his midsection, he bent low. He grunted and cursed softly and then told her, 'No.'
With his full weight, he drove the woman against the smooth black wall, and together, his face on her left shoulder, they bent and peered over the edge.
Pamir grabbed the plasma gun, yanking hard.
And Sorrel made herself jump.
Those two motions combined to lift her and Sele'ium off the path, over the edge and plummeting down. Pamir's gecko-grip was ripped loose from the basalt, and he was falling with them, one hand on the gun, clinging desperately, while the other arm began to swing, throwing its fist into the killer's belly and ribs. Within moments, they were falling as fast as possible. A damp singing wind blew past them, and the wall was a black smear to one side, and the rest of Fall Away was enormous and distant and almost changeless. The airborne rivers and a thousand flying machines were out of reach and useless. The three of them fell and fell, and sometimes a voice would pass through the roaring wind -a spectator standing on the path, remarking in alarm, 'Who were they?' Three bodies, clinging and kicking. Sele'ium punished Pamir with his own free hand, and then he let himself be pulled closer, and with a mouth that wasn't more than a few days old, he bit down on a wrist, hard, trying to force the stranger to release his hold on the plasma gun.
Pamir cried out and let go.
But as Sele'ium aimed at his face, for his soul, Pamir slammed at the man's forearm and pushed it backwards again, and he put a hard knee into the elbow, and a weapon that didn't have safeties released its stored energies, a thin blinding beam that coalesced inside the dying man's head, his brain turning to light and ash, a supersonic crack leaving the others temporarily deafened.
Pamir kicked the corpse away and clung to Sorrel, and she held tight to him, and after another few minutes, as they plunged toward the yellow depths of a living, thriving cloud, he shouted into her better ear, explaining a thing or two.
Again, it was nearly nightfall.
Once again, Pamir sat outside his apartment, listening to the wild songs of the llano vibra. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. Neighbors strolled past or ran past or flew by on gossamer wings. The janusian couple paused long enough to ask where he had been these last days, and Pamir said a few murky words about taking care of family troubles. The harum-scarum family was outside their apartment, gathered around a cooking pit, eating a living passion ox in celebration of another day successfully crossed. A collection of machines stopped to ask about the facsimile that they had built for Pamir, as a favor. Did it serve its intended role? 'Oh, sure,' he said with a nod. 'Everybody was pretty much fooled, at least until the joke was finished.'
'Was there laughter?' asked one machine.
'Constant, breathless laughter,' Pamir swore. And then he said nothing else about it.
A single figure was approaching. He had been watching her for the last kilometer, and as the machines wandered away, he used three different means to study her gait and face and manner. Then he considered his options, and he decided to remain sitting where he was, his back against the huge ceramic pot and his legs stretched out before him, one bare foot crossed over the other.
She stopped a few steps short, watching him but saying nothing.
'You're thinking,' Pamir told her. 'Throw me into the brig, or throw me off the ship entirely. That's what you're thinking now.'
'But we had an agreement,' Miocene countered. 'You were supposed to help somebody, and you have, and you most definitely have earned your payment as well as my thanks.'
'Yeah,' he said, 'but I know you. And you're asking yourself, 'Why not get rid of him and be done with it?''
The First Chair was wearing a passenger's clothes and a face slightly disguised, eyes blue and the matching hair curled into countless tight knots, the cheeks and mouth widened but nothing about the present smile any warmer than any other smile that had ever come from this hard, hard creature.
'You know me,' she muttered.
A moment later, she asked, 'Will you tell me who you are?'
'Don't you know yet?'
She shook her head, and with a hint of genuine honesty, she admitted, 'Nor do I particularly care, one way or the other.'
Pamir grinned and leaned back a little more.
'I suppose I could place you in custody,' Miocene continued. 'But a man with your skills and obvious luck… well, you probably have twelve different ways to escape from our detention centers. And if I sent you falling onto a colony world or an alien world… I suppose in another thousand years or so, you would find your way back again, like a dog or an ugly habit.'
'Fair points,' he admitted.
Then with a serious, warm voice, he asked, 'How is Sorrel?'
'That young woman? As I understand it, she has put her apartment up for sale, and she has already moved away. I'm not sure where - '
'Bullshit,' he interrupted.
Miocene grinned, just for a moment. 'Perhaps I do have an idea or two. About who you might be…'
'She knows now.'
The woman's face seemed to narrow, and the eyes grew larger and less secure. 'Knows what?' she managed.
'Who her father is,' said Pamir. 'Her true father, I mean.'
'One man's conjecture,' the First Chair reminded him. Then with a dismissive shake of the head, she added, 'A young woman in a gullible moment might believe you. But she won't find any corroboration, not for the next thousand years… and eventually, she will have to believe what she has always believed…'
'Maybe.'
Miocene shrugged. 'It's hardly your concern now. Is it?'
'Perhaps it isn't,' he allowed. Then as the overhead lights flickered for the first time, he sat up straighter. 'The thief was your idea, wasn't he? The one who came to steal away the Darmion crystal?'
'And why would I arrange such a thing?'
'What happened afterwards was exactly what you were hoping for,' he said. 'An apparently random crime leaves Sorrel trusting me, and the two of us emotionally linked to each other.'
With a narrow grin, Miocene admitted, 'But I was wrong in one way.'
'Were you?'
'I assumed that the killer, whoever he was, would likely put an end to you. Exposing himself in the process, of course.'
A second ripple of darkness passed along the avenue. Pamir showed her a stern face, and quietly, he said, 'Madam First Chair. You have always been a remarkable and wondrously awful bitch.'
'I didn't know it was Sele'ium,' she admitted.
'And you didn't know why he was killing the husbands, either.' Pamir stood up now, slowly. 'Because the old librarian, Leon'rd, pieced together who Sorrel was. He told Sele'ium what he had learned, and he mentioned that Sorrel's father was a woman, and as it happens, that woman is the second most important person onboard the Great Ship.'
'There are some flaws in the public records, yes.' She nodded, adding, 'These are problems that I'm taking care of now.'
'Good,' he said.
Miocene narrowed her gaze. 'And yes, I am a difficult soul. The bitch queen, and so on. But what I do in my life is enormous and very complicated, and for a multitude of good reasons, it is best if my daughter remains apart from my life and from me.'
'Maybe so,' he allowed.
'Look at these last few days. Do you need more reasons than this?' she asked. Then she took a step closer, adding, 'But you are wrong, in one critical matter. Whoever you are.'
