Big Planet

18 Charley Lysidder

They continued, walking on heavy green carpet along a corridor which constantly curved out of sight ahead. At last Gentile halted at a door of heavy wood. He looked furtively behind, then stooped with the ease of much practice, peered through the crack where the hinges dented the jamb.

He turned, motioned to Glystra, “Come now, look. Assure yourself of her presence—then we must leave. At any moment the High Dain may appear.”

Glystra, smiling grimly, looked through the crack.

Nancy. She sat in a cushioned chair, head back, eyes half-closed. She wore loose pajamas of dull green brocade; her hair was bright and clean, she looked as if she had only just finished scrubbing herself. Her face was blank, expressionless; or rather, she wore an expression Glystra could not identify.

With his left hand Glystra felt for the latch of the door. In his right hand he held his ion-shine. The fat steward squawked. “Stand back, stand back! Now we must depart!” He plucked Glystra’s sleeve with angry fingers.

Glystra shoved him away. “Nymaster, take care of this fool.”

The door was not locked. He flung it open, stood square in the doorway.

Nancy looked up with wide eyes. “Claude”

She slowly put her feet to the floor, stood up. She did not rush to him in gladness and relief.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked quietly. “What’s happened to you?”

“Nothing.” Her voice was listless. “I’m all right.”

“Let’s get moving. There’s not too much time.”

He put an arm around her shoulders, urged her forward. She seemed limp, dazed.

Nymaster held the steward negligently by the nape of the neck. Glystra looked deep into his frightened and outraged countenance. “Back to the radio room.” The steward jerked around, trotted whimpering back along the amber-lit corridor.

Downstairs, back along vaguely remembered ways. Glystra held his ion-shine in one hand, Nancy’s arm in the other.

A hum, an electric susurration.

Glystra pushed into the room. A thin man in a blue smock looked up. Glystra said, “Stand up, be quiet and you won’t get hurt.”

The operator slowly rose to his feet, his eyes on Glystra’s ion-shine. He knew it for what it was. Glystra said. “You’re an Earthman.”

“That’s right. What of it?”

“You set up this equipment?”

The operator turned a contemptuous glance along the table. “What there is of it… Anything wrong with that? What’s your argument?”

“Get me Earth Enclave.”

“No, sir. I won’t do it. I value my life pretty high, mister. If you want Earth Enclave, call it yourself. I can’t stop you with that heater on me.”

Glystra took a sinister step forward, but the man’s face changed not a flicker. “Stand against the wall, next to the steward… Nancy!”

“Yes, Claude?”

“Come in here, stand over by the wall, out of the way. Don’t move.”

She walked slowly to where he had indicated. She was trembling, her eyes roved around the room, up and down the walls.

She licked her lips, started to speak, thought better of it.

Glystra sat down at the table, looked over the equipment. Power from a small pile—a simple short-wave outfit like that owned by a million high school boys on Earth.

He snapped the “On” switch. “What’s the Enclave frequency?”

“No idea.”

Glystra opened a file index, flipped to E. “Earth Enclave, Official Monitor—Code 181933.” The control panel displayed six tuning knobs. Under the first was the symbol “0,” under the second “10,” under the third, “100,” and so by multiples often to the sixth. Evidently, thought Glystra, each knob tuned a decimal place of the frequency. He set the sixth knob to “1,” the second to “8”—he looked up, listened.

Footsteps sounded along the wall, heavy hard feet, and Nancy wailed, a wordless sound of desperation.

“Quiet!” hissed Glystra. He bent to the dials. “1”—“9”—

The door swung open. A heavy black-browed face looked in. Instantly the steward was on his belly. “Holy Dain, it was never my will, none of my doing”

Mercodion looked over his shoulder into the corridor. “Inside. Seize those men.”

Glystra bent to the dials. “3”—one more dial to go. Burly men trooped into the room; Nancy staggered out from the wall, her face drawn and bloodless. She stood in the line of fire. “Nancy!” cried Glystra. “Get back!” He aimed his ion-shine. She stood between him and the High Dain. “I’m sorry,” whispered Glystra huskily. “It’s bigger than your life”

He squeezed the button. Violet light, ghastly on white faces. A sigh. The light flickered, went out. No power.

Three men in black robes rushed him. He fought, wild and savage as any Rebbir. The table tottered, toppled. In spite of the operator’s frantic efforts the equipment crashed, jangled to the floor. At this point Nymaster bolted from the room. His feet pounded down the corridor.

Glystra was fighting from the corner, using elbows, fists, knees. The black-robed men beat him to the floor, kicked his head, wrenched his arms up hard behind his back, punishing him.

