He eyed them not with the lack of composure typical of madness, but instead with the steady and calculating gaze of a stage performer gauging his audience.
He glanced at the tables filled with refreshments tumbled in disarray. Then he gazed back at the fleeing people and murmured, “So go the gray masses, marshaled alternately by gluttony and terror. Pity the weak.”
Chapter 5
Felph turned back to Gallen and Maggie, marched boldly up to them, and bowed so low his wispy hair nearly scraped the floor. Gallen had thought he would wear a crown of some type, a Controller to order the Guides his children wore, but he wore only a small device mounted into his skull, behind his right ear.
“I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance, Gallen, Maggie,” Felph said, nodding to each in turn, smiling pleasantly. “May I introduce you to my beloved children—Arachne, Hera, Zeus, Hermes, and little Athena.”
Felph’s children each bowed in turn, none of them speaking a word. Apparently Felph had forbidden them to speak.
And yet, and yet, can eyes not sometimes speak as loudly as words?
Gallen knew how much wearing a Guide, even for a few days, had pained Maggie. Now he looked into the eyes of Felph’s creations. The oldest, Arachne, smiled weakly; everything about her posture, her trembling smile, begged. “Please, free us.”
The children—for though some were older than Gallen, he still saw them as children—hovered behind Felph, bright, intelligent, eager for attention.
Lord Felph finished his introductions, and said, “I hope you enjoy my hospitality.”
“As do I,” Gallen said, cautiously. “Are you certain you want us to stay the evening?”
“Indeed, of course.” Felph chuckled. “Don’t fear. I play the eccentric only for the sake of the locals. It keeps them away. So you see, there is nothing to worry about, really. Besides, we haven’t had dinner yet, nor have we discussed my proposed terms of employment. I’m very wealthy. I’m sure you’ll find the terms … fascinating.”
Felph stood taller, then gazed fixedly at the bears. “I see you also brought your pets?”
“Orick and Tallea are my friends, not my pets,” Gallen said. “They do talk.”
“Talking pets?” Felph murmured, intrigued. “Like parrots and macaws and whatnot?”
“I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance,” Orick blurted, rising on his hind legs, trying to ease Gallen’s obvious distress at Felph’s comments. “Your palace is remarkable!”
“Well, yes, thank you,” Felph said, somehow delighted that the bear would speak to him. He reached out and pinched the fur above Orick’s left paw. “Isn’t it a bit warm in there?”
“Only when I build a fire,” Orick jested, then laughed, as did Lord Felph.
“Well, I’m very happy to meet you,” Felph told Orick once again, and Felph graciously took both of Orick’s paws in his hand at once, then shook lightly, as if with a dear friend. Felph glanced at Gallen. “Charming bear—a talking bear, really. Now, to dinner.”
As the people of Ruin mounted the florafeems outside, Felph led Maggie and the others through the great hall to a wide corridor that opened into a spacious formal dining room. An enormous table carved of a single slab of white marble sat in the center of the room. The walls had been covered in dark rosewood and inlaid with gold. A single chandelier lit the center of the room, a chandelier with tiny glow globes hidden in a golden net, hung with huge cut diamonds that glittered brilliantly.
Twenty server droids lined the walls. A sumptuous feast was set, with six main meat dishes, several types of bread and rolls, and a dozen dishes of vegetables and fruits, not to mention desserts and liqueurs. Maggie had dined at state banquets on half a dozen worlds, but nothing compared to Lord Felph’s table.
The servant Dooring went to the table, pulled out Felph’s chair, then seated the others in turn. Orick and Tallea could not properly sit at a table, so Dooring removed the chairs, letting the bears stand.
Felph let his guests eat their repast in silence, careful to avoid any talk of business, for to do so was taboo in many cultures. It was an odd and eerie meal, for Felph talked casually of many things—the great drought which would end in a few weeks as Ruin neared Brightstar and the polar caps began to melt, the commercial value of various relics found on Ruin, the outrageous excesses of the governor in a nearby star system who wanted to annex Ruin, and so on. But it was not Felph’s choice of topics that Gallen found to be eerie, it was simply that his children did not speak. Obviously, Lord Felph had forbidden them.
