Exile

by Al Sarrantonio

  Seeming to ignore his ire, the Machine Master said distractedly, "Perhaps I will have something that can aid you in his retrieval."

  Cornelian began to speak, but the Machine Master had disappeared; the ghost of his outline was barely visible, like a soap bubble's edge.

  "Sam-Sei—speak to me now!"

  But there came only silence from the Machine Master's underground chambers. And now the High Leader could see nothing of Sam-Sei at all, only the track of dust motes caught in a beam of sunlight from the high slit of windows, which fell across the flanks of ancient machines.

  Chapter 24

  "Tabrel?"

  Through the gauze of what reality had become to her, Tabrel Kris heard her father's voice.

  It was not a strong voice—as his voice had always been strong. It was weak, like a bent reed, hollow and wispy—but it was him nevertheless.

  For the first time in a week, she had been left alone. That in itself had lessened, the tiniest bit, the constant pressure exerted on her by Kamath Clan's drugs. Being in the presence of the queen, as she had been during her "ministrations," and more horrible yet, being in the constant company of Jamal Clan, whose annoying voice, continual whining, and perpetual state of anxiety drove what little there was left of her own personality to distraction, had only made the drugs' powers more effective. In some sense even welcome, since it made the pain of her being on Titan more endurable. It had almost been with sorrow, then, that she had witnessed the recent reduction of the dosages, which had come at Jamal's insistence. Claiming that Tabrel's love for him was bound to flower and that the potions would soon no longer be needed, Jamal had finally convinced his mother. Tabrel had wisely chosen to mimic the same air of obeisance with the reduction, even though it meant that Jamal's clinging, in his belief that her feelings for him were. truly growing, had become all but unbearable.

  Even now Jamal Clan stood outside the door to her chamber, proclaiming loudly that leaving her alone was a mistake. The boy was like a dog; and his true feelings for her were pathetic in their earnestness. At least he had a sense of chivalry, which had spared her from his bed. Proclaiming that he would not have her until she would have him without the aid of his mother's methods, he had left her to her own bedchamber, even on their wedding night. Still, she had not passed that night in peace, listening instead to his pathetic sobbing from the room next door.

  But now here she was alone, feeling almost herself again.

  And here was her father speaking.

  So he was alive—though barely. On the Screen he looked as if he had aged ten years since she had seen him last. Which had only been. . .two months ago? Three? Inside, where there was still something of herself left, she wept for him, seeing him this way.

  He sat on a thin chair, but looked as if his bag of bones had been set into it. His hands trembled, as did his lip, though his eyes were still strong and clear.

  "Tabrel?" he said again, and it was only now that she realized he was not speaking to her on the recording, but to Prime Cornelian, whose vile voice was heard, though his visage, thankfully, remained unseen.

  "Yes, Senator," Cornelian said, "we are speaking of your dear daughter Tabrel. Would you like her to come and visit you?"

  "No!" her father said.

  "Are you sure, Senator? Are you afraid she wouldn't like to see you this way?"

  "I've told you, Cornelian, that you will never get near her!"

  "Now, now,, there's nothing to get excited about." One of Cornelian's horrid metallic limbs stretched into the picture, patting her father with Cornelian's thin metal simulacrum of a human hand. The hand withdrew. "How do you think she'd feel if I told her that I would spare your life, restore your property and title, and nurse you back to health if she would only agree to come?"

  Here Senator Kris broke down completely, a shaking, sobbing bag of bones.

  The Screen, mercifully, went blank.

  In the darkness, Tabrel Kris felt something she had not felt since Queen Clan's ministrations had begun—a tear of her own, on her own face.

  Though she knew that Prime Cornelian had manipulated her into feeling exactly what she was feeling at the moment, she didn't care. She would go to her father.

  That evening, as the lights of Titan dimmed to darkness and the stars moved aside like a folded blanket from rising Saturn's majesty, Tabrel Kris stole from her own bed and went to the room of Jamal Clan.

  The Titanian prince slept with the pale glow of Saturn-light on his face; his mouth was open distastefully, his breathing loud, and Tabrel thought fleetingly of her first view of him. How handsome she had thought him. A shiver ran through her; but even so, she made her hand touch his face lightly, to bring him awake.

