Double Solitaire by George R. R. Martin

  There had been a couple of uncomfortable moments dealing with the House tailor. Jay had been loud and crude in his rejection of any suggestion that he forgo the pleasure of wearing a sports coat and slacks. The tailor had retorted that it was beneath his dignity to design for a Tarhiji. Jay had retorted that the guy was a Tarhiji, so what was his fucking problem. And besides which he was better than any damn mincing fairy. Tachyon -- no Tisianne, damn it, he had to remember that -- had yelled at both of them. Then Taj had entered and gotten results.

  Mark glanced over at Ackroyd. His outfit was nice but in no way matched the magnificence of Mark's suit. The tailor had been overwhelmed by Mark's size and designed to accentuate the length of the ace's lanky body. The colors were great, but the little hat kept dropping tassels into Mark's eyes, and the fluttering ribbons made Mark feel like a cornstalk bedecked to ward off birds.

  Zabb came sliding down the row to join them. Mark flinched, and his hand shot down next to his chair to reassure himself of the presence of the blessed briefcase. Mark did another quick count. It hadn't changed since the last frenzied count an hour before -- Four Starshine, four J. J. Flash; three Moonchild, four Aquarius, three Cosmic Traveler.

  Traveler had acceded to Zabb's request and had even joined in the spirit of the plot and improved on the original plan. It was a real bummer that this most cowardly of Trips's "friends" was forming a bond with this most charming of enemies. Now, with the elaborate pin delivered to Onyze's suite, Mark just had to wait for the other shoe to drop -- for Zabb to kill the kid.

  Given that Zabb had tried to destroy Mark's home planet, it was sort of jarring to be working with him. But goddamn, Zabb could be charming, and he'd certainly thrown his support behind the Doc's bid to regain his throne and his body. Like early in the evening. Zabb had arrived, taken a look at Tis's outfit, and vanished again. When he returned, he was carrying a pair of elaborate hair combs that appeared to be cut out of solid emeralds.

  "They're mine," he explained. "They wouldn't have suited your coloring in your former guise. In your current one they suit you very well."

  And Mark realized that with their pale, almost white blond hair, Tisianne in her borrowed body and Zabb looked very much alike. Tis was wearing the combs now, the hair caught up over each ear.

  Remembering the combs set another synapse firing, and Mark began to worry again about Jay. Ever since the detective's return with the Doc, he had been sullenly silent, and the lines about his mouth were driven deeper as if he were holding back some raging anger. Trips had probed and had his nose bitten off and spit back at him. All Ackroyd would say was, "Ask our little princess," in a tone so bitter that it sent Mark's stomach scurrying for cover against the back of his spine. He hadn't asked Tisianne -- she had enough to deal with, and there was a haunted look in her eyes that made the peaceful, gentle ace want to hit someone as if that could somehow transfer the pain she was feeling.

  Zabb slid into the chair beside Mark, slipped an arm through his. I guess we're buddies now, thought Mark.

  "I think we're in very good shape," Zabb whispered into Mark's ear.

  Mark nodded, tried to unobtrusively pull his arm free. Just an uptight American, he thought. I can't get used to all this touching, especially between men.

  "I mean, after all, they can't deny she's Tisianne."

  "So what happens? They say she's the Doc, and then she's ruler of the House?"

  "Not quite, they will wait to be advised."

  "As to whether the consensus in the House is to make her Raiyis?"

  "Yes."

  "You're making this sound almost like a democracy." That laugh like a wolfs yip. "Not hardly. Basically it's a precaution to make certain the choice isn't so unpopular that we end up with a family blood feast."

  "That's coming anyway," Trips said, depressed and tortured with guilt over Traveler's involvement in a planned murder.

  "You're far too pessimistic." Zabb gave Mark an encouraging buffet on the shoulder. Then his attention was drawn to something telepathic that was transpiring on the dais.

  The oldest of the old crones folded her hands carefully on the table before her and bowed her head as if in deep and profound thought.

  Lifting her head, she began, "Distaffs and sword sides, stirpes and domestics." It was audible speech, and her focus was over the heads of the nobility, and on the servants clustered about the back wall. "Before we come to the matter before us, it is my sad duty to inform you of the death of the Raiyis."

