A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  She paused inside the door, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness, watching the inanimate things she could not feel crystallise out of the gloom. Then she said, “Amalthea.”

  Amalthea’s mind lurched, dry-spinning at the unfamiliar sound of a woman’s voice. She half-rose from her throne before understanding came, and she composed herself. “You,” she said. “Of course. I knew you were alive. I just have not got over the disappointment yet.”

  Shah smiled in the dark. “Work at it.”

  Amalthea gave a low appreciative chuckle. “You are good. You remind me of me at your age. I was well on the way to my first empire by then. What do you want?”

  “Not an empire. From you, only the key to the shuttle. We’re leaving.”

  Amalthea looked past Shah to Michal. Her gaze still turned his knees to jelly. “Can you fly it?”

  “I don’t have to,” Shah said evenly. “Paul will fly it.”

  Amalthea laughed out loud, a jackal laugh. “My dear child, you are behind the times. Paul is –”

  “Raw meat? Pegged out and bleeding to death in a cactus garden? No. He’s here, but not for long. We’re going up to “Gyr” as soon as you give me the key to the shuttle.”

  “Over my dead body!” swore Amalthea.

  “That would be a bonus,” admitted Shah, “but I’ll do without if we can make this quick, simple and easy. The key. And Paul’s money, if you please. He’d have done the job you hired him for, if it had been there to be done. Your mischief nearly cost him his life.”

  “How shall I live with myself?”

  Shah’s eyes kindled. “Don’t push your luck, lady. You deceived me too. Because of your trickery I damn nearly left him to die. Amalthea, if I had, and then found out what I know now, I would still be here but not for the key.” Her attention remained fixed on the Empress but she spoke to Michal. “The key is on a cord round her neck. Get it.”

  Amalthea rose slowly from the throne. Michal approached her with trepidation. The black cloak fell to the floor and her silver body glittered like a fish. He could not shrug off twenty years’ worship. With everything she was and had done, she was still the woman who raised him, who fed and protected him, without whose strength and energy probably none of the Hive people would have survived, and he could not bring himself to hate her or lay a hand on her. “Lady, I – I –” he faltered.

  “It’s inside her dress, on a cord,” prompted Shah, wondering what the problem was.

  Michal stood between them, indecisive and mortified. His hands made futile half-gestures towards the task before finally admitting defeat. He hung his head in humiliation. “I cannot.”

  Shah suddenly realised what was stopping him. “For pity’s sake!” she exclaimed furiously, starting forward. “She’s made exactly the same way as I am – surely to God you’re not frightened of boobs?”

  Under the spur of impatience her concentration flickered, and with her hands raised either side of Amalthea’s throat she was brought to an abrupt halt by the blunt shock of something small and hard pressed under her breast which in all the circumstances could be only one thing, which a quick downward glance confirmed that it was. Inches separated the two women’s eyes: Shah’s startled wide, Amalthea’s complacent and lazily smiling. Shah had no time to get into her mind and stop her before the gun went off.

  It was the compressed air-gun Chaucer had taken aboard “Gyr”. It had lain Paul out for hours, but that was used as the designer intended, to deliver a concussive shock to the brain from close range. At point-blank range a discharge to the head was as lethal as an ox-hammer: against her rib-cage the blow was enough to hurl Shah across the dark room, her chest clamped in a vice of clutching pain. She fetched up in the angle of floor and wall, stunned and hurting, with no clear appreciation of where her arms and legs had got to and less of where her perception was. Two places it was not: in her own forebrain, ready for use, and in Amalthea’s, inhibiting murder.

  Amalthea followed her across the floor, without haste, like a stalking moonbeam. The gun hung loosely at the end of her arm. Shah saw or heard or felt her coming and tried to crawl away, panic scrabbling in her head to claw out the confusion, but the corner of the room trapped her. She struggled to rise, but her side hurt and her head hurt and both strength and equilibrium failed her, so she slipped quite slowly down the corner, her cheek against the black wall.

