by Janet Morris
“The Marada has disappeared. The Hassid reports her pilot is bringing along an unspecified ship in tandem. The Kerrions will know shortly; I have taken a grave risk holding news of it back this long. Are you under arrest?” All this was whispered through unmoving lips centimeters from Spry’s ear.
“Not yet, though I expect it promptly. Why is Bucephalus being subjected to this second fact-finding expedition?” They unclasped, stood with their heads together, seemingly examining their feet.
“I have no idea. Since Chaeron took control, things have been more and more mysterious. I’m in there to find out why he’s in there. It would be nice if there were something wrong with that ship so I could condemn it.”
“There is, and you know what it is, and so do I. The question remains whether or not they will be able to detect it. I, for one, do not think they will. Why not accept Parma’s invitation? It might be our last meal.”
The guildmaster eyed him sidelong. “Softa, I’m sorrier than you will ever know. I wish there was something I could do . . .”
“There is. Keep the Bucephalus at ready, and don’t count me out quite yet. There’s one sure solution I’ve been saving as a last resort.”
“You’ll never make it.”
“I know. But we won’t be around to incriminate anyone—not me, or Bucephalus.”
“Lords, I’ll never know why I allowed you to talk me into this.”
“Come on, Baldy, you’ll lose face. You’re not supposed to have any emotions. And you’re making me think about things I’d rather not.”
The old man raised his head, looking around at the grimly conversational, clustered pilots, beyond them to the two Kerrion bodyguards awaiting Spry. “In forty-five years of guild service, I’ve never had to despise myself before. It takes some getting used to, this being helpless and standing by . . .”
A clangor sounded from the Kerrion ground transport. The bodyguards shouted Spry’s name. “Wish us luck, old man. Things might not be so bad as they appear. Now I’ve got to go before they drag me, or you convince me I’d just as well turn in my rating and breathe vacuum.” He turned away, and the guildsmen made way for him.
“See you,” the guildmaster’s farewell followed him.
“Better hope not,” he threw back, not turning, meekly letting the Kerrion minions escort him toward the ground transport.
In it, Parma Kerrion struggled to contain his rage:
“I invited Spry to join us because I do not feel it is yet time to arrest him.”
“I was not going to arrest him,” Chaeron objected mildly.
“Well, your matched set of goons surely thought that you were. So did Guildmaster Baldwin; so did Spry. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Making him nervous.”
“In that you surely succeeded . . . Chaeron, if you think to toy with me, you have contracted delusions of grandeur from your mother.”
“May I say one thing?” Chaeron was leaning against a brace of consoles in the control central of the transport, arms crossed, face uncharacteristically stem.
“You may say one thing.”
“Thank you. Shebat and I are married.”
“What?” Parma whirled in his chair so sharply that something deep in his neck cracked. The girl had been standing quietly in a corner. “Come here,” Parma thundered in the small, cluttered cabin full of variegated lights. She came and stood before his desk, red indicator-spill from the console flushing her pale throat.
“So that is why you have been so subdued. I have not time now to hear of all your adventures, foster daughter turned daughter-in-law. Answer me one question—succinctly, for our guest will be here shortly and then you will both keep silent.”
Parma snarled down Chaeron’s objections that there were things it was imperative that he know immediately, without once looking away from the girl whose long fingers rested on the padded edge of his desk. “Shebat, were you coerced, or is this marriage of your choosing?”
There was a long silence he expected Chaeron to break, but his son remained where he leaned, inscrutable, unmoving.
“Shebat?” Parma prompted.
“It was of my choosing,” she answered, in a deep tentative voice as uninformative as her posture (loose and easy), or her face (sober and pale in the indicator spill— now green, telling him that Spry and his guards had boarded). To corroborate that, the transport shivered, accelerated smoothly through its gears.
