This Fortress World

by Gunn, James

  "Yes, yes. I understand that." His eyes seemed magnified by the drifting smoke between us. "What happened then?"

  I lowered myself hopelessly to the bunk and passed a hand across my forehead, ignoring the pain. No one was interested in the vital things. In fragments, sketchily, confused, the story came out. My eyes were closed as I finished. "It's hard to remember. I can't remember any more."

  When I opened my eyes again, his eyes loomed through the smoke, large, blue, feverishly bright. "Why did she come into the Cathedral?…What did she have with her?…Why did she leave?…"

  My head rolled from side to side. "I don't know…I don't remember…I don't know.…"

  The eyes finally went away and the voice with them. I sank into a kind of stupor. I was roused by a chuckle which seemed to come from a long way off.

  "You need a rest," a voice said, "and a chance to let those burns heal. Must have thrown up your hand to protect your eyes just as the gun went off. Lucky for your sight. You're not exactly pretty right now. Eyebrows and eyelashes burnt almost off. Face looks like raw meat."

  "What am I going to do?" I asked weakly. "I'm like a baby outside the monastery walls."

  The chuckle rolled out again. It was almost a giggle. "Well fixed for a baby. Clothes. Money—five thousand imperial chronors in one hundred chronor pieces—"

  My eyes opened.

  Siller giggled. "In the money belt."

  I reached toward my waist with my unburnt left hand.

  Siller exploded with laughter. 'It's still there. If I'd wanted to rob you, I wouldn't have left you around to worry about it. Always find out what I'm getting into. The Agent you stripped was well padded. If it was the price for his share of the job, he or the job came high. Unless you raided the Abbot's treasury." He poked me in the ribs as I struggled to rise. "Never mind. It isn't important. To conclude—you've got a gun worth at least five hundred, a respectable stock of ammunition—"

  He pulled down a flap on my jacket to expose a row of slender metal tubes stuck into padded cloth pockets. "Ten of them. Good for about one hundred short bursts apiece, ten long ones, or one big whoosh. Enough power to heat and light this shop for ten years. Fifty chronors each—if you can get them. Oh, there's no doubt about it. You're well fixed all right."

  "You can't buy freedom with money," I said, "or peace."

  "You'd be surprised what it will buy—if you know where to go and how to spend it. And how to protect it. That means a lot. That you'll have to learn. With a little education, a good deal of ruthlessness, and a lot of luck, you might be able to survive."

  Survive. I shivered as a face swam up into my mind. "Not with the dark one after me."

  Siller's face sharpened. "Who?"

  "I don't know who," I said. I was tired and sick and the endless questioning had made me petulant. "He had a dark face, careless and bold at the same time. Cold, black, ruthless eyes. A hard, heavy jaw, and a big, grotesque nose that wasn't funny at all. He was big—at least as tall as I am—"

  "Sabatini," Siller said. His voice was low and unsteady. The light tan seemed to bleach from his face.

  "You know him?" I said stupidly. I was too tired to be astonished any more.

  "I know him," Siller said, almost talking to himself. "We've met twice. Once on MacLeod. Once on the United Worlds. But I wasn't in his way, and he wasn't in mine—not directly. This time—" He shrugged, but his face was puzzled. "Sabatini had a stake on the United Worlds that should have nailed him down until someone came along just a little faster and harder and smarter."

  "But the United Worlds are over a hundred light years away," I objected.

  "Exactly," Siller muttered. "Who'd have thought—?"

  His aimless movements became purposeful. He went to one wall and pulled aside the hangings. Beneath his fingers a piece of the wall opened out. Behind it was a small cupboard. He selected a few objects and slipped them into his jacket pockets. One of them was a gun, although it didn't look like the one I had taken from the Agent. This had a long, slim barrel. It slipped under his arm, inside his jacket.

  He was getting ready to leave. I watched him, not knowing what to say. Finally he turned back toward me.

  "We'd better be moving along," he said easily. "This place may not be—"

  He stiffened, and I felt a strange, unlocalized sense of alarm. A moment later, from beyond what was apparently an adjoining room, came a loud, officious knocking.

