“Why, obvious? How would you know, doo-doo-head?”
“Was that you?” I ignored his attempt at dissimulation. “Or must I conclude that the host occupants of Jindil, Chuuk, Dahkti, Pawbi and Mool are back again?” I’d named the various Boos of the northern kingdoms.
He said solemnly, “Rephrase the question.”
“Gog-shit!”
“Oh, my!”
“Hooli. This is no goddamn time for games.”
“How right you are. How’d you like to be sent back across the Styx right now, buddy-boy? I can do it, you know.”
“How?”
“By just leaving you alone. Something’ll get you then, or my name ain’t Aunt Jemima.”
“But you couldn’t do that. You’re an Adjuster, too, remember? You can’t take life above molluscs and anemones.”
“Nothing in the book says I have to give it. You were already dead, Collin. Me? I saved you, with three ounces of ‘ol Doc Mandelbaum’s ‘lie-forever-cocktail’ You want me to restopper the bottle? I can do it”
“Screw you, Hooli.”
We stared at each other. He said suddenly, lightly, changing the subject. “It was the sword that did it, you know.”
“You mean the cut?”
“I mean the sword in the cut. The alloy’s a grabber. It breaks down just a bit at the touch of some kinds of humanoid blood—your kind, not Alphian or Fregisian types. It screws up the hemoglobin. You ‘had instant leukemia, buddy.”
“Gods!” I shook my head in both thanks and exasperation at my little Florence Nightingale. “What do I owe you?”
“How’s about a big wet kiss?”
I started to laugh, then stopped. He’d done it again, shunted me off into some backwash area of nonsense and repartee. “Okay,” I said meanly, “if that wasn’t you winking through Mool’s eyes, then where were you when we did battle with the Alphians, and how did you escape the gateway?”
He countered sadly, “You know I’m not permitted to fight, to kill. You know, too, that if my powers were used in any way, especially in the sphere’s proximity, that it would know. And if it did, buddy, well, as I’ve said: that’s it, the end of the ball game. Besides,” and his little eyes twinkled, “you didn’t need me anyway.”
“Yeah,” I said grudgingly. “Perhaps not for fighting. But I do need to know what’s happening. However many victories we win, me and the Marackians, that screwing blue marble could still have the final word. I need to know its true strength, Hooli; what it is and how it operates. You have the answers. I don’t. And, Hooli, that’s a situation with which I damn well can’t be satisfied.”
“Well be satisfied, bird-brain,” he answered coldly, in tones he’d never used before. “It’s out of your hands, I’m telling you, so don’t make waves. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” A sudden conciliatory grin swept across his round little face, for I think he knew that he’d come on a mite too strong. He said, “It’s the big one, buddy. I mean it. So please, cool it. Stay the hell out of it.”
“And who’s going to end it? You?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“All right, Kyrie, I’ll tell you this much: It can go two ways; one way, I’ll call you in; the other way, no. I love you, Kyrie.”
“Thanks for nothing. In the meantime you’ve set me up to believe that the sphere is antimatter. Is it?”
“No comment, except I didn’t set you up.”
“What of the energy tap through the gateway to the pre-nova sun?”
“No comment.”
“Okay, tell me about the Alphians.”
He countered my question with a question. “What have you deduced?”
I sighed. “That they are not clones; that they are most likely lab-birthed from male and female humanoid sperm and ova; that they have but a limited knowledge of themselves; that they lack even the slightest understanding of any theory about the socio-economic aspects of the evolutionary’ processes… I’m bound to conclude, Hooli, that the Dark One’s uncle, as you’ve so pithily described the occupant of the sphere, was also in that first alien ship to penetrate the gateway; that he, she or it escaped to its own universe, taking with it whatever was necessary to recreate Alphian life. In effect, Hooli, I’ve deduced the obvious: That our Alphians are the products of the alien’s efforts to create a life-form subservient to its needs. As apart from those needs and as creature-humanoids, the Alphians are a mirrored caricature of a medley of tape banks filled with mostly fictional history and simple disc-lectures with more of the same. They are absolutely unaware of the peripheral areas of any supposed reality, what it is, how it got that way, what one can expect it to do. Example: An act of magick as practiced in front of an Alphian—and I spotted this at our first meeting—is accepted by him as equal to the results of, say, a servo-mechanism showing up at dinnertime with a platter of gog steaks. He hasn’t the slightest idea of how either works, and is not motivated to find out. If he were, the contradiction would manifest itself eventually in independent thinking and a consequent inevitable rejection of the sphere as god and mentor.
“Our Alphians are dopes, and meant to be so, Hooli. The occupant of your sphere is indeed the Dark One’s ‘uncle’ in that just as the D.O. before him, he too is incapable of organizing his power. He knows nothing of humankind; indeed, nothing of life. His very arrogance, the inability in this case to understand the peripheral but absolutely basic details of the logical development of any species, is his own death warrant!
“Do you understand me, Hooli? I tell you now that if that goddamned sphere and its occupant is not antimatter, then by the vulva of the great mother, I’ll end this war right where it started—on the military field of Glagmaron Castle, and on that hilltop where the alien rests his ship.”
