“Gneaus!” Pollyanna spoke his name breathily.
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Not really. I’ve had work to do.”
Every curve of the woman, every patch of soft, smooth skin,
bespoke sexual craving. She had that look of constant need seen
only in young women in love and the most polished of prostitutes.
Like the hookers’, her eyes become vacant, cool, and
snakelike when she was off stage. She posed, one hip thrown out
model fashion. Her breath came in quick little gasps.
He was not playing the game today. “I want to hear all
about your travels, little lady.” He opened the door to her
apartment. She tried the close, casual brush-past going in. He
answered it with deliberate chill. A ghost of apprehension crossed
her too beautiful face.
She pushed herself at him as soon as he shut the door.
Her pelvis moved against him. “I missed you. All of you.
And the Fortress. But especially you, Gneaus. Nobody makes me feel
the way you do.”
“Sit down,” he ordered. She backed away, more
apprehensive. “Let’s hear the story.”
There were few men Pollyanna could not bedazzle and manipulate.
Hawksblood. Cassius, who made her blood run chill. The Darkswords.
And, she had learned the hard way, Michael Dee. But
Storm . . . He had always been so amenable. He
must have been using her when she thought she was using him. Her
ego was bruised and aching from traveling with Dee. It was not
ready for another blow.
Storm was positively grim.
These invulnerables were all old, old men from whom time and
experience had leached all innocence, had abraded all boyish
vulnerability. There was a darkness in them, a capital wickedness.
It called out to the darknesses in her own soul. Their black flames
reached out and pulled her like a candle pulled a moth. She was
afraid.
“I didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt, Gneaus!
Honest. I just wanted to meet Richard Hawksblood.”
“This is no nursery school, Pollyanna. This isn’t
polite society. We play by the rough rules. We had trouble enough
without your meddling. Your actions can’t be separated from
ours. You’re family. Richard won’t grant you absolution
because you’re a nitwit. You’ve caused deaths that
can’t be recalled. Death breeds death. God only knows how
many men are going to die because of you.”
It was his fault too, he knew. He should have written her off.
He should not have tracked Michael to The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
But similar logic could be used to assign blame to Michael,
Richard, and Lucifer. No, primary responsibility had to remain
Pollyanna’s. Hers had been the initiating decision.
“Tell me everything, Pollyanna. I don’t want
anything added. I don’t want anything left out. I don’t
want you adjusting anything to make yourself look a little better.
I just want straight facts. I want, verbatim, including
descriptions of tones of voice and expressions, everything you
heard discussed. Especially between Richard and Michael, and
anybody they talked with. About anything. There’s just a
ghost of a chance we can still get out of this, or at least tone it
down.”
“That would take hours.” She turned on the tears.
Storm ignored them. Pollyanna interacted with reality through a
studied repertoire of poses and roles. The real Miss Eight hid out
somewhere way off stage, directing the play, pushing the buttons
for whatever response seemed appropriate.
“I’ve bought time.” The stricken face of the
Blackworlder ghosted through his thoughts. The man had not doubted
his fate for one instant. “I need to buy more.”
She turned the tears off as quickly as she had switched them on.
She began talking in a small, soft voice devoid of editorialization
and emotion. She began at the beginning and told nothing but the
bitter truth about everything except her motives.
She had seduced Dee and talked him into taking her to Old Earth
with him. She now believed he had acquiesced for his own reasons.
Their stay on the mother-world had been dull. The one thing that
had impressed her had been the poverty of that gutted, overcrowded
planet. Michael had been upset because the holonets had not been
interested in his coverage of the action on The Broken Wings.
“From Old Earth we went to Blackworld. He kept me locked
in the ship while we were there. The only reason I found out was he
talked in his sleep. He wouldn’t say squat when he was awake.
He was worried and scared. Things weren’t going right,
somehow. He was a little paranoid, like he was afraid somebody
might be after him but he wasn’t really sure. After
Blackworld we went to see Richard Hawksblood. He isn’t such a
big deal in person, is he?”
