The Cache (23 page)

“No!” shouted Rastignac. “Never! Nothing would make me help a bloodsucker!”

“Ah, Jean-Jacques, but you do not know what I know. Something I would never have told you if I did not have to tell in order to get free!”

“Shut up, Lusine! You cannot influence me!”

“But I can. I have a secret! A secret that will enable you to escape from this planet, to fly to the stars!”

Rastignac almost dropped his sword. But, before he could run to the lip of the well, Mapfarity had leaned his huge head over the mouth and rumbled something to the prisoner below.

Rastignac could not hear what Lusine answered, but he did not have to. The giant Ssassaror straightened up, and he bellowed, “She says that an Earthship has landed in the sea! And the pilot of the ship is in the hands of the Amphibians!”

Surprisingly, Mapfarity began laughing. Finally, choking, the sparks crackling from the tips of his ears, he said, “You can leave her in the well. Her news is no news; I know her so-called secret. But I didn’t say anything to you because I didn’t think that now was the time.”

As the meaning of the words seeped into Rastignac’s consciousness, he made a sudden violent movement—and began to tear the Skin from his body!

VI

Rastignac ran down the steps, out into the courtyard. He seized the Jail-breaker’s arm and demanded the key to the grilles. Dazed, the white-faced official meekly and silently handed it to him. Without his Skin, Rastignac was no longer fearfully inhibited. If you were forceful enough and did not behave according to the normal pattern, you could get just about anything you wanted. The average Man or Ssassaror did not know how to react to his violence. By the time they had recovered from their confusion, he could be miles away.

Such a thought flashed through his head as he ran towards the prison wells. At the same time he heard the horn-blasts of the king’s mucketeers and knew that he shortly would have a different type of Man to deal with. The mucketeers, closest approach to soldiers in this pacifistic land, wore Skins that conditioned them to be more belligerent than the common citizen. They carried epees and, while it was true that their points were dull and their wielders had never engaged in serious swordsmanship, the mucketeers could be dangerous because of numbers alone.

Mapfarity bellowed, “Jean-Jacques, what are you doing?”

He called back over his. shoulder, “I’m taking Lusine with us! She can help us get the Earthman from the Amphibians!”

The Giant lumbered up behind him, threw a rope down to the eager hands of Lusine, and pulled her up without effort to the top of the well. A second later, Rastignac leaped upon Mapfarity’s back, dug his hands under the upper fringe of the huge Skin and, ignoring its electrical blasts, ripped downwards.

Mapfarity cried out with shock and surprise as his skin flopped on the stones like a devilfish on dry land.

Archambaud ran up then and, without bothering to explain, the Ssassaror and the Man seized him and peeled off
his
artificial hide.

“Now we’re all free men!” panted Rastignac. “And the mucketeers have no way of locating us if we hide, nor can they punish us with shocks.”

He put the Giant on his right side, Lusine on his left, and the egg-stealer behind him. He removed the Jail-breaker’s rapier from his sheath. The official was too astonished to protest.

“Law,
m’zawfa!”
cried Rastignac, parodying in his grotesque French the old Gallic war cry of “
Allons, mes enfants!”

The King’s official came to life and screamed orders at the group of mucketeers who had poured into the courtyard. They halted in confusion. They could not hear him above the roar of horns and thunder of drums and the people sticking their heads out of windows and shouting.

Rastignac scooped up with his epee one of the abandoned Skins flopping on the floor and threw it at the foremost guard. It descended upon the man’s head, knocking off his hat and wrapping itself around the head and shoulders. The guard dropped his sword and staggered backwards into the group. At the same time, the escapees charged and bowled over their feeble opposition.

It was here that Rastignac drew first blood. The tip of his epee drove past a bewildered mucketeer’s blade and entered the fellow’s throat just below the chin. It did not penetrate very far because of the dullness of the point. Nevertheless, when Rastignac withdrew his sword, he saw blood spurt.

It was the first flower of violence, this scarlet blossom set against the whiteness of a Man’s skin.

It would, if he had worn his Skin, have sickened him. Now, he exulted with a shout of triumph.

