“Huh?” said Seamus, his romantic illusions shattered. While he was thinking grand and passionate thoughts, the woman was planning a theft. He released her and watched her modestly rearrange her robe.
“They keep them in the vault. They make them down here, you know. Quars is a scientist as well as a soldier. That’s why they didn’t feed him into one of the vats. He’s too valuable. We will take only enough for one Festival day. We can’t leave them without any. Horor and Yens pleaded with me to do it. I refused, but now I must. Retha has convinced me. She says that if you saved our lives it must be for a purpose.” The words tumbled out recklessly, her passion turned from him to her newfound cause.
Retha, huh? That thin-shouldered little scamp is nothing but a great terrible troublemaker.
“You want to go through all that again?” said Seamus, now very much back down to earth. He let go of her and sank wearily into a chair by the map table.
“The Young Ones have a plan. On the first day of the Festival they will take the tranquillity pills and storm the Military Center. They have keys to the arsenal. With the carbines and explosives they will take over the Energy Center and the Central Building. They will liquidate the Committee and take command of the City. When the Festival is over, they will be running Zylong.” Her brown eyes were glowing with excitement. “The Guardians, the Committee, the people at key forts like Hyperion, and the Energy Technicians use the pills to stay rational during the Festival. With pills, we can take over the City.”
Seamus put his hands to his forehead and stared glumly at the maps. “Woman, you’re pretty damn intelligent. What chance do you think such a harebrained idea has? Do you think two kids like Yens and Horor and a poor little tyke like Retha can overthrow an old and very established society?”
“They have about as much chance as we have of making it through to your spacecraft, the Dove, or whatever you call it,” she flared back at him.
“Dev.” Absently, he corrected her.
“Yes, Dev, then. Someday you must tell me who he was.”
“He was too cute a man to get into something like this.” Then he remembered some of the things De Valera had done and wasn’t so sure. Maybe this upcoming Festival day will be Zylong’s Easter Monday. The woman has never loved you at all. She’s scheming and conniving and pretending to love you. He noted with considerable satisfaction that his heart was welling with self-pity. What’s the point in living anyway, if your proper woman is only trying to seduce you into a revolution?
“All right, woman, I’ll do it. When and how?” It would be a great story to tell their grandchildren.
“Late night. I’ll come to get you when all is clear. It should be easy.” She was beaming with happiness. Another damn true believer! Then she laughed at him again and hugged him fiercely.
So maybe she’s not lost interest in you altogether. If they laugh at you, it’s a sure sign that they still adore you, if only a little bit.
Although Marjetta looked as if she might kiss him again, Seamus O’Neill was no longer in any mood for romance.
Nor was his romantic mood revived when she shook him awake in the wee hours of the morning, even though he felt the warmth and inhaled the delicious odor of her skin. She had shed her robe for the night’s enterprise. “It will only get in the way. Besides it’s dark. You can’t see me.”
“Worse luck for me.” He sighed loudly. His imagination did a quick flip at the thought of her lentat-covered body. The old dread she stirred in him returned quickly and cooled his fantasies. Still, who knows what we’ll both feel like when we get this stuff out of here?
Taking his hand in her own, Marjetta led O’Neill down a jet-black, bitter-cold corridor. They conserve energy here at Hyperion, O’Neill thought as he groped his way through the dark behind her. The woman’s hand is warm enough, though. Ah, what would be wrong with that warmth next to you in bed every night?
I’ll tell you what would be wrong; you’d have to put up with that tongue and willpower during the day.
I could do a lot worse.
Given time you probably will.
I’m fated.
He abandoned the argument with himself because he didn’t like its conclusion.
Margie seemed to know where she was going. They stopped suddenly. She pushed against a door that swung open slowly.
“The guard is asleep. I … uh … his drink tonight was a bit strong. No one has ever tried to steal the pills before—they don’t officially exist,” Marjetta breathed into O’Neill’s ear.
“Shall we kick him to test it?” he asked ironically.
“Sssh.” She pulled open a trapdoor, revealing a dark hole. “There is a ladder there. You go first. Be careful, it is a long way.”
He had every intention of being careful. The ladder was metal and it was cold on his bare feet. The hole into which they were climbing was frigid and smelled strongly of seawater. An old tidal cave perhaps.
Here I am, he thought, a latter-day Finn Mac-Cool, or was it Art MacConn or Con MacArt? I can never keep those shitheads from the old mythology straight. I’m searching for the Holy Grail on the planet Zylong. The magic cup is a box of pills, my magic princess is a half-daft conspirator, and I’m cold and miserable and lonely and the place smells and the woman doesn’t love me and I’ve been abandoned by my friends and I might as well be dead.
You go first, she says. So I can be the first one to drown in that seawater I hear roaring down there.
Lancelot du Lac, indeed. Galahad, for sure. Parsifal, of course. Maybe they didn’t have to do much to program me into a no-account space bum.
The woman was right about one thing. It was a long way down. When he finally touched the slimy hard rock floor, he was shivering in the cold air.
“I am glad I could not see any of that coming down,” said Marjetta nervously. “I do not like heights.”
“You’ll catch your death of cold in that thin thing,” he warned her.
“Not when I have you to keep me warm.” She started to giggle.
