High Couch of Silistra (28 page)

“What seek you from me? What threat could I possibly be to you?” I whispered, my eyes imploring. I had seen, in his tridoe, the measure of his detachment and the cruelty of which he was capable. Raet played with animal life as a child might with those blocks which interlock, from which structures may be made in accordance with the child’s imagination. Some of his experiments had been so ill-fit to walk, hop, or fly that I had still not shaken the horror from me. “Please,” I enjoined him, when he did not answer, “what service may I do you, you who claim dominion over the world of my origin?”

“Well spoken,” he said gravely, extending his hand to me. “You are your father’s daughter. For now, I will ask no more than that; cede me your recognition of my mandate.”

“I do so vow,” I mumbled, staring into his narrowed eyes, filled with consternation, that such a one would seek to bind me. And he had, thusly, my word from me before I had any inkling of what skills I had so imbound.

We made our way to Teris without further incident, but nowhere along the walkway did I see any sign of the multitude of cubes that had once lined the white walk. It was as if the cube in which I had been imprisoned, and the hundreds of others exactly like it, had never been.

I did not ask Raet. Doubtless he had my questions from my mind. He did not choose to enlighten me.

The classes were held in a large open field, where the walkway abruptly ended, under the multicolored sky. I saw perhaps a hundred Mi’ysten children, with a handful of adults, sitting scattered on the saw-toothed grass.

Raet threaded me through the groups of youngsters, ranging from crawlers to postpubescent youths. I was very conscious of the leash in his hand and the band at my throat. Where could I run, I thought bitterly, where the Mi’ysten could not find me?

The grass was cool under my feet, the earth carpeted warm and yielding. For the first time since my arrival, I trod Mi’ysten soil.

Raet jerked me to a stop by a group of six bronzed toddlers overseen by a sharp-featured, stocky Mi’ysten who wore a blue circlet about his head. He was the first Mi’ysten I had seen who wore anything upon his person but an occasional Shaper’s ring. Looking about me, I realized that all the adults in the field had so bound their heads.

“Teris,” said Raet, handing him the chain leash dangling from the band around my neck, “Estri. I do not envy you your task.” And he was gone from my side.

Teris smiled at me kindly. “I think we will not need this, you and I,” he said, and snapped the leash from my collar. It dropped to the ground. Not since then have I worn one.

His voice was low, modulated, suited to his easy manner. The laughter in his pale amber eyes had no cruelty in it. I found myself much reassured by him, in those first few moments of our acquaintance. He greeted me in Silistran, not the archaic Stoth dialect that the Mi’ysten favored, but modem Silistran, as it is spoken in Astria.

Greatly eased, I sat at his bidding on the grass, and watched the children at their lessons. They were shaping fruit.

After a time, he spoke to me. “We will begin where you left off,” said my teacher. Between us appeared a roiling ball of thick brown substance, over which fiery sparks chased frantically.

“Make the fruit of your choice,” he directed.

My stomach curled back upon itself. My palms wept, and I could not steady my breathing. I was nervous before my teacher. He raised both brows. I sighed and closed my eyes, repeating the ritual I had developed while in my cube.

I reopened them only when I heard a distinct thud. As I had conceived it, the name fruit lay upon its side, red and shiny in the serrated grass.

I regarded Teris.

He picked it up and examined its form, then bit into it, then caused it to halve itself in his hands.

“Good,” he pronounced. “Now, make another.”

I waited for the ball of brown matter. Nothing appeared in the space between us. Teris stared at me intently. I held his gaze as long as I could. With dropped eyes I considered.

“I cannot,” I burst out. “I need the brown matter.”

“Make it,” he commanded.

“Out of the air? I cannot.”

“Why not? All you need is present in the air you breathe. Remember, you are no longer on Silistra.” I remembered. And I recalled how thick and filling this Mi’ysten air had seemed when I first breathed it.

I raised my head to him. It could not be.

He nodded encouragingly.

