A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  “What I said, before. It wasn’t true. I always trusted you. I haven’t always understood you, so sometimes I’ve made mistakes, and often enough I have disagreed with you. I have disapproved of much that you have done. You are ruthless and devious, and such as they are your morals stand at right-angles to everything I was brought up believing. But if I had to choose someone in whom to trust my life, my soul and all I have, without hesitation or reservation, Paul, my choice would still and always be you. Take my hand in your hand and I will walk with you beyond the furthest bound that men dare contemplate.”

  Chaucer, watching with a kind of wonder from the doorway, thought they could be meeting for the first time. Their eyes held each other. Lines that had been so much a feature of Paul’s face that he had thought them permanent softened and found new, less rigorous purposes: care supplanting cynicism, comprehension finally usurping mere cleverness. Peace descended about him like snow-flakes. He smiled gravely at the tall dark girl with her brilliant eyes and her remarkable mind and her fearsome honesty and, with a strange grace born of economy and lack of artifice, dropped her a simple untutored bow.

  Chaucer was loathe to break in on their moment but he had no choice. “Lady, the steward lives still.”

  Chapter Five

  Shah spun, her face ashimmer with hope, but Chaucer’s expression and, even more, Chaucer’s tone, which she assimilated more slowly than his words, knocked the shine out of her eyes and prepared her for the less happy reality.

  Michal was still alive, but only in the technical sense that his dying was not yet done. A hand’s breadth of his spinal column had been devastated. His broken body lay limp and untidy across the doorway, bonelessly insensate, the strong young limbs tangled and spoiled. His face was as grey as dust, his eyes almost closed, only fine white lines showing under the long lashes. He made no sound, even of breathing, and was aware of nothing. It did not require the talents of a telepath to know that Michal’s body was damaged beyond repair and all of his life was withdrawing inside himself, gathering closer and smaller and further from the world of men. The process would take minutes rather than hours, and when it was complete there would be nothing left of him.

  Shah knelt by him. Her eyes were glossy with sorrow but no tears. There was a kind of inevitability about his end that precluded passionate grief; as if, had they but thought, they should have known that a steward who had served faithfully all his remembered life would not leave his mistress, either on Mithras or in death. Shah, who had won so much, was conscious of having lost this last hand to Amalthea, and that after she was dead.

  She looked up. “Oh Paul,” she sighed, “look what we’ve done.”

  “Not you. Not even me, for once. The doing was Amalthea’s.”

  “Only mostly,” said Shah. “We all contributed something. The Hive and the people of the Hive created Amalthea as surely as she created it. You could have stopped her at any time,” she charged the Chancellor, “but you enjoyed the power she fed you. As long as the Drones underpinned it, no man was so low down the hierarchy that he did not feel to benefit from it: apart from the baseline, anywhere you stand in a pyramid you always have more people to kick than you have kicking you. If you don’t care about justice the system is crudely effective, and so the megalith stood until we arrived on the scene.”

  Her gaze glided round to Paul. “You disturbed the equilibrium. If you’d come and done their job and gone, or died, the pyramid would have stood unchanged and Michal safe within its structure. But you challenged the status quo. You represented the possibility of alternate worlds: better ones, whatever else you are you were never designed for tyranny, but you introduced the concept of choice into a social system from which it had been purged.

  “And I made tragedy certain by seducing the loyalties of the one poor soul in the Hive without the experience to follow his heart and still watch his back. Given all the circumstances, Michal was always going to be the victim of everyone else’s ambitions.”

  Chaucer cleared his throat. His mellow voice came out gruff. “If you two hope to get away without unpleasantness, now would be a good time to do it, before this day’s deeds are known.” He extended a hand to help Shah rise.

  Her eyes dared him to touch her. She aimed her words at Paul like pellets. “I won’t leave him while he lives.” Her tone was defiant.

  Paul looked at the dying man. His face caught up in a small, possibly unconscious gesture of helplessness. “There’s nothing you can do for him, Shah.”

