Empyrion II: The Siege of Dome (16 page)

Gerdes nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that is the body responding to the inner gift. The body knows how to move—it's made for movement after all. We have no need to teach it what it already knows.”

“Liberating the body to do what it knows how to do—is that it?”

“Yes,” agreed Gerdes. “You learn quickly.”

Yarden jumped up. “I want to do it again. Please? Right now. I don't want to forget the feeling. I want to remember exactly how I did it.”

“Very well,” said Gerdes, rising slowly and making her way to the panel on the wall. “Ready yourself.”

In a moment the music drifted into the room and Yarden, poised, ready to receive it, heard the first wispy notes and began to sway, guiding herself into the music and away from the critical awareness of her movements. It was easier this time, now that she knew what she was attempting. In no time at all she had entered into that state where her mind soared up through the dreamy, many-toned layers of sound, leaving her body free to respond in its own way.

The session left Yarden exhausted, but flushed with triumph and eager for her next lesson. “Thank you, Gerdes,” she said, a little reluctant to leave. “I intend to practice every moment until I return. To think I had this—this wonderful gift inside me all this time and never knew it. I'll never be able to thank you enough for showing it to me.”

“Your joy is thanks enough,” Gerdes replied. “But you must not think that it will always be so easy. We have much hard work ahead of us, and yes, some pain as well. Tears are as much a part of creation as joy.”

“I know that, Gerdes.”

The older woman shook her head gently. “No, you don't. But it's all right. We will take it as it comes. Good-bye now.”

Yarden said good-bye and walked home, luxuriating in the deep, warm, languorous feeling of physical exhaustion and the knowledge that her special gift had only begun to be explored. There were much finer things awaiting her, she knew; she thrilled to think what they might be.

It seemed to Treet
that he floated in space wrapped in cloud-soft vapors that curled around him, enveloping him and bearing him through endless corridors of darkness. He had floated this way from time immemorial, eternally traveling, yet never really going anywhere at all.

This celestial voyage was perpetually interrupted by vivid hallucinations: the one where he became trapped inside his own heart was a favorite torment, but there were others equally grotesque and frightening. One of them concerned being swallowed by a great transparent eel and enduring a living death inside its hideous stomach. Another saw him entombed inside a coffin-sized slab of crystal, frozen forever, unable to move or cry out, while all around him people moved and lived and breathed, oblivious to his torture.

In his lucid moments, Treet still knew himself to be suspended by wires in a tank of buoyant liquid, undergoing the process of conditioning. He knew this and told himself over and over in what had become for him a litany:
I will survive ... I will survive ... I will survive ... I will ... survive ...

But the periods of lucidity were shrinking, and the boundaries between consciousness and the nightmare region grew ever more amorphous. And his litany of resolve sounded more like naive optimism, cheap and mocking in his own ears.

Still, he would not give in to the creeping despair he could feel gathering around him, and instead continued to fight for his clarity of mind. Yet, to give himself over to the insanity of his weird visions would be far easier than constantly maintaining such a scrupulously tight rein on his mental processes. What did it matter whether he thought he was inside a giant eel? What did it matter what he thought about anything? He was never going to leave the tank with his head intact. In many ways it would be easier on him to simply give in, accept whatever insanity presented itself, and be done with it. Then at least he'd be released. The longer he held out, the longer he'd remain in the conditioning tank and the longer the torture would continue. Better to give in and regain freedom as quickly as possible.

A lesser man would have given in, as untold hundreds of Hladik's victims had. Here, however, Treet's innate stubbornness and frugality came to his aid. As a man who had lived the better part of a century with little more than the price of the next meal in his pocket at any one time, he simply could not allow himself to give up anything that had taken so much precious effort to accumulate in the first place. His mental acuity was a hard-won possession, arrived at only after years of painful and painstaking effort. It was, Treet had learned during the course of his life, no small achievement to be completely sane.

Mental clarity required such tremendous expenditures of discipline, vigilance, and perseverance, that Treet was awed to think he had succeeded where so many, many others had utterly failed. He did not fault those who had failed. Theirs was a fate he had come too close to sharing for him to find any wide margin of comfort in his success.

