A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  “Perhaps it’s time you stopped speculating on matters you know nothing about and gave me the benefit of that small talent you do possess.”

  Laughter sparkled in Shah’s great almond-shaped eyes, and she leaned forward conspiratorially. “You know, if these walls do have ears and if Amalthea is listening, she’ll take quite the wrong inference from that!”

  Paul grinned. “Speaking of which, I see that cohabitation is discouraged. Two bedrooms, and two very definitely single beds. Even the couches are curved!”

  “I think the lady is a prude.”

  Paul leaned back, looking at her, heavy lids drooping over his eyes. Another man might have seemed sleepy: this one had the hooded, predatory look of a leopard mentally tucking in its napkin. “What else do you think of the lady?”

  “You mean, can we trust her? I don’t know, Paul, it’s too early. That wasn’t much of a meeting. I never really got into her at all. She was – elated; maybe more than was reasonable. Despite what she said, she isn’t afraid of being cheated. She isn’t afraid of you.” Shah frowned, the beginnings of concern in the backs of her eyes. “I’m not sure, in all the circumstances, she should be that confident.”

  Paul smiled lazily. “She just has more faith in me than you have. I find that perceptive rather than suspicious. Anything more?”

  “No – only that she doesn’t like me, and I imagine even you –” Shah stopped abruptly, pain twisting up her face. “Oh Paul, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean –”

  “Will you stop being so sensitive on my behalf?” he said gruffly. “You’re right, it didn’t take a telepath to see that, which is lucky enough because I’m not a telepath any longer. I know it, you know it: there’s nothing to walk shy of. Don’t bleed for me, Shah. If I’m hurt I can do it for myself, but that particular wound is healing nicely – it doesn’t need to be handled through a glove-box.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” She leaned forward and took his hand in both of hers. In her smile was the deep friendship that was his only valued possession which he did not count his by right, hard-earned by blood, sweat, toil and – though usually other people’s– tears. He did not know why Shah stayed with him. Most of the time he did not wonder, but when he did the fact that he could find no logical explanation of her loyalty, and therefore no explicit reason for its enduring, was a cold spot in his heart that all his conditioning prevented him from recognising as fear.

  “But Paul, you and I are closer than you care to admit. When you are hurt I cannot but feel it; if I cry out when you keep silent it is because I am less strong than you. I know you’d be happier if I too could be calm and pragmatic and unemotional, but I’m not made that way; and you are dear to me.”

  Paul stared into her face intently for a long minute. Then he rose, his hand pulling free of hers, and went into the kitchen. Shah straightened up with a sigh, disappointed with herself and with Paul, despairing of progress in her self-appointed task of humanising him. His voice reached her through the open door, muffled – as if he had his head in the strange oven. “Anyway, you’re wrong. I don’t want you to change. Not now I’ve gone to all the trouble of getting used to you.”

  Shah said nothing. She smiled to herself. She looked around the hypocritically Spartan room and thought, We could always push the couches together.

  Late into the night – though the passing of the light meant little in the Hive – Amalthea presided over a meeting of the Council.

  The Council of Mithras was not a democratic body. It did as Amalthea instructed it. Its function was primarily to relieve the lady of the tedium of disseminating her wishes personally: she told the Council what she wanted and the Councillors worked out how best to satisfy her. That was in matters of routine. In this matter Amalthea was settling all the details herself.

  The Council met in a dark hexagonal chamber in the secret heart of the Hive. Like the lady’s own cell, its surfaces were faced with a matt black that stole perspective and any sense of time or place. Unlike Amalthea’s room, the blackness was unrelieved by the fire of jewels or the glint of gold. The chamber’s only feature was its great table, echoing the shape of the room, hollow-hearted. The table and the chairs drawn up two to a side were made of clear perspex. Framed by the table was a raised dais from which, suitably elevated above her Council, Amalthea ruled Mithras from a revolving chair. The fact that the Council numbered thirteen had no particular significance for the Mithraians, but nor was it wildly inappropriate.

