We ate our evening meal in a heavy atmosphere as the moons of Kregen spun past overhead in all their different phases. There were five on view tonight. I munched palines and studied Maspero. He remained withdrawn. At last he raised his head.
“The Gdoinye comes from the Star Lords, the Everoinye. Do not ask me of them, Dray, for I cannot tell you.”
I did not ask.
I sensed the chill. I knew that in some way unknown to myself I had failed. I felt the first faint onset of regret.
“What will you do?” I asked.
He moved his hand. “No matter that the Star Lords have an interest in you. That has been known before. It is in your brain patterns. Dray-” He did not go on. At last he said: “Are you happy here, Dray?”
“More happy than I have ever been in my life-with perhaps the exception of when I was very young with my mother and father. But I do not think that applies in this situation.”
He shook his head. “I am doing all I can, Dray. I want you to become one of the Savanti, to belong to the city, to join us in what we must do, when you understand fully what that is. It is not easy.”
“Maspero,” I said. “This is Paradise for me.”
“Happy Swinging,” he said, and went toward his own apartments in his house.
“Maspero,” I called after him. “The girl. Delia of the Blue Mountains. Will you make her well?”
But he did not answer. He went out and the door closed softly.
On the following evening I saw the crippled girl at one of the parties that could be found all over the city. Always there were singing and laughing and dancing, formal entertainments, musical contests, poetic seminars, art displays, a whole gamut of real vivid life. Anything the heart desired could be found in the Swinging City. Perhaps twenty people circulated in the relaxed atmosphere of this quiet party given by Golda, the flame-haired beauty with the bold eyes and the lush figure, a woman with whom I had spent a number of pleasant evenings. She greeted me bearing a book, a thick tome of many pages and thin paper, and she smiled tilting her cheek for me to kiss that smooth rosy skin.
“You’ll love this one, Dray. It was published in Marlimor, a reasonably civilized city some long way off in another of the seven continents and nine islands, and its legends are really most beautiful.”
“Thank you, Golda. You are very kind.”
She laughed, holding out the book. Her gown of some silvery lame glistened. I wore my usual simple white shirt and trousers and was barefoot. My hair had been, as I had promised myself aboard the leaf boat, cut to a neat shoulder length and, in honor of Golda’s party, I wore a jeweled fillet in my hair, one of the many presents I had received from friends in the city, among the trophies I had won.
“You were telling me about Gah,” said Maspero, walking up with a wine goblet for me. He drank from his own.
Again Golda laughed; but this time a different note crept into her deep voice. “Gah is really an offense in men’s nostrils, Maspero, my dear. They delight so in their primitiveness.”
Gah was one of the seven continents of Kregen, one where slavery was an established institution, where, so the men claimed, a woman’s highest ambition was to be chained up and grovel at a man’s feet, to be stripped, to be loaded with symbols of servitude. They even had iron bars at the foot of their beds where a woman might be shackled, naked, to shiver all night. The men claimed this made the girls love them.
“That sort of behavior appeals to some men,” said Maspero. He was looking at me as he spoke.
“It’s really sick,” said Golda.
“They claim it is a deep significant truth, this need of a woman to be subjugated by a man, and dates right back to our primitive past when we were cavemen.”
I said: “But we no longer tear flesh from our kill and eat it smoking and raw. We no longer believe that the wind brings babies. Thunder and lightning and storm and flood are no longer mysterious gods with malevolent designs on us. Individuals are individuals. The human spirit festers and grows cankerous and corrupt if one individual enslaves another, whatever the sex, whatever specious arguments about sexuality may be instanced.”
Golda nodded. Maspero said: “You are right, Dray, where a civilized people is concerned. But, in Gah, the women subscribe also to this barbaric code.”
“More fools them,” said Golda. And then, quickly: “No-that is not what I really mean. A man and a woman are alike yet different. So very many men are frightened clean through at the thought of a woman. They overreact. They have no conception in Gah of how a woman is-what she is as a person.”
Maspero chuckled. “I’ve always said that women were people as well.”
We talked on, about the latest fashions that had, in some mysterious way, reached Aphrasoe from the outside world. The city contained a pitifully few people to lead a planet. Everyone was needed. Maspero, later on, told me that he was now beginning to feel that I would be really the right fiber-as he put it-one of the privileged few who could shoulder the responsibilities of the Savanti. It would be hard, he said. “Don’t think the life will be easy; for you will be worked harder than you have ever worked in your life before-” He held up a hand. “Oh, I know of what you have told me of the conditions aboard your seventy-fours. But you will look back to those days and think them paradise compared with what you, as a Savanti, will have to undergo.”
“Aphrasoe is Paradise,” I said simply, meaning it.
Then Delia of Delphond hobbled across, her face as twisted as her leg at the effort of walking, her gasps loud and separate, a series of explosive blasts of pain.
I frowned.
Frowning was easy, habitual.
“And in Paradise,” I asked Maspero, “what of-?”
“I cannot talk about it, Dray, so please do not ask me.”
To have spoken at that moment to Delia would have been a mistake.
As the party was breaking up and the guests were calling
“Happy Swinging!” to one another and leaping out into space aboard their swingers, I found Delia and, without a word, put my hand beneath her armpit and so helped her along toward the landing platform where Maspero stood talking gaily with Golda. Delia, after a single angry wrench, allowed me to assist her. She did not speak and I guessed her contempt for her own condition, and her furious resentment of me chained her tongue.
“Delia and I,” I said to Maspero, “are engaged to take a boating trip downriver tomorrow. I notice my old leaf boat is still moored at your jetty.”
Golda laughed with her tinkly shiver of amusement. She looked with a very kindly eye on Delia. “Surely you don’t have to prove anything, Dray? If only Delia could be-” And then she caught Maspero’s eye and stopped and my heart warmed toward Golda. There was much I did not yet understand, not least what was the real mission of the Savanti with all their powers on a savage planet like Kregen.
I kissed Golda on the cheek and bowed quietly to Delia, who looked at me with an expression quite amazing, compounded of bafflement, annoyance, pique and-could that be amused affection? For me, plain Dray Prescot hot from the reeking battlesmoke swathing the bloody quarterdecks of my life on Earth?
That she might not meet me at the jetty was an outcome I was prepared to meet when it came. But she was there, dressed in a plain green tunic and short skirt, with silver slippers-one piteously twisted-on her feet and a reed bag in her hand filled with goodies like a flask of wine and fresh bread and palines.
“Lahal, Dray Prescot.”
“Lahal, Delia of the Blue Mountains.”
Maspero watched us cast off. I had provided a pair of oars and I pulled with that old familiar rhythm. “I thought you might care to see the vineyards this morning,” I said, loudly, for Maspero’s benefit. I headed downstream.
“Remberee!” called Maspero.
Delia turned to face him from the sternsheets and, together, we called back: “Remberee, Maspero!”