Melissa Scott - Shadow Man

“I would imagine.” That was the first stranger, the ambiguous one. The voice was as indeterminate as the body and clothes, in the midrange that could mean almost any gender. He could just see the swell of breasts beneath the silk, not quite concealed by the drape of the vest, but the stranger was too wide through the shoulders, too narrow-hipped, to be a woman. Probably a herm, then, Tatian thought, with regret: 3e wasn’t busty enough, or long legged enough, to be a fem. Ȝe probably passed for male, though—most herms did—but it was still hard to be sure from 3er clothes. It was too bad; 3e would have been a striking woman.

“Do you think the rain bothers it?” 3e went on, and Tatian shook his head.

“I doubt it. Though anything’s possible.”

“There’s a woman over in Startown,” 3e said, slowly, and tilted 3er head to one side. In that position, 3e looked more than ever like a cat, pointed face and wide-set eyes framed by a mane of coarse black hair. “She does some work on implants.”

“Oh?” Tatian said, without much hope, and the indigene nodded.

“Starli—Starli Massingberd, her name is, she’s no kin of mine. But she works the kittereen , the jetcar circuit, cars and racers. You might talk to her.”

That sounded promising, after all, and Tatian nodded. “Starli Massingberd—in Startown?”

“She has a shop there. She’ll be on the rolls.”

“I’ll look for her,” Tatian said. And I’ll also check her out with Reiss . Shan Reiss raced kittereens , when he wasn’t driving for NAPD. “Thanks.”

The indigene smiled again. “I’m Warreven.” Ȝe nodded to the other indigene. “And Malemayn. We’re both Stillers.”

“Ser Mhyre Tatian.” Tatian held out his hand in automatic reflex, lulled by the Creole, and Warreven took it gingerly. Assimilated 3e might be, but the handshake was still unfamiliar.

“We were heading out for lunch,” Warreven went on, releasing the other’s hand. “Care to join us?”

Behind him, the other indigene—Malemayn—made a soft noise that might have been laughter or disapproval, or both. Tatian considered for an instant. It wasn’t a proposition, exactly, more of a first move, but the hints of interest, of trade, were unmistakable. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’ve got to get back to the office.”

“Maybe some other time,” Warreven said, and Tatian nodded. The rain had almost stopped, and watery sunlight was beginning to show through the clouds. Curls of steam rose from the puddles in the plaza, and the air smelled suddenly, violently, of seaweed.

It wasn’t a long walk from the courthouse to the Estrange where NAPD had its offices, but the sun was fully out by the time Tatian reached the arcade that led to Drapdevel Court. All but the largest puddles had evaporated, leaving wet shadows that shrank as he watched, and his shirt clung damply to his body in the revived heat. The old woman who owned the rights to the vendor’s pitch at the mouth of the arcade nodded to him, but didn’t stop rearranging her stock, disordered when she’d covered it against the rain. Tatian knew better, after four years on Hara, to hope for much that he could comfortably eat or drink, but he scanned the trays anyway. She had dozens of braids of feel good, some in sheaths, the rest coiled for the smoking pot, and sticks of sourcane soaking in liquertie , a pottery jug heating over a candle flame, and, at the base of the cheap clown-glass statue of Madansa, the spirit who controlled the markets, a plug of odd fibrous stuff he didn’t recognize. That was worth investigating—he could name four proprietary drugs that had been discovered as an unknown plant in a marketwoman’s tray—and he paused to examine it. Up close, it seemed to be a web of close-growing, hairy cords wound over an inner object the size of a child’s fist. He picked it up curiously, turned it over in his hand. The cords were leathery to the touch, the hairs prickly in his palm; the dark brown skin seemed almost warm to the touch. He sniffed it warily, and grimaced at the familiar musty odor. Hungry-jack, he thought, and in the same instant found the cross-shaped mark at the tip of the ovoid where the pod’s pseudomouth had been. He pried back one lip, using the corner of a fingernail, and found the scarlet flesh of the inner pod. The old woman was watching him narrowly, and he handed it to her, saying, “Hungry-jack, grandmother?”

She nodded, weighing the pod in her hand. “They clean the pods when they take them in the seraals . This is the whole thing, dried in the sun on a sand bed.”

“Is there a difference?”

The woman shrugged. “It’s different—milder, but you’ll still fly, my son.”

There was no point, Tatian thought, trying to explain off-world physiology to the indigenes. Harans used the full pharmacopeia almost from the cradle; they grew up chewing poppinberry for a stimulant and drinking nightwake and sweetrum to relax, and a ten-year-old was as likely as an adult to throw a braid of feelgood on the kitchen fire after a hard day’s work. An off-worlder couldn’t hope to match that inbred tolerance. “I’ll take it.”

The old woman looked him over. “Three megs a decigram. Or all of it for fifty grams of metal.”

Hara was metal-poor, and the little that lay close to the surface tended to be tied up in the ironwood trees that grew along the slopes of the central mountains. It was hard, sometimes, for Tatian to imagine the relative worth of the off-world coins in his pockets. And Warreven, he thought suddenly, had been wearing metal bracelets—not glass or carved and painted ironwood, but bright, silver-colored metal. And so had Malemayn: they were Important Men, then, in the Stiller clan. He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of coins. The old woman set up her scale—placing it politely in front of the statue of Madansa, though, equally politely, she made only a perfunctory invocation—and set a fifty gram weight in the seller’s pan. Tatian counted out coins, six quarter-dollars from Joshua, and then five copper hundredths stamped with the Ansonia Corporation’s monoglyph to bring the scales into balance. The woman eyed the scales and took her weight away.

“Enjoy the hungry-jack, my son.”

“Thank you, grandmother,” Tatian answered, and tucked the pod into his trousers pocket with the remainder of his coins. He hadn’t saved much, given the exchange rate, by paying in metal, but then he could afford it.

He went on into the arcade, grateful for the fugitive cool of its shadow, and came out into the sudden brilliance of the court. The bricks that paved the central space were still a centimeter deep in water, and the sunlight glanced from its surface as if from a mirror. The walls of the surrounding buildings were patched and flecked with the reflected light. Tatian sighed, anticipating a flooded cellar, and waded through the blood-warm water, scattering the sky’s bright image and making the shards of light dance across the red brick walls. He fetched up gratefully on the low doorstep of NAPD’s office and stooped to free himself from his wet shoes, peering in through the open door. Stane Derry—Derebought Stane, the office’s only full-time botanist, looked back at him from the door of her own office, her broad face eloquent in its lack of expression.

“How’s the cellar?” Tatian asked, and stepped barefoot into the building, leaving his shoes to dry on the stone sill.

“Don’t ask,” Derebought answered, and then relented. “The pump’s screwed up again. Reiss is down there now, trying to get it going. We’ve got a couple of centimeters of water wall to wall.”

Tatian nodded, already relieved of the worst of his worries. The backups and other records were stored in watertight cases that stood a quarter of a meter off the stone floor: there would be no real damage from this flooding. “I thought Reiss was in Irenfot for the races.”