He nodded. "Yes. That."

Intermezzo: Octember 12, 1308 A.H.

Charisse put her hand on the doorknob, paused, and glanced back once more at Tadeusz Leschitsyn as he labored over Althea's unconscious form. The physician looked up briefly, nodded to her, and returned his attention to his patient. The Morelon matriarch summoned her resolve and exited the sickroom, closing the door gently behind her. She made her way down the hall with measured steps.

I cannot have this any longer.

It was her one and only thought. It had been with her from the moment Althea went into labor. It refused to be dispelled.

She's the only descendant of Alain Morelon remaining to the clan, even if not by blood heritage. She's simply too precious to risk any further. Children or none.

Althea had always seemed above all sickness and pain. Charisse could not remember ever hearing her complain of the slightest malady or the least discomfort. Labor had shattered her illusion of invulnerability. Her screams as the contractions tore through her were the most terrifying sounds any Morelon had ever heard...until Tadeusz Leschitsyn most reluctantly declared the baby dead and forcibly extracted the corpse from Althea's ripped and bleeding body.

If only I could wean her away from the spaceflight nonsense! Damn my brother for passing his obsession onto her shoulders.

I have to try again. Even if she comes to hate me over it. I have a duty.

She descended the stairs, mustered what strength remained to her, and rounded into the hearthroom. As she expected, Martin waited there. He was alone.

He's desperate for children. That might be the key.

He caught her eyes and immediately rose to his feet. She held out her hands, and he took them in his.

"Tad says she'll live," she said slowly. "But she'll be a long while healing. And she's unlikely ever to carry a child to term. The damage to her womb was severe. He recommended a...permanent measure."

Tears welled in Martin Forrestal's eyes.

"Sterilization?"

Charisse nodded.

His face crumpled as he fell to his knees. She descended and wrapped her arms around him as best she could. He wept in the whimpering way of a man who has learned, to his surprise, that there is a limit to what he can bear after all.

She held him and waited.

"The Lord giveth," he choked out at last, "and the Lord taketh away. Blessed, oh, blessed be the name of the Lord."

Charisse did not reply.

For three days Althea Morelon wandered a landscape out of a surrealist's nightmares, a place occupied by wholly abstract entities seemingly disconnected from all reality, and from one another as well. Some of them were marginally comprehensible: reifications of physical laws, templates of ecology and society, and propositions in moral-ethical theory. Others were the purest expressions of form, mere geometric shapes animated by unseen forces. All moved among one another in Brownian patterns. Now and then two would crash together and vanish in a burst of brilliance.

They did not develop. They did not deform. They did not communicate. Their endless ballet suggested nothing but chaos.

She watched a cube of basalt and a pyramid of marble step a pas de deux that surged and slowed in a tidal rhythm. They would approach one another with increasing speed, whirl in tight, fast orbits about one another, then withdraw gracefully to distant positions to revolve slowly about their common center before repeating the pattern. It went on for hours, until finally the two streaked directly toward one another and vanished in fiery mutual annihilation. There were many such dances.

She eavesdropped upon numberless conversations between shadowed titans, discussions of issues so abstract and complex that she could not make out even the edges of the controversy. As each tableau began, the voices of the Olympians were soft, their words were measured, and an air of sweet reason prevailed. Yet eventually those huge robed figures would begin to shout. At last they would fly into a rage and hurl themselves at one another, colliding with a clang that would shake a galaxy.

She watched a sequence of elaborately staged dramas that had a mythical feel: morality plays about courage and heroism, or suffering and endurance, or love and redemption. Though the actors were faceless shapes that barely mocked the forms of men, each had an inexpressible poignancy. It was as if stories Martin had read to her were being produced in the theater of her skull, for her sole entertainment. She could not interpret them, could not even think about them.

Behind it all, enveloping every instant of every scenario that played before her mind's eye, was a voice disconnected from all the rest. It whispered to her pleadingly, continuously, with an urgency to dwarf all the shouted words she had ever heard.

You must fight You were born a warrior You are the only hope Though the visions of pirouetting abstractions, debates among Olympian forms, and foggily viewed morality playlets might someday depart from her memory, she knew, with the subconscious clarity and certainty that brooks no contradiction, that that voice and its whispered commands never would.

Althea did not come near to consciousness until the drugs shielding her from the pain of her injuries began to wane. When they finally failed, she broached the threshold with a thunderous cry, the protest of a great predator tested to its limits by an unprecedented trial of its strength. It shook Morelon House from roots to rafters.

For an eternal moment, pain was all she knew. She clamped her eyes shut and bore down against the flood of agony, pouring all her forces into the struggle to return her body to her command.

The pain refused to relent. It surged with every beat of her heart, unceasingly striving to reave her of all control over movement, thought, and awareness.

The endless whisper had told her that she must fight...but why? That she was born a warrior...but for what cause? That she was the only hope...but for what end?

Time enough for the rest of that stuff later. I will fight. Of course I will. It's what I do.

