SALTAROS: Shadows and Light
Dec. 18th, 2016 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zzambrosius_02As in Chapter Seven, this chapter has some sexy-time rather intimately described. First, because Magistro Skavo is an odd duck, and it wouldn’t be fair to leave you, Gentle Reader, in the dark. Also, the “pillow talk” between bouts of lovemaking reveals somewhat of each participant’s History and Character. IMO, it would behoove the reader to (at least) skim and locate those sections.
CHAPTER EIGHT: Confrontations; Ambros and Skavo; Vandalism
Ambros looked around as he entered the bar: ‘The one place in Eugene that has this gluten-free so-called ‘beer’ on tap, and it has to be a sports bar?’ No matter which direction you looked, you aimed at a big-screen TV. Most of them showed a hockey game.
‘Fortunately, hockey doesn’t really hold my attention very well. Still, not how I’d prefer to spend the evening.’
He’d arranged to meet the Chief of Police at that joint, because he didn’t want to be drinking hard liquor while being interrogated.
He got a drink and tasted it; it seemed vaguely beer-like. He picked up a glass and served himself some ice water, then picked out a table. He sat with his back to a wall; the rear exit was behind and to his right, down a short hallway.
The Chief came in as he was sitting down. Chief Black had stringy brown hair and a bald spot, with a comb-over. At eight in the evening he had a Nixon-level case of five o’clock shadow. His uniform looked rumpled from a hard day’s police work.
The top cop ordered a shot of rye whiskey and hammered it back, then got another, a double. He approached Ambros looking grim and sarcastic.
“Mr Rothakis,” he said, sneering a little. “Or, should I say Mr Scharffen?”
“Rothakis is accurate. You insisted on this meeting...why are we here? Is it just so you can snarl at me and question my identity? If so...” Ambros started to rise.
“Siddown, Rothakis.”
Ambros got all the way to his feet. He began to turn and walk out the back way.
“Come on, Mr Rothakis, don’t make me...”
“Am I being detained?” Ambros interrupted.
“...no. I just wanna talk.” Black’s words slurred enough that Ambros suspected he’d had a couple drinks before he got to “Tully’s”.
“I’ll be happy to chat...if you will be polite. Unless you want to pay for another False Arrest.”
Chief Black grumbled a bit, but eventually came around: “All right, all right, I’m sorry, okay? I just gotta few questions, that’s all.”
Ambros returned to his seat, slowly. He said: “What are we here to talk about? And is it worth it? Is this the best use of your time? Not to mention my taxes. I mean, as a public servant...” He shrugged sarcastically.
After a few moments of silent staring, Chief Black said: “Somebody recently hacked my computers. Home and work.”
“I know. It was in the news. That puzzled me; I would expect you to have state-of-the-art firewalls and all that. How could such a thing happen?”
“I was wondering if you could advise me about that,” said the Chief.
“I can’t think why. I am not especially expert in such matters.”
“Yer not, huh?”
Ambros shook his head: “I have some very high-end equipment, as you doubtless know. I have no knowledge whatsoever when it comes to coding in any of the three common ecosystems in this...country.”
“Really? But you gotta know people, huh?”
Ambros allowed his poker face to crack, and laughed right in the cop’s face: “Everyone knows somebody...right?”
“Maybe so,” said the Top Cop, sourly: “But guess what? The whole aim of the person who hacked me appears to have been information about you...or about this guy Scharffen.”
“Maybe you ought to be hunting for Mr. Scharffen, then.”
“I think I found him.”
“Prove it.”
“I will. It’s gonna take a while: all of the evidence I’d gathered has vanished. But I will prove it.”
“Okay. Good luck.” Ambros sipped the beer, made a face, and waited.
Black took a deep breath, and sighed it out: “See, my IT gal says that whoever did the hack is a real oddball. ‘The machine used is invisible,’ she says: ‘I can’t trace what I can’t see.’ Like one o’ them invisible spaceships on TV.” He took another drink: “And, your email and blog accounts all disappear similarly. She can’t figger it out. Where the posts come from, I mean. Untraceable.”
“I cover my tracks well. It’s not illegal to be elusive, especially on the Webz. My equipment has very good built-in firewalls, so I’m hard to trace.”
“Like the one who hacked my accounts...” the chief trailed off. He muttered, nearly inaudible: “I had some of the addresses of the photos written down, but the original photos are gone, vanished. And it appears as though this Scharffen guy never ever got arrested, so...”
“No fingerprints, eh? Why are you telling me this? Why...”
“I just...”
“If I had hacked your machine...
“...machines,” the Chief corrected.
“...no drunken cop would be able to startle a confession out of me with wild accusations and an upfront admission of lack of evidence. Even drunk, you oughtta know better.”
“Yeah, I do. I just want you to know, I’m on the job...”
Ambros stared at Black for a full minute, calculating. ‘What could he do if he did connect me to my old self? Is he in touch with any spooks? Or the Mob? I didn’t estimate him to be that corrupt, but maybe...if they do arrest me, they can’t hold me...so maybe a little counter-intimidation is in order...’ He took a bigger sip of beer, then a deep breath, and decided.
He pulled a manila file folder out of his shoulder bag: “On the job, eh? So am I.” He slapped it down on the table. The folder had the words “Bad Cops” printed on it in big letters. He got up.
Black opened up the file and groaned. He leafed through a few of the pages, and groaned again.
Ambros leaned in and whispered to the cop: “EugeneWeek would make hay out of that information. Even The Sentinel would probably roast you. Every one of those bad boys failed your own psych test, and you hired them anyway. I don’t know why.”
“Where’d you get this? If you didn’t hack my...”
“Never mind. I have sources. I have friends. Remember what Dan Samuelson told you? We. Are. Watching. I have secrets. You have none. That’s the Status Quo, and you cannot alter it. Now I got work to do. See ya.”
He stomped down the hall, using MPS and Shifter to locate the cops sitting the rear lot: ‘Bent bastards.’
He smiled sarcastically and diverted into the restroom to his right. He pulled out the Shifter and said: “Keenafthono”. He touched the light and Jumped.
The next morning he dropped in as always, then strolled around the War Room, gazing at boards, looking over the shoulders of people as they went about the tasks required to keep all of the parts moving: espionage, and operations initiated by spies in various Lines; engineers and specialists of every sort, engaged in re-building Lines damaged by the enemy; an entire segment of the Red Warrior Guild that rotated from Line to Line, guarding the Gates from the ATLs.
And of course, that constant trickle of bloodied or wounded or dirtied soldiers and operatives, some from Allied Lines, that came through on their way to medical treatment or to report to the Commonwealth on their activities.
He watched a woman work with a machine: ‘She’s the main ‘traffic controller’ for this landing pad,’ he realized: ‘She is standing right in the middle of the machine, surrounded by holograms of the action in various Lines, preparing for evacuations and routing in—and out—all of the routine traffic— like me when I come over...’
She looked to be dancing, singing, and signing, all at once. There was a timer counting her shift down; she was nearly done for the day.
He stood there, watching the shift change, fascinated. An identical machine stood nearby, and a young man stood near it, stretching and warming up.
After a few minutes, the fellow activated the second machine and stepped in. He mimicked the movements of the woman for a while, His eyes darting about from one holo to another. When they were perfectly synchronized the woman made a handsign and stepped out of her machine, shutting it down.
She staggered over to the seating area and fell into a chair. Megalos left his board and got her food and drink, bowing as he presented them to her.
Ambros’ MPS pinged him: ‘Ten lepta until your class,’ it whispered in his ear. He reminded himself to look deeper into the phenomenon he had just witnessed, but left the War Room at a trot.
He stepped out of the Main Hall into a sleeting rain, and ran for the Door. He cursed himself for not checking the weather before Shifting: ‘Damn hoodie is not up to this freezing stuff.
He arrived at Anni’s class area and got out of the rain. He warmed up with the advanced students, then he put on mail and a helm and played at bated steel with them.
Regulos worked with the youngest students, which led to the usual dead end: Regulos unclear on some concept, Archarae mortally confused. He shook his head and began to practice harder, pushing the other Spathae to greater deeds by his skill.
He rested a while, watching the other Spathae play.
A kopelos tugged at his mail; Ambros recognized the lad as someone he’d helped out in the past.
“Sir, would you assist Spathos Regulos? He’s lost himself again...”
Ambros allowed the young man to lead him over to the beginner’s group.
“See,” said the Archaros: “He just doesn’t get it...”
“Yeah. I see. It’s the range: you need the strong of your sword on the weak of the foe’s.”
“Oh...”
Regulos saw him chatting with the kid—‘Kopelos,’ he reminded himself—and snarled.
“If you think you know better than me, why don’t you teach the drill?” asked Regulos, sarcastically.
“Sure, why not?” Ambros smiled, though the helm screen mostly hid that. He walked to the head of the class, unsheathing his longsword simulator: bated steel, with a blunt tip.
He began: “See, if I try to wind this sword while I am too close,” he demonstrated, getting a smack in the ribs from Regulos’ weapon: “I not only have a hard time moving his weapon, but he has a shot at my ribs or belly when I do manage the deed.” He took a step back, and began again; Regulos spoiled the demonstration with a step and cut, which Ambros blocked.
“See, if your foeman realizes your intent and counters as Reg just did,” he continued smoothly: “This block prevents his riposte, and sets him up for this...” Ambros swept his weapon around and tapped Regulos’ wrists.
“And if your partner attempts another counter,” Ambros said, as Regulos foiled his demonstration again: “Then a step-through against a downleft cut, with this soft parry, gets you out of danger...”
Ambros’ patience began to wear thin: “Spathos Regulos. Really. You can’t win a drill, you know?”
Regulos stomped over and added a helm to his outfit. He came back to where Ambros stood: “Let’s see if you have any idea what you’re talking about,” Reg said, and without further warning began to attack Ambros.
The students all backed away, getting as far from the confrontation as the dry area beneath the force field allowed. Anni sat on a stool and watched, a small smile upon her face.
Ambros defended himself, and occasionally smacked Reg lightly: head, shoulders, wrists, a couple gentle thrusts to the guts. He allowed Reg not a single touch.
Finally he said to Regulos: “Enough.”
Reg said: “You haven’t hit me hard yet.”
Ambros said nothing as Regulos attacked again. He waited, and when the opportunity arose, he disarmed the other man and tripped him to the ground. He put both swords into the rack and began to remove his armor, as Anni said: “That’s full time for today, class. See you on Fifthday!”
As he was leaving, he heard Anni remonstrating with Regulos “...he hit you whenever he wanted to, and he didn’t miss once. Pull yourself together before you really make him angry...”
‘I’m going to the Library,” he thought: “I have some work to do...’
Ambros sat in his little high-tech cubby in the Library in Athino. ‘As far as I can make out, about a third of the cubic in this building is made up of these research stations. They even have them attached to the ceilings in some of the rooms...’ It occurred to him to wonder how folks reached those. He put off asking, having, as he thought, more important things to do.
He synced his personal electronics (MPS, Shifter, and laptop) with the Library’s computer system, and began his research.
First he used a Shifter-enabled program to check on the e-zine that he and his family had published. ‘As I expected...three days of furious activity, and then a lot of electronic silence. We need to get that second issue out, and it needs to have something more controversial in it...something to carry people’s attention until the third issue is ready.’
‘The good thing? Looks like just about everyone who visited the magazine signed up for future issues...that’s uncommonly good.’
He logged out of the Shift: ‘I don’t like to stay connected between that Line and this one. I just don’t.’
He checked his calendar: “Hmm. Skavo wants a rendezvous. I wonder...”
He indicated his willingness to meet ser. Se replied that since the weather was bad, se’d meet him at a specific café, ser favorite. He agreed.
“I better get to work,” he said, shutting down all of the distractions: “Two Commonwealth hours, or three hours my time, to do this research and write this essay...Epamanondas, here I come...”
For his introduction, he laid out his experiences in the SCA, and his earlier and later martial activities. ‘A lot of this part is cut-and-paste,’ he thought: ‘The Hellenic version of cut-and-paste, where the machine responds to my eye movements and whispered commands. I’ve introduced myself a bunch of times in a bunch of essays, but I need to keep doing it...someone may find this one first...’
