by C. L. Moore
Juille went up the slope toward the wall, her lips set thinly. She thought she knew what she would find there, and in a moment or two she did—a rectangle of cloudy glass set into the stones. That settled it. Egide, for some unfathomable reason of his own, had brought her back to the pleasure world where their brief idyll had run its course. This was Cyrille.
Why was she here? She had a brief, wild idea that Egide might have imagined the revisiting of old scenes would win her anew to the evanescent mood that had once enchanted them both. But in the urgency of current happenings, she knew not even Egide would attempt anything so fantastic. No, if he were here—and he must be—then Jair and the Andarean weapons would be here, too. Obviously they had come this far at least without interference from the imperial forces. Was this, then, a stopover on their way to the H'vani base, or had they a reason for visiting Cyrille? Or—might they have dropped her here and gone on alone? No—because the real danger from the Lyonese space guards lay beyond Cyrille's orbit, not inside it. If they needed her at all, they needed her as a hostage to pass them by the guards.
Well, they must be here, then. Somewhere on Cyrille, with their nameless weapons, and perhaps armed also with advice from the Ancients that could certainly mean no good for Ericon. She could not even count very much on interference from the skeleton staff of attendants left on Cyrille. The H'vani were armed and ruthless. She could imagine Jair making very short work of anyone who crossed his path. Her very presence, bound and helpless in this room, testified that no staff member had lived long enough to spread an alarm.
She stood before the gate, looking around what must be a moderately small room, though her gaze reached out unhindered toward distant horizons. The grass, the foremost willows, the wall were real. Perhaps some of the lapping water. But the rest was all illusion reflecting upon mirrored walls. Somewhere beyond them, Egide and Jair would be at work—on what? And alone? Probably, unless some of the Andareans had come on with them. Their own ship and men would have been impounded from the very first.
Well—She twisted at her tied hands hopefully. The bonds felt softer, like cloth instead of the knifeproof cord Helia had used. How could she test it? There were no sharp stones; the glass walls would not break, she knew. There was nothing that—
Juille laughed suddenly and fell to her knees. She had her spurs. It seemed interminably long ago that Helia had put them on her heels for a morning ride. In the crowded lifetime since so much had happened that she knew she might never ride a horse again, perhaps might never live to see these spurs removed. But they could do her one last service now, if her cords were made of cloth. She strained backward, sawing precariously.
The rowels bit satisfyingly into her bonds. It was back-breaking and tedious, but it was working. After a long while she felt the cords let go, and for the second time began to rub the prickles of returning circulation from her hands.
And now—what? To all appearances, Juille still sat upon an open beach with blue water breaking at her feet. It was difficult to believe that the walls of a small room were really close about her. The door itself probably lay beyond the gateway in the wall, but she knew it would be locked—It was. Her only contact with the outside was the communication panel, which might be dead. Still, since the illusion of this beach with its strolling ghosts persisted, the communications might be open, too. It was difficult to guess what effect the death of Cyrille's operators would have on the persistence of Cyrille's illusions. Perhaps none at all.
Rubbing her wrists, she walked up the blue grassy slope and pressed the buttons for sight and sound beneath the panel. In the brief moment while it glowed into life, she heard a distant murmur of laughter and saw the young lovers strolling again beyond the trees. The sight of them was oddly dreadful, and somehow oddly pathetic. They were so perfect an illusion of a perfect, idyllic past which might never come again, a peacetime when lovers could walk unheedingly over open beaches. Somewhere, the originals of this living reproduction had once walked hand in hand. They might have grown old many years ago; they might have died yesterday or last week on some other world under the bombardment of H'vani guns. Or they might be cowering at this moment in some underground shelter shaken with the detonation of bombs. But they walked here in an eternal moment of laughter and murmuring, beside a bright blue sea, and they turned indifferent, blind faces to Juille's predicament. Their detachment partook, in a way, almost of the Ancients' divine disinterest, or of the cold, still, passionless reaches of space.
