Perchance. Michael Kurland
in but one direction, that is the direction it will choose.”
“Our relationship, you mean?” Viola asked.
“That is so.”
“You fear that as I can’t leave you, I will grow to resent your lovemaking?”
“Something like that.”
Viola pushed his legs over and jumped up to sit on the table. “But I can leave you whenever I wish,” she told him. “At least I can leave your bed. You didn’t drag me into it, you’ll remember. It took me quite a bit of work to get you to seduce me. You were much too honorable to bed a slave.”
“I was not prepared to believe that you really cared for me,” Parr said. “You saw me from the inside, so to speak, with all my defenses down. People are not heroes to their own servants.”
“Sweet Mother of Ishtar!” Viola said. “You thought I was just trying to get out of work by hoisting my skirts for the boss?”
“The culture you were brought up in seems to have had a penchant for colorful language,” Parr commented, swinging his legs over the side of the table and rotating his arms at the shoulders to loosen them up.
“Here, let me finish the massage,” Viola said, moving behind him and attacking his shoulders with her thumbs. “The culture I came from sold me into slavery,” she said. “I grew up in Menashas, a dirty little town in a dirty little kingdom called Babistron, where my father spent fourteen hours a day making cowhide sandals and selling them for not quite enough money to feed his family. He couldn’t support a daughter, and he had no hope of getting me married. He tried giving me to the temple when I was twelve, but the priests of Ishtar wouldn’t take me. I was too skinny for them. The priests of Basht would take me, for the offering of only a few silver coins. But my father heard what the priests of Basht did with little girls, and he couldn’t go ahead with it. Bless him. So when I was fourteen he sold me to a slaver.”
“I thought that you didn’t like talking about this,” Parr said.
Viola shrugged. “You have it on file from my hypno sessions,” she said.
“I’ve never looked at the disks,” Parr told her.
When new slaves were purchased on any time strand they were routinely given complete suprahypnotic regressions, and their past history was put on disk in their own voices, along with a continuous psychoreading. The practice served the triple purpose of preventing direct infiltration by the various enemies of the Overline; spotting anomalies and anachronisms that would indicate penetration of the time strand by another Paraverse-traveling people; and building up a verbal cultural history of that strand. The intercultural anthropologists would build up a generalized history of the timeline strand by strand. They used it to define the event boundaries that separated one line from the next. Often a seemingly innocuous event would be the one that set off a cascade of change resulting in a continuing history so different from those surrounding it that it established a new line.
“The slaver took me to Constampoli, where I was sold into the harem of a young man named Priato Belesareus,” Viola continued. “Priato had to maintain a harem to maintain his dignity. All the fellows had harems. But he didn’t seem to be very interested in any of the girls. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t any more interested in any of the boys. He liked me to give him massages, and he liked one of the other girls to kiss his feet. Occasionally he would beat us; I think he enjoyed that. Occasionally he had one of the girls beat him. He dressed in white robes and knelt before an image of his god—in the form of a young man stapled to a cross—and allowed himself to be beaten. Thus, he claimed, atoning for his sins. But I think that he liked that even more.”
“I don’t think I need to hear the rest,” Parr said.
“But the rest is truth and beauty,” Viola told him. “Priato died accidentally, while whipping one of the girls—it was either apoplexy or poison, they never knew which—and we were all sold at auction. An Overline recruiter—I think it’s so lovely that they call themselves recruiters—bought a few of us. We were taken and examined, vaccinated, inoculated, irradiated, taught Lesh1 by suprahypnotic induction, told our rights while in the service of the Overline, and brought to the Seventh Level. Then you bought me, and I came here.”
“As a slave,” Parr said.
Viola shrugged. “You know, my dearest love,” she said, “it is a bit hypocritical of you to regret the circumstance which made me your slave, when you don’t give a damn about the status of the seventeen other servants in this household.”
“It isn’t the institution of term-slavery that I’m bitter about,” Parr said, “but merely our entanglement in it. Every servant on Overline—and there must be twenty million of them—is better off with us than in the world he left. Usually much better off. Their rights may be minimal, but they are strictly protected. They are paid for their services. They receive free medical care. And in twenty years the contracts are up and they are released from service, usually with a good bit of money put aside, and do whatever they want with the rest of their lives.”
“On the strand of their choice,” Viola said.
“Yes,” Parr said. “Within very proscribed limits, yes.”
“Except Overline,” Viola said.
“Yes,” Parr said.
“Can’t have overcrowding,” Viola said.
“Can’t have noncitizens who might be troublemakers around,” Parr said.
“This is the best of all possible worlds,” Viola said.
“I don’t claim that being a term-slave is the Platonic ideal,” Parr said. “Merely that it is a vast improvement over what they left. Life is an imperfect bargain for all of us. You and I are in an intractable bind, and I’m one of the highest of the high-muck-a-mucks on this best of all possible strands.”
“Your massage is done,” Viola said. “And I forgive you your trespasses. Or, better, the trespasses of your officious government and your pompous culture. But you I love. You must get dressed—there’s an official visitor.”
“Nice of you to tell me,” Parr said, standing up and redraping the latest towel around him with an approximation of dignity. “What sort of official visitor?”
“I wanted you to get your massage first,” Viola said. “I wanted to spend a minute alone with you first. I didn’t want to discuss our situation, since it always distresses you. Perhaps it even distresses me a little. I’m sorry.”
“I also,” Parr said. “From now on we’ll stick to words of love and comments on the weather.”
“A very serious young man from the Overline Import Complex Directorate is waiting to see you in the library,” Viola said. “I will be waiting to see you in the bedroom.”
“That will be very late,” Parr said. “I have much to do.”
“Wake me,” she said.
Parr dressed carefully, taking his time. Very serious young men from the OIC Directorate had to be kept waiting. If they got to see a preceptor within the first half hour of their arrival, they would become even more serious and self-important, and by the time they were middle-aged men from the OIC Directorate, they might expect that sort of thing.
1. The language of the Overline
PART TWO
HITHER AND YON
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