The Saipese was nearly the same color as the suit and was far from 215 or even 200 sems in height. Hing stood about 175 and his two brown eyes and two gold-hued arms were in the usual places. He was strictly a Galactic, born and raised on Saiping.

King's TP "eye" relayed its image to the self-lit screen built inside the chest of the gigantic headless suit. The extra arms were controlled by a separate telepresence which King operated most expertly indeed. The suit served its purpose. It was intended to add a bit more menace and mystique and thus fear to in-s.p.a.ce boardings. No four-armed beings had yet been encountered among the hundreds of contacted andIor colonized planets. Thus far.

Stripped to a temp-controlled coolsuit of Ming blue, tight as the skin of youth, Hing grinned at his ingenious captain. The suit and its use were Corundum's concept. It had been made meticulously to order by a talented individual on Jahpur. He was, regrettably, no longer alive.

Bearcat was already peeling his turquoise suit and Sakbir his orange one.

Corundum's newest a.s.sociate was far less experienced and thus slower at unsuiting. The helmet came free to reveal the small, well-molded head of an astonishingly pale woman whose short straight hair could not be real; it was the almost white of a distant GO sun. Until Corundum had brought her aboard, none of his crew had ever seen anyone of such hue with (undyed) hair so nearly achromatic. Nor, computer-link had informed them, had 99.789 percent of all the people of the galaxy-including the small (estimated) populace of her planet. The skin and hair colors were real.

30.No less startling were her eyes, and even more so when one knew they were her own, and genetically unadjusted at that. They were lighter than her s.p.a.ce-suit. Their light gray showed only a hint of blue. No such eyes had been seen in the galaxy since the destruction of the majority and absorption of the rest of such a race on Homeworld, centuries and centuries ago. The galaxy was bronze, brown, and browner, and a few who could be called yellow or almost-black. The color of eyes was brown. The color of hair was black, though now and then a dark brown turned up. When the vast majority of the peoples of Home-world-once-Earth had seized the planet and gone into s.p.a.ce as Galactics, speaking Erts, they had done a thorough job of destroying the old ruling minority and overwhelming its genetic lesser pigmentation. Even Universal Edutapes did not contain the word Caucasian.

Corundum knew that the colors of the hair, eyes, and skin of this unwrinkled and spa.r.s.ely haired woman were real and inborn. So did the Accord that Protected her "backward" planet. So did the slaver who had s.n.a.t.c.hed her from it and sold her on Resh.

Corundum also knew her pride. No one offered to help as she struggled to unsuit. She was militant about that. (Firedancer's twitchy lurch was tiny and not even the new crewmember staggered. All knew that they had just moved free of the other ship-incidentally freeing it.) At last the sky-blue suit dropped. Its wearer was revealed as short, compactly lean, and definitely female. Obviously firm of skin and well-toned muscle. In a tight gray breast-band rather than bra or bandeau, and skimpy briefs of the same unattractive gray. She stepped out of the suit. Her muscular, taut-skinned legs showed no sign of jiggle. Her calves were outstanding, perhaps overdeveloped. That was a tendency of the calves of anyone from a high-gravity planet. Their 31.thighs ranged from unusually rounded to ma.s.sive. The pale ones just revealed were not ma.s.sive.

"You did well, Janja," Corundum said. Both he and the (quite young, both in appearance and reality) woman ignored the appreciative stares given her by the other crewmembers of Firedancer.

She shrugged, then flipped her fingers in the gesture she had learned from them: those not of her planet. The gesture meant "so what" or "I don't care" or "beats me" or "no use talking about that," and other things.

"My first time," she said. "I did nothing but stand around in that Hing-size suit and be the mysterious Number Two, silent and inactive. The filter made my voice sound awful, but if that Prithvi has any sense, he knows I'm a woman." She heaved a sigh, crossing her arms to rub them. "I suppose I'm glad that nothing else was necessary. Should I mention that you are still fully suited and faceless, Captain?"

