Children of the Lens (21 page)

"Oh—you mean, then, that there's nothing really the matter with me?" Hard as she was, Karen trembled as her awful tension eased. "That I was supposed to act that way? And I can tell Kit, right away?"

"No need. Your brother has known that it was a passing phase; he shall know very shortly that it has passed. It is not that you were 'supposed' to act as you acted. You could not help it. Nor could your brother, nor I. From now on, however, you shall be completely the mistress of your own mind. Come fully, daughter Karen, into mine."

She did so, and in a matter of time her "formal education" was complete.

"There is one thing that I don't quite understand…" she began, just before she boarded her speedster.

"Consider it, and I am sure that you will," Mentor assured her. "Explain it, whatever it is, to me."

"QX—I'll try. It's about Fossten and dad." Karen cogitated. "Fossten was, of course, Gharlane—your making dad believe him to be an insane Arisian was a masterpiece. I see, of course, how you did that—principally by making Fossten's 'real' shape exactly like the one he saw of you on Arisia. But his physical actions as Fossten…"

"Go on, daughter. I am sure that your visualization will be sound."

"While acting as Fossten he had to act as a Thralian would have acted," she decided with a rush. "He was watched everywhere he went, and knew it. To display his real power would have been disastrous. Just like you Arisians, they have to follow the pattern to avoid setting up an inferiority complex that would ruin everything for them. Gharlane's actions as Fossten, then, were constrained. Just as they were when he was Gray Roger, so long ago—except that then he did make a point of unhuman longevity, deliberately to put an insoluble problem up to First Lensman Samms and his men. Just as you—you must have… you did coach Virgil Samms, Mentor, and some of you Arisians were there, as men!"

"We were. We lived and wrought as men and seemed to die as men."

"But you weren't Virgil Samms, please!" Karen almost begged. "Not that it would break me if you were, but I'd much rather you hadn't been."

"No, none of us was Samms," Mentor assured her. "Nor Cleveland, nor Rodebush, nor Costigan, nor even Clio Marsden. We worked with—'coached', as you express it—those persons and others from time to time in certain small matters, but we were at no time integral with any of them. One of us was, however, Nels Bergenholm. The full inertialess space-drive became necessary at that time, and it would have been poor technique to have had either Rodebush or Cleveland develop so suddenly the ability to perfect the device as Bergenholm did perfect it."

"QX. Bergenholm isn't important—he was just an inventor. To get back to the subject of Fossten: when he was there on the flagship with dad, and in position to throw his full weight around, it was too late—you Arisians were on the job. You'll have to take it from there, though; I'm out beyond my depth."

"Because you lack data. In those last minutes Gharlane knew that Kimball Kinnison was neither alone nor unprotected. He called for help, but help did not come. He was isolated; no one of his fellows received his call. Nor could he escape from the form of flesh he was then energizing. I myself saw to that." Karen had never before felt the Arisian display emotion, but his thought was grim and cold. "From that form, which your father never did perceive, Gharlane of Eddore passed into the next plane of existence."

Karen shivered. "It served bun right… That clears everything up, I think. But are you sure, Mentor"—wistfully—"that you can't, or rather shouldn't, teach me any more than you have? It's… I feel… well, 'incompetent' is putting it very mildly indeed."

"To a mind of such power and scope as yours, in its present state of development, such a feeling is inevitable. Nor can anyone except yourself do anything about it. Cold comfort, perhaps, but it is the stark truth that from now on your development is your own task. Yours alone. As I have already told Christopher and Kathryn, and will very shortly tell Camilla and Constance, you have had your last Arisian treatment. I will be on call to any of you at any instant of any day, to aid you or to guide you or to re-enforce you at need; but of formal instruction there can be no more."

Karen left Arisia and drove for Lyrane, her thoughts in a turmoil. The time was too short by far; she deliberately cut her vessel's speed and took a long detour so that the vast and chaotic library of her mind could be reduced to some semblance of order before she landed.

She reached Lyrane II, and there, again to all outward seeming a happy, carefree girl, she hugged her mother rapturously.

"You're the most wonderful thing, mums!" Karen exclaimed. "It's simply marvelous, seeing you again in the flesh…"

"Now why bring that up?" Clarrissa had—just barely— become accustomed to working undraped, in the Lyranian fashion.

