“I’m buffered,” Dorianna complains, three full bells after sunrise on the following day. She looks as if she hasn’t slept, as if transit-lag has hit her more harshly than is normal for inter-world travelers. Her coffee-black hair is pulled back into a single braid. Now, with no silken cascades framing her face, the set of her jaw, the petulant moue of her lips, and the unblinking focus of her glacial-ice gaze, are all rendered harsher…harder. “I wasn’t told that I’d be under full web lock.” Ilya shrugs. “We weren‘t told that you‘ve become a walking web-access node, either. You’ve got nearly as much hybrid-ware as a pilot. And that ‘ware represents certain diplomatic threats. You’ll be granted basic web access once Biometric Control has completed it’s interrogations.” “And how long will that take?” “You should be able to port into secure web-regions by this afternoon.” “So what do I do until then…climb the walls?” “If you’d like. We have plenty of them.” “A joke, Ilya? You’re attempting humor?” She smiles, but there is cruelty in the depths of her expression, a tightness around her eyes, an odd flattening of the cupid’s-bow of her upper lip. “I didn’t think you dour Nemaean types were capable of that. It‘s too gauche for you, I thought.” “It shows what you know of us Nemaean types, then…doesn’t it?” “It’s why I’m here. To learn.” Yes…the contrived reason for her presence so many parsecs from home: anthro-biotic studies. The haughty teenage girl he remembers is now an interplanetary anthropologist. Like father, like daughter. According to the transit request filed last year, she’s here to map (or begin mapping) the frequencies of genetic drift in remote human populations and determine the social ramifications. Her work is certain to take more than a month, and he‘s sure that she‘ll file for a visa extension within a matter of days. The logic of her visitation smacks of over-specialized academia, and Ilya mistrusts it. Instinct warns him against the month she has already been grated, but it’s his cognitive core that screams, rankles, and bangs against the cage of his brain. --Because pure academia is not a Central System pursuit...not with markets involved, and the profit margins held is such esteem by the corporate governments... History speaks of this, though not as eloquently as the dead who litter today's Nemaean history. Everything he’s learned during his tenure as a Cloistered Brother demands that he take the appropriate actions. The child he remembers being, read, touched, then shied away from the death-letter written by a long-vanished ancestral father interred in the detention camp at Bes. Frontier Marshals had crossed light years from Corporate Earth itself, to quell the revolutionary posturing of Grigory Myshkin himself...and what followed were fires and screams, and black-clad Marshals executing terrorist agitators...old men like the writer of letters Ilya's own family cherishes and lights candles for during the festivals of Ded Moroz. How easy it cold be, then, to metabolize a subtle toxin, deep within his lymphatic core and simply sweat it from his palms. There is opportunity enough to simply touch Doriana, and caress her in ways her body once demanded, and still demands, despite Ilya's own adolescent denials, and the current denials of his Brotherhood tenure. But there is little justification for such action: nothing that would stand before review. As his bonded peer, Aleo would lead that probable review. No Earthwoman is worth the wrenching anguish that Aleo would go through, simply because hot-tempered Ilya Rybashov can’t control the impulses that drive his glands. It is a brisk morning, brilliant--and almost blinding--from sunlight gleaming on the remnants of last night’s rain. The cloying salt-tang of kelp-scent wafts on the air as if exhaled from the vast farms afloat on the face of Mechta Bay. It is a scent Ilya has known for his entire life, and though he no longer works a plankton-skimmer’s decks and rigging, or tends the kelp floats during hot season, he remembers the rhythms, and when he walks the streets of Bes--and even the corridors of a patrol ship in far-interstellar space--he does so with the splay-toed gait of a seaman. It is a thing Aleo likes in him: that lanky, loose-limbed walk, and it is a thing he finds hard to abandon. Now, well to the