Land and Overland Omnibus

CHAPTER 14



It was not until Toller and Steenameert had submitted to the pressure of many hands, and to having their wrists bound together behind their backs, that the alien scales were lifted from their eyes. Retinal communications were permitted to pass to the brain, unaffected by external forces, and suddenly the two Kolcorronians could see normally again.

Night still reigned, but the perceived starlit meadows had been replaced by a complex diorama of dimly lit buildings in the middle distance and ranks of shadowy Dussarran figures in the foreground. Toller guessed he was near the centre of an enormous plaza. The surrounding buildings were delineated by gentle curves, in contrast to the rectangular architecture of his home world, and their outlines were punctuated by slim trees which swayed continuously although the humid night air was perfectly still. The only familiar element Toller could find was the face of Steenameert, turned towards him above a sea of industrious, seething, black-clad alien figures.

"It seems that you have won," Toller said, fighting to keep his voice steady. "Sorcery prevails over strength."

Divivvidiv moved a little closer through the crush of odorous bodies. For your own good, Toller Maraquine, put behind you all your primitive ideas about sorcery. There are no unfair advantages in nature. What is commonplace to my people seems magical to yours, but that is simply because we are more advanced in every branch of learning.

"It is as good as magic when men are deceived by their own eyes."

That was simply done. When I was close enough to the ground I was able to enlist the telepathic aid of some of my fellow Dussarrans. As soon as you and your companion were sufficiently outnumbered we were able to dictate what you could see, in the same way that a crowd can drown out a single voice. Nothing magical about it!

"But you cannot deny that luck was on your side," Toller grumbled, feeling himself being pushed towards a vehicle which had arrived in the vicinity. "For us to land where we did—so close to a city, in the midst of your lackeys… That had to be magic or blind luck."

Neither! Divivvidiv and Toller were losing sight of each other in the press of bodies, but the alien's silent words were clear. As soon as I had given warning of what was happening my people took control of the local wind cells and guided us to this spot. I told you at the outset, Toller Maraquine—your mission had NO chance of succeeding.

I am now returning to my post, so it is unlikely that we will ever see each other again, but you have no need to fear for your life. Unlike you Primitives, we Dussarrans do not…

Uncharacteristically for Divivvidiv, the incisive quality of his thought processes faded. There was a moment of woolliness, shadings of what Toller half-identified as guilt, and then the psychic contact was broken. The concept of telepathy was so new to Toller that he felt a dull amazement at even being able to think in such terms, but he was left with the conviction that the alien had suffered an unexpected crisis of conscience, perhaps triggered by the stresses of the fall from the edge of space.

Guilt! The word was a spiteful mosquito hovering and dipping in Toller's confused consciousness. Is greyface lying to me? Are Baten and I being tricked? Are we being led meekly to our deaths?

Clumsily and inexpertly, he tried to reach out with his mind to the one Dussarran he knew, but there was only an echoing mental silence. Divivvidiv had withdrawn, was lost behind the palisades of his previous existence, and there was no time for retrospection. The vehicle which had nuzzled through the nocturnal ferment of the alien cityscape looked like nothing so much as a huge black egg. It floated a hand's breadth above the seamless pavement. An opening appeared in its side with no apparent aid from mechanisms that Toller could visualize—in one instant the shell was complete, in the next there was a circular entrance to a redly glowing interior. Dozens of hands were pushing him and Steenameert towards it.

Toller's first instinct was to resist with all the power he could muster, but one part of him had somehow come to hope that Divivvidiv was not entirely his enemy. It was a slim hope—based on little more than certain nuances of thought and the notion that the alien might have a sense of humour—but it was the only dim guide star remaining to him.

With Steenameert jostling against him he clambered into the vehicle, feeling it rock slightly under the shifting of their weight. The door flowed itself out of existence, like molten metal closing in response to surface tension, and a sudden pressure under foot told them the vehicle was rising into the night sky. There were no seats, but that was of no importance in the cramped interior because the thickly quilted skysuits of the two Kolcorronians largely filled the available space. It was easier to remain standing. Toller had been too hot for some time, but was only becoming aware of it as stealthy rivulets of sweat darted down his back.

