The angry legionnaire pointed at Lutt. “That merde has been dallying with her!”
The general looked at Lutt.
“This is my employer and protector,” Nishi said, pressing against Lutt’s side.
“I recognize you, monsieur,” the general said. “Lutt Hanson, Jr., no? I am here to speak for the Legion about your Spiral device.” He looked at the D’Assas Anon guards. “No need for you, gentlemen. The Legion takes care of its own, including its own scum.” He returned his attention to the hapless legionnaire. “You have not answered my question. Do you disobey orders?”
“Mon General, I. . . I meant no offense to anyone except the Yankee merde!”
The general flicked a glance across Lutt. “And you, monsieur?”
“I protect myself when attacked, General.”
“Did you punish him?”
“I slammed him into that wall down there and when that wasn’t enough, I slammed him into the wall where you see him now.”
“Slammed?”
“It is true,” Nishi said.
“But this is one of our legionnaires in full armor,” the general said. He studied Lutt with new curiosity.
“Would you like me to demonstrate?” Lutt asked.
“Hmmmm.” The general focused on the legionnaire.
“With the general’s permission,” the legionnaire said, “I will separate this merde from his limbs.”
“I think not,” the general said. “Are you drunk?”
“No, Mon General!”
“Monsieur Hanson has behaved with admirable restraint by not killing you. I take the word of Ma’amselle D’Amato on this. But I have no such restraints. Further trouble from you and I will have you staked out on the plain. Understood, scum?”
“Oui, Mon General” The words were forced from the man but there was no doubt of his fear.
To the D’Assas Anon guards, the general said: “Eject him. He is denied the privileges for six months.”
When guards and prisoner were gone, the general gave a short bow to Lutt. “My apologies, monsieur. You have the word of General Claude Speely DeCazeville that we mean you no harm . . . unless, of course, you are dallying with our little dove.”
“He has asked for my hand in marriage!” Nishi said.
“Indeed! And what have you said, ma’amselle?”
“My response awaits the negotiation of a marriage contract.”
“Very wise!” The general grinned at Lutt. “If all goes well with you, monsieur, you will be the envy of the entire Legion. Now . . .” The general glanced back at the door from which he had emerged. “. . . other matters require my attention. I think we will see each other again.”
When they were back in Lutt’s room, Lutt grabbed Nishi’s shoulders. “What was all of that?”
“General Claude is here to meet with you but if I had not spoken at once about your intentions toward me, it could have become quite serious. He remembers my father and brothers. The Legion is very protective of its own.”
“Didn’t sound like it when he was talking to that trooper. What’d he mean he’d stake the man out on the plain?”
“That? They pin a man in a hot place with inceram stakes. Eventually, the armor breaks down and fire consumes him.”
“Good God! That’s taking care of their own!”
“They can be very severe in punishment. That poor man will suffer much because he cannot return here for six months.”
“No doubt.”
“But you were so brave and strong! I feared for you. And that legionnaire in full armor was like a child in your hands.”
Our hands! Ryll intruded. Remember that.
Nishi pressed herself against Lutt, her head in the crook of his neck. “You are not only rich but strong! Oh, I am so lucky!”
Lutt held her tightly and bent for a kiss but she turned her head away. “No! I might be very weak.”
“Good!”
“No!” She struggled in his arms. “Please do not make me call for help.”
“Would you really?”
“I think so. You do not want to test it and neither do I. Besides, we have other matters to discuss.” She freed herself and stepped back.
“Our marriage contract?”
“That can wait. First, we must decide what to do about the press.”
“What the hell does the press have to do with us?”
“There is one called Subiyama who was with you at the battle and now knows you are in here. In a way, it is funny. She hired the Zone Patrol squad at the U.S. Consulate to spy on our ship. She wishes to know when you emerge and where you will go.”
“She hired the whole squad? How do you know?”
“We know everything the Zeeps do.”
“Zeeps?”
“Zone Patrol, ZP, Zeeps. This Subiyama is a fat lady but very sexed. She is, how you say, shacked up with one of the Zeeps. Do you wish her removed or . . .”
“Let it go for now. She could be useful.”
“Ahhh, my protector is very sly. Perhaps you will bargain better than I thought. I must be careful. But you will sleep now, sweet Lutt, and I will guard that you are not disturbed.”
She tucked him into bed and dodged his groping hands under the pretext of hanging up his robe.
“You must not touch unless I say,” she said.
“You’re pretty good at avoiding it.”
“I have had much practice, Lutt.”
“What about the stuff from my armor’s pockets?”
“I will get that later. Now, you will sleep. It is the doctor’s order and it is my order.”
Better do what she says, Ryll cautioned. You’ll need all of your wits about you when it comes to the bargaining. And I can sense your fatigue.
Don’t you mean our fatigue?
I, too, am low on energy, but our flesh is not yet fully healed and I must idmage more repairs.
Well, do it while I’m asleep. It makes me sick when you turn my eyes inward.
Nishi brought a chair to the foot of the bed and composed herself there with her feet tucked under her.
