A Voyage To Dari Read online

  “Give me leave to demand how.”

  “By rejecting the concept that you are his because he made you. By asserting your individual manhood even though he can annihilate you. As a high vassal, by asking yourself questions about the validity of his concept of chivalry.” '

  “Are you lecturing me about chivalry?”

  “Sir, I had the honor on Nigel III to have been born and bred as a knight in a real chivalry that evolved itself through social interaction among strong and weak men—and not in a contrived pseudochivalry designed to foster one man’s ambition. The truth of that assertion will come out tomorrow in my lethal brain probe.”

  The four eyes were level again. Roland demanded, “How is your claim related to l’oint du seigneur?”

  “As follows. In our authentic chivalry, the king won and held his kingdom by a combination of descent, manhood, and rightness in the judgment of his vassals. Whereas on Erth and on Moudjinn and on every metagalactic planet I know that has chivalry in its history, l’oint du seigneur has been superimposed by one or another scheming king during a late period of chivalric decadence.”

  Roland said deliberately, “I should take pleasure in killing you.”

  “By illusion?”

  “By force in physical combat.”

  “But, Roland, can you be physical?”

  Slowly Roland drew his mouth open in a white-toothed grin. And he demanded, “Can you be?”

  Croyd’s answering grin was rueful. “You, at least, are not stupid. Put it this way: I can be as physical as you can be, and I would like the combat; but I do not like to kill, and this I would do only if I had to do it. Meanwhile I am interested in the fact that I am not yet in that dungeon keep.”

  Roland went intent. “Are you challenging?”

  “If I were, would you be accepting?”

  Roland went rueful. “No,” he admitted, “because that would be rash; I might lose, and that would be a disservice to my lord. So I am afraid I must request that you enter the dungeon voluntarily; and if you refuse, I shall have to call back my two men, or if necessary seven or eight of my men, to throw you in. The outcome is certain; and since this outcome will be more comfortable for you in a five-meter fall if voluntarily you allow me to lower you in . . . ”

  Croyd studied Roland’s feet.

  Croyd said presently, “I wonder why I am not hurling myself against your legs, knocking you over, paralyzing you with a stiff hand to the throat, and escaping.”

  Roland studied the back of Croyd’s neck while Croyd, head bent, studied Roland’s feet. “Since you have warned me, I wonder why I am not hammering the back of your neck. What would you do if you were to escape?”

  “I would of course make for the lifeboat Chloris, to rescue my old friend.”

  “And would you get there?”

  “Of course not. So, Roland, do you tell me the most comfortable way of dropping into that five-meter hole.”

  Now Croyd was gazing straight up into Roland’s eyes. And Roland, looking down into his eyes, said wonderingly, “You realize that you have no way of getting out again, until we take you out tomorrow for the purpose that you know?”

  “This I realize. Is there any proposition I could make, Roland, that would entice you . . . ?”

  “No, Croyd. And this I regret.”

  “Why should you regret? We are strangers.”

  Roland said low, “I have talked with you. Also I have dwelt in your brain. You are no stranger to me.”

  Silence.

  Croyd said low, “I do not say that direct acquaintance with my brain has anything to recommend itself. But if any man has dwelt in my brain and still feels reasonably congenial, that man has got to be my friend even if duty require him to kill me. In your position, I would be implacable; and I so understand you, Roland. Pray ease me into the hole.”

  Eyes level again, they considered each other.

  Abruptly Roland extended himself on his belly in the damp clay, stretching out an arm toward the hole. “Get on your belly, clasp my arm, drop your hindquarters in. I will wriggle as close as I dare without sliding in after you.”

  Croyd silently obeyed; hands clasped arms above elbows.

  Roland worked his way forward; Croyd slid in backward.

  Roland grunted. “You are nearly as heavy as I. I dare come no closer.”

  Croyd, his armpits on hole’s edge, his feet dangling above meters of black space, commanded, “Let go, my friend.” And he let go.

  Perforce, Roland let go. Croyd fell.