But little by little, despite Treet's heroic efforts, the machinery of the conditioning tank worked on its victim. He found his sane moments fewer and more tenuous and the hallucinations fiercer, more frequent, relentless. He felt his grip on reality eroding bit by bit; the plunge could not be far off.

Nevertheless, striving to hold off the inevitable a little longer, Treet undertook yet another of his experiments in sympathetic communication. Thus far these efforts had produced nothing of benefit, save giving him something to do. As he had done many times before, he began by sending his thoughts like hands outstretched, feeling, like radar waves spreading out, searching.

Only this time, instead of his mental radar streaming out into the endless void, something came back. Like the echoed ping of sonar bouncing back from a solid object, Treet sensed something moving at the farthest edge of his awareness. Something massive. He felt like one of those oceanic divers who, in the cold, dark depths of an arctic sea, feels the turbulence of the giant humpback's flukes as the creature glides silently, invisibly past.

The contact shocked Treet so much, his fragile concentration shattered. What was that? Another hallucination? Had he begun hallucinating that he was lucid and receiving impulses from his mental experiments? Or had it really happened?

Cautiously, Treet flung out his mental net once again. He caught nothing, so forced himself to concentrate, to stretch the strands to the utmost. The effort was taxing; the hair-fine filaments of consciousness trembled with exhaustion. He was about to collapse the tenuous net when he felt the mysterious shudder again, and stronger this time.

There was no mistake. He was not imagining it. It was there.

A presence, an intelligence that was not his own, hovered nearby, watching him, regarding him with keen interest, dwarfing him like the whale dwarfs the deep sea diver. Yet, he had nothing to fear from the leviathan his net had snagged. This he sensed intuitively even as his net shrank reflexively from the contact. Whatever he had attracted with his feeble efforts meant him no harm. That much came through instantaneously.

Treet attempted another probe, but could not sustain the effort and withdrew to puzzle over his surprising discovery. There was something out there—he had imagined his mental universe as space, infinite and empty ... until now. Now, there was a presence lurking out there on the rim of his imagined universe. Something or someone.

Could it be Yarden? Treet wondered. He dismissed the possibility at once. Yarden, he reasoned, would feel familiar to him somehow. Her presence would be colored by her personality, and he would know her. This thing, this entity was no one he knew. Perhaps it wasn't even human. Perhaps it was something entirely indigenous to Empyrion, an alien intelligence drawn by his puny experiments. Of course, it could easily have nothing at all to do with Empyrion—a being of pure mental energy inhabiting a separate plane of existence, perhaps.

The possibilities were endless. He simply did not have enough information to know what he was dealing with, and until he did it was useless to speculate. So Treet put the matter aside for the time being and determined to rest up for another attempt at contact later. He wanted his next effort to be his best. He did not know if he'd have another chance.

The
Nilokerus glanced up quickly from his work as his superior came in. He stiffened and made a hasty salute. “Forgive me, Director, you were not announced.”

“Does order and efficiency exist only when I am announced?” The scowl on Hladik's face made it clear that no answer would be sufficient and none was wanted. The Hageman kept his mouth wisely shut. “Where's Fertig? I want him.”

The Nilokerus glanced around the stone-cut room quickly, as if the Subdirector might be found crouching in one of the corners. “He has not been seen, Director.”

“Find him. I want to see the new prisoner. Where is he?”

“Skank—”

Hladik turned abruptly and started for the conditioning chamber. “Find Fertig and send him to me. I want to see him immediately,” he called over his shoulder as he marched into the narrow corridor of cells leading to the room where the conditioning tanks were kept. It had been a sour day for the Nilokerus Director, a day for distractions and irritations. He had the uneasy feeling that things were imperceptibly going wrong, that his authority was crumbling under his feet and he could not see it. He'd soon put it right, however.

He'd crack a few skulls to demonstrate his displeasure, and soon his organization would be back to normal. It was all this business of Rohee's death and Jamrog's funeral spectacle that had made everything lax. A demonstration was needed. Fertig would make a good example. Where was the man? He'd been noticeably scarce since—well, since the Fieri escape. That long ago?

