by Jo Bannister
At first they hardly spoke except about their shared task, Lockwood being as uneasy of Itzhak as Itzhak was terrified of Lockwood. But as the hours passed and nothing happened, neither the peril of their position nor the anxiety each felt for the sick youth who was now King Edmund was sufficiently pressing to keep them from boredom. Lockwood asked, “Have you been long with the Barbarian?”
“I belonged to the old earl,” said Itzhak. “Harry inherited me along with the title.”
“Belonged?”
Itzhak smiled, that rare luminous smile that was made of the same stuff as his songs. “What, doesn’t Chad understand the concept of slavery? Or is it that here only women are considered chattels to be bought and sold?”
Lockwood did not answer directly. A widower now for fifteen years, his own loved and loving wife had originally come to him by virtue not of mutual attraction and consent but of a bride-price. That he did not say as much was strange, because he had never considered it anything other than normal and proper. Instead he said, a little gruffly, “We have a peasant class.”
“An entirely different thing,” asserted Itzhak. “A peasant may labour under a multitude of feudal obligations but on the day-to-day level he is his own master and that makes him fundamentally a freeman. A slave may well enjoy greater comfort, he may eat better and sleep warmer; he may earn the confidence and consideration of people in the highest places; but he has no rights, no intrinsic human value. He is clay, and may be shaped or tramped upon.
“A peasantry grows out of the land. Your mastery of heated irrigation in Chad has given you agriculture, and slavery is an inefficient organ for pursuing it. Slaves need too much supervision, which in turn puts too great a strain on the yield potential of the land: too many mouths to be fed by too few hands. Chad needs a free peasantry. The Northlands don’t. There is no agriculture. The economy is based on the caribou, which are owned by the lords and require little husbanding, and on brigandry. The Northlands have a nobility, a warrior class, and slaves.”
Lockwood nodded, fighting back the notion that it was a thoroughly sensible way of arranging things. That came, of course, of being himself a warrior: he appreciated that others would feel differently. “Were you born a slave?”
“I wasn’t born a Northlander,” said Itzhak. “My family had a small isolated holding southeast of here, at the edge of the Ice Desert. I was acquired by the old earl in much the same way that Shah was by the new: stolen to decorate his halls. My parents had me sing for his pleasure when one of his expeditions brought him to our door. Well, he was pleased enough, I suppose, because when he left – with every beast of ours that could walk and every possession that was not nailed down – he took me too. I was nine years old. His musicians cut me for a castrato but they weren’t as clever as they thought because after that my voice went bad. When they finally accepted that I wasn’t just being difficult they let me write poetry instead.”
“Will I have heard any of your rhymes?”
Itzhak laughed, a high light spritish chuckle like bird-song. “I hope you won’t judge my talent by anything of mine you may have heard. It is my small revenge to write of Harry’s triumphs in the worst verse I can construct. They please the earl well enough, as long as his exploits are sufficiently and flatteringly exaggerated he doesn’t know enough of poetry to know that I mock him, but in civilised lands where my words tell Harry’s tale they know, and they laugh.”
Lockwood was impressed. He had not thought the pale man had so much spleen in him, to take a vengeance against his tyrant.
The time that dragged by for his keepers dripped like slow venom in Edmund’s veins. The measured withdrawal had him in agony, made worse by enough gradually returning comprehension to understand that he must endure it, and with all possible quiet and dignity. Being a sixteen-year-old boy rather than an iron man, he did not wholly succeed.
In all his battle-strewn days, bloodstained and way-marked with death, Lockwood could recall nothing so harrowing as holding the writhing body of his young king, tied wrist and ankle lest in his anguished struggles he injure himself and gagged lest in the empty passages his screams carry too far, and knowing that he had inflicted this agony, and could stop it, and must not. At the height of the craving, before his body began to adjust to the reduced supply, the paroxysms lasted for an hour at a time, the possessed youth kicking and thrashing beyond any reasoned assessment of his physical capacity until finally even that unnatural strength was exhausted and he lay, still but for the tremors of his sobbing, in Lockwood’s powerful arms while the gentle-hearted Itzhak wept openly and Lockwood inwardly.
