“Then we’re off to the star?”
“Nope. Now he wants to go to the Pleiades. We have a couple of weeks’ wait. But don’t ask me what he wants to do there.”
“The Pleiades?” the Mouse asked. “Is that where the nova will be?”
Katin turned up his palms. “I don’t think so. Maybe he thinks it’ll be safer to pass the time in home territory.”
“Wait a minute!” The Mouse swung around to Leo again. “Leo, maybe Captain will give you a lift back to the Pleiades with us.”
“Huh?” Leo’s chin came off his hands.
“Katin, Captain Von Ray wouldn’t mind giving Leo a ride out to the Pleiades, would he?”
Katin tried to look reservedly doubtful. The expression was too complicated and came out blank.
“Leo’s an old friend of mine. From back on Earth. He taught me how to play the syrynx, when I was a kid.”
“Captain’s got a lot on his mind—”
“Yeah, but he wouldn’t care if—”
“But much better than me now he plays,” Leo interjected.
“I bet Captain would do it if I asked him.”
“I no trouble with your captain want to make—”
“We can ask him.” The Mouse tucked his sack behind him. “Come on, Leo. Where is the captain, Katin?”
Katin and Leo exchanged the look of unintroduced adults put in league by youth’s enthusiasms.
“Well? Come on!”
Leo stood up and followed the Mouse and Katin toward the door.
Seven hundred years ago the first colonists on Vorpis carved the Esclaros des Nuages into the mesa rock-rim of Phoenix. Between the moorings for the smaller fog crawlers and the wharfs where the net-riders docked, the stairs descended into the white fog. They were chipped and worn today.
Finding the steps deserted at the Phoenix midday siesta, Lorq strolled down between the quartz-shot walls. Mist lapped the bottom steps; wave on white wave rolled from the horizon, each blued with shadow on the left, gilded with sun on the right, like rampant lambs.
“Hey, Captain!”
Lorq looked back up the steps.
“Hey, Captain, can I talk to you a minute?” The Mouse came crabwise down the stairway. His syrynx sack jogged on his hip. “Katin told me you were going to go to the Pleiades after we leave here. I just ran into a guy I used to know back on Earth, an old friend. Taught me how to play my syrynx.” He shook his sack. “I thought maybe since we were going in that direction we could sort of drop him off home. He was really a good friend of—”
“All right.”
The Mouse cocked his head. “Huh?”
“It’s only five hours to the Pleiades. If he’s at the ship when we leave and stays in your projection chamber, it’s fine with me.”
The Mouse’s head went back the other way; he decided to scratch it. “Oh. Gee. Well.” Then he laughed. “Thanks, Captain!” He turned and ran up the steps. “Hey, Leo!” He took the last ones double. “Katin, Leo! Captain says it’s all right.” And called back, “Thanks again!”
Lorq walked a few steps down.
After a while he sat, shoulder against the rough wall.
He counted waves.
When the number was well into three figures, he stopped.
The polar sun circled the horizon; less gold, more blue.
In the fog before Lorq, figures formed and faded: Aaron Red; Dana; his father. Then … a stocky, bumptious youngster in a new vest, ready for a party; a rangy Australian cynical toward all aspects of pomp and power. Prince killed one of you. I killed the other. Which of us, then, is the greater monster …?
When he saw the net, his hands slid his thighs, stopped on the knots of his knees.
Links clinked on the bottom steps. Then the rider stood up, waist-high in the rolling white. Fog-floats carried the nets up. Quartz caught blue sparks.
Lorq had been leaning against the wall. He raised his head.
The dark-haired rider walked up the steps, webs of metal waving above and behind. Nets struck the walls and rattled. A half dozen steps below him, she pulled off her mist-mask. “Lorq?”
Lorq’s hands unclasped. “How did you find me, Ruby? I knew you would. Tell me how?”
