peered out, his blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Only the needler in his hand made him dangerous. When he reached for the light switch Mischa grabbed his wrist. For all his slothful appearance, he was strong, but he had no training and no practice. Mischa got the needler away from him and kicked it across the room.
'Lie down.'
He made a sound of protest. Mischa flicked out the blade of her knife. The sound silenced him, and he lay down quickly, still clutching his blanket. Mischa took it away and cut strips from the woven synthetic.
'You can't do this.' His voice squeaked in the middle of a word.
'Okay,' Mischa said.
As she twisted the slices of blanket he gathered himself. 'Come on,' Mischa said. The sarcasm in her voice seemed to keep him still more than any real warning might have. She tied his wrists behind him, made him bend his knees, and tied his feet to his hands.
'My arms—'
She ignored him, but he took a quick breath. Mischa grabbed his chin and pulled his mouth shut. The clack of his teeth was louder than his single croak.
'I lose my temper so easy it makes me mad sometimes.' Mischa did not like to frighten people more than absolutely necessary to keep them from forcing her to hurt them. She was a thief, not a terrorist.
The jeweler blinked, trying to see her, trying to find any way to identify her in the dark. Mischa opened the hidden drawer again and used one of the small suede sacks to gag him. He struggled when he realized what it was. Mischa grinned, but waited until she was sure he would not choke on the leather, vomit, and suffocate himself.
The shadow in the doorway was paler now. The lights flickered more often, almost regularly. Mischa waited, holding the door ajar, and slid outside between two washes of light. She left the shop closed but unlocked. Eventually a customer would come in, or the jeweler would work the gag free.
Mischa was drenched with sweat, but the residual weakness had disappeared and she felt good for the first time in much too long. She headed home, laughing quietly. The exhaustion she felt was a satisfying kind, the result of long vigilance and a good job, and knowing, not just hoping, that nothing her uncle or Stone Palace or the Families could do to her could destroy her.
Chapter 6
Entering his newly finished rooms for the first time, Subtwo allowed a sense of well-being to flow around him. The environment lessened the tension under which he had struggled since arriving on earth. In his rooms were no velvet tapestries, no embroidery, no rough-worked stone. The lines were straight and the angles square. His apartment consisted of pleasing rectangular shapes and volumes. The proportions were geometrically and aesthetically perfect.
The walls and floor and ceiling were formed of white plastic, Subtwo's desk module held a three-dimensional representation of a complex mathematical function (the only decoration he needed or wanted), and the spare shipboard computer was already installed. He had access to anything and everything he had ever needed before.
Throughout the remodeling, Subtwo had worked with Blaisse's steward: Madame had executed his wishes with flawless efficiency. Subtwo admired her abilities and appreciated the speed and ease with which the transition had been accomplished, yet now that he was physically comfortable again, he was not settled in his mind. It took him much thought and analysis to realize that his unease resulted from having no more work to do with Madame.
He wished others of his people would ask to have their rooms changed so he could feel justified in requiring her presence. He could not understand their preference for plush and velvet.
A few flaws still marred his place. Eventually they would prey on him, catch his eye, enrage him, but he wondered if Madame would take his insistence on perfection as criticism. He had never worried about making criticisms before, and had always insisted on perfection. Yet this was tolerable: no simple pattern of flaws could upset him more than had the raw stone caves and useless ornamentation. He saw the precious stones and metals in electronics, guidance, fine mechanical constructs; their misuse in mere decoration sent him into periodic rages that he almost failed to conceal. In this castoff place there seemed no way to convert them to any useful function.
He had been on earth only a short time and already he was bored. With the boredom came loneliness, which he had never experienced before. He had never needed anyone, even Subone. Though the pseudosibs seemed united against outsiders, they had never gotten along well. They simply tolerated each other; and they knew each other so well that they were interchangeable in any action. This had nothing to do with liking or empathy or love; it was a purely physical leftover from their upbringing as isolated behavioral duplicates, each influenced as much by the other's responses as by his own.
Since they arrived on this world, Subone seemed to be growing apart from him. Subtwo's pseudosib spent more time with the squad members than working; he wasted his time in dissipation. Subtwo had gone into Center only once: the noise and disorder were more than he could stand.
'Come,' he said, in response to a scratch on the door. It was Madame, who did not knock, whether because she had no experience with doors or because she was reluctant to make so much noise, Subtwo did not know. The sensor which controlled the opening mechanism was clumsy and makeshift, slapped together by a technician on his crew. It was insensitive: it would open to Subone's voice as well as to Subtwo's own. It was one of the small flaws that would begin to annoy him soon.
He turned to face the steward. She was a handsome and elegant woman, and he still did not know her name.
'My rooms are finished now. How do you like them?'
She looked at him with what seemed genuine surprise. 'Why do you ask my opinion, sir? It is of no merit.'
He had not yet decided if she were serious in her self-deprecation or if she were mocking him. He believed she was too intelligent to believe her thoughts were worthless, but in the days they had been working together, she had never deviated from the role she played, if role it was.
His sexual experiences had been experiments, exploratory for him, casual for his partners. Memories of them did not linger unbidden, as did Subtwo's thoughts of Madame. She performed her duties with exquisite correctness but was never servile. Nor did she ever assert her individuality or her opinions, which disturbed Subtwo deeply, but he had realized that such self-repression was essential for survival in a place where a free person literally held the power of life or death over a slave. He thought, though, that by now Madame should know that he would never take advantage of such a situation. He thought she should trust him. He did not understand that Madame's situation required either an erosion of spirit or an erosion of trust.
'Come now,' Subtwo said. 'I'm not Blaisse.'
'You are his guest.'
'I'm used to being thought peculiar for my tastes. I could hardly be offended if you agreed with the majority.'
'By the rules of the Palace, you may correct any slave whose behavior you find offensive.'
'No one should be offended by honesty.' He smiled, a cold expressionless smile that was in his terms meaningful.
'I find your rooms somewhat strange but not unattractive,' Madame said abruptly. 'Strange, yet somehow familiar.'
'A few places in the Sphere build in this style,' he said. 'Perhaps you—'
'There is no way of knowing.'
'Civilized planets keep records.'
She smiled at him ironically, and needed to say no more to indicate the futility of his curiosity. 'Is there anything you need, sir, before I go upstairs?'
