Gordon R. Dickson (40 page)

After they had settled down, there
was a wait of two or three more minutes, then the door to the helicopter
closest to us opened, the steps were run down, and a dozen men and women in
civilian clothes came out to range themselves like an honor guard in a double
line ending at the foot of the steps.

Another brief wait, and a single
figure came out. There was no doubt that this was Paula Mirador, even if the
rest of the proceedings had been designed to leave any doubt. I stared, myself.
I had not seen anything like this since before the time storm; nor had any of
us, I was willing to bet. We had grown so used to living and dressing with
practicality and utility in mind that we had forgotten how people had used to
wear clothes, and what sort of clothes they might wear.

Paula Mirador was a page out of some
ghostly fashion magazine, from her dainty, high-heeled, cream-colored boots to
an elaborately casual coiffure. She looked like she had just walked out of a
beauty shop. In between was a tall, slim woman who only missed being very
beautiful by virtue of a nose that was a little short and a little sharp.
-Besides the boots and the warm brown hair of her coiffure, she wore a carefully
tailored white pants suit over an open-throated polka-dotted blouse, with the
wide collar of the blouse lying over the collar of the suit. A grey suede
shoulderbag with an elaborately worked silver clasp hung from one shoulder.

She took my breath away—and not by
virtue of her band-box perfection alone. Her hair was not that blonde, her face
was not that perfect, but something about her rang an echo of Swannee in my
mind.

She walked down the steps, not
looking at us yokels, and gazed around at the general scenery, then said
something to one of her civies-dressed attendants, who popped to and turned
away to peel off an escort of eight armed troopers to come toward us.

Once upon a time, I would have
credited the attendant with a prior knowledge of what I looked like, seeing him
come directly towards me, alone. Lately, however, I had begun to realize how
much the way in which human beings instinctively position themselves gives out
signals. The group pattern of those standing around me amounted to a sign with
an arrow pointing to me and the words
here is our leader.

At any rate, the envoy, a
round-faced young man in his mid-twenties, who looked something like a taller
version of Bill, came up within a dozen feet of me and stopped. His troopers
stopped with him.

"Mr. Despard?" he said.
"You are Mr. Despard, aren't you, sir? I'm Yneho Johnson. The Empress
would like to speak to you. Will you follow me, please?"

I did not move.

"That makes two of us," I
said. "I'd like to talk to her. I'd like to know what the hell she's doing
here on my property without my invitation. I'll wait here five minutes. If she
hasn't come personally to explain by that time, I'll blow the whole batch of
you apart. You're parked on top of enough buried industrial dynamite to leave
nothing but dust."

He blinked. Whether because of my
tone and attitude, or because of the information about the dynamite, was hard
to tell. Probably both. The dynamite, of course, was a bluff. It would have
taken twenty truckloads of that explosive to mine the whole parking area even
sparsely. But there was no way he and the rest of Paula's party could be sure
we did not have that much; and in any case, I had nothing to lose by bluffing
since they outgunned us anyway.

He hesitated. I turned away.

"Bill," I said, "see
he doesn't waste time."

I walked back a few steps toward the
palace, hearing Bill's voice behind me.

"You've lost fifteen seconds
already," Bill was saying. "Do you want to try for more?"

I turned around and saw Johnson,
with his escort, retreating at a fair pace toward his mistress. He rejoined her
and spoke animatedly. She, on the other hand, as far as we could tell from this
distance, was the picture of cool indifference. She waved a hand gracefully on
the end of one slim wrist, and he came back to us with his bodyguards.

"Mr. Despard," he said.
"The Empress warns you. If you're bluffing, you'll be shot down by our
escort troops as soon as the five minutes are up. If you're not bluffing,
whether you kill us or not, her troops, who love her, will catch you and roast
you over a slow fire. She, herself, never bluffs."

I turned toward Doc.

"Doc," I said, "shoot
him."

Doc unslung the machine pistol he
had hanging from his right shoulder.

"Stop. Stop—" shouted
Yneho Johnson. "Don't! Wait a minute. I'll be right back."

"Just under two minutes
left," I reminded him, and watched him gallop back across to his Empress.

They were still talking a minute
later.

"Four minutes up," said
Bill, behind me.

"Let it get down to thirty
seconds," I told him.

We waited.

"Coming up on four and a half
minutes," Bill said.

I stepped out in front of the others
and made an elaborate show of looking at my watch.

"Now," I said to Bill,
under my breath.

He had a small detonator switch in
his pocket, with a wire running from it back into the palace and from there out
again to a spot in the parking area near its west edge. He reached into the
pocket, pressed the detonator button; and a fountain of dirt exploded very
satisfactorily to about thirty feet in the air, thereby cleaning us out of
dynamite almost completely—and not industrial dynamite at that, but the sort of
explosive that used to be available in hardware stores in mining areas. I made
a large show of looking at my watch again.

"Maybe they won't realize it's
a warning," said Marie, tightly.

"They'll realize," Ellen
said.

They had. The Empress was at last on
the move toward me—not by herself, but with her whole entourage surrounding
her. Mentally, I docked her a couple of points for not coming sooner. It should
have been obvious to her that if there was one patch of ground in the parking
area not likely to be mined, it would be the space where I and my own people
were standing. She came on until her group merged with mine, and she walked up
to stand face to face with me, smiling.

