Mindworlds
Page 6
“No.” Ned nodded at the dark gleam of his image. “I’ll risk wearing it as is.” He pushed the right buttons and pulled the right knobs to remove the helmet, closed it and clamped it on his arm under the jacket. It fit.
“Now,” the Lyhhrt said, “we are starting out with no ship and no allies and men wanting to kill us. How are we to move under those conditions?”
Ned, who had spent a lifetime thinking on his feet, said, “You’ve been saying Brezant promised those Lyhhrt he can bring a force of up to ten thousand—am I right?—if he gets a go-ahead from Lyhhr. We can’t tell whether he was just blowing hard—”
“All I know is what I learned from their ESP woman. If I/we had tried to esp him deeper we would have been killed without learning anything at all!”
“—but from what you’ve said those two Lyhhrt believed him when he claimed to have troops on standby, so we have to assume he’s been enlisting, or his staff is doing it for him.”
“All we need is to find them—do you know where to look?”
Ned shrugged wearily. “How could I know for sure? And that’s not all we’d need! His ‘troops’ could be all over the world, but if he hasn’t got that go-ahead, he’d have to be crazier than he is to go very far.”
:All of them are crazy,: the Lyhhrt said, not bothering to single out anyone.
“We have to start somewhere. If he was here with his whole staff he’d likely base himself near Montador City to be near the Embassy when he’s expecting news—”
“The ESP woman gave no indication that Brezant would move away.”
“—and I’d count on his recruiting first in Earther colonies like here in the Cinnabar Keys or on the Continent. That’s cheapest. His ESP is an Earther and so are all his staff. His nearest lift-off from Cinnabar Keys here is Port City in the Basalt Desert just twenty-five hundred klicks away, it’s all handy. I’d want to start by looking for the kind of people he’d hire in those districts and find out what they know.”
“And where start then! Where start!”
Lonely Lyhhrt gradually became psychotic, something else everybody knew. Ned swallowed. “This is a small town with no kind of work that needs the military. In my home colony overseas I served a year in the reserve and then conscription got voted out—the military isn’t important on this world, there were no ‘aliens’ when we settled here and the wild animals are slaughtered or in cages and parks—”
“Where—”
“We do have some time! And I’m doing my best! There’s legion halls where old soldiers get together, and there’s still people who want to handle guns and march around in ranks and files. But not around here. Port City is probably the best place to look for them.”
“And they will all know who you are, will they not?”
“Brezant won’t be marching around the barracks telling us to keep our back straight, will he? He sounds like a businessman, behind a desk while the officers work in the field. And you know, Lyhhrt, as long as we have Spartakos with us it’s gotta be hard to hide no matter what shape he takes. The whole world knows Spartakos, he’s the only world-cit in the Twelveworlds of Fthel who’s a machine. But”—he nodded at Spartakos and then at the Lyhhrt—“you two can defend yourselves well enough.” If not me. “The old dogs I’m looking for just want a chance to fight and be paid for it, they don’t have anything against us, and if we can mix in we’ll only be like performers to them.” Some kind of clowns. “Maybe I’ll even know some of them if they were pugs like me who fought on five worlds.” His throat had dried up and he wished he had a beer.
“I don’t know what is clowns and I have no beer. Here is water.”
Ned took it on faith and drank it. “We have no choice and that looks to be the only way we can reach Khagodis. You choose the way you want to get to Port City.”
“We’ll take a private monorail car, reach the station by the path that runs along the sea-wall. It’s rough and not many use it.”
“And when do you want to leave?”
“Not tonight. We would reach there after midnight and we have no base for ourselves. We will stay here tonight, I have provided a hammock further back with an oxylator so you will sleep with enough fresh air, and here is a prepared meal for you. We will leave before dawn.” He took a glassy package from one of his shelves and offered it.