“Let’s see: the career of Epamanondas and the end of the Spartan threat to Boeotia: Strategic Flanking, (should I call it Deep Flanking?) Mention Sherman and Patton...” he muttered and typed and re-arranged his points: “...tactical flanking, as done in the real world and the SCA...Applied to the current situation in the Timeline Wars...”
At length, he had his outline built, and a fair bit of actual writing slotted in to it. He could feel himself approaching a stopping point: “The point where I need to wait, once again, for the ideas to gel and the voices in my head to dictate the strategy.” He checked the time: “Gotta go, anyway...”
He strolled through the mist and occasional rain, seeing the city of Athino in a new and different mood: dark, mysterious, a City where temples of crafts and services rose out of the ground suddenly and loomed over him, brooding. His hood reduced his peripheral vision; the fog muted all colors and the lights along the streets made shadows of black and gray.
‘This is the kind of night that would make me really nervous, back home. In my Home Line, I mean...’ he pondered how much he felt at home in the Commonwealth, and how little he did in his own Line: ‘At Rose House, or Samuel B’s, I feel very much at home...the Country Fair had aspects of this feeling, safe and relaxed.’ He realized how much safe had to do with it: “A dark night like this, misty but not too cold, in any city in my Line, would be the time when thieves and rapists and robbers would be prowling. And while rape is not unheard of here...’ He contemplated that for a moment, then promised to come back to that train of thought, soon. “But robbery? Only a true psychotic would try to rob a person on the street, in this town.”
It occurred to him to wonder about psychosis in the Commonwealth. ‘Does it even exist? But surely there is a genetic component to psychopathy. I’m sure there is to sociopathy...’
He wondered if the practice of judicial dueling had affected the prevalence of violent mental illnesses in the Commonwealth: ‘Such people tend to make enemies, and neither the psychotic nor the sociopathic have traits that would make them good swordsmen. Not in my experience, anyway. Well...concentration on goals is some help in the martial arts...ugh.’
He passed the statue of Socratos; the great man’s marble head had disappeared into the fog, and his outfit drew Ambros’ stare.
‘He wears a toga or chlamys, but beneath that a monk’s ankle-length robes...He thought of himself as clergy, as a monk, but had an affair with The Exile throughout the time of the Revolution.’ He wondered, again, what contradictions he himself carried that he hadn’t considered. He smiled sardonically: ‘I’ve faced all of the cognitive biases I know of, and found them in myself, confirmation bias not the least of them...’
After thirty-five years of carefully considering the arguments of people he disagreed with, he still was an anarchist. ‘An anarchist, a syndicalist, and an admirer of the Situationists, for all of their flaws...Must be no hope for me,’ he grinned.
He stumbled upon the café he sought, unaware of how far he’d walked.
Skavo sat at a small table in one corner, alone but not lonely. ‘Se seems always so confident...’ Skavo’s head had an odd shape to it, more oval than most people’s, and larger in the back, as though ser brain had sought extra space in the back of ser skull. Se had a small pointed chin, a very small mouth, and very large eyes, black and deep, but with only the slightest hint of lashes.
Se held a small cup in one hand; when he approached he smelled spirits, and some part of his sensorium identified it as whiskey. He wondered: ‘My sight and hearing are so much better, since I took treatments from Versingos...I guess smell, touch, taste, may also be augmented. I should ask...’
“I didn’t know you drank alcohol,” he said, as he sat down across from her.
“I don’t, not much. I had just a small sip, to understand your preferences. The rest is for you.”
“Thank you.” He sipped: “Tastes like Jameson’s, with a hint more vanilla.”
Se smiled: “I did well, then. The bartender here compounded that, from my recollection of your description of the flavor.”
“You did very well. So did she.” He saluted the bartender with a toast. She smiled triumphantly. “Guess I’ll be back here, whenever I want a taste of home.”
He pondered the potential ripples that his patronage would produce: ‘I am a person of high Status in this City; my regular appearances here would reflect some of that prestige back upon the staff and the place itself.’
Skavo leaned back, apparently relaxed. He could somehow sense ser tension, though he could not tell how.
Se spoke of trivialities, but beneath each of ser questions some probing of his principles lay hidden. He answered honestly, sensing the direction se led him in: se sought intimacy, in an urgent way, but something held ser back.
After several lines of questioning petered out, se asked: ‘How did you become an anarchist, which I gather is a rare position for a person in your Line to take?”
He shrugged: “I can’t take credit for it, really. I was hitchhiking in southern Ohio, trying to get back to the Cleveland area. Guy picked me up, said his name was Stanley and he lived near Cleveland, so he’d take me the whole way. We chatted all the way home to his place.”
“Was he—flirting? Is that how you say it?”
Ambros grinned: “I expect so. But being proselytized by a homosexual anarchist was such a change from Christians that I actually enjoyed it. Anyway...”
“Go on,” se said.
“Well...it turned out Stanley was not the only person in the family that wound up with the hots for me. They said I could move in, on a provisional basis, and we all clicked...I started reading all of the books they had...books on anarchism, yes, but also on archaeology, anthropology, sociology, most of them not at all from an anarchist perspective.” He shrugged, again: “Before I knew it, I was convinced. Anarchism just made sense. It made all of my experiences with Authority fall into a pattern, it explained ‘human nature’ and made the bizarre and illogical actions I saw in History, and around me everyday, into perceptible and understandable strategies that people used to maintain themselves in a hard world.”
“So at—what? Nineteen years old? You became an anarchist.”
“Yes. And nothing has shifted me since, though I tried to talk myself out of it.”
Se did not seem critical; indeed, how could se, considering? Se asked: “You did?”
“Of course. Who would adopt such a summarily dismissed and roundly hated theory if he could avoid it? But even now...well, I recall something one of my mentors said, in a speech when he won some academic award. Something like, the burden of proof for the authoritarians is on them: if they can’t justify the power they wield with good results to the Commons, then the institutions they control should be dismantled and replaced with something fair and democratic. He also pointed out: ‘Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody else is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune’.”
“Hah!” se exclaimed: “That’s true, for certain. Is there anything that would have changed your mind?”
“Yes of course: evidence!”
“Of?”
“Evidence that the rich and powerful and their political lackeys are something other than brutal parasites, living off of the labor of the vast majority and returning little or nothing to the Commons.”
“No one offered you such evidence?”
“Lotta folks thought they had...none of the alleged proofs I saw ever stood up to an inquiring mind.” He grinned at ser: “Do you have such evidence for me?”
Se laughed merrily: “Not at all. I agree with you, actually.”
“Nice.”
They sat silent for a while, then se said: “I have decided. I am going to tell you about myself, my peculiar self, and advance my proposition by that means.”
He stared at ser, working his way to ser meaning: “Go ahead,” he said.
Se said: “I live on a slow hormonal cycle, hovering between what you would call ‘male’ and ‘female’ sensibilities.”
“A two year cycle?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Did someone tell you? Or did you guess?”
“Both. Voukli told me of your preference for hairy barbarians. Then she added that you very seldom take a lover, only once every two years or so, and that the affairs never last more than a season.”
Se made a face, sardonic and amused: “You put the rest together, while sitting here with me?”
“Seemed obvious.” He shrugged: “You are telling me this for a reason, I suppose. You want...” He trailed off, not sure what to say, wanting not to misstep.
Se drew a deep breath: “I am at the most womanly end of my cycle. At this time I am most susceptible to a man’s charms. My kolpi, such as it is, demands attention, and desires penetration. My peos...or clitoris...is in its smallest and most tender state.”
“Is there no way to even out your hormones?”
“I wish. But when the Meds and I attempted to find a halfway state, we found that my bones lost calcium and I became even more fragile than I naturally am.” Se smiled sadly: “All things will pass, including this moment. I almost always go where my heart and kolpi lead me, when I am in one state or the other.”
“I see. And your heart and kolpi lead you now...to me?”
“Don’t think I want merely to use you. I hope to pleasure you as well. We have become, I hope, friends; I would not want to lose that.”
He tipped his head to one side, and said: “I appreciate that. I hope we remain friends, whatever may happen.” He finished his drink.
Se rose: “Will you come with me now? May I show you my strangeness and hope for some satisfaction?”
“I will come with you. Lead me...”
Se took his hand and gently pulled him to his feet. He felt for the first time his physical superiority to ser, as though he loomed over ser in a vaguely threatening way. Se shuddered and squeezed his hand; se caught his eye and then looked away.
‘So unlike ser usual self,’ he mused.
Se tugged gently on his hand, and brought him along with ser.
Ser room lay only a few blocks away: he knew where they were going, but was soon bewildered. They passed lighted areas and shadowed alleys and plataeae and agorae. Suddenly, se drew him into an arched and pillared passage, and to the door of ser small room.
He saw at once that se had prepared for the success of ser wooing. Ser bedding lay folded down. Candles sat on the stone shelves and in the niches upon the walls; the smell of wax and oranges filled the room. The bed itself se had surrounded with flickering electric candles.
Se turned to him and placed ser hands upon his chest: “I am trembling.”
“You are.”
“I am afraid, as I always am, when I place myself in the hands of a man. Give me no reason to fear you, I beg.”
“Tell me what you want.” He thought of his first night with Kim, and wondered how similar se was to her.
Se spoke in American: “I am...’turned on’ you would say...by strength and gentleness. I cannot physically bear any breaking force, or rough handling. I need you...but I need your care and discretion.”
“Go on.”
Se began to kiss him, tugging at his clothing and pulling it from him, piece by piece: “So strong...so muscular...what must it be like to have such strength, such power? To be able to increase that power by exercise and will?” Ser hands roamed over his body, ser eyes wide, ser tongue touching ser upper lip.
“I...”
“You must hold me hard, tight, but with care...eventually you will fuck me, and then it will hurt...that is part of the pleasure I need...but if I call you by your title instead of your name, you must gentle yourself immediately.”
“Spathos is the safe word,” he said, nodding.
Se pulled his trousers down and off, leaving him naked. Se held his nearly erect peos in ser hand, gasping a little as se stroked and squeezed it. ‘O! This is large,” se said: “This will hurt.”
“We needn’t...”
Se interrupted: “I need. It’s as it should be, as it must be for my pleasure.”
He knew he was not above average in size; he wondered what ser sex would be like.
Se knelt down, leaned in, took his peos in ser mouth to the extent that se could.
“Ah, only the head, I wish I could do more.” Se rose and slowly removed her tunic, dropped ser skirts on the floor, kicked them into and among his own clothes.
Se stood there, staring at his body, swaying like a young tree in the breeze. Se wore then only a swath of cloth about ser hips, held in place by some invisible fastener. Se swayed again, towards him; he moved aside and swept ser into his arms, then carried ser to the bed.
He removed the cloth from about ser, finding a magnetic tab that held it there. He pressed ser legs apart, and found ser genitals with his eyes and hands.
She gasped. Se was a She at that moment, despite the strangeness of her kolpi. Ambros explored her, gently, finding labia and a vagina, things he could comprehend. Ser clitoris stood up, as thick as the end of his little finger and long enough to set her labia aside and be visible. Ser urethra passed through it, as if it were a peos. It was clearly not, he thought. He stroked it, and se gasped again. ‘That’s a pleasure button for ser,’ he thought: ‘And a pain point as well, if I am in any way ungentle...’
The rest of ser body disturbed him far more. Se had only the slightest swelling to indicate ser breasts—where breasts would be on a woman. Ser nipples were very small, almost like a boy’s. Se had no body hair; he wondered if se shaved ser head or simply never had any hair there, either.
To his eye, and to his hand, everything about ser screamed: “Too young! Not ready!”
He knew se had at least fifty years in service to the Commonwealth, so he did his best to put that thought aside. ‘Make her a woman, in your mind,’ he thought. ‘Do as you would do for a woman...’
He went to kissing ser kolpi, then to licking ser. He took great care, and also took his time. Se shook and shuddered, and though it took a long time, and his shoulders and neck began to ache, he eventually brought her to orgasm.
