The flexibility of myth is fully exposed in this episode, demonstrating the ease with which archetypal characters fission or fuse from one culture to another.
The primary source-myth arose among the Glestuung water-men whose colloidal bodies flow with the streams they live in. Ameling, rudely deleted from her role of quintessential lover one chapter ago, becomes a tragic figure of major proportion. For the Glestuungo, she is a symbolic victim of that Evil which springs from Earth, Dirt, Rock and Soil. *
Here, the Achibol of the Wandag cycles is split in two. Stick-man and Madman meet face-to-face, erstwhile colleagues but distinct and separate. Benadek alone remains One, the Pure Boy of classical myth, as yet unbecome. But soon, the tale promises . . .
(Kaledrin, Senior editor)
The full moon came and went, tracing silvery fingers the length of the Tin Mule's back trail and beyond, from the plains and rounded eastern ridges to the gray line of jagged peaks below the western horizon ahead. Gaddo and his broken family were hundreds of miles behind.
Achibol had considered asking the plainsman to guide them to the mountains and the Vale, but Teress insisted they push on alone. Benadek wondered if her dalliance with the nomad had displeased her or if, to the contrary, she feared that his presence would have led to complexities. Knowing her, it was the latter, but either way, it pleased him. The complexities would have centered around himself. His present mild attitude would evaporate when he changed again. He would curse himself if he had lost Teress for good in the meantime.
They proceeded north parallel to the distant foothills, and the trail curved westward. The terrain roughened into rounded hills and rolling valleys, grassland broken by roadless tracts of dark, dense forest. Entering higher latitudes, days lengthened until the sun seemed to rise almost before sunset's glow died. They took turns driving, stopping for hot food and sleep only when fatigue overcame all three of them. The Mule's detectors provided their night watch.
On the first leg of their journey they had seen few others, but had read frequent smoke-messages. Now they saw no messagescontrary winds over hills and down the length of valleys made them possible only on calm days. Nor did they see other humans, though the trail was deeply rutted. When it angled west, another joined it from the easterly plains, and then, finally, they saw other wagons. One was far ahead, visible only as it crested hills, and one entered the trail behind. They would overtake the wagon ahead before sunset; the Tin Mule was little faster than a horse cart on level ground, but it gained on the hills. "I wonder what they'll think of our Mule?" Teress asked.
"Yeah! Should we just pass 'em as fast as we can, or pull 'em over? Where's the siren?"
"Was he watching `cop' shows?" Achibol grumbled to no one in particular. "If they hide in the grass, we'll continue on our waybut I wouldn't mind talking with others who've undertaken a pilgrimage similar to our own."
"You think they're going to the Icefields too?" Benadek was skeptical. "Maybe they're just traveling."
"Hmmph! Once, people `just traveled,' but in this age, no one goes a step further than he must. Even the prairie nomads only cover the distance between seasonal food sources. What's ahead but rocks and ice?"
"I wonder," Benadek said thoughtfully.
They shared a campfire with four gaunt men. Barl, the eldest, was a cozie, having the round head and bland, regular features of that breed, but the others were heterogeneous. Ambo's face was almost as dark as Achibol'sthough his neck, when he loosened his jacket, was pale. Dennet was skinny as Benadek, but taller and blond. He had a sparse beard, and six fingers on each hand. Willer had brown hair like a cozie, but his face was sharp and lean as a hatchet, and he was a full head taller than anyone Benadek had ever seen. The latter three were pure-humans beyond doubt.
The grim foursome had been incurious about the Tin Mule, and were no more interested in those they now shared a fire with. They spoke only in response to direct questions, and then only with great effort of will.
Six pure-humans together around a fire with a single cozie. A reversal of the usual order of things; the normal ratio, Achibol estimated, was more like sixty thousand simples for every pure-human. The conclusion could not be avoided: the plains were a breeding-range for the genetic types the planners had tried to destroy, now allowed to survive by a coven of depraved ancients who used them to maintain their own unnaturally preserved selves. Elsewhere the failed plan continued haltingly as honches wiped out pure-human families and tribes, but here the "gods" merely culled their herds, and others, like these four grim men, traveled long and far to pick up drained corpses, to bury them or cremate them.
Gaddo had said women were taken more often than men; children of both sexes were also claimedadolescents, for the most part. That discrimination had not gone unnoticed. "Brides of the Dead, " Dennet growled. "No matter some are boys. The young an' the fair. When I was a boy, y'saw old women, but now? Only old men. A woman's lucky to have two babes ere she's taken. Soon there won't be enough of our kind to carry on, only Barl's sort."
