by Bill Adams
It was a good, hard, rib-creaking burn of ten seconds at several gravities, after which queasy free-fall came as a relief. When my eyes resumed focus, I scanned the panel in front of me. I found an active autopilot indicator and began to breathe again; I’d never flown anything remotely like this.
After a few confused flickers, the front holoscreen gave a series of views of where we’d been and where we were going. The Raven’s silver-piped cigar shape was receding rapidly; Hel loomed comfortably close. But before we even made contact with the atmosphere, we heard a sound like a splash of hailstones, and the holoscreen blazed white for a moment.
The shuttle began to tumble through space, a mind-bending spin that took long seconds for the autopilot to correct. The control panel was showing over-temperature indicators for parts of the superstructure and a loss of some internal sensors. I guessed the Pretender had managed to rake us with one of his drive fields. Fast work—and quick judgment on his best friend—but maybe it wouldn’t kill us.
The shuttle’s dispassionate female voice reported fuel overconsumption and prospective shortfall, then asked if a human wished to copilot. I heard Foyle speak up. Then we hit atmosphere and the juddering turbulence made roaring chimney noises all around us. The request for a copilot did not surprise us; no computer can quite match a human’s holistic grasp and willingness to make judgment calls.
But I had no part to play. I turned from the image of the huge planet falling toward us to Foyle’s face in the instrument panel’s lights—not calm, exactly, but alive and almost happy in the exercise of control. I had every faith in her, but couldn’t help thinking that we were out of the game now. The Pretender would make his assault on the Consultant, and there was nothing we could do about it. Even if we lived.
Chapter Twenty-five
At the last moment, just before I stuck the needle in her, Foyle regained consciousness again. This time she seemed to know what was going on, though she’d lost the immediate past. She looked wildly about the dripping, sooty wreckage of the shuttle cabin.
“Crash landing?” she asked. She tried to straighten herself in the cradle of my arms and shuddered with pain when the movement reached her splinted leg.
“You did beautifully,” I assured her. “The navicomp showed you a few places that might be snowfields this time of year. You picked the right one and skimmed us across it soft as a kiss, fifteen minutes after the fuel ran out.”
“My leg?”
“Bit of a jolt when we stopped. We had fire bleeding out of a bulkhead from that energy hit we took in space, and you’d wedged your legs in a bad place to give me a clear shot with the extinguisher.”
“Fire?” She made an almost comic face at the laundry list of disasters.
“Not big, but any worse and we’d be dead. Lost most of the emergency rations and all but one temperature suit. But it’ll work out. We’re only a few days away from the Consultant’s castle. We lost the radio, but he was probably tracking us—I’d imagine he thought it was his wife and daughter who ejected. Wouldn’t be surprised if he sent robots to pick us up, but I can walk us in even if he doesn’t.”
“Walk?”
“There’s a sled to carry you,” I said. “No temp suit, but I can put you in the ration sack with an air tube. You’ll be okay.”
“You’re going to put me to sleep.”
I showed her the label from the medikit. “It’s just first-stage suspend. Best thing for you, until we reach a doctor, believe me.”
“I don’t want to die in my sleep,” she said.
“There’s no danger of that, darling. No big concussion. The pain drugs have confused you, and you passed out when I set the leg, that’s all.”
“You’re not lying to make me feel better?”
“You’re supposed to kill me if I lie to you again, remember?”
“That’s true. Kiss.”
I kissed her.
“It’s terrible not to remember what just happened,” she said. “Like an itch you can’t scratch. Remember, I told you once, you didn’t look like a sidekick? Should have known then what I’d be in danger of becoming if I messed with you. But what could I do? I had to know how the story comes out. And I don’t suppose it’s really any more fun to be you, the man of destiny himself.”
“No. Pure hell, till I had you.”
“Take off your mask. I want to see your true face again.”
I showed it to her. She lifted one hand weakly, brushing my cheek with her fingertips.