  A murmur moved like a moaning wind through the crowd, and Mark whipped his head around so hard to stare at Tisianne that he thought he'd snapped his neck. The Doc stood perfectly still, and the blankness of her expression was the giveaway.

  "My God, now he's got to live with that too," Mark murmured, in his distress losing control of his pronouns.

  "Life on your planet has finally given Tis a spine. I'm impressed. I didn't think she could do it," Zabb said. His voice redolent with satisfaction, he added, "And it certainly caught Egyon on the hop. That he did not expect out of us."

  The old lady was continuing. "Tell your families, and honor Shaklan with your grief. The city and House will observe three days of mourning beginning tomorrow... May his spirit draw near and guide us."

  "May we do honor for him," came the litanous response from the assembly.

  Briskly the old lady said, "So we dispense with the dead and resume our march to the future." The sharp old eyes were bent again on Tisianne. "It is clear you are Tisianne, however altered. Welcome home."

  "Thank you," Tis said, bowing as deeply as her pregnancy would permit.

  "On the issue of your elevation this council will convene at midnight and hear the decision of the swords. In the meantime, Taj, you will continue to serve as regent." The old man rose and bowed, crossed to Tisianne, tucked her arm beneath his, and led her toward the door. The meeting was obviously over.

  Mark stood, relieved to have his six-foot-four-inch frame out of a chair designed for midgets, and grabbed convulsively for his briefcase.

  "What the hell is a sword?" Jay asked.

  "The male head of each distinct breeding line within the family," Zabb explained.

  The crowd eddied about them. Little conversation knots formed and broke, servants threw open doors, accepted a pair of gloves from a passing master, and continued smiling, always smiling. Mark wondered if the Tarhiji were really that happy, or just terrified.

  "There are women here," said Jay suddenly.

  "Yes," Zabb answered,

  "And not just the old broads and servants." Mark winced.

  Zabb chuckled. "Yes, so?"

  "So where's the harem?"

  "Rarrana is not included in the tour... Unless you'd like to alter your plumbing in exchange for a peek?"

  "No thanks, but how come these --"

  "They're sterilized. We don't keep women in seclusion because they're women. We keep them there because they're breeding."

  Zabb swung a chair around with his foot and straddled it. Pulled out the Takisian equivalent of a cigarette case and offered it. Both humans declined. Zabb shrugged, placed the cigarette between his lips, and a servant seemed to come boiling up from beneath a chair to light it.

  "Assassination attempts are rarely directed at men. We just settle for them because they're usually all we can reach, and it's a convenient way to vent spleen. No, pregnant females are the preferred target. Kill one, and you've ruined hundreds of years of careful genetic planning."

  "Gee, the girls must be really touched to know they're so important."

  "We do value our women," Zabb said, stung by the sarcasm in the detective's voice.

  "Yeah, as brood mares."

  "Do you ever get to marry for love?" Mark asked.

  "We marry for power, we breed for posterity, we love... only rarely."

  "Great culture you got here," Jay grunted.

  They were settled in Tisianne's old suite. Servants were still arriving with arm-loads of stored
furniture, paintings, a computer, musical instruments, holostage. There was at least a lull in the politicking. Tis was slumped on the window seat, staring up at the moonlit glacier crawling like a frozen waterfall over the edge of the cliff. Taj had just entered, and she was giving him her profile.

  Coldly she said, "I see you didn't see fit to preserve my room."

  "I was extremely annoyed with you," was the unfazed reply. "And as for your father's office -- we went back a lot of years. Also, I was maintaining the illusion he was going to get well someday."

  Tis drew a hand across her forehead. "I'm sorry. Irritability seems to be the domain of pregnant women. Is Skatt coming?"

  "On his way."

  "What approach do I take with him? Ideal," she pushed back her hair, stood, and began to pace. "I don't know any of these swords. Half of them were children when I was here."

  "There were a lot of deaths forty years ago. A lot of vacancies to fill with too-young candidates. And you're just a memory, or a figure in a tale to most of them."

  "So they don't fear me."

  "And you're not precisely intimidating now."

