Gateway To Xanadu (50 page)

“I said, I won’t be a teenager forever,’ ” I repeated in a voice that wasn’t as steady as it should have been. “Why don’t you say something? Like an agreement, for instance.”

“You know, Diana, I think I ought to feel sorry for you,” he mused, looking at me strangely. “And that in spite of all the grief you’ve given me. Valdon told me something you obviously don’t know. You’ll be a teenager until you go back with him to be readjusted, and if you walk out on this job you won’t be going back.”

I just stared at him and shook my head back and forth, just as though it was on a wire. I couldn’t believe it-I wouldn’t believe it!

“Hang on, Diana,” Ringer advised, his voice softer than it had been. “There’s one more thing. The Council voted to honor Valdon in his stay here with us, and granted him the rank of Agent First Class.

When you two get to the facilities on Tanderon, he’ll be the ranking half of the partnership.”

Ringer said his piece and then waited for my reaction, but it was more than he expected-or, at the very least, different. He saw the quiet tears filling my eyes and saw, too, that the anger I’d shown was gone.

“Ringer, don’t do this to me,” I whispered, my breath coming in gasps. “Don’t all the years we’ve worked together mean anything? Please don’t make him senior to me, please! You don’t know him, you don’t know what he’ll do. Please!”

I grabbed the bed’s side rail to get closer to him, and he frowned and got out of the chair fast to put his hands on my arms. I moaned and cried and grabbed his shirt with both hands, all the while pleading with him, and he forced me back farther onto the bed, then pressed the nurse-call. His face looked pale and concerned over the way I was babbling, and he stabbed one-handed again and again at the nurse-call, then cursed under his breath when there was no answer to it. He put the bed down flat while muttering something soothing, saw that I wasn’t trying to sit up again once he had me down flat too, and decided to take a chance. He took a lead away from the bed, watching closely to see if I was going to move, then made a dash for the door and out. I knew he’d be back in no time with professional help and I didn’t want to be sedated, so I left off crying just ragged sobs-until a nurse not Jane-rushed in, then begged to be left alone for a while.

The sympathetic woman agreed immediately, herded a still-worried Ringer out in front of her, and I was finally able to put aside the act.

Of all the damned bad luck! I stretched out flat on my back to stare up at the ceiling, wishing I had something breakable in reach. Not only had the Council decided to knock me down, they’d also opted for jumping on me with both feet. And the worst part of it was the bit about Val. Remembering the way he’d been on the Station and later on in the Sphere, I was willing to bet he’d try milking a higher rank for all it was worth. He’d made it plain that he didn’t care for my sense of humor and way of doing things, and life would not lack interest with him trying to take charge again. I stirred in annoyance, knowing good old Ringer had had more than a little to say about what was to be done with me, so the worry I’d given him was no more than what he’d asked for. He and I had worked together for a long time, long enough for him to know better than to crow in front of me. I never mind someone taking his best shot, but bragging about it before it lands is asking for trouble.

A dark, snowy dawn was just beginning outside the vu-cast window, but it wasn’t doing much to lighten the blue-shadowed mounds covering the forest floor. I caught a glimpse of something thin and gray moving silently between the trees,.; and then it was gone from view, leaving no more than dainty footprints that were already on the way to being filled. My eyes continued to stare at the scene, but my mind wandered away to consider the problem I had, examining options and possibilities, and I was so far into it that the slamming open of the door to my room took an instant to penetrate to where I was. Before I knew what was going on, I was treated to the totally unexpected presence of Val, who stopped beside my bed and reached out fast to grab my arms.

“Diana, are you all right?” he demanded harshly as his fingers dug into my arms. I was so surprised by the suddenness of it all that I couldn’t hold back a gasp. The steel-like grip of his fingers hadn’t really hurt me, but it was so rigid and demanding that I could almost feel it through the neranol. My gasp must have reached past the intensity he was projecting; his fingers loosened as abruptly as they’d tightened, and faint confusion filled his deep black eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said apologetically, shifting his grip to the bed rail. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I just left Ringer and he was really shaken. He said something about hysteria and collapse, and almost had me believing I’d find you catatonic.”

