“Grigory was never convinced that the map was more than a myth,” Darla said. “But it’s true that the map is in the hands of the dissidents. Jake as much as gave it to them when he plunked it down on Assemblywoman Miller’s desk.”
“And why in the name of God did he do that?” Wilkes wondered, more to himself than to anyone. “At any rate, this was after he returned from his … quest, heroic journey, back from the future or the past or wherever the hell he went.” Wilkes began pacing again. “But Miller is in a psych motel, isn’t she?”
“She doesn’t have the map, nor does she know where it is,” Darla said. “By now it’s probably been copied and recopied several times over. No telling how many people have it now.”
“Which is why,” Wilkes said pointedly, “we’re doing it this way. Stop Jake here, intercept him and get the map, and it never gets back to T-Maze. Things go back to the way they were before.”
“Or the whole universe disappears, us with it,” Van said gloomily.
“In that case, we’ll never know what hit us. As painless a death as you could hope for. But that’s doubtful. Paradox is built into the Skyway, if you believe legends, and I do. The universe can surely survive a Paradox or two.”
“But… it already happened,” Van persisted, unconvinced. “They have the map. I just don’t see how we can change that one immutable fact. And as long as the dissidents have it and the Authority doesn’t, everything’s fine. Why fiddle with it?”
“How can you think like that, when at least a dozen dissident leaders were arrested not a few days ago? The Authority’s closing in, Van.”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Van said dejectedly. “I was hoping against hope that somehow we could avoid all this.”
“So was I,” Wilkes said. “But even if what Darla says is true and the Authority doesn’t know about the Roadmap yet, surely Grigory will be able to convince them sooner or later.”
“That’s what I don’t understand. How can he convince them if he isn’t convinced himself? Darla?”
“You must understand,” Darla explained, “that Grigory had been acting pretty much on his own. He was kicked upstairs to his job, and he resented it, but his professional dedication was unswerving. You know how he is, Van. It’s essentially a public-relations job, investigating strange phenomena and manufacturing explanations for public consumption. Not a day goes by when someone doesn’t report having a visitation from the Roadbuilders. You’ve heard the stories. Usually no reliable witnesses, no corroborating evidence. Just wild stories. The Roadbuilders will return someday and make the road free again, abolish all oppressive governments, open up the entire Skyway to every race. That sort of thing. If you believe the stories, the Roadbuilders have handed out hundreds of maps to humans and nonhumans alike, but no authentic artifacts have ever materialized. It was Grigory’s job to debunk all the stories, kill the hope that generates them, the hope that people have of someday getting the Authority off their backs. That’s why the Authority can’t really bring itself to believe in the map unless it has its nose rubbed in it. I agree with Van that Grigory—if he’s alive, which I doubt—won’t be able to convince the Authority, even if he comes to believe in the map himself, which I also doubt.”
Wilkes said, “And this Eridani creature is the key to the whole thing. Is that what you’d have us believe?”
“As far as I can tell, she is.”
“Well; I have no problem with that,” Van said. “There’s certainly something to it. Maybe it’s not d complete map, or an accurate one, but it’s a map.”
“As I said,” Darla told them, “I haven’t had the time or the opportunity to study Winnie’s drawings. You’ll have to make the final judgment, based on the evidence.”
“If only we had more to go on,” Wilkes complained.
“Only Winnie can give us more information,” Van said. “But we have to find her first.”
“We’ll find her,” Wilkes said confidently. “Darla, can you be sure that Winnie’s journey-poem clearly reveals that there’s a way back to T-Maze through Reticulan territory?”
“No. That fragment was all I had time to translate. Lots of distractions, and then Jake spirited her away. But back on the island I specifically asked her if she knew a way home. That’s when she started reciting the poem.”
“A way home,” Wilkes repeated: “Hmm.”
“I think he’s coming around.”