"Well, Baten," he said dispiritedly, "I gave you ample warning about what might happen."

Steenameert mustered a smile. "I have no complaints. I am going to see sights the like of which I had never imagined, and my life is in no danger."

"That's if we can believe what greyface said—he has already lied to us."

"For a reason! This time he has nothing to gain by telling us an untruth."

"I suppose you are right." Toller was reminded of the odd wavering, the telepathic stains of guilt and self-reproach in Divivvidiv's last communication, but he had no time to pursue the line of thought. He and Steenameert swayed against each other as the direction of their weight shifted. There was a barely perceptible jolt as the vehicle came to rest. A small hole appeared in the side and rippled outwards in the dull metal to become a circular doorway.

Beyond it was a kind of short corridor which seemed to be fashioned from a mottled glassy tube of elliptical cross-section. The material was blurrily streaked with grey, yellow and orange, and was either lit from behind or was giving off an even glow of its own. Toller looked to his left and right and saw that the near end of the tube met the outer shell of the transporter in a curved seam so neat that it would have been impossible to slide a strip of finest paper into it. He transferred his attention to the far end of the corridor. It terminated in an ovoidal wall at the centre of which was a small circular aperture which continuously opened and shrank in a manner which for Toller, exhausted and emotionally drained though he was, had to have biological implications.

"Is somebody trying to make us feel welcome?" he said to Steenameert as he started forward, moving clumsily in his voluminous skysuit, hands still tied behind his back. As he and Steenameert reached the end of the corridor the aperture in the wall rolled back to give them clear access to a large and complicated enclosed space, a circular hall rimmed with stairs and galleries. Imposing though the alien cathedral might have been to Toller in his normal state of mind, its architectural vistas now flowed outwards in his vision, centring all of his attention on the small group of women who were running in his direction.

And foremost among them was the Countess Vantara!

"Toller!" she screamed, her beautiful features transformed into a mask of inhumanly enhanced desire. "Toller, my love! You came, you came, you came… I should have known it would be you!"

She hurled herself against him with such force that he was almost driven backwards. Her arms went around his neck and she kissed him with wet lips and urgently probing tongue. Toller was both thrilled and gratified, senses overwhelmed to the extent that he scarcely noticed the stockier form of Lieutenant Pertree moving behind him. The lieutenant began to untie his hands, while the three remaining members of the crew converged on Steenameert with similar intent. Vantara pushed Toller back to arm's length, still clasping his neck, and it was only then that her eyes began to take stock of the true situation.

"You're a prisoner!" she accused. "You have been captured, just like us!" She recoiled from Toller, her expression changing to one of disappointment and anger. "Did your ship also blunder into that strange reef?"

"No. I approached it in daylight and managed to get by. On reaching Prad and being told that your ship had failed to arrive, I immediately set out to find you."

"Where are your forces?"

Toller rubbed his newly freed wrists. "There are no forces—Baten is my only companion."

Vantara's jaw sagged as she shot an incredulous glance to her lieutenant. "You set out—a general commanding an army of one—to challenge an invader!"

"At that time I had no way of knowing there was an enemy presence," Toller said stiffly. "My only thought was of your safety. Besides, two men or a thousand—what difference would it have made?"

"Can this be the real Toller Maraquine who preaches defeatism, or is it an impostor conjured up by those foul beings who deny us our freedom?" Vantara turned away before Toller could protest and walked quickly towards the nearest stair.

First I'm too foolhardy—then I'm too timid, Toller thought, feeling both wounded and baffled. In his confusion he stared at the three young women in ranker uniforms who were attending to Steenameert. They were helping him out of his cumbersome skysuit, and at the same time—their welcome to him apparently undiminished—were smiling and plying him with questions. Steenameert looked embarrassed but gratified.

