He hesitated, gazing at her, until he realized she had looked away from him and was standing rigid and withdrawn.
'No,' he said. 'Nothing.'
Jan Hikaru's Journal:
Today I had a long, strange conversation with Subtwo. I think my presence upsets him. He knows I'm not a raider, he knows my interests and my areas of competence, he knows my background, but he doesn't know what I am. And how could I tell him, when I don't know myself?
I did tell him that I don't plan to join his group, and never did, that I'm here by chance, that I'll leave as soon as possible. Whatever happens, I doubt I'll be stranded here. Subtwo was not, I think, brought up with starship traditions, but he respects (or indulges) his people's customs. And the raiders have enough regard for my poet to give me a ride off earth.
I think Subtwo knows more about me than I know about him and Subone. Something unusual: I used the computer link in the common room and tried to key the memory for the pseudosibs. I didn't get a null, so there should have been information in the news-storage banks, but the terminal couldn't—or wouldn't—produce the data. I wonder what terrible things the blank spaces held to make a perfectionist like Subtwo erase a whole segment from his precious files?
When the invitation from the Lady Clarissa arrived, Subtwo had to send someone into Center to find his pseudosib. Subone had been spending more and more time in that morass of irregularities and inconsistencies. He seemed to like it, while it drove Subtwo to distraction. Subone would sit with his people, with sellers of sexual oddments, with anyone, with no one, drinking and laughing, forgetful of propriety and oblivious to his training, his position, his intelligence. Subtwo was pleased with the growing apart, though he wished Subone had chosen a different way of manifesting the change. Perhaps, with his increasing ingestion of narcotics, depressants, hallucinogens, and stimulants, Subone was trying to drive away what reactions he felt from Subtwo. The experiment of their upbringing would not be completely finished until they stopped feeling the occasional resonances of each other's muscles in their own.
When Subone returned, he was wearing a smelly tunic of animal fur and he had animal teeth tied in his hair. He smelled of ethanol and sweaty sex.
'Yeah, what?'
Subtwo disliked the imprecision that had crept into Subone's speech, but could think of no way to correct it. 'We're dining in the Palace tonight,' he said. 'At the request of our hosts.'
'At their orders, you mean.'
'We are partners.'
Subone sneered. The expression fit badly on his smooth, bronzed face. 'All right,' he said. 'Let's go.'
'Are you going like that?'
'Of course. Why not?'
'It offends me.'
'Ahh,' Subone said in disgust.
Subtwo shrugged; they walked together to the alice tube and allowed themselves to be pressed upward into the Palace.
Subtwo had not expected a banquet. Clarissa's communication had made no mention of other people, but when the pseudosibs reached the top of the alice tube, they were conducted to a large hall lit by chandeliers and guttering flames in cages of brass wire. Multiple flickering shadows, like electromagnetic auras, surrounded all the people: forty-one, Subtwo observed, and he and Subone made forty-three. Both prime numbers. Subtwo knew of omens, numerical omens based on primes and perfect squares and triads, but he did not know if this might be an omen, or what kind. He did not like prime numbers: no formula could predict them.
The Lady Clarissa reclined at the end of the table near the doorway by which they entered. She was wearing a series of metallic strips that twined around her body, changing hue and intensity with the temperature gradient. She stretched out her graceful jeweled hands to the pseudosibs. Her eyes mimicked the flash of diamonds. Subtwo wondered how she could see through the multiple facets; he wondered if she saw, with an insect's vision, numerous minuscule shifting images.
'It's good of you to come,' she said. 'Everyone's anxious to meet you.'
'We are pleased to be invited,' Subtwo said by rote, as Clarissa inspected first him, then Subone, with an unhurried gaze. The iris enhancers gave her a strange appearance of blindness.
Clarissa released Subtwo's hand, and stroked Subone's furry tunic. 'How exquisite,' she said. 'It must have been very expensive. It suits you well.' She let her hand rest just above the hem, which reached barely halfway down Subone's thigh. Subone smiled at her; his teeth were as white and shiny and sharp as the fangs strung in his black hair.
'In such a historical place, what else should I wear but fur?'
Clarissa laughed. 'But what does one wear under it?'
'Why, nothing. That would reduce its barbaric impact.'
The guests in range of his voice laughed uneasily, unsure of Subone's aim, compliment or insult.
'You must let me wear it sometime,' Clarissa said. 'It would make me feel primal.'
'You may wear it now, if you like,' Subone said, and reached for the lacings. Shocked, Subtwo reached out to stop him, but Subone's quick glare held him back. The Lady Clarissa watched until Subone had unlaced the tunic past his groin. 'Ah, no,' she said. 'I spent too much time on my own garments, and they might not flatter you.'
'Another time, perhaps.'
Clarissa introduced them to the nearby guests, and pointed out each individual of the assembled company, who lay on thick cushions around the long table. Subtwo made appropriate sounds of greeting, filing their names and faces away in his mind should he ever need the information. They were all related to Clarissa in one manner or another, and each was served by at least one personal attendant. The attendants were not introduced, though Subtwo had included them in his original tally.
He involved his full attention in the social ceremonies only when Clarissa announced Blaisse's brother Kenton, who had been sent to Clarissa's people to seal the alliance between the Families and Stone Palace. A few years younger than Blaisse, he was a sullen man who muttered an unintelligible response and turned back to the ministrations of the youth behind him. Subtwo shuddered and averted his gaze: the slave's hormonal balance was disarranged, Subtwo supposed purposely. The result was not pleasing to his eye. But Kenton both interested and repelled him, for Subtwo had found that all Blaisse's statements about the Families were true. If the pseudosibs had tried to carry out their original plan, one of them would now have been in Kenton's place, dissipated, trapped, turning in boredom to perturbing other people's lives.
Clarissa finished the introductions and grasped Subone's hand. 'Sit here by me.' He sprawled next to her, his bare thigh against her leg. Clarissa glanced up and spoke to Subtwo, as though in afterthought. 'Blaisse wishes you to take the place to his left.'
Subtwo walked to the other end of the room, aware of the stares of the other guests. They reminded him of another uncomfortable entrance he had made, when he was first presented to the outside world as a successful experiment. The world's first experience with him was his first experience with the world, and he had wished only to flee back to the safe and constant environment in which he had been raised. That day had held the beginnings of his guilt.
He looked around. These people were nothing to him. He would not even remember their names. If he refused to remember, their pitted stupid faces might blur together in his memory. Except for their foolish dress, they looked ordinary enough individually. But collectively, their physical similarities revealed so much inbreeding that Subtwo felt distress, with simultaneous relief that he had prevented Subone from completing the Palace takeover. Subtwo knew that he could never have considered a permanent sexual alliance with one of these high-bred, inbred, radiation-exposed people. He could imagine their chromosomes leaping and twisting and breaking and rejoining in some mad intoxicated dance, to a rhythm counted by free subatomic particles. The possible results of a partnering were too disgusting to contemplate, though Subtwo did not doubt that their gene pool would benefit from an infusion of new traits.
He reached the end of the table, shuddering, but having avoided touching anyone, slave or lord. By then, they had all gone back to their pleasures or their duties, and Blaisse's alien consort was the only one to observe Subtwo's approach. She watched him, wide-eyed, frightened.
