The Man Who Never Missed (13 page)

He took a deep breath. “No, I’m not asking you to do that.”

She sat up suddenly. The servomotors in the bed whined as they tried to adjust to her quick movement. “You aren’t asking me to go with you?” Her voice was laced with puzzlement—and anger.

“I wanted to know if you would—if I were to ask. You didn’t seem particularly enthused about the idea, so I won’t ask.”

Juete slid away from him and out of the bed. She turned and stared down at him, her hands clenched into fists. She was no less beautiful for her anger. Khadaji felt a hard lump gather in his chest, and a dryness wrapped his throat. “You don’t want me to go!”

He sat up on the bed and clasped his arms around his bare knees. “I love you. I want to stay with you. But I also have something I must do. I have a… vision. I might well fail in trying to attain that vision. Probably I will. I can’t ask you to share the kind of life I might have.”

“You can’t ask?—” Her voice became cold, as it did when he’d seen her really angry. “I would not have gone. If you had begged, I would not have gone!”

In that moment, looking at her wonderful nakedness, he thought he understood something more about her. She needed him to ask her to go, so she could be the one to refuse. He had known she wouldn’t leave Darkworld and so had thought to spare his own ego by playing ‘what if’ games with her. In doing so, he had cheated her of refusing. It was an important point, one he should remember. He was tempted to say something, to tell her she would do just fine without him, that she could find another like him with little effort. But he didn’t say it; it was a thing they both knew. And there were already others.

He slid off the bed and began to gather his clothes.

They did not speak as he dressed. He realized now that he had not really known Juete as he had thought.

Already, he was learning.

There was no one to see him off at the sling. As Khadaji stood there, waiting to board the boxcar, he wondered if Pen had known this moment would come. He wondered about Pen, about how he was doing, where he was. There might be a way to trace him, through the Siblings of the Shroud. One day, he would have to do that. But not now. Now, he had places to go and things to learn, it was time to start thinking of what he was going to do, and how it might be achieved, once he decided. Leaving Juete was painful, but he would survive. It was as Pen had said: the Disk was still in spin and who could say where it would take him?

His inner voice spoke to him then, nasty in its interrogative. O how philosophical we are! Would you have been so quick to leave if you’d thought Juete ‘faithful’ to you? Was it your vision which truly made you go? Or lanced pride?

Khadaji shook his head, but the voice had already done its mischief and was gone. He didn’t want to think about the question it had raised. Damn!

As he entered the boxcar, he half-hoped to see Juete running up to the entrance, to ask him to stay—or to go with him. It didn’t happen. Self-control, Pen had taught him, was primary. You had to be able to control your own actions before you could hope to influence the actions of others.

He had, Khadaji knew, kilometers and years to go.

Ah, damn!

Chapter Thirteen

KHADAJI STROKED A control bar and the form-chair in which he sat extruded itself into a bed, complete with privacy sonics and polarizers. He was tired, more so than he should be after only six hours on the system hopper. He wanted to be alone.

The voyage from Rim to Bocca would take six days. That time would be on both ends of the trip, moving at subluminal speeds before and after the Bender did its magic. Bender was what it was called by almost everybody, but the true name of the drive which gave men the galaxy was the Scales-Waller Augmented Reality Analog Instigation Construct. What it did was simple enough to say—the Bender put a ship into that state of being in which the vessel was all places at once. Once there (or here or everywhere), the Bender wrapped metaphysical fingers around a particular point of allness and pulled it to the ship. The physics and mathematics of it were enough to drive an average genius insane—Scales and Waller had both been as far above the average genius as the average genius was above a moron.

So what, Khadaji? Why do you care? Aren’t you just trying to avoid what you really should be thinking about? Hmmm?

Yes, dammit! Leave me be!

Maybe the bed was a bad idea, he thought. Maybe he should go to the lounge and strike up a conversation with another passenger.

No. He didn’t want to do that.

He looked at the menu on the bed’s control holoproj and saw that the device had a built-in sleep generator. Good. He would set the thing for six hours and escape his thoughts that way.

It was only as he was drifting off that Khadaji wondered what he might dream about…

—was deep enough so the warmer colors had begun to fade, save under the artificial day of the lamps he wore. There were left the blues and violets, rippling gently in the cold silk of the Nemui Sea. Emile wondered about that name. The oceans of San Yubi were all connected and at times, this named portion of the water world seemed anything but a Sleepy Sea.

