Gaaf the medic, a former physician of Fleet, was trapped in the Avalon, and trapped by more than metal. There were the dreams, and waking nightmares, too.
First there was the uproar on Revenge. Gaaf watched it. All of them went to the warehouse to retrieve the treasures stored there, but all the things were gone. Castillo made certain statements about what would be done to the People of the Rose. There would not be much living in the City of the Rose when he was finished. Gaaf would have preferred not believing the threats, but he believed them. Castillo’s face was scarlet and he screamed at Suarez to bring him the headman of the town. While he waited he paced and snarled, and then he said more about what he was going to do. Gaaf started to go away but thought: What if he notices I’m gone? What if he knows I left because of him? What if he gets angry at me?—and so he stayed. He stood just inside the Avalon and watched Castillo interrogate Elder Rann. He saw the D’neeran woman again, walking in front of Juel to her death, and turned away as if that would make it not real and sink it into dream.
And then there was the shocking end of it, he heard the sounds outside and hesitated, thinking he ought to go see, and Castillo came back, running and yelling orders through an intercom to Wales on the flight deck. Gaaf was in his way and was shoved aside. The push was hard enough to knock him into the wall and bruise his shoulder, and the first instant of shock and pain brought tears to his eyes. He collected himself and followed Castillo slowly to the flight deck. But they were taking off when he got there, in a hurry, jabbering. Later he found out Juel was dead.
The Avalon left Revenge behind and moved out into space. There was no more talk about the People of the Rose. Instead they talked about the Golden Girl. The Avalon had gotten a good look at her: a pretty ship, an expensive, sophisticated toy. A Dru-class yacht. Gaaf had never seen one before. He stared at the pictures and tried to imagine the luxury inside. You had to be born to wealth to have one, he thought. But why would anyone who could own one be on Revenge? What interest could anyone like that have in stealing Castillo’s store of trade goods?
Far away from Revenge, in deep space, the Avalon waited. The men asked: for what? But Castillo kept his own counsel. Besides Castillo there were five of them now that Juel was dead: Suarez, Wales, Gaaf, Ta, and Bakti. They passed time with gambling and watching the ’beams. What the ’beams had to say was going to be crucial. What was the golden ship going to do with the woman who was the only witness to the aliens’ deaths?—it was a mystery. The Avalon filled up with the stink of fear. If Oversight had come to Revenge between scheduled visits, if a Fleet representative had been there to warn them off, that would have been one thing. But the golden ship could have nothing to do with Fleet. And nobody knew about Castillo and Revenge. Except—Castillo in those early hours looked at the men of his crew with (it seemed to Gaaf) something new in the ice-blue eyes—
They waited, watching the ’beams. They waited for information about the golden ship. It did not occur to any of them that Hanna might be dead and the secret of their identities gone with her—to any of them except Gaaf, the only one who knew how sick she had been. He did not tell the others, because he did not dare tell Castillo that he had eased her pain and thus, surely, helped her turn on them. But he was haunted, and his dreams were haunted, too, by the swollen brutalized face, the stripped fever-hot body; by knowing he had played God and given her (though he had not known it then) a chance at life. A voice echoed in his mind, fuzzy with fever and drugs. Equally without fear or gratitude she called to him: Wait! Still he was afraid that she was dead. But she might get treatment in time. But from whom?
The name of the Golden Girl’s owner came finally. Gaaf was on the flight deck when it came. There was a picture with it, a routine identification shot. Gaaf looked at the face and wondered what it would be like to be handsome and rich. The man in the picture looked gently amused. Castillo barely glanced at it. He knew the name; he did not have to look at the face that went with it. Suarez also knew it, and cursed bitterly. Castillo only said: “Him!”—as he had said once before, laughing then.
“Who is he?” Gaaf asked, but softly, so that Castillo could choose to overlook the question. And he did overlook it, or did not hear it. He looked at the image with cold hate.
The Avalon went nowhere for a time. “What are we waiting for?” said the others.
“You’ll see,” Castillo answered in his soft voice.
Gaaf wondered if that meant Castillo didn’t know, had no ideas.
Castillo and Suarez talked together privately a great deal. They did not tell anyone what they talked about.
* * *
Twelve hours after Hanna’s escape:
Gaaf slept fitfully, an hour at a time. The aliens died over and over in his sleep. Hanna’s eyes were blank with shock and blue as meadow grasses in the clear morning light after a night of storms. She threw herself at Castillo and Wales turned the stunner on her and she fell, the distant sleepiness of stun softening her face.
Twenty-four hours:
Castillo was calm. There was nothing on the ’beams. The men gambled and drank. “If he’s smart, he’ll kill her,” Suarez said. “He doesn’t need the attention.”
“Worst thing he could do,” Castillo said. “They’re looking for him, not us. She said so. He needs her.”
“He might not know that.”
A smile of real pleasure. “If he finds out too late, when she’s dead—that’s best for us. More time.”
“They’ll drag it out of him, though. That he had her. Where he got her. Us.”
That was not a private talk. Gaaf heard it, but it was too complicated for him. Every place in the Avalon seemed dark. There was shadow on all the faces. He went once to the room where Hanna had been imprisoned and saw the gold chain on the floor. He saw its provocative gleam against smooth skin—until the skin bruised and bled. He had not been able to watch the beating, but Wales had come to get him to wake her up, and so he had to see what they had done.
He put the chain into his pocket. When he revived her, she had been warm under his hands…
Suarez had been with Castillo a long time, longer than any of them except the dead Juel. Gaaf was the new man. He had been on the Avalon for six months, buying medical supplies for resale, and this was to have been his first run to the place they called Gadrah. He supposed it was something like Revenge. When they got there, he was to perform some kind of service, act as physician to some vague population of colonists. There was a great deal he had not been told.
