A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  They were not to learn. This early confrontation was no more than a touching of feelers: the time was not yet ripe for a trial of strengths. Satisfied with the results of his first exploration, Chaucer veiled the probing challenge of his eyes with a smile. Paul’s narrow face remained enigmatic; his expression, such as it was, did not flicker. But he felt like a man who has survived a conflict rather than won one.

  Amalthea, with the air of a fox supervising a cockfight, her purple eyes heavy and ambivalent as wine, leaned forward slightly and tapped the table-top and called the meeting to order.

  Shah was still looking for real people. Despairing of finding any among the pleasure arcades or the opulent public salons where the languid gaudy men gathered to drink heady liqueurs that made them more raucous, more ill-natured and less like the warrior élite of a vital culture than ever, she had insisted on Michal extending his itinerary to take in the manufacturing and service plants in the remote basements of the Hive. There she found Drones. They were no more real to her than the fighting men and, in their dismal apathy and bovine acceptance of their drudgery, hardly less irritating.

  Michal tried to explain the Drones. “They are of a different people. They are very stupid. If we did not feed them they would sit under the trees and starve to death. If we give them work, and oversee them, they can carry out simple tasks and then we feed them and their families. They look miserable and half-dead working in our factories and maintenance areas. But they also look miserable and half-dead sitting under the trees, and then they are hungry too.”

  “Were the Drones here when the Hive people came?” asked Shah. Michal shot her a sharp, hunted look and said nothing. “When was that?” she persisted.

  The steward was patently uncomfortable. Had there been more than just the two of them leaning on their elbows on the rail of the walkway overlooking the factory floor, where the Drones with their wood-brown faces dragged themselves round with a lack of industry or any enthusiasm, even for revolt, that made Shah want to kick some life into them, she would have thought he feared spies. He shrugged and fidgeted and finally said, “I do not know.”

  Shah smiled at him, which made him more uncomfortable still. “Don’t be silly, Michal, of course you know. Were you born here, or were you on the ship that brought your people?”

  He stared. “How could I have been born here? I was a page in the lady’s household and she brought me on her vessel. It was perhaps fifteen years ago. Please do not tell anyone I spoke of it. Please can we speak of something else?”

  At which unsatisfactory juncture Shah had to let the matter rest, or risk alienating her only Mithraian friend. Turning away she gave his arm a comradely pat, and felt the small muscles jump beneath his smooth skin; and then something she had not expected touched her brain and she received a sudden overwhelming impression of greenery and growth, crowding, not threatening but somehow affectionate, fraternal. For a split second she was as a forest tree. Then the vision was gone, leaving her gasping. She had no idea where the image had come from. Her mind reeling, she staggered back against the rail and stared out over the slowly labouring half-wits. It seemed inconceivable that one of those grey-garbed somnambulists was host to a telepath’s brain. Yet she knew Michal was not, a quick scan confirmed that none of the overseers was, and there was no-one else. Marginally conscious that Michal was regarding her with concern growing to alarm, too occupied for the moment to try to reassure him, she spread wide the portals of her remarkable mind in an effort to pick up on the communication again.

  But though the background hum of thoughts that was her perennial companion was amplified and fractured into its individual patterns – whirling, confused agitation from the man beside her, bad-tempered boredom from the overseers, and from the Drones a monotone level of thought just one step up from utter vacancy, like blue-green cyanophytes wondering whether to invent sex and, if so, what it might be good for – the green thought was gone beyond her powers to follow. For a moment she felt, as well as startled past measure, bereft. It was as if someone had of a sudden malice hacked down all that green and loving forest and left her parching alone.

  Awareness that Michal was clucking and fluttering and in imminent danger of laying an egg on the walkway brought her back to herself. She leaned against him, getting her breath back, letting the physical contact steady them both.

  Michal’s virgin heart hammered its way gradually back towards its normal rhythm; not quite reaching it, however, for the soft pressure of her body against him resulted in an aberration of pulse and a congestion about his breast-bone that had nothing to do with fright. “Lady, what happened?”

  Shah raised her head weakly and grinned. “Nothing. Really,” she lied. “Just one of those little wobbly turns women are prone to. You know.”

  “No,” said Michal, interestedly.

  Chapter Three

  Paul dreamed. He did not often dream, but when the phantasms came they made up in spectacle what they lacked in frequency. All his dreams were nightmares.

  Great amorphous shapes he could not identify were feeding on him. They stabbed him with knives and lapped his blood. He could not move. They were accusing him of something. He did not understand. They stabbed him anyway, and all the time his life was slowly ebbing from the wounds he was trying to understand why but they would not explain. They did not care whether he understood or not, as long as he died.

  He woke sweating, fighting off the clammy sheet, wide-eyed and looking for blood. He found Shah’s long arms around his sweat-slick body, holding him while the terror-spasms subsided to let him drag clean air into his cringing lungs. His face was grey, and under the fringe of his sodden hair his eyes were vastly dilated, the gold-flecked irises compacted to narrow brilliant coronas.

  Shah said gently, “Better now?”

