Click’s lips moved; but Corwin, deafened by the whoosh of the car’s rapid passage, could only shake his head. Seeing the policeman’s lips move again, then pause in an inquisitive smile, he answered at last, with a conscious effort at keeping his voice to a conversational volume even though his words were inaudible to his own ears: “Thank you. I suppose the sound of this train is actually no more than a faint hum, but to my ears it seems a monstrous roar.”
Click grinned, sat back, and puckered his lips as though whistling, leaving Corwin to digest the sensations of the ride in complete mental privacy. They shot through one twilit stairwell area, then, about fifteen seconds later by the hippopotamus-one count, through another. For a needletrain, this car was lollybrowsing along at a majestically leisurely rate.
Except for the stairwell areas, which were scarcely more than polka dots of gray glow streaking transient reflections along the bubble dome, the tunnel was utter blackness. They might equally well have been hurtling through the wide and lofty vaulted aisle of some subterranean cathedral, or a smooth and claustrophobic sheath pressing in upon them just beyond the feeble reach of the car’s lighted interior. In either case, one could all too easily associate it with the passage of the Hell-Bound Train.
In justice, however, the car’s interior lighting was of a soft, delicately roseate radiance that befit and enhanced the luxury of the appointments. Inferno-bound they might be, but as angelic tourists on a day excursion ... were it not for the noise—which Corwin’s perception must indeed be magnifying far beyond its standard reality, for he noticed Click obviously exchanging comments with M. Liberty—and for the restraint of the handcuffs, which grew more tedious than amusing. Corwin thought he felt something crawling on his neck, and could only scrunch up his shoulder at it and assure himself that, in such a protected environment, it could only be his imagination. Unless it were some creature he had borne in upon his own person from the wild grasses outside.
M. Randolph had spoken with enviable nonchalance of the ruin of her father’s fortune. She must be old enough to remember having been extremely rich, yet she had shown a total lack of reticence or bitterness on the subject. The minor recession of 2069 had wiped out only a few fortunes, but two or three of them—including the Astergilt—had been among the more spectacular. Some Astergilt branches had survived to put out new shoots, but the main trunk had been felled within hours. Not for the victims of ’69 the slow, creeping attrition of their wealth. Might the very melodrama of sudden ruin facilitate economic readjustment?
That winter of President Preston had seen Corwin’s tenth Christmas. He had not been able, at that age, to discern any lessening of the material cheer round the Yule tree or festive board in his own family; but his parents had always been moderate in such observances, never more than ten Christmas gifts plus stocking stuffers to each of their offspring, for fear of spoiling them. He believed, however, that was the year when Raddy passed one of her own presents, a jeweled pendant, on to cousin Louise, inspiring him to give up a set of real tin knights, his for only three-quarters of a day, to cousin Alice. Uncle Florian’s fortune had staggered beneath that year’s minicrash. It had since recovered handsomely, thanks to the competence of Uncle Florian’s brokers.
Corwin’s sister would still have been Radegunde that year, her nineteenth. Home from the university, aglow with the satisfaction of having voted for Mgumbawe rather than Preston in her first presidential election, securely established in her own medieval world, and seeming to her kid brother more majestic than ever.
A few hours after graduation, she had reregistered her first name as Mother Radiansia and finalized the purchase of an eighty-year-old mansion in Montana, where she had spent most of her time ever since, raising six adopted children with the help of two like-minded female roommates. Whether or not her Little Abbey of the Holy Rood would have met with hierarchical Church sanction as an officially approved order had never been tested, which was probably as well; as the household of a well-off fancier combining private philanthropy with her own personal perceptional world, its legitimacy was unquestioned. Neither Raddy nor her fellow “nuns” had ever taken formal vows; their long skirts and hooded tunics constituted “habits” only in their own perception; and both they and the children enjoyed frequent “pilgrimages” which in fact amounted to vacations and pleasure outings. Certainly those children had romped with the healthiest and least self-conscious during their last pilgrimage to the Midwest, for Corwin’s and Angela’s wedding.
The car slid to a halt at a stairwell, more brightly lit than the others, where two guards waited, apparently cracking jokes with each other. One of them waved and mouthed something at the passengers.
“Can you hear again, M. Poe?” asked M. Liberty.
“Your voice,” he replied, twisting in the attempt to look back at her. “Not theirs outside our dome.”
Click said, “We’ve just been warned not to try opening it up from inside.”
“That could make it dangerous,” the reporter remarked, “for any passengers caught inside during some breakdown.”
“Not really, M.,” said one of the guards, swinging up the bubble dome. “There’s the emergency pocket right there—see that little yellow battery light? Instruction book and tool kit, everything you’d need to get out safely. In a power failure, the juice would go off the outside of the car anyway. Besides, we turn the shockguard off whenever we just have authorized innocents threading the needle.”
“Do you mean to imply,” said the reporter, “by having warned us not to open it, that you had the outside of this car electrified for our benefit?”
The guard turned up his palm. “Well, M., we got this guideline to treat him just like a regular prisoner.”
