-----------------------------------
Centaurus Changling
by Marion Zimmer Bradley
-----------------------------------

Science Fiction/Fantasy

Copyright ©1954 by Marion Zimmer Bradley

First published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1954

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Centaurus Changeling

Marion Zimmer Bradley

"...the only exception to the aforesaid policy was made in the case of Megaera (Theta Centaurus IV) which was given full Dominion status as an independent planetary government; a departure almost without precedent in the history of the Terran Empire. There are many explanations for this variation from the usual practice, the most generally accepted being that which states that Megaera had been colonized from Terra only a few years before the outbreak of the Rigel-Procyon war, which knocked out communications in the entire Centaurus sector of the Galaxy and forced the abandonment of all the so-called Darkovan League colonies, including Megaera, Darkover, Samarra and Vialles. During these Lost Years, as they were called, a period embracing, in all, nearly 600 years ... the factors of natural selection, and the phenomenon of genetic drift and survival mutation observed among isolated populations, permitted these ‘lost’ colonies to develop along scientific and social lines which made their reclamation by the Terran Empire an imperative political necessity.... “

From J. T. Bannerton: A Comprehensive History of Galactic Politics, Tape IX.

* * * *

The Official Residence of the Terran Legate on Megaera was not equipped with a roofport for landing the small, helicopter-like carioles. This oversight, a gesture of bureaucratic economy from the desk of some supervisor back on Terra, meant that whenever the Legate or his wife left the Residence, they must climb down four flights of stairs to the level of the rarely used streets, and climb again, up the endless twisting stairs, to the platform of the public skyport a quarter of a mile away.

* * * *

Matt Ferguson swore irritably as his ankle turned in a rut—since no Centaurian citizen ever used the streets for walking if he could help it, they were not kept in condition for that purpose—and took his wife's arm, carefully guiding her steps on the uneven paving.

“Be careful, Beth,” he warned. “You could break your neck without half trying!"

“And all those stairs!” The girl looked sulkily up at the black shadow of the skyport platform, stretched over them like a dark wing. The street lay deserted in the lurid light of early evening; red Centaurus, a hovering disk at the horizon, sent a slanting light, violently crimson, down into the black canyon of the street, and the top-heavy houses leaned down, somber and ominous. Wavering shadows gloomed down over them, and a hot wind blew down the length of the street, bearing that peculiar, pungent, all-pervasive smell which is Megaera's atmosphere. A curious blend, not altogether unpleasant, a resinous and musky smell which was a little sickish, like perfume worn too long. Beth Ferguson supposed that sooner or later she would get used to Megaera's air, that combination of stinks and chemical emanations. It was harmless, her husband assured her, to human chemistry. But it did not grow less noticeable with time; after more than a year, Terran Standard time, on Megaera, it was still freshly pungent to her nostrils. Beth wrinkled up her pretty, sullen mouth. “Do we have to go to this dinner. Matt?” she asked plaintively.

The man put his foot on the first step. “Of course, Beth. Don't be childish,” he remonstrated gently, “I told you, before we came to Megaera, that my success at this post would depend mostly on my informal relations—"

“If you call a dinner at the Jeth-sans informal—” Beth began petulantly, but Matt went on, “—my informal relations with the Centaurian members of the government. Every diplomatic post in the Darkovan League is just the same, dear. Rai Jeth-san has gone out of his way to make things easy for both of us.” He paused, and they climbed in silence for a few steps. “I know you don't like living here. But if I can do what I was sent here to do, we can have any diplomatic post in the Galaxy. I've got to sell the Centaurian Archons on the idea of building the big space station here. And, so far, I'm succeeding at a job no other man would take."

“I can't see why you took it,” Beth sulked, snatching pettishly at her nylene scarf, which was flapping like an unruly bird in the hot, grit-laden wind.

Matt turned and tucked it into place. “Because it was better than working as the assistant to the assistant to the undersecretary of Terran affairs attached to the Proconsul of Vialles. Cheer up, Beth. If this space station gets built, I'll have a Proconsulship myself."

“And if it doesn't?"

Matt grinned. “It will. We're doing fine. Most Legates need years to find their way around a difficult post like Megaera.” The grin melted abruptly. “Rai Jeth-san is responsible for that, too. I don't want to offend him."

Beth said, and her voice was not very steady, “I understand all that, Matt. But I've been feeling—ah, I hate to be always whining and complaining like this—"

They had reached the wide, flat platform of the skyport. Matt lighted the flare which would attract a cariole, and sank down on one of the benches. “You haven't whined,” he told her tenderly. “I know this rotten planet is no place for a Terran girl.” He slipped an arm around his wife's waist. “It's hard on you, with other Terran women half a continent away, and I know you haven't made many friends among the Centaurians. But Rai Jeth-san's wives have been very kind to you. Nethle presented you to her Harp Circle—I don't suppose any Terran woman for a thousand years has even seen one, let alone been presented—and even Cassiana—"

“Cassiana!” said Beth with a catch of breath, picking at her bracelet. “Yes, Nethle's almost too sweet, but she's in seclusion, and until her baby is born, I won't see her. And Wilidh's just a child! But Cassiana—I can't stand her! That—that freak—I'm afraid of her!"

Her husband scowled. “And don't think she doesn't know it! She's telepathic, and a rhu'ad—"

“Whatever that is,” Beth said crossly. “Some sort of mutant—"

“Still, she's been kind to you. If you were friends—"

“Ugh!” Beth shuddered. “I'd sooner be friends with—with a Sirian lizard-woman!"

Matt's arm dropped. He said coldly, “Well, please be polite to her, at least. Courtesy to the Archon includes all his wives—but particularly Cassiana.” He rose from the bench. “Here comes our cariole.” The little skycab swooped down to the skyport. Matt helped Beth inside and gave the pilot the address of the Archonate. The cariole shot skyward again, wheeling toward the distant suburb where the Archon lived. Matt sat stiffly on the seat, not looking at his young wife. She leaned against the padding, her fair face sulky and rebellious. She looked ready to cry. “At least, in another month, by their own stupid customs, I'll have a good excuse to stay away from all these idiotic affairs!” she flung at him. “I'll be in seclusion by then!"

It hadn't been the way she'd wanted to tell him, but it served him right!

“Beth!” Matt started upright, not believing.

“Yes, I am going to have a baby! And I'm going into seclusion just like these silly women here, and not have to go to a single formal dinner, or Spice Hunt, or Harp Circle, for six cycles! So there!"

Matt Ferguson leaned across the seat. His fingers bit hard into her arm and his voice sounded hoarse. “Elizabeth! Look at me—” he commanded. “Didn't you promise—haven't you been taking your anti shots?

“N-no,” Beth faltered, “I wanted to—oh, Matt, I'm alone so much, and we've been married now almost four years—"

“Oh, my God,” said Matt slowly, and let go her arm. “Oh, my God!” he repeated, and sank back, the color draining from his face.

“Will you stop saying that!” Beth raged. “When I tell you a thing like—” her voice caught on the edge of a sob, and she buried her face in her scarf.

Matt's hand was rough as he jerked her head up, and the gray pallor around his mouth terrified the girl. “You damn little fool,” he shouted, then swallowed hard and lowered his voice. “I guess it's my fault,” he muttered. “I didn't want to scare you—you promised to take the shots, so I trusted you—like an idiot!” He released her. “It's classified top-secret, Beth, but it's why this place is closed to colonization, and it's why Terran men don't bring their wives here. This damned, stinking, freak atmosphere! It's perfectly harmless to men, and to most women. But for some reason, it plays hell with the female hormones if a woman gets pregnant. For 60 years—since Terra set up the Legation here—not one Terran baby has been born alive. Not one, Beth. And eight out of ten women who get pregnant—oh, God, Betty, I trusted you!"

She whispered “But this—this was a Terran colony, once—"

“They've adapted—maybe. We've never found out why Centaurian women go into seclusion when they're pregnant, or why they hide the children so carefully.” He paused, looking down at the thinning jungle of roofs. There would not be time to explain it all to Beth. Even if she lived—but Matt did not want to think about that. They never sent married men to this planet, but Centaurian custom could not admit a single man to be mature enough to hold a place in government. He had succeeded at this post where single men, twice his age, had been laughed at by the Archons. But what good was that now?

“Oh, God, Beth,” he whispered, and his arms went out blindly to hold her close. “I don't know what to do—"

She sobbed softly, scared, against him. “Oh, Matt, I'm afraid! Can't we go home—home to Terra? I want—I want to go home—to go home—"

“How can we?” the man asked drearily. “There won't be a star-ship leaving the planet for three months. By that time, you wouldn't be able to live through blastoff. Even now, you couldn't pass a physical for space.” He was silent for minutes, his arms strained around her, and his eyes looked haunted. Then, almost visibly, he managed to pull himself together.

“Look, the first thing tomorrow, I'll take you to the Medical HQ. They've been working on it. Maybe—don't worry, darling. We'll get along.” His voice lapsed again, and Beth, wanting desperately to believe him, could find no reassurance in the words. “You're going to be all right,” he told her again. “Aren't you?” But she clung to him and did not answer. After a long, strained silence, he roused a little, and let her go, glancing from the windbreak of the cariole cabin. “Beth, darling, fix your face—” he urged her gently. “We'll be late, and you can't go down looking like that—"

For a minute Beth sat still, simply not believing that after what she had told him, he would still make her go to the detested dinner. Then, looking at his tense face, she suddenly knew it was the one thing on earth—no, she corrected herself with grim humor, the one thing on Theta Centaurus IV, Megaera, that she must do.

“Tell him not to land for a minute,” she said shakily. She unfastened her wrist compact, and silently began to repair the wreckage of her cosmetics. Above the Archonate, the cariole maneuvered frantically for place with another careening skycab, and after, what seemed an imminent clash of tangled gyroscopes, slid on to the skyport only seconds before it. Beth shrieked, and Matt flung the door open and abused the pilot in choice Centaurian.

“I compliment you on your perfect command of our language,” murmured a soft creamy voice, and Matt flushed darkly as he saw the Archon standing at the very foot of the roofport. He murmured confused apology; it was hardly the way to begin a formal evening. The Archon lipped a buttery smile. “I pray you do not think of it. I disregard speech of yours. It is again not spoken.” With an air of esthetic unconcern, he gestured welcome at Beth, and she stepped down, feeling clumsy and awkward, “I stand where you expect me not, only because I think Senior Wife mine in cariole this one,” the Archon continued. Out of courtesy to his guests, he was speaking a mangled dialect of Galactic Standard; Beth wished irritably that he would talk Centaurian. She understood it as well as Matt did. She also had the uncomfortable feeling that the Archon sensed her irritation and that it amused him; a sizable fraction of the Megaeran population was slightly telepathic.

