Exile (27 page)

Dalin looked back and saw both Ralf and Enry looking at him dejectedly; Enry managed a tiny, grim wave.

Dalin was pushed roughly forward toward the waiting black figures.

He guessed he was planetside. The gravity was different—substantial, though less than Earth's. He guessed he was either on Mars or, more likely, Titan.

He had been blindfolded with a blank visor a!-most immediately. He was offered neither food, drink, nor conversation, and his own questions had gone unanswered.

But the trip had been short enough. When he felt the bump of either docking or landing, he guessed the latter; his evidence only mounted when he was taken out of the ship and smelled what must be atmosphere, thin and sweet, nothing like the dry canned oxygen of ships.

A short trip in what felt like a ground transport
followed, and then a short march into a building, his forced sitting in a chair, quite comfortable, to which he was bound.

And now?

Suddenly the visor came alive, making him gasp. It was like the blind finding sight. The dimensional image registered on his retinas, flowed up to his brain—

He gasped again, cried out.

"Tabrel!"

It was her: Tabrel Kris, whose features over the last months had stayed sharp in his mind: Tabrel, whose very existence had kept him alive, continued to fill him with hope. She was sitting on a chair in a barely furnished room, staring out through a window at a landscape that must be Titanian: a lush hill rolling to a blue lake in the middle distance, under an eerie clutch of lights that brightened the clouds in a blackened sky. It was like staring at a strange photograph.

"Tabrel!"

"She cannot hear you, King Shar," a voice chuckled, very near.

The image blinked out.

Someone pulled the visor from Dalin's face, making him blink and gasp again.

The voice said, "I am Wrath-Pei."

A figure was there, leaning over him from a gyro chair anchored beside Dalin's. He was beautiful and repugnant: a man like a statue, perfectly featured but chilly as white marble. A mane of silver hair flowed back from his high forehead; he was dressed in silver and black. In his hand he held something like an ancient machine: two open blades flowing back to sculpted ebony handles. Dalin smelled the scent of oily lubrication. The man's fingernails were perfectly manicured, polished.

Dalin suddenly realized that he could not move his head, not a millimeter. The man did not blink, but leaned out over Dalin's face, his free hand delicately grasping the edge of one of Dalin's eyelids, pulling it away from Dalin's eye as if he were about to remove a rogue lash.

The clippers rose up into view.

As Dalin began to hear his own screams, the man's gentle voice lied, "Now, this won't hurt a bit."

Blind, once more.

Weakness made Dalin unable to move. There was a band of hot pain across his face, as if he were wearing a visor heated to searing temperature. He felt something soft pressing against his eyes and was able to reach gently up to tap at two bundles of soft, gauzy material held in place with a thin metal strip that encircled his head. He could not remove it and did not wish to; whenever he moved his face in any way, the band of hot pain shot from side to side like a poker laid across the bridge of his nose.

He felt an overwhelming urge to close his eyes—but even when he slept, which was fitfully, he was unable to indulge this compulsion.

Always, he felt the tender touch of those gauze pads against his naked eyes.

By meals, he was able to count two and a half days before he felt, with a shiver that made him want to scream, the knock of Wrath-Pei's chair bumping against his own. He felt the monster's clement touch over his eyes, heard Wrath-Pei's coos of solicitous attention.

"There, there," Wrath-Pei said, patting Dalin's arm. "It won't last more than a day longer. You'll feel much better come tomorrow."

With a chuckle, the monster was gone.

Only to return the next day, while Dalin dozed. Dalin awoke to feel Wrath-Pei's hands on him, peeling back the gauze with care, making those loving sounds.

The world brightened. He saw the monster's grinning face hovering over him, the eyes probing this way and that.

"How do you feel?" Wrath-Pei asked.

Before Dalin could answer, the monster had placed something in front of the king's face: a mirror, with which he could regard himself.

