Adrienne Martine-Barnes

by The Dragon Rises (v0. 9) (epub)

  Vraser tented his large hands and rested his chin against them thoughtfully. Gilhame knew that as Principal Medical Officer, Vraser had access to that portion of the psychotape information which was closed to himself. He also knew that he was asking the man to violate both the sacred confidence which that knowledge carried with it and his medical ethics. Dominants were rare even among telepaths, and most of them were psycho-conditioned so that they did not know their talent themselves.

  “There are a few,” Vraser began slowly. “Yourself, of course. I have often thought it was a good thing that you could not enter into the Dream of Faldar. It would have become such a bloody nightmare under you.” The man sighed and leaned back in his chair, picking up his pipe and relighting it. “But you are too strong for the task I think you suggest. You cannot conceal yourself. You want a subtle dominant. Let me see.” He looked off into the air with a bemused expression on his face. “A man would be better than a woman. It is hard for a woman to color herself with a male subject’s patterns. But. . . no, there isn’t a man in the fleet who is effacing enough for the job you outline. But, which woman?” He tugged at his beard, then pulled his earlobe.

  Gilhame stood and waited. There was no rushing a man who carried a whole fleet’s psionic knowledge in his head. Finally, Vraser swung his chair around and punched the keys of his computer console. Data, encoded, flowed over the screen. He studied the numbers and signs on the screen for a while, then closed the line.

  “Normally—if your request could ever fall into the classification of ‘normal,’ which it couldn’t—I would recommend a member of my staff. Unfortunately, she is recovering from a bout of elemin fever. Do you realize that almost every world has an indigenous fever that is almost beyond the Healer’s art? Funny, isn’t it? We can lessen the severity of the attack, but we can’t cure it. This leaves us with two possibilities, of which I think Halba Alvellaina Curly-Krispin is the most possible. The tones of her mind are most near to the masculine. It will require her to use one of the invading mind-drugs, of course, since she is quite untrained.”

  “Who is the other possibility?”

  Vraser made a face. “I’ve told you too much already.” “Who else?”

  “Her sister, Armanda Krispin.”

  “Really? I would have guessed it was Derissa.”

  “Halba Derissa’s talents lie elsewhere.”

  Gilhame knew better than to press the matter. “But you favor . . . the older girl.”

  “I do.”

  “Thank you. I will try to forget we ever had this conversation. I wasn’t aware that you had psycho-tapes on,

  “I did them as soon as they came on board. It was my responsibility.”

  “Well, you have given me the devil of a problem. Let’s hope that Morshull can figure a way to diddle the box so that I don’t have to use ... to ever need to know what you’ve just told me.”

  Gilhame stood uneasily outside Alvellaina’s portal. He had never invaded the sanctity of her quarters. Always, she came to him. There was not, of course, a portal on the ship which would not open at his command. He could not decide whether to retreat to his own rooms and request her presence, to beg admittance to hers or to ask to meet her in some neutral place.

  The pard butted against his legs, buzzing mightily. He looked down at the fluffy white beast. “Do you think you could do your trick and open m’alba’s door for me, little friend? Or should I just forget it and go find Armanda?”

  The animal responded after the manner of its kind, opening its mouth and exhaling but making no sound. Then it looked at the portal, puffed its body fur up and gave a curious keen. The entrance whispered open, and the pard bounced across the threshold.

  “Alvellaina? May I enter?” he called.

  There was a sound from the inner chamber. “What? Oh, it’s you.”

  “I was just passing, and the door was open,” he said mendaciously.

  “It’s your ship,” she replied.

  “Not this part.”

  “Stop being thoughtful and polite. I prefer you when you are slightly menacing. Come in.”

  He entered a suite of rooms identical to his own and those of his high-ranking officers. But where his room was hung with the curious momentos of a hundred worlds, and Buschard’s was decorated with the stuffed heads of the beasts he hunted whenever the opportunity presented itself, this room had a transient quality to it. There was no personal litter, nothing except a bowl of flowers on the table to show that anyone resided there.