"You must excuse my aristocratic commander," Lieutenant Pertree said, gazing up at Toller with a wry glint in her eye. "The terms of our detention here could hardly be described as onerous, but the countess—being of royal blood, and therefore possessing an exquisite degree of sensitivity—finds the life much more harrowing than would a commoner."

Toller was almost grateful for the flicker of anger which brought reality into sharp focus. "I remember you, lieutenant, and I see that you are as insubordinate and disloyal as ever."

Pertree sighed. "I remember you, captain, and I see that you are as besotted and calf-eyed as ever."

"Lieutenant, I will not tolerate that kind of…" Toller allowed the sentence to die, suddenly recalling that he had only permitted Steenameert to accompany him into the unknown on condition that they discard all the stultifying appurtenances of rank and class. He smiled apologetically and began ridding himself of the stifling swaddles of his skysuit.

"I'm sorry," he said. "The old ways die hard. I have heard your given name more than once, but confess to having forgotten it…"

"Jerene."

He smiled. "My name is Toller. May we pledge friendship and in consequence present a united front against the common enemy?" He had expected the sturdy lieutenant to appear mollified to some extent, and therefore he was surprised when a look of alarm manifested itself on her rounded features.

"It must be true," she breathed, suddenly losing her air of case-hardened composure. "You would never have spoken that way in normal circumstances. Tell me, Toller, have we been transported to another world? Are we lost forever? Is this prison on a strange planet millions of miles from Overland?"

"Yes." Toller saw that the three other women had begun listening intently to his words. "How could you fail to know such things?"

"Night came upon us when we were two hours below the datum plane," Jerene said in a small, reflective voice. "It was decided that we would continue at reduced speed through the hours of darkness and carry out the inversion manoeuvre at first light…"

She went on to describe how the crew, most of them sleeping, had been thrown into a panic by a great shuddering groan from the balloon. It had been accompanied by the sound of the four acceleration struts breaking and ripping into the material of the envelope. Almost at once choking billows of miglign gas had spewed downwards around the crew from the balloon mouth as the flimsy structure collapsed inwards. Finally, to add to the terror and confusion, the gondola had coasted into the writhing folds of the ruined envelope and had been swallowed by them.

It had taken fear-protracted minutes for the bewildered astronauts to fight clear of the wreckage. Enough light was being reflected from Land for them to make the incredible discovery that their ship had collided with a crystalline barricade which appeared to span the horizons like a dull-glowing frozen sea. And only furlongs away—wonder piled upon wonder—had been the outline of a fantastic castle, exotic and enigmatic, silhouetted against the silvered cosmos.

Somehow they had managed to retrieve enough personal propulsion units to enable them to fly to the castle. Somehow they had managed to locate a door in its metallic surface.

They had entered, and—somehow—had found themselves, with no perceptible lapse of time, prisoners in a grey-and-yellow cathedral…

"It is much as I suspected," Toller said when the lieutenant had finished. "Something told me that she … that all of you were still alive."

"But what happened to us?"

"The Dussarrans employ a gas which quickly renders those who breathe it insensible. It must have—"

"We deduced that much for ourselves," Jerene interrupted, "but what happened after that? We have been told that we were magically transported to another world, but we have only the monsters' word for that. We believe we are somewhere inside the castle. It is true that we have normal weight—as though standing on solid ground—but that could be more magic."

Toller shook his head. "I'm sorry, but what you have been told is true. Our captors have the ability to travel through the space between the stars at the speed of thought. You have indeed been transported, in the blink of an eye, to their home world of Dussarra."

His words drew cries of mingled concern and disbelief from the listening women. A tall, snub-nosed blonde in the uniform of a skycorporal laughed and whispered something to the woman next to her. It came to Toller that the lessons in cosmology and galactic history that he and Steenameert had received from Divivvidiv had brought about fundamental changes in their inner selves, separating them from the rest of their kind. He got a slight but uncomfortable insight into how he, while steeped in ignorance, must have appeared to Divivvidiv.

"How do you know that all the humbug about being magicked through the heavens is true?" Jerene challenged. "You have to go by what you have been told, just like the rest of us."

