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Unusual for a prisoner, was Avon’s first thought on the matter. The typical man with a dog for a daemon was a model citizen, eager to yield to authority to a tedious degree. A common enough type—outside of prison.
Of course, perversions could make a criminal of even the most obedient. But Blake, Avon decided almost immediately, was most definitely a political criminal, not a child molester. Everything about him screamed ‘revolution.’ If all of the Federation’s most wanted looked like Blake, it was no wonder that the Federation kept those pictures off the public vizcasts. Looking Blake in the face was something like touching a bit of metal paneling expecting an ordinary sensation of polished steel, and instead feeling a painful charge of static electricity. Except the jolt came every time, instead of just occasionally, on a stroke of bad luck.
Blake had rounded shoulders and average muscle tone – in all, a build Avon was used to seeing around the workplace, as well as when he looked in the mirror, if he was honest with himself. But Blake’s eyes were remarkable. Intent, intense, beautiful. They made it difficult for Avon to believe Blake was on suppressants like the rest of them, and impossible for him to believe he’d ever been the naturally obedient sort. So why a dog? And such an ordinary one, at that: a dark coated thing, almost black, with large amber eyes and a broad snout.
The problem was one that had never really stopped bothering Avon, in all the time he’d been with Blake. And there was something else. It took him far longer to notice, but Blake seldom touched Siriol, and never playfully, affectionately. Jenna often ran her fingers over Aias’ feathers. Vila let his monkey play with his hair and tickle his face. Gan, too, held his goose daemon, his large hands gentle and careful with the bird. When Cally’s ocelot sprawled half across her lap, she always stroked her. Avon didn’t notice that Blake was different until he saw Blake place a gentling hand on the glossy dome of Siriol’s head as she snarled at Travis’s wolf. The gesture surprised him, and it shouldn’t have. Why hadn’t he seen it before? Perhaps because Blake, although easy with people, was not free with physical affection. Perhaps that was why Avon hadn’t noticed the oddity, but it didn’t at all explain why Blake didn’t touch his daemon. Once he noticed, though, he couldn’t stop noticing.
***
“Blake.” Avon said, strolling onto the flight deck. Blake didn’t turn to face him, just continued as he was, in repose on the flight deck couch. Siriol lay curled a few feet from Blake, her legs twitching with a restless dream. She yipped once in her sleep, as though in response to Avon’s presence. Or perhaps he flattered himself. “I’ve been contemplating the programming for the armory that specifies a single function isomorphic response. Or, as you so prosaically put it, allows us one gun each. I think I’ve found a way to alter it.” He halted just behind Blake, a bit too close, arms braced on the couch. When he breathed in, he could smell the depilatory cream that Blake rather charmingly over used.
“Isn’t one gun enough to point at me?” Blake asked.
The question hit Avon like a blow across the face—if, that is, it were possible to land such a blow without facing one’s opponent. It shouldn’t have mattered to him. So Blake was still harping on Avon wanting him dead. What of it? Perhaps it should even have pleased him. He certainly disliked those increasingly common flashes of intuition that told him that Blake was looking at him and seeing him precisely as he was, rather than as he wanted to be seen. But Blake misunderstanding him wasn’t any better. His breath came a little faster, in spite of himself. He was angry, and…disappointed?
Before he could pull himself together and think of a response that would demonstrate both his superior intelligence and his disdain, Aletheia sprang into motion against the Siriol in a flurry of boxing paws. Siriol merely shook her head and lifted a paw, as if to ward off the blows.
“Aletheia, enough,” Avon ground out. The ferocity the attack was equaled only by its absurdity. A hare against a dog. “After our run in with the Altas, Blake, I find I want Liberator under my control as far as is possible. Since I cannot reprogram you to allow me to steer this ship where I please, the armory will have to do,” he said crisply. Aletheia continued to swipe at Siriol.
“Brave little rabbit,” Vila said, grinning at him.
“Well, now, she isn’t afraid of Blake’s pet,” Avon said flatly.
An instant later he was choking, gasping for breath but unable to draw it. Siriol’s teeth were at his daemon’s throat. He reeled backward, blind, panicked, stumbling away from the couch that might have steadied him. He would have fallen, but someone’s arms came up around him from behind. Cally’s, he decided, before passing out.
