Castle Dreams (3 page)

“Well, congratulations. What did you move?"

“Bishop to queen's three. There. You're in check."

Dalton studied the board. “So I am."

“You always manage to squirm out of it, but this time I've got you. You're hemmed in on all sides. You must either move your king or take the bishop with the queen, but doing the latter will put your queen in jeopardy. And if you move your king, it's only a matter of time before I corner you.” Lord Peter folded his arms and gloated.

“What a jam,” Dalton said appreciatively. “Quite a nice little trap you set for me."

“And have just sprung mercilessly."

“So you have, so you have. Unless..."

Lord Peter sat up. “Unless?"

“Well, if I'm not mistaken, if I take your king's bishop with my queen's, you're in check ... and—unless I'm entirely misapprehending the strategic situation—that's mate."

Lord Peter saw with horror that Dalton was right. “Impossible!"

“I would not kid his lordship."

Lord Peter looked ill. “I think I'll go to my room and blow my bloody brains out."

“Here, here, that's hardly called for. Besides, you'll have the chambermaids all upset."

Lord Peter thought it over. “You're right, they'll refuse to step into the place and there'll be no end of mess.” He gave the matter more consideration. “I'll throw myself off the King's Tower."

“Now you're being reasonable."

The giggling from Deena and Linda quickly faded as Melanie came running into the room. They saw the look on her face.

“Melanie, what's wrong?” Linda asked uneasily.

“It's the servants,” Melanie said grimly. “They're saying something happened to Lord Incarnadine. Word came through from the aspect he's in."

“My God, what—?"

“They're saying...” Melanie swallowed hard and tried again. “They're saying he's dead."

 

 

 

 

KEEP—NEAR THE QUEEN'S TOWER—LOWER LEVELS

 

Lugging a huge sheaf of fan-folded paper—a computer printout—Gene trudged the hallways of Castle Perilous, looking for a doorway into an interesting universe. His explorations of the past two weeks hadn't turned up a portal worth spitting into, and this outing was no exception.

He stopped. Before him stood an anomaly, an archway that opened onto a pleasant landscape of trees, grass, shrubs, and bright sunlight. The anomaly consisted in the fact that this innocuous scenery did not lie outside the castle in the normal sense. It was part of another world, one belonging to a universe entirely separate from the one that the castle occupied. In the castle nomenclature, this doorway to a strange cosmos was an “aspect."

He consulted the printout. It was a list of aspects with names and descriptions, grouped according to location in the castle. Gene thumbed through the pages covering the 14th floor of the keep. There were hundreds of listings, and the locations were somewhat vague. For instance: “Twelve paces east, along common bearing-wall between Tinker's Stall and Queen's Ladies' Sewing Room: to right of foliated pilaster."

Big help. There were hundreds of empty rooms on this floor. No one knew which had been what a millennium or two ago, when this catalogue of aspects been compiled (the data had come out of an ancient book in the castle library and had recently been sorted by the castle's mainframe computer).

But Gene thought he had this aspect pegged.

“'Arcadia,'” he read aloud from the printout. “'Clement, peaceful; salubrious climate. Fauna: small and inoffensive. Population: by all indications uninhabited. Flora: extensive, variegated. Otherwise undistinguished.'”

Another parklike aspect, of which the castle had thousands. Pleasant, good for picnics and outings. Hills, trees, and grass. Of little interest to a man hungering for high adventure.

Gene moved on.

He had changed from castle clothes—the usual neo-medieval attire—to an all-weather one-piece outdoor suit that Linda had conjured for him, at his behest and to his specifications. Fashioned of a sturdy synthetic material and dyed in camouflage, it featured numerous zippered pockets and a wide utility belt. The belt had pouches holding compass and other accouterments, along with a hunting knife and scabbard. With hiking boots and backpack, he was set for any climate and terrain, within certain limits, from high desert to subarctic tundra. Very hot and very cold climates would be problematical—but of course the choice of world was his.

He simply couldn't decide.

