by Jo Bannister
Next time, he thought, shrugging off the sense of disappointment, he would pay more heed to Shah, take on nothing until she was satisfied. At least that way he should have only one enemy at a time to contend with. He still believed that war fought between professional champions equipped to the limit of their art was a better, cleaner way of settling disputes than involving whole generations and gross planetary products in messy, disorganised amateur skirmishing that could last years and leave nothing for the eventual victors to inherit. Only next time he would be sure of his cause. And he would keep Shah with him. The risks they faced in “Gyr” were easier to evaluate and simpler to deal with than the potential hazards of splitting up. If Shah had been aboard when he had discovered the true identity of the “Quasar Griffin” he would have booted Chaucer out of the side door, loosed a leash of target-seekers at the Hive and marked the lost fee down to experience.
Alone in the quiet familiar cockpit, attuned to its resonances, at home amid its technical complexities and bright inhuman perfections as a despot in his palace or a deity in his temple, Paul felt his sense of proportion, which was not the most robust of his faculties, beginning to reassert itself. After all, apart from briefly losing control of the situation, he had lost nothing. How must Amalthea feel? How would she feel if Shah insisted on bringing Michal with her? Paul grinned at her imagined chagrin but only for a moment, after which it occurred to him to wonder how he would feel. He considered that in some depth but failed to reach a conclusion before “Gyr” shivered to the gentle capture of the returning shuttle.
Even at this late stage, believing the battle won, he did not allow himself the luxury of carelessness. He channelled the communicator through to the shuttle before opening the air-lock. “Shah?”
The voice came back vibrant with a chuckle. “Who else?” It felt like weeks since he had seen her.
“Alone?”
“Except for these.” She rattled something glassily, like marbles, by the intercom.
Paul smiled a small, satisfied, almost smug smile at his instrument-panel and opened the hatch and waited for her soft step on the deck.
She came in with a rattle of gems like castanets and tossed the leather pouch over his shoulder onto the console, and wrapped friendly arms around his neck while his fingers worried open the precious sack. He whistled reverently and poured a glittering stream out on his hand.
Claws raked his throat. Shocked to his soul, with awful sick premonitions lurching in his breast, he let the jewels fall and scatter unheeded across the deck. He grabbed the friendly twining arms away from his burning throat and found the slender hands decorated with black talons. In the screen before him laughed the pointed face and the grape-bloom eyes of the woman behind him.
He tried to rise but all his strength had flown, incredibly fast. Amalthea freed herself from his grasp casually, without effort. He tried to speak, but what emerged from the hell-fires blazing around his larynx was only a blood-choked whisper which the computer refused to recognise as his; and Paul’s last thought, as consciousness pitched head-first into a cauldron of pain, helplessness, fear and a graphic understanding of how he had been tricked, was that he did not blame it.
Truth
Chapter One
Shah woke instantaneously to panic of a kind she did not understand and on a scale that made its emanation from and containment within a human spirit prodigious and disturbing. And indeed, the panic was not of Shah’s mind only. It had swept through the forest like wind, swirling everywhere, buffeting things and people and seeming to draw new strength and turbulence from both. Through her own wide-eyed incomprehension and the urge to flee untempered by any clear notion of what from or where to, Shah felt similar shapeless fear like silent screams wrenched from unseen people all around, as well as a deeper subliminal awareness of something greater, omniscient, more furious than afraid, seething on a level barely perceptible to her with a vast inhuman hatred. Like an echo in her body and mind hung, disjointed, the memory of an anarchic moment when the air clapped and the forest groaned and the earth beneath her moved in a fractional tremor she could have imagined but was dreadfully sure she had not.
She was still lying in the sanctuary of the timber crown, the living room was black as the inside of a box, and her limbs were warm and rigid with nightmare. Michal was sleeping close by, his breathing soft, his mind as clear as an unwrinkled brow, the only sentient creature in her ambit who was immune to the emotional supercharge in the writhing air.