“Doesn’t it make you think of him instead?” I asked.
“I could never confuse him for you,” Foyle said. “He and I never even seemed to be in the same room, and I know why—it’s in his face. He does not believe in this universe. He has many feelings, many poses. But he doesn’t really care.”
“I care.”
“I know.”
“What’s your other name, Foyle?” I asked.
“I never liked it, so I threw it away. After Roger died, I wanted a life with nothing in it except what I had chosen. You were different at first, you sneaked in, but even you, finally. I chose you. And I choose you now.”
“I’m yours. You’re the one.”
“Put me to sleep, then,” she said. “And be there when I wake up.”
◆◆◆
Hel was an Earthlike planet, or had been made so long ago by creatures known as the Titans, the aliens whose secrets the first Kanalists had recorded in the White Book for the Consultant to find. But it was a cold world except at the equator, and its useful landmass was in higher latitudes. The hologram pictures on the Raven had shown the Consultant’s castle atop a cliff overlooking a sea. But in this season, as the shuttle navicomp had told us, the sea was frozen over.
That was where we had crashed; the snowfield was the lee of a long, shallow island, and ice stretched everywhere beyond it. The horizon was white and almost empty; I was lucky the damaged shuttle could still tell me which distant smudges of mountaintop to use as landmarks. The sun was a dim red hole in a gray sky, and the vastness I crossed was nothing but wind and ice, ice and wind.
The cold would have killed me in minutes if not for the silvery, lightweight temperature suit, its insulation so perfect it could have cooked me instead, its sensors allowing the fibers to breathe just enough. The cleats on the ends of its boots never seemed to clog and lose their grip. The transparent bubble helmet gave me a good view of the nothingness in all directions, of the wraiths of ice particles that spun and fled in the endless skirling wind; and the helmet feeped an urgent alarm if the wind grew too great, warning me to crouch and lock down the sled anchors until the velocity fell off to a mere forty or fifty kilometers an hour.
The big sled was similarly well-designed, its solar panels sending a trickle of power to maintain the special coating of its runners, keeping them almost perfectly frictionless. Although it was weighed down with a bundle containing a tent, provisions, and Foyle’s sleeping body, I could pull it with little more effort than walking by myself.
The only chore was to carry the towline at arm’s length to one side or the other; if I drew it directly behind me, it overtook the backs of my legs every time I slowed down. After a while, I hit on the notion of tying the towline to the butt of the A-rifle I’d found in the shuttle stores, and carrying the weapon cross-body, arms in front of me.
But no matter how good my equipment, I could not escape the hike itself. I had thought myself fit before I started. You walk all day anyway, don’t you? No, you don’t. After the first four hours the breaks I took became longer and longer. I trudged and trudged, trying fruitless experiments like using the sled as a scooter—too unwieldy—but always returning to the endless walk, on and on, though the distant black landmarks never seemed to get any closer.
Some places the ice changed color, showing tints of green or blue in the gray and white. Some places it was darker and, I feared, thinner, and I diverted my course as much as I could to stay where I felt safer.
It
was not silent. At any time, the moan of the wind might be pierced by mysterious booming or cracking noises that resonated beneath my feet. In the distance I saw holes and rifts in the ice, and sometimes the shapes of big white creatures fishing at them. I had no way of knowing the crust wouldn’t crash open beneath us, too, at any moment. But there was nothing to do about it.
At such times, the mind drifts and dreams.
A man of destiny, Foyle had said. A special destiny. If Summerisle’s story was true, if I had been tangent to time and space when I broke out of the Barbarossa bubble, I could have emerged anywhere in our almost entirely unexplored galaxy, at any point in time from six or seven decades ago to billions of years in the future.
And yet, as if it were meant to be, I had been returned to the tiny patch of stars where humans live, and within a human lifetime.
