Their Master's War (16 page)

"Could I get a juliet?"

"What the hell's a juliet?"

"I don't know." Maybe the juliet was something exclusive to the "phallic serpent." "So what's your special?';

A longtimer with a steel hand leaned over and spoke to him. His voice was slow and slurred and grated from deep in his throat. "You're in the wrong place, kid." I m sorry.

"You're too young. You need to be out fighting and whoring. You'll get to be like us soon enough. If you ain't killed first."

"I don't understand."

"Of course you don't. You're too young and green." "Do you know a place that has a serpent banner?" The longtimer leaned closer. His breath reeked of the sweet gas. "Look into my eyes, boy. What do you see there?"

The eyes were heavy-lidded and bloodshot from the gas, but there was something else, a deadness that didn't come from anything but a lifetime of combat horror.

"That's the light-year stare, boy. It means you don't care no more. All you want to do is blot it out. How long you think any of us in here has got?"

"Get out of here, boy. Take all your energy someplace else and leave us alone." Hark stood up so fast that he almost hit his head on the domed roof. He scrambled through the exit with all the clumsiness of headlong drunken panic. He didn't want to be one of those old men. Suddenly an idea beckoned. Couldn't he hide out there? Never go back to the
Anah
5? The thought evaporated. They'd get him on his thumbprint. All he could do was go and look for his messmates. They were all he had. He chose a direction at random and started walking, hoping to see something that looked familiar. Nothing did. He knew that he ought to ask someone, but he held off after his experience in the dome. More than anything, he wanted to walk. He'd walk until he found a really rowdy booth, and then he'd ask someone about the phallic serpent banner. It was right at that moment that he heard the voice.

"Harkaan? Is that you?"

He turned and faced complete unreality. Her clothes were black and skintight, her face was heavily painted, and her hair had been bleached white and fluffed out, but there was no mistake.

"Conchela?"

Conchela, the witch girl who had ridden with him to

the Valley of the Gods. He looked at what she had become and wondered how he appeared to her.

"Do they still call you Conchela?"

She nodded. "They still call me that."

Nine

"Of course, they do a job on you. Mindshot, implants, hormone runrounds, and probably stuff we don't even know about. And there's the constant Therem psych. It goes on and on until you can't even think straight. All you've got in your head are the slogans. We are the servants of our fighting men, we're here to please, it's our contribution to the Alliance, our part in the war effort, and all the rest of the eternal crap. From the waist down you're on a perpetual burn, but inside your brain there's this cold, furious knot of truth. We're slaves on this hunk of rock, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it." Hark ran an uncomfortable hand down Conchela's back. Her skin was so smooth, all he wanted to do was make love to her again. He wanted to repeat the sensation of losing himself in her body. He had no idea how to cope with her sudden anger.

"Come on, now, it can't be that bad."

She slowly turned to look at him. He wanted to put his hands on her breasts, but suddenly he didn't dare.

"It can't be that bad? You troopers are so damned ignorant. It can't be anything but that bad. That's how it's been designed. They keep you stupid, and they seduce you with power, the power to run all over the universe and stomp and smash and blow up anything that gets in your way. It doesn't matter that you die somewhere along the line, you've got to die anyway."

Hark thought of the jumps and the dry, bitter taste of fear going down in the dropcraft. "You don't really know."

"Sure we know. We know better than you do. We've seen thousands of you. We've screwed thousands of you. It's a lifelong line on the old recstar."

Her mood was changing. The anger had diminished to bitterness.

"The only way to keep yourself from the stare is to not see the faces. The men come through, but you don't know them."

She shook her head. "Why the hell did you have to come here, Hark?" Hark propped himself up on one elbow. He simply couldn't follow her mood swings. "Maybe it was our destiny."

"You men still believe all that. That's what keeps you ignorant. There is no destiny. Our destiny was sold to the Therem Alliance centuries ago."

Bitterness gave way to a terrible sadness. Her arms slid around his neck, and she pulled him to her. His face was between her breasts. He felt her sigh.

