This Fortress World (18 page)

"It's too far," I said. "I can't walk that far. Go on, Laurie. Please leave me. Get away, if you can, and I'll be more grateful than you can imagine."

"No," she said. She said it soft and low, but I knew she would never say anything else. "Take another step," she said. "Just a little one."

I took a step and another one and another one, and it wasn't so bad, really, as long as it was only one step at a time and I didn't look ahead but concentrated only on taking this one step, this one step more. And the corridor was not paved with knives, exactly, as it had been in my dream. It was more like needles, and after a little they didn't jab into my toes every time I took a step and send their shivers of pain all through my body but only every few steps, and I could stand it. My feet seemed a long way down, and my head seemed a long way up so that I bent my head down to keep it from bumping against the ceiling. And Laurie was beside me, holding me up with her strength, and making little encouraging sounds.

The darkness inched past, and we went by the cavern room and it was dark, the machines in it like dark, crouching demons, and I wondered where Sabatini was, and the others, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered except taking one more step, and I took it, and I didn't step in the right place because there were needles there, but that was all right because I could stand it. As long as Laurie was beside me and the only way I could get her out of this place was to walk out with her, I would walk. I would walk all over Brancusi, if its crust was still smoking; I would walk up into space, I would climb to the stars, if there were only needles there to press my toes against, and we were climbing and there were needles there.

We climbed one step at a time. I counted them for a while, but I lost track after we got to a hundred, because the darkness was spinning, and it wouldn't stop no matter how steadily I held my head. It had grown a little lighter, too, and there were footsteps in the light, not ours I figured out at last, but somebody else's.

I felt something pressed into my right hand, and I looked down and it was a gun, a flash gun. I wondered where it had come from, and then I knew that Laurie must have brought it for me, and now I had it in my hand I felt stronger and more of a man, no longer naked, and it struck me as funny that I should be stumbling along the dark corridors of an old, old fortress with a beautiful girl. I laughed and the footsteps ahead stopped, and a light sprang up beside me, lighting the corridor, lighting the Agent who stood blinking in the light.

It wasn't Sabatini, nor the small, dark man with the glittering eyes, either, but the other one, the big, soft one who was hard and cruel underneath, the one who laughed. He wasn't laughing now. He had a gun in his hand, and I was laughing. I was laughing so hard that I could scarcely raise the gun in my hand, but I lifted it up and pulled the trigger while he was trying to peer against the light, and he smoked for a moment and melted to the floor.

I couldn't stop laughing, and I started to run. I ran through the dark corridor and feet pattered after me, calling. And I knew that I should stop running, I should stop laughing, and let the feet catch up, but I couldn't stop.

And I ran on numb feet through the night until it solidified around me, and I couldn't run any more.

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I think I was unconscious for a long time, and the unconsciousness blended with sleep, and the sleep was plagued with dreams.

They were not ordinary dreams. Sometimes, I think, I was awake and thought that I was dreaming, and sometimes I was dreaming and thought I was awake, and I couldn't sort out the reality. I had a fever, and when I wasn't burning I was freezing, and I raved.

Sometimes I dreamed that I was back in Laurie's rooms, only I was not in the kitchen but in the bedroom that I had never seen, in Laurie's own bed. And I dreamed that Laurie would sit beside me on the bed and put her hand on my burning forehead, and her hand would be cool and healing, and her voice would be music. And I knew that was a dream, because I had fainted there in the castle. She could never have lifted my body, never have carried me out, and I dreaded the moment when I would wake up and learn whether she had escaped after she discovered that she couldn't bring me back to consciousness.

I dreamed, too, that I was back in the cell on the moldy straw, and I didn't know whether that was a dream or not. I hoped that it was a dream, not so much because of myself, but because Laurie was there, too. Sometimes she lay against the wall, where Frieda had lain, and sometimes she lay close beside me when I was shaken by chills, and she warmed me.