***
Avon returned to consciousness stretched across the flight deck couch. He felt a weight on his chest and felt a moment’s panic—ah, no, that was why. Aletheia lay on top of him. He glanced around the room and found that the flight deck had emptied, except for Blake, who stood over him, with his arms braced on the back of the couch. It was a nearly perfect reversal of their earlier position. Nearly perfect, except that Blake had been sitting, legs apart, relaxed and in command, while Avon now lay sprawled flat on his back, pinned beneath Blake’s gaze. Avon refrained from running a hand over Aletheia’s ears to soothe her, unwilling to make himself look any more rattled than he had to.
“Was it something I said?” Avon said wryly. He was momentarily surprised to find he could speak easily—but of course he could. It hadn’t been his throat that had been nearly torn out. He had known Siriol to be capable of such savagery, had seen her kill the daemons of troopers before, but he realized he’d truly not expected her to turn on Aletheia, no matter how either of them behaved.
“As a matter of fact, it was,” Blake told him. “You’re an intelligent man, Avon. Haven’t you ever wondered about my daemon? Or, as you said, my pet?” Blake patted Siriol’s head, and the self-conscious irony of the gesture made Avon’s eyebrows go up.
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Avon said, and it was Blake’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “I assume you awoke to the plight of the honest man late in life.” It was one of the many plausible theories he didn’t really believe.
“She didn’t settle as a dog,” Blake said bluntly. “It happened when the Federation reconditioned me. Whether it was a cause or an effect, I can’t be certain.”
For a moment Avon was so appalled that he couldn’t think of a thing to say. His hand came up involuntarily to touch Aletheia. Blake looked at him steadily.
“Well, Blake,” he managed finally, “have you anything else to tell me about yourself? I prefer not to speak in ignorance. Particularly…when doing so endangers my life. If there’s nothing else, perhaps we might bring this interview to an end.”
If Blake chose to hear that as an apology, he was welcome to do so, though Avon didn’t believe in them.
“All right, Avon,” Blake said. “I’ll leave you.”
And he did, Siriol trotting close at his heels, ears back and tail down. After another minute, Avon got up and left as well, scooping Aletheia into his arms.
***
What everyone else paraded for the world to see, Blake kept hidden. That thought, which had at first been a simple observation, had become Avon’s justification for what he was doing. Why shouldn’t he know what Blake’s daemon had been?
“Orac,” he said, inserting the key, “Blake’s daemon was altered during his reconditioning. Are you able to tell me her original form?”
Orac whirred away. Aletheia watched it work from her place beside it on Avon’s desk, large dark eyes fixed on the computer as the lights clicked through its circuits.
“If the information is accessible at all, it is encoded under a series of modified vingere ciphers. The task is well within my capabilities, but if you wish me to break the ciphers and retrieve the files, I will require twenty-five minutes of uninterrupted computation to do so. The soonest I will be able to waste time on such a trivial request is in three weeks time.”
“Three weeks?” Avon said, “Surely you have twenty-five minutes to spare now.”
“I suggest you consult Roj Blake about de-prioritizing his demands on my capacity,” Orac said. “He is monopolizing my circuits.”
Avon considered. Orac could be manipulating him. It was something between human and machine. It had no daemon, but its personality seemed to go beyond that of a pre-programmed interface. In fact, he suspected Ensor had used Dust in Orac’s design—an avenue for further investigation, but not at the moment.
“It might be lying to us,” Aletheia said. “It doesn’t want to help us. It probably tells Blake that you are monopolizing its circuits.”
“It is possible to be too paranoid,” Avon said absently, more concerned with whether she might be right than with his reply. Could Orac lie? He could hardly say, “Orac, do you lie?” and expect to learn anything useful from the question. So Orac could be tricking him into giving it uninterrupted time for its own research. Or perhaps the computer was sadistic enough simply to take pleasure in making Avon exhaust himself over the decoding. He couldn’t do as Orac suggested and talk to Blake, which, he suspected, Orac well knew. Which meant he couldn’t assign the task to Orac, if he wanted the task done as soon as it could be, which he did. Which could be just what Orac wanted, but it seemed the only choice.
