by Ian Wallace
Croyd said, “Thank you, sir. I have chosen my arms. They suit me, and once, a long while ago, I was used to them.”
Over in the pavilion, the duke was exhibiting ill-restrained impatience, but these two knights were not noticing.
Roland said, “In the lists, it is customary to thrust only at the front of the adversary, since his rear is unprotected. But you must be sure to understand that if it should come to ground combat with secondary weapons, and should one of us inadvertently turn his back in the course of the fighting, the other might fairly thrust at his vulnerable back. This is our rule; if it were not for this rule, few of our fights would ever terminate in anything decisive. Do you understand this rule, Croyd?”
Croyd answered, curbing his graul, who had begun to dislike Roland’s horse, “In my world it is different, but I am in your world. Roland, be sure that if you should turn your back while you were fighting, I would strike at your back. But not if you were running. I retract that; you will not be running.”
“Nor will you. Shall we fight?”
“Before we begin, Roland, I want you to know that I am a conscientious objector to death combat. In the past, I have killed my share of men in fair combat; but that was a long time ago. I eschew it. A duel in which one of us would be temporarily disabled—and for the highest conceivable stakes—this I would welcome; but I have a distaste for killing you, because death has a way of terminating human options.”
“Croyd, this is not shameful war into which the innocent are pressed, but an honorable duel of consenting peers.”
“I do not really consent, Roland. I will fight you, but I do not want to kill you.”
“If you do not kill me, I promise that I will kill you.”
“To that I will never consent.”
“Again, then, shall we fight?”
“Let’s.”
Roland slammed shut his visor; and the two knights cantered to the far ends of the lists and turned to await the trumpets.
In the first pass, they thundered down upon each other; Roland thrust viciously upward at Croyd’s naked face, Croyd parried it to the right with his stick, which broke on, Roland’s lance but deflected it.
They turned to face each other at the far ends. A page ran forward to hand Croyd another short lance. There was no question of Roland’s long lance shivering; Croyd was wearing nothing for it to shiver on.
In the second pass, Roland made for Croyd’s leather-covered midriff; Croyd, parrying with nearly the hilt of his lance, managed at the same time to bring the beak around so that it thrust at Roland’s vulnerable groin; but Roland’s chain mail resisted the light beak, and his momentum drove Croyd’s lance back through Croyd’s hand, burning and bloodying the hand, while Roland earthquaked past, his groin in dolor but not really injured and not bloodied.
They turned again to each other, Croyd, grimacing, threw down his blood-greased lance and accepted another in his left hand; Roland with dignity was holding position in the saddle, and whatever pain contortions his face might be making were invisible within the gander beak of his helmet.
The trumpets bugled for the third and final pass.
This time Roland went murderously for Croyd’s chest. Croyd ducked down on the graul neck at the last instant; the brass beak tore open his shoulder leather and skin as, passing Roland, with the hilt of his spear in his left hand, he jabbed rightward, catching Roland off-balance in the armored rib area and knocking him so far askew on his horse that armor weight pulled him down.
Croyd leaped off his graul, awkwardly drawing sword with his left hand.
The duke and all the people were on their feet.
By the time Croyd got to Roland, the knight had rolled over on his back and, visor up for visibility, was presenting the point of his great long two-handed sword. Croyd circled him cautiously, smaller sword ready in his left hand, which was nearly as dexterous as his right, unready to move in on the great sword, especially since Roland’s front was practically invulnerable to Croyd’s lighter blade. (He reflected, somewhat late, that his own sword was merely iron, whereas Roland’s was doubtless beaten surface steel.) While he circled, Roland let go the sword with his right hand, began to push himself up off the ground with his left, had arm and wrist strength to parry a Croyd thrust with one hand, incredibly made it to his feet, and advanced on Croyd, swinging his neck-severing sword with both hands.
