Ritter scowled grudgingly at the craftsmanship of the dragonfly which he viewed through the window of Hansen's house/palace/eyrie.
"This isn't going to be easy, you know," the engineer said. "I'll need the vehicle itself to examine."
"Yeah," said Hansen. "We'll go get it."
Ritter frowned. "How long can I keep it?" he asked.
"As long as you need," Hansen replied with a shrug. He looked out through the panes to the east, toward the horizon of gently waving grass. "Duration doesn't matter here."
The exterior of Hansen's dwelling was of cast plastic with windows of preternatural clarity. North had told him that the building had no soul, but it was the architecture to which Hansen had become accustomed when he was a security officer on a far world, in a distant time.
Besides, Hansen wasn't sure that he had a soul either. If he did, then he shouldn't have felt empty inside most of the time.
"But won't the owner miss it?" Ritter protested. He knelt beside the perfect image and took an electronic magnifier from his sleeve pocket.
The dragonfly's control module was a seamless monomer casting, at least down to the level the portable unit could magnify. He'd probably have to cut—and that meant analyzing the material so he could learn how to weld it before he started to dismantle the dragonfly.
"It'll go back to the niche in time where Krita finds it again, never fear," Hansen explained. There was movement on the horizon, not just the grass bending and rising in its slow dance with the wind.
"It's not going to be easy," Ritter repeated as he spot-checked radiation from various points on the vehicle while it was at rest. "And I'll have to take it back to my own laboratory. . . ."
The squat engineer looked up, half expecting to be told that he must perform the work here, away from his familiar equipment and support structure—
Which would give Ritter the excuse he needed to bow out of the project and go home to what he knew.
Hansen turned and nodded, "Yeah, I assumed you'd want to do that," he agreed without concern. "Though I could duplicate your equipment here, if you'd prefer."
"No, I . . . ," Ritter said. "I'll be all right, back in my lab. No one questions what I'm working on."
He was afraid of the unknown. Every human being feared the unknown.
But Chief Engineer Ritter wasn't so frightened of learning the unexpected that he would refuse a unique opportunity.
Ritter resumed his preliminary examination of the dragonfly by measuring the dielectric potential across ten centimeters of the casing material. For the readings to be valid, the 'window' had to be as transparent across the whole spectrum as it was in the optical wavelengths. . . .
Hansen opened the door and looked out to the east. He could barely hear the clatter of the swans' pinions, but the car they drew was hidden behind the cloud of feathers rowing against the air.
"Just so long," he said to Ritter, "as you can do the job."
"Matter is matter," the engineer grunted. "I can analyze it; and if anybody can build it, then I can copy what he did."
He scowled at the reading he'd just taken. He checked it against similar lengths of the control panel and a leg strut, then swore in appreciation.
"All right," Ritter said, "I've seen enough to know that it's no good me fooling around with pocket instruments on a project like this. You deliver—"
His eyes focused past Hansen's shoulder. "What in hell is that?" he demanded.
Hansen laughed with some amusement but no humor. "My visitor, you mean?" he said, following the engineer's eyes. "She drops by when she has nothing better to do . . . and tries to do me."
The swan car swept in a circle that brought it to a halt broadside before the men. Between fifty and a hundred of the birds had been somehow harnessed to the gold lacework vehicle.
The swans held their positions well enough in flight, but as soon as they settled, they began to hiss at one another like a knot of vipers.
The driver was a haughty youth with broad shoulders, a wasp waist, and a pointed black moustache which perfectly matched the color of the jock strap that was his only garment. He glanced at Hansen, then Ritter, sniffed, and began polishing the slim-spoked wheels with a chamois rag.
Ritter blinked in amazement at the queenly woman who descended from the car.
She was tall, and her hair and clinging dress were both the exact color of the golden car. When she moved, for instants that were almost subliminally brief, the dress seemed to vanish and leave her—except for the jewel between her breasts—as perfectly naked as she was perfectly formed.
Hansen slid open a crystal door. "Hello, Penny," he said with the wry smile of a man who'd been impressed despite himself. "You know, I've been meaning to ask you—how do you train those birds?"
Penny waved a languid hand. "It's taken care of for me," she said in a voice of studied culture.
Then she looked over her shoulder at the swan car and snapped in a very different tone, "Myron! Move it away, won't you? How is anyone supposed to think with all that racket?"
Ritter expected the driver to react sullenly, if at all. He knew the type, and they weren't all male.
Instead, Myron dropped his chammy and touched the controls—electronic, not mechanical reins, the engineer saw. The birds settled into the traces and began to beat their wings in unison.
Whatever else Penny might be, this surly young stud behaved as if she held his life in the palm of her hand.
Which meant that she probably did.
The car trundled off a few hundred meters, where the swans' noise was lost in the breeze.
"I have an idea you'll like, Hansen," the woman resumed in her false cultured tones again. "And I promise that you won't believe how much you like it until you've tried. . . ."
She touched Hansen's chin with long, perfect fingers and turned his face to a three-quarter profile.
Hansen disengaged Penny's hand. "I'm busy, Penny," he said.
"Do you want me dark haired?" she asked.
Light struck from the jewel on her breast and abruptly she was dark, with hair like a rippling ebony carving and lips a fuller, darker red to match. "You know that time doesn't matter here, whatever you're doing. Busy doesn't exist for us."
"I'm always going to be too busy for you, Penny," Hansen said. "I wish you could understand that."
His face hardened into the expression Ritter had seen momentarily when Hansen kicked the pistol from his hand. "I'd appreciate the offer more," he went on, "if I didn't know you'd say the same thing to a Shetland pony you hadn't met before."
