If
Bucephalus
had been like that . . . but
Bucephalus
had not been;
Bucephalus
was gone from cruiser-consciousness, from his own consciousness, from any possible resurrection. He found himself wishing that it had been
Marada
who had been eradicated, then hurried to cover his thought.
The smooth, effortless touch of the command cruiser reached him:
“We are all of us confused. I take no offense.”
It was only after he had promised the space-enders he would do his best for them, and received from them their word to abide by whatsoever agreement he could make, that Spry thought to wonder why Shebat had been able to raise the space-end committee, a difficult task, quicker than she could contact the
Hassid
, so much easier an operation.
He thought about it, transiently, but it was pushed away again by the space-enders’ reminder:
“We still have a few cards to play,”
as it had been obscured by the
Marada’s
greeting (or was it a warning?).
His mouth was dry and fouled, his lips sticky, reluctant to part. Why should he expect the girlchild to be any better composed?
“We still have the baby, do we not?”
had prompted Harmony;
“We still have Shebat.”
Her dead, cold voice conjured up the nightmare visage even over the static-filled com-line. He had not answered, only made a shushing sound.
Too much, too much to fit into his mind, to integrate when so much of him had so recently been intent on total segregation from his kind. Or was it secession? He wished he knew. Once more, he did not like the person events were forcing him to become.
“Shebat,” he said softly, gently. “Let’s have that line in to
Hassid
.” He twisted around to see her, enthroned in the epicentral control central that had been his sickbed so recently.
She avoided his eyes. Her black curls hid her face, tinged warm in the indicator spill. But all around, the
Marada’s
meters responded to her internal chaos with flares of color.
“Can . . . can you do it yourself? I cannot. I do not feel well.”
“You do not feel well?” he repeated, disbelievingly, making it a taunt.
Then her head came up. Her white teeth flashed, bared. “You cannot expect me to call him, to talk to him as if nothing had ever happened!”
Spry took a deep breath and expelled it, counting slowly. “Shebat, this has got to be a joke.”
“You like jokes! You told me yourself: they are our only life-preservers in this fearful storm.” She stood abruptly. A red light lit behind her. “Do it yourself.”
“
Sit down.
Run that board or I will.”
She set up the line he had asked for, but her voice was so small and sad that it made Spry wonder if even life was a worthwhile struggle in light of such despair.
The arbiter’s bearded face came up on his right-hand monitor, chiaroscuro.
Finger poised over the transfer button that would exchange Shebat’s picture for his own, he hesitated, transfixed by the play of emotions running over Marada Kerrion like conflicting readouts.
“Shebat?” Between the arbiter’s brows, two parallel lines deepened. “Are you hurt?”
“Kerrion One,” she replied archly, “to your commander, Kerrion Two.”
“We’re not quite sure who that is, right now,” Marada drawled, shifting on the screen, his miniature hands lacing behind his head. The narrowed eyes roved around as if searching for something. “Are you commander of the rebels, then, and not hostage as I have so far presumed?”
“Careful!” It slipped out of Spry unbidden, for he knew Marada well, and the sort of jargon arbiters employed.
Shebat’s lip twitched. She said, “I am piloting, temporarily. The commander of the rebels was Valery. He is dead with
Bucephalus
, “
“So you are Kerrion One?” Marada’s tone was different, soothing, yet the tight squint around his eyes lingered.
“We were before that, have been since
Bucephalus
went mad entering sponge. It was necessary. . . .”
“I see.”
“Do you? Will you put me through to whomever it is that will accept the space-enders’ surrender?”
“Want to talk to Chaeron, do you? That’s easy enough.”
A warning rang in Spry’s head. He signaled Shebat, but she did not see. With one hand, she stabbed the transfer mode that activated his monitor for communications. With the other, she rubbed at her tears.
As Chaeron’s voice rang sonorous around the
Marada’s
control room, Spry’s peripheral vision saw Shebat slump down, weeping.
It took Spry an instant to draw his attention from the girl.
Chaeron was saying: “My brother tells me I have no authority here. Be that as it may. Spry, I am going to finish what I have started, if my wife and my brother’s son, and, of course, yourself, are not immediately surrendered up to us, along with the cruiser you have commandeered!”
“Cheap at the price. Consul. What else do you want?”
“What I want,”—his beauty became ephemerally a horrific beauty as might befit some haughty angel of death—“my brother, and not any sense of humanitarianism, denies me. After all—” He leaned forward, so that the foreshortening of his image in the monitor made him seem some great-headed dwarf. “—I have no authority here, except over Consortium citizens. If I did, I would incinerate you all to the last impotent soul. But the arbiter, here, claims jurisdiction over that, so . . .
“I tell you what you do,
Softa
,” smiled Chaeron so that Spry shuddered perceptibly at the sound of his own name, “you draw up alongside us, and transfer aboard. Bring my wife and Marada’s son with you. We will have our end straightened out by then. Whatever the outcome for the bulk of them,
your
fate is set.”