“You must excusing Cassiana,” the Archon offered languidly as he conducted his guests across the great open skycourt which was the main room of a Centaurian home. “She went to the City, one of our families visiting, for she is rhu'ad, and must be ever at their call when she is needed. And Second Wife is most fortunately in seclusion, so you must excusing her also,” he continued as they approached the lighted penthouse. Beth murmured the expected compliments on Nethle's coming child. “Youngest wife then be our hostess, and since she not used to formal custom, we be like barbarian this night."

Matt gave his wife a vicious nudge in the ribs. “Cut that out,” he whispered, savagely, and with an effort that turned her face crimson, Beth managed to suppress her rising giggles. Of course there was nothing even faintly informal in the arrangement of the penthouse room into which they were conducted, nor in the classic and affected poses of the other guests. The women in their stiff metallic robes cast polite, aloof glances at Beth's soft drapery, and their greetings were chilly, musical murmurs. Under their slitted, hostile eyes, Beth felt despairingly that she and Matt were intruders here, barbaric atavisms; too big and muscular, too burned by yellow sun, blatantly and vulgarly colorful. The Centaurians were little and fragile, not one over five feet tall, bleached white by the red-violet sun, their foamy, blue-black hair a curious metallic halo above stiff classicized robes. Humans? Yes—but their evolution had turned off at right angles a thousand years ago. What had those centuries done to Megaera and its people?

Swathed in a symbolic costume, Rai Jeth-san's youngest wife Wilidh sat stiffly in the great Hostess Chair. She spoke to the guests formally, but her mouth quirked up at Beth in the beginnings of a giggle. “Oh, my good little friend,” she whispered in Galactic Standard, “I die with these formals! These are Cassiana's friends, and not mine, for no one knew she would not be here tonight! And they laugh at me, and stick up their backs, all stiff, like this—” she made a rude gesture, and her topaz eyes glinted with mischief. “Sit here by me, Beth, and talk of something very dull and stupid, for I die trying not to disgrace me by laughing! When Cassiana comes back—"

Wilidh's mirth was infectious. Beth took the indicated seat, and they talked in whispers, holding hands after the fashion of Centaurian women. Wilidh was too young to have adopted the general hostility toward the Terran woman; in many ways, she reminded Beth of an eager school girl. It was hard to remember that this merry child had been married as long as Beth herself; still more incredible that she was already the mother of three children.

Suddenly Wilidh turned color, and stood up, stammering confused apologies. “Forgive me, forgive me, Cassiana—"

Beth also rose, but the Archon's Senior Wife gestured for them to resume their seats. Cassiana was not dressed for formal dining. Her gray street wrap was still folded over a plain dress of dark thin stuff, and her face looked naked without cosmetics, and very tired. “Never mind, Wilidh. Remain hostess for me, if you will.” She smiled flittingly at Beth. “I am sorry I am not here to greet you.” Acknowledging their replies with a weary politeness, Cassiana moved past them like a wraith, and they saw her walking across the skycourt, and disappearing down the wide stairway that led to the lower, private parts of the house.

She did not rejoin them until the formal dinner had been served, eaten and removed, and the soft-footed servants were padding around the room with bowls and baskets of exotic fruit and delicacies and gilded cups of frosty mountain nectar. The penthouse shutters had been thrown wide, so that the guests could watch the flickering play of lightning from the giant magnetic storms which were almost a nightly occurrence on Megaera. They were weirdly beautiful and the Centaurians never tired of watching them, but they terrified Beth. She preferred the rare calm nights when Megaera's two immense moons filled the sky with uncanny green moonlight; but now thick clouds hid the faces of Alecto and Tisiphone, and the jagged bolts leaped and cast lurid shadows on the great massy clouds. Through the thunder, the eerie noise which passed, on Megaera, for music, was wailing from the slitted walls. In its shadow, Cassiana ghosted into the room and sat down between Beth and Wilidh. She did not speak for minutes, listening with evident enjoyment to the music and its counterpoint of thunder. Cassiana was somewhat older than Beth, small and exquisite, a filigree dainty woman fashioned of gilded silver. Her ash blonde hair had metallic lights, and her skin and eyes had almost the same hue, a gold-cream, smudged with gilt freckles, and with a sort of luminous, pearly glow ... the distinguishing mark of a curious mutation called rhu'ad. The word itself meant only pearl; neither Beth nor any other Terran knew what it implied.

The servants were passing around tiny baskets, curiously woven of reeds from the Sea of Storms. Deferentially, they laid a basket before the three women.

“Oh, sharigs!” Wilidh cried with a childish gusto. Beth glanced into the basket at the wriggling mass of small, greenish-gold octopods, less than three inches long, writhing and struggling in their nest of odorous seaweed and striking feebly at each other with the stumps of claws they did not know had been snapped off. The sight disgusted Beth, but Wilidh took a pair of tiny tongs and picked up one of the revolting little creatures, and as Beth watched with fascinated horror, thrust it whole into her mouth. Daintily, but with relish, her sharp small teeth crunched the shell; she sucked, and fastidiously spat the empty shell into her palm.

“Try one. Bet',” Cassiana suggested kindly. “They are really delicious."

“N-no, thank you,” Beth said weakly—and suddenly disgraced herself and all her conditioning by turning aside and being very completely and excruciatingly sick on the shimmering floor. She barely heard Cassiana's cry of distress, although she was conscious of a prim offended murmur, and knew she had outraged custom beyond all credibility. Through helpless spasms of retching, she was conscious of hands and voices. Then she was picked up in strong familiar arms, and heard Matt's worried “Honey, are you all right?"

She knew she was being carried across the skycourt and into a lower room, and opened her eyes sickly to see Cassiana and Matt standing over her. “I'm—I'm so sorry—” she whispered. Cassiana's thin hand patted hers, comfortingly. “Do not think of it,” she reassured, “Legate Furr-ga-soon, your wife will be well enough, you may return to the other guests,” she said, gently, but in a tone that unmistakably dismissed him. There was no polite way to protest. Matt went, looking back doubtfully. Cassiana's strange eyes looked rather pitying. “Don't try to talk,” she admonished.

Beth felt too sick and weak to move and being alone with Cassiana terrified her. She lay quiet on the big divan, tears slipping weakly down her face. Cassiana's hand still clasped hers; in a kind of childish petulance, Beth pulled her hand away, but the slender fingers only closed more tightly around Beth's wrist. “Be still,” said Cassiana, not unkindly, but in a tone of absolute command, and she sat there, looking down at Beth with a staring intensity, for some minutes. Finally she sighed and freed Beth's hand.

“Do you feel better now?"

“Why—yes!” said Beth, surprised. Quite suddenly, the nausea and the pain in her head were altogether gone.

Cassiana smiled. “I am glad. No—lie quiet. Bet', I think you should not ride in cariole tonight, why not stay here? You can visit Nethle—she has missed you since she went into seclusion."

Beth almost cried out with surprise. This was rare—for an outsider to be invited into a Centaurian house any further than the skycourt and penthouse reserved for social affairs. Then, with a stab of frightened memory, she recalled the reason for Nethle's seclusion—and her own fears. Nethle was her friend, even Cassiana had shown her kindness. Perhaps in a less formal atmosphere she might be able to ask something about the curious taboo which surrounded the birth of children on Megaera, perhaps learn some way of averting her own danger ... she closed her eyes and leaned against the cushions for a moment. If nothing else, it meant reprieve. For a little while she need not face Matt's gallantly concealed fear, his reproach....

Matt, returning with Cassiana, quickly gave consent. “If that's what you really want, honey,” he said gently. As she looked up into his tense face, Beth's impulse suddenly changed. She wanted to cry out “No—don't leave me here, take me home—” a night here in this strange place, alone with Centaurian women who were, however friendly they might be, entirely alien, seemed a thing too fearful to contemplate. She felt inclined to cry. But Cassiana's eyes on her proved rather steadying, and Beth's long conditioning in the ceremonial life necessary on Megaera triumphed over emotions she knew to be irrational.

Her husband bent and kissed her lightly. “I'll send a cariole for you tomorrow,” he promised.

* * * *

The lower portions of a Centaurian home were especially designed for a polygamous society in harmony with itself. They were carefully compartmented, and the only entrance from one to the other was from the great common stairway which led to the roof and skycourt. Roughly a third of the house was sectioned off for the habitation of Rai Jeth-san and his seasonal consort. The remainder was women's quarters, and the Archon himself might not enter them without specific invitation. In effect, Megaera's polygamous society was a rotational monogamy, for although Rai Jeth-san had three wives—the legal maximum was five—he had only one at a time and their alteration was strictly regulated by tradition. The surplus women lived together, always on terms of the most cordial friendship. Cassiana took precedence over the others, by custom, but there was the closest affection among all three—which had surprised Beth at first, especially when she found out that this was by no means rare; the bond between the wives of one man was traditionally the strongest family tie in existence, far stronger than the tie between natural sisters.

Beth had discovered long ago that she was not alone in her awe of Cassiana, who was one of the peculiar patriciate of the planet. Men and women fought for the privilege of serving the rhu'ads; Beth, relaxing into the almost sybaritic luxury of the women's quarters, wondered again—what was Cassiana's strange power over the Centaurians? She knew Cassiana was one of the rare telepaths who were found in the Darkovan planets, but that alone would not have explained it, nor would Cassiana's odd beauty. On Megaera there were perhaps 10,000 women like Cassiana: curiously beautiful, more curiously revered. There were no male rhu'ad. Beth had seen both men and women throw themselves to the ground in a burst of spontaneous emotion as one of the small, pearl-colored women passed, but had never understood, or dared to ask. Cassiana asked her, “Would you like to see Nethle before you sleep—and our children?"

This was, indeed, a strange relaxation of tradition; Beth knew no Terran had ever seen a Centaurian child. Astonished, she followed Cassiana into a lower room.

It seemed full of children. Beth counted; there were nine, the youngest only a baby in arms, the oldest about ten. They were pale, pretty children, like hothouse flowers reared in secret. Seeing the stranger, they clustered together, whispering to each other timidly, staring with wide eyes at her strange hair and curious garments.

“Come here, my darlings,” said Cassiana in her soft pleasant voice. “Don't stare.” She was speaking in Centaurian, a further gesture of friendliness. One little boy—the rest of the children were all girls—piped up valiantly, “Is she another mother for us?"

Cassiana laughed. “No, my son. Aren't three mothers enough?"

Nethle rose from a cushiony chair and came to Beth, her hands outstretched in welcome. “I thought you had forgotten me! Of course, you poor Terran women, only one wife to look after a husband, I cannot see how you ever have time for anything!"

