“Yes, sir.” The pale face went no paler. The boyish brow did not furrow. Spry merely regarded Parma attentively.
“Yes, sir? So simply? It will not feel so simple when I pull your landing papers. How would you like to spend the remainder of your tenure aboard ship, never setting foot on a platform?”
“I would not like it, sir.”
“But you could live with it, is that it? Well, do not be so sure.”
Still the pilot graced him with his space-eyed glance, saying gravely: “I am not sure of anything, sir. And as for what I did back there, I do not regret it.”
There was a long silence, at the end of which Parma Kerrion began to laugh.
Then the laughter stopped, abruptly. Parma said: “You might answer a question for me: why is no one willing to put the matter of Shebat aside?”
“
Possibly
, because there is no positive proof, no body. The
Marada
is, or was, as capable a ship as the art allows—”
“I know that. I pay the bills.”
“Well, that enters an element of doubt: even if Shebat were twice the novice she seemed, the
Marada
had the power and the knowledge to bring them out, somewhere.” Spry felt his peril; also, a certain degree of regret: he had the missing piece Parma Kerrion was seeking; it was a case full of low-denominational scrip that had bought sanctuary for girl and ship alike. Spry had come to respect the consul general, though he would have preferred not to.
“So, you hold to the opinion that she did take the ship?”
Carefully: “What else?”
“I am asking you, who display so many intelligencers’ skills that I have begun to think you missed your calling.” The old man rubbed his brow, which shone dully.
“If the light is bothering you, sir. . . ?” Before his passenger could answer. Spry closed his eyes momentarily. When he opened them, they were bathed in the colored luminescences of the infrared and apparent-light star maps, the peak-reading indicators, and the green running-lights. Otherwise, the control room was in total darkness, except over the emergency exits over their heads where ruddy arrows shone. Spry’s shoulders came down and his jaws unclenched.
“I asked a question,” came out of the dark on his right, where a man much his senior rested, divested of years by the wash of indicator-spill, which ran along his skin catching highlights, erasing decades with its warm red-tinted glow.
“I gave you an answer. The only other one is Marada’s, who may be right since he is living in with your enemy.”
Why did I say that? Caution . . . No, not you,
Bucephalus!
“Speaking of Marada, how good a pilot is he?”
“Good. He might have been exceptional. He still could be, if he took the guild and his oath seriously.” Parma Kerrion’s eyes seemed black and flat in his rejuvenated face; and wise. Spry felt his palms begin to weep.
“Is that the quarrel between you?”
“A part of it. I would prefer not to discuss our differences. There are some things that are eternal.” He leaned forward and slapped a green oblong, though he had not needed to:
Bucephalus
complained softly that this was so. Spry had only a brief word to spare for the ship, which sensed his agitation and was running systems checks, seeking to calm him. In the semidark, all the boards flared and subsided in sequence: left to right— yellow—blue—red—blue—yellow—green.
“You do not approve of us, do you?” came Parma’s sibilance.
“That is not germane.”
“So? It would have been excruciatingly pertinent, if it so colored your thinking as to make you receptive to Labayan advances. I am not unaware of that, or ungrateful.”
“Belay your gratitude. You have contracted for a modicum of loyalty along with my services. To the extent that my guild oath demands it, I am a good Kerrion minion.”
“But no more.”
“No, no more. I rather liked that little planet girl.” Too obvious? Spry held his breath, after the words had escaped. Why was he taking these chances? If he had told the old man what he needed to know about Jebediah, the risk would be no greater.
“So did I,” said Parma bleakly.
