A Passage of Stars Page 27

  “He isn’t Pero,” she repeated.

  “That may be true,” replied Senator Isaiah. “That I cannot deny. But our evidence is incontrovertible. Sabotage. Our classified computer banks have been violated; secret information has been passed through an unknown conduit into the hands of whatever Jehanist sects fester on this planet. Do you think we would continue to tolerate this situation?”

  “You can’t try him and sentence him as Pero if he isn’t Pero.”

  He lowered his clasped hands to lie, reflected in the smooth sheen, on the desktop. “How do you know he isn’t Pero?”

  “Because—” She halted.

  The Senator smiled, an endearment hard as stone, “If he isn’t Pero, then who is? It’s worth five hundred thousand credits to you.”

  Lily looked at Pinto. She could see no resemblance between this hard man and the young Ridani. Pinto’s tattoos disguised his features too well. Perhaps their only likeness was pride.

  “Get me Pero,” said the Senator, “and you can have your man and the credits. That is the only offer I will consider.”

  Did they even know what Robbie looked like? Did they still think Pero was a committee, rather than an individual? But even as she thought it she knew she could never do it. Not really even for Robbie’s sake, or for her own conscience, but because she knew with painful clarity, with a knowledge that she suddenly wished she did not have, that Heredes would never forgive her for saving him with such a betrayal. That is a command, Lilyaka.

  “I’m sorry, Senator,” she replied in a voice that surprised her with its calmness. “If I could find Pero for you I would, but I can’t.”

  “Very well spoken,” he applauded, and he rose. The interview was over.

  “Father!” Pinto walked forward and grasped the Senator’s arm. “I know you can free him. Help me. Please, Father. You raised me as your own child, in this house. You educated me. You loved me once.”

  She saw the resemblance. It was that surprising sweetness of visage that could soften Pinto’s face for an instant. She saw it now, but not in Pinto, rather in the hard lines of Senator Isaiah’s face, subdued now by another emotion as he lifted a hand to touch with infinite tenderness Pinto’s unbruised cheek.

  “My child,” he said.

  The door into the interior of the house clicked and, accompanied by a light trill of laughter, opened.

  “And you must see my husband’s study. He won’t mind being disturbed.”

  A vision entered, ethereal as gauze, exquisite as a rare curio. Halted, wide eyes taking in first Lily and, wider now, Pinto, with every evidence of astonishment. The door, flung wide as well, housed two curious and extremely well-dressed females. The vision herself was young, not more than Lily’s age, and her frail blondness proclaimed her to be the tiny Arabinthia’s mother.

  “I’m sure you know Eugenie Feng and Ducera Mughal Demoivre, Samuel. But who are these”—the barest pause as her gaze examined Pinto—“people.”

  Senator Isaiah lowered his hand and with an impatient gesture shook off Pinto’s hand from his arm. “Nothing to worry about, my dear. I was just calling the guards.” With a firm finger he pressed the desk intercom and spoke a concise command into the air. “They will be escorted off the estate.”

  “You relieve me.” Her eyes did not leave Pinto. Pinto’s eyes remained locked on Senator Isaiah. Into this gap pierced the bright, knowing voice of the darker of the two women at the door.

  “Senator! Never say this is the same little tattooed boy who used to run tame about your house. Before you bonded with dearest Binthia, of course. You weren’t in company yet, Ducy, but I used to come over quite a bit with my sister when she was on senatorial business. It was such a lark. But Senator, I really wouldn’t have recognized him.”

  “One wouldn’t expect you to, Madame Feng.” Senator Isaiah drew back farther from Pinto, slipping around his desk chair so it stood between him and the young man. “It’s so very hard to tell them apart, after all.”

  Ducy tittered. The vision smiled.

  “I must say it was a delightful prank while it lasted.” Eugenie Feng blinked innocently into the glare of her audience. “But of course, while it could pass in a bachelor establishment, it wouldn’t suit at all for a family man.”

  “Not at all,” murmured the Senator. “There you are.” This last addressed to six blue-clad guards who waited respectfully in the hall until the three women moved far enough into the room that they could pass through to stand, three each, by Lily and Pinto.

