Her face loomed against his. Warm lips struck his own, became moist. On the back of his neck, still the warmth of her fingers, the cool of her ring. Her hand slid.
Then, behind them, Prince screamed.
Ruby jerked away, snarling. Her nails raked his shoulder. She fled past him down the rock.
Lorq did not even watch her. Exhaustion held him in the flow. He stalked through the fragments of glass. He glared about at the crew. “Come on, God damn it! Get out of here!”
Beneath the knotted cable of flesh, the muscles rode like chains. Red hair jerked up and down over his gleaming belly with each breath.
“Go on now!”’
“Captain, what happened to my …
But Lorq had started toward the door.
The Mouse looked wildly from the captain to flaming Gold. He dashed across the room and ducked out the broken glass.
In the garden, Lorq was about to close the gate when the Mouse slipped through behind the twins, syrynx clutched under one arm, sack under the other.
“Back to the Roc,” Lorq was saying. “We get off this world!”
Tyy supported the injured pet on one shoulder and Sebastian on the other. Katin tried to help her, but Sebastian was too short for Katin really to assist the weak, glittering stud. At last Katin stuck his hands under his belt.
Mist twisted beneath the streetlights as they hurried along the cobbles through the City of Dreadful Night.
Pleiades Federation/Outer Colonies (Roc transit) 3172
“Page of Cups.”
“Queen of Cups.”
“The Chariot. My trick is. Nine of Wands.”
“Knight of Wands.”
“Ace of Wands. The trick to the dummy-hand goes.” Take-off had gone smoothly. Now Lorq and Idas flew the ship; the rest of the crew sat around the commons.
From the ramp Katin watched Tyy and Sebastian play a two-handed game of cards. “Parsifal—the pitied fool—having forsaken the Minor Arcana, must work his way through the remaining twenty-one cards of the Major. He is shown at the edge of a cliff. A white cat tears the seat of his pants. One is unable to tell if he will fall or fly away. But later in the series, we have an indication in the card called the Hermit: an old man with a staff and a lantern on that same cliff looks sadly down the rocks—“
“What the hell are you talking about?” the Mouse asked. He kept running his finger over a scar on the polished rosewood. “Don’t tell me. Those damned Tarot cards—“
“I’m talking about quests, Mouse. I’m beginning to think my novel might be some sort of quest story.” He raised his recorder again. “Consider the archetype of the Grail. Oddly unsettling that no writer who has attacked the Grail legend in its naked entirety has lived to complete the work. Mallory, Tennyson, and Wagner, responsible for the most popular versions, distorted the basic material so greatly that the mythical structure of their versions is either unrecognizable or useless—perhaps the reason they escaped the jinx. But all true Grail tellings, Chretien de Troyes’ Conte del Graal in the twelfth century, Robert de Boron’s Grail cycle in the thirteenth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, or Spenser’s Faerie Queene in the sixteenth, were all incomplete at their authors’ deaths. In the late nineteenth century I believe an American, Richard Hovey, began a cycle of eleven Grail plays and died before number five was finished. Similarly, Lewis Carroll’s friend George MacDonald left incomplete his Origins of the Legend of the Holy Grail. The same with Charles William’s cycle of poems Taliesin through Logres. And a century later—“
“Will you shut up! I swear, Katin, if I did all the brain-hacking you did, I’d go nuts!”
Katin sighed, and flipped off his recorder. “Ah, Mouse, I’d go nuts if I did as little as you.”
The Mouse put the instrument back in his sack, crossed his arms on the top, and leaned his chin on the back of his hands.
“Oh, come on, Mouse. See, I’ve stopped babbling. Don’t be glum. What are you so down about?”
“My syrynx …”
“So you got a scratch on it. But you’ve been over it a dozen times and you said it won’t hurt the way it plays.”
“Not the instrument.” The Mouse’s forehead wrinkled. “What the captain did with …” He shook his head at the memory.
“Oh.”
“And not even that.” The Mouse sat up.
“What then?”
Again the Mouse shook his head. “When I ran out through the cracked glass to get it …”
Katin nodded.
“The heat was incredible out there. Three steps and I didn’t think I was going to make it. Then I saw where Captain had dropped it, halfway down the slope. So I squinched my eyes and kept going. I thought my foot would burn off, and I must have got halfway there hopping. Anyway, when I got it, I picked it up, and … I saw them.”
“Prince and Ruby?”
“She was trying to drag him back up the rocks. She stopped when she saw me. And I was scared.” He looked up from his hands. His fingers were clenched; nails cut the dark palms. “I turned the syrynx on her, light, sound, and smell all at once, hard. Captain doesn’t know how to make a syrynx do what he wants. I do. She was blind, Katin. And I probably busted both her eardrums. The laser was on such a tight beam her hair caught fire, then her dress—“
“Oh, Mouse …”
“I was scared, Katin! After all that with Captain and them. But, Katin … “ The whisper snagged on all sorts of junk in the Mouse’s throat. “It’s no good to be that scared …”
“Queen of Swords.”
“King of Swords.”
“The Lovers. My trick is. Ace of Swords—“
“Tyy, come in and relieve Idas for a while,” Von Ray’s voice came through the loud speaker.
“Yes, sir. Three of Swords from the dummy comes. The Empress from me. My trick is.” She closed the cards and left the table for her projection chamber.
Sebastian stretched. “Hey, Mouse?”
Chapter Seven
Outer Colonies (Roc transit) 3172
“What?”
Sebastian walked across the blue rug, kneading his forearm. The ship’s medico-unit had fixed his broken elbow in forty-five seconds, having taken somewhat less time over the smaller, brighter wounds. (It had blinked a few odd-colored lights when the dark thing with a collapsed lung and three torn rib cartilages was presented to it. But Tyy had fiddled with the programming till the unit hummed efficiently over the beast.) The creature waddled now behind its master, ominous and happy, “Mouse, why you not the ship’s med your throat let fix?” He swung his arm. “It a good job would do,”
“Can’t. Couple of times they tried when I was a kid. Back when I got my plugs they gave it a go.” The Mouse shrugged.
Sebastian frowned. “Not very serious now it sounds.”
“It isn’t,” the Mouse said. “It doesn’t bother me. They just can’t fix it. Something about neurological con-something-or-other.”
“What that is?”
The Mouse turned up his palms and looked blank.
“Neurological congruency,” Katin said. “Your unattached vocal cords must be a neurologically congruent birth defect.”
“Yeah, that’s what they said.”
“Two types of birth defects,” Katin explained. “In both, some part of the body, internal or external, is deformed, atrophied, or just put together wrong.”
“My vocal cords are all there.”
“But at the base of the brain there’s a small nerve cluster which, if you see it in cross section, looks more or less like a template of a human being. If this template is complete, then the brain has the nervous equipment to handle a complete body. Very rarely the template contains the same deformity as the body, as in the Mouse’s case. Even if the physical difficulty is corrected, there are no nerve connections within the brain to manipulate the physically corrected part.”