Those pale, steady eyes of the Culture teacher.
But then there was a grinding whir and the dorm’s lobby shield, an opaque plastic, extended on its groaning hinges (the building was old) and engulfed her.
Instantly, the red dust, caught windless in the air, dropped around her, letting her breathe and see again.
“Whew!” she said.
To the tattoo of sand hitting the shield, she walked to the lobby door, which opened at her command, and entered the dorm.
The dorm attendant was in position in the lobby—but before it could quiz her, Visid said, in her own simulacrum of a robotic voice, “Visid Sneaden, entering.”
“Very well,” the attendant said, bowing stiffly from the waist; this one wore a tunic that hid all but its head, which shone like an ancient Earth toaster.
Hearing her own steps echo on the stone floor, she climbed the nearby stairwell to Level 2 and waited for that door to open for her.
At least there was some noise now.
She heard her own name in whispers, only magnified as she passed the first dormitory rooms on her right. Looking briefly in, she saw two students, Irma and Rainier Molton, sister and brother, staring back at her noncommittally. The dorm room’s Screen was on, showing banks of arithmetic homework.
Returning their stares, she walked on.
Arnie Cam, her roommate, was, at least, waiting for her in their room.
“Visid!” the younger girl cried, rising from her bed to fling her arms around her roommate. “We thought—”
“You thought what?” Visid said.
Arnie removed her arms, suddenly embarrassed. “Nothing …”
“Thought they had wiped my brain? They will, but not yet. There’s something happening.”
Arnie said, “There’s talk of another war. It was on the Screen—”
“I knew it!” Visid cried. “Cornelian will go after Wrath-Pei now. But so far it’s not going well.”
“How do you know these things?” Arnie looked genuinely surprised. “All they said—”
“—was what they want you to hear. You have to look between the words. The very fact that they tell us anything means it’s serious, and that they’ll want something from us.”
Arnie continued to pout. “And you shouldn’t talk about the High Leader like that.”
The older girl ignored her.
“And what did they keep you after lessons for?” Arnie asked.
“Something about a special project. Maybe it will be my ticket out of here.” She suddenly turned to her roommate. “But you’re not to tell anyone about it, all right?”
“But what shall I say when they ask?”
“Tell them … anything you want. That they took preliminary measurements to clean my brain.”
Arnie’s eyes widened. “Did they?”
“No.”
But Visid Sneaden’s thoughts were already elsewhere, connecting data into a scenario, fitting the snippets into a pattern, reading between words, cutting and pasting real fact and real culture and history and religion into a coherent picture that would give her the one thing in which she was interested, the one thing that would unlock so many puzzles about herself, this place where she was forced to be, and the place where she so desperately wanted to be—the one thing she would never stop looking for: the truth.
Chapter 2
“This is not acceptable!”
Pynthas Rei already knew that, but was not about to say anything at the moment. To say anything might mean an end to his life—and, miserable as that life was at the moment, Pynthas wished to hang on to it for as long as possible.
The High Leader, formerly Prime Cornelian, towered over Pynthas like a huge metallic insect. His two sets of forward limbs, which served as hands, were strong enough to break a man in their grasp; Pynthas had seen the High Leader perform that particular trick on a few occasions. Reared up on his hind limbs, the High Leader doubled not only his height but his fearsomeness, and those forward limbs now hovered over Pynthas’s trembling body, the sharp long fingers opening and closing like vises.
“Not acceptable!”
“Of course not, High Leader,” Pynthas squeaked. Desperately, his eyes darted around his chamber for something to give the High Leader to crush—lest it be his own head. His eyes fixed on the nearest object, which he quickly grabbed and thrust up over his head.
The High Leader’s nearest hand closed on it like a crab’s claw—and it was only at this point that Pynthas’s brain recorded the fact that he had just let the High Leader destroy one of his most precious personal objects—a ceramic figure in the shape of an Earth bear that his mother had given him when he was a boy.
