Kenneth Bulmer - Keys to the Dimensions 03, page 8
“But they’d never admit to being frightened,” said Gait in his usual heavy authoritarian way. They were strolling between banks of flowers—ordinary flowers—in the garden of the Chrysoberyl Wing, and the perfume of strange forms of chrysanthemums wafted about them. The wizards of Senchuria liked order in their arrangements.
Still walking a little gingerly, Redfern nodded. Val held onto his arm. He had capitalized, in his own mind, the W of Wizards after he had learned more of their story.
“I’ve come to terms with their idealism,” Gait went on. “Arlan teaches a similarly abstract form of withdrawal…”
“But warmer, Gait! Much more human!” cried Val.
He nodded, smiling. “In these worlds nothing is free. Well, that’s a fair enough evaluation. You just made it hard on yourself, Scobie.”
Redfern hadn’t forgotten. His convalescence, after they had patched him up and poured new blood into him, was taking time. Val, too, still looked white around the lips. Neither of them would forget the experience through which they had gone with the emotion broadcasters affixed to their heads. That apparatus had been taken away; but Redfern still thought he could feel it adhering like a clammy limpet to his head.
“So I did. But I’m constitutionally incapable of respecting an authority that is manifestly incompetent, overly cruel, or just plain stupid.”
“In this case the authority—the Wizards—was none of these things. You now know why they must have their accumulators fully charged. They see this purely in the light of a fair bargain.”
“Fair!” snapped Val with some acerbity.
Gait smiled deprecatingly. In the sunshine at the far end of the garden Mina, Tony and Nyllee turned on the flagged walk to return, their white gowns, like the ones worn by Gait, Val and Redfern, shimmering with silky cleanliness.
“I think so, Val. The Wizards maintain their independence in a most precarious situation. They defend us all now.”
“Those damned ghouls of theirs tried to kill us, though,” rumbled Redfern mutinously.
Gait shook his heavy head. “Not so. They were anesthetic darts. A trifle overpowering for humans; but the Wizards habitually deal with life forms far more monstrous and menacing than humans.”
“And the roaches?”
“Purely hunting animals. We have life forms on Montrado for those purposes, as you have on your Earth. And, Scobie, the Wizards have forgiven you for killing their Suslincs, what you call roaches. As for the Gara’hec, well, they are in reality close to zombies and your description of them as graveyard ghouls was striking and apt. They—”
“You mean they really were…” Val didn’t continue.
“Yes, Val. The Wizards are isolated here on an interdimensional nodal point of immense size and potential. They must use every artifice to maintain their integrity and independence. The Gara’hec are really the dead, refurbished for some use through mental techniques, clever mechanistic and electronic wizardry, given exoskeletal support and isotope-battery power. They have a pseudo-life of their own. They are not nice to look at, I grant you; but they are excellent hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
Redfern felt the defilement of that idea. He shivered. “But I shot them! If they were the undead they wouldn’t have died, for they were already dead.”
“You shot away their motor functions, their controls. You said yourself you had to shoot some twice.”
Val clung to his arm more tightly. Mina and Tony and Nyllee looked like white statues from a sunnier age strolling among the flower beds. Redfern thought of those ghastly insect-human faces lowering down on him.
“Poor devils!” he breathed. “Is that all the people here have to look forward to when they’re dead?”
“I find nothing strange,” Gait said solemnly, “in learning that the Wizards consider it an honor to continue to serve in that form after their death.”
“So all the time they wanted emotion from us, to charge their accumulators? Well,” Redfern finished, still not too sure, “they got it from us, all right. I was scared silly.”
“I find it very hard to like them,” said Val in her soft voice. “Very hard.”
“Think of the teachings of Arlan. He will help you.”
“You said the Wizards defended us,” Redfern said. He’d have to adjust his thinking on this; but that would take time. “And you said this was a big interdimensional nodal point. How can they be isolated, then?”
