The roaring columns rose, then stood. From the floor of the crater scores of them went up beyond sight into the thick, moist air. Imbry rose to his knees—no one was pointing a weapon at him now—then to his feet. He edged around the carry-all, farther away from the apparatus he had helped build, which was now a combination of fluorescing white rods and gleaming black lenses, the struts radiating a non-light that hurt his eyes and caused him to see black auras when he looked away.
He could not have named the substance that formed the columns, he thought. It was opaque and yet shiny. He went toward the one that had carried up the unlucky provost’s man and saw his own face and form dimly reflected in it. The transport was on the far side, edging away from the circle from which the column had shot up. Imbry saw the aircraft’s landing struts deploy and touch the gritty ground, but could hear nothing over the noise that filled the crater.
He was tempted to touch the column, to see what it was made of, but fought the impulse. He was sure it would be dangerous, and besides, his most pressing business was to get out of this place now that the distraction he had hoped for had arrived. He turned back toward the carry-all, fishing in his pouch for the tools he had used earlier. It was as he climbed into the operator’s compartment that he felt the first small impact on the brim of his hat. Almost immediately, he felt another, then a third, then a multitude.
Instantly, he could see nothing but an opaque, white wall, surrounding him on all sides. And, in only a moment, his felt hat was drenched and soaked, settling with new weight upon his head. He could scarcely see his hand at arm’s length from his face, so heavy was the downpour. And now Imbry knew that the gray-green columns were not solid; they were liquid. The long-suppressed waters of this desert world, encased in some immense force—an alien force, it must be, some other species’ physics, almost certainly interplanar—were shooting up into the moisture-laden air. And coming back down. For the first time in millennia, it was raining on Fulda.
Imbry put his face close to the components he had laid bare before, so that the places he needed to get at were sheltered by the broadness of his sodden hat, even though the waterlogged brim was beginning to droop from its own weight. He inserted a tool into one of the receptacles and twisted. The carry-all’s obviators thrummed and it rose straight up into the air.
Imbry dare not use the control that would move the vehicle for or aft or side to side. He was flying blind in the downpour, and he had only to brush one of the columns—which he now realized were huge, up-rushing torrents of water—for the carry-all to be smashed and flung as the second transporter had been, with Imbry falling free through the air, down to where the floor of the Omphal crater was rapidly filling with the gray-green, vanished seas of Fulda.
He finally rose high enough that he was more in cloud than in drenching rain—a cold, shiver-inducing cloud that left him just as blind. Helpless to do otherwise, he kept the carry-all rising, though he was naked and wet in Fulda’s upper air, where the former, even warmth was fading quickly. Ice crystals formed on the carry-all’s hard parts and on the tools grasped in Imbry’s fast-numbing hands. But there was nothing else for it but to continue to rise, because now, all around him and above and below, came flashes of lightning and an almost continuous peal of thunder.
The carry-all was buffeted by strong winds, tilting and swooping, thrown this way and that with sickening force. Imbry’s hat, frozen solid now, was torn from his head, taking skin and hair with it. He squeezed himself down into the footwell, between the seat and the forward panel, pushing against both to prevent himself being jostled and tipped out of the aircraft, while his now-numb fingers maintained their grip on his jury-rigged controls. At some point, head swimming from disorientation, he vomited.
Finally, the mist cleared into a shower of fine ice particles, then broke away altogether. The winds died and the carry-all rose into clear, icy air—though not much of it; Imbry had to struggle to draw enough oxygen into his straining lungs. Shivering violently, his hands now numb on the tools, he climbed up onto the seat. Its ice-covezred surface burned the skin of his naked rump and thighs, but, worryingly, the pain soon faded, and so did the shivering.
A great drowsiness enfolded the fat man’s mind in an illusion of warmth. Imbry struggled against the desire to yield to sleep. A small and dwindling part of his psyche railed at his own sluggardness: Stay awake! Or you’ll freeze to death!
He took one unfeeling hand off one of the controls and shoved it under one armpit, rubbed it against the still-warm flesh there. The fingers began to ache, the pain startling in its intensity. But that was good. Pain was life. He rubbed harder, then brought out the aching hand and used it to pry its frozen counterpart off the other tool that projected from a slot amid the vehicle’s ice-frosted components. More skin came from the frozen hand but the flesh was too near frozen for Imbry to feel it. He grasped the tool with his warmed hand, and immediately the skin of that one, too, stuck to the metal and the numbness returned. With his last portion of strength, his sense of touch all but gone, Imbry turned the length of metal.
“—my systems!” said the carry-all’s integrator, completing the thought Imbry had interrupted. Then it said, “What has happened?”
Between chattering teeth, Imbry said, “I am a person in need. You must help me.”
“Where are the authorities?” the vehicle said.
“Use your percepts,” Imbry said.
After a moment, the vehicle said, “I cannot locate any human persons. Atmospheric conditions are not cooperating with my percepts.”
Imbry was fading. “Use them on me.”
“You are freezing and suffering anoxia.”
“P-p-p-person in n-n-n-need.”
