Dream Dancer (7 page)

She had slipped all her bodyguards’ concerted scrutiny to climb up here: there also was the gift of enchantment awork in the Kerrion milieu: she had made use of the ability to “pass by unnoticed” often when Bolen would see an extra leg of beef or a few coppers to be gained by loaning her warmth to some traveler. She had been beaten soundly upon reappearing with dawn’s light, of course, but she had found the beatings preferable to lying with strange men with rough ways and rougher hands.

Here, in Lorelie, it was the bodyguards who faced corporeal punishment should she slip their care. She was Kerrion enough already, she reflected with a sour grimace, to put her own whim above the fortunes of four lesser beings. After all, if they were not up to maintaining their surveillance in the face of all contingencies, even the spell of “passing by unnoticed,” then they were not capable of properly performing their tasks and deserved whatever chastisement was doubtless already in progress.

She had missed dinner.

She intended to miss, also, the grueling after-dinner hour of precise sipping of drinks under Ashera’s watchful eye, of interrogation disguised as pleasantry, of manipulation masquerading as advice.

Within a week she would be quit of this place; she would shed it like a too-small skin. Of all the wonders of Lorelie, only Chaeron would be hard to leave. She had learned more watching him than he had intended to teach, but she was aware that his intentions were on the whole honest, though he might not have meant them to be at the start.

Something, she decided, would have to be done about Chaeron.

When she had determined what that “something” was to be, she forsook her peak of meditation for the halls of the family tower, before which her worried bodyguards yet milled in agitation.

As Shebat and her bodyguards climbed the hundred cobalt stairs to the residency, the doors’ sensors recognized her party, drawing back. The eye-teasing mezzanine preened itself; crystal stairs filled with cascading water eternally swirling passed beneath her tread. The water was wealth. This quantity of it put to decorative use was an outrageous surfeit of power. What power was here lay truly in Ashera’s hands, the ladies said: Parma held sway in the Kerrion consulate’s worlds; in Lorelie, all danced to Ashera’s tune. Recruit Chaeron to silence Ashera’s objections, or even Parma’s promise might not serve.

What spell, then? But she had not thought of any by the time Chaeron’s lintel was broached, though she went the long way around to make sure she did not meet Ashera, whose constitutional after dinner took her through the tower’s main halls.

Shebat shivered at all she was wagering, and signaled her men to await without, thinking that everything, since she had begged Marada to take her with him into she knew not what, had been the wildest of gambles. How, then, could freedom from Lorelie’s poisonous beauty be less? Her knuckles were white as she tapped the door, forgetting the Kerrion manner of pressing a lit plate which would chime within.

In that final instant, the face of the old woman who had been Bolen’s wife, who had taught Shebat what small enchantments she possessed, who had known the arts of reading, even writing, but had died too soon to pass them on, came before her eyes. But the cracked lips had no spell to speak, only the spittle that they had bubbled in their dying, before things went from bad to worse without her, while Bolen’s nightmare had held her helpless in its sway.

She felt that way again: helpless, terrified, a piece of meat before a slavering wolf; she felt her blood coursing her veins. As the door slid back and a puzzled Chaeron scanned her and hurriedly ushered her within, she was mumbling a conditionless warding that might bring her to the other side of this adventure whole and hale. He would likely have seen the dull glow of the attendant signing, did he not take a moment to dismiss her bodyguards, saying that he would call them in their quarters when he needed them, and to Shebat on the closing of the door:

“There is no need of advertising where you are, when mother would so dearly like to know. What possessed you to insult her so thoroughly? You could have sent word.” The chastisement in his tone was wry; he enjoyed his mother’s irritation; Shebat’s folly; all his family’s striving was a comedy put on for his amusement.

Shebat said as much, eyes flashing.

“Now, I have hurt you, and I did not mean to. You are becoming too beautiful to trifle with. Sit, and tell me what brings you here. If it is the same thing that kept you from dinner, so much the better. By the way, are you hungry?”

“No, I am not hungry,” she murmured, backing away from him, keeping her distance until a couch behind her knees forced her to sit or betray herself. The couch, one of a pair, was small, dark, intimately designed as was the chalcedony room about. He sat easily beside her, catty-corner with one leg drawn up, arms lying along the upholstery so that one hand was behind her neck. He was lightly clad in a loose, teal shirt and trousers. He had been about to retire, she realized, pulling her gaze away from the Kerrion crest worked into a jewel hung from a chain about his neck. She was acutely uncomfortable, wishing that she had not come. The soft silk trousers rustled as he shifted. She could find no place to rest her eyes, which kept trying to return to his chest, and the hair on it which Kerrion formality had never allowed her to guess might grow there. Though he was certainly fully clothed, the opened vee at his throat disconcerted her thoroughly: why was it so astounding that Chaeron’s throat grew hair on it or had an idle chain swinging from it, slowly back and forth?