It would only be a step from accepting that larger-than-life stroke of luck to believing I must fulfill the whole Larkspur legend: the hero who would return to restore Old Rite Kanalism and the Federal Alignment, writing immortal works of art along the way—and to hell with merely living like a human being. What a dictatorial idea, Destiny—no wonder dictators all find it so seductive.
And what a hollow idea, too. Between them, the Pretender and Summerisle had proven that. The great artist—a drunken suspend-sleep psychotic putting on a three-quarters-borrowed play before an audience that would have applauded anything. The great liberator—a perpetual fugitive, hiding even from his own daughter, locked forever in titanic struggles with all the conspirators in the universe.
Trudge, trudge, shift the towline…
What I wouldn’t have given to be Christopher Sly instead. Establish a little theater on the canals of Venezia. Sit in a corner of some tavern in the mornings in a big shirt, writing “minor plays in the manner of Larkspur” and verses to Foyle’s eyes. Foyle would be restless, of course; Venezia’s a bit damp for archaeological digs. Best she picked up another vocation anyway. If history has taught us anything, it is not to dig up the fucking past. Never thought of it before—trudge, trudge—but can’t every evil in the world be traced to the p—
What was that noise?
I had told Foyle I expected the Consultant to send robots for us, and it was half true, even though our flaming reentry and radio silence might have given him the wrong impression, and the Pretender might be keeping him too busy.
But when I heard the strange new noise, a wild metallic chittering, I turned and saw them.
Iceboats of some kind, just black triangles at this distance, coming from behind and skating to my right at great speed—with no water friction to slow them, icecraft keep accelerating, and can go much faster than the wind.
I tried to hail them, and one in the rear, smaller than the others, veered off in my direction.
In the minute it took to come near, the weird chirp and chatter sounded ever louder. I couldn’t see any lines or tackle rattling against the boat; the noise was more like an attempt at communication, but why not radio? And then the black shape was upon me, reefing down its sail area and executing a wild gybe to make a circle in the high wind. Its body was too small to be a manned vehicle, though its rubbery skin could have been a machine’s protective coating.
But then a huge-eared, eyeless head opened a mouth full of white teeth to screech the broken-metal noises at me, and in an instant I could see that the complicated vanes and skates were limbs and talons, and the sails were wings. Eyes would probably have been too vulnerable to wind chill; the dog-sized creature was “seeing” me with sonar, the echoes of its chittering. It circled me and the sled one last time, craned its neck toward the retreating pack of its fellows, and skated off at a hundred kilometers an hour to rejoin them.
Ice bats.
Soon they were lost to sight in the dusk. Not long after that, I had to anchor the sled for the night and set up the tent around it. I reached into the provision sack to check Foyle’s temperature and pulse, feeling slightly less alone, slightly more helpless. I removed my mask and returned it to its dish, not knowing why I bothered with it any more, but not trusting my tired brain to make a decision on giving it up. And I lay in a narrow space on the sled while the tent whirred and flapped in the perpetual wind.
No rescue robots. Yet surely I hadn’t misunderstood what had happened on the Raven. The Pretender had been in charge from the beginning, and Captain Marius had been handcuffed and isolated. But the hostage escape procedure had been brilliantly planned to work without any orders given: every time the ship passed through Niflheim toward Hel, on the hour closest to descent, the disguised shuttle would be prepared to eject. All the captain and his charges had to do if hijacked was get themselves thrown into detention, ready to confirm the escape order when asked. Even a “friendly” like me could trigger it. But that was a weakness; if I’d set it up, I would have required a password, and the shuttle would have had to wait for one of the Consultant’s loved ones to arrive. A curious lapse, that: “I hear you, and recognize your authority.” But maybe after his last visit to Venezia, Summerisle had taken his old keepsake recording of me, the one he’d modeled the Pretender after, and added my voice to the ship’s recognition database. Quite a vote of confidence, and one I hadn’t lived up to…
But neither my unhappy thoughts nor the tent’s whip-crack noises could keep my exhausted body awake for long. It was light when I awoke and put my mask back on. I stowed the tent with stiff and aching limbs, but there is no better antidote for muscle soreness than doing the same exercise the next day. By noon the endless trek was no longer torture, and I took heart to see a change in the landscape I approached. The landmark mountains grew higher above the horizon, and between them began to rise the headlands that were my goal.
