The Red Queen (18 page)

Mostly,
I thought.

I lingered a little longer inside the Hub, then asked if we could go and look at the drying racks. Dragon said regretfully that this would take another hour and she was to meet Tash at the bathing hut.

It seemed to take less time to retrace our steps. I was careful to follow close behind when the path narrowed, for it was harder and harder to see in the long thickening shadows of the bristling cacti. I was breathing through my mouth, but I thought the air tasted as foul as it smelled and marvelled that Swallow had kept vigil in its midst. I wondered why the path had not been made a uniform width, especially given the Beforetimers’ love of conformity. No doubt there was a reason behind it and every bend in the path, for it was beginning to seem to me that there was nothing in Habitat that existed incidentally.

‘I thought Tash was sick,’ I murmured when the path widened enough for us to walk side by side again. ‘I thought that was why Balboa came this afternoon.’

Dragon gave me a troubled look and I cursed myself for suggesting that Tash might have lied. I realised, too, that I might have asked Dragon what ailed the Speci girl when I had the chance the previous night. Now she said, ‘She took her solitary time.’ I glanced at her and she added, ‘Every Speci has the right to a free day for every week of work, and two hours of that must be solitary time. Tash usually walks to the wall through the crops.’

‘I must have got muddled,’ I said vaguely, wondering why Tash had not mentioned that she would not come when we parted the day before. Mayhap she had simply forgotten. When the distant lights of the common began to show through the looming cacti, I thanked Dragon for showing me the Hub and said I hoped to visit the burying field the next day. That gave her pause but she only said she would mention it to Tash. We parted when we reached the path leading to my hut.

‘You should ask one of the Committee if you can come to eat in the common rooms,’ she said.

I told her I intended to, when next one of the Committee members visited me. Then I bade her farewell and made my way along the blue-lit path to my hut. My feet were sore and I slipped off my sandals with relief and washed my dusty feet. The basket of food Dragon had left sat where I had put it earlier, but knowing it would contain more of the peculiar Habitat fare, I sighed, and left it where it was, wondering how much more of it I could endure. Then I noticed the bowl of plums. They were dusty but I was too lazy to rinse them. I brushed away the dust from one and bit into it. To my delight it was deliciously tart and very juicy. I ate it and then another greedily, wondering why, when the Speci had such fruit, they were not inspired to make their food tastier. Finally, I carried the bowl with me to the front step and sat down, deciding they would be my nightmeal. Gazing up at the stars, I ate another and then another until the bowl was empty. The taste left by the plums was slightly bitter, and belatedly, going inside to wash the stickiness from my fingers, I hoped there was nothing poisonous in the dirt.

After a half hour and many mugs of water, the bitterness had grown so strong that I was near to gagging. In desperation I washed my teeth, but in the midst of this, I became terribly dizzy. I staggered towards the bed, but my legs gave out before I could reach it and I slithered helplessly to the floor. I banged my chin hard, for I was unable even to lift a hand to break my fall. For one second I lay still, my mouth full of wretched bitterness, and then my senses went mad. I saw flashes of colour and each flash was like a blow. I felt I was falling and then floating, and then it seemed to me I was being torn apart by opposing forces. Dimly I sensed my arms and legs were twitching.

The plums, I thought, but the thought was a leaf in the wind and went spinning away.

I fell like a stone through the layers of my mind, my will as numb as my limbs. I thought I had used up the residue of dark spirit power left in my mind to wake myself from the profound sleep generated by the cryopod, but I could still feel it. Wondering if enough remained for me to draw on it to free my will from the plum drug, I envisaged the dark sword as I had done before. There was not a trace of the dark spirit power in my mind, as I had feared, but the sword quickened and I felt it draw effortlessly on the deep pool of spirit-strength at my core. The heavy numbness of the plums slid off me as lightly and easily as water from the feathers of a duck, and my will was my own again. Immediately I slowed my descent, thinking again,
the plums
. They must have been drugged or they were themselves a drug. But who would drug me in such a way, and to what end?

