The Key to Irunium

VIII

Crowded by Cino and his bullies, Dalreay and Prestin hurried along the corridor and entered a small cylindrical chamber. The door slid shut. The floor shifted and then rose rapidly. Dalreay grasped at Prestin, his face looking shattered by the experience.

“Elevator,” Prestin said. “We’re going up.”

“These hunters are mortally afraid of science,” scoffed Cino. The man made Prestin feel that life should sometimes not be allowed. “We’re going up inside one of the Sorba trees. They’re among the largest in the rain forest.”

“Rain forest,” said Prestin. “The Big Green, the Big Growth, the Cabbage Patch. I see.”

“We’re right in the middle of it—” Dalreay’s pallor tinged green around the edges. Prestin wanted to help the Dargan, but he felt that nothing he could say would be of any use. He kept himself away from Cino; the contrast between the two men could have served as the model for ying and yang.

The elevator stopped after what seemed like an over-long ascent for inside a tree. Prestin began to wonder if he was being duped—that the rain forest was not the Amazonian basin he had conjured up. As a city dweller, the ideas of jungles had always held a romantic lure for him, a golden-green promise of strange and gallant adventures.

They went out of the door as soon as it slid open, Cino swaggering ahead. Dalreay kept close to Prestin, who could take no comfort from the reversal of their roles. Ahead of them, a circular expanse of windows walled the aerial platform in perspex. Prestin guessed that the platform was a round construct bolted onto the tree trunk like a lollipop on a stick. He followed the others, with Dalreay half a pace behind him, and walked across to look out the windows.

He had not been duped: he was indeed looking out from the top story of a true rain forest. Slowly, and with growing realization and awe, he fathomed the true stature of those trees. It would have been impossible for him to have judged their height if there were no gaps in which he could see down far enough to what he imagined was the ground—or was it merely the top of another story of jungle trees? But a group of giants had fallen, tearing with them lianas, vines, and parasites of all sorts; the gap ripped the eternal closeness of the jungle to let in long beams of sunlight. Prestin could only guess at the heights involved. A thousand feet? That seemed impossible; then he remembered the elevator ride, and saw what his eyes told him of diminishing perspectives.

Birds and vividly colored flying animals flitted between the trees. The Sorba trees must be those he could see with the bushy golf-ball tops. They sprouted up here and there through the welter of greenery, that formed the topmost layer of continuous forest. To look down on that bunched series of treetops was to imagine it a solid surface that one could walk across as easily as a grass field.

He knew, of course, the surface existed as a closely integrated yet diffuse culture medium; no one was going walking there. Where that canopy had been broken and the sunshine poured through, plants below grew avidly, madly, with an almost visible reaching for the light. What went on down in those lower depths made any imagination boggle. He knew that a terrestrial tropical forest biome might support as many as five stories of trees. Looking down he could see three separate linked levels where certain trees reached their highest growth—he did not care to guess how many others there might be here. With water and sunlight in abundance, the rest could safely be left to nature, here on Irunium as well as on Earth.

“Strange, isn’t it,” said Cino with his patronizing sneer. “How the forest ceases so abruptly—there is quite a sharp edge where the savanna begins. The answer, of course, is that the dividing line is marked by the beginning of the jewel-bearing rocks. We live in the Big Green because it is safe for us.” He waved his Mauser casually and Prestin and Dalreay moved along. “But we mine the savanna. It’s nice that way.”

“That Lombok Vine,” said Prestin, appalled. “That grew out of there?”

Cino sniggered. “That was a baby one. Down in the Big Green the Lomboks and the Narwhals really grow big. We keep a constant check on our trees, like this Sorba. A strangler fig can germinate from an epiphyte reasonably high up on a tree, reach down to the ground, kill the tree and take over its place in the sunshine. We don’t like that happening to the trees we live in.”

“And this is safer than living out there on the open land?”

“Safer for us, surely, because we have the technology to cope with these brainless plants.” Cino took out a crumpled cigarette pack and shook one out. “Smoke?”

“No, thank you.” Prestin did not add, “It’s a mug’s game.”

They went on around the perspex-walled enclosure until they reached a short staircase going up. So the aerial platform had itself more than one story.