"Far from it!" Toller replied, beginning to divest himself of his own skysuit. "When Baten and I entered the castle, as you call it, we took its corpse-faced master prisoner at swordpoint. And we brought him here as a hostage in a good Kolcorronian ship—therefore we can testify that all of us, at this very moment, are millions of miles away from Overland. We are on the home planet of the invaders."

Jerene's eyes widened and as she gazed up at Toller her face became tinged with pink. "You did all that for:…" She glanced towards the stair by which Vantara had departed the company. "You took one of those ancient ships from the Defence Group … and flew it to another world … all because…"

"We bagged and parachuted all the way to the ground with our prisoner," Steenameert put in, breaking a lengthy silence. "It was only then that the cursed scarecrows overwhelmed our senses and blinded us to the forces which lay in ambush. Had it been a fair and honourable contest things would have been very different. We would have walked in here with our hostage—who would have been quaking and in fear of his life because of the blade that lay across his throat—and then we would have bartered him for your freedom."

"I must report this to the captain." Jerene had become slightly breathless, and the pupils of her eyes seemed to have distended as they hunted over Toller's face. "She should be apprised of all the facts."

"She believes us still to be in our own weightless zone!" Toller sighed with relief and smiled as he realized why Vantara's attitude towards him had shifted so rapidly. "It was only natural that she should have expected me to arrive at the head of an armada. It was only natural that she should have felt a certain disappointment."

"Yes, but had she been a little less impatient…" Steenameert abandoned his comment and lowered his head.

Toller glared at him. "What are you saying, Baten?"

"Nothing! Nothing at all!"

"Sir?" The tall blonde stepped forward as she addressed Toller. "Can you tell us how long we have been here?"

"Why? Can't you count the days?"

"There is no day or night within this dome. The light never changes."

Toller, who had been trying to reconcile himself to the idea of being imprisoned for a long time, found the prospect of living in continuous even light strangely depressing. "I would say you have been here some twenty-five days. But what about your meals? Do they not mark the days?"

"Meals!" the blonde gave a wry smile. "Each cell has a basket which the monsters constantly replenish with cubes of… Well, each of us has a different opinion about what we are forced to eat."

"Spiced bluehorn hoof," another tall woman—a swarthy, brown-eyed skyprivate—suggested in aggrieved tones.

"Spiced bluehorn shit" the remaining flier put in with an exaggerated scowl, bringing snorts of amusement from her companions. She had cropped brown hair which made an ill match for her conventionally pretty face.

"These are Tradlo, Mistekka and Arvand," Jerene said, indicating the three rankers in turn. "And, as you will have noticed, they have already forgotten how to conduct themselves in the presence of an officer."

"Rank no longer means anything to me." Toller nodded an informal greeting to the women. "Speak as you will; do as you will."

"In that case…" Arvand shimmied to Steenameert's side, clasped his arm and gave him a warm smile. "It is difficult to sleep in a lonely bed—don't you agree?"

"Not fair!" the blonde Tradlo cried, disconcerting Steenameert further by gripping his other arm. "All rations must be shared equally!"

Toller had an urge to move off in pursuit of Vantara, but it was obvious from Jerene's manner that she was eager to go on speaking to him. He acquiesced when she turned away from the others, implicitly creating a space in which they could converse discreetly about matters of consequence.

"Toller, I am sorry that I have shown a tendency to make little of you," she began hesitantly. "You always seemed to bluster so much … and there was that sword … You made it so obvious that you longed to emulate your grandfather that—the logic of it now escapes me—all who met you assumed your ambitions to be in vain.

"But for anyone to do what you have done … for you to have flown one of those antiquated wooden barrels through the black deeps of space to another world … for you simply to be here…

"All I can say is that Vantara is the luckiest woman in all of history, and that you will have no need, ever again, to stand in the shadow of your grandfather. There can never be any doubt that you and he were peers."

Toller blinked to ease a sudden smarting in his eyes. "I value what you say, but all I did…"

"Tell me something." Jerene switched to a tone of practicality rather sooner than Toller might have liked. "Have the monsters cast a spell over us? How is it that we can hear what they say, even when they are not in our presence, even when there is no sound? Is it magic?"

