Shadow Man (Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction) (38 page)

He sounded both sleepy
and annoyed; Tatian allowed himself a smile, knowing the cameras were
off, and said, "It's Mhyre Tatian. Sorry to wake you, but it's
important."

"Hang on," Mats
said, but he already sounded more awake. "All right. What's up?"

"I'm not going to
be in today at all, and maybe not tomorrow," Tatian said. "Warreven's
been attacked by the ghost ranas, and I'm at 3er
place--3e called me from
the hospital, asked me to get an off-world doctor for 3im
and the herm 3e was with."

"God and the
spirits." That was Derebought's voice, quickly smothered.

Mats said, "Derry's
right, boss, we've already been warned off local politics."

"I know." Tatian
bit back his own annoyance. "That's why I'm calling you. I'm
on leave, as of yesterday. Fix it in the records, will you? I don't
have access from here. You don't know where I am, or what my plans
were. You don't know anything about me playing politics, or
anything about me and Warreven."

"All right," Mats
said, and Derebought broke in.

"Do you want me to
let Serram Masani know what's happened?"

Tatian hesitated, then
nodded, forgetting for an instant that the screen was blank both
ways. "Yes," he said, "but as discreetly as you can. Don't
use the port lines unless you have to."

"All right." He
heard Derebought's intake of breath as she considered her next
words. "Are you sure this is..." Her voice trailed off again as
she failed to find suitably diplomatic phrasing.

Tatian finished it for
her. "Smart? No. That's why I'm clearing out of day-to-day
business for now. I want NAPD to have deniability."

"You think it's
that bad?" Derebought asked, and he could almost hear the shake of
her head. "Sorry, you wouldn't be doing this if you didn't."

"No." Tatian took a
deep breath.

"How can we contact
you?" Mats asked. "This number?"

"Try it," Tatian
said. "This is Warreven's residence, so I don't know how long
I'll be here. But I'll keep in touch myself. Go ahead and get as
much of the surplus in from the
mesnie
s
as you can--you can handle payments, Derry--and by the time you're
ready to ship, this should have blown over."

"All right,"
Derebought said. "Be careful."

"I will be," Tatian
answered, and cut the connection. He stood for a moment, staring at
the screen without really seeing the shut-down codes. This wasn't
smart, that he did know; he was getting much too deeply involved in
Hara's politics, and if he had any sense at all, he'd leave
Warreven asleep, tell Jaans Oddyny he wouldn't take care of any
more payments, and pull himself and NAPD well clear of the whole
situation. He had the contracts in hand, signed and sealed, and
Stiller was bound to honor them. That should be enough for anyone. He
shook his head then, turned away from the now-dark center--just the
time display glowing green in the upper corner of the multiple
displays. It was too late for that now, he was already committed--and
besides, he admitted silently, he didn't want to abandon Warreven.
Ȝe was the only
reasonable person--reasonable indigene, anyway--he'd met on this
unreasonable planet. He owed 3im
what support he could give.

Agede, the Doorkeeper:
(Hara) one of the seven spirits who mediates between God and Man;
Agede's domain is change, death, birth, and healing.

11

Warreven

When he woke again, it was
afternoon, the light that filtered in through the shutters cool and
indirect. He lay still for a few minutes, hoping that if he didn't
move he could drop back into sleep, but the pain in his neck and down
his chest and ribs was too much to be ignored. He had a headache,
too, radiating from the bruised eye and socket to stab both temples
and down to the point of his jaw. Turning his head to check the
chronometer sent weird streaks of light across his vision, pain
flaring with them, and he rolled instead onto his side--setting off
more aches, but not as sharply painful--so that he faced the glowing
box. It read eighteen-ten; he swore, thinking of Haliday, and crawled
out of bed.

He was able to dress
himself, barely, struggled into loose trousers and a tunic that
opened from neck to hem, but his hair defeated him. It still hurt too
much to raise his arms above his head, hurt even worse when he tried
to twist the long strands into a braid, and in the end he left the
mass of it loose and stumbled toward the kitchen to get more
doutfire. Tatian had left the box open on the counter, and Warreven
carefully extracted four more of the fragile rolls. Two shattered
under his touch; he sighed and licked his finger, dabbed up the
shards, letting the thin, bitter fragments dissolve on his tongue.