Beth blushed—Nethle's outspoken references to Beth's “unhappy” state as a solitary wife, always embarrassed her. But she returned Nethle's greeting with genuine pleasure—Nethle Jeth-san was perhaps the only Centaurian whom Beth could tolerate without that sense of uneasy dislike.

She said, “I've missed you, Nethle,” but secretly she was dismayed at the change in her friend. Since Nethle had gone into seclusion, months ago, she had changed frighteningly. In spite of the distortion of pregnancy, Nethle seemed to have lost weight, her small face looked haggard, and her skin was a ghastly color. She walked shakily, and sat down almost at once after greeting Beth, but her gay manner and brilliant joyous eyes belied her illness. She and Beth talked quietly, about inconsequential things—Centaurian custom almost outlawed serious conversation—while Cassiana curled up, kittenlike, in a nest of soft pillows, picking up the littlest baby.

Two toddlers came and tried to crawl up on her knees at once, so Cassiana laughed and slid down on the floor, letting the children climb all over her, snuggle against her shoulder, tug at her garments and her elaborately arranged hair. She was so tiny that she looked like a little girl with a lapful of dolls. Beth asked her—hesitantly, for she did not know if it was polite to ask—"Which are your children, Cassiana?"

Cassiana glanced up. “In a way, all, and in another way, none,” she said curtly and Beth thought she had trespassed on courtesy; but Nethle put her hand on the solitary boy's head. “Cassiana has no children, Beth. She is rhu'ad, and rhu'ad women do not bear children. This is my son, and the oldest girl, and the girl with long hair. Those,” she indicated the twin toddlers and the baby in Cassiana's lap, “are Wilidh's. The rest are Clotine's. Clotine was our sister, who died many cycles ago."

Cassiana gently put the children aside and came to Beth. She looked at one of the little girls playing in the corner. She made no sound, but the child turned and suddenly ran to Cassiana, flinging her arms around the rhu'ad. Cassiana hugged her, then let her go, and—to Beth's surprise—the tiny girl came and tugged at Beth's skirt, clambering into her lap. Beth put an arm around her, looking down in astonishment.

“Why, she—” she broke off, not knowing, again, whether she should remark on the extraordinary likeness. The tiny girl—she seemed about four—had the same, pearly, lustrous skin; her hair was a silvery eiderdown, pallid and patrician. Cassiana noted her discomfiture and laughed gaily. “Yes, Arii is rhu'ad. She is mine."

“I thought—"

“Oh, Cassiana, stop it,” Nethle protested, laughing. “She doesn't understand!"

“There are many things she does not understand,” said Cassiana abruptly, “but I think she will have to learn to understand them. Bet', you have done a terribly unwise thing. Terran women cannot have children here in safety!"

Beth could only blink in amazement. The self test taken the day before had shown her pregnancy to be less than a month advanced. “How ever did you know?” she asked.

“Your poor husband,” Cassiana's voice was gentle. “I felt his fear like a gray murk, all evening. It is not pleasant to be telepath, sometimes. It is why I try not to go in crowds, I cannot help invading the privacy of others. Then, when you were so sick, I knew."

Nethle seemed to freeze, to go rigid. Her arms fell to her sides. “So that is it!” she whispered almost inaudibly. Then she burst out, “And that is the way with the women of Terra’ That is why your Earthmen will never take this planet! As long as they despise us and come as conquerors, they cannot come here where their women—die!” Her eyes glared. She rose and stood, heavy, distorted, menacing, over Beth, her lips drawn back in an animal snarl, her arm raised as if to strike. Cassiana gasped, sprang up, and with a surprising strength, she pushed Nethle back into her chair.

“Bet', she is raving—even women here, sometimes—"

“Raving!” Nethle said with a curl of her lip. “Wasn't there a day when our women and their unborn children died by the hundreds because we did not know the air was poison? When women died, or were kept in airtight rooms and given oxygen till their children were born, and then left to die? When men married a dozen wives to be sure of one living child? Did the Terrans help us then, when we begged them to evacuate the planet? No! They had a war on their hands—for 600 years they had a war on their hands! Now they've finished their private wars, they try to come back to Megaera—"

“Nethle! Be quiet!” Cassiana commanded angrily.

Beth had sunk into the cushions, but through her cupped hands she saw that Nethle's face blazed, a contorted mask of fury. “Yes, yes, Cassiana,” her voice was a mocking croon, “Bet’ condescends to make friends with me—and now she will see what happens to the women of Terra who mock our customs instead of finding out why we have them!” The wildness of her hysteria beat and battered at Beth. “Oh, yes, I liked you,” she snarled, “but could you really be friends with a Centaurian woman? Don't you think I know you mock our rhu'ad? Could you live, equal to us? Get out!” she shouted. “Get off our world’ Go away, all of you! Leave us in peace!"

"Nethle!" Cassiana grasped the woman's shoulders and shook her, hard, until the wildness went out of her face. Then she pushed Nethle down in the cushions, where she lay sobbing. Cassiana looked down at her sorrowfully. “You hate worse than she hates. How can there ever be peace, then?"

“You have always defended her,” Nethle muttered, “and she hates you worst of all!"

“That is exactly why I have more responsibility,” Cassiana answered. She went to the curtained door at the end of the room. At her summons, a servant came and began unobtrusively to shepherd the children out of the room. They went obediently, the older ones looking scared and bewildered, glancing timidly at the weeping Nethle; the little ones reluctant, clinging to Cassiana, pouting a little as she gently pushed them out the door. Cassiana drew the curtain firmly down behind them; then went back to Nethle and touched her on the shoulder. “Listen,” she said.

Then Beth had the curious feeling that Nethle and Cassiana were conversing through some direct mental exchange from which she was excluded. Their changing expressions, and faint gestures, told her that, and a few emphatic, spoken words seemed to give point to the soundless conversation—it made Beth's flesh crawl.

“My decisions are always final,” Cassiana stated.

Nethle muttered “...cruel of you..."

Cassiana shook her head.

After long minutes of speech-silence, Cassiana said aloud, quietly, “No, I have decided. I did it for Clotine. I would do it for you—or for Wilidh, if you were fool enough to try what Bet’ has done."

Nethle flared back, “I wouldn't be fool enough to try to have a baby that way—"

Cassiana checked her with a gesture, rose, and went to Beth, who was still lying huddled in the pillows of the big divan. “If I, who am rhu'ad, do not break the laws,” she said, “then no one will ever dare to break them, and our planet will stagnate in dead traditions. Bet', if you can promise to obey me, and to ask me no questions, then I, who am rhu'ad, promise you this: you may have your child without fear, and your chance of life will be—” she hesitated, “equal to a Centaurian woman's."

Beth looked up, speechless, her eyes wide. A dozen emotions tangled in some secret part of her mind, fear, distrust—anger. Yet reason told her that Cassiana was showing disinterested kindness in the face of what must certainly have been obvious to her, Beth's own dislike. At the moment Beth was unaware that proximity to the telepath was sharpening her own sense perceptions, but for the first time in months she was thinking reasonably, unblurred by emotion.

Cassiana insisted, “Can you promise? Can you promise, especially, not to ask me questions about what I have to do?"

And Beth nodded soberly. “I'll promise,” she said.

* * * *

The pale pink, watery sunlight looked feeble and anachronistic on the white, sterile, characteristically Terran walls, floors and furnishings of the Medical HQ; and the white indoor face of the old doctor looked like some sun-sheltered slug.

He's lived here so long, he's half Centaurian himself, Matt Ferguson thought irrelevantly, and threw down the chart in his hand. “You mean there's nothing to be done!” he said bluntly.

“We never say that in my profession,” Dr. Bonner told him simply. “While there's life, and all the rest of it. But it looks bad. You never should have left it up to the girl to make sure she took her anti shots. Women aren't reliable about that kind of thing—not normal women. A woman's got to be pretty damned abnormal, to be conscientious about contraceptives.” He frowned. “You know, it's not a question of adapting, either. If anything, the third, fourth, fourteenth generations are more susceptible than the first. The planet seems so perfectly healthy that women simply don't believe it until they do get pregnant, and then it's too late."

“Abortion?” Matt suggested, lowering his head. Dr. Bonner shrugged. “Worse yet. Operative shock on top of the hormone reaction would just kill her now, instead of later.” He leaned his head on his hands. “Whatever it is in the air, it doesn't hurt anybody until we get the flood of female hormones released in pregnancy: We've tried everything—manufacturing our own air—chemically pure, but we can't get that stink out of it, and we can't keep it pure. There's just something linked into the atomic structure of the whole damned planet. It doesn't bother test animals, so we can't do any experimenting. It's just the human, female hormones of pregnancy. We've even tried locking the women in airtight domes, and giving them pure oxygen, the whole nine months. But we get the same reaction. Pernicious vomiting, weight loss, confusion of the balance centers, convulsions—and if the fetus isn't aborted, it's oxygen-starved and a monster. I've lived on Megaera forty years. Matt, and I haven't delivered a live baby yet."

Matt raged, “Then how do the Centaurians manage? They have children, all right!"

“Have you ever seen one?” asked Dr. Bonner tersely.

At Matt's denial, he continued, “Neither have I—in forty years. For all I know, Centaurian women cultivate their babies in test tubes. Nobody's ever seen a pregnant Centaurian woman, or a child under about ten years old. But one of our men—ten, twelve years ago—got a Centaurian girl pregnant. Of course, her family threw her out—right in the damn’ street. Our man married the girl—he'd wanted to, anyhow. The man—I won't tell you his name—brought her in to me. I thought maybe—but the story was just exactly the same. Nausea, pernicious vomiting—all the rest. You wouldn't believe the things we tried to save that girl. I didn't know I had so much imagination myself.” He dropped his eyes, bitter with an old failure. “But she died. The baby lived. It's up in the incurable ward."

"Jesus!" Matt shuddered uncontrollably. “What can I do?"

Dr. Bonner's eyes were very sorrowful. “Bring her in, Matt, right away. We'll do our damnedest for her.” His hand found the younger man's shoulder as he rose, but Matt was not conscious of the touch. He never knew how he got out of the building, but after a reeling walk through streets that twisted around his bleared eyes, he heard the buzz of a descending cariole, and Cassiana Jeth-san's level voice.

“Legate Furr-ga-soon?"

Matt raised his head numbly. She was about the last person he cared to see. But Matt Ferguson was a Legate of the Terran Empire, and had undergone strenuous conditioning for this post. He could no more have been rude to anyone to whom courtesy was required, than he could have thrown himself from a moving cariole. So he said with careful graciousness, “I greet you, Cassiana."

She signaled the pilot to set the hovering skycab down.

“This meeting is fortunate,” she said quietly. “Get into this cariole, and ride with me."

