Who turned out the lights?
Sensory deprivation.
Will I meet myself?
Karil lay upon a couch, surrounded by cushions ranged in order and carpets richly spread, wearing robes of fine green silk and rich brocade, and decked with bracelets of gold. Fruit hung in clusters at his fingertips in the shade of palm and pomegranate trees. Gardens and vineyards, flowing springs and gushing fountains surrounded him. He drank pure wine, whose very dregs were musk, and goblets of ginger-flavoured water served by dark-eyed, high-bosomed bashful virgins, fair as corals and rubies, chaste as hidden pearls, as the sheltered eggs of ostriches.
"I don't care," a voice was saying. "You can only talk to him for a few minutes and then we're putting him under again."
The vision of Paradise faded. He saw a doctor at the foot of his tank, fiddling with controls and checking readouts. A man's face came into view, leaning over him.
"My name is Mitsu," he said. "It's my duty to inform you that you are under arrest. If you co-operate and answer our questions, it will be to your advantage."
Karil mumbled something through thick lips.
"What? I didn’t hear you."
"I'm not dead," Karil repeated. It was more a statement of surprise than a question.
"No, not quite. We got to you in time. You'll never be a father, they tell me, but you'll survive."
There was a transparent cover over the tank, and his arms, legs, and neck were secured. A fluid supported and washed over him, bathing, massaging, healing. What little he could see of his body was covered in radiation burns--red scale sloughing off and new brown skin emerging--but most of it was hidden by tubes and ducts, and his arms were draped with intravenous tubes and sensors. The air he breathed beneath the cover was rich with oxygen.
Karil struggled to speak again. "Where's Loris? And Atalanta?"
"That's very clever," Mitsu said, "but, believe me, it's the wrong attitude. Now, are you going to answer my questions?"
"I don't understand," Karil said. He considered for a moment the possibility that he was still dreaming. "Where am I?"
"You're still on Io, in the Security sick bay. As soon as the doctor says you can be moved, we're taking you somewhere else. Once there, I assure you, we'll find out what we want to know. Why don't you make it easier on yourself? Where has Loris taken Atalanta? What has she done with Ivan? Who are you working for?"
Comprehension returned. "I don't know where she's taken Atalanta, but it's somewhere beyond your reach. Ivan helped her. In fact, she couldn't have done it without him. And as for who I'm working for: I'm working for Loris, and she's working for Galilean Security, which is more than I can say for you. If I know Loris, Khadijha's already been notified about you..."
"Nice try, Karil. I can see you're not willing to co-operate yet. We can wait." Mitsu spoke to the doctor, who did something with the control board at the foot of his tank. Karil felt a wave of dizziness overcome him and realized he was being drugged.
***
Karil was in Paradise once again, reclining among silken cushions beneath fruit-laden trees. Loris fluffed his pillows and Johanna offered him a platter of luscious figs.
"I had the strangest dream," he told them. "I dreamed I was being interrogated by Mitsu."
They laughed merrily, their voices like tinkling fountains in the cool shade. Karil set down his wine and settled back among the cushions. Johanna leaned over Karil and kissed Loris on the lips.
"I'm so glad you're back safely, Loris."
"I'm glad too. We had a rough time of it, but it's all right now."
Karil looked down the hill and saw Atalanta resting in the meadow.
"I want to hear all about it," Johanna said. "You start, Karil. What was the plan?"
"Loris and Ivan would take Atty out of the hangar and hide her somewhere safe while you and I..."
"Where?"
"I don't know. Loris can tell you that. ...while you and I went to..." Karil looked at Johanna in shock.
"What is it, Karil?"
"You're dead."
"Of course not, silly. They got to me in time. Remember how surprised you were to see me?"
"And Annie's dead too."
"No, she's not," said Loris. "Look."
Anais Nin was in the clearing below, parked next to Atalanta. Isfahan played in the undergrowth beneath them.
"No," said Karil. "This is wrong."
***
"I don't know how you managed to beat the drugs," Mitsu was saying. "They must have you under a powerful suggestion." He was sitting beside the tank like a hospital visitor. But there were no flowers.
"They?"
"Your organization."
"What are you talking about? I'm a Free Trader."
"If your intention was to cause an interplanetary incident, you'll be glad to know you’ve succeeded. There are demonstrations, threats of embargoes; riots may break out at any moment. The High Companies and the Galilean Corporations are accusing each other of space-piracy, for Crissake. But we're not at war yet, and we'll have the truth out of you soon."