Benadek's eyes moved meaningfully from Achibol to Teress, projecting an unspoken question.
"It makes no sense," Teress commented aloud. "What will happen when our kind's gone?"
"It's poor eugenics," Achibol replied. "Better to cull only males and the very old." The strangers, uncomprehending, unused to Achibol's blunt speech, glared suspiciously. "If you hunted only bulls, not cows, and left the sick and weak alive, how long would the herds last?" the mage clarified.
"Gods and spirits need not make sense," Willer stated flatly.
"Is that what you consider them? Gods?" Achibol snapped. "Then what hope is there for your kind?"
"None," Willer snapped back. He spat into the fire.
The four men had lost seven loved ones between them, and hoped only that their remains would shortly be found, laid out neatly on the rocky ice flow of the Vale of the Dead. That alone would lay their agonies to rest, for their conviction was absolute that the "brides" were as ill-used in captivity as their bodies were in death. Only the recovery of their desiccated flesh would prove their mortal suffering had ended.
"Autopsies," Achibol suggested the next day, as the Tin Mule moved out ahead of the wagon. "If there are unclaimed bodies, we can discover more of what we're facing."
Benadek and Teress disagreed. "We need to know how to stop them," the boy said. "The details are irrelevant. We already know the process."
"Besides," Teress added, "what would we do with the ones we cut open? We couldn't leave them for their relatives to find, and it would be wrong to hide them. Why add to the suffering of men like those?" She gestured behind them, though the wagon was no longer in sight.
"Of course," the sorcerer agreed. "I grasp at straws." The subject was dropped. The trail narrowed until they could pass oncoming wagons only at the widest places. Silent nods passed between themselves and the occupants of the wagons. Some carts were well-laden with large, light bundles: the unburned dead.
Ahead were jagged processions of higher and higher hills, bordered by cloud-tipped, snow-covered peaks. Spruces and delicate aspens clung to the rocky slopes, mixed with odd leafless trees like giant mossesfar removed, Achibol suspected, from their unmutated ancestors.
* * *
"Wagons," Teress exclaimed. "There must be a hundred of them."
"Looking for bodies," Benadek speculated.
"So many? All together? There can't be that many kidnap victims . . . can there?" Teress shook her head in wishful denial.
"You underestimate the population of the prairie and forests." Achibol's head swayed sadly. "Because nomads walk lightly and no longer gather together, they seem few, but there are tens, even hundreds of thousands scattered out of sight of us and of each other."
"And the ancients' need for fresh victims grows as they age," Benadek commented. "A hundred years from now there'll be ten times as many wagons down there. It'll be a city, unless . . ." He left his hopes unspoken.
"Shall we join the unhappy throng, apprentice? Or have you decided upon another course?"
"No. I mean, yes, let's go down there." They engaged the Tin Mule's wheels and crept down the muddy, rock-strewn, rutted trail.
It was a cheerless gathering. They edged the Mule between irregular rows of wagons identical except in color and minor accouterments. Incurious faces observed their progress past one fireside gathering and then another. "There," Teress said, pointing at an open space. Achibol guided the Tin Mule into place. Faces turned from the nearest fire, but no one greeted them or sent them off again. It was almost dark, and the wind from the icefields cascaded down the valley, cold and damp. The ground itself, deposition of recent receding glaciation, was soggy and rilled with meltwater from the ice beyond, ice held by the saw-toothed arête as the chipped brim of a much-used bowl might hold thick porridge.
A ripple of moving shoulders and shuffling bodies opened places for them at the fire. Achibol sat next to a burly leather-clad fellow who smelled of wood smoke and grease. Benadek lowered himself beside a woman of indeterminate years whose blond or white hair was thick with yellow smoke-residue, her coarse-woven skirt stained with ashes and pinholed with tiny burns. Teress wedged herself between her companions. A wooden cup was passed, and Achibol drank cautiously, inclining his head ever so slightly as he passed it to Teress. Warned by the mage's hand on her knee, she took only a sip. Bitter, with a flavor of evergreens, one sip was enoughan appropriate brew for a gathering of lost souls.
"Gin." Benadek's lips formed the syllable without voicing it. The distillation of fermented juniper berries made his tongue dry, but this time he neither spat it out nor expostulated. Fiery warmth grew in his gut, driving out the chill that swept down from the icefields. Shuddering, he took another swallow.
