David Drake - Balefires

"I know," Rigsbee admitted softly.

"You know? You think you know!" the voice shrieked. "But you will know, Judson, for eternity you will know if you…

"But it's no good to tell you that, is it?" the voice went on. "You will do this thing, I see. And you are wiser than I can ever hope to be; but because of what I am, Iknow things that you only accept. Not even you, Judson, can imagine what you are about to do to yourself. To your soul."

Rigsbee shrugged, ran a hand through his thinning hair while his eyes stared unseeing at the numbered spines of his volumes. "I'm sorry, Vera-"

"Goodbye." Her word was as soft and as dull as the first handful of dirt on a coffin. Rigsbee shuffled to the corner, let his hand brush down the wire cage. The albino starling within croaked, darted its head forward to spike the ball of his thumb.

"Goodbye, Vera," Rigsbee muttered, and he turned away again.

The back door groaned. The lock had worked smoothly, but the hinges were frozen with the grit of long disuse. The girl glanced up the outer wall before entering. It was too dark to tell the ivy from the trellis it climbed.

"Nice place," she said as she followed Rigsbee up the stairs. Her knee-length coat was of a plastic imitation cowhide, now torn at two of the seams. The belt was missing and she held the front closed with one thin, white hand."You been here long?"

"Most of my life," Rigsbee said as he unlocked the door to the second story. Despite the dimness of the stairwell, he inserted his key without fumbling.

Again the girl hung back, hipshot, in the doorway. She was a dark brunette; long snarls of hair bobbled against her coat as she suddenly giggled. "Aren't the neighbors gonna wonder if they saw me come in?" She laughed again, stepping over the threshold with an exaggerated stateliness. Shrugging away the coat, she tossed it onto one of the straight chairs and stood in tank top and jeans. Most of the bright embroidery had worn away. Her bare toes, poking through handmade sandals, were an unhealthy blue beneath their coating of grime.

"This way," Rigsbee directed briefly, swinging the stair door shut and motioning the girl inward toward his study.

" 'Cause if you don't care," she went on, speaking over her shoulder as she slowly obeyed Rigsbee, "this doesn't have to be a one night stand, you know."

Rigsbee's glance took in her too-thin face, her too-white skin. "That won't be necessary," he said flatly. "It's in the next room."

"It wouldn't be so much," the girl said with unshakable coquetry. "I mean, not another of these-very often." Both hands lifted the thin top up over the waistband of the jeans. A hundred dollar bill, folded vertically into eighths, was poked into the jeans on her midline. "I couldn't put it in the top," she said with another giggle. Raising the thin cloth higher, the girl pirouetted back toward Rigsbee. The motion flung out her breasts, bare beneath the hiked blouse. They were not large but seemed surprisingly full for a body so thin; the areoles were almost black against the dingy pallor of her flesh.

Rigsbee stepped past her, his neutral expression unchanged. He swung the room's other door soundlessly toward him. White light flooded out."Go in," he ordered, holding the portal open. Its inner face was covered with a thin, hard fabric that seemed less reflectant than self-luminous. Despite the strangeness of it, the girl obeyed this time without hesitation. Her motion slowed; then, three steps inside the final room, she stopped completely.

The whole chamber and its only furnishing, a circular couch, were covered in the slick fabric. The high ceilings of the old house had allowed Rigsbee to dome the material smoothly in the center of the room without making the edges uncomfortably low. The light was not harsh but was shadowless and omnipresent, the interior of a cold, white star. Rigsbee entered behind the girl, closing the door on the last rectangle of reality left to the room. In his right hand swung the bird cage from his study. The starling hopped uneasily on its perch.

The girl let her blouse fall; her head rotated, taking in featurelessness."Hey, this is unreal," she whispered. A hesitant step brought her to the couch. It was firm to the touch, warmer than blood."You really go all out, don't you?" she said. For the first time, there was a trace of something genuine in her voice.

Rigsbee slid off his shoes and stepped onto the couch. The cage hung from the center of the dome on a hook that had been invisible until then. "It's time now.

You can take your clothes off," he said. He loosed the gold-shot sash he wore over his street clothes as a belt.

The girl pulled the top over her head, freeing it with a sharp tug when it caught in a loop of hair. With the same motion, she flipped the garment carelessly toward the wall. Seating herself on the edge of the couch, she hooked one long, slim-jointed toe over the backstrap of the other sandal, then paused. The surgical coldness of the light bit at her. "I-" she began. She hugged her breasts close without sexual intent. "Look," she said, "you want me to take a shower? I mean, they shut the water off… "

"I hired you as you are," Rigsbee answered bleakly. "Afterwards you may bathe or not, as you please. Get off the rest of your clothes."

The girl obeyed without enthusiasm. Both sandals struck the wall. They should have clattered but did not. She thrust the folded bill into a side pocket before sliding the ragged jeans down her thighs. "Look," she repeated, her eyes on Rigsbee's short, soft body so as not to have to see her own so clearly, "have we got to have the lights so bright?"

For the first time that night, Rigsbee smiled. "Yes," he said, the tight rictus of irony still on his face as he reached for the girl, "but they'll dim later."

As she began the ancient mechanisms of her trade, the girl wondered again how a room with no visible light source could be so brilliant. Then, without paling, the lucence began to slip from white to violet in waves as mindless as the sea's.

The room was yellow-green, a throbbing chartreuse that washed the fine gray hairs of Rigsbee's chest into a new-sewn field. "Again," he said quietly.

"Again, honey?" The girl ran her calloused palm over his belly with something like affection as she snuggled closer. "Say, you're not bad. But this time-" She repositioned herself with a silken movement on the glowing couch.

"Yes," Rigsbee muttered in a gelatinous voice as he bent. The girl's high-thrusting legs flickered shadows across her prominent rib-cage. And the light in the room glissaded to orange.

Garnet light the color of congealing blood oozed across them. Rigsbee rose to his feet awkwardly. The girl squirmed on the couch, stretched. "Now what, honey?"

"Nothing." Rigsbee's eyes were focused beyond the throbbing walls of the room. "Now you can leave."

Plucked eyebrows arched in surprise. "What's the matter? Wasn't I good?"

His tone itself a manner of ignoring the girl, Rigsbee went on, "The thing I had to do required that I be… sexless, that will suffice, to contact those who can aid me. With a female associate with whom I could have merged my spirit, I could have become a neuter entity. That was…"

He looked at the starling. It felt the impact of his eyes, the thin ruby whites around pupils which were still metal gray. The bird squawked, hopped to the far end of its perch.

"… impossible under the circumstances," Rigsbee continued. "Where the body goes, the spirit must follow, then. It became necessary that I drain a part of my nature, the masculine portion. For that, I needed you. Nothing more."

"My God," the girl said, rising from her back to her elbows. "You mean you didn't even want to fuck?"

"You?" Rigsbee asked wearily.