Juille looked away.
The panel was lighting up. She looked through it into a corner of some office, with a black glass desk below a wall board on which lights winked busily. Across the desk, a dead man sprawled. Juille looked at him stonily and pressed the buttons again. She did not know the proper combination, but she thought that eventually she must find a room where the men she sought were working. Probably the control room. Because, until she knew better, she must assume that the H'vani had come to Cyrille for a purpose, and she knew the only purpose in their minds would be destruction. The control room, she had heard, was the only one here with a visual screen that looked down upon the great green world of Ericon. She hunted on and on.
And she found other dead men. She found offices wrecked and charred. She found empty rooms. But she found no living creatures until at last, by a lucky accident, she finally hit upon the combination that opened a little window upon the men she was hunting. And her guess had been right. They were in the control room.
Its vast space was crowded with the machinery that kept Cyrille upon its course and filled with the living illusions of its fantasies. One wall was glass, like a telescopic lens focused upon the world beneath. And though that world was directly below, in the window it stood at right angles to the floor like a looming green wall.
Before it, two men were laboring busily. Juille, watching as if from a small opening high up on the side of the great room, saw Jair's red head and beard, and Egide's yellow curls. No other figures moved in the room. They had come on alone, then. And they worked with utter absorption before the glass wall.
The object of their interest was a great searchlight, far larger than themselves. They had maneuvered it before the window on its rolling frame and were centering its focus now upon something outside, with much reference to a chart engraved upon the wall. Over the face of the light, a metal net with rainbow nodes had been spread.
Juille remembered that net. Watching, she felt a cold sinking in the pit of her stomach. She had no idea how the arrangement would function, but its implication was very plain. The Ancients had betrayed her, then, and Helia's people had betrayed her, and unless she could get out into that room very soon, the Lyonese Empire would be betrayed, too.
For Egide had found a substitute for his invading fleet. Here inside the defenses of Ericon, was a ship so cunningly disguised that it could swing a path of destruction all around the planet. He was making Cyrille itself that ship. And Juille thought to herself that if this were the advice the Ancients had given him, then they must have lied to her and the Lyonese. For, unless she could put a stop to it quickly, the world below them was certainly doomed.
Until now, no weapons had ever existed strong enough to bridge the airless gap between Ericon and its satellite, but the confidence showing in every gesture of the men she watched must mean that such a weapon existed now. This searchlight, netted with shining, colored bulbs. It was hard to believe that the light could be cast so far, or that the simple addition of the net would charge it with destroying violence. But the H'vani worked like men who knew what they were doing. Obviously they meant to let the little pleasure-world circle on around Ericon until it floated above the target they had marked. That target would almost certainly be the Imperial City itself. And before avenging ships could blast Cyrille from its course, the city and half the countryside could be wiped out if this weapon had any real power.
Could she stop the destroyers first? It looked hopeless. From this angle she could see o
nly a great panoramic curve of hill and forest below, partly obscured by a rolling thunderstorm. That dim light might be morning or evening; they could be ten minutes from the city or a full turn of the planet. And she had no idea which way the control room lay from here. Even if she knew, the door that shut her in was locked.
Wait, though. She had one weapon, if Egide had not found it. Hopefully Juille groped in her helmet lining. A hard handle met her fingers, and her spirits rose on a swift curve to something almost like hope. She laughed aloud and pulled out the little gun. There it lay, fitting her hand as it once had fitted the hands of a race whose very name no longer had meaning in the Galaxy they once had ruled. It might yet save the race that ruled today, if luck was with Juille.
Slim, flexible barrel with its spiral of silver tubing, bell-shaped muzzle, trigger curved like a tiny sickle—What would happen when she pulled it? Most likely—nothing, unless just possibly the Andareans had made use of the weapons on that rack within recent years. Lightning might come blasting out when she touched the trigger, or the gun might explode in her hand, on—
Juille set her finger on the trigger, clenched her teeth and turned the bell-muzzle toward the lapping sea. Slowly she tightened her finger.