“Truss him well,” said Mercodion. “Take him down to the pen.”

They marched him along the corridors, down the stairs, along the arcade overlooking the oasis.

A black speck streaked low across the sky. Glystra uttered a hoarse cry. “There’s an air-car! An Earthman!”

He stopped, tried to pull close to the window. “An Earth air-car!”

“An Earth air-car,” said Mercodion easily, “but not from Earth. From Grosgarth.”

“Grosgarth?” Glystra’s mind worked sluggishly. “Only one man in Grosgarth would own an air-car—”

“Exactly.”

“Does the Bajarnum know—”

“The Bajarnum knows you’re here. Do you think he owns an air-car and no radio?”

He said to the black-robed men, “Take him to the pens, I must greet Charley Lysidder… Watch him carefully, he’s desperate.”

Glystra stood in the middle of the stone floor, naked, damp, miserable. His clothes had been stripped from him, his head was shaved, he had been drenched in an acrid fluid smelling of vinegar.

These were the pens of Myrtlesee Fountain. The air was gruel-thick with latrine reek and slaughter-house odors, seeping in with the steam from the processing rooms. Glystra breathed through his mouth to escape awareness of the stink. Horrible odor—but it was a poor time to be fastidious. He frowned. Strange. A component of the stench was a heavy, pungent, almost sweet, smell which tickled his memory.

He stood quietly, trying to think. Difficult. The stone floor oozed under his bare feet. Four old women crouching beside the wall moaned without pause. A thin red-eyed man vilified a blowsy woman with waist-long blonde hair, which for some reason had not been shaved. She sobbed into her hands, without apparent attention to the curses of the man—guttural throat-catching sobs. Steam and stench poured in from the processing room through chinks and cracks in the stone, likewise bars of yellow light flickering through the steam. With the light and the steam came the sounds of the processing: boiling, pounding, rasping, loud conversation.

Eyes looked in at him, through the hole to the corridor, blinked, passed on… Unreality. Why was he here? He was waiting to have his head boiled. Like Bishop’s head. Pianza was lucky; he lay buried beside the yellow reeds of Lake Pellitante. Cloyville was luckier yet. Cloyville wore a grotesque puff of purple lace on his head, and played at being both master and servant.

This was the low ebb. Nearly the low ebb. Much of a man’s dignity went with his hair. There was one more notch to slip—from naked humiliation into the anonymous soup of the processing pots. It was almost foreordained, this last notch. It had been a steady progress down a slope toward lesser and lesser life, morale, power… A whiff of the pungent sweet odor came from the processing rooms, stronger than ever. It was definitely familiar. Lemon-verbena? Musk? Hair-oil? No. Something clicked in Glystra’s mind. Zygage! He went to the wall, peered through a chink.

Almost under his face a tray held four neatly arranged heads, with their brain-pans sawed off to display the mottled contents.

Glystra twisted away his gaze. To the right a cauldron bubbled; to the left a bin held acorn-shaped fruits. Zygage, indeed. He watched in fascination. A man, sweating and pallid, in clammy black leather breeches and a blue neckerchief, scooped up a shovel-full of the zygage acorns, sprinkled them into the cauldron.

Zygage! Glystra turned away from the hole, thinking hard. If zygage were a constituent for the oracle-serum, why, then, the brain-extracts? Probably no reason whatever; probably they were added only for their symbolic potency. Of course he could not be sure—but it seemed unlikely that pituitary and pineal soup would cause wild contortions like those he had witnessed in the Veridicarium. Much more likely that the zygage was the active ingredient; such would be the parallel with Earth plant-extracts: marijuana, curare, opium, pejote, a dozen others less familiar.

He thought of his own experience with zygage: exhilaration, then hangover. The oracle’s reaction was the same, on a vastly exaggerated scale. Glystra pondered the episode. A miserable terrified wretch had undergone torment and catharsis to achieve a magnificent calm and rationality.

It had been an amazing transformation, baring the optimum personality apparently latent in every human being. How did the drug act? Glystra’s mind veered around the question: a problem for the scientists. It seemed to achieve the results of the great de-aberration institutes on Earth, possibly by the same essential methods: a churning through the events of a lifetime, the rejection of all subconscious obsessions and irrationality. A pity, thought Glystra, that a man only achieves this supreme state to die. It was like the hang-over after his smoke-breathing… In his brain there was a sudden silence, as if a mental clock had stopped ticking. Bishop had felt no hangover. Bishop had—he recalled Bishop’s intensified well-being after the zygage inhalation; apparently his habit of ingesting vitamins had warded off the hangover.

