The Altar at Asconel (6 page)

I
T SEEMED
that a slow eternity passed before they again heard a bang on the outer door. Vix leapt to his feet.

“That
must
be the girl being brought!” he declared. “And we
still
haven’t heard from Tiorin!”

“I don’t think so,” Spartak countered, and now voiced the thought which had occurred to him earlier: that the port authorities would certainly advise them of the girl’s arrival by communicator. He went to open the lock, and found Rochard had returned.

“I wouldn’t have been so long,” the nervous man exclaimed, “but I thought it safer to try and reach you by communicator rather than come back. Only once you’re under Imperial requisition even the palms I can normally grease seem to be put back in their pockets.…To the point, since I did have to come here again: your brother is on his way, and if you can delay your departure one more hour he’ll join you. Uh—I can’t help wondering,” he finished in a fawning tone, “whether I may not have done you too some small service.…?”

Spartak had been isolated in the environment of his order on Annanworld for so long that at first he did not get the point of this delicate probe for a gratuity. When he did, he found he was ignorant of the current purchasing power of Imperial money. He fumbled a twenty-circle piece from
his pouch, and that seemed to satisfy Rochard; at any rate, he gave a mechanical smile and scampered down the ladder again.

“I wonder who he is,” Spartak murmured to Vix when he had relayed Rochard’s news.

“Him?” Vix shrugged. “He’s of a type which I’ve seen spring up on a dozen worlds—carrion worms infesting the gangrened body of the old Empire. Probably he’s regretting this instant that we’re not doing anything which would entitle him to a reward if he informed on us to the port authorities. That’s how people like him make a living: buying and selling information for use in blackmail, law evasion, and petty crime in general.”

“I thought he was a frightened fool when I first saw him,” Spartak admitted. “But he must be pretty astute.”

“Astute? Him? He didn’t even try to find out if we were from Bucyon, like the assassin he told us about who came after Tiorin. He might have sold out his best employer and seen his throat cut without reward to himself.”

Spartak was briefly silent. Then he mentioned his un-familiarity with the purchasing power of money nowadays, and added ruefully, “I think I’ve been too long away from real life, Vix!”

“I could have been put away from it permanently, but for quick thinking on your part,” Vix retorted in a gruff tone. “At least we know we need only delay another hour, now. I hope they’re having trouble locating this mutant girl.”

But barely half the hoped-for period had gone by when the communicator barked at them.

“Vix of Asconel, come to the port control building. Your passenger under requisition is here.”

Vix and Spartak exchanged glances that promised determination to resist, and sat tight, their mouths clamped shut on the temptation to answer and comply.

After a second peremptory order, however, there was a noise from below, and Vix jumped up.

“Vineta!” he exclaimed. “The conditioning is on her too, isn’t it?”

Spartak nodded. “Is she trying to get out of the lock?”

“No, it doesn’t sound like it.” Vix went to the door to peer out. “No, she’s coming here!”

The girl’s face was pearled with sweat, and her teeth were chattering. “Vix, you must shut me in the cabin!” she forced out. “Or else I cannot stay against the orders I can hear!”

“Hear?” Vix rapped.

She nodded. “Like a little voice in my own head, whispering all the time.”

“It’s a good idea to lock her in,” Spartak confirmed. “I wish there was some way we could lock all of us in—is there?”

“Not that I know of,” Vix grunted. “Sooner or later, even if we closed everything fast, we’d be driven to operating the emergency escape hatches, which can’t possibly be locked.”

He did as Vineta had asked, and on his return put a question to Spartak. “Little voices inside the head—is that how it feels to you?”

Spartak shook his head. He answered loudly, as another command came over the communicator, trying to drown out the words with his own. “It affects different people different ways, I’m told. It gives me a helpless tightness in the guts, makes my mouth dry and I think eventually it will blur my vision.”

“How long before it gets unbearable?”

“I don’t know. How strong are we?”

But the authorities’ patience was shorter than their endurance. With ten minutes still to go before the promised time of Tiorin’s arrival, there came a thunderous banging on the lock door, entirely different from Rochard’s timid knock.

“Tiorin?” whispered Vix, whose neck was now corded with tension as he struggled against the invisible compulsion to leave the ship and fetch their unwanted passenger.

