He had told me, and I had believed him. But as I looked at Susarma Lear’s sweat-stained face, at the blonde hair now matted and tangled, and the blue eyes colder than any eyes I had ever seen before, I knew that there was no way on Earth, or on Asgard, or anywhere in the universe you could name, that she was ever going to take my word for it.
“Don’t kill him,” I begged. “Please, don’t kill him.”
I wouldn’t let go of her arm. I don’t know exactly why I cared so much. After all, it was his word against hers… or his word against her instincts. What had he done for me in the few hours we’d been together? What sense was there in my trying to defend him?
But I did care. Maybe I had simply reached the end of my tolerance for death and destruction. Maybe I was suffering from a nasty bout of that old omnivore confusion.
She brought her pistol round and pointed it at my face.
“If you don’t let go,” she said, “I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
She’d already set the world on fire—what had she to lose?
There was no doubting that she meant it. Her special paranoia was well and truly unconfined, and there was not a thing I could do to contain it.
I let go of her arm.
Jacinthe Siani was still out in the open, crouching on the path. Nobody had bothered to pull her out of the way. She looked very miserable, brought into as much disarray by her falls and collisions as anyone else. Her hair was a mess and the expression on her nearly-human face was sheer blind panic. She was staring out along the curving path, and though I couldn’t see him from where I crouched, I knew who she was staring at.
Susarma Lear had turned away from me, and I was utterly forgotten.
I guess there comes a time in every man’s life when he does something totally stupid, for no good reason at all.
I leapt to my feet, and shouted with all my might: “Run, you bastard, run!”
Once I was standing, I could see him. He was seven or eight metres away, in the middle of an unusually large patch of bare ground. He had been looking at Jacinthe Siani, his eyes wide in apparent puzzlement. As I rose, he turned to me, but he gave not the slightest sign that he had heard what I said, and the noise of the fire-startled insects was so clamorous that he probably could not make out the words. It was only the sight of me that had attracted his attention, and he stared at me as though I was a madman. He did not appear to be armed, and all he was wearing was a pair of underpants. For all his gargantuan bulk, he looked supremely vulnerable—the easiest target in the world.
Susarma Lear rose in front of me, emitting incomprehensible obscenities. Without the slightest pause or hesitation she thrust her gun out before her and fired. The flame-bolts sizzled like fireworks as they shot through the air, striking him full in the chest: one, two, three.
He went over backwards, collapsing into himself as the hot gases opened up his pleural cavity, frying his heart and his lungs.
The star-captain let out a mighty scream of triumph, and then the sky went crazy too.
All the blazing lights began flickering and flashing, and I felt for the second time that nightmarish sensation of having acid poured into my skull. I reached up with my hands to cover my face, trying to shut my eyes against the assault of the mindscrambler, but I had no chance.
The last thing I saw before I was rudely thrust into insensibility was Myrlin’s shattered body, lying with arms outstretched on that patch of bare ground.
It was shimmering, like a distorted video-picture about to flicker out and disappear.
But it was me who flickered out.
35
When I woke up again I felt anything but good. My stomach was queasy, my head was spinning and I had a dreadful metallic taste in my mouth. My eyelids felt as if they were glued down and the muscles in my legs were aching.
Nevertheless, I managed to sit up, and after a while I opened my eyes, blinking in order to clear my vision.
I was still in the same place. The sky had stopped flickering, and was now presenting a reasonable simulation of twilight. Some of the lights were on, but most were off. The forest was still, and very quiet. I could still smell smoke, but the odour was faint and distant.
Susarma Lear was stretched out on a gigantic leaf, her head cradled by a purple flower. She was quite unconscious, and made no response at all when I shook her sleeve.
I looked at the patch of open ground where Myrlin’s body should have been lying.
The body wasn’t there.
Nor was the patch of ground.
I wasn’t altogether surprised. Dazed as I was, I remembered seeing the body flicker before I went out for the count, and the suspicion must have been born in my mind at that moment that all was definitely not as it seemed.
I checked Jacinthe Siani, who responded no better to my half-hearted attempt to rouse her than the star-captain had. I could also see Seme, similarly dead to the world, though not actually deceased.
I coughed a few times, trying to get the awful taste out of my mouth, and then leaned against the wall, trying to draw strength from its cool solidity.
Myrlin came out of the bushes. He was dressed exactly as he had been when I had seen him shot down, but his big hairy torso was quite intact, and though the dim light made him seem a little greyer than I remembered him, he looked a good deal healthier than I did.
It was the first time I’d been able to get a good look at his face, without an obscuring visor. His features weren’t rugged at all. He was round-faced with skin that looked very soft. He was like a vastly overgrown baby, except for the big nose.
“Hello, Mr. Rousseau,” he said softly.
“That damned lion,” I said, with a certain amount of irritation. “You weren’t testing me. You were testing the illusion.”
“They weren’t entirely sure that it would work,” he said. “It’s a new trick they worked out specially for the occasion. You had me worried when you seemed to have it figured out, but I thought it went well enough. I think it worked on the star-captain. She’ll be quite convinced that she killed me. A cathartic experience, I’m sure. She’s been under a lot of stress.”
“The others are really dead, though.”
“Oh yes,” he said, mildly. “Amara Guur and his men are really dead. She knows they’re dead—and that will help to convince her that I’m dead too, should she begin to doubt it. I didn’t have any qualms about letting them die—they tortured Saul Lyndrach, and caused his death. They’d have killed me too, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the tranquillisers they pumped into me weren’t as effective as they expected. There are advantages in being a giant.”
“You orchestrated the whole thing?”
“Mostly. I didn’t have a completely free hand. They went along with most of what I suggested.”
“They?”
“The people who live here. They seem to be a little shy—I haven’t actually met them in the flesh yet. But they have very sophisticated machines.”
I shook my head, still trying to get back the good feeling I’d had when I woke up only a couple of hours before. An awful lot had happened during those brief hours.
“Is the fire out?” I asked, deliberately choosing a question of marginal relevance. I didn’t feel up to asking the big ones yet.
“Yes. It didn’t do too much damage. It can all be repaired.”
“That’s a relief.” The sarcasm wasn’t really called for, but I figured that I might be excused.
There was a pause, while Myrlin looked down at the prostrate star-captain, who had a more peaceful expression on her face now than I’d ever seen there before.
“I don’t think they actually believed me,” said Myrlin.