by Janet Morris
When I was done, I was physically exhausted, but my mental state was no better. I lay on my black hard couch and wept. My stomach cramped and my breasts felt exceptionally sensitive. My erect nipples burned when I touched them. When my hunger drove me again to seek to create a meal, my back pained me terribly, my intestines were constricted, and upon rising I became so dizzy that I staggered and would have fallen but for the wall of my prison against which I stumbled. I thought dimly, through a haze of pain, that I must have made some mistake in creating the white gruel. I dry-heaved on my hands and knees, but I had nothing to give up. When that was done, I crawled weakly back to the couch and dragged myself up upon it. I slept fitfully, and when I awakened, the couch was slick with blood. My thighs were covered with it, and it poured forth from me in a steady stream. Fear a cold knot in my aching belly, I examined my red-covered hand. The blood was fresh and new. I thought it ironic that my mistake with the food source had caused me to hemorrhage, and what a foolish reason that was to die, here on some nameless world so far from home.
I prepared myself, as we of Silistra are taught, to let go the things of flesh and substance, to embrace that existence of mind that is after death. But death did not come for me as I lay waiting for it, but sleep instead.
When I awoke, I found the bleeding somewhat abated, though still occurring. I had thought never to awaken, and I was not much pleased. My breasts no longer pained me, nor my intestines nor groin. I sat up cautiously and waited until the dizziness receded. There was much dried blood, dark and caked on my body. I realized, finally, what significance my bleeding bore. And I mourned. I mourned a long time that never-to-be born egg that had somehow made its way to my womb, only to languish and die there unfertilized. On Silistra, I must have produced it. When? I thought perhaps somewhere along the trail with Sereth. I remembered the time it could have been, when we came upon the crevice we had jumped with the threx. Not after that had Sereth put seed within me, but had used me otherwise. So I had my chance, and had not made use of it. I wondered, as I keened the child-death chant, if ever another egg would be granted me, ever in my life. Sometimes one has only a single opportunity. I prayed to the old gods, in my bereavement, that such would not be the case.
I wondered how long I had truly been in my cube. Long enough for the egg to die and be expelled. Longer than I had reckoned it.
Uncaring of my food supply, I filled my bowl with water and rubbed the blood from my hips and legs. Then again, and cleaned the rest of me as best I could. Having been denied my child, I cared not at that moment if I lived. I made no attempt to produce food for myself, but lay where I was before the north wall and slept.
When I next awoke, the bleeding was truly stopped, and I needed only half a bowl to clean the streaks and clots from my upper thighs. I had just finished doing this, and was about to drink the remainder, when a noise behind me made me turn.
They were standing there, on the other side of the black platform, that spectacular bronze woman and man who had first met me with collar and kiss when I arrived. The man’s haughty, angular face bore a suppressed smile; his eyes were calm and wise, glowing with internal fire. She beside him was symmetrical perfection, with round full breasts and generous hips. Her face was the most beautiful I had ever seen; her dark hair glowed with a life of its own.
“Welcome to Mi’ysten, which you have called Zredori, little sister,” said the woman in a voice musical in both ear and mind. She spoke to me in archaic Silistran, a Stoth dialect, and spoke it with no hint of accent or flaw.
I got slowly to my feet and regarded them, the black platform between us. I was still deep in my grief, weaving on my feet, unsteady.
The bronze man came around the couch and took me by the arm. His hand was cool on my skin, his flesh smooth. I looked at his hand on my arm, bronze on copper, at the perfection of its form, at the ring he wore on his middle finger, the ring that was identical to the one I wore threaded through the chald at my waist.
“You are not he,” I said, looking up into those flickering fire-eyes. My eyes were level with the nipples on his thick-haired chest.
“No.” He smiled and spoke for the first time. “I am not. I am Raet.” But I knew who he was. I knew that voice, and the accompanying mind-touch. I was not mistaken.