Hooli was so silent that I feared that he’d left his host and gone on to greener pastures. But then he said—and I’d never heard so soft a voice from him before, nor such a contemplative sadness—”Kyrie, in your own way, the humanoid way, you’ve come pretty close; indeed, you’ve grasped the particulars the alien overlooks when tackling you. Yes, Great Collin, and I call you that seriously, for you are now as much of Camelot-Fregis as you ever were of your Foundation. You’ve guessed it right The sphere and its occupant are not antimatter, and can, with luck in all areas, be destroyed by you. The other side of the coin, however, is still the catastrophic disaster if you fail.”
“So? It’s a chance I’ll have to take.”
“Not true.”
“Hooli. You give me a pain in the ass like the original D.O. never did. I don’t know what you know because you won’t tell me; can’t tell me. I do know what I sense, see, feel and hear each hour of the day—which is that a gang of test-tube freakos have been unleashed upon this altogether beautiful world and have introduced a wanton destruction and slavery upon the inhabitants of same. And all this under the protection of an apparently amoral, unconscionable life-form with almost infinite powers. I, too, am an Adjuster, Hooli. Remember? I’ve a job to do the same as you. Though I can’t, for the moment, hit the source of evil, I can attend to its peripheral manifestations, preparatory for a final denouement. The moment those preparations are completed, I will attack the sphere. Believe me, Hooli. You can count on it.”
He said suddenly, solemnly, “Would you believe that to do nothing is the best thing?”
‘Tell me why and I’ll think about it” “I can’t, Kyrie.”
“Then .screw you, you miserable little raisinless brownie. All you’re showing me is that when the chips are down, you offer a monkey wrench plus a refusal to help. I haven’t forgotten the Deneb either, Hooli.”
“What you say is not true and you are very unfair.”
I laughed dramatically, bitterly. “Which part is not true? You never speak to the ‘whole’ of anything if you can possibly avoid it”
He glared at me, shook his head and said, “Well, I did snatch you out of old Charon’s b
oat. That’s a plus, or don’t you think so? If I say that for you to do nothing is best, then deliberately allow you to live, knowing that you’ll try to stampede these poor bastards into a bloody holocaust with damn little chance of winning your way, I most certainly have helped you. … To have allowed you to die would have been one helluva lot easier, buddy. For me, you would be one problem less.”
I grunted. Who could counter that? “You did say that I could attack the sphere and, with luck, win. Right?”
“Sure. With a little luck you could also paddle across a lava lake in a paper boat”
“Would you prevent me from attacking it?”
“I will not answer that.”
I sighed, drew the obvious conclusions; to me, that is. “Oh, ho, my little gog’s bladder,” I said accusingly, “we’re beginning to see a dottle of a different color.”
“Yup,” he cliched in turn—”a whole new kettle of fish.”
“So you’d prevent me?”
“I didn’t say that”
I quickly retreated to the original question. “But you did say the sphere had an energy tap through the gateway to a pre-nova?”
“Increments, buddy. No steady flow. He sucks up what he needs. Think of the converters aboard the Deneb. Took up space, right? Well there are no converters aboard the sphere. Just packs; batteries, if you will.”
“Sounds archaic.”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On whose foxhole you’re working out of.”
“In other words, our D.O. in the sphere has no personal pipeline to the pre-nova, but can plug into a pipeline when he wishes. And this end of said pipeline—is on Alpha?”
“You got it, buddy.”
I then asked smoothly, “Well then, Pooh Bear, other than saving my life, what else are you here for?”
He grinned his rodent grin, said silkily, ‘To suggest, in the words of your ancient carpenter philosopher, that you’d better ‘pick up your bed and walk’ and in a hurry. Get a move on. Time’s a wastin’ and all that What I’m saying, buddy, is that if you don’t get your ass movin’ in the direction of Glagmaron your fairy-tale princess and her companion will be lost to you forever.”
I laughed. “To that moron, Tarkiis? Hooli, whatever Murie would do or has done, she’d never be lost to that.”
“Not lost, buddy. He’ll eventually kill her and Caroween too. The signs are there. Which means you’ll have to get both of them out of there, quick.”
“But I saw them through Elioseen’s mirror just a few hours ago. There was no indication of anything like that.”
“You saw her two, weeks ago, Kyrie. That’s how long you’ve been ill.” .
“You knew I was dying, and you waited two weeks? Why, Hooli?”
He grinned. “Priorities.” .
“But why would he do that?”
“Well, he’d thought to keep them as bait for you, since the whole world knows now that the ‘Collin’ lives. But she’s begun to mock him—among other things.”
“Damn!”
“You’ve got forty-eight hours, at best. And remember what I told you before, too. If I have to call you in, it’ll have to be quick; everything else to one side and no questions asked.” He got up, stretched and straightened his mortarboard.
“Are you leaving?”
‘I’ve done what I came to do; saved your life and thereby, hopefully, saved the lives of our two pretty princesses who deserve better than a laser in the belly, ‘just for fun.’ As for your posturings and all that, well, I’ve got better things to do, buddy.”
“Why is it, Hooli, that I’m left with the feeling that you’ve actually told me nothing at all?”
