His ugliness ought to have bothered him, but it didn’t, and he wondered why. We make love with our eyes closed. Who had told him that? The same woman who’d told him, It’s not the meat, it’s the motion? Opening Rowan’s body was like facing that pile of field-stripped weaponry. He knew what to do, what parts counted and which were camouflage, but could not remember how he’d learned it all. The training was there, yet the trainer was erased. It was a more deeply disturbing coupling of the familiar with the strange than any he’d yet experienced here.
She shivered, sighed, and relaxed, and he kissed his way back up her body to murmur in her ear, “Um … doan’ think I can do pushups, jus’ yet.”
“Oh.” Her glazed eyes opened, and focused. “My. Yes.” A few moments of experiment found a medically-approved position, flat on his back in great comfort with no pressure or strain on his chest, arms, or abdomen, and then it was his turn. That felt right, ladies first and then he wouldn’t have pillows thrown at him for falling asleep immediately afterwards. A terribly familiar pattern, with all the details wrong. Rowan had done this before too, he judged, though perhaps not often. But great expertise on her part was scarcely required. His body worked just fine… .
“Dr. D,” he sighed up at her, “yr a gen’ius. Aes … Asku … Aesch … that Greek guy coul’ tak’ lessons in resurr’ction from you.”
She laughed, and oozed down beside him, body to body. My height doesn’t matter when we’re lying down. He’d known that, too. They exchanged less-hurried, exploratory kisses, savored slowly like after-dinner mints.
“You’re very good at that,” she murmured wheezily, nibbling on his ear.
“Yea …” His grin faded, and he stared at the ceiling, brows drawing down in a combination of gentle, post-coital melancholy, and renewed, if purely mental, frustration. ”… wonder if I was married?” Her head drew back, and he could have bitten his tongue at her stricken look. “Doan’ think so,” he added quickly.
“No … no,” she settled back again. “You’re not married.”
“Which ever one I am?”
“That’s right.”
“Huh.” He hesitated, winding her long hair in his fingers, spreading it idly out in a fan across the burst of red lines on his torso. “So who d’you think you were makin’ love to, jus’ now?”
She touched a long index finger gently to his forehead. “You. Just you.”
This was most pleasing, but … “Wuzzat love, or therapy?”
She smiled quizzically, tracing his face. “A little of both, I think. And curiosity. And opportunity. I’ve been pretty immersed in you, for the past three months.”
It felt like an honest answer. “Seems t’me you made t’ opportunity.”
A small smirk escaped her lips. “Well … maybe.”
Three months. Interesting. So he’d been dead a bit over two months. He must have absorbed a lot of the Durona Group’s resources, in that time. To begin with, three months of this woman’s labor were not cheap.
“Why you doin’ this?” he asked, frowning at the ceiling as she snuggled carefully around his shoulder. “I mean t’whole thing. What d’you expect me to do for you?” Half-crippled, tongue-tied, blank and stupid, not a dollar to his non-existent name. “You’re all hangin’ on m’recovery like I’m your hope ’f heaven.” Even the brutally efficient physical therapist Chrys he’d come to see as pushing him for his good. He almost liked her best, for her merciless drive. He resonated to it. “Who else wants me, tha’ you should hide me? Enemies?” Or friends?
“Enemies for certain,” Rowan sighed.
“Mm.” He lay back in lassitude; she dozed, he didn’t. He touched her net of hair and wondered. What did she see in him? I thought it as the enchanted knight’s crystal coffin … I picked out enough grenade fragments to be certain you weren’t a bystander… . So, there was work to be done. Nor did the Durona Group want any ordinary mercenary. If this was Jackson’s Whole, they could hire ordinary thugs by the boatload.
But then, he’d never thought he was an ordinary man. Not even for a minute.
Oh, milady. Who do you need me to be?
Chapter Twenty-Three
The re-discovery of sex fairly immobilized him for the next three days, but his instinct for escape surfaced one afternoon when Rowan left him sleeping, but he wasn’t. He unlidded his eyes, and traced the pattern of scars on his chest, and thought it over. Out was clearly a wrong direction. In was one he hadn’t tried yet. Everybody here seemed to go to Lilly with their problems. Very well. He would go to Lilly too.
Up, or down? As a Jacksonian leader, she ought traditionally to lodge in either a penthouse or a bunker. Baron Ryoval lived in a bunker, or at least there was a dim image in his head associated with that name, involving shadowy sub-basements. Baron Fell took the penthouse at apogee, looking down on it all from his orbital station. He seemed to have a lot of pictures in his head of Jackson’s Whole. Was it his home? The thought confused him. Up. Up and in.
He dressed in his grey knits, borrowed some of Rowan’s socks, and slipped into the corridor. He found a lift tube and took it to the top floor, just one above Rowan’s. It was another floor of residence suites. At its center he found another lift tube, palm-locked. Any Durona could use it. A spiral staircase wound around it. He climbed the stairs very slowly, and waited, near the top, till he had all his breath back. He knocked on the door.
It slid aside, and a slim Eurasian boy of about ten regarded him gravely. “What do you want?” The boy frowned.
“I want to see your … grandmother.”
“Bring him in, Robin,” a soft voice called.
The boy ducked his head, and motioned him inside. His sock feet trod noiselessly across a deep carpet. The windows were polarized against the dark grey afternoon, and pools of warmer, yellower lamplight fought the gloom. Beyond the window, the force field revealed itself with tiny scintillations, as water droplets or particulars matter were detected and repelled or annihilated.
A shrunken woman sat in a wide chair, and watched him approach her through dark eyes set in a face of old ivory. She wore a high-necked black silk tunic and loose trousers. Her hair was pure white, and very long; a slim girl, most literally twin to the boy, was brushing it over the back of the chair, in long, long strokes. The room was very warm. Regarding her regarding him, he wondered how he could ever have thought that worried old woman with the cane might be Lilly. Hundred-year-old eyes looked at you differently.
“Ma’am,” he said. His mouth felt suddenly dry.
“Sit down,” she nodded to a short sofa set around the corner of the low table in front of her. “Violet, dear,” a thin hand, all white wrinkles and blue ropy veins, touched the girl’s hand which had paused protectively on her black silk shoulder. “Bring tea now. Three cups. Robin, please go downstairs and get Rowan.”
The girl arranged the hair in a falling fan around the woman’s upright torso, and the two children vanished in un-childlike silence. Clearly, the Durona Group did not employ outsiders. No chance of a mole ever penetrating their organization. With equal obedience, he sank into the seat she’d indicated.
Her vowels had a vibrato of age, but her diction, containing them, was perfect. “Have you come to yourself, sir?” she inquired.
“No, ma’am,” he said sadly. “Only to you.” He thought carefully about how to phrase his question. Lilly would not be any less medically careful than Rowan about yielding him clues. “Why can’t you identify me?”