“You,” Cino said to Prestin. “Up. You,” to Dalreay, “wait here.” The cigarette moved between his lips as he spoke in a modish 1930-type fashion.

Prestin climbed up the stairs, wondering what nastiness awaited him. He had not forgotten Melnone, nor that ghastly seeking vine, and he felt himself acutely aware of the unanswered questions.

The head of the stairs was enclosed by a small anteroom, quite unremarkable, and he walked through it toward the double doors at the end. He pushed them open and heard a splashing of water and a girl’s soft voice saying, “In here, Bob.”

This, he told himself, not without humor, should be interesting.

He went in and forgot his flippancy; he stood for a moment on the threshold, dizzied by the scene.

Without question, the stage had been set. Ancient Greco-Roman statuary, voluptuous in its clean whiteness of line, stood on marble floors. A fine mist of scented vapors coiled langourously from the bath where, like Diana among her ladies, a girl lay half-submerged in the fragrant water. Her limbs and body shone with pink health, her toenails gleamed ah impudent scarlet. Her dark hair, coiffed and sprinkled with gems, had not been imprisoned by any bathcap horror. Three copper-skinned maidens, nearly as naked as she was, tended her, one with unguents, one with an oversized sponge, the other delicately applying an ivory strigil. They laughed in low, throaty giggles as he stood there like a loon.

Music floated wantonly in from some hidden source; it was soft, stroking, quarter-tone music, forgettable but creating an atmosphere of unquestioning relaxation.

“You are a little early, Bob. But you don’t mind if I keep you waiting, do you?”

Her voice, smooth and apparently unsubtle, reached Prestin very agreeably. He looked at her overtly now, aware that she was coolly enjoying his discomfiture. She was well worth looking at, at that, with her dark hair, her violet eyes, and her mouth that might have been too ripe and soft and pouting for some tastes.

“I’d like you to tell me what this is all about.”

“Of course, Bob. That’s why I asked you to come up. I hope Cino found you all right?”

“Oh, yes. He found me. He found a cringing little thing called Melnone, too—”

“Melnone was a fool!” The words cracked hard and then, with a soft smile and a splash of water, she covered them with a tinkle of merriment. Foam churned in the bath and the scarlet toenails disappeared. Knees—inevitably dimpled—appeared in their stead. “His usefulness was over. All the Valcini think of is their awful sports.”

“You are not a Valcini, then?”

“Bob!”

“No, I guess you’re not.” He walked a little further into the room, over the expensive-looking scatter rugs. “You had no further use for Melnone, and, slug that he was, you got rid of him.” He laughed gently. “Just when I happened by.”

She was certainly a magnificent creature. The foam of the bath prevented him from seeing much of her figure; but the flash of her eyes, indignant, hurt, pleading, the hand so earnestly thrust over the edge of the bath to him, the whole aura of personality flowing from her, all added up to a woman among women. Prestin unmistakably felt the effect she was having on him.

A copper-colored maiden stood lithely and brought a sea-green gossamer veil and held it ready for the girl in the bath. Towels were brought. Despite himself, despite all his own precepts, Prestin could not keep from looking as the girl rose from the bath. He did not see anything, of course. One never did.

Wrapped in the veils and the towels, she swayed toward an opaque glass cubicle where fresh hot air blew.

“You haven’t told me your name yet,” he said.

“Oh, Bob!” The veils and towels fell to the floor as she raised her hands behind the glass. The hazy silhouette charmed Preston, but he wondered what she meant.

“What do you mean, ‘Oh, Bob? You know who I am. Because we busted out of the arena you had an excuse to have Melnone killed. You brought me here. You must want something. Why be so cagey?” He jerked his head. “Cino’s down there with his Mauser and his bullies. What’s holding you up?”

Her handmaids were helping her into a flame-colored negligee. If she wore anything underneath it, Prestin hadn’t seen her put it on. She walked out toward him with a light, bouncing step, doing up the flowing ribbon bow about her waist. Her face was flushed but still meticulously made up, and now very close. She came up to about his shoulder.

“Oh, Bob! Surely you know who I am?”

He hadn’t a clue. He’d been hoping to find Fritzy who’d disappeared somewhere about here, coming through from a landing Trident. Maybe she’d hit among the trees and a Lombok had got to her—he shut his eyes. He’d been trying not to think about that for some time.

