The sound, smell and tactile sensations faded.
Viewers grumbled, looked questioningly at those seated beneath the senso-helmets on either side.
The moving colors on the screen, shapeless, became even more so, lost all psychological resemblance to the emotions of the film, faded slowly out until the screen was white, blank.
A moment later the enclave's public address system was spliced into the parlor's broadcast facilities, as it reached every Pure in the fortress no matter where he was or what he was doing.
The audience quieted.
The square, sober face of Kitson Helger, enclave news promoter, flashed onto the screen in the front of the parlor. His eyes were darkly ringed, and his lips were pale and trembling. He said, “Little more than an hour ago our General put through an emergency call to Dr. Danfrey, ordering him to the Military Suite. Upon arrival Dr. Danfrey discovered our General was experiencing a series of severe heart palpitations. Despite all that Dr. Danfrey could do, our General passed away fifteen minutes ago. Until the Committee on Leadership elects a replacement Preakness Bay Enclave is without a guiding light. Services of mourning are being held in all enclave chapels.”
The sober face evaporated.
Merka Shanly, wearing a mask of grief, raced up the aisle of the parlor, pushed through its exit doors.
The Pures in the parlor watched her leave. There was no one in Preakness Bay Enclave who did not know that she had been the General's mate for more than three months, longer than any woman before her.
In the corridors she passed other Pures, who tried to stop her and offer their condolences. She pushed past them, fighting to hold onto her grief-stricken expression, trying not to crack open before them.
She stepped into the lift, dropped, was caught in the beam, floated swiftly upward until she called out the number of the floor she wanted. The lift delivered her. She stepped out and hurried down the main hall of the governmental level, toward the Military Suite.
The door opened at her command, closed behind her.
She walked across the foyer, through the main lounge, through the library and into the master bedroom.
“So far?” she asked.
Dr. Tokel Danfrey looked up, nodded, and turned back to the corpse on the bed. “Were you seen?”
“For the past two hours,” she affirmed.
“I've fed the news to Hegler, and I saw him deliver it correctly. Now it's up to you, Merka, to keep the riff-raff out of here.”
“Will do,” she said.
She looked once at the bed, saw the gaping wound in the dead General's neck, the blood spilled all over the white bedclothes.
She had washed her hands thoroughly, three hours ago, just after she had murdered him. Still, she looked at her pale fingers, at the transparent nails, as if they held some crimson taint that would betray her.
The main door to the suite reported the presence of several governmental officials.
“Don't let them in here!” Dr. Danfrey said. He was busy with his surgical tools, cutting the body into disposable sections.
She nodded, left the bedroom, closed the door.
“Let them in,” she told the suite monitor when she had reached the main lounge.
It obeyed, sliding the door wide.
Four men entered, one fully as tall as the General, the other three all somewhat shorter than Merka Shanly herself. The tallest was Ober Iswan, Chairman of the Committee on Leadership. He was a stern man, not only pious in his devotion to Lady Nature, but fanatically zealous. He observed feast days and fasts as few other enclave Pures did. She supposed he was to be admired for that.
Ober Iswan said, “ I want to see our General' s body.” He did not speak out of suspicion, but out of deep emotional attachment to the dead man. They had been friends, of a sort.
“The doctor's with him — with it,” she said. “He's performing an immediate autopsy.”
Iswan looked surprised. “Here — not in the medical labs?”
“He thinks there was something distinctly odd about the General's demise, perhaps some bacterial infection. If the enclave has been contaminated by one of the Ruiner's microorganisms, it is best that we find out as soon as possible. Performing dissection here also eliminates the need to move the corpse through other, perhaps uncontaminated, sections of the fortress.”
“Of course,” Iswan said. “You took it on yourself to give the doctor permission for the operation?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Very fine,” Iswan said. “You show a certain levelheadedness, a quickness of response that is admirable.”
Merka sighed inwardly. Ober Iswan was the only one of these four men who had not pledged themselves to her, the last member of the Committee on Leadership who had any integrity. Now that he was pacified and, to some small degree, in her corner, her chances of ascendancy to the vacated seat of power were vastly increased.
The plague scare had been the best part of the plan. Only ten years had passed since five hundred had died from some never-diagnosed outbreak of disease. Ober Iswan had lost a son in that disaster.
The other three crowded forward, asking prearranged questions to which she supplied prearranged answers. Now and again, Ober Iswan leaned forward from his seat, bony hands folded before him, dark eyes intense, to ask a question of his own. These were never difficult to answer and, indeed, were the questions they had expected of him. For weeks now his associates had been subtly informing him of Merka Shanly's capabilities, intelligence and commitment to Lady Nature's ideals. It was hoped that all of these bits of carefully constructed praise for her, along with the set questions the other men were now putting to her, would give Ober Iswan the idea of proposing her name for the post of General.
Though a majority vote by the seven-member committee was necessary to elevate a normal citizen to the post of General, Ober Iswan was the only committee member who could propose names for possible election. He must be made to propose hers.
