Day of Truth Page 7

  The coexistence has strange results. When Mark Chaos is delivered into Heljanita’s hands by being forced to land on Aetema, it is the tunnel dwellers who find and help him.

  Because Marc Chaos has met the Mother, he comes back to Aetema with Darkscar. And thus Heljanita’s fortress is, after all, threatened.

  CHAOS’S STORY CONTINUED

  We landed on Aetema as near as I could put us down to the spot where I had landed my own ship more than seven years before. I wasn’t sure by any means—the whole planet was so desolate and unwholesome that one part of its surface looked pretty much like another. The correct latitude was easy enough to estimate, but the longitude was more a guess than a memory. I didn’t have much time to look around, either. Darkscar was worried that Heljanita would detect our presence if we flew around for long inside the atmosphere. I suppose that if Heljanita’s toys could detect a fleet across most of a galaxy, near a distorting nebula, then he could have detected one ship in the vicinity of his own world. On the other hand, he probably wouldn’t see it if he wasn’t looking for it, and he wouldn’t be looking for it. I hoped.

  After the ship settled, I waited for Darkscar to decide the next step. I was in no hurry to go out into the intense cold and the dim daylight, and I was still doubtful about what Darkscar could possibly hope to achieve. As far as I could see, we had no chance of finding the tunnels. We would have to wait for the tunnel dwellers to come to us.

  Darkscar seemed content to sit inside the ship for a while, watching the screen closely, then decided to have a closer look and rolled the screen back to expose the windows. The scene wasn’t quite as miserable as I remembered it. There was snow on the ground, but it wasn’t snowing, and the distant sun gave sufficient light for us to be able to see comfortably for some distance.

  “No sign of life,” commented Darkscar with a note of disappointment in his voice.

  “You won’t see them,” I assured him. “If they do come close to us, then we’ve a better chance of picking them out on the screen than in their natural surroundings. All that black and white is very deceptive, and these people know how to exploit it.”

  We both returned our eyes to scanning the landscape, whose alternation of black and dazzling white became no less bewildering on long staring. I searched in vain for a splash of color, but even the sky was a pure, even lead gray.

  “I wonder how they can make a living out of that,” I said.

  “Things grow,” replied Darkscar. “Even here. Solar energy is weak, but it’s there.”

  We fell silent again. Neither of us had anything to say. I thought that we might stand more chance of being found if we went outside, but apart from the fact that it was painfully cold, I had nearly been killed the last time.

  Darkscar’s faith paid off—or his luck held—and they found us, eventually. We could hardly see them, and we couldn’t count them. They kept their distance and seemed to be more interested in keeping up under surveillance than actually trying to do anything about our presence. They had not the slightest interest in coming any closer. They were scared.

  “We’ll have to go out to them,” I suggested reluctantly.

  Darkscar made no comment. The truth of what I’d said was all too obvious. He turned to Comarre.

  “We’re going outside. Diall and Valens had better come to the bottom of the ladder with us. but they stay by the ship and try to keep their guns out of sight. If we do get jumped, they fire over their heads. We don’t want to hurt anyone—anyone at all.”

  Comarre nodded his agreement and motioned to the two crewman Darkscar had referred to. They had heard, and there was no need for the Falcorian to confirm the orders.

  And out we went. I had a sinking fear in my stomach, and I was telling myself that I was risking a great deal for no good reason. I wasn’t on Darkscar’s side. I wasn’t even in his war. But events kept dragging me on regardless of my protests.

  The cold ate its way straight through our clothes and hammered at our skin. I gritted my teeth and waited for the first shock to dissipate, but it never did. When we began to walk forward, I was still tensing my body against the bite to such an extent that my walk was jerky and puppet-like, and I couldn’t say anything.

  They watched us coming, without moving. They knew we could see them. I could almost feel them getting ready to kill us. I wished that I could shout some kind of reassurance to them.

  Darkscar seemed less perturbed by the cold, although it might just have been his habitually assured manner maintaining the illusion.

  “We want to talk,” he called. “We are not strangers. The man with me is Mark Chaos. He has spoken to the Mother before.” No doubt it all sounded ridiculous to them. As far as they were concerned strangers were strangers. My name would mean nothing, except perhaps to the Mother herself and her weak, protected, male consorts.

  “Will you take us to the Mother?” asked Darkscar. We were still some way off, and he was still forced to shout. “We want to help you get rid of the silver strangers.” The silence made the words seem very empty. They were listening, all right. But what they thought was their secret for the time being.

  Darkscar was still calm and collected. I wished I had his faith. I glanced sideways, and caught a barely perceptible movement. I knew then that we were surrounded, and that we were cut off from the ship. If they wanted to kill us, then a few shots fired into the air would not stop them.

  They never said a word. But made no move, either. As soon as they began to turn away, expecting us to follow, I began to breathe again, and I found that the cold was bearable after all. Whether Darkscar’s shouted sentences had influenced their decision or not, we could not know.

