A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  She woke panting, sweat in her hair, her eyes groping for Michal, but Michal had not returned and Shah could not remember where he had gone or why she felt so desperately uneasy about his absence. But nor could she calm herself, and so, though it was very early, she rose and wrapped the blanket around her against the dawn chill and wandered off in search of some antidote to the nightmare. She saw Drones curled up under one or two of the nearer trees, but none stirred at her soft passing tread.

  Although she searched with both her eyes and her mind, projecting her perception like a pack of running dogs to catch his scent, she could neither locate him nor allay the feelings of dread that rose through her like nausea when she tried to recall where he had gone. Once she seemed to pick up a faint, frail emanation of some distant mind that was not of the Mithras compound but it was gone before she could focus on it. At length, not knowing where else she might enquire, she approached one of the big old trees and, resting her brow against its elephant-hide bole, opened the petals of her mind to its radiation as a supplicant spreads arms to the sun.

  What she learned there rocked her like shell-shock.

  She found Michal a sleeping knot in the middle of the thorn sea which, its purpose accomplished, had long since relaxed its tense integrity. It had been a prison he could not without shredding his flesh escape when, too tired to stand any longer, numb with despair, he had cramped his body into the tiny circle of ground around his feet and lapsed into wretched slumber. He still believed himself a prisoner when Shah roused him with her toe in his ribs. Fumbling for awareness with his numbed mind and his sleep-blind eyes and his stiff awkward body he groaned, “Paul –”

  “No,” said Shah. Her voice was cold. Her almond eyes glittered darkly, despising him.

  Michal felt the blood rise through his face, not only because Shah thought he had betrayed Paul but also because he could not explain why. “We – got separated. He went that way. I could not move.” He showed his lacerated palms, the blood crusted to scabs.

  Shah was unimpressed. “Well, you can move now.” She strode off in the direction he indicated without a backward glance, and Michal slunk after her like a kicked dog.

  She posted him outside the cactus garden. She could feel drifting, tenuous shreds of Paul’s mind within. “If you see or hear anything at all, shout. Then you can hide.”

  “Shah, please,” he begged, squirming under her scorn.

  “Shout.” She walked under the green arch into the dream.

  The bizarre garden with its livid vicious colours was wholly familiar to her. She knew what to look for and where to look, and she found Paul as she had known she would.

  The vegetation bound him. The horny succulents had savaged him. His strength had sapped with his blood into the ground. That was the vengeance the Drone had spoken of, and that was the richness, and the tithe was almost paid. Paul was facing death, hanging onto his life with grim, unreasonable persistence and no longer any clear idea what he wanted it for. His eyes were open, half-hooded, the pupils shock-shrunken so that the golden aureoles flared in the sunk dark hollows, a startling colour in his bloodless face.

  Shah, searching his eyes with a strange heady mixture of compassion and contempt, sweet and bitter as incense, found no recognition, no awareness other than of hurt. Even the raging power of his mind was drained, diminished to a murmur, the great angry essence of him withdrawn into an inner sanctuary where she could not follow and from whence quite possibly he would not emerge. He looked finished.

  But he was not finished; not quite, not yet. Her presence, or perhaps her probing mind, awoke some lingering consciousness in him and something moved in his eyes. Shah felt them struggling to focus on her and, when they did, felt the shock of recognition jar his frail captive frame. Dry-eyed, clear-headed, she said his name and his burnt lips moved in hers.

  “Paul, you bastard,” she said, “I should leave you here to rot.”

  She could not catch his reply. She knelt beside him, one hand resting lightly on his chest, bared and bloody from the thorns. He whispered distinctly, “But you won’t.”

  “No?” His helplessness tempted her. She had forgiven him nothing, but at this low ebb any retribution she might exact seemed apt to despatch him entirely, and if it came to a straight choice between saving him and leaving him then he was right: she would not leave him. “No, perhaps not. I don’t owe you much, Paul, but perhaps I still owe you better than that.”