Matt obeyed, mostly because he lacked, at the moment, the ingenuity to form an acceptable excuse. He climbed in; the skycab began to ascend again over the city. It seemed a long time before Cassiana said, “Bet’ is at the Archonate. I have made a finding the most unfortunate. Understand me, Legate, you are in situation of the baddest."

“I know,” Matt said grimly. His wife's dislike of Cassiana suddenly became reasonable to him. He had never been alone with a telepath before, and it made him a little giddy. There was almost a physical vibration in the small woman's piercing gaze. Cassiana's mangling of Galactic Standard—she spoke it better than her husband, but still abominably—was another irritation which Matt tried to hide. As if in answer to his unspoken thought, Cassiana switched to her own language. “Why did you come to Megaera?"

What a fool question, Matt thought irritably. Why did any man take a diplomatic post? “My government sent me."

“But not because you liked Megaera, or us? Not because you wanted to live here, or cared about Terrans and Centaurians getting along? Not because you cared about the space station?"

Matt paused, honestly surprised. “No,” he said, “I suppose not.” Then annoyance triumphed. “How can we live together? Your people don't travel in space. Ours can't live in health or ordinary comfort on this—this stinking planet! How can we do anything but live apart and leave you to yourselves?"

Cassiana said slowly, “We wanted, once, to abandon this colony. For all Terra cared, we could live or die. Now they have found out their lost property might be worth—"

Matt sighed. “The Imperialists who abandoned Megaera have all been dead for hundreds of years,” he pointed out wearily. “Now, we have to have some contact with your planet, because of the political situation. You know that. No one is trying to exploit Megaera."

“I know that,” she admitted. “Perhaps fifty other people on the whole planet realize that. The rest are one seething mass of public opinion, and under the anti-propaganda laws, we can't change that.” She stopped. “But I didn't want to talk politics. Why did you bring Bet’ here, Legate?"

Matt bit his lip. Under her clear eyes he told the truth. “Because I knew a single man couldn't succeed at this post."

Cassiana mused. “It's a pity. It's almost certain that this affair will close out the Legation here. No married man will want to come, and we cannot accept a single man in such an important position. It is against our most respected tradition for a man to remain single after he is mature. Our only objection to your space station is the immense flood of unattached personnel who will come here to build it—drifters, unmarried men, military persons—such an influx would throw Megaera into confusion. We would be glad to accept married colonists who wanted to settle here."

“You know that's impossible!” Matt said.

“Maybe,” Cassiana said thoughtfully. “It is a pity. Because it is obvious that the Terrans need Megaera, and Megaera needs some outside stimulus. We're turning stagnant.” She was silent for a minute. Then she continued, “But I'm talking politics again. I suppose I wanted to see if it was in you to be honest. Perhaps, if you had grown angry sooner, been less concerned with polite formalities—angry men are honest men. We like honesty, we rhu'ad."

Matt's smile was bitter. “We are conditioned in courtesy. Honesty comes second."

“A proof that you are not suited to a society where any fraction of the population is telepathic.” said Cassiana bluntly. “But that is not important. This is—Bet’ is in very real danger. Legate. I promise nothing—even we Centaurians die sometimes—but if you will let her live at the Archonate for three, maybe four of your months—I think I can promise you she'll live. And probably the baby, too."

Hope seethed in Matt. “You mean—go into seclusion—"

“That, and more,” said Cassiana gravely. “You must not attempt to see her yourself, and you must keep your entire Legation from knowing where she is, or why. That includes your personal friends and your officials. Can you do this? If not, I promise nothing."

“But that isn't possible—"

Cassiana dismissed the protest. “It is your problem. I am not a Terran, I don't know how you wilt manage it."

“Does Beth want to—"

“At this moment, no. You are her husband, and it is your child's life at stake. You have authority to order her to do it."

“We don't think of things that way on Terra. I don't—"

“You are not on Terra now,” Cassiana reminded him flatly.

“Can I see Beth before I decide? She'll want to make arrangements, pack her things—"

“No, you must decide here, now. It may already be too late. As for her ‘things!” the pearly eyes held delicate scorn, “she must have nothing from Terra near her."

“What kind of rubbish is that?” Matt demanded. “Not even her clothes?"

“I will provide anything she needs,” Cassiana assured him. “Believe me, it is necessary. No—don't apologize. Anger is honesty."

“Look,” Matt suggested, still trying to compromise acceptably. “I'll want her to see a Terran doctor, first, the authorities—"

Without warning, Cassiana lost her temper.

“You Terrans,” she exploded, in a gust of fury that was like a physical blow. “You stupid lackwit from a planet of insane authoritarians, I told you—you must say nothing to anyone! This isn't a political matter, it's her life, and your child's! What can your so-called authorities do?"

“What can you do?” Matt shouted back. Protocol went overboard. The man and woman from two alien star systems glared at each other across a thousand years of evolution.

Then Cassiana said coldly, “That is the first sensible question you have asked. When our planet was—jettisoned as useless—we had to acquire certain techniques the hard way. I can't tell you exactly what. It isn't allowed. If that answer is not adequate, I am sorry. It is the only answer you will ever get. Wars have been fought on Megaera because the rhu'ad have refused to answer that question. We've been hounded and stoned, and sometimes worshiped. Between science and religion and politics, we've finally worked out the answer, but I have never told even my husband. Do you think I would tell a—a bureaucrat from Terra? You can accept my offer or refuse it—now."

Matt looked over the windbreak of the cariole at the wideflung roofs of the city. He felt torn with terrible indecision. Reared in a society of elaborately delegated responsibilities, it went against all his conditioning—how could one man make a decision like this? How could he explain Beth's absence? What would his government say if they discovered that he had not even consulted the medical authorities? Still, the choice was bald—Bonner had made it very clear that he had no hope. It was: trust Cassiana, or watch Beth die. And the death would be neither quick nor easy.

“All right,” he said, pressing his lips together. “Beth—Beth doesn't like you, as you probably know, and I'll be—I'll be everlastingly damned if I know why you are doing this! But I—I can't see any other way out. This isn't a very polite way to put it, but it was you who insisted on honesty. Go ahead. Do what you can. I—” his voice suddenly strangled, but the little rhu'ad did not take the slightest notice of his losing struggle for self-control. With an air of remote detachment, she directed the driver of the cariole to set him down before the Residence.

During the brief ride there, she did not speak a word. Only when the cariole settled on the public skyport did she raise her head. “Remember,” she said quietly, “you must not call at the Archonate, or attempt to see Bet'. If you have business with the Archon, you must arrange to meet him elsewhere. That will not be easy."

“Cassiana—what can I say—"

“Say nothing,” she advised, not smiling, but there was a glint in the pearly eyes. In a less reserved face, it might have been friendly amusement. “Sometimes men are more honest that way."

She left him staring dumbly upward as the cariole climbed the sky once more.

* * * *

When Cassiana—no longer friendly, but reserved and rigid—had brought the news that Matt had commanded her to stay, Beth had disbelieved—had shouted her hysterical disbelief and terror until Cassiana turned and walked out, locking the door behind her. She did not return for three days. Beth saw no one but an old lady who brought her meals and was, or pretended to be, deaf. In that time, Beth lived through a million emotions; but at the end of three days, when Cassiana came back, she looked at Beth with approval.

“I left you alone,” she explained briefly, “to see how you reacted to fear and confinement. If you could not endure it, I could have done nothing for you. But I see you are quite calm."

Beth bit her lip, looking down at the smaller woman. “I was angry,” she admitted. “I didn't think it was necessary to treat me like a child. But somehow I don't think you would have done it without good reason."

Cassiana's smile was a mere flicker. “Yes. I can read your mind a little—not much. I'm afraid you will be a prisoner again, for some time. Do you mind much? We'll try to make it easy for you."

“I'll do whatever you say,” Beth promised calmly, and the rhu'ad nodded. “Now, I think you mean that, Bet'."

“I meant it when I said it before!” Beth protested.

“Your brain, and your reason, said if. But a pregnant woman's reasoning faculties aren't always reliable. I had to be certain that your emotions would back up your reason in the event of a shock. Believe me, you'll get some shocks."

But so far there had been none, although Cassiana had not exaggerated in the slightest when she said Beth would be a prisoner. The Terran woman was confined closely in two rooms on the ground floor—a level rarely used in a Centaurian house—and saw no one but Cassiana, Nethle and a servant or two. The rooms were spacious—even luxurious—and the air was filtered by some process which—while it did not diminish the distinctive smell—was somehow less sickening, and easier to breathe. “This air is just as dangerous, chemically, as that outdoors,” Cassiana cautioned her. “Don't think that this, alone, makes you safe. But it may make you a little more comfortable. Don't go outside these rooms."

But she kept her promise to make imprisonment easy for Beth. Nethle, too, had recovered from her hysterical attack, and was punctiliously cordial. Beth had access to Cassiana's library—one of the finest tape collections on the planet—although, from a little judicious searching—Beth decided that Cassiana had removed tapes on some subjects she thought the Terran woman should not study too closely—and when Cassiana learned that Beth knew the rather rare art of three-dimensional painting, she asked her guest to teach her. They made several large figures, working together. Cassiana had a quick, artistic sensitivity which delighted Beth, and she swiftly mastered the complicated technique. The shared effort taught them a good deal about each other.

But there was much inconvenience which Cassiana's kindness could not mitigate. With each advancing day, Beth's discomfort became more acute. There was pain, and sickness, and a terrible feeling of breathlessness—for hours she would lie fighting for every breath. Cassiana told her that her system, in the hormone allergy, had lost the ability, in part, to absorb oxygen from the bloodstream. She broke out in violent rashes which never lasted more than a few hours, but recurred every few days. The ordinary annoyances of early pregnancy were there, too, magnified a hundred times. And during the electric storms, there was a strange reaction, a taut pain as if her body were a conductor for the electricity itself. She wondered if this pain were psychosomatic or genuinely symptomatic, but she never knew.

For some reason, the sickness receded when Cassiana was in the room, and as the days slid past. Cassiana was with her almost constantly, once or twice even sleeping in the same room, on a cot pushed close to Beth's. Unexpectedly, one day, Beth asked her, “Why do I always feel better when you are in the room?” Cassiana did not answer for a minute. All the morning, they had been working on a three-dimensional painting. The floor was scattered with eyepieces and pigments, and Cassiana picked up an eyepiece and scanned a figure in the foreground before she even turned around to Beth. Then she disengaged her painting cone, and began to refill it with pigment.

“I wondered when you would ask me that. A telepath's mind controls her body, to some extent—that's a very rough way of putting it, but you don't know enough about psychokinetics to know the difference. Well—when we are working together, as we have been today, your mind is in what we telepaths call vibratory harmony with mine, and you are able to pick up, to a very slight degree, my mental projections. And they, in turn, react on your body."

“You mean you control your body by thinking?"

