The Man Who Never Missed (8 page)

Somewhere along the way, Khadaji began to lose the sense of foreknowledge he’d had. He still had the memory, but the sense of oneness he’d felt with the universe during the slaughter faded and became less sharp. There were some moments when he could touch it, but they became fewer and shorter. It was as if he’d passed through a magical door on a conveyer; he continued to move and the door grew smaller behind him. He wanted to stay at the portal, but he could not. And he didn’t know where he was going.

So, when Pen began one particular teaching, Khadaji found himself puzzled.

They were sitting in the largest of Pen’s rooms, a low-ceilinged square six meters on a side. The room was cool, despite the heat of Maro’s summer outside, kept that way by a strip of lindex filter set under the opaqued window. There were three foam chairs, a desk with a comp terminal on it, and a large chest against one wall; no other furniture.

“Pubtending? Are you serious?”

Pen laughed from within the folds of his gray shroud. “To be sure,” he said. “One must make a living.”

Khadaji had a little trouble picturing Pen behind a bar, or window, mixing drinks and dispensing tablets. He said as much.

“Ah, but it is a perfect job for a priest, even one so un-priestly as I. Consider: who has a better opportunity to see people with their masks lowered than a pubtender? Men will confide things to you drunk they wouldn’t tell a brother when sober; stoned women will reveal secrets they’d never speak as pillow talk while straight. More than one pubtender has come from the ranks of practicing psychologists—or gone there from some bar.”

Khadaji shook his head. “I don’t know…”

Pen waved one hand. “What’s to know? You’ll have to do something to feed yourself—I won’t be around forever. A top-ranked pubtender can always get a job and as I said, there are few places better to study the human condition. More, it’s a skill I can teach you.”

Khadaji stood and walked to the plastic window. He touched a control on the sill and the window shifted from near black to clear. The light was too bright, bringing a blast of reflected heat with it. He darkened the window again. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem exactly what I had in mind.”

“And what did you have in mind?”

Khadaji turned to look at Pen. “I-I don’t know. Something…”

“Ah. I see. Well, until you figure out what, precisely, perhaps it would be wise to learn what is available.”

Khadaji considered it. Pen was right. He only had vagueness where he felt he should have some plan. Pubtending? It was as good as anything, he supposed. And easy enough, he figured.

He was wrong about how easy it would be. He found that out quickly.

Pen stood and walked to the comp terminal. He removed a small steel marble from his robe and held it out so Khadaji could see it. Khadaji recognized the ball as a recording sphere, a storage device for information. Though the sphere was small, it would hold several hundred volumes of hard copy.

“This contains seventeen years of experience as a pubtender,” Pen said. “Every drink I know how to mix, every chem, planetary and local laws regarding dispensing, favorites on different worlds, everything. Cross-referenced, indexed, annotated and illustrated. Come and see.”

Pen dropped the vacuum-formed steel ball into a circular slot on the computer’s terminal and stroked the unit to life. The operating system acknowledged the format of the sphere with a wash of colors and words across the holoproj image above the keyboard, then went into mode-select.

“Verbal,” Pen said, “standard Interstitchi, float it.”

“Acknowledged,” the computer said. It had a deep, feminine voice.

“Index-categories, primo screen—give me this one visual.”

“Running.”

Two seconds after the computer spoke, four words splashed into the air over the unit. Khadaji blinked and stared at the projection. The words were:

LIQUIDS, SOLIDS, GASES, RADIANTS

Pen turned to Khadaji. “Pick a category,” he said.

Might as well keep it simple, Khadaji thought. “Liquids,” he said.

Pen turned back to the computer. “Liquids—give me the total number, please, verbal will do.”

“Nineteen thousand three hundred sixty-nine,” the computer said.

Khadaji raised his eyebrows. “Buddha! You’ve made that many different kinds of drinks?”

“So it seems.”

“You can’t remember them all.”

“I probably could, but there wouldn’t be much point to it. That’s why I have the sphere. Usually, it’s enough to learn the ten or twenty most popular ones in any given pub to get by—you can call up anything else if you need it.”

Khadaji shook his head again, something he seemed to be doing a lot lately. “I wouldn’t have believed there could be that many different kinds of drinks.”

Pen chuckled. “People or mues will drink almost anything. Some very strange stuff.” He said to the computer, “Liquids—Shin’s Kiss, give the ingredient list, visual.”