“Emile, let’s have a position report.”

The voice from his comset startled the boy. He glanced at the chronographic read built into the rim of his mask. The numbers winked at him grayly. Sharkshit, he was overdue again. He cleared his throat. “I’m at hex seven, Dad. One-nine-two meters.”

The suit’s heater kicked on, fighting the chill of the water. Emile still felt cold; probably because his father would be pissed at him for missing report—in time as much as from the water.

“Recorded,” his father said. “Do let me know when you reach the inversion, if you are still awake.”

“Yes, sir.” He felt guilty enough without the sarcasm. The old man could really be nasty when he wanted to be. Good thing his mother wasn’t oncom. She was already pissed at them both. She didn’t want Emile doing visuals any deeper than a hundred meters anyway; if she knew he was past-tensing his reports, she’d raise bottom muck to get the old man to cancel it.

Emile blew a larger than normal exhaust. The bitter tasting gas mix chorused away from him in a burst of hemispherical bubbles heading for the surface. His mother was relatively dense, considering she was a medic and a lib. Half of Emile’s friends were doing deep visuals, easy, and he’d been dolphed by them until his old man had finally let him go below a hundred. Sharkshit, he was twelve, not a towhead!

Emile looked down, but it was too dark to see the inversion layer yet. He checked his descent rate, adjusted the suit’s trim a hair to speed it up.

‘Course, there was good and bad in being able to do deep. He wanted to, but he also didn’t want the old man to think he’d changed his mind about herding. No way. There were five other worlds in the Shin System and he’d never even been off planet. He didn’t want to spend his life sucking mix and herding tuna. Directing sharks and harvesting was fun, but it got old fast. He didn’t know how the old man kept it up after all the years. It was flatshoal boring and Emile wasn’t going to spend his life doing it—not studying and cataloging ick and bug poisons like his mother, either. He pitied his little sister. Evin already had it laid out for her, she’d be a fishfarmer, contracted to a fishfarmer, and when she got old enough to get pregnant, she’d raise more fishfarmers! Sharkshit, it was enough to make him want to spit. He was getting out and off, soon as he was able.

Meanwhile, he’d better not miss another report. Emile kept a steady watch on his chronometric read as he sank toward the inversion layer.

—slid the hatch of the bottle shut and tapped the sealer control. He grinned like a dolph through the densecris dome at the approaching storm. It looked like a good one, and Weather had reported the pod was thick and full of juice.

“Yo, Emile, you tucked and ready?”

Emile laughed. That was Little Hamay in his bottle. He was half a klick south and behind Emile’s bottle, so he couldn’t see the other boy, but Emile said, “Yeah, I’m ready.”

Already the bottle began to bob in the small waves being pushed ahead of the storm. It looked like it was gonna be a good fucking ride. Lightning flared two klicks away.

A third voice filled the short circ of the com. “Are you sure we won’t get into deepmuck over this?” That was Jeda, in her own bottle, just to Emile’s left.

“No way,” Emile said. “I told ‘em we’d be discom while we ran the desal tests, so we got three hours, at least. Nobody will bother us and we can dive and be back on station in plenty of time to finish.”

“You hope.”

“Trust me, Jeda. I wouldn’t lie to you.” Talking to Jeda made him feel tingly, as if something was fluttering in his belly. Last year, she’d been just another girl. But now, there was something different about her. He hadn’t figured out just what had changed, but something sure had. He kept wanting to be around her, to talk, to be… alone with her. Only most of the time, he couldn’t think of a sharkshitting thing to say. So he’d invited her to storm-bounce with him and Little Hamay. “What’d you have to ask her along for?” Little Hamay had said. All Emile could do was shrug. Why not?

The rain came across the water in blowing patterns, spattering the waves and whitecapping them. Emile’s bottle—a two-meter-long sub shaped like a kayak with a densecris bubble in the middle—began to pitch a little more. Storm-bouncing was a kick, but definitely a negative as far as the adults were concerned. If they knew about this, Emile would be stuck in his cube and disconnected from anything except edcom for two weeks. But they wouldn’t find out.

