Читать книгу Perchance - Michael Kurland - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

Castimere Parr. Preceptor of the Overline, rose from the streaming water and slowly stepped out of the octagonal sunken tub. He wrapped himself in yards of blue cotton towel and crossed the tessellated floor of his hot room to inspect himself in the huge mirror set into the blue-tiled wall. “Tell Miss Viola I am ready to be poked and prodded,” he told Drom, his squat body servant, who stood by the door.

As Drom silently padded from the room, Preceptor Parr used one edge of the towel to wipe off the mirror and stared at his reflection. A wiry, muscular man of medium height, medium age, with more than the usual number of scars and the hint of an incipient potbelly, stared back. His face was not unusually ugly, but it was not one he would have chosen; it was narrow, with a high forehead below thinning brown hair and above wide-set brown eyes, and what he regarded as an overly large nose. Despite the reliability of the rejuvenation process, his middle-aged body looked subtly and unsatisfactorily different to him than when he had actually been merely middle-aged. He was not pleased with his appearance, but then he had never been, and he had more meaningful things to worry about.

Parr turned away from the mirror, glad that whatever vanity he possessed was not dependent upon his appearance. He was vain about the quickness of his mind, the responsiveness of his body; the fact that, with a bit of practice and conditioning, he could still hold his own or better in a duel of either wits or foils against any but a true master. He was vain about the depth of his knowledge, hard won over a century of service to the Overline, and his ability to make decisions on what seemed to the conscious mind to be too little information. He had long ago learned to trust his unconscious mind’s winnowing of information and the conclusions it drew.

The Overline continued to exist, fat and sluggish and happy, through the constant watchfulness and prompt actions of its preceptors, backed up by the ready response of the Overline Security Service. There was a time a few centuries ago when this one strand in the vastness that was the time continuum believed itself to be the only one possessing the secret of hopping about the Paraverse, and in its conceit it had named itself the Overline. But now it knew that other machines traveled the Paraverse. Some were controlled by men whose knowledge of the secret had turned them into complacently evil exploiters of those on time strands unfortunate enough to come under their control; some by nonhuman intelligences that had no more regard for mankind than mankind had for water beetles. Some of these, if they ever stumbled across the home strand of the Overline, would destroy it reflexively and without compunction.

Everyone on the Overline knew of the threat, but most thought it such a remote possibility as hardly to be worth considering, if they thought of it at all. The others believed that if by some strange accident they were attacked, the Service would destroy the menace in short order. After all, what were they paying their taxes for?

But Castimere Parr and his fellow preceptors, charged with the safety of the Overline and its interests in the rest of the Paraverse, knew how thin the protecting wall was, and how close the barbarians were to the gates. Any strand on which the Overline Import Complex was firmly entrenched had to be defended, lest a captured transporter reveal the location of the Overline itself. Any strand that was only partially exploited would be abandoned rather than chance losing a transporter or conveyer—an action about which the merchant lord doing the exploiting was never pleased.

Parr closed his eyes and stretched out prone on the marble massage table. He tried to focus his thoughts on one of the larger problems that awaited him in the worlds beyond his bath. Brisk exercise followed by a steaming tub had usually served to clear his mind and bring his thoughts into focus. But it hadn’t been working of late, and today he found himself unable to concentrate on any one question for more than a few seconds before it was brushed aside by another. What he needed, he decided, was a vacation.

The curtain parted and Viola entered. A brief white dress was wrapped around her slender form with an artless simplicity that only the highest art can achieve. She looked desirable. For Castimere Parr she always strove to look desirable. But then, for Castimere Parr she always looked desirable, whether she tried or not. She carried a stack of fresh towels and a bottle of body oil. “Your slave, Preceptor Parr,” she said, bowing slightly. “What do you require?”

Parr rose on one elbow to look at her. “It is impossible,” he told her, “for such perfection of beauty, grace, and wit to be enfolded within the slight body of a single twenty-six-year-old female. Surely there must be five of you.”

She laughed. “If I weren’t your slave already,” she told him, putting the towels down at his feet, “such words would go a long way toward capturing my heart. But since you already have my body, and my personal services covenant for the next sixteen years, what would you do with my heart?”

Parr smiled. “You don’t love me?” he accused.

“Not a bit.”

“You’d leave me?”

“In a flash. Just unlock the ankle chains.”

“You aren’t wearing ankle chains.”

Viola looked down. “That’s so.” She pushed Parr’s head down onto the table and surrounded it with her arms. “Then, perhaps I love you,” she said.

After an appropriate pause, she took the bottle of oil and began massaging his neck and shoulders. “Your muscles are still tense,” she told him. “What’s the point of boiling yourself for an hour in that sunken pot if it isn’t even going to relax your neck and shoulder muscles?”

“The problems won’t go away just because I immerse myself in steam,” Parr said.

“You let more of the world sit on your shoulders than any man should carry,” Viola told him. “It’s going to age you before your time, and you know how I hate old men.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Indeed. I can see that in your every gesture.” He rolled over, nearly upsetting the massage oil. “The problem, my love, is that you should be the problem. What to do about you—us—should be of paramount concern, and my mind should occupy itself with nothing else until it is solved. But somehow I can’t seem to drop these other, lesser concerns, and they crowd into my mind unbidden and leap about, demanding attention.”

“There’s no rush about us—about our problem,” Viola said. “It will keep for years unchanged, as I am indeed your slave as well as your lover; and we can neither of us do anything about the one, nor do we wish to do anything about the other. Concentrate on the problems of the rest of the Paraverse; ours will wait, Preceptor Parr.”

Parr shook his head. “It is unstable,” he said. “And as it can change 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