A strangled whine began to form in his throat—but at the same moment he saw with relief that the High leader’s mood had suddenly calmed and that he, Pynthas, would live through this day after all.
But still, his bear.
“Perhaps,” the High Leader said, turning to pace the room, lowering the central limbs to make his gait resemble a bug with its front elevated, “there is something positive to be gained in this. It can be taken as a good sign. And, as always, it can be used to our advantage. You’re sure this intelligence is reliable?”
Pynthas, ever the toady, instantly nodded his head in obeisance. “Absolutely, High Leader. The agents who perished getting us this information were all top-notch people.”
“And how many of these outposts has Wrath-Pei taken?”
“Two, so far. On Oberon, Neried; there is indication that he means to attack Casto next.”
“Let him have them.”
Pynthas’s mouth dropped open; he could not help his mouth from blurting, “What?”
The High Leader turned once more to face the toady; but now there was a glint in his eye. “Yes, let Wrath-Pei have them all. If those outposts give him a heightened sense of security, he can possess them all.”
“But, High Leader, if we try to get to Titan, it will be like going through a minefield to get to it!”
Annoyance clouded the High Leader’s features, and Pynthas was instantly sorry he had spoken.
“Let me do your thinking for you, Pynthas,” the High Leader snapped. “From now on I want you to be what you are: a part of the furniture in this room.”
“Yes, High Leader!”
Pynthas stood very still, as if he were a lamp or ottoman; it took him a few moments to notice that the door had opened and slid closed and that the High Leader was gone.
Only then, when he was alone, did Pynthas Rei slump to the floor. His gaze fell on the shattered shards of his ceramic bear, and a tear came to his eye as he scooped them up; two of the larger pieces fit together into the chipped shape of the bear’s happy grin.
“Oh, Mother!” Pynthas Rei sobbed, the shards dropping to the floor as Pynthas’s briefly happy past came back to invade his thoughts.
Limb tips clicking on the steps like a dog’s claws, the High Leader climbed, and arrived in no time at the garret room in which he kept Senator Kris. Chuckling at his own sobriquet for the chamber, the Museum, the High Leader entered, letting the door close behind him as his mechanical eyes adjusted to the gloom.
It was night outside in Lowell City; during the day the room’s single cut of window presented a crawling oval of sunlight on the round walls; but tonight, with even the city’s lights dulled by the growing dust storm, the room was barely illumined a dark orange, like pumpkin soup, with the senator’s yellowish containment field in the center.
The High Leader wondered if the senator’s weak eyes registered the color and brightness changes in the chamber. Did he follow that bright oval around the wall during the daytime?
“Senator!” the High Leader said brightly. “How are you?”
Kris, suspended in an upright field that commenced a bare meter off the floor and held him in tight constraint, opened his weary eyes to gaze at the High Leader. For a few moments he said nothing; then the slightest of smiles crossed his lips.
“Cornelian,” he said in a faraway whisper. “I take it you haven’t found her yet.”
The High Leader quashed the beginnings of peevishness. Instead, he said brightly, “No, I haven’t, Senator! But I will!”
“How long has it been? Years?”
“Oh, yes, it’s been three years, Kris. Two since our last visit together. And how are you faring?”
Kris tried to smile again, but instead winced. His body, a skeletal bag of bones, was so tightly held that any movement of face or limb caused discomfort.
The High Leader walked to the window and looked out. “When the dust isn’t flying, it’s truly a stunning view of Arsia Mons from here, if I remember correctly. Too bad you were put in the field facing the wall instead of the window, eh, Senator?” He turned and faced Kris again, who managed a smile at last.
The High Leader said, “You seem to have lost weight, Kris! Things aren’t getting too roomy in there for you, are they?”
The High Leader moved to the containment control and snicked it the tiniest bit higher; the senator drew in his breath in pain.
“There, that’s better, isn’t it? Snug enough now?”
“You’ll … never … get what you … want from … her … Cornelian,” Kris gasped.