“Quite right,” Corwin said quickly, sitting forward to facilitate Click’s unhitching of the handcuffs from the bar in the back cushions.
“Not quite so far,” Click instructed him. “You’re putting too much strain on it, locking it tighter. ... Yeah, that’s better.”
“Have you called up reinforcements, too?” M. Liberty was asking coolly, once again the objective seeker of facts. “Or is it usual to have two guards at this post and only one at the others?”
The first guard hesitated. The second said, “Well, M., that’s data that technically shouldn’t reach the inmates’ ears, but in this case—”
“Say no more at present!” Corwin exclaimed.
At almost the same moment, Click remarked, “There!”
Released from the passenger seat, though still handcuffed, Corwin suffered himself to be facilitated from the car and escorted up a flight of stairs exactly similar to those he had perceived at the point of embarkation. This time, however, his fantasy mode applied to the interior of the guardhouse as well: to him, it seemed a room reminiscent of what he conceived William Legrand’s dwelling at Sullivan’s Island must have been like on the eve of the Gold Bug affair. From a little distance, what he knew to be the monitor screens resembled a wall of framed natural history prints. A third guard sat watching them. The presence of three guards in a post little larger than the one he had visited earlier suggested that one, at least, if not two, had been summoned to special duty for the occasion.
“Yes! Your lordship,” said the third guard, apropos, apparently, of nothing else than Corwin’s arrival. “Care to step over here and take a peek at the reception waiting inside?”
Moderating his response to his assumed character of Lord Moan, Corwin replied, “Thank you. It might prove mildly diverting,” and stepped over to that wall. Click stepped with him, retaining a needlessly tight grip on his upper arm.
At closer range, the screen images still resembled colored prints, but no longer of entomological specimens. Now they were Currier and Ives products of a style so realistic that their inner movement actually seemed appropriate. Several showed views of the same group of people and small animals from various angles,
all at some little distance. The proportion of males to females appeared perhaps three to one, though the miniature size of the figures rendered it difficult to be sure. They sat about in portable lawn furniture or strolled at ease in twos and threes, chatting with one another as they petted heir dogs and cats or sipped drinks from a large crystal punchbowl set up on a white-clothed table beneath a colorful awning. It looked a peaceful, even bucolic scene; and Corwin breathed a secret sigh of relief. He had half apprehended some grotesque initiation.
Which could, of course, still await him, somewhere beyond the range of the screens. To a large degree, he could trust what he saw on them. His perception made them marvelously animated 19th-century prints of a crowd appareled in the genteel costume of that era (though minus the preposterous ladies’ bustles), with similar touching-up of lawn furniture and other appurtenances; but he would be perceiving their actions accurately. Who could tell, however, what the line of trees and shrubs in the background might veil from the Argus eyes of these monitors?
“Yeah, that’s about the closest they ever come to the wall, too,” said the guard. “And then only to welcome new additions to their little society. Not just anybody, either. They won’t do it for new staff members, only for new paying guests.”
M. Liberty commented, “They might be any fancy-class garden party.”
After a skeptical grunt, one of the two guards who had met the needletrain replied, “Watch how they keep from even looking at the wall.”
“Well?” said the reporter. “Wouldn’t you, in their place?”
“Look,” the guard who had waited aboveground in the guardhouse went on to Corwin, “if you ever need to signal us an S-O-S, come up to about six or seven meters from the wall. That’ll put you four or five meters closer than the closest floater you’re seeing there on the screens. And hold up your hand with the fingers spread out, like this. Either hand. If it’s really urgent, hold up both hands. Any section of the wall, it’s all monitored, but the closer you are to the gate, here—it’s the one and only gate—the faster we’ll be able to get the cavalry in to help you. Ponymyetcha?”
“Yes, I understand.” Nodding, Corwin repeated the guard’s kind instructions. Privately, he wondered how many desperate situations would even allow of his coming to within six or seven meters of the wall. “And now,” he continued aloud, “if we have covered everything that we conveniently can at this juncture, I might as well be getting inside.” He added in his thoughts, Before my resolution fails utterly. Despite your kind plaudits.
Leaving one guard still at the monitor screens, the others quitted the guardhouse. Standing on its threshold, they saw its nearest neighbor, which looked, at this distance, about the size of a dime balanced up on edge and seen full face or obverse. These two guardhouses seemed virtual Siamese twins; the next nearest ones were little more than pinheads in either direction.
Fifty yards away loomed the prison wall, its unique gate positioned midway between the twin guardhouses. Boldly the little group of five set forth through the intervening and intentionally rugged terrain, innocent of any visible pathway. Again they marched with the first guard in the lead, the second in the rear, and the policeman and reporter flanking the captive, each holding one arm.
He was grateful for this support. While remembering the solid if stony and uneven ground beneath the wildgrowth around M. Randolph’s guardhouse, and assuming that it was much the same here, he now perceived it as a swampy black morass into which his leg seemed to sink, at every step, almost to the knee. He could see, feel, and smell the illusionary slime clinging tarlike to his trousers.