  Still in the compass of her arms he nodded fitfully. “Hell roast, though,” he whispered, “that was a classic.”

  “Tell me.” He told her, too weak not to. “You’re right,” she said, finally releasing him. “That was a classic.”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No, I sit up every night on the off-chance of you being attacked by large shapeless things with knives.” Paul chuckled shakily. Shah disappeared into the kitchen and returned with hot drinks. “It’s nearly day. You don’t want to go back to sleep, do you?”

  “Not enormously.”

  “Because brother, do I have some news for you.”

  “I too have tidings,” offered Paul. “You were asleep when I got back and I didn’t want to get you up.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  He grinned tiredly. “A man isn’t responsible for his dreams. I just happen to have a vivid imagination.”

  “You have a violent soul,” said Shah disapprovingly. “I suppose your news is that you’ve reached agreement with Amalthea over the financial arrangements for blasting some poor unsuspecting sod out of the sky.”

  “Well,” Paul observed thoughtfully into his mug, “sods they may be, and unsuspecting they maybe and hopefully remain, but that note of sympathy is conspicuously absent from most people’s voices when they talk about pirates. It is specifically and totally absent from the voices of pirates’victims.”

  “These people? Maybe they’re victims. Maybe they’re pretty like pirates themselves. This planet was occupied when they came here. Maybe the Drones aren’t anybody’s idea of an evolutionary zenith, but they are human and they’ve been forced into the rôle of slave-labourers.” She told him about the basement regions far beneath them supplying the Hive with all its corporate needs. “Which brings me to my news. Paul, somewhere here there’s a telepath.” She explained.

  The revelation rocked Paul almost as hard as it had hit Shah. Each was the other’s only experience ever of another mind-delver, and Paul’s faculties had been destroyed. The discovery of one on Mithras was thrilling and alarming to approximately equal degrees: exciting, especially for Shah, because of the prospect of a unique
communion; dangerous if their only real advantage and therefore their safety margin were to be eroded by an equivalent facility operating on behalf of the Hive.

  Paul’s first thoughts shot to the lord Chaucer with his knowing diamond eyes, because telepathy reinforcing that psyche was what he feared most – even more than cruel, arrogant but divinable Amalthea. But he was sure it was neither of them. Shah had met Amalthea, and Paul did not believe that Chaucer could have turned mind-rays on him without his knowledge. He had recognised Shah’s ability the moment he saw her, and her first venture into his brain had been as painful as an excavation. Though he retained no perception of his own, his brain-cells were preternaturally sensitive: before him no-one had ever felt or sensed or suspected Shah’s exploration of their minds.

  Yet if the telepath was one of the Hive people, he should by every rule of caution and common sense have been at that Council meeting. Paul could hardly remember some of the faces, but there was no doubt in his mind that any of them masked a perception. The telepath was either unknown to the Hive or outside it. That was intriguing, possibly disturbing, but not a cause for concern. Paul’s response was less enthusiastic than Shah’s because he had less to gain and more to lose from contact with even a benign telepath. He could not share in any communion and he was afraid of losing Shah to an unflawed perceptive.

  “What are you thinking of doing about it?”

  Shah frowned, not understanding his coolness. “Look for him, of course. If I can pick up his mind again I may I get a fix on him. Otherwise I’m going to look outside. I There was a strong feeling of outside in the image I got.”

  “We don’t even know what is outside – not beyond the clearing. I don’t think the Hive people go into the forest.”

  “Then perhaps it’s time somebody did,” Shah retorted tartly. “I’ll see what Michal will tell me. You can ask ‘Gyr’for a scan. If that’s not too much trouble.”

  Paul stiffened. “No trouble. But I shan’t have time to come exploring with you. You’ll have to be careful.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be well looked after. I have one devoted slave already and I expect to collect more. That’s my other bit of news. Apart from the sorry specimens in the Drone community, it appears that Amalthea and I are the only women on this planet. The Hive people were the crew of a fleet vessel carrying the Empress to an outpost of her system. There was a malfunction and they drifted for four years before arriving here. They expected to effect repairs and leave, but we were right about the atmosphere – it ate their ship or something. The point is, there is no generation here. Everyone you see was on that ship when it embarked 19 years ago, and they’re all men. Michal was Amalthea’s page: he’s the youngest person in the Hive.

  “And that,” she said, rising and walking away with a backward glance that was half provocative, half earnest, “makes me something special round here.” She closed the door smartly behind her.

  Paul rested his arms across his raised knees and his chin on his arms and watched the closed door for a long time. His flecked obsidian eyes smouldered like embers. “You think I don’t know?”

  They walked out to the shuttle. Shah invited Michal along. He went, because he would go with her into any Hades of his heart’s imagining, and gladly, because Paul walked with a traveller’s stride that carried him ahead and left the young man and the girl to follow at their own pace; but outside the Hive was a place of fear to him, and all the way from the tall fluted gates to the bare swathe where the shuttle shone in its constantly retouched coat of oil he was glancing anxiously around him, measuring the distance from the Hive and the distance remaining to the small haven of the waiting craft. In total the trip was a scant mile, but to Michal who had spent most of his life within close confines it felt an epic journey. Beyond the naked earth the forest began.

