cannot understand.”
“How do the stones work?”
“Each face is carved with the rune of a realm. I read the combinations, how they fall, or in the case of the emptiness where it falls in relation to the others. Would you like to know what your future contains?”
“Yeah. Go on.”
“Pick up each crystal, hold it in your hands for a moment, try to impress it with your essence, then put it in the bag.”
He picked up the clear one, naturally. Love Lady. “How do I impress it?”
She just shrugged.
He squeezed the crystals one at a time, feeling increasingly stupid, and dropped them in the goatskin bag. Anastasia Rigel shook the bag, then tipped the crystals out.
“What does it say?” Dariat asked, a shade too eagerly for someone who was supposed to be sceptical.
She stared at them a while, eyes flicking anxiously between the runes. “Greatness,” she said eventually. “You will come to greatness.”
“Hey, yeah!”
Her hand came up, silencing him. “It will not last. You shine so bright, Dariat, but for such a short time, and it is a dark flame which ignites you.”
“Then what?” he asked, disgruntled.
“Pain, death.”
“Not yours. Many people, but not yours.”
Anastasia Rigel didn’t offer to sleep with him that time. Nor any of his visits during the month which followed. They walked round the savannah together, talking inanities, almost as brother and sister. She would tell him about the Starbridge philosophy, the idiosyncrasies of the realms. He listened, but became lost and impatient with a worldview which seemed to have little internal logic. In return he told her of his father, the resentment and the confusion of loss; mainly in the hope she’d feel sorry for him. He took her down into a starscraper; she said she’d never been in one before. She didn’t like it, the confining walls of the apartments, although she was fascinated by the slowly spinning starfield outside.
The sexual tension died down from its initial high-voltage peak, though it was never laid to rest. It became a sort of game, jibes and smirks, played for points that neither knew how to win. Dariat enjoyed her company a lot. Someone who treated him fairly, who took time to hear what he said. Because she wanted to. He could never quite understand what she got out of the arrangement. She read his future several times, though none of the readings ever proved quite as dire as the first.
Dariat spent more and more time with her, almost divorcing himself from the culture lived out in the starscrapers and industrial stations (except for keeping up on his didactic courses). The portentous aspirations in his mind lost their grip when he was in her presence.
He learnt how to milk a goat, not that he particularly wanted to. They were smelly, bad-tempered creatures. She cooked him fish which she caught in the streams, and showed him which plants had edible roots. He found out about the tribe’s way of life, how they sold a lot of their handicrafts to starship crews, chiefly the rugs and pottery, how they shunned technology. “Except for nanonic medical packages,” she said wryly. “Amazing how many women become technocrats around childbirth time.” He went to some of their ceremonies, which seemed little more than open air parties where everyone drank a strong distilled spirit, and sang gospel hymns late into the night.
One evening, when she was wearing just a simple white cotton poncho, she invited him into her tepee. He felt all the sexual heat return as the outline of her body was revealed through the fabric by the light of the tepee’s meagre oil lamp. There was some kind of clay pot in the centre with a snakelike hose coming from the side. It was smoking docilely, filling the air with a funny sweet and sour scent.
Anastasia took a puff on the pipe, and shivered as if she’d swallowed a triple whisky. “Try some,” she said, her voice rich with challenge.
“What is it?”
“A wide gate into Tarrug’s realm. You’ll like it. Anstid won’t. He’ll lose all control over you.”
He looked at the crimped end of the tube, still wet from her mouth. He wanted to try it. He was frightened. Her eyes were very wide.
She tipped her head back, expelling two long plumes of smoke from her nostrils. “Don’t you want to explore the realm of mischief with me?”
Dariat put the tube in his mouth and sucked. The next minute he was coughing violently.
“Not so hard,” she said. Her voice sounded all furred. “Take it down slow. Feel it float through your bones.”
He did as he was told.
“They’re hollow, you know, your bones.” Her smile was wide, shining like the light-tube against her black face.
The world spun round. He could feel the habitat moving, stars whipping round faster and faster, smearing across space. Smeared like cream. He giggled. Anastasia Rigel gave him a long, knowing grin, and took another drag on the tube.
Space was pink. Stars were black. Water smelt of cheese. “I love you,” he told her. “I love you, I love you.” The tepee walls were palpitating in and out. He was in the belly of some huge beast, just like Jonah.
Bloody hell.
“What did you say?”
Shit, I can’t filter . . . What’s green? What are you—
“My hands are green,” he explained patiently.
“Are they?” Anastasia Rigel asked. “That’s interesting.”
What has she given you?
“Tarrug?” Dariat asked. Anastasia had said that was who they were going to visit. “Hello, Tarrug. I can hear him. He’s talking to me.”
Anastasia Rigel was at right angles to him. She pulled the poncho off over her head, sitting crosslegged and naked on the rug. Now she was totally upside-down. Her nipples were black eyes following him.
“That’s not Tarrug you hear,” she said. “That’s Anstid.”
“Anstid. Hi!”
What is it? What is in that bloody pipe? Wait, I’m reviewing the local memory . . . Oh, fuck, it’s salfrond. I can’t hold onto your thoughts when you’re tripping on that, you little prick.
“I don’t want you to.”
Yes, you do. Oh, believe me you do, boy. I’ve got the keys to every dark door in this kingdom, and you’re the golden protйgй. Now stop smoking that mind-rotting crap.
Dariat very deliberately stuck the tube in his mouth, and inhaled until his lungs were about to burst. His cheeks puffed out. Anastasia Rigel leant forwards and took the tube from between his lips. “Enough.”
The tepee was spinning in the opposite direction to the habitat, and outside it was raining shoes. Black leather shoes with scarlet buckles.
Shit! I’m going to kill that little black junkie bitch for this. It’s high bloody time I shoved the Starbridge tribes out of the airlock. Dariat, stand up, boy. Walk outside, get some fresh air. There’s some medical nanonic packages in the village, the headman’s got some. They can straighten out your blood chemistry.
Dariat’s giggles returned. “Piss off.”
GET UP!
“No.”
Weakling! Always bloody weaklings. You’re no better than your bastard father.
Dariat squeezed his eyes shut. The colours were behind his eyelids too. “I am not like him.”
Yes, you are. Weak, feeble, pathetic. All of you are. I should have cloned myself when I had the chance. Parthenogenetics would have solved all this bullshit. Two fucking centuries of weaklings I’ve had to endure. Two centuries, fuck it.