"I was trying to prevent an interplanetary incident, not cause one. Can't you see that?"
"Is the Martian Rebellion supposed to benefit from this, is that it? Or just you and Shagrug? Did you dupe Loris somehow, or is she part of it?"
"Listen to what you're saying," Karil said. "Can you imagine anybody duping Loris? Can you imagine Loris killing Anais? Which is more ridiculous?"
"I've been in this game a long time. No amount of scheming and betrayal seems ridiculous to me. It's too bad Johanna’s dead. I'm sure we could have used each of you to make the other talk."
"Why did I come back here, then?" Karil offered. "Look at the condition I'm in. Why did I risk my life? Why didn't I just disappear?"
"I don’t know. Maybe Loris betrayed you too. Maybe you're innocent. But we’ll find out for sure soon enough, and if you're lucky there won’t be too much brain damage. Once we've gotten you transferred to the hospital, we'll be inserting a chip in your cerebral cortex that will ensure..."
"I know how it works."
"Excellent. Maybe you'll co-operate as soon as we get there and avoid the unpleasantness." Mitsu got up and left.
***
When they came to re-fit his tank for acceleration and zero-gee, Karil could only watch helplessly. A quick-drying seal was spread over the regenerating fluid to form a flexible but watertight bond about his neck, and he was wheeled like a baby in a pram through empty corridors to the cutter hangar. He was loaded aboard a ship like a mummy in a sarcophagus, fastened to the deck within, and given a final check before liftoff. There was a webbed acceleration couch mounted beside him. Mitsu began to strap himself into it as the pilot and astrogator checked their controls.
"What do you want done with this cat?" a guard asked. He thrust Isfahan through the hatch at gloved arm's length, while the animal squirmed and hissed in righteous indignation. Karil was extraordinarily glad to see his fellow prisoner again.
"What the hell do I care?" Mitsu said, busy fumbling with his couch. "Keep it."
"The damn thing won't eat anything we give it."
"Then let it starve. Or space it."
"Space it yourself," the guard said. "It's part of your investigation and therefore your responsibility. We have no facilities for animals here."
"Bloody pain in the ass, that's what it is," Mitsu said. "All right. Give it here."
The guard handed the cat to Mitsu, who dropped him like a hot rivet. He had suddenly become a tiny tornado of flying fur and slashing claws. He backed into a corner, ears flattened, body swelled to half-again its normal size. Mitsu and the guard hesitated, while the pilot and astrogator grinned.
Izzy danced like a pugilist and emitted a long siren wail of warning, spitting in murderous defiance. Mitsu and the guard circled like hyenas about a wounded buffalo, then pounced upon him. After a moment, they had him by the scruff of the neck, threw him into a suit-locker, and slammed the door. While they busied themselves with the first-aid kit, Karil could hear him yowling and scratching inside.
"A little acceleration will knock the fight out of you, my friend," Mitsu said to the clattering door. "And you're out the air-lock as soon as we hit free-fall."
He fastened himself into the gee-couch as the guard left the ship and sealed the lock behind him. "It won't be long now," he told Karil. "You'd be surprised just how easily one of these things"--he patted the titanium cocoon--"can be converted to a sensory deprivation chamber."
"Oh, not again." Karil's heart sank. In time, a man in sensory deprivation would confess to any charge his captors cared to bring against him, would invent crimes of his own, just to hear a human voice, and Mitsu, apparently, had never met a conspiracy he didn't like.
The cutter lifted off and vaulted into space, Karil protected by the fluid in his tank from the worst of the acceleration. They fell freely through the vacuum.
As Mitsu was unstrapping himself, Karil saw the astrogator turn, pull his laser, and calmly kill the pilot, then swivel about, take aim at Mitsu, now clawing at his restraints in desperation, and shoot him too. Mitsu slumped and floated free in the remaining straps, a neatly cauterized hole in his forehead. Without a word, the killer turned back to his instruments and altered the cutter's trajectory.
Karil had thought he was beyond surprise. "Who are you?" he demanded. "Where are you taking me?"
The killer did not reply. When he had finished his corrections, he released himself from his couch, collected the bodies of his victims, and wrestled them into the airlock. He did not evacuate the lock before opening the outer hatch, and the escaping air thrust the corpses into space. They would fall away from the ship on a new trajectory, to become grisly new satellites of Jupiter.
