How Dark the World Becomes (10 page)

“You think he’s okay?” I asked.

“I’ve never thought he was okay,” she said, and went back to stitching my arm. 

“Does this hurt?” she asked as she took another stitch.

“No.” 

She took another quick, hard stitch and gave the surgical thread a tug to draw the wound closed. I sucked in a quick breath between clenched teeth.

“How about that?” she asked.

“Yeah,
that
hurt.” 

She smiled.

“You know, your bedside manner really sucks.” 

“You didn’t always think so,” she said without looking up, but the next stitch was gentle. Her long jet-black hair, shining in the UV antiseptic light, hid her face from me for a moment.

“Nope, guess not,” I answered, and I sighed.

She looked up at me, but what was there to say? That I’d have been better off with her than Cinti? But without Cinti, I wouldn’t have taken Jim Donahue’s place, so there wouldn’t have
been
a clinic for June to come and take over, and she’d probably still be doing meatball triage in a Co-Gozhak field hospital out in some godforsaken backwater.

Some
other
godforsaken backwater. 

Water under the bridge.

“Did Markov’s people do this?” 

“Indirectly. We’ve been hitting banks. We hit one of Bernardini’s—lifted a ton of
Cottos
—and then some son of a bitch sliced me as we were walking out. We checked for guns, but this little prick had a composite blade up his coat sleeve.”

“Did you kill him?” she asked.

I shook my head. 

“The Gil did—kept his wits, too. No wild gunplay, no retribution on the others standing around, just one quick, clean head shot before the guy could stick me again. I was proud of him.”

She glanced down at Phil’s crumpled form with a look of mixed surprise and approval, and then went back to my arm, using a surgical sponge to clean away some of the blood seeping from the wound. I had my shirt off, and she paused a minute to look at my left forearm, below the wound.

“Still got that stupid tattoo, I see. First time I met you, I had to stitch you up,” she said softly.

“Yeah.” 

Nine years ago and a bunch of light-years away.

“I’ve got this feeling . . . ,” she started, but she didn’t finish the sentence. She just finished stitching the knife wound closed. June was smarter than ninety percent of the people on the planet;
she
knew I was leaving—one way or another.

“I’m taking off tomorrow,” I said, answering the unspoken question. She didn’t look up. “You know that if I stay here, he’ll come after the clinic, to get at me.”

She nodded.

“Just the clinic,” I added. “He doesn’t know about us . . . he can’t. Everything between us was off-world, way back when, before you came here. There’s no way he can know about us.”

“You could have given him something to find out about,” she said quietly, still not looking up. There was a hint of bitterness in her voice, but not much—mostly there was just resignation, because she knew I couldn’t have come around, couldn’t have given Kolya something to find out about, not while I was with Cinti—or with anyone else. Nope, not me.

I wonder if they have support groups for serial monogamists. 

She sprayed a fast-set bandage on the wound, and Phil started stirring on the floor. June glanced down at him, and before he opened his eyes, she leaned forward, grabbed my face in both hands, and kissed me hard on the lips. When she started to let go, I put my arms around her and pulled her close to me and kissed her back, long and hard.

Because she was right—this might be the last time we were ever going to see each other, and here she was, just stitching me up again, and it wasn’t fair, but there it was. 

*   *   *

The cigar smoke curling around Henry’s face blended with the dark caramel of the bourbon as he took another sip, eyes closed in pleasure.

“Not bad,” he allowed.

“If you like bourbon. Tastes like liquid candy to me.”

“Kiss my ass,” he answered, and then shook his head. “It’s gonna be strange around here without you, you know?”

“Yeah. You be all right?”

He made a face. 

“What? Without you here to get every psycho and dumb-ass thug on the planet intent on killing us? Let me think . . . Yeah, I guess I’ll be all right.”

“Kiss
my
ass.”

He chuckled in reply, and we sat in silence and drank for a while, bourbon and scotch, Henry and I.

“It’s gonna be weird for me being . . . someplace else. You know?”

“Fish out of water? All that?” Henry asked.

“Yeah.”

“Gotta make it work for you, that’s all. I ever tell you about my grandiddie’s grandiddie?”

“Nope.” 

“Way back when your great-great-grandiddie was eating boiled cabbage and screwing sheep in Ukraine, mine was fighting the Nazis.”

