Strider's Galaxy (19 page)

He was right: the polar landscape was impressive. From space it had looked like a featureless desert, and even the Pockets had been unable to show it from the angle at which they were seeing it now. There were sharp-edged mountains of ice, fairy arches, deep crevasses, rolled hummocks of snow, eddies of wind raising minor, short-lived blizzards. She snuggled closer to the bot, and his grip tightened compensatorily. She felt utterly safe.

"Tell me, Pinocchio, are you male or female?"

"Neither. And you?"

The question startled her. Of course she was female. Back in decontamination he'd seen her more naked than anyone had seen her before. But she sensed from the way in which he'd spoken the question that he was entirely serious.

"I don't know," she said at last. "No—that's a lie. I do. For a long time I thought I was maybe a man locked up inside a woman's body, and I wanted more than anything else to escape from it. If I'd had enough money I'd probably have had an Artif transfer and become a man. But I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't."

"Why?"

"Because I'm not male. I'm female. It's as simple as that. But . . ."

"But your sexual attraction is towards women, and sometimes you fall in love with them." The bot was speaking as quietly as he could. The slidecraft was moving at no great pace, but still the air was whipping past their ears.

"Yes," she said.

"You should never have been aboard the
Santa Maria
, you know. With the exception of Strider, the personnel were in part selected for their fertility, which involves the willingness to act in what could be best described as a fertile fashion."

"I know," said Strauss-Giolitto. "I did a lot of lying to get selected for the mission. I invented a most sensational set of past liaisons. Some of my male friends invented relationships on my behalf." She breathed deeply. "I wanted so much to be a part of this mission that I'd probably have forced myself to go to bed with Dulac in order to prove my qualifications, if that'd have been what was necessary. I even considered screwing around a bit with men, just to add a veneer of truth to the stuff I was claiming to have done. But the SSIA never dug very deep. Most people talk openly about their sexuality. I never did—never have, except with lovers and a very few close friends."

"Why were you always so secretive?" He was holding her even more closely. She felt like a child who needed a cuddle, and was being given it.

"My religion," she said. "Officially it accepts people like me, but there are still enough atavists around who point to carefully selected passages in the Bible and growl that homosexuality is a sin. They ignore the bits about fornication. In a way I was imitating them, disapproving of myself. It was almost as if there had to be two mes: the good Christian who had just never found any Mr Rights, and the evil woman who used female sexbots and occasionally had female lovers. I lived two lives, not just for the outside world but in my own head.

"Besides, there were the practical aspects," she added. "There are still prejudices about. Almost everybody but a Christian is allowed to have sex with whomever they want, but not teachers. Homosexual teachers are too often popularly regarded as a threat—as if I'd want to seduce some toddler."

"You have your own prejudices," said Pinocchio mildly.

"Yes, but that's diff—" She paused. No, it
wasn't
different. She was speaking to someone whom she felt she could trust. That he was a bot was neither here nor there, just in the same way that she was no less a woman because she wanted the love of other women. She wasn't a pseudo-man, and neither—in a quite different sense—was Pinocchio. He was himself. He was a person.

After a long time she said: "Does anyone else on the
Santa Maria
suspect, do you know?"

"Strider's a perceptive woman," said the bot. "I expect she's pretty certain. And Lan Yi's a wise old bird. Most of the others obviously think you're just frigid."

"That's a pretty rotten thing for them to think."

Pinocchio shrugged. "It's what you seem to want them to think. It's the disguise you've created for yourself, after all."

"Yes, but . . ." Again she hesitated. He had spoken the truth. But still she didn't like people
thinking
about her in that sort of dismissive way:
Oh, her, she's just an icecube, no chance there, must be something wrong with her hormones.

She changed tack. "I'd expected that at least a couple of the women might be bisexual, just by the law of averages, but I was out of luck. It's been a very lonely few years."

"Yes, that was a rotten hand of fate," said Pinocchio sympathetically. "In screening out the homosexuals the SSIA inadvertently screened out the bisexuals as well—except for one male, and he doesn't know it himself."

"Who?"

The bot looked down at her. She was nestling into his shoulder. Her face and scalp were glowing with the warmth he had been giving her.

"I
keep
secrets," he said reprovingly.

"Will you keep mine?"

