“Then why are you bringing it up?” Shebat snapped, whirled on her heel, and stormed away toward the control room.
She was yet hovering there, a leg thrown up on the padded bumper of the master console, when Harmony, the dream dancer, waddled—lugubrious, piebald, and threatening—into view.
“Harmony!”
“You!” In translucent mil, her bespotted form gleamed, grotesque. “You have some questions to answer and some recompense to make! Sit down.” Behind her, two space-enders with long jaws and pursed frowns entered.
All three bore down on Shebat.
Leaning over her, so that the black/brown/red/white bull’s-eye between her breasts showed its every mole. Harmony rasped: “Let’s start with Softa. Then maybe we’ll get around to my dream dancers.” The face thrust close:
“Now!”
Shebat, protesting, tried to rise. Harmony’s spatulate hand on her chest pushed the girl back down.
“Now!”
Or you’ll be dead as that dream dance of yours! What have you done to Softa?”
Beyond Harmony’s expanse,
Marada’s
meters began to peak.
“Julian!” Shebat wailed.
A slap across the mouth silenced her. “Forget him; he can’t hear you. And don’t give me that horrified Kerrion look, neither. We won’t hurt ‘im. Not him. He’s worth keeping alive. You’d better convince me that you are, too, dearie, ‘cause I’d dearly love to space you and see if you’ll turn into a siren, or just turn blue!”
Shebat fingered her swelling lip gingerly, felt a wetness, and took her finger away. It was rouged with blood.
“I thought you liked me,” Shebat whispered slowly, her eyes on her own trembling hands, digging in her lap.
“Liked you? Liked a traitor who would walk out and leave us all to be sterilized and deported without even a
word? Like you?
Like I like your
Kerrion
boyfriend, your
Kerrion—”
The epithet “Kerrion” had broken free of restraint, trebling into a throaty scream, then was visibly swallowed up. The gelatinous breasts of the troupe mistress quivered, then were still. In a different, canny voice she continued:
“Now, you just tell us what you did to Softa, and help us
un
do it, and we’ll forget the rest of it.”
Though Shebat did not in the least believe Harmony, she wanted to tell her what would bring Softa back from faraway dreaming. The trouble was that she did not know.
When Valery Stang raced into space-end in
Danae
with two stolen cruisers close behind, no one had made any progress in uniting Softa David Spry’s body with his dreaming mind. The
Bucephalus
remained patched in to
Marada
; Softa David remained on board. They did not dare move him, being unable to foresee what the result of that might be. Shebat and Julian, too, remained in
Marada
, at space-anchor: Shebat maintained
Marada’s
control of
Bucephalus
; Spry’s plight maintained the space-enders’ control of Shebat.
“Pleasure to see you. Lady Kerrion,” said Valery, twinkling eyes softening his hatchet face. His lank hair was clubbed back. He still wore Kerrion black-and-reds. When he turned to wave out the two space-enders who followed Shebat everywhere she went on
Marada
, she saw
Danae’s
device and call letters were embroidered on his back.
Amazingly, the ubiquitous space-enders, obedient, disappeared.
Shebat felt annoyance, welcomed it, so long had it been since she had felt anything but the disorientation of entrapment.
“How is it that you, loyal pilot of my husband, can command space-enders?”
Valery Stang chuckled, “Come on, girl. Let’s not play the ingenuous Kerrion. It’s the middle of the third millennium, and we’re all thieves in the night. It’s just the night that’s bigger. You left your Kerrion prerogatives behind when you joined us—”
“I joined Softa,” Shebat replied frostily. “Not you or yours. And had I been considering it, the treatment I have been shown at the hands of these . . . pirates . . . would have convinced me I had been mistaken. I want—”
“No one cares what you want,” broke in Valery, more gently than fit his words. “These ‘pirates’ fan the last spark of freedom remaining in all the halls of man. You are here on their sufferance. Your survival depends upon their good will.”
“Good will?”
It was Shebat, this time, whose incredulous laughter rang out around
Marada’s
control room. “
Marada
and I depend on each other for our survival. Don’t worry about
us
.”
“Look, Shebat. Harmony loves Spry like a mother loves her only pup. It was Spry who got her out of here and set her up in the Consortium. You can’t blame her.”
