Escape to Chaos

Chapter Two Calna

Sarrz stood at attention facing the Director. The words that had lashed out at him made feel faint and dizzy. There was contempt on the Director’s gaunt face.

Sarrz tried again. He said, “But no Agent has disobeyed a—”

“Be still! What order had you started to give when I put you under arrest?”

“I had ordered Agent Solin to go to Era 4 and destroy the body of Andro. I thought she would immediately try to... you see, there’s an emotional attachment... seemed logical that...”

“Do you remember your history, Sarrz? What in its simplest sense, was cancer?”

“Why... uncontrolled cell growth, starting with one rebel cell and—”

“Any Agent, Sarrz, equipped with an Agent’s ship, is very, very close to being impregnable. We are dealing with an unbalanced Agent, for the first time in socionetic history. You would have fixed it so that she would have returned to that place and found this Andro destroyed. Revenge is a typical emotion in an unbalanced mind. What, then, would keep her from using the ship and her mobility to intrude in the most destructive possible way on all probability frames within our reach?”

Sarrz blanched. “But...”

“One rebel cell in our structure, Sarrz Remember that. If we are not to lost twenty-two sister galaxies, we must eliminate her. Possibly you think this is an alarmist reaction. Agent Calna ceased to be predictable when she prejudiced the entire operation in Era four. Angered and hurt she can force twenty-two cultures off their extrapolated pattern. Saying that she retains enough loyalty to refrain from doing that is mere wishful thinking. I want every available Field Team briefed and assigned to the planet Era four calls Zeran. I want a trap that she won’t see on the way in, and can’t slip out of. Is that clear?”

“It is clear,” Sarrz said with an effort.

“In the meantime proceed with your plan of presenting Shain, through Solin and the team on Rael, with proof of the death of his youngest son. But warn Solin not to kill Andro. Not under any circumstances. Once we have the girl, Andro can be safely killed.”

When Deralan had been young, he had not feared space flight. He stood as a guest on the bridge of the flagship of the police fleet returning to Rael. He was returning to report to Shain the utter destruction of the remnants of Andro’s rebel force. And the sixth escape of Andro himself.

Deralan was a realist. The execution would be swift, and relatively painless. For a time he had considered lying to Shain. But lying led straight to the rooms of evil repute under the main palace, and there Deralan would scream until Shain found the truth and permitted him to die.

In his youth he had accepted the great, roaring, shuddering, thundering ships as a part of life that would never change. Now he knew of the great fields where tens of thousands of the ships moldered away, as no one had the skill to repair them. If the drive failed in flight, the crew and passengers were dead. It was that simple.

And many had failed. Abilities had been lost, somehow. He could see the sign of those lost abilities in the puffy face of the captain of the flag ship now standing before the vast control board, watching his officers complete the intricate procedure for landing. Deralan felt a vast bitterness. They were like monkeys firing a gun. The monkey pulled the trigger and the gun went bang. Ask the monkey to explain the principle of expansion of gasses. The officers pulled switches in the order prescribed in the space flight manuals. The ship landed. It was that simple. If one switch was pulled and somewhere in the guts of the ship a coil failed, that was too bad, and very very fatal.

Routine repairs could be made. New tubes, oxygenation equipment — things on that level. But what made the ship take off, accelerate to ten lights, deaccelerate and land — what induced the normal gravity under any acceleration — what force adapted the view screens to the acceleration — all those things were mysteries, lost in the ancient past when men were wiser, stronger.

Deralan thought sourly that Andro had not been very farsighted. All he had to do was wait. He could die knowing that within a thousand years there would be no more ships that would function. With no more ships, the House of Galvan would rule one planet rather than a galaxy. Each inhabited planet would be isolated, left to go its own way, find its own answers, maybe win its way back to space. The ships would die and Empire would die with them.

Now the face of Rael was so close that it filled all of the view screen, the tiny drift of cloud appearing flat against the surface. Deralan’s mind kept returning to the report the three men had given him. He could not suppress a thin eerie feeling of awe and concern. “I saw him. He seemed to be hurt. He had a weapon. As I aimed, he dropped out of sight. We went back there. There was no place for him to get out. There was no hole for him to drop through. He was just... gone.”

Shain would not be amused by that story. Three of them had seen it. Deralan had isolated the three who had seen it happen. After considering all sides of the question he had killed them. His power over his men was that of life and death, with no questions asked. Their eye-witness account was an embarrassing factor, an unnecessary factor in the equation. Deralan felt no regret, and no satisfaction over it.

He knew that he did not dare lie to Shain, and yet he wished to continue to live. It was impasse.

The fleet landed, a far smaller fleet than had set out in pursuit of Andro. A guard of honor awaited Deralan as he disembarked. They formed a hollow square around him. Deralan smiled. Shain hadn’t been thinking of honor when he sent the guard. Shain had been thinking of escape.

Metal-clad heels struck the paving in harsh cadence as the twelve guards escorted Deralan down the center of the Avenue of Kings. The once-proud street had become a place of bazaars. Rael was a wise and sour old planet. To it had come the dregs of a thousand planets, the sycophants, the cheats, with their smell of depravity, their swaggering insolence. One did not walk alone at night on Rael.