But—trudge, trudge, shift the towline—the hypnotic hours of gray on gray, as empty wind polished empty ice, began to have their way with me. I kept stopping to check on Foyle, her warmth the only real thing. The pair of us had gone through ice and cold together before. Had two years really passed since then, or had the interim been just a dream? All my plotting to place myself among the Pan-Kanalists; my escape from the Tribunal I’d always dreaded; the floating world of Venezia; the Pretender with my face and much of my past; an eighteen-hundred-year-old play that told the story of his life; Domina in my arms again. Not very believable, any of it.
What did I want? To be anyone but Evan Larkspur, anywhere with Foyle. Yes, but there would have to be more. I would have to believe it was real, or else I’d be no better off than the Pretender, playing what I knew was only a part in a world full of ghosts.
I wasn’t asking for a life without surprises or flukes—real life is always improbable—but I wanted what Foyle had wanted: “to know how the story comes out.” I wanted a universe with some artistic consistency to it—at least as much as the Pretender had brought to the Manfred play. Not the sort of world you glimpse in a really rotten novel, like The Castle of Otranto, where characters convert within the space of a scene from evil to good and back again, love or kill on the basis of a few sentences overheard and misunderstood, and suddenly forget or suddenly remember the most important facts of their lives as the random turn of plot requires.
But here we were, Foyle and I, hours away from the Consultant’s keep and what would almost certainly be the end of some story, the revelation of some secret, and so many details seemed impossible to reconcile—the Pretender’s skill at versifying, Domina’s passion for her ascetic husband, Summerisle’s lack of interest in my copy of the Barbarossa log, a dozen others. If only I could, for just a moment, see past the masks, mazes, and mirrors to the logic behind the art, the truth to which I could say, “But of course!”
I wanted a sign, and it came into focus for me on the headland, only a few kilometers away and a hundred meters up, looking down from its cliff: the Consultant’s castle, simple, black, and ancient.
The Tower, as Topolina had prophesied. The House of God, they call it sometimes.
And now that I was so close to all the answers, I had to detour to one side. The ice was thinner here—heat from the land, perhaps—and one of the great white fishing creatures stood hunched on a jagged edge of ice overlooking a swatch of black water directly in my line of march. The fisher turned and looked at me once, and I was glad he showed no interest; he was as massive and shaggy as the largest bear, and his walruslike face bore savage-looking tusks.
I passed him at a good distance, more worried about the way ahead, flecked with black patches—would there be a solid bridge to land?—when suddenly a fusillade of clicks and cheeps burst through the wind, and I turned to see the ice bats swooping toward the fisher.
The fisher reared up and roared at them with the sound of a dozen bulls, swinging his tusks and claw-tipped arms. The first bats veered aside to make a tight circle around him and the small fishing hole. Soon the fisher was ringed in by a wall of black wings, all I could see. But now two skaters who had hung back began to approach at amazing speed in a straight line toward the black circle. At the last instant, the other bats scattered; the confused fisher was facing the wrong way as the newcomers lifted off from the ice and soared to either side of him, their skate-blade talons whipping through the air like scimitars, and where they touched down on the other side, the ice was red. The fisher bellowed, turned, broke ice to widen the fishing hole, and jumped into what proved to be shallow water, for he was still waist-deep when a full attack wing sped by, talons flashing.
In moments he’d stopped moving, a mass of blood and blubber, and the pack around him gorged like wolves.
I continued to draw the sled closer and closer to land, but not before untying my A-rifle from the towline and setting the projectiles to “Heat Seeking.” That should do the trick in this environment, and there were twenty shots in the clip, nothing to worry about, really—hadn’t they passed me by earlier?