Compleat collected sff w.., p.218
COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 218
Everything about her was an illusion, she realized with sudden cold insight that no Cyrillian art could dispel. But it was an illusion so dangerous that the very integrity of the mind could be enchanted by it, the keen edge of reason dulled. And she felt frightened as no possible physical threat could frighten her. When the Amazon discards a woman's gentleness of body and mind she is almost certain to make the discard complete. Juille thought she was not asking too much of an intellectual equal when she expected from him the same cold, unswerving devotion to a principle that was the foundation of her own life. Egide would never have it.
But she knew she had better not see that disarming face of his any more. Not even to solve for herself the perplexing question of his intention last night. Better to let it slide. Better to go now and forget everything that had happened upon the drifting cloud, beneath those burning stars. Now she knew the shifting, unstable ground upon which women walk; she would not tread it again. She sat up.
"Helia," she called through the fog-veiled doorway. "Helia, send for our ship. We're starting back to Ericon—now."
-
Egide sat clasping one knee, leaning his head back on the window frame and looking out over a field of pale flowers that nodded in the rays of tricolored suns. He did not look at Jair. His cloak today was a mantle of licking flame.
"Well?" said Jair, the boom in his voice under close control. No answer. Jair looked down reflectively at his own clasped hands. He tightened them, watching the great muscles writhe along his forearms under the red-heat haze of hair. "Has she recognized you?" he asked.
Egide picked up the glass beside him and spun it thoughtfully. Rainbows flickered across the floor as sunlight struck it. He did not answer for a moment. Then he said in a detached voice, "That. It's a false alarm, Jair."
"A false alarm!" Jair's voice made the glass shiver in Egide's hand. The muscles crawled spectacularly along his arms as his great fists clenched. "She isn't the emperor's daughter?"
Egide flashed him a clear, blue glance, and grinned.
"Never mind," he said. "You don't have to impress me."
There was a certain blankness in Jair's reddish gaze that Egide recognized with an odd, illogical shiver. He said, "Sometimes I forget how good you are at your job, Jair. And sometimes it surprises me—"
"You mean," Jair said, and even in restraint his voice made the glass vibrate, "we've wasted all this time and money—"
"Well, no, I wouldn't call it wasted. I've had a very pleasant time. But we'd better leave today. It wasn't the emperor's daughter."
-
Rain danced from the high curve of the crystal wall and went streaming in long, irregular freshets down the sides of the glass room, veiling Ericon's soft-green hills outside. Within, firelight wavered beneath a great white mantelpiece carved with the mythological loves of logs and goddesses worshiped a long time ago by another race.
The rain and the firelight and the silence of the people in the room should have made it a peaceful hour here under the high glass curve of the walls. But over the mantelpiece was a communicator panel that was like an open window upon death and disaster. Every man in the room leaned forward tensely in his chair, eyes upon the haggard, blood-streaked face that spoke to them hoarsely through the panel.
The voice carried over long-lapsed time and the unfathomable dark distances that stretch between worlds. The man who called was probably dead now; he spoke from another planet that circled far outside the orbit of Ericon.
"Dunnar has just surrendered to the H'vani," he was telling them in a tired, emotionless voice that sounded as if it had been shouting a little while ago, though it was not shouting now. "We hadn't a chance. They came down in one wave after another all around the planet, bombing everything that moved. They landed troops on the night side and kept raining them down all around the world as the dark belt moved on. The day side got the bombing heaviest, beginning in the dawn belt and moving on around with the planet. They had their own men planted everywhere, ready to rise. Smothered our antiaircraft from the ground. Much of it must have been manned by their spies. Some of our interceptor craft were shot down deliberately from below. Watch out for H'vani men planted—"
Behind the speaker a flaming rafter fell into the range of the communicator screen and crashed somewhere near, out of sight. The man glanced back at it, then leaned to the screen and spoke on in a voice of quickened urgency. Above the crackling of the flames, other voices shouted in the background, coming nearer. There was the noise of what might be gunfire, and another sliding crash as more beams fell. The speaker was shouting now, his voice almost drowned out in the rising uproar of Dunnar's destruction.
"The weapon—" he called above the crashing. "No chance for us ... came too fast—We've smuggled out one man ... fast ship ... bringing a model to you. Watch for him. They'll follow—" A blazing beam came down between his face and the screen. Through a thin curtain of fire he mouthed at them some last urgent message of which only a word or two came through. "Weapon ... might save the Galaxy ... give them a blast for Dunnar—" And then the fire blazed up to blot out face and voice alike, and Dunnar's ruined image faded from the screen.
For a moment after it was gone, the warm firelight flickering through the room seemed horrible, a parody of the flames that had engulfed the spokesman in the panel. The crash of burning Dunnar still echoed through the quiet, and the hoarse, despairing voice of the last man. Then the emperor said in a flattened tone,
"I wanted you all to hear it a second time, before we go out to meet the ship."