Hladik snorted. Fertig would have some explaining to do. Perhaps it was time to designate a new Subdirector. Yes, that might do. Fertig's demise would serve as a handsome warning to any Nilokerus tempted to slough their duties or allow zeal to flag.

He arrived at the conditioning chamber and entered. The room was dimly lit, the only illumination coming from the tank itself, which had two bodies suspended in it. Strange, thought Hladik, I was aware of only one prisoner. Where had the other come from? What is going on here?

He spun on his heel. “Skank!” he shouted in his best outraged Director's tone. “Present yourself! Skank!”

His summons was rewarded by a shuffling sound from the adjoining room as the lumpy bulk of Skank came lumbering into view. The man gave Hladik a look of frank disapproval, which the Director ignored as he did the stench of the place. “Where have you been?” Skank opened his mouth to answer, but Hladik threw a hand toward the tank. “Why are there two prisoners in the tank? I come to see one and find two. Under whose order was this done?”

Skank peered at his leader with open contempt, spat on the floor, and said, “Two, did you say?”

“Yes, two! Are you blind as well as stupid? Look!” Hladik whirled around and gestured at the tank and at the single figure floating there. Stunned, he sputtered in protest. “Th-there were two just now. I saw them clearly with my own eyes. Two men in the tank. I saw them.”

Skank spat and shrugged. “There's but one now.”

The Director clenched his fists and would have struck the insolent Skank, but remembered what he'd come to do. “Yes, there is but one now. I want a report.”

“The prisoner is as you see.”

“His mental status.”

“Heavy alpha and beta activity. This one has stamina, Director. He resists with force.”

“Then increase the stimulus. I want him broken.”

Skank rolled a foul eye at his master. “My orders were to keep him undamaged.”

“I give the orders, Skank. Do as you are told, or I will find someone who will.” Hladik stepped close to the tank and peered at the captive suspended motionless inside. Was there something familiar about his one? Hard to tell—they all looked alike after a while.

He turned away. “Send word as soon as he is ready to receive the theta key.” He fixed Skank with an ominous stare and marched from the stinking chamber, pausing to steal a final glance at the tank. Strange, he thought, I distinctly saw two.

Fertig stole a last
look around his kraam. Had he forgotten anything? No, he had checked and checked again. He had all he could take with him in the bundle beneath his yos. It was time to go. Now. Before he was missed, before Hladik sent Invisibles to find him.

The day the Fieri had escaped, Fertig had chosen his course. To save his life he had only one hope: making his way to the Old Section to join the Dhogs—if they would have him. To help persuade the Dhogs that he was a valuable asset, Fertig had spent the last weeks searching for information of likely use to the nonbeings. Now, armed with an assortment of facts—enough, he hoped, to buy himself a place among them—Fertig was ready to depart.

Hladik had not mentioned the Fieri debacle since that day, but Fertig knew the Hage Leader had not forgotten. The Subdirector had time and time again seen Hladik pull out from his formidable memory long lists of past transgressions to indict a victim. Fertig knew Hladik had not forgotten his presence in the room the day he and Jamrog had ordered the Mors Ultima to strike another Director. And he knew it was only a matter of time before his role in the escape of the Fieri was discovered and his death warrant issued.

He had considered joining Tvrdy, but contacting the Tanais Director was too risky. Jamrog now had Invisibles seeded throughout Hage Tanais, and Tvrdy was under closest observation. Fertig strongly doubted he could reach Tvrdy without being recognized and reported the moment he set foot on Tanais soil. Besides, time was running out for Tvrdy too. Jamrog was closing for the kill. Thus, the only path left Fertig led to the Old Section.

Desperate as he was, Fertig found no comfort in the prospect of joining the Dhogs. If even a fraction of the tales were true, life among them was certain to be raw misery. But Fertig feared death more than discomfort—and death was certain if he stayed. Already Jamrog's instability was manifest for anyone with eyes to see it. Empyrion was spinning into a chaos of blood and destruction. Who would be left alive when the smoke cleared?