"This is your medical exam. It's required before I can sell you.'
They were in a tiny room of flower-twined partitions, a padded slant table, and the green glaring lens of the tentacled ceiling. All of Carl's orifices were probed, blood was drawn from his arm, skin scraped from his abdomen, and the hair shaved from his face.
He saw himself in the androb's chrome surface, and again he didn't know himself. The face staring back at him was longboned and pugnacious.
Silk-textured garments tailored for his precise dimensions emerged from a wall panel. They were a white tunic shirt, loose black trousers, and corded leather sandals.
Carl dressed and was lea by Allin around the blossomed partition to a garishly lit chamber, reminiscent of a SoHo art gallery.
A group of a dozen people stared at him and began a swift numerical exchange. He was being sold.
The bargaining went quickly. Within moments, a bald and sinewy little man was clasping to Carl's wrist a sturdy strap attached to a thickly corded leash. The leash was metal-clamped to his belt.
Allin was pleased. "You've earned Tarfeather enough fiber cord for another counsel tent and two tree homes."
"That much?" Carl peered into his owner's coriaceous face. "What makes me worth anything to you? I don't have any skills. You haven't even interviewed me."
He looked at Carl distrustfully and then at Allin.
"Doesn't he know?"
"You'll be taking the place of Picwah's son in the lottery"
Allin informed Carl with his pyknic leer, "as well as working as his servant for one tenth of a cycle. After that, if you're still alive, you're free."
"Thanks."
`As part of the deal," Allin added, " I promised your lord Picwah that if you caused him any trouble I would cut off your ears." He grinned like a wolf. "You know, of course, I'd have traded you to the zotl themselves for a Foke. It's your fortune that the last prisoners were taken on to Galgul before we arrived. Farewell, dropping. Work hard."
Picwah snapped at Carl's wrist leash. "Come on-I have much to do."
"Wait!" The command cracked from across the gallery through the veils of muttering from other negotiations.
Carl heard it and looked. Picwah didn't and kept going.
His leash jerked taut against Carl's immobility, and the scrawny man was yanked to his haunches.
`Are you acting up already?" he almost-screamed, popping to his feet and glaring at Carl.
Carl thumbed his attention to the approaching figures. Ile woman he had seen earlier by the algal pools was rushing across the chamber. In her wake were two blue-robed, wide-bodied Foke.
"A wizan," Allin noted and dutifully bowed.
The fragrance of rose madder accompanied her as she stepped up to Carl, her gray-streaked eyes flecked with redgold regarding him as if his face were a mirror.
Carl played his gaze over her oak-brown hair and
the lynx angles of her face. "Evoe," he guessed in a wishful whisper. ,
Surprise swung across her face. " I do know you,' she breathed back. "But from where?"
The guards were watching her with anxiety. "How do you know her personal name?" one of them queried Carl.
"My lady, you are distressed," the other said to her. "We should go."
She touched Carl's arm, and a blur of energy warmed him. "Why are you here?" she asked.
Carl held up his strapped wrist. "I've been sold." He cast a nod to Allin. "By him."
She looked hard at Allin. "Why are you selling him? He looks Foke-worthy."
Allin met her stare with a stern countenance. "He has been wizan-appraised, my lady." The Foke warrior observed the wizan guards' edginess, and he asked: "What has distressed you?"
Evoe said nothing, for she was watching Carl for what was familiar.
"The last of her kin, a distaff aunt, was a prisoner in Rhene," a guard related. "We had come with the ransom to free her. But she has already been taken to Galgul."
That last word cracked the guard's voice. Allin nodded in sympathy to their anxiety. "You are indeed distressed, my lady," he said loudly to her; then, to the guards: "You must take her to where she can rest."
"Will you came with me?" Evoe asked Carl.
His heart was squashed with feeling. The eld skyle had been right about this woman-she was all the colors of waking to him, the flesh of dreams. She wasn't shimmeringly beautiful or vein-poundingly erotic. But her slender face enthralled him with its waif eyes and a puckish smile that showed small white teeth. What could he say?