Ned accepted it doubtfully. It looked with its paper fork and tiny square of napkin almost like any takeout from any shop that sold them. He was far from asking where the Lyhhrt might have bought it or by what alchemy he might have made it, only squatted with his back against the wall and pulled the heatstrip. “Bangers an mash? Eh, I guess that’s what comes of hanging around ESPs.”
He ate watching the last of the red sun’s rays bouncing off the tide pools’ ripples, rings of light growing and fading on the mossy roof of the cavern. Spartakos, with nothing else to do, stood motionless beside the cabinet. The Lyhhrt had disappeared into some corner of it.
The food tasted as it should, and the mild stink of the briny air did not spoil it. During a day of sweat-popping fright Ned had forgotten hunger and weariness. But the tension of keeping the Lyhhrt right-side-up had stiffened his neck, the fright had not left him and was very near panic—Goodbye Zel and kiddos, this crazy business got me killed!— yet his eyelids began to close as soon as he ate the last scrap; and he fell into a half-waking dream in which he watched the Lyhhrt opening a folded shelf into a table, touching a place in his neck to open little doors in his silver abdomen, a miniature cabinet.
Ned pulled himself up and staggered to the back of the cave where he found the same kind of sturdy canvas hammock he had slept in on several other worlds, dinged the oxylator, climbed in and …
Lyhhrt reached in for the transparent globe that held his naked self in its liquid, one and a half kilos of brain that looked like a giant cowrie shell with pseudopods holding almost invisible remotes; its thin and glistening skin was mottled in mauve and rose.
Lyhhrt was dreaming in his marshy world with its sundogs but no moon and its multiple millions of our/selves, while he directed his workshell to set the globe on its table, unplug it and add fresh nutrients from squeeze-droppers and vials of powder.
Ned dreamed with him … .
—what to do then? We wanted to be left alone to live as One and we were attacked by Ix, we begged for help from Galactic Federation and were ignored, Zamos gave us back our lives but made us become slaves and create more slaves for them—
—you say it would have been better to die and be forgotten—
—be One with the Cosmic Spirit—
—you think so! The Cosmic Spirit is life, we are part of life, and life battles to exist … the Ix attacked us to save their own lives when they could have asked—begged and pleaded as we did—for help … and who knows whether they did and were refused as we were by some other Federation of worlds … now Zamos is gone and if not completely destroyed its head has been smashed and nothing is left but flailing limbs—
Ned, dreaming, asked himself if there was a congregation of Lyhhrt in this cave or if he had been transported to their world, and realized, dreaming, that there was one Lyhhrt with generations of teeming minds in one brain telling each other the story of one people … .
—we were supposedly saved from Zamos, but the work we did for him we do still and the difference is, we are paid for it … but are we saved? We dream impossible machines and clothe ourselves in them and create ships and weapons for flesh-covered souls to destroy each other—what kind of freedom is that? We go out alone and isolated in metal casings and spy for others and make ourselves insane—and if we refuse, stop selling, stop destroying, want to live in peace, in One, on our own world, they say—
:Wake up!: the Lyhhrt said. :They are coming.:
Ned’s eyelids were stuck together and he had no time to rub them apart before a tongue of flame darted into the mouth of the cavern. His first thought, oxylator!—no, the Lyhhrt had turned it off, the flamer’s whip o
f fire curled back on itself against the Lyhhrt’s force-field with a hiss as it drowned in the pool at the cave’s mouth. One tick after that a gun’s barking shot sent its missile tearing through the field, it caromed off the corner of the Lyhhrt’s cabinet, cut the strings of Ned’s hammock—
Ned was halfway to the floor by then anyway and the bullet exploded in the ceiling and sent splinters into his neck and shoulder, no, his collar and sleeve.
Then there was quiet.
Ned understood, was made to understand in the chaos, that the attack-suits of their assailants had been programmed to fire as soon as their sensors identified the targets. Spartakos had jammed their electronics as soon as their signals reached him.
But: “That force-field was an error on my part,” the Lyhhrt said calmly. “It delayed the signal.”
