by Andre Norton
Jabis was not to be ruffled. “A point ten, my lord, does not give demonstrations. As you know, the Hive accrediting can not be forged. It is only because I have urgent business in Brok and must leave for there that I am selling her at all. Though I have had an offer from the Foostmam herself to retain this one for lease-outs—”
Tamisan, had she had anything to wager or someone with whom to wager it, would have set the winning of this bout with her uncle. Uncle? To Tamisan’s thinking she had no blood tie with this small insect of a man—with his wrinkled face, his never-still eyes, his thin hands with their half-crooked fingers always reminding one of claws outstretched to grab and grab and grab. Surely her mother must have been very unlike Uncle Jabis, or else how could her father ever have seen aught worth bedding—not for just one night but for half a year—in her?
Not for the first time her thoughts were on the riddle of her parents. Her mother had not been a dreamer—though she had had a sister who had regrettably—for the sake of the family fortune—died in the Hive during adolescent stimulation as an E dreamer. Her father had been from off-world—an alien, though humanoid enough to crossbreed. And he had disappeared again off-world when his desire for star roving had become too strong to master. Had it not been that she had early shown dreamer talent, Uncle Jabis and the rest of the greedy Yeska clan would never have taken any thought of her after her mother had died of the blue plague.
She was crossbred and had intelligence enough to guess early that this had given her the difference between her powers and those of others in the Hive. The ability to dream was an inborn talent. For those of low power, it was an indwelling withdrawal from the world. And those dreamers were largely useless. But the ones who could project dreams to include others—through linkage—brought high prices, according to the strength and stability of their creations. E dreamers who created erotic and lascivious other-worlds once rated more highly than action dreamers. But of late years, the swing had been in the opposite direction, though how long that might hold no one could guess. And those lucky enough to have an A dreamer to sell were pushing their wares speedily lest the market decline.
Tamisan’s hidden talent was that she herself was never as completely lost in the dream world as those she conveyed to it. Also—and this she had discovered very recently and hugged that discovery to her—she could in a measure control the linkage so she was never a powerless prisoner forced to dream at another’s desire.
She considered now what she knew concerning this Lord Starrex. That Jabis would sell her to the owner of one of the sky towers had been clear from the first. And naturally he would select what he thought would be the best bargain. But, though rumors wafted through the Hive, Tamisan believed that much of their news of the outer world was inaccurate and garbled. Dreamers were roofed and walled from any real meeting with everyday life, their talents feverishly fed and fostered by long sessions with tri-dee projectors and information tapes.
Starrex, unlike most of his class, had been a doer. He had broken the pattern of caste by going off-world on lengthy trips. It was only after some mysterious accident had crippled him that he became a recluse; supposedly hiding a maimed body. And he did not seem like those others who had come to the Hive seeking wares. Of course, it had been the Lord Kas who had summoned them here.
Stretched out on the easirest with that cover of fabulous silk across most of his body, he was hard to judge. But, she thought, standing he would top Jabis, and he seemed to be well muscled, more like his guardsman than his cousin.
He had a face unusual in its planes, broad across the forehead and cheek bones, then slimming to a strong chin which narrowed to give his head a vaguely wedge-shaped line. He was dark-skinned, almost as dark as a space crewman. His hair was black, cut very short so that it was a tight velvety cap, in constrast to the longer strands of his cousin.
His tunic—lutrax of a coppery-rust shade—was of rich material but less ornamented than that of the younger man. Its sleeves were wide and loose, and now and then he ran his hands up his arms, pushing the fabric away from his skin. He wore only a single jewel, a koros stone set in an earring as a drop which dangled forward against his jaw line.
Tamisan did not consider him handsome. But there was something arresting about him. Perhaps it was his air of arrogant assurance, as if in all his life he had never had his wishes crossed. He had not met Jabis before; and perhaps now even Lord Starrex would have something to learn.
Twist and turn, indignant and persuasive, using every trick in a very considerable training for dealing and under-dealing, Jabis bargained. He appealed to gods and demons to witness his disinterested desire to please, his despair at being misunderstood. It was quite a notable act, and Tamisan stored up some of the choicer bits in her mental reservoir for the making of dreams. It was far more stimulating to watch then a tri-dee, and she wondered why this living drama material was not made available to the Hive. Unless, of course, the Foostmam and her assistants feared it, along with any shred of reality which might awaken the dreamers from their conditioned absorption in their own creations.
For an instant or two she wondered if the Lord Starrex was not enjoying it too. There was a kind of weariness in his face which suggested boredom, though that was the norm for anyone wanting a personal dreamer. Then suddenly as if he were tired of it all, he interrupted one of Jabis’ more impassioned pleas for celestial understanding of his need for receiving a just price with a single sentence.
“I tire, fellow. Take your price and go.” He closed his eyes in dismissal.
2
IT was the guard who drew a credit plaque from his belt, swung a long arm over the back of the easirest for Lord Starrex to plant a thumb on its surface to certify payment, and then tossed it to Jabis. It fell to the floor so the small man had to scrabble for it with his finger claws, and Tamisan saw the look in his darting eyes. Jabis had little liking for Lord Starrex—which did not mean, of course, that he disdained the credit plaque he had to stoop to catch up.