The aimless crowds opened to let the guard through. Some of them jeered at the guards and then fell suddenly silent as they recognized Deralan, feared almost as much as Shain himself and his elder sons.

A drunk reeled too close to the guard. The man at the front left corner of the hollow square reversed his ceremonial short-sword with a practised gesture and smashed the man’s skull with the heavy grip.

They marched through the stink of the bazaars, past the crones that vended remedies for every ill, past the street girls in their rags, past men who turned with jerky quickness to hide a wanted face from the keen eye of Deralan. The main palace towered at the end of the Avenue of Kings. They marched through three gates so huge that the men did not have to change formation. Only the fourth gate was so narrow that they shifted to a column of twos. Deralan was midway along the column.

Just as he passed through the gate a screaming girl came racing from the side, her eyes wide with panic. A bearded man chased her. In her fright she ran directly into Deralan, staggering him. The guards cursed and shoved her roughly back into the grasp of the bearded man. Deralan fingered the object the girl had thrust into his hand. It had a soft texture. In the great main hall of the palace he risked a glance at it. For a moment he did not know what it was. When he at last understood what it was, his mind reeled with the shock, and his mouth went dry.

But Deralan was a realist and an opportunist. They took him back through the corridors to the private apartments of Shain. Shain was a ruin of what had been an enormous, powerful man. Years of debauch had left him looking like a pig carved of cold lard.

“Your report told me nothing,” Shain said.

Deralan straightened up from the ceremonial bow. “Forgive me,” he said. “I possibly took a childish pleasure in anticipating this moment.”

“I have some childish pleasures waiting, if I don’t like your report.”

Deralan bowed again, advanced and handed the object to Shain. “My proof, your imperial majesty.”

Shain unfolded the soft square. He stared at it. Then he threw back his great head and began to laugh. He laughed until tears squeezed out of the small eyes and rolled down the white heavy cheeks: Deralan took a deep breath. He knew that he was out of danger.

“How did you do it?” Shain demanded.

“We searched the city. I found him myself, and killed him. It was your wish.”

“You did well. Tonight we shall celebrate your victory... and... and the death of the best of my three sons, the death of the only one fit to be Emperor.”

Always, in a limited world, the machines grew more powerful. Machines were a form of inbreeding. Man turned his attentions onto his own pleasures and comforts and the machines grew, giving sage electronic attention to the complexities of equations with a thousand variables. And man grew softer within his limitations.

But now, with multiple realities waiting to be merged, the machines were of little help. Properly guided, the machines had indicated the possibility of multiple space-time frames, had assisted in finding a way to reach them. But once reached, it was once again up to man to work with hands and eyes and heart to achieve that unity which would weld twenty-five conditional realities into one world.

The Agents were recruited from those who, in less pressing times, would be termed malcontents, would be difficult to control, manage. All of them were, in one sense atavistic.

The Agent was man. His tools were provided by the machines. And no tools in history equaled the golden pyramidal agent ships. They were the extension of the Agent, the way the stone ax fitted the horny palm of the Neanderthal. On SL drive they could span the galaxy in a mouth. The webbed forces, interlocked and convoluted like the surface of a brain, shimmered constantly along the five planes of the ships. They were very close to being invulnerable. They could dive into a planet crust, protecting the Agent in much the way an insect would be protected while held in the palm of an iron fist as the fist was driven into loam. They could move in any direction except time, and at speeds beyond contractive effects. Yet it was the Man and not the Ship.

Calna entered Era 4 at the galactic rim. She was lost. It took long hours of feeding data into the computors to arrive at exact position. Since exact position was only exact in relation to any known object, she calculated her speed in relation to Zeran’s sun in the invisible distance. She established course corrections. The ship flickered once and was gone. Twenty hours later the alarm brought her out of deep sleep a hundred million miles from Zeran. She had set the protective web so that light was bent around the tiny ship. She risked observation, in three-second intervals, returning to objective invisibility each time. She knew that she could be detected only by a chance intersection of her path from the galactic rim. It was a risk she had to take.

She stretched the weakness of sleep from her body and tried to think clearly. She was afraid. She suspected weakness in herself that implied an eventual failure. The rescue of Andro was, in Sarrz’ terms, weakness. Emotionality. In all probability it would make her reactions predictable. And so she had to fight for a cold objectivity. What made it most difficult was that thoughts of Andro made her heart pound and her face flush. Agents were taught to consider the peoples of backward frames as pawns to be moved at will, sacrificed for the sake of socionetic gambits. But she thought of Andro in the way of a woman rather than an agent. Yet, even if she were to rescue Andro and take him out of reach of the Field Teams who were undoubtedly waiting, what would he think of her? What would he see in this strong-bodied woman of a more mature culture? This woman with the grey-bright eyes and the hair like ripened grain in a September sun.

She remembered the harsh and shameful joy with which she had seen the death of the woman, Daylya whose beauty had been like a warm cry in the night.

Andro was, above all else, a strong proud man. He would not react kindly to being aided by a woman who, in all except brute muscle, equaled or surpassed his own strength.

