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the rules."
     
    She could not believe what she was hearing. "You—"
     
    "Cecelia—the rules are on a different level, when you're talking about realities . . . surely you know that." His tone indulged her, the knowledgeable adult to the ignorant adolescent. "Men like Bunny make the rules . . . until someone else displaces them." He pushed the white king along the board, knocking the other pieces askew, until it rested on the edge of the board. "Yet there are always rules beyond rules . . . the rules that keep a man in his place—or move him away." His finger touched the game piece; it teetered a moment on the edge of the table, then fell.
     
    Her body tensed, as if she had seen an unexpected ditch looming beyond a jump she thought she knew. His expression shifted, reflecting hers; she hated that he had noticed. But he kept smiling, waiting her answer. She couldn't think what to answer. She had to say something, though; she could feel his smile beginning to stiffen in place, like overbeaten egg whites.
     
    "I see," she said, buying time. She didn't understand about Bunny yet, what rules he had broken that brought this man and his faction to the desperate action they had taken. She didn't understand why he had hinted so broadly, or what he expected her to do about it. But she did see that none of it was accidental, not Bunny's death, or this dinner meeting, or anything else Pedar did. Perhaps as far back as the Trials several years ago, her first ride in years. He had tried then to talk to her about the politics of the Rejuvenants, and she had dismissed it as mere fashion. "I do wonder," she said after a long pause, "what, if anything, the New Texas Godfearing Militia has to do with Rejuvenants."
     
    He relaxed just that fraction which told her she had chosen the safer alternative at that conversational fence.
     
    "People need something to blame for their disappointments," he said. "As some opportunities are foreclosed, others must be seen to open. Or unrest might become general."
     
    Cecelia puzzled at this. Again, he waited for her, that indulgent smile which told her he expected her to be slow to understand. She hated that patience; if this was what she would become, as a Rejuvenant, she might just as well run her horse over a cliff and be done with it. Opportunities foreclosed—that had to be because Rejuvenants could live well-nigh forever, and who was going to give up power and privilege while still young and capable? Mentally, she transferred the problem to horse breeding, where it made more sense to her. If the old horses didn't die off, and you kept breeding at the same rate . . . well, of course.
     
    "I wonder if rejuv drugs would work on horses," she said, before she could get a lock on her tongue.
     
    Pedar burst out laughing, and the bald man at the next table looked up. "Cecelia, my dear! Only you would think of rejuvenating a horse!"
     
    She could feel the heat in her face. Yet—if he laughed at her like that, he was not afraid of her wits. She allowed her voice to carry a little sting. "I see what you mean, Pedar. Those who cannot afford rejuvenation, or who are simply impatient, see ahead of them a lifetime of blocked opportunities—blocked by the Rejuvenants. But the universe is large—if they are discontented and ambitious enough, there are colony worlds—"
     
    "Theft is always more profitable, until the thief is caught," Pedar murmured.
     
    "That's—" She was about to say ridiculous, when a tension in Pedar's face silenced her.
     
    She had too much to think about, and she did not really want to think about any of it. Of what use were her wealth, and her skills, and her rejuvenated body, if she couldn't do what she liked without having to worry about the rest of the universe? What she had wanted—what she hoped to gain—was a long life full of her own particular pleasures . . . which began, though they did not end, in that stable block on Rotterdam. Which centered on