Daddy-O laughed. He sounded genuinely amused. “This is nonsense,” he observed, more to the other FBY man than to me or Despoina. “Sewell—that’s his name, I believe—Sewell is bluffing. If he can do what he says, why doesn’t he simply do it? I doubt he would be restrained by any considerable scruple for life. Handcuff him, Phillips, or throw a net over him. Perhaps a net would be best. But bring him along. I want to examine him.” He turned to go.
I drew a deep breath. I had failed—no, I hadn’t. Something was putting me on, as I might put on clothing, something old and powerful; a heart that was not my own was beating, steady and strong, within my breast. Now I knew what to do.
I knew the meaning of the double axe.
“Wait!” I said.
I must have put considerable authority into the syllable, for Daddy-O turned half around to look at me. “Well?” he said.
I gave him look for look. I could feel him trying to probe my mind; but then, he had three minds to probe. He wasn’t getting anywhere with it.
“I haven’t much scruple for your life,” I told him, “but we could be useful to each other. Don’t you know that?”
This time he didn’t laugh. “How?” he said.
“You have the organization; we have the power,” I said. “You’ll never find out unless we choose to tell you. Our people can be silent. The inquisitors used to complain that we slept on the rack.
“Force won’t do it. But a free agreement might. A modus vivendi—we can work out the details later—would be of great mutual benefit.”
Daddy-O was, I am sure, an intelligent man. In some respects, he had a better mind than I. But it had one serious limitation: he couldn’t imagine anyone genuinely actuated by motives very different from his own.
He knew we Wicca have “supernormal” abilities. He coveted them for the sake of personal and organizational aggrandizement. He saw life in terms of power; it didn’t occur to him that we would no more surrender our “secrets” to him than we would have surrendered them to the inquisition. He thought the craft was a bag of valuable tricks, whereas it is a glowing faith.
He hesitated, chewing on his lower lip. I could see that his pride of caste was warring with the plausibility of my argument (and, despite some obvious holes, it was superficially plausible). He was just on the point of telling Phillips to turn us loose for the time being, when Nipho, who had been lying unnoticed on the spot on the rock floor where I had left him tied, piped up.
“Take him to pieces, Daddy-O!” he yelled. “Take him to pieces and find what makes him tick!”
That tore it. The big chief’s face set hard. Nipho’s unceremonious interruption had recalled him to himself—or, more accurately, to his former conviction that the Wicca “powers” were nothing but a matter of physiology.
In a moment he was going to tell Phillips to throw a net over us and prod us up the stair. I hadn’t any time at all. I made the bull-leap.
Now, there has been a lot of nonsense talked about Crete. In particular, the general public has accepted, for almost three-quarters of a century, things as genuinely Cretan that never existed except in the mind of the excavators. “Creativity” is something to be avoided in restoring long-buried works of art. Insight helps, and patience. But if an archaeologist wants to be “creative,” he would do better to take up knots and fancy ropework.
Not all the bull-leaping frescoes and statuettes fall into this category. Two or three have, in fact, been correctly restored. The sport did exist. But the real importance of bull-leaping is as a physical symbol for a psychological thing.
Over the horns, then, and through the air. Dizzy and glad, a little rapture-sick. Dizzy and glad, through the air, and straight at Daddy-O’s head.
He did not want to receive me. But he had had no warning, and I—or the third of my mind that was doing the leaping—was augmented by that other, long-breathless force. Time is different there, you see. But it had been a long time, four millennia at least, since the man who had set up that pattern had seen the blessed light of the sun.
Now came a very odd thing. I had ousted Daddy-O from his cranium; I could feel him raging impotently around me. But “I” still remained in command of Sam Sewell’s body; I saw through his eyes, drew his breath. I had a divided consciousness, that is all. It would be a waste of words to try to describe it further.
I raised the chief’s hand to his lips and had him rub his lower face. “Ah—Nipho, be quiet,” I made him say. And then, to Phillips, “Stun him, if he keeps talking.”