"Why the hell did you have to come here, Harkaan?"

Before they made love again, she gave him a small whiff of sweet gas from a tiny vial, only a fraction of the size of the ones they'd been passing around in the-dome. It wasn't enough to make him dizzy; it just slowed everything. The previous desperate, rushing need was reduced to warm, easy desire. With so much more time, it seemed that she was able to aid and abet his pleasure in a dozen ways, ways that Hark hadn't imagined were

possible. Her hands and mouth played games with his body. His eyes closed, and his breathing became deep and labored. He began to groan. His nerves spasmed. He found that he was talking to Gods that he'd thought were long forgotten. He was perfectly ready to die at any point except that the floods of sensation kept building and building. Why the hell did men have to fight when they could spend their time doing this? She was right. Men were ignorant.

At the finish, they were grunting and screaming and clawing at each other. In the afterglow, they clung for a long time, but eventually they had to fall apart. Hark lay on his back with his outstretched arm under Conchela's shoulders. He opened his eyes. Hers were closed. Could she be asleep? He turned his head and looked at the place where Conchela lived. It was nothing more than a cubicle, but compared to the messdeck, it was a haven of privacy. The bed took up exactly half of the chamber. It was draped with multicolored fabric hangings, irregularly shaped silks and satins that looked like offcuts from the manufacture of flags, banners, and decorative clothing. They turned the bed space into a shadowy, mysterious cave. The other half of the chamber was a complete contrast. It was stark and functional. There was a small workbench with a tiny lathe, a quartz arc, a bench-top anvil, and a miniature welding ring. In addition to her basic duties as a thumbprint prostitute, Conchela designed and made metal jewelry, which she bartered with the other women for clothes, cosmetics, extra food, and small luxuries such as alcohol and sweet gas.

"It's the only thing that keeps me sane," she had explained. Alongside the workbench there were the survival basics of the Therem system: a water spigot, a diet gooper, and a waste swallow. These, at least, were the same as on the cluster. In a maze of shelves, there were

jars and bottles, bunches of herbs, and vials of chemicals. There were the raw materials of her trade, the rolls of metal shim that she turned into small works of art. Hark envied her the ability to direct her own time even in this very minimal way. On the ship and in combat, there was always someone to tell one what to do.

Conchela opened her eyes and looked at Hark. "What are you thinking about?"

"Me?"

"There's no one else here."

Hark stared at the patchwork canopy above his head.

"I was thinking about all the stuff that you've got. We don't have anything up on the cluster, only what we can hide in the cavity behind our lockers."

"You have to remember that I'm so much older than you. I've been here on the recstar much longer than you've been on your ship."

"How can that be? We were picked up at the same time."

"You make the jumps. They do things to relative time. Didn't you think I looked older?" "I don't know. I..."

"You thought it was all a result of the life of degradation I've been leading." "I knew you'd changed."

"You could lie."

Hark's embarrassment robbed him of words. Conchela leaned over and kissed him. "You're still such a boy."

The hours passed slowly, and Hark luxuriated in the unique sensation of having nothing do and nobody shouting at him. They ate and drank and made love. In between, they slept. Each time Hark woke, he experienced a moment of panic, sure that he was back on the messdeck and that it had all been a dream. Then he saw that he was still in Conchela's cubicle, and he eased

down under the covers with a sigh. He didn't want to think about going back to the ship. At times, Conchela talked. Along the track of her swings of mood, she seemed to feel a need to explain. She wanted Hark to know exactly what it meant to be a woman and to live on a recstar.

"I guess you could say that we remember. You men see nothing but combat. You're isolated in your crews and your twenties. We see thousands of you guys. Over the years, millions of men pass through a place like this. Each one has his own part of the puzzle."

"What puzzle?"

"Who we are, of course. Where the human species came from and where it's going. It's the one way we can fight against the system, against the Therem, if you like. They've stopped us having children. That's for the primitives out oni eplanets. All that's left for us is to maintain the memory."