  From the tail of one almond eye, great with fear, she saw silver Amalthea bear down on her like a searchlight and stop within arm’s reach. She saw the pale bare arm come up, straight and calm, and the silver gun steady in the small clawed fist. She shook her head, tiny repetitive shakes like a tremor, whimpering.

  She felt the flared muzzle of the strange gun lodge against her temple, between the ear and the eye where the flat bone made for a good contact, and the cool kiss stopped the shake and the whine and perhaps all the ongoing mechanisms of life, but she heard Michal cry “Lady – no!” with all the anguish of divided loyalties.

  Amalthea slid him one slow sideways look, without anxiety or compassion or dislike or any other human concern; almost without recognition, as if his cry were the creak of a board or the whisper of a draught under the door, no sooner identified than forgotten.

  Michal had never in his short life been a mover of events, but he had served his lady faithfully and then betrayed her utterly, and the certain knowledge coming in that brief moment of eye contact that she had difficulty remembering his face was devastating in a way that even her fury never was. Something left him: not the fear of her, not the instinct for self-preservation; perhaps that integrated view of his world by which the individual makes sense of the things happening about him, in the absence of which neither his actions not any other’s retain enough meaning to keep the fabric of life from crumbling and entropy from pouring in. It was in that state of dearth and meaninglessness that Michal acted now, without consideration for the consequences, because it was that integrity of cause and effect which Amalthea’s ultimate, largely unwitting insult had dislocated.

  Without foresight and therfore calmly, he swept Amalthea aside with one arm and gathered Shah up in the other and projected her – her long body limp with reaction, unresisting but not helping much either – out onto the gallery, where she stumbled into Paul’s arms as he raced up the stair.

  Almost without breaking step he put her behind him, thrusting her into Chaucer’s grasp. In a situation too hectic and too far gone for chauvinism, the Chancellor took charge of the frightened girl as if he had not spent the last several days conspiring at her death. His big hands supported her and his mellow, musical voice encouraged the breath and the heart and the life back into her. Holding Shah, feeling her heart thunder against his chest, mouthing solicitudes that occupied a fraction of his attention, Chaucer thought of Amalthea and doubted if he could do anything to help her now and wondered if he wanted to.

  The impetus of Paul’s drive for the Empress was broken by the rock-steady figure of Michal, still in the doorway, tall and strong and filling it with an unfathomable calm. But Paul was not interested in Michal and hardly noticed. His eyes were savage with a warning that was little short of a threat. “Get out of my way!”

  Michal looked at him – looked down at him – without expression. His gentle eyes were blank, his innocent face enigmatic. They gave no clue to the whirling madness deep within him, the sudden surging soaring sense of freedom. He shook his head. “No.”

  If Amalthea could have seen her lost steward’s strange luminous, prophetic face she too might have been stayed, but she did not. She saw only his broad back filling her door, an unforgivable intrusion between her and her quarry, and she pressed the flared muzzle of her gun against his spine and squeezed the trigger.

  After the muffled sonic belch and the soft thump of the boneless falling there was nothing but silence. No cries, no recriminations; no flurry of too-late action; no wailing, no gnashing of teeth. Only the silence, whose very profundity finally penetrated Shah’
s shock-shell and brought her, tentative as a shy child, back to the Hive, to Chaucer’s impersonally protective arms, and to the light faintly ashy scent, fragrant as woodsmoke, of dying.

  She turned out of the Chancellor’s embrace and, drying her nose on her sleeve, moved with uncertain steps to the doorway of Amalthea’s cell. There she stopped and looked down. Still no-one spoke, no-one stirred. The silence stretched impossibly, drawing out thinner and thinner and wider until it seemed to encompass not only the Hive but all of Mithras in its tenuous elastic web. Paul stood beside her. Only inches separated them, but he made no attempt to touch her or she him. When she had seen enough she stepped carefully over Michal’s crumpled body into the room. She breathed gently and felt anger and power come with every breath. She no longer felt her own hurt.

