The Sardonyx Net (47 page)

She shrugged. “Once a week.”
 

“Your brother is perceptive,” Dana said. “How long do you think it will take him to see that we have been lovers?”
 

“You're forgetting something,” Rhani said.
 

“What?”
 

“Darien Riis.”
 

It was true; he had forgotten her. What was that nonsense Rhani has quoted to him: Cherillys' Law, that was it. “I don't know what difference she'll make,” he said, “and neither do you. Rhani, if Zed realizes that I've shared your bed, he'll kill me, or worse. He can do worse.”
 

“What do you want me to do?” Rhani said.
 

I have to ask, Dana thought. “Free me.”
 

Her amber eyes locked on his face. “What will you do if you are freed?”
 

“Leave,” he said.
 

“But you said you'd find Loras U-Ellen for me.”
 

“I will. I have. T—my friend will contact him; I'm sure of it.”
 

“I'm sure of nothing,” she said. Her eyes gleamed, luminous in the dusky space. “If I don't free you, Dana, will you try to escape?”
 

“I'd be a fool to do so,” he said, thinking of Tori Lamonica, of his ship, of the Hype....
 

“But will you?” she insisted, shaking herself free of him, gripping his shirt with both hands. “Will you?” She answered herself. “Probably.”
 

“I could tell you a lie,” he said.
 

“Don't,” she said. “I don't want you to lie to me.” She ran her fingertip over his mouth. “Dana—listen. I need you. I can't tell you why, not now, only that I do, that your presence here is vital to me in a way you cannot know. Please, please, be patient.”
 

He said, “Will you free me, Rhani?”
 

She said, “I will, Starcaptain. But not now.”
 

“You won't tell me when.”
 

“No.” She gripped his shoulders, hard. “Dana, don't try to escape. Please trust me.”
 

“It's not you I don't trust,” he said. He released the bubble door. “After you, Rhani-ka.” She climbed from the bubble. He closed the bubble door and walked to join her on the stairway to the house, thinking as he did: Rhani Yago, I'll trust you—just as much as you seem willing to trust
me
.
 

The Kyneths ate communally, at a wooden table so huge that lifting it would tax the strength of a family of Skellians.
 

Zed sat next to Davi Kyneth. The boy's nearness had frightened him, but after a while he relaxed. Eleven people sat at the table, nine Kyneths, Zed, and Rhani. The wood literally groaned as the slaves heaped it with food. All the Kyneths, big ones and small ones, ate hugely. Looking over the ruins of the house had been depressing, and Zed was surprised to find that he was hungry. He had gone from the house to the Clinic, but they had nothing there for him to do, and after an hour of wandering around Outpatient, he had come back to the Kyneth house and fallen asleep.
 

Rhani was eating. He watched her narrowly; there was an intensity about her that disturbed him. She had told him, just before dinner, about Binkie's death. After the initial shock—no, he thought, not shock,
anger
, admit it, Zed Yago, you wanted him for yourself—he had stopped questioning her. She was eating with an appetite now; internally, he applauded. She had been running on her nerves for hours; she needed fuel.
 

Imre and Vera, a middle daughter, were having a ferocious argument. Imre blew out his cheeks and bristled his beard; Vera tossed her red hair and slammed a fist on the table. Nobody but Zed seemed to notice. Aliza called down the table to Rhani; something about the weather. Rhani raised her voice in answer. As she did so, she glanced across the table at Zed. Speech was impossible, but he read in her eyes what she was thinking:
How different this all is!
 

“C-C-C-Commander?” said Davi. He held up a breadstick as if he thought it might talk to him.
 

“I told you not to call me that,” said Zed. “Didn't I tell you my name?”
 

“Yes, but—” He squirmed in the cushions.
 

“What is it, then?”
 

“Z-Z-Zed.”
 

“Good. Did you want to ask me something?”
 

“Yes, please. Is this the kind of food that people eat in space?”
 