Gallen felt suspicious of his motives.
When the last dessert was finished an hour later, Felph pushed his chair from the table a foot, a formal sign that dinner had ended. Gallen did the same.
“Now to business,” Felph said, folding his hands over his belly, “unless you are still hungry?”
“No,” everyone said in unison, including Orick. It was a rare meal that served enough even for that bear.
“Good, good.” Felph nodded thoughtfully. He stared at Gallen. “As you may have noticed, I keep very few human retainers. My droids handle the vast bulk of my work—cultivating the fields, mining the hills. They work as technicians and factory workers, servants and cleaners—all here in the depths, under the palace. I reserve humans only because of their versatility. It is rare that I seek to hire a human. The palace is self-sufficient. I even export some small items. Yet—I need your services, Gallen O’Day.”
Gallen nodded. “Is it a criminal you want to apprehend? If so, this fine dinner, thought much appreciated, was hardly necessary. Tracking criminals is what I do.”
Felph smiled and shook his head. “It is not a criminal I seek. It is a deed I want done, an artifact—an ancient Qualeewooh artifact—that I would like you to acquire.” Felph folded his hands and raised them to his chin, watching Gallen’s face. “You have seen the jungles of Ruin from space? We call them the tangles, for the trees of Ruin become tangled together into such strange and impenetrable masses, that the word `jungle’ somehow does not do them justice. At the base of every tangle is a lake or sea, and the native dew trees float on these waters, spreading broad floating leaves that cover the water completely. The dew trees themselves are enormous, sometimes fifty meters wide, and their roots may anchor a thousand meters deep into the ocean, while the trunks rise fifteen hundred meters in the air. On these dew trees, parasitic plants grow—ribbon trees and fire brush and a thousand forms of fungus, until all of them twist into an impenetrable mass.”
“I’ve seen them from space, but not close up,” Gallen said. Indeed, when Gallen had landed, it seemed that he had little choice of spots to set camp. The land that was not desert on Ruin seemed to be the impenetrable tangle, and so Gallen had landed in a clear desert, where native predators might not prove too bothersome.
“The tangles are filled with wildlife. Florafeems, like the ones you rode here, feed in the foliage at the top, and thousands of other species of animals live in the canopy, some of them hundreds of meters into the growth, where perpetual darkness reigns.
“The predators in the tangle are—unusually nasty, let us say. Evolution has given them certain advantages over the human form. Their nervous systems give them superior reflexes—which let them react about twice as fast as humans do, and their muscles process energy at a more rapid rate.”
Gallen smiled wryly. “So they are nasty enough to keep you from your artifact?”
“Other men have gone searching for it. I’ve sent killer droids into the tangle, trying to recover the object of my desires—I’ve even sent in a dozen of my own clones. No one has managed to retrieve it for me.”
“So, you are saying it’s dangerous?” Gallen asked.
“For normal men. Perhaps even for you. No Lord Protector has ever tried the deed. I would, of course, provide droid escorts, the finest military weaponry “
“Yet even then, you don’t expect me to succeed.”
“Why would you say that?” Fel
ph asked.
Gallen nodded toward Felph’s children—to Arachne and Hera, Athena. “You don’t let them speak. You’re afraid they’ll ruin the deal, talk me out of it.”
Felph grinned. “Very perceptive. I should have known that a Lord Protector would be so perceptive. To put it candidly, I am unsure of your chances. If I thought the venture fruitless, I wouldn’t even entertain this notion.”
“You told me that I would find your offer interesting,” Gallen said. “I’m not exactly interested in dying.”
“Of course not,” Felph said.
“So what do you offer?” Gallen asked. “I assume the reward justifies the risks?”
“I would, of course, take precautions before sending you in. I’d clone you, download you memories, so that should you fail, you will have lost nothing. Beyond that …” Felph spread his hands wide, indicating his palace, “whatever you want.”
