A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  Amalthea was speaking again. “You disappoint me, Paul. Are you not going to threaten me? – Something along the lines of ‘While I live you will never be safe from me’.”

  Paul surveyed her from the curiously patrician angle afforded by his position supine on the bed, which was such that he could look down his nose at the ceiling. With her bloody lips apart with anticipation like the hungry pant of a raptor’s beak, and her great grape eyes lively with delight, and her clawed hand fondling his hand in an indecent parody of a lover’s touch, she was monstrous and mad but also magnificent: a harpy in full flight. There was a kind of appreciation in his damp face, and a knowingness, and it creased up slowly in a smile. “I thought about it. I decided it would sound absurd.”

  Amalthea aired a laugh of pure enjoyment. “Ah, Paul, the workings of your mind are a source of constant pleasure to me. Well, almost constant. Will you not ask about the girl?”

  “You said she was dead.”

  “Do you not want to know how she died, or why?”

  “Jealousy,” said Paul.

  The mockery froze in Amalthea’s pointed face. “What?”

  “You were jealous of her. There was a time once when you were young, and maybe then you were a woman and not an eagle owl’s nightmare, but that time will not come again. You had to get rid of her. The contrast was too revealing.”

  Amalthea’s lips still curved, but her eyes blazed. Her talons, scoured now of the drug which had floored him aboard “Gyr”, clenched on Paul’s hand, drawing blood from the palm. She spoke in her teeth.

  “Do not think I do not understand you. You would like me to kill you, so that your ship would destroy my city. I shall not do that, not until my technicians can find a way of suborning her computer. Then she will be my ship, and I shall pick you apart fibre by fibre.”

  Paul considered the possibility. It seemed not too remote. “Gyr” had been custom-built for him, tailor-made, and on the balance of odds he still backed her silicon-chip integrity against the earnest but necessarily random probings of the Mithraians. Still, they were bright people – Chaucer had managed to liberate the shuttle or none of them would be here. They might gain control of her eventually. Paul was surprised and saddened at how little it seemed to matter. He said distinctly, “What did you do before you were a vampire?”

  Amalthea, white with temper, threw his hand back at him, rose like a rearing snake and struck him smartly across the cheek with her naked palm. But though she had slapped a good many faces in her time, in this instance the angle was unusually awkward, and as she lined up a more satisfying second service she seemed to see a sudden image of herself reflected in his eyes and found it oddly humiliating. Colour rose from her throat towards the high cheek-bones, giving a depth and radiance to her porcelain skin which would have first amazed and then enthralled her many admirers. Amalthea, Morningstar of Mithras, looked momentarily forty years younger, a girl flustered by her own passion.

  His skin stinging under her hand did more to focus Paul’s thoughts, prism-scattered by shock, than any amount of clever mechanical repartee. His world, which had been knocked vital degrees sideways by recent developments, now clicked back into place almost audibly, and reaction set in. True to character, his reaction was perverse, paradoxical, diametrically opposed to anything that might have been expected or understood. Shah had once accused him of hunting round in his psyche for ways of feeling that would mystify other people, and there was something in that. It was at once a vanity and a defence. Now, as the feeling about her death came percolating slowly through, it was not rage that slowly filled him but relief.

  He had known Shah for a year and a half. She had loomed larger in his life than any other human being. He had never kissed her. He had never lain with her. Without knowing it she had filled his soul, given depth to his powerful, complex, brittle personality, and given him something to care about beyond himself and the trappings of his warrior profession. Her death freed him from obligation. With only his own life at stake he could act now, within the framework of circumstances, as he wished and chose. He could set himself up against the Hive like a meteor against an atmosphere, and let them both burn up in a brilliance of mutual destruction, and he could do it without a shred of compunction or regret. Amalthea had killed his soul. He was a doomwatch machine again.

