Part 1 (1/2)

s.p.a.cEWAYS.

KING OF THE SLAVERS.

by John Cleve.

SCARLETHILLS.

Alas, fair ones, my time has come. I must depart your lovely home- Seek the bounds of this galaxy To find what lies beyond.

(chorus) Scarlet hills and amber skies, Gentlebeings with loving eyes; All these I leave to search for a dream That will cure the wand'rer in me.

You say it must be glamorous For those who travel out through s.p.a.ce. You know not the dark, endless night Nor the solitude we face.

(reprise chorus)

I know not of my journey's end Nor the time nor toll it will have me spend. But I must see what I've never seen And know what I've never known.

Scarlet hills and amber skies, Gentlebeings with loving eyes; All these I leave to search for a dream That will cure the wand'rer in me.

-Ann Morris Let us each forsake every other kind of knowledge and seek one thing only ... to learn and discern between good and evil.

-Plato, The Republic

Prologue.

She wore black. It was a jumpsuit, black, and it looked sprayed on. The sinister night-gleam of it was relieved only by her skin, at face and neck and bosom. Her hands were sheathed in filament-thin gloves of black. They looked painted on, as the jumpsuit did. It caught highlights where the form inside rounded it out, seeming to strain it. At the upper back, and over the b.u.t.tocks, and at the calves, which were unusually prominent.

It showed a lot of skin in front, skin that was pale and looked almost white in its shocking contrast to the black fabric. The suit was cut down the front not in a V, but in a U, a huge capital U. Partway down were the curves of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, bare inside the jumpsuit and within its cleavage, and they were firm unto hardness, those b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Warheads, the currently-in slang called them.

Her skin was pale and her hair was more pale than that and her eyes, too, a silvery gray with only the ghost of a hint of sky-blue.

Her name was Janja, and she was black and white. Mix those, and the result was gray. Janja was gray, and she was with The Gray Organization.

Actually the super-policers, the war-preventers, the super-spooks were named TransGalactic Order. That yielded the initials TGO, and they in turn yielded the 1.2.sobriquet-the nickname, in plainer terms-The Gray Organization. Aristotle had written that black represented evil and white represented good and that the two could not mix. The result, Aristoteles of Athenos wrote, was gray: good and bad, neither bad nor good, both bad and good. And that, the philosopher-scholar wrote, was impossible. Good and evil could not at one and the same time exist in the same ent.i.ty, Aristotle said. White and black could not coexist; gray was impossible.

(In that, Aristotle was dead wrong. TGO existed, and so did Janja, in black and white.) She was from a planet called barbaric, and the planet was a gentle idyll of lovers where war was unknown. She was from a planet called Protected and she had been stolen off that world, all unprotected, as a slave. She had never known violence on that ”barbaric” world, and she hated it-and in time she slew her masters (her owners)-and sliced away their manly attributes as trophies. She abhorred violence and lawlessness and, back on her own planet before her capture and use, had been saving herself for marriage; and she became mistress of a pirate, a s.p.a.ce pirate all in black.

She wore a weapon and she had used it. She was of Aglaya where men and women, girls and boys were Lifemated, and she believed in that, and she had been s.e.x-slave of her masters on planet Resh-and had killed them-and on planet Knor (she killed them, too, in order to escape) and lover to a woman named h.e.l.lfire and a non-human named Cinnabar and now a man . . . a man who bore five names (that she knew about), one of which was Rat.

She despised the race that had enslaved her. Them, the Thingmakers, and she had joined them. She abhorred killing and had killed two of those men who had stolen her away to slavery to begin with. One, the one 3.named Jonuta of Qalara, she had killed twice. (And the anti-Aristotelean contradictions continued: Jonuta was alive.) She was Janja and she was gray.

She moved with the ease and grace of the shadow of a soaring bird, or of a cat. She did not swagger. Instead she glided, using muscles developed on a planet whose sun was legend and whose gravity was not. It was high, that gravity. It created short people, strong people, strong-legged people of strong will.

She was Janja, gray in black, and she was a hunter, a prowling hunter among the Thingmakers. She had become one of their guardians, their police.

Only she knew that she was an alien among Them, a true alien.

Oh, she resembled their dark race, except only in pigmentation.

