“I think people were going back and forth, or supplies, or both maybe,” she told Amanda, who came to put a rug around her shoulders and a mug of tea into her shaking hands.
“That stands to reason,” Amanda said, going back to her careful checking of Mark’s printouts. “It would be hard to make a pocket universe an entirely closed ecology. And I suppose the crew has to go on leave sometimes. Now, if only we could find out what sort of supplies they need regularly, we’d be home and dry. We could send our team in disguised as provisions.”
“I’ll see what I can get you on that,” said Gladys. Lord! Amanda made a lousy cup of tea! Too intellectual, that was her trouble. Mind above tea. “You really think we’re going to have to send people across?”
“Can you see any other way to get close enough to blast them and cope with all the surprises they’re going to heave at us?” Amanda asked. “The Trojan horse idea still seems the best bet to me.”
“You’re probably right,” Gladys agreed mournfully. Probably because she was so recently out of linkage with Jimbo, she found her mind full of earthy sadness, playing over all the brightest and best and most beautiful of the young folk associated with the Ring — feisty little Flan Burke, that lovely boy Tam, the nice-looking blond fellow who was Paulie Lister’s lover, bossy Roz Collasso, and many, many more. Any of these could be chosen as storm troopers bound for Laputa-Blish. Such a waste. Such a shame. But no point mentioning that to Amanda.
“I’ll have a look at the supplies they’re getting,” she promised. Disguise the kids as corned beef? Unless the citizens of Laputa-Blish turned out to be vegetarians. That would cause problems.
She was out of luck the next few watches, however. Laputa-Blish neither received nor sent anything concrete. All it did was move.
“Move?” Mark asked, startled.
“Bless you, they all move, these universes!” Gladys said. “Ours wriggles about, and theirs wanders up and over and around ours, and all the others do it too. Every time I go, there’s a difference. Cup of tea, Mark, please.”
Mark, who had spent his stint looking after Gladys in laboriously exploring ways and means of transferring matter between universes — the pirates had proved it could be done, otherwise he would have despaired — sprang to the kettle, and then stopped. “What about Laputa-Blish? Does that move?”
“Yes. It sort of jostles in a circle around theirs. The first time I went back to look for it, I thought it had gone,” Gladys confessed. “But it was just around the back of them after all. I was in quite a panic till I realized.”
“I’ll need its course plotted,” he said. “If it’s moving about, our capsule could miss it and simply disintegrate in the void between. That void’s giving me nightmares anyway. All sorts of things could happen to our team there. I must have a chart of how Laputa-Blish moves.”
“You’ll get it. When do I get my tea?”
“Now — at once,” he said, diving to the stove through the jungle trees. They kept the kettle perpetually simmering these days. “Amanda left you some soup in a thermos. Want some?”
“Not if it’s like her tea,” said Gladys.
“It’s not. She said her sister made it.” Mark brought her the soup with her tea, and she did not refuse it. As he got back to work, she said sharply, “Did you feed my cats?”
“They make damn sure I do,” he said. She chuckled. When he next looked, she was off again, or perhaps asleep, with Jimbo a dark, leggy, motionless heap on her lap. He got down to work again, grateful for the heavy warding Gladys kept around her house. Someone kept trying to contact him. He was fairly sure it was Paulie. It was sharp and possessive and had a female feel to it. Whoever it was had some difficulty penetrating Gladys’s wards as more than a little nagging whisper. At any other time he would have answered at once, just on the off chance it was Zillah — even though Zillah was never possessive and had anyway made it plain that everything between them was finished — but not now. Transfer was fiendishly difficult. He kept wondering why, when the pirates could do something of this order, they needed to steal from Earth at all.
Gladys burst out laughing.
Mark jumped around to find her leaning back in her chair cackling, and Jimbo capering around her legs. “Are you all right?” he said cautiously.
“Oh, dear me, yes!” she said, wiping a tear of laughter away with her blotchy knuckles. “Oh Lord! You’ll never believe this, Mark! I’ve found out what those big linkages are. I was fairly sure they were transferring people, and they are. They’re women, Mark — girls for the troops! They just sent the lot of them back.”
“Are you sure?” he said. Her earthy cackle unnerved him. He felt prudish dismay.
“Of course I’m sure! Every soul in Laputa-Blish at this moment is a man. Think I don’t know the difference?”
“Then we’ve got our strike force,” he said, divided between distaste and relief.
“That’s right, dear,” Gladys said. “Trojan women. Girls for the troops. Jael smote Sisera sleeping, and a few Jezebels for luck. I almost wish I could be going myself!”
Further careful observation confirmed that the resident population of Laputa-Blish was indeed all male. Amanda and Maureen gleefully set about choosing a group of the gifted, committed, and good-looking from which the strike force could be selected.
“It serves them right,” Amanda said, briskly ticking names on her list, “for confining the use of magic to the male sex.”
“Oh, but they don’t,” said Gladys, and her eyes met Mark’s. “That poor girl in the hospital was a proficient, wasn’t she?”
“We’d better get in touch with her,” he said uneasily.
“All in good time. When she’s ready to talk.” Gladys stroked her animal. “Jimbo says she’s still in shock yet. He thinks the pirates don’t really understand about rebirth the way we do.”
II Arth
1
The High Head of All Horns and King’s Vicar on Arth performed the final motions that transferred his visitors from Arth to their homes in the Fiveir of Leathe. Instead of doing it with his mind, which was the usual practice, he drew the symbols of the weave in the air with his hands and took vicious satisfaction in the way they burned green across his sanctum. Ozone crackled from wall to wall. Those ladies were in for a rough ride. Having done this, he sank into a seat, slung his heavy mitre onto its stand, and loosened his uniform with savage relief.
Nag, nag, nag! He could see them now, all the pretty faces gathered about his conference table, all the expensive and no doubt fashionable clothes, each one assaulting his nose with her own particular thick perfume — not to speak of assaulting his psyche with their dozen individual soft accusations. All claiming he had hurt them, for the Goddess’s sake! Didn’t they think he could see into their souls at least as well as they could see into his? Hurt, indeed! He knew them all to be as hard as nails, each one softly and inexorably set on having her own way. Well, they commanded in Leathe maybe, but not here in the separate small universe of Arth.
When he learned that this year’s high-tide transfers would be bringing the entire Inner Convent of Leathe to see him, he rightly interpreted it as another attempt by Lady Marceny to get his soul under her domination. Report had it that she, and her mother before her, had possessed his predecessor in soul and mind too. The High Head had no doubt that the report was true. Marceny was the hardest and most inexorable of all the women of Leathe. She possessed most of the power in Leathe, but she was not satisfied with that, nor with having made a vicious puppet out of that son of hers. Not she. She wanted Arth as well.