“So,” he said softly after a time, “does what you see please you? Do I suit?”

“Oh, no. I mean—did I wake you?”

Eyes crinkled under slightly raised brows. “Oh, no? I am devastated; I had hoped this might be what it looked. And no, you did not wake me. I toss and turn, but sleep has been eluding me of late. So I thought to catch it unawares, at this early hour.” He waited, but Shebat only blinked, owl-eyed. “Ask me,” he suggested delicately, “why it is that I cannot sleep.”

“I had better not,” she blurted. “That is . . . I need your advice, Chaeron. And your help.”

“My dear, whatever I have is yours. I will lay my cloak in the puddle barring your path, I promise. But first, you have not given me even a sisterly kiss.” And he leaned forward, his hand cupping the back of her neck, guiding her firmly.

“There, that is better.” The blue eyes, inches from hers, sought deeply, so that Shebat looked downward, at his pulse beating in his throat. He sighed, releasing her head. “For the first time, you have kissed back, rather than enduring me. Why is that?”

She would have wriggled away from him, but the couch was small and he had leaned close and she had nowhere to retreat. “You are going to be angry with me.”

“Never.” But auburn lashes flicked down, hiding his eyes, while his fingers ran lightly along the nape of her neck. “But it must be important, else you would not be suffering so intimate a touch. Is it important enough that I might buy what you will not give freely? With my sage counsel, perchance, or my influence upon my mother?”

“Are you always so cruel?” she wondered, hearing her tongue betray her as it stumbled.

“Only when there is no alternative. But honesty sometimes seems cruel.”

“Especially coming from you.” It slipped out, she could not stop it, being fully engaged with his proximity and the trepidation come so fully upon her.

His mouth barely twitched, but humor hardened to another, sharper thing behind the blue of his eyes. “What is it, little sister, that makes you so unaccepting of my affection?”

“Only that it would frighten me, should it become more than filial.” The fingers stopped moving, lay quiet on her shoulder.

“And is that so bad? Fear spices love, always.”

“But I am already in love, with Marada, and not with you.” She shrank back, having said that, the few inches the resilient couch allowed.

Colder, if possible, became Chaeron’s smile. “You confuse emotional love and physical love. I suppose I can excuse that in a young girl. Marada!” Chaeron dismissed his brother by simply speaking his name. “Let us hear what it is you came here to say. The hour grows late for pointless chatter.”

“I should never have come here,” Shebat wailed.

“So? Perhaps not. But you are here, nevertheless. I, for one, am not of a mind to waste this opportunity. And something, unfortunately not my attentions, drew you here. Now,” he said, chiding her gently, “what can I do for you, or must we sit here while I try to guess while my ardor prompts me to guess at things other than those you might choose? I know you are young, and I understand that idealism is the precinct most especially of young girls, but your presence threatens to make me forget all my hard-won insights in search of surer proof.” Again the fingers moved lightly on her back. His lips sought hers, inexorable arms enfolded her. But she locked her teeth together against his probing tongue, and to the questions his body asked, hers made no answer, keeping stiffly silent.

After a brief time he released her, pushed up from the couch and crossed the room, where he spoke unintelligibly, very low, into his terminal.

Then he turned, leaning back against the artfully concealed console, and said precisely: “I have summoned your protectors. I am sorry about this, but I have waited long, and I had to see for myself if what you said was true. Since it is, I would like you to speak your piece and take your leave.”

“I want to leave Lorelie. I have Parma’s permission,

but without your blessing, Ashera will surely suborn him.”

He leaned there, pushing at the cuticle of one nail with the perfect curve of another, for the space of a dozen breaths. Then he straightened up and from an expressionless mouth said, “I think that would be a good idea. But keep watch well about you. The arm of my mother is long and has many hands.” Then he crossed to the couch and with his habitual courtesy helped her up, to, and through the door beyond which the four bodyguards were just arriving.

Seeing that they were there, he seemed relieved. He said to her, “It has been a pleasure,” bowed slightly, and retired, the door closing silently behind.

