He had given in to Geste, but by all the
gods and demons, he promised himself, he was not going to lose to
Lady Sunlight without putting up a fight.
He backed out onto the grassland for a
running start.
He bruised his shoulder on the unyielding
barrier.
He glared at the grove, rubbing absently at
his injured joint. He had bruised his shoulder, but he did not give
up. He would never give up.
He did not give up, and at last,
considerably later, he stood, somewhat battered, in the center of
the meadow, trying to decide what to do.
He had struggled against the invisible wall
for hours, as the sun passed its zenith and hurried down the
western sky. He had rested briefly at the wake’s first sunset, but
when full dark had arrived he had renewed his efforts. When the
secondlight sunrise came he had rested again, finishing off the
last crumbs of corn and washing them down with water taken from the
stream where it emerged from the southeast corner of the grove.
There, he noticed, the stream became an ordinary ditch, with no
rocks and rills, and he began to suspect that the entire grove was
an artificial creation, devised by Lady Sunlight for her own
enjoyment.
He tried sneaking upstream to slip under the
barrier beneath the shallow water, but succeeded only in covering
himself with mud; water did indeed pass under the barrier, but the
opening was too small for him.
He climbed out and dried himself off, and
after sitting for a moment, thinking, he decided to try digging his
way under. He felt his way forward, looking for the barrier in
order to know where to start digging, and did not find it.
The barrier had vanished. He walked into the
grove unobstructed, and found his way to the meadow.
There was no sign of Lady Sunlight there. He
could see glitter in the air sometimes, and once or twice he bumped
into invisible somethings, but he could not locate anything out of
the ordinary more than once. He found no supernatural doorways, no
hidden caves, no messages, nothing but an empty meadow where, every
so often, he would brush against a wall that wasn’t there when he
turned to investigate further. The bright little fluttering things
were gone without a trace, as were the small furry creatures that
he had glimpsed at her feet, and there was no music, but only the
whisper of the wind in the leaves, the gurgle of the stream, and an
occasional call from a lonely bird.
He stood there, baffled.
He wanted Lady Sunlight more than he had
ever wanted anything. He knew that was irrational, but he could not
help it. He thought it was not really for her own sake—she was
staggeringly beautiful, but he knew nothing more about her than
that, and beauty meant little. It was for what she represented. She
was a Power. That meant she was unobtainable. It also meant that
she was a part of the group that he felt had wronged him. The
combination was irresistable.
This was not love, in any form. It was lust.
He knew that.
He understood his motives, and he was not
proud of them, but he was unable to change his feelings. He wanted
her, very much indeed. Quite aside from the sexual element—and
powerful as it was, he thought he could resist that—he wanted to
talk to her, to voice his complaints and challenge her to answer
them.
She was not there. All he saw was the empty
meadow.
Defeated, he thrust his hands in his
pockets, hunching forward and glaring balefully at the unmindful
wildflowers.
His finger touched something hard and slick,
and he stopped, startled, as he realized what he was touching. A
smile spread slowly across his face, then faded again.
It might, as he had told Mardon, produce
nothing but a faceful of stink. If Geste had told the truth,
though, Bredon had his answer. He had a demand to make that would
surely be a challenge even for Geste. If Geste gave him what he
asked for, then he would have Lady Sunlight and a victory over the
Powers; if Geste failed, then he would have shamed Geste as Geste
shamed him. He pulled out the red disk.
“If this doesn’t work, you bastard, I’ll do
my best to kill you,” he said. Then he grabbed the disk in both
hands and pushed against it with his thumbs.
It cracked easily, then crumbled, and
suddenly he held nothing but red powder.
Bredon brushed the powder from his hands and
looked about expectantly.
Nothing happened. Leaves rustled, and
somewhere a bird whistled plaintively.
He waited, quickly growing angry.
“May demons suck the marrow from your bones
for lying to me, Geste the Trickster!” he shouted at the rustling
leaves overhead, after a moment passed without incident. Disgusted,
he started toward the stream, intending to cross it and head home.
