Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Mystery fiction; Science fiction
"I'll get them for you," she said, waving the knife's glittering blade
at me. I moved away and sat on the edge of my bunk. She flicked the
clasp open, and spread the two halves apart. There were two shirts and
some underwear in the case, plus the collapser. Not a cigarette to be
seen. She looked at me, narrow-eyed.
"I don't smoke," I explained weakly.
"You Amnesty-bearers!" she grated between even, white teeth. "Ready to
destroy everybody with impunity, aren't you! You wouldn't even wait to
find out what I wanted!"
"I haven't said a word," I pointed out delicately.
"You lied about the cigarettes," she accused.
"How would you treat a stranger who burst into your cabin with an
unsheathed knife?" I said, exasperated.
She looked down at the knife, and reddened. "Maybe I was a bit abrupt
about this. It's just that--" Her face suddenly crinkled up, and her
deep blue-violet eyes burst into tears. Then the knife fell to the
carpet, and her face was buried in her hands. I leaned forward and
removed the knife from within her reach, then took her by the shoulders.
She whimpered hopelessly, between shuddering sobs, "Am I under arrest?"
"Depends," I said. "Depends entirely on why you came in here like this.
And what my possession of the Amnesty has to do with it. And how," I
added, puzzled, "you seemed to know so much about Amnesty-bearers and
their vile dispositions!"
She took her hands from her face, streaked with tears, and said, with a
shy grin, "I was guessing at that part. I just kind of assumed they'd
all be pretty intolerant. Who wouldn't be, with all that power?"
"Well, _I_ wouldn't for one," I said defensively. "I only bite when I'm
bitten."
She found a handkerchief somewhere and began sopping up the wet spots
from her complexion; a complexion, I noted happily, that did not come
off with water.
"Have a chair," I said, and rang for the steward. "I hope you drink?"
"Not a lot," she admitted. "But I could use one right now."
"Good," I said, watching her as she poised gracefully on the chair
before my cabin's private stereo set. "By the way, my name's Jery. Jery
Delvin."
She flushed scarlet again, and said, "Mine is White."
"First name?" I asked. She paused. "What is your first name?"
She looked at the carpet. "Snow," she said softly.
"For real?" I said. "Like with the dwarfs?"
She nodded, as one who'd been over the same conversational ground many
wearisome times in the past. "Mother was a Walt Disney fan, back in the
Age of Movies."
I shook my head, and rang for the steward again. "I think we both could
use a drink."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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