by Ann Maxwell
The sphere of light moved farther into the room, lighting a different section. The turquoise dance beckoned as charmingly as The Luck’s smile.
“A pool!” she whistled, delight sliding through each note.
Kirtn shared her joy but was more cautious. He had not forgotten that God’s House might hold less than divine surprises.
She stepped forward eagerly, anticipating the feeling of warm water supporting her exhausted body.
“Rheba.”
“But—” She sighed and slowed down. He was right.
“I like to swim even more than you do,” he said quietly. “Remember the acid pond on Loo.”
She stopped. She sniffed the air carefully, wondering if his more acute sense of smell had picked up the oily, biting odor of acid. She inhaled again. All she could smell was air that was both fresh and blessedly moist. Outside, the planet’s air was not only thinner than she was used to, it was much more dry.
“It smells like water,” said Kirtn.
Rheba did not answer. She grabbed her head and tried not to moan aloud. Fssa was talking with Rainbow.
Kirtn realized what had happened, even though he felt only mild discomfort. He picked her up and hurried farther into the room. Distance was the only medicine he could give her.
The sphere of light flickered madly, then went out, leaving only her racing akhenet lines to light the room. He swore with a poet’s rage, wishing Fssa were within reach. He tried to give her his own energy to withstand the pain, only to discover that even his Bre’n strength had reached an end.
He carried her as far as the edge of the pool, then held her, trying to shield her with his body even though he knew it was impossible. Below his feet the pool shifted and slid, blue on blue, stirred by invisible currents. Streamers of turquoise wound throughout, leaving midnight shadows far below. If there was a bottom, he could not see it. He stared down, wondering what miraculous therapies the Zaarains had performed in the pool’s depths.
And then the floor began to move.
Kirtn’s reflexes saved him and Rheba from being shunted into the pool. As he leaped backward he spun and fled for the door.
The floor moved faster.
Rheba screamed and twisted in his arms, calling out for Fssa to stop. But the Fssireeme could not hear and she could not bear the pain any longer. She clawed wildly at Kirtn, not knowing what she did.
The floor hummed musically beneath Kirtn’s running feet. He hung on to Rheba and forced his exhausted body to run faster, not to stumble despite her body twisting in his arms.
Stop it, fire dancer!
His need reached her as no words could. She went limp, biting her lips until blood blurred the akhenet patterns on her face.
The floor flew beneath his feet, but he was a man on a treadmill making progress only in his mind. She saw the pool looming over his shoulder, saw the turquoise glide of currents and blue depths.
Kirtn!
Her scream was as silent as his had been, a minor mind dance that was born out of need and the closeness of their flesh. He reached deep into himself and answered with a burst of speed that made the pool fall away from her horrified glance.
But he was only flesh and bone, no match for an immortal Zaarain machine. With a despairing cry he felt the floor fall away, throwing them into the turquoise stomach of God.
The Bre’n’s last thought was a smoking curse that The Luck, inevitably, had avoided falling into the soup.
XVIII
After the first shock of being thrown in passed, Kirtn realized that his worst fears were not true—the pool was nothing like acid. The liquid was both warm and cool, thicker than water but not at all sticky. It was wonderfully invigorating, like being in the center of an akhenet healing circle while minds danced in each cell of his body.
Buoyed by the liquid, he had to swim very little to keep Rheba and himself afloat. She lay loosely against him, only half conscious. If she still felt the agony of alien communication, it did not show on her face. Her hair spread out in the water, sinuous with invisible currents of energy.
If this was being “in the soup,” Kirtn thoroughly approved. He was not reckless, however. He made sure that neither he nor Rheba accidentally drank any of the fluid.
And then he felt his clothes dissolve.
He watched in horrified fascination as his cape thinned around Rheba’s shoulders, revealing her glowing akhenet lines.
Rheba murmured sleepily. Her eyes opened, clear cinnamon with fires banked, at peace. Then she remembered where she was. With a startled cry she awoke fully. Her lines of power flared into incandescence, lighting the pool until it was like floating in the golden eye of God.