Chapter Five
Intimacy of a different kind was flowering at the pile. Different from the wary friendship growing in Itzhak’s cell, quite different from the steamy manoeuvres suspicioned by Harry Jess; different almost certainly from any act of human intercourse then occurring anywhere in the world. Its singularity was due to the extraordinary intellects of the two participants, and it began with a man asleep over a book of logarithms.
Paul was not an habitual napper. Normally he slept only an hour or two during the stillest part of the night: if the need arose he could go for days without sleep with no marked lessening of efficiency, only an increasing tetchiness. But he had been working hard on the pile, the sealed room was warm and airless, perhaps there was still enough drax in his system to disturb his equilibrium. When he stopped in the middle of the day to split a flask of wine and a bowl of dust-free fruit with his assistant, he wedged himself in a comfortable corner with his feet up and the calculations reared against his knee, and gently fell asleep.
Shah’s first instinct, when she saw what had happened, was to shake him awake in case Harry came calling. Then, defiantly, she supposed that a nuclear engineer was entitled to spend his lunchbreak as he chose and resolved to let him rest. She quietly removed the book from his lap and his glass from its perilous perch on his softly rising chest, then sat down at the bench to observe him in a way that, in his watchful wakefulness, she was inhibited from doing.
He was older than her and probably older than Harry but not by much: she put him in his early thirties. Awake he seemed older than that; asleep he looked younger. In sleep the deep harsh lines of his face, hardly less intractable than scars, softened and subtly changed, the anger and brittle bitterness leaching away. In their place Shah saw pain: the old underlying pain, not sharp but somnolent, enduring. The anger was an armour, partly to shield him from hurt but mostly so that the blood did not show.
Shah thought again of his terrible loss, a whole dimension ripped from his mind, and again failed to remain objective about it. Panic rose to suffocate her and she thought she must cry out, but a new notion came to divert her, at once impossible and compelling, and so strange that her fright faded.
It was this. Her mind was the same as Harry’s and Itzhak’s and Lockwood’s except – it was of course a massive proviso – for her additional perception. Paul’s mind was the same as hers except that his perception had been erased. So why was not Paul’s mind the same as Harry’s? – because it was not, nothing like, and nothing like any other she knew either. Could the ringing, windy plain echoing around that hive of industry be nothing more than the empty socket which had contained his inward eye? Or was his brain fundamentally different and his lost telepathy a camouflage – not the greatest but the least of his peculiarities?
And having thought that, she really had no choice but to go exploring. There would never be a better chance. Innocuous in sleep, his spare frame for once languorous and unstrung, his penetrating idol’s eyes unseeing and still behind the lowered lids, his breathing unhurried, he might have been a laboratory animal anaesthetised for the experiment. Touching fingers as light as butterfly wings to the fine dark hair which spilt over his brow, she was struck by an unlooked-for vulnerability in his passive, haunted face and wondered about the last time this or something like it was done to him, his mind invaded not by another mind but by a tool which bu
rned. Thinking that she was almost unable to continue, but curiosity and a practical need to know what she was dealing with over-rode conscience and she slid into his brain.
He was still conscious which made it worse. The operation would be impossible under anaesthesia, and there would be no pain, but it was as cruel as making a man witness the amputation of his arm or leg. A spinal injection had locked the skeletal muscles so that he remained quite still without restraint, a prisoner of his own body. As to the other, a neural suppressor protected those around him from telepathic assault, though the fruitless backwash of desperation occasionally sent trays of instruments clattering to the floor.
One of his governors sat beside him, absently patting his immobile hand and wishing he had some more meaningful comfort to offer, his heart – which was unaccustomed to doing much more than pumping – twisting uncomfortably while Paul begged for mercy as he had not before or since.
