The Sardonyx Net Part 19

He said, "Domni Ferris, kindly take your hand off my arm."

Ferris Dur let him go.

Zed smoothed his shirt. "My thanks."

Ferris Dur said, "Isn't Rhani here? Why is she not with you?"

Zed said, "She's at home, she isn't feeling well. I imagine she'll be well enough to attend your party."

"Has someone from the Clinic seen her?"

Zed said, "I am a senior medic."

Ferris stared at him. "That's right," he said. "I forgot." His shirt was grease-stained. Kerit bait, Zed thought, despising him. "She isn't seriously ill?"

Zed set his teeth. His fingers curled at his sides. "No," he said. "Now, if you'll excuse me...." If you don't get out of my path in five seconds, Ferris Dur, he thought, I'm going to walk over you. Ferris stepped back: Zed took a deep breath and slid past him. Davi Kyneth was watching him with that d.a.m.nable look of hero-worship, not two meters away.

"Bring my cloak," he snapped to a slave near the door. The slave brought it. "Please give my regards to your mistress."

The slave bowed, clear-eyed. "Commander."

The night, like most Chabadese nights, was cold and crisp. Overhead, the stars glittered like points of ice. Zed pulled the cloak closer to him. He walked north along the deserted Promenade. He thought, steadily, holding his mind to it; I shall have to tell Rhani about my conversation with Imre -- and then pain welled up inside him; he swayed, body bunching as if he walked into a wind. A tormentor of children, is that what he was destined to become? I'll kill myself first, he thought. For a moment he wished that there could be an easier way out of what he had made of himself. He could go to Nexus, or better yet, to Psi Center, and put himself into the care of the telepaths. He could try again to find a lover. He could leave Chabad, be a pilot for a corporation, perhaps return to Nexus and train to be a Starcaptain.... But his attachment to Rhani had spoiled him for anyone and anything else, and he knew none of those would work.

He stopped suddenly in the middle of the street. He was hurrying to get home, and it was not his sister he was thinking of, but Dana, even Binkie. He breathed slowly and deeply until his tension subsided and his muscles slackened.

He knew how to keep himself under control; choice as well as chance had gone to make him what he was.

The house was blissfully dark and quiet. On his way upstairs he heard Corrios walking around to the windows, resetting the alarms. We should have alarms on the estate, he thought. I wonder why we never thought of it. Because, he answered himself, we never thought that there we'd be accessible to harm. He glanced into Rhani's bedroom. She had fallen asleep with the light on. He walked through the scented dimness to the bedside.

"Zed-ka?" Her voice was thick. Eyes closed, she yawned.

He suppressed a moment of fury. What if it were _not_ him? Dana should be here, should have been lying across the threshold.... He relaxed his fingers effortfully. "Yes, it's me." "Is it late?"

"Not very."

She opened her eyes. "Was Ferris Dur there?"

"Yes. He asked for you. I had an interesting conversation with Imre Kyneth. Remind me to tell it to you tomorrow."

"All right." Her lips curled in a sleepy smile.

Zed drew a fingertip across the smooth line of her cheek. "Good night, Rhani-ka," he said. He left her door ajar and went to his room. He leaned in the doorway, while desire shuddered through him, corrosive as poison, swift as a surgeon's knife. Walking to the window in his room, he flung it open and leaned on the sill, arms crossed, while the sweat poured off him.

The city lights glittered below him; the stars glinted austerely above.

He looked up.

After a while, the compulsion died.

He stood quietly, frightened. His control was slipping. He had been roused close to action twice in one night, and he was only two weeks back from the Net. He had learned not to be greedy, learned to starve his system.... He rested his head in his hands. Fear and reproach were pointless. He could go to Lamartine's: they would not be pleased to see him, but for two hundred credits they would let him pick out a slave to do whatever he wanted to. Need would rest, satisfied.

A breeze touched his cheek. There was a sliver of moon in the west. He squinted at the evening sky. The glow of the city's lamps gleamed on the icebergs' slopes.

