“I am planning to add you and your friends to my little gallery of losers here. They displeased me also.”
He gestured at the row of gray images that surrounded them. Spacebread coughed tea from her lungs and tried to focus on the statues. When she did, she realized they were not statues. They were people. Or rather they had been people. Their faces were frozen in conditions of surprise. The gray stone expressions were of terror, and their hands were being lifted to shield their eyes. Basemore had gazed into their eyes without his glasses. And he meant to do the same to her.
His eyes twinkled menacingly as she surveyed his gallery. He motioned with his teacup, and a gauzy curtain was drawn aside. Now the source of the music was apparent, as was its ghostly cadence. Spacebread’s whiskers bristled when she curled her lip at the scene.
It was an orchestra. The music wound its way from dozens of instruments held by traditionally robed figures. But they moved wrongly. Wires gleamed and small gears meshed at their joints, their limbs jerked woodenly at pedal or bow or reed. Glazed, lifeless eyes stared past her.
“Mummies, all,” Basemore chuckled. “They played at my coronation. Beautifully. Far too beautifully for them to ever play for anyone else. I called them in for a private performance and had them play into my recording equipment, which precisely recorded their movements. Then I removed my glasses for them. Now their beauty is mine each time I replay their recording filaments and they move as they moved before.”
Spacebread looked at him and shook her head. “You haven’t captured their beauty. You can’t possess beauty by killing it. The music is dead. Listen. It hangs in the air without life.”
“Without life!” Basemore barked, jerking toward her. “You will be without life when I look into your soul. Then you can be my music critic!”
She now felt the hands gripping her bound arms behind her. Gauging the weight of the man by his grasp, she swept the last cobwebs of wooziness from her mind and went into action. She bent down without warning and twisted, sending her guard careening over her back. Out of balance and in bondage, she toppled onto cushions spread about a table. There was a crash and a bellow as the guard slammed head-over-heels into Basemore.
The guard, a tall cruel-looking Ralphian hobbled up cursing and drew his gun, but the regent stepped between him and the white cat.
“Pretty show. Well done. But merely a gesture.” Basemore straightened his robes. He was olive with rage, and when he stepped close to Spacebread and glared down at her she could almost feel heat from his eyes. She stared back anyway. She knew she had infuriated him and was doing so more by returning his gaze.
“Perhaps I am being hasty,” he said at last, turning his eyes away. “I don’t think you have learned your lesson yet. It would be a shame to send you into the next world burdened by such ignorance. No, I shall not add you to my collection yet. I shall savor your capture awhile longer, and when my plans are complete I shall send for you. You will witness my triumph and be humiliated by it before you die.”
Spacebread hissed contemptuously.
Basemore pouted. “But what to do with you in the meantime? Perhaps it would be best to chain you to a wall until things in the north are ready …”
“Excuse me, Lord VolVarnix,” wheezed the gnorlff. “This one is strong. If the others are as strong, we could use them in the quarry. The Blik-Twell dome would rise that much sooner. You could always collect them later.”
Basemore’s smile curled jaggedly around his face. “Yes. Marvelous idea. Nothing pains you more than the loss of your freedom, does it, my dear? Very well, you will be a slave.”
“You cannot take my freedom from me, Basemore,” Spacebread said coldly. “Freedom is internal.”
Basemore, recovering from the flush of anger, snorted and turned to Dezorn. “You would like the figlet for yourself, I take it?”
The gnorlff’s face grimaced in a greedy smile, thick salivary glands in its cheeks pulsating. “Only to save for the victory feast when we …”a glance at Spacebread “… celebrate at the Pole. A figlet conies along only rarely, and as you know, Highness, we gnorlff’s prize them above every other delicacy.”
Basemore crooked an eyebrow. “So it is reputed. Very well, you may have the little creature, but I still don’t see why you don’t just have it for lunch tomorrow.”
The Gnorlff looked shocked. “Oh, no. No. It must be fattened up on a solution of spices and nutrients for at least a week,” it gurgled. “I will eat it at the triumphal banquet as the delectable pinnacle of our success.”
“Careful you don’t choke, gnorlff,” Spacebread snarled.