“Real food, you mean.” Zed took the breadstick and bit it. “Sometimes. It depends who you are, and if it matters to you what you're eating, and what kind of a ship you're in.” The bread had a sesame taste.
 

“In the Net?”
 

“The Net carries real food, much like this, though not with this—variety. When you're the size of a space station, food, even for several thousand people, doesn't take up all that much space. It would if it were for more than three months, but it isn't. And also, most of those people sit all day, or sleep. They don't need very much to eat.”
 

“What about on a little ship?”
 

“Tell me what kind.”
 

The boy blushed. “An MPL?”
 

“Big enough for captain and crew: six at most. That one?” He grinned at the boy. “You've been studying. Most MPLs carry food bars. It isn't always easy to navigate in hyperspace; a trip can take longer than you thought. Rather than guess what you need, and stock up on real food, and maybe run out of it halfway, you load with food bars. They compress; you can take as many as you like, as long as you also take a water supply.”
 

One of the younger girls said, “Doesn't that get boring?”
 

“Very. But in the Hype, either you're bored stiff anyway, or you're so busy concentrating on saving your skin that you can't taste what you're eating.” A slave put a large platter of egg tarts in front of him. “Unlike the food this household eats, which, I attest, tastes stupendous.”
 

Aliza smiled. “Rhani said you like egg tarts.”
 

“And breadsticks,” said Zed with his mouth full. Davi turned red.
 

A sister observed with clinical interest, “Look, the Brat's blushing.”
 

Davi's ears turned scarlet with embarrassment; he started to get up from the table. Imre yelled at his daughter good-humoredly. Zed dared to put a hand on the boy's shoulder. “Stay.”
 

Aliza rapped for silence. The children quieted; heads turned. “I don't know what Family Yago will make of Family Kyneth hospitality,” she said, “with all of us behaving just the way we always behave. Yelling.” Imre chuckled. “
You're
as bad as
them
,” said his wife, referring to their children.
 

“Worse, I hope,” said Imre. “Think of the years I've had to practice in.”
 

Aliza said, “I am well aware of them. Now, my loves, Rhani wishes to talk to Papa, so minors and middle kids, upstairs.”
 

There was a general howl. Vera said, “What are we supposed to do upstairs?”
 

Aliza said, “Play.”
 

Dead silence greeted this remark. Vera said, “Mother, even
Davi
's too old to
play
.” Davi nodded vigorous agreement.
 

Imre said, “Get out of here! Shor, Yianni, Margarite, you stay.”
 

Zed whispered to Davi as the boy stood up, “What are middle kids?”
 

“Over fourteen but under twenty. There's Vera and Caspar and Jory and Sandor and—”
 

“Wait a minute! How many of you are there?” demanded Zed.
 

The boy grinned. “All together? Counting Mother and Father, twelve. The others aren't here; they're learning things.”
 

The slaves cleared the table. Rhani held onto a plate of seaweed. Zed kept the egg tarts. Wine was poured. One of the slaves was sent upstairs with a plate of candies: “To keep the peace,” observed Aliza. “Or they'll be half-killing each other, and we'll have to send Zed up there to patch wounds.”
 

“I told you she'd have us earning our keep,” said Zed to Rhani, gesturing with his spoon.
 

She smiled dutifully. She was too far from him; the other side of the table felt a continent's width away. Isolated from her, he felt trapped. He sipped the red wine—it was good wine, Enchantean wine—slowly, uneasy.
 

A slave dimmed the lights. Rhani struggled with the heavy cushioned chair, and Margarite shot up and wrestled it back for her. She rose, saying, “Do you mind if I pace? It makes it easier for me to think.”
 

Imre said, “Go ahead, my dear.”
 

She had let her hair loose. In the somber light, it looked dark, almost black, certainly not red compared to the brilliance of Aliza's tresses. Zed felt a worm of desire for her, deep in his bones. He tensed, forcing it deeper.
 

