The Queen of Space, page 25
Habibula and Star?
If those faint flecks of light ahead really showed where they were, could she hope to reach them? Somehow set them free? Not likely. Even if she reached their cells, she lacked Habibula’s famous way with locks.
Cruel reality came to dim her first elation. The ancient tunnel seemed to stretch ahead forever, colder than her own cell had been, its musty air so thin she was panting fast. The faint patter of her bare feet rustled back from its unseen walls, their whisper a haunting reminder that these great black stones had been laid to contain things powerful and dangerous beyond nightmare.
How could she hope?
“Because—”
Gasping the word, gasping it again, she clung hard to the vanishing wisps of her triumph and staggered on toward that first pool of light.
The entrance to another cell, when she came reeling to it. Strangely, the outer grille was lifted. When she peered around the corner into the angled passage beyond, the second gate was also lifted.
Listening eagerly for Star’s voice or Habibula’s wheezy whine, she crept into the passage. Pausing to listen again, she trembled in terror of whatever might emerge to meet her. Shadows shifted as she moved, changing into shapes as monstrous as those unknown things the dungeons had been designed to hold.
A voice!
Elation raised her for an instant, let her fall again. It was neither Habibula’s nor Star’s. Heart pounding, she crept on. From beneath the lifted grille, she could see into the dungeon.
Huge as her own had been, now in use as a laboratory. Cold blue light glinted on the metal and crystal of devices strange to her, arrayed all around the lofty walls. With no pause to wonder what they were, she peered at two snowballs.
These lay on a long workbench at the center of the room. White fog hung around them, draining in wispy streamers toward the floor. Two people bent over the bench.
Brendish—and her mother!
She saw them in harsh-lit profile. Brendish flushed and panting. Her mother pinched and ashen, tiny-seeming on the cell’s huge scale, looking cold in a black fur jacket too large for her. One thin hand held a thick-tubed weapon pointed at the white-smoking workbench.
Brendish was rasping. “If you want my opinion, I don’t think the little monster will ever tell us anything. I’ve always said we ought to kill it by any means we can. I’ve just had one nasty jolt, and I don’t want another.”
He glanced uneasily behind him.
“Hit it again—”
He must have seen Jil.
“A human spy!” Darting behind the bench, he turned to point at her. “That naked bitch sneaking in the door. Freeze her! Quick!”
Her mother spun, the black tube lifting.
“Think you’re chilly, baby doll?” His nasal taunt echoed against the great stone blocks. “Take a taste of total cold!”
38
The snowballs smoked.
Brendish was a scraggy-bearded demon, leering through white fog. His sardonic jeer rang and died against the basalt walls. Naked, chilling, waiting, Jil had time to study her mother’s face.
An enigmatic mask, nearly fleshless, made up heavily, smiling vacantly above the black-barreled weapon. More skeletal than human, empty of all emotion, that empty smile ordained by the cruel parasite within.
Jil had time to regret all her old resentments. Time to understand her mother’s second marriage. Time to recall her dismayed bewilderment at all the dreadful changes since. Time for wrenching pity. For this thing about to kill her was not her mother really, but a painted machine.
The thick black tube had come level in the frail-seeming, blue-veined hand. Jil shivered, looking into its dark hollow. Something clicked, and a cold blue glow began to flicker there.
Tired of waiting, she suddenly wanted the weapon to flash. Total cold, she thought, would erase her being instantly. No master parasite would ever feed upon her—
The weapon was wavering, the blue glow gone.
Her mother’s face had changed into another sort of mask. A grimace of utter tragedy, quivering and contorted. The mindless smile drew into a snarl of hopeless hate. The dead eyes came alive again, black with stark despair, yet ablaze with overwhelming rage.
“Baby—doll—”
The sound through the red-painted snarl was a sobbing moan. The skeletal body slackened for an instant in the too-large coat, like a puppet with strings cut loose. Alive again, shaking violently, it swung the weapon from Jil to Brendish.