"Who seek you?" a burly plainsman rumbled from across the fire. "Perhaps your search will be short, if your kin are as dark as you."
Achibol responded with a slow shake of his head. "We seek no kin. Rather, we would find those who take yours."
"You're seeking grain in an apple tree." The other laughed dryly. "The honches are down there." He gestured in the direction of the plains far away. "Here, there are only the dead, and we who await them."
"They must be brought here by some means," Achibol persisted. "And where do the captives go, between their taking and their reappearance in this sad place?"
"Beneath the ice are the caverns of Endless Life, the Soul-Eaters' realm. Would you go there?" The nomad laughed louder than before.
"If there's a door, I'd consider it. Do you know of one? From whence do the remains emerge?"
"You're mad, dark one. The passage to Endless Life is through Death's door. Are you so old you'd pass through willingly?"
Though the intellectual parts of Achibol's mind sparked with the desire to explore Life and Death in the new theology the plainsman's words hinted at, he stuck to his immediate objective. "Perhaps my madness surpasses even your speculations. Perhaps I would converse face-to-face with the ones who so misuse our kin. Is there a door?"
The man's expression showed pity and scorn. "The husks of Those Who Return appear among the rocks. If there are tracks of booted feet, of wagons like yours, then rains, melting ice, and our own footprints, erase them. If there are lights in the nighttime dark, we don't see them, but look instead to the warmth of our fires, and await the day. If sounds are heard over the whisper of Nightwind, we don't hear them, for they are out of the Depth, and we are dwellers on the surface of this Sphere." His words, delivered in a singsong chant, were obviously not new. In a generation they would be no longer a nomad's chant but a somber hymn. Long silence ensued, broken only by breathing, sniffling, and the creak of leather and stiff limbs.
"There's the Immortal Fool," a soft, feminine voice broke the quietness, "in the small valley by the ice's verge." Of she who spoke, Benadek could see only a shadowed blotch in the darkness.
"There is that," the plainsman agreed, though all could hear the disapproval in his tones. "And would you lead them there, Ameling?"
"I've brought the Ancient Fool his offerings three times," the unseen voice replied without hesitation, "and spoken with him, and shared his rude bed. I'd go there with this one if he asks. These three aren't like us. Their quest surpasses ours."
"As this old one claims!" the nomad snapped. "Believe it, and you'll die there on the verge. You'll lie unrotted, shunned by the very ground."
"I'm already dead, Jask. I merely lingerand now I know why. My fate is to guide these seekers." The newcomers' eyes turned to the rustle of cloth as the woman Ameling came into the light, throwing back her hood. With ill-concealed horror, they recognized what had befallen her in the valley near the ice. Ameling was bald. Her face, neck, and scalp shone with crimson scarring. Burns. Swatches of skin had burned, scabbed over, and curled loose again under the assault of the cool, deadly fire that now raged within her bones. Ameling spoke truthfully: she was already dead. Achibol recognized radiation poisoning. He gave her a week to live. Benadek, with the benefit of medically trained memories, allowed her a further month of living death.
Teress, once the initial shock was banished, saw beyond the pain and the scarring to the delicate bone structure, the patches of pale, clear skin, and the lovely, intense blue eyes, lashless and mostly lidless. Tears blurred her vision as she recognized what she hoped Benadek would not: Ameling, unlike most others here, was a simple, a poot. A very specific kind of poot. Had some kind god given Ameling back her long, blond hair, her gently arching brows and her long, dark lashes, she would have been identical in every respect to . . . Sylfie.
This moment had been bound to occur, Teress told herself. Only their long isolation from simple humankind had prevented them from coming across such a poot before. There were, after all, only a limited number of templates. Hopefully Benadek would not notice, right away. Teress had no idea how he would react. He might even change again.
"Well?" Ameling demanded abruptly, standing over Achibol, her back to the fire, her face fortuitously in shadow, "Will you risk this for a chat with an old madman who claims to have lived for thousands of years? Three nights with him has done this to me." When Achibol did not answer immediately, she covered her head with the hood once again.
Achibol was struck dumb by the connotations of her words: ".. lived thousands of years . . . an old madman . . . " Ameling could have been describing . . . him. Hope, and its companion, fear, raced through his stony thoughts like a mountain deer and a pursuing wolf.