Forcing responses from her arms and legs Shah fumbled on the floor for the lantern and lit it. Its quick pale glow up the fluted bark-encrusted walls revealed nothing amiss. She shook Michal awake. “We have to get out of here.” Her voice was shaking too and she could not hold the lantern steady.
Michal woke like the primaeval amphibian crawling out onto the primordial mud: with slow, uncertain paddling motions and very little idea what was expected of him. The beautiful clarity of his sleeping mind was muddied with confusion. He blinked sluggishly at the light. “Shah? What is wrong?”
“I don’t know – something –” she spoke half-coherently through chattering teeth –“something awful. They know. I can’t understand. We have to get out – get out –”
If he was insulated against the earthy feelings of the forest, he was not insensitive to hers. Her distress cut through the fleecy residue of his broken rest and his awareness sharpened and leapt into focus. “Very well.” He took the lamp from her, and with arm protective around her guided her through the lancet archway and outside.
Outside the lamp was redundant. The dark forest glimmered with a Vulcan light that came not from the sky but from ground level, reflecting eerily back from the bellies of low clouds. Shah whimpered, “I hurt.” There was sound too, a sharp mutter like a sotto voce argument and a soft windy roar; and on the improbable wind the fragrant, pungent smell of smoke.
“Hell’s teeth,” ejaculated Michal, “the forest is on fire!”
The vigour of rising sap in that green and vital place made for a slow and smoky conflagration. There was no question of the flames leaping from tree to tree faster than a man could run, but they progressed steadily despite the humidity, and within minutes of vacating it Shah and Michal saw the first flickering tongues reach out from adjacent tree-tops to lick and taste and begin the slow consumption of the living chamber to which the Drones had brought them. As the hungry fire gnawed down to the tightly woven branches, spreading a roof of flame whose Lucifer gleam appearing through the lancet heralded the end of the tree-crown, Shah’s eyes filled with tears and her heart with a sense of bereavement that she understood no more than the panic.
Michal took her hand. “Come on, let us see if we can help.”
The seat of the disaster was more than an hour’s march away, but the flash had devastated a great expanse of forest even before the fire caught. The trees lay flat, stripped, in rank upon indecent rank of naked matchwood, pointing their broken roots at the source of their destruction and their bare toppled heads towards the impossible safety of distance. The ground beneath them was scorched; black ash cloaked them with the final decency of a shroud.
The fire had started on the periphery of the blitzed oval, driven outward by the force of the blast in an egg-shaped ring of flame, and close in the trees had burnt hard and passionately with the great heat of the explosion. As that initial irresistible fury died away the greenwood and copious living sap began to play their part, slowing the rushing flames to a saunter and then a sluggish smoky trudge that was hardly an advance at all. The precious place where the Drones accomodated their infrequent dead and rarer visitors marked almost the outer limit of the zone of despoliation within which virtually nothing had survived.
Free to seek escape in a way that the trees were not, the Drones dwelling in the blighted area in practice fared hardly better. Their concept of danger was dulled, their ability to respond blunted by the equanimity with which they met death. They had burned where they sat, under
the burning trees, while they wondered if they should be doing something about the situation and, if so, what.
Surgeon led a party of Drones into the charcoal landscape, so alien to anything they had known, so painfully distorted, and Michal and Shah went too. There was little they could do, but then there was little any of them could do except witness and remember.
Shah found an old woman dying under a charred bush where the fire-storm had passed too quickly for total consumption. She found her by the frail wandering pulses of her fading mind. Feeling her thready presence like the tiny racing heart of a hand-held bird, Shah stepped aside from the trail of footprints pressed by her companions in the ash and sought out the heat-shrunk creature in the illusory safety of her bush.