He loved the melody of her features.
The guards took her arms and she shrugged them off. "Will you come with me?" she asked again, more urgently.
"Yes," Carl's whole body said.
"Lady!" Allin barked.' "We have witnesses to your distress. I am hereby overriding your authority by Foke right for the Foke good."
The guards seized her. She slumped and twisted, throwing herself against one guard for purchase and heaving the other to the ground. With her free arm, she jabbed viperlike at the remaining guard's face, and she was free. Her hand reached into the guard's robe, and she came away with a pistol.
Allin had settled into an attack crouch, and he crabbed toward her, ignoring the gun.
With. both hands, Carl grabbed Picwah by his shirtfront, hoisted him into the air, and flung him at Allin.
A knifeblade grinned in Evoe's hand. She cut the leash, and she and Carl bolted for the chamber's exit. They ran through gold-lighted corridors and into a transparent elevator. The lift tugged at their tensed insides, and as the gallery level pulled off; they both laughed with relief.
"My name's Carl." He took her hand, and the warm electricity was still there.
"In my whole span, nothing like this has ever happened to me before." Her face glowed apricot from the exertion. "How do you know my name?"
"The same way I know your language. They were the gifts of an eld skyle."
"How long have you been in the Werld?"
"About twenty or so meals."
The elevator stopped, and she guided Carl out by
his hand. They were on a rooftop. Clouds the color of gunsmoke wisped overhead. Below, a laser-lit city blazed like magma.
"Rhene," Evoe announced. "The City of Sacrifice. We can't stay here."
The wind was steep on the top ramp of the clearing pavilion, and Carl was sure she was going to jump to the fallpath. His 'heart was galloping in' anticipation. She led him instead along the curve of the ramp in the circle of a landing pad. Dozens of glossy, enameled flyers were parked along the perimeter.
Evoe selected a blue-toned one and raised its blackglass canopy. "Get in."
The sling Carl crawled into held his weight and swiveled wildly until he realized he, had the control grip in his left hand.
Evoe slid into the second sling, and the faceted blackglass hood closed with a sigh from its airtight bolts. The interior was black.
Green points tapped on in the dark as Evoe activated its drive.
"Are we stealing this thing?" Carl asked into the blackness.
"It's a flyer," the answer arrived with a chorus of moving control lights and audial cues, "and any citizen of Rhene may fly it."
The canopy's blackglass phased to transparency, and Carl watched with glittering fascination as the landing pad dropped away and they were suddenly high over Rhene. The clearing pavilion, he saw at once, was the city of glass towers that he had seen from afar during his thornwing flight. In the direction toward where he had been then, clouds folded in on themselves like the interior of a brain.
"That's the Cloudgate," Evoe's alto voice informed him. "It's the only safe route through the destroyer winds to the Welkyn where the zotl live. That's why
Rhene is here-to guard their upper Werld from the human animals they breed in Midwerld for their food."
"I came through there in a thornwing."
"That's about the only way through," Evoe agreed. "The fallpath flows down. Thornwings can
get down the Cloudpath, but not up it. The only way up is a flyer. And the zotl destroy all unauthorized craft."
Rhene glowered below them like embers. "Where are we going?"
"Where no one will find us." She made some small adjustments and leaned back in her sling.
Skyles whirled past as their flyer swiftly found its way through the maze of the Werld. The continuous abrupt,changes in direction never touched them, and they hung gracefully in their slings.
Evoe was looking at Carl with an earnestness in her dolphin-tinted eyes that gave him the same slick feeling as luck.
"Tell me about yourself," she requested, "so that maybe I can figure out why I feel this way about you."
"What way?"
A burr of anxiety snagged her voice: "Don't you feel it?"
He did. The eld skyle had prepared him for it, and it still amazed him. The sublime tranquillity of a summer afternoon prismed all his thoughts and feelings. He had been saturated with strangeness since he had been snatched out of his former life-and now the luster of caring emotion -welling in him, the most natural and primal emotion of any child, seemed strangest of all. "I'm in love."