Benadek, recovering, dwelt upon the physical implications of Ameling's condition. Three times she had been exposed, three nights she had spent "in the old man's bed," intimately close to him. Three exposures, with weeks between them, in which some healing had occurred. Six, even eight weeks or so later, she was still alive. Facts and figures about radiation, about therapies and dosages, welled up from his liver and marched across the surface of his brain. "The radiation level isn't too high. If the exposure is brief, it won't kill me. A gate. It has to be a gate to the redoubt below, with a radiation-barrier gone awry. And if I need to, if there's cell damage, I can change just a little . . ."
Achibol's silence grew to awkward length. Only when a heavyset plainsman snorted derisively, mistaking silence for terror, did the mage recall his wandering thoughts. "Will you guide us? I have medicines that will ease your painthough no remedy will cure you."
"You're kind," Ameling replied, "and honest as well. Until tomorrow, then. I have little strength, and must ration it." With a curt nod, mostly hidden in her hood, she made her way from the fire.
"I suppose that's all the fun for tonight," the woman next to Benadek muttered snidely, getting to her feet. "I've pyres to build in the morning."
"Pyres?" Benadek asked.
"We aren't all here seeking kinfolk," an elderly man commented. "This fire belongs to those of us who dwell here in the vale, eking a living from the seekers, who come and go."
"You mean you don't have to be here?"
The old man, who was missing several teeth, laughed unpleasantly. "Have to be? No one has to be here, or anywhere, but for some of us, there's no reason to depart, and nowhere to go. Jask, for instance . . ." Jask, the burly fellow, scowled. "He's lost his whole band. When he left them to seek the husk of a sister taken in the spring, he came here and what did he find? The rest of them, wives, sisters, and daughters, had preceded him, and he gave them all to wind, on one great pyre. Here he's stayed, to build pyres for others who have something to trade. Why would he depart?
"And Ameling?" He shook his head and wiped spittle with his sleeve. "At least there's workhusks to be located, pyres to be built at the valley mouth, and guidance for seekers. But don't sleep soundly, boy. Some here like the taste of smoke and sweat less than others, and live by easier means. You understand?"
"Thieves," Benadek stated flatly.
"Mind it well." He struggled to get his feet beneath him, and tottered off among the irregular ranks of wagons. One by one the others departed, leaving the fire to glow, not bothering to cover it.
"You see?" Achibol said, "It's begun already."
"What has?" Teress asked.
"The priestly cultthese pyre-builders and corpse-finders. Now they merely serve the seekers, but how long before they build tollhouses on the valley path, and crematoriums, and sell cemetery patches of forest soil to grieving kinfolk? In time, they may collect the husks themselves, and innocents from the plains will pay them for remains lined up like sides of meat in the market. What stately mortuaries they'll build!" Neither of the mage's companions commented on his gloomy predictions. If they failed, it might indeed come about just so. A City of the Dead might rise here at the entrance to the Valebut it was idle speculation; much could happen in the days ahead, and morning was not far off.
Benadek had never imagined so much ice. Its depth was suggested by the chuckle and gurgle of running water deep within, which found its way up through tortuous cracks and melt-holes. On either side of the glacial tongue, jagged rock walls confined the ice to a path hundreds of yards wide, the Vale of the Dead. In front, still higher, the glacial remnant ended in a cirque, a steep amphitheater cut into the spine of the mountain.
They walked half the day up the rising valley, and hours more up the rotten slickness of the stagnant glacier, picking their way over cracks and silt-heavy rivulets that wove across the ice and beneath it, carrying its substance away. "When I was young," Achibol reminisced, "the glacier still grew. There was a lovely stone lodge, well back from the advancing ice, with a good asphalt road. Vehicles like our Mule carried tourists as far as we've come, in minutes. The trails and crevasses were well-marked, and the way safe. Still, when the glacier moved, cracks like these could snap shut like snakes' mouths."
"Why don't they do it now?" Benadek asked skeptically.
"Because the ice no longer grows. For centuries it's melted a few feet a year. If we were to wait long enough, even the command center beneath the great ice sheet above, this small glacier's rich relation, would be exposed."
"Where, exactly, is the redoubt?"
"Ahead, beyond the rim of crags up there where the blown snow hangs like roof-eaves. Dug into rock that has seen no sunlight in a hundred times my own life's span. As for the entrance, ask Ameling."
The maimed plainswoman had said little all day, merely cautioning them about weak ice, where glassy patches of luminous blue-green marked immense hollows belowfrom whose slick, cold embrace no one could escape if he broke through their treacherous crusts. Now, she pointed to the valley wall, just below the low-hanging afternoon sun. "We must climb. There's a trail, and spikes driven into the wall. We can be atop the ridge by nightfall."