“Can’t I? False creature who has turned upon me: I curse her name as she has bespattered mine! I spit upon her spirit, and my spittle is acid—”
“By the last Jest, I had forgotten you.” Valery’s long-fingered hand stroked his nose, hiding his smile. “Let’s not get emotional. . . . I have to be going, posthaste. I came here to ask a favor.” He leaned against the master console.
“No favors.” Her lip curled.
“Gods, you’re beautiful. All right, no favors. A deal, maybe.”
“Go on.” She worried her hair, discomfited.
“I’ve the arbiter
Marada’s
son with me. I’d like to transfer him over here. He’d be better off with you.
Marada’s
got the facilities.”
“Better off with me? I cannot control even who comes and goes on my own ship.” The exaggeration rang hollow even to her own ears: she could be free of space-end and space-enders in a moment, merely by commanding
Marada
elsewhere.
“Shebat, please.” The eyes behind those words stayed her objections. “He’ll be safer with you. I have no experience with children, let alone sick infants. And the arbiter has sown only ill-will here. Besides, he’s Kerrion; you’re Kerrion. It’s your place.”
Safer, Sick infant? That child of a loveless bed?
She almost said all of these but
Marada’s
cruiser-thought intervened, prodded, retired. She said: “Very well. What benefit do you offer in exchange?”
“I’ll intercede with Harmony. They’ll leave you alone. You and Julian will both receive passes, interim space-ender status.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. I don’t want that. I want these people off my ship, and off
Bucephalus
, I want nothing to do with space-end.”
Valery shrugged. “Dramatic, but impractical. Very well, you want nothing to do with them, and they want nothing to do with you. It would be easy enough to arrange, but for the cruisers, and Spry. They do want the cruisers, and somehow or other they feel that Spry’s . . . affliction . . . is your fault. Is it?”
She spat at him. He wiped his cheek, which turned red as she watched. The veins at his temples bulged, pulsed blue.
“Shall I take that as affirmation? The senior dancer of Harmony’s troupe swears that when he was teaching you, odd and terrible things went on. Chaeron says you do strange things with your hands, and I don’t mean the obvious sort of things. Things that color the air . . . ?”
“So, you are here at Harmony’s behest, after all. Very well,” she said, feigning resignation. “Take me to Softa, and I will try to undo what has been done. Bring the child before me, also. But I will suffer no more violence from these criminals, nor their presence. Any evil visited upon me, I will turn back on the sender.” She leaned close, whispering through parted lips: “Keep them away from me, Valery, or they will know no more than Softa.”
“So you
did
do that?” There was a drawing back of Valery’s head, deeper into the protection of his body. Shebat could almost see the superstitious chill tickling the man’s flesh.
Her nails dug into her thigh, pain the only antidote to the smile threatening to break from cover. “No, I did not do it. But it is possible I could undo it, given the chance.”
“It will take time to convince the authorities here. Meanwhile, I’ll have the infant brought over.”
“As you will,” Shebat dismissed it. She was not in the least concerned with the child, she told herself, not wanting to accept the animosity she felt for Madel Labaya’s child. She was most interested, however, in getting herself and Julian out of space-end. By now, even her foster brother must be ready to admit that this was no place for Kerrions. If only Softa did not lie in
Bucephalus
. . .
She was so filled with scheme and resentment, she did not pursue the question of why Valery was anxious as to the child’s safety.
When it was delivered to her, in a little container like a miniature ejection capsule, she ceased thinking of anything else at all.
He was so small, so still, so peaceful, yet sad with tubes in his nose.
He was red-skinned and black-haired and resembled Parma more than either his father or mother.
She looked in through the transparent shell at him, feeling her sinuses rustle, the first prelude to tears. It was not his size or his sleeping, or even that he was Marada’s that was saddest: saddest was that no one knew his name.
The nameless son of her beloved neither flailed nor wept. He lay unmoving and unmoved by life’s excitation. Looking into the placid face, she could not hate him, who was Marada’s son. Looking longer, something stirred in her that prompted her fingers to tap a sequence which caused the capsule to open. Unable to look away, like one in an unwanted dream, she disconnected the tube feeder and picked up the limp, warm form.
Cradling him in her arms, his bare bottom moist against her, she crooned to him, ancient runes in the tongue to which she had been born.
Somehow, she found herself sitting in
Marada’s
master couch, the child’s cheek against her own, wet with tears.