Se said: “Come to me, inside me.”
“I...can’t.”
“Oh,” se said. “Oh, I see.”
It was his turn to shudder: “You...look like a boy, or a girl, of ten years or so. I know you aren’t, but I’m programmed by my own culture...”
Se drew him to ser: “I understand. Rest here, await the inspiration. Make me a woman, in your mind...a grownup.”
His face right next to sers, he saw the fine network of wrinkles at the corners of ser eyes and mouth. He felt ser breath on his ear, ser fingers exploring him, skillfully. Se kissed him, expertly, as no child could. Somewhere in his psyche, his subconscious became convinced of her womanhood.
“She,” he thought.
He found the inspiration she’d spoken of, and lifted her legs.
She cried out as he penetrated her. Deep inside, as far as he could go, he found his peos lubed by her juices. She gripped his shoulders with her hands and her fingernails. Long and sharp as those nails were, her hands hadn’t the strength to dig them into him.
“Hold me tightly! Fuck me hard, take your pleasure!”
He did as she commanded, his mind racing. She made little ‘eep’ing sounds, seeming to be in some pain. He remembered her words, and persevered. Her kolpi gripped him, once, twice, thrice, but oh! So gently! He came, grunting as he spilled into her.
She pushed at his shoulders and he lifted his weight from her.
They lay side-by-side, ser hands upon his face and hip. His hands he put upon ser bottom and breast.
Se sighed: “That was almost perfect. I would like you to do that to me twice a tenday or so, until my desire ebbs.”
He smiled: “My Trine permits it. I am not unsatisfied. I will carve out time for this pleasure.”
“Ah, good.”
After a few kisses, se asked him: “You have been with Voukli as well, or so the rumor has it. Yes or no?”
He nodded: “Rumor has it right, this time.”
“But not with Arrenji yet?”
He laughed out loud: “Yet? I doubt that she’d be interested!”
“Truly? I can’t think why she would not be.”
“Well, first of all, she appears to be into beefier guys than me. Like that fellow from Explorer’s Guild, the ex-Black Warrior dude. And second, I don’t know if I could get into Arrenji...”
“Why not?”
He shook his head, as well as he could with ser so close to him: “I don’t know. Voukli is intimidating but human. Arrenji...” He shuddered, a completely non-sexual shudder: “Arrenji is just terrifying. Flat out terrifying.”
“I suppose that’s true. Estelli’s Line seems to produce at least one person like that every generation or so.”
“That’s her family—her extended family, right?”
“Yes, but she is not in the extended part. People with some connection to Estelli’s Line are...how do you say it? A dime a dozen. But Arrenji is in the main line of descent, from three of her four grandparents. That’s why she lives at Villa Estelli.”
He laughed: “Yeah, I guessed that. And her Status within the family must be preposterously high. She’s living in Selos’ Tower, with the ground floor sitting room at her disposal.”
“She also uses half the uppermost floor at the Line’s country house.” Se nuzzled against his chest, apparently reveling in his hairiness.
“I heard about that place. Forty or fifty people live there, right?”
“Yes, and every member of the family out to about the fourth degree has privileges there. For retreats or...vacations, you know?”
“Ah. Out of curiosity, who were Arrenji’s ancestors? I mean, from back at the beginning of the Commonwealth?”
Se said: “Arrenji is descended from Nikos Messeninos and Eleni Leontari, via her son Leontaros, and also from Eleni’s adopted daughter, Queen Saráyi. Her maternal grandmother is a collateral descendent of Magistri Arrendi Korinthini, via her adopted niece Theadori.”
Ambros shook his head, hard and fast. He rubbed his temples: “That means she’s also from the Xenos-Selos-Thenos Line...”
“Exactly.”
“Oy. To the Vey. No wonder she’s such a badass.”
They lay in silence for a while, in touch but not foreplay.
After a while se said: “What about your Line? Ambros’ Line? Your Trines, the three women you are bound to?”
“What about them?”
Se cocked ser head to one side, then sat up, stretching: “I wonder how you see yourselves. You cannot be formally ‘married’, as they would call it in USIT Seventeen.”
“We can’t be. We formed a corporation instead.”
Se looked at him oddly: “A corporation? Oh, a criminal enterprise?”
He laughed: “Well, a lot of corporations are just that. Ambrose Bierce wrote that ‘A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who lacks the capital to start a corporation.’ But he was a notorious cynic. In our case, we entangled our existing business affairs and real property. We pooled our resources to increase our standard of living and compete in a foul and evil money economy.”
Se lowered ser brows: “Are you a notorious cynic?”
“At times, yes. Especially in the past, but ask the right person and you’ll hear me denounced as such right up to a year ago. Or even yesterday. Finding out about this place,” he gestured broadly, to take in City and Line: “That’s mellowed my cynicism a little, as far as this part of the Multiverse is concerned.”
He laced his fingers behind his head and chortled: “Still, and of course, anyone not cynical about the various forms of capitalism that are raping the planet in my Line is either willfully ignorant or monumentally stupid. Even most members of the ruling class are as cynical as Diogenes. But unlike the Old Cynic, they neither live simply nor criticize the status quo. They just steal from the Commons and gloat in their cynicism.”
“You seem to be amused by that.” Se looked concerned.
He made the sign for air quotes: “’I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused’,” he said, and then: “‘I jest out of season, to forestall yet more untimely tears’.”
“How is your family’s corporation different than the cynical ones?”
He sobered: “First, we do not hire people to do our work for us. Hiring and firing people is the Original Sin of Capitalism, as an economic system and as an Ideology.
“Of course, we don’t need to exploit other people to make a profit; in the language of my Line’s Dismal Cult of Economics, we are a privately held ‘B’ corporation. I can bring in enough cash from outside Line Seventeen to keep things ticking along without any problems. In other words, I cheat; or that’s the way an ideological capitalist would likely look at it. But even before that, Marie was running her catering business in an entirely non-traditional way, treating the big jobs as joint ventures with temporary partners and splitting the proceeds according to some complex formula...”
Se waved that off: “Of course, the people that you associate with are assumed by me to be ethical. But you are bringing money in from other Lines, Quiet Lines, and from Sacred Band Intelligence. Yes?”
He nodded.
“So how does that affect the...money supply, is that how you say it?”
He pursed his lips and nodded: “Good point. In a sense I am adding a small impetus to inflation by importing objects of value and also by creating notional money and dropping it into my bank accounts. In another situation, that would be a bad thing to do...”
“Why is it not?”
He shrugged: “The economy in United States Imperial Lines is so distorted by the various governments’ creation of the same sort of notional money—in the trillions of dollars, where I am dinking around with thousands—that my actions are trivial by comparison.”
“I see...” Se did not sound convinced: “You must then...‘launder’ the money you carry in to your Line.”
“Yes.”
“How do you do it?”
“I’ve stuck to coins, actual coined money, most of it antique in nature, and most of it gold. As artifacts of an earlier historical period, they have ‘value’ (to some people) far in excess of their face value, or even of their value as metal.
“And then, I wanted to make it difficult but possible for the authorities to figure out where that cash was coming from, so I disguised myself and sold the first batch of coins in a big city far from my current home...”
“Did it work?”
“It worked on the authorities, I think. I believe they’re still involved with police work, tracking my movements via witnesses and surveillance cameras. It didn’t work on anyone I sold coins to. Not a one of them figured out who I really was, mind you, but not a one of them believed my disguises, either.”
Se chuckled: “Better work on the...spy craft? If you want to be a truly effective agent.”
“You got that right.”
“But your actions still affect the money economy, and not in a good way. That your actions are trivial, and your effect small, does not alter that basic truth.”
“Again, you are correct.”
He pondered ser critique, and decided that in end it did not matter: ‘Se is an Ideological Pacifist; se will be far more disturbed by the violence inherent in my job than by the economics of it. And right now...” He saw the way se looked at him: ‘Right now se—she—wants my peos.”
She pushed him down onto his back and straddled him, her mouth on his. He buried the part of his mind that freaked out about her boyishness and kissed back, abandoning himself to her lust.
She rode him, not that differently than any number of women had at other times. He found himself falling back through time to his youth, and recalling Tina’s lovemaking. He closed his eyes, feeling a mix of intense emotions: joy, sexual tension on the very verge of release, grief at the multiple losses, old and new, that stalked his memory. He put his hands on Skavo’s thighs and squeezed; she gasped and he lightened his grip, shocked yet again at the softness of her and her frailty.
She orgasmed, her hands on his wrists, holding him down as well as she could; he felt a bit of semen pulled from his peos by her feather-light contractions.
She lay down atop him, sighing. He put one hand at the small of her back, the other on the side of her face, kissed her tenderly.
She returned the kiss, moaning, then turned her head away.
She lifted herself off of him, tears falling: “I can do no more. I’m sorry.”
“I am not unsatisfied.”
“Oh.” Se stared at him, lust and curiosity mingled in ser features.
He contemplated the dissonances between them. How to broach the subject that interested him? ‘Straightforward inquiry is the custom, here.’
He steeled himself and spoke: “So...surely the violence inherent in my work is far more painful to you than the economics of it. How do you square these things?”
Se sighed again: “A well-rehearsed practice of cognitive dissonance.” Se sat up, drawing a heavy robe about serself: “Sorry. I don’t mean to hide myself from you. I am susceptible to cold.”
“I am not offended.” He grinned: “Go on, if you don’t mind. Tell me how cognitive dissonance serves you. For most people, it is a source of discomfort.”
“Yes. It is that.” Se grimaced: “Somebody had to...I mean, when the Sacred Band offered a seat on their Master’s Council to any member of the Pacifist Deme who would take it...we agreed that one of us ought to take it.”
“And you...?”
“The seat remained vacant for half a year, while we discussed it. How such a person—how one of us —would react, and what actions we might take...in theory whichever one of us sat in that room could...veto...any action the Sacred Band proposed.”
He nodded, seeing it: “The person who took that seat would have to sometimes sit silent while plans to kill people and break shit took form right before ser.”
“More than sometimes. Not as often as I feared; the Council spends most of its time hearing reports about the situations in various Timelines, and fine-tuning its espionage and information campaigns. But, often enough...”
“Often enough, you are listening to plans that are repellent to you, in your deepest self.”
“Yes.”
“And yet, you chose me for a lover.” He held out his hands: “See the blood? No? But it is there.”
“I know. But it is on my hands as well, and for all of their posturing, it is on the hands of the other members of my Deme, my dearest friends.”
“Do they see that?”
“Some of them. Vaguely. Unclearly.”
Se sat silent for a time. At last se said: “My attraction to certain kinds of ex-barbarian men is not something I can control...I don’t even try anymore. When the season comes upon me, I seek and find the pleasure that my body demands.”
“When you are at the other end of your cycle, do you...?”
Se put a hand on his lips: “No. Not for you to know, not for you to ask.”
“Very well. How about this: What would you or your Deme do, if you had your way? How would you deal with the ATLs and their allies, the things they do, the threat they are to peace in this Line and any other Line they can find, the threat they pose...
“...To our very existence?” se interrupted: “The Deme’s ‘official’ position is to negotiate a withdrawal from all of our Allied Lines and somehow cut ourselves off from the rest of the Multiverse, since it is so intractably violent. If we could do that, the Deme, our ‘global organization’ that is, would advocate for that course.” Se put a fist to her ear: “That is not my position. I don’t think that we will ever do that, as a Line. Even if we could.”
“Well,” he said: “and if we could, how would we then assure that no one found our safe haven, by accident or design?” He looked at ser with a shrewd expression: “Would you do it, though? If it could be done?”
“If I could order the world to my desires, do you mean? I’d prefer that the Gates had never opened for us.”
“It’s over two hundred fifty years since they opened the First Gate,” he said: “Would you close them now, knowing what we know?”
Se shrugged, and made a pained face: “That would be like turning our backs on a rape in progress. Would it not? How could we sit here, at peace and in plenty, while Jean L’Iriquois and his minions ravaged one world after another, ourselves blissful, ignoring the plight of billions of people?”
He frowned: “That would surely weigh upon you. Us.”