“Sleep, sweet Lutt,” she whispered.
Sweet Lutt, he thought. It was a pleasant thought and it helped him drift into slumber.
Ryll waited until the mental rhythms told him Lutt was deeply asleep and then, fighting the induced urge to join him in slumber, swiveled his eyes inward.
It was a complex idmaging problem with timing and placement that required a nicety of application. Presently, a small slip of paper drifted from the air above Nishi onto her lap. She picked it up and looked at the message there.
“Do nothing to awaken Lutt. Our lives depend on it. This message is from the one who shares his body. Eat this paper if you wish to learn more.”
She looked at the sleeping figure and then with a pensive expression, chewed and swallowed the note.
Ryll materialized another note above her. She caught it before it reached her lap.
“How do you do that?” she whispered.
Having anticipated the question, Ryll already had provided the answer on the new message. “I have the power to create such things. That should prove the truth of what I tell you. And I tell you not to get him the basil. It would be very dangerous. Eat this message and I will provide another.”
Obediently, Nishi ate the second note and looked up at the place where the messages originated. Presently; another note materialized there and, wide-eyed, she watched it drift to her lap before picking it up and reading it.
“My name is Ryll and Lutt has stolen my body. Lutt’s body was severely damaged in an accident. He seeks to gain complete control of this body with the basil, which is a drug to me. But the basil will make him ineffective, too, because this is mostly my flesh. Now, eat this message, too.”
She ate the note and whispered: “What do you want of me?”
The next note was a time materializing. Ryll found the effort drew more energy than anticipated. “Deny him the basil and I will
get you to Earth with much money. Eat this note.”
“But I want the marriage to this man!” she whispered after swallowing the paper.
Ryll drew on fading energies to answer: “That can be managed, but his mother is sure to raise objections and she could prove difficult. Trust me. Do not trust Lutt. He wishes only to use your body and gratify his disgusting lust. I share his mind and know this. Now, eat this note.”
Slowly, Nishi masticated the paper and swallowed it.
When no other message was forthcoming, she bent close to the sleeping figure. “How do I know this is true? Tell me!”
But Ryll, too, drained of energy, had joined his fleshmate in slumber. Deep snores shook the recumbent figure.
***
Chinese population controls of the last century contributed to this crisis. With more than forty percent of their people over age sixty-five and millions of one-child families, it was inevitable the new generation would throw off restrictions and compete in the breeding arena. They were only temporarily delayed by a ratio of 3.4 males to every female, an imbalance due mostly to earlier female infanticide. They met this by drastic measures such as outlawing abortions, economic benefits for live births, forced female immigration from neighbor countries, a law permitting divorce on grounds of infertility, and Assignation Bureaus to spread pornography and promote casual liaisons.
—“The Liebensraum Crisis,” NSC analysis
Lorna Subiyama stared at Lew Doughty with delight and amazement. “I’m your first? You mean it?”
They sat in the murphy bed of quarters obtained for Subiyama by Sue Ellen Pratt. It was a cramped apartment by Earth standards but Sue Ellen had assured her it was in a Security Area whose inviolability was guaranteed by the Legion.
Subiyama had no doubt that Sue Ellen was taking a kickback on the rental but that was part of the game here. And the two small rooms did include a tiny kitchen and an adequate dry bath. The bed, though, could only be described as “intimate.”
She and the sergeant she knew as Lew Doughty had arrived almost three hours earlier after his afternoon shift, their arms loaded with inceram containers of black-market produce. Subiyama prided herself on her culinary abilities and frequently said, “People who don’t like to eat aren’t any good in bed, either.”
Her new lover had definite tastes in food. He demanded she cook him something with basil. He pronounced it strangely, calling it “bazeel,” but there was no doubt what he meant. The basil sauce she made for the outrageously expensive caribou steaks evoked an odd reaction. He actually “slurped” it up, washing it down with an American chablis of doubtful provenance, and showing increasing signs of inebriation.
His reactions in bed she found equally amazing. He obviously admired her ample, darkly tanned flesh and, in the throes of sex, called her his “blessed Habiba.” He also shouted several times, invoking “the Great Bazeel.” His unbridled enjoyment inspired Subiyama to experiment, attempting with some success several sexual variations about which she had only read or heard reports.
It was when they both lay exhausted that he produced his ultimate shocker. “I have never done that before. I always thought it would be disgusting but it is sublimely enjoyable, especially after the bazeel.”
At first, Subiyama refused to believe him. “How could you live this long, especially in the ZP, and still be a virgin?”
“It is shameful,” he said and actually blushed.
Beginning to believe, she asked: “How could you hide it?”
He looked down at his sheet-covered lap. “One can pretend many things if one knows the culture.”
Subiyama found this a quite erudite response, especially convincing when he looked at her with calflike eyes and asked: “You will keep my secret?”
“Honey lamb, it’s our secret! Hey! I never had a virgin before. You’re a first for me, too. Wow! The things I am going to teach you!”
“You will be kind?”