Ned had not enough handkerchiefs to wipe his sweat off, and said through wildly chattering teeth, “Oh yeh.” No force-field? Saw himself licked to ashes by that sharp flame tongue. He pulled himself up, still violently shaking. He had been skimmed by missiles before, but never two at once.
Where are they?
“Come and see,” the Lyhhrt said.
There was rage in the voice and thought. Ned did not want to follow, but the cave was a dead end. He stepped carefully past the charred walls over the ash-strewn floor, avoiding the puddle. The sky was still dark with brilliant stars, dimly lit with a pink streak in the east.
Two figures were standing immobile before the cave’s opening. They were crying out faintly through the thick bubble helmets, a thick man in dark glasses, a tall woman with yellow hair; since their electronics had been disabled they could not move in the flame- and bullet-proof suits. The suits, heavy akrytex dark as charcoal, could have stood by themselves anywhere, like the rocks at Stonehenge. “They’re from Brezant?” Ned asked.
“Yes. They did not send their barflies after us this time.” He walked around the two figures, came back to stand beside Ned and pointed at the weapon, suit glove still gripping and aiming it at them. Ned knew it, the long-barreled Quadzull: the one weapon Zamos originally had forced its Lyhhrt slaves to design for the Ix, and this one had been modified for Earthers.
“If you’ve been shielding me how did they track us?”
“Sweat, spit, skin flakes. We have not moved very far from your bar.”
Not a very good choice, Lyhhrt. One more “error.” “We better move away from here pretty fast.” For the first time Ned noticed that the Lyhhrt-workman had reshaped himself back into the O‘e beggar he had been at the curbside beneath the Lyyhrt-world restaurant. To be less noticed. Oh yes. Ned sensed Spartakos at his shoulder, fixed in a stare at Lyhhrtas-O’ e.
As the Lyhhrt-O’e was intent on the two attackers. “What shall we do with these?” A question half to himself and half to the man and woman in the suits, the one with the gun and the other with the flamer. “I wonder if those suits would still protect at close range … .”
Ned sensed more than mere toying with the thought. The pair were frantically twisting and crying out, their bubblehelmets misted with their breath.
Spartakos had begun to say, “No, Maker—” but Ned overrode him. “Lyhhrt, neither of these is the one that killed your Other, and this is my home. I come around here two or three times every tenday and I live five minutes away with my wife and kids. If I disappear and two bodies turn up there’s gonna be more people after us than even Spartakos can count.”
After a long moment the humble O’e face turned away. “Yes,” the Lyhhrt said. His voice cracked. “Time to leave.”
“Do they have enough air?”
“They have enough air. Whoever comes by in a boat will find them.” He turned to Spartakos, who could not take his eyes off Lyhhrt-as-O’e. But neither said a word as the Lyhhrt went back into the cave to lock up and hypnoform his shelves, flick off his lamp. He led the way out: not to the east up the Grottoes steps where Dusky Dell’s Happy Hour had folded itself up until noon, but westward around the jut of the cliff toward the much larger steps an ancient civilization had hewed out of the live rock of the cliff’s face.
Ned forged his way up the giants’ stairway under the blaze of stars that seemed now like the constellations of another world, a day-and-a-half away from being at least half-contented to hug Zella and drink beer in Dell’s.
“What—?”
Spartakos and the Lyhhrt were standing motionless three steps above him. Ned’s heart jumped and he scrambled to see what was keeping them, at first a dark shadow and then by its dry and musty smell the body of an O’e who had crept there to die under the hot sun, eaten away by diseases that brute evolution seemed to have spawned for the purpose.
Spartakos was very still. The Lyhhrt was beyond impatience—almost sparking with electric tension—but he only said quietly, “This one even you could not have helped.”
Spartakos bent to pick up the gnarled and now sexless body and let it slip into the sea. He went on in silence on the path along the sea-wall and the Lyhhrt said sharply, “Come along, Edmund Gattes.”
Lyhhrt hate names and use them most often as something near insult. Ned raised his head from the sea and said levelly, “You chose me, Lyhhrt.”
