Wizards’ Worlds (36 page)

Why, it had innumerable possibilities! Tamisan’s hands clenched the robe lying across
her knees. Study—she would have to study! And if Starrex only gave her more time .
. . She no longer resented his indifference now. She would need every minute it was
prolonged.

“Porpae!”

The android materialized from behind the web.

“I must have certain tapes from the Hive.” Tamisan hesitated. In spite of the spur
of impatience, she must build smoothly and surely. “A message to the Foostmam: send
to Tamisan n’ Starrex the rolls of the history of Ty-Kry for the past five hundred
years.”

The history of a single city and that of the one which based this sky tower! Begin
small so she could test and retest her idea. Today a single city, tomorrow a world,
and then—who knew—perhaps a solar system! She reined in her excitement. There was
much to do. She needed a note recorder—and time. But by the Four Breasts of Vlasta—if
she could do it!

It would seem she would have time, though always at the back of Tamisan’s mind was
the small spark of fear that at any moment the summons to Starrex might come. But
the tapes arrived from the Hive and the recorder, so that she swung from one to the
other, taking notes from what she learned. Then after the tapes had been returned,
she studied those notes feverishly. Now her idea meant more to her than just a device
to amuse a difficult master; it absorbed her utterly, as if she were a low-grade dreamer
caught in one of her own creations.

When Tamisan realized the danger of this, she broke with her studies and turned back
to the household tapes to learn again what she could of Starrex.

But she was again running through her notes when at last the summons came. How long
she had been in Starrex’s tower she did not know, for days and nights in the oval
room were all alike. Only Porpae’s watchfulness had kept her to a routine of eating
and rest.

It was the Lord Kas who came for her, and she had just time to remember her role of
bemused dreamer as he entered.

“You are well and happy?” He used the conventional greeting.

“I enjoy the good life.”

“It is the Lord Starrex’s wish that he enter a dream.” Kas reached for her hand, and
she allowed his touch. “The Lord Starrex demands much. Offer him your best, dreamer.”
He might have been warning her.

“A dreamer dreams,” she answered him vaguely. “What is dreamed can be shared.”

“True. But the Lord Starrex is hard to please. Do your best for him, dreamer.”

She did not answer, and he drew her on, out of the room to a gray shaft and down that
to a lower level. The room into which they finally went had the apparatus very familiar
to her—a couch for the dreamer, the second for the sharer with the linkage machine
between. But here was a third couch. Tamisan looked at it in surprise.

“Two dream, not three?”

Kas shook his head. “It is the Lord Starrex’s will that
another shares also. The linkage is of a new model, very powerful. It has been well
tested.”

Who would be that third? Ulfilas? Was it that Lord Starrex thought he must take his
personal guard into a dream with him?

The door swung open again, and Lord Starrex entered. He walked stiffly, one leg swinging
wide as if he could not bend the knee nor control the muscles, and he leaned heavily
on an android. As the servant lowered him onto the couch, he did not look to Tamisan
but nodded curtly to Kas.

“Take you place also,” he ordered.

Did Starrex fear the dream state and want his cousin as a check because Kas had plainly
dreamed before?

Then Starrex turned to her as he reached for the dream cap, copying the motion by
which she settled her own circlet on her head.

“Let us see what you can do.” There was a shadow of hosility in his voice, a challenge
to produce something which he did not believe she could do.

S
HE
must not allow herself to think of Starrex now, only of her dream. She must create
and have no fear that her creation would be less perfect than her hopes. Tamisan closed
her eyes, firmed her will and drew into her imagination all the threads of the studies’
spinning. She began the weaving of a dream.

For a moment, perhaps two fingers’ count of moments, this was like the beginning of
any dream and then—

She was not looking on, watching intently, critically, a fabric she spun with dexterity.
No, it was rather as if that web suddenly became real and she was caught tightly in
it, even as a blue-winged drotail might be enmeshed in a foss-spider’s deadly nest
curtain!