A priority light purpled on Parma’s desk-top display even as a B-flat chimed silently in Chaeron’s head. Both men activated their “hold” modes, Parma with a touch and Chaeron with a subvocalized code. Having deferred any further interruption by that means, they promptly forgot what they had done.
Shebat was speaking: “With your permission, father, I will go greet Spry, and hold him in the forward compartment while you two deliberate my fate. I just cannot listen to it . . .” She backed a few steps from his desk as she spoke, and her voice was distorted with some emotion Parma realized he was going to have to name before proceeding further into the drastically altered landscape of their mutual concerns.
“Listen to what?” Parma pressed, gently. He did not like the aspect of her, built of fear and entrapment, of resentment and scorn.
And so cold: “Listen to Chaeron. He will tell you all you want to hear, I am sure. Spare me your astonishment, and what must follow.” Still retreating, she reached behind her and touched the doorplate, which obediently hissed open.
Then she was gone through it, into the open body of the command transport. Parma had a transitory glimpse of four black-and-reds sprawled on the parallel couches, of the driver at his station beyond. And of Spry, rising into view, his gaze on Shebat.
Then the door was closed, and Chaeron’s sigh echoing in the sparkling sanctum.
“All right, Chaeron, what is all this about?”
The youth took the seat that Shebat had disdained, between his desk and the monitor banks flanking the door. In it, he slouched sideways, one leg hooked over the seat’s arm. “Shall I answer in a hundred words or less?”
“Chaeron, you are about to find yourself back in Lorelie so quickly that all this will seem a dream.” Parma’s fist came down hard on the padded console. “What did you do to that girl?”
“That girl? That girl is also known as Aba Cronin, dream dancer, revolutionary, murderess . . . It’s all in my slated report, every slimy detail.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” lowered Parma, but his face was flaccid.
“That girl, under an additional falsified identity, took all her pilot’s boards. She awaits only the oath to become a guildmember in good standing. Ask me under what name she accrued her credentials . . . No? As Sheba Spry, fabricated sister of your own pilot.” Chaeron slid his eyes toward the door, beyond which were Spry and Shebat.
“I confess to being not one whit mollified by these excuses.”
“Excuses? Father, you are in danger of losing my respect.”
“And you are in danger of losing everything. Explain yourself! Quickly.”
Chaeron let out a long soughing breath. “Sometimes I think I should give up, become the unredeemable dolt you wish me to be. But no matter, I have done what I have done for us all . . .”
“What have you done?”
“I have cleaned the dream dancers out of level seven, every one of them. Some yet await sterilization and deportation, some are already on their way to space-end. I saved out one girl to show you why I so acted, one dancer who can perform Aba Cronin’s most foul propaganda, should you wish to see for yourself why unrest among the low-livers has become so pronounced, or whence the whispering campaign that maligns us came. And I went down there alone and got Shebat out of there before the cordon closed. I saved her honor at the risk of my life, and you from bearing the shame of having the worlds and platforms know what now they dare only conjecture: that it was a Kerrion who damned us all so convincingly.”
“And you say you have eliminated t
his threat?”
“Compare the election projections for last week and this.”
“No need, I believe you. It is a good thing we only have elections once every twenty years.” Parma rubbed his forehead. “I cannot say I am thrilled, but though your methods are not my own, I cannot fault your objectives. I will try to be more patient in the future.”
“I’d rather have your trust,” Chaeron muttered.
“Expediency can carry its own retribution. If you forced yourself upon her, she will never accept you.” He wondered if it was his own repulsion at the thought of Ashera’s son bedding Shebat that he had read in her face. And wondering, he strove beyond his feelings for impartiality, but lost his grasp of it at Chaeron’s next words.
“It is not me she fears, but you—your reaction, your retribution. She is all but a pawn of the guild. She has broken every law of the Consortium. If she married me under any pressure it was the need to protect herself from your justice.”
“Slate!” snarled Parma, and took a great shuddering breath, then canceled his order: “End: slate,” without having recorded any decree at all.