She had not been allowed to approach Dee and Hawksblood most of
the time. She did know they were talking about Blackworld. What
little she knew she had learned from Richard’s
underlings.
Then Michael had vanished. No one knew where he had gone. Some
thought Tregorgarth, some thought The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
“It was The Mountain, Polly. Go ahead. You’re doing
great so far.”
“I had to hang around and wait. It was boring. I hardly
ever saw Hawksblood. He was working on the Blackworld project. I
never realized how complicated your work is. You don’t just
jump in the ring like a boxer, do you?”
Storm smiled the weakest of smiles. If nothing else, Pollyanna
had confirmed his intelligence about Richard. Hawksblood was in on
Blackworld for sure.
“It was two months before Michael came back. That was a
couple of weeks ago. He was really happy. Before, when his tapes
were turned down and he thought somebody was after him, you
couldn’t hardly live with him. All he said was that he saw
the man and everything was all right. He wouldn’t even talk
in his sleep.”
Who? Storm wondered. Not him. Who else had been on The Big Rock
Candy Mountain? Why had Michael been there, anyway?
“He was back about a week when he grabbed me and that
yacht and took off for here. Every couple of days he locked me out
of Command. Whenever he let me back in the instel set was warm. I
don’t know who he was talking to. Then we got here. And the
rest you know.”
And the rest he knew.
He checked the time. Her tale had taken an hour to tell. He had
a few questions. He doubted she could answer them.
Pollyanna, he thought, was one hell of a puzzle. She was all
surface and no depth. Even when you bedded a stranger she took on
some kind of shape as bits and pieces of bed talk jigsawed
together. But not pretty Pollyanna. She remained strictly
one-dimensional. Her only real attributes seemed to be her beauty
and her vagina, and her devotion to both. She had rebuilt her
makeup while she talked.
She was a damned android built for modeling and screwing! You
could penetrate her body, but not her facade.
Even Lucifer was baffled by her. She seemed to exist solely to
be appreciated for her beauty, like a classic painting or cherished
poem. Curious.
He had not thought much about Pollyanna before. She was like
that painting. There to be enjoyed and otherwise ignored. It was
time to start poking around, back in the silly shadows.
He would have to unravel her by reversing the usual process, by
what he did not know.
Pollyanna had made a second point clear. The Blackworld affair
was deeper than he had suspected. A potential mercantile war over
trillions worth of radioactives did not excite Michael. Pollyanna
said he seemed indifferent to the opportunity to tape the conflict.
It was important to him for some other reason.
It had to be The Game.
That was Dee’s label for the feud he had been engineering
between Hawksblood and Storm. He did not know Storm knew that The
Game’s goal appeared to be mutual annihilation. It had been
going on since the founding of the two freecorps.
Storm still could not understand why.
He bullied Pollyanna. “Who did Michael see on The Big Rock
Candy Mountain? Why?” The answer had to be important.
Pollyanna did not have it.
“Ah, damn. Damn.” He let her kiss him once, then
gently disengaged and departed. He returned to his study, put
Cassius on call, and turned to Ecclesiastes. He found no solace
there. The frenetic, helter-skelter flitting of his mind kept him
from following the printed words. He tried the clarinet.
The soul-trying days had come.
Cassius listened without being noticed. “I’ve never
heard you play so mournfully, Gneaus,” he said.
Startled, Storm replied, “It’s a dirge. I think
we’ve reached the end. I grilled Pollyanna. She’s a
good observer. You wouldn’t figure it considering how
vacuum-brained she acts.”
“I’ve sometimes wondered about that.”
“You too? Then it’s not my imagination. Could
anybody be that shallow without working at it?”
“Possibly. Then again, a preoccupation with sexual
encounter would make a mask few men, being egoists, would care to
lift. You wanted me?”
Storm made a mental note to ask Frieda and his daughter for the
woman’s view of Miss Eight. “We’re getting old,
you and I. We’re in our sundown days. Things are slipping
past us. It’s like we’re caught in some backwater of
time.”
