Ardor on Aros (17 page)

The parrot, I thought, held the answer. Pope Borgia. What happened to the husband Cesare and the Borgia Pope allied Lucrezia with in marriage, when he wasn’t useful anymore, when a new alliance was more profitable? Cesare knocked him off. Maybe Lucrezia cried and maybe she didn’t. But she married the next man they told her to. In this case it’s worse, even more dangerous, because in this case this lovely doll herself controls the Borgia power—and once she knows and has yours, you are nothing, Hank Ardor. Nothing, except a corpse shortly mourned and soon forgot.

Behind us, the natives were getting mighty restless. “Can we discuss it later?” I asked, and I saw the look in her eyes, and knew I might as well have said “No.” More honorable for me, and just as much an affront to Solah Borgia. I watched the well-separated and over-developed halves of her chest expand as she drew in a great angry breath. I glanced at the watch.
Tought, Solah baby. It’s time. We can’t even parley.

It had been only eight-point-something minutes, but to the audience that was a long time. The only thing that would have kept us from being plastered with tomatoes, had they had any, was her status among them. Slipping….slipping…

I looked at her. “IS IT TIME, SOLAH? IS THE HOUR AT AN END?”

There was panic in her eyes. “Ye—no…”

“ARE YOU SURE?”

Panic, mounting; fear, overwhelming anger, becoming paramount, her nostrils flaring, her lips pale, her face paling, pupils dilating, a little tic in her left jaw—oh lord, she was beautiful, absolutely beautiful! Why is a woman so beautiful to us when she is scared half to death, or in pain or panic—are we so barbaric?

“I DON’T KNOW HE HAS ME GOT TO WIN CAN’T LET HIM—” It was her mind, not her throat, that hurled out those “words.” The broadcast power is seldom used here. She had done so deliberately, on the desert, hoping to call in help. Now—stress. She forgot, and she broadcast. Many others heard her and knew what I knew: she was in a panic. And—

She vanished. Although I couldn’t see it beyond the great throng, I pointed in the direction of the sundial. And—their murmur rose to a cry as they all saw her. She materialized at the sundial just as they turned.

She looked up with those wide panicky eyes and saw: nothing but other eyes, staring at her, seeing her fear, her absolute terror of losing, of being thrust down and back. It was a frozen moment. She, the child caught with its hand in the cookies. The crowd, the shocked, the surprised, the slowly angering mother. For they realized what she was doing, what I’d shown them, what she’d been forced to do by being incompetent to compete. While all eyes were on the platform she meant to check the sundial and appear again almost before she was missed. Now, caught, she neither moved nor vanished. She just stared, as if hypnotized with fear. A frozen moment—but not in time. I glanced at the watch and I raised both arms high and bellowed will all the strength in my lungs and larynx:

“NOW! LISTEN! I ANNOUNCE THE TIME TO YOU WITH SHADOWORLD CHIMES! IT…IS…THE…FIFTH HOUR!”

And as they all stared at me in breathless silence, the amulet on my chest chimed the hour.

In the instant before pandemonium someone yelled, from the sundial: “It is TRUE! The hour BEGINS!”

The girl in the green bra and trunks vanished from the sundial. She did not reappear on the platform, or anywhere else she could be seen; she sent herself to her room in the palace, I suppose. Leaving behind her the screaming thought-concept:

HATE

And I stood there trembling, sweat streaming, staring out at all those faces until I saw a blood hood thrown back and a man raised his hand and shouted:

“Hail the Sorcerer of Brynda!”

It was my caravan friend, Thro Alnaris. His raised hand signaled his success: Dejah and Pro were out of the dungeons. Which, as we later learned, was precisely where her serene witchship had gone, stopping off at her room only long enough to collect a dagger.

She was the Jadiriyah. She had been the Jadiriyah since she was a child. She was undefeated and undefeatable, willful and arrogant. And defeated, but unable to accept defeat.

It began within minutes. As soon as she found the dungeons minus the two on whom she’d have let off the steam of her spite.

