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  Selim Labaya had shaken his head, pursed his mouth in which the spittle had suddenly turned chalybeate, and called his shipboard bondmates to his side to sketch them the outline of their consul general’s plan to turn tragedy into comedy, loss to gain, mortification to satisfaction.

  Those who knew the countenance of Selim Labaya of old were drawn like swords to ready by the welcoming smile that slithered across the old patriarch’s visage like a hungry python toward a burrow of mice. Some who knew him better saw the Labayan device of undulant dragons rampant replacing the airborne eagle above a circle of seven stars which was etched into the rings of Lorelie’s anchor-planet, Alexandria. One, who could not set foot on Lorelie, whose face would have begun a war had Parma Kerrion beheld it, whose gerontic back was bent, whose inveterate mind was the more deadly from all the years poison had been baking into its blade, laughed a laugh which sounded throught the Labayan ship like rending metal squealing in complaint.

  But when the delegation had made dock, departing with those sent to meet them, there was no sign of the bare-pated man, who was holed up content with a dream dancer secreted in the ship’s bowels for just that purpose. Old Jebediah giggled over the proximity of himself and his pleasure to Parma and his displeasure, when he remembered it, which was not too often, for the dream dancer was most talented, and kept him ecstatically engaged.

  To Marada, surveying Lorelie, no hint of Labayan presence showed. But he needed no doubt of their attendance nor insight into Labayan intentions to make him wary. He was twelve hours late to the audience his father had demanded, a function of the deep sleep come upon him so disadvantageously in the Orrefors’ guest suite. He bore with him mute testimony to the folly of his willfulness. The effect of his transgressions on his father’s temper could be no less far-reaching than the results he carried so cold in Hassid’s hold.

  The beauteous Lorelie did not beguile him: he was immune to her outward glory, knowing full well the passions swirling within like rot eating away fruit beneath a perfect rind.

  Shebat’s awe at the sight—soft oohs and aahs cooed from wonder’s own throat—temporarily lightened his load, then brought it back redoubled when he added her again to the sum of his difficulties and found the number a heretofore undreamed of prime too great to be contained within the universe he had known. All would change; how, he had no idea.

  At best, he would sit in his older brother’s chair, a fate beside which death would seem the kinder to one who shunned the machinations of commerce. At worst, he would resign his citizenship quietly, if it were demanded of him, accepting the attendant sterilization without complaint. This, too, was an alternative beside which death’s dirge was a celebratory hymn. But death, the eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth death of primitive times, was no part of Consortium justice. Its gentler sister, suicide, had been exposed upon a winter hillock: the shame of suicide upon the entire bond group would lead to a rash of the same; no man committed suicide without committing murder. Hence, no Kerrion had ever stooped so low, since the Jesters’ first smirk.

  Marada, in his rat’s maze, turned back from the blind alley of what might occur in the unknowable hours stretching out before him, matched velocities with the man-made moon Lorelie, and docked his ship. It was not so difficult as it would have been even a hundred years previously, before the Kerrion codicils of supergravity had obviated the necessity of dizzying spin and Kerrion crystalline chemistries had freed habitational designers from restricting considerations of size and stress. But it was not easy.

  When it was done, he felt buoyed, cleansed by Hassid’s palliative communion. Perhaps, somehow, he could retain the ship. For the first time since he had begun the docking maneuver, he remembered the Earth waif, and constructed various contingency plans that shielded her from any backwash of Parma’s wrath.

  So he came to the time of reckoning, and found the most difficult of it to be the consigning of Hassid’s facile brain to what might be a permanent limbo. Once all was dark in the ship but standby lights and all quiet without but for the soft hiss and thud of the automated re-pressurizing of the bay, he was past the worst of it; his hands steadied. Like the ship, he was ready, holding all faculties in abeyance but those standard functions: his heart beat, saliva jetted, breath came and went.

  Loud in the quiet came the soft tone that signaled a safe exit, then Shebat’s muted cry of delight when the port drew back and Lorelie’s fragrant air caressed her cheek.

  There were none to meet them. Marada’s scant brows drew down protectively over his eyes, and his voice came from deeper in his chest. In the miasmic Lorelian light, the chain rings in his ears were divested of their sparkle; in the stiffness of his carriage, they dared not swing, but hung quiescent.