  Amalthea had posed too much of a menace all her life not to recognise danger when she saw it, even if she did not understand it, and had come too far on the strength of sheer female power to deny the potency of the inexplicable. Her amethyst eyes burned, her red mouth curved with defiance and adrenalin. She stood her ground, levelled the gun and fired.

  The range was too long and Shah absorbed the shock-wave with only a sway, as if she had been slapped across the cheek. She stepped forward. Amalthea fired again, but as the distance between them shrank so the compression cell of the small weapon ran down; the effect was the same. Shah stepped forward. Finally Amalthea stepped back. Locked in a kind of slow, graceful, terrible dance the two women – small silver electric Amalthea, brilliant even in retreat, and dark Shah, gaunt and ragged, implacable-eyed, an advancing Nemesis, justice with an invisible sword and no blindfold – glided in unison towards the centre of the chamber.

  Premonition struck Paul like a fist to the gut when he realised, with a sudden totality of comprehension like an apocalypse, what Shah intended. Cold jolted through him. “No, Shah!” He hurdled the obstacle in the doorway and caught her arm. “No.”

  She spared him no glance. “Take your hand off me.” Her voice was death.

  “Not that way, girl. Not –”

  She threw him off. She angled her head just enough to flash lightning at him from the corner of one coldly raging eye, and the force of her mind hit him like running into a wall. Pain exploded behind his eyes like fireworks. His sight went out. His brain felt as if it was being kneaded against the inside of his skull. Deprived of vision and with the strange fierce pressure in his head, his balance began to waver. For a brief chilling moment he lost all sense of direction and elevation, like weightlessness or the jump-sickness that afflicted tyros aboard star-drive ships, or the deep disorientation and confusion achieved by sensory deprivation. He seemed to float for an incalculable time in an infinite ocean of black, without space or time or any reference points, just his small lost mentality, frightened and bewildered, adrift in four dimensions out of sight of land.

  Then, stumbling blindly, he lurched against the wall. Its firm substance and uncompromising verticality were a fixed point in the void of his senses. By clinging to that small reality with all the will he could muster he was able to claw a chink in the enveloping dark, like a chick in search of birth pecking a window in its shell, and thence to roll back the shroud with an effort no less laborious for its metaphysical nature. The Hive came back.

  Amalthea had cast her exhausted weapon aside. She was still backing before Shah’s advance, but there was no sign of fear about her, or even of resentment. She made her slow reverse easily, with a faintly impish smile, as if she found quietly fighting for survival a great joke. Her voice, when at last she broke the silence, compounded the charisma of wit, irony and exhilaration. “I know how it would pleasure you to see me destroyed. But you cannot do it, child; not you. I am your future.”

  “Then I don’t want it,” said Shah. “I would not live so long that I should favour you.”

  “You have no choice. You are my past.”

  “In all my life,” Shah said grimly, “I never had but three friends. The first was my conscience, the best of me, and he is far from here. The last you have murdered with no more point or purpose than a man needs to swat a fly.”

  “Michal? Michal betrayed me.”

  “Michal never by word or deed betrayed you. He vouchsafed me his friendship, maybe even his love, but his worship he reserved to you. He didn’t think you deserved it, he just couldn’t help himself. Do you suppose he died protecting me from you? No. He put himself between you and your proper and inevitable destruction, and you killed him for his pains. So now history can take its course.”

  Amalthea hooted. “You see yourself as history?”

  Shah managed a bleak smile. “Destiny, then; at least yours.”

  “Child,” said the lady of Mithras, her voice vibrant, “you do not begin to know what destiny is. All this” – she waved a white arm round the dark room – “is charade. Nothing important has happened here, except that you and I have discovered each other. That is what destiny is: fate distorting the lives of hundreds for twenty years to achieve the meeting of two people who would never otherwise have found each other. Everything that has happened to my people since we left our home, or maybe even before – perhaps the very existence of this planet Mithras – was a device to bring us together. That makes us very special, Sharvarim-besh. It makes it a sacrilege even to consider rejecting what I offer.”