  Siller crouched. "Knock!" he whispered viciously. "Come in and get a taste of hell!"

  Slowly, casually, as if the scene just before had never happened, he straightened and turned a carefree face toward me. "On your feet," he said. He was beside the doorway leading, I presumed, to the bookshop. In that direction, at least, the knocking continued. He pressed a section of the door frame. Nothing happened.

  "Who is it?" I asked. The knocking stopped, ominously.

  Siller looked at me, apparently surprised that I was still lying on the bunk. He shrugged. "Some customer, perhaps. The shop is closed. Permanently."

  While Siller went to the draped wall opposite the doorway, I listened in silent torment to the beginning of a sound I was coming to know too well—a thin, spitting sound, muffled now by distance. Then, in the other room, a crash, a shout, and a crackling roar. The last sound was meaningless to me. Then a wave of heat radiated from the wall, and a tongue of flame licked through the doorway.

  "Come on!" Siller's voice was impatient. "Get up. Even if I could wait, the fire won't."

  I looked toward him. He was standing by the wall, holding back a drape from a rectangular, black opening. I sat up. The room wavered and spun. I forced myself slowly to my feet. The room rocked under me. Instinctively I reached out to support myself against the nearest wall. The hand jerked itself back without my volition; the wall was smoking hot.

  I clenched my teeth and concentrated on taking a step. Sweat beaded my forehead as the room steadied. There were ten steps in all. I took five of them cautiously, slowly, as if I were balancing myself on a thin wire above a gulf. On the sixth step I stumbled. The last four I made in a headlong dive. At the last moment I grabbed the edge of the doorway with both hands to keep myself from plunging through.

  "Good man," said Siller, patting my arm. "I had to make sure you were worth taking along."

  I raised my head with great effort. Siller's face was a pink blur. I forced the words out like bitter pellets. "And—if I hadn't—made it?"

  Siller's voice had a shrug in it. "I would probably have left you here."

  The flames were eating hungrily into the room behind us, but the space beyond the wall opening was dark. A slim tube in Siller's hand became a light and illuminated a corridor. I took a step. It was not so much a corridor as an unfinished space between two rough walls. Dusty, cob-webbed, it was littered with broken boards, pieces of metal and plastic, and other discarded building materials.

  Behind me, Siller slid a thick plastic door into the opening and touched a button beside the doorway. A thin line of fire ran around the edge and sputtered out.

  "Now," Siller said, chucklingly, "if they save this room—as they probably will—let them figure out how we left it."

  He draped my left arm around his shoulders and led me down the musty corridor. Even in my exhaustion, I wondered at the weight Siller's slight figure could bear without apparent effort. For the trip seemed eternal, and the light splashing ahead suggested no changes in the corridor, no possible end to the journey. Stumbling, coughing in the haze of dust raised by our feet, I made my way onward until time and distance became meaningless.

  At the end of eternity the feet stopped, and I stopped, and Siller was gone from beneath my arm. I sagged against something hard and rough, and Siller made vague, blurred motions in front of a blank wall. Then there was a doorway where the wall had been, and I was inside, blinking in a blaze of magnificence.

  I've lost my way, I thought disjointedly. We've come through a hack door in space into the Emperor's palace
.

  But I knew I was wrong. Somewhere a voice whispered that this was the room of a humble bookseller, but my senses, shocked into a moment of clear vision, rebelled.

  Humble? Not this! Pictures built into the walls in almost three-dimensional reality were surely the work of genius. The walls themselves glowed with hidden light and subdued color. Shimmering chairs and a davenport squatted on the deep-carpeted floor. An alcove held tall bookcases, and the bookcases held row on row of magnificently bound volumes. In one corner stood an oversized three-dimensional teevee…

  The room blurred into a fantasy of color. I threw a hand up in front of my eyes. With the other I caught hard at the edge of the doorway for support…

  Siller said something, but it was only a senseless jumble of sounds.

