"Only six more days, my darling," said the Kalif, then felt self-conscious for it. He hadn't learned to read her emotions, except for those she displayed openly, and to her it might seem like only six days left of freedom. But no. Here there was no freedom for her.

She nodded. "Only six," she said, then looked at him and found his eyes. "I am glad."

I am glad! The simple words touched him. "Are you still going to the library?" he asked.

Tain nodded. She'd been using the collegial library in the Sreegana, learning about Varatos and the Vartosi, and the empire. "I'm still on the Abstract of History," she said, "following the syllabus without calling up elaborations much. It seems awfully long. When I've read through it once, I'll start over again." She paused. "What have you been doing?"

"Um, nothing very memorable," he answered. "The broad business of government is interesting, but the details can be tiresome. I work too often on details." Actually I've been planning the invasion of the Confederation, he thought. The place you come from; the home of your childhood, of your family. But that I'll tell you after we're married, when you know me better.

Yes, he answered himself, wait till she's married to you. Then, when she learns about it, she'll hardly have a choice. For a moment it seemed to him he was about to tell her after all, but he didn't.

"Let me tell you where I thought we'd go after the wedding," he said instead. "If it doesn't sound good to you, I'll make other plans. It's an island in the ocean, very beautiful, very private. My sister's husband owns it. It's six miles long, all high hills covered with forest. And there are beaches, and sparkling clear brooks with waterfalls. We can stay for five days, unless you want to leave sooner. The main house is large, but we'll use the small one because we'll have no guests. And the help there is very good. We can swim and boat and walk, and lie in the sun. Do you think you'll like that?"

Tain reached across the table and put her hand on his. His loins stirred at her touch. "I will like it," she said. "It will be new and beautiful, and I will be coming to know my husband."

Hearing her say that, it seemed to Chodrisei Biilathkamoro that he was the happiest man in the world.

It also sparked faint fear in him, for it seemed to him that loving made him vulnerable.

Tain lay dreaming and tossing. She was with a tall, handsome boy in uniform. They were in a forest, a jungle, and when they came to a special place, they took their clothes off and began making love. She felt a climax start to build, but then something happened, and it wasn't him anymore. It was a hairy man, Veeri, and he wore a military cap as he humped and thrust. She told him to stop, but he wouldn't. Then a girl came up behind him, a slim girl with red hair, and chopped off his head with a sword. Tain watched the head go bouncing across the ground. The red-haired girl helped her up.

"He didn't harm you," the girl told her, and Tain realized she still had her trousers on, loose-fitting military field pants mottled green. And boots. Veeri hadn't harmed her after all. Then the girl was leading her across a field, toward a sort of tall doorway with no wall. Just a doorway, standing there by itself. They stopped when they came to it. "That's the place," the girl said pointing. "You need to go through there. Otherwise we'll all be killed."

Tain looked into the door, but all she could see was roiling cloudy blackness, and suddenly she was very afraid.

Then there were soldiers with the girl. One was the tall handsome boy. "You have to go through it," they all said to her, "through the gate, or we'll all die." They took hold of her and began to push. She held back, and it wasn't her friends that pushed her, but strangers, men of the ship. They gripped her with hard biting hands, pushing. She tried to scream, but nothing came out, and suddenly, on her own, she found herself lunging at the doorway.

And woke up, panting, sweating, staring into the darkness above her. Shaking, she got up and dialed a cold drink, then went to the bathroom and back to bed. Before she slept, she tried to remember the dream, but all she remembered was how frightened she'd been when she woke up.

Twenty-three

The land was rolling but not steep-old glacial drift at 45њ south latitude. Except on flood plains, the last sparse woods had been cleared a millennium earlier, and the only trees to be seen stood in single rows along the grassy roads, and around the occasional groups of farm buildings. The fields held different crops, but wheat predominated.

What was called "wheat" on Varatos was not what their ancestors had named wheat some thirty thousand years before. But a pre-dispersion taxonomist, examining the florets with a hand lens, would have found glumes and barbed lemmas, and assigned the plant to the family Gramineae, the grasses, which includes wheat, corn, and the other grains, and done it without hesitation. Though he'd have had to declare a new tribe and genus, for it would not have keyed to any taxon in his compendium. Clearly it was not Triticum -the true wheats-or anything else in the tribe Hordeae. Had he examined the roots, he'd have become confused or excited or both, for they had abundant nodules that resembled those on legumes. And which did, in fact, convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrogenous compounds within the plants, as those on the legumes did.

Thus what was called wheat, on Varatos and over most of the empire, was a nitrogen-fixing grain, providing a relatively low-cost, high-yield food crop that did not require expensive nitrogen fertilizer. It was also not a rowcrop; it germinated promptly; the seedlings established quickly, rooted deeply, and were winter hardy; all of these contributing to excellent soil protection. Uniform crop height permitted leaving tall stubble for erosion protection prior to disking, and even after disking provided a matrix that left the soil resistant to erosion until final harrowing, immediately prior to seeding.

On the negative side it was subject to occasional catastrophic outbreaks of harvester beetles, which could wipe out not just a field but a district. There were fully effective treatments, but they were either unacceptably expensive or had unacceptable ecological side effects that kept them off the market. Hail was another source of crop destruction. And ordinarily, destructive rust fungi that built up in the disked-under crop residues dictated that other crops be raised on a field every third year. The rotation crops normally alternated between forage crops and some crop that required intensive cultivation, permitting the exposure and destruction of most harvester beetle broods while hoeing.

And hoeing it was. Machine cultivation could have been used, but hoeing permitted the visual discovery of harvester beetle broods, and their fuller destruction. And at least as important, hoeing was cheap-peasant labor was cheap-and helped provide employment for the large peasant population.

The farm of Lord Favrami Gopalanaami was a rather modest one-a thirty-peasant operation. So far he'd managed to keep all six of his gentry work bosses-men who'd been with him since he'd inherited the place six years earlier-though it would be advantageous economically to let one or two go. Even four bosses could conduct the work force about as well as six, if the crew tasks were organized properly.

The week was eight days long. The farm workweek ended at noon on Sevenday, except for the evening feeding of livestock, dunging out the dairy barn, and milking. In the cottage of work boss Peleea Ravalu, the entire household sat over the last of the midday meal, watching the video of a great event more than six thousand miles northwest in Ananporu.