The concubine’s chamber wasn’t exactly a harem—it was much too well trafficked for that, and there were male staff about as well—but it was one big chamber for too many women to be stuffed into with little to do except tend to the kids and straighten up the lower levels. Most were simply young unmarried females that the Baron had taken a lustful fancy to once, when going through their area, and had basically then rendered them impossible to marry as virgins to lustful guys who never were.
Tann Nakitt wondered when the hell the Baron had time to knock all these women up, plus the wives and maybe one not for the road but on it, and suspected that fidelity wasn’t great around this place, either. What the hell; since all the guys here were at least cousins to each other and the Baron, well, it was all in the family.
Nakitt had thought the very concept of herself as a virgin, even though in a strictly biological sense it was true, hilarious. Still, if she was going to find out what it was like on this side of the sexual ledger, it would be at least first with the Baron, if only for absolute political reasons. After that, whatever helped attain an objective, from faithfulness or celibacy to wanton lust and abandon, was just fine with her.
The chamber was not exactly a rotten place for all the mob, though. There was a large fountain with the ancient Ochoan goddess of fertility fittingly posed in the center in alabaster, and a soothing stream of water was pumped—oh my!—into her at a couple of suitably obscene points. If an Ochoan hadn’t managed to carve that one, an Ochoan had inspired it.
To the left of the fountain as you faced the rear of the chamber was a large pool of deep, clear, cool water that would be suitable for relaxing in or exercising; a similar pool on the right gave off wisps of steam and appeared to be bubbling from some source of compressed air. Indoor baths. Very fancy. Beat diving into the ocean every day.
A massive vanity with a single curved mirror was against one wall; the other wall was false and concealed a fullblown Ochoan mass toilet with water constantly running in it and bearing away the bad stuff. There was also a shower, possibly fed by some kind of raincatcher cistern above or perhaps by another diversion of the falls; it would get you clean in a hurry.
The back of the hall contained a series of chambers with very comfortable-looking beds, each of which could be curtained off but now were not. Doorways flanked the bedding chambers.
“The door on the left goes to the nursery, where at least two from here are on duty at all times, and beyond them the hatcheries,” Kzu explained. “Everyone is also expected to spend time in midwifery with the eggs; that way nobody is stuck there for weeks. Have you ever sat an egg before?”
“Sorry, no,” Tann Nakitt responded. Hell, I never even liked children of my old species, nor any others. It would be interesting to see if a maternal instinct was built into a dominant sentient species. She sure didn’t feel very motherly now.
“Well, it is the simplest thing one can do. Don’t worry. What little is needed, you’ll be taught. Now, the right hand contains some rooms where various things are taught by palace instructors, and the gateway to the fish pool. That’s an area where food delivered to us is kept until needed. There is too much pandemonium here for set meals, although we seldom eat or do much else alone, but you may if you wish. You may also enjoy any of the amenities available here, and there are many. You will be expected to keep the chambers spotless, as well as the floors, toilets, washables, and, of course, yourself. However, you may not leave this complex on this level unless you are summoned. Some of the girls are summoned as ladies in waiting for the royal wives, but that is a high privilege. If you are summoned, remember to show respect to royalty here, and use at least basic court titling. The Baron is His Highness, the Baronesses are all Highnesses as well. Men of the nobility are always addressed ‘my lord,’ ladies of the nobility as ‘my lady.’ Staff is either ‘sir’ or ‘madam.’ The one exception is that, among the concubines, only I as chief of concubines am to be called Madama. No one here has a title, and you will generally be referred to as ‘girl’ no matter how old you are. After the Baron lies with you, he will give you some jewelry, something like the necklaces and anklets you see, and perhaps some gems for implant if he is really pleased. After that, you will be one of us, and your name will be reregistered in the rolls as Nakitti a Oriamin.”
“Sounds like no more status than I had before,” she noted, disappointed.
“Not true. You are the lowest rank of the castle, it is true, but you will still now and forever outrank all commoners. You may gain added rank by position, if you have some particular expertise, some skill or knowledge, and you exhibit it without making the nobility think you may be smarter than they are. Bearing royal children, of course, also gains you stature. We do not ask why the Baron takes someone into the household, but that is the situation. Remember, too, you are in a political atmosphere where everyone’s pride and honor is important, and where they jockey for favor and respect. That means you always convince them that you’re a poor, ignorant country lass out of her league no matter what the truth. Punishments here can be painful as well as costly to one’s comfort. Remember that.”
She nodded. “Oh, I will. I most certainly will.”
“Here is a commons chamber not being used,” Kzu said, pointing to a bare area flanked by curtains on three sides. “Get whatever you wish to personalize it and make it comfortable from the storerooms to the right. After that, eat, sleep, relax, and try and fit in with the others and await His Highness’s summons.”
Tann Nakitt looked around the place. That summons couldn’t come soon enough.
