by Janet Morris
Chaeron found himself stooping low, putting an arm on his half-brother’s back, hot and moist though the room was cool.
Marada did not shrug that comfort away, although Chaeron had not one single word to add to it, but could only hover there, helplessly mute, until somehow, something lifted Marada’s despair, or he became able to face it.
The artificial day had turned to night in Shechem before Marada Seleucus Kerrion raised himself up to seek the comfort of Hassid.
Chapter Fifteen
Shebat Alexandra Kerrion sat alone in her cruiser, Marada, ready to exit sponge. Rainbow-washed in the spill from Marada’s console, her eyes spat color like mirrors, aiming their beacon into the gloom.
All around her in Marada’s belly, comforting eyes winked: “We can do anything.”
They would need equal parts luck and omnipotence, just to dock in the same universe they had fled so haughtily, sure of their expertise and their capability, like horses taking their bits in clenched teeth, racing uncontrollably for the joy of it on spring’s first damp, misty morning.
Shebat sighed: there were no horses in the Consortium and no wondrous anticipation of what the new day’s weather might be like. Every day was much like the last, and the only animal tolerated by the Consortium was man.
Her finger paused over an amber ready-light, making it seem that she could see through enflamed flesh to her very bone. She envisioned Julian Antigonus Kerrion, head bent, flaxen hair swaying, doing the same, sixty meters away within Bucephalus’s once-mighty hull. Now, crippled and weak, Bucephalus rode the end of a towing cable, barely knowing, while Julian took an urgent apprenticeship in the pilot’s craft.
If it had not been for the presence of Softa David Spry in Bucephalus, his mind wound in his cruiser’s and his body forgotten, Shebat might have laughed, so unlikely was her plight.
But Softa lay near death in Bucephalus, which made considerations such as the unlikelihood of two adolescents, not even seventeen, being able to bring the two cruisers to safe port somehow inconsequential. Softa needed them. Shebat came again to that dam she had constructed against the “if onlys” and the “what ifs” of hindsight and apprehension.
Softa would have said Shebat was running hot, and seen to cooling her. But Softa was not there with his gentle voice and his space eyes peering kindly out of his flat face. No, Softa was not in Marada: Shebat had hardly slept since coming aboard, though they had been ten days in sponge. The naps and dozings at her station were no substitute for a block of time spent sleeping; the drugs she had been taking to remain alert interfered with normal REM sleep; she felt surreal, detached.
Running hot: she was determined to bring Bucephalus safely into a slip at space-end. No other thought could brave the infernal desert of her will. Sometimes she could not have told why she must do it; or how long she had been doing it; or whether doing would ever give way to have done. These things were peripheral to her existence: there was herself, the Marada with his lover’s voice and infinite wisdom, and there was the task at hand. What more there might be beyond her circumscribed universe of acceleration couch and visual display monitors she refused to consider, then forgot. She had never been to space-end; it was no place, but a quality of destination, existing, perhaps, only in her mind. Once, she had mistrusted even Julian’s carefully controlled voice coming through sixty meters of sponge to spring from Marada’s speakers and devil her ears: all without Marada’s expanse was suspect, perhaps not real. Her world was Marada’s, as much of radio, X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet, as of what her eyes could see.
She shied away from that wonderland, because of her task. In Marada’s communion, safe in cruiser-consciousness, nothing hurt. No ugly thoughts swarmed about her head so that she must swat them with the thumping of fist against console or palm against thigh. It was a place free of bedevilment, of questions, filled with the present and success; and love.
But Marada the cruiser had become reminiscent of Marada the man, and though he had been trying to please her, this was a wall between them.
The arbiter’s slight stung no less fiercely as the days wore on: I will make him love me; I will become so desirable that he cannot resist, but he will never have me; he will lie awake as I have lain awake.
It might have been these determinations that stung her to effort beyond her capabilities. It might have been that the arbiter Marada who had taken her up and thrown her down among his feral family and disappeared, never to think of her again, had saved her from eternal wandering by not remembering her face when again they met . . . but Shebat did not think so.