She pressed it back to the guard, and nothing happened Nothing? She had time for one wave of sickening disappointment, and then thought she felt life against her palm. The gun was quivering. The quiver ran up the coil of tubing and shook against her fist, and a tiny glow seemed to be forming about the bell-shaped orifice. A glow that spun and spun. Juille stood holding the gun out at arm's length, while the glow grew brighter and faster, and the spinning increased.
Then a globe of luminous fire drifted from the bell-muzzle. It spun brilliantly like a tiny sun, moving away from her at leisurely speed and expanding as it moved. Straight out to sea it went, and the ripples mirrored its broken reflection on their surface. Juille held her breath.
There was a moment more of silence, while the waves lapped softly on the beach and the willows whispered and distant voices laughed. Then the spinning sun in midair flared out in one expanding flash and one tremendous hissing roar, like fire in water. The flash was golden.
When Juille could see again what she saw looked unbelievable even in the face of knowledge. Hanging in what seemed like open air above the still-rippling ocean was a circle of twisted girders, black and peacock blue from the heat of their destruction. Through the wall she could see a stretch of dim corridor. Plaster fell crumbling between the beams. And all around the edge of the opening a strange little dazzle of dancing colored motes faded slowly. The revolving sun had vanished.
Except for that hole in the air, everything remained unchanged about her. And though that hole was the only touch of reality in all this small world, it was fantastic as it hung there over the serene ocean rolling in from illusory distances.
She waded out through the warm blue ripples. Even when the shattered wall was within arm's length and she could see the transparent glimmer of her own reflection swimming above the wavelets in the reflecting wall, she had a feeling of instability as she set one knee upon a girder that hung unsupported on the air.
Beyond the opening lay a narrow corridor running left and right, lighted only by a dim thread of luminous paint down the center of the floor. Which way? What next? She had no idea even of how many charges remained in her weapon. Perhaps none. Perhaps only two or three. What she must do was find Egide as soon as possible and somehow manage to see him first, just long enough to focus him in the cross-hairs of the lenses which still hung about her neck.
She thought she had shut her mind to Egide now. He must remain only an enemy to kill if necessary, to capture if possible on the invisible leash of her strange lensed weapon. Until she held his life a forfeit in the lens all else must wait. And Jair—well, she must deal with him as opportunity arose. Without quite understanding it, she had a feeling that Jair was less of a danger than Egide.
She turned at random to the right, following the luminous line warily. At the end of the corridor she came out into the office with the black glass desk which she had first seen in the communicator panel. The dead man still sprawled across the glass. Juille, struck by a sudden hopeful thought, began jerking open drawers of translucent opal plastic. Papers—files of colored cards—a bottle of green brandy. A manicure kit. And—ah! A little palm gun with an extra clip of charges!
Juille laughed exultantly. This was for Jair! The bell-mouthed pistol might never fire again; the lens at her throat was a one-shot weapon. But this find put her on an equal footing with the two H'vani.
There was a large communicator panel on the wall behind the dead man. One of the labeled buttons below it said, "Control Room." Juille thought to herself, "I'm not afraid of you now," and pushed the button, watching the panel glow and the great central room take shape beyond it.
Egide and Jair had finished their work. The searchlight was like a long-legged bird with its big eye craning downward through the window that opened upon Ericon. The trap was set. The Imperial City somewhere on the face of the globe below was rolling slowly upward toward its doom.
Egide at the moment was talking into a tiny portable communicator which he certainly had not worn when he landed upon Ericon that day. Reporting—success?—to some H'vani base. Perhaps summoning some armada of invading ships to follow the path of destruction he was about to launch upon the Imperial City. Juille wasted no fruitless speculation on that. She put her face close to the communicator and called:
"Egide! Egide, look up!"