In four days and three nights Tann Nakitt had almost become accustomed to sleeping with the constant chatter and din reflected off the smooth walls, and learned how to sit on eggs, and already been lectured for being less than diplomatic with some very young brats who bit. She didn’t, however, make friends in the place, since, after all, she was another outsider coming in, and thus the current novelty of the big man and a new rival for diluted favors. She did get the impression that this would last until yet another new one was brought in, which could be any time or could be months or years. When it happened, though, she’d be one of the girls.
On the fourth night the Baron summoned her. The summons was delivered by a female chamberlain who suggested that she make herself as attractive as possible. This was not something Tann Nakitt had any experience in, and she decided that clean and neat and maybe a wee bit of fragrance was the best route. Anything more and she risked looking like an abstract painting.
The Baron was quite as handsome and, well, big, as she’d remembered him, and there were those come-hither hormones he seemed to ooze that made it hard to concentrate on what he was saying.
His chambers were simpler than she’d expected, although still the lap of lavish luxury. What surprised and pleased her most was that he seemed to have walls of books! Real books, bound in leather and carefully shelved. She couldn’t read any of it, but the idea that he could, and did, made him go up a notch in her respect. The Realm had abolished books so long ago that few even knew what they were; you didn’t need them when any terminal could answer any question or create a small cube that would have your own hologram spouting your lousy love poetry. But Ghomans still had books on their world, and had carefully preserved and respected them. Ghoman books were not treated as objects, but as the collective spirits of the brightest of their ancestors.
He had ordered what was, for Ochoa, a gourmet meal, including several delicacies rarely seen by the common folks and some exceptional wines. She found she didn’t have much of an appetite, though, but she did take and enjoy a few things, a light snack as it were, and very much enjoyed the wines.
“Well, Nakitti, what do you think of my castle?” he asked her at last.
She still hadn’t defined him, and might not for many more sessions. That made any conversation tricky, because he might be the greatest conversationalist around and wonderful to her, yet if she said something that touched a
button in him, probably something illogical and unforeseeable, it might turn him into a raging maniac.
“It is most grand, Highness. I did not dream that such opulence and high art were so close.”
He seemed to like that. “I saw you eyeing my books. The ones over there are the finest histories of my people, going back as far as we have records—and that is very far indeed. Others involve the sciences, mathematics, architecture, astronomy, and so on. These are local books, Ochoan books. I feel a link with them. There are at least seven ages of our written language, and it has taken time but I have mastered them all. Twenty-five volumes devoted there to trade and commercial law and customs, and another forty on diplomacy. But concerning war—there’s almost nothing. We are in the middle of an ocean surrounded by nations whose denizens can breathe only water, and most of them only water under heavy pressure. Our land is rich in those things that are of true importance, but we have nothing here worth mounting a massive expedition that cannot be gotten more cheaply and easily elsewhere. So, we simply haven’t ever had the need to learn how to fight. Oh, we have the trappings of it—little more than show officers and a customs police, really. That leaves me with nothing but logic. Kzu tells me that you were asking about the guns and forces. That may not be diplomatic as a newcomer here, but your implications match my own logical study. If we actually had to defend this place, we wouldn’t know how. Would you?”
Uh-oh! Nice trap, Baron and Kzu. Play dumb to stay out of trouble or be smart and show up the locals. And, damn it, the way he’s pumping the hormones out, I can’t think straight!
“Highness, I was never a soldier, and this kind of war is as far in the past to my old life as it is now to this one.”
“Spare me the humble act, Nakitti! Can this place be defended?”
She thought a moment and decided to drop the evasions. “Highness, it can, but only if the guns all work, there are competent trained people present to use them if and when required, and sufficient fresh supplies for both the weapons and for a siege. It would not guarantee a result, but it could make a positive result possible.”
“Excellent! That is what I wanted to hear! I will need you here, Nakitti. I have some problems that must be worked around. Those who are in the military command do not know anything about their jobs, but they love the titles and all the festooned ornamental sashes and ribbons and body markings and all that. I cannot remove them. Most of them are my sisters and aunts and nieces. My nephews believe they are generals, although they have never fought anything more than using their swords to spear fish. I can order things to get done, but I must do it through them. What I need is knowledge behind the orders.”
She liked the idea of being a power behind the throne but was appalled at his evident belief that attack was inevitable. “Highness, do you really believe that an attack will come here?”
“I consider it only a matter of guessing the month and the day.”
“But—Highness! You just finished telling me about the isolation, the lack of immediate enemies…”
“And yet it is precisely for that reason that we are the center of the target! The only land, the only harbors, for a thousand kilometers. Control Ochoa with a true combined force and you control the commerce of the Overdark. Control it, and you have bases from which to provision and shelter a powerful group that can then use a naval force to go almost anywhere it wills against a mainland target. You can raid, pick, weaken, force a potential enemy to shift his forces hundreds or thousands of kilometers up and down a coastline, exhausting them, straining and confusing their supply lines, all that. Our enemy—it knows the military way. If I can see this, then it has seen it long before. Will you help me?”
