The Enigma Score (32 page)

He was halfway up the stones before she reacted enough to follow him. He was inside the cleft, exploring its sloping depth, before she reached the shelf. ‘Come in,’ he whispered, wary of the echoes his voice might rouse. ‘It slopes back, away from the trail. Some of the rocks have rolled back here. Help me push some of them up to narrow the hole we came through!’ He thrust one of the stones toward her, and she rolled sideways to push it still farther. Within moments they had cleared themselves a hidden crawlspace with ledges of stone above and below and walls of broken rock around them. The wind came through the crevices with many shrill complaints and the late light of evening fell slantingly in frail, reedlike beams, lighting Don’s pale face and wide, apprehensive eyes.

‘It’ll be fairly dark by the time they get here,’ he said, one hand squeezing her shoulder. ‘I’m going out and lay additional mule tracks, around the corner and down a bit farther. They may use lights to see the trail, but in the dusk this wall will look solid, as though this crack were full of stone.’

He slipped out and onto the trail, seeking out tiny patches of soil that would take clear imprints of the false hooves. When he had gone half a mile farther, he came to a split in the trail, which he traveled until it petered out onto rock, and more rock stretching endlessly away to the south. Then he pocketed the mule shoes, climbed the wall and scrambled back the way he had come, careful to leave no visible trace, grateful for the wind that might be presumed to have blown their tracks away.

She was waiting for him with stones ready to plug the hole behind him. Their two mattresses were already inflated on the roughly rippled stone. ‘Thank God for an inflatable mattress,’ she murmured. ‘We’ll have to be quiet. It’ll be easier with something soft under us.’ Her voice broke into a gasping sob.

He pulled her toward him, almost roughly. ‘You’ve been strange ever since you saw them,’ he said. ‘Ever since you saw that man. There’s more to it than you’ve told me.’ He stretched out on his own mattress and drew her down beside him, watching her face. One eye was lit from the side by a last vagrant beam of sunset light, that eye tear-filled and spilling. ‘Tell me.’

She gasped. Her teeth were gritted. He saw the muscle at the corner of her jaw, clenched tight.

‘Will you tell me,’ he asked. ‘Don’t you think I should know?’

‘I had a friend,’ she said. ‘A good friend. Her name was Mechas, Gretl Mechas. She came from Heron’s World, on contract to the Department of Exploration. Not an Explorer. She was in procurement and accounting. They housed her in the Priory in Northwest because there was extra space there. We got to know one another very well….’

Tasmin waited, waited longer, then said, ‘Go on.’

‘She got word her sister was in need of something back on Heron’s World. Gretl never told me what it was. She seemed a little annoyed about it, in fact, like the kid had gotten herself into some kind of trouble. Anyhow, Gretl needed money to send home. She went down to Splash One, to the BDL credit authority. She could have done it all by com, but Gretl was like that. She liked to do things personally.’

‘Yes.’

‘When she got back she told me she’d met Harward Justin. He’d stopped by the loan desk while she was there, and he’d been pretty persistent in asking her to have lunch with him. She told me she’d refused him though he hadn’t made it easy. You’d have to have seen Gretl in order to visualize this properly, Tasmin. She was stunning. Men did pester her, but she didn’t take it seriously because she was in love with someone back on Heron’s. She laughed about it when she told me. She said Justin looked like a Jubal toadfish, fat and greasy and with terrible little eyes….

‘Anyhow, when she went to make her first payment, they told her Justin had paid off the loan. She owed him, personally. She left her payment in an envelope for him, but as she was leaving, that man – that Spider Geroan – accosted her and told her Justin wanted to see her.’

‘Yes.’

‘She was very strong-willed, Gretl. Indomitable. Spider Geroan took her to Justin’s office, there in the BDL building. Justin told her how he wanted her to pay the debt, and she told him she would pay her debt on the terms she had incurred when she took it, nothing else.

‘When she got back she was angry. I’d never seen her so angry before. And she told me what Justin said. Justin told her he’d paid her debt, now she owed him. He told her people had to pay him what they owed him, or else. He said if she wouldn’t have him, then Geroan could have her. And he laughed when he said it.