If he did not, he must be eliminated.
Now there could be no halfway measures.
In an hour Dr. Tokel Danfrey came into the main lounge and looked at them somberly for a moment. Then, in his deep and authoritative voice, he said, “I have dissected the General's corpse and, on my own initiative, have consigned it to the incinerator by way of the master-bedroom chute. I have subjected myself to sonic cleansing in the General's bathroom and have given myself a massive dose of antibiotics. His room will be sealed for a period of thirty days and conscientiously sterilized.”
“You've found something!” Ober Iswan gasped, rising up, his thin hands fisted at his sides.
“I found nothing,'' the doctor said. “It appears to be a simple case of heart failure, for natural causes. But whenever a man who appeared to be in the best of health one day dies the next, I like to take precautions. I remember the plague of a decade ago.”
“So do we all,” Iswan said. He had relaxed slightly, but was still tense.
Merka said, “I'll make arrangements for new quarters immediately and place a requisition for a wardrobe. My old clothes, of course, must not be taken from that room. And I wish to make a suggestion that may not be within my province.”
She addressed this remark to Ober Iswan who said, “Yes?”
“A new General should be elected posthaste. If anything should come of this plague threat, the existence of Preakness Bay may well depend on having a decisive leader.”
“I agree,” Iswan said. “I'll convene the committee immediately.”
The name of Plino Grimwaldowine was first proposed as a replacement for the fallen leader.
The Committee on Leadership rejected him, soundly, over the course of seven ballots.
Ober Iswan next expressed faith in Castigone Pei, who had once led a successful campaign against the tainted in the days when the enclave had maintained Nature Cleansers and who now was known for his poetry and gentleness. Such a man, containing violence and peace, must be special.
; The committee disagreed.
Third: Cooper Hine.
He was turned down.
Merka Shanly was proposed as the fourth name.
She won rapid acceptance.
While the Military Suite was quarantined, suitable temporary quarters were established for the new General, Preakness Bay's first female leader in eighty-six years. Since the fortress had been designed to provide comfortable lodging for fifty thousand people, but now housed fewer than five thousand, no problem was encountered in clearing and appointing a lavish suite for the new General.
By nightfall Merka Shanly sat alone in her bedroom, triumphant, having dispatched a dozen orders to her confidants who must now be rewarded for their loyalty.
In the three months since she had become the late General's mistress conditions in the enclave had gone unchanged. Prewar supplies were wasted, while no provisions were made for survival once they had been used up. On a recent tour of the three hundred storage vaults beneath the fortress she had seen that they could last only another ten years at their present rate of thoughtless consumption. She had worked hard to establish sympathizers and had successfully performed the bold murder of her master. She had earned the right to set a new course for the people she ruled.
But she worried, now, that she would not last long enough to effect these changes. Only three days ago she had begun to develop a rudimentary telepathic talent.
27
Leaving the mist-shrouded formations of Smoke Den for the civilized land called January Slash, the five espers returned to their routine of travel by darkness and sleep by day. The nearest Pure enclave was the Jinyi Fortress, far to the north of the province, beyond the Hadaspuri Sea, and none of the tainted folk in this region appeared to be aware that esper fugitives might be crossing their land. This should have been, with minimal precautions, a time of peace for the travelers, a time to renew their strength to face more rugged obstacles ahead. Instead they found themselves growing more agitated by the day, partly because the land was parched and sandy and hardly fit for human habitation, and partly because their sleep was ruined every night by the intrusion of dreams they did not understand and for which they had no explanations.
Jask was the first to dream, on the first night after they departed the field of black glass. His visions were filled with places, people, and concepts that were utterly alien to him. Time and again, he woke, sitting straight up beside Melopina, a scream caught in his throat. He could never remember what the genesis of his terror had been, though it was profound enough to leave him shaking each time. Drifting back into sleep, he would pick up the dreams again, follow them through to the penultimate moment of unknown terror…
The following night Melopina dreamed as well, whimpering in her sleep so loudly that she wakened Kiera, who tried but failed to comfort her.
On the third night no one was spared the dreams.
In the morning, exhausted, they sat around a meager breakfast and discussed the vision they had somehow received: a vast city composed of living tissue, a pulsing mass of inhuman flesh that shaped itself to the needs of the millions who lived within it, a many-armed but stationary behemoth fully a hundred and fifty kilometers from end to end, containing five hundred levels of living space. Its streets were of living fiber, like bloodless veins that connected its many rooms, amphitheaters, auditoriums, shops, schools, churches, factories, entertainment centers and private homes. It grew where its citizens felt it needed to grow, provided water and electricity through its own metabolic processes. Though mindless, it contained an enormous brain, as large as an enclave fortress, which controlled its highly specialized functions.
Could any such creature have existed? Melopina 'pathed.
I've read a number of prewar books that survived the holocaust, Tedesco said. But I've never encountered mention of a living city. He considered a moment. However, there are many other things I know to exist that I never encountered mention of in those books.
