“Oh,” said Jwana, “they can be bribed as easily as anywhere else. And if a man is hunk enough, they might even ‘solicit the bribe,’ if you know what I mean.”
The face for the other news team heard her and laughed. “If he took a bath first!”
Méarana glanced at the Angletar dame, but the woman’s eyes were hardly visible through the white grill across the eye-slot. “MO’ to the point,” said the dame in a silky contralto, “I heah that his, ah, vigah, might result in an extended sentence.”
Billy had returned by then with the drinks and sandwiches. “What strapim for man he go down?”
The Alabastrine pushed her chair a little away from the Terran. “I don’t understand your, um, accent.”
Méarana said, “Fou-Chang’s Gazetteer mentions that men are not allowed on the surface, but doesn’t say what happens if they go.”
“Oh, well,” said Dame Teffna, “there’s not much immigration to Boldly Go. So poor Teodorq will have to, ah, ‘contribute’ to their gene pool, as much as he can for as long as he can hold up.”
Billy Chins laughed. “Then why not plenty men more go down there jildy?” Jwana and the news face at the other table, who was playing dummy that hand, laughed as she rolled the dice.
“Saving only one thing,” said Dame Teffna from behind her screen. “When they finish with him, they cut his head off.”
The news faces and Billy stopped laughing.
“Surely, y’all knew that, dears,” said the dame. “It does take some of the edge off the humor.”
“Here,” said the news face from Sumday. “This is a flat of the man.
He was in Pish-Toy City on the Southern Scarp—that’s on Sumday—and he tried to rescue what he thought was a princess being abducted, and…Well, he got himself in the news back home, like everywhere else he’s been. Be a shame to shorten him.” She handed the flat to Jwana, who passed it on to Dame Teffna. “I’ve seen him. He was on Alabaster, too.” When the Angletaran sighed over the picture, Jwana leered. “I told you he was a hunk.”
Billy Chins blinked, and looked at Méarana before he handed the flat to her. “Billy Chins no like piksa men. Like piksa women.” But his eyes, the harper saw, were bright.
Méarana took the “piksa” from him and saw that it was a normal flat holo. It showed a very large man with raven, shoulder-length hair pulled back in a tail. He wore a sleeveless vest made of blue canvas. Both shoulders were intricately tattooed. He stood grinning on the top step of what Méarana thought an official building while police freed him of his bonds.
And around his neck hung a medallion in the same style as Méarana’s own.
“Billy,” Méarana told her servant. “Change of plans. This is a man I want to see.”
The news faces exchanged knowing looks and Jwana again made a fist with her right hand. “I like a woman,” she said, “who knows what she wants.”
Boldly Go’s single continent, known simply as The Mainland, rose from the One Great Sea just north of the equator. Elsewhere, scattered strings of volcanic islands marked the submarine rifts of her oceanic plates. The official history was that she had been settled exclusively by women to begin with; but other accounts claimed a later Revolution; and still others a plague affecting only males. The survivors, they said, had made a virtue of their necessity.
Whatever the beginning, the end had been the same. Across the quadrant, men told themselves that the matriarchs did not really mean what they said, and the whole planet was just waiting for the right man to come along. They were invariably surprised to learn that, yes, the matriarchs really did mean it; and whether they had been waiting for the right man or no, he was not it.
For their part, the matriarchs maintained a corps of Amazons to keep the “bad ones” of the desert from troubling the settlements, and to caution their sister matriarchs. Alliances among “Nests” were quick, heartfelt, and abandoned on a moment’s bad faith. Still, the Sisters of the Corps, though they fought one another lustily when one matriarch offended another, maintained the Amazon Joint Navy, second to none in Lafrontera. K. P. Charakorthy, the famed “Pirate of the Blue Sun,” had learned this when his fleet had had come for booty and honor and had departed with neither. It had cost Boldly Go one city—J’lala on the Purcell River—and Charakorthy his entire fleet.
Charming Moon was one of three moderate-sized bodies that stirred the One Great Sea into unusual and irregular tides. The old Commonwealth seed ships that had salted this region of the Spiral Arm had found the Sea already pregnant. Certain chemical reactions almost always tossed off amino acids and eukaryotes and sundry other bits of living matter, although they seldom elaborated further. So Boldly Go was already terraformed and waiting when the Ramage settlers made their way there.
Méarana left Billy Chins on Charming Moon with some misgiving, but comforted herself with the thought that if he had survived among the’ Loons, he could last a week or so in the relatively benign Men’s Room. He would have to pay the genetic tariff, but the harper suspected he would enjoy it.
She dropped to Boditown, capital of the Nest of Boditsya, where the Wildman was in custody. Being a curiosity as well as a prisoner, access was relatively easy to obtain, even for touristas. Méarana learned he was housed in Josang Prison, called the prison and, using her Kennel chit to get past an underling, spoke with the Warder herself. During the visi-phone conversation, she noted a display of crystal animals on the shelf behind the Warder’s desk, and so before visiting the prison in person, she purchased in an import shop a lovely crystal horse made by Wofford and Beale on New Eireann. Officially, it was not a bribe, but it did smooth the way to the Visitors’ Room.
The Visitors’ Room was entered through the main offices on Josang Avenue, a bustling thoroughfare with self-directed ground traffic. Méarana had not seen the insides of many prisons, and those only on sims and immersions, but she had not expected a brightly lit and tastefully decorated waiting room done in earth tones and furnished wth planters and chairs and tables. Bowls of patchouli and fragrant pit-roses from the Thatch Mountains gave the room a less-than-incarcerating air. The chairs were comfortable and there were no barriers between visitors and prisoners.
Méarana turned to her escort. “Not exactly escape-proof.”
The Amazon sergeant laughed. “Where on Boldly Go could he hide?”
They brought him in a few minutes later. Teodorq Nagarajan was every bit as impressive in person as he had been in the holoflat. The raven hair, the broad, white smile, the smoothly muscled chest and arms, the impression of sheer animal power very nearly overwhelmed. What she had not expected was that he would be so short. He stood at only five feet and five thumbs, a head shorter than Méarana.
Nagarajan was bare-chested and walked with a panther’s grace. Each deltoid had been tattooed with a man’s head whose beard flowed past the elbow. His pectorals were likewise adorned, though with a dragon and a tiger. When he turned—and Méarana suspected his turning was meant for display—he revealed a pair of oversized cat’s eyes on his scapulas. Thus adorned, he would appear ferocious in attack, and vigilant to any who approached from the rear.
His jailors had not taken his medallion from him, for it dangled on its golden chain, flanked by flaming dragon and growling tiger. The disc seemed to rest cupped between dragon’s claw upholding it and tiger’s paw protecting it.
The barbarian paused in the doorway, assessed the tactical situation, and eyed Méarana and the Amazon in almost a tactile manner. Then he swaggered to one of the chairs and flung himself into it, throwing his right leg over the chair arm, and propping up his chin with his left arm. “Awright, babe,” he said in passable Gaelactic. “Ain’t no bed in this room, so yuh ain’t here for that. Too bad. Dames here, they think looking purty is a crime, so yuh be the first looker I seen. Hey! We could do it in one of these here chairs, if yuh like.”