The Parallel Man (6 page)

I hid a smile and picked up the belt with the pouch. Opening the pouch I spilled out the small gold-colored discs it contained and told Pellow, “Divide them into two piles; I’ll choose one and leave you the other.” He gave me an admiring grin and did as I had told him. I watched his hands to see that none of the discs disappeared.

“Benton can’t stay here much longer,” he told me, “he has business to attend to in the City. He’d leave you here to hunt if you wanted, but I wouldn’t advise it; you’re too isolated here if the Fenric thing blows up, as it might. You have quick wits and good luck, cit; I’ll be happy to stay with you if you want me. What are your plans?”

I looked at him and said slowly, “Stay with me if you wish, Joseph Pellow. I plan to make a journey, if I am not prevented. A journey to a place called Carpathia.”

Pellow darted a sharp glance at me. “And where may that be?” he asked.

I tried to remember the exact words that Benton had used. “One of those little star systems out on the Tail,” I said.

Pellow’s hands closed protectively over his little pile of golden discs. “Star passage is expensive,” he said. “Still . . . Wait, though. Benton is a trader. Surely he can arrange passage for us if you ask him. From the questions the sister asked me, they have the idea that you do some sort of secret work. If you told him that you wanted to get to Carpathia unobtrusively, he’d probably be able to arrange passage for us on a cargo ship. It’s done often enough; I know from my days as a flitter.”

I hesitated. Some obscure sense that I was somehow being pursued or sought told me to leave no trail that could be followed. But surely if Benton thought that I was on some secret errand he would turn away anyone trying to trace me. I had done little enough for him but he felt himself obliged to me. In fact, I felt the obligation went in the other direction, but I liked young Benton and did not mind being obliged to him. “All right,” I said reluctantly, “I’ll speak to him.”

Benton was engagingly eager to do something for me and to prove himself a man of importance. He unlocked a small room full of gleaming machines and flashing lights, spoke to several disembodied voices and imaged faces, then turned to me and said with a smile, “We’re in luck. A startrader who owes our House a favor actually has a cargo going to Carpathia. You and Pellow will travel as special supercargoes responsible for that shipment. The ship is a little Independent carrying a variety of small shipments. But the captain is experienced and the ship is fairly new. She’ll lift day after tomorrow if that suits you, and you can go aboard tomorrow night.” He waved my thanks aside and plunged into plans for a boar hunt and feast the next day.

Between the hunt and the feast I was in little condition to take much note of my surroundings when Benton’s flying pavilion carried me back to the city the following evening. The pavilion landed on a broad sweep of what looked like lawn, brightly lit by glowing globes on tall poles. When Pellow and I emerged from the pavilion, though, the stuff underfoot was not grass, but some slightly resilient stuff the color of grass. A tough, competent-looking man in dark, close-fitting garments met us and led us past immense mysterious structures to a great circular thing like a giant’s shield flung carelessly on the false greensward. A square opening in the edge of the thing was evidently an entryway; a light warmer than that of the globes spilled from it.

I could see as we entered that the outer walls of this thing were immensely thick, made of some smooth dark stuff. Inside there was a sort of high desk occupied by a slender man with the look of a clerk. On the wall behind the desk the word “Argo” was written in golden letters and beneath it a stylized picture of a small sailing galley that might have sailed the Inner Sea. Standing beside the desk talking to the clerk-like man was a tall dark-haired woman of remarkable beauty, who had an air of absolute authority. She might have been a reigning queen. I was not surprised when my guide saluted her and said, “These are the two men from Degnan Freres, Captain.”

She nodded and gave us a brief smile which lit up her dark eyes. “I’m Elena Petros,” she said. “Welcome aboard Argo. Your cargo is already sealed in Gamma hold. I’m not sure what point there is to sending you with it, but you’re welcome enough to the spare cabin.” Her eyes flicked over Pellow, then measured me with an approving look I might have resented from a woman less magnificent than this one. “You have the look of a Carpathian,” she told me. “I presume that you’re homeward bound.”

A sudden feeling of uncertainty swept over me. “I hope so, Lady,” I said. Could it really be so easy as this, stepping onto this strange vessel and voyaging back to the place I had come from? Could Castle Thorn and the court of Carpathia exist in the same world as this place of enchantments? Young Benton had spoken as if a cargo to Carpathia was a commonplace enough affair, but surely nothing like this great dark disc had ever been seen in the skies of my homeland.

