WITH MY HAND on the doorjamb, some buried-alive instinct thumps within my chest: this is going to hurt.
I take a deep breath and step inside.
The bedchamber of Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon is really pretty restrained, when you consider that the guy in the bed there rules the second-largest empire on Overworld. The bed itself is a modest eight-poster, only half an acre or so; the extra four posts—each an overcarved slab of rose-veined thierril thicker than my thigh—support lamps of gleaming brass. Long yellow flames like blades of spears waver gently in the breeze from the concealed service door. I close the door soundlessly behind me, and its brocade paper–covered surface blends seamlessly into the pattern of the wall.
I wade through the billowing carpet of silken cushions, a knee-high cloud of vividly shimmering primary colors. A flash of maroon and gold to my left, and my heart suddenly hammers—but it’s only my own livery, my servant’s dress, captured briefly in the spun-silver mirror atop the Prince-Regent’s commode of lacquered Lipkan krim. The reflection shows me the spell, the enchanted face I present: smooth, rounded cheeks, sandy hair, a trace of peach fuzz. I tip myself a blurry wink and smile with my sandpaper lips, ease out a silent sigh, and keep moving.
The Prince-Regent lies propped on pillows larger than my whole bed and snores happily, the silver hairs of his mustache puffing in and out with each wheeze. A book lies facedown across his ample chest: one of Kimlarthen’s series of Korish romances. This draws another smile out of my dry mouth; who would have figured the Lion of Prorithun for a sentimentalist? Fairy tales—simple stories for simple minds, a breath of air to cool brows overheated by the complexities of real life.
I set the golden tray down softly on the table beside his bed. He stirs, shifting comfortably in his sleep—and freezing my blood. His movement sends a puff of lavender scent up from the pillows. My fingers tingle. His hair, unbound for napping, falls in a steel-colored spray around his face. That noble brow, those flashing eyes, that ruggedly carved chin exposed by careful shaving within his otherwise full beard—he’s everybody’s perfect image of the great king. The statue of him on his rearing charger—the one that stands in the Court of the Gods near the Fountain of Prorithun—will make a fine, inspiring memorial.
His eyes pop open when he feels my hand grip his throat: I’m far too professional to try to stifle his shout with a hand over the mouth, and only a squeak gets past my grip. Further struggle is discouraged by his close-up view of my knife, its thick, double-edged point an inch from his right eye.
I bite my tongue, and saliva gushes into my mouth to moisten my throat. My voice is steady: very low and very flat.
“It’s customary, at times like this, to say a few words. A man shouldn’t die with no understanding of why he’s been murdered. I do not pride myself on my eloquence, and so I will keep this simple.”
I lean close and stare past my knife blade into his eyes. “The Monasteries kept you on the Oaken Throne by supporting your foolish action against Lipke in the Plains War; the Council of Brothers felt, on balance, that you would be a strong enough ruler to hold the Empire together, at least until the Child Queen reaches majority.”
His face is turning purple, and veins in his neck bulge against my grip. If I don’t talk fast, I’ll have choked him out before I’m done. I sigh through my teeth and pick up the pace.
“They have discovered, though, that you’re an idiot. Your punitive taxes are weakening both Kirisch-Nar and Jheled-Kaarn—they tell me ten thousand free peasants starved to death in Kaarn alone last winter. Now you’ve bloodied the nose of Lipke over that stupid iron mine in the Gods’ Teeth, and you’re making noises like you want to fight a full-scale war over two crappy little eastern provinces. You have ignored and insulted the Lipkan trade delegation and have dismissed the Council of Brothers’ admonitions. They’ve decided that you’re no longer fit to rule, if you ever were. They are tired of waiting. They’ve paid me a great deal of money to remove you from the throne. Blink twice if you understand.”
His eyes widen stiffly, bug out staring from his head as though he’d make them lidless if only he could, and his throat works under my hand. He mouths words at me that my poor lipreading skill can’t follow beyond the initial please please please. He’d like to argue with me, no doubt, or perhaps request leniency or asylum for his wife and two daughters. I can grant neither; if a war of succession follows this murder, they’ll have to take their chances along with the rest of us.
Finally his eyeballs begin to dry, and he blinks—once. Funny how our reflexes conspire to kill us, sometimes. In terms of my contract, I’m to ensure his comprehension; if I’m to do this properly, I should wait for his next blink. All proprieties should be observed, in the death of a king.
His gaze shifts minutely—the old warrior is going to make a try for me, a last desperate convulsion of his will to survive, calling on other, more recent reflexes to rescue him.
When it’s a choice between observing the proprieties and getting caught in the Prince-Regent’s bedchamber, nine infinite floors up the spire of the Colhari Palace, the proprieties can fuck off.
I jam the knife into his eye. Bone crackles and blood sprays. I use the knife to twist his face away from me: a bloodstain on this livery could be fatal, on my way out. He flops like a salmon that’s found unexpected land beneath an upstream leap. This is only his body’s last unconscious attempt to live; it goes hand-in-hand with the release of his bowels and bladder. He shits and pisses all over himself and his satin-weave sheets—another one of those primordial reflexes, a futile dodge to make his meat unappetizing to the predator.
Screw it. I’m not hungry anyway.
He quiets after a year or so. I brace my free hand against his forehead and work the knife back and forth. It comes free with a wet scrape, and I set about the grisly part of this job.
The serrated edge slices easily through the flesh of his neck, but grates against his third cervical vertebra. A slightly altered angle of attack puts the edge between the third and fourth, and a couple seconds’ sawing loosens his head. The copper scent of his blood is so thick I can smell it through the stench of his shit; my stomach twists until I can barely breathe.
I uncover the golden tray that I’d carried up from the kitchens, gently set the plates of steaming food to one side, and put Toa-Phelathon’s head in their place, picking it up carefully by the hair so that none of the gore that drains from it will stain my clothes. I replace the golden dome and strip off my bloodstained gloves, tossing them carelessly onto the body beside the discarded knife. My hands are clean.
I lift the tray to my shoulder and take a deep breath. The easy part’s over. Now I have to get out of here alive.
The trickiest part of this escape is the first hurdle: getting away from the body. If I pass the pair of guards at the service door cleanly, I’ll be out of the palace before anyone knows the old man is dead. My adrenals sing to me a potent tune that makes my hands tingle and raises goose bumps up my back. My heartbeat thunders in my ears.
