CHAPTER 1
Little Cori squinted as the living room formed around him. He had slipped over the railing of his bed and, clutching the teddy, had followed his feet to the room `porter. Ma and Da should be in their silent room, but little Cori's feet were showing him different. He knows this deep rumble in his belly that always comes just before they go away to "The Work."
* * *
Corin pressed a sideways frown into his pillow, realizing now just how much intention little Cori was attempting to redirect.
* * *
Though he knows that he shouldn't be there, the living room comforts little Cori. The growing room has streams and trees, sometimes with cherries, and animals that go on their way without minding him. But he finds comfort now in the way that, as he walks forward, the chairs and tables of the living room come apart into bushes, flowers, and stumpy trees and then remake themselves into just the way that they should be. It is as though they know where he is going and show the way.
Cori sees the place in his inner sight. In the center of the room is a round crystal floor with a standing circle-block. The floor and circle-block are see-through, and underneath is a large roundish ball (like when he squishes his red ball against the floor) that could be crystal, but it isn't entirely see-through. It seems to hold thin sheets of milk and dots of colors inside of it.
Dr. Treyvon is telling him that it is "an and a log" (that was a funny way of using "an" and "a") of the fabric of space. Cori pulls at his tunic and wonders what she means.
He likes Dr. Treyvon, who gives him things that stay the way that they are, but he doesn't like the "an and a log." He remembers when it is made. Ma and Da are busy and happy for days and days, talking things that he can't follow, and then they just go away. Not away like he can't see them with his eyes, but away even that he can't see them in his mind sight. The absence around his bed scares him.
Cassie brings him food and reads him books, but mostly little Cori sits against the corner with his eyes closed, trying to find them inside. Dr. Treyvon comes and carries him into the living room and shows him Ma and Da sitting on pillows with their legs folded in front of them, one on either side of the round floor. He buries his head in her shoulder, not wanting to see.
Cori continues walking, getting the tingles as he does. His hair floats about his face, and he knows that it is getting cut because it drifts across his eyes as the scissors go "snip, snip."
He can see Da now, a dark shadow, standing on one side of the crystal floor with his arms held up and legs braced. It feels like Da is trying to keep something in place that he knows would break if he touched it.
Da's eyes are fixed on a white woman standing with her hands against the circle-block. Little Cori wonders if it is Ma, but cannot be sure. It looks like Ma, and Ma is there, like the leaf is still there when the sun shines through it, but she is somehow more and less than Ma.
Fear grips him. Cori drops the teddy and hurries, hands pushing on the backs of the white chairs until he finds an aisle between the three rows. As he runs between, he can see Ma again. Something grows from her belly. Light is gathering there. It forms milky sheets and bright spots.
Little Cori feels her slipping away. An openness is emptying into him. He screams, commanding "No, Ma! Stop it!" and runs forward faster and faster until he trips on the raised edge of the floor. The world turns sideways, and he stiffens, but the pain doesn't come because Da catches him and lifts him up, murmuring weakly "No, not you, too" as he kneels and presses little Cori carefully against his breast.
But a wind is blowing through him. Little Cori fights against the embrace, pushing with his legs. Da is strong, though, and presses him closer, pressing him all over his body, pressing against the openness until he is the shape of little Cori again. For a moment he is like the things that Dr. Treyvon gives him.
Da murmurs, "I will bring her back." Little Cori begins to fight, and Da takes back the untrue thing. "Hush. Shhh," Da soothes, stroking his hair, "We will find her." Cori feels wetness on his neck, and for a moment Da's muscles are all fighting against each other, and little Cori knows his bendy bones.
He is being carried now. His muscles are all like a board, and little Cori keeps his eyes tight shut. Other voices move around them, asking questions, but Da bumps through them. Cori feels the world tilting sideways, until he comes to rest on Da's legs. The teddy presses against little Cori's ear.
Ma is handing it to him, telling him that the teddy is to help him with togetherness, with that funny, gentle smile she uses when saying things that Cori shouldn't think he can follow.
His hands are his hands again. He takes the teddy and buries it in the safe place against Da's chest.
Corin came back to his pillow and then the sheets and then the sunlight bleeding through his eyelids, inwardly chiding himself for going so deep. The intensity of the memory had come upon him for a reason and that reason was a warmth at his back that was different from the warmth of his father as they had rested together the night that his mother lost herself. The warmth surrounded a feminine fragrance named Leelay and a connection to last night.
