Double Solitaire

  So she could now add sleepwalking to her list of night terrors.

  She went searching for relief. Finn's liquor cabinet revealed him to be something of a wine snob, but there were also bottles of brandy, fine whiskey, and vodka.

  The residue of the sedative was still in her system, making her head like cotton wadding and dragging at her limbs, and she knew as she uncapped the brandy that she shouldn't be doing this. But it had been a haven for too many years, and she wanted to turn off her head.

  Tach had made a substantial dent in the level of brandy in the bottle before an over-full bladder sent her staggering into the bathroom. It had a traditional toilet, but there were also an oubliette in the French fashion. A rather large hole in the floor.

  How did Finn manage at the clinic? Back into a stall, lift his tail, and hope his aim was good? Tach wondered.

  The bath had also been altered. It was an enormous sunken affair with heavy frosted sliding doors.

  She realized she had never before considered the difficulties Bradley had to face. The realization shamed her, adding to the already deep depression that seemed to have a palpable presence.

  After relieving herself she stood and stared at her thickening body. I've become a joker. A stranger in a deformed body. Lifting the hem of the long T-shirt, Tach ran an experimental hand across her swollen belly. She was a trained physician. It wasn't hard to locate Illyana's head.

  What a burden to grow up knowing you were conceived during a violent rape. That in your veins runs the blood of a madman, a killer. How can I ever explain it to you? What will I tell you when you ask about your father? A pleasant little story maybe? He was called the Outcast, and he was a lonely prince who went away long, long ago.

  Her laugh was a bitter yelp, a cry of pain. You're an accident. Blaise became my child in a spray of blood. You were conceived in blood. You'll be born in blood. What's to keep you from being a monster too? To keep you from feeding on me the way he did? The way you already have.

  The physician-trained part of Tachyon's mind was screaming like a siren trying to penetrate the drug-, alcohol-, and exhaustion-induced depression. Over the long, pain-filled years Tach had always managed to battle back from the weary surrender. This time she didn't care to try. Illyana's emotions wove a frantic counterpoint about Tachyon's wear bitter thoughts. It was like holding a small dying creature.

  We'll die together, baby, Tach thought as she rummaged through the medicine cabinet.

  Bradley was an old-fashioned boy. The mother-of-pearl grip on the straight razor glittered in the lights. With clumsy fingers Tach pulled out the blade. She cut the pad of her thumb badly, but it didn't seem to hurt. Methodically she spun the spigots, filling the tub with hot water. Settled onto the toilet to watch it fill.

  Will you understand, baby? asked Tachyon as she studied first the razor, and then the tub. I hope so, because I have to do this. I'm so tired. I cannot go on.

  It was filled. She stripped out of the T-shirt and walked down the steps into the water. The heat of the water stung her toes. Slowly she lowered herself into the water. Lifted an arm from the water, drew the blade down the length of her wrist. There was cold and pressure, and then pain. The blood was running down her wrist, warm and a little sticky. Switch hands and repeat the process. She had two good hands again. She could do surgery.

  Cutting out the life, she thought dreamily as she rested her head against the edge of the tub.

  Warm, so warm. The blood flowed from her wrists, mingled with the water, and was carried away in ever-widening eddies. Sunsets over oceans. Flower petals dancing away in the chop of a mountain stream. Lethargy tugged at her. Soon even the light faded.

  Chapter Two

  "I'm having second thoughts about your plan."

  Durg looked up and met the boy's flat black stare. He hadn't lived longer than two hundred years without learning how to read through bravura, and he could see the panic huddled in the back of Blaise's eyes. He was also a Morakh; trained not only for combat, but for diplomacy and counsel. He arranged his features into an expression of warm attention.

  "May I know why, lord?"

  Blaise cast a nervous glance about the control room of the ship. Durg was seated on an extruded bench against one of the curving, pearlescent walls. The boy took Durg's arm and tugged the Takisian into the center of the circular room.

  In a low whisper (as if it would do any good if the Ishab'kaukab decided to listen) Blaise said, "Sooner or later he's gonna wake up." A head jerk toward Kelly, who sprawled unconscious in the big canopied bed. "And when he does, Baby's going to know that's not Tachyon and head straight back to Earth."

  "Your point?"

  "Why don't we handle it now? Turn around, head back --"

  "And go where?"

  "Tahiti, Tibet... Why does it have to be Takis?"

  "Anyplace you can run on Earth, your grandfather can run too. And what of Bloat? A creature that can warp and bend reality will not be discouraged by a few thousand miles." That blow struck home. Durg saw it in the slight widening of the eyes. Blaise shuddered and allowed his fear to emerge a bit farther from the shadows. "The joker adores your grandfather. He will not rest until he sees you punished." Durg paused a suitable few seconds, then added softly, "And I thought you wished to be a prince?"

  Blaise leapt on that. "Yeah, it sounded great when I was running the jumpers and ruling my piece of the Rox, but I've had a lot of time to think in the past day, and I've remembered a few little points that Granddaddy told me which you've carefully omitted."

  "Such as?"

  "I'm an abomination on Takis. Unplanned breeding is like the greatest sin. As soon as I set foot on the planet, I'm going to be killed."

  Durg cautiously placed an arm around Blaise's shoulders. The young man tolerated the contact. So, he wants to be a little young today, coddled a little. Durg guided him back to a bench and pushed him down.

  "You are discounting three things. One which you cannot know. Two which you have forgotten. Beneath all of our flowery oaths and honor and blood ties there is a strong streak of practicality in all Takisians. We are the ultimate pragmatists. You will be bringing a great gift to the Vayawand." He turned and pointed at the prone Tachyon body. "The heir to the House of their greatest enemy. You also possess an extraordinary power. I have been bred to resist mind control. You can control me. We shall use that. Believe me, however disgusting your pedigree, they will not waste your talent. The first hours will be critical, but if we can survive, I think you have the potential to become a great ruler."

  Blaise flung his arms around the Morakh's thick waist and buried his head against Durg's massive chest. "You won't leave me alone, will you?"

  "I am your blooded man. Only your rejection or my death will end my service." Durg allowed a slight smile to cross that elfin, beautiful face. "And we Morakh are not only killers of kings, we are also their advisers."

  Lifting his head, Blaise said, "Uncle Claude taught me how to be a revolutionary." He sounded very young.

  Durg laid a hand on the top of the boy's brush-cut red hair. "And I shall teach you to be a prince."

  It still didn't seem like a spaceship. First, it had a name... Baby -- whoever heard of a spaceship named Baby? Second, it didn't look like a spaceship. The walls were curved and fluted, and glowed with a pearlescent light that made Kelly feel as if he were living inside a seashell. And the central feature of the control room was a great canopied bed. No captain's chair, no helm, no banks of blinking computers -- just a bed. Third, there was the fact that the ship talked and sang... and wept. And only Kelly could hear her. And this was the final thing he had learned from the sorrowful voice that filled his days and tormented his dreams. Baby was a female.

  Blaise had turned back to the screen that Baby had obligingly telescoped open on the floor and wall.

  "So that's it," said Blaise, and despite his best effort his voice was filled with wonder.

  Kelly wanted to go and look, but his head was p
ounding. There were millions of minds ahead, and the pressure of their thoughts closed about Kelly's brain like a vise.

  It had been a journey from hell. Once Kelly had regained consciousness, the ship had realized this wasn't her master. Rejecting this impostor in Tachyon's skin, she had bolted for Earth. Blaise had mind-controlled the poor, terrified creature and then begun a deadly stalk. As he hunted Kelly about the confines of the living quarters, the young man, a mad light dancing in those black eyes, had carefully explained aloud to the ship about the kidnapping and the jump and the rapes.

  Then Blaise sprang upon Kelly, and he couldn't help himself -- Kelly screamed. Only to have the sound die in a desperate gurgle as Blaise had closed his hands about Kelly's throat.

  "So you see, Baby, if you don't do what I want, I'll kill this body, and Grand-pere will never be able to recover it. He'll be trapped forever, and it will be your fault."

  Baby was very docile after that, but she wept most of the time, and the sound of that psychic weeping was slowly driving Kelly mad.

  Durg stirred, an act as startling as if an Easter Island effigy had stood. The squat, heavily muscled body had a monolithic quality, and the delicately beautiful head set atop the broad shoulders only made it worse.

  "Better take control of her," grunted the Takisian. "Her instinct will be to bolt for the Ilkazam platform. Let it happen and we're all dead."

  Incredulous, Blaise demanded, "It's been almost fifty years. How the fuck can she still remember?"

  "She is an Ishab'kaukab. They do not forget."

  Blaise nodded, and his eyes took on that flat, unfocused stare that meant his power was being utilized. Baby's mournful mutterings cut off abruptly. Kelly felt Blaise's mind control, wrapping about the soul of the ship like poisonous tentacles. Trapped and no way out.

  Kelly understood the emotion. It had filled every waking hour as she grew up in the small Oklahoma town. Shit-kicker heaven, was how she still thought of it. Three thousand people, one movie house, four restaurants where you could get a mess of poke, and some biscuits and red-eye gravy. But Kelly, reading her romance novels in the heat of a summer night as the bugs formed a shade for the naked light bulb, dreamed and wondered what coquilles St. Jacques tasted like.

  Everybody at her high school said she was really pretty. Model pretty. Actress pretty. And home was dust, and bugs, and chores, and Mom and Dad, who didn't appreciate how different, how special, she was. There had been fights, and problems, and then one day she had stolen the egg money and bought a bus ticket to New York.

  All the way to Manhattan she had comforted herself and silenced the rumblings of her empty belly by dreaming about her modeling career -- the clothes, the fame, the money. But mostly she'd dreamed of the triumphant homecoming. Momma in tears, and Daddy all hangdog, sorry now because he hadn't realized what was growing up in the old clapboard house in the Baldy Hills. And Eugene Pelz would be sorry he hadn't taken her to the senior prom even if she was only a freshman.

  The reality of Manhattan was very different from her fantasies. The tall buildings cut off the meager winter sun, creating a world of shadows, slush, and city dirt. After the songs of frogs and crickets, birds and cattle, the noise of the city was a scream that assaulted the ears. Buses were disgorging passengers like steel whales belching out schools of frantic fish. Kelly noticed there were a lot of young, blond, frightened-looking girls. And she noticed the men who closed on them like sharks. One approached her, offered her a place to stay. Charm oozed like rancid sweat from his pores. Kelly belted him in the knees with her suitcase and fled. The following days were a blur of streets, crowds, shelters, assaults, panhandling for enough to buy a hot dog from a street vendor. And the glass and chrome and stone faces of the buildings mocked her. Behind those facades was the world of the wealthy, the famous, the powerful, and that world was not going to open for a fifteen-year-old from Atoka, Oklahoma -- no matter how pretty she might be. She called home once, but her daddy refused to accept the collect call, and Kelly had stood sobbing in a pay-phone booth while no one in New York noticed.

  Eventually she had met David, and he had brought her into the center of the jumper family. It had been fun back then, and David had promised that soon she would make her initiation. Blinded by love and admiration, Kelly had waited and prayed she might lose her virginity to the charismatic young man, but it had never happened. There had been limousine rides and money, but there had also been robbery and murder and terror. Then David died, and there were no more limousine rides. There was just terror. She was a second-class wannabe jumper without a protector.

  Until Blaise. He was David and more: handsome, charismatic, fearless, dangerous, and possessing an ace's power. But it came from a far more exotic source. This was no wildcard infection. Blaise was an alien, or at least a quarter so, grandson of the famous and flamboyant Dr. Tachyon. Kelly wanted to be his girl, and he'd sort of encouraged her, but eight months ago she had learned her true status -- dupe, tool, weapon. Blaise had kidnapped Tachyon and terrorized Kelly into participation in a bizarre triple jump that left Kelly in the alien's body, and him in hers.

  Now that body lay twenty-three light-years away, and Tachyon was about to experience the deepest moment of woman's life as he gave birth to the child that Kelly's body carried.

  And Kelly is slowly going crazy, thought the false man as the assembled minds of Takis beat at his brain.