Shah had known, following Surgeon into the scorched land, that such a discovery was likely if not inevitable, and she had dreaded it. Like many young, whole, healthy people she had a shame-faced horror of the ugly things that happen to bodies with age, disease and trauma. Deformity sickened her. But when she came on the little ravaged body of the old Drone she found, to her surprise, that there was nothing horrible about it, nothing sickening. It was a sad thing, because the old creature should not have died that way, but revulsion was impossible in the face of the patient dignity with which she waited for death.
Shah knelt quietly beside her and disclosed her mind. “Can I help you?”
The Drone’s mind, undamaged by fire or pain, that burden being shared among all her people, smiled like an opening flower. “I require no help, child. But if you have nowhere to go pressingly, it would be pleasant to pass the last of my life in your company.”
Convention urged Shah to lie, to make light of the woman’s burns and promise her swift recovery. But she could not lie with her mind and, considering the problem, she understood quite suddenly that no such lie was called for. To minimise the extent of the Drone’s injuries was to make little of her, deny something which was her right and put the aside the mute testimony of her abused body; and to promise her life was to discount the quiet happiness and undermine the deep serenity and confidence with which she prepared to greet the death which was the organ of translation to that broader corporate existence. The enduring calm of the fading persona was a revelation to Shah, touching her much more intimately than the comprehensive, scholarly explanation tendered by the Drone under the tree an aeon ago, before she was shot, before this happened.
She said only, “I shall be happy to wait with you.”
The old woman tried to drag herself out of the bush and to sit up, but though her mind remained potent her physical shell was all but destroyed and could not serve. Shah laid gentle hands on the ruined thing and carefully eased the old head into her lap. “Thank you,” said the woman. Her berry-brown skin was mottled with burns too deep to blister and her grey dress had charred away into her flesh.
“Are you in pain?”
“None, I thank you. I feel very little. I am dying.”
“Yes. You are not afraid?”
Again the sweet smile bloomed, moving Shah to pangs of regret. “Child, how should I be afraid? Do I not know where I am going? Do I not know all that I shall become a part of? And afterwards, is there any power of heaven or earth capable of coming betwixt me and eternal communion with my land, my people and everything that I cherish? Do not grieve for me, Sharvarim-besh. I am greatly to be envied.”
“And – you are ready for this?”
“I am weary with waiting.”
Michal, missing her, back-tracked to where Shah’s footprints left the path and found her cradling a dead body. Tears streaked her dusty face, but the eyes she lifted to him were murderous. Her voice was thick with hatred. “You know who did this, don’t you?”
Michal shook his head. “We cannot know – not for sure.”
“I know. Look at it!” she spat. “There’s nothing capable of that much devastation on all Mithras. That was ‘Gyr’. It was Paul.”
“He could not know what you know,” murmured Michal.
“Do you suppose it would have made any difference? When there was money to be made, and all he had to do was turn his guns on a worrisome bit of forest and the poor little sods who lived there? And there weren’t many of them, you know, and they weren’t very bright.”
She put the dead woman aside and rose to her feet in a fast, flowing movement graceful with feline savagery. “He’s sold himself – body, soul and guns. Amalthea’s found his price and paid it, and he’s turned her from a lunatic local pestilence into a contagion with access to the stars. A bit of forest, a few Drones? – with his help she’ll devastate worlds before anyone finds a way of stopping her.”
They gave the Drone shallow burial under the bush where she had sought sanctuary. Afterwards they did not rejoin Surgeon’s party, but at Shah’s insistence returned to the margins of the Hive clearing to seek intelligence there.
If Shah had wondered secretly on the long walk back whether she had misread the situation, that hope burst with the finality of a pricked rainbow bubble when she emerged through the hedge into the dazzling unaccustomed light. The shuttle shone in its baptism of oil on the landing-strip. “Gyr” had returned to Mithras; as she had known.
While she was debating whether to approach the shuttle, or the Hive, or what to do, the high main door of the Hive opened and a small party emerged onto the broad curved steps. Shah pressed back into the hedge, Michal behind her, for concealment.
