The Lion of Farside

" ^ "

She slept through breakfast and most of the morning, wakening slowly, aware finally that she'd slept the clock around. Up! she told herself. Up and face the day! Then burrowed deeper into the security and comfort of the thick feather mattress.

But when she peeked again, the clock (which bore the name Westclox on its face and had been made in Norcross, Georgia, in another universe) said 11:32, and she discovered she was hungry. So dragging herself from bed, she washed and dressed, and by noon had joined a growing crowd of attractive women, ages twelve to perhaps ninety, in the dining room. She was among the earlier arrivals, and there was room beside her, but somehow Liiset, when she came in, took a seat at the other end of the room. Without acknowledging her wave or meeting her eyes.

A guardsman intercepted her as she left. (Recognizing identities among look-alikes was a talent that turned on early in the Sisterhood, with both girls and boys, even among those like Idri who did not see auras.) His face told her nothing, and his aura scarcely more, for this errand meant little to him, but she followed with an empty feeling. To the Dynast's office.

When she entered, she knew at once that here was trouble, the trouble she'd avoided thinking about. Two persons awaited her. One was Idri, with a look of hard-eyed satisfaction. The other was the Dynast, older than any other Sister, ever, by at least a century. A Sister of awesomely long life and memory. She'd been Dynast when Curtis's great-great-grandfather had run away. Yet she could pass easily for twenty-five, if you ignored her eyes and aura.

"Welcome home, Sister Varia," Sarkia said amiably. "I see you're pregnant."

It didn't show physically yet, but any Sister who could see auras could tell.

"You realize why you're here, of course."

Varia nodded. This would be her hearing for refusing an order, and perhaps for desertion. "Yes, Sister Sarkia."

"Very well." The Dynast recited the charges in an almost kindly tone. "Do you deny either of them, in kind or in spirit?"

"No, Sister Sarkia."

"Can you cite extenuating circumstances?"

"Only that the events at Ferny Cove were described to me as much more drastic than they actually were. It seemed to me that the Sisterhood had been destroyed."

The Dynast's eyes and aura showed no agitation. "But obviously it was not," she said. "You lacked faith, no doubt because of your long separation from us. Well. We must get you back into the spirit of service and discipline. Yours is our most fertile clone, and you and Will Macurdy much our most fertile pairing. You should have brought his nephew through, as ordered." She paused, seeming to consider. "I'm assigning you to duties in the creche; this will go well with your pregnancy. Meanwhile you'll maintain your physical health by participating in the morning drills."

She stopped there and sat wordless for a minute, her eyes holding Varia like a bug on a pin. "Then, after a suitable post-partum recovery, you will be assigned to a Tiger barracks for re-impregnation."

A sudden stone sat heavily in Varia's bowels. The Tiger clones had been bred and culled for a hardness of spirit, and they were notoriously infertile. And there was more, she realized; the Dynast was not done.

"During your assignment in the creche, you will be supervised by Sister Maliv. During your assignment in the Tiger barracks, Sister Idri will see to your welfare, and make sure you are properly chastened and corrected."

Varia had never seen Idri smile before.

While living and working at the creche, Varia managed mostly not to dwell on her sentence. Only occasionally did she think of it, sometimes at the sight of a Tiger striding lithe and hard down some path. And sometimes when she wiped and washed some boy infant, or awakened from nightmare. Gestation seemed scarcely to take weeks, though she'd been in the Cloister more than four months when she was taken to the lying-in ward. To her surprise and dismay, Sarkia was there, and Idri.

She was delivered of two boys, about two and a half pounds each, but vigorous. When infants and mother had been cleaned up, and the babes taken to be fed (they were too small to nurse), Varia's eyes went to the Dynast, and stuck on her gaze. Sarkia's lips had thinned and twisted.

Because she'd borne only the two, Varia realized. Had only willed two, those first hours after fertilization, when in her self-induced trance, she might have willed half a dozen. Like their ylvin progenitors, most Sisters were relatively infertile. Which meant spending several nights in a breeding room each month, with selected partners. Usually the experience was enjoyable, for typically their partners were skilled and pleasant, and it was how things were done in the Sisterhood. And when a Sister became pregnant, she was expected to produce as large a litter as was safe. Five was usual.

But conception with Curtis had taken place in a different world, and the future she'd had in mind had been a different future.

Sarkia turned to Idri and muttered: "Do what you will with her."

For the second time, Varia saw Idri smile.

Over the following two months she continued in the creche, nursing infants of mothers who had other duties, and after a bit, her own. After the first six weeks her nursing duties were gradually reduced till in the third month she went dry. And knew her sentence would soon begin.

Even so it began with a shock. Two grinning Tigers banged into her room one evening, running her roommates out. While one held her arms painfully behind her back, the other chopped her hair off with scissors, then shaved her head, leaving numerous nicks behind. When he was done, they stripped her roughly, put a coarse woolen shift on her, and hustled her from the building, arms behind her back again. That sack-like shift, which fell short of her knees, was all the clothing left to her.