He came across Suarez in the common room. Suarez, drinking alone, was talkative. Gaaf asked him who Michael Kristofik was.
“A mistake,” Suarez said. “That’s what he is, a mistake.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“I remember,” Suarez said in a confiding voice. His eyes had a secretive look.
“What do you remember?” Gaaf said, bolder.
“Prettiest little boy you ever saw. Got away one night on Alta.”
A nightmare that was not a dream swept over Gaaf. Cries in the night months ago, no dream; in space near Colony One, which they had left in a hurry for no reason Gaaf could see. They were a child’s cries, but in the morning no child was aboard. Later, on Willow, he watched Castillo watch a fresh baby-fat boy, maybe ten years old; the dilated eyes came out of a bad dream. The boy was with a crowd of family. He left with them, safe, out of reach. You could not forget nightmares when the pieces added up by day. Castillo’s expression. Cries in the night. The pretty boy who got away.
“Mikhail,” Suarez said.
“What?”
“That’s his name. Wonder if he remembers.”
Gaaf thought about something else, retreating. He put his hand in his pocket, and the chain rubbed against his fingers.
Slight as the wisp of a dream and with burning flesh. The black bone-deep bruises on her thighs. I couldn’t do what they did, Gaaf thought. I’d be gentle. So careful—
He dreamed about it, smiling a little. But Suarez said, “He went to whoring on Valentine. Then he pulled off a big one. I mean big.”
The lights in the common room seemed dim. It was darker and darker. Chairs, tables, everyday objects thickened; they had sharp angles in the dark, were unrelieved cubes.
“What’s the mistake?” Gaaf asked.
“He’s still alive,” Suarez said.
Thirty-six hours:
He slept again, a little. Hard fists on soft skin. She cried out, tears of agony stood in her eyes, burst out, coursed down the discoloring cheeks.
“Oh no. Oh no—” He woke again and stumbled to the common room. They were listening to the ’beams. The hunt was up. Not for them. But only not yet.
“We have to go,” Suarez said.
He sat at Castillo’s right hand. Castillo sat at the head of a long table. He had something in his hands. Gaaf had seen it before: a cylinder of densely engraved gold. At one end there was a rim of flashing jewels round a circle of blackness. Castillo turned it over and over.
“Go where?” said Ta. His nails were badly bitten; he was subject in some moods to something like remorse.
“Gadrah,” Castillo said. “As planned.”
“They’ll get us there, too!” Ta said with violence.
“They won’t,” Castillo said. The faint smile covered his whole face. I know something you don’t, it said.
“Fleet’ll be everywhere for this. There’s no place they won’t go.”
“Not Gadrah,” Castillo said, and he said it with absolute certainty.
“Why not?” Ta said.
“You’ll see. But our cargo’s incomplete. We were robbed,” Castillo said without irony. “This is the last run. We’re trading for more than payload this time. There’s not enough to trade.”
The things stored on Revenge had been purchased legitimately. There was no chance of replacing them.
Wales said, “You’re not thinking of another raid someplace.”
“We might not need one.” The smile stayed in place. “We might be able to get somebody to give us what we need.”
“How?” Wales said.
Castillo explained. He kept turning the golden cylinder in his hands. The engraved letters on it, the ones in Standard, said plainly where it could take them.
* * *
Space fled away behind them. Now they had an itinerary, and the first place they would go was Outside. Gaaf, though ten years with the Interworld Fleet, shrank from it. In Colonial Oversight the stops had been far apart, the isolation profound; each tour of duty was like being Outside, or so he had always thought, and he had never been sure the Fleet would return. To avoid thinking of it he made his head be full of Gadrah: a simple puzzle, a place an Oversight veteran should know.
Suarez showed him pictures of two children of Gadrah and their mother. He said they were his children and their mother’s name was Nekotym. She was a plump creature with bad teeth and extraordinary eyes of warm amber flecked with gold.
“I never heard of the place,” Gaaf said. “Is it called something else?”
“Maybe.”
“What’s it called?”
Suarez grinned. Gaaf persisted. “Why’s he so sure Fleet won’t pick us up there?”
“You’ll see when you get there,” Suarez said, sounding like Castillo.
Gaaf spent a long time ciphering it out. At least he evolved a satisfactory explanation: that wherever Gadrah was, Castillo’s cover there was impenetrable. It was the only possible explanation.
Still Gaaf ought to know about the place; ought to have heard of it, at least, by whatever name.
He tossed and turned in the dark nights, doping himself to sleep when he was desperate for rest. The rags of his life flapped around him in the dark. He had not meant to come to this. He had not meant to witness murder and break bread with murderers. Yet inexorably he had come here. He had never made one single right choice, had not even been a very good physician. There had been too many deaths in the backwaters of a star-spanning culture, and too many of the bereaved had shaken his hand and thanked him, like God, for his failures. His progress from a failing farm on Co-op to greater failures on lesser worlds had been—no progress at all. Increasingly furtive, increasingly alone, he had garnered no good memories to take along on the longest journey he had ever made. He had done one brave thing in his life, and only one: in a sudden access of good taste where a woman was concerned, he had tried to make dying easier for Hanna ril-Koroth. The pathetic inadequacy of it ground at him and gnawed his dreams. There had been a stunner in his hands. A brave man with a stunner could have saved her. But he was not used to saving people; he was only used to helping them die.
