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and stress. But it was not easy.
    When it was done, he felt buoyed, cleansed by Hassid’s palliative communion. Perhaps, somehow, he could retain the ship. For the first time since he had begun the docking maneuver, he remembered the Earth waif, and constructed various contingency plans that shielded her from any backwash of Parma’s wrath.
    So he came to the time of reckoning, and found the most difficult of it to be the consigning of Hassid’s facile brain to what might be a permanent limbo. Once all was dark in the ship but standby lights and all quiet without but for the soft hiss and thud of the automated re-pressurizing of the bay, he was past the worst of it; his hands steadied. Like the ship, he was ready, holding all faculties in abeyance but those standard functions: his heart beat, saliva jetted, breath came and went.
    Loud in the quiet came the soft tone that signaled a safe exit, then Shebat’s muted cry of delight when the port drew back and Lorelie’s fragrant air caressed her cheek.
    There were none to meet them. Marada’s scant brows drew down protectively over his eyes, and his voice came from deeper in his chest. In the miasmic Lorelian light, the chain rings in his ears were divested of their sparkle; in the stiffness of his carriage, they dared not swing, but hung quiescent.
    Shebat took note, but she had put on him the spell of twelve coils binding, and feared not at all for the safety of the Arbiter Kerrion, who had delivered her from the abyss of ignorance and surely would not be decreased on that account.

 
    Chapter Three
     
     
    Parma Alexander Kerrion had sired seven sons, the other six of which combined had not garnered half the troubles to hearth as had the one he now watched slowly but without hesitation climbing the last teal hill of several between port and tower, lissome of stride but sure in bearing, though he walked in company of a travesty, female, garbed in Kerrion colors. And doubtless also in the company of his fear: Marada could not help but have appraised the situation. But of this, the sauntering youth who paused often to point this way or that or touch the swivel-headed creature he had brought gave no sign. In the privacy of his bath—the only privacy to be had on Lorelie these days—the consul general leaned with elbows on sill, jutting chin cradled in flat hands which propped up the folds of his face so that it seemed that the Parma of a quarter century past stared squint-eyed out at his son’s approach.
    Of the bone white hair on Parma’s head, Marada was responsible for bleaching the better half. Twenty-five years less one month ago, Marada had been born of Persephone, slaying her in his pursuit of life, and Parma’s hair had begun to turn. How many times he had wished he could trade back this accursed spawn of passion for the woman who inspired it! But such bargains could not be made; even Parma’s influence held no sway in Fate’s court. All the Kerrion bond’s awesome biochemical abilities were useless in the face of death. Once lost, no person could be regained: cloning reproduced body but not soul. He had declined the opportunity to bring wife up as daughter, to see her grow away, go away, wed away to some youthful scion of a rival consulate. She had taken unto herself the only immortality worthy of the name: in Marada her genes rode, awaiting their dissemination.
    Parma sighed. Any possible consequence, of whatever gravity, was superior in his sight to the one facing him by law: he was not about to see his own son neutered and cast out. Whatever the cost, he would prevent that. No matter how much he disliked—must one mince words with oneself? No? Then: hated! —the boy at times like these, he was his mother’s son. How could what was consummately attractive in the mother be so infinitely destructive in the son? It was as if the old crone Chance sat drooling on his ledger, each drop that fell upon some entered credit blurring it away.
    Well, Marada would