This was no dreaming such as Tamisan had ever known before, and panic gripped so harshly
in her throat and chest that she might have screamed, save that she had no voice left.
She fell down and down from a point above, to strike among bushes which took some
of her weight, but with an impact which left her bruised and half senseless. She lay
unmoving, gasping, her eyes closed, fearing to open them to see that she was indeed
caught in a wild nightmare and not properly dreaming.

As she lay there, she came slowly out of her dazed bewilderment; she tried to get
control, not only over her fears, but her dreaming powers. Then she opened her eyes
cautiously.

An arch of sky was overhead, palidly green, with traces, like long, clutching fingers,
of thin gray cloud. As real as any sky might be, did she walk under it in her own
time and world. Her own time and world!

The idea she had built upon to astound Starrex came back to her now. Had the fact
that she had worked with a new theory, trying to bring a twist to dreaming which might
pierce the indifference of a bored man, precipitated this?

Tamisan sat up, wincing at the protest of her bruises, to look about her. Her vantage
point was the crest of a small knob of earth. But the land about her was no wilderness.
The turf was smooth and cropped, and here and there were outcrops of rock cleverly
carved and clothed with flowering vines—some of them; others were starkly bare, brooding.
And all faced down slope to a wall.

These forms varied from vaguely acceptable humanoid shapes to grotesque monsters.
And Tamisan decided that she liked the aspect of none when she studied them more closely.
These were
not
of her imagining.

Beyond the wall began a cluster of buildings. Used to seeing the sky towers and the
lesser, if more substantial structures beneath those which were of her own world,
these looked unusually squat and heavy. The highest she
could see from here was no more than three stories. Men did not build to the stars
here, they hugged the earth closely.

But where was
here?
Not her dream—Tamisan closed her eyes and concentrated on the beginnings of her planned
dream. That had been about going into another world, born of her imagining, yes—but
not this! Her basic idea had been simple enough, if not one which had been used to
her knowledge by any dreamer before her. It all hinged on the idea that the past history
of her world had been altered many times during its flow—and she had taken three key-points
of alteration, studied on what might have resulted had those been given the opposite
decision by fate.

Now, keeping her eyes firmly closed against this seeming reality into which she had
fallen, Tamisan concentrated with fierce intentness upon her chosen points.

“The Welcome of the Over-Queen Ahta—” she recited the first.

What if the first star ship on its landing had not been accepted as a supernatural
event and the small kingdom in which it had touched earth had not accepted its crew
as godlings, but rather had greeted them instead with those poisoned darts the spacemen
had later seen used? That was her first decision.

“The loss of the Wanderer.” That was the second.

A colony ship driven far from its assigned course by computer failure, so that it
had had to make a landing here or let its passengers die. If that failure had not
occurred and the Wanderer not landed to start an unplanned colony . . .

“The death of Sylt the Sweet-Tongued before he reached the Altar of Ictio.”

A prophet who might never have arisen to ruthless power, leading to a blood-crazed
insurrection from temple to temple, setting darkness on three-quarters of this world.

She had chosen those points, but she had not even been sure that one might not have
canceled out another.

Sylt had led the rebellion against the colonists from
the Wanderer. If the welcome had not occurred . . . Tamisan could not be sure—she
had only tried to find a pattern sequence of events and then envision a modern world
stemming from those changes.

However—she opened her eyes again—this was not her imagined world! Nor did one in
a dream rub bruises, sit on damp sod, feel wind pull at clothes, and allow the first
patter of rain to wet hair and robe. She put both hands to her head—what of the dream
cap?

Her fingers found a weaving of metal right enough, but there were no cords from it.
And for the first time she remembered that she had been linked with Starrex and Kas
when this happened.

Tamisan got to her feet to look around her, half expecting to see the other two somewhere
near. But she was alone, and the rain was falling heavier. There was a roofed space
near the wall, and Tamisan hurried for it.

