Their Master's War

Nine

"Of course, they do a job on you. Mindshot, implants, hormone runrounds, and probably stuff we don't even know about. And there's the constant Therem psych. It goes on and on until you can't even think straight. All you've got in your head are the slogans. We are the servants of our fighting men, we're here to please, it's our contribution to the Alliance, our part in the war effort, and all the rest of the eternal crap. From the waist down you're on a perpetual burn, but inside your brain there's this cold, furious knot of truth. We're slaves on this hunk of rock, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it."

Hark ran an uncomfortable hand down Conchela's back. Her skin was so smooth, all he wanted to do was make love to her again. He wanted to repeat the sensation of losing himself in her body. He had no idea how to cope with her sudden anger.

"Come on, now, it can't be that bad."

She slowly turned to look at him. He wanted to put his hands on her breasts, but suddenly he didn't dare.

"It can't be that bad? You troopers are so damned ignorant. It can't be anything but that bad. That's how it's been designed. They keep you stupid, and they seduce you with power, the power to run all over the universe and stomp and smash and blow up anything that gets in your way. It doesn't matter that you die somewhere along the line, you've got to die anyway."

Hark thought of the jumps and the dry, bitter taste of fear going down in the dropcraft. "You don't really know."

"Sure we know. We know better than you do. We've seen thousands of you. We've screwed thousands of you. It's a lifelong line on the old recstar."

Her mood was changing. The anger had diminished to bitterness.

"The only way to keep yourself from the stare is to not see the faces. The men come through, but you don't know them."

She shook her head. "Why the hell did you have to come here, Hark?"

Hark propped himself up on one elbow. He simply couldn't follow her mood swings. "Maybe it was our destiny."

"You men still believe all that. That's what keeps you ignorant. There is no destiny. Our destiny was sold to the Therem Alliance centuries ago."

Bitterness gave way to a terrible sadness. Her arms slid around his neck, and she pulled him to her. His face was between her breasts. He felt her sigh.

"Why the hell did you have to come here, Harkaan?"

Before they made love again, she gave him a small whiff of sweet gas from a tiny vial, only a fraction of the size of the ones they'd been passing around in the-dome. It wasn't enough to make him dizzy; it just slowed everything. The previous desperate, rushing need was reduced to warm, easy desire. With so much more time, it seemed that she was able to aid and abet his pleasure in a dozen ways, ways that Hark hadn't imagined were possible. Her hands and mouth played games with his body. His eyes closed, and his breathing became deep and labored. He began to groan. His nerves spasmed. He found that he was talking to Gods that he'd thought were long forgotten. He was perfectly ready to die at any point except that the floods of sensation kept building and building. Why the hell did men have to fight when they could spend their time doing this? She was right. Men were ignorant.

At the finish, they were grunting and screaming and clawing at each other. In the afterglow, they clung for a long time, but eventually they had to fall apart. Hark lay on his back with his outstretched arm under Conchela's shoulders. He opened his eyes. Hers were closed. Could she be asleep? He turned his head and looked at the place where Conchela lived. It was nothing more than a cubicle, but compared to the messdeck, it was a haven of privacy. The bed took up exactly half of the chamber. It was draped with multicolored fabric hangings, irregularly shaped silks and satins that looked like offcuts from the manufacture of flags, banners, and decorative clothing. They turned the bed space into a shadowy, mysterious cave. The other half of the chamber was a complete contrast. It was stark and functional. There was a small workbench with a tiny lathe, a quartz arc, a bench-top anvil, and a miniature welding ring. In addition to her basic duties as a thumbprint prostitute, Conchela designed and made metal jewelry, which she bartered with the other women for clothes, cosmetics, extra food, and small luxuries such as alcohol and sweet gas.

"It's the only thing that keeps me sane," she had explained.

Alongside the workbench there were the survival basics of the Therem system: a water spigot, a diet gooper, and a waste swallow. These, at least, were the same as on the cluster. In a maze of shelves, there were jars and bottles, bunches of herbs, and vials of chemicals. There were the raw materials of her trade, the rolls of metal shim that she turned into small works of art. Hark envied her the ability to direct her own time even in this very minimal way. On the ship and in combat, there was always someone to tell one what to do.