Avon had training in cryptography, and one of his ex-lovers, the otherwise unimaginative Tynus, had fancied sending him erotic cryptograms. So the task would not be beyond his skills, but it definitely would be tedious. Information under a vingere cipher of any sort would take hours—perhaps days--to decode.
“Give me the encrypted text. I’ll do it myself,” he told Orac.
“The probability of a human of your intelligence completing this task in under three point five weeks is below twenty percent. Factoring in your psychological profile, however--” Avon removed the key.
That was longer than he’d thought, but he’d be damned if he was going to back down to Orac now. He’d be finished in two weeks, he decided.
“It’s playing you like a synth-organ,” Aletheia told him.
“Probably,” Avon snapped.
***
The first three nights, when he closed his eyes, the ciphers came back to him, garbled, his brain trying to continue the task in spite of him, making him turn over and over on his bed until he gave it up and went back to work on them in earnest. After that, he slept only in snatches, at his desk, with the lights on, and made up for the difference with stimulants.
He shouldn’t exhaust himself, he supposed. They were between raids, a time during which Blake typically planned and made contacts and charts, and Avon rested, fiddled with his own projects, did Cally’s yoga, and cheated at games with Jenna and Vila. When they did resume their battles, he would be tired and slow from his time locked in his room with the ciphers. With that thought, he decided that he should get something to eat, even if the stimulants were killing his appetite.
“Well, Avon?” Blake said. He sat at the table, sharing a meal with Jenna. “Did you manage it?”
“What?” Avon said sharply, his finger stalling above the “flash thaw” button.
“The re-programming for the guns,” Jenna said. From her shoulder, Aias ruffled his feathers in a superior fashion.
“Ah. Why not draw a second one and see?” Avon said with nasty smile.
“So you haven’t,” Jenna said, with a little smile of her own.
What Avon had told Blake about his reason for reprogramming the armory was true. In the immediate aftermath of their encounter with the Altas, he’d found himself unusually aware of the unremitting humming of the ship, which didn’t grow louder at speed, the curious over-brightness of the corridors, the temperature of the walls beneath his fingers—too close to his own body temperature to feel either warm or cold to the touch-- when he trailed a hand along one. Even the smell of the air: very faintly of ozone, and surprisingly pleasant. The startling thought that the ship might be something different and more alien than he’d imagined, something out of his control, had made him notice it again. But the same thing had happened with Blake’s daemon, and, he had to admit, his interest in Liberator was inconsequential beside that. Siriol was the more consuming mystery.
Of course, he assured himself, it wasn’t all about Blake’s daemon. Orac had manipulated him into his current feverish pace.
A ping told him his protein had heated.
“Join us, Avon?” Blake asked.
For a moment, he considered it—he wasn’t entirely averse to eating in company--but knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his mind on the conversation. Obsession called.
***
Two and a half weeks after that first conversation with Orac, he broke the last of the ciphers. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t allow himself to hesitate, before reading what had been encrypted beneath them
The delay came, instead, in understanding. He scrolled through the reader, file after file, and for long minutes his mind simply wouldn’t let him believe that he was looking at nothing.
The files were useless, might as well have been empty. There was nothing particularly sensitive or scientific, and nothing on individual victims. They were precisely the sort of documents he’d most despised writing for the Aquatar Project, the sort of thing one wrote up to secure funding through the review panel, with just the right amount of technical specificity to dazzle an idiot.
“Orac!” he snapped. “There’s nothing here.”
“If the information existed in tarriel-cell based storage, that is where it would have been. The information has likely been stored using brain-print technologies,” Orac said, sounding smug. Avon ripped out the key and threw it across the room. The Federation didn’t just guard its secrets well—it made sure that anyone who attempted to discover them would pay in time and effort and pride. Aletheia leapt onto the table, closer to him.
He blinked, passed a shaking hand over his eyes, then over Aletheia’s back, then got up and retrieved the key, locking it back into place.
“Avon,” Orac said, “you have decrypted the vingere ciphers three minutes before I predicted you would. Although that difference may seem insignificant to you, I am remarkably precise in my predictions. I assure you, it is most unusual.”