The screen went blank. All that could be heard in the
Marada
was the sound of Shebat’s muffled weeping: a sniffle, a gulped sob.
He felt, transitorily, that he must join her. Then he blinked away the blurriness and spoke to the cruiser:
“You heard him,
Marada
, Match and subordinate yourself to
Hassid
.”
It was a millennium since Shebat had been aboard
Hassid
. The magic of the cruiser had been stripped away. The kindly tutor was now the instrument of her downfall.
Shebat whispered to Softa David: “It will be well, in the end. They are my family.” But she did not believe it.
She could not believe it: she had seen
Marada
look at her like a piece of perplexing data in need of interpretation.
They proceeded through a crowd of black-and-reds interspersed with a few familiar faces.
There were too many people on the
Hassid
, all looking at her, staring into her, whispering innuendoes about her as she passed. She found as she cleared the press and stepped into
Hassid’s
control room that she had caught Spry’s hand, and could not let it go.
She heard the baby cry, somewhere behind her.
They had taken no chances: they had sent an escort over to the
Marada
. She had been afraid, briefly, that those would perpetrate harm in the cruiser, and then chided herself: Marada Kerrion was in charge, Chaeron had so much as told Spry. The arbiter would not do that. But the men had scooped the child away from her, as if she would hurt him, whom she had saved from eternal dreaming.
Softa’s hand squeezed hers, demanded withdrawal.
The two Kerrions waited, the fair and the sanguine.
Behind her back, the lock hissed shut. She looked around, saw two black-and-reds at either side of it. Then she glanced at Softa, who was not looking at her, but met a stare from Marada Seleucus Kerrion filled with murder, a stare she had never dreamed his kind eyes could mount.
But then, she had never known him, but only known what she wished him to be, what she had fantasized him to be.
She sensed Chaeron’s concern, his inspection, his approach. His voice whispered: “Be careful. Volunteer nothing. Let me help.” His lips, as he spoke, did not move. He reached out a hand. It fell on her back, comforting. She fought the urge to turn in to his embrace.
Before Marada Kerrion, she could not. She shook Chaeron off and stood alone. He almost spoke again, but the words died on his lips and he wiped them away with his palm.
The gesture reminded her of Parma, and she squeezed her eyes shut that she might keep out the greater remonstrance which must be waiting for her on Draconis.
After that one interval in which Chaeron whispered, the silence grew long.
In it. Spry paled. In it, Shebat’s calves began to tremble so that she fought to lock her knees.
Near his control console, Marada Kerrion touched a switch.
“If you choose, Spry, you can present your side of this.” He stood at ease, weight on the balls of his feet, hands riding his hips: he had already won.
“For the record?” Spry spat bitterly.
“Of course.”
“What are the charges against me?”
Marada chuckled. “I think it will be easier to have you read our indictment; speaking it will take too long.” He slid his eyes leftward; a monitor jumped into life, filled with print.
Shebat would never forget his face, paled with fervor, or his eyes sliding over her, colder even than Chaeron’s had been that first conjugal morning when she had spurned him and her own passion of the previous evening both with a slap and a snarl, sending him wordless from the room.
She could not deny, standing with them both and with Spry (who of all of them deserved her allegiance most), that it was to Marada her heart belonged. In the most unsuited of circumstances, she longed only to change his frown to a smile of tender welcome.
When Spry stepped back from the monitor, he said: “So?”
“So, my dear Master Pilot,” Chaeron spoke first, “you are stripped of your license. You will never pilot another Consortium vehicle. Thus, since the space-enders no longer have possession of any stolen ones, you are effectively grounded. Your subversive ring is broken. Your friend, Baldwin, will be joining you here quite soon—”
“That will do, Chaeron,” advised his older brother. “All he says is true. I am afraid you are here to a certain extent under false pretenses: I have no intention of negotiating with you. Wait—!
“Good. Now, though I have no jurisdiction here unless invited, your overture served as that invitation. As far as I am concerned, and as far as my superiors are concerned—” And here he reached behind him and without looking disengaged the arbitrational cube from its in-dash housing, hefting it in his hand. “—as far as cube arbitration is concerned, this matter is closed.” The cube was fully colored: red, with stripes of orange. “The decision, as you can see, is not favorable to your endeavor on the whole.” He tossed the cube to Spry, who caught it and held it as a man might hold a deadly viper.
“However, since you are already at space-end, since you have performed, however unintentionally, some few services for the Consortium, I am not going to take you back into Kerrion space. The necessary operation—”
“Marada, you cannot do this! Spry was trapped, unconscious, in
Bucephalus
until you attacked! He had nothing to do with this—”
“Young woman, keep silent. It does not matter whose hand was turned to this task, but whose thoughts precipitated it.” So distant was Marada, as if she had never crept into his bed while he dreamed—but then, she reminded herself, he did not know. He did not know. . . .
