Mindworlds

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  Ned looked around at all the hopeful and the needy. He wanted to say, Let’s get out of here … but not to be overheard.

  “Spartakos, we might have some use for that army of yours.”

  “I knew that you would,” Spartakos said.

  “But guerillas, not chessmen.”

  A couple of recruits were deputized to carry Gretorix’s body on a stretcher. The dead thief was dragged away by the feet.

  “We have to move out some way before the roll call shrinks any more. Tell your Maker that.”

  “I do my best, but—he is like your God. He does not answer.

  Khagodis: Secrets

  Hasso’s spirit was very sore. He had accomplished nothing, had deceived himself into half-believing, if only for a moment, that someone could truly care for him, had acquired a deadly enemy and the attention of a powerful being who was only too interested in him.

  He and the Lyhhrt were up late in his marble-lined room, finding rest difficult with a long tense voyage facing them next day.

  “Why in the name of all the Saints is it interested in me?”

  The Lyhhrt said patiently, “Because it wants to know—”

  “But why not find somebody else!”

  “Because everyone else exploded, Hasso! Isn’t it possible that it touched Gorodek, and Ekket, and who knows how many others, and they couldn’t bear the touch?”

  “I would have thought that one like you would have been most interesting of all to such a being,” Hasso said stubbornly.

  The Lyhhrt said with a bit of sadness, “My people are not great explorers of the exterior world, Archivist. Their senses are dim and they cannot see unless they make themselves eyes. Because of my youth I am untrained and inexperienced. Only when I put myself in your mind do I know what you saw and felt, no more.”

  “I would help that being find what it wants if I knew how, but in the meantime I am just afraid of offending it.”

  “Evidently you have not done that so far.”

  “It seems to be a bodiless energy being, and if it came from that ship I wonder why it needed one.”

  “I am afraid we will not know until it tells you, Hasso.”

  Tells me, indeed!

  “From your experience, it appears to want to know something about a world where people need flesh.”

  And what do I know of the world, always imprisoned in my flesh? Hasso leaned on his staff and looked out into the night.

  After a few moments, the Lyhhrt said, :Since we have spoken so much of this other Lyhhrt I must tell you something that you may not want to know.:

  The dark tone of the thought made Hasso uneasy. :Only if you must, friend.:

  :When I first came here I was sure I had made a terrible mistake. Loneliness and fear are weak and simple expressions of what I felt … and when I was finishing my work for Galactic Federation I thought I might really go mad in the particular way that isolated Lyhhrt do … and then one day I heard a voice that was not one of madness, in the same way that you have been called by that … being. But this was an Other. I was filled with joy. Yet …

  :I am not altogether foolish and I did not accept its invitation at once. But after many days in which the Other urged me to give some acknowledgment, finally I answered. I refused to meet this one or have more than an informal change of thoughts, but I believed there was no one in the world happier than I … alone no longer!

  :Then, when I finally agreed to meet him he withdrew for some while and after a day or so he very carefully explained his circumstances. He was living inside a fleshly being, and this being had an acquaintance who would be glad to accommodate me.:

  Hasso gulped, and had nothing to say, or think.

  :I tried not to be horrified, I was afraid to make him angry, and when I begged him to tell me why he chose to do this, he said that fleshers have more power and influence than we do in clumsy metal workshells that only frighten and repel others.

  :When he kept pressing me to join in this perversion I began to feel threatened and put distance between us very quickly, and I have been spending a whole year trying to calm myself. I have no proof but cannot help believing that the one here is the same.:

  “Is that the person who warned you of an attack by Lyhhr?”

  “No, that came from outworld. This one seems to be part of the attack plan, another part of the population altogether! And, Hasso, I came down here with you because I thought it was time to conquer my fear and make myself useful. And some day I might be able to cure myself of hiding in these stupid clothes, which are not quite as bad as living in a flesher’s body.”

  Hasso said fervently, “I hope that being who is so interested in ‘people’ does not decide to inhabit one!” And added, “But you, friend, will you go home eventually?”

