Chaining the Lady (11 page)

The Captain put his human arm around her shoulders. Suddenly she was crying in very human style against his shoulder. “Oh, Dash—I'm
afraid
!”

“Perfectly normal reaction. But there is no need to be concerned, now. I have established very thoroughly that no attempt on your life originated
here
. I regret I had no chance to explain what I was doing, before, but of course I could not be
sure
until we had investigated. I regret that the equipment was destroyed, but that can be replaced in due course. All is well so long as
you
are well, and I shall ensure that you remain well.”

He addressed his magnet. “Slammer, you will accompany Yael of Dragon until further notice, protecting her from any threat whatsoever. Understood?”

The magnet bobbed.

Oh, no!
“Captain, I'd really rather
not
have the magnet–”

“The magnet is your friend,” the Captain assured her. “Pay attention.” He pointed to a metal chair anchored to the floor of Melody's cabin. “I believe that object intends harm to Yael of–”

A blast of air rocked them back. The chair exploded. Slammer hovered back where he had been, the heat of sudden motion dissipating from his shell.

Only Dash's strong arm around her had prevented Melody from being blown over by the impact of the magnet's motion. The chair was a flattened mass of partly melted metal. Yet it had been done so quickly that Melody had not even seen it happen.

The Captain gave her a final squeeze and let her go. “No one will even
think
of harming you now,” he said. “You are safe. Believe.”

Melody believed.

* * *

“I was always a sucker for fortunes,” the Chief of Coordinations said.

“You must understand, I make no claims for the supernatural,” Melody informed him, tapping the Cluster deck lightly. She had combed out her hair so that it was long and loose, parted in the center and coursing down in brown streams just outside her eyes, in the fashion of the ancient human witches. Yael had been delighted, and had offered pointers on details.

“Well, as long as it doesn't take too long,” he said. “I do have other business.”

Melody leaned forward carefully, holding the deck in both hands so that her arms pressed against the sides of her breasts, making them bulge out of the artfully low-cut décolletage. “I wouldn't want to inconvenience you,” she murmured.

His eyes did a little male-animal dance upon her cleavage. “Oh, no inconvenience. Take your time.”

“Do you know your Significator? The card that represents you?”

He glanced momentarily at her face, brow wrinkling. “Is there are card named Hath?”

She smiled. “I don't believe so. What is your planet of origin?”

“Conquest,” he said.

“Well, Hath of Conquest, let's look through these cards and see if any of the faces reflect your home. I am not familiar with it, so you will have to make the selection.” She showed him the first of the Major Arcana, numbered Zero in the deck. “This we call the Fool, though he is not really foolish. It is just that his tremendous vision outreaches his footing.” The picture showed a young man about to step off a cliff. She flexed the face, bringing up an alternate. “This is the same key, but in this aspect he is called the Nameless One. There are over a hundred versions of each card; I have only a representative sampling here.” She flexed it to the third face.

“No, wait,” Hath said. “That second one; I believe that will do.”

“Oh?” She flexed it back. “Why?”

“The arthropod. This typifies my world.”

“There are spiders on your world?”

“No. But related creatures, yes. We cultivate them; they are our primary food. So arthropods are most important to us.”

“That makes sense,” Melody agreed. “Very well. This is your Significator, and we shall use this facet of the deck. It is called the New Tarot, though it is not new any more. It was one of the decks created in honor of the so-called Aquarian Age of astrological Earth. It has been modified to fit the standard hundred card format, but otherwise it is reasonably authentic.”

She continued talking, careful to provide him a continuing view of her front so as to hold his attention, but her own thoughts wandered. In fact, she had read of Planet Conquest, as it had a certain historical value. It had been the first human extra-Solar colony, the start of Sphere Sol.