"And then?" Achibol asked. "How far will we be from the hermit and his cave?"
"We'll be there."
"Then we'll camp below tonight, and climb in the morning."
"There's no dry place! Our blankets will become dank, and we'll freeze."
Achibol waved his talisman. "I've been monitoring the radiation," he said. "The hidden fires which burned you emanate from a place on the cliff top. My companions and I have to pass through them, but there's no reason to sleep among the invisible flames. For that matter, there's no reason for you to make the climbanother dose will kill you."
"Do I care? My fate is in my hands, not yours, and I don't expect to return to the valley floor again."
Knowing the constant suffering she endured, the pain and nausea that never waned, the mage made no effort to change her mind. "Then we'll camp below for our own sakes, and perhaps avoid your fate."
Ameling approved his callous decision. "Your mission is of great import to all men, even beyond the Edge of the World."
"What do you know of our quest, Ameling?"
"What my heart tells me. You're much like the Immortal Fool, though neither mad nor immortal yourself, I suspect."
"Tell me about him," Achibol urged.
"He's smaller than you, like a child, but with no hair atop his headthough he's not lost his eyebrows as I have. His brows are as white as fresh snow and as bushy as the beard that covers his chest. And . . . he has a magical box like yours, though his is dead."
"Then he's Yasha!" Achibol's eyes went wide, and his talisman dangled unnoticed, scant inches above the snow.
"He calls himself that," Ameling cried. "I knew you were the oneshis reinforcements!
Achibol's hand rose to clutch at his chest. "A seat, boy! Set your pack beneath me, for I must rest." Benadek hurried to comply, his face registering his concern. "Master? Are you ill? What must I do?"
"Nothing, boy, nothing." Achibol's face was several shades lighter than usual, an ugly ocherous color, and he shook as if in the grip of a terrible ague. Sweat glistened on his wrinkled brow in spite of the damp wind off the ice above. His breathing echoed with a high, metallic whine. "It's the shock of hearing that my colleague still lives. I'll recover enough to go on, never fear."
Benadek seemed not to hear, as if listening to sounds beyond the range of ordinary human ears. Kneeling on the slick ice before his master, he laid his hands on the old man's. "You have many secrets, Master Achibol, Sorcerer, Scrivener, and Charlatan. I, as your apprentice, have been privy to some. But before we go one step further, there must be one less secret between us." Though his features were as boyish as ever, Benadek's expression was as stern and old as Achibol's at its most severe. The boy's dark irises thinned and his pupils expanded in spite of glaring ice all about. They seemed ready to absorb every nuance read from the oldster's eyes, locked now to his own. "What are you, Master?" Benadek asked, unblinking. "You're less human than Dispucket. Are you a machine like Circe?"
Achibol did not answer immediately. Slowly, blood suffused his face and his yellowed skin darkened toward its normal shade. His breath came more easily, without the eerie whine of moments before. He grinned, a prankish, sinister expression that Benadek remembered all too well . . . It seemed so very long ago that the mage had stood in an alley, grinning just like that, blocking his escape and holding a shining gold coin in his outstretched hand.
He remembered, too, mischief in Achibol's eye as he drew a tiny vial from his voluminous trunk. "Androsterone Five," he had said. "Just the thing for a night on the town."
"I'll give you enlightenment," the mage had said on still another occasion, "Dispucket awaits you . . . Spread wide your arms and hug him . . ." Oh yes. Benadek remembered. That chill wind from the depths of his own memory made him shudder spastically.
"You know what I am, boy. You discovered it in Circe's archives . . . but now I'll show you." Never taking his eyes from his apprentice, Achibol lifted his hand to his face and laid a gnarled finger just below his right eye. "See now how I look at the world, apprentice," he rasped, and Benadek stared. Slowly, as if drawn aside by some vision of infinite attractiveness, Achibol's eye turned to the outside. Further and further it rotated, while his left one remained fixed on Benadek's face. Red blood vessels appeared on the nasal margin as the dark iris buried itself on the other side . . . and the eye rotated further.
The sorcerer's eye seemed about to reverse itself in the socket, to reveal the tattered, twitching ends of muscles ripped free by the unnatural movement, but . . . beyond the white surface, past the red-veined perimeter, Benadek saw a sharply defined, metallic edge! As Achibol's human eye disappeared entirely into the folds of his face, the reverse surface was revealed, a steely orb which stopped with its tiny red-glowing pinhole aligned with the bridge of Benadek's nose.