“I guess it could be,” Spartak replied with difficulty. “I’d better go see. I think I know more about what’s been done to us than you do—I stand a marginally better chance of arguing for a while longer if it’s not Tiorin down there.”

“Go ahead,” Vix consented, and his face twisted with self-contempt at his own frailty.

It was not Tiorin. It was the pudgy woman with gray hair, accompanied by a squad of uniformed guards and the mutant girl—presumably—laid out on a stretcher on the back of the ground car in which they had all ridden over to the ship.

“You there!” she roared at Spartak’s appearance. “If you fight our conditioning much longer, you won’t be in a state to fly space! If that’s how you think you’re going to evade my orders, I tell you straight you won’t get away with it! I’ll condition one of my own pilots and drag you out to jail, and Delcadoré will be the only planet you see for the rest of your lives!”

A cloud of formless terror due to the conditioning enveloped Spartak’s brain. He was unable to speak, Ignoring him, the woman turned to the guards with her.

“Get that girl off the car and put her aboard!”

Slowly, the terror retreated as Spartak called on every trick of self-discipline taught him on Annanworld. He found his voice again, could see clearly as the guards awkwardly sought to get the girl-laden stretcher up the ladder to the lock at which he stood.

A shocking possibility crossed his mind, and everything else, conditioning included, fled from his awareness. He leaned forward on the rail, peering down at the girl. From her face, and the slightness of the body under the blanket in which she was wrapped, he deduced that she was scarcely more than a child—fifteen or sixteen, perhaps.

But that wasn’t what transfixed him. He had assumed her to be unconscious, perhaps injured by the peasants or whoever had tried to stone her to death—the gray-haired woman had mentioned something about that. However, he had seen without a shadow of doubt that her eyes were open.

“What’s wrong with that girl?” he called.

The guards, busy trying to get her up the ladder, didn’t answer. The woman on the car merely scowled.

Behind him in the lock, Vix appeared, clutching his gun but somehow unable to find the trigger, so that his hands wandered absurdly over the stock and barrel, like jointed insects with minds of their own.

“Is she sick, or hurt?” he inquired feverishly.

“I don’t think so,” Spartak rapped.

“Get back!”—from one of the guards manhandling the stretcher up to them. Despite himself, Vix obeyed instantly. Spartak heard him cursing under his breath.

The stretcher grated over the edge of the platform and was slammed flat. Blue eyes in a face which would normally have been ruddy and healthy, but had turned sallow, stared at the sky, not even turning to see into whose care she had been committed.

“Catatone!” Spartak thundered, and rage so great that it overcame the force of the conditioning stormed into his limbs.

“What did you say?” Vix cried.

“She’s under catatone! It’s a paralyzant—they first got it from the poison of the Loudor ichneumon.” He stamped to the guardrail and stared down at the gray-haired woman.

“Correct!” she applauded mockingly.

Vix plucked at his arm. “Isn’t it as well?” he whispered. “After all, to have her—”

Spartak brushed aside the other’s hand. “It’s the cruelest thing in the galaxy!” he blazed. “Because it
only
paralyzes! It doesn’t dull pain! How’d you like to be unable even to moisten your eyes by blinking—or move to relieve a cramped leg—or control your bowels?”

He heard Vix draw his breath in sharply, and from the corner of his eye saw that the redhead was staring with dismay at the girl’s taut body.

“And don’t you know why they did it?” Spartak raged on. “Because there’s so much lying and deceit going on in this once-proud Empire they’re afraid a mind-reader could tell a few unpleasant truths to the people they’re duping—like the man we met earlier, shy of his arm and his leg!”

He saw, as clearly as through a telescope, that his taunt had made the gray-haired woman wince. Without conscious intent, he shot out his arm and seized the energy gun from Vix’s fumbling grasp. Trying desperately to stretch this moment of not-thinking to its utmost, he leveled the weapon and found the trigger.

“Where’s the antidote?” he shouted, “Get me the antidote or I’ll burn you where you sit!”

There was a dreadful silence. Incredulous, the guards turned at the foot of the ladder and stared up at him, shaking with
the effort of keeping the gun sighted on the gray-haired woman, but somehow finding the resources to go on,

“We—we haven’t got it!” the woman quavered.