He was very hungry now, and he had found nothing to eat anywhere in
the grove.
“
...neither woman would relinquish her claim to
the child.
“
Rawl the Adjuster looked at them carefully, and
said, ‘Long ago, an ancient king revered for his wisdom faced a
case exactly like this, and proposed that the baby be cut in half,
that each mother might have half. What would you think of that
solution?’
“
Both mothers gasped in horror at the idea, and
each quickly offered to give up her claim to forestall such a
catastrophe.
‘“
I thought as much,’ said the Adjuster. ‘That
story never sounded right to me. Let us see if we can’t do better.
Give me your hands.’ And he reached out to the two women.
“
Well, naturally, both were hesitant to touch the
actual flesh of a Power, but first one reached out, and then the
other, not wanting to be bested, did the same. They held hands with
the Adjuster for a moment, and then he released them and stepped
back. He picked up the baby, then returned it to the
cradle.
“
A moment later he announced, ‘This woman is the
child’s true and rightful mother, the woman who bore him,’ and he
pointed to the woman on the left. ‘The sheens prove it.’
“
No one knew why Rawl spoke of sheens, but it’s
sworn by all who were there that that was his word, or one very
like it.
“
When he had made his announcement, the other
woman flung herself at his feet, confessing that it was true, that
her child had died and she had taken the other in its stead, and
the Adjuster bade her rise and stop weeping.
‘“
I cannot give you back your dead child,’ he
said, ‘but I can give you another just like it. Bring me the
remains of the dead child.’
“
And the woman ran behind her house and began
scraping at the dirt where she had buried her babe.
“
The Adjuster followed, and the dirt flung itself
aside at his gaze. He reached out and pinched the dead child’s arm,
then returned it to its grave.
‘“
In three days,’ he said, ‘I will bring you your
child.’ And he vanished.
“
The people wondered mightily at this, and for
three days they spoke of little else. Most of them doubted that
even a Power could create a new child without a mother’s womb, and
certainly not in three days; some ventured to guess that Rawl had
gone to search the world for an orphan to take the place of the
lost infant.
“
But lo, when the three days had passed, the
Adjuster returned with a baby in his arms, and the child was
newborn, and in fine health, and was in every way the exact image
of the poor dead boy that lay behind the house, with hair and eyes
and features just the same.
‘“
A clown,’ the Adjuster said. ‘This is a clown
of the one that died.’ He handed the baby to the dead boy’s mother,
and then he vanished again.
“
But the odd thing is that the Power’s prophecy
was wrong, and when the boy grew up he became a fine blacksmith,
and not a clown at all.”
—
from the tales of Atheron the
Storyteller
Crystal shimmered white in the air above the
terrace, and Lady Sunlight stepped down onto the pavement. A
polychrome torrent of flying sparkles poured after her, glittering
in the sun, and a golden-furred creature the size of her hand leapt
out beside her, nose up and alert.
“Hello!” she called. “I’m here!”
“Hello, Sunlight,” a hoarse voice
replied.
She turned, startled, and found a short man
dressed in black standing at one corner of the terrace, where he
had been admiring the view to the west. A thick black disk perhaps
a dozen centimeters in diameter hovered above one of his shoulders,
and a black-furred and bat-winged creature glared at her from the
other. A small feelie vine was wrapped around his wrist.
“Oh, hello, Rawl,” she said. “I didn’t know
you were here.”
“I’m here,” he replied.
“I can
see
that,” she said, annoyed.
She shifted her shoulders, drawing her flowing polychrome gown more
closely about her and sending her insectile aerial circus into an
uproar. “Is Sheila here yet?”
“She’s inside,” Rawl said, jerking his head
toward the gleaming windows.
As he spoke one of the transparent panels
vanished, and a tall, handsome woman in a brown body-suit leaned
out, brown hair stirring in the breeze. Music spilled out around
her, the mellow droning of an ancient Fomalhautian mood piece, and
the accompanying images swirled behind her.
“Hello, Sunlight!” she called. “I’m glad you
could come!”
