by TylerRose.
At the end of those four months, she insisted they go early for a test. She had a feeling, and the test was positive. Scans determined the fetus had implanted itself into her uterus just two days earlier. Further scans showed the baby would be half Sistarian and half Voranian. None of Tyler’s human DNA was present. Gender could not be determined at this point.
“Come back in forty days and I will be able to tell you the sex,” Dr. Dheez smiled. “Congratulations.”
“Can you give any estimate of how long I’ll carry her before delivery?”
“Not really. Sistarian gestation is around 240 days. Voranian is closer to 270 days. So I can give you a range of 238 to 270 days, then take a week off the early side for an early birth or add a week to the back end for a late birth. I’m going to tell you not to even think about it right now. When we get to your 200th day, we’ll see if we can get some kind of determination based on growth rate and development.”
“Sounds logical,” Shestna said. “Thank you.”
No sooner were they in their rooms than he was issuing new orders.
“You will not travel with me anymore. You will stay on Voran.”
“Just hold your horses,” she stopped him. “I’m not going to be a prisoner just because I’m pregnant. I have months to go before I even begin to show. So forget all that crap right now, Sta.”
“If you carry a son, you carry my first fully acknowledged heir. He must be protected at all times.”
“It’s not a boy. It’s a girl.”
“How can you know that?” he challenged.
“I have always known my first child would be a girl. My second will be a boy. But that is beside the point. I’m not going to be kept in a cage just because I’m pregnant. Get over it.”
“I forbid you—“
“You stop right there,” she pulled up short and stood eye to eye with him. “Don’t you dare let that sentence pass your mouth. I have a lunch with Baener and you have a meeting with…someone. See you later.”
She walked out, Pisod close behind. He said nothing through her muttering.
“The Councilman will be with you in a moment,” Baener’s servant said on letting them in.
Baener was intently watching a view screen, and pressed his remote control rapidly. He waited, watched, and smiled in victory.
“What did you win?” Tyler asked.
He looked to see they’d arrived. “Your Highness,” he smiled even broader. He was one of the few who were genuinely pleased to see her.
Taking her hand, he drew her into the living room and offered her a seat as the servant brought bubbly glasses of wine.
“Do you recall the bungalow compound I offered for you to stay in?” he asked.
“Yes. A prison,” she recalled with a scowl.
“A higher level membership became available. I won it in auction.”
“Good for you,” she replied. “You get to kill more prisoners?”
“I’m more interested in the monthly dinner and other special events,” he grinned in a particular way.
Events that centered around sexual escapades and orgies, and she didn’t even want to know.
“What news have you today? Anything new and good?” Baener asked.
“Nothing I’m able to share with the galaxy yet, but this will be my last serving of wine for a while.”
“I won’t tell anyone until you announce it. Congratulations.”
“Is there a Temple of the Immaculate on any of the Deek’Trai planets?” she asked.
“Yes, but you refused to go there when I offered it,” he admitted.
“The prison?”
“The prison itself is on top of a plateau, out in the open. Inside the plateau is the temple. It’s been there for about a thousand years, I think. The prison was created about five hundred years ago. Having the prison atop it is the perfect cover for all the extra security around the base and along the sides of the plateau.”
“You offered me a bungalow, not the space below it,” she said.
“That particular bungalow has an entrance down into the temple. You would have been shown at the appropriate time and could have come and gone between the two as pleased you. The offer stands. I can take you there anytime you want. I just have to make a phone call to let the House Master know we’re coming.”
He watched the play of emotions pass over her face. Confusion, annoyance, guilt, uncertainty.
“Please don’t feel badly about refusing, Tyler. All things in their own time and it wasn’t time yet. Now you know because now you have asked. It is there for you even if you never use it. The men who take care of it will continue to do so even if you tell me to abandon the place. You don’t have to do or say anything about it. You don’t have to think or feel anything.”
Relieved, her expression and posture both eased. The servant returned to announce the meal was ready. Baener seated her at a triangular table just three feet on each side, and took the seat opposite.
“You had a table for ten in this spot at your supper last week,” she observed.
“Indeed I did. I have standing orders that the table size is to be changed according to the party invited. Two guests requires only three sides,” he replied, the second servant bringing the first dish around while the other poured cold water.
Her phone buzzed. She took it from her pocket, scowled and put it back. It buzzed again a few minutes later.
“Pi, tell your brother to stop nagging me. He only makes me more angry.”
“Anger on this happy day?” Baener questioned as the second course was laid before them.
She glowered fresh. “The first thing he said was I couldn’t travel anymore. I was to stay home on Voran. Like hell I will. I won’t trade one prison for another and be shut up somewhere else.”
“It is not a prison when you choose to be there and choose when not to be there, Tyler. Then it is only a cloistered sanctuary that you use when you desire. Whatever the place. Your home on Earth. A temple on Deek’Trai VI. Your home on Voran.”
