Return - Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy

by Al Sarrantonio

  A moment later, he found himself in his duplicate chambers in the Arabia Terra region of Mars.

  The figure in the stasis web within a containment field eyed him with a mixture of loathing and terror. Wasting no time, Sam-Sei pulled his rack of tools close by and began work on Wrath-Pei’s features.

  “We have little time,” the Machine Master said, “and much to do. Plans have changed, and I must finish today. There will be a bit more pain than you are used to, I’m afraid. You were always better at medical procedures than I, just as my forte was mechanical things. But while I work, I will tell what will become of our Mars, and what Prime Cornelian has planned. Let me especially tell you about the operation I will perform on Cornelian when I am through here. You will find it interesting listening.”

  Sam-Sei worked, and spoke, and the figure in the stasis field sought to scream.

  Finally, four hours later, the Machine Master was nearly done. He put his tool down and examined his latest cut; he studied Wrath-Pei’s face and then his own in a hand-held glass. He bent to more closely examine his brother’s features, then studied his own again before putting the mirror down.

  “The stasis web blocks the view, partially. But at this point,” Sam-Sei said in approval, “we are nearly identical twins.”

  The Machine Master turned to the tools on his rack and sought one special tool, larger than the others, which he held up for Wrath-Pei’s inspection. It gave off a thick rod of purple-green light.

  “And now,” he said, as Wrath-Pei’s eyes went impossibly wide with pleading terror, “after I make one final cut, we will be once more identical, will we not?”

  And bending to his brother’s body, he did so.

  Sam-Sei carefully packed his tools, cleaned his work area, then stopped to look down at his identical form in the stasis web. Wrath-Pei had apparently passed out. The Machine Master bent close, peering through the faint electric mist of the stasis field to study Wrath-Pei’s face. It appeared he had missed a tiny spot after all.

  If only he had been blessed with Wrath-Pei’s medical dexterity …

  Retrieving a thin cutting tool, the Machine Master bent low, cursing the interference of the stasis web; impulsively, he reached back to momentarily deactivate it, along with the containment field.

  Instantly, Wrath-Pei’s eyes opened wide and he took Sam-Sei by the throat with one strong hand. As he rose out of the web, he tightened his grip and slowly turned his brother around, eventually forcing him down into the stasis web and deftly turning it on with a finger; with a second finger he flicked on the containment field and tightened it.

  Sam-Sei now stared up from the web; he tried to move but could not.

  “Comfy, brother? I hope not,” Wrath-Pei said; the words came lisping out of his lipless mouth, which he was not accustomed to.

  In the stasis field, Sam-Sei tried desperately to speak.

  “Want to chat? Very well …”

  Wrath-Pei loosened the containment field and the Machine Master was able to speak.

  “What … are you going … to do?”

  Wrath-Pei threw his head back and howled laughter. “Do? Why, I have lots of plans! Locked in that field as I was, I had nothing to do but make plans!” He turned to his brother’s neat tool rack and pawed at it, pulling out the thinnest blade he could find. “For instance …”

  He bent over Sam-Sei and held the blade close to his brother’s eyes. “Care for a trim? Care, for instance, to die?”

  Wrath-Pei drew the blade back, preparing to thrust, but at the last moment he stayed his own hand. The knife hovered above Sam-Sei’s face.

  “Actually, I have bigger fish to fry!” He grinned widely, and Sam-Sei looked up into his wild eyes.

  “You were always insane, Wrath-Pei—but now you’re mad!”

  “Yes! Crazy! Crazy like a fox!”

  Spinning away from the stasis web, he began to laugh as he looked through Sam-Sei’s instruments; coming up with what he sought, he turned to face Sam-Sei.

  “Good-bye, brother! I’m afraid this time it’s forever! I’d like to return and …” he ground his teeth, hissing, “cut you up—but I’m afraid I won’t have time!” Another blurt of laughter escaped him, and he activated the instrument in his hand; a tornado of counterclockwise energy particles swirled around him, and he began to disappear.

  “Good-bye, brother!” he howled—

  —and then he was gone.

  In Sam-Sei’s underground chambers, Wrath-Pei appeared.

  Trying not to burst into laughter, and avoiding all reflective surfaces, he busied himself with preparation.