I closed my eyes and attempted to conceive the brown matter in the space between us, just as I had seen it. I could not hold the image. I was ignorant of the brown material. Knowledge of its consistency, temperature, qualities, and properties—all were lacking. I had never studied the brown matter, nor used it in its raw form. I had been foolish. I thought it not the first time I had been impeded by my own superficiality.

Once more I met the eyes of my teacher. Patient Teris, how infantile I must have seemed to him.

“Demand to know,” he advised. “Demand to see. You can get the information you need.”

“From where?”

“From within. You have access to direct information. You have interacted with the brown mass. Somewhere you know it. One does not have to know why one knows a thing in order to benefit from the knowing.”

I did as he commanded. After long failing, long refusing, long pretending, anguished, I shaped another red, juicy name from the air of Mi’ysten. I had not wanted to. I had not wanted to learn the truth—that the Mi’ysten could shape fruit, trees, skies, mountains, worlds, stars. Nor that they had, in some distant time and from some unknown space, shaped even my world, even my ancestors. I had shaped. Truly, I did not want to know it, or accept it and my half-bred status and the ramifications of my father’s nature. In that first shock, I did not want to be as they. I coveted not at all the power over life and death and the control of reality I saw around me, that omnipotence within which they lived, free from all that could threaten them. Eternally. How quickly would I be consumed by boredom if such a life were mine? It would not be so. I was not as they. I would not, could not be. Nor would they ever accept me among them.

That thought comforted me, momentarily.

“What you fear is the loss of relevance,” Teris chided me softly. I had forgotten. On Mi’ysten there was for me no privacy.

“Relevance,” he continued, “is in itself a construct superimposed upon reality, upon the universe, by your limited brains and linear thought processes. It stands like a stenciled no-trespassing sign nailed askew upon the first tree of the last forest at the edge of your world, where no eye will ever pass that can read the language in which it was written. Yet truth proclaims itself.” He hested the second name fruit into the air, where it spun between us, unsupported. Tens’ eyes sucked my feelings from me.

I had shaped.

Oh, barely, perhaps, but enough to taste the burden, enough to know what questions might be asked.

“Teris,” I said to him, “Raet exacted from me an acknowledgment of his sovereignty, but over what, I am not sure. Nor do I have the ‘why’ of it.”

The name fruit plummeted to the ground, rolled thrice, lay against its twin near my foot. Teris considered it. When he raised his countenance to me, I could not name his expression.

“I am a Mi’ysten child—a created son, as is he. Those of us who seek shaping skills are not many, nor are we as successful as our fathers. I can see no resolution, in the long run, of the struggle between the children for the father’s heritage. But I am not among those who favor such drastic steps as Raet and some others have proposed. If, between you two, some grounds for converse could be found, it would be a union whose fruit would be prized highly by many of us.”

“I do not understand.”

“None of the Mi’ysten children have been successful in creating a stable world. If the space-time children were no more, there would be many new theaters upon which experimental dramas might be staged.”

I merely stared at him.

“Among our assigned labors is the caretaking of creation. Raet and his followers tread the thin line between self-aggrandizement and iniquity, between innovation and insurrection. If the assessors vote as I believe they will, it may be a rebuke sufficient of itself to remind them of their place. You will have influence upon your father, in whose hands all of creation truly rests. Do you see?”

“If Raet comes upon the need, he will call on me to stand for him?”

“At least. Your expressed word has done that much, already. By accepting his mandate in the worlds of time and space, you have gainsaid aforehand any objection you might have justly entered, should you claim your full blood-right.”

I did not tell him that I would not have gainsaid Raet, regardless. I asked, instead, of those others who had been in the cubes, and was told that all but three were returned to their homes without the lapse of any subjective time. Their loved ones did not miss them, for they were never gone. Nor did they recollect Mi’ysten, not even the cubes in which they had lived. Of the three, I was one. The other two, Teris assured me, I would see in good time. And upon that subject he would speak no more.

The Mi’ysten guard their privacy. I questioned him about what Dellin had told me: of the contact team that had landed on Zredori, and their horrible demise. He answered that the ship had landed in a tangential clime where primitives were developing. When I only regarded him, he added that they had been unexpected. I answered him that it was unlike the Mi’ysten to make such an oversight. Surely the crude creatures of time and space could not so surprise their creators. He looked at me very keenly, dismissed his other students, and escorted me to Esyia’s tridoe. He never taught me again.

