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CHAPTER ONE

REUBIN FLOOD

Reubin rode the tube from the shuttle apprehensively. There had to be an explanation. What had happened to Alex?

He’d been lucky to make it to Snister. This star liner was the last scheduled to and from the planet for months.

Other passengers stood or sat, waiting to arrive at cen­tral processing. Reubin guessed they used a shuttle here on Snister to better control the arrival and departure of people and cargo. Which meant too much governmental control and some sort of closed society.

When his wife had failed to arrive on Webster’s as planned, he’d dropped his business in the sector capital and hopped a starship for Snister. Alexandra was sup­posed to join him, and then they were to take the Long Life treatment, and ship out for the frontier, ending their pre­vious lives and beginning new lives together.

Supposed to, he thought.

The tube bumped and stopped. The far end opened and people filed off in the usual disorderly manner of civilians.

When the starship had neared Snister, he’d tried to ra­dio Alexandra. No luck. Snister’s central locator con­tained no record of her. He’d remembered Alexandra’s daughter: Tique Sovereign. Yes, there was a listing for Tequilla Sovereign. “Put me through, please.” No re­sponse. “I’ll leave a message.” Reubin gave his name and the message, “Am arriving 1500 local on shuttle. Where is Alex?”

Surprisingly, the processing agents at passport control were efficient.

Walking up the concourse afterward, he came out into the waiting area. Scenes he’d witnessed hundreds of times before. Families reuniting. Businessmen threading through the throng.

With little hope of success, he scanned the crowd. No sign of Alex—wait...no, not her. Against the far wall, he saw a woman leaning in the shadows, staring out a bubble toward the landing area.

Tique. Alex had showed him a holo of her daughter once. “Pronounce it like ‘Teak,’” she’d said. One of the things Reubin liked about the Long Life Institute and their dictatorial policies was that by definition everybody was forced to speak Federation English.

Tique had turned to survey the new arrivals and obvi­ously spotted him at once.

She was a woman with curly auburn hair, quite as at­tractive as her mother but in a different, more angular way. Her eyes were quick and intelligent. She wore one of those half jumpsuit-half skirt things Reubin didn’t un­derstand. The height of fashion, no doubt. She shook her head and moved toward him.

He searched her face for some clue. Words and greet­ings bubbled around him as he arrowed toward Alexan­dra’s daughter. His subconscious was sending warning signals to his other self.

He stopped.

She stopped. “You would be Reubin Flood?” Her words were cool.

“I am. Where’s Alex?” Something was dead wrong.

“You didn’t receive my message on Webster’s?”

“No. When she didn’t arrive, I headed here. We’ve been in transpace.”

“Let us get out of the crowd,” Tique said as a man jostled her, looked at her and twice at Reubin and mum­bled an apology.

A nameless dread began to seep through Reubin, outward from his gut, grinding through him like a throbbing poison. The beast within him came to a higher level of awareness. He followed her, asserting his control.

Tique stopped at the bubble, glanced out, and turned to face Reubin, “My name is Tique—”

“I know. It was that or your mother would have gotten a tattoo. Where is she?” His voice was rough, demand­ing.

“I...she’s dead. Mother is dead.”

He’d known it. He could smell death from afar. Not again. Not now. “How?” The word sat harsh between them. A familiar, deadly tremor began deep inside him.

“Heart attack.” Her face was impassive. Did she blame him for her mother’s death? How could she?

But Reubin didn’t care. It had been centuries since he’d felt about a woman the way he had about Alex Sovereign. Why was he so awkward about the term “love?” They’d met under strange circumstances and forged a friendship which quickly turned to romance. A comfortable feeling of well-being and togetherness. A long buried rage boiled and rose and rose. He spent a moment controlling the now familiar feeling, and forcing it back. Control. Now was the time for control. Can you not let me have my grief? he asked. The lurk­ing presence did not respond.

The shock was still spreading through him, stunning him. Dazed, Reubin looked at life going on around him. A child dragged a Raggedy Ann doll across the tile. Peo­ple swirled in groups or alone, some talking happily, oth­ers hurrying, anxious to be home and away from this place.