Dalin screamed at what he beheld: a human face with a skeleton's sight: round lidless eyes bulging, always to be open, never able to close.

Laughing, Wrath-Pei drew the mirror away. "Splendid! Thank you! Splendid!"

"Why have you done this to me?" Dalin cried. Wrath-Pei chuckled. "I'm afraid your troubles have only just begun, King Shar. To Prime Comehan, you are of no use at all. If he had you, you would be dead now. You are of no use to me now, but you may be later. So I'm afraid you must go to a safe place, an out-of-the-way place."

Wrath-Pei's chair moved back away from Dalin's; the king beheld a black-dressed boy without fingers, who guided it from the room. He felt his own chair move forward, following Wrath-Pei's, through corridors, out into the deep, cool darkness of Titanian night. They entered two transports, and after a short journey, Dalin's chair once more followed, as Wrath-Pei entered a spacious building whose outside dimensions Dalin gauged as huge. They were sped through hallways, and then Dalin was thrust ahead of a waiting Wrath-Pei, whose chair had been pulled to the side of an open entrance, into which Dalin's own was pushed.

And there was Tabrel Kris, in the flesh, sitting quietly in her chair staring sadly out at the night.

Overcome with the sight of her, forgetting his circumstances, Dalin screamed "Tabrel!" while trying to urge his chair forward from where it had been stopped in the center of the room, meters from the window and from Tabrel Kris.

Slowly, Tabrel turned from the window. She stared at Dalin with unfocused eyes. For a long moment she looked confused, as if her mind were traveling back from another place.

Then, slowly, she turned back to the window. "Tabrel, it's me! Dalin Shar!"

Tabrel made no movement.

Dalin covered his face with his hands, tears beginning to flow from the corners of his ruined eyes.

To the sound of Wrath-Pei's laughter, Dalin was taken from the room and returned to the waiting transport.

"I should have told you, King Shar," Wrath-Pei tittered, "that she's married! I can't tell you how amusing it was to me when Queen Kamath Clan discovered through her ... ministrations that our little princess was in love with you instead of poor Prince Jamal. Though by her reaction to your current appearance she may rethink her relationship to her hubby—unless, of course, due to the potions she didn't even recognize you." The titter built to a full-throated laugh as Dalin was pushed into the back of the transport and the door closed on him.

"Off we go!" Wrath-Pei said, and when Dalin's tears began to dry he was once more on board a ship in phase drive, on his way to a place he could not imagine.

"M
agnificent!"

Prime Cornelian, High Leader, could not keep the delight and satisfaction from his voice. Though he knew that most, if not all, of what he now beheld had been staged for his benefit (especially since he had given the directions himself), there was nevertheless a part of him that relished the moment in terms beyond the purely theatrical.

There was, after all, a part of all humans that relished spectacle, was there not? Did not the ancients have their victory celebrations?

Bread and circuses—didn't someone once write that that was what the public craved?

And staged and theatrical though it was, the public surely seemed to crave it.

Lowell City—and Mars—had never seen anything like it, of this the High Leader was sure. Even in the early days of the republic, when the first prefects marched on foot to preside over the first Senates, Prime Cornelian knew that there had not been such a turnout as this. For those early parades had
been mere celebrations of government, a public display of civics. This was something much grander, and much more conducive to hysteria: a planetwide banquet hailing the subjugation of another planet—and, of course, the man who had accomplished it.

