Shadow Man (Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction) (7 page)

The stranger saw him
looking then and smiled. Tatian smiled back, but the expression was
cut off by a sudden static pain in his wrist. It ran quickly up the
molecular wires and reached his elbow, spreading a tingling numbness
before he could grab the controlpad and shut the system down
completely. The stranger had been watching, curious as a cat, and
Tatian felt himself flushing. To his surprise, however, it was the
other indigene who spoke first.

"Are you all right?"
His voice, cultured and almost accentless even in creole, held
nothing but a mild concern, but Tatian felt the color deepen in his
face.

"Fine, thanks."
That was patently a lie, and he added reluctantly, "I've got a
loose connection in my implants, that's all. It stings a little
sometimes."

"I would imagine."
That was the first stranger, the ambiguous one. The voice was as
indeterminate as the body and clothes, in the midrange that could
mean almost any gender. He could just see the swell of breasts
beneath the silk, not quite concealed by the drape of the vest, but
the stranger was too wide through the shoulders, too narrow-hipped,
to be a woman. Probably a herm, then, Tatian thought, with regret: 3e
wasn't busty enough, or long legged enough, to be a fem. Ȝe
probably passed for male, though--most herms did--but it was still
hard to be sure from 3er
clothes. It was too bad; 3e
would have been a striking woman.

"Do you think the
rain bothers it?" 3e
went on, and Tatian shook his head.

"I doubt it. Though
anything's possible."

"There's a woman
over in Startown," 3e
said, slowly, and tilted 3er
head to one side. In that position, 3e
looked more than ever like a cat, pointed face and wide-set eyes
framed by a mane of coarse black hair. "She does some work on
implants."

"Oh?" Tatian said,
without much hope, and the indigene nodded.

"Starli--Starli
Massingberd, her name is, she's no kin of mine. But she works the
kittereen
, the
jetcar circuit, cars and racers. You might talk to her."

That sounded promising,
after all, and Tatian nodded. "Starli Massingberd--in Startown?"

"She has a shop
there. She'll be on the rolls."

"I'll look for
her," Tatian said.
And
I'll also check her out with Reiss
. Shan Reiss raced
kittereens
, when
he wasn't driving for NAPD. "Thanks."

The indigene smiled
again. "I'm Warreven." Ȝe
nodded to the other indigene. "And Malemayn. We're both
Stillers."

"Ser Mhyre Tatian."
Tatian held out his hand in automatic reflex, lulled by the Creole,
and Warreven took it gingerly. Assimilated 3e
might be, but the handshake was still unfamiliar.

"We were heading out
for lunch," Warreven went on, releasing the other's hand. "Care
to join us?"

Behind him, the other
indigene--Malemayn--made a soft noise that might have been laughter
or disapproval, or both. Tatian considered for an instant. It wasn't
a proposition, exactly, more of a first move, but the hints of
interest, of trade, were unmistakable. "Thanks," he said, "but
I've got to get back to the office."

"Maybe some other
time," Warreven said, and Tatian nodded. The rain had almost
stopped, and watery sunlight was beginning to show through the
clouds. Curls of steam rose from the puddles in the plaza, and the
air smelled suddenly, violently, of seaweed.

It wasn't a long walk
from the courthouse to the Estrange where NAPD had its offices, but
the sun was fully out by the time Tatian reached the arcade that led
to Drapdevel Court. All but the largest puddles had evaporated,
leaving wet shadows that shrank as he watched, and his shirt clung
damply to his body in the revived heat. The old woman who owned the
rights to the vendor's pitch at the mouth of the arcade nodded to
him, but didn't stop rearranging her stock, disordered when she'd
covered it against the rain. Tatian knew better, after four years on
Hara, to hope for much that he could comfortably eat or drink, but he
scanned the trays anyway. She had dozens of braids of feel good, some
in sheaths, the rest coiled for the smoking pot, and sticks of
sourcane soaking in
liquertie
,
a pottery jug heating over a candle flame, and, at the base of the
cheap clown-glass statue of Madansa, the spirit who controlled the
markets, a plug of odd fibrous stuff he didn't recognize. That was
worth investigating--he could name four proprietary drugs that had
been discovered as an unknown plant in a marketwoman's tray--and
he paused to examine it. Up close, it seemed to be a web of
close-growing, hairy cords wound over an inner object the size of a
child's fist. He picked it up curiously, turned it over in his
hand. The cords were leathery to the touch, the hairs prickly in his
palm; the dark brown skin seemed almost warm to the touch. He sniffed
it warily, and grimaced at the familiar musty odor. Hungry-jack, he
thought, and in the same instant found the cross-shaped mark at the
tip of the ovoid where the pod's pseudomouth had been. He pried
back one lip, using the corner of a fingernail, and found the scarlet
flesh of the inner pod. The old woman was watching him narrowly, and
he handed it to her, saying, "Hungry-jack, grandmother?"

