High Couch of Silistra (25 page)

I cannot say how much time passed before I slept, for I spent much of it within, trying to integrate my ego with my situation and those strengthened skills I felt within me. I seemed different in some subtle way and went deeper and deeper within, to attempt to assess that difference and familiarize myself with it. Yet I could find no specific area or understanding to which I had not had previous access. I was altered, but I knew not how.

Upon awakening I conjured my food, drink, and shower, as I had done before. I worked hard at my dhara-san. It was painful, for I stretched muscles long ignored.

Then I turned to what I now fondly regarded as my food box, and began experimenting. I created much food that I did not eat before I had managed a name fruit. When I had it, crisp and tart and red in my hand, I turned to materializing a starchy tun. I became absorbed and obsessed with the brown roiling mass that created at my bidding the desires of my mind. I settled into a routine of exercise and meditation, creation and thought, and I did not notice that the brown mass grew ever more tenuous, and the spark lights that had once chased each other in profusion fewer and fewer.

When I had slept six times, it seemed to me that I was having more trouble than I had come to expect with the food production. I found myself straining harder and harder, and getting less satisfactory results. My parr was again claylike, my name soft and pulpy. I thought long on this. I had not had sign contact with the Hertekiean for three sleeps, since he had thrown up his hands disgustedly one morning when I emerged from under my makeshift shower, and turned his back. With this deteriorating of the level of my objective success, the well-being I had experienced began also to fade. Perhaps my father was dead, in truth, and I would stay here until I died, half-starved and surely insane from boredom. I found it difficult to keep my mind on any one subject; it jumped and rambled and would not respond to my demands for silence and concentration.

On the eighth waking period, I could get little but unrecognizable white sludge from my food box, and the brown mass seemed absolutely tenuous. It was then that I went to the wall I shared with my dark neighbor, with the plate of unpalatable lumpy gruel in my hands. It was a long while before he noticed me and came to stand there. I signed my plight by pointing to the plate and my much-diminished stock of brown foodstuff.

He nodded and pointed to his own. When I had first compared the two oblongs, mine had been the darker, the thicker. Now his was noticeably more solid, though I thought it less dense than it had been when I first saw it.

He held up eight fingers, then pointed to where I had discarded my rejected efforts and let the floor absorb them. Then he gestured again, his hands high over his head, fingers wriggling, bringing them down over his body, then shaking them, as if to rid them of excess liquid. With a sinking stomach I realized what he had been trying to tell me all along. There was a finite amount of brown semiliquid provided, and I had squandered most of mine. It was my own stupidity that had brought this about.

The dark man shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands wide. There was nothing he could do for me. He wandered to his black couch and lay down upon it.

I regarded the brown semiliquid left in my oblong food box. The less dense the brown stuff, the more difficult it was to control. I thought of my daily showers, and groaned out loud. I wondered what would happen when the wispy remains of the brown stuff were gone. If my father had intended to come for me, certainly he would have done so by now. Disconsolately, I ate the unappetizing white gruel. I dared not try for a better meal. The stiffness from resumed daily dhara-san had faded, and I threw myself into the postures with all my strength.

When I was done, I was physically exhausted, but my mental state was no better. I lay on my black hard couch and wept. My stomach cramped and my breasts felt exceptionally sensitive. My erect nipples burned when I touched them. When my hunger drove me again to seek to create a meal, my back pained me terribly, my intestines were constricted, and upon rising I became so dizzy that I staggered and would have fallen but for the wall of my prison against which I stumbled. I thought dimly, through a haze of pain, that I must have made some mistake in creating the white gruel. I dry-heaved on my hands and knees, but I had nothing to give up. When that was done, I crawled weakly back to the couch and dragged myself up upon it. I slept fitfully, and when I awakened, the couch was slick with blood. My thighs were covered with it, and it poured forth from me in a steady stream. Fear a cold knot in my aching belly, I examined my red-covered hand. The blood was fresh and new. I thought it ironic that my mistake with the food source had caused me to hemorrhage, and what a foolish reason that was to die, here on some nameless world so far from home.

