in her hidden recipe breathed forth hidden essences. The plants of the world bowed to her passing. She was gravid with vegetable life. The touch of her hand on a leaf made it flood with purple life. She walked in the cool of the morning in fields humming with bees and trailed her fingers in the sticky silks, touching lightly the tassels. Maize seemed to erupt from the erect stems, kernel-choked cobs golden amid the purple photo-optimized leaves.
“What is it exactly that you do, my pretty?” asked Bander Zonin. His handsome, serious, sly face came close to hers, nuzzled with his rusty, wiry, itchy beard. “You are a goddess to this world, Gloriana. You are Ceres. You are Cyble, Arianrhod, Pi-Hsia-Yuan-Chun, Tlazolteotl. You are glorious! Darling, kiss me!”
She knew those fertility goddess names, had learned them from childhood. With a certain lofty smugness she accepted their implications. There was no complacency at all in her response to Zonin’s declarations of love. Gloriana, the beautiful child, melted. Her heart opened like a flower. She sighed, she came near to fainting in his arms.
Beneath a vast shading tree, hung with long deep green languid leaves, Bander Zonin led her to an ornamental pond bright with sparkles and small leaping fish.
“We won’t need our shoes,” he said.
Taking her hand, he led them wading through water lilies, then laved the mud from her toes at the grassy edge of the pond, and dried her delicate dark feet with his shirt. She sighed, leaned against his hairy breast, allowed him to tuck her naked feet upon his lap. He shifted, after a time, bent and kissed, caressed them. A tremor passed through her loins, upward to her belly and her heart. For an instant the world shook and went away, and returned with a wild brightness she had never known.
“Make love to me,” she told him urgently.
Bander Zonin regarded her with amusement. “My dear, there is nothing I’d rather do. But we must wait. We must deny ourselves a little longer. Your father—”
“Oh, bother my father,” cried Gloriana, and smothered his mouth with kisses, despite the bristles. After a moment she drew back. “You do not love me.”
“How can you say such a thing? Darling, you are the soul of my soul, light of my life. I respond to your lightest touch as the gardens do when you walk among them, trailing your fingers in the silks.” He drew back, offered her a bland glance. “And how do you do that, my sweetest girl? What is the secret of your bond with this bounty, this cornucopia.”
“That’s boring business.” Gloriana pouted, rose, slipped on her sandals, ran away into the sunlight. “Last one to the gazebo is a moldy peach!”
He ran in pursuit, shirt folded in one hand, careful to lose, breathing hard in anticipation.
* * * *
You know the next part of the story, if you retain any knowledge at all of the Old Homeland world. Some call it truth, some say mere legend. I will tell it quickly, then, so we might move on:
Her father, it is said, held a magnificent ball for her engagement to be wed.
Human people came to his great house from all the reaches of Harvest, and many more rode down the sky ladder from the star worlds beyond in the deep blackness.
They gathered, glittering with jewels, bright or sable their gowns and jackets, sweet-smelling. Three Lords and Ladies were in attendance, majestic, dour, and satisfied.
Augmented creatures stood guard, or fetched and carried. Gray people scurried back and forth, taking cloaks, passing out crystal globes of fine vintage from the vineyards. Crisp bird flesh lay on plates, and incomparable corn or wheat breads smoking from the oven, and fruits, vegetables, fish charred in their scales, winking up with glazed eye, and their roe piled high on silver bowls.
In they came, borne to the great house in cunning vegetable carriages shaped by the witchy DNA of the growers of Harvest, drawn by prancing giant mousers and attended by their gray augmented cousins.
You know all this.
How, tender, she came down the high, broad staircase in a soft glow fixed upon her, sharp-boned in her youth, midnight hair piled about her aubergine features, eyes alive with hope and expectation.
How the great, vile biologist Bander Zonin met her at the foot of the staircase, bent over her hand, knelt, gestured once to a mouseman bearing a deep salver. He lifted her small right foot from the flagged floor, to the amazed gasps of the company, and as music swelled from the orchestra removed her pretty shoe, took a beautiful fur boot from the salver, and slipped it up her toes, beyond the sweetly curved sole of her foot, pulled it past her ankles, let it fasten itself at her calf. Gloriana drew in her breath, and pressed her hands to her cheeks. The living booty was white as snow, and splashed in an eye-teasing pattern of blood-red markings.
It was a fabulously expensive gift. She settled her weight into its ineffable comfort.
Bander Zonin slipped away her left shoe, drew up the second Ioconian wolf-fur boot past her achingly lovely ankle. It closed upon her lower leg.
Applause and cries of admiration. The orchestra burst up with the first waltz of the evening.
The biologist bowed again to his betrothed, and took her hand.
“May I have the honor?”
They floated to the center of the ballroom. There they spun, weightless, she a bird with the borrowed feet of a hunting beast, he a beast, a male hunting, a wolf, a fox, a thief.
The floor filled with men and women smiling, taking their measures. Music swooped, cantered.
Nobody heard her shriek, her scream, her pitiful cry—not for a moment. And then everyone heard it.
Nobody who heard her scream would ever forget it.
She tumbled slowly, it seemed. He released her waist, her hand. Gloriana fell with a crash, clutching her left foot.
The blood-splashed ivory fur burst scarlet with real blood.
She screamed and screamed.
And Bander Zonin tore off the boot, tearing away, it seemed to the aghast onlookers, the whole of her perfect heel, half the toes of her foot. He stared, apparently in horror, at his gift. He sagged. Mouse persons rushed to the aid of their mistress. Mausers roared in confusion. People rushed to Gloriana’s aid. In the crush, the rush, Zonin vanished.
“Stop that foul son of a bitch!” roared anguished, incredulous, broken-hearted William Avid, Master of Harvest, taking up his traumatized daughter in his arms. “To the orbital ladder, mausers!”
Within hours, as Glory Avid lay mute in a hospital shell, everyone knew that the brute had escaped. He had done the unthinkable, twice. First he had pillaged and raped the witchy flesh of the first daughter of Harvest planet. Then he had flung himself, and his grisly, fabulously lucrative prize up and out and into the black, strapped down against gravity inside a spacecraft from the old imperium. Nobody knew such things existed still. Their ignorance was his salvation, his escape.
Within a year, certain other worlds began to bear unwontedly lavish fruit and crops, under suns not quite as hard and hot as Harvest’s but fecundated by the old hidden secret of the flesh of the women who had ruled and enriched Harvest for thirty-two generations.
When