  “I cannot tell you. But somehow I will find an Other.”

  A clamor rose in the hallways and the lights went off, and then on again.

  The TriV burst into light and sound with a flash image of two groups striking at each other with sticks. Hasso could not identify any of the combatants, but one of them fell with a bloody head. After that the screen blackened, a robotic voice said: BE CALM AND DO NOT PANIC, and clicked into silence.

  “What’s happening?” Hasso pushed the TriV’s ON button but it remained dead, then pulled himself up and hurried to the esplanade doors to make sure they opened. “Come quickly, Lyhhrt, whatever is happening, I want to be out of this!”

  Silence. The cloth-wrapped figure stood against the wall and did not move. “Lyhhrt, what’s the matter, Lyhhrt!” Hasso was struck with horrible fear. Someone began to beat on the door with a staff or weapon. With great effort Hasso stilled himself and opened his mind.

  :It is Dritta! Please let me in quickly!:

  He recognized her face through the spy-way and let her in. She was followed by Ekket, but Hasso did not have time to let his heart flutter. Both were carrying packed travel-cases. “What is going on?”

  “Someone has tried to attack the Speaker for the Governors of Isthmus States, and there is such a great disturbance in all the Assembly Halls that my chief, Tharma, has sent me to bring you and Ekket away right now, along with—what is the matter?”

  Hasso had crouched and taken off his helmet in order to part the clothing, and put his ear against the Lyhhrt’s body. “One moment I was speaking to him, and the next—”

  He could hear faint humming, but did not know whether it came from the machines or the pulse of a tiny heart. “There are small sounds, but—”

  “He fainted?”

  “He stopped. One moment we were speaking together and then nothing … .”

  “You must come, Hasso.” Dritta was as firm in her way as her mentor Tharma. “My chief has ordered it and there is no more time.”

  “No! I cannot go without him! He put himself at risk for me. Even if he is dead I must bring him.”

  For a moment Dritta stood looking Hasso up and down, and Hasso noticed for the first time that she was slung with a heavy collection of stunners, zaps and serious firearms.

  She went over to the wall, opened a door that Hasso had not known was there, and pulled out a small wheeled baggage-cart. “If we must, we will take him.”

  She laid the soft-skin cases on the wagon for a bed and began to lower the Lyhhrt’s standing figure. Ekket, who had been waiting in the corner with tear-filled eyes, came forward. “Let me help,” and the two women set the Lyhhrt on the wagon with a great deal of both strength and gentleness. Hasso could not help wondering if the Lyhhrt might ever have appreciated being treated in this way.

  “Come.” Dritta picked up the remote and slid open the glass door; the wagon with its burden followed the remote’s signal on silent wheels. Hasso locked his helmet and came after Ekket, leaving his marble chamber without regret. The stars and moons glared down and Hasso did not turn his head for a glance. His spirit was with that clumsy heap of cloth and metal.

  The esplanade tapered off down a ramp which was a
collector lane from other rooms, but their occupants were either quarreling in the halls or had hurried away to avoid the conflict. Dritta said quietly, “This ramp leads to the underground station platform. We will not be travelling on a passenger train, I apologize for the inconvenience, but secrecy is safer. We will board a freight train that brings in food and building materials and takes away processed waste. We’ll leave on the barge that carries it to Dead Moon Crater to be burnt, and the cruiser Ocean Star will pick us up from there.”

  The air turned cold in the dimly lit tunnel at the end of the ramp, and the sounds were muffled, pattering clogs and sandals, the tick of Hasso’s staff, and the thin skim of wheels on stone. The Lyhhrt was all too silent. If he had dared, Hasso would have stopped and lifted the Lyhhrt’s body in his hands to breathe life into it somehow, but the thought was madness, and he hurried with the others.

  Hasso had never needed to take an underground train and there were few of them in the world: membership in Galactic Federation had made Khagodi a traveling species willy-nilly. The cold vault looked old and dusty because of its newness. The dust came from hewn stones and the oily spills from the engines that brought them. “The train is coming,” Dritta said.