I prepared myself, as we of Silistra are taught, to let go the things of flesh and substance, to embrace that existence of mind that is after death. But death did not come for me as I lay waiting for it, but sleep instead.

When I awoke, I found the bleeding somewhat abated, though still occurring. I had thought never to awaken, and I was not much pleased. My breasts no longer pained me, nor my intestines nor groin. I sat up cautiously and waited until the dizziness receded. There was much dried blood, dark and caked on my body. I realized, finally, what significance my bleeding bore. And I mourned. I mourned a long time that never-to-be born egg that had somehow made its way to my womb, only to languish and die there unfertilized. On Silistra, I must have produced it. When? I thought perhaps somewhere along the trail with Sereth. I remembered the time it could have been, when we came upon the crevice we had jumped with the threx. Not after that had Sereth put seed within me, but had used me otherwise. So I had my chance, and had not made use of it. I wondered, as I keened the child-death chant, if ever another egg would be granted me, ever in my life. Sometimes one has only a single opportunity. I prayed to the old gods, in my bereavement, that such would not be the case.

I wondered how long I had truly been in my cube. Long enough for the egg to die and be expelled. Longer than I had reckoned it.

Uncaring of my food supply, I filled my bowl with water and rubbed the blood from my hips and legs. Then again, and cleaned the rest of me as best I could. Having been denied my child, I cared not at that moment if I lived. I made no attempt to produce food for myself, but lay where I was before the north wall and slept.

When I next awoke, the bleeding was truly stopped, and I needed only half a bowl to clean the streaks and clots from my upper thighs. I had just finished doing this, and was about to drink the remainder, when a noise behind me made me turn.

They were standing there, on the other side of the black platform, that spectacular bronze woman and man who had first met me with collar and kiss when I arrived. The man’s haughty, angular face bore a suppressed smile; his eyes were calm and wise, glowing with internal fire. She beside him was symmetrical perfection, with round full breasts and generous hips. Her face was the most beautiful I had ever seen; her dark hair glowed with a life of its own.

“Welcome to Mi’ysten, which you have called Zredori, little sister,” said the woman in a voice musical in both ear and mind. She spoke to me in archaic Silistran, a Stoth dialect, and spoke it with no hint of accent or flaw.

I got slowly to my feet and regarded them, the black platform between us. I was still deep in my grief, weaving on my feet, unsteady.

The bronze man came around the couch and took me by the arm. His hand was cool on my skin, his flesh smooth. I looked at his hand on my arm, bronze on copper, at the perfection of its form, at the ring he wore on his middle finger, the ring that was identical to the one I wore threaded through the chald at my waist.

“You are not he,” I said, looking up into those flickering fire-eyes. My eyes were level with the nipples on his thick-haired chest.

“No.” He smiled and spoke for the first time. “I am not. I am Raet.” But I knew who he was. I knew that voice, and the accompanying mind-touch. I was not mistaken.

I struggled to pull my arm from his grasp, but it was as iron. I tried to claw his face, mindless with fear and rage, but he caught my hand.

“Would you prefer that I bound you, or removed your body from your control?” he queried me calmly, holding me now by both wrists. I shook my head mutely. I was not willing to again experience the paralysis I had undergone by his will under the Falls of Santha.

The woman was beside us, peering anxiously into my face. She touched my hair, then my brow, with her cool hand. I felt my hate and fear receding, replaced by a passive calm. I had no choice but to do as they bid. I felt, for the first time, an anxious desire to please them, these beings who held my life in their hands.

“You have been long enough here, Estri,” the woman said. “I would take you to my tridoe—my keep—but you must behave like an intelligent, civilized being.” She looked around at the cube that had been my home. “And yet …” She hesitated. “And yet, that may be too much to ask.” She brought from nowhere a pair of metal bracelets, joined by a short length of chain, and a longer chain of the same whitish metal. The chain she clipped to the band around my neck, the bracelets she snapped shut upon my wrists, held by Raet in front of me. But I did not struggle. In the end, they would have their way with me. I had no defense, no escape.

Leashed and braceleted, I was led through a door that opened magically before us, out of the cube and onto the white walkway. Raet held the leash attached to my collar loosely in his left hand, and the woman, still unnamed, she who had called me “little sister,” held my right arm. She was a head taller than I. I saw the Hertekiean, his face pressed to the wall of his cube, staring after us. If my hands were free, I would have waved him tasa.

