Android at Arms (16 page)

There was a constant murmur of sound in the garden, the rubbing of vine stem against stem, blown by the night wind, the cries of insects, the gurgle of the water. But he heard also the appreciative slurping of his companion as he shared that boon of a long cool drink.

Andas had mouthed two of the tart-sweet (more tart than sweet in this wilder stage) loquat globes before he thought of what might be a serious problem for the Salariki. Though his species was omnivorous, their tastes were still strongly carnivorous. But that was not the greatest difficulty—could the alien safely ingest what was Andas's native food? Anyone traveling from world to world had immunity shots. But that did not mean that they were safe from the effects of another's food—which to them might be deadly poison.

He held the bunch of fruit he had snapped free and looked to Yolyos, who in this gloom was only a shadowy bulk still dribbling his fingers in the water.

“Maybe you cannot eat these.”

“There is only one way to be sure. And one does not welcome starvation if there is any form of food available,” returned the other calmly. “I am duly warned, Prince.”

There was a rustling, and Andas guessed the other was culling his own bunch of fruit.

“It is not bad to taste,” Yolyos announced a moment later, “though that can be no warning of future trouble. Many traps are overlaid with pleasant bait. I would rather have a well-covered xar leg bone in my hand, but one does not miscall what the First Ancestress desires to set before one. So—I eat.”

But Andas continued, as he fed himself, to listen for any sounds from the other to suggest that this
was
a deadly trap covered with pleasant bait as far as the Salariki was concerned.

“It is food, but not too filling,” the alien remarked at last. “However, for the smallest favors a man in need must be thankful. That we have this private food and water is another piece of good fortune to be paid for when one is free to concern oneself again with debts to the First Ancestress.”

As he tried to get up, Andas found himself dizzy. Perhaps it was the lack of rest, but it seemed to him that some of that vertigo came from the cloying scent of the flowers. Suddenly he wanted to be away from the garden. He said so sharply that he must have surprised Yolyos, for the other asked, “What danger do you feel here, Prince?”

“The flowers—that smell—I must have fresher air!” He lurched and would have fallen had the other not steadied him. In the end Yolyos had almost to carry him out of that lush growth into the sterile dustiness of the barracks. There Andas drew as deep breaths of relief as those the Salariki had taken when he had fronted the banks of perfumed bloom.

“You are all right now?” Andas heard the Salariki rather than saw him. Out in the garden, though no moon had yet risen, the masses of white flowers seemed to give light.

He jerked free from the other's hold, feeling shame that such a thing as a flower, even in bulk, would weaken him so. “Yes. We can rest above—in the commander's room.” He wanted to be near the exit he knew while in a place of such ill repute.

“You go on.” Yolyos was back at the door. “To me that scent is all meat and drink. I shall come when I have had my fill.”

Andas was too tired, too uneasy to argue. After all, he had warned the other. If Yolyos, knowing the danger, wanted to go and smell flowers in an overgrown garden, then let him.

Andas climbed to the upper chamber. The bed was but an empty frame. He could have brought some of the vines and grass from the garden to soften the floor. But he wanted no more of the loquats. With a sigh he stretched out on the hard surface and closed his eyes.

Dark—but with a kernel of red light that drew him, so that without knowing why, save that he must, he went toward that. Then that kernel enlarged suddenly, as if he had covered some length of distance in a single step or by willing it. There was a fire, and the weaving flames were the only illumination of a grim scene.

That fire burned not on any hearth but in the middle of a room, and not a room of four stout walls and an intact roof either, for the flames, now revealing, now dying so that they hid again, showed a ragged hole larger than any window in the wall facing him across the source of heat and light. When the fire burned higher, he could see that the roof was only partly overhead. There was little protection against a thick, creeping mist, such as Inyanga knew just before the winter came.

There was one who fed the fire, coming now and then on her hands and knees, pulling pieces of roughly broken wood to push into the flames with caution, as if she drew upon a scant supply. Andas, from his days at Pav, recognized the technique practiced in survival course, though by the looks of her she played no training game but lived life on the thin edge of survival in truth.

That she was a woman he could tell only from the hair braided tightly to her skull in the many small braids of a desert nomad, for her body was a huddle of coarse garments from which protruded arms near as thin and curveless as the sticks she handled. Her face was as close to a skull as that of any living human being could be. And, save for her eyes, she might well have been one of the dead-alive of the old, old tales.

As she fed the fire, the light it cast grew so that Andas could see the other occupant of that ruined room. He had been propped up so that he sat facing Andas across the flames. But there was something about the way his limbs were stretched before him under a tattered rug that made the prince think they were useless.

On the stranger's lap lay—was it a voice-harp? Andas could not see it clearly in this bad light, and the woman with her fire-feeding kept blocking the view. It did have some resemblance to that elegant and courtly, if very old-fashioned, musical instrument, save that from one end of it projected and then rose a fan of slender rods. Woven back and forth, uniting the rods into a transparent fan, were wires or threads that gleamed and glistened as the light touched them.

But the man did not seem to be in the act of playing. Rather he held, gripped tightly in one hand, a splinter with a wad of candle fluff on its tip, which burned with such restricted light that the holder had to bring it very close to what was in his other hand in order to see, if he could see at all.

And what he was trying under such difficulty to see was a book—not a reading tape such as had been in use over untold centuries now, but an ancient
book
with pages to be manually turned, words printed on them. Andas knew books. They were curiosities and brought high prices from dealers of antiquities. There were at least a dozen in the Triple Towers, among the treasures collected by dilettante emperors in the past. But those were treated as treasures, kept in gem-set boxes.