“It would weigh most heavily upon my colleagues in the Pacifist Deme, though many of them don’t realize it.”
“How can they not?”
Se smiled: “Ignorance is bliss. Willful ignorance upholds untenable positions. They’d feel it right away, if their wishes ever came true. I give them that much credit: they are not able to lie to themselves when faced with reality.”
“I know plenty of people who can do that,” he muttered.
“Yes,” se said: “Barbarians, pardon the word: people whose languages allow for or even demand ambiguity, and whose education fails to teach the triad: Logic, Emotional Honesty, and Empiricism.”
He agreed: “I find it a lot harder to lie to myself in Rational Hellenic.”
“Did you make a practice of lying to yourself in American?”
“I struggled against that on a regular basis. But I had a ‘satori’...”
“Satori?”
"Oh, a Japanese word in my Line. It refers to a sudden understanding of the self, of one’s essence, usually after long years of work and investigation.
“Anyway, about five years before my recruitment here: I heard a lecture from a guy who taught what he called the ‘Mental Martial Arts’. He said: ‘You can’t stop lying to other people until you stop lying to yourself.’ That rang true to me. So...Satori!”
“I see.”
He looked right at her, shrewd again: “You are an outlier in your Deme, and on the Master’s Council. And physically as well...”
“Yes,” se said: “I don’t doubt that my physical being has affected my...you would say, my political choices. For fourteen seasons out of every sixteen I am immune to the call of sex or physical pleasure. My body will tolerate little in the way of exercise, save some disciplines that you would regard as ‘yoga’. I cannot therefore be tempted to any kind of violence: neither my mind nor my body is capable of anger or aggression.
“When I am not in one of my sexual seasons, I am numb to most of the emotional turmoil of an ordinary person; but I am familiar with that turmoil, from my yearly sojourns in the land of desire.”
He thought about that: “So you were the perfect candidate for the job of liason between the Guild and the Deme.”
Se pointed at him: “Indeed, you’ve hit the mark. I can sit unperturbed through either group’s meeting, most of the time. I can present each side honestly to the other; I can defend my silence in Council to my comrades in the Deme. When criticized, I can calmly offer my position to whomever might desire it...no one else has offered to take it, as yet.”
Se drew close to him again: “Hold me now, if you will, very gently, and we will sleep...”
He woke the next morning to find ser gone. Se left neither note nor any message at any of his various caches, in any of the Lines he frequented. He shrugged, and dressed, and went where he needed to go next: ‘My Salon,’ he judged: “And look at my list, and do the next thing.’
He found Kim waiting for him at the Salon, curled up in a chair reading something in a pile of loose papers.
“Hi!” she said, jumping up and embracing him: “I saw the note you sent about spending the night with Skavo...how’d that go?”
He squeezed her tightly and said: “That’s hard to describe. Se is an odd one.” He gave her a brief summary of his conversations with Skavo, but said nothing about ser physical oddity.
Kim laughed: “Well, I guessed that you’d head here this morning. What are you doing today?”
Ambros pointed to a list that he’d pinned to a small bulletin board. He said: “My list of tasks and chores never ends, does it? If I have no plans for the day, and I am not exhausted or in need of R and R, this list tells me what jobs need doing. ‘Do The Next Thing’ is one secret to Getting Shit Done.”
He tapped the list: “This is next: I’ve been worrying for some time about that surveillance system at Miss Clementine’s house.” He sat in the chair right below the list.
“I can understand that,” said Kim: “I am not happy that it’s there. I’d be even more distressed to find out that Eddie is using it for anything at all. If he’s using it for nefarious purposes…” She pulled a pen out of her pocket and scribbled something on the list.
Ambros scowled: “What are the odds that Aunt Clem had it installed?”
“I don’t know...I think you know more about her than I do, now.”
“It’s possible. I guess I oughta do something about it.”
“What will you do?”
He smiled: “What I ought to do is go visit the Aunties and demand some answers. Something keeps holding me back.”
“Well, what will you do about the surveillance system?”
He frowned: “I gotta think about it. The first thing to do is to find out who is using the system, and for what. But I keep running up against the facts of my new life: if I contemplate a seemingly intractable problem, more often than not I have a solution at my disposal, due to Commonwealth technology.”
‘Hmm. But you have to think about it because…?”
He shrugged, then pointed at his skull: “There’s an awful lot of stuff up here from RNA.” He tapped his temple: “Some of it only manifests as a memory when I actually contemplate some related subject...as in, I just now realized that I can go poke around Eddie’s part of the house without actually going up there.”
She grinned: “How?”
He pulled one of the Commonwealth ‘flying cameras’ out of a pocket: “I can Saltate one of these into the garage, and then fly it through the house remotely.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“See, I probably could have figured that out myself, given time; thinking about sneaking around up there put the bug in my ear, and now I know exactly how to do it.”
“When will you try it?”
He cogitated: “Your sister is coming in to town tomorrow, and bringing Aspen, right?”
“Yes…”
“I guess I’ll check out Eddie’s schedule. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and he’ll be in town for a meeting or something. If so, I’ll do it tomorrow.” He consulted the list again: “Um.”
She looked at him, wide-eyed: “What?”
“I did not write this...”
“What does it say?”
“Take a look...”
She leaned over him; he found himself looking right down her blouse.
She said: “It says: ‘Make Kim make squeaky sounds.’ Hmm.”
“Yeah,” he said: “I take it you feel that I am not keeping up with your desires.”
She oozed down onto his lap: “What are you gonna do about it?”
He shrugged again: “It is the next thing on the list...”
“Oh. Okay.”
He kissed her.
“Today we check out Eddie Roth. Eddie and his magical mystical bug network.”
Ambros sat in his office at the Salon, with a flying camera on the desk in front of him. He activated it and it rose and hovered an inch above the surface. He wondered yet again about the force that powered the various hovering objects that all of the ’wealthers took for granted. He allowed the RNA program with its explanation to rise in his mind for the umpteenth time: “Nope,” he said: “Still makes not a bit of sense. Fields created by the interaction of seven-and-thirteen-dimensional realities? The words are in Hellenic, but the concepts are beyond me.”
He put that out of mind, and closed his eyes. He visualized the inside of the mansion’s garage, partly by recalling the 1953 Vincent that sat in one corner, wasted on a wealthy fool who admitted that he’d only ridden it twice.
When he was sure he wasn’t going to accidentally send the thing to the wrong Line, he triggered the Shifter, sitting ready by his hand. The camera vanished with a tiny ‘pop’. He set the Shifter aside and checked his reception: “Excellent!” His Commonwealth laptop gave him a nearly 3-d look at the camera’s field of view.
He guided the camera around various corners, until he could get into the ventilation system. He ‘flew’ through the ducts until the camera beeped: “There we are,” he said, chortling. He dropped the spycam’s POV until he could see the room that all of the anomalous wiring centered on. He stared at the screens, all of them powered down, and the control panels and keyboards. He ordered the camera to access the system.
His glee at finding the system’s nerve center so easily evaporated in the realization that the system was very thoroughly encrypted: ‘It is only just conceivable that this is Line Seventeen tech.”
He contemplated his options, then ordered the spycam to record everything it could. He called the thing back, and it appeared in front of him. He transferred its recordings to his machine and set to work.
The first pass through the machine gave him hash: ones and zeroes, and fuzzed out video with static for sound.
His desktop machine had a lot of Commonwealth attributes, which made it pretty good at breaking into databases and decrypting the contents. He muttered and grumbled profanely at the blockages and firewalls protecting the system out at Aunt Clementine’s.
“All right, fine. Rich man has beyond state-of-the-art protections on his spy room. Let’s see how he holds up against this...” Ambros hard-wired the Newest Pismo into the desktop; then he used his MPS to hook the whole assembly to the Library in the Commonwealth.
He watched the full weight of the Commonwealth’s machine tech crawl over the records, unlocking them or decrypting them one by one. While it worked on one of the thornier files, he began going through the smaller documents.
He frowned: “I thought Eddie was a defense attorney...this is...I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
“No! It’s obvious. He’s collaborating with the prosecutors, using his guest rooms as wiretap lounges and sending the evidence to the DA...
“No wonder Eddie’s acquittal rate is so low. I mean, the DA can’t use these recordings in court, but it sure does let him pursue warrants he’d otherwise never know to ask for.”
He sat biting his lower lip for a few minutes, wondering what to do. He sighed; he searched the documents for the date he was most concerned with, and found the file that had the recordings from the first of November.
He purged that from his copy of the files, and sat there pondering the situation.
He shook himself from head to toe, and said aloud: “This simply can’t be allowed to stand. And I...am the only one who knows about it.” The loneliness of it hit him then: “I won’t harm anyone by doing the needed deed today. Imagine being a Sacred Band Magistros, though, and finding a person who needed the treatment I’m about to give to Eddie’s surveillance system ...”
He made a recording of the setup, linked it to the audio-visual files, and set it aside under the same overfile where he kept Chief Black’s records of Bad Cops. He mused: “At least there’s no sign of RNA drives anywhere in the system.”
Then he went to the wayback room and armored up.
“I don’t intend to get caught doing this,” he muttered: “But I’m not going to be recognizable, or vulnerable either, while I’m at it.”
Being a writer of fiction, at least part-time, he knew that in an adventure novel he’d write himself as a rash and admirable fool: ‘I’m not that guy, though. I won’t get shot, captured or recorded doing this vandalism.’ He put a small power module in his patch pocket.
He finished arming, and blacked out his face shield: “Let’s do it,” he said, and concentrated on the coordinates for the spy room.
He Jumped, and dropped right into the middle of the room. He pulled out his plasma sword and silently destroyed all of the keyboards and other inputs. The smell of ozone and burning plastic filled the room.
He gave himself a mental dope slap, and destroyed the smoke detector just in time. Then he began tracing the circuits and burning out all of the places where the wiring gathered before entering the backs of the larger mainframes. ‘Of course he wouldn’t connect this to the outside world, so he has enough processing power right here to run something like a nuclear power plant.’
He traced the largest cables to a room below where he stood, and realized that the lower room was a “cold-clean” room. He cut a hole in the floor of the control room and sliced the refrigeration unit in two.
He hopped down through the hole and checked out the set-up: “Here’s the main memory...” He burned holes through all of the cases and cut each of the many motherboards into bits. He stood there a moment, pondering.
‘I am not one hundred percent certain I got everything,’ He thought: “I don’t want to stay any longer than this, though. That’s what my insurance policy is for...’
He got out the power module he’d brought along. He put his gloves on the floor and tinkered with the tiny control panel until the mod beeped and showed him settings he desired.
He wiped the mod down with a kerchief from his pocket, and set it on the floor. He used the MPS to locate all of the servants, and grunted: ‘None in range of the module...’ With his gauntlets on again, he Saltated back to the Wayback Room. As soon as he was there, he triggered the power mod. It exploded, letting most of its energy load go as an electromagnetic pulse.
He made a face: “That oughtta do it.”
He began disarming. “I feel a little bit sick,” he grumbled: “That had to be done didn’t it? I couldn’t let Eddie betray any more of his clients, could I?
“I dunno. Maybe it wasn’t any of my business.” He got down to his civilian clothes. He walked slowly in to his office, sealed the door to the Wayback Room behind him, and sat at his desk, reviewing the cases discussed on the videos and comparing them to records hacked from the County Courthouse. After a while, he shook his head: “There are three really bad guys in State Prison because of Eddie’s collusion with the DA; two of them probably could have been convicted without his help. But most of his victims are people who were growing pot, or selling their bodies for sex...they deserved a decent defense.” His expression grew grim: “Maybe I was a little hasty, and not entirely in the right.” He shrugged: “Eddie Roth, however, was entirely in the wrong. And he won’t do it again, so there’s that.”
He wondered what to do next. He thought about the list in the other room, and shook his head: “Escapism, that’s the ticket.”
He opened up the document for his novel, and dove into another Timeline: “Mathilde, Mathilde, Mathilde Wolman...”
