Gods of the Greataway (30 page)

Manuel
fought his way toward her.

“He-he-he-he!” His Bale Wolf uttered a high-pitched giggle and tripped him. Lying down, Manuel saw the Girl’s Bale Wolf snarl, all fooling done, and raise the knife high.

“No!” Manuel shouted. “Leave her!”

And just for a moment the Bale Wolf paused and glanced at him. Manuel saw a rush of movement; then the Bale Wolf drove the knife downward with all its force. He saw no more, because his Bale Wolf had jumped onto his head and was reaching for his throat. He rolled onto his back and the creature rolled with him, keeping its hold. As consciousness began to leave him and he slipped into a well of despair, he saw Zozula go down fighting and Sir Charles fall like a tree. He saw Blondie Tranter bleeding and screaming while a Bale Wolf teased her with its claws, and he saw Bambi smiling, patting on the head a creature that was preparing to disembowel her.

And he saw Blind Pew stand and swing his stick, and lay a Bale Wolf cold at the exact moment it materialized.

It lay twitching on the floor. Pew stepped over it and advanced down the aisle, a gaunt black figure using his stick like a flail with no regard for friend or foe.

But he left a trail of broken Bale Wolves in his wake. They dodged between happentracks, seeking to catch him unawares, but he knew they were coming, and with his uncanny precognition, he swung his stick time and again, clubbing them senseless at the instant of materialization. One by one they fell, to lie bleeding, twitching and whimpering, too dazed to skip into an adjacent happentrack, too bemused to avoid the crushing seaboots of Pew as he stamped and swung his way down the carriage.

There came a great howl, echoing the length of the Train, and the remaining Bale Wolves left the passengers, who collapsed where they stood, crying with pain and fear and disbelief, and relief. The Bale Wolves turned and stared at Pew. The howl became a jabbering snarl as they attacked in a body, bounding over the seat backs like a monkey troop and getting in one another’s way as they crowded Pew, tearing and slashing as they backed him against the wall.

Yet Pew
stayed on his feet. He’d produced a knife, a sharp sailor’s knife, now that the stick had proved too cumbersome for close quarters, and with this he hacked and stabbed and out-thought every move of the Bale Wolves until they backed off, snarling in a semicircle, bleeding and watching him with their fierce little eyes.

Pew said into the sudden quiet, “So it’s a standoff, me beauties. I’m a poor blind man and I can’t see to kill ye — not unless ye attack. Then it’s a different kettle o’ fish, ye may lay to that. It’s a strange sense o’ danger I have. So what’s it to be, me beauties? Do ye leave us to continue the voyage in peace — or do ye die?”

And one by one, the Bale Wolves disappeared.

*

All except one, who lay in the aisle half under Zozula’s seat, a victim of one of Pew’s more vicious blows. The beast stirred, and his outline began to shimmer …

Zozula seized the fire extinguisher that lay nearby and crashed it down on the Bale Wolf’s head.

Its outline firmed up.

Manuel shouted, “We’ve got one! We’ve got one!” Then his excitement evaporated.

The Girl lay beneath Mentor, and from Mentor’s back there protruded a short knife. He was not moving, and Manuel knew he was dead. He rolled the body aside to reach the Girl. She lay with her head turned away. A sudden terror seized Manuel as he knelt beside her. She was very still. Her shoulder was bare, the clothing torn away. In the flesh was a jagged wound, semicircular, from which blood seeped slowly. The skin around the wound was black and ugly-looking. She was breathing — very faintly, but definitely breathing.

“We
must get her to the Dome,” said Zozula. His eyes kept straying to his clone-son, his expression unfathomable.

“How?”

“It’s just a question of belief,” said Zozula.

Meanwhile, Silver was levering himself to his feet with his crutch. The rest of the passengers, shaken, some weeping, many injured, were sorting themselves out. It seemed that Mentor’s death was the only one. “Let’s go home,” said someone.

Silver crashed his crutch against the wall to gain attention. “Shipmates!” he roared. “I promised ye adventure, and by the Powers, we’re having it. ’Twas a royal victory, eh? ’Tis no time to be talkin’ o’ quitting. We beat the Bale Wolves and we beat them fair and square. Now we continue the voyage!”

