by Janet Morris
Shebat’s lip twitched. She said, “I am piloting, temporarily. The commander of the rebels was Valery. He is dead with Bucephalus, “
“So you are Kerrion One?” Marada’s tone was different, soothing, yet the tight squint around his eyes lingered.
“We were before that, have been since Bucephalus went mad entering sponge. It was necessary. . . .”
“I see.”
“Do you? Will you put me through to whomever it is that will accept the space-enders’ surrender?”
“Want to talk to Chaeron, do you? That’s easy enough.”
A warning rang in Spry’s head. He signaled Shebat, but she did not see. With one hand, she stabbed the transfer mode that activated his monitor for communications. With the other, she rubbed at her tears.
As Chaeron’s voice rang sonorous around the Marada’s control room, Spry’s peripheral vision saw Shebat slump down, weeping.
It took Spry an instant to draw his attention from the girl.
Chaeron was saying: “My brother tells me I have no authority here. Be that as it may. Spry, I am going to finish what I have started, if my wife and my brother’s son, and, of course, yourself, are not immediately surrendered up to us, along with the cruiser you have commandeered!”
“Cheap at the price. Consul. What else do you want?”
“What I want,”—his beauty became ephemerally a horrific beauty as might befit some haughty angel of death—“my brother, and not any sense of humanitarianism, denies me. After all—” He leaned forward, so that the foreshortening of his image in the monitor made him seem some great-headed dwarf. “—I have no authority here, except over Consortium citizens. If I did, I would incinerate you all to the last impotent soul. But the arbiter, here, claims jurisdiction over that, so . . .
“I tell you what you do, Softa,” smiled Chaeron so that Spry shuddered perceptibly at the sound of his own name, “you draw up alongside us, and transfer aboard. Bring my wife and Marada’s son with you. We will have our end straightened out by then. Whatever the outcome for the bulk of them, your fate is set.”
The screen went blank. All that could be heard in the Marada was the sound of Shebat’s muffled weeping: a sniffle, a gulped sob.
He felt, transitorily, that he must join her. Then he blinked away the blurriness and spoke to the cruiser:
“You heard him, Marada, Match and subordinate yourself to Hassid.”
It was a millennium since Shebat had been aboard Hassid. The magic of the cruiser had been stripped away. The kindly tutor was now the instrument of her downfall.
Shebat whispered to Softa David: “It will be well, in the end. They are my family.” But she did not believe it.
She could not believe it: she had seen Marada look at her like a piece of perplexing data in need of interpretation.
They proceeded through a crowd of black-and-reds interspersed with a few familiar faces.
There were too many people on the Hassid, all looking at her, staring into her, whispering innuendoes about her as she passed. She found as she cleared the press and stepped into Hassid’s control room that she had caught Spry’s hand, and could not let it go.
She heard the baby cry, somewhere behind her.
They had taken no chances: they had sent an escort over to the Marada. She had been afraid, briefly, that those would perpetrate harm in the cruiser, and then chided herself: Marada Kerrion was in charge, Chaeron had so much as told Spry. The arbiter would not do that. But the men had scooped the child away from her, as if she would hurt him, whom she had saved from eternal dreaming.
Softa’s hand squeezed hers, demanded withdrawal.
The two Kerrions waited, the fair and the sanguine.
Behind her back, the lock hissed shut. She looked around, saw two black-and-reds at either side of it. Then she glanced at Softa, who was not looking at her, but met a stare from Marada Seleucus Kerrion filled with murder, a stare she had never dreamed his kind eyes could mount.
But then, she had never known him, but only known what she wished him to be, what she had fantasized him to be.
She sensed Chaeron’s concern, his inspection, his approach. His voice whispered: “Be careful. Volunteer nothing. Let me help.” His lips, as he spoke, did not move. He reached out a hand. It fell on her back, comforting. She fought the urge to turn in to his embrace.