  I took one step forward and fell. I was unconscious before I hit the floor.

  | Go to Table of Contents |

  Chapter Five

  I woke up next morning and my education began. I was in a large bed. The room was not the one I had seen last night. I felt rested, but when I tried to move, stiffened muscles screamed their protest. My face felt hard. My hand smarted. There was a knot on the back of my head…

  "Where's your gun?" Siller whispered from the doorway. His voice was like the hiss of a snake.

  I sat up, groaning, trying to shake the sleep away.

  "Where's your gun?:" Siller asked again, even softer, and I noticed that his gun with the long, slim barrel dangled from relaxed fingers.

  I pawed at my chest. I found nothing but skin. A rumpling of the smooth, soft blanket revealed only the fact that I was naked.

  There was a tiny explosion from the doorway, as if someone had expelled air from between his lips. Something hissed through my cropped hair. I looked up. The gun no longer dangled between Siller's fingers. It pointed straight at me. What a little opening it has, I thought foolishly, no bigger than the head of a pin.

  "What—" I began.

  Siller cut me off. "If I had been any one of a million men you would be dead by now."

  Sheepishly I glanced behind me. Just above my head a small needle was half embedded in the wall.

  "All right. I've learned my lesson," I said, and reached up to remove the needle from the wall.

  "I wouldn't do that if I were you," Siller said casually. "It's poisoned."

  My finger tips trembled an inch from the needle.

  "Lesson number two," Siller said. "Never touch anything you don't understand. Corollary: never become involved in a situation until you know what you hope to gain and what you stand to lose and the extent and quality of the opposition."

  With a pair of tweezers, Siller loosened the needle from the wall. He dropped it carefully into a small vial, which he corked and placed in his left-hand pocket.

  "Then you don't follow your own advice," I snapped ungratefully, "or you wouldn't have taken me in."

  "That," said Siller, "is where you are mistaken."

  After that he was silent. When I had dressed and eaten, he gently applied new salve to my face and hand. His hands felt unpleasantly warm and moist.

  "I imagine you were never a handsome man," Siller remarked dryly. "So your change in appearance can't be called disfigurement exactly. The face should be completely recovered in a week. Except your eyebrows and lashes and perhaps a little discoloration. The hand may take a little longer. If you live that long.

  "But you can claim the distinction of being the only living man who was ever hit squarely by the bolt from a flash gun."

  I decided that Siller's suite of rooms was hidden in an abandoned warehouse. From a doorway in his somehow-too-luxurious bedroom, a flight of steps led down to a subterranean level. There was plentiful room for an adequate and secluded practice range. That day, among stones, dirt, insects, and rodents, I learned the rudiments of weapons.

  Siller balanced my flash gun in his hand. "Somebody named Branton invented the energy storage cell. Or maybe he only found it and rediscovered the principle. That's what you have under that flap on your jacket. Slip one into the butt of the gun, it strikes two contacts. Pull the trigger"—spat! a blue bolt sped from the gun to splash against a crudely painted outline of a man on the stone wall—"the circuit is closed. A one-hundredth part of the energy is released. The barrel is non-conductive. It channels the energy in the direction the gun is pointed.

  "There's a button on the barrel. If the forefinger presses this when the trigger is pulled, the burst is ten times as long. That's useful against a mob. The cell itself has a small lever on the side. When the cell is inserted in the butt of the gun, that lever is pressed down. Otherwise no energy can be released. You can press it down by hand, though. Drop it, or throw it, and the lever will spring up, and the cell will let loose all its energy at once when it strikes against an object."

  I practiced short bursts. From the first I seemed to have a natural aptitude for shooting. My shots seldom wandered far from the outline of the figure on the wall, and soon they were centering in the body every time.

  "The body is the place to aim with a flash gun. It's the largest target and the target most difficult to move. A body-hit and you're dead. If you shoot at the head, you're bragging. Braggarts don't live long."

  Siller was a storehouse of gunman's wisdom.