The sky went black. I don’t think she controlled the heavens; I think it was illusion. Thunder rolled and crashed and lightning leaped and speared. The wind grew and grew and eventually there was darkness, the darkness of night amid a howling, angry wind that sent dust and litter scurrying about from street to street and signs swinging and clattering. It pulled and pushed and toppled people, until they cleared the streets and battened down to shudder and roll their eyes.

We sat in Lalaikah’s dark, worn-carpeted room: Dejah and Pro Thoris, and Proby and Thro and I—and the parrot, complaining, and the woman who had been a witch. She sat with her eyes closed. She’d sworn that she alone was saving the entire city from the destruction willed by Solah’s rage.

Pro Thoris nudged me. “I’d thin the Jadiriy of Brynda would stop all this,” he muttered.

“Shut up,” I said. Quietly.

“No way to talk to your father-in-law,” he grumbled.

“Hush,” Dejah said. “You aren’t that yet, and he could change his mind!”

I squeezed her to let her know there wasn’t a chance.

Outside, the wind did its absolute damndest to huff and puff and blow the city down. And then the pounding wasn’t that of the loose shutter next door. It was at Lalaikah’s door.

Proby and I flanked the door with drawn swords; Thro opened it. We stared at the two cloak-swathed men who were blown stumbling in, and we did not sheath our bare bodkins. They helped Thro close the and bar the door.

They were Stro Fentris and the Guildmaster of Brynda.

He and I regarded each other for perhaps a minute; a very long one.

Then he swept back his cloak, to show me his sword.

“Take it,” he said.

I sheathed mine without replying, and gazed at that big muscular man in silence. He looked whipped; hangdoggy.

“The girl,” he said. “She’s on a rampage. It’s happened before, but never like this. Now the city knows what it’s been like for me. The girl.” He regarded the rug, then looked at me again.

“Her mother died hating me, and Solah has always hated me. But—she has the power, the jadiriyah power. I haven’t been master of Brynda, or even the Guild. She has.” He nodded at the door. “The street’s full of serpents, now. It’s…unbelievable. You can’t make a child into a woman when you can’t discipline her. When she knows she has all the power, she doesn’t have to grow up. You can’t teach a child control when there’s no way you can discipline her, when she…when she can turn you about and march you into a wall, or vanish and appear behind you and slap you in the back and be gone before you turn. When she can…when she would make her father crow, or fall and be unable to get up.”

He swung away, his face writhing in anguish. The warrior’s cloak swished and flapped, low on his big calves. We said nothing, and after awhile he turned.

“They tried to slay my daughter in her spelling chamber, but she escaped. The mindtravel, of course. She’s barred from our home. And I too. Stro Fentris saved me from being torn apart. I’m deposed. All…because of her…and because of my black, stinking weakness!”

Can you feel sorry for the man who’s had all the power to be had over a city, more than one city?

Yes, of course, when you realize he’s a man who wants to be a man but isn’t; who’s been pretending, all these years; who’s been a self-hating puppet dangling on his daughter’s—his
daughter’s!
—strings.

“What will she do?” I asked.

“Kill you all! Smash this house into the bowels of the world, crush your bodies into jelly, tear the feat bosom off that horrid bitch, hang this crawling creature from the palace battlements! Strange you with your own useless organ, Ardor!”

Solah’s face was a twisted, vicious mask, her hand sup and clawed even as she appeared. She still wore the green bra and trunks, and over it all a varicolored cloak that swept the floor. Her eyes seemed to burn into me, to pierce like the gale outside. Slowly she turned her ring hand, until the source of her power flashed at me. Slowly, with an expression of utter malice in the eyes staring at me, she raised her other hand to cover the ring.

Her father had not turned to face her; he seemed to have frozen. Now his face went from horror to mindless rage. He whirled, his hand whipping across his belly to his hilt. And for once in his life he moved faster than she, and for once in his life he disciplined her.

The sword plunged into her naked belly, widening her navel into a long gash. As quickly he jerked it out again, as a warrior does to release the gush of blood.

Her eyes stared. She clapped her hands over the wound. Blood streamed between her fingers. Er mouth writhed soundlessly.

She disappeared—

—and reappered.

And flickered, there and not-there—and then her knees buckled and she fell forward on her face.

We stood there in silence. Complete silence; the parrot had hushed, and the wind had died with the Guildmaster’s daughter. He turned slowly from her. The sword dripped.