The two groups had joined now, to continue their stroll in the sunshine of Senchuria.
“I can tell you that, Scobie.” Tony spoke with a sureness that he had not possessed before, his thin freckled face eager and alive. “We have a transportation system in Montrado that is similar to the railway system on your Earth. Think of the Wizards as being on the central platform of a large junction. They can be visited by people from many dimensions, yet they themselves are cut off by the webs and warps of the barriers. It takes power to break through the dimensions unless you have a Gate and a Porteur.”
“They receive many visitations. They trade with some races of the dimensions. For others they have only contempt and hatred, and these they fight against. They speak of the Porvone with utter horror and loathing.”
“I’ve heard of them,” said Redfern, nodding.
“Only last month they had to resist the invasion of a vast army of half-men, pouring through a nodal point in the forest. The area all around here is studded with Gates and Portals. They threw all the power of their emotion weapons. Hatred poured out like black floods of passion; fear gibbered through the forest.” Gait spoke with enthusiasm. “They fought a fierce and awful fight through the emotions. Luckily for us, the Wizards won. Had they lost”—he shrugged meaningfully—”when we arrived we would have received a very different reception.”
They began to walk back to the Chrysoberyl Wing. Lunch was due. Gait went on speaking.
“I’ve studied the whole problem with Vivasjan. He is what I’d call their chief minister, a wonderful old man with whom I’ve discussed the philosophy of Arlan at length. Since their written records began they have histories of continual dimensional incursions. They were a proud race but they learned much from other dimensions. A great deal of their power and their science is borrowed; they can maintain a higher degree of technological achievement than any they would have attained on their own, living between the forest and the sea of grass. The rest of this world is relatively untamed, virgin. There is much exploration to be done.”
“That follows.” Redfern adjusted the translator band with its winking jewels in his hair. They all spoke easily now, their languages freely intermingled. “I suppose you can feel sorry for them. But they really play it rough. I can still feel those yellow flowers cutting into me.”
Gait sighed. “The philosophy of Arlan teaches acceptance of all things.” He smiled with his heavy solemnity. “Although we could no longer stomach the Contessa and her cohorts of evil. I think you will come to believe that the Wizards of Senchuria are strictly fair. They take and they give, living by trading; they have their own integrity.”
“I suppose so.”
They all went in to lunch, taken in a wide pleasant refectory. The food was delicious. They were joined by Vivasjan and some of his advisers. Vivasjan was a strong-faced, solemn man, clad in the long scarlet robe generally adopted by the Wizards when they wore clothes, and his features showed the strain of a long life spent in balancing force against force, of maintaining his city and people against interdimensional trickery and invasion. For a short time Redfern had had this man as an enemy, so he had thought, and he could see the wisdom of changing that situation. Vivasjan would be a good friend and a bad enemy.
The chief minister explained the position again, and added: “We can accept all kinds of emotion and adapt it to our purposes. We prefer to use love. It is easier and more pleasant to collect. The obverse of love is hate. We have electroencephalographs here and we have studied many dimensions’ work on psychology and the pathology of the mind. Kandinsky, from your Earth, Mr. Redfern, has done much pioneering. In fact we have some Terrestrial EEG’s in operation. The nervous energy of the brain cells, part electric and part chemical, can be isolated. We do isolate it and we use it.” He sighed. “But we would prefer to bask in the emotions of love rather than hatred. We have been born into a parlous position, here in Senchuria.”
Again Redfern felt a feeling of sympathy for these Wizards engulfing him, against what he considered his proper feelings of resentment.
“Earth?” he said, picking up the point. “Then you could show us the Portal to get back home?”
Gait interrupted. “I’ve covered that, Scobie. There are no direct links with either your Earth, Montrado or Irunium.”
Val put down her wineglass. “We can go back indirectly, though. As soon as we’re strong enough.”
“Yes,” said Vivasjan. “Yes, that would be best.”