"There is no magic," Toller explained, again aware of the gulf which had opened between him and his kind. "It is the Dussarran way. They have progressed far beyond the need for shaping words with their mouths. They speak mind-to-mind, no matter how great the distance involved. Have these things not been explained to you?"

"Not a word. We are animals in a zoo as far as they are concerned."

"I suppose I received my education because the scarecrow I dealt with was buying time, preserving his life." Toller looked around the galleried dome with distaste. "When do the Dussarrans communicate with you?"

"There is one who seems to be known as the Director," Jerene replied. "He will speak to us for hours at a time—always asking questions about our lives on Overland, about our families, about our food, farming methods, the differences between men's clothing and women's clothing… Nothing is too trivial for him.

"Then there is another one—possibly a female—who gives us our orders."

"What manner of orders?"

Jerene shrugged. "When to leave our cells and come down here to the main floor … that sort of thing. We stay here while the food and water is being replenished up there by one of the monsters."

"Does this so-called Director ever visit you in person? Do you ever get Dussarrans who seem to be important figures in their own society making close inspections?"

"It is difficult for us to tell. We sometimes see groups of the monsters behind that partition, but…" Jerene indicated a glazed, box-like structure which enclosed one of the entrances to the dome, then she gave Toller a thoughtful look. "Why do you enquire of such things, Toller?"

He gave her a thin smile. "I have lost one perfectly good hostage—now I am in the market for another."

"But after what you have told us… It is impossible to escape from here."

"You are wrong on that point," Toller said quietly, his expression becoming sombre. "It is possible to escape from any stronghold … provided that one's heart is sufficiently set on it … provided that one is prepared to risk making the ultimate escape…"

Toller and Steenameert were arguing about traditional and modern methods of constructing furniture, with emphasis on the design of chairs.

"Don't forget that we have had iron for only fifty years or so," Toller said. "The design of brackets and angle braces will improve; the design of woodscrews will improve."

"That is of little import," Steenameert countered. "Furniture should be regarded as a form of art. A chair should be regarded as a sculpture as much as a contrivance for supporting fat arses. Any artist will tell you that wood should only be mated to wood. Tenons and dovetails are natural, Toller, and not only are they much stronger than your wood-and-metal hybrids, they have a rightness which…"

He continued speaking as Toller knelt and tested the gallery flooring with a heavy webbing-repair needle taken from his emergency pouch. Toller looked up at him and shook his head, signifying that the floor construction was too strong to be ripped upwards in a surprise raid on anybody who happened to be underneath. They were in the part of the first gallery directly above the enclosure where, according to Lieutenant Pertree, groups of Dussarrans sometimes gathered to observe their captives.

"Yes, but ever since the Migration only the rich have been able to employ the services of competent joiners," Toller said as he straightened up. "Surely it is better for the ordinary citizen and his family to have something to plank their arses on—and I doubt if many of the said arses are fat—than for them to squat on the floor."

Toller and Steenameert were openly talking about furniture design—a subject which evoked mental images of joints and frames—and at the same time were searching for weak points in the structure of their prison. They continued the contrived discussion as they made their way downstairs to the enclosure itself. They were novices, true primitives, in the darkly glimmering and bottomless world of telepathic communication, but they had gleaned enough from their encounter with Divivvidiv to believe that the aliens were fallible and could be deceived. It was likely that attempts were being made to eavesdrop on their innermost thought processes, but Kolcorronians were warriors by instinct and had a talent for misleading enemies.

"You can't deny that doors have been improved by the addition of iron hinges and fittings," Toller said as he reached the enclosure. In general it was surprisingly similar to what an artisan from Land or Overland would have built for the same purpose. It was a rectangular three-element structure with one edge attached to the wall on each side of an entrance to the dome. The three faces ran from the floor to the underside of the first gallery, and were glazed from waist-level upwards.