The two subsided into silence. Spry needed to give his full attention to the
Bucephalus
, who was only now beginning to recover from the lack of confidence that had accompanied the ship’s selective loss of memory and its attendant overhaul. It had hurt Spry more than anything he had had to do in this heinous interlude; more than the entire Shebat Kerrion affair. It had hurt him because he could not truly justify the cost to the
Bucephalus
, an innocent who should not have had to pay Spry’s bill, especially when the item purchased was an increment of human freedom for a human entity, and nothing to do with the cruiser except that it had been victimized by the one human from whom it had the right to expect protection, even love. Spry loved
Bucephalus
, as a pilot must love his cruiser. He loved the strength of him, a command cruiser’s strength; the quietude of his power; the discerning logicality that abided within. To have betrayed the
Bucephalus’s
trust in him was unthinkable. Having done so, for whatever cause, he had been busy making reparations rather than thinking about it. Only the fact that he had so recently taken over the ship from his retiring predecessor had allowed him that latitude: if he had had the
Bucephalus
from blank infancy, he never would have been able to do it; it would have been like bulk-erasing himself. But the retiring pilot’s teary-eyed unwillingness to put a part of himself to death, Spry’s empathetic, half-drunken boast that he could ship the
Bucephalus
without an individuality-wipe, plus
Bucephalus’s
disconcerting conception of himself as a male, had not allowed Spry to keep his distance emotionally. He had known when he ordered the
Bucephalus
to discard portions of its memory that Spry himself would never be able to forget that he had done so. He had raced against time, putting his plan into operation as quickly as possible, knowing that soon enough he would sorrow over what he had done, but that if he waited even a few days longer, he would not be able to act at all. So he had bought himself endless grief and reparations; every hesitancy or sign of bemusement in the
Bucephalus
struck him to the quick. Neverendingly, he was searching ways to rebuild the cruiser’s self-esteem; neverendingly, he shored it up with bricks stolen from his own wall. It might have been this that led him to speak carelessly to Parma Kerrion about Labayan “enemies” and his own fondness for Shebat. Should things go amiss, what he had done to the
Bucephalus
would have been done to no purpose. That, he could not suffer to occur.
What Parma could not suffer to occur was even then in progress.
A raffish young man in consular blacks strode through the luridly lit maze of seventh-level street, scattering the inebriated and infirm who whined and chanted in dim rubescent alleys. Once a hand dared to reach out toward him, clutching. Even as he spat upon it, he was past. Nothing: a gnarled hand, protruding from a crusty sleeve.
No other challenged his command of the street, though low-livers spilled onto it from adjacent bars. The lights leered, polychrome, but the man looked neither right nor left, only into the clear space about him. Behind his back, he heard a lorry braking in the drop-shaft, garbled shouts and pounding feet as pedestrians raced to hail it.
A woman screamed, ahead and off to his right, across an intersection. As he turned onto that narrow side street, a citrine sign illumined her at pulse-beat intervals, struggling beneath a shapeless form. He walked on, unconcerned.
The thwack of his boot heels changed pitch as he quit the street, changed rhythm as he descended a short flight into a basement court.
He knocked, his gloved fist aurora’d in a steady rufous glow pierced by distant citrine flashes.
A hum and a scarlet blink from the door told him he was being scanned.
He pulled at the fingers of one gloved hand with the other in an unconscious, measured fashion. As he was peeling the body of the black glove from his hand, the door was opened by a slight youth in tattered livery carefully matched to the peeling somber walls so exposed.
The youth smiled: the man had been here before; tipped well. He stepped aside, with bowed head and murmured welcome ushering the man within.
“Busy night?” the man guessed, handing the youth his gloves and cloak, inclining his head slightly to the left, wherefrom muted revelry wisped around a blind corner.
“Yes, sir,” affirmed the youth, flattered to be spoken to by the sorrel-haired man. His hands moved deftly over the elegant cloak, feeling the raised pattern of its blazon. “Have the dream of your heart, sir,” he well-wished the client, who laid a softly intimate glance on him.
“Thank you. I am sure I will,” said the man with a hieratic smile, before striding around the corner beyond the doorkeeper’s view. From the opposite direction, somewhere down the scabrous hall in the dancers’ quarters, a querulous voice called the boy’s name. With a last glance after the uniformed man, the doorkeeper hung the cloak in his coatroom, and went to see what Harmony wanted.
Rounding the blind corner was like stepping into a dream: it was meant to be, but that did not lessen the effect of star-stippled eternity-walls receding forever on his right and left; of misty, churning ceilings that cushioned perspective; of yielding, hand-deep carpet which might have been that very opalescent mist come to ground.
At the corridor’s end, bathed in overhead amber light that spilled in a perfect circle, was the concierge at her rostrum, stark and black as the obsidian console wrapping her round.
Her white eyeballs gleamed like inset shells. Bright teeth behind purple lips sparkled as she smiled in recognition. Silver nails paved with gems flashed as she cued her console. “Who writes the book of dreams?” she murmured, putting new meaning into an old formula, lowering her head so that each recurled hair glistened.
“To each his own,” responded the man.
“Who dreams with the dreamer?”
“Aba Cronin.”
Her serpentine fingers danced amid the lighted studs. “How long will the dreaming last?”
No answer. The concierge looked up. “How long—?”
The man reached out his hand and when he had withdrawn it, a large denominational coin lay there. “The night.”