“We want to go home!” the cry came from several passengers.

“Avast there!” Silver launched into a tirade against cowardice, mutiny and desertion, thumped his crutch against the floor for emphasis, while Pew listened with head cocked, and the passengers muttered.

Manuel said to Zozula, “Hasn’t he had enough?”

“He can’t quit. If the passengers leave the Train, Silver will cease to exist. I think he believes what I told him, deep down.”

“What about us? The Girl always got off this Train before. If you think we can wish ourselves off, you’d better start wishing quickly, Zozula. The Girl’s very sick!” The sharpness of Manuel’s tone recalled Zozula to the problem and he concentrated, closing his eyes.

People were climbing from their seats, advancing on Silver in open mutiny now, and the driver’s voice became shrill as he harangued them, backing toward the door. Zozula opened his eyes again. It was beginning to look as though the whole Train would be returning to the Dome with no conscious effort on his part. Silver tripped and fell, and his one leg waved in undignified fashion as he tried to scramble up again. “We’re going back, by God!” shouted Sir Charles, jabbing the driver with a shooting stick. “Get a grip on yourself, man. Turn us around!”

“Silence!”

Pew stood
above Silver like a giant. The shouting died away.

The blind man looked taller, monstrous in his black cloak. With his green eyeshade and beaklike nose, he resembled some great hooded bird of prey barely held in check. His opaque gaze roved among the passengers, and they flinched before it as though he could see into their very souls. Silver looked up at him from the floor, clutched his ankles in supplication, then began to crawl up his body, whimpering. Pew dashed him aside with one blow of his stick and then addressed the passengers.

“There’ll be no turning back,’ he said, so softly that they strained forward to hear, eagerly, wanting to get it right, not wishing to offend him. Then, hearing, they nodded at him and at each other; yes, there would be no turning back. Who could ever think of turning back?

Manuel found that his knuckles were white with tension and his hands were stiff when he uncurled them. “Get us out of here, Zozula,” he said quietly, scared the frightful Pew might hear.

“I can’t. I’ve tried. I can’t make it work!” And now, at last, there was fear in Zozula’s eyes. He had lost control. Pew was stronger than him. What had gone wrong? Only hours ago Pew had been their prisoner, a mere figment of the imaginations of the Dream People, who were in turn nebulous electrical charges in the Rainbow, which was supposedly controlled by him, Zozula. Sick at heart, he sat still, bewildered, beaten, mourning Mentor, his clone-son.

Manuel turned to the injured Girl and took her hand in his, and just for a moment her eyes opened and she looked at him. Softly he said to her, “Don’t worry about a thing, Girl. I’ll make sure you’re all right. Just lie there quietly, and we’ll have you back home in no time …”

He used no conscious effort or belief.

He looked at the Girl, and something seemed to flow between them. He couldn’t describe it, afterward (although later humans had a name for it). It was similar to the way he felt when he did his mind-paintings—particularly when he did the painting of Belinda — but it was not the same. It was somehow stronger, and it did not come from him alone. It had something to do with the Girl’s being there, too, but that was still not the full answer. It had to do with something inside him, a living entity that was part of him, yet separate, perhaps like a soul.

The Skytrain
faded from around the Triad, and they found themselves on a hillside overlooking the ocean, and it was morning, the sun rising out of the easterly bank of crimson clouds.

B
efore the
Mole had become Caradoc, he had lived for some weeks in a remote area of the Dome, having been brought there by his father, Lord Shout. Lord Shout was a Wild Human who had found the blank curved walls of the Dome depressing after the boundless space of Outside, so he had instructed members of his tribe to climb the catwalk on the Dome’s outer surface and clean the muck of aeons away until the windows of his room were clear again and he could see the distant hills where his village lay. This had been somewhat shocking to Zozula, who had not realized that the Dome’s surface was intended to be transparent. It was also a little terrifying, because the clear windows were as high as the clouds, and on a clear day surveyed a dizzying expanse of Earth.

Now Selena stood in Lord Shout’s room.

She trembled as she looked at the great Outside, so open, so clear, so limitless compared to the only Outside she had ever known: the low clouds and tiny confines of the People Planet’s lone island. But she was a Cuidador, and outside this window was the future; she and other Cuidadors must get used to it.