Conchela opened her eyes and looked at Hark. "What are you thinking about?"

"Me?"

"There's no one else here."

Hark stared at the patchwork canopy above his head.

"I was thinking about all the stuff that you've got. We don't have anything up on the cluster, only what we can hide in the cavity behind our lockers."

"You have to remember that I'm so much older than you. I've been here on the recstar much longer than you've been on your ship."

"How can that be? We were picked up at the same time."

"You make the jumps. They do things to relative time. Didn't you think I looked older?" "I don't know. I…"

"You thought it was all a result of the life of degradation I've been leading." "I knew you'd changed." "You could lie."

Hark's embarrassment robbed him of words. Conchela leaned over and kissed him. "You're still such a boy."

The hours passed slowly, and Hark luxuriated in the unique sensation of having nothing do and nobody shouting at him. They ate and drank and made love. In between, they slept. Each time Hark woke, he experienced a moment of panic, sure that he was back on the messdeck and that it had all been a dream. Then he saw that he was still in Conchela's cubicle, and he eased down under the covers with a sigh. He didn't want to think about going back to the ship.

At times, Conchela talked. Along the track of her swings of mood, she seemed to feel a need to explain. She wanted Hark to know exactly what it meant to be a woman and to live on a recstar.

"I guess you could say that we remember. You men see nothing but combat. You're isolated in your crews and your twenties. We see thousands of you guys. Over the years, millions of men pass through a place like this. Each one has his own part of the puzzle."

"What puzzle?"

"Who we are, of course. Where the human species came from and where it's going. It's the one way we can fight against the system, against the Therem, if you like. They've stopped us having children. That's for the primitives out on i e planets. All that's left for us is to maintain the memory."

"You mean you remember what the men tell you?"

"That's what they come here for. To get laid and to tell it to somebody. You all have to tell it to somebody. You don't want to believe that after you've gone, nobody will remember. I guess that's what we're doing. We're remembering you all."

"I don't have anything I want to tell."

"Oh, yes, you do. And you will. You'll sob it out to someone before you leave this rock."

Conchela swung her legs over the side of the bed. The flow of words had temporarily halted. The story seemed to be unfolding in fits and starts and snatches. She poured herself dark, amber wine from a stone jug.

"You'd better thumb my sensor a few times. I'm supposed to be working. I don't want to be closed out of this place because I didn't make the norm."

Hark pressed his thumb into her sensor five times. "Is that enough?"

"It'll help." Almost an hour passed before she picked up the story again.

"Bit by bit, we get parts of the picture. It wasn't always like this. That's one thing we know for sure. Before the Yal came, we had our own civilization. We had even colonized the closest planets in our home system."

"Before the Therem came?"

"In the very beginning, it was the Yal that occupied our home world. The Therem took it and us from them."

"You learned all this from listening to the men talk? The men on my messdeck know nothing of these things."

"You have to realize that this knowledge has taken centuries to acquire. Also, there are those of us who go up to the clusters to service the medians. The medians know much more than anyone suspects."

"Have you ever been with a median?"

Conchela laughed. "A median? You're joking. I'm not the kind the medians go for. Something for which I'm profoundly grateful."

"And, according to the medians, it was the Yal that destroyed this human civilization that could travel from planet to planet?"

"The Yal only suppressed it. The Therem, being the Therem, had much more elaborate plans."

"You sound as if you really hate the Therem."

"Don't you?"

"I don't know. We don't get much time to think about that sort of thing. We know we hate the Yal. Most of the time that's enough."

"Doesn't that say it all? The Therem destroy our identity as a species and spread us over the galaxy to be their slaves, and you only hate who they tell you to hate."

"It's not really like that."

"You know it is. Oh yeah, you'll blame it on the suits or the topmen or the officers or something they put in the food, but deep down, you know it's the truth."