"You mean you remember what the men tell you?"

"That's what they come here for. To get laid and to tell it to somebody. You all have to tell it to somebody. You don't want to believe that after you've gone, nobody will remember. I guess that's what we're doing. We're remembering you all."

"I don't have anything I want to tell."

"Oh, yes, you do. And you will. You'll sob it out to someone before you leave this rock." Conchela swung her legs over the side of the bed. The flow of words had temporarily halted. The story seemed to be unfolding in fits and starts and snatches. She poured herself dark, amber wine from a stone jug.

"You'd better thumb my sensor a few times. I'm supposed to be working. I don't want to be closed out of this place because I didn't make the norm."

Hark pressed his thumb into her sensor five times. "Is that enough?"

"It'll help." Almost an hour passed before she picked up the story again.

"Bit by bit, we get parts of the picture. It wasn't always like this. That's one thing we know for sure. Before the Yal came, we had our own civilization. We had even colonized the closest planets in our home system."

"Before the Therem came?"

"In the very beginning, it was the Yal that occupied our home world. The Therem took it and us from them."

"You learned all this from listening to the men talk? The men on my messdeck know nothing of these things."

"You have to realize that this knowledge has taken centuries to acquire. Also, there are those of us who go up to the clusters to service the medians. The medians know much more than anyone suspects."

"Have you ever been with a median?"

Conchela laughed. "A median? You're joking. I'm not the kind the medians go for. Something for which I'm profoundly grateful."

"And, according to the medians, it was the Yal that destroyed this human civilization that could travel from planet to planet?"

"The Yal only suppressed it. The Therem, being the Therem, had much more elaborate plans."

"You sound as if you really hate the Therem."

"Don't you?"

"I don't know. We don't get much time to think about that sort of thing. We know we hate the Yal. Most of the time that's enough."

"Doesn't that say it all? The Therem destroy our identity as a species and spread us over the galaxy to be their slaves, and you only hate who they tell you to hate."

"It's not really like that."

"You know it is. Oh yeah, you'll blame it on the suits or the topmen or the officers or something they put in the food, but deep down, you know it's the truth."

Conchela lay on her back, seemingly unwilling to say anything else. Hark put a hand on her stomach, but her body was stiff and unyielding. It was some minutes before she came around and pulled him to her. Sometime later, as they were lying side by side, filmed by sweat, Hark couldn't keep his curiosity to himself.

"What I don't understand is how you women manage to keep all these bits and pieces together."

"That's a question only a man could ask."

"It is?"

"Sure it is."

"So how do you do it?"

"Through the covens."

"Covens?"

"Another man's question."

She spelled it out. "Covens are cells of women. Seven women to each cell. We sift anything that we may have heard and then pass it on to the mother cell. Each mother cell controls seven covens. Beyond the mother cells are the processing enclaves, all the way to the committee of the seven High and Venerable Madames."

Hark was dumbfounded. "There's a whole system?"

"Don't you think women are capable of creating a system?"

"It sounds almost like a religion."

"It does have elements of a religion, but for the most part, they're a cover. It's really modeled on how the thinking machines work."

Hark decided not to ask about thinking machines. The answer would only confuse him. "Why do you need a cover?"

"To deceive the Therem. If they knew what we were doing, they'd more than likely dismantle the whole recstar system and exterminate us into the bargain."

"Why should they bother? There's no way that your keeping records can harm them."

"The Therein bother about everything. That's what makes them the Therem. It may only be a median's vanity, but there's even a theory that we make the Therem nervous. They may think that we're inferior to them, but we're too smart to be left to our own devices. We did get into space on our own. They don't want humans to have an independent history and culture that they can't control. Besides, they almost wiped us out once, and there's nothing to say that they won't do it again. We have to be careful."

"When did they nearly wipe you out?" "It was called the Lysistrata Massacre." "What's Lysistrata?"