  Amalthea, watching from the sidelines of her own confused emotions, wishing she had not hit him and wanting to hit him again, saw the understanding creep into his eyes, the appreciation of loss condensing in the shadows under his small introvert frown, and waited breath-abated for the cataclysm of pain and grief and savage fury that would be no less shatteringly elemental because his drugged body prevented him from stamping around breaking things.

  It did not happen. The storm she expected did not blow over, it simply became apparent that she had misread the glass. Paul was not breaking up with his bereavement, outwardly or inwardly. His brow had cleared and he was returning her gaze and, satirically, like someone sharing in a rather decadent joke, he was grinning. His eyes left Amalthea and travelled over the bare room. He levered his elbows under him and with effort raised his head to complete the scrutiny. Then he looked at Amalthea again; insolently, she thought, as if she were the joke, but she was used to fear and could not but marvel at insolence from a man in his position. He drawled, “Lady, be gentle with me.”

  She stared at him intently. For the first time, with Paul helpless in her grasp, she felt endangered by him: not by his ship or his skill or his clever mind, but by the strange magnetism of his forceful, obtuse, unyielding personality. She was threatened by obsession, she knew it, but if she cared she did not care enough.

  She lunged at him. Her tiny fists balled in his shirt-front and with unexpected strength she slammed him up against the wall. “Listen,” she hissed. “This is insane. Shah does not matter, alive or dead; Mithras does not matter. You and I matter. We are the strong ones, the storm-riders, the void-drinkers. The stars belong to those with the courage to take them. We are the favoured of the universe. But we are going to die like dogs on this hateful, back-of-beyond planet unless we recognise the fact that must be sin-obvious to everyone else: that we are but opposite facets of the same coin, as inescapably bound by nature and destiny as the atoms of one element.

  “Look what we have to offer each other! The triumvirate of you, me and ‘Gyr’will be a darkness such as the galaxies have never known. We are the harbingers of a new night. There shall be no fury like our fury; our rage shall blind worlds. Our hand will stretch across infinity, and our reach will be an empire beyond the dreams of mortal men. We shall shake the heavens, and pocket the fallen stars for loose change.”

  Amalthea’s mad eyes saw an end of exile, her red lips tasted freedom. Lust ran a tremor like ecstasy through her tense excited body and rang a note of mayhem in her musical voice. Urgent with desire, she pinned Paul against the wall.

  “You think you do not need me. You think you could do it alone, but you could not, even if I let you go. I can, though. I have done it before, I can do it again, and I intend to. I want it back: the power, the dominion. I was born to rule millions, not a few hundred tacky middle-aged men with nothing better to do than foster squabbles! Do you know what the real pull of power is, the real opiate? Not the wealth, or the honour; not even the power of death – any fool with a loaded gun can take that. No, the real towering power is not making people die but making them live as you want, talk as you want, think as you want; making them finally want what you want. When you have that you have it all: power amounting to divinity. Paul – I can make gods of us.”

  Paul gazed into her eager amethyst eyes from a range of inches. He smiled at her, as good-naturedly patronising as if she were a child, and shook his head. “The people you meet when you haven’t got your gun.”

  Amalthea did not understand. She stood back, her wild eyes flicking up and down him. When he offered no elaboration she said tautly, “Explain.”

  Paul rested h
is head against the wall and chuckled. “Amalthea, I have done some evil things in my day. I have even enjoyed doing some of them. But I am still not so far gone in depravity that I would willingly disgorge you on an unsuspecting universe. Play with your tacky tin soldiers: you and they deserve one another. I’m not going to take you off Mithras. It’s as good a padded cell as the cosmos could have devised. Make yourself at home: if I have any say in the matter, you’re going to die here.”

  That left no room for misconception. Disappointment and animosity welled up in Amalthea’s breast. Cruel anger flooded her pointed face, but there was calculation in her eyes. The angle was better now. She let fly a prodigious swinging flat-hander which Paul saw coming but could not evade. Landing with a crack like a whip, the blow rocked him sideways, and by the time he had got his face off the bed again she had gone, slamming the door, her footsteps a staccato tattoo fading quickly down the corridor. The room was in darkness. He sat in the dark, alternately smearing the cool wetness of blood from his cheek and checking his teeth for rattles, and the last thing Amalthea heard before she turned the corner was low laughter gurgling in his scarred throat.

