A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  Shah shook her head. “It couldn’t have. It was only a bush.”

  “It attacked me,” insisted the frightened man.

  Shah shook her head again, smiling, but a tiny perplexed frown between her eyebrows reflected an unease she could not shake off and the absurd inclination to take his panicky imaginings at face value. At last, still wondering, she looked around.

  It was a very strange forest, although Shah – who was raised in a desert land and had less experience of trees than Michal – did not appreciate its curiosity. It seemed unable to make up its mind what kind of forest it was. Tall slender trees like firs rubbed shoulders with broad gnarled trees like olives. Roots like the groins of cathedrals raised trees like great mangroves proud of the forest floor, which was littered with giant cones and deep in leaf-mould. The grey boles of the trees were strides apart and they carried a high canopy of light-splintering foliage which blotted out the sky.

  There was no more agreement on the season than on the nature of the forest. Some of the trees were in blossom, sprawling powder-puffs of white or blue foam clouding the high tops and lying misty on the ground below. Some were turning to gold, or shedding hosts of bronze leaves which swam in deep drifts down the woodland avenues. The air was sweetly cloying, and had the greenhouse taste of having been breathed too much. So far below the canopy there was no breeze to stir and freshen it. Its damp pungency was redolent of slow decay. There was no birdsong in the branches, no furry scuttering among the roots. Not even the whirr of insects disturbed the soft, waiting silence of the eerie uncanny wood.

  Shah had an extraordinary, compelling sensation of the wood waiting for her response to what had happened in the thicket.

  Conscious that she could be making a fool of herself, aware too that the only one who could see her was Michal and he was in no mood for laughing, she asked for his knife. Wide-eyed, expectant as the trees, he produced a broad leaf-shaped blade from a tooled sheath at his belt. He could never remember using it except to peel fruit for Amalthea: the fighting men, who scrapped among themselves viciously at times, left the Empress’s steward strictly alone.

  Shah took it, steeling herself to its weight and feel, and selecting a sappy young tree like a rubber plant stabbed it deliberately in the bole. As she wrenched the knife from the bleeding wound she directed stern thoughts of reproof and the intention to stand no nonsense from a stack of kindling on a broad front into the grey forest twilight.

  Immediately, before she was ready, flashed back the rich green emission she had first experienced in the bowels of the Hive. Then it had nearly knocked her over: now, coming as it seemed to from all around her, it both blasted and supported her and she felt she could hardly have fallen had she tried.

  Her first instinct was to cringe away from it, to shut fast the portals of her mind against the monstrous, insufferable invasion. But she fought the impulse, and with an almost physical effort opened wide, petal-like, the psychic flanges that guarded her mentality. The green thought flooded in like a tide, and in her head took shape and reason and spoke to her with tongues she could fathom though they made neither words nor sounds. As she listened she began to understand; and what she was beginning to understand was staggering.

  Michal broke into her import-laden reverie. At his voice the vision and all the other sensory communications which were accumulating to turn her picture of Mithras on its head vanished, and the sudden loss of them made her wheel angrily on him. He was still kneeling on the ground in the sun-dappled half-light and he was pointing. “Look,” he said again.

  A Drone had walked through the thicket hedge as if it were his garden gate. For a long minute he stood regarding them even as they watched him, all unspeaking. Then he calmly turned and went on his way. Amid the tall trees and the broad trees and the soft grey light, his slow and measured stride – which seemed in the open fields a stupid, indolent shamble – took on a dignity and an aptness to his environment. He looked as if he could keep up his careful, silent pace all the day that the forest world knew. His short lumpish body, brown of limb and grey of garb, blended with the sturdy grey-brown trunks and threw off the watcher’s gaze long before he disappeared from their sight.

  “Do you know him?” Shah found herself whispering.

  Michal stared at her as he had stared at the Drone. “It was a Drone. Shah, there are thousands of the dreary things –”

  “– And to you they all look alike,” she finished irritably. “Michal, my son, do I have news for you.” But she did not deliver it then. She caught his hand, which was still vaguely pointing into the trees, and pulled him to his feet. “Come on, we’re going to follow him.”