A million Solarians had been moved by matter transmission at phenomenal energy expense to the system of Gienah, sixty-three light-years distant from Sol, there to colonize a supposedly ideal virgin world. But the preliminary survey had overlooked a critical element of the planet's ecology, and it had very nearly wiped out the colony in the first year. The near-fiasco had been hushed up by the Solarian bureaucracy, but it was only a fraction of the disasters that beset the “Fool” period of Earth's history. How aptly Tarot reflected that situation! Yet, Melody reminded herself, the vision of Paul of Tarot also stemmed from that conflux.

Of course, such information was also available to the Andromedans. So if a spy or hostage wanted to claim origin in a planet of Sphere Sol, this would do. And a hostage entity would have no reason to pretend; it could draw from its host's mind. She would be wasting her time trying to trap it by means of misinformation. In fact, a person could have a great deal of misinformation about his home planet, since of course most people here in the fleet would be second- or third-generation emigrants whose ancestors had shipped at half-light speed from those planets. A man could call a planet “home” as a matter of cultural pride, when he had never been there. This was another reason it was generally considered that the only sure way to identify a given entity was by aural analysis.

“Now these hundred cards are arranged in order,” Melody was saying meanwhile. She spread them in her hands, not forgetting to give her impressive bust another jiggle. “First the Major Arcana, the important secrets, as it were, all thirty of them. Actually there are even more than that, but they don't all have separate cards. This one, the Ghost, has fifteen alternate keys. It really stands for all the missing secrets, whose number may well be infinite. So the full extent of the theoretical deck–”

“I don't really understand about such things,” Hath said. “And I do have duties elsewhere. Would you mind doing the reading now?”

So her bosom would not hold him forever. Well, he had a typical human reaction. Few sapients were sincerely interested in Tarot; they only wanted a slice of their future handed to them conveniently. This would not be a good reading. The querist really had to understand the cards for that. But then, the reading was not her purpose. “Please shuffle the cards now,” she told him, handing him the deck.

His eyebrows lifted. “I have to do the work?”

“You have to do the work. You may not be conscious of it, but as you shuffle the cards you are arranging them in an order that satisfies you.
You
determine their final order. I only lay them out and help interpret. There is nothing supernatural about it; the cards merely reflect your will.”

“I know you have to say that,” he said, his eyes straying at last from her décolletage to her legs, which she had disposed artistically to the side of the table. “There are laws, aren't there? You can't claim anything about spiritual influences, but they're there all the same, right?“ He shuffled the cards.

A born sucker; she had known the type in Sphere Mintaka. They wanted to believe in fantastic agencies, not in mundane reality. The truth was that modern space science had far more effect on most entities' lives than any possible spiritual agency.

“I only help you interpret the cards,” she insisted, knowing he would take this as confirmation of his conjecture. “No spirits exist except as you have conjured them.”

He returned the deck. Melody dealt the first card of the reading. It was the Five of Serpents of the New Tarot, with the five snakes radiating out from the points of a five-pointed star. Too bad; these Minor Arcana were not complex enough to evoke the reactions she needed. What would she do if the whole layout turned out to be like this?

But she tried. “What does this suggest to you, Hath?”

He hardly glanced at it. “The patina of reproduction, of course.”

Melody forced her mouth to work. “Of course.” Was he teasing her or was this a completely alien reaction?

She dealt another card: unity, equivalent to The Lovers in the more conventional decks. It could be considered as representing the commencement of a new way, though of course it was far more devious than that.

“There is the first shoot entering the nutrient globe,” Hath said. “Ready to fission in that egg into the five sexes that will consume the body of the female entity laid out as food, before emerging as shown in the prior card.” He looked up “I'm surprised they are permitted to print such graphic material.”

“Sometimes they do have trouble with local censors,” Melody said somewhat feebly. For she had abruptly identified the applicable culture, the one she knew of that had five genders. Sphere * of Andromeda.

By the time she completed the reading, she was certain Hath was another hostage. She gave him a nice “fortune” and let him go. But her human heart was pounding.

Her first Tarot testing had been a success. But she was not precisely satisfied with its verdict. If a random sampling of personnel had so easily turned up another agent of Andromeda,
how many more were aboard this ship?