This beautiful moment came between them when he pushed into her once again, and she, fighting against herself, was finally overcome. Something had shifted inside her, and she was no longer teasing him to batter against her but embracing him with every part of her womanhood. Corin had paused in genuine surprise until Leelay's thighs encouraged him to continue, and every thrust was like a plunge into joy. As she came over the top and began to relax, he had taken her nipple between his lips and then kissed her over her heart and in the soft space above her neck, doing everything that he could to draw out the sensation.
He had tripped then over a moment of regret, projecting her realization of discovered power and the trouble it would create for the men in her life. Withdrawing, Corin had kissed her down her belly until he could play with her clitoris, gently drawing away her excitement until she drifted off with exhausted promises of "more later."
Corin knew from the depth and pace of her breathing that Leelay awaited a choice. In a detached manner, he gave cognizance to the pulsing call of her skin. At dinner last night, she had thus offered herself as her wine swirled lazily in the glass against her cheek. Corin was taken by the grace of her pose, the hypnotic rhythm of the light reflecting off the tilting surface of the liquid—a counterpoint to the silent gloss of her lipstick in the soft lighting. It was absolutely transparent and uncontrived.
Corin found himself now wishing that he hadn't accepted. Sexual liaisons were unavoidable in the sequence of his lives. Intimacy with a caring woman was the best means he knew for taking the pulse of a culture. Last night's choice was spontaneous, though, driven by some inner need that he could not justify, not even in the context of the personal goals that his introspection had raised. Yes, he had seen some aspect of Ma in Leelay, but she was not unique in that way, and from long-established experience he should have known better than to let a thrill-seeker tie her ambitions to him.
With a disciplined finality, he slipped deftly from under the covers and stood, taking only a moment to admire the way that Leelay had arranged herself before collecting his clothes and padding into the bathroom. Ten minutes later he stood out on the balcony. As a final stratagem, Leelay moaned, rolled over and arched onto her knees. Corin deflected the challenge of her labia as he swung a second leg over the fourth-floor barricade. Raising his eyebrows, he stepped down onto a compliant needled carpet amidst fog-kissed redwoods.
A logging road cut across the mountainside below him. He started down the slope, and after three steps tripped over nothing and fell to his knees. Looking over his shoulder where the balcony had been, Corin confronted the enormity of his mistake.
CHAPTER 2
He heard his name being called, first from above, then from the left and below. Not Zenica, but the other. The calling paused as he struggled with confused regrets. This was not the time, from a lifetime away, to compare her to Zenica. Gathering him in required her to reveal herself fully in return, and his rejection was both wrong and dangerous.
So he stilled his emotions and let the presence of the other roll through him. The feeling of her came back, and he opened himself to the remnants of his joy in her. A smell: the profligacy of flowers she bought from the street vendors to display on tables and shelves. A warmth in his breast: The tenderness of her touch as she cleansed and dressed a child's wound. Admiration: Deftness at the table of state that deflected unjust criticism. And a name: Cassandra. These thoughts and the attached sensations swept over him, coalescing into a warm flush as she placed her hands on his temples and pressed her moist lips against his forehead, her signal that the ritual would start.
Cassandra began with the toes, flexing them gently. The confusion was only just bearable. These were not the talons of the Frithnel, but soft and small relative to the foot palm. The fingers were long and relatively few. He seemed not to fit this body, but the kneading of her fingers opened it to him, and with it came early memories. Toes in the surf, fingers molding clay. The shoulders did not rotate with the range necessary to operate a Frith conveyance but could guide a ball with formidable accuracy. The weak lower leg muscles would leave him helpless on the lattice frame of the Tras-ton arena but held steady on a storm-pitched deck. Slowly she worked him inwards, kneading the organs of the abdomen, avoiding only the groin.
He knew now his form but, in the dark of the entry room, not fully his past. All he had were a few instants of connection to his life. Here was the most difficult stage of the ritual. He felt Cassandra's weight come down on the cushion above him, and she lifted his head and laid her legs over his shoulders. His mind reeled as she set his head on her lower belly. Rather than the buffering of quilted fabric, he felt the intense intimacy of exposed skin. She had altered the ritual, and the most personal of his memories collided in his mind.
Zenica came to the fore, the life-love who had shared The Work and with whom the ritual had been a simple opening of the eyes and a finding of themselves in each other. But most immediate was his life-mate, ShShas, tearing open a dozen eggs after the hatching of two, and feeding the newborns with the contents. And finally Cassandra herself, knowing desperately that she could never be Zenica. All these relationships made ethical sense in context, with the evolved biological mechanisms for subjecting primitive responses to rational control, but in their naked spiritual manifestations they went to war with one another, vying for dominance.