It was their agreement that in the presence of others she called him only captain, or Corundum. Just six days-standard ago she had come up with a perfectly awful nickname for him-which Corundum rather liked. It was better than Ruby, or Sapphire, or even Blue-eyes. And certainly preferable to Dum-dum. He knew he was called that, though never within his hearing.

"Corundum is comfortable," he said from within his white s.p.a.cesuit. "That ship has no converter and therefore no subs.p.a.ce capability. Thus it is a long, long run from Murph. We shall be there in a few days. Or rather at its fourth satellite, tastelessly named Dot. One fears that places us a good while still from vacation and celebration-which we shall not take on Murph! But then it will be the better for our antic.i.p.ation." He patted his suit-bag with a gauntleted hand. "Bearcat, Sakbir: here is approximately two kilos of tetrazombase."

32.The smile in his voice prompted Hing to ask, "Whose is it, Captain?"

"Ship's shares," Corundum said, and watched the flashing of teeth in delighted smiles. "Perhaps we can a.n.a.lyze it before we reach a buyer, Sakbir?" "Immediately, Captain!"

"Good, good. Hing, you charming four-armed mysterious alien, you, do please go and tend the con. Sub-s.p.a.ce entry after fifty-second warning; Jinni is plotting course. There is both a pulsar and a collapstar to avoid between here and Murph. We are now honest but poor merchants, hauling needed equipment to those needy pnamprum grabbers on Dot. Corundum shall unsuit in his cabin. Ident.i.ty Beta, comrades, if need arises. Janja?"

The others-except for Hing-gazed after the two. One lithe and short and nigh naked, the other tall and baggy-bulky in the gleaming white coverall. Corundum's ungauntleted hand moved easily and without pressure to her b.u.t.tock, a taut oval of moving muscle hard as the front of his-flexed-thigh. Sakbir licked his full lips.

"So. Your first boarding, Janja. Your first act of piracy, that impossibility of the s.p.a.ceways. Now you merit being called outlaw, and deserve your position on the wanted list. And was it exciting?"

"Of course! You know that, my dear. Here, get your hand out of there-at least while you're suited up!"

"What an inducement to unsuit! And was Milady Janja disappointed that all was so routine, so dull?"

He's asking for compliments on his planning and handling, Janja thought, for she felt or chermed it from him.

She could not read minds, Janja whose people were not truly human. But she had the cherming, the feeling of emotion and intents, of others. It was more than they had, those she thought of as the Thingmakers. A month (thirty twenty-five-hour days-standard) with Corundum had heightened her ability where he was 33.concerned. Otherwise the hard toughness of corundum, with a hardness of nine to diamond's ten, made it difficult to work. They shared a common enemy and the common goal: Jonuta's destruction. Their eventful meeting had taken place in a s.p.a.cefarers' watering hole on Franji, There Janja had used him, meanwhile fascinating him with her looks and her ruthless resourcefulness. He had impressed her with his own surpa.s.sing resourcefulness, quick thinking-unto-action, and enormous courtly charm. Since then they had also shared life, his cabin, and his bed.

Janja of Aglaya was Corundum's woman, and more. And perhaps less.

She was answering his question: "Perhaps, but not truly. A battle would have been their error, and ours. I was impressed with the smoothness of the operation. I am impressed, evil pirate."

Behind her brow, she frowned. But why did you kill that man?-and how easily, coolly you did it! How long before I bring up that subject-murder? How long before you, my ally and my mentor and my lover with that lovely ever-ready slicer of yours, disrupt my infatuation and force me to find you abhorrent? And then what?

He thumbed the door of his cabin, said, "Open, sesame," was ignored, and with a chuckle he undogged his helmet and spun the seal.

She took the helmet from him; a man who was very dark even in a galaxy of dark peoples. Black hair hung in waves nearly to his shoulders, framing a nose that was large; a beak. It was a lean face, with sensuous lips. The eyes were arresting, and more. Without the huge black contact lenses he had affected the night of their meeting, his eyes were a blue that was far more striking than hers, with her coloration. They were sapphire eyes; royal blue eyes, the more startling and blue against his dark hair and skin.

Of course that was by bis choice. They could have 34.been brown. They were not his eyes. That is, they were his, but they were not eyes.

