Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Accordingly, Bleys went back to reconsider those actions, and lost himself in the intricate fascination of juggling the characters and situations that his escape would require.

  Engrossed as he was, and braced for its happening, he was disturbed only temporarily when he walked through the point in the high-ceilinged hall where the phase-shift once more transported him nowhere—though a portion of his mind did register a momentary, uncustomary flare of anger at this unnecessary discomfort.

  Bleys passed onto and through the section of bare concrete hall; and it was not until he stepped through its farther door into the last relatively short leg of normal hotel-type hallway, leading to the right turn that would leave him finally facing the first door to his own suite, that his mind was suddenly awakened from its musings. As the door to the earlier section clicked shut behind him, all illumination of this final stretch of hall went out, leaving him in complete darkness.

  He stopped, his senses at once alert. Then, almost in the same instant, he backed up a step and put his hand behind him to touch the emergency open button of the door he had just passed. The stud depressed, but the door did not open. He tried his wrist-controls—with no success. Whatever had locked it was beyond most customary controls.

  He breathed out softly. Almost reflexively, he moved forward again silently, sidling against the left-hand wall of the hallway, so that he would have room behind him in which to back up and maneuver. Then, once more, he stopped and reached out, feeling with all his senses for any information they could pick up through the utter darkness. His mind raced over the situation, hunting for understanding and searching for possible courses of action.

  So, he had overestimated the calm reassurance of Newton’s ruling minds. Either the Council had decided to act immediately after all; or, perhaps, Half-Thunder had activated his own plan defiantly, possibly even secretly. Overhearing Thunder’s words from the balcony, Bleys had assumed the other man was talking about the legal action the Council had used as a threat in the afternoon. But this looked like some action that would be more direct, and physical.

  Instinctively, now, Bleys felt the urge of a trapped creature to start swiftly toward the far end of the corridor, to get out at that end since this was locked behind him. But a moment’s thought made it obvious that if this end was locked, the other would be, too.

  Bleys’s mind swept back and forth over the situation, searching for understanding and possible courses of action. If this was what Half-Thunder had arranged for him—he checked in mid-thought. There was something not right about the way his mind was working. He could not put his finger exactly upon what he sensed; but his reasoning power seemed both slowed and showing a tendency to think in circles. He had been about to repeat the whole train of thought he had finished a second before.

  Concentrate, he told himself. Clearly, his reasoning had skimmed over the situation in very superficial fashion, when it should have been digging in, looking for loose ends in Half-Thunder’s plan that he could turn to his own advantage. Angrily, he made the effort to concentrate.

  Down the corridor some distance ahead of him, Bleys heard a latch click. His straining ears heard a door open and the sound of someone brushing through that opening.

  Bleys did not hear the door close again. But after a few seconds in the silence of the darkness, he heard a barely audible, rhythmic panting, like that of a man with a hoe chopping at something noiselessly—and it was coming slowly but steadily toward him along the wall of the corridor at Bleys’s right hand, as he faced toward the sound. The panting could now be heard to be accompanied by the voiceless susurrus of something swung through the air. Both sounds were working their way toward him.

  Bleys suppressed another unusual, powerful rush of animal panic and closed his eyes. He exhaled deeply and centered. He opened his eyes on the darkness again. His elbows pressed lightly against his rib cage as the reflexively tense muscles in his neck and shoulders relaxed. His knees flexed, settling his heels firmly to the floor, bearing his weight evenly on both feet.

  Mind followed body into the dreamlike harmony from countless hours of practice for physical contest. His senses reached out, sharp now, separating the sounds approaching him into their separate meanings.

  The scuff of a sole at the far end of the corridor…

  A syncopated footfall… heel and toe. Not the gliding slip-step of a trained fighter.

  But that regular, repeated sound—the faint swish of whatever was flailing the air.

  Near at hand, Bleys could feel the quickly fading residue of heat from the earlier illumination of the walls. That heat still masked any other source of thermal energy, but the technology was established and reliable. The heat would be gone, enough not to interfere, in a few more seconds.

  Scuff… swish-swish.

  The sound conjured the image of a blind man swinging a cane.

  No, not a cane. Something else.

  Bleys let his mind sink deeper into meta-awareness, liberating memories long submerged.

  A Japanese word rose to the surface of his mind—two words—bokken… the wooden sword… katana… “the sword that cuts from heaven to earth”…

  Clearly back to his mind came the image of his tutor’s long, sad face, abruptly eclipsed by darkness and the feel of the blindfold against his own forehead, leaving him with blended music of sword and breath, and the distinctive sound that was the signature of the sword as it cut the air. “The tip of the sword moves faster than sound, Bleys Ahrens. It leaves a trace of vacuum in its path, and the surrounding air rushes in like thunder in the wake of a lightning stroke.”

  —Swish-swish. Not the crisp hiss of a focus cut… but prolonged… whispery…

  The remembered image of his tutor dissolved into another—one of a man batting at a swarm of gnats.

  Bleys felt his body turn in trained response, a few degrees to his right. He felt a perceptible moving heat source now. Whoever was coming was drawing nearer along the wall opposite the one against which his left shoulder was pressed.

