Android at Arms

by Andre Norton

  The tape was snapped into the board. But before they activated the autopilot, they had one more task. Tsiwon, wrapped in a covering from the bunk on which he had died, was carried out, to be laid in a second grave scooped out of the earth. Elys lingered as they built a cairn of such small rocks as they could find.

  “I do not know in what gods or spirits or powers he may have believed,” she said in a low voice. “But that one such welcomes him now, let it be so—for no man should go alone into the shadows without some belief to make smooth his road.” It was as if she recited some farewell, and they stopped hunting rocks for a moment to stand, one on either side of her, and give silent farewell to the Arch Chief of Naul, of whom they knew little, but who had their good wishing on his long journey into the mystery no living creature had yet solved.

  6

  Where on Inyanga would they land? The question bit at him during all his waking moments and brought him one nightmare after another. In his dreams Andas saw the Triple Towers in ruins, even as Wenditkover had been, or else a detachment of the guard waiting to take him prisoner for some crime his double had committed in his name. Such speculations could provide almost endless possibilities, and he could make no concrete plans without knowing more. He might have worked himself into a state of unsupportable tension if Yolyos had not challenged his preoccupation with the future.

  “Would you step into danger without weapons to hand?” the Salariki asked.

  Andas wanted to pace, to wear off in physical exertion the tension in him. But with weightlessness he clung instead to the astrogator’s seat.

  “Weapons?” he repeated. “What weapons do we have? Or”—he was suddenly more alert—“have you found an arms cache?”

  “Your own weapons,” Yolyos returned. Your mind, your two hands. Accept that you cannot foresee the situation awaiting you, and do not try to be prepared in half a hundred ways when you need all your attention for one alone.”

  “I don’t understand.” Andas thought that argument had little meaning—except it was true. He could not defend himself without knowing the enemy.

  “Just this—this ship has been used for illegal purposes. Of that we have simple proof. And where did Turpyn’s chosen tape take us? To a base that was secret. Therefore—”

  But Andas had already fastened eagerly on the suggestion and wondered why he had been so thick-witted as not to deduce it for himself. “You mean that a tape which would bring us to Inyanga might not do so to a port where the authorities would mark its arrival!” Why, that might solve so much. Then once more cold logic froze his first feeling of relief.

  “That would be little better. A Guild port—with the Guild waiting—”

  “Yes, but they would not be expecting our arrival. They might not even be occupying such a field at the time. Where on Inyanga might such be situated? Can you foresee a little helpfully in that direction?”

  Andas closed his eyes on the control cabin and tried to mind-picture the continents of his home world. One needed certain physical attributes for a secret landing field. And Inyanga had few stretches of wilderness left to conceal such. At last he decided it was between the Kalli Desert and some hidden pocket in the Umbangai Mountains. And he said so.

  “Desert or mountains,” mused Yolyos. “And how well patrolled are either?”

  “Not very well. There are two roads across the Kalli, but both follow old caravan routes from oasis to oasis. In fact, though there are aerial survey maps, most of the northern part has never been explored. As for the Umbangai—they lie to the north. A large section of those was once a royal hunting preserve. Now they are government conservation experimental lands. They are patrolled by rangers, but not often—they can’t nose down every canyon. There is too much land, too few men.”

  “But of these two possibilities then, perhaps the desert is the best?”

  “I trust not!” Andas could see some chance of getting transportation if they finned down in the Umbangais. But suppose they hit the Kalli at some secret but non-manned Guild field—there would be no way of getting across that blazing waste to civilization. On the other hand, he did not want to land in the midst of a Guild crew either.

  He decided that Yolyos’s suggestion had really done little to relieve his state of tension. It seemed that if the authorities did not loom as possible opponents, the Guild did. Andas sighed.

  “You see”—Yolyos’s tone was mocking, or did the Salariki get some satisfaction from ramming home the darkness of the future?—“you can plan for little either way. So the more you exhaust your mind trying to foresee, the more failure presents itself. You had better forget the whole matter.”

  “Easy for you to say!” flared Andas. He sulked silently, trying to remember all he had learned about the Kalli. That must surely hold their port.

  Once more ship time could not be planet time, and a voyage of unknown length added to their misery. Elys again took to her bunk, unable to adjust to non-grav. And this time Grasty declared himself as unfit, swearing that the blow he had suffered had left him in permanent pain. He might be right—at least he ate far less.

  At last the warning of exit from hyper came, and then they swung into landing orbit. On the visa-screen Andas saw the mottled shape of what the tape declared to be Inyanga, though he could not recognize any feature. And he wondered, with a new chill, if once more they had been deceived.

  Andas felt sick, closing his eyes against a new and shattering disappointment as they went into a breaking orbit. Soon the ship would set down. In the Kalli, the Umbangai, or a port? There was no way he could alter that—he would have to accept the gamble. But he did not want to feel anything more until they three-finned on solid soil. He willed himself to that state.

  He roused when Yolyos asked, “Do you know where we are?”

  The Salariki had triggered the visa-screen into action, and the slowly passing landscape was indeed desolate. They had planeted in an expanse of very barren waste between two cliffs.