I struggled to pull my arm from his grasp, but it was as iron. I tried to claw his face, mindless with fear and rage, but he caught my hand.
“Would you prefer that I bound you, or removed your body from your control?” he queried me calmly, holding me now by both wrists. I shook my head mutely. I was not willing to again experience the paralysis I had undergone by his will under the Falls of Santha.
The woman was beside us, peering anxiously into my face. She touched my hair, then my brow, with her cool hand. I felt my hate and fear receding, replaced by a passive calm. I had no choice but to do as they bid. I felt, for the first time, an anxious desire to please them, these beings who held my life in their hands.
“You have been long enough here, Estri,” the woman said. “I would take you to my tridoe—my keep—but you must behave like an intelligent, civilized being.” She looked around at the cube that had been my home. “And yet …” She hesitated. “And yet, that may be too much to ask.” She brought from nowhere a pair of metal bracelets, joined by a short length of chain, and a longer chain of the same whitish metal. The chain she clipped to the band around my neck, the bracelets she snapped shut upon my wrists, held by Raet in front of me. But I did not struggle. In the end, they would have their way with me. I had no defense, no escape.
Leashed and braceleted, I was led through a door that opened magically before us, out of the cube and onto the white walkway. Raet held the leash attached to my collar loosely in his left hand, and the woman, still unnamed, she who had called me “little sister,” held my right arm. She was a head taller than I. I saw the Hertekiean, his face pressed to the wall of his cube, staring after us. If my hands were free, I would have waved him tasa.
We walked along the white way, between the rows of cubes with their isolated occupants, under the shifting sky. My lost child was strong in my mind, and the question of who had precipitated the egg into my womb; and my body, long celibate, was burning, aware of the bronze Raet on my left.
“I would have given you that child, there at the Feast of Conception, but your guardians were too close around you, and kept me from you.” I threw up all my mind shields. I was humiliated that he had caught my errant body’s need.
“The Baniese!” I accused. He smiled. I tightened my block.
“That will do you little good,” he said. So his reading was such that my shield was useless. I let it drop.
“And if you had succeeded, Raet?” said the woman. “She would have been triply admixed, and so disqualified from the tests. And you would have won. It must rankle you that you did not.” I could feel her grip tighten on my arm. The wave of hostility that came from her toward the bronze Raet made my head spin.
“Little sister”—the superb woman spoke to me— “your scores were the highest of any of the children. Our father, in his choice of your mother, was well-vindicated.”
“Our father?” I asked. The rest of what she said was too obscure.
“Estrazi had me by Tyiana. I am Esyia, your half-sister. And Raet, whom you have evidently met, is also my mother’s son.” Then Astria had been right. My father’s daughter’s brother had sought me. A strong wind buffeted me. We were coming to the end of the stacked cubes. The view between the stacks wrenched at my sanity.
“What tests?” I asked her. She and Raet exchanged glances.
“I think it makes little difference now,” he said to her.
“It is still not within our function to discuss it with her,” she said.
“You brought it up,” he reminded her.
As they wrangled, we came to a place where the stacked cubes abruptly ended. The panorama before me strained my cognizance of reality. From a central point, triangular
spokes of terrain radiated. Lush forest, shimmering with mist, great barren steppe, ice waste, rolling sea. My body felt their pull. I was glad for the bronzes’ grasp upon me. I was drawn like metal scraps to a strong magnet.
“Now you know part of the reason for the collar you wear,” Raet said in my ear. “These are departure points”—he waved his hand at the spectacle before us—“for experimental climes, tangential realities. Within these areas do we refine our prototypes, before seating them in space-time. Their sequentiality is greatly quickened, hence the pull you feel. The molecules of your body, linear-conditioned, feel it. If we were not with you, nor the collar you wear upon your neck, you would be drawn into the closest of them, probably that rainforest there, to live out your span triple-timed. Once you became so entrapped, it is doubtful even we could find you before dissolution overtook your body.”
