The Warlock Wandering (36 page)

"Of course," Chomoi repeated, numbed.

"I would nurse thee a week, an I could," Gwen said gently, "yet I cannot, and thou must needs arise and aid me."

"Oh, no—Ow!—problem. No, now, I can stand." Rod removed her hand gently as he hefted himself up onto his feet, aching in every joint—but functional. He kept hold of her hand, though. "'

Gwen gazed at Chomoi's wrists, and her manacles exploded. She stared, then rubbed her joints to make sure they 284

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• were untouched by all that force. As she did, two more explosions burst the cuffs at her ankles.

"Watch out for shrapnel," Yorick said softly.

"I did." Gwen looked up at him. "None struck thee, did it?"

"Not a bit," Yorick assured her.

Gwen nodded and glared at his handcuffs. They burst, then his ankle-cuffs, too.

He stood up, flexing his fists. "Shall we go?" Gwen nodded and turned toward the chamber door. "What bearing, husband?"

Rod frowned, gazing off into space as he opened his mind to the myriad of thoughts that spun and twisted through the great complex around them. Down—it would be down low, for protection... There! He caught the thoughts of someone thinking about sending something ahead. He fo-cused on the thoughts ... yes, "ahead" meant "future"—

3511, after Rod's own lifetime. He nodded, satisfied, and reached out to touch and meld with Gwen's mind, leading, showing her.

She nodded. "Aye, I see. Then let us go, husband." The door blew out and away from them, its hinges and bolts shredded like raveled rope. Yorick and Chomoi stared, appalled.

"She's angry," Rod explained. "Catch up, folks." They leaped to keep up with Gwen, and the familiar moire sprang up around them. Just in time—four guards stationed outside looked up in alarm, then yelled as they leaped back, whipping out their blasters.

The blasters burst into flames in their hands.

They howled, throwing the torches from them, nursing their bums. Gwen ignored them and moved on. The other three had to hurry to keep up.

Chomoi was still staring back at the guards, then turned her head around to look up at Rod. "But she's the gentlest soul I've ever met!"

"I told you," Rod said impatiently, "she's angry." An iron grille blocked their path. Gwen glared at it, and it burst into smithereens. She marched through the steel rain of its pieces, into an intersection. Blaster fire erupted from both sides. The bubble around them glowed briefly before the blasters exploded in the armsmen's hands. They screamed and whirled away. Gwen marched on.

"Uh, I hate to be indelicate," Yorick said, "but..."

"Because she loves me," Rod answered. "Besides, I've got some power myself, you know. I could survive long enough to get out of range."

They turned into a stairway. As they came out at the bottom, they saw a dozen men blocking their path with iron nets. Gwen narrowed her eyes, and the strands glowed whitehot. Flames licked out along them, and the guardsmen dropped them, cursing. Gwen surged forward, and the force field crashed into the dozen, bulldozing them out of the way. Some of them screamed as it squashed them against the wall, but Gwen paid no heed.

They turned a corner into a wide hallway. Twenty men were drawn up in front of a high double door in two ranks, one kneeling, one standing, all with blasters ready. The blasters melted in their hands.

They threw them away with yowls of agony, just before the door behind them exploded into iron filings. The guards leaped aside, staring in terror. The iron filings filtered softly to the floor.

Gwen stepped through the door.

A lone technician stood by a wall full of keys, pressurepads, and sliders, with an open-faced cubicle six feet wide set into it. At the sight of them, his mouth stretched in a grimace of horror, but he whirled and started slapping at keys and pads.

Gwen glared.

An invisible hand yanked the man off his feet, three feet into the air. Suddenly he slumped, unconscious, and the 286

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unseen hand dropped him in an untidy bundle.

"He sleeps," Gwen explained. The moire around them disappeared.

Yorick leaped for the wall and started turning and punching. Rod stood slack-limbed in reaction. Only once before had he ever seen Gwen in a real towering rage, and there hadn't been anywhere nearly as much power arrayed against her.

"Dost'a truly know how this device doth function?" Gwen demanded.

"No fear," Yorick snapped. "I know the standard settings by heart."

"But this isn't your brand," Rod protested.