  For perhaps the first time he saw in her face full awareness of her own power. It glowed in her; not a lust, like Amalthea’s, but nor was there much modesty in it. It was as if, after protracted evasions, she had finally been confronted with what she was, only to find that she really rather liked it. She was proud of what she could do, with a clear calm pride that was neither arrogant nor shy. She said quietly, “You’re wrong. There’s nothing you can do. There is something I can do.”

  Chaucer did not understand her. Paul did. Some resentment but more fear thickened his voice. “No. Shah, I told you –”

  “I know: too dangerous to try. But the Drones shared my pain when I was hurt and I’m going to try to share Michal’s now.”

  “You can’t share in his death!”

  “I don’t intend to. But if I can make it easier for him, take some of the hurt and some of the fear, even if I can’t begin to recompense him for what we’ve done to him with our scheming, still maybe it’ll mean something to him. Maybe just walking part of the way with him will help. I know there’s a risk. I owe it to him to try.” She grinned suddenly. “Give me your hand and I’ll dare anything.”

  She stretched her strong hand towards him. Paul wanted her to dare nothing, but he could not refuse her request. Feeling his own impotence like hemlock, bitter in his belly and leaden in his veins, he took her hand; and he held onto it, dropping to his knees to support her limp vacated body, when she slipped inside Michal.

  Shah had been a telepath all her life. Most of that time she had used her talent instinctively; only in the comparatively short period that she had known Paul had she received any kind of training. But if her education had been limited her experience was without parallel. From childhood she had tripped in and out of the minds around her, often without any particular reason, using her perception with the same abandon as others use their eyes. She was as familiar with the private thoughts of men and women – whose faces she had long forgotten and whose names she had never known – as her contemporaries had been with their playgrounds: the markets, arcades and plazas of the caravanserai town where she was born. She had wandered, unsuspected, through the mental processes of soldiers, prostitutes, philosophers, thieves, murderers, grocers, barbarians, royalty and a poet. She had ventured, with more difficulty and at some cost to both of them, into the brilliant ice-diamond intellect, sprawling and infinitely complex, where reason warred eternally with rage for the possession of Paul’s soul. She had known minds in the passionate heights of love and hatred, in terror and in triumph, going about their trivial human concerns and aspiring to godhood. She had never tasted death. She entered Michal’s fading animus without preconception. Even so, she was surprised.

  She expected to find him lost, hurt and frightened, spinning out of control in the dark. She did not expect to find him – when she finally found him, deep within the shrinking boundaries of his existence – calm, content, fully aware and happy if somewhat startled to see her.

  “Shah! Whatever are you doing here?”

  The place where they met was without dimension, either of space or time. There was neither visible light nor patent darkness, and there was no sound. They spoke some other way.

  “I was – concerned,” stammered Shah. “I – I thought I could help.”

  She felt him smiling. The smile was not part of his broken body but an expression of his undamaged mind. An existential smile, it hung in nothing, a distillation of the pure essence of a young man with a great if unt
ried capacity for happiness. “Sweet Shah, my dear and idiotic friend! Whatever makes you think I need help? This is the one task even I may be relied upon to complete without error. Some of us need help to be born, many of us require help repeatedly throughout our lives, but the most ineffectual of us can die without assistance.”

  Shah was stung by his obvious amusement although neither immune to his logic nor unimpressed by his new assurance. “I thought you would be hurting. I was going to share your pain. I suppose you find that pretty laughable, too.”

  Michal’s gentle spirit was immediately contrite. “Forgive me. That was a brave and kindly thought. But quite unnecessary. I have no pain. Pain is the prerogative of the viable. I feel nothing. Go back now. Remember me fondly.”

  “There is time yet. I want to ask you something.”