‘She told me about it, shaking her head over it, furious, not able to believe the man. She reported it to the Priory office and to the Explorer King, both personally and in writing. Technically, it was a violation of the union contract. The contract doesn’t allow sexual harassment….

‘Two days later they found her in the alley out behind the Priory, there in Northwest. Her flesh cut in little pieces, all over, like noodles. Head, face, everywhere. Her clothing and personal things were dumped on top of the body. Except for her clothing, we couldn’t have identified her. I tried to believe it was someone else, but the clothes were hers. No one could have recognized her. Whoever did it had rubbed something into the cuts to keep her from bleeding to death right away. And then dumped her there. Like a message.’

‘And you think it was Geroan?’

‘I know it was. I went to the protector that investigated her death and I screamed at him to find who was responsible. I told him about Harward Justin trying to use her, about his threatening her. The protector got me out of there, took me for a walk, and he whispered to me that if I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me, I’d keep my mouth shut. He was scared, Tasmin. Really scared. He said they knew who did it, who’d been doing it for years, but they couldn’t touch him because he had people to swear he was in Splash One when it happened. He even showed me pictures of the man. His name was Spider Geroan, they said, and he worked for Harward Justin. Then I remembered what Gretl had told me. She wouldn’t give Justin what he wanted, so he told Spider he could have her….’

‘She’d been raped I suppose,’ Tasmin said, sickness boiling in his stomach.

‘No,’ she choked. ‘Nothing so normal as that. Geroan isn’t interested in sex. He isn’t even interested in dominance, which is what most rape is anyhow. No, the protector said Geroan has something wrong with his nervous system. He can’t feel pain, so it fascinates him. Watching people in pain is the only pleasure he has….’

Donatella shuddered into gulping sobs, and he took her in his arms, pulling his blanket over them both. There was a sound, and they tensed, listening. It came again. Far down the trail, the way they had come, a voice shouting. Had they found the mules? He shivered. Why else would they call out?

Following that sound, he felt only fear, her fear, shared, her trembling and his, their bodies cold under the hasty covering, their senses strained for the first breath of sound that would presage the arrival of the adversary, the enemy, perhaps Geroan, who would use them for an arcane and terrible pleasure, perhaps someone else merely seeking their deaths and not particular about how these deaths were to be brought about.

He was caught in the story she had told about Spider Geroan. What did such a man think or feel, or remember? Did he humiliate and degrade his victims so he could come to despise them, making murder seem a deserved end rather than a despicable corruption? Did he feel anything about them? Did he remember at all? Was his pleasure physical? Was it transitory? Was there some quiet orgasm of the mind that substituted for pleasure of the senses? Since he could not feel pain, could he feel anything? How did one communicate with someone who could not feel at all?

It would be, he thought, like being killed slowly by a machine. Pleading would mean nothing. The device would be programmed to inflict pain, and it would not care what the victim said or did.

Tasmin clenched his teeth tight to keep from shaking. He had always feared pain. The prospect of pain filled him with horror. He imagined blood, wounds, deep intrusions into organs and bone. Bile filled his throat and he gulped, then blanked it out. His way of dealing with the horror was not to think of it. He had seen students, mad with fear of the Presences, run directly toward them, and he wondered what it would take to break his own mind and make him behave in such a way. He had learned to blank out such thoughts, and he did so now, erasing them, thinking only of darkness and quiet.

Donatella was remembering the body of her friend and was wondering whether she had the courage to take her own life before she fell into Geroan’s hands. Her knife was under the mattress, where she could reach it. She was not sure reaching it would be enough. She clung to Tasmin, thinking of begging him to help her, not let her be taken by that man. The terror built into a spasm of shaking, and then ebbed away, leaving her limp.

Her face was buried in his shoulder, against his naked skin where his shirt had come unfastened under his Tripsinger’s cloak. Her cheek was on his chest, her breath moving softly into the cleft of his arm, where the hairs quivered, as in a tiny wind.

