THE WANTON OF ARGUS aka THE SPACE-TIME JUGGLER

by John Brunner

  Kelab nodded quite calmly. He said, “Indeed it is.”

  Ordovic’s sword flew from its scabbard and he made it whistle in the air an inch from the conjurer’s chin. He said, “As you value your life, restore her her senses!”

  Kelab made a tiny movement, and the sword blued, flared, and melted into nothing. He said, “I have already, Ordovic. This girl is not Sharla of Argus.”

  “Not—Conjurer, you lie!” Ordovic tossed aside the useless sword hilt and made as if to smash Kelab’s face with his bunched fist.

  “I tell truth,” Kelab insisted, with a glance at Landor. His face was strained, and around him too, the air was beginning to glow blue. Landor was scowling anxiously, and his eyes burned with an inner light. “This girl is no princess, but a puppet, a dupe, a slave.”

  “Of whom?” demanded Ordovic.

  Kelab’s face went into a snarl like a tiger’s, but he forced out with difficulty, “Why, who else but Landor, Ordovic?”

  Landor said furiously, “Conjurer, you are mad!”

  Kelab relaxed, shrugged easily. He said, “Answer me this question. When did Andalvar fall ill? Five months ago without warning?”

  Landor nodded, puzzled.

  “Yet,” said Kelab devastatingly, “it is a three-month journey from here to Loudor, longer by way of Annanworld, and when you found Sharla you claimed to have been engaged in searching for her two months already. Three months before Andalvar fell ill you went in search of Sharla. Why then?”

  “There was a—a prophecy,” began Landor, reddening, but Kelab cut him short.

  “You do not believe in prophecies, Landor. You have said so often. Only last night you said so again. Why then?”

  There was a sudden crash of thunder, and darkness came, blacker than the depths of space.

  For an instant Ordovic feared he had been struck blind. He could feel nothing, hear nothing but the echoes of that tremendous thunderclap, and—

  And there was nothing beneath his feet, no concrete, rain-wet, and no cold breeze on his face.

  Death?

  Then there was a great ripping of the blackness like frozen lightning, and solidity returned to his body. He gulped air and stared around.

  No ship. No concrete beneath his feet. No low buildings around the port. No city of Oppidum beyond them. But a lavender sky and a cruel red sun, and a hot blast that tore at his eyes, and bare hard rock beneath his feet. He was alone.

  He cried out in terror. There was no fear in him of human weapons, of sword or spear or even the mutants’ thing-that-kills-at-a-distance, but this was magic, and it was more than human.

  The cry went echoing among the rocks around him, and echoed and echoed again, and seemed to grow with distance instead of fading. Twenty miles ahead he saw a mountain like a bleeding finger in the harsh red light split and fountain into the sky without sound save the echo of his cry.

  The splitting of the mountain made the earth shudder like a pool of water. He saw the frontal wave of an earthquake flow across the flat bare plain towards the rocks where he hid, parting it into chasms a mile deep and folding it like waves breaking.

  Then it reached him, and the ground shook with terrifying silence, and he fell, blinded and nauseated, into a vast crevasse.

  Down—down—down—

  Then the blackness split again and there was a cool green bower among drooping trees that were not birbrak trees but enough like them to awaken a stir of longing. There was green lush grass before it and a clear still pool with a few pebbles on the bottom. He looked, entranced, into the bower, and saw Sharla.

  She sat there on a bank of the cool grass, naked, and stretched out her arms towards him with a glad cry. He made to run forward, embrace her—

  And a voice—her voice—said in his memory, “I am not Sharla of Argus.”

  Sharla—not Sharla—real or imaginary—

  He hesitated, and she called again. Her voice?

  Or the voice of Landor, whose puppet she was?

  He stopped, planting his feet firmly on the ground, and looked away. She began to weep. He steeled himself not to move.

  Then there was a touch on his shoulder, and he half relented, turned to face her—

  But it was not Sharla. The green and shading trees had put out their branches like tentacles, to constrict—

  Again he screamed, and began to run. On the water’s edge he tripped and fell into the pool. It parted before him, and he fell without breaking the surface.

