I Dare by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee Page A

and cupped his face in her two hands.

    "The song changes us all," she said softly. "Do not fear it. Now go." She kissed him, the stone walls faded, and he straightened, his face wet with tears and his mouth warm from her lips, to face Edger the Clutch turtle in the room of catastrophes.

    The turtle blinked his enormous eyes, once, and inclined his body as far as the shell would allow.

    "All honor to you, Shan yos'Galan."

    Stiffly, Shan returned the bow, equal to equal. "May our work together return perfect health to our brother," he said, his voice chill in the High Tongue, and turned to open the lid of the sarcophagus.

    The interior lit itself, dimly, casting cool blue shadows across the slender, naked body of a man. Shan unsnapped the locks and lowered the front wall of the box. The pallet slid out of twilight and into brightness; the man was revealed as gold-skinned and unscarred; lean muscled, and somewhat longer in the leg than the average run of Liadens. His chest rose and fell with the blessed, unhurried regularity of deep sleep. His face was smooth—achingly innocent, in repose—the well-marked brows at rest, firm mouth tightly closed, long dark lashes smudging golden cheeks. And Shan saw with an absurd feeling of relief that the gash which had disfigured his brother's face had been erased by the 'doc's scar-cancelling program.

    "Time passes, Shan yos'Galan," a big voice rumbled behind him. "And I fear that haste must be made."

    "Yes, of course." Blinking away tears, he slid his arms gently beneath his brother's shoulders and knees and lifted him from the pallet to the cot. Val Con sighed and nestled his cheek into the pillow, his lips relaxing into what Shan dared to call a smile, but did not approach true wakefulness. Shan spread the blanket tenderly over the slim body and looked up into Edger's eyes.

    "Now what?"

    "An excellent question," the turtle said. "Let us ascertain. Your whole attention is required in this time and place, Shan yos'Galan. Do you place your regard upon this our brother and guide me in my exploration."

    "Guide?" Shan stared at him. "How am I going to guide you?"

    "I subvert my will to yours: Should the song go beyond its bounds, only will me nay and I will contain it. Should it quicken that which is best left sleeping, your touch will give it back to hibernation. It must be so, for the best health of our brother."

    Shan inclined his head, glanced down at Val Con's sleeping face and, for the third time in a single day dropped his shields completely, focusing his entire attention on the murky disorder of his brother's once scintillant pattern.

    "First, we question," Edger boomed, and formed a series of three short, interlocking notes. Watching with Healer's eyes, Shan saw fires sequentially awake and die within the murk, illustrating a pattern both broken and feeble—the damaged nervous system.

    Edger sang again, and Shan saw a quickening of color, a sparking of passion, fading almost immediately back into the ambient grayness, displaying the med tech's proudly achieved normalized cerebration.

    A third time Edger sang and the lifemate bridge blazed in glory, alive with the force of two willful, passionate souls, joining each to the other in—muddy melancholy.

    "What," Edger inquired, his voice approaching a decibel level that Shan thought might pass for a Clutch whisper, "was that last?"

    "The bridge that connects our brother and our sister, soul to soul and heart to heart."

    "Those who heal by machine dared tamper with this ?" Edger demanded, albeit rhetorically. "They are fools, Shan yos'Galan."

    "I'm inclined to agree," Shan said, more than half of his attention still on Val Con's mired pattern. "They have forgotten what 'lifemated' means—what it had meant, in the past."

    "This joining is not . . . usual among the Clans of Men, I know. Is it more usual among your Clan Korval, or among my sister's human clan of Erob?"

    "Erob bred mighty wizards, once," Shan said,