The girl’s voice sounded softly in his ear and he could feel her breath on his cheek, smell the sweet warm bath scent of her, feel her softness pressing against him as she raised on tiptoe. “Oh, Bob! And here I’ve been waiting so long to meet you after we talked. Of course you know who I am! I’m Perdita! You knew that all along, didn’t you, you naughty boy?”

“Perdita? The Contessa? The Montevarchi?” Prestin laughed. He took her upper arms into his fists and pushed her back, looking down on the sweet, lovely face staring up at him—seeing the sweetness and the loveliness as a carefully put on covering, “You! The Contessa!” He shook her gently, despite his feelings. “I spoke to the Contessa on the phone. I’d know that voice anywhere. Sorry, baby—try me with another one.”

“You’re a fool, Bob!” She wrenched herself free and stormed across the apartment, its luxury and refinement lost in her anger, her face indrawn and bitter. “What do you know of the dimensions? You puny Earth people think you are Lords of Creation! Well—you’re not—You’re not!”

“But you are?”

The thrust went home. She lifted her head like a snake, and like a snake her tongue flicked in and out. “We are of the dimensions! I am the Montevarchi—the name by which I choose to be known here, and on your world. This is the body of Perdita that I am using, her brain that I think with, her eyes that I see you with, her hands that I touch you with—” She swayed forward again. “Her lips that I kiss you with—”

Prestin fended her off. The three handmaids stood grouped by the door, ready to run. “I don’t want your kisses, Contessa. I don’t know what you’ mean about someone else’s body—”

“The body is mine now! I share it and use it—”

“Yes, well. You’ve had your fun. Now I would like to go back to my own world.”

“You refuse me?”

“I refuse you, yes. I refuse what you are, what you stand for, what your henchmen are. I hate the Valcini. I wish to go home now, and my friend—”

“Todor Dalreay of Dargai? Do not worry about him. He is already shackled among the mine slaves.”

“You cat!” He swung about sharply, some idea of bluffing his way past Cino buzzing in his mind. He could break out, given half a chance. Then Cino appeared at the door. His Mauser served the same purpose as a barred gate.

“He won’t play, Cino. You know what to do with him!”

“Yes, Contessa.” Cino flicked the Mauser at Prestin. “You will come with me.”

“She isn’t the Montevarchi—” said Prestin.

“For now, she is.” Cino jerked the Mauser again, his lips thin and antisocial. “Get with it, friend.”

“Just what did you want with me?” Prestin now understood the grandstand play where, days before, he would have been baffled. “You’ve been after me ever since Fritzy disappeared.”

“Don’t worry about Upjohn. She is—working—for her living.”

Prestin lunged forward and grasped the girl. “Fritzy! She’s alive! She’s all right—”

Cino hit him over the head with the Mauser and, half stunned, Prestin was dragged free of the girl. She shrugged her negligee straight, shuddering. “Take him away, Cino!”

His head a roaring inferno, Prestin was led down the stairs and back down the elevator shaft of the Sorba tree. If that girl was the Contessa, then he had made a pretty poor showing. She had offered herself in exchange for something. Now, Prestin knew, he was going to do what the Montevarchi wanted—without payment.

But Fritzy was alive! And must be somewhere near, if what the pseudo-Contessa had said could be relied on.

Most of the confusion below had been sorted out and Prestin saw squads of men, Honshi guards and ordinary security men in snappy uniforms with helmets, clubs and automatic rifles, maintaining order.

Cino sniggered. “They squirted the old acid all over that Lombok. It shrivels the devils a treat. A pity I missed the fun.”

Prestin could imagine. The lungings and swaying, the growing and shriveling, the clawing retreat, the gaping mouth and the fume of acid… Interesting tastes, friend Cino…

The settlement—or whatever one could call an intrusion by one dimension’s culture into another—sprawled half in and half out of the edge of the forest. Concrete had been used lavishly, and as they walked through covered streets full of box-like apartment houses, Prestin saw gangs of workmen repairing cracks and pouring boiling acids into crevices. He knew that the Valcini lived here from choice—albeit some of their decisions had been forced on them by the Contessa, it seemed—and so he knew they had good reasons.