  Where the soil was not slicked over with the glassy surface left by old rocket burns, it was red, streaked by vivid green and wine-color, marking mineral deposits. The rock walls of the cliffs were layered with strata in red, white, and yellow. There was no sign of any building or of another ship. They were not at a regular port.

  Then the turn of the screen showed a wide-mouthed opening in the face of the cliff and within that something—

  “Stop!” Andas ordered, and Yolyos pressed the button.

  The scene stilled, and they were able to study it. This was not altogether forsaken country. There were objects well within the hang of the cliff mouth, and they were covered with protecto sheets.

  “I think nobody’s home now,” commented the Salariki. “Luck is with us to that extent. But do you recognize the country?”

  Andas shook his head. “But if we are on Inyanga and there has not been another tape substitution, then this is the Kalli.”

  Sometime later he had no doubt that this was both Inyanga and the Kalli, for upon exploration the covered objects within the cave proved to be skimmers, made for air travel, well suited to the waste. And not ordinary skimmers either, but master craft. Behind them was a rack of energy units, each canister also in protective covering.

  Blown sand had gathered in pockets chance had formed in the coverings of the skimmers. Andas thought that good evidence that they had not been used for some time. Any one of the craft provided with a unit would give him transportation.

  “So it would seem that fortune runs at your shoulder, Prince,” the Salariki commented. “Now, do you just take off—and in which direction?”

  “If I wait until night, the stars will give me that,” Andas said with assurance. As the good luck Yolyos commented on seemed to hold, he would trust it as long as he could. “I go north from here, and once I strike the Manhani Trail, then I will know where I am in reference to the Triple Towers. But—”

  He rested one hand on the skimmer he had chosen, from which Yolyos had helped
him strip the protecto covering, and glanced back at the ship. Now that they were down, Elys was no longer plagued with weightlessness, but she needed water. Her body once more showed signs of that drastic dehydration. And where in all Kalli would she find any moisture?

  “But—” prompted Yolyos.

  “Elys, the rest of you, if you stay here—”

  The Salariki did not reply, only watched Andas with those brilliant blue-green eyes as if Andas must come to some decision for himself.

  Andas knew that he could invade the Triple Towers in his own fashion secretly. His training in the hidden ways was the core of that belief. But to take Grasty, Elys—though he did not feel the same way about Yolyos. Somehow the Salariki from the start had impressed him as being the one of their party well able to care for himself. Andas could go on to the Triple Towers, send back for the rest as soon as he could—

  But what if he never made it? Chance had put him into this company. He owed no house loyalty to any of them. But now that the moment had come to cut loose, he hesitated. Elys on a waterless desert? He remembered how light she had been when he carried her to the pools that meant her life. And Grasty with his complaint of pain—what if he had been internally injured and his whining was more than a claim for what comforts they had?

  To carry more than two would crowd the skimmer, and the future was uncertain—so uncertain he did not allow himself to think too much about it so his own fears might not weaken him.

  “Do you go soon?” He had not realized how long that pause had been until the Salariki asked a second question.

  “Choose!” Andas rounded on Yolyos. Let them make the choice, each one of them; then the future would be as much of their own bargaining as it was of his. “Stay with the ship, or come with me.”

  “And them?”

  “Let them do likewise.”

  “Good enough,” the Salariki agreed. “Though we may hang like deter weights about you in the future.”

  “In some cases I am not certain of that,” Andas answered.

  So he put it to the others. There was a way to civilization out of the waste. But he was careful to lay out the fact that he was far from sure their troubles would then be over.

  Elys raised herself on one elbow. Even within the short time they had been finned down here, her dehydration had grown worse. She was close to skin over small sharp bones again. Grasty nursed his paunch between his hands.

  “It is a small choice,” he groaned. “Stay here and die of ache in my belly; go hence and perhaps fare as bad, if not worse. But I will go.”

  Elys still searched Andas’s face, as if she would read there some more hopeful sign than his words. “This is desert and no water.” Her voice was weak. “I will take the chance.”

  It was going to be a very tight fit into the skimmer, the more so because Andas saw to rations also. But, with the coming of night, the heat, which had fitted a tight lid over the valley all day, lifted, and his guides were the stars overhead.

  They lifted in the dark, Andas, a little rusty at the control, raising them in a leap that brought a harsh protest from Grasty. Then he settled the small craft into straight flight, and they winged their way north over the waste.

  By dawn they had reached the scrubland that fringed the waste and spiraled down over a sluggish river, which in this season had shrunk to what was little more than a series of scummed pools. Elys must have water. Andas had grown continually more uneasy about her, though, unlike the groaning and grunting Grasty, she had asked for no aid since they had lifted her into the flier.

  He brought the skimmer down on a sandbar that divided two of the drying river pools and, with Yolyos’s aid, carried the now inert girl to the nearest. Using a piece of driftwood, Andas cleared off the ugly scum along the edge, and then they laid Elys in the turgid water, Andas kneeling in the stinking liquid to support her.