“Then get it!” Spartak told her. “No, not you—you’re my hostage. Send one of these bullyboys for it. And tell him to run both ways!”

Vix put his hands on the guardrail, clamping them till the knuckles were white. Seeming to draw strength from his brother’s example, he cried, “And tell that man below not to pull any tricks—I saw him move for his sidearm!”

The guard who had tried to get at his gun jerked his hand back from his waist, holding it out at his side.

“Hurry!” Spartak rasped. “Your conditioning is good. I might decide I have to give in—but I’ll burn you first!”

The woman shrieked terrified orders, and the guards broke as one to dash back to the port control building and fetch what was required.

The time that passed now was hardly human-scaled, inside Spartak’s over-strained mind. It was time slow enough to suit the growth of galaxies, the cooling of suns. Yet there was nothing in all of space except a frightened fat woman on a ridiculous little groundcar, trembling as the gun stayed aligned with her head.

Could he endure? His guts were chilled with nausea; his vision was swimming and there were random, insane noises in his ears. The metal of the gun seemed alternately burning hot and freezing cold, and often he had the illusion that—like Vix—he was not gripping the trigger, but fumbling in front of and behind it.

“There he comes!” Vix said. He pointed, but Spartak dared not look away from the sole focus of his attention.

“Let him bring it up,” he breathed. “Put it alongside the girl’s head.”

“Bring what up?” Vix glanced at him in wonder and not a little admiration. “Oh! Not the guard coming back—but Tiorin! I can see his red hair plainly!”

“I don’t care about Tiorin,” Spartak said. A vague puzzlement flashed across his mind: he did care really, didn’t he? Only somehow it was less important than the main purpose, the bringing of the antidote for catatone.…

“Spartak, listen to me,” Vix was saying out of infinite distance. “Spartak, Tiorin is here—he’s come up to the lock and brought the antidote with him. I told the guard to give it to him and here he is and he’s brought it. You can put down the gun and we can leave.”

Spartak’s temporary universe, containing only himself, the gun and its target, crumbled, and utter darkness over-whelmed him.

T
WO BLURRED
faces topped with red hair swam in Spartak’s unfocused vision. He struggled to bring the images into register with one another. The effort made his eyes hurt. He gave up, and only then discovered that there were two faces in reality, not merely in his imagination. One of them belonged to Vix. But the other—

Of course, Tiorin! Memory came flooding back, and he was able to force himself up on his elbows. He was lying on one of the bunks in the upper cabin, and both his brothers were leaning over him with expressions of concern.

“Spartak?” Tiorin said doubtfully. “How do you feel?”

Thoughtfully Spartak took stock of his body and still more of his bruised mind. He said eventually, “Bad. But I’ll survive.”

“By the moons of Argus, it’s a miracle,” Vix declared. “I shall never know till my dying day how you managed to keep that gun on its target. I had something like that in mind, but I couldn’t control my hands under the conditioning.”

“They’re alleged to know a good many things on Annanworld which have been forgotten elsewhere in the galaxy,” Tiorin said. “Where’s that jug of broth your girl brought? Oh, there. Give some of it to Spartak—it’ll help to restore his strength.”

Vix carefully set the spout of the jug to Spartak’s lips, his other arm serving as a prop behind the younger man’s shoulders. Spartak sipped and sipped again; the broth was
hot and spicy, and he thought he detected the faint flavor of some energy concentrate under the masking tastes.

Meantime, he had a chance to look at Tiorin, whom he had not seen since the day of Hodat’s accession to the Warden’s chair.

His second brother had aged noticeably. He would in fact be—Spartak calculated rapidly—forty-one, which in the heyday of galactic civilization had been late youth, not early middle age. But the extreme wealth of the Empire was needed to support freely available geriatric treatment; now, and for the foreseeable future, only those fortunate enough to inhabit secure planets like Annanworld would enjoy the old benefits. He had a passing vision of peasants grubbing on decadent worlds, mating in their teens, the women worn out by childbirth at age thirty. It was not a pleasant idea, and Spartak spoke hastily to distract his mind.

“Tiorin, it’s incredible that we should have located you!”