Before Marada Kerrion, she could not. She shook Chaeron off and stood alone. He almost spoke again, but the words died on his lips and he wiped them away with his palm.
The gesture reminded her of Parma, and she squeezed her eyes shut that she might keep out the greater remonstrance which must be waiting for her on Draconis.
After that one interval in which Chaeron whispered, the silence grew long.
In it. Spry paled. In it, Shebat’s calves began to tremble so that she fought to lock her knees.
Near his control console, Marada Kerrion touched a switch.
“If you choose, Spry, you can present your side of this.” He stood at ease, weight on the balls of his feet, hands riding his hips: he had already won.
“For the record?” Spry spat bitterly.
“Of course.”
“What are the charges against me?”
Marada chuckled. “I think it will be easier to have you read our indictment; speaking it will take too long.” He slid his eyes leftward; a monitor jumped into life, filled with print.
Shebat would never forget his face, paled with fervor, or his eyes sliding over her, colder even than Chaeron’s had been that first conjugal morning when she had spurned him and her own passion of the previous evening both with a slap and a snarl, sending him wordless from the room.
She could not deny, standing with them both and with Spry (who of all of them deserved her allegiance most), that it was to Marada her heart belonged. In the most unsuited of circumstances, she longed only to change his frown to a smile of tender welcome.
When Spry stepped back from the monitor, he said: “So?”
“So, my dear Master Pilot,” Chaeron spoke first, “you are stripped of your license. You will never pilot another Consortium vehicle. Thus, since the space-enders no longer have possession of any stolen ones, you are effectively grounded. Your subversive ring is broken. Your friend, Baldwin, will be joining you here quite soon—”
“That will do, Chaeron,” advised his older brother. “All he says is true. I am afraid you are here to a certain extent under false pretenses: I have no intention of negotiating with you. Wait—!
“Good. Now, though I have no jurisdiction here unless invited, your overture served as that invitation. As far as I am concerned, and as far as my superiors are concerned—” And here he reached behind him and without looking disengaged the arbitrational cube from its in-dash housing, hefting it in his hand. “—as far as cube arbitration is concerned, this matter is closed.” The cube was fully colored: red, with stripes of orange. “The decision, as you can see, is not favorable to your endeavor on the whole.” He tossed the cube to Spry, who caught it and held it as a man might hold a deadly viper.
“However, since you are already at space-end, since you have performed, however unintentionally, some few services for the Consortium, I am not going to take you back into Kerrion space. The necessary operation—”
“Marada, you cannot do this! Spry was trapped, unconscious, in Bucephalus until you attacked! He had nothing to do with this—”
“Young woman, keep silent. It does not matter whose hand was turned to this task, but whose thoughts precipitated it.” So distant was Marada, as if she had never crept into his bed while he dreamed—but then, she reminded herself, he did not know. He did not know. . . .
“I will not keep silent! You promised me, should I ever desire it, no matter what the circumstance, that I had merely to call you, and you would deliver me home. Well, Marada, I am calling you. I have had enough of your Consortium and enough of your tortuously conceived ethics, more decadent than the evils you seek to stave off the
reby. I am calling you: Take me back to Earth!”
“Shebat!” Chaeron and Spry objected in chorus.
But Marada, nodding, said only: “I am relieved. It is the best choice for you. Should you stay, you would suffer more anguish than your primitive, reactionary behavior warrants. And yet—”
“You sanctimonious—”
“Now, Chaeron, do not try my patience. I have many things to sort out. I might get confused as to the magnitude of your own errors, or become convinced that they were not errors at all, but intentional malevolence.”
“She is my wife!” Chaeron choked incredulously, as Spry tossed the cube onto Hassid’s console and took Shebat under his arm.
“Then go with her, little brother. We own Orrefors space, though it is troublous. Go with her, and good riddance. I care not one whit for your hide nor your plans nor even your propinquity to me. In fact, it would be a relief and a boon to the family.”
“Kiss my ass,” suggested Chaeron.
