The Trickster was by no means certain Thaddeus was right about that, but he did not see any sign that Thaddeus could be swayed by logical argument, and he did not continue that line of debate. “All right,” Geste said, “let me think.” He reached up and scratched his ear.
Thaddeus took the opportunity to signal a housekeeping machine for a drink. He turned to Geste, intending to play the gracious host and offer the Trickster something, and found himself staring at a sparkling web of metal in Geste's hand, a web he recognized immediately as a stasis field generator, though he had never seen one so small.
Before he could say anything, Geste triggered his weapon, and Thaddeus froze into total immobility, a sphere of air around him freezing with him. The soft light in the room refracted strangely through the interface between normal air and the motionless field, and the colors within the field-the red of Thaddeus's angry face, the grey of his chair, the black of his hair, the brown of his clothing-seemed to fade.
As the stasis field reached full intensity the three-meter globe first turned a dead, flat black, then brightened to gleaming, reflective silver, as light became first unable to leave the field, and then unable to enter.
Thaddeus was gone, sealed inside a mirror-finish bubble of timelessness. The housekeeping machine carrying his drink, a floating wedge of black with a crystal goblet embedded in it, bumped futilely against the bubble's bright, impenetrable surface.
Geste stared, trembling. He had forced himself to remain calm while arguing with Thaddeus; he had had his internal machines and symbiotes under orders to keep him calm, and a semi-intelligent biochip chanting gently hypnotic reassurance directly to his audial nerves. He had been as slick and smooth as anyone could have wanted in pulling the stasis generator from the bent-space pocket he had built into his ear.
Thaddeus had scanned his guests up and down the spectrum, checked for every sort of emission imaginable-Geste had expected as much, and had detected some of the operative devices with his own internal mechanisms. Thaddeus had blasted them all with high-speed flashes of high-intensity ultraviolet, infra-red, and gamma radiation that were too quick to seriously harm human tissue, but which would fry virtually all surface-dwelling or air-carried tailored microbes, and would burn out the metastable energy fields that made up noncorporeal intelligences-not that they had brought any noncorporeals to Denner's Wreck, or had the means to create them. He had doused them all in chemical suppressants to prevent any sort of pheromone-assisted psychological assault. He had removed their clothing and searched it, all the way down to the subatomic level.
Their symbiotes had been damaged, their own tissues somewhat damaged as well, and Geste was fairly sure that he had lost some magnetic memory somewhere, but Thaddeus had been reassured that he had disarmed his visitors.
However, he had not checked on the shape of the spaces they occupied.
Even Thaddeus could not think of everything.
Geste had counted on that. He had never heard of putting a bent-space pocket into a human body, and he had hoped that Thaddeus hadn't either.
Not that that had been his only trick. Thaddeus had wiped out a wide variety of artificial bacteria and a few viruses with his disinfectants and ultraviolet, and had confiscated more than a dozen weapons of various kinds in Geste's clothing.
The bent-space pocket had been the Trickster's best gimmick, though, and he knew it. People built the pockets into floaters all the time, but not into themselves; it seemed somehow unhealthy to put a hole through one's own body, even a polyspatial hole that bypassed mere normal-space flesh. For one thing, an opening was needed. Virtually all the natural openings in the human body were already spoken for, and creating new holes was dangerous and unesthetic.
Geste, of course, had been desperate. He had considered anchoring the pocket to the roof of his mouth, but had rejected that; he had needed to be able to talk. Instead, he had sacrificed the hearing in his right ear. He hoped that removing the pocket and rebuilding his inner ear would not be too difficult.
His trick had worked, and Thaddeus was captured, and now Geste's programmed calm had run out. Adrenalin poured into his blood unregulated by his damaged and panicky symbiotes. He stood, shaking, as the realization sank in that he had done it, he had stopped Thaddeus.
A sliver of triumph worked its way through the numb relief, and then shattered into full-blown gloating. He had done it! Thaddeus was neatly boxed up and out of the way.
On the heels of exultation came doubt. Was Thaddeus boxed up? It seemed too easy, somehow.
Perhaps there were machines that were programmed to release Thaddeus. Perhaps there were creatures with orders to kill the prisoners. Geste stepped back and looked about warily.
“Not bad, Geste,” Thaddeus’ voice said, speaking from the wall behind him. “Not bad at all."
Geste turned, telling himself that it was just a machine, a recording or an artificial intelligence synthesizing its master's voice.
“A very nice effort,” the voice said. “But not enough. No, Geste, I'm not a recording, not a machine. I'm Thaddeus. The real Thaddeus."
Geste was trembling again, harder than ever.
“You see,” Thaddeus said, “you only got one of me."
Chapter Twenty-Three
“The Power called Leila of the Mountain of Fire lives inside a mountain, in the great jungles far to the southwest. The top of the mountain was blasted away long ago, and inside the hole that the blast left burn fires so hot that the rock itself melts and flows like water. Whether it was Leila who blasted the mountain and lit the fires, or whether that happened before she came to live there, no one now remembers.
"Whatever the cause, the mountain burns, but Leila lives in it unharmed. Her skin is darker in hue than any mortal's, even a southerner's-almost black. Some say this is due to the heat of the flames surrounding her home.
"There is a village at the foot of her mountain, a large and prosperous village, and Leila looks after the people there. When one falls ill she comes to his bedside and touches him, and five times out of six he is well again the next day. When the crops fail or the hunters return empty-handed, Leila's creatures bring baskets of strange food and leave them in the village square, for the Elders to distribute to those who need it most. Storms always pass by the village without harming it, yet there is never a drought.
"This might be paradise, save that Leila asks a price for her protection; once a year she chooses a handsome young man from the village who must come alone to her home atop the mountain. This man knows he has been chosen when a voice calls him by name, a voice that speaks from the air.
"If the chosen one refuses, then Leila's protection is withdrawn from the village; no baskets of food are brought when supplies run low, the ill are left to recover or die on their own, storms no longer pass by, and a thousand lesser evils go unhindered. Leila takes no vengeance, she merely withdraws her aid.
"But that is enough; in all the memories of the villagers, and in all the tales going back many generations, no chosen one has held out against the summons for more than a season.
"And what becomes of the chosen ones, the sacrifices? No one knows. Some have returned alive, after a season or a year or ten years, but these fortunate ones never remember anything that happened after they passed the rim of the crater. Most never return at all. None have ever been found dead-if they return, they return alive and well, and usually live long, happy lives, troubled only by their inability to recall what befell them…"
– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller