Kelric blinked. “I didn’t realize.”
“You didn’t realize?” She came over, standing at her full height, which wasn’t much. “Kneel to me, slave,” she intoned in a dramatic voice.
“I already am,” he pointed out.
“Well, yes, I suppose, in a way.” She dropped to her knees and peered at him. “Your face bedevils me.”
He pressed his fingers against his temple, trying to subdue his growing headache. “I’m sorry it upsets you.”
“Did I say it upset me? I most certainly did not.” She sighed. “You providers are soooo sensitive. But don’t worry. I can read you poetry or something. Would that keep you happy? Or I could punish you. That would make me happy.”
I don’t believe this, Kelric thought. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Hah!” She clasped her hands in front of her heart. “My life is over and all you can think about is your own comfort.”
He wondered if he had stepped into a hallucination. “Why is your life over?”
“You have to ask? There you are, sitting like some vision out of an erotic holovid, and you have to ask? I knew it. The moment I saw you, I knew it.”
Kelric tried to think of a way to make her say something coherent. “All I know is that I’m a gift for you.”
“Well, of course.” She beamed at him. “What more could you ask than to be my provider?” Sitting back, she pouted. “He thinks giving me presents will make everything. all right. Well, he’s wrong.”
It was beginning to make sense. “Do you mean your husband? Admiral Kaliga?”
“Of course.” She leaned forward again. “We were married two months ago. He and my parents had an agreement, you see, because they wanted our Houses to join. Not that anyone asked me. Well, you wouldn’t understand, it’s all very complicated, this business of marriage. Anyway, you see, when I was born, they betrothed me to him, even though he was already old then, over fifty.” She paused for breath, then plowed onward. “He’s a terrible husband. Do you know, I was talking to him this morning and he—I still can’t believe this—he told me to be quiet. Can you believe it? I can’t believe it. I know why he got you for me. He’s going to send me away. He thinks this will make me agree, you being so beautiful and all, but I will not be humiliated.” She threw her arms wide, as if to address the universe. “Do you hear me! I WILL NOT be humiliated.”
For the first time in his life Kelric felt pity for an Aristo. Poor man. Then again, he deserved it, if he was an ESComm admiral.
“Why do you look so dour?” she asked. Glowering, she added, “And why are you wearing clothes?”
“Most people do,” he said.
“Take them off.”
He flushed. “What?”
She made an exasperated noise. “You’re a sex slave, aren’t you? So take them off.”
“For crying out loud,” Kelric said. “You’re a married woman. Suppose your husband walks in?”
“So?”
“So? That’s it?”
“Why would he care?”
“You’re his wife.”
“He bought you for me.” She waved her hand. “Hightons always buy their spouses slaves. Why should he be different? It isn’t like you’re a person or anything. If he ever caught me with another Aristo, well, that would be different. He would have me executed.”
“Xirene?” The deep voice came from the entrance. “What are you talking about?”
Kelric looked up. The man standing in the doorway had to be Xirad Kaliga. He wore the black uniform of an ESComm officer with an admiral’s red braid. Unlike Xirene’s chaotic mind, his was razor-sharp, honed to a piercing edge.
“Xiri!” She scrambled to her feet and ran to him. Throwing her hand over her heart, she spoke in an impassioned voice. “Why, Xiri? Why? Do I make you so unhappy?”
The admiral rubbed his eyes. “What is it now, Xirene?”
“I won’t go away. You can’t do this to me.”
He lowered his arm. “Do what?”
She paused, apparently nonplussed by his reaction. “Isn’t that why you bought me the provider? So I wouldn’t complain as much when you sent me away?”
“I’m not sending you away.” The admiral took her hands. “Why would I do such a thing?”
I can think of a lot of reasons, Kelric thought. And I’ve only known her for a few minutes.
Xirene pouted. “You are always upset with me, love.”
“I’m not upset with you.”
“You ignore me,” she stated. With a flourish, she withdrew her hands from his.
Tiredly he said, “Xirene, I don’t even remember ordering this provider. I will check with my steward tomorrow. But I’ve no intention of sending you anywhere.”
“Oh.” A smile broke out on her face. “I’m so glad to hear that. I don’t want to go away. I really do like you, you know.”
The admiral drew his wife into his arms and tilted her face up to his. Pointedly ignoring Kelric, he kissed her for a long time, which as far as Kelric was concerned kept her mercifully quiet.
Finally Kaliga raised his head. He glanced at Kelric, then back at Xirene. “This man isn’t a provider. He’s a laborer. I ordered several a few days ago. He just came in early.”
“But look at him,” she protested. “He’s too pretty to—”
“Enough!” A muscle jerked in Kaliga’s cheek. “It’s a mistake. I will have him sent to the dorms.”
“But I thought he was a present for me.”
Kaliga brushed her hair back from her face. “Go in the central room. I left you something.” An image flashed in his mind, a ruby necklace that matched the gems in her hair.
Lucky man, Kelric thought, to have brought her another present.
Xirene glowed, already forgetting Kelric. “You are a most esteemed husband, my love.” Then she swept off, in search of wherever Kaliga had left the necklace.
The admiral turned, his focus snapping to Kelric. “Get up.” As Kelric rose to his feet, Kaliga said, “Who sent you?”
Kelric knew he couldn’t make up a background. He had too little data about Eube to pull it off. “Don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry.” Kaliga watched him as if he were a bug on the wall. “Where are you from?”
“I don’t know that either, sir.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t understand those things.”
He snorted. “What did they do, take your brain out?”
“No, sir. I don’t know. He felt Kaliga’s anger. The admiral thought one of his enemies had sent Kelric as an insult, to suggest the aging warlord couldn’t satisfy his pretty young bride better than a brainless provider.
“You will work on the rim crew,” Kaliga said. With that, he spun on his boot heel and stalked out of the room.
Only then did Kelric realize he had fallen into a military mode of address with the admiral, in his attempts to sound deferential. He called Kaliga “sir” rather than using the overblown honorifics providers piled on their owners. If Kaliga noticed, though, he gave no sign of it. Kelric suspected he had become so used to military forms, they were transparent to him.
Relieved they were going to leave him alone, Kelric sat in the pillows and mentally sifted through the jumble of data he had picked up from Kaliga and Xirene. The admiral was tired, overworked by some recent political upheaval. A change in government. Something about Eldrin, their stolen Key, but it hadn’t been immediate enough in the Aristo’s mind for Kelric to extract details.
A maid showed up with a change of clothes for him, a gray jumpsuit with the silver silhouette of a battleship on its shoulder. Kelric recognized the insignia of the Kaliga Line: just as the House of Majda had always produced admirals and generals for ISC, so the Kaliga line did for ESComm.
He thought of Tarquine’s revelation about Corey’s assassination. Even after so long, it hurt. How would his life have been different if Corey had lived? He would never have ended up on Coba. Probably
he would be in Allied custody now, like the rest of his family. At least this way he had the chance to make things better for his people, his family, and Corey’s memory. If he could just reach the damn Lock.
After he changed into the jumpsuit, he folded his gold clothes in a neat pile. He had rather liked those garments. So had Tarquine. An unsettling response stirred his thoughts. Gods help him, but he had found Tarquine intriguing. He could no longer pretend drugs caused the emotion. Her designer chemicals no longer saturated his body.
You feel interest so fast, he thought. He had never really thought about it before, but it did seem he often became very fond of his lovers. Not always. Only if he liked them in the first place. But when he did, he invariably felt great affection in a short time.
It wasn’t love, though. When he truly loved a woman, it blazed inside him. Not once, but four times, he had fallen in love with great intensity, the type of emotion called “once in a lifetime.” Kelric treasured those memories. He still loved Corey after thirty-five years. He would forever care for Savina, the mother of his daughter. Nor would he forget Shaliece, his first romance, at fourteen. He would love Ixpar until the day of his death.
Hell, he liked being in love. He liked making love. It wasn’t only sex, though that played a big part. He could have had plenty of partners if his only interest were the mechanics. It was more than that. As an empath, he thrived on the affection from his partners. The more he gave to them, the more they gave back to him.
It was an odd insight. He didn’t normally analyze his moods. But it was true. The better people around him felt, the better he felt. When they desired him, loved him, he experienced those emotions too. The greater their contentment, the greater his. So he sought to make them content. He liked to see his lovers smile, hold them, laugh with them, pleasure them. The more they enjoyed sex, the more he enjoyed it. If they felt wanted, emotionally and physically, then so did he.
That lovely coppery provider Taratus sent him, the two girls and the youth at the banquet, even Tarquine the Finance Minister—they all evoked his affection. Their emotions imprinted on his empath’s mind, became part of his neural patterns. Gods help him, but Tarquine fascinated him. It was impossible for him to sleep with a woman the way Cargo Master Zeld had wanted, fast and hard, for lust only. If he had made love to her, he probably would have started to like her too.
He wondered if all telepaths experienced the effect. Although it was known they fell in love more easily than normal people, he had never heard of it taken to this limit. Did some quirk of his mind intensify the process? Fate had given him an appearance people found pleasing, but it didn’t seem enough to explain the extreme reactions he inspired, whether it was the queens of Coba going to war over him or Tarquine spending fourteen million credits.
The effect had an ugly flip side: just as his empathic traits enhanced his positive experiences, so they magnified the negative. The auction had been a nightmare. What he had picked up from the Aristos that night had been his own pain. The rape they had committed imprinted on his mind at a level so deep, it had become part of him, like emotional scar tissue.
Combat was even worse. He had experienced the death of every Trader he killed, both taskmakers and Aristos. He felt them die, felt their fear and hatred, felt the Aristos lust for his pain. Over the years it had all become ingrained in his psyche, battle after battle, year after year, scar after scar.
He had liked being a test pilot, though. Alone and isolated, he thrived on the exhilaration of flight, even the danger. It was just him and his craft, sailing the seas of space or the swirling skies of a planet. No hatred, no death, no brutality.
Kelric knew now he would have been happier as a math professor at some university, alone with his equations, married to Corey, able to love her and be loved in return, without the pressure of other minds. Except for lectures. No wonder he hated public appearances. All those minds focused on him were like the pound of waves against a crumbling seawall. It didn’t matter whether the sea was beautiful and wild like Skolians, or dark and brooding like Aristos. If the wall broke, he would drown.
“—must come now,” the voice said.
He raised his head. The lieutenant who had brought him to the house was standing in the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” Kelric answered. “What did you say?”
“You must come now,” the lieutenant repeated. “To the dorms.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course.” He stood up, relieved he was going to spend the night in a dorm rather than sleeping with Xirene, or whatever else she might have decided to do with him.
The magcar waited outside. The lieutenant put him in back, then slid into the front seat. They took off through the starlit parks. He didn’t think the officer was actually driving; the car took care of that. Their separation had more to do with prestige: an ESComm lieutenant had far more status than a laborer.
The dorms were on the edge of a residential area, where parks gave way to rows of long, airy buildings. The car stopped in front of a pale gold structure. The lieutenant escorted Kelric inside, into a lobby with ivory walls. It had no furniture, only yellow pillows strewn about on a light blue carpet.
A taskmaker met them, an ordinary fellow in a gray jumpsuit with the Kaliga insignia on his shoulder. He carried a holoboard, which he filled out with a light pen as he asked Kelric questions: name, age, former address, taskmaker class, and so on. The fifth time Kelric said, “I don’t know,” the man made an exasperated noise, filed the document in memory, and turned off the board.
After the lieutenant left, the other man took Kelric into an airy hall with screen walls. As they walked, the man said, “I’m Melder Xiradson. I’ll be your supervisor on the rim crew.”
Xiradson? That made him the son of an Aristo named Xirad. It wasn’t hard to guess which one. His features were those of Xirad Kaliga. His brown hair showed traces of the Aristo shimmer, and his eyes were more bronze than brown. Kelric also felt an Aristo’s mental pressure from this man, though at a lower intensity.
As they walked, Melder watched him. When Kelric raised his eyebrows, the supervisor said, “You’re a provider. Why are you here?”
Kelric shrugged. “The admiral didn’t want me with his wife.”
“Interesting.” Wisely, Melder kept his thoughts on Kaliga’s wife to himself. “In here.” He slid aside a screen in the wall.
Kelric looked down a wide hall lit dimly by a few lamps. Men slept on downy blue pallets marked with the Kaliga insignia. Like the other rooms, this one had no furniture, just a blue carpet and yellow pillows.
Melder indicated several empty pallets. “You can take whichever you like. Breakfast is thirty minutes after dawn.”
Kelric nodded. “Thanks.”
As he walked into the hall, a few people glanced at him. Most were asleep, though. One man lay under a lamp reading a holobook. The faint chirping of silver-eye crickets came through the parchment walls and the air smelled of night-blooming vines. Kelric chose a pallet in the shadows halfway between two lamps, to cut down on the light so he could sleep. He needed the rest; it would give his hydraulics a break and keep his mind fresh.
But sleep evaded him. He lay in the shadows and brooded. Kaliga was certain to investigate him. The admiral would discover no record existed of the DNA pattern in Kelric’s supposed ID. Then what? He couldn’t risk drawing attention right now by walking out. But tomorrow he had to find a way to leave. Otherwise the Aristos would find one for him, on their own terms.
With his hands behind his head, he stared at the ceiling. He understood better now his drive to see his parents and siblings. Rhon. He had always taken his family’s close-knit nature for granted. A community of empaths. Through their minds, they shared an unconditional love. He had never understood the concept of “loneliness” until he left home. It was a haven unlike anything else he had known.
He only wished he had it now.
18
Rim-Walker
“You mean I just walk?”
Kelric asked. “That’s it?”
“That’s right,” Melder said. They were strolling along a blue gravel path among the lawns and willows of the parks. “If anyone needs you, they’ll either send a page or call you over.” He indicated the palmtop on Kelric’s belt. “Pages are usually general. The rim web sends whichever of you on the crew is closest to the pager.”
It sounded straightforward to Kelric, albeit strange. “So we do errands for people?”
Melder nodded. “Within bounds. You’ve no clearance, so you can’t do certain military tasks. If an officer needs a cleared rim-walker, he’ll route his request through the page system.”
Kelric hid his frustration. The duties most likely to require he visit the hub would be military rather than residential.
Melder stopped at a junction with another path and indicated an amber building to their right, shaded by droop-willows. “My office is in there. If you have questions, come by or contact me on your palmtop.”
“All right,” Kelric said.
Melder gave him an odd look. “The proper form of address is ‘Yes, sir.’ Or more.”
“Yes, sir.” Kelric knew the crew boss wanted him to use the honorifics a provider gave an Aristo. Melder’s half-Aristo mind pressed on him, yet another reason to leave as soon as possible. He would take the best opportunity that presented itself today and make the most of it. He tried not to think what would happen if that wasn’t enough.
After Melder went to his office, Kelric turned on his pager and continued along the path. This day was like the previous: warm, sunny, and pleasant, with no wind. In the controlled space habitat, they had perfection all the time.
Rim-walking seemed a strange job, one with no counterpart in Skolian habitats. Robots and web services could easily do most of the errands. Of course, as far as Aristos were concerned, no real difference existed between robots, primitive Els, and low-level taskmakers. Apparently even some Els had higher status than he did as a provider or rim-walker.
“You,” a woman called. She was sitting on a nearby lawn with a group of people. “Come over here.”