Little Hamay came oncom. “Hey, Emile, you heard the story about the Deep Ranger?”

Deep Ranger was the hero of the entcom series cast. Guy was able to change into a gill suit and kick ass like nobody when the mals started trouble. He wore a disguise, so nobody would know his secret identity. “Tell me,” Emile said.

“Okay. It’s a Fuggin Roy joke. Fuggin Roy is tapped into edcom, see, and it’s primary sex ed. The teacher says, ‘Okay, I need some input examples of sex stuff. So Fuggin Roy’s input circ lights, but the teacher don’t want to call on him, ‘cause he’s such a jerk-off. So she calls on Mary. And Mary says, ‘Mitosis, that’s cell division.’ And the teacher says, ‘Good, Mary. Who else?’ And Fuggin Roy’s circ blares again, but she calls on Bill, and he lays out something about menstrual periods. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘One more.’ This time, nobody’s circ lights except Fuggin Roy, so she has to call on him. So Fuggin Roy says, ‘Well, the Deep Ranger is out diving, see, and all of a sudden, eight thousand mals come out of the coral and start shooting at him with harpguns. So the Deep Ranger pulls his own harp-gun and starts filling the water with long darts, zap, zap, zap! And pretty soon, the Deep Ranger has killed all the mals, speared ‘em deader than chum.’ The teacher waits a few seconds and Fuggin Roy don’t say nothing else, so she says, ‘Well, that’s a very nice story, Roy, but—what’s it got to do with sex?’ And Fuggin Roy says, ‘Well, it’ll teach them mals not to fuck with the Deep Ranger!’ ”

Emile wanted to laugh, but he held it, waiting to hear how Jeda was going to react. After a second, she came oncom. “That’s stupid, Hamay, really stupid.”

Emile didn’t say anything—his bottle was sliding down the trough of a big wave and he was trying to hold the nose into the wind. It wasn’t that stupid a joke, really. Actually, it was kind of funny, but he didn’t laugh. Suddenly, what Jeda thought of him seemed more important than what Little Hamay, his friend for years, thought. And his gut churned in a funny way that was only partially due to the sudden roll of the bottle as the storm clawed at it.

“—your duty to the Confederation requires your participation in galactic service. You should all know the alternatives by now, but I will list them again.” The Confed rep stood in the center of the assembly hall in front of an active holoproj unit. The two hundred seats were filled with young men and women, all watching the rep. Emile Khadaji watched maybe a little more carefully than most.

“First, there’s the military. Confed standard is six years. Then there’s medical, you’ve got eight years’ tour there. Those of you with weak stomachs can try for Civilian Corps, but the input is limited and we are talking about ten years minimum. That’s it, people. You will have to do your duty, one way or another. It’s up to you. Personally, I would hope you’d do military. The pay is better, the chances for advancement better, and the tour is shorter. Who knows? You might even get posted to your homeworld.”

Several people laughed at this. The military contingent on San Yubi consisted of a hundred troopers; chances of anybody here making it into that post were slim and snowball. Besides, Emile didn’t want to be stuck on his home-world. He wanted to see the galaxy, he wanted to see action.

Jeda leaned toward Emile from her seat next to him. “Medical is the best deal.”

Emile smiled, but said nothing. They talked about joining Medical together and asking for link-posting. But Jeda wasn’t as… exciting as she’d once been. She was, Emile reflected, kind of… dull. He’d had other girls, even a few guys, to play nik-nik games with since that first time with her, and, well, she wasn’t-so hot. He was going for Military, for a new start. One thing he had learned: there were a lot of fish in the sea. He meant to sample a few…

“—won’t hurt, but you may notice a transient itching sensation,” the Medic said.

The goddamned fishfucker! ‘Transient itching sensation,’ was it? Khadaji felt as if someone had pumped him full of rock venom. It was all he could do to keep from clawing gouges in his skin. Each of the fucking bacteria must have teeth and talons!

But the augmentation process was working. He tried the test he’d heard about, the stack of coins on the back of his hand. When he dropped his hand from under the metal circles, it seemed as if he had all the time in the galaxy to pluck them from the air. Oh, he was fast! Of course, it didn’t make much difference in the barracks, since everybody else was auged the same way, but against a civilian? He couldn’t wait to get to a pub to start a fight.