  "Mother?" he said apprehensively, sitting up. Then his eyes lit on Tabrel. "My princess!"

  Fighting through the layers of Kamath's potions, Tabrel put a finger to his lips.

  "Be quiet. And listen to me .. . husband." The last word stuck in her throat, but the drugs in her helped her to continue to smile.

  Delirious with joy, Jamal put a hand on her arm. "You have come to me! And on your own!"

  "Yes," she whispered. "And I wish to be with you. But not until I am myself again."

  Dismay crossed Jamal's face. "My mother! Damn her interference!"

  Tabrel nodded. "I have been fighting to be myself since her first ministration. It pushes me into myself and makes me who I am not."

  "I will kill her!"

  Tabrel set her hand lightly on his face. "No. But you must help me stop her. Do you know where her potions are kept?"

  "Yes."

  "Can you get to them?"

  Jamal became thoughtful; finally he nodded. "She makes her rounds tomorrow. The room will be accessible to me."

  "Good. Then you must bring the potions to me so that I can switch them with something harmless."

  "I will switch them for you, my bride!"

  "No, you must let me do it. If your mother asks you later, you must be able to tell her the truth, that you did not exchange them."

  Jamal thought a moment, then nodded vigorously, caught up in the plan. "I will do whatever you ask!"

  "My father is very ill."

  "Then we must help him! Perhaps Wrath-Pei--"

  "There may be a way," Tabrel said. "If you are willing to help me."

  He scrambled out of the bed and knelt before her. "I would do anything for you, my bride! I would die for you!"

  Though she was thinking That may be necessary, Tabrel only forced herself to lay her hand gently on his head—which made her think once more of him as a dog.

  Leaving him there in rapture, she padded back to her own room, slept all that night, and late into the next morning.

  Jamal's knock upon her door found her already awake and dressed.

  He had brought the case, as she had prayed he would.

  She took it from him and said, "Now go outside and make sure no one bothers me."

  Immediately he left.

  Tabrel turned her full attention to the case of potions. From its blue velvet cradle she drew out the green bottle labeled "Obedience" and the slim red carafe designated "Truthfulness." The blackened bottle called "Death" she slipped into her tunic, after making sure it was tightly closed. She also withdrew and hid the clutch of silver syringes filled with "Sleep."

  She emptied the carafe containing "Truthfulness," refilling it with water. She did the same to "Affability."

  "Jamal!" she called, and when he had returned, she put into his palm the opened bottle of "Obedience."

  "Drink, and see if I have done well!"

  To allay any suspicion, she drank from the carafe of Truthfulness.

  "I have replaced them with water!" she said. Eager to please, Jamal tilted the green bottle to his lips and drank deeply.

  He lowered it almost immediately, his eyes growing heavy. "Oh . . ."

  "You will follow my every command," Tabrel said. "You will not disobey."

  Dreamily, i
n his singsong voice, Jamal said, "Yes."

  "You will use whatever power you have while your mother is away. You will feign emergency. You will book passage for me offworld on the fastest and most untraceable ship possible. You will do everything in your power to get me home to Mars."

  Jamal nodded.

  "You will do all these things for me, Jamal Clan, and you will tell no one; no knowledge of these things will ever leave your heart."

  "Yes . . ."

  She put her hands on him and turned him to the door, "It is time to go."

  He opened the door obediently and walked straight into the monstrous form of Kamath Clan. Behind her, lounging in his chair, which floated on the air like a suspended bird, sat Wrath-Pei, looking languidly amused.

  "Hooray for us!" he said to Kamath Clan. "We were both right! I guessed why they'd do it, and you guessed how! I'm shocked that Cornelian thought something so crude as that transmission to the girl would work! The Bug must be losing his touch!"

  "Mother . . ." Jamal said.

  Kamath pushed past him into the room, brushing Tabrel aside to gather her bottles. She turned to Tabrel and held out her hand.

  "Give them to me."

