She reached down, picked up the small, ornate picture cube from the tabletop beside her. The face within it might have been a picture of herself as a girl. She rotated the cube, watched the laughing face change expressions through three dimensions as it moved. The island trader who kept track of the child’s progress had taken the hologram for her, and she found herself moved by strange and unexpected emotions when she looked into it. Sometimes she found herself longing to see more of the child than just this picture… to touch her or hold her, to watch her at play, watch her grow and change and learn: to see herself as she must have been, so long ago that she could not really remember it any more.
But no. Look at the child, dressed in coarse, scratchy cloth and greasy fish skins, probably eating out of a pot with her hands in some drafty stone hovel. How could she bear to see herself like that — to see in microcosm what this world would be reduced to in a few more years, when the off worlders abandoned it again? But it might not have to happen again, at least not so completely, if only her plan could be carried through. She looked more closely at the face in the picture, so like her own. But when she looked this closely, there was something that was not the same, something — missing.
Experience, that was all that was missing. Sophistication. Soon she would find a way to bring the girl here, explain things to her, show her what she had to look forward to. And because she would be explaining those things to herself, the girl would understand. What little technology the off worlders left to them must not be allowed to die again. This time they must preserve and nurture it; at least try to meet the off worlders as something more than barbarians when they returned again…
She crossed the room abruptly, switched the endless courtly banalities into oblivion by twisting a pearl on the mirror’s base. She changed the audio and brightened video to pick up images from another hidden eye. The inconspicuous incorruptibility of mechanical spies and the sheer pleasure of manipulating them had led her to have installed a network of thousands throughout the levels of the city. Omniscience and license were blossom and thorn on the same vine, both fulfilling their separate needs while feeding from the same source.
She looked now on the image of Starbuck; watched him striding impatiently inside the mirror’s heart. The muscles knotted and flowed as he moved, under his dark off worlder skin. He was a powerful man, and he seemed too large for the confinement of the chamber’s intimacy. He was nearly naked; he had been waiting for her to come to him. She stared with frank admiration, her memory a kaleidoscope of images of passion, forgetting for the moment that he had come to bore her like all the rest. She heard him mutter a profanity, and decided that she had kept him waiting long enough.
Starbuck was many things, but he was not a patient man; and knowing that Arienrhod knew that, and used it against him, did nothing to improve his mood. He might have spent the time she kept him waiting contemplating the fine line between love and hate, but he was not particularly introspective, either. He swore again, more loudly, aware that he was probably under observation, knowing it would amuse her. Keeping her satisfied, in every way, was his chief function, as it had been that of the Starbucks before him. He had the mental facility of an intellectual, but it was guided by the inclinations of a slave dealer and no morality at all: qualities that together with his physical strength had freed the youth known as Herne from a futureless life on his homeworld of Kharemough to follow a successful career of trading in human lives and other profitable commodities. Qualities ideally suited to his current life as Starbuck.
“Who is Starbuck?” He posed the rhetorical question to the mirror-inlaid bottle on the small cabinet by the bed, laughed suddenly, and poured himself a drink of native wine. (Gods! the things these stinking backwater worlds could find to get high on. He almost spat. And the things a man got used to…) Even now he spent a part of his time inside his old Herne-persona, drugging and gaming with casual off world acquaintances, sampling the diversions of the Maze. And as often as not they would turn, looking him straight in the face with bleary eyes, and ask him the same question: Who is Starbuck?
And he could have told them that Starbuck was a traitor, the off world advisor for this world’s Queen, who worked to protect her interests against the Hegemony’s. He could have told them that Star buck was the Hunter, who called up his alien Hounds and led the pack on the Queen’s orders to a grim harvesting of mers. He could have told them that Starbuck was the Queen’s lover, and would be until some quicker, shrewder challenger brought him down and became the new Starbuck — for the Queen was traditionally the Sea
Mother incarnate; she had many lovers, as the sea had many islands. All of those things would have been true, and several more besides. He could even have told them that he was Starbuck, collecting the confidences he needed to keep the Queen’s position in negotiations firm — and they would have laughed, as he did.
Because Starbuck could have been any one of them, and as easily none of them. He merely had to be an off worlder And he merely had to be the best. Starbuck’s anonymity was assured by ritual and law; he existed above and beyond all authority, all retribution except the Queen’s.
Starbuck turned, gazing over the rim of his drink at the incongruous clothing laid out on a shelf along the mirrored wall by the mirrored door: the calculated black silk and leather of his formal court attire, and the traditional hooded helmet that masked his real identity, that made Herne interchangeable with a dozen other ruthless and power-hungry predecessors. The helmet crested in a set of curving, steely spines like the antlers of a stag — the symbol of all the arrogant power any man could ever want to wield, or so he had thought when he first settled it onto his head. Only later had he come to realize that it belonged to a woman, and so did the real power — and so did he.
He sat down suddenly on the turned-back covers of the long bed; watched his endless reflections in the walls mimic him mindlessly into infinity. Seeing the rest of his life? He frowned, pushing the image away, running a hand through the thick black curls of his hair. He had been Starbuck for better than ten years now, and he was determined to go on being Starbuck… until the Change. He wielded power and enjoyed it, and it had never mattered to what end, or where the real source of the power lay.
Didn’t matter? He looked down at the heavy strength of his arms, his body still hard and youthful, thanks to privilege. And the butchering of mers… No, the slaughter didn’t matter at all, as an end it was only the means to a greater end. But the source, yes, that mattered. She mattered — Arienrhod. All the things that had the power to move him were hers — beauty, wealth, absolute control . eternal youth. In the first moment he had seen her at audience in the palace, with her former Starbuck at her side, he had known that he would kill to possess her, to be possessed by her. He imagined her body moving against his own, the bridal veil of her hair, the red jewel of her bitter mouth… tasting power and privilege and passion incarnate.
And so it did not strike him as incongruous that he moved unthinkingly from the bed to his knee, as the door opened and made the vision reality.