Lusine swooped up from behind him, bent over the fallen man. Her fingers dipped into the blood and went to her mouth. Greedily, she sucked her fingers.

Rastignac struck her cheek hard with the flat of his hand. She staggered back, her eyes narrow, but she laughed.

The next moments were busy as they entered the castle, knocked down two mucketeers who tried to prevent their passage to the Duke’s rooms, then filed across the long suite.

The Duke rose from his writing-desk to greet them. Rastignac, determined to sever all ties and impress the government with the fact that he meant a real violence, snarled at his benefactor, “
Va
t’feh fout!”

The Duke was disconcerted at .this harsh command, so obviously impossible to carry out. He blinked and said nothing. The escapees hurried past him to the door that gave exit to the outside. They pushed it open and stepped out into the car that waited for them. A chauffeur leaned against its thin wooden body.

Mapfarity pushed him aside and climbed in. The others followed. Rastignac was the last to get in. He examined in a glance the vehicle they were supposed to make their flight in.

It was as good a car as you could find in the realm. A Renault of the large class, it had a long boat-shaped scarlet body. There wasn’t a scratch on it. It had seats for six. And that it had the power to outrun most anything was indicated by the two extra pairs of legs sticking out from the bottom. There were twelve pairs of legs, equine in form and shod with the best steel. It was the kind of vehicle you wanted when you might have to take off across the country. Wheeled cars could go faster on the highway, but this Renault would not be daunted by water, plowed fields, or steep hillsides.

Rastignac climbed into the driver’s seat, seized the wheel, and pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The nerve-spot beneath the pedal sent a message to the muscles hidden beneath the hood and the legs projecting from the body. The Renault lurched forward, steadied, and began to pick up speed. It entered a broad paved highway. Hooves drummed; sparks shot out from the steel shoes.

Rastignac guided -the brainless, blind creature concealed within the body. He was helped by the somatically-generated radar it employed to steer it past obstacles. When he came to the
Rue des Nues,
he slowed it down to a trot. There was no use tiring it out. Halfway up the gentle slope of the boulevard, however, a Ford galloped out from a side-street. Its seats bristled with tall peaked hats with outspread glowworm wings and with drawn epees.

Rastignac shoved the accelerator to the floor. The Renault broke into a gallop. The Ford turned so that it would present its broad side. As there was a fencework of tall shrubbery growing along the boulevard, the Ford was thus able to block most of the passage.

But, just before his vehicle reached the Ford, Rastignac pressed the Jump button. Few cars had this; only sportsmen or the royalty could afford to have such a neural circuit installed. And it did not allow for gradations in leaping. It was an all-or-none reaction; the legs spurned the ground in perfect unison and with every bit of the power in them. There was no holding back.

The nose lifted, the Renault soared into the air. There was a shout, a slight swaying as the trailing hooves struck the heads of mucketeers who had been stupid enough not to duck, and the vehicle landed with a screeching lurch, upright, on the other side of the Ford. Nor did it pause.

Half an hour later Rastignac reined in the car under a large tree whose shadow protected them. “We’re well out in the country,” he said.

“What do we do now?” asked impatient Archambaud.

“First we must know more about this Earthman,” Rastignac answered. “Then we can decide.”

VII

Dawn broke through night’s guard and spilled a crimson swath on the hills to the East, and the Six Flying Stars faded from sight like a necklace of glowing jewels dipped into an ink bottle.

Rastignac halted the weary Renault on the top of a hill, looked down over the landscape spread out for miles below him. Mapfarity’s castle—a tall rose-colored tower of flying buttresses—flashed in the rising sun. It stood on another hill by the sea shore. The country around was a madman’s dream of color. Yet to Rastignac every hue sickened the eye. That bright green, for instance, was poisonous; that flaming scarlet was bloody; that pale yellow, rheumy; that velvet black, funereal; that pure white, maggotty.

“Rastignac!” It was Mapfarity’s bass, strumming irritation deep in his chest.

“What?”

“What do we do now?”

Jean-Jacques was silent. Archambaud spoke plaintively.

