Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [163]
"Use a public scanner. You can't be sure of mine," Faul pointed out. "I might have programmed it to give a false readout. You'd better start thinking smarter if you want to make a success of this business, Fassa. But don't worry—it's all there. Ownership transfer and my palmprint to back it up. I wouldn't cheat you. I don't want you coming back to this office."
"Don't you, Daddy dear?" Fassa twisted forward over the desk, sinuous and flowing in her formfitting sheath of Rigellian spiderspin. She leaned close enough to let Faul breathe in the warmth and subtle perfume of her skin . . . and was rewarded by a flash of pain and desire in his eyes.
"Ta-ta, Daddy dearest." She slid from the desk and clasped the minihedron inside a corycium heart that dangled from her charm bracelet. "See you around . . . I don't think."
"I wonder," Faul said hoarsely, "how many of those little charms contain men's hearts and souls."
"Not many—yet." Fassa paused at the door and gave him a sparkling smile. "I'm starting the collection with you."
Now, three days out from Central, she had already added a second hedron to the collection. Fassa jingled the charm bracelet reflectively. Each of the sparkling bits of jewelry was a clasp or a cage or an empty locket, waiting to receive some trinket. She'd collected the charms over those lonely years at boarding school, spending the lavish birthday and Christmas checks from Faul on expensive custom-made baubles. One for each time that Faul had come to her room at night. Only twenty-three in all; strange, she thought, that less than two dozen carefully chosen nights over a period of four or five years could make you rot away from the inside. Twenty-three shining jewels, each as perfect and beautiful in its own way as Fassa was in hers; each as empty inside as she was.
No, not any more. Two of them are filled. Fassa pushed off from the wall with the tips of her fingers and floated gently through the main cabin, twirling the charms around her wrist. Before she was done, she'd fill every charm with something . . . appropriate.
And then what?
No answers to that, no conceivable end to the future she'd mapped out for herself.
Blaize
The central cabin was empty; Polyon's buddies had all slunk off to their cabins to think over their wager and its probable consequences. Good. Blaize knew he could perfectly well have talked to Nancia from the privacy of his own cabin, but somehow it seemed more real to come here and speak directly to the titanium column that contained her shell.
Besides, she wasn't answering him from the cabin. He thought maybe she'd turned off the cabin sensors to give her passengers privacy.
He cleared his throat tentatively. Now that he was here, and not so confident of his welcome, it seemed rather strange to be talking to the walls. Sort of thing that got you shipped off for a nice rest in a place like Summerlands Care, Inc. Blaize shivered. Not for him, thank you. If he ever did need medical treatment, he'd make sure to go to a clinic where that snake Alpha bint Hezra-Fong was not operating.
"Nancia? Can you hear me?"
The silence was as absolute as that of the empty, black space outside the brainship's thin skin.
"I know you're listening," Blaize said desperately. "Watching, too. You have to be. I wouldn't close my eyes or turn my back on somebody like Cousin Polyon, and I don't believe you'd risk letting him sneak into your control cabin unobserved."
His wild gestures as he made the last statement almost overbalanced him in the ship's light grav field. He grabbed at a handrail and made a dancer's turn into the center of the cabin, recovering from the near-stumble as gracefully as a cat correcting a mis-timed jump. Nancia's titanium column coruscated in rainbow reflections of the cabin lights, sparkling and dancing around him. And she did not reply.
"Look, I know what you're thinking, but it's not like that. Really." Blaize grasped a chair back to steady himself. "I mean, what could I do? Did you expect me to call them all criminals and wrap