Android at Arms

  Even if he and the Emperor shared a common knowledge of the hidden ways, the other was still no thought reader and could not be sure in which direction Andas would head. In fact, their present path was so far away from the ultimate goal of the temple that it might not be suspected. He hoped that the false Andas and those obeying his orders would believe that their quarry would head at the fastest possible speed for the temple. It was there that they would be setting up the most intricate of their traps.

  But the longer they had to do that, the less favorable Andas’s chances became. Yet his tired brain saw no other plan possible.

  He was tired, fatigue weighting him down with a thick smothering—just at a time when he needed to be thinking sharply, his reflexes acute. If they could reach the walled-off place, then he could rest. He said so, and Yolyos answered, his voice a purring murmur through the dark.

  “True, we are not made of metal like robots. And if we are androids, it would seem that we are also heir to the ills of our prototypes.”

  The air in the tower smelled of dust and faintly of animals—as if some of the long-empty rooms had been used as lairs. But they did not explore any of the chambers on the levels they passed, using the limited beams of the torch to bring them into the section just below the surface of the ground outside, where once more Andas’s memory found the door to the other ways.

  He set the fastest pace he could maintain, needing to find refuge where he could rest, drink, perhaps find something to ease his aching stomach. This passage ran straight, with no branching ways, until they came again to one of those very narrow stairs and started to climb. It was short, taking them up past perhaps two floors. Then Andas inserted his fingers in certain slots, having first blown the dust from them, and pulled. They stepped at last into what had been the private chambers of the guard commander in the days of the old north gate.

  The windows still had protective panes, so grimed by years of neglect that one could see them only as a very vague light against the velvet dark. There were sliding inner shutters, and though the runs of these were badly rusted, they beat and hammered until they got the windows covered. Only then did Andas switch the torch on the high beam and look around.

  Against one wall stood the frame of a bed, so massive that it had probably been deemed too much to be moved. Their own footprints patterned the floor, together with the tracks of small creatures that had roamed the deserted barracks at will. There was nothing else.

  “You mentioned water—” Yolyos said.

  “There was a garden.” Andas turned his head to the west wall as if he could see through it. “When we were here last, there was a spring there. There might even be a loquat vine in fruit. They live for years without tending.”

  “I would suggest we test the existence of both—now.”

  But Andas felt a reluctance to leave this shuttered room now that he had gained it. It was as if outside the walls of this one place waited all the menaces he had fled. Only the needs of his body drove him to battle that vague sensation of brooding danger.

  Below the quarters of the commander stretched halls and rooms stripped now of everything that might suggest they had once harbored companies of guards. Passing these, they came out into a space between the barracks and the inner gate—to be assaulted, not by the stale, dusty air of the deserted building, but by a wave of almost overpowering fragrance, where a vine, grown wild and assertive beyond all resistance from its fellows, had run thick cables across the ground, bushes, and intervening trees, throttling them into dead skeletons fit only to support its vicious luxuriance.

  Great white flowers burst in clusters along its stems, almost as if their growth was as explosive as blaster fire. And the ground was deep with rotting layers from past bloomings. Loquat indeed. Andas stared. He had never seen such a wild stand of the vine.

  Beneath the clusters of flowers now in bloom hung the fruit of earlier blooming, smaller than the globes he had known, as if the strength here had gone more to flower than fruit. But it was ripe and ready for eating. They could eat, but however could they batter their way through that netting of leaf and stem to find water? He had no idea in which direction to search, and he doubted if they could get well in without jungle knives to clear a path.

  “Water? I will find it!” Yolyos had been drawing deep lungfuls of the scent, as if the odor, well nigh too powerful for Andas, was as much a restorative for him as the food and drink they sought.

  “That way—” He was so confident as he went that Andas followed him without question.

  The Salariki did not rip and tear at the vines as Andas would have done. Rather he spread and pushed with gentleness, as if he handled something he would not harm, turning many times to hold open a space for his companion to squeeze through. It might be that he disliked the thought of breaking a path more brutally.

  They had lost sight of the barracks, so deep was that growing curtain, when they at last found the spring. Once it had been piped in to feed a pond, but that bowl had long ago been broken by the roots of the vine, so that now the water gathered in a few shallow cups, trickled from one to another, and formed a stream beyond.

  The water was good—how good Andas did not realize until he plunged his hands into one of the depressions again and again, bringing them cupped and dripping to his parched mouth. He had tasted wine from the Emperor’s finest stock in the old days that could not compare with this.

  There was a constant murmur of sound in the garden, the rubbing of vine stem against stem, blown by the night wind, the cries of insects, the gurgle of the water. But he heard also the appreciative slurping of his companion as he shared that boon of a long cool drink.

  Andas had mouthed two of the tart-sweet (more tart than sweet in this wilder stage) loquat globes before he thought of what might be a serious problem for the Salariki. Though his species was omnivorous, their tastes were still strongly carnivorous. But that was not the greatest difficulty—could the alien safely ingest what was Andas’s native food? Anyone traveling from world to world had immunity shots. But that did not mean that they were safe from the effects of another’s food—which to them might be deadly poison.

