The Albino Knife (12 page)

Somehow, during the tumultuous time of the revolution, the zoo had slipped through the cracks, had been missed by those attempting to smash flat every last bit of Wall's handiwork. Perhaps it was because the late Factor Wall had taken care to have the creation of the zoo and its operation far removed from his name. Or maybe it was because the herds of lumbering herbivores posed no threat to anyone and therefore remained unnoticed. Or maybe in the end the zoo was simply so far down the list that no one had yet gotten around to it.

No matter. The zoo was there, still run by the galaxy's foremost expert on the animals therein, an emaciated woman who had commanded the place since its creation. Operating funds from a special account were always sufficient to get things done. The revolution had not laid its angry grip upon the grasslands, and if the trunked animals living there noticed any change, it was not apparent. They foraged, they bred, they brought forth young,they passed on.

It was difficult to reach the zoo through the swamps by ground travel. It was easy enough to get to by air, but few made the trip. The odd scientist arrived now and then to study, academic zoological types who drooled over the exotic animals, but mostly the staff had the place to themselves. The tropical heat and frequent thunderstorms offered little competition to a Republic intent on rebuilding an entire galaxy.

What use were clumps of oafish animals when billions of humans and mues needed proper governing?

Yes, the people had long memories, but the people were now and then shortsighted. And sometimes, the people were simply blind.

In a building near the east bank of theRiverofDeath , the air coolers hummed as they struggled to keep the inside at three quarters of the tropical day's temperature without. The place was sparsely furnished; there were chairs, tables, beds and a small kitchen, as well as a fresher with shower and toilet and sink.

Adequate, if not luxurious.

Within the room were visitors. One of them was a colorless, average and easy-to-forget man called Tone. The second was a dark man with a long nose and thick muscles who went by the name of Cteel.

The third was the Albino Exotic woman, Juete.

The fourth visitor was invisible.

And it was this fourth visitor who ruminated upon the zoo and its fate, and who listened at the same time intently to the conversation in the room. And who tended to several hundred other items of business simultaneously.

"You are free to wander about the grounds as you choose," Cteel said. "You will find sunblock in your quarters, as well as an umbrella-field and a dogheel cooler. Don't bother trying to escape. None of the vehicles will operate without a code only I know; none of the communication gear will transmit; none of the staff will come near enough to speak to you. You must be in your room by nightfall."

The Exotic woman inhaled slowly, inflating her chest and lifting her rather perfect breasts slightly under her dark thinskins. Her nipples hardened, easily visible through the cloth. She exuded pheromones, deliberately now, filling the air with a sexual call. No doubt she would be puzzled once again as to why the two men were not responsive. Albinos learned early of their ability to attract others and there were few who could resist the call when it was fully unleashed. Probably Juete had never met such a one, and her failure to lure either Tone or Cteel into an embrace or even a response must be frightening. It was her most potent weapon, and it had proved useless so far.

It would continue to fail; the two men were infected with a tailored olfactory virus specifically designed to counter the albino's hormonal signals. More, if either somehow lost control and attempted without orders to have sex with Juete, a series of interlinked viral-molecular charges growing in their hypothalami, cranial nerve clusters, and higher brain, would receive an ultrahigh frequency radio pulse. The explosions resulting would be tiny, but of sufficient strength so that an intensely painful death would follow. The best surgeons who had ever lived could not stop it. Both Tone and Cteel knew what would happen; it had been explained to them in great detail. Neither would be seduced and sympathetic to Juete, no matter how hard she tried. Not if they wished to continue living.