Basemore fixed her again in his malignant stare. “Have a seat, Spacebread,” he said. “We can talk over old times.”
Spacebread wriggled to a sitting position. She summoned all her wits and courage. “Give me my buckle and the murderer Dzackle, and I will be gone. I have no interest in your plans of conquest, and I have done no crime.”
Basemore cackled, turning his wrinkled throat up and laughing long. When he finished, he gestured at the tall guard. “I don’t think Dzackle here would agree to that. Besides, he is my best man.”
The Ralphian grinned, scars wrinkling all over his face.
Spacebread smiled back. Dzackle, at last. “One day, dear Dzackle, I will make you an even broader smile, across your throat, for Gramlin of Fomalhaut Six.”
The laughter stopped.
“He was a friend of mine and an honest man. You have a debt to balance.”
In the tense silence, the gurgle of Basemore pouring tea was a punctuation of Spacebread’s promise.
“How have you been these last years, pussycat?”
“I live. And don’t call me pussycat.” Spacebread did not feel like humoring him. She had quite had a fill of Basemore and his jokes.
“You live. And in much the same manner as when we last met. As you can see, I have improved my station somewhat. With the money we made, I bought a Regulusian title, papers and all. I made a few more deals of a profitable sort and arrived here.
“I was bored with the ordinary sort of endeavor. Larceny, kidnapping, piracy. A basilisk of my intelligence requires more … fulfilling pursuits. I wanted power. And now I rule twelve million Ralphians and receive my due taxes. And soon I will rule more. Much more.
“All this while you just ‘live.’ But then you were always a loser. Just like these losers you see around you. They could not bear to look into my brilliant eyes. People like you always lose. Weakness loses.”
He was mad. Spacebread looked at the way Basemore’s green lips trembled when he said “power.” He was no longer an adventurer as he had been when she had known him. Not even the criminal who had stolen her pay. Now Basemore was evil. He had allowed his lust for control to consume him. How had he ever gotten through the Planetary Power?
“How in blazes did something as deranged as you get through the Power?” she asked, relaxing. At least she wasn’t going to be killed right away.
Basemore’s slit eyes hardened. “Deranged? You joke with your life, pussycat. Your strength is not that vital to the Blik-Twell dome. Still, I will wait. You will beg me to stare into your eyes before I am done.”
“But your question is fair,” he continued, sipping his tea. “My Lord Dezorn helped me enter Ralph. I had something he wanted; or knew where to get it. With the help of a seer, he had located a child, a Ralphian. The star charts indicated that he was to become a great conqueror, destined to rule the entire planet. I had him killed. The Power allowed me to land and take his place. It is the destiny of this planet to be ruled by one. The Power knows that. And now I am that one.” Basemore’s incandescent eyes stared ahead of him into the dream of power he had woven for himself.
But that dream, which he had woven, now had him trapped, and he was pulled along by it, without volition, helplessly. Once that happened, Spacebread realized, a deadly flaw had formed. Let him think she was weaker than he. She knew better.
“My buckle plays a somewhat impo
rtant part in all this, I presume,” she mused, hoping to wring useful scraps of information from his pride.
His eyes bore into her. “It matters. You need know no more.”
Basemore put his empty teacup on the table. “I have wasted enough time on you. Since you won’t be needing your weapons, they now belong to my servant, Dzackle.” He nodded to the Ralphian.
Dzackle grinned and jerked the belt, with the still-empty buckle, sword, pistol, pouches and all from around her middle. At least they did not have her Foldover pack.
Basemore stood. She struggled up to face him.
“Once we were partners and friends, pussycat. Then I found out how trusting and weak you were, and I used your share of the money to build this, my present power. And your buckle will help me further. But the weak must serve the strong. You are a loser. You will always lose, but this is your final loss. The next time you see me, you will become an exhibit in my museum.”
Basemore tucked a box from the table under his arm, then Dzackle shoved Spacebread ahead of them, down the hallway to the storeroom she had awakened in. Another guard unlocked the thick door, spilling light onto the still recumbent figures of her companions. Dzackle’s foot sent her spinning; she tripped and then landed in the corner.