Still arguing about historical developments in his home world's carpentry, Toller casually leaned against a corner of the enclosure and felt it shift slightly. He stood head and shoulders above all the aliens he had seen, and furthermore was built in much bulkier proportions, from which facts he estimated that his body weight was at least three times that of the average Dussarran. His physical power could be factorized upwards again, because of differences in muscle density, making him a force that Divivvidiv and his kind were unaccustomed to dealing with. There was a good possibility that a structure which a Dussarran saw as a formidable barrier could be breached by a single charge from Toller and Steenameert.

The alien captors had many undeniable advantages over the handful of Kolcorronians, but—Toller hoped—they were too sure of themselves, too complacent. Their best thinkers seemed to be expending their energies on remote abstracts, such as the dissolution of galaxies, while dismissing more immediate threats from close at hand. They were like high kings preparing defences against global enemies, and all the while ignoring the body servant with the phial of poison or the smiling concubine with the slim dagger…

"I concede the point about doors and door furniture, but that is. a special case," Steenameert said, nodding significantly as he tested a panel with his foot. "Metal has a natural function there, but it will always be out of place when you come to chairs and tables."

"We shall see what we shall see," Toller replied as they continued their leisurely circuit of the dome.

They had been imprisoned for an indeterminate time, only a few hours, but already Toller's impatient and turbulent nature was rebelling against the monotony of confinement. A telepathic voice with indefinable female undertones had directed him and Steenameert to particular cells on the first gallery. Toller had inspected his briefly and then, being uncooperative on principle, had announced that he did not like it and was going to use another. As the cells were identical, and did not even have doors, there was no reason to prefer one above any other, but the reaction he had hoped to provoke did not occur.

He had lain for a while on the spongy oblong that was his bed, but had quickly become bored and had tried to visit Vantara in her cell. His hope had been that her attitude towards him would have improved once she had learned from Jerene that it had been impossible for him to have arrived at the head of an army of rescuers. She had, however, remained aloof and uncommunicative in her little enclave—her cell was flanked by those of the other women. Trying to be philosophical about it, Toller had decided that being informed she was a prisoner millions of miles from home—instead of only a few thousand—was good enough grounds for any woman to lapse into a spell of depression.

Becoming even more restless, he had explored every gallery of the dome. It was big enough to accommodate twenty times as many captives as at present, but none of the featureless compartments showed any sign of previous occupation. Had the place been designed as a prison? Did the Dussarrans have such things as prisons? Or was the dome, with its sterile shadowless illumination, more the equivalent of a zoo? A birdcage?

The torrent of questions caused a stirring in Toller's memory. Just before he and Divivvidiv had parted company, possibly forever, the little alien's mental presence seemed to have been disturbed by a dark emotion. Toller had intuitively recognized it as guilt—and in retrospect that identification appeared more and more accurate. At the time Toller had wondered if he and Steenameert were being led away to be slaughtered, but his suspicions had been ill founded—so what had been causing the turmoil in Divivvidiv's alien soul?

There was also the matter of the Xa—that fantastic sea of living crystal—and the reason for its presence in the weightless zone between Land and Overland. Now that Toller's consciousness had been saturated with exotic concepts, now that strangeness had in a way become the norm, he could accept the notion that the Xa's function was to hurl an entire world into the heart of a galaxy which was millions of light years distant.

When he had first encountered the proposition it had been remote from the realities of life on the sister planets. It had been a conceptual soap bubble; a gossamer palace constructed from pale-tinted abstracts—but now everything was different!

He and Vantara and some loyal companions were imprisoned on that ill-fated world, and … and…

Toller's brow wrinkled as other pertinent memories began to flicker behind his eyes. During his first antagonistic meeting with Divivvidiv the alien had told him that the intergalactic leap was due to take place in about six days' time. Had it been six days? Yes, that memory held true … and the flight to Dussarra had taken roughly four days … and more precious time had slipped away during the long fall from the edge of space…

Icy sweat prickled through Toller's skin as he realized that the time available to the small band of lost Kolcorronians could conveniently be reckoned in hours.

Or perhaps only minutes…