She strove to smelt her love into hate, but the hate would not take an edge on so poor an anvil as her pique. And so she had neither hate nor love, but only mortification, anguished dreams in whose clutch she would not He, and the task of guiding both ships to the lonely ring of stars at space-end.
She had punched up multiple displays of that once-mighty galaxy, now merely an exoskeleton marking its prior extent, the remnant of a galactic collision so long ago that no record was left in any scanning mode of the event: no rumble, no ghost noise, no infrared memory. Just the ring like a ring of smoke, and the blackness beyond.
“Shebat,” spoke Marada the cruiser, no longer with the voice of Marada the man.
She had ceased wondering at the cruiser’s ability to interrupt at just the right moment, whenever she stared down the well of dreams.
“Yes, Marada, whenever you are ready.” She could not have said whether she had spoken aloud. Whenever she had to talk to Julian, her mouth felt rusty, stiff with disuse.
The first day, when she had realized that she had fled prematurely, in blind self-preservation, she had talked and talked and talked, while Julian followed each minute order, attaching Softa to Bucephalus’s life-support: intravenous feeding had been the hardest program for Julian to run; his voice had gone thick and mumbly: he went faint at the sight of blood. Placing the point of the feeder in Spry’s vein had taken nearly a half-hour.
Then, with Spry’s vital signs coming from Bucephalus and punched up on Marada’s console, Shebat had felt better. Fugitively, until Bucephalus suffered an irrational interlude.
Marada had suggested, when it was over, that Shebat have Julian disable Bucephalus’s discernment mode, leaving him mindless, an automated caboose.
But Spry’s mind hung in the balance: Shebat could not give that order.
Marada had suggested that the fate of all of them, cruisers and Kerrions, would be determined by her refusal to act.
Shebat had suggested to Marada that the cruiser, in his new capacity as command cruiser of Kerrion space, find some way to extricate man from machine, or failing that, to secure their survival against whatever dangers he foresaw.
There had been a long pause before the cruiser answered, and its voice seemed to carry emotion, though she told herself fiercely that such could not be:
“Have I displeased you, Shebat? Am I not functioning in accordance with your expectations? I have waited so long to ship under you, and yet you are cold toward me. It was not my fault, but Spry’s and Bucephalus’s. Not having command status then, I was forced to obey. . . .”
“Marada,” she had sobbed, taken off-guard, half-aghast, with a superstitious chill tiptoeing up her spine, “I did not expect you to sound like . . . him . . . the arbiter.”
“I did it for you. Shall I undo it?”
“Oh no, no. It is lovely. It is just strange, and abrupt. I liked you . . . the way you were . . . but I thank you for doing it for me.” Finding herself unable to hurt Marada the cruiser’s feelings, she became entangled in the problem of whether the cruiser had feelings that could be so injured.
It had taken the time in sponge, meshed with Marada, to make her understand the truth of it.
By then, Marada understood the truth of it, and slowly, without Shebat noticing, he deleted the arbiter’s speech patterns from his vocalization.
If he could have deleted the bruise from her heart, he w
ould have. He did not understand outboards’ vulnerability, did not know why Shebat thought so differently about his namesake than about any other subject or even person.
Shebat loved Marada the cruiser, so she had said to him, when they had successfully talked Julian through the operation that put Softa Spry on life-support. Marada was very careful to answer immediately his pilot’s needs and queries, to always use her name, lest she misconstrue any hesitation as disavowal and her love for him turn sour, also.
There was something to the outboard males’ lamentations on the impenetrability of women’s minds. Marada the cruiser had not been less than fascinated by Hassid’s womanly thought; in his communion with Shebat, intermittent as it necessarily had been because of crippled Bucephalus and his precious cargo, Marada had become intrigued unto obsession.