  "A flash gun is the fist in the face, the heel in the teeth, the knee in the groin. It's brute force, unabashed violence. I like the needle gun. A poisoned needle in the right spot will kill almost as quickly and far more quietly. The needle gun is the poison in the cup, the knife in the back. It's subtle, secret, stealthy; it gives no warning before, no notice after. A flash gun has its advantages—if you ever have to face a half-dozen attackers or a mob. I'll never get in a spot like that. Besides, needles are cheaper. And you can always get them. Cells are scarce."

  All that day I practiced. Soon, from fifty feet, I could hit the part of the body I aimed at, nine times out of ten. After that I practiced drawing the gun out of the shoulder pocket. But I couldn't equal Siller's catlike quickness. When he went up to the suite for food, I inspected his jacket. Into the gun pocket was clipped an ingenious little device constructed from a spring, a catch, and a release lever. When the gun was thrust in, it cocked the spring. When the hand entered the jacket, pulling it out a little from the body, the lever released the catch and the gun shot upward into the palm.

  I unclipped the device from his pocket and fitted it into mine. When Siller returned, put on his jacket, and shoved his gun into the pocket, he looked puzzled. We drew. I had my gun pointed at him before the barrel of his gun had cleared the jacket.

  He frowned, but it slowly turned into a grudging smile. "You're smarter than I thought, Dane. You might have a chance outside after all."

  I offered to return the device.

  "Keep it," he said. "I have others."

  I went on practicing. Draw and fire. Draw and fire. Draw, turn, fire. Practice until the movements became as automatic as breathing. Siller would say, "Dane!" A gun would appear in my hand. He would take a cautious step forward, a whisper of a movement that scarcely stirred the dust, and I would spin, crouched, a gun spitting flame into a blackened stone figure.

  We dueled for hours.

  "Watch the eyes," Siller would say. "The eyes are mirrors of decision. Before the hand knows, the eyes have revealed the mind's intention. Except Sabatini. His eyes never change expression whether he's kissing a girl or mutilating a child."

  I would cover Siller with my unloaded gun. His hand would dart out, snakelike, to twist the gun away, push it aside, and draw his own.

  "Not so close. Keep the gun away, back against your side or your hip. You have to disarm me and still stay far enough away so that I can't bother your aim."

  Practice again. Draw and fire. Draw and fire. Soon I could hear a scuttling sound among the stones, draw my gun, and leave a rat smoking and twitching in the dust. After a moment Siller joined the game.

  "Good shot!" he said, his eyes glittering. "T
he next one's mine."

  The rodent population took a sharp and sudden drop.

  Siller showed me how to hold and use a knife, how to silence an enemy quietly and finally, how to duel, how to deal with a man when you have a knife and he is weaponless and, more important, when the situation is turned around. He showed me how to make a sleeve scabbard and gave me a keen knife to slip into it. Finally, grudgingly, he admitted that I would have a chance of staying alive, even in a world of Agents.

  After a late afternoon meal, Siller vanished with my clothes. He left a robe that strained at the seams and reached only to my knees. I searched the suite. I had already noted that the subterranean room had no windows and no doors, and I could find no others upstairs. There was only the one door, and it was locked.

  I roamed the suite restlessly. Finally I looked through the bookcases. The majority of the titles seemed to be fiction. I passed them by. But at last I came upon a small case filled with more serious books. The wide range of subjects revealed a facet of Siller that I had not suspected.

  There were a number of Jude's books. I might have taken down The Book of the Prophet, The Church, or Ritual and Liturgy, but I knew them by heart. And the others were meaningless to me, the technical ones like Principles, Energy and Basic Circuit Diagrams, Machines and Man's Inheritance, and so forth. I had received a religious, not a lay, education.

  The book I finally pulled out had a battered cover and well-thumbed pages. There was no author listed and no publishing details. There was only the title, The Dynamics of Galactic Power. I settled down in a deep chair to read. I read slowly and carefully, but the time passed swiftly, because there was meat in the book, a strange new food that made my head swim with something close to intoxication. All of it was fascinating, but one passage I can remember still, almost word for word.

  We must face the realities of power. The key to understanding is the fortress world, and there is no key to the fortress. Let us look at it, clearly, with eyes unglazed by dreams, unblinded by false hopes.