She nodded, weighing
the pod in her hand. "They clean the pods when they take them in
the
seraals
.
This is the whole thing, dried in the sun on a sand bed."

"Is there a
difference?"

The woman shrugged.
"It's different--milder, but you'll still fly, my son."

There was no point,
Tatian thought, trying to explain off-world physiology to the
indigenes. Harans used the full pharmacopeia almost from the cradle;
they grew up chewing poppinberry for a stimulant and drinking
nightwake and sweetrum to relax, and a ten-year-old was as likely as
an adult to throw a braid of feelgood on the kitchen fire after a
hard day's work. An off-worlder couldn't hope to match that
inbred tolerance. "I'll take it."

The old woman looked
him over. "Three megs a decigram. Or all of it for fifty grams of
metal."

Hara was metal-poor,
and the little that lay close to the surface tended to be tied up in
the ironwood trees that grew along the slopes of the central
mountains. It was hard, sometimes, for Tatian to imagine the relative
worth of the off-world coins in his pockets. And Warreven, he thought
suddenly, had been wearing metal bracelets--not glass or carved and
painted ironwood, but bright, silver-colored metal. And so had
Malemayn: they were Important Men, then, in the Stiller clan. He
reached into his pocket and produced a handful of coins. The old
woman set up her scale--placing it politely in front of the statue
of Madansa, though, equally politely, she made only a perfunctory
invocation--and set a fifty gram weight in the seller's pan.
Tatian counted out coins, six quarter-dollars from Joshua, and then
five copper hundredths stamped with the Ansonia Corporation's
monoglyph to bring the scales into balance. The woman eyed the scales
and took her weight away.

"Enjoy the
hungry-jack, my son."

"Thank you,
grandmother," Tatian answered, and tucked the pod into his trousers
pocket with the remainder of his coins. He hadn't saved much, given
the exchange rate, by paying in metal, but then he could afford it.

He went on into the
arcade, grateful for the fugitive cool of its shadow, and came out
into the sudden brilliance of the court. The bricks that paved the
central space were still a centimeter deep in water, and the sunlight
glanced from its surface as if from a mirror. The walls of the
surrounding buildings were patched and flecked with the reflected
light. Tatian sighed, anticipating a flooded cellar, and waded
through the blood-warm water, scattering the sky's bright image and
making the shards of light dance across the red brick walls. He
fetched up gratefully on the low doorstep of NAPD's office and
stooped to free himself from his wet shoes, peering in through the
open door. Stane Derry--Derebought Stane, the office's only
full-time botanist, looked back at him from the door of her own
office, her broad face eloquent in its lack of expression.

"How's the cellar?"
Tatian asked, and stepped barefoot into the building, leaving his
shoes to dry on the stone sill.

"Don't ask,"
Derebought answered, and then relented. "The pump's screwed up
again. Reiss is down there now, trying to get it going. We've got a
couple of centimeters of water wall to wall."

Tatian nodded, already
relieved of the worst of his worries. The backups and other records
were stored in watertight cases that stood a quarter of a meter off
the stone floor: there would be no real damage from this flooding. "I
thought Reiss was in Irenfot for the races."

"He was,"
Derebought said, and shrugged. "But I guess they got a bad storm,
and it washed out the track. So when he showed up here, I figured I'd
put him to work." She looked down at her desktop. "Did you get
the permits straightened out?"

"I think so." He
reached for the secretary cube that stood inside the doorway and ran
his hand over the input strip to trigger the output nodes. Images
blossomed in the air before his eyes, mixed icons and text, nothing
of immediate importance, and the failing connection surged again,
sending a wave of cold down his arm. "Have you heard anything about
Norssco moving into any of our areas?"