Orick gasped, and even Gallen sat back in surprise. Gallen could imagine a lot. As he gazed at the opulence around him, he realized that Felph really would make good on his offer.
“That’s right,” Felph said. “I am four thousand years old, and in my youth I inherited more money than I could ever spend. That has been invested and accruing interest for ages. I control the economies of fifty worlds. If you acquire the artifact I desire, I will give you,” he shrugged, “half.”
Gallen’s heart pounded. Maggie reached over, clutched his arm under the table. A warning? Did she want him to jump at the offer, or back away from it? He glanced at her, and her face was set, wary. She was telling him only to be careful, he suspected.
But he couldn’t be careful. Only days ago she’d begged him to flee the civilized worlds, get her away from the dronon. Government officials, sympathetic to Gallen’s plight, had loaned Gallen a ship.
“What would be worth so much?” Gallen asked.
“The Waters of Strength,” Felph said.
Gallen asked, “What makes them so valuable?”
Felph shrugged. “I’m not certain that they are. At the very least, they intrigue me. That intrigue has held me here on this planet for six hundred years. But if the legends are true, then it is said that in ancient times the Qualeewoohs brewed the Waters of Strength, and those who drank them made four great conquests.” He raised one hand and counted off on four fingers, “Self. Nature. Time. And Space.”
Gallen shook his head. “That seems a bit much to expect from a potion. What proof do you have that it exists?”
“There are many accounts of it in Qualeewooh histories. It was brewed some thirty millennia ago, at the dawn of the Age of Man,” Felph said. “As for evidence of its continued existence, there is ample evidence. What evidence would you have?”
Gallen shrugged. “A thirty-thousand-year-old Qualeewooh, telling me where to find it.”
Lord Felph raised a brow. “All right,” he said. “Fair enough. Follow me.”
He got up from the table, and Gallen followed him out the corridor, back into the great hall, and out another passageway. Maggie followed at Gallen’s back, along with the bears, Felph’s children, and Dooring.
The passageways led to a road that wound outside the palace itself, and Gallen saw that night was full upon them, but though the stars dusted a cloudless sky, Brightstar outshone them all, more like a brilliant moon than a star. Gallen could see quite well, and indeed felt the heat of the star. He followed Felph through a garden of dahlias in shades of white and black, then down into a great chamber, an ancient chamber carved by the Qualeewoohs.
Felph reached into his pocket, pulled out a glow globe, and held it aloft. “If you look up here, you can see writing on the walls, most of it in a tempera made from colored clays mixed with pulp from bark.” There was indeed writing on the ceiling, intricate designs of stylized Qualeewoohs painted in vivid reds, blues, yellows, and greens. There was a queer feeling to the place. Strange scenes on the ceiling depicted birdlike creatures in armored helms, who carried knives on their wing tips, battling beasts in the heavens. The hall was ten meters across, but less than two meters high. By the odd proportions, one sensed it had not been burrowed by human hands. The symbols were obviously stylized, yet there were intricacies in the work that astonished Gallen. It was like nothing ever painted by a human. On one wall was a set of symbols that gave off ominous overtones. They depicted yellowish fanged beasts, like upright jackals with large ears, apparently dancing in a green mist.
“What do these symbols mean?” Maggie asked.
“No one knows,” Felph said. “Each mating pair of Qualeewoohs writes in their own private language, which they teach their children, but the children themselves create their own version of that language at adolescence. The result is that after a few generations, even the Qualeewoohs can’t decipher the family writings. But Qualeewoohs tell me that the private languages tell mostly of common things nearby nesting sites, feeding grounds, and the attendant dangers at each. But there is much more personal information that the Qualeewoohs don’t share with us—mystic teachings and magical rites.”
“You mean that the Qualeewoohs are still alive?” Orick asked. “I thought that they were all killed or something. That’s why the planet is called Ruin.”
“Not killed,” Felph said. “They are rare, but not extinct. We’re in a period called `the bone years,’ when their members become quite few. It’s a planetwide drought. And of course, over the past few centuries, their numbers have dwindled lower than ever. Poachers, you know.”