  Wrath-Pei chuckled while Tabrel, refusing to move, was roughly searched by the queen, who produced the bottles and syringes. Kamath Clan's face darkened at the sight of the bottle marked "Death."

  "You would have used this," she said.

  Tabrel said nothing, but stood defiant.

  The queen said, "My mistake was to reduce her dosages. I should never have listened to the boy."

  Wrath-Pei eyed Jamal with interest. "Perhaps if you let me interview the prince ..

  "No!" the queen said. She quickly added, "He needs my care now."

  Wrath-Pei smiled and shrugged. "Ah, well."

  "You must leave me alone with the children now," Kamath Clan said. "There are measures I must take to assure this doesn't happen again."

  "Of course," Wrath-Pei said. "We can't have anything happening to our little princess. She seems to be so valuable to Cornelian." He continued, "Lawrence found an amusing reference to her situation in the ancient literature. It's a pity her name isn't Helen."

  Kamath Clan looked at him blankly, but he did not elaborate.

  "When I am done here, I will come to you," she said. "There are two matters we must discuss."

  Wrath-Pei nodded. The boy Lawrence, barely visible behind the chair, nudged a mechanism-with the stump of one hand, and the chair slid back smoothly and began to turn.

  "Don't be long."

  The queen assented, and then, behind closed doors, began ministrations in earnest.

  For some reason, Wrath-Pei had decided to install himself in the residence of the late Commander Tarn; though Kamath Clan knew there was irony in this, she did not see amusement.

  Tarn's residence, like his office, was in the Ruz Balib section. The Sacred Grounds always gave her a measure of peace, though today she found herself too preoccupied to find this repose. Using the central walkway of the tree-lined quadrangle, she passed the late commander's offices and walked on. Soon the drab colors of office buildings turned to brighter shades of residences; and, behind the guarded gate of Tarn's property, the orange-red of the house's ornate front for a moment arrested her. Though she had never been here, she had assumed from Tarn's bureaucratic demeanor that his home would be as boring as his office or himself. This did not appear to be so.

  She was further surprised by the interior, which was stuffed to overflowing with trinkets and furnishings from the Four Worlds. Tarn, it seems, had been either a secret collector with a private income or an embezzler of state funds. Some of the items, such as a tea service of nineteenth century Earth and a painted tarp of early twenty-first century Mars, were museum pieces even to the queen's barely trained eye. The rooms were spacious and airy, in vague Martian style; and, on closer inspection, the home itself seemed to be built of Martian sandstone, a luxury in itself.

  Thus, perhaps, Wrath-Pei's interest in it.

  "Hello!" Wrath-Pei's torpidly cheerful voice called. At first she could not locate it. She stood at the midpoint of five branching rooms, a Martian architectural style; all were filed with abundant and cleverly hidden artificial light and more booty—including, in one, massive pieces of Titanian furniture, finer even than that in the palace.

  Queen Clan was clutched with anger and felt now that perhaps Tarn's method of disposal wasn't so extreme, after all.

  "Please! Come in!" Wrath-Pei's voice called again. Now the queen caught sight of the hovering chair and its occupant. It resided in none of the five rooms but beyond one of them: an enclosed patio which led to an open area even more brightly lit than the indoor rooms.

  Kamath Clan made her way through the patio, noting more antiques and treasured pieces: a painting by Carvan-Shay, a Titan landscape long reported stolen from a nearby gallery.

  The queen passed through an open archway into brilliant light resembling that of Earth's Sun. For a moment her memories came flooding back: the fields under brilliant blue sky, the warmth like toast on her skin....

  But the artificial sky in this domed room was pink and the light not quite as bright as she thought, more Martian than Earth, but still blinding, by Titanian standards.

  "Sit down! Join me!" Wrath-Pei offered.

  His chair floated over an artificial pool of water—one of the largest such amusements the queen had seen on all of Titan. The pool, shaped like a human kidney, was illuminated by hidden lights which brightened the pink dome with reflected light and played on the gently lapping blue of the waves.

  The image of Wrath-Pei's chair hanging still over moving water was unsettling.

  "Do you like what I've done with the place?" Wrath-Pei asked.

