“I’m looking. What do you see, Ruby?”
“You—you and Prince—want to control the internal flames that run worlds against the night. There, the fire has broken out. It’s scarred this world, this city, the way Prince scarred you.”
“To bear such a scar,” Prince (Lorq felt his jaw stiffen; muscles bunched at temple and forehead) said slowly, “you may have to be greater than I.”
“To bear it I have to hate you.”
Prince smiled.
The Mouse, Lorq saw from the corner of his eye, had backed against the doorjamb, both hands behind him. Slack lips had fallen from white teeth; white encircled both pupils.
“Hate is a habit. We have hated each other a long time, Lorq. I think I’ll finish it now.” Prince’s fingers flexed. “Do you remember how it started?”
“On Sao Orini? I remember you were as spoiled and vicious then as you—”
“Us?” Prince’s eyebrows arched again. “Vicious? Ah, but you were blatantly cruel. And I’ve never forgiven you for it.”
“For making fun of your hand—”
“Did you? Odd, I don’t remember. Insults of that nature, as you know, I rarely forget. But no. I’m talking about that barbaric exhibition you took us to in the jungle. Beasts; and we couldn’t even see the ones in the pit. All of them, hanging over the edge, sweating, shouting, drunk, and … bestial. And Aaron was one of them. I remember him to this day, his forehead glistening, his hair straggling, face contorted in a grisly shout, shaking his fist.” Prince closed his velvet fingers. “Yes, his fist. That was the first time I saw my father like that. It terrified me. We’ve seen him like that many times since, haven’t we, Ruby?” He glanced at his sister. “There was the De Targo merger when he came out of the boardroom that evening … or the Anti-Flamina scandal seven years ago … Aaron is a charming, cultured, and utterly vicious man. You were the first person to show me that viciousness naked in his face. I could never forgive you for that, Lorq. This scheme of yours, whatever it is, with this ridiculous sun: I have to stop it. I have to stop the Von Ray madness.” Prince stepped forward. “If the Pleiades Federation crashes when you crash, it is only so that Draco live—”
Sebastian rushed him.
It came that suddenly, surprised all equally.
Prince dropped to one knee. His hand fell on the quartz lumps; they shattered with blue fire. As Sebastian struck at him, Prince whipped one of the fragments through the air: thwik. It sank in the cyborg stud’s hairy arm. Sebastian roared, staggered backward. Prince’s hand swept again over the bright, broken crystals.
… thwik, thwik, and thwik.
Blood dribbled from two spots on Sebastian’s stomach, one on his thigh. Lynceos lunged from the pool edge. “Hey, you can’t—”
“—yes he can!” Idas grappled his brother; white fingers tried and failed to tear the black bar from his chest. Sebastian fell.
Thwik …
Tyÿ shrieked and dropped to his side, grabbing at his bleeding face and rocking above him.
… thwik, thwik.
He arched his back, gasping. The wounds on his thigh and cheek, and two on his chest flickered.
Prince stood. “Now, I’m going to kill you!” He stepped over Sebastian’s feet as the stud’s heels gouged the carpet. “Does that answer your question?”
It came up from somewhere deep below Lorq’s gut, moored among yesterdays. Bliss made his awareness of its shape and outline precise and luminous. Something inside him shook. From the hammock of his pelvis it clawed into his belly, vaulted his chest and wove wildly, erupted from his face. Lorq bellowed. In the sharp peripheral awareness of the drug, he saw the Mouse’s syrynx where it had been left on the stage. He snatched it up—
“No, Captain!”
as Prince lunged. Lorq ducked with the instrument against his chest. He twisted the intensity knob.
The edge of Prince’s hand shattered the doorjamb (where a moment before the Mouse had leaned). Splinters split four and five feet up the shaft.
“Captain, that’s my …!”
The Mouse leaped, and Lorq struck him with his flat hand. The Mouse staggered backward and fell in the sand-pool.
Lorq dodged sideways and whirled to face the door as Prince, still smiling, stepped away.
Then Lorq struck the tuning haft.
A flash.
