The Road to Amber (36 page)

Sanskrit
was the liturgical or high speech of ancient India.
Okeān
means ocean. A
pragmatist
is a practical person.
Magnanimous
is generous and forgiving.
Sidereal
means related to the stars. In mythology
avatars
are physical incarnations of gods; since Zelazny wrote this poem, avatars have become the symbols that represent a person on-line. To
vitiate
is to corrupt. To
syncopate
means to emphasize musical notes off the regular beat.
Deific
means divine.
Obfuscation
is the act of deliberately causing confusion.

U
ttering a curse in his well-practiced falsetto, Cora swung his blade and cut down the opposing swords-woman. His contoured breastplate emphasized features which were not truly present.

Simultaneous then, attacks came from the right and the left. Beginning his battle-song, he parried to the left, cut to the right, parried left again, cut through that warrior, parried right, and thrust. Both attackers fell.

“Well done, sister!” shouted Edwina, the aging axe-woman, from where she stood embattled ten feet away. High compliment from a veteran!

Smiling, Cora prepared for another onslaught, recalling when he had been Corak the cook but months before. He had had a dream then, and now he was living it.

He had thought of being a great warrior, laying about him in battle, famed in song and story for his prowess. How he had practiced with the blade! Until one day he realized he need also practice his walk and his speech—as well as shaving closely and clandestinely every day—if he were ever to realize that dream. So he did. And one day he disappeared, Cora appeared weeks later, and a legend was born. Several months into the campaign now, and he was not only accepted but celebrated—Cora, Lady of Steel.

But the enemy, too, had heard of him, and all seemed anxious to claim the glory of reaping his head. Perspiration broke out on his brow as five warriors moved to engage him. The first he took out quickly with a surprise rush. The others—more wary now—fought conservatively, seeking to wear him down. His arms ached by the time he had dealt with the second. His battle-song broke as he dispatched the third and took a cut deep in his right thigh from one of the others. He faltered.

“Courage, sisterl” shouted Edwina, hacking her way toward him.

He could barely defend himself against the nearer warrior as Edwina took out the fourth. Finally, he stumbled, knowing he could not rise in time to save himself from the death-blow.

At the last moment, however, an axe flashed and his final assailant’s head rolled away in the direction of her retreating sisters.

“Rest!” Edwina ordered, taking up a defensive position above him. “They flee! We have the field!”

He lay there, clutching his thigh and watching the retreat, fighting to retain consciousness. “Good,” he said. This was the closest it had ever been…

After a time, Edwina helped him to his feet. “Well-acquitted, Steel Lady,” she said. “Lean on me. I’ll help you back to camp.”

Inside her tent, the fractured leg-armor removed, she bathed the wound. “This will not cripple you,” she said. “We’ll have you good as new shortly.”

But the wound extended higher. Suddenly, she had drawn aside his loincloth to continue her ministrations. He heard her gasp.

“Yes,” he said then. “You know my secret. It was the only way for me to distinguish myself—to show that I could do the work as well or better than a woman.”

“I must say that you have,” Edwina admitted. “I remember your prowess at Oloprat, Tanquay, and Pord. You are a most unusual man. I respect you for what you have done.”

“You will help me keep my secret then?” he asked. “Let me complete the campaign? Let me make a record to show the world a man can do this work, too?”

She studied him, then winked, pinched his fanny, and smiled.

“I’m sure we can work something out,” she said.

Zelazny drew criticism because his early work had no strong female characters, and he corrected that with Mari in “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” (see afterword to that story). Here, Zelazny’s strong female characters and irreverent humor manage to poke fun at a few gender stereotypes.

Falsetto
is a man’s falsely high singing or speaking voice.
Parried
means warded off a blow.
Clandestinely
means secretly, often to conceal an illicit act.

J
eremy Baker was the only survivor when the
Raven
‘s Warton-Purg drive delivered the vessel to the vicinity of a black hole. Its tidal forces immediately did their stuff. The hull groaned and cracked as indicators screamed the ship’s situation and listed its problems. Jeremy, who had been somewhat bored, had been in the possibly enviable position of testing his powerful extravehicular survival suit at the time of the disaster. He had on everything but the helmet, which he promptly donned. Then he hurried to the control station with the intention of activating the Warton-Purg drive again in hopes off leeing through extracurricular space—though under the circumstances it was more likely to cause the
Raven
to explode. But then the
Raven
was exploding anyway and it was worth a shot.

He never made it.

The vessel came apart about him. He thought he glimpsed the jumpsuited figure of one of his crewmates spinning amid the debris, but he could not be certain.

Suddenly, he was alone. Pieces of the Raven drifted away from him. He took a sip of the suit’s water, wondering when he would feel a great heaviness in his feet as they were drawn down the gravity well faster than the rest of him—or perhaps it would be his head. He was uncertain as to his orientation. Still half in shock, he scanned the sky, peering into a star-occluding blackness. There. It would be his right arm where the stretching would begin. At least it would be an interesting way to die, he reflected. Not too many people had gotten to try it, though there had been a lot of colorful speculation.

He seemed to drift for a long while, musing on final splendors, without detecting any unusual sensations other than occasionally glimpsing what seemed a small, local patch of flickering light. He could not be certain as to its source. After a time, he felt an uncontrollable drowsiness and he slept.

“That’s better,” a voice seemed to be saying to him a bit later. “Seems to be working fine.”

