Refusing to look at Langton again, he rearranged his clothing, schooled his features, and crossed the dance floor to an opening in the hedge. Never again. I"m never going to do this again.

As he approached the opening, senses raw, he felt Inea. She crouched behind the hedge, watching him cross the floor. Then she broke and ran, the hedge tossing in her wake.

What she thought she"d seen-what he"d been projecting for anyone pa.s.sing by to see-was a man and woman hastily coupling with embarra.s.sing intensity.

He broke into a shambling lunar run. "Inea, wait!"

Chapter seven.

Inea ran from him as if he were truly evil.

It would be so easy to stop her with Influence. t.i.tus skidded to a halt in the midst of a weight lifting cla.s.s and summoned the revulsion he"d felt as he"d forced each of the codes out of Suzy Langton. I won"t be addicted to Influence.

"Hey, Mister, anything wrong?" called the instructor, a muscular young woman who had oiled her black skin until she looked like an ebony statue. Abner Gold stood behind her.

t.i.tus noticed an odd intensity in her gaze, but brushed it aside. "Oh. just forgot something." He pushed on.

As he emerged from an arch in the vine that shielded the weight lifting area, he found Inea poised on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet, eyeing him. They were near the entrance to the gym. The rowing team he"d seen working out was gone, and their area was dimmed. t.i.tus cast about for any trace of Abbot. He found nothing, but one of his string could be watching.

t.i.tus moved into the rowing area, and called, "Inea, you didn"t see what you thought you saw. Not here and not in the cafeteria. We really need to talk. Come sit?"

He settled cross-legged on the floor beside one of the rowing machines, leaning against its side, waiting. He had almost given up hope, when she drifted through the gate.

As she entered the area, he erected a shield around them to divert the interest of pa.s.sersby. "Let me explain my-apparenta" behavior. Please, Inea, please listen."

"I can"t imagine what you could say after what I saw."

"Remember the bat?"

She glanced sharply at him. "So?"

"I can make people see anything. In the refectory, you thought I"d eaten a meal. Here you thought I"d taken a woman. I did neither."

"How do I know? You could say anything."

This was why he"d promised himself never to Influence her. "Think," he pleaded. "People must believe I eat, so I must create that impression even if it means using the defensive gift of my kind."

t.i.tus watched as she digested that, and recoiled. "You lied to me. You drank blood from that woman. Is she dead?"

He sprang to his feet. "G.o.d, no!"

But she was out and around the divider, racing back to the dance floor. He caught up to her at the dance floor"s hedge, grabbed her by the shoulders and held her. "Listen to me!" he whispered fiercely. "I haven"t lied to you. I will never lie to you. The cut on Suzy"s face nearly drove me out of my mind, but I didn"t take anything from her-except the information I need to do my job. She"ll never remember me. You"ve no cause to be horrified-or even jealous."

She relaxed. "All right, then let me go look."

"She"ll be waking up soon."

"I"ll be quiet."

He let her go. She crept through the hedge. t.i.tus thought he could feel Suzy stirring. Perhaps she had, for a moment later, Inea reappeared. "Well, she"s not dead anyway. I guess I shouldn"t leap to conclusions."

He put his arm around her shoulders and led her back to the rowing area, this time guiding her all the way in and sitting her down beside him. "Do you still doubt me?"

"I don"t know. When I saw you eating in the cafeteria I thought you"d tricked me, but I couldn"t imagine why unless you really had killed someone and had him buried in your place."

"Why didn"t you go to the authorities right then?"

"I-I wasn"t sure. Then I saw your expression when Suzy"s blood spattered all over the mat."

He groaned. "Did I really give myself away that badly?"

"No, everyone was l.u.s.ting after the sight of blood. I don"t suppose they"re all vampires."

"No. Humans have their own ideas of amus.e.m.e.nt."

"You didn"t find it amusing. It made you hungry."

"Yes."

"Then why didn"t you just drink Suzy"s blood?"

"You believe I could but didn"t?"

"I don"t know what to believe. If you could do such a thing-if you have to do such things-why didn"t you?"

"Because I didn"t have her permission."

"Permission? Is that supposed to be funny? You took information from her, you said-I presume with this power of yours. I a.s.sume she didn"t give permission for that."

"What I took from her was not for myself, but for the benefit of humanity. What I refused was for myself alone."

"You never used to be so selfless-or concerned about honor."

"That"s true. The young have so little power, they don"t have to agonize over its proper use."