“I have a story to tell,” said his sister, gazing at her hands. “I don't know where it starts, or ends.” She thrust her hands in her pockets, hunching her shoulders. “I mostly know the middle. One piece of it began on the Yago estate, on a summer night, two years back. Or perhaps it began even earlier, when my secretary, Tamsin Alt, left Chabad, and I replaced her with a slave named Ramas I-Occad.
 

“But I won't start it that far back. Let me start with a letter I got just recently, before the Net came home. It was a threat. I'd been threatened before, but no one had ever carried one out, so I didn't take it seriously. I don't even recall what it said, anymore. But it was signed, ‘The Free Folk of Chabad.'”
 

Zed was surprised—astonished, in fact. It was unlike Rhani to disclose Family business with anyone. But perhaps a threat to her, because it was personal—damnably personal, he thought—was not quite Family business. He sat quietly, containing his restlessness, while Rhani described the letters, the estate bombing, the police visit, and the attack in the street which Dana Ikoro had thwarted.
 

She spoke dispassionately enough, but when she talked about the woman with the broken bottle in her hand, Yianni got up and walked around the room, clearly upset past bearing. She halted it there to let them all catch their breaths.
 

Aliza said, “Rhani, that's an incredible story. We—the Families—have always been exposed, but rarely have we been actually attacked.”
 

“Ah,” Rhani said, “but this was a very special group of dissidents, Aliza.”
 

Why? Zed thought. He was suddenly annoyed at Rhani. Why was she making him sit through this?
 

“Now,” she said, “I want to go back again, to another part of the story. This starts even farther back, on Enchanter, I believe. As far as I can tell, it begins when a fourteen-year-old boy is taken to observe the loading of the Net.”
 

Imre said, “Yianni, sit down. You distract us. Rhani, please go on.”
 

“He was a very sensitive child, or a very ethical child, or a very impressionable one. I'm not sure. At any rate, the sight—and information he received, which delineated some sort of basic family complicity in a practice he found repugnant—affected him a great deal. So much so, that at age eighteen he changed his name and went off to become a Federation official dedicated to the destruction of the slave system in Sardonyx Sector. I speak, of course, of Michel A-Rae.”
 

Imre said politely, “I didn't know you knew so much about him, Rhani.”
 

“He told me most of this himself,” Rhani said. She stepped to the table and, lifting her glass, took a sip of wine. The Kyneths watched her every move, as if they were watching a masque, a mime, or a play. “Now, at the beginning of my story I mentioned a slave I bought, Ramas I-Occad. I called him Binkie, and he was my secretary—a tall, pale man. You might remember him, Aliza. You complimented him the morning of the Auction.”
 

“I remember,” Aliza said.
 

“I didn't know it at the time, of course, but he hated me.” She squared her shoulders. “Part of it was my fault. Part of it was someone else's fault—” she looked, bleakly, at Zed—"and it may be that that part, too, was my fault. He thought so, anyway. So. Our dedicated policeman comes to Sardonyx Sector. He may once, indeed, have been a moral man. But times have changed him. He takes all the legal steps possible to destroy the slave system. But he also takes a number of illegal steps. He forms—out of his own staff—a group of seeming rebels. He calls them the Free Folk of Chabad. And, on the off-chance that it might prove a fruitful approach, he suggests that they write to Rhani Yago's secretary and ask him to turn informer on her, for them. Perhaps they know what happened on that estate, on that summer night, two years back.”
 

Imre said softly, “Rhani, you shock me. His ability to turn his staff into assassins bespeaks a level of corruption in Federation service which I did not suspect was there.”
 

“None of us did, Imre. But I should emphasize, A-Rae did not want assassins. The attacks were never designed to kill me. They were designed to frighten, to keep me off-balance and afraid.”
 

Margarite said, “You mean, Michel A-Rae got members of his staff to attack you? To burn your house?”