Darius nodded. “I think he will accept. But he will be concerned about the fate of his original Prima.”
“She may well be traveling back to the Mode of another Darius, to marry another Kublai.” Her chest heaved with silent laughter. “We are interchangeable.”
He did not laugh. “But when I return, he will vacate the post, and need no Cyng wife.”
Her face lifted again and turned to his. “If you return with your love, would you marry me then? I can do for you what I can do for him, and I would be discreet about your love-mistress.”
Darius was startled. A power of multiplication rivaling his own!
“Why, yes, I believe I would! You understand the nature of the marriage.”
“I certainly do. Consider us affianced, in that unlikely event.”
Darius sank into thought, his mind racing. He had visited the other Mode in search of exactly a woman such as this: one who could expand his power so greatly as to make it no burden, without being depleted herself. He had found her. She was not young and lovely and sweet; she was old and smart and cynical. She was not his love. She was Kublai’s lost love. What a strange solution!
“You were correct,” he remarked. “There was something to talk about.”
“Yes. There is more, but I felt it necessary to clarify our relationship as I believe it is, so as not to deceive you.”
“More?”
“I have had twenty years to ponder the nature of the Modes,” she reminded him.
“Kublai will be most interested in what you have to say.” He might be interested himself, but right now he was tired, and wanted to sleep.
“Delicately put. Let me mention just one other question, whose answer I believe I know.”
“One other thing,” he agreed.
“We are in a provocative position, physically. If this causes you to desire—”
“No. No offense.”
“That is the answer I anticipated, and prefer. We are of different generations, and thrown together only by the chance of our Mode involvement. Now we must share warmth and sleep.”
Darius was glad to agree. He relaxed, adjusting his head on her shoulder, cushioned from her shoulder bone by her shirt and hair and the thin blanket, and closed his eyes. She relaxed similarly against him, and drew him in closer for that warmth. Her bosom touched his chest, and he became conscious of her breasts as she breathed.
His imagination shaped her body into that of Colene. He did desire a woman, and Colene was that woman. But the two of them had been hedged by imperfect understandings, and it had not been right. Were they traveling the Virtual Mode, together like this, then—well, if it had been Colene who had made that offer, this time he would have accepted.
“You are thinking of your loved one,” Prima murmured.
“We are sharing minds?” he asked, surprised.
“Some. Bear in mind that I have similar power to multiply as you do; that is a kind of emotional interaction. It is stifled now because I am isolated from your Mode and your special Chip connection, but our minds will interact increasingly as we associate and are in close contact.”
“Surely true,” he agreed. His power had been stifled in the alternate Modes, but she derived from his own Mode, or one very similar. He had no experience with such interaction, because he had never before encountered a woman of her level of power.
“But mainly I felt the tenderness of your touching, and knew it was not for me.”
She was embarrassingly perceptive. “It is true.”
“If I marry Kublai, I will try to pretend he still loves me. I hope that at least he desires me.”
“He has a young and beautiful and attentive wife,” he said. “She is Koren. I impressed on her the need to be unmarried from the Cyng of Hlahtar, and she hates me. She will hate you, if you evoke his desire.”
Her body stiffened, then relaxed. “True. I thank you for that reminder. I have no right.”
Evidently she had been quite lonely, trapped in the dragon’s Mode. She had loved Kublai, and perhaps still loved him, having had neither satisfaction nor any other man to dream of. She could represent disaster for Kublai’s love life. Yet she had a power that would be invaluable to any Cyng of Hlahtar, himself included.
“If I may make a suggestion—”
“By all means.”
“Marry Kublai, but take a lover. Make it obvious. Then it will be seen that the marriage is purely convenience.”
“That is good advice,” she said sadly. Then she was silent, and they drifted to sleep.
IN the morning they were both quite stiff and uncomfortable. It occurred to him that this was indeed a provocative position, but that even had it been Colene here, it would have become relatively unexciting in this situation.
They unkinked their legs, and Prima got her skirt decorously down so that her diapers no longer showed, which was a relief. They worked their way down to the ground and stretched and exercised, jumping together to get warm.
“I must undertake natural functions,” she said. “But we can not untie our arms.”
“What exactly would happen if we did?” he asked. “I mean, if we are careful to remain right here in this Mode—or if I stepped across, I could return for you.”
“It might be all right,” she said. “But my fear is that because I am now a creature of the dragon’s Mode, and have no alternate Mode anchored in that, I would fall through the Modes and return there. That is a risk I prefer not to take.”
“Fall through? But if you do not walk across the borders—”
“If you will humor me while I relieve myself, I will explain in more detail.”
“As you wish.” He was sure she had good reason. He stood facing away while she squatted to do her business and bury it in the dirt. Then she faced away for his turn. This was another firm reminder that there was little actual romance in being bound to a woman; instead the details he would have preferred to ignore were made uncomfortably evident.
Then they made a meal from his supplies, and she explained while they waited for the water they had drunk to be assimilated. “You understand that a traveler’s tenure is limited on the Chip Mode, because he gradually loses contact. If he does not return fairly soon, he never will.”
“Yes. I call it the Virtual Mode, because it is analogous to a state of functioning by that name in the Mode where I met my love. It is presumed that a traveler has been killed or lost or trapped as you were. Now that I have learned what happened to you, I consider this presumption confirmed.”
“Virtual Mode,” she repeated musingly. “As if it is something not quite real, yet seems real. A useful concept.” She paused, evidently assimilating the notion. “However, the presumption of the reason a traveler through the Modes does not return is not confirmed. He may indeed be killed, lost, or trapped, but the mechanism is more basic than that. You are aware how you must eat and drink cautiously in foreign Modes, because you can not immediately assimilate the food.”
“Yes. I was warned, but forgot. I drank at this lake, and lost the water from my stomach. I had to do it again, and wait.”
“Precisely. Your body isolates the foreign molecules and separates them from their Mode; they must join yours. But the corollary is more dangerous: the more foreign matter you incorporate in your body, the less remains of your original substance. Eventually your body is more foreign than native, and you are unable to remain on the Virtual Mode. Then you are trapped, regardless of the rest of your situation. This happened to me.”
“But the dragons caged you!”
“Yes. They caged me and fed me, and in due course I became too much of their Mode, and could not escape. I had little choice: had I refused to eat, I would have died of starvation. They knew that. They would have done that with you. They allowed me to feed you your own food because they wished me to ingratiate myself with you. They knew that in time your food would be exhausted, and the process of assimilation into their Mode would accelerate. The very process of breathing was already beginning that.”