected a transparent wall around herself and watched the world through it. Visitors were allowed inside the wall only very occasionally, and never for very long. Her near-celibacy was all the stranger in an age that was so promiscuous. In the century and a half before she discovered she'd qualified to go on the scientific expedition to Embrace-of-the-Forest and its enigmatic dead planet, she'd slept with, all told, two men and one woman, one night apiece, no interesting conversation in the morning, not much interest in the event; the operation had in each case been a clinical one, designed purely to release a sexual tension which would not succumb to masturbation. The wall had been kept essentially intact.

And now she was on Starveling, sent here to examine the biochemistry of the planet's rudimentary lifeforms and, if the expedition was lucky and found some remains, to make guesses about what the workings of the bodies of the long-ago ETs might have been. She was also trapped in a dark, smallish chamber with a man she didn't much like. He was a nuisance: a complicating factor in what would otherwise have been an engrossing intellectual puzzle. That it had been by accident that he had breached her wall ameliorated his crime somewhat, but only somewhat. She'd bandaged his fearful wound automatically, more because she'd known it would look bad to her rescuers if she hadn't than for any other reason; but, as she recognized, the fact that she'd forgotten about the painkiller for so long was symptomatic of her sense that he'd forced himself on her.

~

Wincing histrionically as he moved his right leg, making sure Mouse heard the way he silenced the whistle of his indrawn breath, Makreed shifted himself over to one of the metal boxes. He brushed away the superficial dust and looked at the artefact in the rather too white light from his torch. The drab green metal looked back at him with little friendliness. For the first time since they'd landed on Starveling it became a part of his consciousness that they really were on an unknown planet – not just in some mysteriously hitherto-unexplored tract on one of the Authority's worlds. The box seemed more alien to him than any luridly tentacled monster.

It looked utterly inert. He pushed it, knowing as he did so that the thing was fixed immovably to the smoothly tiled floor.

During the earlier forays into the complex, no one had discovered a single marking on any of the boxes: they were just featureless metal cuboids. And yet obviously they must be something more than that – they had to have been put here for some purpose. The long-gone race that had come of age under the light of Embrace-of-the-Forest must have constructed them with some useful function in mind. Surely they couldn't be books: if they'd been books there'd have been some simple way of opening them. It crossed his mind whimsically that maybe the boxes hadn't been built by the ETs at all: maybe they actually
were
the ETs.

He smiled at the thought. Anything was possible in the universe, as people were constantly discovering. The whole structure of reality was a never-ending conundrum, with observed fact frequently at fundamental variance with the predictions of theory. The age of the universe was known from isotope-dating to be only about five million years – far too short a time for all the rich diversity of sophisticated lifeforms it contained to have evolved at the rates that could currently be observed. One or the other calculation must be wrong, and so physicists on one side and biologists on the other produced ever more unconvincing hypotheses as to how the rate of radioactive decay and/or mutations might have wildly fluctuated in past eras. And then there were the calculations that showed beyond all possible shadow of doubt that the speed of light should be some kind of limiting velocity in a universe that was curved as the universe was indeed curved, yet the transition from sublight normspace into supralight flashspace was an easy one, as any space-traveler could tell you, only the changed images on the telltales giving any sign that a barrier had been crossed. Mathematicians had teased for centuries at the paradox, but as yet they had found no flaws in the theory.

Rather like there were no flaws to be found in the impossibly stolid boxes ...

Wasn't it a bit presumptuous of the expedition to have assumed the boxes
had
any function? Half the gadgets on which the Authority had founded a technological civilization shouldn't in theory have worked, yet they obviously did. The only conceivable explanation was that they were made to do so by the existence of each new Incarnate One, who through the donation of his or her blessings could tailor the laws of the universe such that they conformed to human requirements. But presumably the boxes, which must have been constructed by the ETs long before the election of the first Incarnate One, were without such blessing. Perhaps the ETs, too, had had a spiritual magic which could empower the otherwise useless, and that magic had died with them ...

"I've finished doing this door," said Mouse.

Makreed swivelled where he half-lay. In the poor light of their torches he could see her taking the few steps needed to join him next to the box. He admired the precision and economy of her movements, was surprised to discover that he found them attractive.

She squatted down beside him. He noticed that for some reason she'd kicked her boots off.

"Any luck?" she said, nodding unnecessarily towards the box.

"What would you expect?" he replied sourly.

"You never know." Her voice was as soft as she could make it while still being audible to him.

"Any signs of life from the other side of either of the doors?"

"Nothing. But I'm not surprised. After all, the damn' things are about a meter thick. And solid."

Suddenly she smiled, like dawn. She put her right hand in the light of his torch and he could see a massive bruise across the back of it, staining the darkness of her skin even darker. She must have done some hammering on the doors as he slept.

His immediate reaction was to take her hand in one of his own, but she pulled her arm swiftly away.

"It doesn't hurt," she said. "I've told it not to. I'd teach you how to tell your foot to stop hurting, too, but it would take more time than it's worth."

