To THE LAND OF THE ELECTRIC ANGEL: Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist Author (The Frontiers Saga) (8 page)

Rio's mouth twitched and suddenly she was laughing. Blake felt momentarily offended; then he found her laughter infectious and smiled himself. Her laugh was gutsy and startlingly loud in the empty night patio.

"We're crazy, you know that?" she said.

Does Voss own you?
The question burned a trench through his mind like a laser gone wild.
Are you Voss's property?
He stopped smiling.

"You look so angry!" Rio said, and put her hand on his shoulder and drifted closer. She looked soberly at him. "You're afraid," she said.

Yes! Afraid of losing you! Losing something I don't have!

"If he finds out, he'll be petulant and petty," she said. "But he'll get over it."

Blake looked at her a long time before he spoke. "I want you," he said, "but not that way. Not only as long as Jean-Michel doesn't find out. Not as a loan-out from the Boss. And when it's over, you go back to being his property."

Rio's face darkened. Blake's heart sank. He had spoken with such foolish possessiveness.

"He doesn't own me!" she snapped. "I am not like Theta's wench. I'm not one of the silly little pagans running around spending their youth, trying for the big time."

Blake raised his eyebrows in a silent question. He didn't want to ask, but he had to know.
Something small and petty and weak inside me wants to know.

Rio untangled her legs and moved back along the rim, both hands on the smooth stone edging, not looking at Blake. "I'm.. ... I value myself too much for ... for what they do. Sundance sold herself to Theta's agent because her whole family was starving up in Zavitaya, near the Manchurian border. Theta renamed her and trained her to be the pliable creature you see." She shot Blake a quick glance. "No one has trained me, not that way."

"Rio, I–"

"I know what you think. They always think that. I've had some beauties come after me. They think Jean-Michel talks in his sleep or something, and they want me to slip them little financial scraps on the side. They've sent me some gorgeous young men and beautiful young women. I've been ... I've been offered some freaky scenes, scenarios that I would control completely, from whips to electrostims.
Anything, just
as long as I tipped them off on Jean-Michel."

Blake was silent, and the water lapped against the tiles. "But no one wanted you for
you,"
he said.

"No! That's not true. I ... I can't believe it's true." She moved further along the curving pool edge and Blake followed her. She spoke in a soft voice, almost to herself. "No ... There have been several ... They ... wanted ... just me. I know that ... I ... think that..."

"But they were not the ones you wanted," Blake said, suddenly certain. He moved closer and touched her shoulder.

Rio looked at him with a quick, fearful expression and shoved against the pool edge. The water pillowed behind her head as she backed up. She twisted over and swam to the opposite end with a great deal of energy. She ended up under the waterfall and Blake followed.

The water crashed around them, louder now, pelting off their shoulders as they stood in the shallows and looked at each other.

"Rio..."

"Don't, Blake. I don't want just another damned quickie. I can't do that again. I'd rather..."

"I want you, Rio. More than anything else in the world." They looked at each other, their eyes slitted against the cascade of the thin sheet of water. "I hardly know you, but I want you."

Rio moved back, out of the waterfall. Her golden body gleamed with water drops in the warm night. Blake stepped free of the water and they looked at each other until Rio looked away.

Blake smiled. "I've gotten in trouble before, being so ... so impulsive. I'm a romantic. It's the way I've been programmed, I suppose."

Rio smiled at him, a sad, weary smile. "Don't," she said.

"Yes," Blake said and moved a step closer in the water. "To hell with 'Blake Mason, Environmental Concepts,' to hell with money, to hell with Voss Investments and Voss Oil and Voss This and Voss That. To hell with a tomb for the ages."

"It isn't just a tomb." Rio stopped short, and her lips parted. "Don't, Blake, please. He can get angry. You haven't seen that side of him. He can be ruthless. He has power. He can ruin people when he gets angry enough. Ruin ... and worse! He owns Costa Verde, he owns Bodigard and all those toughs, he owns senators and ministers and police chiefs."

"I don't care," Blake said, and, amazingly, he really felt that he didn't. "I've been looking for you ... all my life ... and I'm not going to lose you!"

Rio pulled further back, staring into his eyes, her face sad and frightened. "No, Blake, you ... you don't understand..." She turned swiftly and dove into the pool, swimming strongly to the opposite side. Blake swam after her, but she was already up the pool steps and running across the tiles before he reached the edge. She disappeared into the house.

Dripping, wet, he trotted after her, looking each way as he came into the hall. He did not see her, and had run a few feet toward the main hall, when he saw his shed water splashing on the carpet. He looked back, turned and ran, tracing her by the dark spots on the Verneuil carpet. But the droplets ceased before he came to an intersecting passage, and he had lost her.

Arbitrarily, he took the right-hand corridor and proceeded along it until he saw an open door. Beyond it, a Mexican family sat at dinner. The women glanced at Blake and quickly looked back at their dishes. The men looked at him impassively, their faces telling him this was their territory. These were the workers who trimmed the trees, tended the garden, cleared storm damage, did the maintenance, serviced the boats, and cooked the meals. They were not the pretty creatures who served their employer in a different way; they were honest, hard workers, too polite to show their shock at a near-naked man invading their home. Blake started to speak but turned away instead.

Walking back toward the main hail, he glanced into the rooms that were open, seeing the pairings that had broken off from the mass still seething in the main room. In one room he saw Sundance curled up in Theta's arms, but neither noticed Blake. The music in the main hall did not completely mask the short, earnest gasps coming from the pile of glistening flesh. Blake looked for Voss, but did not see him in the melee.