Cassandra stiffened as his fingernails found the softness of her calves. He knew that she was reciting the litany, and pulling on the strings of his personality to pass it through the spiritual filter of her womb, resurrecting his humanity from its alien disruption.
His seventh chakra gaped open. The sounds reported by his ears became intelligible, and her invocation of the litany began: "Truth. Compassion. Reason. Love. Order. Service." A sudden shift occurred, a core of light opened in him. He fought his way through to it, found its echoes amidst the schizophrenia, and draped his selves around it. Conflict fled to the periphery, and he remembered.
He was called Random, Thaumaturge of Attachment, provocateur for stability, and he had come home.
CHAPTER 3
Leelay did not have words to describe her feelings. This man was, well, unnatural. Something must be done. Her time with him had cost her too much.
She was known and accepted at the Two Lions, and her mother's voice clucked at her as she jumped out of bed, pulling the sheet violently behind her. Wrapping it around her with the unconscious ease of a tribal girl, she shuffled to the open slider on the balcony. Pausing a moment to assemble herself, Leelay smiled and swept through, shrieked and jumped back, stepping on her train and falling gracelessly onto her backside.
None of the rooms at the Two Lions were small, but the balcony was only two meters by seven. He was not there.
With all the desperation of a woman searching for a prized diamond earring, she scrambled forward on her hands and knees, peering around the edge of the doorway to confirm what she had glimpsed. Heart pounding, she hen-hopped toward the low stucco barricade and lifted her head over. The upturned faces of the groundskeepers greeted her, and she ducked quickly down again. Hoping that her garb would be shielded by the barricade, she raised herself halfway and peered over the edge. "Ntombo?" No sign, but the man by the pool waved gaily at her. She ducked back down.
The full gravity of her situation came to bear. What had he done to her?
* * *
The sun had risen yesterday with a dull dread. The general, or "Father," as he insisted, was losing interest in Leelay, or rather tiring of pushing against the disapproval of first wife.
They both knew that first wife found her dignity from pride in activity, and first wife maintained an iron grip over the affairs of the household and the children. She observed an indolence in Leelay that justified disgust, and Father had wearied of the demeaning reports of his favorite's conduct. Soft men did not hold estates in the Congo, but in their success even hard men took pride in their children and household, and Father depended upon first wife.
Leelay had tried. Born at Kinshasa the daughter of a mining engineer, she had spent her early childhood in Angola and South Africa, the latter a heaven that included attendance at school. That advantage was not enough to overcome first wife's outrage at Leelay's occupation of Father's bed, nor her aversion to her Muslim upbringing, with its Arabic and heretical social codes.
And so Leelay had been assigned duties she deemed beneath the status of a favorite. She made games of them. Shortly after puberty, she had been transferred to her aunt's care in Kinshasa, and one of the first comparisons she had derived was of the sagging vitality of women only ten years her elders. Tribal women were weathered, but strong and healthy, and their men appreciated them.
So when assigned to organize the riding gear, Leelay had discovered a long crop, and took to wielding it around the house in the fashion of the goat girls. The children sought her out, and she chased them merrily around the lawn in the cooling hours before sunset. And the library dusting. Remembering the fruit pickers, she had piled books into a sling and lugged them around the room until collapsing against the display stands, where she diverted herself with the picture books. Careful to restore the room to order, this had gone on for weeks until first wife's long ears brought her storming.
The three wives may have found her undignified, but Leelay knew how her bread was buttered, and Father took pride in her glow. None of the others would have inspired him to talk of taking her into the bush with him. She had hoped that he might bring her into his household. Her strengths, however, were ground down against the united force of the three women that preceded her.
When confronted with the end, Leelay set her mind to go out in flames of passion. The invitation to the symphony was to be the scene of her presentation as a gift to one of his corporals. She accepted that outcome, although she knew it was the beginning of a slide into desperation, but planned to delay it. She wanted first wife to feel her on Father for a long time yet.
She had some support among the house staff and claimed a ride down to the fashion square. A dark dinner gown with long feathers up the back had caught her eye. The proprietress, somehow recognizing her situation, had kept to her order books. Leelay, not to be deterred, had taken to matching gowns against her length.
The murmur of men's voices in the back had broken off, and Ntombo stepped through the curtain. Something electric happened, and he caught her eye in the mirror for an instant. Her cheeks warmed, and she turned toward the wall. He confidently strode forward, relieved her hand of the hanger, and sympathetically turned her world upside-down.
"It's not a battlefield."
He handed the gown to the proprietress, who paused and then under the pressure of his gaze unrolled her fingers to indicate the front of the store. He disappeared for a moment and came back with the gown in the window. Leaving it on a peg, he stepped back and announced, "This one."
