Escape to Chaos

Chapter Three Revolt on Simpar!

The slip towers glowed, grew misty and indistinct. The City of Transition gave a delicate shrug of raspberry shoulders and slipped from Era 6 to Era 4. The risk of thus hastening the deviation from plotted culture line was great. But the Director felt that coordination could better be obtained within the target era than from outside. As yet no method of direct communication between eras had been devised. Field Team reports could be received at Transition and orders could go out only if the city were in the era which ex-Agent Calna had made so critical.

Sarrz felt lost. The Director had stepped in to handle direct coordination of Field Teams. Sarrz was left without a function. Though it irked him, it did give him a chance to review the entire picture. As with all directing heads in Socionetics, Sarrz had a good background in Symbolic Probability. With the idle and aimless feeling of mental doodling, he decided to equate the index of probability of the loss of further space-time frames.

He took the small table which held the computor and swung it around within easy reach. He put it on alphabetic scale and ignored, as he fed in the data, the glow of the ‘insufficient data’ light. He had the direct loss of one era, the pending loss of a second, plus areas of disturbance in three more.

He read off the index and it startled him. He cleared the computor and tried again. Same result. He sat and listened to the quickening thud of his heart. The index of probability of all sister space-time frames being lost was almost grotesquely high, so high that complete data would have to be within itself improbable in order to level off the result based on incomplete data.

The inference was that some outside factor was at work, some unequated factor. There was a parallel in astronomy. Find the deviation and then look for the cause.

Suddenly Sarrz realized that this matter was of highest importance. The Director must be informed, and at once.

He reached for the switch that would enable him to communicate with the Director.

And that was the way they found him. His heart had stopped as his fingertips had touched the switch.

Animal caution did not desert Andro as he recovered consciousness. He neither stirred nor opened his eyes. He remained quite still and concentrated on bringing all senses up to peak awareness. Hearing — the soft rush and babble of water, a crackling stir, as of wind in leaves. Scent — the spiced smell of brush and forest and wild places. Touch — brush of grass against his arm. Warm air against his body. He remembered the deepness of the burn wounds. He concentrated his sensory attention on the wounded areas and could find no message of pain from the scorched nerve ends. He increased the depth of his respiration and could not detect the quick knives that had stabbed him with each breath as he stood in the blue shadows of the alley.

He remembered those who had joined him, and who had lost. Grief was deep and slow and still. Daylya and all the others. His fault. And born of impatience. Had he waited, grown a bit stronger, planned more thoroughly...

His ear picked up the whisk of grass against an approaching foot. Fingertips touched his chest over his heart. He opened his eyes just enough to see the figure outlined against the sky, bending over him. The equation was simple. Once all your allies are dead, all who remain are enemies.

Andro struck with clenched fist, with a roll that brought the heavy muscles of shoulder and back into the blow. He rolled onto hands and knees and jumped up onto his feet, weaving a little from weakness. He stood under a strange sky near the mightiest tree he had ever seen and looked down on the crumpled unconscious figure of a woman. She wore a toga-like garment of lime yellow, a wide belt from which small unknown devices dangled. Her hair had the clarity and purity of the white fall of water into the deep blue pool a few yards away. On the angle of her jaw was the spreading stain of the force of the blow. He stood and waited and listened for others. There was no sound but the water and the wind. He bent over and fingered her jaw clumsily. The bone did not feel loose and broken under his fingers.

It was then that he remembered his wounds. He looked at his side, and found a strange thing. The skin was clear, firm, healthy over the wounds, and he would have thought he had dreamed the wounds were it not for the untanned pallor of the new skin.

He looked at the woman again, and he frowned. The alley floor had given way under him and he had fallen into darkness. The woman was connected with that phenomenon in some way. At the moment she was helpless. Yet the devices on the belt she wore were a promise that she might not remain helpless. He rolled her over and looked for a place to unhook the belt. It seemed to have no fastening and it fitted too tightly around her slim waist to be slipped down over her hips. He contented himself with unhooking the small devices. He could not guess their uses. Yet they had a gleam that spoke of efficiency, utility. There were six of them. He carried them carefully in his cupped hands and placed them behind a stone. It taxed his strength to tear a strip from the hem of the lime yellow toga. With the strip he bound her hands tightly behind her, placing the knot out of the reach of her fingers. As he tightened the knot, his right arm extended, he saw that the tattoo was gone from his upper arm. It was replaced with another area of that pallid healthy skin.