She breathed hard, unused to the weight she wielded. Laces tightened, loosened, tightened between her breasts. “When Prince found that you’d left Triton, he sent tapes to six dozen places that you might have gone. Cyana was only one. Then he left it to me to get the report on which one was received. I was on Chobe’s World; so when you played that tape at the Alkane, I came running.” Nets folded on the steps. “Once I found out you were on Vorpis, in Phoenix … well, it took a lot of work. Believe me, I wouldn’t do it again.” She rested her hand on the rock. Nets rustled.
“I’m taking chances in this round, Ruby. I tried to play the last one through with a computer plotting the moves.” He shook his head. “Now I’m playing by hand, eye, and ear. So far I’ve come out no worse. And it’s moving a lot faster. I’ve always liked speed. That’s perhaps the one thing that makes me the same person I was when we first met.”
“Prince said something very much like that to me, once.” She looked up. “Your face.” Pain flickered in hers. She was close enough to him to touch the scar. Her hand moved, then fell back. “Why didn’t you ever have it …?” She didn’t finish.
“It’s useful. It allows each polished surface in all these brave, new worlds to serve me.”
“What sort of service is that?”
“It reminds me what I’m here for.”
“Lorq—” and exasperation grew in her voice—“what are you doing? What do you, or your family, think they can accomplish?”
“I hope that neither you nor Prince knows yet. I haven’t tried to hide it. But I’m getting my message to you by a rather archaic method. How long do you think it will take a rumor to bridge the space between you and me?” Lorq sat back. “At least three thousand people know what Prince is trying to do. I played them his message this morning. No secrecy anymore, Ruby. There are many places to hide; there is one where I can stand in the light.”
“We know you’re trying to do something that will destroy the Reds. That’s the only thing that you would have put so much time and effort into.”
“I wish I could say you were wrong.” He meshed his fingers. “But you still don’t know what it is.”
“We know it has something to do with a star.”
He nodded.
“Lorq, I want to shout at you, scream—who do you think you are?”
“Who am I to defy Prince, and the beautiful Ruby Red? You are beautiful, Ruby, and I stand before your beauty very much alone, suddenly cursed with a purpose. You and I, Ruby, the worlds we’ve been through haven’t really fit us for meanings. If I survive, then a world, a hundred worlds, a way of life survives. If Prince survives …” He shrugged. “Still, perhaps it is a game. They keep telling us we live in a meaningless society, that there’s no solidity to our lives. Worlds are tottering about us now, and still I only want to play. The one thing I have been prepared to do is play, play hard, hard as I can—and with style.”
“You mystify me, Lorq. Prince is so predictable—” She raised her eyebrows. “That surprises you? Prince and I have grown up together. But you present me with an unknown. At that party, years ago, when you wanted me, was that part of the game too?”
“No—yes … I know I hadn’t learned the rules.”
“And now?”
“I know the way through is to make your own. Ruby, I want what Prince has—no. I want to win what Prince has. Once I have it, I might turn around and throw it away. But I want to gain it. We battle, and the course of how many lives and how many worlds swings? Yes, I do know all that. You said it then: We are special people, if only by power. But if I tried to keep that knowledge forward in my mind, I’d be paralyzed. Here I am, at this moment, in this situation, with all this to do. What I’ve learned, Ruby, is how I can play. Whatever I do—I, th
e person I am and have been made—I have to do it that way to win. Remember that. You’ve done me another favor now. I owe it to you to warn you. It’s why I waited.”
“What is it you want to do that you have to give such an inflated apology for?”
“I don’t know, yet,” Lorq laughed. “It does sound fairly stuffy, doesn’t it. But it’s true.”
She breathed in deeply. Her high forehead wrinkled as the wind pushed her hair forward across her shoulder. Her eyes were in shadow. “I suppose I owe you the same warning.” (He nodded.) “Consider it given.” She stood up from the wall.
“I do.”
“Good.” Then she drew back her arm—flung it forward!
And three hundred square feet of chain webbing swung over her head and rattled down on him.
The links caught on his raised hands and bruised them. He staggered under their weight.
“Ruby …!”
She flung her other arm; another layer fell.
