BEYOND THE INVISIBLE BARRIER
"We
have received warning. The Lord of the Flames is loose on Earth once
more."
Once before the Lord of the Flames had been
driven halfway across the universe. His return would mean a new era of chaos and
conflict for the populace of Earth.
The Lord of the Flames was a strange
adversary—a force of evil devoid of physical substance. He sought warmth in
unpredictable places: creeping into the soul of a worm or the stem of a flower
or into the mind of a man.
Unless
his hiding place could be discovered, the Lord of the Flames could crumble the
world once more to ashes. But finding him was not a simple matter. Evil is everywhere and the thing from space only lurked in one being
at a time.
Turn
this book over for second complete novel
SAMUEL
R. DELANY presents
The Towers of Toron as the second of a trilogy dealing with the
same epoch and characters. The first of the group was Captives of
the Flame, Ace
Book F-199. Prior to that, his novel The Jewels of Aptor, Ace Book F-173, received considerable acclaim.
Delany resides in New York City and is a
prolific and talented young writer, whose work in poetry and prose
have already won him awards. He is currently working on the third novel
in the story of the war of Toromon.
Samuel R. Delnny
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York 36, N.Y.
THE TOWERS OF TORON
Copyright ©, 1964, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Yes,
Antoine, I was writing another novel.
THE
LUNAR EYE
Copyright ©, 1964, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A.
Engraved on a four-by-five card in graceful black
letters that leaned across the shiny surface like dancers:
To
Her Grace the Duchess of Petra "We Have an Enemy Beyond the Barrier"
You Are invited to Attend a Ball at Dawn Given by his Royal Highness King Uske In Honor of Our Successful Effort And Impending
Victory In Our War with Ketrall
Two things caught the eye about this
invitation: first, the
paper was enamel-smooth except for the space around the
word "Ketrall," as if some other name had
been rubbed off
and this one substituted, and second, there was a ten inch
coil of wire taped to the lower right hand corner with a
black bead at one end. ^
Petra
tore loose the coil, threaded the wire into the revideo,
pressed the button, and it was drawn into the machine. The screen glittered
with dots of color that became the face of a blond young man with gaunt
unhealthy features. "Well, there' you are, dear cousin," said the
face with languid insolence. "You see, I'm attaching this personal
entreaty with your invitation. Do come away from your little island to my big
one. You were always my favorite relative and life has been passionately dull
since you went into—what else can I call it?—seclusion. Please, dearest Petra,
come to my party and help me celebrate our coming victory. So much has happened
in these three years since I saw you last. So much has happened. ... So much has happened. . , , So much has happened. . .
The Duchess made a disgusted sound, banged
the shut-off button, and the face disintegrated. "A tic in the message
wire," she said. "And since he conquered Tranu
six months ago, you'd think he'd have the decency to print new invitations
instead of scratching the name off the left-overs and
printing across the blank space. Ambassadors of Tranu
are going to be there—prisoners of war in fancy dress—and you'd think he'd have
the decency . . ." She let out a long breath.
"We're
in a country that isn't used to war. Perhaps the etiquette of conquest . .
."
"There
is no etiquette of conquest," she cut him off. She brushed her hand across
her sunrise copper hair pulled back from her temples and forehead by a
burnished cluster of gold sea-serpents. "But there is a
sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.
I don't know, Jon. Perhaps I'm too much in love with some idea of the
aristocracy; I was born into it; I turned away from it when I was young. And
now I'm back in it again. I think we're going to attend this ball, Jon Koshar."
"With
Arkor too?"
"Yes," she said. "The three of
us will be needed again. You received a warning, didn't you?" The
black-haired man nodded.
They
turned at a sound behind them. Doors shaped like double mollusk shells fanned
apart, and in the doorway stood a giant seven feet and a handful of inches
tall. On the left side of his face three scars jagged down his cheek and neck,
darker parallel welts in dark skin. "When will we leave?" he asked.
The triplex of scars was the brand with which the frequent telepaths among the
tall forest people were marked.
"Tonight," Petra
said.
"You're
going to take Tel and Alter," said Arkor. It was
a statement, not a question.
Jon frowned. "Are you,
Petra?"
"We're
all going to pay my cousin the King a visit," she told them. "We've
received warning. The Lord of the Flames is loose somewhere on Earth once
more."
"We
drove him halfway around the universe three years ago," Jon said.
"Well, we may have to do it again."
Across
the evening salmon-colored clouds strung out like floating hair. Red light
caught on the polished brass rail that ran around the yacht deck. Water flopped
at the side of the boat. "Everyone's aboard," Jon told the Duchess.
"Then
we can start." She turned and issued an order. Engines rang out like
plucked chords on a musical instrument. The ship mounted, then
plunged forward toward the night. As blackness washed the sky and stars stuck
diamond-tipped pins into evening, Jon and Petra lingered at the rail.
"Where is Ketrall?" she asked.
"Who
knows." Jon motioned toward the horizon.
"Somewhere beyond the radiation barrier, some other oasis of life out in
the dead misty land we call our planet. It's probably the same as Tranu. Only it isn't fortunate enough to be populated with
humans as Toromon is."
Suddenly
one of the motormen cried out from the yacht bridge. "Toron ahead!"
"We're
nearly there," said Petra. They looked over the prow of the ship, across
the dark water.
Imagine
a black gloved hand, ringed with myriad diamonds, amethysts by the score,
turquoises, rubies. Now imagine that glittering hand
rising slowly above the midnight horizon, in each jewel an internal flame.
Thus, the great island city of Toron thrust over the
edge of the sea.
The
windows of the Grand Ballroom in the royal palace of Toron
rose coffin-shaped two stories toward the ceiling. As
the panes lightened, the musicians blew windy music from their tuned
sea-shells, and above the marine chords, the weaving voice of a theremin dipped and climbed. Emerald and coral gauze
swirled from the women's arms. Purple and crimson satin glistened on the doubleted thighs of the men.
Through
the wide windows, against the ending night, the dark band of the transit-ribbon
leaped away from the laboratory tower of the palace and disappeared among the
other towers of the city until, at last, it soared over the sea, over the
mainland beach, over the forest of lush titan-palms and descendants of the oak
trees of an Earth fifteen hundred years in the past, across the penal mines
where men and women prisoners toiled the metal terrón from shafts sunk in the twisted rocks, across
groved plains where only in the past three years had
vegetation dared creep, and at last into the mainland city of Telphar. Telphar—the strongest
military establishment Earth had ever seen, her generals boasted.
"A
ball in the morning!" the young girl in the ruby silk exclaimed. The
shoulder of her dress was fastened with a copper lobster whose beaten tail
curved down to cover her right breast. "Don't you think this is a
wonderful idea, to have a ball at dawn?"
The
elderly woman beside her pulled her thin lips tighter. "How
ridiculous," she said softly. "I remember when balls were affairs of
taste and breeding." A caterer passed them offering hors d'oeuvres.
"Just look," the woman continued who wore on her head a silver wig
coiled through with roped pearls, "just look at thatl"
Strips of fillet were wound about toasted circlets. "That fish came from
the aquariums. Fish from the aquariums served at an affair of statel Why I remember when no one
would think of serving anything but fillet imported from the mainland
fishermen. Aquarium-grown fish! Why, the idea. What have we come to?"
"I
never could tell the difference between one and the other anyway," the
girl in the ruby dress replied, munching into a patty of fish-roe and chopped
scallion.
The
woman with the silver wig humphed.
Jon Koshar moved away and wandered through the hall, over the
polished white floor that shimmered with the reflections of fabulous gowns.
Isolated to one side of the room and swathed in furs were two representatives
of the forest guards, the lonely giants of Toromon's
forest on the mainland. Further away were the six-legged, arthropod ambassadors
from Tranu. A few feet nearer stood three squat
ambassadors from the neo-Neanderthal
tribes that lived in the
ruins beyond Telphar. They wore crude bronze wrist
bands and leather skirts. Three years ago, Jon Koshar
reflected, three years ago the empire of Toromon, of
which the island Toron was capital, did not even know
of their existence. But now ... now ...
Someone screamed.
Jon whirled around as the scream came again
across the ballroom. Heads turned, people crowded forward on one another, then
pushed back. Jon was shoved sideways and someone put an elbow in his chest.
More people screamed, backing away from what was coming across the floorl
Something
inside that had always made him go against crowds took him forward, and
suddenly he was at the edge of the clearing. An elderly man in a bright red
suit was staggering about, his hands against his eyes. Behind him a scarlet
cape billowed, sagged about his ankles, then billowed
once more as he lurched forward.
Sticky
crimson bubbled between his fingers and dribbled down the backs of his hands,
staining his scarlet cuffs still darker. He cried out again, and suddenly the
scream turned into liquid gurgling.
The
man went down on one knee. When he came up, there was a smear of blood over the
white tile and the knee of the trouser leg had deepened to maroon.
Another
figure had detached himself from the crowd, slim, blond, dressed
in white. Jon recognized the King.
The
staggering figure splattered to the floor at His Majesty's feet and rolled
over, his grasping hands falling from his face.
Now
more people cried out and even Jon gasped in a breath and bit down on it like
metal.
Blood
puddled from both cuffs and trouser legs. Red jelly
slipped away from what had been a face. Suddenly the barrel chest collapsed and
the red cloth that had covered flesh now sagged down till it obviously draped
no more than the spikes of meatless ribs. Reflexively one hand raised two
inches from where it lay on the bloody cape, then fell back, bones separating,
scattering, as the stubborn radial tendon dissolved. At the same time, the
skull rolled away from the neck: cheek bone, nasal cartilage, and chin chuckled
over the tile.
Through
the crowd across from him Jon saw the redheaded figure of the Duchess moving
toward the arched ballroom entrance. Immediately he turned, made his way to
the edge of the room, and in three minutes had skirted the floor to the entrance
where the Duchess was waiting. She seized his shoulder. "Jon," she
whispered, "do you know who that was? Do you know?"
"I know how it was
done," he volunteered. "But not who."
"That
was Prime Minister Chargill, the head of the Council."
She took a breath. "All right. Now you tell me
how."
"When
I was in prison at the mines," Jon said, "a not too close friend of
mine was an expert toxologist, and sometimes he used
to shoot off his mouth. That was terenide. It's an
enzyme acting as a cellular tranquilizer."
"You
mean the body cells get so tranquil they can't even hold onto one
another?"
"That's
about it," Jon said. "The results are what you saw happen to Chargill."
The
music, which had stopped, suddenly resumed, and above the twining melodies a
casual voice sounded over a loud-speaker system: "Ladies and gentlemen, I
am so sorry that this unpleasantness has interrupted my morning party, so
terribly sorry. I must request you, however, all to repair to your homes. Our
orchestra will now play for us the Victory Anthem of Toromon."
The melody on the theremin halted abruptly, then plunged into the soaring theme of the Victory Anthem.
"Come
up to my suite immediately," whispered the Duchess to Jon. "There's
something I wanted you to see before this. Now it's imperative."
Across
the room, the first light stained the panes a polished copper in the immense
coffin-shaped windows. Like violet blades, light slanted through the ballroom,
over the heads of the scurrying guests avoiding the scarlet horror drying on
the ballroom floor.
Jon and Petra hurried
through the arched doorway.
The
Duchess Petra had secured a family suite among the personal chambers of the
palace. A few minutes after they left the ballroom, she ushered Jon through the
triple door into the softly lit, purple-carpeted room. "Jon," she
said as they stepped inside, "this is Rolth Catham. Rolth Catham,
this is Jon Koshar, whom I told you about."
Jon had stopped at the door, his hand half
extended, looking at the man in the chair. He wanted to close his eyes and rub
them, but what he saw was not going to go away. About half of Catham's face was transparent. Part of his skull apparently
had been replaced with a plastic case. Through it Jon could see blood boiling
along the net of artificial capillaries; metal teeth studded a plastic jawbone,
and above that an eyeball hovered before the ghostly gray convolutions of
brain, hidden by a web of vessels.
Jon's
mind thawed from the first surprise, and he said out
loud, "Catham. Catham
of Catham's Revised History of Toromon." He jumped at the first familiar thought in
his mind, turning it into a pleasantry. "That's right,
we used your book in school."
The
three quarters of Catham's mouth that was living
flesh smiled. "And your name is Koshar? Is there
any connection between you and Koshar Aquariums or Koshar Hydroponics? Or for that matter with Dr. Koshar who discovered the inverse sub-trigonometric
functions and applied them to the random system of the spatial
co-ordinates—which is more or less the technological reason behind the present
conflict Toromon has gotten itself engaged in?"
"Koshar Aquariums and Hydroponics are
my father. Dr. Koshar is my sister."
Chatam's one mobile eyebrow shot up.
"I
told both of you before that I would have surprises for you," the Duchess
said. "Professor Catham, we're going to exchange
stories this evening. Just a moment. Arkor?" the Duchess called.
In
the silence following, Professor Catham caught Jon
staring at his glittering visage. The three-quarter smile came again. "I
usually announce right off whenever I meet someone for the first time that I
was in an accident fifteen years ago, a freak explosion out at University Island.
I'm one of General Medical's more successful, if a trifle bizzare
experiments."
"I
figured it was something like that," Jon said. "I was just
remembering once when I was in the prison mines. There was an accident and a
buddy of mine got one side of his face smashed in. Only General Medical was
pretty far
away, and the medical facilities out there were never particularly famous
anyway. He died."
"I
see," said Pofessor Catham.
"That must have been the mine disaster of '79. Did they do anything about safety conditions after that?"
"Not
while I was there," Jon said. "I went
into prison when I was eighteen and the tetron
explosion was in my first year. Five years later, when I got out, they hadn't
even changed the faulty cutter machinery."
Just
then a door in the side of the room opened and Arkor
came in.
At
the sight of the triple scars that branded the giant's neck, the historian's
eyebrow was raised once more. "Do you always keep a telepath in your
service, Your Grace?"
"Arkor is not in my service," the Duchess said.
"Nor are we in his. Professor, this is very important. Not twenty minutes
ago Prime Minister Chargill was assassinated. I'd
like you to go over what you told me when I spoke to you earlier."
"Chargill," began the historian, and the single eyebrow
now drew down toward where the other would have met it in a frown,
"assassinated?" Then the half-face relaxed again. "Well, it's
either the Malis who are responsible, or perhaps the
council itself wanted him out of the way . . ."
"Please,
Professor," said the Duchess. "Will you repeat what you told me before. Then we'll add what we can."
"Oh,
yes," Catham said. "Oh, yes. Well, I was
telling the Duchess, when she first called me at the University, or rather
ferreted me out of . . . Well, anyway—" he looked from Jon to Arkor, to Petra, and back—"anyway," he went on,
"Toro-mon is perhaps the strangest empire in the
history of Earth. You have lived in it all your lives so its unique properties
do not strike you, but to one who has studied the development of the world
before the Great Fire, fifteen hundred years ago, its uniqueness is immediately
apparent. Until three years ago, Toromon's empire
consisted of the island of Toron, the handful of
islands scattered near it, and the fifteen hundred or so square miles of
mainland opposite the islands, a strip of beach, then meadow lands, bordered by
forests, bordered, in turn, by an uninhabitable rocky crescent that more or
less cuts off this fifteen hundred square miles from the rest of the mainland
continent, which is still hopelessly radioactive. After the Great Fire more
than a thousand years ago, this area I've outlined was completely isolated from
the rest of the world by radioactive land and two freak radioactive currents in
the sea. Until recently, we never thought that there was anything left on earth
to be cut off from. There were several good technical libraries that survived
the Great Fire, and our ancestors fortunately were literate, educated people;
so we have a fairly good picture of what the world was like before. And
although there was some economic and social back-sliding at first, when a
balance was finally achieved, technology began to progress once more and within
a comparatively short time, it had equaled that of our ancestors, and in many
non-destructive areas, far surpassed it. Very early in our history, we discovered
the metal, tetron, as a source of power, the one
major fact that our pre-Great Fire ancestors seemed entirely ignorant of, from
the records we have.
"Now
what is unique about Toron is simply this. No empire
that we know of before the Great Fire ever survived for fifteen hundred years,
first of all. Nor did any empire ever exist for over a hundred years or so in
complete isolation from any disruptive force. Nor did any empire, country, or
even tribe that was in isolation ever continue to develop once it had been
isolated.
"Yet,
through the strange set of circumstances I have outlined—the surviving
libraries, the intelligence of our ancestors, the geographical diversity of
our land allowing for interchange between rural and urban cultural patterns— Toromon has existed for one and a half thousand years in
isolation while still managing to preserve a constantly developing technology.
The details of this process are fascinating, and I have devoted most of my
life to their study, but that is not what I want to explore now.
"The
effect of this situation, however, is like a thermite
explosion going on inside a sealed bottle—for fifteen hundred years! It
doesn't matter how long it takes, eventually the bottle will explode. And the
longer the bottle remains sealed, the further the fragments will fly. With the
discovery of these other oases of life in this radioactive world, that
explosion has taken place." Catham leaned
forward in hiá chair now and meshed his fingers together
like the interlocked tines of two forks. "Sixty-eight years ago Toromon's scientists conducted the first experiments in
matter transmission across wires. The transit ribbon was built between Telphar, our one city on the mainland, and Toron, our island capital. Then Telphar
was cut off from us by an increase in the radiation barrier—almost as if the
area of Toromon's empire were being purposely
diminished to hasten the final explosion. Three years ago we learned that an
atavistic mutant race, living on the other side of the first barrier had
managed to increase the radiation artificially using some surviving equipment
from before the Great Fire." Catham turned to
Jon now. "Three years ago, as well, your sister, Dr. Clea
Koshar, discovered the inverse sub-trigonometric
functions and their application to the random system of spatial co-ordinates.
In six months the old transit ribbon was turned into an antenna that could beam
matter wherever we wished, and Telphar, inhabitable
again, became a military establishment to send men, by the thousands, from any
place on the globe. We annexed the neo-Neanderthal race
that had manned the projectors, the same way that we had annexed the forest
people forty years previously. Contact was established with one non-human
mutant race, Tranu. We conquered them in a year. Now
we have contacted Ketrall, and we are already
hopelessly at war." Catham raised one hand to
his transparent cheek. "Why a war? Why not peace?
Toromon has been too long held in. That's all I
know."
"I
thought you would mention what I saw as the most obvious thing about all of
this," the Duchess said. "Three years ago, before we even knew that
there was anything on the other side of the radiation barrier, it was decided
by the council that there must be an enemy of Toromon's
somewhere, and the council had my cousin, the King, officially declare war. The
war started before the enemy was even discovered, and Toromon
has been officially at war ever since, seeking out one new enemy after another.
Do you remember the incident that caused war to be declared, Professor Catham?"
"Yes. The King's younger brother, Prince
Let, was kidnaped. That must have been done by some
early group of malcontents. The Malis go back quite a
way, but they never were as strong as they are now. AH they actually accomplish
is stirring up trouble that goads on the war. And no one, so I hear, will even
walk through the Devil's Pot after dark."
"It
never was a particularly savory area of the city," replied the Duchess.
"But Professor Catham, now I'm going to tell you
my story. Its a lot briefer
than yours, and a lot more incredible. But it's true. And well prove it. Toromon has had access to wireless matter-transmission on a
large scale for three years. There are at least two other races in the universe
that have had access to it for billions of years. They use it to travel among
the stars. These races aren't even composed of individuals, but are rather
collective consciousnesses. Their method of interstellar travel is more psychic
than physical. One seems to be a sort of amoral experimenter. The other race, a
much older one, is benevolent and composed of three centers of consciousness,
rather than one, which seem to check and balance one another. We call it the
Triple Being.
"You
spoke of Toromon's uniqueness, it's
combination of isolation and development. The experimenter, whom we call the
Lord of the Flames was also aware of Toromon's uniqueness,
and from the outside he began to meddle in order to keep it isolated as long as
possible. You wonder where the neo-Neanderthals got the equipment and knowledge
to close the radiation barrier? It was the Lord of the
Flames.
"Jon,
Arkor and I were contacted by the Triple Being three
years ago. With their help we rooted out the agent of the Lord of the Flames
among the neo-Neanderthals, though too late to stop the major explosion. But
he's back again, Professor Catham. What the results
of his presence will be this time we don't know. Incidentally, the kidnaping of Prince Let was our doing. For the past three
years he's been safely with the forest guards on the mainland. We hope that
eventually this hysterical war will end, and then Prince Let can come back and
perhaps straighten out what-ever's left of Toromon, if there is anything. While he was in the palace
with his mother and brother, his very life and sanity were in danger. It was
all we could do."
"I see," said Catham.
"And you're going to prove all this? Why tell me about it in the first
place?"
"Because we need someone with an historical orientation to help us
and advise. The
Triple Being will only help so much, in order not to upset our culture pattern
by introducing extraneous upsetting elements. The first advice we need is what
to do with two youngsters that helped us in our first effort, a boy and a girl.
The boy, Tel, had run away from a small fishing village on the mainland to Toron when he got involved with us. The girl is an acrobat.
They were very helpful to us then, but we don't need them any
more, and it seems a shame to keep them away from society this long. But
they have a tremendous amount of information that might be dangerous especially
to them. And there's one more problem." She turned to Arkor.
"Bring the kids in, will you?"
Arkor turned from the room. He came back followed
by a boy about seventeen with dark skin and sea-green eyes. After the boy came
a girl perhaps a year older and nearly an inch taller. Her skin was tanned the
same as the boy's, but her hair was the color and texture of bleached silk, and
her eyes were fog blue. Both looked surprised at the apparition that was Catham, but they were silent.
"The
special problem is this," the Duchess told him, and reached for a button
on the arm of her chair. At her touch, the lights in the room dimmed to half
their original brightness.
Rolth Catham started
forward in his seat. He was sitting alone in the purple carpeted room—with five
empty, but animated suits of clothes, a woman's sitting in the Duchess's chair,
two men's standing beside it, and the scant garb of the two youngsters hovering
by the door. But though the lights were dim, they were still bright enough to
see that the bodies inhabiting them had vanished.
From
the chair the Duchess's voice, natural and unruffled, continued. "During
the time we were first involved in this affair, the Triple Being went as far as
to make us immune to certain frequencies of radiation by restructuring our crystallization
structure. The side effect, however, was that the index of refraction of our
bodies' substance took a nose dive. Which means that when the light gets below a certain intensity, we disappear . . ." The light went
up, and the five people were back in the room. "So you see the problem.
That demonstration, incidentally, is our only real proof."
"I'm
impressed," Catham said. "No, I don't
believe you. But I will
take it on as a theoretical problem, which might be fun to work on. You want to
know what to do with the kids? Spray them with pigmented viva-foam, turn them
out on the world, and leave them to their own devices. The remaining three of
you concentrate on the Lord of the Flames." Catham
rose. "You can contact me back at the University. I must say it's all very
interesting. But I seriously don't believe it's anything more than a psychotic
fantasy on your part." He smiled his three-quarter smile. "And that's
a shame, your Grace, because you have a terribly vivid imagination. But I will
advise you to the best of my ability, however I can." He stopped.
"Consider this before I go. You say you're responsible for the kidnaping of Prince Let three years ago? The government
finally decided it was Malis. Malis
probably are responsible for Chargill's death—if he
is dead. In your fantasy world, aren't you perhaps responsible for that?" Catham went to the door, opened it, seemed surprised to
find it not locked, and went out.
Arkor, Jon, and the Duchess looked at one another.
"Well,"
said Arkor. "He is serious about advising us,
but he doesn't believe it."
"That's better than nothing," Jon
said.
"Arkor, find out what in the world viva-foam is, and get
hold of some as soon as possible," the Duchess said.
II
Fifteen
copper centi-units,
on top of an empty cardboard crate, had been arranged into a square—minus one
corner.
Then
a hairy fist whammed the surface, the coins leapt, and the three men who had
been kneeling around the box fell backwards spluttering. "What's the
idea?" demanded one with curly brown hair.
"Heyl Hey, you
look at me!" A grin slashed the wide face of the interrupter. Squat,
barrel-broad, with no neck and little chin, he had hair and eyebrows the color
of unraveled hemp. "Look at me!" he bellowed again, threw back his
head, and laughed.
"Aw,
cut it out," whined the green-eyed, heavily freckled kid they called
Shrimp. "Why don't you pick on someone your own size?"
Lug's
squat torso rolled back on his pelvis and his brachy-dactylic
hands slapped at his low, heavy stomach. "I pick
on—" He turned to the third man. "You!"
Waggon, the third man around the crate, had the
same thick physique, only his hair was wiry and black and his forehead even
lower.
"Aw, leave Waggon
alone," Shrimp complained. "We're trying to teach him to play a
game."
"He's
my size," grunted Lug, giving Waggon a playful wack on the shoulder.
Waggon, who had been concentrating on the coins,
looked up surprised, his wide eyes blinking. Very little white showed around
his pupils.
"Leave him alone,
Lug," Shrimp said again.
A
second time Lug belted Waggon's shoulder. Suddenly Waggon rolled to his feet, ropes of muscle knotting along
his shoulders, arms, and thighs. He leaped, and they tumbled to the floor. The
other recruits looked up from their bunks where they sat reading military
pamphlets. One seven foot forest guard who had been leaning by a double-decker
bed peeled himself away from the olive colored wall, and walked toward the two
sprawling Neanderthals. Suddenly he reached for them. There was a howl, another
howl, and then Waggon and Lug were dangling by their
collars from the forest guard's fists. "Why don't you apes leam to do a passable imitation of human beings?" the guard asked in a reasonable voice.
Big-pupiled eyes blinked, fists folded like cats' paws, and the
nearly opposable big toes, sticking through the open-toed boots, curled in. The
forest guard let go, and they bounced to the floor, catching themselves on
their knuckles. They shook themselves like dogs and lumbered off, at once
seeming to have forgotten the incident.
"Look ho," came
a voice from the door.
Everyone
snapped erect as the sergeant entered, followed by three new recruits: a forest
guard with a shaved skull, a dark skinned black-haired boy about seventeen with
vivid sea-green eyes, and an unusually squat Neanderthal who kept blinking.
"New men here," the sergeant said.
"Look ho. Ptorn 047 AA-F." The shaved guard
stepped forward. "Tel 211 BQ-T." Tel,
green-eyed and silent, stepped forward. "Kog 019 N-N." The blinking Neanderthal moved up
now. "All right you guys," the sergeant said, "don't forget
there's an orientation meeting in"—he
looked at the ceiling chronometer—"eleven minutes. When that gong sounds,
hustle!" He turned from the room.
The three newcomers relaxed and tried to
smile as half a dozen men called out perfunctory, "Hello."
Green-eyed
and freckled Shrimp came over. "Hey, any of you fellows interested in a game of chance? Why don't you come over with me and get to know some
of the guys. My name is Archibald Squash. Really.
Imagine a mother naming a kid Archibald. But you can call me Shrimp." He
seemed to be directing his attention more and more toward the Neanderthal. Now
he turned directly to him and said, "Your name is Kog,
right? Well, come on over and join the game."
Tel
and Ptorn looked at each other, then followed Shrimp
and Kog to where another man was arranging coins on
top of the cardboard crate.
"Hi,
Curly," Shrimp said. "This is Kog. Kog, Curly.
Kog wants to play a little game with us, Curly.
That's right, Kog." His enthusiastic
friendliness seemed forced to Tel. But the Neanderthal grinned warmly and
nodded. "You just sit down here," and Shrimp, his hand on Kog's shoulder, pushed him to a squat beside the crate.
"Now this is the way we play— you got any money?—you arrange the coins in
a square, four-by-four, but with one corner missing. Then you take this here deci-unit and just flip it across the box-top so that it hits the coiner, see? And two
coins fly off the far edges of the square, like that. Now we number the coins
on the far side—one,
two, three, four, five,
six, seven—get your money out, Kog—and you bet on two
of them. Let me show you.
I
bet on two and six. Now I flip the coin and—two and five fly off. Here, you get
half a unit. That's cause only half my bet came
in." He placed a half-unit piece in Kog's hand. "Now. You want to try."
"Eh—yeah." Kog
nodded. "What do you call this?"
"Randomax, randy, double-dice, cut-coin, seven-down, take
your pick."
"Randy?" Kog asked.
"Randy," repeated Shrimp. "All right. Now put your money down. Fine.
Your bet?" "Huh? Oh. Eh-two
and six."
Kog flipped, the coin struck the vacant corner,
and the two coins that were neither two nor six flew from the edge.
Shrimp
made a regretful sound and Curly picked up Kog's unit
note.
"Huh?" asked the
Neanderthal.
"Oh,
it's not over," Shrimp said. "That's just a first try. Now we all go
again."
Glittering
coins and crumpled notes landed on the box-top and the coin was flipped again,
then again, and then again.
A
bewildered frown had chiseled itself into Kog's face
when suddenly the smooth-skulled forest guard leaned over the make-shift table
and said levelly, "How about giving me a chance at that?"
Shrimp
looked up, at first surprised, then uneasy. "I was just gonna suggest we break up the game. I mean . . ."