  “A darkness the galaxies have never known?” suggested Shah. “An empire beyond the dreams of men? Falling stars for loose change? Are you going to make me a god too, Amalthea?”

  Anger, but still no fear, flared in Amalthea’s gaze. Her eyes stabbed from Shah to Paul and back. “Him? Yes, I would have treated with him, until I had his ship. I have always used men. I have never shared anything with any of them. That is the unique bounty I offer you.”

  Shah paused, but only to seek a way of expressing herself unmistakably. “Amalthea, even if I wanted what you offer, how could I trust you? You are without honour. All Mithras is a cactus garden, knives behind flowers, but you who were not even born here are its crowning poison. You lie, cheat and deal death not only for profit, which is monstrous, but for pleasure. You have a whim of adamant.

  “I posed you no threat when you sent a man to kill me. Despite your deceits, Paul was still trying to fulfil a contract for you when you sold him to the planet for a kind of death no human being should have condoned. Your treachery all but cost him his life; and me my soul, for I believed him your convert and was prepared to abandon him to the consequences of that alliance, and would never have known my error while he lived had you not delegated his death to the forest. And now you have murdered probably the only person ever who cared for you unselfishly. You are too awful to live.”

  “I am too awesome to die,” pronounced Amalthea. “At your hands, anyway.”

  “Hands?”

  Close enough to join hands, they confronted each other. Amalthea could retreat no further – seeking the advantage, perhaps more psychological than actual, of the raised plinth in the centre of her chamber she now found herself trapped with the black throne at her back – but Shah made no overt move towards her. Only her eyes went still and chill and somehow deep, vertiginous and unfathomable as sacrificial wells and equally inviting. Amalthea felt herself falling into them, drawn compulsively, helpless to save herself, tumbling like an inept diver with no sense of direction save down. And as she fell she felt pressure growing in her head like a worm growing in her brain.

  Amalthea screamed. The terrible quavering shriek stilled hearts and froze blood wherever in the Hive it was heard: a piercing, alien wail woven of agony, dread, defeat and a peculiarly poignant despair. Her amethyst eyes glazed and slid away.

  Paul was behind her, to one side of the throne, his right arm about her narrow waist, Chaucer’s long knife in his hand buried to the hilt in her breast. The silver mail had scarcely delayed its entry: it had passed under the ribs from the unprotected triangle of her thorax and lodged in her heart, where a sharp twist l
et out all her life. Her quit body, smaller than always, slumped in his arms. He held her for a dullard moment. Then, awkwardly, lacking his customary strength, he manoeuvred her to the throne and let her down there. Her head tipped back and her dead eyes, already losing their grapebloom lustre, surveyed the room quizzically and with no little irony.

  Shah, all her senses back in her own head, mounted the step. She looked not at Amalthea, but at Paul. Her eyes were primitive with fury. She made no attempt to speak. Her arm swung and her open palm slashed against his cheek where the print of Amalthea’s claws still lay.

  The force of the blow rocked him. His last reserves of resilience tapped to the bed, he took time to recover. He said wearily, “You would have killed her.”

  “You’re damn right I’d have killed her,” shouted Shah. “She was mine. You had no right –”

  “From inside. You were going to kill her from inside. You’d never have got out.”

  Shah stared at him. Her skin began to crawl. “How do you know?”

  Paul shrugged. He looked almost as shrunken and wasted as the dead woman on the throne. He looked as though if he did not sit down soon he would fall down. “I don’t, not for sure. It was one of the things we considered when – when I –” He shrugged again. “We considered it too dangerous to try. There weren’t many things my makers considered too dangerous; except, of course, trusting me with my own brain.”

  Shah sought his eyes. Even through her own waning rage and growing grief she felt his dull hurt. Her long fingers touched his cheek with the gentleness of a moth-wing in the dark. She spoke quietly but without sentiment.