“What happened?”
“We’re in the soup,” whistled Kirtn smugly. There was an undertone of uncertainty in his whistle, however. He had not forgotten their clothes; the same thing could happen to their bodies. But he doubted it. Floating in the supportive warmth of the pool with his fire dancer alive in his arms, he found it hard to worry about anything. “How do you feel?”
“Good,” she said simply. “I haven’t felt this . . . whole . . . in a long time. Not since Deva.”
He smiled as her hair flowed sinuously over his shoulder and curled around his neck. The energy that came from that touch was as smooth and controlled as any he had ever felt from master dancers on Deva.
“I wonder why the natives fight this?” She sighed, moving only enough to stay afloat.
“We haven’t tried to get out yet,” said Kirtn, but there was no force to his objection. If Square One’s God wanted to kill them with kindness, so be it. There certainly were worse ways to die—he had seen them.
Rheba laughed, sensing his comfort because she was touching him. She concentrated on sending him a picture of a Bre’n floating smugly on a turquoise cloud. He smiled and wound his hand into her hair, noting absently that each strand was silky and . . . dry. Whatever the soup was made of, it had unusual properties for a fluid.
Her cheek rubbed over the palm of his hand. He sensed her surprise and the reason for it at the same instant she did.
“It’s healed!” she said, grabbing his hand and looking at it from all sides. She took his other hand and touched it wonderingly. “Completely healed.”
A sphere of light blazed forth and hovered overhead, making the room lighter than any day. She examined her Bre’n critically, swimming around him, trying to find the multitude of bruises, gashes and scrapes that the rockfall had left on him. His copper fur was sleek and bright, unmarred by so much as a scab or a smudge of dirt.
Kirtn reached out lazily, drawing her to him with the full strength of a Bre’n. “You’re healed, too. Look at that light you made. Or are you drawing on the Installation’s core?”
She moved her head in a slow negative, still fascinated by his strength, a fluid ease that echoed the power implicit in the currents coiling beneath their feet. “Although,” she whistled, “I feel strong enough to take on a Zaarain core now.”
“Don’t,” he said quickly. “Not unless we have to. No use in pushing our luck—or is it Daemen’s?” He sighed. “I suppose we should go back and see how he’s doing.”
“Wait. Fssa isn’t through yet.”
“He isn’t? Does it still hurt?”
“Sort of,” she whistled, “but it’s all far away, as though it were happening to someone else.”
“I could get fond of this soup,” he said approvingly. But even as he spoke he was measuring the height of the pool’s rim, looking for a way out. The better he felt, the less willing he was to be the captive of even a benign God. “More light.”
He had used a mentor’s tone. She responded with a reflexive outpouring that nearly blinded him.
“Control,” he said crisply, as though giving lessons back on Deva. “Outline the rim of the pool.”
A line of light snaked around the lip of the pool, defining it. There was no place where the rim dipped down enough for him to grab it and pull himse
lf out.
“Arm’s length below water level,” he said.
A second line of light bloomed. He swam along the side. There were no steps, no ramps, no irregularities in the seamless pool wall. Getting in had been easy. Getting out would be a trick.
Currents curled beneath him. Fluid humped up, lifting him until the lip was within reach. In a single motion he pulled himself out of the pool.
Getting out was as easy as wanting to.
A globe of light followed him as he walked back to where Rheba swam in the center of her own incandescence. “Come to the side,” he called.
“I’m trying to.” Her whistle was sharp, telling of the fear that was growing in her. “It won’t let me!”
Kirtn’s powerful dive brought him to her side in an instant. Currents swirled around her, holding her back from the side with exactly as much energy as she expended trying to advance. Her lines were so hot that steam began to curl up from the fluid.
“Don’t fight it,” he said.
She stopped trying to swim toward the side. Immediately the currents stopped trying to hold her back. She looked at him, her expression both perplexed and frightened. “Why won’t it let me go?”