  He held the bunch of fruit he had snapped free and looked to Yolyos, who in this gloom was only a shadowy bulk still dribbling his fingers in the water.

  “Maybe you cannot eat these.”

  “There is only one way to be sure. And one does not welcome starvation if there is any form of food available,” returned the other calmly. “I am duly warned, Prince.”

  There was a rustling, and Andas guessed the other was culling his own bunch of fruit.

  “It is not bad to taste,” Yolyos announced a moment later, “though that can be no warning of future trouble. Many traps are overlaid with pleasant bait. I would rather have a well-covered xar leg bone in my hand, but one does not miscall what the First Ancestress desires to set before one. So—I eat.”

  But Andas continued, as he fed himself, to listen for any sounds from the other to suggest that this was a deadly trap covered with pleasant bait as far as the Salariki was concerned.

  “It is food, but not too filling,” the alien remarked at last. “However, for the smallest favors a man in need must be thankful. That we have this private food and water is another piece of good fortune to be paid for when one is free to concern oneself again with debts to the First Ancestress.”

  As he tried to get up, Andas found himself dizzy. Perhaps it was the lack of rest, but it seemed to him that some of that vertigo came from the cloying scent of the flowers. Suddenly he wanted to be away from the garden. He said so sharply that he must have surprised Yolyos, for the other asked, “What danger do you feel here, Prince?”

  “The flowers—that smell—I must have fresher air!” He lurched and would have fallen had the other not steadied him. In the end Yolyos had almost to carry him out of that lush growth into the sterile dustiness of the barracks. There Andas drew as deep breaths of relief as those the Salariki had taken wh
en he had fronted the banks of perfumed bloom.

  “You are all right now?” Andas heard the Salariki rather than saw him. Out in the garden, though no moon had yet risen, the masses of white flowers seemed to give light.

  He jerked free from the other’s hold, feeling shame that such a thing as a flower, even in bulk, would weaken him so. “Yes. We can rest above—in the commander’s room.” He wanted to be near the exit he knew while in a place of such ill repute.

  “You go on.” Yolyos was back at the door. “To me that scent is all meat and drink. I shall come when I have had my fill.”

  Andas was too tired, too uneasy to argue. After all, he had warned the other. If Yolyos, knowing the danger, wanted to go and smell flowers in an overgrown garden, then let him.

  Andas climbed to the upper chamber. The bed was but an empty frame. He could have brought some of the vines and grass from the garden to soften the floor. But he wanted no more of the loquats. With a sigh he stretched out on the hard surface and closed his eyes.

  Dark—but with a kernel of red light that drew him, so that without knowing why, save that he must, he went toward that. Then that kernel enlarged suddenly, as if he had covered some length of distance in a single step or by willing it. There was a fire, and the weaving flames were the only illumination of a grim scene.

  That fire burned not on any hearth but in the middle of a room, and not a room of four stout walls and an intact roof either, for the flames, now revealing, now dying so that they hid again, showed a ragged hole larger than any window in the wall facing him across the source of heat and light. When the fire burned higher, he could see that the roof was only partly overhead. There was little protection against a thick, creeping mist, such as Inyanga knew just before the winter came.

  There was one who fed the fire, coming now and then on her hands and knees, pulling pieces of roughly broken wood to push into the flames with caution, as if she drew upon a scant supply. Andas, from his days at Pav, recognized the technique practiced in survival course, though by the looks of her she played no training game but lived life on the thin edge of survival in truth.

  That she was a woman he could tell only from the hair braided tightly to her skull in the many small braids of a desert nomad, for her body was a huddle of coarse garments from which protruded arms near as thin and curveless as the sticks she handled. Her face was as close to a skull as that of any living human being could be. And, save for her eyes, she might well have been one of the dead-alive of the old, old tales.

  As she fed the fire, the light it cast grew so that Andas could see the other occupant of that ruined room. He had been propped up so that he sat facing Andas across the flames. But there was something about the way his limbs were stretched before him under a tattered rug that made the prince think they were useless.

  On the stranger’s lap lay—was it a voice-harp? Andas could not see it clearly in this bad light, and the woman with her fire-feeding kept blocking the view. It did have some resemblance to that elegant and courtly, if very old-fashioned, musical instrument, save that from one end of it projected and then rose a fan of slender rods. Woven back and forth, uniting the rods into a transparent fan, were wires or threads that gleamed and glistened as the light touched them.

  But the man did not seem to be in the act of playing. Rather he held, gripped tightly in one hand, a splinter with a wad of candle fluff on its tip, which burned with such restricted light that the holder had to bring it very close to what was in his other hand in order to see, if he could see at all.

  And what he was trying under such difficulty to see was a book—not a reading tape such as had been in use over untold centuries now, but an ancient book with pages to be manually turned, words printed on them. Andas knew books. They were curiosities and brought high prices from dealers of antiquities. There were at least a dozen in the Triple Towers, among the treasures collected by dilettante emperors in the past. But those were treated as treasures, kept in gem-set boxes.

