Liberator Of Jedd

Chapter Eighteen

Blade was traveling light. For weapons he had only his short iron sword and a dagger. He carried neither food nor water. He waited for an hour after full darkness, then made his way through the narrow winze that had eroded past the end of the steel wall. The way was tortuous and he was scraped and bleeding from a dozen minor abrasions when he emerged on the Krope side of the wall. He sought safety in the shadows at the foot of the cliff and took a breather and his bearings. And knew at once that something was wrong — or, from his viewpoint, right.

Except for the shadows where he now lurked, the great wall was lighted clear across the valley. He could see no fixtures, no light standards, nothing physical, yet the light was there. A misty soft radiance lacking any glare, yet showing up every detail. Blade smiled a bit grimly. Transmission of power without wires. They were working on it now back in Home Dimension.

He studied the large metal building. It was well lit, but now stood in silence and with no movement of any sort. No sound, no sign of life, only the eerie, brooding loneliness. Blade began to understand. He waited another ten minutes, then stalked into the light, his outward mien bold enough and his spine cold. If the ball of fire rolled now, if he had guessed wrong—

Silence. Nothing. Blade approached the metal house and peered through a window. They were in there, the robots, and they were motionless, frozen, caught in strange attitudes when the power had failed.

Failed? Or had it been cut off deliberately? Blade thought it must be the latter. He had just bet his life on it. He was awaited.

There was a full moon. It shimmered up over the horizon, a great golden orb in a cloudless sky, and against it Blade saw the gleaming spear of the high-rearing tower he had glimpsed from the crag. He began walking toward it.

He trudged in a silence and a desolation he had never known before; not for a little time did he come to realize that the aching solitude was as much in his own heart as in the forsaken landscape. He thought of his dead Ooma and willed himself not to think of her. The golden image of Mitgu leaped to his mind and that he also banished. His head pained and he began to sweat copiously. On and on he stalked, past the soundless factories and the empty homes — though he could see robot figures motionless in them both — and at last he came to where the land moved away toward the horizon in an endless belt of slow motion.

Blade halted and wiped his face and neck. He was drowning in sweat. His vision was fuzzy. He stared at the moving earth, then laughed harshly at himself. It was a moving walk, a level escalator six feet wide, moving toward the shining tower over which the full moon now hung like a yellow lantern.

He did not step on the moving walk at once. New pain lanced his head and he doubled up with another pain in his belly. Sweat cascaded down his big body. When the gut pain had gone, Blade straightened and, with his fingers, explored his groin and armpits. They were there — the soft swell, the beginning mushy lumps. Buboes. He had mistaken the headaches! It was not the computer searching for him.

Blade had the plague.

His nostrils tickled and he put a finger to his nose. It came away slightly stained with blood. The Yellow Death.

For one moment he knew terror as he had never known it before. Fear scourged him until his knees trembled and he could not breathe; and his throat and chest were stuffed with a noisome mist that choked him. For that instant he was a beaten man — then he breathed deep, stared at the tower and stepped on the moving sidewalk. He was not yet dead and there remained a task to complete. And there was, for him, a trifle of hope. Hope the Jedds could not know. Blade had a chance. A bare chance.

As soon as he stepped on the walk it speeded up. Now it carried him toward the looming tower at a great rate. He was right. He was awaited.

It was a quarter of an hour before he reached the foot of the tower. As he rode toward it Blade studied it with appreciation and awe. It was of the same shining metal as the wall across the valley, but here mere utilitarianism had been forsaken for beauty. As an aesthetic concept it had the just-rightness of perfection, in that Blade could not have imagined it any different. It stair-stepped up in massive beauty and was lost in small, moist clouds newly formed about the spire. The tower was, he reflected, very nearly a mile high.

The moving walk slowed and stopped opposite a tall arched entrance. Blade left the walk and went into the tower, past robot guards and attendants, past men and women and children, all robots, all frozen into workaday attitudes. There could have been no warning, Blade thought. These robots had been cut off in the midst of life. And yet they were not dead in the real sense. They waited.

He crossed a vast lobby to where a bank of elevators hung motionless, their machinery as dead as the robots. Blade began to search for a stair, wondering if he had the strength to climb a mile into the sky, when he heard a faint whirring sound. He found the source at the far end of the elevator bank. One small lift, nothing but a series of barren cages, was in operation. Like empty boxes on a chain the little cages constantly ascended and descended on the far side.

Blade hesitated, still wary, and for the first time the voice spoke to him. Spoke in his brain. There was no outward sound, no echo in the great lobby, nothing but the neutral and unshaded voice — pure sound — speaking clear in his mind. Wearily he wiped his sweat away again and prepared to obey. Sound telepathy.

In his brain the voice said: «Step into one of the cages, Richard Blade. Ascend to me. Fear nothing. When you have reached my level I will speak again.»

