As he moved into sleep, he tried to visualize the Lady and her Isle, to reach out across the thousands of miles to her and create a bridge, some spark of consciousness over that immense gap, by which she could make contact with him. He was hampered by the empty places in his memory. Presumably any adult Majipooran knew the features of the Lady and the geography of the Isle as well as he did the face of his own mother and the outskirts of his city, but Valentine’s crippled mind gave him mainly blanks, which had to be filled by imagination and chance. How had she looked that night in the fireworks over Pidruid? A round smiling face, long thick hair. Very well. And the rest? Suppose the hair is black and glossy, black like that of her sons Lord Valentine and dead Lord Voriax. The eyes are brown, warm, alert. The lips full, the cheeks lightly dimpled, a fine network of wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. A stately, robust woman, yes, and she strolls through a garden of lush floriferous bushes, yellow tanigales and camellias and eldirons and purple thwales, everything rich with tropical life; she pauses to pluck a blossom and fasten it in her hair, and moves on, along white marble flagstones that wind sinuously between the shrubs, until she emerges on a broad stone patio set into the side of the hill on which she dwells, looking down on the terraces upon terraces descending in wide sweeping curves toward the sea. And she looks westward to far-off Zimroel, she closes her eyes, she thinks of her lost wandering outcast son in the city of the Ghayrogs, she gathers her force and broadcasts sweet messages of hope and courage to Valentine exiled in Dulorn — Valentine slipped into deep sleep.

And indeed the Lady came to him as he dreamed. He encountered her not on the hillside below her garden, but in some empty city in a wasteland, a ruined place of weather-beaten sandstone pillars and shattered altars. They approached one another from opposite sides of a tumbledown forum under ghostly moonlight. But her face was veiled and she kept it averted from him: he recognized her by the heavy coils of her dark hair and by the fragrance of the creamy-petaled eldiron flower beside her ear, and knew that he was in the presence of the Lady of the Isle, but he wanted her smile to warm his soul in this bleak place, he wanted the comfort of her gentle eyes, and he saw only the veil, the shoulders, the side of her head. "Mother?" he asked uncertainly. "Mother, it’s Valentine! Don’t you know me? Look at me, mother!"

Wraithlike she drifted past him, and disappeared between two broken columns inscribed with scenes of the deeds of the great Coronals, and was gone.

"Mother?" he called.

The dream was over. Valentine struggled to make her return, but could not. He awakened and lay peering into the darkness, seeing that veiled figure once more and searching for meaning. She hadn’t recognized him. Was he so effectively transformed that not even his own mother could perceive who lay hidden in this body? Or had he never been her son, so that there was no reason for her to know him? He lacked answers. If the soul of dark-haired Lord Valentine was embedded in the body of fair-haired Valentine, the Lady of the Isle in his dream had given no sign of it, and he was as far from understanding as he had been when he closed his eyes.

What follies I pursue, he thought. What implausible speculations, what madnesses!

He eased himself back into sleep.

And almost at once, so it seemed, a hand touched his shoulder and someone rocked him until he came reluctantly into wakefulness. Carabella.

"Two hours after midnight," she told him. "Zalzan Kavol wants us down by the wagon in half an hour. Did you dream?"

"Inconclusively. And you?"

"I remained awake," she answered. "It seemed safest. Some nights one prefers not to dream." She said timidly, as he began to dress, "Will I share your room again, Valentine?"

"Would you like to?"

"I have given oath to act with you as I acted before — before I knew — Oh, Valentine, I was so frightened! But yes. Yes, let’s be companions again, and even lovers. Tomorrow night!"

"What if I am Coronal?"

"Please. Don’t ask such questions."

"What if I am?"

"You’ve ordered me to call you Valentine and to regard you as Valentine. This I’ll do, if you’ll let me."

"Do you believe I’m Coronal?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"It no longer frightens you?"

"A little. Just a little. You still seem human to me."

"Good."

"I’ve had a day to get used to things. And I’m under an oath. I must think of you as Valentine. I swore by the Powers to that." She grinned impishly. "I swore an oath to the Coronal that I would pretend you are not Coronal, and so I must be true to my pledge, and treat you casually, and call you Valentine, and show no fear of you, and behave as though nothing has changed. And so I can share your bed tomorrow night?"

"Yes."

"I love you, Valentine."

He pulled her lightly to him. "I thank you for overcoming your fear. I love you, Carabella."

"Zalzan Kavol will be angry if we’re late," she said.

—2—

THE PERPETUAL CIRCUS was housed in a structure altogether opposite from those most typical of Dulorn: a giant flat unadorned drum of a building, perfectly circular and no more than ninety feet high, that stood by itself on a huge tract of open land on the eastern perimeter of the city. Within, a great central space provided an awesome setting for the stage, and around it ran the seating ring, tier upon tier in concentric circles rising to the roof.

The place could hold thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Valentine was startled to see how nearly full it was, here at what was for him the middle of the night. Looking outward into the audience was difficult, for the stage-lights were in his eyes, but he was able to perceive enormous numbers of people sitting or sprawling in their seats. Nearly all were Ghayrogs, though he caught sight of the occasional Hjort or Vroon or human making a late night of it. There were no places on Majipoor entirely populated by one race — ancient decrees of the government, going back to the earliest days of heavy non-human settlement, forbade such concentrations except on the Metamorph reservation — but the Ghayrogs were a particularly clannish lot, and tended to cluster together in and around Dulorn up to the legal maximum. Though warm-blooded and mammalian, they had certain reptilian traits that made them unlovable to most other races: quick-flicking forked red tongues, grayish scaly skin of a thick, polished consistency, cold green unblinking eyes. Their hair had a medusoid quality, black succulent strands that coiled and writhed unsettlingly, and their odor, both sweet and acrid at once, was not charming to non-Ghayrog nostrils.

Valentine’s mood was subdued as he moved out with the troupe onto the stage. The hour was all wrong: his body-cycles were at low ebb, and though he had had enough sleep, he had no enthusiasm for being awake just now. Once again he carried the burden of a difficult dream. That rejection by the Lady, that inability to make contact with her, what did it signify? When he was only Valentine the juggler, significance was insignificant to him: each day had a path of its own, and he had no worries about larger patterns, only to increase the skill of hand and eye from one day to the next. But now that these ambiguous and disturbing revelations had been visited upon him he was forced to consider dreary long-range matters of purpose and destiny and the route on which he was bound. He had no liking for that. Already he tasted a keen nostalgic sorrow for the good old times of the week before last, when he had wandered busy Pidruid in happy aimlessness.

The demands of his art quickly lifted him out of this brooding. There was no time, under the glare of the spotlights, to think of anything except the work of performing.