  Michal was reluctant to follow the unknown Drone into the unknown wood, but he was even less inclined to stay or attempt to return through the thicket alone, so he did as he was bid. If it struck him as ironic that in a world virtually without women he still managed to be hen-pecked, he must have decided that now was not the moment to assert his masculinity.

  Paul was working with star-charts and logarithms at the dining-room table when he heard the clatter of running feet in the corridor. For a split second his internal organs seemed to cling together in fear. Then he put down his pen and rose quietly and moved to the front door. He opened it to the first fall of the hammering fist.

  It was not a murder squad but a messenger from the lord Chaucer. Paul snatched his charts and calculations from the table before following the man at a sprint.

  He found the Chancellor poring over a chip of green light pulsing on a dark plastic screen in the radio-room. The display, like everything else in the small high room, hunched under the curving shoulder of the Hive and inferior only to Amalthea’s cell and the golden hall, was not only home-made but home-conceived. Ingenuity amounting to genius had gone into the design of devices employing the higher physics but none of the harder metals. Nothing in the room seemed familiar to Paul, even with the vague once-removed familiarity of unknown scions of known families, but when he studied the jewelled dials and silver and plastic consoles he was able to identify their functions, and he was impressed more than he would have admitted at how few gaps remained in the array. The Mithraians had developed a whole unconventional technology to replace that standard one which the hungry atmosphere had eaten away.

  He was not allowed long for contemplation. Chaucer, leaning his heavy body on his hands over the screen, looked up with that unholy luminescence men call battle-light in his diamond eyes. He tapped the emerald spot with an immaculately manicured claw. “That is them,” he declared, smiling in his beard, a note of triumph in his deep equivocal voice.

  “You’re sure?” Paul could feel the nerves and muscles all through his body keying up in readiness for combat. He was not afraid. He had been bred for a soldier, raised to it, and though he no longer enjoyed the massive advantage that had been bred into him his practical and tactical skills continued to increase with every exercise of them. He was that ideal fighting machine, a robot with imagination. Still his chemistry was that of a man, and when action offered adrenalin flowed, reminding him that he was mortal.

  Chaucer flayed him with an impatient glance. “Of course I am sure. Who else? This is hardly a spatial highway; if we got any passing traffic we would not have been here fifteen years. Besides, I know that signal. Look.” He pulled a drawing across the screen. “That is their ship. It is a semi-armed merchantman they have picked up from somewhere, but there is nothing half-hearted about their armament now.”

  “Do you know their capabilities?”

  “Roughly.” He read out a string of numbers. Paul jotted them down beside his own calculations.

  “What’s the calibration on that screen?” He flicked through his log tables. “Then intercept is about here –” he pointed with his pen – “which is handy enough. It’ll be dark by then, you’ll be able to watch. I’ll go up to ‘Gyr’now, but I’m going to hug the planet as long as I can. I’ve a lot more power than them, I can afford to, and the less
time they have to work out what to do about me the better.”

  “Very well.” Chaucer looked at him sideways. “The lady told me you could capture their ship.”

  Paul chose to misunderstand. “When were you talking to Shah?”

  The Chancellor smiled thinly. “My apologies. I have not yet adjusted to the change in circumstances. The lady Amalthea said you could take the ship undamaged.”

  “Hardly undamaged. Intact perhaps, if they prefer to take their chances with you than with me.”

  “It is not only that we wish to recover our treasure. A ship of our own, even one we had to repair, would make us immeasurably freer than we are now.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind,” grunted Paul. “Now, if you’ll excuse me –”

  “I am coming with you,” said Chaucer.

  Paul’s narrow jaw dropped. “Like hell you are!”

  The lord of Mithras caught his wrist in a grip Paul could not break. His diamond eyes were savage; Paul was startled at the strength of him, the power of that massive personality which bore down on him like a heavy weight. The beautiful voice was descended to the awesome hiss of a labouring machine that brooks no hindrance.

