26 Come the Morning
“Tompa?” Roussel’s voice was soft, questioning—and getting too flickin’ close.
She stared at the doorless entrance to the room where she huddled in the corner. He would find her. It was inevitable. The Temple was wide but so shallow that each of its hundred or so rooms opened directly onto the courtyard. This room was typical: small, rectangular, featureless, and devoid of hiding places. There was no furniture except for a raised, padded sleeping platform built in to the rear wall, as though the Temple was a huge dormitory. There was nowhere to hide.
Bowing her head, she put her arms around her chest and trapped her hands in her armpits. The real enemy was no longer Roussel. It was herself.
In the distance, a burst of revelry indicated that the new converts were enjoying the wine and had started their herd-bonding orgy. Closer to the Temple, Roussel’s footsteps clicked along the stones, pausing occasionally to peer into a room. At each room, he called her name, growing closer, squeezing the suspense and anticipation in her belly tighter and harder. Tompa clamped her eyes shut against the glistening shivers that thrummed along her nerves.
It was as though her body had been transformed into a diagnosis display for the personnel cocoons she used to test on the Vance’s light-craft shuttles. The test started with an explosion of pulsing, hypnotic colors that filled the wall-sized display. After a minute, the pulses settled into a three-dimensional schematic of a virtual human in the cocoon. Rainbows danced and tingled along intricate traceries of connections, cascading in spectacular and confusing patterns that only the computer could interpret.
And now Tompa could feel vivid colors surging wildly across her flesh, merging into whirlpools around her chest and groin. She had no computer to interpret the bedlam. Oh, she guessed that some mad flavor of arousal lay smirking behind the chaos, but most of the sensations—awareness of the skin under her toenails, of the air brushing tissue as it moved in and out, of blood as it gushed through her veins—pointed nowhere.
And she was still thirsty. The wine hadn’t helped even that.
“Tompa?”
A shadow eclipsed the rectangle of light from the doorway. She held her breath and sat absolutely still, closing her eyes momentarily as though that might help her become invisible. Yet she heard herself say, “In here.”
Roussel ducked his head and stepped through the door. He was too tall; he had to stoop. Stoopid Roussel. Stupid, stupid.
“I’m drunk,” she whimpered.
“Oh. Okay.”
He knelt and lit a small, square candle like the ones Awmit had used in the cavern, spreading a monstrous shadow of himself across the wall. The flickers of light and darkness were part of the same code as the flares oscillating through her flesh, whispering the same enigmatic message. Holding her breath, she squinted at the secret language writhing on the wall. Its meaning flew through her head like water through a sieve. Water—cool and quenching . . .
Roussel didn’t approach her, but crossed the room to sit on the padded ledge on the far wall. He held up a bottle and placed it prominently on the ledge beside him.
“Not gonna drink with you,” Tompa growled. “Not gonna do anything with you!”
“It’s water from the newcomers. I was still thirsty and I figured you might be, too.”
She stared at the bottle. Fishbait, that’s what it was. A worm on a hook to lure her within reach. “Go to hell.”
He chuckled, then opened the bottle and took a long drink. She watched his throat bob, hoping he wouldn’t drink it all but determined not to beg for anything. When he was done, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, closed the bottle, and set it back on the ledge. He hadn’t tipped the bottle back far; she was pretty sure there was some left for her, damn him.
“Congratulations, Tompa.”
“For telling you to go to hell?”
“For winning acquittal.”
She tried to lick her lips. “Oh.”
“It’s over.”
She shook her head, the movement making her aware of the erotic potential of fingertips grazing her neck and of the aching emptiness of her own skin. “No, it isn’t.”
He nodded slowly. “I guess you’re right.”
She lowered her head and whimpered.
“You’re beautiful and desirable, Tompa. Seeing you in that loose uniform has been driving me crazy long before I had the wine. It isn’t just your body, though. You’re the most spirited woman I’ve ever known.”