He turned—I made him turn—toward Sam Sewell. “Very well, you may go,” I said through boss-man’s lips. “You are to report to our headquarters at your earliest convenience. Any considerable delay will result in trouble. You understand? You will be kept under surveillance.”
Sam Sewell nodded. “Yes, I understand.”
“Very well, then. Go.” (I hoped I wasn’t repeating myself too much.) I had him turn away from me.
Sam Sewell walked past him, Despoina following. Her hand was still on Sewell’s arm. Together they started up the helical stair.
Sam Sewell felt drained and weak. But that could be excused, and the FBY men made way for them. For the moment—as long as I could control the chief’s body—they were safe.
And now the last of the odd things of that odd time happened. (How many parts does the mind have? Now I had four.) Odd, but simple: I knew who I was.
I would think about it more later, when I had time. But I knew who I was.
24
They had made way for us, we had started up the helical stair. But they were only a few feet behind us. As they moved up after us I could hear the faint clank and jangle of the gadgets and grenades they wore at their belts. We did not dare go as fast as we could.
We climbed. Around and around, tracing out the big circle with the twelve-foot diameter that the digger had made. We would stop for a moment or two, catch our breath, and then go on again. We climbed.
Daddy-O, behind us, was not doing very well. Sam Sewell’s occupation of him was turning out to be deleterious. His heart beat was weak and irregular, his skin was dry and flushed, his field of vision blurred. Now and again I had him stop to lean on the arms of his lieutenants, and twice I had him reply, to their solicitous questions, “Nonsense! I’m quite all right. Just a little tired.”
This was wildly untrue. Daddy-O, boiling with rage outside his cranium, knew it. I am uncertain what the reason was for his physical distress; Kyra, when we discussed it later, said that the autonomic nervous system’s action was inhibited by my usurpation of Daddy-O’s body. When I protested that the autonomic nervous system keeps on functioning even in deep unconsciousness, she replied that personality persists even when there is no awareness of it. I suppose a non-technical explanation would be that it doesn’t do a body any good to be run from the outside.
The big chief’s frequent stops to rest had widened the gap between us and has men. We could climb a little faster now, and we did. Around and around, around and around, we climbed.
But now I was confronted by a cruel dilemma. I had no particular reason to feel concern for the FBY’s chief, but I wasn’t a murderer. If I didn’t let him back inside his own body fairly soon, I’d have his death on my hands. More cogently, if he collapsed, I’d have a new FBY chief to deal with, and I didn’t think I could manage the bull-leap twice. But if I let Daddy-O run himself again, his first act would be to order Despoina and me arrested. And the next thing would be “taking us apart to find out what made us tick.”
I compromised. I moved out just a little, enough to let him put a few tendrils of his own inside and start his heart to working properly. But my action was a tiny bit too late. I had misjudged the time.
Too late. The smooth nervous impulses of normal heart beat had gone into a wild jangle of conflicting innervation. Daddy-O, back in his body too late, gave a bubbling moan and fell down on the stair.
His men gathered anxiously around him. I had withdrawn my co
ntrol of him the instant he fell. Now Despoina and I, wasting no words on external communication, began to run for all we were worth.
No shout came from behind us. I suppose they were too occupied with their attentions to their collapsed leader to notice the extent to which Despoina and I had speeded up. The babble of their worried voices receded, and the tingling sensation between my shoulder blades—the expectation of a bullet, a bolt from a stun gun, or a tear-gas grenade—began to die away. By the time exhaustion forced Despoina and me to a more moderate pace, I had begun to hope that our flight would escape notice.
We had come up a long, long way. There were only a few inches between the edges of the stair treads and the sides of the shaft, and I could not see the bottom. But even the partial glances I caught made me dizzy. The pressure in my ears kept changing. Up through H, clean through G, buried in its rubble; and now we must, I thought, be nearly done with F. I could see an enlarging round spot of light at the top of the shaft. Yes, we had come up a long way.
