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  Vel Thaidis screamed—but mutely. She clasped the scream, bricked it inside her, with the truth.

  How could they accept these lies? To love Ceedres and be indifferent to her, that was not sufficient. The auto-priest at the temple had been a witness. The priest would show—must already have shown—that barely a phrase of Ceedres’ testimony was accurate.

  Not a sound in the salon. They waited.

  The tone. Now Vel Thaidis’ own voice came from the machine.

  How defenseless it was, that disembodied voice, lost in its electronic wilderness: “First let me admit to being afraid,” it said damningly.

  They all heard it, Domm and Chure, Ond and Ket, Lail and Tu and Zem. And Thar. Thar—

  What was the girl’s voice saying now? (Not her own voice, surely, fragile, trembling, tiny flickering motes adrift in the wide chamber.) She was telling how he had taken her into the temple, and they had risen up into the bizarre black place ablaze with white flowerings of fire.

  An indistinct mutter about her. She did not need that to reveal to her the idiocy of what the voice said. No temple had such an upper room, a room like hell in a myth.

  The blood pounded against her temples and her eyes. Had she gone mad? Had she dreamed the black room in Maram, as she had dreamed of heaven? Had she dreamed it all?

  “He said he didn’t understand the room’s purpose or what it symbolized, but that he went there often, to conquer his fear of it,” the naïve girl said in the recording machine.

  Vel Thaidis felt her mind swirling against her skull. Shame and nausea flared in her stomach. Her eyes were filming over and she was ready to faint in order to escape—from the salon, her voice, and from herself.

  But somehow she had held herself immobile. And suddenly a cool acid flowed through her, and she was sane again, appallingly so, in possession of herself, mind and body. At that instant she saw the depth and height of Ceedres’ plan and comprehended why she had known she could not fight him, that item she had been instinctively aware of but unable to reason out. For Ceedres had taken her to the upper room, hidden from others. Ceedres had overridden the conditioning of the auto-priest. Ceedres, whose estate had been wrecked by a failing technology, experimenting perhaps in ways to salvage it, had hit instead upon methods of robot control, which, like the black room itself, no others had ever encountered.

  And so, not only did her testimony appear deranged, but the priest—

  The priest (denizen of the Thar boundary: “He recognizes me . . . I’m frequently here . . .”) would not necessarily speak the truth.

  In a world where machinery was incapable of falsehood, a machine which Ceedres had learned to control could be the exception.

  It could say that everything had occurred in the temple as Ceedres had avowed.

  It could say Vel Thaidis was the liar.

  And no one would doubt it.

  She would not laugh or weep. She would not faint. She would remain immobile, looking at nothing and at no one.

  The voice in the machine was done.

  Yune Chure broke out: “The girl’s story is a ludicrous fabrication. An hallucination caused by an unstable temperament and muddled wits.”

  “Pure madness.” That was the old lady of Tu, dry as rain.

  Yune Domm said heavily, “We have yet to hear from the priest who witnessed the dialogue in the temple.”

  “The priest is here,” the Lawguard said.

  The door slid open. The priest was walking toward her. Vel Thaidis did not look. She did not need to see it, nor to hear. The priest would repeat Ceedres’ testimony in its own words.

  It was like a white gleam on the periphery of her vision. The drapery to ape human clothes, the large hairless skull to ape intellect, the poreless complexion of the non-man. Unobtrusively, the sentences dripped into her ears. “Yune Thar and Yune Hirz came into the room of prayer. She began to suggest to him that they become man and wife. He said nothing, and her speech grew more ardent. He rejected the proposal politely, though with some self-consciousness. . . . ”

  It was over. It was as she had known it would be.

  Yune Ket asked if he might question, and was invited to do so.

  “There’s been talk of an upper room, modeled like hell in the myth. Is there such a place, and did Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz go into it?”

  “The temple energies are stored above the room of prayer. No one enters.”

  “Thanks, priest.” The Courteous Address.

  She was utterly discredited. She had invented a fantasy about the temple. Ergo, everything she had uttered was fantasy. She had begged for Ceedres’ love and he had refused her on the grounds of honor. In spite and humiliation, she had lashed out at him, and he, too thoughtful of her weakness, had enabled her to stab him. His tale was plausible, realistic and gallant. Hers ridiculous.

  “Will you deliberate?” the Lawguard said.

  Domm answered at once.

  “The bulk of the facts were already with us before we formed council. There’s no need for deliberation. Subject to this proof, we had our response in readiness. Precedents for such business are rare, but they have been set. Shall I still speak for us all?”

