Authors: C. J. Cherryh
Motion stopped, a tableau of staring faces, not the ordinaries, not the common run of scruffy, self-important Freethinkers. It was a concentrated pack of Algol’s allies, fifteen or twenty grotesques and a few sliding down the path to that distinction. Central among them, huddled in chairs, were a couple of juvvies who looked too normal to be sitting where they were.
The girl of the pair sprang up and bolted, throwing over her chair at her tormentors, bolted straight for Ardath and Isis in the doorway. Bright girl. The boy, hesitating, Algol caught, snatched back, a hostage.
“Well,” Algol said, passing the boy to his friends, standing there in his red and black glory. There came a distracting thump from back in the farther hall on the left, and again on the right, and then a fight broke out somewhere in the corridors upstairs. “Is this a general break-in? Little dog, bringing his sister to protect him?
Your friends back there have run into trouble.”
There was shadow enough, and Procyon moved into it. It might 3 8 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h
not be news, here, that mark of his, but it was there. He saw its immediate effect on the soberer, saner members of Algol’s company, who began to look to the edges of the room.
“A cheap tattoo,” Algol said. “Is this Brazis’s plan, is this little play how he scares fools?”
“Déclassé,” Ardath said, stretching out an elegant arm, her fires fading as she walked into bright light, while Isis maintained an arm around the fugitive girl. “Déclassé, Algol. Past and outcast.
You’re responsible for bringing in the slinks on the street. You’re their best friend.”
“Silly,
useless
pretty-face! Run away, run, before I change those looks of yours for good and all.” Algol’s right hand flashed with silver. It was a stinger looped about his ring finger, that weapon of the outlaw fringe, capable of injecting mods or deadly poison.
Cries broke out among the intruding audience, a jam-up in the doorway as observers crowded back out the door. Ardath stood her ground, and Spider’s hands likewise flashed with metal, two such devices.
But a gray-skinned man walked in from the back halls, a man with burning blue eyes, who wore a soot-gray coat over his shoulders, and unfolded fingers all loaded with stingers.
“Well, well, Typhon,” Spider said, who, depend on it, knew the very darkest layers of Concord.
“There’s
trouble for us. Back away, back away, all.”
“Ardath,” Procyon said, “go. Run.”
“This boy.” Algol flicked his own stinger on, the flash of a green light on its shining top. “Does this foolish boy interest anyone?
What is this currency worth?”
“Let him go!” the juvvie girl cried. “Let him go! Please let him go!”
“Friendship. Loyalty. Splendid virtues.” Algol reached out toward the hapless boy, who could not budge from the grip of Algol’s allies. “Will you come here, little girl? Come and take him—?”
In the same moment Isis’s hand lifted from her gold-pleated robes. A weapon hissed.
Algol reacted as if slapped. Looked down at a needle lodged in his black hand, a silver spark in the light. The stinger loosened in Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 8 3
that grip, slid. His followers shoved one another to avoid it as it fell. He let go the boy’s arm.
“Kill,”
the
ondat
voice said. That was what it sounded like. Procyon took a solid grip on the knife hilt, prepared to use the only weapon he had as darts hissed, as Typhon made a lightning move at Spider. Stingers spat. Spider jumped back.
A gunshot deafened the air. Typhon spun back and around in a mist of blood and hit the corner wall. Supporters fled for the back hall, trampling one another in their haste. Typhon slid down, and Algol slumped heavily to the floor, the upstairs boy sitting stock-still, frozen, by his side, in a room rapidly vacated, except for Ardath’s company, and the dead.
The two cleaner-bots sputtered and hummed into action, rushing about madly, sizzling blood spots into nonexistence. The repair-bot moved to the back of the room, flashing investigatory lights into the dark.
A man in a long black coat, the man from the service nook, walked from the streetside doorway behind Ardath, crossed the floor to nudge Algol with his foot. Algol didn’t move. The man kept his right hand in a deep coat side pocket.
The man looked up, then, looked straight at Procyon.
“Procyon Stafford,” he said quietly.
“Yes, sir,” Procyon said. His head buzzed.
“Braziss,”
the
ondat
voice said, and he believed, this time, that the
ondat
was telling him what he already knew. “Yes, sir. I am.”
