TWO
His arms were still tight about her and she was murmuring strange words of endearment when one of the approaching pedestrians swung about and gestured to a lean, big-boned woman a few feet to the left of him. Both pedestrians increased their strides, their shoulders jogging in the sunlight.
The first gesturing pedestrian was a man with a squat, muscular body and coarse-featured face. He was not a civilian. He wore the iron-gray uniform of a Monitor-caste security guard and the insignia of his rank, a silver mace, glittered conspicuously on his chest. A thick leather belt encircled his waist, and a flexible metal rod terminating in a catgut whiplash dangled at his hip.
The big-boned woman also wore a uniform. It was so tight-fitting that it seemed molded to her body, accentuating its angular contours and stripping her of every vestige of femininity. Lantern-jawed and gimlet-eyed, she bore down upon Teleman and the girl in his arms with a stride so vigorous that she quickly outdistanced the man, who was moving forward resolutely enough but without undue haste.
Teleman turned pale when he saw her. He swung about, relaxing his grip on his companion's slender waist, and taking a swift step backward. His alarm communicated itself to the girl and she stepped back also, letting her arms drop to her side and shaking her head, as if her hair, in its wild disarray, had become a brand of shame as dangerously revealing as her flushed face and heightened breathing and the crumpled condition of her attire.
The memory of what had just happened seemed suddenly like a stone around Teleman's neck. He felt weighted down and helpless, and filled with a terrible burden of guilt. He felt as if he had been hurled from the heights into a dark, deep well and was sinking down in thrashing helplessness and despair, with the weight still attached to his throat.
He dared not meet the bony woman's savagely condemnatory gaze or the gaze of her companion, who had gripped the whiplash at his waist in one of his wide hands and was using the other to gesture with.
The bony woman was the first to speak. She came to a halt directly in front of Teleman and the girl and looked them up and down, her lips curling back from her teeth in scorn and loathing.
"You are not privileged to make love," she said. "You have done an outrageous thing. There is no precedent for such behavior. It cannot be tolerated and you will both be punished. How severely I am not in a position to say. But you will be punished. You can rest assured of that."
"They may find themselves begging for death!" the Monitor-caste security guard said, halting at her side and slapping the metal-handled whiplash against his left palm with a look of brutal impatience in his red-rimmed, slitted eyes. He held himself very straight, his gaze passing from Teleman to the girl and lingering with an insulting, utterly brazen boldness on the ivory-textured whiteness of her unbound breasts.