Then she went seeking, into the baby mind that spurned the things of life, deep among colors and bright sparkling spinners of thought like ghost-rattles, traversing mountains like teats ever offered, crawling in his dreams with him though they were like no dreams she had ever met in the minds of those who had opened their eyes and seen. She spoke to him in impulses; she had no words to reach him, who had never listened to words. Emotion reached him. This he understood: it blew within her mind in a ripping gale, such a gale as she had not experienced since she herself lay within a mother’s womb.
She coaxed:
taste of life: it is bitter, but sweet. It sates more than dreaming. . . . See? . . . Taste? . . . Love/life come creeping. Out then, little one; back again each eve; one final eve back for the eternity you clutch too soon.
She promised only everything. She wept, wrenchingly, but did not know. She promised anguish, despair, failure: piquant trillings, the feel of them conjured up in both their dreams. She promised brightness, to squint against the sun. She bent over, holding him fiercely to her breast, squeezing tightly.
Marada Seleucus Kerrion’s son began to cry.
It was not until the miracle of the waking child was assured that Shebat took time to listen to the news
Marada
the cruiser had gathered from his sister-ship,
Danae
, so recently come from Shechem.
On the very day that Valery Stang arrived at space-end, Kerrion Three was putting into Draconis with the grande dame of Kerrion space raging and pacing her cruiser’s length.
They had been delayed, and delayed again. Four days had been added to the duration of their journey, for reasons the consul general’s wife instinctively knew to be spurious.
Something was wrong: she had had a headache for a week.
Something was very wrong: Parma had been convivial, even gentle, in the one message he had sent. A greeting, it had been: that, too, was unusual. Why would he of a sudden have developed such a yen for her that he could not wait to greet her in person? Such a gesture could not have come from the frugal, pragmatic Parma she knew so well, unless . . . could something really be amiss with the elections?
It was the only possibility that Ashera could credit, yet it was hardly creditable. Parma Alexander Kerrion was Kerrion space. Not one of his brothers or sisters, not a single first cousin among the bondkin, had the savvy or the influence to successfully unseat him. No one among the lesser bondkin had the wherewithal to give it a try.
True, there were other contenders: there must be, to have free elections in the first place. True, there was the obligatory Labayan-sponsored opposition. But when had there not been? Circling her suite on soundless feet like an old lioness readying for the hunt, Ashera told herself, as she had told herself countless times on this unnecessarily long and arduous journey, that since she could not conceive Kerrion space without Parma overseeing it, no one else could, either. Expectation is its own ratification: it could not be the elections that had prompted Parma’s uncharacteristically compassionate greeting to be spewed out toward her cruiser, crawling so slowly toward Draconis since it had exited sponge.
She was missing her own parties; things would not proceed smoothly with a less-practiced hostess presiding over such discerning guests.
If this was some trick of Parma’s to lessen her influence, she would feed him his own wiles one by one and he would not like the taste of them one bit.
But even suspicion could not ease her. Anger, for once, did not have its customary, buoying affect. Something was wrong, and Parma was delaying her—delaying the moment when she would find out!
Parma Alexander Kerrion, stroking the ancient wood of his desk in his office, knew to the quarter-hour when his wife would arrive. He had hoped, by this day, to have solved his problems, or failing in that, to have solved the portion of them that included Julian Antigonus Kerrion.
But his ploy had not worked: Julian was still missing.
Parma rubbed his seamed neck, sighed a huge, tired sigh. In the office which had been furnished by his father’s father, decorated by his father, and maintained by himself, change itself seemed held in abeyance. Stability exuded from every cranny. Sitting here, a man could not quail before even the most dastardly fate: it was not seemly. The woods and bronzes and porcelains from early Earth whispered softly that perfection maintains itself by its harmony with the natural order.
His father had been very fond of saying that.
But then, his father had believed his own propaganda.
Parma had had a difficult score of days since Marada’s message had preceded him into Draconis, and all things had burst apart in mad unpredictability.
He stood up slowly, hand to the small of his back, growling at tired muscles’ complaint, and headed for the executive washroom.
Sometimes, he thought it the Jesters’ finest touch that man must shit. All our posturing and all our accomplishment to which we point as proof that we are not simply “creatures” cannot stand before it: as we void, we are voided; in the act of elimination, our pretention toward godhead is eliminated.