  But the time was limited. The dimensionless place at the hub of Michal’s contracting world was subtly changing, stretching thin, becoming remote and rarefied. There was no sense of menace, but Shah was aware that Michal was gravitating away from her, drawn – not pushed – by forces beyond her perception. It was as if Amalthea’s gun had torn a small rent in the fabric of space, allowing the void beyond – call it death, call it paradise, call it entropy – to rush in and claim him; and he was willing enough to be claimed only Shah was there stopping the hole, obstructing the process. “Ask.”

  “Why, Michal? Was it for me? Was it for Paul? Was it Amalthea you were protecting? Why did you do it?”

  A kaleidoscope of possibilities flashed before her inward eye. She saw – or something – her own body an awkward, bony tangle, all head and knees, heaped in a corner with important pieces at impossible angles. She saw Paul spread-eagled on the floor, his outflung arms bare to the turned-back cuffs of Michal’s capacious shirt, his face destroyed. And she saw Amalthea, imperious as ever, gleaming with silver and malice, surveying her shrunk empire from the eminence of her throne with daunting dead eyes from which the glow had not yet perished. The only death he seemed not to have contemplated was his own.

  He said, “I am not sure. I think I just got tired of being pushed around.”

  Shah felt shame rising through her like a blush. “Oh Michal, I’m sorry.”

  “Regret nothing. I have no regrets. Nothing in my life was worth one half so much as chancing it for you.”

  The rent was stretching, the press of the void growing more insistent. The fibres of Michal’s mind were aligning to it like iron-filings to a magnet. He was ready, even eager, to obey its summons, his attention straining towards it like a dog on a leash. Shah was aware that she was holding him back but could not bring herself to give him up. She could not relinquish something which she valued and could not have again.

  “Shah, you must leave now,” urged Michal.

  “I don’t want to.” Even to herself her voice – voice? – sounded petulant, like a child sent early to bed.

  “You must. I have to go. You know that. For your own safety –”

  It was too late. The rent ripped wide with the scream of calico. Entropy poured in, instantly everywhere. In the madly rushing nothing Shah lost Michal, lost herself – was swept away, helpless as a matchstick on an ocean swell, without direction or perception or any control of the situation, not knowing which way up she was or where she was going, or even, with any certainty, who she was any more. Her senses fled; comprehension, identity fled; fear – not hysterical but desolate, soul-deep – flooded into the vacuum. Too dangerous to try, Paul had said, but she had known better; had to know better, be stronger, be cleverer, and now she faced dissolution in the vortex of her own pride. She felt herself stretching in the tow of unknowable forces. She knew herself lost.

  She heard – heard? – her name. The familiar shape of the word pulsed through the chaos of Michal’s collapsing synapses like a beacon. Far and faint and somehow fragile as it was, it gave direction to her wilderness, something to focus on and struggle towards, and in struggling she felt herself grow stronger and the voice grow nearer and the chaos wear thinner until only a fine membrane, a kind of surface tension, separated her from freedom and substance. She raked at the membrane with mental claws and the energy of desperation, and the world came back.

  She found herself cradled with infinite care in the arms of a man she hardly knew, gazing into the rosy bearded face and the concerned gem-bright eyes of the Chancellor of the Hive of Mithras. When he saw intelligence in her look Chaucer smiled gravely for a moment; only a moment, then the smile faded and he set her gently down on the dais by Amalthea’s throne. He turned away from her.

  “She is all right, Paul. What about you?”

  Something between a grunt and a groan was his reply. Paul was hunched against the wall by Michal’s dead body, bent over his bent knees, clutching his head in his hands as if it might otherwise fall and roll away. Chaucer could not see his face, but the knuckles of his hands were white and their heels ground into his temples.

  “Paul. Can I help?”

  “No. Leave me alone.” His voice was pinched, breathy with effort.

  “At least let me –”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  Chaucer straightened up, chewing his lip. His searching eye settled on the flask on Amalthea’s table. The Hive brewed a characteristically vicious liqueur from beans, but the Empress had never indulged; fortunately, on Mithras even the spring-water had teeth. He filled a goblet with it.

  As he passed her Shah caught his arm. “What happened, please?”