“I’m not used to going without my Skin. There are things I miss. For one thing, I don’t know what you’re thinking, Jean-Jacques. I don’t know whether you’re angry at me or love me or are indifferent to me. I don’t know where other people
are.
I don’t feel the joy of the little animals playing, the freedom of the flight of the birds, the ghostly plucking of the growing grass, the sweet stab of the mating lust of the wild-horned apigator, the humming of bees working to build a hive, and the sleepy stupid arrogance of the giant cabbage-eating
duexnez.
I can feel nothing without the Skin I have worn so long. I feel alone.”

Rastignac replied, “You are not alone. I am with you.”

Lusine spoke in a low voice, her large brown eyes upon his.

“I, too, feel alone. My Skin is gone, the Skin by which I knew how to act according to the wisdom of my father, the Amphib King. Now that it is gone and I cannot hear his voice the vibrating tympanum, I do not know what to do.”

“At present,” replied Rastignac, “you will do as I tell you.”

Mapfarity repeated, “What now?”

Rastignac became brisk. He said, “We go to your castle, Giant. We use your smithy to put sharp points on our swords, points to slide through a man’s body from front to back. Don’t pale! That is what we must do. And then we pick up your goose that lays the golden eggs, for we must have money if we are to act efficiently. After that, we buy—or steal—a boat and we go to wherever the Earthman is held captive. And we rescue him.”

“And then?” said Lusine, her eyes shining.

“What you do then will be up to you. But I am going to leave this planet and voyage with the Earthman to other worlds.”

Silence. Then Mapfarity said, “Why leave here?”

“Because there is no hope for this land. Nobody will give up his Skin.
Le Beau Pays
is doomed to a lotus-life. And that is not for me.”

Archambaud jerked a thumb at the Amphib girl. “What about her people?”

“They may win, the water-people. What’s the difference? It will be just the exchange of one Skin for another. Before I heard of the landing of the Earthman I was going to fight no matter what the cost to me or inevitable defeat. But not now.”

Mapfarity’s rumble was angry. “Ah, Jean-Jacques, this is not my comrade talking. Are you sure you haven’t swallowed your Skin? You talk as if you were inside-out. What is the matter with your brain? Can’t you see that it will indeed make a difference if the Amphibs get the upper hand? Can’t you see
who
is making the Amphibs behave the way they have been?”

Rastignac urged the Renault towards the rose-colored lacy castle high upon a hill. The vehicle trotted tiredly along the rough and narrow forest path.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean the Amphibs got along fine with the Ssassaror until a new element entered their lives—the Earthmen. Then the antagonizing began. What is this new element? It’s the Changelings—the mixture of Earthmen and Amphibs or Ssassaror and Terran. Add it up.

Turn it around. Look at it from any angle. It is the Changelings who are behind this restlessness—the Human element.

“Another thing. The Amphibs have always had Skins different from ours. Our factories create our Skins to set up an affinity and communication between their wearers and all of Nature. They are designed to make it easier for every Man to love his neighbor.

“Now, the strange thing about the Amphibs’ Skin is that they, too, were once designed to do such things. But in the past thirty or forty years new Skins have been created for one primary purpose—to establish a communication between the Sea-King and his subjects. Not only that, the Skins can be operated at long distances so that the King may punish any disobedient subject. And they are set so that they establish affinity only among the Waterfolk, not between them and all of Nature.”

“I had gathered some of that during my conversations with Lusine,” said Rastignac. “But I did not know it had gone to such lengths.”

“Yes, and you may safely bet that the Changelings are behind it.”

“Then it is the human element that is corrupting?”

“What else?”

Rastignac said, “Lusine, what do you say to this?”

“I think it is best that you leave this world. Or else turn Changeling-Amphib.”

“Why should I join you Amphibians?”

“A man like you could become a Sea-King.”

“And drink blood?”

“I would rather drink blood than mate with a Man. Almost, that is. But I would make an exception with you, Jean-Jacques.”

If it had been a Land-woman who made such a blunt proposal he would have listened with equanimity. There was no modesty, false or otherwise, in the country of the Skin-wearers. But to hear such a thing from a woman whose mouth had drunk the blood of a living man filled him with disgust.