by Janet Morris
That quieted her. She sought the levels speeding by beyond the window. He seized the respite gratefully, to reconsider what had occurred. Many things seemed strange to him, vying for his attention while the drink fumed in his belly. He shuffled among them, watching her absently, the curve of her cheek and the froth of her hair, choosing those musings for this moment and those it was needful to save for later. Among the events put by for scrutiny at a later date he saved all things in the line of her questioning: what he wanted, and why he wanted it, were not so clear as they had been before.
Some things were very clear, and troubling: she had not disintegrated into helplessness when her access to the data pool was suspended, as would have most low-livers and consular personnel alike. But then, she was not born to it, as were younger platform dwellers; as was he to some extent. Though he knew the dangers of dependency upon an external source, he maintained a twice-hourly check-in with the powerful Kerrion data pool, plus a standing packet-sending procedure which allowed the data pool to interrupt him with its chiming B-flat whenever any of a number of his standing information orders had been filled or updated. Was he dependent, then? he wondered as he had many times before. Could he have been so calm if suddenly the voice whispering in the back of his head was arbitrarily silenced?
He plucked at the neck of his uniform collar, loosened the closure there, watching her and letting his thoughts roam where they would. The dream dancers themselves, many proclaimed, presented a similar danger: men became dependent upon them to the exclusion of all else. He had been exceedingly careful— He stopped himself, shifting abruptly in his seat so that he drew Shebat’s gaze momentarily from the level numbers, now into three digits, flashing in the shaft.
Dream dancers themselves were said to suffer if denied their art. But then he thought of her empty dream dancers’ box; of the song she had made him hear before she had even fitted the circlet to his temples; and of the “spell” she had conjured up between her fingers, the spell that had made him weak and dizzy and clumsy when he most needed to be strong, level-minded, and capable. Could she really think herself a sorceress, as she had intimated? In this day and age, could she? Again he shifted, looking down a treacherous path, turning away and retracing mental steps to find one safer. This time, she did not face away again immediately to the window, but regarded him expectantly.
“You have not asked me about my party,” he reproved softly, and when she did, he detailed the exigencies to which he had been put to camouflage all this night’s suspect goings and comings behind a cloud of revel and debauch. A believable cloud, coming from him. He had held similar gatherings of the young elite, trendsetters and enfamers, rich consular scions who could run with so fast a pack, every second Friday since he had come fresh and curious to Draconis and caught a whiff of the true scent of Parma’s trail. All for this moment, he had spent endless nights with fawning flamers flaunting their bitch-pilot boyfriends. “Some of these flamers can talk your clothes off before you realize what is happening.”
“Bitches? Flamers?”
“You kept remarkably pure, for a girl living alone on level seven.” Valiantly, he managed not to laugh at her. “Slang terms: Spry is ‘first bitch’ in Kerrion space, so I assumed that his apprentice would know what warriors in the pilotry-rating wars call each other. Flamers, you must have seen: flamboyantly attired young gentlemen who court each other, and the bitches most ardently since they have become high fashion. If you get into anything you cannot handle, do not panic. I will be right there. Or, if you prefer, you can sit the affair out in my quarters. It is not necessary for you to do any more than walk through and meet them. I am afraid it is well within the character I have built, for me to parade you through and disappear with you and not be seen until time comes to clear the exhausted bodies strewn around the hall.”
She was supposed to laugh; she did not, but said to him: “What are you going to do to me?”
“You are reputedly intelligent. You tell me.”
“You are going to force me to marry you—”
“Tsk. I would never force you.”
“—to marry you. Your power then would be almost imperial in scope. You are going to dispense with me if I prove difficult to maneuver, but only after our holdings are joined . . . even my deportation would not matter then. It would be kept quiet. I well know how little of Kerrion affairs is heard among the fractional citizens. How long were you going to wait before telling me? Or is the whole affair predicated on my suggesting it to you?”