Not again, he thought. A bitter taste rose in his throat. A primal slithering began in his soul. His first response wasn’t the grief, the sorrow he knew intellectually would assail him later. Rather, outrage grew in him like gorge rising. It threatened to overwhelm him; the serpent within recognized the trigger and fed on the outrage and the internal chaos that outrage produced. Reubin struggled for control, all the while watching the woman Tique cat­alog the emotions running across his face.

She stepped back.

The tremor peaked.*Let me out,* the serpent urged, already close to the surface.

-No. Not now. Reubin’s emotions were being ravaged by the realization Alex was dead and his control had slipped.

Reasserting control, he swiveled to face Tique. “No­body dies of a heart attack. Not anymore.” He was aware his voice had turned to ice. Alex was dead.

“Yes, they do,” Tique replied. “It is not frequent, but it does occur. Especially in people who haven’t had a treatment in over eighty years standard. And especially in people who’ve had a lot of LLI treatments.”

He shook his head. He didn’t want to believe it.

“Look,” Tique’s voice was accusing, “you’ve got me defending my own mother’s death! I don’t want to do that thing. Don’t do this to me.”

Reubin saw how close to the edge Tique was. He re­inforced his control. “Let’ss get out of here.”

She cocked her head at his sibilance, then turned and walked off.

They went down the concourse. At the baggage drop, he punched in his pax code and his single case appeared in the mouth of the chute.

Her back was stiff with resentment. At least she’d had some time to reconcile her loss.

Tique led him outside the terminal, her movements mechanical. Reubin knew that this was her first life, so it stood to reason that her mother’s death might well be Tique’s first experience with death. Not that many people died these days. Except on Karg and a few other places he’d been.

Snister’s atmosphere was humid. Clouds swirled. He thought it might rain and wondered idly what the rain was like on Snister. Anything to stop thinking of Alex; anything to occupy his mind so that the other part of him could not use his grief to grab control and wreak the havoc he so desperately desired. Reubin was a strong man, but the serpent scared him. Indiscriminate response was not civilized, not right.

Tique put a card in a slot and soon an elevator arrived with her groundcar. They surged out along the route.

They drove to the outskirts of Cuyas, Snister’s capi­tal. Reubin remained quiet, yet his thoughts were boil­ing. A different idea occurred to him. “Can we visit her grave?”

She glanced sharply at him. She shook her head. “Mother was cremated.”

“Oh.” He tried to recall the data that the shipboard tape had spewed out about Snister. He remembered that the population was not at all large for a planet its size. In other words, they wouldn’t begrudge the burial space. “It was her wish?” He asked the question not so much to know the answer, but to find out more about his wife. He knew so very little.

Tique shrugged and maneuvered the car under a large, pyramidal building. “I don’t know. The government pa­thologist ordered it.”

“Why.” Not a question, but a statement.

“Something about the rarity of the cause of death. In case it was a bio-organism, they didn’t want to take a chance on the infection spreading.”

Typical governmental bumbling, Reubin thought. They could have put her in a safe coffin—casket, he corrected. On the other hand, perhaps they had saved tissue sam­ples. The officials at the port of entry had seemed effi­cient, so there was no reason to think that others would be less so.

When they arrived in Tique’s apartment, she showed him to a bedroom. “I’m sorry. I closed out all of Moth­er’s affairs, sold her home, all of that.”

“Oh?”

“The government thought it best.”

“Oh?”

Tique looked exasperated. “Look, damn it. She was a high government minister. There were considerations.”

“Oh?”

Tique placed her hands on her hips. “Of course. The money. You can have the goddamn fedcreds. I’ll give you an accounting balance sheet to go along with it, too. If you can prove you married her.”

Reubin set down his case. He looked her in the eye. “Keep the money. I don’t need it, I don’t want it.”

“Then why—?”

I want Alex, he thought. “You got any liquor in this place?”

“Yeah, sure.” Tique was obviously annoyed at his brusqueness.

He followed her into the main room. She pointed to a wet bar. “Help yourself. I’ll be back in a moment.” She left through a door on the other side of the room.

Reubin looked around. Tique’s apartment was nothing spectacular. She was not filthy rich, but certainly well-to-do. The furnishings were warm and comfortable and the environmental control cut Snister’s humidity in half. A lot of beige in the room. Smell of fresh cut flowers. View from about four floors below the top of the pyra­midal building.

On a hunch, Reubin checked the control console, and punched in to display the current memory.

