Gene turned the comer and surprised a man in combat fatigues and futuristic helmet bolting out of an ambush position, apparently unaware of Gene’s approach. Gene fired wildly, two shots, and ducked for cover.
The gun made a curious sound, rather like a crossbow, perhaps louder. But it was nothing like the ear-splitting crack of a conventional weapon.
He heard a groan and looked over the edge of the crate. The man was lying supine, his weapon out of reach.
Gene rose from cover as Sativa came jogging past. She went to the man and leaned over him.
The rebel solider turned his head and scanned her through red night-sight goggles.
She raised her weapon and aimed at his chest.
“Sativa, no!”
Gene’s shout was in vain. She fired, and the man died as Gene looked helplessly on.
She met his bewildered look with a face twisted by hatred and the immense effort of self-justification.
“You don’t understand. Members of my family have died in their terrorist attacks. My half-brother was tortured to death by these scum.”
He said nothing.
“Let’s try this direction. I don’t think —”
Shouts in the direction in which she pointed drove them back, but that route also had its disadvantages. More voices and more boots thumping against the level tunnel floor.
Fairly soon, no direction seemed likely to yield an escape route. Shots came out of the darkness at them.
They took up positions on opposite sides of the tunnel and alternated fire in both directions.
Gene wondered how many rounds his weapon had, trying to remember whether she had told him seven hundred or seventeen hundred — or was it just seventy?
He sprayed on full automatic for a while, then switched to single shot in case the lowest figure was correct. He had two extra clips in his knapsack but doubted he could reload under fire. It had been difficult enough in “training.”
Slugs chunked into the wall near him, not ricocheting even when hitting at a sharp angle. They packed a lot of wallop, these weapons did. The man Sativa had shot would probably have died in any case, possibly from shock alone. With that grim consolation. Gene assuaged his feeling of half-earned guilt.
But that wasn’t really bothering him. The prospect of imminent death was. They were trapped, and this was possibly the end. As he fired, he thought of giving up.
No. There had been a death; an execution, yet. As he saw it, that pretty much blew chances for a negotiated settlement or clemency on the captors’ part. Anyway, Sativa probably had not lied about these guys. They certainly weren’t pulling any punches.
Or were they? They were returning fire very conservatively.
Of course. They were afraid of setting off all this ammo.
Sativa wasn’t. She had turned into a human Gatling gun, spitting death in both directions.
How much longer before the nuke grenades went off?
Nuclear grenades. Really, now. He couldn’t conceive of it. It seemed like a joke.…
He watched in amazement as Sativa threw something in one direction, hauled back, and heaved something in the other.
Nuke grenades in the tunnel?
“Concussion squibs! Get down!”
Gene hunkered down just in time. Twin flashes dazzled him, and two bone-shaking concussions jarred him one way, then the other. He wound up on his buttocks, wedged in tight.
She yanked him out and pushed him forward.
“Get, get!”
He got, running through thin smoke and jumping over still bodies.
“Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston pie!” he yelled as he brought the butt of his rifle around to connect with an enemy face mask. He ran on into the darkness, virtually blind.
He collided with someone, rolled, and bounced to his feet again, racing on. He cracked his hip against something, almost tripped again, dimly saw a comer to turn and turned it.
A half-minute later he was still sprinting through total darkness, somehow using his magical sensors, when he heard Saliva’s hoarse shout behind him.
He sensed something up ahead, a barrier. He slowed to avoid banging up against the gigantic metal door that blocked the end of the tunnel.
She came running up, bringing her ghostly glow with her.
“You’ve found it!”
“What? Oh, the freight entrance.”
“Yes!” She dragged him backwards. “We’ve got to arm the launcher.”
“Right.”
He followed her back down the tunnel to the nearest intersection. When they got there, shots drove them back.
“Give it to me!”
He took the launcher off his back and handed it over.
“Cover!”
He took up a position at the comer and began concentrating fire on the tunnel segment to the right. Answering fire was more responsive here, as the tunnel was less cluttered with munitions in this area. He switched his weapon back to automatic and hosed in both directions to keep enemy heads and weapons down.
Sativa worked furiously behind his back. But soon she was ready. Balancing the firing tube on her shoulder, she took aim at the blind end of the tunnel.
“Get down and cover your eyes!”
“We’re too close!”
“Move!”
He stretched out and tried to make himself one with the wall, burying his face in his shirt-sleeve.
“You’re right, this ought to kill us,” she said almost casually a second before he squeezed the trigger.
The missile left the tube with an ear-splitting whoosh of flame.
A split second before the world came apart he felt her weight on his back, felt her shielding him with her body.
More light than he’d ever suspected to exist turned the mine into the interior of a star.
He couldn’t get up at first. She was lying on his legs; he pushed her off and struggled to his feet. He bent to pick her up, couldn’t quite. He slapped her face a few times.
He did manage to drag her a few feet before she woke up.
“I can walk,” she yelled.