And yet she had survived. They heard it on the ’beams as they hurtled toward Omega. The news came out of D’neera somehow, on the heels of the news of the hunt for Michael Kristofik. No one was surprised, except Gaaf. He had to stay away from them, he could not let them see it. Someone else had saved her. The bruises and fever must be gone. She must look as she had when he saw her first, seated between two lumps of alien flesh, holding one by its thready hand. Steady sapphire eyes: she knew what she was doing. Gaaf did not even know where he was going, he did not even know what Gadrah was. But first he was going to the planet of the aliens. He did not know anything about aliens either, except that he did not like them. She knew about aliens. She was not afraid of the Outside. She was supposed to have gone there. He was going in her place, and someone else had saved her; a criminal, it seemed; a braver one than Gaaf.
They passed beyond Omega and heard nothing more.
* * *
It started to seem as if pieces of the Avalon were missing. In the dark; it was always dark. Sometimes what the other men said made no sense, as if they spoke an alien tongue. They gave Gaaf peculiar looks at times. He stayed in his cabin, but it was dark there, too. The nightmare went on without end. But when it ended, they would be where the aliens were. After that—Gaaf’s mind skipped ahead, passing over the aliens. After that it would be Gadrah, where there were people.
Sometimes, when he had the energy, when the men of the Avalon looked like people, he tried to find out about Gadrah.
He was afraid to question Castillo, and Wales was as secretive as Suarez. So he approached Ta, but Ta had made only one trip to Gadrah in three years. He said Castillo and the men of the Avalon were important at Gadrah, that Castillo was a powerful man. Ta said there was a city of white stone that shone in daylight, but the sky always looked cloudy at night. The inhabitants of the city dressed in fine garments and jewels, the finest the Polity could provide. The girls were lubricious, the liquor strong.
It did not sound like any place Gaaf had seen or heard of in his years with Oversight. But after a while it was plain that Ta was nearly as ignorant as Gaaf; that at Gadrah he had been too preoccupied with spirits and girls to look around much, and the memories he had were unreliable.
Gaaf wanted to ask if Ta had ever heard the others talk about the way to get there, but he was afraid to. He was afraid Castillo would find out about his questions.
The other man on the Avalon was Bakti. In ten years he had been to Gadrah three times. He did not know much more about it than Ta. But one night, hunkered in the dim corridor near the black room where Hanna had been held (her blood still spotted the floor), he said to Gaaf, “I don’t think we’re going back.”
“Back where?”
“Civilization,” Bakti said. He talked as if he knew what it meant.
“What do you mean, civilization? Gadrah’s civilized, isn’t it?”
The other man’s face was uneasy in the shadow. “It’s a long way out.”
“So?”
“A long way.”
Bakti looked at Gaaf emphatically. Gaaf shook his head and Bakti hunched closer.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t think anybody else knows where it is. It’s out past Heartworld, I know that. And there’s no charted settlements out there. I looked it up. I don’t think anybody knows except him. And maybe Suarez. Juel knew. The other trips I made, they didn’t let anybody else onto flight deck. You couldn’t pick up a relay transmission. It was like it is out here. They said it was us that was shut down for security. I don’t think so. I don’t think there was anything to pick up. It was a lot like this. A long, long trip. And there wasn’t anybody else out there.”
Gaaf looked at Bakti blankly. Bakti was hinting the impossible, a trap for the credulous. An Oversight veteran would know. The disbelief showed on his face.
Bakti said, “Listen. Most of the people there, they don’t even speak Standard. Most of ’em don’t read it. Most of ’em can’t read at all.”
Gaaf grunted. That was unusual even for an isolate like Revenge.
“And they keep slaves. Would the Polity put up with that if they knew?”
Gaaf refused to take the statement literally. “It’s not much better on Nestor. They’ve never done anything about Nestor.”
“Nestor’s got a fleet of its own. This place doesn’t. Even on Nestor there’s Polity observers walking around. I never saw anybody from the Polity on Gadrah but us. They talk like nobody ever comes there but us.”
“Oversight does,” Gaaf said. What Bakti proposed was unbelievable, so Gaaf did not believe it.
He would see it for himself, and in the meantime he was going to see the aliens.
Hanna’s face when the aliens died was painted on his dreams. She had tried to save them. She had suffered for them. Nobody had ever done any of that for Gaaf. Nobody had ever looked at him like that. He did not think anyone ever would.
* * *
The journey of the Avalon went on for four weeks, which was as long as any point-to-point journey inside human space ever had to last. Then it went on for another week, and another. After that it was impossible for Gaaf to disregard the truth that he was really Outside, and he stopped counting. The others had, perhaps, less imagination; they were not as disturbed as he. Or maybe they were reassured by Castillo’s calmness. The red-haired man was as tranquil as if he were native to Outside, as if the dangers of the flight were insignificant. To be so he must be a masterful pilot. Whenever Gaaf saw him, the empty half-smile was in place on his lips, and his eyes were calm to the point of vacancy. Their light blue was transparent at times. But Gaaf, when he looked into that window (when he dared), looked through it, saw nothing: blank vacuum.
He seldom saw Castillo, or any of the others. They lived on packaged rations and did not come together to eat, only to drink or gamble or watch dramas of human lives from standard recreational programming play out in the walls of the common room for hours on end. Otherwise they moved in separate orbits, colliding accidentally and not often.
The Avalon seemed more dark each day. Gaaf secretly brought more lights to his room from other places, and tried to make the shadows flee. But they lurked at the corners of his eyes even when the room was bright as a star. So in the glare of light he closed his eyes and thought of Hanna to keep from thinking of other things. Old habits reasserted themselves and he stopped thinking of the reality of pain which he had witnessed, and remembered the beauty she had been at the very start, an untouchable ideal, like all beautiful women. But they were not untouchable in fantasy, and so she played a part in the limited reach of his sweaty imaginings. There was not much to do on the Avalon, and it was a long voyage.