This time he spoke the code-phrase in his own quiet, medium-range voice without the electronic distorter built, into the suit's speaker. The door of his cabin recognized him and opened.

"Ah, the wonders of technology," he said, with his peculiar urbane and over-sophisticated air of amus.e.m.e.nt and satire. His sweeping gesture, an ancient courtier's, bade her enter before him.

Janja did.

Still she marveled at the fantastic opulence of this man's shipboard home. He was a pirate, lean and seemingly ascetic while courtly in his far-out-of-fashion way. He wore unrelieved black-except for the s.p.a.ce-suit, since a black suit in s.p.a.ce would have been stupid. But his cabin!

She remembered the first time she had seen it, a month ago shortly after their hurried departure from Franji and then Franjistation, and she tried to see it that way again, as if for the first time. (The year or so since her kidnap and enslavement now seemed a decade. Her month with Corundum seemed a year-in the most positive way.) On her third day aboard Firedancer she had risen from his bed, naked, to examine his cabin. . . .

One three-meter-long wall-never a bulkhead, as the bed was not a bunk-was a hologram of what he told her was a medieval tapestry. It was alive with color. With animals and richly dressed (and poorly painted) people and flora, the vista seemed to stretch away a kilometer. That wall commanded one's attention on entering the cabin, and the s.p.a.cious feeling was there to stay.

The adjacent wall continued the illusion. To Janja of ever-warm Aglaya it was at once beautiful and eerie, gaze-demanding and frightening. The t.i.tle was the subject: Icebergs.

She had never seen icebergs and never dreamed of 35.their existence. She still had yet to see snow. The beautifully blended colors of this wall were many, and hardly chill, so that somehow this oddly hued, jagged ma.s.s rising out of water seemed not too harsh and cold. It seemed to be stone. It was not. "The artist was Frederick Edwin Church-a most strange and unfamiliar name, and without I.D. numbers! He had painted the scene centuries and centuries ago on Home-world in a year then designated as 1861. And no, Cor-rundum's researches indicated that icebergs had never truly looked so beautiful, even at sunset, all in yellow and gold and pink and lavender and rose and purple and blue and . . .

A pirate!

This scene, too, stretched away for kloms and kloms -kilometers and kilometers. Its shadows and depth were ghostlike and magnificent. Here was majesty, and no person had had anything to do with its creation. (Yet one had, for this was a painting; not reality but human fancy and vision.) Janja could, stare at Icebergs. Three meters long by 215 sems tall, it could become the universe. Staring, she felt a part of it. Losing herself in it. Joining it; going away into it. Shudder and fear it even while loving it, with a feeling close to reverence.

To promote a feeling of security, the wall a meter or so from the foot of the (large! firm!) bed-not-bunk was covered with cork of a warm deep gold hue. Corundum had hung it with various smaller holograms made from paintings.

He had to tell her what that one was-a "horse." And that strange city of domes, that was most ancient indeed, he told her, and had been called "Al-Madinah." There were twenty-one "Medinahs" now, on twenty planets, but that one was gone. And that ferocious-looking man sitting his "horse" atop a hilt and gazing out across a vista that ran out to meet a planetary horizon. That was Jenghiz or Chengiss Khan, he told her; Jen-ggis, staring at a place he would conquer.

36.It had been called Khitai and Cathay then, China much later, on that cerulean-sky planet, which was Homeworld. Khan was about the color of King, Janja noticed.

The painter of this beautifully idealized s.p.a.ce scene -a woman and a man striding in lockstep across planets-was an artist who signed itself only "Jean." Homeworld, Corundum said; twenty-second century. Its t.i.tle was Oneness. From conquest to. oneness.

And there was this strange thing in heavy shades of red, yet not harsh reds. Its t.i.tle was In the Underworld. A man and a woman-she with yellow hair and pale skin!-had their backs to the viewer. Neither wore much. The man was brandishing a rather short sword. They faced a giant thing, a hairless, ma.s.sive, winged, horned being that Corundum said was fanciful. A demon, or shaitan. (Who?-An ancient embodiment of evil.-Oh.) The woman's legs could have been copied from Janja's: solid-looking with overdeveloped calves like smoothly, doubled fists beneath the skin.