Derebought shook her
head. "Not a thing. Why?"

"Tillis Carlon was in
Wiidfare's office when I got there. I thought maybe someone was
sending a message."

"I wouldn't have
thought so," Derebought said, and shrugged. "Then again, maybe
Wiidfare's dabbling in trade again."

"Oh, he's doing
that." Tatian reached for the keypad, used it to move to the next
screen of messages, not wanting to risk his implanted control pad.
"Reiss is downstairs?"

"Yes. Are you all
right?"

Tatian lifted his sore
arm. "The damn connection's getting worse. I'm going to have to
get it looked at."

Derebought nodded. "Good
luck finding someone."

"Yeah. Ask Reiss to
stick his head in my office when he gets through in the cellar, would
you?"

"Sure."

"And I bought this on
the way in," Tatian said, and pulled out the uncleaned pod. "It's
hungry-jack, dried whole. Have you ever heard of preparing it that
way?"

Derebought frowned. "I
don't think I've ever seen it dried like that. I've seen it
whole when it was fresh, but I always thought you had to clean it
before you could use it. We always did in my
mesnie
,
anyway." She held up her cupped hands. Tatian tossed it across to
her, and she turned back into her office. Tatian followed, leaned
against the door frame. Derebought set the hairy pod on her desk,
pulling her maglamp down over it, and peered down through the lens.
"Interesting, though."

"Run a full analysis
on it, covering and all," Tatian said. "See if anything turns
up."

Derebought mumbled
agreement, already probing the web of cords with a blunt glass rod,
and Tatian sighed, recognizing her absorption. He flicked a toggle on
the secretary, setting the sys-tem to forward calls to his desk. "I'll
be in my office," he said, and pushed open the door.

The desk woke at his
approach, sensing his presence, and Tatian flinched as the
recognition pulse tingled through his skin. The desktop lit,
producing half a dozen working screens scattered through the clear
surface, and Tatian scanned them as he sat down. Most were old
business, and none was urgent; he reached for the shadowscreen,
splaying his hand across its virtual surface to fit his fingers to
the current control configuration. He flicked a "button"--a
literal hot spot, a bump of warmth under his finger--and a new
screen appeared, offering access to Bonemarche's communications
system. It was primitive by comparison to the systems current on most
of the Concord Worlds--even now, a hundred years after contact had
been reestablished with the rest of human-settled space, most
indigenes who lived outside the urban areas didn't have access to
the planetary net; it had only been last year that all the
mesnie
s
had gotten a terminal--but it was at least adequate for
communications within Bonemarche itself. He ran his fingers over the
shadowscreen's shifting spaces, summoning contact codes for Norssco
and then for Tillis Carlon. That matter needed to be settled now:
Carlon needed to be disabused of the notion that he could poach on
NAPD's territories.

A panel slid aside on
the wall, revealing a meter-and-a-half-square flat screen. A red dot
appeared, indicating the camera position; Tatian slid his finger down
another control, fading it to near-invisibility, then flicked the
control away. Glyphs swam across the base of the screen, and then a
face appeared, a stocky, dark-skinned woman with a Norssco badge at
her collar, the camera dot centered like a misplaced caste mark
between her eyes.

"Can I help you,
ser?"

"Ser Mhyre Tatian,
for Tillis Carlon."

"Ah." The woman's
eyes flickered as she consulted some internal display. "I'll
patch you straight through, ser."

That was a good sign.
Tatian waited while the screen went blank and then reformed to reveal
Carlon sitting at a desk that very nearly matched his own. A line of
icons flickered in the upper left corner of the screen--security
programs currently running, save-file protocols in effect, nothing
out of the ordinary--and Tatian noted them with one corner of his
mind, intent on the image in front of him.

"Tatian." Carlon
sounded distinctly relieved.

"You said I should
call."

"Yes. I thought I
owed you an explanation."

Tatian nodded once, and
Carlon gave a smile that was almost a grimace. "Wiidfare asked me
to come in then, said he'd had some one cancel an appointment.
We--I've been having a little difficulty with our residency
permits lately."