Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy (8 page)

One section of the facility was still unfinished; nearby were modeling materials, tiny sticks of plastic, a thin raser knife to cut them with.

Carter pulled up a chair, adjusted the lighting onto the model, fitted a close-up lens over his eye for the exquisitely delicate work.

He picked up the raser in his hand.

Regarding it for a moment, he pushed the tab that activated the pencil-point-thin cutting beam.

Pushing up the sleeve of his tunic, he burned a straight line into his flesh, until he could smell his own corporeal self roasting, as he knew he would roast in hell when his time on Eden was finished.

There were many such lines on his arms, and thighs.

He had thought of burning his eyes out, but knew that he needed them for work and that his visions would nevertheless continue unabated.

His finger, rock steady, lifted from the raser’s firing tab; for a moment he regarded the singed flesh, giving off a blackened smoke.

He let his tunic fall back over his arm.

He bent over the model, and began to work.

Chapter 9

R
emember.

Within the labyrinths of Kamath Clan’s mind, withdrawal was beginning to take hold. She had always told herself, with the rock-hard certainty she held to all things in life, that if this moment ever came—as it inevitably would when Quog passed from life—she would be able to abide it. But she was wrong. Quog had become such an integral part of her existence over the years that now, when his essence was finally denied her, the depths of her addiction were all too apparent.

There had been other, shorter periods when she had been denied—or had tried to abstain. Denied: when Quog, in one of his periodic fits of temper or madness, had refused to see and provide her. Abstinence: when she had resolved, years ago, when it first became apparent that her reliance on Quog was becoming too strong—a danger for any ruler open to blackmail or extortion—to give up the pleasure altogether. Always she had returned to Quog and always, in the end, he had accommodated her.

It was only now that the bill was coming due, that the danger in her failure at both denial and abstinence was all too apparent.

She both cursed herself for her weakness and wished with all her being that Quog was here before her.

At this moment she would do anything he asked, debase herself however he demanded, if only he would furnish what she required.

What her withdrawing mind needed.

“Ohhhhhhhh.”

Kamath Clan’s head was on fire, felt as if the synapses between her brain’s cells were lit with hot chemicals. None of her potions had eased the growing pain, the growing need; nothing she had done, no mantra of Moral Guidance, no secular prayer of her ancestor, Faran Clan, could remove this blight from her mind.

Remember.

But she could not!

Her brain screamed for memories, for the sweet, relived times on Earth, happiness under a sapphire-blue sky, the bright, washed smell of a puppy wriggling in her bosom, the towering safeness of her mother and father standing against the warmth of a perfect summer day; the nearness of Sol, hot on the skin, the smell of cut green grass, and the gasp-inducing stark wet look of a healthy apple tree against that perfect sky on that
single perfect day.…

“Ohhhhhhhhhh!”

But none of it came! None of it was there! While her brain cried to relive that one perfect moment in her life before everything became hard and changed forever—that one, single,
perfect
instant when she was six years old, the timeless frozen moment of pure happiness that Quog had stretched out for her all these years of unhappiness and hardness—there was only fire! Heat instead of memories! Living death instead of reliving!

Screaming out, holding her head as if it would burst, Queen Kamath Clan fell to the floor in her chambers and sought to drown her pain with blankness. She would think of nothing.

But still her brain cried out for memories, sucking at the dry teat of reliving!

Remember.

“NOOOOOOOOOOO!”

From far off, but only in the next room, she heard her son Jamal undergoing his own pains. They would not be as severe, she surmised—doubly for the reason that he had not partaken of Quog’s offering as long and had precious little of happiness to remember. Still, her heart, in the midst of the fire in her head, went out to him.

And, in lesser measure, to the other.…

“Ohhhhhhhhhhh!”

The wave of withdrawal grew higher, carrying her screaming with it, to the point, finally, where she dove up into fiery blackness and lay still on her bare floor, asleep but undreaming.

S
he awoke with the artificial light of day streaming through the window. The Screen in her room proclaimed the time as midday. Her ordeal had lasted days. She rose slowly, limbs trembling, from the floor and beheld herself in the room’s mirror; she was herself, only less so, a large figure whose outer skin had shrunk and wrinkled. The fire in her head had, for the moment, abated.