It was reflection from Prince’s vest; the beam was tight. Prince flung his hand up to his eyes. Then he shook his head, blinking.
Lorq struck the syrynx again.
Prince clutched his eyes, stepped back, and screeched.
Lorq’s fingers tore at the sound-projection strings. Though the beam was directional, the echo roared about the room, drowning the scream. Lorq’s head jarred under the sound. But he beat the sounding board again. And again. With each sweep of his hand, Prince reeled back. He tripped on Sebastian’s feet, but did not fall. And again. Lorq’s own head ached. That part of his mind still aloof from the rage thought: his middle ear must have ruptured … Then the rage climbed higher in his brain. There was no part of him separate from it.
And again.
Prince’s arms flailed about his head. His ungloved hand struck one of the suspended shelves. A statuette fell.
Furious, Lorq smashed at the olfactory plate.
An acrid stench burned his own nostrils, seared the roof of his nasal cavity so that his eyes teared.
Prince screamed, staggered. His gloved fist hit the plate glass. The wall cracked from floor to ceiling.
With blurred and burning eyes, Lorq stalked him.
Now Prince struck both fists against the glass. Glass exploded. Fragments rang on the floor and the rock.
“No!” from Ruby. Her hands were over her face.
Prince lurched outside.
Heat slapped at Lorq’s face. But he followed.
Prince wove and stumbled down toward the glow of Gold. Lorq crab-walked the jagged slope.
And struck.
Light whipped Prince. He must have regained some of his vision, because he clawed at his eyes again. He went down on one knee.
Lorq staggered. His shoulder scraped hot rock. He was already slicked with sweat. It trickled his forehead, banked in his eyebrows, poured through at the scar. He took six steps. With each he struck light more vivid than noon, sound louder than the lava’s roar, odor sharper than the sulfur fumes that rasped his throat. His rage was real and red and brighter than Gold. “Vermin … Devil … Dirt!”
Prince fell just as Lorq reached him. His bare hand leaped about the scalding stone. His head came up. His arms and face had been cut by falling glass. His mouth opened and closed like that of a fish. His blind eyes blinked and wrinkled and opened again.
Lorq swung his foot back, smashed at the gasping face …
And it was spent.
Lorq sucked hot gas. His eyes raged with heat. He turned, arms slipping against his sides. The ground tilted suddenly. The black crust opened and heat struck him back. Lorq staggered up between the pitted crags. The lights of Taafite quivered behind shaking veils. He shook his head. His thoughts reeled about the burning cage of bone. He was coughing; the sound was a distant bellow. And he had dropped the syrynx …
… she cleared between the jagged edges.
Cool touched his face, seeped into his lungs. Lorq pulled himself erect. She stared at him. Ruby’s lips fluttered before no word. Lorq stepped toward her.
She raised her hand (he thought she was going to strike him. And he did not care) to touch his corded neck.
Her throat quivered.
Lorq looked over her face, her hair, twisted about a silver comb. In the flicker of Gold her skin was the color of a velvet nut-hull. Her eyes were kohled wide over prominent cheekbones. But her magnificence was in the slight tilt of her chin, the expression on her copper mouth, caught between a terrifying smile and resignation to something ineffably sad; in the curve of her fingers against his neck.
Her face loomed against his. Warm lips st
ruck his own, became moist. On the back of his arm, still the warmth of her fingers, the cool of her ring. Her hand slid.
Then, behind them, Prince screamed.
Ruby jerked away, snarling. Her nails raked his shoulder. She fled past him down the rock.
Lorq did not even watch her. Exhaustion held him in the flow. He stalked through the fragments of glass. He glared about at the crew. “Come on, God damn it! Get out of here!”
Beneath the knotted cable of flesh, the muscles rode like chains. Behind loose vest laces, at each breath red hair jerked up and down with his gleaming belly.
“Go on now!”
“Captain, what happened to my—?”
But Lorq had started toward the door.
The Mouse looked wildly from the captain to flaming Gold. He dashed across the room and ducked out the broken glass.
Out in the garden, Lorq was about to close the gate when the Mouse slipped through behind the twins, syrynx clutched under one arm, sack under the other.