  When Shah and the steward reached the shuttle Paul was already on board, seated at the console and keying instructions to “Gyr’s” main computer, a hundred miles up and half a planet away. While they waited for a reply he ran a damage check which showed the oil to be serving its function well.

  The men painting the shuttle were Drones under the guidance of a single Hive overseer. Michal wondered how he could bear to work this close to the trees. The Drones, of course, were happier out here than anywhere else, though their enthusiasm was ever a low-key affair. They just slouched a little more jauntily. Painting an inert lump of metal with oil, and starting again at the nose whenever they reached the tail, was the exact task for which they were fitted by Providence. The high spot of their day came when the oil-can ran dry, and one of their number was despatched up to the Hive to replenish it. More often than not some distraction would waylay him and a second Drone would be sent to bring him back. Sometimes a third Drone would be needed to find the second Drone.

  Despite Shah’s misgivings, the Hive people did not abuse the Drones. This was less due to their kind and generous natures than to the total pointlessness of trying to beat sense into the apathetic things. A belaboured Drone would sit down beneath the lash and die without a sound or any sign of displeasure, nor would his relatives learn anything at all useful from his demise. It had occasionally happened that overseers, their patience strained beyond human tolerances, had cracked under the strain and pounded disinterested Drones to a bloody pulp, but experience showed that the only way for a supervisor to retain his sanity in the face of such provocation was for him to treat his charges as oxen: strong and biddable but quite mindless and basically ineducable. He would feed and water them, and harness and direct their strength, and he might grow a little fond of them particularly if his team seemed less slow, stupid or trying than another man’s, but he would never ever think of them as people. There was no way of knowing how they thought of him.

  When the console began chattering back “Gyr’s” response, to his amazement and acute embarrassment tears sprang to Michal’s eyes. Concerned as he had been for her, Shah took his hand.

  “Whatever’s the matter?”

  “I – I do not know,” he stumbled, rubbing his sleeve furiously across his eyes. “Forgive me! I – that sound – the last time I heard it –”

  Shah understood. “Was fifteen years ago, on your own ship, before you were marooned.”

  “I suppose – It is silly – I am sorry. Oh God,” he moaned, squirming in an agony of self-consciousness.

  Shah laughed and hugged him. “Don’t take on so. Everybody gets nostalgic sometimes – even him.” She nodded at Paul. “If you want to see tears in his eyes, ask him about camels.”

  “Camels?”

  “He used to breed them. He had this big bull, and a cow he used to talk to as if it was his mother.”

  “Camels?”

  “You know: big sandy-coloured things with humps.”

  “Humps?”

  The communication chattered to an end. Paul folded a slip of paper into his pocket. “Well, that’s ‘Gyr’s’assessment of the situation, but I don’t know if you’re going to like it.”

  “Well? Tell us the worst.”

  “Now?” Paul raised a not very tactful eyebrow in Michal’s direction.

  Michal, already distressed, reddened and drew himself up stiffly. “You have matters to discuss. I will wait outside.” He rushed to the airlock, and it closed on him with a crisp, quiet click that seemed to reverberate longer than a slam.

  “That was a bit unnecessary,” said Shah, smarting on his behalf.

  Paul glowered at her from under low brows. “That isn’t a lap-dog you’ve picked up. He’s Amalthea’s servant, and however enamoured he may be of you he’s going to jump to her bidding because she’s spent twenty years training him that way. Every word he hears will find its way back to her, and I’m not so fond of the woman or so impressed by her honesty that I care to share my secrets with her.”

  “I don’t believe Michal spies on us,” Shah retorted hotly. “And I see no danger in sharing with him the results of a geographical survey of a world he’s
lived on for fifteen years.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” said Paul snidely. “I won’t guess what people are thinking if you won’t guess what’s likely to prove dangerous.”

  “Don’t offer me your deals, Paul, I know what they’re worth. You tell me you’ve made one with Amalthea, but you act as if she’s the devil’s mother. If she isn’t, that makes you a pretty nasty bastard; and if she is, I’d rather not think what that makes you.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m not. I’m not naïve enough to suppose that because somebody I don’t know from Adam wants to hire me they necessarily want to pay me as well. I think I’ve built enough safeguards into this deal you so despise that when I’m finished here we’ll get away with both our money and our lives. But if you are stupid enough to place your trust in Amalthea or Michal or anyone else on this planet, there’ll be a series of unfortunate accidents involving falling masonry or unmarked quicksands or guns that go off as we’re cleaning them, and Mithras will have a nice new battleship for the price of an exploding medal and three inches of fuse.”

  “Don’t worry,” snapped Shah, “you’ve done a good job on me. I trust no-one, on this planet or any other. I don’t even trust you.”

  It was not true, but Paul thought it was. He stared at her, angry and hurt; then he threw the slip of paper, tight crumpled from his fist, on the deck at her feet. He locked quickly through the hatches and went stalking back towards the Hive.