He helped her up and she could walk a bit. There was light coming from the blasted end of the tunnel, which was now a gaping hole in the side of the mountain. Together, they staggered toward blinding day.
Just as they came out into the world she lurched and fell. He lost his grip on her and she rolled down the crumbling slope of the mountain. He ran after her, fell, and rolled until he was brought up against her still form.
There was a gaping hole in her chest, blood fountaining out.
“Run,” she said. “The grenades … chain explosion …”A spasm went through her body.
She died in the interval between heartbeats.
He made his way down the mountain — running, stumbling, falling, sometimes all three at once. He slid the remainder of the way and ended up half-buried in a pile of mine tailings.
He got up and ran, amazed that he was essentially unhurt, no bones broken. His hands were scratched but that was the extent of the damage.
He began to sprint, wondering how far you’d have to run to be safe from multiple nuclear blasts — and possible chain-reaction secondary explosions. Pretty far, he guessed.
He ran across bare desert floor and jumped a narrow dry wash. When he came to another, this one wider and deeper, he dove in and took cover.
About fifteen seconds later the mountain went up. But it was a surprisingly muffled, subdued affair. Smoke issued from the ventilation shafts along the peak of the mountain, then flames reared up. A tongue of fire licked out from the tunnel mouth, then turned to black smoke. A few seconds later a series of smaller explosions began and continued for the next several minutes. The mine turned into a nuclear inferno.
By that time he had begun to walk home.
He came trudging through the portal, stepping from that too-colorful world of blue and yellow rocks into the relative drabness of the castle.
He felt a slight jar as he
passed through, a signal that there was some time displacement. Every universe has its own clock, its own rate of time flow. Spend an hour in a different world and a day might go by in the universe you left. Gene had developed a sixth sense about it; he could usually guess how much time had passed in the castle since his departure.
It felt like half a week, castle time, give or take a day. He’d only been gone, at most, six hours in subjective time. He wondered what had happened, if anything, in his absence. Probably nothing.
He came into the sitting room and collapsed on the settee. He wasn’t hurt. He had defied death again. He wondered why he liked to do that.
Silly. Very silly to keep doing it. One of these times he was going to be just a tad too silly and get his ticket punched.
He thought about Sativa.
Then he decided not to think about Sativa. Sativa belonged in another world. Her world was not his. No need to think of her at all. She wasn’t part of reality.
He thought about her anyway. He thought of her face and how pretty it was. Then the face became distorted by hate.
He didn’t want to think about her. He didn’t want to do anything just now except rest. He’d go to his room, catch a shower, and go to bed. When he got up he’d eat, then maybe go to the Gaming Hall and see what was cooking there. Maybe somebody wanted to get up a few rubbers of bridge. Or cribbage. Or whist or something. Trivial Pursuit?
He saw purple eyes and white hair.
Funny, it didn’t look old white, like hair on an old person. It was just white. Like the whitest blond. A little whiter than corn silk.
But she didn’t exist any longer. Her world — her worlds — didn’t really exist. Nothing really existed but the castle.
The places on the other side of these portals weren’t real, he told himself. They were movies. Yeah. They were 3-D Technicolor movies in Cinerama and Panavision with Dolby stereo sound. You could walk through them.
She’d been nothing but celluloid, the kind of stuff that dreams are made on.…
Dreams.
Twenty-four
Seaside
Dreams.
She’d had a doozy last night. Crazy stuff.
Linda poured another cup of coffee, added a dab of milk. No sugar, and she hated the substitute. She drank and looked out her kitchen window with its view of palm trees, Santa Monica beach, and the wide Pacific. The moon was still up, setting in the west.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.[24]
Crazy dream about a castle.
The phone rang and she reached for it.
“Hello?”
“Hi! Up early, are you?”
“Hello, John, dearest. I had a nutty dream about you last night.”
“Oh? Sexy, I hope.”
“Well, sort of. You were a king in a magic castle.”
“Great. What were you?”
“A witch, I think. I could do magic. So could you. And then … it got scary.”
“What, the dream?”
“Yeah. I don’t want to talk about it. Something happened to you, and I woke up in a sweat.”
“You okay?”
“Sure. It was just a dream. Listen, do you want to do lunch today?”
“Why not? And dinner. And more.”
She smiled. “I like the “more’ part. I love you.”
“I love you, Linda.”
“Are we still on for the trip up to Tahoe?”
“You bet. We leave Friday night.”
“It’ll be nice. I’m glad I met you, John.”
“Been nice so far, hasn’t it? Me, a king? You know, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It was strange — the dream, I mean. It was so involved. Did you ever have a dream that seemed so real and so detailed that you think, Where am I getting this stuff?”
“All the time. I dream all the time, Linda. In fact, last night I dreamed that I died.”
“Oh, how awful. Are you okay?”
“Sure. But how can we tell when we’re dreaming, Linda? Maybe this is a dream.”
