by C. L. Moore
Spraying out exquisitely through the hollow of the sphere were the tree's branches, feathery with leaves of pastel confetti. And floating here and there through the green twilight of the bubble, or nested among the limbs, or drifting idly about through the flowers and the leaves of the vast tree, were crystal platforms upon which diners sat embowered in little arbors of confetti leaves like the tree's.
A soft breeze blew delicately through the twilight, stirring the leaves, and the softest possible music swelled and sank upon the air.
"There is also," the disembodied voice went on as the vision faded, "dancing upon the royal lake of the Dullai satellite—" And in the panel Juille saw couples gliding to stronger music across what appeared to be the mirror-smooth waters of a lake that reflected a moving array of stars. She recognized the lake and the lighted tiers of a city around it, which she had visited on a political mission once several years ago, on a world far away across the Galaxy. The panel blurred again.
"We have also," continued the sugary voice, "several interesting variations of motion available for public use just now. A new swimming medium—" Pause. "An adaptation of musical riding—" Pause. "A concert in color and motion which is highly recommended as—"
"Never mind just now," Juille interrupted. "Send me your best dresser, and let me have some of the Dullai mountain music. I'll try your flower scents, too—something delicate. Keep it just subsensual. I don't want to be conscious of the separate odors."
Helia gave her mistress a piercing look as the panel went blank. Juille laughed.
"I did it well, didn't I? For one who never visited the place before, anyhow. I've been reading everything I could find about it for a month. There—nice music, isn't it?"
The distinctive plaintive vibration of Dullai music sheets began to shiver softly through the room. On a world far away in space, from a period three generations ago, the sad, wailing echoes rang. No living musicians could play the flexible metal sheets now, but upon Cyrille all things were available, at a price.
"The rooms seem to be ready, highness," Helia remarked dryly.
-
Juille turned. A broad doorway had opened in the wall, and beyond it was a long, low room through which sunlight poured softly. The floor gave underfoot, firm and resilient. Furniture held out upholstered arms in invitation to its series of upholstered laps. Beyond a row of circular windows which filled one wall an ocean of incredible greenness broke in foam upon colored rocks.
The bedroom was a limbo of dim, mysterious blue twilight beyond a circular doorway veiled in what looked like floating gauze. When Juille stepped through she found it was a sort of captive fog instead, offering no resistance to the touch.
The nameless designers of Cyrille had outdone themselves upon the bedroom. For one thing, it appeared to have no floor. A film of very faintly dim-blue sparkles overlying a black void seemed to be all that upheld the tread. A bed like a cloud confined in ebony palings floated apparently clear of the nonexistent floor. Overhead in a night sky other clouds moved slowly and soporifically over the faces of dim stars. A few exquisitely soft and firm chairs and a chaise longue or two had a curious tendency to drift slowly about the room unless captured and sat upon.
There was a fog-veiled alcove that glittered with mirrors, and beyond it a bathroom through which a fountain of perfumed water played musically and continuously.
Helia's astringent expression was eloquent of distaste as she followed her mistress through the rooms. The pet llar, clinging to her shoulder, turned wide eyes about the apartment and murmured now and then in meaningless whispered syllables.
"Just what are your plans, highness?" Helia demanded when they had finished the tour. Juille glanced at her crossly.
"Very simple. I'm going to spend a few days enjoying myself. Is there anything wrong with that? I'll have some new clothes and visit the public rooms and see what it's like to be an ordinary woman meeting ordinary people."
"If you were an ordinary woman, there might still be something very wrong with it, highness. But you aren't. You have enemies—"
"No one knows I'm here. And don't look so grim. I didn't come to experiment with exotic drugs! Besides, I can take care of myself. And it's none of your business, anyhow."
"Everything you do is my business, highness," Helia said gruffly. "I have no others."
-
Elsewhere in Cyrille a young man in a startling cloak sat at breakfast beside broad windows that opened upon a fairyland of falling snow. The lushed, whispering rush of it sounded through opened casements, and now and then a breath of chilly wind blew like a stimulant through the warm room. The young man was rubbing the curls of the short, yellow beard that just clouded the outlines of his jaw, and grinning rather maliciously at his companion.