  Then, in a shadowy corner of the room, he saw a tiny household shrine of the kind which was usually dedicated to the Mother of All Living. Alvellaina followed his eyes and crossed quickly to the object, pulling a bright blue cloth down over the structure.

  ‘How profane my eyes must seem to her,’ he thought. “Should I apologize for my display of temper last night?” he asked.

  “No. I have thought about it a great deal, and I see that you are, in your own way, an honorable man. I feel I must beg pardon for being so . . . childish.”

  “M’alba ...”

  She cut him short. “Save your sweet phrases for someone else. What do you want?”

  “Must I want something?”

  “No, but you do.”

  “I have a task which you are most suited to, but which I have no doubt will be distasteful to you.”

  “That will be true, however you use me.”

  “Yes.” He outlined the problem to her slowly, explaining what had happened in the brig, and finally asking for her help in controlling Caraheen.

  “I don’t want any part of your schemes. This is your mess, not mine,” she replied.

  “That is inaccurate. The mess, as you call it, is more of your uncle’s making than of anyone else’s—your uncle’s and your father’s. Quite a family affair.”

  She flinched. “Why should I help you?”

  “If you don’t wish to, I shall ask your sister Armanda. Vraser doesn’t think she is the most able tool for the job, but at this point I’ll take whatever I can get.”

  “No! I won’t have her entangled by your . . . And I won’t do it either.”

  “The Gamester machine has two potential targets, Alvellaina: This fleet and the planetary population on the Island Worlds. If you refuse me, and Armanda fails me— which I believe Vraser’s cavil indicates she might—and that thing attacks either target, then it is on your head. There are fifty thousand souls on the Island Worlds, perhaps more. Your pretty white hands would be as blood-stained as mine, then, wouldn’t they? Do I ask too much—that you should control one miserable man for a few minutes so that no one might die needlessly?”

  He was standing very close to her. He watched her white skin turn rosy. Her eyes seemed to dilate until there was very little green showing, but only the deep black of her pupils. She swept her hand across his face too fast even for his fast reflexes.

  “You unspeakable bastard!” she screamed, striking at him again. He caught her arm and twisted it behind her. He could smell her sweet scent and feel the trembling of her body as she struggled against him. She stiffened suddenly, and he knew that she was feeling his acute awareness of her. “Let me go!!”

  He released her, stepping back. “You are even more spoiled than I thought, m’alba. The next time you strike me, I’ll turn you over my knee. You deserve a beating.” “I could cut your heart out, your balls off. I . . . I’ll see you eaten by vermin!” she screamed and shrank back at the same time, clutching her shoulders with her hands. “You filthy animal.”

  “I promised to keep my hands off you, not to let you batter me. Now, if you really want to roast my heart over an open fire, I suggest you calm yourself and then go see Medic Vraser. I wouldn’t want to deprive you of the sight of my testicles on a spit. Just think, we might have to play this whole dreary scene over again ... as other people.” Alvellaina went pale at the thought. “Do you always have it your own way?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Get out.
I’ll go see Vraser. You . . .”

  “If you are short of expletives, I suggest you apply to Chief Technician Morshull. He has a rather colorful supply.” Gilhame beat a hasty retreat on that note, well aware that his beloved was looking for something portable to throw at him. He took a deep breath as the portal closed behind him. Somehow, it was comforting to know that Alvellaina was no happier in her immortality than he was in his. He wondered where she rested between times. Not in Glass Castle, certainly. Then, his mission accomplished, he put her from his mind and went towards the bridge.

  Caraheen slumped over a console on the bridge, half conscious, with Alvellaina’s hands on his shoulders. The odd gray box sat before him. Gilhame watched the tableau, thinking of Morshull’s reaction to the thing. “Give me a month, or maybe six, and I might be able to figure it out. But three hours? I am not that much of a genius, you old camel-bugger,” he had said. Well, Morshull had always been less respectful than most of his staff.