It was like a camera coming into focus, suddenly, and there in front of me was the tall, white-haired man I’d seen at Sonny’s, Dr. Van Wyck Vance, wearing a midnight-blue jumpsuit. He was smoking a cigarette wrapped in tan-colored paper, blowing smoke at me. I looked at him. It was just like the last time; I was abruptly awake, aware… but this time I could recall clearly what had happened when I was under. The entire preceding conversation settled into my forebrain as if it had been recorded and just now fed in.
Wilkes was seated in an armchair to my right, Darla on the bed across the room. Vance was standing in front of me. “Hello, Jake,” Wilkes said.
I nodded, then turned to Vance.
“I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” he said. “I’m Van Wyck Vance.”
“I know,” I told him. “I’ve met your daughter, Daria. She speaks highly of you.”
They turned to Darla, who shook her head. “How did you know?” Vance asked.
“A little birdie told me.”
Vance took a thoughtful puff on his cigarette, then shrugged. “Well, you said he was resourceful, Corey.”
“Yes, he is,” Wilkes said.
Darla said, “Jake, Daria is a name I rarely go by. Van always called me Darla.”
“Her mother named her,” Vance said, sitting down next to his daughter. “I never cared for it. I remember when she used to come home in tears—her schoolmates were teasing her by calling her ‘Diarrhea.’ Remember, Darla-darling?”
“I’m glad to say I’ve repressed that.”
Vance laughed.
I was sitting in another armchair with nothing binding me, and I thought now would be a good time to get up. I started to.
“Roadmap!” Wilkes said sharply.
I was startled enough to plop back down, then looked around for someone with a gun. Nobody was holding one on me. I felt weak. My head felt like a ball of fuzz sitting on my shoulders.
“You won’t be able to get up, Jake,” Wilkes informed me. “I planted the posthypnotic suggestion while you were under. Actually, I should say posthypnogogic. This thing doesn’t induce a standard hypnotic trance.” He held up a thin brightgreen tube about half a meter long. “Subjects are ten times more suggestible under it. Even consciously being aware of the plant doesn’t break the spell.”
“The Reticulans are very good at mind-control technology,” Vance said.
“Unfortunately,” Wilkes said, “they don’t know enough about human physiology yet to make this thing really useful. Twrrrll tells me they’re working on it, but we’re still as much a mystery to them as they are to us: If you were a Rikki, Jake, you’d be my obsequious slave, and would tell me anything I’d want to know, or do anything I’d want you to do. As it is, all the wand does to humans is either knock ‘em out or turn them into shambling hulks in a highly suggestible state—and I’m not enough of a psychometrician or a hypnotist to always get the results I need.” He brandished the wand at me in the manner of a headmaster reprimanding a wayward pupil. “You’re a tough customer, mister, I’m not at all sure I could make you tell me where you’ve hidden your little alien friend—and even if I could, I have the sneaking suspicion I’m going to need your active cooperation to actually get hold of her. You’ve got her stashed with somebody on board, somebody—a group, I bet—with whom we can’t readily punk around. A gaggle of Buddhist nuns … boy scouts… the damn Archbishop of Seahome and his acolytes. I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re slippery, Jake. Slippery. No, I’m afraid I’ll have to resort to oldfashioned methods of persuasion. Meantime…” He stroked the
wand lovingly. “This gizmo will keep you right where I want you.”
Vance said, “I suppose a truth drug wouldn’t do either?” Wilkes shook his head disdainfully, continuing to caress the wand.
“Ingenious little things,” he went on. “Very powerful. The effect can cover a city block. You adjust the field-strength here.” He fiddled with one end of the rod, which was ringed with a wide silver band. “This doodad here. The only drawback is that the effect can be thwarted by taking a simple tranquilizer. Of course, if the subject doesn’t know that…”
“Tranquilizer?”
“Yes. You’d think the opposite would be true, wouldn’t you? A high-altitude pill of some kind. An antidepressant. The way I understand it, that does almost no good at all.”
“Almost,” I said, feeling foolish.
“Why, are you on something? You did seem to be semiaware while you were under. Good try, Jake.”