Their slaves mined the jewel rocks. Evidently, to a Valcini mind, life was less safe there than here.

He saw gangs of slaves chained up, shambling dispiritedly on their way to and from the mines. He recalled Dalreay’s attempt to blow up a mine working, and he knew it would take an army to shift the Valcini now.

“When do you chain me up, Cino?” he said, surprised at his own tone. The absence of hope, the acknowledgement of complete defeat, could act as a drug, making a man drunk on apathy.

“You aren’t slaving in the mines, offal,” said Cino with a sneering grin that no ordinary human being grinned. “You’re joining the Transportation Corps.”

The overwhelming presence of the rain forest at their backs dwarfed everything else about them; one would never escape from that swarming green nightmare. They went into a concrete box with a few windows and a large red star over the door, masquerading as an office block, but even inside the building Prestin felt the domination of the Cabbage Patch.

A fussy little majordomo met them, wearing a neat gray suit off the peg of some smart Italian tailor’s shop. His face showed the oily will-to-please that brought out mulish disobedience in Prestin. Cino jerked his Mauser.

“This one is good, Cyrus. He’s the one who sent the girl, Upjohn, through.”

The faded little man rubbed his hands in usurious glee. “So! The Contessa drives us hard. Any extra help, especially at this time, is very welcome.”

“Your worries slay me.” Cino’s contempt dripped.

“Come with me—what’s his name? I did hear about that girl, but—”

“Prestin. Robert Infamy.”

The little man giggled. Prestin had to admit sourly that he possessed something that resembled a sense of humor. “R.I.P.? He, he! He’s come to the right place!”

“Get lost,” said Cino, holstering the gun. He left without a backward glance. Any ideas of jumping the little fellow and taking off were dispelled with sobering speed as two Honshi guards stepped up to escort him. Cyrus led with a skipping little walk.

They marched over cheap rush matting laid on the concrete and, oddly enough, Prestin found himself keeping step with the guards as Cyrus skipped ahead. The air of secrecy and mystery deepened when they entered a small room whose only light fell from blue lamps clustered in the ceiling.

“Quiet, now!” whispered Cyrus.

The cathedral hush and clinical sterility enveloped them.

A man sat on a plain wooden chair, a shrouded figure with his hands to his head, bent over, meditating. A small mound of jewels lay on a table before him, sparkling luridly in the diamond-bright spotlight, to form a focal-point of brilliance in the room. Prestin caught the vaguely outlined shape of Honshi guards in the shadows beyond. The man sat as though made from putty.

The jewels lay neatly heaped in the center of a yellow circle painted on the table.

The jewels disappeared.

Prestin blinked.

The hunched figure pushed back with a sigh, straightened, and rubbed shaking hands over white hair. The man turned his head so that the blue light caught stubbled jawbone and cheek, set a blue star in his pupil, turned his face and teeth into ghoulish terrors. The man’s hair could be gray, Prestin realized—the all pervading blueness made quick color identification difficult—but his hair should be white. The fitness of things ought to be preserved.

A Honshi—not a guard but some sort of overseer—placed another small heap of jewels on the yellow circle, counting them out meticulously. They were totaled up by an assistant operating a small comptometer slung on a leather strap around his neck.

“There you are, Graves!” Echoing from a speaker screwed to the wall below the spy-eye of a TV camera, a hard, young metallic voice spoke with level authority. “Porteur, Graves!”

But the shaking man had shrunk back, his hands raised as though to ward off a blow, his features sagging blue-gray and awful. “No more!” he said, croaking the words. “My brain is on fire! No more—give me a rest!”

“Two minutes, Graves!” the metallic voice hammered with all the insolence of youthful authority. “Then—Porteur! Otherwise you know what will happen!”

“Yes.” Graves collapsed back onto the chair, his shoulders heaving, his head sunk. “Yes, I know.”

Now Prestin understood what he was witnessing; understood what David Macklin and the Montevarchi had wanted; understood why the girl in the bath had offered herself; and understood, with choking claustrophobic horror, what was going to happen to him.