Redfern could not remain unaware of the general air of unease among the Wizards, the sense of resignation verging on apathy. Only Vivasjan, of all the men and women wearing the long scarlet robes, appeared to possess a strength and a determination that would brook no obstacles to what he wanted to do. Redfern saw the tired faces and the nervous gestures that made a question mark of the future. Here in Senchuria there was never any purposeful and clearly-held vision of tomorrow.
“What are they all scared of?” Redfern whispered to Gait.
The heavy man moved his shoulders fretfully. “They have means of testing the various nodal points scattered about their land. They can sense movement, preparation, a deliberate building-up of forces that can rip the dimensional barriers to shreds.”
Val gasped. “You mean another invasion?”
Somberly, Gait nodded.
Feeling personally refreshed even if the Wizards acted with that restraint upon them, Redfern joined the others in a tour of the city. He marveled at the concentration of wealth and the lavish use of scientific methods in sanitation and lighting and the provision of bodily comforts; he smiled to see strange incongruities of cultures, where, for example, a sodium-arc lamp standard would be wreathed in curled gems. He saw silent electric cars running on fat pneumatic wheels, and each car was a mobile encrustation of gems.
“Much of our technical help comes from Slikitter,” Vivasjan said, leading them up a jewel-sparkling escalator to the battlements. “They are not a particularly pleasant people, un-human in form; but they recognize self-interest as a valid method of bargaining and they do respect a contract.” A sense of the weirdness in living in a culture that exchanged goods and treasures and ideas across the dimensions seized Redfern. Here he was, walking on the smooth red stone of the battlements of this city, relishing the sunlight, when all about him lay that hideous snow-filled ice-waste of the dimension through which they had come. Here, also, lay a part of the wide savanna of Irunium, and here, too, must be a part of Manhattan, all coexistent and yet invisible and separated from each other by intangible bonds stronger than the toughest of man-made materials.
A group of the Gara’hec patrolled the battlements. The living dead wore their sketchy armor and carried short, stabbing broad swords. In place of the crossbows with which they had hunted the humans in the forest they now bore more sophisticated weapons. Redfern saw automatic rifles of Earthly pattern, machine-cannon mounted on gimbals, and odd, cone-like weapons the functions of which he could not know. He made a mental note to find out just what the powers of these strange weapons were. Knowledge, especially knowledge of unknown armaments, was power. Across the sea of grass a patrol of crystals floated past like wind-blown bubbles, faceted and hard-edged, gleaming and twinkling, menacing and inhuman.
He had learned that no one in fact was ensconced in each crystal. They carried their own lowly form of pseudo-intelligence sparked by a receptor tuned to the wavelengths broadcast by the Wizards; this gave them a limited range of independent decision and operation but chained them permanently to the overriding control of the city’s masters.
They knew their job and they did it with a remorseless matter-of-factness well in keeping with their hard crystalline nature.
The sea of grass shimmered under the sun.
On either hand, stretching away like a greenish yellow wall, the forest edge quivered with unseen life.
Redfern was only too well aware that a large number of unresolved questions hung about him; he also realized he would have to await those answers in the greater working out of the problems confronting him and his comrades. Activity only too clearly indicating coming conflict broke about him. Many more of the gruesome Gara’hec marched onto the ramparts. A voracious pack of the Suslincs, those huge furry roaches, burst from a gate beneath him and roamed out across the sea of grass. Gleaming crystals scintillating and flashing in the sunlight wove a pattern around and above the Suslincs. A stronger, more brilliant and vibrating yellow light seemed to irradiate the massed banks of yellow-starred flowers in their marshaled ranks.
“Yes.” Vivasjan nodded affirmation. “The report has been received.” He hitched vaguely at the waist of his scarlet robe as though seeking something there that was unaccountably absent. “From a world we know as Infalgon a fresh incursion is breaking upon us.” He sighed. “There are war machines and many armored men. Again we of Senchuria must descend to the folly of fighting to protect those things in which we believe.”