The gnorlff, no longer able to remain still, lunged and plucked up the small bundle that was the unconscious figlet and hugged him in its spindly pods. Dezorn’s three eyes glowered at Klimmit’s peaceful features, imagining him floating in honey.
The door closed, and brought a midnight veil around the three left behind. Presently Spacebread discovered that in the fall, her hands had broken free, and she rubbed her worn wrists, wincing.
Her heart was heavy. All of her plans had fallen to pieces before Basemore’s evil schemes. Maybe she really was a loser. She should have let them have her belt buckle. A belt buckle, a shiny bauble. But why? Why?
Softly she picked up Sonto’s head and cradled him in her arms.
Her voice split the black silence. “Alas, I have lost the poor figlet to the monster I first saved him from. All he wanted was to become a Warrior. And worse. Far worse, I have led you into a trap from which there is no escape, my dear Sonto. And you alone can warn the true king and save this place.”
Her words broke off as the night-black head stirred in her lap. Sonto sighed deeply and tried to lift his face. “With you,” he said, “in this trap with me to call me ‘dear,’ it seems no trap, lady.”
He fainted again in a limp pool. She held him closer, tightly. He was the only thing Basemore had left her, and she would not lose him.
[8]
The Last Gnorda on Ralph
THE QUARRY WAS at the farthest reach of the gnorlff’s lands, beyond the spice fields and the long rows of comtosh plants turning crimson in the sun. It was a deep chasm in the surface of the earth, a wound that had produced hundreds of cubes of black stone from the shoulders of Ralph. In the mined-out sections of the canyon, lavender vines raced small trees up the cracks in the rock. Occasionally an outcropping was split off by vines and was heard to crash to the floor with a thunderous roar. Just beyond the area being mined, Spacebread could see one of the taboo Ralphian mounds. The far western corner of the quarry was the only section that was presently mined, and the slave area, a low collection of Ralphian huts jammed together, was located on the rim directly above it.
They were moved into one of the huts as dawn turned the sky to molten gold. The other quarry slaves had already been assembled, a motley, beaten, pasty crowd, flinching at casual sounds. Their clothes were smudged clots of netlike homespun.
Dzackle, who had been put in charge of the plantation, limped in front of the new captives, the Thorian blade rattling on his belt. Spacebread smiled inwardly to think she had given him that limp on Fomalhaut 6. He glared at her.
“You are free to work—no more,” he growled. “If you try to run away, you will be shot. If you strike a guard, you will be shot. You work, you eat. “His gauntleted hand gestured at the gun towers on either end of the compound and across the gorge. There were guards everywhere.
Dzackle regarded them coldly, then pointed to them and said to the guards, “Watch these three. If they give you any trouble, fry ‘em!”
Lucidan was left with the older slaves preparing meals and caring for the camp while a thick contingent of guards marched off the others. When, after a half-hour’s climb down sharp cubic stairways overgrown with vine, they reached the work area, the sky was bright enough to reveal heavy steel tools and the glimmering blackness of the vein of magnetic mineral they were working.
Spacebread squeezed Sonto’s paw strongly as they were parted; he gave her a jaunty wink.
It was difficult to get her comrades to show her what to do. They seemed to be moving through programmed patterns of work without consciousness. Their gray eyes were lifeless and uninterested. But as she followed their motions and caught on, they made room for her, and occasionally let her set the rhythm of their toil. She became one of them, the huge organism of the workers digesting her into them.
She tried not to think about her predicament. She tried to clear her head of surplus traffic and learn the routine. Because of the nature of the stone they mined, no lasing beam equipment could be used. Only the ancient tools of Ralphian quarrying: picks, wedges, complicated levering machines with dozens of geared handles. The huge chunks of stone were rolled on sleds to a sling attached to a vast hoist on the canyon rim.
They worked—stupid, slow, backsplitting toil. Clouds of magnetic dust swirled each time a slab of stone was split off the mass. Spacebread worked and suppressed any thought of the figlet or escape or Sonto; she tried only to work without thinking of failure or despair or the circle of surprised statues and the orchestra in the manor. She worked, and wondered why they must work so feverishly to complete a magnetic mineral fort, and what connection that had with the Pole, where Basemore had gone.
