Piers Anthony - Chaining the Lady

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.

“How did you get the notion of adventure?” Melody inquired, not unkindly. “Wasn’t mere survival among dinosaurs adventure enough?”

“Not after my natural folk died,” Yael said simply, and Melody knew immediate shame. But the girl continued, unaware of it. “The dinosaurs weren’t so bad, really, when you got to know them. They just figured the territory was theirs , since they were there first.”

“How did you select your name?” Melody asked, changing the subject.

“There are popular names here, after famous people in our history. Many boys are called Flint, after Outworld’s first transferee, and many girls are Honeybloom, after his wife. When my family was lost, I could not keep the name they gave me, so I chose a new one. There was a poem they read to me as a child, and I always liked it, so I took the name of the ancient poetess who made it, Yael Dragon. It seemed to fit, because Etamin is the Eye of the Dragon in Solarian myth, and it was a dragon that—”

She broke off, and Melody realized that she was crying. As well she might. A dinosaur, a virtual living dragon, had destroyed her family; a cruel identification, but perhaps a necessary one.

“What is the poem?” Melody inquired, hoping again to take the girl’s mind away from the tragedy.

“Actually, she didn’t write it,” Yael said. “It was to her, really. Does that make a difference?”

Melody thought again of her own uncapsulated past, the confusion and shifting of rationales. “No. Not if she was responsible for it.”

“I never really understood it, but it does something to me. I—well, it goes like this:”