In the upper left corner of my vision, the red Exit Square blinks. I ignore it, even as it moves with my eyes like an afterimage of the sun.
I’m only halfway across the room when the service door swings open. Jemson Thal, the master steward, starts talking before he even clears the doorway. “Your pardon, Majesty,” he begins in a hasty breathless gabble, “but there is a rumor of an impostor among the serv . . .”
Jemson Thal takes in the headless corpse on the bed, he takes in me, and his gabble trails into gasping. His eyes go round and the color drains from his face; his mouth works like he’s strangling. I close the distance between us with a long, smooth croisé and kick him in the throat. It drops him like a bag of rocks, and now he’s strangling for real as he tries to breathe around the splinters of his larynx, clawing at his throat and writhing on the service-passage floor.
One of the guards is, will be, easy. With a wordless exclamation he drops to one knee beside Thal and tries stupidly to help him. What’s he think he’s gonna do, thump the poor bastard’s back until he coughs up his windpipe? The other isn’t in sight; smarter than his partner, he’s pressed against the wall of the service passage, waiting for me.
Both of these guards wear long sturdy hauberks under their mantles of maroon and gold, with padded chainmail coifs reinforced by studded steel skullcaps. Toa-Phelathon spared no expense in outfitting his Household Knights; my knives are useless against them, but hey, that’s all right—I’m deep in it, now.
The waiting is over. I’m happy again.
The smarter guard has a brainstorm and begins to shout for help.
I uncover the tray and gravely regard Toa-Phelathon. The lower third of his flowing hair is soaked in blood, but his face isn’t too contorted; even with the ruin of his eye he’s still clearly recognizable. I thrust the tray through the doorway about chest high; the sight of its cargo cuts off the shouted alarm as efficiently as an arrow down the throat.
While the portion of the guard’s brain that handles signal processing still struggles to assimilate the concept of the disembodied head of his king, I skip out into the service passage; I have two seconds, maybe more, before Smartguard there can use his mind for anything beyond saying, “Huh?”
The guard on one knee claws at his sword as he surges to his feet. I drop the tray with a clang, and the head bounces away as I get a hand on the dumb guard’s wrist and keep that blade where it belongs. I follow with a sharp headbutt that rings in my ears with a slapstick bonk; Dumbguard’s nose spreads like deviled ham, and his eyes drift together. I wrap both forearms around his coif and pivot away from him, twisting him sideways into a hangman’s throw that sends him tumbling forward to crash into Smartguard. The padding behind his chainmail coif didn’t give his neck enough support to save him: his neck bones parted with a sharp pop as I levered him over my back. He twitches out the last of his life as I leap lightly across Jemson Thal’s convulsing body to go over and kill Smartguard.
That’s when Toa-Phelathon gets his piece of me, a bit of petty revenge that must have him snickering in the afterlife.
I’m coming down—it’s just a little jump—but I’ve got my eyes on Smartguard, who’s disentangling himself from Dumbguard, and my foot lands on Toa-Phelathon’s head.
It rolls out from under me, and I upend like Elmer Fudd.
I barely manage to take the fall on my shoulder instead of the back of my neck, and only the narrowness of the service corridor saves my life: when Smartguard swings his broadsword at my head, its tip hangs up in the woodwork. I try to roll away, but I come up against Jemson Thal, who’s still choking, and this time Smart-guard gets it right. Instead of swinging his sword, he lunges with a stiff arm and drives a foot of steel through my liver.
A sword in the belly is a disconcerting thing: it doesn’t really hurt, much, but it’s really fucking cold, it radiates freezing cold that surges through your whole body and drains the strength out of your legs, like the brain freeze you get from chewing up an ice cube only you feel it all over, and you can feel the blade sliding around in there, slicing things up, and frankly, the whole process sucks, if you ask me.
A couple of pounds of steel in the belly also plays fuckass with the forcepattern of the spell that makes me look like a teenage eunuch. The magick flickers like a dying CRT, and the discharge lifts hair on my neck and makes my beard tingle.
Smartguard pulls the blade instead of twisting it around in there—a mistake of inexperience that I’m going to kill him for. It scrapes a rib on the way out, a sensation that’s analogous to fingernails across a blackboard combined with having your teeth drilled without anesthetic; screaming clouds of blackness bloom inside my eyes. I moan and shudder with pain, and Smartguard mistakes these for death rattle and convulsion—more inexperience.
“There, you bastard, an easy death is better than you deserve!” he says.
Tears well in his eyes for his fallen lord, and I don’t have the heart to tell him that I agree with him. He bends toward me a little as the enchanted disguise finally fades, and his eyes go wide. There’s awe in his voice when he says, “Hey, you could be . . . you look like, like Caine! You are, aren’t you? I mean, who else would . . . Great K’hool, I’ve killed Caine! I’m gonna be famous!”
I hook my right toe around his ankle to hold his leg while I stamp his knee with my left. It snaps, loudly, and he collapses into a wailing heap. That’s the trouble with chainmail: it’s no defense against joints bending in ways they’re not designed to bend. He doesn’t drop his sword, though; the kid has heart.
I come to my feet with an acrobat’s kip, tearing something inside my wounded belly. He jabs at me with the sword—but from the ground he’s slow, and it’s easy to slap my palms together around the flat of the blade, kick his wrist, and take it away from him. I flip the sword end-for-end and neatly catch the hilt.
“Too bad, kid,” I tell him. “You’d’ve been pretty good, if you’d lived.”
I shortarm the swing, and it takes him across the top of the ear, half an inch below the studded rim of his skullcap. The edge doesn’t penetrate the chain coif, but it doesn’t have to; I’m good with swords, and the impact alone is enough to fracture his skull and kill him.
I pause a bare moment to get my breath and take stock of my situation. I’m bleeding, front and back where he ran me through, and no doubt internally as well. I figure I’ve got ten minutes of useful action before I hit shock. Could be longer, could be a lot less; depends on how much damage that broadsword actually did and how badly I’m hemorrhaging.
