“I think you’re dreaming.”
“I was hoping.” Mark looked back at the tiles. The selection hadn’t improved. Nothing suggested itself.
“Has he got anything in that bag of tricks to help?” Jay indicated the medical bag.
“Can’t… the baby.”
“Oh yeah…” A pause while Jay frowned at his tiles. “How do you spell titillate?” Mark spelled it.
“Shit. I need another l.”
Jay spelled out tit. Mark carefully recorded the detective’s three points.
TRY hung alluringly off on the left side of the board. Mark gathered up his tiles and spelled out tryptophan.
“What the fuck is that?” Jay yelped.
“It’s an amino acid.” Mark had hit a triple-word score, and double points on the y. He now led Jay by a hundred and eighty points.
Jay collected two new tiles, leaned back, folded his arms across his chest, and eyed Mark. “What did happen out on the Rox?”
Mark shrugged. “He got jumped.”
“By who? With who?”
“She hasn’t told you?” Jay shook his head. “It’s, like, really private to her, you know? So I probably shouldn’t…”
“I’m trying to do a job here, Meadows. A little information would help.” Mark remained stubbornly silent. “Look, from the performances she puts on every time she goes to sleep, I gotta figure her current condition isn’t due to her catlike Takisian curiosity to experience sex from the other side.”
“No.” Mark mournfully admitted.
“Judging by the way she reacts every time one of us touches her, I’m figuring she got raped.” Mark just kept staring, giving away nothing. Jay’s next words sent the comforting little delusion of his poker face fleeing. “By Blaise, right?” Mark tried to control the reaction, but his head snapped up. Jay smiled humorlessly. “You may be kicking butt in Scrabble, but don’t ever gamble with me.”
“Okay, so now you know.”
Jay shook his head. “It’s really disgusting.”
“It wasn’t the Doc’s fault!”
“Really? She’d probably disagree with you. So would I.”
Anger has a taste, almost a physical presence. Mark could feel it battering against the back of his teeth. “Oh, why?” He wanted it to sound casual, instead emerged in sharp razorlike exhalations.
“Tachyon had me searching for Blaise a year ago because she was scared to death of the little shit. And after my investigations I could see why.” The detective glanced back toward the bunk. “All and all I don’t know if Tachy is such a great candidate for motherhood… shit, fatherhood… fuck it – parenthood. He sure screwed up with Blaise.”
Mark hadn’t noticed when he’d picked up the Scrabble tile, but suddenly it was there, and he was twisting it through his fingers. “Blaise is crazy! Certifiably, clinically crazy. For years Doc tried to provide a stable and normal home environment. He tried with love to undo twelve years of sickness. And yeah, it’s a bummer he failed, but at least he tried.”
“He should have gotten some qualified help, but he’s so damn arrogant… I guess he thought he could be a kid shrink too.”
“That’s not fair!” Mark cried. “It’s real easy for you to sit there and throw stones, but you were partly to blame.” The flush appeared in Jay’s cheeks so fast he might have been slapped. The tile between Mark’s fingers snapped, and both men jumped. Suddenly horribly self-conscious, Mark tossed away the shards of the tile.
“How do you know about Atlanta?” Jay demanded. He was breathing hard.
Mark ducked his head. “The Doc told me. Not too bright, taking a thirteen-year-old off to play detective. Course you couldn’t predict that Ti Malice creature would possess him, and then use Blaise’s mind control to kill that poor joker, or that Blaise would enjoy it so much. Any more than Doc could predict how his spoiling would fuck with the kid. You guys were trying to care. It just all went funky and triggered the craziness.”
Jay didn’t say anything, just sat for a long moment with his head bowed. “Meadows,” he said finally. “I apologize. I was royally out of line.”
Mark cleared his throat selfconsciously. “Hey, I didn’t mean to rant at you. He’s just my closest friend… and personally, I think the Doc will make an awesome parent. She adores kids.”
“He must, otherwise she wouldn’t have let this one get her stretched out to here.” Jay demonstrated, then shook his head. “How do you suppose she’s handling it? If I suddenly got switched… had something growing inside me…”
“I don’t think Takisians are as hung up about gender as we are. Kids are also, like, the wealth of the family. And there’s the telepathy. If you had bonded mind to mind with your baby, could you kill her?”
“Probably not.”
Mark swallowed hard, past the question that lay like a lump in the center of his throat. “Hey, man, I don’t mean to be nosy, but I gotta ask it.” Jay nodded assent, but warily. “Why are you along on this trio
“I need to have my head examined.”
“No… seriously.”
The detective sat silent, his face an unmoving, uncommunicative mask. It went on for so long that Mark was beginning to writhe with embarrassment. Finally Jay sighed, and Mark also exhaled in relief.
“I don’t know,” Jay said in so serious a tone that it hung oddly on his lips. “Not out of friendship, like you. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I like Tachy well enough, but…” The shrug said it all. “Maybe it’s a funny kind of chauvinism. For years they’ve been sneaking in on us, manipulating us, watching us. Now we’re coming. Taking it home to them.”
Jay stared down at the backs of his hands. Turned them palms up, either startled to find they moved, or searching for meaning in the creases and lines. Mark tried and failed to resolve the very ordinary man he saw with the individual living inside that skin.
“And what about you?”
Jay’s question pulled him back. Mark fitted the broken tile together. Pressed hard. Laid the pad of one finger against it and pulled. It was still broken.
“I read them all… Clarke, Asimov, ‘Doc’ Smith. My dad flew state-of-the-art test planes. He was too old for astronaut training. I was all… wrong. No stomach for regimentation, the wrong attitude for the academy. They would have eaten me. He founded Space Command. His son couldn’t pass the evaluation for the airforce academy. Maybe it broke his heart… I don’t know. We don’t talk much… never have.”
Mark paused, remembering the last time he’d seen that erect, iron-haired figure, his hands resting on the shoulders of his granddaughter, sending his son out on the run from the government the general had sworn to defend. No, they hadn’t talked, but somehow Marcus had understood.
Softly Mark resumed. “Now I’m going. Now I finally have something I can share with him.”
“So you’re into this for everyone but you.”
“No,” Mark shook his head. “I’m looking…”
“For what?” Irritation sharpened Ackroyd’s tone. It seemed Ackroyd wasn’t a man with a lot of patience for soul searching.
“I don’t know.”
She knew she was driving them slowly mad. Even Mark was showing rebellion in the tight line of his lips, or the annoyed inhalations each time she refused to acknowledge their remarks. Unless they were couched in Takisian, of course. Then she listened and responded, but in the careful, simple phrases of a parent to a precocious five-year-old.
She joined them at the table carrying several articles of clothing. Jay sighed. “Benaji, sala’um, wai’r’sum -”
“No,” Tach interrupted in English. “Today we move on. You’ve learned Sham’al – loosely translated, industry speak. Now you have to get a taste of Ilkazal in the public mode.”
“Time out.” Jay gave the sign.
Before the detective could get wound up, Mark intervened. “We don’t have time to learn every language spoken on Takis, Doc.”
“I’m not expecting you to, but all you’ve learned is the lingua franca, if you will. The language of commerce, and communication to the lower classes. There is a diplomatic tongue, Amlas, used only between Houses. Then there is the language of each House, private and public. You don’t need the private – you haven’t wives or children to address. I doubt you’ll need Amlas – why should you be negotiating with the rival Houses on behalf of the House Ilkazam? But if you don’t have at least a nodding acquaintance with Ilkazal, you’ll be dismissed as mere servants or aliens.”