realities?'
Renatta gave her a long, hard look. 'I don't know how they've got things set up around here, but where I come from, a woman can do any damn thing she wants.'
'Must be very exciting.'
Two of the other painted girls had moved nearer. The Minstrel Boy grinned. Renatta had only just arrived, and she was already fomenting revolution.
'Sometimes it's exciting, but there are other times when it can be hard and brutal.'
Renatta de Luxe had come a long way since she had begged the Minstrel Boy to take her away from the Caverns in the gold submarine.
Dass-el-Hame did not return until past noon on the following day. A glorious pseudosun had come up in a blaze of gold, and the singing and the peals of bells from beyond the walls of the residence indicated that the festival of Cha'a was still in full swing. When the Elevated Palarch returned, he seemed anything but festive. He glared acidly at the half-clad contract warriors who lounged by the pool eating his fruit, drinking his wine, and progressively going native.
'Your employers can be very persuasive.'
Reave hitched up his sari and got to his feet, 'So what's the story? Is the meeting over? Are we staying here?' He was determined not to treat the man as anything other than an equal despite the grandiose title.
Dass-el-Hame sighed. He looked as though only exhaustion was stopping him from being exceedingly angry. 'In his wisdom, my beloved Master has granted the metaphysicians of Krystaleit sanctuary in this settlement. They will be free to remain here for as long as they like, and they will be provided with the resources to continue their research.'
Reave raised an eyebrow. 'You don't seem too happy about this. Worried they might cause a few changes in your snug little social system?'
For a moment it looked as if Dass-el-Hame was going to tell Reave exactly how worried and unhappy he was, but then a lifetime as a courtier, with all its complex intrigue and guardeddiplomacy, asserted itself. He contented himself with pursing his lips. He looked as though he were sucking a lemon. 'I don't question the wisdom.'
'And what about us? Have we been granted sanctuary, too?'
'You are still under contract. Your employers require that you remain.' The Elevated Palareh eyed the weapons stacked in the comer of the courtyard. 'They seem to feel that you are the temporal end of their leverage, the hard fulcrum, so to speak.'
Reave half smiled. So Showcross Gee and his bunch were not so spiritual that they wouldn't stoop to at least a covert threat of violence to get what they wanted.
Dass-el-Hame caught the smile and went quickly on. 'You will remain here as my guests until more permanent quarters can be arranged.'
From his expression, it was clear that the extended hospitality was something else that gave him no pleasure at all.
The first few days were a novelty, but as that wore down, time started to blur into the languidly sensual rhythm of lotus life. For the Minstrel Boy, it was like nothing more than the routine gratification of the Caverns from which he had fled what seemed like a century before. The only real difference was that Palanaque had days and nights, whereas the Caverns had been shrouded in a continuous soft gloom. Palanaque even had a little mock weather system. One afternoon a soft novelty rain had fallen over the city. Aside from minor interruptions of that kind, there was nothing but the slow torpor of mindless hedonism.
Initially the Minstrel Boy was not too bothered by the enforced idleness. After the ducking and diving they had been forced to go through since their reunion at the Voice in the Wilderness, a period of doing absolutely nothing was far from unwelcome. But the Minstrel Boy could not keep himself from thinking ahead. A time would come when the seven of them would become bored with the luxury and lethargy and start hankering for some action. The inclination would be to cut loose from Palanaque and move on. He wondered how the metaphysicians would take that when the time came.
Jet Ace was the first to chafe at the relentless ease. He still had his dreams of becoming a legendary hero. He took to flying by himself at the far end of the valley, away from the city. The Minstrel Boy would not have been the least bit surprised if one day he simply failed to come back from one of his solitary excursions, simply deserted into the nothings. Yet each day he returned. Itseemed that Jet Ace's sense of duty was stronger than his ambition. The Minstrel Boy had no ambition at all. He simply played among the painted women and wondered what was going to happen next.
Billy was also showing signs of the strain of having nothing to do. The Minstrel Boy had noticed that Billy's mental condition seemed to worsen when he had too much time on his hands. In Palanaque there was one refinement that he had never seen in the Caverns, and Billy seemed increasingly to be turning to it as a cure for boredom. It was a kind of short-term discorporation, lasting from a few minutes to almost an hour, from which the subject emerged confused but euphoric. It was referred to as a spiritual outreach, but Billy Oblivion scoffed at that description.
'Hell, it ain't nothing but turning an inversion trick. Back in Utgard they called it doing the Valhalla, and out in the Dumps, it's known as reality jagging. You do whatever your particular thing is, you know? Lobe pressure, tantric exercise, drugs, mantra, whatever. Your body goes limp, and then you wake up sometime later, feeling great, with this stupid grin on your face. The damnedest part is that you can't remember why you feel so good, but you want to do it again real soon.'
Scoff as he might, Billy spent a lot of hours spiritually out-reaching. With a kind of inept junkie cunning, he tried to keep it from the others, but there was not one of the other six who had not come across him sprawled on a bench or propped up against a wall, out there, dead to the world, with his eyes rolled back into his skull. Nobody had said anything, but each hoped that something would turn up to occupy Billy's mind and slow the downward drift.
It was only after five full weeks that something happened to break the perfumed monotony. It was late afternoon, and Dass-el-Hame was not expected to return to the residence until well after dark. While the seven remained his guests, he spent as little time there as possible. So it caused a good deal of consternation among the house girls when he suddenly, without warning, hurried in, flanked by two of his aides. He quickly rounded up the seven contract warriors.
'You will all come with me. Our detectors have picked up an object in the nothings that seems to be coming this way.'
As the legend is told, the metaphysicians of Krystaleit made their ultimate breakthrough in the short space of time between the destruction of their city and the overthrow of their refuge at Palanaque. This is yet another point where the oral tradition takes its leave of what is plausible. Metaphysicians all over the Damaged World had worked for nine centuries on the problem of nonreversible discorporation and a malleable afterlife. It scarcely seems possible that after such lengthy and concerted effort, the goal should be achieved by a handful of individuals under the most stressful and makeshift conditions in just a matter of weeks. A much more likely explanation is that the ultimate breakthrough was made much earlier but its mechanics were not widely employed until the days immediately before the Final Cataclysm. If this is indeed true, it says a lot about the metaphysicians' faith in their discovery.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
