High Couch of Silistra

by Janet Morris

  “Why do Silistran women commit themselves into public usage, and then, when pregnant, become willingly the property of the men who impregnate them, giving to those men title to all they have gained in their years in the Wells?”

  “Why not?” I retorted. “You will never understand Silistra if you take the facets of the culture out of context. That is M’lennin’s mistake. Chaldra. All is chaldra. There is great chaldra attached to the Wells.”

  “I had a tape on chaldra,” he interrupted. “It did not explain the Wells.”

  I sighed. The sun was getting higher, and I had to find M’lennin.

  “I shall try to show you, then. A girl, when she reaches puberty, takes a number of examinations. Her scores on these, she submits to the Wells. From this information on her physical, psychical, and mental potential, the Wells either accept or reject the girl. Astria has first choice, Arlet second, and so on. Astria will take a highly intelligent girl with a strong fore-reader index, if she is attractive; Arlet will take a high hormonal index, for they specialize in exotic sex. Each Well has a character. It is a great honor to be an Astrian girl, and wear the silver chain with white interwoven. Once a girl is accepted by a Well, the security of her family is assured. They are gifted by the Well and benefited in many ways. The girl’s earnings are invested by the Well, and we are very good with money. A woman goes out of Astria with a great fortune. She is also educated continually and thoroughly. She learns comparative cultures, the known languages of the galaxy, musics, dances, a large number of required subjects, and others, of her choice. She learns the ways of love. She becomes cultured and sophisticated. She has opportunities to mate with some of the most powerful and brilliant men in the known galaxy. Should a woman, given a choice between such a life and the lot of the farmgirl on the plains, choose to churn bondrex milk and slop parr? And meet perhaps a hundred men in her life? Should she risk bearing the unfulfilled chaldra of reproduction to her grave? The chances of an isolated Silistran woman conceiving are sixty to one.

  “As for the men,” I continued, “I believe our men are content. Only four percent of Astrian women conceive by off-worlders. A man need not have money to partake of the Well if he is Silistran. There are games once a set, and festivals once a pass, where the men may earn silver and gold well tokens. These games range from physical to psychical, and any man with a talent or skill may gain entrance to the Well in this manner. Men love the gamble as they love wealth. A man knows that should he bring child on a girl in the Well, he will acquire not only a sensual, beautiful woman, but the money to enjoy her at his leisure in luxurious surroundings. If he can impregnate two, then two women and two fortunes are his. The men control much on Silistra. Both the dependent and independent cities draw great revenue from the Well and the traffic they bring. The traders and the merchants and the slayers and the hunters, and the weavers, and more, prosper from the Wells. Thousand of years ago the Day-Keepers and the forereaders determined the social structure of Silistra, building upon the ruins of past mistakes. It has endured.”

  “You are angry,” he said, tracing my lips with his finger.

  “No,” said I, “but I have said this say many times.”

  “What if a woman falls in love with a man without him having impregnated her?” he asked thoughtfully.

  “There is the pressure of chaldra to consider,” I reminded him. “Perhaps she would stay in the Well until she conceived, and petition that the father’s right to her body be waived. If the Well accepted this, they would pay the father double the birth-price, and the woman would, once having repaid the Well, be free to leave and go to her lover. The Well would gift them and absorb the loss. I have never heard of a woman leaving the Well without conceiving. She goes to the Well to become pregnant. Why would she leave without fulfilling her purpose?”

  “You have not conceived,” said he, “but you have left the Well.”

  “Oh,” said I. “I have taken on the chaldra of the mother; to find my father. I seek him. I have no man whom I love. The skein of the time weave bears me to Arlet. My father was an off-worlder who did not want my mother, nor the birth-price, nor me. He spread his seed and disappeared. If a man does not want the woman, the Well buys her back, and the profit to the father is high. But he did not wish it. I was raised by the Well, for my mother died at my birth. Women who have been in the Well and have not conceived are given such children to raise when they can no longer take the couch. We care for our own.”

  “I, too, am half-bred,” said Dellin. The way he said it made me think the fact had caused him some pain. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the couch.

  “Anything I can do to help you discharge this chaldra, whatever I can, I will do. I will be, remember, powerful in Arlet. What race was your father’s?”

  “That is what I am here to find out,” said I. “Come with me if you wish, while M’lennin and I attempt to unravel the riddle.”

  He nodded and pulled me to him again. I begged off, and we showered and I dressed. In my short white sleeveless s’kim, which tied behind at back, waist, and hip, I walked him, naked, to his own room, where he pulled on black shorts and sandals, and we went searching for food and M’lennin.

  III. The Context Within Which the Act Is Viewed

  We found M’lennin in his main room, a place of clicking, whirring machines, each of which blinked a thousand varicolored eyes and spun its wheels and flickered its indicators back and forth across the lighted maws, of its meters, singing to itself and its fellows in machine song. The door was open, the room dim-lit. We never made it to the kitchen.

