Stein nodded and she gave instructions to the driver. After a few minutes they pulled into a deeply shadowed wayside. Some kind of bird was going doink doink among the crags. A spring emerged from the yellow limestone into a triple-tiered basin and the hellad was permitted to drink from the lowest pool, after which Dedra had the driver lead the beast to where it could crop from the thick shrubbery. She bathed her face in the central basin and produced a small mirror and a golden comb, which she used to repair her straggling coiffure. The ornate headdress was badly crushed. After a futile attempt to restore it, she threw it into a waste receptacle.
"Let some trash collector have a treat. I think my hair will do for now, but we'll have to hope Tasha is too stoned to notice my gown."
"Can you stop her reading our minds?"
Dedra gave a sour little laugh. "Ah! You don't know about our dear Tasha-Bybar, the Anastasya Astaurova that was, prime benefactress of the Tanu breeding scheme. Well, relax, lover. She has no metafaculties at all! Her gold torc is honorary—a token of Tanu esteem. Tasha is the human gynecologist who first showed the exotics how to reverse our sterilization some sixty-odd years ago. There are about a dozen other gut choppers doing the work now as well as Tash, of course, but none as competent as she is. She does all of the silvers herself. Literally keeps the old hand in."
A picture of the bell-dancer was projected before Stein's mental eye. "I've seen a few," he muttered. "But that's a different shade of kink!"
Dedra dipped one hand into the topmost pool of the fountain and drank from her cupped palm. "She's quite insane now. She must have been borderline when she passed through the auberge ... Don't give me that old-fashioned masculine look, lover! I think she's a traitor to the human race, just as you do. But what's done is done. Most of us women make the best of it."
Stein shook his head. "How could she?"
"There's a crazy kind of logic to it ... How do you like frustrated motherhood for starters? Here's this too dreadfully sexy bod that can't grow babies—so why not be a mother by proxy? All these perfectly healthy female time-travelers could have lovely Tanu children if only some good doctor repaired the mischief done by those gyn-folk with the little laser scalpels back at the auberge. The fix is quite tricky, because Madame's people seem to've anticipated some kind of jiggery-pokery among the philoprogenitive. But dear Tasha perseveres! Finally she gets it right, and she passes on her skills to a select squad of Tanu students. And here we all are, ready to be plowed and planted."
"If she's such a wiz of a doctor, why doesn't she have one of her prize pupils fix her up?"
"Ah! That's the too-barfmaking tragedy of it all, lover. Within that voluptuous female form with the enhanced secondaries and the estrogen implants there beats the heart of a true XY."
Stein glared at her in impatience. "What the hell are you talking about?"
Dedra climbed down from the fountain and sent an imperious mental command for the carriage. "An XY, lover. Tasha is a transsexual. Oh, you could stow away some real woman's fertilized egg in her fake uterus, and maybe shoot her full of preggy hormones, if you could get them in this primitive world—and perhaps the embryo would live a few weeks before dying. But that's all, lover. Maternity is a marvelous and tricky symbiosis. And of course, no one in our Galactic Milieu or anywhere else has ever made a true mother out of a male."
She stepped lightly into the calèche without assistance. "Well? Don't just stand there. Do you want to see your wife, or don't you?" Stein climbed in and they rode away.
When the red and white lights of the Redactor Guild buildings were quite close, Dedra said, "You're going to have to be careful when we get inside. Tasha can't read you, but there will be plenty of others who can. Heavy screens aren't my specialty, although I'll do the best I can for you. But if you start thrashing around and break through me it's going to be both our asses in a sling."
"I'll relax," he promised. "Sukey taught me things when we—on the trip down the river when we wanted privacy."
"Trust me," she pleaded. Looking up at him in the dusk, she tried to find one small scrap of empathy; but all that mattered to him was the safety of his precious, funny-faced love.
"I'm sorry I hurt you," he conceded. But that was all.
She stared straight ahead at the slouched beanbag shape of the old driver. "Think nothing of it. My fault for standing in the tornado's path. Lucky little Sukey..."
The carriage drew up to the entrance. Once again, Stein played the solicitous gray-torc esquire and Dedra, the Exalted Lady. There were two guards in garnet-colored half-armor on station beneath the portico. A peevish silver male came to escort them up to Tasha-Bybar's eyrie.
