DarkShip Thieves (29 page)

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at her serene assumption that Kit and I were going to be a flying—and life—team. I found myself blurting out, "I can. I mean . . . I can do the maps."

She'd flashed me a huge smile, and patted me again. "I knew how it would be from the moment you two came in. I know my brother. He'll do better with you."

I don't want to give the impression that Kath was a bad pilot. She did drive through the traffic in downtown Eden as ably as Kit did, and she managed not to hit anything even while gesturing wildly. It was just that as far as Katherine Denovo was concerned, there were far more important things in life than staying on the correct path at every minute. Things like jumping to conclusions about one's brother's love life, for instance.

Not that she was alone in that. Kit's mother, Tania Denovo, had come flying in, two weeks after Kath. She started dropping her clothes off at the door, just like Kit did—making me realize where Kit got it—and smiled vaguely at her husband as he picked them up and tried to introduce me.

"I heard at the center. Isn't that just like Kit? He always was eccentric. Only an Earther would do for him."

Though this serene assumption that I was engaged to Kit in all but announced fact disturbed me a little, I did find myself liking all three women in the family. Anne was the quiet one, her silences, like Kit's, filled with observation, sometimes interrupted with the one word that either changed the tenor of the conversation or caused everyone to erupt into laughter. Exuberant, talkative Kath was always ready to jump into the conversation and say what she thought of anything and everything—even when she manifestly knew nothing about it. And then there was Tania—who was like a combination of her daughters. Her conversational gambits could take you completely by surprise, until your realized she had jumped two or three points ahead in the conversation, having disposed of all other points in her mind.

All three of them seemed determined to find me clothes. Daring clothes, interesting clothes and demure clothes. If I let Kath have her way, I'd dress like a Cat, and my protests met with an assurance that "Kit will like it."

At any rate, their absolute certainty that Kit would come home—that he was even now speeding home to us did me good and sustained me when he was a day late. Two days and I started feeling frantic. Three days and the only thing that kept me what could pass for sane—under a dim light and if one squinted—was that I had the deposition at the end of the week.

By the day of the deposition, I was frantic. I concentrated on fear of the process rather than on counting the minutes, the hours, the days that Kit was late.

The deposition was to take place at the judicial center. You will ask what the judicial center was doing in a place that had no laws. Well at least that's what I asked. Kath had looked at me as if I were completely insane. "Well . . . we don't have written laws, but we do have customary laws. Laws don't need to be written or come from a central body to apply." And when I admitted that I supposed it was true, she'd shrugged. "The center is where they have jury trials. And where depositions like this take place."

"Jury?" I said.

"Well, you can have twelve people weigh in on your question, when you can't prove it one way or the other. They ask you questions and then they state the opinions and their reasons. This is published, and usually is enough to squelch bad opinion." She frowned. "If the judgement is favorable to you, that is. We tried to convince Kit to do a jury trial a year ago, but he said they'd hang him, which is weird, because they really couldn't. Well, not without paying a serious bloodgeld fine. He said he'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six, but that he still had no intention of being hanged." She'd looked at me, her blue cat eyes wide and puzzled. "I think my brother reads too much."

We were at breakfast and she was drinking quantities of clear, sickeningly sweet bug juice, the main caffeine vehicle around these parts. I was drinking tea because Doc Bartolomeu had been sending over packets of the finest Oolong. I was fairly sure it was synthed, not grown, but I couldn't care less. The idea of drinking a liquid that came from the poop of bioed bugs made me shudder, and I didn't care how hygienic they told me it was.

I understood Kit's joke—at least vaguely—as a reference to twentieth century laws against gun ownership, and had to agree with Kath that the man read too much. "I suppose," I said. "That over the last few years Kit hasn't had the opportunity for a rousing social life."

"Oh, he never had a real social life," Anne said, sitting down. "He's a lot like me. He prefers a few friends, but trustworthy."