“Running.”

Two seconds later, the holoproj lit up with:

SHIN’S KISS

30CC BLENDED LIQUOR - WHISKY STOCK (QUADRANT COMFORT) 30CC FRUIT EXTRACT - COCONUT MILK (ISLE OF WENT)

30CC VEGETABLE EXTRACT - CUCUMBER SOAK (SHIN)

40-45 GRAMS SUCROSE POWDER

DIHYDROGEN OXIDE/CARBON DIOXIDE BLEND, QS TO TOP.

Pen said, “It should be pretty obvious how I have them organized—I go from general to specific, ending with a brand name, if there is one.”

“Interesting,” Khadaji said. “But it looks pretty tame. I would think there’d be a lot stranger stuff.”

“Don’t let the names fool you,” Pen said. “Computer, give me an ingredient list of Shin—skip the cucumber.”

“Running.”

Another list lit the air, this time mostly chemical compounds. Water, ammonia, sodium chloride, potassium chloride, uric acid, creatinine, creatine, urea, phosphorus, magnesium—the list ran on. It didn’t mean anything to Khadaji.

“Don’t recognize it?” Pen chuckled again. “You should. It’s common enough. Urine.”

Khadaji blinked. “Piss?”

“Human urine, to be precise. Shin is made by soaking a cucumber in urine for a week, then blending it into a nice frothy texture.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all. The drink is quite popular on some worlds—Thompson’s Gazelle, for one. They even drank a version of it on Earth at one time, as a remedy for snakebite. And there was one culture which drank the urine of those intoxicated on certain mushrooms—to get the effect without some of the nasty side effects of the mushrooms themselves.”

“Shit.”

“As I said, there are some strange beings who will drink even stranger drinks.” Pen’s voice was dry. Khadaji didn’t know if he was being had or not. He suspected not.

“There are fewer chemicals used for recreation in the solid and powder categories, fewer still in gases and radiants. And, of course, which ones are legal on which worlds determines their use. Is it a bit more complex than you thought?”

Khadaji stared at the formula for Shin’s Kiss, still glowing in the air half a meter away. “Yeah. A bit.”

“You don’t need a degree on most worlds to challenge the pubtender’s exam, but you do need to learn a few things. We might as well get started.”

Khadaji nodded. Well. It wouldn’t be dull, not if there were other chemicals like Shin’s Kiss. My.

Khadaji had learned a good deal about falling, rolling and tumbling, he realized, as he found himself flying through the air for the tenth time that day. He nicked, hit the grass at a good angle, and came up, without injury or even mild pain.

“You were sleeping,” Pen said. He stood three meters away, enveloped in his ever-present shroud. The wind was chilly, it was late fall shading into winter and snow was expected in the mountains within a few days. Khadaji nodded. He hadn’t been concentrating and the result showed it. Sumito required total attention for it to work; anything less was cause for instant loss of control. After five local months, he was getting better, but he still had a long way to go. Muscle memory had to be trained, Pen told him, and concentration had to be sharpened to a needle’s point. He could walk to the seventy-second step.

As for the planet, he was getting used to it, as well. The smells of the air no longer seemed alien, nor the slight differences in gravity, nor the actinic quality of the local sun’s light. The people still waged their war against the Confed, with no success. More troops had been sent to the world and the numbers of the ready-to-die attackers could not overcome the firepower of the Confederation machine. Khadaji wondered sometimes if he and Pen would eventually be the only people alive except troopers…

The snow was piled half a meter thick upon the frozen ground. Khadaji and Pen walked over it on flat, thin sheets of enforced plastic radiating from their slushboots like artificial spider’s webs. There was a flaw in the heating system of Khadaji’s suit—a spot over his left buttock the size of his hand so cold it was going numb.

“Primary routes of administration?” Pen didn’t wear a conditioned suit, only the shroud of his order.

Khadaji’s breath made frosty clouds as he spoke. “Oral, anal, vaginal, nasal, ophthalmically, otically, cutaneously.” He hit a patch of soft snow with his left web and sank in that direction, almost toppling.

“You forgot poenile—the meatus urinarius,” Pen said. “Use the mnemonic and you won’t.”

Khadaji blinked. Damn. The memory device—flashed across his mental screen. On Aqua, crafty people never open virginal orifices. The first letter of each word stood for one of the primary routes of drug administration.