CHAPTER EIGHT: Confrontations; Ambros and Skavo; Vandalism
Ambros looked around as he entered the bar: ‘The one place in Eugene that has this gluten-free so-called ‘beer’ on tap, and it has to be a sports bar?’ No matter which direction you looked, you aimed at a big-screen TV. Most of them showed a hockey game.
‘Fortunately, hockey doesn’t really hold my attention very well. Still, not how I’d prefer to spend the evening.’
He’d arranged to meet the Chief of Police at that joint, because he didn’t want to be drinking hard liquor while being interrogated.
He got a drink and tasted it; it seemed vaguely beer-like. He picked up a glass and served himself some ice water, then picked out a table. He sat with his back to a wall; the rear exit was behind and to his right, down a short hallway.
The Chief came in as he was sitting down. Chief Black had stringy brown hair and a bald spot, with a comb-over. At eight in the evening he had a Nixon-level case of five o’clock shadow. His uniform looked rumpled from a hard day’s police work.
The top cop ordered a shot of rye whiskey and hammered it back, then got another, a double. He approached Ambros looking grim and sarcastic.
“Mr Rothakis,” he said, sneering a little. “Or, should I say Mr Scharffen?”
“Rothakis is accurate. You insisted on this meeting...why are we here? Is it just so you can snarl at me and question my identity? If so...” Ambros started to rise.
“Siddown, Rothakis.”
Ambros got all the way to his feet. He began to turn and walk out the back way.
“Come on, Mr Rothakis, don’t make me...”
“Am I being detained?” Ambros interrupted.
“...no. I just wanna talk.” Black’s words slurred enough that Ambros suspected he’d had a couple drinks before he got to “Tully’s”.
“I’ll be happy to chat...if you will be polite. Unless you want to pay for another False Arrest.”
Chief Black grumbled a bit, but eventually came around: “All right, all right, I’m sorry, okay? I just gotta few questions, that’s all.”
Ambros returned to his seat, slowly. He said: “What are we here to talk about? And is it worth it? Is this the best use of your time? Not to mention my taxes. I mean, as a public servant...” He shrugged sarcastically.
After a few moments of silent staring, Chief Black said: “Somebody recently hacked my computers. Home and work.”
“I know. It was in the news. That puzzled me; I would expect you to have state-of-the-art firewalls and all that. How could such a thing happen?”
“I was wondering if you could advise me about that,” said the Chief.
“I can’t think why. I am not especially expert in such matters.”
“Yer not, huh?”
Ambros shook his head: “I have some very high-end equipment, as you doubtless know. I have no knowledge whatsoever when it comes to coding in any of the three common ecosystems in this...country.”
“Really? But you gotta know people, huh?”
Ambros allowed his poker face to crack, and laughed right in the cop’s face: “Everyone knows somebody...right?”
“Maybe so,” said the Top Cop, sourly: “But guess what? The whole aim of the person who hacked me appears to have been information about you...or about this guy Scharffen.”
“Maybe you ought to be hunting for Mr. Scharffen, then.”
“I think I found him.”
“Prove it.”
“I will. It’s gonna take a while: all of the evidence I’d gathered has vanished. But I will prove it.”
“Okay. Good luck.” Ambros sipped the beer, made a face, and waited.
Black took a deep breath, and sighed it out: “See, my IT gal says that whoever did the hack is a real oddball. ‘The machine used is invisible,’ she says: ‘I can’t trace what I can’t see.’ Like one o’ them invisible spaceships on TV.” He took another drink: “And, your email and blog accounts all disappear similarly. She can’t figger it out. Where the posts come from, I mean. Untraceable.”
“I cover my tracks well. It’s not illegal to be elusive, especially on the Webz. My equipment has very good built-in firewalls, so I’m hard to trace.”
“Like the one who hacked my accounts...” the chief trailed off. He muttered, nearly inaudible: “I had some of the addresses of the photos written down, but the original photos are gone, vanished. And it appears as though this Scharffen guy never ever got arrested, so...”
“No fingerprints, eh? Why are you telling me this? Why...”
“I just...”
“If I had hacked your machine...
“...machines,” the Chief corrected.
“...no drunken cop would be able to startle a confession out of me with wild accusations and an upfront admission of lack of evidence. Even drunk, you oughtta know better.”
“Yeah, I do. I just want you to know, I’m on the job...”
Ambros stared at Black for a full minute, calculating. ‘What could he do if he did connect me to my old self? Is he in touch with any spooks? Or the Mob? I didn’t estimate him to be that corrupt, but maybe...if they do arrest me, they can’t hold me...so maybe a little counter-intimidation is in order...’ He took a bigger sip of beer, then a deep breath, and decided.
He pulled a manila file folder out of his shoulder bag: “On the job, eh? So am I.” He slapped it down on the table. The folder had the words “Bad Cops” printed on it in big letters. He got up.
Black opened up the file and groaned. He leafed through a few of the pages, and groaned again.
Ambros leaned in and whispered to the cop: “EugeneWeek would make hay out of that information. Even The Sentinel would probably roast you. Every one of those bad boys failed your own psych test, and you hired them anyway. I don’t know why.”
“Where’d you get this? If you didn’t hack my...”
“Never mind. I have sources. I have friends. Remember what Dan Samuelson told you? We. Are. Watching. I have secrets. You have none. That’s the Status Quo, and you cannot alter it. Now I got work to do. See ya.”
He stomped down the hall, using MPS and Shifter to locate the cops sitting the rear lot: ‘Bent bastards.’
He smiled sarcastically and diverted into the restroom to his right. He pulled out the Shifter and said: “Keenafthono”. He touched the light and Jumped.
The next morning he dropped in as always, then strolled around the War Room, gazing at boards, looking over the shoulders of people as they went about the tasks required to keep all of the parts moving: espionage, and operations initiated by spies in various Lines; engineers and specialists of every sort, engaged in re-building Lines damaged by the enemy; an entire segment of the Red Warrior Guild that rotated from Line to Line, guarding the Gates from the ATLs.
And of course, that constant trickle of bloodied or wounded or dirtied soldiers and operatives, some from Allied Lines, that came through on their way to medical treatment or to report to the Commonwealth on their activities.
He watched a woman work with a machine: ‘She’s the main ‘traffic controller’ for this landing pad,’ he realized: ‘She is standing right in the middle of the machine, surrounded by holograms of the action in various Lines, preparing for evacuations and routing in—and out—all of the routine traffic— like me when I come over...’
She looked to be dancing, singing, and signing, all at once. There was a timer counting her shift down; she was nearly done for the day.
He stood there, watching the shift change, fascinated. An identical machine stood nearby, and a young man stood near it, stretching and warming up.
After a few minutes, the fellow activated the second machine and stepped in. He mimicked the movements of the woman for a while, His eyes darting about from one holo to another. When they were perfectly synchronized the woman made a handsign and stepped out of her machine, shutting it down.
She staggered over to the seating area and fell into a chair. Megalos left his board and got her food and drink, bowing as he presented them to her.
Ambros’ MPS pinged him: ‘Ten lepta until your class,’ it whispered in his ear. He reminded himself to look deeper into the phenomenon he had just witnessed, but left the War Room at a trot.
He stepped out of the Main Hall into a sleeting rain, and ran for the Door. He cursed himself for not checking the weather before Shifting: ‘Damn hoodie is not up to this freezing stuff.
He arrived at Anni’s class area and got out of the rain. He warmed up with the advanced students, then he put on mail and a helm and played at bated steel with them.
Regulos worked with the youngest students, which led to the usual dead end: Regulos unclear on some concept, Archarae mortally confused. He shook his head and began to practice harder, pushing the other Spathae to greater deeds by his skill.
He rested a while, watching the other Spathae play.
A kopelos tugged at his mail; Ambros recognized the lad as someone he’d helped out in the past.
“Sir, would you assist Spathos Regulos? He’s lost himself again...”
Ambros allowed the young man to lead him over to the beginner’s group.
“See,” said the Archaros: “He just doesn’t get it...”
“Yeah. I see. It’s the range: you need the strong of your sword on the weak of the foe’s.”
“Oh...”
Regulos saw him chatting with the kid—‘Kopelos,’ he reminded himself—and snarled.
“If you think you know better than me, why don’t you teach the drill?” asked Regulos, sarcastically.
“Sure, why not?” Ambros smiled, though the helm screen mostly hid that. He walked to the head of the class, unsheathing his longsword simulator: bated steel, with a blunt tip.
He began: “See, if I try to wind this sword while I am too close,” he demonstrated, getting a smack in the ribs from Regulos’ weapon: “I not only have a hard time moving his weapon, but he has a shot at my ribs or belly when I do manage the deed.” He took a step back, and began again; Regulos spoiled the demonstration with a step and cut, which Ambros blocked.
“See, if your foeman realizes your intent and counters as Reg just did,” he continued smoothly: “This block prevents his riposte, and sets him up for this...” Ambros swept his weapon around and tapped Regulos’ wrists.
“And if your partner attempts another counter,” Ambros said, as Regulos foiled his demonstration again: “Then a step-through against a downleft cut, with this soft parry, gets you out of danger...”
Ambros’ patience began to wear thin: “Spathos Regulos. Really. You can’t win a drill, you know?”
Regulos stomped over and added a helm to his outfit. He came back to where Ambros stood: “Let’s see if you have any idea what you’re talking about,” Reg said, and without further warning began to attack Ambros.
The students all backed away, getting as far from the confrontation as the dry area beneath the force field allowed. Anni sat on a stool and watched, a small smile upon her face.
Ambros defended himself, and occasionally smacked Reg lightly: head, shoulders, wrists, a couple gentle thrusts to the guts. He allowed Reg not a single touch.
Finally he said to Regulos: “Enough.”
Reg said: “You haven’t hit me hard yet.”
Ambros said nothing as Regulos attacked again. He waited, and when the opportunity arose, he disarmed the other man and tripped him to the ground. He put both swords into the rack and began to remove his armor, as Anni said: “That’s full time for today, class. See you on Fifthday!”
As he was leaving, he heard Anni remonstrating with Regulos “...he hit you whenever he wanted to, and he didn’t miss once. Pull yourself together before you really make him angry...”
‘I’m going to the Library,” he thought: “I have some work to do...’
Ambros sat in his little high-tech cubby in the Library in Athino. ‘As far as I can make out, about a third of the cubic in this building is made up of these research stations. They even have them attached to the ceilings in some of the rooms...’ It occurred to him to wonder how folks reached those. He put off asking, having, as he thought, more important things to do.
He synced his personal electronics (MPS, Shifter, and laptop) with the Library’s computer system, and began his research.
First he used a Shifter-enabled program to check on the e-zine that he and his family had published. ‘As I expected...three days of furious activity, and then a lot of electronic silence. We need to get that second issue out, and it needs to have something more controversial in it...something to carry people’s attention until the third issue is ready.’
‘The good thing? Looks like just about everyone who visited the magazine signed up for future issues...that’s uncommonly good.’
He logged out of the Shift: ‘I don’t like to stay connected between that Line and this one. I just don’t.’
He checked his calendar: “Hmm. Skavo wants a rendezvous. I wonder...”
He indicated his willingness to meet ser. Se replied that since the weather was bad, se’d meet him at a specific café, ser favorite. He agreed.
“I better get to work,” he said, shutting down all of the distractions: “Two Commonwealth hours, or three hours my time, to do this research and write this essay...Epamanondas, here I come...”
For his introduction, he laid out his experiences in the SCA, and his earlier and later martial activities. ‘A lot of this part is cut-and-paste,’ he thought: ‘The Hellenic version of cut-and-paste, where the machine responds to my eye movements and whispered commands. I’ve introduced myself a bunch of times in a bunch of essays, but I need to keep doing it...someone may find this one first...’
“Let’s see: the career of Epamanondas and the end of the Spartan threat to Boeotia: Strategic Flanking, (should I call it Deep Flanking?) Mention Sherman and Patton...” he muttered and typed and re-arranged his points: “...tactical flanking, as done in the real world and the SCA...Applied to the current situation in the Timeline Wars...”
At length, he had his outline built, and a fair bit of actual writing slotted in to it. He could feel himself approaching a stopping point: “The point where I need to wait, once again, for the ideas to gel and the voices in my head to dictate the strategy.” He checked the time: “Gotta go, anyway...”