It was her mind that was different.

In the mind, she was not human, not what They called ”Galactic.” She was more than that; more than Galactic and thus a pace beyond human. In her mind and because of her mind, she was an alien among Them.

Stolen from her own world and her own kind-her very life-and trained only as slave and pirate and mistress, she refused to be any of those. And so she was with TGO, because she had to do and to be, and she could not return to Aglaya. Not with all the knowledge she had from Them. Native planetary populations should be allowed to develop in their own way at their own pace, the Galactic Accords said, and TGO enforced the Accords.

She was Janja, and she was gray, and she was a cop. With The Gray Organization.

She was working. Right now she was on a mission for TGO. White of hair and ”white” of skin and sheathed 4.in black, she functioned grayly for The Gray Organization. In the dark, dark gray night. She was also being pursued.

A slender belt angled rakishly across her hip and almost nonexistent belly. Four slim strips of leather-imitating black plastifabric called equhyde were braided together into the slim belt buckled with s.h.i.+ning mother-of-pearl. From the belt hung a holster. Slim, straight, and narrow; a holster designed for a form of sidearm called a stopper.

Her holster was empty.

She was working and her stopper was in her black-gloved hand. Merely a squeeze-actuated black cylinder in a slim-fingered fist that did not squeeze.

She was also running as hard as she could. That was hard indeed, propelled by those churning tensing muscular legs developed on her high-G planet, and it was fast. City buildings fled past the fleeing Janja, in the night.

Aglaya's gravity was one-and-a-third-standard; this world's was only three-quarters-standard. This planet was called Franji., She ran fast and silently on Franji, on heels and soles of extruded prostyrene that was like rubber crepe and, made to TGO specs, was a lot better. She ran without looking back. That was part of her training. To look back while fleeing accomplished nothing, she had been taught. It did tend to slow one down and increase risks both known and unknown. Looking back to a.s.sess danger while running was natural to the human species and to the Aglayan species so much like it. A better model was the cat. Members of that species did not trouble even to glance toward the sudden noise or menacing smell that set their legs moving. They merely sprinted, at speed and without looking back, until they 5.knew they had taken themselves well away from the source of the noise or the odor-the catalyst to their running.

Then and only then did a feline pause to look back-pause, while poised to fight or to sprint on.

Janja ran, stopper in hand, silently along a silent street. Since she made no sound with her feet and only a little with her breathing, she heard clearly the slapping feet behind her, the steps of her pursuer.

She rounded the corner of a building of the same material as the soles and heels of her boots, and charged across a plaza and down thirty plascrete steps with a blurry churning of her black-sheathed legs, and around a neon-lit fountain all beautiful in six colors and eight hues, and past the menacing uniformed policer she knew was only a holoprojection designed to frighten potential lawbreakers (who knew of it and laughed and strove to perform obscene acts on the projection) and up thirty broad imitation marble steps, and around a corner again- In near darkness, she stopped almost as swiftly as if she had run into an invisible wall.

She hadn't. She was fast, and she could stop fast, too. Gray Janja of far Aglaya. She waited, staring, holster empty and stopper in hand, up and ready. Poised.

Footsteps clomped unevenly down the last of the steps, slap-slapped across Fountain Plaza, and came less rapidly up the steps she had taken with such ease. She heard those feet reach the top.

The man who had been chasing her came hard-breathing, a man desperate to overtake her because she was intensely dangerous to him and his career. Winded from the steps he skidded around the same corner she had rounded, with his legs moving almost in the manner of a cartoon figure. Treading air while he turned, gun in 6.hand. His hair was the blue that was fas.h.i.+onable on Franji and his conservative clothing was expensive.

He saw her for something on the order of an instant before Janja said: ”Hi. Chasing me here where we're alone is your second mistake, demagogue.”

And she squeezed the grip of her cylindrical weapon.

He fell down unconscious. She did after all abhor violence and most of all killing and would not set her stopper on its killer setting, its number Three setting. She had set the modified outworlder stopper on Two. That sonic attack rendered the ”victim” quite unconscious, almost in an instant.

The man who had been lured into following her until she tired him and trapped him, a handsome man and magnetic-charismatic, fell down like a bundle of laundry and lay just as forlornly.