"No," Yorick agreed, "it's a copy. Who do you think invented the damn thing, anyway?" He twisted a final key.

"There! That's date!" He pushed a slider. "That's location!" He punched a sequence on a keypad. "That's the security code! And the instruction to forget!" He punched at a pressure-pad. "And that's the time-delay control! Everybody inside! It'll start up in one minute!"

A huge, hulking shape filled the shattered doorway.

"Laser cannon!" Chomoi yelped.

"Inside, quick!" Rod all but threw her into the six-foot cubicle. Yorick leaped in after her, and Gwen stepped up. Rod was right behind her. He turned just as the cannon rotated, its huge maw facing them. Rod stared into doom. Doom was suddenly warped and twisted and shot through with the color-swirl of the moire. Gwen clasped his hand with both of hers. "Tis as thick a field as I can manage. Now, husband, lend me of thy strength!"

It took a moment. There had been so much power flying around loose during that march from the torture chamber—

and she'd been learning so horribly much about electronics!

But after that moment. Rod managed to remember the girl in the haystack, the mother with the baby in her arms, the gentle partner, and his thoughts flowed and melded with hers.

"Thirty seconds," Yorick groaned.

A stream of ruby light lit the force field.

The whole doorway filled with a sheet of flame. It raged and twisted in convolutions—not in a single blast, but in an endless roiling rage.

Sweat sprang out on Gwen's brow. Her hold tightened on Rod's hand.

Rod gave her all the energy he had, all there was of him. She paled, trembling.

Concern flooded him, and washed into her—concern, tenderness, love.

Heat seared him, a Sahara noon, an oven, a flaming furnace. Chomoi gasped, and Yorick groaned, "Ten seconds." It was ten seconds of eternity, ten seconds of agony, ten seconds of the sickening realization that, this time, they just might not make it, as the flames baked and raged—but it was ten seconds that were just long enough for their minds to meld completely, and for Rod to realize, in the midst of Hellfire, that she was still the same, loving partner, and that she was still his self-interest, as the flame wrapped them up...

The floor lurched, slamming them against each other, and air flooded in, blessedly cool. Dazed, Rod straightened, clinging to Gwen, gradually becoming aware that the flame was gone, that he was staring into a vast chamber filled with bench after bench full of electronic equipment, huge wardrobes, tall cabinets...

And, right in front of them, a short, spare man in a white lab coat, with a mane of white hair and an eagle's face, on a head that was too large. He glared up at them with a gaze that was so piercing Rod almost shuddered, even though he had borne that stare before.

But he pulled himself together, squared his shoulders and 288 Christopher Stasheff

took a deep breath, then stepped down out of the time machine carefully and said, "Dr. McAran, I presume." They were sitting around a circular table, drinking restoratives (hundred proof). Around them, other tables filled the large room, with a variety of people clustered in discussion groups. Egyptian scribes rubbed elbows with ninthcentury paladins; Sumerian peasants chatted with Ming Dynasty bureaucrats. The whole room was a glorious melange of periods and styles, a meeting place of the centuries in a riot of colors, with a nonstop buzz of conversation in a pidgin English that Rod could just barely recognize as the ancestor of his own century's Anglic.

He frowned intently at McAran's last comment. "Well, sure. Of course I understand that Gramarye's pivotal. If it develops into a constitutional monarchy, it'll be able to provide the communications system the DDT will need to keep democracy alive."

"More than that," McAran said. "Your neighbors aren't going to be standoffish, Major. They're going to leave their home planet, lots of them, and they're going to fall in love and marry, wherever they go. A thousand years from now, about half the people in the Terran Sphere will be telepaths—because of your people." Rod just stared. He felt Owen's hand tighten on his, and squeezed back.

McAran waved his last earthquake away. "But that's really secondary. Gramarye's real contribution will be the wiping out of this artificial dichotomy we've developed between intuition and intellect, humanity and technology. Your local chapter of the Order of St. Vidicon is the cutting edge of that revolution, but it's simply formalizing something your whole people have been developing since they landed on Gramarye. Of course, they just view it as magic and mechanics—and they see absolutely no reason why one person can't be gifted in both."

Rod transferred his stare to Gwen.

She looked about her, confused, then back at him. "Milord?"

