Shadow Man (Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction) (2 page)

"Raven."

There weren't many
people here, in the White Watch House, who would call him by his
childhood nickname. He turned, already smiling, to see Tendlathe
Stane beside him. "Ten. It's good to see you. I'm sorry for
your loss."

"Thanks." Tendlathe
looked at him, refusing to match the smile. "Father wants to talk
to you."

"Why?" Even as the
word slipped out, Warreven regretted it, but knew better than to
apologize.

Tendlathe shrugged. "I
wouldn't know," he said, and tilted his head toward the
off-worlder in unspoken warning.

Warreven sighed.
Everyone knew that Tendlathe opposed the pharmaceuticals'
influence, but there was no point in being actively rude. He nodded
to the woman. "If you'll excuse me, mirrim?"

"Of course," Cyma
said, backing away, and sounded relieved to be clear of their
conversation.

"So what does he
want?" Warreven asked, and followed Tendlathe along the length of
the gallery toward the stairs.

"I don't really
know," Tendlathe answered. "He just said he wanted to be sure to
talk to you before you left."

Warreven made a sour
face. A summons like that from the Most Important Man could mean
almost anything, from a trade case--and the advocacy group was
handling half a dozen right now, in both the off-world and the
traditional courts--to some business between Stane and Stiller. He
had acted as a go-between for Temelathe before.... He shook the
thought away. There was no point in speculating; Temelathe would tell
him soon enough.

Now that the main part
of the ceremony was over,
faitou
s
had appeared in the main hall, carrying trays of food and braided
feel-good and jugs of sweetrum. Warreven stopped to snag a cup of
sweetrum from a passing woman, and Tendlathe looked over his
shoulder, showing teeth in a not entirely friendly smile.

"Think you'll need
that?"

"You tell me,"
Warreven answered, and this time Tendlathe did laugh.

"I told you, I don't
know what he wants. But--" He stopped abruptly, tried again. "Look,
Raven, I haven't seen you in ages. Can we get together
after this? We can talk properly then, not like here."

Warreven hesitated.
There were a lot of reasons he hadn't seen much of Tendlathe over
the past eight or nine years. They had been at the Concord-sponsored
boarding school in Rivers-edge together, and they had spent holidays
together at Temelathe's
mesnie
outside Gedesrede, along with half a dozen other children of
Important Men and Women. They had come of different clans and
Watches--collected, Warreven had realized very early, to improve
Temelathe's position as Speaker of the Watch Council--but for some
reason Temelathe had taken a liking to him. When he had turned
eighteen--human years, bioyears, not the longer calendar
years--Temelathe had proposed a marriage between him and Tendlathe.
It had been contingent on a change of Warreven's legal gender, of
course: a great honor, but an even greater sacrifice, given the
patrilineal structure of both his own and Temelathe's
mesnie
s.
Luckily, Tendlathe had been equally unenthusiastic about the
proposal, and it had been relatively easy to decline. Though if he
had not been the one to become the wife, Warreven admitted, it would
have been a tempting offer. But now there was too much between them,
not just politics, but the marriage that hadn't happened as well as
the one that had to make it simple to retrieve the old ease. He had
waited too long, and Tendlathe looked away.

"It's not that
important."

"What do you want,
Ten?"

Tendlathe looked back
at him. They were much of a size, both thin and slight, so similar in
looks and coloring that when they were children strangers had usually
assumed they were siblings, to their mutual disdain. Tendlathe had
grown his beard as soon as he was able, but the narrow dark line,
coupled with the long hair pulled back into a severe braid only
seemed to emphasize the matching length of chin. "It's Aldess,"
he said at last. "I want to talk to someone who deals with the
off-worlders regularly."

So Aldess was thinking
of going off-world for help with her next pregnancy, Warreven
thought. It made sense: the Concord Worlds had better technology
anyway, and they were used to dealing with these complications. He
said, "All right, but I don't know what I can tell you. When?"

"After this is over,"
Tendlathe said. "Come by the house--our house, not here--I'll
give you dinner, if you'd like."

