The Sardonyx Net (61 page)

“Yes,” Rhani said. “Thank you.”
 

“Can we help you?”
 

“No. No, I'm fine. I just wanted to know why you're here.”
 

“We're guarding the commander,” said the woman grimly.
 

“Why?”
 

“That cop—A-Rae,” the woman said. “He's still somewhere in the city. They've grounded all flights from the Landingport until he's found. Except for us, of course.” She jerked her thumb at the bubble they had come in. “We've got special clearance.”
 

“From whom?” Rhani said. “How did you know?”
 

“Tam Orion,” said one of the men. “He called us. Woke me from sleep.”
 

The woman snorted. “
I
wasn't sleeping.” She grinned, and patted Rhani's arm. “Don't worry, Domna. No one'll get to the commander while he's in this place.”
 

“And if they try,” the other woman said, “too bad. I'd like to get my hands on the people who killed Jo Leiakanawa.”
 

“I see,” Rhani said. “Thank you.” She swallowed. They murmured reassuring noises at her as they walked away. She went back to Ferris, wondering how Tam Orion could have called them all when he never spoke, and then remembering that he was a telepath. Odd, she hadn't known that until Dana told her. Dana—was he still on Chabad, then? Perhaps he had gotten away before they grounded the flights.
 

She climbed into Ferris' bubble and closed her eyes. A moment later he was shaking her awake. “Rhani, we're here,” he said. She rubbed her face and gazed at the shadowy hangar. I wonder if I'm doing something stupid, she thought. Maybe I should have gone to the Kyneths'.
 

But once within the walls of Dur House, she began to feel, not less tired, but more awake, and she recognized the artificial clarity of that state beyond sleep. Her eyes burned, gritty with hours of wakefulness, and her clothes were sticky with sweat. “I would like a wash,” she said to Ferris.
 

“This way,” he said, guiding her along the upstairs hallway. Noises drifted up from the kitchen below; someone dropped a pot. He opened a door. “Here. Look.” He pushed her gently into the doorway. Rhani gasped.
 

The room was like nothing she had ever seen in the somber depths of Dur House. The walls were blue. The bed, which was low and uncanopied, was covered with a blue-and-white spread. A white kerit fur rug graced the floor. One window looked south, another west, and through its clear pane she saw the gleam of sunrise on the Abanat ice. A wooden chair with curved runners at the base of its legs stood beside the window. “What's that?” she said.
 

“It's called a rocking chair. I thought you might like it,” Ferris said.
 

Walking to it, Rhani pushed tentatively at the back. The chair rocked slowly back and forth. It was a soothing motion—good for the baby, she thought. Then the sense of Ferris' words penetrated. She said, “You thought
I
might like it? You brought it here, for me?”
 

He nodded, and his hands plucked at the gold buttons on his robe. “Yes. When I first thought, maybe—about the marriage, you know—I asked people what your room at the estate was like, people who had been there, I mean. I know you love the estate. I wanted to make you a place where you would be comfortable.”
 

Rhani said, “You made this room for me.” He nodded again. “How long ago?”
 

“A while. Since—since my mother got sick. She said you were more like a daughter to her than I was like a son. That's when I thought of asking you to marry me.” He bit his lower lip, and said in a low voice, “Advocate Wu spoke to me. She told me I'd been stupid and unfair because I didn't tell you the truth about not being the head of the Family.”
 

Rhani scowled. Christina had no business doing that, she thought, annoyed. “It wasn't stupid,” she said. “After all, you are Ferris Dur,
Domni
Ferris Dur, and even if you don't make all the decisions for it, you are still head of your Family.” For what it's worth, she thought. At least Domna Sam had the sense not to take that away from him. She gazed at the room, astonished at the care with which it had been furnished. The bed's coverlet was apton and silk, and the curtains were white gauze. The bed's headboard was white, wooden, with three sliding shelves.
 

Someone told him a great deal about my room, she thought. “Ferris, who did you ask to help you make this room?”
 

“Are you angry?” he asked.
 

Sweet mother.... “No,” Rhani said, “I'm not angry. I think it's beautiful.”
 

He licked his lips. “Clare helped.”
 

“Clare Brion?”
 

He nodded. “And Aliza Kyneth, a little. Though she didn't understand why I wanted to know what your room was like. I was afraid to tell her. She probably thought me a nuisance.
Her
children are all clever.”
 

Rhani said, “This is better than clever, Ferris. This is kind.” Releasing her hold on the rocking chair, she walked to him, stretched to tiptoe, and kissed his cheek. “So kind that I think I'd like to stay here a little while, until Zed is out of the Clinic, at least. May I do that?”
 

Ferris' mouth went slack with astonishment. Then, straightening, he said, “Domna, I am honored.”
 

“I am only Rhani,” Rhani said. She glanced toward the closet, wondering if there were clothes in it. She was willing to bet there were, and that they were her size. She wondered if the washroom contained a blue-and-cream-tiled shower stall. “Is there a com-unit in this room?”
 

“I can have one installed,” said Ferris. “Shall I?”
 

“Please,” she said. She needed to talk to Christina Wu, and Loras U-Ellen if he would talk to her, she didn't know, he might be still hiding from Michel A-Rae, and, if Christina approved, she would then call Tak Rafael....
 

She blinked as the door slid closed. Ferris had left with such uncharacteristic delicacy that she hadn't heard him. Kicking her shoes off, she curled her toes in the kerit fur. To her left, the metallic grate of the intercom gleamed in the azure wall. In the washroom, her favorite soap sat on the shelf beside a replica of the ivory brush Zed had brought her at the close of one Net circuit. It had come, she thought, from Sabado.
 