It was an hour past sundown when the slaves groped in a trembling caravan up the quarry staircase to the flickering fires of the compound. Spacebread and Sonto walked like scarecrows, both now the same color of gray from the cloying magnetic sediment, into the assigned hut with four other workers. Lucidan sat with the old slaves and handed them bowls of thin broth and roots after they had settled beside her. Weakly, they ate.
“Do not think we are lost yet, lady,” Sonto said between slurps of soup. His violet eyes flickered up to meet hers. “Work will not kill us. It will make us stronger. All we have to do is watch how they do things; the cracks in their armor will appear in time.”
She smiled thinly and put her paw on his. “I had thought no such thing, you vandal. I am merely distraught. This entire adventure has become maddeningly out of proportion. I am the last hope of an entire planet for the sake of a belt buckle. And against the Planetary Power?” She shook her head sadly, gray motes spinning off her ruff to cluster on their metal eating utensils.
“These people are broken,” Lucidan whispered, “like straws.”
Indeed, their coworkers ate in a deadened silence, neither chatting with one another or clustering in groups of friends as is usual in a group.
“I have learned the others’ names and former villages with difficulty,” she continued. “They were originally, in the old days, paid to farm the lord’s lands. And paid fairly, for that was the old lord. But now they are forced hard and rewarded only with death. I have never seen people so soulless. It is monstrous.”
“It is an offworld disease. Slavery,” Spacebread said.
“We will remedy it, mother,” Sonto said fiercely, but low. “As soon as I can get to the good king, there will be an army, the Royal Guard will sail from King’slsle and Bothwil will be free again.”
Lucidan did not comment, only stared into the sightless void before her as if some spectral shape danced behind its depths. As if her eyes, being constantly open to what everyone else was not seeing, could see the echo of what they could not notice.
“Le
t us hope we may get you to the king in time,” Spacebread warned. “And let us plan, too.”
Exhaustion forced them to huddle together in a bare corner of the hut and sink into druglike sleep before they could speak further.
The morrow dawned too early. It scarcely seemed they had closed their eyes. And the morrow after that was worse. All day Ontagon beat down into the black chasm of the quarry with them, pounding at their backs and making the dust into flickering mirrors. At night they were too tired to plot. They discovered aches in neglected muscles from their ears to the tips of their tails. But on the fourth day they seemed equal to the pace, the rhythm was not as killing, and something hopeful happened.
They had already become familiar with the patterns of work, the routine. Spacebread was with a Ralphian technician and a grizzled guard waiting for a sheet of ebony mineral to split off the cliff above them and slide into the magnetic net they had spun for it with a primitive force-machine. Then she was to help back a truck under the ore to roll it to the sling, which would lift it to the quarry rim. The guard was watching the splitting process on the slope with some intensity, for the sheet of ore weighed tons, and had to fall just right. This allowed Spacebread to find some shade a few feet away and sit.
She was breathing in the shadow-air as if it were dark ice cream when she felt the dust around her swirling strangely. She opened her eyes to find a dozen or two fluttering iron butterflies glimmering before her in shades of blue and gray. Their wings and nervous systems made little magnetic eddies in the air around her. She was delighted. To see them almost took away the pain of captivity. She held out her paw venturingly, and one immediately landed on it, then another till her finger was crowded. They were the tribe of butterflies she had befriended earlier and must be migrating along her trail. They twittered in their odd electrical way, and she began to hatch a scheme.
Luckily, none of the guards noticed how the droves of butterflies hung around Spacebread for the next few days. They seemed to regard them as a nuisance, and sometimes fired to disperse them, harmless but disturbing for the creatures. While Sonto worked on memorizing the guards’ shifts and distances to the edge of the forest, Spacebread got herself assigned to a communications team by bribing a Ralphian with saved-up roots. It was a radio helmet she wanted, and she managed to steal one and experiment with tuning it to certain little-used bands in her spare moments. She cursed not having her Foldover Bag, for it contained the equipment she needed to rig the helmet for butterfly-speech.
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