Cyrus said, “I have a replacement—if you would—”

The young voice from the speaker answered, “Very well, Cyrus. Wheel him in. And you, Graves. Go and rest. And, Graves, remember”—the voice harshened with a menace that prickled Prestin’s skin—”tomorrow you will Porteur twice as much! Go, offal.”

Honshi guards dragged Graves away; the beaten, broken man hung between them, shoulders peaked like steeples of the devil.

Cyrus pointed at the chair. Without arguing, Prestin sat down. He felt acutely conscious of all the frog-like eyes regarding him with that typical Honshi lack of external emotion; their fear of the human prisoner had abated with numbers and the surroundings. “Well?” he said.

“The yellow circle exists at the exact position of a nodal point, Prestin.” The hard voice from the speaker splattered the blue-lit room with sharp-edged echoes. “You will Porteur those jewels across. You will do this for the Contessa and she will be very pleased with you.”

“An interesting set-up.” Prestin spoke evenly. He felt sick. “But you have forgotten one thing. I cannot Porteur objects at will. I do not know how it is done.”

“We will teach you, Prestin. You can do it, that means you have a Porteur’s mind. With the equipment you have, you can be taught. I have heard of the girl, Upjohn. You will work well for the Contessa.”

“Until I’m a beaten wretch like Graves?”

“You were offered the alternative.”

Cyrus wheeled forward a trolley-mounted switchboard covered with high-voltage liquid switching units, ammeters, voltmeters, gauges the significance of which escaped Prestin, and electrodes on expanding leads. Cyrus took up an electrode and began to unwind it. He told Prestin, “This won’t hurt me as much as it’ll hurt you.” He giggled again.

Prestin felt his mouth fill with vomit. He swallowed and gagged and tried to rise, but the Honshi guards held him as Cyrus clipped the electrodes around his arms, legs and back. His clothes had been through a great deal since he had landed in Rome; this was their final indignity. Now he was dressed in rags. His beard was coming along nicely, too.

Cyrus’s sense of humor now only evoked the red desire to smash and rend and kill.

“Porteur those jewels through the nodal point, Prestin!” The metallic voice chipped at him like a pneumatic drill.

“I can’t!” he said viciously, trying to tear free.

An electric shock hit him. He froze in his position, stunned, eyes like billiard balls. There was more than a mere electric shock there; he felt his brain as a separate entity, as a separate thing apart from his body, like an egg frying in a pan.

The Honshi guards holding him wore thick rubber gloves. He glared down, his head bent, his mouth drooling, as the shock passed through him. He had never realized that anything could hurt so much.

When it was over he fell back against the chair like a plastic bag emptied of water.

“That was both to encourage and help you, Prestin.” The impersonality of the voice from the speaker outraged Prestin; he would have preferred someone on which to focus his hate. Hating a loudspeaker and a TV eye was a sure-fire way to the nut-house.

“I don’t know what to do!” he said, and heard and disliked and feared the note of pleading in his voice.

The shock hit him again.

He slumped when it ended, shaking and feeling the sweat dripping off his forehead. “What do I do?” he shouted.

The shock…

“Try, Prestin. We will help you. Focus your thoughts on the jewels. Use your God-given gift! Porteur them! Do it, Prestin!”

The shock hit… and he did it.

The jewels vanished.

Cyrus said, “Aaah!”

“I,” the remote steely voice said with immense self-satisfaction, “have always said the stick will beat the carrot, every time.”

Dazed, sick, aching, Prestin shook his head. “It’s a convincing demonstration—but it isn’t always so!”

The shock hit him then, gratuitously, and he went rigid. When it went away, the hard young voice said, “That was for impertinence. I do not tolerate that from offal.”

More jewels were placed precisely on the yellow circle.

He did not understand how he had done it and could not see how he was to Porteur again without that diabolic electric—and more than electric—shock. He looked at the jewels. They glittered back at him icily. The young voice said, “Porteur, Robert Infamy!” And the shock screwed him into a knot of agony.

He Porteured the gems.

“Good. You may soon Porteur without my help. But always remember, Robert Infamy, when you Porteur in the future—it was I who helped you. Without me, your gift would always have lain fallow. You have much to thank me for, Prestin, a very great deal. I hope you are grateful.”

“I’ve no doubt,” said Prestin out of his agony of spirit, “I’ve no doubt at all I can find a way to repay you.”