  The railway car was a framework for carrying freight; and a pair of laborers hung tarpaulins over it to shelter the travelers and laid woven straw mattresses to carpet the splintered floor. When they were done, Dritta gave them money and they put their tongues out in thanks and crept away. Hasso spread his cloak on the floor of the car and Dritta placed the Lyhhrt’s awkward metal-and-cloth body on it; then she reprogrammed the remote and sent the baggage carrier back to its home in the wall. “Nobody will trace us with that,” she said.

  Hasso removed his helmet, got down on his good knee and gave his whole mind to the Lyhhrt. He did not notice when the train began moving.

  Lyhhrt, Lyhhrt, you are a metal box of mind I cannot open … .

  Dritta crouched beside him. “He stopped speaking—and—perhaps living for no reason at all?”

  “I must believe he is alive … It is as if he has been struck dumb, paralyzed, there is a pulse, a whisper of something there … . I’m afraid it is only the noise of his ventilators.”

  “Can his shell support him?”

  “Yes, if he is alive in it.”

  “I’ve seen this effect from ESP attacks—but none of our people have the power to attack a Lyhhrt that way.”

  For a moment Hasso had a horrible fear that the being, who was all energy and no mass, might have become curious about the Lyhhrt and—

  But no, my friend told me a terrible secret, and it was perhaps one secret too many in this crisis. Only another Lyhhrt could do this … “Your chief may have told you of my suspicion—”

  “That there is another Lyhhrt in this area? Yes. She said it was her obligation to warn me of all possible dangers.” She touched her stunner and dipped her head. “I’m afraid I have no defense and no treatment for this condition.”

  Hasso closed his eyes to keep the tears in and reached out for the touch and texture of Lyhhrt mind, friend or enemy, listened intensely but could hear nothing beyond his own heartbeat except the puffing of the steam engine and a faint whirr of circulation in the shell’s vents. His back and leg ached fiercely, and he fought the pain desperately though he knew that it was foolish to believe that his touch or nearness would do good.

  And felt something. Again.

  Again began to feel the peculiar terrifying sense of Other that was nothing like the Lyhhrt sense of the word—

  No no whatever you are leave me with my friend you have nothing to know here!

  Once more his mind was magnified, clarified, every thought flung against his inner eye in a lurid intense glare, he was dizzy, disoriented, wanted to sink into sleep, lose consciousness, whatever would stop the attack, the red lightnings of terror in—his mind? the Lyhhrt’s?—found, somewhere, the merest strength, as much as would press finger and thumb together, as much as might crack an eggshell, set himself against fear to look into the maelstrom the attacker had made of the Lyhhrt’s mind, an abyss of hate where the icy cold waters of his world thrashed and spun … .

  Shivering with fear and at the same time savage with determination, Hasso let himself fall into the eye of the storm and made himself hover until his passion forced calm on it, searched for the small pulses of the heart and the minuscule impulses of the brain. After endless time they shimmered to life and the Lyhhrt’s essence returned. His limbs vibrated slightly. :Archivist … :

  “You are quite safe now,” Hasso said, I think, I hope.

  “Archivist …” The word came through the voder with an odd warble.

  “No, no, don’t stir yourself. Rest.”

  He hauled up on his staff to stretch and crouched again, everything used up, opened his eyes and found Dritta beside him. She looked at Hasso, then at the Lyhhrt, who had become still again, and he saw that she had taken off her helmet. She said, “I think he must be sleeping now.”

  Hasso moved away from the Lyhhrt, from whatever forces had opened his mind for him, or given him strength, and pulled on and locked his own helmet quickly, wanting only to keep his thoughts to himself. There was a question waiting at the edge of his mind that he could not ask yet.

  Then he noticed that Ekket had been huddled in a corner, weeping. He was wordless, but Dritta crept over to her as quickly as the lurching and rattling of the car would let her. “What is upsetting you, dems’l?”