westward rim of Bes, he sits with Dorianna, fingering the rim of his mug and contemplating the gentle tongues of steam rising from his hif-infused tea. “You’re modified,” Dorianna says. “Not like you are.” “No…definitely not like me. Your tea stinks of cognitive-spectrum narcotics, and the beds of your fingernails are a tell-tale purple. I wouldn’t have noticed, but you’re so pale! You used to be tan. I remember there was once a time when you could take your shirt off without blinding anyone.” She pauses, cocks her head to one side and surveys him through cold, blue eyes. “You’ve got basic web-access enhancements…but you don’t need much more than that. You’ve got a bloodstream full of hif…and a nervous system hyped beyond any human norm.” “Hif isn’t a narcotic.” “It’s illegal in the Core Systems…and with good reason.” “You don’t know its potential…nor your own tolerances,” Ilya says, and after a quick nip of his tea, he returns her probing stare. “And no…you can’t make me a part of your study. I’m your keeper…not your donor-informant.” “I’m here for a month…Ilychka…I won’t be dealing with informants and donors. I’m only laying the groundwork for future studies.” “So…we’ve gone from being boring backwater zeks to the core of your future studies,” Ilya says. He can taste the mocking challenge in his voice. “That remains to be seen.” “How?” “In case you hadn’t noticed--which I doubt--you’re New Ruthenian…that makes you Nemaean…and the last I heard, Nemaeans--especially Cloistered Brothers like yourself--aren’t exactly the most forthcoming people in the galaxy. Your Brotherhood may insure that the peole of Nemaea remain as...backwater zeks.” There is a pause, he times it to the beat of his heart. “Maybe not,“ he says, after a count of three. "I can show you something that’ll give you every bit of information you need to build a foundation for this…study.” He has her attention now, and he leans forward, elbows at rest on the table-face. He clasps his mug and musters every bit of his strength as he holds her cold, probing focus. “And what…Ilya…would that be?” “Our own antrho-biotic library.” For another moment there is silence: a void between strangers who wear faces familiar to one another. “You’d give us access to your own oh-so-guarded studies…?” “I’d give access to...you,” Ilya pronounces. Firmly. “Me. Personally.” If her words are a question, their inflection doesn’t reveal as much, but the expression of quizzical surprise is all the punctuation he needs. “Why me…?” “Because I don’t like you, Dorianna…and the sooner you get what you’re after…the sooner you’ll leave.” He can feel the tingle of hif in his blood and the web-worked sparks of thoughts forming linkages in the deepest regions of his cognitive mind. There are patterns and he sees them: some fit together, easily and without effort. Others remain opaque and slippery to his mental touch. Like skimmer-fish darting through snares too cumbersome to capture them. But there is a pattern, and a sudden twitch of tension raised at the corners of Dorianna’s mouth. She’s a big girl, she can take personal barbs…especially from a lanky blond-hair from the wrong side of the Nemaean line, but she is troubled. Ilya can see that, can smell the faintest whiff of fear-response pheromones bleeding from the flesh beneath her arms. It isn’t personal feelings, or her oh-so-important study that lies at the source of her unrest. --Not with pheromones pumped at such volume. No. She’s felt this way since morning, and he can smell the tension hissing and crackling around her, like a cloud of some strange plasma. There is something else at stake, some agenda deep within the core of her study that drives her to return here. Profit, he imagines...she's likely put a price on her return here, and she's most probably anxious to collect what her corporate government has promised her. She sits back and fingers the rim of her own mug. She steals a nip of the strong kafé chokolot he’s always known her to drink. She toys with an errant wisp of dark brown hair, tucking it behind one ear. She inhales. “So that’s it…? You’ll risk exposing sensitive information just to get rid of me?” “No.” “So what else is at play here? Why would you do it?” “For the same reasons that you came here in the first place.” “For study?” He says nothing in response. And in his silence, he