Andro sat a few feet from the woman and waited for her to regain consciousness. He tried to guess what had happened. He still wore the leather and metal battle skirt, but his cape was gone. He remembered tearing it off as it had started to flame, throwing it aside as he picked up the dying girl and carried her through the great smashed place in the hull of his ship. The battle skirt showed signs of having been scorched. The thongs that bound his sandals were blackened, crisped and the hair had been burned from his calves and ankles. The holster at his right side was empty.

The woman’s face was toward him as she opened her eyes. Her eyes were a clear grey and they saw nothing. They focused on him and he did not like the look of intelligence that came into them. In face and body he found her pleasing, but the eyes alarmed him. They spoke too clearly of knowledge beyond his own — knowledge that made him feel like a child. He saw her test the strength of the strip that hound her wrists, then sit up awkwardly, throw her head back to swing a heavy strand of her hair away from her face. She smiled at him as a conspirator would smile.

“Who are you?” he asked heavily.

She moved her underjaw from side to side and grimaced. “You are strong, Andro.”

“Who are you?”

“Your friend. Your very good friend. My name is Calna.”

“Calna,” he said, tasting the word carefully. “I was dying. Now I am whole again. I was trapped, and now I am free. If you did that, it is evidence that you are a friend. But your purposes in doing that may make you enemy rather than friend.”

She glanced down at her belt. “Untie me, Andro. The bonds are too tight.”

He untied her. She stood up, flexing her hands, rubbing her wrists. The top of her shining head was on a level with his eyes. She smiled at him and there was something in the smile he didn’t like.

She said, “I’m helpless now because you took the things from my belt?”

“Of course.”

She put her hands on him and he tried to strike her again. He cried out in sudden agony as her fingers found pressure points. She did not cease smiling. She touched his elbows in what could have almost been a caress and both arms hung slack and useless. Her hand swept across the side of his throat and he fell heavily. He tried to move and though his effort made the sweat stream from his face, he could not move.

She sat beside him and said softly, “It will go away in a few moments, Andro. And do not let your pride be hurt. Those are methods in which I was, carefully trained.” She stood up and glanced around. She went unerringly to the stone behind which he had hid the shining things. She picked them up and hooked them casually onto the belt.

Some of the weakness had left him. He sat up and glared at her. She laughed. “Don’t look so fierce, Andro. You see, I know you very well. I’ve known you for four long years. There were five escapes before this last one. Probably you thought they were good luck, or even good judgment. I was helping you, Andro. Six times you should have died, and I helped you. The seventh time occurred while you were unconscious and that was the worst time of all, the most dangerous.”

“Why did you help me?”

“I am not from your world, Andro.”

“I have guessed that.”

“My world was interested in your revolt against Shain. It was to our advantage to help you succeed- We helped in many ways, but not enough. I was following orders given to me. When it was seen that our help was not enough, I was ordered to let you die on Zeran. I disobeyed orders.”

“Why?”

Calna frowned. “I... I don’t really know. I knew that I was becoming emotionally interested in you, but that in itself should not have been strong enough to enable me to act counter to my training. It just became something I... I had to do, Andro. Now I am being hunted by my world.”

“As I am being hunted by mine?”

“No. Your world believes you are dead.”

He stood up as the last increment of his strength flooded back. He looked around.

“Is this your world or mine?”

“Neither.”

He stared at her. “What are we to do? How did we come here? I wish to go back to my own world. I left... many things unfinished.”

“You cannot go back. There is no way.”

Andro watched her for a moment. “Until that moment, I believe you told the truth. Now why do you start to lie?”

“Listen carefully and understand, if you can. I will say it as simply as I possibly can, Andro. We tried to help your world without making our presence known. If we did it too obviously, your world would grow out of our reach and we could no longer visit it. If you should go back now, the mere fact of your returning from the dead will put your world out of our reach. So I cannot permit that.”

He studied her. “That seems odd, Calna. You say you are being hunted by your world. Can they hunt for you here?”

“Of course.”