“I will not keep silent! You promised me, should I ever desire it, no matter what the circumstance, that I had merely to call you, and you would deliver me home. Well, Marada, I am calling you. I have had enough of your Consortium and enough of your tortuously conceived ethics, more decadent than the evils you seek to stave off thereby. I am calling you: Take me back to Earth!”
“Shebat!” Chaeron and Spry objected in chorus.
But Marada, nodding, said only: “I am relieved. It is the best choice for you. Should you stay, you would suffer more anguish than your primitive, reactionary behavior warrants. And yet—”
“You sanctimonious—”
“Now, Chaeron, do not try my patience. I have many things to sort out. I might get confused as to the magnitude of your own errors, or become convinced that they were not errors at all, but intentional malevolence.”
“She is my wife!” Chaeron choked incredulously, as Spry tossed the cube onto
Hassid’s
console and took Shebat under his arm.
“Then go with her, little brother. We own Orrefors space, though it is troublous. Go with her, and good riddance. I care not one whit for your hide nor your plans nor even your propinquity to me. In fact, it would be a relief and a boon to the family.”
“Kiss my ass,” suggested Chaeron.
“Not very likely, considering that it is up to me whether you will still be able to call it your own tomorrow. Chaeron, for the last time: until we are back in Kerrion space, your words have no weight. I urge you to save them. They may fly back upon you, elsewise.”
They all subsided, looking around at each other and at the two determinedly straight-faced black-and-reds whose chins were tucked into their chests, standing rod-straight by the portal.
“Gentlemen,” said Marada Seleucus Kerrion, “escort Spry to our surgeon. Tell him to be gentle, the man has got to be fit to be shuttled down to his cohorts.”
Shebat, finally uncaring that Marada watched, wriggled in Spry’s loosening grasp:
“Softa, I am sorry. It is all my fault. . . . Forgive—”
“Ssh, ssh. Nothing is anyone’s fault. Things just happen . . . men come to cross-purposes. He could have treated me less kindly. Let it go. I’ll see you again, don’t give me any long farewell. And don’t be afraid. We have what we have had, each one of us. No more is allotted to any man than that.” He kissed her, lightly, a dry kiss that made her forehead tingle.
She watched him ease his way out between the large guards, small and compact, bearing undaunted, as if he went to a new berth rather than sterilization and confinement away from all that he loved. Without a cruiser, what was Softa David? In point of fact, without a cruiser, what was any pilot?
She whirled, her pupils for the first time dilated with horror: “My cruiser, too, goes to Earth with me. Parma gave me the
Marada
. You cannot—” her voice seemed to lose its strength, grew tremulous—“take him from me.” Then almost inaudible: “Please!”
But the arbiter was already shaking his head to and fro in negation. The corners of his mouth, within their fringe of beard, pulled in, making deeper shadows that reached up to either side of his nose. His limpid, poet’s eyes seemed to soften, then glaze hard.
“I understand,” he sighed. “Believe me, I do. But you have made it impossible for me to help you, other than fulfilling your request to go back whence you came. For all of us, it is best that you stay there.”
Chaeron was sitting on the padded bumper of
Hassid’s
curved dash. His legs crossed, elbow balanced on knee and chin on fist, he watched his brother like a man viewing some distant holocaust. “Marada, leave off. I’ll give her the damned cruiser if I like. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“It is too bad for you both that what you say is not true. Chaeron, I am tired and, most especially, I am tired of you. Since we must finish this in Draconis, what say we put it aside until then?”
He reached over, stretching for the arbitrational cube Spry had tossed onto the console. Grasping it, he replaced it in its box.
“You do not mind,” Marada said over his shoulder to Shebat with just a hint of a smile as if they discussed a pleasure outing, “stopping by Draconis on your way back to Earth?” He spoke in Shebat’s language, suddenly, so that she had trouble making sense of his words, so that Chaeron could not understand at all. “It will be your last trip through spongespace; if it is longer, then there is no harm in that.”
For a moment, she saw a flicker of hope. Then the hardness of his face extinguished even that.
Not knowing what else might serve, she appealed to Chaeron: “Please, don’t let him take my cruiser away. Please.” She found herself sinking down on the bulkhead, vanquished by tears. “Please, Chaeron, don’t let him.”
She did not see the hatred like weaponry flashing between the two brothers. She did not see anything but the bulkhead rippling through her tears, and then a hand that reached down to lift her up. The hand had auburn hairs fleecing it, and a strong arm attached to it on which she had to lean.
His nose brushed her hair, his voice wafted centimeters to her ear. “It is too early to give up hope. We will see what my father has to say.”
Marada, to the accompaniment of the opening of the control room’s doors, excused himself: “I must go see to my son.”
When Shebat looked up, they were alone. So she said to the space where the doors had shut behind the arbiter: “I saved your son from years of unknowingness, brought him out of the well of dreams. Is this how you repay me?”