  He felt sad that Alvellaina had been forced to do his bidding, yet glad that she might begin to understand the way in which he treasured the lives of the people who served under him. Then the box changed color, and he forgot his reverie as he watched Caraheen and Alvellaina. There was a stillness on the bridge for perhaps a minute, then the box went back to its dull gray.

  Alvellaina took her arms away from Caraheen’s body, and the rodent-faced man slid down and out of his chair onto the floor. Alvellaina bent down and touched the secretary’s throat. Her lips were quivering when she stood up.

  “He’s dead. You . . . have ten hours. The machine was uneasy about your continued presence in the system, but I don’t... I don’t think it will do anything for a while.” She rubbed her hands together uneasily. “It’s confused. But, I bought you ... a little time. And I think I killed him.” She gasped the last sentence, turned, and fled the bridge, white and shaking.

  Nine hours later, Gilhame once again sat in his great control chair, watching the screen. The Gamester machine rippled slowly through space, almost eellike in its sinuosity. A swarm of tiny objects which Gilhame knew he was not really “seeing” sped towards the dreadnought, a flight of mechanical gnats which Morshull had christened “screamers,” attacking the thing broadside. There were forty-seven of them, not the eighty he had asked for, and he did not know if it would do the job. But all he could do now was wait.

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see his console screen rattling off numbers as it tracked the screamers to their destination. The bridge was filled with whispers as most of the technicians watched the screen. The computer flashed a message, and he knew that contact had been made. For several minutes nothing happened.

  The gray box beside him on the arm of the chair became translucent. Gilhame picked up the electrode and pressed it to his forehead, listening. He could “hear” the machine asking questions of a sort. “What? How? Why? Pain. Terrible pain. Why? I am impregnable. How?” Then the dreadnought vanished.

  About forty seconds later it reappeared at the left flank of ur Fagon’s fleet. The great mouth of the thing swooped down on a destroyer. Gilhame watched with a kind of sick fascination. A tinny voice on his headset told him the Sureswift was gone. Then a section of the dreadnought began to sheer off, as the ships nearby the Sureswift attempted to maneuver out of range. The “head” of the machine turned from side to side, snapped up a scout, then seemed to stop, the little ship still hanging in its maw. Gilhame could see the midsection of the dreadnought begin to separate and float away from the main body.

  The box beside him glowed red for a few seconds, then went back to dull gray. There was no sound on the electrode. He removed it, remembering the sort of agonized scream the dreadnought had made, glad that he had made the decision to concentrate Morshull’s gadgets around the section where they had picked up life-readings of a sort, but vaguely sorry he had had to kill the old machine. He watched the scout ship slip out of the still open mouth.

  Gilhame felt tired; even his bones ached. He made a silent prayer for the dull but able Captain Inaga of the Sureswift and the eight hundred people who had been with him, gave a nearby yeoman a few curt orders and left the bridge. ‘What a thing I am,’ he thought as he strode down the corridor, ‘to have saved my fleet and yet caused the invention of a new piece of weaponry potentially more dan-

  gerous than the dreadnought itself. Why can’t I just stop fighting, stop spending lives to save lives, just die, once and for all? Every time I spend a man, it gets harder.’

  Chapter IX

  The little boy ran into the square. He was a sturdy lad of five or six, with black hair slanting from a widow’s peak, reddish eyebrows and great green eyes with flecks of gold in them. He wore a gray single suit with a red dragon stitched across the chest. The child looked up at the sky and screamed, “No, Father, no!” Then there was a blinding flash of whiteness.

  Gilhame woke. He sat up in bed, sending the pard sliding off his chest, and flicked on the light. He was shaking and sweating. The pard said several things in extremely low feline as she rearranged herself at the foot of the bed.

  The dream again. When had it begun? Gilhame was not certain. Ten days earlier? Two weeks? He propped himself up on the bed, picked up an empty pipe from the nightstand, stuck it in his mouth and sucked meditatively for a while. Gradually, the trembling in his body ceased.