“Spirited as in drunkest, yeah. And I feel . . .” A sob, prodded along by the sensations storming through her abdomen, improbably bubbled from her mouth, of all places. “Like I’m only half a person.”
Roussel nodded as though she’d said something profound. “Yes.”
She didn’t understand why he just sat there, why he didn’t get this ratshit over with. He’d had wine, too, though he’d nursed the bottle slowly compared to her eager gulps. He must know she was powerless to resist.
Minutes passed while her breathing, and her mind, grew heavier and heavier. “How can you just sit there?” she asked at last in a slurred voice.
“It isn’t easy. I want to . . .” He looked out the door of the room and took a deep breath, then chuckled. “Awmit was getting frantic. He’s always wanted to have sex with a Shon of another species. Intersex, he calls it. With a herd-bonding orgy underway, this is his big chance—but he didn’t feel he could leave Tar-Thara alone, under the circumstances. Apparently two other members of her family dwarain are among the pursuers—if they’re still alive, that is. Awmit’s trying to find them so he can turn her over to their care and join the orgy.”
“Shut up, Roussel.”
“Call me Dante.”
“Shut up!” Tompa ran both hands over her face, which tingled and yearned under the touch. She jerked the guilty hand away from her flesh. When she glanced up he was staring at her with burning eyes—yet he remained as motionless as Bez-Tattin’s statue.
Oh, God. The maggot was going to force her to make the first move, stripping her of even the self-righteous fury of the raped. “Goddamn you!”
He didn’t answer.
Her body felt strange, as though it had decided to throw off the yoke of her mind. She rose to her feet and stepped toward him, agonizingly aware of her thighs rubbing each other. The room was small. Four steps. One more and she’d be in his arms.
She didn’t take the fifth step. “Give me the water.”
He looked at her, then picked up the bottle. For a moment she thought he was going to make her come closer, but he tossed her the bottle. She opened it and drank greedily. Much more satisfying than the wine.
Satisfaction. Why did she have to think about that? About hands and lips touching her, yes, stroking her, yes, rubbing her body like a match against a rough surface.
He was smiling at her again. She wanted to claw the grin from his face, wanted to . . . she wanted to . . . wanted . . .
Shaking her head, she groaned, defeated by herself. “Two things. First, I figure you’re one of those maggoty gordos who wants to know whether it was ‘good.’ Well, it never is, so your flickin’ male ego is headed nose first down the toilet.”
His damned grin didn’t falter. In fact, it grew wider, and he started taking off his shirt. “And the second thing?”
Jubilant sounds from the distant Shon orgy swam through Tompa’s mind as she watched him remove the shirt. Only when he was done could she force her gaze up to his eyes. “I’ll still hate you in the morning.”
He paused, hands on his belt. “Tompa Lee, a man could fall in love with you, if he were crazy enough.”
“Go to hell.”
Chuckling, he undid his belt with unhurried, mesmerizing fingers. “Come the morning, remember that you crossed the room. Not me.”
God, how she wanted to shatter his smug smile. She took a deep breath and stood as tall—and as still—as possible. “You roach-damned, slap-happy mental reject. Some Navy hero
you are. I could have survived without you.” There was his guidance through the old landslide, of course, and his help bringing down the bridge, but at the moment none of that counted. “You’ve been useless,” she hissed, leaning closer for emphasis. “Totally and utterly useless.”
His smile vanished. For a moment she thought he was going to go all confused and flap-happy, and victory swelled inside her. Yet when he met her gaze, instead, her eyes grew blurry with tears.
“I know that,” he said quietly.
After long, heavy, unbearable seconds, he removed his trousers. Then he stood motionless, proudly and flagrantly male.
So close. A hand’s breadth away. Yet Tompa merely shut her eyes and balled her hands into fists. Her heavy breathing echoed against the stone walls.
Or was it his breathing, not hers? She couldn’t tell. The sounds mingled, intertwined, thrust and parried, moving in and out in a primordial, eternal rhythm that somehow focused the chaos inside her into a hot, moist tunnel of energy powerful enough to propel a starship into space.