I have to admit Val really looked upset, but Ringer’s news hadn’t left me much in the way of compassion. I looked up into his face as I tucked my hands behind my head, and snorted my opinion of his comments.

“Don’t look so disappointed,” I advised, unable to keep the dryness from my voice. “You may have missed the catatonia, but you’re just in time for the suicidal depression. I may even let you help me decide whether to cut my wrists or my throat. ”

If he had exploded and started shouting at me I wouldn’t have been surprised, but the relieved grin that covered his face was a surprise. He unwrapped his fingers from around the bed rail as his grin widened, and reached out one hand to brush the hair from my eyes.

“You’re all right.” He chuckled, for some reason pleased with my sarcasm. “I recognize your standard courtesy of manner-and never thought I’d be glad to hear it.” He took a ,deep breath and stretched, then looked around and spotted the chair Ringer had used. He seemed to need it, and walked over to collapse into it before looking at me again.

“You know, you never mentioned how long it takes people to heal around here,” he observed, apparently no longer upset. “If we were back at the base, you’d be on your feet by now. ”

“You neglected to mention a few things, too,” I responded, shifting over onto my side to stare at him.

“I’ve decided that Ringer must have been putting me on. Nobody has immortality.”

“Who-said anything about immortality?” he asked, obviously knowing what I was talking about. “This age business is strictly in the way of being cosmetic. You’re seventeen, you’ll register as seventeen until you have it changed, but you haven’t really been made seventeen again. Look at it this way: your heart has just so many beats natural to ix from the time it was first formed. If we make your heart register like that of a seventeen-year-old, that doesn’t mean we’ve cancelled out all of the beating it’s done till then. If you were sixty when it was done, and your heart has sixty-one years of beating in it, you’d still have only one more year until it stopped, no matter what you and it looked like.”

“Thanks for the lecture.” I nodded, keeping my eyes on him. “It’s really settled all of my problems. Now I’m free to be young and happy again.”

“Poor Diana!” He laughed, stretching out comfortably in the chair. “They really gave it to you, didn’t they? Put from what Ringer said, you’ve been asking for it for a long time.”

“Ringer can blow it out his- Oh, hell, never mind!” I snarled, snarled, turning away from him. “You don’t know the first thing about it.”

“Then why don’t you try telling me about it?” he suggested from behind me, almost in annoyance. “I know it’ll be a brand new approach for you, but you might manage it if you try hard enough.”

I turned back and measured him for a minute, then nodded my head.

“Okay,” I said slowly, sitting up straight. “I think I will. I’m in this mess now because of you, and there’s no reason why both of us shouldn’t know all about it. Sure, I cut you out of my operation, and I did do it on purpose. If I could have left you on the Station I would have, but that age thing kept me from doing it the right way. My original intention was to train you before letting you work with me because you do have potential, but no matter how competent you are, Val, you’re still not agent caliber and never will be unless you learn to use your head in addition to other parts of your anatomy. ”

“If you think you’re telling me something,” said Val, “you’d better think again. “Nothing you’ve said so far makes any sense.”

“It doesn’t?” I asked, warming to my subject as I continued to keep my eyes on him. “Then see how this grabs you. Certain procedures are set up for valid reasons, and assignment leadership is a perfect example of one of those. The assignment leader is usually the one on the team with more experience, knowledge, expertise, or all three, the one who gets to make all bottom-line decisions for precisely those reasons. Not only did you immediately try to take over an assignment when you had no real idea about what was going on, you also spent your time looking for ways to protect me from all those big, bad Xanadu people. If I had to guess, I’d say you still don’t understand how much extra trouble we had because of those little pastimes of yours.”

“That might be because we didn’t have any extra trouble,” he said, stubbornly insisting on the point.

“What’s really bothering you is the way you had to take orders for once, instead of doing everything your own way.”

