Meeting at Infinity (7 page)

I
N THIS
, the latest of Hal Lanchery’s three franchises to be opened up, the traders’ domain was within an island of green forest surrounded by open plain, thickets of shrubs and wide, meandering streams. Tonight was clear and rather bright, with a very white quarter-moon in the sky.

Under a tall tree, surrounded by his aides, Hal Lanchery finished briefing Fearmaster through an interpreter. Fearmaster was tall, muscular, and courageous. But when he was with the traders, he showed fear. He could not help it. And it was better that way.

Lanchery had taken this franchise for the sake of its furs and skins, which were superb and plentiful. It had not at first occurred to him that the G’kek’s mastery of wild animals could be put to use. He shifted in his chair as he thought of how the idea had come to him, and felt a stir of uneasiness, wondering if he was doing right or not.

He was in his way a handsome man—lean, young to be of such eminence, with a fair beard. Most of the merchant princes wore beards, and their followers also, because of the aura of frontiersmen which hung about them. Not that there was much of the pioneering spirit in franchise work. Sometimes, though, an ugly look would cross his face, and it would seem suddenly Savage, barbaric.

Fearmaster, skilled in reading nonverbal communications, saw such a look now, and gave a grunt as though he had been struck in the belly. Lanchery came back from his private thoughts and snapped at the interpreter.

“Well? How’s it going? You’ve been talking a long time.”

The interpreter shrugged. “I had difficulty making sense of something he said. It seems they’re developing taboos against referring to our equipment directly—they use circumlocutions
which get harder and harder to follow. But as I understand it, they’re doing all right with the animals. Only the portal we’re setting up smells so strongly of man and of electricity they doubt whether they’ll get the beasts right up to it.”

“Ask him if there’s any way of covering up the smell, then.”

“I did. Apparently the portal will have to be smeared with bruised leaves and animal droppings. Then it might not be too bad.”

“Get him to attend to it, then. Or if he doesn’t like the smell himself, get him to show the technicians the right sort of leaves and so on.”

The interpreter rattled off the order; Fearmaster bowed and darted away among the trees, glad to be off. When he was gone from sight, Lanchery rose, sighing heavily.

“I’m going to walk round the perimeter by myself for a while,” he said. “I want to think over the plans. I’ll be back in a quarter-hour at most.”

This was definitely the most pleasant of the trading posts he operated, he reflected. It was all set among trees; much of it—the portals themselves, and all the technical stuff—was underground, buried in the slowly rising hill on which the patch of forest grew. At ground level, it was possible to be quite alone among the trees, seeing no one, hearing practically nothing but nature’s noises. And yet there was no danger of intrusion because of the heavily guarded perimeter.

Correction. Almost no danger of intrusion. There had been one intruder. But he found it ridiculous to think of her as a source of danger.

A bluish glimmer shone between two of the stark black trunks, and by its light he caught sight of
her
face. Forgetting everything else, he dashed forward calling out her name.

“Allyn! Allyn!”

And she was there again.

The bluish glimmer came from the substance of her clothes:
a cloak with a high stiff collar that framed her head like a numbus, a tunic and slacks which as they glowed seemed to pour liquidly around her body and legs. She turned slumberous-lidded eyes towards him, but otherwise remained immobile.

Lanchery felt a stab-like pain go through him—not for her beauty, though her face was lovely and her body was very shapely under its blue luminous garb. Yet women far more beautiful clamored to offer themselves to merchant princes like Lanchery, and he enjoyed that fact well enough. No, the cause was not to be found in physical beauty.

He halted, paces from her, when he would have gone forward to touch her and confirm that she was really there, because the stab-like pain paralyzed him. He heard his breath rasping in his throat, and felt that his heartbeat had accelerated madly. Giddily he fumbled for words.

“Did it work, Hal?” said that husky voice which could raise the hairs prickling on his nape, which seemed to tingle down his spine like a blast of iced water. “Did they agree?”