"You've seen the red glow of my eye before, haven't you? Though I've tried to conceal it? Was it magic, did you think, that you failed to investigate further? How long since you ceased believing in magic, boy? And how long since you thrust this particular mystery aside, unanswered? What have I failed to teach you that you discover only now, through one mechanical system's momentary failure, that such systems exist?" Achibol's eyes, flesh and metal, remained fixed on Benadek.
"You've accepted my immortality, haven't you? You even discovered the techniquesbut didn't you wonder where the precipitators and filters were? Did you suspect I `plugged in' when I slipped inside the temples without you, and thus pacified yourself to seek no further for my secrets? Did you assume falsely that the odd bits and pieces stored in my trunk would assemble into my machinery of life? Shame, boy! It's a tradition from time immemorable, an apprentice's duty, to ferret out his master's secrets. Ah well. You're slow and late, but at least you've arrived. You know now where my devices are hidden?"
Benadek nodded, focusing on Achibol's chest. "Of course," the mage chuckled, even though his lengthy speech seemed to have weakened him again. "Everything is inside. Miniaturized, to be sure, but still too bulky to fit in a human body, with all its wet machinery. Do you begin to understand?"
Benadek forced his lips to open, sucked breath through his throat, and forced it back across his vocal cords. "How much of you is human?"
Again Achibol chuckled. "Not my balls or their impressive companion, nor my guts or my other eye. Not even most of my muscles. My skin is still my own, though modified, and I've retained a few shreds of contractile tissue beneath itmy smile, thus, is my own. What else?"
"Your brain, Master."
"Excellent, boyand why so little else? Come now, use the facilities you were born withand those you stole from Circe's cryo-vaults. Why am I no more than a brain and a bag of skin hiding a tin-and-plastic imitation body? What purpose is served?"
Benadek, faced with Achibol's barrage of questions, delivered in a manner he was uncomfortably familiar with, replied more easily than before. "For the filters and such that sustain you to be carried within, other functions had to be sacrificed, leaving room only for your brain and the glands that support it."
"Exactly, lad. I'm proud of you once more. What else?"
"You must have an atomic-decay battery for energy. Your bones? I don't know."
"Silicon, apatite, and gold," Achibol told him. "Interwoven lattices with organic carbon-fiber reinforcing. I don't break legs easily." His face relaxed slightly. He smiled benignly. Benadek relaxed too, realizing that this . . . man . . . was still the Achibol he had known.
"Anything else, boy?"
"The eyes, Master. Infraredprojector and scanner bothin the right. What's in the other one?"
"Rangefinder, short focal-length organic-lensed and mirrored catadioptric telescope, a microscope and several low-discrimination pickups for the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. My microwave radar used to be in the right one."
"Do your bones have other functions too?"
"Ahyou're still thinking. Good. Of course they dowhat a waste of good space, otherwise. There are biochips and nonmagnetic ROM for my autonomic functions, and protected storage for those bits and pieces of gland and organ that keep my brain happy and sane. And now you have it all. So . . . speculate, boy. Generalize a bit, if you will."
"Master, I know now that you are only as immortal as your fabricated systems, and that some of them are failing."
"Failing? Hmmph. Many failed so long ago I've entirely forgotten the habits of dependence on them. Here, under my fingernails, were microprobesgeneralized chip pinoutsand chemical injectors for nasty compounds. I had to remove those myself, at no little discomfort, for fear the only one poisoned would be me. Unfortunately, other functions had to be sacrificed with them, and the `talisman' is only a poor substitute. Even my self-diagnostics are casualties of entropy, so I can't tell you just how much of me still functions. Did you hear the noises in my chest?"
"I did, Master."
"You heard my heart fail. I don't need diagnostics to know that. It stopped several minutes ago, I'd guess, though my clock-functions are erratic."
"How do you remain alive now? Your organic brain must still need blood."
"I have two hearts. Now I'm at the mercy of the primary one, shut down centuries ago when it became unreliable. It was the backup unit that just failed."
Benadek hesitated to ask the obvious question, but Achibol anticipated it. "How long? An hour or a yeara decade if I'm lucky." He drew himself up, preparing to rise. "So, succeed or fail, we must hurry, if I'm to see the end of this mission of ours."
"We'll succeed, Master. You'll live. Surely there must be some way to repair you. We'll find that too." Benadek's brave words belied the knot of feelings bound tightly inside him.
