Patternmaster

He won’t be talked out of it. He’s made up his mind. I’m going to have to face him sooner or later, no matter what.

If you’re foolish enough to attack him, Teray, I’ll help him against you myself. Now be quiet and fade into the background with Laro!

The intensity of Joachim’s anger burned into Teray. He had no doubt that that Housemaster was completely serious. The dialogue had taken place in only a few seconds, so there had been no more of a pause in his conversation with Coransee than Coransee’s last questions deserved. Now he still had to answer that question and do it in a way that would not lead to his deeper involvement. Somehow. He was about to speak when Joachim took the matter out of his hands.

“Are you trading with me, Coransee, or with my apprentice?” he asked angrily.

Coransee turned slowly to look at Joachim. Teray was startled at the relief he felt to have the man’s eyes off him.

“Don’t you think the boy should have something to say about this?” asked Coransee.

“You said it yourself.” Joachim ran the words on both the vocal and mental level for emphasis. “What we decide, he will have to accept. He shouldn’t even be here. Neither should the artist.”

“All right,” Coransee agreed. Teray wondered, under his renewed fear, how it felt to Joachim to have his most serious words answered with no more than mild amusement. “But the boy is right, you know. Sooner or later he will have to face me.”

Teray said nothing, sent no parting thought as he left the office. Coransee’s casual undetected eavesdropping into his conversation with Joachim was no more than payment for his own earlier snooping. But it angered him. one should have been able to bypass his screens so easily without being noticed. He had been careless himself. It would not happen again.

He located Iray as quickly as he could, then managed to find a private corner where he could tell her what happened.

She heard him, her eyes widening with disbelief as he spoke. Then before she could respond, a mute interrupted them with an offer of cool drinks and food

It was the first time he could recall her being harsh with a mute.

“Get away from us! Leave us alone!” Teray, what are you saying?

“Speak aloud,” he ordered. “And screen. This will be all over the house soon enough.”

But Joachim wouldn’t…

“Iray!”

She switched in mid-sentence. “… trade you. He wouldn’t. He needs you. You’re the strongest man he’s ever been able to fit into his House.”

“I didn’t say he was going to trade me. I said Coransee wants him to.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.” Teray frowned. “He’s found that he’s my brother—half-brother, probably. It has something do with that.”

“What difference could that make?”

“I tell you, I don’t know.”

It must be something else. Maybe he really does need your strength now that the Clayarks are raiding him.”

“He can use my strength. But he doesn’t really need it. He didn’t even expect us to believe him when he said that.”

“Maybe he just wants to do something to Joachim—get even with him for something.” She shook her head angrily, bitterly. “Maybe he just likes being a son of a Clayark bitch!” She stood leaning against him, radiating her anger. “Joachim won’t let it happen,” she said. “He must have expected some kind of trouble, the way he kept warning us. But we can depend on him.”

“I hope so. But there was something … at the last, when he made me leave, he threatened to help Coransee against me if I attacked.”

“He was angry. He didn’t mean it.”

“He was angry, all right. But he meant it. He would have done it.”

She opened her mouth to protest again, to defend Joachim. Then she closed it and lowered her head. “It can’t happen, Teray.” She seemed to surrender to the fear that she had been holding at bay with her anger. She pressed herself against him, trembling. “Don’t you see what it would mean?” she whispered. “The outsider restrictions.”

He said nothing, only looked at her. He knew which restriction she had in mind. There were several: outsiders were not free to father children as they wished, and of course they had little or no say in where they lived or how long they lived there. They were property. But the restriction Iray had in mind was the one that said outsiders could not marry. They were free enough to have all the sex they wanted with any woman in the House who would have them—as long as they were careful to father no unauthorized offspring. But if, as in Teray’s case, a man was married before he lost his freedom, his wife took her place among the women of the House, the Housemaster’s wives. And she became the only woman in the House permanently forbidden to her former husband.

The laws were old, made in harsher times.

Perhaps it was reasonable, as the old records said, to forbid weak men to sire potentially weak children. But what reason could there be for denying a man access to his chosen one, his first, while permitting him so many others? What reason but to remind him constantly that he was a slave?