Desperate Croyd leaped and rolled at Roland’s feet, his shoulders hitting Roland’s brazen shins. Roland staggered but did not fall; and Roland raised his sword with both hands to bring its edge down on Croyd’s neck. The Croyd sword came up and dug into Roland’s back down low; and the wounding deflected the Roland sword so that its heavily down-crashing flat crushed into the Croyd skull.
After a number of minutes it became clear to the duke, and presumably to any other people in the pavilion who might, like Roland, be more than phantoms, that neither man was now able to move, that both at least for a while would lie motionless.
The horse and the graul, bereft of riders, were together over on a far side of the courtyard, getting acquainted, beginning to see points of possible friendship value in each other. Unhappily, during this burgeoning, both of them vanished. So did the pages. So did most of the people.
Contemporary Action - INTERSPACE/NONSPACE
Days 4 - 5
This house of mine is vast and beautiful. Even better, its potentialities for new experience are infinite!
—Dr. Orpheus
SOMEWHEREWHEN in the spatiotemporal infinity of nonspace there brooded a solitary chateau that Pan/ Croyd had long ago erected by psychophysical projections, reifying this house by directional fantasy out of the vitality that void is made of.
Because every point in real space is immediately adjacent to nonspace, Pan opened Croyd-rescue operations by going to this empty house, arriving there by means of an intricate midbrain act that did not clearly involve spatial body translation.
It would perhaps have been more direct to move instantly into Dzendzel’s metaspace fissure brain whose image Freya had seen in a well that was actually the focal tube of an I-ray receptor. This, Pan might have done by the same method that had brought him here. But the most direct route is not always the wisest: you don’t just waltz into a cosmic brain with hostile intent. Planning must be done; and the most congenial, most isolated, most concentration-fostering pace for swift combat planning was this nonplace, where (ruefully he reflected) Croyd certainly now was not.
This house consisted, symbolically perhaps, of two neo-Gothic-towering halves which rose eerily, separately out of a foundation of nothing; and these halves were linked by a lofty breezeway bridge like a golden spider skein across gray nothing.
Centered on this bridge Pan now stood, staring deep into endless zero, one fist gripping a slendering rail, the other slowly and rhythmically beating upon this rail. Already here his sensors had found the Castel Jaloux in metaspace at the instant of Croyd’s ejection in Chloris— had penetrated Chloris and the brain of Croyd, had comprehended Croyd’s power loss, had been unable to communicate, through Croyd’s eyes had watched the Castel flare and vanish—and then abruptly had been driven out of Croyd and Chloris by an implacable-irresistible mind screen. He had tried again and again; he had failed even to find Chloris again, or the Castel either. For the moment he was impotent; and it harassed him to notice that in a way he was semiaccepting this impotence.
Pan/Croyd would be acting already. Croyd would be acting already.
In his split-off from Croyd, had he somehow left behind will?
No. Croyd will he possessed, fully—or Pan will, name it either way—but something within Pan was blocking it as effectively as the block by the hostile mind screen.
He knew what the something was.
He had first to kill the inward block.
To do this, he would have to confront the vitality of the block, even if that vitality should slay him.
The block was his two-years-abandoned respon
sibility.
In agony he catapulted a thought out into nonspace, physically shouting the thought as he thought it:
“KRELL!”
Freya sat in her private rooms in the duke’s castle, nerving herself to attempt the adventure that Pan had asked her to attempt. Deliberately she infused her mind with abhorrence of the thing-complex that Dzendzel was creating; but precisely this effort sidetracked her into absorbed contemplation of the duke’s impossible-possible feudal dream.
Feudalism! Not since college had she contemplated it. Or had she? Wait . . .
What surfaced was an old bantering with . . . Croyd? Pan? How did one distinguish? When? A decade ago, nearly . . . no, only seven years ago. Eh, then Croyd it had been, and she had been Greta. Nostalgia weakened her with the blurred pang of the unreachably gone; nevertheless, Freya nerved herself to taste the saltiness of good remembering.