“As gentle as I can be.” She smothered him with kisses and felt his body tremble with renewed excitement. “You learn fast, sweetie pie. What we’re going to do now is called ‘the Australian Crawl.’”
“Afterward, could we have more bazeel?” “
Anything your little heart desires, sweetie. You know? I like this. Sex hasn’t been this much fun since my first orgy back in Dallas.”
***
The proliferation of cult movements in the latter half of the twenty-first century set the stage for the technological refinements and sophistication in the present runaway spread of such groups as the Raj Dood following on Venus. That such blind manifestations display the corruption and hypocrisy found in earlier cultish power centers did not surprise your investigators.
—“Cults and Cultists,” an article in Psychology Today
Nishi awakened Lutt with a cup of bitter coffee. She had brought a net bag containing the contents of his armor’s pockets, and she had an odd expression on her face.
She waited until he drained the cup, then: “Who is Ryll?”
The cup fell from his hand and shattered on the floor. Lutt sat up in bed.
“Where did you hear that name?”
“Never mind! You say we will make the marriage and all the time you know your mother will not give us her blessing!”
“She doesn’t live my life!” Lutt snapped.
“I do not have the proper pedigree, is that it?”
“She sure as hell will know where you worked on Venus but that has nothing to do with—”
“I still have my honor!”
Lutt sent a probing thought to Ryll: Where’d she learn about you? The Dreen did not reply.
You sneaky alien! You told her, didn’t you?
Ryll remained isolated from him.
“I can see it is all true,” Nishi moaned.
I don’t know how you did it, but I’ll get you for this! Lutt raged.
“You are two people in one body,” Nishi said. “That is what I have seen in your eyes.”
“This is my body and this is me!” Lutt said.
“And you can make notes that drop out of the air,” Nishi sneered.
So that’s how you did it!
Nishi began to cry. “If you made a gun for me right now I would shoot you with it!” she sobbed.
Ryll found this shocking. Make a gun? He felt competent to idmage almost any manufactured product, provided he had raw materials and imprint. It was a higher form of Dreen creativity for which schooling and talents had prepared him but . . . a weapon? If he idmaged a weapon, he would be the first Dreen to do such a thing and he did not relish the distinction.
You’ve really done it this time, Lutt accused. We need her to survive and you’ve made her our enemy.
Ryll was shocked out of isolation. ˆ
They wouldn’t!
Shall we test it? Let’s say I rape her and see what happens.
No! Wait!
For what?
She wants marriage. Promise her marriage.
Lutt thought about this. Married to his Ni-Ni? Wasn’t that what every dream encounter told him he most desired? But the mystical oddity of such a union filled him with fear. How could I dream about her before I even knew she existed?
Perhaps it’s a glitch in the original idmage of Earth, Ryll offered.
Glitch?
An anomaly in the idmaged plan.
I don’t like it.
You mean you really wouldn’t like being married to her?
Lutt stared at Nishi. She had stopped crying but she looked at him with an odd expression of fear and something else. Hope?
“Ni-Ni, my sweet,” Lutt said, “we need each other. You want to go back to Earth as—”
“I do not need anyone! I survive quite well on my own!”
“And you would not like to be the rich wife of a rich man?”
She put a finger to her chin and her expression definitely was one of calculation. “So you remember my ancestry.”
“And I want you.
”
“Want! You never speak of love! It is always want!”
“Isn’t love just wanting?”
“It is more . . . much more.”
“I’ve never even considered marrying another woman.”
“And you truly wish the marriage with me?”
“Yes, dammit!”
An enchanting smile dimpled her cheeks. “Then I will ask General Claude to negotiate the marriage contract for me after we make the arrangement to lease him your invention.”
“Is that a yes? We’ll be married?”
“Provided I get a satisfactory contract and you explain to me about this person Ryll.”
“First a small precaution,” Lutt said. He took his father’s spy detector from the net bag and scanned the room. The device flushed out a spy dot on the bed’s headboard. Lutt pried the thing out, examined it and destroyed it.
“A listening device only,” he said. “Whose?”
“The Legion or D’Assas Anon,” she said. “No one else could possibly do it.”
“Just on the possibility that I’ve missed more of these things, I’m going to delay telling you about Ryll,” he said.
“But you promise?”
“I promise.”
She should know how empty your promises are, Ryll sneered.
Shut up, you Dreen sneak! I’ve saved our bacon for now but I’m not forgetting about you! Maybe we’ll make an inceram hang glider and ride the winds of Venus!
“Lutt, there is another matter,” Nishi said.
“What now?”
“The fugu chefs wish me to do a story about them and—”
“Do it. You’ll be a regular reporter yet. Maybe General Claude would grant you an interview. And you might do a piece on the grunts fresh from the field.”
“You make me work for my pay? That is good. But there is a matter I hesitate to mention because it is delicate.”
“Delicate? How?”
“My guru knows you are here.”
“Your guru?” Lutt began to laugh.
“Do not make the joke of it. He is the most important guru on Venus, the Raj Dood. Many legionnaires go to him for advice. My own father swore by him.”