But she was nervous. She stepped off the escalator, turned around the bulk of the pylon and bowed. 'Master Cornut,' she said.
The wind caught at her blouse and hair. Cornut stood dreaming over the rail, his own short hair blown carelessly around his forehead. He turned idly and smiled with sleepy eyes. 'Ah,' he said. 'Locille.' He nodded as though she had answered - she had not. 'Locille,' he said, 'I need a wife. You will do.'
'Thank you, Master Cornut.'
He waved a gentle hand. 'You aren't engaged, I understand?'
'No.' Unless you counted Egerd - but she didn't count Egerd.
'Not pregnant, I presume?' 'No. I have never been pregnant.'
'Oh, no matter, no matter,' he said hastily. 'I don't mind that. It isn't any sort of physical problem, I suppose?'
'No.' She didn't meet his eye this time, though. For there was a sort of physical problem, in a way. There couldn't have been a pregnancy without a man. She had avoided that.
She stood waiting for him to say something" else, but he was a long time in getting around to it. Out of the corner of her eye she noted that he was taking pills out of that little box as though they were candy. She wondered if he knew he was taking them. She remembered the knife-edge at his throat in class; she remembered the stories Egerd had told. Silly business; why would anyone try to kill himself?
He collected himself and cleared his throat, taking another pill. 'Let me see,' he mused. 'No engagements of record, no physical bars, no consanguinity, of course - I'm an only child, you see. Well, I think that's everything, Locille. Shall we say tonight, after late class?' He looked suddenly concerned. 'Oh, that is - you have no objection, do you?'
'I have no objection.'
'Good.' He nodded, but his face remained clouded. 'Locille,' he began, 'perhaps you've heard stories about me. I - I have had a number of accidents lately. And one reason why I wish to take a wife is to guard against any more accidents. Do you understand?'
'I understand that, Master Cornut.'
'Very good. Very good.' He took another pill out of the box, hesitated, glanced at it.
His eyes widened.
Not understanding, Locille stood motionless; she didn't know that a sudden realization had come to Master Cornut.
It was the last pill in the box. But there had been twenty at least! Twenty, not more than three-quarters of an hour before-twenty!
He cried hoarsely, 'Another accident!'
It was as if the realization released the storm of the pills. Cornut's pulse began to pound. His head throbbed in a new and faster tempo. The world spun scarlet around him. A rush of bile clogged his throat.
'Master Cornut!'
But it was already too late for the girl to cry out - he knew; he had acted. He hurled the box out into space, stared at her, crimson, then without ceremony leaped to the rail.
Locille screamed.
She was after him, clutching at him, but impatiently he shrugged her off, and then she saw that he was not climbing to hurl himself to death; he had his finger down his throat; without romance or manners, Master Cornut was getting the poison out of him quickly, efficiently—
And all by himself.
Locille stood by silently, waiting.
After a few minutes his shoulders stopped heaving, but he leaned on the rail, staring, for minutes after that. When he turned his face was the racked face of a damned soul.
'I'm sorry. Thanks.'
Locille said softly, 'But I didn't do anything.' 'Of course you did. You woke me up—' She shook her head. 'You did it by yourself, you know. You did.'
He looked at her with irritation, then with doubt. And then at last, he looked at her with the beginning of hope.
CHAPTER VIII
The ceremony was very simple. Master Carl officiated. There was a friendly meal, and then they were left alone, Locille and Cornut, by the grace of the magisterial power inherent in house-masters, man and wife.
They went to his room.
'You'd better rest,' said Locille.
'All right.' He sprawled on the bed to watch her. He was very much aware of her, now studying, now doing womanlike tasks about his room - no. Their room. She was as inconspicuous as a flesh-and-blood person could be, moving quickly when she moved. But she might have been neon-lit and blaring with sirens for the way she kept distracting him.
He stood up and dressed himself, not looking at her. She said questioningly: 'It's time for sleep, isn't it?'
He fumbled. 'Is it?' But the clock said yes; it was; he had slept the day through. 'All right,' he said, as though it were some trivial thing and not world-shaking at all. 'Yes, it's time for - sleep. But I think I will take a walk around the campus, Locille. I need it.'
'Certainly.' She nodded and waited, polite and calm.
'Perhaps I shall be back before you are asleep,' he went on. 'Perhaps not. Perhaps I—' He was rambling. He nodded, cleared his throat, picked up his cloak and left.
No one was in the corridor outside, no one in sight in the hall.
There was a thin electronic peep from the robot night-proctors, but that was all right. Master Cornut was no undergraduate, to wriggle under the sweep of the scanning beams on his belly. It was his privilege to come and go as he chose.
He chose to go.
He walked out on to the campus, quiet under a yellow moon, the bridge overhead ghostly silver. There was no reason why he should be so emotionally on edge. Locille was only a student.
The fact remained, he was on edge.
But why should he be? Student marriage was good for the students, good for the masters; custom sanctioned it; and Master Carl, from the majesty of his house-master's post, had suggested it in the first place.
Queerly, he kept thinking of Egerd.
There had been a look on young Egerd's face, and maybe it was that which bothered him. Master Cornut was not so many years past his sheepskin that he could quite dismiss the possible emotions of an undergraduate. Custom, privilege and law to one side, the fact remained that a student quite often did feel jealous of a master's prerogatives. While a student, Cornut himself had contracted no liaisons to be interfered with. But other students had. And there was no doubt that, in Egerd's immature, undergraduate way, he might well be jealous.
But what did that matter? His jealousy could harm only himself. No serf, raging inwardly against his lord's jus primae noctis, was less able to make his anger felt than Egerd. But somehow Cornut was feeling it.
He felt almost guilty.
He was no logician, his field was Mathematics. But this whole concept of right, he thought as he paced along the riverbank, needed some study. What the world sanctioned was clear: The rights of the higher displaced the rights of the lower, as an atom of fluorine will drive oxygen out of a compound. But should it be that way?
It was that way - if that was an answer.
And all of class, all of privilege, all of law, seemed to be working to produce one single commodity - a product which, of all the world's goods, is unique in that it has never been in short supply, never quite satisfied its demand and never failed to find a market: Babies. Wherever you looked, babies. In the creches in the women's dorms, in the playrooms attached to the rooms of the masters - babies. It was almost as though it had been planned that way; custom and law determined the fact that as many adult humans as possible spend as much of their time as possible in performing the acts that made babies arrive. Why? What was the drive that produced so many babies?