He cowered down into the ice fog.
“Rara!” He screamed that old pet name. “Freeze the snooping bitch! The masters command it—”
“The monsters—don’t command—don’t command me now.” A hoarse and oddly broken whisper, as if her mother had to grope for speech. “I—I’m free—”
“No, you aren’t!” Narrowed eyes darting from the weapon to Jil and back again, he dragged himself defiantly straighter. “Not for long, Rara. The masters may lose their grip for a moment, but they always come back. And they’ll make you suffer—and teach you how to love—”
“Love?” Her mother’s fleshless body jerked in the loose black fur as if she had been a puppet worked on wires of agony. “We won’t—be loving—loving you—”
Brendish shrieked.
Suddenly steady, the black weapon clicked. Blue light flashed. The kneeling man shone for a moment, luminous and blue in the swirling fog, a blue halo around him. The blue went out. His rigid body turned crystal white with sudden frost. It toppled very slowly backward to the black stone floor and shattered there like fragile white glass.
Jil shrank back, arms against her breasts, shivering from a flash of searing cold. Stunned, staring, she watched the glittering crystals growing over the shards of what had been Rem Brendish. She heard their dry crackle, watched a new pool of fog that formed around them, flowing away into vanishing streamers.
Her mother stood motionless a long time, staring down into that tiny cloud, seemingly not even breathing. At last, with a long sigh, she shook her wasted head, leaned to lay her weapon on the bench and turned unsteadily. Dilated and empty at first, her eyes came slowly into focus.
“Jil?” Her whisper seemed strangely tentative and faint. “You are my Jil?”
“Mother!” Her own shaken voice was no stronger. “I am Jil.”
“Don’t hate me, Jil!” her mother begged. “Please say you don’t.”
Choked and voiceless, eyes welling, Jil could only shake her head.
“Through all that hell, I thought you did. And never—never blamed you for it. Because I did neglect you so.” Her mother hugged her harder. “I thought—grieved because I thought I’d never get to tell you—tell you that I loved you.”
Clinging, she sobbed again.
“Grieved because I couldn’t—couldn’t tell you I really loved your father. As much as I did Shon. Oh, Jil! I never understood. Never really tried to see what the nebula was to them or why you always loved it so. I hope—hope you can forgive—”
“Mother!” Jil found a quavery little voice. “There’s nothing—nothing to forgive—”
“Thank you, baby—baby doll!”
“I did hate the way you called me that.” Jil squeezed the frail-seeming frame against her. “Till now.”
“I never knew.” A little calmer, her mother paused to shake that fleshless, death-white head. “Jil! Jil! I was such a fool. I guess because of what my people taught me. Because they named me Tsara and brought me up to be an Ulnar princess. Because I caught their crazy dream.
“Rem used that to trap me.
“My silly pride. My old love for Shon. He made me believe there would be a cure for Shon—life with him was dreadful, but they let me believe they were arming people in the nebula to lead a revolution—I thought it would be a human revolution—to restore the Empire.
“When I was on the Purple Empress.” The lifeless whisper sank. “When Shon’s parasite had put the creatine into me. Then I knew what they were and what they’d done. It’s dreadful—dreadful, Jil—the way they use you.
“I hope—hope you never know.”
Her mother shuddered in her arms.
“I saw—saw you, Jil. On the Purple Empress. Saw you serving them in what they called the throne room. I tried—tried so hard to speak. But of course they wouldn’t let me make a sign. I knew they meant to plant a creature in you. I was glad—so glad when I thought you’d escaped.
“But now—you never should have come here.” The stick-thin figure sagged into her arms, a puppet with all strings cut. “Because you’ll never get away. Nobody will. Except—”
The skull face jerked toward the weapon on the bench.
“Except with the cold-gun. They can’t bring us back from that—”
Jil shrank from it.
“We can’t just kill ourselves. Not while we have any sort of chance—”
“Not we.” Bleakly forlorn, the gaunt head shook. “Not me.”
