Patron of the Arts

by William Rotsler

  I didn’t even know what direction I was going in, I was just going fast. I had to think and not be looking over my shoulder at the same time. After a fast hour of thump-and-jerk, I stopped to consult the automap.

  I was here. The Sunstrum complex was there. Star Palace was about here. Bradbury was behind me. I was afraid now to go to the Sunstrums. The killers must know about my relationship with Nova and they might try for another kill when I was there. I didn’t want to endanger the Sunstrums needlessly, so I headed toward the Star palace. Maybe I could get enough time to think it out and find a solution. I spun the wheel and took off.

  It was bright morning when I crested a dune and saw the Star Palace far ahead, looking like the dropped crown of a rich king. I scanned it with everything in the cat, then prepared myself. I programmed the autopilot and got out on the side-strip. Reaching through the open hatch, I steered as close as I could to the edge of the base.

  As the sand cat clanked by, pluming sand behind, I punched in the autopilot and jumped for the dark opening of one of the base’s curious garage-like rooms. The sandcat shifted to the right, the hatch slammed shut, and it was off, covering me with sand as it shifted gears. I watched it head straight across the desert, programmed to miss Burroughs, skirt along the John Carter Range and come in somewhere along Northaxe. Unless they got to it first.

  I had radioed the Sunstrums where I would be, and they would come and pick me up at the time I estimated things might have cooled down. “Be careful,” Nova had said on the microwave. “We’ll have some counterfeit papers ready for you in a day or two.” There was a pause and I heard only the hum and crackle of the transmission wave, then she spoke again. “I love you, Brian. Goodbye.”

  I got up, dusted myself off, and tossed the provision sack over my shoulder. Stepping carefully, I went right up the side of the Palace, a little less worried now about breaking off any of the crystals. I climbed over a balcony of rippled green and blue and went inside to find a quiet place to sit and think.

  I rejected the gold and red splendor of a hollow sphere of inward-pointing pyramids and the purple mystery of a low-ceilinged cavern next to it. I chose the tranquility of an emerald green hemisphere floored with smooth clear crystal in rounded lumps. Beneath the water-clear floor was a sea of frozen life, intricate crystalline complexes and strange growths that seemed to wave and move with the reflections of sun and self.

  I stretched out on a smooth, flat surface, as if I were floating on an alien sea, and rested my head on a pillow of satin-smooth crystal with a flowerlike red-red growth within.

  Slowly I ran through the disciplines of relaxation and at last I slept. In my dreams faceless menaces pursued me through blood-red crystal corridors with sandy floors, endlessly running, endlessly fleeing. Noises invaded my dreams and there were mechanical men, tireless, deadly robots chasing me. Then suddenly, in the crystalline trap, they froze. The noises stopped.

  I awoke instantly, my gun in my hand and my eyes wildly searching. What had happened?

  I crept across the crystal lake, through bands of amber and brown light, and out onto a tiny cuplike balcony. It was late afternoon, almost evening, and there was no sound but the soft sighing of the wind. Just beyond the nearest dune there was the faint haze of dust and as I peered narrowly at this I saw the tiniest flash of light. It was a dull red reflection from the distant sun. I saw one, then two tiny spots appear and I ducked low as the flash of lens came at me.

  They were scanning the Palace, and their sandcat was parked out beyond the dunes.

  They had to be assassins, for any tourist would simply drive right up and climb out. A nuvomartian might not even stop.

  Here I go again, I thought angrily.

  They couldn’t be absolutely certain I was in the Palace and perhaps they might not find me. Hiding in an already scoured lair was better than running, I thought, and watched them come over the dune cautiously. There were two of them and they kept well apart. I tracked one with my gun, but the light was too uncertain for me to risk a shot, and he was moving deceptively, running, crawling, walking, stopping suddenly.

  I decided to go back into my former hideout deep in the bowels of the great structure. I moved as quickly and as silently as I could, but this time I had no light, and I kept bumping into sharp corners. I banged my head painfully on a stalactite and barely stifled my curse. I moved on, often stumbling, until I saw below me the brilliant rainbow flashes as two lights scanned a crystal cavern below me.