"You don't have to
feed me," Warreven said. "Besides, I have plans." Something
flickered in Tendlathe's eyes, disappointment, maybe, or annoyance,
and Warreven couldn't quite repress a sense of satisfaction. And
that, he knew, was ridiculous: he and Tendlathe had defined their
relationship years before, and they had both ruled out anything more
than friendship. He grinned, at himself this time, and said, "I'll
come by at the twentieth hour?"

Tendlathe nodded. They
had reached the dais then, and he stopped a calculated distance from
the Most Important Man. Before he could say anything, however,
Temelathe turned to face them, waved one big hand in welcome.

"Raven! Come up
here." He turned to the man at his side, an off-worlder in the
severely cut uniform of one of the Big Six. "This is Warreven...
Stiller, the one I told you about. The one who might have been my
daughter-in-law."

Out of the corner of
his eye, Warreven saw Tendlathe freeze for a fraction of a second,
his handsome, bony face going absolutely still, and then he turned on
his heel and stalked back through the crowd, heading toward the table
where Aldess was holding court. Warreven allowed himself a sour smile
and stepped up onto the dais. "That was a long time ago, my father.
I decided against it, and so did Tendlathe. I remain a man, thank
you." He saw the off-worlder looking at him, saw the familiar
movement of his eyes checking the shape of hips and shoulders and
chest, looking for the indicators of true gender. "Legally, at any
rate, which is what matters."

The off-worlder's
eyes snapped away, fixing on something in the distance, over
Temelathe's shoulder, and Warreven was pleased to see a faint color
rising under the man's fair skin. If he'd been on Hara long
enough to be doing business with the Most Important Man, he'd been
there long enough to know better than to be so obvious about it.
Harans might actually have the same five sexes as any other human
beings, but law and custom admitted only two.

"And in the process,"
Temelathe said, "you missed a chance to serve your clan and Watch.
But, no matter." He gestured again, drawing Warreven closer. "I
want to introduce you to Ser Wile Kolbjorn, of Kerendach. The two of
you may be doing business together."

Kolbjorn held out his
hand, the off-world greeting, and Warreven took it warily. He knew
Kerendach, of course, any Stiller did: Kerendach was the largest of
the Big Six, held most of Stiller's harvest contracts. They paid
the clan in metal and in concord dollars for the various products it
gathered from land and sea; if anyone thought Kerendach could pay
more, they were careful not to say it. Kerendach had Temelathe's
backing, and that meant there was no point in negotiating. Though why
Temelathe thinks I'll be doing business with them, Warreven
thought, I don't know. Unless they've been dabbling in trade.
That was more than likely--the Big Six didn't need the extra
income, or the hassles with their own agencies, IDCA, the
Interstellar Disease Control Agency, chief among them, that trade
inevitably caused, but it was equally inevitable that low-paid clerks
and shipping techs would take their chances at that game. "Mir
Kolbjorn," he said, and braced himself for whatever the approach
would be.

To his surprise,
however, Kolbjorn merely nodded, releasing his hand, and looked from
him to Temelathe. "A pleasure meeting you, Mir Warreven. I'll
look forward to further acquaintance. Mir Temelathe, thank you.
Please give my best wishes to your daughter-in-law." His eyes
flickered a little at that, darting toward Warreven, but he
controlled himself instantly and turned away.

Warreven watched him
go, tilted his head to one side. "And what was that all about, my
father?"

Temelathe laughed, and
flung a heavy arm across the other's shoulders. "Insurance, my
son, for both of you. Trade's a nasty business, you should have
more strings to your bow."

"If you say so,"
Warreven murmured, not bothering to hide his skepticism. Temelathe
laughed again, and drew him down from the dais with him.