Chaeron had not moved, would not until he had either broken through his father’s habitual hostility or been broken by it. In that moment when Parma had deactivated the recording mode unused, he thought perhaps he had done it.
But then his father put both elbows upon the console and propped his face in his palms, saying: “Chaeron, I may have to ask you to annul your marriage. I will deliberate on it the night long.”
Out of his shock, from the bottom of a deep well of shriveled consciousness that counted bone and muscle as the farthest border of his holdings, Chaeron managed to work his tongue: “Surely you are not going to prosecute her? Her crimes are hardly more than errors come from her lack of familiarity with us—less than any of your other children have done . . .”
Parma stared at him unwinkingly. A cold horror gripped him, an understanding that it was in no way possible for him to sway Parma’s decision. To that he said: “No! I swear to you I will not accept it. Take her status away from her, her stock, her privilege of first-born. But I will not give her up.”
“I might just do that,” said his father conversationally, and, noticing the purple light still blinking impatiently, thumbed it onto the audio channel.
So it was that Parma and Chaeron learned together that Marada was a mere two hundred million miles from Draconis and closing, bringing two cruisers and the emergency attendant to such a difficult maneuver. And bringing some other emergency also—else why would he be coming now at all?
“Sit,” Chaeron said, turning one of the wing chairs in his suite around to face the couches. Shebat sank down sprawled amid deep cushions. With a shrug, Spry took the other. She had not been able to speak to him of her remorse (or anything else) before the bodyguards, nor at dinner, nor on the way here. She had managed only to whisper in his ear an apology, to receive a pat on the hand and the information that Spry, also, felt regret. His implication was that he did not fault her. But then, he did not know what was to come. Shebat had a good idea what Chaeron still held in abeyance, and she was inundated with guilt.
The consul inspected them like a pair of faulty mag-cards: impersonally.
“We can speak candidly, here.” Chaeron began. Off to the right of him, the door to his sleeping quarters was closed. Shebat’s eyes kept returning to it as if to a magnet. But there was no way to warn Spry except verbally, and no purpose in that. It was too late to do anything but watch, and listen, and ferret out a new moment at which to embark upon some action which her shock-narcotized mind had not as yet been able to conceive.
“What is it you want, Chaeron?” grated Spry, insultingly familiar.
“To welcome you as a valued employee.”
“Better men than you have tried that. I have an oathbond to my guild; it extends to my clients; I am not subvertible.”
“Are you not?” Chaeron asked. “When so many innocents’ fates depend on you?” His eyes slid to the bedroom. Knowing what she would see, but not having any alternative, Shebat sank deeper in the dark upholstery as if it were really the dank sod it mimicked.
In through the door two Kerrion intelligencers propelled the slant-eyed, golden-tressed Lauren, whose beauty had so devastatingly compromised Shebat’s self-image when first she had encountered it.
Lauren lunged toward Spry, his name on her lips and tears on her cheeks, but the intelligencers caught her by the arms and held her kicking and sobbing.
Spry was up on his feet, his flat face scored with emotion.
“Softa, Softa,” moaned the girl, even while Spry faltered half-way to her.
“Unwise,” remarked Chaeron evenly, observing without a move. “Better,” he commended, when the pilot stopped totally, an arm’s length from the girl suspended between her guards. “Thank you, gentlemen; take her out the back way.”
“No.” Spry had his hands outstretched, but somehow could not touch her.
“I suggest you sit back down. Pilot.”
So it was that Spry came under Chaeron’s sway. Or so it seemed.
The pilot came to stand over Shebat; he saw her tears; he shook his head imperceptibly. “No blame,” he said under his breath, then turned away with slumping shoulders to make his way heavily to the opposite couch and sink into it.
Lauren had blamed her, raging hysterically the evening before, when Chaeron had revealed that she was prisoner rather than guest, and what fate he had meted out to the rest of her troupe. Oh, yes, Lauren had blamed her. That Spry offered support and absolution was the first ray of hope come into her leaden, empty world since she had become Chaeron’s.
