Courtship Rite

17

GAET RODE THE FIFTH model of the gossamer skrei-wheel through Kaiel-hontokae, attracting stares and a wake of children who followed him for blocks on end with their high excited laughter. The tri-wheel had independent suspension for its two front wheels and nine gears in a compact gearbox plus a rudder wheel larger than on earlier models. The frame had been extended and was capable of carrying freight.

Sometimes Gaet had to lift it over obstacles, but it was well suited to the mountain roads maintained by the Ivieth. It was not the latest model. The best creators of the local og’Sieth clan were already working on a stripped down bi-wheel for rapid personal transport which had no suspension and was evidently capable of maintaining a vertical balance by gyroscopic action similar to the forces that balanced a top. Progress was being delayed by a problem with the new lightweight gears which should have worked well but in practice had an unfortunate tendency to jam and even snap.

The journey through the city reminded him of nothing so much as the shoulder-hitching he’d done on the backs of Ivieth runners as a child, except that on a straight stretch of the main road he could reach a terrifying speed that was faster than any man could run. He had been told by Benjie, the og’Sieth’s local craftsmaster, to give his skrei-wheel a rough workout since much more information about its wear modes was necessary before they dared put the device into production. It wouldn’t do to have fifty of them that all needed the same replacement part every week.

The buildings rushed by and the children couldn’t keep up and he kept to the streets between the hills of the city. He was thinking, as he took the cobblestone bumps, that if such vehicles became as common as footwear a man might not have to spend so much of his time away from his wives.

Ah, wives! There was his motive for hurrying! He was going to be glad to see Noe again. With Teenae away and Kathein interdicted and so much work to do, Hoemei and he had been reduced to near-celibacy.

Gaet left his skrei-wheel unattended outside the walls of the Great Cloister of Kaiel-hontokae. In a city where even the petty criminals were eaten and used for leather, theft might happen but it was no great preoccupation of the populace. The Great Cloister curved halfway around the base of a small hill, a formidable stone building. It was a Kaiel sanctum and the root of their technology. None but the true Kaiel walked within. After kneeling in the sacrarium and offering a prayer to the God of the Sky, Gaet headed straight for Noe’s cell. A faint odor of solvents was in the air. His walk took him past an ancient stained-glass window and rows of stone pillars. He had to climb stairs and walk through one wing of the building to get to yet a third wing.

On tiptoes he entered Noe’s room, which was fully equipped because she, as did many Getans, maintained several residences. She was asleep on large yellow and blue dyed pillows that took the shape of her body. He thought that perhaps he would not wake her, perhaps he would just delight in being with her for a few moments and then leave. Hoemei had mentioned how short of sleep she was.

“Hello,” she said lazily.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

She motioned with her body for him to come to her. “My nap is over. I need your shaft to wake me up.” Slowly she began to undress him while he lay with her, but she gave up and let him finish, and then pulled him under the blankets.

“Mmmmm… you’re cool,” she said deliciously.

“You’re warm. I feel like a loaf of bread being baked.”

“Mmmmm…” She went back to sleep but a corner of her brain that stayed awake persisted in arousing him and they made love, she less and less passively, until she cried convulsively and sat up, hugging herself with her arms.

“What are you doing in the city? I thought you were in the mountains?”

“I’m chasing ball bearings.” Gaet laughed.

“Hoemei said you were making wagons. I didn’t believe him. He said they were light enough for two men to lift.”

“I can lift one myself. They’re fast. We are going to have fifty of them built, maybe seventy, in time for the coastal famine. But only if I can find the craftsmen to provide those damn ball bearings.”

She giggled. “Only Hoemei could get you to do trade clan labor.”

“Only Hoemei could get you to work at all,” he retorted.

“I must say dallying in the temple beats administering the labors of fifty juveniles fresh from the creches. The Cloister is a human pressure cooker! There is so much to do!”

“Getting anywhere?”

“You can bet your coins we are! I have them working in ten parallel teams. They are terrified of me. They think I’m going to make soup out of them if they don’t overachieve. Guess who saved us weeks of work?”

“I brought you some honeycakes in case you were awake.”

“Is that all you ever think of? Making me fat so you’ll have more to hold? You never listen to me.”

“All right, who saved us weeks of work?”

She munched on her honeycake. “Our betrothed.”

“Kathein?”