  She hauled at the living thongs with no more effect than that they tightened convulsively into the raw welts already carved where their embrace had met unprotected skin. Her efforts must have hurt him, but he remained impassive until the great cactus with its bloody spines began to lean ponderously over them, when a shudder of pure primitive fear ran the length of his snared body.

  Shah growled a mind-threat at the giant plant and it straightened back, its spines rattling a disappointed tattoo. The exchange gave her an idea. She rocked back on her heels. “Let me into your mind.”

  His eyes flared at her with the same fear the cactus drew from him. “No.”

  “Wrong answer,” she said. She forced her hard perception against the portals of his mind until their weakened defences failed and with a kaleidoscope rush of sensations she was inside his head. He moaned and his eyes closed. She felt like a rapist.

  She felt the roots and suckers sawing at her flesh, the cool air against her skin where the shirt had been torn away and the terrible weakness creeping like death through her sapped veins. She sent the power of her mind pulsing through all his annexed body, and when her control was total and unarguable she concentrated her still unplumbed faculties as she had never concentrated before. She felt a pattern develop inside her and pushed it outwards, and outside her dual form it became a dome of force, a kind of personal magnetosphere, expanding against the menace of punitive, absorptive Mithras with its message of strength and singularity, absolute determination and the demand LET ME GO!

  “It had no choice,” she explained later as the three of them rested as far from the cactus garden as an hour’s stumbling had taken them, breakfasting on fruit. It was the last of the mysteries and misunderstandings they had spent the time resolving. “Mithras had already accepted me as a kind of foster-child. For that overgrown pot-plant to have used its knives on me would have been tantamount to suicide – or perhaps more like cannibalism, one part of the compound feeding on another. The cactus can neither see nor hear: all it knows comes through the telepathic network linking all the indigenous elements of this world. When it suddenly found my mind bawling at it, so far as it could know its prey – you, Paul – had been spirited away and a part of itself, in the widest sense, substituted. With any luck it’s still trying to work out how.”

  “While it is we are safe?” suggested Michal hopefully.

  Shah looked at him in surprise. “Good God, no. No part of this bloody planet is safe for any of us any more.”

  Michal’s tragic gaze went from Shah to Paul and back. He was down to his singlet, having parted with his shirt to Paul whose own was in ribbons and who was still shivering although the morning was now mild, and he had the desolate air of something abandoned. “Then what – where –”

  Paul shrugged the borrowed shirt closer about him. It was too big, but the bulk of bandages filled it out in places. His face was ashy with exhaustion but his eyes were his own. “Where do you think?” he grunted, gracelessly.

  “I don’t suppose you have the key.” Paul made no reply, but the look he gave her was scathing. “No, I suppose not. Amalthea?”

  “Or Chaucer.”

  “Michal, who do you think would keep the key to the shuttle?” They were skulking on the outer margin of the perimeter hedge, not far from the small glistening craft, waiting for dusk.

  “Amalthea.” Her steward sounded sure. “She would trust no-one with the one means of leaving Mithras.”

  “On her, or hidden?” asked Shah.

  “What is it like?”


  “It’s a key,” Paul said heavily. “It’s key-like. You know, a little metal thing, flat with teeth down one side?”

  “I thought it might have been something fancier,” Michal said mildly. “She will keep it with her.”

  “All right,” said Shah. “Then who’s staying behind?”

  “What?”

  “What?”

  “Somebody has to stay behind,” she explained patiently, “to rescue the other two when they get caught. That’s how they do it in all the best videos.” Eighteen months before she had not known what a video was.

  Paul noted a twinkle in her eye which had been missing for some time. “Well, you’ll have to go, for obvious reasons. Michal had better go, because he knows the geography of the place. And if I don’t come you’ll bring me the key to her treasure chest, the key to her bottom drawer, maybe the key to her heart but nothing we can open the shuttle with. We’ll all go, and try to avoid getting caught.”

  Shah laid her hand on his arm. Her eyes held his. “Paul, if it comes to a fight, or if we have to run, will you be all right?”

  He glared at her. “Just you watch me.”