And Tania had jumped in, as she sat down and poured herself bug juice, "Oh, not to say that this whole thing hasn't been a nuisance. More than a nuisance, if what Jean tells me about Kit being wounded is true, but don't go imagining that Kit has been some sort of a victim. I'm sure that the general silence around him has annoyed him, but very little more. We used to say the whole world could implode or disappear and Kit would be perfectly happy provided the music center and his violin were left untouched. He'd never even notice we were missing."

I thought of the gems with children's birthday parties, and of the thoughts of them in his mind, when I'd shared it. I didn't say anything. I was willing to share part of his memories only because it could lift a threat from his head. But it was none of my business to tell his adoptive family how loved and cherished they were. At any rate, I was sure for all their protests, they already knew.

The judicial center looked like a Greek temple from the outside, with massive columns arrayed in portico, just outside an outsized door. Over the door was something in Greek, a language I didn't read. Beside the door, doc Bartolomeu was waiting, dressed all in black, carrying his black case and looking very solemn.

"There wont' be a jury for this," he'd say. "Because the facts are incontrovertible. You got it directly from his mind and—if the hypnotics can prevent you from lying, there is no way the evidence can be vitiated. Everyone knows that you can't lie in mind link, which is why one normally only does it with one's spouse."

He seemed to know where we were going, and I let him lead me along huge, echoing hallways. At the end of the final hallway there was a double door, which led to a massive amphitheater. Every seat was taken, and most of them seemed to be taken by people wearing Cat or Nav uniforms. I also recognized quite a few members of my own profession.

As doc took me to the platform at the end of the amphitheater, he said, "It took this long to setup because we needed to advertise it. Though the recording will be available, it is more effective if as many people as possible witness it.

On the platform was a chair—much like an Earth armchair. I sat in it, feeling demure and little-girlish, not least because the thing had been designed for a large person and, at five feet nothing, I must look like a child in it. I was wearing a white silk dress that covered my knees, and for reasons known only to her, Kath had insisted I tie my hair back and wear pearl earrings.

The Doc stood facing the people and explained he was going to inject me and with which drugs, inviting them to research the effects. And then that he was going to ask about the facts that I'd got from Cat Christopher Klaavil's mind.

And then he'd touched an injector to my neck.

Of the various drugs I've tried—those given to me by doctors and psychiatrists, those administered by peace keepers trying to keep me quiet, and those I've sought out for myself, Eden hypnotics are the worst—just above Morpheus on the list, and only because Morpheus makes me sleep for hours and I don't like being unconscious and at people's mercy.

What Doctor Bartolomeu called judicial-grade hypnotics didn't make me sleep. After the first moment of blankness, my mind tiptoed in, hesitantly, like a child entering a suspicious house. I could hear and—once my vision did a sort of flip flop thing, where fog covered the room and my eyes seemed to be trying to blink nictating eyelids which I didn't have—see. I could feel my hands, clasped on the arms of the chair, my legs, demurely crossed, the silk of the dress against my legs. What I couldn't do was control what came out of my mouth.

I didn't realize how complete my lack of control was till after the doctor had introduced me, by explaining that I was an Earth native, rescued by Cat Christopher Klaavil in the energy trees. I guessed he was afraid of having to ask me the question of how I'd ended up aboard the Cathouse, because I'd blurt out that Kit had gone all the way to Circum to rescue me. And that would probably get most of Eden furious at him for endangering them. And perhaps rightly.

You see, I wasn't fully aware of how these hearings were held. I knew the Doc would ask me questions. What I didn't know was that the audience got so much participation.

After the introduction and stating that he thought I might have some facts that would weigh on the death of Navigator Jane Klaavil, the doctor turned to me, but before he could ask any questions, someone in the audience—a sharp, shrill voice—asked how I could know that, since I wasn't even there at the time, was I?

The doctor phrased it more coherently, as, "Please, state for the citizens of Eden how you came to know the circumstances of Jane Klaavil's death."

I had the time of an hesitation, but it was only a moment, and then I heard words pour out of my mouth. I heard myself telling of the attack on Kit in the half-g gardens, of my violent response to it, of more or less dragging the fast-bleeding Kit to the flyer, of needing mind contact to be able to get him help.