“You are reasonably bright, after all. I. would have hinted once more. Then if you did not respond, I would have suggested it to you as the evening progressed, in what I confess I had hoped would be a more congenial circumstance. You would have swooned in my arms, for public display only, of course. I would have your proxy; and you would have your body and your privacy sacrosanct. You could even start a discreet affair with Marada, should he be willing. You may do as you choose, as long as appearances are kept up. I could not care less. But you mistake me if you think I would force the issue. In fact, you continually insist on casting me as a villain, a ruffian and a rogue. Though I may be a little of the last, I eschew those other two modes. It is not fitting in the son of a consular house. If you cannot trust in me, you can trust in the axiom that decorum must be preserved. I do not wash my dirty linen in public. Nor are you so irresistible to me that I would give up all that I am and follow you to space-end for your favor. However, since we are on the subject, I must add that of all the logical developments possible from these circumstances, the one of our union is the least disruptive, not to say the pleasantest. What say you?”
“I hate you.”
“Enough to wed me?”
“You will not touch me?”
“Never, if you do not wish it.”
“I do not wish it.” Her voice trembled with some emotion he could not name. Behind her head, the number one ninety-seven flashed by. “But neither do I wish to ‘pay’ for my ‘crimes.’ You have not said that you can protect me from your holy Kerrion justice.”
“You are a hard woman, Shebat Kerrion. I have not promised what I cannot deliver. If when Parma returns in three days I can present you as my wife, I might be able to control matters by that. I might not. My father is his own authority in all things.”
“Then, I will take my chances with him.”
“As you will. But accept this token of my friendship. If you run out of funds, you can always sell it.” He reached in his cloak and got out the slim presentation box and tossed it where he guessed her lap might be. “I cannot foresee another circumstance in which to use it.” Did that sound too naked? He was afraid that it had, but words, like deeds, cannot be called back.
They were coming out onto level two hundred. Under its illusion of vast evening sky they toured its wide thoroughfares, past spired edifices of artful largess.
She turned the slim bracelet with its inset stones in her fingers, holding it to the window to catch the streetlight. “Chaeron,” she said huskily, “I do not know what to say.”
“Say you will wear it always, or some such.”
“I will wear it always.” She thrust suddenly against him from her corner. Her lips pecked his cheek. Then she was gone again, as far away as the lorry’s confines allowed. From that shadowed nook, her voice came very softly. “People will say, ‘They are so much in love that she yet wears the first gift he gave her.’ That is, if you are not a widower immediately after becoming a husband.”
“By the Jesters,” he excoriated in disbelief at his good fortune come panting in masked as defeat. “You may yet make a Kerrion.”
“I hope not,” came her wistful, disparaging sigh out of the shadows between them, growing deeper as the lorry turned into the consulate’s gates and up the day-bright drive at the end of which lay the consummation of four months’ extensive preparations. Then, as the lorry halted and a man ran down the staircase to open its door, she cried: “My clothes! I cannot meet your fr
iends looking like this!” Her hands flew to rake back her hair. The lorry’s door was opened, spilling light on a face which showed more trepidation than anytime previously in the entire escapade just coming to a close.
“Ha, I have finally got you rattled. I will ask no better wedding gift. As for clothes, I took the liberty of ordering some, though I fear I somewhat underestimated your breast and butt.” He motioned with his hand for her to precede him out of the lorry. “But no matter: strain on a piece of cloth has a certain virtue.”
When he had ducked out of the lorry, she still seemed uncertain. Her shoulders were drawn up around her ears, her arms crossed, hands holding his cloak about her waist.
“Ready?” he said softly, as the lorry door slammed and motor started.
“No. Yes. Yes!” The platinum bracelet gleamed smugly at him from her wrist.
Chapter Nine
The footman who had come running down three-tiered, carnelian flights to open their lorry’s door still bowed, frozen in mid-flourish. He was short, porcine, curly-haired, impeccably attired in black and red, and badly winded.
