McCaffrey, Anne – The Coelura

“Yellow Triad City” elicited the information that there had been a third City, now abandoned. It had served as a trade and export center for a product no longer available. Yellow Triad City had been put on minimal care one hundred and twenty years ago. An update line informed Caissa that the ruins were now considered dangerous even for protected excursions.

Summoning a geographic display of Demeathorn’s large, roughly triangular continent, Caissa regarded it thoughtfully. Blue Triad City was in the southeastern corner, enjoying quite the best temperature on its plateau. Red Triad City was in a direct line of flight to the southwest, situated on the vast bluff that shoved into the western sea. If one considered an equilateral triangle, the upper tip would put the abandoned city precisely north, again in an elevated position, overlooking the scattering of islands that staggered northwards, presumably the interdicted Oriolis group.

Further queries, even using her father’s private code, brought discouraging answers that were in their phrasing subtle evasions. No sporting animals, no facilities, interdiction by the Red and Blue rulers for residents or visitors due to extreme hazards and lack of rescue units.

Caissa made a rapid calculation which confirmed that the range of any of the rescue vehicles serving the sporting and fishing areas could reach the farthest north island at a push, even if they had to rely on solar-charged batteries for a return flight. She could extract nothing further about coelura which, in her mother’s estimation, had distinguished Demeathorn and which once had generated the need for the third city. Even at fourteen, Caissa had deduced that much.

She had abandoned such fruitless research though occasionally in the first few months, she had tried alternative questions on the Memorax. Then she had begun to participate actively in the sporting life which absorbed her sire, and occupied the planet’s inhabitants and the many visitors who came to enjoy hunting Demeathorn’s canny, deadly and diverse predators.

The intervening six years had passed pleasantly enough for Caissa and she acquired the status of “quota hunter” no small achievement. She had a reputation as well as private wealth to pass on to her own body-heir. Now, mulling over her sire’s request that she consider the new Cavernus, she wondered how that could be connected with Baythan’s boast that he would, at long last, accomplish his mysterious mission and restore his contractual honor with the High Lady Cinna. Caissa would willingly have supported her sire in any effort to acquit himself with the High Lady, but marrying that insipid Cavernus was stretching the sire-bond very thin indeed.

Caissa rose to pace restlessly about the reception room, reviewing heir-contracts and intimacy requirements. “A small sacrifice today that might reap unexpected rewards,” Baythan had said. “I took the promise for the deed,” Lady Cinna’s high pure voice reminded her.

Although it had been six years ago that the High Lady had officially left Demeathorn, she had made sporadic and unannounced visits to the Blue Triadic City in which Baythan and Caissa resided. Aware of the antagonism between her natural parents, Caissa noticed that these visits invariably occurred when her sire was protocologically unable to disappear on a hunt or some ministerial errand. Very privately, Caissa likened the Lady Cinna’s attitude towards Baythan as similar to the sly, six-legged deadly nathus of Demeathorn’s deep forests, a creature of immense patience for stalking its prey from the aerial advantage of the closely grown ferfa trees. Her father, on the other hand, reacted like a man caught in a labyrinth, trying to find the one way out to the sun.

Nor was Caissa immune to her womb-mother’s verbal pricks and darts. These were mainly concerned with the lack of “elegant or suitable” males to carry on the quintessential qualities of Caissa’s historically illustrious heritage of governors, explorers spatial and scientific, male and female.

Though Baythan had full custody of his heir, Caissa could have requested permission to go anywhere in the galaxy that her private income, which was large, permitted. The Lady Cinna had, however, prejudiced herself in her natural daughter’s estimation by humiliating the sire in the heir’s presence. In the strict terms of contracts which Caissa had studied, as long as Baythan lived, he could not be held in default of that unpublished clause. A strange condition, indeed, Caissa thought, if, as his heir, she would inherit the obligation.