Part 13 (1/2)

She awoke standing against a wall. Metal bracelets clamped about her wrists were snapped to metal plates. Her arms were forced out from her at right angles, technologically shackled to the wall. Standing before her was a man.

He was only about 170 sems* tall, with skin the color of rich mahogny. His eyes were so dark a brown as to appear black; as if they were all pupil, without irises. Black, wavy hair grew straight across his forehead, rather low; strange for a man with such intelligent eyes. Also strange was the fact that his hair was sprinkled and occasionally streaked with gray. Sideburns fanned out on a line with the bases of his lobeless ears and were clipped, like the rest of his hair, quite close to his head. Rather thick lips covered intensely white teeth in a smallish mouth. The incisors were p.r.o.nounced, crowding canines that were accordingly diminutive, unpointed. A deep, nearly round dimple holed his aggressive chin. He wore neither moustache nor beard, and did not need them-the eyes were his feature, and he was very, very male.

”You are strong, very strong,” he said. His voice was a deep baritone in which she recognized no accent. ”Shockingly courageous. Either your pain threshold is abnormally low-and our sensors show that to be false -or you have unbelievable control. You have taken much and screamed impressively little.”

* 170 centimeters: about 5 feet, 7 inches, Old Style 166.

She decided neither to comment nor to accuse or call names. Instead, she merely nodded. ”Who are you?”

He looked surprised. ”You don't know?”

”I try not to waste breath on unnecessary questions,” she told him, and she added, ”I'd rather save it for screaming.”

He smiled. And brought up a gloved hand to strike her in the mouth-watching closely, obviously studying her reaction. She felt her upper lip double back under her teeth. She tasted salt.

”You are also impossibly arrogant,” he said.

”Consider my fingers flipped,” she said between swelling lips. ”Why not? What can you do to me that you haven't already?”

”For one thing, we can really kill you. Slowly.”

With a little pus.h.i.+ng, she let him hear a throaty chuckle. ”Each time I have died here it was real, for me. How can real reality be worse than perfectly simulated reality? How can I prove this isn't another mental experience?”

He turned away, shaking his head. A wrap-front robe enveloped his broad body past the knees. It moved with iridescent glimmers, in a dark green velvon or velvet. He had girded it with a broad black belt rather than a sash, she noticed, and his legs were powerful. A large, broad, and thick man; a powerfully built man who was unusually un-tall.

”Unbelievable. Un-be-lievable! And the face . . . the body . . . unbelievable.” He swung back to face her and she felt pierced by those eyes, impaled on those black eyes. ”What do you remember? Before the whipping, I mean?”

”Was the whipping first?”

He shook his head with the tiniest of closed-mouth 167.

smiles. The shake was in wonder, not negation. He said, ”Pos.”

She strained her neck to look down at herself. She was naked-and unmarked. Whole, so far as she could see. With swollen, red-brown aureoles.

”I'll have to sort it out,” she said. ”Oh, that grat's-a.s.s bar. Captain ... I don't remember. Gupta? Red-hand, he said-a bit melodramatic, that. Ah! The wine -drugged, wasn't it! Drugged either by the bartender or the apparent slave who brought the drinks. Umm. You are his torturer then, is that it? What's he want? I actually believed he wanted to discuss a merger.''

He shook his head with a whimsical little smile. ”What a fool! Unbelievable stoic bravery and fort.i.tude-and utterly a fool. I am Ramesh Jageshwar.”

Well, Janja thought, it worked. I'm here.

In the hands of Ramesh Jageshwar called Kshatriya: Warrior. Also called King of the Slavers. He took in over a billion stells a year, according to estimates, but no one could compute or guess at his expenses, his payroll. He was the ultimate villain of the Akima Mars mellerdrammers. Preposterously rich and enormously powerful, he could have anything and probably had nearly everything. Her quest was completed. She was a prisoner, according to plan.

