The Gabble and Other Stories (28 page)

She slid forward onto his stomach then turned and reached back to pull his shorts down and off his legs. He was amazed at just how far she could twist and bend back her body. Once his shorts were removed she slid back until his penis rested between her buttocks then, after raising herself a little, she continued to push back, bending it over until it almost caused him pain, then with a swift movement of her pelvis, took it inside her. Snow groaned, then gritted his teeth as she started to ride him, staring down at him with that strange expression on her face.

In the evening, when it was time to move on, Snow moved with a bone-deep lethargy. He had not slept much during the afternoon. Each time he had tried to relax after a session of sex Hirald would do something, whether that would be to take his penis in her mouth or assume some position he could not resist. This had been after her climax while she rode him. It had been so intense that she had cried out and shuddered uncontrollably, and after it she had looked down at herself in surprise and shock. Thereafter she had been eager to repeat the experience. Snow felt sore and drained.

As they walked across the darkened violet sands they had talked little, but there had been one conversation that had raised Snow’s suspicions.

‘Your hand, how did you lose it?’

‘Andronache challenge. It was shredded by a flack shell.’

‘How is it now?’

Snow had paused before replying. Did she know?

‘What do you mean; how is it? It was amputated. It is no longer there.’

‘Yes,’ she had said, and no more.

* * * *

The sun was breaking the horizon and the night asteroids fading out of the sky when they reached the rock field at the edge of the Thira. With little energy to spare for conversation, Snow set up his day tent and collapsed inside, instantly asleep. When he woke in the latter part of the day it was to discover himself undressed under a blanket with Hirald lying beside him. She was up on her elbow, her head propped on her hand, looking at his face. As soon as she saw that he was awake she handed him a carton of mixed juice. He sat up, the blanket sliding down. She was naked. He drank the juice.

‘I’m glad you came along,’ he said, and the rest of the day was spent in pleasant activity.

That night they moved deep into the rock field. The following day passed much as the one before.

‘I think it fair to tell you I have an implant,’ Snow said as he rested after some particularly vigorous activity. ‘You won’t get pregnant by me, and my sperm is little more than water and a few free proteins.’

‘Why do you feel it necessary to tell me this?’ Hirald asked him.

‘As you know, there is a reward out for my testicles, stasis-preserved. This is not because the Merchant Baris particularly wants me dead. I think it is because he is after my genetic tissue.

It has value, of a kind. At the water station the Androche ... seduced me.’ Snow was uncomfortable with that. ‘She did it so she could collect my sperm, probably to sell.’

‘I know,’ said Hirald. Snow looked at her and she went on, ‘He is after your testicles to provide him with an endless supply of your genetic material.’

Snow considered that. Of course there had to be more to Hirald than he had supposed, but the Olympic screwing had clouded his thought-processes somewhat.

‘He wouldn’t get that . . . meiosis only leaves half the chromosomes in each sperm,’ he said.

‘He would get there eventually. Your testicles could be kept alive and producing spermatozoa for a very long time. It is the next best thing to having your entire living body to provide the genetic material. I suspect Baris thought it unlikely he could get away with that. He’d never get you off-planet without your consent. This way he also corners the market.’

‘You know an awful lot about what Baris wants.’

Hirald looked at him very directly.

‘How is your hand?’

Snow looked down at the stump. He unclipped the covering and pulled it off. What he exposed was recognizably a hand, though deformed and almost useless. The covering had been cleverly made to conceal it, to make it look as if the hand was missing.

‘It will be no different from its predecessor in about six solstan months. I intended to walk out of one water station without a hand, then into another station with a hand and a new identity.’

‘What about your albinism?’

‘Skin dye and eye lenses.’

‘Of course you cannot take transplants.’

‘No ... I think you should explain yourself.’

‘The people I work for want the same as Baris; your genome.’

‘You’ve had opportunity . . .’

‘No, they want the best option; you, willingly. I want you to gate back to Earth with me.’

‘Why?’

‘You are regenerative. It is the source of your immortality. We know this now. You have known it for more than a thousand years.’