“Not very likely, considering that it is up to me whether you will still be able to call it your own tomorrow. Chaeron, for the last time: until we are back in Kerrion space, your words have no weight. I urge you to save them. They may fly back upon you, elsewise.”
They all subsided, looking around at each other and at the two determinedly straight-faced black-and-reds whose chins were tucked into their chests, standing rod-straight by the portal.
“Gentlemen,” said Marada Seleucus Kerrion, “escort Spry to our surgeon. Tell him to be gentle, the man has got to be fit to be shuttled down to his cohorts.”
Shebat, finally uncaring that Marada watched, wriggled in Spry’s loosening grasp:
“Softa, I am sorry. It is all my fault. . . . Forgive—”
“Ssh, ssh. Nothing is anyone’s fault. Things just happen . . . men come to cross-purposes. He could have treated me less kindly. Let it go. I’ll see you again, don’t give me any long farewell. And don’t be afraid. We have what we have had, each one of us. No more is allotted to any man than that.” He kissed her, lightly, a dry kiss that made her forehead tingle.
She watched him ease his way out between the large guards, small and compact, bearing undaunted, as if he went to a new berth rather than sterilization and confinement away from all that he loved. Without a cruiser, what was Softa David? In point of fact, without a cruiser, what was any pilot?
She whirled, her pupils for the first time dilated with horror: “My cruiser, too, goes to Earth with me. Parma gave me the Marada. You cannot—” her voice seemed to lose its strength, grew tremulous—“take him from me.” Then almost inaudible: “Please!”
But the arbiter was already shaking his head to and fro in negation. The corners of his mouth, within their fringe of beard, pulled in, making deeper shadows that reached up to either side of his nose. His limpid, poet’s eyes seemed to soften, then glaze hard.
“I understand,” he sighed. “Believe me, I do. But you have made it impossible for me to help you, other than fulfilling your request to go back whence you came. For all of us, it is best that you stay there.”
Chaeron was sitting on the padded bumper of Hassid’s curved dash. His legs crossed, elbow balanced on knee and chin on fist, he watched his brother like a man viewing some distant holocaust. “Marada, leave off. I’ll give her the damned cruiser if I like. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“It is too bad for you both that what you say is not true. Chaeron, I am tired and, most especially, I am tired of you. Since we must finish this in Draconis, what say we put it aside until then?”
He reached over, stretching for the arbitrational cube Spry had tossed onto the console. Grasping it, he replaced it in its box.
“You do not mind,” Marada said over his shoulder to Shebat with just a hint of a smile as if they discussed a pleasure outing, “stopping by Draconis on your way back to Earth?” He spoke in Shebat’s language, suddenly, so that she had trouble making sense of his words, so that Chaeron could not understand at all. “It will be your last trip through spongespace; if it is longer, then there is no harm in that.”
For a moment, she saw a flicker of hope. Then the hardness of his face extinguished even that.
Not knowing what else might serve, she appealed to Chaeron: “Please, don’t let him take my cruiser away. Please.” She found herself sinking down on the bulkhead, vanquished by tears. “Please, Chaeron, don’t let him.”
She did not see the hatred like weaponry flashing between the two brothers. She did not see anything but the bulkhead rippling through her tears, and then a hand that reached down to lift her up. The hand had auburn hairs fleecing it, and a strong arm attached to it on which she had to lean.
His nose brushed her hair, his voice wafted centimeters to her ear. “It is too early to give up hope. We will see what my father has to say.”
Marada, to the accompaniment of the opening of the control room’s doors, excused himself: “I must go see to my son.”
When Shebat looked up, they were alone. So she said to the space where the doors had shut behind the arbiter: “I saved your son from years of unknowingness, brought him out of the well of dreams. Is this how you repay me?”
“Shebat, Shebat,” soothed Chaeron, not listening, knowing only that he had her back again and he would not bow down to Marada’s determination of her fate. Seeing that she yet wore the bracelet he had given her as a betrothal gift, he turned it.
