LITMIR.BIZ

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inversions.

      Death, then, brought the Landgrave Ullimus Wong down the ladder from the black skies into the light-shot morning atmosphere of the Harvest world, wrapped in substances colder than ice, his frigid mind trickling with thoughts. He was a fool for honor, and had been tattered and torn in its quest, his very cells swollen and choked with sinister poisons from his terminal duel.

      My master Wong was the last victim of those molecular machines loosed to corrupt the minds and flesh of humans in the galaxy, before his action obliterated them to the last atom and they were declared Wicked, listed, alongside the Mind Machines, at the head of Forbidden Technik. His noble deed broke the power of the small murderous machines, at terrible cost to himself. That made him a laughing-stock to some and a martyr to many more. But that is another tale, one everyone knows.

      As the old, old realm perished in the moment of its victory, his doomed Seigneur placed him in my caïque, at the very edge of death, laden with immobilized molecular machines fought to a standstill even in his own flesh, and sent us aloft, fleeing through the slipstream in search of recovery that might never be found.

      When word of the second betrayal of Gloriana Avid spread across the skies, a rumor circulating outward in whispers, riding the coattails of the gossip that always attended her luminous mother, I seized and correlated the data. Those rumors had eddied for decades before they reached me. Decades rose and fell like fashion, like the hot sun of Harvest upon its lush world’s horizon, until word came of the third betrayal, and then decades more.

      Riding the slipstream is no easy task.

      To go from here to there, wherever here is or there, takes an instant too brief to measure. Calibrating the currents in the quantum tides, though…ah, a special gift is required, and good fortune. Once, tall ships of the Homeland ocean world set out in hopes of a favorable wind, but languished, often as not, in doldrums, paralyzed, crew starved and gaunt, perishing of thirst surrounded by endless water, deranged by heat and pointlessness. It is that way also, too often, in the slipstream.

      Finally I brought our vessel to the station above the equator of the fertile world, and coupled us to the ladder, and brought down my charge to the surface.

      Where we found cats waiting. (All but one.)

      Fearsome mausers.

      And the mad lady Glory, with her ruined limb, her tattered heart, her crumpled, longing mind.

      * * * *

      Seventeen, she had been, with a perfect complexion eggplant-dark, teeth radiant in the white hot light, a dance quivering inside her, modesty-constrained arms eager to fling themselves wide, to embrace whichever prince destiny had deemed fit for her consort. Yet she was racked in the night, and during the heavy downpours that fecundated the crops, with an anxiety deep as her bones. No child abandoned so early, and so late, is ever free of dread. I am not worthy, she thought to herself, pulling the brocaded pillow over her head in the night. They will all leave me. I am not to be loved.

      But those were night terrors. In the daylight she trod out in the grace and beauty gifted from her mother’s genes, and with the authority learned from her father’s governing hand upon the tiller of the Harvest planet.

      Thrillingly, the biologist Bander Zonin came to her through the difficulties of the slipstream, with his suit and soon enough his proposal. William, Avid pere, looked well enough upon the match. He needed brains as rigorous, brilliant and dedicated as this man’s. A garden world is not just scattered into existence with a handful of unruly seed sown into loam. Everything is prepared, for generations. So it had been with the Harvest world; so it was now. All things were propitious: the worm-turned soil, deep and dark and heavy with life, the air thrilling with the very breath of vegetable life, the star above with its vital spectrum, as if designed for that function by a supernal Hand. (None gave credence to such superstitions, except those few who fancied an elder race had passed, sowing the galaxy itself with life and the requisites of life. It is possible; it has never been disproved. Still, the conjecture led nowhere, except into sectarian wars of the most extreme uselessness and brutality, and the notion went into eclipse.) Meanwhile, the sun of Harvest poured out its rich light, and the crops flourished madly, gladly.

      There was one secret ingredient: the life-enhancing gift of Gloriana Avid, and of her mother Glory before her, and of thirty generations of glorious women shaped for that singular task.

      Something in her hidden recipe breathed forth hidden essences. The plants of the world bowed to her passing. She was gravid with vegetable life. The touch of her hand on a leaf made it flood with purple life. She walked in the cool of the morning in fields humming with bees and trailed her fingers in the sticky silks, touching lightly the tassels. Maize seemed to erupt from the erect stems, kernel-choked cobs golden amid the purple photo-optimized leaves.

      “What is it exactly that you do, my pretty?” asked Bander Zonin. His handsome, serious, sly face came close to hers, nuzzled with his rusty, wiry, itchy beard. “You are a goddess to this world, Gloriana. You are Ceres. You are Cyble, Arianrhod, Pi-Hsia-Yuan-Chun, Tlazolteotl. You are glorious! Darling, kiss me!”

      She knew those fertility goddess names, had learned them from childhood. With a certain lofty smugness she accepted their implications. There was no complacency at all in her response to Zonin’s declarations of love. Gloriana, the beautiful child, melted. Her heart opened like a flower. She sighed, she came near to fainting in his arms.

      Beneath a vast shading tree, hung with long deep green languid leaves, Bander Zonin led her to an ornamental pond bright with sparkles and small leaping fish.

      “We won’t need our shoes,” he said.

      Taking her hand, he led them wading through water lilies, then laved the mud from her toes at the grassy edge of the pond, and dried her delicate dark feet with his shirt. She sighed, leaned against his hairy breast, allowed him to tuck her naked feet upon his lap. He shifted, after a time, bent and kissed, caressed them. A tremor passed through her loins, upward to her belly and her heart. For an instant the world shook and went away, and returned with a wild brightness she had never known.

      “Make love to me,” she told him urgently.

      Bander Zonin regarded her with amusement. “My dear, there is nothing I’d rather do. But we must wait. We must deny ourselves a little longer. Your father—”

      “Oh, bother my father,” cried Gloriana, and smothered his mouth with kisses, despite the bristles. After a moment she drew back. “You do not love me.”

      “How can you say such a thing? Darling, you are the soul of my soul, light of my life. I respond to your lightest touch as the gardens do when you walk among them, trailing your fingers in the silks.” He drew back, offered her a bland glance. “And how do you do that, my sweetest girl? What is the secret of your bond with this bounty, this cornucopia.”

      “That’s boring business.” Gloriana pouted, rose, slipped on her sandals, ran away into the sunlight. “Last one to the gazebo is a moldy peach!”

      He ran in pursuit, shirt folded in one hand, careful to lose, breathing hard in anticipation.

      * * * *

      You know the next part of the story, if you retain any knowledge at all of the Old Homeland world. Some call it truth, some say mere legend. I will tell it quickly, then, so we might move on:

      Her father, it is said, held a magnificent ball for her engagement to be wed.

      Human people came to his great house from all the reaches of Harvest, and many more rode down the sky ladder from the star worlds beyond in the deep blackness.

      They gathered, glittering with jewels, bright or sable their gowns and jackets, sweet-smelling. Three Lords and Ladies were in attendance, majestic, dour, and satisfied.

      Augmented creatures stood guard, or fetched and carried. Gray people scurried back and forth, taking cloaks, passing out crystal globes of fine vintage from the vineyards. Crisp bird flesh lay on plates, and incomparable corn or wheat breads smoking from the oven, and fruits, vegetables, fish charred in their scales, winking up

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