by C. L. Moore
Egide turned from the unresponsive screens after ten minutes of futile effort.
"Cyrille's dead," he shrugged. "Now what?"
Juille looked down at the lens in her hand. "We'll have to suspend hostilities for a while," she told him. "I can't keep my thumb on this stud forever. And I don't want to kill you now. I'll have to, though, unless you promise to keep a truce until we get back to Ericon. I'll even have to trust your word—"
He looked down at her with a smile. "I seem to fall somewhere between H'vani and Lyonese," he said dryly. "I'm civilized enough to make a promise and—well, savage enough to keep it. You can trust my word, Juille."
Juille's lips thinned; she dropped the lens back on its chain inside her tunic. All she said was, "We'll have to trace the hangar room from the screen up there. Do you know how?"
Egide pointed to a chart engraved on the wall beneath the panels. "If anything like halls are left outside here, we'll find it," he promised.
There were halls. Not many and not much of them, but enough to help materially. They opened the door and stood looking out at a crazily angled ceiling on which a tangle of debris clung as if to a floor. And Juille glanced up to find Egide looking at her gravely, without words. It was not difficult to guess his thoughts. Perhaps anger was the dominant emotion that made her flush so hotly. She could not be sure herself. After a moment, she said in a voice that sounded a little unsteady, "Let's go."
The fragments of hallways that remained were small, lucid stretches between lengths of howling chaos. Nothing in those lengths had any resemblance now to any normally balanced world. Juille found time to be thankful anew that most of Cyrille's materials were fireproof. Earth and air and water were churning insanely through the broken walls; if the fourth and most ravenous element were loose here too, not she or Egide or Jair would ever have left alive.
As it was, they were nearly swept away time and again as they made frantic dashes from shelter to shelter through the hurricane. Curiously, only the very small and delicate relics remained intact now. Trees, buildings, furniture that had made up the illusions were battered almost unrecognizably, but a swarm of gorgeously colored autumn leaves, for instance, had ridden with the storm and brushed stinging past.
Gravity shifted imponderably. They ran slowly, like people in a leaden-footed nightmare; they changed with unexpected suddenness to long, swooping strides that covered ten feet at a step. They sailed through the clogged air; they were smashed crushingly to the ground amid a rain of fragments made suddenly heavy.
The air was in strong motion now, and twice as they staggered along they heard the distant shriek of it rushing furiously through punctured space walls, dragging great winds behind it. But each time the tortured pleasure-world healed itself and they heard the suck and slam of locks automatically closing off the broken rooms. It might be a matter of minutes or hours before some stray lightning bolt, still ravening through the walls, pierced some bulkhead with broken locks, and Cyrille was sucked empty in one vast, sudden gust.
The avalanching water thundered somewhere not far off as they came at last to the hangar room, buffeted, breathless, very sore from the bounding of the tornado. But they had no time to rest. This apartment, like the Control Room, seemed to have a gravity machine of its own and the ships remained intact in their cradles, waiting to be launched each through its separate door. But a bolt might come smashing through the walls at any moment. The two refugees never remembered afterward just how they managed their escape. Neither of them had really expected to leave Cyrille alive.
The emperor looked up from his map. The cluster of officers looked up, too, but no one said anything as Juille came quickly into the room, saying, "Father—"
"Glad you got back," the emperor told her in a voice she did not know. She found she scarcely knew the man himself—this helmeted warrior with the fierce blue blaze in his eyes and the look of stunned bewilderment still a shadow upon his lined face. They all had that stunned look. Ericon had been invincible so long—Only the emperor seemed to know exactly what he was about. Even with this disaster upon him, even with the bewilderment still in his eyes, he knew what he was doing now, what he must do next. This was the man who had been so great and terrible a leader in the days of his youth; he was great and terrible again. No trace remained of the patriarch in white robes, pleading for peace. No trace remained either, Juille thought, of the indulgent father she had left.
