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you who s missing."
"You don t think they could have mistaken her for me, do you?" she gasped in
alarm. "Taken her to be united with my lady?"
He wasn t sure if she was afraid for Rowan, or afraid that Rowan would steal
her place. What a ghastly, hideous new paranoia.
"How soon are you... no," he reassured her. Himself. "No. At a glance in the
hallway, sure, you d look quite alike, but someone would have to take a closer
look for that. She s years older than you. It s just not possible."
"What should I do?" She tried to get to her feet; he held her arm, pulled her
back to his side on the bed.
"Nothing," he advised. "It s all right. Tell them - tell them I made you stay
in here."
She looked askance at his littleness. "How?"
"Trickery. Threats. Psychological coercion," he said truthfully. "You can
blame it on me."
She looked most dubious.
How old was she? He d spent the last two hours teasing out her whole life
story, and there didn t seem to be very much of it.
Her talk was an odd mixture of sharpness and naivete. The greatest adventure
of her life had been her brief kidnapping by the
Dendarii Mercenaries.
Rowan.
She s made it out. Then what
? Would she come back for him? How? This was Jackson s Whole. You couldn t
trust anyone. People were meat, here. Like this girl in front of him. He had a
sudden nightmarish picture of her, empty-skulled, blank-
eyed.
"I m sorry," he whispered. "You are so beautiful... on the inside
. You deserve to live. Not be eaten by that old woman."
"My lady is a great woman," she said sturdily. "She deserves to live more."
What kind of twisted ethics drove Lotus Durona, to make of this girl an
imitation-willing sacrifice? Who did Lotus think she was fooling? Only
herself, apparently.
"Besides," said Lilly Junior. "I thought you liked that fat blonde. You were
squirming all over her."
"Who?"
"Oh, that s right. That must have been your clone-twin."
"My brother," he corrected automatically. What was this story, Mark?
She was getting relaxed, now, reconciled to her strange captivity. And bored.
She looked at him speculatively. "Would you like to kiss me again?" she
inquired.
It was his height. It brought out the beast in women. Unthreatened, they
became bold. He normally considered it a quite delightful effect, but this
girl worried him. She was not his... equal. But he had to kill time, keep her
in here, keep her entertained for as long as possible. "Well... all right...."
After about twenty minutes of tame and decorous necking, she drew back and
remarked, "That s not the way the Baron does it."
"What do you do for Vasa Luigi?"
She unfastened his trouser-strings and started to show him. After about a
minute, he choked, "Stop!"
"Don t you like it? The Baron does."
"I m sure." Dreadfully aroused, he fled to the chair by the little dining
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table, and scrunched himself up in it. "That s, um, very nice, Lilly, but it s
too serious for you and me."
"I don t understand."
"Just exactly so." She was a child
, despite her grown-up body, he was increasingly certain of it. "When you are
older... you will find your own boundaries. And you can invite people across
them as you choose. Right now you scarcely know where you leave off and the
world begins. Desire should flow from within, not be imposed from without." He
tried to choke off his own flow by sheer will-power, half-successfully.
Vasa Luigi, you scum
.
She frowned thoughtfully. "I m not going to be older."
He wrapped his arms around his drawn-up knees, and shuddered.
Hell
.
He suddenly remembered how he d met Sergeant Taura. How they had become
lovers, in that desperate hour. Ah, ambushed again by the pot-holes in his
memory. There were certain obvious parallels with his current situation, it
must be why his subconscious was trying to apply the old successful solution.
But Taura was a bioengineered mutation, short-lived. The Dendarii medicos had
stolen her a little more time with metabolic adjustments, but not much. Every
day was a gift, each year a miracle. She was living her whole life as a
smash-and-grab, and he heartily approved. Lilly Junior could live a century,
if she wasn t...
cannibalized. She needed to be seduced to life, not sex.
Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a
contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it.
"Don t you want to live?" he asked her.
"I... don t know."
"I do. I want to live. And believe me, I have considered the alternative
deeply.
"
"You are... a funny, little, ugly man. What can you get from life?"
"
Everything
. And I mean to get more."
I want, I want
. Wealth, power, love. Victories, splendid, brilliant victories, shining
reflected in the eyes of comrades. Someday, a wife, children. A herd of
children, tall and healthy, to rock those who whispered
Mutant!
right back on their heels and over on their pointed heads.
And I mean to have a brother
.
Mark. Yeah. The surly little fellow that Baron Ryoval was, quite possibly,
taking apart strand by strand right now. In Miles s place. His nerves
stretched to the screaming point, with no release.
I ve got to make time
.
He finally persuaded Lilly Junior to go to sleep, wrapped up in the covers on
Rowan s side of the bed. Chivalrously, he took the chair. A couple of hours
into the night and he was in agony. He tried the floor. It was cold. His chest
ached. He dreaded the thought of waking with a cough. He finally crept into [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]