He lay down again, letting the question go, content to let her massage his thoughts into oblivion, where they belonged. He rested his head against her shoulder as she took one of the spice-scented smokesticks from the ebony box on the bedside table and lit it. He breathed in the drifting smoke as she inhaled, for once enjoying the exquisite sharpness of all his senses, the intoxicating awareness of simply being alive. “Was I a virgin when you met me?”
She did not laugh, but turned her head to look at him. “I don’t think so. Not physically.”
“I was very young.”
“Yes,” she said, stroking his forehead gently.
“But I feel so old… .”He closed his eyes, and fragments of image swarmed through his memory again, bits of glass in a shaken kaleidoscope, a random geometry of light.
“I know.” she murmured.
“Mundilfoere, where did I come from—’?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated. She kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “You are here, now.”
“Yes… .” He opened his eyes again to look at her, and the echoes of a music from no known place or time, that lived inside his memory like a lie, began to fade. He sighed, pressing her hand against his cheek, holding it there. Her skin was soft and cool against his own, like the touch of a … of a … He let go of the image that would not form, and released her, letting the tension flow out of him, letting his gaze wander. He became aware of the strains of a Kharemoughi artsong still playing in the room, filling the bluegray space, carrying his mind out and into the bluegray heights of the sky beyond the slitied window, out where there were never any questions.
She inhaled smoke, let it out again in a sigh. After a time she said, “Sab Emo has been more than kind to us, in his own way, all these years.” She handed him the drugged incense and he inhaled deeply.
“Yes,” he murmured, shaking off the past, still not fully believing in the present.
“I’m glad it will not be necessary to have him killed. He has been useful to the Brotherhood, as well.”
Reede snorted. “For a minute there, I figured we weren’t going to have the chance to think about it, let alone act on it. Gods … I thought he was serious. What if he had been—?”
“I would have told him that I was carrying your child.”
He pushed up on his elbow again, staring down at her with something close to wonder. “Are you serious?” he said softly, “Are you—”
“Of course not.” She smiled at him, a little sadly. “That is not for us. … You know that, beloved. It is not our destiny in the motion of things.”
He looked away, silent for a long moment, before he said, “I thought you said you never lied to Humbaba.”
“It would have been the first time,” she answered. “And the last. Although I have not always told him the truth. …”
“But if you had, those could be lies too.”
“If it’s true that I lie.” She smiled at him. “One has to know how to ask the right questions … and sometimes, how to answer them.”
“Have you ever lied to me?”
She looked deeply, unflinchingly into his eyes. “Never.”
“But you haven’t always told me the truth.”
She touched his lips with her fingers. “Don’t torture yourself with questions, tisshah’el. There is no need. You are my beloved.”
Acquiescing, he kissed her again. “You can move into my quarters tonight. Have your things sent over …”he smiled, “wife.”
She moved restlessly, as if she had not been listening to him. Or did not want to hear it. But he would not let himself think that. “The Brotherhood will not be pleased to hear that he has divorced me. It makes controlling him harder.”
“Who? Humbaba?”
She nodded. “They may vote to remove him after all … and that undermines our position.”
Reede put an arm across her shoulders and drew her back to face him. “Don’t worry. Humbaba’s just barely smart enough to know he’s not smart enough. He’s depended on you for years for his policy. That’s not going to change. Only your sleeping arrangements—” He pressed himself down on top of her, feeling the familiar throbbing warmth between his legs as his chest came in contact with her flesh.
“Yes …” she breathed distractedly, between his kisses. “You are wise, my love. But perhaps I should not bring my belongings to you until he has proven that true. Everywhere there are eyes. …”
“Damn their eyes,” he said, his voice husky, every nerve in his body coming alive with exquisite sensations of arousal. “Do it. Just do it. For me.” His arms tightened around her. He felt her hands on him, now, all over him, her nails digging into his flesh as her eagerness began to match his own; felt her legs slide apart to grant him entry. Her hands took hold of him with dizzying insistence, guiding him in. “Oh gods,” he whispered, “I love you….”
Reede walked alone through the sterile silences of the lab complex hallways, wearing only a loose robe carelessly wrapped around him. Displays posted every few meters along the walls, beside sealed doorways, above every intersection, reminded him that it was well before dawn by local time. The sky outside his window slit had been as black as death, Mundilfoere had been sleeping like a child beside him, when he awakened and realized why he had—realized what he had left undone.
His body always felt as if electrodes were attached to it, vibrant, jangling, alive. But while he slept the drug had turned up the voltage. He should have realized that the incredible sensations of his wedding with Mundilfoere were more than just her skill, and his desire. He should have recognized the warning signs. But he had been too preoccupied. … By the time his body had wakened him from his sodden slumber, every nerve ending was on line, and singing; he could not get back to sleep when his skin told him he was lying on a bed of nails, knowing that by morning he would think it was a bed of hot coals.
Every step he took now was exquisite agony from the pressure on his feet; the light hurt his eyes, every breath he took made his chest ache from the fluid collecting in his lungs. Stupid. Stupid. His brain repeated the litany with every step he took, too dazzled by sensation to provide the more graphic epithets his stupidity deserved. He had actually been so besotted with lovemaking that he had not gone back to the lab—
He reached the doorway he was looking for, touched the identity sensor with his fingertip as gingerly as if it were red hot; had to hit it harder when it didn’t register him, and swore. The sound made him clench his teeth. The security seals dematerialized and he went inside.
A high anguished keening drilled into his consciousness the moment he entered the room. He stopped, then crossed the lab, not even bothering to order the doors closed behind him.
In a small transparent cubicle was a quoll, the only living thing in the lab besides himself. He had picked it up in Razuma, just one of countless abandoned animals starving in the streets. He never used animals for tests; the results he got from the datamodeling programs were far more precise. But in this case, he had made an exception. In this case, the perversity of his need to know had made him bring the wretched creature back with him to the lab. He had fed it, cared for it, given it the drug. … He had watched the quoll grow and thrive as the technoviral had taken over every cell in the animal’s body, just as it had done to his own; turning the quoll into a perfect physical specimen. The drug, which he had designed himself, had been meant to do what the water of life did; to keep a body’s systems functioning without error—to extend a human life indefinitely. It had almost worked….
The quoll had come to know and trust him, greeting him with eager whistles every time he entered the lab, watching him at work. Sometimes he had even put a hand into the cage when it scratched at the plass, and stroked its soft, tufted fur. …