Squatting (well, more sitting) on his pot (well, on the marble sculpture taken from Farouk’s palace), Parma could not help peeking over his shoulder to make certain that the drooling crone. Chance, had not slipped in behind him before he’d closed the door.
Selim Labaya was dead.
He could not get used to it.
It frightened him; he felt consummately alone.
He had not meant it to happen. No one could have imagined it would happen. No data pool nor Kerrion computer had predicted it, no rationality sanctioned it. But Labaya was dead, uncaring, as ever, of what should be.
Labaya’s death left Parma the last
Camelus
in an arid waste. None of the Labayan bondkin was a worthy successor, even blind Justice shirked choosing some young fop or old reprobate to take his place. In plain talk: no one could take Selim’s place, as no one among his own get could take Parma’s when he, too, was gone. It was the end of an era, and like all things very old, the smell of decay preceded it into view.
Parma remembered when he had been a child, how he had hated the smell of his parents’ bedroom, with its promise of death that tickled his nose so that he would try to shut his nostrils against it. His parents had been only in their forties, but the smell spoke plainly to a child’s nose.
He must smell that way himself, by now. Chance was kind in that there was no little boy with waggling tongue to tell him so. Or was it? Had he given up too soon, and commended the heir he craved to the limbo of the unborn? It was sure that among those sons he had spawned there was pitifully little choice: Marada edged out the others only because of the promise Parma had made to Persephone, when “romance” had not yet been stricken from his vocabulary.
Let it lie; let it lie
, he scolded himself. Soon enough reflection would be banished in Ashera’s acidic arrival. “Old Dragon Breath,” the children called her, even her own.
The very drooling specter who had hounded his life, he sometimes glumly admitted her to be.
Finished with his toilet, he hitched up his pants and quit the sanctum of his innermost thoughts, knowing that even there, on this day, there was no peace to be found.
In point of fact, there was no Julian to be found, which was worse: he had been doing without peace for a lifetime, but Ashera had been forced to do without Julian’s sunny presence in Lorelie only under the greatest duress, and would not take the news well at all.
Suddenly, he wished he had not delayed her arrival. Best to have the whole thing over with, at last. An overriding truth remained to be wielded against whatever accusations his wife might field: the boy could not be kept forever in Lorelie, kept safe at the expense of whatever small chance he had to become a man.
Was this, then, youth’s vision of manliness, to foresake all inheritance and honorable tasks to become an outlaw, a rebel?
Thinking back through a fog of years to his own chasings-after-manhood, Parma had to admit that his own visions of seemly derring-do had not been so different in substance from those that had prompted Julian to cast all to the wind.
But Parma had not
done
it. That was the difference and the poisoned tip of the arrow lodged above his heart. Parma had turned away from rebellion. He had not wrung his parents’ hearts this way. . . .
He had hoped, diffidently, that he would get a message telling him the boy had been kidnapped. No message told him it was Julian who was the abductor: Parma’s sleep was the object of ransom, only no price had yet been set.
Settling in his chair, behind the desk on which Kerrion space had been charted and built, he depressed a stud.
He had put off viewing Shebat’s dream dance long enough. The unfortunate dream dancer, Lauren, had been in detention longer than was necessary. A quick flight to space-end would have been kinder.
He had many things to set straight before his wife stormed in on a tide of imprecation. He wanted the girl out of the consul general’s tower by then.
He probably would have attended to it sooner, if Chaeron’s curt message had not arrived to make small all else in its shadow:
“Selim Labaya and immediate family suicided, Shechem is ours, Marada persists in his dementia. Circumstances demand we return by way of space-end. Sorry to miss the elections. Respectfully your consul, Chaeron.”
Respectfully, yet. Circumstances . . .
what
circumstances, his intrigue-loving, serpent-tongued son had not bothered to say.
He had sent back a demand for explanation, but it seemed that the transmission had not been received. Why that was, Parma hardly cared anymore. When Chaeron got home, he would find himself the consul of the smallest, poorest backwater platform Parma commanded. He was debating between two almost equally unpleasant ones. . . .
The door clucked, drew back.
Parma rose up, but did not come around the desk to greet the dream dancer. A trill of excitement he would have preferred to disallow would not be banished. The girl, the dream dancer, was exquisitely beautiful, with golden hair and a regal throat, so charismatic that she wore the dingy detention smock like fine raiment.