Chaney 'pathed, It seems to me that the question of the living city's existence is not our major concern. What should interest us now is why we have all, simultaneously, begun to dream of it.
They weighed various possibilities and rejected all of them.
They continued their march north.
During the fourth sleeping period the dreams grew more intense, more urgent, as if they carried some message that must be understood.
No one, however, understood that message.
Jask had forgotten the unseen entity that he had been certain was trying to contact them in the Black Glass craters. He was more consumed by the current mystery of the dreams than by the older mystery of the silent creature that might or might not have been a figment of his imagination. On the sixth day, however, he came to understand that both phenomena were part of the same puzzle. He woke from the familiar dream at that point where it somehow metamorphosed into nightmare, and he instantly recognized the unseen being's presence — a distant fuzziness, a straining power, an urgency that had no outlet.
He told the others that he felt they had been approached by some invisible entity in the craters and that it had followed them. The dreams were its only successful attempts to establish contact.
The Black Presence? Tedesco 'pathed.
As I said before, this creature would not seem to be intelligent in the sense the Presence would have to be. It lacks order, coordination. If it were the Black Presence, it could contact us easily with its superior esp abilities.
But it must have some telepathic talent! Witness these awful dreams, Kiera 'pathed. She gnashed her pretty teeth in a show of dislike for the visions.
They could reach no conclusions.
By the tenth day out of the Smoke Den all of them could sense the straining nearness of the creature, could feel it drifting at the rim of their extrasensory perception, completely beyond the ken of their normal five senses.
Knowing it was there did nothing to suppress its emanations.
The five espers continued to sleep less than they would have liked, shocked awake again and again from the brink of that ultimate, unspeakable horror, which despite its vividness in dreams was never made quite clear enough to be remembered out of sleep.
They entered the Divide of Cessius, which marked the lower third of January Slash. They crossed its black-and-red marble floor, wending their way between the hundreds of upthrust steel spikes that dotted it, climbed its far wall and came out on the other side, into more sand and cactus.
The dreams continued.
At the edge of the desert they came upon the Vast Remains, the largest known ruins of prewar origins, wound through its blasted streets, past buildings that had fallen but had once stood two thousand meters high. They slept in the shadows of cylindrical buildings that had no entrances or windows; these monoliths still thrummed within and radiated a gentle heat by night, as a byproduct of some other, inexplicable task, filled by pointlessly functioning machinery that had been sealed against the ravages of time. They crossed the inner-city canals, which were filled with blood — or at least with some fluid that quite resembled ichor. They passed scattered robots that still stumbled through their programmed chores, oblivious of the end of their world and of the specterlike five who walked past them in the purple darkness.
And the dreams continued.
Having crossed the Vast Remains in less than a week, they camped by a clean brook, beneath a monstrous, mutated elm— the countryside having changed from its desert motif — and hoped that the ruins might somehow form a barrier between their unknown guest and themselves. All of them badly needed a good day's sleep.
As they lay beneath the gnarled elm, however, the unseen being pressed itself upon them more vigorously than ever: Melopina woke, crying out, with the feeling that some creature had hold of her and was pressing her down into the earth…
She kicked at it.
She flailed the air and snarled in fear.
She gasped for her breath. Jask could see that she was really havi
ng some trouble getting it, as if someone were choking her.
Mellie…?
Help me!
Jask bent over her and, as he touched her face to feel for a fever, he felt the… thing rise from her. A cold, damp force pushed over him, lingering long enough for him to recognize that distant psychic fuzziness, was gone without a trace.
When she had explained how it had felt, a formless mass of invisible flesh crushed into her, they discussed this new development.
It's getting bolder, whatever it is, Tedesco 'pathed.
Perhaps my grave robbing is finally being punished, Chaney 'pathed. Maybe this is the spirit of one of my victims, come to torture us.
No one laughed. They were willing to consider any possibility.
By the time they reached the abandoned port of Kittlesticks on the Hadaspuri Sea, they had all experienced physical contact — or something quite similar — with their unwanted companion. It approached them boldly now, while they were sleeping or while they were awake, as if it wished desperately to tell them something, to impart the essentials of a tale, an ethereal Ancient Mariner full of its own history of curses, calms and death.
The five espers walked through the cobbled streets of Kittlesticks, which was little more than a thousand years old but which had been abandoned more than eight centuries ago. Its inhabitants had reported that the ghosts of Indians could be seen in the streets at night, slinking from shadowed door to shadowed door and that in the morning skeletons were found in the beds of men who had gone to sleep with all their flesh. Whether Kittlesticks lay upon ancient Indian burial grounds or whether the sea had washed unclean spirits under the extensive docks in the harbor, no one could say. When half the town's population had died in this mysterious manner, the rest picked up their belongings and moved down the coast, where they founded the town of Last Resort, which had thrived as a Hadaspuri Sea marketplace for many centuries after.
They came out on the docks, where a hundred boats still lay, half rotten and sunken, others of metal and in relatively good repair.
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