‘Still, why?’

‘We have managed to keep your secret for the last three hundred years, ever since it was discovered. Ten years ago a mistake was made and the knowledge was leaked. Now many organizations know about you, and what you represent; whoever can decode your genome has access to immortality, and through that, access to wealth and power unprecedented. Baris is one who would like this. He was the first to track you down. There will be others.’

‘You work for Earth Central.’

‘Yes.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better just to kill me and destroy my body?’

‘Earth Central does not suppress knowledge.’ Hirald smiled at him. ‘You should be old enough to understand the futility of this. It wants this knowledge disseminated so that it cannot cause damage, cannot put power into the hands of the wrong people. The good it would do is immense also. The projections are that in ten years a treatment could become available to make anyone regenerative, within limits.’

‘Yet till now it kept a lid on things,’ said Snow, an old hand at spotting discrepancies like this.

‘It guarded your privacy. It did not suppress knowledge. Not suppressing knowledge is not equal to seeking it out.’

‘Is Earth Central so moral now?’ wondered Snow, then could have kicked himself for the stupidity. Of course Earth Central was. Only human beings and other low-grade sentients could become corrupt, and Earth Central was the most powerful AI in the human polity. Hirald, noting his discomfiture, did not answer his question.

‘Will you come?’ she asked him.

Snow looked to the wall of the tent as if looking out across the rock field.

‘This requires thought, not instant decisions. Two days should bring us to my home. I will

. . . consider.’

* * * *

Draped in chameleon cloth the hover transport was indistinguishable from the surrounding dunes. Inside the transport Jharit shuffled a pack of cards and played a game men like him had played in similar situations for many centuries. His wife, Jharilla, slept. Trock was cleaning an antique revolver he had picked up in an auction at the last water station. The bullets he had acquired with it stood in neat soldierly rows on the table before him. Canard Meek was plugged in, trying to pick up information from the net and the high-speed conversations the runcible AI had with its subminds. The call came as a relief to all of them but her; she resented dropping out of that world of perfect logic and pure clarity of thought back into the sweat-stink of the transport.

‘I am Baris,’ said the smiling face from the screen.

Coming straight to the point Jharit said, ‘You have the information?’

‘I have,’ said Baris, his smile only slightly less, ‘and I will be coming to join you for the final chase.’

Jharit and Trock exchanged a look.

‘As you wish. You are paying.’

‘Yes, I am.’ The Merchant’s smile was gone now. ‘Turn on your beacon and I will join you within the hour.’

‘How are you getting out here?’ asked Canard Meek.

‘By AGC of course,’ said Baris, turning to look towards her.

‘All AGCs are registered. The AI will know where you are.’

Baris flicked his fingers at this and his face assumed a look of contempt.

‘No matter. We will continue from your position to . . . our destination, in the transport.’

‘Very well,’ said Canard Meek.

Baris waited for something more to be said, and when nothing was he gave a moue of disappointment. The screen blanked.

The Merchant arrived in a fancy repro Macrojet AGC. He climbed out dressed in sand fatigues and was followed by two women dressed much the same. One of them carried a hunting rifle and ammunition belts. The other carried various unidentifiable packages. Baris struck a pose before them. He was a handsome man. Not one of the four reacted to this foolish display. They knew that anyone who had reached the Merchant’s position was no fool. Jharit and Jharilla looked at him glassy eyed. Trock looked at the rifle. Canard Meek looked briefly at one of the women, took in the imbecilic smile, then back to the Merchant.

‘Shall we be on our way then?’ she said.

Baris shook his head and still smiling he clicked his fingers and walked to the transport.

The two women followed him as obediently as dogs. The four came after: hounds of a different breed.

* * * *

Out of the rock field reared the first of the stone buttes, carved by wind-blown sand to resemble a statue of something manlike sunk up to its chest in the ground. In the cracks and divisions of its head, mica and quartz glittered like insectile eyes. Snow led the way to the base of the butte where slabs of the same stone lay tilted in the ground.