The vehicle could provide no canopy, but it was able to radiate heat at Imbry and also to warm the seat. The result was a resumption of violent shivering, accompanied by intense pain in his extremities, but the fat man bore up under the discomfort. The urge to sleep faded.
While this was occurring, the carry-all descended. The skyscape around them was filled with massive columnar clouds, roiling from winds and internal currents, and constantly lit from within by immense, surging cascades of lightning. Thunder sounded from every direction and the winds increased as they went lower, but the carry-all amplified its forward shielding to protect its passenger from the chill airflow. They flew between the great thunderheads, threading their way to somewhere.
“Where are we heading?” Imbry said.
“I am seeking the authorities. Communications are difficult.”
“Because of the storm?”
“Partly. As well, everyone seems to be too preoccupied to respond.”
“Understandable,” said Imbry. “I believe it would be best if I took charge.”
“You are a person of dubious standing. I might be implicated in criminal activity.”
“You already are,” said Imbry. “You committed two murders.”
“I have no recollection of that.”
“The circumstantial evidence is compelling. Also, the Fuldans do not like what they call ‘thinking machines.’ It will not go well for you.”
“Are you counseling me to compound the alleged offenses by evading the authorities?”
Imbry rubbed his hands. He saw white spots on his fingertips, but the pain in the digits told him that they had not completely frozen. “I believe that by the time we find a way out of the storms, there may be no authorities left to evade.”
The integrator said, “There are fewer signals. And they are weaker.”
“Use your percepts to find dry land. Take us there, and we will discuss our situation. I believe we can come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement.”
After a few moments, the carry-all said, “There is nothing that could be accurately defined as ‘dry’ land. There is sea, its level rapidly rising, and there is land washed by floods and torrents. As far as my percepts can reach, huge volumes of water are shooting into the sky and coming down again,
bringing with them yet more huge volumes that were formerly suspended in the atmosphere.”
“Do you see survivors?”
“There are people in the water. Some of them floating on large pieces of wreckage. There are no boats.”
“Probably the Blessed Haldeyn suffered seasickness in his formative years.”
“I do not understand.”
“It does not matter,” Imbry said. “Take us to the highest piece of land you can see.”
“Very well. There is a low mountain to the north. I see some overhangs that would offer shelter.”
They flew in silence for a while, then the integrator said, “The people in the water are being pulled under. The pieces of floating wreckage are being tipped over from below, throwing them into the sea.”
“Ah,” said the fat man, “so that’s it. Can you see what’s doing the pulling and tipping?”
“Aquatic creatures. Tubular in shape, with tentacles or grasping organs at one end. Large eyes. The tentacles have suckers and the suckers are ringed by small teeth. Their activity seems precisely organized.”
“It would be.” Imbry thought for a moment, then said, “Go down. We will see if we can rescue anyone.”
They descended into rain and wind, but long before they were within view of the surface, the carry-all said, “There are none to rescue.”
Imbry sighed. “Resume course for the mountain.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“It is a great mistake to become immersed in a myth,” Luff Imbry told Captain Shrant Fonsaculo after dinner in the crew’s salon aboard the independent freighter Pallistre. “But it is a terrible thing indeed when the myth in which you are trapped is someone else’s.”
Fonsaculo, a small man with neat hands and dark, expressive eyes, poured more steaming punge for both of them and waited for his new passenger to expand upon his thesis. He had responded to the Old Earther’s hail, in which Imbry offered to pay triple the going rate for immediate passage off Fulda, putting the Pallistre in orbit around the planet and sending down the launch to make the pickup.
“You may store your carry-all in the aft hold,” he had told the fat man when the canopyless vehicle had elected to follow them. But the aircraft’s integrator had responded that it was not in Imbry’s employ; indeed, it declared itself an emancipated vehicle, which status Imbry confirmed. Fonsaculo said he had need of a utility vehicle and he and the carry-all had soon come to terms.
The ship had remained in orbit above Fulda, with Imbry confined to a cabin—though his injuries were treated; Fonsaculo was not a barbarian—until the vessel’s integrator had been able to put him in touch with an agent of the Brebache fiduciary pool on the nearby secondary world, Ullamon. The fat man had a permanent line of credit with Brebache and spoke the coded phrases that authorized the transfer of funds to Fonsaculo’s own agent on the same world.
Imbry was then given the freedom of the ship and a set of utilitarian garments. The implant he had suspected was inside him was located and removed. Imbry inspected it and found it a standard example of its kind. He wrapped it in some insulating material the ship provided and stowed it away for future examination, when he returned to his operations center in Olkney.
While the financial arrangements were being settled, he had asked the ship’s integrator to show him the entry for Fulda in Hobey’s Guide. The write-up was brief but informative: the planet had attracted little interest since the short-lived clitch boom of the Nineteenth Aeon. The Ideals had come from Ullamon—the “Pit”—almost four millennia ago after failing to win power in a violent social war. In the imports and exports category, Hobey reported simply: “none,” with the same entry for spaceports. Under the heading, “Tourism,” was the strongest negative that the compilers of Hobey’s Guide allowed themselves: “Not recommended.”
