by C. L. Moore
Egide seemed to be carrying her. Everything bobbed curiously around them. He was carrying her doggedly through a snowstorm that changed to a gust of tiny frightened birds, white and pink and yellow, rushing by them shoulder high in a great beat of wings. And now they were flying, too, twisting over and over around each other in the midst of a twisting tornado of colored debris. Juille laughed weakly at the ludicrous feeling of weightlessness.
"Glad it amuses you," Egide told her savagely, trying in vain to right himself. "If this is your idea of suicide, go ahead. I'm leaving." He shoved her violently away and struck off awkwardly through midair, pushing a way ahead through the floating jetsam of the worlds, and holding on to the ceiling for leverage.
"Wait! Come back!" Juille floundered after him, knowing vaguely in the back of her mind that there had once been some urgent reason why he should not leave her. Nothing mattered now that had mattered before, but there was still that nagging remembrance.
"Stop following me!" Egide barked angrily, pushing a drifting boulder aside.
"Wait! Wait!" Juille wailed, and brushed the boulder from her way.
If they had been tensely staking their lives a few minutes before on the hope of killing each other, all memory of that had relaxed and floated away with the floating worlds. There was nothing ludicrous to either of them now in the futile anger of their voices. And if, in this utter suspension of all they had been thinking and believing, Egide fled from Juille as a danger and a menace, and if Juille struggled after him calling him to return, it may have meant nothing at all.
Juille had little recollection of what happened between that time and the time she found herself helping Egide, who resisted her irritably, to lever open a door in a slanting ceiling. They hoisted themselves through it with difficulty. Then Juille turned suddenly very sick as gravity reversed itself in midair and whirled the floor around underfoot, jerking the door handle from her grasp.
After a moment, everything righted itself. Juille found herself leaning on a cold, smooth wall of plastic, looking over a familiar room. Machinery filled it, and from the walls, hundreds of paneled screens looked down in serried rows. Many of them still functioned, mirroring insane pictures as world tumbled through world. Sounds howled down from their windows, hodgepodging together into a continuous ululating roar. And before her, a vast glass wall opened upon the red glow of fire.
That was Ericon down there.
Remembrance avalanched back upon her. And for a stunned moment, the sight she saw below meant nothing. She had looked too long upon ruin to be shocked by it now. Ericon stood up like a great green wall before her in the telescopic glass, its surface crisscrossed with a path of destruction. The Imperial City, like a toy relief map spread upright on the wall, sent great rolling plumes of smoke upward from its shattered buildings. She could see the wreckage of the Imperial patrol ships lying where they had fallen among the ruins. The futile flashes of gunfire from far below sparkled like fireflies in the dusk of the consuming smoke. But she could not quite force her mind to believe any of it. She had seen too much miniature destruction in the past few hours to accept this destruction, so far away, as real, full-sized, disastrous.
No. What sent a cold flooding of despair through her now was the sight of the great black shapes which were forging silently past the window in perfect formation, silhouettes against the pulsing red glow of Ericon beneath.
The great armada of the H'vani was driving in from space through the breaches of the devastated space defenses. They were coming in now—now, as she stood watching. This was something real. There was no parallel for this in the make-believe destruction she had just wrought. She leaned against the wall and let her wide eyes absorb the sight of Ericon's ultimate ruin, unable to make her mind take hold upon anything but that.
So her futile adventures among the little worlds of Cyrille had been for nothing, then. Sometime while she had gone striding among them dealing thunderbolts, Cyrille had swung at last over the target Egide awaited. And he had loosed a real thunderbolt upon a real world. She could see the ravaged surface of it interlaced with broad molten tracks of ruin. Cyrille's traitorous work was done. Juille thought sickly of what must have happened down there when the unsuspected moon, which had circled Ericon for countless ages, suddenly began to pour death upon the city.
That silent armada could take over now. It would take over, against whatever resistance might be left in the stunned and ruined city below. Her father might be dead already. And without either of them to organize the shattered remnants of the empire, what hope did the Lyonese have? She tried to turn over in her mind the names of those who might succeed her, she tried to think how quickly the forces on the outlying planets of this system might be summoned in, but with the very heart of the empire lying in shambled ruins down there, it was hard to think at all.
Then her hand at her throat touched the outlines of that small lensed weapon which had been Dunnar's last gift to the Lyonese, and a faint hope began to struggle in her mind. If the Lyonese had lost their Imperial City and the services of herself as a leader, had not the H'vani lost their leaders, too? Jair, dead somewhere out in the raving chaos of Cyrille, and Egide here—Egide leaning against the window and looking down at the great armada that was pouring in upon Ericon.
Egide had crossed the still-intact floor of the Control Room while Juille stood stricken against the wall, gazing upon the ruin of her empire. Now he lifted his head and watched her without moving as she pulled out her lens upon its chain. She must have seemed to be looking in a mirror as she lifted the lens and tried vainly to steady it enough for her purpose. Certainly there was no overt threat in the action. He stared, not interfering, as she braced her elbows on a projecting bar and centered him in the thin cross-hairs of the weapon.