  The lights, moving and reflecting, confused me even further, for now they were the only illumination. The light shifted colors several times a second, bouncing and receding, growing bright and passing through the spectrum as it came up through the layers and rooms and colored crystals.

  I stopped and did not move at all, except to breathe and listen. My gun was at my side and I tried to blend with the forest of stalagmites among which I was standing. The two lights below me parted and one grew dim while the other grew brighter and closer.

  The light was in my eyes, reflected from a hundred surfaces, coming in at different angles, making multiple shadows, confusing my aim. I fired first, and there was the brittle collapse of an armload of crystals. He fired, but the mirror surfaces of the stalagmite near me reflected most of the beam. It was hot, though; the heat seared my hand and face. I shot again, as close to panic as I had ever gotten, but I don’t know if I was even close. I was firing into the hundred lights, but he had me in his sights.

  There was a sudden wire-hot lance through my thigh, like a thrust sword, and I gasped with pain. I fired as my leg collapsed, and I held down the trigger. The shattering of a thousand crystals was mixed with the hoarse scream of a man, and my gun melted. I dropped it from my seared hand as I fell forward. My shoulder hit something hard and my body flipped to fall heavily onto stalagmites like knives. I felt blinding pain.

  My fingers probed for my thigh, and I found it wet with blood, a great raw wound. I realized my leg must be almost severed, the image of the assassin lying in his pool of blood flashed into my mind. I felt the rest of my body and found it covered with burns and cuts from the crystals. The nameless man buried beneath the fallen crystal had killed me. I inched forward, amazed that I could even think against the pain. There was still one more killer, but my gun was useless. I tried finding the dead man’s gun by feel, but couldn’t. The light was buried, too, shining out through the beautiful rubble. I dug for it and turned it off. I almost fainted from the effort, and when the world swam back to me I knew I had to get away from there.

  I tried to tear a tourniquet from my jumper, but the material was too tough for my weak hands, and slippery with blood. I dug at the huge Martian jewels covering the killer’s body, using the light to find his laser. With pain-blurry eyes I examined it and found the charge almost exhausted. I thumbed it to the lowest setting and fanned the beam. Then I took a deep breath and fired a long burst across my great wound. My scream sounded down through the crystal caverns, echoing and reechoing grotesquely. I lay panting with exhaustion, the laser fallen from my hand, depleted. But my leg was almost cauterized. Maybe I wouldn’t bleed to death right away.

  It might take an hour.

  I started crawling. I wasn’t crawling anywhere but away. I hoped I would leave a blood trail too faint or too confused by the intricate crystal patterns for the other man to track.

  I knew I was dead, but the animal in me kept me going.

  I stared down through the floor at involved complexes that could be crystalline structures the size of my hand, or something as big as a transporter and far away. Reality was sharp and painful beneath my torn hands and knees, but at the same time it was floating, shifting, changing, a mind-stream going through the rapids, a blurring and melting of pain and reality and alien fantasy.

  Death was ahead of me in time. Death was behind me, clutching a laser. Death dribbled out behind me, in blotches and blobs. I carried it like a mountainous rock. I wanted to lie down and quit, but something ke
pt me moving. I stopped feeling the pain of ripped palms and gashed knees. There was only the now of doom and extinction. I collapsed several times; each time I passed out and awoke knowing, somehow, that it was only a few seconds. I swam through the pain until it was a part of me, a necessary skin and dagger point that covered me.

  My hands pulled me through the sands when my legs gave out, and I dragged myself like a broken toy that doesn’t know when to quit. I went over a hump of sand in the dark and slid down the other side, filling my mouth with gritty clog. I spat it out and pulled myself on. The light was gone, somewhere, but I seemed to move through a faint mist of light. The red stone walls grated against this shoulder, then that, and I broke the side of my face in a drunken lurch. Sand?