“Uh—oh—” He cursed himself and his stumbling tongue. How could any woman reduce him to this trembling state of self-consciousness, like a child? He drew a deep breath and made his voice steady by force. “Yes, Allyn. They agreed. And everything is going very well.”

“You understand what’s at stake, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. It’s a considerable prize.”

A throaty chuckle, somehow sounding almost eerie. “Don’t you believe me, Hal? Don’t you believe that you’ll get Lyken’s franchise if you do as I say?”

“Yes, of course! You’ve shown me how it can be done. By the time Lyken loses out I’ll be in an impregnable position. But—”

“Yes?” Gently prompting him, the single word seemed to caress the air, and he shuddered. But he let the questions come in a rush.

“But why do I trust you, Allyn? I don’t know who you are or where you come from or how you come to be in my franchise!”

She chuckled. “You trust me because I’m trustworthy, Hal, that’s all. It’s your instinct guiding you. Your intuition. And why shouldn’t you rely on that guidance?”

The words actually said nothing much, but warm confidence flowed into Lanchery as he heard them, as though injected drug-like into his veins. He licked dry lips.

“Will you stay?”

“No, I won’t stay.”

He flung his hands wide, helplessly, and spoke in a beseeching tone. “Allyn, Allyn! How long must this go on? Coming and going like a phantom, you haunt me! I think of you every waking minute and when I sleep I dream about you.”

Without seeming to move, Allyn had glided forward like a will-o’-the-wisp. Now she was close enough for him to reach out and touch her. He could not. His hands and arms froze; only his heart seemed to respond, striving to leap out to her.

Soft and light as a breeze, yet as electrifying as a lightning bolt, her lips brushed over his. His eyes closed. He poised for a moment on the brink of some unimaginable abyss, glorying in the fear that he might fall.

When his eyes opened again, she was gone.

Jome Knard found it best to think of other things when he was making the nightly check of his patient’s cocoon, nutrient supplies, regenerants, and perceptor. There was never anything wrong; he had allowed a margin of error wide enough for any contingency, so he could permit his hands to get on with their job, his eyes to get on with theirs, and think of other things. He had to. He could
feel
the hatred in the room if he did not distract himself.

He dared not extirpate that hatred. Not yet. In the first
weeks after the fire, when life hung delicately in the balance, that hatred had provided Allyn Vage’s only impulse to live. She had reconstructed her personality around it. It would have to wait to be eliminated—when the cocoon was removed, and she could walk again, and see the world with eyes instead of sensing it through the half-understood rho function fields of the perceptor …

Now that Nevada was supposed to be in Lyken’s franchise, immune to revenge, immune to Athlone’s pursuit, what would that do to his patient’s sanity?

How did she know about it? Athlone would have lied about it if that had been possible; thanks to the perceptor, it wasn’t. But Athlone would have lied because he had to, and being deprived of the chance was damaging him, too. Knard had watched him almost as closely as he had watched Allyn over the past months, and he was achieving depths of self-abnegation which Knard would hardly have believed possible for a modern man. In the beginning, he had assumed that Athlone simply loved Allyn—that accounted for his interest in her survival, for his desire to see Nevada tried again and condemned. Moreover, Allyn had been beautiful, and would be beautiful again. Knard knew that; he had studied her pictures when programming the computer that supervised the regeneration of her body.

Of love, Knard had a detached view, having witnessed in his patients its damaging effects as well as its valuable ones. Nonetheless, love was essentially sane and human. The thing that whipped Athlone slave-like down his path of self-destruction was neither. It was simply an obsession.

How would the frustrating of his self-imposed mission of vengeance affect him, then? And Knard checked himself there, a cold shiver moving down his back. The term “self-imposed” had come automatically to mind. When it came, he found himself questioning whether it was right.

He looked at Allyn, cocooned on her pedestal. She had no
sense of touch, pain or position—those nerves would take a long time to grow back to full functioning. She would have forgotten what it was like to be hungry or thirsty, or to need to eliminate, because all that was taken care of. It was insane to think of her wielding influence over Athlone.