A dark thought: what if the Tumen had sent a message to one of the Committee to drug me because I had revealed myself a Misfit when I tried to reach out to Ahmedri? Or because the Tumen who had attended me had told the others I was pretending to be simple and they wanted to find out why? Or, had they made up their minds to drug me and try again to submit me to the cryopod to get the additional information they wanted?

I had been drifting downward, and now the tug of the mindstream interrupted my speculations. I saw it below me, beautiful and swift and utterly strange. My awareness of it seemed unusually strong, the result no doubt of the dark spirit power focused in the sword, for it must surely have some kinship with the silvery spirit-matter of the mindstream.

Almost as if my attention was a summoning, a pale tendril rose from the mindstream and made its way purposefully towards me. I gathered my wits, caught hold of it and willed myself to rise, drawing the silvery thread with me, up through the layers of my mind. When I reached consciousness, I felt the full force of the drug, but although my body was entirely in its grip, my will was free and I might have cleansed it from my body. However, since my body could heal itself of whatever damage the drug had inflicted or was inflicting, I left it to its own devices and let my mind rise above consciousness, drawing the silvery tendril after me. I allowed it to spill out into a shapeless spirit-form and let my will flow into the spirit-form along the tendril connecting us.

I opened my spirit-eyes and looked about the hut, though
look
was not the right word, any more than
up
or
down
described what a spirit does. But I had no other way to think about the movements of will and spirit. I could feel a pulse of power at my hip where the black sword would hang if I rose to the dreamtrails and took on a proper spirit-form; it strengthened and steadied me. I looked down at my body, now a dull, dark shape still shuddering and trembling, a pale froth of foam at its lips, and felt nothing. The idea of leaving it behind did not seem so very terrible.

Looking around, I noted the brown shapes of the lifeless matter that were the bed and table and walls of the room, but the light coming through the door and window slats was a dazzling wondrous stream of gold and white with blue streaks shooting through it like swift fish. Rather than directing the spirit-form back down into my mind, I floated to the light and flowed outside through it, into the open air.

The sky was white and yellow above the dark earth and shadowy brown humps of the huts. I saw the dark, lifeless shape of the wall about Habitat and knew that whatever devices protected it, it could not contain or constrain my spirit-form. I flew towards it and over it, effortlessly. For a moment I was confused, for as I passed over it the wall seemed to vanish, but the joy of being free made it hard to think. I soared over a low huddle of buildings. It was hard to discern the details of physical form when I was in spirit-form, but certainly none of the buildings were scrapers. Of course, they might be the remnants of a Beforetime city, the higher buildings having crumbled long ago back to earth, but there were not many of them. If the Tumen dwelt in the buildings, their numbers must be small, far too small to listen to everything that was said in Habitat.

I flew low over the buildings, searching the streets between them for signs of life, to no avail. Given the hour, the Tumen might be abed, or at least inside, so I entered one of the buildings, thinking to do a rough count of the inhabitants of the settlement. I found no sign of life save the occasional flourishing aura of some little plant, or a bright red patch on a wall that I guessed to be some sort of vigorous lichen. Increasingly puzzled, I went through building after building and did eventually find some life: small lizards and a curious, scuttling crab-like creature with enormous pincers that glowed purple with spirit energy. I did not know what the purple colour signified but I could guess it was something defensive, for it raised them when I came near. Like most beasts the tiny creatures must possess the power to engage their spirit-eyes even when they were awake. On another occasion, I would have found that fascinating, but now, I needed to understand the emptiness of the settlement.

The obvious answer was that the Tumen dwelt elsewhere, watching and listening from afar, and only visiting Habitat to bring things requested by wish-prayer or, occasionally, a new Speci to be resurrected.