She fought. She denied the automatic urge to flee from the pain, to hide in the recesses of the mind that nothing from outside can reach. She spurned the yearning for relief via narcotics and the loss of volition that would accompany it. She confronted her agony squarely, accepted it, embraced it, and made it part of her...a part that would, however grudgingly, bend to her will.

When she opened her eyes at last, there were a multitude of faces around her bed. Her parents, Martin, Charisse, Chuck, Patrice, Alvah, Barton, Nora, and Elyse formed the innermost ring.

"That hurt," she gasped.

Elyse went at once to a nearby cabinet, searched briefly, and came back with a dermal infusor. Althea raised a hand with great effort, and Elyse drew back.

"No," she whispered. "No more drugs. I have to fight."

"What?" Elyse said.

"The pain," Althea said. "I have to fight it down." She struggled up onto an elbow, and a jolt lanced through her from her groin to the roof of her skull. She bore down and forced it back.

"There's a nerve trunk that runs from the top of the womb up into the ventral abdomen and joins the spine," she ground out. "It was badly abraded by the baby's passage."

"How do you know that?" Charisse said.

She scowled the question aside. Every breath brought a new siege of agony. "I have to learn to bear it, at least for now."

"But why, love?" Martin said.

As her family looked on in wonder and terror, she swung her legs out from under the bedcovers, planted her feet on the floor, and struggled to stand. Her abdomen rebelled, sending forth a torrent of pain. She opened to it, absorbed it, and in so doing broke its power over her.

"Because the alternative is to remain drugged into unconsciousness." She swallowed. "For the rest of my life."

"No."

"Martin," she pleaded, "why not?"

He did not reply. He lay staring at the ceiling, as if he were alone in their bed. Althea slid across to him and slipped her arms around him.

It had taken three days of unceasing concentration and maximum effort, but at last she had gained the upper hand over the pain cascading through her. It was still there, but she had walled it off from her conscious mind, reduced it to a backdrop. Except for certain specific flexures of her body, she could function as she always had. The pain no longer impinged on her consciousness unless she willed it so.

The three weeks since then weighed far more heavily on her mind.

"Martin," she said, "I am in control. You won't hurt me. You won't make me hurt myself. We can go back to our regular lives...well, except that I have to avoid some of my old exercise routines. But we can make love." She forced down an ugly thought and swallowed through a dry throat. "Don't you want to?"

He did not look at her. He remained silent.

-Don't push him any harder, Al.

Why not, Grandpere?

-No good can come of it.

I don't understand.

-And you're better off for that. Trust me.

Althea's willfulness surged high.

I don't think so, Grandpere.

-Althea- Later, maybe.

She terminated the internal dialogue with a snap of her will and pressed her husband to her. He did not react.

"Martin," she murmured, "what if the pain never goes away?"

He looked at her with something akin to pity.

"And what if it does?" he said at last. "There's no point to it any more."

"Huh? What-"

"Good night, Althea."

He broke the embrace, turned away from her, and did not speak again.

Chapter 19: September 12, 1310 A.H.

"How long has it been?" Nora Morelon said.

Barton Morelon continued to run the brush smoothly though Nora's mane of chestnut hair. "Coming up on two years now."

I could never have imagined that it would last two weeks, let alone two years.

"Have you seen her recently?"

He did not reply.

"Bart..." Nora turned and took the brush from his hand.

"It's been a while, love." He scowled. "The last time got me wondering if she wants to see any of us, ever again."

Nora's eyes filled with sorrow. "Charisse did a bad thing, didn't she?"

It wasn't just Charisse.

He suppressed the thought and merely nodded.

"Is there any possibility of getting them to reconcile with one another?"

He caught her face between his hands and caressed it. "Nora..."

She looked unswervingly into his eyes. He muttered "I don't know," broke the gazelock, and dropped backward onto their bed. It was all he could do to contain his regrets. He dared not speak of them even to his wife.

Nora rose from her vanity bench, looked down at him for a moment, and smiled wanly. After a moment she stretched out beside him and slid her arms around him.

"You feel responsible," she said. "Why?"

He stared at the ceiling, willing his thoughts to jell.

"For a long time," he said at last, "I bought the wrong story. I let myself believe that Charisse's meddling was the whole problem." He turned to face his wife. "I'm afraid that's not the case, love. It never was."

"Then what is?"

If only I'd shown some spine...behaved like a man instead of a sheep...

If only I'd done for them what they did for me.

"Imagine if we were to suffer a really bad disappointment, love," he said. "Imagine that you'd discontinued the Inconceivable, and we started trying for a baby, and nothing happened. Imagine that after a couple of years, we went to Tad Leschitsyn and got ourselves tested, and I turned up sterile. What would that change?"

"Change? Nothing," she said. "If we can't, we can't. That's a possibility every couple has to face." She brushed his cross pendant with her fingertips, then raised them to his cheek. "Would it change something for you?"

"Not the least little thing, love," he said at once. "We'd go on just as we are now. A little sadder, maybe. But not every man would react the same way."

And not every clan matriarch.