Knard kept thinking of it, nonetheless. Even when he went back to his own room and stared out, as he often did, at the night lights of the city, for tonight the city reflected the troubled surface of his mind. It was being tortured, as he was.

The Battle of Lyken’s Franchise began long before the official foreclosure at midnight. Lyken’s decision to switch to kidnapping instead of normal recruiting took by surprise both the police and those of the cultists who were not cultists but
agents provocateurs
planted by other concessionaries. The effect was to coagulate the rioting into formal fighting, and for that Lyken’s men were better trained and better equipped. It also frustrated the police, whose strict orders were to interfere with recruiting rather than with rioting.

By nine the avenues were being barricaded with wrecked cruisers and building materials, and the first bodies were being taken off the streets.

By ten energy weapons were being used, in addition to clubs and gas guns. The story about the fungus which had been brought in by Lyken’s team on a consignment of grain was given official currency on the newstapes. A good number of genuinely fanatical cultists now joined in with the intention of starting a genuinely fanatical riot.

They were considerably too late. While energy bolts were sizzling down the avenues their banners and protective incantations were out of place. About a thousand of them provided supplementary cannon fodder for Lyken, which was not unwelcome because by now he was losing about thirty per
cent of his raiding teams and not getting very good returns.

About the same time, too, refugees started to move out of the Eastern Quarter into the Northern and Southern Quarters, further hindering the attackers. Along Holy Alley the yonder boys assembled to jeer at and stone the refugees, knowing they would come creeping back in a day or two, ashamed of themselves.

By eleven Lyken had reached his target of twelve thousand cannon fodder. The roofs of the buildings comprising his base were serving as fire posts to enfilade the avenues nearby. The first explosives had been used, and the casualty list had topped the hundred mark.

Between eleven and twelve the technicians responsible for discriminating down to Lyken’s Tacket Number and locating his franchise completed their preparations and turned their machinery on to warm up.

And at midnight precisely every building in the complex that was Lyken’s base blew up with a thunder of collapsing stone.

Where the white tower juts checkerboarded with light out of the unsleeping city, technicians turn with thoughtful expressions to the newly unsealed numbers locating Lyken’s franchise. They study them. They have already fed power to their machines. Six or seven hours’ work, and they will have opened a portal to the world which was sold to Ahmed Lyken with its animals, its vegetation and even its people. Then they will strive to take it away from him.

This is not right, say some of those who subscribe to the cults of this city; there is One, they maintain, who has power to say to a man, “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” They say it is arrogant of man to do this; nonetheless, the Directors ready their angels with flaming swords to drive Lyken from his Garden of Eden.

Some of the technicians have heard that Lyken has blown up his base. This is singular, unprecedented. They nod over the news and go on working.

Where the wind leans mightily against the redwood tree, in the land of the people called G’kek, strange sounds pierce the night. Fearmaster crouches by a forest trail and listens to them, his entire body seeming to become an ear. He is thirty-four years old, strong, tall, brave, besides being possessed of skills in leadership and organization beyond any other of his nation. Therefore the nation follows him. He has slain catamounts and ridden wild buffalo; he has defied the elements even to the god voice of the thunder. Therefore the nation reveres him.

Yet he can still tremble. He does tremble when he thinks of those who come with a leader called Lanchery. Possibly they are gods greater than the thunder gods even though they scorn propitiation. Any sensible man would obey their commands.

But he does not understand what they are making the people do. Gods, he knows, are capricious and unpredictable, and truck with them is best left to the experts. Yet he is the expert among his nation when it comes to Lanchery and his followers.

The penthouse apartment where Jome Knard now sleeps fitfully is too far above the clamorous rioting streets for much of the racket to have reached it. The thunder of Lyken’s base collapsing into rubble makes its fabric rattle. Barely below the surface of sleep, Knard turns a little on the air cushion which is his bed, and the bed adjusts with tireless automatic precision to his altered weight distribution. The noise of the explosion blends into the dream which is disturbing him.