“I don’t know. It practically threw me out.” He swam behind her. “Let me do the swimming for both of us.”
She relaxed against his grip, floating up behind him as he stroked for the side. After a few moments he saw that he was not making any progress. He reversed direction. The current died as quickly as it had been born.
He experimented, swimming in all directions with Rheba. It became obvious that he could tow her anywhere in the pool, except to the side. Whenever he got within reach of the rim, currents swirled up and pushed him back to the center of the pool. If he let go of her, however, the liquid was very cooperative. He could swim where he pleased and get out as easily as he had the first time.
“Are you tired?” he asked, using Senyas, because he did not want to reveal any more of his fear than he had to.
“No. I think I could fall asleep and the damn stuff would keep me face up.” Her tone was more frustrated than afraid, now. She felt better when he was in the soup with her. “I suppose I could just vaporize the little beastie.”
Kirtn pulled himself out of the pool, the better to measure its size. It was big. “That wouldn’t work unless you tapped the Installation core. And there’s a good chance that some kind of defense mechanism is programmed into the recycler.”
“Self-defense,” she said firmly. “This soup is alive.” He hesitated, then accepted her verdict. She had a much finer discrimination among energy patterns than he did. If she said it did not feel like a machine, then it was not a machine.
She took his hesitation as a question, however. “Mentor,” she said in clipped Senyas, “when you first hit the soup, what did you feel?”
“Surprise, then pleasure. Intense pleasure,” he added, remembering.
“But you should have been scared right out of your copper fur.”
He realized she was right.
“What you felt,” she continued, “was the zoolipt’s pleasure. We were very nice Treats.”
“I thought this was the hospital, not the recycler.”
“To the Zaarains, the functions might have been the same thing. Or they became the same thing here, in Square One.”
“That would explain the clean room,” said Kirtn. “The zoolipt ate all the organic goodies.”
“Right,” said Rheba, sounding just like Scuvee. “Somewhere down there beneath my naked feet must be connectors leading out of the Installation to feeding stations.”
“Wonder what the zoolipt is planning for dinner.”
“I hope fire dancer isn’t on the menu,” she said, looking longingly at the lip that the soup would not let her reach. “Why did it let you go?”
“Maybe it doesn’t like furries.”
She made a flatulent noise and turned her back on him. “Kirtn, get me out.”
He did the only thing he could. He dove in and surfaced beside her. “It healed us when it could more easily have killed us,” he said reasonably. “It’s keeping Fssa from driving you crazy talking to Rainbow.” She held his hand and watched him with wide eyes. “You sensed its pleasure,” he added, wrapping a stray curl of her gold hair around his finger. “Do you sense any malevolence?”
She closed her eyes and drifted against him, concentrating on the intricate energy patterns that made up the zoolipt. She sensed its power, the sweeping currents that moved restlessly in its depths. She felt again its pleasure as it lapped around their alien chemistries. No matter how hard she concentrated, she could feel nothing else except her own fear and the distant pain that was a Fssireeme talking to a Zaarain construct.
“Nothing.” She sighed. “But I’m not a mind dancer or even an empathic engineer.”
He pulled her close, not knowing what else to do. They floated passively on the breast of the zoolipt. It responded to their unspoken needs, supporting their bodies like an invisible, infinitely comfortable bed.
“It’s gone,” she said, after a moment.
“What’s gone?”
“The pain. Fssa must be finished.” Then, fervently, “I want out.”
A current swirled her out of Kirtn’s arms and deposited her on the lip of the pool. The zoolipt withdrew from her without leaving so much as a drop of itself behind.
He stared, then swam toward the side with powerful strokes. Fluid bunched up underneath him like a wave and flipped him neatly into the air. He landed on his feet beside her, looking as surprised as she did.
As one, they turned and stared at the glimmering turquoise zoolipt.
“I think,” said Rheba slowly, “that it’s like the Devalon’s womb. It only lets you out when you’re healed. As long as I felt pain, I was a patient. As soon as Fssa shut up, I was a human being again and could come and go as I pleased.”