Two black-and-reds followed upon her heels, stationing themselves at either side of the door.
“Out, out,” Parma waved preemptorily. “We certainly do not need you. Do we, young lady?”
It must have been a long time since Lauren had last opened her lips to speak. They worked, unwilling to part. The soft acquiescence she made was wordless, as her slithering down into the leather wing chair before the desk was boneless, as all things about her seemed magical and ethereal except the forearm-long, black dream-box she balanced on her lap.
Her sad eyes held his. “What are you going to do to me?”
“I thought you had been told. It is what you are going to do to me. . . .” He fought a long-unused grin. “Show me my adopted daughter’s dream dance.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered, aghast.
“Oh, yes, unless you are enjoying your stay in detention. You are here because you are still holding evidence, Chaeron thinks, that would be of interest to me. Once I have seen it, then I can make some disposition of your case.”
“That is what I am afraid of,” she breathed, unblinking, like a mouse watching the clawed paw descend.
“Young lady, I am pressed for time. Either you will oblige me, or not. If not, then I will send you back—”
“No. Yes, I mean . . . yes, I’ll do it. But you must not be angry with me. I only learned it from her at my troupe mistress’s request, and I have never shown it but at a customer’s demand.”
“Is that what Chaeron did, demand?”
He did not miss the shifting of her eyes, the tight swallow, the imperceptible lowering of Lauren’s head at the speaking of his son’s name. He did not want to know why he was seeing them. He said very gently: “I regret as much as you this entanglement of yours in our affairs. Be assured that I will make as good a determination in regard to your future as your actions have allowed me to. . . . You will not suffer further indignity, I promise that.”
Without another word, the dream dancer opened up her box, fussed within. Closing it, she took up the two circlets and held out one to Parma: “If you will just put this on your head . . .”
When he had seen the dream dance, he knew why Chaeron had hesitated to dispose of the girl Lauren in the accepted manner, or thought he did.
His hands were shaking with rage at Shebat, and with something else, come out of the dream dance’s apocalyptic expanse.
Lauren, holding both circlets to her breast protectively, cowered in the ancient chair, face pale as her hair, so that her lips seemed enflamed.
“I have no choice but to send you to space-end.” He did have another choice: he could have the girl killed, or her forebrain stirred so that she could never speak of what she held in her head. But Parma saw too much Kerrion blame in her “crime,” too much full life in the fine young body fearful before him.
Did she understand? Her mouth came open in astonishment or horror; incredulity filled her eyes, straightened her back. She said nothing in answer, went docilely with the black-and-reds who came at his summons to collect her. He was grateful for that. He was not so sure that the girl should be deported, if his stepdaughter and his son were to be excused their part in all this.
Dream dancing would be legal soon enough, directly after elections, to be exact: he had been planning to do it for a long time. He had decided to do it at the right time, which was upon him; he could smell it in the air.
Still, it was illegal now, and had been then, and he was within his rights to invoke the law, still standing. Then why did he feel regret, and some more insidious hesitation he could not name? Because Marada and Chaeron had trundled themselves off to space-end without so much as a by-your-leave on some errand they neglected to explain, that was why.
He did not for one second believe they had left Shechem before his message arrived there. . . .
“Who was
that?
” sprang through the door before it had fully opened. Ashera’s proud, bosomy prow glided toward him, implacable.
Her beauty was redundant, after so many years of knowing it. She did not affect him, anymore, as woman-to-man, but had become a sparring partner, whose charms were beside the point.
“Sit down, my dear,” he said gently, ignoring her question, tapping the “no-slate” and “conference, no entry” buttons almost simultaneously.
Ashera stood rod-straight, her arm on the wing chair’s back. “What is it?” Trepidation, garnered from his face and his voice, made her voice small. “What is it?”
“Sit down.”
“I do not want to sit down. What is so weighty that I cannot stand to receive it? Think me a child, do you? Spit it out, old toad!”
“If you wish. Julian has run off.”
Ashera’s regal forehead pleated: “Run off?”
“With Spry and Shebat. Disappeared.”
“Spry;
Shebat— My baby!
You did this! You viper! Julian, Julian, Julian,” she wailed, sagging so that Parma found himself propelled out of his chair, hurrying to support her.
Instead of accepting the comfort of his embrace, she pounded with small fists upon his chest, so that he let her go.