Why that one? she had asked. It was so menacing.

"Because hers are the most magnificent legs and posterior Corundum has ever seen," Corundum told her, and after a while she chuckled. Why not? That was a reason, and it was his cabin, his home in s.p.a.ce.

Here was another by the same long-dead artist, with the single name "Boris." It was called Primeval Princess. Again it showed a nearly naked woman. Again she was blond. This one faced the viewer in majesty, staring coldly down at the viewer from the heights of her beauty. She had a hand on each of two perfectly horrible lizard-monster-things that flanked her. Various pieces of entwining metal jewelry visibly cut into her flesh. She was beautiful and she was imperiousness itself; a face that looked down upon the universe in general.

Why this one? (That stare, Janja thought, would make her nervous. Self-conscious. And the beasts looked ready to come slithering out of the painting.) 37."Because she is a magnificent and desirable woman and Corundum is a man," Corundum told her. "And now she reminds me of you."

(Janja had some understanding of that, now. Then, that third night, she had reacted with incredulity and some scorn.) "Her? With those big meaty thighs and those great sacs on her chest? That thick waist? How can you say so?"

"I can say so. She is that artist's concept of the ideal -and not thick-waisted! She comes close to Corundum's. You approach perfection, Janja; she is idealism."

"Male idealism."

He finger-flipped. "No fine sub-ancient Greek athlete, ever looked as good as that same artist painted men." Before she could ask the meaning of "Greek," he went on, "This is Corundum's home. You may have noticed that Corundum is male."

The sound that came up from her throat united a purr and a chuckle. She had noticed, yes. He gave off more male feeling than anyone since Jonuta, whom she wanted only to kill. She considered, staring at the meter-tall painting in golds and other connected hues, with that weird yellow foliage behind the-behind H.R.H. Primeval Princess.

"And do you think you would like me so ... so ..."

"Imperious," he provided, from just behind her.

"Haughty and almost sneering, looking down," Janja finished.

"Imperious," he repeated. "Perhaps. How can one be sure? Corundum likes the work. It is intensely sensuous, to a definite male who definitely loves definite females, I may be a bit in love with her."

A pirate!

"And with this one's-posterior and legs." Almost she touched the full firm-looking backside of the blond in the other painting.

"And yours, Milady Janja."

She poked it back a little and wiggled it, just a little, 38.but he was not that close behind her, and chose not to respond. I hope I am not expected to twine too-tight metal jewelry about my arms and legs, she mused. "You are not understandable, Corundum."

"Perhaps my name should be Conundrum? Of course I, am not, Milady Janja. Corundum, is unique, and no one-sided fictional creation. Corundum is a mix. We would not accept many of the people we know personally, if they were characters in fiction, because they are too many-faceted. Corundum is many things and belongs only to Corundum."

"Sapphire, and ruby, and emery."

"Yes. Though none of those has the softness of estheticism that you know is in me."

Yes, she did. A pirate! "And Corundum answers . .. does he answer only to himself?"

"He does."

"Oh," said willful Janja who had been enslaved and bloodily freed herself, "I do like that!"

He was close behind her as she examined another painting, a long one. "Hmm. Is this on old Home-world, too? All in blues and those weird greens?"

"No." His voice was even more quiet as he looked over her shoulder at the landscape she regarded. "No. That is a scene on a small planet named Meccah, and it was painted only thirteen years ago."

"It is lovely. Why is it so-flat?"

He chuckled. "It is a painting, Milady Janja. That is the original. A painting. Hand and oils on canvas. No computer, no laser. It is not a hologram or a holo-projection. Its depth is its own; the artist's."

"It is beautiful and I would like to be there." Janja was staring at it and into it. It bore no t.i.tle and was signed with the single word or name "al-Addin."

"Now?"

"No," Janja said, and put back a hand to touch the man in black. "Not quite now. It is lovely and inviting and yet it makes me . . . uncomfortable. Doesn't it you?"