  “It is not given to many to deny me, mercenary, and you are not one. My people have bought you with years of waiting and working, with fear and faith and a truly unreasonable belief in the future, and I will not leave their investment and perhaps their last hope in the hands of a paid assassin I do not know and have no cause to trust.

  “Look at you. Do you know how we have kept the Hive together the last half-year, Amalthea and I? We have presented you to our people, gift-wrapped. We have made you out a Titan – an invincible. They trusted in us for nineteen years and finally we failed them. So we gave them you to trust instead, and it was trust only that kept them from falling into despair, schism, conflict and ultimate self-destruction. The promise of you was their salvation.

  “And then you arrive: one man, with a ship they can’t see, and a whore they can, who talks more about money than fighting. It is not what they were led to expect. You have to prove yourself to them if you are to justify my actions and those of the lady Amalthea. Our credibility is riding on you. So when the guns flare and your precious hull staggers under their pounding, you will not be tempted to turn tail and find elsewhere an easier way of making money because I shall be there to stop you. If we do not win this battle, Paul, I shall not want to survive it and you will not get the choice.”

  Paul’s voice was low, flat. “Take your hand off me.”

  Chaucer could not remember ever in his life being threatened. Even Amalthea found other ways. But he had the distinct feeling he was being threatened now. “What?”

  “Take your hand off me.”

  The Chancellor loomed over the smaller man, and his lip curled. The silence in the close dim room was avid. Chaucer tightened his grip until he felt the bones grate; then, with elaborate distaste, he threw Paul’s arm back at him. The sneer and the derisive gesture were for the benefit of the people watching. Inwardly he felt neither anger nor contempt, only a passing respect for a solitary alien ready to oppose him in his own stronghold, surrounded by his own men, and some anxiety lest he should have underestimated the mercenary in his delicate and finely tooled calculations. He felt, like a twinge of indigestion, a regret that he had not had more time to consolidate his assessment of this fiercely unbending young man on whom all his clever, tortuous planning pivoted.

  Unbending still, dark marks on his wrist but no pain in his face or voice, Paul was speaking through his teeth. “I told Amalthea, and now I’ll tell you, and after that I don’t expect to have to say it again. I do this job because I’m good at it, maybe better than anyone else, and because I enjoy it. I took your job because I believed I could do it and that at the money it was a good risk. I still believe that, but even if I didn’t I would not – as you put it – turn tail because that way a mercenary very quickly runs out of clients. Like the Hive people, I too believe in the future: mine, and I value my reputation too highly to risk losing it in a tinpot little war like this one.

  “You want to come with me? You want to ride a bomb into battle, against an adversary whose capabilities we can only guess? With instructions to limit the attack because the sods on the ground fancy the other ship as a souvenir? It’s twenty years or more since you were in a space battle, Chaucer. Have you any idea what kind of armaments and tactics to expect? We use devices that will turn you white. Do you even know your emission tolerances after so long? Mine, you will not be surprised to learn, are high.

  “I don’t need your help, Chancellor, I don’t need your company, and I don’t want you crawling around my deck looking for somewhere to be sick. But I will take you, if that’s what you require, on the clear understanding that if you get in my way I will move you.” The pitch of his voice and the fire in his eyes implied greater violence than the words.

  Again, as in the Council chamber, the gaze of the two men met with a percussion that seemed to reverberate round the small room and should have registered on the oscilloscopes. Between them they seemed to hold time still. There was no sound, no movement; even the green blip on the scanner seemed to pause. The confrontation was more overt, less mannerly than before. Again Chaucer ended it. Again Paul was left plunging in a mental turbulence of relief, frustration, obscure humiliation and the acute awareness of having won nothing. He would have been happier for knowing the worry he was causing his opponent.