Conchela lay on her back, seemingly unwilling to say anything else. Hark put a hand on her stomach, but her body was stiff and unyielding. It was some minutes before she came around and pulled him to her. Sometime later, as they were lying side by side, filmed by sweat, Hark couldn't keep his curiosity to himself.

"What I don't understand is how you women manage to keep all these bits and pieces together."

"That's a question only a man could ask."

"It is?"

"Sure it is."

"So how do you do it?"

"Through the covens."

"Covens?"

"Another man's question."

She spelled it out. "Covens are cells of women. Seven women to each cell. We sift anything that we may have heard and then pass it on to the mother cell. Each mother cell controls seven covens. Beyond the mother cells are the processing enclaves, all the way to the committee of the seven High and Venerable Madames."

Hark was dumbfounded. "There's a whole system?"

"Don't you think women are capable of creating a system?"

"It sounds almost like a religion."

"It does have elements of a religion, but for the most part, they're a cover. It's really modeled on how the thinking machines work."

Hark decided not to ask about thinking machines. The answer would only confuse him. "Why do you need a cover?"

"To deceive the Therem. If they knew what we were doing, they'd more than likely dismantle the whole recstar system and exterminate us into the bargain."

"Why should they bother? There's no way that your keeping records can harm them."

"The Therein bother about everything. That's what makes them the Therem. It may only be a median's vanity, but there's even a theory that we make the Therem nervous. They may think that we're inferior to them, but we're too smart to be left to our own devices. We did get into space on our own. They don't want humans to have an independent history and culture that they can't control. Besides, they almost wiped us out once, and there's nothing to say that they won't do it again. We have to be careful."

"When did they nearly wipe you out?" "It was called the Lysistrata Massacre." "What's Lysistrata?"

"Who, not what. She was a character in a play by a man called Aristophanes." "Huh?"

"Don't worry about it. The massacre was over a century ago. Unrest was spreading across all the fronts. Needless to say, the recstars were among the most restless. Back then, things were a whole lot more slack but at the same time also cruder, going on bestial…"

"Bestial?" Hark wanted to hear about this.

"They were big on orgies back in those days. Piles of naked people, humping and pumping in a cave. It was pretty basic and the Venerable Madame decided that we weren't going to take it anymore. The Madame, by all accounts, was a hell of an orator. We only had the one back then. The committee of seven came later. The plan was simple. We'd totally withdraw our services. Not a man jack was going to have any fun until conditions got better. She believed it would be simplest for the Therem to negotiate. The Therem didn't negotiate. They kept the men locked up in their clusters, and they turned the lanteres and the red spheres loose on us. The lantere execution squads slaughtered over three-quarters of the population before they were called off."

Her eyes were hard, and she quickly took a sip of her wine.

"They brought in new women from the planets to re-populate the place, but there were enough survivors to provide a link with the past. There actually were improvements. The thumbcredit system was introduced. The craftwork was encouraged; the brewing, baking, and distilling; the food production. Our upstart need for an identity was channeled into forsaken basket weaving. There was another side, though. Any keeping of permanent records was immediately stamped out. It was after this that the coven system evolved. As far as we know, the Therem think it's just some witch cult revival, straight out of the planetary memory. They like us to get ourselves locked into that kind of primitive shit."

"Did you ought to be telling me this? I might get drunk or something and blurt it all out."

"Who are you going to tell? Your topman? The top-men know about us. Besides, any woman only knows in detail what her coven or group knows. The thing is the sum of its parts, and they'd have to kill all of us this time. If we ain't a nuisance, the odds are that they'll leave us alone."

She took another sip of wine.

"I can't talk anymore."

Her breakneck emotional cycle seemed to have once again completed itself. She shivered and wrapped a blanket around her body. Hark sat up. He wanted to comfort her, but the way she was holding herself warned him off. As far as it was possible in the intimacy of the bed, she appeared to be shutting him out. He lay down again, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. He waited a full fifteen minutes until he guessed she'd softened enough for him to talk to her.

"Do you think we'll ever get out of this?" he asked her.

"You mean you and me? We don't have a chance."

"I meant the human race as a whole. Do you think we'll ever get free of the Therem?"