“No. Oelita. We were requisitioning samples of the wheat-eating underjaw and before we got the order out, they arrived by way of an itinerant glassblower. Oelita seems to be an observant woman. She collected some a while ago and gave them to a renegade Stgal priest who breeds detoxified profane vegetation. He was worldly enough to send them to the Cloister here. Oelita also had written out an amazingly detailed description of the underjaw life cycle.”

“Do they contain human genes like Hoemei maintains?”

“They certainly do. It is an unbelievable crime. It’s Judgment Feast for the Mnankrei. We’ll have to break the whole clan to a lesser status, maybe destroy it.”

“You’ll wear Scowlmoon’s crescent for a necklace before you see that happen. It’s impossible. They tried it with the Arant and we’re here.”

Her eyes blazed. “We’re Kaiel — not Arant!”

He laughed. “I see you believe our forged history.”

“They let too many of you atheists out of the creches!” Noe was above all an aristocratic patriot.

Gaet did not bother to remind her that the creche had been essentially an Arant idea or that the God-made ectogenetic machines on which the Arant heresy arose had probably existed and been destroyed during the terrible crusade. Instead he changed the subject. “I figure Sorrow can hold out for one season against the Mnankrei. They have enough reserves for that. If the underjaw is still an abomination by then, the Stgal are doomed.”

She grinned smugly. “We already have the underjaw control ritual. It is not yet God smooth, but it will be.”

“That’s fast work!”

“I’m a fast woman,” she flirted. “Why do you think you fell in love with me after one heartbeat?”

“You mean it wasn’t your family money?”

“Don’t you remember? It was right after I offered you that purple drink,” she teased, licking the honey from her fingers. “Extract of slave pituitaries.”

“That’s what you plan for the beetles, to spike their drinks?”

“We need only to synthesize three artificial genes.”

“For what purpose?”

“The underjaw carries up to a hundred tiny symbiotes in its cervical carapace which are its only source of the alalaise it needs to power its wings during migration flight. When underjaws overgraze, the population begins to die. A dead underjaw triggers the sexual phase of the symbiote whose larvae thrive on the corpse. In their winged phase they find living underjaws and as the under-jaws become symbiote-saturated, a migration begins. We’ve found a way to use the human protein in the deviant underjaw to trigger the sexual phase of the symbiote while the underjaw is still alive so that it is eaten alive. The larvae mature and find other underjaws. If the new underjaw is of the Mnankrei-synthesized variety, then the sexual phase begins again instantly. If not, the symbiote establishes a normal relationship.”

“Clever. Who thought of it?”

“Me, you oaf!” She cuffed him. “When I was reading Oelita’s description of the life cycle. Get dressed. I’ll show you.”

“I just got undressed!”

The labyrinth of the Cloister contained perhaps one-third of the entire Kaiel wealth. There were the tapestries and the windows and the gold foil and silver inlay, of course, but that was for show. The major investment was in intricately crafted biochemical apparatus, dust-free and sterile rooms, electron eyes, silvergraphing techniques that could capture the image of a protein string on boron-anate plastics. There were rooms where genetically truncated and modified microlife cells fabricated difficult chemicals. Priest-changed ziants performed much of the necessary micro-manipulation and sensing. Within this labyrinth the ancestor of Gaet’s host mother had been synthesized from human and artificial genes. Even among the priest clans where breeding and biochemistry was a familiar art, the Kaiel were known as magicians.

While Noe took a nap with her head on the desk top, Gaet curiously examined relevant silvergraphs and pondered over hundreds of variations of hypothetical genetic chains that had been inserted in the fast-breeding symbiotes and tested. It was not his field of expertise but he read the group’s work well enough. In the Getan language the same word was used for “priest” or “leader” or “biologist”. Nobody survived the creches who was not a fine biochemist.

“Hey, this one seems to work!”

She woke up and looked to see the source of his enthusiasm. She smiled proudly. “It’s sluggish but my children are optimizing it.”

“You’re still sleepy.”

“I need the mountain winds in my face.”

“How about a run on my skrei-wheel?”

“Is it dangerous?”

It was dangerous so she loved it, clinging to Gaet’s back, flying faster than men could run. The ground rushed under her eyes like that peak-risk moment when a sailplane comes in for a landing, but there was no jolt or collapse of wings — the earth kept slipping past in endless orgasm.