Dream Dancer Read Free

wife. Since he was not ready to be disowned by his kin, he chose the former. Then he thumbed open the channel to the great-grandmother of all habitational spheres, which had been called the Stump so long that the reasons for its name were lost in antiquity. To the same operator who had taken his report on the loss of two lives, he commended the alteration of another. Assured that he would have no trouble debarking the girl without entry papers, he remembered that she had been sitting, silent and unmoving, since he had deferred the matter of whether she might be teachable.
    The Stony countenance that regarded him had a slight tilt to it that instructors and foes alike would come to respect highly. “I can learn,” she challenged him as if no time had intervened.
    The language assimilation program he had used to while away the trip to her gutted planet still lay in his ship’s bank. “Let us see,” he said, and began to set up the program in reverse. When it was ready, he handed her the headset.
    She did not speak again until it was nearly time for him to ready the ship to enter the docking bay. “Marada,” she said slowly, experimentally, “I am hungry.” And then she burst out laughing, for she had spoken to him in Consulese, the lingua franca of the Consortium.
    And he, seeing his ready-lights flashing, reached over and took up the small white hand and kissed it without looking away from his work. What he was piloting was a near-idiot reconnaissance craft, crude, rude and in chancy repair. The Stump’s bay was the oldest in the whole of the Consortium’s ten thousand platforms, and no ship’s pilot had entered it on instruments in years. So it was that he was too busy to glimpse the beatific radiance of the girl Shebat, who held one hand cradled to her promissory breast while she listened to the chatter of clearance and attitude corrections with triumphant understanding of the words, if not the meaning.
    That will come, it will come, she told herself fiercely and, very cautiously so that he would not detect her meager ability, cast a spell of twelve coils binding over Marada to protect him from all evils of the night.
    “We are almost there,” he said. The tip of his nose hobbled when he spoke. “This is your last opportunity to see back the way you have come. After this, you must look only forward, and forget from where you came.” And he passed his hand over a light: once, twice.
    Shebat screamed. She kept on screaming long after the starry night with the bilious, oversized moon was gone from before her. But she saw it, even behind the palms pressed to her eyes: dark, dark, all around, dark.
    “Where did you think we were?” she heard him ask, but she could not answer. Black, black night full of evil dreaming filled her sight and heart and her mind. The tales of enchanters’ depravity in the dark night among the stars were true: here she was, carried off ensorceled as children always were. But to what purpose?
    It was that bitter curiosity which made her take down her palms from her eyes, saying: “I am not a virgin, you know. Stump only eats virgins.”
    Marada had been darkening all his lights, one at a time with a touch. He stopped, straightened and turned to her very slowly, saying: “What did you say?”
    “I said, I am not a virgin, and Stump only eats virgins, everyone knows that. So your debt will have to be paid another way.”
    “I see,” said the enchanter, leaning back against the console. “Well, why did I go to all the trouble of teaching you Consulese if I was going to do that?”
    “Perhaps you are not so great an enchanter as you claim. Perhaps you did not know. Your two friends could not even keep their lives from the crowd’s wrath. And you were looking around in the kitchen for a way out, not trying to save them, or even avenge them.”
    “It is not for us to strike down the helpless. I have lived that adage so long it never occurred to me that the helpless might strike first.