“Highness, you have been studying military thinking somewhere, or you are a genius coming into his calling, as we all hope and pray. As I swore to you before, all that I have and all that I am I pledge to you to use as you wish.”
He moved from the table and came around toward her, and as he got close he towered over her, then put his great wings around her.
“You know,” he said softly, “I was afraid you would be a sexless creature, or an ugly one, but you are neither. I wish us to work together on all levels.”
Her initiation into the household was completed with the rather joyous discovery that not only was he large in a lot of ways, when it emerged from within him it proved to be sheathed in bone…
Chemistry, as any Ghoman would say, won out. Okay, Tann knew it wasn’t very romantic, but she had never been very romantic, either. Besides, Ghoman sex was never like this! Exit Tann Nakitt, now placed on the shelf from this point on with the other dusty memories; enter Nakitti a Oriamin, and, for now at least, she liked that just fine…
Jinkinar, Kalinda
The journey from Mahakor to Jinkinar had been a very long time in coming, but it had finally come, the nervous government’s hand forced by the forthcoming international conference, at which the Powers That Were wanted everybody who wasn’t with Chalidang to be present, possibly on the theory that if you weren’t with them, you might be convinced to be against them.
They traveled with Inspector Shissik, but free and as companion, not as a prisoner. They still didn’t have official status, but then, nobody in authority in Kalinda had the slightest idea what you did with two different people sharing one body. They had gone so far as to consult with the ambassadors of three races that knew something about it, but all of them thought it was a matter of symbiosis or twinning.
Kalindans moved from point to point using what were basically trains, except these were open cars, with the passenger belted in, and they traveled very fast along electromagnetic lines of force. It was exciting just seeing the world after being cooped up for so long, and fascinating to see the landscape as they passed, even if by means they had never used so readily in the artificial environment of the city. Virtually no light penetrated this far, and what life there was with some self-illumination was too weak to reveal anything but the creatures themselves. Still, it was as clear as day to them, seeing by sound and by reading magnetism, radiation, and changes in heat. It wasn’t colorful, but it was as detailed and precise as any vision they had ever experienced.
As with all high-tech civilizations, the place wasn’t what it used to be. The marks of Kalinda were all over, not just in small structures, the remnants of old commercial enterprises like mines and farms, and old physical roadways now disintegrating, but also in the surprising lack of abundant larger life-forms other than their own kind. Oh, there were some, scurrying across the bottom, swimming by here and there, and clustered in dense sea growths, but nothing they would have expected from an underwater paradise.
“You see the same story everywhere,” Shissik commented, not sounding upset. “Screw up the environment, change things, plow up all the plants in an area, dig out all the minerals from another that were also used as part of a local food chain’s diet, and you eventually wind up with a lot of desolation. It is the price of progress.”
They wondered about that, even as they knew a lot of the Realm had done exactly the same thing both under and above the waves. Still, Ari asked, “So all the high-tech hexes are as desolate? No exceptions?”
“Oh, there are exceptions, sure,” the Inspector answered uncomfortably. “Too late to restore here, though. You’d have to create something new. They’re always talking about it, since a lot of other hexes have compatible life-forms comparable to what was lost here, but then they cost it out in time and labor and it never gets anywhere. I think they all hope that one day we’ll crack the secret and be able to turn water and rock and sand into fields of sea grass, and recreate the now extinct crion and solander that used to be food staples here. But I doubt it. The Big Computer ain’t gonna allow anybody here to do that. It would make things impossible to manage. Some things, I think, are reserved for the gods.”
There was no way to answer that, given what they now knew and understood about the place. They’d been walled off from the w
orld too long, while being too preoccupied with dealing with their own problem of separate personalities within the same body.
Instead of eventually merging into one combined new personality, Ari and Ming had grown more distinct, and each was more comfortable when in control. Since taking the left half of the body one way didn’t work if the right half was trying to go the other way, some compromise had been worked out. The fact was, everyone usually operated on automatic, a right/left consensus. For them, during any pause by one, the other assumed control if they wanted to do something or had something to say. Relax, and the other would reassert control. In a few cases, particularly arguments, it could get bizarrely comical, but for the most part it seemed to work.
After a lot of initial struggles for privacy, both had grown so used to the situation that they had relaxed their control and opposition when nothing was happening—which, during all this time, was a long part of their days. It had been facilitated by psychotherapy drugs administered in the hope that it would result in a third combined personality that was stable. It hadn’t done that, but it had opened Ari’s mind, his experiences, memories, personality, and outlook to Ming’s, all the way back to childhood, and it had opened her to him. In both cases it was a shock and a revelation. First to fall had been the “grass is greener” outlook by the sexes, as he discovered what it was like to be raised female and she discovered that it wasn’t easy to be raised male, either—just different. She found it a shock to see herself as a sexy and supercompetent intellectual woman she’d never met but would have liked to be, and he was disappointed to discover that she’d thought he was a pretty good one-night stand but no big deal.
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