In that time I must descend eight heavily guarded floors of the Colhari Palace and lose myself in the crowds of Ankhana’s Old Town—all while carrying the head of the Prince-Regent. The alarm’s been raised, and I’m probably bleeding to death, but that’s no reason to leave him behind; without the head, I don’t get paid, and besides, carrying a severed head won’t make me any more conspicuous than I already am. With blood running down my legs, I can’t bluff, I can’t hide, and I’ll leave a trail behind wherever I go. Now I can hear the pounding of booted feet approaching at a run.
The red Exit Square is back at the upper left corner of my field of vision, flashing on and off.
I get the rhythm of it and start triggering my blink reflex in synch with the flashing. The service passage and the dying men around me fade into nonexistence.
HARI MICHAELSON’S EYES ratcheted open when the Motorola rep swung back the helmet, and he ground his teeth against the sliding non-pain of the IV needle that the rep’s assistant slowly drew out of his neck. He lifted his hand and hacked a cough against the thick callus that ridged his knuckles, and the Motorola rep hastily produced a paper cup for him to spit into. He stretched slowly, with much creaking and joint popping, and sat forward in the simichair, elbows to knees. His straight black hair was glossy with sweat, and his eyes of the same color were rimmed in red; he turned away from the reps and rested his face on his hands.
The Motorola girl and her assistant both looked at him with the kind of hopeful puppy-dog eyes that sickened him.
From the depths of an immense, genuine calf-leather lounger, Marc Vilo asked, “Well? How was it, Hari? What do you think?”
Hari took a deep breath, sighed it out, scratched his beard, rubbed the sallow scar that crossed the bridge of his crooked, twice-broken nose, and tried to find the energy to speak. He called this, privately, his post-Caine shits: a shattering cocaine-crash depression that hit him every time he came back to Earth and had to be Hari Michaelson again. Even today—not even a real Adventure, only a three-year-old recording—had been enough to trigger it.
And let’s be honest: There was more going on here than post-Caine shits. There was a sizzling hole in his guts—like he’d swallowed acid and it had burned its way out through the skin, right alongside the scar Smartguard’s broadsword had left on his liver. Why this cube, out of all Caine’s Adventures? What in Christ’s name was Vilo thinking?
To bring him here and put him through part of A Servant of the Empire again—even a small part—was an exquisite refinement of cruelty, a lemon squeezed into an already-salted wound. It chewed at him, gnawed that hole in his guts like a little fucking rat.
Most of the time, he could kid himself along, pretend that he wasn’t really hurt, pretend that this empty burning ache that took over his chest whenever he thought of Shanna was just indigestion, just an ulcer. Most of the time, he could pretend the pain came from a hole in his guts, instead of the hole in his life. He’d gotten good at kidding himself: for months now, he’d had himself believing he was getting over her.
What the fuck, huh? Practice makes perfect.
“Hari?” Vilo leaned forward in his lounger, an edge of dangerous impatience sharpening his voice. “Everybody’s waiting on you, kid. Let’s have it.”
Slowly, Hari managed to force words from his throat. “It’s illegal, Biz’man. This is illegal tech.”
The Motorola rep gasped like a Leisurewoman meeting a flasher. “I assure you, I personally assure both of you, this technology was developed entirely indepen—”
Vilo cut her off with a smoke-trailing shut up wave of his cigar, a thick black ConCristo almost as big as he was. “I know it’s illegal, Hari, shit. Am I an idiot? I just want to know if it’s any good.”
Mark Vilo was a little salty-haired fighting cock, a self-upcasted Businessman pushing sixty from the far side, a swaggering bowlegged bastard who was the majority stockholder in Vilo Intercontinental—ostensibly a worldwide transport firm. He was the lord and master of this sprawling estate in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, and was the Business Patron of the superstar Actor whom everyone called Caine.
“Good?” Hari shrugged, sighing. Why argue? “Yeah, you better believe it. Next best thing to being there.” He turned to the Motorola rep. “Your neurochem feed—that’s a fake, isn’t it?”
The rep made protesting noises until Hari cut her off with a weary, “Ahh, shut up.”
He was glad, really, that the Motorola rep was an idiot; it gave him something to think about beyond the cold hurt that lived in Shanna’s eyes whenever he pictured her face. It had been months since he’d been able to even imagine her with a smile.
Keep your mind on fucking business, he snarled at himself.
He turned to Vilo and tried to stretch some life back into his voice by flexing his aching shoulders. “Don’t let them shit you, Biz’man. This whole Exit Square business, what do they call that? Blink in Synch?”
The Motorola rep offered a glassy, professional smile. “It’s only one of the cutting-edge features that make this unit the best value on the market today.”
Hari ignored her. “So you trigger your blink reflex to exit the program,” he went on. “It’s not a mechanical trigger. It reads the impulse as feedback on the inducers; this is wholly owned Studio technology, and the Studio takes this kind of shit seriously. The neurochem feed is just camouflage. Nothing’s going through that line but the hypnotics—and not much of them, if you want to know: they pooched the feed. They’re playing all the sensation through the same kind of direct neural induction that the Studio uses in their first-hander chairs—and they’ve got it turned up too high. The smell, when I cut off Toa-Phelathon’s head? The real thing’s not that potent. And they had the adrenal level jazzed so high I could barely breathe. Finally, the sword in the guts, it hurt too much.”
“But, but Entertainer Michaelson—” the rep sputtered, exchanging a quick worried glance with her assistant, “—we have to make it believable, you know, I mean—”
Hari rose slowly; the post-Caine shits made him feel boneless, as if only extreme concentration kept his head on his shoulders—but a little bit of Caine’s edgy threat began to leak into his voice, into the cold darkness of his eyes.
He lifted the hem of his tunic to expose the brown lines of the twin scars, front and back, on his left side below the short ribs, where Smartguard’s broadsword had pierced his liver just less than three years ago. “You see these? You want to touch them? So who should know better? You?”
“Hari, Jesus Christ, don’t be such an asshole,” Vilo said. He waved his cigar dismissively at the rep. “Don’t mind him; it’s not personal, y’know. He’s like this with everybody.”
“I’m telling you,” Hari said lifelessly, “they screwed it up. If that sword scraping my rib had hurt as much when it really happened as it did just now, I’d have spent a couple more seconds stunned. When something hurts that much, there’s not much you can do except moan or scream, writhe around, or pass right out. That poor bastard guard would have put his next thrust into my throat. All right?”