“You had better begin thinking of me as O’e,” the Lyhhrt said.
THREE
Khagodis, Steaming Around the Diluvian Continent
:What are we to do?: the Lyhhrt asked Hasso sadly. :If we refuse to sell them our powers, build their ships and weapons, make ourselves sick with loneliness—try to live peacefully on our own world, they say: but you create wonderful instruments of surgery, heal bodies and minds with them, teach us to think thoughts we never dreamed of, and if you refuse that, what are you?:
Hasso said carefully, :Lyhhrt, perhaps there is more than one way to serve the Cosmic Spirit.:
:It may be so, Archivist, though it would be difficult for me to tell that to my Others short of heresy … and what are we to do in the meantime?:
If Ned found it difficult to think of his Lyhhrt employer as O’e, Hasso could hardly keep from thinking of his own Lyhhrt companion as the Baby; he seemed so much like a lost child. Though a powerful one.
At Ocean City most of the barge’s passengers had disembarked and boarded a much bigger coal-powered vessel for the journey southward around the coast of the Diluvian Continent. A long three days this was, and would have been longer and harder if Hasso had not been able to afford a sleeping basin. Nothing to see but the ocean’s curving horizon to starboard, and to port the deep mass of the continent; beginning thickly green, it gradually eroded to pale granite that shifted from pink to gray as the long shadows slanted.
Hasso was hard put to keep his mind on the dangers around him, to restrain himself from trying to catch glimpses of the young woman—:Her name is Ekket,: the Lyhhrt had said—who had seized his consciousness at one blink. But I cannot throw away everything I have worked for all my life in one moment of foolish desire … .
She was standing by the railing looking out at the red line of the sunset; between her and Hasso three or four children were playing knucklebones and jumping up and down with triumph or dismay. Hasso was grateful for their distraction.
The Lyhhrt said suddenly, :Look!—no, don’t look!—but now the young woman’s guardian is encouraging her to remove her helmet and cool herself … I believe that’s a trap, he may have caught a trace of you in her thoughts … perhaps I wasn’t shielding as well as I believe. Keep your helmet on, friend.:
Hasso obeyed, with regret. But he got one instant’s flash of her thought, perhaps by the young Lyhhrt’s compassion for a lover, or merely a momentary breach of his shielding:
my mother
has sold me like a
whore
a thought shaped in the seh form that Skerow had written in all her life, brevity bursting with passion in nine syllables, created by a poet’s tendency to fit a thought into such a waiting form, sometimes the inability to think it without forming it.
Quickly Hasso and the Lyhhrt cleared their minds and focused on blankness to avoid an entirely different and dangerous thought: :There is another Lyhhrt traveling with us, who knows everything we are thinking, and he is working for Gorodek. I am sure he let us into the young woman’s mind to trap us, and we must take care, Archivist.:
They finished their last day of voyage without speaking, and the last night in fighting back their dreams.
In the morning the landscape to portside was one great heap of rocks after another, with scrubby clumps of blue-green growths among them; eventually the ship passed through a breakwater into the harbor, where it tied up at a rough temporary dock built with newly hewn stone pilings and heavy planks of gubthawood still glossy with fresh waterproofing. The docking was the first at this location, since the New Interworld Court was truly new; the travelers would go through Imports and Registrations, a cluster of stone buildings as new as the pilings, and entrain for the Court on new steel tracks.
Hasso disembarked with a deep sense of foreboding that the gray skies reflected, and kept preventing himself from looking around at every step. He had his helmet latched tightly and the passes and ticket ready in his sling-pocket, and knew where to board the flatbed train. “Will you be coming along with me?” he asked the Lyhhrt. “I’m traveling on the third platform behind the engine.”
The Lyhhrt was ignoring the stares of some of other passengers who, having been dissuaded from paying attention to him earlier, now suddenly noticed his awkward clothing and lurching walk. “I have a cheap ticket,” he said. “I came on such short notice.”