“Oh, is it?” I retorted, raising my eyebrows in faint surprise I felt not at all. “Then I suppose I was imagining that little difficulty we had with Greg Rich, all because you ‘didn’t care for the man.’ If you hadn’t antagonized him to the point of challenge, I never would have had to kill him. And how about the orders I gave you on the subject of my being for sale? James told me about the talk he’d had with you, the talk during which you turned down his offer cold. If you’d followed orders he would have expected to collect me here on the Station, and most probably would not have sent his plug-ugly after me right in the Sphere. And as a final item, if you search your memory very carefully, you may remember that I made a point of telling you that if you ran into any difficulty in the Sphere and I wasn’t available to consult, you were to go to the Management. I wasn’t talking for the practice, but when you did run into trouble, what did you do? You went charging to the rescue and almost got us both killed. The Management is very close about what leaves the Sphere. If you had tried taking over a shuttle or ship from the port, they would have followed standard procedure, overridden your controls with a grabberfield the way they do with docking here in the Station, and crashed the ship in a place specifically reserved for the purpose. Am I coming through any clearer now?”

My lecture had grown downright heated, but that wasn’t why Val was still staring at me.

“James was going to take you out of there,” he put in, a very definite disturbance in his stare. “How did he plan on doing it?”

“James had his own ship, but unless he had taken some very special precautions he wouldn’t have made it either,” I pointed out, gesturing a dismissal. “But James wasn’t very tightly wrapped anyway, so it doesn’t pay to talk about it. The point is still the same. You kept overriding my orders and worrying about protecting me, and we were out-and out, lucky we lived through it.”

“Is that part of why you got rid of me a couple of days ago?” he asked, quiet now. “Ringer said you knew what would happen.”

“Sure I knew.” I shrugged, looking briefly away from him. I was glad Ringer had told him the truth, but I was oddly disturbed over his lack of anger. “This isn’t my first time in a hospital, and I didn’t need you running around making things worse.”

“Making things worse,” he echoed. “Translated, that means you knew how I would feel about standing around helplessly, watching you wrapped in the agony of pain you were suffering because of me.

Because of what I did and didn’t do.”

“Come on, Val, let’s not get melodramatic.” I grew impatient as I glanced at his expressionlessness.

“James may have grabbed me because you disobeyed orders, but you had nothing to do with the rest of it. If I hadn’t tried hurting him when I was in no shape to hurt even so much as his feelings, it never would have happened.”

“You shouldn’t have had to try hurting him,” he responded quietly, his big body still stretched out and relaxed in the chair, his black eyes sober with accepted guilt. “I’m sure you know as well as I do why I waited until morning to finally go looking for you. I was so damned sick to get out of that place, I kept telling myself that I could ruin everything if I tried looking for you. I’d given you a choice for the following morning, and to avoid the choice you didn’t want to accept, you were tracking down Radman and finding a way to execute the warrant. When I finally came out of the dream and had to admit something had gone wrong, it was already too late. I know which part of it was my fault and which wasn’t, and you can bet I won’t make the same mistake ‘again. What I don’t understand is why you haven’t said any of these things to Ringer and the Council. It would be bound to make a difference. ”

“What happens between partners on an assignment stays between them,” I told him stiffly, folding my legs in front of me. “I don’t know how they do these things where you come from, but around here we don’t go crying to anyone about the problems we have. If we can’t get along with the partner assigned to us, we find a different partner, which is what I intend doing. I hope you’ll be happier with whomever you team with next.”

“Now what -are you talking about?” he demanded, sitting up suddenly in the chair to gape at me in disbelief. “You can’t refuse to be my partner! I don’t want anyone else!”

“That’s too bad, because I do,” I said adamantly. “The only thing you seem to have gotten out of everything I just said was that you know what to blame yourself for, and to hell with all the rest of it.

That perspective fits in nicely with the way the Council is looking at it, but I don’t like being caught in the middle. Find somebody else to take advantage of, friend; I’ve already had my share.”

“What do you mean, that fits in with the way the Council is looking at it?” he asked with a frown, ignoring everything else I’d said. “What does the Council have to do with this?