"I didn't mean it that way at all, and you know I didn't," Kay snickered. "Shame on you—fishing for compliments, and at your age, too!" Ignoring the older woman's attempt at protest she went on: "All kidding aside, mums, you're a mighty smart-looking hunk of woman. I approve of you exceedingly much. In fact, we're a keen pair and I like both of us. I've got one advantage over you, of course, in that I never did care whether I had any clothes on or not. How are you doing?"

"Not so well—of course, though, I haven't been here very long." Forgetting her undressedness, Clarrissa frowned. "I haven't found Helen, and I haven't found out yet why she retired. I can't quite decide whether to put pressure on now, or wait a while longer. Ladora, the new Elder Person, is… that is, I don't know… Oh, here she comes now. I'm glad—I want you to meet her."

If Ladora was glad to see Karen, however, she did not show it. Instead, for an inappreciable instant of time which was nevertheless sufficient for the acquirement of much information, each studied the other. Like Helen, the former queen, Ladora was tall, beautifully proportioned, flawless of skin and feature, hard and fine. But so, and in most respects even more so, to Ladora's astonishment and quickly-mounting wrath, was this pink-tanned stranger. Practically instantaneously, therefore, the Lyranian hurled a vicious mental bolt; only to get the surprise of her life.

She hadn't found out yet what this strange near-person, Clarrissa of Sol III, had in the way of equipment, but from the meek way she acted, it couldn't be much. So Clarrissa's offspring, younger and less experienced, would be easy enough prey.

But Ladora's bolt, the heaviest she could send, did not pierce even the outermost fringes of her intended victim's defenses, and so vicious was the almost simultaneous counter-thrust that it went through the Lyranian's hard-held block in nothing flat. Inside her brain it wrought such hellishly poignant punishment that the matriarch, forgetting everything, tried only and madly to scream. She could not. She could not move a muscle of her face or of her body. She could not even fall. And the one brief glimpse she had into the stranger's mind showed it to be such a blaze of incandescent fury that she, who had never feared in the slightest any living creature, knew now in full measure what fear was.

"I'd like to give that alleged brain of yours a good going over, just for fun." Karen forced her emotion to subside to a mere seething rage, and Ladora watched her do it. "But since this whole stinking planet is my mother's dish, not mine, she'd blast me to a cinder—she's done it before— if I dip in." She cooled still more—visibly. "At that, I don't suppose you're too bad an egg, in your own poisonous way—you just don't know any better. So maybe I'd better warn you, you poor fool, since you haven't got sense enough to see it, that you're playing with an atomic vortex when you push her around like you've been doing. Just a very little more of it and she'll get mad, like I did a second ago except more so, and you'll wish to Klono you'd never been born. She won't make a sign until she blows her top, but I'm telling you she's as much harder and tougher than I am as she is older, and what she does to people she gets mad at I wouldn't want to watch happen again, even to a snake. She'll pick you up, curl you into a circle, pull off your arms, shove your feet down your throat, and roll you across that field there like a hoop. After that I don't know what she'll do—depends on how much pressure she develops before she goes off. One thing, though; she's always sorry afterwards. Why, she even attends the funerals, sometimes, and insists on paying all the expenses!"

With which outrageous thought she kissed Clarrissa an enthusiastic goodbye. "Told you I couldn't stay a minute—got to do a flit—'see a man about a dog', you know—came a million parsecs to squeeze you, mums, but it was worth it—clear ether!"

She was gone, and it was a dewy-eyed and rapt mother, not a Lensman, who turned to the still completely disorganized Lyranian. Clarrissa had perceived nothing whatever of what had happened; Karen had very carefully seen to that.

"My daughter," Clarrissa mused, as much to herself as to Ladora. "One of four. The four dearest, finest, sweetest girls that ever lived. I often wonder how a woman of my limitations, of my faults, could possibly have borne such children."

And Ladora of Lyrane, humorless and literal as all Lyranians are, took those thoughts at their face value and correlated their every connotation and implication with what she herself had perceived in that "dear, sweet" daughter's mind; with what that daughter had done and had said. The nature and quality of this hellish near-person's "limitations" and "faults" became eminently clear; and as she perceived what she thought was the truth, the Lyranian literally cringed.

