Chapter Forty-two

One panel of the observation room showed a vehicle speeding toward Hansen. The panels to either side gave close-ups of an aircar driven by a lone woman.

The driver's features were unfamiliar, but the jewel between the full breasts left no doubt of Penny's identity.

The three-quarter frontal angles in the magnified images showed Penny's face was set with grim determination. That would have been normal enough for North—or Rolls, or almost any other member of their teams, the men and women who had become gods when they came to Northworld. But not Penny.

Perhaps the expression, like the visage itself, was merely a shape formed by her necklace.

The sky behind the aircar turned black. A squall swept across the plain.

Rain-cooled air slammed down in a column, then spread over the pond as a fierce wind which flattened grass. In the far distance, black-backed grazing animals the size of the aircar faced the storm. Their Y-shaped nasal horns lifted as they bellowed challenges to the lightning.

Hansen smiled as he stepped out into the wind. The titanotheres were as stupid as the aircar, and the vehicle had no brain at all.

But then, Hansen's own recent behavior had a lot in common with what the beasts were doing now.

Penny pulled up hard and let the vehicle fall twenty centimeters with the fans cut off. Its shock absorbers protested. The driver herself hung inertialess in the air for the time it took for the results of her lack of skill to settle down; then she got out of the car.

Penny had grace and—which was harder to recognize—intelligence. She drove badly because nothing, either animate or machine, mattered to her except for her own appearance and her own lust.

At least until now.

"I have a favor to ask you, Hansen," she said.

The squall hit.

The huge drops of the leading edge were massive enough to batter through layers of warm air and chill it so that the rest of the storm could follow. They smashed and splattered silently on the bubble of protection covering the aircar and the two gods beside it.

There was no thunder, but lightning rippled every few seconds. Penny's face looked terrible in its blue-white glare.

Hansen said, "Let's go inside, then," and led the way into his home.

Penny looked with distaste at the extruded furniture and blank walls of the lower chamber, not because the decor would have been cheap on any of the 1,200 planets of the Consensus of Worlds, but rather because it was austere to the point of asceticism.

Hansen smiled. The walls became a mass of pink, gold, and mirrors, while the furniture sprouted carvings so florid that they almost hid the underlying purpose of the items.

"Oh, I don't care about any of that!" said Penny with a wave of her jeweled hand. She sounded as if she meant it . . . but if she did, it was for the first time since Hansen had met her. "I came about—something else."

"All right," said Hansen.

He'd wait for her to get to the point . . . but this was his home. He wasn't going to hop around in it like a nervous client in a fancy cathouse.

"I know that duration doesn't mean anything to us," Hansen said. "But . . . ?"

He sat on the floor, not a chair, and stretched out on his left hip and elbow. The surface looked hard, but it gave slightly under his weight.

"Yes, well," said Penny, making washing movements with her hands. She turned almost instinctively to one of the mirrors now adorning the walls and checked her appearance "I, ah . . ."

Penny's right hand touched the beehive of red hair she currently wore. She was full-bodied with a dusting of freckles on her shoulders and cheekbones. Her skirt and scoop-necked blouse were made of tiny gemstones, strung rather than attached like sequins to a fabric backing. They rustled minutely as she moved.

The woman realized what she was doing. Her face contorted into an expression Hansen would have described as self-loathing on anyone but Penny.

She turned and snapped to Hansen, "I don't want you to take Ritter with you against the Lomeri. That's what I came for."

"Oh . . . ," said Hansen as he got to his feet again.

Lying down was about as awkward a position as you could find for drawing a pistol. Intellectually that made no difference here, where the two parties controlled the Matrix and powers which dwarfed the destructive capabilities of any artifacts.

But Hansen's subconscious knew it was going to be the kind of conversation that had made Hansen very thankful for guns in the days when he was no more than human.

"We aren't attacking the Lomeri, Penny," he said. He looked at a Cupid-decorated pilaster instead of his visitor, who stood near it. "It's just that we need to launch from Plane Two to get where, ah, I need to be in the Open Lands."

"The lizardmen think you're attacking," Penny said coldly. "And anyway, they wouldn't care. They like to kill, just the way you and North do!"

I don't like to—

Hansen grimaced. "I guess if I didn't like killing . . ." he muttered, aloud to himself, "I'd do something else. Other people manage, most of them."

"All I'm asking is that you not take Ritter with you," Penny said with careful precision. "I can give you any number of servants, thousands of them if you like."

Hansen snorted. "That would convince the Lomeri that the Final Day had come, wouldn't it?" he said. "Look, Penny, I didn't tell Ritter he had to come along and mind the override. He wants to come."

"Because he thinks it's his fault that the damned machine doesn't work!" the woman blazed. "Anybody could do that! Anybody!"

"Not anybody," Hansen said, clipping the syllables. "And—"

There were a few of the West Kingdom warriors Hansen could train into the job; Culbreth certainly, and maybe Arnor. They had the courage, but the technology of war outside the Open Lands was alien to them.

That technology was crucial. On Plane Two, the Matrix was only a gateway—not a weapon to turn against the lizardmen, who would swarm toward any intrusion they detected.

"—if it comes to that, it is Ritter's fault that the dragonfly won't work unless somebody minds the shop on Plane Two for a couple minutes."

"So for that you make him—!"

"No!" Hansen snapped. "He did everything a human can who doesn't work in the Matrix. But for that I let him volunteer to help me. Because I sure-hell need the help."

Penny looked at him. Her gaze was as smooth and opaque as polished granite. Instead of speaking, she lifted the jewel on her breast by its transparent neck band and held it out to Hansen.

"Go ahead," she said at last. "Take it."

"I don't understand, Penny," Hansen said. His voice was thinned by the truth of the statement. He kept his hands at his sides.

Without the necklace to transform her appearance, the woman before him was what genetics and about nineteen standard years had made her: soft though not fat; blondish hair, but not blond by several shades. Her areolae were small and very pale. Despite her youth, her breasts sagged, and there was a mole near the left nipple.

"I'm giving it to you!" she shouted. Her eyes were clamped shut, but tears streamed out beneath the lids anyway. "Only give me Ritter! That's all I ask, just give me Ritter."

"Penny," Hansen said. He didn't know what to do with his hands. "Penny, listen, it's not like that."

He put one arm around her plump shoulder. She collapsed against his chest, sobbing.

"Please," she whispered. "Please, Commissioner. . . ."

Hansen eased the woman's head back and guided her hand so that the necklace dropped around her neck, where it belonged.

"Penny," he said, "listen to me. Ritter thinks he's responsible for the problem. I don't think he's responsible; there's just so much you can do working back from a piece of hardware."

The woman stepped away from him. Her form shifted reflexively through a number of choices before settling into someone with black hair and austere, aristocratic features.

Someone as different from the real Penny as Hansen could imagine meeting.

"Ritter says it's his duty to back me up," Hansen went on, knowing that she didn't—couldn't—understand what he was saying. "I can't tell him he's wrong, because I'd feel the same way myself if I stood where he does. And I'm going to let him do what he wants to do, because I like him well enough to let him make his own decisions."

He swallowed, then added the rest of the truth: "And because I need him."

"You're a bastard, Hansen," Penny said distinctly but without raising her voice. "You're doing this because you hate me. I don't know why, but you hate me."

She turned and walked with stately grace to the lift shaft which would return her to the upper level where her vehicle waited.

"I don't hate you, Penny," Hansen called to her back. "I don't hate anybody."

Except myself. And that's never stopped me doing whatever was necessary.