  Shebat took note, but she had put on him the spell of twelve coils binding, and feared not at all for the safety of the Arbiter Kerrion, who had delivered her from the abyss of ignorance and surely would not be decreased on that account.

  Chapter Three

  Parma Alexander Kerrion had sired seven sons, the other six of which combined had not garnered half the troubles to hearth as had the one he now watched slowly but without hesitation climbing the last teal hill of several between port and tower, lissome of stride but sure in bearing, though he walked in company of a travesty, female, garbed in Kerrion colors. And doubtless also in the company of his fear: Marada could not help but have appraised the situation. But of this, the sauntering youth who paused often to point this way or that or touch the swivel-headed creature he had brought gave no sign. In the privacy of his bath—the only privacy to be had on Lorelie these days—the consul general leaned with elbows on sill, jutting chin cradled in flat hands which propped up the folds of his face so that it seemed that the Parma of a quarter century past stared squint-eyed out at his son’s approach.

  Of the bone white hair on Parma’s head, Marada was responsible for bleaching the better half. Twenty-five years less one month ago, Marada had been born of Persephone, slaying her in his pursuit of life, and Parma’s hair had begun to turn. How many times he had wished he could trade back this accursed spawn of passion for the woman who inspired it! But such bargains could not be made; even Parma’s influence held no sway in Fate’s court. All the Kerrion bond’s awesome biochemical abilities were useless in the face of death. Once lost, no person could be regained: cloning reproduced body but not soul. He had declined the opportunity to bring wife up as daughter, to see her grow away, go away, wed away to some youthful scion of a rival consulate. She had taken unto herself the only immortality worthy of the name: in Marada her genes rode, awaiting their dissemination.

  Parma sighed. Any possible consequence, of whatever gravity, was superior in his sight to the one facing him by law: he was not about to see his own son neutered and cast out. Whatever the cost, he would prevent that. No matter how much he disliked—must one mince words with oneself? No? Then: hated!—the boy at times like these, he was his mother’s son. How could what was consummately attractive in the mother be so infinitely destructive in the son? It was as if the old crone Chance sat drooling on his ledger, each drop that fell upon some entered credit blurring it away.

  Well, Marada would not be blurred away, erased for his evildoing as his stepmother had counseled, as Selim Labaya had demanded, as Justice herself seemed to require. But one could dream of it: a world without the constant weight the boy was upon his sire, without the continual parade of offended parties and the contumacious whirlwind which was ever the wake of Marada’s passage.

  A knock on the door and a concerned murmur from without caused the beset patriarch to snarl violently: Can a man have no peace even sitting on his own pot? through his dromedary’s lips, no longer drawn firm by upholding palms. Persephone, Marada’s mother, had called Parma her shaggy camel. The comparison had grown only truer during the ensuing years, though Persephone, like the dromedary, was extinct, forgotten by all but Parma, who kept the likeness of both woman and Camelus by his bed.

  The voi
ce, unflagging, demanded entrance.

  And since it was young Chaeron, third-born son, he who thought to make up for the black presence of Marada by the bright light of his own (who would, if scheming succeeded, once more pull design and dynasty out of harm’s way!), Parma got up from his defecatory throne, unlocked the door, and admitted him.

  Chaeron Ptolemy Kerrion: auburn-maned, beryl-eyed, wide-browed. And, as ever, smiling oh so slightly, the perpetual jest of which he was always the brunt accepted, even anticipated in altruistic good humor. First-born of Parma’s third wife, he had always known it would come to this: all things would devolve to him: the power, the primogeniture, the privilege. All things good had been his due from birth. He accepted them with gracious aplomb, never questioning his great fortune nor his right to command all he surveyed. His mother, Ashera, was fond of saying he had slipped from her womb with nary a kick nor a cry, had lain face down on her belly, laughing, and had not stopped chuckling since. On this particular day, his only shadow of concern was that the smile not break its restraint and beam too brightly, that his humor jump its traces and, braying loudly, spoil all things by crossing the finish line prematurely, without the chariot it was meant to draw, thus disqualifying him from the race.