39."In a way. Only in a way." He was close behind her and his hands came onto her hips.

"Meccah," she murmured, not handling the little growl-sound well at all. "Do you think it has changed a great deal, in thirteen years?"

"I know that it has changed, but very little," he said, only just loudly enough to be heard. "And that area has changed even less."

"You know that."

"Yes. I own that land. It is Corundum's land. Corundum will not allow it to be changed. The mineral rights under it might be enough to buy everyone on Meccah. They are not for sale."

"Everyone on Meccah?"

"No. The mineral rights. Many are for sale on Meccah, and everywhere else along the s.p.a.ceways."

"Oh. Mineral . . . oh." She did not have their language completely, yet. She had many words and phrases yet to learn. "Valuable things in the ground. Platinum? Oil? Gold?"

"No. Corundum."

"Oh! Rubies and sapphires. And emery."

"Yes. Corundum."

"And it is yours and you will not sell it," she said in delight, standing in his cabin with him behind her, his hands on her, only three days-standard after their violent meeting in the Parallax Lounge on Franji.

"Pos," he said; the standard word of a.s.sent and agreement.

"Now I know that you are sentimental and probably I know where you are from. You bought the picture from the artist itself? You know it, the artist? Is it a woman or a man?"

"Pos. I know him."

From behind, his fingers were on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were naked under his fingers and his fingers were moving. Three days after their meeting, she remembered the first time she had felt them there. A 40.few hours after their meeting! She had been encased in shining silver then, a skinnt.i.te over which she wore a little skirt and bandeau, both of a deep red. Burgundy, he called it, the cultured Corundum. The word was unknown to her, then.

She had rushed off the street of Franji's capital and hurled herself against the first man she saw, a stranger. Corundum. She had no idea who he was. He was standing conveniently, and he wore a sidearm that instantly gave her an idea. She had embraced him and pretended to need rescue from Jonuta's man Srih. Srih had not spotted her, for she was disguised. She had called out to him, then run, knowing he would follow. Srih followed. He entered the Parallax Lounge behind her. Clinging to this black-clad stranger she had cleverly drawn the stopper he wore on his left hip, pivoted, whirled, and fried Srih. All in less than a minute.

Srih was the murderer of Tarkij. Tarkij, with whom she would have spent the rest of her life on peaceful, "Protected" Aglaya. Srih and Jonuta's Jarp crewmember, Sweetface, had s.n.a.t.c.hed her off Aglaya. She wanted Jonuta. That was her purpose now, her Mission.

She had begun. Srih was dead.

The charming Corundum had bade her keep his pistol and urged her to depart the Parallax. He joined her in an electricab. They quickly discovered their shared enmity for Jonuta, and their fascination with each other. (And possible use to each other? Best not to think about that.) Corundum suggested immediate departure from Franji.

"Since you are most definitely, female and Corundum male, however, you may well question the motivation. My ship Firedancer is above, docked at Franji-station. If Jonuta is onplanet, he will soon be warned, and seeking you. Best to leave now, and believe that 41.another and better opportunity will present itself. If you have valuable possessions here, Corundum will happily replace them in honor of these two salutary occasions."

Janja was less grim than she had been in a year. Inside she was smiling, perhaps even grinning. What great good fortune to have run into this courtly co-enemy of Jonuta! Question his motives? No. She handed him back his stopper, which had now served doubly as a symbol.

She asked, "Two great occasions, Corundum?"

"Two, yes. The occasion of the entirely timely demise of Srih, left hand of 'Captain Cautious'-Jonuta! And the equally felicitous occasion of our meeting, Janja."

Janja's cherming told her that what he said was precisely what he felt. Along with s.e.xual desire for her, of course. She decided to respond.

He had drawn her to him then, hi the cab, and she had responded, liking it and the way he did it. A few hours later they were in s.p.a.ce and his hands were on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, from behind. She did not stiffen at the intimate touch. She shared his yearning . . . and she had a Mission.

And besides, Janja was excited. She had killed, and found this man, and fled. She was free, with a friend and ally-who was a fascinating and more than attractive man.