He said again, "Glad you're back—" and for a moment stared at her with eyes that really saw what they looked at. But it was a curiously blind stare still. He knew vaguely that something more than that phrase might be expected of him, that in normal times, his only child's return from death would have been a signal for tremendous emotional release. Not any more. He was no longer a father or a man, but an emperor with the weight of imminent disaster on his shoulders. His mind was not functioning now except in terms of empire. He was a machine at this moment as Jair was a machine, all his faculties bent toward one consuming purpose.
"We're evacuating the city," he told Juille without preamble, and a cold, bright intensity burned in his voice and his lined face. It was not his daughter he spoke to, but a tried officer whose advice might be helpful. He was not questioning her presence or her past experiences, only her usefulness at this terribly urgent moment. "Through this pass here—" His steady finger traced a course across the map. "Up into the mountains where the forbidden woods make a pocket, the H'vani can't attack by air. Enough troops are left to make a stand until reinforcements start coming in from the planets. That Dunnar weapon ought to swing a lot of weight, too. Now—"
"It's still working?" Juille had seen too much of the city and the surrounding countryside ravaged by those dreadful broad swathes of molten ruin to have much confidence in anything material now.
"It's working. With any luck, it always will work." The emperor gave a ghost of a chuckle. "The H'vani sealed it in so tightly I don't believe anyone could ever dig it up again. That's once they've overreached themselves."
Juille received that and dismissed it with a nod. "Good luck for us. Father—so much has happened. You've got to listen to me. Haven't you even a minute to spare alone?"
The emperor gave her a keen look under his brows, then nodded to the little group of men and women around the table. "All right—one minute." Juille waited while they fell back out of earshot, down the length of the big shattered room through whose walls the smoke of the burning palace blew now and then in pungent, strangling gusts. She spoke fast.
"The Andareans—you don't know about that yet? They've been holding revolutionist meetings in the tunnels. And there's Egide—they told you I've brought him in as a hostage? I—"
"Hostage be damned," the emperor said abstractedly. "Only one thing matters right now—getting my troops out. You can't bargain with madmen like the H'vani when they're looting a city. Later—maybe. A wonder you ever got through their fleet—"
"I didn't come through. I thought I'd better circle—"
The emperor wasn't listening. "We have half an hour to clear the city. If you have anything important to say, say it and let me get back to work." He gave her a sudden cold glance across the map. "I haven't forgotten what you did in the council hall, Juille. That was treason. You'll have to stand trial for it later. You may be responsible for the loss of the city."
"Your peace wouldn't have gone through, father. The H'vani came in conspiracy with Helia and her people. They got their new weapons from them. They never meant to keep the truce themselves."
The emperor's fierce blue eyes fixed her sharply. "You're not lying about that, are you? It's true?" His voice deepened with a note of anger she knew well. "All of you were playing me for a fool, eh? Using my truce to work your own lying schemes in. All of you! By the Ancients—" There was a thunder as vibrant as Jair's in the old man's voice. "By the Ancients, you all deserve to die together! I ought to let you! I had the possibility of peace in my very hands, and I let you destroy it among you—"
But the brief anger passed, and the deep old voice diminished to a rumbling echo. "No, it wasn't your fault or mine. I saw the way out, but I couldn't show it to you. The race isn't worth saving." His big shoulders slumped. Then he saw the map and his head came up with a familiar blue glare in the eyes. "But I will save it! By the gods, I will. Get out of here and let us work, will you?"
"But father—" Juille groped in bewilderment for the reins of government that seemed so abruptly to have dropped from her hands. "I want to broadcast to the H'vani. If they find out we have Egide—and about Jair being an android, they—"
He scowled at her, his face bright with alert intensity. "Android?"
Juille explained it in a few jumbled phrases, and saw a shadow dim the brilliance of his eyes as he followed that knowledge to its conclusion.
