Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (7 page)

“They can join the Assembly.”

His voice tightened. “That’s not the same.”

“Without full Rhon access to the psibernet they couldn’t
carry out their duties as members of the Triad.” I spoke more softly. “Our
children won’t be Rhon, but they will be empaths, powerful ones. That’s all the
more reason to make sure the Rhon stays strong.” I swallowed. “If Skolia falls
to Ur Qox, then you, me, any children we have—we’ll all become providers.
Permanently.”

The muscle under his eye twitched. “That won’t happen. We
won’t let it happen.”

“No. We won’t.”

He was still blocking me, though not as much as before. I
didn’t push it. I wanted things to be right with him, for it to work out where
my other two tries at marriage had failed. “Rex. I’m sorry.”

“I need to think.” He touched my cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And then he left.

The spectacular sunset had finally cooled into darkness, leaving
Athens and the Arcade lit only by lamps and holos. But I still couldn’t sleep.
The Delos day had no resonance with my internal clock.

I wondered if Rex was in bed. What he would say to me tomorrow,
in the early hours of darkness when humans here started their day. I lay naked
in my big bed, submerged in its frothy blue blankets and silk sheets. Then I
rolled over. Again. And again. My tossing wound the blanket so tight around my
legs I could barely move. I pulled off the covers and turned over again, facing
the console, the air cool on my bare skin.

A button the size of a coin was glowing blue on the console.
I pushed it. “Yes?”

“Soz.” Rex’s voice floated out of the speaker.

My shoulder muscles relaxed. “Heya.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No. I’ve just been lying here.”

“Do you remember Jo Santis? That officer you bunked with
when we went for retraining a few years ago?”

“Vaguely.” Whatever prompted him to ask a question like
that? “Why?”

“She told me something about you. I’ve been thinking about
it.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. What in a spacer’s helmet
had I done that some woman I barely knew would tell Rex and that he would find
thought-provoking after all these years? “What did she say?”

“She told me you sleep naked.” I could almost see his wicked
grin. “That true?”

Ah. I stretched my arms. “Maybe.” I almost added,
Why don’t
you come and find out?
But for some reason those words stayed in my throat.
Instead, I said, “I used to when I was a girl, when it was hot.” We hadn’t even
had fans to cool my father’s house.

“Soz ...”

“Yes?”

“I can deal with the succession thing. It just caught me by
surprise.”

I exhaled. “I should have said something before. I was
stupid.”

“You’re never stupid.” He laughed. “Dense as hell sometimes.
But never stupid.”

“Hey.” I smiled. “I’m still your CO, you know.”

“I’d rather a wife.”

“Me too.” After he retired, he would have to get my family’s
approval before we could marry. But he would pass. Even I could see how well
suited he and I were.

“You want a wife too?” Rex asked.

I laughed. “No. You. Husband.”

His voice softened. “See you tomorrow, Soz.”

“Night.”

After we cut the connection, I still couldn’t sleep. Now it
was because I kept remembering how tightly his pants had fit. I was never going
to get any rest now. Finally I sat up and turned on the lamp over the bed. Soft
light diffused through its blue glass.

The book Tiller had given me lay on the nightstand by the console.
I opened it to the title page.
Verses on a Windowpane. A
pen-and-ink
drawing below the title showed a window frosted with snow and ice. An
indistinct form was visible on the other side of the pane, someone or something
just barely discernible through the icy coating on the glass. The unknown
figure was drawing in the frost, tips of fingers showing against the window.

As I flipped through the book, a tag fell out, a ticket stub
from the Arcade. It marked a page with a poem on it and another drawing of the
frosted window. Whatever had been on the other side of the glass was gone now.
The pane had shattered, its broken glass jutting up in shards that glistened
with ice on their edges. The poem was written in English, but my spinal node
translated it:

A frame of stone. Silvered glass frosted with icy tears.

My fist closes on the mirror; flesh traps ice. Brittle snaps
of breaking tears. I see you now standing behind me: always watching, always
waiting, never satisfied.

I sheathe
my
heart, its bare softness guarded by ice.

“For pugging sakes.” I closed the book. “What kind of poem
is that?” I dropped the book on the console and lay down again. What was Rex
doing right now? Sleeping? Did
be
sleep with his clothes on? Weird
images from the poem mixed in my mind with far more appealing images of Rex
minus his uniform.