The backpack bulged with a week's rations, and his canteen held a three-day supply of water. The trouble was that he didn't know quite what he had in mind. Was this a recreational outing? Just a backpacking trip? If so, perhaps he merely wanted to spend a week alone and watch fish break the crystalline surface of a mountain lake, or observe a canopy of silent, alien stars slowly wheeling, or look for fossils in the uplifted limestone beds of ancient seas, or maybe just contemplate the involuted folds of his navel....

Then again, maybe he actually wanted to explore an inhabited aspect, one with an interesting culture that merited scrutiny. It might be entertaining to find an aspect set in a historical period similar to one of Earth's. A rough-and-tumble milieu. A war.

Was that what he hungered for? Violence? Sobering thought. He didn't think of himself as particularly bloodthirsty. True, he liked proving himself with a sword, and had parried and lunged in many a fencing duel—but all of his fighting had been in one cause or another: defending his friends and the castle against invaders, or overthrowing a particularly odious regime in one of the inhabited aspects, or generally fighting the good fight. All perfectly justifiable. Yes, he'd killed men, several. And quasi-men: non-humans and not-quite-humans.

So, did he want more of that? Did he feel the overwhelming need to seek out such confrontations? To what purpose? Must he spill blood to set his own racing?

He stopped in front of another aspect, this one desiccated and bleak. He walked on.

No, he didn't like spilling blood. He was tired of conflict. The castle had gone through one convulsion after another in the past few years: siege, palace intrigue, dissension, invasion, and castlequake (extreme instability caused by stress and disharmony in the multiverse). He wanted a reprise of any of that? Absolutely not. The last thing he wanted was more
Sturm und Drang
.

Another portal, another world. There was not much out there but salt flats under a deep purple sky. He continued down the stone-lined corridor.

What he craved was adventure. He wanted to undertake an expedition to discover something. Search for the source of the Nile. Climb Everest. Sled through the Antarctic. Plumb the depths of the Marianas Trench in a bathyscaphe.

Or find equivalents of any of those things in one of these worlds.

Here was yet another aspect. And yet another picnic ground. He thumbed through the printout, vainly trying to find something of interest. He'd come to this floor because a few of the descriptions sounded promising. He had failed to locate any of the aspects described.

He flipped through page after page. Jeremy, the castle data-processing chief, had given him the printout, but could neither vouch for the data's accuracy nor warrant that it wasn't completely obsolete. Aspects sometimes shifted around, and this list had been compiled thousands of years ago. Efforts were being made to update the records, but the job was time-consuming.

Perhaps only Incarnadine, King of the Realms Perilous, knew every aspect, where it was and what it was. However, he claimed he didn't, and everyone usually took him at his kingly word.

Gene lost his grip on the unwieldy printout and a section of it dropped to the floor, trailing its paper tail. He stooped to pick up the spill but in the doing dropped more. This produced a blood-chilling oath. He kicked at the pile. Paper all over the place.

He gathered up the whole mess and threw it into the nearest alcove. Dusting his hands, he walked away.

He saw a room to his right and entered. It was one of the castle's countless sitting rooms, furnished as usual with dark carved chairs, a settee, and a few tables. Tapestries depicting hunting scenes draped the stone walls. This room seemed to get some use—there was a bowl of fresh fruit on one of the tables.

Gene shucked his backpack. He took an apple, lounged on the settee, and munched abstractedly.

This was useless. Either he wasn't being systematic enough or his luck had turned bad. Never before had he run into the problem of finding an interesting aspect. Used to be they popped up at the drop of a hat.

Maybe there was another problem. What used to be a novelty had long ago become commonplace. Maybe he'd seen enough interesting new worlds. Maybe he needed to go back home to his own.

But the longer he thought about going home, the less attractive the prospect seemed. Home? What was home? What was Earth, for that matter? One big heaving ball of storm and stress. He wondered what current world crisis was grabbing the headlines.

Not that he cared.

So, not going home left the alternative of staying here, which was boring. He wondered what in the world was wrong with him. Why could nothing in a fantastic enchanted castle captivate his imagination?

Could he be just plain depressed—clinically depressed? It happens to lots of people, he thought. Who granted you immunity?

