High Couch of Silistra (6 page)

I leaned against Dellin’s shoulder and whispered a warning in his ear. He nodded, and when M’len passed him the pipe, he inhaled only a tiny amount and blew it out almost immediately. He passed it to me.

I dragged deep and held the smoke. I felt my limbs tingle and the colors in the room brighten. I handed the pipe back to the Liaison First, leaning across Dellin’s lap. My breast brushed his hip and burned at the heat. My need was much intensified by the drug. I looked up at Dellin. His face was beaded with sweat.

“No more,” said he to M’lennin, pushing back his chair, “else I will be in no shape to use her.” He gestured vaguely to me. “Get up.”

I got up, putting my arm around the unsteady out-worlder’s waist.

“Your room or mine?” he murmured, nuzzling my neck.

“Mine,” said I, maneuvering him toward the door.

“Tasa,” said the Liaison First indistinctly from his armed sueded chair. I doubted M’lennin would make it to his couch this night.

“Tasa,” I replied, steering Dellin around the corner.

The danne had been of exceptional strength. I stepped square on Santh’s tufted tail where he lay stretched out beside Sithantha across the threshold to my apartment. He growled softly, opened one eye, and regarded me balefully. Supporting Dellin with one arm as best I could, I leaned over the hulion and slapped the lockplate.

“Step carefully,” said I to Dellin.

He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and removed my arm from his waist. He stared at Santh and Sithantha.

“I,” said he, “am in worse shape than I thought.”

“No, they are there.”

“They?” He looked straight at me, making a valiant effort to focus my face.

“The hulions. Step over them.”

“Hulions. Certainly.”

Somehow I managed to get him into the shower. When the cold water struck his clothed body, he howled and grabbed for me. I evaded him, laughing, while the stinging spray did its work.

Sputtering and growling, he stumbled out of the stall and stood dripping, hands on his hips, much sobered.

“Come strip me, woman,” said he.

I did as he bid me, and he took me there on the pile of sopping clothes.

Then he stripped me of the Koster silk and regarded me.

“Does that come off?” he said, hooking a finger between the chald and my naked body. He closed the chald in his fist.

“No,” I lied.

“Good,” he grunted, and dragged me by the chald across the floor and up on my Astrian couch.

He was superb, and I told him so, over and over, as he used me. He had the skill of taking a woman out of herself, and I was truly lost to him. Only in the predawn did I have a chance to deliver to him an Astrian lovemaking, and even in that he directed me.

Then we slept, and I missed my appointment at sun’s rise with M’lennin.

Dellin wakened me with his renewed interest, and afterward I lay on my back in the crook of his arm, staring at the lofty ceiling. The midmorning light streamed through the crystal windows. He kissed my temple.

“Tell me about life in the Well,” he said in an odd voice.

I extended my right leg as high as I could in the air, pointing my toes. I studied the play of shadow along my inner thigh. I sighed.

“You wish to know what a fine girl like me is doing in a place like this, do you not?”

“It is not the place,” said he, fondling my breast, “but the situation. Yes, I suppose that is what I want to know,” he admitted. I wiggled my toes.

“I understand,” he continued, “the economics. of Silistra. I realize that each Well is autonomous, and that each Well-area has its Liaison, acting independently of the other. I can even accept that I shall be one. I have studied my tapes and committed the four major Silistran languages to memory. I have also studied all the available data on your time theory and your Day-Keepers and your genetic manipulation. I understand your concern with your low birthrate, your unwillingness to use drugs to alter your natural-selection system, a system that puts the woman in a centralized location of sexual activity until that precious and unpredictable egg drops and is fertilized. I can even swallow that bit about only the egg knowing the right sperm, and that a Silistran woman ovulates only upon the presentation of desirable sperm, and then only two or three times in her life. I find the concept of shipping your best psychics off to the Day-Keepers, that they might conceive only with other psychics, hard to take. It must be even harder for Silistran men. And the costs of access to the Well! Have you not priced yourselves out of the local market? How about the fine physical specimens who can’t get up the couch-price?” He was up on one elbow, staring down into my face. I said nothing.