  Roland waited. He wriggled to hole’s edge, looked in, saw nothing. He inquired, “Are you all right?”

  No reply.

  Roland sighed heavily. He got to his feet, considered his beclayed armor, willed away the clay, ritually hand-brushed his front, considered the hole.

  He leaned over this hole. He called, “Croyd, if you can hear me, remember what I said: you may find neighbors, but they will not be human, so you may as well ignore them.”

  No answer.

  Somber, Childe Roland stalked away from the dungeon keep.

  WHEN, AFTER MANY dungeoned minutes, Croyd was fairly sure that Roland had gone away, he moved out of the cramped position that he had fallen into and lain motionless in, because he wanted to stop talking and think about (a) escape, (b) what practical outcome escape might lead to, (c) whether a would be worth the trouble in view of b. Unhappily, examination of his prison was going to be less than highly efficient, because, among the effective illusions of Duke Dzendzel, here the duke had established the illusion of total darkness. There was always, however, the sense of touch.

  Cautiously making his way across dank clay with outstretched arms, Croyd encountered a pseudostone wall (pseudodank) and began to belly-crab his way along it, running fingers high up and low down. When after centimetering a couple of meters he had discovered no special feature on the wall, and could think of no way to make a tangible mark on the wall so that he would be able to tell when he would have come full around his cell, he decided on an assumption. Such a cell would be extremely unlikely to be more than fifty meters in perimeter, the concave wall curvature was such as to suggest more, like fifteen, and his highly accurate mental clock (which long ago he had established before his discovery of more exotic mental possibilities, and which had therefore stayed with him) said he was progressing at a rate of one meter per minute; he would therefore continue the scouting for fifty minutes, and this would bring him all the way around at least once and possibly three times.

  At the end of five minutes, having discovered no relieving feature anywhere in the wall, he narrowly missed kicking over his bowl of water. He knelt to taste it; real water—imported, probably; this you don’t just illude. Nearby there was bread. Considerately he set the water a meter out from the wall so he wouldn’t kick it again, and positioned the bread near the wall so he would be sure to kick it again, and moved onward. Fifteen minutes later he kicked the bread again, accurately validating his fifteen-meter concavity inference. In this circular cell wall he had discovered no feature—certainly no hope of an escape avenue—from floor to well over two meters up.

  On a chance—having apparently all night for this stuff (if night was a term having reality here apart from the diurnal rhythm established by Duke Dzendzel)—he made one more circuit, leaping high as he went. When again he met the bread, he had found no feature even above three meters up. And he was momentarily winded.

  Squatting, he ate some bread and drank some water.

  Standing then, he began a shuffling, distrustful, crosspattern cruise of the pseudoclay floor; a lucky hole might afford escape, an unlucky hole might drop him into itself forever. (Fascinating how solidly and totally the Lord of the Fissure had installed one-G gravity everywhere here!) Since any hole less than thirty centimeters in diameter would be useless for escape, he established his kinaesthetic estimate of that width for his search pattern.

  In almost precisely the center of his cell he found a hole about ten ce
ntimeters in diameter. He had no idea what use the duke would have for such a hole; Croyd, however, thought of two uses, although neither was an escape use. Having used this hole for one use, he pressed onward.

  He found no further hole. He felt his way back to the bread. By placing his back to the wall, extending both arms rigidly, and establishing his back as tangential to the arc, he would be able to advance about four meters and find the center hole again at any time when urgency might suggest the second type of use.

  He sat, nibbling the bread. The high hole above was beyond his normal human jump reach.

  This dungeon keep stank. Probably the stench was illusory; but as foolery went, it was pretty convincing.

  That was when he was confronted by the panther and the python.

  Quite evidently these animals were furious and ravenous, and each of them was oversize. It crossed Croyd’s mind that the zoological poetry would have been better if there had also been an octopus.

  An octopus joined them. It was oversize. All three were noticing Croyd.