They had been studying plans for a ship of the line that he was projecting—a ship which (although this was a thing that Freya did not yet know) was to materialize as the Castel Jaloux. And she had remarked, “Castles are fun, grounded or airborne. Nevertheless, I took a D in early medieval history.”
“Vague name for it, Greta. What centuries?”
“About third through fourteenth—I think. I remember something about the manor and the glebe. The lords and ladies huddled in the manor while the peasants got slaughtered outside in the glebe. They were always feuding, so we call it feudalism.”
“You didn’t earn the D. You flunked.”
“What was it really, then?”
“Honest feudalism had pooped out by the tenth century. At its earlier best, a manor was like a big family. The glebe was where the peasants farmed, to feed the lord and themselves. In return, when trouble started, the lord moved all his serfs inside the walls for protection. And when things were peaceful, the bounteous lady of the manor went out and mothered the serfs. Rousseau and some others called it a social contract. We call it feudalism because feud, or feod, meant fee or fief.”
“A fief was a fee? I thought it was a woman.” Greta, who had actually earned a B, was playing stupid; this worked on Croyd the way tickling by an ant works on an aphid, and the milk was usually worth drinking.
“A fief was land, really,” he told her. (Knowing her tactic, he invariably counterplayed stupid and gave; it was a private joke, and private jokes are high-level lovemaking.) “A big lord would give a little lord a title, and the little lord would pay for the title by giving the big lord his land as a fee—in fief. The little lord kept possession of his land, but now it was really the property of the big lord. That made the big lord the liege and the little lord his vassal.”
“Well, break my back! And here I always thought a vassal was a slave. How about the king?”
“He was liege to all the lords. They were all his vassals. I hope you realize I’m oversimplifying this.”
“I take it you drew an A,”
“I’ve been there.”
She had no question, she knew. He’d been uptime there—or then, rather; but much earlier, on his home planet, Nigel III, he’d grown up with the stuff. She suggested, “Take me there-then sometime?”
“Mmmm. Take you uptime on Erth, that is. My home planet isn’t there anymore.”
“But it was there then?”
“Of course.”
“So take me there then.”
Silence. Croyd had gone thoughtful.
Greta brightened it. “From history, I remember that they stank. Did they? Did you?”
“No stench in uptime.”
“True, but on Nigel III, when you lived there?”
“I never noticed anything that hadn’t always been usual.”
Freya suddenly giggled, and it broke the reverie, and inexplicably she found that the reverie had nerved her. Arising, she oriented her thought to the castle’s I-ray transmitter which the duke had used several hours ago for descending into his hell-haven. Servants were about; she radiated projective hypnosis through multiple wall piles of thick rock: sleep . . . When she knew that they slept, she quit her room and descended to the place where Pan had told her to go; and just as Pan had clairvoyantly known, there she found the transmission-reception cubicle of the duke’s private I-ray pullman.
She entered this cubicle.
Just before she activated intergalactic relay, Freya experienced a patterning of comprehension. What had nerved her was a reverie about Croyd. What she feared was Greta. And this was totally absurd, because Pan was Croyd, and Freya was Greta.
Aren’t we?
Behind Pan there was a nonhuman quiet cough.
Pan pondered this cough.
A chirring treble queried, “Is all well, Sirrah Pan?”
Slowly Pan turned to face with a semibitter smile a six-foot-high gold-armored decapod who stood as tall and erect on his four hind members as a decapod can stand, bending upon Pan all five of his eyes with a concern that the angles of his antennae expressed.
They contemplated each other.
Pan straightened a little. “You knew instantly that I am Pan, not Croyd.”
“Instantly.” The chirr did not come from the decapod’s mouth; it seemed to emanate from vibrating chitin plates somewhere in the thorax—in one of the thoraces, anyhow.
Pan slumped on a thought. “I will not ask how you knew, and do not tell me.” Again he straightened; and out of long practice (long ago) he chose the creature’s second and fourth eyes to eye. “Then all the more you were good to come, Krell. How did you get here so fast?”