  Once it was dark they crossed the compound, dodging the sentinel beams of the searchlights, and entered the Hive by the basement door used by the Drones. In theory the night watch was supposed to include the technical area on its rounds, said Michal; in practice the policing of the Drone areas was left to those supervising their labours, and since that was a full-time job the interlopers had no difficulty evading scrutiny as they ghosted through on their way to the higher levels. Shah was aware that the Drones had seen them, and that they were perplexed and watching flat-eyed, but she did not anticipate disclosure. They passed unchallenged into the Hive of the Mithraians.

  Shah found Amalthea in her own high cell, alone and quietly brooding. “She’s thinking about you,” Shah whispered to Paul.

  “That’s nice.”

  “She’s wondering why you’re not dead yet.”

  Michal navigated a route up the Hive which, though it seemed complex and illogical, afforded swift progress and a high degree of concealment. Several times they heard voices – once a great number of them laughing in a communal hall the other side of a curved wall – and twice they fled for cover from the sound of descending steps on the stair, but they saw no-one and were seen by none, and so they gained the golden hall.

  It was no less gaudy, no less crass, but seen in juxtaposition to the silent forest, stretching in infinite menace beyond all their horizons, the Mithraians’ need to erect some testament to their own worth finally made a kind of sense. If Shah could not admire the monument, she could pity the deep insecurity which fostered that grotesque expression of defiance. The whole Hive was the spectacular edifice that it was in compensation: a brilliant totem at the hub of a tiny, transient, enemy-encompassed world.

  Immune now to glory and grossness alike, Shah pressed forward to the stair, her eyes on the gallery and the door which gave onto Amalthea’s private place. The lady of Mithras was still within, still keeping her dark vigil, waiting for the cataclysm which would signal the death she craved and feared more than any save her own. Paul would never know, because Shah would never tell him, but profoundly as Amalthea required his death and much as she would have pleasured in it, her celebration would have been tempered with regret even if she alone would have known of it. She had wanted him with a fierce wanting previously reserved for planets.

  Behind them, between the gilt pilasters, the great panelled door agleam with beaten gold opened again and one step fell on the ringing floor. Michal spun like a child caught stealing. Shah, her eyes snapping, divided sharp calculating glances between the doorway and the stair.

  Paul turned slowly. His gaze was ambivalent, his voice was low. “Chaucer.”

  Chapter Four

  Shah’s nostrils flared with impatience. Her eyes glittered snakishly. “Paul,” she hissed, “I’ll deal with him.”

  “No. Get what we came for.”

  “He’s armed. You’re not.”

  Paul looked at her. “Get the key. The Chancellor and I have things to say.”

  “He has a knife.”

  “Go!”

  With a wordless hiss like an angry snake she turned her back and flounced up the stairs. After a moment’s hesitation Michal followed her.

  Chaucer drew a long silver knife from under his clothes. “She is right. How does she do that?”

  “She reads minds.”

  “Ah.” Chaucer’s leonine head nodded slowly, as if it were not the most bizarre thing anyone had ever said to him. “How are you still alive?”

  “That was Shah, too. Faced with the choice of her safety or mine, she opted for the latter. I really don’t know why.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To repossess my spacecraft. Amalthea has the key.”

  “Yes.” Chaucer looked after the young man and the girl. “Will they kill her?”

  Paul looked at the knife, and, curiously, at Chaucer. “Does that matter to you?”

  Chaucer laughed ruefully. “Oddly enough,” he said, “it does.”

  “You’d be better off without her.”

  “I know.”

  “You should have taken the deal I offered.”

  “I know.”

  Paul felt the same frustration that had ridden him in “Gyr”, trying to coax the fleeing freighter to stand and fight. “Chaucer, this planet is approaching a state of integrated consciousness. I don’t expect you to understand what that means, but the point is coming at which Mithras will tolerate the Hive no longer. There will be nothing you can do about it, the planet will simply become untenable for you. I can still arrange for you to get your men away before that.”

  “My men?”

