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Valentine had desired her for years, and they'd come close to making love out of sheer boredom once or twice while serving together in the KZ. But the half joking, half flirting they'd done in the past had always been passed back and forth around a shield of professionalism, like two prisoners swapping notes around a cell wall.

"I wanna see what that little Husker cowgirl thought was so special," she said with a facial spasm that might have been a flirtatious eyebrow lift that suddenly decided to become a wink.

Dumb shit, why did you ever tell her that?

He pulled her into his room and shut the door behind them.

"Not drunk and not with us about to-" he began, fighting off her fingers as they sought his belt.

"Now who's the tease, huh?" she asked, falling back onto the bed as though he'd kicked her there. "You're a lot of talk and fancy words. Ahn-Kha's got bigger balls than you-"

That struck Valentine as a curious-and stipulatable-argument. They'd both seen Ahn-Kha any number of times, and the Golden One had a testicular sack the size of a ripe cantaloupe.

"Ali, I-"

"It's always I with you, Val. Ever notice that? I don't even want us to be a we, I just want one fuck, one goddamn, sweaty fuck with a guy I halfway care about. I spent eight months on my back for those grunting Quislings. Wasn't like blowing some eighteen-year-old sentry to get through a checkpoint 'cause I had a story about how I gotta get medicine to my sick aunt-I had to eat breakfast with those greasy shits and talk about how great they were and just once I'd like-"

And with that it was like all the air had left her lungs. She leaned over with her mouth open for a moment, a surprised look on her face-then she fled to the bathroom.

Valentine pulled his lengthening hair back from his eyes, listened to the mixture of sobs and retching sounds echoing off the tiles in the washroom, and let out a long breath. At the moment he couldn't be sure that he wouldn't rather face another air pirate raid than go into that room.

But he did so.

The mess was about what he expected. A horrible beery-liquor smell wove itself above and around the sharper odor of her bile, and she was crying into the crook of a vomit-smeared arm at the edge of the toilet.

He picked her up. After a quick struggle he set her in bed and took off her shoes and socks, and gave each rough foot one gentle squeeze.

"No, not now," she said. I wasn't.

"I got puke on my good bra."

"I'll rinse it out and hang it up."

"Thanks."

Her freckles looked like wildflowers in a field of golden wheat.

By the time he'd used a washcloth on her face and arm, rinsed out her clothes-and her socks for good measure-she was murmuring at some level of sleep. He put a thin blanket over her and cleaned up the toilet area, using a bowl as a wash bucket.

When that was done she was truly asleep, rolled into the blanket like a softly snoring sausage.

* * * *

That night Valentine sat in his musty room with its vomit-disinfectant-and-tobacco smell and quieted his mind by laying out the three pieces of paper bearing Gail Foster's name. Black Lightning was still pounding away, the amplified music much reduced by the bulk of the intervening hotel.

He took a yellowed blank sheet of paper from his order book and drew a cross in the center, dividing the paper into four squares. He labeled the top left "Goal" and the top right "Known Known." The bottom left became "Known Unknown." Another scrape or two from his pencil and the bottom right box had the label "Unknown Unknown."

While it seemed like gibberish, the formula had been taught to him in his youth by the old Jesuit, Father Max, the teacher who'd raised him after the murder of his family. Father Max had told him (a couple of times-when Father Max was in his cups he sometimes forgot what he said) that the analytic tool came from a woman who used to work at the old United States Department of Defense intelligence agency.

It divided one's knowledge of a subject into facts you knew, facts you knew you didn't know, and the possibility of important pieces of knowledge out there that you weren't aware of until they rose up and bit you. But by diligent pursuit of the questions in the other two squares you slowly accomplished the goal, and sometimes found out about the third in time to act.

And when an Unknown Unknown showed up you had to be mentally prepared to erase even your Known Knowns.

Valentine had lived in the Kurian Zone, had even spoken to one directly, and all his experiences had left him with was the unsettling conviction that humanity's place in the universe wasn't much different than that of a Canis familiaris-the common dog. There were wild dogs and savage dogs and tamed dogs and trained dogs, and dogs knew all about other dogs, or could learn soon enough, but their guesses about the wider world (cars and phones and other phenomena) and a dog's place in it was limited by the dog's tendency to put everything in dog terms.

If he tried to put himself in the place of the practically immortal Kurians, an endless series of doubts and fears popped up. The Kurians had laid waste to Earth once with a series of natural catastrophes and disease, so what was to stop them from unleashing an apocalyptic horseman or two if mankind became too troublesome? He'd seen on the Ranch in Texas that the Kurians were toying with different forms of life in an effort to find a more pliable source of vital aura than man, in the form of the ratbits. How much time did man have before the Kurians decided to clear off the ranchland that was Earth and raise a different kind of stock? Wouldn't a goatherd who got sick of bites from the billys switch to sheep?

Depressing speculation didn't help find Post's wife. He remembered his promise and picked up the pencil again. Under "Goal" he wrote: "Learn what happened to Gail Foster." He did some mental math as he transcribed Kurian dates (the years started in 2022, and after a brief attempt at calendar reform had reverted back to old-style months and days).


Tags: E.E. Knight Vampire Earth Fantasy