We were nearly at the top. Still no shouts from behind us, no noise of pursuit. I had time to marvel at the size of the digger and wonder how the FBY had ever got it into place. The logistical difficulties of getting a thing that size into F and started digging must have been enormous… Closer and closer; only a few feet now. Then I saw, with a staggering shock of dismay, that two guards had been posted at the top of the shaft.
Despoina saw them at the same moment as I; her fingers tightened on my arm. But if Sam Sewell was dismayed into a momentary helplessness, the pattern Sam had contacted half an hour ago was not.
He pushed his way up through me as a swimmer pushes his way through water. I felt my face—Sam Sewell’s ordinary, plastic face, molded by long-dead plastic-shaping fingers. It was not painful in a physical sense, but it took great resolution for me not to resist it. If he had put me on earlier as I might put on a suit of clothing, he was now rearranging his garment.
He and I were willing ourselves together. The boundaries of our two natures were growing blurred. A strength and wisdom not my own lay at my disposal. It was a heady, self-intoxicated experience—and yet, one to inspire a deep humility.
Despoina and I had reached the top of the shaft. The guards were looking at us uncertainly. I pushed Despoina in front of me unceremoniously, as a prisoner might be pushed. To the guards I said, “The chief’s had a heart attack. Go get a doctor, and a stretcher with straps. Hurry, now.”
The voice I had spoken in was not my own. It was lower in pitch, with more force in the plosives and a longer lingering on the sibilants. It was, in fact, Phillips’ voice.
“Yes, sir,” said one of the guards. “Excuse me, sir, I didn’t recognize you at first.” He hesitated. “The girl, sir—”
“She’s a prisoner,” I answered, frowning. (How odd my face felt, with the muscles and their points of attachment in the wrong places!) “I told you two to hurry. This is an emergency.”
“Yes, sir.” The guards turned and made off at a running lope.
Despoina and I took the last two steps out of the shaft. We were on F, in a part of that extensive level that was not very familiar to me. I thought the closest access to E lay to the right. But that was the way the guards were going. It would be better to take another path.
We took the corridor to the left, then, as rapidly as we could. That was not very fast, for we were both exhausted, and Despoina, particularly, was almost on the edge of collapse.
The “pattern of power” that had been a man once, millennia ago, was leaving me. Gently and quietly, a little at a time, it was withdrawing from me, disentangling itself from my body, my mind. I felt a little sad. But it was good to be only myself again.
We had gone only a few feet further when Despoina had to stop and lean against the wall to rest. My heart smote me when I saw how pale she was. But I did not dare let her rest for more than a minute or two.
“I know,” she gasped when I said we must move on. “They’ve left the shaft… and… we didn’t come all this way… to be caught.”
Seconds later we heard the sound of explosions at the end of the corridor from which we had come. They were followed by a shudder, a tremble, through the very fabric of the rock.
What was happening? Were our pursuers trying to blow up the whole level in order to rid themselves of us? Surely not; they must be lobbing grenades into the cross-corridors at random, trying to flush us out.
But the ominous shudder through the rock had given me an idea; perhaps it was the last legacy of the pattern that had been a man once in Crete, millennia ago. I knew where I had seen Jaeger.
“Hurry, hurry!” I said to Despoina. “We’ve got to get to the lower gallery!”
25
We had taken cover behind an outcropping of rock to the left of, and a few hundred feet distant from, the entrance to the lower gallery. I thought the rock would keep our pursuers from picking us up with snooper-scopes. And I believed (I had a dim recollection of Jaeger’s testifying to this effect before a senate investigating committee) that the rock ceiling was particularly strong at this point. Strong enough? That was something we’d have to find out.
There was another good reason for selecting this spot as a redoubt. Despoina had told me, as we hurried along, that any sound made here would be picked up, amplified, and reechoed from about the middle of the gallery. Unless the men pursuing us were more familiar with the acoustic properties of the gallery than I thought they were, they would probably think we were hiding somewhere inside it.