  Pinto still stared at Senator Isaiah, a horrified fascination. “I thought you would help me.” His voice had the hoarse roughness of a broken whisper. “I thought you would help me.”

  At first, in the silence, the Senator did not meet the young man’s gaze. But like some kind of hand-by-hand reconstruction, Lily watched as a cold determination informed Isaiah’s face, setting it back into a hard mask. He lifted his eyes to meet Pinto’s, dispassion facing a desperate plea.

  “If not for my sake, sir—” Pinto’s voice broke, then stabilized. “If not for my sake, then at least for my mother’s. For her.”

  “Remove them,” said the Senator.

  Pinto jerked away from the hands that closed on his good arm, started forward. The desk chair blocked him from the Senator. “You loved her!” he cried. “Don’t think I don’t remember that. You bought her beautiful dresses. You called her your beauty. You bought her jewels, you bought her anything she asked for. You built her the cottage on these grounds that I was born in! Can you deny that?”

  Pale eyes inspected the clear vulnerability of Pinto’s face. The Senator sighed, a grandiose gesture. “Like the rest of her kind,” he said in the tone usually reserved for teachers imparting the obvious truth to their slowest pupil, “your mother was a common whore. One pays a whore, boy.”

  Pinto gazed as if blind at the Senator, and when the two blue-clad guards stepped up beside him, laying their hands on his jacket, he seemed not even to notice them. Beyond him, the vision’s smile appeared to be fixed into place on her face.

  “You disgust me,” said Lily. The Senator’s gaze jumped to her, his mask of dispassion slipping for a moment to reveal something much uglier underneath it. “You disgust me,” she repeated, and she used the surprise her comment created to edge forward toward him. “You and the rest of your kind make me sick.”

  “Young woman.” The mask solidified into a skin impervious to emotion. “There will be no scandal in this house. Remember that I could easily have both of you executed.”

  “He’s your son!” She leaned on the desk, bracing her hands. The guards moved up beside her.

  “No female tattoo can possibly claim any one man for paternity.”

  “You wouldn’t kill your own son!” Hands touched her arms.

  The Senator shifted his gaze from Lily’s outrage to Pinto. The young man’s eyes still had not moved from the Senator’s face, but he stood limp as a sleepwalker, and expression had fled his face utterly. With a slow, thorough examination that summed up the worth of a soul in its scrutiny, the Senator surveyed Pinto and then, with a light shrug, turned away from him to face the vision and the other two women. “One piece of trash more or less is worth nothing to me,” he said. “Get them out of Central, by JooAnn Gate.”

  Lily launched herself over the desk, grabbed the Senator. If she could only—but the Senator struggled against her, and she had no hands free. Five guards converged on her. Someone screamed, light and ineffectual. Lily kicked, taking one guard down, a second, lost her grip on the Senator, but her left arm was caught, held, vised behind her back, her right arm—when they shoved a gun up against her temple she stopped fighting. They weren’t very gentle.

  “If I could have taken you hostage, you damned—” she yelled as they propelled her out of the room. They shoved her down a hall, down another hall, down steps, outside, and threw her into a truck. The doors swung to with a hollow crash, followed by the scrape of a bolt sliding into pla
ce.

  21 JooAnn Gate

  SHE SLAMMED HER FISTS into the closed door. “I killed him!” she cried. The metal did not yield at all under her fist. The truck jerked forward, drove. She hit the door again.

  Behind her, a noise. She did not recognize it. She spun in time to see Pinto collapse. That sound again, not a cough, not a laugh, but as final as either of them. He was crying—not even crying, but sobbing.

  She knelt beside him.

  His entire body, slender as he was, shook with the force of his weeping, the wrenching sobs of the hopeless lost. He had already gone past the point where he could stop himself, gone far past rational sorrow.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she put her arms around him. He did not resist. Perhaps he was past resisting. He wept against her, face pressed into her shoulder. In her arms, he seemed fragile. Damp from his tears seeped through the cloth of her tunic. She gazed at the far wall.

