“Woman may do so oftener,” said the Lady Yuria.
She was high in Storm’s councils, fair-haired, violet-eyed, but with her cousinship plain to see in the Diana face and figure. More women than men were at the board, and took clear precedence. A family resemblance marked them all, both sexes handsome, vital, ageless. Their conversation was a glittering interplay in which Lockridge was soon lost; he gave up trying to participate, leaned back and enjoyed it as he would music. Afterward he had no firm idea of what had actually been said.
They retired to another hall where colours shifted in hypnotic rhythm through floor and walls. Servants catfooted about with trays of refreshment, but there was no visible source for the melodies to which they danced. His diaglossa taught Lockridge the intricate measures, and the Warden ladies were supple in his arms, blending their movements with his until two bodies became one. Though the scale was strange to him, he was more deeply moved by this music than by most else he had known in his Me.
“I think you must have subsonics along with the notes,” he ventured.
Yuria nodded. “Naturally. But why must you have a name and an explanation? Is not the reality enough?”
“Sorry. I’m just a barbarian.”
She smiled and drew closer in the figure they were treading. “Not ‘just.’ I begin to see why you found favour with the Koriach. Few of us here—certainly not myself—could be such adventurers as she and you.”
“Uh . . . thanks.”
“I am supposed to care for your young friend—look, she has fallen asleep—she won’t need me this night. Would you care to spend it with me?”
Lockridge had thought he wanted only Storm, but Yuria was so much like her that every desire in him shouted Yes! He needed his whole will to explain that he must get rested for tomorrow. “When you get back, then?” Yuria invited.
“I shall be honoured.” Between the wine, the music, and the woman, he had no doubt of his return.
The Lady Tareth danced by with Hu and called gaily, “Keep some time for me, warrior.” Her partner grinned without resentment. Marriage was a forgotten institution. Storm had remarked once, with some anger, that free people had no property rights in each other.
Lockridge went to bed early and happy. He slept as he had not done since he was newborn.
Morning was less cheerful. Hu insisted he take another euphoriac. “You need a mind unclouded by fear,” the Warden said. “This will be difficult and dangerous at best.”
They went out for some practice with the devices the American would be using, to make real for him the knowledge imparted by the diaglossa. High they flew over endless parkland. Near the limit of their trip, Lockridge spied a dove-grey tower. At the fifteen hundred foot summit, two wings reached out beneath a golden wheel, to make the ankh which signifies life. “Is that on the edge of a city?” he asked.
Hu spat. “Don’t speak to me of cities. The Rangers build such vile warrens. We let men live next to the earth their mother. That’s an industrial plant. None but technicians are quartered there. Automatic machinery can do without sunlight.”
They returned to the palace. From outside, its roofs and spires made one immense subtly coloured waterfall. Hu conducted Lockridge to a small room where several others waited. They were men; war, like engineering, was still largely a male provenance, short of that ultimate level on which Storm operated.
The briefing was long. “We can get you within several miles of Niyorek.” Hu pointed to a spot on the map before him, the east coast of a strangely altered North America. “After that, you must make your own way. With your beard shaven off, a Ranger uniform, your diaglossa and what additional information we can supply, you should be able to reach Brann’s headquarters. We have ascertained he is there at this moment, and of course we know that you will see him.”
The drug did not keep Lockridge’s belly muscles from tightening. “What else do you know?” he asked slowly.
“That you got away again. It was reported to him—it win be reported—that you escaped to a time corridor.” Hu’s gaze became hooded. “Best I say no more. You would be too handicapped by a sense of being a puppet in an unchangeable drama.”
“Or by knowing they killed me?” Lockridge barked.
“They did not,” Hu said. “You must simply take my word. I could be lying. I would lie, if necessary. But I tell you as plain truth, you will not be captured or killed by the Rangers. Unless possibly at some later date . . . because Brann himself never found out what became of you. With luck, however, you should emerge from the corridor through another, pastward gate, slip out of the city, and cross the ocean to this place. There you will know how to get back to the present. I hope to greet you within this month.”
The bitterness faded in Lockridge. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get down to details.”
15
There was no full-dress fighting in this era, or there would have been no Earth. Somewhere, sometime, when one side or the other believed it had grown strong enough, the great onslaught would be launched; but its nature was unguessable by the combatants themselves. Meanwhile the hemispheres were fortresses and skirmishes were incessant.
The Warden spaceship screamed on a long curve, westward and downward across an ocean where a storm had been generated for this night. At the end of that trajectory, a voice said, “Now,” and Lockridge’s capsule was ejected. Meteor-like, it streaked through wind and rain, aflame with the violence of its transit. The ship came about and raked for altitude.
Lockridge lay amidst incandescence. Heat buffeted him; his skull rang with vibration. Then the weakened pod burst open and he cast himself free on his gravity belt.
So fast was he still going that the force field was barely able to shield him from a stream that would have torn him asunder. The hurricane raved about his screen, blackness, lightning, and a wall of rain. Waves grabbed upward at him, spindrift smoking off their crests. As his speed dropped below the sonic, he heard the wind skirl, thunder crash, waters roar. A blue-white flare cut through the weather and left him dazzled for minutes. The explosion that followed struck his ears like a hammer. So they detected us, he thought stunned, and shot a firebolt at the ship. I wonder if she got away.
I wonder if I will.
But so small an object as a man was engulfed by the tempest Nor were the Rangers likely to be on the alert for him. They would only expect their enemies to take this much trouble for a major operation and could not know that the sending of a single agent was indeed one.
History said he was going to reach Brann’s castle.
Climate control fields pushed the storm away from the coast. Lockridge broke into clear air and saw Niyorek.
Monstrous it gloomed on the shore, and inland farther than his vision went. Maps and diaglossa had told of an America webbed from end to end with megalopolis. Little broke that mass of concrete, steel, energy, ten billion slaves jammed together, save here and there a desert which had once been green countryside. The gutting of his land seemed so vast a crime that he needed no drug to cast out fear. Oh, Indian summers along the Smokies, he thought, I’m comin’ to get revenge for you.
North, south, and ahead, the city raised ramparts where nothing but a few wan lamps, and the spout from a hundred furnaces, relieved the lower murk. A sound came over the sea, humming, throbbing, sometimes shrilling so high it was pain to hear: the voice of the machines. On the upper levels, individual towers lifted a mile or more, the first dawn-glow pallid on their windowless sides. Cables, tubes, elevated ways meshed them together. The spectacle had a certain grandeur. They were not small-minded, the men who dreamed those vertical caverns into the sky. But the outlines were brutal, bespeaking a spirit whose highest wish was the unrestrained exercise of unlimited power, forever.