The volume that the frowning would-be reader held in this place of dark and ruin had a cover of what appeared to be thin slabs of wood, the pages as thick as plasta sheets, but yellow and tattered on the edges. The prince looked beyond the wonder of that ancient book to the face of the man who held it and—

Did he cry out, or was that sound only uttered in his mind? At least neither the reader nor the wraith woman who fed the fire were startled or looked up to see him. But that other's face, thin, with a half-healed scar upon the temple—that face was his own!

This must be a dream, yet there was a feeling of reality in it such as Andas had never known in any dream he had walked or drifted through before. Could it be true then that men lived many lives, as the priests of the half-forgotten cult of Kaissee taught? And that some men were allowed to see these past lives? That the deeds of one life, good or bad, influenced the next? If so, was he looking now upon a self that had been his in the dim past?

He could see the lips of that other Andas move, but he heard no sound. And now the reader must have said something to the woman, for she came away from the fire, hunkered down by him, and took that dreary taper into her hand, holding it close to the page of the book, while the man's right hand, now free, moved to lie on the keyboard of the harp.

The fingers pressed, one, two, three—Again Andas heard no sound. Rather there was a vibration in the air. Once more he cried out as that vibration closed about him like a net, drawing him toward the fire in spite of his struggles.

Again the fingers moved, and the vibration tightened. Now he heard sound, too, very faint and far off. But it echoed and rang in his head, a torment that could not be shaken off. The reader looked up from the book, straight at Andas. The prince saw the eyes in the thin, starved face widen. It was plain he himself was seen.

The woman started, letting fall the candle. And Andas heard another sound, a thin cry of distress.

But he was free of the net the harp had woven. And he pulled away with all the strength he had, seeking the dark that lay beyond the fire, away from the man wearing his face.

Andas opened his eyes, afraid for a moment to look about him lest he see the fire and know that he was a prisoner in that place where a man wove a spell with a harp. But the acrid smell of dust and the silence told Andas that he lay safe (if one could term his present situation safe) once again in the commander's quarters.

Had it been a dream? He tried to compare it with dreams he had known. But most of those had been very fleeting and lacking in detail after one awoke. This was a different matter, for against all reason, his instinct and his emotions told him that somewhere, or sometime, the scene he had just witnessed had been real. Perhaps his fatigue, his exposure to thirst, hunger, and the strong scent of the flowers had unlocked some unknown portion of memory and he had spied upon his own far past. But then—

Andas sat up, drawing a deep breath of wonder and then of relief. If he could believe that, if he had, as the priests of Kaisee taught, remembered another life—that was proof he was no android!

By some experiment he could have been imprinted with all the memories of a man he had been made to resemble. But he could see no possible way he could also have been made aware in deep unconscious parts of the mind of events from the other man's past life. If he could only believe in the creed of Kaissee, then his own fears were stilled. Now he could only hope.

The presence of the book—that certainly meant the scene had been in a very ancient past. Books were treasures never to be used as that stranger had done. And the harp, while in part it was akin to one he himself had been taught to play as one of the graces of his rank, was different. The past—he had seen into the past—

Was it because he had the key? He had heard many legends concerning that, though privately those of royal blood discounted most of the old stories. Yet there must be an aura of power that clung to a talisman that had been venerated by generations upon generations, so that such objects took on a patina from that worship until in themselves they kept shadows of the very forces they represented.

His hand slid across the breast of his coverall, seeking the shape of the key. But first he touched that other thing he carried—the ring. And he jerked his fingers away as if the fire he had looked upon in his dream had licked them. That—that
was
a thing of power and one which he had forgotten or he would not have carried it so long. It should be destroyed, though he had no means for doing so. If he hid it somewhere here among the ruins, it would still have a way to draw to it the one to whom it had been sealed. Men might question the power of the key, except when it was put to the use for which it was fashioned. But there was altogether too much proof of the influence of such a ring. He had a duty to see to its destruction. Luckily he could accomplish that also when he took the key to its proper place.

Andas lay back on the stones, but he was too wide awake to sleep again. Instead, he began to recall detail by detail the dream, and instead of fading as such normally would, it all became more sharply fixed, until he could remember things he had not noted at first—such as the bandage that had shown on the breast of the man when a movement of the stranger's hand on the harp had pulled aside the clumsily patched tunic he wore. There had been a crusted black-red stain on that bandage.

So it had been more perhaps than hunger and cold that had set those dark shadows under the stranger's eyes. He had the look, now that Andas had time to consider it, of a man sore hurt.

Of the ruined building in which those two had sheltered so poorly, he was not sure. It was certainly not of the Triple Towers he knew. He had seen tapes of warfare, and this dream scene reminded him strongly of such a picture taken in a refugee camp. War could reduce men to such a plight.

There had been wars in plenty on Inyanga—he could not deny that—though for the most part those had occupied only the claimants to the throne and their liegemen and had very seldom spread to the country at large. In fact, one of the pacts made by Akmedu had been that when disputes were to be settled in blood, the fighters must withdraw to the Red Waste. It had worked out very well. But the last “war” to be fought there in any force was now generations back. He himself had gone into the Red Waste from Pav—there had been nothing there like the scene he had witnessed.

“Prince!”

Roused out of his thoughts, Andas got up. He was stiff from the hardness of his bed and gave a little catch of breath at the complaint of a leg muscle.

“Yes—?” he did not need to ask who came. There was so strong an odor of loquat blossom accompanying the new arrival that the Salariki must have been rolling in a blanket of the moon-white flowers.

11

“There are doom dealings here!”

To Andas the words made no sense, but he could read the emotion in the other's voice, that growl he had come to identify with anger as far as the Salariki was concerned.

In spite of the shutters they had forced into place across the windows, Andas could see the dark form, and he turned on the torch to catch the other in its rays. Yolyos had his back turned. He was facing the one window that overlooked the fatal Place of No Return.