“Yeah, I think the Ukies got the word there was a war going on, too. This musta been one of your white ancestors, right?” 

“No, black. He was a flyer, and they hardly let any of them fight in the war, just one little unit. They escorted bombers over Germany. Lots of bombers got shot down, and the flight crews got put in Nazi POW compounds—
stalags,
they called ’em.”

He took another sip of bourbon and smiled appreciatively.

“Just like you in the ladies’ room at Quann’s, their job was to escape, so they formed these escape committees. Nazis knew it, so they’d send in Germans who could speak English, pretending to be captured aircrews, trying to infiltrate the escape committees.”

“That work?” I asked.

“Yeah, worked pretty good. Till some black dudes got there. Then all those southern white pecker-head bomber pilots put the black fighter pilots in charge of the escape committees. My great-great-grandiddie was one of them, shot down over Germany, escorting bombers. Know why they put ’em in charge?”

“They knew they weren’t Germans.” I said, and Henry nodded.

“Damn right, and that’s the point: they made fish-out-of-water work for them.”

I took a sip of scotch and thought about that for a while.

“Nice story. But given my complexion, I don’t think the whole Nazi POW camp thing’s going to work for me.”

“It’s an analogy, dumbass.”

“No kidding? Henry, how am I going to survive without you around?”

“Huh! Who says you’re gonna?”

*   *   *

I tried not to brood about June during the maglev ride the next day. Brooding is dangerous when people are trying to kill you, and there was no guarantee that Kolya didn’t have someone watching the trains. Watching wasn’t the problem, of course—riding along joining the party was. 

Our two compartment mates were Varoki, middle-aged annoying husband and bored wife, which from my point of view was a nice low-threat combination. Once we got moving I’d gone out into the corridor and planted two tiny remote eyes looking either way. They fed into the inside of my shades. Not reflector shades—that’s too obvious—just standard polarizing wraparounds with a receiver for live feed. I could keep an eye on the approaches to the compartment from either direction, and for all anyone knew I was watching a dirty movie. 

But nobody made a move, and after a while the brooding came back, because there was nothing I could do about June but brood. I was committed to a course of action and had to see it through—too many people’s lives depended on it. After that, who knew? 

It was the sight of the Needle that finally cleared my mind. 

I’d seen Needles a half-dozen times, but I never got over the sight. Marfoglia was
blasé
, of course—the jaded traveler who’s seen it all before—but the two kids and I couldn’t take our eyes off it. 

“Barraki, how many Needles have you ridden?” I asked. 

He screwed his face up thinking, ears up and alert, and started ticking them off on his long fingers.

“Akaampta, Hazz’Akatu, Peezgtaan, Zissiwaa . . . mmm . . . and Tu’up! Yes. Those five, but I was very young when we visited Tu’up. I do not remember it very well. How many Needles have you ridden, Sasha?”

“Just two: this one and Nishtaaka.”

“How many for you, Boti-Marr?” Barraki asked. 

Boti-Marr
, Aunt Marrissa, turned and smiled at him. It was one of those smiles that looked like she’d gone to school to learn how to do it—like she could smile that way even with a mouth full of sewage. I don’t know about you, but I always get a warm, fuzzy feeling when someone smiles at me and I know they’re at least as happy to see me as they would be to have a mouth full of sewage.

“I was just thinking about that,” Marfoglia answered. “I’ve been on
both
of Earth’s Needles, of course, since I’m from Earth. I’ve been up and down the Needle on Bronstein’s World, the one here at Peezgtaan, Akaampta, Sha-shaa, and Eeee-ktaa. Now, which Needle on Hazz’Akatu did you ride? The Old Tower or the Merchant Gate?”

“Only the Merchant Gate,” Barraki answered. 

“I’ve heard that’s the better one,” she said. “The Tower is slower, and the compartments aren’t nearly as nice.” 

I had a feeling that any compartment the e-Traak rode in would be pretty nice. 

The maglev ride from Crack City to Needledown had taken most of the afternoon, even at a couple hundred klicks an hour through the near-vacuum on the surface. The Needle’s at the equator—has to be—and the Crack’s, you know, where it is, so there’s no way to get the two any closer together. 

By now we had a pretty spectacular view of the base of the Needle, only a couple kilometers away, with Prime setting to our left and casting impossibly long shadows across the dusty, barren rock flats that some long-dead Varoki snake-oil salesman had named the Sea of Welcome. The Needle glowed yellow-orange in the setting sun, a sparkling, impossibly thin thread stretching up to the heavens. Well, we could see it from a few kilometers away, so maybe not thin in an absolute sense, but compared to its length . . . 