  The oppressive cold began to irritate me after half an hour, and after an hour it was a dull ache bordering on the intolerable. It was impossible to find a comforting thought, and I was reduced to reiterating an agonized wish that the journey should cease. But we had a long way to go yet. I suppose that, all things considered, I was as right as any man could have been about where to land the ship. But a few miles of landscape is nothing when seen from a scanning spaceship, and I’d put us down a long way further out from the tunnels than I would have liked. The thought did occur to me that I might be completely wrong, and that this might be a different tunnel city that we were going to.

  But that doubt, at least, was unjustified. When I had been absolutely sure for an hour or more that I couldn’t have stood another ten minutes of the savage cold. we entered the warm, humid tunnels of their home. Within minutes, the blessed relief of the sweating warmth had restored my sanity and my health. I was completely at a loss to understand how people who lived constantly in such warmth could adjust themselves to the temperatures outside.

  They handed us over to one of the obese, effeminate—by our standards—men, who took us to see the Mother of the Underworld. I think she was really quite pleased to see me again. She had liked me the last time—had enjoyed talking to me. For all her fanatical talk about order and rigidity of society, she was intelligent enough to find the strict routine of her society very boring.

  She didn’t look well. She seemed to have lost some weight, but no*’ from the right places. The vast volumes of fat still hung from the entirety of her body; what was missing had been taken from inside, from the core of her body, which was already under a terrific stress. She looked on the point of death, but did not seem unduly worried. Again, I was judging by our standards.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and there was no weakness in the sonorous, lipless whisper. “You came at a bad time.” She moved her position slightly to see me better, and I winced at the pain on her face as liter upon liter of fat rolled across her couch and settled again. The effort brought tiny tears to the comers of her eyes, but the tears were quickly lost in the sweat which formed on her cheeks.

  “I gave birth two days ago,” she explained. “Thirteen children. It’s something of a freak,” she added, with a ghostlike smile that was only in the voice and not in
the actual muscles of the face. “I’ll recover,” she assured me, “but it will take time. The children are demanding.”

  I didn’t ask to see the children. I hated the idea of seeing them. The whole concept of the Mother’s way of life was nauseating.

  “I’m sorry we came at a bad time,” I said, “but it won’t wait. We need your help.”

  I tried to explain. I told her about Heljanita and Dark-scar, about the threat to the Kingdom of the Beasts. I told her what the robots were and explained our need to get at the creator rather than the toys. I pleaded Darkscar’s case rather well, although he persisted in trying to take up the thread himself and launch into semi-sermons about the evil of disorder and the absolute necessity for all right-minded Beasts and Humans to do their utmost to defeat Heljanita.

  The Mother did not like Darkscar. I found it a little strange, because their ideas had so much in common. They were both in favor of order and harmony at all costs. I think the Mother may have despised Darkscar’s methods of attaining that order. Perhaps she saw the same inconsistencies that I did: the collector’s willingness to fight on Heljanita’s terms; his dream of forcing harmony on the whole galaxy.

  The Mother believed that isolation was the key to perfect order. She believed that the degree of control necessary to enforce total harmony was possible only on a small scale. She knew that it was necessary to change the biological structure of the society as well as the political. The Mother was a realist. Darkscar was not. The Mother could see how Darkscar’s society could produce Heljanita, whereas Dark-scar could not. Darkscar and the Mother were out of sympathy.

  Yet I continually got across. She listened to me. She respected what I had to say, but I feel sure that she detected my somewhat lukewarm commitment to Darkscar’s lunatic schemes. I don’t know what we had between us that enabled us to communicate so well. Her way of life was repulsive to me, and mine was to her. But we could talk as individual people. We were both Beasts. She listened to my plea.

  And she said “No.”

  Darkscar wanted to argue, but I stopped him. I knew that she meant what she said.

  “Do you know where the citadel is?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you help us to get there at least?”

  She stared at me. Her eyes were blue and seemed very small in their monstrous setting. They were grotesquely ordinary eyes to be found in that bizarre face. They looked almost beautiful.

  “You’ll fight this man without our help? Two of you against a fortress?”

  “There are eight of us,” I said. She giggled, a high-pitched, girlish giggle that brought a start of amazement from Darkscar.

  “You’ll never get there,” she said. “It’s more than a thousand miles north of here.”

  “We have the ship. We’ll fly it low to within a few miles—we’ll have to risk being seen. But we dare not get so close that we could be shot down before we land. The approach has to be on foot. If several miles are involved, we’ll need someone to guide us and help us stay alive. None of us can stand this sort of cold for long.”

  “I would like the silver strangers destroyed,” she said. And then: “Do you honestly think we can help you? The children would be scared. Ther might not survive a flight in a spaceship. They hate strangers with a pathological fear, and yon are strangers. Do you really think they will be able to help you?”

  “They’re Beasts,” I said, not very confidently. “They have intelligence. We can make use of them. They’ll get used to us.”

  “You can take two,” she said. “I’ll talk to them, try to make them see what is asked of them. But you’ll have to do a lot of that yourself. And be careful. They are my children. I’ve borne hundreds since, but they’re still my children. Do you understand?”

  I said I did, but it became patently obvious later that I didn’t. I never have understood.

