«She's an ARM,» Carlos said.
Feather Filip and I were sharing a tamale too spicy for Sharrol. Feather caught me staring and grinned back. An ARM?
I'd expected Feather to be striking. She wasn't exactly beautiful. She was strong: lean, almost gaunt, with prominent tendons in her neck, lumps flexing at the corners of her jaws. You don't get strength like that without training in illegal martial arts.
The Amalgamated Regional Militia is the United Nations police, and the United Nations took a powerful interest in Carlos Wu. What was she, Carlos's bodyguard? Was that how they'd met?
But whenever one of us spoke of the ARM that afternoon, Feather changed the subject.
I'd have thought Carlos would orchestrate our sleepfield dance. Certified genius that he is, would he not be superb at that, too? But Feather had her own ideas, and Carlos let her lead. Her lovemaking was aggressive and acrobatic. I felt her strength that afternoon. And my own lack, raised as I was in the lower gravity of We Made It.
And three hours passed in that fashion, while the wonderful colors of the reef darkened to light-amplified night.
And then Feather reached far out of the field, limber as a snake … reached inside her backpurse, and fiddled, and frowned, and rolled back and said, «We're shielded.»
Carlos said, «They'll know.»
«They know me,» Feather said, «They're thinking that I let them use their monitors because I'm showing off, but now we're going to try something a little kinky. Or maybe I'm just putting them on. I've done it before —»
«Then —»
«Find a glitch so I can block their gear with something new. Then they fix it. They'll fix this one too, but not tonight. It's just Feather coming down after a long week.»
Carlos accepted that. «Stet. Sharrol, Beowulf, do you want to leave Earth? We'd be traveling as a group, Louis and Tanya and the four of us. This is for keeps.»
Sharrol said, «I can't.» Carlos knew that.
He said, «You can ride in cold sleep. Home's rotation period is fifty minutes shorter than Earth's. Mass the same, air about the same. Tectonic activity is higher, so it'll smell like there's just a trace of smog —»
«Carlos, we talked this to death a few years ago.» Sharrol was annoyed. «Sure, I could live on Home. I don't like the notion of flying from world to world like a, a corpse, but I'd do it. But the UN doesn't want me emigrating, and Home won't take flat phobes!»
The flatlander phobia is a bone-deep dread of being cut off from Earth. Fear of flying and/or falling is an extreme case, but no flat phobe can travel in space. You find few flat phobes off Earth; in fact, Earthborn are called flatlanders no matter how well they adjust to life elsewhere.
But Feather was grinning at Sharrol. «We go by way of Fafnir. We'll get to Home as Shashters. Home has already approved us for immigration —»
«Under the name Graynor. We're all married,» Carlos amplified.
I said, «Carlos, you've been off Earth. You were on Jinx for a year.»
«Yeah. Bey, Sigmund Ausfaller and his gnomes never lost track of me. The United Nations thinks they own my genes. I'm supervised wherever I go.»
But they keep you in luxury, I thought. And the grass is always greener. And Feather had her own complaint. «What do you know about the ARM?» she asked us.
«We listen to the vid,» Sharrol said.
«Sharrol, dear, we vet that stuff. The ARM decides what you don't get to know about us. Most of us take psychoactive chemicals to keep us in a properly paranoid mind frame during working hours. We stay that way four days, then go sane for the weekend. If it's making us too crazy, they retire us.»
Feather was nervous and trying to restrain it, but now hard-edged muscles flexed, and her elbows and knees were pulling in protectively against her torso. «But some of us are born this way. We go off chemicals when we go to work. The 'doc doses us back to sanity Thursday afternoon. I've been an ARM schiz for thirty-five years. They're ready to retire me, but they'd never let me go to some other world, knowing what I know. And they don't want a schiz making babies.»
I didn't say that I could see their point. I looked at Sharrol and saw hope in the set of her mouth, ready to smile but holding off. We were being brought into these plans way late. Rising hackles had pulled me right out of any postcoital glow.
Feather told me, «They'll never let you go either, Beowulf.»
And that was nonsense. «Feather, I've been off Earth three times since I got here.»
«Don't try for four. You know too much. You know about the Core explosion, and diplomatic matters involving alien races —»
«I've left Earth since —»
«— and Julian Forward's work.» She gave it a dramatic pause. «We'll have some advanced weaponry out of that. We would not want the kzinti to know about that, or the trinocs, or certain human domains. That last trip, do you know how much talking you did while you were on Gummidgy and Jinx? You're a friendly, talkative guy with great stories, Beowulf!»
I shrugged. «So why trust me with this? Why didn't you and Carlos just go?»
She gestured at Carlos. He grinned and said, «I insisted.»
«And we need a pilot,» Feather said. «That's you, Beowulf. But I can bust us loose. I've set up something nobody but an ARM would ever dream of.»
She told us about it.
To the kzinti the world was only a number. Kzinti don't like ocean sports. The continent was Shasht, 'Burrowing Murder. Shasht was nearly lifeless, but the air was breathable and the mines were valuable. The kzinti had dredged up megatons of sea bottom to fertilize a hunting jungle, and they got as far as seeding and planting before the Fourth Man-Kzin War.
After the war humankind took Shasht as reparations, and named the world Fafnir.
On Fafnir, Feather's investigations found a family of six: two men, two women, two children. The Graynors were ready to emigrate. Local law would cause them to leave most of their wealth behind; but then they'd lost most of it already backing some kind of recreational facilities on the continent.
«I've recorded them twice. The Graynors'll find funding waiting for them at Wunderland. They won't talk. The other Graynor family will emigrate to Home —»
«That's us?»
Feather nodded. Carlos said, «But if you and the kids won't come, Feather'll have to find someone else.»
I said, «Carlos, you'll be watched. I don't suppose Feather can protect you from that.»
«No. Feather's taken a much bigger risk —»
«They'll never miss it.» She turned to me. «I got hold of a little stealth lander, Fourth War vintage, with a cold sleep box in back for you, Sharrol. We'll take that down to Fafnir. I've got an inflatable boat to take us to the Shasht North spaceport, and we'll get to Home on an Outbound Enterprises iceliner. Sharrol, you'll board the liner already frozen; I know how to bypass that stage.» Feather was excited now. She gripped my arm and said, «We have to go get the lander, Beowulf. It's on Mars.»
Sharrol said, «Tanya's a flat phobe too.»
Feather's fingers closed with bruising force. I sensed that the lady didn't like seeing her plans altered.
«Wait one,» Carlos said. «We can fix that. We're taking my 'doc, aren't we? It wouldn't be plausible, let alone intelligent, for Carlos Wu to go on vacation without his 'doc. Feather, how big is the lander's freezebox?»
«Yeah. Right. It'll hold Tanya … better yet, both children. Sharrol can ride in your 'doc.»
We talked it around. When we were satisfied, we went home.
Three days out, three days returning, and a week on Mars while the ARM team played with the spacecraft Boy George. It had to be Feather and me. I would familiarize myself with Boy George, Feather would supervise the ARM crews … and neither of us were flat phobes.