Despite her confident words, she backed away as she spoke. If her theory was wrong, she did not want to find out by ending up in the soup again. As an afterthought, she even took back all but a small sphere of her light. She did not want to irritate an organism that spent most of its time in darkness.
Daemen’s voice came from the hallway beyond the room. “Kirtn! Rheba! Where are you?”
“In here,” yelled Kirtn.
“But that’s the recycler! I told you”—Daemen ran into the room breathlessly—“to turn right, not left!”
“We did,” Kirtn said dryly.
“Oh.” Daemen looked at his feet, obviously embarrassed. “I never could tell the two apart. . . .” He looked up again, then away, embarrassed for a different reason. “What happened to your clothes?”
Rheba remembered they were naked and smothered a giggle.
“The zoolipt ate them,” said Kirtn blandly.
Daemen threw a frightened look around, for the first time noticing the pool where tone on tone of blue turned restlessly. “Oh!” He backed up nearly all the way to the hall. “That’s much bigger than our zoolipt. And it’s the wrong color. I’m not sure it’s a recycler at all!”
“It recycled our clothes fast enough,” pointed out Rheba, trying not to smile.
Daemen looked up, realized that neither Kirtn nor Rheba was embarrassed, and smiled at her in a way that made the Bre’n want to flatten him.
“You certainly look good—ah, healthy,” amended Daemen, as he walked back to them. He stroked her skin as his rain-colored eyes looked at her with obvious pleasure. “Beautiful. I mean, even the scrapes are gone.”
Kirtn knew exactly what he meant.
“The zoolipt healed us,” she said, feeling suddenly awkward beneath Daemen’s admiring glance. She remembered Kirtn’s insistence that The Luck was not a child. “Look at Kirtn’s hands.”
Reluctantly, Daemen turned away from the fire dancer’s fascinating body where intricate curling patterns pulsed with light. He looked at Kirtn’s powerful hands and then up at the Bre’n’s metallic g
old eyes. Kirtn smiled. Daemen backed away from Rheba.
“Where’s Fssa?” she asked.
Daemen rummaged around beneath the frayed cape he wore. “Said he was cold,” he explained, unwrapping the Fssireeme from around his waist and handing him to Rheba.
Kirtn sighed. Just when he was ready to strangle the little smoothie, Daemen proved he was not a cherf after all. The Bre’n knew that Daemen did not want to handle the Fssireeme at all, much less keep the snake warm by wearing him like a girdle. If The Luck would just keep his hands off Rheba, Kirtn might even come to like him.
Fssa was quite dark and noticeably cool to Rheba’s touch. Immediately she gathered energy and held it in her hair. When it whipped and shot sparks, she wove the Fssireeme into place. Her hair calmed as the snake drew off excess energy into himself.
Within moments, Fssa was rippling with metallic colors, as bright as the dancer’s hair he was woven into. He whistled a complicated Bre’n trill. Rheba and Kirtn listened, then turned toward The Luck. Rheba looked concerned. The Bre’n looked like a predator.
“What’s he saying?” asked Daemen nervously.
“Not much.” Rheba’s voice was quick, her words rushed. “Rainbow is happy. It collected a few more crystals—two swaps and seven outright thefts, from what Fssa says.” She hesitated, remembering Daemen’s obvious fear of the zoolipt’s blue depths. “The zoolipt is ecstatic. We’re the first new taste it’s had in Cycles. Fssa said it was very bored with garbage, sewage, and dead bodies.”
Daemen’s hands made small movements. Even talking about the zoolipt’s gastronomic needs made him nervous.
“Fssa also said that the barbarians are waiting outside.”
“For us?”
“For food. They didn’t expect us to come out. At least, not as ourselves. The few live people who are thrown in die of fright.”
“Sensible,” muttered The Luck, looking nervously at the zoolipt’s too-active blue surface.
“However,” continued Rheba, “there are legends of willing Treats.”
Daemen looked up, sensing that she was finally coming to the point.