  The Chancellor backed off with serpentine slickness. “I accept your conditions,” he said; too easily, Paul did not believe a word of it, had he meant it he would have grudged it like blood, but Paul was at a loss to know what Chaucer expected to gain by chicanery now. Still he would sooner have gone into battle with a loose snake on “Gyr’s” flight-deck than with the lord Chaucer in the right-hand seat.

  But his choice in the matter was limited. Faced with obduracy on the part of the Mithraian, all he could really do was refuse to fly, and if he did that he had no illusions about his chances either of leaving Mithras or enjoying a long stay upon it. Besides – and this was the point Chaucer failed to appreciate – he did not want to miss the battle. He had come a long way for it, done a lot of work on it and expected to be paid a lot of money for it; but more than all this his blood was up. He was a fighting man by breeding, training, talent and every natural instinct, and he would have flown “Gyr” with both Chaucer and the snake on his back rather than be disappointed now. He needed this engagement like an addict needs a fix. Shah said he was immoral. Paul made the scorpion’s reply, conveniently forgetting that the scorpion drowned.

  Unhappy as he was, then, there was nothing for him to think about. “Damn you, come on,” he growled, shouldering past Chaucer to the door. From the corridor all the way to the parked, glistening shuttle he kept up a steady jog, but though Chaucer was breathing more heavily than he at the end Paul was denied the satisfaction of either seeing him fall behind or feeling him hurt to keep up.

  Air and Darkness

  Chapter One

  They lost the drone. For some time as they stole deeper into the grey world – and their eyes adjusting to its spectrum began to recognise subtleties of shade and tone: smoky blue smudges in the bark, a blush of rose along a sappy stem, tiny bright stars of white and yellow flowers peeking from the mossy forest floor, and the myriad variations on the green theme which gained in intensity what, sun-starved, they lost in brilliance – Shah believed she had the silent figure in view; or if not that exactly, that she knew how far ahead he moved and where he travelled. She could not dog him with her mind, for all the vibrant coruscating images that flooded in when she opened the sluices. With her embryonic understanding of just what this great imprecise intellect was, she was not surprised that trying to track a solitary Drone through it proved no more feasible than trailing a firefly across a field of meteors. Still she thought she knew where he was, until she got there and there was no sign of him. She looked at Micha
l and Michal looked at her, and each knew as surely as if it had been written large in fluorescent letters that the one had no more idea where they were than the other.

  Michal coped with the disaster with admirable fortitude. Being lost was just another addition to the long list of terrors a man should expect who ventured into a forest. Already beyond panic, he greeted the development as a martyr, with soulful resignation.

  Curiously – or perhaps not so, given that Michal had long passed his credulity threshold while this was hers – Shah was more distressed than the Mithraian. She never got lost. Wherever she wandered there were minds she could tap into to learn where she was and how to get where she was going. She had only ever been lost once, and that was in the ice-and-fire depths of a man’s psyche: Paul’s, more expansive, more complex and contradictory, cleverer, angrier and lonelier than anything she had encountered in twenty years’ mind-hopping. Now, her perception useless in this overwhelming confusion of perceptions, she was lost again – dazzled, deafened, her mental compass spinning. “Stop it,” she gritted.

  Michal, his alarm circuits almost exhausted, summoned up the last rather weary dregs in response to the sight of Shah turning slowly on her heels, then quicker, in the terrible grey-green place, crying out to no-one he could see, “Stop it – stop it – I’m drowning – STOP IT!” her voice rising at the last to a wail.

  “Shah!” He caught her arms and shook her, and pulling her to him folded her against his chest, absorbing the shudders of her long body with his own. She clung to him like a frightened child. Slowly the tremors ceased.

  She mumbled into his shoulder, “It’s stopped.”

  “What has?” There was concern, and more, in Michal’s scratched and dirty face.

  Shah did not look at his face. “Oh God, how am I going to tell you? Michal, there’s something in the forest – no. No. The forest – the forest itself – was talking to me. Not out loud; in my head. I’m a telepath. This forest is intelligent, and communicative, and telepathic. It was hammering my brain in its need to communicate. It’s stopped now.”