  The volume that the frowning would-be reader held in this place of dark and ruin had a cover of what appeared to be thin slabs of wood, the pages as thick as plasta sheets, but yellow and tattered on the edges. The prince looked beyond the wonder of that ancient book to the face of the man who held it and—

  Did he cry out, or was that sound only uttered in his mind? At least neither the reader nor the wraith woman who fed the fire were startled or looked up to see him. But that other’s face, thin, with a half-healed scar upon the temple—that face was his own!

  This must be a dream, yet there was a feeling of reality in it such as Andas had never known in any dream he had walked or drifted through before. Could it be true then that men lived many lives, as the priests of the half-forgotten cult of Kaissee taught? And that some men were allowed to see these past lives? That the deeds of one life, good or bad, influenced the next? If so, was he looking now upon a self that had been his in the dim past?

  He could see the lips of that other Andas move, but he heard no sound. And now the reader must have said something to the woman, for she came away from the fire, hunkered down by him, and took that dreary taper into her hand, holding it close to the page of the book, while the man’s right hand, now free, moved to lie on the keyboard of the harp.

  The fingers pressed, one, two, three—Again Andas heard no sound. Rather there was a vibration in the air. Once more he cried out as that vibration closed about him like a net, drawing him toward the fire in spite of his struggles.

  Again the fingers moved, and the vibration tightened. Now he heard sound, too, very faint and far off. But it echoed and rang in his head, a torment that could not be shaken off. The reader looked up from the book, straight at Andas. The prince saw the eyes in the thin, starved face widen. It was plain he himself was seen.

  The woman started, letting fall the candle. And Andas heard another sound, a thin cry of distress.

  But he was free of the net the harp had woven. And he pulled away with all the strength he had, seeking the dark that lay beyond the fire, away from the man wearing his face.

  Andas opened his eyes, afraid for a moment to look about him lest he see the fire and know that he was a prisoner in that place where a man wove a spell with a harp. But the acrid smell of dust and the silence told Andas that he lay safe (if one could term his present situation safe) once again in the commander’s quarters.

  Had it been a dream? He tried to compare it with dreams he had known. But most of those had been very fleeting and lacking in detail after one awoke. This was a different matter, for against all reason, his instinct and his emotions told him that somewhere, or sometime, the scene he had just witnessed had been real. Perhaps his fatigue, his exposure to thirst, hunger, and the strong scent of the flowers had unlocked some unknown portion of memory and he had spied upon his own far past. But then—

  Andas sat up, drawing a deep breath of wonder and then of relief. If he could believe that, if he had, as the priests of Kaisee taught, remembered another life—that was proof he was no android!

  By some experiment he could have been imprinted with all the memories of a man he had been made to resemble. But he could see no possible way he could also have been made aware in deep unconscious parts of the mind of events from the other man’s past life. If he could only believe in the creed of Kaissee, then his own fears were stilled. Now he could only hope.

  The presence of the book—that certainly meant the scene had been in a very ancient past. Books were treasures never to be used as that stranger had done. And the harp, while in part it was akin to one he himself had been taught to play as one of the graces of his rank, was different. The past—he had seen into the past—

  Was it because he had the key? He had heard many legends concerning that, though privately those of royal blood discounted most of the old stories. Yet there must be an aura of power that clung to a talisman that had been venerated by generations upon generations, so that such objects took on a patina from that worship until i
n themselves they kept shadows of the very forces they represented.

  His hand slid across the breast of his coverall, seeking the shape of the key. But first he touched that other thing he carried—the ring. And he jerked his fingers away as if the fire he had looked upon in his dream had licked them. That—that was a thing of power and one which he had forgotten or he would not have carried it so long. It should be destroyed, though he had no means for doing so. If he hid it somewhere here among the ruins, it would still have a way to draw to it the one to whom it had been sealed. Men might question the power of the key, except when it was put to the use for which it was fashioned. But there was altogether too much proof of the influence of such a ring. He had a duty to see to its destruction. Luckily he could accomplish that also when he took the key to its proper place.

  Andas lay back on the stones, but he was too wide awake to sleep again. Instead, he began to recall detail by detail the dream, and instead of fading as such normally would, it all became more sharply fixed, until he could remember things he had not noted at first—such as the bandage that had shown on the breast of the man when a movement of the stranger’s hand on the harp had pulled aside the clumsily patched tunic he wore. There had been a crusted black-red stain on that bandage.

  So it had been more perhaps than hunger and cold that had set those dark shadows under the stranger’s eyes. He had the look, now that Andas had time to consider it, of a man sore hurt.

  Of the ruined building in which those two had sheltered so poorly, he was not sure. It was certainly not of the Triple Towers he knew. He had seen tapes of warfare, and this dream scene reminded him strongly of such a picture taken in a refugee camp. War could reduce men to such a plight.