“Then why not return me to my world. You say it will place my world out of reach. Then wouldn’t that mean safety for you, in my world?”

“Yes, but it is against all my training, all I believe in, and...”

He saw her indecision and for the first time he felt that his strength equaled hers. He put his hands lightly on her shoulders, felt her tense under his touch. He looked into her grey eyes until her glance wavered, dropped. She came into his arms with a small cry in her throat that was like a confession of weakness, that was the sign of the transfer to him of the authority for whatever path they would take into the unknown future.

“We will go to my world,” he said. He felt her acquiescence. “And before we return,” he said, “you will teach me how to use the devices of your world. When I return I shall be stronger than Shain and Larrent and Masec, even with no followers.”

She stood a little apart from him then, her head lowered. “My people will be looking for us in your world. They will want to stop us, before the effects of your return have made sufficient change in your world to move it out of their reach.”

At a place which was the essence of no-place, and in a time which, in stasis, was no-time, there was a record of progress in the analysis of paradox, where directed thought maintained the record, where a billion eras moved the record one half-step nearer the point where at last all infinities would become finite. It could not be done on the basis of a controlled experiment, because there is a flow in that theory. The mere factor of control is an alien factor, a newness added to the other components. Without control, all things must be weighed and all factors considered. The measured counting of high value infinities can only be performed in no-time, and only no-place is vast enough to hold the records.

A child awakens and cries in the night. In its simplest sense the impact of that occurrence can be measured through a thousand generations, given all factors for weighing. What complicates it is that cause and effect are expressions of the same factor. It is more delicate to trace the child’s awakening backward for a thousand generations, but still finite and feasible — given enough time and enough space for the keeping of records. Where it becomes paradoxical is when worlds are bridged and all probabilities assume equal values, and in ten thousand co-existent fields of probability where the child awoke at the same instant, the same track can be plotted backward for a thousand generations and be identical for ninety-nine hundred and ninety-nine probabilities, only to diverge at the next to the last generation in the very last of the ten thousand coexistent webs in the matrix. So go back and make that last one similar, and the result will be an increment of divergence which results, most probably, in no child at all, and, less probably, in a night of unbroken rest for the child.

The labor involved makes it essential that the computations be made in no-time, and the records kept in no-space.

And one facet of the endless computation can be — as one range of probabilities begin to gain mutual access, what happens if such access is denied?

The finite computation of infinities is possible because infinity is merely a function of time and space. Only nothingness becomes endless.

Ever since the dreaded audience with Shain that had been so miraculously saved from disaster, Deralan was obscurely troubled. It was his nature and his profession to learn the background of all events and incidents. Long search for the girl who had handed him the object which had bought his safety was fruitless. He was almost glad that he could not find her. They had returned to Rael from Zeran with all haste possible. Either the object had been brought back on the pursuit ships, or it had arrived at Rael by faster means. And Deralan did not see how it was possible for the object to have been smuggled onto one of the ships. As to faster means of transport — there were none.

As he tried to pick up the threads of his responsibilities that had been disrupted by the revolt of Andro, third son of Shain, he found himself suffering from an inability to give his complete attention to his duties. The capital city was very much like a cage of wild animals. The animals detected the faint inattention of the trainer and crouched a bit lower on their haunches, ready to spring.

When two of his most trusted assistants were torn to bits by a mob, Deralan did not feel the old raw fury with which he had avenged similar previous incidents. His identification, capture and execution of the leaders of the mob was quick and effective, but without heat. His villa, protected almost as well as the very palaces of Shain, no longer was a place of revelry by night. He ceased the entertainment of those close to Shain, and knew that by so doing he was prejudicing his influence at court. He spent more and more time alone, and his thoughts were dark. Many times there was fear in him, but fear of something not quite understood.

He felt that somewhere in the city he would find an answer to all that troubled him. He began to listen more carefully to the talk of odd happenings in the empire. It seemed to be a time of strange occurrences that bordered on the supernatural.

On one sultry afternoon when most of the city slept, Deralan questioned a frightened girl who had been brought to him by his agents. She was a dirty, half-wild creature, seemingly poised on the very edge of flight. Her dark red hair was matted with filth and her tip-slanted eyes were of that distinctive lavender shade of the women of Vereen. Her rags barely covered her body. In her left armpit was the telltale gouge where the mark of the slave had been recently removed. Very recently removed.