"There's always the prophecy."

"The prophecy?"

"You never heard about it?"

Hark shook his head. "No, never."

Conchela glanced at him scornfully. "You troopers really know nothing. It was back before the massacre. The Venerable Madame of the time was Mystic Heda. She had a habit of falling into trances and talking in tongues. Her pronouncements became more and more outrageous, and people began to wonder how long it would be before the Therem did something about her. Finally she went into a trance in front of a huge crowd and announced that sometime in the future, a leader would come who'd free us from the Therem and take us to our own planet."

"Do you believe that?"

"I'd like to, but it's hard. Some of Heda's lesser prophecies did come true, so I try. It's the only hope we've got."

"What happened to Mystic Heda?"

"She was executed."

Conchela stood up and started searching through the clothes that were scattered on the floor.

"It's time we got out of here," she told him.

"What?" Getting out of there was the very last thing that Hark had in mind.

"Did you think that we'd stay shacked up in here, cozy and romantic, until you were called back to the ship?"

"It seemed like an idea."

"Forget it."

"What did I do?"

"You didn't do anything. It's just that we can't beat the system. The Therem don't like romance. They think it makes you guys hard to handle. They like you to spend your liberty drunk and stupid."

"But who would know?"

"Thumbprints, you idiot. If you keep thumbing my sensor, the big brain is going to notice and we're going to get a visit from the shore patrol. Besides, I'm programmed to get bored with you in double time. It's only the fact that we knew each other back on the planet that's been keeping it in check."

Hark was stunned. It had all seemed so easy. Conchela grinned at him.

"Don't look so desolate. I'll come with you and help you find your messmates. They'll take care of you."

The moment they stepped out into the corridor, they were caught up in an eddying spiral of drunks and women. The recstar never closed. It seemed to be in a permanent condition of roaring night. If anything, the noise seemed louder than when he had gone with Conchela to her cubicle. The booths were humming, and the fighting men were rapidly turning into animals. The light seemed more red than he remembered, bloodshot with anger and alcohol. They had to edge around two men who were head to head, blindly slugging and pounding each other. They also had to skirt a drop pilot who was throwing up on his tunic and stand aside when a shore patrol crunched by. It was the first time that Hark had been able to take a close look at these guardians of order in their lumbering servo suits. They appeared almost indestructible, yellow plate steel with heavy-duty rivets and paint that was flaking to the undercoat. There was nothing comical in the way they rolled and swayed, reproducing the movements of their human operators. The servos were worn and dangerously capable. The giant claws on the ends of their arms could circle a man's waist. They were quite merciless. Despite their crisp white uniforms and hard faces, the human operators seemed almost fragile in comparison to the massive machines that encased them.

"You don't want to mess with those bastards."

"I already learned that."

A troupe of dancers in huge, grotesque masks were coming toward them. The group was a large one, thirteen in all. They were moving slowly, beating on small hand drums, alternately crouching and then stretching up, grasping for the ceiling. They were followed by a large crowd of drunken men, shuffling and stumbling in their wake. Some were aping the crouching and reaching movements of the dancers. Hark and Conchela stood and watched them pass. There was something ponderous and primitive about the ragged procession-almost sinister. Hark realized what was disturbing him. The march reminded him of the way they'd conducted rites for the dead back on the planet. Conchela must have felt it, too. When the parade had passed, she let out a long breath but quickly covered herself by being brisk and matter of fact.

"You said your messmates had taken over a booth with a serpent banner?" "It was under a vent shaft."

She pointed over to the right. "I think the place we're looking for is just over there."

They cut through a small side corridor and made a left turn. When they came out into the main corridor again, Hark thought that he recognized some of the booths. Then he spotted the air shaft and the serpent banner.

"There it is."

The "phallic serpent" looked a little the worse for wear. A number of chairs and tables had been smashed, and pieces were scattered around the floor. Helot and a woman with short-cropped hair were passed out in the middle of the debris. Kemlo sat at a table with a drink in front of him, but he seemed no more aware of the world around him than those on the floor were. Conchela took hold of Hark's arm.