What other instruction I received, she imparted to me. I learned from her that shaping on Mi’ysten is not the toil of shaping in the worlds of time and space, where entropy reigns. She could give me no more than the most elementary of mind shields, nor dared she instruct me in the obviation of space, that mode of travel most favored by Mi’ystens. The first, I attempted on my own with partially satisfactory results, building upon the infants’ shield whose workings Esyia was qualified to teach. The second was a skill about which I would have been content to remain ignorant, but that I felt so keenly my immurement, made ever sharper by the freedom Esyia and her siblings enjoyed.

It became Raet’s habit to come and take me, occasionally. And when he did not, the feelings I had for him—the raging, hating love—caused me great pain. As it was then, so is it still, between us. When I am with him, I despise myself for my weakness— that I can never be more than flesh toy to him. That I cannot even refuse to love him. At those moments, I regret my limitations, my Silistran blood, with all my heart. And when he does not seek me, when that pain recedes, the constrictive chill of loneliness and longing takes its place. I have a thousand times cursed him, and as many times traded off in fantasy all that I might ever become for revenge upon his supernal flesh. I would, at those moments, be gone from this place, away from him, home on Silistra, and be there gladly, with no remembrance of what has here occurred. Or would have, until this day just passed, if one may give names like “day” and “night” to time as it is experienced here.

Just after my rising meal, he came to see me. I can recognize that in his own way he gets value from me, else he would not do so. We went together to his tridoe, and he made for me a night sky like the one Kystrai had made in the dining hall. I look forward to that the most, out of all that transpires when I couch him—seeing the evening sky. So much do I crave it that the fact that such a sky might be made for my view directly following sleep and sun’s meal no longer troubles me. One never knows how one would miss the night until it is taken away.

“Do you like it?” he asked, nuzzling my ear as I lay on my back in his feather-edged, cerise grass, looking up at the stars.

“It is very beautiful,” I allowed. I tried in vain to pick constellations I knew from the blazing myriad points of light.

“It is more than that,” he said, his lips in my hair. “It is the night sky you have been awaiting. Look there. … I may not see you after this,” Raet said, and put his arms around me. I turned my face to him, to protest. The afterimage of the explosion danced upon his forehead, new star glowing bold between his eyes.

“And I am certain that such will be the case,” came the voice from above me, where I lay beneath Raet on the cool grass.

Raet rolled from me, and Estrazi was all that my mother had promised, and more. I rose to my knees, struck dumb and witless. The recording of my conception had not prepared me for him. Ah, rather, before whom the morning star pales insignificant, and all that I have borne to kneel before thy brightness becomes too meager to speak, I have no questions for you who have labored in the lands of life interminably. I have in me no single query as to right or fitness, you who bear unending query in the babbling tongues of creation. No supplication, not from me, not when the torrent of thy grace and compassion inundates my soul.

Through my tears, I saw him reach out to me. How did he appear, most supernal of masters? In a flesh form so magnificent that his brightness illumined the air around. I saw myself then, in that glow; myself as he saw me, a triumph of life, a wonder so great that a song might be made for my singularity. I, his creation, beheld him.

Our fingers touched.

He smiled, not with mouth, but with those eyes like universes forming.

I sensed rather than saw his attention shift. Before me that superb form disintegrated and reformed into a writhing slitsa of light. It pulsed a moment, dancing upon the grass. Then it shot into the air, to be met there by another. And, clawing hair back from my face, turning round and round in vain for sight of Raet, I knew what I had seen. Raet! It was up, then, I looked, into the night sky, where he pulsed in his light form. Bright against the dark firmament, the two spun and closed. I crammed my knuckles into my mouth and sank down upon the grass, craning my neck to see them. They became one, flared unbearably, disengaged, and melded again. The pulsating glare grew in intensity until I threw my arm over my face and huddled, sobbing, my head turned away.