Slowly, she said, "I believe you. It adds up. I"ve been trying to watch you, but I can"t keep up with you. n.o.body can go as long without sleep as you do. But why steal information from Brink"s? To sell it? Professors don"t make much. It takes lots of untraceable money to create false ident.i.ties."

"But anyone in the market for Brink"s secrets couldn"t be trusted to use them for the benefit of humankind."

"Why would that stop you?"

He caught her hands and hissed, "I don"t use any power, human or otherwise, in such ways! I simply do not!"

Stunned, she let her hands lie between his.

Against his will, his head lowered and his lips sought hers.

Barely making contact, he hesitated, feeling her flesh tremble as his body pressed against hers, revealing his state more clearly than words ever could. But he held back.

When she was sure he wasn"t going to force her, she relaxed, and he felt the divine power of her. He didn"t know which need was more urgent, the growing heat in his groin or the thirst that burned in every cell.

He felt the waves of arousal that beat through her, surging between them, possessing them both, and he knew he had another power over her. Now she wouldn"t say no.

He scooped her into his arms and buried his face in her damp hair. "Before I died, when we were engaged," he said, "I never felt like this. It was easy then to wait until our wedding night." He had never felt true arousal until after his wakening, when it became tangled up with the thirst. Luren didn"t reach s.e.xual maturity until after First Death.

"When you died. I cried myself to sleep each night because we"d waited. I"d rather have been alone and pregnant than alone and a virgin. The next time I didn"t wait."

"Did you ever marry? You aren"t married now, are you?"

"Divorced. The one I did trap into marrying me-well, I hated myself more than he ended up hating me. If you"ve learned not to use your power, then I"ve learned recreational s.e.x doesn"t do much for me. This time, t.i.tus, I have to be sure! Especially with what you say, I have to be sure!"

He started to move back, but she clung to him. "It feels so good, t.i.tus. How could it be wrong?"

"Yes." He schooled himself to patience, wanting her to have what she needed from him.

But she felt his tension. "Is it that you want to. bite my neck?"

He thrust back from her, holding her shoulders at arms length, embarra.s.sed enough by that truth to laugh it off as another myth. But he owed her more. He shrugged. "Any vein will do. But I no longer drink from humans. I told you."

"Your canine teeth aren"t very long."

He laughed. "No, but incisors do break skin, only not too neatly. We use surgical tools so the wound heals fast." He took a deep breath, struggling to quell his urgency. "But all I"m asking now is what any man would want. I"m human, too, remember? I"m asking you to go to bed with me. Nothing. kinky. Just what we"ve always wanted with each other." Just that. Maybe it will be enough-for now.

"Is it especially good with. vampires? Or is that a myth, too?"

"I"ll make it like nothing you"ve ever known."

"Like you did with Suzy?"

"No! That was illusion. I won"t need any illusion with you." But he knew that his hunger sharpened the experience for his bedmates, even when he used no Influence. "I promise, everything between us will be real."

"I keep believing you-and I keep going back to my room wondering if I"ve gone mad. I haven"t got a shred of real evidence to prove what you"ve made me believe."

"Tell me what evidence you want-it"ll be yours."

She put her hands on his cheeks, fingering the roughness of his beard. He waited, but when she didn"t name her proof, he pleaded shamelessly, "But in the meantime. ?" He pressed his lips to her palm and let them describe his offer.

She listened to his silent message, eyes closed, but when he worked up to the inside of her wrist, she sensed his hunger rising. She jerked free, staring at her hand. "What if you"re really a vampire? And what if you"re as evil as legend says and if I let you-then I-I"ll become-"

"Is that what you"ve been brooding about?"

"If you really were such a horror, you"d compel me to believe you, so the more I believe you, the more I doubt."

"Actually, that"s wise-" -with Abbot around.

"Are you telling me you are evil?" She wrenched away, trapping her arms over her chest. "How melodramatic."

"No, not evil. But you"ve got to prove it yourself." Even wasn"t evil, just scared of the power of his cattle. "Will you tell me what you took from the Brink"s woman?"

"No. It"s bad enough that one non-Brink"s person has it. No one else will ever get it from me."

"That"s not proof. That"s not evidence."

"I know. Nothing I can do or say is evidence. You must define for yourself the proof that you would accept. It might be best if you can get it without my knowing."

She scrambled to her feet, stared down at him, then yanked herself around and made for the opening in the divider. Over her shoulder, she warned, "Don"t follow me this time."

He felt that if he did, she would surrender. But he also knew what he hadn"t understood that time he"d paced outside her door and had almost gone in to seduce her. The next day her doubts would return and spoil everything forever.