One day when he had gone straight from fantasy into sleep, he woke with a sense of alarm. He knew immediately what had caused it: a change in the background noises of the Avalon. It took him a minute longer to realize that the ship had stopped. He went into the corridor with dread. Ta and Bakti huddled in a dark corner and talked in low voices. They fell silent when he came close.
“What happened?” he said.
It was Bakti who answered. “We’re there.”
“Where?”—for a minute he thought they meant Gad-rah. That was how little he wanted to go to Uskos.
“Alien country,” Ta said.
Gaaf went to the flight deck. He had been there frequently throughout the flight, and so had all the others; on this trip it did not appear to be, as Bakti had said of other journeys, forbidden. Castillo and Wales and Suarez were there. Castillo talked. His voice was strange and what he said was a rasping gabble. Then Gaaf saw the transparent shield of an automatic translator in front of his mouth, which damped the vibrations of his voice, twisted them around, and turned them into another language.
Almost as soon as Gaaf came in, Castillo switched off the translator and looked around. “We’re landing,” he said.
* * *
The Avalon was guided to a city of great stone buildings, all identical and so massive they seemed monolithic. Gaaf was on the flight deck for the landing. The Avalon, accompanied by (or strategically surrounded by) an escort, glided over the city for a long time. It went on and on, the truncated tops of stepped piles of masonry all alike ticking away beneath them. This was the City of the Center, by which was meant it was treaty ground, and here came the beings of Ell and Sa, of Ree and Naa and other lands, to settle their differences and have peace. Gaaf looked out on the City of the Center with blank eyes. Before the landing Castillo turned off the translator again. He said, “We’ll be traveling a lot. I told them we want to. Look out for what we need.”
Gaaf thought that meant there had been a promise, and whatever was asked for would be given. So maybe the crazy scheme would work and Castillo would get what he wanted from the ignorant aliens. He trembled with relief, hoping no one would notice. Quite apart from other dreadful suspicions, after what had happened to the aliens and Hanna, Gaaf had come to understand that Castillo dealt out death casually and apparently without fear. It meant nothing. It only meant something had gotten in his way. Gaaf did not want to see any more of it. He had never thought himself a violent man, and now he knew he could not strike or wound or risk his life even to save someone else’s more valuable life. That was why, when they needed him to wake up Hanna, they had had to come and get him after his flight from what the others did, and why his hands had trembled when he lifted her bleeding head.
There was a great commotion at landing. There were translators enough to go around, both ear- and mouthpieces and the processing modules for the hand or belt. What was the Avalon doing with all these translator units?—nobody used them in human space, they were only used by people who had business in places where Standard was unknown. No one on the Avalon asked Castillo about that, but Ta said, “How’d we get the program?”
Castillo gave him an amused look, but he did not answer. It was Suarez who said, “Got it soon as we decided. Hook into any relay and tie in with D’neera. Ask for D’vornan library. That’s all.”
“They just give it to you?”
“Anything you want.”
They came off the ship all together. They were armed. Just before they went out Castillo said, “Don’t answer any questions. Not now, not later. I answer the questions.”
Outside the air was stunning in its brightness and clarity. Gaaf was blinded; he put his hands to his eyes, shielding them from the light of the star. Nothing shielded him from the heat. Yet he was only in the sub-tropics, and they were only a little more hot and more brilliant than comparable latitudes of Earth. But the Avalon had been very dark, and Gaaf had sprung from a cool climate.
Finally he took his hands from his face. Eyes blinking and watering, he saw Castillo hand the golden cylinder to the aliens. He called it a token of faith. He said Rubee and Awnlee of Ell would not return, but men who would have been their friends, though too late to save them from beings alien to humans as well as Uskosians, had made this journey in their place and come to initiate friendship. After that they climbed into wheeled vehicles and were taken through the towering city. But Gaaf’s eyes kept watering, so that he did not see anything.
* * *
It was not so bright in the chambers of Norsa. Norsa, a personage of indeterminate position and age, appeared to be in charge. Gaaf knew that was his name because he said “I am Norsa,” but his description of his function was beyond the capability of the translator. He wore a garment that looked like a brilliant, lavishly embroidered blue barrel. Other Uskosians were there also. They talked with Castillo. At first Gaaf did not listen, but looked in horror at the aliens. They were unutterably ugly. Their skin was dank and leathery, in color a dirty brown. The depressions of their eyespots were filled with an unstable colloid that made him want to retch, and the agitated cilia round their mouths made his skin crawl. Their hands were variable and blunt; he looked for the long thin strings of fingers that had been wrapped around Hanna ril-Koroth’s small human hands, but he did not see any. And they stank. The whole place stank. The walls of Norsa’s chambers were golden, except where they were streaked with bands of other colors, some bright and some subtle. The bands were horizontal and strapped them into the room, which seemed to shrink.
Gaaf began to hear the conversation. Norsa said: “It is a strange tale you tell.”
“Your emissaries indeed met with misfortune,” Castillo answered.
“Is it possible to obtain their bodies?”
“We could not find them. They were put into the sea.”
Gaaf’s eyes wandered to a sweeping window on the city. It was as impressive from here as it had been from the air. The gleaming towers marched away into the sky, making him small.
He heard a name he recognized and his attention sharpened:
“—and this creature of another people, to whom this gift was made—this Hanna ril-Koroth—betrayed honored Rubee and his steadfast selfing?”
“That is what we learned.”
“But why?” Norsa said, and even in the mechanical impersonality of the Standard words fed into Gaaf’s ears, there was a tone of perplexity.
“Zeigans are not like humans,” Castillo said. “They hate those of other species, even humans. Humans do not often go there. Humans went there this time only because there was word of your envoys landing there. But we were too late for anything except vengeance.”
