"Did you think I'd stolen him, Hansen?" Penny called in a tone of harsh challenge as Ritter brought the aircar to a halt in front of Hansen's dwelling.
Hansen noted that the engineer flared the ducted fans fore and aft so that they wouldn't spray grit over Hansen's legs as the car settled. Ritter was a good man; an amazingly good man.
But then, Nils Hansen always needed the best when there was a job he couldn't do.
"Master Ritter isn't a chattel you could steal, Penny," Hansen said with a cool smile; but he was glad to see Ritter returning, glad not to have to check on the situation . . . gladder yet not to have checked and learned something that he didn't want to know, and then to act because he said he would act.
Hansen didn't want to die. Not really. Not most of the time.
Ritter shut off the engines and spread his blade pitch to maximum so that air would brake the drive fans to a halt in the least amount of time. Though the car rested solidly on the ground, it rocked when the engineer lifted his heavy body out of it.
He grinned at Hansen and said, "Tsk. Didn't think I'd stay away from a puzzle like this one just to screw, did you?"
Ritter raised his arms over his head, interlaced his fingers with the backs of his hands downward, and stretched up onto his tiptoes, still smiling. His clothing looked the same as that in which he had left with Penny, but Hansen's practiced eye noted that these garments were perfectly clean and of a softer fabric than the originals—though whatever synthetic Penny chose would certainly wear like iron despite its comfort.
Otherwise the engineer—otherwise Ritter—wouldn't have accepted the replacements.
Hansen smiled again, this time with more humor than before. "You're ready for work, then?" he asked.
"I'm always ready for work," Ritter replied, and he quite clearly meant it. They walked through the simple doorway into the observation level of the house.
Penny followed them. Her face was twisted into an expression too dismal to be described as a pout.
Penny's garb was normal enough for her: a macrame bra, briefs cut to expose rather than conceal, and net stockings. Her body, however, was unusual.
Penny now wore the form of a nineteen-year-old with vaguely blond hair, slightly overweight in a puppyish sort of way. She was neither stunningly beautiful nor strikingly grotesque. A mildly attractive young woman, but not the appearance someone would pick from an infinite choice of features and bodies.
Unless it was the way they had looked before they received the power to choose; and if so, that was a fact Penny had been working to conceal for as long as Hansen knew her.
"Unusual vehicle there," Hansen said. He gestured with his thumb, but he did not look back toward the aircar.
Ritter blinked. "You're joking!" he said. "It's dead standard. Besides, nothing could be unusual after that whatever-you-call-it pulled by all those birds."
"Swans," said Penny quietly.
"You'd be surprised what people will come up with when any whim works as well as the next," Hansen said. "It does all work, you know. When all times are the same time; and when any idea has power if a—"
Hansen swallowed but managed not to lose his calm expression. "If a god chooses to think it."
Penny stared morosely out a window. For the moment the view was only waving grass the aircar had overflown on its way here.
"Penny just . . . ," Ritter said, rubbing his chin and scowling at the memory. "She said, 'All right,' and there it was, a car like the ones we build for Duke Greville's scouts on campaign. I don't understand."
"It's a matter of arranging the correct point on the correct event wave to intersect with present reality," Hansen said.
Ritter turned in sudden fury—looked for a solid object within his reach—saw nothing. He slammed his right fist into his left palm with a tremendous smack.
"That's just words!" he shouted. "It means nothing!"
Penny flinched at the engineer's anger. She turned around.
"How would you," Hansen said coolly, "describe to a blind man the process of sorting red and yellow objects without touching them, Master Ritter?"
The engineer grimaced at his display of temper. Frustration carved his face into harsh angles like those of a tumbled wall. "Sorry," he muttered.
"Sorting event waves through the Matrix works in much of Northworld," Hansen continued, "for some people."
His voice had less of an edge than a moment before. "It didn't work where I came from, not that I knew about, anyway. And it doesn't work for anydamnbody on the plane you come from. But that doesn't mean it isn't real."
