of human nature-Earthly or Vorrish—to select such a person as tutor to his heir.
Yet if I were not, why I had been so passive for those seven months, when my every instinct should have been toget in touch with the people in the Acre and ask how best I could serve the cause of Earth from my unique position?
Other unaccountable memories piled on that foundation. I remembered how Olafsson had commanded Ken, Gustav and Marijane to get out of his office when they brought me in for questioning, and not to mention the episode to anyone. I remembered the look of disgust on Marijane’s face when she found my house shield strapped to my arm. I remembered the passionate way I had tried to convince her that she was wrong about my being a mere serf—and wondered whether I’d been more interested in convincing her, or convincing myself.
Once, while I was fighting to still my raging thoughts because I was exhausted and not only wanted, but needed, to sleep, an idea occurred to me which I was too weak to debate with myself, so that it simply rested in the front of my mind until I dropped off. The phrase is apt; that time, I felt I actually was dropping when I went to sleep, as though into a pit of darkness.
The idea must have stayed in my dreams, for when I awoke the following morning I found that I’d come to accept it.
I’d lost the need to justify my actions to myself. I’d given up the impossible struggle. But I had an even stronger need in its place: I had to justify myself to someone else who usually identified with Marijane.
That puzzled me for a while. Then I reasoned that she was, after all, the first Earthly girl or woman I’d seen since I’d come to work on Qallavarra. Maybe, I told myself, that made her a kind of symbol for me. I didn’t find it very difficult to be without women, generally speaking, and I doubted if there was any deeper emotional implication. But I wasgoing to have to prove by deeds, as well as explain by words, my good reasons for behaving as I had done, and since, in a sense it had been Marijane who first showed me how I’d been wasting my time, it would have to be Marijane I proved them to.
It was lucky that the first person who suffered from my new-found authority was someone as generally hated as Dwerri. If it had been someone better liked by the rest of the retinue of the House of Pwill, I would not have had such an easy time as I did. Particularly, I realized, I was coming to be hated and suspected by three important groups of people on the estate.
The most influential were the junior members of the family of Pwill—among them, the wives other than Shavarri.
I hadn’t been wrong in my guess as to what use Shavarri intended to make of the love potion I brought her. She must have been dissatisfied for a long while with her status as an under-lady. Well, that was not surprising; all the junior wives were dissatisfied. Alone among them she had had the enterprise to do something about it. There was a limited amount of visiting permitted between the seraglios of the various great houses—encouraged, I think, by & hope that useful tidbits of information about the plans of rivals in the never-ending jockeying for power might leak out that way—and it must have been on one such visit that Cosra of the House of Shugurra suggested that she enlist Kramer’s help.
Kramer had described Cosra as a stupid and greedy young woman, or words to that effect. I doubted, now that I was coming to know her better, whether Shavarri was either stupid or greedy. From hints picked up in talking to her I gathered that not the least of her reasons for deciding totake action was the destruction of her original fantasy notion about what her life as a junior wife might lead to.
Pwill was a level-headed man. Also he had great ambitions for the future of his house. All too often, I’d heard, the fortunes of a house which had seemed unchallengeably in the ascendant had been wrecked by squabbling among rival
Yet if I were not, why I had been so passive for those seven months, when my every instinct should have been toget in touch with the people in the Acre and ask how best I could serve the cause of Earth from my unique position?
Other unaccountable memories piled on that foundation. I remembered how Olafsson had commanded Ken, Gustav and Marijane to get out of his office when they brought me in for questioning, and not to mention the episode to anyone. I remembered the look of disgust on Marijane’s face when she found my house shield strapped to my arm. I remembered the passionate way I had tried to convince her that she was wrong about my being a mere serf—and wondered whether I’d been more interested in convincing her, or convincing myself.
Once, while I was fighting to still my raging thoughts because I was exhausted and not only wanted, but needed, to sleep, an idea occurred to me which I was too weak to debate with myself, so that it simply rested in the front of my mind until I dropped off. The phrase is apt; that time, I felt I actually was dropping when I went to sleep, as though into a pit of darkness.
The idea must have stayed in my dreams, for when I awoke the following morning I found that I’d come to accept it.
I’d lost the need to justify my actions to myself. I’d given up the impossible struggle. But I had an even stronger need in its place: I had to justify myself to someone else who usually identified with Marijane.
That puzzled me for a while. Then I reasoned that she was, after all, the first Earthly girl or woman I’d seen since I’d come to work on Qallavarra. Maybe, I told myself, that made her a kind of symbol for me. I didn’t find it very difficult to be without women, generally speaking, and I doubted if there was any deeper emotional implication. But I wasgoing to have to prove by deeds, as well as explain by words, my good reasons for behaving as I had done, and since, in a sense it had been Marijane who first showed me how I’d been wasting my time, it would have to be Marijane I proved them to.
It was lucky that the first person who suffered from my new-found authority was someone as generally hated as Dwerri. If it had been someone better liked by the rest of the retinue of the House of Pwill, I would not have had such an easy time as I did. Particularly, I realized, I was coming to be hated and suspected by three important groups of people on the estate.
The most influential were the junior members of the family of Pwill—among them, the wives other than Shavarri.
I hadn’t been wrong in my guess as to what use Shavarri intended to make of the love potion I brought her. She must have been dissatisfied for a long while with her status as an under-lady. Well, that was not surprising; all the junior wives were dissatisfied. Alone among them she had had the enterprise to do something about it. There was a limited amount of visiting permitted between the seraglios of the various great houses—encouraged, I think, by & hope that useful tidbits of information about the plans of rivals in the never-ending jockeying for power might leak out that way—and it must have been on one such visit that Cosra of the House of Shugurra suggested that she enlist Kramer’s help.
Kramer had described Cosra as a stupid and greedy young woman, or words to that effect. I doubted, now that I was coming to know her better, whether Shavarri was either stupid or greedy. From hints picked up in talking to her I gathered that not the least of her reasons for deciding totake action was the destruction of her original fantasy notion about what her life as a junior wife might lead to.
Pwill was a level-headed man. Also he had great ambitions for the future of his house. All too often, I’d heard, the fortunes of a house which had seemed unchallengeably in the ascendant had been wrecked by squabbling among rival
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