“Back to the Roc,” Lorq was saying. “We get off this world!”
Tyÿ supported the injured pet on one shoulder and Sebastian against the other. Katin tried to help her, but Sebastian was too short for Katin really to assist the weak, glittering stud. At last Katin stuck his hands under his belt.
Mist twisted beneath the streetlights as they hurried along the cobbles through the City of Dreadful Night.
“Page of Cups.”
“Queen of Cups.”
“The Chariot. My trick is. Nine of Wands.”
“Knight of Wands.”
“Ace of Wands. The trick to the dummy-hand goes.”
Take-off had gone smoothly. Now Lorq and Idas flew the ship; the rest of the crew sat around the commons.
From the ramp Katin watched Tyÿ and Sebastian play a two-handed game of cards. “Parsifal—the pitied fool—having forsaken the Minor Arcana, must work his way through the remaining twenty-one cards of the Major. He is shown at the edge of a cliff. A white cat tears the seat of his pants. One is unable to tell if he will fall or fly away. But later in the series, we have an indication in the card called the Hermit: an old man with a staff and a lantern, on that same cliff, looks sadly down the rocks—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” the Mouse asked. He kept running his finger over a scar on the polished rosewood. “Don’t tell me. Those damned Tarot cards—”
“I’m talking about quests, Mouse. I’m beginning to think my novel might be some sort of quest story.” He raised his recorder again. “Consider the archetype of the Grail. Oddly unsettling that no writer who has attacked the Grail legend in its naked entirety has lived to complete the work. Malory, Tennyson, and Wagner, responsible for the most popular versions, distorted the basic material so greatly that the mythical structure of their versions is either unrecognizable or useless—perhaps the reason they escaped the jinx. But all true Grail tellings, Chretien de Troyes’ Conte del Graal in the twelfth century, Robert de Boron’s Grail cycle in the thirteenth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, or Spenser’s Faerie Queene in the sixteenth, were all incomplete at their authors’ death. In the late nineteenth century I believe an American, Richard Hovey, began a cycle of eleven Grail plays and died before number five was finished. Similarly, Lewis Carroll’s friend George MacDonald left incomplete his Origins of the Legend of the Holy Grail. The same with Charles Williams’ cycle of poems Taliesin Through Logres. And a century later—”
“Will you shut up! I swear, Katin, if I did all the brain-hacking you did, I’d go nuts!”
Katin sighed, and flipped off his recorder. “Ah, Mouse, I’d go nuts if I did as little as you.”
The Mouse put the instrument back in his sack, crossed his arms on the top, and leaned his chin on the back of his hands.
“Oh, come on, Mouse. See, I’ve stopped babbling. Don’t be glum. What are you so down about?”
“My syrynx …”
“So you got a scratch on it. But you’ve been over it a dozen times, and you said it won’t hurt the way it plays.”
“Not the instrument.” The Mouse’s forehead wrinkled. “What the captain did with …” He shook his head at the memory.
“Oh.”
“And not even that.” The Mouse sat up.
“What then?”
Again the Mouse shook his head. “When I ran out through the cracked glass to get it …”
Katin nodded.
“The heat was incredible out there. Three steps and I didn’t think I was going to make it. Then I saw where Captain had dropped it, halfway down the slope. So I squinched my eyes and kept going. I thought my foot would burn off, and I must have got halfway there hopping. Anyway, when I got it, I picked it up, and … I saw them.”
“Prince and Ruby?”
“She was trying to drag him back up the rocks. She stopped when she saw me. And I was scared.” He looked up from his hands. His fingers were clenched. Nails cut the dark palms. “I turned the syrynx on her, light, sound, and smell all at once—hard! Captain doesn’t know how to make a syrynx do what he wants. I do. She was blind, Katin. And I probably busted both her eardrums. The laser was on such a tight beam her hair caught fire, then her dress—”
“Oh, Mouse …”
“I was scared, Katin! After all that with Captain and them. But, Katin …” The whisper snagged on all sorts of junk in the Mouse’s throat. “It’s no good to be that scared …”
“Queen of Swords.”