They laughed a lot during that flight. The tight space of that pod seemed as big and full of promise to Carl as the entire room of May. He told her about himself. Not everything, of -course. He left out his balding head and flat feet. But he told her the high
lights: St. Tim's, college, the brokerage house in Manhattan, and the Blue Apple. He was surprised by how little there was.
And how interested she was in it.
Evoe never finished her story. She was one and a half cycles old and had completed many initiations. She had been born into an ancient Foke clan with a legacy of fealties to other clans. That meant she had spent half of her first cycle serving and learning from various and scattered Foke tribes. She had attained a great deal. Her most valuable lesson was learning to surrender the leadership role she had been born to. Over the years of her ancestral servitude, when she cleaned the lodges and reared the children of other noble clans, she was immersed in and fell in love with the simpleness of living. After her thrall was over, she stayed close to that love, and she lived longer than any other in her family. She was the first wizan in their known history. And that had been a great humiliation to her clan.
Among the Foke, wizan were honored. They were allowed to write books. But warrior leaders, chiefs, were glorified. They alone could carry the guns smithied in the Foke's secret armories. The two were never found together in one person, though Chief Wizan was a popular character in Foke myth and lore. Foke chiefs were bound by law to take the Foke's greatest risks, and they always led in battle. None ever lived more than half a cycle.
Evoe suspended the telling of her story when the flyer landed on a skyle cliff among spires of fir. The pod went black.
"We'll send the flyer back," her soft voice said in the darkness. "They'll only be able to trace us to here-and by the time they do, we'll be long gone. Here, take this." She handed him the gun she had taken from her guard. "I have one, too.
And some
naphthal pods--firebombs. I had come to Rhene armed, to free my kin."
Carl took the gun and tucked it in his belt.
The canopy bolts hissed open, and sharp alpine air flushed in.
Carl rolled out of the flyer and stood up among bleached grass drooping over a whispering plunge. His eyes looked like raisins, and Evoe sang with laughter.
"Don't worry. I'm not going to lose you now," she said before shoving him into space.
They fell a hundred meters before the fallpath caught them firmly, and with her arm around him, they rose toward clouds red and blue as bruises. They flew through the bucketing wind a far spell before they launched into a calm warm flow where they could talk. The giant terrain rivered by on all sides. They kept themselves positioned so that the dark Rim side was above them, and they could look down into the glimmering reaches of the Eld. She continued her story, and Carl learned about the Werld.
Evoe had lived in Rhene for over a quarter of a cycle, and she knew the intensities of pleasure that kept people there. The zotl had developed the bliss collar, a -rapture device that magnetically stimulated the limbic 'brain and wove the cellular quilt of the body with pleasure while leaving the mind clear. Like almost everyone in Rhene, she had worn the bliss collar, and she never cared then that her name was in the lottery or that people she knew had lost and been taken to Galgul.
She had survived all seven drawings and probably would still be wearing the collar if she hadn't witnessed a Foke attack. She saw only the end of it, after the insurgents had already succeeded in blasting their way through the barriers of the Well, the prison where people were gathered before being sent on to Galgul. The prisoners had already been freed, and she'd seen
their flyers falling down the sky away from the incandescence of Rhene. To cover their escape, a band of Foke had stayed behind and held off the androbs with a commandeered laser cannon.
Evoe had stood on the cordon line with the crowd and cheered as the attack squad of androbs was shattered by the blinding bolts from the cannon. After the prisoners were well gone, the Foke guerrillas dispersed. But by then, the zotl had arrived.
She had never seen the zotl before. They came in their own flyers, designed for their alien anatomies. Their flyers were man-long needles that' cut through the air almost faster than seeing and could stop or shift direction instantly. Within moments, they had stunned all of the guerrillas still in Rhene, and they carried them up the Cloudgate and into Galgul.
The Foke had lost seven fighters and had freed over a hundred prisoners. The sacrifice and the victory profoundly affected Evoe, and shortly afterward she left Rhene and returned to the wilds. The last half cycle, she had been traveling among the Foke clans, living again their nomadic rituals.
