The Sardonyx Net (26 page)

But it was not perfect. Pressed against the ice, Zed's palms began to ache. More than once he hung by claws alone, kicking to get his front points more solidly into the ice. His forearms hurt. He should have started with axe and hammer. He should at least have taken rope and set up a belay. He told the thinking, doubting brain to shut up. Left hand. Right foot. Right hand. Left foot. Do it over again. Sweat stung his eyes till they burned. The interior of the ice suit was at body temperature; it would stay that way. His hands were numbing. He worked his way around a bulge so big he could not see around it. He knew what was on its other side: more ice. It rippled mercilessly overhead, as high as infinity. His foot slipped. He kicked it in again, went up another twenty centimeters, and found himself at the ledge.
 

It was a wide ledge, roomy enough to sit on and still have room to stand and turn around when it was time to start again. Zed waited for his hands to warm up. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, and before his head could tell him why he should stay on the ledge a little longer, just a little longer, he began climbing. He used the claws. He had gone from looseness to tension and now he was loose again. He felt as if his skin were soaking in a warm oil bath. The physical, the sensory, the real took hold of him like a great inexorable hand. It thrust him up the mountainside. He cursed the heat, the glare, the numbing cold that sealed his flesh to his bones. He couldn't feel his fingers. He looked down once.
 

The sea glittered like blue-green crystal below him.
 

The second ledge turned out to be sixty meters up. This ledge, too, was wide. Zed muscled onto it. “Yago,” he said, and his claws slid back. He worked his cold, tired, and cramped hands forward and back, till the blood began to return to tingle and burn them. It was a welcome pain. His mouth quirked, and he leaned back against the adamantine ice face. Pain cleared the senses; it made the world seem bright and sharp. Zed wondered what Dana Ikoro would think of that.
 

For a price, there was a further refinement of ice climbing technology available on Chabad. The operation was tricky, but surgeon Ja Narayan had been known to do it. Zed knew two climbers who had had it done. The bones of the hands and forearms were removed, the flesh laid back, and artificial bone was joined to real bone. At the tips of the fingers, the artificial bones ended with retractable claws. The operation destroyed the feeling in the hands, and, when the claws were extended, the hands could not be closed.
 

At a party, Zed had heard some learned guest of Theo Levos discourse on “the ultimate egotism” of ice climbing. The speaker claimed that it was an unconscious confirmation and symbol of this egotism that a claw climber shouted her or his name over and over again at the ice. This, the philosopher remarked, revealed the fundamentally decadent nature of Chabadese society. The listening guests nodded, and refrained from pointing out that the speaker was the guest of a Levos, and was standing in the heart of that decadent society, being served by slaves, drinking decadently imported wine.
 

Zed had refrained from strangling the idiot. He asked the man if he had ever done any ice climbing. The answer had been, “No, certainly not!”
 

Zed grinned, remembering. He'd rarely heard anyone make less sense. After a very little time on the ice, the shouted name became meaningless, a noise without objective referent. It ceased to have an owner; it was just a word, unconnected.
 

He stood on the ledge. Glancing at his left wrist, he checked the small suit chronometer which told him how long he had been climbing. It did not surprise him to learn that he had been climbing for nearly three hours. His shoulders and forearms ached; he ignored them. A cool wind fanned his cheeks. He smelled the sharp, tangy scent of the ice. He said his name; the claws came out. He chopped his aching arm into the ice wall and stepped upward, setting the front points of his right foot.
 

He climbed.
 

At breakfast that morning, Rhani, remembering Zed's comment from the night before, waited for him to join her. Finally, when Amri came into the bedroom to remove the plates, she realized that he was not coming. “Amri, is my brother still asleep?” She said.
 

Amri shook her head. “No, Rhani-ka; his door is open. He isn't in the house.”
 

“Do you know where he went?”
 

“No. But I think he left early this morning.”
 

Corrios, padding up the stairs with the mail, said, “Yes.”
 

“Do you know where he went, Corrios?”
 

“Ice,” the big man said succinctly.
 

“Ah,” Rhani said. She took the mail from the tray. She wondered what had happened at the party to send Zed to the ice. She doubted very much that it had been his conversation with Imre.
 

Could it have been meeting Ferris? She considered that, then shrugged. As she did so, her fingers encountered a letter with a crest on it.
 

It was from Ferris Dur. She opened it. It asked after her health and sent regrets that she had not come to the party. There was also a letter from the Abanat police. She tore it open quickly. Officer Tsurada wrote: “
We are having some difficulty in tracing the Free Folk of Chabad. They are either smaller than we thought, or more tightly organized. Only a few of our informers have even heard of them, and their information is sketchy and has proved largely useless
.”
 

“Wonderful,” Rhani said aloud.
 

“I beg your pardon, Rhani-ka?” said Binkie.
 

She looked up. “Good morning,” she said. “I didn't hear you walk in.” She held the letter out to him. He perused it.
 

“I'm sorry, Rhani-ka,” he said.
 

“So am I.” She stretched. “Is there anything else in that pile that I should look at?”
 

He fanned through the rest of the letters. “They seem to be mostly invitations, Rhani-ka.”
 

“Feh.” She stretched again. Her body felt tense and tight. Perhaps she had slept in an odd position. Rising, she paced around the room once. “Zed isn't here,” she said to Binkie. “He's ice climbing.”
 

He bowed his head. She wondered where Dana was. She had a swift, unexpected memory of his hand against her cheek, and shivered.
 

Turning to the intercom, she called him. “Dana!”
 

“Yes, Rhani-ka?”
 

“Come to my room, please.” She stepped away from the intercom and smiled at Binkie. “Bink, I shall not need you this morning.”
 