"Of course. Unless it should endanger the rest of the personnel in some way, but I can't imagine that ever it could." He looked towards the rear of the craft, where Polyaggle was still sleeping. "You want her very badly, don't you?"

Strauss-Giolitto gave a rueful, bitter smile. "I thought I did, for a while. I still find her very attractive."

"You still want her." It was a flat statement.

"Yes," said Strauss-Giolitto after a moment.

"I'd forget the idea."

"Why?"

"She's human
oid
, not human. In more ways than you can imagine, she is utterly different from you. She told me about some of them after you'd fallen asleep. Apart from anything else," added the bot, looking out over the snowscape, "she has responsibilities to her own kind. She is the Queen of her hive."

#

Strauss-Giolitto had dozed back off to sleep against Pinocchio's side by the time the slidecraft gave a judder that was perceptibly different from all the lurches and swayings that had gone on before. It was enough to bring both her and Polyaggle to instant wakefulness.

Polyaggle unfolded herself with her customary grace from the floor and walked forward easily, mastering the rolling of the craft with ease. Strauss-Giolitto, turning with sleepy eyes to watch her and remembering her own timorous crawl over the same stretch, was instantly envious. At the moment what she herself wanted desperately were a lavatory and a meal, definitely in that order. The consequences of the decontamination procedure were beginning to take their toll.

"The slidecraft is nearing our destination," said Polyaggle coolly. "If you would be so good as to move over . . ."

She gestured with a claw, and the two of them shuffled aside to give her access to the control panel.

With Pinocchio's arm around her, Strauss-Giolitto no longer felt frightened of the height they were travelling above the pack ice. It was odd the way you could feel perfectly comfortable looking out of the window of a shuttle that was travelling a thousand kilometers above Mars, but being just a few hundred meters above the ground could inspire such fearsome vertigo. She supposed it was because it was so much easier to imagine yourself falling a few hundred meters to meet a gory end than it was to conceive of a drop of a thousand or more kilometers. Or maybe it was just that the shuttle was enclosed; she still hadn't become accustomed to the idea that being even relatively motionless in the open air was something that could be enjoyed.

She wondered how many of the rest of them from the
Santa Maria
would feel the same way. Most, she guessed.

Pinocchio was looking intently forwards, almost as if he had forgotten she was there. She followed the direction of his gaze.

Ahead of them was a great hill of snow, distinguishable from the rest of the landscape around it only by the gentleness of its slopes and the area it covered—it was difficult to judge from here, but Strauss-Giolitto reckoned the thing must be ten or twenty kilometers across. But there seemed little else of interest about it until she realized that it formed an almost perfect arc of a sphere.

Then a black diamond-shaped object appeared on the nearer hillside and slowly grew larger. No: Strauss-Giolitto could see more clearly as they grew closer. It wasn't an object but an aperture. They were heading straight towards it.

"Presumably this is one of those features of primitive, useless Spindrift that you don't go out of your way to show any visiting ships of the Autarchy," said Pinocchio.

"You are correct," said Polyaggle. She relaxed from the control board. "They have taken over and are guiding us in now."

They plunged towards the slope, seeming to be moving faster and faster the nearer they came to the surface. The slidecraft slowed to pause, bobbing, just outside the opening in the ice. Strauss-Giolitto could feel eyes watching her—alien eyes.

Then they were moving inward. The glare of the ice vanished behind them. They were entering a place of utmost blackness. Even the daylight from behind them seemed reluctant to penetrate it.

#

"What the hell's going on?" said Strider to Nightmirror, who was taking a turn on the command deck. "They've just vanished inside some bloody snowdrift!" She had been following her personnel's progress on Spindrift keenly for a duty-shift and a half now. She looked up, red-eyed, from the Pocket, as if expecting to find Nightmirror standing there beside her.

THERE IS NOTHING TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT,
said the Image.
I AM IN CONSTANT COMMUNICATION WITH TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE, WHO IS CURRENTLY RESIDENT WITHIN THE BOT. YOUR PEOPLE ARE SAFE ENOUGH.

Thanks to Nightmirror's efforts, Strider had been able to record in holo most of the conversation Pinocchio and Strauss-Giolitto had had with the alien down on the spaceport, but the link between the two Images had gone strangely dead during part of the time the little party had been travelling across the icecap. Moreover, she still hadn't been able to replay that recording and get Nightmirror to translate for her what the alien was saying: at the moment she could hear Pinocchio and a very tired-sounding Strauss-Giolitto clearly enough, but the alien's side of the dialogue was just a mess of whistling noises. Strider was beginning to feel that there were too many things she was not being allowed to know.