A tear slipped from her eye. It moved down her cheek like slow electricity, leaving a line of fire in its wake and eventually teasing her lips with saltiness—the taste of pain, of blood, of life itself. A tremor started, stopped, teased her with the promise of total conflagration. Her breathing grew quicker, heavier. Her body was swaying from the wine, swaying . . .
The back of her hand brushed against him. At the touch, the boundary between them—and with it, the last fragments of Tompa Lee—dissolved into a fury of animal lust.
The candle had burned out and the room was dark when sensations enticed Dante out of a wondrous dream. He knew immediately where he was and whose body pressed against his, whose head cut off the circulation to his tingling arm, whose fingertips trailed over his penis in languid, teasing strokes. He grinned like a teenager who’d just lost his virginity.
“About time you woke up,” Tompa whispered close to his ear.
The Temple was silent. The orgy must be over—outside, at least. Tompa sat up, her tattered uniform a grey blur in the darkness, and put one knee on either side of him. She was no expert. He had to help her find the way, but soon she was riding him slowly, experimentally, as though doing this entirely for herself. Taking his cue from her, Dante remained as motionless as possible under her bold yet shy ministrations.
He was surprised, startled, overjoyed. He wanted to ask her if the wine still sang in her loins. He wanted her to know that it had left his system completely, that this was him loving her, not just a chemical reaction. But he sensed that words, any words, would shatter Tompa’s hesitant intimacy, so he said nothing.
And when she traced her fingertips over his cheeks and up higher still, he shut his eyes and let her touch him, a thumb on each closed lid.
Her hips no longer moved, though her thumbs still pressed his eyes. Was she so inexpert that she thought this was arousing?
A drop fell onto his chest. A tear.
“Don’t cry, Tompa,” he said in the soft, soothing voice that darkness and intimacy summoned from him. “It’s all right.”
She didn’t answer, didn’t move.
“Everything’s all right.”
In response, her thumbs pressed harder. Red swam in his vision.
Then he knew. I’ll still hate you in the morning. She wanted to blind him. Kill him.
And he deserved it, he supposed, for putting her through this trial. He’d tried to make amends and failed. Here in Bez-Tattin’s Temple, he would get what he deserved.
Yet Bez-Tattin obviously knew mercy as well as retribution. If he couldn’t die a hero, there was no better way to die than while loving this woman. He moved his hips once, twice, trying with all his being to ignore the pain in his eyes.
Tompa shuddered, either from horror or desire. “No,” she breathed. “No.”
Dante thrust again.
The pressure on his eyeballs intensified.
Again.
She made a sound that started as a growl but ended as a whimper. “Dante . . .”
He wasn’t sure if it was a question or a warning, but at least she’d used his first name. “Yes?”
She removed her thumbs. He opened his eyes and searched her face, but the gloom hid her expression.
Silence, utter stillness.
And then her lips replaced her thumbs on his face, soft and frantic and apologetic. More tears fell to his skin. Dante wound his arms around her and, no longer passive, made love to her.
Afterward, Tompa slept in his arms. For a long time, he listened to her tranquil breathing, kept awake by his delight that she was comfortable enough in his embrace to feel such deep peacefulness. Then, when pre-dawn light began filtering through the doorway, he watched her as she slept. Her body was soft, relaxed. The corners of her mouth twitched upward in a smile. She murmured, snuggled closer, and smiled again in her sleep. He’d never seen her smile before, and now she smiled because of him. He felt like a genius.
After watching her a while longer, he knew he was too full of life to return to sleep. He tried to disentangle himself carefully, but nonetheless Tompa stirred and opened her eyes.
“Good morning,” he said.
For a moment, she looked so tired that she didn’t remember anything. Then her eyes widened and she really looked at him. Her expression told him nothing, but at least she wasn’t clawing at his face. After a moment, her eyes started to close.