"How are you
feeling?" Tatian was standing in the doorway, arms braced against
the walls to either side.

"Like somebody hit
me," Warreven answered, and was rewarded by one of Tatian's quick
grins.

"I wonder why?"

Warreven smiled back,
cautiously, newly aware of bruises, and reached into another cabinet
for a bottle of sweetrum. He uncorked it, drank, flinching as the
liquor hit the cuts on his lip. The raw sugar taste of it seemed to
cling to his back teeth, but it took away the bitterness of the
doutfire. "Maybe because somebody did. Has Malemayn called, have
you heard anything about Hal?"

"He called around
noon," Tatian answered. "Oddyny'd been over to look at 3im.
He said there hadn't been any change, that he'd call if there
was. He left a number at the hospital, though, if you want to try
that."

Warreven took another
swallow of the sweetrum, started to nod, and felt the muscles of his
neck tighten painfully. "Yes--it's not that I don't trust you,
I just want to talk to him myself."

"I figured," Tatian
said, and stepped back out of the doorway.

Warreven slipped past
him, still carrying the bottle of sweetrum, vaguely surprised that
the off-worlder's presence was so reassuring. Maybe it was the very
matter-of-fact way that he'd stepped in, the ordinary, reasonable
common sense of it all--which hardly seemed to be common anymore.
The media center was lit, both screens turned to news channels, and
Tatian cleared his throat.

"You seem to have
made the narrowcasts."

"Me?" Warreven
looked at the screens. Both showed the Harbor Market, crowded not
with merchants but with the same sort of crowd that had been
dispersed the day before. Even the rana band was back, half a dozen
drummers now, and a pair of flute players, perched on a platform that
looked higher and less stable than die previous day's stage. People
were dancing--any time there was drumming, people would dance--but
beyond them crates and spent fuel cells and all the other debris that
collected on the docks had been dragged into a crude barricade.
Tough-looking dockers--and not just dockers, Warreven realized, but
men and women in ordinary clothes, with only the multicolored rana
ribbons to mark them as something different--leaned against it,
blocking all access to the Gran'quai.

"Officially,"
Tatian said, "they're continuing yesterday's protest against
the ghost ranas. But the main thrust of what they're saving is, if
you and Haliday aren't safe, no one is."

"Wonderful,"
Warreven said, and took another swallow of the sweetrum. The pain was
starting to ease, even the headache, and the lights were beginning to
show faint, rainbowed haloes. It was going to be difficult to balance
comfort and sobriety.

"The code's there,"
Tatian said, and pointed to the table beside the media center. He had
found the remote as well, Warreven saw, and stopped to collect it,
then turned to the couch, shoving aside the quilts Tatian had left
neatly piled there. He sat down, setting the bottle beside him, and
ran stiff fingers over the remote's control surfaces, bringing up
the main screen and then the new codes. The menus flickered past, a
montage of text and symbol, bringing him first into the hospital's
main system, and then into a secondary paging system. He entered the
last segment of Malemayn's codes, and waited. The communications
screen went blank, except for a time display; in the screen beside
it, the drummers moved in frantic rhythm, following a chanter's
gestures. His shadow fell across the heads of the dancing crowd,
stretched to the edge of the empty Market. As he turned, jeering, to
the camera, Warreven could see the Trickster's mark vivid on his
cheek.

"Raven?" The
communications screen cleared with the word, and Malemayn's face
appeared at its center. Warreven could see white walls behind him,
and the occasional out-of-focus figure of a nurse or doctor,
elongated shapes in pale green: still calling from a public cubicle,
he thought, which meant Haliday wasn't well enough to have a
private room. Malemayn sounded worn out, and the stubble was dark on
his cheeks. Warreven touched his own face, feeling the coarse hairs
starting, and wondered if he would be able to shave himself in a few
days, once the swelling went down.

"How's Hal?" he
asked.