She examined the room, noting the scattered potion bottles, some shattered. There was a hole in one wall that she did not remember inflicting; the toilet smelled of vomit.

She straightened up, cleansed herself, changed her clothing, and, breathing deeply, went out into the hallway.

A guard stood back, looking fearful, but with measured relief on his countenance when Kamath Clan glared at him.

“You stood vigil the whole time?”

“Yes, my queen,” he said.

She nodded, suppressing a shiver. “And the children?”

“Still in their rooms, my queen.”

Kamath took an unsteady step forward, her glare hardening when the guard reached to help her. “Stay at your post.”

“Yes, my queen.”

Kamath Clan opened the door to her son’s room and entered, closing it behind her.

Jamal lay on his bed, mouth open wide, staring at something on the ceiling that wasn’t there.

When Kamath stood over him, invoking his name, he said nothing, but his parched lips undertook to move.

In a cold whisper, Kamath said, “It will be all right, Jamal. You are new to it, and I pray it will let you go more easily. Also, you will enjoy its benefits longer.” Obviously lost in a mixture of pain and rapture, Jamal nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Ta-brel …”

Kamath said, “Yes. I will see her now.”

She left Jamal and opened the door separating her son’s room from his inconsummate bride’s.

Tabrel Kris, in a condition similar to Jamal’s, sat huddled in a corner, eyes staring at nothingness.

“You are stronger than my son, and it will give you up less easily,” Kamath Clan said. “Enjoy it while you can.”

The girl’s lips moved, and the queen moved close enough to hear the word “garden” spoken in a whisper.

“Be in your garden, then,” Kamath Clan said; and then, in a gesture that in her normal course would have been abhorrent and alien to her, she touched the girl’s head.

“Stay in your garden as long as you may, and fight with your nails to give it up.”

Briefly, and with a flicker of recognition, Tabrel looked up at her; and Kamath Clan, startled, saw defiance.

In a moment the waning drug overwhelmed her again, and her mouth moved ever so slightly.

“Garden …”

“Yes,” Kamath said, all thoughts of tenderness purged, other thoughts of necessity overtaking them. Suddenly she knew what must be done.

B
ack in her chambers, the queen activated her Screen and sought to call Wrath-Pei.

One last time.

Still, the traitorous pirate would not speak with her. The Screen remained blank, and Kamath Clan could almost hear Wrath-Pei’s laughter.

She switched the Screen off.

An image of Quog—alive or dead, it made no difference—flashed before her, and she could feel the aching fire of withdrawal rising within her again.

“Damn you, Wrath-Pei.”

He would laugh no more when she was finished with him.

Quickly, before her brain’s burning became too much for her to bear and she collapsed screaming to the floor once more, she reactivated the Screen and placed another call, one she had never before made. Before long she spoke with Prime Cornelian, High Leader of Mars.

Chapter 10

D
alin was doomed—and then he was alive.

There was no other way to think of it. The sequence of events was a simple one: he had put his weight on the ice shelf; the shelf had given way, causing him to fall to his death; something had shimmered beneath him, and then he was back on the ice shelf, on a solid wide area beside all of his and Shatz Abel’s equipment, as if nothing had happened.

It was that simple—and that complicated.

What had the
goblin—
the
thing
that saved him—been?

He had no idea; except that he had felt a tingle on his skin, as if something had penetrated him skin-deep. And then he had felt nothing, and the creature, whatever it had been, was gone.

He rolled up his sleeve and examined his skin; there was no trace of anything, and nothing unusual, no shimmer, no wave of light, was left anywhere around him.

By this time, Shatz Abel, nearly mad with concern, had made his way down to the ice ledge; he looked down for a safe place to step and his eyes widened with astonishment to see Dalin looking safely up at him.

“But Sire! I saw—I mean, you fell—I mean—”

“
Yes,
I did fail,” Dalin said. “But here I am.”

“Goblins!” Shatz Abel said, standing firmly now on the ice ledge. He reached out to poke at the king tentatively.