“Seemed like a hell of a good idea at the time.”
“I’m curious, though. Did you actually know about the dream wand? Did you happen to be awake that night when we walked in at the commune?”
“Commune?”
“The religious group’s place. When a subject’s already in normal sleep, there’s no awareness of going under.”
I looked at Darla briefly. She looked slightly confused, so I thought it would be better not to mention the wand’s use at the Militia station.
Wilkes picked up the byplay and looked at Darla, then at me. “Something?” he asked.
“We do have the mystery of Jake’s escape from the Militia station to explain,” Vance reminded him.
“Oh, yes. Twrrrll was sure he detected another wand in operation there. But that was most likely the Ryxx, don’t you think?”
“How did they get hold of a dream wand?”
“Oh, the Ryxx are master traders. They probably paid the right price to a renegade Rikki and got it. Or they may have a similar technique of their own. Besides, we did see two Ryxx nearby.”
Vance grunted noncommittally.
“Who knows?” Wilkes conceded. “They may not have done it, but they have just as much reason as we do to keep the map secret. Granted, it’s hard to understand why they didn’t grab Jake as soon as he came out, or try to, anyway. But they didn’t. And I’m not going to waste time wondering why. Someone got him out of there, for whatever reason.”
I said, “May I ask a question?”
“Sure,” Wilkes said.
“Why did you come to the Teelies’ farm that night?”
“You’d have to see to understand. Darla, would you call Twrrrll in here?”
Darla didn’t get up. Vance rose and said, “I will.” He went to the connecting hatch, opened it, and called the alien’s name. After a moment, Twrrrll came in. It struck me how tall he was, how sickly thin his limbs were, and how they contrasted with his seven-digited, powerful hands, hands that could envelop a human head and squeeze. His feet were huge as well. He wore no clothing except for crisscrossing strips of leatherlike material that wrapped his thorax like a harness.
“May I be of serrrvice?” the alien asked.
“Jake would like to see the mrrrllowharrr,” Wilkes said.
“Verrry well.”
It was a strange sensation to see him undrape an invisible something from his shoulders and cradle it in his hands. Stranger still to watch him stroke it with two fingers and trill to it softly. As he did so, something even more unsettling was happening to my perceptual apparatus. It wasn’t like watching something flicker into existence out of thin air. No, not like that at all; for the thing was there all the time. Everyone has had a similar experience. You look and look for a misplaced object, something you just had a minute ago but inexplicably misplaced, like a pen on a desktop. You search and search and can’t find it, until someone points it out for you and it’s right under your nose. The thing in the alien’s hand existed, was there, but the fact simply had not registered in my brain. All at once the animal materialized, but I knew it had been there all along. I had seen it, but had not recorded it as a datum.
“It still amazes even me, Jake,” Wilkes said.
It was a match for the caterpillar-snake thing Susan had accidentally killed at the farm, its pink brain-bud glistening moistly in the overhead light. I felt queasy, desperately hoping my worst fears were unfounded.
“It was with you all the time, Jake. On your jacket, most of the time. Probably right under your collar, tucked away safe and snug.”
I felt like throwing up. “How?” I said in a strangled voice.
“Strange survival tactic. Marvelous, really. Not visual camouflage, but perceptual camouflage. God knows how it’s done, but the animal makes its predators forget it’s there. Some extrasensory power, no doubt. Your perception of it gets shunted directly to the preconscious, bypassing the primary perceptual gear. Is that basically the way it works, Twrrrll?”
“Yes. We would use different terminology, perhaps. But yes.”
“Trouble is, the mrrrllowharrr is very sluggish, which makes it vulnerable when it gets underfoot. Isn’t that what happened at the farm?”
I took my eyes from it. “Darla?”
“Yes. One of the Teelies accidentally stepped on it.”
“We were hoping that’s what happened, and that you hadn’t become aware of it somehow. Its hold on the mind isn’t absolute: We couldn’t locate the carcass, but Twrrrll convinced us to take a chance and plant another one, this one’s mate. We put it on your jacket, which you conveniently left outside your sleeping egg.”