  Down—down—down—

  Then searing heat, blistering heat. He stood among rocks that glowed redly, before a pool of molten metal that bubbled like water, white-hot. Flames flickered and spat around him, and there was a high thin singing in the air, which stank of sulphur and had the hot unsatisfying flatness of a furnace room.

  He looked up. There was no sky but a veil of hot, smoky vapors that whirled and scudded and sometimes tore to show, straight overhead, an unbearable white flame that was a sun. And not only straight overhead—eastwards another, dimmer, and southwards another, blue instead of white. Three blazing suns and rocks that were ready to flow down as lava.

  The pool before him boiled furiously, bubbling and spitting. One of the red bubbles did not burst, but grew larger. He drew back, but the rock behind him was red-hot. He froze, staring with horrified eyes at the surface of the monstrous bubble. Higher it grew. Taller than himself, its base all but touching his feet. Higher—

  He fell forward and it burst, leaving a hollow roundness into which he fell.

  Down—down—down—

  He crashed into the branches of a thick tree, its leaves blue-green and shiny. The heat here was wet, muggy; the air smelt of decayed vegetation and fetid swamps. There was a monstrous roaring noise in the distance.

  All around was the tree, obscuring the sky except for the gap straight overhead caused by his fall—a real, physical fall, which had bruised him and torn his clothes and stunned his mind.

  He shifted in the crotch where he lay, and something slender and black rustled away, hissing. A serpent!

  He stared around wildly in the green-dark shade, and saw more of them, coiled on the branches or sliding without noise up or down the trunk. One of them disturbed a creature which flapped away on many leathern wings, uttering a curious harsh scream.

  Then the roaring was nearer, and he saw things coming towards him through the jungle. They were all mouth and great sagging belly, with many shifting eyes and long whiplike tentacles.

  One of them came up to the tree where he was, and a thin long tentacle wrapped round his body and tore him from his perch, held him for an instant above that horrible black maw. The stench of rotten meat from it made him vomit.

  Then he was falling again, down—

  A bare expanse of snow and a bitter, cutting wind. He lay in the snow for a while, panting, weak in body and mind. Delicious coldness—he could lie here forever and sleep—

  He forced himself to stagger to his feet and wrapped his torn garment around his cold body. At once snow drove into his face and a blizzard shut down around him like a wall.

  What now? Was this the end? Was his fall from world to world to finish here? Was this even real? His frantic mind beat at the numbed confines of his comprehension, seeking an answer which he could not give.

  Someone was coming towards him through the snow. A big figure, larger than life. The Leontine giant?

  No, he was dead. He himself had done the killing—

  And yet not. That was Sabura Mona’s hypnotic conditioning. She had done the killing. And here she was. Walking out of the blizzard—

  He turned and stumbled away, fell and lay still in the snow till she came and picked him up as if he had been a child, and walked with him into the whirling whiteness.

  Sometimes, as he looked at her, she seemed not to be Sabura Mona, but Kelab, and she spoke with Kelab’s voice, soothing him to sleep, and he drowsed, warm in her arms, as if she radiated warmth in this sub-zero world. It seemed to last
a long time…

  The air blued for a moment, and he was suddenly fully awake again, blinking in bright yellow light. Sabura Mona set him down upon a soft couch before a leaping fire, which Kelab was tending. Then she went aside to the wall and stood motionless.

  Ordovic sat up and stared at Kelab. The little conjurer was cut and bleeding. His gaudy headscarf was muddy and his brown clothes were torn. But there was a kind of strange contentment on his face.

  Ordovic thought, minutes—or years—ago, I hated this man more than I hated anyone in the galaxy. But I cannot hate him any longer because I know who did to me what has been done, and beside the hatred I feel for that man I can have no others.

  Without looking up the conjurer said, “I owe you an explanation.”

  Ordovic looked around him. He saw a square room with this couch where he lay, a stool beside the fire for Kelab, the walls bare and featureless. He said grimly, “A small debt beside what Landor owes me.”