Fem: (Concord) human
being possessing testes, XY chromosomes, some aspects of female
genitalia but not possessing ovaries; %e, %er, %er, %erself

Mhyre Tatian

The room was artificially lit,
and dim, the curtains and sunscreens drawn tight against the day's
fading light. The environ-mental system rumbled in the next room,
churning cooled air into the three rooms of the apartment, and the
apartment's current owner listened with half an ear, judging the
output. Nothing on Hara was ever quite cool enough--he had been born
on one cold planet, had spent his childhood and adolescence on
another--and he had reconfigured the room plan so that he slept next
to the main cooling vent. It was noisy, but it meant that he could
sleep--and it also meant that the current main room, which had been
intended as the bedroom, was warmer than he liked. He looked around
the table, wondering if he could afford to turn the system down
another notch. His employer, New Antioch Pharmaceutical Design, was
reasonably generous with its housing allowance, but cooling costs
were always astronomical this time of year. Arsidy Shraga sat
opposite him, frowning over his set-up pad, lights flickering under
his fingers as he tried out three different configurations in quick
succession. He looked hot and bothered, but then, he was losing this
game, and losing badly. Eshe Isabon, on the other hand, was looking
cooler than ever, smiling faintly as he studied the board. %e met his
gaze, and %er smile widened for an instant, before %e shifted the
next block of pieces into position. Shraga threw up his hands at that
and blanked his pad.

"Shit, that finishes
me. I'm out."

"Tatian?" Isabon
looked at him, eyebrows lifting.

Mhyre Tatian reached
for the dice arrayed on the tabletop in front of him, palmed them
without taking his eyes from the pattern of pieces, and selected two
of the ten-sided dice. "I'll go again. Once."

Isabon smiled more
openly. Shraga said, "Remember, the red one's the tens."

Tatian acknowledged
that with a grin--among friends, it was almost acceptable to cheat a
little at queens-road--and rolled the dice. The first, the brown,
the single digits, bounced off Shraga's random-number box and came
up five. The red rolled farther, came to a stop above the cluster of
blue lights that marked his own home camp, and showed a two.

"Oh, bad luck,"
Isabon said, without sympathy.

Tatian made a show of
studying the board, but he had needed at least forty to stay in the
game. "I'm out."

Isabon looking
sideways, fingers busy on %er wrist pad as %e called up the bets and
side bets. "You owe me ten-point-two cd, Tatya. Shraga, you owe me
nineteen-nine, and you might as well make it twenty."

"Like hell," Shraga
answered, his fingers busy on his own pad. "Nineteen-nine is
right--or I'll make it fifteen in metal."

Tatian gave a rather
sour laugh at that--he spent too much of his time making and
assessing similar offers; Hara's indigenes were desperate for
metal--and Isabon shook %er head slowly.

"No,
nineteen-nine--and in dollars, thank you."

"Never play
queens-road with a fem," Shraga said, with mock bitterness, and
reached into his pocket for his card.

"Never gamble with a
fem," Isabon corrected amiably, and mated his card to %er own.
Lights flashed as the transfer went through, and Isabon freed the
cards, offering Shraga's to him with a flourish. "Thank you, ser.
And yours, Tatya?"

"Ten-two, you said."
Tatian reached for his own card, pressed his thumb against the
veri-lock, and quickly entered the transaction. Isabon took it and
returned it a moment later with the green light flashing: transfer
complete. Tatian switched it off and stuck it back into his pocket.
"Anyone want anything else to drink?"

"I'll take another
beer," Shraga said promptly, and Tatian suppressed a sigh.
Beer--real beer, not the narcotic-spiked, fermented grain drink the
indigenes called beer--was imported from off-world and
correspondingly expensive. Still, there was no going back on the
offer, and he went on into the apartment's narrow kitchen.

"Isa?"

"Whatever I had
before."

"All right." Tatian
rummaged in the cold box, brought out three frosted bottles, Shraga's
beer and a bottle apiece of quatra for him and Isabon. Quatra was a
local drink, one part sweetrum to three parts ruby melon juice; like
all the local liquors, sweetrum was strong and rough, and not very
consistent, but the sweetmelon juice cut the worst of the flavor.
After a moment's searching, he found a tray and filled a shallow
bowl with the sour-sweet mixed-fruit relish. He added his last
package of flatbread and carried the precariously balanced cargo out
into the other room, setting it on the table beside the playing
board.

"Did you hear the
news? Aldess Donavie had another miscarriage. Today's the
whatever-they-call-it, the ceremony."

Shraga winced visibly,
and Tatian remembered too late that the other man had a partner and
child at home on Cassandra. The same mutation that had produced the
five sexes had increased the incidence of miscarriage; almost anyone
who had successfully had a child would have lost another early in
pregnancy.