  I stopped and fell against the stone and my bloody fingers touched the wall in the dark. I must be somehow in the old part, the deepest part, where the mural was. Maybe I would be safe there. I forced myself onward until I could go no farther. I lay there against a dune, my mind a sluggish pool of sludge, thinking, So this is how it is to die. My tortured body told me it might have been easier to go with a surgical clean laser cut through the torso.

  But I lay there in that darkness with images and thoughts coming and going.

  Nova.

  Madelon.

  Cilento and Sunstrum and the great sphere of stars.

  My mother, my father, and falling broken into the crystals. Was my death to be so plebeian, I thought, with my life flashing past like some newsstat bio?

  The images blurred and ran, and through my closed lids I saw the mural over my head, glowing in the dark, pulsating, throbbing, the long arms moving. The perspective shifted and stretched, then condensed and ran like melted wax. Madelon was in one of the arms, glisteningly naked, turning, swimming through stars, laughing, her long hair like a net. Nova was in the next arm as the great spiral wheel turned, her hair spreading out like black night, blocking out the galaxies whirling in the distance. Crystal jewels coated her body like light, shifting and running like water as she turned in space. Something else came up on the next spiral arm, a formless form, a rainbow in the shape of a shape, a turning, shimmering dance.

  The pain was distant and then gone and I was there in the galaxy dance, part of the farflung arms, part of the stars and atoms and utter void. The arms curved through time and space, becoming one, becoming many, blending, regenerating, purifying, a cascade of color sound, a river of light, a comet of time . . .

  My body and mind parted, breaking, disintegrating, each with a reflection of the whole, each with the whole of perfection. I was Nova, I was a star, I was void, I was crystal, I was energy . . . I was . . . always had been . . .

  I linked . . . went back, far back, linking, linking. linking. I was part of everything . . .

  I was Feather of Flame and Lastwarrior.

  I was Flowerbringer and Nightwind and Gilgamesh.

  I was earth and fire and Xenophon, Demonkiller, and Rainbowsound.

  I was Stormsweep and Firestar.

  I was Brian Thorne.

  I was reflected in man, but I was one—unique—a fragment of all. I was IOK and IOR and Cre-vlar-mora-ma. I was merah and damu

  and smoke.

  I linked.

  I was.

  I knew.

  The atoms drew together. They formed into the old pattern. Returned, they moved and meshed and I was whole again. But not the same.

  I realized I was staring up at the ancient mural. It was dark, yet I could see it plainly, more clearly than I had with the light. The galactic spiral still spun in a frozen moment of time, a millisecond frame from eternity.

  The pain was gone.

  Startled, I felt in the dark for my thigh.

  It was whole.

  Complete, uncut, unsevered.

  My hands were smooth, my exhaustion gone. I could feel the thin cold Martian air in my lungs. I could sense the pulsebeat of blood and the busy, busy body at work.

  I looked up at the mural, but now it seemed too dark to see clearly.

  I got to my feet, shaky in mind, but whole in body. I moved my leg and it moved without pain, without thought. I went toward the passage, sure in the dark as if I had been there a thousand times and did not question my knowledge.

  It was night in the First Place. I went upward, through the vaults, through the Magician’s Hall, through the place where Windbird had cronned, and into the zarri where the Sun had once danced on the children. I crossed the varuna of Starbringer and there, in the crimson purple salla of the Lastborn I killed the killer. He saw me and moved slowly, as if in a gelatin of panic, and his weapon turned toward me, toward the Sunface, toward the Omi, where the Teacher had once stood. I reached out and took his weapon and thought it suitable that I kill him with it.

  11

  I left the Star Palace and took the killers’ machine and went to the Sunstrums. I needed money and they gave it to me. I kissed Nova and went across the sands toward Bradbury.

  Now I stood in a spacesuit under the bowl of night. Beneath the jagged rock under my feet was the core of the ship, a whole asteroid christened the Marshal Ivan Dmitri, and ahead of me was Earth. And Huo.