  M’lennin waved us within, and we came up behind him where he sat before a bank of controls. Somehow he had devised to project the contents of the cube upon the right-hand screen that covered the wall before us. My mother was just fading into gray.

  We watched my father take my mother, double life-size. Dellin threw his leg up on the console and pulled me against him.

  “He’s got the moves, eh, Dellin?” said M’len.

  “Quiet, I am learning,” retorted Dellin.

  I said nothing. My night with the Liaison Second faded into perspective as I watched. I had not, after all, conceived with Dellin. I would have felt the egg enter my tube. With such a man as the one on the screen before me, I would surely conceive. I pulled a bit away from Dellin’s encircling arm.

  “One need not be a deep-reader to know what you’re thinking,” said he in my ear.

  M’len pushed a button, and the scene froze. He touched another and another, and the left-hand portion of the screen lit up with columns of words and percentiles and numbers decimal.

  “There you see it, Estri,” said the Liaison First.

  “No, I do not,” I answered. “Explain it to me.”

  He went through the list item by item. It was very complicated.

  “So you see,” he summed up, “what we have here is a 1.0000 to infinity bipedal standard air-breather. The archetypal man. The bipedal standard is a composite of all the divergent characteristics of the four-hundred-odd races of the hundred and forty-eight planets of the Bipedal Federate group. There is no such thing as a living standard biped. Or there was never known to be one. Now we see such a man before us. The absolute man. The only one I have ever heard of. I cannot place him for you, Estri. There should be no such being.”

  My heart sank. “May I see the skeleton again, please?” I asked.

  I studied it. I saw some of my own peculiarities there, cervical ribs, excessively thin flat bones. I counted the vertebrae. He, as I, had two more than Silistran norm.

  “All right, M’len.” The Liaison First hit the console, and the lights came on while the projections on the screen faded.

  “How about the languages?” Dellin asked. “Did you catalog?”

  M’lennin handed Dellin a fax sheet without turning from the machine. He twisted a dial and slid a fader, watching two lit meters.

  “All dead languages,” mused the Liaison Second. “Eve
n the Silistran is archaic. Three the computer banks cannot identify. Yet the woman seemed to have no trouble understanding him. Could she have gotten the meaning of his words from his mind?” he asked, looking at me.

  “She could, but I could not. My mother was an exceptional telepath, but not enough of a deep-reader to go to the Day-Keepers.”

  “Pity,” said M’len, his chin propped on his fist. The console hissed and burped up a small flat oblong and two sheets of the orange, rubbery fax.

  “Do you want stills?” he asked. I nodded, and he ran his hands over the coder again. The machine spit two palm-sized color holos into his waiting fingers. He then turned from the console and faced us. The Liaison First handed me the fax, stills, and the black flat oblong, which he explained was a modern version of the silver cube. I nodded as he instructed me in its operation.

  “I would leave now,” I said to my host.

  “I expected that you would want to go today when I realized how little I could make of this. Dalf is at the hover, ready when you are. Take care, Estri. I like this whole business less, the more I know.” He was genuinely concerned.

  The Liaison First extended his hand palm up to the Liaison Second. “All is in readiness for you in Arlet. You have the call codes if you need me. Tasa, Liaison.”

  “Tasa,” Dellin and I said in unison. We had been delicately dismissed.

  “How long will it take to get to Arlet in the hover?” I asked Dellin as I grabbed up my belongings and stuffed them in my old parr-hide sack. I would leave nothing behind this time.

  “A set, at least,” said Dellin.

  “A set!” I cried. “I could walk there in that time.”

  “Ah, but it will be infinitely more pleasurable to fly,” said he.

  “I must get to Arlet,” I objected.

  “You will,” he assured me as we made our way across the stone court to the egg-shaped, creamy metal hover. “But you must teach me of Silistra on the way.”

  We climbed the ramp, and I ducked my head in the low entry. It was a very tiny space, filled with more hateful blinking gadgets and three contoured seats. I chose the back one, away from the window. I do not like to fly. One must give over too much of one’s destiny to the caprice of circuits and steel. The Beten pilot waved.

  I was not pleased with Dellin. I knew he could have had me in Arlet before next sun’s rise. I leaned back on the seat and closed my eyes. I was hungry and irritable and tired. I felt guilty about sneaking off from Santh, but I knew he would have insisted on following, and one cannot be inconspicuous with a giant hulion at one’s heels. I had been lucky to get away without him. I heard the pilot bringing the engines to life. I was very tired. I was asleep before the hover gained the air.

  I dreamed I was in a strange checkerboard land, where all of time-space were jammed together like some impossible collage. A piece of winter laid half atop a chunk of primal sea, which bubbled over an unseen edge into a volcano that vomited fire and ash onto a plain covered with waving grain, while hailstones fell bouncing into a triangle of rainforest that grew in the midst of desert dunes, and a great bronze figure stood laughing, towering over the scene, legs astraddle. He pointed at me with a finger, and I saw that that finger was adorned with my father’s ring. I fell down on my knees and cried in fear, but the giant only laughed and snapped his fingers. Instantly I was imprisoned in a block of transparent ice.