The ship which bore Parma Alexander Kerrion to Draconis was hardly more elegant and only one cabin larger than Marada’s. Even while experiencing initial surprise, something told Shebat that she should have known: Parma would give no less than the best, else not give at all.

And, too,
state of the art
and Kerrion were so synonymous in space technology as to have become threads in the carpet of sly wit the pilots carried with them wherever they went, in the way of men who must make endlessly transient berths smack of home.

So when she met Softa David Spry, the tawny, compact pilot just signing on the Kerrion flagship in place of the dewy-eyed retiree come aboard briefly to make the round of introductions, Shebat did not think to comment on the odd-sounding prenomen appended to his name. Though Parma burst out chuckling when the old pilot brought before him the new, extending his hand in greeting, saying, “Glad to have you,
Softa
David Spry,” still Shebat did not understand.

After a surfeit of smothered smirks whenever Shebat called him Softa David, which she did often in her irrepressible questioning of the pilot’s every move, the flat-faced pilot said gravely, “
David
will do. Softa’s a tease-title, come from the contracted letters of ‘state of the art.’ It’s like a nickname, but . . . don’t go, now. Or hang your head. You did not know, and none of us hurried to tell you.”

“I will never learn it all,” Shebat muttered miserably, sinking down into the acceleration couch on Spry’s right. “I am no Kerrion born, as you have well seen. All their names, and yours the more for not being Kerrion, sound strange to me. I cannot bear this endless stumbling over unforeseeable obstacles.”

“Lords, do you always talk like that? No, I am sorry. I was going to tell you something about not letting the teasing get to you, and teased you myself instead. Look, you cannot be so serious, when the whole universe is a side-splitting joke. Surely you can see that. If you are not a Kerrion and yet are most soberly presented to each and all as the heir apparent, you must in some way have entertained yourself with the humor of that. If I were as serious as you, I would go mad straightaway, the next dip into flight. If what your . . . father? Stepfather? Anyway, if what old Parma so grudgingly admitted is true, and you want to fly, you had best learn how to tell jokes, and to take them.”

“Tell me about it,” she demanded, unaware her lips were parted, or that she leaned far forward.

“About what?”

“About the spongespace, about all those lights,” she waved at the master control. “Tell me about how it feels. What is the nature of it that the theory cannot proclaim?”

The pilot pulled at his lower lip, glanced at his panel, adjusted something there. “There’s too much to tell, and too little. You have had the theory of it, then? And found it intriguing but mysterious? All the visible space we see is mirage; what is distant may be near; what seems near is far. True measures and optical measures differ widely. The
sponge
part is pure analogy. Visual space is a distended skin, points on which can be reached by going beneath. Hence, Draconis and Lorelie are not lifetimes apart, but days. If we were to crawl along beneath the speed of light, or just at it, time dilation would cause us to age at a different rate than those in stationary space; ergo, space travel would be impractical. If we were to traverse spongespace on instruments, the discrepancy would still exist, but in a random fashion: the time we lost approaching the speed of light would be subtracted by the negative, or backward-running temporality one encounters exiting spongespace, but in a random fashion that would make,
did
make, in early experimental penetrations, spongetravel equally impractical. Imagine coming out in Draconis space
before
you even leave Lorelie . . . are you following?”

Shebat nodded, though she was somewhat taken aback by the thought of being in two places at once. “What happens then? Which is the real person, which not?”

The pilot sighed. “I’m just confusing you, aren’t I? People are the coefficient in the equation that keeps that particular paradox from occurring. Why, in detail, no one knows. The one time an automated device made that journey without an organic brain, an explosion occurred at the designated point of arrival three hours before the device was launched. Let me try, very briefly, to explain the principle: the human brain contains such an inflexible conceptualization of sequential time that the guiding brain demands from spongespace acquiescence to its schedule. And gets it, somehow. Men didn’t ‘understand’ what goes on in the heart of a fission reaction when they exploded the first A-bomb. We do not understand how the mind presupposes its rhythm on what seems a soulless cosmos. But the fact remains that if a human guidance system experiences ten days’ subjective time on a flight from point A to point B, the time-loss and time-gain the universe exacts as payment of passage are exactly and to the second in accord with subjectively experienced time. Thence, among other things, the Lords of Cosmic Jest, for who could have foreseen that the mind of man was powerful enough to command the currents of spacetime? A servile universe is difficult to comprehend; an amenable one raises all my hackles.”

“But you still have not told me why piloting is no fit occupation for a Kerrion, nor why when it appeared on my aptitude tests the computer red-lined it.”