  Jay looked up from where he was switching channels on the holo. "We could give her a bazooka to hold. The Madonna of the AK-47."

  Tis ignored him. "Where's Zabb?"

  "Delivering a thinly veiled threat to Pshara."

  Tis shook her head. "I wish I could really trust him." She sighed. "But back to the problem at hand. How do I handle Skatt?"

  "Offer him Revenue. He likes money, and he doesn't respond well to threats."

  "That will annoy Rad'gar."

  "He's one of Egyon's pack. Nothing we do will make him happy."

  "And we don't want him handling the finances anyway," Tis concluded.

  Mark was hanging about the edge of the conversation. At the lull he pushed to her side and took her hand.

  "You should, like, take a break. We could... talk."

  She didn't need to be a telepath to understand his drift. "It's too fresh to even look at, much less discuss." She pulled free and walked away.

  "It won't stay bottled up forever," the ace warned.

  "It's down there with all the other ghouls in the basement. They'll keep each other occupied until such time as they all break out at once, and I go stark raving mad."

  "Sorry to add to your burdens, your princess-ship," Jay said. "But just in case I run into Blaise on the street, I better have someplace to send him other than Yankee Stadium. Have you got jails here? Dungeons, whatever? Or will you take deliveries here?"

  Tis looked to her uncle. "Do we still have the holding cells in the labs? Where we tested the Enhancer on prisoners?"

  "Yes. We still occasionally use them," Taj said.

  "Take Mr. Ackroyd there. Let him see the cells."

  "May I ask why?"

  "No," Tis said shortly.

  There was a tap on the door. They both glanced toward it.

  "You can handle Skatt without my guidance?" Taj asked.

  "I think I can manage."

  Taj bowed and led Jay out another door of the suite.

  Tis nodded to a servant, and the carved double door was opened. Arranging her features into a smile of welcome, Tis moved with what grace she could muster to greet him. Evaluated the warmth of admiration in his green eyes as he studied her physical charms. Pretty warm. She gave his fingers a slight squeeze and drew him toward a settee. She was definitely getting the hang of this body.

  "This is really charming and intimate. Dinner in an airplane hangar with five or six hundred of your closest relatives."

  "It's prettier than that," Mark protested.

  "Okay, dinner in a baroque barn. Jesus, do they have to feed this herd at every meal? Doesn't anybody have a hot plate in their room? Wish I had a hot plate in my room."

  "The Doc needs us here."

  "Bullshit. Even our little princess for a day couldn't wrangle us a seat at the head table. If shit starts happening, Tachy's toast."

  Mark wasn't having any part of Jay's bad mood, and that pissed the detective off even more. Placidly the gawky ace took another bite of highly spiced meat and mumbled around the mouthful, "You'll have her out of harm's way in an instant. I'm not worried."

  "Glad one of us isn't."

  "I think this is pretty impressive," Mark said, indicating the dining room.

  "What, that they can flop food on the table three times a day? Then I'm really impressed with the Jokertown Soup Kitchen. They probably feed a thousand derelicts a day."

  Mark surveyed the glittering crowd. Musicians performed softly in a recessed alcove set high in the wall. The balconies overhanging the room were filled with a gaggle of very young Takisians peering down at the diners. Nearby stood sentries, rifles cocked across their chests. Servants slipped through the hall clearing dirty plates and replacing empty entree dishes with full ones. Service was family-style Chinese. A myriad of dishes to sample, all highly spiced, or very sweet, laid on a bed of a grainlike substance. It had a nuttier flavor than rice and a chewier consistency, and from the way Jay was frowning and pushing it around his plate, it didn't sit any better on his palate than it did on Mark's.

  "I think I've figured out the food," Mark said.

  Jay grunted. "Good, when you figure out where I can get a patty melt and a beer, let me know."

  "This is a cold planet. People in colder climates tend to crave heavily spiced or gamy food and sweets. I'm a little surprised that the ruling class had an ideal of beauty which favors the slender. Usually plumpness is valued in harsher climates... indicates you've got wealth. Still, the ordinary folks do tend to be kinda pudgy --"

  "Thank you, Professor. Will there be a quiz tomorrow?"