  “Marada and friend have docked safely. They approach. As per your order, no one met them, nor was a lorry available for their use,” said Chaeron carefully, once the door had clicked shut behind his back, absently toying with the drape of his teal dress-cloak.

  “And our guests? Are they still so flushed with calculated passion? Or has Selim decided the time is appropriate to display some disposition toward compromise?”

  Chaeron rubbed a hand across his chuckle, then let its sparkle touch his sire with just the right amount of incredulity mixed in. “Sir? Were you listening then?”

  “Come now, boy, this is no time to hide your intellect, such as it is. Come over here.” Parma walked to the window. Below, Marada and his companion were just beginning to climb the hundred-stair flight of synthetic sapphire that led to the tower’s gilded doors. “Look there, Chaeron, get a glimpse of the newest Kerrion.”

  The confident smile dissolved, a rare flicker of thoughtfulness replaced it on that countenance which seemed designed by a sculptor’s skill to beautify Kerrion coinage. Treated abruptly to a glimpse of the youth’s classical profile, Parma shook off irritation: the boy could not help it that he so favored his mother. Then Chaeron reset the mask of his smile and peered downward. “So you are telling me you are going to accept his wardship of the girl?”

  “Guess again, son of Ashera. Surely the mother’s wiles must have migrated along with her grace behind the oh, so unprepossessing front you yet present? I could do with a little more evidence of that incisive wit your mother proclaims but I can only suspect you possess. Honesty, too, is a perquisite of my successor; at least, within the family John.”

  “So, then,” said Chaeron easily, throwing a leg up on the sill and a calculating long look at his father, “you will take the girl in as a full member of the family, so that you can throw Marada to old Labaya’s wolves?”

  Parma’s laugh pealed around the little room, filling it, drawing from the son seeking to become heir a tentative harmony, as the father chortled: “Good, very good. The time for mincing words and seemly humility is indeed past. If old Selim does what he must, then I will do what I must.” Parma was sober-faced, suddenly. “I must keep my bargain,” he added mysteriously. Then: “The girl would likely be one burden too many for Marada, whose tribulations are only beginning.”

  “And if there is a vote on this, you would like to count mine?”

  “I will count yours, and your mother’s, and your brothers’. In fact, it is you I am charging with securing unanimity on this point.”

  If Marada were allowed to remain guardian of the girl, Selim Labaya could claim him unacceptable by reason of that fact for the compromise Parma had in mind, and demand another heir of Kerrion blood to replace him. This, Parma was not willing to risk. Most definitely, it must be the very same son who had brought about this state of affairs and damaged Labayan honor, who repaired the damage and salved the wound. Most definitely, Marada would be his gift to Labaya: let the juggernaut rage in Labayan space. Indeed, let Labaya do what he would with the youth. No amount of firepower, no commercial coup or biochemical pestilence could compare to the havoc Marada would wreak in the Labayan consulate once he was part of it.

  He spoke so candidly of this to Chaeron that the youth snorted softly in unfeigned admiration, and began to bate. Observing this, Parma was content to loose him among the Labayans to see what he could do: “All haste, my boy. Your success, most candidly, hangs on it. When I walk out there I want old Labaya ready to spring his ‘trap’ on me. And I, all unknowingly, will fall into it without even a moue of protest. What, after all, is a father to do?”

  “Next to you, I am a poor pup. But I will do my best, father. And—” Hand on door, fingers tapping the silver knob, the young consul-to-be gave one more candid look to his sire. “—as for the wardship of the little barbarian, should any objection be made on account of your having used up all your allotment of offspring, then I will take her, in full citizenship, as my first and lawful child. After all, can a man do less for his brother than he would for his sire?” And to his father’s approval, he bowed out the door, closing it firmly behind him.

  Chaeron had offered a great deal for the vacant seat of the first-born, with its consular privilege, which had not yet been offered him in so many words. But it would be. It would be.

  With a determined straightening of his shoulders, Chaeron set off down the ultramarine hall to the salon where the Labayan delegation of four men and two women was being entertained. This, finally, was the day he had long hoped for. Opportunity had come in the way he liked best: simple, with clear-cut rules, a task to perform that would earn him the desired result that had been his sole absorption since he was old enough to understand that the two other women’s sons stood between him and the honors that were his due. All of Ashera’s schemings and weblike machinations over the years since he had been old enough to be privy to her confidence had not ever had even the wildest chance of succeeding, and he was reverently happy that he had always brushed them aside (when he caught her early enough) or stymied them out of hand (when he had caught her too late to do better).