"As you know, I have been in doubt as to whether or not to support you actively, as you wish," Ladora offered, as the two walked across the field, toward the line of ground-cars. "On the one hand, the certainty that the safety, and perhaps the very existence, of my race will be at hazard. On the other, the possibility that you are right in saying that the situation will continue to deteriorate if we do nothing. The decision has not been an easy one to make." Ladora was no longer aloof. She was just plain scared. She had been talking against time, and hoping that the help for which she had long since called would arrive in time. "I have touched only the outer surface of your mind. Will you allow me, without offense, to test its inner quality before deciding definitely?" In the instant of asking, Ladora sent out a full-driven probe.

"I will not." Ladora's beam struck a barrier which seemed to her exactly like Karen's. None of her race had developed anything like it. She had never seen… yes, she had, too—years ago, when she was a child, that time in the assembly hall—that utterly hated male, Kinnison of Tellus! Tellus—Sol III! Clarrissa of Sol III, then, wasn't a near-person at all, but a female—Kinnison's kind of female—and a creature who was physically a person, but mentally that inconceivable monstrosity, a female, might be anything and might do anything! Ladora temporized.

"Excuse me; I did not mean to intrude against your will," she apologized, smoothly enough. "Since your attitude makes it extremely difficult for me to cooperate with you, I can make no promises as yet. What is it that you wish to know first?"

"I wish to interview your predecessor, the person we called Helen." Strangely refreshed, in a sense galvanized by the brief personal visit with her dynamic daughter, it was no longer Mrs. Kimball Kinnison who faced the Lyranian queen. Instead, it was the Red Lensman; a full-powered Second-Stage Lensman who had finally decided that, since appeals to reason, logic, and common sense had no perceptible effect upon this stiff-necked near-woman, the time had come to bear down. "Furthermore, I intend to interview her now, and not at some such indefinite future time as your whim may see fit to allow."

Ladora sent out a final desperate call for help and mustered her every force against the interloper. Fast and strong as her mind was, however, the Red Lensman's was faster and stronger. The Lyranian's defensive structure was wrecked in the instant of its building, the frantically struggling mind was taken over in toto. Help arrived—uselessly; since although Clarrissa's newly enlarged mind had not been put to warlike use, it was brilliantly keen and ultimately sure. Nor, in time of stress, did the softer side of her nature operate to stay mind or hand. While carrying Lensman's Load she contained no more of ruth for Civilization's foes than did abysmally frigid Nadreck himself.

Head thrown back, taut and tense, gold-flecked tawny eyes flashing, she stood there for a moment and took on her shield everything those belligerent persons could send. More, she returned it in kind, plus; and under those withering blasts of force more than one of her attackers died. Then, still holding her block, she and her unwilling captive raced across the field toward the line of peculiar little fabric-and-wire machines that were still the last word in Lyranian air-transport.

Clarrissa knew that the Lyranians had no modern offensive or defensive weapons. They did, however, have some fairly good artillery at the airport; and she hoped fervently as she ran that she could put out jets enough to spoil aim and fuzing—luckily, they hadn't developed proximity fuzes yet!—of whatever ack-ack they could bring to bear on her crate during the few minutes she would have to use it. Fortunately, there was no artillery at the small, unimportant airport on which her speedster lay.

"Here we are. We'll take this tripe—it's the fastest thing here!"

Clarrissa could operate the triplane, of course—any knowledge or ability that Ladora had ever had was now and permanently the Lensman's. She started the queer engines; and as the powerful little plane screamed into the air, hanging from its props, she devoted what of her mind she could spare to the problem of anti-aircraft fire. She could not handle all the gun-crews; but she could and did control the most important members of most of them. Thus, nearly all the shells either went wide or exploded too soon. Since she knew every point of aim of the few guns with whose operations she could not interfere, she avoided their missiles by not being at any one of those points at the predetermined instant of functioning.

Thus plane and passengers escaped unscratched; and in a matter of minutes arrived at their destination. The Lyranians there had been alerted, of course; but they were few in number and they had not been informed that it would take physical force, not mental, to keep that red-headed pseudo-person from boarding her outlandish ship of space.