The tickling breath came into the blankness Tasmin had evoked, came as a recollection, a summer hillside, grass beneath him, Jubal trees along the ridge, himself lying with his arms around Celcy and the warm, moist breeze of summer cooling the pits of his shoulders. Celcy’s head was on his chest, her lips on his skin. Now, as then, he felt the hairs moving in a dance of their own and responded to the diminutive titillation as he had then, by turning a little, moving her body more solidly onto his own, moving his arm more closely around her. One of her legs fell between his, a sudden, unexpectedly erotic pressure, and he raised his own leg in surprise, bringing it into intimate contact with her.

She gasped, becoming very still, and he felt the quick heat between them. They breathed together, her lips opening on his skin, her hand moving between them to pull her shirt away. Then the skin of her breasts was naked against his own, her nipples brushing his chest as she thrust herself up from him to tug at the belt around her waist.

He felt a ripple across his belly as the silken belt that had held her full trousers tight around her slender form pulled free. He saw the sash through half closed eyes, a ribbon of scarlet. Then there was nothing between his leg and the furry mound of her groin except the fabric of his trousers.

Blood beat in his ears. He shut his eyes, not wanting to think or see, wishing he could shut his ears as well and let the surging feeling wash over him in silent darkness, with only the sunlit meadow filling all the space around him. She made no sound, merely raised away from him a little so he could free himself from his clothing, only as much as necessary, soundlessly. There was no time for anything more than that, no time for anything between them except this urgency, no time for avowals or questions or even words. They existed separately, in a place remote from time or occurrence.

Their bodies slid together in a continuous, gulping thrust, then lay joined, scarcely stirring, needing scarcely to shift, the tiniest motion amplified between them as though by some drug or device into a cataclysm of feeling. She pushed only a little, the smallest thrust of her body toward him and away, and they were gasping, uncontrolled, grasped inexorably by a continuous quiver that swept them up and over a towering wave of sensation to leave them floundering in the trough, blood hammering in their ears.

‘Aaah,’ she moaned in an almost soundless whisper. ‘Aaaah.’

‘Shhh.’ He whispered in return. ‘Celcy …’ The fear was gone. His body was disassembled. There was a violent pain behind his ears from the spasms that had seized his neck and jaw in a giant’s vise, but even this seemed remote and unimportant.

Then there was the sound of a voice, the rattle of gravel, and the vision of meadowlands shattered as his eyes snapped open. Coming toward them was the crunch of hooves, a voice cursing monotonously.

Their bodies lay flaccid, boneless, like two beings mashed into one creature, that creature scarcely aware. Through a chink in the piled stones, Tasmin could see through slitted eyes a dim segment of the path extending back the way they had come. A line of mules. Two Explorers, one of them on foot examining the trail with a lantern, then the man Donatella had said was Spider Geroan with a another rider behind him, dark and silent as a shadow. Then the string of riderless mules. They went past in a shuffle of feet, a roll and rattle of gravel. After a long gap a bald man and a tired, smudge-faced woman approached.

The final hooves came closer, passing the ledge with a scratch and click of stone against stone, then went on to the south. The voice they had heard before cursed again, at repetitive length. The woman answered, briefly and whiningly, the two finally complaining their way into silence behind the rocky rampart.

The pain in Tasmin’s head departed, leaving a vacancy behind. Her body clenched on him like a squeezing hand, and he moved once more, this time slowly, languorously, lifting her with his body, holding her there with his hand while he dropped away, then pulling her down once more, over and over again, impaling her, holding her tight to him as he rolled over upon her and thrust himself into her. The wave came again, slowly, building and cresting, carrying them with it into the dark depths of a strange ocean.

The first time it had been Celcy. This time it was no one at all. He sought a name and could not find one as nonsense words flicked by, babbling rhymes, childlike sounds. Perhaps the name he wanted was an exotic word in some foreign tongue, a question without an answer.

‘Mmmmm,’ she sighed.

He did not know who it was. Who either of them were.

They slept as their fleeting hunger had dropped them, disarrayed, close coupled, slowly moving apart as the night wore on until dawn found them still side by side, but separate. When Tasmin awoke, it was to a strange dichotomy, a bodily peace surpassing anything he had known for months coupled with an anxiety for which he could not, for the moment, find an object.