He bowed his head. Walking to his medic's case, he thumbed it open and picked from it a clear capsule: chloral hydrate, purveyor of dreamless sleep. He swallowed it dry and shut the case. Shedding his clothes, he unclipped his hair, closed the open window, and struggled into his bed.

He would take his needs to the exorcism of the Abanat ice.

*Chapter Nine*

The next day, carrying his ice climbing equipment over his shoulder, Zed Yago stepped from the movalong that terminated at Abanat's westernmost street.

At his back, the dawn sky was clear and brilliant. A hill of orange gra.s.s separated the city from the beach. He walked across it, feeling the tough gra.s.s bow but not crush beneath his weight. The beach sand was fine as talc. Even this early there were tourists on the dunes, wearing sunshades and skinscreen and not much else. In two hours, hundreds of them would be lying in the Chabadese sun, slathered with skinscreen. The beach, with its breezes, was about the only place you could stay outdoors on Abanat and not collapse from the heat.

Zed walked north until he came to a paved walkway and a metal gate. The sign on the gate said, PRIVATE. On the other side of the gate sat a dock with boats. Zed pushed the unlocked gate aside; a squatting man with a hammer looked up, nodded, and returned to his repair work. Over his bowed head the Abanat icebergs loomed, deceptively lovely, terribly bright.

Icebergs are bits and pieces of glaciers. Even on Chabad there were glaciers, left from a period some twelve thousand Standard years ago, when most of Chabad except the equator had been covered with ice. Chabad's current climate was the result of a ma.s.sive dust cloud through which the entire solar system had been pa.s.sing since that time: the interstellar dust, remnant of some long- vanished star, lowered the albedo and raised the surface temperature of the planet.

Every year, portions of the polar ice sheets wormed equatorward, broke from the mother ice sheet, and tumbled into the sea. The first Abanat iceberg, Primo, had been transported to southern pole in the sixty-seventh year of the then mining colony. Before its arrival the colonists' water had come from desalinated seawater, carefully rationed and recycled. In colony year sixty-one, a dilettante Leyvian chemist working in the free lab at Kroeber University on Nexus had discovered and refined a non-toxic substance which r.e.t.a.r.ded melting.

Painted on a surface, it insulated just about anything solid from the inevitable absorption of heat. The chemist patented his find, licensed it to Family Kyneth, and then retired to grow rhododendrons on Ley.

Family Kyneth hired a platoon of chemical engineers and explained what they needed to be able to do with the substance, named Antimelt. In preparation for the event, they built four immense ships, known collectively as the Floating Islands. During the next five years, bubblecraft flew out every polar spring, looking for bergs. A properly ma.s.sive berg was located in the sixth year.

It was five hundred meters thick, six hundred and forty meters wide, and two-point-four kilometers long.

It had calved from the south pole's Komarkova Glacier, and was moving north with the current. The Floating Islands went to meet it. They aligned themselves along its southern width, laid their tremendous prows against its icy wall, and shoved. The berg moved. Once out of the flow of the current, they maneuvered it to a halt and brought out hoses and nozzles and wet suits and airtanks and twenty-two tanks of Antimelt. Crews painted the berg from above and sprayed it from below with the r.e.t.a.r.dant. The process took four months. Coaxing it at last to Abanat, they headed the monster berg toward sh.o.r.e, where its underpart ran aground in the Abanat mud. Around it they constructed an artificial bay, a giant bowl, and festooned the berg with pipes and sluices to direct and capture the freshwater runoff. The friction of the water wore away the paint; the berg melted slowly at the littoral line. As its volume decreased, the berg lightened, lifting from the sea. Every five years or so -- at public expense -- Family Kyneth manufactured more Antimelt, and sent out a crew to reapply it.