She wondered how long she had been here, how long she had been tortured. She wondered what she had said, what all she had told them. Ratran Yao had a.s.sured her that she could not say or be made to say that she was with TGO, and that the information could not be taken from her mind. He must also have known or expected that she would be tortured. Probably, she mused. Goodole Rat.

Since no one knew for certain the location of Ramesh 168.

Jageshwar's lair, she also wondered where she was.

”I'm impressed,” she told Ramesh Jageshwar. ”I suppose I should be frightened, too, though ... I've never met anyone who has seen you or has any idea what you look like. That indicates that those who do know do not leave here, alive. Wherever here is ...”

She paused for just a moment, for a couple of beats, but he showed no sign of speaking. He was beyond such tiny ploys then, she a.s.sumed, and went right on.

”Wait, I see it. Don't tell me-s.h.i.+eda was your creature, and perhaps Vettering too, and . . . could Jonuta be? And Gupta of course is your man-ah, and you probably own that bar. The Gotoh.e.l.l Bar. I went there and went to h.e.l.l. Really put my toes in it, didn't I? I killed s.h.i.+eda and incurred the wrath of G.o.d, or the next worse thing. Why am I alive?”

”You cannot guess?”

”Because killing me is such fun that you plan to do it again and again for the next several years?”

”Believe it or not, I am not s.a.d.i.s.tic.”

She paused to look down at herself again. ”Alive, after all that dying. And apparently intact, too.” She lifted her head to meet his gaze. ”Why?”

”I cannot believe that you cannot guess.''

”Somehow I had the notion that the mighty and nigh-legendary Kshatriya would not be so p.r.o.ne to cryptics -a phrase I use only to avoid the uncomplimentary 'children's guessing games,' which would not be properly respectful to the King of the Slavers. Oh-oh, I angered you again! Going to slap me again? Is it more fun with me shackled helpless?”

His hand had begun to rise, sinister in the glove; it dropped. Smiling, he shook his head. ”If I release you, will you give your word not to try anything . . . rash?”169.

”Oh come, Kshatriya, what's the word of a slaver worth?”

He laughed. ”Touche!”

”I'm considering, Kshatriya. Might I get something to drink? A stik?”

”You would bargain, woman?”

”I'd try!”

He stared at her bright smile, and again he shook his head in wonder. Impressed wonder.

”I'd try. Guarantee me a drink and a tranqstik and I will guarantee . . . umm. Four hours of non-violence. Guaranteed!”

His eyes twinkled and the unlikely crow's feet crinkled at their corners. Surely he was older than his apparent-age 3 5 or so!

He said, ”After which ...”

”. . . to be discussed,” she said.

He jerked his head down in a single brief nod; a Janja-like nod, oddly enough. ”Done.”

He walked away across a floor carpeted deeply in something furry and golden-green, rather like unusually plush moss. He was broad, and she was sure that there was musculature rather than excess meat under the robe. A long divan of dull russet faced her; between it and the chair set at right angles to it stood a closed table. The arm of the couch was equipped with a console, which he finger-tapped as he sat. To Janja's right, a nine- or ten-meter wall went transparent. She gazed, squinting, at a vertiginous view of pinky-blue sky and of mountains in black and gray and purple. She felt that she was not looking at a holographic projection. This room, wherever it was, was very, very high.

He tapped again and her arms were released. When they dropped to her sides she grunted at the impact of 170.

the manacles on her thighs. She had not been prepared for his releasing her from across the room. The wall-plates were electromagnetic, then, as she had thought; she just had not thought of a switch across the big room.

She stood still, leaning back against the wall, enduring the terrible p.r.i.c.kling tingle from shoulders to fingertips while circulation returned to her arms and seemed trying to make up for lost time. She raised her hands and ma.s.saged each with the other.

The carpet was yielding and soft and not at all p.r.i.c.kly under her bare feet as she crossed to the seated man. She was aware of the unsteadiness of her gait. She worked at walking not as flauntingly as Daura might have done and yet as would a woman aware of her body and its sensuality.