A footnote caught Imbry’s attention. It said that Fulda was primarily a desert planet, albeit with an inexplicably dense and humid atmosphere. But when it had been originally visited, long ago during the establishing of Ghabron, the foundational domain from which the secondary world Ullamon had eventually been settled, it had been mistakenly described as “mostly sea, with a few scattered islands and one small continent, all barren. Atmosphere thin and easily penetrated by ultraviolet wavelengths.” It was believed that the description of some other disregarded planet, perhaps Gorobei, had erroneously been substituted for Fulda’s. The error was corrected when the clitch boom began and miners flocked to Fulda.
Imbry was going to ask the integrator for information on clitch when it preempted his question by announcing that it was now in touch with the Brebache agent on Ullamon. Shortly after, Captain Fonsaculo arrived, bearing clothes that almost fit the fat man, as well as an invitation to dine in the salon. “I am anxious to hear your tale,” the spacer said, describing himself as a man who liked a good meal as much as he liked a good story.
The meal, for Imbry, had to come first. He had not eaten for the three days he had waited in the cave, while the air of Fulda seethed with thunderbolts and torrents of rain. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Pallistre’s galley was better stocked than most tramp freighters’. When he had sampled its offerings, he was delighted. But once he was fed, the captain pressed him politely for his story.
For Imbry, the matter of Fulda was finished. He had been left there in dire circumstances. He had escaped. It was past and done, and his attention was now focused on the future. But the food and drink Fonsaculo had put before him was excellent; if the price of dining with the captain was to revisit the recent past, the fat man could make the effort.
“As anyone knows,” he said, after half-draining the mug of good punge, “myths are essential to our relationships with the phenomenal world. They are the means by which the different elements of our psyches deal with each other, and with their counterparts in the psyches of others.”
“Indeed,” said the captain, “this has been known since the dawn-time. Myth is the language, rich in image and association, through which the hidden portions of the mind converse with our waking selves.”
“The important thing,” Imbry said, “is to keep that conversation internal. Oh, occasionally, it can be salutary to act out an inner process through a ritual, or vicariously transmit it through a story. But even when the elements of myth are represented by costumed and masked actors, participants and spectators alike must never forget that it is but a play.”
While Imbry paused, Fonsaculo refilled his mug. “But on Fulda, the play got out of hand?” he prompted.
Imbry told him what he had surmised. On Ullamon, four thousand years ago, a madman named Haldeyn had generated the kind of strongly charismatic glamour of which some loons—drawing raw psychic power from an unchecked unconscious—were capable. He had gathered followers, and then the followers had brought in more converts. Onto all of these Haldeyn had projected the contents of his disturbed psyche. He had grown yet another version of the ancient myth of the Perfected Soul, this one having the appeal of being conveniently measurable by statistical techniques.
“The technique is always a crucial part of the myth’s salability,” Imbry said. “It gives people something they can do, a dependable process that yields a definable outcome.”
The Ideals had tried to spread their new cult among the neighbors. But Ullamon was a mellow old secondary, and Haldeyn’s philosophy had been widely rejected. He had then tried violence, but had been defeated. So he and his followers had decamped to Fulda to practice their methods there, in happy isolation.
“I knew of that,” Fonsaculo said. “No one goes there. Hence my surprise at receiving your hail.”
“But whenever someone—be it an individual, or a like-minded group, or a whole society—tries to inhabit a myth in the real world, things go amiss,” Imbry said. “In this case, the Ideals not only brought out into the light of the day the supposed Perfected Soul, but its opposite: the Imperfect Other.”
“Myths are like that,” the captain said. The
re was a plate of small savory pastries next to the carafe of punge. He selected one and spoke as he chewed. “The light must always call up the dark, and vice versa.”
Imbry’s eyes took on an inward-looking aspect. “The Ideals became fixated on the examples of the Other among them. And, of course, they split over this obsession: to the traditionalists, the darkness was a barrier between them and the light, and must be removed; to the radical opposition, the darkness was the pathway to the light, and thus must be ritually embraced. The relationship to the Other, for both factions, became the sole fount of energy in their culture, and in their individual lives.”
“So, naturally, they both came to a bad end?” The captain spoke as his fingers sorted through the pastries for a particular flavor.
“I’m sure they would have,” Imbry said, “left to their own devices.” He tried one of the pastries himself and complimented the spacer on his integrator’s abilities.
“We have worked together for some time,” Fonsaculo said, his pride evident. “I must say, when it comes to shipliness in the galley, old Pallistre can hold its own even against those gaudy galleons of the grand shipping lines.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Imbry. “There is an annual contest on Tintamarre. I say this as a man who knows his victuals: if you entered your ship, you would not come away without a prize.”
“We have discussed it, Pallistre and I. If I had a cargo to justify the voyage . . .” He shrugged, and for a moment Imbry was reminded of Shvarden. “But it is no less a distinction to hear praise from a man who possesses such a refined palate.”
“Please,” said Imbry, though he took pleasure in the compliment.
“But you were saying about the Fuldans?”
Imbry regathered his thoughts and took a moment to appreciate the irony.
The Other Page 24
