It was his fault too, he knew. He should have written her off. He should not have tracked Michael to The Big Rock Candy Mountain. But similar logic could be used to assign blame to Michael, Richard, and Lucifer. No, primary responsibility had to remain Pollyanna's. Hers had been the initiating decision.
"Tell me everything, Pollyanna. I don't want anything added. I don't want anything left out. I don't want you adjusting anything to make yourself look a little better. I just want straight facts. I want, verbatim, including descriptions of tones of voice and expressions, everything you heard discussed. Especially between Richard and Michael, and anybody they talked with. About anything. There's just a ghost of a chance we can still get out of this, or at least tone it down."
"That would take hours." She turned on the tears. Storm ignored them. Pollyanna interacted with reality through a studied repertoire of poses and roles. The real Miss Eight hid out somewhere way off stage, directing the play, pushing the buttons for whatever response seemed appropriate.
"I've bought time." The stricken face of the Blackworlder ghosted through his thoughts. The man had not doubted his fate for one instant. "I need to buy more."
She turned the tears off as quickly as she had switched them on. She began talking in a small, soft voice devoid of editorialization and emotion. She began at the beginning and told nothing but the bitter truth about everything except her motives.
She had seduced Dee and talked him into taking her to Old Earth with him. She now believed he had acquiesced for his own reasons. Their stay on the mother-world had been dull. The one thing that had impressed her had been the poverty of that gutted, overcrowded planet. Michael had been upset because the holonets had not been interested in his coverage of the action on The Broken Wings.
"From Old Earth we went to Blackworld. He kept me locked in the ship while we were there. The only reason I found out was he talked in his sleep. He wouldn't say squat when he was awake. He was worried and scared. Things weren't going right, somehow. He was a little paranoid, like he was afraid somebody might be after him but he wasn't really sure. After Blackworld we went to see Richard Hawksblood. He isn't such a big deal in person, is he?"
She had not been allowed to approach Dee and Hawksblood most of the time. She did know they were talking about Blackworld. What little she knew she had learned from Richard's underlings.
Then Michael had vanished. No one knew where he had gone. Some thought Tregorgarth, some thought The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
"It was The Mountain, Polly. Go ahead. You're doing great so far."
"I had to hang around and wait. It was boring. I hardly ever saw Hawksblood. He was working on the Blackworld project. I never realized how complicated your work is. You don't just jump in the ring like a boxer, do you?"
Storm smiled the weakest of smiles. If nothing else, Pollyanna had confirmed his intelligence about Richard. Hawksblood was in on Blackworld for sure.
"It was two months before Michael came back. That was a couple of weeks ago. He was really happy. Before, when his tapes were turned down and he thought somebody was after him, you couldn't hardly live with him. All he said was that he saw the man and everything was all right. He wouldn't even talk in his sleep."
Who? Storm wondered. Not him. Who else had been on The Big Rock Candy Mountain? Why had Michael been there, anyway?
"He was back about a week when he grabbed me and that yacht and took off for here. Every couple of days he locked me out of Command. Whenever he let me back in the instel set was warm. I don't know who he was talking to. Then we got here. And the rest you know."
And the rest he knew.
He checked the time. Her tale had taken an hour to tell. He had a few questions. He doubted she could answer them.
Pollyanna, he thought, was one hell of a puzzle. She was all surface and no depth. Even when you bedded a stranger she took on some kind of shape as bits and pieces of bed talk jigsawed together. But not pretty Pollyanna. She remained strictly one-dimensional. Her only real attributes seemed to be her beauty and her vagina, and her devotion to both. She had rebuilt her makeup while she talked.
She was a damned android built for modeling and screwing! You could penetrate her body, but not her facade.
Even Lucifer was baffled by her. She seemed to exist solely to be appreciated for her beauty, like a classic painting or cherished poem. Curious.
He had not thought much about Pollyanna before. She was like that painting. There to be enjoyed and otherwise ignored. It was time to start poking around, back in the silly shadows.
He would have to unravel her by reversing the usual process, by what he did not know.
Pollyanna had made a second point clear. The Blackworld affair was deeper than he had suspected. A potential mercantile war over trillions worth of radioactives did not excite Michael. Pollyanna said he seemed indifferent to the opportunity to tape the conflict. It was important to him for some other reason.
It had to be The Game.
That was Dee's label for the feud he had been engineering between Hawksblood and Storm. He did not know Storm knew that The Game's goal appeared to be mutual annihilation. It had been going on since the founding of the two freecorps.
Storm still could not understand why.
He bullied Pollyanna. "Who did Michael see on The Big Rock Candy Mountain? Why?" The answer had to be important.
Pollyanna did not have it.
"Ah, damn. Damn." He let her kiss him once, then gently disengaged and departed. He returned to his study, put Cassius on call, and turned to Ecclesiastes. He found no solace there. The frenetic, helter-skelter flitting of his mind kept him from following the printed words. He tried the clarinet.
The soul-trying days had come.
Cassius listened without being noticed. "I've never heard you play so mournfully, Gneaus," he said.
Startled, Storm replied, "It's a dirge. I think we've reached the end. I grilled Pollyanna. She's a good observer. You wouldn't figure it considering how vacuum-brained she acts."
"I've sometimes wondered about that."
"You too? Then it's not my imagination. Could anybody be that shallow without working at it?"
"Possibly. Then again, a preoccupation with sexual encounter would make a mask few men, being egoists, would care to lift. You wanted me?"
Storm made a mental note to ask Frieda and his daughter for the woman's view of Miss Eight. "We're getting old, you and I. We're in our sundown days. Things are slipping past us. It's like we're caught in some backwater of time."
Cassius raised an eyebrow. Storm had difficulty expressing his feelings.
"We're on the verge of the nightfall of the Legion. Maybe of all the freecorps. I think we'll be both cause and effect of our own destruction, and I can't see any way out."
"As long as there are corporations and rich men who need us, and who won't be intimidated by the government, there'll be work for us."
"Time's catching up with us. Confederation is starting to flex its muscles. It's a historical process. It's inevitable. Democratic control and government regulation are coming on faster than the frontiers are moving out. They're about to catch up with us."
"You're too much the pessimist."
"Consider the past, Cassius. The block vote of pestholes like Old Earth will devour the capital approach. It's an old story. Goes all the way back to Rome. Why do something for yourself if all you have to do is vote for a guy who'll rob somebody else and do it for you?"
Storm's bitterness surprised him. He had not been aware of the strength of his own feelings.
He told Cassius what he had learned from Pollyanna.
"What do you suggest we do?"