The possibility that they had already killed him was like the first rasp of the knifeblade against her throat. She knew how she would plan it were she in charge of those attempting to intercept her. She would make the path to Andro’s black and quiet tomb very simple. And escape impossible. By a focus of power five other Agent ships could hold her ship in stasis. She sensed that they were waiting.

She knew the exact location of Andro’s body. It was in a crypt in the small room of the highest tower in a frozen city abandoned for half of time. The body would be hard and tough as granite. If there were some way to snatch it up on the run...

Anything could be transferred from planet to ship providing the proper field were built around the item to he transferred. A field was created by a tiny generator no larger than a plum. It could he set to create a field a foot across, or five miles across. But it had to be placed in position.

The item could he received inside the ship, or received within any given range of the ship She made her plan. If was dependent on deceiving them through apparently descending to land near the crypt. Their reaction times would be trigger-fast. It would be close, and with no possibility of fumbling.

She boldly dropped the ship’s screens and streaked toward the dark side of Zeran. She came down through the blackness with her view screens adjusted so that the ruined city stood out as though bathed in a great light. The adjusted generator lay in the small disposal port. The port switch was hooked in with the computor which in turn was hooked up with the aiming screen. She waited without breathing, her hands on the lower panel, fingertips moist on the controls. The interval of drop was to be twenty seconds. The instant she heard the click, she chopped the ship into SL drive and winked away into space She felt for a fractional part of a second the drag of the focused power of the other Agent ships. It was as though, for that moment, her ship flew through molten lead. For the moment there was nothing for her to do. She had set the ship to come out of SL at exactly twenty seconds from the moment of the drop. The port was ready and skin-gravity set to hold any air that would escape, heat screen ready to combat the cold of space.

She put her hand on the main port control. The moment she felt the tiny, twisting dislocation that meant the end of SL, she tripped the control and the port yawned. The receiving area was set outside the open port. With the suddenness of an explosion the entire top of the tower appeared in the receiving area, swung over and thudded against the ship. Using the top panel she slipped ship and tower into Era 20 to give her a few more moments of grace.

The rough stone of the tower was flat against the open port. Using the hand blower she crumbled a hole through the stone, exposing one corner of the black crypt. She widened the hole, caught the crypt with the focused beam of the attractor, angled it through the port. Ignoring the crumbled stone that had drifted in, she shut the port and tried to flee.

The ship did not move. She cried out, and fought the controls. Her hands flashed across the panels as she tried combinations of controls. Higher and higher rose the thin whine of the ship’s screens, fighting the holding force. She applied all power to a straight SL drive, feeling the heat rising within the ship. The ship grew hotter and she waited, her jaw set, until she could scent the acrid odor of the scorched tendrils of her hair. Then, with one fast motion, she cut off everything in the ship. The pursuers were in the position of a man who runs to break down a door when the door opens just before his shoulder touches it. Calna’s ship gave a tiny lurch and she was ready to take advantage of it. She slipped to Era 1, and immediately to Era 25, and applied full SL drive the moment the new frame had been attained.

The ship whipped off into freedom, and she laughed aloud with a note of hysteria. She used a completely random pattern of slip and direction, taking no chances, working for long hours on the twin panels until she knew that pursuit was impossible. She knew the danger of awakening Andro in too unfamiliar an environment. The chance of madness was too great.

In Era 11, one of the most backward ones, she found the planet she wanted. In more sophisticated probability frames, it had been turned into a rest planet for Agents. It was uninhabited in all frames except the basic three. The best aspect of it was that it was not the last place they’d look for her. Anticipating her reaction, they would look at once in the last place. It was neither the best nor the worst, thus a median chance in several billion.

She drifted low across the springtime face of the planet and selected a place where a crystal stream came down across rocks to form a pool beside a slant of lush green grass. She tucked the ship between the mighty roots of a fairyland tree so tall that clouds brushed its crown. This was a planet on which one felt elfin. Small and wild and free. The vastness of the trees and the boulders and the utter stillness were the artifacts of magic.

She opened the purloined crypt and laid her fingers against the marble coldness of Andro’s cheek. All body functions were suspended She moved quickly and lightly as she prepared the twin injections that would bring him slowly up to the threshold of life once again. The tips of the needles had to be heated before she could put them into the vein on his inner arm.

She made the injections and then laid her head against his broad chest. It was like listening to a stone. It was the coldness of death and she felt small and afraid. With no circulation of the blood, with the blood itself as still and hard as the red veins in marble, it took a long time for the effect to spread from the point of innoculation.

The heart, at last, gave a slow thud. She counted to thirty before she heard the next thud. Each time the interval decreased by a full second. Body warmth began to return. When he took his first fluttering, shallow breath, she straightened up and smiled down at him. There was color in his face again.

With the help of the small attractor she unhooked from her belt, she lifted him effortlessly and carried him through the port and placed him on the fresh-scented grass at the edge of the deep blue pool.

Then, motivated by a force that was strange to her, she used the cleansing chamber of the ship, webbed fresh garments for herself in a brighter color than ever before.