Habu. James B. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ to reason that her mother’s death might well be Tique’s first experience with death. Not that many people died these days. Except on Karg and a few other places he’d been.

      Snister’s atmosphere was humid. Clouds swirled. He thought it might rain and wondered idly what the rain was like on Snister. Anything to stop thinking of Alex; anything to occupy his mind so that the other part of him could not use his grief to grab control and wreak the havoc he so desperately desired. Reubin was a strong man, but the serpent scared him. Indiscriminate response was not civilized, not right.

      Tique put a card in a slot and soon an elevator arrived with her groundcar. They surged out along the route.

      They drove to the outskirts of Cuyas, Snister’s capi­tal. Reubin remained quiet, yet his thoughts were boil­ing. A different idea occurred to him. “Can we visit her grave?”

      She glanced sharply at him. She shook her head. “Mother was cremated.”

      “Oh.” He tried to recall the data that the shipboard tape had spewed out about Snister. He remembered that the population was not at all large for a planet its size. In other words, they wouldn’t begrudge the burial space. “It was her wish?” He asked the question not so much to know the answer, but to find out more about his wife. He knew so very little.

      Tique shrugged and maneuvered the car under a large, pyramidal building. “I don’t know. The government pa­thologist ordered it.”

      “Why.” Not a question, but a statement.

      “Something about the rarity of the cause of death. In case it was a bio-organism, they didn’t want to take a chance on the infection spreading.”

      Typical governmental bumbling, Reubin thought. They could have put her in a safe coffin—casket, he corrected. On the other hand, perhaps they had saved tissue sam­ples. The officials at the port of entry had seemed effi­cient, so there was no reason to think that others would be less so.

      When they arrived in Tique’s apartment, she showed him to a bedroom. “I’m sorry. I closed out all of Moth­er’s affairs, sold her home, all of that.”

      “Oh?”

      “The government thought it best.”

      “Oh?”

      Tique looked exasperated. “Look, damn it. She was a high government minister. There were considerations.”

      “Oh?”

      Tique placed her hands on her hips. “Of course. The money. You can have the goddamn fedcreds. I’ll give you an accounting balance sheet to go along with it, too. If you can prove you married her.”

      Reubin set down his case. He looked her in the eye. “Keep the money. I don’t need it, I don’t want it.”

      “Then why—?”

      I want Alex, he thought. “You got any liquor in this place?”

      “Yeah, sure.” Tique was obviously annoyed at his brusqueness.

      He followed her into the main room. She pointed to a wet bar. “Help yourself. I’ll be back in a moment.” She left through a door on the other side of the room.

      Reubin looked around. Tique’s apartment was nothing spectacular. She was not filthy rich, but certainly well-to-do. The furnishings were warm and comfortable and the environmental control cut Snister’s humidity in half. A lot of beige in the room. Smell of fresh cut flowers. View from about four floors below the top of the pyra­midal building.

      On a hunch, Reubin checked the control console, and punched in to display the current memory.

      A side wall darkened and there was Alexandra Sover­eign. He turned up the sound, but not loudly enough that it would alert Tique.

      Alex. She wore her favorite silver jumpsuit. Large sil­ver earrings dangled from her earlobes, looking like row­els.

      “Hello, Silver Girl,” Reubin whispered.

      He punched “PLAY.”

      Alex laughed, certainly not a tinkle. “I’m telling you, Tique. You should have seen him as I first did. Half the planet ablaze, and he cut across the sky ahead of me in a hijacked barge, for gosh sake.” Alex sipped a drink. “Enough firepower lancing through the skies at him to run the city’s power requirements for a hundred years. I have diplomatic immunity, so I wasn’t really worried. But he reached the starship before I did, and stepped off into the entry port and the barge barely hesitated, it shot off somewhere while his rear foot was in midair.”

      Tique must have replied, but that had been deleted or the pickup was targeted on Alex only.

      “I put my aircar in the cradle, stepped into the air lock and the door was closing and the ship was taking off and this crewman was bowing and escorting me down the corridor and all I could think about was the man. Tique! You wouldn’t believe it. He was half-scorched from some battle. Dried blood on the other half. Weapons, my God! On his back, on his hips, protruding from his boots. Twin bandoliers crisscrossing his torso like some bandito of olden times, carrying God knows what.

      “My first view of Reubin Flood, Tique. Grim and ex­hausted—but wary and alert. The sight of him hit me right between the eyes and in my womb. He followed me down the corridor and I could sense his eyes boring—”

      Reubin froze the frame, staring at the image on the wall. At his core, he knew it wasn’t over. He would never, ever get over this woman. He was angry with himself for being so coldly analytical about her, him, them. Must history repeat itself? He hoped not. But the rage flamed, right there below the surface. A killing urge grew inside him. No, he thought. Not again.

      *Yes. This is my function.*

      It was easier to contain the serpent this time; at the spaceport it had been a real struggle.

      He hit the “HOLO PROJECT” button and the frozen Alex leaped from the wall to the middle of the room. For one second, then he punched it back onto the wall. The holo was too real, evoking Alexandra’s presence almost sacrilegiously.

      “That’s private,” Tique said from the doorway.

      Caught, Reubin started.

      Tique was staring at him. “My God. Your face,” She shuddered,

      Reubin killed the image and turned to the bar. “Sorry for the intrusion,” he mumbled. He found some 150 sour mash and poured it over ice in a tumbler. He would mourn later. Freeze his sorrow just as he’d frozen Alex on the wall. He lifted his eyes to Tique and she shook her head.

      Her words rasped in her throat. “For a moment, I saw in you what she saw that first time, the rawness she de­scribed—”

      Reubin had regained his control. “You don’t need to patronize me to cover the awkwardness. I’m all right now.”

      She came over to him. “I wasn’t, Reubin Flood. It was my opportunity, perhaps my only one, to find out what you are really like; what Mother saw in you. And I didn’t want to waste the chance.”

      “Sure. Look, kid. If you’ll help me, I’ll be on my way. Can you show СКАЧАТЬ