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Piers Anthony: Chaining the Lady

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Chaining the Lady: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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CHAINING THE LADY is the second CLUSTER book. Melody, a product of Flint and the Andromedan’s mating in CLUSTER, must save the Milky Way Galaxy and create a place where creatures can transfer without limitations. Melody must survive in worlds unknown and alien to her and she does that where others fail when her aura augments her skills and abilities. The book opens with the discovery that Andromeda, the enemy galaxy of the first novel, has discovered the secret of involuntary hosting: a Kirlian aura that is sufficiently stronger than that of an individual can take possession of that individual. Andromeda has secretly infiltrated the highest levels of government in Sphere Sol and its allies and resurrect its plot to steal the energy of the Milky Way. Melody of Mintaka, a direct descendant of Flint of Outworld and his Andromedan nemesis, has a Kirlian aura of well over 200. She is pressed into service to “possess” and interrogate a captured Andromedan transferee. Melody, hosted in the young and beautiful body of Yael of Dragon, must, like her progenitor Flint, find a way to defeat the Andromedan threat and save the galaxy. The mysterious Ancients are present again in the form of their artifacts and sites. The themes of Tarot and of various myths of Sphere Sol (in this case that of Perseus and Andromeda) play a big part this novel. The interSphere fleet of starships has forms analogous to the Tarot suits of Disks, Cups, Wands and Swords.

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She returned slowly to the table. One thing was sure: The model for the picture was sexually appealing, so as to create the necessary urge in the mind of Perseus. That suggested that her present host was an extraordinary beauty—which just might be useful.

For perhaps an hour, Solarian time, Melody contemplated her hundred-face spread. She also flexed the Ghost through all fifteen alternates, dwelling about one minute on each. Apart from the necessary activity of her fingers, she did not move; in fact she had entered a light trance.

At last she gathered up the cards, shuffled them until her host-fingers were proficient at this, then cut the deck several times and turned up one card randomly.

It was a picture of another lovely young human female, with a long, light head-mane and slender firm body, nude. But this one was not chained. She half-kneeled on a green bank beside a pool, one foot resting forward on, not in, the water. She held two pitchers from which water poured; one into the pool, the other onto the ground, where it split into five blue rivulets. There were eight stars in the blue sky above her—seven white, one yellow— and a red bird perched in a tree.

“The Star,” she murmured, “in one of the pre-Sphere renditions. Key of great hope—or great loss—its five rivulets flowing into the five suits, its smaller stars signifying the seven planets of ancient Solarian astrology, the large star sometimes called the Star of the Magi. Now why does this particular Trump manifest now?” Whatever its original meaning, the largest star actually reminded her of mighty Mintaka, center of the universe she had known so long ago as a bud. The nostalgia was suddenly so intense she had to close her human eyes and suffer its ravages without resistance. It was not merely that she was more than four hundred parsecs from it now, and in alien guise; time more than distance separated her from that stellar hope. What she had sought there had been lost in the distant youth of her lifetime, and never recovered, but even now the pain and shame could emerge from its capsule to haunt her. Her effort to shield herself from that agony had brought her to Tarot, but remarkable as that study had been, it could not make up for it. It had shown her the folly of her past, not the folly of her future.

She forced open her human eyes, staring at the card again. The Star-girl’s hair flared from her head to the level of her knees, framing her body in a luxuriant cape. In fact, it was almost like an aura, that mark of distinction that made Melody herself remarkable. But what was the use of aura, when the essence of her life had been poured out like that of the two vases of this scene? Hope and loss—how well she understood!

She dealt another card. This was a semihuman female with two pouring cups, but in this case she had a fish’s tail rather than legs, and she was pouring the liquid from one cup into the other. In the background was a section of the Milky Way galaxy, with recognizable constellations as seen from System Sol. Naturally the Solarian deck was oriented to the Solarian view. This picture had strong points of similarity, notably the girl’s full mammaries, but the symbolic meaning was quite different. “Temperance,” Melody murmured.

She dealt one more. This was yet another young woman fully clothed and holding a large disk or coin, an unit of Solarian monetary exchange. “Page of Solid, female,” Melody remarked.

She studied the three cards side by side, noting their parallels, which were impressive. Three healthy, sexually appealing young women. The Tarot was certainly trying to tell her something of importance, and this time she intended to continue her meditation until she comprehended it without undue distraction by her personal feelings. Again she moved into a trance.

Suddenly she snapped her fingers—an automatic Solarian gesture her Mintakan body could not have performed —in understanding. “Girl, stand forward,” she said.

And inside her brain the host-girl presented herself as directed. “Here,” the child-human whispered voicelessly, with associations of guilt and fear.

“I had supposed this body was vacant,” Melody said disapprovingly, also voicelessly—for this was a dialogue of two minds within a single brain, and Melody did not want the listening recorders of the Imperium to eavesdrop on this very private matter. She had never been in transfer before, but her mind remained her last reservoir of individuality, and she was a private person. To share a brain, to have every thought monitored even in the process of formulation…

“No—we are always present,” the girl said. “We do not interfere, cannot interfere, but we must live. We must not forget.”

“I fear I have not kept up with the times,” Melody said, making a mental twang of strings that translated into a figurative shake of the head. “Transfer is now to live hosts?”

“Always. Was it ever otherwise?”

A woman out of touch with the present, transferred to the body of a girl out of touch with the past! “Who are you?”

“I am Yael. I remained hidden, as instructed. How did you find me?”

A mental smile. “The Tarot found you, Yael. It reveals what is hidden in the mind. In this case—another mind. Tell me about yourself.”

“We’re not supposed to intrude—”

“So I gather. You are merely supposed to sit mute while an alien occupies your body. I understood slavery had been abolished in System Etamin.” A system was the next unit below the sphere, the planets associated with a single star. There was a major slave-culture within Segment Etamin, but not System Etamin—for what the distinction was worth.

“Slavery?” Emotion of confusion.

“You don’t even know what the concept means? That’s sophisticated servitude indeed! Even the slavemasters of Sphere Canopus have not taken it this far. By what right can any society require an individual to give up her own body? I should have thought the Polarians, with their adoration of the individual before society, would at least have made some roundabout objection.”

“Oh, you mean hosting,” Yael said. “Nobody made me. I wanted to do it. I get good pay, and the Society of Hosts watches out for me, and I get adventure that I could never have myself, and—”

“Oh, I comprehend. It is a business.” The expression Melody used had tones of prostitution, a human vice much ridiculed in Sphere Mintaka, but only the literal meaning translated into human thought. “Tell me about it —in your own concepts.”

Yael explained: She was the child of a poor farmer in the protected wilderness of Planet Outworld. Her parents had both been of subnormal intelligence, and had been allowed to beget offspring—limited to one—in return for voluntary commitment to the land. Few citizens wanted to reside in the vine forest or to preserve the ways of Outworld’s Stone Age heritage, as this involved primitive hunting and planting, chewing of dinosaur hides, and much exposure to discomfort and danger. But this man and woman had so desired a family that they had undertaken this cruel life—and thrived on it.

But one day a wounded predator dinosaur had charged their hut and wiped them out. Only Yael had survived, because she had been gathering wild juiceberries at the time. Still a child, she had been taken in by another forest family—but it had not been a happy mergeance. When it became apparent that this low-aura, low-intelligence waif was about to mature into an astonishingly lovely woman, her adoptive father had made plans to supplement the family income by engaging her in concubinage to the highest-bidding local landowner. This would have been a life of inferiority and disillusion as her youthful beauty faded, terminating in the drudgery of servant-status. Yael had aspired to more than this; she had the soul of an adventuress despite her circumstance.

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