Blade stepped into a moving box and was carried upward. The journey was slow and seemed endless. There were no doors, no windows, apparently no floor stops, and when the lobby vanished from sight he was in a tube of steel being borne upward. And up and up and up—

The voice spoke to him again: «Soon you will come to a light. Step off the cage there.»

Up and up. He saw the light sliding down to meet him. As the box slid past, Blade stepped off and was in a narrow, upward-slanting tunnel of steel. A light glowed at the top of the tunnel. Blade made for it. He passed under it and through an open door and into a vast open rotunda. It was open to the sky on all sides and guarded only by a railing. Moonlight drenched it and Blade caught his breath. To the south, far off beyond the wall, he could see the fires of the Jedd camp.

The voice came back. «There is a ladder near where you now stand. Find it and climb 'to the next level.»

Blade ascended the ladder. He was weak now, still drenched in sweat, and the head pains came with ever-increasing frequency. He could feel the tumors growing in his armpits and groin. How soon would the crazy laughter begin?

He was halfway up the ladder when the voice spoke to him: «You are dying of plague, Richard Blade. You know it and I know it. But you will live yet a time. Long enough to do something for me — the one thing I cannot do for myself.»

Blade stared up, his big hands white-knuckled on the rungs of the steel ladder. «How do you know my name?»

«I have followed your every move, and known your every thought, since you arrived in my dimension.»

Blade halted just beneath a square opening that led to the level above. «You understand that? You know of computers and X Dimensions?»

Laughter in his brain. «I understand the concepts. But do not waste time. Climb. I am in need of you.»

Blade climbed up through the aperture and found himself in a high-walled room of steel. A gleaming square room with no openings. In the exact center of the room was a high tank on stilts of metal. It too was square, about forty by forty feet and twenty feet in depth. A ladder led up the side to a runway atop the tank.

In his brain the voice spoke again: «Stop now. Try to understand what I say. I depend on you.»

Blade put his hands on his hips and scowled around him. He might be dying of plague — as indeed he was — but the calm assurance, the superiority, of the bodiless voice was beginning to irk him.

«Where are you?» he asked.

Voice: «I am in the tank. As you will see presently. But now that you are here and cannot leave, and must do as I ask, I will take some little time for explanation. The plague will not kill you immediately and I–I have stood my pain for ages. I can bear it a little longer. I would have you understand, Blade.»

Blade put a hand on his sword. «Understand what?»

Voice: «About the Jedds. When they were a great people and ruled the world. Our world. You have seen the robots?»

«I have seen them.»

Voice: «They are part of the joke. A great cosmic joke. It was the old Jedds who invented the robots. But they did their work too well — the robots soon surpassed the Jedds and took over and sent them into exile. Far back in the beginning of time, this was, and ever since the Jedds, the humans, have been trying to find their way back here to the land of the Kropes. For so the robots called themselves. Kropes.»

Blade frowned. He was sick, very sick, yet found himself with the will and strength to grow angry with this voice. Why the anger he could not understand. But it was there. He was beginning to hate.

Blade said: «Why do you tell me all this?»

Voice: «It amuses me. And can do no harm. And I would strike a bargain with you.»

«What sort of bargain?»

«In time — in time. Listen — it was the custom of the Jedds to destroy all their robots when they reached a certain age. They were junked, cannibalized, and new robots made from the parts saved. I, who speak to you now, was a robot and I was in turn discarded and torn apart. But that one time they were careless, the Jedds. My brain was not destroyed as usually was done, the thousands of parts not beaten into a fine powder as was the custom. Instead, a lazy Jedd flung my brain into a pond. I lay in that ooze for centuries and somehow, someway, life came to me. Real life and real intelligence. My own. And I began to grow. I was cunning and I learned how to hide myself. And all the time, over all the long eons, I grew. And at last I had my revenge on the Jedds. I ruled. I invented the Kropes. I built the marvels you have seen. The wall and this tower and all the rest. I built it with my brain. With my will. Are you familiar with the theory of telekinesis, Blade?»

Blade's head was spinning. Fever flamed in him and things began to shift slightly out of focus. He took a firmer grip on himself and answered, «I know the theory. I have never seen it work. To create actual physical things by sheer power of will — by willing them into existence.»

Laughter in his brain. For a moment Blade feared it was his own, the dying manic laughter of plague, then shook it off. He had yet a little time — and in spite of all he still hoped.

Voice: «You have seen it, Blade. Look around you and see it again. But enough — to our bargain!»

«I am sick. Ill. I have a great tumor that is killing me. Even my will cannot cure it. But you, Blade, you with your sword can cut the tumor out and destroy it and I will be well again. You will do this?»

Blade stared defiantly up at the tank. «Why should I?

You are no friend to me. Why should I, who am myself dying, help you to escape death? On the contrary — I would rather have you die. Then the Jedds can come into this land and build it anew for themselves and their children. No. I refuse. You get no help from me.»