"Come
on," insisted Ptorn. His long arm reached across
Tel's shoulder and his brown fingers squared the coins. Shrimp and Curly
exchanged worried looks.
"Money," Ptorn
said and put a unit note beside the coins.
Curly
said, "I think I'll throw in my rag right now." From around the box
Shrimp kicked him and Curly's hand which had started
leisurely for his winnings jerked back like a lengthened spring released.
"Three
and five," Ptom said. His wide ivory-yellow
index nail struck the milled edge.
Three and five leapt away
from the square.
Ptorn picked up the money. "Two and
six," he said, moving the corner coin back for another shot.
Click-click.
Two and six shot away.
Again
Ptorn crumpled unit notes in his fingers. "Two and four."
"Now wait a minute." Shrimp
interrupted.
"Two
and four."
Click-click.
He
waited while they placed the final bills in his double width palm. Then he
dropped the money in front of Kog. "This is
yours, ape," he said, and walked away.
Shrimp
sucked air between his teeth. "Them God damn big boys," he muttered
looking after the guard. "How do they do it, huh? How? It's a perfectly
fair game, but they win it every time." Suddenly he looked directly at Tel
and smiled. "Hey," he said. "I bet you're from one of the mainland
fishing villages."
"That's right,"
Tel said, smiling back. "How did you know?"
"Your
eyes," Shrimp said. "Green. Like mine. You know, us fishermen got to stick together.
What made you hitch up with the army?"
Tel shrugged. "Nothing else to do."
"That's
the truth," Shrimp said. "Oh, this here is Curly, my partner in crime.
He's a farm boy."
Curly
was still brooding over his randomax losses.
"I'm no farm boy," he grunted. "I ran with a Mali gang in the
Devil's Pot for almost a year."
"Sure,
sure," Shrimp said. "You know, this is a perfectly honest game. On His Majesty's yellow locks, I swear. But
somehow . . ."
A
gong broke the air like china and a metallic voice wedged into their ears.
"All new recruits report to the Stadium of the Stars. All new recruits
report to the Stadium of the Stars."
"That's us," Shrimp said, and among
the others, he and Tel, with Curly behind them, started for the door.
Among the central buildings of Telphar to which the activity of the recruits was
restricted was one structure that sank into the city like an inverted blister.
Large enough to hold ten thousand beneath its canopy of flood-light simulated
constellations, only one section was filled with new restless, rangy soldiers.
On
the dais glinting officers looked like clock-work toys. One approached the
microphone, coughed into it, and as the echo staggered from wall to wall
through the arena, he began: "We have an enemy beyond the barrier. We have
made contact with two intelligent species beyond the radiation barrier, and
both have proved so hostile and abominable to every principle that mankind. . .
."
Among
the six hundred new soldiers, Tel sat, and listened, with more questioning
than some, and not as much as others.
Then
there was free time for the recruits until the next day when they would be
moved to training headquarters. Tel still tagged after Shrimp and Curly.
"How does that game really work?" he finally asked when they were
walking back to the barracks over the raised highway.
Shrimp
shrugged. "Actually I don't exactly know. But somehow, the apes just don't
have a chance. Oh, it's honest. But they just don't seem to win more than one
out of ten. Regular people like you and me, well, we
do all right and get better with practice. But those big guys—just forget it
when they're around. Aren't you coming inside with us?"
They
stopped at the barracks door. "Naw," Tel
said. "I
think I'm going to keep
walking and see what's around."
"I
can tell you it's not much," Shrimp said. "But suit yourself. See you
later."
As
Tel went off, Shrimp started in, but Curly looked after the figure disappearing
down the roadway.
"What are you waiting
for?" Shrimp asked.
"Shrimp, what color
are that kid's eyes?"
"Green," Shrimp
said. "A little darker than mine."
"That's
what I thought too, this afternoon. But I was
looking at them all the way back here, and they're not any
more."
"What color are they
then?"
"That's
just it," Curly said. "They're not nothing.
They're just like he's got two holes in his head."
"Hell, it's
halfway dark. You just couldn't see."
"Oh
yes I could. And I swear there wasn't a thing behind his eyelids. Just holes."
"This
evening air's no good for you, boy," Shrimp said, shaking his head.
"Come on inside and I'll play you an honest game of randy."
Tel wandered up the darkening roadway. He
took a covered ramp that mounted from one spiraling ramp to the next and came
out above most of the surrounding buildings. Only the Central Palace was
noticeably higher than this one. As the roadway wound up to the dark tower, he
could look across the triple railing over the smaller buildings of Telphar.
Below
the city stretched toward the plains, and the plains toward the mountains which
still flickered faintly purple from the radiation barrier along their snaggled edge. Mercury lights suddenly flicked on and
bleached away the .shadows on the ramp. Looking up, he saw a figure perhaps
twenty yards away, another recruit out exploring.
As
Tel approached', he realized the man was shaved bald. Then, coming closer, he
recognized the forest guard who had arrived with him that afternoon.
Ptorn saw him and waved. "How
you doing?"
"Fine," Tel said. "You just out walking too?"
Ptom nodded and looked back over the railing. Tel
slopped beside him and leaned on the top bar. A breeze pulled their sleeves
back from their wrists and tugged nt
their open collars. "Hey," Tel said after a minute. "How did you
work that thing with the randomax game?"
"You wouldn't understand."
"Huh?" said Tel. "Sure I
would. Try me."
Ptorn turned sideways against the railing.
"If you really w.int to know, try and follow this: suppose you're in the
city, siiy in Toron, and
you're on the sidewalk. Now let's say line of
those big trucks Koshar Hydroponics uses to ship
stuff from the docks to the warehouses is coming down the sheet. And let's say
it stops about a quarter of the way Irom the end of
the block. What happens?"
"It stops?"
"Well, no, I don't mean stop exactly.
Let's say it just cuts its motor."
"Then
it goes on rolling." "How far?"
Tel shrugged. "That depends, doesn't it,
on how heavy the truck is, or how fast it is going?"
"Right,"
Ptom said. "But if you were crossing the street,
you could judge pretty accurately whether you'd have time to get over, or even
just about where the truck would stop-once you saw it start to slow down."
"I guess so," Tel
said.
"Well,,
do you realize that when you do that, you're doing unconsciously a problem that
would take a mathematician with pencil and paper who knew the exact weight of
the truck, speed, rate of deceleration, and friction component of the wheels
at least a couple of minutes to solve? Yet you do it in under
half a second with only the inaccurate information your senses can gather in a
moment or two."
Tel
smiled. "Yeah, that's pretty amazing. But what's that got to do with the
game?"
"Just this. You and I can do that. But if you put one of the apes on that street
corner, he'd have to stand there until the truck came to a dead stop before
he'd dare cross over. Oh sure, if you taught him the mathematics and gave him a
pencil, paper, and all the factors, he could figure it out in about the same
time any other mathematician could. But he couldn't just glance at the
decelerating truck and figure where it would stop."
"I still don't quite
see," Tel said.
"Well look—the way you men can just figure out by looking at
things that the apes could never perceive, we can figure out things with just a
glance that you men couldn't see either, like what angle and how hard to shoot
that coin to make the ones we want fly off the edges of the randomax
square. If you can judge the direction and the velocity of the coin, you can
figure the give and play of forces in the matrix and how it'll work out by the
edge."
"I think I
understand," said Tel.
"I
can't explain the mathematics to you, but you can't explain the mathematics of
your slowing car to me."
"I guess not," Tel said. Suddenly
he looked up at the forest guard and frowned. "You know when you said
'men' just before, you made it sound like something that—wasn't you."
Ptorn laughed. "What do you mean? The apes
are part of you, just like you men are part of us."
"There,"
Tel said, "even just now. Can't you hear the way you say it?"
Ptorn was quiet a moment. Then he said, "Yes.
I hear it."
And
the quietness suddenly repelled the youngster. "About the game," he
said. "Could any of—us men, do what you did just guessing?"
Ptorn shrugged. "I suppose some exceptional
minds among you could. But it's really not important, is it?"
"I
guess not," Tel said. "Us men," he repeated. "What do you
call yourselves, if you don't think of yourselves as men?"
Again
Ptorn shrugged. "We think of ourselves as
guards, forest guards. Only the 'forest' isn't so important."
"That's
right. Sometimes you're referred to as forest guards, sometimes as forest men.
Why's that?"
"As
'guards' we guard your penal mines at the edge of the forest and return escaped
prisoners."
"Oh
yes," Tel said. "I'd forgotten." Again he looked over the dark
buildings. "I knew an escaped prisoner once, before I joined the
army." He was quiet for a moment.
"What are you thinking about?" Ptorn asked.
"Huh?"
said Tel, looking up again. "Oh. As a matter of fact I'm thinking about a
necklace."
"A necklace?"
"Yeah,"
Tel said. "It was made of shells, polished sheik that I strung on leather
thongs."
"What's that got to do
with the escaped prisoner?"
"The
girl I gave it to knew the prisoner too. It got broken
once, stepped on. But I fixed it later. It was a pretty necklace. I polished
the shells myself."
"Oh," Ptorn said, a little softly, a little gently.
"What
do you suppose all those lights are way over there at the edge of the
city?" Tel asked.
"I'm
not sure. Maybe they have something to do with the basic training camp. That
looks like it's out in the restricted part of the city, though."
"Yeah,"
said Tel. "But then why would they have lights on if there weren't any
people there?"
"Who knows."
Suddenly he stood straighter. "Hey, look."
"What is it?" Tel asked.
"Can you see? Some of them are going
off, just flicking out."
"Oh
yeah, I just saw one. I wonder how far away they are?"
"I'm
not sure," Ptorn said. "The ones that go
out aren't coming on again. I wonder what it might have to do with basic
training. You know it's supposed to be a pretty tough six weeks."
"I hear it's rough."
"Yeah," said Ptorn.
"But so are the Ketrall."
"You
know," said Tel, hunching his shoulders. "I haven't seen any of—you
guards in the recruits who can read minds, the ones with the triple
scars."
Ptorn stood up from the rail. "Really?"
he said. "What do you know about the telepaths?"
"Nothing,"
Tel said. "I just know . . ." He stopped. "Well, I knew a guy
once, I mean a guard, who could read minds. And he'd been scarred . . ."
"You
know a lot of interesting people, don't you," Ptorn
said. "Did you know that very few of you men know about the telepathic
guards? Very, very few. In fact I'd say there were
only about forty of you who knew."
"You're—not a telepath?" Tel asked.
Ptorn shook his head. "No. I'm not. And
you're right. There are none in the army. They don't draft any."
"I don't usually talk about them,"
Tel said, warily.
"I
think that's good," said Ptorn. "That's
good." Suddenly he dropped his arm around Tel's shoulder. "Come on
back to the barracks with me, kid. I want to tell you a story."
"About what?"
"About a prisoner. I mean about an escaped prisoner."
"Huh?"
They
left the railing and walked toward the ramp, that
would take them back to barracks level. "I used to live near the penal
mines, Tel. Not all of the forest guards patrolled the mines, but if you were
born near them, chances are you would. We're organized there into squadrons,
platoons, sort of a miniature army. Further away the tribes of guards are much
more informal, but near the mines where there's a job to do they have to be
fairly strict. The guy in charge of our platoon was a quiet guard, with three
scars banding his cheek and neck. We would sit around the campfire, talking or
wrestling, but Roq—that was his name—would stand
against a tree and watch. At the time I speak of, it had just gotten dark, and
the sticks on which we had roasted our meat still leaned against the
rock-rimmed fireplace, their tips shiny with grease. I could feel rain in the
air hanging behind the still leaves.
"Then
a branch snapped, leaves brushed one another, and Larta
entered the clearing. Larta was a lieutenant in Frol's platoon that patrolled the woods a mile away. The
left side of her face was also run with triple scars. She pushed a black pelt
from her shoulder so that the swinging fur shimmered with orange firelight.
Silently she and Roq conversed for perhaps ten
seconds. Then, still without looking at the rest of us, they spoke so we would
understand. 'When will they try to escape the mine,' she asked.
"
'Just
before dawn,' Roq said.
"We all listened now.
"
'How
many will try to run,' asked Roq.
" 'Three,' said Larta. 'There is the old man with the
limp. He has been at the mines fourteen years. His right leg was smashed in the
cave-in five years back. He holds hate in his brain like a polished ruby,
flickering behind his eyes with a secreted flame. He is crouching beside the
guard-house steps, rolling a twig between his fingers while he waits, trying
not to think of the pain in his leg, feeling very old. Beside him is the heavy
one. The texture of his mind is like iron and mercury. He is very conscious of
his body, and as he crouches, he is thinking of the roll of fat where his legs bend ;it his waist and his stomach rolls across itself under
his prison uniform. He is conscious of the six freckles on his right cheek and
the ten on his left. There is an appendectomy scar across the right side of his
belly, and he thinks of that now, briefly seeing the white walls of the General
Medical Building with their chrome handles. He has always tried to give the
appearance of an easy, adaptable person around the prison camp, flowing quietly
and precisely into the few new situations that arose. But the determination
with which he worked on this escape—the dirt under his nails is damp and
crumbly, and feeling it roll out between his fingers, he remembers how he was
nearly caught in the tunnel they dug with spoons and shoes and hands even to
get so far as the guard house—the determination is cool and hard. The third
one, the youngest one, with the black hair and the stunned eyes crouches behind
the other two. Think of a smooth pool of water. Then think of something bright
thrust up from below, a fire-blade, its sparks glittering in the surface
ripples. This is how the idea of freedom thrusts from his young, arrogant
mind.' As Larta spoke, the rain began, thin and
gentle through the night.
"Roq said, 'They huddle closer now. A cord is tied across
the guard-house steps in front of the entrance that faces back toward the
shacks. The rear guard always leaves this way a moment before the forward guard
leaves by way of the entrance facing the jungle. The first guard will trip on
the cord and cry out. The second guard will run back to see what happened, and then
they will dash across the spotlit strip into the
trees. Mercury and Iron planned it. The Flicking Ruby tied one end of the
string, and the Sparkling Blade tied the other. They are waiting, alone with
their breathing and the thin rain.' We sat still and waited too. Larta returned to her platoon.
"That's
primarily the story," Ptorn said. "The
actual escape, how they heard the first guard cry out and the second run, how
they sped across the strip and got separated among the dark wet trees; or how
in the darkness I tracked beside the Secret Ruby, heard him limping over the
damp leaves not seven feet away, heard him stop, hesitate, then whisper, 'Hank,
Jon, is that you? For the love of . . .' and then I flicked the hilt of my
fire-blade, and the wet leaves shone with glaring greenness, and he staggered
back and screamed, the ruby of hate confounded in the comers of his eyes; he
screamed again, then fell full face on the soft black earth. I drew the blade away, flicked the hilt again, and the brittle sparks died,
and his body went out. Or how the chubby one screamed, and screamed, and
clutched himself to a dripping trunk, his cheek pressed against bark, and
screamed. And the mercury vaporized, and the iron flooded him with hot liquid
fear. And at last he cried, still clutching the tree, 'Who
are youl God damn it, where are youl
Nol God damn it, come out and show yourself! It's not
fair! Oh please, it's not fair . . .' And we circled
him, and circled closer. Or, how we carried the bodies back at dawn, in the rain,
and left them in the mud outside the shacks—that is really beyond the story,
the real story of the escape."
They
had almost reached the barracks. "Why?" began Tel. "Why did you
say this to me?"
Ptorn smiled. "We only brought back two
bodies. The third one, the youngest, got deterred into the radiation fields
where we couldn't follow him. He should have died. But he didn't. He escaped.
Now you said something about knowing an escaped prisoner, and there's only been
one escapee in the past sixteen years. Also you know about the telepaths. And
besides, your eyes are funny. Did you know that?"
Tel blinked.
"I'm
not a telepath," Ptorn said again. "But any
forest guard would have told you that story if you had said what you did. We
trust each other with information a lot more than you men do. We—perceive
things a little more clearly."
"But I still don't
understand . . ."
"Look.
We're going into basic training tomorrow. In six weeks we'll be off to Kerrall. Until then, friend, keep out of any more random
games. They may not be as random as you think. And keep your mouth shut."
They turned into the
barracks.
Ill
The
island city of Toron is laid out in concentric circles. In the center
along colonnaded streets are the Royal Palace and the towering mansions of the
wealthy merchants and
29
industrialists. Buildings stare wide-windowed at each other, many of the windows
composed of layers of stained glass rotated across one another by hidden
machinery. Brass or marble railed balconies lip the upper stories. Leisurely
people dressed in dark colors wander along the treets.
The
outer ring is the waterfront, piers, wharves, public buildings and warehouses.
Clinging just inside is the section known as the Devil's Pot,^ a raveled
webbing of narrow streets where furious gray alley cats stalk overturned garbage,
and wharf rats are as big as double fists. Living here is the vast laboring
population of Toron, and the less vast but more
vicious underworld of the city, consisting of the roving gangs of Malis that range inward from the island's rim.
Between
the inner and outer rings is a section of commonplace apartments, rooming
houses, and even occasional private dwellings. Here live clerks and craftsmen,
salesmen and secretaries, doctors, engineers, lawyers and supervisors, those
who had worked hard enough and been lucky enough to rise out of the confusion
of the Pot, and those too weak to cling to the center who had been flung off
the whirling hub.
In a
two room apartment in one of these houses, a woman lay on her back, her eyes
closed, her mouth opened, her fingers twined in the bed sheets. She was
intensely conscious of the city on both sides of her. And she was trying not
to scream.
She
clamped her jaws and her eyes snapped open in a doll's mechanical stare. On her
door was a name-plate that said—black letters on yellow metal—Clea Rahsok. Rahsok was her real name spelled backwards. Once her father, at her suggestion, had called a branch company of
refrigeration equipment. "Rahsok".
She had been twelve when she first suggested it to him. Now she was using the
disguise for herself. She had lived between her father's house and the
University until three years ago when she had made three discoveries.
Now
she lived alone, and did very little but walk, read, figure in her notebook,
lie on her back, and try to keep from screaming.
The
first thing Clea had discovered was that someone she
loved, loved with an aching fondness that made the back of her neck tingle,
that made her jaw clench and her stomach suddenly flatten itself whenever she
thought of him (his short red hair, his broad taurine
body, his sudden grin and the deep inside laughter like a bear's growl)—this
someone was dead.
The second thing she had discovered (she had
been working on it for half her stay at the University and nine tenths of the
time that she was supposed to be spending on the government project she had
joined right after she received her degree) was inverse sub-trigonometric
functions and their application to random spatial co-ordinates. The result was
a paper presented to the University and then again before a select board of
government councilors. The conclusion still threaded through her mind: . . and so, gentlemen, it is more
than conceivable that by converting the already extant transit-ribbon, we may
send between two hundred and three hundred pounds of matter anywhere on the
globe with the pin-point accuracy of microns." Anywhere! Anywhere at all!
The third thing that she
had discovered—
—But
something first about her mind. It was a hard, brilliantly honed mathematical
mind. Once she, along with fifty other mathematicians and physicists, had been
handed three pages of radiation data in order to discover a way over, under, or
around it. She had looked at it for three minutes (after having put off picking
it up for over three days while she scribbled in her notebook on her own pet
project) and announced that the radiation was artificial, generated by a single
projector that could be destroyed, and thus solved the
problem. In short, it was a mind that cut through information to the correct
answer even when the incorrect question had been asked—
—She
had discovered the third thing when she had been assigned to work on a small
section of a top secret government project after the presentation of her paper
on sub-trigonometric functions. She was not told what the project was nor the
significance of her part, but her mind, working from Ikt section, had carved and carved at the mystery. It was part of some
immensely complex computor, whose purpose,
apparently, must be—must be— Her body jerked upright on the bed, the sheets
falling from her breasts, and she was breathing very fast in the darkness.
When
she made this discovery, she disappeared. The easiest part of that was the
trivial disguise of her name. The hardest was convincing her father to let her
take this apartment. Between the two was the careful destruction of some
government records; all copies of her contracts to work for the crystallizing
war effort, and the record of her retina pattern on file from her birth. She
banked on the general war confusion to keep them from searching her out. After
she was established in her two small rooms, she methodically began to dull the
edge of her amazing mind.
She
went for longer and longer periods away from her books, tried to ignore the war
propaganda that flooded the city, made as few decisions as possible, and if she
did not succeed in actually blunting her mind, she sufficiently blurred her
perception of its keenness to accomplish the same end.
She
thought a lot about the person who had died, less about sub-trigonometric
functions, and when she came anywhere near the third thing, she would think
immediately about something else, about not screaming, not screaming, keeping
silent and still.
Crumpled on her desk was a poster she had
once peeled from a board fence. Across its green surface, scarlet letters
proclaimed:
We
have an enemy beyond the barrier
Clea put on her bathrobe, walked to the desk, and
started to reach for the poster. Suddenly she turned around, and went into the
front room without turning on the light. Her clothes were over the back of a
chair. Quietly she put them on. Then she went to the door, stepped into the
hall, and went to the stairs. Blue-grey dust wedged into the corners.
At
the front door she saw Dr. Wental trying to get in.
When she opened it for him, he grinned at her, scratched his thin, wrapping
paper colored hair, and crashed into the door-jamb.
"Dr. Wental!" Clea said.
"Are you all right?"
Still smiling, the doctor
nodded vigorously. "Spirits ..."
he said. "You be quiet, now. We have to get upstairs quietly so my wife
won't—" His Adam's apple gave a little leap and he tapped his lips gently
with his fist, looking guilty, "—won't know. Quietly."
His extended arm landed on Clea's shoulder and he
sagged against her as his knees gave in different directions. "Beautiful green spirits, Miss Rahsok.
If you will excuse a terrible pun, I am in really fine . . ." But he
hiccupped again. "But many too many, much too much.
Will you help me upstairs, Miss Rahsok,
quietly?"
Clea sighed, and supported Dr. Wental along the hall. "So my wife won't know,"
he said again. "Oh, this war is a dreadful thing. We have an enemy beyond
the barrier, but what it's doing to us back here, in Toromon
. . ." He shook his head. "You have to work to get ahead and get the
better things in life. But it's hard." He paused to shake his head again.
"Occasionally you just have to let go . . ." At the word
"go" he slipped back down two of the six steps they had negotiated. Clea whispered, "Damn" and clutched the handrail.
"You know," continued Dr. Wental, "all
this increased production, of all sorts of equipment? And a good civilian just
can't get a hold of any of it. I've got a man coming to me tomorrow with a case
of lupus erythermatosis. He was recommended to me by
a specialist. I did some research in it a few years ago, and I came up with a
few things too. But how can you treat lupus erythermatosis
without adrenocorticotropic hormone. You look in the
General Medical Catalogue and there should be enough around to treat an army.
But try to get some and somebody in a white smock tells you, 'I'm sorry.
Private doctors can only get minimum rations during
this period.' What am I going to tell this man. Go
away? I can't treat you? I can't get the drug? And he has as much money as the
sea has salt. I'm an honest man, Miss Rahsok, just tring to get the better things for my family. That's ail, really." They had reached the doctor's door
when suddenly the doctor fell against the wall. The forefinger of his left hand
pressed against his lips for quiet, while he tried to put his thumb into the
print lock.
As Clea went down the hall again, she heard the raspy whisper
behind her, "Quietly, quietly, so my wife won't know."
Outside the breeze from the sea lapped the
houses and wedged into the streets. Her black dress was buttoned tight around
her neck, and her black hair (once it had been braided with a silver chain, and
she had danced in a white dress with a man who had short red
hair, whose shoulders were box broad, whose words were quietly wise, whose
laugh was like a bear's growl, who wore a military uniform— and was dead—her
black hair was tight back in a
bun that took her fifteen minutes each morning to brush, comb, and roll up
straight and lacquer stiff.
Carefully,
so carefully she unhooked the top of her collar, and as the flap fell open, she
sucked coolness into her chest, past her stomach, deep against her diaphragm.
She walked on more easily.
"Hey,
lady."
She
jumped, but it was a policeman. As he approached, his uniform changed from the
dull color of the undersides of maple leaves to bright olive as he stepped into
the ring of light from the street lamp.
"Isn't
it sort of late for you to be wandering the streets like this? Malis from over in the Pot beat up a man and near killed
him last night just six blocks from here. You'd better go on home."
"Yes sir," Clea said.
The
officer walked on, but Clea stood a moment. Then she turned and started away. When she had gone
twenty steps, she glanced back, perhaps to see if the officer were watching.
Under
the street lamp where she had been a minute before was a girl with silken white
hair. Clea frowned just as the girl dodged to the side—and vanishedl
Clea
opened her mouth. The moment the girl had stepped out of the direct beam of the
lamp, she had disappeared, gone out like a candle flame. Clea
blinked. Then she turned and hurried toward home.
Halfway
she stopped. About three blocks down, she recalled, was an all-night bar with a monumental array of pin-ball,
slot, and bowling machines.
She came home at six o'clock the next morning. The bartender for the last two
hours had simply leaned on the counter and watched the woman with the tight bun
and the high black dress who drank only soft drinks and amassed phenomenal
scores on the gaming machines.
A
woman with a scarf around her head was setting out a garbage can in front of
the building.
"Up
bright and early, Miss Rahsok?" asked the woman,
wiping her hands on her checked housedress. "It's good to get up early and
take a walk. Shows a proper attitude. With this war on
it's so hard to stay cheerful. I just wish we could send letters to our boys,
or hear what it was like, or send packages. Then it would be so much easier.
Sometimes I just think, 'Oh, Jommyl Jommyl If you could just be here for a . . .' But it's so
hard. Now you take my oldest daughter, Renna. You'd
think she would appreciate how hard it is. What with all the really eligible
young men off beyond the barrier a girl has to be particularly careful about
who she knows, and whom she goes with. I keep trying to introduce her to nice
boys, but she will just pick up with anybody. Oh, it's awful. If a girl's going
to get ahead, she's got to be careful. Renna is
seeing some dreadful boy named Nonik. Vol Nonik. And do you know where
his parents live?" She pointed toward the Pot. "And he doesn't even
live with them—"
"Excuse
me," Clea interrupted. "I—I have some work
to do and I've got to get upstairs. Excuse me."
"Oh,
of course, of course," said the woman, stepping back from the doorway.
"But you know a girl can't be too careful."
Inside
the apartment, Clea stood by the closed door, thinking,
'His arms were strong. He caught me in his arms once when we were walking
single file along the stone wall by the wharf. His laugh was like a bear's
growl; he laughed when we watched the two squirrels cluttering at one another
on the campus lawn the day he came to visit me at University Island, and his
words were quiet and wise. He told me, 'You have to decide what you want.' And
I said, '1 want to work on my project with the sub-trigonometric functions, and
I want to be with you, but if this war . . .' And suddenly I realized how
profound a thing he'd told me then and realized that having said what I wanted
out loud, to him, they were so much easier to have, even though the war . . .
the warl He's dead!"—and she stopped thinking.
On
the desk she saw her slide rule and her notebook sticking out from under the
crumpled poster, and she remembered, "...
in brief, what all this mathematics boils down to, gentlemen, is that these
inverse sub-trigonometric functions do apply to the random spatial co-ordinate
system I've outlined and define it precisely; and so, gentlemen, it is more
than conceivable that by converting the already extant transit-ribbon, we may
send between two hundred and three hundred pounds of matter amywhere
on the globe with a pin-point accuracy of microns." Anywhere! Anywhere at
all!—and she stopped thinking.
She
closed the window, lay down on the bed, and again memories flooded her mind.
She had begun work on the computor not long after the
paper. Something for an imput that will take information from one and a half to
three and a quarter kilo-specs, and can
handle at least forty thousand data; that's the first thing you can work on. Quite idly she assumed that it must be an imput that takes information directly from the human brain,
seeing as the neo-Neander-thal's
brain energy had just been measured at one and a half kilo-specs while the
strange cortex of the brains of the forest guards produced up to three and a
quarter. No, it was not an obvious correlation to make. But she had the information
and made the connection as someone else might reason that a thermometer whose
specifications stated that it read at least ten degrees higher than
ninety-eight point six would be employed in taking abnormal human temperatures.
