significant.'
'I--Patera, I want to tell you first about meeting you. It won't
take long. and it may be more important, maybe a lot more
important. You still think about the day you came to our manteion,
I know. You've mentioned it several times.'
He nodded.
'Patera Pike was there, and you loved and respected him, but a
man wants a woman to talk to. Most men do, anyway, and you did.
You'd been raised by your mother, and we could see how you
missed her.'
'I still do,' Silk admitted.
'Don't feel bad about that, Patera. No one should ever be
ashamed of love.'
Maytera Marble paused to collect her thoughts; her rapid scan
was back, and she reveled in it. 'We were three sibyls, I was about to
say. Maytera Mint was still young and pretty, but so shy that she ran
from you whenever she could. When she couldn't, she would hardly
speak. Maybe she guessed what had happened to me long ago. I've
sometimes thought that, and you were young and good-looking, as
you still are.'
He began a question, but thought better of it.
'I won't tell you who Bloody's father was, Patera. I've never told
anybody and I won't tell now. But I will tell you this. He never
knew. I don't think he even suspected.'
Silk filled his lungs with the cool, clean breeze from the window.
'I slept with a woman last night, Maytera. With Hyacinth, the
woman Blood asked about.'
'I'm sorry you told me.'
'I wanted to. I've wanted--I want so badly, still, to tell people
who don't know, although a great many people know already. His
Cognizance and Master Xiphias and Generalissimo Oosik.'
'And me.' Maytera Marble's forefinger tapped her metal chest
through her habit. 'I knew. Or rather, I guessed, as anybody would,
and I wish that you'd left it like that. Some things aren't improved
by talking about them.'
Oreb broke off his inverted examination of Thelxiepeia's features
to applaud Maytera Marble. 'Smart girl!'
'We were three sibyls, as I said. But Maytera Mint wasn't there
for you Patera, so I was the only ones left. I was old. I don't think
you ever grasped how old. My faces had gone long before you were
born. You never realized they weren't there, did you?'
'What are you talking about? Your face is where it ought to be,
Maytera. I'm looking at it.'
'This?' She drummed her fingers on it, a quick metallic _tap-tap-tap_.
'This is my faceplate, really. I used to have a face like yours. I
would say like Dahlia's, but she was before your time. Like Teasel's
or Nettle's, and there were things in it, little bits of alnico, that let
me really smile or frown when I moved them with the coils behind
my faceplate. But all that's gone except for the coils.'
'It's a beautiful face,' Silk insisted, 'because it's yours.'
'My other face wasn't, and what it was showed in your own every
time you saw it. I resented that, and you resented my resentment
and turned to me to ease your loneliness. But we were much more
alike than you realized, not that I've ever cared, myself, for
machines like this. I never thought they could be people, really, no
matter how many times they said they were. Now I'm just a message
written on those teeny gold doodads you see in cards. But I'm still
me, a person, because I always was.'
Silk fumbled Remora's ruined robe for a handkerchief, and
finding none blotted his eyes on his sleeve.
'I didn't tell you that to make you feel sorry for me, Patera.
Neither of me were easy to love, no more than I am now. You were
able to love one just the same, and not very many men could have,
not even many augurs. I thought that if you knew how you came to
love and not like me, it might help you some other time with some
other woman.'
'It will, I know.' Silk sighed. 'Thank you, Maytera. With myself,
most of all.'
'Let's not talk about it any more. What do you think of the
Ayuntamiento's terms? Still what you told Loris?'
Silk made a last dab at his eyes, feeling the grit in the cloth,
knowing that he was dirtying his already-soiled face and not caring.
'I suppose so.'
Maytera Marble nodded. 'They're perfectly hopeless. Not a single
thing for Trivigaunte, and why should the Guard hand over its
senior officers, why should Generalissimo Oosik allow it? But if we
offered trials, regular ones with judges--'
'Man back!' A big hand glittering with rings had appeared on the
windowsill. It was followed by a yellow-sleeved arm and a whiff of
musk rose.
'That's why you wanted to stay here.' Silk stood up a trifle
unsteadily, helped by the cane, and crossed the room to the
window. 'So your son could join us.'
'Why no, Patera. Not at all.'
Leaning over the sill, Silk spoke to Blood. 'Here, hold onto my
hand. I'll help you up.'
'Thanks,' Blood said. 'I should have brought a stool or something.'
'Take mine, too, Bloody.' Maytera Marble braced one foot on the
sill in imitation of Silk.
Flushed redder than ever with exertion, Blood's face rose on the
other side of the window. With a grunt and a heave, he tumbled into
the room.
'Now for my granddaughter. She'll be easy after Bloody.'
Bending over the sill again, Maytera Marble clasped skeletally
thin hands and lifted in an emaciated young woman with a seared
cheek.
'Poor girl!'
Silk nodded his agreement as he returned to his chair. 'Hello,
Mucor. Sit down, please, so that I may sit. We're neither of us
