The Sardonyx Net Part 38

Rhani was eating. He watched her narrowly; there was an intensity about her that disturbed him. She had told him, just before dinner, about Binkie's death. After the initial shock -- no, he thought, not shock, _anger_, admit it, Zed Yago, you wanted him for yourself -- he had stopped questioning her. She was eating with an appet.i.te now; internally, he applauded. She had been running on her nerves for hours; she needed fuel.

Imre and Vera, a middle daughter, were having a ferocious argument. Imre blew out his cheeks and bristled his beard; Vera tossed her red hair and slammed a fist on the table. n.o.body but Zed seemed to notice. Aliza called down the table to Rhani; something about the weather. Rhani raised her voice in answer.

As she did so, she glanced across the table at Zed. Speech was impossible, but he read in her eyes what she was thinking: _How different this all is!_ "C-C-C-Commander?" said Davi. He held up a breadstick as if he thought it might talk to him.

"I told you not to call me that," said Zed. "Didn't I tell you my name?"

"Yes, but -- " He squirmed in the cushions.

"What is it, then?"

"Z-Z-Zed."

"Good. Did you want to ask me something?"

"Yes, please. Is this the kind of food that people eat in s.p.a.ce?"

"Real food, you mean." Zed took the breadstick and bit it. "Sometimes. It depends who you are, and if it matters to you what you're eating, and what kind of a ship you're in." The bread had a sesame taste.

"In the Net?" "The Net carries real food, much like this, though not with this -- variety. When you're the size of a s.p.a.ce station, food, even for several thousand people, doesn't take up all that much s.p.a.ce. It would if it were for more than three months, but it isn't. And also, most of those people sit all day, or sleep. They don't need very much to eat."

"What about on a little ship?"

"Tell me what kind."

The boy blushed. "An MPL?"

"Big enough for captain and crew: six at most. That one?" He grinned at the boy. "You've been studying. Most MPLs carry food bars. It isn't always easy to navigate in hypers.p.a.ce; a trip can take longer than you thought. Rather than guess what you need, and stock up on real food, and maybe run out of it halfway, you load with food bars. They compress; you can take as many as you like, as long as you also take a water supply."

One of the younger girls said, "Doesn't that get boring?"

"Very. But in the Hype, either you're bored stiff anyway, or you're so busy concentrating on saving your skin that you can't taste what you're eating."

A slave put a large platter of egg tarts in front of him. "Unlike the food this household eats, which, I attest, tastes stupendous."

Aliza smiled. "Rhani said you like egg tarts."

"And breadsticks," said Zed with his mouth full. Davi turned red.

A sister observed with clinical interest, "Look, the Brat's blushing."

Davi's ears turned scarlet with embarra.s.sment; he started to get up from the table. Imre yelled at his daughter good-humoredly. Zed dared to put a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Stay."

Aliza rapped for silence. The children quieted; heads turned. "I don't know what Family Yago will make of Family Kyneth hospitality," she said, "with all of us behaving just the way we always behave. Yelling." Imre chuckled.

"_You're_ as bad as _them_," said his wife, referring to their children.

"Worse, I hope," said Imre. "Think of the years I've had to practice in."

Aliza said, "I am well aware of them. Now, my loves, Rhani wishes to talk to Papa, so minors and middle kids, upstairs."

There was a general howl. Vera said, "What are we supposed to do upstairs?"

Aliza said, "Play."

Dead silence greeted this remark. Vera said, "Mother, even _Davi_'s too old to _play_." Davi nodded vigorous agreement.

Imre said, "Get out of here! Shor, Yianni, Margarite, you stay."

Zed whispered to Davi as the boy stood up, "What are middle kids?"

"Over fourteen but under twenty. There's Vera and Caspar and Jory and Sandor and -- "

"Wait a minute! How many of you are there?" demanded Zed.

The boy grinned. "All together? Counting Mother and Father, twelve. The others aren't here; they're learning things."

The slaves cleared the table. Rhani held onto a plate of seaweed. Zed kept the egg tarts. Wine was poured. One of the slaves was sent upstairs with a plate of candies: "To keep the peace," observed Aliza. "Or they'll be half- killing each other, and we'll have to send Zed up there to patch wounds."

"I told you she'd have us earning our keep," said Zed to Rhani, gesturing with his spoon.

She smiled dutifully. She was too far from him; the other side of the table felt a continent's width away. Isolated from her, he felt trapped. He sipped the red wine -- it was good wine, Enchantean wine -- slowly, uneasy.

A slave dimmed the lights. Rhani struggled with the heavy cushioned chair, and Margarite shot up and wrestled it back for her. She rose, saying, "Do you mind if I pace? It makes it easier for me to think."

Imre said, "Go ahead, my dear." She had let her hair loose. In the somber light, it looked dark, almost black, certainly not red compared to the brilliance of Aliza's tresses. Zed felt a worm of desire for her, deep in his bones. He tensed, forcing it deeper.