  He nibbled, examining them. Apart from their size and one other feature, they were a quite normal panther and python and octopus; and instant by instant, auditorily enlivened by the snarling and the hissing and the baleful octopus silence, they were drawing closer, the normal cell stench augmented by the stench of their breath.

  The other abnormal feature was that they were visible in total darkness—visible in full color.

  “Gramercy, Childe Roland,” Croyd muttered; and casting his eyes upward, he gave attention to question b.

  Should he somehow bring off escape—a possibility that now seemed as impossible as anything ever is—what then would he do? Three avenues suggested themselves. One was that he might lose himself in the fissure, and before dying of thirst or starvation (or perhaps of suffocation outside the artificially oxygenated area), somehow find a way to get to some galaxy—a process which would require, now he thought about it, around five quadrillion years if without a spaceship he could fly through metaspace at swallow speed. A second was that he might grope his way to Duke Dzendzel and kill him and release the fissure from thrall; but it was an outside hope that, having found the duke, he could kill him; it was no more than a random possibility that, in this chiaroscuro of illusory shifting, he could find the duke; and it was a god dream that, having found and killed the duke, he could discover how to disenslave a whole metagalactic fissure. (With his special powers, maybe; but they were gone.) A third avenue was—and he deferred this as third and last, although probably it would have been the first thing he would have tried—that he might somehow blunder into finding the Chloris and would rescue Tannen; but even assuming that he could find Chloris, she was immobilized here by the power of the duke, while the Castel Jaloux was googols of kilometers out into metaspace helplessly fleeing into annihilation with Djeel and Hanoku and Gorsky and the rest.

  Escape, actually, was a pretty silly idea in terms of its possible consequences, quite apart from its nonexistent possibilities.

  Perhaps, before departing Nereid, he would have been wise to contact Pan, giving him some checkpoints and checktimes. On the other hand, could he infer from Dzendzel’s tongue slip that maybe Pan . . . He shrugged (heavily, with panther claws on both shoulders); Pan he had regretfully written off when Pan had welched on a duty and run away to Djinn for Las Vegas business. You keep on loving your brother who is your other self; but your brother is his own man, and you can’t run him unless you want him to stop being his own man, and meanwhile you have your own life to live.

  The panther had sunk its jaws agonizingly into one of his shoulders; the python was crushing his pelvis; lovingly the octopus was caressing his neck with a tentative tentacle, drawing blood with its sucking cups.

  With his right hand he scratched the octopus gently behind the place where its ear ought to be, if it had one; with his left, he fondled the neck of the python; with his front teeth, playfully he bit the nose of the panther. And, as a purely academic exercise, he began to enumerate his possibilities of effective escape if he had not lost his special powers.

  For example, since he was convinced that this castle, dungeon keep and all, was a system of externally forced illusion, he could have out illuded the illuder by converting the ceiling above his head into a circular sloping ramp down to the floor, whereup he could simply have walked out into the gray, seeking his friend.

  Or, more simply, he could have located Tannen by projective telepathy and instantaneously teleported himself to his friend.

  Alternatively and earlier, he might have avoided detention in the first place. Standing before Duke Dzendzel, he might have uptimed

  to when? And to what effect? You can’t change uptime. Can you?

  Nevertheless, he might have gone uptime to the past instant (gone power!) when he and Tannen and Chloris, each experiencing illusions of his own birthplace, had realized simultaneously that these had to be illusions. Whereupon Croyd could have lurked invisibly in Chloris, and at the instant of re-presentation of the present he could have called himself teleportatively back to himself.

  No, that was silly. Had he possessed the power, then his action could have begun long before: at the instant when he and Tannen, whirled away from the Castel Jaloux aboard Chloris, had awakened to the fact that the Castel had been supernally boarded, Croyd by mind reach could have reboarded her and . . .

  Absently he noticed that the panther and the python and the octopus had somehow departed. He rather missed them; he had come to like them a little. Nevertheless he returned to thought.