  The others acknowledged, thus affirming his role as spokesman. Their calls of assent were like the scrape of metal blades, cleavers parting the sinews of anteline carcasses, wheels grinding pebbles at the wayside, the gears of clocks striking together.

  That was fanciful. Too much so. They were condemning her for a fantasy.

  “Then,” Domm said. He paused. He was stern in preparation for her stare, her crying. She did not stare or cry or look at him. “By the Law, no criminal can go unpunished, whatever rank he occupies. Similarly, restitution must be made, where possible. Our decision is based on others to be read in the statutes of Yunean legality. Vel Thaidis will be stripped of her title and her holding, and this portion, half the estate of Hirz, shall be awarded to Ceedres Yune Thar. She herself thereafter to withdraw to the Slumopolis, to live by common labor. Her act was without honor. It’s fitting she should become a daughter of the Slum, which has no honor even in its name. There is our decision. There the matter rests.”

  “No. The matter can’t rest there.”

  Vel Thaidis’ wrists jerked and her head almost lifted. But she snatched herself away from the brink. It was Ceedres Yune Thar who had spoken. No longer from the machine, but from the hollow of the room. His voice was like velvet, and serene. It embodied restraint. It showed the council that they must reassess their command. The very slice Ceedres had carved for his plate he now pushed gravely aside. His wickedness was wondrous. It had a high gloss, an intricate patina.

  He plays them all like chames. I wasn’t alone in that.

  In fascination, she heard Yune Chure say loudly, “Ceedres, you’re misguided to plead for her. Even her own brother has avoided the council.”

  “I won’t turn thief against Hirz,” Ceedres said.

  “Let the girl talk for herself,” said Yune Tu in her wry cracked drawl. “Let Vel Thaidis ask for clemency.”

  “Vaidi,” Ceedres said, swiftly, intimately, across the crowded chamber. “I can try to protect you only so far. For love of life, say something to them.”

  Words seethed in her mouth. She bound herself in a vise.

  How different it might have been, she thought. They might have convened council to marry us. Maybe he would have been kind to me, as Omevia is kind to her pet cat. Kinder than now.

  “The sentence stands,” Domm said.

  “It stands,” said Yune Tu.

  Each repeated the ritual.

  This time Ceedres was dumb.

  The Lawguard moved again. It glided to Vel Thaidis, and then her space was filled with gliding. A fence of copper columns, twenty Lawguards shut her in. At last she could focus her eyes and turn her head, for she would see only ma
chines on every hand.

  “You must come with us.”

  She rose.

  She was dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  They told her she might take nothing with her from the palace of Hirz. Of course not. The dead took nothing with them. In ancient compliment of the eternal sun, they were cremated in golden ovens, their dust mingled with wine and stored in golden urns. The Lawguards, being primed to human frailty and requirements, even gave her a sip of wine. A sip of wine to mingle with her dust.

  They walked down through the gardens. How soothing the lawns under her feet. She had never properly appreciated them before, they had simply been part of her. And the slender gemmy spikes of the fountains, and the extraordinary trees. This was her home she was leaving.

  As they crossed onto the sand of the shore, another of the dry rains had started. The pale green flakes, scales of the sky, slanted across the air, dissolving without moisture on ground, fabric or flesh. One brushed her mouth, and she tasted, appropriately, its bitterness.

  Near the margin of the lake was a vehicle. It resembled no living species, it had no decoration, no team of robot animals reined in front. Brown metal; the transport the Lawguards had brought to conduct their human passenger.

  The sight of it was unbearable. It was the funerary urn. Suddenly, the leash on which she had held herself slipped from her fingers. Her knees gave way, and she dropped on the sand with the dry rain dappling her shoulders, the nape of her neck. Then something was firmly wrapped about her upper arms. She stared dazedly, and beheld the unfurled tentacles of the Lawguards elaborately binding her, as they eased her upright.

  Her mouth gaped maniacally to scream. She thought, with great clarity: Begin, and you’ll never stop. They’ll pick out your screeching from the palace. The Lawguards will bind your lips, or pour some drug between them, or under your skin. Don’t scream aloud.

  Supported by the Lawguards, she regained her feet and walked on. She did not scream.

  A section of the vehicle folded aside.

  Within was a rectangular area. A nodule of automatic controls bulged at its center, inartistic divans of plastum were fixed to the floor against the walls, from out of which a narrow aqua-closet jutted. There were no windows.

  Into this blind box Vel Thaidis stepped.

  “You must relinquish your clothing and your jewels.”

  She made no protest. She had known how it would be. The Lawguards had no humanoid digits with which to unfasten the seals of material or of necklaces. Yet the Law demanded she renounce everything. All she had had belonged to Ceedres now.