Cassius raised an eyebrow. Storm had difficulty expressing his
feelings.
“We’re on the verge of the nightfall of the Legion.
Maybe of all the freecorps. I think we’ll be both cause and
effect of our own destruction, and I can’t see any way
out.”
“As long as there are corporations and rich men who need
us, and who won’t be intimidated by the government,
there’ll be work for us.”
“Time’s catching up with us. Confederation is
starting to flex its muscles. It’s a historical process.
It’s inevitable. Democratic control and government regulation
are coming on faster than the frontiers are moving out.
They’re about to catch up with us.”
“You’re too much the pessimist.”
“Consider the past, Cassius. The block vote of pestholes
like Old Earth will devour the capital approach. It’s an old
story. Goes all the way back to Rome. Why do something for yourself
if all you have to do is vote for a guy who’ll rob somebody
else and do it for you?”
Storm’s bitterness surprised him. He had not been aware of
the strength of his own feelings.
He told Cassius what he had learned from Pollyanna.
“What do you suggest we do?”
“First, secure Dee here. Things will move slower if
he’s tied down. Have Thurston handle that. He doesn’t
have the imagination to be taken in by Michael. You go to The
Mountain. Take Mouse. You won’t send him back to Academy, and
you tell me he’s interested in intelligence work. The two of
you, find out who Michael met there. Keep an eye out for
Seth-Infinite.”
“You’re softer than you pretend, my
friend.”
Storm shrugged. “Ship him home if he gets in the way. Tell
Wulf and Helmut to start getting ready for Blackworld.”
“Why?”
“Looks like we’ll end up there, like it or not. We
ought to be in shape. Oh. Have the older sergeants think up jobs
for Benjamin and Homer. We’ve got to keep them out of
trouble. Lucifer I want to backtrack his damned bubble-brained
wife. All the way to the place where she was born. Got
it?”
“Got it. I take it you won’t be here
yourself.”
“No. I’ll rendezvous with you on your way back from
The Mountain.” He glanced around, half expecting to see
Michael crouching in a shadow. “Where we keep Fearchild. I
want to ask him a question.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Festung Todesangst,” Storm murmured. “It was
the only clue in Michael’s papers. Pollyanna mentioned it. So
did Richard.”
By the raising of an eyebrow Cassius registered as much emotion
as he ever did. “To the lion’s den. To see Valerie? Or
Helga herself?”
“Valerie. Michael will be using the facilities for all
they’re worth. And she will make sure Valerie handles the
work. Valerie might know what’s going on.”
“I shouldn’t
presume . . . Nevertheless . . . Gneaus,
it’s too damned dangerous. If she lays hands on
you . . . ”
“I’m aware of the danger. But I have my edge. She
doesn’t expect me. There’s an unmonitored landing pad
near an out-of-the-way entry lock. I have her recognition codes. I
spent a fortune arranging this way in back when they were building
the place.”
“Gneaus, I don’t
think . . . ”
“You can’t talk me out of it, Cassius. It’s
got to be done. Let’s get on with it. Let’s both go and
get back before anybody misses us. We can’t control Michael
forever even if we chain him to a wall.”
“I’m on my way.”
Storm sequestered himself with the things he loved, strolling
around his study, gently touching this or that, remembering,
reaching out after timeworn feelings he had almost forgotten. He
and Cassius, they were not emotionally normal. Too many hard
decisions, too many cruel losses, had turned them into calloused,
indifferent men.
He worried about the young ones. Mouse especially. Would they
follow the same doomed path? He hoped not.
His study tour was not a habitual practice. It reflected his
appreciation of the dangers of Helga’s World, and his
uncertainty about his ability to get out again. “The risk has
to be taken,” he growled. “The thing has to be tried.
The key is there somewhere. If it’s anywhere.”
He spent a few minutes with his wife, then collected equipment
he had kept ready since the construction of Festung Todesangst. He
said no good-byes.
Cassius would know what to do if he did not come back.