understands that he’s just slid his toes over an invisible line. He’s spoken his mind, and he’s played his hand. There is no retreat from this position, no way to recant the challenge that he’s levied. After a moment, he simply nods. For a long while, neither of them speaks. And then, at last: “I’ll escort you back to the Compound…I have duties at the Cloister, but if you want access to the city, I’ve deputized the Compound staff…someone can show you around.” “I need web access.” “You’ll have it. I‘ll see to it.” “Okay.” For the first time since arriving, Ilya is aware of the café noise--the low babble of random talk and whispered speculations. He is aware of eyes on him, the pressure fronts of gazes and whispered inquiries pressing into him like clouds and vapors of some strange, dense and alien atmosphere. There is music as well, and the half-dissonant, acrobatic play of notes--and a single woman’s multi-tracked voice--recalls Aleo, and the quiet amatory nights they share in the privacy of their cell and the bed cushions that hold their intermingled scents. The music, he recognizes, is an interpretation of Badlerova’s Croon. He knows the Croon, and in hearing it now, he recalls--oh so involuntarily--the countless nights of harrowing intimacy shared with Aleo in the cramped enclosure of their shared cell. I am a monster, he thinks to himself. And he is happy for Aleo’s call to duties in places far from this table…far from this café. It is best, after all, that Aleo is given shelter from the pattern blossoming behind Ilya’s conscious impulses. I am a monster, he thinks again, masking all that he can, lest other Cloister-adepts catch the waft of his scent. They’ll seize only half the meaning of his unrest. They’ll see Dorianna sitting before him, her hair pulled back into a braid. They’ll understand the meaning of his black cassock with the diminutive ruby of the Cloister pinned to the starched collar biting at the flesh of his neck. But they won’t understand that his duties…and the actions they impel are not against this woman, or even her poly-corporate government, but against the bored, young girl who never wanted to come here in the first place. He leaves the remainder of his tea as Dorianna finishes her coffee. **** Mid-day finds Ilya in the labyrinth beneath Cloister Central. The air is rich with the textured scents of hollowed stone and water from diverted springs. There is fungus-odor, from the underground gardens that sprawl in the spring-caves one level down, and the dissonant twang of drift, played in the meditation nooks. Ilya has never favored the psycho-manipulative tonalities of drift, but he understands its necessity, and its popularity among Cloistered Brothers as young as he had once been. It’s how you adjust to Cloister life, how you strengthen bonds with the family you’ve found…the larger family bound by aesthetics and stellar-national needs, of raw, primal-human bonds and not the blunt, snot-simplicity of genetics. Drift. It is how you are born into the Cloister, and how you learn the subjective telepathy that you share with all who call themselves your brothers. He steps with naked feet along the length of Corridor Myshkin--through the dance of ruddy light and shadow cast by the pillars that define this hallowed, ancient place. Myshkin is the First Father of the Cloister at Bes, a member of the Free Ruthenian Guard. Centralists call him a rebel, a terrorist, and Dorianna will surely chafe at any references to his name. It is Grigory Myshkin--after all--who holds repute as the first to cry out (with radiation bombs) for every base freedom denied by Corporate-Earth charter to every indentured surf of Ruthenia. “Ksss,” someone hisses for attention from a darkened nook between pillars. “You’re Ilya-Viktorovich, aren't you? You’re assigned to the offworld woman.” Stopped in his tracks, Ilya’s toes clench at the floor. He doesn’t recognize the voice. A younger Brother…he knows that much, but little beyond the vague note of fear in the speaker’s voice. He turns and catches sight of the speaker. “My name is Oleg-Petrovich….” And by the tell-tale glint of ‘ware implanted in his arms, he is no ordinary member of the Cloister. He is a pilot-trainee, learning the thousand ways to swim in the impulse-command tank of a deep space cruiser. He is a young and pale