  “Eki, I can’t help myself, it was Gorodek tonight, telling the whole world through the TriV that because I was not found pregnant after his horrible attack I must be sterile!”

  Hasso cried out, “He truly said that?”

  “Yes,” Dritta said. “I tried to shut it off before he came out with it, but …”

  Hasso said quickly, “You must not think anything of the sort, dems’l! If anyone is sterile it must be Gorodek—he is old enough to be my father’s father and he has no children!”

  “That’s an idea that is better left unspoken,” Dritta said uneasily, “Better forgotten. Eh, friends, we have two hours to embarkation. Let us find a place to lean on and get some sleep.”

  Tharma and Ravat and Vannar

  Tharma had been looking for opportunities to sleep without finding more than an hour at a time, and when she received the urgent summons from Ravat near midnight, she and her scratch of a security force were at wit’s end trying to keep elderly and dignified diplomats from waging war with staffs, walking sticks, and crutches. Both her hearts were heavy; Ravat had been aging beyond his years, and she felt the same of herself.

  “This is extraordinary,” he said. “They cannot be quieted and I’m sure they will drop from exhaustion, if not apoplexy.” He was watching from several screens; one or two of them were showing replays of Tharma’s efforts. “If we succeed in sending them home they might actually raise forces, and we haven’t seen that for three hundred years. My grandfather remembered the last battle in his childhood. Here is where the world is supposed to be at one with itself!” Ravat’s office was a cut above Tharma’s: three of its walls were marble and only the fourth fiberboard, with a heap of marble slabs leaning against it waiting to be set in.

  “I have done everything I could,” Tharma said firmly.

  “I know,” Ravat said. “I realize that you have been doing much of my work for me as well. What I ask of you now is that you come with me, rouse up your aide Kewar, I will bring my secretary Iskar and we will battle our way through Vannar’s guards and secretaries and disturb his sleep for a change.”

  Tharma did not need to answer.

  Vannar was roused, but carefully, and after a report and a view of the conflict, wrapped himself in his fluffy drying blanket and marched down the long halls and between the ranks of combatants through a lane cleared for him by Tharma. He insisted on doing this alone and punctuated himself with hard raps of his thaqwood staff of office.

  “No, I will face them alone,
and nobody will call me a fool or a shirker!”

  “But do leave that blanket behind, Director!”

  Rather than climb the dais he stopped at the entrance of the Hall of Assembly, took a great mouthful of air, and hit the floor rat-a-tat.

  “Good people! Are you going to break the peace now after you have been tending it so carefully all these years!”

  Tharma felt a surge of respect for Vannar for the first time. The noise ebbed. Someone handed him a microphone.

  “You, Governor of West Sealand, and you, Speaker for the Confederation of Isthmus States! You came to celebrate the wholeness of the world! Now what are you telling me—that you are going to declare war?”

  The Speaker drew himself up. “We have reason enough to worry!” he called out after several breaths and a draught of air. “If the Governor brings forces to our shores to fight off an invasion we have no reason to believe exists, he will find an entirely different kind of battle facing him!”

  Gorodek answered hotly, “If the Speaker is daring to call me liar—”

  Vannar broke in quickly, “If your concerns are so great that you need to air them before the world, and if you are willing to stay here one more day, I will call a full session right here at the beginning of second quarter tomorrow and—”

  But Gorodek could not keep himself still any longer and cried out: “I have more than one concern, I tell you! I came here with a friend and a bride, and my friend is murdered and my bride is lost!”

  Vannar said slowly and quietly, “All parties, it is past midnight. Tomorrow we will discuss—”

  “And that woman—” Gorodek was pointing at Tharma, “—has taken—”

  “Security Chief Tharma has taken extraordinary risks to keep peace.”

  Tharma came up to Gorodek quickly and said in a low voice, “Governor, we are acting according to law, there is no other way.” She would have liked to say, We could not make her love you, but not here, and was aware that any pity for the old man was dangerous.

  “I swear to you that we will do everything with all our resources to avoid any more conflict!” Vannar declared.