The fourth watcher knew the woman was frightened at her failure to sway them, for he had once been an albino himself. Had he lips, he would have smiled, but that was no longer possible. He was alive, after a fashion, but without flesh. He existed only as a viral matrix in a supercomputer that hung in high orbit over the Earth; half a dozen smaller computers on the planet supplemented the main one, and he had thousands of sensors feeding him. He was mind; he could think, he could act after a fashion, he could receive input. His multiple photomutable gel eyes were much sharper than any man's and they saw farther into the red and violet; his ears could detect sounds higher and lower than any ears born of natural life; he could hear radio, sense solar flares, could analyze Juete's organically generated perfume—but he could not feel , for he had no skin, no nerves, no muscles, no body. The fission furnace powering him would last for two hundred years, and he could survive on solar radiation indefinitely past that, if somewhat less actively. He could, in his present form, live virtually forever.

It had not always been so. He remembered his own death, for even that recording had been pulsed to the computer along with the others. He had all the major memories from his former being and they had been coded into electromagnetoencephaloprojic records that occupied and nearly filled the supercomputer which was to become his new self. Hisessence was intact, and though he had no body—yet!—into which he could focushimself, he was mentally the same as he had been before. He had the thoughts and desires and hopes and dreams of a man, albeit he was now certainly something other than man.

He had been, and was now again in his own unique way, Marcus Jefferson Wall, the man who had run the Confed at his pleasure. He had been brought low, assassinated by one he had once loved, and now he had enemies to repay and plans to bring to fruition. Death had slowed, but not stopped him. He grew stronger each day, his unwitting agents spreading his reach throughout the galaxy, and the time had come for retribution. And a fitting one it would be, too.

For it was not only the people who had long memories: the memories of Marcus Jefferson Wall were now and forever eidetic, and those who had given him the worst ones would pay most dearly for having done so.

Chapter Ten

WHILE THE President of the Republic had by his own desire far less power than had the leader of the Confederation, his wishes still received a great deal of respect throughout the galaxy. If you received a com from Rajeem Carlos asking for a favor, chances were probably good that you would at least seriously think about it before refusing.

Khadaji was not surprised, therefore, when doors seemed to magically open for him and his daughter upon the tightly regulated pleasure world of Vishnu. The gas giant Shiva blocked the sun now so that it was both shade- and spin-night, but the huge moon's civilization had been designed to run in day or dark, and myriad colors of generated light—neon, biolume, halogen, incandescent— kept the dark at bay wherever man or mue built their houses of joy. When they arrived at the casino where Juete had worked and lived, it could have as easily been midday, to judge by either the crowds or the illumination at ground level.

The casino owner would be dining on the story of his White Radio com from the President for a long time, and he gave Khadaji and Veate scan rings that would admit them anywhere they wanted to go.

Anything for my friend Rajeem Carlos.

Khadaji and his daughter moved toward Juete's room. The young woman wore a set of plain, tan coveralls, tight clothing that disguised little of what she was. She had the build of an athlete, and he noticed once again how well she moved, with an easy grace. Where did those easy and balanced motions have their base? Was she a dancer? He assumed she could ski, from her story of where she had been when her mother went missing, but he realized how little he knew about her. And Veate had not been particularly forthcoming.

As for himself, Khadaji wore his gray orthoskins and spetsdods, and the soles of his spun dotic boots were new, something called tackgrip shears. He could almost run up a wall, if he put sufficient force into it, and the soles would not slide a centimeter. During a normal walk, the soles would seem no more than standard flexoprene. He didn't have the matador patch on his shoulder—he'd taught them but never gone through the graduation ceremony himself— and the spetsdods he'd worn virtually every minute for years now seemed strange on the backs of his hands. Still, he was obviously what he was, out of practice or not; he wore the clothes, he had the look. Probably he looked better than he felt.

The security din built into Juete's door came to life as the pair approached. It scanned them, then queried vocally:

"Veee-et-tay?"

"Yes."

"Kaahhh-dah-jjee?"

Khadaji grinned at the gravellike tones of the thing's voice chip. "Yes."

As the door slid open, Veate said, "The security system functions just fine, but the vocals have always been like that, slow and stupid-sounding. It amused my mother so she never got it fixed."

"She would find that funny."

The young woman glanced at him sharply. "How would you know? You haven't seen her in more than twenty years."