Captain Elena Petros looked into my eyes. Her own magnificent dark eyes seemed to pierce my soul. “Will home be home when you get back?” she said softly. “Yes, it’s a feeling that starflitters know well.” She gave another of her brilliant smiles and turned to the clerkly man. “There shouldn’t be anything else coming aboard tonight, Tamma,” she told him. “You might as well seal the sally port and show these cits to their cabin.” The man saluted and slid down from his high stool. He touched a circle on the desk, and with a deep hum the ramp by which we had climbed up to this entryway lifted from the ground, pivoting on the threshold. It covered the doorway by which we had entered, fitting flush with the inner wall with a slight click. Those thick walls and the door made by the ramp made a formidable barrier. Against what, I wondered?

I learned the next morning, as I sat on my bed in a room that except for its smaller size might have been the room I had awakened in in the place they had called a “hospital.” As in that other room, there was an oval of swirling colors on the wall, which Pellow called a “View.” Touching one of the now-familiar circles made the colors vanish, to be replaced by what seemed to be a window looking out on the area we had walked through the night before. Dawn was still streaking the sky with colors when three red flashes chased each other across the scene and a woman’s voice spoke from the air. “Lift off in thirty seconds,” said the voice. “Off-duty crew and passengers secure for liftoff.”

There was a deep rumble and the fabric of the room shook very slightly, in the oval view the ground suddenly dropped away, and I saw again, as I had seen from Benton’s flying pavilion, the towers of the enchanters’ city. It was set among rolling hills: I looked for Benton’s estate and lodge but we were soon too high to see any building of ordinary size.

Higher and higher we went: I saw snow-capped mountains off to one side and a blue infinity that could only be the sea a long way off on the other side. The panorama was already vaster than any I had seen from the highest peak in Carpathia, but we rose yet higher; what sky I could see turned strangely dark, and the land beneath me seemed to take on a curve. As I watched in fascination the arc of the sky grew in proportion to the land and stars began to appear. After I don’t know how long I saw the starry sky engulf the land and sea, until the place we had come from was only a circle of misty blue set in a night sky full of stars.

Pellow’s voice brought me out of my trance. “Spectacular, isn’t it?” he said softly. “We take off on gravity-effect engines and it’s most economical to head straight for the sun, so you see the whole dayside.” Then he said more briskly, “There’s time for breakfast before we go Q. Not that you’ll feel the lack of it when you’re Q-time, but your body needs it and you might as well eat while you can still enjoy it.” From a niche in the wall very much like that in the “hospital” room he produced a tray of food and drink far tastier than the food in the “hospital” had been. Pellow grinned. “Trust a Greek captain to see that the Departure Day breakfast is a good one,” he said.

The three flashes came again and the voice said, “Prepare to go Q.” Pellow shrugged and carried our dishes back to the niche where they were whisked away as if by invisible fingers. A whooshing sound as of a great wind sighed through the room for a moment and Pellow cocked his head to listen. “Letting air out of the cargo holds,” he said. “The captain leaves it till the last moment for some reason. Wonder what the cargo is that we’re supposed to be in charge of.” He went to his bunk and stretched himself out, turning his face to the wall. Three flashes again and the disembodied voice said, “Entering Q space.”

In the View the starry sky blinked out, to be replaced by a curious gray blankness through which amorphous gray shapes moved slowly. After a moment I tore my eyes away and turned my face to the wall as Pellow had done. Waves of hot and cold seemed to move through my body and I had the unpleasant feeling that those gray shapes were moving unseen through the room and through my body. My heart pounded, then seemed to stop and start again. A weight seemed to rest on my chest and I struggled for breath, then the weight vanished and I was panting in shallow breaths. My sight blurred, then cleared again. Gradually I settled into a sort of dull apathy, as if my body and my emotions had been worn out by the rapid oscillations of sensation, and had retreated to a dumb quiescence,

Pellow lifted his head and spoke in a dull monotone. “The first few minutes are the worst, after that your body overloads. You won’t feel like doing anything, but it’s important for you to move around, and take some nourishment when it’s provided, otherwise it’s worse when you come out of it. You can let yourself go during what would be the sleep period so long as you’re able to rouse yourself at the change of watches. It will seem like three or four days until we come out of Q and you’ll feel about as you do now for five or ten days afterward, unless you take some steps. I can help you there; starflitters get to know a few tricks . . .” His voice trailed off and he stared dully ahead of him.