"Most unusual," he fretted. "The routine is completely upset, Farspeaking Lady. You know, it was necessary for the Lord Healer himself to use his good offices—"
"We're very grateful to Lord Dionket, Worthy Gordon. It's a matter very important to the Venerable Mayvar Kingmaker."
"Oh, well, of course then. Along through here and up we go. Gwen-Minivel will still be groggy, you know. Lady Tasha likes them to rest well afterward."
"I'll bet," growled Stein. He lurched slightly as Dedra administered a psychic correction.
"We'll not be long, Worthy Gordon. How peaceful it is in your precincts at night! It seems we at Farsense House never really seem to settle down. In and out, in and out. Someone always has an important message or a data-search or a surveillance or a lost dog or something even more vital. I must say, I prefer your tranquil atmosphere."
"Indispensable in a house of healing," Gordon said. They had reached a landing just below the topmost floor of the tower. "The recovery rooms are arranged around the perimeter. The Candidate Gwen-Minivel is resting in Three."
"Please don't trouble yourself to wait." Dedra was firm. "We'll find our way out, and we'll only stay a very few minutes."
Gordon received this suggestion dubiously, but after arguing with the farspeaker for a few minutes, he bowed and retreated, leaving them standing before the door marked 3. Slowly, Dedra slid it open.
Stein pushed past her into the darkness. "Sue? Are you here?"
Someone moved on a chaise near the open window and sat up, dark against the lights of Muriah outside. "Steinie—?"
He knelt down beside her and took her face between his hands. "Have they hurt you? Have they?"
"Hush, love. No." Gently gently my darling ah how did you know? How could you hear me?
Muffled, he said, "I did and I came."
You broke Dedra/Mayvar control O Steinlove how did you break free how is it possible O mydear so wilduntamedrashmadloving!
They will not tie me separate us never until I die.
"Stein," she whispered, and began to weep.
From one corner of the darkened room, the one farthest from the door, came a small sound. The tinkle of a tiny bell.
"So you like to spy, too, do you?" Stein's voice was very soft. He rose to his feet and stood motionless.
"So tall! So strong!" The bells shivered up the scale and down. One with a lower note began a languorous rhythm. The dancer came, fluid as a shadow, and undulated before him. "So you want her? How sweet." It was a song the dancer sang, accompanied by the suddenly discordant chiming. "You want to take her, to take her, to take her!"
In Stein the white-hot anger was born again, an eruption of primitive psychoenergy howling wrath against the mocker and her music. Sukey uttered a low cry and reached out to stem the peril; and Dedra, with her back against the closed door, threw her mind against him, too, even though her restraints were even weaker than Sukey's against that uniquely masculine tidal bore.
"Don't, Stein!" Sukey cried aloud. "Oh, don't!"
"You want to take her," laughed the bell-dancer, bending and thrusting. "But why why why? Take her her her?"
The bell sound and the laughing blended with twisting lights—the glittering bits of metal that rippled over white skin, the pulse quickening with the danger that made it more sweet—and then the
music and dance ended in a shuddering finale and she opened to him as Dedra moaned and Sukey made one last futile try to prevent what was going to happen.
"Take me," invited Tasha-Bybar.
And the bronze sword did.
There was a great silence. Quite calm now, Stein wiped his blade on the draperies, sheathed it, and lifted Sukey into his arms. He stepped over the thing on the floor. "Get out of the way," he told Dedra.
"You can't!" the farspeaker wailed. Mayvar! Mayvar!
The door to the corridor opened, admitting a wide swath of light. An immensely tall man stood there, flanked by two servitors in the scarlet-and-white livery. "I warned Dionket that this was a mistake," Creyn said, his tone weary. He came into the room, gestured, and turned on festoons of the small cold-light lamps. A grim smile played over his lips as he looked beyond Stein and Sukey to the fallen dancer. The coarseness of his mental comment brought a gasp from Sukey and a surprised bark of laughter from Stein.
"You're on our side," marveled the Viking.
"Put Sukey down, you great ass," Creyn told him. "Thanks to you, your wife must be hidden away until the Grand Combat ... and we'll have to move even faster than we'd originally planned."