A side wall darkened and there was Alexandra Sover­eign. He turned up the sound, but not loudly enough that it would alert Tique.

Alex. She wore her favorite silver jumpsuit. Large sil­ver earrings dangled from her earlobes, looking like row­els.

“Hello, Silver Girl,” Reubin whispered.

He punched “PLAY.”

Alex laughed, certainly not a tinkle. “I’m telling you, Tique. You should have seen him as I first did. Half the planet ablaze, and he cut across the sky ahead of me in a hijacked barge, for gosh sake.” Alex sipped a drink. “Enough firepower lancing through the skies at him to run the city’s power requirements for a hundred years. I have diplomatic immunity, so I wasn’t really worried. But he reached the starship before I did, and stepped off into the entry port and the barge barely hesitated, it shot off somewhere while his rear foot was in midair.”

Tique must have replied, but that had been deleted or the pickup was targeted on Alex only.

“I put my aircar in the cradle, stepped into the air lock and the door was closing and the ship was taking off and this crewman was bowing and escorting me down the corridor and all I could think about was the man. Tique! You wouldn’t believe it. He was half-scorched from some battle. Dried blood on the other half. Weapons, my God! On his back, on his hips, protruding from his boots. Twin bandoliers crisscrossing his torso like some bandito of olden times, carrying God knows what.

“My first view of Reubin Flood, Tique. Grim and ex­hausted—but wary and alert. The sight of him hit me right between the eyes and in my womb. He followed me down the corridor and I could sense his eyes boring—”

Reubin froze the frame, staring at the image on the wall. At his core, he knew it wasn’t over. He would never, ever get over this woman. He was angry with himself for being so coldly analytical about her, him, them. Must history repeat itself? He hoped not. But the rage flamed, right there below the surface. A killing urge grew inside him. No, he thought. Not again.

*Yes. This is my function.*

It was easier to contain the serpent this time; at the spaceport it had been a real struggle.

He hit the “HOLO PROJECT” button and the frozen Alex leaped from the wall to the middle of the room. For one second, then he punched it back onto the wall. The holo was too real, evoking Alexandra’s presence almost sacrilegiously.

“That’s private,” Tique said from the doorway.

Caught, Reubin started.

Tique was staring at him. “My God. Your face,” She shuddered,

Reubin killed the image and turned to the bar. “Sorry for the intrusion,” he mumbled. He found some 150 sour mash and poured it over ice in a tumbler. He would mourn later. Freeze his sorrow just as he’d frozen Alex on the wall. He lifted his eyes to Tique and she shook her head.

Her words rasped in her throat. “For a moment, I saw in you what she saw that first time, the rawness she de­scribed—”

Reubin had regained his control. “You don’t need to patronize me to cover the awkwardness. I’m all right now.”

She came over to him. “I wasn’t, Reubin Flood. It was my opportunity, perhaps my only one, to find out what you are really like; what Mother saw in you. And I didn’t want to waste the chance.”

“Sure. Look, kid. If you’ll help me, I’ll be on my way. Can you show me a frame or two of her...uh, remains? I mean before cremation? And the death certif­icate. And I’ll take my leave.”

“You are not very trusting.”

“Nope.” Not when they cremate without checking with the family. “Since, as you said, it was a rare death and the pathologist specified cremation, perhaps they’d have the film of the autopsy.”

“My God! You’d...you’d watch that?”

“I’d dig up her corpse if I had to,” he said. He drained his drink and refilled it.

Tique was looking at him with a combination of sus­picion, awe and horror.

“I take it that you didn’t see any of the evidence,” he said.

“I’m not a doctor.” Tique went to the command con­sole, punched keypads, and read a list scrolling on the inset screen. “There.” She touched another pad and waited. “Doctor Crowell, please.”

Reubin went back to his room to shower and change.

When he returned, Tique shook her head. “No good. Doctor Crowell is gone for the day and his office will not release any of the information without his permis­sion.”

“Even though we’re next of kin?”

“Well, she was a government minister and entitled to confidentiality.” Tique shook her head.

“First thing tomorrow, then,” Reubin said.

It had long since occurred to him that if you inquire about a recently deceased person, the central locator should refer you to the next of kin, a doctor, or at least some minor functionary. They don’t simply report “No listing.”