SERPENT’S REACH BY C.J. Cherryh

It was wise that humans had been forbidden the hive, direct access to queens, to Drones, to the Mind. She abhorred now what she was doing, imprinting Warrior, while it was unadvised by any queen.

That imprint would enter Istran blues, as truth, as true as Warrior’s legitimate message.

It was her key to the hives.

iv

Jim exited the bath, whiter than he had been. He had lost the breakfast, and decided on another prolonged bath. Now, wrapped in a bathsheet, he flung himself belly-down on the wide bed and showed no disposition to move.

Raen bent over him, touched his damp shoulders. “You’re sure you’re all right? You didn’t let it scratch you, did you?”

“All right,” he echoed indistinctly. She decided that he was, and that the kindest thing she could do at the moment was to let him lie. He was shill overheated from the water. She pulled a corner of the bedclothes loose and flung over him, shrugged and walked back to her own business.

She packed, settling everything with precision into bar several cases—scuffed and battered from much use, that luggage—but it contained so well the things she would not give up, from world to world. Most that she had bought on the ship she thought of leaving; and then she decided otherwise and simply jammed things in the more tightly: Istra did not promise their equal.

To all of it she added the fifth and sixth cases, the deep. study apparatus and her precious tapes; she never trusted a strange apparatus, and the tapes-the tapes she kept much beyond their usefulness for casual knowledge, some for pleasure, some for sentiment, a few for reference. And there were half a dozen that Council would be aghast to know existed in duplicate; but Hal Ilit had admitted her within his security, and never seen beyond his own self-indulgence, his own vanity, not even in dying. She counted the tapes through, making sure everything was in its slot, nothing lost, nothing left to assumption.

And she would have taken the refuge deepstudy offered for an hour now, having finished all else: it was the best antidote for unpleasantness. But Jim was there, and she did not mean to make the hit’s mistake: under deepstudy, one was utterly helpless, and she would not, would never accept sinking into that state in another’s presence, even an azi’s. She paced the suite in boredom, and finally, sure beyond doubt that there remained nothing to do, she sat down and keyed in the viewer, one of the entertainment channels.

Beta dramas, trivial and depressing . . . worse, when one knew the deliberate psych-sets which had gone into training their lab-born ancestors: work to succeed, succeed to be idle, consume, consume, consume, consumption is status. It worked, economically: on it, the entire economy of the Reach thrived; but it made excruciatingly boring drama. She keyed in docking operations, and found more interest simply in watching the station spin nearer, the abstract shift of light and shadow across its planes.

She heard a sound from the other room. Jim was up and about. She listened for him to head for the bath again in distress, but he did not, and she decided that he had recovered. She heard a great deal of walking back and forth, the crumbling of plastics, and finally the click of a suitcase closing. She looked round the side of the chair and saw him, dressed in conservative street clothes, setting his case beside her several.

He could indeed have been beta, or even Kontrin: he was tall. But he was a little too fair; and there was the minute tattoo beneath the right eye.

“You look very fine, Jim.”

He glanced down, seeming embarrassed. “I thank you, sera.”

“Formalities are hardly appropriate in private.” She spun the chair about from the viewer and looked up at him. “You’re all right, then.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said almost inaudibly.

“You didn’t panic; you stood your ground. Sit down.”

He did so, on the bench against the wall, still slightly pale.

“Meth-maren,” she said, “is not a well-loved name among Kontrin. And sooner or later someone will make an attempt on my life.” She opened her right hand, palm down. ‘The chitin grafted there is blue-hive; blue-hive and the Meth-marens met a common misfortune two decades ago. Warrior and I have something in common, you see. And listen to me: I once had a few azi in my employ. Somehow a gate was left unlocked and red-hive majat got in. I sleep lightly. The azi didn’t. The room was no pretty sight, I may tell you. But an azi who would walk with me out there into the hall . . . might have been of some use to me that night.”

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