Though she was frightened to the very borderline of unconsciousness, she would not speak. And such was her emaciation that it was immediately obvious to Deralan she would die at once if force were used. What intrigued him most was the freshness of the blisters along the calf of her left leg. Those were the distinctive blisters carried by one who has traveled in one of the old ships with their defective shielding.

Several isolated bits of information clicked into place in Deralan’s mind and convinced him that this girl held a clue to his own bafflement. The increasing numbers of escaped slaves on Rael — the fresh blisters — the girl’s obvious fright — the two month delay in customary reports from slave marts — all these things pointed to Simpar, from his agents on that planet of something only she could give him.

Her teeth were small and even and pointed. “Kill me and watch how a Vereen woman can die!” she whispered to him.

“What made you slave?” he asked, forcing a gentleness into his tone.

“I stabbed my husband. The court sentenced me. They said it was without cause. I was shipped to Simpar with hundreds of others.”

“And you escaped. How?”

She moved restlessly in the thongs which bound her, and turned her head from him, affecting casualness, though the cords stood out like wires in her lean throat.

“How would it feel,” he asked softly, “to be clean once more. To be scrubbed and cleaned and scented again. To feel the touch of silk. To recline beside a spiced fountain and have rich foods brought to you. Fine fruit from Vereen. Wines from Lell.”

She did not move. He saw a tear cut a channel of whiteness through the grime of her cheek.

He called the bored attendants and told them to free her and bring her to his villa. He turned his back on their knowing sneers and left. By the time the girl was brought through the innermost gates of the villa all was ready for her. The maids took her in hand. It was dusk in the wide gardens before she was brought to him. She stood with a new pride, tall and silent and quite lovely.

He watched her eat with the precise, almost vicious hunger of a half-starved animal. The wines were brought. She was wary but after a time she lost wariness and her lips grew swollen and her eyes grew vague and she emptied the glass each time he filled it from the flagon. Night came and he sat with her. She laughed with an empty sound as he caressed her.

“It wasn’t hard to escape, was it?” he asked.

“No. Not hard. Not with the gates broken and the guards dead and the ships waiting. Not hard.”

“Who broke the gates and killed the guards?”

She giggled. “Oh, but I am not supposed to tell anyone that, yet. Not until he is ready. Not until we receive word.”

“You can tell me, Leesha. You will stay here with me in comfort and in peace. There will be no secrets between us. You can tell me.” His tone was wheedling.

She giggled emptily again. Her eyes shuttered and she slumped out of the circle of his arm. He grasped her shoulders and shook her hard. “Tell me!” he shouted.

Her head wobbled loosely. He let her fall to the edge of the fountain. She lay on her hack and her breathing was loud between her parted lips.

At noon the next day, heavily guarded, Deralan shuffled up the ramp and through the port of the waiting ship. His face was deeply pocked and scarred, unrecognizable. Around him was the wailing of the newly enslaved. The inner door clanged shut. In the confined space Deralan’s nose wrinkled with distaste. At take off there was no warning. They slid into a tangled heap at one end of the lightless room.

As he fought free of the others, found a clear space on the floor, Deralan wondered what would become of him if he could not prove his true identity on Simpar.

Once Calna had committed herself to Andro’s plan, she resolutely forgot how far she had veered from the paths of her training. The only remaining indication of the extent of the conflict within her was the splitting headaches which blinded her at times, without warning.

Andro had showed surprising aptness as a pupil. At times she felt that he had taken all of her knowledge and combined it with his own to create a strength beyond anything she had ever before experienced. It was he who had selected Simpar as the symbol of everything he detested about Empire.

They had driven the golden ship deep into the planet crust and waited there for the thrum of directed energy which would tell them that they had been detected. Andro, using the device which collapsed the orbital electrons in matter without releasing the energy, had driven the long slanting corridor to the surface. The ship, completely shielded, lay behind them, deep in the skin of Simpar, utterly undetectable.

Together, disguised by his suggestion as slave buyers from Lell, they had visited the pens, the auction blocks. Though inured through training to the misery on savage planets, Calna felt emotionally staggered by the mere weight of the suffering around her.