“King of Swords.”
“The Lovers. My trick is. Ace of Swords—”
“Tyÿ, come in and relieve Idas for a while.” Von Ray’s voice came through the loudspeaker.
“Yes, sir. Three of Swords from the dummy comes. The Empress from me. My trick is.” She closed the cards and left the table for her projection chamber.
Sebastian stretched. “Hey, Mouse?”
chapter seven
“WHAT?”
Sebastian walked across the blue rug, kneading his forearm. The ship’s medico-unit had fixed his broken elbow in forty-five seconds, having taken somewhat less time over the smaller, brighter wounds. (It had blinked a few odd-colored lights when the dark thing with a collapsed lung and three torn rib cartilages was presented to it. But Tyÿ had fiddled with the programming till the unit hummed efficiently over the beast.) The creature waddled now behind its master, ominous and happy. “Mouse, why you not the ship’s med your throat let fix?” He swung his arm. “It a good job would do.”
“Can’t. Couple of times they tried when I was a kid. Back when I got my plugs they gave it a go.” The Mouse shrugged.
Sebastian frowned. “Not very serious now it sounds.”
“It isn’t,” the Mouse said. “It doesn’t bother me. They just can’t fix it. Something about neurological con-something-or-other.”
“What that is?”
The Mouse turned up his palms and looked blank.
“Neurological congruency,” Katin said. “Your unattached vocal cords must be a neurologically congruent birth defect.”
“Yeah, that’s what they said.”
“Two types of birth defects,” Katin explained. “In both, some part of the body, internal or external, is deformed, atrophied, or just put together wrong.”
“My vocal cords are all there.”
“But at the base of the brain there’s a small nerve cluster which, if you see it in cross section, looks more or less like a template of a human being. If this template is complete, then the brain has the nervous equipment to handle a complete body. Very rarely the template contains the same deformity as the body, as in the Mouse’s case. Even if the physical difficulty is corrected, there are no nerve connections within the brain to manipulate the physically corrected part.”
“That must be what’s wrong with Prince’s arm,” the Mouse said. “If it had been torn off in an accident or something, they could graft a new one on, connect up the veins and nerves and everything and have it just like new.” br />
“Oh,” Sebastian said.
Lynceos came down the ramp. White fingers massaged the ivory clubs of his wrists. “Captain’s really doing some fancy flying—”
Idas came to the rim of the pool. “This star he’s going to, where is—?”
“—its coordinates put it at the tip of the inner arm—”
“—in the Outer Colonies then—”
“—beyond even the Far Out Colonies.”
“That a lot of flying is,” Sebastian said. “And Captain all the way himself will fly.”
“The captain has a lot of things to think about,” Katin suggested.
The Mouse slipped his strap over his shoulder. “A lot of things he doesn’t want to think about too. Hey, Katin, how about that game of chess?”
“Spot you a rook,” Katin said. “Let’s keep it fair.”
They settled to the gaming board.
Three games later Von Ray’s voice came through the commons. “Everyone report to his projection chamber. There’s some tricky crosscurrents coming up.”
The Mouse and Katin pushed up from their bubble chairs. Katin loped toward the little door behind the serpentine staircase. The Mouse hurried across the rug, up the three steps. The mirrored panel slid into the wall. He stepped over a tool box, a coil of cable, three discarded frozen-coil memory bars—melting, they had stained the plates with salt where the puddle had dried—and sat on the couch. He shook out the cables and plugged them in.
Olga winked solicitously above, around, and beneath him.
Crosscurrents: red and silver sequins flung in handfuls. The captain wielded them against the stream.
“You must have been quite a racer, Captain,” commented Katin. “What kind of yacht did you fly? We had a racing club at school that leased three yachts. I thought of going out for it one term.”
“Shut up and hold your vane steady.”
Here, down the galaxy’s spiral, there were fewer stars. Gravimetric shifts gentled here. Flight at galactic center, with its more condensed flux, yielded a dozen conflicting frequencies to work with. Here, a captain had to pick at the trail wisps of ionic inflections.