“Everybody does that.” Cassiana smiled faintly. “Yes, I know what you mean. I can, for instance, control reflexes which are involuntary in—in normal people. Just as easily as you would flex or relax a muscle in your arm, I can control my heartbeat, blood pressure, uterine contractions—” she stopped abruptly, then finished, “and I can control gross reflexes, such as vomiting, in others—if they come within the kinetic field.” She put down the spinning-cone. “Look at me, and I'll show you what I mean."

Beth obeyed. After a moment, Cassiana's gilt hair began to darken. It grew darker, darker, till the shining strands were the color of clear honey. Cassiana's cheeks seemed to lose their pearly luster, to turn pinker. Beth blinked and rubbed her eyes. “Are you controlling my mind so I think your skin and hair are changing color?” she asked suspiciously.

“You overestimate my powers! No, but I concentrated all the latent pigment in my skin into my hair. We rhu'ad can look almost as we choose, within certain limits—I couldn't, for instance, make my hair as dark as yours. There simply isn't enough melanin in my pigment. Even this much color wouldn't last, unless I wanted to alter my adrenalin balance permanently. I could do that, too, but it wouldn't be sensible. My hair and skin will change back to rhu'ad during the day—we keep our distinctive coloring, because it's a protection against being harmed or injured accidentally. We are important to Megaera—” abruptly she stopped again, and a mask of reticence slid down on her face. She re-engaged the spinning-cone and began to weave a surface pattern in the frame.

Beth. persisted. “Can you control my body too?"

“A little,” said Cassiana shortly. “Why do you think I spend so much time with you?

Snubbed, Beth took up her spinning-cone and began to weave depth into Cassiana's surface figure. After a minute, Cassiana relented and smiled, “Oh, yes, I enjoy your company too—I did not at first, but I do now."

Beth laughed, a little shamefacedly. She had begun to like Cassiana very much—once she had grown accustomed to Cassiana's habit of answering what Beth was thinking, instead of what she had said.

* * * *

Weeks slid into months. Beth had now lost all desire to go out of doors, although she dutifully took what slight exercise Cassiana required of her. The rhu'ad now remained with her almost continually. Although Beth was far too ill to study Cassiana, it finally became apparent even to her that Cassiana herself was far from well. The change in the rhu'ad was not marked; a tenseness in her movements, a pallor—Beth could not guess the nature of her ailment. But in spite of this, Cassiana watched over Beth with careful kindliness. Had she been Cassiana's own child, Beth thought, the rhu'ad could not have cared for her more solicitously.

Beth did not know that she was so dangerously ill as to shock Cassiana out of her reserve. She could not walk more than a step or two without nausea and a shooting, convulsive pain. The nights were a horror. She knew faintly that they had given her oxygen several times, and even this had left her half asphyxiated. And although it was now past the time when her child should have quickened, she had felt no stir of life. Half the time she was dizzy, as if drugged. In her rare moments of lucidity, it disturbed her that Cassiana should spend her strength in tending her. But when she tried to voice this, Cassiana returned only a terse, hostile, “You think of yourself and I will take care of myself, and you too."

But once, when Cassiana thought Beth asleep, Beth heard her mutter aloud, “Its too slow! I can't wait much longer—I'm afraid!"

No news from the Terran sector penetrated her seclusion. She missed Matt, and wondered how he had managed to conceal her long absence. But she did not spend much time wondering; life, for her, had been stripped bare of everything except the fight for survival in each successive day. She had slipped so far down into this vegetable existence that she actually shuddered when Cassiana asked her one morning, “Do you feel well enough to go out of doors?” She dressed herself obediently, but roused a little when Cassiana held a heavy bandage toward her. There was compassion in her eyes.

“I must blindfold you. No one may know where the kail’ rhu'ad is. It is too holy."

Beth frowned pettishly. She felt horribly ill, and Cassiana's mystical tone filled her with disbelieving disgust. Cassiana saw, and her voice softened.

She said persuasively, “You must do this. Bet'. I promise I will explain everything some day."

“But why blindfold me? Won't you trust me not to tell, if it's secret?"

“I might trust you and I might not,” Cassiana returned coldly. “But there are 10,000 rhu'ad on Megaera, and I am doing this on my single responsibility.” Then suddenly her hands clenched so tightly on Beth's that the Terran woman almost cried out with pain, and she said harshly, “I can die too, you know! The Terran women who have died here, don't you think anyone ever tried—” her voice trailed off, indistinct, and suddenly she began to cry softly.

It was the first time since Beth had known her that the rhu'ad had betrayed any kind of emotion. Cassiana sobbed, “Don't fight me, Bet', don't! Both our lives may depend on your personal feelings about me in the next few days—I can't reach you when you're hating me! Try not to hate me so much—"

“I don't hate you, Cassiana,” Beth breathed, shocked, and she drew the Centaurian girl close and held her, almost protectively, until the stormy weeping quieted and Cassiana had herself under control again.

The rhu'ad freed herself from Beth's arms, gently, her voice reserved again. “You had better calm yourself,” she said briefly, and handed Beth the scarf. “Tie this over your eyes. I'll trust you to do it securely."

* * * *

Sometimes Beth tried to remember in detail what happened after Cassiana removed the blindfold, and she found herself in a vast, vaulted room of unbelievable beauty. The opalescent dome admitted a filtered, frosty glimmer of pallid light. The walls, washed in some light pigment which both absorbed and reflected colors too vague to be identified, drifted with hazy shadows. Beth was oblivious to the emotional appeal of the place—she was too alien for that—but the place was unmistakably a temple, and Beth began to be afraid. She had heard about some of the extra-terrestrial religions, and she had always suspected that the rhu'ad filled some religious function. But the beauty of the place touched even her, and gradually she became conscious of a low vibration, almost sound, pervading the entire building.

Cassiana whispered, “That's a telepathic damper. It cuts out the external vibrations and allows the augmentation of others."

The vibration had a soothing effect. Beth sat quietly, waiting, and Cassiana was altogether silent, her eyes closed, her lips moving as if she prayed, but Beth realized afterward that she was simply conversing telepathically with some unseen person. Later, she arose and led Beth through a door which she carefully closed and fastened behind them.

This inner chamber was smaller, and was furnished only with a few immense machines—Beth assumed they were machines, for they were enclosed anonymously in metallic casings, and dials and controls and levers projected chastely from a covering of gray paint—and a few small couches, arranged in pairs. Here three rhu'ad were waiting—slight patrician women who ignored Beth entirely and only glanced at Cassiana.

Cassiana told Beth to lie down on one of the couches, and, leaving her there, went to the other rhu'ad. They stood, their hands laced together, for minutes. Beth, by now habituated to Cassiana's moods, could guess that her friend was disturbed, even defiant. The others seemed equally disturbed; they shook their heads and made gestures that looked angry, but finally Cassiana's fair face looked triumphant and she came back to Beth.

“They are going to let me do what I planned. No, lie still—” she instructed, and to Beth's surprise, Cassiana lay down on the other couch of the pair. This one was located immediately beneath one of the big machines; the control panel was located in such a way that Cassiana could reach up and manipulate the dials and levers. This she proceeded to do, assuring herself that all were within easy reach; then reached across and touched Beth's pulse lightly. She frowned.

“Too fast—you're excited, or frightened. Here, hold my hand for a minute.” Obediently Beth closed her hand around the one Cassiana extended. She forced back her questions, but Cassiana seemed to sense them. “Sssh. Don't talk. Bet'. Here, where the vibrations are dampered, I can control your involuntary reactions too.” And, after a few minutes, the Terran woman actually felt her heartbeat slowing to normal, and knew that her breathing was quiet and natural again.

Cassiana took her hand away, reached upward, and began to adjust a dial, her delicate fingers feeling for a careful calibration. “Just lie quietly,” she warned Beth, but Beth felt not the slightest desire to move. Warmth and well-being held her lapped in comfort. It was not a perceptible thing, but an intangible vibration, almost but not quite sensible to her nerves. For the first time in months, she was wholly free of discomfort.

Cassiana was fussing with the dials, touching one control, discarding another, playing the vibration now upward until it was almost visible, no downward until it disappeared into sound. Beth began to feet a little dizzy. Her senses seemed augmented, she was so wholly conscious of every nerve and muscle in her body that she could feel Cassiana's presence, a few feet away, through the nerves of her skin. The particular sensation identified Cassiana as completely as her voice. Beth even felt it—an odd little coldness—when one of the other rhu'ad approached the couch ... and when she moved away again.

I suppose, she thought, this is what it feels like to be telepathic. And Cassiana's thoughts seemed to penetrate her brain like so many tiny needles: Yes, almost like that. Actually, it's just the electrical vibration of your body being put into phase with mine. That's a kind of short-term telepathy. Each individual has his own personal wave-length. We're tuned in to each other now. We used to have to do this telepathically, and it was a horrible ordeal. Now we use the dampers, and it's easy.

Beth seemed to float somewhere, weightless, above her body. A rhu'ad had walked through the edge of the vibratory field; Beth felt the shock of their out-of phase bodies, as a painful electric jolt which gradually lessened as they adjusted into the vibration. Then she smelled a sharp-sweet smell, and with her augmented consciousness knew it was a smell of anesthetic—what were they going to do? In a spasm of panic she began to struggle; felt steady hands quieting her, heard strange voices—

Her body exploded in a million fragments of light. The room, the machines and the rhu'ad were gone. Beth was lying on a low, wide shelf, built into the wall of a barren cubicle. She felt sick and breathless, and tried to sit up, but pain shot through her body and she lay still, blinking back tears of agony. She lay gasping, feeling the weight of her child holding her like a vise of iron.

As details came back to her clearing sight, she made out a second shelf across the room. What she had at first taken for a heap of padding was the body of a woman—it was Cassiana—sprawled face downward in an attitude of complete exhaustion. As Beth looked, the rhu'ad turned over and opened her eyes; they looked immense and bloodshot in the whiteness of her face. She whispered hoarsely, “How—do you—feel?"

“A little sick—"

“So do I.” Cassiana struggled upright, got to her feet, and walked, with heavy deliberation, toward Beth. As she approached, Beth felt a sort of echo of the soothing vibration, and the pain slackened somewhat. Cassiana sat down on the edge of the shelf, and said quietly, “We are not out of danger. There is still to be—” she paused, seeking a word, and finally used the Galactic standard term, “still to be allergic reaction. We have to stay close together—in same kinetic field—days till the reaction is desensitized, and our body develop tolerance to the grafted—” she stopped and said sharply in Centaurian, “I have told you you must not ask me questions! You want your baby to live, don't you? Then just do as I say! I—I am sorry, Bet'—I do not mean to be angry, I do not feel very well either."