Three twisted pillars supported a small dome of roof. There were no walls, and she
huddled in the very center, trying to escape the wind-borne moisture. She could not
keep pushing away the feeling that this was no dream but true reality.

If—if one could dream
true!
Tamisan fought panic and tried to examine the possibilities.
Had
she somehow landed in a Ty-Kry which might have existed had her three checkpoints
actually been the decisions she envisioned? If so—could one get back by simply visioning
them in reverse?

She shut her eyes and concentrated . . .

There was a sensation of stomach-turning giddiness. She swung out, to be jerked back—swung
out, to return once more. Shaking with nausea, Tamisan stopped trying. She shuddered,
opening her eyes to the rain. Then again she strove to understand what had happened.
That swing had in it some of the sensation of dream breaking. It did! Which meant
that she was in a dream. But it was just as apparent that she had been held prisoner
here. How? And
why? Or—her eyes narrowed a little, though she was looking inward, not at the rain-misted
garden before her—by whom?

Suppose—suppose one or both of those who had prepared to share her dream had also
come into this place—though not right here—then she must find them. They must return
together or the missing one would anchor the others. Find them—and now!

For the first time she looked down at the garment clinging dank and damp to her slender
body. It was not the gray slip of a dreamer, for it was long, brushing her ankles.
And in color it was a dusky violet, a shade she found strangely pleasing and right.

From its hem to her knees there was a border of intricate embroidery so entwined and
ornate that she found it hard to define in any detail, though it seemed oddly enough
that the longer she studied it, the more it appeared to be not threads on cloth, but
words on a page of manuscript such as she had viewed in the ancient history video
tapes. The threads were a metallic green and silver, with only a few minor touches
of a lighter shade of violet.

Around her waist was a belt of silver links, clasped by a broad buckle of the same
metal set with purple stones. This supported a pouch with a metal top. The dress or
robe was laced from the belt to her throat with silver cords run through metal eyelets
in the material. And her sleeves were long and full, though from the elbow down they
were slit to four parts, those fluttering away from her arms when she raised them
to loose the crown.

What she brought away from her head was not the familiar skull cap made to fit over
her cropped hair. Rather it was a circlet of silver with inner wires or strips rising
to a conical point that added a foot or more to her height. On that point was a beautifully
fashioned flying thing, its wings a little lifted as if to take off, the glitter of
tiny jewels marking its eyes.

It was so made that, as she turned the crown around, its long neck changed position
and the wings moved a fraction. Thus at first she was almost startled enough to drop
the circlet, thinking it might just be alive.

But the whole she recognized from one of the history tapes. The bird was the flacar
of Olava. Wearing it so meant that she was a Mouth! A Mouth of Olava—half priestess,
part sorceress—and oddly enough, entertainer. But fortune had favored her in this;
a Mouth of Olava might wander anywhere without question, searching, and seem merely
to be about her normal business.

Tamisan ran her hand over her head before she replaced the crown. Her fingers did
not find the bristly stubble of a dreamer, but rather soft, mist-dampened strands
which curled down long enough to brush her forehead and tuft at the nape of her neck.

She had imagined garments for herself in dreams, of course. But this time she had
not provided herself with such, and so the fact that she stood as a Mouth of Olava
was not of her willing. But Olava was part of the time of the Over-Queen’s rule. Had
she somehow swept herself back in time? The sooner she found knowledge of where—and
when—she was, the better.

The rain was slackening and Tamisan moved out from under the dome. She bunched up
her robe in both hands to climb back up the slope. At its top she turned slowly, trying
to find some proof that she had not been tossed alone into this strange world.

Save for the figures of stone and beds of rank-looking growth, there was nothing to
be seen. The wall and the dome structure lay below. But when she faced about, there
was a second slope leading to a still higher point which was crowned by a roof to
be seen only in bits and patches through a screen of oarn trees. The roof had a ridge
which terminated at either side in a sharp upcurve, giving the building the odd appearance
of an ear on either end. And it
was green with a glittering surface, almost brilliantly so in spite of the clouds
overhead.