  Amalthea was speaking. She sprawled gracefully in her elegant, eminent chair, an idly sculling slipper turning her slowly round the faces of her Councillors, and her voice was also slow, but there was nothing idle or inconsequential in either her words or her delivery.

  “These people are to feel at home here. They are to be treated with friendship and kindness, to be facilitated and humoured, to be put at their ease. And if anyone, by word or deed, well-meant or unintentional, gives rise to the least suspicion on their part regarding my motives, I will give him to the planet on the same day that I give it them.”

  Chapter Two

  There was a tap at the door. Shah answered it and found the young man Michal in the corridor, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “Hello.”

  “The lady Amalthea’s compliments, and she wondered – I wondered – we thought your ladyship might like to see something of the Hive.” He finished on a note of relief, although his message could not have been simpler or more cordially received. He seemed very young, although he was probably Shah’s age.

  “Come in. I’ll consult the oracle.”

  Shyly he followed her into the lobby. The living-room door was open; so was the door opposite, through which he could see the foot of a bed draped with softly flowing female things. Shah saw his look and reflected ruefully that she had not been there twenty-four hours and already the place was a dump. She shrugged. “I’m afraid I told your lady a lie. I don’t even make the beds – not with any regularity. Paul?”

  She did not see that Michal’s eyes on her scattered clothes were burning, or that he turned away with heat in his cheeks and blinked rapidly several times and bit his lip. “Paul, I’m being offered a guided tour.”

  Paul was in the bathroom, shaving. Like many small dark men he had a strong beard, and he heartily grudged the time he wasted daily keeping it at bay, yet he would neither let it grow nor use one of the aerosol growth inhibitors which he considered in some ways effeminate. He may well have been the last man in the civilised cosmos to scrape hair off his face with a naked blade.

  There was a splash of water, and he appeared, drying his face. “I heard. You’d better go. See all you can: if Amalthea and I can’t reach agreement we may not be here long.”

  “What if she calls another meeting this morning?”

  “I’ll try to get by without you.”

  Michal sneaked a look at them together. Their casual intimacy, which seemed to mean nothing to either of them, stabbed him with envy like knives.

  “All right, but don’t sign anything,” cautioned Shah.

  “How did I ever manage before I knew you?” wondered Paul, and threw his towel at her head, stumped into the bedroom and slammed the door. It was not the bedroom where the woman’s things were laid out. Michal’s heart leapt and raced on in a way that he did not understand. He kept his eyes on the floor and hoped fervently that his discomposure was less obvious than the blood thundering in his ears and the sweat breaking in his palms seemed to suggest. Michal was a 24-year-old virgin with the emotional maturity of a pubescent schoolboy.

  He looked up quickly, stammering, a hunted look in his face. “What?”

  Shah smiled kindly. “I said, I’m ready when you are.”

  Michal held the door for her, caught her scent as she passed, felt his lurching heart plummet with the knowledge – certain as despair – that she saw him for a fool.

  The blueprint for the Great Hive of Mithras could not have sprung from a sane mind. It defied all the conven
tions of architecture and structural engineering, and trying to discern patterns or principles in its flambuoyantly random alignment gave Shah a sensation like motion-sickness. The Hive was a coil, like a snake in a basket, spiralling slowly up from a broad torus to the domed apex where Amalthea had her quarters. Because of this arrangement none of the floors was quite flat and none of the walls was quite vertical, and the deviations increased not only from level to level but also from the core to the outside wall. Someone with enough time, patience and stamina could climb from basement to apogee without mounting a step merely by following the spiral round, but for those in a hurry there were stairs, in bizarre staggered flights which connected only alternate levels.

  The conducted tour began at the top, or as near the top as any save the chosen few were permitted. “The audience chamber,” said Michal. It was the long golden hall where they had met Amalthea. On that occasion appreciation had been tempered by her own anxiety, by Paul smouldering watchfully on one side of her and Amalthea sparking on the other. Now she gave it the attention it demanded.

