High Couch of Silistra by Janet Morris Page A

spread his seed and disappeared. If a man does not want the woman, the Well buys her back, and the profit to the father is high. But he did not wish it. I was raised by the Well, for my mother died at my birth. Women who have been in the Well and have not conceived are given such children to raise when they can no longer take the couch. We care for our own.”
    “I, too, am half-bred,” said Dellin. The way he said it made me think the fact had caused him some pain. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the couch.
    “Anything I can do to help you discharge this chaldra, whatever I can, I will do. I will be, remember, powerful in Arlet. What race was your father’s?”
    “That is what I am here to find out,” said I. “Come with me if you wish, while M’lennin and I attempt to unravel the riddle.”
    He nodded and pulled me to him again. I begged off, and we showered and I dressed. In my short white sleeveless s’kim, which tied behind at back, waist, and hip, I walked him, naked, to his own room, where he pulled on black shorts and sandals, and we went searching for food and M’lennin.

III. The Context Within Which the Act Is Viewed
    We found M’lennin in his main room, a place of clicking, whirring machines, each of which blinked a thousand varicolored eyes and spun its wheels and flickered its indicators back and forth across the lighted maws, of its meters, singing to itself and its fellows in machine song. The door was open, the room dim-lit. We never made it to the kitchen.
    M’lennin waved us within, and we came up behind him where he sat before a bank of controls. Somehow he had devised to project the contents of the cube upon the right-hand screen that covered the wall before us. My mother was just fading into gray.
    We watched my father take my mother, double life-size. Dellin threw his leg up on the console and pulled me against him.
    “He’s got the moves, eh, Dellin?” said M’len.
    “Quiet, I am learning,” retorted Dellin.
    I said nothing. My night with the Liaison Second faded into perspective as I watched. I had not, after all, conceived with Dellin. I would have felt the egg enter my tube. With such a man as the one on the screen before me, I would surely conceive. I pulled a bit away from Dellin’s encircling arm.
    “One need not be a deep-reader to know what you’re thinking,” said he in my ear.
    M’len pushed a button, and the scene froze. He touched another and another, and the left-hand portion of the screen lit up with columns of words and percentiles and numbers decimal.
    “There you see it, Estri,” said the Liaison First.
    “No, I do not,” I answered. “Explain it to me.”
    He went through the list item by item. It was very complicated.
    “So you see,” he summed up, “what we have here is a 1.0000 to infinity bipedal standard air-breather. The archetypal man. The bipedal standard is a composite of all the divergent characteristics of the four-hundred-odd races of the hundred and forty-eight planets of the Bipedal Federate group. There is no such thing as a living standard biped. Or there was never known to be one. Now we see such a man before us. The absolute man. The only one I have ever heard of. I cannot place him for you, Estri. There should be no such being.”
    My heart sank. “May I see the skeleton again, please?” I asked.
    I studied it. I saw some of my own peculiarities there, cervical ribs, excessively thin flat bones. I counted the vertebrae. He, as I, had two more than Silistran norm.
    “All right, M’len.” The Liaison First hit the console, and the lights came on while the projections on the screen faded.
    “How about the languages?” Dellin asked. “Did you catalog?”
    M’lennin handed Dellin a fax sheet without turning from the machine. He twisted a dial and slid a fader, watching two lit meters.
    “All dead languages,” mused the Liaison Second. “Even the Silistran is archaic. Three the computer banks cannot identify. Yet the