A Cactus Garden

by Jo Bannister

  “I understand.” There was a smile in the Chacellor’s voice. When Paul stopped throwing angry looks around him he saw a smile in his eyes, and it was clear that only considerable physical command kept a smile from his lips.

  Paul scowled at him. He scowled at the men clustered behind him, who did not know what they were hearing but were somehow aware of its significance. He turned away and scowled after Shah’s receding figure. Then he turned back. “It’ll cost you.”

  “Same fee?”

  “Same fee. And the cost of hiring the transporter. And I’ll take it with me. I wouldn’t ask anyone to trust you lot.”

  Shah walked out to the waiting shuttle alone, glad of the quiet,

  glad of the chance to think. Her mind was in a peculiar state of

  frozen turmoil, like a basket of snakes with the lid firmly clamped on. There was a great stillness about her and in her, but in her innermost self of all she knew it was spurious, a façade of calm disguising the seething ferment in her brain. She desperately needed a chance to get what had happened at the top of the Hive straight in her mind. She thought she knew what had happened after Michal died, she believed in the miracle, and she was afraid to approximately equal degrees of the consequences of being right and the disappointment of being wrong.

  Preoccupied as she was, it was some moments before she became aware of the small grey figure silently watching from the margin of the forest. It was Surgeon. Shah inclined her head in recognition, but at first made no move towards him: she was considerably uncertain as to the current state of relations between herself and Mithras. But Surgeon neither approached nor made to leave, and at length curiosity overcame caution. Groping ahead with her perception, using it as a blind man’s cane to forewarn of hazard, she walked across the bare earth to meet him.

  “You won, then,” said Surgeon.

  “Did we? It doesn’t feel much like a victory.”

  “The boy died.”

  “Yes.” She felt her scalp crawl. “How did you know?”

  “We are Mithras.”

  Slow appreciation of what the enigmatic answer implied crept over like the shadow of an eclipse. She was again smitten by the sense of overwhelming power which cloaked the Drones in their own land, an aura almost of majesty which made a strange but not absurd contrast with their homely appearance. “He’s with – He is –?” She did not know the words to express the concept of incorporation.

  “Is he less of Mithras than we?”

  Shah looked towards the Hive. A solitary figure detached itself from the background and moved out into the open. It would be Paul; even at that distance she sensed the weariness which enveloped him like a shroud, not a weakness but a flatness, a loss of elasticity. He walked like an automaton.

  Surgeon’s gaze had followed hers. His attitude remained equivocal. “You freed him.”

  “I had to. He is my friend. I couldn’t let you kill him.”

  “No?”

  “What he did, that hurt you – it wasn’t how it seemed. He didn’t blast the forest for Amalthea. He didn’t know there were people there. There was no way he could know about you, about Mithras.”

  “We cannot forgive, you know. But we do understand that.”

  “We’re leaving now. In a few months a ship will come to evacuate the Hive people. Your planet will be your own again.”

  “We never gave it up.”

  Shah nodded and smiled and began to turn away. Then she thought of something. She fumbled at her hand. “You’d better have these back.” She proffered a palm of ruby and emerald fire.

  The Drone touched her hand, closing it. “Keep them. To remember us by.”

  “You think I might forget?” Her face went serious. “I shan’t forget my promise, either. I’ll be your balladeer.”

  Surgeon’s far-sighted, berry-brown eyes roved the green fields and settled on the small, lonely figure of the trudging man. “He was strong.”

  “He will be strong again.”

  The forest dweller glanced at her and something that was almost an expression ghosted across his leathery face. Then he turned and in three stumpy strides vanished into the thicket.

  Shah’s great eyes flew wide with a last wild notion and she shouted after him, “What about Amalthea?”

  An answer reached her from nowhere. “And is not Amalthea more of Mithras than most of us?”

  When Paul came they went up to “Gyr” almost in silence; not the familiar unstrained silence of easy companionship but a tenser quiet, terse with the recognition that a thing had happened between them that rocked the very foundations on which their shared life was built. It made them as strangers. Once, dull with fatigue, Paul made an awkward and unconvincing essay at conversation and almost broke Shah’s heart.

  He spent half an hour bringing “Gyr’s” computers up to date while Shah hovered in the background, watching covertly, aching for communication and fearing rebuttal as she had not since the first days of their acquaintance. She was still wavering when he finished and straightened up, stretching cautiously. Then he walked off the flight-deck, passing her without a word or a glance.

  “Paul!”

  The look he gave her was furtive, fugitive. “I can’t do any more today. We can leave first thing tomorrow. I have to get some sleep.”

  She could not argue with that. “Yes. All right.” He went on through the hatch. Shah stayed alone on the flight-deck for some minutes, feeling the silence along her skin like cool air, wanting to fight it but not knowing where to aim her blows. Finally she admitted defeat and went to her own cabin.

  She got as far as taking off her jacket and shoes. Then, sitting morosely on the edge of her bunk with one shoe in her hand, she experienced a sudden access of indignation. She shot to her feet, slammed out of her cabin and stalked down the companionway to Paul’s, determination stiffening the fibres of her being like starch. She threw open the door. “Listen, you –”

  Paul was hunched over the chart-table in his cabin, his back to the hatch, his shoulders slumped. He did not turn at the drama of her entrance.

  Impatience immediately gave way to concern. “Paul? What’s the matter?”

  His head hung. His voice was thick and querulous. “I can’t get this bloody shirt off.” He sounded close to tears.

  Blood seeping from his wounds had crusted the fabric to his skin. Shah soaked it off with a warm sponge. Then she made some coffee and brought it in “Apathy” and “Celibacy”. They sat cross-legged at opposite ends of Paul’s bunk, facing each other. Paul buried his face in his mug.

