She looked at her ears in the dressing-table mirror. “My ears stick out,” she said, frowning. She looked up at Zefla, standing behind her. “Do you think my ears stick out?”
Zefla shrugged. Miz shook his head. Sharrow decided her ears stuck out, and used skinweld on them too.
Dloan sat on the bed beside Miz with Sharrow’s satchel turned inside out on his lap. He unpicked the stitching, then reached in and withdrew her new identity papers, handing them to her. She looked at her holo in her ID while Zefla carefully removed the depilatory film.
“ ‘Ysul Demri’, eh?” Zefla said, glancing at the name on Sharrow’s new ID as she crumpled the stubble-studded film and threw it into a bin. She squinted at the holo. “Totally convincing. Always fancied being a bald, did you?” She started to spread hair-preventing cream over Sharrow’s scalp.
Sharrow nodded. “They’re supposed to have more fun.”
Zefla’s hands glided over her soft skin, gently rubbing the cream in. Miz made sensuous grunting noises in the background.
“Geis?”
“Sharrow. I hope you don’t mind me calling you… can’t we get vision on this?”
“No; I’m dressing at the moment.”
“I beg your pardon. Shall I call back?”
“No, it’s all right. It’s… good to hear from you, Geis, but do you mind me asking how you found me?”
“Not at all. I’ve had my comm people scanning all the public data bases for your name; I thought I might be able to warn you if it looked like the Huhsz were closing in. I hope you don’t mind…”
“I suppose not. My life seems to be pretty public-domain these days.”
“I don’t want to alarm you; we’re pretty certain the Huhsz haven’t got access to this sort of hacking power. But there’s a report on the local contract police data base that there was some sort of incident at a party at this guy’s house last night. Didn’t he work for the family, once?”
“That was his father. But, yes, there was an incident.”
“The police aren’t holding you, are they?”
“No. It’s been cleared up. I’ll be on my way soon.”
“I see. Anyway, Sharrow, I was calling for a couple of reasons. There are a lot of confused reports coming out of the Log-Jam at the moment, I won’t ask you about that… but I did hear about what happened to that monorail in the K’lel, and my satellite people tell me there’s a lot of Huhsz activity around an old nuclear-waste silo on the edge of the desert. I just wanted to say… Well, I’d better not say too much, even over this channel, though it is pretty secure… But I did want to say; congratulations. It took one of my best AIs seconds to come up with the same scheme, even after it was pointed in the right direction. It was brilliant.”
“Thanks. It was Miz’s idea, actually.”
“Oh. Still, it was good. But of course it won’t delay them for very long. I understand the holes in the Passports might continue to radiate for quite a while, but the Huhsz have placed orders for portable magnetic inclusion chambers with Continental Fusion Inc. and, well, it’ll make things difficult for them, I suppose, having to cart gear that size around with them, but I just wanted to say that my offer stands; I’ll do all I can-everything I can to protect you, if you’ll just give me the chance.”
“And I still appreciate it, Geis, but I’ll try and dodge them for a while longer.”
“I think you’re very brave. Please remember; if you need any help at all, I am yours to command.”
“The last person who said that…”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. Yes, thanks. I’ll remember.”
She left the viewing-gallery, and in the double doors between the auditorium and the main corridor bumped into a man just on his way in. She started to apologise, then saw his bright smile, his bald head. He looked at her bald scalp and smiled even more broadly as the doors behind her opened and somebody else entered the narrow space between the two sets of doors and put what felt like a gun to the nape of her neck.
“Oh, Lady Sharrow,” the first young man said, sounding perfectly delighted and still gazing at her bald head. “You didn’t need to go to all that trouble just for us!”
They travelled separately to Ikueshleng, the space port for Golter’s eastern hemisphere. The others had already gone when she got there. She paid cash for a stand-by to Stager. She watched some screen while she waited, feeling nervous but trying not to look it. Golter had had some bad experiences with crashing spacecraft over the millennia, and as a result one of the few things that was strictly controlled about the planet was space traffic; the vast majority of commercial ships were restricted to two ports serving a hemisphere each, and both the resulting bottlenecks, though Free Ports and so not closely bureaucratically controlled, were inevitably dangerous places for people on the run.
She survived unchallenged and caught a shuttle around noon; half an hour later she was in Stager, the kilometre-diameter, five-wheel space-station that was the traveller’s usual next port of call after Ikueshleng.
She found a midsystem discount ticket shop in wheel five and bought a high bounce-factor single to Phrastesis Habitats via Miykenns/Malishu-station. She watched the clerk put her credit card into the reader, and tried not to look relieved when the transaction went through. She had to sign an insurance disclaimer, and scribbled something that might just have passed for Ysul Demri if you’d had a good imagination. She bought a disposable phone with a hundred thrials of credit embedded, a basic-model wrist-screen and a newssheet, ate a light lunch in a small, over-priced cafe, then she walked round the curve of the wheel’s outer rim to the viewing-gallery.
She sat between them, in the very back row of the gallery. She stared at the screen. The one on her right did the talking.
“Three baldies in a row!” he sniggered. “What a laugh, eh?”
The one on her left sat watching the screen with a jacket over his lap. He held the gun underneath the jacket, pointed into her side just below her ribs. Guns tended not to be terribly popular baggage items with the people who ran space-stations-she had reluctantly abandoned her HandCannon to a left-luggage agency in Ikueshleng-and she was almost tempted to believe the gun poking into her ribs was a fake, but she thought the better of doing anything that would ensure she’d find out.
She looked at the profile of the silent man holding the gun. He was identical to the one on her right. She could see no sign that either of them was an android.
“I said, what a laugh, eh?” The one on her right poked her with one finger. Her right hand flicked out, grabbed his hand; she glared into his eyes. His mouth made an O. He looked amused. The gun under her left ribs prodded briefly.
She let go of his hand. It had been warm; it had felt like a human hand.
“My, we’re touchy,” the young man on her right said. “I almost wish we’d brought one of our mannequins along.” He pulled at the collar of his tight grey, business-like jacket, adjusting his cuffs. “I take it you had your little flashback two days ago, did you?”
She watched the planet for a moment, looking down on what must be noon on Issier (there; white fluffs of cloud in the centre of Phirar, covering the archipelago) and nodded slowly.
“I believe I felt something, at one point,” she said.
“Just to let you know we haven’t forgotten you,” the young man said. “I hear you were seeing an old friend of the family; terrible shame about old Bencil Dornay. What a shock that must have been for you.”
She sought southern Caltasp under its own speckled cover of cloud, and identified the huge smooth curve of Farvel Bight, its northern limit hidden under the clouds that reputedly never broke above the Sea House.
“Our family likes its old servants to know we haven’t forgotten them,” she told the young man. “Or their children.”
“Indeed.” The young man said. “So now you’re on your way to Miykenns, aren’t you, Lady Sharrow…?” He paused. “Except you missed the ship you were booked on, and which the rest of your team took.”