Later on she saw on a colleague's desk a schematic for a switch-over circuit
for the same voltage differential that would change an input to an output. She
pondered the removing or establishing of up to forty thousand bits of
information directly into a human mind. She solved the problem of the forty
thousand data by getting tri-faceted tetron crystals
to respond to a frequency/multi-frequency hum and coding the overtones. With
ten crystals, each about the size of a pin-head, she achieved a sorting system
that would handle sixty-seven thousand, one hundred and forty-nine data (three
to the tenth power) and was quite proud of her margin. Once, while exploring
the far wing of the building where she worked, she saw through an open door
where an artist had left pinned to the wall several sketches of grotesque,
imaginary marsh-scapes, and some structurally
impossible anatomical dissections of hideous imaginary insects. Two weeks later
rumor got around that two artists working in the building had undergone prefrontal
lobotomy at the insistence of the government psychiatrists. Some other tiny
things: a messenger carrying those same sketches and a spool of magnetic tape
into an office two flights down; what might have been the same spool changing
hands between a white-smocked technician and a military official; her own
inquiry after the pictures: "Oh those? They were burned. They weren't
needed any more," said the violet-eyed lab technician; what seemed like
the sudden disbandment of the entire project which resulted in her being set to
something else; the first reports from the conversion of the transit-ribbon
from wire- to wireless-matter transmitter; and then a conversation at lunch
with an acquaintance from an entirely different department: "... doing work on a weird computor. It puts information right into the brain with
tapes. I can't imagine what a human brain is going to do with sixty-seven
thousand bits of information, but that's what its output is. Can you
imagine?" Clea imagined. One or two other minor
details came long. Then one day she was walking by the wharves late one evening
when the sky was the hue of split sapphires between the long red clouds, when
it hit her: one—he was dead! two—anywhere, anywhere at
all! three— She stopped thinking. She was going to
scream.
Think
about something else, about not screaming, about being still, about nothing. .
. . Slowly the tension eased from her throat, from her fists, from her calves,
and she slept.
Late that afternoon she got up, washed her
teeth, hands, wrists, neck, and face. She ate. Then she went out to buy the
next day's food. Somewhere among all this she had worked out a novel way of
calculating every other place of pi, but she had forgotten it by the time she
again wandered along the evening streets with darkness rolling toward her.
The
first sound that jerked her mind to the surface was a cry to her left. There were footsteps in the
alley beside her, a thud, another cry, then several
sets of footsteps. At first she started to turn away, but something made her go
forward.
She looked around the corner, then pressed back against the wall. Malis!
Two men and then a woman ran forward to where an already indistinguishable
number of number of people were brawling in the
street. Someone jumped back, a man was kicked hard in
the stomach and rolled over the pavement. A woman screamed, cursed, and
staggered with hands over her eyes.
Someone
broke loose from the fray, a girl—with silver-white hair!
Clea felt something catch in her stomach. The
girl ran in a diagonal taking her vaguely in Clea's
direction. Then two men were suddenly in front of her. Something fanned white
sparks as one man raised his arm.
A fire-blade!
As
the arm descended, Clea saw the reflection near her
feet, a thin white line against a disk of water. She reached down, grabbed the
bucket from beneath the rickety drain pipe at her side and dashed the contents
over the figures. The power-blade shorted, steamed, and went out, falling
harmlessly across the white-haired girl's arm.
But
now her safe position behind the drain was known. The girl, dancing back,
looked at Clea, and Clea
looked back. Her eyes! She thought. Good lord, she has no eyes!
But
someone was coming toward her now: the man with the fire-blade. Water shown on
his face and his grin looked like the split rind of a rotten kharba fruit. She kicked at him and dodged, thinking (the
way she would think of the fluctuation in the second derivative of a forth
degree log function, sharply, coolly) of how he supported his weight mostly on
his left foot and used his right to propel himself; and when she was about to
be overtaken, she whirled to face him and brought the side of her shoe down
hard on the top of his right foot—he was barefooted—at the same time jamming
her elbow in the darkness that was his stomach.
As he went down under her double attack, she
fled, hearing her own footsteps, then others in counterpoint, lighter,
overtaking hers. Again she whirled, thinking, I will throw myself in whomever it is and bite for the neck; they won't expect
that.
But
she stopped when she turned, the ludicrous thought rising in her mind like a
thin blade from beneath a smooth surface: but she does have eyes, bright blue
eyes!
They were under a street lamp.
"Come
on," the white-haired girl said. "Down this way.
They're still coming!"
They
turned the next corner, ran the block, dodged down two more alleys, then slowed.
Clea jerked the air into her lungs, trying to
form the words, All
right, who are you, her
tongue working over them as over an anticipated taste, when the girl said.
"Hey, you fight well."
Surprised,
Clea looked at the girl and said instead, "Thank
you." Then she said. "Your arm! What's wrong
with your arm?"
"Huh?"
She was holding her left hand across her right shoulder. "Oh,
nothing."
"You're
hurt," Clea said. She looked up at the sign.
"Look, I live eight blocks from here. Come on up and I'll put something
on it," and, silently, she added, find out who you are.
"Sure, Dr. Koshar,"
the girl said. "Thanks." Clea jumped, or
something inside her did, but she started walking.
In front of her door, her finger poised
before the print lock, Clea asked, "Who sent you
after me? And call me by my first name."
"All right," the girl said.
The door swung in and Clea
turned on the light. "What's your name?"
"Alter," said the girl.
"Sit down over there, Alter, and take
your blouse off." Clea went into the bathroom
and returned with three small bottles, a roll of tape, and one of gauze.
"You haven't told me who sent you yet. Ehhh—that
looks like someone took a vegetable grater to your shoulder."
"I
guess you shorted the blade, but it was still a little hot." She said.
"You haven't let me tell you yet."
"I
wonder where they get those
weapons anyway? Only the guards and the military are
supposed to have them."
"From
the guards and the military," Alter said,. She
winced as transparent liquid flowed across the raw skin and relaxed as red
liquid followed it. "Nobody sent me here, really."
"Maybe
I really don't want to know." Suddenly the brittle tone she was trying to
maintain broke and warmth flooded from beneath. "What's {his?" she
asked, fingering a loop of leather thongs from the girl's neck on which were
strung brightly polished shells of green, red, and golden browns.
"A boy gave it to
me," Alter said. "It's just a necklace."
"It's been broken
once," Clea said. "But it's been fixed.
"That's right,"
Alter said. "How did you know?"
"Because
there are cuts in the surface of the leather around the shells on the right
hand side, as if something heavy came down on it and crunched the pieces on
that side against the leather."
Alter
looked up, her wide eyes like turquoises behind her tanned face. "That's right, someone stepped on it—once." Then she asked,
"Why did you tell me that?"
"Because I'm astute. And I want you to know it." Crisscross, criss-cross,
four strips of tape went over the edges of gauze padding on Alter's
shoulder. Clea went to the freezer, took out some
fresh fruit, and brought it to the table. "You
hungry?"
"Un-huh,"
Alter said, and fell on the fruit, looking up once to say a mouth-filled,
"Thank you." When she was about half finished, Clea
said, "You see if the government sent you, there's no reason for my even
trying to get away. But if somebody else did, then. . . ."
"Your
brother," Alter said. "And Arkor,
and the Duchess Petra."
"What about my
brother," Clea said softly.
"He
didn't send me," said Alter biting into the fruit, "Exactly. But they
told me where you were, and so I decided to come around, and see what kind of
person you were."
"What
kind of person am I?" "You fight well," Alter grinned. Clea smiled back. "How's Jon?" "Fine,"
said Alter. "All in one piece."
"In
three years I only heard from him twice. Did he have ii message?"
Alter
shook her head.
"Well,
I'm glad he's alive,"' said Clea, moving the
bottles together on the table.
"What
they're trying to do with the war . . ."
"I
don't want to hear about it," Clea stood up,, and took the bottles back in the bathroom. "I don't
want to hear anything about the damned war." When she closed the medicine
chest, she looked in the mirror for the length of a held breath.
When
she came out, Alter had gone to the desk, pushed aside the crumpled poster, and
was looking through the note-hook. "What's
all this?"
Clea shrugged.
"You invented the thing that sends you
over the barrier, didn't you?" Alter asked after a moment. Clea nodded.
"Is
that what this is about?"
"That's
just fooling around."
"Can
you explain how the barrier thing works?"
"It
would take me all night, Alter. And you wouldn't understand it anyway."
"Oh,"
Alter said. "I can't stay up all night because I have lo
see about a job tomorrow."
"Oh?"
asked Clea. "Then I guess you can sleep here.
What were those Malis after you for?"
"I
was out," Alter said. "And so were they. That's how they work."
Clea
frowned. "And you don't have any place else to
slay?"
"There
was a place I thought I could sleep at, an inn over in the Pot, but it's been
torn down. So I was just wandering around. I've been away for a while."
"Away where?"
"Just away." Then she laughed. "You tell me about how
that
over the barrier thing works, and I'll tell you about where I was. Your brother
was there."
"It's a deal," Clea
said. "But in the morning."
Alter
went over to the, sofa and lay down with her face to the back so that her
bandaged shoulder was up. Clea went to her own bed.
Before she sat down, without turning, she said, "I thought I saw you
following me last night."
"That's right," came
the voice from the sofa.
"And suddenly you disappeared."
"That's right."
"Explain."
"Ever hear of viva-foam?"
"Neither had I until four days ago. And
until this morning I never had my hands on any. It's a plastic pigmented spray
with pores. I'm covered with it. Otherwise, in dim light you couldn't see
me."
"You'll have to go into that in more
detail tomorrow."
"Sure."
Clea sat down on the bed. "Those Malis were just out? Where do they come from? What do they
want?"
"Aren't
you sort of a Mali too?" Alter asked after a moment. "How do you
mean?"
"A
malcontent," Alter said. "Why are you all holed up here, hiding from
everybody like this? With some people it turns inward, with others it turns
out, I guess."
"You know everything, don't you." She chuckled.
The sound of a yawn came from the sofa.
What
am I doing, Clea wondered, and thought about that,
instead of screaming.
Early morning light slapped a red-gold streak
across the gray wall. Someone was in the bathroom. Water crashed against the
porcelain washbowl.
Then Alter walked out of the bathroom.
"Hi," she grinned.
"Where are you off to?"
"The
circus," Alter said. "To get a job. Want to
go with me?"
Clea frowned.
"Come on," Alter said.
"Getting out will do you good."
Clea
stood up, went into the bathroom, washed her face, and came out coiling the
hank of black hair laboriously into a tight, black bun.
"Braid it," Alter
said from behind her.
"What?"
"Why
don't you braid it? It'll take half the time and it won't look so—" She
gave a nameless little shudder.
Clea let her hair fall to her shoulders again,
then reached up and divided it into three.
When
they came out on the street, Clea's collar was open
and her hair hung in a thick black braid over her shoulder. She was smiling.
Only a few people were out. The sun set crowns of light on the central towers
of the city. Gold caught on a balcony railing, snagged on a bright window as
the light descended to street level.
"Which direction?" Clea asked,
pausing to look at the towers.
"This
way."
They walked between the
buildings toward the Devil's Pot.
In
that crushed rim of the city a vacant lot was a rare thing. The Triton
Extravaganza ("The Greatest Spectacle of Entertainment on Island, Sea, or Continent") had commandeered the
one two-block area and set up its emporium. Criss-cross
ropes webbed green and purple canvas against the sky. Cage upon cage lined one
side of the lot: pumas, an eight-legged bison, a brown bear, a two-headed fox,
a giant boar, and a five thousand gallon aquarium housed a quivering albino
squid. In another, tiger sharks nosed the glass corners, while further on the
octopus raveled and unraveled over blue sand.
A
cove of aerial artists clad in bright tights, ran from one tent, and
disappeared into another. "Who?" Clea began.
"Trapeze
workers," Alter said. "They call themselves the Flying Fish. Corny. Come on. I've got to see Mr. Triton."
"What's
over there?" Clea asked as they started toward a
large wagon at the end of the lot with its great papier
mach6 ucptune-bearded, big-bellied, artd beaming from the roof.
"Huh?
That's the chow wagon. Hey, why don't you go over there and get something to
eat while I see Mr. Triton. I'll join you later but I have to audition on an
empty stomach, or there'll be hell to pay."
"Well,
I—" But Alter was up the steps of the big wagon; and Clea
was alone. The morning was noisy and cool.
She
turned toward the cook-tent where a green and yellow awning spread over wooden
tables. Hot grease sizzled on the grill. Clea sat
down across from a man in a purple shirt sipping chowder from a terracotta mug.
He gave her a grin that pulled the sudden net of wrinkles tight around his
smoky eyes.
A waitress at her shoulder said, "What'll
it be, come on now, I don't got all day, please?"
"Ah, what do you have?"
The
waitress frowned. "Fried fish, boiled fish, broiled fish, fish roe, fish and chips—special is eggs and fried fish, fifty centiunits."
"The special," Clea said.
"Fine,"
the waitress smiled. "You're in for a surprise. It's good today."
The
man across the table grinned again and asked, "What sort of act do you
do?"
Just then a woman in a brief spangled jumper
sat down beside the man and said, "Is she one of the new auditioners?"
"I'm a clown,"
the man volunteered.
"Oh—I—a—don't have an
act."
Both the man and woman
laughed.
"I mean I don't have
an act in the circus."
They
laughed again and the woman nodded. "I just train seals, honey, so don't
hassle."
Just
then the waitress slipped her a plate of bursting white fillet and scrambled
eggs with butter streaming through them, down to the white crock plate. She
picked up the fork, and the clown said, "Honey, you enjoy eating, don't
you."
Surprised, Clea looked at him, and then down at herself.
"No,
I don't mean your weight. I mean the way you look at food. Someone who looks at
food like that, like it was the very special experience it is, that sort of
person never has to worry about his figure." He turned to the seal
trainer. "You know what I mean? Another look, and
you know why they're fat as a tug. Or if their eyes get slightly narrow and
their mouths purse in, then you've got the reason for their rail thin bodies.
But the look you gave—" he said, turning back to Clea.
"Oh, shut up," the seal trainer
said. "You start talking and we'll be here all day." Clea and the two circus folk
laughed. Then the clown said, "Hey," and was looking over Clea's shoulder and far behind her.
She turned.
Across
the lot someone had set up a trampoline. In evenly paced
leaps, a white-haired figure vaulted and spun against the blue sky: back triple
somersault, front triple somersault, half gainer, recovery, full gainer, recovery, jack-knife opening backwards to a reverse swan,
triple back, then triple front again.
"She's good!" the
clown said.
The seal trainer nodded.
Triple
forward, triple forward, swan, triple back. Then a straight
candle through a quadruple back into a full gainer, closing with a double
forward before she hit the elastic for the last time.
People
over the entire lot had stopped to look. Now roustabouts, rubes, sidewalls,
and performers set up a scattering of applause.
Then
Alter was coming toward the cook tent. Beside her, a man had his arm around her
shoulder. He was elderly, rotund, and a great cotton-ball beard fluffed across
his chest.
Clea rose to make room for them at the table, then saw to her surprise that everybody else at the table
was standing too. There was a sudden, uneven, but cheerful chorus of, "Hello,
Mr. Triton. Good morning Mr. Triton."
"Sit
down, sit down," proclaimed Triton expansively, and chairs slid back into
place. Now he continued talking to Alter. "So you'll join us the day after
tomorrow. Very fine. Very fine.
Do you have a place to stay, because you're perfectly welcome to sleep on the lot."
"Thank
you," Alter said. "Oh, this is the friend that I was telling you
about."
Surprise
pulled down the corners of Clea's mouth before she
caught it back up in a defensive smile.
"You're an accountant, right? Well, I
could use somebody to get the books in order. And we will be doing quite a
business on the mainland torn-. Be here with the kid—"
"But
I—" Clea began, looking to Alter who was
grinning again.
"—the
day after tomorrow," finished Mr. Triton, "and the job's yours. Good
morning, everybody. Good morning." Then he paused, looked hard at Clea, and said, "You know, I like the way you look. I
mean the way you look at things." Then he called again,
"Good morning."
"See,
what did I tell you," said the clown to the seal trainer on the other side
of the table.
"But I—" Clea repeated. Mr. Triton was walking away.
I don't want a job—I don't
think."
Alter
was shaking hands with the seal trainer, the clown, and even the waitress who
were congratulating her on her audition. A moment later she looked around to
say something to Clea, but the black-haired woman
was gone.
Clea walked, looking neither at the smoky faces
of the clapboard buildings on her left, nor the screaming boy hurling chunks of
pavement at a three-legged dog to her right. She looked neither at the Uttered
gutters nor at the pale towers that rose in the center of the city. She walked
straight ahead until she reached her apartment building.
"Oh,
Miss Rahsok, there you are. Out early as usual."
It was not yet eight-thirty.
^Oh-eh-hello."
"Like
I always say," said the woman, adjusting her head scarf, "it's always
good to get out bright and early." Suddenly the expression on the woman's
face reversed itself, and she repeated. "Speaking of bright and early, do
you know what my daughter Renna—well, she snuck out
of here at sunrise this morning, and I know she's run off to spend the day with
that Vol Nonik character.
We were arguing about him last night. What are his prospects? I asked her.
After all, I'm a reasonable woman. What does he intend to do with himself? And
do you know what she told me? He writes poemsl And that's all! Well, I had to laugh. I have a surprise for
her though, that I'm sure will drive this Nonik individual out of her head. I got an invitation for
her to the Victory League Ball. I had to wrangle with Mrs. Mulqueen
for half an hour. But if Renna goes she'll meet some
nice young man and forget this idiot boy and his idiot poems. Why isn't a young
man like that off in the army anyway? We have an enemy beyond the barrier, and
I ask you—"
"Excuse me," Clea said. "Excuse me, please."
"Oh,
of course. I
didn't mean to keep you. Good morning."
But Clea had already pushed past and was walking up the stairs.
We have an enemy beyond the barrier. She thought of the poster crumpled on her
desk, and like the stimulus of a conditioned reflex, it released.
His
arms strong, confident around me as his laughter and wisdom were confident, his
bright eyes blinking in sudden sunlight, and the bear growl tenderness—he's
dead. . . .
We
may send between two hundred and three hundred pounds of matter anywhere on the
globe with a pin-point accuracy . . . Anywhere at all.
. . .
That
computer, what else could they use it for, that insanely programed,
crazy, random. . . .
Then
she had slammed the door behind her, razoring through
the thought she had been thinking and the scream that had been building in her
throat. She leaned against the door and bit into the breath that plunged again
and again into her lungs so hard they hurt.
She
did not go out again all day. It was not until midnight that she managed to
make herself leave the room for a walk. But as she reached the stairs, she
heard a crash. Someone had just crumpled at the foot of them.
Frowning,
she hurried quickly down. Then the someone uncrumpled slowly, grinned sheepishly at her, and put a
finger to his lips. "Shhhh.
Please, shhhh. So my wife won't know."
"Are you all right,
Doctor Wental?"
"Of
course I'm all right." Then his Adam's apple lunged upward. "Oh,
excuse me. I'm perfectly all right. Really in very fine—"
"So I gather. Just a moment. Here you go."
They
started up the stairs, the doctor chuckling. "Oh, the
trials and tribulations that a man must go through. Oh,
the trials." He gave another burp. "Got that
poor old lupug erythermatosis
case in this afternoon. Did I say poor? Excuse me. I meant "bloody
rich.' In a month he'll be swollen as a blowfish. But what can you do when
General Medical won't give out any adrenocorticotropic
hormone? Gave him a shot of good old saline solution with a
bit of food coloring. It certainly won't hurt him and I charged him
fifty units. He'll be back tomorrow. Maybe I'll be able to get some by then.
But it's terribly hard, Miss Rahsok. I could almost
cry."
As
they reached the door, Dr. Wental motioned for
silence a final time. She left him fumbling for the print lock. When she
reached the front door, she stopped.
This
time she did not think of her three discoveries. She thought instead, very
briefly, about Renna's mother, Renna,
and Vol Nonik. She thought
about Dr. Wental, Dr. Wental's
patient, and Dr. Wental's wife. Outside inky
blackness pressed against the j*lass door, but beyond she could just hear the
last faint tinkle of the calliope from the circus blocks away. She turned, and
went back up to her room.
The
next morning, her hair in a braid, her collar opened back from her throat, she
walked along the deserted street toward the circus lot. Morning chill cooled
the shadowed half of her face while the sun stroked the other with yellow
fingers. The sea smell came in strongly from the wharves, and she was smiling.
As
she walked by the fence that rimmed the already bustling lot, she saw someone
coming toward her. A flash of silver white hair, and Alter, laughing, ran
toward her and caught her hand. "Gee, I'm glad you came back."
"Why
shouldn't I?" Clea said. "Though
it was touch-and-go for a while. Why didn't you come back to my place?
You could have stayed there. You had me worried."
Alter
looked down. "Oh," she said. "I thought you might be angry. That
job business was sort of a funny thing for me to pull." With one hand
Alter was fumbling with her necklace.
"What possessed you to
tell Mr. Triton I wanted a job?"
"It
just hit me that it might be fun. And maybe you would get a kick out of
it."
"Well thanks. Hey, I hope your friend
who gave you that necklace comes around some day. Did he put them at
logarithmically increasing distances on purpose?"
"Huh?"
asked Alter. "Oh, no, I don't think so. He's off in the war now. Hey, did
I say something?"
"The
war?
No—he can't—"
"What is it?"
"Nothing," Clea
said. Suddenly she put her arm around Alter's
shoulder and gave a friendly squeeze. "Are you sure you're all
right?"
Clea
took a breath and let her arm fall away. "I'm sure," she said.
They walked together into
the lot.
rv
The
next day Tel
began basic training.
"All
right, you guys. Split up into your respective groups and report to your
instruction rooms."
He
came into a large classroom the far wall of which was covered with charts of
machinery. There were no labels on the charts. Across the front wall stretched
a full-color unappetizing swamp-scape, wreathed in
mist and spiked with serpentine, leafless vegetation. A loudspeaker in the
front of the room suddenly announced in a friendly voice (friendly, though
oddly sexless, he noticed) "Take your seats everyone. We are beginning
your basic training."
The recruits shuffled to
their places at the metal desks.
"You
are in the wrong seat, Private Rogers," said the loudspeaker affably. "Two to your left."
A
baffled blond boy looked up, then dutifully moved two
seats over.
"I
am going to read a list of names out loud," continued the speaker.
"Every one whose name I call must leave here and report to room 46-A. That
is two flights up and along the corridor' to your right. Now, Malcon 831 BQ-N, Motion 601 R-F, Orley
015 CT-F . . ." Everyone looked a little puzzled, but the named recruits
rose and went out the door.
When nearly half the room was emptied, the
loudspeaker said. "Now, those of you who are left take your earphones and
put them on. Now look into your vision-hoods."
Tel
slipped his earphones over his ears and rested his forehead on the support
above the masked hood on the table. The magnified screen before him flickered
with merging lights, misty and indistinct, mostly blues and greens, faint red
blushes here and there, a tide
drifting slowly, almost too slowly.
Windy
music came through the phones. Then a gruff but pleasant masculine voice began:
"We have an enemy beyond the barrier. We have been able to reach past the
radiation barrier only a few years, but already we have discovered a menace of
such inhuman and malignant design . . ."
The
voice droned and the colors coalesced, forming at last a recognizable beach.
White sand arched away to the horizon, blue waves broke into white froth that
scudded over the beach. A girl with a remarkable figure wearing a very skimpy bathing suit came to the water's edge, touched her toe to
the foam, then suddenly turned, seemed to see him, and began to run, laughing,
toward him. The breeze tossed her auburn hair. Her Hps
parted and he could hear the waves.
Dr-r-r-r-r-r-r-.
. . .
Tel
jumped back from the masked screen, slamming his spine into the back of the
chair. He tore the earphones from his head. The relief as they clattered to the
desk was as if two needles of pure sound had been ripped from his ear. His eyes
still flickered with the after image of the blinding white light that had
suddenly flooded the screen. Around him the room was in confusion, and
somewhere a woman was laughing.
The
laugh articulated itself, became a voice.
"All right. All right.
Resume your seats in an orderly manner. Resume your seats." Many of the
soldiers had apparently leaped from their chairs.
The
feminine voice continued over the loudspeaker. "Your reaction to that last
problem was not what we hope it will be at the end of your six week course. You men who just came in"— Tel
now realized that a group of completely bewildered recruits who had just come
in were standing by the door— "did they look to you like anyone ready to
fight the enemy beyond the barrier?"
Tel looked around feeling
embarrassed and uncomfortable.
"AH
during your basic training," continued the lilting alto, "you will be
presented with problems of this nature. We want calmness, alertness, and quick
reactions; not confusion and disorder. Now sometimes the problems may not be as
obvious as that, but watch for them. Remember, we want calmness, alertness, and
quick reactions. Will you recruits who have just arrived please take your
seats. Everyone regard your screens and place your head phones on."
Tel
noted as he bent forward that the half of the class who had been in the room
the whole period were a lot slower in putting on their earphones than the
newcomers.
On
the magnified screen an explanation was in progress concerning a piece of
equipment called 606-B. He was shown in detail how to take it apart, put it
together, and keep its numerous parts, mechanical and electronic, in smooth
order. But somehow (perhaps he missed it during the twenty seconds at the
beginning when he'd hesitated over the earphones) no matter how hard he
concentrated, he hadn't the faintest idea what 606-B was used for. But by the time
the film had continued for forty minutes he was sure he could have put one of
the damn things together in his sleep.
A
very gentle bell signaled the end of the period, and everyone raised his head.
Tel checked his program card for his next room and got up to go. Apparently all
the newcomers were assigned to stay in the same room.
"Hey,"
someone whispered, and Tel turned at the door. In the corner seat among the
remaining recruits sat Shrimp. Tel nodded to him, but Shrimp looked perplexed.
"Hey," he whispered again. So Tel went over to him. "What the
hell did they do to you when we came in? You guys looked like—"
"No
talking back there!" The voice from the loudspeaker this time was
definitely masculine. "You in the back there, get a move on. Proceed
quietly and quickly to your next class."
Tel left the room quickly.
Two
flights up he entered a room nearly identical to the one he'd left. Again the
walls were covered with charts of nameless machines. The Marsh-scape spread across the front of the room. He was looking
for the 606-B when a fatherly, middle-aged voice announced from the
loudspeaker: "Everyone sit down. I am going to read a list of names out
loud. All those I call will please report to room 51-D. Now, Ritter 67 N-T, Ptorn 047 AA-F, Tynan 811 NA-T .
. ."
Tel
hadn't even realized Ptorn was in the same room with
him.
After lights-out they talked for a while in
the dark.
Shrimp: "Hey, Lug,
what did you learn today?"
Lug
(grunting from the bunk beneath): "To put it together, take it apart,
keep the central shaft vertical. Aw, go to sleep."
Tel: "Hey, was that
the 606-B?"
Lug:
"Seven thirty something or other. Go to sleep. I'm tired."
Shrimp
(calling upward to Ptorn): "What did you big
boys learn about today?"
Ptorn: "Not enough to talk about now. We've
got to be up at
six tomorrow. We have an enemy beyond the barrier, remember?"
Shrimp: "Yeah, I remember. G'night."
Ptom: "Night."
"Tel:
"Hey Lug, what's the seven thirty something used for, huh?"
Lug: (A yawn from the lower
berth; then snoring.)
There
is the gentle sound of breathing, someone coughs. Someone turns over and the
snoring stops. Then silence, as Tel's ears filled with sleep.
The
next week the platoon was shown a documentary film on Ketrall.
The men filed into the auditorium and took their seats. A few put their knees up against the backs of the chairs in front of them; others puffed on the
plankton cigarettes they had been issued. Tel had never found the taste of
these particularly pleasant. They contained some mildly tranquilizing drug that
only made him dizzy. The lights darkened; the screen flickered, and without
titles the movie began.
The
opening shot Tel recognized as a foggy swamp-scape
similar to the ones at the head of so many of the class rooms. Green mud sucked
and bubbled around the stalks of twining plants. Mist scarfed
over the silt and writhed about. The camera shifted to a more solid stretch of
land, passed by a boulder, a depression in the ground, a fragment of machinery.
Was it the 606-B? The camera moved too quickly for him to be certain. At last
it stopped in front of the ruins of an army barracks. One of the walls was
burned away and the roof sagged. Slowly the camera dollied through the charred
opening into the hut.
A
man sits in a chair, most of his intestines hanging over the arm. He has no
head. Several bunk beds are overturned in the corner. On a crumpled mound of
bedding is a pile of six corpses. The camera dollies out of the shack. Propped
against the outside wall, his legs at insane angles is a grinning soldier. His
eyes are dark holes, and a black insect scurries over his lower lip and down
his chin.
The
camera moves on past a wall composed of burlap gravel bags. Through the
thickening mist Tel can make out barbed wire strung across the wall. Fog closes
across the camera lens. Then the scene cuts.
Through
the haze Tel can make out a row of huts similar to the gutted one in the previous
scene. A few men are walking around.
Close-up
shot of a young soldier in need of a shave. He smiles at the camera, blinks,
and rubs his chin with greasy fingers. Full shot of the same
soldier. He is standing beside a complicated looking machine (That certainly
wasn't the (i06-B, Tel thought. Or was it?) He scratches his chest, looks
embarrassed, then goes back to fixing the machine.
Cut
to shot of barracks building. A group of men have spread boards over the muddy
ground. They squat or sit cross-legged on the boards in an irregular circle. Close-up .shot of the center of the circle. Someone is
setting up a square of fifteen centiunit pieces with
the corner missing. (There is relieved laughter through the auditorium.