“But”—dismay shook her voice—“you’ve escaped.”
“Not for long.” The dark-shadowed eyes stared into the thin white blanket spreading away from what had been Brendish. “I could kill Rem, because he was still human—in his dreadful way. It’s the creatures that can’t be beaten.
“Not by anything organic. Because they aren’t organic. Rem had studied them. He used to taunt me with what they are. He said they would always rule us—what is left of us—because they don’t die.”
“Tell me, mother!” Jil implored her. “All you know.”
“You’ll never understand, baby doll. Not until—unless—you have a master in you.”
“Please! I’ve got to know.”
“If I can find the words—” The whisper halted, the skull face still. “They aren’t anything—anything that can be touched. Fighting them, Rem used to say, would be like fighting starlight. Because, he said, they aren’t matter.
“Their molecules evolved in the nebular clouds. Very tiny particles, linked only by fields of force. Magnetic, electric, partly tachyonic. They lived in space—if what they are is really life—till they made what Rem called their evolutionary leap.”
“Can’t they be killed?” Jil whispered. “Can’t we keep you free?”
“Never. When they seize the body they damage its own functions. They keep it going with their own controls so long as they possess it. When they’re gone—”
The death’s-head shook.
“The body stops.”
“But you—” Jil stared. “You aren’t stopped.”
“Because the thing—the thing in me—is still alive.” The ragged whisper had grown almost too faint to hear. “I can feel it now. Reaching—fighting—to take me back and make me hurt—hurt—”
Too stricken for speech, Jil could only hug her. For a long time, she didn’t move or speak or even seem to breathe, but then the spidery body jerked and straightened.
“Till it comes—” The shuddery voice came stronger. “If I could help—”
“The men—” Jil’s breath caught. “The men who came with me?”
“Locked up. Farther down the corridor.”
“Can you help me get them out?”
“No time for that. No use to try. I’ve seen the creatures work the locks. They sense the motion of the bolts inside. With senses no human being has.”
“We were looking—” Jil peered around the high-walled dungeon in search of any shard of hope. “We came looking for a little creature we call a laser-maker—”
“Here she is—” Her mother nodded at the snowballs on the workbench. “Dead, I think.”
“Dead?” Jil stared at the balls of frost. “Did—did Brendish—”
“Rem and the creatures. The one in me. Trying to make her talk. They thought she knew some secret. Something about AKKA. They tried every sort of torture but they couldn’t invade and control her the way they do us, because she is not organic.
“She never—”
She felt her mother tense and shudder.
“Jil!” Fainter, faster, that breathless whisper rushed ahead. “So much to say, so little time—”
The haunted eyes fixed on that thinning pool of fog.
“The laser-maker never talked. They kept her alive a long time, looking for new ways to cause her pain. But she always beat them. Escaping into something close to death. Always closer.
“Just now—”
The whisper changed again, as if something tried to choke it off.
“Just now Rem—Rem rushed in. Shouting that she had to be killed.”
“The creature in me was going to make me kill her, because they’re so terribly afraid—afraid of AKKA. They think it’s tachyonic. They’re vulnerable to tachyons.
“That’s why they fear the robot—”
“Lord Archy?”
“The robot they caught with you.” That skeletal arm jerked at the nearer snowball. “It can generate weak tach pulses. Rem was using the cold-gun, trying to torture both of them. He thought he could make the robot read her mind.
“The master in me was here to watch—watch and hold the gun—because they’d never entirely trusted Rem. It kept my body back from the robot, but I guess not far enough. Because the robot helped me escape—
“Till—now—”
Her voice rose on that last word, jagged with agony, an endless keening scream. The glazed eyes stared from her painted skull face, mute and unbearable. One stick arm gestured, jerked and flung as if on a hidden wire.
“Back—” A voiceless shriek. “Quick—”
39
Jil stood breathless, terror-frozen.