She did not want to think about the Net. As she took off her clothes, she admired the verisimilitude of the two chambers. So much time spent on fantasy.... She leaned close to the round mirror and saw that the stress of the last few weeks had bestowed upon her a legacy of threadlike lines.
 

I'm getting older, she thought. Soon I'll look like my mother.
 

The thought dismayed her. She didn't want to look like Isobel. I won't! she said to the doppelgänger in the mirror. Naked, she laid both hands on her abdomen. It didn't feel any different. I'm pregnant, she told the mirror, I'm going to bear a Starcaptain's child.... It was romantic nonsense, the kind that Isobel would have silenced at once, had she heard it. Gazing into the mirror, Rhani rubbed her arms. Remembering her mother gave her chills.
 

“
Whoever you are
,” she said to the unborn child in her womb, “
I promise you won't grow up as I did, loving and hating your mother as I loved and hated mine, tethered to one world with no chance to escape it. I promise you will have your chance
.”
 

And, nodding at the mirror—which contained, after all, no image more terrible than herself—she stepped into the blue-and-cream-tiled shower stall.
 

That night she went to visit Zed in his room in the Clinic, and found him on his feet.
 

The guards in their blue-and-silver uniforms were huddled together outside the room, speaking softly. They separated as she walked up to them. “Good evening,” she said.
 

“Good evening, Domna,” said one, a big man, almost as big as Jo the Skellian.
 

“How's my brother?” she said.
 

“Awake.” He tilted his head. “And in a foul temper. That little man—the surgeon—won't let him shinny.”
 

“Ah,” Rhani said. She tapped on the door. “Zed-ka, it's me.”
 

“Come in!” His eager voice reassured her. She palmed open the door. Zed was standing by the window. His arms and hands were bandaged from elbows to fingertips and beyond. “Rhani,” he said. Lifting his swathed left hand, he laid the bandage against her cheek.
 

It smelled medicinal. Under the yards of gauze, she knew, was new tissue, and under it bone, and under it the intricate mechanics of the permanent claws, all of it layered with several different kinds of regenerative paint. Over the grotesque lump Zed's face looked leaner, warier. What happened on the Net, she wanted to ask him. Darien Riis betrayed you, and you killed her, I know. What has it done to you? Aloud, she asked, “How do you feel?”
 

“Impatient,” he said. He walked to the bed and back again to her side. Through the window she glimpsed darkness broken by pools of lamplight and, beyond the dark, the shining interior of another wing of the Clinic building. She wondered which it was. “Ja won't let me out of here.”
 

“What do you want to do?” she asked.
 

His face grew stony. “Find Michel A-Rae,” he said.
 

It was on the tip of her tongue to say,
I know his birth name, Zed-ka
. But the ferocity behind that stony gaze held the words back.
 

Instead, she said, “I hope the Abanat police can find him, Zed-ka. It looks, by the way, as if the referendum most certainly will not take place.”
 

“Ah.” His shoulders hunched. “I'm glad.”
 

“I saw Loras U-Ellen. Dana took me.”
 

“
Did
you.” His whole frame seemed to curve away from her. “We didn't talk about it, did we?”
 

“No.”
 

“There's a lot we haven't talked about.” He wrenched himself around to face her, bracing his elbows on the bed. His arms dangled between them. He was waiting for her to speak, she realized, for her to question him as she had not been able to question Dana Ikoro, to ask him what Dana would not have known the answers to.... Did you love her? Would you truly have left Chabad? She closed her hands to fists and stared at the gleaming floor. The tiles made a diamond pattern.
 

She was not Isobel; she would not punish him. She said, “You haven't asked me where I'm staying.”
 

She heard him exhale. “Where are you staying?”
 

She looked up, smiling. “At Dur House.”
 

His eyebrows lifted. “Isn't that a trifle premature?”
 

“Not really,” she said. “I'm not going to marry him.”
 

“Tell me.”
 

Rhani explained.
 

She expected Zed to grow sardonic, to comment in that voice he reserved for emotions that he didn't share, or didn't want to share. Instead, compassion, or at least pity, moved in his eyes for a moment. “The poor bastard,” he said. He let his bandaged arms, which had been sticking awkwardly out in front of him, fall to his sides. Rhani wondered how he slept, trussed like that.
 

“Do you want to keep on staying there?” he said.
 

“No!” she said, astonished. “No, of course not. The surgeon told me that you'd be released in four days. I thought I'd lease a house.”
 

He smiled. “I'd like that, Rhani-ka.”
 

She wondered what he did when he itched, or needed to sneeze. “Shall I tell you about Loras U-Ellen?” she said.
 

“Please do.”
 

She rubbed her chin. “You won't believe this, Zed-ka. He came to Chabad to sell me the dorazine formula.”
 

“Has he got it?” Zed asked.
 

“No. But he knows someone who has.” She explained the historic relationship between Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and The Pharmacy.
 

Zed was incredulous. “You mean a company based on Enchanter and a criminal consortium based wherever the hell they're based, Sector Vermillion or somewhere, is responsible for the dorazine trade?” He exhaled. “Has been, for fifty years?”
 

She nodded.
 

He said softly, “And our mother never knew.”
 

“No,” Rhani said.
 

“They want fifteen million credits—do we have it?”
 

He had said “we.” Rhani smiled. “We have it, Zed-ka. Just.” She hesitated, and then said, “Of course, our finances have been complicated by the destruction of the Net.”
 

He said tonelessly, “It must have been insured. Isobel would never have neglected that.”
 

“It was,” Rhani said. “But insurance means nothing in the case of uncontrollable accident, malice, fraud, insurrection, or act of god, and the destruction of the Net is three and possibly all five of these.”
 

“What will you do?” he said. “Rebuild the Net?”
 

“With what?” she said. “No. I have a factory to build. What capital I can obtain will go to that.”