"I'm going to leave you now. I've got to get back to work."

"Will I see you again?"

Conchela shook her head. "I don't think so. It's better this way. You'll find other women to take care of you through the rest of your liberty."

"Maybe I'll come here again."

"I doubt it. Even if you did, I'd be an old woman by then."

"The time distortion?"

"We can never go back."

"I haven't seen any old women. What happens to them?"

"You don't want to know."

She kissed him quickly on the cheek.

"Good-bye, Harkaan."

She started to walk away.

"Conchela… wait."

She didn't stop. Hark's first impulse was to go after her, but he stopped himself. She turned a corner and was gone.

Vana had been replaced as booth hostess by a dark-haired woman with slanted eyes and an ample figure. She stood in the back of the booth, watching Hark.

"You liked her, did you?"

"I guess so."

"And she just gave you the brush?" "Yeah."

"She's right, you know. You can't fall in love in one of these places."

Hark dropped his gaze to the floor. "I guess you're right."

"Are you one of this bunch from the Anah 5?"

A new feeling was creeping over Hark: He was a part of this bunch. And that fact was paramount-because when it came down to the line, that was all he was. He knew that the psych programming was taking over, but what the hell, he was going to let it. It was better than hurt and confusion.

"Damn right I am."

"Then damn well lay some thumb on my sensor. I don't know when your messmates are going to be back. If they get back at all. The mood they were in, they're likely to get shipped out by the shores. The name's Vana, by the way."

"The last one was Vana."

"Everyone's Vana in this booth, honey."

"Mine's Hark."

"I don't remember names, honey. What about the thumb?"

"Where did the others go?"

"Who knows? They were blind drunk and looking for trouble. They could be anywhere by now. If I don't get some thumb, I'm going to have to let the place go to some other outfit."

She held out the sensor. Hark took it, but before he could press his thumb into it, Dyrkin came through the entrance.

"What the hell is going on here?"

"She said she was going to let the booth go."

Dyrkin's eyes narrowed. He glared at Vana.

"I paid you in front, you thieving bitch. And I warned you about clipping the boys."

"You can't blame a girl for trying."

"I just don't want to catch you trying."

"You won't."

"I just did."

"But you didn't do anything about it because you know you won't get another place now that the whole cluster's in. I won't be blatant, but I'm going to make my profit."

Dyrkin shrugged. He wasn't about to waste time arguing with the obvious. He turned to Hark.

"So what have you been up to? I ain't seen you since the first fight. You ain't a loner, are you?"

The word "loner" came out as if a loner was something he definitely shouldn't want to be.

"I met a woman. She came from my planet."

Dyrkin raised an eyebrow. "That must have been weird."

"It was, kinda."

"I don't think I'd fancy it. What did you do?" "Screwed a lot, and she talked a lot." "No doubt she filled you up with a lot of witchery." "She said that they remembered." "It doesn't do us any good." "It's good to think you're remembered somewhere." "When you're gone, you're gone." Dyrkin didn't seem to expect Hark to argue with the obvious, either. Hark didn't.

"What happened to the others?" he asked.

"Liquored up and crazy," Dyrkin replied.

"How crazy?"

"Crazy enough that the next two hundred minutes will find Renchett and a half dozen others back on the ship in a punishment pod. If nothing else, it's shaping up as a liberty that's going to be remembered."

"What's Renchett up to?"

"Usual Renchett stuff. Some woman told him that the dauquoi had an RR facility on another level of this rock. He took it into his head to break into this level and see how the dauquoi have their fun. Needless to say, he found a bunch of drunken assholes to go along with him."

"What are the dauquoi?"

"You never came across dauquoi?"

"No."

"Well, they're these big worms. They ain't too smart, and they're mainly used to keep the ducts clear, but they have this real complicated reproductive process, so I guess they qualify for a kind of liberty."

"Shouldn't we do something to stop him?"

"You and me? You want to try stopping Renchett when he's blind drunk?"

"No, I guess not."

"Me neither. I figure if it's anybody's problem, it's Rance's. He can deal with it."