He opened a hand toward Vilo and sighed. “You want to invest in proprietary tech, that’s your business. But I’d think you wouldn’t want to deal with idiots who can’t even tune an induction helmet.”
Vilo grunted. “Invest, nothing. I’m just gonna buy the goddamn thing, Hari; this is a quote-unquote prototype. Not even a dinosaur like Motorola is gonna freemarket tech that pirates Studio effects. I just wanted to have one so I can go over cubes on my own time, without blowing a couple weeks on a first-hander berth.”
“Yeah, whatever. Do what you want.”
“Hari . . .” Vilo said mildly, returning his ConCristo to a corner of his mouth. “Attitude.”
It was a mild chill that settled into the silence Vilo’s admonition left in its wake, just enough that the rep and her assistant exchanged a flickering glance—no one actually shivered. Vilo blandly nodded toward the reps, indicating put on your company manners, son.
Hari lowered his head sullenly. “Sorry, Biz’man,” he muttered. “I’m out of line. But I’ve got one more question—with your permission.”
Vilo gave his lord-of-the-manor nod, and Hari turned to the woman from Motorola. “The cubes this chair plays—they’re not standard Studio-issue recordings. They can’t be; standard cubes don’t carry scent or touch/pain data, and I can’t believe your inducers can read off the neurochem channel and compensate for time lag and dosage and everything else. You’re getting bootleg masters from somewhere, aren’t you?”
The Motorola rep smiled her best corporate smile and said, “I’m afraid I can’t answer that. But, as guaranteed under the purchase contract, Biz’man Vilo will receive cubes appropriate for this equipment—”
“That’s enough,” Hari said disgustedly. He turned back to Vilo. “Look, it’s like this. These idiots have another idiot inside the Studio processing labs who’s feeding them bootleg masters. First, that means that what you’ll get is gonna be, most likely, uncut. A two-week Adventure is going to run two weeks in that chair, just like if you were sitting in the Cavea in a first-hander berth, only worse. This chair doesn’t have twitch-response units, comfort hookups, or an internal food supply. Second, they’ll be feeding you a steady stream of these bootlegs. There’ll be records of regular delivery, that kind of thing, and one of these days, their idiot is gonna get caught. Then before they cyborg him and sell him for a Worker, the Studio cops will get enough out of him to roll up the whole network, which they’ll turn over to their friends in the government. And these won’t be friendly and courteous CID guys knocking on your door, because this isn’t just tech violation anymore. By now, it’s about intellectual property, and copyright infringement, and all of a sudden you’re looking at the Social Police. Even you, Businessman, do not want to get on the short end of the fuckstick with Soapy.”
Vilo leaned back in his chair, snugging his head against its gelpack headrest. He puffed a couple rolling mushroom clouds of his stinking cigar smoke, then sat up again, a half grin wrinkling his crow’s-feet. “Hari, you still think like a criminal, you know that? Twenty years later, you’re still a street punk at heart.”
Hari stretched his lips into a humorless smile in response; he didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, and he didn’t want to ask.
Vilo went on, “Why’nt you go on up to the pond and have a drink while I wrap things down here, hey?”
There was a time, Hari reflected dully, that to be dismissed like a child, like a little fucking kid, would have felt like a slap. Now, it produced only a blank amazement that he still seemed to be going about his business, going on with his life, as though it still had meaning.
But it was an act, as hollow a pretense as was Caine himself.
Without Shanna, the world was empty, and he couldn’t really manage to care about anything at all.
He nodded. “Sure. See you there.”
HARI PROWLED THE sunlit rocks that surrounded the shimmering pond and the twin waterfalls that fed it. The pond was a beautiful piece of work: only the faint scent of chlorine and a sneaking conviction that nature wouldn’t have arranged stone and water with so much attention to human comforts betrayed its artificial origins.
Hari paced back and forth, sat down, stood up. Once or twice he started out toward the scrub desert, into the gritty wind and barren mounds of slag and tailings from the surrounding mines. Each time, he stopped at the fringes of Vilo’s artificial oasis, came back, and started the cycle over again. He stared out at the toxic sludge of the barrens with a kind of wistfulness; he could imagine himself walking among the heaps, all the way up into the dead rock of the mountains. He wasn’t sure that tramping through the poisoned waste would make him feel any better, but he knew it couldn’t make him feel much worse.
Take it easy, he told himself over and over again. It’s not like she’s dead. And each time, a dark whisper in his heart told him that maybe he’d be better off if she was. Or if he was.
With her death, he could start to heal; with his, he’d be beyond pain.
What the fuck was taking Vilo so goddamn long?
Hari hated waiting, always had. Nothing to do but stand around and think—and there were too many things in his life that didn’t bear thinking about.
He looked around for something, anything, he could use to distract himself. He even looked up the wall of the artificial cliffs down which the waterfalls streamed into the pond, thinking that maybe a fifty-meter free climb up a vertical water-slickened face might be just the thing to take his mind off Shanna.
This had been his tactic ever since the separation: Keep busy. Divert the mind. Don’t think about it. And it was a good tactic, one that worked, day to day. Sometimes hours would pass, days, even a week, during which he barely thought of her.
But he’d always been a better tactician than he was a strategist. He won every battle, but on days like today he couldn’t help realizing that he was losing the war.
Even climbing the fucking waterfall wouldn’t help; his experienced eye picked out innumerable handholds and footholds that could only have been put there by intention. This cliff had been designed to be climbed, and he could go up it more easily than most men could climb a ladder.
He shook his head disgustedly.
“Hey, Caine!” called one of the girls who swam in the pond. “Want to come in and play?”
In the pond a couple of the ubiquitous Vilo Intercontinental party girls had been swimming and splashing and dunking each other. Long-limbed, lean, athletic, with perfect teeth and breasts that were better yet, their job was to be available to Businessman Vilo’s guests. They both were staggeringly beautiful. Surgical glamour was part of their bonus for their five years’ service, at the end of which they’d be released to seek their leggy fortunes elsewhere. They were playing up for him now, arranging lovely flashes of thigh and butt, the graceful arc of a well-toned back thrusting a nipple toward the sky; if it hadn’t been so deliberate it might’ve been appealing.