  She stood, now, talking to the stormy-haired consul general of the Labayans, her figure not in the slightest motherly, though she had borne Parma five sons and a daughter. As always, every male eye in the room darted often to her; also as always, none dared stare too openly or approach too closely the woman whose profile might have launched a flotilla in ancient times.

  He sailed easily up to her, putting his hand about her supple waist. She was sheathed in the blues of Lorelie, where Kerrions had no need for the somber blacks they wore when venturing among commoners. She wore the jewels of the house of Kerrion.

  She wore a beauty so all-pervasive that she needed to wear nothing at all, that reduced jaquard and platinum to mere setting, functional necessities like a band that holds a jewel upon the finger. Her face, like her figure, was of evolution’s surest strokes: brow, capacious; nose straight yet slightly uptilted; mouth a generous bow in a creamy oval of a face that made its perfection out of balance: a symphony of restraint. “Mother,” he whispered as his lips grazed her cheek, “our brother arrives even as we speak, and I think you should be the one to greet him.”

  Their beryl eyes exchanged a truer message, the flecks of gold in hers moving outward as the pupils widened. As always, the near-telepathic bond between them made Chaeron uneasy, but he pushed the disquiet away. Later, when all else was accomplished, he would deal with her. Now here was the fierce-jowled pepper-haired freighter of a man whose brows made an unwavering single fine above his eyes, as if all subtraction and addition above the line was registered in the pale blue windows beneath it.

  “Where’s Parma, still blubbering over
his lost boy?” snapped Labaya with a cursory slide of his ice eyes over Chaeron’s person that came back with their assessment unhidden: dilettante.

  All the better, thought Chaeron, as the raspy voice demanded to be taken to his father.

  “Sir, it is on his behalf that I have come to plead with you. My father is ill with grief. To lose one son and immediately face the loss of another! Then, sir, there will be only myself old enough to be of any use. . . . Consider, Consul General, how you might feel in his place. My brother arrives directly. I beg you—”

  “You do? How original, not to say pleasing. I suppose old Parma did not send you, then, if you are going to beg. Beg on then, little do-gooder. Though it will do you little service, it will add spice to what is to come.”

  The smile stayed in place on Chaeron’s lips; he had well trained them. But behind them, teeth clenched hard together. When the time came again for him to speak, he let his eyes stray first to one of the women who had accompanied the four Labayan dignitaries to Lorelie and sat now on a deep-pillowed russet settee with her short leg hidden under the folds of her long golden gown.

  Still looking at her, he said to Selim Labaya: “Any mercy, most honored sir, that you could see fit to bestow on our grieving house in this the moment of our mutual mourning would not go unappreciated. Should both our houses suffer? Should the greatest commercial entity the stars have ever witnessed go unconsummated because of a quirk of fate?”

  “Fate,” Selim Labaya spat. “It’s not fate did this, but that son of his, spoiled rotten and deserving of the same fate he meted out to my daughter! I—”

  “Sir, forgive the interruption, but time grows short. If you could find it possible to seek less than your due in this matter, our whole house would be eternally in your debt.” He looked soulfully, desperately into the old consul general’s eyes, letting his own mist slightly. Dangerous game, here, and he played it with an expert. But the girls would not be present if there was no hope of a lesser demand. . . . What was this one’s name? Madel, that was it. No, the old man was just enjoying the sight of the entire Kerrion bond tiptoeing around its own fortress, obsequious and servile to the last man of them. It rankled him—if it were the true nature of affairs, it would have been insupportable. As it was, he could feel the heat in his loins, the drawing up of his scrotum, the tightness in his throat. But he spoke all his lines as carefully and precisely as might have Parma himself, with the proper nuances of emotion, as if the sweat popping out on his brow was the sweat of fear and not fury. “Sir, if you could find a daughter of yours willing to make another match, Marada to whomsoever you might choose among your offspring, I can assure you we would gladly welcome your choice.”