“I’m getting such a weird feeling hearing you say that.”
She looked out the window. Palm trees, bright sun, the bright blue Pacific. Didn’t she belong here? What could be wrong? What could possibly be …?
“John? Hello?”
The phone had gone dead.
And now night was falling. The sun sank into the darkening ocean. The moon fell out of the sky and the stars threw down their spears.…
“No!”
She dropped the phone and screamed.
She awoke screaming.
The room came into focus. Her room, her suite in the Guest Residence, at Castle Perilous.
Arms wrapped about herself, legs crossed, she sat on the bed and trembled for several minutes. Then she got up and went to the bathroom.
When she came out she poured herself a drink of water from the pitcher on the night table. She gulped it down.
She collapsed back onto the bed and pulled the covers up snugly around her.
And fell back into dream.
Twenty-five
Sea of Oblivion
The night wind blew with steady force. The crew hoisted the spinnaker and the big sail bloomed proudly off the bow.
The albatross followed, circling in the darkness, a white form like a ghost in the night.
“I don’t like the looks of that bird,” he allowed.
“Tekeli-li!” came the call of the albatross.
Apart from that, he was still enjoying doing the skipper thing: shouting orders, bellowing his displeasure, slurping coffee, spitting it over the side and complaining.
“Bilge water! Brew me up something potable!”
“Aye, Cap’n! You’d like, maybe cappuccino?”
“Just espresso.”
“How about a pastry to go with that, sir?”
“You have cannoli?”
“Plain or chocolate?”
“By “plain’ I hope you mean vanilla.”
“Yes, sir, I mean vanilla, sir.”
“With the dark chocolate chips, right?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Just the chips, none of the candied fruit nonsense.”
“Sir, I would say that these are your purist’s cannoli, sir.”
“Fine, bring me one. After dinner.”
“What will you be eating for dinner, sir?”
“What d’you have?”
“Milk-fed veal, sir.”
“Well, wring some out and bring me a glass.”
“That’s not very original, sir.”
“I’m still waiting for that coffee, Telly! The longer I wait, the fouler the weather to come!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Telly left the bridge and the skipper to his thoughts.
He had none. He couldn’t think, he could only go through this dumb show, this pretense, this playacting … this —?
Yes, what the hell was it? Where was he? Why couldn’t he remember anything? He was tired of all this.
Perhaps he was starting to remember.
He scanned the sky. That remark about bad weather had been prescient. He saw flashes, then heard far-off thunder.
“Storm off the starboard beam!”
“Tekeli-li!” the albatross cried.
The storm-blast came and whipped the sea to a frenzy. Whitecaps rose like ice-cream cones and white foam curdled and clotted across the face of the deep. The ship rocked in its cradle of the ocean. Mist gathered and snow fell, and it grew wondrous cold. Icebergs, mast-high, floated by.
Saint Elmo’s fire blazed on the masthead and about the rigging.
“Nice touch.”
“Coffee, sir!”
He took the coffee
. “Well, it’s about time. Pretty storm, eh? What’s it all about, Telly?”
“What are storms usually about, skipper?”
“Oh, I dunno. About nature, the elements. Life. About man and woman, birth, death and infinity. And like that. Did you put Sweet ’N Low in this?”
“Sir, our sugar stores are way down.”
“We just put out!”
“Sorry, everything’s wet down in the galley. We’re shipping water.”
“Well, next time send it Federal Express. God, this is awful. I hate diet soda, too. Leaves an aftertaste. Know what I mean?”
“I do, sir, but I have a weight problem.”
“Are you kidding? Why you’re as svelte as a mackerel. Look at this gut.”
“Tekeli-li!”the albatross screamed as it wheeled in the stormy sky.
“I wish that frigging bird would shut up.”
“It’s an omen, sir.”
“Omen of what?”
“Can be a good omen, sir; can be a bad omen.”
“Well, what species is that critter?”
“I’d say pretty bad, sir.”
“Tekeli-li!”
“I’ll give you “Tekeli-li,” you mangy bird. Telly, fetch my Hawken. 50 caliber from the ordnance locker.”
“Sir, but —!”
“No buts. Tout de suite.”[25]
Telemachus fetched it tout de suite.
“Hey, he’s gonna shoot the albatross!”
Telly’s announcement was met by wailing and moaning among the crew.
“Forbear, Cap’n! Don’t do it!”
“Oh, why not,” the skipper chided. “It’s just a damned bit of wildfowl.”
“I fear thee, Ancient Mariner!”
He took aim and fired. A puff of feathers bloomed in the dark sky.
Presently, something thudded against the deck. And there it lay on the glistening boards, still and bloodied.
“That’s no albatross! You! What’s-your-name!”
“Morry, sir.”
“Morry, take a look at that thing.”
“I’m looking at it, sir.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a chicken.”
“A goddamned chicken?”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned to Telly. “So, what the hell is this?”
“I don’t know, sir. You shouldn’t have shot it.”
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