“You mustn’t do this. Please – it’s not too late. Stop them. I’ll do what you want. Anything. You know what I’m capable of. With power like that you could command the world.”
The old man nodded sadly. “I know. But what’s more to the point, Paul, with power like that you could command the world, and neither I nor anyone else could stop you.”
“All right, I appreciate that, I know why you’re doing this. I tried to get away from you. Can’t you understand why?”
“Of course I understand. I just can’t risk it happening again. You’re too dangerous, Paul.”
“I am as you made me!”
“I know that. I’m sorry we didn’t get it right. Perhaps after this we can give you more freedom, more happiness —”
“I don’t want to be happy. I want to be whole! I’m not a congealed test-tube to be rinsed out and re-used, I’m a man. If you choose to make human experiments, you can’t just flush away your mistakes. Besides, the experiment worked —”
“Yes. But the controls don’t.”
“You can’t destroy me for wanting my liberty! Listen, it won’t happen again, I give you my word —”
“Your word is worth nothing,” the man said gently.
“You can’t do this to me!”
Behind them another voice stated, “Ready.” The man at his side took Paul’s hand in both of his and nodded.
“No!” They said there would be no pain. No pain?! – what then did they call this, this piercing wrenching rending dismemberment in his head, like being eaten alive? He moaned aloud, and felt the hands tighten on his own. Agony dimming his eyes he whispered, “Kill me.”
“That would be murder.”
“So – is – this.”
“You won’t always feel that way,” said the old man kindly. But he did.
She had known before opening her eyes where she was, if not why. That deep cutting chill and the white glare which pierced even shuttered eyelids were unmistakable. The Ice Desert was not so much an environment as an element: it surrounded the cities of the northern world, lapping against their walls, exquisite and pristine and eternally threatening to flatten the walls and flow back over the cities. When the desert winds blew long and hard the ice crystals would pile up in great drifts along the windward walls, and the people of the cities would venture out when the wind stopped to gaze in awe at the white ramps like highways into their fortresses, and would bury their sense of menace under uneasy jokes until labouring teams lowered the frozen wave which dwarfed their defences and made their entire way of life seem fragile and transient. From the standpoint of men, the Ice Desert was like time itself.
Shah was not initially alarmed so much as confused. She could not remember how she came to be outside the city. But Chad could not be far and its walls were high in the flat silver plain, and its remarkable fields stretched wide into the ringing wastes. When her eyes cleared fields or ramparts would loom close.
When her eyes cleared what she saw was more whiteness. Turning on the spot again and again she saw no city, no towers, no fields; no concrete water-pipes haloed with languid steam, no labouring peasants, no patrols; no men, no beasts. All she saw was the Ice Desert, eternal, immutable, under the silver sky. It was all there was to see. Even so she did not finally believe it until she turned her mind upon that mosaic background of other people’s thoughts and could not find any.
At the hearts of galaxies, where every planet is washed by the light of multiple suns, night never falls and darkness is the great unknown. To Shah, bathed since birth in the radiance of multiple personalities, the great unknown was solitude. Now it smote her like a blow, sending shockwaves rippling through her, rooting her to the frozen ground. Childish in her desolation, she clasped her arms about her trembling body and, to fend off hysteria, concentrated all her efforts in an intense search.
And indeed there was something there; not a pattern of minds but perhaps a mind, expansive but tenuous like an ocean inches deep, or like the machine noise at the powerhouse, so deep and regular and constant that you had to really listen to hear it at all. Now she was attuned to it the pulse seemed all around her, but it had direction too, like the desert wind which is everywhere but originates elsewhere. She still did not know what it was, if it was in Chad, even if it was human, but because it was the only dimension in an otherwise featureless environment, and because if she did not do something soon she would literally die of inaction, Shah focused on what seemed to be the heart of the beat and began to walk.