Finally I got up and got dressed. Then I went for a walk. It
was either that or take a cold shower.

The crowds on the Arcade had thinned to almost nothing. I
walked through a south corner of Athens, then jogged along a path that crossed
the stubbly fields surrounding the Delos starport. When I reached the first
terminal, I went in on the upper level, where the arrival and departure gates
were located. The place had that latenight feel unique to starports, with their
cool lights that never went off and their chrome and glass halls. I paced along
its artificially bright corridors like a thug in black boots.

Eventually I came to one of the ubiquitous security checkpoints,
a simple arch about two meters tall. Unlike its crude predecessors that
predated the interstellar age, this arch made multiple recordings of anyone
passing under it, everything from magnetic resonance scans to an analysis of
the person’s skeletal structure. The computer attached to it analyzed the data,
and also the behavior of the travelers as they passed through it.

Two guards staffed the checkpoint, a man and a woman who
were checking a line of bored people through the arch. I got into the line for
no other reason than the fact that it was someplace to go. Anything was better
than returning to the inn, where all I could find to do was read weird poems
about sheathing bare hearts, whatever that meant.

As the line moved forward more people queued up behind me,
most of them looking half asleep. When my turn came, I stalked through the arch
and sent the console into shock. Lights flashed and alarms shrilled loud enough
to wake up every person in the entire area.

The guards stepped in front of me. The woman looked at the
bands on my jacket, then spoke to me in English. “I’m sorry, Primary. But we
can’t let you through until we find out the problem.”

I nodded. Although Skolian law gave Jagernauts the right to
carry weapons in boarding areas of spaceports without a permit, Allied law didn’t.
So we compromised; they could take my weapons until I left the area.

I pulled the switchblade out of my boot. As I straightened
up with it, both guards drew their burn-lasers. I handed it to the woman. She
blinked, then reholstered her gun and took my knife. Next I gave her the
thorn-tube I had hidden in the sleeve of my jacket, and the tiny dart thrower
tucked under my belt. She turned the weapons over in her hands as if she didn’t
know what to do with them.

“Is that all?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

The man indicated the metal studs on my jacket. “Those will
still set off the alarms.”

I took off the jacket and handed it to him. Underneath I was
wearing a Regulation Class Six Garment, Upper Body Issue, Type 3; in other
words, a plain black pullover. But when the man glanced at my pants, which also
had metal studs on them, I said, “I not give you those.”

He reddened. “I didn’t mean—of course not.”

I tapped my torso, then my head, then my thighs. “Got
biomech in here.”

He blew out a gust of air. “Well, give it another try and we’ll
see what happens.”

I went around and walked under the arch again. The alarms
were just as loud now as the first time. The guards were very polite while they
scanned me for more weapons. They were very polite when they asked me to go
through three more times and submit to three more scans so that they could
verify it was the metal on my uniform and the biomech web in my body that were
setting off the alarms. Meanwhile the line of people behind me grew longer and
longer.

Finally the woman said, “She’s clean.”

The man nodded. “All right. You can go on through, Primary.”

Someone in the line clapped. I laughed—and half of the waiting
people jumped. They must have seen too many Jagernaut-runs-amok movies.

Once I made it through the checkpoint, though, I had no idea
where to go. So I walked. And walked. Eventually I stopped near a deserted
gate. I stood in front of its door, staring at my reflection in the windowpane
that made up its upper half.

“Want to retire?” I asked the woman staring at me. Perhaps
it was time to let go, to rest, to give myself the peace I needed to clean out
that file of suppressed memories.

Small footsteps sounded nearby. A child’s voice spoke in English.
“Do you have a motorcycle?”

I looked down to see a girl of about five gazing up at me
with her big eyes. I smiled and tried out my English. “What is ‘mutter-psi call’?”

She smiled back. “It’s like a big bicycle.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what a bi-psi call was either. “Have you
mutter-psi call?”

She shook her head. “Just a trike. A red one. The wheel had
a hole in it.”

Wheel? She meant
cycles. Of
course. “I am sorrow
about the hole.”

“It’s okay.” she said. “My daddy fixed it. The tire was all
empty and he made it full.”

Something about what she said was important, but I couldn’t
figure it out. Then I noticed a man hurrying up the hall. He spoke quickly to
the girl. “Kimberly, don’t bother the soldier.”

I smiled. “Is okay. I enjoy.”