He bowed. “As you wish, Rhani-ka. I—” he hesitated, then said, “I have some errands to run in the city. May I—”
 

“Of course,” she said. “Go ahead.”
 

“Thank you,” he said, and left. She heard Dana's step outside the room, and his voice, as he paused to give Binkie greeting. Did he want her? she thought. She thought so, yes. He came into the room. He was wearing a light gray jumpsuit, and the pale sheen of the fabric made his hair look even darker.
 

“You wanted to see me, Rhani-ka?” he said.
 

She smiled at him. “I wanted your company. Zed is ice climbing—” she watched him for a response, and was disappointed—"and I have a lot of work to do. I hoped you would sit with me.”
 

He sat on the stool. “As you wish, Rhani-ka.”
 

His obedience both pleased and annoyed her. Damn it, she thought, that's something Binkie would say. But then she remembered that Dana and Binkie had something important in common. She went to the com-unit, sat, and tapped in the information code for what she wanted. The screen blinked numbers and then said, IDENTIFY. She pressed her left thumb against the cool plastic.
 

Dana had come silently to stand at her side. “What are you doing?” he asked.
 

“I've requested a breakdown of our present storage and usage figures on dorazine. We have to allocate the limited supplies to serve the strongest need. At present the need is greatest in the Barracks: after the Auction the demand on our stores will drop, but if the situation does not change, we may have to start using one of the legal dorazine substitutes, although they are not as effective. Zed says the best of them is pentathine.”
 

“I see,” he said.
 

She was aware of everything about him: his arm, scant centimeters from her own, the set of his head, his eyes, dark as jet, his smell—it reminded her, somehow, of rainwater. Impulsively she asked, “Dana, where did you go the other day? The day I was so irritable.”
 

She could see at once that it was not a good question, and almost wished she could call it back. He looked at the screen, and swallowed. “I went to the Landingport, Rhani-ka.”
 

“Main Landingport?” she said. He nodded. “What happened?”
 

He bit his lower lip. “The alarms went off, and I was Caged.”
 

She felt a rush of sympathy for him. “You didn't know that slaves are not permitted within Main Landingport.”
 

“I should have known.” His face worked. “I didn't think. Seeing the ships—I forgot I wasn't a Starcaptain.”
 

“What happened when the Cage came down?” she asked, curious. Normally, she was only half-aware of the electronic net that sat shimmering above every gate. She had never seen anyone Caged.
 

“The guards drew their stuns. They questioned me. I—” he caught his breath—"played stupid. They logged my name through the computer and told me to get out.”
 

“What do you mean, they logged your name?”
 

“They recorded that Dana Ikoro, a Yago slave, had been Caged at Abanat Landingport.” His voice was even, but Rhani could hear the tension under it and understood what it was he would not say.
 

“Hmmph.” She frowned, and then, slanting a look at him, ordered the com-unit to show her the Cage records logged at Abanat Landingport over the last two days. In a moment, a line of names winked on the screen. She ran through them: they were mostly tourists who had tried to get into Communications or Compsection with inadequate I.D., a belligerent crew member from one of the shuttleships, a drunk off the street—there. DANA IKORO, SLAVE, FAMILY YAGO SYSTEM #56488B. With care—she had never done this before—she directed the computer to expunge the record.
 

As she pressed her thumb to the screen, verifying her right to order this operation, Dana said, “What are you doing?”
 

“Clearing the record,” she said. She leaned back in the chair. “Now if anyone—my brother, say—should look this information up, your name is no longer on it. You are Yago property; I can do that.”
 

She had thought he would be pleased. But his face only grew more strained. “If your brother asks me,” he said, “I have to tell him, just as I told you. How will I explain to him that the incident is not on the record, if he looks and does not find it there?”
 

“You will say I took it off for reasons of my own,” Rhani said sharply.
 

He nodded. After a moment, he said, “Thank you.” He sat on the stool. Rhani turned to the board and directed it to show her the dorazine figures again.
 

She could not but admire his self-control. She had not asked him why he had gone to Abanat Landingport: it might have been to watch the ships—and it might have been to look for a way offplanet. If that was what it was, she didn't want or need to know.
 

She concentrated on the figures on the screen. Right now, her concern was the Auction. There had to be enough dorazine for the Auction. After the Auction—she cued the screen to detail and asked the computer to break down the figures. How much of the dorazine allocated to the Auction was used there, and how much of it was actually used once the Auction was over, to quiet the slaves still in the holding cells?
 

Some. Not much. Nevertheless, pentathine could safely be substituted in those cases, and that would save—the computer added it up—almost five thousand unit doses. Good. She smiled, pleased, and turned to tell Dana what she had just discovered.
 

He was no longer on the stool. Instead, he was standing to one side of the window, gazing at the street. “What is it?” she asked.
 

He beckoned. Curious, she crossed to look out. “Don't stand in front of the window,” he said. Puzzled, Rhani went to his side, and he moved back so that she could take his place. “There's a man in the park,” he said. “I think he's watching the house.”
 

Rhani tensed. “What man?”
 

“Look at the gate,” he said, “then look left, about ten meters this side of the big tree. He's wearing brown.” She gazed at the green jumble. All she could see was the children in their bright-colored clothes, no man. “I don't—” she began, and then did see him. He was staring fixedly at the house.
 

Despite herself Rhani stepped back. Angry, she said, “Who the hell is he?”
 

“I don't know,” Dana said. “A wacko, perhaps.” He tapped his temple. “Someone a bit crazy.”
 

“In Founders' Green?” Rhani said. “How did he get through the gate?” She strode to the com-unit and, clearing the screen, told the computer to connect her with the Abanat Police Station.