"I can see her now," he said. "In my mind, and in your face. I lived with her; I loved her."

"You left her!"

"I really had little choice."

"Right.You had to save the galaxy, to become a hero, to be the Man Who Never Missed!"

He looked around the room, feeling the emptiness and at the same time feeling Juete's presence. This is where she lives, he thought. He turned back toward his daughter. "Does your mother hate me that much?"

She had promised herself she wasn't going to do this, Veate thought, that she wasn't going to lose control. Fuck it. "Yes!"

She was breathing quickly and her face was flushed, as flushed as it could get. Now he could feel the pheromonic pull she put forth for the first time. Had she been able to keep it from happening before? Or was it that strong emotion intensified it so? It had been that way with Juete. He said nothing. Years of meditation had given him the ability to resist a lot of things.

Her breathing slowed, her color faded back to its fragile, translucent white, and the hormonal attraction ebbed. When she had regained control, she said, "That's not true. She doesn't hate you. She never has.

She said you asked her to go with you, all those years ago.After a fashion."

He sighed."After a fashion, yes. I was young and stupid and I tried to protect my ego and I insulted her.

But she knew I wanted her, knew I loved her."

"How could you go, then?"

He drew himself back from the past, refocused his time-stare, and looked at the woman who was the image of her mother and the child of them both. He said, "Have you had many lovers?"

"What is 'many'?Ten?Thirty?Fifty? And is it your business if I have had a hundred?"

"Do you keep several going so that if one bores you another is waiting patiently in line to step into place?"

"Yes, of course."

He smiled. "Those last two words are more easily spoken by an Albino Exotic than anyone else, aren't they? It's taken for granted that you will have people fighting for your favor. It's who you are, isn't it?"

"You lived with my mother. You know that it is. We were genetically engineered to be sexual toys for the rich. We can't help what we are!"

"Certainly you can. There are albinos who take chem to suppress their pheromone output, use skin dyes and lenses, dress to conceal rather than reveal."

"Passing for tintskins, you mean.Denying their true nature."

"That's what I mean. You can change what you are. You don'twant to change it. Neither did your mother."

"What are you trying to say?"

"Albinos take others' desires for them for granted. It is a given, like the sun coming up in the morning, a constant."

"Yes," she said. "It is. One of our few advantages and something we would be foolish to ignore.So what?"

"Your mother would not give that up for me," he said. "She knew what she was and she enjoyed it. I could only be a small part of her life, only another in the long parade of lovers who was interesting briefly, but not worth concentrating all of her love and energy upon."

"So?"

"So how can you be angry at me for doing the same thing that she did? I loved her more than she did me, but you would have had me give upmy life to worship her. Where is the fairness in that?"

"She birthed your child," she said. "If she hadn't felt something for you, why would she have done that?"

"I don't know. If she had felt something for me, why is it I never knew you existed until you walked into my pub a few days ago? If your mother had not been kidnapped, would I have ever known I had a daughter?"

Veate closed her eyes. "I don't know," she said.

Khadaji moved to a table and picked up a hand mirror lying there. The mirror was an antique, set into a frame of some hard, dark material carved into an intricate likeness of a serpent coiled around the small circle of glass. The frame substance escaped him, some kind of plastic, and for a moment, it seemed familiar. Where had he seen it before?

"It isn't your mother who is angry with me, is it?"

She opened her eyes and stared at him. "I wanted and needed a father and you weren't there. You know how it is with my kind. The galaxy is full of dangers for us."

"And it's my fault that I didn't know you even existed?"

"Yes. It's your fault. You sent her money, but you never came back. Your revolution ended five years ago. You could have found her then. Why didn't you?"

It was a question he had asked himself more than a few times. He'd told himself during the revolution that it would have been dangerous for Juete to be connected to him. But after it was over, the danger was much less. He had gone to hide, but he could have called or even looked her up. Why hadn't he? He didn't have an answer. "I don't know."