He stared at me, and I caught a flash of his thoughts,
surprise that I responded like a normal human being.

Kimberly waved. “Bye.”

“Bye,” I said.

As the girl walked away with her father, it hit me why her
words were important.
It’s okay. It was empty and he made it full.
That
was what was wrong with the Aristo. He wasn’t empty. He didn’t need anyone to
make him full. That cavity, that horrible emptiness
wasn’t there.

After my experience with Tarque I knew too well how an
Aristo’s mind felt. It was a hollow hull. But the Aristo in the bar hadn’t been
a hull. There wasn’t something wrong with him, there was something right.

“He’s not an Aristo,” I told the deserted hallway. “I don’t
care how he looks, how he talks, how he moves. He’s not an Aristo.”

But that made the whole incident even stranger. His guards,
the people in the bar, even my squad mistook him for a Highton. Only a trained
psibernaut who had also been a provider would know he was a fake.

How had he done it? As far as I knew, no exceptions existed
to the rigid Trader caste system. Aristo babies had their DNA verified to prove
it came from Aristo parents. His heredity would have been thoroughly
scrutinized before the Hightons acknowledged him as one of their own. The tests
were done by Eubian hospitals that supposedly couldn’t be corrupted, though I
had my doubts that any humans existed where at least one member of the group
couldn’t be bribed. But it stretched credibility that even a Highton could buy
off three independent verification units.

And why would any of them bother? The verification process
existed because the Aristos all felt the same way: they didn’t want their
bloodlines polluted by non-Aristos. More than any other human race, they acted
collectively rather than as individuals.

None of this made sense. Something strange was going on, and
where Traders were involved I didn’t like strange goings-on. It was time to
find out why they had come to Delos.

I went back to the security check for my weapons and then
left the port. I returned to the inn, but only to get my Jumbler. It fit in a
black holster on my hip, with a strap fastened around my upper thigh for
support. Jumblers had to be big; each contained a particle accelerator. Yet
despite their size they were extraordinarily light, molded from composite materials
that made them easier to lift than far smaller guns made from less expensive
alloys.

My Jumbler carried abitons for fuel, antiparticles of the
biton, the tiny subatomic building block of matter discovered in the
twenty-first century. Bitons, what we liked to call “wimpons,” were the most
weakly interacting particles yet found that coupled to the electromagnetic
field. Their rate of pair-production was miniscule, and like quarks they were
rarely found in isolation. Electrons were made up of bitons—hundreds of
thousands of bitons.

When I hit the Jumbler’s ignition stud, abitons would enter
the accelerator and whip around in a widening spiral until they ejected in a
beam. Abitons annihilated bitons, creating photons, which meant a Jumbler beam
turned electrons into light. If even a mere fraction of the bitons in an
electron annihilated, the electron’s remains became so unstable that it decayed
into other particles.

The collisional cross-section of abitons and bitons was
small enough to let the beam travel short distances in air reasonably well. But
solids were another story. If the beam started to eat electrons in a dense
substance, Coulomb repulsion and the instability of the mutilated electrons
made the material blow itself apart. The gun got its name from the way solids
looked after being shot with it.

I had no intention of shooting the Aristo; regardless of
what people around here seemed to think, Jagernauts weren’t violent by nature.
Besides, killing an Aristo, even a fake one, would achieve nothing except
damage the shaky truce negotiations we periodically tried to conduct with the
Traders. What I wanted was information, and the Jumbler would make an excellent
tool to convince him he should give it to me.

Of course after I left he could call the police. But the
Allieds had no fondness for Aristos. My bet was that if I just asked him a few
questions the police would look the other way.

I headed out into the city, this time up into the hills of
Athens about ten kilometers north of the Arcade. The houses here were mansions
separated by parks that covered more area than the spaceport. An Aristo was far
more likely to have rented one of the mansions than a hotel suite. The problem
was to find which one.

Lamps lit most of the estates, shedding pearly light across
the grounds. The houses were shaped like ships, and made from a green stone
with foamy accents that swirled through the rock. The translucent stone used
for the roofs evoked colors of sky and clouds, and of the delicate fronds of
pale green sealace that drifted in the breakers down by the harbor. The “masts”
of the ships were gold metal spires, each adorned with glimmering disks in hues
of platinum, silver, green, blue, white, the palest rose, and ocean shades of
blue, all chiming together in the stray breezes.