"I remember when we put them on Plane Five," Penny said without emotion. "The first fleet the Consensus sent looking for us after we'd disappeared."
Ritter looked at the woman in fresh horror. "You remember the colonization?" he said. "That was—tens of thousands of years ago!"
Hansen put a hand on the engineer's shoulder and kept exerting pressure until the big man noticed and turned to face him.
"Time isn't the same here," Hansen said gently, though part of his mind noted that if Penny wanted to convince her latest stud that she was some kind of ageless monster, she couldn't have picked a better way. "And anyway, you're thinking of duration again. Besides—"
He grinned honestly, infectiously. "—you 'n me have got a job to do."
Ritter laughed, loose again. Whatever else Penny might be, Ritter knew she was a woman; and a woman was nothing to worry about when there was a uniquely challenging task to accomplish.
He looked around the observation room with a slight frown. "Ah," he asked. "Do you have a—"
"Toilet?" completed Hansen. "You bet. Down there—" He pointed to a drop shaft with a coaming of molded plastic "—and just to the right of the door."
"Back in a minute," the engineer muttered as he stepped into the shaft.
Now that they were alone, Hansen nodded a cautious greeting to Penny. "I guess things worked out for the two of you," he said.
It disturbed Hansen to see the woman acting . . . different. Hansen's fellow gods, who had the power to do virtually anything, always seemed to do the same thing again and again.
It was easy for Penny to create an aircar in place of the swan-drawn vehicle she always used. It was amazing to see her do something because of a man's whim.
Penny hugged herself, squeezing her full breasts almost out of their slight restraint. "Well enough," she said.
She looked at Hansen with the disconcerting intelligence that sometimes glinted from her brown eyes. Out of place in a trollop who thought only of sex and her appearance. "How much danger is there going to be?" she asked.
"On this?" Hansen said in surprise. He waved at a section of window. The clear surface suddenly showed a thicket of magnolia bushes and tall, scale-trunked trees.
Krita's dragonfly and those of her two companions nestled into the vegetation. Their spindly legs compensated automatically for the slope, keeping the saddles level.
Hansen's eyes went flat as he calculated. "Not a lot of risk," he said. "None at all, if things go as they should."
"You're armed," said Penny, nodding toward the cutaway holster high on Hansen's right hip.
Not stupid at all.
"Well, you know what they say," Hansen replied with a chuckle. "You carry a pistol when you don't expect trouble. When you know the shit's going to hit the fan, then you lug something serious along."
Except that pistols were Nils Hansen's weapon of choice, because he pointed handguns as though they were his own fingers. Not that he really expected trouble.
"And those damned things—" Penny turned and spat in the direction of the dragonflies "—are there with the Lomeri."
The spittle vanished in a puff of light at the surface of what was still a window, not a physical opening onto another plane of the Matrix.
"I can make you as many as you—" Penny said.
She spread her pudgy right hand. Five dragonflies, indistinguishable from those sitting in the magnolia scrub, appeared in the gazebo.
Hansen brushed them back into nonexistence with a flick of his own hand. "North and I have an agreement, Penny," he said mildly. "We're going to do a quick in-and-out, Ritter and me. We'll be gone before the Lomeri know we were there. No sweat."
"Easy for you!" the woman blazed. "He isn't a, isn't a killer like you, Hansen."
"Ritter isn't exactly a babe in arms, you know," Hansen said with the care he would have displayed if his dog began yelping and snapping at the air. "Besides, nobody's going to be doing any fighting. We're just going to pick up a piece of hardware."
The engineer rose through the shaft, hitching up his equipment belt and checking the flap of pistol holster dangling from it. He waved cheerfully toward Penny and Hansen.
Penny walked out of the observation room. She leaned against the aircar with her back to both men.
Hansen heard her mutter, "Bastard!"
Hansen supposed Penny meant the epithet for him; but he wasn't quite sure.