Sometimes we would talk, and I wasn't certain then where we were.

"I am a fortress," I would say. "Once I was not, a long time ago I was not, and evil entered my world unopposed. So I learned to build up my walls strong and thick. They will not break them down. They will shatter themselves against my walls, but they can never reach me where I sit in the secret place. This fortress world will stand against the onslaught of the galaxy."

"Shhh," she would say. "No one will hurt you any more."

"I love you, Laurie," I would say. "You are good and pure and beautiful, but I love you most because I have seen you inside your fortress and you are beautiful there, too. There you are most beautiful of all. I love you. I love you."

"I know," she would say. "Shhh, now."

"But it isn't safe to love. I mustn't love you, because love is the battering ram no walls can stand against."

"That's true," she would say softly.

"And if I let you in, will you laugh at me? Will you see the secret me and laugh? Because if you did I think I would be like Sabatini and build myself a wall that no one could ever pierce. I would disappear behind it, and no one would ever see me again. They would see only my fortress walls, cold and gray and impassably thick."

"Sleep, now," she would say. "No one will ever hurt you any more."

And one day I woke up, and I was cool, not cold with teeth-chattering chills, but healthfully cool. I lay there, afraid to open my eyes.

I took a deep breath with my eyes closed. The air was clean and fresh. I moved my feet. They didn't hurt much, a little but not much. There was something over them, something cool and crisp.

I opened my eyes. Sunlight streamed in a window. I was in a bedroom. It was simply decorated, but everything was clean. It was a woman's room. I could tell by the bright, frilly curtains at the window and the colorful, little rugs on the floor. I turned my head. A curtain in front of a clothes rack was half drawn back. I could see tunics and skirts hanging from the rack, not many, but they were hanging straight and clean. I thought I remembered one of them, a yellow one cut low in front.

I sat up. The room tilted for a moment and then straightened up. There was a closed door in front of me. It opened as I looked at it. Laurie came in.

Her face brightened as she saw me. She had a tray in her hand. The tray had a bowl and a glass on it. She hurried to the bed and set the tray down on a low table beside it.

"Will!" she said happily. "You're awake."

"I hope so," I said. I stared at her hungrily. She was wearing the white robe she had worn the morning I was here before, and her hair was loose around her shoulders. Her face was flushed, and she was even more beautiful than she had been in my dreams. "I was afraid that it would be different."

"Why, Will," she said, and her eyes dropped. "What a nice thing to say."

It hadn't been a nice thing to say. It had come out, unpremeditated, because that was the way I felt. "I must have said a lot of things."

"You talked a lot," she said, "but it was mostly raving. It didn't make any sense." She wasn't looking at me.

"Some of it did, I said. "I can remember some of it, and some of it made sense."

But it wasn't any good. The freedom of delirium was gone, and the walls were back. I sighed. I leaned over and looked into the bowl on the tray. There was a thin soup in it, a broth that steamed an enticing odor up to my nostrils. I lifted the bowl like a cup and drank it down. It was hot and good, but it wasn't filling.

"Now for some real food," I said.

"I don't know," she said uncertainly. "You've been sick for a long time."

"How long?"

"Six days."

"It's about time," I said.

She got up and went into the other room, almost running. I lay back against the pillows, a little weak after sitting up for the first time in six days, and I listened to her moving around, humming happily, singing a few phrases. Pans clattered, food sputtered. It was all very wonderful, and I wished it could last forever.

The tray was heavy when she brought it back. In the middle, on a huge platter, was the biggest, thickest steak I've ever seen. It was still sizzling. On smaller plates were potatoes, a vegetable, and a green salad. There were two empty plates, stacked up.

I swallowed hungrily and picked up a knife and fork and cut thin slices from the steak. Inside, it was pink and juicy. I heaped up a plate with food and handed it to Laurie and heaped another plate for myself, and we started eating.