  Everything in the hall was golden, and much of it was gold. The floor was tiled in glowing ceramics, intricately patterned. Fabric hangings shot through with metallic thread clad the long walls. Gilt and crystal chandeliers clustered thickly under the coffered ceiling, where black enamel beams framed burning panels of gold leaf. A waist-high dado of beaten gold girdled the room, and gold liveries decked a retinue of alabaster servants watching the doors with sightless gaze.

  Shah shook her head in amazement. The audience chamber was a spectacle, crowding the eyes, delivering its message with the delicacy of cudgel-blows: that those who made it and kept it had wealth and power beyond comprehension, and that those summoned to it –however well-placed they might consider themselves in other company – were dross here and had better not forget it. Shah began to understand Michal’s habit of dropping his eyes. The golden hall was not specifically to impress the occasional visitor; it was to awe the Hive masses, to remind them of their place. The chamber was brilliant, opulent, gorgeous and glorious and incredibly rich; also crass, over-weening, without subtlety or finesse, its grandeur unimpeached by any style. There was a degeneracy about it, a corruption, a paradoxical poverty of ideals. It was a monument to insensitivity.

  Shah wondered what Michal, who worked here without sharing in the status which it represented and defended, thought of the gilt cavern. She sidled carefully into his unguarded mind, but Michal was thinking of something else, and Shah slipped out again quickly with a grin. She turned her back on the glittering waste, winked at the unresponsive statues, and startled Michal beyond measure by linking her arm through his. “Come on, show me where the real people are.”

  There were no real people; not in the sense that Shah and Michal and Paul and even Amalthea, with her talons and her towering arrogance, were real. There were mannequins, two-dimensional peacocks strutting the walkways and coagulating in idle, languorous groups around the stairs. They ignored Michal and stared at Shah with overt curiosity, covert hostility and, in their secret minds where only a telepath could pry, with fear. Their eyes were flat and hard, without warmth, snakelike and glittering with a kind of latent cruelty, as if they might enjoy making someone suffer were it not such hard work. As Shah passed they leaned against the walls and made lazy malicious remarks and laughed. They were all men, all older than Michal, all swathed in rainbows. Their claws were long and shapely, and in some cases they were painted. They all looked as if they had not done a day’s work in their lives.

  Finally she lost patience with them, viciously sniggering and getting in her way, and rounded on a harlequin clutter of them nudging and giggling into extravagant sleeves like schoolgirls. She stopped and turned, and fixed the biggest and loudest of them with a stern eye and said, “Can you make that noise with your mouth as well?”

  Michal stared at her in plain horror. The tall man leered. Like his nails, his face was painted. Gradually, as understanding dawned, the leer evolved perceptibly into a snarl and he swung his right arm, open-handed.

  Shah slid into his mind and stopped him in mid-swing. With his attention focused on her and anger laying open his defences the penetration was easy. For long moments the big stretched-out form seemed to fill the corridor; then, slow as sunset, he collapsed, his arms and legs and head and chest folding and caving in under the incredulous gaze of his companions until he huddled on his knees on the floor, abject and shrunken like a gaudy discarded doll. The sniggering had ceased. Great tears rolled ponderously down the man’s painted cheeks.

  Shah slipped effortlessly back into her own brain and smiled condescendingly at the humiliated heap on the floor. “Don’t cry, I forgive you,” she said kindly, and turning her back on the silent gaping circle went her way with Michal bobbing in her wake like a rubber dinghy behind a schooner.

  When they were out of sight the steward ventured unhappily, “Whatever you did there, you had better be good at it. You may have to do it again.”

  Shah shook her hair impatiently. She was annoyed: with the men, with Michal for not supporting her, mostly with herself for showing her hand. Her special perception would be the best weapon they had if she and Paul found themselves in conflict with the Mithraians: she cringed mentally in anticipation of Paul’s scorn when he learned she had risked revealing herself to avoid a slap in the face. She told herself that the men were not clever enough to draw the right inferences from the encounter, that it was not important enough to lead to trouble, but still it rankled that she should make such a blunder on her first morning in the Hive. Her list of enemies was growing at an alarming rate.

  “Anyway,” she said to Michal, “who were those idiots?”