Her mention of his foot reminded him of its presence. The effects of the painkiller were beginning to wear off. This was something he could deal with himself, without her help. He opened his medikit, dug out the hypo and sprayed himself on the back of the wrist – as good a place as any. He saw her watching him do this and interpreted the expression on her face as patronizing. She looked away boredly. As the pain began to ebb again he nodded at her, not really liking her, far too aware of the fact that he was having to rely on chemicals for analgesia. It seemed she could do without.

Her hands were moving rapidly over the contours of the box as if she were trying somehow to sense through her fingertips what might be hidden within. Her attention was completely devoted to the task; she didn't see his nod. The skin of her face was drawn tautly across her cheekbones as she concentrated, the peaks pale against the darkness, and he realized how birdlike her whole body could seem. Yet normally she didn't give the appearance of being slight.

She looked back at him abruptly and saw he'd been observing her. Behind the windows of her thin-rimmed spectacles her dark eyes tightened in irritation, and then she turned once more to her exploration of the box. Her lips formed a single straight line.

"D'you think we're likely to get out of here?" he asked, more because he wanted to hear the sound of a voice – even his own – than because he seriously expected an answer.

"Fount of silly bloody questions, aren't you, Makreed?" she said, but without any malice. "Either we will or we won't. I'm hoping one of these boxes might turn out to be a key to the doors. Now, stop interrupting my thoughts and let me get on with it. Besides, remember the air. Again."

He was offended. The emotion annoyed him by its pettiness, but there was no escaping it. She was assuming he was an incompetent simply because his foot had been damaged. He had an insight into what it must be like for all those sorry people who'd irreversibly maimed themselves or had one of the debilitating diseases yet had no wish to choose to euth out of it. The thought of spending eternity being treated as useless appalled him. It hurt him to realize that, as far as Mouse was concerned, he was just an additional factor to be taken into account while she tried to find some way of getting the doors open.

He shuffled on his knees across to the next box, dusted it off like last time, and began running his hands across it in imitation of her. All he felt was smooth, cool metal, as he imagined the black planes of Mouse's back must feel. But this thing – it was an object, nothing more. It was a blank cuboid that some unknown ET had planted here for alien reasons the human species would never discover. He was getting nothing from it, not even a sense that it had been crafted rather than being a product of nature. He shoved at it impatiently, hoping to get some idea of its mass, but his senses refused to tell him anything.

He sat back and again watched Mouse at work. Once more he felt that curious magnetism emanating from her body. How come, then, that he'd never really noticed her before? The position she'd adopted, squatting down intently, was making her uniform trousers stretch over her buttocks, and he felt a foolish urge to reach out and touch the tautness. Only the thought of her contempt stayed his hand.

Makreed was an old acquaintance of lust, but he'd never expected it would wind its webs around him in a situation like this – trapped hundreds of meters underground with little hope of escape, his right foot wrapped in a bloodied bandage. He wondered if the heaviness at his loins was a natural response to the prospect of death.

Mouse froze.

~

"Hello."

"Hello there."

"I recognize you. Haven't we met somewhere before?"

"I don't think so, but if that's what you'd like to believe then please feel free to carry on believing it."

"I like the way you're touching me."

"Why, thank you. It gives me very great pleasure to touch you like this."

"Are you
sure
we haven't met somewhere before?"

"Very sure. But why should that stop us from becoming friends now? I feel that you and I could become very close to each other – don't you?"

"Yes ... yes. It's a good feeling, this learning to know you better. I'd like to be your friend. Syor was very kind to me when she made me, you know; she allowed for the fact that I could make friends whenever I wanted to. It's been a very long time, though, since someone has asked to be my friend."

"You must have been lonely."

"'Lonely'?"

"Sad when you were without friends."

"No. No, not at all. That was one of her further kindnesses. I feel all the joys of being close to others, as we are becoming, but in the intervening times I do not feel any sorrow that I am not in this pleasurable state. That would not be constructive. Or perhaps it was simply something Syor forgot to give me: she was a very simple person, in many ways, before she became our god. I am sorry you feel this sense that you call 'loneliness.' It must be very painful for you."

"It gives me no pain. It is simply something I feel. I feel many things, but few of them cause me either pain or pleasure. And none intolerably so."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, of course I am."

"But now I am beginning to come so very, very close to you, Qinefer, now you have permitted me to venture within your wall, I find you
are
capable of feeling pain. You have a greater capacity for pain than any of the other Qinefers who have come to me."

"I do not want to discuss this subject any further. If you're really the friend of mine you say you are, you'll know it would be better to talk about something else."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you."

"You didn't hurt me. You
can't
hurt me."

"But I know I did. You perplex me, friend ... lover. (I may call you that, may I not? 'Lover'?) There is no reason for you to lie to me. I spoke with you about the pains and pleasures you feel, and you told me they did not exist. Now I sense – as if it were through your own senses – that my thoughts have hurt you very deeply, and I wish to make reparation. Please, if you are my friend, let me do so."

"You intrude into my privacy."

"Friends as close as we are have no privacy, one from the other. Everything of me is laid out naked before you, for you to look at as much as you will. I have no secrets from you."

~

"No!" yelled Mouse, throwing herself backwards from the box, scrabbling clumsily across the dusty carpet of the floor. "Leave me alone, fuck you!
Leave me alone!
"