“I’m sure I will, Kris. In fact, I wanted you to know that I’m about to move against Wrath-Pei. And when I do, my first order of business will be to return your daughter to Mars. And then—”
Despite the pain it caused him, Senator Kris grinned, gasping, “Never … Cornelian…”
Suddenly angry, and afraid he might do more than he should to this man he still needed, the High Leader said, “We’ll see,” and left the garret quickly, tweaking the containment control the tiniest bit tighter as he left, gaining at least a bit of satisfaction from the senator’s moaning gasp.
Chapter 3
Cold.
The world, for Dalin Shar, ruler of a world, was snow, and ice, and cold. He slept at night with the whistle of an icy wind in his ears, touched with the feel of frozen fingertips, listened with ears cold to the touch, watched with lidless eyes that stung from the tap of methane ice crystals. Warmth was something to dream about, something in another world of long ago. Warmth, and flowers, and sunlight, and the smell of roses were something from a fairy tale told to a young boy—a young king in a mythical land that may have been called … Earth.
The fairy tale had a princess named Tabrel, who traveled to this mythical land and walked with the boy king in a garden. The air was scented with the perfume of velvety red roses, and the sky between the trellises was a brilliant shade of blue. There were fat white water clouds in the atmosphere. The afternoon brushed their skins with the heavenly warmth of a nearby star.
And then the young man, thinking to be fey, suddenly stopped and looked into the princess’ eyes—and was locked there forever. And what began as a stolen kiss and flirtation became something that would never end, a moment captured forever in time, when the boy king and the princess felt their hearts suddenly open and flow together, mingling, becoming one.…
Lidless under an ocher moon, Dalin Shar, who was ruler of faraway Earth, thought of his first true-love kiss.
He could see Tabrel in his mind’s eye. Standing on this frozen bluff, with half of Pluto spread out far and wide beneath him like a cracked translucent blue plate; with the dropping, deadly cold penetrating the ripped rags of his thermal suit, and pellets of frozen methane hard as tiny stones pelting his cheeks; with the plum-colored glow of the descended SunOne at the horizon, its waning heat and light still washing the moon Charon with deep lemon; here, in this frigid hell, Dalin closed his mind’s eye and felt not the cold, not the sting of methane crystals, but the incredibly warm softness of the first touch of Tabrel’s lips on his own as he stood with her in his own fragrant gardens, on an Earth that was surely not mythical yet seemed a lifetime away.…
“Dalin! It’s time to come in before you freeze, boy! Hurry up now!”
Dalin felt an insistent pull at his elbow.
The warm Earthly gardens, the kiss, all of it dissolved, leaving Dalin Shar’s lidless open eyes with the pale, hateful, rutted view of Pluto’s moon. Charon had shifted in its orbit toward the horizon, following the dimming purple glow of SunOne. Soon SunOne, in its own orbit slightly faster than Charon, would pull its miserly light away, and the moon would revert to its dull, dead, nearly unseen norm in the sky. It was, after all, a lump of ice and rock not much different from a comet.
A dirty snowball.
“Dalin!” the voice close by his ear rasped again. The pull on Dalin’s sleeve became more insistent. “Use your head, Sire! Come in now!”
Dalin turned his face into the nearly constant eight-mile-per-hour wind of Pluto’s surface. The atmosphere was so tenuous, held by Pluto’s weak gravity and fed by the warming effects of SunOne, that it had at first been thought that no winds at all might form.
But weather was something nearly as voracious as life, and there were even thin clouds of water that occasionally rose like wraiths, when the planet’s surface was turned toward the distant star-like Sun, which nevertheless added its own bulb-like solar energy to SunOne—enough, at least, to form the ghost clouds that swept constantly like a broom to the dirty surface of the dirty planet.
It was in these seasons when the wind rose above the maddening eight-mile-per-hour level to sometimes roar in storms that covered the planet in a dirty blue blanket of ice and snow.
“Dalin!” Shatz Abel’s voice rasped. His grip was like that of an iron vise.