“None of that laughing-at-me stuff now,” he said irritably. “I’m Lancelot du Lac in quest of the Holy Grail.”
Her giggles turned into sniggers, then into laughter.
“What are you laughing at, woman?” he demanded. “You don’t even know the myth.”
“I think Lancelot is a very funny name.”
“Ah, there’s that. Anyway, let’s find this Holy Grail of yours. Turn on your frigging light.”
“What’s frigging?”
“Never mind. Turn it on like I say.”
She turned on the tiny handlight that was strapped to her wrist. The beam searched what appeared to be a small room, coming to rest on a cabinet against one wall. We’ll have a devil of a time getting it open.
Marjetta pulled the drawers open one by one until she found what she was looking for, a tiny wooden box. It was filled with white pills. Holy Grail as anticlimax. No dragons to slay—when he was a kid, he’d always wanted to be a modern St. George and slay a dragon—no evil queens to fight off, no curses to escape, no sword battles with black knights. You simply climb down a long hole with your shivering magic princess and you find it in an open box. Easiest thing in the world.
Then the poet in O’Neill began to think about the symbolism of climbing down a long hole into a dark, sea-scoured cave.
Now isn’t that interesting. What dirty minds those mythmakers had aeons ago. Well, sure I’m not climbing down anything more tonight. You’re never certain whether you can get out of these cave things.
“A hundred of them—enough to free Zylong!” She was shaking with excitement. “Hold me tight, Geemie. When I think what this can do for my world … I am frightened.”
He held her close to him, his hand fitting naturally into the concavity of her back. The pressure of her soft body against his chest was enough to make him almost lose his reason. He felt a sharp stab of delicious pain in his chest, as though something were breaking. He wanted this woman; he was afraid of her; indeed, terrified of her. But he still wanted her. She was the proper woman if there were ever to be one.
Well, maybe you should climb down into some caves. His knees were shaking. Tonight is the night to get her into my proper bed and begin my descent into the underworld. Ah, now that’s a good image. He held her closer and began to explore her body with his lips. That’s what the Grail legend is about, isn’t it? Finn gets the magic cup and the magic princess? Two sacred vessels?
“Let’s get out of here before we decide to stay,” he muttered into her hair.
This business of searching for the Holy Grail might have its good points after all.
O’Neill was back in his own room before he realized how easy it had been. He was in it now up to his neck. Stealing the pills was a kind of engagement with this society which the battles on the desert were not. Tricked into it by two women, one of them a wee slip of a revolutionary and the other someone who pretended to love him.
Of course, he didn’t bring Marjetta back to his bed. She would have come. She was so happy and grateful that she would have done anything he wanted. Seamus Finnbar O’Neill wanted no woman on those terms.
“Shall we swim in the ocean, Geemie? It will be very warm after that terrible cave.”
“Swim at night?” he exclaimed in horror.
“The moons will be out,” she was laughing at him again.
“I think I’ll pass it up tonight,” he sighed. “We have a long trip ahead of us.”
She kissed him at his door. “Brigid and Brendan and Mary be with you, my beloved.”
First time she had ever called him that.
“You’re picking up all the names,” he admitted grudgingly.
“I don’t quite understand how Mary and Brigid are different.”
“My ancestors had a hard time with that too. Well, off with you, woman. You need your sleep too.”
Seamus Finnbar O’Neill, the last great playboy of the western world—indeed, the whole western quadrant of the frigging galaxy—fell into an uneasy sleep in which he was pursued by dragons and demons who lurked in deep, cold caves.
He woke up with a start. It was still dark. Why did he feel frightened and guilty?
Then he remembered what had happened. Dear God, I broke all the Rules. The Taran Code says you do not interfere in the politics of an alien world. That’s exactly what I did. Without even thinking about it. Seduced by a terrible woman. Now I’m in the big muddy altogether.
The farewell scene when they left Retha and their desert companions was a bad one. The little Lieutenant was tongue-tied with emotion and worried about her own task of bringing the troops back to the City.
“Rea, me girl,” Seamus O’Neill tried to hearten her, “in one week I’ll be buying you and your young man the biggest refreshment in the whole of Zylong. Now take care of your feet this time. I’d hate to have to come out and carry you in again.”
She began to laugh. O’Neill bent down over her and tenderly kissed the small forehead. “Sure it’s the truth you’ll bring the troops back, girl,” he whispered. He hated to leave them. They were a good troop after all—not like a company of Wild Geese, but given time and a good commander …
“Do you Tarans kiss every woman you meet?” asked Marjetta coldly, as they rode off into the dusk with the column of “staff.”
“Only the beautiful ones, my dear.”
“You think Lieutenant Retha is a beautiful woman?” Her control was slipping.
“Ah, well, we kiss them all back on Tara,” he said teasingly. “Why, one day I even kissed the cheek of the Lady Deirdre.…”
“Who?” Her voice was edgy.
O’Neill froze in his saddle. How did that slip out? How am I to explain Deirdre?
“Ah, nobody important,” he managed. “Well, she’s kind of important—a religious leader of a sort,” he amended.
“Is she beautiful?” Marjetta was stony-faced now. Good enough for her.
“Oh, no. She’s an old woman now. I guess she never was anything much to look at.”