But as they reached that decision, Provos spoke again. “The despots searched us out, catching first the laggard ones and then the leading ones, who returned to try to help the others. They killed Nona and Darius, and made Colene and Seqiro slaves. Earlier, when the two almost escaped, they killed the horse also, and the girl killed herself.”
Earlier: that meant later, in ordinary time. Colene was catching on to the woman’s memory. But it was an unacceptable future, because of what happened to the others.
They tried out other scenarios, and finally found one that worked: Colene would go alone to distract the despots, while the others proceeded toward the filament. Then Colene would be conjured to rejoin the others, and they would leave the planet and be out of range of the malice of the despots.
“But exactly how do I distract the despots?” Colene demanded.
Before Provos could answer, a blackbird flew overhead, peering down at them. “A despot familiar!” Nona cried. “We must go immediately!”
“But it will see us go into the water,” Darius said.
That was readily taken care of: Seqiro stunned the bird, and it plummeted into the water. Now the despots had no spy-eye, but they already knew the location. So Colene remained, while Darius conjured the others one by one to some other location. Nona was the last to go. She used her magic to make the footprints they had all left fade out.
“Thank you for saving my life,” she said to Colene, with a warm and sincere smile.
“It wouldn’t have been threatened if we hadn’t come,” Colene replied, feeling warmed. But the woman had disappeared.
Colene shrugged, and practiced the smile. If it could warm her, it surely could melt Darius, and she wanted it.
However, she had a more immediate problem: distracting the despots. She must be successful, because Provos had remembered that the plan worked, but it would have been a lot easier if there had been time for that one additional memory. Suppose she messed it up, and changed the future again?
You did a dance and showed them your body, Seqiro’s thought came. Darius was not pleased.
So that was it! “Well, Darius isn’t the one distracting the despots!” she said. “Tell him I’ll dance for him, any time he’s man enough for it.”
Satisfied, she worked out a routine. She wasn’t humanity’s greatest dancer, but men didn’t care how accurate a girl’s steps and hand motions were, they cared how her breasts bounced. Nona could have done a better job of that, but this was Colene’s show. She had always liked the notion of dancing for a sophisticated audience, and wowing them. Of course she had also always known that it would never happen, and that if she ever did find herself in such a situation she would mess it up. But still the vision appealed. It was part of her suicidal disposition: she always had to flirt with disaster. She felt most truly alive when she did that. She had read somewhere that it was the same urge that led explorers to climb the most dangerous mountains, and drivers to race at deadly speeds. It wasn’t just the awful boredom of ordinary existence, it was that they weren’t truly alive unless they were near death.
Actually she had come to life when she met Darius. She had played the same game with him, lying virtually naked with him, tempting him to rape her, and he hadn’t, and her fascination had quickly turned to love. But she hadn’t quite believed that he was from a different reality, and by the time he proved it, it was too late: he was home in his Castle of Laughter, and she was alone in her Hovel of Despair. But then he had made the Virtual Mode, which enabled her to walk across realities as if they were thin slivers of mica, and she had set off in search of him. At first the different realities had seemed much the same as her own, but when she crossed between them, people and animals appeared or disappeared. Then they had become different, with new fundamental laws, such as animals dominating the people and having telepathy. But in one of those other realities had been Seqiro, and she had loved him instantly, and believed in him, and she seldom felt suicidal when he was near. Darius and Seqiro—that was just about all she needed.
Assuming she could survive long enough to enjoy it. What an irony, that when she had the company of both the man and horse of her dreams, so she had no desire to kill herself, she was subject to external threats to her life. And not just her life: Nona was a threat against Colene’s relationship to both man and horse, not because Nona had any evil intentions, but because she was what she was: about four years older than Colene, beautiful, and magically gifted.
Still, it was better to have things to fight for than to be without dreams. Even if she died here on Planet Oria, in the Universe of Julia, it would be better than her life had been on Earth.
Another blackbird flew overhead. There was a familiar! Seqiro had learned that the despots worked through animals, using the senses of the creatures so that they could project full pictures on walls or in the air. In fact, Darius and Wicked Queen Glom had watched a picture of Knave Naylor in Colene’s room, when he tried to rape her. Colene hadn’t fully realized then what had really freaked the man out. It wasn’t the illusion, it was the fact that it seemed real to him. The despots were good with illusion, but they always knew the difference between it and reality. So her plan to do exactly what she had done had been flawed; straight illusion would not have done it. Because Seqiro touched the knave’s mind directly, getting access to it when the man was all excited about what he thought he was going to do to Colene, the effects had seemed real. He believed. Because that was the way it worked, with Seqiro. So Naylor thought that superior magic was protecting her, and that a real serpent was out to kill or castrate him. It was as if a person had a picture of a rattlesnake on his desk, and when he went to pick it up, the snake bit him. But Queen Glom hadn’t seen anything, so she figured the knave was losing his mind, and probably they had had him put away privily. A real one-two punch. Anyway, there had been a bug—a literal bug!—in the room that was the queen’s familiar, so she had seen through its eyes. The queen had gotten an eyeful!
Still, Colene hadn’t much liked the way Darius had hefted the queen’s fat breast. The man was just too interested in the flesh of other women, and not interested enough in Colene’s. Except when he saw her naked from the waist down, without diapers. She could make him squirm, that way, and she liked that.
There was a noise. Then a blue-clad man appeared up the beach. A male theow, by the color coding. And another, down the beach. The despots must have had some magical ways to ship them, or maybe had just used fast horses, and now they were closing in on her. Well, she hoped the rest of her party had made it to the filament; there seemed to have been time.
She waited while more men appeared and walked toward her. They were looking around, probably wondering where the others were. “Sorry, nobody here but us chickens,” she said. And started her dance.
Her first steps were clumsy; she mostly just kicked up sand. Then something seemed to take hold of her, and she became ethereally light and graceful. She whirled, she sprang, she gestured in intricate patterns. How could this be? Then she realized that it was Seqiro’s influence: he was guiding her body. It was one of the things he could do.
But horses didn’t dance. How could he make her graceful, doing things she had hardly imagined? He might make her move faster or have more power, but this dance was intricately choreographed. The human folk in Seqiro’s reality were not given to this sort of thing. He should have no memory of it.
Nona! Seqiro was borrowing from her mind, and relaying it to Colene. It was Nona’s ability she was experiencing.
Colene felt another surge of jealousy. Damn that woman! She had so much that Colene lacked. But Colene couldn’t turn it down; their escape depended on her success.