The massive laser domes to either side were visible as well, also glowing yellow-orange in the twilight. With no significant surface atmosphere to diffuse the light, sunset meant almost immediate darkness. When Prime disappeared below the horizon, the Needle stopped glowing at its base and disappeared, the darkness then shooting up its length, as if the Needle were a fuse to a celestial bomb, burning out before our eyes.

“Oooo!” I heard little Tweezaa say, and I nodded in agreement. 

Oooo.

Mr. Hlontaa said something to Barraki in aGavoosh, Barraki answered fairly sharply, and Hlontaa actually bowed a little and said, “I beg your pardon. I forgot. I was just saying that the structures at the base of the Needle are gigawatt-range optic lasers.”

I smiled to myself. Hlontaa and his spouse were our Varoki compartment mates on the maglev, and once he’d found out that Barraki and Tweezaa were traveling with Human “servants,” he’d started fawning over them. He was one of those guys with lots of opinions and no hesitation about sharing them with you. Out of politeness to me, Barraki made him say everything in English, as well as aGavoosh for Tweezaa.

Earlier, he’d shared some of his theories about Humans. He was very fond of us Humans, he’d assured us. He’d said that several times, I guess so we wouldn’t forget, or get confused about it. We were very creative, he’d said, and quite intelligent, of course. But we just didn’t put the same value on life as other races did. 

Really? 

Oh, yes. Obviously. Just look at the physical violence in every Human enclave in the
Cottohazz
, or the suicidal attacks Human military units are known for. Look at how the rogue brigades on Nishtaaka had fought until they were nearly annihilated. Humans clearly don’t value their own lives the way other intelligent races value theirs. 

“Have you considered the possibility that those soldiers on Nishtaaka were just very brave?” I’d asked. 

No, it’s something more than just that, he’d said. Humans live in the moment, slave to the impulse. That’s why they are such good artists, but cannot control their violent urges—you have to agree with me on that point, don’t you? Considering Human history? 

I’d told him that I thought I was actually doing a pretty good job of controlling
my
violent urges, all things considered. Barraki, who had seen what results my violent urges could produce, giggled at that, which I thought was an interesting reaction. Hlontaa had lapsed into sullen silence for a while—catching up on his reading, he’d said. 

After a while he’d snorted in disgust at what he saw, and then had turned back to us.

“Just look at this,” he’d demanded, and pushed the viewer screen at me. It was an ad for a new Earth import holovid, called
Blood Vengeance of the Tong
. The video snip showed an actress I recognized from a couple of those Black Hand potboilers, held between two leering oriental dudes who looked as if they could snap her like a wishbone, if that’s what they had on their minds. Her hair was wild and disheveled as she struggled between them, and the blouse of her Victorian costume was torn open, her heaving bosoms exposed. These Black Hand vids were definitely a guilty pleasure.

“What do you say about that?” he’d demanded.

I’d studied it for a moment longer and then nodded.

“Nice tits,” I’d answered.

He’d sat back in disgust and kept scanning. Across from me Marfoglia had looked almost as disgusted. I just grinned. 

Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hong Kong holovid pictures were a major Earth export, action-adventure yarns were as popular as they’d ever been, and there was this explosively popular subgenre of historical costume epics depicting a desperate struggle against a sinister secret society. They call them Black Hand vids because the first really successful ones were about the old Sicilian Black Hand. After that, they started cranking them out, and they all followed a pretty standard formula: hero or heroine falls afoul of evil secret society, then sixty minutes of chases, captures, menacing dialog, and gratuitous bodice ripping, concluding with a long bloody finale where the evil secret society is defeated. 

Of course, you could only defeat the Black Hand so many times, so then there came all these other period costume pieces with reluctant heroes and beautiful, self-reliant women menaced by the Templars, Hashashins, Thugee, Ku Klux Klan, Bavarian Illuminati, and now the Chinese Tongs. They were in danger of exhausting the historic supply of secret societies, so they were also now remaking old Fu Manchu films and inventing secret cults in ancient civilizations for which they had few or no records either way—the streets of Aztec Tenochtitlan ran red with the blood of the sinister Tutuwaan.