“What is wrong?” breathed Julian down into her face, and kissed her staring eyes until her lids closed and a shudder racked her, and she turned her face into the crook of her arm. “What is wrong with her, Valery? Did I do something? What? What did I do?” He scrambled to his knees on the bed, crouching down by her head, stroking her hair.
She felt Valery’s touch, as sure as a master pilot’s must be, searching an answer in her nether parts. “Nothing you did, youngster.”
Julian sat back on his heels, his wide eyes seeking Valery’s. When they met, he rolled them upward, so that only the light blue of the bottom iris peeked out.
Valery shook his head and mouthed kisses. Julian bent over Shebat obediently. Under his kisses assaulting her lips, they capitulated. “There is no harm in this. It is nature’s way of seeing that the smart survive. That’s it. Let me show you. There. Better?” Her body said it for her; her mouth was full of Julian’s ardor.
Thus it was that she did not see Lauren come hesitantly among the celebrants, seeking Chaeron with her dream-box under her arm and her finest dancer’s spangles upon her willowy, classic form. She did not see Lauren until she felt a different, softer touch, and heard a silky sigh, and opened her eyes to see what it was that had roused her, hot-skinned and hungry. But when she saw, she screamed unintelligibly and shot up from among them like an ejection pod, hands clapped to the sides of her head, running blindly from room to room.
Chaeron found her huddled in a wing chair, sobbing brokenly in a tongue he had never bothered to learn. She shied from his touch as if burned, her head buried in her arms, knees drawn up, shaking from head to foot.
“Shebat, Shebat. It is nothing. Do not cry. You do not have to do anything you do not want to do.” He stood over her, uncertain as to whether to try to raise her up.
“I cannot. Oh, I cannot, and I would for you if I could.” She hiccoughed, stuttered brokenly: “Divorce me, if you must. I cannot, cannot—I tried—not her, too!”
Then he knew what to do, and he lifted her bodily in his arms, crooning, comforting, saying that she had misunderstood him if she thought he required any of what had come to pass from her, that he required only that she be happy with him, and content, and fulfilled. On the couch where they had slated their marriage vows into the record he set about proving all that he had said. At length, her shoulders ceased their shaking, and her face came out from under the black mist of her hair. Gray eyes glittered hungrily, so unveiled that he hesitated for a moment before he began to do their bidding.
But when he entered her, she forgot one thing, and lost another thereby. She forgot his name, while his burning pressed into hers. A wheel of men and moments spun before her inner sight. Wanting so desperately to name him, she could only remember who he was not. He was not Marada. Yet he plumbed her. A silent, mind-sent wail issued out of her, through sponge and space and time: Marada, help me. Forgive me.
Marada!
And she spun the wheel of identity again, for her body leapt under a man too different to be Marada even in fantasy, and she must name him, and claim him. . . .
But it was he that claimed her, driving even fantasy out of her, until there was room inside her for nothing but their conjoined ardor. And her memory.
She knew him then, oh yes. And she knew that she had tried to fit over him the aspect of his brother, and though the knowing made her body flame hotter, its fire was fueled with the last twigs of her innocence, that she had kept from even the hard men of Bolen’s town. And since those twigs had been her only hold on the person she had been, without them she was lost, spinning as she fell into an indeterminate future, hearing only the dirge her guilt wailed.
Marada Seleucus Kerrion squinted into the vanity mirror, trimming his beard carefully, as if this were any other day of his life, rather than most probably the last. His scissoring was sure, betraying no tremble. Black shearings fell into the white ceramic bowl like cinders. Automatically, before leaving, he cleaned them away.
He went into the plant-filled, white bedroom, knowing that he tracked water on the pristine, ankle-deep carpet, but not caring. He sat naked on the whisper-pink bed, waiting for his mental processes to overcome the shock that had had him running on instinct since he had been waked in the middle of the night by Madel’s smothered screams as her time came upon her.
Never before had his wits deserted him so completely in a crisis. Never before had they been gone so long. But were they truly gone? Or was he only unwilling to heed them? Every fiber of his body, every double-time heartbeat, screamed
run!
His thick, sour tongue wanted to scream it: denyed that, it refused to speak at all. He put his elbows on his knees and his palms over his ears and stared at the pile carpet between his bare feet, noting every tuft, a crumb, a ball of lint, seeking perspective.
The only one he found was:
“run.”