"Marc," she said,
"you and I have to have a private talk."

"I can talk out here," I
said.

"You
probably can." She was very
pleasant. "I find it works better for me if I don't take my own staff into
my confidence exclusively. But don't you think we could both be a little more
relaxed and free if it was just the two of us chatting?"

It was not an unreasonable argument;
and I had already made my point—which was that I was not about to make any deal
behind the back of my associates. I could afford to give in gracefully.

"All right. Come inside,"
I said.

I took her into the palace. On the
still air indoors, I could catch a hint of perfume about her that had not been
noticeable outside. I was suddenly very conscious of her physically—both of her
female presence and her bandbox costuming. The ghost of Swannee moved
momentarily between us, once more. On impulse I took her to the library,
cleared the books off one of the other chairs for her, and we sat down facing
each other.

"You must have somebody around
who cares about preserving information," she said, looking about the room.

"Yes," I said. "What
did you want to talk about?"

She crossed one leg over the other.

"I need your help, Marc."

"You could have written me a
letter, Paula."

She laughed.

"Of course—if it'd just been a
matter of you and me. But I'm the Empress and you're Marc Despard, the man who
controls the time storm. When two people like us get together, it has to be a
state visit."

"Aside from the fact that I
don't begin to control the time storm," I said, "what about this
state visit of yours? A state visit with an army and three howitzers?"

"Don't pretend to be something
other than the intelligent man I know you are," she answered. "All
this show of force is an excuse for you, Marc—an excuse for you to agree to
work with me because that's the only way you can keep the people you have
around you now from being hurt."

"I'm that valuable?"

"I said, don't pretend to be
less bright than you are. Of course you're that valuable."

"All right. But why should I
take advantage of your excuse? Why should I want to work with you, in any
case?"

"Wouldn't you rather have the
resources of the whole world at your fingertips, than just what you can reach
here, locally?"

"I don't need any more than I
have here," I said.

She leaned forward. There was an
intensity, a vibrancy about her that was very real, unique. She had to know I
knew she was using it deliberately to influence me.

"Marc, this world still has got
a lot of people in it who need putting back together into a single working
community. Don't tell me you don't want to have a hand in that. You're a
natural leader. That's obvious, aside from the time storm and what you've done
with it. Can you really tell me you'd turn your back on the chance to set the
world right?"

She either had a touch of the occult
about her, or she was capable of reading patterns from behavior almost as
accurately as I might have myself. My deep drive to defeat the time storm
reached out with its left hand to touch the basic human hunger to conquer and
rule. Mentally, I gave her back the two points I had docked her earlier—and a
couple more besides. But I did not answer her right away; like a good salesman,
she knew when to close.

"Say you'll at least talk it
over with me in the next few days," she added.

"I suppose I can do that,"
I told her.

So it turned out that her appearance
became a state visit in reality. The main body of her troops and the howitzers
stayed out of sight over the horizon, although none of us, including me, ever
forgot they were there; and she, with her immediate official family, slipped
into the role of guests, as old Ryan and the others had been over the
Thanksgiving holidays.

She was a good deal more
entertaining than my neighbors had been, and much more persuasive. She had a
mind like a skinning knife. But the most effective argument she brought to bear
on me in the next five days was the pretense that she was putting her military
strength aside and trying to convince me by argument alone. I knew better, of
course. As I just said, none of us could forget those troops and the artillery
just beyond field glass range. But her refusal to bring her military muscle
directly into the discussion left me to argue silently with my own conscience
over whether it was not just personal pride or stubbornness on my part that
made me so willing to expose my wives and friends to death or maiming rather
than join forces with her.

She had another lever to use on me,
although at the time I did not rate its effectiveness with that of the
argument-only ploy. She was reputed to have the kind of legendary sexiness that
made her troops dream of her at night and consider all other women as
watered-down substitutes; but I got no such signals from her at all. Except for
the odd moments in which she reminded me of Swan-nee, she was good company and
interesting, that was all. At the same time, by contrast, she did seem to make
Marie look limited and unworldly, and Ellen juvenile.

Of course, she and I had very little
time out of each other's company. We were the two heads of state and if she was
to be entertained by us, I usually had to be on stage myself. The time I had
with my own people was what was left over, usually either the early hours in
the morning, before Paula had put in an appearance from the several rooms—suite
was too pretentious a word for them —we had turned over to her and her several
personal attendants— or late at night after she had tired out.

It was a situation that put both
Ellen and Marie, particularly, at some distance from Paula and myself, but
perhaps this was not a bad arrangement. It developed that neither of them liked
her or saw anything but serious trouble coming from any extended association
with her.

"She really doesn't like you,
either, you know," Marie told me, the evening of the third day Paula had
spent with us. "She doesn't like anyone."

"She can't afford to," I
said. "She's a ruler. She's got to keep her head clear of likes and
dislikes for individuals so she can make her decisions strictly on the basis of
whether something is a good thing for her people, or not."

"A good thing for her or not,
you mean," said Marie.

That was unusually outspoken for
Marie. But the more I thought over what I had said to her, the more I liked the
ring of my own words. I went to Ellen's room and tried the same speech on her.

Ellen snorted.

"Is that supposed to be an
answer?" I said. "All right, tell me. Exactly what is it that's wrong
with Paula?"

"Nothing's wrong with
her," said Ellen.