  “The Hive’s fighting men,” replied the steward, watching her askance. “The one you – the one who – the one on the floor was Balrig, captain of Hornet Patrol.”

  “Fighting men?” exclaimed Shah, startled from self-reproach. “Michal, you have to be joking. Fighting men? – with paint on their faces and jewels in their ears, in frills and flounces most whores would consider vulgar? That lot couldn’t fight their way out of a paper-bag!”

  “No, well,” Michal said defensively, “they have not had much practice lately.”

  “Then it’s time they got some practice, because I have it on good authority there’s a war coming.”

  Paul was hardly into his shirt when the hall door opened and closed again. He supposed Shah had come back for something, but in the living-room he found Amalthea, alone, turning slowly on her heel and viewing the apartment with a sardonic eye.

  “In my part of the universe,” Paul said levelly, “we knock. That way we don’t get our heads blown off.”

  “In my city,” said Amalthea with brittle humour, “I go where I please, and heads fall as and how I require. Are you comfortable here?” Like Michal, the lady had quickly taken in the fact that both bedrooms were in use.

  “My wants are very simple. A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and four batteries of laser cannon homed in on anyone I have doubts about, and I can be comfortable most places.”

  Amalthea’s blood-dark lips broadened in a crescent smile. “By heaven, I could have used you fifteen years ago.”

  “Is that how long you’ve been here?”

  The lady’s smile froze. “Who have you been talking to?”

  Paul indulged in a little smile of his own. “You mean you don’t know? I thought you were monitoring my every breath. In point of fact, no-one. But surely it isn’t a secret, Amalthea – not from me?”

  “You should address me –” she began icily, and then paused. “No, perhaps not. You may be the closest thing to an equal that I have. Use my name, before I forget it.”

  “And you must call me Paul,” he said magnanimously.

  Amalthea was strung between laughter and affront. “What do others call you?”

  “Paul. Would I be right in supposing you are here to call me to a council of war, and the absence of my comp
anion on walkabout is purely coincidental?”

  The bloody crescent spread again. “Purely.” She said the word with relish and made it sound like an obscenity.

  Paul grinned. He indicated the door and followed her through it. He entertained a more than sneaking regard for terrible people: the ruthless, the strong, the wielders of power, the dictators of fates, the dark and the fierce and the free. It was more than half vanity. They reminded him of himself.

  Round the perspex table in the dark chamber were arranged the Councillors of Mithras. Amalthea took a seat among them and waved Paul to another; her high place was vacant, her revolving chair discreetly removed. For the present she was happy to foster an illusion of equality.

  Paul scanned the circle of faces impassively. They told him nothing. He needed Shah with her mind that saw through other minds to the roots of men’s souls. He was a professional, skilled not only in the business of weaponry and tactics but also in the assessment of situations and of men. He knew his strengths and his limitations, and when to walk away, and how to do it without exposing his back. He was better equipped for negotiations such as these than almost anyone he had ever known. But since some very clever, frightened men had burned out of his brain the awesome power they had bred him for he had not had telepathy in his arsenal, and without it he felt blind. Having Shah beside him gave him an eye. Still, safety – his but more especially Shah’s – depended on keeping private the nature of their relationship: he was resigned to managing without her, trusting in his ability to create an impression of confidence.

  After Amalthea the senior Mithraian present was the lord Chaucer, Chancellor and Leader of the Council of Mithras, a tall broad powerful man in the full vigour of his age. He had full rosy cheeks and a glossy beard and dark, sumptuous clothes, and none of them said anything about him beside the steel-grey gimlet eyes sparkling, diamond bright and diamond hard, in the baby-pink creases of his face. The eyes were ageless, timeless, penetrating and perceptive as X-rays, knowing as a psychic’s. When Paul met his gaze a kind of concussion seemed to echo through the silent room, as of an iron ram battering against an iron gate. For a long, suspenseful moment the tension reverberated between them, the lord’s piercing scrutiny exactly matched by the mercenary’s determined imperviousness, while the Councillors looked covertly and Amalthea candidly from one to the other, wondering which would crack first.