Then he turned to his instruments. Karil soon gave up trying to get his saviour to speak. The latter sat calmly as the hours went by, had a quick squeeze-tube dinner, watched his instruments. Karil was alternately elated by his unexpected rescue from Mitsu and puzzled and frightened by his companion’s silence. There was no sound from Isfahan either, and Karil wondered if he had been killed or injured during the acceleration, but he was not about to remind the new pilot of the cat's existence.
Then he saw an object growing in the frame of the forward viewport and forgot Isfahan for the time being. It was a medium-sized interplanetary freighter, perhaps a hundred thousand tons, half a kilometre in length. As the cutter darted across its bow like a fly across an elephant’s back, he could see the name and registration of the ship printed there. It was called Silver-footed Themis and was one of Khadijha Enterprise's Star-line freighters.
He breathed a sigh of relief. Of course! Loris would have gone to Khadijha for help. Who else could have hidden her from both Galilean Security and the High Companies?
The pilot was an expert. He matched orbits, dropped down across the great ship's stern, and slipped into an open shuttle bay. But instead of berthing there, the cutter passed through another hatch inside and emerged into a vast open space within. All the cargo holds had been hollowed out to create one enormous bay, and within it, like a foetus in a womb, lay a second ship.
It was of battleship proportions--perhaps 50,000 tonnes, 200 meters in length--and it was bristling with lasers and projectile launchers. The thrust-nozzles at its stern were of a type Karil had never seen before. The cutter drifted along the strange ship's length and Karil studied it intently. He was no longer optimistic about his or Loris' safety; anyone who went to so much trouble to hide a ship of such military power was up to no good. He could see the ship’s name at last--Mjolnir. Thor’s Hammer. It was a battleship, all right.
The cutter slipped into Mjolnir's shuttle bay. There were several other craft inside--life-ships, service vessels. And as the cutter swung about for anchoring in a berth, Karil saw Atalanta, dark and silent nearby. His heart began to pound. Still his rescuer did not speak. The shuttle-bay doors were closed and sealed. As soon as pressurization was done, a cyborg work-crew appeared and wrestled his massive cocoon out through the hatch. He was placed in a freight elevator and felt himself dropping many meters into the ship. The elevator came to a halt and, still in free-fall, he was steered into a hospital room.
There was something puzzling about the ship, which seemed to have been designed in total disregard of the facts of interplanetary travel. Normally, a portion of a ship of this size would spin to provide pseudo-gravity in free-fall, but the orientation of the corridors indicated no such arrangement had been made. Was it designed for local defence--expected to function only in Galilean space and not to travel interplanetary distances? But the sick-bay was clearly not designed for zero-gee.
"Tell me the truth, Doc?" he joked lamely, hoping to glean some information from the response. "How long do I have?"
"That depends on you," someone said. He turned his head as much as possible toward the sound of the voice. Khadijha was drifting in through the doorway, her veils floating bat-like about her, and Ivan was behind her. On the instrument console at the foot of his tank, needles began to swing and lights to flash as adrenalin surged in Karil's system. He was no longer prepared to believe they were here to save him.
"Where's Loris," he demanded. "Have you killed her too?"
"Loris is on board," Ivan said calmly. "But she's incommunicado at the moment. Extremely incommunicado."
The dials wavered again as Karil’s blood ran hot and cold by turns. It seemed he had not escaped the threat of sensory deprivation after all.
"Why are you doing this?" he demanded, trying to think rationally. "What do you want from us?"
Claxons began to sound throughout the ship, echoing in the corridors.
"Warning!" a voice thundered. "Acceleration in sixty seconds."
Khadijha, Ivan, and the doctor drifted toward nearby couches and strapped themselves in. It seemed this entire project had been waiting for Karil, and now that he was secure, along with Loris and Atalanta, they could escape. But to where?
"What do you want from us, dammit!" Karil shouted over the din of the alarm.
They ignored him. In a moment, acceleration came. Karil could hardly feel it in his tank, but it pressed Mitsu and Khadijha into their couches. The ship hit one, two, three, four gees for a time. Claxons sounded again, and they were released from gravity. Karil could speak again.
"Do you want information, is that it? Do you want to know what Mitsu asked me?"
"I couldn't care less," Khadijha said. She turned to the doctor. "Are you ready?"
"In a moment, Captain."
"You're going to be a martyr to the cause," Ivan told him. "When they see what Security has done to you..."