Blake found another corridor he had not searched, and followed it. The walls and ceiling were molten metal, gleaming and flowing stripes of gold, bands of silver, streamers of bright copper, all flowing down in eye-hurting streaks of fiery rivers and cool, slow-moving swaths. Blake ignored the Guinevere sensatron panels that lined the walls like wallpaper, hurried through to the next grouping of rooms. He pushed open a partially closed door to find one of the maids, brown as a penny, polishing an intricate Steuben imitation of the Martian goblets from Northaxe.

"Where's Rio?" he demanded. "Where's your master?"

She was used to the antics of her employer's guests. She just stared at him with her large, dark eyes and pointed down the corridor. Blake whirled and plunged on.

He found Voss in a library, elegantly robed in a deep-red Webwove. The multimillionaire looked up from a computer console and flicked off the machine, as if he did not want Blake to see what he was doing.

"Hello," he said ambiably. "Why aren't you simmering in the fleshpot?"

"Why aren't
you?"

Blake found it surprising he didn't hate the man. A quick, fragmented image of Voss and Rio in bed fell through his mind like a rock through a skylight. He forced himself to be calm, and listened to Voss's answer.

"Too much of a good thing can kill a man," Voss said.

Especially when there's Rio at night.
Blake turned the knife in his own heart, and knew he was deliberately doing it.

"You wandering around looking for something in particular, or just cruising?" Voss asked with a grin, his tanned face pleasant.

"No, I..."

Voss laughed and said, "Don't worry about it.  You've seen the way my sister Theta lives. She rarely wears clothes anymore, except to dress for dinner on those few occasions she consents to attend. But why shouldn't she go nude, especially around here? She finds it stimulating, she says. Last year she wore nothing but jewelry by Ransom to the Daughters of Bilitis Ball."

What did Sundance
wear? Blake wondered.
A collar and chain, artfully engraved "Property Of Rio”
popped into his mind, collar and silver chain leading to Voss's claw.

"Fifty years ago," Voss sighed, "my sister would have been locked up. But then," he chuckled, "fifty years ago most of us would have been in jail, for one thing or another. Do you realize how long marl was on the illegal list, for God's sake?"

Blake nodded, trying to form the words he wanted to say.

Voss gestured toward his video equipment. "They call me a male chauvinist, you know." He smiled crookedly and gave a short laugh. "All of us who are, shall we say, rich have women after us. Shawna has beautiful young men on her trail, and not a few women, either. Are we chauvinists because of that? I think not. These women..." – he gestured around, as if to include the houseguests – "they are selling a service, that's all. Nothing new about it. Men do the same thing and perhaps not in so honest a way." He stopped and sighed, fiddling with a Null-Edit tape on his desk. "Sometimes I think maybe I should not have so much money. People try to blackmail me and assassinate me, do a whistle on me." He smiled up at Blake in an innocent way. "I
give
my money away, I
spend
it, I
use
it, but I do so hate to have it conned out of me by some cheap whistler."

Blake felt a moment's fear as he digested the words.
Did Voss think he was a con man, intent on some high-stakes whistle?
But his need drove him on and he spoke.

"Jean-Michel."

He stopped, and Voss politely prompted him. "Yes?"

"Listen, I want to talk to you about something. Rio and I–"

"Oh, Blake," Rio interrupted from the door, "you said you wouldn't tell him!"

She moved past Blake, regal in a yellow dress that complimented her tanned skin, to sit on the arm of Voss's chair and kiss him on top of his head. He put a hand up to pat her bare arm and smiled up at her.

"What?" he asked.

"Blake and I had the greatest idea," she said with a smile, ignoring the designer, who felt foolish with only a bathing suit on while the others were dressed. He seemed to be in an embarrassing dream. "Suppose you had a duplicate mountain? Something to confuse the tomb hunters with. Something in the same area, about the same size, with some signs of human habitation, or touch."

Voss smiled. "Yes, not bad. The trouble with those tombs of some of the Egyptian kings is that they were so damned obvious! They announced, no,
declared
where they were! The grave robbers arrived there before the body was even cold!" He looked at Blake. "Suppose we kept the exterior construction scars to an absolute minimum? We'll polarize the windows of the helicars, of course, and have a checkpoint somewhere after pickup where we can debug the ship and transfer the workers to another aircar. No traces."

"They'll know the rough area, but in those mountains it could take them years to find the spot," Rio said. "They are still looking for the Lost Dutchman mine in the Superstition Mountains, you know. And Blake had the most marvelous idea..." She paused to smile at them both. "When you're ... you know ... inside ... we dynamite the whole mountainside and hide the enhance completely, very naturally. Maybe you could..." She gave Blake a look, then continued: "Maybe you could plant a thousand-year capsule with the coordinates."

Blake had to admit she had some good ideas, even if some of them were supposed to be his. They might solve the problem of how to hide the tomb from grave robbers.
But that's not what I want to say to Voss.
"Jean-Michel, I–"

"And you will bury us all with you forever," Rio interrupted with a cry, sliding into Voss's lap, throwing her arms wide and going theatrically limp.

A dark expression crossed Voss's face, and for a second Blake believed that Rio's flippant suggestion was exactly what the man had in mind. Burying servants and retainers to serve in the afterlife, in addition to taking along all the treasure that would give him a secure environment in that forever future, was a familiar concept.

Blake shrugged away the thought.
It isn't sane, and Jean-Michel has shown the business world, at any rate, that he is decidedly sane, if a bit ruthless.

Rio came abruptly to life with a whoop, and kissed Voss fast and hard. Then she jumped to her feet with an enthusiasm Blake had not seen before. She pulled the financier to his feet and urged him to come with her.

"Come on!" she cried with mock seriousness, and Voss laughed. "That swim gave me an appetite. Let's eat!"

Back in the main room most of the guests and their girls were lying about, breathing hard, idly watching three bodies actively engaged in a complex maneuver.

"Attention, attention, attention!" Rio cried. "We're going to the Golden Iguana!"