"If Gibraltar Base survives, and if we succeed here, I have half a mind to attempt the trip. There are spare parts, and equipment to maintain my brain functions during major repairs. But that's an ocean away, and no ships have crossed it in eighteen hundred years. We'll cross that water if we come to it, but nowhelp me up. I fear to strain this worn-out pump."
Benadek and Teress helped Achibol regain his feet. Ameling observed, not understanding what had transpired, but knowing that a crisis had arisen and passed. Her brief glimpse of the steely eye confirmed that the sorcerer was unique, and that she had chosen rightly to exert herself for his cause.
Both Achibol's eyes looked normal now, as the four of them trudged carefully over the wet, slippery ice to the edge of the stagnant glacier. They made camp at the foot of the ascending trail. Benadek pulled portable shelters from his pack, and when they were expanded and joined together, Ameling saw that no one would have to sleep in wet blankets. She was glad, then, that their ascent had been postponed, for though she knew she would soon die, she no longer wished to hasten itto the contrary, she wanted to live, if only to see what great events the strange threesome might bring about.
The climb was less difficult than it seemed from below. Though there were switchbacks and places where the weakened Achibol had to be hauled up on braided leather rope, the grade was otherwise gentle. At the top, they waded through deep snow. Yasha's cave was visible as they neared the ridge.
Not until they came within a few dozen paces of the cave-mouth did the talisman indicated the radiation hazard was severe. Benadek insisted that he go on alone. Achibol protested. "Yasha won't know you, boy. If he's truly deranged, I may have a chance of getting through to him."
"How many heavy particles can your hardware sustain? Teress and Ameling will hold you here if you try to follow." The mage saw the women nod.
"Go on then!" Achibol said. "Bring him out here." Benadek pushed off through the snow.
The first indication that Benadek had found the "Immortal Fool" was a high-pitched scream. The second was a tiny, white-haired figure leaping and bounding across the snow. "That's him!" Achibol and Ameling declared as one.
"The Fool," Ameling said.
"Yasha, you runt," the mage hooted.
"Keep away from me!" Yasha squalled.
"Yasha!" Achibol shouted. "Calm down. Look at me."
"What's to look at, old man?" Yasha spat. "There're prettier faces than yourseven that one, marked as she is." Ameling flinched.
"Stuff it, Yosh!" Achibol yelled back. "I'm Archie. You remember me!"
"Archie? Archie? NawArchie's that black kid they gave the East Coast to. You're not Archie."
"But I am, Yosh. I'm Archie Scribner, and I'm no younger than you are. Now look at me."
Yasha looked. For a moment, a gleam of comprehension lightened his face, but it quickly faded. "Archie's old, Archie's dead, and you're a liar. You're one of them." He looked around, seeing threats in every direction. "You can't fool me!" The tiny man leaped away with surprising agility, and dashed back through the disturbed snow. He dove between Benadek's outstretched arms and slid belly-down to the black cave-mouth.
Benadek shrugged. "He's crazy as a tree-pig in springtime," he called back, peering into the cave. "There's nothing here but soggy bedding, rotten potatoes, and a pile of corroded instruments that can't have worked in years. He's talking to one of them."
"Poor Yasha," the sorcerer said sadly. "he's the other side of the coinhis mechanical systems function, radiation or not, but his mind has flown.
An hour later, Benadek trudged back through the snow. Achibol raised his head. "What else did you find?"
"There's a metal door with no handles. Yasha spies upon honches who go in and out, and `reports' with his broken talisman. He knows of ancients who live beyond the door, but believes them trapped within. He awaits `reinforcements' from Gibraltar. I think he's inverted the situationthe honches, or their masters, watch him."
"How so?"
"I had a feeling that I was being watched all the while I was in sight of the door. I think the level of radiation is controlled too, and diminishes when he is alone in there."
"How does he live? Do they feed him?"
"We do," Ameling interjected. "He lives on the gifts I, and others, bring. The honches may feed him tooI'm sure they tease and torment him."
"He's been here a long time?" Achibol asked her.
"I've heard he was here when the first seekers camefifty years ago."
"Fifty or five hundred, it's been long enough. We must capture him and, if there's a kernel of sense left in his head, perhaps it can be brought forth."
"How, Master Achibol?" Teress wondered. "If we force this metal door and seek the ancients within, we can't bring him with us."
"He may know something useful to us, if it can be gotten at," Achibol replied, "and besides, he and I may be the last of our kind. I won't abandon him."