Something was wrong with Shebat, some outboard wrongness that was not in any one of her systems but pervaded all of them, something Marada must isolate and put to right.
“Shebat?” spoke Marada’s voice gently from the console speakers.
No answer, though there she sat in the command couch in full view.
“Shebat,” repeated Marada, preening his every display mode like a peacock’s tail, “there is much to be done.”
He sampled her thought: it was of twelve coils binding and the atrophy of her powers of enchantment. It was sad and barbed and full of pungent regret: she would cast no more spells; spells had estranged her from her beloved and her husband both; and if the truth be known, her protective wardings had decreased every person she had presumed to benefit. The dreamlike enchantment she had made for Softa had not aided him; while creating it, she had had no inkling that disaster lay only a few steps farther down his road.
No, she would make no more enchantments! The rules of sorcery had somehow reversed themselves in the Consortium. Or there were no gods, as the bondkin affirmed. Or was it simply true that her talent, meager from the outset, had been eaten away by the rust of rationality.
“Shebat,” spoke Marada once more, infinitely gently.
. . . Perhaps she would make no more dream dances. . . . Perhaps she . . . Her teeth, which had been biting her lip, clenched hard together. The lip, escaping, edged out into a pout. Perhaps what? Try as she might, she could find nothing glimmering in her own future for which to hope.
She need simply get Spry to space-end. They could get him back from wherever he dwelled within Bucephalus. They could make the old cruiser proud, a commander once again. Julian would have his freedom, his cause toward which to struggle. But herself? What had she to hope for? She had betrayed her husband, Chaeron; her stepfather, Parma; the whole of Kerrion space. She had thrown in with Spry’s folk, not knowing or caring what or who they might be. All of this, because of Marada, the arbiter, who had not even recalled her face.
Shebat sighed and answered the cruiser’s insistent summons. She should not be sad, within his wondrous hull. They were together, ship and pilot. Spry had taught that no outboard matters mattered, that the only reality worth having was that in which she was now immersed.
He was right, after a fashion: there was no bond so intimate between man and man. Or woman and man, she grimaced, touching the studs indicated by the cruiser, who wanted a closer, less-physical meld.
But she could not bring her grief into Marada’s company: she kept the cruiser at a distance, unwilling to give up her sorrow, not ready for the cure.
When she would join with him, pilot-to-cruiser, she would forget her Kerrion concerns, and would soar, free in the moment, seeing/feeling/hearing/tasting without anguish, or guilt, or conjecture.
When it was over, when she had subsided into her discrete flesh, a part of her would rail: how could she have forgotten; how dare she exult when there was so much to mourn?
Marada the cruiser started, then, to speak the words he had not wanted to speak, to reach out to Shebat in a way he had not really wanted to employ: his masquerade was over, for the sake of Shebat.
There was little sign of it: the widening of her gray round eyes, a deepening of her breathing, then the slow slide of mind into mind with nothing held back in deference to convention or preconception.
All of Marada, command cruiser of Kerrion space, met with all of Shebat, pilot, enchantress, dancer of dreams, in a place like the estuary where dream-time meets eternity.
When the stroll was over, Shebat Alexandra Kerrion had come to a new definition of love, of self and time and space and the interface Marada, who encompassed them all.
She murmured aloud, soft endearments. She confessed, much more softly, her faults. She aired her hopes, and even a fistful of scaly, fanged fears saw the light of their mutual examination.
But there was one nagging discomfort she could not bring herself to speak: though Marada’s love was pure and without mendacity, it was also without flesh by way of which to express its truth.
Shebat Kerrion was not then even seventeen years old; she needed arms to hold her and lips to meet her own. In his spacetime, they were one, lacking nothing. In her spacetime, they were imprisoned by their separateness.
Shebat said, “I am an outboard and you are a cruiser. That will never change.”
“It is well that this is so.”
“In this world, I am lonely.”
“Take what you want of fleshly comfort. It is one of the prerogatives of pilots forced apart from their cruisers. It does not matter.”