8
NODONN SENT the thunderbolt down into the dark waters of the Gulf of Aquitaine, where the wavelets reflected the moon and an unsuspecting monster chased a school of tunny not far beneath the surface.
As lightning struck, the sea boiled and belched clouds. Fifteen of the big fish went belly-up, electrocuted instantly. The plesiosaur, however, was only stunned. It broke through the maelstrom, raised its wattled head, and bellowed.
"Oh, you got him!" Rosmar cried. "And a big one!"
"The prey! The prey!" The other Hunters all burst forth into radiance, riders and mounts alike, now that there was no longer a need for concealment. A wheel of rainbow splendor turned in the air above the feebly swimming beast, almost fifty gloriously armored men and women from the court of the Tanu Battlemaster. And to one side, aloof as rosy-gold comets, were Nodonn himself and his new bride.
The Hunt whacked shields, sounded crystal horns. "The prey! The prey!"
"To Vrenol," Nodonn decided, his voice storm-loud.
One of the riders plummeted, trailing sparks, and swooped over the brute writhing amid the deadly waves. The snakelike neck of the plesiosaur lashed out and the knight hauled his chaliko up just in time to escape the dagger teeth. The rider thrust with his glowing sword and a ball of purplish fire flew from the tip to strike the marine monster between the eyes. The animal screamed.
A cheer was emitted by the circling Hunt. "At him, Vrenol!" some woman urged.
The Huntsman waved his sword in jaunty acknowledgment—which was a mistake. With its attacker distracted, the plesiosaur sounded with a simultaneous push from all four paddlelike limbs, leaving the discomfited Tanu knight poised in the air above a surge of evil-smelling bubbles.
"Oh, hard luck," an anonymous voice drawled. One of the armored women blew a derisive triple toot on her animal-headed glass trumpet.
Now Vrenol was faced with the dreadful expedient of pursuing the beast into the water—that element so abhorred by his race—if this first attempt at a kill were not to end in humiliation as the prey escaped.
"Ah, the silly young juggins," said Rosmar. "Bring the leviathan back up, my Lord!"
The blazing face of the Battlemaster smiled upon his bride. "If you ask it, vein of my heart. But Vrenol deserves to dunk for his foolishness." Nodonn reached out to discern the monster's position. "Oh, you'd sneak away, would you?" A blue bolt of energy split the gulf's water, causing the chalikos of the circling Hunt to rear and squeal. The plesiosaur surfaced once more and this time Vrenol went for it with his lance.
"He's got it!" Rosmar exclaimed. "Right at the base of the neck! Let's go down for the kill!"
The Lord and Lady of Goriah spiraled toward the water, the wheel of light fracturing respectfully before their passage. Now the individual Hunters poised waiting for the end. The plesiosaur, paralyzed by the wound, was still able to open and close its great jaws slowly. The seven-meter bulk of it wallowed amidst spreading bloodstains, lapped by small waves and glistening from the moonlight and the radiance of the killer hovering above.
Vrenol gripped his sword in both hands. The blade flashed down. The Hunt cried, "A trophy! A trophy!" One of the ladies descended, her lance couched, and with easy expertise pierced the floating severed head and hoisted it high. She presented the trophy to Vrenol. His glowing form changed from rainbow to neon-red and he was off like a scorching bolide to draw triumph figures among the stars.
"Well, he's young," Nodonn observed tolerantly. "We must make allowances." But on the command mode of the mental speech he warned the others:
Don't think the rest of you will be permitted such sloppiness! These beasts are getting scarce with overhunting and I'll not have them wasted.
The shining troupe responded: We hear Lord and Battlemaster!
Aloud, Nodonn said, "Then back to Armorica and the Tainted Swamp. I require heads from the Firvulag Foe on your lances this night, for they are growing bold. And we must find, if we can, one of the great armored reptiles. It is urgently needed for the arena in the capital."
"On with the Hunt!" cried the sparkling riders. They formed a fiery procession again, with the scarlet figure of Vrenol now leading, and vaulted into the sky on the way to the mainland of Brittany.
Nodonn and Rosmar followed more slowly. He said to her, "There came to me just now a farspoken message from my Lady Mother. You and I must go to Muriah—and the reptile with us. We will take only a small escort to see to the beast."
"You are troubled," she said.
