“I brought you some honeycakes in case you were awake.”
“Is that all you ever think of? Making me fat so you’ll have more to hold? You never listen to me.”
“All right, who saved us weeks of work?”
She munched on her honeycake. “Our betrothed.”
“Kathein?”
“No. Oelita. We were requisitioning samples of the wheat-eating underjaw and before we got the order out, they arrived by way of an itinerant glassblower. Oelita seems to be an observant woman. She collected some a while ago and gave them to a renegade Stgal priest who breeds detoxified profane vegetation. He was worldly enough to send them to the Cloister here. Oelita also had written out an amazingly detailed description of the underjaw life cycle.”
“Do they contain human genes like Hoemei maintains?”
“They certainly do. It is an unbelievable crime. It’s Judgment Feast for the Mnankrei. We’ll have to break the whole clan to a lesser status, maybe destroy it.”
“You’ll wear Scowlmoon’s crescent for a necklace before you see that happen. It’s impossible. They tried it with the Arant and we’re here.”
Her eyes blazed. “We’re Kaiel — not Arant!”
He laughed. “I see you believe our forged history.”
“They let too many of you atheists out of the creches!” Noe was above all an aristocratic patriot.
Gaet did not bother to remind her that the creche had been essentially an Arant idea or that the God-made ectogenetic machines on which the Arant heresy arose had probably existed and been destroyed during the terrible crusade. Instead he changed the subject. “I figure Sorrow can hold out for one season against the Mnankrei. They have enough reserves for that. If the underjaw is still an abomination by then, the Stgal are doomed.”
She grinned smugly. “We already have the underjaw control ritual. It is not yet God smooth, but it will be.”
“That’s fast work!”
“I’m a fast woman,” she flirted. “Why do you think you fell in love with me after one heartbeat?”
“You mean it wasn’t your family money?”
“Don’t you remember? It was right after I offered you that purple drink,” she teased, licking the honey from her fingers. “Extract of slave pituitaries.”
“That’s what you plan for the beetles, to spike their drinks?”
“We need only to synthesize three artificial genes.”
“For what purpose?”
“The underjaw carries up to a hundred tiny symbiotes in its cervical carapace which are its only source of the alalaise it needs to power its wings during migration flight. When underjaws overgraze, the population begins to die. A dead underjaw triggers the sexual phase of the symbiote whose larvae thrive on the corpse. In their winged phase they find living underjaws and as the under-jaws become symbiote-saturated, a migration begins. We’ve found a way to use the human protein in the deviant underjaw to trigger the sexual phase of the symbiote while the underjaw is still alive so that it is eaten alive. The larvae mature and find other underjaws. If the new underjaw is of the Mnankrei-synthesized variety, then the sexual phase begins again instantly. If not, the symbiote establishes a normal relationship.”
“Clever. Who thought of it?”
“Me, you oaf!” She cuffed him. “When I was reading Oelita’s description of the life cycle. Get dressed. I’ll show you.”
“I just got undressed!”
The labyrinth of the Cloister contained perhaps one-third of the entire Kaiel wealth. There were the tapestries and the windows and the gold foil and silver inlay, of course, but that was for show. The major investment was in intricately crafted biochemical apparatus, dust-free and sterile rooms, electron eyes, silvergraphing techniques that could capture the image of a protein string on boron-anate plastics. There were rooms where genetically truncated and modified microlife cells fabricated difficult chemicals. Priest-changed ziants performed much of the necessary micro-manipulation and sensing. Within this labyrinth the ancestor of Gaet’s host mother had been synthesized from human and artificial genes. Even among the priest clans where breeding and biochemistry was a familiar art, the Kaiel were known as magicians.
While Noe took a nap with her head on the desk top, Gaet curiously examined relevant silvergraphs and pondered over hundreds of variations of hypothetical genetic chains that had been inserted in the fast-breeding symbiotes and tested. It was not his field of expertise but he read the group’s work well enough. In the Getan language the same word was used for “priest” or “leader” or “biologist”. Nobody survived the creches who was not a fine biochemist.
“Hey, this one seems to work!”
She woke up and looked to see the source of his enthusiasm. She smiled proudly. “It’s sluggish but my children are optimizing it.”
“You’re still sleepy.”
“I need the mountain winds in my face.”
“How about a run on my skrei-wheel?”
“Is it dangerous?”
It was dangerous so she loved it, clinging to Gaet’s back, flying faster than men could run. The ground rushed under her eyes like that peak-risk moment when a sailplane comes in for a landing, but there was no jolt or collapse of wings — the earth kept slipping past in endless orgasm.
18
Note how the large maelot is captured by a true sea master. We do not deck this creature with the first haul. The maelot is strong and the line is fragile. Let the four-legger escape until it has lost all hope. Then it is weaker than the line.
STORM MASTER TONPA was waiting in a skiff behind his ship when the cry came. He could have overtaken her easily but he did not. He kept his oarsmen far enough behind her so that she had hope, but moved them fast enough in pursuit so that her desperate hope would exhaust her.
When he finally took her, Teenae raked him with her claws and his crewmen had to tie her feet while he held her. They fastened the line so that she was hauled behind the boat. Face down. She had to struggle frantically for air. Tonpa gave careful visual attention to the vigor of these splashings. If they ceased it would mean she was drowning and would need revival.
The skiff slapped safely over the waves to the mother ship. There Teenae was reeled aboard by her bound feet, recklessly swung against the hull by the cavalier sailors, and left to hang by the ankles until Tonpa himself had climbed aboard in his own good time.
The sea priest did not bother to speak to her. He ignored his clawed face. Callously he supervised his men while they lashed her into the painful four-quarter rigging, as if her limbs were the four corners of a sail replacing the furled fore-topsail. Up there her husband would be sure to see her at dawn, upside down, silhouetted, perhaps even rosily outlined.
Arap was also lashed to the rigging, but right side up, and lower down. Tonpa told Arap that pleasure set better in the memory when it was framed by pain. And then he laughed. “How else do I convince her to convince her husband that what you told her was whole truth?”
As an extra precaution he moved his ship out of the bay, silently and without running lights, to foil whatever rescue efforts her husband might attempt. There would be no need for a rescue. At dawn they would be back and what was left of her would be returned to her man.
At the fading of the stars, when Getasun was only peeking at the Njarae from behind the mountains, two rough seamen lowered Teenae and slopped salt water on her crumpled body to revive her. They towelled her down, joking cruelly. A taciturn sailor shaved the strip at the top of her head. They fed her. All the while she said nothing. For a long time she was kept below deck, and then they took her up, unclothed, to face Oelita. She would rather have died on the mast. Not only was Oelita there, but many of the townspeople she knew as well. Oelita, in disbelief, made her say what she had to say over and over again. That was a special torture.