Then Juille drew a deep breath and pressed the white stud. Nothing happened. Nothing, of course, would happen until the other stud was pressed. But Juille felt oddly disappointed that her supreme purpose had been accomplished in this moment, with so little fanfare. It surprised her a bit that she had no emotional reaction now. Neither triumph nor regret, although Egide's life hung upon the pressure of a stud. No feeling seemed left in her at all.
She looked around vaguely, wondering just what to do next. Egide still stood before the window where the great black shapes of his armada passed in stately formation, silent, limned against the light of the burning city. All around them the howling from the ruined worlds of Cyrille still poured down from their screens upon the wall. Through the one ragged gap where Juille's lightning bolt had crashed came more confused roars and thunderings as the tides of water and the shifting gravities put a last touch of havoc on the work she had done. But here in the Control Room, gravity still prevailed, and so far the ruinous tides had not rolled this way. Very likely they soon would. And then there would be no survivors at all upon Cyrille.
Juille shook herself awake. One last faint hope remained with her, but even that must be fulfilled quickly. She held the lens up, her thumb upon the black stud that meant death.
"Egide," she called. "Egide, look here. Remember the weapon from Dunnar?"
He blinked. He had not recovered quite as quickly as she from that curious relaxing of all human values which the shifting gravities induced. He had not had reason to recover so soon, as Juille did, at the shock of what lay below the window. He said:
"What do you mean? Dunnar?"
She flashed the lens impatiently at him. "This is the weapon. This, here! Do you understand me?" She saw that he did, for he reached abortively toward his holster. "No, don't move!" She cried it sharply above the noise from the walls. "I can press this stud before you shoot, and then—" She made a grim little gesture.
Egide hesitated. "That's not the weapon there."
"It's enough to kill you."
He furrowed his brow at her. "The real weapon—that must be down below, on Ericon." He glanced over his shoulder at the gliding armada and the flames of the burning city, and his hand moved
a little nearer his gun.
"Don't do it!" Juille's voice was confident and commanding. "The real weapon's safe, even now. In a bombproof vault outside the city. We thought of everything, you see. Even this. I wouldn't risk it, Egide." She held the lens higher, so the red light from below caught brightly in it, and showed him her thumb already on the lethal stud. He hesitated a little even now.
Juille held her breath. She did not want to kill him yet. She was not sure she wanted to kill him at all, and certainly he would be no use to her dead at this stage. But she might have to press the stud. This harmless-looking adjunct of a distant machine lacked the compelling power of a gun muzzle aimed between a man's eyes. Her own confidence might be a more effective psychological threat than the very real danger of the lens in her hand.
She said in a brisk, decisive voice, "You're coming with me to Ericon, Egide—if we can find a way to get there. The Ancients promised me my chance, too, you know—and mine comes last. You can come back with me to be our hostage—or stay here dead. We haven't lost yet. With Jair gone and you captive, and with this new weapon of ours, I think we've still a good chance. The weapon's going to work its very best under circumstances like ... don't touch that gun!"
He stood there staring at her, fingers hovering over his holster, decision still tilting in the balance. What would have happened had nothing interrupted them, Juille had no way of guessing. But as they faced one another in tense silence, a voice suddenly boomed from the wall above.
"So that's the Dunnar weapon!" Jair's bull-throated bellow roared above the roar of smashing worlds.
Juille started violently. But even in her amazement, she kept her thumb upon the stud and her eyes upon Egide's gun, though insane thoughts whirled frantically through her mind. Jair? Jair alive, with a needle beam through his stomach? Jair, talking in that full, confident bellow of his, when she'd left him dead and drifting through the violet twilight? It was some trick. She had seen illusions enough here to know that it must be some trick.
She risked one lightning glance away from Egide. The unmistakable figure of Jair himself leaned forward into the communicator screen of some yet undamaged world, grinning a bold white grin through the red beard. His red eyes twinkled with triumph, and the burn of her needle beam still marred his tunic to show that the shot had gone home. It must have gone home. There had been no heat flare to prove the presence of armor such as Egide had worn when she turned her gun on him.
She dared not look long at him, but her bewilderment had registered upon the screen as she flashed her gaze back to Egide, and she heard the familiar, rolling vibrations of Jair's laughter ring through the room.
"You shot me straight enough," he announced. "But you'll never kill me with a gun. Tell her, Egide."
Egide was looking up at the laughing giant with a strange expression on his face.
"Jair is an android," he said. "You can't kill him."
Juille gave him a blank stare. She heard herself repeating stupidly, "An android?"
But she did not believe it. That was against all reason. Jair, the very essence of all warm, human masculinity—the frankly barbarous, the laughing Jair, with his voice that shook the walls to its deep timbre. She knew, of course, that androids existed. Cyrille had been making robot humans for a long while now, in such perfect simulacra of reality that only the very closest association could prove the difference. To all intents and purposes, they were real androids—manufactured humans with all the external attributes of flesh. But Jair—
"I had him made ten years ago," Egide told her in a bemused sort of voice, his eyes upon the window where the counterfeit H'vani looked down. "The perfect H'vani type—for a figurehead, you know. I'd got so used to him I seldom think of his not being—human. Sure you're all right, Jair?"