I made another thorough pass of the buildings without seeing the aura of a single person, nor of any animal, large or small. Obviously this was not where Maruman had been prowling in the dream vision of the old cat I had experienced while I was in the cryopod, given the smallness of the settlement and the lack of scrapers, so there was no point in seeking him. But the thought of him made me think of Ahmedri and wonder if he had managed to track us to Habitat. Of course, if he had, there was a strong possibility that one of the Tumen might have taken him captive, too, but seeing he would have realised we had been taken, he was likely to have been wary. In that case, rather than being within the settlement, he would have stayed away from it, but close enough to see it. With this in mind, I moved beyond the buildings into the undulant surrounding terrain.

I had spirit-travelled enough to be able to recognise form hidden within the glowing flows of colour visible on the dreamtrails, so I knew the barren grey land I was passing over was desert. Habitat was obviously somewhere in the white desert that surrounded Pellmar Quadrants, but I could find no sign of the tribesman nor of Darga or the horses. It might be that Ahmedri had tracked the Tumen as far as Pellmar Quadrants, but had yet to locate Habitat.

I could only hope that he had collected our packs and other belongings before coming after us, for among them were the memory seed and the stone sword left for me in the Sadorian Earthtemple by Cassy. If he had bought them and had been captured, they were likely to be somewhere within Pellmar Quadrants and I would have to find them, which would make our escape even more complicated. But better that than that the things I needed for my quest had been left in the desert for months, to be covered over by sand. I clung to the thought that Atthis would have foreseen if I was going to lose them, and found some way to ensure I kept them. I still had no idea who I was meant to deliver the stone sword to, but it must connect to my quest in some important way else Cassy would not have gone to such trouble to get it to me.

Then I experienced a terrible realisation. The armsman could not have the memory seed because I had carried it on me, buttoned into a waxed pocket of my trews! Sickened with dismay, I thought of waking in the hut clad in next to nothing. The only hope was that Ana or Dragon had removed my old clothes; they would certainly have kept them and all they contained safe. I would ask Dragon the first moment I got the chance, because it would fit my simpleton persona to worry about something as insignificant as a piece of clothing. Then I remembered that I had been all but naked when I had woken in the cryopod, for I had felt the restraining bands running over my bare flesh. That meant my clothes must have been removed in Pellmar Quadrants, in the Galon Institute. Would the Tumen have kept them? I prayed so, but I did not want to dwell on the possibility that the seed might be lost, let alone the seed and the sword, so I forced myself to concentrate on the buildings and the roads between them, wondering if I could use them to work out in which direction Pellmar Quadrants lay. If I could find a road that led decisively out of the settlement, I would simply follow it. There must be a road since there been considerable traffic over time between Pellmar Quadrants and Habitat, by all accounts, for how else should the Tumen come to bring things and Speci to Habitat? I did find several tracks and trails leading out of the settlement in different directions, but all of them were swallowed by dunes just beyond the settlement.

I began to make sweeping arcs out into the open desert, searching for something that would suggest the direction of another settlement. I found nothing but endless dunes. At length I ceased striving, accepting that without a clue to narrow the possibilities, there was little likelihood of finding Pellmar Quadrants by chance.

I considered again the small settlement adjacent to Habitat – might that be Pellmar Quadrants? The trouble was that my senses told me it was uninhabited and it would make no sense for the Tumen to live somewhere other than where they worked.

So far I had been unable to find any sign of them. At least I would be able to assure the others there was no one directly outside Habitat waiting to stop us if we did find a way out.

Some impulse prompted me to cease circling and fly directly out into the desert. I obeyed it, marvelling at the contrast between the pallid lifelessness of the dunes, and the blazing golden storm of light that was the sky, and yet both were without life. I suddenly came to a great swirl of colour in the sand, which faded the moment I tried to draw closer. I flew on, over another and another mysterious swirl of brightness, which retreated whenever I approached. If it had been water I was flying over, I would have said the swirls were fish, sinking deeper when I loomed over the surface.

I came to a pool of water with a vivid blue and violet aura, and when I slowed to hover over it, I was amazed to see how it seethed with red spirits that flitted and swarmed like tiny schools of agitated fish. I wondered how so much life came to be there in the midst of that vast and desolate desert.