“Who—What are you?” Jeremy asked.

“I’m a Fleep,” came the answer. “I’m that flickering patch of light you were wondering about a while back.”

“You live around here?”

“I have for a long while, Jeremy. It’s easy if you’re an energy being with a lot of psi powers.”

“That’s how we’re conversing?”

“Yes. I installed a telepathic function in your mind while I had you unconscious.”

“Why aren’t I being stretched into miles of spaghetti right now?”

“I created an antigravity field berween you and the black hole. They cancel.”

“Why’d you help me?”

“It’s good to have someone new to talk to. Sometimes I get bored with my fellow Fleep.”

“Oh, there’s a whole colony of you?”

“Sure. This is a great place to study physics, and we’re all into such pursuits.”

“It doesn’t seem an environment where life would develop.”

“True. We were once a race of material beings but we were sufficiently evolved that when we saw our sun was going to go supernova we elected to transform ourselves into this state and study it rather than flee. In fact, that black hole used to be our sun. Makes a great lab. Come on, I’ll show you. You can see more than you used to because I fiddled with your senses, too. I increased their range. For one thing, you should be able to detect a halo of Hawking radiation above the event horizon.”

“Yes. Lavender, violet, purple… It’s rather lovely. If I kept going and passed through the event horizon would my image really be captured there forever? Could I come back and see myself frozen at that moment?”

“Yes, and no. Yes, you would clutter up the view with your arrested light. No, you couldn’t come back and see yourself doing it. There’s no way out once you go in.”

“I phrased it poorly. Say, if there are other Fleep, there must be something special to call you to distinguish you.”

“Call me Nik,” the other said.

“Okay, Nik. What are those pinpoints of fire ahead? And the huge dark masses about them?”

“Those are my people, performing an experiment. I’ve been moving us at a very high velocity.”

“I’ve noticed that the hole covers a lot more of the sky now. What sort of experiment?”

“Those great dark masses are the remnants of tens of thousands of suns and planets we’ve transported here. You only see the ones in space proper. We pull them out as we need them. We’re shooting them into the hole.”

“Why?”

“To increase its rate of rotation.”

“Uh—To what end?”

“The creation of closed timelike curves.”

“You’ve got me on that one.”

“Time loops. To permit us to run backward through the past.”

“Any successes so far?”

“Yes. A few.”

“Have you got anything that might permit me to get back to the
Raven
before the explosion?”

“That’s pushing it. But it’s one of the things I wanted to check.”

They matched velocities with the flickering congregation, and Nik took him into the vicinity of the largest of these beings. The conversation that followed resembled heat lightning.

“Vik says there’s one that might do it,” Nik told him after a time.

“Let me use it. Please.”

“You should also have strength of mind sufficient to alter your velocity by thought alone,” Nik said. “Come this way.”

Jeremy followed him by willing it until, abruptly, he faced a mass of lines which resembled a computer design suddenly generated in free space.

“I did that just to make you conscious of it,” Nik said. “Enter the trapezoid to your left.”

“If this works I may not see you again. I’d better say thanks now.”

“Noted with pleasure, though I’d like to have kept you longer, for full conversations. I understand your state of mind, however. Go.”

Jeremy entered the trapezoid.

In an instant, everything changed. He was back aboard the
Raven
, standing wearing his suit, helmet in hand. Immediately, he rushed toward the control station, donning his helmet as he went. He felt the familiar drop into space proper. The tidal forces took hold of the
Raven
, and it began to groan and creak.

He could see the switches for the Warton-Purg drive and he extended his arm, reaching. Then the ship came apart and he was drawn away from the controls. He glimpsed a jumpsuited human form, turning and turning.

Later, drifting he met a Nik who did not recall him but who quickly understood his explanation as to what had occurred.

“Am I still in the closed timelike curve?” Jeremy asked.

“Oh, yes. I know of no way of departing a CTC till it’s run its course,” Nik replied. “In fact, theoretically, if you could do it you’d wind up inside the black hole.”

“Guess things get to run their course then. But listen, this time around it was a little different than the first time.”

“Yes. Your classical physics is deterministic, but this isn’t classical physics.”

“I actually got close to the
Raven
‘s controls. I wonder…”

“What?”

“You’ve installed a form of telepathy in my mind. Could you also teach me something—telekinetic, perhaps—that would give me the ability to hold a bubble of air around my head for a minute or two. I’m convinced that slowing to put on the helmet was what kept me from reaching the controls.”

“We’ll see what we can do. Take a nap.”

When Jeremy awoke he had the ability to move small objects with his mind. He tested this by removing units from his tool kit, having them orbit his arms, his legs, his head, and returning them without touching them physically.

“I think I’ve got it, Nik. Thanks.”

“You’re an interesting study, Jeremy.”

This time when he entered the trapezoid he had his mind flexed, and he gathered the bubble of air to him as he rushed toward the control station.

He waited, his hand hovering above the appropriate bank of lights, for the Warton-Purg drive to drop the
Raven
into space proper. The lights went out. Immediately, he ran his hand across the row, illuminating them again.

Simultaneous with the clutch of the tidal forces, he felt the explosion from the rear of the vessel. The manual had been right. Reactivating the drive immediately following shut down was hazardous to the health. He pulled on his helmet as a sheet of flame flashed toward him. The suit’s insulation protected him from the heat as the
Raven
came apart. This time he did not see the jumpsuited figure.