A bellow of mirth shook the walls above the roaring of Cyrille's worlds.
"All right?" Jair doubled a mallet-like fist and struck himself heavily upon the needle char where Juille's shot had gone home. The two humans winced involuntarily. "Just doubled me up for a minute," the android said. "That was enough, though. You did a fine job of wreckage my girl. Now we'll do a better—down below."
Juille got her breath back with a rush.
"Oh, no, you won't," she declared confidently. "Not now." And she caught the red firelight again in her lens.
Jair's laughter was curiously cold. And Juille realized suddenly that it had always been cold. The laugh itself should have proved him inhuman. And a flurry of small recollections came back to convince her—his incredible quickness in gun-fighting, his speed, his silence, his machine-smooth efficiency of motion. Even the fact that he had not worn needleproof armor beneath his tunic. Then the bull-voice with its deeply vibrant pitch that should have been warm and human, and was instead cold to her ears now with the chill of machinery beneath the flesh said:
"Go ahead, girl. Kill him."
Egide's face did not change. Juille thought she understood then his oddly bemused look of a few minutes before. He had remembered that Jair was what he was. He had known this moment was coming, and it did not surprise him now. The android could have no human emotions; loyalty was not in him.
And there went Juille's new hope of forcing Jair into captivity, too, with the threat upon Egide. Her shoulders sagged a little. But even in this fresh disappointment she kept her pressure firm upon the lens stud, and her eyes upon Egide.
"I'd save you if I could," the android's deep voice told the man who had ordered his creation. "It can't be done now. You aren't necessary any more. We've got Ericon, or will have. Too bad, Egide."
Egide nodded, no emotion on his face.
"The barons can carry on now," Jair told him carelessly. "Malon can take over, or Edka. They'll need me."
Egide looked up at the grinning, red-bearded face in the screen.
"They don't even know you're an android," he said emotionlessly.
Jair bent down upon them one last brilliantly warm smile. His eyes glinted with a sudden look of the pure machine.
"I know," he said.
Then he swung away and they watched his broad back receding into the depths of the panel. Beyond him Juille could see the shapes of tiny space boats racked as if in hangars, and untouched as yet by the destruction that was raging through Cyrille. That was the room she must get to, then.
Juille turned back to Egide, realizing for the first time that she had forgotten to keep her eyes on him. But he had not moved. He stared up at the screen, and his shoulders had the little sag her own had assumed a few minutes ago. When he met her eyes he grinned a bit.
"Am I still worth killing?" he asked.
Juille jerked her head toward the empty screen. "What do you think he's planning?"
"He wasn't built to plan. I don't know."
"What was he built for?"
Egide looked at her speculatively. "You don't understand the H'vani very well, do you? Savagery isn't always a vice, you know. There's got to be an influx of it every so often or civilization would bog down in its own rut. It always has happened—it probably always will. Right now my people are on the first rung of the ladder—they're emotional and childish and they need a figurehead. Well"—he nodded toward the wall—"that's Jair."
"Why not you?"
"They don't quite trust me. I'm not typical. Too much veneer for a true H'vani. Maybe too many brains. I had to have some perfectly trustworthy bully who could outfight and outyell the people. Someone with his own brand of charm, too. But anyone with those gifts would be too dangerous to use. He might want to take over, and I couldn't have stopped him. So"—Egide grinned ruefully—"I had the Cyrillians make Jair. It seemed like a wonderful idea. And it worked, too. Jair did a magnificent job. He never had to think, but he certainly could lead. I suppose even now he's done the right thing. From a perfectly cold-blooded viewpoint, the H'vani need a rallying point worse than they need me as a leader. Jair's much better for the job."
"But if none of your men knows he's an android—"
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"I'm not so sure it matters now. I kept it a secret because I couldn't trust anyone at all not to let it slip, and my people—well, they wouldn't like that. But Jair's done his job well up to now. No reason why anyone needs to know."
"He certainly doesn't mean to tell them."
"I wonder. Hard to understand what was in his mind. No android ever had an opportunity just like this before. He never showed any more ambition, until now, than you'd expect from a machine. He may never show any."
"He won't." Juille said it confidently. Egide gave her an inquiring look. "The H'vani are going to find out their leader's not human. You're going to tell them." Her voice took on warmth as the new idea grew. "I haven't lost yet! You're still a hostage. You're going to broadcast to your people just what Jair is. Maybe we'll suggest that some of the other leaders are androids, too. If Jair's what they've been worshiping and following, that ought to shake all their confidence—or else nothing would!"
Egide stared at her almost with a reluctant admiration. She gave him no time to speak. "Drop your guns," she said. "And then go over there and try to get Ericon on the communicators. I don't think you can, but if s worth trying."
Egide gave her one long, searching look, as if not yet quite convinced of the validity of her weapon. But a change in the timbre of the noise that still poured in distantly through the breached wall reminded them both of the imminent danger, and after a moment, he obeyed.
Juille watched the guns clatter to the floor. Her mind was spinning with wary plans now—how to reach the room of the ships, how to keep Egide from overpowering her on the tumultuous way there, what to do first if they ever reached Ericon alive.