  There was nothing valuable about this thought process, really, except an intuitive conclusion that it had led him to. If this elaborate system of illusions had been created at the will of Duke Dzendzel, who had exhibited in conversation challenge and also internally in his illusion system a mentality that was pretty good but not quite up to creating and sustaining these illusions all by itself—then the Fissure Illusion System was being created and sustained by a brain other than the duke’s but executively bossed by the duke.

  Furthermore, if this brain was more subtle and sustained than the minded brain of Duke Dzendzel, someone else had created this brain under command of the duke.

  Childe Roland?

  It was conceivable. Roland possibly had the intelligence, and Roland was obviously the duke’s chief vassal here. A minor question—how an illusion like Roland might have arrived at creating a reality like the brain—could be settled later; meanwhile, here one had a working hypothesis that could be followed through as long as it would keep succeeding and could be abandoned if it should fail.

  A circumstantial test occurred to Croyd, but the test could not be conclusive. If a brain were telepathically monitoring Croyd, then insofarforth Croyd must be in touch with the brain. And hence, if Croyd were to will with all his power a means of escape, possibly the brain would be influenced to . . .

  During the following minutes, Croyd disciplined himself into a single-minded concentration comparable to the god-prayer-vigil that the Lord of the Fissure had recommended.

  Nothing happened.

  At length he abandoned this. The brain was under the duke’s will control: the duke thought what he wanted, the brain found means to do what he wanted. The brain was putting consistent illusions into Croyd, elferently; but it had no readiness to accept impulses out of Croyd, afferently—except, natch, in terms of control feedback.

  So then he was dead.

  Oh, it would be a long tomorrow! They would intimately, agonizingly scan his brain, with Dzendzel standing by perversely enjoying his writhings on the rack; and when they would be done, Dzendzel would have all Croyd’s knowledge, including his knowledge of his bygone powers, but Croyd too would be bygone—i.e., dead.

  Probably Croyd needed to be studying mental prophylaxes against tomorrow.

  There were none available, other than the usual strong human prophylaxes. Against the scanning he could addle his own mind, but the remorseless scan would
get what was in his brain; the addling would ultimately achieve nothing. That left Croyd with only normal human resources against extremes of agony that would have to be unbearable-uncontrollable. He could school himself to be Indian-stoic; unhappily, a sharp shot at his pain inhibitors would rekamatically destroy that possibility, mind or none. Or he could school himself to lie back and masochistically enjoy the pain; but this would work only until Dzendzel would catch on to the tactic and would correct it in Croyd’s pyriform cortex. Or, finally, Croyd could abandon himself to God.

  The last seemed the most meaningful course of action.

  He embraced it, not being at all a total stranger.

  Presently the pattern of his praying emerged into his consciousness, and what he confronted was sharply reorienting. He had a special time problem for escape and rescue; it must be brought off preferably and improbably within the next few hours; failing that, then tomorrow, or at the very latest in about seventy-two hours from last midnight—only a few more than forty-eight hours from now. For in sending him hallucinations involving his brother Pan as his small son, Dzendzel had wholly missed the real Freudian point. Subliminally Croyd was worried about a small son, male or female—whether he would be born, whether even his begetting would be completed; the Pan idea had intruded, that was all.

  Here was the frustrating rationale. For Croyd to be co-father of Djeel’s born child, the second impregnation must occur within seventy-two hours after the first; for otherwise, before the sperm journey would goal-end, the egg would die. Now, if two improbables should be butted end to end—that Tanner would find a synthesis, and that Hanoku and Djeel could be induced to consummate immediately after marriage—then, anytime ahead of forty-eight hours from now, Hanoku with Croyd could co-father the child. But because of the Faleen/Hanoku preoccupation with the lore, Croyd doubted that they would be willing to forget the prescribed forty-eight-hour chastity vigil; and meanwhile, he very much doubted that Tannen would arrive at a satisfactory synthesis. But if Tannen should find synthesis, while Djeel and Onu would cling to the vigil, then Tannen must perform the marriage within the next few hours; and that was simply impossible.