She looked up at him through red-rimmed eyes, but what he longed to see in them, though he spied it, was not for him, but for Marada, who wanted no woman’s love at all.
Some time later, when Chaeron judged Shebat sufficiently calmed, he raised her tearstained face to his. “There is something I must ask you, that Marada, my beloved brother, would not think to ask you, that I do not want to ask you. . . .”
“Ask, then.”
“Where is my little brother, Julian?”
“Oh . . . Oh, Chaeron!” Then her eyes grew very wide and brightly shining in them he saw the answer he had hoped so not to hear. When she said: “He might have been transferred off Bucephalus before . . .” neither of them could pretend it might be true.
After a time, Chaeron said, “So that is that. Julian is gone. Marada will say that I killed him. Perhaps I did. . . . If not for my mother, Shebat, I think I would go with you.”
“I am sorry,” she said.
“He came with you willingly, did he not?”
“He insisted on coming.”
“Then he chose it. But still, it hurts. I had a dream from which I woke up crying. . . . My mother was in it, and Parma, but I do not remember Julian being in it.”
“Chaeron, I—” And then she could not finish it, but only stare into his battlefield of a face, where Kerrion composure sought to vanquish the assaulting tribes of grief.
So it came to pass that Julian Antigonus Kerrion was stricken from the Consortium census, though while Chaeron was first staggering under his burden of loss, a certain siren glided up to the Hassid’s midship port, drawn thither by a distant, compulsive need that had no words on it, and put his palms, then his blue, softly glowing lips against the glass.
But no one ever paid much attention to Julian, even when he was still a man.
Marada had much more to concern himself with than Julian: he must finish what he had started with Spry. It was this matter that took precedence over even his desire to see his son. He hurried.
As he entered the makeshift emergency hospital (which had once been his beloved Iltani’s room and which, save for Spry, they had not needed), his steps slowed.
So consumed was he with the closing down of his investigation, he hardly noticed that the surgeon’s assistant had nearly prepared Softa Spry:
His loins were lathered with foam and his knees drawn up.
“Doctor,” called Marada, motioning the white-coat near. Then: “Don’t sedate him, yet. Get everyone out of here.”
The man had been ejecting a stubborn air bubble from
a syringe. He lowered it, his mahogany face questioning, but obedient. “How long will you be, sir?”
Marada leaned near and whispered something in the man’s ear which sent him scurrying to gather up his cohorts.
Marada waited, arms crossed, until all had disappeared out the door. Then he asked Hassid to assure their privacy and slate the entire proceedings.
Then he approached David Spry, who watched him come without raising his head, accepting the inevitable like some animal run to ground.
“You don’t mind if I don’t rise?” The smile was wan.
Marada found his knuckles cracking behind his back. He pulled out his hands and spread them wide. “David, I could not succeed in wringing a confession out of you. Not even with that bloodchilling little scene, not even with this. You will negotiate a truce for the space-enders, you want me to believe, yet you are not one of them?”
“Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts, hot stuff? Kerrions are constitutionally incapable of it.”
“Are we? Don’t let me stop you. . . . Go ahead, you’re making me feel better about all this.”
“Do you want something, Arbiter? I’d kind of like to put this whole thing behind me, since I can’t avoid it.”
“Embrace your fate, eh? You make a poor stoic, David. Your face is white as those sheets, and your eyes will haunt me forever.”
“I know how sensitive you are, Marada. Forgive the imposition.”
“There is a way out of this for both of us.”
“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“You mean who, what, where, when, and why? Sorry, I’m a rotten journalist.” Spry’s knees moved in the stirrups.
Marada pulled over a wheeled table, pushed instruments aside with a clatter, and hoisted himself up.
“David, let me help you.” The desperation in Marada’s voice brought Softa Spry up on one elbow.
“Go ahead.” Cautiously.
“In the end, there can be no bargain. Your crimes are too grievous; there are too many of them, extending back to old Jebediah’s murder.