“Gneaus!” Pollyanna spoke his name breathily.
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Not really. I’ve had work to do.”
Every curve of the woman, every patch of soft, smooth skin,
bespoke sexual craving. She had that look of constant need seen
only in young women in love and the most polished of prostitutes.
Like the hookers’, her eyes become vacant, cool, and
snakelike when she was off stage. She posed, one hip thrown out
model fashion. Her breath came in quick little gasps.
He was not playing the game today. “I want to hear all
about your travels, little lady.” He opened the door to her
apartment. She tried the close, casual brush-past going in. He
answered it with deliberate chill. A ghost of apprehension crossed
her too beautiful face.
She pushed herself at him as soon as he shut the door.
Her pelvis moved against him. “I missed you. All of you.
And the Fortress. But especially you, Gneaus. Nobody makes me feel
the way you do.”
“Sit down,” he ordered. She backed away, more
apprehensive. “Let’s hear the story.”
There were few men Pollyanna could not bedazzle and manipulate.
Hawksblood. Cassius, who made her blood run chill. The Darkswords.
And, she had learned the hard way, Michael Dee. But
Storm . . . He had always been so amenable. He
must have been using her when she thought she was using him. Her
ego was bruised and aching from traveling with Dee. It was not
ready for another blow.
Storm was positively grim.
These invulnerables were all old, old men from whom time and
experience had leached all innocence, had abraded all boyish
vulnerability. There was a darkness in them, a capital wickedness.
It called out to the darknesses in her own soul. Their black flames
reached out and pulled her like a candle pulled a moth. She was
afraid.
“I didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt, Gneaus!
Honest. I just wanted to meet Richard Hawksblood.”
“This is no nursery school, Pollyanna. This isn’t
polite society. We play by the rough rules. We had trouble enough
without your meddling. Your actions can’t be separated from
ours. You’re family. Richard won’t grant you absolution
because you’re a nitwit. You’ve caused deaths that
can’t be recalled. Death breeds death. God only knows how
many men are going to die because of you.”
It was his fault too, he knew. He should have written her off.
He should not have tracked Michael to The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
But similar logic could be used to assign blame to Michael,
Richard, and Lucifer. No, primary responsibility had to remain
Pollyanna’s. Hers had been the initiating decision.
“Tell me everything, Pollyanna. I don’t want
anything added. I don’t want anything left out. I don’t
want you adjusting anything to make yourself look a little better.
I just want straight facts. I want, verbatim, including
descriptions of tones of voice and expressions, everything you
heard discussed. Especially between Richard and Michael, and
anybody they talked with. About anything. There’s just a
ghost of a chance we can still get out of this, or at least tone it
down.”
“That would take hours.” She turned on the tears.
Storm ignored them. Pollyanna interacted with reality through a
studied repertoire of poses and roles. The real Miss Eight hid out
somewhere way off stage, directing the play, pushing the buttons
for whatever response seemed appropriate.
“I’ve bought time.” The stricken face of the
Blackworlder ghosted through his thoughts. The man had not doubted
his fate for one instant. “I need to buy more.”
She turned the tears off as quickly as she had switched them on.
She began talking in a small, soft voice devoid of editorialization
and emotion. She began at the beginning and told nothing but the
bitter truth about everything except her motives.
She had seduced Dee and talked him into taking her to Old Earth
with him. She now believed he had acquiesced for his own reasons.
Their stay on the mother-world had been dull. The one thing that
had impressed her had been the poverty of that gutted, overcrowded
planet. Michael had been upset because the holonets had not been
interested in his coverage of the action on The Broken Wings.
“From Old Earth we went to Blackworld. He kept me locked
in the ship while we were there. The only reason I found out was he
talked in his sleep. He wouldn’t say squat when he was awake.
He was worried and scared. Things weren’t going right,
somehow. He was a little paranoid, like he was afraid somebody
might be after him but he wasn’t really sure. After
Blackworld we went to see Richard Hawksblood. He isn’t such a
big deal in person, is he?”