Laurie ate with me, heartily, but watching me, too, to see that I didn't eat too fast and get sick. So we ate slowly, both of us, but we ate for a long time, and when we finished I propped myself back against the head of the bed and felt happier and more contented than I had felt since I left the monastery.

"I haven't thanked you for rescuing me and for nursing me while I was sick," I said. "It's just like the other time. They don't make words big enough for things like this. Both times you put yourself in danger. The last time it was such bad danger that I still shiver when I think about it. And you did it for a stranger. Why?"

"I was the only one who could do it," she said simply. "And it was something that needed to be done."

"That isn't why, but I suppose it will have to do. How did you find out I was being kept there?"

She looked away. "People talk to me."

"But how did you find the place? How did you get inside without anyone seeing you?"

"There's always a way to get into any place, no matter how well it's guarded."

"How did you get me away after I passed out that second time?"

"Please, Will," she said. "I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to think about it again."

I took a deep breath. "I won't ask any more questions, but I'm going to talk about it. You've risked a lot, and you can't be in any more danger than you are now. You should know what it's all about, or as much as I can tell you. I would have told you before if it hadn't been for the danger. Now—"

"You don't have to tell me anything," she said.

"I know," I said, "but I want to tell you." That was true. The desire to tell was almost a passion. What Sabatini hadn't been able to torture out of me, I wanted to give away, a gift of gratitude or of—of something else.

I made a long story out of it because I wanted her to know everything. I told her about the monastery and the Cathedral, how life was a long dream of peace and piety and reflection, and if the physical life was austere, the inner life was rich and full, and I had never wanted to leave.

Laurie listened and nodded. She understood.

I told her how that dream was shattered, there in the Cathedral, when Frieda entered, filled with life and fear, and of the Agents who waited outside for her. I told her about the gift Frieda left—"A pebble," Laurie mused—and how Frieda had gone out into the street, gone out to the black Agents, and Sabatini had smiled at her and cut off her feet.

Laurie's face twisted with horror.

I told her how I had doubted and hesitated, how I had gone to the Abbot hopefully, uncertainly, and what he had said, and what I had felt and done. I told her about the aliens in the monastery, and the long chase through the corridors, and the strange and terrible fight in the Cathedral, and how I had finally escaped.

"Ah," Laurie sighed.

I told her about Siller and the bookshop and the escape to his surprising rooms and what he had taught me in the basement. I told her what I had learned about the physical and political and social situations in the galaxy and about life and about Siller. I told her how Siller died and how I had fled again, and as I told it, it seemed as if I had always been fleeing and never escaping, always running and never getting away from the real danger.

"You can't run away from yourself," Laurie said.

It was true. That was what I had been trying to do, and it was impossible. I had known it a long time, but I hadn't been able to face it until now. I was through running. I had stepped off the treadmill for good.

I told Laurie about the long chase through the streets of the Imperial City and of my escape. Her face was alive as she listened; her eyes watched me; she lived the experiences with me as I described them. She was concerned and relieved, apprehensive and hopeful, and she believed and understood, and it was surprising to me that I could repeat it all calmly, reliving the terrible things and they were not so terrible as they were sad, and my burden of guilt rolled away like a stone in front of the cave that imprisoned me.

I told Laurie about our meeting and how I had felt. I told her of my trip through the city after I left her and of reaching the port and finding Falescu gone. I described how I had gone to the office and tried to bluff my way aboard the Phoenix, and had my bluff called, how I had bribed my way aboard the ship, and the way I had been captured and what Sabatini had said about my hiding place.

Laurie shook her head. "He was right. You shouldn't have trusted one of the officers."

I told how Sabatini and his men had escaped with me from the port, how they had taken me to the old fortress. I described the cavern room. I told her what Sabatini had said and done and how I had decided not to speak at all. I told her about the nightmare night, the long, long night, in the cell, and of Frieda.

Tears glittered in Laurie's eyes. "You should have told him. Why didn't you tell him?"