“Not really.” Even Tiorin’s voice had changed from what Spartak recalled: grown deeper and become colored with a sort of drawl to suggest that he weighed every single word. “I’ve been explaining to Vix how it happened. Right now, he tells me, you’re feeling very annoyed at the pretensions of the rump of the Empire, but it saved my life by still possessing some of the old advantages—an efficient law force, swift communications.… It was no secret that I was second son to the former Warden of Asconel, you see. I’d found it helpful to draw on the small prestige this conferred. And when Bucyon’s assassin arrived, and started asking rather too freely where he could find me, some inspired official grew alarmed. He sent a warning to me, and we laid a trap for the would-be killer; it was from him that I learned about this hellish cult Bucyon had imported, and also of course about the death of our brother Hodat.”

A shadow crossed his prematurely lined face.

“Accordingly, I had it noised about that I’d gone to beg Imperial aid in the deposition of the usurper at the court of Argus.”

“I still don’t see why you didn’t,” Vix muttered.

“You of all people should know,” Tiorin retorted. “Holding what it has is beyond the Empire’s power now—whole
fleets are rebelling and setting up on their own.… What chance would I have had of securing aid except on terms that would be ruinous to Asconel? Do you know what price the old Twenty-Seventh Fleet set for their return to Imperial jurisdiction? You, Spartak?” On receiving headshakes, he concluded, “The free right to sack the planet Norge!”

Spartak, shocked beyond measure, pushed aside the empty jug of broth. “But Norge was one of the last Imperial outposts beyond Delcadoré!”

“Still is. The price was refused. But the point is: the price was set. I’d have had to promise something similar in respect of Asconel, and I wouldn’t have had the heart.” Tiorin scowled. “No, it seemed to me that my only hope was to exploit my inborn capital as Hodat’s legal heir; that’s why I hired agents to inform me of the arrival of any ship from Asconel. I was afraid the most likely occupants of such a ship would be more assassins, out to complete the job I’d once frustrated, but by good luck yours was the first vessel to reach Delcadoré since I learned the news.”

“You’re relying on your appeal to the citizens to make them rise up in support of you against Bucyon?” Spartak suggested.

“So are you, I gather,” Tiorin countered.

Spartak shook his head heavily. He said, “I talked with Korisu, the man Bucyon sent to murder Vix—and of course myself as well if possible. My judgment is that if Bucyon has contrived to turn a once-loyal citizen of Asconel into a fanatic supporter of his regime and his cult, it’s going to take more than simply fomenting a counterrevolution to set our planet free.”

There was a depressed pause. Vix broke it with his habitual intolerance of extended silence. “We’re going to have all the time in the galaxy to work out our plans,” he grunted. “Once you dropped that gun and keeled over, Spartak, the conditioning took hold on me, and I had—
had—
to get to the controls and set our course for this planet Nylock. And we’re well on the way there now.”

“The girl!” Spartak said, and swung his feet to the floor. “Did you give her the antidote?”

“We thought we’d better not,” Tiorin admitted. “Obviously
you knew something about medicine in general and catatone in particular, and I’m afraid I’ve learned little about anything in the years we’ve been apart. I’ve gone on indulging myself.”

“Wise of you, I guess, but…” Spartak stood up, swaying, and had to close his eyes briefly as empathic agony stabbed him at the thought of the torment the mutant girl was undergoing. “Where is she?”

“I told Vineta to make her comfortable in the other cabin,” Vix muttered.

Spartak hesitated. Then he spoke his mind, as his training on Annanworld had accustomed him to do. “Listen, Vix! It’s painfully obvious that you hate the idea of having a mind-reader aboard. I guess you’d rather leave her the way the Empire liked to have her—incapable of speech, so she can’t give away any secrets she picks up. But mutant or not she’s a human being, and sheer chance decreed that she should be gifted with abnormal talents rather than you or I or Tiorin. If she’s survived into her teens, she’s bound to have learned discretion and foresight. She won’t reveal the things you want to keep private.”

“I hope not,” Vix shrugged. But he seemed ashamed of himself, and turned away without further comment.

“Here’s the phial of antidote,” Tiorin said, fumbling in his belt-pouch. “I hope it’s the real stuff, not some fake they palmed off on us to make us leave the planet.”

“We’ll soon find out,” Spartak answered grimly.