I shivered. Vaguely, I apprehended what he was saying. I could not, alone, walk safely upon the face of this world. I began to realize just how far advanced the bronzes were. And with that realization, my assessment of myself and reality as I had known it began to crack and crumble.
Esyia waved her hand, and a section of the white way rolled back, revealing steps descending steeply into darkness. We made our way down them, and onto a landing before which were double doors. The doors opened at our approach. We stepped within the cubicle so revealed, and my stomach came up in my throat as I felt the floor moving down under me.
“We could have come a quicker way, but for you,” Raet said. “Did you find your transition to Mi’ysten uncomfortable?”
I shuddered in remembrance of the agony I had experienced on the black platform. I nodded.
“You see, Esyia? There is a flaw in their basic structure that no amount of admixing or evolution will cure. They remain locked in space-time because it is impossible for them to function out of it. Even this one, doubtless the best of the lot, cannot make even such a simple adjustment. I submit to you that such deficiencies are irreparable.” His tone said he had won some great, long-standing battle, using me as example. I felt a great unease, as if by my reaction I had put myself in danger.
“Do not worry, little one.” Esyia’s hand was on my temple, and peace returned to me. “They will never be able to sway the assessors now, not with your performance taken into account.” The doors slid soundlessly open, and I did not find out who “they” were, or what assessors she meant. The scene revealed by the open doors was unremarkable, and I breathed a sigh of relief. A long corridor stretched before us, white and solid, with doors at regular intervals down its length. The floor was of some rusty stonelike material, solid and warm under my bare feet. We made our way along it.
“Where is my father?” I asked.
“At the star nurseries,” Raet explained, as if such an answer made it all clear. “He is at a critical stage in his shaping, and will return when he has his project stabilized. You will stay with us, your choice of Esyia’s tridoe or mine, until he does. That is, unless you would return to the cubes.”
That was no choice at all. Raet’s hand was on the small of my back. I tried to ignore my body, surging at his touch. I had much reason to hate him, but I could find no hate in me. My mind raged at my weakness, but my body would not listen. What he had said—that he would have given me a child in Arlet—rang in my head. I longed to fill that void within me. I wondered if he might not be able to do so here, despite the fact that I had so recently lost one.
“No,” he said. I winced and concentrated upon keeping my thoughts under control. But they would not obey me. No he could not? Or no he would not? My mind demanded an answer.
“No I cannot, but not for the reason you think.” I caught his amused expression out of the corner of my eye. My skin felt hot and flushed.
“Estrazi would doubtless reduce him to component atoms,” Esyia put in. “Such a child, so admixed in but two generations, would upset his plans. If it had been done before the testing, the constants would have fallen out differently. There would have been no need to worry what effect such a child would have upon the future of your planet.”
Certainly they felt my confusion, but neither deigned to enlighten me.
We stopped before a door, identical in my sight to dozens we had passed, and it opened obediently. Within, I saw sculptured gardens, under a summer sky. We walked between fancifully trimmed hedges of flowering bush, gold and pearl and green. The walk was flagged with slabs of iridescent stone, the air cool and clean, with pungent aliveness that tickled my nostrils. At the end of the long straight path, I could see an arabesqued, towered building, of some gold-veined white stone.
Up the tiered steps we went, and into a mosaicked hall of breathtaking beauty. Esyia’s tridoe made Astria seem some peasant hovel. Precious metals filigreed the door lintels, the walls were covered with hangings of vibrant intricate silks. They showed me through the tridoe: the kitchen, where a great table of some golden material was laid with platters of the same; the sleeping rooms, each more wonderful than the one preceding it; the large chamber that could seat three hundred. In the kitchen were no stoves, no stores, no plumbing. In the sleeping rooms were no facilities for grooming or toilet. I had been here long enough not to need to ask why.
In that sleeping room of umber and ocher, which Esyia assigned to me, was a great couch of intaglioed sienna metal. I sat upon it, on the spread that bore the same pattern as my father’s ring. Raet removed the leash from my collar. My hands were still bound in front of me. He looked down upon me.
