The Sardonyx Net Part 40

He touched a bare s.p.a.ce on a shelf. The gla.s.s sculpture Rhani had given him, now melted and unrecognizable in the wreckage of the house, would have fit right there. Too bad, he thought. Pus.h.i.+ng apart the terrace drapes, he felt for the handle, found it, and slid the door aside.

A woman sat, cross-legged, on the terrace, a watering can at her feet.

She rose instantly. She was barefoot. Her gaze was steady, her eyes normal, not dilated or fixed -- but the steady look was a shade too direct. She was frightened of him. The fear did not tantalize or excite him. She tilted her head to one side, evidently waiting for him to speak, to react, to tell her what to do.... He felt his chest tighten with tension. He couldn't breathe. He gasped, and the tension broke, shattered like ice breaking.

Cara had entered his bedroom at his back. With anger in her tone, she said, "I tried to tell you. You wouldn't listen."

"When did she get here?" he said.

"The Barracks' bubble brought her," said the steward. "They delivered her yesterday without a word of explanation. I have the invoice." She put her hands on her hips. "Zed-ka, what possible use have we for a computer technician?"

Zed blinked at the total irrelevance of the question. Finally he said, "Cara, go away, please."

Cara opened her mouth, shut it with a snap like a door closing, and stalked from the room. Zed gazed at the woman on the terrace. He had not expected her to be here, not yet. He wondered what they had told her about him in the Barracks. He thought: Be human, d.a.m.n it, Yago -- be kind. Send her away.

He couldn't.

Softly, he said, "Tell me your name."

She said, "Darien Riis." She sounded fragile as gla.s.s.

Brusquely he said, "You don't have to be afraid of me." She bowed her head.

"Do you know who I am?"

"You're Zed Yago. I remember you from the Net."

He had not seen her. There were plenty of prisoners he never saw; most, in fact. As chief medic, he checked the records, but the juniors only called him for certain cases. "I don't remember you," he said. "Were you sick? Did I come to your cell to treat you?"

She shook her head. "I saw you at the loading." She touched her hair. It was very lovely, long, red-gold, fine and flyaway.... "My hair was shorter then."

In the press of the loading he could easily have pa.s.sed her without noticing her. "You're not on dorazine."

"No. They stopped the dosage two days ago."

"We don't keep house slaves on dorazine."

"Am I yours?" she asked.

"No," he said. "You belong to my sister Rhani. I don't own slaves."

"What do I call you?" she said.

"Call me by my name."

"Zed," she said. He caught his breath. Her voice was husky with nervousness; it made her sound like Rhani.

"Come to the garden with me," he said. She followed him downstairs and into the kitchen. Immeld was cleaning a countertop. She looked up at them, lips tight. At the southern bank of flower beds, Timithos knelt, adjusting a water sprinkler. He waved.

Darien said, "It's lovely here."

After the Net and the Barracks, Zed guessed that the estate came close to her memories of freedom. She was looking at the dimensions of the place. He hoped with genuine fervor that she had not started looking for ways to escape.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"Enchanter."

"Does this remind you of home?"

"Not at all," she said. "I just like it." She gestured with an upturned palm. "Has it been here long?"

"About a hundred years. My grandmother built it. Her name was Orrin Yago."

"Is that the one who went to Nexus?"

"Yes. That's the one."

"We learned about her studying sector history."

They walked beneath a bitter-pear. Darien reached up to pluck a dangling fruit. Zed caught her fingers. "Don't," he said.

"I'm sorry."

"It's nothing to be sorry for," he said. "The fruit looks good but it isn't edible. I'm sparing you an awful taste."

She stared upward at the tree. "Aren't they pears?"

"Certainly. But Chabad's soil is extraordinarily alkaline, and all the fruits and vegetables we grow are affected by the alkalinity. We can breed them to grow, but we can't make them taste good."

"That seems unfair," she said.

"Nothing here is fair," said Zed. Her fingers, in his own bigger hand, were trembling. He let them go, and sat on the gra.s.s. She copied him. "Tell me about yourself," he said.

She drew her knees to her chin. "I've always lived on Enchanter. I lived in a family-group till I was twelve, and in a peer-group from twelve to fourteen. I studied to be a computer technician because I like fixing things.

The last job I held was in the Enchanter lab."

"What did you do that put you in prison?" "I was stupid," she said angrily. She rubbed her hand over her face as if to hide the fact that she was blus.h.i.+ng. "I skopped with another technician. He wouldn't leave me alone. I just wanted to distract him. He took me to his home and I gimmicked his cooking unit. He ended up with a bad burn. I ended up in prison." She half-smiled. "I tried to claim it was a practical joke, but the tribunal wouldn't believe me."

"Was it?"

"No," she said. "I wanted him to be burned."

Zed said, "We have a saying on Chabad: '_The past is past_.' I won't ask you again."

She bowed her head. The gesture was terrifying; it shrieked of vulnerability. "What did they tell you about me in Abanat?" he said.

She hesitated before she looked up. Her voice flattened. "They told me that you are a medic, and a pilot."

"Is that all?"

"No." She drew a breath; released it. "They told me that you're a s.a.d.i.s.t; that you like to hurt people."

"Is that the worst they told you?" He leaned toward her.

"Yes," she said. He wondered if she were telling the truth. Even he had overheard the stories they told about him and Rhani. His own hands were shaking.

He touched the ground, seeking stability. Gra.s.s stems curled around his wrists.

She flinched back.