  Bleys waited for the next step of the other toward him, to cover any sound from his own soft-soled half-boots. He eased himself around so that the left wall was now hard and flat against his back, his heels against its base above the carpet.

  Sound approaching. Scuff/slap—swish/swish… swishhh… pause… scuff/slap—swish/swish… swish…

  The beat of the sound brought back the memory of his tutor’s words. “As the tip moves toward you, the pitch rises, like the sound of an oncoming aircar. When it moves away, the pitch falls.”

  The rhythm was broken for a second. Then continued.

  The darkness lost importance. Sounds, heat and memory were building together a clear mental image.

  …Average New World height for males. Tip of sword making a figure-eight—left to right… Likely two-handed grip, but if so, the sound is too even… A trained swordsman would make a drawing cut on each down stroke. The sound would vary—left cut from right cut. An untrained man, flailing with the sword, rather than using it.

  Bleys stepped away from the wall, let his feet glide toward the sound. Slipping along close to the wall at his left now, silently.

  No more than three paces now from the oncomer.

  Swish/swish—left, right. —Left, right.

  Bleys moved to the left again—the oncomer’s right. Two steps…

  Swish—cut to the left—scuff/slap.

  The sound and heat came closer, moved past Bleys. Reek of sour sweat… and Bleys turned to follow, silent upon the carpet, breathing shallowly.

  He was now behind the moving, panting figure.

  Swish/right hand…

  The sword tip-sound came up close over the assailant’s left shoulder as he shifted his body slightly, beginning a downswing to the right. Bleys’s left hand arced over the man’s head and followed his mental image of the sword arm.

  There was no grunt of surprise as Bleys clamped his hand around the man’s left wrist. The assassin tried to je
rk Bleys’s hand away, and Bleys went with the movement, pivoting on his toes to his left and bringing up his right hand to join his left. He dropped to his left knee, still gripping the man’s arm as if Bleys himself were delivering a sword-cut. It was kote-gaeshi, one of the most effective throws in aikido.

  On the practice mat, Bleys would have thrust his arms out, propelling his opponent forward and allowing him to roll out of the throw; but his hands now moved as if they had minds of their own.

  In the darkness of the corridor, instead, Bleys drew them down and inward. The attacker flew over his back and directly head-down toward the floor.

  He released the wrist and elbow he held a fraction of a second before the attacker’s head struck the floor, with all his body’s weight behind it.

  Suddenly the silence was complete. Only the stale smell of sweat…

  Bleys’s long fingers reached out, found and probed beneath the man’s collar. The warm flesh under his touch gave back no pulse.

  He away took his hand. It had been a perfunctory, almost a ritual examination. The man’s neck had taken the full weight of his body, accelerating through an arc of decreasing radius before striking the floor. A gust of feeling moved through Bleys. He felt nothing in himself. But why had he killed? It would not have been necessary.

  For a second, his mind was back on Harmony, when he had stopped the Militia major from hanging the three farmers.

  Bleys straightened, swiftly. Now, after the tension of concentration in darkness, his mind was clear and sharp-edged. Quickly he went down the corridor, feeling along the side the attacker had come down, until his fingers slipped into the empty space of an opened doorway from what must have been the assassin’s room.

  He entered it. Within, the lightlessness was as complete as it had been out in the hall.

  In the dark, Bleys turned and felt about on the wall at the left of the door for the general emergency alarm required in public buildings. He found the stud for it and pressed it.

  A bell began to clang loudly, in the room and in the hall outside. A voice spoke loudly from the room’s ceiling.

  “This is an emergency, but there is no immediate reason for alarm. Will all guests please evacuate this section of the hall. This is an emergency…”

  It went on repeating. Beyond his own opened door, Bleys could hear the sound of many other doors opening automatically. He stepped out again into a hall where the lighting was on and every door open. More important, the locked barriers at each end of this row of rooms should be unlocked.

  He glanced briefly at the body of his would-be killer. Its head was at a brutal angle to its shoulders. A crude, plastic, homemade sword, like the one Bleys had seen dropped by the man running amok on Cassida, lay a little distance from the right hand of the body on the floor. The body itself was that of the rather portly businessman from Cassida who had tried to start a conversation with him on the spaceship as they were landing on Newton. Bleys still felt nothing.

  No one had come out of any of the other open doors. Of course. The Council would have made sure that this particular stretch of hotel corridor was unpopulated; except by the one man primed or conditioned by Half-Thunder to run amok and kill Bleys, in what should seem to be an unfortunate accident. As crude and direct a solution to Bleys as a Council problem as the blast of sonics had been planned to be. No wonder the Council’s other members had resisted it.

  But the alarm was still sounding. Abandoning any appearance of ordinary movement, Bleys ran to the far end of the corridor, went through its now-open end and along a short stretch of corridor.

  The alarm stopped sounding.

  The silence came like an unexpected shock. But Bleys had turned the corner and was at the doorway of his own private lounge, now—happily closed, like all the doors of his suite. He pressed the stud on his wrist control pad, stepped through the opening door and let it close automatically behind him. Inside, he pressed the stud that turned on the lights and dropped into one of the oversized float chairs.