“I still cannot believe people would kill them,” Gallen said, not bothering to conceal his outrage.
“Perhaps if you’d met a Qualeewooh, you’d understand,” Felph answered. “They are feral. Their ancestors reached great heights of civilization, but the descendants are poor representatives of their species.”
He brought the light to a corner, where a glass case had been built into one wall. “Here you can see some spirit masks—Qualeewooh masks made of lacquered leather, with some inlaid silver fangs, and writing painted on the masks. The Qualeewoohs make these when they reach adolescence, then have them permanently glued to their faces. The masks cannot be removed. When a Qualeewooh dies, its body is left behind as being nothing, something merely cast off. But the dead Qualeewooh’s mate will bring the mask back to one of its favorite aeries.” He raised the globe toward the wall. The birdlike masks were about three feet from nose to head, and just the width of a human face. Gallen got the distinct impression that the empty eye sockets on the gray-blue masks were gazing out at him. “You said you wanted to speak to a dead Qualeewooh. Open the case. Put on a mask. As I remember, the center one there is quite well-made.”
Gallen looked at Felph suspiciously. The hair rose on the back of Gallen’s neck. On Tremonthin, the Inhuman had downloaded memories of past lives into Gallen. And somewhere, Gallen felt he had lost a bit of himself in a sea of otherness. He dared not put on the mask.
“What do the masks do?” Gallen said.
Felph frowned in thought. “The methods for making a spirit mask are kept secret from humans, so it is difficult to explain precisely how they work. The means for producing them is taught by the `ancestors,’ the Qualeewoohs’ word for gods. I cannot explain it any better than to say this: you and I would say that these masks are receivers. The masks let the Qualeewoohs’ dead ancestors speak to them.”
Gallen said, “But earlier tonight, Herm said that wearing the masks drives you insane.”
Felph smiled secretively. “Some would say that it drives you divine. It is true that long-term exposure to alien thoughts might … confuse some. But there is little harm in short-term exposure. Please. You said you wanted proof of the Waters. This is part of the evidence.”
Gallen immediately stiffened. Felph seemed more than a bit mad himself. He had worn the masks, of that Gallen felt certain. Perhaps the mask had made him insane. Certainly a normal man would not have howled for his guests to leave his party, would not have bayed like a wounded hound almost as
soon as they entered his home. Felph was insane, and possibly dangerous. Gallen didn’t trust his judgment, didn’t want to don the mask. Yet a certain morbid fascination gripped him. Gallen wanted to know for certain that Felph spoke the truth.
Gallen went to the case, pulled out the mask that Felph had indicated—a mask of deep purples with threads of red among the silver writing. He took a deep breath, then held the strange birdlike mask up to his face with both hands. Almost immediately he stiffened, as if bracing himself for a blow. Wearing the mask somehow seemed suffocating—though Gallen could breathe easily enough. It was an odd sensation. He felt as if—his head had elongated, as if it were pulled into a far place.
Almost immediately he saw something—a vision one might call it, and the oddity of it repelled him. At first, his mind could not make sense of what he saw. A world as flat and featureless as a sea of molten lead, skies in banded shades of yellow and crimson, and green birds of light wheeling through the skies. One of the birds was flying toward him, growing larger and larger in his field of vision, and its thoughts seemed to pummel Gallen. Half-formed questions formed in Gallen’s mind—questions that he felt, curiously, must be answered once posed.
He choked back a sob, then drew the mask away, shoving it toward Felph. He found that he had dropped protectively to one knee.
He blinked rapidly and shook his head, as if trying to wake from a disturbing dream, then said weakly. “All right. I believe you.”
“What, what did you see?” Orick nearly shouted.
“It is not so much what you see,” Felph said. “It was what you think and feel. The ancestors speak to your whole soul—your hopes and desires and dreams.”
Orick asked, “What did they say?”
Gallen shook his head. “They asked me …” he struggled for words, “if I could seek for the Waters of Strength. To seek with my whole being. They told me to find … peace?” He frowned, as if uncertain of the message.
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