Free Mindworlds by Phyllis Gotlieb Page B

half-contented to hug Zella and drink beer in Dell’s.
    â€œWhat—?”
    Spartakos and the Lyhhrt were standing motionless three steps above him. Ned’s heart jumped and he scrambled to see what was keeping them, at first a dark shadow and then by its dry and musty smell the body of an O’e who had crept there to die under the hot sun, eaten away by diseases that brute evolution seemed to have spawned for the purpose.
    Spartakos was very still. The Lyhhrt was beyond impatience—almost sparking with electric tension—but he only said quietly, “This one even you could not have helped.”
    Spartakos bent to pick up the gnarled and now sexless body and let it slip into the sea. He went on in silence on the path along the sea-wall and the Lyhhrt said sharply, “Come along, Edmund Gattes.”
    Lyhhrt hate names and use them most often as something
near insult. Ned raised his head from the sea and said levelly, “You chose me, Lyhhrt.”
    â€œYou had better begin thinking of me as O’e,” the Lyhhrt said.

THREE
    Khagodis, Steaming Around the Diluvian Continent
    Â 
    :What are we to do?: the Lyhhrt asked Hasso sadly. :If we refuse to sell them our powers, build their ships and weapons, make ourselves sick with loneliness—try to live peacefully on our own world, they say: but you create wonderful instruments of surgery, heal bodies and minds with them, teach us to think thoughts we never dreamed of, and if you refuse that, what are you?:
    Hasso said carefully, : Lyhhrt, perhaps there is more than one way to serve the Cosmic Spirit.:
    :It may be so, Archivist, though it would be difficult for me to tell that to my Others short of heresy … and what are we to do in the meantime?:
    If Ned found it difficult to think of his Lyhhrt employer as O’e, Hasso could hardly keep from thinking of his own Lyhhrt companion as the Baby; he seemed so much like a lost child. Though a powerful one.
    At Ocean City most of the barge’s passengers had disembarked
and boarded a much bigger coal-powered vessel for the journey southward around the coast of the Diluvian Continent. A long three days this was, and would have been longer and harder if Hasso had not been able to afford a sleeping basin. Nothing to see but the ocean’s curving horizon to starboard, and to port the deep mass of the continent; beginning thickly green, it gradually eroded to pale granite that shifted from pink to gray as the long shadows slanted.
    Hasso was hard put to keep his mind on the dangers around him, to restrain himself from trying to catch glimpses of the young woman—: Her name is Ekket ,: the Lyhhrt had said—who had seized his consciousness at one blink. But I cannot throw away everything I have worked for all my life in one moment of foolish desire … .
    She was standing by the railing looking out at the red line of the sunset; between her and Hasso three or four children were playing knucklebones and jumping up and down with triumph or dismay. Hasso was grateful for their distraction.
    The Lyhhrt said suddenly, : Look!—no, don’t look!—but now the young woman’s guardian is encouraging her to remove her helmet and cool herself … I believe that’s a trap, he may have caught a trace of you in her thoughts … perhaps I wasn’t shielding as well as I believe. Keep your helmet on, friend.:
    Hasso obeyed, with regret. But he got one instant’s flash of her thought, perhaps by the young Lyhhrt’s compassion for a lover, or merely a momentary breach of his shielding:

    my mother
has sold me like a
whore

    a thought shaped in the seh form that Skerow had written in all her life, brevity bursting with passion in nine syllables,
created by a poet’s tendency to fit a thought into such a waiting form, sometimes the inability to think it without forming it.
    Hasso kept his eyes resolutely away from Ekket, but he could not help noticing that