Meeting at Infinity Read online

  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. The
y 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.

  Allyn Vage does not sleep in her cocoon. There are no fatigue products in her bloodstream—they would hinder the never-stopping process of regenerating her body. Only, her energy is somewhat debased, artificially, to conserve the subtle unconscious rhythm of night and day; this is necessary from a psychological point of view, to assure a further link with reality in the isolation of her mind.

  Beneath her seat, the perceptor supplies her with news. She has often found it impossible to describe to Knard the sensation of using the perceptor. The closest she has been able to come is to say that she experiences a series of white or colored threads, having personal associations and extending through a grey medium as dense and resistant as deep water. Somehow the threads parallel reality, or reality parallels them.

  But the inability to describe what she experiences troubles her not at all. She knows about it, and that is enough.

  And it is possible, she has found, to play on these threads as on the taut strings of a musical instrument. Twang one here, and the vibration continues along it. Other threads with which it comes in contact resonate in sympathy, more or less. A great deal of control is possible. She has not said anything to Knard about that.

  Luis Nevada faces, shaking and cursing, a new world, into which he bought admittance without knowing what he was doing.

  Curdy Wence faces the same world, chewing on another pad of tranks, as measured as time in spite of the situation he has got into. He feels exceptionally proud of himself. He doesn’t waste time hoping, or worrying. He plans.

  Kingsley Athlone sweats in his police cruiser, his jacket unbuttoned and his face grooved with a giant scowl, which is so deep it seems it will be permanent. The radio crackles with news of the violence abroad in the city, and he barks orders and sweats anew. He thinks less of the forces under his command than of the man he has hunted for weeks and months and who is now laughing at him from beyond the Tacket portals—immune to revenge, immune to anything.

  His search of Nevada’s lodging was fruitless, he recalls, and damns Clostrides. He damns the call which fetched him off Nevada’s track with news of the rioting. He damns his own self-preserving desire to interfere, which led him to order his policemen to hinder the ’cruiters instead of the cultists. Even that far his need for vengeance was driving him! Even to such an overt act against Lyken who had snatched Nevada away!

  Of course, if Lyken lost out, no doubt Clostrides would be grateful for the assistance. But what difference would that make, if Nevada did not survive?

  And by now it must be known to hundreds, if not thousands, of people, that the police had orders to concentrate on the ’cruiters and let the cultists be when possible. That alone made this extended rioting possible.

  Athlone shivers in spite of sweating so much. There will be complaints, inquiries, investigations. All he can do now is clear up the mess he permitted the rioters to create.

  He barks further orders, and the fire of the fury begins to flicker out.

  Jockey Hole knows about the police’s orders. He has known for hours. He thinks that Clostrides probably gave the orders to Athlone at their interview. Anyone else would have assumed that automatically. Jockey only entertains it as a possibility.

  From his nighttime headquarters at the Octopus Bar on Holy Alley, he reaches out and feels the city’s feverish pulse. His eyes and ears are everywhere in the Quarter. So far the all-important string has not fallen into his grasp.

  High in the white tower of The Market, the Directors meet for the last time before the invasion. Two things trouble them particularly. By blowing up his base, Lyken has cut himself off from the world, and that is unprecedented. Other concessionaries in the past have fought to hold what they had; all of them have fought on both fronts, and some of them have held out for the necessary length of time.

  And Hal Lanchery—always brash, always eager and defiant—tonight is glum and speaks only in harsh monosyllables.

  The Directors are very rich, probably as rich as any man has been in history. Yet they know they are not sure of defeating Lyken. Their wealth lies in a slender margin of profit on a truly gigantic investment. They can afford to fight Ahmed Lyken only until the drain on their resources is greater than the continued profit. Therefore, the victory must come swiftly, or it will be pointless. Likewise, there must be something to show for it: there must be Lyken’s franchise in operating order, or else they will have wasted their man power and money to gain something no better than a raw, undeveloped franchise for which they could have bought the rights cheaply.

  Lyken’s strange action, and Lanchery’s gloom, make the Directors feel that the balance is swinging the wrong way.

  Ahmed Lyken has made his choice. There is no longer any point in wondering if he is correct to place so much trust in the secret of Akkilmar, or indeed whether Akkilmar is still a secret. There is no stopping things now.

  11

  CURDY WAS running low on tranks; he felt the raw saw-edge of nervousness cutting through his armored mind, bit by bit, but he didn’t know how long his supply would have to last, so he dared not chew another pad yet. About the time the group of captives he was with was driven through the Tacket portal into the franchise beyond, Nevada’s moaning had got on his nerves much too much, and he had slipped the hysterical man a couple of pads. They had worked, all right. Now he sat in the pew-like seat beside Curdy, his face long and blank, his fingers toying nervously with the chain that was still ringed to his wrist, but not crying any longer.

  What they had been through, it occurred to Curdy, had a lot in common with being processed in a factory. A lot in common!

  Obviously, Lyken had a system set up and well drilled to cope with such a situation. It started with the kidnapping of people off the streets; it went on with the near-automated precision of the chaining
up and the conveyer belt delivery of the chained groups to the Tacket portals. It was at that stage—in the hall where the portals stood—that most of the captives who were going to break down, did. Curdy had decided he wasn’t going to, but with Nevada howling close behind him and a bunch of other hysterics a few yards ahead, he had had a tough time. The tranks he had slipped to Nevada were a sort of insurance against next time.

  He kept himself calm partly with tranks, partly by thinking of problems Lyken must be facing. That was useful; he might exploit one of the problems and get away. Curdy was determined not to yield easily. He’d almost got away from the pug who woke him in the paddy wagon on delivery at Lyken’s base; only the officer with the energy gun had stopped him. There would be another chance, for sure—even if it was the other side of the portal. He wasn’t sure about the technique of dispossession of a concessionary, but if that was what was going on, it seemed fairly sure that he’d get an opportunity to desert to the invaders.

  There was one of the problems he was turning over in his mind. He’d heard cries and curses from ahead of him in the chained line of captives which suggested that one or two cultists had been brought in among the rest. How did Lyken expect to keep cultists loyal, especially under these circumstances? What earthly good would they be, hysterical with fear at having been taken into one of the abominable Tacket worlds?

  But that problem didn’t last very long. He found out its answer directly after passing through the portal.

  That was an experience he’d expected to find shattering. In spite of everything, his heart had pounded and his breath had come and gone in gasps as his chained wrist led him towards the portal, which shimmered slightly like a vast soap bubble stretched on a wire frame. Yet when he passed through, with Nevada hanging back frantically behind him and screaming, he felt nothing at all. The temperature dropped a couple of degrees; the sounds he could hear changed and became less shrill; there was a vaguely alien smell in the air. Otherwise he might still have been where he was before.