He strolled through the mist and occasional rain, seeing the city of Athino in a new and different mood: dark, mysterious, a City where temples of crafts and services rose out of the ground suddenly and loomed over him, brooding. His hood reduced his peripheral vision; the fog muted all colors and the lights along the streets made shadows of black and gray.
‘This is the kind of night that would make me really nervous, back home. In my Home Line, I mean...’ he pondered how much he felt at home in the Commonwealth, and how little he did in his own Line: ‘At Rose House, or Samuel B’s, I feel very much at home...the Country Fair had aspects of this feeling, safe and relaxed.’ He realized how much safe had to do with it: “A dark night like this, misty but not too cold, in any city in my Line, would be the time when thieves and rapists and robbers would be prowling. And while rape is not unheard of here...’ He contemplated that for a moment, then promised to come back to that train of thought, soon. “But robbery? Only a true psychotic would try to rob a person on the street, in this town.”
It occurred to him to wonder about psychosis in the Commonwealth. ‘Does it even exist? But surely there is a genetic component to psychopathy. I’m sure there is to sociopathy...’
He wondered if the practice of judicial dueling had affected the prevalence of violent mental illnesses in the Commonwealth: ‘Such people tend to make enemies, and neither the psychotic nor the sociopathic have traits that would make them good swordsmen. Not in my experience, anyway. Well...concentration on goals is some help in the martial arts...ugh.’
He passed the statue of Socratos; the great man’s marble head had disappeared into the fog, and his outfit drew Ambros’ stare.
‘He wears a toga or chlamys, but beneath that a monk’s ankle-length robes...He thought of himself as clergy, as a monk, but had an affair with The Exile throughout the time of the Revolution.’ He wondered, again, what contradictions he himself carried that he hadn’t considered. He smiled sardonically: ‘I’ve faced all of the cognitive biases I know of, and found them in myself, confirmation bias not the least of them...’
After thirty-five years of carefully considering the arguments of people he disagreed with, he still was an anarchist. ‘An anarchist, a syndicalist, and an admirer of the Situationists, for all of their flaws...Must be no hope for me,’ he grinned.
He stumbled upon the café he sought, unaware of how far he’d walked.
Skavo sat at a small table in one corner, alone but not lonely. ‘Se seems always so confident...’ Skavo’s head had an odd shape to it, more oval than most people’s, and larger in the back, as though ser brain had sought extra space in the back of ser skull. Se had a small pointed chin, a very small mouth, and very large eyes, black and deep, but with only the slightest hint of lashes.
Se held a small cup in one hand; when he approached he smelled spirits, and some part of his sensorium identified it as whiskey. He wondered: ‘My sight and hearing are so much better, since I took treatments from Versingos...I guess smell, touch, taste, may also be augmented. I should ask...’
“I didn’t know you drank alcohol,” he said, as he sat down across from her.
“I don’t, not much. I had just a small sip, to understand your preferences. The rest is for you.”
“Thank you.” He sipped: “Tastes like Jameson’s, with a hint more vanilla.”
Se smiled: “I did well, then. The bartender here compounded that, from my recollection of your description of the flavor.”
“You did very well. So did she.” He saluted the bartender with a toast. She smiled triumphantly. “Guess I’ll be back here, whenever I want a taste of home.”
He pondered the potential ripples that his patronage would produce: ‘I am a person of high Status in this City; my regular appearances here would reflect some of that prestige back upon the staff and the place itself.’
Skavo leaned back, apparently relaxed. He could somehow sense ser tension, though he could not tell how.
Se spoke of trivialities, but beneath each of ser questions some probing of his principles lay hidden. He answered honestly, sensing the direction se led him in: se sought intimacy, in an urgent way, but something held ser back.
After several lines of questioning petered out, se asked: ‘How did you become an anarchist, which I gather is a rare position for a person in your Line to take?”
He shrugged: “I can’t take credit for it, really. I was hitchhiking in southern Ohio, trying to get back to the Cleveland area. Guy picked me up, said his name was Stanley and he lived near Cleveland, so he’d take me the whole way. We chatted all the way home to his place.”
“Was he—flirting? Is that how you say it?”
Ambros grinned: “I expect so. But being proselytized by a homosexual anarchist was such a change from Christians that I actually enjoyed it. Anyway...”
“Go on,” se said.
“Well...it turned out Stanley was not the only person in the family that wound up with the hots for me. They said I could move in, on a provisional basis, and we all clicked...I started reading all of the books they had...books on anarchism, yes, but also on archaeology, anthropology, sociology, most of them not at all from an anarchist perspective.” He shrugged, again: “Before I knew it, I was convinced. Anarchism just made sense. It made all of my experiences with Authority fall into a pattern, it explained ‘human nature’ and made the bizarre and illogical actions I saw in History, and around me everyday, into perceptible and understandable strategies that people used to maintain themselves in a hard world.”
“So at—what? Nineteen years old? You became an anarchist.”
“Yes. And nothing has shifted me since, though I tried to talk myself out of it.”
Se did not seem critical; indeed, how could se, considering? Se asked: “You did?”
“Of course. Who would adopt such a summarily dismissed and roundly hated theory if he could avoid it? But even now...well, I recall something one of my mentors said, in a speech when he won some academic award. Something like, the burden of proof for the authoritarians is on them: if they can’t justify the power they wield with good results to the Commons, then the institutions they control should be dismantled and replaced with something fair and democratic. He also pointed out: ‘Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody else is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune’.”
“Hah!” se exclaimed: “That’s true, for certain. Is there anything that would have changed your mind?”
“Yes of course: evidence!”
“Of?”
“Evidence that the rich and powerful and their political lackeys are something other than brutal parasites, living off of the labor of the vast majority and returning little or nothing to the Commons.”
“No one offered you such evidence?”
“Lotta folks thought they had...none of the alleged proofs I saw ever stood up to an inquiring mind.” He grinned at ser: “Do you have such evidence for me?”
Se laughed merrily: “Not at all. I agree with you, actually.”
“Nice.”
They sat silent for a while, then se said: “I have decided. I am going to tell you about myself, my peculiar self, and advance my proposition by that means.”
He stared at ser, working his way to ser meaning: “Go ahead,” he said.
Se said: “I live on a slow hormonal cycle, hovering between what you would call ‘male’ and ‘female’ sensibilities.”
“A two year cycle?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Did someone tell you? Or did you guess?”
“Both. Voukli told me of your preference for hairy barbarians. Then she added that you very seldom take a lover, only once every two years or so, and that the affairs never last more than a season.”
Se made a face, sardonic and amused: “You put the rest together, while sitting here with me?”
“Seemed obvious.” He shrugged: “You are telling me this for a reason, I suppose. You want...” He trailed off, not sure what to say, wanting not to misstep.
Se drew a deep breath: “I am at the most womanly end of my cycle. At this time I am most susceptible to a man’s charms. My kolpi, such as it is, demands attention, and desires penetration. My peos...or clitoris...is in its smallest and most tender state.”
“Is there no way to even out your hormones?”
“I wish. But when the Meds and I attempted to find a halfway state, we found that my bones lost calcium and I became even more fragile than I naturally am.” Se smiled sadly: “All things will pass, including this moment. I almost always go where my heart and kolpi lead me, when I am in one state or the other.”
“I see. And your heart and kolpi lead you now...to me?”
“Don’t think I want merely to use you. I hope to pleasure you as well. We have become, I hope, friends; I would not want to lose that.”
He tipped his head to one side, and said: “I appreciate that. I hope we remain friends, whatever may happen.” He finished his drink.
Se rose: “Will you come with me now? May I show you my strangeness and hope for some satisfaction?”
“I will come with you. Lead me...”
Se took his hand and gently pulled him to his feet. He felt for the first time his physical superiority to ser, as though he loomed over ser in a vaguely threatening way. Se shuddered and squeezed his hand; se caught his eye and then looked away.
‘So unlike ser usual self,’ he mused.
Se tugged gently on his hand, and brought him along with ser.
Ser room lay only a few blocks away: he knew where they were going, but was soon bewildered. They passed lighted areas and shadowed alleys and plataeae and agorae. Suddenly, se drew him into an arched and pillared passage, and to the door of ser small room.
He saw at once that se had prepared for the success of ser wooing. Ser bedding lay folded down. Candles sat on the stone shelves and in the niches upon the walls; the smell of wax and oranges filled the room. The bed itself se had surrounded with flickering electric candles.
Se turned to him and placed ser hands upon his chest: “I am trembling.”
“You are.”
“I am afraid, as I always am, when I place myself in the hands of a man. Give me no reason to fear you, I beg.”
“Tell me what you want.” He thought of his first night with Kim, and wondered how similar se was to her.
Se spoke in American: “I am...’turned on’ you would say...by strength and gentleness. I cannot physically bear any breaking force, or rough handling. I need you...but I need your care and discretion.”
“Go on.”
Se began to kiss him, tugging at his clothing and pulling it from him, piece by piece: “So strong...so muscular...what must it be like to have such strength, such power? To be able to increase that power by exercise and will?” Ser hands roamed over his body, ser eyes wide, ser tongue touching ser upper lip.
“I...”
“You must hold me hard, tight, but with care...eventually you will fuck me, and then it will hurt...that is part of the pleasure I need...but if I call you by your title instead of your name, you must gentle yourself immediately.”
“Spathos is the safe word,” he said, nodding.
Se pulled his trousers down and off, leaving him naked. Se held his nearly erect peos in ser hand, gasping a little as se stroked and squeezed it. ‘O! This is large,” se said: “This will hurt.”
“We needn’t...”
Se interrupted: “I need. It’s as it should be, as it must be for my pleasure.”
He knew he was not above average in size; he wondered what ser sex would be like.
Se knelt down, leaned in, took his peos in ser mouth to the extent that se could.
“Ah, only the head, I wish I could do more.” Se rose and slowly removed her tunic, dropped ser skirts on the floor, kicked them into and among his own clothes.
Se stood there, staring at his body, swaying like a young tree in the breeze. Se wore then only a swath of cloth about ser hips, held in place by some invisible fastener. Se swayed again, towards him; he moved aside and swept ser into his arms, then carried ser to the bed.
He removed the cloth from about ser, finding a magnetic tab that held it there. He pressed ser legs apart, and found ser genitals with his eyes and hands.
She gasped. Se was a She at that moment, despite the strangeness of her kolpi. Ambros explored her, gently, finding labia and a vagina, things he could comprehend. Ser clitoris stood up, as thick as the end of his little finger and long enough to set her labia aside and be visible. Ser urethra passed through it, as if it were a peos. It was clearly not, he thought. He stroked it, and se gasped again. ‘That’s a pleasure button for ser,’ he thought: ‘And a pain point as well, if I am in any way ungentle...’
The rest of ser body disturbed him far more. Se had only the slightest swelling to indicate ser breasts—where breasts would be on a woman. Ser nipples were very small, almost like a boy’s. Se had no body hair; he wondered if se shaved ser head or simply never had any hair there, either.
To his eye, and to his hand, everything about ser screamed: “Too young! Not ready!”
He knew se had at least fifty years in service to the Commonwealth, so he did his best to put that thought aside. ‘Make her a woman, in your mind,’ he thought. ‘Do as you would do for a woman...’
He went to kissing ser kolpi, then to licking ser. He took great care, and also took his time. Se shook and shuddered, and though it took a long time, and his shoulders and neck began to ache, he eventually brought her to orgasm.
Se said: “Come to me, inside me.”
“I...can’t.”
“Oh,” se said. “Oh, I see.”
It was his turn to shudder: “You...look like a boy, or a girl, of ten years or so. I know you aren’t, but I’m programmed by my own culture...”
Se drew him to ser: “I understand. Rest here, await the inspiration. Make me a woman, in your mind...a grownup.”
His face right next to sers, he saw the fine network of wrinkles at the corners of ser eyes and mouth. He felt ser breath on his ear, ser fingers exploring him, skillfully. Se kissed him, expertly, as no child could. Somewhere in his psyche, his subconscious became convinced of her womanhood.