He dragged himself back to his room and to a very miserable night. Nothing helped. Unable to sleep, he carefully recorded the codes he"d memorized then tried three times to use them, but he kept keying mistakes.

In the morning, he pulled himself together and went to the lab hoping work would banish his mental conversations with Inea. When he had a.s.signed everyone to a task for the shift, he barricaded himself in his office and patched his calculator into his desk terminal, invoking one of Abbot"s handy programs. It caused Security programs to forget that certain files had been accessed. He hadn"t dared to use it before because it had been known to fail on other Brink"s systems used by banks. But this time he had Brink"s own codes, so he went after the records of those heading clandestine departments.

He sweated through every pause, afraid the old program, which had allowed his kind to create ident.i.ties, was finally obsolete. The Project"s systems had to be superior to banking systems, for banks had to show a profit while the government didn"t. So government could spend absurdly on security. Langton"s codes had been changed, or if he"d gotten one wrong and he couldn"t answer a challenge on the first try. he refused to think about that.

At last he found a compilation of hobbies and prior professions of those working in Biomed and Cognitive Sciences.

Someone had gone to great lengths to a.s.semble scientists who seemed ideal to perform one sort of task, but were in fact better suited for something else entirely. The two key figures turned out to be Mirelle and Mihelich, with Gold a close third because of his Sandia connections and his work on low-grav bio-cybernetic laboratory instruments.

Mihelich was not just an M.D., but a geneticist, a research cytologist, and a pioneer in cloning techniques with several patents on work done under the auspices of various corporations, so that few people knew of his contributions.

t.i.tus dug out some of the man"s more esoteric papers and waded through the alien language of biomed. Clearly, Mihelich was one of ten researchers who understood human cloning well enough to produce a viable luren or orl fetus. And he had gathered all the help and equipment he"d need.

When t.i.tus uncovered the profiles of Dr. Mirelle de Lisle and her co-workers, the scope-the sheer audacity-of the clandestine half of the Project came home to him.

It would be useless to clone an alien without knowing what he was. The Cognitive Sciences, which included anthropology, ethnography, ethnology, linguistics, and psychology, yearned to dub themselves Xenology. But there had been no strangers to study until Kylyd arrived. Now, the leaders of that movement were on the moon to create an environment suitable for raising alien children.

But the biggest discovery, t.i.tus made by accident. One of Mirelle"s reports-which read like a textbook in applied kinesics, a branch of anthropology dealing with communication encoded in subconsciously controlled movement-contained an illegible doc.u.ment that seemed like gibberish until he recognized the phonetic alphabet and looked up the symbols.

An hour later, he stared at a screen full of squiggles he could read as plainly as English. But it wasn"t English. It was luren. distorted p.r.o.nunciations, strange words, and odd syntax aside, it was the language Abbot had taught him, and the doc.u.ment seemed to be a transcription of a kind of verbal log recording off Kylyd.

They"ve tapped the ship"s electronics! And not a hint of that had ever appeared in any official report from Project Station. He backed out of the file stealthily, his mind leaping from the sketchiest hints to rock-hard conclusions.

The first time he"d seen Abbot in Kylyd, squeezing through the twisted portal, he"d been carrying something that could have been a recorder. Abbot was an electronics wizard. Abbot had Marked Mirelle, who was on the clandestine side of the Project. Abbot knew what she knew.

Knowing that it had been done by the humans, never mind that official reports said they couldn"t even ignite the lighting system, Abbot could have jiggered a recorder to mesh with Kylyd"s own system. And if so, he could have been pulling data out of the control console he bent over with such absorption while t.i.tus hid in the sleeper"s chamber.

Abbot had this transcription as well as others the humans knew nothing about, and Abbot was learning to read Kylyd"s records. The humans, of course, had no idea what Mirelle"s gibberish meant; there was no Rosetta stone.

Why would Abbot spend so much time on language? Just to send the SOS in the right dialect? Hardly. He intended to wake the sleeper. But what did Abbot plan to do with a wakened luren-a pure-blood?-a pure-blood who would become his son-wholly in his power?

t.i.tus shied away from that idea, telling himself it was just wild conjecture, but he was unable to get the thought of the orl out of his mind. What if they had been aboard as crew, not food? What if the galactic luren of today would not regard Earth"s humans merely as a food supply? And what if Abbot was right? What if this really was the last chance for Earth"s luren to survive intact as luren? What should I do?