The woman communed with her console. Computation and schedule duly entered and confirmed, she touched a light. “Number fourteen,” she directed him, offering a key.
“Enter” flashed greenly on the featureless-seeming wall to her left. A section of that wall drew back.
“Your change, sir!”
“Keep it,” came the low, sonorous voice from the man’s broad, retreating back.
Before him was the source of the sounds he had been hearing: a common room built of crystalline shadows and filled with miasmic smoke. He went on by without an inward glance, slipped past two engrossed couples seemingly leaning on empty, star-strewn space without attracting their notice.
One more move in the maze, and he was among the dreamers and their dancers, secreted behind closed cubicles’ doors. When he found the door he sought, he inserted the thin, single-use key in a slit below the number fourteen glowing steadily in LEDs. The door clicked, opened to reveal a twice man-length cubicle containing a circular, dusky recess that seemed to hover in deepest, glittering space. He stepped out onto the apparent nothingness, and behind his back the door sighed shut.
The dream dancer rose up like a phantom from the void beyond the recess, and came to meet him, feet sure on the star-strewn floor. Crystal bangles on her ankles tinkled with each step, more about her wrists chiming a counter-rhythm. She was clad from throat to toe in a netherworld net sparkling with starlight so that when she moved against the eternity-walls she was difficult to see—a void-siren hovering in deepest space with only its face to mark it. The face was pale, amid a crown of snaking pearled braids so tightly bound up that her eyes seemed to slant slightly. Gray and cavernous, dwarfing all artful decoration, the eyes of Shebat Kerrion held his.
Without breaking stride, the whole starred extent of her shivered. Fine nostrils flared, shuddered. A tongue darted out and wet pouting lips. Then he took a step to meet her.
She took his hands in her void-clothed ones, and he felt the silken net slither against his palms. “Welcome, dreamer. Who seeks the dream of his heart?”
“You know me,” he said gently. “Who dances for me?”
“And you know me, also,” she whispered. “Do we dance?”
“We do.”
She slid her hands out from his, and her eyes out from his, led him down three steps into the soft, upholstered center of the pit. In the middle of the low-walled, dusky circle they sat like two castaway space-mariners in a rubber raft, with the sea between the stars twinkling all around. Between them was a meter-long black box, oblong, in the top of which two fillets of golden wire rested, each in its circular groove.
Without taking her eyes off his face, the dream dancer lifted both circlets from their resting place. Holding one out to him, she said so softly: “What is the dream of your heart?”
“I rather thought you knew that, too,” he said, taking one and holding it before him. “Improvise.”
Something writhed in her eyes, something that dragged from his lips: “When last we met, I wanted to possess you. But there was no echo of my desire in you. Give me the dream of my heart: what you withheld in life. Come to me, weak with desire, as I was then.”
Slowly the girl nodded, not looking away but not seeing him. From somewhere a voice came out of her, but not from her lips, which were motionless: “It will be your dream.” With the fillet half-raised, so that she gazed at him from behind it, she said, “A night is long. Have you a second dream?”
Chaeron Kerrion raised his own fillet to a height with Shebat’s. There was to that movement the hint of a salute, and to his voice a thickness that made it nearly as husky as hers. “We spend the first half of the night with your dream, one you make for me. The second half we will fill with one I have made for you.”
The two circlets hovered in their hands, close but not touching. A music came softly, waves crashing on a distant beach. “You would trust me with your fate?” she wondered.
“As you will with yours.”
The girl’s eyes squeezed shut. In a convulsive movement, she raised the fillet and settled it on her brow. Motionless, barely breathing, she awaited him.
Chaeron hesitated, savoring the moment. Against the slate upholstery, her form was cleariy limned. She had become more woman than giri, yet a hint of boyishness still lingered despite the softening four months’ time had wrought. With her eyes closed, the piquant beauty of her features was no longer overshadowed. For a moment, he almost forsook his resolve in favor of the ageless feelings her presence stirred deep within him. All the fine hairs on his body lifted and fell. Then in one swift motion he raised the resilient, warm fillet and felt it cuddle against his temples as it fit itself to his brow.
Then he walked on a sandy shore bespattered with salt spray. His feet were bare and moist and sand stuck to them, sucked wistfully as he raised them, and wept foam as he brought them down again where an old wave just receding had laved a gleaming dark expanse slick and smooth. Young waves far out to sea sang his name as they approached, rearing up their spumy heads to see him. Low horns soughed beyond the rim of the world; the waves raced to him with word. A flock of trebling birds preceded them. White with wings blurred gray, they wheeled above his head.