Now the one who had called to him slid behind the other and drew her into an embrace; one hand cupped her breast while the other slid below the water’s surface toward her crotch. She bent her graceful neck to kiss her partner’s shoulder, all the while inviting him with her eyes.
Hari sighed. He supposed he might as well jump in; at least fucking a couple party girls would have a certain honesty. Unlike the celebrity-hungry women who put themselves in his way wherever he went, these girls were professionals. There wouldn’t be any pretense that they cared about him, or he about them.
A few years ago, sure, he would have done it. But now, so late in his life, after he had finally found someone who had loved him, whom he had loved, who had made truth of the ancient euphemism making love, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even get interested. Fucking those girls would be like sticking his dick in a knothole: a complicated, slightly painful way to masturbate.
A waistcoat-and-cummerbund servant slid silently up beside Hari and offered a tray with a snifter of scotch.
Hari sighed. “Call me Hari, all right? Everybody forgets I have a name.”
“Oh, okay, uh, Hari. I just wanted to say, y’know, I’m a big fan of yours, I even, well, y’know . . . ah, never mind.”
But the servant—Andre, Hari thought his name might be—still hovered expectantly at his elbow. Hari took a slow pull from the snifter and watched the girls swim.
The servant coughed and said, “I only get cubes of your stuff, of course. I only been a first-hander once, a few years ago when Biz’man Vilo took a bunch of us for vacation. It was kinda wild, because, y’know, we didn’t first-hand you—that’s really expensive—but the guy we did, he was Yoturei the Ghost. You remember him?”
“Should I?” Hari said, bored. Why do people think that all Actors know each other?
“Well, yeah, I mean, I don’t know. You killed me—I mean him. In the Warrens in Ankhana.”
“Oh, yeah.” Hari shrugged, remembering now the ruckus at the Studio when he’d transferred back after that Adventure. “He tracked me for a day or two before I caught him. Hell, how’m I supposed to know the kid’s an Actor? He should’ve had enough brights to stay out of my way.”
“Jeez.” The servant leaned closer, conspiratorially, offering a whiff of the red wine that was giving him the balls to keep talking. “Y’know, sometimes I even dream of being you . . . being Caine, y’know?”
Hari grunted a laugh. “Yeah, sometimes I do, too.”
The servant frowned. “I don’t get it.”
Hari took another pull from the snifter, warming to the conversation. Even empty chatter with a fan was better than standing alone with his thoughts.
“Caine and I, we’re not the same person, all right? I grew up in a San Francisco Labor slum; Caine’s an Overworld foundling. He was raised by a Pathquan freedman, a farrier and blacksmith. By the time I was twelve I was a sneakthief because I wasn’t big enough to be a mugger; when Caine was twelve, he was sold to a Lipkan slaver because the whole family was starving to death in the Blood Famine.”
“But that’s all, like, pretend, right?”
Hari shrugged and sat down on the rocks, making himself comfortable. “When I’m on Overworld, being Caine, it seems real enough to me. You train yourself to believe it. Overworld is a different place, kid. Caine can do things I can’t; I mean, he’s not a spellcaster, but the principle’s the same. He’s faster, stronger, more ruthless, maybe not as bright. It’s like magick, I guess. It’s imagination, and willpower: you make yourself believe.”
“That’s how the magick works? I mean, I don’t really get it, magick, but you—”
“I don’t really get it, either,” Hari said sourly. “Spellcasters are crazy. They, sort of, hallucinate on command . . . Ah, I don’t know. First-hand one sometime. They’re all fucking bughouse nuts.”
“Well, then, uh—” The servant offered a clumsy boys’-club laugh. “Then why’d you marry one?”
And, somehow, it always comes back to Shanna. Hari emptied the snifter, swallowed hard, sighed, and with a blurred whip of the wrist fired the empty snifter over the pond to shatter on the rocks on the other side, a shimmering crystal shower echoing the waterfall’s rainbow spray. Hari rolled his eyes up to meet the consternation on the servant’s face. “Maybe you better go sweep that up, huh? Before the Businessman gets here.”
“Jeez, Caine, I didn’t mean to—”
“Forget it,” Hari said. He leaned back on the rocks and laid his elbow over his eyes. “Go sweep.”
Lying there, he could only think of the end of A Servant of the Empire. He could almost feel Shanna’s lap below his head, almost smell the faint musk of her skin, almost hear her whisper to him that she loved him, that he had to live.
The happiest dream he could dream, lying on the rocks beside Marc Vilo’s pool, was of lying on the shit-stained cobbles of a narrow Ankhanan alley, bleeding to death.
A shadow fell across his face and woke him up.
His heart leaped, and he started upward, shading his eyes, breathless—
Vilo stood over him, haloed by the afternoon sun. “I’m goin’ into Frisco. Come on, Hari, I’ll give you a lift home.”
VILO’S ROLLS LURCHED slightly on insertion into the slavelanes. The Businessman unbelted his pilot’s straps, walked back to the passenger lounge, and poured himself a long shot of Metaxa. He drained a third of it at a gulp and lowered himself onto the love seat that formed a corner with the sofa where Hari sat.
“Hari, I want you to get back together with Shanna,” Vilo said.
Long years of practice in dealing with the upcastes kept Hari stone-faced. He’d anticipated it and thought he was ready, but the sizzle in his chest told him he’d never be ready for this.
It seemed like, somehow, she was all around him, like he couldn’t turn his head without seeing something that reminded him of her, like every word spoken in his presence was some kind of a jeering reminder that he had been tried and found wanting—that, in the end, he just wasn’t good enough for her.
He stared out one of the broad windows that sided the Rolls, watching the snowcapped peaks of the Rocky Mountains flow past far below. “We’ve been over this,” he said tiredly.
“Yes, we have. And I don’t want to have to talk about it again, understand? You patch things up with her, and I’m not kidding.”
Hari shook his head wordlessly. He looked down at his hands, folded now between his knees like a sullen child’s, and with a sudden twist popped his knuckles hard enough to make his joints ache. “Can I have a drink?”
“All right,” Vilo said. “Help yourself.”
Hari went to the bar and kept his back to his Patron while he pretended to scan the liquor display. Finally he stabbed a code at random, and the dispenser whirred and hummed and burped up some evil-smelling crimson frozen fruit concoction—and eliminated Hari’s last delaying tactic. He sipped it and made a face.