  By the time the High Leader arrived, he was ready.

  “It is time!” Prime Cornelian said, making his way to the operating area that had been set up next to the cabinet. A long suspended light tube flooded a low, narrow pallet; cases of tools and instruments lay open on a nearby workbench.

  “Yes,” Wrath-Pei said, feigning his brother’s solemnity—though what he wanted to do was laugh hysterically. “Are we quite alone?”

  “I have ordered that we be left in peace.”

  “Good.” He indicated the pallet to the High Leader. “Crawl over it, and rest. Leave everything else to me.”

  Without hesitation, Prime Cornelian moved over the pallet and lowered himself.

  “Let your carapace go slack,” Wrath-Pei ordered. The High Leader did so.

  “Good. Now I will deactivate your outer functions.”

  Reaching behind the High Leader’s huge head, Wrath-Pei opened a narrow panel and moved two switches.

  “Can you hear me?” Wrath-Pei said.

  The High Leader moved his head, ever so slightly. “Can you move your limbs?”

  The High Leader incrementally shook his head. “Good. Then it’s time to make the transfer. Relax. Your mind will go blank for a time. And then …”

  In twenty minutes, the High Leader awoke, sitting by the side of the tank dripping viscous green liquid onto the floor, to see, through rheumy eyes, Sam-Sei grinning at him from beside the huge metal insect of his carapace. Prime Cornelian felt weak; felt a bolt of a twisting pain which he had forgotten had ever existed. It grew into a gasping electric shock when he tried to stand on his soft, rubbery legs.

  With a further gasp he looked down at his own misshapen feet, curled in on one another like artificial plastic things.

  Sam-Sei began to laugh.

  “Why … haven’t you … called in attendants?” the High Leader rasped angrily. He tried to raise a fist but howled with the pain that shot through his arm when he tried.

  Sam-Sei continued to laugh, backing up into the empty carapace as he lost control of himself.

  “What’s … wrong with you? I’ll have you … executed!” Prime Cornelian croaked. Again he tried to rise, with even more pain and less success.

  Sam-Sei kicked at the empty insect body resting on its pallet. Still hooting laughter, he retrieved a long metal bar and raised it, bringing it down on the carapace’s empty brain pan.

  With a thumping clang, the head cover flew off its hinge with the second strike and hit the floor, rolling away.

  “Stop! Stop!” Prime Cornelian cried hoarsely.

  Dancing around the prone metal insect, Sam-Sei struck at it again and again; one limb bent and then was knocked off, and Sam-Sei immediately moved to the next, whacking it off at the top joint cleanly.

  “What fun! Want to help?” Sam-Sei hooted, offering the bar to the horrified form of Prime Cornelian before shrugging and swinging viciously at another limb until it broke off and dropped to the floor.

  “Sam-Sei! You’re mad!” the High Leader shrieked, trying desperately to take a step now and collapsing with a groan.

  “Yes! I’m mad! But I’m not Sam-Sei!”

  Huddled in pain next to the tank, the High Leader looked up with weak eyes as the Machine Master approached, bearing his weapon lightly in his hands. The Machine Master bent down and smiled widely.

  “Who …” the Hi
gh Leader gasped.

  “Who else? Your old friend Wrath-Pei!”

  “NOOOOOOOO!”

  Dancing back, howling wildly, Wrath-Pei turned to the metal carapace’s head and brought the metal rod down again and again on it; for a moment his laughter was subsumed by wretched anger and he spit out, “There! There!” as his blows struck home.

  Then, all at once, the head broke free of the body with a metallic snap and lay broken, crushed, ruined, on the floor.

  “NOOO … OOOO … OOO …” the High Leader wailed. “Some… one! Guards… ! Help me!”

  Laughing again, Wrath-Pei turned to the body, denting it up and down before suddenly stopping and facing Prime Cornelian.

  “They’ll come and find you eventually, bug. And you will even live for a time, before the Puppet Death finishes what it should have finished years ago. But I’ll be gone—and I’ll take what you want most with me!”

  Spinning on his heels, dropping his weapon with a clang, Wrath-Pei left the underground chamber as Prime Cornelian, fighting for breath and filled with impotent rage, fell forward and tried to crawl, and call out, and was barely able to whisper.