But he didn't feel depressed, exactly; though what he was feeling—restlessness, boredom, and a sense that nothing really mattered—were suspicious symptoms. He gave some thought to the notion of seeking professional help.

Therapy? He was skeptical of its value. Something about all that shrink business had always struck him as questionable. Sure, therapy had it clinical uses, but for a person in generally good mental health to sit himself down...

Or was he just rationalizing? He considered his reluctance as a candidate for the symptom category.

Boy, they get you coming and going. Feel the need for therapy? No? Well, that simply means you need therapy.

He suddenly laughed.

You see, Doctor, I live in this big enchanted castle. And one day, while flensing a dragon, I suddenly got this overpowering feeling of futility....

No, that would never do. They'd take him directly to the bouncy cubicle.

He sighed and tossed the half-eaten apple over his shoulder; then, regretting this act of thoughtlessness (the servants had enough work) he got up to retrieve it and saw that it had rolled through a doorway—an aspect, in fact—one that he had only half-noticed on entering.

Now he noticed it. This world was very nice, very nice indeed. He poked his head through. There was a clean, bracing wind blowing through a stand of pines to the right. Well, they looked like pines, but they were orange. On second thought they didn't look
much
like pine trees.

Even with orange non-pine trees, the terrain reminded him of places in Utah or western Colorado. Except for the colors: bright turquoise-blue rocks. Copper compounds? And a sort of pink sky. Airborne dust particles, he guessed.

Actually it didn't look a hell of a lot like anyplace he'd ever seen or visited. But it did look interesting. Sort of like photographs of a national park in Kodachrome-gone-mad.

He went back and fetched his gear. Wouldn't hurt to step through and look around. He wouldn't wander very far, not until he was sure this world was uninhabited. He could usually tell. Unpopulated worlds had a certain feel to them; and populated ones were sometimes all too unmistakable, especially those that succumbed to the temptations of technology (from stone axes to beverage cans). Litter was a trans-universal phenomenon.

He walked through the portal and out into a bright new world.

Yes, it was fairly obvious what he really wanted. Just a few days alone to ruminate and gather some wool. A little retreat to recharge the spiritual batteries. Had he really wanted adventure, he would have opted for an adventurous world, an inhabited one, a choice that would have necessitated research, reconnoitering, and extreme caution. To say nothing of breaching the language barrier, learning the customs, coming up with a convincing identity, and all that sort of undercover stuff. You couldn't really go traipsing into an inhabited aspect—or any aspect—without adequate preparation. He had violated that rule enough to know how dangerous it could be.

He really liked this world. Snow-hooded peaks to the north, as he reckoned north, an orange forest to the south—aquamarine badlands in between. Vegetation was strange not only in color. He passed a bush with diamond-like nodules depending from thin stalks. Another plant looked like an avant-garde sculpture constructed of clear plastic tubing.

He stopped to take a compass heading. His directional guesses were fairly true. The mountains lay to the magnetic north. He'd head toward them and try to find that crystal mountain lake. He probably wouldn't be able to eat the fish in the lake, though he had brought tackle and hand-line. This was hardly an Earth-like world, and the plant and animal proteins here probably didn't match his body chemistry. In other words, most everything that might appear edible would not be. He'd be living out of his backpack for a week. But that he was perfectly willing to do. He'd brought the best in freeze-dried comestibles.

The air was temperate, but it would likely get cold at night. That was no problem, however, as he had a high-tech wonder of a one-man tent and a mylar-lined sleeping bag that was rated down to minus 35 degrees Celsius.

He hiked along for about ten minutes, keeping the sun to his left as he threaded his way around upthrusting strata of greenish-blue. Yellow streaking ran through the rocks.

As he was coming down into a shallow canyon, a loud report shattered the air and made him jump. It was quite unexpected.

He looked up. No thunderclouds, and he was momentarily mystified until he saw the contrail of a fast-moving object in the sky. The noise had been a sonic boom.

“Oh, damn."

He'd have to head back. Despite his intuitions to the contrary, this world was not only inhabited but technologically sophisticated.