  I awoke sweating, to find Dellin shaking my shoulder.

  “You were moaning and crying. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, now,” I said, knuckling the sleep from my eyes. My stomach churned, and my face and eyes stung from lack of sleep. “I had the strangest dream. About the ring.” I sat up, wide-awake. “I forgot to show M’len the ring! I am such a fool, it is a wonder I can feed myself.” I groaned.

  “Easy, Estri.” He brushed my hair from my eyes. “We are going to set down for a meal. I thought you would prefer it to eating in the air.” He patted my arm and took his seat next to the Betenese pilot.

  My head was spinning. How could I have forgotten? The landing was accomplished without incident, and I felt better as soon as I had solid ground beneath my feet.

  Dalf, the pilot, carried out a basket filled with good Silistran fruit, cheese, honeyed binnirin bread, and the inevitable brin. Dellin made pleasant small talk with his pilot while I ate in silence. He seemed determined not to discuss the ring or my dream. So be it! After all, he and I had nothing together but mutual lust. I chided myself for expecting more from him. I examined the glade around us.

  When there was nothing in the basket but crumbs, seeds, and cores, the diminutive Betenese disappeared into the hover. He returned with two large bladders of drink, and handing one to Dellin, retired with the other to the shade of a giant wisper tree.

  “Let us explore,” said Dellin, shouldering the bladder and helping me up. I brushed the crumbs from my white s’kim and took his arm. My irritation was fading. A full belly and the warm sun of Silistra do wonders for the temper.

  We walked far through brush and trees. The jitkaws flittered and the black harths cawed and the large-eyed, bush-tailed krits scurried in the high branches. It was a beautiful day. I pointed out flora and fauna to Dellin as we went, that he might see pictures for the words he had hypno-learned. We wandered past the glade into deeper forest of dappled light and moist cushioned sound; a sunken meadow.

  I sat beneath a fan-leaved wisper tree, leaning my back against the cool velvet bark, motioning Dellin to join me. He squatted cross-legged and pulled the bladder from his shoulder. He uncorked it and tipped it to his lips, swallowed, and handed the skin to me.

  “I have no name for this, but it is good,” said he, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

  “It is fermented name, from that round red fruit you ate last night,” I said when I tasted it. “It is called the same whether food or drink. The drink is always potent,” I explained.

  “Tell me about your dream,” he suggested, moving to share the support of the tree trunk with me.

  I did so. He listened, his arm around me, his nose in my hair.

  “Let me see this ring,” said he thoughtfully when I had finished.

  I reached down under my s’kim and took the tiny key from its hiding place and removed the chald from my body and held it out to him.

  “I thought you said it did not come off,” said he, referring to the chald.

  “They do not, as a rule.” I smiled. “I would not be without my chald, even in sleep.”

  He held the ring close to his face, and the ends of the chald, looped through its band, dangled in his lap. He turned it, and turned it again. He peered long into the stone. Then he handed it back to me.

  “It reminds me of something,” said he as I refastened the chald around my waist and replaced the tiny key in its housing and smoothed my white s’kim down around my thighs. “Something about it that I should connect. I cannot quite grab the thought. I have seen something that relates to it, somehow, and recently.”

  “Think,” said I, staring at him.

  He raised his free hand and dropped it in his lap. I waited. Finally he shook his head.

  “I am sorry,” said he. “Perhaps later on. My mind is on other things.” He grinned broadly.

  “Not now,” I snapped. I had an uncomfortable chill.

  “Now,” said he, taking me by the hair. “Fight me,” he advised.

  I did, until I felt myself fighting my own desire.

  Then I lay on my back under the wisper tree and struggled futilely, deliriously, and with much art.

  I was very close when I opened my eyes and saw them staring down at us. Dellin’s mouth was on mine, and he was deep in his pleasure. I tried to warn him, but it was too late.

  Hands dragged us apart. Hands forced me to my belly on the leaves and bound my wrists to my ankles, right to right and left to left. There, under the tree, a number of them took their turns with me. I caught a glimpse of Dellin trussed and helpless, watching,
while two of them held him. The two men that held Dellin wore no visible chalds.

  They took much glee in my debasement.

  I lost count of them, and my mind went elsewhere and I endured them until the last rolled away and pulled up his laced pants.

  In that moment I gathered my wits about me and feigned unconsciousness. I raced through the mind-clearing ritual and called Santh with all the power I had. Then a hand was shaking me, and I did not get the hulion’s answer.

  A filthy bearded face loomed before my eyes. The teeth in that face were yellow and broken, and the breath from that mouth was fetid. I tried to turn my head away, but he jerked me back.

  “High lady, do I offend you?” he rasped.

  I spit at him, hitting him square in the eye.

  He jerked my head back by the hair until I thought my neck would snap. I cried out in pain.

  “My Well will pay a ransom for me,” I gasped. He loosened his hold, and we eyed each other. Over his shoulder I could see Dellin, bloodied, down on his belly on the ground, naked. I groaned inwardly.