“I was here, just inside. We take turn about on sentry duty here. It is my trick.”
“You do this for Croyd?”
“No. He has not been here often. He gives us no orders—not even advice. He listens to our reports, and nods, and goes. We have not seen him for months.”
Emotionally Pan was in torment, wanting to ask about Croyd, about Krell and his people; wanting to tell Krell about Croyd. No, this first thing had to be done first. Deliberately he said, “Four years ago I swore to Croyd that I would stay with you five years if need be. And I swore the same to you, Krell, and to your people. I called out to you first of all to stand here and tell you honestly that I ran out on my trust, that I bitterly regret running out on my trust. If you wish, you may kill me, Krell; I ask only that if you wish to kill me, you tell me so first, and let me answer before you strike. But I will not defend myself.”
Taciturn Krell stared at Pan, and Pan waited. Krell could slay him with a snap or a blow of one claw.
Krell said deliberately, “I will take time to examine the nature of your trust. Our species was dying in Andromeda Galaxy. We gathered our pregnant females and crossed metaspace to invade your Sol Galaxy, to lay our eggs in humans and reconstitute ourselves as your masters. But you defeated us, sirrah. The trauma left our females sterile, so that we were no longer a threat to you in our small numbers, although we are virtually deathless; nevertheless, you would have been right to exterminate us. Instead, noble sirrah, you spared us; and because we were parlous unready to mingle with humans, you made an island for us in nonspace, and you and your Freya set aside five years of your precious lives to lead us into selfrehabilitation. What quarrel can we have with you for departing three years early?”
Somehow the six-foot Krell had become taller, not shorter than Pan, who responded eventually, weakly, “It was not I who defeated and spared you, it was Croyd.” “Sirrah, you are one of you, Croyd is the other of you. It would be totally impossible to determine which of you is which.”
“You could tell.”
“Only because you called to me in anguish. It was a good guess, because you departed us in anguish. If I may say so, sirrah, we have progressed in your absence, we have built on your early pointers; but we would profit now by your criticism, if you could spare time for a visit”
“Krell! Croyd is in trouble! That comes first!”
“Of course, Pan. Can we help in some way?”
Miserable, jaw-knotted Pan was beating a fist into a hand palm. “I had to confess guilt to you first. I had to get your reaction to that first. I have a painfully divided mind about your reaction to that. Perhaps I hoped that you would wish to kill me. Had you so informed me, I would have asked for a delay until we could rescue Croyd; and then I would have presented myself defenseless for killing.”
“You have taught us, sirrah, that killing is an inhumane act, to be reserved for ultimate exigency and thereafter regretted. I fail to see here an ultimate exigency. I consider you my liege, and I prefer to serve you as a noble vassal who is willing to say no and stand his ground.”
But it didn’t really help, although it quieted Pan a little. He labored out the following: “It was Croyd and not Pan who taught you that. This house is my birthplace and Freya’s birthplace. Croyd reified us here. Then we had a conference, and I drew the chore with you people. It was a sort of a family conference: Croyd was papa, Greta was mama. Was I supposed to say ‘Go to Hell, move over, I'll be in command now’? Be a realist, Krell; was I supposed to say that?”
Krell’s face, if that was what it was, never wore any particular expression; but the positions of his antennae were revealing. Just now, both antennae were aimed straight at Pan. “Of course not. You were supposed to do what you did do instead. You were supposed to say, in effect: ‘Croyd, you and I have been one man for a long time, but all of a sudden I seem to have become your little boy. Okay, Father, I'll play the game, I won’t kick you off your rock; I'll accept your menial chores like helping the Krell people get established in a new environment, and in return you will forgive me for being so obsessed with your superiority and my own inferiority that I end by turning my back on my trust and becoming a—’ ”
Krell suddenly went sprawling on the nonspace bridge, felled by the sidesweeping hand and arm of Pan.
When, collecting consciousness, Krell could look up, Pan was on his knees bending over him, and the eyes of Pan were suicidal.