She did not know him, Shebat realized as he straightened at Chaeron’s greeting, as she did not know the grounds or the thrice-tiered, floodlit staircase leading up into the consul’s turret. The consulate was five-sided, for some reason lost in antiquity. Where each side met its neighbor, squat obsidian towers fit the joints. It was greater in area than the entire Kerrion slipbay: twenty stories tall and labyrinthine with corridors. There was a standing joke about the “lost pilot of Draconis” who went in there, unauthorized, to lodge a complaint against his employer a hundred years ago and wandered them yet; every so often some hysterical clerk would claim to have seen him slipping in ghostly, antiquated uniform from door to door. Shebat had never seen the ghost pilot, or the consul’s lair: her business had been with family matters. She had never been out of the consul general’s turret, which rose between the northeast and west sides, away from the curve of the “skywall” in whose very shadow the consul’s turret nestled, so close it seemed that she could touch it, if she walked just awhile.
Shebat shook her head, reminding herself that what seemed close was really far, all else illusion. If she walked toward the horizon, it would recede, almost like a planetary horizon if one sought it up the curve of a hill. . . . “What?”
Chaeron reintroduced the footman to her, calling her “Shebat Kerrion, my betrothed,” his sidelong glance inviting her to share his pleasure in the quiet dropping of the bomb. The footman, calloused from years of Kerrion service, hardly staggered, refrained from clapping hands to ears to block out the roar her name made no matter how soft its speaking in that quiet place. He offered felicitations and welcomes and disappeared back to his post, leaving her scraping her feet on the impervious Kerrion-grown crystal that formed the carnelian walkway.
“That is that,” confided Chaeron, watching the little footman scurry up the tiers. “Everyone who knows anything will know who you are and why you are here, before we have climbed up to our own threshold. Painless, you see. I—”
A mighty roar cut him off, a shudder under his feet following the clap like close-struck thunder made him reach out and take hold of her. She hardly felt him. Above her head, red and green grids flashed alive in the sky: flaring twisting sheets. A wind sucked at her. Her mil began to swell. Her lungs began to empty. . . . Sirens howled.
He pulled her against him. “It is nothing.” He used his precious breath, shouting in her ear, shaking her until her scream stopped, and she realized that she had to breathe to scream. His hands brushed her hair from her face, cradled it in his palms, forced her to look up at him. “Just a meteorite. Catastrophe theory . . . the molecular sieves will keep the air from escaping. Happens once in awhile. Better a few little holes now and then than one big bang. . . . Now, come dear. Are you an apprentice pilot, or not? Shhh. . . . Better?”
“Better,” she mumbled, feeling stupid and girlish and far too young. There was no taunt in his demeanor, but concern. She tried to pull away, thinking she would have preferred derision to bitter compassion’s sickly smell, craning her neck to see the grid-forms sucked toward an otherwise invisible puncture, like a computer simulation of magnetic fields about a black hole. . . . As she watched, the grids seemed to flicker. Suddenly released from the suction, they floated uncrimped, flaring geometric sheets of light, fading slowly now that emergency that had made them visible was past.
Chaeron had her by the wrists and was examining the palms of her hands. How long he had been speaking, she could not have said. Her inner ears ached and the mil inside her was calming but not quiescent, so that every internal cavity it wrapped seemed to slither and slide. She ran her tongue around the roof of her mouth, trying to hurry the puffiness away. “If that had been a serious emergency,” he was scowling, “your mil would have been barely up to it.” One of his nails traced in her palm, then tapped twice decisively. ‘Tomorrow, you must have a session with the mil-fitter.”
“No,” she wailed.
“Barbarian,” he accused. “Uncivilized tot. Yes, you will, if I have to oversee it myself. Or stay in some hermetically sealed turret for the rest of your life. You certainly cannot take your pilot’s license like this.” He forced her hands up where she must inspect them. She saw the thin white-laced cracks flaking on her palms.
“If you insist, prince of dalliance, pompous pederast,” she snarled, giving back insult for insult, trying to jerk her wrists from his grasp.
