Tripoint

Most of all she despised Tom, when he looked at her in stupid, hateful need, expecting her to give him what she'd gone out on Mariner dock looking for in her own blind juvenile instinct, the expectation of affection Bowe had betrayed and Mischa had, because nobody cared.

So now the kid wanted her to validate the worst lie she'd ever learned the truth of? The kid wanted to run the cycle all over again, and she wanted to kill him or detach him or beat the expectation out of his eyes—the way she wanted to kill him now for being where he was, and for changing the equation that was her and Bowe… Tom couldn't stay out of her life, one thought ran, couldn't stop screwing things up, and making what should be simple into a muddled, fucked-up mess; and meanwhile another thought ran, He didn't deserve having happen to him what had happened to her, didn'tdeserve where Bowe could send him, onto some damned Fleet dark-ru

And sometimes, sometimes when she dreamed in the deep between points of realspace, she made love with Bowe, real, sharp-edged, bitter love, not rape, except as shemade things happen in her dream, and he didn't have any say about it. It was love, and it wasn't. It was sex, and it wasn't. It was a power-trip, and it wasn't. It was screw-you and damn-you. It was the only place she could feel the sensations she'd looked to him to make her feel, and she only felt that when she let go her grip on the solid universe. Bowe was the only human she knew who understood the absolutes of the demons. The only one who could understand. Certainly not safe, clutch-on-reality Mischa. Not Saja. Not any Hawkins. The whole Family was delusional. The whole premise of their existence was desperately tied to a morality that earned them comforts they wanted. They lived in the grip of their demons without ever seeing the raw, real dark that drove them.

But she had.

Mischa talked about morality and necessity and respectability.

But she saw how all that worked, and how they kept a careful shield up and how they didn't look too long into mirrors, too deeply into their own eyes.

She did.

And maybe, she thought, in that deep dark behind her eyelids, maybe Bowe had been equally desperate. Maybe Bowe'd gone looking, too, that day on the docks, and maybe he'd let loose his demons and loosed hers and they'd always be bound… maybe it tied him and her in such a way they went on screwing each other in a non-biological sense, creative only when they were joined, locked in a reality that nobody else could see.

Sometimes she desperately needed to know Bowe was out there. Sometimes she wondered if he needed her in the same way.

And he took Tom to himself.

Why?

What did he want? What did he need? Of all his demons, which one was in the ascendant at that moment?

Or had Tom sought him out?

Don't hurt the kid, she wished Bowe, in the way she sometimes talked to him in absentia… he was a far better conversationalist than the Family offered. He's mine to kill, and I didn't. Don't you presume, you bastard. You haven't paid for him. I did.

Hurt him and I'll have your balls, you son of a bitch.

Until then, we can go on having these little talks. We can go on meeting in the dark.

Or I can turn up on your dockside. I can meet you at Pell, withmy ship.

Or I can track you across the universe, solo. You're my obsession. My life. My reason for living.

Thank God you exist. Otherwise I'd be stuck with Mischa, fighting on his scale. And I'd strangle for want of oxygen.

—iii—

DREAM OF A SPIRAL TO NOWHERE. Sometimes it had colors and sometimes not. Sometimes it had sound, like a humming machine, deep and powerful.

Sometimes it was the brig, but the walls and the bars came and went, tilted into polyhedrons and dimensional oddity.

Sometimes shadows passed very fast. He thought of nursery rhymes and the man that wasn't there. He'd been that man, that boy, not there. Cousins had taught him that rhyme and now it wouldn't leave his head. He'd gone to sleep with it, and with the shadows, that twisted and turned one into a shadow, a presence he felt more than saw, a breath of change in the air about him.

He wasn't afraid, in this visitation—aroused, more than anything, but not acutely so, more a languid half-aware state, in which something brushed against him, made a dizzying slow incline in the surface under him, shadowed the air above him.

He dreamed a textureless voice, for a subjective long while. It told him in an idle, distracted way, about the War, about the hazards and the solitude of the fringes of the fighting, about space deeper and more silent than any merchanter would know—and qualities in hyperspace that proved it had events linked to Einsteinian space by the deformations of spacetime a star made. One could trade temporality for position and vector for event potential.

Meaning, the voice said out of empty air, and with a touch of wicked mirth, you do damn well hope you potentiate toward the next star. But there are places you don't do that. You can feel them in the numbers, in the interface. That's how we found them.

He'd the strangest notion someone had come to visit him, just to pass the tedious no-time, and sat pouring this strange conversation into his ear. He hadn't the least notion who'd found 'them' or what 'they' were. He'd missed that part. But he found himself oddly safe and comfortable lying still and listening, feeling or dreaming, he wasn't sure, but he wasn't in danger.

Wasn't in danger when the shadow leaned down and kissed him on the mouth, saying, Sweet boy, I've traveled more lightyears than you. I'm ever so old, if we should compare notes. Can you open your eyes? Can you look the dark in the face?

He didn't see things clearly. He wasn't sure what he saw.

"You have to get used to it," the voice said, in its no-time, distorted way—like it was playing back a second or so out of synch with his heartbeat, but that didn't make sense, it was just the way the brain heard it, or that was what the voice told him he was hearing, simultaneously, or first, he just couldn't get hold of when things were happening to him, or how he'd ended up skin to skin with his visitor. Sequential memory was nowhere. It was a mental end-over-end tumble, out of control. Physical sensations cascaded out of order. He was out of breath and not getting air, then spi

Was it sensuality traded for spatiality, vector for potential? He couldn't remember the answer to his question, or why he'd asked it. He hadn't any breath. He couldn't get another. Then he found a way through the interface, came spi

Was out for a moment or two. Came back, gasping for a single breath, like a newborn.

"Don't believe Christian," someone said. "Nothing's free."

He was alone, then, couldn't put reality with where he was or where he'd been, until the next pulse at the interface dropped his stomach through infinity and sent his heart and lungs struggling after the demands of his body.