  "I've never been here," the queen answered.

  "No? I wish you had; you wouldn't recognize old Tarn's hovel." He gave a slight wince. "It looked like a barracks before I took it over."

  "So all the furnishings are yours?"

  "Of course! Some of these pieces looked lost in my ship. But here . . ." Wrath-Pei gazed around lovingly.

  So Tarn had been guilty of nothing but being in the way, after all.

  "Would you enjoy something to drink?" Wrath-Pei asked, and it was now that the queen caught sight of the nearly invisible Lawrence, standing still in one corner of the pool room, like a potted plant. There was something vaguely vegetablelike about him, his stunted limbs like short roots, his black clothing, the short-toed boots unmoving, perhaps seeking to suck up the rogue droplets of water splashed onto the nearby tile from the pool.

  Wrath-Pei was still waggling his own glass, which held a bright red liquid. (Blood? No ...

  "No, thank you."

  "Perhaps, you'd enjoy something else? A... ministration from . . . Quog?"

  At the potioner's name, Kamath Clan went cold inside, and Wrath-Pei smiled over his cocktail.

  "Don't worry, my queen. It will be our little secret. Am I correct in guessing that you've just given your daughter-in-law and your son their initiation into that particular fraternity?"

  How does he know? How could he know? Queen Clan found herself saying, "Yes."

  "Ah. Then they should be much easier to manage. Old Quog is an interesting fellow, is he not?"

  "You've visited him?" the queen said, almost in horror.

  Wrath-Pei's smile widened. "Only ... in the line of duty. I followed you there this morning. An interesting follow, as I say. But old, very old. I hope he isn't near death?"

  The queen fought panic. "He is . . . not well."

  "A pity. But we must do what we can for him."

  "Yes . . ."

  "Good. Now, what was it you wanted to discuss with me?" The incremental smile widened another notch.

  "I .. ." Fighting the clutch of anxiety in her throat, Kamath Clan forced herself back to rigid control. There was a way to handle this—there was always a way.

  "I wanted your thoughts on what Prime Com
ehan's intentions are."

  "His intentions toward Titan?" Still Wrath-Pei's smile had not left.

  "Yes."

  "He intends to have it."

  A blink was the queen's only show of surprise.

  Wrath-Pei continued, in a slightly more serious tone, "Oh, surely, he means to have it all. Earth, Mars, Venus, Titan, Pluto. All of the worlds. But as for Titan—not yet."

  "We are safe?"

  "For now, yes. His immediate goal is Venus. That, of course, is the true prize. And before long he will possess it. But Cornehian having a prize and keeping it are two different things. The Bug will never feel safe—or content—until all the worlds are in his orbit."

  "Is there nothing we can do?"

  "Hmmm?" Wrath-Pei looked as if he had been distracted from his thoughts. "Oh, yes," he said, still distracted, "there is much we can, and will, do. Cornehian will find that the rose that is Titan has a very long thorn. I was just thinking . . ."

  "Then you have no intention of forming an alliance."

  "What? Of course not! My only alliance is with you, my queen. But perhaps a ... nonaggression pact, for the moment. They are useful. By now, Cornelian knows that he will have to contend with us sooner or later. Later will serve his purpose, as well as ours. We are quite safe from his tinkering, for the moment. But. . ." Again Wrath-Pei was preoccupied.

  "Is there something else on your mind?"

  Slowly, Wrath-Pei turned his gaze back to the queen. His smile had returned, widening. With barely a flick of one finger in Lawrence's direction, the hovering chair moved over the water toward Ka-math Clan. The queen looked at Lawrence; the boy had not moved a muscle, but there had been a flit of red light across his visored face.

  Wrath-Pei's chair stopped a precise meter from Kamath Clan. The two were face-to-face, WrathPei's smile locked in place as he lowered his drink to a holder, which ratcheted out from the chair's base, above the holster where the ever-present clippers reposed.

  Wrath-Pei leaned slightly forward, arms resting on his knees. His sculpted face and lionine hair framed his beautiful eyes, which stared intently into the queen's own.

  "I was thinking of our own alliance."