Without Antimelt, Primo would have lasted perhaps five years before diminishing beyond use. It lasted forty-five. In the one hundred twelfth year of the colony's founding, Family Kyneth sent The Floating Islands south and culled two more bergs, one a little larger, the other a little smaller than the first.

They were called Primo II and Secundo.

Dumping his equipment bag into the nearest boat, Zed clambered in and pointed the craft into the bay. Ahead of him the visible portion of Primo II glittered like milk gla.s.s. Secundo, south of it, had an aqua tinge. From beneath the boat's bow, water lifted upward in a fine spray. A seal, curious and fearless, popped up three meters away to look at him. Zed increased the boat's speed, and the light sh.e.l.l lifted until it skated the surface of the sea. Primo II, sleeping giant, muttered to itself as he approached. All icebergs did that; they boomed and hissed as their ice melted and reformed. Abanat's icebergs, melting slowly, were more silent than most.

He felt peaceful, loose, and light. He took the boat around to the southwest face of Primo II. There were no seals here; they preferred the gentle slopes of the east face. A dock, a path, and a long, low building disturbed the iceberg's surface. Zed tied the boat at the dock and walked, carrying his bag, into the building. "Loren," he called.

She came from one of the supply rooms, one leg dragging slightly from the spinal injury she had received the day, four years back, that, claw climbing, she had fallen from the ice. She could not climb, but she could walk. "Wondering when you'd get here," she said. "I heard the Net was back."

She was like Yuki, obsessive. For Loren Basami, life happened only on or around the ice.

"Anyone else up?" Zed asked.

"Two." She named them. They were both claw climbers. Zed wondered how many of them there were now. Thirty? He flexed his fingers. He had brought traditional ice climbing equipment: crampons, ice axe and hammer, screws and pitons, boots. But he had also brought his ice suit and claws. "How do you want to go?"

"Clawed," he said.

"You can leave the bag in cubicle nine," she said.

Following her to cubicle nine, Zed shook out the soft, furry folds of the ice suit and laid it on the single chair. He stripped, and, unsealing the suit, stepped into it. It molded around him from ankles to neck. He worked his hands into the suit's arms and into the flexible framework of the fingers. Except for the deceptively mild stiffness of the struts that held the claws in place, they felt very much like surgical gloves.

"You want a bandolier?" Loren said. Zed shook his head. "Rope?"

"No." He laced on his boots. She bent to check the lacings.

"Belt holsters," she suggested.

Zed frowned. Finally he decided to take axe and hammer with him. He might tire of the claws and need the tools. He took axe, hammer, crampons, and his iceshades from the bag, and nested the axe and hammer into the holsters. "All right," he said.

He followed Loren to the sound room. The heavy door, closing, sealed out extraneous sounds; the seals' barking, the clatter of pa.s.sing boats, the _lip- lip_ of water. The rhythms of their breathing seemed unnaturally loud. With total impersonality, Loren ran her fingers over the crotch of Zed's suit until she found the thumbnail size disk that led to the suit's power pack. She pulled a lead from the machine at her side and attached it to the suit. She nodded, and Zed said his name. Most ice climbers chose their own names to signal their claws; your own name was the one thing you would not shout by accident on the ice.

"Zed. Zed." His voice sounded strange, but that was because, in the sound room, it was unmingled with all other sounds. "Zed." He repeated it, whispering, shouting, speaking normally, until Loren signaled him to stop. She changed the wire's position. "Yago," Zed said. "Yago."

"Enough," Loren said. Detaching the lead, she snapped the protective patch on the disc.

Zed extended his hands. "Zed." The claws slid out. They were five centimeters long, light, rigid, very strong, made of a steel-and-ceramic laminate. Zed's fingers crooked to follow the curve. "Yago," he said. They retracted. He repeated the ritual, changing his voice, and the claws responded each time. "Good."

Loren said his name. The claws did not move. "All right," she said. She opened the sound room door. They walked out of the building. "Take trail four,"

she directed.