“Why do Silistran women commit themselves into public usage, and then, when pregnant, become willingly the property of the men who impregnate them, giving to those men title to all they have gained in their years in the Wells?”

“Why not?” I retorted. “You will never understand Silistra if you take the facets of the culture out of context. That is M’lennin’s mistake. Chaldra. All is chaldra. There is great chaldra attached to the Wells.”

“I had a tape on chaldra,” he interrupted. “It did not explain the Wells.”

I sighed. The sun was getting higher, and I had to find M’lennin.

“I shall try to show you, then. A girl, when she reaches puberty, takes a number of examinations. Her scores on these, she submits to the Wells. From this information on her physical, psychical, and mental potential, the Wells either accept or reject the girl. Astria has first choice, Arlet second, and so on. Astria will take a highly intelligent girl with a strong fore-reader index, if she is attractive; Arlet will take a high hormonal index, for they specialize in exotic sex. Each Well has a character. It is a great honor to be an Astrian girl, and wear the silver chain with white interwoven. Once a girl is accepted by a Well, the security of her family is assured. They are gifted by the Well and benefited in many ways. The girl’s earnings are invested by the Well, and we are very good with money. A woman goes out of Astria with a great fortune. She is also educated continually and thoroughly. She learns comparative cultures, the known languages of the galaxy, musics, dances, a large number of required subjects, and others, of her choice. She learns the ways of love. She becomes cultured and sophisticated. She has opportunities to mate with some of the most powerful and brilliant men in the known galaxy. Should a woman, given a choice between such a life and the lot of the farmgirl on the plains, choose to churn bondrex milk and slop parr? And meet perhaps a hundred men in her life? Should she risk bearing the unfulfilled chaldra of reproduction to her grave? The chances of an isolated Silistran woman conceiving are sixty to one.

“As for the men,” I continued, “I believe our men are content. Only four percent of Astrian women conceive by off-worlders. A man need not have money to partake of the Well if he is Silistran. There are games once a set, and festivals once a pass, where the men may earn silver and gold well tokens. These games range from physical to psychical, and any man with a talent or skill may gain entrance to the Well in this manner. Men love the gamble as they love wealth. A man knows that should he bring child on a girl in the Well, he will acquire not only a sensual, beautiful woman, but the money to enjoy her at his leisure in luxurious surroundings. If he can impregnate two, then two women and two fortunes are his. The men control much on Silistra. Both the dependent and independent cities draw great revenue from the Well and the traffic they bring. The traders and the merchants and the slayers and the hunters, and the weavers, and more, prosper from the Wells. Thousand of years ago the Day-Keepers and the forereaders determined the social structure of Silistra, building upon the ruins of past mistakes. It has endured.”

“You are angry,” he said, tracing my lips with his finger.

“No,” said I, “but I have said this say many times.”

“What if a woman falls in love with a man without him having impregnated her?” he asked thoughtfully.

“There is the pressure of chaldra to consider,” I reminded him. “Perhaps she would stay in the Well until she conceived, and petition that the father’s right to her body be waived. If the Well accepted this, they would pay the father double the birth-price, and the woman would, once having repaid the Well, be free to leave and go to her lover. The Well would gift them and absorb the loss. I have never heard of a woman leaving the Well without conceiving. She goes to the Well to become pregnant. Why would she leave without fulfilling her purpose?”

“You have not conceived,” said he, “but you have left the Well.”

“Oh,” said I. “I have taken on the chaldra of the mother; to find my father. I seek him. I have no man whom I love. The skein of the time weave bears me to Arlet. My father was an off-worlder who did not want my mother, nor the birth-price, nor me. He spread his seed and disappeared. If a man does not want the woman, the Well buys her back, and the profit to the father is high. But he did not wish it. I was raised by the Well, for my mother died at my birth. Women who have been in the Well and have not conceived are given such children to raise when they can no longer take the couch. We care for our own.”

“I, too, am half-bred,” said Dellin. The way he said it made me think the fact had caused him some pain. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the couch.

“Anything I can do to help you discharge this chaldra, whatever I can, I will do. I will be, remember, powerful in Arlet. What race was your father’s?”