We walked along the white way, between the rows of cubes with their isolated occupants, under the shifting sky. My lost child was strong in my mind, and the question of who had precipitated the egg into my womb; and my body, long celibate, was burning, aware of the bronze Raet on my left.

“I would have given you that child, there at the Feast of Conception, but your guardians were too close around you, and kept me from you.” I threw up all my mind shields. I was humiliated that he had caught my errant body’s need.

“The Baniese!” I accused. He smiled. I tightened my block.

“That will do you little good,” he said. So his reading was such that my shield was useless. I let it drop.

“And if you had succeeded, Raet?” said the woman. “She would have been triply admixed, and so disqualified from the tests. And you would have won. It must rankle you that you did not.” I could feel her grip tighten on my arm. The wave of hostility that came from her toward the bronze Raet made my head spin.

“Little sister”—the superb woman spoke to me— “your scores were the highest of any of the children. Our father, in his choice of your mother, was well-vindicated.”

“Our father?” I asked. The rest of what she said was too obscure.

“Estrazi had me by Tyiana. I am Esyia, your half-sister. And Raet, whom you have evidently met, is also my mother’s son.” Then Astria had been right. My father’s daughter’s brother had sought me. A strong wind buffeted me. We were coming to the end of the stacked cubes. The view between the stacks wrenched at my sanity.

“What tests?” I asked her. She and Raet exchanged glances.

“I think it makes little difference now,” he said to her.

“It is still not within our function to discuss it with her,” she said.

“You brought it up,” he reminded her.

As they wrangled, we came to a place where the stacked cubes abruptly ended. The panorama before me strained my cognizance of reality. From a central point, triangular spokes of terrain radiated. Lush forest, shimmering with mist, great barren steppe, ice waste, rolling sea. My body felt their pull. I was glad for the bronzes’ grasp upon me. I was drawn like metal scraps to a strong magnet.

“Now you know part of the reason for the collar you wear,” Raet said in my ear. “These are departure points”—he waved his hand at the spectacle before us—“for experimental climes, tangential realities. Within these areas do we refine our prototypes, before seating them in space-time. Their sequentiality is greatly quickened, hence the pull you feel. The molecules of your body, linear-conditioned, feel it. If we were not with you, nor the collar you wear upon your neck, you would be drawn into the closest of them, probably that rainforest there, to live out your span triple-timed. Once you became so entrapped, it is doubtful even we could find you before dissolution overtook your body.”

I shivered. Vaguely, I apprehended what he was saying. I could not, alone, walk safely upon the face of this world. I began to realize just how far advanced the bronzes were. And with that realization, my assessment of myself and reality as I had known it began to crack and crumble.

Esyia waved her hand, and a section of the white way rolled back, revealing steps descending steeply into darkness. We made our way down them, and onto a landing before which were double doors. The doors opened at our approach. We stepped within the cubicle so revealed, and my stomach came up in my throat as I felt the floor moving down under me.

“We could have come a quicker way, but for you,” Raet said. “Did you find your transition to Mi’ysten uncomfortable?”

I shuddered in remembrance of the agony I had experienced on the black platform. I nodded.

“You see, Esyia? There is a flaw in their basic structure that no amount of admixing or evolution will cure. They remain locked in space-time because it is impossible for them to function out of it. Even this one, doubtless the best of the lot, cannot make even such a simple adjustment. I submit to you that such deficiencies are irreparable.” His tone said he had won some great, long-standing battle, using me as example. I felt a great unease, as if by my reaction I had put myself in danger.

“Do not worry, little one.” Esyia’s hand was on my temple, and peace returned to me. “They will never be able to sway the assessors now, not with your performance taken into account.” The doors slid soundlessly open, and I did not find out who “they” were, or what assessors she meant. The scene revealed by the open doors was unremarkable, and I breathed a sigh of relief. A long corridor stretched before us, white and solid, with doors at regular intervals down its length. The floor was of some rusty stonelike material, solid and warm under my bare feet. We made our way along it.