He let her go, his countenance full-armored. “I will not trade epithets with you. It is no way to start a marriage, an impossibility in any continuing one. You will do what I advise you to do; or not, and suffer the consequences. You should also see a physician: seventh level’s gravitation is sporadic, a function of its age more than any flaw in supergravity. However, even .7 to .9 normal can adversely affect red and white cell balance when endured for four months. If you do not wish to take care of yourself, it will become my duty. Save us both the trouble and cultivate some responsibility as regards your own person.”
“Chaeron, I will . . . take your advice.”
“So you say. We shall see, I suppose.” He held out his arm to her. After a moment of wondering what she was expected to do about the crooked elbow put out to her like a bird’s broken wing, she took hold of his forearm, and let him lead her up the ruddy walk fringed with real grass, up the three wide-stepped staircases, and into the consul’s turret.
The little footman was nowhere in sight, but two bodyservants on the threshold bowed, took her cloak, murmuring greetings to them both as if Shebat had always been a fixture of their existence as worthy of deference as the consul himself.
Inside the foyer, things were very different from what she had become accustomed to on level seven, or even in the consul general’s turret.
A cousin had held the office prior to Chaeron, and he pointed the man out to her among the hologram portraits staring brooding down upon those who brought their business here. Like all Kerrions, save Parma, the faces were small-jawed, moderate in feature, as if some criterion of suitable urbanity had been predetermined and decreed de rigueur for all scions of Kerrion blood. They peered doorward, twenty portraits sharing a certain resplendently mannered mien. Red-haired, blond, raven-browed, each had the delicacy, the understatement of feature and form, that set Kerrions almost recognizably aside from their less-pedigreed servants. On the lower levels, she had seen snaggle-teeth crowded into prognathic jaws, low, bulging foreheads and platyencephalic skulls, not to mention melanin disorders, twisted frames, warts and suppurating acne. Never here. In Lorelie she had noted it, but just thought all Kerrions were blessed with beauty. In Draconis, from the first, she had seen that such was not the case: Jebediah had taken pains to acquaint her with genotypes and their relative proliferation; with prejudice as it was practiced on Draconis—by eye.
Across her inner eye’s lid paraded the graffiti’d hallway she had become accustomed to haunting while
among Harmony’s dream dancers: she saw the peeled paint, crumbling bits wriggling in the draft from a passer-by. Quark lib! had been scrawled across Harmony’s door. Down with the Ultraviolet Apartheid! had marked the room of Rajah, the senior dancer who had been so troubled over the insinuating presence that had joined them both while they worked on an improvisational segment. I’ll trade you two blind crabs for one with no teeth, had been the legend Lauren had scribbled on hers. . . . She came to her own doorway, saw that she had chosen to mark her domicile: Armageddon Now! Her heart gave a little skip that made her clutch at her throat. She had consigned her dream dancer friends to Chaeron’s mercy, such as it was. She recollected the senior dancer’s kindly, smile-wrinkled face, on the day he had explained to her that the legends on Harmony’s door and his own referred to the quark-slings used to launch neutrinos bearing messages on their journey through sponge. Quarks were volitional, sensient pairs; it was cruel beyond tolerance to abuse them so offhandedly, had said the senior dancer to her, and then more softly: what can you expect from Kerrions?
Shebat had had no answer. Now she had one: it was the tableau unfolding before her inner sight, screams and flight and burnt limbs . . . and boots! The sound of thumping boots, the sight of them shining and black as doom, which she had feared from childhood on. . . .
“Shebat! Shebat!” Chaeron was shaking her like a rag doll. “What is the matter with you?”
She pulled free, struggling to raise up her eyes from the high, polished ebony boots on her own feet. . . . Had she become part of what she had feared above all things, one of those she had hated? She would certainly be called so by the dream dancers, and despised. Her name would become the epithet she had tried to shrug off by taking new ones. Shebat of Bolen’s town was now Shebat Kerrion in deed, as well as in name. “What is the matter with me? Ask better. What right have I to be here with you when my fellows are being rounded up like wild cattle to be slaughtered?”