  But somehow, confronting Huo seemed the least of my troubles. First I had to get back safely in order to confront him and his double. A double, no matter how good, could not possibly pass a really close professional inspection. I knew enough judges, senators, and power figures at least to get a hearing from some of them, no matter what the public view of the bankrupt Thorne might be.

  Or so I thought, anyway.

  What had happened to me in the Star Palace was what really occupied my thoughts.

  I was still confused about the utter clarity of what had happened to me. Was the whole thing, no matter how vivid, my imagination? I had been so sure, so certain, and two more men had died at my hands. Had I dreamed my fatal wounding?

  I was very clear about what had happened, but I was not certain why it had happened. If it happened at all, it had happened the way I remembered it, with an incredible spreading of myself, back into the past, forward into the future, and sideways into the now. But I knew that was contemporary verbalizing, a pallid explanation to my logical self. When a whole event is nonverbal, how can you explain it even to yourself? It had happened to me. I had felt and experienced —something.

  I had killed again, or rather, executed. If I hadn’t, he would have killed me, and he certainly had been trying. There was no remorse and no guilt in me, except in that odd abstract way of What else might I have done to prevent it?

  The rock-encased asteroid-ship shot Earthward at an unimagined speed, but I seemed to stand dead in space, my senses too limited to see anything but the obvious. Yet for that one time—how long?—my senses had seemed almost infinite, a godhood of sorts, or so it seemed by comparison to my normal condition. That had faded, but the residue that remained had changed me. I felt somewhat like a computer terminal, with a universe of knowledge linked to me, waiting only the pressure of the right keys, the right questions, the correct situation.

  I stood on the asteroid and the silent internal thrust gave it direction and it loomed over me, a great sugar-loaf of pitted space trash. I waited for them to come out to try to kill me again.

  I was weary of killing, yet it seemed very remote. I had come out so that no one else might be hurt, that was all.

  Get it over with, I asked them silently. Make your try and die. I haven’t time for you now.

  There were two of them, and one was in a crew suit. I waited patiently until he found me and started to aim. I shot him first, then the other. The crewman leaped backward as he was hit; the explosion of his suit moved him off the surface and he floated, a broken unit, slowly drifting toward the drive end.

  The other one was Pelf. I lifted him up and gave him a shove and he floated, too.

  That’s seven.

  I went back inside and decanted and went to my cabin. There was much I had to think about.

  We or
bited Earth and went into parking orbit out near Station Three. The shuttle picked us up and we went in past the Tycho Brache and George IX and straight to Decon. I suppose I could have used Pelf’s papers but I just didn’t feel like it. I did, however, bribe one of the crewmen to let me wear a crewsuit to avoid notice by the newsmen; all the big news was gone from Martian trips, but the Station stringers usually met any incoming ship and culled it for items.

  Keeping my faceplate dimmed, I went straight through to the Earth shuttle and kept myself inconspicuous. We landed at Sahara without incident, and I decanted in crews quarters and lockered the suit. I used minimal evasion tactics and took a jet for Berlin first, then to Arctica Four, before heading for New York. I did it all mechanically, in a dull haze, with my mind in many elsewheres.

  I paused on the pedestrian street level to look up at the General Anomaly building. I felt very remote from it and the pride I had once felt seemed foreign and distant. It was not my building; I had only paid for it. Steelworkers and cement handlers and welders were the ones who built it. Electricians and decorators and airlift operators were the ones who owned it. They had made it, not I.

  Huo had put guards out on the street, too. They looked like casual gawkers, but their eyes were too restless, too alert. I walked past the outer perimeter, but they didn’t appear to notice me. Had I changed that much?

  The guards at the door recognized me, but I looked at them and they seemed to freeze, uncertain and confused. I went to the executive elevator and there the single burly guard was more certain. But slow. The elevator door opened on the sealed floor according to the punch code, and there were four of them, ready but unwilling to act. Bowie saved them.

  “Easy, boys,” he said from the right, his laser steady. “Hi, boss,”

  he said with a grin, standing separate from the other outer guards.