A few flaws still marred his place. Eventually they would prey on him, catch his eye, enrage him, but he wondered if Madame would take his insistence on perfection as criticism. He had never worried about making criticisms before, and had always insisted on perfection. Yet this was tolerable: no simple pattern of flaws could upset him more than had the raw stone caves and useless ornamentation. He saw the precious stones and metals in electronics, guidance, fine mechanical constructs; their misuse in mere decoration sent him into periodic rages that he almost failed to conceal. In this castoff place there seemed no way to convert them to any useful function.
He had been on earth only a short time and already he was bored. With the boredom came loneliness, which he had never experienced before. He had never needed anyone, even Subone. Though the pseudosibs seemed united against outsiders, they had never gotten along well. They simply tolerated each other; and they knew each other so well that they were interchangeable in any action. This had nothing to do with liking or empathy or love; it was a purely physical leftover from their upbringing as isolated behavioral duplicates, each influenced as much by the other's responses as by his own.
Since they arrived on this world, Subone seemed to be growing apart from him. Subtwo's pseudosib spent more time with the squad members than working; he wasted his time in dissipation. Subtwo had gone into Center only once: the noise and disorder were more than he could stand.
"Come," he said, in response to a scratch on the door. It was Madame, who did not knock, whether because she had no experience with doors or because she was reluctant to make so much noise, Subtwo did not know. The sensor which controlled the opening mechanism was clumsy and makeshift, slapped together by a technician on his crew. It was insensitive: it would open to Subone's voice as well as to Subtwo's own. It was one of the small flaws that would begin to annoy him soon.
He turned to face the steward. She was a handsome and elegant woman, and he still did not know her name.
"My rooms are finished now. How do you like them?"
She looked at him with what seemed genuine surprise. "Why do you ask my opinion, sir? It is of no merit."
He had not yet decided if she were serious in her self-deprecation or if she were mocking him. He believed she was too intelligent to believe her thoughts were worthless, but in the days they had been working together, she had never deviated from the role she played, if role it was.
His sexual experiences had been experiments, exploratory for him, casual for his partners. Memories of them did not linger unbidden, as did Subtwo's thoughts of Madame. She performed her duties with exquisite correctness but was never servile. Nor did she ever assert her individuality or her opinions, which disturbed Subtwo deeply, but he had realized that such self-repression was essential for survival in a place where a free person literally held the power of life or death over a slave. He thought, though, that by now Madame should know that he would never take advantage of such a situation. He thought she should trust him. He did not understand that Madame's situation required either an erosion of spirit or an erosion of trust.
"Come now," Subtwo said. "I'm not Blaisse."
"You are his guest."
"I'm used to being thought peculiar for my tastes. I could hardly be offended if you agreed with the majority."
"By the rules of the Palace, you may correct any slave whose behavior you find offensive."
"No one should be offended by honesty." He smiled, a cold expressionless smile that was in his terms meaningful.
"I find your rooms somewhat strange but not unattractive," Madame said abruptly. "Strange, yet somehow familiar."
"A few places in the Sphere build in this style," he said. "Perhaps you—"
"There is no way of knowing."
"Civilized planets keep records."
She smiled at him ironically, and needed to say no more to indicate the futility of his curiosity. "Is there anything you need, sir, before I go upstairs?"
He hesitated, gazing at her, until he realized she had looked away from him and was standing rigid and withdrawn.
"No," he said. "Nothing."
Jan Hikaru's Journaclass="underline"
Today I had a long, strange conversation with Subtwo. I think my presence upsets him. He knows I'm not a raider, he knows my interests and my areas of competence, he knows my background, but he doesn't know what I am. And how could I tell him, when I don't know myself?
I did tell him that I don't plan to join his group, and never did, that I'm here by chance, that I'll leave as soon as possible. Whatever happens, I doubt I'll be stranded here. Subtwo was not, I think, brought up with starship traditions, but he respects (or indulges) his people's customs. And the raiders have enough regard for my poet to give me a ride off earth.
I think Subtwo knows more about me than I know about him and Subone. Something unusuaclass="underline" I used the computer link in the common room and tried to key the memory for the pseudosibs. I didn't get a null, so there should have been information in the news-storage banks, but the terminal couldn't—or wouldn't—produce the data. I wonder what terrible things the blank spaces held to make a perfectionist like Subtwo erase a whole segment from his precious files?
When the invitation from the Lady Clarissa arrived, Subtwo had to send someone into Center to find his pseudosib. Subone had been spending more and more time in that morass of irregularities and inconsistencies. He seemed to like it, while it drove Subtwo to distraction. Subone would sit with his people, with sellers of sexual oddments, with anyone, with no one, drinking and laughing, forgetful of propriety and oblivious to his training, his position, his intelligence. Subtwo was pleased with the growing apart, though he wished Subone had chosen a different way of manifesting the change. Perhaps, with his increasing ingestion of narcotics, depressants, hallucinogens, and stimulants, Subone was trying to drive away what reactions he felt from Subtwo. The experiment of their upbringing would not be completely finished until they stopped feeling the occasional resonances of each other's muscles in their own.
When Subone returned, he was wearing a smelly tunic of animal fur and he had animal teeth tied in his hair. He smelled of ethanol and sweaty sex.
"Yeah, what?"
Subtwo disliked the imprecision that had crept into Subone's speech, but could think of no way to correct it. "We're dining in the Palace tonight," he said. "At the request of our hosts."
"At their orders, you mean."
"We are partners."
Subone sneered. The expression fit badly on his smooth, bronzed face. "All right," he said. "Let's go."
"Are you going like that?"
"Of course. Why not?"
"It offends me."
"Ahh," Subone said in disgust.
Subtwo shrugged; they walked together to the alice tube and allowed themselves to be pressed upward into the Palace.
Subtwo had not expected a banquet. Clarissa's communication had made no mention of other people, but when the pseudosibs reached the top of the alice tube, they were conducted to a large hall lit by chandeliers and guttering flames in cages of brass wire. Multiple flickering shadows, like electromagnetic auras, surrounded all the people: forty-one, Subtwo observed, and he and Subone made forty-three. Both prime numbers. Subtwo knew of omens, numerical omens based on primes and perfect squares and triads, but he did not know if this might be an omen, or what kind. He did not like prime numbers: no formula could predict them.
The Lady Clarissa reclined at the end of the table near the doorway by which they entered. She was wearing a series of metallic strips that twined around her body, changing hue and intensity with the temperature gradient. She stretched out her graceful jeweled hands to the pseudosibs. Her eyes mimicked the flash of diamonds. Subtwo wondered how she could see through the multiple facets; he wondered if she saw, with an insect's vision, numerous minuscule shifting images.