Her mother was moaning, shaken with a strange convulsion. Agony contorted the made-up face. Brighter blood smeared the scarlet mouth. The bare-boned frame jerked and tossed. A puppet hung on tangled strings, it snatched the cold-gun off the bench, flung it to the floor, dived to recover it.
Writhing there, kicking, gasping, it fought itself. Insane hands flailed at the weapon, trying first to fling it away, then clinging grimly. The thick tube twisted as if itself alive. Once it came toward Jil. She saw the blue glow inside the tube, felt a glow of cold.
But then the muzzle swung down.
The mechanism clicked.
A hard blue flash swept that tortured form. All motion stopped. The contorted stick thing glowed blue for a moment, till crackling frost turned it to an epic of agony, done in pure and instant white.
Jil stood where she was, staring down into the fog forming around it. Her eyes ached, and dry sobs of pain and gratitude convulsed her. That final scream dying in her mind, she heard her mother’s voice from long ago.
Crooning loving lullabies when she could first remember. Scolding her for tracking the red mud of Hawkshead Pass on the fresh-mopped floors of her grandfather’s house. Yelling in the icy nebular night to call her inside from the white-streaking meteors and the hot-sulphur scent of the wild storms she loved.
The air was good again, somehow cleansed by that blue flash. Breathing deep, she remembered wondering how her mother could hate the clean, dry bitterness of leatherweed on the wind at Hawkshead Pass, or how she could like the stale perfumes that clung to her decaying Ulnar relics.
Swiftly, the ice fog hid that image of agony.
Its stark tragedy was still unbearable. But at least—at last—the terror had passed.
Her mother was free.
She listened. The crackle of frost had ceased. In the dead stillness of the dungeon, all she could hear was her own quick heart, but it became a drum of marching danger.
Danger here from the horror that had owned her mother.
Danger all around her, from the swarming parasites, surely now alarmed and closing in to take her.
Danger the Gyrel luck had all run out.
Trembling, reeling from too many blows, drained empty by too much emotion, longing for time, she stared again at the great black blocks of the dungeon wall—
Legion green!
Star’s cosmonalls, rolled into a bundle on the end of a shelf. Habibula’s. Her own. Their space boots tossed beside them.
Alive again, breathing fast, she slid into her torn yellow suit. The boots stiff and cold to her numb feet, she stumbled to the doorway with the other bundles and turned there to glance back at the smoking snowballs.
Lord Archy and Miss William—dead?
Crusted deep with frost, they were still too cold for her to touch, lying too near the ice fog writhing around the dreadful shape that had been her mother.
She spun, ran clumsily.
Caution checked her at the third barrier. Peering out into the corridor, she found its darkness soundless and unbroken except for two tiny lights. The far blue glow from the cell where she had fought the gigantic free-styler.
The other light—Star and Habibula?
She ran for it.
Too far. Her breath was too soon gone, and her footfalls rang too loud on the wall she couldn’t see. Slowly, too slowly, the dot grew into a dim-blue pool, black-streaked with shadows from great gray bars. Lungs aching, she tried to hold her breath long enough to listen.
A wheezy groan?
“Giles?”
“Lass?” His moan came faintly through the grille. “For life’s sake, lass, we’re dying. Dying in this mortal-dungeon. Of fearful cold and famine, lass! Mortal soon, unless you let us out—”
“Giles, I can’t.”
“Open the mortal door—”
“I’ve no key.”
“You need no key.” His voice came louder. “I conned that stinking rat when they were dragging us in. Stripped and shivering and left to perish without one precious morsel—”
“How, Giles? How?”
“I let the yellow-bellied bastard think he had me senseless, but I could hear the way he worked the mortal lock. Listen, lass! You’ll find a gold-colored plate set deep in the mortal stone by the door, about as high as you can reach. Hit it three times. Quick and hard. Count ten, slow. Hit it twice. Count fifteen. Hit it four times, slow.”
She found the plate. On tiptoe, she struck it with her doubled fist and counted, struck it and counted, finished and waited.