When Castillo finished talking there was silence. But after a time Norsa said, “Your people will have the gratitude of mine for the vengeance you took. Also we must have gratitude that it is you, the human beings, who have come to seek us; rather than those others who would wish us only to die. It was too much to think that we would find only peace in the stars. Yet that was our hope.”
They were given a spacious place to stay, which, however, was well guarded. Surrounding it was a garden. Many of the flowers were tall, coming higher than Gaaf’s waist; they had great blossoms made of flat petals; they were in color bright yellow, deep gold, and vivid pink, and glowed so brightly, and were so perfect, that at first he thought they were artificial. Before the first evening was over there would be more meetings, but for a short while they were alone. They left the house and went to the garden, “In case the walls have ears,” Castillo said, and they walked among the flowers.
“All of you listen,” Castillo said. He looked around, shepherding them with his eyes. Some of them were nervous. The reality of their presence on an alien world getting its first sight of humans was sinking in.
“Don’t answer any questions unless you have to,” Castillo said. “If you have to, say as little as you can. Don’t even talk about it among yourselves, in case they’re listening. If you have to talk, keep the story straight. Their envoys first made contact with Zeig-Daru. They got killed there, Fleet heard about it, that’s how we got the course and why we’re here. They were killed by Zeigans. Remember that.”
“What about the D’neeran woman?” Ta said.
“The name’s right on the course module, says she was their friend. I had to bring it up. They think she was a Zeigan and we executed her for what they did.”
“They won’t swallow it,” Ta said, “the Zeigans are telepaths, they can’t pretend to make friends first and kill you later, they just kill you right away.”
Castillo said, “They don’t know that here. So forget you ever knew it.”
Later there was a banquet at which the food looked terrible and tasted worse. Suarez and Wales went back to the Avalon and returned with real food, but Gaaf did not eat; the drinks had been all right, and he was asleep. Only in his dreams Hanna protested bitterly, as she had not protested, not once, aboard the Avalon.
* * *
They began traveling at once. Despite Castillo’s strictures the men talked among themselves. “He said we don’t have much time before the Polity comes,” Bakti told Gaaf.
“He told them that?”
“No, no, I don’t know what he told them. That’s what he told Suarez.”
“You heard Suarez say that?”
“No, that’s what Ta said Suarez said.”
So it was impossible to know what could be believed. That did not stop the men from talking, and it did not keep Gaaf from listening.
They did their traveling in the Avalon, though transport was courteously offered. What explanation could Castillo have given the aliens for this? How did he explain their going armed—and why did he want them to be armed? How did he justify keeping their hosts off the Avalon? Why did he keep them off?—Gaaf did not hear all the lies and so he never knew if a lie were at issue, or an omission. It crossed his mind that the same thing was precisely true of what Castillo told/lied about/did not tell the men of the Avalon. There was no use listening to words at all. The range of certainties shrank from hour to hour. To: food and drink to go into the mouth. A smelly cubicle on the Avalon. The physical existence of the other men of Castillo’s crew. Gaaf’s own body was less certain than it ought to be; it had tics, twitches, moments when it seemed to fade. As for the outside world, the alien world, it was all a single shining piece, like a peculiar dream to the meaning of which there was no point of entry.
Two beings were assigned to him, him personally, to assist him (or maybe to watch him or both). He was nearly afraid to speak to them at all. Their names were Biru and Brinee, and whenever the Avalon landed in its travels they were there, like personal demons. Gaaf dreaded stepping off the ship and seeing them, inescapable. The other members of the crew had their personal devils, too, and Castillo had several. But Castillo’s face, unlike Gaaf’s, never altered at the sight of them. In their presence he was impassive, and at other times he never spoke of them except to make coarse jokes about the presumed sexual practices of this species.
All time was a single piece to Gaaf, a seamless tissue. There were events, but it did not seem to him that they marked a progression. The events might as well have coexisted all together: until the very end.
There was:
A day of rain like the rain Gaaf remembered from the poor fields of Tarim on Co-op, the water coming down in a curtain like a solid substance. Without being able to see anything because of this cataract, he entered, with the others, a building that grew out of the rain. The water poured down with such power that inside it could be heard pounding the structure’s roof, though the building was substantial. Gaaf was dizzy with the stench of the aliens. There were hundreds of them here, spots of gaudy color in their overdecorated garments, though they sat in shadow on long benches. Only the foremost portion of the great chamber was brightly lit, and there, set well to the back of a deep platform, were two black cubes. The human beings were taken to the front of the hall and given cushioned seats. A being dressed in scarlet came to the edge of the platform.
“I am Balee of Ell,” he said, and began to speak or to declaim, and presently Gaaf realized that he was attending some kind of memorial service for Rubee and Awnlee of Ell. When Balee was done, music began: a kind of irregular drone punctuated by scrapes and squawks. More beings came onto the platform, until it was filled with them. They were masked, and they glittered and dripped with jewels.
Suarez sat at Gaaf’s right, and Castillo beyond Suarez. Gaaf heard Suarez whisper, “Those stones real?”
Castillo breathed, “Find out.”
Balee of Ell said, “And this is the story of the Fate of Relell.”
Gongs sounded, setting up vibrations in the walls, the furnishings, the bones. The beings on the platform moved in the stately ritual of the Fate of Relell.
“On a day,” said Balee, “Relell of the tribe of Relell in the land of Ell set forth with his selfings and all his kinsmen to settle on the far shore of the land of Naa. For in that time the coast of Ell was torn by great storms, and against those storms the Master of Chaos aided none, but watched.
“And Relell and his selfings and all the people went forth in fair ships well made, yet scarcely were they out of sight of land when the ship of Relell’s selfing Uprell foundered, and all who traveled in it were lost. Yet when the people looked behind they saw that the storms were worse than before, and so they could not go back; yet when they looked before them they saw the Master of Chaos. Therefore they went on.”