“Secondary,” Pen said.

“Sub-Q, IM, IV, IC.”

“Good. We’ll do nine kilometers today, so we should have time to cover nasal adequately. Let’s start with powders.”

Khadaji nodded. It was going to be a long walk.

Khadaji sat nude in the hot swirling waters of the local immersion tub, next to Pen, who was fully clothed in his robes. Nobody seemed to think anything of that, a man dressed to the eyeballs, and Khadaji was quite used to it by now. The thickened water stroked Khadaji’s sore muscles and the aroma of mint floated up from the surface with the steam. A plastic roof kept the snow and most of the cold out; it was late, and only a few people enjoyed the water with them.

“What would you get if you served a patron voremholts on Primesat?”

Khadaji shifted, to allow the stream of hot water under his left buttock to flow up between his legs. His penis bounced in the stream. “Probably a nice tip,” he said. “Voremholts is expensive in the Centauri System.”

“And the same drink served on Tatsu would get you…”

“Two-to-five in the local prison.” Khadaji’s voice was dry.

“And on Gebay?”

Khadaji shifted back. The water was causing some blood flow down there he couldn’t do anything about now. He looked across the tub at a girl with long white hair. She was young and had a nice smile—not to mention a slim and attractive body he’d noticed when she’d entered the tub. Maybe he could do something about that anatomical swelling…

Pen slapped the water and a glob of it arced up and splashed against Khadaji’s face. “Hey!”

“What happens if you serve voremholts on Gebay?”

Khadaji wiped the water from his face. It left a greasy feeling on his skin. “Gebay. Not much. Except in the Konta Compound, where any but church-approved chemicals are illegal. They cut your hair off for selling proscribed drugs. Which doesn’t sound all that bad, by the way.”

Pen shook his head. “No. They don’t cut your body hair. They pull it out, one strand at a time. The pain is supposed to be incredible, after a time, not to mention the anticipation. It takes three days for someone not particularly hirsute—they work straight through, day and night.”

Khadaji felt a chill, despite the heat of the water surrounding him. Gebay. The religious compound—serve no voremholts there.

“And the makeup of voremholts?”

“Jahambu bark, majani wormwood and tecal mushrooms, dissolved in a fifty-fifty solution of water and Koji rum.”

“And where is the best voremholts made?”

“The Bibi Arusi System—the green moon, Rangi ya majani Mwezi.”

Pen nodded; the shroud swirled around him in the water. “Very good,” he said. “No more questions for today.”

Khadaji inhaled through his nose, enjoying the tickle of the mint. “I have a question,” he said. “Will you ever tell me about your order? The Siblings of the Shroud?”

“It is a complex subject,” Pen said. “We are called many things: existential humanist/pacifists; elitist intellectual pantheist/positivists; meddling sons-of-bezelworts. A few minutes in a tub would hardly suffice to scratch the surface. Besides, it isn’t important for you to know about me, only about yourself. The Shroud isn’t your way.”

“All right. I have one question you can answer, then. Do you ever take that shroud off?”

Pen laughed. “Certainly. Normally, not in view of another person, that’s frowned upon, but when alone, it is allowed. I sleep without it, normally bathe without it, and surely make love without it—in the dark, at least.”

Khadaji was surprised about the last. He had somehow thought the order was celibate, though Pen had never said so.

Pen caught Khadaji’s look, apparently. He laughed again. “Oh, yes, we have the same stirrings as others. And we indulge them. In fact, I will not be sleeping in our rooms this night.”

Khadaji grinned. “Got something lined up?”

Pen said, “I have plans for the evening, yes.”

Khadaji’s grin widened. Good. He’d have the rooms to himself, and the young woman with hair like snow might also be free. He was thinking of the best way to approach her when Pen stood and waded across the hip-deep tub toward the girl. He extended his arm, dragging the wet folds of the cloth across the scented and thickened water. As Khadaji watched, the girl smiled sweetly and took Pen’s hand in her own. Khadaji watched the muscular roll of her buttocks as she and Pen climbed from the tub and walked to the drying rooms. Khadaji found his mouth was agape. He shut it and blinked at the suddenly irritating mint fumes. Well, I’ll be damned, he thought. Maybe some of the critics of the Siblings were right. Certainly Pen seemed a son-of-a-bezelwort, at the moment, anyway.