don’t know,” Faineworth said.
“She just disappeared,” Edbeck said, waving his hands in the air. “Poof! She has done it before. The doctor thinks she goes sideways in time.”
Faineworth glared at his friend.
“She has been back here at least twice,” the questioner said, looking back and forth between them. “How do you bring her back?”
“She just comes back,” Faineworth said. “We don’t control it.” Edbeck nodded his agreement.
“Now, why would she do that?” the man demanded.
“I don’t know,” Faineworth said.
“We think she is in some sort of loop,” Edbeck said. “That her mental condition makes her cycle between here and wherever else she goes.”
Faineworth turned to glare at his friend, but said nothing. Edbeck appeared not to notice.
“Mental condition?” the man asked.
“She has amnesia,” Faineworth said unwillingly.
“Ah, yes. Of course.” The man turned to his companions. “I am leaving now. Stay for two weeks to see if the girl comes back. Bring her unharmed to the hive. Then kill these two. Destroy the city.”
“New York?” one of them asked.
“Whatever.”
Wait a minute!” Edbeck screeched. “You can’t do that!”
The man paused for a second and turned to him. “You are mistaken,” he said. Then he left.
CHAPTER FOUR
Castimere Parr. Preceptor of the Overline, rose from the streaming water and slowly stepped out of the octagonal sunken tub. He wrapped himself in yards of blue cotton towel and crossed the tessellated floor of his hot room to inspect himself in the huge mirror set into the blue-tiled wall. “Tell Miss Viola I am ready to be poked and prodded,” he told Drom, his squat body servant, who stood by the door.
As Drom silently padded from the room, Preceptor Parr used one edge of the towel to wipe off the mirror and stared at his reflection. A wiry, muscular man of medium height, medium age, with more than the usual number of scars and the hint of an incipient potbelly, stared back. His face was not unusually ugly, but it was not one he would have chosen; it was narrow, with a high forehead below thinning brown hair and above wide-set brown eyes, and what he regarded as an overly large nose. Despite the reliability of the rejuvenation process, his middle-aged body looked subtly and unsatisfactorily different to him than when he had actually been merely middle-aged. He was not pleased with his appearance, but then he had never been, and he had more meaningful things to worry about.
Parr turned away from the mirror, glad that whatever vanity he possessed was not dependent upon his appearance. He was vain about the quickness of his mind, the responsiveness of his body; the fact that, with a bit of practice and conditioning, he could still hold his own or better in a duel of either wits or foils against any but a true master. He was vain about the depth of his knowledge, hard won over a century of service to the Overline, and his ability to make decisions on what seemed to the conscious mind to be too little information. He had long ago learned to trust his unconscious mind’s winnowing of information and the conclusions it drew.
The Overline continued to exist, fat and sluggish and happy, through the constant watchfulness and prompt actions of its preceptors, backed up by the ready response of the Overline Security Service. There was a time a few centuries ago when this one strand in the vastness that was the time continuum believed itself to be the only one possessing the secret of hopping about the Paraverse, and in its conceit it had named itself the Overline. But now it knew that other machines traveled the Paraverse. Some were controlled by men whose knowledge of the secret had turned them into complacently evil exploiters of those on time strands unfortunate enough to come under their control; some by nonhuman intelligences that had no more regard for mankind than mankind had for water beetles. Some of these, if they ever stumbled across the home strand of the Overline, would destroy it reflexively and without compunction.
Everyone on the Overline knew of the threat, but most thought it such a remote possibility as hardly to be worth considering, if they thought of it at all. The others believed that if by some strange accident they were attacked, the Service would destroy the menace in short order. After all, what were they paying their taxes for?
But Castimere Parr and his fellow preceptors, charged with the safety of the Overline and its interests in the rest of the Paraverse, knew how thin the protecting wall was, and how close the barbarians were to the gates. Any strand on which the Overline Import Complex was firmly entrenched had to be defended, lest a captured transporter reveal the location of the Overline itself. Any strand that was only partially exploited would be abandoned rather than chance losing a transporter or conveyer—an action about which the merchant lord doing the exploiting was never pleased.
Parr closed his eyes and stretched out prone on the marble massage table. He tried to focus his thoughts on one of the larger problems that awaited him in the worlds beyond his bath. Brisk exercise followed by a steaming tub had usually served to clear his mind and bring his thoughts into focus. But it hadn’t been working of late, and today he found himself unable to concentrate on any one question for more than a few seconds before it was brushed aside by another. What he needed, he decided, was a vacation.
The curtain parted and Viola entered. A brief white dress was wrapped around her slender form with an artless simplicity that only the highest art can achieve. She looked desirable. For Castimere Parr she always strove to look desirable. But then, for Castimere Parr she always looked desirable, whether she tried or not. She carried a stack of fresh towels and a bottle of body oil. “Your slave, Preceptor Parr,” she said, bowing slightly. “What do you require?”
Parr rose on one elbow to look at her. “It is impossible,” he told her, “for such perfection of beauty, grace, and wit to be enfolded within the slight body of a single twenty-six-year-old female. Surely there must be five of you.”
She laughed. “If I weren’t your slave already,” she told him, putting the towels down at his feet, “such words would go a long way toward capturing my heart. But since you already have my body, and my personal services covenant for the next sixteen years, what would you do with my heart?”
Parr smiled. “You don’t love me?” he accused.
“Not a bit.”
“You’d leave me?”
“In a flash. Just unlock the ankle chains.”
“You aren’t wearing ankle chains.”
Viola looked down. “That’s so.” She pushed Parr’s head down onto the table and surrounded it with her arms. “Then, perhaps I love you,” she said.
After an appropriate pause, she took the bottle of oil and began massaging his neck and shoulders. “Your muscles are still tense,” she told him. “What’s the point of boiling yourself for an hour in that sunken pot if it isn’t even going to relax your neck and shoulder muscles?”
“The problems won’t go away just because I immerse myself in steam,” Parr said.
“You let more of the world sit on your shoulders than any man should carry,” Viola told him. “It’s going to age you before your time, and you know how I hate old men.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Indeed. I can see that in your every gesture.” He rolled over, nearly upsetting the massage oil. “The problem, my love, is that you should be the problem. What to do about you—us—should be of paramount concern, and my mind should occupy itself with nothing else until it is solved. But somehow I can’t seem to drop these other, lesser concerns, and they crowd into my mind unbidden and leap about, demanding attention.”
“There’s no rush about us—about our problem,” Viola said. “It will keep for years unchanged, as I am indeed your slave