  “I’ll find you a ship, I’ll find you a crew and I’ll find a planet willing to take you.”

  Chaucer smiled. “Same fee?”

  “Same fee,” affirmed Paul.

  “What of Amalthea?”

  Paul sucked in a deep breath. “She’s mad, and she’s evil. She’s galactic warfare walking round looking for somewhere to happen. Mithras is the perfect prison. It would be criminal ever to let her leave.”

  “And do you suppose,” suggested Chaucer, aiming blind but with devastating accuracy, “that no-one ever said the same about you?”

  Paul froze from the soul out. It had been more than ten years, but the nerves still jumped when the wound was touched. At length he said, “I know they did.” A tiny spasm he could not suppress caught up his face and his voice. Chaucer was abruptly reminded how much abuse his unremarkable body had absorbed over the past days. Striking him with the force of a revelation came the knowledge that, almost whatever the circumstances, he was not prepared to add to it further. The play was done, and if he was less than happy with his performance in it there was at least a certain dignity in ringing down the curtain.

  “Damn you, listen to me!” Chaucer blinked, surprised somehow to find Paul still talking. His eyes blazed and his lip had a hard twist the Chancellor recognised, with amazement, as self-contempt. “They said it, and they meant it, and they did to me things you wouldn’t understand the half of before they felt safe from me. I didn’t think so at the time, of course, but they were right. There are some people who are just too intrinsically dangerous to have around. Probably I was one. For certain, she’s another.”

  For a surreal moment, held in the bitter gold-sparked gaze of an angry young man’s strange eyes, Chaucer felt himself in the pull of a black hole, an emotional event horizon sucking him into that elemental chaos that was Paul’s tormented restless spirit. It was of course a nonsense. Paul was not a cosmic force, only a rather battered young man with more ability than purpose, more intelligence than understanding, more past than future, and the hollowness of misplaced destiny haunting the back of his eyes.

  Precisely what spectres rode him the Mithraian did not know, and he doubted that it mattered. What disturbed Ch
aucer was not that he was haunted but that he should know his ghosts so well. He was become the sum of them: all the cruel and bitter things, all the betrayed ambitions, the lost illusions, the murdered hope. He had trodden the coals of human bankruptcy and emerged, if not unscathed, still somehow unconsumed. Such intimacy with the stuff of death seemed to Chaucer a kind of incest, an unholy alliance of blasphemy and a strange innocence. He felt suddenly very old and very weary.

  He laid his knife, which he was still holding, down on a table and turned away. “Go home, Paul – wherever you conceive that to be. Take your key. Take your friends, and your ship, and your money, and go. Leave us in peace.”

  “You’ll all die here!”

  “Then let us rest in peace,” snapped Chaucer. “I will not have her killed and I will not abandon her. She is all that you say, perhaps more, but we all swore her fealty and were glad to do it, and I will not see her betrayed now. Do not grieve for us, mercenary. We are none of us much better than Amalthea, and all of us less great.”

  Shoulders set, he walked away down the long hall, rocklike in his immovable determination, but he did not reach the door. From the gallery, where a black slit marked the door ajar to Amalthea’s chamber, came a cry of such anguish as to momentarily strike both men where they stood. The voice was Michal’s, and the words were “Lady – no!” and in all the circumstances they could have meant almost anything, but the tone was pure horror.

  Paul reacted first. His tired body jerked into action and he was halfway up the stairs before he realised he had snatched Chaucer’s knife from the table-top as he moved.

  Shah had entered the dark chamber mind first.

  Amalthea, seated still upon her black throne, her black cloak cast around her, had heard nothing, but neither was she thinking of the key to the purloined shuttle. There was no reason why she should. Until “Gyr” had taken such action as was programmed to mark her captain’s death it would be most unwise to approach her, and if that programme did indeed conclude with self-destruction it could be a long time before the little craft would be of use. It would naturally be kept safe against that day, but there was no urgency to keep the key constantly at the forefront of its custodian’s mind. It would have been convenient, but Shah was hardly surprised.