She had not been allowed to approach Dee and Hawksblood most of
the time. She did know they were talking about Blackworld. What
little she knew she had learned from Richard’s
underlings.
Then Michael had vanished. No one knew where he had gone. Some
thought Tregorgarth, some thought The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
“It was The Mountain, Polly. Go ahead. You’re doing
great so far.”
“I had to hang around and wait. It was boring. I hardly
ever saw Hawksblood. He was working on the Blackworld project. I
never realized how complicated your work is. You don’t just
jump in the ring like a boxer, do you?”
Storm smiled the weakest of smiles. If nothing else, Pollyanna
had confirmed his intelligence about Richard. Hawksblood was in on
Blackworld for sure.
“It was two months before Michael came back. That was a
couple of weeks ago. He was really happy. Before, when his tapes
were turned down and he thought somebody was after him, you
couldn’t hardly live with him. All he said was that he saw
the man and everything was all right. He wouldn’t even talk
in his sleep.”
Who? Storm wondered. Not him. Who else had been on The Big Rock
Candy Mountain? Why had Michael been there, anyway?
“He was back about a week when he grabbed me and that
yacht and took off for here. Every couple of days he locked me out
of Command. Whenever he let me back in the instel set was warm. I
don’t know who he was talking to. Then we got here. And the
rest you know.”
And the rest he knew.
He checked the time. Her tale had taken an hour to tell. He had
a few questions. He doubted she could answer them.
Pollyanna, he thought, was one hell of a puzzle. She was all
surface and no depth. Even when you bedded a stranger she took on
some kind of shape as bits and pieces of bed talk jigsawed
together. But not pretty Pollyanna. She remained strictly
one-dimensional. Her only real attributes seemed to be her beauty
and her vagina, and her devotion to both. She had rebuilt her
makeup while she talked.
She was a damned android built for modeling and screwing! You
could penetrate her body, but not her facade.
Even Lucifer was baffled by her. She seemed to exist solely to
be appreciated for her beauty, like a classic painting or cherished
poem. Curious.
He had not thought much about Pollyanna before. She was like
that painting. There to be enjoyed and otherwise ignored. It was
time to start poking around, back in the silly shadows.
He would have to unravel her by reversing the usual process, by
what he did not know.
Pollyanna had made a second point clear. The Blackworld affair
was deeper than he had suspected. A potential mercantile war over
trillions worth of radioactives did not excite Michael. Pollyanna
said he seemed indifferent to the opportunity to tape the conflict.
It was important to him for some other reason.
It had to be The Game.
That was Dee’s label for the feud he had been engineering
between Hawksblood and Storm. He did not know Storm knew that The
Game’s goal appeared to be mutual annihilation. It had been
going on since the founding of the two freecorps.
Storm still could not understand why.
He bullied Pollyanna. “Who did Michael see on The Big Rock
Candy Mountain? Why?” The answer had to be important.
Pollyanna did not have it.
“Ah, damn. Damn.” He let her kiss him once, then
gently disengaged and departed. He returned to his study, put
Cassius on call, and turned to Ecclesiastes. He found no solace
there. The frenetic, helter-skelter flitting of his mind kept him
from following the printed words. He tried the clarinet.
The soul-trying days had come.
Cassius listened without being noticed. “I’ve never
heard you play so mournfully, Gneaus,” he said.
Startled, Storm replied, “It’s a dirge. I think
we’ve reached the end. I grilled Pollyanna. She’s a
good observer. You wouldn’t figure it considering how
vacuum-brained she acts.”
“I’ve sometimes wondered about that.”
“You too? Then it’s not my imagination. Could
anybody be that shallow without working at it?”
“Possibly. Then again, a preoccupation with sexual
encounter would make a mask few men, being egoists, would care to
lift. You wanted me?”
Storm made a mental note to ask Frieda and his daughter for the
woman’s view of Miss Eight. “We’re getting old,
you and I. We’re in our sundown days. Things are slipping
past us. It’s like we’re caught in some backwater of
time.”