"Stop babbling," the emperor snapped. "You can't broadcast, you little fool. Didn't you see what's happened to the city? About that android—"
Juille gaped at him, not listening. She had seen ruin indeed, all the way here. Whole city blocks melted into slag, fire pouring from the public buildings, half the palace itself battered into a shambles. But the thought of a blinded and silenced communicator system had somehow never occurred to her.
"None ... none of it works any more?" she stammered.
"None." The emperor's voice was definite. "About the android—I don't like it. I don't like it at all." He brooded a moment. "Well—we'll climb that wall when we come to it. Now by the gods, will you get out and let me work?"
Juille looked up at the shattered walls of the room, with rain blowing through them, pungent with the smoke of nearing fires. She could see a stretch of purple thunderclouds, and her mind seized almost eagerly upon the sight—was it the same storm she had glimpsed from Cyrille, moving majestically over the face of Ericon? She knew she was grasping at straws, anything to avoid facing the truth. She had not yet realized the full extent of what had happened here, she did not really want to. Ericon was lost, but her mind would not face that yet. Automatically she looked about for the nearest communicator screen, so that she might convince herself with the grimness of the actual sight.
And there were no communicators. She could see no farther now than her unaided eyes could look. The knowledge was suddenly smothering. All her life she had had the wonderful windows of those screens to open at a touch upon any view she wanted, anywhere in the Galaxy. No walls had ever really shut her in before. No limits of eye or voice seemed narrow, for the sight and sound of worlds light-millenniums away had always been available at the touch of a stud. But now—
Juille looked frantically about the broken room, feeling for the first time in her life the full, crushing weight of a claustrophobia such as no race could ever have felt before now. Not a fear of confining walls, but of confining worlds—of solar systems too small to be endured. This was a blindness and a deafness beyond all previous experience—a god's scope cut abruptly down to the scope of a human. For a moment she fought an insane desire to batter against the intangible prisoning limits of her own senses. Their terrible pigmy boundaries struck her dumb. For the first time she knew what it was to be one small human creature in a galaxy of worlds, unaided by all her race had achieved on its way to the powers of godhood.
This was what the loss of civilization really meant. For the first time the full import of the Galaxy's great loss overwhelmed her. So long as she could see those lost worlds she might hope to win them back, but to be struck blind like this was to lose them forever. She knew a sudden agony of homesickness for all the planets she might never see again, a sudden terrible nostalgia for the lost, familiar worlds, for the fathomless seas of space between them. Ericon's eternal greenness was hateful, strangling in its tiny limitations.
And this was what her father had so desperately feared to lose that he had been willing to compromise even with the H'vani, so long as both races might maintain it. In this shattering revelation of what barbarism might really mean, she knew that her father had been right, indeed, and herself terribly wrong. But it was far too late to do anything at all about it now.
Through the green folds of the hills veiled by slanting rain, the emperor watched the remnants of his army wind slowly upward. He sat his fretting horse easily, looking down from this hilltop with much the same look upon his face that his portrait had worn in the Hall of the Hundred Emperors. Eager and fierce and proud. Around his neck over the armor he wore a chain and the small lens of the Dunnarian weapon. It was ironically pleasant to know that the heart of that weapon lay safe forever beneath the very halls the H'vani were tramping now.
Juille knew he was thinking of that by the shadow of a grim smile that crossed his bearded face as he glanced back toward the tower of smoke above the city. Once, it seemed very long ago, she had wished aloud that she might have known the young warrior her father used to be. She knew him now. The emperor was magnificently that man again, with all the years of his experience added to give a depth the young man never knew. Age seemed not to have touched him today. He sat at the front of a little group of officers, watching the armies that were to avenge the Lyonese go streaming up the pass.