Dalin said, “Yes. Apparently there
are
goblins.”

“I knew it! We’re doomed!”

“Hardly,” Dalin said. “After all, whatever it was, it saved my hide.”

“True!” the pirate said. He edged to the ice shelf’s lip and looked over. “Is it gone?”

“I think so,” Dalin said. “When it let me go it seemed to melt upward, into thin air.”

“Goblins! So the stories are true!”

“It looks that way,” Dalin said. “Shouldn’t we be moving on?”

Shatz Abel was studying the entire area around them, eyes darting to and fro.

“I said it’s gone,” Dalin said.

“Perhaps,” the pirate said, looking at Dalin. “Then again, perhaps not.”

R
ather than stay on the inconstant ice shelf, they began their descent. Below them another hundred meters was a narrower shelf, and they climbed down to it. This time, Shatz Abel went first, driving pitons deep into the ice; they both wore harnesses and trusted no crevice or step.

Halfway to the next ledge the ice began to dissipate; and soon they were descending a sheer rock face. To Dalin’s surprise, he saw that what he had taken to be bottomless had seemed so because the rock’s deepening color had given the illusion of making it look deeper than it actually was. In fact, below the second ledge they soon reached a slope that angled downward into a long valley. Soon they were walking instead of rappelling.

When they rested, Dalin looked up to mark their progress and was astounded by how much territory they had covered; the black sky above was a faraway slit between towering walls of rock and ice. At the bottom, their valley had nearly evened out; at this rate, they would reach the far side before making camp and be ready to make the ascent up the far wall after sleep.

“It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” Dalin said.

Shatz Abel shook his head. “As I keep telling you, Sire, we’ve barely started. And it’s a lot harder to climb up than
fall
down.”

The huge pirate began to study their surroundings closely as they walked; no doubt, Dalin thought, looking for goblins.

A
t the base of the far canyon wall, they camped, ate from food tubes and sought sleep. Dalin knew that Shatz Abel was having trouble with slumber—the big man snored like a bellows when he slept, and tonight there was only silence, punctuated by occasional loud snufflings, from the pirates’s sleeping bag. Dalin himself found sleep elusive; here at the bottom of Christy Chasm the wind whistled and moaned, sounding like a cacophony of wailing ghosts. High above, through the cut of rocks that showed the sky, he saw part of an asterism that may have been the Big Dipper; to either side of it a wash of fainter stars brushed the night.

Knowing the pirate was awake, Dalin asked, “Shatz Abel?”

The other grunted, then said, “What is it?”

“Why isn’t there snow down here?”

“The storm’s are localized. There are times when this arroyo is filled to the brim with snow, I’ll wager.”

“Are you worrying about goblins?”

The pirate snorted. “Not worrying. Wondering.”

“You have no idea what they are?”

“None. And it vexes me. I’ve been to most of the moons of the Solar System, set foot on every planet you could set foot on, and yet I’ve never met anything but transplanted men. We’re all of us from Earth, your domain, originally; the Martians, Titanians, what men are left on Venus, here on Pluto. All from Earth. Outside of a few Martian fossils, there’s never been anything anywhere else to compare with Earth life. But now…”

“Why does it bother you?”

“As I said, Sire—it makes me wonder.”

Dalin was growing tired, felt his mind drifting toward slumber as he yawned the words: “Wonder about what, exactly?”

“Wonder about what’s beyond our little Pluto here.”

“Hmm.” Dalin barely heard the pirate’s final words, and yet they penetrated his mind and colored his dreams with shimmers of particle waves.

“And who,” Shatz Abel said.

A
wakening refreshed and dream-riddled, they made their ascent by the light of SunOne.

Shatz Abel proved a skilled climber; and with their adequate gear they had climbed a quarter of the way up in no time. The spot they had chosen was not ideal, though, and now the difficult part of the mount ensued. Dalin was not keen on dangling from a jut of rock, held by rope and piton, while the pirate scaled above him, looking for proper hand and footholds; one slip reminded him all too much of his recent brush with death, as he swung to and fro while the pirate, cursing above him, hauled him back to safety.