Cassius raised an eyebrow. Storm had difficulty expressing his
feelings.
“We’re on the verge of the nightfall of the Legion.
Maybe of all the freecorps. I think we’ll be both cause and
effect of our own destruction, and I can’t see any way
out.”
“As long as there are corporations and rich men who need
us, and who won’t be intimidated by the government,
there’ll be work for us.”
“Time’s catching up with us. Confederation is
starting to flex its muscles. It’s a historical process.
It’s inevitable. Democratic control and government regulation
are coming on faster than the frontiers are moving out.
They’re about to catch up with us.”
“You’re too much the pessimist.”
“Consider the past, Cassius. The block vote of pestholes
like Old Earth will devour the capital approach. It’s an old
story. Goes all the way back to Rome. Why do something for yourself
if all you have to do is vote for a guy who’ll rob somebody
else and do it for you?”
Storm’s bitterness surprised him. He had not been aware of
the strength of his own feelings.
He told Cassius what he had learned from Pollyanna.
“What do you suggest we do?”
“First, secure Dee here. Things will move slower if
he’s tied down. Have Thurston handle that. He doesn’t
have the imagination to be taken in by Michael. You go to The
Mountain. Take Mouse. You won’t send him back to Academy, and
you tell me he’s interested in intelligence work. The two of
you, find out who Michael met there. Keep an eye out for
Seth-Infinite.”
“You’re softer than you pretend, my
friend.”
Storm shrugged. “Ship him home if he gets in the way. Tell
Wulf and Helmut to start getting ready for Blackworld.”
“Why?”
“Looks like we’ll end up there, like it or not. We
ought to be in shape. Oh. Have the older sergeants think up jobs
for Benjamin and Homer. We’ve got to keep them out of
trouble. Lucifer I want to backtrack his damned bubble-brained
wife. All the way to the place where she was born. Got
it?”
“Got it. I take it you won’t be here
yourself.”
“No. I’ll rendezvous with you on your way back from
The Mountain.” He glanced around, half expecting to see
Michael crouching in a shadow. “Where we keep Fearchild. I
want to ask him a question.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Festung Todesangst,” Storm murmured. “It was
the only clue in Michael’s papers. Pollyanna mentioned it. So
did Richard.”
By the raising of an eyebrow Cassius registered as much emotion
as he ever did. “To the lion’s den. To see Valerie? Or
Helga herself?”
“Valerie. Michael will be using the facilities for all
they’re worth. And she will make sure Valerie handles the
work. Valerie might know what’s going on.”
“I shouldn’t
presume . . . Nevertheless . . . Gneaus,
it’s too damned dangerous. If she lays hands on
you . . . ”
“I’m aware of the danger. But I have my edge. She
doesn’t expect me. There’s an unmonitored landing pad
near an out-of-the-way entry lock. I have her recognition codes. I
spent a fortune arranging this way in back when they were building
the place.”
“Gneaus, I don’t
think . . . ”
“You can’t talk me out of it, Cassius. It’s
got to be done. Let’s get on with it. Let’s both go and
get back before anybody misses us. We can’t control Michael
forever even if we chain him to a wall.”
“I’m on my way.”
Storm sequestered himself with the things he loved, strolling
around his study, gently touching this or that, remembering,
reaching out after timeworn feelings he had almost forgotten. He
and Cassius, they were not emotionally normal. Too many hard
decisions, too many cruel losses, had turned them into calloused,
indifferent men.
He worried about the young ones. Mouse especially. Would they
follow the same doomed path? He hoped not.
His study tour was not a habitual practice. It reflected his
appreciation of the dangers of Helga’s World, and his
uncertainty about his ability to get out again. “The risk has
to be taken,” he growled. “The thing has to be tried.
The key is there somewhere. If it’s anywhere.”
He spent a few minutes with his wife, then collected equipment
he had kept ready since the construction of Festung Todesangst. He
said no good-byes.
Cassius would know what to do if he did not come back.