Andro, his face altered by her careful surgery, stalked through the open slave marts with an unforgiving grimness in his eyes, in the clamp of his jaw. They knew their danger. Were he to announce his presence too quickly, they would be over-powered by Field Teams before his influence could spread enough to cause a probability deviation.

Calna sensed that Simpar, as well as the other main planets of Empire, was under constant, wary scrutiny. She explained to Andro, saying, “We must free them in such a way that it will appear to be a natural revolt. I have been trained in that sort of thing. Yet if I do it too cleverly my presence here will be suspected.”

He thought it over. “Then why not take this step? As we free them, give them ships and send them away to other planets. And. as they leave, tell them that Andro of Galvan has released them, and to keep that information secret until the word is passed. That will give this influence you talk about, the widest possible chance to operate.”

The Director received the report in person. He immediately beamed it to all Field Teams in Era 4, saving. “Slave revolt on Simpar indicates help being given by Ex-Agent Calna. Request immediate Team concentration at Simpar.”

Within twenty hours the suspicion was verified by direct report from Simpar The Field Team reported, “Ex-Agent Calna and Andro can be immediately eliminated. However, escaped slaves have gone to other planets with information re Andro Request verification of present probability index, as ship power less responsive than before.”

“Index sagging. Approaching danger point. Immediate elimination ordered. Verify. Verify.”

There was no verification. The Director waited until the last possible moment before ordering the slip back to a stable era. The city slipped back and communication with all Field Teams was thus cut.

It was night on Simpar. The triple moons, blood red, arced across the night sky. There were no more ships. The freed slaves, eyes wide and wild in the torchlight raced through the plundered streets. Throughout Solom, the capitol city of Simpar, Andro and Calna could hear distant crashes, faint screams as the last of the traders and buyers were hunted down and murdered. They had underestimated the unreasoning fury of the slaves, and thus found themselves in danger Slaves dressed in the fineries of the traders and buyers and were themselves killed by their fellows.

Thrice Andro had to stand and fight and kill in order to clear their path through the city. The first scattered revolts on the planet had been orderly, and the freed slaves had been spirited away on the captured ships without incident Rut this past night when the last of the fortified marts and pens and mansions of the traders and the government had fallen completely was nightmare.

Andro found a grim humor in having to stand and do battle with slaves who died screaming his name, as though it were a magic incantation.

At last they were out of the city Fires burned unchecked in the heart of the city. At one place flames rose hundreds of feet into the air. The dark plain was ahead of them, and in the darkness they meant to find the slanting tunnel down to the hidden ship

“Now have we won?” Andro demanded as be hurried along beside her.

“I’ll know when we reach the ship. If we’ve won, we cannot reach any other known era.”

The hidden entrance to the tunnel was less than a mile ahead. They ran on, and the night seemed endless as the clamor of the city faded behind them.

Solin’s ship, containing the other agent who had replaced Calna, hung poised and-invisible fifty feet above the mouth of the tunnel. The screens were adjusted to make the plain that stretched out toward the city as bright and clear as though it were bathed in sunshine.

He watched the tiny figures approaching. He knew who the first two were. The third one, the one who followed them, was unknown to him.

Solin felt the tiny shudder and turned almost in anger to Arla, the woman Agent who had replaced Calna. “It’s pointless to keep trying,” he said, “we’re beyond the point where we can return.”

The woman dropped her hands from the panel and turned toward him. Her expression was bleak and hopeless. Her shoulders sagged. She glanced at the screen. “Soon they’ll be near enough.”

“There seems to be no point in killing them now,” Solin said.

Arla gasped. “But it was an order! Your service with that Calna has made you a poor Agent, Solin. You heard the order.”

“We’re trapped here in Four. They can’t reach us and we can’t reach them. So why kill them? The damage is already done.”

“It was an order,” the woman said.

Solin sighed. He sometimes wondered if the male-female teams were not a mistake. According to Field Team theory, it made for a more flexible unit, increased the time that could be spent by any single Team on any single assignment. But it did give rise to a great many petty irritations.

“We took so long finding the tunnel,” the woman said. “That’s what trapped us here. We can make it worth while now by following orders.”