  CAIN RAYSHADE

  Cain Rayshade of Aurita is not a big man. He has never been an expert swordsman or an impressive speaker. His eyes have a peculiar intensity which makes other men look away without their knowing why. He is a man of nervous habits and changeable temperament. Few of his fellows like him, but none would care to enumerate reasons for their distaste, and none would voice it openly.

  All his life, Rayshade has fought against this silent dislike. Because if it, he has felt alienated, an outcast among the Beast Lords. In truth, he was not quite the man most of his contemporaries were, in terms of those skills most valued in the empire of the House of Stars. But even since then his attempts to prove himself have met with little success. There is no field in which he is good enough to meet even those standards remaining. In the eyes of the Beasts—particularly the Falcorians and their like—his remains the subordinate position.

  In a different man, his ceaseless quest to advance himself and enlarge himself might easily have turned to hatred by virtue of its perpetual failure. But Cain Rayshade is a clever man, and one who sees both himself and others with understanding. He knows full well that no blame exists to be fixed, and that there is no point in hatred.

  His deficiencies lead him to cling to every bit of ground that he can gain with a jealous stubbomess. He becomes a cunning man, a man not really to be trusted, despite the fact that he wants to be worthy of trust. This semi-contradictory slyness tends to aggravate the dislike people already feel and provide an excuse for it, thus making it all the more unlikely that Rayshade can ever succeed.

  Somehow, his moments of glory are always lost. His attempt—in the company of Chaos, Deathdancer and Jade Keyrie—to trap Alexander Blackstar during the Beast war almost resulted in the defeat of the Beasts in the battle of the Kamak system. It was he who fatally wounded David Star-bird on Home, but the prowess attached to the victory became absorbed by the wave of reaction following the slaughter in the House of Stars.

  Had it been Robert Hornwing or Richard Stormwind instead of Judson Deathdancer who survived the war with Rayshade, then he would undoubtedly have been forced into a minor role yet again. But Deathdancer has his own weaknesses, and Rayshade is able to cling to a good deal of the rule which descends uneasily upon them.

  In a way, Rayshade welcomes the new war. It consolidates his power. It complicates the situation thus promoting cleverness and cunning at the expense of strength and popularity. And above all, it offers him one more chance to elevate himself to the rank of hero, to sweep aside unreasoned prejudice in a blinding flash of glory.

  INTERSTELLAR MELODRAMA

  Cain Rayshade stared into the unfamiliar screens before him, at the twisted tangle of bright silver dots which seemed to fill space better than the stars did.

  There must be ten thousand of them, he thought; his first burst of awe leading him to a gross overestimation. His lips moved unsteadily as he vocalized the thought. They were dry, cracking in the middle to leak blood on to his tongue.

  The toy ships sped toward the Confederacy fleet in a gigantic crescent-shaped disc, flat plane head on, horns forward.

  He looked at the edges of the projection screen, where two groups of paler dots were visible. Rayshade furrowed his brow as he tried to make the oddly shaped projection into a globe in his mind’s eye, to judge exactly how his own forces were arrayed. It was going to be difficult to make his mental picture of the formation correspond to the split pattern on the screen. He had to make the two edges join along the seam, and curve the two-dimensional representation into three dimensions.

  He could hear Deathdancer snapping orders into the high-omega link already—orders like “close up” and “steady” directed to specific fractions of the fleet, insinuating that Deathdancer had not only mastered the mental interpretation of the screen but knew the formation so well that he knew where everyone was within it.

  Deathdancer’s orders were the orders of a secondary officer. That made Rayshade smile. His fellow leader was not going to try and lead the battle. Rayshade was the better tactician, the faster brain-worker. For the time being, he was the m
an who mattered. Then he frowned again. Even so, the fleet had two masters and that was never good tactics. He almost regretted that he and Deathdancer had not shelved their politics and handed command of the fleet to either Daniel Skywolf or Stephen Warlock.

  His bleak eyes scanned the ranks of the toy fleet as it came closer and clearer, eclipsing the dim red blurs of those few stars which were visible. He seemed to be trying to stare them out, as though they were another face whose eyes were bound to give way to the intensity of his own. He could now make a more reasonable estimate of the size of the toy fleet, but even so he could see it to be almost twice the size of his own. Only Stormwind of Sabella could have driven a fleet against opponents like that and stood any chance of victory. But Saul Slavesdream’s desperation had once led him to do what only Stormwind could have done, and Cain Rayshade hoped that his own desperate need to win could do the same.

  They’re robots, he thought. Faster, more accurate. But they don’t need to win. It doesn’t matter to them whether they hit or miss. We can win, if only because we must.

  The inaudible words sounded hollow, even to him. He wished that the words might be true.

  The sting of his own thoughts made Rayshade grab the microphone in front of him with an unwarranted brutality, and begin talking into it in a fast, low voice. He imagined that it was not the ineffectual voice of Cain Rayshade speaking, but a combination of the men he had always envied and admired. He tried to inject something of the power of Eagleheart, the fury of Stormwind and the coldness of Mark Chaos. But it still sounded hollow.

  The Confederacy fleet eased into a familiar formation—the wide-winged arrowhead that Saul Slavesdream had used to cut apart the Human fleet at the battle of the Kamak system—Stormwind’s formation.