He paused, knowing he should let her rest. He reminded himself that though he’d sipped the wine sparingly, she’d gotten drunk, so there was more than just tiredness weighing her eyelids. Still, the eagerness that made his limbs feel light forced a question to his lips. “Last night, Tompa—the second time, I mean—was it because of the wine? Or me?”
Her eyes slipped shut. “Sleepy,” she murmured. “Later.”
“But—”
With a hung-over groan, she rolled onto her side, facing away from him.
There would be a ‘later’ for them? Amazing.
He put on his pants. The air held a touch of crispness that was pleasant, so he left his shirt off. As soon as he went out the door, he stopped, startled. Then he chuckled softly, so as not to wake Tompa.
Shon orgies weren’t neat and tidy affairs. Naked bodies sprawled in widely spaced clumps of ten or twelve. Every inch of the previously smooth dust between the clumps was marked with footprints, handprints, kneeprints, and prints of other body parts Dante didn’t care to identify. Clothes, rucksacks, bottles, and bits of food littered the courtyard. A tunic hung from the edge of the porch roof where Bez-Tattin’s statue stood. A torn white garment—underwear?—lay at the edge of the stone pavement along the front of the Temple.
No one was awake but him. It was a strange moment of privacy, as though time was suspended just for him. He’d noticed the night before that when Shons slept they made a soft whisper like a mother hushing a child, steady rather than the cyclical, in-and-out snoring of humans. Now the hushing sound of a hundred sleeping Shons stroked Dante’s ears as though the grey, pre-dawn air itself was slumbering peacefully.
He took a deep, yawning breath. He loved this place, this people, this planet.
The realization startled him. He reexamined the idea, then grinned. Maybe he could talk Carolyn into assigning him to the embassy that would be set up on Zee-Shode, to get rid of him if nothing else. His experience with Shons was greater than all but a handful of humans; hopefully that would work in his favor, because this is where he wanted to live the rest of his life.
He looked up at Bez-Tattin, whose sword of justice seemed positively phallic to Dante this morning. “Do you grant wishes, big guy? If so, that’s mine.”
He glanced at the doorway to the room where Tompa slept. No, he couldn’t ask for her, too. Oh, they might stay together awhile, but the intimacy enforced by the trial would eventually fade. They had too little in common and she was, after all, young enough to be his daughter.
Strange how he’d had to
be willing to give up everything—the Navy, his career, the Vance, his friends—in order to find himself again. He grinned at the piles of sleeping Shon bodies. There was something to be said for Shon justice, though it had seemed so barbaric at first. Risking everything for justice was powerful stuff—he felt that power in his very blood—and Shons really cared about fairness. Most humans would rather die than publicly admit they’d been wrong the way these Shons had done last night. Shons equaled definitely good people, as Awmit might say.
Feeling lighthearted, Dante went to the edge of the pavement and stepped barefoot into the courtyard, enjoying the powdery dirt of Zee-Shode. He picked up the torn white cloth that he guessed was Shon underwear. Though he held it at different angles, he couldn’t figure out how it would be worn.
Several of the red, yarn-like worms he’d seen last night fell from the underwear. He squatted, curious about even the lowliest creatures of this planet. The worms rolled sideways into the dust, smoothing it out as they went. In fact, the dust everywhere was rippling ever so slightly. The edges of his own footprints were already softening under the movements of the worms. Scavengers, combing the dust for food? Perhaps they’d been brought here by the Servants to maintain the dust, like terrestrial sheep used as lawnmowers. He hoped he’d have the chance to learn if he was right.
“You lads,” Dante said to the rippling ground, “are going to have to work overtime to clean up the mess left by this orgy.”
“Truth shines thusly, Dante human.”
Dante craned his neck in the direction of Awmit’s voice. There he was, huddled on a step halfway up the stairway pillar. A few steps above him, Tar-Thara was curled in sleep. Awmit rose and started down the spiral stairway.
“Can’t sleep?” Dante asked.