We waited. It was part of my plan to use the tidal stresses the moving moon makes through the solid rocks of her primary. Magic would not help us much now, except to supply the illusion that I hoped would trick our opponents into action. I would try to accomplish a physical effect by physical means.
I used the sight and saw, through hundreds and hundreds of feet of construction and rock, that the reddish circle of the moon was mounting steadily in the sky. The ideal time to put my plan into action would be when she was a little past the meridian.
Our pursuers were going to a lot of trouble to capture us. I could hear their voices as they gave orders over walkie-talkies to their men on the levels above us, and they were bringing up searchlights and racks of small shells. The light was poor, but they were visible enough. All these men, to catch two unarmed Wicca! It had its amusing side. I wondered fleetingly why they didn’t simply rush us. But they didn’t know exactly where we were, and they couldn’t be quite sure we weren’t, after all, carrying the spores of some new and deadlier form of plague.
I speculated about the racks of shells. Hand grenades? Almost certainly not—they had those at their belts, and would be reluctant to use them on us, in any case. They wanted us intact, and they wanted what we were carrying intact. The shells probably held tear gas or some anesthetic. It would take a good deal of provocation to make the FBY throw grenades directly at where they thought we were. The grenade-throwing on F had been intended solely to scare us out.
There was a rumble, and then an amplified voice, loud and toneless, addressed us. “Come out, and you will not be hurt,” it said. “We will respect the agreement Commissioner Harris made with you. We promise you immunity. Come out, and you will not be hurt. Come out, and you will not be hurt.”
It was a promise; I felt a prickle of temptation. We Wicca are trained in scruple for life, if we do not possess it to begin with. Perhaps we could arrange a modus vivendi after all.
I put my lips against Despoina’s ear and said, very softly, “Can you pick up their thoughts?”
She shook her head. “No,” she answered in the same cautious manner. “They’re shielding.”
That in itself was suspicious—why should they be shielding, if they were sincere in their offer?—but it wasn’t conclusive.
I reflected. Then I pried a few pebbles loose from the surface of the rock and pocked them—one, two, three, four—against the adjacent rock wall. In a second or two a noise, almost exactly like t
he noise of a stun gun at full charge, came echoing out of the middle of the lower gallery.
There was an immediate burst of activity—order-issuing, saluting, and jumping about with materiel—from our antagonists. The amplified voice stopped in mid-phrase. In the confusion somebody let his mental shield drop briefly, and I, who am no more than a fair telepath, caught the words, “… bastards. When we catch them, I’ll take pleasure in dissecting out the girl’s nervous system personally.”
Well, that was conclusive enough. I sighed softly. Now that we had nothing but my plan to fall back on, I realized how rickety it was.
What would they do next? The moon was almost on the meridian. I remembered that Jaeger, a geologist testifying against the construction of the levels system, had said that the whole site was geologically unsound, but that the lower gallery was so weak the work of trying to reinforce it would bring its roof tumbling in. The legislators had heeded him enough to omit the gallery from the scheme of construction. It was more of an effect than witnesses before committees usually have.
Our antagonists were loading up their belts with shells from the rack. Whatever they were going to do, it was time for Despoina and me to begin our work.
When I had asked her, just before our pursuers had come up with us, whether it would be possible for us to make the phantasm of a man, she had pinched her lip and replied that it would be difficult. Such projection needed a calm, clear mind. But when I had explained what I was aiming at, she had agreed to try. Now, on our knees facing each other, between the outcropping of rock and the rock wall, we began the simple rite.
The most difficult thing, as she had foretold, was keeping our minds on the work. If it had not been for Kyra’s training, I could never have done it. Curiosity about the noises our enemies were making kept breaking in. But at least we were finished. On the rock floor between us a whitish ropey thing lay, twitching weakly with life from our life.
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