Benadek silently agreed with the mage's intent, for his own dark reasons: were the components in the small madman's body identical to Achibol's? If his mind were truly gone, could Achibol use his . . . spare parts? "It won't come to that, Master," Benadek said quietly, "because from here, I have to go on alone. You and Teress and Ameling can take him back to camp with you."
"What do you mean?" asked the mage. "You're only a boy . . . only one man, I mean. How can you face the ancients alone?"
"I'm less a child than any of youeven you, Masterand I'm more than an ordinary man. I can get inside, because the door will only open to those who are wanted inside."
"They'll want you?"
"Honches come and go. I'll be the next honch."
"They'll see through any disguise."
"It won't be a disguise, Master. I'll become the honch."
"It's too dangerous," Teress cried. "What if the change goes too far, as it did"
"Everything's been building to this. Dispucket, the change in the swamp, Sufawlz and the memories . . . as if the world forced me out of its womb unfinished, in desperate need. I had to learn as I went alongas I still must."
"You had friends, boy. You weren't alone."
"Am I ever alone? I have Jim Bostwick, Jean-Francois, Jack, Anna . . . bits and pieces of poor Vlad Sovoda even surface once in a whileand there's really no choice. Not only can you not get in, but none of you could survive the radiation for long. That wash of deadly particles would have killed me if I hadn't changed even as I started to die. Those within obviously tolerate the old Fool, or he would be dead."
"What must be done?"
"I'll catch Yasha. Take him with you to the camp, and if I succeed I'll look for you there. You should be safe enough."
"Safe from what? Honches? Perhaps we should hide in the woods."
"Perhapsthough honches aren't my worst fear. I don't want you hurt if the redoubt is destroyed. There'll be more radiation."
"The reactor! You're planning a meltdown!"
"It's a magnetic-containment fusion reactor. It won't melt down, but it can be overloaded. Superheated steam could be dangerous."
"And you?" Teress asked. "How will you survive it?"
"I'll try to find a way, of course, but if I don't . . ." He shrugged. After all, it was not as if this were the first time he had thought about death. There were worse things.
"So?" Abrovid asked reluctantly, fulfilling his own prophesy. "What exactly does it mean. To Saphooth, I mean."
"Benadek's going to become a honch, right?"
"That much I understood," Abrovid muttered irritably. "So what?"
"What's he going to do with the original honch?"
"Tie him up? Surely not kill him?"
"Exactly!" Kaledrin beamed as if Abrovid were his star pupil. "Kill him. Just as Saphooth claims that wedescendants of Benadekdid to his `original' races. Except their fixed-form remnants, of course. The ongoing tale supports his paranoia."
"That's bad, then. What will you do?"
"I had hoped you'd have a new approach."
"Me? I'm a systems programmer. What do I know about myths . . . or wars?"
"So be systematic about it!" Kaledrin snapped.
Abrovid brightened internally, but kept his feelings concealed. Kaledrin really did need his help. "Let me think a minute," he said. And he did.
"Well," Abrovid began, breaking the silence that had continued not for one minute but a score. "It is a systems problem. Even if Saphooth's partly rightif we mutables are Benadek's descendants and he isn't." He paused, enjoying waiting for Kaledrin to beg him to explain . . .
"Well?" Kaledrin snapped. "You have an idea, not an egg! You don't have to hatch it!"
That was not the response Abrovid had fished for. Ah, well. He was still Abrovid, and Kaledrin was . . . Kaledrin. "Assuming it's true that we normal people . . . we mutables . . . are a race apart, then the others are like applications programs. They do different things, and are adapted to different circumstances, and have different talents. Right?" Kaledrin bobbed his eyestalks impatiently. "There has to be an operating system to tie them all together and keep everything running smoothly. That's us. Without us normmutablesnobody could understand what it's like to be not only an Arkendhi vacuum-dweller, but a Saritan mudworm, a simian-form forester, and . . . and you name it. Without us, they couldn't even communicate with each other. Then there'd be wars. Galactic society, trade, everythingwould crash, and . . ."
"Magnificent, Ab! You've said it! All this time, it's been there, lurking in a dark corner of my mind, and it took youof all peopleto give me just the prod I needed. Yesa system in which we mutables are the reticulum, the over-program. Perhaps I can defuse Saphooth yet. Oh, how I wish he were here right now! I'd make him see it!"
Abrovid moved quietly toward the door. Kaledrin was so involved with "his" new idea he did not even notice Abrovid leave. Abrovid did not wish Saphooth back. In his opinion Kaledrin had replaced him all too well.