Yang was just beginning to get angry when the door opened and a very tall naked woman entered. Her hair was in a thousand white braids and her eyes were oval rubies. The aureoles of her taut, almost conical breasts were much the same color as her eyes. A faint scent of faux ambergris wafted into the waiting room and mingled with the fumes of kif. Yang sat hypnotized.
“You the customer?” she asked Stef with some interest.
“No, I’m waiting for Dzhun. This guy’s your customer.”
“Figures,” she sighed, and taking Professor Yang’s thin and trembling hand in her own, the White Tiger led him away.
A few minutes later the box made two announcements: Dzhun was ready, and Stef was to wipe his cock and get to Yama’s office soonest. Stef promptly did what he almost never did-lost it completely.
“FUCK THE FUCKING UNIVERSE!” he roared in English. The divan weighed a hundred kilos but he tossed it end over end. At the crash the door flew open and a guard entered, pulling an impact pistol half as long as her arm. Stef calmed down instantly.
“Ya bi sori.My deepest and humblest apologies,” he said, clapping his hands together and bowing. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Stef had seen a number of bodies killed by impact weapons. A body shot usually left very little except the head, arms and legs, plus assorted fragments.
“Straighten out the goddamn sofa,” said the guard, watching him narrowly. She was Mongol and looked tough. Stef did as he was told.
“Incidentally,” he said as he was leaving, “I’ll need a raincheck on Dzhun. I already paid my khans.”
“Talk to the front desk,” growled the guard.
Outside, Stef took a deep breath and ordered a hovercab. He felt that he now had a personal score to settle with thesvini who had not only stolen a wormholer but forestalled his session with Dzhun. Since thesvini were the only reason he currently had money enough to buy her time, that was unreasonable. But Stef wanted to be unreasonable. That was how he felt.
“So the theft was an inside job,” he muttered, trying without success to get comfortable in one of Yama’s black chairs.
“Yes. A trusted scientist turns out to belong to a terrorist group that calls itself Crux. He’s been checked a hundred times. Living quietly, no extra money, no nothing. During lie-detection tests, brain chemicals always indicated he was telling the truth. Trouble was, the wrong questions got asked. Are you loyal? To what? He answers yes, meaning loyal to humanity as he understands it. Are you a member of any subversive group? Subversive in what sense? To the existing order, or to humanity? He gets by with a false answer again.”
“What exactly do these Crux fuckers believe in?”
“Life. The absolute value of human life. The wormholer opens the way to reverse the worst calamity in human history, the Time of Troubles. Trillions of lives are hanging on the issue-not only the lives that were lost in the famines and plagues and wars but all their descendants to the tenth generation.”
Stef growled, scratched himself, longing for kif, for Dzhun. “Bunch of fucking idealists.”
“Exactly. People with a vision, willing to destroy the real world for the sake of an idea. We’ve gotta kill them all.”
Yama jumped up-a springy man, muscular, bandy-legged. He was fifty and nearing middle age, but a lifetime of the martial arts enabled him to bounce around like a ball of elastoplast.
“Kill them!” he roared, chopping at the air.
Watching him tired Stef.
“And this was what you called me back for?”
“No. Or not only.” Yama fell back into the desk chair. “The group that has this grand vision is, of course, organized in cells that have to be cracked one by one. But the guy who talked in the White Chamber knew one name outside his cell, the name of a woman, an off worlder. She’s called Dyeva. She’s one of the founders of the movement, and she was supposed to contact him.”
Stef sighed. “Anything from IC on her?”
“No,” admitted Yama. “No report yet from Infocenter.”
“Call me when one comes in,” said Stef, rising. “I’m extremely grateful for the way you took me away from my pleasures to give me information that, as yet, has no practical significance. Please don’t do it again.”
Yama saw him to the door, nodding to the Darksider who approached smelling like the shit of lions, owls and cormorants mixed together. Stef pinched his nostrils and spoke like a duck.
“I love coming to your office, Yama. The place has a certain air about it.”
Half an hour later, Stef was again sprawled in the middling expensive parlor at Radiant Love House, waiting. Another customer had taken Dzhun while he was away. Stef spent the time smoking kif and thinking about shooting Dyeva, whoever she was, with an impact pistol.
“Phut,”he said, imitating the uninspiring sound of the weapon. He made his long hands into a ball and drew them rapidly apart, imitating the explosion inside the target. Stef had studied wound ballistics and he knew that impact ammo vaporized in the body and formed a rapidly expanding sphere of superheated gas and destructive particles.Dyeva v’atomi sa dizolva, he thought. Thesvin flies apart, turns to molecules, atoms, protons and quarks.
“How happy I am,” murmured the box, “to inform you, Sir, that the person of your choice is ready to receive you.”
Instantly Stef was up and moving, his bloody thoughts forgotten. At heart he was a lover, not a killer.
In the blue peace of the electronic room, Professor Yang lay huddled under a sheet of faux silk.
Beside him, her hand still languidly resting on a gadget called an erector-injector, lay a statue of living ivory. At least he now knew the White Tiger’s given name. Even if it was only a prost’s working name, anom d’amour, for Yang it was what the old French phrase meant-a name of love.
“Selina,” he murmured, and she turned her head and smiled at him.
“I’m afraid your time is up,” she whispered. “But perhaps you’ll come again, my dear. You were special.”
“Selina,” he said again. Around him monitors winked and a low electromagnetic hum soothed with a white sound. Yang was all too conscious of the birth of a new obsession, one even less affordable than four wives and natural sugar.
“Imust see you again,” he said.
Detecting the urgent note in his voice, Selina smiled. Ah, that enigmatic whore’s smile! thought Yang with pain in his heart. What did it mean? Pleasure in you, pleasure in your money, no pleasure at all but mere professionalism? Who could tell?
Wasn’t this how he had happened to marry the most obnoxious of his four wives?
Dyeva sat quietly in the front room of a small but elegant suburban villa.
The windows were open and the morning sun entered through a gentle screen of glossy leaves thrown out by a lemon tree. The room held all the necessities of rustic living, bare beams across the ceiling, lounges covered with faux linen, a glass table bearing apples and oranges and kuvisu fruit, and a mashina half the length of the wall to entertain the owner, a Professor of Rhetoric whose hobby was playing at revolution.
Relaxing on the lounges were the other members of the cell: two students and a dark and tensely attractive woman of middle age who bore a painted mark on her forehead. The students were still talking about Professor Yang’s lecture of last evening, tailor-made as it seemed for the members of Crux.
“Lord Buddha, but he makes you see it,” said the boy, fingering a string of beads restlessly. He was an Old Believer. Dyeva had noticed years ago that such people were represented in Crux far beyond their numbers in the general population.
The girl was lovely: bronzed, yellow-haired, sloe-eyed, the perfect Eurasian. She called herself Dian and spoke in a throaty whisper that someone had told her was mysterious.
“Actually, he’s a horrible old man. But it’s as Kuli says, he has the gift of making the past live.”
“Weexpect to do more along that line,” said the owner of the villa in a deep, resonant voice, and the two young people laughed happily. All three of them loved the taste of conspiracy; the older man, whose codename was Zet, earnestly hoped to seduce Dian. Supposedly nobody in the group knew anybody else’s real name. They had a vast and fundamentally childish panoply of measures to preserve secrecy-passwords, hand signals, ways of passing information in complicated and difficult ways.