"Stable," Malemayn
answered. "No change from what I told Tatian. That off-world
doctor, Oddyny, she was here again, and she says he, 3e
should be moved over to the Starport as soon as 3e's
able, which should be in a day or two. Ȝe's
still unconscious, but Oddyny says not to worry. They're keeping
3im under to let the
treatments work."

Warreven allowed
himself a long sigh of relief. He hadn't realized, until that
instant, just how frightened he had been. "So 3e'll
be all right?"

Malemayn nodded. "Oddyny
says it's going to take a month or so, but 3e'll
be fine. How are you?"

"Sore," Warreven
said, and Malemayn laughed.

"You look like death.
No, you look like the Doorkeeper."

Warreven looked
sideways, found his reflection in the glass of the nearest window.
With the black bandage covering one eye, he did look a little like
the popular drawings of Agede the Doorkeeper, the spirit of death and
birth and change. "Thanks," he said sourly, and did not reach for
the sweetrum. Agede was always drawn with a cane and a bottle; there
was no need to complete the resemblance.

"The tech said you
should be sure and reschedule your appointment, have your eye looked
at sometime tomorrow."

"Reschedule?"
Warreven scowled at the invisible camera.

"They wanted to see
you this afternoon," Malemayn said. "I mentioned it to Tatian,
but he thought--we both thought--it was better to let you sleep.
The tech said you should be sure and come in tomorrow, though."

Warreven nodded, not
looking at the off-worlder. He wasn't entirely sure he liked
Tatian's looking after him, wasn't sure he entirely disliked it,
either. But then, it had been Malemayn's decision, too.

"I'm going to stay
for another hour or so," Malemayn went on. "Oddyny said she'd
be back to take another look at Hal, and she said she'd have time
to give me an update then. And then I'm going home and get some
sleep."

"What about Hal?"
Warreven asked, a little too sharply. The old fears rose in his mind:
Haliday left alone, unconscious, the doctors deciding to castrate, or
simply not to save, 3er
ambiguous body, all because there was no one there to protest--

"Relax," Malemayn
said. "I made it very clear, and Dr. Jaans was with me, that Hal's
to be treated like they'd treat an off- worlder. I left a couple
hundred megs with the ward nurse, too."

Warreven nodded,
appeased. "That ought to be enough."

"I'll pay more if I
have to," Malemayn said.

"Let me know what I
can put into the pot," Warreven said.

Malemayn shook his
head. "We'll adjust this through the partnership. Once this is
all over. Æ, Raven, I don't know how we're going to keep
working, with Hal in the hospital and you supposed to be being
seraaliste
--"

He broke off, shaking
his head again, this time in apology, and Warreven looked away,
embarrassed. "I know, Mal, I'm sorry. For what it's worth, it
wasn't my idea."

"And this wasn't
Haliday's either," Malemayn said. "I know." He sighed, looked
down at something beneath the camera's line of sight. "Look, I've
got to go. I'll call you if there's any change, any news at all,
but if you don't hear from me, everything's fine."

Warreven nodded again.
"Give Hal my love," he said, softly, even though he knew Haliday
couldn't hear the message yet. Malemayn nodded, and broke the
connection.

"I hope you don't
mind my not waking you," Tatian said, after a moment. "I went in
and looked, but you were pretty well out of it."

In the main screen, a
shay filled with
mosstaas
pulled into the Market, and Warreven caught his breath before he
realized it was a clip from the day before. "It's all right,"
he said, still watching the screen. "I think sleep was probably the
best thing for me."

"That's what I
thought," Tatian agreed.

The image in the screen
changed again, returning to the live feed. Warreven frowned, trying
to figure out where the cameras were stationed--on the Embankment,
maybe, or on the Customs House balcony--and the off-worlder cleared
his throat.

"Look, it's maybe
none of my business, but you might want to think of moving Haliday
now. If 3e's well
enough, of course."

" Æ." Warreven
tipped his head to one side, felt the muscles tighten, but the pain
was distant now, deadened by the sweetrum and the doutfire.

"You know your planet
better than I do," Tatian said, his voice abruptly formal. "I'm
not presuming to tell you your business. But this doesn't look good
to me." He gestured to the screen.