Penny sniffed. She didn't appear to be upset by the insult. "You don't know what you're missing," she said.
Her jewel flashed. She changed again, her body rather than merely her hair and features. Ritter's mouth was dry. Now Penny was a heavy, shorter woman whose chestnut hair had flecks of gray.
"I watch you with other women, you know," she said archly to Hansen.
He laughed. "I can't stop you," he said.
"I can be those other women," Penny said with a sudden fierce edge. "Look at me, Hansen! I can be—"
The jewel winked. Penny was blond, not quite so tall as before, not quite so statuesque, and Hansen shouted, "No!" as his fist rose mantis-quick for a blow that would crumble bone—
Penny was a teenage girl, not unattractive, who wore coveralls of gray synthetic and an expression of blended fear and desire.
Hansen squeezed his right fist with the fingers of his left hand. "Penny," he whispered to the ground in a ragged voice, "don't show me Unn again. Don't."
He looked up at the girl. She simultaneously shifted to the woman's form in which she had arrived.
"It isn't just a body, Penny," Hansen went on, his voice filling to its normal timbre. "And it especially isn't just that body."
"You're wrong, you know," Penny said, without rancor but flatly certain; as certain as Hansen was in his own belief.
She turned and looked Ritter up and down appraisingly. "Your slave's from Plane Five, isn't he?" she said. "They're all such squatty fellows."
Ritter had seen men eye women that way—Duke Greville, for instance, whether the woman was a new concubine or the daughter of a peer; but it was a surprise to see the look on a woman's face.
"He's not a slave," said Hansen easily. "We're helping one another. Partners."
Ritter didn't stare devouringly at women. A unique piece of equipment—like the dragonflies waiting across a dimensional window—might elicit the same expression from him, he supposed.
"I haven't had one of your type for . . . ," Penny said, walking around the engineer as if he were a garment displayed on a mannequin. She giggled. "There I go, talking about duration."
Ritter rotated to face her. The jewel on her breast twinkled. At each flash, Penny was a different female form. Each time, along with changes in hair color and facial features, she was slightly shorter and a few kilos heavier—tending toward the somatotype with which the engineer was familiar.
"Turn around," Penny said sharply, making a brusque gesture with her hand. "I want to see your profile."
"Go to hell," said Ritter. He turned his back on her and knelt to study the dragonfly again.
The sonic imager he carried lacked power to penetrate the casing material. He'd need the full-scale X-ray equipment of his lab, and—
The woman giggled again and leaned over Ritter's shoulder. One bare, heavy breast lay on the back of his neck; the nipple of the other brushed his right biceps. "What's your name, then?" she asked coyly.
Ritter stood up slowly and turned.
"Penny," said Hansen in a dangerous voice, "he's under my protection."
"I'm not going to hurt him, you know," Penny replied with a touch of steel herself. "Just the opposite."
"My name's Ritter," Ritter said. "I'm an engineer."
The form Penny had settled on—for the moment—was that of a twenty-year-old woman, five centimeters shorter than the engineer. She had red hair—nearly orange on her head, duller and mixed with brown on her armpits and pubic triangle. Her body was thick, but powerful muscles dimpled the fat sheathing her hips and thighs.
Apart from the jewel, she was completely nude.
"Penny, we have business to take care of," Hansen said in a tone that thinned as he noticed the way Ritter met the woman's eyes.
Penny put a hand on the engineer's shoulder. She turned to Hansen and said haughtily, "What's the matter? Is he really your slave after all, and you control his breeding rights?"
Hansen took a deep breath. "Master Ritter?" he said, letting the context serve as the remainder of the question.
Ritter touched his lip with the point of his tongue. He didn't understand the powers of the people he was dealing with; but he didn't doubt that those powers went beyond the ability to appear and disappear, went beyond the capacity to change shape.
Went possibly to life, and certainly to death.
"Duration really doesn't matter?" he asked. "Time spent here doesn't mean time taken away from the job?"
"No problem," Hansen said. He gave Ritter a genuine grin. "Go have fun, partner."
The engineer ran his hand over the plane which displayed the dragonfly, careful to avoid touching the curved surface.
"This," he said to his guide, "is the kind of fun I've never had before."
He looked at Penny. "All right, lady," he said. "I'll go for a ride with you, if that's what you want."
Hansen smiled. "I want to talk to Penny alone for a moment, Ritter," he said. "If you could—"
"I'll tell Myron to bring the car by," Ritter said with a grin of his own, pride and anticipation. "Let's see if he gives me a hard time."
He stalked off, a powerful man wearing bright, loose clothing that bulged with equipment. Very sure of himself, of his ability and of his manhood.
Hansen's smile faded as he transferred his attention to Penny. Before the expression was wholly gone, it had become a leopard's snarl.
"He's my responsibility, Penny," Hansen said. "If you get—"
"I won't hurt him!" the woman blazed.
"We can't bring the dead to life, Penny," Hansen continued as inexorably as a train on rails. "If you do something in a fit of pique that can't be undone, then I'll come after you. Do you understand?"
"You'd bring down the Matrix if you did," Penny said. "All of us. All of Northworld."
"Do you doubt me, Penny?" Hansen said in what was barely a whisper.
"No," the woman said. For a moment there was nothing in her eyes but calm intelligence. "I don't doubt you at all, Hansen. There won't be a problem."
Penny took the man's hard right hand between both of hers, raised it, and kissed the tip of Hansen's trigger finger.
She turned to meet the swan car. Her driver cringed like a whipped puppy in front of the big engineer as they approached Hansen's house.