Again that flashing smile. “They knew better.”
“And the Doc’s? Is his… her room still intact?”
“No.” Zabb turned from where he was fiddling at the contents of an elaborate desk with etched crystal fronting each of the drawers. “I made sure it was assigned to others… oh, it must have been twenty or so years after my little cousin’s precipitous departure.”
Mark seated himself on the corner of a table and swung a leg. “Are you so shitty to the Doc because you’re trying to bury the fact you really do like her?”
The Takisian had a funny expression. “Very… very perceptive. Is that why you agreed to accompany me and leave my cousin with only a single protector?”
“Yeah. And she would have stopped me if she’d thought it was wrong.”
“Tis and I each have a mission to accomplish.”
“And you need me if you’re going to succeed.”
“I could probably achieve it alone, but remembering how difficult you… er, your friends can be, I thought your involvement might simplify matters.”
“What is it you want me to do?”
“Help me kill a man.”
Hands up, palms out as if the words alone had the power to damage him, Mark backed off. “No, oh no, no way.”
Zabb pressed in, driving Mark around the opulent room like a drover with a skittish horse. “Then she’s dead.”
“That can’t be true. She’s got guards, she’s got us. Besides, there’s no reason to kill this kid. The Doc is the Doc, and once her bona fides have been established, the kid will just get shunted aside.” Zabb didn’t answer. He just began filling a pipe from a twisted blown-glass humidor, never taking his sardonic, cold eyes off the sweating ace. “Killing that boy won’t accomplish anything,” Mark continued. “There’ll always be a replacement waiting to…” Marks voice trailed away.
The images parading past his mind’s eye were those from human mythology. Of dragons’ teeth being sown into the plowed earth, and soldiers springing up like foul weeds.
“Precisely, which is why I want to remove Onyze in a way that will implicate Egyon and sow the seeds of distrust among the remaining members of that line. It’s a very effective way to discourage pretension and treachery. And it will work. Oh, not for all time, but for a score of years, perhaps there will be peace.”
“The peace of fear,” Mark said defiantly.
“The best kind I know,” was the imperturbable reply.
“Then I’m sorry for you.” And he found that it was true.
Zabb hunched one shoulder. He picked up a lighter and drew on his pipe until he had it burning to his satisfaction. “Tisianne understands the harsh necessity that presently drives us. Even now she is taking an action that tears her soul. But she will act. Will you?”
“Not this way.”
Zabb tried another tack, still in that same sweetly sane tone. “Have you never in your life acted to defend the helpless?”
Indignation edged the words. Mark sounded as harsh as an old crow next to Zabb’s mellifluous arguments. “This is not a case of self-defense, and all the sophistry in the world isn’t going to make it self-defense!”
“Perhaps I failed to express myself clearly. It is not incumbent upon either you or your ‘friend’ to kill Onyze. I will handle that, but I need full intelligence to succeed. I need a – in your culture I believe it is called a ‘bug’ – planted.”
“It makes me an accessory to murder, and I won’t do it!”
“Does your friend also share in your charming if totally unrealistic belief?”
Suddenly wary, Trips asked, “Which friend?”
“That blue fellow who can walk through walls.” In a burst of regretful reminiscence he added, “By the Ideal, he nearly drove my poor Hellcat mad.”
“Traveler.” Mark turned away, wrapped his bony arms around himself as if the act could somehow comfort. The scent of the alien tobacco was sweet in his nostrils.
Zabb was continuing. His voice was low, calming, eminently reasonable. “You have chosen a philosophy for yourself. A foolish one by my lights, and one I cannot understand, but you are the one who must face the shame of your descendants, and the rage of your ancestors. But how can you make the decision for this other individual? He might be willing to help me. To help Tisianne.”
With a tongue suddenly too thick for his mouth, Trips managed to mutter, “I do care… and he won’t help. He’ll be too afraid.” He paused, considered. “Maybe he’ll even believe it’s wrong.”
“How nice for you if he does. How fatal for Tisianne.” Zabb dropped the pipe into an ashtray with a clatter. “And then there’s the infant…”
Trips found words beyond him. He let out a sound that was half curse, half sob, and pulled out the small vial of blue powder. Downed it. As the transformation began to take hold, he faintly heard Zabb saying, “Don’t take it so to heart. You can always ease the conscience with the comforting argument that it wasn’t you. You were right, sophistry is the other great Takisian art.”
“Made any more progress?” Tisianne asked, as she shut off the computer and turned to face Taj. They were in the medical labs of House Ilkazam.
Not by the flicker of an eyelash did the older Takisian indicate that he read the wealth of fury and sarcasm behind the four words. “A little. It hurt us when we lost our two best researchers.”
“Ansata’s death was his own choice. A simple surrender was all that was required.”
“Or you could have released his ship.”
Tis wasn’t going to buy one instant of guilt. She buried the brief flash that tried to surface. “That was never an option. I weighed fifteen lives against the thousands on Earth. Ansata lost. And as for my absence – I was unavoidably detained.”
Jay surprised Tisianne by speaking up. Obviously he understood Takisian better than he spoke it. “If your ship hadn’t been damaged, would you have stayed?”
Slowly she said, “Probably not. I was very young, and I was making a grand gesture in the best and grandest Takisian style. You were just faceless masses who were going to be so very, very grateful. Only later did I learn to love you.”
“You have reason to be grateful, groundling,” Taj said. “You obviously have received some great and potent power, or you would not be a companion to Tisianne.”
Jay didn’t have to climb down the alien’s throat, Tis did it for him. “Grateful! Grateful! The Ideal curse you and leave you childless. Is Jay’s power worth tens of thousands of lives? Is it worth the damage to his life, concerned as he must be over the fate of any children he may sire? Is it worth the loss of all that I am? What was conceived in this room I am now carrying to fruition.”
She spun away and tried to regain control of her ragged breaths. The fury, the anguish helped propel her to a cabinet. It kept her from thinking too much about the purpose of the drug she was loading into an epispray.
“I see you haven’t lost your flare for impassioned speeches. Do you still favor desperate causes?” Taj asked.
He was trying to fathom the mind of a person who would run off to save the inhabitants of an alien world. Trying to see if she regretted throwing away her birthright and her future. Tis thrust the epispray deep into her pocket and looked her uncle straight in the eye.
“I’d do it again… in a second…”
His expression softened. “That’s my Tisianne. Your father would be proud.”
“Did he ever forgive me?”
“No… but he missed you to the end.”
“It’s time I saw him.”
The infirmary was almost empty. There was one young man floating in a biogerm bubble. The bubbles hung from the ceiling by long filaments that monitored the injured body, but it did look as if the patient had been swallowed by a Portuguese man-of-war. Tis also thought of them as placenta pods. They served the same function as the womb, growing a healthy body, and the individual floating in their soothing soup often seemed to revert. Like the man before them, curled on his side, his thumb in his mouth, eyes squeezed shut, and nutrient feeds stabbing his body at a hundred different points.