  In Prime Cornelian’s private trophy room, deep in the bowels of the back rooms of the private sections of the former residence of the High Perfect of Mars, stood a glass case with a thin feeding tube leading to the mouth of the boy Lawrence, Wrath-Pei’s protégé. The dark data visor that perpetually covered the boy’s face suddenly came to life; and, behind the visor, the boy’s lidless eyes scanned the flow of numbers and symbols that brought him back to more than minimal life.

  Lawrence tottered forward, which pulled the feeding tube from his gullet, and opened the case with the stumps of his hands and walked, on the toeless boots that shod his feet, to the rendezvous his data-rich mind had thought would never occur.

  In no time at all, Wrath-Pei, feigning Sam-Sei’s demeanor once more, made his way up through the labyrinth of the residence of the High Prefect of Mars, past rat-infested dungeons, crematoria, garbage processors, treasure rooms, washrooms, cooking kitchens, bureaucratic offices, torture chambers, spy offices, offices of the children of Venus and Titan, offices of the Red Youth, of the Red Police, of the Martian Marines, prison cells, ministries of booty, ministries of war, towers of light, more towers of light—and, finally, to the highest tower in this highest building on Mars, the Cupola Room.

  There, waiting for him beside the prone body of the room’s single Martian Marine guard, was the boy Lawrence, controlling Wrath-Pei’s gyro-chair, which floated in midair, waiting.

  “Lawrence!” Wrath-Pei shouted in glee. “How wonderful to see you again! And my chair!”

  The boy said nothing, but bowed, as streams of data flowed across his visor.

  Wrath-Pei, giving a sigh of pleasure, lowered himself into the gyro-chair.

  “Into the room, boy!” Wrath-Pei ordered.

  Lawrence complied, his data screen closing the door behind them.

  “Tabrel! How are you?” Wrath-Pei cried lustily, holding up a hand for Lawrence to stop the gyro-chair before the iron-filigreed, four-postered, rose-silk canopied bed and looking down at the young woman caught in a containment field within.

  “What? Can’t speak? We’ll soon fix that!”

  As he reached to deactivate the field, his eye was caught by something near the bed, and he paused to study it.

  “My heavens! It’s a little bug!”

  Laughing, he bent down to examine the small insect carapace, finished and finely detailed, its brain pan hinged open and waiting.

  Grinning, Wrath-Pei looked from the carapace to Tabrel, and back again.

  “A baby bug!”

  As he raised his fist to smash it, there came a sound at the door.

  “No time!”

  He returned to the bedside; Tabrel looked up at him with hateful recognition.

  “Yes!” Wrath-Pei’s lipless grin widened. “It’s me!” The door opened.

  “Time to go!” Wrath-Pei laughed and, activating the instrument in his hand, whisked himself and Tabrel Kris away from the highest room in the highest building on Mars, and away from the Red Police entering it—and away from Mars itself.

  Chapter 20

  “They’re the fiercest fighters in the Solar System!” Om Quet claimed proudly.

  “But will they fight for me?” Trel Clan said without conviction. Like most generals who had never fought a battle, Om Quet was a peacock, more feathers than beak. His dress was fastidious, which also annoyed Trel Clan. “If they fight so well, why do they hide in this smelly cave?”

  The general was also a strict disciple of Moral Guidance, and bristled at any hint of blasphemy. “My king, I hardly think it prudent that you treat the tenets of your own ancestors so lightly; as you know, the smell of sulfur is a sacred thing to us.”

  “To you, perhaps. To me it is nothing more than a bad odor. Did it bother you when Wrath-Pei made such comments?”

  “My king, Wrath-Pei was …”

  “Yes?”

  The general finally decided on a word: “… different.”

  “How so? Were they frightened of Wrath-Pei?”

  “Oh, yes, my king!”

  “And are they not frightened of me?”

  There was silence; the general, unable to come up with an answer, said nothing.

  Trel Clan, showing building anger, snapped, “All I wish to know is; will they fight for me as they fought for Wrath-Pei?”

  “I honestly cannot say, my king. Wrath-Pei thought it prudent to hold these troops on Jo in reserve when the war on Titan broke out. They were pledged to him. Even though Wrath-Pei is gone, and even though most of them are Titanians, I cannot guarantee their loyalty…”

  “Are you saying that because they do not fear me, they will not follow me?”