dark-hair--his features set in the squared-jaw countenance of someone born in the Uplands. His accent marks him as well--Rüs, as is common enough, but snared in the glottal acrobatics of sub-arctic pedigree. He is as pale as Ilya himself, as shirtless, but as Ilya takes a step closer to him, he can see hints of nerve-rich webbing between his fingers and meticulously pedicured toes. “You have some care in regard to my mission?” He speaks as gently as he can, taken aback by the raw admiration he sees flashing in young Oleg’s dark eyes. “I’ve been to Sol…as far inward as the ice-fields of Triton. I know Centralists.” “Friends?” “Associates at study.” Ilya nods. Oleg’s experience is a common one--a play at cultural exchange, an attempt--either desperate or misguided--to erode the barriers between Central and Rim. “Recently?” “Four years ago.” “And now, you’re taking pilot’s training…” “Yes.” “You’ve formed a triad?” “There are two of us…we still have to find our third.” “Be patient…it happens on its own.” Oleg nods. ‘Ware implants glint at his temples, beneath a border of stubble that indicates recent enhancement. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Oleg says. “You’re not disturbing,” Ilya responds. “You’re on your way elsewhere.” “Everyone is, Oleg….” And Oleg laughs, quietly: mostly to himself, by the sound of it. He recovers and glances directly into Ilya’s eyes. “There’s talk,” he says. “Among the seniormost pilot-swimmers. The Centralists are shifting transit lanes, and there’s an interest in the stars beyond Faraday.” --In towards the galactic core, in territories few Centralist ships have breeched. Nothing new here. Ilya has heard whispers, has taken accounts from the news. “I think your Earther woman is a part of this.” “How?” “I don’t know…but be careful of her studies. Edit what you reveal to her. I’m no expert, Ilya-Victorovich, but the senior ‘swimmers say things that scare me, and I’m not so brave to keep my fears silent.” Ilya’s hand settles on Oleg’s shoulder; the flesh there is hot and soft--proof that Oleg’s metabolism has been boosted to the pilot-swimmer’s ideal, that the prodigious burn of calories keeps him on the knife’s edge of starvation if he doesn’t watch his consumption of protein-rich foods. It is a terrifying existence, Ilya reasons, to shift even that minute a distance from the baseline human norm, and the thought of it drives his fingers into a gentle, kneading clench. Oleg closes his eyes, trapped--for this moment at least--in the conditioning of ecstasy-response. “I’m taking your words to heart,” Ilya says in a soft, gentle whisper. “And when my assignment is ended, I want to find you. Come to my partner and I, and drink a toast. Nastoika, maybe…or vodka, if you’re a traditionalist.” Oleg laughs, emerged, though only slightly from the shuddering grip of ecstasy. Ilya withdraws his touch, with the barest hint of a lingering caress, and thus, releases the trigger. “Thank you,” he says, quietly. Oleg nods, and in that moment, their meeting ends. He steps out of the pillar-boarded nook, back into the brighter, baleful light of the corridor proper. He waves farewell to Oleg, and picks his way through the long, lonely walk to the library at the terminus of the hall. He remains there, at swim through complex seas of data…on Centralist politics, on inquiries into the nature of anthro-biotic studies from a Centralist perspective. He absorbs the accounts written by Doiana’s father, on life in the aquaculture communities of Free Ruthenia. And four bells later, he emerges from the library, shuddering with cold-sweat dread at the insights he’s taken from the volumes of data siphoned into his head. He thinks of Dorianna, and her reasons for coming here. He plots out her study into the anthro-biotic complexities of Nemaean life, and shudders at its implications in the hands of corporate-government leaders. Dear gods! Worlds, people, and whole unborn futures lie in ominous shadow! “You’re a pawn,” he says, as if to her. “A damn-stupid pawn.” **** And here is the end of part two. This will be an extensive story, but I hope it maintains some entertaining appeal and offers a glimpse into the visual world universe of Nemaea that I've shown in previous visual posts. And as always, thank you for reading, viewing and commenting. Part Three is coming soon!