“What is this . . . this . . . state?” I asked him. Pellow gave the ghost of a shrug.

“I’m not sure anyone knows, really,” he said. “We go outside of normal space and time, into—this. We call it quasi-space and quasi-time, Q space and Q time for short. We come back into realspace an immense distance away from where we started. Carpathia is twelve zir from Home; light takes about fifty odd years to make the journey. So far as anyone can tell the ship has taken no realtime at all to make he journey. If you could go Q near a planetary mass starflits would be a great deal easier. As it is, you have to get about fifty diameters out from your departure planet before you can flit and your point of arrival has to be a long way out from any planetary mass. We may take as much as a day or two realtime from POA to planetside. But we’ll still be in emotional freeze—we won’t care.”

Indeed, I cared for little in the time that followed, or seemed to follow. But I forced myself to activity, mindful of Pellow’s warning. I did endless exercises, which never seemed to raise a sweat or leave me tired, forced myself to rise from the bed promptly at the bell which marked the change of watch, and made myself swallow the tasteless food which appeared in the niche in our cabin. On a long campaign I have been so tired that I fought and marched and choked down food like a man asleep yet walking; this was like those times except that I felt no weariness, only a dull apathy that made it easy to lie unmoving in my bunk during the time of “sleep.”

The second “day” I went out of the door of my room, not because I had any desire to, but because some small part of my mind which still judged and willed told me that I should learn what I could of this vessel in which I rode. I wandered long gray corridors and saw sights which might almost have overturned my reason had my emotions not been frozen. Not all of the crewmen on that ship were human. Some were like giant lizards without tails, who walked on two feet. Their glittering black eyes had double lids and their face was covered with fine scales which grew larger on what you could see of their bodies. They were clothed, but more lightly clad than the human crewmen, as if they found the rooms too hot. There was a furred creature with three pale blue eyes and a feathered being with a head like an owl’s. Some of the crewmen who seemed otherwise human had grayish skin or strange vari-colored eyes.

No one hindered me as I wandered through the corridors and I saw strange sights in some of the rooms that I ventured into. A large room held row after row of crystal boxes, each holding a human infant, dead or frozen in some strange sleep. Another room was like an antechamber to a larger room which was separated from it by a large transparent wall. Beyond the wall seemed to be pale green water in which floated something like a giant flower. But as I stood and gazed eyes opened in the flower and surveyed me with what seemed to be intelligence.

Once I came to a door that seemed to be guarded by a crewman who stood beside it. I looked at him and made a gesture of inquiry. He spoke into a small disc on his wrist, seemed to listen, then touched a circle which opened the door. Inside was a great circular room filled with glittering shapes and lights which marched in slow patterns across panels. Before the panels sat crewmen, some human and some not. Several glanced my way; the feathered creature seeming to turn his head completely around to do so. At one end of the room was a chair like a throne, and behind it a semicircular sweep of carpeted floor. Pacing along this floor in what seemed to be a well-worn path, her hands clasped loosely behind her back, was the captain, Elena Petros. She came to the end of her carpeted area, turned and saw me. She gestured me to come to her and I walked over and stood at the edge of the carpet, somehow reluctant to step onto what seemed a private preserve.

Her face and voice seemed almost normal as she greeted me, but it was all will power and magnificent control; her fine eyes had no sparkle and her body was slack when she did not make it move to her will. “You’re very active for a passenger, Citizen Thorn,” she said. “Some of them do nothing but stare at the walls. You’ll be glad of it when you get planetside; you should be out of freeze in the minimum time. Right now we’re busy trying to chart a possible anomaly.

But come back to the bridge after we come out of Q; you’ll get a better view of planetfall from here. It won’t mean much at the time, but it will be something to remember.”

I saluted and left her then, casting an incurious eye on crewmen who stared intently at lighted panels or manipulated curious instruments. Again I exercised, ate and prowled the corridors. Eventually, lights flashed again and a starry sky glowed again on the View in my room. A faint vibration began in the fabric of the ship and after a while one star began to shine more and more brightly. Soon it became a tiny disc, too bright to look at until Pellow touched a circle at the side of the screen and the brilliance faded to a bearable level. “This is a crew cabin,” he said. “Cut-off would be automatic on the View in a passenger cabin. Otherwise some passengers would stare at the primary till they damaged their sight.”