  “You got it pretty badly, no?” said Kelab sympathetically. “I did what I could for you, but; Landor is powerful in his way, and it wasn’t a lot.” He shifted a log, and the flames spat and crackled.

  “Explain then,” said Ordovic, rising and coming over to spread his hands at the fire. “Where are we?”

  “We are no place in any physical sense, Ordovic, since this and all the other places you have been swept through are countries of the mind—those, visions from the sick mind of Landor, but this is a creation of mine.”

  Ordovic shook his head to clear it. He said, “I owe you my life. Or Sabura Mona. Somehow I have a strange impression that you are the same person. Who is Sabura Mona?”

  “You already have an inkling of the truth,” said Kelab. “She is not human. She lives alone, without comforts and without one slave—yet she guides an empire. The Empire. She is a robot, a mechanical woman.”

  Ordovic nodded slowly. He had known, really, since he saw her kill the Leontine giant. He looked at her again, standing with inhuman stillness against the wall, and this time he did not shudder, for she was only a machine.

  He said, “But how is she here? Is she too an illusion?”

  Kelab shook his head. “Things of the mind are real here, and so she is real. She is as much a thinking being as you or I. She is here in her own right. Also she is my only advantage over Landor.”

  “And you? You are no mere man. Are you a robot?”

  Kelab shook his head.

  “A mutant, then? From one of the Outland worlds?”

  “I’m no Outlander.”

  “Then you must be an emissary from the Golden Age.”

  “Not what you mean by the Golden Age—the time of the greatness of the Empire—but from a better age than this nonetheless. I’m from the future.”

  He accepted it without disbelief. The skepticism was washed out of him. “But Sharla?” he said. “The girl who is not a princess after all?”

  Kelab glanced at his watch. He said, “We have a short time before Landor can strike again. I stunned him, with a lucky blow you might say, but it was no physical weapon I used. Next time or never, I’m afraid… But your explanation—

  “Landor too is from the future, and it is in the creation of that future that I am engaged now, and that’s why I was so anxious to secure Andra in the Regency. I’m going to have a devil of a time putting things to rights even if I do beat Landor.

  “The history of my time depends on Andra marrying Barkasch and bringing Mercator into the Council of Six—remember? The prophecies about the ruin of the Empire which Landor sealed his doom by affecting to despise, will come to pass, and revolt and rebellion will tear it apart. There will be another Long Night, in which most of the histories and most of the knowledge will be lost. Yet out of that will come the first human society to approach perfection.

  “Somewhere in the Long Night a mutation will occur which will give—from my point of view, gave—to men for the first time unbounded power and a standard by which to control their using of it. The power—well, I said I held the planet of Argus in my hand. I did and do. I could crush it like a soft fruit with no other tool than my mind. And all—or nearly all—the men and women of my time have that power. The standard by which they control it—is telepathy. That was the key. It gave men a sense of unity, of belonging to a union rather than fighting for themselves alone.

  “The result—peace between man and man. The end of your breed, Ordovic, and of all fighters, but the fine fruit of this tangled tree of humanity.

  “But not quite the full fruit. The mutation had not yet bred to perfection in my time, and one or two individuals lacked the sense of common ground and still craved the feeling of power over their fellow men. Such atavisms must be shunned by us, for their insanity is in part contagious, so we segregate them and watch them.

  “Once, one of them vanished. I do not mean died, or went away. Our sense of unity is not dulled by distance, and death is a slow fading after tens of thousands of years to one who controls his environment as completely as do I, for instance. He—whom you call Landor—had taken himself and his pretensions to power to a time and place where he could use them.

  “What time? That was the question we had to answer.

  “We guessed that the by then almost legendary Empire would have attracted him. We studied the few flimsy records we had for any spot at which he might try to interfere, and posted scouts to watch them, of whom I was one. I knew as soon as I was told of the coming of Sharla that something was wrong—and behold: Landor. Ambitious to wield real power over people—Imperial power.