“That is what I am here to find out,” said I. “Come with me if you wish, while M’lennin and I attempt to unravel the riddle.”

He nodded and pulled me to him again. I begged off, and we showered and I dressed. In my short white sleeveless s’kim, which tied behind at back, waist, and hip, I walked him, naked, to his own room, where he pulled on black shorts and sandals, and we went searching for food and M’lennin.

We found M’lennin in his main room, a place of clicking, whirring machines, each of which blinked a thousand varicolored eyes and spun its wheels and flickered its indicators back and forth across the lighted maws, of its meters, singing to itself and its fellows in machine song. The door was open, the room dim-lit. We never made it to the kitchen.

M’lennin waved us within, and we came up behind him where he sat before a bank of controls. Somehow he had devised to project the contents of the cube upon the right-hand screen that covered the wall before us. My mother was just fading into gray.

We watched my father take my mother, double life-size. Dellin threw his leg up on the console and pulled me against him.

“He’s got the moves, eh, Dellin?” said M’len.

“Quiet, I am learning,” retorted Dellin.

I said nothing. My night with the Liaison Second faded into perspective as I watched. I had not, after all, conceived with Dellin. I would have felt the egg enter my tube. With such a man as the one on the screen before me, I would surely conceive. I pulled a bit away from Dellin’s encircling arm.

“One need not be a deep-reader to know what you’re thinking,” said he in my ear.

M’len pushed a button, and the scene froze. He touched another and another, and the left-hand portion of the screen lit up with columns of words and percentiles and numbers decimal.

“There you see it, Estri,” said the Liaison First.

“No, I do not,” I answered. “Explain it to me.”

He went through the list item by item. It was very complicated.

“So you see,” he summed up, “what we have here is a 1.0000 to infinity bipedal standard air-breather. The archetypal man. The bipedal standard is a composite of all the divergent characteristics of the four-hundred-odd races of the hundred and forty-eight planets of the Bipedal Federate group. There is no such thing as a living standard biped. Or there was never known to be one. Now we see such a man before us. The absolute man. The only one I have ever heard of. I cannot place him for you, Estri. There should be no such being.”

My heart sank. “May I see the skeleton again, please?” I asked.

I studied it. I saw some of my own peculiarities there, cervical ribs, excessively thin flat bones. I counted the vertebrae. He, as I, had two more than Silistran norm.

“All right, M’len.” The Liaison First hit the console, and the lights came on while the projections on the screen faded.

“How about the languages?” Dellin asked. “Did you catalog?”

M’lennin handed Dellin a fax sheet without turning from the machine. He twisted a dial and slid a fader, watching two lit meters.

“All dead languages,” mused the Liaison Second. “Even the Silistran is archaic. Three the computer banks cannot identify. Yet the woman seemed to have no trouble understanding him. Could she have gotten the meaning of his words from his mind?” he asked, looking at me.

“She could, but I could not. My mother was an exceptional telepath, but not enough of a deep-reader to go to the Day-Keepers.”

“Pity,” said M’len, his chin propped on his fist. The console hissed and burped up a small flat oblong and two sheets of the orange, rubbery fax.

“Do you want stills?” he asked. I nodded, and he ran his hands over the coder again. The machine spit two palm-sized color holos into his waiting fingers. He then turned from the console and faced us. The Liaison First handed me the fax, stills, and the black flat oblong, which he explained was a modern version of the silver cube. I nodded as he instructed me in its operation.

“I would leave now,” I said to my host.

“I expected that you would want to go today when I realized how little I could make of this. Dalf is at the hover, ready when you are. Take care, Estri. I like this whole business less, the more I know.” He was genuinely concerned.

The Liaison First extended his hand palm up to the Liaison Second. “All is in readiness for you in Arlet. You have the call codes if you need me. Tasa, Liaison.”

“Tasa,” Dellin and I said in unison. We had been delicately dismissed.

“How long will it take to get to Arlet in the hover?” I asked Dellin as I grabbed up my belongings and stuffed them in my old parr-hide sack. I would leave nothing behind this time.