spent as tutor with the Pwill family on Earth. I must have had friends and social contacts…?
And yes, there they were, distinct in my memory.
Surely, though, back on Earth where the passage of two generations hadn’t sufficed to wipe out the scars of defeat, a person like myself in a privileged position living as the Vorra did off the fat of the planet, would have been hated still more vigorously and decried as a traitor?
Yet as far as I could remember no one had ever accused me like that. I’d enjoyed my five years as a tutor, setting aside the sheer impossibility of ramming sense into the solid bone head of young Pwill.
Paradox. I couldn’t resolve it. I gave up after a moment and let my mind wander on, still at random.
Marijane. Shavarri. The whole question of women. It seemed like a long time since it last bothered me. I pictured Shavarri to myself and gave a critical nod. Yes, she was definitely pretty by anyone’s standrds. Purely as a matter of interest, I reminded myself, there was no physical reason why Vorra and Earthfolk shouldn’t make love together. There was more difference between the males than the females, but the essential functions were the same. Mark you, I went on informing myself, you couldn’t mistake one race for the other without clothing, and a union couldn’t be fertile, and actually humans didn’t find Vorra stimulating because they lacked some skin-secretion with a particular scent which formed part of normal human stimulus patterns. But Vorrish soldiers were much like any other soldier, andduring the years directly after the armistice when Earth was heavily garrisoned and no such luxuries as camp-followers of their own race were permitted they’d established the physical feasibility of it beyond doubt—
I checked myself and began to chuckle. The story I had spun to Marijane to calm her down was working altogether too fast on my imagination. Here I was seriously considering the possibility of seducing Shavarri in order to make use of her to foist my ideas on Pwilll This was ludicrous, mainly because I hadn’t any ideas worth foisting.
At once I was grave again. Why not? Why was I wasting an irreplaceable opportunity like the one I had? I was an outpost of Earth in the very heart of Qallavarra, in the second most powerful great house—likely soon to be the first, if the schemes Pwill was now weaving came off.
As soon as possible, then, I was going to have to return to the Acre. I’d seek out Olafsson, put it to him frankly that I realized I’d been neglecting my duty as an Earthman, and ask what use I could be.
To be going on with, anyway, I could improvise something along the lines Kramer had shown me. I could make myself appear more of the “mysterious Earthman;” I could invent a few mystic powers to impress—well, Shavarri to begin with, because I knew she was already hooked; then some of the other wives and perhaps senior officers and retainers among my colleagues. And finally Llaq herself?
I grunted. That would take a lot of work. Old Llaq was probably the hardest-headed woman on the planet. I was sure half her husband’s advancement was due to her initiative.
But I didn’t have to begin with Llaq.
Plans began to blossom in my mind, as though they hadbeen waiting in my subconscious and needed only the right stimulus to develop.
I walked up the road towards the house, admiring the way its glass domes and windows caught the slanting afternoon sun. It was quite an achievement in its way; all the houses were, especially compared to the slapdash overgrown villages which here substituted for cities. A house was a complex of barracks, factories, recreation facilities, palace, every kind of service from food and clothing to education and medicine—what there was of it on this planet! From a distance it gave the clear impression of being a united, organized whole dedicated to an important purpose.
That made it all the more remarkable and dismaying to think I had
Shauna Rice-Schober[thriller]