But Softa, now, was Chaeron’s, was he not?
Spry seemed to have similar doubts: “What is it you want me to do? Can I buy her out with some minor treachery? Or myself? Why are you holding her? Or do you need a reason?”
“I want you to continue as before. I may have some questions from time to time. I am more interested in preventing treachery than perpetrating it. I will hold onto the girl, for a while. She is evidential; I may display her skills to my father, eventually. As for my right to hold her, she is a dream dancer and there are none of her kind left in Draconis.”
“What?”
“Ah, I had thought Shebat would have found a way to warn you, or your guildmaster. It is no secret. I cleaned the lot of them out of here.”
Spry stared incredulously at Chaeron, raw despite curling his lips. “You really want that consul generalship, don’t you?”
“I am mildly interested in it. Do you want me to threaten you, or is that a surrender?”
“I am yours to command,” said Spry bitterly, “for the time being. I want an incentive. After all, Lauren is, in the end, just another slip.”
Chaeron laughed softly, genuinely. “Very good. What kind of incentive would you like?”
“The Bucephalus.”
“Your humor is oblique. If by any stretch of the imagination I could consider your worth so much, it is still against the law.”
“I thought Kerrions made their own laws. Change the ruling.”
“Well, I suppose I—”
“Parma will never stand for it,” Shebat interrupted.
“Sit down. Be silent. If I want your input, I will ask for it,” Chaeron snapped. “Parma will never allow it while he lives, Shebat is right. I could do such a thing in a few years, but not yet. Choose again.”
Spry observed the comedy mask that remade Chaeron’s face. There was no doubt that the consul was enjoying himself. “Shebat, then. And safe-conduct to wherever she may choose.”
The Kerrion consul shook his head wonderingly. “I have married her, Oh chivalrous pilot, who would sell a lover out without a second thought but puts a guildfellow above even your own safety. I must say I am impressed.”
“Don’t you mean ‘confused’? I know loyalty is no part of Kerrion education. Yes or no?”
“No.”
“Then I will be leaving, and you can arrest me, or whatever it is you are going to do, either now or later. I will be in the guildhall, in plain sight.”
“Sit down.”
Spry sat back.
“Shebat, tell Spry you are content to remain my wife.”
“I am content to remain his wife.”
“That makes me feel much better,” said Spry dryly. “Since we’re all so content with our various lots, what say we continue as if nothing has occurred to mar our longstanding good fellowship: you be the consul, I’ll be the pilot, Shebat will be the headstrong heiress who becomes a pilot. Give me Lauren when you are done with her, if she is intact.”
“And you will do what?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to find out from you. I am hardly in a position to dictate terms, as you have so well convinced me. I will not act against your father, who has my respect and my oathbond, nor against my guild.”
Shebat, watching Spry shrinking smaller, and hearing his voice becoming increasingly sibilant, lost all hope.
When Chaeron bid her escort the pilot down to the consulate’s doors, she could not even feel surprise, just obey him with a dull thudding in her ears that was not her bootfalls on the hydrastone.
Twice she started to say something to Softa, in the corridors. Both times he silenced her instantly. Hot-cheeked, she paced him.
When at the lintel he proposed she walk him to the lorries, of which one or two were always at ready, she acquiesced.
Spry said, as they descended the steps: “I want you to take your pilot’s oath. I have enough influence to get the name corrected on your boards, you won’t have to take them again.”
“I am still without my master-solo flight.”
“Precisely. I’ll log one for us. In the Bucephalus, since you have lost your cruiser. The day after tomorrow, I am free.” His eyes glittered with double entendre. “Will you be?”
“I will make sure to be,” Shebat promised.
They reached the lorries, walked among them toward those showing ready lights.
Spry stopped, leaned against an empty one, looking back the way they had come. “You had better go on back.” He shivered. “I hate to think of you with that pederast.”