While she spoke, Evoe modified the way Carl held his limbs so that he was more comfortable with the sensation of freefalling and rising with the vallations of space. Foke as experienced as Evoe could read the flightlanes in the stream curves of clouds and the shapes of skyles. What had looked to Carl to be a mere moiling of clouds among the suspended jumble of skyles began to take on the continuity and direction of a terrain as she talked. He also learned to tell at a distance the warm skyles and clouds from the cold by the flowlines of the wind.
Evoe guided them toward a skyle and held him by his belt as they broke free of the fallpath with strong bodytwists. Gravity steepened at once, and he would have hit the approaching rock ledge with his face if Evoe hadn't righted him at the last moment.
They ate owlroots and slamsteaks. The slamsteak was a large snail found on some skyles.
The Foke ricocheted the snail off the fallpath so that it slammed back into the rocks hard enough to break its sturdy shell. Braised and seasoned with local herbs, it was tender as lobster and sapid as filet mignon.
They jumped from skyle to skyle eating as they went and working on Carl's blundering flying skills.
When Carl had worn out his anxiety about jumping and landing and he was familiar enough with the sky geography to begin to see the fallpaths among the clouds and floating mountains, they landed to rest.
Lying together on their backs with clouds building into great treeshapes, violet and yellow, and the trees themselves cloudlike, their branches boiling in the green wind, Carl was happy. Maybe it was the first time in his life that he was happy. Or maybe he'd just never been awake enough to notice it when it had happened before. But he was so happy that he could hear a song playing inside him that he'd never heard before.
Carl had never been musically inclined, yet that interior melody was vivid enough for him to hum. Evoe reached into the coral-stitched pocket of her black robe and took out a devil's harp, a blond wood instrument with small internal windbags and pipes. She caught his tune and chivvied it in the wind with the rustling branches and the hickett of tree toads. It was the first and simplest song he had ever created, and i
t was
stamped with the common melodic traits of his time on earth:
rootweave of the nearest tree. For a while, he shifted his gaze from the jazz of her laughter-shimmying breasts to the pointillism of blue-and-green trees-from the shadow of pubic hair behind the hem of her chemise to the slow mandala of -a dew-spider in the shaded grass.
Her heart bobbed like a cork.
They touched each other at the crest of the right moment, and silks of feeling tickled the spaces of hunger inside them.
The taste of her salt skin mingled with the power turning within, and everything loosened, splintered, multiplied.
When they made love, they became each other. She felt his brimming strength, the magnetism in his bones, and she saw herself as if through his eyes backsprawled in a ruffle of grass and horsemint. His eyes closed, and he felt the gorging magic filling him like light, tightening through the lens of his awareness to the burning focus of an orgasm. The resin smell of crushed grass spelled over them.
Solitudes opened, and they rocked back into their own bodies, the sex between them liquid, filling the dark gnarled foot of the tree with a charmed, fleece odor.
Her limbs were straggled, sticky, humming with dreams.
She held to his arms, and the glittering sounds of their bodies and the surge of feeling in the nimbus of their flesh opened her completely to the moment: She felt the slippery green moss floating out of the treeroot beneath her, and the other skyles iced with the Werld light, sun-high, swelling the tree bark, rising the sap.
A claret light sheened among the clouds when they came out of each other. She had seen through him, beyond his adamized body and past life on earth to the cryptic silence in him. Carl didn't know how else to explain it. He felt that they had interpenetrated each
other's souls. They had heard each other's stories-now they, felt each other's inner life.
He remembered the eld skyle telling him about Evoe, and how she would be mated to him by the very molecular nature of his body. And he was at peace. He knew this woman truly loved him just for him. She lay across his warm chest, and the smell of her hair reminded him of rain. How could the eld skyle have known? Was it telepathy, that it had used to select Evoe for him? The moment was too wonderful for him to think that thought through. The light was ripe, the rock shadows somnolent. Later, he would wonder why he had accepted his new life so mindlessly. Several lizardwings flicked through the plum sky like meteors.
In Other Worlds Page 6