“All right,” Dalin said somberly.
For a moment he looked into Shatz Abel’s bearded visage.
“Follow me!” the pirate said urgently.
Dalin nodded.
He bowed into the wind, following Shatz Abel in line like one of two monks. But these clerics were not praying; they were guarding their faces from cutting crystals of methane, which could wear away features given enough time, even as they constantly reshaped the ugly cold blue face of Pluto.
They trudged the path they both knew so well back to shelter. The wind was a constant whine, like torture, in their ears, and now Dalin felt where the ice crystals had burned against his unprotected face.
They bowed under the eaves of their cave and entered their shelter, which was tunneled into the side of an icy hill.
Shatz Abel immediately closed the stainless door to seal the structure.
“Quickly!” he said, throwing back Dalin’s hood. “Let me see what you’ve done to yourself!”
The light, though purposefully dim in the shelter, hurt Dalin’s eyes. He sat tiredly on the chair that Shatz Abel thrust beneath him, and subjected himself to the man’s probing of his face and hands.
“I told you to discard these gloves a week ago!” Shatz Abel scolded. He dropped Dalin’s reddened hands and shambled off to one end of the shelter, rattling through an old medicine cabinet. His gait was like a bear’s.
“You’re a fool!” Shatz Abel said, shuffling back with one of his inevitable tubes of ointment, which he began to smear sloppily across Dalin’s knuckles. Vaguely, there was pain that Dalin chose to ignore.
Shatz Abel paused in his slathering to look up angrily at the younger man. “You’ll murder yourself yet!”
“I don’t care if I die.”
Shatz Abel’s anger continued. “Don’t care? Don’t you care about the people carrying on your fight for you?”
Dalin looked at him blankly. “As far as I’m concerned, they don’t exist.”
Shatz Abel raised an ointment-stained hand and brought it sharply across the young man’s face. “How dare you!” he shouted.
Anger flared through Dalin. Snapping out of his reverie, he brought his own hand up and held it above Shatz Abel, balling it into a fist.
The two men looked at one another, and suddenly the pirate laughed.
“Look at you!” the pirate said. “Three years on this rock, and in some ways you’re still th
e boy you were when you arrived here! True, you’re inches taller, and a bit broader in the chest; and, someday soon, you may even have to shave your whiskers—” with a chuckle, the pirate tried to brush his hand across Dalin’s still mostly smooth chin; the king knocked Shatz Abel’s fingers away with a sour look, “but in some ways, you still act like a child! True, you can pull your weight when work needs to be done, arm wrestle well enough to at least give me a challenge—and you did save my skin last year when you deflected our falling antenna mast from my skull. And true: you have lost a bit of your courtly impudence, and deprivation has curbed your selfish instincts.
And yet, in certain areas …” The pirate left off, still grinning.
Dalin stared at him, anger held.
“Go ahead, boy—hit me, if it makes you feel better.”
Suddenly all anger drained from Dalin, and he dropped his hand to his lap again. “It’s just that none of it matters to me if …”
Shatz Abel stood up and laughed. “The young man in love!”
Now Dalin’s anger flared again and held, as he launched himself at the burly pirate, who was shuffling back to his medicine cabinet to replace the salve.
Dalin struck Shatz Abel, knocking him down, then stood over the older man as Shatz Abel turned himself over, looking up at Dalin and bringing a hand across his cut lip.
“The young man in love…”
“Yes! I love her!”
“Even though you know nothing of her for three long years—” Shatz Abel began.
The two men were distracted by a scratching at the metal door, which rose to a constant tapping hiss.
“The wind is picking up,” Shatz Abel said. His brow furrowed as he pushed himself to his feet, dabbing a final time at the blood on the corner of his lip. “This storm will be worse than the last.”
Dalin was staring at the door. “The last storm lasted a month.”
Shatz Abel humphed. “In any event, we’d better cover the dish and stow the outside gear.”
Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy Page 2