  Reaction, at last—a hollow feeling of shaky exhaustion formed like a blue bubble inside him, flooding him with a sensation of weakness he could never remember sensing before. Bleys felt emptied out, a shell of himself; and besides that, he, who never had headaches, had the threat of one now just above the space between his eyes.

  Growing up through all this, though, was an emotion like the relief of a hunted wild animal that had safely regained its burrow, even though it still heard the hounds of the hunters baying close by.

  For a long moment, Bleys gave in to the reaction; then, with a surge of will, he thrust it from him. His mind began to work, picking up speed on a new tide of excitement beginning deep in him, but now rising.

  He had actually chosen very carefully the order in which he would go and speak on the first three worlds. New Earth had to be first, Cassida had to be second and Newton had to be third. This order, because they must necessarily represent an escalation of the opposition he would face among the powers that controlled each world.

  And so they had. But something also had happened—something not entirely unexpected, but something he had been not counting on at any particular time. Just as it was impossible, in any practical sense, to be lucky all the time, he had reasoned, so it would necessarily be impossible to be without luck all the time.

  Somewhere along the rungs of the ladder of things to be done, which made up the outline of his plan, there would be unforeseen difficulties—like the unbelievable temerity of the Council, in injecting him with whatever the substances had been. He would have to deal with that situation quickly, now. But the point was, just as unfortunate things could happen, the fortunate could, too.

  He had been on the alert for such an eventual gift of luck; and now it had happened, with the attack upon him in the dark. The attack itself had indeed been crude; but the Council must have voted unanimously for it after he had left the room after walking in from their balcony. The vote of the anonymous member with the blur for a head would then not have been necessary.

  But it was that same anonymous member who now fascinated Bleys. He had reasoned that as his opposition became more and more capable, eventually he would find someone in a controlling position who was unusually capable, a kingpin worth conquering or recruiting.

  The individual who had hidden his identity with the head-blur just might be such a find. But just now there was no time to think about that. First, right now, a quick change in immediate plans was necessary.

  He punched the private, shielded call numbers on his wristpad, for Toni, Henry and Dahno. They were numbers that did not change, even when they went from world to world—automatically picked up on his landing and made part of whatever communication system existed on the world they had come to.

  “I’m calling you all,” he said, keeping his voice casual, into the pickup on the pad. “What with everything going on today, I haven’t had the chance to talk about our schedule for tomorrow. In my case, I want to make that afternoon concert of the Symphonie des Flambeaux. But if you’re close, give me a tone, and I’ll expect you all here within a few moments.”

  He dropped his arm with the control pad on to the chair arm beneath it and leaned back, closing his eyes. Within seconds of each other, three separate chiming notes sounded from the walls around him.

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.”

  “—You’re all here. You must all have been in the hotel, then. That’s good,” he said a few moments later when they were assembled, guarded by the blue security bubble and seated in floats around him. “I was afraid at least one of you might be out.”

  “The three of us were having our own meeting,” said Henry.

  “Of course,” Bleys said. “Now I’ll tell you what’s happened since I last saw you.”

  Briefly in simple words, he told them of his climb along the wall, his escape from the balcony of the Council, and his meeting with the amok Cassidan who had been conditioned to kill him. They listened in silence. />
  “I don’t think,” he said when he was finished, “we can wait for tomorrow to make our break. Henry—is it possible to try to break out starting right now?”

  The other two glanced at Henry.

  “Yes,” Henry said. “But all our plans are based on picking you up from tomorrow afternoon’s Symphonie des Flambeaux. If you’re sure you want to start now—”

  “I do,” Bleys said.

  “Then we don’t have time to arrange a new pickup point for you. You know there’s also a performance of the Symphonie at twenty-three hundred and thirty hours tonight? You could make that, and we can shift schedules accordingly to pick you up from it. Toni goes with you, in any case.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do,” Bleys said. “Now, will you tell me the details of how you’re going to pick us up there?”

  “No,” Henry said. “A lot of our people are going to have to make plans as they go along. Also, if you want to start now, we haven’t time. I still need to get a number of the Soldiers out of the city ahead of us. They’re still here because they weren’t expecting to go until tomorrow. But I can start them moving in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, casually. Or even shortly after you’ve left with Toni for the Symphonie. Dahno and I will be going in separate directions, to rendezvous with the rest of you later. Let Toni tell you what to do. She knows the plan.”

  “All right,” Bleys said. He looked at Toni, and she smiled at him. Strangely, for the first time since the lighting had gone out in the hallway, he had a sense of safety, with her here. He smiled back. A warmth flowed between them.

  Chapter 33

  “If this is your first visit to the Symphonie des Flambeaux—” Bleys read to himself with some difficulty from his copy of the brochure that had been handed to both him and Toni as they came into the auditorium to find their seats for the performance.

  It might be the dimness of the place, but for some reason he seemed to have to strain to keep the letters of the words in focus. The small threat of a headache was still with him.