A sudden stillness came over the scene of carnage. The bellowing, the chattering ceased, the gambolers halted their cavorting, those overhead stayed their hands in the stringing of entrails among the tree limbs.
“Boss of bosses!” Sayjak said, knowing, at that moment, that he would not be killing Dortak. “Good idea. Me. Boss of bosses. Like old Karak. Never been a boss of bosses since him.”
“Maybe good idea,” Dortak said. “But maybe one day you hate it. Trouble comes, you got to help all clans. Otlag, Bilgad—they will come to call you boss of bosses. Here comes Otlag now. They get trouble and go drum for you at Shannibal, you got to come and help. All People your People now. Big job.”
As Dortak rose and moved away and Otlag came to offer his allegiance, Sayjak considered some of those ramifications involved in being boss of bosses. He found the prospect vaguely unsettling. Big job, as Dortak had said. Boss of bosses. But Karak had done it, long ago, and they still told stories of his deeds as though they were but yesterday. It would be good if one day they told such stories of Sayjak.
As Otlag rose, Bilgad came up to take his place, to call him boss of bosses. Sayjak licked his lips, showed his teeth, nodded his head.
“Yes,” he said. “Big boss. Go now. Have fun. Eat, dance, have sex, chop up bodies and play with pieces. Be safe. Sayjak is watching.” Moments later, he seized a passing female by the shoulder. “Your turn to have fun,” he said. “Great honor.”
Tranto loafed within his stand of trees, looking out over the herd. The transition had been very smooth. He had not even been challenged in the days since Scarco’s disappearance. Of course, since none of the herd were certain as to exactly what had happened to Scarce it was possible to believe the worst. And he was certain that at least some of them did. A number of young bulls drifted off on occasion, taking several days to return. Muggle had reported overhearing them discuss the possible locations of Scarco’s remains. He had also overheard comments that Tranto was an unlucky name, its most famous bearer being a trouble-making rogue. Of late, however, the quest for Scarco’s bones seemed to have been abandoned—and the herd continued to treat Tranto with full respect and deference.
He wandered the grove until he was facing eastward again. Yes, still there…
“Morning, boss.” Muggle had come up behind him, silent as a shadow. “Going to be another hot one. The birds say it’s been raining up north.”
“That’s nice,” Tranto said. “Who’s that one?”
“Which one?”
“The one who just raised her head from browsing and looked this way.”
“Oh, that’s Fraga. She’s a flirt. Daughter of Cargo and Brigga.”
“Any current—attachments?”
“No. A number are interested in her, of course. But she hasn’t encouraged any one of them over the others.”
“Good,” Tranto said. “That is, a girl should take her time and think these things over.”
“True,” Muggle agreed.
“Let’s browse a bit, heading down over that direction. Slowly. When we get there, we’ll just say hello. Then you can do introductions.”
“Sure,” Muggle said.
“It’s good to mingle with your people every now and then.”
“It is,” Muggle agreed.
Abel and Carla stared at the virtual form of their swollen daughter, there in their home virt space. They regarded Chalmers and the slightly hunched, white-bearded figure of Dr. Hamill.
“…highly unusual,” the doctor was saying. “I can’t recall another case of false pregnancy during transfer sleep. Her records do not indicate any psychopathology—”
Carla glanced quickly at her husband, then back at the doctor.
“What,” she said, “if it is a real pregnancy?”
Dr. Hamill met her gaze.
“The surface scan—which takes only seconds to run—showed the hymen intact,” he told her. “Is there some reason to think otherwise?”
“Not really. But humor me and check further, anyway,” she said.
“Of course. Though it would be highly unusual if—”
“It’s highly unusual that she’d be in an untraceable transfer state for over three months, too, isn’t it?”
“Well, that goes without saying. We are doing the best we can on that front—”
She turned to glare at Chalmers.
“Has it ever happened?” she asked. “A crossover pregnancy?”
“Certainly not!” he replied. “It’s physically impossible.”
“We could be making all sorts of legal history,” she said.
John D’Arcy Donnerjack and Ayradyss took up residence in the black castle on a rainy morning in early October. They supervised their robotic staff in the uncrating and disposition of furniture they had bought from antique dealers in odd corners of the Continent. The servants’ pneumatics made soft puffing sounds as they unrolled, raised, and hung tapestries to soften dark stone walls, placed chests, armoires, benches, and high-backed chairs in various chambers, erected canopied beds, assembled suits of armor, hung weapons and shields, unrolled rugs. They also installed walk-in freezers and modern instant ovens in the second kitchen. The first kitchen was a period piece in keeping with the overall decor, functional, but intended mainly for effect. Ayradyss liked the feeling of permanence that came with antiques.
While ninety percent of Castle Donnerjack was a showpiece, the other ten percent was state of the art in all technical effects associated with work and pleasure. Entering the upper west wing, one came into contemporary times. There, John Donnerjack had his office, containing modern furniture and voice-activated and manual terminals, with walk-in holographic display stages capable of transporting machine from within machine from within machine constructs—so Gedanken-‘pure of operation that they could function only in Virtu—into seeming imported pockets of that place, to allow for laser-pressure forcefield manipulations of a sort that might not be enacted elsewhere. Beyond the office was the Great Stage, where illusion-master Donnerjack, with great expense and technical innovation, had wrought the same effect, full-scale. To enter the Great Stage was a translation; it was like walking into Virtu in the flesh. He was to use it for testing pieces of his large-scale projects. He was also, frequently, to use it for his coffee breaks.
He and Ayradyss stood on a high balcony that night of the first day, regarding the stormy North Minch by moonlight.
“So you have actually restored your ancestral home,” she said at last.
“In a way,” he said. “I don’t really know how the old place looked. Not likely this good, though. Probably about the only thing we have in common with it is that we built it on the same spot. We dug it out and formed everything up. There were indications there had been an old cellar down there—”
“With tunnels,” she said, “leading off of it. Where do they go?”
“Way back into the rock. They seem to be natural. I didn’t try to explore them all. Just sealed them off with a big metal door. If the wine cellar were to grow monumentally I suppose we could set some racks inside it. Otherwise, they serve no purpose.”
“But that’s how you know this was really the site?”
“Well, my grandfather’d said something about the old place supposedly having tunnels. That, along with the foundation, makes me think I was probably right.”
“It is so different from Virtu.”
“In what way?”
She gestured outward.
“That storm will pass after a time,” she said, “and things will return to a—ground state that is stable.”