"I have a story to tell," said his sister, gazing at her hands. "I don't know where it starts, or ends." She thrust her hands in her pockets, hunching her shoulders. "I mostly know the middle. One piece of it began on the Yago estate, on a summer night, two years back. Or perhaps it began even earlier, when my secretary, Tamsin Alt, left Chabad, and I replaced her with a slave named Ramas I-Occad.

"But I won't start it that far back. Let me start with a letter I got just recently, before the Net came home. It was a threat. I'd been threatened before, but no one had ever carried one out, so I didn't take it seriously. I don't even recall what it said, anymore. But it was signed, 'The Free Folk of Chabad.'"

Zed was surprised -- astonished, in fact. It was unlike Rhani to disclose Family business with anyone. But perhaps a threat to her, because it was personal -- d.a.m.nably personal, he thought -- was not quite Family business. He sat quietly, containing his restlessness, while Rhani described the letters, the estate bombing, the police visit, and the attack in the street which Dana Ikoro had thwarted.

She spoke dispa.s.sionately enough, but when she talked about the woman with the broken bottle in her hand, Yianni got up and walked around the room, clearly upset past bearing. She halted it there to let them all catch their breaths.

Aliza said, "Rhani, that's an incredible story. We -- the Families -- have always been exposed, but rarely have we been actually attacked."

"Ah," Rhani said, "but this was a very special group of dissidents, Aliza."

Why? Zed thought. He was suddenly annoyed at Rhani. Why was she making him sit through this?

"Now," she said, "I want to go back again, to another part of the story.

This starts even farther back, on Enchanter, I believe. As far as I can tell, it begins when a fourteen-year-old boy is taken to observe the loading of the Net."

Imre said, "Yianni, sit down. You distract us. Rhani, please go on."

"He was a very sensitive child, or a very ethical child, or a very impressionable one. I'm not sure. At any rate, the sight -- and information he received, which delineated some sort of basic family complicity in a practice he found repugnant -- affected him a great deal. So much so, that at age eighteen he changed his name and went off to become a Federation official dedicated to the destruction of the slave system in Sardonyx Sector. I speak, of course, of Michel A-Rae."

Imre said politely, "I didn't know you knew so much about him, Rhani."

"He told me most of this himself," Rhani said. She stepped to the table and, lifting her gla.s.s, took a sip of wine. The Kyneths watched her every move, as if they were watching a masque, a mime, or a play. "Now, at the beginning of my story I mentioned a slave I bought, Ramas I-Occad. I called him Binkie, and he was my secretary -- a tall, pale man. You might remember him, Aliza. You complimented him the morning of the Auction."

"I remember," Aliza said.

"I didn't know it at the time, of course, but he hated me." She squared her shoulders. "Part of it was my fault. Part of it was someone else's fault -- " she looked, bleakly, at Zed -- "and it may be that that part, too, was my fault. He thought so, anyway. So. Our dedicated policeman comes to Sardonyx Sector. He may once, indeed, have been a moral man. But times have changed him.

He takes all the legal steps possible to destroy the slave system. But he also takes a number of illegal steps. He forms -- out of his own staff -- a group of seeming rebels. He calls them the Free Folk of Chabad. And, on the off-chance that it might prove a fruitful approach, he suggests that they write to Rhani Yago's secretary and ask him to turn informer on her, for them. Perhaps they know what happened on that estate, on that summer night, two years back."

Imre said softly, "Rhani, you shock me. His ability to turn his staff into a.s.sa.s.sins bespeaks a level of corruption in Federation service which I did not suspect was there."

"None of us did, Imre. But I should emphasize, A-Rae did not want a.s.sa.s.sins. The attacks were never designed to kill me. They were designed to frighten, to keep me off-balance and afraid."

Margarite said, "You mean, Michel A-Rae got members of his staff to attack you? To burn your house?"

Rhani nodded. "I was not supposed to be in it. That addition was Binkie's idea. He hoped I would die in the fire, and that with my death he'd be free."

"Where the h.e.l.l is Michel A-Rae now?" Yianni said.

Rhani smiled. "No one knows. The Abanat police are searching for him.

He's still on Chabad. According to Ramas I-Occad, he has one more scheme to set in motion, something special he has prepared for me. I want you to help me find him, Imre."

It was like watching a masque or a play, so that, even as he caught his breath in fury, Zed saw himself listening and reacting as if he were one of the players. He did not move. He found himself contemplating Michel A-Rae's motives with an almost intellectual pa.s.sion. I wonder what it was that disturbed him, he thought. Could someone he knew -- a friend, teacher, lover -- have been a slave?

Then a slave opened the door. Stepping into the reverberant silence unnerved her; she fumbled, and dropped a plate. The clatter made them jump. Zed felt something break in his mind. His dark self, released, writhed. He wanted, simply, to kill Michel A-Rae.

The blood burned in his eyes, so that he saw the room, Rhani, the Kyneths through a true red haze. His hands clenched, every tendon and muscle curling.