“I’ll help!” Tony sounded fierce and proud.
“Yes.” Gait nodded, grim and somber. “You have the promise of our aid.”
“Now wait a minute…” protested Redfern.
Val rounded on him. “Oh, Scobie! Surely you cannot refuse!”
“Help the Wizards, after what they did to us? It goes against the grain, Val.”
Her brown flushed face looked up at him, troubled, mutinous, her eyes sparkling dangerously, the effect, Redfern could not help considering, of moisture and sunlight. “But Gait has explained all that! It’s their way, their integrity, their demand for absolute fairness and payment for value received—”
“Value received! I can still feel that damned contraption on my head! Those vile yellow flowers cutting me to ribbons! I’d say the value was a little one-sided, Val. Wouldn’t you?”
A swarm of black dots burst over the far horizon.
“If you understood the philosophy of Arlan you’d know! Acceptance and repayment. They are tenets in which one can believe. And the Wizards are our only hope now. Look!”
Everyone on the battlements was looking and pointing.
The black dots grew in size. While the nearer ones coming swiftly on took form, color and substance, still more surged up over the horizon to form an unending band of movement flying toward the city.
Redfern gasped.
Each one of those dots resolved into a gauzy-winged flying creature from whose rounded contours the sunshine splintered in shards of iridescence. The transparently fragile wings beat in whorls of color. Long tactile antennae reached out ahead of the creatures’ heads.
Seated astride each flying body a chunkily square being crouched forward, compact and very menacing. The light caught reflections from the goggled face and gleamed from helmeted leather. The light struck sparks from the tips of long lances swung low. A shower of projectiles sprouted in advance of the oncoming host. Gara’hec coughed and died, again. Suslincs squealed and collapsed.
“They’ll fly right over the yellow flowers!”
“Prepare yourselves!” called Vivasjan strongly. “Our enemies know who are the masters here! Stand fast, for they are upon us!”
The sunlight darkened under the wings of the enormous host.
X
“Hurry the women to shelter!” shouted Redfern. If the Wizards of Senchuria had their confounded emotion-milkers affixed to his head right now they’d be slopping over.
Crystals flashed in the sun. The flying host winged on.
“Why aren’t your hatred dispensers working?” screamed Val.
Vivasjan’s face showed his stricken disappointment, the answer to the Wizard’s despair. “These are creatures like the Gara’hec! They can feel no human emotions!”
Nearby two Gara’hec swung a twenty millimeter machine-cannon, began pumping graze-fused shells. Noise and smoke and fire lashed the brilliance of the day. Ever since Redfern had learned of the nature of the Wizards of Senchuria and the fact that their city lay at the intersections of many dimensions, this was the moment he had feared.
This particularly nasty type of position was one in which he had everything to lose. All he could do now, as Val had said, was try to help the Wizards overcome these flying hosts from Infalgon. Earth, in that moment of screaming horror, seemed very far away.
He rushed toward the twenty-millimeter machine-cannon and pushed aside the twice-dead bodies of the Gara’hec. Each half-insect half-human face glared like a corpse uncovered after a hundred years. Their armor clanked as they fell.
The projectiles fired by the flying men—Redfern had to call them that for lack of any better pejorative—curved down to splash in puddles of steaming acid. Where they struck they ate through leather and flesh and bone. The air seemed full of them.
Redfern ducked down and pulled the trigger. The cannon bucked beneath his hands and he squirted it about as a fireman might direct a hose, which probably saved his life. Clear sky showed for an instant.
Tony ran to drop at his side and fire a machine carbine. The thin freckled face showed an intense concentration and no sign of fear. Redfern wondered how his own face looked. Then the magazine ran empty and the machine-cannon clicked futilely.
“How the hell do you reload this thing?” panted Redfern.
“No idea.” Tony slapped a fresh clip into the carbine. “Get back to the inner wall. I’ll cover you.”