He did not give a glance to Tamisan as he bowed himself out. And she was left standing as if she were an android or a machine. It was the Lord Kas who stepped forward, touched her lightly on the arm as if he thought she needed guidance.
“Come,” he said, and his fingers about her wrist drew her after him. The Lord Starrex took no notice of his new possession.
“What is your name?” Lord Kas spoke slowly, emphasizing each word as if he needed to do so to pierce some veil between them. Tamisan guessed that he had had contact with a lower-rated dreamer, one who was always bemused in the real world. Caution suggested that she allow him to believe she was in a similar daze. So she raised her head slowly, and looked at him, trying to give the appearance of one finding it difficult to focus.
“Tamisan,” she answered after a lengthy pause. “I be Tamisan.”
“Tamisan—that is a pretty name,” he said as one would address a dull-minded child. “I am Lord Kas. I am your friend.”
But Tamisan, sensitive to shades of voice, thought she had done well in playing bemused. Whatever Kas might be, he was not her friend, at least not unless it served his purpose.
“These rooms are yours.” He had escorted her down a hall to a far door where he passed his hand over the surface in a pattern to break some light-lock. Then his grip on her wrist brought her into a high-ceilinged room. There were no windows to break its curve of wall. The place was oval in shape. The center fell in a series of wide, shallow steps to a pool where a small fountain raised a perfumed mist to patter back into a bone-white basin. And on the steps were a number of cushions and soft lie-ons, all of many delicate shades of blue and green. While the oval walls were covered with a shimmer of rippling zidex webbing—pale gray covered with whirls and lines of palest green.
A great deal of care had gone into the making and furnishing of that room. Perhaps she was only the latest in a series of dreamers, for this was truly the rest place—raised to a point of luxury unknown even in the Hive—
for a dreamer.
A strip of the web tapestry along the wall was raised, and a personal-care android entered. The head was only an oval ball with faceted eye-plates and hearing sensors to break its surface, its unclothed, humanoid form ivory white.
“This is Porpae,” Kas told her. “She will watch over you.”
My guard, Tamisan thought. That the care the android would give her would be unceasing and of the best, she did not doubt, any more than that the ivory being would stand between her and any hope of freedom.
“If you have any wish, tell it to Porpae.” Kas dropped his hold on her arm, turned to the door. “When the Lord Starrex wishes to dream he will send for you.”
“I am at his command,” she mumbled the proper response.
She watched Kas leave and then looked to Porpae. Tamisan had good cause to believe that the android was programmed to record her every move. But would anyone here believe that a dreamer had any desire to be free? A dreamer wished only to dream; it was her life, her entire life. And to leave a place which did all to foster such a life—that would be akin to self-killing, something a certified dreamer could not think of.
“I hunger,” she told the android. “I would eat.”
“Food comes.” Porpae went to the wall and swept aside the web once more to display a series of buttons she pressed in a complicated manner.
When the food arrived in a closed tray with the viands each in its own hot or cold compartment, Tamisan ate. She recognized the usual dishes of a dreamer’s diet, but better cooked and more tastily served than in the Hive. She ate; she made use of the bathing place Porpae guided her to behind another wall web, and she slept easily and without stirring on the cushions beside the pool where the faint play of the water lulled her gently.
Time had very little meaning in the oval room. She ate, slept, bathed and looked upon the tri-dees she asked Porpae to supply. Had she been as the others from the Hive, this existence would have been ideal. But instead, when there was no call to display her art, she grew restless. She was prisoner here, and none of the other inhabitants of the sky tower seemed aware of her.
There was one thing she could do, Tamisan decided upon her second waking. A dreamer was allowed—no, required—to study the personality of the master she must serve, if she were a private dreamer and not a leasee of the Hive. She had a right now to ask for tapes concerning Starrex. In fact, it might be considered odd if she did not, and accordingly she called for those. Thus she learned something of her master and his household.
Kas had had his personal fortune wiped out by some catastrophe when he was a child. He had been in a manner adopted by Starrex’s father, the head of their clan, and since Starrex’s injuries Kas had acted in some fashion as his deputy. The guard was Ulfilas, an off-world mercenary Starrex had brought back from one of his star voyages.
But Starrex, save for a handful of bare facts, remained more or less of an enigma. That he had any human responses to others Tamisan began to doubt. He had gone seeking change off-world, but what he might have found there had not cured his eternal weariness of life. And his personal recordings were meager. She now believed that, to him, any one of his household was only a tool to be used or swept from his path and ignored. He was unmarried and such feminine companionship as he had languidly attached to his household—and that more by the effort of the woman involved than through any direct action on his part—did not last long. In fact, he was so encased in a shell of indifference that Tamisan wondered if there was any longer a real man within that outer covering.
She began to speculate as to why he had allowed Kas to bring her as an addition to his belongings. To make the best use of a dreamer, the owner must be ready to partake, and what she read in these tapes suggested that Starrex’s indifference would raise a barrier to any real dreaming.