  Chapter Two

  Over the next few days Mithras positively hummed with thinking, most of it about Paul.

  Amalthea and the Council of the Hive wrestled, increasingly acrimoniously, with the problem of taking control of “Gyr”, until Chaucer finally got across the message that, if not actually impossible, the task was so fraught with hazard that any prospect of success was vastly overshadowed by the probability of total ruin, the Hive reduced to rubble and no-one left to mourn its passing. Amalthea only reluctantly abandoned her claim to the black ship when the Chancellor pointed out that, although it had taken them fifteen years to get it together, they now had a radio system which had brought them close to deliverance twice in one year while third times were universally considered lucky. After that the Council turned its attention to how Paul might be disposed of in such a way that the retribution of his ship might not fall upon the Hive.

  Mithras, in its great black-hearted rage at the assault from space, was also contemplating the man responsible and how it might wreak its vengeance. Not knowing about the doomwatch device, because Shah did not know, it was not inhibited by concern for the consequences of its actions, and it is by no means certain that it would have been deflected if it had known. The compound intellect that was the earth, the vegetation and the people of Mithras was very, very angry.

  Shah was excluded from the communion. She hardly cared, hardly noticed. She had enough worrying of her own to get on with.

  From her knowledge of the protagonists and from the evidence, circumstantial as it was, available to her Shah had built up a comprehensive, cohesive and utterly erroneous picture of events which cast a new and jaundiced light on the whole venture. She believed that Paul had known the truth about Amalthea’s “pirates” from the start or had discovered it early on, keeping her deliberately in the dark either way. His failure to allow her the time necessary to assess his new partner had been not rash but calculating. She had no hypothesis to explain “Gyr’s” disappearance after the battle – perhaps the merchantman had succeeded in inflicting unexpected damage, perhaps she had secured her escape by trickery, perhaps they had fought across half a constellation until, succumbing to the monstrous bombardment, the great hollow ship had split assunder and spilt her cargo down the starways. Whatever, “Gyr” had returned without her prize.

  She had then proceeded to her second objective: the blasting of the forest, in facilitation of Amalthea’s desire to expand her colony, her malice against the inexorable wilderness, or merely her wish to see her new toy in action. For Shah had no doubt that Amalthea had bought Paul, with his ship and his guns and his proud talk about the morality of mercenary engagement, for a double fistful of prettily coloured mineral crystals. It was easy enough, she reflected, to be drawn to that spectacular combination of hardness and brilliance. She wondered what would happen now and worried because she did not know what she could about Paul, what she should do, or even what she wanted to do.

  Michal, too, was worried: mostly about Shah, silent and withdrawn, of ghostly mien and haunted eye, distracted, restive and monosyllabic; but also about Paul, Amalthea, the forest, the Hive and himself.

  Independently of the Council’s deliberations, even to a degree at variance with them, Chaucer thought of Paul not just as a threat to be countered but as a lost opportunity to be rued. He could not rid himself of the notion that better handling of the situation, on the part of himself and others, would have brought infinitely better results. Amalthea was his empress and her word was law, nor was he particularly disturbed that his agreement with Paul had been dishonoured; only this nagging sense of waste which he did not understand kept him from sleep. As near as he could express it, privately, to himself alone, it was like seeing a racing horse break its leg – one moment grace and power and unlimited potential and kings clamouring for a fetlock, the next dog-meat.

  Almost the only one on Mithras giving no serious thought to his position was Paul. He was finding it difficult to think logically about anything for more than a couple of minutes at a stretch. His blind cell was dark, silent, blood-warm and short of air. His gaolers were not punctilious about feeding him. He slept too much and lost track of the passage of time.