“Frustrations thrash discordantly this one’s nerves and remove utterly sleep from the continuum of possibilities.”
Dante met him at the edge of the porch’s pavement. “I gather you never found her relatives.”
“Agree sorrowfully.” The Shon made a quiet keening sound. “This one spent thwartedly the entire orgy restraining the young one and himself, then reminding lusty ones of her overabundant youth. Pillar struck finally this one as only possible place to perform simultaneously both tasks.”
“It must be hell having a teenage daughter.”
Awmit gave a soft bleat.
“You did the right thing,” Dante said. “I suspect that the big guy upstairs”—he jerked his thumb toward the roof where Bez-Tattin stood—“will make sure you get what you deserve for your unselfishness. This is the Temple of Justice, after all.”
“This one hopes unconvincedly.” Awmit kicked at the ground, sending a cloud of dust and worms through the air.
Dante chuckled. The old Dante had believed passionately in justice; the new Dante had known with equal passion that justice was a delusion. Until now, that is. This Temple was five hundred thousand local years old. That was seven hundred thousand Earth years. Even if Shon culture changed more slowly, Bez-Tattin’s continuing existence as a living symbol was awe-inspiring. The galaxy was strange beyond the imagining of earthbound minds; maybe justice really did exist in special places like this.
“Dante!” Carolyn’s voice shrieked in his mumbler. “This is an emergency! Wake up!”
He jerked, startled and pained by the sudden screech. A regular mumbler could never transmit so loudly. Microphone transmissions had a range of volumes mumblers didn’t, but he hadn’t known that even they could transmit so loudly.
“An entire lifetime,” Awmit said, “passed unsexily before this one appeared at such an opportunity, and—”
“Damn you, Dante Roussel, answer me!”
“Carolyn,” he said aloud. He shook his head and reminded himself to subvocalize. “Turn down your microphone, Carolyn.”
“Never again,” Awmit said, “this one fears—”
“So you can ignore me? No way. When I had the techs set up the transmitter here in my office I insisted they turn it up as high as possible.” She coughed, the sound strange and distorted by the mumbler. “I’m dying, Dante.”
Dying? The thought made no sense at first, and he was ashamed that it roused so little emotion in him. Had the Klicks attacked the Vance? “Carolyn, what’s happening? What’s the matter?”
“World-aged aphorism,” Awmit said, “states clearly—”
Dante held up his hand to stop Awmit, but the little man didn’t understand.
“. . . opportunities pass fastly like the water of a river, never—”
Carolyn coughed repeatedly. Dante turned away from Awmit and put his hands to his ears, hoping to concentrate on his mumbler. “Is the Vance on fire, Carolyn? Is that why you’re coughing? What the hell is going on?”
“I’m coughing,” she said, “because I took my pills.”
Pills? What was she talking about?
Oh. Her poison pills. “Why did you do that?”
“You made love to her last night, didn’t you? Don’t deny it. Although you can hardly call sex with a street slut like Tompa Lee ‘making love.’ You fucked her.”
Dante leaned against a pillar, trying to make sense of the words that pounded his brain. A woman like Carolyn wouldn’t kill herself because of jealousy; there had to be more going on here. Another thought made him shiver. She would do her damnedest to take others to Hades along with her. He stared toward the dark room where Tompa still slept.
“I notice you don’t deny it,” she said. “I’m not used to losing, Dante. But I’ve lost any hope of fulfilling my mission—”
“But Carolyn,” Dante said, “I told you before, this trial wasn’t just about Tompa, it was also about which alien race the Shons will trade with.”
“Oh Dante, stop it. Your theory makes no sense. I mentioned it in a meeting with the Kalikinikis, just to see their reaction. They laughed. Do you honestly expect me to believe a person of your mental ability about something so important?”
He felt his face grow warm.
She coughed again, and the sound was weaker this time. “No time for more interruptions.”
Awmit tiptoed to Dante’s side. “Dante human feels illy consequent to drinking wine?”