Oh, there were gasps. Plenty of them. Just as I said that I would have liked to kill Joseph but Kit told me not, I realized that on the part of the amphitheater facing me, on the second row of seats at my eye level, sat Joseph Klaavil, between a man and a woman who, by their look, were his mother and Father. The woman looked like an aged version of the little blonde in the holos. But my voice ground on, with neither compunction nor pain, even as my brain registered recognition.

I explained the mind communication, or at least said I had it with Kit, and what it felt like, and then stopped. That was the question they'd asked. How I'd come to have knowledge of the circumstances of her death, and not what those circumstances had been.

"Yeah, but—" a voice said, from the audience.

"Please, Nav, not now," Doc Bartolomeu's voice said, smoothly. "You may ask questions later. For now, will Patrician Sinistra please describe Jane Klaavil's death as experienced through Cat Christopher Kaavil's mind?"

I did. I started with her going out for what she said was a routine repair. Once outside, she'd removed her helmet, and then very quickly stripped off her suit.

She was mind-linked with Kit the whole time and as soon as he realized what she was doing, he had searched frantically for his suit. My mind and my voice felt all this as if it had happened to me, as though I had seen a much beloved spouse commit suicide, as if I'd felt her death in my mind.

Her suit had clung to the ship, due to the non-magnetic attraction to the ceramite. Her body—grotesque, desiccated, unrecognizable, had floated away in the vastness of space. She'd hidden Kit's suit. Kit had not found it till much later, and then he'd brought hers inside—the only thing left after her self destruction.

When I finished speaking, I was wracked with sobs and my face was soaked with the echo of the tears he'd cried then. I heard something much like a gasp from my right, and would have turned to look in that direction, only my body wasn't so much out of my control as such an unimportant thing that it was beyond me to figure out how to move it. Still, I was aware of someone moving in my far-right periphery vision and even at that distance, that blurrily, I noted calico hair and unruly calico beard.

Someone from the audience asked about the reason for the quarrel. Before Doc could either ask me the question or say I didn't know, Kit's voice cut in, clear, familiar, at once immensely welcome—because if he was talking it meant he was here, and if he was here, he hadn't died in the powertrees—and terrifying, because I wasn't sure what he'd think of my meddling in his private life. I wasn't sure what he'd think of this at all. All I knew for certain was his voice, politely crispy, "Please," he said. "You've already heard more than I would have liked to share. May I have some privacy, please?"

More than he would have liked already. I felt my fingers clench tight on the leather upholstery of the arm chair and I missed whatever the person in the audience said.

Kit made one of those sounds he made—half snort, half sigh—when someone exasperated him. "The general reason for it I think was the fact that our marriage had proven sterile and of a form of sterility not likely to be solved in a laboratory. Jane . . ." He paused and drew a deep breath, like people will do when a sore spot is touched. "My wife wanted children." A pause. "Does that satisfy your curiosity or do you wish to give me hypnotics too?"

I listened and was glad my expression couldn't change, because my heart clenched in my chest at the thought that the stupid idiot in the audience would take Kit up on that offer. And then they would find out what Kit was. But the grumbled mutter from the nosy spectator clearly meant that no more explanation was needed.

And then the questioner who'd spoken first, asking me how I'd come to have mind contact with Cat Klaavil, asked, "Yeah, but how come she ended up in the powertrees? And how come people started disappearing afterwards? And the Earthworms started hunting us?"

"I hardly think this is any—" Kit said.

"It is a pertinent, if confused question," the doctor said. Turning to me he asked, "How did you come to find yourself in the powertrees and at the mercy of Cat Klaavil?"

I wasn't sure what would come out of my mouth till it came, and then was relieved to hear the succinct answer, "there was a revolt aboard my father's space cruiser. His guards or former guards were chasing me. They told lies about me to Circum, so I couldn't go there. So I fled to the powertrees, where I crashed into Cat Klaavil's ship."