* * * *

Beth knew already that Cassiana never exaggerated, but even knowing this she had not expected the violence of the next few hours. After they reached the Archonate, the world seemed to dissolve around her in a burning fever, a nausea and pain that made her previous illness seem like comfort by comparison. Cassiana, deathly pale, her hands as hot as Beth's own, did not leave her for an instant. They seemed unable to remain apart for an instant. When they were very close together, Beth felt a brief echo of the miasmic vibration which had eased her in the room of the machines; but at best this was faint, and when Cassiana drew away from her, by even a few feet, a vague, all-over trembling began in every nerve of her body, and the spasms of sickness were aggravated unbearably. The critical distance seemed about twelve feet; at that distance, the pain was almost intolerable. For hours, Beth was too miserable to notice, but it finally dawned on her that Cassiana was actually sharing this same torture. She clung to Beth in a kind of dread. Had they been less ill, Beth thought, they might have found it funny. It was a little like having a Siamese twin. But it was not funny at all. It was a grim business, urgent as survival.

They slept that night on the narrow cots pushed close together. Half a dozen times in her fitful sleep Beth woke to find Cassiana's hand nestled into hers, or the rhu'ad girl's arm flung over her shoulder. Once, in a moment of intimacy, she asked, “Do all women suffer like this—here?"

Cassiana sat up, and pushed back her long pale hair. Her smile was wry and the drawn face, in the flicker of lurid lightning that leaped and danced through the shutters, looked bitter and almost old. “No, or I fear there would be few children. Although, I'm told, when Megaera was first colonized, it was pretty bad; More than half the—the normal women, died. But we found out that sometimes a normal woman could go through a pregnancy, if she was kept close to a rhu'ad constantly. I mean constantly. Almost from the minute of conception, she had to stay close to the rhu'ad who was helping her. It was confining for both of them. If they didn't like each other to start with—” suddenly softly, Cassiana chuckled. “You can imagine, the way you used to feel about me!"

“Oh, Cassiana, dear—” Beth begged.

Cassiana went on laughing. “When they didn't hate us, they worshiped us, and that was worse. But now—well, a woman will have a little discomfort—inconvenience—you saw Nethle. But you—if I had not taken you to the kail’ rhu'ad when I did, you would have died very soon. As it was I delayed almost too long, but I had to wait, because my child was not—"

“Cassiana,” Beth asked her in sudden understanding, “are you going to have a baby too?"

“Of course,” Cassiana said impatiently. “How could I help you if I wasn't?"

“You said, rhu'ad don't—"

“They don't usually, it's a waste of time,” said Cassiana unguardedly. “Married rhu'ad are not allowed to go through a pregnancy, for now, during all the six cycles of my pregnancy and two more while I recover, no woman in our family group can have a child"—suddenly her anger came back and closed down like a black cloud between their brief intimacy. “Why do you torment me with questions?” she flung furiously at Beth. “You know I mustn't answer them! Just let me alone, let me alone, let me alone!"

She threw up her arm over her eyes, turned on her side and lay without speaking, her back to Beth; but the other, sinking into a restless doze, heard through her light sleep the sound of stifled crying...

* * * *

Beth thought it was the next day—she had lost consciousness of time—when she started out of sleep with the vague, all-over pain that told her Cassiana was not close to her. Voices filtered through a closed door; Cassiana's voice, muted and protesting, and Wilidh's high childish treble.

“...but to suffer so, Cassiana, and for her! Why?"

“Perhaps because I was tired of being a freak!"

“Freak?” Wilidh cried, incredulous. “Is that what you call it?"

“Wilidh, you're only a child,” Cassiana's voice sounded inexpressibly tender. “If you were what I am, you would know just how much we hate it. Wilidh—since I was younger than you, I have had the burden of four families on my head. In all my life, am I not to do one thing, just one, because I myself wished for it? You have had children of your own. Can't you try to understand me?"

“You have Arii—” Wilidh muttered, sulky.

“She isn't mine—not as Lassa and the twins are yours. Do you know what it's like to carry a child—to watch it die—” Cassiana's voice broke. The voices sank, were indistinct—then there was a sudden sound like a slap, and Cassiana cried out furiously, “Wilidh, tell me what Nethle has done! I'm not asking you, I am ordering you to tell—"

Beth heard Wilidh stammering something—then there was a stifled scream, a wailing sound, and Cassiana, her face drained of color, pushed the door and came with groping steps to Beth's side. “Bet'—wake up!"

“I'm awake—what's happened, Cassiana?"

“Nethle—false friend, false sister—” Cassiana's voice railed her. Her mouth moved, but no words came. She looked ghastly, sick and worn, and she had to support herself with one hand against the frame of Beth's cot. “Listen—there are—Terrans here, looking for you. They are looking for you—days now—your husband could not lie well enough, and Nethle told—” she clutched at Beth's hand. “You cannot leave here now. We might both die—” she stopped, her face gone impassive. There was a knock on the door.

Beth lay quiet, her eyes burning, as the door swung wide. Cassiana, a stony, statue-still figure of offended tradition, stared coldly at the two intruders who crossed the threshold. In six hundred years no man had penetrated these apartments. The Terrans stood ill at ease, knowing they violated every tradition, law, custom of the planet.

“Matt!” Beth whispered, not believing.

In two strides he was beside her, but she drew away from his arms. “Matt, you promised!” she said unsteadily.

“Honey, honey—” Matt moaned. “What have they done to you here?” He looked down, tormented, at her thinner cheeks, and touched her forehead with disbelieving dismay. “Good God, Dr. Bonner, she's burning with fever!” He straightened and whirled on the other. “Let's get her out of here, and talk afterward. She belongs in a hospital!"

The doctor thrust the protesting Cassiana unceremoniously aside. “I'll deal with you later, young woman,” he said between his teeth. He bent professionally over Beth; after a moment he turned on Cassiana again. “If this girl dies,” he said slowly, “I will hold you personally responsible for denying her competent medical attention. I happen to know she hasn't been near any practitioner on the planet. If she dies, I will haul you into court if I have to take it to Galactic Center on Rigel!"

Beth pushed Matt's hand away. “Please—” she begged. “You don't realize—Cassiana's been good to me, she's tried to—she sat up, clutching her night robe—one of Nethle's a little too small for her—about her bare shoulders. “If it hadn't been for her—"

“Then why all this secrecy?” the doctor asked curtly. He thrust a message capsule into Cassiana's hands. “Here. This will settle it.” Like a sleepwalker, Cassiana opened it, drew out the slip of flexible plastic, stared, shrugged and tossed it to Beth. Incredulous, Beth Ferguson read the legal words. Under the nominal law of the Terran Empire, they could be enforced. But this—to the wife of the Chief Archon of Megaera—she opened her mouth in silent indignation.

Matt said quietly, “Get dressed, Betty. I'm taking you to the hospital. No—” he checked her protest, “don't say a word. You aren't capable of making decisions for yourself. If Cassiana meant you any good, there wouldn't be all this business of hiding you."

Cassiana caught Beth's free hand tight. She looked desperate—trapped. “Leave her with me for three days,” she made a final appeal. “She'll die if you take her away now!"

Dr. Bonner said tersely, “If you can give me a full explanation of that statement, I'll consider it. I'm a medical man. I think I'm a reasonable man.” Cassiana only shook her head silently. Beth blinked hard, almost crying, “Cassiana! Can't you tell them—"

“Leave her with me for three days—and I'll try to get permission to tell you—” Cassiana begged helplessly.

Before her despairing eyes, Matt lowered his own. “Look, Doc, we could be making a big mistake—"

“We're only delaying,” the doctor said tersely. “Come on, Mrs. Ferguson, get dressed. We're taking you to Medical HQ. If we find that this—this delay hasn't really hurt you any—” he turned and glared at Cassiana, “then maybe we'll do some apologizing. But unless you can explain—"

Cassiana said bitterly, “I am sorry, Bet'. If I were to tell now, without permission, I would not live till sunset. And neither would anyone who heard what I said."

“Are you threatening us?” Matt asked ominously.

“Not at all. Only stating a fact.” Cassiana's eyes held cold contempt.

Beth was sobbing helplessly. Dr. Bonner rasped, “Pull yourself together! You'll go, or be carried. You're a sick girl, Mrs. Ferguson, and you'll do as you're told."

Cassiana said softly, “Leave her alone with me for just a few minutes, at least, while I get her dressed—"

Matt started to leave the room, but the doctor put a hand on his shoulder. “Stay with your wife. Or I will."

“Never mind,” said Beth wearily, and began to get out of bed. Cassiana hovered near her, not speaking, her face sick with despair, while the Earth-woman managed to dress herself after a fashion. But as Beth, still protesting helplessly, leaned on Matt, Cassiana suddenly found her voice.

“You will do justice to remember,” she said, very low, “that I have warn’ you. When there come thing which you do not understand, remember. Bet'—” she looked up imploringly, then without warning she broke down and collapsed, a limp rag, on the tumbled bed. The servant women, spitting Centaurian curses, hastened to her. Beth struggled to free Mart's hands, but the two men carried her from the room.

It was like dying. It was like being physically pulled into pieces. Beth clawed and fought, knowing in some subconscious, instinctive way that she was fighting for her life, feeling strength drain out of her, second by second. The world dissolved in red fog, and she slumped down fainting in her husband's arms.

* * * *

Time and delirium passed over her head. The white sterile smells of the Medical HQ surrounded her, and the screens around her bed bounded her sight except when Matt or a puzzled doctor bent over her. She was drugged, but through the sedatives there was pain and a fearful sickness and she cried and begged Matt incoherently, “Cassiana—I had to be near her, can't you understand—” and Matt only patted her hand and whispered gentle words. She dived down deep into delirium again, feeling her body burning, while faces, familiar and strange, multiplied around her, and once she heard Matt shouting in a voice that cracked like a boy's, “Damn it, she's worse than she was when we found her, do something, can't any of you do anything?"

Beth knew she was dying, and the idea seemed pleasant. Then quite suddenly, she came up to the surface of her fogged dreams to see the pallid stern face of a rhu'ad above her.

Beth's eyes and brain cleared simultaneously. The room was otherwise empty. Pinkish sunlight and a cool, pungent breeze filled the white spaces, and the rhu'ad's face was colorless and alien but full of reserved friendliness. Not only the room but the whole building seemed oddly silent; no distant voices, no hurrying footsteps, nothing but the distant hum of skycabs outside the windows, and the faint rustle of the ventilators. Beth felt a sort of drowsy, lazy comfort. She smiled, and said without surprise, “Cassiana sent you."

The rhu'ad murmured, “Yes. She nearly died too, you know. Your Terrans are—” she used a word which did not appear in Megaerean dictionaries “—but she did not forget you. I have done a fearful thing, so you must promise not to tell anyone that I've been here. I brought a damper into the building and hypnotized all the nurses on this floor. I've got to leave before they wake up. But you will get well now."