Tiger barracks were different from Sister barracks-temporary squad huts with bath and latrine. Normally two half-sibling clones made a squad, and eight grinning Tigers were waiting when Varia was propelled into their breeding room. For a minute she was pushed-thrown back and forth among them like a beach ball, staggering, reeling around the small ring of naked Tigers, never allowed to fall. Then the shift was pulled from her, and the sergeant, exerting his prerogative, threw her on the bed and took her roughly.

The first round was quick. The sergeant took perhaps a minute, while the others, having watched, were mostly quicker, and she'd begun to feel hopeful that this wouldn't be as bad as she'd feared. But though their fertility was low, they had the sexual energy of youth. Thus those who'd finished, restimulated by watching the others, had a second round which took much longer, and in some cases sadistic forms. Long before that round was done, Varia was weeping silently in blind desolation. She wasn't really aware when the still longer, much rougher third round began, and was unconscious well before it was over.

She awoke in the empty bath. Awoke when the Tiger sentry threw a bucket of cold water on her, then threw her shift at her, and watched grinning while she pulled it on. A sober-faced guardsman waited outside, and led her to the kitchen, barefoot and in only her wet shift, through twenty degree cold and two inches of snow. She was hardly aware of it, though she shivered violently. Most of the Sisterhood had the power to produce additional body heat by mentally controlling cellular respiration levels and circulation. In Varia's state of shock, only shivering was available to her.

At the kitchen, a younger Sister waited, an adolescent. Big-eyed at what she saw, the girl showed Varia her duties, demonstrating and helping, while Varia emerged somewhat from shock, becoming more aware, watching and duplicating: Fires were laid, then lit, in the dining room stove, the stack of ovens, and the great ceramic cookstove, and replenished in the large ceramic water heater, for the hot springs weren't hot enough for kitchen needs.

It was now that Varia, hobbling and unable to stand straight, realized fully how sore she was. When the instructions were finished, and Varia, outside in the cold, had begun splitting the day's firewood, the girl vanished. Meanwhile, with the exertion and the partial return of her mental faculties, Varia had stopped shivering.

Fifteen minutes later the chief cook arrived, the Sister in charge of the kitchen, a large, strong-looking woman, handsome instead of pretty. Arrived well ahead of her usual hours, and came out to the woodpile to peer at Varia in the darkness. The woman's lips were as thin and twisted as Sarkia's had been at Varia's delivery.

Her voice was rough. "What's wrong with you?" she demanded.

Voice dead, face wooden, Varia told her, and began shivering again, violently. The woman took her arm and steered her brusquely into the kitchen where there was light, squinted at the black eye, the split and swollen lips. "Take off your shift," she ordered.

Varia did, without emotion.

"Good God!" The cook looked at the myriad black bruises and bloody spots on thighs and buttocks, arms and breasts, for when Varia had gone into shock, the Tigers had pinched and struck her, even jabbed her with knife tips, trying to elicit movement. "Here, girl," the woman said, and helped her onto a table. There, by the light of an oil lamp, she examined her as a gynecologist might have. Varia was literally raw, fore and aft, despite being slimed with semen, and undoubtedly had vaginal and rectal lesions that could become infected. Swearing, the woman turned to the now-shivering girl who'd fetched her.

"Go outside and bring me the guard."

The girl ran, and the guard came in, looking worried.

"Where did you get her?" the cook demanded.

He told her.

"That clone! Go back there and wake up the sergeant." The guard blanched; he was scarcely out of adolescence himself. "Tell that pile of shit his mother wants him in this kitchen within ten minutes, or I'll see his balls on my butcher block."

She hadn't raised her voice, but the intensity behind it allowed no noncompliance. As the guard reached the door, she shouted after him, "Make sure you tell him exactly what I said."

Then she sent Varia with the adolescent girl, hobbling off barefoot to the infirmary.

She was in the infirmary for three days. On the second, the chief cook came to see her. "I talked to the sergeant," the woman said. "He's one of my sons. He said Idri told him they should do whatever they wanted with you, the rougher the better. So when Idri came in to breakfast, I was waiting for her. I took her to the woodpile and shook hell out of her. She took it, too." The woman's smile was grim. "I was bred to produce Tigers. I could twist her head off if I wanted, and she knew I was on the edge. All she could say was, she was going to report me to the Dynast."

The cook laughed, a dry bark. "I'm eighty-eight years old, girl. At my age you don't have many years left before decline, and you think a bit, some of us, most of us, of how your points will balance after death; what penalties and penances might await you. Makes it easier to take the bull by the horns. In midmorning the Dynast called me to her. I told her what you'd looked like, and what my son had said.

"She didn't say a thing, but I saw her jaw tighten. Later her secretary stopped to tell me not to worry about anything Idri might want to do." Again she snorted. "As if I would. Sarkia told her she'd wanted you punished, not killed. And ordered her to latrine detail for a week; she'll love that, high and mighty as she sees herself.

"Then she had your sergeant in. Not that she raked him over the coals like I did; he's just a Tiger, the way she designed him. But she set him straight. You'll find things better when you go back."

The cook left then. And of all she'd said, the words that stuck in Varia's mind were four: "When you go back." She'd have to go back to that place.

8: A Plan Enacted