“Will you behave yourself?” he said severely.
“It seems I have little choice.”
He looked at me with that expression of distrust I have come to expect from him, and touched the metal bracelets at my wrists. They fell away and hit the brightly patterned thick-piled earth-tone rug and were gone. He stood, muscles tensed, regarding me like the dorkat one finds in the parr-house among its slaughter: one can never tell what the wild and dangerous beast will do.
“Are these quarters satisfactory?” Esyia asked softly, stepping between us.
I nodded, but my mind knew my body’s needs, and spoke its message.
“Oh,” she said, and circuited the large room. “How about here?” And where the keep narrowed into an alcove, a wall came into being. Since the retarded child could not dispose of her own waste or attend to her own cleanliness, mechanical means had been provided.
I put my recently freed hands in my lap. I wished they would remove my collar.
“That we will not do, for your sake as much as ours,” said Esyia, coming to sit beside me. “We will come for you later, and share a meal,” she said, and her body was gone from the room. I looked dumbly at the wrinkled depression where her bottom had indented the coverlet with her weight. Raet leaned against one of the chased bronze posts that rose from the couch to meet the muraled ceiling high above our heads.
What can I say about him? That he was his father’s son seemed a certainty. That I was so aroused by him as to make the misery he had caused me on Silistra inconsequential? That even Tyith’s death was not meaningful enough to stem my need for him? All of that and more. That I cared not that he considered me at best a wild animal, incapable of rational thought? Doubtless. Trembling with eagerness, I went to him, honored beyond comprehension that he would deign to use me. That no child could come from this union, I had previously ascertained. But I wanted that meaningless couching more than I had wanted any other, and I despised myself for my need. Perhaps he used me out of pity, perhaps curiosity, perhaps to further put me in my place. That last he truly accomplished. I, so skilled in the needs of men, found myself barely able to satisfy him. His vitality was such that when I lay finally exhausted from my efforts, I understood why my mother had given up her life to bear a child to such a one. But I would not be allowed that sense of purpose, that rationalization, that Estrazi had permitted my mother. With this couching, I had met my own lust head-on for the first time in my life. To do so is a shattering experi
ence for a woman. To do so with a creature as superior to oneself as one is to the bondrex on the plain rubs salt into the open wound.
When he had gone from the keep, by that instant exit the Mi’ysten prefer, I thought long upon what had occurred. Full of self-recrimination, I paced off my assigned quarters. There were no windows in the ocher keep, nor would the door open for me. I was as much a prisoner as I had been in the crystal cube, but in a more urbane setting. I cannot blame them for being loath to let the beast roam their keep at will. I would not set a dorkat loose in the halls of Astria.
“Flesh toy,” he had called me, “come here.”
“We are all flesh,” I had replied.
“Ah, but we by choice, and you by design. Therin is a great difference.” His voice had been husky, his eyes half-closed. God-man or not, the man in him knew and desired me.
I held onto that one shred of comfort. For whatever reason, I excited him. When he was gone, I was consumed with fear that I could not do so again, that he might never again so use me. I found myself desperate for his acknowledgment. I doubted I would ever have his respect, but how he regarded me seemed more important than the next breath I would take—out of proportion to what had occurred. I was more right than I knew.
I determined to ask Esyia if she could teach me a mind shield effective against him. I could not bear the thought that Raet had access to the emotional maelstrom whirling within me.
We were in the kitchen, Esyia and I. She had come for me while I lay, drained and dozing, on the black couch-spread that bore my father’s mark, and escorted me through the corridors into the kitchen with the great golden table. The walls, which had been sculptured winy rock when I had first seen them, were covered so thickly by green-leaved plants that the rock was merely the pattern in which the creeping shiny-leaved mat had conceived to grow. That any plants could have grown up along the walls in such profusion in the short time since I had been in that room was impossible.