"Right," Zed said. He had done it once, some years ago, but by now it would have changed, as, beneath the coating of Antimelt, compressed by the climbers, ice shifted and reformed.

"If you don't come down by nightfall, we'll come get you," she said. She always said that. Occasionally a bubble did have to come and pick some exhausted climber from the ice. But for a clawed climber, unpartnered, unbelayed, there were only two ways down. One was to reach the east face trail, where steps had been chopped into the ice. The other was to fall.

"See you," said Zed. He walked to the trail marker, and stopped at the foot of a blue, near-vertical wall. He fastened his iceshades around his head and strapped the crampons on his boots. Now his feet had claws: ten pointing down, two pointing out of the toes of each boot. Primo II towered over him, pitiless and stark. Its snow cover had long gone, melted in its journey toward the equator; what gleamed above him now, rucked and creva.s.sed and thousands of years old, was Chabad's polar ice.

Beneath the ice, showing only occasionally on the surface of the berg, lay the water system's pipelines. They were set off by red markers, and the climbers stayed out of their way. The pipelines halted a few meters above the waterline. Nothing disturbed the ice above that point; not sunlight, not the friction of an occasional storm wind, or the great wreaths of fog that gathered around the ice peaks and blew inland in gray plumes. Zed examined what he could see of the trail. About twenty meters up was a ledge. He could not see farther than that because of the glitter in his eyes. Foolish to wait any longer, he thought, and his heart began to beat with increased strength. "Zed," he said.

The claws slid out. He reached, chopping as high as he could into the frozen blue surface with his left hand. Kicking the front points of his right foot into the ice a meter up the face, he pushed upward, swinging his right hand at the ice. The claws gripped. He was up. He set his left front points in, leaned his weight on them, and worked his left-hand claws free of the ice. He reached upward, struck. Stopped and kicked his right foot. Ice climbing was not like rock climbing, where there were projections to cling to, boulders to grab, the safety and strength of rock. He leaned out, keeping his heels low and his muscles loose, snaking slowly up the milky blue wall, dancing on the tips of his fingers and toes. Despite the cooling breeze, it was hot -- 32 degrees Celsius - - and sweat slicked his skin within the ice suit. It was the best material ever developed for climbing ice: made of apton and kerit fur, it was supple, nearly weightless, and it fended off cold at the same time as it reflected back light.

But it was not perfect. Pressed against the ice, Zed's palms began to ache. More than once he hung by claws alone, kicking to get his front points more solidly into the ice. His forearms hurt. He should have started with axe and hammer. He should at least have taken rope and set up a belay. He told the thinking, doubting brain to shut up. Left hand. Right foot. Right hand. Left foot. Do it over again. Sweat stung his eyes till they burned. The interior of the ice suit was at body temperature; it would stay that way. His hands were numbing. He worked his way around a bulge so big he could not see around it. He knew what was on its other side: more ice. It rippled mercilessly overhead, as high as infinity. His foot slipped. He kicked it in again, went up another twenty centimeters, and found himself at the ledge.

It was a wide ledge, roomy enough to sit on and still have room to stand and turn around when it was time to start again. Zed waited for his hands to warm up. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, and before his head could tell him why he should stay on the ledge a little longer, just a little longer, he began climbing. He used the claws. He had gone from looseness to tension and now he was loose again. He felt as if his skin were soaking in a warm oil bath. The physical, the sensory, the real took hold of him like a great inexorable hand.

It thrust him up the mountainside. He cursed the heat, the glare, the numbing cold that sealed his flesh to his bones. He couldn't feel his fingers. He looked down once.

The sea glittered like blue-green crystal below him.

The second ledge turned out to be sixty meters up. This ledge, too, was wide. Zed muscled onto it. "Yago," he said, and his claws slid back. He worked his cold, tired, and cramped hands forward and back, till the blood began to return to tingle and burn them. It was a welcome pain. His mouth quirked, and he leaned back against the adamantine ice face. Pain cleared the senses; it made the world seem bright and sharp. Zed wondered what Dana Ikoro would think of that.