"Don't be afraid," he said. "Please don't be afraid."

"How can I help it?"

"Say my name."

"Zed."

His hands curled like claws in the dirt. She still sounded like Rhani.

"You look like my sister, do you know that?" he said.

Darien said, "I saw a holo of her."

"You don't agree?"

"I don't see it."

"Wait till you meet her." He glanced at the house. "Your hair's redder than hers, and your eyes are brown. Hers are the color of topaz. But they're the same shape." Darien rubbed her chin. A lock of hair, like a copper coil, fell across her cheek. You _don't_ look like her, he thought. You look like what she was, at a time when you were huddling with your family in the snow of an Enchanter winter, when the future seemed as promising as a ripening fruit on a nearby tree, when I was fifteen.

He had wanted to touch her from the first moment he'd seen her. The impulse was frightening. Her jumpsuit was green, glittering with silver reflective threads; it made him think of seasons that Chabad did not have, it made her seem new, virginal.... He did not dare touch her. In that soft, husky voice, she said, "Why did you buy me?" They faced each other like distorted mirror images, under the shadows of the bitter-pear.

She spoke in Rhani's voice. Zed answered her truthfully. "I had to."

"Because I look like your sister?" He nodded. "Then why ask me questions?

It doesn't matter who I am. Put me back on dorazine; I'll be anything you want me to be."

"No!" said Zed, with such intensity that Darien flinched away. "Oh, don't," he said, and reached with desperate, tense care to touch her cheek.

"That _isn't_ what I need."

"What do you need?"

He could not tell her. He could not say: I need you to love me and not be afraid of me. He could not say: I need you to help me destroy nineteen years of careful conditioning. All his barriers were coming apart. He was frightened. He should not have talked to Yianni. "If I had wanted a doll, I could have had one made," he said. She tossed her hair back, in a gesture that had been Rhani's, when Rhani was seventeen. The uncanny resemblance made his heart leap in his chest. "I don't understand," she said.

"Don't try," said Zed. He stood, and held out a hand to help her to her feet. "Let's go back to the house," he said.

"Whatever you wish," she said quietly. Ignoring his hand, she stood, brus.h.i.+ng bits of gra.s.s from her jumpsuit.

It crossed his mind that it was uncanny, almost frightening, how quickly she had adapted to him, almost as if she had been made for him. Somewhere inside me is a romantic fool trying to get out, he thought, I can hear him screaming.

It's just an accident that she looks and sounds -- and moves, a little -- the way Rhani did. It must be an accident. Nothing in nature accounts for it.

Timidly she touched his right arm. "Do you want me to be your companion?"

It was as good a word as any. "You might think of it that way."

She persisted. "Is that my work?"

"Does that trouble you?"

"It's not my skill," she said. "I'm a computer tech."

"I'm sure my sister can make use of your skill. She may need a computer tech. She's going to be training a new secretary."

"Why?" Darien asked. Zed explained briefly. She rubbed her chin. "I have some experience as a secretary."

"Perhaps Rhani will want you to take the job on temporarily."

"I'd like that."

She faced him, in the kitchen. The house machinery sighed. She touched her upper left arm. "What about this?" she said.

"Even if I wanted to," Zed said, "I couldn't free you. I don't own slaves."

She caught her lower lip between her teeth. "I'll try," she said, shaking back the hair that fell loose and glowing like a sunset down her back. Zed couldn't tell if she spoke to herself or to him.

"Thank you," he said. "I'm going to my room now. It's the third door from the end on the left upstairs. I'll see you later, Darien." It was the first time he'd said her name. She smiled at him.

He went back to his bedroom. Never had it seemed more of a refuge. He put his palms flat against the cold gla.s.s of the terrace door. There were religions on the Living Worlds, but none thrived on Chabad, and though Zed had heard of several of them, he shared none of their beliefs. But he wished, with the vehemence of prayer, for patience with which to circ.u.mvent the danger in his own reactions.

She's such an innocent, he thought. I don't want to hurt her. He flexed his fingers. His left hand stung. Let me not hurt her. Let her trust my good will and not be disappointed.

Let her want _me_.

He ate a meal alone, in his room. Immeld, still obviously furious at him (probably for cutting Cara off), brought it to him. He looked idly through his booktapes, remembering Darien's questions about the estate and Orrin Yago. He was amused to find among them an old tape of Nakamura's _History_. In the later afternoon, he went to the hangar to repair the bubble. During the flight he had noticed a flaw, a flicker-effect in the opaqueing machanism of the skin. He had a general idea what might be wrong but he was not an engineer. Still, it was something to work on.... He had to take the entire mechanism out of the craft and put it under a light on his workbench. It took him several hours to locate the weak spot on the microchip. He could not replace it himself; a new chip would have to be ordered from the Landingport, and that would take several days.

Oh, well. He put the craft back together. The hangar was cool but not cool enough; by the time he was finished, his s.h.i.+rt was off and he was streaming sweat. Darien was sitting on a sawhorse, watching him.

He had no idea how long she'd been there. "I didn't hear you come in," he said. He was not entirely pleased to see her. All afternoon the conviction had been burgeoning in him: Yago, you're crazy. He had almost decided to send her back.

She held out a towel. "Here," she said. "You need it." It was true: taking it from her, he scrubbed his face and hair until his eyes stopped stinging, and draped the cloth around his neck. She had brought him a pitcher of fruit drink. She filled a gla.s.s and handed it to him.

The drink was precisely to his taste, not too sweet.

"Have some," he said.