Time in these high northern latitudes, where through the short summer the sun circled barely perceptibly below the horizon, was difficult to judge. Chilled to the marrow in her inadequate clothes she trudged through the glaring day, so blue-cold that the tundra itself seemed hardly colder, so weary she walked in a miserable dream, lost and deeply frightened. Only the subliminal psychic heartbeat stood between her and madness, kept her walking away from death.
She was roused from her reverie of despair by two possibly unconnected changes. The first that she noticed was a sudden quickening of the mental beam, a strengthening of both intensity and activity, like opening the door on the powerhouse and transforming the dull hum into a dozen different busy machine-sounds. Also, the temperature was rising. Looking up, she found the plain ahead ended abruptly in a glass curtain.
Approaching, cautiously but with a lightness of step borne of relief that this penance of a place was not after all unending, she recognised that the curtain was not in fact glass but, like everything else in the northern desert, ice. It hung in shimmering folds from half way up the sky, static as ice but dancing with the lights of some internal, intrinsic life. Shah touched it carefully and it was as cold as ice, yet she perceived a heat-source somewhere behind it. The curtain, being rigid ice, made no sound, but sound was all around, out at the limits of her hearing, strange and secret yet somehow not sinister, as if she knew it, knew it all, if only she could remember.…
The curtain had convolutions in its serpentine shape where the folds folded back on one another. Seeking the sound, and the psyche, but more than either of them the promise of warmth, Shah passed through one such gap into
“You’re all right now. Come on. Wake up, damn you.” He sounded as exhausted as she felt, but his voice finally brought some semblance of intelligence into her blank, stretched eyes and she looked at him with perplexity, perhaps an aftermath of shock, but with a soul that was recognisably her own.
Paul slumped to the floor beside her, wondering if she was aware yet of the dark marks of his hands on her cheeks, wondering if she felt any more mentally and physically battered than he did. Later, when they had both recovered somewhat, he would be brilliantly, devastatingly angry, but just now he lacked the energy. It occurred to him briefly that if Harry should chance upon them sprawled like this, so evidently spent, he would leap to a conclusion almost more dangerous than the truth; but Harry was a bridge he would have to cross sooner or later and anyway he was too tired to care.
“Paul?” His name felt strange on her lips, like saying her own. When h
e did not respond she tried again, tentatively, full of an apprehension she could not explain.
“Yeah.” Spreadeagled beside her, he lay with peculiarly graceful abandon, his eyes closed.
“I feel – awful.”
“Serve you bloody well right.”
“Please – what happened?”
Paul rolled his head towards her. She had sat up and was hunched over her bent knees, cradling her head in her arms. She sounded close to tears.
“You made a mistake. You tried exercising your talents inside my head. You got lost.”
Shah, remembering, experienced a surge of panic and bit back a scream. “Gods! Paul, it was – cold!”
“What did you expect,” he snarled, “a welcome mat and a log fire? What were you thinking of?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – I only – I wanted to know about you. Please don’t be angry.”
Paul looked away. “Forget it.”
“I don’t understand. I’ve been tripping in and out of people’s minds all my life. Nobody’s ever known before. I never guessed I could hurt anyone.”
His temper snapped. “I’m not anyone,” he spat. “I’m not like you, I’m not like your Barbarian friends, I’m not like anybody you know about. You think your party-tricks amount to something special? When my brain was intact I had a perception compared with which yours is fog-bound; I was telekinetic and there was every indication that teleportation lay within my grasp. You don’t even know what those things are, do you? You’re a paranormal midget. What do you know about telepathy?”
“Enough to know,” she cried, “that if I were you and I met me, I wouldn’t let envy keep me from passing on secrets that were no longer any use to me.”
Pain stabbed in his eyes; he swung, she flinched; his open hand struck into her bruised cheek with a crack like thin ice. The blow changed everything. A pettiness, it left Paul frozen, his arm awkwardly raised, a slow tide of humiliation rising through him. He abhorred physical contact, avoided it obsessively, so that slapping Shah out of her catalepsy had required an effort of will. Now he had struck her again, in wrath, and he felt like an animal.