The man looked around at the rest. “I have names, I have image, and the Chairman’s police have the exits blocked. Those of you who don’t belong here, show ID as you leave.”
Ardath would die first. And being what she was, had no ID.
“Magdallen,” Ardath said scornfully, “Magdallen. Are we not surprised?”
“Exquisite, take your people and go. Leave the refuse for the Council police.”
The juvvie boy suddenly broke from his frozen stance, leapt from his chair, and fled for the back door, dodging among Algol’s fallen followers. He got as far as that doorway, where Brulant, red-gold fires glowing in shadow, stopped him with one outflung hand, a gold metal stinger on the other.
3 8 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h
“Procyon.” Ardath came to him. Procyon evaded her touch, kissed his fingers and almost touched her face. But he didn’t touch her skin with what had touched his lips at all.
“I have an illicit,” he said, and drew back the fingers. “And I need some help. I’ll go with this gentleman, where I can get it.”
“I know a doctor,” she said. “I know a good doctor.”
“I know others,” he said, meaning the hospital inside Project walls. “And I’ll be all right, Ardath. This is a friendly intercept.
Magdallen, you say. We’ve met before. If it’s a while before I see you again, don’t worry.”
“He has no right, here!”
“Complications, Ardath. Dangerous complications. Things you don’t want to have a thing to do with. I can deal with them, the way you deal with the street. I love you. That’s all.”
Tears stood in her eyes. He wished he could fix things. He wished he could make everything right for her, and for the parentals. She stood looking up at him, her true face, the Arden face, her blue and gold tendrils faded in the light.
“Sir,” he said. “Let me walk my sister out of here.”
“Be my guest,” Magdallen said. He had a phone in his left hand, so it was a good guess the Project tap wasn’t functioning here. Or they were communicating with station police.
He didn’t want Ardath deeper involved than she was, not with Earth authorities in the mix. He moved, close by his sister, but not touching, Ardath keeping close the girl who’d run to her for safety, another dubious touch.
Point of good faith, Magdallen kept his focus on the several ex-devotees of Algol who emerged, standing frozen in a clump on the far side of the bar. Brulant moved his group in.
The juvvie boy took his chance and darted to the door, ran to Ardath—not, however, touching her: Procyon interposed his arm to prevent any other contact with his sister, and the boy didn’t near touch him, only maneuvered to stay close to her.
The repair bot passed the doors with them. The two cleaner-bots stayed inside, zapping up the blood, clicking in robotic reproach.
A small swarm of cleaner-bots arrived and two of
them
joined the repair bot, making up his trio.
Procyon stopped outside with Ardath, in the relative safety of Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 8 5
Blunt Street, in a ring of spectators. A knot of uniformed Earther police waited there, guns in evidence, along with a man in a gray Earther suit.
“Katherine,” that man said sternly.
The girl with Ardath ducked to her far side, seeking protection.
“I’m not Katherine, and I’m not going with you.”
“You have to,” the man said. His face could be plastic. It had no expression, not even when Magdallen walked out of Michaelangelo’s between them and the police. Magdallen held out an object in his hand, a simple phone.
“You can call the governor. You don’t arrest anybody here. This is Council territory.”
“Take the boy, I don’t care. I’m authorized by this girl’s father to take her back.”
“And I don’t want to go with you!” the girl cried. “I’m with
her
!
So is Noble!”
“She’s perfectly free to call her father,” Ardath said calmly, in a low voice that hushed the crowd. “Let
him
tell her. And we know who that is.”
Silence followed. Standstill. The tap buzzed in that silence, a steady, repetitive noise:
“Go Brazisss. Procyon go Brazis.”
“Brazis,” Procyon said under his breath, and tried the tap, an effort that dizzied him, as a hand—Magdallen’s—slipped inside his elbow. “Sir. Brazis. We need help here.”
The man in the suit had one hand inside his pocket. He removed it carefully, and with the same slowness touched a communications unit on his gray collar. “I hear you,” the man said to someone, and then, no happier than before, signaled the uniformed police to stand down and put away the guns. To move back.
Outsider
police stayed, still moving about inside, still mopping up.
The girl didn’t budge.
“Procyon,”
his tap said suddenly.