Vitamins… Perhaps the oracle died from exaggerated vitamin depletion. And the idea gave Glystra much to think about. He walked slowly back and forth across the damp stone floor.

The woman with the yellow hair watched him dully; the red-eyed man spat.

“Ssst.”

Glystra looked toward the wall. Hostile eyes gleamed through the hole. He crossed the room, peered out into the corridor.

It was Nymaster. His tough round face wore an expression of angry discomfort. “Now you lie in the pen,” he said in a low urgent voice. “So now you die. What then for my father? Your man will take away the swords, and possibly kill my father, for so you ordered.”

True, thought Glystra. Nymaster had served him faithfully. “Bring me paper,” he said. “I will write to Corbus.”

Nymaster handed through a greasy scrap of paper, a bit of sharp graphite.

Glystra hesitated. “Have you heard anything of—”

“Koromutin says you will be oracle. For Charley Lys-idder himself. So the prefect told him while he was beating Koromutin.”

Glystra pondered. “Can you bribe me free? I have other metal, other swords like yours.”

Nymaster shook his head. “A ton of iron would effect nothing now. Tonight Mercodion has ordained that you burn up your mind for the Bajarnum.”

The words sank into Glystra’s mind. He stared at Nymaster scratching his cheek with a ruminative finger. “Can you bring Corbus back with you? For another sword of fine steel?”

“Aye,” said Nymaster grudgingly. “I can do so… A mortal risk—but I can do so.”

“Then take him this note, and bring him back with you.”

Now the sounds and the stenches of the pen had no meaning for him. He paced up and down, whistling thinly through his teeth.

Up, down, up, down, looking across the room at each turn, watching for Corbus’ face.

A chilly thought struck him. He had guessed something of the mechanics of the plot against him. After Morwatz had failed, after he had eluded the second expedition by crossing the river Oust and dropping the high-line, he had been left to go his own way to Myrtlesee, but all the time, all the weary miles from Swamp City, he had merely been taking himself to a prearranged trap. The strategy was clear. He had been left to execute it himself. Suppose Corbus was part of the machinery? At this moment nothing was unthinkable.

“Glystra.”

He looked up, turned to the hole. It was Corbus in priest’s robes. Glystra glanced right and left, crossed the room.

Corbus looked in at him quizzically. “How goes it?”

Glystra pressed close to the hole. “Did you bring it?” he asked in a whisper.

Corbus passed a little package through the hole. “And now what?”

Glystra smiled thinly. “I don’t know. If I were you I’d start back down the monoline to Kirstendale. You can’t do any more here.”

Corbus said, “You haven’t told me what you plan to do with the vitamins.”

“I plan to eat them.”

Corbus eyed him questioningly. “They been giving you bum chow?”

“No. Just an idea I’ve got.”

Corbus glanced up and down the corridor. “With a big hammer I might make a hole in this wall—”

“No. There’d be a hundred priests out here at the first click. You go back to the sword-maker’s, wait till tomorrow. If I’m not there then I’m never coming.”

Corbus said coolly, “There’s one or two charges in the ion-shine. I’ve been half-hoping”—his eyes glistened— “to meet someone we know.”

Glystra’s throat constricted. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered.

Corbus said nothing.

“She never had Bishop killed, I’m sure of it… It was an accident. Or he tried to stop her.”

“No matter how you look at it—she’s part of the picture. Four good men killed—Bishop, Pianza, Darrot, Ketch. I’m not counting Vallusser; that little rat was in up to his neck. I’ve been watching her a long time—ever since she insisted on joining our little suicide club.”

Glystra laughed shortly. “I thought all the time it was—that she—” he had no words to finish.

Corbus nodded. “I know. One thing I’ll say for her, she put her life on the line alongside ours. She came out on top. She’s up there”—he jerked his thumb—“and you’re down here. What a stinking hole. What are they cooking?”

“Brains,” said Glystra indifferently. “They distil out some kind of nerve juice which they mix with zygage and feed the oracles. It works on the oracles like the smoke worked on the Beaujolain soldiers, only a thousand times more.”

“And it kills them?”

“Dead as a mackerel.”

“Tonight you’re the oracle.”

Glystra held up the package Corbus had brought him. “I’ve got this. I don’t know what’s going to happen. From here out I’m playing strictly by ear. And,” he added, “I may be wrong, but I have a hunch there’ll be a few unforeseen developments here at Myrtlesee Fountain and I’m not worrying.”

Nymaster appeared behind Corbus. “Come, there’s a prefect on his way down. Come quick.”

Glystra pressed close to the hole. “So long, Corbus.”

Corbus waved his hand non-committally.