But the more Tamisan learned in this negative fashion, the more it seemed a challenge. She lay beside the pool in deep thought—though that thought strayed even more than she herself guessed from the rigid mental exercises used by a point ten dreamer. To deliver a dream which would captivate Starrex was indeed a challenge. He wanted action, but her training, acute as it had been, was not enough to entice him. Therefore—her action must be able to take a novel turn.
This was an age of oversophistication—when star travel was a fact, when outer action existed in reality. And by these tapes, though they were not detailed as to what Starrex had done off-world, the lord had experienced much—the reality of his time.
So—he must be served the unknown. She had read nothing in the tapes to suggest that Starrex had sadistic or perverted tendencies. And she knew if he were to be reached in such a fashion, she was not the one to do it. Also Kas would have stated such a requirement at the Hive.
There were many rolls of history on which one could draw—but those had also been mined and remined. The future—that again had been overused, frayed. Tamisan’s dark brows drew together above her closed eyes. Trite—everything she thought of was trite! Why did she care anyway? She did not even know why it had become so strong a drive to build a dream that, when she was called upon to deliver it, would shake Starrex out of his shell—to prove to him that she was worth her rating. Maybe it was partly because he had made no move to send for her and try to prove her powers, his indifference suggesting that he thought she had nothing to offer.
Tapes—she had the right to call upon the full library of the Hive, and it was the most complete in the star lanes. Why, ships were sent out for no other reason than to bring back new knowledge to feed the imaginations of the dreamers!
History. Her mind kept returning to the past, though it was too threadbare for her purposes. History—what was history? A series of events—actions by individuals, or nations. Actions had results. Tamisan sat up among her cushions. Results of action! Sometimes there were far-reaching results from a single action—the death of a ruler, the outcome of one battle, the landing of a star ship—or its failure to land.
So—
Her flicker of idea became solid. History could have had many roads to travel beside the one already known. Now—could she make use of that?
Why, it had innumerable possibilities! Tamisan’s hands clenched the robe lying across her knees. Study—she would have to study! And if Starrex only gave her more time . . . She no longer resented his indifference now. She would need every minute it was prolonged.
“Porpae!”
The android materialized from behind the web.
“I must have certain tapes from the Hive.” Tamisan hesitated. In spite of the spur of impatience, she must build smoothly and surely. “A message to the Foostmam: send to Tamisan n’ Starrex the rolls of the history of Ty-Kry for the past five hundred years.”
The history of a single city and that of the one which based this sky tower! Begin small so she could test and retest her idea. Today a single city, tomorrow a world, and then—who knew—perhaps a solar system! She reined in her excitement. There was much to do. She needed a note recorder—and time. But by the Four Breasts of Vlasta—if she could do it!
It would seem she would have time, though always at the back of Tamisan’s mind was the small spark of fear that at any moment the summons to Starrex might come. But the tapes arrived from the Hive and the recorder, so that she swung from one to the other, taking notes from what she learned. Then after the tapes had been returned, she studied those notes feverishly. Now her idea meant more to her than just a device to amuse a difficult master; it absorbed her utterly, as if she were a low-grade dreamer caught in one of her own creations.
When Tamisan realized the danger of this, she broke with her studies and turned back to the household tapes to learn again what she could of Starrex.
But she was again running through her notes when at last the summons came. How long she had been in Starrex’s tower she did not know, for days and nights in the oval room were all alike. Only Porpae’s watchfulness had kept her to a routine of eating and rest.
It was t
he Lord Kas who came for her, and she had just time to remember her role of bemused dreamer as he entered.
“You are well and happy?” He used the conventional greeting.
“I enjoy the good life.”
“It is the Lord Starrex’s wish that he enter a dream.” Kas reached for her hand, and she allowed his touch. “The Lord Starrex demands much. Offer him your best, dreamer.” He might have been warning her.
“A dreamer dreams,” she answered him vaguely. “What is dreamed can be shared.”
“True. But the Lord Starrex is hard to please. Do your best for him, dreamer.”
She did not answer, and he drew her on, out of the room to a gray shaft and down that to a lower level. The room into which they finally went had the apparatus very familiar to her—a couch for the dreamer, the second for the sharer with the linkage machine between. But here was a third couch. Tamisan looked at it in surprise.
“Two dream, not three?”
Kas shook his head. “It is the Lord Starrex’s will that another shares also. The linkage is of a new model, very powerful. It has been well tested.”
Who would be that third? Ulfilas? Was it that Lord Starrex thought he must take his personal guard into a dream with him?
The door swung open again, and Lord Starrex entered. He walked stiffly, one leg swinging wide as if he could not bend the knee nor control the muscles, and he leaned heavily on an android. As the servant lowered him onto the couch, he did not look to Tamisan but nodded curtly to Kas.
“Take you place also,” he ordered.
Did Starrex fear the dream state and want his cousin as a check because Kas had plainly dreamed before?
Then Starrex turned to her as he reached for the dream cap, copying the motion by which she settled her own circlet on her head.
“Let us see what you can do.” There was a shadow of hosility in his voice, a challenge to produce something which he did not believe she could do.