"Two und six," someone calls out. Tel laughs too). Suddenly, at some
signal which the audience cannot hear, the men look up from their game. Someone
scrapes the coins into his palm, and they quickly run off. Shot of the men
running across the clearing before the shacks. Shots of men
climbing into squat, caterpillar-tread tanks. Shot of tank's plastic
observation bubble as driver takes his seat inside. Shot of four tanks
starting one after another. Shot of tanks rolling away through the mist, which
closes slowly behind them.
Around
the twining plants the green mud bubbles occasionally. The barracks shacks are
empty. The clearing is deserted.
Then
a tank stops in the middle of a thickly overgrown section of swamp, one corner
sunk in the mud. Twenty feet away another tank is lying on its side. The camera
approaches the first tank. The observation dome has been smashed in. One metal
side plate has been twisted away like lead foiL The camera dollies toward the ominous rent to peer inside
the gutted interior where torn and broken—
The
screen flickered. The lights went on. Though they had seen nothing through the
black gash, Tel found when he released the armrests of the auditorium chair
that his palms were running with sweat. The seat of his pants and backs of his
thighs were also damp.
"All right," came the loudspeaker's
voice, "report to your assigned workshops."
Ten minutes later Tel was disassembling a
machine very like the one the young soldier had been fixing in the film. He
removed an oily plate, wiped it on his apron, and looked at it in the bluish
light from the spiral fixture poking from the ceiling. In the right-hand corner
neatly inscribed was: 605-B.,.
He
looked at the machine, then he looked up, coughed, and said, "Eh—I think
there's been a mistake." He felt uncomfortable addressing the thin air.
When others asked, they received answers iess than
half the time.
But
the loudspeaker clicked and a man's
voice asked, What is it, Private Tel 211 BQ-T?"
"Wasn't I supposed to be working on
606?"
There
was a long silence. Then a woman's
contralto said, "The correction will be made when and if necessary."
Suddenly he felt confusion as a dozen ideas
that he was hying to set straight all knotted
together like snarled fishing lines. The confusion became rage which immediately
retracted into fear. What were they trying to do to him? What was the damn
machine used for anyway? And if he didn't know, how could he fight the enemy
beyond the . .. Dr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r
. . .
They
flung their hands over their eyes at the blinding flash that came from the blue
fixtures. Before the buzzing stopped the words had leaped into his mind so
clearly that at first he thought they came from the speakers: calmness,
alertness, quick reaction. He froze, beating back the question that tried to
squirm up into his mind, "Quick reaction to what?"
Slowly
he relaxed. He was calm. He was alert. Two or three people in the shop had
already gone back to work, so he picked up a connective bar from the parts rack
on the table. For one sudden moment he wanted to heave it at something. But
instead he fitted it carefully between the plates and twisted the helical pin
into place.
That evening some of them went out on the rampway and set up a game of randy.
Shrimp:
"O.K. big boy, I'll take my chances with you. Come on, hunker down here,
and play me a round."
Ptorn (shaking his head): "I'm just
watching."
Shrimp:
"Say, how come you big guys have all been so quiet for the last couple of
days? What gives up there in your superior noggins?"
Ptorn: "I'll just watch."
"Waggon:
"Come on. I got money to loose."
Curley:
"Play him, Shrimp. The ape's gotten better. Won fifteen units off me
yesterday—before I won back twenty."
Tel: "Hey, Ptorn, why have you guys been so quiet?"
Ptorn (shrugging): "I don't know." (He
pauses). "What do you think the enemy beyond the barrier, looks
like?"
Lug
(leaning against the railing, now looks up and snatches his head): "You
know, I never thought of that before."
Tel watches the guard and the Neanderthal
looking across the railing over the city. Far away the meaningless lights blink
off, and off, and off.
The
third week they put him in a dark room. "What's your name and
number?" "Tel 211 BQ-T."
Dr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-
He
staggered back and covered his eyes. But there had been no flash, he realized a
moment later. Calmness, alertness, quick reaction.
"Turn
around."
He
turned.
"Walk
forward."
He walked. He walked a long time, figuring at
last that he must have entered a tunnel. Dr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-
Calmness,
alertness, quick reaction; he kept walking, though the tension in his back and
shoulders almost made them hurt. And there had been a flash, this time. But it
was green and not that bright. He had glimpsed mist, and sharp plants without
leaves, and mud was bubbling someplace. No, that was in the front of the room
where he had his classes. Or was it someplace else, with the strange machine.
. . .
"What
is your name and number?"
"Eh-Tel 211
B-eh-BQ-T."
"Describe
what you see."
"Eh—where?"
"Describe
what you see in front of you. Keep walking."
There
was another green flash. "I think—the sea?" He said. "Yes, the
sea, and there are waves breaking over the yellow sand, and the little boat . .
."
Dr-r-r-r-r-r-r-
"Describe
what you see." The light flashed again.
"No.
I mean the 605-B, or maybe the 606-B, I'm not sure —I have to put it together.
I can put both of them together. That's right. Either one.
They're almost the same, but they're different down in the drive box. I fix
them so—" And a sudden thought welled warmly and comfortably into his
mind, and with it an amazing relief that started in his shoulders and washed
down to his feet, "—so we can use it against the enemy beyond the barrier.
That's what it's for. It must be. It's the 606-B, and I can take it apart and
put it together, take it apart and put it—" There was another green flash.
"That's
Ketrall, yes, the mud, and the plants that don't have
any leaves on them, all the mud, and it's foggy. And those are pebbles over
there. No, they aren't pebbles. No, they're shells, very pretty, red and brown
and milky shells, like somebody polished them for a long—"
Dr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-
Dr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-
Dr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-
The
pain that built in his back, his thighs, his arms, nearly made him collapse
before he knew it was there. At last he stopped talking, staggered back, and
put his hands over his eyes, though again there had been no flash.
"What is your name and number?"
"Eh-Tel-My name is Tel
60-5-6—Tel-"
"What is your name and
number."
Something
gripping at the back of his throat suddenly released and a scream let loose
that had been lodged somewhere in his stomach, "606-B! 605-BI I don't knowl I don't know They wouldn't
tell me which onel They wouldn't tell
me!"
"Wat is your name and number." "Eh-eh-Tel
211 BQ-T." "Describe
what you see."
"I
see—I see the mud, and the plants, and the shacks where the soldiers are. They
are sitting in front of the shacks, playing randy. I have to fix it while they
play with the coins because—the enemy—yes, the—" and beyond the mist, something
was moving across the mud, something was knocking aside the twining plants; at
first he thought it might be one of the tanks returning, only it wasn't. No!
"No!" he cried, "it isn't lixed yet!
The 606-B, I haven't fixed it yet, and it's coining. Oil Lord, it's—"
Dr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-
Afterward, when they took
him out of the room, the loudspeaker told him (a soothing female voice) "You did very well. Very well indeed. You will be an asset against our enemy
beyond the barrier." Already he wasn't sure what had happened in the room.
But he had done well, and that made him feel very good.
That evening, however, the apes played randomax by themselves.
Everyone else only sat on their bunks and watched the clumsy games of the
Neanderthals, speaking very little.
V
Jon
Koshah walked down one of the radial streets of Toron, past the merchants' mansions, past the hive houses,
into the sprawling rim of the Devil's Pot, past the lot where the Triton
Extravaganza was folding its tents to begin its mainland tour, past the
wharves where the Shuttle Boat was pulling in with its load of workers from the
Hydroponics Gardens. A breeze caught in his black hair, and his black eyes were
calm as he moved through the surge of men and women erupting from the launch
pier. Further down were the private yachts. He walked to the royal pier where
the sun across the water snagged on the polished chains. The orange-hulled boat
with the double molusk shell, insignia of the Duchess
Petra, dipped in the water. A long shadow fell across the dock as Arkor appeared at the railing.
"Hi," Jon called.
"What's the news from the University?"
He
stepped over the chain and walked to the end of the "
gangplank.
"I've
spoken to Catham," Arkor
said, coming down to meet him. "He was a bit surprised to see me, I think.
You give me the news here and I'll give you mine."
"Apparently
Alter is with my sister, so the Duchess's secret service reports. And Tel
finally went into the army, off to fight the enemy beyond the barrier."
"Catham simply says to find the Lord of the Flames and expel
him as fast as possible. Then ask questions."
"Why?"
"He
says it's a historical necessity. If Chargill hadn't
been assassinated already, we could conceivably spend more time iiguring this thing out."
"Sounds
reasonable."
They
left the pier and started up the waterfront street. After a few minutes of
silence, Jon asked, "Arkor?"
"Yes?"
"What
do you hear?" "With my mind?"
"Yes." "In you?"
"Around
me, and in me too."
Arkor smiled. "You must think that's very
important, you who can't see what I see, hear what I hear. It isn't
though." He paused. "I can sense—that's a better word than hear-about
a block in every direction, at least clearly." They rounded a corner.
"There's a worker who's remembering how her brother died eating poisoned
fish. In that building over there a man who runs with a Mali gang is having a
nightmare about someone he beat up two nights ago . . . There, now he's
dreaming about food and has turned over and closed his teeth on the pillow.
Over there is a guy sitting at a wobbly table In the
corner room of the top floor. The late sun through the window strikes his bare
chest. He's trying to write a poem about a girl and runs his fingers over the
paper. He glances at a sketch of him the girl drew in red chalk and hung on the
wall behind him, then writes: Renna, Iter brown eyes opening
on ocean light . . . Somewhere in the circus lot I sense a woman
with a mind like polished boron going swiftly through the account books of the
Triton Extravaganza . . ." Suddenly he smiled. "It's your sister,
Jon." As suddenly a frown replaced it. "Something's wrong."
"What is it," Jon asked, "Is
she all right?"
"Yes,
but it's something—in her mind. It's down very deep." Arkor's
frown increased. Then he shook his head. "No, I can't sense it. It's almost as if she's
hiding it behind something else. I can see the pattern, hear the sound of it,
but it's too deep to sense the meaning."
"What
do you sense in my mind?" Joh asked when they
had gone a few steps further.
"A
cry," said Arkor, "sharp as a blade thrust
up from under a pool of dark waters."
"A
cry for what?"
"For—a
recognition; a recognition of what you call freedom."
Jon
smiled. "I'm glad it's still there. You know, Arkor,
I'm committed to do as much as possible to end this war. But I didn't exactly choose to become an agent of the Triple Being. It was a
choice of dying in the radiation fields after my escape, or joining them.
That's no choice, and I won't be free until they leave us."
"Another
thing I hear both in your mind and your voice is how much you want me to
believe you—"
"But it's the truth.
Go ahead, read my mind."
"I
already have," Arkor said. "I wish you
could understand this, Jon. You think the main difference between you and me
is that I know what you're thinking while you don't what I think. That's not
it. It's far more a difference in perception that exists between all you men
and all us guards. The difference between men and guards is the difference
between blind men and men who can see. While the difference
between the guards who can read minds and the guards who can't is the
difference between normal and colorblind vision."
"Which is to
say?"
Arkor sighed. "Which means
that what I hear is not important. And how I hear it—which is—you can't
understand."
They
moved among the better apartment buildings in the center ring of the City. The
eastern sky was shadowed. Once they paused. "The Lord of the Flames,"
Jon said.
"Even you can feel
it."
Jon nodded. "Can you spot exactly where
he is or who he's inhabiting?" "Not
yet."
They
moved further through the growing buildings. "What do you hear now?"
Jon asked.
"I
hear an Executive Supervisor of one of your father's1 plants
wondering if the assassination of Prime Minister Chargill
will eventually effect his salary. He's talking to his wife about it. In the
basement of their house is a drunken old woman who has wandered through their
cellar door which was accidentally left open. She is hiding in the corner from
what she calls the "jibbies" which are
actually memories of the beatings her mother gave her when she was a little
girl on the mainland. Neither the supervisor nor the old woman is aware of the
other's existence. And even if he were to go into his basement, find her, and
drive her out, or if she were to pick up the length of metal pipe in the
corner, climb the stairs, wander into the living room and bash both his and his
wife's brains out—and she has killed two people in her fife already—there would
still be no awareness exchanged."
"The
Lord of the Flames," Jon said again. "We're closer by a good
deal." "Can you see what he's doing now?"
"Not
yet," Arkor said. "But in front of the
military ministry a policeman is standing, waiting for his platoon and
darkness. They are going to make a raid on a bar in the Devil's Pot where a
Mali gang is supposed to hang out." Now they passed by a mansion familiar
to Jon. "There's your lather," Arkor said.
"He's thinking of calling in his secretary and writing a letter to the
supply commandant at Telphar expressing his good
faith in the war effort with a pledge for half a million units. What will the
publicity value of that be he wonders."
"Does
he think about either me or my sister?"
Arkor shook his head. They passed on making their
way closer and closer to the Royal Place of Toron.
"The Lord of the Flames," said Arkor.
As
night closed finally between the palace towers they turned down the deserted
avenue of the Oyster. At last they walked under a stone arch and Jon opened the
lock with his thumb print on the round silver plate. The Duchess had ordered it
keyed to her guests. In the corridor they passed a niched
statue of the late King Alsen, and turned up a hroad flight of marble steps. They reached the fifth floor
of the living tower and stopped before the gold doors of the Duchess's suit.
For these inner doors Jon produced a black metal key, twisted in the lock, and
the doors swung inward over the purple carpet. Petra was standing by the
curtained window, fingering a smoky crystal set in a silver chain at her neck
and gazing down over the night lit city. She turned to them as they entered.
"You're back," she said, no smile on her face. "The Lord of the
Flames, I can feel him as though he were in the room." "He's in the
palace," Arkor said.
"That
close?" the Duchess asked. "Arkor, can you
tell what he's done this time. I've been dissecting government reports for a
week and I can't see any place where he might have stuck his finger in."
"Nothing
comes through that clearly yet. Maybe he had something to do with Chargill's assassination?"
"It's
possible," said Petra. "I can't throw any light on that either."
"You said he's in the
palace," Jon said. "Which direction?"
Arkor paused another moment. "There," he
pointed.
They
went to the door, turned down the hall past the now unoccupied rooms of the
Queen Mother and past the other empty chambers for royal guests. Finally they
mounted a short flight of stairs to a hallway lined on both sides with flood
lit statues.
"We're going toward
the throne room," Petra said.
"That's right,"
nodded Arkor.
The
hall opened into one of the alcoves of the dark throne room. Heavy draperies
sagged toward one another at the fifteen foot windows. From the pale night
lights of the city, slender isosceles triangles lapped the polished blue floor
where the illumination slipped between the drawn curtains.
"Wait,"
whispered Arkor, and in the three-quarter darkness
Jon and the Duchess saw his forehead crease. He pointed diagonally across the
hall toward one of the many other shadowed alcoves.
"We'll
spread out," whispered the Duchess. "Remember all we have to do is
see him all together."
Petra
moved off behind the columns to the left and Jon started to the right. Keeping
in the shadows of the rippling tapestries he worked his way along the hall
toward the empty throne platform.
Then a voice came, hollow, from across the
floor. "What is it! Who's there?"
His eyes froze fast to the
alcove.
"Who's there? I'll call the
guards." A white-cloaked figure moved into one of the
spears of light, turning uncertainly and calling, "Who's there?"
The
King! Jon felt a twinge of recognition and moved away from the
tapestries. At the same time Arkor and the Duchess
stepped out of hiding. At first the king only saw the Duchess and said,
"Petra. You gave me quite a scare. For a moment
I thought that you. . . ."
And then:
The green of beetles' wings—the red of
polished carbuncle—a web of silver fire. Lightning split
Jon's eyes apart and he plunged into blue smoke.
Then
he saw gray, great strips
of gray, some tinged
with lavender, some with red, others faintly yellow or orange. It took him a
moment to recognize that he was on a desert, a strange gray desert under dim,
gray sky. A wind pulsed and the tints of sand shifted; orange glinted green,
red lightened to yellow, and the bluish color to his left deepened. And the gray gauzed over all, endless and rippling.
He
raised his tentacles slithering up his
trunk. His roots stretched far into this gray sand, far down to a stream of
pure hydrofluoric acid nourishing and cool. But here at the surface the thin
atmosphere was cold, dry, and gray.
Three
heat sensitive slits in his husk registered the presence of two other tentacles
cactuses near him.
He rustled his feelers again and they rustled back to
him. Watch out, rustled one cactus (that was
Arkor), the Lord
of the Flames . . .
Another
cactus (that was
Petra) swayed gently
forward, tendrils lisping over the sand.
Something
raised its head behind a near sand dune. Three opalescent eyes blinked and drew back.
Jon let his feelers
hang very still.
Now the whole head, onyx black
was raised once more, and again the three
eyes blinked at
them. The lizard hissed; needle-teeth rimmed a spongy pink gum. It hissed again, mid glowing sand
swirled before its mouth. On six black legs it climbed the dune, heading in Jon's
direction. The
Lord of the Flames . . .
Suddenly
he lashed out and caught the beast around the neck. Rasping, it pulled back,
but the tall plant that was Arkor bent forward
suddenly and three lanky tendrils circled the reptilian body. The Duchess
snared two beating legs, and together as they all strained back, the hissing
turned into a scream in the thin cold air. The shiny black skin parted and
thick blue oozed over the broken limbs, then darkened-the sand.
The
scream sounded once more, then stopped as the throat
caved in beneath crushing pressure. There, there, there . . .
It was dark. Moist warm dirt slipped by Jon's
rough skin as his long boneless body muscled down through the earth. There was
a vibration to one side and above. (Yes, it was the Duchess of Petra's). He
angled his burrowing until he broke through the ground separating them and was
burrowing beside her, their flanks in rippling contact.
Where's Arkor?
Jon asked.
He's gone ahead to the
temple.
Is he back in good grace
with the priestess?
Apparently. She sent a summons for him a heat cycle ago.
His
offense was very great, and perhaps she has not forgiven him yet. I wonder if
she suspects what part we played in the
scheme.
There
was a shudder along the length of the great worm beside him. I hope not, she vibrated nervously. Then we'll be in for it. All we can do is
attend the end-of-cycle prayers and hope she makes no denouncement of us.
Now,
except for their identifying vibrations, they were silent as they pushed toward
the temple and the end-of-cycle ceremony.
It
was a pocket of soft mud kept moist by perfumed liquids siphoned from every
comer of the subterranean empire. Jon could sense the exotic odors even before
the texture of the earth changed and he suddenly broke into the luxuriant perfumed
silt. They coiled near the back, waiting while the Other worms joined them, waiting for the prayers to begin.
At last, when the mud-trap was filled, the
familiar vibrations of the priestess reached through the temple. She
communicated to her congregation through an ingenious amplifying system
composed of a pair of metal rings that circled the mud-trap, and when she
curled around them and spoke, her words carried over the entire volume.
HaiVto the great Earth Goddess in whose food track
we reside, she
began the invocation. May
the mud he pliable always.
May
none under her protection bifurcate until he chooses, responded the congregation, and the prayers
began.
At
last the rituals ended and the priestess began the announcements: We have good news for you, my fellows. A
member of our herd who previously incurred our displeasure is with us once
more.
Jon
felt among the vibrations a new, but familiar pattern. (Arkor, he realized, must have just entered the
temple). But at the same time he realized there was something else present,
something that had been there much longer, but was suddenly pressing in on his
awareness. With a shudder the length of his entire coiled intestinal track he
realized it was the Lord of the Flames. The Duchess twisted apprehensively
beside him. The
Lord of the Flames, she
whispered, touching her flank to his. It's the priestess!
I know, he whispered back, as the priestess continued.
This
apostate, again with us engaged, in a plot to end the custom of our cyclic
sacrifice to the Earth Goddess of eleven newly bifurcated children, claiming
that to drive them down into the earth until their bodies were shriveled by the
Great Central Heat was beneath our wormlike dignity. But he has come back, said the priestess warmly, and for his crime of subversion he has agreed
to sacrifice himself at the beginning of the next heat cycle, and with him will
be sacrificed his two co-conspiritors in the plot. .. .
They
didn't even wait for their identification vibrations to be sounded over the
ring-amplifier. Both leaped forward, slipping between the other worshippers,
sliding through the temple mud. When they reached the priestess, however, the
temple was already in chaos. Jon bumped
into a sluggish body that was sending out Arkor's
identity vibrations;
but the
form was limp and flaccid. Of course, he must have been drugged and carried
here against his will. But the Lord of the Flames. . . .
Jon leapt for the priestess and coiled around her body only to find she and
Petra were already grappling. With his nether end he
dragged Arkor toward them. The movement revived the
giant worm a bit, but someone had coiled about the speaker rings and was
crying, Help!
Help! The priestess is being murdered!
Other
muscular lengths fell into the struggle, but the Lord of the Flames: There, there, there .
..
Cataracts of blue gushed from the rocks.
Geysers of orange billowed over the burning stones, whipping against the sky.
The fire was beautiful, and the only other light came from the three dim ivory
moons in their shifting triangle on the black night.
Jon
soared above the fire, feeling exaltation in the great contracting muscles of
his breast, in the air beating through his waxed feathers, and his whistling
wing-tips that arced the night again and again as he rose higher and higher.
Heat fanned his soft underfeathers. Opening his beak,
his breath over his taut larynx quivered a warbling song. Arkor, he called, Petra,
where do you fly . . .
Even
before he had completed his question, Petra's voice sang, I fly over the green flames where the copper
burns, now to the yellow where sodium flames . . .
From
further away a third voice joined them, Hydrocarbons lapping blue currents through orange tides . . .
From
the hundreds of birds around him, two joined him, and together they rose
through the thickening smoke until the air cooled their wings, beating like
hearts, without stop, without rest. The music blended, melodies wove and unwove
with one another.
Then a sudden cawing cut the smoky air.
Dark
wings flapped among the golden. Viciously it tore up at quickly passing
under-feathers with a purple beak; swooping down, its scarlet talon struck at
a momentarily up-turned eye. As it beat through the cloud of birds, gold
feathers fell,
were caught up on an occasional warm breeze, then dropped again, singeing,
charring, at last bursting into white fire.
Follow, cried Petra.
We follow, cried Jon and Arkor.
Jon whirled and arrowed toward the dark beating. His beak plunged among black feathers as
talons meshed with his own. Arkor was close above
him, and the terrible flapping of Petra's wings hammered from below. Then a
beak jabbed into a glittering eye, and the great wings shook, then relaxed. They were so entangled that at first they were
pulled down nearly a hundred feet before their frantic flapping caught the air.
For one moment they held the limp body in dusty heat. One wing still shivered
uselessly. Then Jon released his hold at the same time as Petra and Arkor, and as they rose up, the whirling body fell. They
watched the shadow bust into livid fire which turned golden as the
conflagration dropped.
The
Lord of the Flames, they sang, there, there, there, as, from the glowing hulk fast smoldering on
the rocks, a final burst of fire leaped forth. Then Jon caught one glimpse of
movement, soaring anew from the ashes, heard one bright explosion of melody as
this newcomer ascended toward the flock, before blue smoke washed into his
eyes, only to be swept away by sudden lightning. He was bound in a web of
silver fire, he was lost in the red of polished carbuncle, and before his eyes
was the fading green of flickering beetles' wings.
Jon stood in the throne room, blinking. To
his left, he saw Petra and Arkor in the dim light. To
his right, at the foot of the throne, one hand clutching the fluke of the
gilded dolphin, was the white-cloaked figure of the
king sprawled on the polished steps. The other hand still moved over the blue
tile. Jon ran up to him and stooped beside him. "He's alive," he
called back.
There
was a clattering of footsteps, and he looked up to see guards all around him,
their fire-blades poised. Someone turned on the throne room lights and he saw that
Arkor and Petra were among the guards. "All
right, what happened to His Majesty?"
Jon
was flustered, but the Duchess began quickly, "We're not sure. We heard
him call out as we were coming toward the throne room. Then suddenly he ran
across the floor and collapsed."
"He's
alive," Jon repeated. "But you'd better get a doctor to him."
"Move
away," the guard said, and Jon stepped back. "Who are you?" the
guard demanded as the others surrounded the King.
"I'm the King's cousin," the
Duchess said, "and these are my guests."
The
guard frowned, but, contented himself with, "Well, you better return to
your suite, Your Grace. And stay there till we get this straightened out."
Just
then another guard came from across the room. "Yes sir, he did get a
chance to trip the cameras before anything happened."
"Fine,"
said the chief guard. He glanced from Petra to Jon and Arkor.
"This place is combed with cameras, you know, that can be tripped from
half a dozen places." He waited for some reaction, but there was none.
"Well, we'll develop these and see what happened. Please go to your
rooms."
Jon, Arkor, and the
Duchess left the throne room. As they reached the hall, Jon released a breath
that he had been holding since his last. He's alive.
In their suite, the Duchess dropped into the
chair with the wooden back carved like a coiled shell, and ran the fingers of
both hands through her fiery hair. "I suppose where they have cameras,
they have microphones," she said, glancing around the room. Arkor walked to one wall on which was an underwater sea-scape in muted tones of orange and sienna. Casually he
leaned his palm against the right eye of a stylized octopus in battle with an
equally stylized whale. "No they don't," he said. "Or at least
they can't hear anything out of it. Though actually they
haven't even put a monitor on it yet."
"Those cameras almost messed us up once
before when we kidnaped Prince Let. Thank God this
time there won't be anything to see." She turned to the giant now. "Arkor, did you get a chance to see what the Lord of the
Flames did on this visit?"
"It
was more difficult this time," Arkor said.
"Human beings' minds are a bit harder to ferret
things out of than the neo-Neanderthals where he was hiding before."
"Well, could you tell anything?"
"I can tell who murdered Chargill."
"Who?"
"His Majesty
himself."
"Do you know why?"
"That
I'm not sure. But there was something else in his mind, something that—"
Suddenly he turned to face the other man. "Jon, do you remember when we
were coming here, I caught your sister's thoughts, and I said that something
seemed to be wrong? I said there was some kaleidoscopic image that I could get
the pattern of but not the meaning? Well that same pattern, that same image was
in King Uske's mind tool"
They were silent a moment.
Then Jon asked, "What exactly does the
similarity mean?"
"It
means that they both know something, the same thing, and even feel the same way
about it. But it's hidden down deep, like something you learn and then try immediately
to forget. It was a lot stronger in Uske's mind, but
it was there in both. And it may have something to do with the Lord of the
Flames."
"Well
then what is it doing in both of their minds?" asked the Duchess.
"That's a good question," Arkor said.
"We'll
try it on Catham to see what he comes up with— along
with about umpteen others."
There
was a knock on the door. At the Duchess's nod Jon opened it. The chief guard
stepped in. "Your Grace, gentlemen, the films have been developed. You are
free to go and come as you like, but you may be questioned later on."
"Has His Majesty said anything
yet?" Petra asked.
The guard looked from under lowered brows.
"His Majesty is dead." He turned abruptly, and Jon closed the door
slowly after him.
"I
guess," said Petra, "that dislodging the Lord of the Flames was more
of a jolt than he could take."
"It's
all a healthy man could stand," said Arkor,
"and the king was sickly all his life."
Petra
placed her long finger-tips together. "Chargill dead at the King's instigation. Now the
King dead through . . ." She didn't finish. "With all this war
business streaming about like flood water, the government is going to go
through quite a contortion. All the little factions will start to wiggle and
squirm."
"Do
you think anyone will try to use the Queen Mother as a rallying point?"
asked Jon.
"I
doubt it," Petra said. "She's safe in her padded room at the General
Medical psycho-ward. Probably fairly happy, too. It's
a shame she cracked up last year. I remember her from years ago as a pretty
powerful personality that might well have done the empire some good."
It
was Arkor who said, "This means it's time for
Prince Let to come back."
The Duchess nodded.
"Just
who is in fine for the throne, I mean after Let?" Jon wanted to know.
"I
am," Petra said, shortly. "You and Arkor
must start out to the mainland forests this evening and bring him back as fast
as possible."
"If we can find him in
the forest," said Jon.
"We'll find him,"
Arkor said.
Jon
pulled back the curtain at the window and looked over the lights of the city,
out to where the sea spread like black cloth to a moonlit horizon. Away from
the palace threaded the transit-ribbon, its top streaked with moon-silver,
supported by its mammoth pylons, a two hundred and twenty-five mile antenna
beaming matter around the earth. "I don't know," he said. "I
wonder now if this is getting out of hand. No one meant to kill—or at least I
certainly didn't mean to kill—the King."
"Are
you suggesting that I did?" asked Petra quietly. "Ask Arkor if that was my intention."
"No, I won't ask," Jon said.
"When I was in prison, I wanted . . ." He stopped.
"Jon, who was
responsible for your going to prison?"
"Three
years ago I would have said King Uske. But both of us
were only children in school when it happened. Yes, something very twisted and
sadistic made him dare me to break into the palace and steal the Royal Herald.
But something equally foolish and headstrong made me go along with it,
frightened me so much I actually killed a guard who was trying to stop me. But
when I found out the King was dead just now, I waited for the feeling inside
me, wondering whether it would be a sense of completed revenge, relief, or
freedom. And it was nothing. I'm still not free, not just of the Triple-Being,
but of something in myself."
"Every one has that," Petra began. Then she added more
softly, "Perhaps you have it more than most, Jon Koshar."