From this elevation they all could see the distant, undulating mass far down the valley that was the pursuing H'vani. Juille smiled a tight, triumphant smile. They were fighting on their home planet now, under conditions they knew by heart. They would beat the H'vani yet. On any other planet, planes could have bombed their infantry out of existence in a few minutes. But here, in this long arm of mountain land that lay between two forbidden territories, the Ancients permitted no aircraft to fly. The H'vani—Juille's smile deepened—had learned that to their awestruck cost a little while before. They would send up no more ships over the lightning-guarded territory of the Ancients.
She looked sidewise at Egide. He sat with bound hands before him, his two guards near, his eyes on the following H'vani horde. They had spoken very little to one another since that long, silent flight through the H'vani fleet, with Ericon turning on its axis far below. Juille was a little startled to hear Egide speak now.
"Jair'll be leading them," he said, nodding down the valley. She gave him a keen glance, not at all sure even yet just how she felt about the H'vani's captive leader. She said in a noncommittal voice:
"He won't be leading long. We'll get our broadcasters in order again—"
"Maybe," said Egide, and was silent.
Juille glanced down at the small animal balancing on her knee. The llar had a curious way of turning up at most of the crises in her life. It was here now at one of the highest. She put out a tentative hand to caress it, and to her surprise, the little creature permitted the gesture. She wondered if its recollection of that episode in the tunnels had reconciled it to her touch at last. The great eyes stared up into hers with owlish intentness as it pushed its smooth head against her hand.
Someone said, "I see we have something in common, highness," and she looked up into the gray gaze of the man from Dunnar. He was smiling and nodding toward the llar as it bent its head to her caress. Juille smiled.
"It's my turn to be flattered now. The two of you did me a great service. I may not have thanked you properly yet."
The envoy shook his head. "Your pet deserves the thanks, highness."
"It was amazing," Juille began eagerly. "How did you manage it? I'd never have believed such a thing could happen."
The man smiled his remote, enigmatic smile. "I will tell you that soon, highness," he said. "Not quite yet, but soon." He flung one corner of his dark cloak over his shoulder and turned away. Juille watched him thoughtfully, a tall thin figure of regal elegance in that cloak.
Egide's voice recalled her.
"I think I can see Jair from here," he said, leaning forward over his bound hands on the saddlehorn. "They've got that third weapon, Juille. See it—the glint of light there at the front?"
Juille caught her breath sharply. The third gift of the Andareans! She had forgotten that. She had let her father plan hi
s campaign without considering it.
"What is it?" she asked Egide fearfully, wondering if he would tell. He looked at her with an expression difficult to analyze.
"A paralyzer," he said simply.
"But we've got those. That's nothing new."
"This works on a bigger scale than anything we've ever had. You've got small hand-paralyzers. This is an attachment that transforms a standard heat-beam caster into a machine to throw a long cone of force. It can whittle your army down by battalions. Once that goes into operation—" He shook his head, lips tightened.
Juille gave Egide a curious glance. Then, without speaking, she shook her reins and rode forward to her father's side. They spoke briefly. In a few minutes, several men with lenses hanging at their necks, slipped down the hillside and vanished into the underbrush bordering the valley. Juille rode back looking confident.
"All right," she said. "They won't find it so easy now. We have our weapons, too, you know. You might have guessed I'd stop that cannon if I could."
"Of course I guessed."
Juille looked at him in bewilderment. He was smiling.
"I'd like to talk to you alone," he said. She hesitated. Then she nodded to his guards and turned her horse aside, leading the way a little distance off toward the brow of the hill. They sat there side by side, watching the two armies winding up the valley. Rain had almost ceased now. A cold wind blew in their faces, and overhead the purple thunderclouds came rolling up faster than the H'vani hordes.
Egide said, "Juille—" and stopped. After a moment, he tried again. "Juille—do you think the H'vani will defeat you?"
"They have a chance," she admitted. "But no, they won't."
"You're sure?"
"How can anyone be sure? I don't believe they will."
"But they have the edge now."
"What of it?" She twisted to face him angrily. "You don't have to boast about your people."