“Sir.” His voice shook. It was surreal to speak to Brazis here, in public, with armed confusion around him. He wasn’t safe. He might never again be safe. “I’ve got a passenger. Another tap. I think, sir, I think it’s the
ondat
.”
While it said, in the same ear,
“Brazis, Braziss. Hello.”
“We thought so,”
Brazis said.
We thought so.
We
thought
so, jarred 3 8 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h
through him, an of-course acceptance that left him not a known fact in the universe.
Marak,
was what he wanted to ask, the only thing he wanted to know about, for himself. And couldn’t. Dared not.
“This is Antonio Brazis.”
The voice wasn’t in his head, it was in the air, thundered like God from speakers all over the area.
“We
have visual identification of all persons in the area, with nine active warrants, two of which have already been served by our personnel moving
through the vicinity . . .”
Several individuals in the crowd melted away, fast. Another took out running down the middle of the street.
Then a quieter voice, through the Project tap:
“Report to the office,
stat. No delays, no fuss. Just move. Now. No one will stop you.”
“Yes, sir,” Procyon said, and turned to the man who had taken his arm. Magdallen, his sister had called him. Slink. High-powered, deadly-armed slink, who’d quietly removed the knife from his hand. “I’m called in. I’m called in, sir.” He suspected a slink knew where, and why. Magdallen let go his arm, at least. “Let my sister alone.”
“Your sister has no problem with us,” Magdallen said quietly, and Procyon turned, threaded his way through a crowd that melted away in front of him, disheveled, coatless—cold, now that the adrenaline had run out.
“Procyon!”
He looked back at Ardath. “Love you. See you.” He didn’t believe it. He fixed that sight of her in memory, hoping he’d have a memory by tomorrow.
He turned and walked, then, the object of stares and hasty avoidance, and the three bots that dogged his steps zipped and dodged along with him. He couldn’t do anything about that. He didn’t know what choice he had. Report, not home, but to the office.
The office, he said to himself, and, walking down to the corner of Blunt and Grozny, turned onto Grozny, a very long way from the office, and just kept walking in the right direction.
He heard a hum behind him. An open Council police cab showed up and wanted him to get in.
“Go Braziss,”
the voice in his head said, and he tapped into the Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 8 7
office. “I’ve got an escort, sir. Bots. I don’t know if I dare take a cab.
I don’t know what Kekellen will do if I lose them.”
“Can you walk?”
“I’m doing all right so far, sir,” he said, looking down that long, long street, Grozny, that eventually, under various names, led everywhere on the deck. It curved up as it reached a point of in-distinction, floor becoming horizon.
It was a long way. But the police made no objection when with a “Sorry,” he wandered on. The police just trundled along in his neighborhood, like the three bots, and he kept moving.
S E T H A R E AU X S AT in his chair looking at the life-globe, watching a lizard catching gnats. Kathy was alive. He didn’t know what condition she was in. But Kathy was alive.
“She doesn’t want to come in,”
Dortland had advised him, the dark spot in that most welcome news.
“I tried, sir. I was confronted
by an Outsider riot. She’s with Procyon Stafford’s sister—who does have
a clean record. There’s another matter—-”
Dortland talked about Freethinkers. About the Movement suspects, both of whom were dead, with bots occupying the place, ripping up evidence, even taking the bodies apart, annihilating traces.
Unprecedented. Unsettling to contemplate. He had had a call from Brazis, who had visual surveillance down there, and who proved a far more exact source of information.
Kekellen had answered their request. Hadn’t he?
He never wanted to admit to that message he’d sent. Never wanted to, and hoped he never would have to. Whatever those dead bodies contained—Earth authority wouldn’t get hold of them, not now.
But Kathy was safe. With Stafford’s sister. Safe, with someone who might possibly talk cold sense into her stubborn young head.
Kathy had refused to go anywhere with Dortland. Good sense in his daughter.
Dortland was only anxious, he suspected, to be told he was off the hook.
“You did your best,” Reaux said. Time to make peace with this 3 8 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h
man. To warm the atmosphere, at least enough for polite lies to take root and grow. Dortland in his debt might be useful and informative. “She’ll call. She’ll call when she’s ready. Come back to the office. I count it a success.”