Without
turning from the window, Jon asked, "All right Arkor,
you can sense it. Tell me what it is."
Arkor's
voice, though not sad, came with a grave emotion Jon had not heard in his voice
before: "I can't, Jon Koshar. It's another
buried mask I can't pierce. It's easily the most familiar pattern that I see in
all men's minds, almost the identifying mark of a human."
Jon
turned from the window, sharply. "Guilt?" he asked. "Is that
what it seems to you? Well now I perceive something very finely, and it's not
guilt, Arkor. It's something-else."
The
giant's eyes narrowed in momentary concentration, and when he spoke this time,
it was with an uncertainty as new in his voice as the previous grave emotion:
"No—it is not guilt."
Jon
turned to the window again. "I don't understand," he said.
"Perhaps Catham was right. Every time we
exorcise the Lord of the Flames and suddenly go hopping around the universe, I
wonder—" -
"Wonder what?"
asked the Duchess.
"I
wonder whether this whole thing isn't a psychotic
fantasy after all."
The
Duchess drew in a breath, giving her mind time to ponder Jon's words. "I
only know," she said, "that whatever this means, we can only act as
we see. And we must return Prince Let to Toron as
soon as possible."
Jon
turned back to the room. "All right. Then we will
go to the forest and bring him back."
"Shall we leave
tonight?" asked Arkor.
"Yes,"
said the Duchess. "I will try to get the council's ear and see if I can
waylay some of the confusion that is going to result."
Jon
and Arkor started for the door. A moment before they
closed it, Jon repeated, with puzzlement in his voice, "A psychotic
fantasy."
The Duchess looked up from
the report she had begun.
"You
have no time to worry about that," Arkor said to
him briskly. "You only have enough to think of it once,
or perhaps twice, to convince yourself that it is not."
VI
His boot
soles hit the mud, and he
was in Ketrall. He hugged his arms tightly around his
chest and pulled against himself to release the excitement that quivered in his
wrists and shoulders. The ground was as soft here as the swampy pools made by
the sea's backwash in those winding inlets. The mist in front of him was as
dense and damp as the autumn fogs that used to wrap his boat in the mornings.
The air held October chill. And the sky, beyond the mist glowed faintly like
the polished surfaces of well rubbed shells.
No. Something
wouldn't let him think that. You shouldn't think of that, he thought to himself. Tel walked forward,
trying to see. He felt vaguely unsteady, like the time when he had been lost
for six hours in the dinghy that foggy morning when the oar had slipped. For a
moment the mist gave way and he glimpsed the barracks to which he was to
report.
He
ducked forward, noticing that the ground was firmer,
and at last stepped through the door of the shack. "Hello," he
called. There were no lights. He sniffed the fog floating in the darkness. It
had the faint odor of seaweed. The familiarity made everything more real,
vivid. Yet he was somewhere in a half dead blister of the irradiated earth, on
some protected scab on the wrecked crust of the planet. "Hello," he called
again.
"Hello
yourself," came back a familiar voice. A face rose, came forward, its
features materializing through the haze. "So you made it out here," Ptorn said scratching his bald head. The black eyes smiled
down at him. "Good for you. Quite a trip, eh?"
"Yeah," said Tel. "You can say
that again."
"I think that's your bed over
there."
Tel
moved inside. Along the wall he could just make out a row of beds. "Hey,
where's the enemy in relation to us?" he asked. "And where's
everybody else?"
"We're
pretty well behind the line of fire," said Ptom.
"And the others will be here soon."
"Sure
as hell can't see anything around here," Tel said, squinting toward the
door again. "Some of them damn Ketrall might be
hanging around, just sneak up behind you, and burn you out. How are you gonna know?"
Ptorn shrugged.
"Hey, boy!" A shadow filled the doorway. "Hi,"
Tel said, not sure if he recognized the newcomer, even
though the voice was familiar. "Glad to see you made it too."
"Certainly
looks like you came through all right," Tel said, still unsure of whom it
was. "Shrimp? Oh, I thought it was you. How do you feel?"
"Damp,"
Shrimp said. "Smells like the inside of an old lobster pot."
"Just like home," Tel joked back.
Another
shadow darkened the door. "Uggg.
Can't see nothing up here."
"There's nothing to see, ape,"
Shrimp shot back across his shoulder as he went to his bed. He dropped himself
on his back across the mattress. "That transit jump sure takes a hell of a
lot out of you." He stretched himself, arched his back, and then dropped
back to the bed. Springs squeeked.
"Like rocks," Shrimp mumbled, closing his eyes.
"Any
of them ketzis come around, wake me up. But not for
anything else."
"Hey,
Tel," said Lug, stepping into the shack,
"I'll play you a game of randy."
"I'll beat you,"
Tel warned him.
"I
don't care," the Neanderthal said, "I just want to play. Over
here."
"All right," said
Tel. "A couple of rounds."
Lug
went to the doorway where the light was bright enough to see and spread a
handful of centi-units on the worn boards. Tel,
leaning against the jamb, crouched also and started arfanging
the coins in the randomax square.
Darkness
slipped across his hands, and he and the Neanderthal looked up. An unfamiliar
forest guard stood before them. Tel squinted through the mist. He could make
out nothing distinctive about the features, but the hair was light and the
guard was particularly tall.
"Move. I want to get inside." The voice was
cold. "If sound could
have color, thought
Tel, then this voice would
have the faint blue sheen of oiled steel.
"Can't you step over?" Lug asked
affably. "We just got them set."
Suddenly
the booted foot shot out, Lug and Tel snapped their hands back in time, but the
coins went skittering.
"What
the—" began Lug. "Hey," he called into the cabin after the
guard. "You don't have no manners, you know that?
If you were my size, I'd bust you."
"Keep
quiet, Lug," Tel said. Something in the guard's voice suggested a tautness
that he would rather not cross. Remembering what Ptom
had said about perception, he wondered whether or not Lug had felt it too.
The
Neanderthal was gathering up the coins. "He acts just like an ape that
ought to be pounded around a little," Lug continued. Then he made a disgusted
sucking sound.
"Hey, you guys are new
up here, right?"
The
squat hulk of a Neanderthal stepped into the doorway now. Lug blinked.
"You guys are
new?" he asked again.
"That's right,"
said Ptorn from inside.
"Then come on. I have
to show you something."
Ptorn joined Lug and Tel at the door and they followed
the other man out. "My name is Illu," he
introduced himself as he led them over the soft ground outside the cabin.
"What do you want to show us?" Tel
asked.
"You'll
see," said Illu. "We show it to everybody
who comes here. It makes them feel better. Some of them, anyway."
"What
is it?" It was Lug who asked now. "You'll see," repeated Illu.
Tel
glimpsed the shadows of other cabins in the mist as they entered the clearing.
In the middle was a pole stuck in the ground. As they approached, Tel saw that
there were two signs pointing in different directions. One jutted off toward
the gray headquarters building and said: "Tranu— 2,068 miles. The other, pointing some sixty degrees away,
read: Toron—-9,740
miles.
"The Scout put this up," Illu said.
"The Scout?"
asked Tel. "What's that?"
"He's
in our cabin," Illu said, surprised that Tel did
not know. "He's the guy who came in just before I did." He looked
back at the sign. "Doesn't this make you feel
better?"
Tel
was puzzled. But Lug put his ham-like hands against the post and groweled with satisfaction. "Ummm,"
he said, looking from Tel to Ptorn. "Now we know
where we are. That makes me feel better."
Illu grinned. "I told you. We show it to all
you new people."
"How long have you
been out here?" Lug asked.
"Aw too long." Illu spat in the mud. "You tell me what's happening back
home."
"It's
all crazy," Lug said. "AH everybody talks about is the war. Nothing but war."
"Urn," said Illu.
"And now you're in it yourself."
The
two Neanderthals had struck up a friendship and wandered off together, leaving Ptorn and Tel.
"I
wonder how he figured it out?" Tel said, looking
at the sign up close.
"He must know his math," Ptom said.
The split plank that formed the post was gray
and weathered, and the grain was separating. The nails had rusted quickly in
the damp air leaving faint brown rings around the deep-set heads, like the
ancient nails in the weather-beaten boards of his father's old boathouse. He
was about to say something, but before the words formed in his mouth, Ptorn nodded his head and said, "Yes, it does."
When they got back to the barracks, most of
the beds were taken with soldiers already in the regiment. In the light-less
cabin, the figures looked like shadows through the thick mist hanging even on
the inside. Tel went to his bed. As he sat down, the figure on the bed next to
him suddenly rolled over and said, "Hey, you're one of the new guys that's come to fill up the holes."
"What holes?" asked Tel.
"You know, replacements."
Tel
couldn't make out the face and for a passing moment was reminded of one of the
many featureless voices that had spoken from the loudspeaker during his basic
training.
"What
happened to the others, the ones we're replacing?" Tel asked warily.
"You
really want to know?" responded the shadowed voice.
"Not
really." Tel ran his palm across the blanket, trying to detect the texture
of the invisible weave. "Do your eyes ever get accustomed to all this
fog?"
"No. But you do."
"How?"
"After a while you get used to being
half-blind." "Oh. Just exactly what do you guys do here?" Tel
wanted to know.
"Well,"
mused the bulky shadow, "it depends on what
you've been trained for."
"I'm
a maintenance mechanic for the 606-B. And I know the 605 pretty well too."
"Oh, then you won't have any problem
here with finding something to do."
Tel
grinned through the fog and felt a surprising glow of usefulness, a warm
reassurance.
"I gotta get
some sleep," the shadow said.
"Hey, Just one more question." Tel
lowered his voice. "What's with that big blond forest guard?"
"You mean the Scout?" the voice
came back.
"Yeah, the one who put up the sign-post."
"How do you mean
'what's with' him?"
"Well," said Tel,
"he's sort of a funny character."
"Sure
he is," replied the voice. "He's the Scout. You'd be funny too if you
had to do what he does." The springs squeeked again as the figure turned over. "Look, talk
to me some other time about it, soldier. I gotta get
some sleep."
"Oh,
yeah," said Tel. "Good night." He sat back on his cot, alone,
looking this way and that through the murky cabin. He wondered what the Scout's
function was, and then he wondered what he was a replacement for. Maybe he
should have asked what happened to the person he was replacing, but . . . He
was glad there was work for a 606-B repair man, very glad, because he could
take it apart, put it together, replace any worn part, tell when the slip
plates had too much oil, or when the plumb coils were about to give. If only he
knew what—if he knew what it was. No. He mustn't think
that. Instead he thought about how good it made him feel.
A few hours later, when Tel was wandering
outside the barracks, he stopped, bent down, and looked at his boots. They were coated with mud halfway to his ankles. As he stood up, sucking
breath between his teeth, someone called, "Who's that?"
"Eh-Tel
211 BQ-T."
"Oh,
hi.
It's me, Lug."
"Hey
there, ape. I thought you were a sergeant
or something."
"Hell
no," Lug said, solidifying in the mist as he came forward. "You
surprised me too." He came only a bit above Tel's shoulder, but his smile shone up through the haze.
"Did your friend Illu tell you anything about what's
going on?"
Lug scratched his head and fell into step beside Tel. "I don't know if I understand it." "What did he say?"
Lug brought his hands together in
concentration and his craggy face furrowed deeper. "At first he says we're
in front of the main line of ketzi forces. We're part
of a string of bases thirty miles in front of that line. But what IUu said is that they're afraid they'll circle us and
attack from behind.'' He looked up puzzled at Tel.
"What don't you
understand?"
"How
can they attack us from behind if they're in front of a string, a line of
bases?"
"Simple,"
Tel began. Then he paused, remembering what Ptorn had
told him about perception. "Look, Lug, how long is a string?"
Trluh? I don't know."
"How far does a string
run?"
"From
one end to the other," said Lug, shrugging. "How long is that?"
"That's
as long as it needs to be: from one end to the other. Now suppose the ketzis come around the ends of the string. Won't they be
behind us then?"
Lug
pondered a moment. "Oh. I guess they will. I hadn't thought of going
around." They went on a few more steps. "That means we're in some
danger, or we may be, huh?"
"I
guess so," said Tel, feeling at once apprehensive, and at the same time
affably superior at having solved Lug's minor topological conundrum. Perhaps
that was what Ptorn felt like toward him, he reflected.
Examining his own feeling, he was relieved to find in it nothing that the ape
might resent. "Just by being on Ketrall, we're
in danger, Lug."
"Yeah. We have an enemy beyond the barrier," Lug quoted. "Only now
we're beyond the barrier too."
They were nearing a rise in
the ground.
"Hey,
rocks," said Lug, moving to place his hands on the rough, broken surface.
"Makes me think of . . ." He did not finish his sentence, and Tel
remembered his own first thoughts about the colors behind the mist, though
putting them out of his mind as quickly as before. He folded his arms, leaned
against the rocky wall, and gazed through the fog. "What do you think
we're looking at?"
"Nothing,"
answered Lug.
"Mist, fog, water vapor—nothing. Lug, what's it like where you come from?"
"You
mean—" Tel could sense the words came from deep in Lug's mind,
"home?"
"Yeah. What was your home like?"
"Home,"
mused Lug, "was—the place I lived." He turned to Tel and grinned.
"Yeah," he said. "That was what was best about it. It was the
place I lived!"
Tel
laughed, and again wondered how his own insights seemed to Ptorn.
"And
Mura," Lug's voice became quieter, "and Porm,
and Kuag; those are the people I lived with. Porm," he explained, "was my daughter."
"You
have a daughter?" He hoped his surprise did not come through the mist.
"How old is she? How old are you?"
"She's four summers
old," Lug said. "I'm nineteen winters."
From
somewhere Tel remembered that the average age of the neo-Neanderthals was
forty-five. Having such a short life must make things appear very different. Yet a daughter, a family. Some place in him, like an
efflorescent crystal, he felt respect growing for this condensed, foreign image
of himself. "What was your home like?" he asked again.
"It
was beyond the first radiation barrier," Lug said, "the one that
broke down just before anybody knew we were there."
"I know," said Tel.
"It
was in a broken stone building, a 'ruin' they called it. All of us lived in the
ruins. The big trees had pushed most of the buildings down, and there were
stairs that led up and just stopped over open air. Children played with rocks
and sticks on the stairs, and sometimes the wind came and we all went inside
the stone buildings and stayed in the corner, and sometimes sang to the wind;
or when the water fell from the sky, we sang to the water. When it was very
hot, we danced for the sun." He stepped back and began to raise one foot
and then the other with a little hop. "Like that, only with lots more
people, and lots faster, with beating and shouting. Once a month we did that
for the moon, only different. That's because the moon and the sun are alike,
and not like rain and wind. You understand?"
"I understand," Tel said.
"Sometimes
we'd mend the leather over the hole in the sunward wall. But then you have to
go out and catch a boar, and that's not home any more. That's—" He paused.
"The rest of the wide
world," Tel supplied.
"Yes,"
said Lug, screwing up his eyebrows and nodding. "And it's very, very wide,
you know. Very wide."
Now Tel nodded.
"The
rest of the wide world," repeated Lug. "That's very different from
home. That's something else entirely. Home . . ." He paused once more, and
at last took refuge in his previous revelation. "Home is where I
live." Suddenly Lug grinned slyly. "All you very tall, very wise men
who can get around the ends of strings, you must think this is very silly. You
must know where home is."
"Do you think it's
silly?"
"No," said Lug,
"but—"
"Then
don't worry about it," said Tel. "It just may not be silly after
all."
Lug
pondered, then seemed satisfied. Now he moved back
from the wall again and did his little dance. Then he stopped and looked up.
"No sun," he said. "No moon. Home is where I live, and then
there is the rest of the wide world. But where is this?" He gazed forward
through the mist again. "No place," he answered himself.
Tel
looked down at Lug's feet. "Don't your feet get muddy?" he asked.
Because their big toes were comparatively opposable, the Neanderthals felt
uncomfortably cramped in boots that prevented them from picking up things with
their feet, and so had been issued open-toed boots.
"They
get too muddy," Lug said, wriggling his toes in the soft, green earth.
"I wash them."
"I guess that's the
way it goes," Tel shrugged.
"What's
your home like?" Lug asked. "Is it the place you live?"
"It
isn't," Tel said. "At least I haven't lived there for a long time,
almost three years. I left when I was fourteen and went to Toron."
"Some of my people go there," Lug
said. "I don't know if they like it very much. Those that come back say
it's very complicated."
"It is," Tel
said.
"What did you do in the city?"
"Just
knocked around," Tel answered evasively. "Got into trouble here, got
out of it there, couldn't get a job because there weren't enough jobs to go
around, and ended up in the army." They leaned back against the rocks once
more. "Say, did Illu say anything to you about
the Scout?"
"The
guard who built the signpost?"
"That's right. And kicked up our game."
"Oh, him, the one with no manners. All I know is that he is a really important
person around here. I don't know what he does, though."
"Maybe
he goes out spying on the ketzis. That's what I'd
guess from the name. I wonder if he knows what the ketzis
look like."
"You know you're right," said Lug,
his face furrowing. "How are we gonna fight them
if we wouldn't even recognize one if it came up to us and said hello?"
"We'd recognize
it."
"Yeah. I guess we would."
VII
Above
the yacht the
stars were still. Over the railing, water rushed the sides, whispering and
lisping against the tapered hull. At the horizon the jeweled towers of Toron diminished and sank down.
"Do
you think after these three years that you'd recognize the Prince if he came up
to you right now and said hello?" Jon asked Arkor.
The wind was like a cold palm against the side of his face, like cold fingers
playing through his black hair.
"I
don't know," Arkor said. "His mind will
have changed and his body will have grown. At least it should have if the
Duchess was right about sending him there in the first place."
Jon leaned into the wind, his eyes narrowing
to pry between the two sheets of blackness, sky and sea,
that joined before them. Finally he stood up. "Perhaps we'd better
get some sleep," he said. "We'll be there by dawn." Together Jon
and Arkor turned from the rail.
Sun
broke through one layer after another of the night, until at last it burst
bloody over the gray water. Already the shore was in sight. This was one of the
few places along the coast, away from the fishing villages, where the forest
came near the beach. Once it had been an emigration spot from the mainland to
the island city. Now a burned dock sagged like a blackened limb into the tide.
As
Jon mounted the deck in the chill, he saw there were no other boats at the
remaining piers. Overhead a thin whine razored down from the sky. Then he saw, high above him, the
sudden gleam of short distance planes. They were army craft, carrying recruits
from Toron to Telphar. The
whine died, and he looked back toward the port which swung toward the boat
through the brightening morning.
When
Arkor joined him on deck, the wooden pilings were
already thumping along the side of the boat. The motor cut, reversed, and the
diminishing space between the bow and the shore suddenly flooded with foaming
backwash.
A
few dock-hands appeared to catch the hawser that the crewmen tossed. One
boatman appeared by Arkor's side, but the giant had
already picked up the huge coil of black rope. "I'll secure it," he
said, dismissing the man, and flung the line across the closing slip of water.
They
leaped aboard. Jon looked after Arkor when he started
toward the boardwalk.
A
half hour later they stood among great shadowed trees. Arkor
was listening, one brown hand against a barrel-thick oak trunk.
"You're home
now," Jon said. "What does it feel like."
The
giant shook his head. "Not what you think it should feel like." His
eyes narrowed. "I don't hear anyone yet. Come on, let's go this way."
With surprising rapidity they made their way
for the next hour through the forest. Abruptly the trees thinned, and in front
of them Jon caught a glittering that must have been sun on the sea. They
reached a cliff where broken rock spilled to ledges below. Fifty feet down,
still a hundred feet above the water, was a very large table of rock. The sun
burned white across the whole lithic arena, and the small
temple at the edge cast a sharp shadow.
"The priest is
there," Arkor said. "Follow me down."
Before
they reached the plateau, a man emerged from the door of the temple. Black
robes caught the breeze that moved across the warm rock toward the sea. A trumpet shell hung by a leather strap over one of the man's
shoulders. His face showed more age than any other guard Jon had ever
seen.
"Why have you come
back?" the priest asked.
"To take the young king to reign in Toron. His brother, King Uske,
is dead." They spoke in another language, but Arkor
opened his mind to Jon who then found the strange syllables easily
comprehensible.
"There
are no kings in the forest," the priest said. "You have left us, why
do you come back?"
Arkor was silent a moment. Then he said,
"Three years ago, a young, light-haired boy came into the forest. He was
the King's younger brother, and since the King is dead, he must rule now."
Jon
noted that the priest was not marked with the triple scars of the telepath.
"Do
you wish anything of him? Are you going to take anything from his mind? You
know that is not allowed."
"I
will take nothing from his mind," Arkor said.
"His consent will be given, not taken."
"He is not of the
forest people?"
"No,"
answered Arkor. "He came here and chose to avail
himself of our people's hospitality. It is his right to choose to leave. May I
have permission to search for him?"
The priest was silent while two waves broke
on the crumbling rocks a hundred feet below. "You may search for him
according to your own ways," the priest said, and turned back into the
temple.
Jon and Arkor
walked back to the trail that led up into the forest. "What was that all
about?"
"How
much of it did you understand?" Arkor asked. "I don't mean the words, but what was going
on?"
"You
were asking him for permission to look for Prince Let and telling him why you
came."
"Yes,
but I was doing a lot more." The giant hoisted himself up around a
leaning sapling. "I was—how would you say it—acknowledging an unpleasant
situation."
"What do you
mean?"
"It's like this," Arkor said as they gained level ground again. "Among
the forest guards, the telepaths are in an ambiguous and very uncomfortable
position. In fact that was why I left. You see they are thought superior and,
at the same time, feared. It is understood that nature is aiming for the time
when all guards will be born telepathic, yet the non-telepaths know that they
are threatened by this growing minority. So the telepaths must be marked on
discovery and must acknowledge the' nominal sovereignty of the non-telepathic
priest. It keeps peace and allows nature to go! on."
"I
hate to think what would happen if telepaths started appearing among us
men," Jon said. "There wouldn't be peace for long."
Arkor nodded. "That's why we keep the
knowledge of our powers from you as much as possible."
"Occasionally
I wish I could hear into other men's minds myself," said Jon.
Arkor laughed. "As I said before it would be
like suddenly giving color vision to a man still incapable of distinguishing
one shape from another and who could not even judge distances. It might be fun
like a game at first, but finally it would become a meaningless, annoying
hindrance."
Jon
shrugged. "Where do we begin to look for Let? It's your territory."
"First
we find some people and check their minds for any knowledge of the boy."
"Is
that what the priest meant when he said you could search according to your own
ways?"
"That's right."
"Maybe your people are more civilized than we are," Jon said.
At that Arkor
laughed.
Like a net of capillaries, paths threaded the
body of the forest. They had crossed nearly half a dozen before Jon recognized
the scattering of crushed leaves on the black earth, the broken twigs, the slight compactness of the earth that marked them.
"Over
there," said Arkor, "two women are napping
on a cape of moss by the side of a fallen maple log. One of them has seen the
strange light-haired boy with the limp who is not of the forest people."
He looked at Jon. "It sounds like Let."
"Where did he get the
limp from?" Jon wanted to know.
Arkor shrugged. A bit later he paused again.
"There is a man passing by over there who once hunted with the light-liaired boy. They made a moose
trap together six months ago."
Jon
strained to see through the trees in the direction Arkor
pointed, but he didn't even hear a rustle. "In six months, Arkor, he could have wandered anywhere."
"True,"
said the giant. Suddenly he stopped short, and Jon drew up still beside him.
A
moment later the leaves before them were pushed aside mid a tall guard with a
shock of white hair running through
I lie black at his temple stepped forward. Three scars ran down the left
side of cheek and neck.
"You have come for the young
stranger," said the guard (and again Jon understood.) "You know where
he moves now," Arkor said. "You know
II ia t he walks by the high rocks, stops now, leans against the
slick he is carrying and squints up at the sky through the
leaves that glitter like pale blue chips.''
"You
will follow the webbing of thought that holds him In
the center," said the guard with the white struck hair. Then, without
further interchange, Arkor continued walking In his direction and the other guard passed on in his.
"Now
you know where Let is?" Jon asked. Arkor nodded.
After
a moment Jon said, "Why did you speak out loud?"
"We
were being polite."
"You
talk out loud when you want to be polite to each other?"
Arkor glanced down at Jon. "We were being
polite to you."
The
light that lapped among the green leaves grew yellower as day turned toward
noon. Once they heard an animal screech in the distance, and once they walked
over a damp stretch of ground through which a mazy stream delved in a rocky
cleft. "You know, there's something wrong," said Arkor
after a bit.
"With the Prince?"
"No,
not with Let, but with the thought pattern I'm following."
"What
is the thought pattern?"
"It's
like a radar net that all the telepaths, or most of
them, maintain for directions, for information. You have to ask permission to
use it. But there's something wrong with it, something down at the very end,
dark, and unclear." He stopped and looked at Jon, his eyebrows pulling
together. "And Jon, it looks for all the world
like the pattern I saw in your sister and in the King."
"What's
it doing here in the forest," Jon asked. "Can you tell what it means
now?"
Arkor shook his head. "The prince is through
those trees," he said. "Perhaps you better speak to him first alone.
It will recall things to him more quickly if a man presents them to him."
"Doesn't
he remember?" Jon asked. "It's been a long time, and he's
young." Jon nodded and stepped forward through the curtain of branches.
The figure turned abruptly and the light eyes
narrowed behind the dark face.
"Your
Majesty?" Jon said.
The
hair was long, naturally fair, but sun bleached in uneven streaks.
"Your name is Let?
You are the heir to the throne of Toromon?"
The
figure stood very still. He held a staff in one brown hand and wore the garb of
the forest guards, makeshift leather pants, a pelt across one shoulder for a
cape, his feet bare.
"Your
Majesty?" Jon asked again.
The eyes widened now, extraordinarily bright
in the browned face. "Excuse—excuse me," the voice sounded strangely
rough, yet strangely youthful, "if my speech is— slow.
I haven't spoken your language for a long time."
Jon
smiled. "Do you remember me? I and a friend brought you here three years
ago. Now we are here to take you back with us. Do you remember? You were sent
here by the Duchess of Petra?"
"Petra?"
He paused, looking up now as if some answer would come from the trees. "My—cousin, with red hair. The one
who told me the story, about the prisoner who. tried
to escape. Only it wasn't a story, it was real."
"That's right,"
Jon said. "I'm that prisoner."
"Why have you come?" the young man
asked again.
"Your brother is dead. You must take
over the throne."
"Did you know my brother?"
"Only
a long time ago, before I went to prison." Jon paused. "I was just
about as old as you are now."
"Oh,"
said the Prince. He took a few steps forward, and Jon noticed the slight limp.
"There is a war on," said the Prince, marshaling what information he
had into this new language. "I hear them talk about it sometimes when they
come to take people from the forest to fight the—enemy beyond the barrier. I
will have to learn a lot, and there will be a lot to do. I remember more of it,
now." As they went through the trees to where Arkor
was waiting, Jon wondered at the speed with which the youth was adjusting to
this new situation. Arkor met them on the other side
of the trees.
They had nearly reached the shore when Arkor suddenly stopped. "The boat!" he said.
"What is it?" Jon asked. They were
still in the woods.
"It's
the Malis," Arkor
said, "at the docks, trying to sink the ship!"
"Out here, on the shore?" Jon
asked. "For what? I thought there were just Malis in the city."
"Gangs
have sprung up all over Toromon. There's a forest
guard with them, and the—the pattern I saw!"
"Why
are they wrecking it?" Jon asked. "Can you get any reason?"
Arkor shook his head. "The crewmen are
fighting. One of them tries to start the motor, but a fire-blade slashes across
his back and his scream goes all liquid and gurgly
before he slumps over the control panel. Fire glints in the eyes of one
frozen-faced man who suddenly jumps backwards from the tilting deck as water
sloshes across the boards and hisses against the flame. Smoke obscures the
wheel house where the crewman lies." Arkor
breathed heavily.
"Why?"
Jon asked. "Why? Were they sent? Did they have a plan?"
"The
Malis," Arkor said
softly, "the malcontents. No, or at least I couldn't detect any."
"What do we do
now?" Let asked.
"We've
got to get back some way," Jon said. "I guess we go in another
direction."
The
strain left the giant's face and he turned with them and nodded. They began to
walk again, this time perpendicular to their original route. "We might be
able to get back to the Island from one of the fishing villages," Arkor said, "or perhaps catch a tetron
tramp taking ore from the mines back to Toron."
Once
they came to a field in which a deserted farm house sagged into the slow breeze
that waved across the riotous grain. Back in the woods, night flooded the trees
until the moon rose and silvered the leaves around them. They came to another
clearing where a great strut-work pylon soared into the air and a black band of
metal—the transit-ribbon— made a mark like a pen line across the lightened
night sky.
They
slept some at the edge of the clearing, and at dawn they continued.
In the brightening woods, Arkor
heard the sound first. Then the two others stopped and listened. Beyond the
dewy trees, the tin-can wail of a calliope sounded thinly through the morning. ...