  "I'm sorry, I'm doing it again. It's just... just so interesting."

  Jay was frowning at a languid noble who had dispensed with a chair and instead reclined on a settee by the table. His eyes were closed, and a beautiful young woman hunkered next to him on the floor and carefully fed him morsels from the plate she held in her lap.

  "I'm surprised at you. This society hardly embodies the values of the Summer of Love. It's violent, and these psi lords are a bunch of drones."

  "The highborn aren't totally useless. The medical advances are, like, a direct result of the research done by the Houses."

  "But it's done only for their own reasons."

  "Well, yeah, but, like, why quibble with the result?"

  Jay checked his watch. It was a reflexive and totally useless glance; it was still set for New York time. "We ought to be getting close to the witching hour. I think it's time for Tisianne to get control, muster an attack, and take Blaise and this girl. I'm ready to blow this Popsicle stand."

  "I don't think the Doc has a clue about what to do once he has control of the House. If these Vayawand dudes are guarded like this place, it isn't going to be all that easy to dislodge Blaise, especially now that he's the Raiyis."

  The annoyance seemed to sprout like a weed, taking root somewhere in the pit of Jay's stomach and blossoming in the back of his throat. "Meadows, you know what your ace power is -- it's to be boring and --"

  But there was a commotion at the head table, and Meadows's face had gone a strange, sickly green white color. Jay jerked around and stood so fast his chair crashed over backward. But it wasn't Tisianne. Instead it was the pouty boy Onyze who was on his feet, hands clawing at his throat, and emitting a thin, tearing scream that was really awful to hear.

  Jay had to hand it to them. Takisians were stone-cold calm in a crisis. Guards encircled their charges, there was the piercing hum of lasers being charged, or cocked, or whatever the hell one did with a coherent-light weapon. But no panic, no mass stampede for the exit. In fact the only people running seemed to be Trips and he, and they were headed toward the trouble instead of away from it.

  "Dumb," Jay muttered as he bounded up the steps onto the dais holding the head table.

  Zabb had his hands on Tisianne's shoulders, holding her in pl
ace. There was a cold, Medusa-like look on the Doctor's face, but her body arched toward the suffering young man, yearning to go to his aid: Takisian and human conditioning at war with each other. It was Zabb's steel grip that decided the outcome.

  Egyon reached his boy puppet and ripped open his elaborate vest and shirt. There was a thing, some kind of crystalline insect, attached to the base of Onyze's throat. Wielding a knife, Egyon flipped the creature off. It hit the table with a brittle sound, skittered a few steps, then froze, and as Jay watched, its structure began to rearrange itself until it resembled a jeweled pin in the design of the sword crest -- identical to the one nestled in the lace at Egyon's throat.

  The creepy crawler might be off Onyze's throat, but it was clearly too late for the young man. Some powerful poison was at work. The death rattle was loud as Egyon lowered the Ilkazam pretender to the floor. Jay expected some kind of respect for the dead, but Egyon sprang to his feet, leaving the sightless eyes staring fixedly up at the painted mural on the ceiling. His hand was in his pocket, and Jay somehow suspected he wasn't jacking off.

  "This is murder. You've broken House Peace," Egyon said.

  Zabb laid dainty fingertips against his chest. "I?" He glanced around the circle of nobles. "I think a more useful question is who gave Onyze the ankatai'li?"

  Silence like the grave. The eyes of the Kou'nar slid toward Egyon. Anger gave way to confusion gave way to belligerence.

  "What?" he demanded truculently.

  "My lord," said one of the nobles. "It was you who placed the badge on Onyze's lace."

  "Impossible! I didn't see the boy until we gathered here."

  A bitshuf'di, one of the neutered women, spoke up. "I saw you, my lord. Do you call me a liar?"

  Meadows looked like a man who'd had the crap kicked out of him. Jay didn't exactly understand how Meadows's ace power worked, but he had a very strong feeling, honed by years of careful observation, that one of the gawky ace's "friends" was behind the tragic demise of young Oinky and old Eggy's current predicament.

  "A rather drastic way to signal the transfer of your support to Tisianne," Zabb goaded.

  And Egyon bit, firing directly through the material of his pants pocket at Tisianne.