  Chapter Three

  There was sand underfoot, black and fine. A cold wind lifted it into puffing little dust devils like smoke in the harsh dry air. The sand marched to meet a sky of gun-metal gray. No feature broke or softened the knife-cut line of the horizon. It was an utterly desolate place.

  "Your life." Blaise's voice seemed to come whispering from all directions. "This is what it's become. How it's going to stay." The wind seemed to shiver with a cold, evil laughter.

  Tachyon whimpered and covered her ears with her hands. "No, you're gone. You can't hurt me anymore."

  "Sure I can. I'm twined around your dreams, I hide in the dark places of your soul."

  "Leave me alone."

  "No problem. You haven't got anybody now."

  She had to force out the words. "I have my friends."

  "Really? Is it an act of friendship to tell you that you've lost yourself forever? That you have to resign yourself? In other words, shut up, stop whining, and let us get on with our lives. We're sick of you and your problems, Tachyon."

  "They are not saying that."

  "They're thinking it," retorted Blaise.

  "No! I would know."

  "You know nothing! You're no telepath. You're a crippled excuse for a telepath."

  "Finn," cried Tachyon in desperation. "He is my friend."

  "He was thrilled to have you gone. It was a chance at last for him to excel and be recognized. And it's more just that a joker should run the Jokertown Clinic. Not you, an arrogant, bigoted fool who has secretly despised your damned and deformed stepchildren."

  "Don't! Don't. Stop, please!" Tach dropped to her knees, bent at the waist until she was brought up short by the swell of pregnancy.

  "Look at you. What a laughable sight. A man... trapped in a woman's body, and pregnant. Bloated, ugly. Neither you nor that child are loved. You're an embarrassment, and she'll be an even greater one once she's born. Blaise's crazy bastard." The scorn was evident in the ghostly voice.

  But there was a point of light, a burning fire that struggled valiantly against the creeping cold that was gripping all her limbs. It was music, and the scent of sunlight in a girl's hair, and the touch of silk. It was life.

  "Illyana," Tach murmured.

  She came striding across the sand. Where her feet touched, the black shattered into rainbow colors. Her wild mane of golden red hair formed a nimbus about her face. She had her mother's mouth with that cute little porpoise smile, and Tachyon's features, all sharp angles and pointed chin.

  She leaned down and took Tach by the hand. "No, PapaMom. It's not fai
r."

  Shaklan came drifting by and gathered his granddaughter into his arms. "House Ilkazam doesn't breed cowards," he said as they whirled away to a lilting three-quarter-time song.

  "No!" The shout brought Tachyon fully awake.

  The water was a deep rose, and very cold. She gripped the edge of the tub and tried to stand. The Formica was icy cold, and slick with blood and water.

  Strain shivered through the muscles. With a gasp she fell back into the embrace of the water.

  Rolling heavily onto her knees, Tach began crawling for the steps of Finn's sunken bath. Her hair trailed like seaweed behind her. It was an effort to keep her mouth and nose above water. First step. Second. Her head was on the top step, the tile clammy against her cheek. Hair wrapped like tentacles about her arms and throat. She was dimly aware of the water lapping at her buttocks. Mostly she was aware of numbness.

  Query/love/fear/love/query???

  Not the self-composed young woman who had come to her in death's dream. Terrified child. My child. It was horribly uncomfortable lying on her stomach. Tach heaved herself up, crawled free of the grip of the water. She dragged down one of the towels and cinched a clumsy tourniquet about one wrist.

  The doorjamb served as a crutch. Tach climbed shakily to her feet, tottered for the phone. She passed a full-length mirror on that thousand-mile journey. The red-streaked body with the distended belly was a fearsome sight. Collapse on the bed. Dial Cody's number.

  It seemed to ring for a long, long time.

  "This better be good." Cody's sharp tones were as welcome as a symphony to Tachyon.

  "Cody. I'm hurt, badly... badly. Help me."

  "Who is this?"

  "Tachyon."

  "On my way."

  The phone gave back the flat nasal buzz of a disconnected line. Tach lay back in the bed and tried to stay conscious.

  "You know, this is only the second time I've seen you in seven months, and you've managed to wreck my mood both times."

  A brief smile flickered across Tach's lips. "Once by being a bastard, and once by being a Juliet."