I tried not to think of the possibility that I would not be allowed to go at all. My hands busied themselves with a vivilon chemise, setting in a gusset without a moment’s thought while my mind remained caught in its web of anxieties. I knew things about the K’Famir that I should not know. I knew things about the Mercan Combine that I should not know. Creatures of various kinds had talked back and forth over my stooped body, giggling over pillow talk, telling secrets. I knew that the Mercan Combine planned to take over Chottem, that the Omnionts intended to annex Thairy and Tercis. Oh, not right away. Not until all the servants on Earth had been pumped into the system. The thing had sucked up this information with groans of pleasure, but still I had felt its underlying dissatisfaction, its barely sensed agitation.
This morning I had told it I would not return until late, for I intended to go into the pleasure quarter to hear what other races thought of the news from Earth. It had hissed at me, as it always did, a threat, a certainty of death if I did not return timely. How it would accomplish this, I didn’t know. Adille had simply died of weakness, for it had drained her dry. I felt no weakening as yet. My mirror showed no dissipation of strength or premature aging. The thing didn’t want to weaken me. It wanted to go on using me.
I bent over to pick up a few spilled pins and once again heard conversation from the neighboring fitting room.
“I’ll have Miss Ongamar take care of it. I never have any complaints about her work.” It was Lady Ephedra’s voice.
“She’s been with you quite a while,” said a languorous, uncaring voice. “Not cheating the decree, are we, dear?”
Shrill squeals of laughter. “Aren’t you dreadful to say such a thing! She’s been with me for a long time because she’s very good. Quite the best I’ve had. A decree is a decree, but I confess I shall hate to turn her over to the males up there on the Hill of Beelshi.”
I stopped breathing. Lady Ephedra’s voice went on. “I don’t know why they always want humans. They don’t use any of the other slaves as sacrifices, only humans.”
I gritted my teeth and breathed lightly, lightly, they mustn’t know I was listening. In case someone peeked in, I had to keep my fingers busy, but that voice could only belong to one of the baron’s neuters. Of all the K’Famir, I hated the neuters the worst. At least the others seemed to know they were being cruel, the neuters did not even realize it. They had no minds at all.
“How much longer does she have?” asked the languorous one.
“I may be able to stretch it to a year,” said Lady Ephedra. “For some reason, they wanted her dead several years ago. Someone, somewhere ordered it. I misled them then, telling them she had died, and I have lied to them several times since, extending her term of bondage. Very soon, I shall not be able to lie to them anymore.”
“Do you always obey the decree and let the males kill your fitters?” the neuter asked.
“Oh, yes,” said the Lady Ephedra. “Stretch it out as one may, one must obey, eventually. One doesn’t know what they may have picked up in the fitting rooms. They always die on the hill, shortly before their terms expire.”
In the neighboring room, I straightened, my hands still working as I finished the chemise and set it aside, momentarily amazed at how easily I had done the task, created a piece of clothing for a creature more like a spider than a human, a creature with eight extremities, with two mouths, four eyes, no visible ears, and several sets of copulatory organs, some of them used only for pleasure.
So they did not intend to let me go. Though it was likely Lady Ephedra didn’t know precisely how her fitter was to be killed, she knew it would happen. I was suddenly very warm, almost hot, the fury rising in me like a wave. I would kill them all, I would burn down House Mouselline. I would…
I would do nothing precipitant, I warned myself. I had been fortunate to overhear. It gave me time to make a plan. Time perhaps to get away. Time certainly to arrange that someone in Dominion would learn of all the things I knew.
“Are you finished, Miss Ongamar?” asked the Lady Ephedra from the doorway of the little room. “Everything completed.”
“Oh, yes, Lady Ephedra,” I said, bowing humbly. “Just straightening up before I leave.”
I Am M’urgi/on B’yurngrad
Ferni rose early and quietly from the warm bed where I lay, still half asleep. He left the door ajar, and I heard him speaking to B’Oag in the oasthall below.
“You’re putting a fine polish on that copper,” he said.
“Been rumblin’ at me,” B’Oag complained. “In the night. D’ja hear it?”
“Once or twice,” Ferni said. “It didn’t sound like an imminent eruption.”
“Yah, well, last time it went, it didn’ give any warning atall. Never hurts to check, see all the seams’re tight.”
“You have a relief valve, don’t you?”
“Be a fool not to, wun I?”
“Any chance of getting some breakfast? Do you have a henhouse here?”
“Oh, sure. Sev’ral nice little vents comin’ off this spring, ’ere. Got one of ’em cased up through the henhouse ’fore it warms the barn. Keep a lantern out there, so eggs we got. Hens won’t lay ’thout light, ’thout heat. I got jibber sausage, too, smoke or plain. The bread’ll be baked another little while. Y’wanna take it up?”
“Good idea. The longer she rests, the quicker her job will be.”
There was silence for a few moments before B’Oag remarked, all too casually, “I heard somethin’ a few days back. Mebbe somebody’s got one a those, like she has.”
Ferni said, “I’m sorry