"I work too hard," he said. "It may be Juille of Ericon, and again, it may not. All the same, I'm going to have my vacation."
"It's time to stop playing, Egide," said the man across the table. He had a tremendous voice, so deep and strong that it boomed through the hush of the falling snow and the glasses vibrated on the table to its pitch. It was a voice that seemed always held in check; if he were to let it out to full volume the walls might come down, shaken to ruins by those deep vibrations.
The man matched his voice. He wore plain mail forged to turn a fire-sword's flame, and his hair and his short beard, his brows and the angry eyes beneath were all a ruddy bright color on the very verge of red. Red hair grew like a heat haze over the rolling interlace of muscles along his heavy forearms folded upon the table, and like a heat haze vitality seemed to radiate from his bull bulk and blaze from his scarred, belligerent face.
"I didn't ... acquire ... you to be my conscience, Jair," the young man said coldly. He hesitated a little over the verb. Then, "Oh, well—maybe I did." He pushed back his chair and stood up, the outrageous cloak swirling about him. "I don't really like this job."
"You don't?" The big red man sounded puzzled. Egide gave him an odd glance.
"Stop worrying about it. I'll go. What will she be like? Hatchet face, nose like a sword—Will I have to kiss her feet?"
Jair said seriously, "No, she's incognito." The glasses rang again to the depth in his voice.
Egide paused before the mirror, admiring the sweep of cloak from his fine breadth of shoulder. Alone he would have seemed a big man himself; beside Jair he looked like a stripling. But no one, seeing them together here, could fail to sense a coldness and a curious lack of assurance behind all Jair's dominant, deep-voiced masculinity. He watched Egide with expressionless eyes.
The younger man hunched his shoulders together. "Br-r-r! What a man will go through to change the fate of the Galaxy. Well, if I live through it I'll be back. Wait for me."
"Will you kill her?"
"If I can."
"It must be done. Would you rather I did, later?"
Egide gave him a dispassionate glance. For a moment he said nothing. Then—
"No ... no, she doesn't deserve that. We'll see what she's like. Unless it's very bad, I'll spare her that and kill her myself—gently."
He turned to the door, his amazing cloak swinging wide behind him. Jair sat perfectly motionless, watching him go.
-
Helia said, "This will be the dresser." A sustained musical note from the entry preceded the amplified sweetness of the familiar inhuman voice, and Juille turned to the door with considerable interest to see what came next.
The best dress designer upon Cyrille seemed to be a soft-voiced, willowy woman with the pink skin and narrow, bright eyes of a race that occupied three planets circling a sun far across the outskirts of the Galaxy. She exuded impersonal deftness. One felt that she saw no faces here, was aware of no personalities. She came into the room with smooth, silent aloofness, her eyes lowered.
But she was not servile. In her own way the woman was a great artist, and commanded her due of respect.
The composition of the new gown took place before the mirrored alcove
that opened from the bedroom. Helia, her jaw set like a rock, stripped off the smart military uniform which her mistress was wearing, the spurred boots, the weapons, the shining helmet. From beneath it a shower of dark-gold hair descended. Juille stood impassive under the measuring eyes of the newcomer, her hair clouding upon her shoulders.
Now she was no longer the sexless princeling of Lyonese. The steely delicacy was about her still, and the arrogance. But the long, fine limbs and the disciplined curves of her body had a look of waxen lifelessness as she stood waiting between the new personality and the old. She was aware of a certain embarrassed resentment, suddenly, at the step she was about to take. It was humiliating to admit by that very step that the despised femininity she had repudiated all her life should be important enough to capture now.
The quality of impassivity seemed to puzzle the artist, who stood looking at her thoughtfully.
"Is there any definite effect to be achieved?" she asked after a moment, speaking in the faintly awkward third person through which all employees upon Cyrille address all patrons.