A different kind of laughter in his brain now.

Voice: «I said a bargain, Blade. If you help me I will permit the Jedds entrance into my land of Kropes. I will aid them in any manner I can. I will put my robots at their disposal, to do all manner of work, and though I shall rule I will do it with kindness and understanding and the Jedds will remain a free people under their young Empress.»

Mitgu. The Golden Princess. Blade shook his head to clear it. His temples were pounding now, the fever flaring higher, the loathsome buboes growing like vile toads in his groin and armpits. He would never see her again.

He stared at the shining tank. Moisture gleamed and dripped on the metal, a reddish exudation he had not noticed before. Then his own sweat blinded him again.

«And if I do not make this bargain?»

Voice: «I will die in time. But that will be long coming and before I die I will destroy the Jedds. I know your plans, Blade. When two days have passed I will remain quiet and keep my robots immobilized. The Jedds, as agreed, will come into my land. I will permit them beyond the Shining Gate. I will wait. Then I will send the flame and destroy them every one. To the last Jedd child. What do you say to that, Blade?»

Blade wiped sweat from his eyes with trembling fingers and did not answer. The tank was spinning now, before his eyes, like a great centrifuge. He was so damned weak!

Voice: «Do not underestimate my powers, Blade. It was I who sent the plague upon the Jedds, time and again, to keep them weak. It was either that or destroy them utterly, and I am not cruel for cruelty's sake.»

Blade walked to the ladder at the side of the tank. «I will do as you wish.» Fast, now. Quickly. Do not think lest the voice divine those thoughts. Act. Now.

He reached the top of the ladder and stood on the runway surrounding the tank. In the tank, all but submerged in a red liquid that gave off a faint smell of brine, floated the brain. It was the size of a small whale. Blade began to walk around the runway, loosening his sword in its sheath.

The enormous brain nearly filled the tank. The lobes were well demarcated and the convolutions writhed in complex whorls of pink and blue-gray tissue.

Voice: «You see the tumor, Blade?»

He saw it. Springing from the right frontal lobe, rooted deep through the dura mater and into the tender arachnoid and pia mater, was a monstrous and sickly white growth. The tumor was nearly as large as Blade himself. He went farther up the runway to examine it. He had a decision to make and he would get only one chance. Frantically, pushing everything else out of his mind, he strove to remember his anatomy, cursing himself for the many times he had dozed through class at Oxford.

He said, «I see the tumor. It is large and goes deep. Shall I begin now?»

Silence. It drew out. Then the voice said, «Begin.»

Blade drew his sword and leaped from the runway to land on the floating brain. His feet sank a bit into the spongy cortex and he slipped and nearly fell, then regained his footing. He began to make his way slowly toward the ugly mushroom of the tumor, stepping carefully over the deep sulci that separated the convolutions. Suddenly, out of his own memory file, came remembrance of one of Lord Leighton's droning lectures.

Disrupt the axons of the granule cells in the molecular layer.

Blade reached the tumor and stopped. He raised his sword — and hesitated. There was a new flare of pain in his own skull. A different, but familiar pain. Lord L was reaching for him again.

The voice shrieked: «Get on with it. Cut out the tumor, Blade. Cut it out!»

Whatever their barbarities, Blade thought, the Jedds were human. They deserved their chance. This thing, this monstrous pure brain had outgrown all humanity and was, in essence, evil. It deserved to die. It must die.

Blade leaped over the spreading white tumor. With both hands he raised his sword and plunged it deep into soft pink-blue tissue. He cut and slashed and tore, using all his strength, summoning his last energies, and his iron blade ravaged the brain like a wolf might a tender lamb. Sweat poured from him and Blade heard himself cursing. He was knee deep in reddish fluid. He fell and nearly slipped down the lobe into the tank, but recovered by seizing a mass of tissue and digging in with his nails. All the time he was slashing with his sword.

A scream filled the mile-high tower. It shook on its foundations, trembling like a reed as a vast black wind blew through it. Blade hacked grimly away.

The tower spire was in darkness now. Dense black clouds enveloped it. Lightning drove golden forks into the gloom. The brain moved and heaved beneath Blade. He kept on cutting away in a frenzy of hate and fear. He was gouging out huge gobbets of brainstuff and flinging them aside. The brain lunged upward in the tank, like a fish leaping, and Blade clung for his life. In his ears, in his brain, was one long ascending scream of terror and death.

Then new pain. Blade was stricken, paralyzed. He dropped his sword and it slid down the brain and into the tank. Blade sank to his knees as the pain ripped him into shreds. His head left his body, torn away by lightning, and the top of the tower parted and Blade's head was propelled up and out into the night sky. He hurtled toward the moon, full and splendid, a mammoth gold piece in the sky. And suddenly, writ large across the moon in Gothic script, in Lord Leighton's crabbed hand, he saw the words — Welcome Home, Richard.