Catherine Asaro - Aurora in Four Voices

Soz was watching his face. "What?"

"His greatest work. Face his demons and exorcise them. I’m the substrate." It was suddenly all too obvious. "Get rid of me and he loses his inner devils." Jato swallowed. "He’s going to kill me as part of the sculpture. It’s what he’s always intended."

She stared at him. "That’s sick."

Jato wished he had never pulled her into this. "If we had died on the Promenade, he would have worked with that footage. Now you’re onto him, so he has nothing to lose by bringing us here where he can tailor the work to his needs."

"Actually," a voice said. "You’re the one who is going to kill her."

He looked up with a jerk. Crankenshaft was standing across the studio, by the console in the corner where the two holo-walls met. In one hand he held Jato’s bird sculpture; in the other, he had a laser carbine.

"A tragedy," Crankenshaft continued, in the voice he used when he wanted to bait Jato, to drive his rage. "She came to the greatest artist alive hoping to inspire a dream. A beautiful woman, after all, has certain advantages. Unfortunately she arrived while you were here." He sighed. "I should never have left you two alone. But who would have thought an Imperial Messenger would be in danger? Besides, Jato, we thought we had cured you." He shook his head. "She was overconfident. An unguarded moment and you were able to bind her." Lifting the bird, he said, "A blunt instrument you stole from me brought about her death. I was forced to kill you in self-defense."

Jato stood up, an explosion working up inside of him. But before it let loose, Soz spoke in a mild voice. "You’re Granite Crankenshaft."

Unease showed on their captor’s face. "You should have never pried into his records, Messenger."

"Why would you claim Jato stole that bird from you?" she asked. "He made it."

The tic under Crankenshaft’s eye gave a violent twitch. He shifted the sculpture, his hand gripped around it as if he held a weapon. "No one would ever believe he created a work as stunning as this, with that fugue. Only his exposure to me enabled him to do it. Me. He could never have done it by himself. So the credit belongs to me."

Jato knew he should be infuriated that Crankenshaft would claim credit for his work. But the implication in his captor’s words so staggered him that the arrogance of the statement rolled off his back. He could hardly believe it. The great Granite Crankenshaft was threatened by his work.

Crankenshaft unhooked a cord from his belt and threw it at them. It landed at Jato’s feet, a leather thong with ceramoplex balls on each end that could have been anything from decorations to superconducting webs.

"Tie her hands behind her back," Crankenshaft said.

Jato crossed his arms. "No."

Crankenshaft touched a panel on the console. A giant globe crept through a slit in the thermoplastic wall and floated to the center of the studio.

"Non-linear dynamics and metapsychology," he commented. "Do you know that with detailed enough initial conditions, you can model procreation? The correlation between the calculated results and an actual act that proceeded from those conditions is quite high."

Jato scowled. "What are you talking about?"

"Sex," he said. "Establish the initial scene well enough and you can model the rest with amazing accuracy."

"Go to hell," Jato said.

"Tie her hands."

"No."

"Commence protocol," he said.

Three syringe guns slid out of the globe. Jato didn’t duck fast enough, but it didn’t matter: none of the shots were aimed at him. Soz moved in a blur, but she couldn’t go anywhere with her ankles chained to the ledge. One shot missed her, but judged from her reaction, the other two hit home. She jerked as if she had been struck and her entire body tensed.

"What are you doing?" Jato shouted at Crankenshaft.

"Jato, it’s all right," Soz said. "I’m fine."

"It’s a clockwork venom," Crankenshaft told her. "Even your meds can’t adapt enough to deal with it."

She said nothing, just focused her attention on him with an unsettling intensity.

"What’s a clockwork venom?" Jato asked.

Soz glanced at him. "The name comes from clock reactions." Although she sounded cool, sweat was beading at her temple. "Combine certain chemicals under proper conditions and they cycle through a series of reactions. In human blood, clockwork venoms undergo a cycle, each step producing a different

poison."

"Can your nanomeds fight it?" Jato asked.

Crankenshaft answered. "Even sophisticated meds have trouble with complicated cycles. This one has hundreds of steps, all with varying duration lengths and side reactions that change from cycle to cycle. It’s a brilliant work of chemistry." He gave Jato an appraising look. "You’ve felt one poison in the cycle. Last time you were here. Perhaps you recall?"

Jato remembered all right. It had burned like hell.

"The others have different effects," Crankenshaft observed, as if Soz were a lab experiment. "Nausea, muscle stiffness, dizziness, pain. She’ll start vomiting soon. Eventually she will die."

Soz remained calm, but sweat was running down her temples. When she wiped at it, the motion looked mechanical, as if she had let the hydraulics in her body take over.

"As soon as her hands are bound," Crankenshaft said, "I’ll give her the antidote."

"Jato." She spoke quietly. "Do what he says. Please."

There was no mistaking the strain in her voice. Jato grabbed the thong off the floor and wrapped it around her wrists. The broken lock mechanism on her manacles felt warm, probably from the energy released when her chompers ate it. He tied the thong loosely around her wrists, making no attempt to knot it. But the ceramoplex balls activated and yanked the cords tight, binding her wrists and then locking into each other.

"Leather," Crankenshaft said.

Jato straightened up. "What?"

"In molecular terms, it’s complex," he said. "More heterogeneous than, say, manacles. Not as strong, but a logical backup when dealing with disassemblers."

Jato gritted his teeth. How did Soz stay so cool? She just watched Crankenshaft, intent and quiet. Crankenshaft took a ring with two mag-keys off his belt and threw it to them. As the keys hit the floor near Jato’s foot, a syringe on the globe hissed. Soz moved like an automaton, trying to duck, but the shot hit her anyway.

"That had better be the antidotes," Jato said.

"The red key unlocks your ankles," Crankenshaft said. "Gold unlocks hers."

After Jato freed their ankles, Soz moved stiffly, swinging her legs off the ledge.

"Go to the pool," Crankenshaft said. "Both of you."

"No," Jato said.

"Don’t make it harder on her than necessary," Crankenshaft said. "I can calculate a lot of what I need, but I’ll achieve better results with genuine images of the two of you to work from."

Jato stayed put. "I won’t rape her and I won’t kill her. You can doctor holos to make me look like a Trader, but nothing can make me act like one."

Crankenshaft’s voice hardened. "Go to the pool. Otherwise, I’ll pump her so full of clockwork venom she’ll beg you to kill her."

With no warning, Soz moved. Fast. Dropping to one knee by her boots, she whipped out her hands, shreds of leather flying away from her wrists. She yanked the "decorative" tubes off her boots and brought them up, one in each hand, liquid shooting out from both. One stream splattered over the drone, creating clouds of gas. The other hit Crankenshaft’s carbine and splashed into his face. He shouted, dropping the laser as he covered his face with his hands. When the gun hit the ground, it shattered like porcelain.

The Mandelbrot globe hissed and a shot from its air-syringe hit Jato in the neck. In a bizarre blur of motion, Soz threw her boots. They hurtled through the air and smashed into the globe, shattering its outer shell where the liquid from her cylinder had doused it. The whole assembly crashed to the floor, its innards breaking apart on the stone. Blinking and humming, the debris moved in twitches as it began to reassemble itself.