Hearing a sound, she turned.

Zozula stood there. Her heart leaped with joy, but she managed to conceal it. “I hear your journey was a success,” she said.

“We captured a Bale Wolf — Brutus has it now. But the Girl was seriously hurt. And … and we lost Mentor, I’m afraid.”

“So
I heard.” She turned away.

“He died like a hero. I was a fool — he had much more courage than I gave him credit for. The Girl told me he saved her life. He threw himself in the way of a Bale Wolf’s knife and took the blow that was meant for her. He was a brave man, after all.”

“Of course he was. He was your clone-son.” Her voice was muffled.

“He gave a bad impression, at first.”

“That was my fault. I raised him badly. I spoiled him.”

“I … I was ashamed of him, Selena. I kept thinking he was what I might have been. What I
am
, underneath. A coward who wakes up screaming at night.”

“We all do that, Zo.”

Standing beside her, looking at the vastness of Outside, he caught sight of a tear on her cheek. Awkwardly, he put an arm around her. “There was nothing we could do to save him. It all happened so quickly. He liked the Girl, I think.”

“Don’t we all?” she muttered.

“Listen, Selena … I’m very sorry. I … I realize you were fond of him. I’m not a fool, you know.”

She swung round to face him, and her eyes were glittering. “Oh, yes you are!”

He backed away, astonished at her violence. “My dear …”

“Haven’t you got the sense to work out
why
I raised Mentor,
why
I kept him in my quarters as an adult? Are you completely stupid, Zozula?”

“Well, I thought you explained all that. Research, and so on …” He flushed. “If you’re trying to tell me you were lovers, well, it’s really no concern of mine. What you do up there is your own affair.”

“Yes, we were lovers.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.” Now he too was getting annoyed.

“Well, you’re going to, whether you like it or not. I’ve spent fifty years of unhappiness with Mentor, you know that? Fifty years of wondering why I did such a thing. Wondering if the caracals would tell people. Wondering if they already had and if the entire Station was laughing behind my back. Wondering if word would get back here, to the Cuidadors. Fifty years of guilt, Zozula. Watching Mentor growing up to look like
you
, and to walk and talk like
you
, and yet not to
be
you. Fifty years of watching him develop into a spoiled brat, of living with a poor substitute while you and Eulalie were living together, content with each other and hardly aware of the Dome around you.”

There
was a long silence. In the end, Zozula said helplessly, “I loved Eulalie very much. Now she’s dead, I don’t know how to handle it … and I don’t know how to handle people, either. I feel alone suddenly, and I feel as though the rest of the Cuidadors are my enemies, attacking me with their sympathy. Does that sound strange? I lived with Eulalie for centuries, and I never knew how much I depended on her. All that time, she was protecting me from the way I feel now, and I never realized it.
This
is why I’ve thrown myself into this quest of ours. It’s not through a sense of duty — not really. It’s because I can’t face life without Eulalie, and because I find the company of Manuel and the Girl less … less embarrassing than the company of the Cuidadors. And because I suddenly hate this Dome. Does that explain anything?”

“Not really.” But Selena’s tone had softened.

“I’m just an arrogant old fool who’s been caught out, Lena. That’s the truth of it.”

“I know.”

“It’s too soon for me to start thinking of the future.”

“I know.”

Tentatively, he said, “There’s still plenty of time.”

*

Meanwhile, the nurses, using ancient technology under the direction of Caradoc, worked on the Girl. She was still alive, but her breath was shallow and her pulse weak. The venom of the Bale Wolf was being carried through her system, although the wound itself had begun to heal.

Brutus took samples of venom from the Bale Wolf and fed them into the Rainbow. The creature lay on its back in a cage, breathing slowly and powerfully, drugged into insensibility. It had to be kept that way, unconscious, because no cage could have held it if it recovered its senses and its powers.

The
Rainbow analyzed the samples. The answer came back: The Bale Wolf’s venom contained a virulent agent with an effect similar to cancer, capable of changing the very structure of body cells, and quickly.

A nurse injected adrenalin into the Girl, simply to keep her alive. She was wasting away. Her substance seemed to be dissolving into the force fields in which she was suspended.