“Exactly what is your problem?” Vilo asked. “I think this is the third time I’ve told you, straight out and no dodging, that I want you two back together. So what’s the holdup?”
Hari shook his head. “It’s not that simple.”
“My ass. The only reason I let you marry her in the first place was she’s good for your image. And mine. I need to soften a little so I can cozy with Shermaya Dole; she’s a little leery of selling GFT to me.”
The Doles were a Leisure family, but it pleased Shermaya to dabble in Investing, and occasionally in Business; she sponsored a number of Actors, including—most prominently—Shanna.
Vilo took another long pull of his brandy and went on musingly. “Green Fields Technologies . . . Y’know, I’ve been trying to crack into agriculture for five years now, and GFT has some new synthetic something or other that’s supposed to let us recover the Kannebraska Desert for farming. Dole’s worried about the GFT Laborers and Artisans, though; I’ve almost got her convinced that I won’t postacquisition downsize at all. Silly bitch. Anyway, I’ve been talking to her about Shanna, and she says she won’t press for a reconciliation; she’s got this thing about letting you two work this shit out for yourselves. I say, screw that. Dole’s a twitch, and a softhearted one, too. She’s teetering. I get you back together with Shanna, it just might trip the wire on this deal. So do it.”
“She left me, Biz’man,” Hari murmured, and was again surprised at the sudden twist of pain that followed saying this. It always surprised him, every time. “There’s not much I can do.”
“Well, what’s up her goddamn ass then?” Vilo snapped. “There’s probably five billion women that’d sell both their tits and an ovary to spend one night with you! Jesus Christ!”
“The nights weren’t the problem.”
The Businessman chuckled crudely. “I’ll bet.”
Hari stared down into the creamy crimson head of his drink. “She, ah . . . shit. I don’t know. I think she figured that I’d be a little less like Caine. It was—” He took a deep breath. “It was the Toa-Phelathon thing that started it, if you really want to know.”
Vilo nodded. “I do know. That’s why I picked that cube for you to audit today.”
Hari stiffened, and muscles at the corners of his jaw suddenly bulged.
“She left you because you’re an asshole,” Vilo told him, jabbing his finger at Hari’s chest. “She left you because she couldn’t stand living with a homicidal shit-heel who treated her like dirt.”
A red mist began to coalesce in Hari’s vision. “I never. . .” He clenched against his temper and said, “It wasn’t about how I treated her. I treated her like a queen.” The glass trembled in his hand and slopped a bit onto the Rolls’ carpet. The spreading stain looked like blood.
Vilo followed his gaze and snorted. “You can clean that up later. Right now I’m not done talking to you.”
He drained his glass and leaned forward, creases in his face deepening with his frown. “I know you’re a little wrought up, but you listen now. I want you back together with Shanna, and no fucking around on this. You do whatever it takes. If she thinks you’re too . . . whatever, you make goddamn sure that you’re less. You follow? I don’t care what it takes. You do it.”
“Don’t ‘Biz’man’ me, Michaelson. I give you a lot of fucking slack. I let you talk up, I let you play studman for the public, and I give you a lot of fucking money. You start paying back now. You ever don’t feel like it, you just remember that you’re not the only motherfucking Actor that fronts for VI.” Vilo sat back to let Hari think about it.
Hari’s ears rang with the tension in his neck. Slowly, carefully, he set his glass down on the bar, watching his hand all the way. Then, just as slowly and carefully, he turned back to his Patron and said, in a voice held very soft and very calm, “Yes, Biz’man. All right.”
HARI STOOD BY the tall chain fence that surrounded the grass court behind the Abbey and watched Vilo lift the Rolls expertly from the lawn, its turbocells rotating toward flight position before it cleared the trees. He squinted against the backblast but held his position respectfully until the Rolls slid into the thick, rolling clouds over San Francisco, clouds that now reflected the bloody glow of the streetlights from the city below.
He walked to the broad armorglass doors of the sunroom, put his hand on the scanner, and said, “Honey, I’m home.”
The pause was as brief as money could make it, while the scanner read his palm and matched it against his voiceprint, then disengaged the security system and magnetically unlocked the door. Actuators hidden in the walls took up much of the work of opening the seventy-odd kilos of armorglass that made up the doors; they seemed as light as old-fashioned plexi.
The lights came on as he entered the sunroom, and the Abbey said to him, “Hello, Hari. You have fourteen messages.”
The furniture in the sunroom was a beautifully matched set of antique bentwoods; Hari moved through the room uneasily, touching nothing. The drawing room lit up as he approached the door.
He said, “Abbey: Query. Messages from Shanna?”
“No, Hari. Shall I replay messages?” The voice followed him; the housecomp phased the sound from tiny speakers hidden in each wall to make the Abbey’s voice seem to speak softly from just behind Hari’s left shoulder. Shanna had found the placement creepy; she’d never liked to talk to the house, and she had pestered him to change it until they’d once nearly come to blows.
Hari sighed. He stopped on the rose-veined marble floor of the front hall and looked up the wide empty sweep of the stairs that rose to the second-floor loggia. “Yeah, fine,” he said. “Abbey: Replay messages.”
The nearest wallscreen—the one beside the service elevator behind the stairs—lit up. Hari couldn’t see the face as he turned away and climbed the stairs, but he knew the voice—the deferential whine of his lawyer. Even though they were of the same caste, both Professionals, his lawyer insisted on bootlicking; Entertainers have some theoretical social precedence over Attorneys.
As Hari walked through the echoing halls of the Abbey, each wallscreen behind him flicked off and the next one ahead flicked on, all showing his lawyer’s sweating face as he explained that Hari’s petition to upcaste to Administration had been denied yet again; the lawyer believed that the Studio was blocking him, because Caine was still so popular that Hari’s retirement from Acting would represent a substantial fiscal burden et cetera et cetera.
Hari went into the gym and stripped off his Professional’s suit and slacks. He didn’t have much interest in what his lawyer had to say; he hadn’t really expected to be allowed to upcaste, anyway. The lawyer’s only other news was that Hari’s request for an appeal of his father’s sedition sentence had been denied yet again.