  She had not had a choice back there: by not betraying Robbie as Pero, she had not betrayed Taliesin. Still—still, there must be something she could do. There would be a trial. It could drag on for months. There must be another way to free Heredes. Pinto shuddered against her and she tightened her arms around him.

  Later he lapsed into silence, exhausted. She lowered him gently to lie on the floor.

  A narrow grill cut through the side of the vehicle above the cab. Standing, she could see the white, sloping roof of the cab and beyond that a slice of the landscape. She watched until the rumbling sway tired out her legs.

  “How long will it take to get to JooAnn Gate?” she asked, settling down beside Pinto, who sat in a forward corner, arms wrapped around bent knees, eyes fixed on the dull floor.

  “Four hours.” He did not move. “Far enough that no suspicion will devolve on him.”

  She stood again to look out the grill. “I just hope we’re going toward Zanta and not away from it.”

  “We are.” He laughed. It was not a happy sound. “Ya luck be running high, ain’t it?”

  Lily gazed out the grill. Park and building blurred past. The constant vibration of the truck made her feel nauseous. She pressed one cheek against the hard metal patterning, letting the rush of air gust against her face. Her hair brushed the ceiling of their cell. She shut her eyes.

  Joshua Li Heredes. Taliesin. She could reconstruct his face very clearly in her mind. It was his smile that she remembered best. Even at his gravest, the sensei instructing his class, a whispered jest, a stifled laugh at some mistaken command, would bring that smile to his lips, to his eyes, touching like a brief traveler before it fell back into gravity. As long as she had known him he had always been quick to see humor, to respond to the absurdity in any situation.

  Maybe that was the quality that lent him patience. And patience, more than anything, she would need now, to win him free. She sighed; patience, Robbie, Bach, and Kyosti.

  The wind coursed along her skin, knotting the strands of her hair, slipping between her lips to dry out her mouth. Kyosti. How could any one person be at once so impossible, with that strange obsessiveness and those disturbing lapses into instability, and yet so very appealing? This time when she sighed, breath touched by a low sound from the back of her throat, she stroked her cheek briefly with the back of her fingers. But that soft pressure only made her aware of the edge of steel cutting into her other cheek, and she pulled her face away from the grill and the gusting air. The grill had embedded its pattern into her skin, an impermanent tattoo marking one side of her face.

  “Pinto, look,” she said, displaying herself.

  “I prefer not to,” he said into his knees. “The less I see of Central the better.” But some quality in her silence caused him to look up, and for a moment he stared at her. His lips quirked up. “You aren’t going to get into pilot’s academy looking like that.”

  “It’s a good thing I don’t want to get into pilot’s academy, then.”

  His smile lasted a brief space longer before he turned his face back down to rest on his knees. Lily sank down in the other forward corner and allowed the motion of the vehicle and the hissing blow of the wind to lull her to sleep. She dreamed, vividly, of Kyosti.

  “Lily,” he said, and his bronzed hands touched her. She sighed and pressed into those hands.

  “Lily.” She started awake. Pinto pulled back from her. “We’ve stopped.”

  The back hatch yawned opened. The guards pulled them out at gunpoint, handcuffed Lily’s hands behind her back. High walls surrounded them. In the far distance Lily heard a constant noise, like Unruli’s storms, a tumult that ebbed and swelled but never ceased.

  The guards halted them at the end of the alley next to a metal door. A beep sounded; one of the guards lifted his wrist band up to an ear, listened, murmured back into it.

  “No use even trying to use the gate,” he said to his fellows. “They got a broadcast running in a couple minutes about that Pero guy. We’ll have to hike it down to Auxiliary Gate Five.”

  They conferred in undertones.

  “… might have expected …”

  “… not just the troops …”

  “… we could go see …”

  Deciding, they motioned Lily and Pinto in through the door. The corridor they marched down seemed almost like a mine shaft. Smaller halls, like shoots into smaller veins, thrust off at intervals. They turned into one of these. It grew a little dim, and they rounded a corner and came into an observatory that looked out, through plastic windows, over the great square that fronted JooAnn Gate. A square that lay outside of Central. The gate, a massive front of metal, rose at least fifty feet above the square. Narrow terraces pushed out from the wall to hang over empty air. Figures populated the terraces, uniforms and big, stationary guns.