Beth pleaded, “Why is this secrecy so necessary? Why can't you just tell them what you've done? I know they didn't think I'd live, the fact that I feel better should be enough proof!"

“They would try to make me tell them, and then they would not believe me. After they see your baby, they will believe it. Then we will tell them."

Beth asked her, “Who are you?"

The rhu'ad smiled faintly and mentioned the name of one of the most important men of Megaera. Her eyes twinkled at Beth's astonishment. “They sent me rather than an unknown—in the event I am found here, your Terrans might hesitate to cause an international incident. But just the same I don't intend to let them see me.” “But what was the matter with me?"

“You developed an allergy to the baby. Alien tissue—blood types that didn't mix—but you'll be all right now. I haven't time to explain it,” the rhu'ad finished impatiently and turned, without another word, and hurried out of the room.

Beth felt free and light, her body in comfort, without a trace of sickness or pain. She lay back on her pillows, smiling, feeling the faint stir and quickening of the child within her, then adjusted the smile to the proper angle as a nurse—one of Dr. Bonner's hard-faced old Darkovan assistants—tiptoed in, her face sheepish, and peered round the corner of the screen. Beth had to force back a spontaneous laugh at the change which came over the old lady's face as she gasped, “Oh—Mrs. Ferguson—you—you do look better this morning, don't you? I—I—I think Dr. Bonner had better have a look at you—” and she turned and actually ran out of the cubicle.

* * * *

“But what did they do to you? Surely you must know what they did to you,” Dr. Bonner protested tiredly for the hundredth time. “Just tell me what you remember. Even if it doesn't make sense to you."

Beth felt sorry for the old man's puzzlement. It couldn't be pleasant for him, to admit he'd failed. She said gently, “I've told you everything.” She paused, trying to put it into words he could accept; she had tried to tell him about the manner in which Cassiana's physical presence had soothed her, but he had shrugged it off angrily as delirium.

“This place where they took you. Where was it?"

“I don't know. Cassiana blindfolded me.” She paused again. From prolonged mental contact with Cassiana, she had come from the kail’ rhu'ad with a subdued sense of having taken part in a religious ritual, but it meant nothing to her as religion, and she could only give incoherent scraps of her impressions. “A big domed room—and a room full of machines—” at his request, she described the machines in as much detail as she could remember, but he shook his head. Trying to help, she ventured, “Cassiana called one of them a telepathic damper—"

“Are you sure? Those things are made on Darkover, and their export is generally discouraged—even the Darkovans won't talk about them very much. The other thing could have been a Howell C-5 Electro-psychometer. It must have been a special hopped-up model, though, if it could put your cell waves into phase with a telepath's!” His eyes were thoughtful. “I wonder what they did that for? It must have hurt like hell!"

“Oh, no!” Beth tried to explain just how it had felt, but he only shrugged and looked dissatisfied again. “When I examined you,” he told her, and glanced sidewise at Matt, “I found an incision, about four inches long, in the upper right groin. It was almost healed over, and they d pulled it together with a cosmetic lacquer—even under a magnifying glass, it was hard to see."

Beth said, struggling for a dim memory, “Just as I was going under the anesthetic, one of the rhu'ad said something. It must have been a technical term, because I didn't understand it. Aghmara kedulhi varrha. Does that mean anything to you. Dr. Bonner?"

The man's white head moved slightly. “The words mean, placenta graft. Placenta graft,” he repeated, slowly. “Are you absolutely certain those were the words?"

“Positive."

“But that doesn't make sense, Mrs. Ferguson. Even a partial detachment of the human placenta would have caused miscarriage."

“I definitely haven't miscarried!” Beth laughed, patting her swollen body.

The old man smiled with her. “Thank God for that!” he said sincerely. But his voice was troubled. “I wish I was sure of those words."

Beth hesitated, “Maybe it was—Aghmarda kedulhiarra va?"

Bonner shook his head, almost Smiling. “Kedulhi—placenta—is bad enough,” he said. “Kedulhiarra—who ever heard of grafting a baby? No, you must have had it right the first time, I guess. Maybe they grafted, subcutaneously, some kind of placental tissue from a Centaurian. That would even explain the allergy. Possibly, Mrs. Jeth-san acted as the donor?"

“Then why did she have the allergy too?” Beth asked. Dr. Bonner's heavy shoulders lifted and dropped. “God knows. All I can say is that you're a lucky, lucky girl, Mrs. Ferguson.” He looked at her in unconcealed wonder, then turned to Matt. “You might as well take your wife home. Legate. She's perfectly all right. I've never seen a Terran woman look so healthy on Megaera. But stay close to home,” he advised her. “I'll come over and have a look at you now and then. There must be some reason why the Centaurians go into seclusion. We'll try it with you—no sense in taking chances."

But Beth's sickness did not return. Contentedly secluded in the Residence, as snugly celled as a bee in her hive, she made tranquil preparations for the birth of her child. Nature has a sort of anesthesia for the pregnant woman; it smoothed Beth's faint disquiet about Cassiana. Matt was tender with her, refusing to discuss his work, but Beth detected lines of strain in his face and voice, and after a month of this she asked him pointblank, “Is something wrong, Matt?"

Matt hesitated—then exploded. “Everything's gone wrong! Your friend Cassiana has really messed us up properly with Rai Jeth-san! I'd counted on his cooperation, but now—” he gave a despondent shrug. “He just says, in that damned effeminate voice of his,” Matt's husky baritone rose to a thin mocking echo of the Archon's accent, “peaceful settlement is what we want. Terran colonists with their wives and children we will accept, but on Megaera we will not accept floods of unmarried and unattached personnel to disturb the balance of our civilization.” Matt made a furious gesture. “He knows Terrans can't bring their women here! The hell with this place, Betty—space station and all! They can blow the planet into the Milky Way, for all I care! As soon as Junior is born, and you're clear for space, I'm going to throw this job right in the Empire's face! I'll take a secretaryship somewhere—we'll probably have to go out on the fringe of the Galaxy—but at least I've got you!” He bent down to kiss his wife. “It serves me right for bringing you here in the first place!"

Beth hugged him, but she said in a distressed tone, “Matt, Cassiana saved my life! I simply can't believe that she'd turn the Archon against you. We don't deserve what Cassiana did for me—the Empire's been treating Megaera like a piece of lost-and-found property!"

Matt laughed, guilty. “Are you going in for politics?"

Beth said hotly, “You have authority to make recommendations, don't you? Why not, once, just once, do what's fair, instead of what the diplomatic manual recommends? You know that if you resign now, Terra will close out the Legation here, and put Megaera under martial law as a slave state! I know, the official term is protectorate satellite, but it means the same thing! Why don't you make a formal recommendation that Megaera be given dominion status, as an independent, affiliated government?"

Matt began, “To achieve that distinction, a planet has to make some important contribution to Galactic Civilization—"

“Oh, comet dust!” Beth snapped. “The fact of their survival proves that their science is ahead of ours!"

Matt said dubiously, “The Empire might agree to an independent buffer state in this end of the Galaxy. But they've been hostile to the Empire—"

“They sent a petition to Terra, six hundred years ago,” Beth said quietly. “Their women died by thousands while the petition was being pigeonholed. I think they'd die all over again before they asked anything of Terra. It's Terra's turn to offer something. The Empire owes them something! Independence and affiliation—"

“Cassiana's certainly got you sold on Megaeran politics,” Matt said sourly.

“Politics be damned!” Beth said with such heat that her husband stared. “Can't you see what it means, idiot—what Cassiana did? It proves that Terran women can come here in safety! It means that we can send colonists here for peaceful settlement! Can't you see, you half-wit, that's the opening Rai Jeth-san was leaving for you? Cassiana's proved a concession on their side—it's up to Terra to make the next move!"

Matt stared at her in blank surprise. “I hadn't thought of it that way. But, honey, I believe you're right! I'll put through the recommendation, anyway. The planet's almost a dead loss now, things couldn't be worse. We've nothing to lose—and we might gain a good deal."

* * * *

Beth's baby was born at the Residence—the Medical HQ did not have maternity ward facilities, and Dr. Bonner thought Beth would be more comfortable at home—on the first day of the brief Megaeran winter. She came, alert and awake, out of a brief induced sleep, and asked the usual questions.

“It's a girl.” Dr. Bonner's lined old face looked tired and almost angry. “A little over three pounds, in this gravity. Try to rest, Mrs. Ferguson."

“But is she—is she all right?” Beth caught weakly at his hand. “Please tell me—please, please let me see her—"

“She's—she's—” the old doctor stumbled over a word, and Beth saw him blink hard. “She's—we're giving her oxygen. She's perfectly all right, it's just a precaution. Go to sleep, like a good girl. You can see her when you wake up.” Abruptly, he turned his back and walked away.

Beth struggled against the lassitude that forced her head back. “Dr. Bonner—please—” she called after him weakly. The nurse bent over and there was the sharp prick of a needle in her arm. “Go to sleep, now, Mrs. Ferguson. Your baby's all right. Can't you hear her squalling?"

Beth sobbed, “What's the matter with him? Is there something wrong with my baby?” The nurse could not hold her back. Before her fierce maternity the old woman hesitated, then turned and crossed the room. “All right, I guess one look won't hurt you. You'll sleep better if you've seen her.” She picked up something and came back to the bed. Beth reached out hungrily, and after a minute, smiling faintly, the Darkovan woman put the baby down on the bed beside Beth.

“Here. You can hold her for a minute. The men don't understand, do they?"

Beth smiled happily, folding back the square of blanket that lay lapped over the small face. Then her mouth fell open and she uttered a sharp cry.

“This isn't my baby! It's not—she isn't, you don't—” her eyes blurred with panicky tears. Rebelliously, scared, she looked down in terror at the baby she held.

The infant was not red or wrinkled. The smooth soft new skin was white—a shining, lustrous, pearly white. The tight-screwed eyes were a slatey silver, and a pallid, gilt-colored down already curled faintly on the little round head.

Perfect. Healthy. But—a rhu'ad.

The nurse dived for the baby as Beth fainted.

* * * *

It was nearly a month before Beth was strong enough to get up during the day. Shock had played vicious havoc to her nerves, and she was very ill indeed. Her mind acquiesced, and she loved her small perfect daughter, but the unconscious conflict forced itself inward, and took revenge on every nerve of her body. The experience had left a hidden wound, too raw to touch. She sheltered herself behind her weakness.