She could hear her own voice echoing hollowly from the walls of the huge room beyond the panel. Egide stared about for several seconds before he located the connected panel. At that distance, though she could see his face change, she was not sure what emotions showed there for a moment. He shouted, "Where are you?" and the echoes rolled back from the high walls.
"Come and find me," she called derisively, and waved her unbound hands at the panel to show that she was free. Before he could answer she pressed the disconnector. Then she counted to ten and pushed the same button again, looking down with a grin into the big room. A struggle of sorts was taking place there. Egide, dropping his private communicator, had evidently made a lunge toward the master control panel to locate the screen she had just used. Jair held him by the cloak and they were disputing fiercely. Juille scowled. Evidently the big red man did not trust his prince with this dangerous captive. But it was no part of her plan to have Jair come hunting her. She listened to the indistinguishable deep murmur of their argument. Then Egide gave a savage shrug and turned back to the window. Jair's white grin split the dark-red beard, visible even from here. She saw him give his belt a hitch, draw his gun and lumber purposefully away, his enormous shoulders swaggering a little.
Juille made an insulting noise into the panel. The two men glanced up, startled. She waved again, even more insultingly, and disconnected the panel. Well, no help for it now. She must find the Control Room herself, and do it quickly, and she must play hide and seek with Jair through the strange interior of Cyrille while she hunted it. Luck decidedly was not with her. But she was well armed now, and the element of surprise was in her favor.
The first thing to do was to get as far as possible from this room before Jair arrived. And since he might come by some swift intramural means she did not know of, she had better go quickly. It was eminently satisfying to feel the weight of a gun in each hand as she turned to the opposite wall—even though one gun might be empty, or very nearly empty. The very feel of it alone sent her spirits soaring. The odds were fairly even after all, for she did not think Jair could know much more about Cyrille's inner workings than she did, nor could he guess that his quarry was as well armed as he. She had no illusions about Jair's purpose. He would certainly shoot on sight. No need any longer to hold her for a hostage, with that deadly mechanism in the Control Room already trained upon Ericon. Jair would shoot without warning, but he could not know that she would, and t
hat gave her a little advantage.
Outside the office a wide, shallow, moving ramp carried Juille down to a hall and an empty foyer with arched doors all around its wall. She glanced about nervously. This was no place for her. Her spurs rang faintly as she ran across the floor and dodged under the nearest arch. Another hallway, curving to the left. For all she knew she might be running straight into Jair's arms. She opened the first door she came to, glanced inside, and then sprinted through a field of waving lilies, knee-high, leaped a chuckling stream, tore open the door of a thatched cottage and found herself in another dim hall lighted by a luminous floorstrip.
The next random door led her into an arcade above a frozen twilight sea, with gusts of snow blowing through the open arches. Her breath went pluming frostily over one shoulder as she ran. Another hallway. An orchard that showered pink-scented blossoms upon her and housed one startled rabbit. It lolloped ahead in a frenzy, dodging off to the side just before she came to a gate in the orchard wall that let out onto the usual hallway.
She lost all sense of direction and ran as haphazardly as the rabbit had done, through a confusion of smallish rooms filled with every conceivable scene and climate. In several that she passed time had stopped. Clouds hung motionless in illusory skies, scenes reflected upon the walls were motionless, too, and lost all power to deceive. No water stirred and the air was windless. But most of the rooms she ran through were functioning still, and she passed a medley of mornings and noons and nights dwelling upon a wide variety of tiny worlds.
So closely is the human mind bound by the revolutions of its planet that after a while she found she had lost her time-sense as well, and could not help feeling that the hours had telescoped together in a dream as she ran, that this should be tomorrow, or even the day after that. Egide's playful device upon the cloud for making the days go by had turned to convincing reality here. She had been through too many nights and mornings for the present to remain today. She had even passed too many winters and blossomy springs for her own mental comfort, and though her reasoning consciousness derided the feeling, it lurked uneasily just below the surface and darkened her subconscious thoughts as she ran on.