The balance of the messages were of even less interest, from his local Professional’s Tribune asking for his endorsement in the upcoming election, to eight different begging calls from various charitable organizations, interspersed with requests for appearances and interviews on a number of magazine netshows. He made a mental note to have the Abbey’s secretary subroutine upgraded to include a precis function; it would be painfully expensive—all AI functions were—but more than worth it, if it would allow him to avoid hearing their whining voices and seeing their eager, sincere, puppy-dog eyes.
Much of his time at home he spent here, in the gym. The exercise rooms, and the track that circled the second floor of the Abbey, were the only parts of the Abbey that hadn’t been refurnished under Shanna’s direction. Everywhere else, Hari felt like a guest in his own empty house.
Clad only in his shorts, Hari went to work on the gelbag without putting on gloves or foot guards. The harder it was hit, the stiffer the gelbag became, up to approximately the resistance of human bone, then it gave way with a sharp pop. Long before Hari had worked out the pressure of the frustrated anger that boiled behind his ribs, each blow he struck penetrated deep into the gel with a satisfying crack that sounded a lot like the snap of a human neck.
His shoulders gradually began to loosen as his body warmed up—with a painful slowness that forcefully reminded him of the approach of his fortieth birthday. It only made him hit harder. He barely even saw the bag, after a while; shifting images of the Toa-Phelathon assassination played tag behind his eyes.
That was one of Caine’s murders that stayed with him, hung around the back of his head like an upcaste guest: no matter how sick of him you get, you can’t make him leave.
He couldn’t even blame the Studio for it: Caine had taken that job, accepted the Monasteries’ commission, even though the Studio had told Hari that they were leaning in favor of war between Ankhana and Lipke, Overworld wars being very good for business, very fertile ground for young Actors to make their reputations. Hari had gone before the Studio’s Scheduling Board to personally argue in favor of the assassination. He’d argued that the murder of the Prince-Regent would destabilize Ankhana’s federal feudalism; he’d argued that civil wars are bloodier and far more bitter than war between two empires on opposite sides of the Continental Divide could ever be.
He’d never wanted to be proven so conclusively right.
The bloodshed that had followed, as the various Dukes of the Cabinet jockeyed for power and slaughtered each others’ adherents, was appalling even by Overworld standards. The poor, bewildered little Child Queen Tel-Tamarantha, in regency for whom Toa-Phelathon had ruled, had survived her uncle by mere hours; none of the competing Dukes could take the risk that another would control her, and so the first casualty of the Succession War had been a beautiful, slightly dim-witted nine-year-old girl.
Sometimes, now, as he slammed the gelbag with fist and elbow and shin, it was his own face he imagined on the bag’s surface, his own neck that he wanted to hear snap.
A Servant of the Empire was unusual for a Caine Adventure, nearly unique. Despite his reputation, Caine rarely murdered his targets outright, in blood that cold; the audiences didn’t like it. They wanted more action, more risk—some few even liked a fair fight. The murder of the Prince-Regent was still a popular rental, even now—three years later—largely because of the extraordinary violence of Caine’s escape from the palace. Caine had killed four more men and one woman beyond the two guards, the master steward, and the Prince-Regent, a total of nine; he’d also nearly died himself, and the increasing desperation of his attempts to get out of the Colhari Palace while hanging on to consciousness added suspenseful spice.
If he had been what he pretended to be, an Overworld native, he would have died that day. Even the state-of-the-art medical technology of the Studio infirmary had barely sufficed to save his life after his emergency transfer back to Earth. He’d stumbled into that alley in Ankhana’s Old Town as his vision faded to black, sure that the Studio would leave him there to bleed to death because he hadn’t made it back to his designated transfer point.
The exception they’d made for him had been approved at the highest level; it had to be. No one below the Board of Governors, in Geneva, can pass down such decisions. Arturo Kollberg, the Chairman of the San Francisco Studio, had personally pleaded with them; when Studio CEO Turner added his voice to the plea, they had finally approved the emergency transfer that had saved his life.
Emergency transfers are more rare than flawless diamonds. After all, where’s the suspense, if Actors can be pulled back to Earth anytime they get in a little trouble? Even stars of Caine’s magnitude get killed from time to time; it’s what keeps the first-handers coming back. You never know if the Adventure you’re passing up might be the Actor’s last. Among the Leisurefolk and Investor families that make up the bulk of the firsthand audience, there’s a whole bag of cool derived from having been on-line with a major star when he or she is violently killed—in real time, seeing what he sees, feeling the life drain from his body as though it’s your own.
And that’s where he’d been, lying among rags and scraps of food, his blood pulsing through his fingers onto the shit-stained cobbles of an Ankhanan alley, when a shadow had fallen across his face and woke him up.
He leaned his forehead against the impact-warmed poly of the gelbag and draped his arms around it, like an exhausted boxer going into a clinch to hold himself on his feet. The memory had him in its jaws, now. It shook him like a terrier shakes a rat, trying to crack his spine with the whiplash.
That filthy little cul-de-sac, and the shadow on his face, opening his eyes to see the haloed silhouette above him . . .
Shanna had stood over him, a full eclipse of breathless horror.
She’d been in Ankhana on an unrelated Adventure of her own, as Pallas Ril; Ankhana before the Succession War had been a popular environment. The uproar at the palace, the shouts of panicked guards and blaring trumpets and the massive, desperate manhunt through the streets of Old Town, had drawn Actors like flies to a three-day corpse, all hoping to inject a little excitement into their second-rate Adventures. Of the hundreds of men and women in Ankhana who’d been looking for him that morning, only Shanna had taken that narrow turn into the stinking shadows of the cul-de-sac where he lay, the head of Toa-Phelathon still held by a snarl of bloody hair in his fist.
Only Shanna had knelt beside him, had cradled him on her lap, had stroked his hair as light had faded from his world.
They had been married less than a year.
He would have been better off if he had died that day. Instead, the emergency transfer had finally been approved, when it was almost too late, bringing them both into a reality far colder than a lonely death in a filthy alley.
It brought them to Earth, and to each other.
She had believed—when they met, as he courted her, even when they married—that Caine was only an act. She had believed that inside somewhere, within his heart of hearts, he was a fundamentally good and decent man. She had believed that no one could see in him what she saw, until that morning when she knelt with his head on her lap.