He tried becoming the crumb, but he kept seeing his first-born, small and red and straight of limb—and as blank and empty as a poem that will not scan.
He had never meant to impregnate Madel by live cover. He had never meant to touch her at all. But she had meant both, fervidly. And by all the best medical counsel, things were predicted to end well, both with the mother and with the child. As so often happens, the best medical counsel was wrong. . . .
It was most likely due to the fact that his son had been conceived in space, he told himself, not willing to accept the obvious: his sponge-hours had caught up with him; he could never father a normal child.
But when Madel so smugly announced that she was pregnant and that all was purported to be well with the fetus, he had wanted to believe her. He needed to discharge his obligation; his sense of arbitration made him weak before her rightful demand.
After all, Selim Labaya had been a sponge-pilot, and he had sired Iltani, a healthy and preeminently normal child; Iltani’s sister, whose wits were dull but adequate—
And
Madel, who from all accounts had been hale at her birth.
Could it not have been Madel’s contribution, rather than his own, that had caused their child to be unresponsive to the world they had brought him into?
Did it matter?
He was not sure that it did matter. He was more and more sure that the only counsel his mind could muster was the proper counsel, for he had seen Selim Labaya’s purpled, contorted visage. And he had seen Madel’s heartrending agony, her vain attempts to get the baby to flail, or cry, or even twitch. But it had lain like a doll with no batteries: all potential, no actualization.
He had found it impossible to stay with her once her father had come striding in all silent with murder in his eyes.
He had come back to his connubial suite, taken an ambient-water shower, attended his morning toilet, waiting for the reappearance of logic in his empty mind. But nothing came to attenuate the repeated command echoing within his skull:
run
.
He tried to fit an arbiter’s discernment over his situation:
run
.
There were a few hairs growing on the first joint of his right big toe, but not on his left. He sighed, threw himself backward so that he lay stretched out on the bed still musky from his wife.
“Hassid: Systems checks. Departure on my arrival.”
“Destination?”
came the cruiser’s feminine whisper in the back of his head.
“As logged: home.”
Had the cruiser sighed? Or was it his own relief? his mind playing tricks on him?
He put the thought aside: it was extraneous. He was embarked upon it now. All that remained was to make it to the slipbay.
He shot up and did not quite run across the bedroom, seeking his clothes. He did not think that he would actually be obstructed by Selim’s Shechem Guard, but he planned a circuitous route, calling it a shortcut, as he pulled on his old Kerrion black coveralls and chose an older pair of boots.
He hoped this wasn’t the start of a trade war. But if it were, he wanted to be on his own side—if he still had one. He was aware that Parma might think he had worsened the situation by bolting prematurely. But Parma had not seen Selim Labaya’s face. As an arbiter, Marada had been trained to know intent by scrutiny. He could tell if a man was lying at a glance. He knew Violence’s bitter halitosis. Fear’s feral smell. And he knew murder when he saw it.
The fact that Selim Labaya had just been cheated out of all he had expected to gain by wedding his daughter to the probable heir of Kerrion space
by no fault of Marada’s that Labaya himself did not share
—this had not mitigated Selim’s wrath.
Marada saw a cartoon image of himself trying to remind Labaya of their similarities in good arbitrational fashion while the Labayan sire smilingly decreed the length and breadth of Marada’s death.
He sounded a dry chuckle, since there were none to hear him, and pulled on the old boots. . . . He zipped the coveralls up to the base of his throat. He was taking nothing with him but the clothes he had on.
His body and mind were the only weapons he needed; the only ones he wanted.
He was not going to start any trouble.
He was also not going to die in this weed-choked joke of a habitational sphere.
He was aware that Selim Labaya would voice some strong objection to his wishes, should he have the chance. But the Jesters had not only thrown him into the bottomless pit, they had tossed a weighted rope after him: he could climb back out, if he could just grab it in time.
He already had flight clearance for this morning.
Madel was three weeks late. He had been going home for elections. It was whim, and some misplaced sense of responsibility, that had caused him to stop by Shechem on the way. . . .
Run!
Walk,
he counseled himself back,
it is safer.
He vaguely regretted that he did not regret leaving Madel to drown in her misery alone. But if he was right in his assessment of Labaya, he was saving her double agony. However much he had tried to discourage it, the brash, ill-favored girl, who had never loved even herself, loved him. If her father committed mayhem upon his person, under her very nose and because of what had come from her belly, how much worse would it be for her?