“Why?” was all I could say.
“It leaves a psychic trace, Jake. The Reticulans can follow it anywhere. Even through a potluck portal.”
The alien left and closed the hatch, leaving behind the smell of turpentine and almonds.
“All that nonsense at the restaurant,” I said when my stomach had quieted down. “It was only to plant that thing on me?”
“Right, and I nearly ran out of chitchat before that thing finally made it over to you, crawling over the floor.”
“Then why the gunplay?”
Wilkes triumphant smile dissolved. “That…” He grunted. “That was a mistake. Rory—the one who drew on you—is a little dim. Likable, but dim. I mentioned that we wanted to throw a scare into you. To Rory that meant he should wave his gun around. I, uh, had to let him go, of course. Luckily, Darla was there to save the day.” He studied my face, as if watching a seed that he had planted take root.
“I didn’t know, Jake,” Darla said in a low voice. “Not about the mrrrllowharrr. I didn’t see the thing.”
“Corey, really,” Vance said deploringly. “Jake’s opinion of my daughter must be low enough. Do you have to rub it in?” To me he said, “Darla wasn’t working for us then.” He turned to her with a thin smile. “And I’m not even sure she’s with us now. Are you, Darla-darling?”
“You know where my loyalties lie, Van,” Darla said resentfully.
“I do? Maybe you’d like to remind me once again.”
“It isn’t important. The deal is that I hand over Winnie to you … correction. That was the deal before Winnie disappeared. The deal is now that I help you find her in exchange for leaving Jake alone. I go back to T-Maze with you, using your secret route through Rikki country.” Darla looked at me. “You were right, Jake. There is a way back from here.”
“But we’re not letting it get around,” Wilkes said to me in a stage whisper.
“I know,” I said. “And I know about the antigeronics you’re running into the Outworlds. Neat little scheme, and one hell of a big market to have cornered.”
“Nothing gets past you, does it?” There was a sort of admiring awe in Wilkes’ voice. “Go on, Darla.”
“When we get back, I alert the dissidents to destroy all copies of the map. Anyone who has had anything to do with it will have to go underground, take to the road until the crackdown runs its course. The movement will be hurt, but at least the Auth
ority won’t get the Roadmap. Meanwhile, the secret will be safe with us.”
“And what about Winnie?”
“She can be taken back to Hothouse and left with the movement network there. As far as I know, nobody knows about her yet, not even the dissidents. They may have the map, but they aren’t aware of its source. I can’t be absolutely sure, but it’s a good bet even Grigory never realized her significance. He never mentioned her to me.”
“Hmm.” Wilkes brought his palms together and touched both index fingers to his lips. “We have some problems here. Namely, you yourself are wanted by the Authority. If you’re caught, you’d have a hell of a time explaining how you got back from a potluck portal.”
“I won’t have to. Nobody saw us shoot it, or knows that we did, except you and your partners.”
“And Grigory.”
“Grigory’s dead.”
“Do we know that?”
“I told you what happened on Seven Suns.”
“Yes, and you haven’t played your role as grieving widow very convincingly.”
“You must know I signed a life-companionship contract with Grigory for other than personal reasons.”
Vance said, “When everything is secured back in the Maze, Darla will come back here with me.”
Wilkes brooded. “All very well and good, but still…” Somewhere in the room, Sam’s key beeped.
“Aren’t you going to answer it, Darla?” Vance asked. “Only polite.”
Darla took it out of her pocket, then threw it across the room to me. “He should,” she said.
I picked it up and looked at Wilkes.
“Is there a camera on that thing, Jake?”
“Yes.”
“Set it up on that table, will you please? And point it at me.”
I did, and opened the circuit, then sat back down. “Hello, Corey! Long time no see, and all that merte.”
“Hi, Sam. Your son is our guest.”
“So I gathered. What’s up?”
Starrigger Page 26