  Chaucer shook his head. His disturbed eyes held her briefly and then slid away. “I do not know.”

  “You were here; you saw!”

  His eyes came back and gripped her like hard hands. “I do not understand what I saw. I do not know what happened. I do not want to talk about it.” He shrugged off her hand and went to Paul.

  Kneeling, he gently pushed Paul’s clenched hands down and, supporting his head as a woman might a child’s, raised the goblet to his lips. “Drink it, you crazy obstinate inhuman son of a star-djinn,” he murmured tenderly.

  Before they left the high cell Paul went to Amalthea and took the stolen key from her throat. Then he wrung the two jewels off her dead hand. Chaucer raised his leonine head, and his sea-grey eyes flared angrily.

  Paul favoured him with a wan smile. “You think we’re just going to walk out of here? They aren’t deaf, down below. They know something’s been going on up here, and when we try to leave they’ll want to know what. I don’t want to have to fight my way through them today.”

  Chaucer’s eyebrows climbed. “Today?”

  Paul rocked a hand. “Tomorrow either, for preference. These’ll get us through. You people have spent too long backing away off from these rings to stand up to them now. They’ll wonder what it means, they’ll watch us like hawks, and the minute we’re out of the door they’ll be up here like greased lightning, but Shah wearing these stones will see us safely through a mob that neither your authority or my martial expertise would make much impression on.” He tossed the rings to Shah who put them on.

  Chaucer nodded slowly. His gaze took in the still commanding sliver of moonlight on the black throne. “You could just be right.”

  “I have to be.”

  With respect finally established as the currency, Chaucer felt free to dislike the mercenary a little. “Are you always this sure of yourself?”

  “I have to be.”

  Shah walked down the levels of the Hive, her head held high, green and claret fires dancing on her hand, the men at her shoulders. The Hive people lined every corridor, clustered around every stair. Like children witnessing something momentous, those at the front hanging back and those behind pressing forward, with fearful and sullen faces, they seemed an endless arcade of living statues, only the hoarse whisper of their breath like a tide over shingle breaking the clamouring hush. Their avid eyes clutched at her passing, hung upon her step, drank in the jewels. The anarchy of their racing minds jostled her brain. She looked to neither
side, concentrating all her attention on keeping a steady pace and a firm course through the crowding dregs of Amalthea’s empire.

  Only once, anticipating the challenge that would explode the illusion of sanctity and bring the Hive down about their heads, did she invoke the power of her perception in their defence. Balrig staggered back, palms clapped to his ears, a ringing of confusion in his brain and no lingering recollection why his mouth was open. He closed it and sat down on a step to nurse his head, and the two aliens and the strange-eyed Chancellor passed unchallenged and so gained the safety of the tall door.

  Shah passed through the high portal and down the steps and set out across the clearing towards the distant shiny shuttle without breaking her stride. But Paul paused halfway down the steps and looked back. Chaucer had stopped in the doorway, a sea of faces crowding at his back. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

  Chaucer made a helpless gesture with his arms. “How can I leave them now?”

  “It’s the only way you’ll get them off Mithras before the situation here hits the fan.”

  “I know. Unless –”

  Paul squinted up at him suspiciously. “Unless what?”

  “Unless you hire us a ship and send it here. I could hold them together until it arrived.”

  “Hell’s teeth, Chaucer,” snarled Paul, “you think I’ve nothing better to do than run round the galaxy after you people? Why stop at hiring it, maybe you’d like me to fly it too, and then give you a hand loading the furniture? I’ve got a living to make, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not as if I owed you anything.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, it’s been interesting, but I don’t leave here with any sense of being eternally in your debt. I feel no crushing compulsion to grovel, suck and crawl my way into your affections for old times’sake. My sentimental attachment to the Hive has worn thin to the point of through. I can ride my burners out of here without a backward look, and if years and light-years hence I casually hear that something weird happened on Mithras and there aren’t any people there any more, the only worry I’m going to have is remembering where I heard that name before. You understand? I don’t need your problems.”