The baby—over Matt's protest, Beth had insisted on calling the child Cassy—was more than a month old when one afternoon her Centaurian servant came into her room and announced, “The Archon's wife has come to visit you, Mrs. Legate Furr-ga-soon.” Beth had forced the memory so deep that she only thought that Nethle or Wilidh had come to pay a formal call. She sighed and stood up, sliding her bare feet into scuffs, and padding across to her dressing panel. She twisted buttons, playing out lengths of billowing nylene to cover her short indoor chemise, and slid her head into the crusher which automatically attended to her short hair. “I'll go up. Take Cassy down to the nursery, will you?

The Centaurian girl murmured, “She has her baby—with her."

Beth stared in stupefaction. No wonder the servant girl had seemed thunderstruck. A baby outside its own home, on Megaera?

“Bring her down here, then—” she directed. But that did not dull her surprise when a familiar, lightly moving form shrouded in pale robes, ghosted into the room.

“Cassiana!” she said tremulously.

The rhu'ad smiled at her affectionately as they clasped hands. Then suddenly Beth threw her arms around Cassiana and broke down in a tempest of stormy crying. “Don't, don't—” Cassiana pleaded, but it was useless. All the suppressed fear and shock had broken loose at once, and Cassiana held her, awkwardly, as if unused to this kind of emotion, trying to comfort, finally bursting into tears herself. When she could speak again steadily, she said, “Can you believe me, Beth, if I say I know how you are feeling? Look, you must try to pull yourself together, I have promised I'd explain to you—"

She freed herself gently, and from the servant's arms she took a bundle, carefully shielded in tough, transparent plastic, with double handles for carrying. She opened the package carefully and from the depths of this ingenious cradle she lifted a wrapped baby, held it out and put it into Beth's arms.

“This is my little boy—"

Beth finally raised her eyes to Cassiana, who was standing, fascinated, by Cassy's crib. “He—he—he looks like—” Beth faltered, and Cassiana nodded. “That's right. He is a Terran child. But he's mine. Rather—he's ours.” Her earnest eyes rested on the other in something like appeal. “I promised to explain—Dhe mhari, Bet', don't start to cry again..."

* * * *

“We rhu'ad would probably have been killed, anywhere except on Megaera,” Cassiana began, a few minutes later, when they had settled down together on a cushioned divan, the babies snuggled down in pillows between them. “Here, we saved the colony. Originally, I think, we were a cosmic ray mutation. We were part of the normal population then. We hadn't adapted quite so far.” She paused. “Do you know what Genetic Drift is? In an isolated population, hereditary characteristics just drift away from normal. I mean—suppose a colony had, to begin with, half blonde people, and half brunette. In a normal society, it would stay distributed like that—about 50-50 percent. But in one generation, just by chance, it might vary as far as 60-40. In the next generation, it could go back to normal, or—the balance once having been changed—it could keep drifting, and there would be 70 percent of blondes and only 30 percent of brunettes. That's oversimplified, of course, but if that keeps up for eight or ten generations, with natural selection working hard too, you get a distinct racial type. We had two directions of drifting, because we had the normal population, and—we had the rhu'ad. Our normal women were dying—more in every generation. The rhu'ad could have children safely, but somehow, we had to preserve the normal type."

She picked up Cassy and snuggled her close. “Did you name her for me, then?” she asked. “Well—I started to explain. A rhu'ad is human, and perfectly normal, except—they will find it out about Cassy some day—we have, in addition to our other organs, a third ovary. And this third ovary is parthenogenetic—self reproducing. We could have perfectly, human, normally sexed children, either male or female, who would breed true to the normal human type. They were even normally susceptible to the poisonous reaction in this air. These normal children were carried, in the normal way, except that a rhu'ad mother was immune to the hormone reaction, and could protect a normal child. Or, a rhu'ad woman could, from the third ovary, at her own will—we have control over all our reflexes, including conception—have a rhu'ad, female child. Any rhu'ad can reproduce, duplicate herself, without male fertilization. I never had a father. No rhu'ad does."

“Is Cassy—"

Cassiana paid no attention to the interruption. “But the mutation is female. While the normal women were dying, and only the rhu'ad could have children—even these children died when they grew up—we were afraid that in three or four generations we would end with an all-female, parthenogenetic, all-rhu'ad society. No one wanted that. Least of all the rhu'ads themselves.” She paused. “We have all the instincts of normal women. I can have a child without male fertilization,” she looked searchingly at Beth, “but that does not change the fact that I—I love my husband and I want his children—like any other woman. Perhaps more—being telepathic. That's an emotional problem, too. We have done our part for Megaera, but we—we want to be women. Not sexless freaks!"

She paused again, then continued, evidently searching for words. “The rhu'ad are almost completely adaptable. We tried implanting rhu'ad gametes—ova—from our normal ovaries, into normal women. It didn't work, so finally they evolved the system we have today. A rhu'ad becomes pregnant in the normal way—” for the first time Beth saw her blush slightly, “and carries her child for two, maybe three months. By that time, the unborn child builds up a temporary immunity against the toxins released by the hormone allergy. Then they transfer this two-month embryo into the host mother's womb. The immunity lasts long enough that the baby can be carried to full term, and birthed. Then, of course, there's no more danger at all, for a male child—or, for a female child, no more danger until she grows up and herself becomes pregnant.

“Another thing: After a woman has her first child like that, she also builds up a very slight immunity to the hormone reaction. For a woman's second child, or third, or more, it is sufficient to transplant a fertilized ovum of six or seven days ... provided that there is a rhu'ad within immediate call, to stabilize the chemistry in case anything goes wrong. One or more of my families always has a woman who is pregnant, so I must be continuously available."

“Isn't that terribly hard on you?” Beth asked.

“Physically, no. We've done what they do with prize cattle all over the Empire—hyperovulation. At certain days in each cycle, rhu'ads are given particular hormone and vitamin substances, so that we release not one ovum, but somewhere between four and twelve. Usually they can be transferred about a week later, and the operation is almost painless—"

“Then all the children in your four—families, are yours, and your husband's?"

“Why, no! Children belong to the woman who bears them and gives birth to them—and to the man who loves that woman, and mates with her!” Cassiana laughed. “Oh, I suppose all societies adapt their morals to their needs. To me, it's a little—nasty, for a man to have just one wife, and live with her all year. And aren't you terribly lonely, with no other women in your house?"

It was Beth's turn to blush. Then she asked, “But you said those were normal children. Cassy—Cassy is a rhu'ad—"

“Oh, yes. I couldn't do with you what I'd have done with a Centaurian. You had no resistance at all, and you were already pregnant. Women do become pregnant sometimes, in the ordinary way, on Megaera—we are strict about contraceptive laws, but nothing is entirely reliable—and when they do, they die, unless a rhu'ad will take for them the risk I took for you. I had done it once before, for Clotine, but the baby I had died—well, during those three days while you were shut up alone, I went to the kail’ rhu'ad, and put myself under a damper—and became pregnant. By myself."

A thousand tiny hints were suddenly falling into place in Beth's mind. “Then you did graft—"

Cassiana nodded. “That's right. When we went together to the kail’ rhu'ad, the dampers put us into phase—so the cellular wave lengths wouldn't vary enough to throw the babies into shock—and just exchanged the babies."

Beth had been expecting this; but even so, Cassiana's casual tone was a shock. “You really—"

“Yes. My little boy is—by heredity alone—your child and the Legate's. But he is mine. He lived because I—being rhu'ad—could carry him in safety, and manage to stabilize his reactions to the hormone allergy with the atmosphere. There was no question of Cassy's safety: a rhu'ad baby, even a rhu'ad embryo, is perfectly adaptable, even to the alien environment of a Terran body. The first few days were so crucial because you and I both developed allergies to the grafted alien tissue; our bodies were fighting the introduction of a foreign kind of substance. But once we mother hosts began to develop a tolerance, I could stabilize myself, and my little boy, and you—and when you were taken from me too soon, I could send another rhu'ad to complete the stabilization. There was no need to worry about Cassy; she simply adapted to the poisonous condition which would have killed a normal child."

She picked up Cassy and rocked her almost wistfully. “You have a most unusual little daughter, Bet'. A perfect little parasite."

Beth looked down at Cassiana's little boy. Yes, she could trace in his face a faint likeness to the lines of Matt's, and yet—hers? No. Cassy was hers, borne in her body—she wanted to cry again.

Cassiana leaned over and put an arm around her. “Bet',” she said quietly, “I have just come from the Legation HQ, where—with full permission of the Council of Rhu'ad—I have laid before them a complete, scientific account of the affair. I have also been allowed to assure the Terran authorities that when Terran colonists come here to build the Space Station, their women will be safe. We have suggested that colonists be limited to families who have already had children, but we will give assurance that an accidental pregnancy need not be disastrous. In return I received assurance, forwarded from Galactic Center, that Megaera will receive full dominion status as an independent planetary government associated with the Empire. And we are being opened to colonization."

“Oh, how wonderful!” Beth cried impulsively. Then doubt crept into her voice. “But so many of your people hate us—"

The rhu'ad smiled. “Wait until your women come. Unattached men, on Megaera, could only make trouble. Men have so many different basic drives! An Empire man from Terra is nothing like a Centaurian from Megaera, and a Darkovan from Thendara is different from either—take ten men from ten different planets, and you have ten different basic drives—so different that they can only lead to war and ruin. But women—all through the Galaxy, Terran, Darkovan, Samarran, Centaurian, Rigelian—women are all alike, or at least they have a common basic area. A baby is the passport to the one big sorority of the universe. And admission is free to every woman in the Galaxy. We'll get along."

Beth asked numbly, “And you were convinced enough of that to risk your life for a Terran who—hated you? I'm ashamed, Cassiana."

“It wasn't entirely for you,” Cassiana admitted. “You and your husband were Megaera's first and last chance to avoid being a backwater of the Galaxy. I planned this from the minute I first saw you. I—I wasn't your friend, either, at first."

“You—you couldn't have known I'd get pregnant—"

Cassiana looked shamed and embarrassed. “Bet'. I—I planned it, just as it happened. I'm a telepath. It was my mental command that made you stop taking your anti shots."

Beth felt a sudden surge of anger so great that she could not look at Cassiana. She had been manipulated like a puppet—

She felt the rhu'ad's thin hand on her wrist. “No. Only a fortuitous accident in the way of destiny. Bet', look at them—” Her free hand touched the two babies, who had fallen asleep, cuddled like two little animals. “They are sister and brother, in more than one way. And perhaps you will have other children. You belong to us, now Bet'."

“My husband—"

“Men will adapt to anything, if their women accept it,” Cassiana told her. “And your daughter is a rhu'ad—who will grow up in a Terran home. There will be others like her. In her turn she will help the daughters of Terran families who come here, until science finds a new way and each woman can bear her own children again—or until Centaurians take their place, moving out into the Galaxy with the rest—"

And Beth knew in her heart that Cassiana was right.