He walked out of the softly lit heiress’s suite and into a hall paneled in rare woods. He passed two liveried bodyservants, raised his hand to a bodyguard with whom he had shared a few drinks. The man’s face was stony, trying not to show that he knew about the abortive birth as the staff always knew everything that occurred in Shechem, instantaneously. . . .
His flesh started to crawl as he came in sight of the great doors leading out into the gardens. At the bottom of those steps would be a lorry he could command. . . .
The two doors drew back, the sensors recognizing him, honoring him as if nothing were amiss. Perhaps nothing was. . . .
Run!
He half-obeyed, lunging forward, then pulled himself up short. It appeared that he had tripped, only slightly, instantly recovering as he came out into the sharp hothouse light of Shechem. The steps were the broad kind that took a stride in between stairs. At their foot, the lorry shone coppery and smug; enclosed; tiny; hovering; ready.
He thanked Chance that it was one of the little bullet-shaped, automated multidrives, rather than a command lorry with wheels and sirens and drivers of the human sort. The perfumed air and the white light and the isolation of his racing metabolism gave all things a two-dimensional clarity. Sound was magnified: his boots cracked loudly on the hydrastone; the sigh of the contented doors reclosing behind his back was like a roused dragon’s roar.
The metal of the doorlatch chilled his hand. The lorry’s door hummed back. He crawled into black, padded shadow that danced blue and green after Shechem’s plant-favoring illumination.
The door sighed shut. The query tone chimed; he spoke his slipbay number, blinking until he could see clearly through the polarized windows. The little lorry glided off over the roadless Shechem terrain toward the drop-shaft under its Doric portico.
Marada’s stomach began to give up sporadic jets of scalding water. He concentrated on a bio-control that sent blood into his hands and feet. Gradually, his nerves quieted. The entrance of the lorry into the drop-shaft was a sudden attenuation of exterior light, a dark coolness through which he dived like a half-smothered fish released at the last instant to plunge bottomward. . . .
But he was not the only fish in the sea: lights floated upward toward him in the parallel shaft; lights followed him downward. Two blips on his traffic screen confirmed his visual sighting. He flipped the bilious screen off.
Collisions were avoided by traffic control, not individual vehicles. Collisions could also be decreed, if Labaya wanted him badly enough. If he wanted Marada that badly, Marada was already dead, only had not found out yet.
Which would explain the emptiness he felt. . . . But he had felt it before: when Iltani, his betrothed, had died. He vaguely considered that there must be some hidden thing awry within him, that he could not truly grieve. Maybe that was what was wrong with the baby, only magnified: the father could not grieve; the son could not grieve. . . .
Lords, he was tired. Tired of Labayan intrigues and space-end squalor, and meting out high-handed justice to the cast-off scrubs of society, disowned but illegally managing to survive.
Though he knew his own family to be little better than that one he had so disrupted merely by trying to be kind, so sorely beset, he sought them. An old lie can be a comfort, faced with a new, ravening truth . . . he had never really wanted to find out if he would truly have to pay the pilot’s price. He had banked sperm on Lorelie. Why had he let Madel dissuade him from fulfilling her desire for children in the only prudent way?
But she had been revolted, unwilling to be “cheated”. . . . Now his only chance was to get clear of Shechem before the old man shook off his grief long enough to realize what Marada must do, and move to prevent him.
The red-glowing drop numbers flashed by outside the window with comforting regularity, each a milestone which he used to shore up the battlements of his courage.
He had never had such a bad year.
His luck was bound to change. Nothing lasts forever, except perhaps sponge.
The little lorry’s hum heightened. Below the floor, supergravity pads would be glowing, adjusting for a smooth exit onto level one. Like a sailor, he shifted imperceptibly as the lorry took the out-turn and moved laterally instead of vertically.
He flipped the traffic scope on; one blip had taken the exit tunnel. But then, there was no place else for it to go, save back up. Beneath their feet lay the guts of Shechem; ahead, her navel.
Like Draconis, Shechem’s slipbay had no rotational gravity, just supergravity to hold body to putative ground. Less than a half-kilometer away, beneath the gray crystal sheets stronger than space-steel, was zero gravity and the maw of night. . . .