  The cracking clay about the edge was marked with a lacework of animal tracks, but nowhere were any footprints of men to be seen. He hated to hold her in this soupy stuff, but it was all he had. She began to stir, moaned, and her eyes opened.

  “Lower!” Her head twisted on his arm. “Lower!”

  He hesitated. The smell and the muck of the pool were so disgusting that he did not want to obey her order. But at last he let her down so even her face was submerged in it.

  Once more her recovery was quick. She wriggled from his grasp. So submerged, with the water so thick, he could not see her, though the surface was roiled with movements.

  “Let her be.” Yolyos caught Andas by the upper arm and pulled him out of the pool. “She knows what is best.”

  Andas had to accept that as he squatted on the sandbank, using that grit to rub from his body the slimy deposit the water had left. But he kept watching the pool, wondering if he should plunge back in and try to bring her to the surface even against her will.

  She arose at last without his aid, her hair in dark strings about her head and shoulders, with none of the exuberance she had shown at the jungle pool on the unknown world. She spat, raking her fingers through her hair, her face betrayed her disgust at her present state.

  “You could do no better,” she said. “That I know. But never, do I believe, could you do worse, not even by intention. Where are we, and where do we go?” She looked around as if only now was she aware the ship was not standing by. “Where is the ship?”

  “Back in the desert,” Andas answered. He was suddenly very tired, wanting nothing so much as to rest. “We are on our way to the Triple Towers.”

  “I have been thinking.” Yolyos looked up the fast-drying river. “Are those mountains?”

  Andas followed the pointing finger westward.

  “A spur of the Kanghali.” At least he knew that much.

  “There might be more water closer to them. A better place to camp? Or do you intend to keep on by day?”

  Andas shook his head. If they were lucky, very lucky, they might come in after dark. In the day the skimmer would be sighted by any patrol. But Yolyos’s suggestion made sense. Elys needed water, certainly a better supply than she had just dragged herself out of. And closer to the mountains they would find that.

  “Yes.” He did not elaborate on his agreement. They climbed back into the skimmer, Elys sitting stiffly as if she hated the very liquid that had restored her to life, and then they took off along the river westward.

  By the time the sun was mid-point in the east over the horizon, they had emerged into a green land where trees stood and there was more water in the river, running with some semblance of current before the heat of the waste attacked it. In the foothills they found what they wanted, a curve of open land where the river made an arc and they could set the skimmer down.

  Elys was out of its confinement before either Andas or Yolyos could move. She ran straight for the water, plunging in with a cry of joy that reached them like the call of a bird. Then she was gone, and they left her to her own devices.

  She returned much later to pick up the E-ration tube that was her share of their meal, the traces of her ducking in the desert pool washed away, her spirits once more high. Grasty, on the other hand, lay in the shade the skimmer offered and grunted when anyone spoke to him, refusing food but drinking avidly from the mug Andas filled at the stream edge and offered to him. Here the free running water was chill from the mountain heights and clear so that one could see the bed sand where small things scuttled around stones or hid in burrows excavated in the clay.

  They slept in turns, Elys, Yolyos, and Andas sharing watches, knowing that they could not get Grasty to aid. They waited until the twilight was well advanced before they took off again.

  “You have in mind some landing place?” Yolyos asked. “I think you must want one as secluded as possible.”

  “The Triple Towers are built on the west bank of the Zambassi. They can be reached from Ictio only by triple bridges, one for each tower. By land, that is. On the west there is a ring of forts and outer walls. It is forbidden to fly
over the royal grounds. However, if one comes in near to roof level at a point between the Koli and Kala forts, then one can set down in the section I told you of, the quarters that were once my father’s. Unless there have been drastic changes in the palace, that is one of the long deserted portions with no regular inhabitants. I need only to set foot there—”

  He did not continue. With Yolyos he could share the secrets of the Triple Towers. And—he might almost have also spoken of them before Elys. But Grasty he did not trust.

  “What do we do?” Elys asked.

  “Stay hidden. This portion of the Triple Towers is—or was—uninhabited. A man might live for a year without being found if he did not wish it.”

  “But you speak of a palace—is that not so?” she questioned.

  “It has been added to, built on and about, for so long that all of it has not been in use for generations. The courts facing the three bridges, the traditional ones of the Emperor, the Empress, their suites, and those granted to members of the royal clan houses, are in use and have been since they were built, nearly a thousand years ago. Some of the rest were constructed for pleasure at certain seasons of the year, deserted in between. Others housed secondary wives when it was necessary for the Emperor to keep the peace by choosing mates from each of the military clans. More arose merely because some emperor was fascinated by a new form of building and wished to have an example.

  “When Asaph the Second went traveling through the Fourth Sector, he gathered artists and architects as one would pick luden berries in the river woods. He set them to work to duplicate in miniature buildings on their home worlds that had taken his fancy. And before he was assassinated, ten years after his return, at least five were finished. The others, still incomplete, were abandoned. Those are now largely shunned.

  “So the Triple Towers is like a great city in itself, a city in which perhaps only three out of five wards are inhabited. If we can land where I hope, we shall have our choice of hiding places.”