Well now, the intensity of his obsession was enough to throw off even Orac’s calculations. How disconcerting. Then there was the matter of just what sort of game Orac was playing with him.
“Have you been experimenting on me? Did you know that those files were a false trail?” Avon asked.
“Of course not!” Orac whirred.
Avon sighed. Perhaps it was true, perhaps not. In either case, it wasn’t what he wanted to know most. He had to know, he had to know what else he could do.
“Orac, how do you suggest I proceed?”
“More logically than you have been! Although it is unlikely that Blake himself recalls the original form of his daemon, it is not logical that you have not put the question to him,” Orac told him.
Avon dropped into his chair, and Aletheia sprung instantly up into his lap. He gripped the edge of the table hard. It hardly mattered what Orac thought. He had his reasons for not asking Blake. But to think that Blake himself might not remember. He…hadn’t considered that possibility. It was terrible to consider, too terrible to consider.
“Damn them! Damn them!” Avon was surprised to hear himself saying aloud, his voice unsteady with a grief he didn’t entirely understand. He had always known what the Federation was capable of, and he had never cared. Well, he was exhausted. He was not at his best. Although Blake might disagree – he seemed to like his lunatics frothing. The thought made him smile a little, momentarily distracting him. But only momentarily. He struck the table hard with the flat of his hand.
“You need to rest,” Aletheia said. “You need to get control of yourself.”
“Control of my self! You’re the one who started all of this.” His voice cracked. “Why couldn’t you just leave Blake’s daemon alone? Always fighting her…don’t you know you look ridiculous?”
He strode across the room to his bed and his bedside table. Then, hands still shaking, the right one hot and buzzing with pain from slapping it against the table, he took two sleeping pills from the bottle. He lay down the bed, and Alethia leapt in beside him and pushed into his arms.
He fell asleep instantly, too tired even to remind her that they were supposed to be quarreling.
***
Avon woke not with a sense of curiosity, or compulsion, or frustration, but of longing. He had finally had a deep enough sleep to make it possible again to recall his dreams. If this was the consequence, he was sorry he’d managed it.
He’d dreamed of wandering through the Liberator’s corridors, lost in them, every one the same. He’d dreamed of calling out again and again. Why, or for what, he couldn’t recall. Worst of all, he’d dreamed of seeing Blake’s daemon in her proper form. One of those hazy dreams that whispered that there was a place where everything was whole and real, but that he could never go home to.
Of course there was no such place. There never had been. And of course he couldn’t remember what the daemon had been, if there had been any image at all. Dreams often worked that way—you could know something without seeing it. Perhaps the opposite of waking, where you often saw without really knowing, he thought, briefly whimsical.
He brushed a hand over his face and touched what felt suspiciously like dried tears. It was all ridiculous. Absolutely laughable. He slammed a hand against the wall again, then ran it compulsively over Aletheia’s coat, stroking over her back again and again, toying with her ears.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“You want to know Blake,” she said to him. “Not just solve this one particular mystery. That isn’t impossible. There are other ways to know a man than to know the form of his daemon.”
“Yes,” he said, dislodging Aletheia with an impatient wave of his hand so that he could sit up in bed. “Yes, there are.”
***
“Blake.” Avon said, when Blake had opened the door to his cabin. Blake squinted in the bright light of the corridor, his fingers fumbling to do up his shirt. Siriol braced her paws in front of her and opened her mouth in a yawn. “The armory no longer specifies a single-function isomorphic response. But you will have to take my word for it until you can test it for yourself. As you can see, I am unarmed.” He flashed a lop-sided smile.
Blake’s eyes flicked down to Avon’s hands. In one, he held a bottle of wine; in the other, a corkscrew.
“Take you at your word?” Blake said, smiling, “Don’t I always.” He lifted a hand, as though to gesture Avon into his room. Aletheia hopped forward, once, twice, then stopped, waiting for Avon.
Of course you don’t, Avon thought bitterly, stock still in front of Blake’s door. But then, had he ever given his word to Blake and asked Blake to believe him? Perhaps not.
He followed Blake inside.