Juille uncrossed her long bare legs and leaned forward, scowling under the crown of dark-gold braids.
"We're ready for them," she said grimly. "That weapon wasn't quite finished, though."
"That's why they struck when they did," murmured an Amazon officer beside her. "Beautiful timing—beautiful! Almost a split-second attack, between the finish of the weapon and the mounting of it."
There was silence in the room. The opening blow had been struck of a battle that must engulf every world in the Galaxy before it ended. No one spoke for a while, but the air was heavy with unvoiced thoughts and most of them were grim.
The emperor put out a hand to the game set up on a table before him and moved a bead along a curve of colored wire. It was a game of interplanetary warfare, played like chess, though the men moved both vertically and horizontally on wires like an abacus. Firelight glinted on the colored beads carved like ships and worlds.
"You'll lose your master planet unless you bring up the blues," Juille told him absently.
"This is a solitaire game," said the emperor. "Mind your own business."
The rain blew pattering against the glass and the fire crackled softly. Juille's llar came out from beneath her chair, stretching elaborately, yawning to show a curved pink tongue. The crackling of the logs was a whisper of the terrible roaring crackle they had heard across the void from Dunnar's collapsing cities. They would hear it again from other worlds before the holocaust ended that had begun almost before their eyes here. Perhaps they might listen to it in this very room, on the sacred soil of Ericon itself. Other dynasties had crumbled upon Ericon before theirs.
"Why don't they report again on that ship?" the emperor said irritably, flipping a carved bead around a curve with too much force. Juille, seeing its course, automatically opened her mouth to object, and closed it again without saying anything. the llar swung itself up on the emperor's table with soundless ease and put out its webby-fingered paw to move two beads precisely along the notched wire.
"Ah, so you know Thori's Gambit, little friend?" The emperor's tired face creased in a smile as the llar's round-eyed stare met his through the maze of painted wires. He moved a translucent red bead between the two the llar had shifted. "I wish I could be sure that was an accident. How much does a llar really know?"
The little animal put its head down, rolled up its strange, shining eyes and wriggled all over, like a playful kitten. But when the emperor stretched out a hand to stroke it, the llar turned deftly away and flowed down over the table edge onto the floor with a grace that was almost frightening in its boneless ease.
The screen glowed above the fireplace. Everyone looked up, even the llar. An expressionless face announced in expressionless tones:
"Escaping Dunnar ship approaching landing field from space. Three enemy pursuit ships have succeeded in passing the Ericon space guard and still survive."
The emperor got up stiffly. "Come along," he said. "We'll watch."
-
They came out in a window-walled room above the landing field. A fine mist blew in through the openings, sweet with the fragrance of the wet green hills beyond. The clean smell of wet concrete rose from the broad, brown expanse below, where the small figures of attendants dashed about excitedly in preparation for the landing.
One inner wall of the room was a screen upon which they could all see now what had been taking place overhead, above the layers of rain cloud. The emperor sat down without taking his eyes from the screen. Juille crossed her arms on the high back of his chair and watching, too, ringing one spur in a half-unconscious, continuing jingle. Everyone else was silent, standing respectfully back, and the sound of breathing was loud in the quiet.
On the screen they could see how the tiny black ship from Dunnar had cut its rockets and hurled itself headlong into the gravitational embrace of Ericon, swinging around the planet to subdue the speed it had not dared slacken in space. Behind it, still in suicidal pursuit, the three H'vani ships flamed on. They had escaped the space guard only because of their smallness and mobility, which meant that the range of their weapons was too limited to do much damage at a distance. But they were cutting down the space between them and their quarry, and the race was close.
"But they'll have to turn back now," breathed Juille, gripping the chair-back. "They won't dare ... look, there go our interceptors."
The screen divided itself in half with an oddly amoebalike motion, one section showing the swift rise of Ericon's interceptors while the other mirrored the orbit of the newcomer as it swung around the Control Planet still at dangerous speed. It was curious to think of the plunge into circumscribed space time which that ship was just now making as it emerged from deep space where neither time nor distance have real meaning. The fugitive had flashed through morning and noon and night, and come around the world into dawn again, and so into the misty forenoon above the watchers.
Now they saw it put out wings upon the thin upper air, like a diver suddenly stretching out his arms, and come coasting down upon their sustaining surfaces in a great sweeping spiral above the field.
"There goes one of 'em," the emperor said in a satisfied voice. Juille glanced back at the upper screen and saw one of the pursuers from space twisting downward, its black sides beginning to glow already from the friction of that thin high air. It dropped incandescently out of the picture, which was following the other two ships in their headlong flight. Their own sheer speed gave them an advantage. They were drawing away from the interceptors, taking full and suicidal advantage of the fact that upon Ericon immutable law forbids any aircraft to fly at will over the surface of the sacred planet.