There was a good deal of noise on the platform-stage. Balee’s voice was amplified, the stiff robes of the players crackled and swished, they chanted and cried out, and the droning went on, too, interrupted by other raucous noises. Under cover of all this Castillo and Suarez talked softly together. Gaaf leaned toward them, trying to appear as if he did not.
“Where do they keep it?”
“We’ll find out.”
“Find out where it is from the air.”
“It won’t be enough.”
“Mark one, though.”
“And they came after great peril and loss to the shore of the land of Naa, and it was summer. Yet the Master of Chaos had caused the season to sicken, and though summer it was cold, and nothing grew in all that fair land. And so when the people sought to plant the seeds they had brought, the seeds died in the ground, and nothing lived and all the land was barren. And there was an end to the food that had come on the ships, and there was great suffering. And the Master of Chaos walked among the people of Relell and watched, yet he did not signify amusement, but was grim and did not answer those who cried to him.
“The winter came, and Relell, though starving, was gravid, and his time came upon him and he brought forth a selfing whom he named Senu; for he wished the Master to be unaware that the youngling was of the land of Ell or the tribe of Relell or that he was the selfing of Relell, and thus he hoped that Senu would be spared. But the Master came to him as he suckled the babe, and it died at Relell’s teat, and the Master watched. And Relell cried out to him, but the Master did not answer, and disappeared.
“At length the winter passed and spring came, and of those who had set forth from the land of Ell, only the twentieth part remained, and they had scarcely strength to hunt or fish. Yet they did, for they said to one another, ‘Now at last the winter is past, and surely now the Master will cease to discourage our endeavor.’ And they grew stronger; but one day there came storms and wind. The wind blew down their huts and blew away their ships and weapons, and they ran from the waves that came onto the shore. And Relell with his last strength tied himself to a tree so that he might not be washed away.
“But then he looked out to sea, and on the sea he saw a wave as big as a mountain, and he knew that his end had come. And in the wave he saw the lineaments of the Master of Chaos, and he cried out to the Master of Chaos, ‘Why? It was a brave undertaking done correctly. What is the reason for these things?’
“But the wave overcame him and he was swept away and drowned, along with all the people. And when all of them were gone the Master of Chaos looked down and said, ‘There was no reason.’ Yet he did not signify amusement.
“And so,” said Balee abruptly, “it is until this moment,” and everything stopped.
After that the players went one by one to the black cubes and took off their jewels and laid them on the cubes. They grew into blazing heaps which Castillo watched with concentration; Suarez’s mouth was open. Then it was over.
* * *
There was:
One more standardized tour of a manufacturing facility. Gaaf was on the flight deck again when the Avalon landed near it. Castillo and Suarez talked. Gaaf listened, and as he listened there filtered into his comprehension, too slowly for alarm, the reasons Castillo used the Avalon for local transport rather than accept the transportation the aliens offered. One reason was that here they could talk among themselves. Another was that this way they could build up detailed maps of where they had been so that, if they wished, they could come back to a place quickly.
Gaaf was not sure what that meant.
They got off the ship and there were greetings. Here were Biru and Brinee, and here also were the other beings of the official party of escorts, the devils who shadowed Castillo and the others. Here were the beings who managed this particular facility, and at their heels something else: a small furred bright-eyed creature on all fours, with a kind of embroidered saddle on its back. It made ambiguous noises the translator could not render into Standard.
The factory was built in a brown countryside. There was warmth in the sunlight, and Gaaf did not know if this country was always brown, or if it was only not the season of growth. The factory made no pretense of fitting into its surroundings. It had cupolas, and its enameled facade was indigo and maroon. Gaaf’s bitter youth on Co-op had convinced him that all factories ought to be underground. The Uskosians were proud of this one, though; it pleased them; they talked as if they were amused by its effrontery.
Castillo acted amused.
They went through the factory and the thing with the saddle got interested in Gaaf. It sidled up to him, pranced around his feet, tripped him up. He kept thinking it would bite him, he dodged it, he made tentative kicking movements, and finally he ducked into a dark passageway to escape it. It followed him. So did Brinee, who found him leaning against a wall, sweating, trembling, and cursing the beast in a whisper. His agitation was apparent even to nonhuman eyes, and Brinee shooed the thing away.
Brinee said, “I am sorry. It is only a pet.”
Brinee stood between Gaaf and the end of the passage. Gaaf looked past him longingly. Where were the other human beings?—he had to catch up with them. But he could not bring himself to walk toward Brinee in the dark.
Brinee said after a while, “My far-kin Awnlee had such a one as a child. He loved it dearly.”
Gaaf knew which of the dead aliens was Awnlee. Hanna’s mental cry of anguish at his death had been perceptible to all of them.
The passageway was murky as the middle of a night. Something seemed to tug at the leg of Gaaf’s trousers; he looked down in a frenzy, kicking. But there was nothing there.
“Are you well?” Brinee said.
Gaaf passed a shaking hand over his face and said, “This is hell.”
The word came out of the translator in unadorned Standard. Neither Ell nor any other Uskosian land had an equivalent concept or a comparable word.
“Ell?” said Brinee. “No, today we are in the land of Ree. Let us join the others.”
Throughout the rest of the tour, Gaaf felt animals snapping at his ankles. There were never any animals there, though.
The factory produced fine liqueurs the color of ripe grain. There were jars and jars of them stacked, shelved, crated, awaiting shipment.
Castillo tasted the liqueurs and nodded. He said to Suarez, with no attempt at concealment, “Mark two.”
The aliens had no idea what he meant. Gaaf was beginning to guess.
