Timegods' World Read Free Page B

laughing, and Trien was grinning, and if Windlass saw them I was going to be in big trouble.
    “—that Carnelia, indeed all the early Western royalty, placed an inordinate emphasis on sexual purity, perhaps because of the lower-class stigma attached to sexually transmitted diseases before the availability of modern medical techniques, and partly because of the need to ensure a clear line of royal descent in order to avoid a repetition of the chaos created by the Fylarian Fragmentation …”
    I had to hand it to Windlass. He could talk his way out of anything.
    “ … so you are correct in saying that in the modern context Carnelia’s actions seem farcical. But that is not the question, Master Sammis. Are her actions farcical for the time and the society in which she existed? Are they? Come now?”
    “It still seems like she overreacted, but it’s hard to say, sir.” I could have argued it either way.
    “Master Sammis, last week you were disciplined for your reaction to criticism by a comrade of your performance during the centreslot title game. In fact, upon one occasion you failed to place an inflated rubber bladder inside a loose section of netting in the middle of a grassy field. This failure did not affect your survival, your future, or your status. It should not have affected your self-esteem, given your overall athletic reputation, despite your size. Yet you were so threatened by a mere verbal criticism that you employed bodily violence.
    “Carnelia’s whole value system and life may be threatened by her thoughtless action. Yet you, who react violently to a meaningless criticism of a generally meaningless game, are going to tell me that context is not important?”
    Jeen was still grinning, but now he was laughing at me.
    “No, sir.”
    “So you might consider accepting that context is vital in evaluating value systems?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Master Kryrel …”
    For some reason, freezing on Mithrada didn’t seem quite so impossible after Old Windlass finished with me.

VIII
    SOME DREAMS NEVER quite go away. So it was with my dream of the crossroads with its blue and red and gold and black directions that were all the same and all different.
    Some nights that dream would flash before me, and then I would dream no more. Other nights, I would find myself moved from the crossroads in one direction or another, buffeted on invisible currents that were no less strong for not being felt or seen, until I was carried almost through a black chill wall into some place or time. Almost, but not quite, carried through that barrier, as though I stood behind a curtain where I could see most of what went on.
    One dream was especially vivid. Or perhaps I recalled it because it so closely paralleled what actually occurred.
    I had been carried into those black chill curtains that looked into another world, or so it seemed, and stood within a tower that glittered, inside and out. The tower was suffused with an energy that made it a beacon of sorts on both sides of the black curtain. No matter how I tried to look at the walls, they refused to stay in focus, even less than the other objects and people I could see from my obscured perspective.
    Yet one thing was clear. The tower did not exist. Yet it was concretely there in my night/dream vision. I could see people walking through that tower. Some few looked ordinary. Ordinary as they looked, they were suffused with the same sort of energy as the tower itself, on a lesser scale.
    Far less frequently, I could see others, dressed in tight black uniforms, who radiated a far greater sense of energy. In the most vivid of these dreams, the one that stuck with me, I could see one of the men in black more clearly than the others. He was below average in height, and far smaller than the colorful and uniformed giant who stood beside him. Yet the power which suffused him left the taller figure a mere shadow beside him.
    The smaller man seemed graceful, with a narrow face and sandy hair.