“She,” he thought.
He found the inspiration she’d spoken of, and lifted her legs.
She cried out as he penetrated her. Deep inside, as far as he could go, he found his peos lubed by her juices. She gripped his shoulders with her hands and her fingernails. Long and sharp as those nails were, her hands hadn’t the strength to dig them into him.
“Hold me tightly! Fuck me hard, take your pleasure!”
He did as she commanded, his mind racing. She made little ‘eep’ing sounds, seeming to be in some pain. He remembered her words, and persevered. Her kolpi gripped him, once, twice, thrice, but oh! So gently! He came, grunting as he spilled into her.
She pushed at his shoulders and he lifted his weight from her.
They lay side-by-side, ser hands upon his face and hip. His hands he put upon ser bottom and breast.
Se sighed: “That was almost perfect. I would like you to do that to me twice a tenday or so, until my desire ebbs.”
He smiled: “My Trine permits it. I am not unsatisfied. I will carve out time for this pleasure.”
“Ah, good.”
After a few kisses, se asked him: “You have been with Voukli as well, or so the rumor has it. Yes or no?”
He nodded: “Rumor has it right, this time.”
“But not with Arrenji yet?”
He laughed out loud: “Yet? I doubt that she’d be interested!”
“Truly? I can’t think why she would not be.”
“Well, first of all, she appears to be into beefier guys than me. Like that fellow from Explorer’s Guild, the ex-Black Warrior dude. And second, I don’t know if I could get into Arrenji...”
“Why not?”
He shook his head, as well as he could with ser so close to him: “I don’t know. Voukli is intimidating but human. Arrenji...” He shuddered, a completely non-sexual shudder: “Arrenji is just terrifying. Flat out terrifying.”
“I suppose that’s true. Estelli’s Line seems to produce at least one person like that every generation or so.”
“That’s her family—her extended family, right?”
“Yes, but she is not in the extended part. People with some connection to Estelli’s Line are...how do you say it? A dime a dozen. But Arrenji is in the main line of descent, from three of her four grandparents. That’s why she lives at Villa Estelli.”
He laughed: “Yeah, I guessed that. And her Status within the family must be preposterously high. She’s living in Selos’ Tower, with the ground floor sitting room at her disposal.”
“She also uses half the uppermost floor at the Line’s country house.” Se nuzzled against his chest, apparently reveling in his hairiness.
“I heard about that place. Forty or fifty people live there, right?”
“Yes, and every member of the family out to about the fourth degree has privileges there. For retreats or...vacations, you know?”
“Ah. Out of curiosity, who were Arrenji’s ancestors? I mean, from back at the beginning of the Commonwealth?”
Se said: “Arrenji is descended from Nikos Messeninos and Eleni Leontari, via her son Leontaros, and also from Eleni’s adopted daughter, Queen Saráyi. Her maternal grandmother is a collateral descendent of Magistri Arrendi Korinthini, via her adopted niece Theadori.”
Ambros shook his head, hard and fast. He rubbed his temples: “That means she’s also from the Xenos-Selos-Thenos Line...”
“Exactly.”
“Oy. To the Vey. No wonder she’s such a badass.”
They lay in silence for a while, in touch but not foreplay.
After a while se said: “What about your Line? Ambros’ Line? Your Trines, the three women you are bound to?”
“What about them?”
Se cocked ser head to one side, then sat up, stretching: “I wonder how you see yourselves. You cannot be formally ‘married’, as they would call it in USIT Seventeen.”
“We can’t be. We formed a corporation instead.”
Se looked at him oddly: “A corporation? Oh, a criminal enterprise?”
He laughed: “Well, a lot of corporations are just that. Ambrose Bierce wrote that ‘A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who lacks the capital to start a corporation.’ But he was a notorious cynic. In our case, we entangled our existing business affairs and real property. We pooled our resources to increase our standard of living and compete in a foul and evil money economy.”
Se lowered ser brows: “Are you a notorious cynic?”
“At times, yes. Especially in the past, but ask the right person and you’ll hear me denounced as such right up to a year ago. Or even yesterday. Finding out about this place,” he gestured broadly, to take in City and Line: “That’s mellowed my cynicism a little, as far as this part of the Multiverse is concerned.”
He laced his fingers behind his head and chortled: “Still, and of course, anyone not cynical about the various forms of capitalism that are raping the planet in my Line is either willfully ignorant or monumentally stupid. Even most members of the ruling class are as cynical as Diogenes. But unlike the Old Cynic, they neither live simply nor criticize the status quo. They just steal from the Commons and gloat in their cynicism.”
“You seem to be amused by that.” Se looked concerned.
He made the sign for air quotes: “’I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused’,” he said, and then: “‘I jest out of season, to forestall yet more untimely tears’.”
“How is your family’s corporation different than the cynical ones?”
He sobered: “First, we do not hire people to do our work for us. Hiring and firing people is the Original Sin of Capitalism, as an economic system and as an Ideology.
“Of course, we don’t need to exploit other people to make a profit; in the language of my Line’s Dismal Cult of Economics, we are a privately held ‘B’ corporation. I can bring in enough cash from outside Line Seventeen to keep things ticking along without any problems. In other words, I cheat; or that’s the way an ideological capitalist would likely look at it. But even before that, Marie was running her catering business in an entirely non-traditional way, treating the big jobs as joint ventures with temporary partners and splitting the proceeds according to some complex formula...”
Se waved that off: “Of course, the people that you associate with are assumed by me to be ethical. But you are bringing money in from other Lines, Quiet Lines, and from Sacred Band Intelligence. Yes?”
He nodded.
“So how does that affect the...money supply, is that how you say it?”
He pursed his lips and nodded: “Good point. In a sense I am adding a small impetus to inflation by importing objects of value and also by creating notional money and dropping it into my bank accounts. In another situation, that would be a bad thing to do...”
“Why is it not?”
He shrugged: “The economy in United States Imperial Lines is so distorted by the various governments’ creation of the same sort of notional money—in the trillions of dollars, where I am dinking around with thousands—that my actions are trivial by comparison.”
“I see...” Se did not sound convinced: “You must then...‘launder’ the money you carry in to your Line.”
“Yes.”
“How do you do it?”
“I’ve stuck to coins, actual coined money, most of it antique in nature, and most of it gold. As artifacts of an earlier historical period, they have ‘value’ (to some people) far in excess of their face value, or even of their value as metal.
“And then, I wanted to make it difficult but possible for the authorities to figure out where that cash was coming from, so I disguised myself and sold the first batch of coins in a big city far from my current home...”
“Did it work?”
“It worked on the authorities, I think. I believe they’re still involved with police work, tracking my movements via witnesses and surveillance cameras. It didn’t work on anyone I sold coins to. Not a one of them figured out who I really was, mind you, but not a one of them believed my disguises, either.”
Se chuckled: “Better work on the...spy craft? If you want to be a truly effective agent.”
“You got that right.”
“But your actions still affect the money economy, and not in a good way. That your actions are trivial, and your effect small, does not alter that basic truth.”
“Again, you are correct.”
He pondered ser critique, and decided that in end it did not matter: ‘Se is an Ideological Pacifist; se will be far more disturbed by the violence inherent in my job than by the economics of it. And right now...” He saw the way se looked at him: ‘Right now se—she—wants my peos.”
She pushed him down onto his back and straddled him, her mouth on his. He buried the part of his mind that freaked out about her boyishness and kissed back, abandoning himself to her lust.
She rode him, not that differently than any number of women had at other times. He found himself falling back through time to his youth, and recalling Tina’s lovemaking. He closed his eyes, feeling a mix of intense emotions: joy, sexual tension on the very verge of release, grief at the multiple losses, old and new, that stalked his memory. He put his hands on Skavo’s thighs and squeezed; she gasped and he lightened his grip, shocked yet again at the softness of her and her frailty.
She orgasmed, her hands on his wrists, holding him down as well as she could; he felt a bit of semen pulled from his peos by her feather-light contractions.
She lay down atop him, sighing. He put one hand at the small of her back, the other on the side of her face, kissed her tenderly.
She returned the kiss, moaning, then turned her head away.
She lifted herself off of him, tears falling: “I can do no more. I’m sorry.”
“I am not unsatisfied.”
“Oh.” Se stared at him, lust and curiosity mingled in ser features.
He contemplated the dissonances between them. How to broach the subject that interested him? ‘Straightforward inquiry is the custom, here.’
He steeled himself and spoke: “So...surely the violence inherent in my work is far more painful to you than the economics of it. How do you square these things?”
Se sighed again: “A well-rehearsed practice of cognitive dissonance.” Se sat up, drawing a heavy robe about serself: “Sorry. I don’t mean to hide myself from you. I am susceptible to cold.”
“I am not offended.” He grinned: “Go on, if you don’t mind. Tell me how cognitive dissonance serves you. For most people, it is a source of discomfort.”
“Yes. It is that.” Se grimaced: “Somebody had to...I mean, when the Sacred Band offered a seat on their Master’s Council to any member of the Pacifist Deme who would take it...we agreed that one of us ought to take it.”
“And you...?”
“The seat remained vacant for half a year, while we discussed it. How such a person—how one of us —would react, and what actions we might take...in theory whichever one of us sat in that room could...veto...any action the Sacred Band proposed.”
He nodded, seeing it: “The person who took that seat would have to sometimes sit silent while plans to kill people and break shit took form right before ser.”
“More than sometimes. Not as often as I feared; the Council spends most of its time hearing reports about the situations in various Timelines, and fine-tuning its espionage and information campaigns. But, often enough...”
“Often enough, you are listening to plans that are repellent to you, in your deepest self.”
“Yes.”
“And yet, you chose me for a lover.” He held out his hands: “See the blood? No? But it is there.”
“I know. But it is on my hands as well, and for all of their posturing, it is on the hands of the other members of my Deme, my dearest friends.”
“Do they see that?”
“Some of them. Vaguely. Unclearly.”
Se sat silent for a time. At last se said: “My attraction to certain kinds of ex-barbarian men is not something I can control...I don’t even try anymore. When the season comes upon me, I seek and find the pleasure that my body demands.”
“When you are at the other end of your cycle, do you...?”
Se put a hand on his lips: “No. Not for you to know, not for you to ask.”
“Very well. How about this: What would you or your Deme do, if you had your way? How would you deal with the ATLs and their allies, the things they do, the threat they are to peace in this Line and any other Line they can find, the threat they pose...
“...To our very existence?” se interrupted: “The Deme’s ‘official’ position is to negotiate a withdrawal from all of our Allied Lines and somehow cut ourselves off from the rest of the Multiverse, since it is so intractably violent. If we could do that, the Deme, our ‘global organization’ that is, would advocate for that course.” Se put a fist to her ear: “That is not my position. I don’t think that we will ever do that, as a Line. Even if we could.”
“Well,” he said: “and if we could, how would we then assure that no one found our safe haven, by accident or design?” He looked at ser with a shrewd expression: “Would you do it, though? If it could be done?”
“If I could order the world to my desires, do you mean? I’d prefer that the Gates had never opened for us.”
“It’s over two hundred fifty years since they opened the First Gate,” he said: “Would you close them now, knowing what we know?”
Se shrugged, and made a pained face: “That would be like turning our backs on a rape in progress. Would it not? How could we sit here, at peace and in plenty, while Jean L’Iriquois and his minions ravaged one world after another, ourselves blissful, ignoring the plight of billions of people?”
He frowned: “That would surely weigh upon you. Us.”
“It would weigh most heavily upon my colleagues in the Pacifist Deme, though many of them don’t realize it.”
“How can they not?”
Se smiled: “Ignorance is bliss. Willful ignorance upholds untenable positions. They’d feel it right away, if their wishes ever came true. I give them that much credit: they are not able to lie to themselves when faced with reality.”
“I know plenty of people who can do that,” he muttered.
“Yes,” se said: “Barbarians, pardon the word: people whose languages allow for or even demand ambiguity, and whose education fails to teach the triad: Logic, Emotional Honesty, and Empiricism.”
He agreed: “I find it a lot harder to lie to myself in Rational Hellenic.”