For a price, there was a further refinement of ice climbing technology available on Chabad. The operation was tricky, but surgeon Ja Narayan had been known to do it. Zed knew two climbers who had had it done. The bones of the hands and forearms were removed, the flesh laid back, and artificial bone was joined to real bone. At the tips of the fingers, the artificial bones ended with retractable claws. The operation destroyed the feeling in the hands, and, when the claws were extended, the hands could not be closed. At a party, Zed had heard some learned guest of Theo Levos discourse on "the ultimate egotism" of ice climbing. The speaker claimed that it was an unconscious confirmation and symbol of this egotism that a claw climber shouted her or his name over and over again at the ice. This, the philosopher remarked, revealed the fundamentally decadent nature of Chabadese society. The listening guests nodded, and refrained from pointing out that the speaker was the guest of a Levos, and was standing in the heart of that decadent society, being served by slaves, drinking decadently imported wine.

Zed had refrained from strangling the idiot. He asked the man if he had ever done any ice climbing. The answer had been, "No, certainly not!"

Zed grinned, remembering. He'd rarely heard anyone make less sense. After a very little time on the ice, the shouted name became meaningless, a noise without objective referent. It ceased to have an owner; it was just a word, unconnected.

He stood on the ledge. Glancing at his left wrist, he checked the small suit chronometer which told him how long he had been climbing. It did not surprise him to learn that he had been climbing for nearly three hours. His shoulders and forearms ached; he ignored them. A cool wind fanned his cheeks. He smelled the sharp, tangy scent of the ice. He said his name; the claws came out.

He chopped his aching arm into the ice wall and stepped upward, setting the front points of his right foot.

He climbed.

At breakfast that morning, Rhani, remembering Zed's comment from the night before, waited for him to join her. Finally, when Amri came into the bedroom to remove the plates, she realized that he was not coming. "Amri, is my brother still asleep?" She said.

Amri shook her head. "No, Rhani-ka; his door is open. He isn't in the house."

"Do you know where he went?"

"No. But I think he left early this morning."

Corrios, padding up the stairs with the mail, said, "Yes."

"Do you know where he went, Corrios?"

"Ice," the big man said succinctly.

"Ah," Rhani said. She took the mail from the tray. She wondered what had happened at the party to send Zed to the ice. She doubted very much that it had been his conversation with Imre.

Could it have been meeting Ferris? She considered that, then shrugged. As she did so, her fingers encountered a letter with a crest on it.

It was from Ferris Dur. She opened it. It asked after her health and sent regrets that she had not come to the party. There was also a letter from the Abanat police. She tore it open quickly. Officer Tsurada wrote: "_We are having some difficulty in tracing the Free Folk of Chabad. They are either smaller than we thought, or more tightly organized. Only a few of our informers have even heard of them, and their information is sketchy and has proved largely useless_."

"Wonderful," Rhani said aloud.

"I beg your pardon, Rhani-ka?" said Binkie.

She looked up. "Good morning," she said. "I didn't hear you walk in." She held the letter out to him. He perused it.

"I'm sorry, Rhani-ka," he said.

"So am I." She stretched. "Is there anything else in that pile that I should look at?"

He fanned through the rest of the letters. "They seem to be mostly invitations, Rhani-ka."

"Feh." She stretched again. Her body felt tense and tight. Perhaps she had slept in an odd position. Rising, she paced around the room once. "Zed isn't here," she said to Binkie. "He's ice climbing." He bowed his head. She wondered where Dana was. She had a swift, unexpected memory of his hand against her cheek, and shivered.

Turning to the intercom, she called him. "Dana!"

"Yes, Rhani-ka?"

"Come to my room, please." She stepped away from the intercom and smiled at Binkie. "Bink, I shall not need you this morning."

He bowed. "As you wish, Rhani-ka. I -- " he hesitated, then said, "I have some errands to run in the city. May I -- "