  Sipping at her own, watching from under her fringe, Shah said, “I have to know what happened.”

  His eyes flicked up and down, hunted. “You know what happened. Michal died. In spite of your intervention, he still died.”

  “Yes. Did I?”

  She saw him shudder. He did not reply.

  “I went into Michal’s mind because I thought I could help him,” she said carefully, picking her words, working at staying calm. “I found he needed no help, but before I could leave his death broke through and enveloped both of us. I was lost. I lost Michal, lost my way. I thought I was dying. Did I die?”

  Paul would not meet her gaze. He looked everywhere else, with a dismally shallow pretence of idleness. “Patently not.”

  “As you will. Then someone called me by my name. You.”

  “That’s right.”

  “From inside. You followed me inside. Didn’t you?”

  He could not cope with her interrogation. He knew what she was driving at. Whatever he had done in the Hive room, it had left his brain pulsing with pain and possibilities. The pain was quiescent now but the other was eating him up, like fever. The last thing he needed was a cross-examination. Tired as he was, he started to his feet and made for the door. But he did not leave. He had never run from his enemies, felt suddenly ashamed of fleeing from Shah. He slowly turned. His face was twisted. Shah’s gut twisted up in sympathy.

  He leaned b
ack against the door, his palms braced flat against its cool plane. The words came hard. “I don’t know what happened. When the boy was dead and you were still in there – I tried to reach you. I knew I couldn’t, but I tried. And then my head –” Mere memory was enough to make him flinch. “All the same, I know what didn’t happen and so do you. I’m not a telepath, Shah, I no longer have any extra-sensory capacity. That part of my brain was burned out with a laser. Whatever happened, it had to be your faculties at work. I have none.”

  Shah did not believe it. Starling-coloured highlights danced down the length of her straight dark hair as she firmly shook her head. “No. The power was outside me. I had nothing, was nothing, then. If I was not dead I would have died, but that somehow you came for me and did something that hurt your head and saved my life. Those are the facts. We may interpret them as we will.”

  “What do you think – that I’m lying to you?” He was trying to whistle up enough anger to cover the hollow fear in his eyes. “That all the time I’ve known you I’ve been carefully hiding, for reasons of my own, a full range of extra-sensory abilities from mind-reading to teleportation? That I pretended to be taken in by Amalthea’s lies for the sheer pleasure of being shot, carved up and generally abused by the Hive people, and that in order to protect the illusion I manifested a detailed and – if I say it myself – persuasive impression of a man bleeding to death in a cactus garden? Is that what you think?”

  “Of course not. Oh Paul, do sit down, you look terrible.”

  “Maybe that’s part of the illusion too,” he said snidely. But he came back glowering and sat beside her on the bunk.

  “I never for a moment believed you’d lied to me,” said Shah. “But now something remarkable has happened, and it occurs to me to wonder if perhaps they lied to you.”

  His eyes burned her. The hope he had fought against had gained a foothold. That and the fear fed on each other, making him a battlefield. “Explain.”

  She took a deep breath and tried. “The people who – made – you went to a lot of trouble to get a telepath. They bred you, from God knows what stock, for the inherent trait and then they engineered, manipulated and trained you until they had refined a supreme and, to the best of their knowledge, unique talent. If they’d known about me perhaps they wouldn’t have bothered, but that’s neither here nor there. But you were more than they bargained for. Your powers and personality were too much for them to control. You frightened the life out of them, and finally they felt they had no choice but to – incapacitate you. To protect themselves.”

  Paul said in his teeth, “They crippled me. They used a laser to burn every vestige of perception out of my head.”

  “But did they? They wouldn’t do it lightly, not after all their work. They would think very hard and consider all the alternatives. You were very young: it must have occurred to them that as you grew up you might become more amenable. If there was any chance, they’d want to preserve the option.”

  She felt the tension of his body where his shoulder touched hers. “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, I don’t know enough to. But what I’m wondering is this. Suppose they didn’t burn it out – that was only what they told you. Suppose what they actually did was isolate it, wall off that part of your brain – behind a barrier of scar tissue or somesuch. Would you know the difference?”

  “I don’t know.” He was trembling now. “You’ve been in there – what do you think?”

  “Paul, I wouldn’t begin to know. Your mind is like nowhere I’ve ever been anyway. But it’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “Dear God,” he whispered, “it’s possible.”

  “And not knowing it was there still,” Shah hurried on, “you’ve managed without it all these years. But today, for me, you tried beyond any human expectation of trying. You nearly killed yourself trying. What if all that effort broke down a portion of the barrier and let your perception out? Just for a moment, just long enough for you to reach me. What then, Paul? What then?”

  “I don’t know.” He touched his fingertips to his aching skull with reverence and wonder. “I don’t know.”

  Shah put her arm around him and lowered her head onto his shoulder. “Me neither. But Paul, I think we should try to find someone who does.”

  They remained like that, quiet and unmoving, for a long time. The ship slept about them, only murmuring peacefully to itself as systems that were designed to tackle the distances between stars drowsed their way through one 85-minute orbit after another. Below, the languid turning of Mithras brought slow night on the Hive.

  Paul thought that Shah too was sleeping, and was considering how he might put her to bed without waking her, but she was not asleep. She moved her head on his shoulder languorously, rubbing against his neck like a cat.

  “I wonder how Michal likes being a planet,” she yawned.

  Copyright

  First published in 1983 by Hale

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3636-8 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3635-1 POD

  Copyright © Jo Bannister, 1983

  The right of Jo Bannister to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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