Vineta looked up, startled, as he entered the lower cabin, then gave him one of her quick shy smiles. He nodded in response before dropping to his knees alongside the mutant girl and reaching for his medical case.

“She doesn’t move at all!” Vineta exclaimed. “She is alive, isn’t she? But how does she breathe?”

It was an astute question. Not for the first time Spartak found himself suspecting that this self-effacing girl was the exact opposite of Vix: where he talked much and thought rather too little, she probably thought a great deal despite speaking very seldom.

“You haven’t looked under this covering?” he suggested.

Vineta nodded. “She’s clothed in some thick garment—I couldn’t see how it fastened, so I left it.”

Spartak drew the blanket aside. The girl’s body was revealed completely enclosed in a suit that glistened as if wet. A bulging hump showed across her bosom; another made her belly rise as though she were pregnant.

“Yes, I’ve seen that technique before,” he said—more to himself than Vineta. “Turn her head on the side, please. I shall have to put the antidote into the neck arteries; if I take the suit off she’ll suffocate before I save her.”

If Tiorins ghastly suspicion is correct, she’ll die anyway
.…But he drove down that thought and administered the antidote with deft fingers.

Seconds dragged away like hours—and she moved. Spartak realized he had been holding his breath; he exhaled gustily. “Now we must get the suit off, quickly. See, it fastens on the shoulders and at the hips. Open that side.”

With a sucking noise the wet-looking material let go. The skin revealed was pallid and unhealthy, somewhat swollen with accumulated fluids and here and there wrinkled up into ugly white ridges.

“That’s how she breathed—see?” he explained, as the mound on her bosom was exposed, and proved to be a machine in a metal casing. “That drives air in and out and acts as a pacemaker for her heart. And this”—the similar device on her belly—“takes care of bodily wastes, but not very well.”

Now the mutant girl had sufficiently recovered for an expression to come to her face, and at the sight of it Vineta could not stifle an exclamation of horror. It was the worst look of pain Spartak had ever seen.

“Can you do massage?” he demanded, stacking the prosthetic machines anyhow on a handy shelf. “Space knows how long she’s been kept from moving—the return of normal sensation will be pure torture!”

Vineta’s hands flew to the pale stiff limbs and began to rub.

“Thank you.” The words came on breath alone, barely audible. “Thank you. You can stop now. The pain’s gone.”

Spartak sat back, exhausted, and stared at the girl. “Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.” A small tongue slipped out to moisten her lips, which were chapped. “You are Spartak, yes? And you are Vineta?”

Spartak’s eyebrows drew together. So far as he could recall, he hadn’t addressed Vineta by name, nor been addressed, since entering the cabin. He said, “Did you read names from our minds?”

A smile came and went on the mutant girl’s face. She said, a trifle louder as her vocal cords came under control, “Yes. And it feels very good. I have felt so much fear in people who knew what I am, but in your mind I feel—what to call it? Curiosity, I think. And in hers, much kindness. I am so glad to be here.”

“Then you also know what’s going to happen to you?” Spartak suggested.

“Yes. And I see why you ask. Frankly, I don’t care where I go so long as it’s away from—from the past.” The small sharp-featured face clouded.

“I’ll let you rest now,” Spartak said. “Vineta, perhaps you should bring her some of that broth you made for me—it seems to have brought about my recovery from shock very quickly.” A thought struck him, and went unvoiced by deliberate decision as his eyes returned to the mutant girl.

She gave a thin chuckle. “My name’s Eunora,” she said. “You have a clear mind, Spartak—it’s like looking into a deep transparent pool of pure water, and I can see all the way to the rocks at the bottom except in one place. And that’s where you’ve been conditioned to take me to Nylock.”

“I imagine,” Spartak said with difficulty, “that you can make allowances for my brothers. I don’t think they feel as I do about—about people like you.”

“No, I can sense them—just barely.” Eunora shut her eyes and seemed to be listening to distant noises. “They are both full of resentment; the conditioning lies on all their thoughts like dense fog, and one of them can’t help thinking that I’m responsible for the delay in your mission.”

After that, silence. Spartak caught Vineta’s eye and nodded her out of the cabin. Then he went, heavy-hearted, to rejoin his brothers.