Then he felt an unexpected pain in his left hand; it jolted him from his murderous state. He opened his fist, grimacing. He had been holding a spoon, a piece of fine silver, as all Kyneth tableware was. He was still holding it, but it no longer looked like a spoon, and it was b.l.o.o.d.y. He had driven its edges into the flesh of his hand.

He picked the mess from his left hand with his right and deposited it upon the table. As he reached for a cloth napkin to staunch the bleeding, Aliza exclaimed. "Zed! What -- Lela, get a cloth from the medical kit, and hot water."

"Just bring a clean cloth and a gel bandage," Zed said. "I'll attend to it later."

"It needs more than that," Yianni said. Slender, swift, a redhead like all the Kyneth children, he came forward, napkin in hand. Zed recalled -- he was the Kyneth who was studying to be a medic. He pulled a candle close to Zed's chair and went down on one knee, reaching for the injury with unconscious grace.

Zed's system shrieked. "No!" he said shortly. He pulled the hand back.

Yianni looked up, still kneeling, startled. Then, without comment, he laid his napkin in Zed's lap and returned to his chair.

The slave, Lela, brought a sterile cloth, hot water, and gel. Zed fixed a rough bandage.

Imre said, "Zed, do you need a tourniquet? Surgery? Perhaps a cast?"

Zed laughed. It eased the tension. "No, I'll live." He glanced at Yianni.

"Thank you."

Aliza said, "Your sister has a fine sense of drama."

Zed smiled. As always, pain, whether his or another's, had sharpened his senses. He sipped the wine, admiring the play of light on Rhani's hair. Yianni Kyneth was studying him over the rim of his own goblet. Imre said, "Rhani, I will of course do everything in my power to help the Abanat police locate Michel A-Rae. How much of this do you intend to make public?"

"As little as possible," Rhani said. "The confessions of the ex-police are, of course, already public. And I expect the Abanat police to make public their warrant for A-Rae's arrest."

"Imre," said Aliza, "what if the Chabad Council were to offer a reward to persons a.s.sisting the Abanat police in that endeavor?"

Imre c.o.c.ked his head at Rhani. "What do you think, my dear? In this matter, you are the most injured party."

Rhani said, "The A.P. might find it somewhat demoralizing. But I suppose, if they haven't located him in a few weeks, we might."

"Who is Henrietta Melones?" Margarite said. Imre shot his daughter an approving glance, and then answered her.

"No one we need be concerned with," he said. "My sources on the moon tell me that this is the highest Federation rank she has ever held, and that there is no chance of her being named captain, as opposed to acting captain."

Silence descended. Aliza rose, a pillar of light in the dark room.

"Yianni, get the light, please." Yianni rose and vanished into the darkness. The overhead chandelier came on. "Is there more, my children?"

Zed tensed. He watched his sister, suddenly afraid that she would tell the Kyneths about her alliance with Ferris Dur. But she simply shook her head.

"Good," said Aliza. "Then -- since we have all received enough shocks to our nervous systems to make sleep imperative -- I, at least, am going to bed!"

Imre rose from his chair. "I always go to bed with my wife," he explained.

Zed walked to Rhani. She held out her hand and, when he laid the bandaged one upon it, she drew it to her lips. "Can you forgive me for that?" she said.

Zed said, "It isn't incapacitating."

Behind them, Yianni Kyneth coughed. "Excuse me," he said, "but are you sure, Zed, that you won't need help in tying that?"

"I can manage," Zed said. He put his arm around Rhani as they walked from the room. As he escorted her up the stairs, he regretted that he could respond to such overtures only in his own devastating way.

He rummaged in the Kyneths' vast medikit: spray anesthetic allowed him to st.i.tch the deepest cut. Re-covering the hand with gel, he went to the room he'd been given. Through the window drape he saw lights in the sky: the city was giving the tourists a fireworks display. No wonder the children had been quiet, he thought. He watched as the night sky over the Barrens sported a white-hulled ship with indigo sails, a gold-and-purple dragon, and a green kerit. For a finale, a great silver wheel bloomed in the sky and burst in a shower of glittering sparks. In the adjoining bedroom, someone produced a series of m.u.f.fled shrieks which turned into giggles. He wondered what it would have been like to grow up in a house filled with siblings, permitted to yell, to giggle, to argue with one's parent. He wondered how he might have turned out if he had grown up a Kyneth.

He walked down the hall, to say good night to Rhani. But the guard at her door said, "She's asleep, Commander. She turned the light out ten minutes ago."

"Thank you," said Zed. Feeling cheated, he returned to his room. He had just taken off his shirt when a tap sounded on his door. He opened it.

His visitor -- I should have known, Zed thought -- was Yianni Kyneth.

"I want to talk to you," he said. His eyes were hard and direct.

Zed said, "Come in." He gestured to a chair -- the rooms in the Kyneth house always seemed to have lots of chairs in them. Yianni shook his head.

"I don't want to sit. I want to know what happened tonight," he said firmly.

"What happened?" "Between us. There was something." His gaze was like a knife. "I won't let it sit and fester. I don't do things like that. If we talk, perhaps we can discover what it is."