Without slackening his pace, he peered up at them, singing in the awesome wide sky which betrayed no comforting recurve, but ever expanded.
Dream dance
, he recalled, tasting the salt sprayed onto his lips. He looked down again at the bubbles that squelched out from under his heels as he drove them into the sand. The legs that drove the feet wore loose homespun, trousers the color of the newly washed shore. They were rolled up to his knees. He let his gaze continue upward; felt as well as saw the drawstring knotted below his navel. Still walking just beyond the waves’ caress in time to the sea’s song, it seemed that he had been walking forever; would walk, until entropy quelled the ocean’s tide.
He took stock of his gilt-haired trunk, seeing even an old burn from his childhood, low on his right side. The medallion Parma had given him when he turned sixteen beat chilly time against his solar plexus. He fingered the condensation on it, a grain of sand there, wondering at the complexity of the dream, inhaling the salt spray of a sea he had never seen under a sky he had never craved; so vast and diminishing. To his left there rolled the sea; to his right he passed dune after grass-caped dune.
Looking inland, he collided with her, grabbed her reflexively, struggled against gravity with her hot-cold flesh against his. Then her inexorable gaze like the thunderheads bubbling in off the ocean steadied him, and he held very still, his arms lightly around her.
“Do you like my song?”
“Oh yes.”
“Do you like my world?”
“It is so big—lonely.”
“I do not much like yours, either. But come, and we will make a smaller world together. And you will like it, I promise.”
Almost, he took it: her kiss, her choice, her dream as rendered. But his intention had been otherwise. With a bittersweet taste in his mouth, he whispered: “Not so easily, Shebat, nor so quickly done.”
“The dream-time is not so separate from your reality; what is done here echoes there.” Her hand pushed flat against his chest, between them.
“Good.” Then he kissed her, unclenching her teeth with his tongue, dissolving her resistance. He pushed her gently away, when that was done.
“Now I know why I brought you here,” she said through puffy lips, wiping them with her hand as she stepped back unsteadily like something wounded into a waxy-leaved forest that had not been there before.
He walked through the pungent, mossy grove, content to stroll in the live, whispering stands of trees which rayed moist golden light into artful shafts. She would appear between two bushes, lips apart, breast or thigh hidden by a brace of leaves. Eventually, her cheeks bore sparkling tears.
It was not until she reached out her fingers, entreating, her eyes full of the sorrow of the scorned, that he suffered her to come unto him.
When all he had longed to hear had been said, and what he longed to have done to him had been done without his speaking a single word on a bed of teal-headed mosses, she wept.
“This is no part of my dream,” he remarked, touching her lashes where a tear hung suspended, taking it onto his finger.
“Is it not?”
“You are undisciplined in your art, to question a client.”
“I have given you your dream, even in the place most besuited to it: that world where I was born.” Her cheek was on his shoulder, her face turned toward his. Eyes glittering with unshed tears glowed brighter, larger, until he found himself holding his breath lest the black pools suck it from him. “I am creator, here. Not you. Whatever I please, I can do. I can make you a snake or a frog; a mosquito alighting on my arm. If I choose to swat the life from you, what then?”
He shifted imperceptibly, managed a drawn smile.
“This is my place, as it has been the place of those like me for thousands of years. My kind has looked after yours over all the centuries, no matter that yours seeks to wipe us out. Had there been no single dweller on Earth to inherit the mage’s mantle, this place of power would still exist. One of your own would have been transmuted to fill it.”
“Are you threatening me, dream dancer?”
“I am warning you, stepbrother. Not for myself; I would not have bothered. I am just a girl. . . .”
“Or so it seems.”
She pushed up on one arm, regarding him narrowly. Then, slowly, she nodded. “Or so it seems. It seems also that it is on me to tell you not to thwart the dream dancers, for this place is alive and awake and will not respond kindly to being isolate and Entombed once again.”
“I must assume you are not talking about this physical grove, but the stuff out of which you have created it? if you did? Perhaps
I
did . . .”
She laughed, and began tearing at the braids bound up on top of her head. The verdegris, living light ran the contour of her breast, met its raised tip, swirled there. “Doubt me here, even?” The hair loosed, fell down around her face like a wave of black water. She leaned over him until the hair tickled his cheeks, until her fresh warm breath puffed against his lips and the smell of a sated woman tickled his nostrils. “Have you ever had a dream like this before?” she queried slowly in husky satisfaction.