* * *

Melody was tired, and so was her host. She had been awake and active for some time, and had experienced more new and unsettling thing that ever before in her life. She had to relax.

“Let's take us a subsonic clense and estivation,” she told Yael.

“What?” Bewilderment.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot. I mean a hot shower and sleep.”

“It must be some life, on Mintaka,” Yael remarked.

“It is some life
here
, girl!”

Yael laughed, pleased. “It's my dream come true. I hope we're stuck here forever.”

Incurable lust for adventure! “Very well. Why don't you strip us down and take us our shower, and I'll tag along for the ride.”

Incredulous thrill. “You'll let
me
run the whole body? Even though I'm only the host?”

“The Lord God of Hosts is with you yet,” Melody agreed. Then, feeling the instant reaction: “I'm
not
ridiculing your religion! It is possible to love and laugh at the same time, you know.” She was afraid that would not be enough, but Yael's mind brightened. Another advantage of lesser intelligence: it was easily satisfied. Melody's actual attitude toward Solarian religion was more complicated and skeptical than the human girl could appreciate.

Yael took over the body, hesitantly at first, then with greater sureness. Melody had to school herself to let go, becoming completely limp in intent, so that it was possible. they/she began to shrug out of her blouse, letting the fabric tear down the front and back. As it was recyclable, it would be conveyed to the ship's clothing unit and merged with similar refuse. The oven would melt it down and the centrifuge would spin out the dirt, and the jet-molds would squirt new clothes on order into the system. Little was wasted in space, apart from the fact that the whole space effort was a waste. Monstrous fleets that could never do battle.

Yael stopped, her bosom half-bared. “The magnet!” she said.

Melody looked where the girl was gazing, the easiest thing to do, in the circumstance, since the eyes were under host control. “Slammer's all right; he's just hovering.”

“That's just it. He's
watching.
”

Now Melody laughed. “Of course. He's protecting us. With those hostages around, that's just as well.”

“But he'll see—you know.”

Melody had to work this out before responding. Solarians wore clothes, lest the males be sexually stimulated by the sight of the female torso, and impregnate—but she hardly needed to rehearse that fact again. “He's not human. He's a
magnet
. Breasts mean nothing to him. Not even so fine a pair as yours.”

“How do we know?”

That stopped her. “Well, it does seem unlikely. Anyway, he has no eyes.”

Yael was reassured. “That's right. He
can't
see.” She stripped away the rest of the blouse and skirt and stuffed them into the recycle chute.

Actually, Melody realized, the magnet
could
see. He merely used a different system. The human body's presence and density distorted its magnetic environment slightly, so that Slammer could locate it precisely. Clothing made little difference. Yael would be shocked if she realized that the magnet could probably perceive her most intimate internal functions.

“We'd better use the john,” Yael said, heading for the refuse cubicle. Then halted again. “This is an
open
slot. And the magnet's right
here.
”

So the action of elimination possessed different scruples from there mere exposure of flesh. “All creatures have natural functions,” Melody pointed out.

“That means it
understands
. It's
male
, and it's
watching
. Or
listening
. Or
something
.”

“That last covers the situation best,” Melody said. Odd that a function that both male and female Solarians practiced similarly should have greater social restrictions than one that involved sexual differentiation. Mintakans were not that way; they were quite open about intake and elimination. Solarian sexuality seemed to extend well beyond the mechanisms of sex. She had had no idea. “We can tie a curtain to conceal the seat.”

“Yes!” That solved the problem. The Solarian girl was locked on vision; the curtain made no difference to Slammer, but relieved her problem of propriety.

After the toilet, the shower. This already had a curtain, to prevent the spray of water from splashing out wastefully. Slammer hovered close, but did not intrude within the shower itself. The magnet seemed to be satisfied to maintain a distance of about one human body length. It hovered closer when potential enemies were about, and hung further away when this seemed secure, as now. He was an excellent bodyguard.