Flan leapt to her feet too. “But we don’t know either!” she babbled. “I thought you knew that. We just call it the world — you know, the way one does — and none of us have the slightest idea how to tell you where it is, because none of us has ever been outside it before, and we don’t even know what it looks like.”
She had no idea if he believed her or not. She tottered forth through the veiling of the wall with a feeling of having diced with death and unexpectedly won.
5
The preliminary reports from Calculus Horn came in later that morning, and they were somewhat confusing. It seemed that Arth had arrived at a node of fate which, although only a minor node giving rise to low-probability outcomes, prevented a fully satisfactory long-term forecast. Calculus had attempted long-term casts, but these were woolly. Two suggested disaster. One of these gave Arth as completely destroyed by the castaways, and the other suggested far-reaching changes; but since all eleven of the other casts gave the situation as largely unchanged by the refugees, High Brother Gamon had written off the two minority casts as the lowest probability and ticked the majority reading. Looking them over, the High Head had no hesitation in countersigning Brother Gamon’s conclusions.
When it came to short-term readings on the castaway party itself, the confusion was even greater. Every single reading was different. Most balanced out into precisely nothing. Looking along the charts, the High Head saw love, success, and stability jumbled with death, disaster, and change in both major and minor readings. “This looks like the Powers of the Wheel saying, ‘pardon us, what was your question?’ to me,” he said wryly.
“My opinion too,” said Brother Gamon. “If you take the disaster to refer to whatever accident befell that capsule, then there is nothing to suggest that their stay in Arth will be anything but peaceful and happy. But of course, I shall have to take detailed individual readings on all the survivors before I can be quite sure.”
“Start those as soon as you want,” said the High Head. “Meanwhile, for horoscope purposes, look at all the close analogues to the Postulate worlds, and if those don’t fit, try analogues to ours. It’s going to be one or the other. As soon as you get a match, tell me.”
He discounted otherworld and its analogues. Flan and Sandra had so plainly been lying. All in all, he sent Brother Gamon forth with considerable optimism, both of them confident that the castaways’ home universe would be discovered in the next day or so. And as far as early readings could be trusted, it looked as if these people were pretty harmless to Arth. You only had to compare these readings with the sharp indications of disaster read on the Ladies of Leathe, to see how little there was to fear. Tentatively he ordered that vigilance on the party be relaxed. He would be interviewing them all again anyway tomorrow.
This done, he turned to Edward’s preliminary report on the dead in the capsule. So far, Edward was puzzled. All seemed to have died of total heart failure without any evidence of violence at almost the same instant. Edward conjectured that this instant of death was the moment when the capsule broke through into Arth and encountered the first wards. He simply could not account for the fact that death had been selective.
The High Head’s decision was conveyed to the castaways along with an execrable lunch. Two young mages arrived carrying a large platter mounded with passet, which steamed overcooked vegetable scents and seemed to have uncertain-looking dark gobbets embedded in it.
While they placed this unsavory heap on the only table, the higher mage who chaperoned them stood tapping his boots with his stick — officer’s baton? wand? none of the women were sure which it was — and gazing at some point above all their heads.
“Vigilance upon you is relaxed,” he announced. “You will not any longer be closely watched, and you may go anywhere in the citadel within reason. You will be told if you overstep the bounds. And you will be careful not to interrupt any mage in his work.” So saying, he summoned the two young mages with a flick of his stick and departed, conveying them before him with the tip of it pointed at their backs. It was as if the young men were marched off at gunpoint.
As the doorway folded shut, feelings inside the room were divided between suspicion that this announcement was a trick to get them to talk, and disgust at the nature of the lunch.
“At least we can talk about this food,” Flan said. “What are those horrible-looking black bits?”
“Burnt meat,” said Sandra.
Helen put forward a long-fingered hand and squeezed one of the gobbets in a cautious finger and thumb.
“Oh, don’t!” Zillah said. “It looks like a slug.”
This earned her a startled look from Judy and a reproof from Roz. “There’s no need to be disgusting,” Roz said. “Well, Helen?”
“Someone burnt the meat and then soaked it in water to make it soft, I think,” Helen said. “It may be the way they do things here.”
None of them could manage much of the stuff, and Marcus refused to eat anything at all; although this, Zillah suspected, was because he had spent most of the morning eating bread and jam. “Oddie dug!” he shouted. Encouraged by Flan’s shuddering laughter, he threw a handful of black gobbets across the room.
“Marcus has it right,” said Flan. “Ardy poo for breakfast and oddie dug for lunch. What a gift with words your child has, Zillah.” She might be angry with Zillah herself, but she did not feel Roz had the slightest right to treat Zillah so peremptorily. Having, she hoped, made that clear, she said, “Well, Roz? What say we test out this permission to go anywhere we like?”
“Suits me,” said Roz. The two of them departed without another word. The veiling of the door opened to let them through without any difficulty, and no mage appeared, either to stop them or escort them.
Sandra said unbelievingly, “It looks as if that mage meant what he said. In that case, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to find their kitchens and I’m going to tell them a thing or two.”
“I’ll come with you,” Helen offered quietly. “Suppose we take the plate of stuff back with us? That will give us an excuse to go there.”
Sandra thought this was an excellent notion. The two of them set off, carrying the large platter between them; with everyone’s forks stuck into it at random and Marcus’s handful of gobbets reposing on top. This left Zillah with Judy and Marcus. We’re the two shell-shocked ones, Zillah thought, looking at Judy sitting very upright against the wall. Judy’s eyes filled with tears from time to time. Otherwise there was almost no expression on her slightly droll face. She looked like a sad Pierrot. Zillah did not feel like crying. It was more that she had a blank, disconnected feeling, rather light and feverish — the way she had always thought a person might feel if they were coming around after a lobotomy. She simply could not get used to the fact that she was not missing Mark any longer. By coming here, she had put it out of her power to hope, and her misery was gone. Oddly enough, it did not seem to make her feel relief.
But there was Marcus to look after. “Do you want to go for a walk, Marcus?” Zillah said dubiously. As far as she could work out, he should have been resting — or was it getting ready for bed? She felt more than a little jet-lagged herself. Every rhythm in her body was telling her that, though it was afternoon in Arth, it was quite another time on Earth. If Marcus was feeling the same, he would be restless and irritable.