Then she began to giggle. ‘I’m going to have you,’ she told him. ‘You’ll have to kill me, because if you don’t I’m going to kill you! It’s you or me – get it?’
Gasping with passion and fright, she lunged at him again. He retreated, but she clambered over the bed to get at him. ‘You’d better do it,’ she breathed. ‘You’d better do it now. Or I’ll get you sooner or later. Creep up on you – stick it in – bet you got no other body to wake up in. Right?’
‘Right,’ he said harshly. He caught her wrists in his hand, holding the knife away from him, while she kicked desperately at his crotch with vermilion-painted toes. A rage was boiling up in him to think how close to death he might have been, accompanied by a feeling of heat and a pounding in his ears – an unfamiliar reaction he would not have guessed he could make.
‘All right.’ His words came thickly. ‘If that’s how you want it—’
He twisted her hand, forcing her to drop the knife. He punched her in the stomach. She folded up on the bed. He fell on her. A mist was before his eyes as he felt his hands go round her throat.
Passing on the avenue a few yards distant, Captain Joachim Boaz paused.
The ship’s beams were sweeping the district, searching for information. What they brought him in this instance was far from what he sought, but it caught his attention just the same.
The scene was the distasteful kind he had glanced at on many occasions and then turned away from. He would have done so now except for one extra piece of information. The beam told him: She has no replacement body. Then: He believes she has.
Boaz hesitated, of a mind to keep to his own business and pass on, but his colonnader training told on him. He turned into an alley that ran through a small maze of rented rooming shacks. His ship told him when he had come to the right place; told him what was happening behind the lithoplast wall. The entrance was on the other side of the building, and he judged there was no time to go looking for it.
He called on the ship to flood his tissues with toughness and strength. He attacked the thin wall with the edge of his hand, chopping right through it in three sharp blows. Then dust and frayed fragments were raining down about him as, like some kind of demolition engine, he burst through the partition and confronted the startled pair.
Romrey rose slowly from the bed. To him, Boaz must have been a frightening sight, and he began to edge toward the cupboard where he kept his gun.
Boaz raised a monitory hand.
‘You should be warned that you are laying yourself open to a charge of murder,’ he rumbled.
Romrey huffed, momentarily overcoming his surprise. ‘What are you talking about? It’s legal here.’
‘Only when the terminated party has a working linked-up clone.’
‘What?’ Romrey murmured. His eyes sought Mace’s. ‘But don’t you have…?’
Mace was rubbing her neck. She winced. Then she shrugged.
‘So I’m tired of life. So what?’
‘And what about me?’ Romrey’s anger returned. He bent over her, his fist raised in her face. ‘I would have gone to the chamber for you!’
‘Be gallant. Say I’m worth it.’
Mace slipped from under him and stepped to where she had dropped some clothes near the door. Deftly she slipped into a shiftlike robe, smoothing it down. She pulled up her hair and tied it in a snood.
Boaz stared at her. Through her ostentatious unconcern, certain facts were visible. First, very fine white lines in the skin, unnoticeable by most but discernible to Boaz, told him she had silicon bones. But that did not mean she was a colonnader – though still rare, bones were being acquired by more and more people these days, not all of them colonnaders.
Boaz did not think she was a colonnader. The stoical quality of ataraxy was not in her face. In his judgement she was pure epicurean, and lived for the senses.
And, yes, she was tired of life. She had chosen an exotic style of suicide without a thought for the consequences for her victim – something a colannader would never do.
While she dressed momentary looks of concentration came to her face, suggesting to Boaz that she was switching off her bone functions one by one, detumescing from a plateau that had never been reached. Was she relieved – or just disappointed? He tore his gaze away as the man spoke.
‘Are you law enforcement?’
Boaz smiled faintly. ‘Not the law you are talking about. No, I am nothing official.’
The man was peering through the hole Boaz had made in the wall, as if expecting to see something there. ‘What other kind of law is there?’
‘He’s talking about cosmic ethical law,’ the woman said acidly. ‘He’s just a goddamned busybody. A fully boned, paid-up, stuck-up ethical pain in the neck.’ Boaz realized she took his supernormal strength for evidence that he, too, wore silicon bones in his body, and she had put two and two together.
‘I’m surprised you ever got replaced, with your attitude,’ he told her. ‘Replaced’ was how bone people referred to their transformation.
‘The surgeon wasn’t a colonnader either. See, busybody? The ethic is disintegrating.’
‘Perhaps that is why you wish to end your life? Those who devised silicon bones intended them for people with philosophical training.’
‘Maybe.’ The tiredness in the girl’s eyes struck Boaz. The man, meanwhile, looked from her to Boaz in bewilderment.
‘Look here,’ he said to Boaz, ‘thanks for saving my neck, but why don’t you two lunatics just clear off and let me get some sleep?’
‘As you wish,’ Boaz said. He made for the door, but then the ever-present ship beam, emanating from a processing load that all this time had been sifting and guessing with the data it was collecting from the scene, made a suggestion.
Both of them could be useful to you.
He turned. ‘Could it be you are here on Sarsuce waiting for the Wanderer?’
Romrey made a wry face. ‘Sure. And I’ve got coordinates, too.’
‘False ones?’
‘Probably. But how would I know? I brought them back in Iridan.’
‘They are fake. It is almost certain.’ Boaz turned to Mace. ‘And you?’
She tossed her head. ‘Why would someone with a yen for extinction be searching for anything – except death?’
Boaz waited. She relented. ‘All right. Not me, I don’t give a damn for anything. I belong to a man called Radalce Obsoc. One more collector’s item. He wants to get down to Meirjain. He wants it bad.’
Boaz picked out only what was relevant from her cryptic comments. ‘You belong to him. Is that why you want to die?’
‘Maybe. I’ve been with him a long time. I just felt tired.’
‘Your will to live has been drained away through indulgence in the senses.’
‘Maybe. But then I’m into pleasure, not power like you.’
It was understandable that she should misjudge him. Boaz surveyed them both. They were an unlikely pair.
‘There might be some benefit in our working together.’
Romrey had worked his way through bewilderment and incredulity. Now he was merely puzzled. ‘How?’
‘You are aware that it is going to be very difficult to land on Meirjain without knowing the position of its appearance beforehand. We can take it that all those co-ordinates offered here in Wildhart and elsewhere are false, and indeed in such circumstances it would be impossible to identify the real ones among the fake. Special talents are needed to track down who has the real ones. A detective could do it, perhaps….’
‘Obsoc already hired a detective,’ Mace said. ‘He got nowhere.’