“Hello, Sheila!” Sunlight answered, waving
gaily. “I wouldn’t miss it! I brought some flutterbugs to brighten
up the place!”
“Well, then, don’t just stand there, come on
in, and bring them with you! You, too, Rawl; Autumn House is now
officially open.”
“It isn’t autumn yet,” Rawl said, as he
turned away from the panoramic view of the western foothills and
the desert beyond. The floating disk spun slowly, and faded from
sight; his creature blinked slowly and curled itself up to his
neck. The feelie vine stroked his wrist soothingly.
“Oh, I know that,” Sheila said. “But I felt
like coming up here a little early this year. It’s just another
hundred hours or so, anyway; that’s close enough. Come on in!”
When his inhuman passenger was secure on his
shoulder Rawl strode across the terrace with calm assurance. Lady
Sunlight hesitated.
“Sheila, who else is here?” she asked,
reaching down to scoop up her golden-furred companion.
“No one, yet,” Sheila replied, momentarily
puzzled. Then her expression cleared. “Oh, you mean Geste. I
haven’t gotten hold of him yet; they tell me he’s out bothering the
natives again. I don’t think he knows I came early, so you should
have a couple of days—local days, at the very least—before he gets
here.”
“Good!” Lady Sunlight said.
Rawl passed her on his way to the house.
“They aren’t natives,” he said, almost to himself.
“Oh, certainly they are,” Sheila retorted.
“They were born here, weren’t they? They’ve been here for thousands
of years, so they’re natives
now
, and it doesn’t matter
where their ancestors came from.”
“Yes, it matters,” Rawl insisted, as he
stepped into the lounge.
“Well, yes, it
matters
,” Sheila
admitted, annoyed, “because they’re human and not extraterrestrials
or artificials, but damn it, Rawl, they’re natives now, and we need
some
term to distinguish them from our own little
expedition.”
Rawl just shrugged at that, and gestured for
a drink. A silver dish—actually a small, self-aware machine, akin
to his own disk-shaped device—that floated in mid-air appeared, a
ball of crystalline fluid held in a field above it.
Sheila helped Lady Sunlight into the
house—not that she needed it, but simply as a gesture of welcome.
The glittering flutterbugs scattered across the lounge,
transforming the seething Fomalhautian imagery to something much
quicker, more cheerful and more scattered. The music changed to
match, improvised by the household machines, and an odor of
cinnamon and new grass wafted through the room. “I wish you and
Geste got along better,” Sheila said.
“Oh, sometimes I wish we did, too,” Lady
Sunlight replied, sighing as she settled into a floating red chair.
A feelie vine offered itself to her ankle, but with a gentle twitch
she sent it away. “We did once, you know—we were lovers for about a
decade once. But he’s just
so
childish and immature with his
stupid pranks! Do you know what he did? He...”
Sheila, sinking into her own seat, cut her
off. “Yes, I
do
know, dear, because he came and told me
about it himself, and you shouldn’t hash it over again.”
“I suppose he was bragging about it.”
“No, he was apologizing, explaining why he
wouldn’t be able to visit at the same time you did for awhile.”
Rawl sipped his drink through a pseudopod of
force, and asked, “What
did
he do? I hadn’t heard.”
“Oh, this isn’t anything new,” Sheila said
before Lady Sunlight could speak. “I told you about it. It was
almost three years ago, now.”
“Oh, that,” Rawl said, shrugging.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing!” Lady Sunlight exclaimed.
“Nothing
important
,” Rawl
amended.
“Maybe not to you, Rawl, with your damned
high ideals, but it’s important to
me
when some young idiot
ruins a party for some stupid joke that he should have outgrown
before they ever let him leave Terra!” She settled back, stroking
her tiny pet. The creature chirrupped softly.
“Is Geste Terran?” Rawl asked with mild
curiosity.
Lady Sunlight hesitated. “Is he?” she asked
Sheila.
Sheila shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I never worried about it.”
“Housekeeper, is Geste Terran?” Lady
Sunlight demanded of the ceiling.