unforgivable betrayals.
Finally Death, as legend has it, long afterward brought the chance (the inevitability, romantics and cynics alike would suppose) of a fourth great and heart-killing betrayal.
Death brought the time-locked tattered Landgrave Ullimus Wong in his box of ice, fetched him down from the dark empty places that cup all the worlds and their stars.
“Death,” they say—It is a misnomer, and a cruel one; I protest it.
I’m Death.
* * * *
All mothers remove themselves eventually from their children.
All children find it necessary to cast off the protective and stifling concern of their parents.
It was not Desdemona’s withdrawal that damaged her daughter’s trust, but its abruptness, its blindly selfish disregard.
Mothers die, sometimes, and their children mourn, holding to the mystery of death as a fate imposed, unavoidable, its consequences unintended. Grace Desdemona Merribelle Avid failed to die; she went up into the dark that cups the worlds and entered her own brilliant light, her glory, emoting fantasies into the minds of hundreds of billions who joined her, became her, in the stages of imagination.
So she was gone, yet she was everywhere, inescapable, the name upon everyone’s lips. How bitter. The old people of the Homeland world had a name even for this, as they did for almost everything: Mommie dearest.
But put it aside as a dissonant dominant note droning, throbbing, behind Gloriana Avid’s becoming. No more than that, if no less.
Mausers, too, abandon their litters, so it was not the absence of Precious Blue Silk, when she, in her turn, had gone from Harvest, that bent the detestable cat to his abominable path. After all, his staunch male siblings suffered no lasting angstful trauma in the departure of their dam. The lovely surviving females with their seasonal names went on unshaken, unbroken, having learned long before her departure the elements of right cat behavior.
Some claim to detect a common element here, of maternal treachery in human and mauser; to the contrary it is held, by the learned, who know only what they have been taught, as mere coincidence, perhaps contributory in small degree, perhaps a random skew.
What is beyond doubt is the second wounding done to motherless Glory—by the strutting biologist Bander Zonin, who caressed her delicate left foot with the most ardent promises, then tore flesh from bone and pilfered her world. It is enough to make Death smile, or grimace.
* * * *
I was named Death by the ignorant and envious, because I cheated finality for my master, the Landgrave. For nearly a thousand years, by the calendar of the Homeland world, I voyaged the galaxy by slipstream beside his frozen person, waiting for the knowledge to arise on some world that would heal and then revive him. Doing it the other way around would kill him stone dead, and that was the last thing I wished to see on my watch.
So naming me by the fatal affliction I had striven so many centuries to forestall is inevitable, given the attraction to human minds of opposites, contraries, inversions.
Death, then, brought the Landgrave Ullimus Wong down the ladder from the black skies into the light-shot morning atmosphere of the Harvest world, wrapped in substances colder than ice, his frigid mind trickling with thoughts. He was a fool for honor, and had been tattered and torn in its quest, his very cells swollen and choked with sinister poisons from his terminal duel.
My master Wong was the last victim of those molecular machines loosed to corrupt the minds and flesh of humans in the galaxy, before his action obliterated them to the last atom and they were declared Wicked, listed, alongside the Mind Machines, at the head of Forbidden Technik. His noble deed broke the power of the small murderous machines, at terrible cost to himself. That made him a laughing-stock to some and a martyr to many more. But that is another tale, one everyone knows.
As the old, old realm perished in the moment of its victory, his doomed Seigneur placed him in my caïque, at the very edge of death, laden with immobilized molecular machines fought to a standstill even in his own flesh, and sent us aloft, fleeing through the slipstream in search of recovery that might never be found.
When word of the second betrayal of Gloriana Avid spread across the skies, a rumor circulating outward in whispers, riding the coattails of the gossip that always attended her luminous mother, I seized and correlated the data. Those rumors had eddied for decades before they reached me. Decades rose and fell like fashion, like the hot sun of Harvest upon its lush world’s horizon, until word came of the third betrayal, and then decades more.
Riding the slipstream is no easy task.
To go from here to there, wherever here is or there, takes an instant too brief to measure. Calibrating the currents in the quantum tides, though…ah, a special gift is required, and good fortune. Once, tall ships of the Homeland ocean world set out in hopes of a favorable wind, but languished, often as not, in doldrums, paralyzed, crew starved and gaunt, perishing of thirst surrounded by endless water, deranged by heat and pointlessness. It is that way also, too often, in the slipstream.
Finally I brought our vessel to the station above the equator of the fertile world, and coupled us to the ladder, and brought down my charge to the surface.
Where we found cats waiting. (All but one.)
Fearsome mausers.
And the mad lady Glory, with her ruined limb, her tattered heart, her crumpled, longing mind.
* * * *
Seventeen, she had been, with a perfect complexion eggplant-dark, teeth radiant in the white hot light, a dance quivering inside her, modesty-constrained arms eager to fling themselves wide, to embrace whichever prince destiny had deemed fit for her consort. Yet she was racked in the night, and during the heavy downpours that fecundated the crops, with an anxiety deep as her bones. No child abandoned so early, and so late, is ever free of dread. I am not worthy, she thought to herself, pulling the brocaded pillow over her head in the night. They will all leave me. I am not to be loved.
But those were night terrors. In the daylight she trod out in the grace and beauty gifted from her mother’s genes, and with the authority learned from her father’s governing hand upon the tiller of the Harvest planet.
Thrillingly, the biologist Bander Zonin came to her through the difficulties of the slipstream, with his suit and soon enough his proposal. William, Avid pere, looked well enough upon the match. He needed brains as rigorous, brilliant and dedicated as this man’s. A garden world is not just scattered into existence with a handful of unruly seed sown into loam. Everything is prepared, for generations. So it had been with the Harvest world; so it was now. All things were propitious: the worm-turned soil, deep and dark and heavy with life, the air thrilling with the very breath of vegetable life, the star above with its vital spectrum, as if designed for that function by a supernal Hand. (None gave credence to such superstitions, except those few who fancied an elder race had passed, sowing the galaxy itself with life and the requisites of life. It is possible; it has never been disproved. Still, the conjecture led nowhere, except into sectarian wars of the most extreme uselessness and brutality, and the notion went into eclipse.) Meanwhile, the sun of Harvest poured out its rich light, and the crops flourished madly, gladly.
There was one secret ingredient: the life-enhancing gift of Gloriana Avid, and of her mother Glory before her, and of thirty generations of glorious women shaped for that singular