VIII
"Then
the ketzis started to fire on us from the left. We
scrambled back behind those rock bags like frightened cuttlefish. We must have
splattered mud all the way back to Toromon. They have
something that flames like the sun almighty and makes the fog look like powdered
fire where it hits. A couple of times I've been to advanced platoons that have
gone out to try and establish the beginnings of a permanent encampment but got
messed up by the ketzis. It's pretty horrible what
they do; nothing but pieces of guys all over the place. They'd told us this
particular capture was going to be easy as cutting a melon. They'd told us
there probably wouldn't be a shot fired. Well I didn't want to end up like one
of those gutted platoons and I swear I was about to take off over the rock bags
and just beat it as fast as I could. Suddenly, though, there was a scrambling
in the confusion of guys about twenty feet down the line. I remember I heard a
rock bag fall, so I took a breath and figured— really sort of calm when you
think how much sweating I was doing— 'Well, they've finally broken into the
fortress, and I guess I can expect to be dead in just about six seconds.' But I
was wrong. The excitement down the line was growing. Apparently somebody from
our side had scrambled back over the wall. Then someone turned on a hand-flood,
and for a moment I saw a tall silhouette against the fog. The Scout had gotten backl
"I
was down there in no seconds flat. Everybody else was crowding around too,
trying to hear what he was saying. He squatted down in the mud and pulled the
guy with the hand-flood down beside him. 'Shine it over here,' he whispered.
We were all crouching to see. He began sketching in the soft mud, and you could
just see where his finger scarred the ground what with the dark and the mist.
'This is our wall,' he said. 'There's a ketzi
encampment here, and here. But each one has got two heat throwers so they can
hit us in four places along the wall at once. But remember, it's only two
encampments. If you make a beeline fifteen degrees off twelve o'clock, you'll
bypass both of them, and they won't be looking for you there. You've got about
ten minutes before their next barrage. Now get going.' He pointed over the
wall. 'In that direction. It'll take you straight back
to the base.' And before we could ask any questions, he was over the wall
himself and gone in black fog. The next thing I knew I was over the rocks
running after the footsteps of the guy in front of me."
"That
was me," Illu grunted. "Running after,
hell, you ran me over."
The
others laughed. They were sitting on a pile of boards that had been laid
outside the barracks across the mud. Tel sat crosslegged,
his back against the shack wall. Now he leaned forward on his knees to hear the
rest of the storyteller's tale.
The
fire had removed the immediate sense of mist, but along the curved shacks he
could see other blurred orange fires curving away through the fog.
"That
Scout," the narrator concluded from his seat atop the empty machinery
crate, "he's a pretty good guy." Now he looked at Tel. "So don't
mess with him too much. Yeah, he's a little strange, but . . ." The
soldier shrugged. Someone else had asked the question, but Tel inside the
cabin, hearing it start, had come out to listen.
Just
then a darkness passed the fire near them in the haze.
Then firelight touched the long neck, the open collar, the knife-like
cheekbones, and the pale hair of the guard. His black eyes swept across them
and he went straight into the shack. Shrimp, who was standing in the doorway, quietly
moved aside. A moment later there was a creeking of
bed springs.
"That's him," the storyteller said.
"He's really seen the ketzis close up?" somebody asked.
The
raconteur motioned for him to keep his voice down and answered softly,
"Well, if anybody has, it's him." He dropped his hands to his knees,
leaned back in the darkness and yawned. "I'm turning in," he said.
"It's just as hard to get up in the morning here as it is in Toromon."
Tel
watched the group break up as some of the men from other barracks who had
wandered over started back in the darkness. "Officers will be shooing us
inside in a minute anyway," Hlu grunted down to
Tel.
"Guess
so," Tel answered, stretched, and stood up on the boards.
He
was just about to go inside when he heard a sound which was something like
chirping or cheeping, with a twitching melody underneath. It was coming from
the other side of the barracks.
Tel
stopped, glanced around the corner and held his breath. Something was beating
the mud. Quickly Tel ducked back around the comer and grabbed the shoulder of
the first person he saw still outside the hut. "Hey," he whispered.
"There's something back therel You can hear itl"
"Probably a spy for the ketzis." Then there was a laugh and the shoulder
shook beneath Tel's hand. "Forget it, soldier. It's just one of the
flip-flops that come around sometimes." Now Tel recognized the voice as
belonging to the person who had the cot beside his.
"What are they?"
"Who
knows. They're animals, I think. But they could be
plants. They don't bother the ketzis and except for
making noise don't bother us."
"Oh," Tel said. "You're
sure?"
"I'm sure."
The
sound came again, a distinct flapping sound, irregular, stuttering; then the chirping melody.
Tel
went inside the barracks, pulling his shirt out of his pants. He shrugged it
down his arms, and sat on the edge of his bed. The sagging springs were tight
against his buttocks, the air moist on his skin. He'd almost gotten used to
the vegetative odor, but if he took the air deeply into his lungs, he could
feel the rank smell far back on his pallet.
He
pulled the blanket up from the mattress and slipped into the dark envelope with
the warm spot where he'd been sitting, listening to the sound -the material
made coming loose from its well tucked edging, bringing a warmth to the surface
öf his mind because of its familiarity. With his
cheek pressed against his forearm now, he squinted and listened. Outside in the
mud he heard the flapping again, a sound like a loose canvas sail beating
against a mast, like the slap of his mother's hand-loom when the treadles
struck the leather stops and the threads shifted up and down, like his father's
hand beating the water from his slicker as he strode up from the boathouse,
like his father's belt beating. .
. .
Flop-flip, flup-flep,
flap-flop; he opened his eyes. The mist was bluish between him and the barracks
ceiling. He was lying on his back. It was very early in the morning. Flop-flap. The sound was just outside the door.
Suddenly
Tel sat up, stuck his feet in his boots (the leather was damp) and stood up in
his underwear. The mist was lighter now and the shadows on the beds were still.
He went to the door and narrowed his eyes against the blue morning. Flip-flup. Last night's fire had
died quickly without tending, and the ashes and half-burnt boards lay a few
feet away. A very neurotic quail was walking among the ashes.
Or
maybe it was an extraordinarily self-composed feather duster. It was exploring
the remains of the fire on three large webbed feet. It poked at a bit of
charcoal, circled it three times, then stood over it, squatted, and—injested itl
At
first Tel thought he glimpsed a head or a tail, but no, the body was a
shapeless ball of feathers. It flapped around another piece of charcoal, then
changed its mind and sounded its chirping, whistling chuckle. Tel stooped at
the doorway to look more closely. Perhaps the creature noticed him, because it
cocked its head (body?), took six flop-flop steps
toward him, then leaned its body (head?) the other way and did a couple of demi-plies.
Tel laughed and the flup-flip twittered.
"Hey, what's that?" someone asked
above him.
Tel
looked up and saw Lug leaning against the doorjamb, clawing at his hairy
stomach where his undershirt didn't reach his underpants. Tel shrugged.
"He's
sort of cute," Lug said. Then he coughed and ground his fist into first
one eye then the other. "Damn mist," he muttered and spat across Tel
into the mud. The flap-flip stepped back, then
carefully waddled closer to the door. Tel held out his hand and made a rapid
snapping sound with his fingers.
"Does it bite?"
Lug asked.
"I'll find out in a
minute."
At the sound the flep-flep
leaped ten inches backwards, nearly lost its balance and began to plie again.
"Reveille hasn't rung
yet. Why are you up?"
Both
Tel and Lug turned quickly at the steel-glinting voice behind them. The Scout
had come to the door. As he stepped forward, the bluish light slowly defined
his equine features.
"Either
shut up or go outside," the Scout said. "Men are trying to sleep in
here. One or two of them even worked hard enough to deserve it." He
stepped through the door, then looked back over his
shoulder. "Go on. Get out of there if you're going to jabber." Then
he glanced down and saw the flip-flap.
Tel
and Lug had stepped outside and were standing uncomfortably by the wall when
the Scout looked back at them, smiling. Tel met the smile with a
puzzled frown.
The
Scout pointed to the flop-flup who was now doing an
arabesque with two of its legs now, and perhaps listening. "Is that a
friend of yours?"
!Huh?"
"Do
you want a pet?" Tel shrugged.
The
Scout bent down, picked up a piece
of charcoal and held it toward the flup-flop. The
creature lowered its feet, scurried to the Scout's hand, straddled it, and
squatted. Then it quietly wrapped its flippers around the Scout's wrist. As the
Scout stood up, the flap-flop sagged over and dangled from his forearm like a
feather handbag.
"Hold out your arm," the Scout
said.
Tel
extended his arm alongside the Scout's and the forest guard began to flex his
fist. The flep-flip suddenly got nervous and, one
flipper at a time, went on Tel's arm.
"He
likes charcoal and he likes warmth," the Scout said. "Give him both
and he'll stay with you." Then he turned and strode off through the mist,
buttoning his shirt.
"I
wonder if he's going out to sneak a look at some ketzi
encampment," Lug said. "What are you gonna
do with that thing?"
Tel
looked at the flip-flep. Then the flop-flap did
something. It opened an eye and looked back at Tel. The boy laughed out loud.
The
eye was the milky hue of a polished shell, streaked with veins of gold. Another
eye opened to reveal mother of pearl. Then a third (as the other two closed)
shone through the feather, streaked, like the first, but with red. "Will
you look at that?" Tel said.
The third eye closed.
"At
what?"
"Aw, it just
stopped."
Lug
yawned. "Let me get back inside and catch my last five minutes," he
said. "I just got up to see what you were looking at anyway." He went
back to the door and made his way to bed.
Tel
raised the flop-flap and stared at it. Seven eyes appeared in the feathers;
without pupils, their muted silver surfaces swirled with pastel lusters. A warm feeling uncoiled through him, fighting the
coolness of the mist. He was in Ketrall, gazing into
friendly, familiar—so familiar pastel eyes.
That afternoon he checked over the 606-B. The
asbestos washer on one clutch plate had worn way down, so he peeled it off as
neatly as the rubber stripping would allow and took it to the quarter-master's
station. He got a new one in less than thirty seconds which was a relief after
the time it took to get practice replacement parts on the training base back in
Telphar. Once the flup-flup
tipped the lubricant can and black oil spilled onto his arm and got all over
his hand; even after washing it off at the spiggot,
he just resigned himself to having black-rimmed nails for a while.
Once a tank rolled by close enough to see Shrimp riding in the open
bubble.
"How's it going?" Tel hailed him.
"I
can almost turn this thing on a deci-unit,"
Shrimp called back.
"Good for you," Tel called.
"Hey,
guess where I saw Curly—" But the tank swerved away and the mist closed
behind.
It
was not until after the knock-off whistle pierced the fog that Tel realized the
flup-flup had left its perch on top of the assembly
rack. Quickly he looked around.
Flap-flup, came from somewhere behind him. He wiped his hands on
the seat of his pants, turned, and started off through the mud. Once he hit a
pot-hole, staggered, and nearly fell. When he got his balance he was just
outside the semi-circle of cabins.
He
listened and heard a twittering from the left. He turned and followed it. He
had climbed over a three-foot wall of rock before it occurred to him that maybe
it wasn't his flep-flop he was following. He stooped
down and made the snapping sound with his fingers. Instantly the twittering
began again, but still too far away for him to see. He took a few running steps
forward and heard the sound of paddle feet receding. "Hey, come on,"
he said out loud, "Come back and stay with me." Maybe he should have
brought some charcoal. He'd put some in his pocket that morning, occasionally
feeding the animal all afternoon. But now when he ran his hand into the
envelope of his back pocket, the cloth was just gritty. "Come on back
here," he called again.
Flep-flop, flip-flip,
flop-flep.
He
ran forward ten, fifteen, twenty steps. When he stopped, the flup-flap stopped too and chuckled. "Oh, the hell with
you," Tel said and turned around.
He
walked maybe half a dozen long strides through the thicker mud before he slowed
down and a frown worked over his face. He turned right, took five steps, and
stopped when a clump of leafless trees appeared before him. He frowned again
and walked in the other direction. Five minutes later he noticed that the
ground was extremely firm under his feet. He didn't remember crossing any
ground of this consistency.
To
his right the mist was bluer. He tried to recall from which side night had
approached the encampment. There was the gray afternoon, meeting all the guys
in the barracks. Then there was the night, sitting around the fire, listening
to the stories the soldiers told. But how did the change go between them?
He had started walking again when something
brushed his cheek. He jumped back and saw that he had walked blindly into
another grove of spiky, shadowless trees. The twig
that had brushed his cheek had not been sharp and scratchy but rather wet, and
it bent like rubber. He rubbed his cheek, then reached
out to touch the branch again.
Just
then the idea of what being lost meant slipped into his brain and galvanized
his spinal column, as smoothly as a hot wire plunged through his vertebrae. His
hand drew back, and the rear of his thighs, his neck, and the small of his back
felt like crinkled foil pulled slowly taut. He backed away from the skeletal
trees, his legs feeling soft, his joints all awash on one another. The mist was
thick and very close . . .
Something
twittered on his left. Violently he turned right and ran. The mud splashed, and
it was darker to his left-no, right. The ground was hard, then soft under his
shoes. He ran. The mist clawed into his lungs and made the inside of his
nostrils sting. He ran.
Then
his hands snapped up just in time to keep him from crashing face first into a
sudden rise of rock. He kept his cheek pressed against the veined stone gasping
with tiny, terrified breaths for nearly three minutes, before he realized that
he was at the bottom of a cliff. The rock disappeared above him and faded away
to the right and left. He turned his back to the wall at last and tried both to
keep his eyes closed and not to think; but they kept on opening and darting
about of their own volition. Hysterically they tried to fix on some form in the
dark haze. Yet he was afraid to take his hands away from the rock behind him
(where he had nearly rasped away his finger tips) and look at them for fear he
wouldn't see then even if he held them in front ol
his eyes.
And something was coming toward him.
He mashed
the air out his lungs with one breath, his ribs as taut as crushed springs. Mother, he thought, waiting for white fire to turn
him into glowing smoke. Oh,
mother, father . . .
"You
pick a hell of a time to go off on a stroll," the Scout said, and as Tel
nearly collapsed from the wall, the forest guard's big hand struck his chest
sharply. "Breathe," the Scout said.
Tel
began to breathe. He wanted to cry, but choking down the rank damp air was more
important. He peeled himself from the rock. The back of his shirt and pants
were soaked.
"Don't
fall down," the Scout said, "because I won't carry you."
Tel didn't fall.
"Come on," the
Scout said. "We don't have all night."
His
legs didn't want to walk and his first steps were irregular: "Where—where
are we?"
"About forty yards from a ketzi nest," came the slow
voice.
That
stopped Tel. "Wait a minute—" he managed to pant. "I thought
they were—were thirty miles away. I couldn't have come that far."
"They
don't wait for us to come to them," the Scout said. "Get a move on.
We're nowhere near safe."
"Wait
a minute." Tel managed to say again. "You mean the ketzis are really camped only—I mean you've seen them,
really looked at them? You could take me close enough so I could look?"
"In
this light with this mist," the Scout's cold, polished voice came back,
"you'd have to get awfully close to see anything." Then, with the
same amusement of his voice as when he'd shown Tel how to coax the flap-flap,
he said, "Do you want to go over and take a look?"
Tel
had to clamp his jaw to keep from making the hysterical noise that ached and
flooded up behind the prison of his leeth. All he did
was shake his head. Whether the Scout sensed his answer, or actually saw his
wagging head in the last twilight, his only words were, "Let's get
going." And then, after five minutes of silence, with odd humility he
added, "I've never seen them either."
Finally
the camp-fire glow pierced the mist ahead of them. Chills still raced down
Tel's back but he said, "Eh—thanks. What—brought you out after me?"
"You're
a good mechanic, and the 606-B is a pretty important baby."
"Yeah," said Tel.
"I guess so."
As
they passed the sign-post, there was a twittering chuckle, then a whistling
chirp. Something went flep-flup by his left boot.
"It's been wandering around here all
night trying to figure out where you were," the Scout said. "It's
been lonesome."
"Huh?"
said Tel. He stood still and blinked. Then he let his body drop to a stoop and
extended his arm. The flip-flop's paddle-feet wrapped trustingly about his
wrist.
"You
mean to tell me you've been waiting here all this time? You mean you're just
going to hang there and blink at me with those pretty eyes of yours and tell me
you were here all along, while I was out running around in that— You ought to
be ashamed of yourselfl Why you ought to be ashamedl"
Like
pure relief, like the sudden upward thrust at the removal of great pressure,
the affectionate admonishing baby talk welled from him. And there were tears
running down his cheek when he looked up.
The Scout had disappeared
into the fog.
The
nightly game of randy was breaking up when he got to the barracks. He fished a
piece of warm charcoal out of the fire, fed the flop-flip, and set it to warm
itself by the embers. "Man," said Illu when
he saw Tel, "we thought you'd had it. What were you out looking for?"
"Just exploring,"
said Tel.
"Just don't explore yourself right into
a nest of ketzis. You know they've moved
closer." "Yeah," said Tel. "So I heard."
When Tel got into bed, he
was just about to go off to sleep when the soldier next to him raised up on his elbow and whispered, "You back
alive?" Tel laughed. "I guess I am."
The shadowed figure whistled. "I'm
surprised, I admit it. You hear about the ketzis
moving in?" "I know they moved." "There may be a major
blast pretty soon." "You mean a battle?"
"I don't mean a game of randy. I was in Tranu in Company Forty-four when we took it." He let
out another whistle. "Hut that was nothing to these ketzis. Compared to Ketrall,
Tranu was just a little baby experiment." Tel
heard his head drop back to the pillow. "Well, good night soldier. And I um glad to see you back, kid."
"Thanks," Tel told him, and rolled
over. Outside, once, he heard the tiny whistling, chirping chuckle before
exhaustion .struck him into the dark pool of slumber.
IX
Flap-flap, flap-flap, flap-flap; in the breeze from
across the meadow, the canvas cover that she had pushed from the calliope beat
against the back of the keyboard console. Her notebook was open on the music
rack and a strange graph of multiple lines wove over the page, cut here and
there by single, double, and triple dashes. She struck a fourth, then an
augmented fifth. On the lower right hand corner of the page was a meticulous
pencil drawing of a leaf. The model for the
drawing had blown across the field and settled on lop of the calliope bench for the eight minutes she had needed to trace its
serrated edge and fine veining, then lilted away on another gust.
She
struck a third chord.
"What
are you scribbling at?"
Clea turned and smiled. "Hello, Mr.
Triton."
The
rotund, bearded gentleman looked back over the I cuts, wagons, mobile ariel
rides, and metal runways that ran between
them. "Not too much business this afternoon. 1 remember when we'd travel through the farm lands here
and have more yokels out than you could shake a stick at. When it came time for
the Big Show you'd have to turn them away." He made a clicking sound with
his teeth. "This war is a bad business. Still, we have an enemy beyond the
barrier. What's all that scratching you're making?"
"It's
a new and totally useless method of musical notation. It's much too complicated
for sight reading, though it's able to catch a lot more nuances in the music
than the present system."
"I
see," said Mr. Triton. With one hand he began an arpeggio over the tinny
notes. "I started out playing one of these things twenty-seven years ago." He took his hand from the
keys and made a gesture over the entire park. "Now I own the whole thing myself." Then he let his arm fall and a disappointed look darkened the wrinkles
already there. "This slack we're in, though; we've had slack seasons
before, but never quite like this. We'll be heading back to Toron
before the end of this week. At least there we'll be sure of a steady crowd."
Just
then Clea looked over the top of a calliope wagon at
the grassy meadow. Then she stood up.
"What is it?" Mr.
Triton asked. "Who are they?"
Clea
slipped out from behind the bench, jumped from the platform and began to run
across the field, the warm stems brushing her legs. As she ran across a
clearing in the grain twenty locusts snapped up before her from the yellow
stubble. "Jon!" she cried as the stalks flicked her forearms.
"Cleal" He caught his sister in his arms and whirled
her once around.
"Jon, what are you
doing here?"
He sat her down between
them. Arkor and Let stood back.
"We came to pay you a
visit. Now, what are you doing?"
"So
many things I couldn't begin to tell you. I've discovered a new overtone in
the tetron vibration series. And did you know that
the density of leaf veins, as they get further away from the stem is a
constant, and a different constant for each leaf? You can put that in your
useless information file. Then I'm working on something a lot bigger than all
that, but I can't really go into yet. Oh, and in the morning I do the
accounting." As they began to walk back toward the calliope wagon, she
asked, "Who are your friends?"
"Arkor, this
is my sister, Dr. Koshar. And this is—"
"Excuse
me," Clea interrupted. "I'm traveling under
an alias. They know me as Clea Rahsok."
Jon
laughed. "We've got a small secret of our own. Clea,
this is His Royal Highness, Prince Let. We're trying to get him back to Toron to take over the throne."
Clea stopped and looked hard at Let. "It's
possible," she said. "But I thought he was dead. At least that's the
official information the News Service let out when he was kidnaped.
You're still working with the Duchess Petra?"
"That's right."
"Oh,"
she said. "Well, come on and I'll introduce you to Mr. Triton."
"What sort of show
have you got?"
"A
good one," Clea said. "But no business, though."
It was not until they had passed into the deep shadow of the calliope wagon
that Clea stopped again and looked from Jon to Arkor. "Your eyes," she said. "Jon, can I
talk to you later and ask some questions?" Then the volume of her voice raised as she looked up to the platform. "Mr. Triton,
this is my brother Jon and two friends of his."
"Really?" asked Mr. Triton.
"You don't say."
"We're
traveling back to Toron along your route. We saw your
posters up at the fishing village and decided to come by," Arkor volunteered. "It's a fine poster, too. It really
catches your eye. Who designed it?"
Mr.
Triton folded his hands over his belly, beamed, and said, "Why, I did it
myself. You like it? I even designed the masthead for the wagons back there.
It's my circus from toupee to toenail."
"Would you show us around?"
suggested Arkor.
"Well,"
said Mr. Triton, "well. I believe I will. Come along, I believe I'll just
do that." The jolly impresario climbed down the wagon steps and led them
toward the tents, past the various stands and along the metal walk-ways.
A
tongue of sunlight fell between the tent flaps. Jon stood
101
just
inside the door, breathing the warm odor of sawdust. Clea
leaned against the dressing tabled
"That
isn't all your stuff, is it, Sis?" He pointed to the open wardrobe.
"I
share this dressing room with a friend of yours," she told him. "Now
just what's going on, brother of mine?"
"I'll
show you," he said, grabbing a piece of skin at his neck. He twisted it,
and suddenly it seemed to tear loose. He peeled it upwards, and his jaw and
half his neck and cheek came away. "You mean the acrobat. She's a good
kid, Clea." He peeled away another slab of his
face so that only the mouth and one eye socket were left. There was nothing
underneath.
"I
know she is," Clea said. "I wouldn't be
here if it weren't for her. I asked her to tell me what
was going on, once, but she said that the more people who knew, the more people
who would be in danger. So I've let it he. But I'm
still curious."
The
rest of Jon's face disappeared. "She was in a group, Clea, that today would go by
the name of Malis. I was a member too, you might say.
Unfortunately we were marked, just like the forest guards you see with their
triple scars. Our mark, though, was that we disappeared in dim light—like
creatures of the imagination, if you will." He ran his fingers roughly
through his hair which vanished as though a hanging wig had been rubbed away.
"Like psychotic fantasies," the headless voice came from above the
empty collar.
Then
his hand reached into his pocket, brought out a tiny capsule, and held it up to
where his face should have been. The thumb pressed a tiny stud on one end and a
fan of spray jetted out and caught the form of his skull, a transparent face,
then swiftly opaque again.
"But
there's a solution to everything." His face, though still wet, was almost complete again. "Now the job is to get a
king back on the throne as soon as possible, and to end this war." The
other end of the capsule produced a black,spray
which covered his hair. "Will you help us, Clea?"
"I'm
impressed," she said. "Maybe you can do an act in the side show.
Doesn't that stuff clog your pores?"
"No," explained
Jon. "When it dries, it perforates and ii Hows air and sweat to get through. We've got to
get him back, Clea!"
"Which faction are you working
for?" she asked. "Or lias the Duchess got
her hand in for the throne herself?"
Jon
shook his head. "Clea, it's bigger than any of
this political hassling. It's even bigger than our enemy beyond Ilie barrierj because we may have
an ally among the stars."
Necklaces of light loop by tent and gambling
stand. Couples stroll eating fried fish from paper
bags. A wonder-wheel rings the darkness and children scuttle under the
rope-railing of the walks. At the bottom of the glass walled aquarium wagon,
the octopus stretches over green rocks, mid the calliope hails brittle notes
against the neon night.
Alter came out the rear exit of the big tent,
lifting her white hair from the back of her neck with both hands. The breeze
was cool across her nape and under her arms. She still felt slightly
light-headed from her bout on the trampoline before the applauding crowd as she
moved out of the passageway thick with clowns and sawdust.
She
stopped when she saw the scarred giant. "Arkor?"
she smiled. "How've you been? How's the Duchess, and Jon. And is there any
word from Tel?"
"No
word," he said. "But everybody's alive and kicking. Jon is here with
me. So is Prince Let."
"You're
taking him back to claim the throne? Good. What me you
looking so hard at?"
"I'm
listening," he said. They had started walking beside the tent, Alter
ducking under the slanting guy ropes, Arkor stepping
around them. "Alter, there's something in your friend Clea's
mind that I can't quite understand. It was the llu'ng
that was keeping her to herself. It was the thing I hat somehow you helped to
break through. But I can't see it enough to understand it."
"It's
Tomar," Alter said. "He was a soldier that
she was engaged to at the very beginning of the war. And he died. She told me
about just before she got to work on this new big project of her's. She says this one should be even more important than
the matter-transmission projection."
Arkor shook his head. "It's not that, Alter.
It's something much further down. It was something she figured out once, and it
was so terrible, she uses Tomar's death to avoid remembering
the other thing. It has something to do with the Lord of the Flames, too."
"Clea?"
asked Alter in surprise.
"As
I said, I still don't know exactly what it is. But for one thing, all the
telepathic forest guards also know about it, and they're using their combined
forces' to keep it away from me. They apparently know about my contact with the
Triple Being and they're unsure of what to do about it. The information is in
the minds of all the important councilmen, but the guards are protecting it in
their minds. Clea seems to have figured it out all by
herself, and then rejected it as too unbelievable.
Alter, just listen to anything she has to say and see if something pops
up."
"I
thought I'd retired from this intrigue business," Alter said. "But
I'll listen." Her fingers had strayed to her throat, where they played
with the leather necklace strung with polished shells.
Chains of lights dangle between tent and
gambling stand. Couples stroll, crumpling their greasy paper bags. A
merry-go-round whirls light across the enameled hides of sea-horses and
polished porpoises, and the children crawl from under the tent flaps again and
scurry back to the walk-ways. Dolphins nose the corners of the aquarium wagons
and the calliope increases its tempo.
"How do you like it, son?" Mr.
Triton came up behind the dark boy in forest dress who was leaning against a
stay and looking up at the glittering trapeze act.
"It's
fine," Let said. "I've never seen anything like that before."
"Never?" Mr. Triton ran his eyes over the boy's erect figure. From his height,
though, he certainly wasn't a guard. "Well, then I guess it must be quite a sight for you." Beside them in the stands,
the audience applauded.
"It must be hard to do that up
there," said Let.
"It
certainly is. But you know what the hardest thing of all is? It's managing all
these people, all who do their own individual act."
"How do you
mean?"
"Well,
I've done just about everything in this business, from play the damn calliope
to training wild sharks." He paused and looked up at figures spinning in
the ariel spot. "Come
to think of it, I never was anything where I had to stay up in the air too
long." Applause swept the dark tent once more. "But the hardest thing
I ever did was trying to get them all to work together. You've got to listen to
everybody's say, and try to keep everybody happy and alive at the same
time."
"How do you do
it?"
"You
don't. At least never as well as you want to," Mr. Triton said. "You
hold votes, sometimes; or sometimes you look ahead and put your foot down hard
when there's disagreement. And when you're wrong, you admit it as fast as
possible, and change it to right if you can."
"Then
what?" Let
asked.
"Then
you hope everything goes all right and that you'll be around next season to
present your show."
The
Prince looked up at the spinning figures. "They're beautiful," he
said. "All that strength and delicacy at once; it's worth trying to keep
that up there, isn't it?"
"Yes,"
said Mr. Triton, folding his'hands over his stomach.
"Yes, it certainly is. You'd make a good circus person, boy."
Some
of the lights have winked out by the side-show tent. The fried-fish wagon and
the gambling stand, however, are still going strong. Couples stroll, arm
pressed closely against arm, hand in hand, head against shoulder. The
kiddy-cars on the wooden arena still roar against the darkness, and the
children stand on the walk-ways, knuckling their eyes and yawning. The manta-ray
ruffles the blue sand at the bottom of the aquarium tanks, and the calliope
player
THE TOWERS OF TORON has stepped down from the
wagon to get a bowl of chowder.