"You lost contact for a while earlier!" she said angrily.

THERE WAS GOOD PURPOSE FOR THAT,
said Nightmirror.

The response was presumably meant to be soothing, but it had the opposite effect on Strider. "Don't fucking patronize me, you gobbet of half-real energy!" she yelled.

O'Sondheim looked up from his own Pocket. He was visibly every bit as weary as she was. "Cool it, Leonie," he said quietly.

"And you can fucking shut up as well," she said. "Go off into a corner and milk yourself off a couple of liters of testosterone, why don't you?"

They were having a personal conversation.

"Who were? Oh, Strauss-Giolitto and Pinocchio, you mean. What was it about?"

IT WAS PERSONAL, AS I SAY. TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE DECIDED THAT IT WAS ENTIRELY BETWEEN THE TWO OF THEM, AND THAT IT SHOULD NOT BE TRANSMITTED.

Strider's eyes were slit-like with fury.

"So that's what goddam Ten Per Cent Extra Free thought, is it? Who's supposed to be in charge of this mission?"

You are.

"Then how come Ten Per Cent Extra Free's suddenly started making all the decisions?" She knew her anger had moved her beyond the bounds of rationality, but she was too exhausted to care. "I ordered constant monitoring of everything that went on down there. I need to know it
all
. I even need to be able to review what it looked like when those decontamination bots went shooting into Strauss-Giolitto's rectum, and what she said about it. Now,
tell me why you two Images conspired to cut out half an hour of the transmission
!"

There was a long silence, and even through the red haze of her temper Strider began to worry that she'd gone too far and persuaded the Images that they should desert their human comrades.

WE ARE NOT SPIES, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER,
said the voices of Nightmirror and Heartfire in quasi-harmony.
WE WILL REPORT AND RECORD EVERYTHING THAT AFFECTS THE WELL-BEING OF YOUR ENDEAVOR AND OF THE PERSONNEL UNDER YOUR COMMAND. BUT PINOCCHIO AND MARIA STRAUSS-GIOLITTO WERE TALKING TO EACH OTHER ABOUT THEMSELVES, AND THEIR FEELINGS. THEY WERE SAYING THINGS THEY CERTAINLY WOULD NOT HAVE SAID HAD THEY REALIZED THAT ANYONE BUT TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE WAS LISTENING TO THEM. WE WILL
NOT
REPORT SUCH INFORMATION TO YOU.

"Were they
balling
, or what?"

No.

There was an icy silence in her mind.

She slumped against the Pocket. Inadvertently she nodded her head into it, and a perfect replica of her own bunk popped cheerily into view.

She was being stupid, and the worst part was that she knew it. She had been fraught with anxiety during that long half-hour when the Pocket in which the recording was being made had gone blank. Now it had gone blank again, and she was doubly fraught. But it was senseless of her to be taking her fears out in the form of rage against the Images.

"I'm sorry," she said, once she could get her voice under control. "But can you tell me, please, why the transmission has gone dead again."

WE ARE CONTINUING TO RECEIVE INFORMATION FROM TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE.
She must really have perturbed them: they were still speaking together.
BUT THE INSTALLATION INTO WHICH THE PARTY HAS GONE IS SHIELDED HEAVILY AGAINST ELECTROMAGNETIC LEAKAGE, SO THAT HE CAN TRANSMIT ONLY DIRECT MENTAL INFORMATION TO US. HOWEVER, YOU WILL FIND OUT EVERYTHING ONCE THE PARTY RETURNS HERE. TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE HAS EXPLAINED THE SITUATION TO PINOCCHIO, AND HE IS MAKING A RECORDING THROUGH HIS OWN EYES AND EARS AS BACK-UP.

"He could have been doing that all along," she said. Her anger waxed again, but this time it was almost exclusively with herself. It was something she should have thought of. It had been one of the basic tenets of her training: never rely on one system when two systems will do and, if you can manage a third, all the better. She was beginning to depend too much on the Images to do almost everything for them—hell, they all were, but it was her duty to ensure that there were back-ups for when things came along that even the Images couldn't manage.