They were given certain gifts, as Castillo had predicted. Half a dozen jars of the exotic liqueur; a pyramid of spun-crystal many-colored balls that made sweet sounds when the wind blew over them; stiff ceremonial gowns and masks in primary colors; a handful of other things; not much.
“They took a fortune in presents to Earth,” Ta complained aboard the Avalon.
“They expect a return before they do that again,” Castillo answered.
That was enough to satisfy Ta, but Gaaf, emboldened by this rare communicativeness in Castillo, said, “Did they come out and say that?”
“Hinted.”
“That’s a hell of an attitude,” Ta said, aggrieved.
Wales said, “The funny thing is we’ve got what the Polity was going to give them right down in the holds.”
Some of them chuckled, but Gaaf did not see the humor in it.
“Don’t say so when they’re around,” Castillo said. “Not a word.”
They were traveling toward a city in the heart of Ell where they would be welcomed by an agrarian guild. Suarez said before they landed, “Won’t be much here, I guess.”
“You never know,” Castillo said. “There’s something they want us to see later, some kind of museum. Might round us out, if it’s as good as I think it is. It’s time we went. Long way to Gadrah. Back to Omega, a good six weeks; a week to Heartworld sector; then another five. Three months. We might pass the Polity on the way, I guess,” he said, and the smile came again.
They had now been on Uskos for two Standard weeks, and Gaaf had thought himself adjusting to it. By that he meant that he had learned to blank out the nonhuman landscapes, beings, language, and artifacts. He clung instead to the interludes on the Avalon as if they were life, and all the rest a dream to be endured. In this life a single image suddenly stood out, clear if not technically accurate. It was the course Castillo projected: a course through the waste of Outside, then into and out the other side of human space to another void. In the middle—to be crossed with casual haste, touching nothing—was all the space Gaaf had ever known before: Earth and Fleet’s headquarters at Admin, the amusements of Valentine, the roiling network of Polity culture, even the outposts to which Oversight ministered, even (God help him) Co-op. And everything outside that was barren: a few alien civilization that were patches of terrifying light; and Gadrah, the unknown.
He put his head down on his knees because he felt faint. “You sick?” Bakti said.
He mumbled, “I don’t feel so good.”
“That’s a joke,” Suarez said. “The doctor gets sick.”
He thought of saying: Maybe we can catch what they have here. But he did not, because he suddenly did not want them to have an overriding reason for wanting a physician aboard.
He still had his head down at the landing. He said, “I have to stay here. I can’t sit through one of those God damn shows the way I feel.”
“I don’t know if I can get through another one either,” Wales said, but they were indifferent.
Castillo said, “If somebody’s here, at least we don’t have to secure the ship. Just keep your eyes open.”
“Yes,” Gaaf said.
They were down and the others filed out to the farmers’ guildhall and a dignified spectacle of sowing and reaping, to the some-kind-of-museum which might be—what? Mark five? Mark six? Mark the last, anyway.
Gaaf did not raise his head until they were gone. When he did he had real difficulty doing it, because of the fatigue that dragged at his bones all the time. From the flight deck he saw that the sky outside was gray. The town of Elenstap was spread out before him on a series of gracefully folded hills. Many of the structures in it were brightly colored, so that it presented a festive air. But the colors all ran together, and it was not a human spectacle, and Gaaf shrank away from it, back into the dimness of the Avalon.
The unknown. He chewed the palm of one hand. His head ached.
He thought: I can’t do it.
He thought of what would happen if he begged Castillo to leave him somewhere, anywhere, in human space.
He would be killed. That’s what would happen.
He looked toward the controls of the Avalon. He had been in Fleet too long not to know something about them. For centuries the human species’ desire for many spacecraft had run head-on into the complexity of interstellar flight, and the result had been standardization. A brave man would hijack the Avalon and—
But Gaaf was not a brave man.
The Fleet would come eventually to this world of aliens. They would take him and probe him and punish him for his part in what had happened to the Far-Flying Bird.
Unless. There was his Fleet record: adequate if not outstanding. There was what he had done for Hanna.
And if the impossible was true? Then there might be more. If it was true.
Desperation gave him a small cunning. He crept toward the controls after all. Trembling, looking over his shoulder, he researched the course to Gadrah.
And there it was, as he had feared but not quite, not really, believed until now: a lonely track past the limits of known space, bumped off the inner edge of the spiral arm that had in it not only Earth and her offspring, but all the habitable worlds supposedly known to any human beings.
Aboard the Avalon, standardized, were data storage modules no longer than a finger and a centimeter thick. Gaaf knew where to find them. He put onto one what he wanted to take, and ordered the Avalon to forget his tampering.
Then he sat back, quaking and twitching, to wait.
* * *
The Treasure Store of Elenstap in the Land of Ell was a fair, proud structure three stories high, with two wings set at angles to the main bulk of the building, which was the older portion. Ell had been essentially at peace for a thousand years, and its people’s lively interest in the arts for those thousand years and longer was reflected in the land’s Treasure Stores, by which name was meant public treasures that belonged to all the people who came to admire them. The newer wings of the Store of Elenstap had been constructed to complement the Old Store. They were made of white marble streaked with russet, the marble having come from the same quarry that had supplied the stone for the Old Store. Set into the exterior walls at intervals were palimpsests representing the most important works within, and the representations, though stylized, were masterpieces in their own right. Also the cartouches had been treated with a substance, invisible by day, that absorbed the daylight and shone at night. The Store stood by itself in a grove outside the city, and visitors to Elenstap came there at night to regard a sight no visitor should miss: the radiant images floating in the dark, seemingly unsupported, a catalog in light of the chief treasures of that place.