Juille swallowed a desire to answer angrily that there was not. Her state of mind confused even herself. This was her first excursion into incognito, her first conscious attempt to be—not feminine. She scorned that term. She had embraced the cult of the Amazon too wholeheartedly to admit even to herself just what she wanted or hoped from this experience. She could not answer the dresser's questions. She turned a smoothly muscular shoulder to the woman and said with resentfulness she tried to conceal even from herself:
"Nothing ... nothing. Use your own ingenuity."
The dresser mentally shot a keen glance upward. She was far too well-trained actually to look a patron in the face, but she had seen the uniform this one had discarded, she saw the hard, smooth symmetry of her body and from it understood enough of the unknown's background to guess what she wanted and would not request. She would not have worked her way up a long and difficult career from an outlying planet to the position of head designer on Cyrille if she had lacked extremely sensitive perception. She narrowed her already narrow eyes and pursed speculative lips. This patron would need careful handling to persuade her to accept what she really wanted.
"A thought came to me yesterday," she murmured in her soft, drawling voice—she cultivated the slurred accent of her native land—"while I watched the dancers on the Dullai Lake. A dark gown, full of shadows and stars. I need a perfect body to compose it on, for even the elastic paint of undergarments might spoil my effect." This was not strictly true, but it served the purpose. Juille could accept the gown now not as romance personified, but as a tribute to her own fine body.
"With permission, I shall compose that gown," the soft voice drawled, and Juille nodded coldly.
The dresser laid both hands on a section of wall near the alcove and slid back a long panel to disclose her working apparatus. Juille stared in frank enchantment and even Helia's feminine instincts, smothered behind a military lifetime, made her eyes gleam as she looked. The dresser's equipment had evidently been moved into place behind the sliding panel just before her entrance, for the tall rack at one end of the opening still presented what must have been the color-selection of the last patron. Through a series of level slits the ends of almost countless fabrics in every conceivable shade of pink showed untidily. Shelves and drawers spilled more untidiness. Obviously this artist was great enough to indulge her whims even at the expense of neatness.
She pressed a button now and the pink rainbow slid sidewise and vanished. Into its place snapped a panel exuding ends of blackness in level parallels—satin that gleamed like dark water, the black smoke of gauzes, velvet so soft it looked charred, like black ash.
The dresser moved so swiftly and deftly that her work looked like child's play, or magic. She chose an end of dull silk and reeled out yard after billowing yard through the slot, slashed it off recklessly with a razor-sharp blade, and like a sculptor modeling in clay, molded the soft, thick stuff directly upon Juille's body, fitting it with quick, nervous snips of her scissors and sealing the edges into one another. In less than a minute Juille was sheathed from shoulder to ankle in a gown that fitted perfectly and elastically as her skin, outlining every curve of her body and falling in soft, rich folds about her feet.
The dresser kicked away the fragments of discarded silk and was pulling out now such clouds and billows of pure shadow as seemed to engulf her in fog. Juille almost gasped as the cloud descended upon herself. It was something too sheer for cloth, certainly not a woven fabric. The dresser's deft hands touched lightly here and there, sealing the folds of cloud in place. In a moment or two she stepped back and gestured toward the mirror.
Juille turned. This tall unknown was certainly not herself. The hard, impersonal, perfect body had suddenly taken on soft, velvety curves beneath the thick soft fabric. All about her, floating out when she moved, the shadowy billows of dimness smoked away in drapery so adroitly composed that it seemed an arrogance in itself.
"And now, one thing more," smiled the dresser, pulling open an untidy drawer. "This—" She brought out a double handful of sequins like flashing silver dust and strewed them lavishly in the folds of floating gauze. "Turn," she said, and Juille was enchanted to see the tiny star points cling magnetically to the cloth except for a thin, fine film of them that floated out behind her and twinkled away to nothing in midair whenever she moved.
Juille turned back to the mirror. For a moment more this was a stranger whose face looked back at her out of shining violet eyes, a face with the strength and delicacy of something finely made of steel. It was arrogant, intolerant, handsome as before, but the arrogance seemed to spring now from the knowledge of beauty.