She leaned back, and the nets pulled, striking his ankles so that he slipped.
“No! Let me …”
Through shifting links he saw she was masked again: glittering glass, her eyes; her mouth and nostrils, grilled. All expression was in her slim shoulders, the small muscles suddenly defined. She bent; her stomach creased. The adapter circuits magnified the strength in her arms some five hundred to one. Lorq was wrenched forward down the steps. He fell, caught at the wall. Rock and metal hurt his arms and knees.
What the links gave in strength, they sacrificed in precision of movement. A swell swept the web, but he was able to duck beneath and gain two steps. But Ruby kicked back; he was yanked down four more. He took two on his back, then one on his hip. She was reeling him down. Fog lapped her calves; she backed further into the suffocating mists, stooped till her black mask was at the fog’s surface.
He threw himself away from her, and fell five more steps. Lying on his side, he caught at the links and heaved. Ruby staggered, but he felt another stone edge scrape his shoulder.
Lorq let go—of the nets, of his held breath. Again he tried to duck what fell at him.
But he heard a gasp from Ruby.
He beat links from his face and opened his eyes. Something outside …
It darted, dark and flapping, between the walls.
Ruby flung up an arm to ward it off. And a sheet of netting exploded up from Lorq.
It rose, avoiding the links.
Fifty pounds of metal fell back into the fog. Ruby staggered, disappeared.
Lorq went down more steps. The mist lapped his thighs. The astringent arsenic fog clogged his head. He coughed and clutched rock.
The dark thing flapped about him now. The weight lifted a moment; he scrambled up the stones on his belly. Sucking fresher air, gasping and dizzy, he looked back.
The net hovered above him, grappling with the beast. He pulled himself up another step as the shape flapped free. Links crashed heavy on his leg; pulled from his leg; dragged down the steps; vanished.
Lorq sat up and forced himself to follow the thing’s flight between the stones. It cleared the walls, gyred twice, then returned to Sebastian’s shoulder:
The squat cyborg stud looked down from the wall.
Lorq swayed to his feet, squeezed his eyes closed, shook his head, then lurched up the Esclaros des Nuages.
Sebastian was fastening the steel band about the creature’s flexing claw when Lorq reached him at the head of the steps.
“Again, I—” Lorq took another breath and dropped his hand on Sebastian’s gold-matted shoulder—“you thank.”
They looked from the rocks out where no rider broke the mist.
“You in much danger are.”
“I am.”
Tyÿ came quickly across the wharf to Sebastian’s side. “What it was?” Her eyes, alive like metal, flashed between the men. “I the black gilly saw released!”
“It all right is,” Lorq told her. “Now, anyway. I a run-in with the Queen of Swords just had. But your pet me saved.”
Sebastian took Tyÿ’s hand. As her fingers felt the familiar shapes of his, she calmed.
Sebastian asked, seriously: “It time to go is?”
And Tyÿ: “Your sun to follow?”
“No. Yours.”
Sebastian frowned.
“To the Dim, Dead Sister now we go,” Lorq told them.
Shadow and shadow; shadow and light: the twins were coming across the wharf. You could see the puzzled expression on Lynceos’ face; not on Idas’.
“But …?” Sebastian began. Then Tyÿ’s hand moved in his, and he stopped.
Lorq volunteered no answer to the unfinished question. “The others we get now. I what I waited for have. Yes; time to go it is.”
Katin fell forward to clutch the links. The rattle echoed in the net house.
Leo laughed. “Hey, Mouse. In that last bar your tall friend too much to drink had, I think.”
Katin regained his balance. “I’m not drunk …” He raised his head and looked up the curtained metal. “It’d take twice as much as that to get me drunk.”
“Funny. I am.” The Mouse opened his sack. “Leo, you said you wanted me to play some more. What do you want to see?”
“Anything, Mouse. Anything you like, play.”