He was beginning to fade.
“Where you going?”
“Actually, nowhere. Watch, Kyrie.”
And just like that the plain disappeared along with Hooli, and I was awake and scrabbling to sit up against the familiar pillows of my bed in the apartment in Gortfin Castle.
I looked wide-eyed around me. It was midmorning. The windows were full open. A wanning sun flooded in to touch the furniture and to ‘halo’ the Well coiffed heads of a half-dozen lords and knights, along with my usual stalwarts, plus the lovely Lady Elioseen….
Seeing the absolutely pop-eyed looks on then-startled faces since I’d returned from the dead, I said instantly aloud and strongly, “The one thing, comrades, that I could use above all else is a wash bowl full of gog stew, two loaves of bread and sufficient beer to wash it down. Now what say you all to that?”
Crying joyously, “By the gods, Collin, you’re alive!” Rawl Fergis leaped instantly to his feet. Sir Dosh, on the other hand, went straight to his knees to begin a hoarse braying of prayers to Ormon, Wimbley and Harris, learned, no doubt, at his father’s knee. The dark Lors Sernas—he’d had a jeweled flagon of wine to his lips—gripped it hard and stared over its rim in awe. Gen-Rondin but shook his head in a paroxysm of personal joy, then covered his eyes while my students who’d survived the flight before the temple, simply held up their hands and waved at me. Happy grins split their faces. The Lord Fel-Holdt stood stern, proud—and grateful.
Only Elioseen wept, softly and silently. Then she smiled through her tears so prettily in her joy that I lived, that I could not help but smile back and shed a tear or two myself.
And lastly; on a pillow at the foot of my bed, and with the pillow on a small stool, I spotted little round Hooli, the Marackian Court Pug-Boo. I now knew what he meant when he’d said that he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Where,” I demanded loudly, “did that come from?” I pointed to him deliberately, while he, unseen, crossed his eyes and dangled his tongue at me. *
Gen-Rondin arose to say, “Why, we found him in the hall, my lord; just a few minutes ago. I’m reminded, sir, that in the great war of Dunguring, all court Pug-Boos left those countries with traitorous kings and came to Marack. ‘Tis a good omen.”
Oh, ho. I shook my head at Hooli. He’d done something else for our cause. He’d insinuated himself into the scene as a moral factor….
The best tactic, I decided, was to ignore him. “What of my food?” I asked. .
But they brought me broth instead, all crying and making over me in such a way that I knew that I’d indeed been dead for sure. … When I finished the bowl, quaffing it as I would a tankard of beer, I allowed them to lead me down to the great room of the chirurgeons; this, though being ten pounds lighter as a result of my illness, I was of the opinion that I could have Sown the distance myself. As for strength. Well, with any encouragement, I’d have walked right through the apartment door without opening it Moreover, I was as clear-headed as I’d ever been in my life before.
What had Hooli said? That I must return to Glagmaron and seize Murie and Caroween from the jaws of their would-be murders? Well, why not? Other than Hooli’s own reasons—the ‘play within a play’—I would damned well do it because I loved her. I’d also do it as a part of our own plan to prevent the stabilization of Alphian power. After all, as I’d told Hooli, I, too, was an Adjuster!
On no single world of any I had ever visited had T ever found the equal of Camelot’s ‘room of the chirurgeons.’ Galactic science can do many things, but the chiros, masseurs and gnostics of Fregis’s curing rooms are in their own way, and for the purposes they serve, incomparable.
We made a party of it. Fel-Holdt joined as well as a goodly half of .the off-duty officers and lords at Gortfin. All of us together in the great pool-bath, to be pleasured and relaxed by its warmth and cleansed in its curative waters. Wine, sviss and beer were served to make the camaraderie a true celebration of my return from ghast (the Fregisian hell) and, as a matter of fact, to be the only one on record to do this. They’d thought me dead. To a man, they wept in their” cups for joy to find me living.
The chiropractic, the massage with heated oils and curative salves that followed, brought such additional euphoria that my Rawl was prompted to remark that my weight loss
had given my profile a hawkish cast to strike fear into the hearts of my enemies. He vowed to follow suit, to make himself lean and mean, as did Sir Dosh. But not just yet, they agreed hastily. After the war, perhaps. As of the moment they had a serious need to build their strength for the struggle at hand. And, too, it was well known that both of them dearly loved their seats at table and the pleasures of the platter and bottle.
More broth, some fruit, and I slept again for four hours. This time when I awakened it was as if I’d never had an illness in my life. In the vernacular of an older time: I’d truly been born again.
In the solarium and in the company of most of those who’d joined me in the bath, I was briefed on what had happened during my two weeks’ hiatus. Fel-Holdt was proud to report that a truly competent resistance had been organized throughout the north, along lines previously agreed upon. Moreover, the last of the thirty thousand Marackians who had fought against Hish in Om had finally made it from that far continent to the area of Corchoon in Kelb. Our sailors, alert to their coming, had contacted their fleet of coasters some hundreds of miles off shore and had then guided them to safety in the various inlets and lagoons of Kelb. From there they were being filtered in to Fel-Holdt’s ever growing forces.
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