  His son. He kept killing his son. A child who did not exist, yet who kept calling to him. In all time, he had never had a son by the woman he loved, only the sister-son so often sent against him, or a child by some other woman. And her son too. Alvellaina’s. Where did the child come from? Was his lust to overcome him? No. He would never rape her, never break his word. How then? But he kept seeing the child’s pleading face before the dreadful light came. What was that light? ‘My son, oh, my child!’

  The faint whisper of the portal caught his attention. He

  tensed a little, removed the pipe from his mouth and held it in his right hand in such a way that the stem made a provocative little protrusion. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but ur Fagon had killed men with less.

  Alvellaina seemed to drift into the room. At first all he saw was her white face in the darkness beyond the bed. Her red hair seemed to have a life of its own, surrounding her face like a nimbus. A dark green cloud flecked with silver floated below her long throat, making her seem a disembodied head. For a moment he wondered if he was still asleep.

  “What is it?” she asked quite sharply. She moved closer to the bed, and the green cloud became a nightgown of transparent stuff offering tantalizing glimpses of her long legs and small, high breasts.

  “Nothing.” He didn’t want her here, not now.

  “Why, you’ve been crying.”

  Gilhame lifted his hand to feel the moisture on his face. He did not remember weeping. Damn her and all women to perdition, particularly all women with foresight. How dare she come floating in like some ancient sea sprite, almost naked, and notice his tears. A faint hint of her scent touched him. ‘There is nothing like the smell of a warm, healthy woman,’ he thought.

  “Have I been?”

  “Are you ashamed to cry?”

  “No. Should I be?” He noticed the pipe clenched in his right hand and released it, putting it back on the night-stand.

  “I heard you cry out.”

  “Through the ship’s walls? You must have very good ears indeed. I had a nightmare—nothing more.” She had been on the ship for nearly two weeks now, and they had fallen into the habit of a kind of tense rudeness. He had left her to herself a great deal as he wrestled with the problem of revamping his fleet’s maneuvering capabilities to accommodate the eighteen ships he had acquired from Krispin’s disbanded fleet and the ten from the Coalchee.

  She sat gingerly at the foot of the bed and rubbed the sleeping pard between the ears. The little beast rumbled with pleasure but did not wake. “Do you always cry during nightmares?”

  “Certainly. It is much more efficient than
at any other time.”

  She giggled. It was the first time he had ever heard her laugh, and the sound delighted him. “You are ashamed to cry. It is not unmanly, you know.”

  “I am not concerned with my masculinity—no, not that.”

  Alvellaina looked at him, clearly nude beneath the silky coverlet, stared thoughtfully where his waist disappeared beneath the blanket and stopped smiling. “I see that.” “Did anyone ever tell you that you smell like roses?” “Roses?”

  “It’s a flower.”

  “Yes, I know. But they are scentless. We have many on our estate. They have no smell.”

  “They did once. Once they were the very smell of love.” “Oh.” She was uncomfortable now.

  “I am not much on ladies’ garments, but is that thing you are wearing for sleeping in?”

  “Yes.”

  “What a shame. It really belongs on a dance floor. Except, of course, that every woman in the place would want to scratch your eyes out and every man . . . well, it is an incitement to riot.”

  “Is it?” She sounded pleased.

  “Yes, it is, my innocent. I cannot tell if you are vain or naive. All women are vain in varying degrees, I know. But that is not an appropriate garment to wander around the corridors of the ship.”

  “From my portal to yours is six steps.”

  “Is that all? Then retrace them.”

  “No. Not until you tell me what woke you. It is not the first time I have heard you call out. Is it a very bad dream?” “Only my conscience pricking me for my numerous misdeeds. These sanguine hands you are always taxing me about.”

  “You cannot lie to me, Admiral.”

  “I suppose that is true. For a woman who hates my guts, you certainly avail yourself of the inside of my skull with great familiarity. It was an ugly dream about the death of someone I love very much. It will not come to pass. They do sometimes, you know, these twisted visions of possible futures.”