When they reached the shuttle Shah could distinguish the members of the group: Amalthea, a big bearded man – Chaucer, whom she had yet to meet – and four fighting men of Hornet Patrol, long languid Balrig among them. Shah was close enough to see the pouch Amalthea carried and to hear it chink.
Chaucer went first through the air-lock, the others remaining on the ground. Amalthea astonished Shah by using the time to polish her claws. Then Chaucer reappeared. “All is ready, lady.” He and the soldiers withdrew a safe distance but did not return to the Hive. The shuttle bore Amalthea up into the dusty sky.
Shah swore. “They’re going to thank the bastard with a guard of honour!”
Paul stirred to the awfulness of poison in his veins. His head hammered, his skin poured cold sweat, weakness bathed him like an ocean. Yet he supposed he was not going to die, or not yet, or he would not have woken at all. His throat burnt still, and his chest hurt. For some reason beyond immediate recall that bothered him more than the rest of the awfulness.
He wondered where he was. Not on his ship, nor in the apartment he had shared with Shah, but he had hardly hoped for as much. He moved his head, looking for clues: there were none, only a small grey room, windowless, with a bed against whose unpillowed hardness his cheek collided when he failed to find the strength to stop his head rolling. “Oh, shit,” he whispered.
Not wholly sympathetic laughter greeted him. He had thought he was alone, but Amalthea was sitting waiting on his blind side. Now she leaned over him and thoughtfully tipped his face towards her with a slender finger whose black claw pricked his chin. She smiled at him, half like a mother, half like a tiger.
He whispered, “You do a good impersonation.”
“Not so good,” she said, but she looked pleased. She essayed it again and did not sound remotely like Shah. “The radio is deceptive, of course. You expect some distortion. You heard what you wanted to hear.”
“It was the hell of a risk.”
“Not really.” Amalthea took his hand in hers and he lacked the strength to snatch it away. “I had no choice. Being unable to produce your woman as required I had no alternative but to imitate her, or have the Hive reduced to rubble about my ears.”
Paul’s aching head struggled with what she was saying. “Shah isn’t here? You’ve lost her?”
“No, Paul, you have lost her. Shah is dead. I had her shot and her body dumped in the forest.” The crescent smile of her dark lips never faltered. A note of phony regret laced the equivocal voice with obscenity.
Paul’s w
eak body had gone supremely still inside. His eyes were clearing but nothing came to fill them: no pain, no rage. Finally he said, “I don’t believe you.”
Amalthea shrugged. “It does not matter.”
“Oh yes it does. Because – Ah.” The breath left him in a sigh of slow comprehension. His eyes slid to his aching chest. Then he believed her, because she had no reason to lie. He waited for feeling to come.
“Yes,” she was saying, “we found your little device. We could not cut it out, of course, because then your ship would have taken you for dead and reacted accordingly. Instead we severed the muscle manipulating it. So it is still reporting your heartbeat to ‘Gyr’, just none of your instructions. While you live, and while you are here, the Hive is quite safe from your pantechnicon.”
It had been the simplest of transmitters, but Paul had considered it foolproof. It told “Gyr” that he was alive and where he was, and by flexing a small muscle attached to the implant he could if necessary call fire out of the sky. But without that direct command “Gyr” would take no action to endanger her living commander. When his heart stopped, all hell would break loose. But if they watched him carefully he might outlive them all. The prospect was like looking down a very long grey tunnel.
Suddenly and for the first time he was clearly aware, as if some intervening opacity had been removed, how many mistakes he had made: little ones, mostly, but cumulative. He had made errors, fallen for deceptions and allowed himself to be out-manoeuvred with a readiness he was ashamed of, and his negligence had cost him Shah, “Gyr” and as much of his life as was worthy of the name. He had spent ten years working for his ship, repeatedly in situations more perilous than Mithras, and now he had thrown away everything he had won because the euphoria of winning had made him careless. He acknowledged that Amalthea was good, with Chaucer beside her better than good, but still she had not deserved her victory as much as he deserved defeat.