Had any such thing ever occurred anywhere on the Four Worlds? The High Leader doubted it. Even the Earth ancients of Rome—who had, after all, named Mars after their god of war—could not approach this spectacle in elegance and magnitude, never mind sheer length. Here came the High Leader himself at the head of the pageant, riding upon an armored float forty meters high (shielded of course); its lighted bunting pleasantly hurt the eyes, even here in broad daylight, of the thousands who lined the thoroughfare, fifty deep in places. From his perch the High Leader tried to find guile or hidden treachery on their adoring faces, but could find none. Oh, how the people loved a winner! Weeks ago he had been vilified in secret, no doubt plotted against; his only ally had been the iron fist and the absolute will to use it. How long ago had he ordered the annihilation of one of his own towns—and then blamed it on off-planet intervention, not expecting anyone, most of all Martians, to believe it? How recently had they hated his every move; his suppression of liberties, even basic ones; his outright murder of their elected officials; his threat to destroy any of them, at any time, merely because it suited his purposes? But today—they loved him! Pynthas had reported that the Red Police had arrested only ten people in the last three days—and seven of them for plotting victory celebrations in Prime Cornelian's honor that were so grand as to be dangerous! The High Leader had immediately commuted their sentences.

They loved him!

This was something that Prime Cornelian had yet to fully understand. He knew it was possible
;
as a student of history he understood the phenomenon well. But these adoring, wildly happy, tear-stained faces to whom he had merely brought a victory he had expected all along—this was something new and unknown to him. And he found that he was enjoying it.

Waving now to the endless crowds, lifting two and sometimes four limbs in acknowledgment, to the extent that his joints began to ache for an oil bath (oh, how good that would feel later!) he had to admit that it was much better to be liked than hated. Not quite as good, or useful, as being feared—but it could take second place.

And to the horizon, to either side of the grand thoroughfare which had been built by the early Martians to celebrate their independence and their democracy, he saw only Martian faces, filled with love for him.

For the briefest moment, his own heart felt something like love for these, his people, to whom he had brought greatness for his planet.

Proudly, he stood up on his rear limbs and waved high to the crowd, knowing that they would enjoy
the rest of what the day held in store, the rest of the victory parade.

Behind Cornelian's armored float came another display, at eye level. As the ancients had done, so, too, now marched, in the modern equivalent of chains, the vilified loser of the recent conflict: Targon Ramir, lately Venusian leader, now conquered and humbled.

And behind the prisoner and the mile of sharply dressed, crisply marching Martian Marines, a veritable circus of wonders: miles of captured goods already imported from Venus: carts filled with fruits and vegetables; expensive fishes and animals rarely seen on parched Mars, not even in zoos—otters, seals, the massive, tanked sleek body of a tiger shark swimming angrily and ceaselessly, a
penguin
(all but extinct on Earth, a quick failure at Mars' north polar cap, but thriving in the doctored southern wastes of Venus' growing ice shelf)—and tomatoes as large as big fists, cabbages like leafy gods, red peppers the size of heads, bananas so yellow they hurt the eyes. All of these were wonders to the thin Martians. And there were other goods as well: trees, sequoia breeds pulled up at the root and transported whole, displayed on trailers like fallen rockets; they would make expensive houses and be worked by Martian craftsmen into marvelous carvings. Indeed, there had been a time on Mars when wood itself had proved better barter than precious metals; these days, it was merely pricey and rare. There were carv
ers out in that crowd, Cornelian knew, who now wept with joy and thanksgiving. Feeling their eyes on him now, he made his wave even more imperious.

There came caravans of Venusian equipment. Though much had been left on Venus to aid Carter Frolich in his continued work, much had been stolen away to find new uses on Mars. The prize of the lot: a feeder station, whose parts, now displayed, would be reassembled in the Syrtis region and aid in Mars' own continual renewal. It represented the finest in all the Worlds, and though Frolich had been loath to part with it (not that he had had much choice), he had contented himself with Cornelian's promise of aid to build even bigger and better facilities. At this, Frolich's eyes had nearly washed over with grateful tears.

My, my!
Cornelian thought.
Everyone loves me these days!

And then came eight massive plasma detonators; their tubes, bluer than any ocean or sky, straddling three trailers each. They made the sequoias look like toothpicks. But here they were, serving a threefold purpose as testaments to Targon Ramir's failure, as spoils of war, and (though no Martian was aware of it) as useful weapons on the home front.