Clea decided to walk once more around the circus
grounds before she went to bed. She passed the darkened side show tent and was
going toward the wonder-wheel when she caught a look, or a feeling, she wasn't
sure. Anyway, she turned her head and saw the giant forest guard who had come
with her brother looking at her from about fifty feet away.
He
looks like he's trying to see inside of my head, she thought. Then she shook
the thought away. Under it, under everything she had been thinking of recently,
was her new project. It was an amazingly beautiful, subtle, and profound
unified field theory. It was far neater than Derek's, or would be when she
finished it, and it contained towers of thought and logical processes, plumbed
oceans of reverberating overtones among syllogistic rhythms, and encompassed
all her previous work on random spatial co-ordinates— .... gentlemen, it is
more than conceivable that by converting the already extant transit-ribbon, we
may send between two hundred and three hundred pounds of matter anywhere on
the globe with a pinpoint accuracy of microns.
No,
don't think about it. Brush that thought away with the other. But you haven't
thought about it for so long, so long . . .
And
then she remembered his quiet smile, his broad, bulllike
body, the brush of red hair, his sudden wide grin, and the deep inside laughter
like a bear's growl. And then she stood, stunned, surprised, because the memory
was so much clearer in her mind, now, so that she did what she had never let
herself do before, and whispered his name, "Tomar
. . ." and waited for the great wave of pain, that should come; only it
didn't, and realized that sometime in the last few months the wound inside her
had healed, and in healing he had not slipped away, but come closer, if only
because she was in the world of life where he had lived, instead of the retreat
world of death that was her own invention.
And
as she stood shocked motionless by the surprise of the discovery, something
from the depths of her mind began to boil, to surge upward toward her
consciousness, like a pattern clearing, a kaleidoscopic chaos resolving into a
recognizable, meaningful thought. . . .
No! She threw herself upon it, grappled with
it, struggled to keep it out of her mind. No! No! Oh, please help me. Nol
Somehow, oblivion received
it again.
She
was panting, and the wonder-wheel, rimmed with lights, made a meaningless
circle against the black. The calliope was playing again. She blinked, and
looked back to where Arkor was standing. She saw him
frown once, shake his head slightly, and turn away.
The light bulbs were black beads along the
wires that dangled from tent to gambling stand. The last couple threw a
crumpled bag into a trash receptacle. The late moon lined shadows from the rope
railings against the metal walks and lay out a templet
of the wonder-wheel and the merry-go-round across the crumpled grass. The
octopus, the porpoises, and the manta-ray had settled on the bottom of the
tanks. The calliope was still.
They
met by the darkened wonder-wheel, and the late moon turned her white hair
silver. Their eyes were hollow darknesses.
Jon
smiled. "How do you like normal life now that you've lived it again for a
bit?"
"You
call a circus normal?" She smiled back. "How's it coming with the
war? Will you stop it?"
"We've
made another try at it. We chased the Lord of the Flames out of King Uske of all people."
"The
last time he'd closed the artificial radiation barrier that kept us away from
the neo-Neanderthals. What had he done this time?"
"We
don't know yet," Jon said. "Clea knows, at
least Arkor thinks she does. But it's too deep in her
mind."
"That
must be what he meant when he was talking to me earlier," said Alter.
"How could Clea know, Jon?"
He shrugged. "It's not
exactly 'know'; it's that she seems to have some obscure information
that coincides with something that was in King Uske's
mind when the Lord of the Flames left him."
"I
see," she said. "You know, it's funny, I mean Tel and me. We're the
only people in Toromon who know anything about what
you're really doing. And both of us have just sort of drifted away from it all.
He's in the army and I'm in the circus. He's off in the war you're trying to
end, and I'm—well, I'm here." She dropped her hand and then raised it
again. "I hope he gets back soon. Jon, have you gotten your own thing straightened
out, that search for freedom that you used to talk about?"
"I
won't have it until the war is over and I'm free of these Triple Beings. Or so
I tell myself. In prison I learned to wait pretty well. That's what I'm doing
now. And being able to walk about makes waiting a lot easier. And I'm learning
too, things that will probably be useful to me when it's all over. But
sometimes I envy you kids, I really do. I hope the both of you have a lot of
good luck."
"Thanks, Jon."
Before dawn, the strings of lights were wound
around wooden spools. The level beams of the new sun caught the ballooning
tents as they collapsed and were folded and stained the stacked sides of the
dismantled gambling stand pale copper. A few children had gotten up to watch
the wonder-wheel, the merry-go-round, and the kiddy-car arena disassembled. By
six-thirty, the circus carts were rolling toward the shore and the docks where
the great red and gold ship, The Triton, would
take them back to Toron.
X
That
morning reveille
sounded early. Tel gave the 606-B a good going over before it was hauled off
into the tank, and though the mist lay thick, the weather was warm.
"The King is dead."
"Huh?"
"In Toron,
King Uske died at the palace. The report came through
this morning!"
"Do you think it was
an assination?"
"I don't know. I
didn't see the report."
The
rumor washed over the camp like a wave. Though no one could be sure, it was
assumed that the King's death had something to do with this sudden move they
were making. And it was comforting, if only because it established some
reason.
Tel
was coming from the supply cabin with a number three plumbing coil for the 605
(nobody had ordered him to, but he'd checked it on his own and found the number
three nearly burned through) when he saw Illu
carrying something over his shoulder. "What's that?" he hailed the
Neanderthal.
"It's
the sign-post," Illu said. "I asked the
Scout if he was taking it with us, and he said, 'What
for,' and walked away. So I'm bringing it."
"Good for you,"
Tel said.
When
he got back to the 605, he had to argue with the two guys who had just come to
take it away and who didn't want to give him time to fix the coil. But then one
of them saw the flup-flep and said, "Hey, you
must be the fellow that they been talking about that's got one of them things
for a pet." And during the time they were fooling around with the feathery
animal, Tel got the coil in place. Then they went off, wheeling the 605 in
front of them on a bearing-dolly.
When
he was on his way back to the barracks, he passed Ptorn
and another guard at the corner of the cabin. "Perhaps this battle will be
the final one," Ptorn said. "You mentioned
there was talk of a truce?"
"Of
a victory or a truce," said the other, "now that the King is
dead."
Inside
the shack, Tel was reaching under his bed for his rucksack when someone said,
"Well, it looks like this is it."
"Huh?" said Tel,
looking up.
The mist hid the man
sitting on the next bed.
"Oh,
how are you," Tel grinned. "I guess there's no way to know where
we'll be assigned in our next camp. I wish we'd gotten a chance to talk
some." Tel gave an embarrassed chuckle which the
other man returned.
"You
heard anything about his battle?" the man asked. "Just
rumors. Do you think they'll end the war?" The man shrugged.
"Well,
I have to get to my departure detail. I hope we run into each other again some day." He picked up his sack and slogged out into
the mud. He could hear the wheezing tanks lining up at the other end of the
encampment. His order-plate said he should report to tank number three.
He
was wondering if there would be any problem taking flap-Hep
along when a familiar voice called, "Hey." Shrimp solidified in front
of him. "Tel? Yah, I thought it was you."
There was someone else with him. "Tel, here's Curly. How do you like
that?"
"Oh,
hi," Tel said shaking hands with the taller man.
"How've
you been?" Curly asked. "I'm over in Camp D-2. You guys working any
good randy deals?"
"Hell
no," Shrimp interjected. "Everybody in this camp's honest." He
shifted his weight. "Hey, Tel, we were having a little argument about you.
And we wondered if you'd help straighten it out for us; if you don't
mind."
"Sure,"
Tel said. "What is it?"
"Now
just exactly what color are your eyes?"
Tel
drew his eyebrows together and shifted uncomfortably. "Green," he
said. "Why?" And then wished he hadn't."
"Can
we take a look?"
"I—I
guess so."
Shrimp
came very close to him and Curly looked over his shoulder.
"See,
I told you," Shrimp said. "They're green, just like mine. That's cause we both come from the shore. On the shore almost
everybody's eyes are green."
"No,
that's not what I meant," said Curly. "What I'm talking about only happened when it was darker, and not as much light as now.
Come on, let's get in the shade."
"Hey,
look," said Tel, "I gotta get going. I'm
supposed to be at my tank and ready to pull out."
"What
tank do you take?"
"Eh-three."
"Good.
That's the one I'm driving. Come on," Shrimp said. Tel jutted his mind out
in five different directions for escape
but
struck brick at the end of each; so he walked with them through the fog toward
the dark row of tanks.
"Here's
my baby," said, Shrimp, whacking the black metal hull.' It rang hollowly
as they went around to the side.
"Inside'll do it," Curly said, opening the door. The
ladder dropped its rubber casters slowly into the mud. "Now I'll show you
what I mean."
Tel
mounted to the tank behind Shrimp and in front of Curly.
"No, don't turn on the light. That's the
whole point."
In
the three-quarter dark tank whose only illumination came from the pilot bubble
at the other end, Tel stood against the wall while Shrimp and Curly peered into
his face. Tel's heart was going like snapped fingers.
"All
right," Shrimp said. "Now what color does that look like to
you?"
Curly
frowned. "I don't understand it," he said. "Back in basic
training, whenever it was half dark, they always used to look like they just
weren't there."
"But—but
my eyes are green," Tel said. Something was turning inside him, like a
smoky crystal full of memories he could not see. "My eyes are green."
"Of
course his eyes are green," Shrimp said. "What other color would the
eyes of a fisherman be, or the eyes of the son of a fisherman?"
"Yeah. I guess so," Curly said. He looked again. "They're green all
right. Maybe I'm crazy."
Yes,
thought Tel, my eyes are green, always have been, and always will, and wondered
why he had felt so nervous when they had asked to look, why should
they be any other color, he wondered. Why?
"The King is really
dead back home?"
"Yeah. I heard it at the report office. Do you think that means the war may be
over soon?"
"Who
knows? They say this is going to be the big battle. Maybe this will decide
it."
"I
hope so. I'd give my eyeteeth to get back to Toron;
hell, just to see what it looks like."
"Me too."
As the tank whined through the mud, the mist
struck in gusts against the oval portals. Tel sat at the end of the bench. In
the bubbleseat at the front, Shrimp jogged right and left, his hand on the steering rod, his head and shoulder in
silhouette on gray fog. They had been going for an hour when there was a sudden
burst of sound to their left, like rocks smashing.
The
men looked at each other. "What was that?" someone called up to the
driver.
Shrimp shrugged.
The
rising and falling of the tetron motor sizzled
beneath them. Tel leaned his head back on the metal wall, and the vibrations
had nearly put him to sleep when there was another crash. He came awake in time
to see light flare through the right window.
"What
the hell was that?" somebody bellowed. "Are we under attack?"
"Shut up," Shrimp called from the
driver's seat. "Shut up back there."
Then,
through the instruction speaker in the corner, a voice came: "Be calm,
alert. Remember your training. Drivers proceed as scheduled. Stand by for
orders."
Tel
waited, desperately trying to pull down the beating blood that filled his body.
The tank rolled forward.
A half an hour later someone said, "This
is a hell of a way to fight a battle, all trapped up in a damned clam-crate."
"Shut up," the officer with them said.
The flep-flap was sitting quietly under the bench. Now Tel
reached down and gave it a piece of charcoal. As he bent forward and his cuff
pulled up, cool feather brushed his wrist.
The
next time he looked at the oval windows, it was getting dark. They had been
going a long time.
"All drivers halt," said the speaker.
Shrimp's shoulder jerked forward as he jammed
on the 112
break stick. The tank lurched. No order came to
move. Tel reached under the bench and sat the bundle feathers in his lap. All
its eyes were tightly closed.
The
men began to scrape their boots back and forth over the floor and the benches squeeked. "Come on, relax," the officer said.
"You guys'll get your chance."
"Convoy disembark," came through the speaker.
The
men stood up, stretched their legs, and punched at the ceiling to stretch their
arms.
The door clinked open, the ladder dropped
down, and Tel, in his turn, climbed out. Except that the mist was darker and thicker,
it might have been the same place that they had climbed in. As the group at the
foot of the ladder grew, Tel noticed that the ground was perhaps a little
firmer. Just then there was a crashing noise through the evening.
Their eyes snapped left; and fire, fifty feet
away, rose white and billowing through the mist. A momentary silhouette showed
a grove of spidery trees between them and the hit.
Suddenly
there were orders breaking in the air all around them. "Tank-four
to your left." "Dispatch convoy report to Major Stanton."
"Convoy from tank-three follow me."
Tel
followed at a half run as they left the tank. Two men joined them from another
platoon. Suddenly they were stopped, split in half, and Tel's group was led to
the left while the others went right.
They
had just passed another group of squat, black tanks when there was a second
hit, this time on the far side. Eyes narrowed, heads turned as the deep blue
evening flamed white, then darkened. "Throw those rock bags up!"
someone was calling. "Throw those rock bags up!"
Tel
turned in time as a heavy burlap sack scraped into his palms, yanking from the
shoulders, nearly pulling him to the ground. A man on the other side was
waiting for it, and he tossed it on, turned back, and caught a second bag. They
were making a chain of rocks across the area.
"You
and you—" (neither one was Tel, but the order made him turn his head and
almost miss a rock bag) "—climb that rise back there and report to D-T
platoon."
Something metallic rattled
to his left.
"Watch out! It's sharp!"
Three
men were unrolling a coil of barbed wire in front of the rock-bag wall. The
coils ranged over the burlap ends. The flip-flup
jumped back just in time to avoid being stepped on and the coil unspiraled along the wall.
"Hey, you. They need you down the line about fifty feet."
Tel
turned and sprinted off. A handful of men, apparently heading for the same
destination, had just joined him when there was thunder and another flash. He
clamped his eyes shut and nearly tripped over something. Someone steadied him,
and as he looked up a voice said, "Hold on there, Green-eyes."
Curly was one of the men
who had joined him.
They
stopped together and were stuck after one another at a new section of the
rock-bag wall brigade. The rhythm was working its way into his shoulders, his
body: steady yourself, catch, swing around, and toss.
Splat!
He'd been too self-confident. He was bending down to pick up the bag when
somebody yelled, "Get down!" He went onto his knees in the mud and
clutched the sack. His eyelids turned orange in front of his pupils and he felt
heat all along his right side. When it went away, he staggered up, and nearly
tripped over Curly.
Curly
grabbed his arm and together they went as fast as they could back up along the
wall. Suddenly Curly grabbed him again and pulled him down into a depression in
front of the rocks. The flop-flop rolled in after them and twittered. The fog
was deep blue, but through it Tel saw the sweat on Curly's
face. They were both panting.
Behind
them was the whine of a tank shifting position, a coughing stutter, a sizzling
hiss of tetron units, then silence.
Twenty feet away from their little depression there was some confusion.
"Is
that the 606-B they're setting up?" Curly asked. "I thought I heard it humming. That's your
machine, isn't it?"
"Yeah,
it is," said Tel, trying to catch his breath. "But I don't think I could tell a tank from an electric razor right now."
Another hit caught them to the left. They ducked, and then Curly raised his
head and peered around. "Looks like they're giving us
hell."
"What are you looking for?" Tel
asked. "I can't see a thing."
Curly
went back down in the pit. "Just to see if anybody's real close." His
voice was suddenly grave. "Hey, I—I want
to explain something, well, I mean
something about me. To you."
"Huh?" said Tel.
"I
felt sort of funny with that business about your eyes today. So, I got to
thinking. And I figured
I might as well tell this to you, about me, like an apology."
His
first surprise and repulsion turned over in his belly, and though unsure of
what was on the other side, he said, "Yeah, I see."
Curly
smeared a muddy hand across his forehead. "Damn," he said, and gave
an embarrassed laugh. "There used to be this guy,
in the Mali gang I ran
with back in Toron. He wrote these real strange
poems. His name was Vol Nonik,
a sort of funny guy. Anyway, I wish
I was showing this to him, because then he'd make a poem out of it. But he
couldn't get into the army because there was something funny with his back. So
I guess you'll have to do." He laughed again, then
looked down at his hands. "You've never seen anybody do this before, have
you?"
"Do what?"
"Look," Curly said. "At my hands. Look." "I don't under—"
"We
may not get out of this thing alive," Curly said. "So look at my
hands!"
Tel gazed at the soldier's muddy cupped
fingers. They began to glow.
Faintly
blue at first, through the fog, the blue became red, a red fire flickering in
his hands, a ball of red fire glittering just above his palms, shot with green,
then suddenly yellow. "Look," Curly breathed. "You see."
The ball of fight lengthened, became more slender, bifurcating at the bottom
and top. The waist thinned, the head raised, fingers articulated themselves at
the ends of tiny, feminine, flaming hands. She bent, miniature, and swayed on
tiptoe, wavoring in his cupped hands. Blue, bronze,
and golden flames like pinpoints raced her body. A breeze came (Tel felt it on the back of his
neck) and her hair, a bell of blue sparks, shimmered behind her. She raised her
arms and whispered (a voice like a
whisper of water over sand: "Curly, I love you. I love you, Curly, I love
you."
"Isn't
she—beautiful?" Curly's own whisper came like
two number ten rasps against one another over the faint message of the
miniscule homuncula. He breathed deeply now, and she
faded.
When Tel looked up from the muddy fingers,
Curly was staring at him intensely. "You ever see anyone do that
before?"
Tel shook his head.
"How—how do you do it?"
"I
don't know," Curly said. "I—just do. I used to dream about her,
before I came to Ketrall. But once, I thought about
what it would be like if I just made her happen. And there she was, as you saw,
in my hands. I never showed anyone else. But with all this—" He made a
motion around them. "—I thought
I ought to show it to someone. That's all." Suddenly he seemed
embarrassed. "Well," he grunted.
Tel
glanced at his pet; the flup-flip's polished eyes
were open, and he wondered if it too had seen the flaming girL
so vivid, so sparkling, so real.
The
familiar whine of a tank motor was growing behind him. Suddenly he whirled in
the mud, and saw the looming shadow. "Get out of here," he cried to
Curly who looked flustered and then dove to the
right. Tel scrambled to the left. The tank careened toward him, passed him
within inches, as he whirled to stare at the moving side and staggered
backwards; for one moment he was close enough to see through the bubble dome on
top, the tall, light-haired figure of the Scout at the steering rod. Then the
tank was past him, crashed through the rock wall, and the fog closed behind the
black bulk and swirled into the gap left in the rocks.
What
the hell's going on? Tel
wondered. A whole bunch of people were running toward the gap. Then an
officer's voice stopped them. "Get the hell on down the linel Are you waiting for the ketzis
to come in after you?"
And he was running again when the next hit
came—not
close enough to blind him, but not far enough away to ignore. He caught himself
short in the middle of a breath. In the harsh light, he saw against the wall,
tangled in the barbed wire, Shrimp, his whole left side was charred black. The
wet mud had kept the rest of his uniform from burning. There was very little of
his left leg, only the burnt stick of his left arm, and one cheek looked like
crinkled carbon paper, though the remainder of his face was vividly
recognizable. Aflame and panicked in a former hit, he must have tried to climb
the wall, forgetting where he was going, and fallen back into the tangles of .
. .
Then
the light went out, and Tel was still running. He wasn't breathing; perhaps his
heart had stopped; but his feet kept beating down into the mud. It was too dark
to see anything now, but on the screen of night before him, blinking on and
off, was the after image of the glittering flakes of burnt uniform, the red of
drying blood, and a net of iron wire.
They
did a lot of fighting after that. During one dark lull, the first stories began
to trickle back.
"Did you hear what happened about the
Scout?" "What?"
"He was in that tank."
"The one that went berserk and busted the damned blockade?"
"Yeah. And they found him. He'd driven the thing smack through our wall into a
nest of ketzis. He just crushed the whole
installation."
"What about him?"
"They
said the tank exploded when it hit. Somehow he knew that nest was there and
that it would get us if it wasn't gotten rid of somehow."
"He
sure picked a hell of a way to get rid of them. Where's the Scout now?"
"Are
you kidding? They found pieces of that tank over half a mile radius."
In
the darkness Tel pressed his cheek against the wet burlap of the rock-bag
siding, feeling the gravel through the cloth, and listening to the men talking
beside him. His fingers moved through the flap-flip's feathers, their softness
tickling the tender skin on the inside of his knuckles. He was still, thinking
about the Scout, and Shrimp, and wondering why . . .
XI
"Miss
Rahsok! Where in the world have you been?" The
woman with the kerchief set down her garbage pail beside the stoop. "I'm
so glad to see you. Isn't it all terribly exciting, the coronation and
everything? You'll never know what I've been going through. Actually I'm so
upset I don't know what to do. You know how concerned I am about my daughter, Renna. I don't even know how to begin telling you—"
"Excuse
me," Clea said, "I'm in an awful rush." . "What happened is I actually managed to get a
ticket to the pre-victory ball the council gave last week in memory of His
Majesty. That was just before Prince Let had been found. I had to lie myself
perfectly green to that atrocious woman on the committee about why my daughter
hadn't been sent a ticket throught the regular
debutante channels. But I got it, and we made the most beautiful dress, all
white and silver. What girl wouldn't love a white and silver dress.
The design was simply gorgeous. Well, you would have thought she was going to a
funeral, the way she moped around. Renna does a
little drawing, nothing great, mind you, but suddenly her pictures turned
completely morbid, skulls lying in the branches of trees, dead birds, and one
perfectly hideous little boy crouched on the beach about to be swept away by a
wave. I should have known something was wrong right then. She kept on saying
she didn't really want to go to the ball, that she wasn't interested. Go for
your mother's sake, I told her. You may meet some dashing Duke or Lord, and,
who knows? Well, she thought that was silly, and laughed. But anyway, at four
o'clock in the morning, she set off in her beautiful white and silver dress.
Oh, she looked so beautiful, Miss Rahsok, I nearly
cried. In fact I did cry, after she was gone. Because she
never came home. That evening I got a letter that she had gotten married
to that awful boy I told you about who writes poems and lives in the Devil's
Pot. She invited me to visit them, but I just couldn't go. She said that she
would tell me about the ball, and that it hadn't been so bad after all.
Imagine, a pre-victory ball, not so bad! Isn't it awful? Isn't it
terrible?" The woman drew up her shoulders. "But then you take my
younger daughter . . ."
"Excuse
me," Clea said. "I'm really sorry, but I've
got to get upstairs and get some things. Excuse me." She hurried past the
woman into the hall.
She opened the thumb-print lock and stepped
into the dark apartment. The window shades were drawn.
It's
like a little cave, she thought, where I spent so much time. There's not enough
room for an acrobat to turn a cartwheel. It's too dim to see the grease paint
on a clown's face even if he were standing just across the room, and you can't
hear any—any calliope music.
She
had come back to pick up her notebook with the odd radical formulas she'd never
thought she'd look at again. Hut then I never thought I would want to look at
anything again, she reflected. She went to the desk, remembering Alter, Mr.
Triton, and the great tide of red and gold that was (lie circus. As she opened
the drawer, she rested her other hand on the desk top, and her fingers touched
a crumpled piece of paper. She frowned, stood up, and spread out the sheet.
Bright red letters blazed across a green field:
We have an enemy beyond the barrier.
Viciously she tore the paper across, then tore it across ngain. She
jammed the pieces deep into the waste basket, snatched up her notebook from the
opened drawer, and left the apartment.
Around
the corner of the hall from her, something crashed (o the floor, bringing her
up from the pit of unformulated imger into which she
had plunged. She ran forward to see what it was.
"Oh—eh—good morning Miss Rahsok."
"Dr.
Wental, it's three o'clock
in the afternoon!" exclaimed Clea. "Isn't
it sort of early to be—in this condition?"
The
Doctor raised his finger to his mouth. "Shhhh. I don't want my wife to know. I'm
celebrating."
"What in the world are
you celebrating?"
"The King's coronation. What else?" As he tried to get to his
feet, Clea took his arm. "Oh, the bars are
filled to bur— (urp)—sting. Everyone's celebrating!
The war will be overl The
war will be over and all the boys will be back. Hold on a minute there, will
you?"
The
doctor shook his head and steadied himself against the wall. "A new king,
and a new age, I tell you. You have no idea how good an age it will be. But
then, you have no idea how good an age it has been. Who knows where I'll go,
what heights I'll have scaled."
"What are you talking about?"
"My medical practice," said the
doctor, and chuckled. "I get new recommendations every day, every
day." "Your lupus erythermatosis patient
got better?" "Eh—which one?"
"The
first one, the one you had difficulty getting the medicine for."
"Him? Oh,
him. He died. There was a very small stink about it; someone accused me of
cutting the medicine with something. But they couldn't prove a thing. I have
acquaintances on the Council and they couldn't prove a thing. The important
part is that people heard about the recommendation, and every day, every day .
. ."
"I
think you can make it the rest of the way by yourself, Dr. Wental,"
said Clea.
"Oh,
yes, of course. But when things go so well, sometimes you just have to break
out and celebrate."
"Not that door," Clea said. "The next one."
"Oh,
thank you." He moved unsteadily to the next apartment entrance.
"Yes, thank you so much. But be very quiet now, because I don't want my
wife . . ."
Clea left him fumbling at the thumb-print lock.
The
royal entertainment, supplied by Mr. Triton, was 120
waiting in
the palace garden for the festivities to start. Clea
entered the broad plot of grass cut by stone walks with granite benches. Vari-colored canvas had been stretched over slanting tent
poles, and the circus people strolled back and forth in their spangled
costumes, talking quietly. "Dr. Koshar?"
Clea turned to see Arkor.
"What is it?" "We need your help." "What do you
want?"
"Some information." He paused for a moment. "Will you come
with me?" Warily she nodded.
"I
don't want to frighten you," Arkor said.
"And some of what I want to talk about will be frightening." They
walked into the palace entrance. "Will you help us?"
"What
do you want the information for? So far, I haven't any idea what you're talking
about."
"You
do have some idea," Arkor corrected her.
"Why else did you quit your government job three years ago, and shut
yourself up since then?"
"Because I was unhappy, and confused."
"I
know why you were unhappy," Arkor said.
"But why were you confused?"
"I
don't think I understand your distinction."
"The
distinction was yours," Arkor said. "You
have a very precise mind, and you usually mean what
you say. I ask again, why were you confused?"
"You
haven't answered my question," Clea said.
"Why do you want this information?"
"Fair
enough," Arkor said. "It's a piece of information that a number of people have, among them most of
the council, and the late King Uske. Many of the
people of the forest have it also. Yet it is being protected very well. You are
the only person we have found who possesses this information who is outside
this protection."
"You
are being very imprecise," said Clea.. "You're going to have to be honest with me if you
want my help."
"I
said it would be frightening."
"Go
on."
"First
of all I can read your mind." He waited for a moment 121 and then went on.
'There are many telepaths among the forest guards. They have a constant mental
net that spreads all over Toromon. Now though I can
read minds, I have been excluded from this net. I assumed it was because I was
somewhat of an apostate; my interests were not theirs, and among the telepaths
there is little—I suppose you would call it nosiness. This piece of information
I'm looking for concerns the war, and is perhaps the
most important thing about it, maybe the secret of ending it, or winning it, or
losing. The first thing that conceals it in most minds is an incredible layer
of guilt, and I should have been able to break though that, but I can't. It is
under the further protection of the telepathic net I spoke of. I tried to get
some explanation from the net, but though I was not discouraged from seeking
along my own ways, I was given no clue. You are the only person in whom I can
detect this information who is not under the protection of the net. That's
because you figured it out yourself where as these
others have all been informed of it by one another, and have had to deal with
it somehow on official level. The guilt is there even more strongly in you, but
the pattern is still there, glowing beneath the surface of your mind,
recognizable, but indistinct." Arkor paused one
final time. "Incidentally, the last person we tried to explain any of this
to insisted it was a psychotic fantasy. But he agreed
to help us as though it were a hypothetical problem. So you have a positive
precedent even if you don't believe me." They turned down the hall.
"If
I'm not being protected," Clea asked, "why
haven't you dug it out of my mind already."
"You're
working on a unified field theory," Arkor said,
"that you believe might be the greatest discovery man has yet made; and I
have a great deal of respect for your opinions, Dr. Koshar.
If I dug it out, it would leave your mind terribly shaken, and some of your
creative faculties might be impaired. You'll have to fish it out yourself, with
just a little prodding from me with perhaps some verbal assistance as well."
"As
a hypothetical problem," Clea said, smiling,
"I'm game."
"Fine," said Arkor.
"Now, as I said before, don't be frightened. But about an hour ago you
tore up a piece of paper and threw it away, very angrily. Why?"
"How
did you—I didn't tear—" The confusion that struck her came with complete
surprise. "Oh you mean—well, it was a stupid war poster, and I
suppose—"
"Why are you upset
now?"
"I'm
not—I mean I just wondered how you knew I tore it— the paper, the poster up. I
was in my apartment with the door locked and the shades down."
"That's
not what upset you. Why did you bring the poster into your home in the first
place?"