Words she’d heard before from Mankell months ago.
“Yes, but how much of an idiot do I look like when I tell my husband to go to hell and then I turn around and do exactly what he wanted me to do?”
“Not at all,” Baener said in complete seriousness. “It is one thing to be dictated to without input, discussion or choice. It is another entirely to recognize your own need for solitude and take advantage of it when you need it. You are young and accustomed to doing as you wish. He is getting old and is high ranking and, thus, is accustomed to getting what he wants. I am sure this marriage is a bit of a rude awakening for you both at times.”
She said nothing.
“Just be you, Tyler. Whoever that is right now, be that.”
“I go back and forth between knowing and understanding and accepting it all to not being sure of anything,” she admitted.
“Of course you do. You’re a person. Everyone has those same doubts. You should easily feel that from most. When they bluster the most is often when they are feeling at their weakest.”
She did feel that from most people. A person fully confident in their own ability and knowledge was rare. Baener was one such rare person.
The third course arrived and she realize she’d not been paying much attention to the food she’d been eating. Fruit and a soft cheese with crackers. A soup. Now, savory lamb-like meat skewers with small bread rounds and leafy lettuce-like vegetable. He used a little bread to pinch a piece of meat and slide it off the skewer, then added the lettuce and a few drops of seasoned sauce. Vinegary, slightly spicy, it went well with the meat and vegetable.
“You look like you have more to say,” he prompted.
“There is more, but discretion is important too.”
“True. So say it without names.”
She needed a moment to decide on her words. “I get tired of every man who wants to be with me demanding he must be the Master. It’s hot in the moment but it starts to get
tiresome when they want me to be obedient all the time. I feel they’re taking away my right to choose and decide for myself.”
Baener sat back a moment, regarding her, considering who she meant. “You had a special someone back on Earth, yes? A man to whom you were accountable yet let you roam free?”
She nodded.
“That is what you became accustomed to. There was no doubting he was your authority figure but he didn’t try to command and control you except during intimacy. Correct so far?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Then you come out into the galaxy and much of the galaxy is male dominated and they all want to own you. They all fight each other to possess you.”
She had no more words, just nodded again.
“Male is master and woman is his servant on most planets of the Congress. Those on which the woman is equal are few. Growing in number, but few. These men who want you require that they are the dominant force in the relationship because that is what they are accustomed to on their own planets and on most planets they visit. They cannot be anything else. Not for long, that is. They know no other way to be and must make it clear as early in the relationship as possible. It’s expected of them by their Gars, their Presidents, Kings and Emperors, their societies.”
“Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. It’s like the mold of what I’m supposed to do is shrinking around me. I hate it. I can’t be a proper Voranian wife or woman but they expect it of me. Everyone except Encito, that is.”
“He lets you call him by his first name?” Baener asked, visibly surprised by the notion.
“He’s never corrected me when I’ve used it.”
Baener smiled that broad expression that meant he was very pleased. “You are indeed the favorite daughter. It is no small thing for him to allow his given name to be used—by anyone. Only the Empress has that privilege.”
They talked more on her growing relationships with Dorn and Shestna’s sister, having met all his former Seven Day Brides and children.
“You look very tired,” Baener observed as they finished the gelatin-like dessert.
“I am,” she realized, noticing herself the odd fatigue.
“Come lie on my sofa and rest a bit before you go back to your quarters.”
“I don’t want to take up your space for that,” she tried to put him off.
“Nonsense. You keep refusing the big place I have ready for you. You can borrow a small sofa and appease my need to see you well.”
How could she resist? She let him take her to the sofa on the other side of the apartment. He fussed with a pillow for her, placing it so she would be mostly upright after so big a meal. Kicking her shoes off, she curled up inside her dress skirt.
“There’s a shawl on the back if you get chilled,” he gestured.
She nodded and gave way to the fatigue. A few minutes of sinking into her drowsiness and she realized she was getting chilly. Blindly reaching, she pulled the shawl down to cover from her shoulders to her knees. She crashed hard.
“I have work to do. Stay or go at your choice,” Baener said to Pisod.
Pisod took a book out of the sack he carried for her, to show he had something to do. He sat in the chair of the sitting area. Baener’s desk was on the other side of the sofa and he often looked over to her while reading briefs, reports and proposals. Eventually, Pisod’s phone buzzed in his breast pocket, the ringer silenced but vibration mode loud enough to be heard from twenty feet. That needed to be fixed. He sent back a short message, sleeping.
“Is that Shestna?” Baener asked when the phone buzzed again.
“Yes. He’s telling me to wake her.”
“Has he learned nothing?”
“No, he has not,” Pisod replied, sending back a Like hell.
“Tell him to call me,” Baener said, picking up the next document.
Pisod sent the message and Baener’s phone rang half a minute later.