  “Here,” said one of the guards. “Let’s see what that broadcast is.” He flicked a switch on his com-unit and Central Center snapped on.

  “—the arrest of the agitator Pero yesterday provided conclusive evidence that this man only wishes to terrorize and disrupt the peaceful lives of the citizens of Arcadia. There is no so-called social liberation involved in this man’s agenda—”

  Below, as turbulent as if it were the first flush of a storm touching the plaza, a crowd of people had gathered, so many that Lily could not even begin to estimate their number—ten thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand?

  “All the gates,” said one of the guards, listening on a different frequency. “Every one’s got a mob like this.”

  The speaker continued, and as she spoke, the crowd swayed, responding to her words, but not in sympathy. “—and after interrogation, Pero has admitted the truth of these allegations. Listen to me, citizens!”

  A railing graced the transparent wall. Pinto gripped it and stared down onto the plaza. From their vantage point they looked on at an angle—the seething crowd, noiseless behind the window, the grim, closed front of JooAnn Gate, the motionless troops stationed on terraces above. Afternoon shadows stretched out across portions of the crowd. A broad expanse of stairs led up to the great entrance.

  “—he has admitted, admitted that this revolution is purely for gain, for what credits he can steal from the riches we have all worked for. And if you don’t believe me, if you don’t believe that I, elected head of your Senate, am telling you the truth, then simply wait a moment, citizens.”

  On the far edges of the square more bodies pressed toward the front, spilling out of the side avenues that led from three angles into the six-sided plaza.

  “Yes! Pero himself will tell you now the truth. He has recanted, citizens. He has repented—he admits he has lied to you, exploited you for his own ends. Hear him, citizens!”

  The crowd pressed forward, pushing up the steps toward the gate.

  Lily looked at Pinto. He looked at her. The guards fell silent. Voices mumbled in the background over the channel, someone being led forward.

  “Comrades.” Heredes’s voice. Quiet, so that they saw the crowd still as it strained to
listen. “‘If you stay together they will cut you to pieces.’” Silence. A strange, popping noise, a shattering crash that echoed across the channel. “‘We advise you to stay together!’” he cried, and his voice drowned out the yells coming from the background. “‘If you fight their tanks will grind you to a pulp. We advise you to fight!’”

  The crowd shifted violently, like liquid building to a boil.

  “Stop him—” A voice crackling through in static. “Pull the—”

  “‘This battle will be lost.’” His voice. “‘And maybe the next will also be lost, but you are learning to fight, and realizing—’”

  A flurry of yelling overwhelmed him, but a second crash sounded, and his voice resounded out again, a cry that mesmerized them all. “‘Realize that it will only work out by force and only if you do it yourselves—’”

  A shot, no echoing ricochet because it came over the channel. Two more shots in quick succession.

  Utter silence.

  A murmured voice. A fourth shot, hard and final.

  She didn’t think. She went for the door. Two guards grabbed her. She fought. She had to get to him, to get to him. More hands. She kicked, she twisted, but her hands were cuffed; she felt them propel her backward. She fought forward. They flung her. She hit the plastiglass so hard that it stunned her.

  Was half-aware of Pinto clasping her, saying something urgent to her, but she couldn’t hear, could scarcely see. The plastiglass pressed up against her face. At first she thought the smoke coiling up in spreading screens throughout the crowd was her vision clearing. She could not make sense of the whole, but there, a woman pushing away from a reaching finger of smoke; a man covering his face with his hands; a body, convulsed, carried by two men. Everyone was moving so slowly.

  “—the traitor Pero—”

  “—execution by—”

  “—return to your homes or—”

  Snippets of words caught at her, but made no sense. An officer, up on a terrace, winced and staggered and fell. Below, a woman holding a gun, firing up. A man cowering, shielding two children. Another officer, on a farther terrace, recoiled and fell to her knees.