“She…she’s had me—and Brynda—in her thrall for years. Since she was eight years old. Young…and beautiful…and she’s killed us both.”

“Guildmaster,” Stro Fentris said, “No. Come with me, now. We’ll get you out of the city. Itza…Azulthade…”

Shayhara backed from Fentris’ outstretched hand.

“No. You’ll make a good Guildmaster, Stro…Brynda deserves a good Guildmaster, after me.” His eyes swerved to me. “It’s dishonorable,” he said. “Unmanly…but I’m minded to kill you. As if all this were your fault…because you dared defy both her and me.” He closed his eyes. “The Jadiriy of Brynda,” he said. To me.

Proby said, “But—Guildmaster! What will you do?”

“Die,” the Guildmaster said, and he clasped both hands around the pommel of his sword and jerked its point to his sternum and lunged forward. He fell on the floor on his face; the sword that had transpierced his body tented his cloak. He jerked only twice.

We gave him a Guildmaster’s funeral.

The people insisted on the ritual ceremony treatment of Solah’s body.

All that was a long time ago. A long time.

I am Executive Secretary of a New Thing: the Interguild Council. Pretty much my invention. Not the concept, but the actuality and the formal post. I am liaison man among the Guilds of Brynda. At the beginning I set a (secret) goal, which is now about forty percent realized. I set out to break the power of the Warriors’ Guild. Not by headlocking, meeting it with its weapons, but by slow dilution and erosion.

The rising power of the Artisans Guild helps.

We really should subdivide it; what does Pro Thoris’ silversmithing have to do with my three alarm clock manufacturies? (Rigging alarms to water clocks and hourglasses was easy. A sensitive weight takes care of it. The new alarm sundials, thought, took some doing). Too, there are the safety-pin craftsmen—six of whom are my employees, since it was after all my invention. And the ready-made boot and sandal cobblers. And the two “plants” now making (water- or slook-powered) “electric fans.”

Brynda is becoming an industrial state, phasing out the power of the warriors.

Dejah and I are of course cross fertile, and neither my figure or hers is what it was. There are no bottle-babies on Aros.

Aros.

Phantasy world. The clue came from my father-in-law. Kro Kodres’ cryptic message was to
me.

A year after the deaths of the Jadiriyah and her father, when I was growing moneyed and powerful and gaining weight from both my Guilds-liaison job and my manufacturing enterprises, my wife presented me with the first of our three sons.

“I’ll have to buy some gold,” a beaming Pro Thoris said. “To make you a cup in honor of the golden cup of your mind, Big Head.”

I stared at him.

Golden cup: Arone euphemism for the type of mind that sets tings going. And bighead:
sorrfelinas.
I was suddenly aware that I had misunderstood the dying Kro Kodres. He hadn’t said big
bones;
zorveli nas. He’d said
sorrfeli nas
: big
head
. “The golden cup is bighead.” The mind that sets things going (on Aros) is bighead. But capitalize it: Bighead.

Even before I named Pope Borgia “Bighead,” even before I knew Solah (Evelyn Shay, had she been here) was called “Bighead” (for a different reason), long before Pro called me Bighead. Solah: a sort of Arone simulacrum of Evelyn Shay. What she’d like to be, on such a world. Sexy, looking like her ideal woman, Liz Taylor. And powerful. A witch.

The mind that sets things going on Aros, Kro Kodres had been telling me—because he and his words were a part of the whole phantasy—is Bighead. And bighead is Evelyn Shay,
and
Pope Borgia,
and
Hank Ardor.

It hit me a few hours later, and the clouds of mystery began to dissipate as puzzle-pieces locked up. Sure, Aros is full of surprises and inconsistencies. It’s a mental creation.
The creation of three minds.

First, Evelyn’s. She began it, postulating a Burroughs-type world. Realizing the place of a woman in a semibarbarian culture, she gave herself Power: she saw herself as a sorceress. (Childish as only an American woman can be; arrogant as befits a woman who is both a physics-Ph.D. candidate and—a jadiriyah.)