When she looked down and saw the old man’s head on the cobbles like a discarded ball, ragged shreds of neck below the bloody ruins of its eye, she finally began to suspect that she was wrong about him, and the world was right.
That wasn’t the end of their marriage, no: that would have been too easy. Neither of them were quitters. They hung on to each other like grim death, fighting and making up and fighting again, both of them pouring their guts into each other, no matter what the cost. It was Shanna, as usual, who had done the right thing, the smart thing, the practical thing: she had let him go.
When she left, she took with her everything that had been right with his life.
He pushed himself off the gelbag and whipped into a side kick that folded it in the middle like a car around a bridge pylon. He grabbed the bag and tried to rip it off its shock cords; he hammered at the bag with fists and stiffened fingers, elbows and knees, forearms and shins, toes and heels and forehead. But no matter how hard he hit, how long he worked, he couldn’t touch the anger. He couldn’t get at it, not this way. And the anger was only the shield of the pain.
Finally he stopped, panting. This wasn’t what he needed. He knew what he needed.
He needed to go back to Overworld.
He needed—finally, inescapably—to hurt somebody.
And as always, when lacking a better target, he turned on himself.
He said, “Abbey: Call Shanna. Audio-out only.”
The wallscreen lit up with her face, and the soft green hazel of her eyes stabbed him like a knife.
This was her message dump, of course; she no more answered her screencalls personally than he did.
“Hi there,” her image said brightly, cheerfully, sincerely glad-to-see-ya. “I’m Pallas Ril, adventuring mage. I’m also Shanna Leighton, Actor.”
Shanna Leighton Michaelson, Hari said silently.
“If you have a message for either of me, start talking.”
His mouth tasted of dust. He could only stare: at the subtle curve of her neck, the line of her jaw, the thick curls of her short-cut hair. His fingers twitched with the memory of its softness. If he closed his eyes, right now, he could fill in every line of her body, every faintest freckle.
I’ll change, he told her digitized image, but silently; he knew this was hopeless. Perhaps she’d help him put up a pretense, just a few days to satisfy Vilo, perhaps she still cared enough for him for that, but he couldn’t even ask.
It’d hurt too much to be refused, and it’d hurt more if she went along with it.
She’d claimed, more than once, that their separation was painful for her. He didn’t know if that was true; he didn’t know if she still hurt as much as he did. He hoped not.
And here he was, and the tingling in his hands and the stutter in his chest told him that he’d been wanting this for a long time. He’d only been waiting for an excuse.
The pressure from Vilo gave him something to say that would gloss over the unspoken truth: that no matter how hard he tried to pretend otherwise, no hour passed in which he did not ache for her. He didn’t know what to say, how to put it that wouldn’t sound too cold, that wouldn’t sound like My Patron and your Patron have decided we should be together.
But he had to say something. He cleared his throat. “Uh, Shanna, this is Hari, and I’ve—”
“One moment,” her image told him, and it swiftly morphed into a new view of her, in her rich blue and steel gray Overworld costume, the one she wore as Pallas Ril. “Congratulations! You’ve made my Friends File.”
Friends? he thought. Is that what we are?
“Being in the Friends File means I can tell you that I’m currently on Adventure, and I expect to be back on the evening of November 18. Don’t expect a return call before then, and you won’t be disappointed.”
Hari sagged, defeated. He’d forgotten; today’s avalanche of memory had buried it entirely. She’d left for the latest installment of her ongoing Adventure a week ago. He canceled the call with a weary slap against the wallstud. She wasn’t on Earth. She wasn’t even in the same universe.
My life, he thought, is a short dive into deep shit.
THE SQUEAL FROM his wallscreen stabbed him like a knife in the ear. He started upright, head spinning. He’d been drinking into the late hours of the morning, sitting alone in his empty house, and now his eyes were crusted shut and he couldn’t make sense of that shrieking. He rubbed his eyes until the lids parted with a dull ripping sensation that brought the taste of blood to the back of his throat, and the brilliant sunlight that streamed in through his bedroom window threatened to burst his skull.
What the fuck time is it? Noon?
“Abbey,” he croaked thickly. “Polarizers. Twilight.”
“Please rephrase your command, Hari.”
He cleared his throat and spat a wad of phlegm into the disposall under the nightstand. “Abbey: Polarize the windows. Twilight.”
As the room gradually darkened around him, he raised his voice so he could hear himself over the shriek. “Abbey: Query. What is that fucking noise?”
“Yeah, yeah. Abbey: Delete word fucking. Retry.”
“That noise is your priority alarm, Hari. It indicates a screencall coded Extremely Urgent.”
“It is the code labeled King Bleeding Studio Asshole, Hari.”
“Shit.” He shook the cobwebs out of his head. King Bleeding Studio Asshole was the label of the code he’d given to Gayle Keller, the personal assistant of the Chairman of the San Francisco Studio, Arturo Kollberg. It meant this was bad news. “Abbey: Audio only. Answer.”
The shrieking suddenly cut to creamy silence. Hari said, “Yeah, Gayle. This is Hari.”
“Entertainer Michaelson?” The Chairman’s secretary sounded uncertain; like most people, he was uncomfortable talking to someone he couldn’t see. “Uh, Administrator Kollberg wants you in his office ASAP, Entertainer.”
“In his office?” Hari repeated stupidly. Kollberg never saw people in his office. Hari hadn’t been in the Chairman’s office in ten years. “What’s this about? My next Adventure isn’t until after the first of the year.”
“I, ah, don’t really know, Entertainer. The Administrator wouldn’t say. He only told me that if you asked, I should tell you it’s about your wife.”
“My wife?” What isn’t about my wife? he thought sourly, but that was only his hangover talking. “What is it? Did something happen?” His heart thumped once, heavily, and kicked into a faster beat. “Is she all right? What happened?”
“I can’t really say, Entertainer Michaelson. All he said is to tell you—”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Hari snapped. He swung his legs out of bed and stood up, and suddenly he didn’t feel hungover at all. How fast could he shower and dress? No, fuck showering; he had no time. Brush his teeth? See the Chairman with stale scotch on his breath? Shit, pull it together. “I’m on my way. Tell him half an hour. Tell him . . . just tell him I’m on my way.”