  “He knew who I was, of course, since I changed the marriage bond. My motive in that was not what you thought, but to prevent Barkasch from being unable to marry Andra later. That was the first move—in the nature of a challenge.

  “The girl you know as Sharla is not Sharla. She is much as the real Sharla might have been, but her name is Leueen and she is of middle-class birth and no princess. Landor slipped in between her sale by Heneage at Mooncave on Loudor and her purchase by Pirbrite, took her out of time long enough to give her some resemblance to the real Sharla and construct a complete and detailed hypnotic personality for her. Then he shifted to the time of Andalvar’s death, and planned to use her as a puppet, to front for his ruling of the Empire.

  “But there were holes—vast lacunae—in his story, if anyone had looked for them. Did you truly believe that anyone shrewd enough to be a slaver would not have investigated the claims of a child to be Sharla Andalvarson? He could have named his own price to her father—half the galaxy! No, the real Sharla died when one of the holds of the slaver blew into space during takeoff. I’ve met the slaver—he didn’t know even then whom he’d kidnapped. And his pretensions to statecraft! You’re no skilled hand at intrigue, but you knew enough to walk warily and plug the spy-holes in your room. He? He did not even expel Andra’s slaves from Sharla’s quarters.

  “He played badly, considering they were the highest stakes he could name.”

  “Or I,” said Ordovic. “Imperial dominion—it could have made the Empire great again.”

  Kelab laughed shortly. He said, “You owe the Empire no allegiance. You’re Outland born. Besides, I can name a higher.”

  “Name it.”

  “Peace between men.”

  Ordovic considered it soberly for a while. Then he said, “I lack the sense of unity you say you have. And all my life I’ve lived by violence. But I can understand, I think. Maybe it is a higher stake.”

  “Landor has not yet lost,” said Kelab. “Ordovic, our time’s shortening. Listen to this.

  “Remember that what happens to you is illusion as far as you’re concerned. If you fall into the trap of believing, you’re lost. I cannot protect you always, for Landor has the strength of the insane and I—I say it in all humility—I am more important to the safety of the human race than you. Landor has hidden Sharla as I hid Dolichek when the Leontine giant kidnapped Sharla for me, but his is no mere illusion of warped l
ight as mine was, but a twisting of the mind, of space, even of time. If you want to find her, remember for all you are worth that all is illusion save the spaceport at Oppidum. When we return there, the battle’s over.”

  Ordovic said, “Kelab, once I called you a coward, afraid to fight with a man’s weapons. I am ashamed. The weapons you fight with are not a man’s. They are the weapons of gods.”

  “Hush!” said Kelab, his dark face suddenly alert. He put out one hand, and the robot that was called Sabura Mona came to life—

  And there was blackness.

  IX

  He was aware in a strange extra-sensory way of the presence of Kelab and Sabura Mona, casting their minds here and there, searching, and of an atmosphere of struggle beyond ordinary human striving. In the midst of the darkness he clung with all his powers of mind to one bubble of brightness. It framed Kelab’s face, set and serious, saying, “If you fall into the trap of believing, you are lost.”

  This is illusion!

  The pounding of his heart was like a trip-hammer, and the rush of blood in his ears like a mighty tide. He felt neither heat nor cold, only an overpowering sense of evil, wrongness, insanity.

  That wasn’t illusion.

  Then the darkness began to drift away, like a curtain falling in low gravity, revealing a blank landscape with a ghastly sun setting behind black mountains ahead of him. Stars shone down with the unwinking glare of empty space. There was a bare orange plain before him and around him, and he felt sand soft and dusty between his toes.

  This is illusion!

  But things of the mind had reality here, even as he was real, and as conscious as if he were physically present. What twisted creation of Landor’s warped brain might not also be real here? Sabura Mona was real though she was a robot—

  In panic, he crouched, stared all around, hardly daring to look from one spot to another lest what he feared should slip his eye. Nothing. Upwards, nothing. Blackness.

  It dropped from above like a wet pall, softly, coldly slimy, and folded over him from head to foot, a constricting nothingness. He screamed, kicked, fought—