“Oh, Marada . . .” Shebat’s voice was husky, her mind filled with thoughts of pilots’ promiscuity and the odd, hungry look they all carried in their eyes. “. . . It does matter. It matters so very much. . . . I understand now. Spry, even Valery, maybe—” But she could not finish that last part, about Marada Kerrion, who surely looked at her, had always looked at her, through the veil of his relationship with his cruiser Hassid, next to whose charms Shebat’s would ever sum a poor second. . . .
This time, when Shebat wept in earnest, there was nothing the cruiser Marada could do.
When she had sobbed a final sob for her rent humanity, the cruiser was waiting, attentive, every mechanism in both himself and Bucephalus readied to eject them into normal space, if space can be said to be normal at space-end.
Julian felt as if he were trapped in a gigantic die tossed by the Jesters in some obscure gamble.
He was watching the hieratic landscape of colored lights before him: piles of them stacking and unstacking, changing color, going out; lines of them jumping and undulating, writing indecipherable messages on his retinas which were the more awful for the knowledge that if he had merely understood their language, he would have been other than a helpless victim of fate.
For at least the fiftieth time, he tried to reason it out: this panel before him consisted of a number of modules, long and thin, whose constituent parts repeated—to learn one from top to bottom would be to learn them all. But the tiny letters beside each subgroup were ambiguous, coded: mode; att.; pan; zm; 30/60/90 . . .
Thirty, sixty, ninety what? He could not ask Bucephalus, had been warned specifically not to arouse the cruiser. He pushed back from the auxiliary console, stared across the wasteland of quiescent terminal. Only this small patch bay was still operative, and since he had no idea what the . . .
But then, it struck him what the panel might be: if “zm” were “zoom!” then at least he could push one button, do one thing to alter his situation on his own.
Julian shook flopping tow hair out of his eyes, depressed mode’s first stud. On his left, around the curve of the board, and on his right, by his cheek, screens leapt to life. Julian had found the visual scanners.
Once the purpose of the module had been decoded, the capabilities represented by the labeled studs and lights fell to reason’s decipherment.
It was as he was congratulating himself on having given sight to the blind hulk in which he rode (with Spry’s unknowing form lolling in the command couch, only an occasional fart to recall it to mind), that Marada’s voice cracked his is
olation:
“Julian, sit down and touch nothing else. We are about to enter your native spacetime.”
As usual, Marada’s inhuman, confident orders both chilled and rankled the youth’s nerves.
“Thank Chance,” he whispered, settling his long-muscled frame into the rightmost acceleration couch, reflecting that hereafter, at least, food might be palatable and his stomach more disposed to accept it. Space-end surely boasted better than the cold rations from Bucephalus’s darkened galley.
“Thank Shebat,” the cruiser amended.
Julian turned his face away, as if the Marada’s voice could be avoided. His tongue flickered out, catching a strand of blond hair fallen close, twisting it round and round in an unconscious, habitual grooming. The one thing he liked least of every unfortunate occurrence recently was this penchant of the Marada’s for talking out of turn. Face it: for talking like some bondkin uncle, or friend of his father’s or teacher at University. This pilotry was not so glamorous as he had supposed, nor so noble. He detested long periods of inactivity, and mysteries of any sort. He abhorred following instructions. Trusting his well-tested capacity to improvise in any situation, he was incensed by the cruiser’s treatment of him. After all, it was his plight, was it not? His ass on the line, true enough. Yet he was not consulted about anything concerning his welfare. He was not a part of the struggle, even when the struggle’s outcome concerned him most of all. Shebat and Marada hoarded control, cogitation, commiseration: Julian might have been as inert as Softa, for the use that was being made of his insight, his intelligence, his bravery. Just like in Lorelie, or in Draconis, he was a hothouse plant, succored and pruned to other’s standards. Only this time, his safety was not assured.
That was something, anyway: the acceleration of his pulse, which could not be fooled, told him that this was crisis, come to call.