And then she knew herself in the mirror. Only the gown was strange, and her familiar features looked incongruous above it. For the first time in her life Juille felt supremely unsure of herself. Not even the knowledge that the very stars in the Galaxy were subject to her whim could help that feeling now. She drew a long breath and faced herself in the glass resolutely.
-
The tiny elevator's door slid back and Juille stepped out alone upon a curve of the crystal stairs which wound upward around that enormous tree trunk in the central room. For a moment she stood still, clutching at the old arrogance to sustain her here in this green spring twilight through which perfume and music and soft breezes blew in twisting currents. In that moment all her unsureness came back with a rush—she had no business here in these despised feminine garments; she belonged in helmet and uniform. If she walked, she would stride as if in boots and rip these delicate skirts. Everyone would look up presently and recognize her standing here, the warrior leader of the Lyonese masquerading like a fool.
But no one seemed to be looking at all, and that in itself was a humiliation. Perhaps it was true that she was not really pretty. That she did not belong in soft silken gowns. That no man would ever look at her except as a warrior and an heiress.
Juille squared her shoulders under the cloud of mist and turned toward her waiter, who had snapped the switch of a cylinder fastened to the back of his wrist and focused the invisible beam of it upon an empty floating platform across the great hollow. It drifted toward them slowly, circling on repellor rays around intervening objects. Then it was brushing through the leaves of a mighty bough above them, and Juille took the waiter's arm and stepped out over green twilit space into the tiny leafy arbor of the platform. She had expected it to tilt a little underfoot, but it held as steady as if based upon a rock.
She sank into the elastic firmness of a crystal chair, leaned both elbows upon the crystal table and moodily ordered a strong and treacherous drink. It came almost instantly, sealed in an apricot-tinted sphere of glass on a slender pedestal, a glass drinking tube rising in a curve from the upper surface. The whole sphere was lightly silvered with frost.
"Shove me off," she told the waiter, and sipped the first heady draft of her drink in mild defiance as the arbored platform went d
rifting off among the leaves. A vagrant current caught it there and carried her slowly along in a wide circle in and out of the branches, past other platforms where couples sat with heads close together with exotic drinks. Juille felt very lonely and very self-conscious.
-
On the curving stairs a young man in a startling cloak looked after her thoughtfully.
There were times, he told himself, when even the most trustworthy of secret informants made mistakes. He thought this must be one of the times. He had been waiting here for some while, watching the crystal stairs patiently. But now—the Amazonian princess of Ericon was a familiar figure to him from her news-screen appearances, and it was impossible to identify that striding military creature with this woman swathed in shadows, her garments breathing out stardust that drifted and twinkled and faded behind her like wafts of faint perfume as she moved.
The young man knew very well what magic the dress designers of Cyrille could work, but he could not believe their magic wholly responsible for this. He grinned a little and lifted his shoulders imperceptibly under the remarkable cloak. It would be amusing to find out.
He kept an eye upon the drifting platform and mounted the stairway slowly, keeping level with it.
-
Juille watched her drink go down in the frosted sphere and was somewhat ironically aware that her spirits were rising to match it. The rigid self-consciousness of her first few minutes had relaxed; the drink made her mind at once cloudy and sparkling, a little like the shadowy draperies she wore. This was a delicious sensation, floating free upon drifts of perfumed breeze while music breathed and ebbed around her in the green twilight.
She watched the other patrons drifting by, half-seen among the confettilike leaves of their bowers. Many of the faces she thought she recognized. Cyrille was not a world for the rank and file of the Galaxy to enjoy. One had to present stiff credentials to make reservations here, and by no means all of the patrons came incognito. It was a place to enjoy forbidden pleasures secretly, of course, but equally a place to see and be seen in. The wealthy and the noble of all the Galaxy's worlds took considerable pride in showing off their elaborate costumes and the beauty of their companions here, for the very fact of their presence was as good as a published statement of wealth and ancestry.