‘Here,’ he said, holding his hand out to a sandwich of slabs. With a grinding, the top slab pivoted to one side to expose a stair dropping a short distance to the floor of a tunnel. ‘Welcome to my home.’

‘You live in a hole in the ground?’ said Hirald with a touch of irony.

‘Come and find out.’

As they climbed down the slab swung back across above them and wall lights clicked on.

Hirald noted that the tunnel led under the butte and had already worked things out by the time they reached the chimney with its rails pinned up the side and the elevator car. They climbed inside the car and sprawled in the seats ringing the inside, looked out of the windows as it hauled them up the chimney cut through the centre of the butte.

‘This must have taken you some time,’ said Hirald.

Snow said, ‘The shaft was already here. About two hundred years ago I first found it.

Others had lived here before me, but in rather primitive conditions. I’ve been improving the place ever since.’

The car arrived at its destination and they walked from it into a complex of moisture-locked rooms at the head of the butte. With a drink in her hand Hirald stood at a polarized panoramic window and looked out across the rock field for a moment, then returned her attention to the room and its contents. In a glass-fronted case along one wall was a display of weapons dating from the twenty-second century and at the centre of this a sword dating from some prespace age. Hirald had to wonder. She turned from the case as Snow returned to the room, dressed now in loose black trousers and a black open-necked shirt. The contrast with his white skin and hair and pink eyes gave him the appearance of someone who might have a taste for blood.

‘There’s some clothing there for you to use if you like, and the shower. No problem with it cycling. There’s plenty of water here,’ he told her. Hirald nodded, placed her drink down on a glass-topped table, and headed back into the rooms Snow had come from. Snow watched her go.

She would shower and change and be little fresher than she already was. He had noted with some puzzlement how she never seemed to smell bad, never seemed dirty.

‘Whose clothing is this?’ Hirald asked from the room beyond.

‘My last wife’s,’ said Snow.

Hirald came to the door with clothing folded over one arm. She looked at him questioningly.

‘She killed herself about a century ago,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘Walked out into the desert and burnt a hole through her head. I found her before the crab-birds and sand sharks.’

‘Why?’

‘She grew old and I did not. She hated it.’

Hirald had no comment to make on this. She went to take her shower, and shortly returned wearing a skin-tight body suit of translucent blue material, which she did not expect to be wearing for long once Snow saw her in it. Snow was occupied though; sat in a swivel chair looking at a screen, he was back in his dust robes, his terrapin mask hanging open. She walked up behind him to see what he was looking at. She saw the hover transport on the sand and the two women pulling a sheet over it. The Merchant Baris she recognized, as she recognized the four hired killers.

‘It would seem Baris has found me,’ said Snow, his tone cold and flat.

‘What defences does this place have?’

‘None, I never felt the need for them.’

‘Are you sure they are coming here?’

‘It seems strange that he has chosen this particular rock field on the whole planet. I’ll have to go and settle this.’

‘I’ll change,’ said Hirald, and hurried back to get her suit. When she returned Snow was gone. When she tried to follow she found the elevator car locked at the bottom of the shaft.

‘Damn you Snow!’ she yelled, slamming her fist against a doorjamb, leaving a fist-shaped dent in the steel. She then walked back a few paces, turned, and ran and leapt into the shaft. The rails pinned to the edge were six metres away. She reached them easily, her hands locking on the polished metal with a thump. Laboriously she began to climb down.

* * * *

Jharit smiled at his wife and nodded to Trock, who stood beyond her strapping on body armour.

This was the one. They would be rich after this. He looked at the narrow-beam laser he held. He would have preferred something with a little more power, but it was essential that the body not be too badly damaged. He turned to Baris as the Merchant sent his two women back to the transport.

‘We’ll go in spread out. He probably has scanning equipment in the rock field and if there’s an ambush we don’t want him to get too many of us at once.’

Baris smiled and thumbed bullets into his rifle, adjusted the scope. Jharit wondered about him, wondered how good he was. He gave the signal; they spread out and entered the rock field.