He spun away from the Shon.
“I swallowed the pills my arrogant jefes gave me, and did it gladly. They thought they knew me well enough to manipulate me.” She gave a harsh laugh that degenerated into a wheeze. “Damn Corsortium Earth, damn the Kalikinikis, damn Tompa Lee. And damn you. I may not win, but all of you sure as hell are going to lose.”
Here it came. The revenge.
“With me dead,” she continued in a proud voice, “my replacement as ambassador is supposed to be Ingler, the Consortium’s hand-picked watchdog. But as I speak, I’m rewriting that order.” She paused for several seconds, and when she spoke again her voice was weaker than before. “There. My official replacement as Ambassador to Zee-Shode is now the absolute worst person for the job.” Coughs, deep and wracking, interrupted her speech. “Tompa Lee.”
“I didn’t hear you right. I thought you said Tompa Lee.”
“Let the Consortium try to make use of that slut as an ambassador. And Ingler won’t have any authority to try to patch up matters. The Consortium will lose plenty.”
Dante shook his head. It made no sense—although despite what Carolyn thought, the girl had certainly gained the Shons’ respect. No, Carolyn undoubtedly had a grenade of some sort up her sleeve—and she’d already pulled the pin.
“What else have you done?” he asked.
Her weak laugh dissolved into coughing. “The poison,” she wheezed, “is from a Chilean desert plant. The ghouls at the Consortium thought a poison from my homeland was a nice twist.” She gave a few more coughs, each one less energetic than the last. “Remember I told you that Shon officials were going to approach me three times about extending the trial? I said no the first time, of course. Also the second time, too—but that was before you fucked the little whore. Well
, the Shons called back an hour ago and . . . and asked the third time.”
A chill poured down Dante’s back.
“Didn’t expect me to agree,” she whispered. “Just . . . just a formality . . .” Her voice faded to a pained, gasping silence.
“But you agreed.” His words came out in a flat monotone. “You said the trial could continue.”
Carolyn wheezed or laughed, he wasn’t sure which. “Damned right. Major Krizink and . . . and fifty Shons . . . attack . . . sunrise.” She gasped so shrilly that Dante could almost feel her pain. To his surprise, however, she continued after a few seconds. “Klicks’ll be screwed because . . . kill . . . ambassador . . . A decisive political . . . blunder . . . Everybody screwed.” She laughed, and the weak sound was ripe with agony and malice. “They’ll kill . . . Tompa Lee and . . . you.”
Dante turned to the direction where the sky was lightest. He couldn’t see the horizon, but sunrise was painfully near.
“Your fault,” she said in a choked moan. “Shouldn’t have be . . . trayed . . . meeeee.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Dante noticed the peaks surrounding the Temple turn a bright, bloody red as the sunrise touched their tips.
A roar shattered the dawn like the crow of a maniacal alien rooster. Figures, mostly short and round with a few tall and fierce, poured through the rainbow gate and pounced on the nearest clump of converts. The roar changed pitch, becoming low and ominous before dying away completely. The hung-over Shons stirred slowly, dazedly, and were scarcely able to raise a hand in their own defense. The attackers swarmed around the clump so thickly that Dante couldn’t see what was happening, though he could imagine fists and knives pounding, tearing. Screams of agony pierced the air, only to die in mid-shout. A naked Shon flew over the melee, booted by a Klick’s foot or tail. Before the unfortunate creature’s body had stopped rolling, it was set upon by half a dozen pod-loogs who hadn’t been able to get close enough to the action to wield their knives. They did so now with gusto.
After mere seconds, the attackers burst away from the first clump of revelers, leaving behind a mangled pile of motionless bodies dressed now in liquid red. The attackers charged to the next clump before most of the converts in the cluster were even sitting up. Again, they were engulfed and destroyed with such speed that Dante hadn’t yet managed to react. He stood there, disbelieving, his mouth agape.
“Bye,” Carolyn said.
Or maybe her last word was “Die.”