"You talk too much sometimes," Khadijha said.
"What do you mean?" Karil said. He felt fear creeping over him as if the tank were filling with ice-water.
"They locked you away in sensory deprivation a little too long. By the time we had rescued you and Loris, both your minds had been destroyed."
Karil shuddered in his restraints.
"Frankly, I wanted to kill you both immediately," Ivan went on, "but Khadijha hasn't gotten where she is by wasting something as valuable as a human being. When Kelley..."
"Shut up!" Khadijha whirled to face him, and he shrank from her gaze.
"Kelley?" Karil’s mind was spinning. "Charles Kelley? What’s he got to do with this?"
"I'm ready," said the doctor.
"No. Wait," Karil shouted.
Mitsu and the doctor placed an opaque cover over the tank and sealed it. The blackness was absolute. The last sound Karil heard before they shut off communication, perhaps the last human voice he would ever hear, came from the ship’s address system:
"Warning! Mjolnir separation in sixty seconds."
Karil listened for the sounds of separation and the smaller ship's acceleration--the clank of released grapples, the roar of the drivers, orders ringing through the passageways--but there was nothing. There was only the sound of his own pulse in his ears as he held his breath, all but drowning out the distant hum and whisper of the tank's pumps and air-purifiers. Suddenly, he felt the fluid in the tank move as acceleration began. The warship was under way.
***
The hallucinations began in a matter of hours--or was it days? They were vivid and appeared to be passing before his eyes rather than through his mind--floating, it seemed, a few centimetres before him. He could not make them go away by force of will, or by closing his eyes. At first there was a general brightening, as if some light were seeping into the tank from no particular direction. There were dots and lines, then simple geometric figures or repeated patterns--lattice-works like screens in a mosque. Banners of different colours flickered like waving flags. He found that he could look directly at certain parts of the figures by moving his head as much as possible, as if they were part of a real tapestry. Other times, the figures would drift past him, beyond his control.
Gradually, the abstract patterns became whole and recognizable objects. Books drifted before him, tumbling, and he found himself trying to read the titles on the spools, trying to reach out and grasp them. Household objects, utensils, articles of clothing, artefacts of all sorts floated about like the contents of an untidy cabin in free-fall. Then there were whole landscapes, detailed scenes of Earth or Mars. Sometimes they would split into strips that moved in opposite directions, or cracked and peeled away like tearing curtains, revealing blackness beyond.
He began to lose parts of his body. He felt his limbs separate, vanish, and return attached at strange angles. He felt he was tilted into a vertical position, or floating face down. His own voice, when he talked to himself, was strange and unfamiliar, seemed sometimes to be coming from somewhere else. Like Alice's, his body shrank and stretched. For a while he was an enormous head with a tiny, withered body hanging from beneath his chin. Sometimes his body became as brittle as glass, and he was afraid to move, lest it shatter into a thousand fragments.
Sometimes, it would soften and become rubbery. Then he would try to pull his hands from his restraints, but struggle as he might, and certain as he was that his wrists were soft as butter, he could not do it. Sometimes he flattened and stretched and became no more than a thin film, floating on the surface of his tank-fluid like the moon’s reflection on a still pond.
Other times, the worst times, he was rational and knew he was already beginning to lose his mind. There were chilling moments when he seemed to wake to the sound of maniacal laughter and knew it was his own.
***
Karil opened his eyes and found that the tank was open. The room was suffused with dim light. Karil sat up and saw Jay sitting across from him, his back against the wall. His knees were drawn up before him and his hands rested on his knees.
"What," he said, "is the significance of the Brazen Anvil?"
"The Brazen Anvil?"
"Yes, what does it mean?"
"It's from Hesiod. Nine days a brazen anvil would fall from heaven to Earth, nine more days from Earth to Tartarus."
"But what does it mean?"
"Great weight. Great speed. Nine hundred eighty centimetres per second squared. Great distance."
"But what does it mean?" He pointed and Karil saw the Brazen Anvil sitting beside him. He climbed out of the tank, surprised at how nimble he remained, and fell upon the anvil. Grunting with exertion, he wrestled it to the door. The door blew open in a rush of wind and he fell through, still clutching the heavy object. They tumbled through the blackness of space, Earth turning far below.
Atalanta swept past him, arcing through the Jovian system, accelerating as she swung about the planet, and on toward Saturn. Karil and Ivan watched her fall into Saturn-orbit in a leisurely swing, then circularize at perisaturn to approximate that of the moon Tethys.