“It must have been easier going,” said M. Liberty, to whom the mud, while merely tall weeds springing from bumpy ground, would nevertheless still prove hindersome, “when you could take the wallcar.”
“Not really,” said Click. “You still had just as much of this stuff to cross, and then it was all at once instead of half at a time.”
“So those are the old wallcar tracks,” the reporter went on as they neared the wall.
“Still electrified,” said the rearguard. “Don’t try touching them. Or any of the wall, for that matter. But for some reason more of the charge seems to concentrate in the old rails than anywhere else.”
“It must be quite an electrical expense,” said M. Liberty.
“It’d be a monster,” the guard agreed, “if we kept the whole thing electrified clockround. So we usually just use a randomized spotdance at night and shut it off completely during the day.”
Presumably that was data a prisoner ought not receive, but at this stage Corwin had little inclination left for reminding them.
“But you have it on now?” said M. Liberty.
“Comes on automatically whenever anyone gets within five meters of the inside wall, either side of same. It’s about nine hundred and ninety-nine to one that anybody’s that close right now, but seeing where they’ve set up their reception, better play it safe.”
“How is the warden—I should say, manager—going to collect him?”
“Voicekey, M. The manager’s voicekey deadens the door—just the door—on his side. The way our voicekey deadens the outer door. The airlocks themselves are shielded unless and until someone tries to force an inner door. That happens, and it electrifies automatically.”
“And your daystaffers, chaplains, and professional servicers have to go through all this, as well?” the reporter persisted.
“Well, they don’t get strapped into the hot seat, but—”
“The hot seat?” Corwin said before he could stop himself.
“Don’t worry about it, your lordship,” said the guard in front, turning to walk backwards for a few steps—no mean feat, in this terrain. “We just call it that for a joke. Looks a little bit like one of those old Chamber of Horrors museum pieces, but actually it’s in about the only part of the airlocks that can’t be electrified at all.”
The rearguard had already resumed his explanation to M. Liberty. “—you’d be surprised how much of the hooha Warden Warren’s responsible for. Never think he was a convicted murderer himself, he’s so clumped up about security. For instance, there used to be the ‘Warden’s Walk’ inside—a pathway up to the door that wouldn’t trigger the wall juice. Warren insisted we get rid of it.”
With every gaze he could spare from the swamp that seemed to encircle him, Corwin was searching the wall. Where prior to his underground ride he had seen the same solid expanse of sheenful metal that realizers presumably saw, he now beheld a fortress of massive boulders, the piling of which one upon the other must have been an engineering accomplishment comparable to raising the pyramids, had they actually been boulders. It bothered him that he could spy no evidence of the wallcar rails M. Liberty had mentioned. They ought to have translated into something, if only two curiously parallel lines of mortar.
The gate bulged out several meters beyond the rest of the wall, but in so graceful a curve that its full extent became apparent only gradually, as they drew closer and closer. Standing dwarfed before it at last, Corwin strained his eyes in an upward search of the soaring archway. “Where,” he murmured, “is the revered slogan, ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’?”
“Be appropriate enough,” said the rearguard. “But a little gloomy. Nope, I can’t see Hilmar putting up any sign like that.”
M. Liberty must have spoken figuratively when she alluded to it last night. She had, after all, apparently never before seen this place in person. Now she remarked, “Most of your ‘paying guests’ probably see those words anyway, carved large in letters of stone. Not that there’s any reason M. Poe should see them.”
“That’s right. Fanciers.” The front guard bent forward and muttered a few syllables into the voicelock, which looked to Corwin like an oldfashioned keyhole in a rusty iron plate that covered a sixth of the door’s surface. “Just in case your lordship overheard,” he added
, swinging the door open, “each of us guards has a different password, and all the passwords change every day.”
More sophisticated, then, than the most popular type of voicelock, which could be programmed to recognize up to a dozen voices and open to almost any word any one of them uttered. Unsure whether these two guards were aware of his own status as a registered fancier, Corwin refrained from commenting upon the painful creak of the door hinges. Presumably it was audible only to himself.
The entryway, door and passage alike, proved too narrow for three abreast; in order to keep his grip on Corwin’s right arm, Click half turned and walked sideways. M. Liberty simply loosed his other arm and followed. The rearguard remained outside, shutting the door on them.
“Airlock number one,” announced the front guard. He must be referring to the passage around them, barely a meter wide, perhaps three meters long, and plunged into shadow by the closure of the outer door. Feeling a cobwebby whisper on his cheek and forehead, Corwin closed his ocular orbs and repressed a shudder.
“Space-alloy tubing?” M. Liberty guessed.
“Right. Seamless.” The guard made several seconds’ worth of snapping and grating noises at the inner door, added another combination of muttered syllables, and ended, in the brutalized French that had been in vogue a decade ago, “Voyela!”
Not until they were all in the second chamber, with the door made fast behind them, did he dial up the light. To Corwin, it was as though he had kindled two torches necromantically and simultaneously, one in a wall bracket beside the door and a second beside yet another iron-bound door in the wall opposite.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 165