  “Gyr” was not thinking, not in any sentient sense, although the circuits continued to cross-examine one another with inhuman thoroughness deep in her silicon synapses; nor was she counting the orbits she made around the small green world. So infinite was her patience that she was not aware of waiting. She knew two things, which together filled her horizon of consciousness: that she was no longer receiving signals from Paul’s voluntary blip-transmitter (possible malfunction, possible accident, possible inimical interference, full battle readiness, constant alert) and that the involuntary life-signal was still coming through (heart beating, life present, no action contemplatable inconsistent with continuation of subject life status, weaponry on hold, further information required).

  Her consciousness, which was fundamentally different from the human one, was such that she could deal with virtually unlimited quantities of data, but only in the simplest terms. She was capable of apparently complex, in reality only very fast, feats of deduction but quite incapable of inference. In the absence of further input she was powerless to guess what might have befallen Paul and unable to initiate a programme to find out. While the life-signal continued to reach her she would continue to wait, all triggers metaphorically cocked by electronic digits that grew neither tired nor itchy. If the life-signal ceased she would instantly, impassionately, unrelentingly rain havoc from the skies. After that she would self-destruct, which would be a spectacular sight for anyone still in a position to enjoy it.

  It was against that background of fermenting thought that Michal, hating himself, tentatively approached the main Hive door at the top of the curved steps to seek an audience with Amalthea.

  He was most unhappy about the errand that brought him there, but judged it marginally the lesser of two evils. He could have refused to co-operate, at least until he should be compelled, but Mithras had made it clear that before that it would use Shah. Knowing the forest’s intentions, Michal would not subject her to that ordeal. Necessarily Mithras had instructed him through Shah, but in that cataleptic state, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, of which she retained little conscious memory. He would not have her learn the full implications of the Mithras sanction while there remained any chance of keeping her in ignorance. So Michal shouldered the loathsome duty himself, knowing as he did that it was only a matter of time before she stumbled across the truth – in his mind or another’s – and only hoping that it would all be over by then.

  He dragged his heels across the open space that only days ago had been all his world, deriving brief cheer from the distinct possibility that Amalthea would cut him down before he could open his mouth and thus rescue him from an inv
idious situation. But she did not. She received his reluctant embassy in frigid silence, but spring set in as he leadenly explained the proposition, and by the time he had finished the thaw was well advanced. She sent for Chaucer, and Michal repeated his message; then Amalthea despatched him to an ante-room, as blithely as if he were still her steward and had never contemplated defection. He found that negligent amnesty more humiliating than anything he could remember.

  When they were alone Amalthea turned to her Chancellor with shining eyes and a crescent-shaped beam, clapping her clawed hands with rare spontaneous delight. “And they say God has no sense of humour!”

  Amalthea, who did not believe in gods, could afford to be flippant. Chaucer, who entertained niggling doubts, was cagier. “I do not like the idea of the Drones having themselves a culture out there. That is what he was saying?”

  “Something like that. The Drones and the trees. I am not sure he understood what they were telling him.” She shrugged. “Well, we always knew there was something out there. It cost us enough people, early on.”

  “But the Drones?” Chaucer was uncomfortable, though he could not have explained precisely why, even to himself. “We have used them as slaves for fifteen years.”

  “We must assume they did not mind too much. What does it matter? Whatever this thing is poor Michal has been babbling about, it is offering to do us the most enormous favour and to pay us for the privilege. That is a nugget I am not prepared to bite, Chaucer.”

  “It could be a trick. If the girl is alive after all–”

  Amalthea shook her silver head firmly. “No. I raised that boy. I would know if he was lying. He does not do it well.”

  “Then it really is vengeance? This – thing – wants Paul dead and is prepared to buy him off us?”

  “He burnt its beloved forest. We only mined a few gem-stones, and for that it put us under seige for fifteen years. He blew whole chunks out of it. Oh yes, it wants him dead.”