The
Hassid
was already positioned at the launch tube that would spiral them down and out of Shechem and Selim Labaya’s hands. He could have kissed her smiling face, greeting him as ever from beneath his license numbers stenciled left of the port. As he entered, he patted her painted, upturned breasts, half-visible beneath her mystic’s veil.
The port hatch secured, its red light greening. He ran then. He charged the control room door which barely made way for him, so agitated that he spoke out loud to the cruiser:
“Home! Go! Now, Hassid!”
“I have no final green,”
the cruiser spoke with her voice, worriedly.
“Screens are still up in the outer bay.”
Marada, slapping the panel before him, exploded: “Move!” He armed her turrets: a flaming tongue of laser-fused destruction could now vaporize the vacuum screens at Hassid’s command.
“Satisfied?”
A gust of acceleration pushed him back into his couch, even as a thunder and a shudder came forward from the rear of the cruiser. Ahead of them a devil’s eye of fire purified the hatch-bay just before
Hassid
lunged through it, all her alarms ringing.
Shechem Authority’s channel squawked and stuttered. Marada silenced it. The damage bells rang. Around the waist of the circular control room indicators seared toward red. All else was darkness. He breathed a deep, shaky sigh, assessing the damage.
“Seal the storage bay off. I will go in there and plug things up later.”
No answer.
“Hassid?”
“They . . . fired . . . on us,”
the cruiser said incredulously.
“I know, baby, believe me.” He flicked his eyes around ruefully. “Nothing that cannot be fixed. Just get me home and I’ll have you gold-plated.”
“I slated that,”
she warned. Then:
“We are receiving a good deal of verbal abuse. I assume you do not want it through the speakers. It is quite foul, the usual outboards’ overstatement. . . . By my calculations they cannot catch us—”
“Why do I ever leave you?”
“I am sure I do not know, Marada, Are you hurt?”
“No, why?” He was feeding a request for recircuiting of his air purification equipment through to her as he talked. The colored lights made his hands ephemeral as they passed over them in the dark.
“Your metabolism is upset. We are speaking aloud: you do not want me close to you.”
“Not right now,” he admitted. “Outboards’ troubles. I am not fit for your company, not yet. Is there any way we can get into sponge a little earlier?”
“As I was saying when you interrupted me: they cannot catch us, but they could be there when we come out into spacetime; our ETA is prelogged. If we went in now, we could shake off any possible pursuit—”
A screen flashed, lurid with her impatience that he would not open his mind to her, showing her proposed flight plan.
He had never seen anything quite like it before.
He checked it against his instinct, complemented her, and got ready to step out of his human person and into the great racing fish that cut the waters of space and time. When he was almost fit to navigate, he opened up to her, letting his body slump and his mouth go slack, trusting her sparkling touch to do the rest.
He looked out at spacetime through her “eyes” which knew it as a grid of glowing forces, waves and densities, tides and courses, straits dark and pulsing, narrows cold and sharp like thorns. He shivered and felt the numbness that marked her injured tail. Amputation phantoms whispered where hull used to be. Her sadness was salt, chalybeate, popping like blue sparks in the mouth/skin that was both their outer hull and their inner. Her joy at receiving him nuzzled close, sweet-breathed, warm. Every magnetic caress coursing around her was for him. Her power; the sparkle/thrill/heat/taste of ambient space sizzling in her wake: these were his also. They dove and dipped, wriggling, one creature racing, its own exhilaration spurring it on. The subtle speed/tickle quickened. Burning needles sluffed off their armor; they shot spongeward at nearly light-speed, then jackknifed, spun and leapt.
Green is sponge and cool like nightbreeze, going everywhere and nowhere, the birth of time not even warming it, no chaos warning it, more eternal than our little wriggle of a universe no greater to it than the explosion of a single impulse toward thought in the godhead’s brain.
Sponge smiled her cool, marble smile, taking them to her bosom, carrying them with giant soundless strides across the ages. Everywhen rolled like landscape below, some fields plowed and some heights virgin. Marada and
Hassid
cuddled in the embrace of the eternal traveler. What more could be asked by mind than to meet its mother? Neither looked beyond their comfort, both suckled the penultimate teats. From the same womb, man and machine; from the same mind, life and death. From the same song are sprung the waves that wash the universe up onto eternity’s beach, and those that will lave it back again.
What more might man and machine wish?
We wish a place in space and time, far from near,
they answered the mother together.
Ah, yes. Here we are
. . . the mother sighed, amenable, but regretful that her children wandered so.