"They won't dare—" Juille told herself under her breath, leaning forward. Behind her a rustle and an indrawn breath all through the room spoke the same thought. For the enemy ships, winged now and swinging down through the heavier air in pursuit of their escaping prey, were being driven farther and farther off the prescribed course beyond which all air traffic is forbidden.
The interceptor ships were sheering away. Juille could picture the frantic indecision of their commanders, torn between the necessity to destroy the invaders and the still more urgent necessity not to transgress an immemorial law laid down by powers even higher than the Galactic emperor's.
In the lower half of the screen, the single-winged ship had leveled off for a landing. Someone outside shouted, and for a moment all eyes turned to the windows and the broad concrete field outside.
Down out of the misty clouds came a duplicate of the shape upon the screen. In silence, the black-winged ship came swooping through the rain, lower and lower over the heads of running attendants. It hovered to a halt and sank down gently upon its own reflection in the wet concrete. And upon the screen behind them, the same scene took place in faithful duplicate.
Indeed, the image was more faithful than the reality, for at this distance the naked eye could see only a swarming of tiny figures around the newly arrived ship. The emperor called, "Closer," and turned back to the screen.
-
The scene below rushed into a close-up upon the wall, swooping toward them with dizzy speed. Now they could watch the opening slide into view upon the ship's side, and the man who ducked out and stepped down upon the brown concrete in the drizzle of misting rain. It beaded his shoulders with moisture in the first few moments. He blinked the rain out of his eyes and looked about calmly, not in the least hurried or alarmed.
The envoy from Dunnar was an astonishing figure, so tall and so very thin that at first glance he looked like a scarecrow shape beside his vessel. But when he turned to face the crowding attendants and the screen, he moved with a grace and sureness that had something unmistakably regal about it. He wore his plain black overall with a remarkable sort of elegance, and his own quiet sureness seemed to throw everyone else on the field out of focus. The muscular attendants looked squat and brutish by contrast with his scarecrow height; the well-dressed officials moving forward to receive him were vulgar beside his overalled simplicity.
He looked up into the featureless clouds where his pursuers and defenders still waged an invisible battle. All around him the crowding men looked up, too, futilely. Only in the control room, where the emperor and his staff sat, did the eyes that followed that lifted gaze see what was happening overhead.
And now, as their gaze went back to the neglected drama above, a horrified fascination seized upon every watcher in the room. Even Juille's unconsciously jingling spur was silent. She felt the sudden clutch of small fingery paws, but she did not glance down as the llar came swarming up her leg to a vantage point upon her shoulder. She felt its tiny, quick breathing against her cheek as it, too, stared.
Not within the memory of any living man had the law of the Ancients been violated which forbade air traffic over Ericon. Obedience to those laws had been rooted as deeply as obedience to the law of gravity. There were violations, of course; tradition said all such violators died instantly.
Juille watched the first such episode in modern times with a catch in her breath and her throat closed from tremendous excitement. She wondered if everyone else in the room felt the same half-guilty anticipation, the impious wonder.
For there was a wide gap now between the enemy ships and the Ericon interceptors. It had been a suicide pursuit anyhow, for the H'vani. They were certainly doomed. And they were taking one last headlong chance in the hope of destroying their quarry before they were themselves destroyed. The interceptors had forced them by now far out of the narrow traffic lane whose invisible boundaries should have been so rigid. For the first time in living memory, ships spread their wings upon the forbidden air of Ericon.
They were swooping down in a long dive now, coming fast through the clouds toward the landing field where the newcomer stood unconcernedly staring up into the mists that hid them.
"They're going to make it—they are!" Juille whispered to herself, gripping the chair-back with aching fingers.
Out on the landing field, crews were manning the antiaircraft guns in frantic haste, sheer incredulity numbing their fingers as they worked. No one had ever quite believed that these guns could be needed. They were meant for defense against ships attacking from directly overhead, in the prescribed landing lane from space. Even that possibility had seemed absurd. But now—
"Get that fool off the field!" the emperor roared suddenly, making everyone jump. "Get him off! They'll be here in a minute! Look at them come!"
Down through the mist the two surviving ships came driving through air that shrieked away from their wings. Men were scattering wildly from the field. Loud-speakers roared at the Dunnarian to take shelter. He stood imperturbably, tall and thin and quiet, looking up into the clouds.
And for a timeless moment a faith rooted millenniums deep in human minds shook terribly as the Ancients were defied—and stayed their hand. No peril to the defenseless envoy on the field—though he carried a secret that might save their race—moved the watchers half so deeply as what they were seeing now. The ships dived on through the screaming air, and behind them clouds boiled furiously in the vortex of their passage.