Loris sat across the table, listening. "She was all right when she left Mars," Karil told her. "And it didn’t happen in the Belt because she would never have made it to Jupiter in that case, and she certainly couldn’t have travelled to Saturn and back in that time..."
"For such is the distance," Atty said, "from Earth’s surface to gloomy Tartarus. For a brazen anvil dropping out of the sky would take nine nights and nine days and land on the tenth day."
Karil was free from his tank and drifting through the deserted corridors of Mjolnir. There was something puzzling about the ship. It seemed to have been designed in total disregard of the facts of interplanetary travel. Normally, a ship of this size would spin to provide pseudo-gravity in free-fall, but the orientation of the corridors indicated no such arrangement had been made.
Mitsu leaned over his tank. "Atty knows, doesn't she? Tartarus. And Hell. And Pluto, her dark lord. All those visions of apocalyptic doom."
"Controlled fusion represents the ultimate in spacecraft propulsion short of the total annihilation of matter." It was Karil's teacher, from Astrogation class. Karil looked out the window, watching the ships go by. "It is true that research on the annihilation drive has continued sporadically since antimatter was originally created in small quantities in the Twentieth Century, but despite the work of such as Marwan al-Zubair of the Titan Institute, the basic problems of control and containment have never been... Karil, are you listening to me?"
Al-Zubair and Kelley and Park sat before a mural of Saturn. "Our shipyards are full of High Company spies," al-Zubair was saying. "And they know full well that there are no warships being constructed there."
The teacher droned on: "A magnetic field would contain the anti-hydrogen, releasing it a few micrograms at a time to react with a small quantity of ordinary hydrogen. The resulting mutual annihilation would provide the thrust. The advantage, of course, is that minute amounts of fuel are able to produce enormous energy, allowing for continuous acceleration over a long period of time. The disadvantage--and this makes antimatter drive impractical at the present time--is that production of antimatter itself is much too costly."
"Ye powers of the nethermost abyss," Atty said. "I come no spy, with purpose to explore or to disturb the secrets of your ancient realm. See how the hammer of all the Earth is hacked and broken in pieces, a storm-wind coming from the north, a vast cloud with flashes of fire and brilliant light about it, and within a radiance like brass, glowing in the heart of the flames."
Between Thor’s Hammer and the Brazen Anvil, a link was forged. Understanding came to Karil in a rational moment, like a rush of hot wind, and the truth blazed like a furnace in the dark. "I am not mad yet," said Atalanta. "The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass, the earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad."
***
He was in the basement of his father's palace, where he had stolen after nightfall to explore passages he had never seen before. There was nothing there but dust and cobwebs and the sound of his own heartbeat. Somewhere, someone touched a sensor and the lights winked out, one by one, down the stone corridor. One last ceiling-lamp above his head flickered and went out.
"Somebody turn the lights on," he called out, his small child’s voice tremulous. "There's somebody down here."
There was utter darkness now, and the sound of footsteps on a stair. A heavy door was shut.
"I said: there's somebody down here!" he shouted. He tried to make his voice sound angry and threatening, but it sounded hollow, and it squeaked.
There was a shuffling sound, as of some huge beast approaching. It was Satan, coming for him. But I've always been a good boy! I pray five times a day; I can recite whole passages from the Qu'ran. It's true that I don't give alms, but I have no money, and there are no beggars here; and it’s true that I haven't made a hajj, but I'm not allowed to leave the palace grounds.
The shuffling grew closer.
It's true that I spied on the concubines, and I've tasted wine, and I've fornicated, and I killed a man, and I don't believe in anything at all anymore, except the teachings of Progeny, and he's an infidel, but...
He could smell Satan’s breath, redolent of sulphur and old decayed earth. That was something even his teachers didn’t know: the smell of Satan's breath.
It was a test, that's what it was. A test of his courage. The angel Michael would place his sword between him and Satan at the last moment, and the latter would slink away from its light. "Begone, Satan," he would say, "you shall not have this boy."
He saw the Martians gathering about him, cobwebbed with frost, their mouths open in screams of asphyxiation. It was his fault they were dead. And Johanna too, shot dead before his eyes. And Loris, and Anais, and Atalanta, all dead because of him. He felt a touch like cold steel on his wrist and he screamed.
"Hush now. Don't be afraid. Mother's here, Darling." Atalanta's voice rang in his ears.