Part 14 (1/2)

175.

She shrugged. ”Home. My original home. It seemed fitting.”

”What did you hit s.h.i.+eda's s.h.i.+p with?”

”We were on the ground, a small s.h.i.+p, and they were up in parking orbit. They didn't think to fear us. Got 'em with a deprotonizer. Poof!” She smiled at him. It was a tight smile, in which the eyes failed to cooperate, and he studied it.

”Why a depro gun?”

”My secret.”

He leaned a little forward. ”No, it isn't.” Firmness and strength rode his voice. The man radiated great strength, great firmness, intense purpose.

”All right then. It was all I could afford, that ancient and I understand short-lived weapon. Effective, wasn't it.”

”s.h.i.+eda thought so, if he had time to think.” Leaning forward from the divan, he opened the table and took out a small cube of clear plas. He looked into it. Ramesh Jageshwar smiled. ”This still says you're still telling the truth.”

”You've already heard it, haven't you? Haven't you checked? By the way, do I ever get any clothing?”

”Sometime, probably. We checked you partially, pos; back to Resh. Hawking takes longer, of course. I'll send the query by tachyon next month and we'll have the answer tomorrow. Have you ever used the name Yanya?”

She chuckled. ”No, but some people have called me that. Why is 'Jansa' so hard to p.r.o.nounce?”

”Don't look at me, Jansa. People are stupid, and especially about words that sound or look unusual.”

”Doesn't sound unusual to me.”

”All right. Think your story will check out on Hawking?”

176.

This time she flipped her fingers. ”If your sources are accurate, it will.”

She was right; there were records of her on Hawking, by now, 'way out there in the outermost of the Outer Worlds, because Rat Yao would have planted them. If he had asked about the privateer she had killed-and his mates-well, that was Raon, whom Yao had slain on Shankar-along with both his mates. By now records would show that she had purchased the depro gun on Shankar and installed it on Rahman, in secret.

”I can't understand why the truth, my history, is so necessary, Ramesh Kshatriya.”

He leaned back on the couch and stared at her with the tiniest of enigmatic smiles. ”Can't you? Even I don't know how many people want me, Jansa. Various people are extensions of me, in a way, and you've indicated that you thought s.h.i.+eda was. You could have been-could be-part of an elaborate plot to placidate me. Too, there's another Reason.”

She waited, looking at him expectantly but otherwise letting the provocative statement hang there without the question he must expect.

Ramesh Jageshwar rose, extending a hand. Naked, she took it and went with him. Down a corridor and into a big room done all in red and silver with a laserstrobe ceiling that was not quite this side of eerie. He opened a broad, tall maroon drape to reveal a huge three-dimensional picture; a holopainting. Full-length, and naked. A woman, with shoulder-length hair that was very light, ash-blond, and a slender, nicely curved body. She wore only a belt, deep purple and stark against her pale flesh. Buckled in silver, it hung aslant across her hips to support an empty holster. The stopper was in her hand, leveled at the viewer.

”My sister, Daura.”

177.

”Odd sort of family pose, but she's lovely. She looks familiar, although I don't think I know her.”

He did not smile, much less chuckle. ”You might better recognize a mirror image of her, since that's what you are accustomed to seeing. You are more like her,” he said quietly, staring at the tall painting, ”than anyone I have ever seen or hoped to see.”

”I beg your pardon?”

He turned to look at her. ”You are very much like my sister Daura,” he said, and something s.h.i.+fted in Janja's mind.

As he spoke that key phrase (one of seven possible variations prepared for her), the mental shackles that had protected her throughout interrogation and torture slid from the mind of Janja-not-Jansa. At once she remembered it all; who and what and why she really was, and why she was here.

Now, if she were again questioned under drugs or surveillance of a liar's cube, she would immediately betray herself, because she no longer believed the story she had repeatedly told here; the story she had believed was true, the whole time. It had been her ”memory.” Heretofore only she had been in danger. Now both she and TGO were.

Ratran had installed the hypnochemic block and false story for her protection, of course. And for the protection of the far more important TransGalactic Order.

16.

No man voluntarily pursues evil, or what he thinks to be evil. To prefer evil over good is not in human nature; when a man is compelled to choose between the two evils, no one will choose the greater when he can have the less.

-Socrates He gave her things to wear. Skin-fitting things, oftener in white than in black or anything dark. Garments or ”outfits” with interesting cutouts and hardware. Salacious and kinky things. The matching breast-cups and briefs of bra.s.s-imitating pra.s.s were nicely padded within for her protection. She laughed at them and felt ridiculous, but he told her they were s.e.xier than nudity and part of an ancient s.p.a.ce tradition. She wore them, naturally; the reason was simply because he provided them and wanted her to wear them. Another ”outfit” consisted only in various long, flowing streamers of cloth, baby blue on one surface and silver on the other. More s.p.a.cefaring tradition, he told her.

On another occasion she was painted here and there, and otherwise wore nothing for an entire morning. Jan-ja really didn't mind. She was of Aglaya, not of them.

Ramesh, she learned, was beset by neither guilt nor doubt about his slaving operations.

He commanded many s.h.i.+ps and derived income from 178.

179.

the operations of others whose captains were not directly in his employ but whom he backed or had backed when they were beginning their enterprises. (Janja was reminded of the way TGO kept various caught-and-re-leased outlaws on call, for occasional use-or-else.) Interestingly, he was not served byslaves.

Indeed he did not, she learned, really approve of slavery!

It was merely a most excellent means of acc.u.mulating wealth by administering to the needs of rapacious people in power who were too stupid or cruel or uncaring to end slavery; leaders or ”leaders” who had the need to be served by human beings whom they owned, body and mind. It was a matter in which Ramesh was not immoral, but un-moral.

On the other hand he was beset by both doubt and guilt concerning his sister.

The guilt had been with him for thirty years; he was aged forty-four years-standard. The siblings had begun to act as lovers when he was fourteen and she twelve. He was at pains to advise ”Jansa” that it was not that either he or Daura had seduced the other, but that instead it was a mutual longing and drifting together that first time. It continued.

Janja a.s.sumed that he was covering the fact that he had seduced Daura. Janja was wrong. As she came to know him better, she realized that he had chosen the opposite tack from the truth. He was covering for Daura. The just-nubile girl of twelve had initiated the incestuous liaison. To lie so as to cover for her was the way of Ramesh Jageshwar called Kshatriya.

Again Janja was compa.s.sed about by swirling gray. It was hard not to think of this man as honorable, after over five weeks here with him.

He and Daura had married, each to another. Within 180.

two years he had been divorced. Since then he had lived unmarried, although that did not mean that he lived either unattached or celibate. His sister's husband had died four years after their marriage. A year later she had joined her brother in what became a permanent partners.h.i.+p, in business and in bed. A year or so after joining him, Daura had told Ramesh directly that she had slain her husband. His guilt heightened, though he had neither had anything to do with the murder nor even known about it.

Ramesh Jageshwar, slaver and commander of scores of slavers, stealer and seller of thousands of human beings annually, felt no guilt about his business. His guilt came from his incest and was magnified by the fact that his sister had murdered her husband in order to come here and live with him, as His lover.

He admitted to a feeling near relief when she vanished, months ago. At first he had a.s.sumed that she had been s.n.a.t.c.hed by a rival. Then, when no threats or attempts at bargaining were made, he suspected something called the Outerworld League.