"Uh... nothing. We'll talk about it later." But he tucked her hand into his elbow and kept firm hold of it with the other hand, as he turned back to McAran. "Okay, so Gramarye is immensely important to the future of democracy, maybe even to the future of humanity, period. So what does that have to do with your coming eleven hundred years into your future, just to meet me?"

McAran looked a little uncomfortable. "Well, I really only came over to the time machine that was bringing you in. You're in the twentieth century right now. Major—technically." Rod pushed his jaw back into place.

Yorick erased the problem. "Doesn't really matter. Major. This time-travel base could be located in any century. It is, in fact—just keeps going for a couple of thousand years, all the way through the Fourth Millennium. And it was just as easy to set the controls for this century, as for the one we were in. Easier, in fact—these are the ones I have memorized. Quicker to punch in, when you're in a rush."

Rod gave his head a shake. "Okay, if you say so. But..."

"Why did I want to meet you?" McAran wore his grim smile. "Well, I've heard so much about you. Major!"

"Great. Can I present my side of it?"

"No. Because if Gramarye is pivotal in the development of democracy, you're pivotal in the development of Gramarye." Rod froze.

Gwen gazed at him, wide-eyed.

"Me?"

McAran nodded. .,

"Why not her?" Rod jabbed a finger at Gwen. "She's at least as powerful as I am! And she's done as much as I have toward putting Gramarye on the road to freedom!"

"Aye, yet I've espoused thy cause only for reason that 290

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I've espoused thee," Gwen said softly, "and so would I continue to do, e'en—God forbid!—an thou wert ta'en from me. Yet had I never known thee, I ne'er would have so much as thought of it."

McAran nodded. "She was reared in a medieval monarchy, Major; she didn't have the vaguest notion of democracy. Nobody there did—except the future totalitarians and anarchists, who had come back in time to subvert Gramarye."

"And she wouldn't have learned advanced technology if those Futurians hadn't kidnapped the two of you back in time," Yorick said.

Gwen shook her head. "Thou canst not avoid it, my lord. Thou mayest not be the person who doth bring matters to fruition, but thou art the one who doth sow the seed." She flushed, smiling, and turned to McAran. "Which doth bring to mind that thou hast not spoken of the role our children are to play in this."

"Mighty," McAran assured her, "but only an extension of what you two are doing. An extension and an expansion, I should say, there are four of them, and each of them will grow up to be more powerful than either of you. Still, they'll only carry on what you've begun." His frosty smile etched itself on his face again. "Even if they don't quite realize it."

The exchange had given Rod a moment to recover. He took a deep breath. "But that still doesn't tell me what I'm doing here, talking to you."

"Do I have to lay it out for you?" McAran growled. "I want to make sure which side you're on." .

"Why ... democracy's."

McAran just regarded him, with a glittering eye.

"No," Rod said slowly, finally recognizing the transformation within himself. "Gramarye's." McAran nodded.

"But democracy is in Gramarye's best interest!"

"If you're so sure about that," McAran grated, "you won't mind joining GRIPE."

Rod sat still for a minute, letting the shock pass. Then he said, "I'm already a SCENT agent. Doesn't that make me an affiliate member?"

McAran shook his head. "There's no official alliance between the two groups—just common interest. We don't even have a formal tie to the Decentralized Democratic Tribunal. In fact, neither of them knows we exist—and frankly, we like it that way. So, of course, one of the responsibilities of membership is maintaining that secrecy."

"Of course," Yorick added, "we do have overlapping membership. Other than you, I mean."

McAran nodded. "Some of our best agents are SCENT

operatives. We even have a few DDT bureaucrats, and the odd tribune or two."

"Must be pretty odd, all right," Rod muttered.

"So how about you?" The eagle's eye was still on him.

"Are you for us or not. Major?"

Rod met McAran's stare, and took a deep breath. "For you—but not part of you. Call me an associate member." McAran sat still for a moment. Then he nodded. "As long as you're for us, and not against us." He stood, holding out his hand. Rod stood, and clasped it. He was amazed at how fragile and slender the scientist's hand seemed. But McAran was nodding, and smiling again. "Good to have you. Major. Now, would you like to go back where you came from?"