Why “Aros?” Sounds like Eros, that’s all. Why mirror-images? I’m not sure. Maybe whim. Maybe because that’s what you
see,
and Evelyn was seeing herself here.

Kro Kodres was out there because I expected to find someone, and because I needed to know the language. Maybe Evelyn “put” him there, seeing herself as a noble Florence Nightingale with the wounded man—from whom she could learn the language. Maybe if she’d come here, he’d have been a prince. He wasn’t for me because I just can’t believe that sort of luck. (He had been, as it turned out, in the process of carrying off Solah. Which is why he had her ring.)

Telepathy: to facilitate learning the language. (Probably wouldn’t work, but all those books say so, and Evelyn accepted it). It is still little used. Maybe because I don’t think much about it.

The lighter gravity is standard Burroughs…but consider its effect on an Earthly woman’s body. Up float breasts and innards; out goes the bosom and in goes the tummy. Evenly Shay liked that concept, obviously.

Kro Kodres also provided a pleasantly mysteriously cryptic phrase—which, rather than having to do with Arone affairs of state, was the solution to Aros itself. His message was to and for me.

He probably died, poor bastich, because I
thought
he would.

The reason for Evelyn/Solah’s presence out there on the desert: Maybe that was my idea. Damsel in distress, carried off by Kro Kodres. But it happened that said damsel was
Evelyn’s
mental creation, not mind. So there I stood with egg on my face when she vanished. I suppose I arrived too late to prevent her Vardor rape because Evelyn and I both agreed that things were always too easy for hero
and
heroine on the barbar world. The girls are always grabbed, but never molested.

Part of Aros was created by Evelyn. Part of it I created, all unknowingly, and pretty much as I went along. And part, of course, is Pope Borgia’s.

Expecting to find a jungle, he did. There aren’t any snakes or predators or cockatoos because he didn’t want any. And all the fruits were ripe, remember: for him. The men were Amazon-basin types because that’s what
belonged
in a jungle, according to the gospel of Pope Borgia/Bighead. Still, he’s a parrot, and he liked Dr. Blakey. So they wore lab smocks. And wouldn’t it be nice if parrots ruled people, and told
them
what to say, and he was boss! So he was.

The jungle vanished behind us because he was concentrating on something else. It reappeared when he looked back, because he knew it was there. (
Cogito, ergo est.
) He found a caravan because I described one and hoped to find one, and he expected to. There was a road through the jungle because I assumed there would be.

There aren’t any bees here because I hate honey. There
are
flies because, fool that I am, I
expected
them. Which is why Brynda looks like a city out of Flash Gordon, and a girl named Dejah Thoris (unimaginative me!) looks like Sophia Loren. And Frood/Freud has already lived, because I always thought Man might have grown up if Freud and Darwin and Havelock Ellis had lived before Napoleon and Watts and Marco Polo. And the schlemiel who invented gunpowder.

Each item here was born, created, as we thought of it, expected it. And instantly it had always been with history and a full explanation for its existence. (Why is Dejah’s name Dejah? Obviously there could be no sensible explanation. So Pro remembered that her mother named her. And her mother’s dead. And if I thought, from now till doomsday, her name to be Kate or Jodie or something, it would still be Dejah. There’s no changing what’s done. I’ve tried, with the flies, and with some mistakes I’ve made.)

Lalaikah. Well, I couldn’t dope it out. I needed help. So: here was wise-grandmother-image Lalaikah. She said “No one should call one names but oneself, eh?” And that was the key to
her.
She was a creation of my subconscious. A message from me to me, because I
knew,
subconsciously, but my conscious mind needed help. So: Lalaikah. Strange, or perhaps not so strange: she died the day after I at last worked out the solution to the mystery of Aros.

There isn’t and won’t be a nation here with aircraft or bandaids—because I can’t sincerely believe that there is.

How did I get here via a machine whose inventor called it a “temporal dissociator?” In the first place I don’t know. But—part of the energy was Dr. Blakey’s harnessing the electrical output of his own brain waves, as he himself said. And
my
brain waves, perhaps, and Evelyn’s, and Pope Borgia’s too. Also “within the bell,” Blakey said, “‘reality’ as we know it does not exist.” He was right, strangely, without knowing it. Aros is—unreal.