  “It is more … complicated than that, my king…”

  “And what about you, General Quet? What about your loyalty? How complicated are you?”

  The general tried in vain not to preen. “They do owe me a certain loyalty. And since Wrath-Pei’s loss, they have looked up to me as their natural leader.”

  “Enough!” The king stepped forward and struck Om Quet in the face with the back of his hand. “Two guards!” he shouted. “Come immediately!”

  A pair of black-clad soldiers appeared, blinking at what they beheld: General Quet, stunned, a hand against his flushed check; the king, fuming.

  Trel Clan screamed, “Drag him out of here and put him under arrest! I want him bound to a lashing pole in the temple in twenty minutes, and I want every soldier assembled! Each and every one of them is to take a blood oath to me, in my presence!”

  Om Quet’s eyes widened. “My lord, you cannot administer such an oath in the Temple of Faran Clan! It is pure sacrilege!”

  Trel Clan’s face grew bright red. “It is what I command!”

  The king stared at the two soldiers for a moment, until they finally looked at one another and took the general gently, each by an arm.

  “I said drag him out!”

  The two soldiers gripped Om Quet tighter and drew him out of the room.

  When they had left, the anger immediately drained from Trel Clan’s face, replaced by cold passivity.

  Everyone was susceptible to acting, it seemed. Act angry, and they will think you angry. Act like a child, and they will know you as one.

  Act like a king—

  No, that one was real.

  And would soon be more so.

  For though the actor could get away with just about anything, mimic just about anyone—clown, child, king—the real king had to be even more than an actor.

  He had to not only fool his audience, but own them.

  Trel Clan had seen immediately that this incoherent, ragtag group of Wrath-Pei’s soldiers could not possibly hope to survive an assault on Prime Cornelian. They had military discipline of a sort, yes, but it had been based on the iron terror imposed by Wrath-Pei. Once Wrath-Pei had been removed f
rom the picture, they had fallen into slovenly ways.

  They needed to believe in something.

  Be afraid of something.

  Afraid of him.

  There was no time for anything else.

  And he almost had them. In the short weeks following his coronation, he could sense that what had first been respect for his crown had begun to grow into respect for him.

  And fear.

  For fear was the only weapon he had to forge of this mass of soldiers a deadly weapon in such a short period of time.

  After today, he would have them.

  Pacing back and forth, enjoying the feel of his silken purple robes and the light weight of the yellow-gold crown on his head, Trel Clan allowed the actor to drop from his face for the briefest moment, and the inner certainty that was growing within him rise. The tiny seed of the hidden Trel Clan—which he had always known was there, in all those cold years at Titan’s Ministry of Foreign Import Trade, Second-Class Division, Expendable Goods, in all those years as fourth cousin to Jamal Clan, twentieth removed from the throne, all those bleak empty years of nothing—was sprouting at last. His fondest, most secret, most desperately held dreams were coming true.

  He clasped his hands together and allowed the first smile that had ever passed his lips to brighten his face. I’m going to do it!

  After today, after the lashing death of general Om Quet, he would truly be king.

  In the Temple of Faran Clan, night was falling. A glimmer of reflected light from Jupiter, Jo’s master, filtered into the tiny windows at the apex of the church; caught in dust motes, it floated red, yellow, dusky brown. The temple’s own lamps were turned up bright on their stands, and the ever-present fragrance of sulfur hung in the air, though the bath, at the king’s request, had been covered.

  The altar itself had been moved; in its place was a marble font, beside which stood a whipping post to which general Om Quet, stripped to the waist, had been bound, his back to the congregation.

  Trel Clan entered from the nave and walked solemnly to the altar. His long ceremonial robe’s train was borne by two red-robed retainers; behind them, a trumpeter sounded a loud voluntary, harsh and echoing in the huge chamber; behind them, two drummers beat funereal time, thump, thump, on muffled snares. Behind them, a contingent of black leather-clad soldiers marched in grim lockstep, leading the final member of the train, the executioner with his weapon coiled like a snake around one muscled bare arm, his face tightly hooded in black leather, eyes unreadable.