The Avalon remained at Elenstap that night. The crew rejected the hospitality of Elenstap and stayed on board. If the townsfolk or the official party from the City of the Center were offended, they did not say so, and the humans could not read the nonhuman faces or tell what the movements of the heavy bodies said.
At twilight it began to rain. There was a sharp burst of wind and water which declined to a settled drizzle. No one would come to stand outside the Treasure Store that night, though it glowed brightly as ever in the rain.
Before dusk changed fully to night, Castillo began to detail certain plans he had been formulating since the Avalon’s arrival. Not even Gaaf was surprised by them. But his lack of surprise was of a different order from that of the others. He had made a vague guess at what would be done, deducing it from what Castillo said. The others had not had to guess. There was something that they needed on this world, and it had not been given to them. Therefore they would take it.
Gaaf listened to them talk and they turned into aliens—strange smooth-skinned beings with flexible mouths. This terrified him, and the Avalon was very dark. His simple plan for escaping them seemed a hopeless thread. He was afraid they could read his mind, that someone had read it all along, like the woman who ought to have died on the Avalon. He even thought he saw her at a corner of the dark room.
Don’t give me away! he begged, but she did not hear him; she disappeared. He knew she had not really been there, he was not crazy. All the same his body twitched. The Uskosians were no good either, anatomical freaks with muscle in the wrong places. They were the only link he had left to the Polity, though; to real human beings.
The briefing was over and he had not heard a word of it.
In the middle of the night the Avalon lifted into the air. It flew straight over Elenstap and came to the Treasure Store, and it pushed fire before it. The end of the new west wing blew away. The Avalon hovered at the broken end and the men threw down a ramp to bridge the gap between the ship and the smoky second floor of the Store. Gaaf shoved through the men at the end of the ramp. He did not remember going there. Wales yelled, “You’re supposed to be up with Suarez!” but they were in a hurry, they did not have a second to spare, and no one else questioned Gaaf. Castillo looked at him and the pale blue gaze looked through him; then Castillo turned away.
Gaaf prayed to something and ran after the others, across the ramp, fleeing from darkness into the dark.
The others had lights and wore masks to protect them from the dust and smoke. Gaaf had no equipment. He ran in the dark, tripping over broken stones, falling. His clothes ripped, his hands bled; he got up again and ran into a wall. But he fell on it weeping with relief. He fumbled through the dark with his hands on the wall, bumping into things and knocking them over, or bruising himself against heavier objects that would not move. A door opened under his hands and he fell inward into a blacker darkness and the door snapped shut behind him; the air was cleaner here, but he could see nothing and crawled in the blackness, clawing for the door. He found it and crawled out into the smoke again—and saw a light bob as a man ran back toward the ship with something in his hands.
He kept dragging himself along the wall, stumbling and choking. He was dazed, he had forgotten why he was doing this (but he knew he could not go back); it was blind flight propelled by blind hope, but the hope was light years distant where there were human beings. Another door opened, on light this time, and fresher air; Gaaf saw a staircase, and he half-fell down it. The stairs were painted like the rainbow and gracefully railed, lit by lamps shaped like miniature starbursts, though this way was for emergencies and seldom used. It was pretty, for a nightmare.
He could not read the strange alien signs. But the aliens left nothing to chance, not on a route designed for frightened beings trying to get out. The door that led outside was transparent, the blessed wet night showed through it, and it opened outward as soon as Gaaf fell on it. He stumbled out into the rain. There was a terrible howling somewhere, horrible screams far away but surely louder than any normal throat could make—he did not recognize it as machine noise, fire or disaster control devices racing to the Store of Elenstap and making their ordinary sounds. It seemed that something living and huge and ravening was coming for him—
A dark shape passed overhead, accelerating to another target. If Gaaf had been missed from the Avalon, no one had bothered looking for him.
He stumbled through the grove of trees with wet branches lashing at his head, and out into the soggy fields.
* * *
In the night Gaaf began to understand about the Master of Chaos. Rain pattered on trees he could not see in the dark, and the wind moaned through them. He walked zigzag and blind, falling when stones and other objects turned under his feet, capricious and malevolent. The ground kept falling away or rising up in front of him, so that he moved in a drunken lurch. He could not see anything. He could not even see the lights of Elenstap reflected from the clouds. He did not know if he were walking away from the town or toward it, he went in no direction but randomness.
He kept his right hand in his pocket much of the time, clutching the precious wafer that might buy his life from the Polity. The gold chain was there, too. And maybe she would plead for his freedom as she had pleaded for the aliens’ lives. And when she learned of his flight from Castillo and learned of this journey in the dark she would say, How brave you are, Henrik Gaaf. The blue eyes would rest on him gently and—
He talked to her in the dark. He talked to his sisters on Co-op also. But they said, Quite whining, Henrik, shut up and work.
The rain slackened and stopped. After that there were new noises in the dark as nightbeasts crept from hiding and set about the hunt. There were not so many trees, and then none. The ground was more even and things grew in it in rows which Gaaf followed because it was easier walking that way. Sometimes there were no rows, but solid masses of vegetation that caught at his legs and feet like snapping animals. He stumbled on, wet to the skin, cold and hungry and very tired.
When he could go no farther, he sat down on the ground. He tried to imagine Hanna beside him, the warmth, but he could not. He was too cold.
He fell asleep without knowing it, and when he woke up it was light and an alien bent over him. He yelled and squirmed away from the touch and then he saw that he was surrounded by a ring of them. He began to weep. He wept all the rest of the day; they looked at him without comprehension. There were no translators and they could not talk to him, though they tried; they tried very hard. And they took him back to the City of the Center and put him in a bare locked place, he had not expected anything else, he had not expected anything, and he was passive and only wept; but when they took the wafer of data away from him, he howled so desperately that they gave it back to him again.