  She undressed herself and let the drapery fall (maybe he would gift it to Omevia), the tissue-fine undergarments, removed her sandals, the bracelets, the collar, the rings. She stood at the heart of a second dry shining rain, and hypnotized by it, overlooked an ornament in her hair. A tentacle came and plucked it away, and the up-combed pilings loosened. Skeins of silk, danger-black, shawled her shoulders and her breasts.

  “Your hair,” the Voice Lawguard said.

  Perhaps by custom they must hack it off. But her moment of abjection had gone by.

  “Your hair is tinted. This tint cannot be matched in your new condition of life. At the Instation it will be molecularized to conform with its natural color. This is in your own interests. Now please dress.”

  They would undye her hair in order to disguise her. How curious. The gray tunic with its metal-link belt would not disguise her. Her body proclaimed her origins. Full-breasted, small-waisted; the apple curve of the hips, the rounded arms and long legs, the slim wrists and ankles and the high-arched feet. In the Slumopolis, the women were as lean as lionag. Their breasts were shallow, their hips no broader than their waists. Their limbs were bony, their hands and feet huge and overgrown, their faces regularly deformed. Or were these stories also lies?

  The Lawguards were leaving the vehicle, bearing her jewels and clothing with them.

  She watched the door shut. She was enervated. She did not care anymore.

  The vehicle twitched and raised itself on its jets of air.

  Too late now. Too late to protest, to cry out for mercy, to scream and beat with her hands, to take up a knife and cut her veins. Much too late for any of that.

  She had begun to speak again. As the vehicle whirled over the sandy shore and presently across the surface of the lake itself, Vel Thaidis discovered herself lying on a divan, and praying to the gods of her childhood. Her words were incomprehensible and had no passion. She did not, in her incoherent and lusterless frenzy, suppose they would be listened to. Apparently they were not.

  * * *

  • • •

  Pollinated by the dust, the sunlight streamed through the main salon of the Thar palace. Motionless and brief, the wine-red shadows hemmed the old furniture, the carven benches, the gilded message panels. The fountain pierced the fishless aqua of its basin. A little sand blew about the floor, as it usually did, unswept.

  Velday stood on the threshold woodenly.

  “It’s Maram,” he said to the man seated in the tall chair beyond the fountain. “I waited, but you didn’t come.”

  “Did you think I would? Stride into Hirz as your sister was dragged out of it?”

  “She didn’t speak at the council. There was nothing she could say.”

  “She should, nevertheless, have spoken,” Ceedres answered.

  “My sense of shame,” said Velday, “is insupportable. The princes have urged you to take your portion of the Hirz estate. It’s due to you. My sister—I believe she kept silent because she acknowledged the justice of her punishment.”

  “Oh, you believe that, do you?”

  “Ceedres,” Velday muttered. He hung his head. He became a child, offering the childishness that Ceedres should master him, and remove all grounds for independent concern, all trace of doubt. For Velday felt doubt, keenly. His blood tie with his sister hurt him like a bruised nerve, yet Ceedres had come first. It had been intuitive, the brotherhood of gender staking its claims before the shout of blood. Where Velday had been all-important to Vel Thaidis, Ceedres had been all-important to Velday, and for not dissimilar reasons. Each of the Yune Hirz was young and desperate for a hero, an anchor, some wondrous essence to love, which would make him more than he was. But after the battle which Ceedres had easily won in Velday’s soul, Velday knew the sting of conscience and an alarm at the random forces which had reshaped his life. He had prophesied for himself Ceedres’ and Vel Thaidis’ marriage, or had thought he had. That Ceedres would shirk such a union, deferring to his poverty, had smitten Velday with unfathomable pangs of excitement, admiration, misery. That Ceedres had not come to Hirz to comfort him, to fill up the gaping void, smote Velday more deeply. “Ceedres,” he said, “my sister’s holding is yours by right of Law. Accept it. For my sake.”

  “Vay, the process of the Law is perfect, but harsh. We’re human.”

  “The council told me of your reluctance. I gave my word I’d persuade you.”

  “I’m to trample on your grief.”

  “Yes, I grieve, but what she did—was intolerable. I thought she’d killed you.”

  “You were not alone.”

  “I remembered the lionag hunt—I suppose Ermarth Yune Zem’s death may have reminded me—you were fourteen. You fired when the king cat was almost on top of you. I dreamed that hunt over and over for a year. I thought then you’d die. We’re brothers, Cee. We swore that before the gods, do you recall? Ten years ago, in a room of prayer.”

  “You recollect it all excellently. You realize Vel Thaidis was also important to me? I’ve curdled my brains trying to find some way to approach the conclave of the Law on her behalf. How is it machines can order our lives so thoroughly?”