Katin shook the nets again. “From star to star, Mouse; imagine, a great web that spreads across the galaxy, as far as man. That’s the matrix in which history happens today. Don’t you see? That’s it. That’s my theory. Each individual is a junction in that net, and the strands between are the cultural, the economic, the psychological threads that hold individual to individual. Any historical event is like a ripple in the net.” He rattled the links again. “It passes over and through the web, stretching or shrinking those cultural bonds that involve each man with each man. If the event is catastrophic enough, the bonds break. The net is torn awhile. De Eiling and 34-Alvin are only arguing where the ripples start and how fast they travel. But their overall view is the same, you see? I want to catch the throw and scope of this web in my … my novel, Mouse. I want it to spread about the whole web. But I have to find that central subject, the great event which shakes history and makes the links strike and glitter for me. A moon, Mouse—to retire to some beautiful rock, my art perfected, to contemplate the flow and shift of the net. That’s what I want, Mouse. But the subject won’t come!”
The Mouse was sitting on the floor, looking in the bottom of the sack for a control knob that had come off the syrynx. “Why don’t you write about yourself?”
“Oh, that’s a fine idea! Who would read it? You?”
The Mouse found the knob and pushed it back on its stem. “I don’t think I could read anything as long as a novel.”
“But if the subject were, say, the clash between two great families, like Prince’s and the captain’s, wouldn’t you at least want to?”
“How many notes have you made on this book?” The Mouse chanced a tentative light through the hangar.
“Not a tenth as many as I need. Even though it’s doomed as an obsolete museum relique, it will be jeweled—” he swung back on the nets—“crafted—” the links roared; his voice rose—“a meticulous work; perfect!”
“I was born,” the Mouse said. “I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.”
Katin looked at his big, weak fingers against the mail. After a while he said, “Mouse, sometimes you make me want to cry.”
The smell of almonds.
The smell of cumin.
The smell of cardamom.
Falling melodies meshed.
Bitten nails, enlarged knuckles; the backs of Katin’s hands flickered with autumn colors; across the cement floor his shadow danced in the web.
“Hey, there you go,” Leo laughed. “You play, yeah, Mouse! You play!”
And the shadows danced on till voices:
“Hey, are you guys still—”
“—in here? Captain told us to—”
“—said to hunt you up. It’s—”
“—it’s time to get going. Come on—”
“—we’re going!”
chapter six
“THE PAGE OF WANDS.”
“Justice.”
“Judgment. My trick. The Queen of Cups.”
“Ace of Cups.”
“The Star. My trick. The Hermit.”
“With trumps she leads!” Leo laughed. “Death.”
“The Fool. My trick is. Now: the Knight of Coins.”
“Trey of Coins.”
“King of Coins. My trick it is. Five of Swords.”
“The Deuce.”
“The Magus; my trick.”
Katin watched the darkened chess table where Sebastian, Tyÿ, and Leo, after the hour of reminiscence, played three-handed Tarot-whist.
He did not know the game well; but they did not know this, and he ruminated that they had not asked him to play. He had observed the game for fifteen minutes over Sebastian’s shoulder (the dark thing huddled by his foot), while hairy hands dealt and fanned the cards. From his small knowledge Katin tried to construct a cutting brilliance to toss into the play.
They played so fast …
He gave up.
But as he walked to where the Mouse and Idas sat on the ramp with their feet hanging over the pool, he smiled. In his pocket he thumbed the pips on the end of his recorder, wording another note.
Idas was saying: “Hey, Mouse, what if I were to turn this knob …?”
“Watch it!” The Mouse pushed Idas’ black hand from the syrynx. “You’ll blind everybody in the room!”
Idas frowned. “The one I had, back when I fooled around with it, didn’t have—” His voice trailed, waiting for an absent completion.
The Mouse’s fingers slipped from wood to steel to plastic. He brushed the strings and snagged unamplified notes. “You can really hurt somebody if you don’t use this thing properly. It’s highly directional, and the amount of light and sound you can get out of it could detach somebody’s retina or rupture an eardrum. To get opacity in the hologram images, you know, this thing uses a laser.”
Idas shook his head. “I never played around with one long enough to find how it worked inside all the—”