“Did you make a practice of lying to yourself in American?”
“I struggled against that on a regular basis. But I had a ‘satori’...”
“Satori?”
"Oh, a Japanese word in my Line. It refers to a sudden understanding of the self, of one’s essence, usually after long years of work and investigation.
“Anyway, about five years before my recruitment here: I heard a lecture from a guy who taught what he called the ‘Mental Martial Arts’. He said: ‘You can’t stop lying to other people until you stop lying to yourself.’ That rang true to me. So...Satori!”
“I see.”
He looked right at her, shrewd again: “You are an outlier in your Deme, and on the Master’s Council. And physically as well...”
“Yes,” se said: “I don’t doubt that my physical being has affected my...you would say, my political choices. For fourteen seasons out of every sixteen I am immune to the call of sex or physical pleasure. My body will tolerate little in the way of exercise, save some disciplines that you would regard as ‘yoga’. I cannot therefore be tempted to any kind of violence: neither my mind nor my body is capable of anger or aggression.
“When I am not in one of my sexual seasons, I am numb to most of the emotional turmoil of an ordinary person; but I am familiar with that turmoil, from my yearly sojourns in the land of desire.”
He thought about that: “So you were the perfect candidate for the job of liason between the Guild and the Deme.”
Se pointed at him: “Indeed, you’ve hit the mark. I can sit unperturbed through either group’s meeting, most of the time. I can present each side honestly to the other; I can defend my silence in Council to my comrades in the Deme. When criticized, I can calmly offer my position to whomever might desire it...no one else has offered to take it, as yet.”
Se drew close to him again: “Hold me now, if you will, very gently, and we will sleep...”
He woke the next morning to find ser gone. Se left neither note nor any message at any of his various caches, in any of the Lines he frequented. He shrugged, and dressed, and went where he needed to go next: ‘My Salon,’ he judged: “And look at my list, and do the next thing.’
He found Kim waiting for him at the Salon, curled up in a chair reading something in a pile of loose papers.
“Hi!” she said, jumping up and embracing him: “I saw the note you sent about spending the night with Skavo...how’d that go?”
He squeezed her tightly and said: “That’s hard to describe. Se is an odd one.” He gave her a brief summary of his conversations with Skavo, but said nothing about ser physical oddity.
Kim laughed: “Well, I guessed that you’d head here this morning. What are you doing today?”
Ambros pointed to a list that he’d pinned to a small bulletin board. He said: “My list of tasks and chores never ends, does it? If I have no plans for the day, and I am not exhausted or in need of R and R, this list tells me what jobs need doing. ‘Do The Next Thing’ is one secret to Getting Shit Done.”
He tapped the list: “This is next: I’ve been worrying for some time about that surveillance system at Miss Clementine’s house.” He sat in the chair right below the list.
“I can understand that,” said Kim: “I am not happy that it’s there. I’d be even more distressed to find out that Eddie is using it for anything at all. If he’s using it for nefarious purposes…” She pulled a pen out of her pocket and scribbled something on the list.
Ambros scowled: “What are the odds that Aunt Clem had it installed?”
“I don’t know...I think you know more about her than I do, now.”
“It’s possible. I guess I oughta do something about it.”
“What will you do?”
He smiled: “What I ought to do is go visit the Aunties and demand some answers. Something keeps holding me back.”
“Well, what will you do about the surveillance system?”
He frowned: “I gotta think about it. The first thing to do is to find out who is using the system, and for what. But I keep running up against the facts of my new life: if I contemplate a seemingly intractable problem, more often than not I have a solution at my disposal, due to Commonwealth technology.”
‘Hmm. But you have to think about it because…?”
He shrugged, then pointed at his skull: “There’s an awful lot of stuff up here from RNA.” He tapped his temple: “Some of it only manifests as a memory when I actually contemplate some related subject...as in, I just now realized that I can go poke around Eddie’s part of the house without actually going up there.”
She grinned: “How?”
He pulled one of the Commonwealth ‘flying cameras’ out of a pocket: “I can Saltate one of these into the garage, and then fly it through the house remotely.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“See, I probably could have figured that out myself, given time; thinking about sneaking around up there put the bug in my ear, and now I know exactly how to do it.”
“When will you try it?”
He cogitated: “Your sister is coming in to town tomorrow, and bringing Aspen, right?”
“Yes…”
“I guess I’ll check out Eddie’s schedule. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and he’ll be in town for a meeting or something. If so, I’ll do it tomorrow.” He consulted the list again: “Um.”
She looked at him, wide-eyed: “What?”
“I did not write this...”
“What does it say?”
“Take a look...”
She leaned over him; he found himself looking right down her blouse.
She said: “It says: ‘Make Kim make squeaky sounds.’ Hmm.”
“Yeah,” he said: “I take it you feel that I am not keeping up with your desires.”
She oozed down onto his lap: “What are you gonna do about it?”
He shrugged again: “It is the next thing on the list...”
“Oh. Okay.”
He kissed her.
“Today we check out Eddie Roth. Eddie and his magical mystical bug network.”
Ambros sat in his office at the Salon, with a flying camera on the desk in front of him. He activated it and it rose and hovered an inch above the surface. He wondered yet again about the force that powered the various hovering objects that all of the ’wealthers took for granted. He allowed the RNA program with its explanation to rise in his mind for the umpteenth time: “Nope,” he said: “Still makes not a bit of sense. Fields created by the interaction of seven-and-thirteen-dimensional realities? The words are in Hellenic, but the concepts are beyond me.”
He put that out of mind, and closed his eyes. He visualized the inside of the mansion’s garage, partly by recalling the 1953 Vincent that sat in one corner, wasted on a wealthy fool who admitted that he’d only ridden it twice.
When he was sure he wasn’t going to accidentally send the thing to the wrong Line, he triggered the Shifter, sitting ready by his hand. The camera vanished with a tiny ‘pop’. He set the Shifter aside and checked his reception: “Excellent!” His Commonwealth laptop gave him a nearly 3-d look at the camera’s field of view.
He guided the camera around various corners, until he could get into the ventilation system. He ‘flew’ through the ducts until the camera beeped: “There we are,” he said, chortling. He dropped the spycam’s POV until he could see the room that all of the anomalous wiring centered on. He stared at the screens, all of them powered down, and the control panels and keyboards. He ordered the camera to access the system.
His glee at finding the system’s nerve center so easily evaporated in the realization that the system was very thoroughly encrypted: ‘It is only just conceivable that this is Line Seventeen tech.”
He contemplated his options, then ordered the spycam to record everything it could. He called the thing back, and it appeared in front of him. He transferred its recordings to his machine and set to work.
The first pass through the machine gave him hash: ones and zeroes, and fuzzed out video with static for sound.
His desktop machine had a lot of Commonwealth attributes, which made it pretty good at breaking into databases and decrypting the contents. He muttered and grumbled profanely at the blockages and firewalls protecting the system out at Aunt Clementine’s.
“All right, fine. Rich man has beyond state-of-the-art protections on his spy room. Let’s see how he holds up against this...” Ambros hard-wired the Newest Pismo into the desktop; then he used his MPS to hook the whole assembly to the Library in the Commonwealth.
He watched the full weight of the Commonwealth’s machine tech crawl over the records, unlocking them or decrypting them one by one. While it worked on one of the thornier files, he began going through the smaller documents.
He frowned: “I thought Eddie was a defense attorney...this is...I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
“No! It’s obvious. He’s collaborating with the prosecutors, using his guest rooms as wiretap lounges and sending the evidence to the DA...
“No wonder Eddie’s acquittal rate is so low. I mean, the DA can’t use these recordings in court, but it sure does let him pursue warrants he’d otherwise never know to ask for.”
He sat biting his lower lip for a few minutes, wondering what to do. He sighed; he searched the documents for the date he was most concerned with, and found the file that had the recordings from the first of November.
He purged that from his copy of the files, and sat there pondering the situation.
He shook himself from head to toe, and said aloud: “This simply can’t be allowed to stand. And I...am the only one who knows about it.” The loneliness of it hit him then: “I won’t harm anyone by doing the needed deed today. Imagine being a Sacred Band Magistros, though, and finding a person who needed the treatment I’m about to give to Eddie’s surveillance system ...”
He made a recording of the setup, linked it to the audio-visual files, and set it aside under the same overfile where he kept Chief Black’s records of Bad Cops. He mused: “At least there’s no sign of RNA drives anywhere in the system.”
Then he went to the wayback room and armored up.
“I don’t intend to get caught doing this,” he muttered: “But I’m not going to be recognizable, or vulnerable either, while I’m at it.”
Being a writer of fiction, at least part-time, he knew that in an adventure novel he’d write himself as a rash and admirable fool: ‘I’m not that guy, though. I won’t get shot, captured or recorded doing this vandalism.’ He put a small power module in his patch pocket.
He finished arming, and blacked out his face shield: “Let’s do it,” he said, and concentrated on the coordinates for the spy room.
He Jumped, and dropped right into the middle of the room. He pulled out his plasma sword and silently destroyed all of the keyboards and other inputs. The smell of ozone and burning plastic filled the room.
He gave himself a mental dope slap, and destroyed the smoke detector just in time. Then he began tracing the circuits and burning out all of the places where the wiring gathered before entering the backs of the larger mainframes. ‘Of course he wouldn’t connect this to the outside world, so he has enough processing power right here to run something like a nuclear power plant.’
He traced the largest cables to a room below where he stood, and realized that the lower room was a “cold-clean” room. He cut a hole in the floor of the control room and sliced the refrigeration unit in two.
He hopped down through the hole and checked out the set-up: “Here’s the main memory...” He burned holes through all of the cases and cut each of the many motherboards into bits. He stood there a moment, pondering.
‘I am not one hundred percent certain I got everything,’ He thought: “I don’t want to stay any longer than this, though. That’s what my insurance policy is for...’
He got out the power module he’d brought along. He put his gloves on the floor and tinkered with the tiny control panel until the mod beeped and showed him settings he desired.
He wiped the mod down with a kerchief from his pocket, and set it on the floor. He used the MPS to locate all of the servants, and grunted: ‘None in range of the module...’ With his gauntlets on again, he Saltated back to the Wayback Room. As soon as he was there, he triggered the power mod. It exploded, letting most of its energy load go as an electromagnetic pulse.
He made a face: “That oughtta do it.”
He began disarming. “I feel a little bit sick,” he grumbled: “That had to be done didn’t it? I couldn’t let Eddie betray any more of his clients, could I?
“I dunno. Maybe it wasn’t any of my business.” He got down to his civilian clothes. He walked slowly in to his office, sealed the door to the Wayback Room behind him, and sat at his desk, reviewing the cases discussed on the videos and comparing them to records hacked from the County Courthouse. After a while, he shook his head: “There are three really bad guys in State Prison because of Eddie’s collusion with the DA; two of them probably could have been convicted without his help. But most of his victims are people who were growing pot, or selling their bodies for sex...they deserved a decent defense.” His expression grew grim: “Maybe I was a little hasty, and not entirely in the right.” He shrugged: “Eddie Roth, however, was entirely in the wrong. And he won’t do it again, so there’s that.”
He wondered what to do next. He thought about the list in the other room, and shook his head: “Escapism, that’s the ticket.”
He opened up the document for his novel, and dove into another Timeline: “Mathilde, Mathilde, Mathilde Wolman...”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-12-19 06:28 am (UTC)Shouldn't that be a '52 vincent, not 53?
Pissing off the police chief to that extant seems like an atypically dumb move on his part... but maybe that's author-intentional?
53 and the police chief.
Date: 2016-12-19 04:12 pm (UTC)As far as the EPD is concerned, I see Ambros as both furious at their constant (unwarranted in more than one way) interference with him, and desiring to intimidate Chief Black. This will make the old bastard angry,
sure, since people tend to get angry at things that scare them...but if Mr Rothakis were to send a copy of that folder to the Media, Black would, at the very least, lose his job. Which is why he's groaning as he flips through it. He knows all those names, and what the officers have done. Now the power balance has flipped, and Black must be as wary of Rothakis as the other way around.