"Because—because
I just don't like this whole war business in the first place. I don't like the
idea of our people dying beyond the barrier for—" She stopped.
"For
no reason?"
"No." She took two breaths.
"For something I did, something I
discovered."
"I
see," Arkor said. "And that's why you quit
your job?" "I—yes. I felt responsible."
"Then
why did you bring the poster into your house in the first place. And why did
you wait all this time, until you were about to leave that house for good, to
tear it up?"
"I don't know. I
was—"
"Confused,
yes. Now
what were you confused about?"
"I
was confused because I felt guilty. I felt somehow responsible for . . ."
"For the war? But we have an enemy beyond the barrier, Dr. Koshar.
You mean that you personally felt responsible for this whole governmental and
economic flux that produced the war? You must know that there were many more
factors at work than just your discovery."
"For
a personal reason, then."
"You mean the death of your fiance, Major Tomar?"
"I mean for the death of my fiance Major Tomar in the warl"
Arkor waited a moment. Then he said, "I don't
believe you."
Clea looked up at him. "That's your
privilege." "Shall I tell you why?"
"I don't know whether I want to
hear."
"When did Major Tornar dieF'
"I don't think I want
to talk about itl"
"He
died in the late spring three years ago on a mission to wreck the radiation
generators just beyond Telphar. You didn't make your
discovery of the inverse sub-trigonometric functions and their application to
random spatial coordinates until three months after he was dead. Major Tomar didn't die off in Tranu or Ketrall,
he died in military service here in Toromon. Now how
could your discovery have had anything to do with his death?"
"But I was working for
the government . . ."
"Dr.
Koshar, if you were half a dozen other people—even
other brilliant people—you might be capable of falling into that sort of
sentimentality. But you have a hard, resilient, supremely logical mind. You
know that's not why you fed guilty."
"I don't know why I feel guilty then!"
"Then
answer these: why did you bring the poster into your house if you didn't want
to be reminded of the war? And if you were angry, if you disagreed with this
'whole war business,' why didn't you tear the poster up the day you peeled it
so carefully from the board fence. Why did you leave it crumpled up on your
desk for nearly a year and a half. What were you trying to remind yourself of something you had discovered but
couldn't and wouldn't believe; something that today you thought you wouldn't
have to remind yourself of again, tear it up, jam it into the waste-basket,
push it out of your mind."
"But
there won't be any war now," she interrupted him. "Remind myself!
There's a new King now! Remind myself? But there'll be a truce declared,
they'll all come back, and there won't be any . . ." She was talking very
loudly, very fast, and they had nearly reached the throne room though there was
nobody in the hall.
Down
an adjoining corridor swept the two diplomatic ambassadors from Tranu, six-legged mutant spindled armed insects with blue
cloaks billowing behind their thoral mandibles. By
chance, Arkor glanced at them, and suddenly he
stopped, listening, sensing, as the creatures walked past.
Clea turned too, surprised. Something had been
prying at her mind, she realized now that it was gone. She had' been resisting,
pulling down, but now that the pressure was lifted for a moment, her mind
relaxed.
Then it happened. It surged up from the
bottom of her mind like a tide, a water spout, erupting into her consciousness
as an undersea volcano throws off mud, sand, and steam. She fell against the
wall and whispered, "The war . . ."
But Arkor had taken a step forward, after the ambassadors.
"Those creatures," he cried, "from Tranu.
No, we won the war against Tranu,
they saidl But we won the war . . . I" He nearly screamed it.
And
from the wall behind him, Clea shrieked back,
"What war! Oh, don't you seel What war . . . 1"
XII
In
the middle of
the soldiers, Illu pounded the sign post into the
muddy earth. "How do you know if the arms are pointing right?"
someone asked.
Illu
shrugged. "It don't really make much difference,
does it."
Tel
turned away now with Ptorn beside him. The new
barrack cabins sat at the edge of the new encampment, dim and distant through
writhing fog.
"It's good to be
camped again."
Tel
looked around at the vague shapes in the mist. "Yeah," he said.
"Makes you feel like you've got your feet on the—" He pulled his boot
from a deeper puddle of mud. "—ground again."
Ptorn laughed.
"You
know, I've been thinking. I've been thinking about it a long time,
too."
"About
what?" asked the guard. "About
the Scout."
"You
and a lot of other people," Ptorn said,
gesturing back to where the group of soldiers were
breaking up around the sign. "What's your particular thought?"
"I want to know why."
"I
can think of six whys I'd like the answer to," said Ptorn.
"Which one's yours?"
"Just why he did what he did. Why he
smashed that tank into the ketzi nest to save
us."
"That's a pretty good one. Maybe he
figured that if somebody didn't do it, we'd all go up in flames."
"Maybe." Tel hunched his shoulder. "You know, I suppose I could understand
it better if the whole regiment were made up of forest guards. But it
wasn't."
Ptorn laughed. "Look," he said,
"we're all the same phylum, same genus, same
species. That's not the part to wonder over."
"Well,
I do," Tel said. "You guards, I know, have a different language that
you speak in the forest. What about the Neanderthals? How did they learn our
language so fast?"
"I
believe their home language is a lot closer to the official language of Toron than ours is. After all, our language was an artificial
one we invented ourselves, hundreds of years ago. It's a great deal more
compressed than yours. Have you asked any of the apes about it?"
"I
guess I will," Tel said. After they had walked on a few more steps, he
said again, "But I still don't know why."
Someone
was running toward them through the fog. He nearly bumped into them, steadied
himself on Tel's shoulder, and cried: "The truce! Did you hear? They're
crowning the new King and there's going to be a truce! We'll all be going home!
We'll all be going back to Toromon!"
Then
he took off in another direction toward a group of soldiers standing around the
barracks' entrance. Tel and Ptorn looked at one
another. The forest guard grinned. "We'll go back," he said.
"We'll go back."
They
were called in later, and as they stood around the little room, the speaker was
announcing to them through the misty atmosphere:
"—does not go into effect until six o'clock this evening. Until then we are still at war. We are quite
near a ketzi encampment. There will be no wandering
off the base.
Until
the truce is actually
consummated, the ketzis' defenses will be tripled.
Anyone who strays beyond the encampment limit will be considered guilty of
aggressive action. When the truce conditions are concluded, we will begin
preparations for decamping."
First whispers, then talk, then laughter
spread through the men. Then they burst out the door into the camp clearing.
Somebody took his shirt off, knotted it in a ball, and flung it into the air.
Somebody else fell down in the mud, laughing hysterically. There was a lot of
running around, and more laughing, and some crying. Tel saw Lug coming out of
the barracks toward them.
"What
is it?" the Neanderthal called. "Huh? What's the matter?"
"What do you mean what's the
matter?" Tel called back. Lug came up rubbing his eyes. "What's
everybody shouting about?"
"Where
were you?" Tel asked. "Weren't you there for the announcement?"
"I
was—" Lug rubbed his eyes again and looked—expressing himself in the way
he hunched his shoulders a little-embarrassed. "I was asleep."
"They
signed the truce!" Tel explained, getting excited all over again.
"Huh?"
His fists fell slowly from his face. He shook his head. "Huh?"
"Lug,
they signed the truce! The war's over!" He gave the Neanderthal a playful
whack. "Ape, how do you manage to sleep through something like that?"
"I
was tired," Lug said. He looked up at Tel and drew in the thick ropes of
his brow. "The war's over?"
Tel
nodded vigorously. "Finished, over, ended, done with; don't you see
everybody cheering and jumping around?"
Lug
looked around at the rollicking men. "That means we can go home?"
"That's right. Home."
Lug
smiled and yawned. "That's good," he said with his eyes still closed.
"That's good."
"Lug, what are you going to do when you
get home?" Lug shrugged his shoulder up; then, as they began to go down, Tel saw an idea suddenly flood up behind his broad face and burst out in words: "I know. I'm going to
teach." "Teach?" Tel asked.
"That's right," Lug said, excitement
animating his heavy features. "I'm going to teach them things."
"You mean
your people in the
ruins?"
"That's right. I learned a lot of things just coming here that they should know.
Like how to write down talking. The Scout taught me to do that, before he—well,
he taught me, and to read it too."
"The
Scout taught you to read and write?" Tel asked in amazement.
"That's
right," Lug said. "And I could teach my woman, and my girl child, and
the others. And we could plant kharba fruits in rows
where the land was clear instead of picking them wild. You can take care of them better and can have a lot more of them that way. I was talking to a guy who
lives on one of the coastal farms and he said that's the way they do it there. I've learned a lot of things. And if I
teach them, then everything will be better for us. Right?"
"Sure,"
said Tel.
"Hey,"
asked Lug, looking down at Tel's feathery, flippered
pet that was slapping back and forth and twittering a few feet away, "will
they let you take that thing back with you?"
"I
don't know," Tel said. "I hadn't thought
about it."
"Do
you think he'd be happy back in Toromon? It isn't
very muddy back there is it?"
"No,
it isn't. I'd like to take him, though. I've gotten sort of fond of him."
Lug
squatted down and made the snapping sound with his fingers. The flep-flep waddled over and climbed onto his hand. Lug
stroked the feathers and chuckled. "Maybe if you had two flips-flaps to keep each other company, it wouldn't be so
bad. But one by itself would get lonely."
"I'd
like to keep him around up until I go, anyway, even if I couldn't take him back. He can sort of wave good-bye to me just as I leave."
"That
would be nice."
"Oh,
I wanted to ask you something," said Tel. "What is it?"
"How
come you apes who live further away from Toron than
the forest guards speak the same language we do when the guards have
another?"
Lug thought a minute. "Well, it's not
exactly the same," he said. "We have some different words for things.
But they're mostly for food and stuff like that, things you use in the
house."
"Oh," Tel said. "I see."
"And
we pick up your words fast. That's another thing I want to teach when I get back. I asked the Scout about it once, and he
said the forest language is a made-up language, from years ago. It speaks a
lot faster, and so many of them have forgotten the old language now unless they
have a lot to do with you men."
"I see," Tel
repeated.
Lug
laughed. "Then I even teach you something. I'll be a good teacher because
I can explain well."
"Sure,"
said Tel. "You want to look after the animal for a bit? I'm going to check
my tools and see if they're all ready to give back. It'll take me about a half
an hour to run through them all."
"I'll
watch him," Lug said, and Tel walked off toward one of the barracks' cabins,
calling back over his shoulder:
"Thanks a lot."
Tel had been blundering under what he'd
thought was his bed for five minutes when it dawned on him he'd prob-bably wandered into the wrong cabin. The arrangement
of the barracks was a little different from the old camp and he still hadn't
gotten it down right. As he got up, he nearly bumped into the figure of another
soldier about to sit down on the next bed. "Oh, hey, I'm sorry," Tel
began.
"That's
okay pal," the other soldier said, "Say, aren't you the guy who used
to be in my cabin back in the old camp?"
Then
Tel recognized the voice. "Yeah, that's right. I'm glad to run into you
again. I thought you'd been transferred to another encampment. How've things
been treating you since the battle?"
The figure shrugged.
In the darkened cabin they sat now on opposite
beds. The fog had thickened, and the soldier was still a blank shadow in Tel's
eyes.
"Fair, I guess." The shadow
chuckled. "Life hasn't been too bad."
"I
guess if you got through that damn thing you can't complain about too much.
Isn't it great about the truce? What's the first thing you're gonna do after you get back to Toromon?"
The
soldier let out a sigh. "I don't know if it's all that great. Maybe for
you guys it is. But me? I really don't have anything
to do when I get back. I was sort of hoping it would go on a little longer. I
was at Tranu in Company Forty-four. That was a great
company, it really was. Now I'm in Ketrall. I'd just
as soon go someplace else after this and fight a little more. This ain't a bad life. It's just risky. And I guess for me the
risks are just about over."
"Oh,"
Tel said, not quite understanding. "Well, what did you used to do back in Toromon?"
The
shadowed head shook slowly. "You know, I don't even remember. I've been
away so long, somehow I just don't even remember."
Tel frowned
as the figure lay back on the bed. Then he stood up and went outside, stepping
over the burned-out logs of last night's fire. He was just about to go into his
own cabin, when somebody hailed him, "Hi there, Creen-eyes?"
^Curly?"
"In
person. Already to leave?"
"Just about. I still gotta check my tools. Hey, Curly, I wanted to ask you about that thing you showed me . . ."
"Shhhh."-Curly's forefinger
sprang to his lips. "Somebody might hear you talking about it."
"I
just wanted," Tel lowered his voice, "to know how you did it."
"Have you tried it
yet?"
"No, but-"
"Well,
then don't bother me." Curly's annoyance got cut
off when somebody cried out across the muddy flat: "Hey you, come backl" There was a distant, double flop-flup, flup-flop, one of tiny flippered feet, the other of open-toed
Neanderthal boots.
"That's Lug!" Tel said. "He
must be chasing my—"
The form was just discemable thirty feet away and moving
further
off.
"Well, where does he think he's chasing
it?" said Curly.
"Oh
hell," Tel said, "I forgot to tell him about the boundary." He
took off across the mud shouting, "Come back here, you stupid ape! Get
back here!"
He caught up to Lug some forty feet outside
the camp limit, grabbed his shoulder and whirled him around.
Lug
looked surprised. "It got away, and I just—" he began to explain.
"Just get back as fast as you can
run."
"But
the truce."
"It
doesn't take effect until six o'clock and the ketzis
have doubled their watch. Now get going." As they started back at a trot,
Tel felt his first panic break and found relief in a flow of friendly abuse
directed toward the Neanderthal's jogging back. "I used to wonder why the
Scout would break his neck for us guys. Well, here I am and maybe I should know
now, but I'm damned if I do. Come on, move." Lug speeded up, just as Tel
heard the sound of flippers at his feet. He stopped and dropped to a crouching
position. "Well, there you are!" He accosted his pet, held out his
hand and snapped his fingers. "Come on, baby," Tel said, "you can have a nice piece of charcoal when we get
back."
Lug
who was already inside the boundary line tinned around and called, "Hey, I
thought you said run."
"Come
on," Tel called once more at the flap-flop who opened four shell-polished,
pastel eyes and blinked at him. "Come."
And that was the last sound he ever made.
Lug staggered backward from the rumble of
miniature thunder, his lids cramped shut before the column of white fire that
spurted up where a moment before Tel had been crouching.
"What the hell was that?" someone
cried from across the flat. Ptorn ran up and grabbed
the Neanderthal's arm. "Lug, what happened?"
"I
don't know—I don't know—" His eyes were still closed and he was shaking
his broad head back and forth.
One
of the officers was shouting: "God damn it, this war isn't over yet. Now
who was outside the boundary! Who was it?"
By one of the barracks, Curly looked up from
his cupped hands in which a flaming woman danced over his dirty palms and
frowned.
XIII
.
. pronounce you
King Let of the Empire of Toromon."
Jon,
standing in the first gallery below the raised throne, watched the chief
councilman back away from the blond youth with the tan face who was now the
King. There were not more than sixty persons in attendance: the twelve coun-cilmen, members of the royal family, their guests, and
several other important or highly honored state personages. Jon was there as
Petra's guest. Among the others was the grotesquely imposing figure of Rolth Catham, the historian. The
King paused while he looked over the people in the room, and then sat upon the
throne.
Applause rippled among the
participants.
Then
a man in the back of the room looked over his shoulder at another noise,
louder than the clapping coming from the ante-chamber. Someone else turned, then still more people. The sentries' attention was alerted
by now. Jon and Petra
both received mental nudges
at the same time. "It's Arkor," Petra whispered, but Jon had already begun to make
his way back to the ante-room. The Duchess paused just long enough to get Catham's attention, then followed.
When
Jon pushed into the smaller chamber he saw confusion. Guards were holding Arkor, and others, were surrounding one of the ambassadors
from Tranu. Clea was
leaning against the wall. The body of the second ambassador was scattered, in
pieces, over the floor.
Akor was saying calmly but loudly, "No, I killed no one. They are not ambassadors, they're impostors. Will you
just please look at the 'body.' "
The plastic rib cage had cracked open and the
clock-work interior of the "ambassador" still hummed and quivered.
One glass eye had rolled from its rubber socket across the tile.
"Can't you understand, they're robots!"
The
sentries looked, the council-members starecL A moment later Jon saw the King push through the door with
a guard on either side. "Now what's going on," one of the guards was
demanding.
It was Petra who suggested the private
meeting in the council room. The members sat along one side. At the head of the
room the young King was seated on a slightly raised platform. On the other side
sat Jon, Petra, Arkor, Catham,
and Clea. "Now what is it you want to say?"
The
Duchess nodded to Arkor who stood up and faced the
council. "I have somebody here who is going to tell you something that you
all know, but have conveniently insulated yourselves from. Something you all
did, then decided consciously that it was the only way out of a problem, but
took the decision only at the assurance that you would not have to remember
making it." He turned to Clea. "Now, will
you tell the council what you were about to tell me, Dr. Koshar?"
Clea stood up. Her face was pale. "They
won't believe it," she said. Then her voice grew firmer and she spoke
directly to the council. "You won't believe it. But you know it anyway."
She paused. "I spoke
to many of you three years ago when I first made the discovery that enabled you to send people, equipment, and
supplies off to this war of yours. You were incredulous then. And you will not
believe this at all: there is no war."
The council members looked
at one another and frowned.
She repeated, "There
is no war, and you know it."
"Well,"
spluttered one of the council members, "then what—I mean where—are all our soldiers?"
"They are sitting"—she took a
breath—"in tiny metal cells stacked up like coffins in the vast section of
Telphar where recruit soldiers are not allowed."
"And
what are they doing there?" demanded another council member.
"They
are dreaming your war, each one desperately trying to dream his way back to
what he knows is reality, somewhere deep at the bottom of his mind. Sodium pentathol drugs keep them in a foggy, highly suggestive
state; three years of constant propaganda keep their minds trained on the
subject of war; six weeks of basic training formally designed to make a raving
psychotic of the steadiest mind lends the final unquestionable patina of
reality to the dream in which every sensation of the real world, the sound of
wrinkling sheets, the glitter of sun or water, the fee] of wet cloth, or the
smell of old rotten wood, are fitted into a mosiac
defined by whatever each one fears and loves most, and is called war. Finally,
a computer with an information-sorting mechanism that can take whole sensory
patterns from one brain and transpose them to another keeps all these dream
co-ordinated with one another."
"Oh, that's
ridiculous."
"It's
impossible."
"I don't believe all
this."
It
was as if the doubt was a signal upon which a vast mental flood gate opened.
Jon had felt something similar when Arkor had made
him understand the language of the forest guards. But this was as though he had
suddenly acquired another sense, sharp as sound or sight.
In
terms of sight, it was like standing before a vast pattern of bright lights
rising around him yet still before him. In terms of sound it was as if a
symphony's opening phrase had begun and he was waiting for the cadence to
resolve. In terms of touch, it was as if a storm of frozen and heated winds
swirled toward him but had not yet struck. But it was neither sight, nor sound,
nor feeling; because he still felt the ridged back of his chair, could hear the
rustling of the councilor's robes, and could see their worried faces, their
narrowing eyes and pursing hps.
Arkor addressed the vast mental pattern that they
were all aware of now: "Why have you protected this secret in their
minds?"
The answer came back like sparkling
fire-works, chords of music, waves of tingling foam:
"Because we did not know what else to do with it. It was an idea, this
war, which sprouted in the late King's mind, yet the seeds of it are in every
mind in Toromon. The one man who opposed the King,
and that was even after the plan was well under way, was Prime Minister Chargill, who was assassinated. We felt we could neither
help nor hinder you in your effort because we did not understand it. The
government asked our help in obliterating the knowledge from the minds of those
officially connected with the project, and since it was a solution to the
economic problem, we consented; because we could not refuse."
Jon and Petra both stood now beside Arkor. "Then understand our effort now," Jon
said.
"Our intent was to
save our country," said Petra.
"And
to salvage the freedom of each man in it," said Jon, "freedom from
such oppressive—dreams!"
"Then
what must we do?" asked the collective mentality of the telepathic guards.
"You
must go into every mind in Toromon and release the
knowledge of war. You must band them to one another for that moment, so that
they both know themselves and each other, whether they be in the royal palace
or the coffin-cells of Telphar, or the stone ruins
beyond. Do that, and you will have served this breed of ape, man, and guard
called Human."
"Some minds may not be
ready."
"Do it."
There was a wave of
consent.
And
a doctor in the General Medical Building dropped his thermometer against the
desk and realized, as the mercury beaded over the white plastic, that his anger
at the head nurse, who always put the progress tags on backwards, was hiding
his knowledge of war.
A
woman drinking at the Devil's Pot bar ran her finger around the wet ring her
glass had left on the stained wooden counter and saw that her frustration at
being expelled from the University for cheating on an examination
for which she had worked six hours arranging microfilm crib sheets, was hiding
her knowledge of war.
Councilman Rilum, caught the
thirty-year old memory that spun in his mind of the time that a clothing
industry that he had been vice co-ordinator of had
burned down, and realized his rage at the lax enforcement of fire regulations
was hiding his knowledge of war.
A
man who worked in the aquariums paused on his way across the wharves, took his
hands out of his back pockets, looked at the scars beneath the faint haze of
black hair on his forearm, and realized his fury at the woman who had whipped
him with an iron rod when he had been a child on a mainland farm was hiding his
knowledge of war.
Councilwoman
Tilla caught a fold in her robe and squeezed it with
her old fingers as she remembered the catastrophe at Letos
Island where her father had been killed when she had gone to help him collect
fossils as a girl, and realized that the child's fright had been hiding the
adult's knowledge of war.
Captain
Suptus stood on the bridge of a tetron-tramp
that was pulling away from the dock and blinked his eyes against the bright sunset,
remembering how a man with white hair had stood up behind a desk in the office
of a shipping company (another company than the one he worked for now) and had
sworn, "You'll never set foot on another ship as long as I am alive!"
and suddenly understood his terror at that dozen-year dead man had hidden from
him his knowledge of war.
A
woman named Maria dove from the coastal rocks and felt purple waters close her
in a fist of shadows. The rims of her goggles pushed against her face, and in
the last light she tore the oyster from the shale and soared toward the surface
again. Sitting on the rocks a moment later she worried her knife between the
crusty valves. Crack, scrape, crackle; and the tongue of flesh, without pearl,
shone wetly in the blue evening. And for a moment she remembered another,
larger oyster in which had lain an immense, milky sphere,
that had rolled away from her fingers, across the edge of the rock, and
dropped with a miniscule splash twelve feet into the green water. And her
stomach had caught in a furious knot, and in that knot was tied the anger and
frustration hiding her knowledge of war.
A forest guard stopped by a tree and pressed
his palm against the rough bark, and remembered the morning seven years ago
when he and two others had been sent to catch a girl that was to be marked as a
telepath, and how she had fought him with silent maniacal indignation, and how
his momentary anger had risen, connecting with a score more of tiny streams of
anger, and how that net of hostility even now was hiding his knowledge of war.
A
prisoner stepping from the mineshaft-lift spat in the footsteps of an overseer
who had turned his back and was walking out into the ferns, then frowned,
remembering his older brother years ago walking away from him down a dark
hallway, and there had been tears running down his own face as he crouched in
the corner; and he suddenly under stood that those tears had been a veil all
this time obscuring his knowledge of war.
Councilman
Servin pressed his heel hard against the leg of his
chair, glancing from one face to the other in the council room and thought: "Harsh, and uncomprehending, like my
uncle's face the day he called me down from my room and, in front of the whole family, accused me of stealing wine from the green liquor
stall in the pantry, and even though I had done nothing, I was so frightened, I
couldn't speak, and was punished by being ignored completely by the whole family for a week and had to take my meals alone, and knew that what had kept him from speaking
then, now hid from him his knowledge of war.
Across
Toromon, further than Telphar,
beyond the seared plains and among the stone ruins, a military recruiting
officer suddenly lifted his pen from his paper. At the same time, across the
desk from him, the young Neanderthal who had been about to mark the application
raised his broad head, and the two stared at one another, each recognizing his
own knowledge of war.
And
in the palace garden, among clowns and acrobats, Alter sat on the ground
against a marble urn. Wind over the grass and through the leaves tugged at her
white hair. She
moved her fingers along the leather strands of her necklace, from the milky
shell streaked with gold, to the one that was plain mother of pearl, then to
the one with veins of red, and thought, Oh, he tried, he tried to dream some fragment of me into that terrible
dream, dream himself back into reality, as another had dreamed his mother's face was always on the bottom of a
certain kind of rock, as another had been able to converse with his dead father
when the breeze made the leafless foliage shiver and speak to him, or as
another had found all beauty and love in a flaming figure dancing on his
fingers. But
he didn't know, he didn't know his own knowledge of
war . . .
"How did you know?"
Jon asked.
Clea moved her hand over the polished table-top
before she looked up at the council members. "Because I
worked on the computer. Because I knew from the reports on the
conversion of the transit ribbon that progress couldn't be going that fast.
Because there was a minor mistake in calculation in the working condensation
of the theory due to a typographical misprint that would have rendered the
whole process invalid and that no one ever caught but me. Because I knew what
the economic situation of Toromon was, and I knew it had gotten into that bind of great excess and little mobility
which must mean war. Because of a dozen things which meant this was the only
answer possible. Because it was assumed that war would become such a reality in
everyone's mind that it would never be questioned; and because they did not
realize that that reality must prove itself again and again to questioners, and
that it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to
prove itself under logical rigor. The idea of asking questions was almost
impossible; but only almost."
Here
grotesque Catham stood up, sunset light from the
window catching the plastic case of his skull. "I have one more question,
Dr. Koshar. How do the soldiers die?"
"Do
you really want to know?" Clea asked. "Do
you know the game randomax that has become so popular
recently? The computer has a selector that works on a similar principle only with a much larger matrix, singling out
soldiers to be killed by random choice. Then, when the choice has been made, by
controlled suggestion the soldier has a dream which maneuvered by the computer
so that a situation will arise that will allow death. Then the cell in which
the soldier is lying is electrified, his body is incinerated, and the cell is
ready for another drugged madman who is prepared to fight the enemy beyond the
barrier.
"Oh,
the planning that must have gone into this," Clea
said, "the probing and discovery. Tranu was just
an experiment compared to Ketrall. In most peoples'
minds Tranu is a number of battles, Mordor, Krothering Side, the
Battle of the Trees; it is a record of carefully reported casualties, three
thousand in the first month, the complete slaughter of heroic Company Forty-four
with not one left alive, then the detailed report of the death of two men under
the torture of the Tranusians; it is the detailed
creation of a visible enemy, those plastic robot insects Arkor
destroyed. But it was found that all this wasn't necessary. Simply turn them loose in the haze of their own injured brains with
weapons and they will create their own enemy, greater and more malignant than
any which carefully deluded psychologists could create for them, always hidden
behind a fog of terror.
"They
were stultified by their own horror, incapable of questioning law or reality,
or any other facet of existence; because after this training, six weeks and
before, no questions could be asked."
Catham raised his head slowly, and the young King
stood up. "Perhaps, we will now," said the King, "have
peace."
Later
they filed from the chamber to attend the coronation festivities that were
about to begin. Jon started to turn down the stairway that would take him back
to the garden when someone touched his shoulder. It was Catham.
"Yes?"
"I
have some questions that are not for the rest of the Council," the
historian said. "They're about your Lord of the Flames."
"Our
psychotic fantasy?"
"If you will." The three-quarter smile formed on the human
half of his face.
"Why
don't you just rack him up to one of those elements of reality that must be
questioned to prove the reality real."
Catham shrugged. "I already have. What I want
to know is this: do you think the Lord of the Flames planted this monstrous
idea of a war without an enemy in King Uske's
mind?"
"Certainly
not the idea," Jon said. "Perhaps the method for
turning the idea into such a reality, though."
"I
hope it worked the other way around," Catham
said. ^Why?"
"Because
of what it says about mankind if the idea didn't come from something
extra-human." Catham nodded, and walked on down
the corridor. Jon watched him go, then continued down
the steps.
The
circus people were all filing into the entrance that would take them into the
palace auditorium.
Across
the garden he saw his sister with her arm around Alter's
shoulder. They were walking quietly at the end of the line. He thought: And what have I learned? Look, they all go softly into the dark doorway toward the
bright but distant spotlights, even though they know now, the way they went
before. Can I detect any difference in the way this one
holds her shoulders up, or the way that one has two fingers beneath his belt,
or the way the other fumbles with the gold braid on his shoulder? But what
difference should there be? I have
waited these years, and I have watched. And I will still go on pondering what I have
learned. Watcher and prisoner, I wait
for freedom. At least from all this, 1 know
from which direction freedom will come, because, if for no other reason, I have lived with my observations, and can at last move in to see what
effect the observations have had on me. What can I salvage? Whatever is not clumsy, and can face war and deny it.
The
garden was empty now. He stood by himself in the swelling darkness, fixed actor
yet mobile observer in the strange matrix of matter and motivation.
And
a universe away, a triple mind watched him, ordered its own knowledge of war,
and made ready.
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F-222
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