"It's nothing that can't be dealt with." But his deep thoughts on this matter were heavily screened.
Rosmar lifted the flashing glass helmet from her head and hung it from the horn of her saddle. "That's better. The wind in my hair! How I love to ride beside you, my daemon lover! Shall I ever learn to fly without your help?"
"In time you may learn. It's a shallow enough trick. We reverence you more for your gentler powers." And he smiled on her.
"My powers are for your service," she said. "But tell me what is happening in Muriah."
"There are matters touching upon our dynastic hopes. I must go down to assist other members of the Host of Nontusvel—for our Tanu people only respect the display of power."
"Is it the Firvulag?"
"There is a certain Delbaeth," he said, "whom I shall have to deal with before another does, shaming our House. But the real danger comes from newly arrived humans. Damn the time-gate! When will the others understand its perils?"
Rosmar laughed. "Do you think we humans should be locked out of Exile? Do you think the Tanu could survive without us?"
He reined up his steed and halted hers, so that the two of them drifted a moment in apparently motionless air. The sound of surf against the coastal rocks reached them, a faint booming.
"Some humans belong in the Many-Colored Land. People like you, Rosmar, my green-eyed, gray-eyed love, who never truly fit into the world of Elder Earth. But not all members of your race who come through are willing to accept the Tanu as masters. There are those who'd take the land away from us ... or failing that, destroy it."
"Let's fight them together!" she said, wild with excitement. "Yours is the only world I want to know." Her soul opened to the bright Apollo, showing that what she said was true. Their two minds embraced in an ardent lifting.
"My daemon lover," she laughed.
And he said, "My own Mercy-Rosmar."
9
JUMP ELIZABETH.
She stood on the headland above the White Silver Plain, looking down on the phantom cavalry of cloud shadows racing there on the empty moonlit salt. At the rim of the grassy terrace was a low railing. Beyond that a few stunted, picturesquely deformed pines at the precipice edge overhung a sheer drop of perhaps 100 meters to the Mediterranean abyss.
Jump Elizabeth jump to peace.
"Do you hear it?" she asked Brede.
A dark shape sitting on a stone bench stirred. Its topheavy headdress with the padded brim inclined in agreement.
"They're farwatching me from the palace," Elizabeth continued. "See what happens when I approach the brink—"
Jumpjumpjump! Be free abandoned onlyoneofkind! Poorforlorn thing Elizalonelybeth. Jump to release. Escape undesecrated while yet possible. Jump...
Palms resting on the balustrade, she leaned far out. Night winds brought the scent of the distant lagoon to mingle with the orange blossoms of Brede's garden. Out here on the land's end of Aven, far from any freshwater influx that would encourage simple algae and hardy crustaceans to flourish, there was no fishy-iodine smell of marine life—only the bitter alkali of the Empty Sea.
Elizabeth said, "They worked on me all afternoon while I was locked in my suite, trying to set up what they thought would be an appropriate emotional basis for the suicide impulse. Trading mostly on motifs of despair and dignity-threat, mixed with a good dollop of old-fashioned funk. But their whole foundation is spurious. The motivations are unacceptable to my metapsychic ethic. If they'd gone for the self-sacrificing altruism angle they'd have been nearer the mark—not that that would have worked, given this exile situation."
Brede's mental voice, so formal and lacking in the elisions and con-catenations of ordinary mindspeech, said:
The masterclass metapsychics of your Milieu embraced a common ethical formula?
Elizabeth let amiable affirmation shine through the barrier she had maintained between herself and the Shipspouse since her first meeting with the exotic woman two hours earlier. "Most of us followed a system consonant with the philosophy of an evolving theosphere. Are you familiar with this concept? With the major religions of the later human era?"
I have studied your people since their first timefaring. Some of their professed philosophies have dismayed and repelled me. You must understand that the Tanu embrace a simple, unstructured monotheism without any priesthood or established hierarchy. We have been quite willing to grant religious freedom to those humans whose faith was nonmilitant. But there have been zealots who persisted in disrupting the King's peace—bareneck ones, of course—and these were speedily granted the martyrdom they subconsciously craved ... But none of the humans I have studied was able to shed light on the Unity of your Galactic Milieu. And this is understandable, for only a true metapsychic can know it. In humility I request that you enlighten me.