“My good friend, she is asleep not ten feet from me and we will leave her that way until she wakes of her own accord,” he answered. “Never wake a pregnant woman. Moreover, never wake a pregnant goddess. Didn’t living with a harem teach you anything?”
“She could be there for five hours,” Shestna tried to protest.
“So what if she is. I’m not going anywhere until I go to bed.”
“We are hosting a dinner party.”
“If she’s awake, she’ll be there. If not, you’ll make her apologies,” Baener reasoned. “I’m talking in this voice and she’s not even moved. She is very asleep and we will leave her be. If she won’t go to the cloister, then we will make the cloister around her wherever she is. Enjoy your dinner party.”
She wasasleep…and she was with Jerome, in Toledo, in that little apartment on Pickle road. Not that first time they’d been together, however. He was much more familiar with her than he had been their one night. They’d been there many times, treated it like a second residence. They could sit in a silence, smoke a joint. He called her babe, took her by the hand to the bedroom to make love to her without making love to her. It was normal for them to make love without making love. Their passion was intense. Orgasms rocked her body and mind.
Then they were in his car, that same matte black Torino. Im Reesana was talking to them through it while they drove miles and miles across the state.
The battle downtown and she was there in the thick of it. The East Side blew up. She felt the shock wave, felt the heat, felt the fear and the grief of the thousands of people who died in that moment. But Davis Besse did not blow up.
Jerome was on K’Tran with her. They were living there together as a couple. She blew up a house with her own pyrokinesis. She gave birth to his son.
“When you woke up today, did you know you were going to die?”
This was no mere dream. She was there. The faces of Baener, Mankell, many others she already knew. She lived those moments, the pain and effort of giving birth. The heat of the fire.
A sensation of being underwater, rising to find the surface but the surface being too far away. That desperation of running out of air, exertion of swimming harder, hand stretching and reaching to break the barrier between this world and that.
Tyler snapped awake, pushing up from the pillow and blinking hard to see and recognize this room she did not know. Her eyes didn’t want to focus. Dragging in breaths as though she had been under water.
“You must have been very tired.”
Familiar voice she didn’t see in the dim room, her eyes seeing never-ending cascades of sparkles of light.
“Lights, increase ten percent.”
The brighter light helped the sparkles to go away and she saw Baener in the companion chair with a book in his hand, turning off the tiny lamp clipped to the cover. Calm energy, but relieved.
“Baener. We had lunch,” she recalled. “I don’t remember lying down.”
“What’s the last thing you do remember?”
She had to search for that memory, as though it was buried under years of life elsewhere.
“You told me about the plateau on Deek’Trai V, with the prison on top. A bungalow has access to the temple inside the plateau. How long was I asleep?”
“About twelve hours. It’s two in the morning. Were you dreaming?”
“I missed our dinner party. Shit.”
“I missed it too since I was one of the guests. Are you hungry? Or do you need to rest more?” he asked.
“Where’s Pisod?” she asked instead.
“Asleep on the floor,” he gestured to the dark lump several feet from her.
No self-doubt. All the while she’d been living those events, she felt no fear. No second guessing. She knew what she knew and she knew it was right. Yet she still felt love and passion.
She did lay back against the pillow, exhausted by so much intense dream action.
“Is there some sect somewhere that believes in ridding themselves of specific emotions?” she asked out of nowhere.
She let her question stand.
“There is a religious sect that believes they can discard specific detrimental emotions. I don’t know it’s official name but they’re referred derogatorily as the robots. Few of them have ever actually done it. Mostly, they attain a high level of control and become proficient at ignoring an emotion. In short, they pretend not to have the emotions they don’t want.”
“But there are documented cases of someone who literally and truly removed a specific emotion?” she pursued.
“Maybe three over the last thousand years?” he said. “What emotion are you thinking to discard?”
“Where is this sect?” she asked, getting up and finding her shoes.
She did that often. Asked a different question rather than answering one she didn’t want to answer. She was holding her cards close.
“They’re rather secretive and private, as you might guess. I’m sure Julian can find whoever the highest official is and make an introduction.”
“Thank you, Baener, for your hospitality. I did not mean to impose on you.”
“You didn’t impose, Your Highness. In fact, I soundly sent your husband about his business so that I could selfishly bask in my own generosity and privilege, watching over you while you slept.”
She smiled at the compliment. He was one of the few men who never wanted anything from her, who wanted nothing more than to help. Sincerely and without private agenda. He was right now exactly as she had felt from him in that dream that wasn’t a dream.
She nudged Pisod in the thigh. “Pi, wake up. We’re going.”
He sat up, rubbed his face. “Where to?”
“Home. If my husband wants me to remain planet side, I’ll remain planet side and have the universe brought to me.”
Arriving, she set Pisod to finding classes on emotional control while she called Julian.
