The correct door, the door Aulden had meant to direct him to, was a hundred meters further on.
Bredon hesitated. He was, he believed, nearing the war room now, with just two more chambers and a short passageway to pass through. What if, worse than a mere machine, Thaddeus himself waited on the other side of this door?
Well, he would just have to risk it. “Emergency override!” he called. “Human in danger! Open up!"
The door slid obediently open, and he found himself looking into an unlit storeroom lined with dusty, vacant shelves and smelling of ink. No doors led to the war room antechamber. No doors led anywhere.
“Oh, you stinking demons!” Bredon hissed, realizing he was lost.
Worse than lost, he was alone in the enemy's stronghold, unarmed and virtually defenseless, without even a symbiote to hold wounds closed or counteract poisons.
No, he corrected himself, he was not unarmed or defenseless. He had Aulden's password. He turned and looked back down the corridor.
No one was coming. His danger, though real, was not immediate.
He still had no idea why Aulden's directions had failed him, but that did not matter. He was a hunter; when one trap or strategem failed, he devised another instantly.
He turned and headed back for where he had left one of the machines awaiting orders.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“I knew a woman once from another village, a village far from here, on the south coast where the eastern forests give way to sandy beaches, who claimed that she had once been a guest of Lord Hollingsworth of the Sea. As she told it, she had been playing on the beach as a girl, throwing sand out onto the drifting watersheets and watching as they first tried to eat it, then spat it back up in hundreds of little spurts that sent it bouncing around madly-apparently that was a popular game among the young people around there. As she played, though, something rose up from the sea, a great black shape that she could never describe clearly. She once said it looked something like an ear of corn the size of a house, or perhaps a giant fish, though of course there are no true fish in salt water.
"At any rate, a man came out of this thing and spoke to her, and told her not to fling sand on the watersheets, because it could kill them. They were delicate, this man told her, and trying to eat the sand could give them the equivalent of a very bad stomach-ache, one so bad that it could kill the weaker ones.
"She thought this worrying about watersheets was absurd, and said so, despite her fear and wonder at this person's strange appearance and even stranger mode of travel, which she took for an odd sort of boat. The man retorted that she knew nothing of the sea or its creatures.
"She admitted that she knew very little, and after some further discussion she found that she had agreed to visit with the man in his home beneath the sea.
"The man was Lord Hollingsworth, of course, and his home the sunken palace Atlantis, deep beneath the ocean. They rode there together in the boat, or fish, or whatever it was, and he showed her many of the sea's creatures, weird and frightening things of every size and shape.
"You know, a watersheet is so thin that if you get the right angle, you can put your hand right through it and not even notice. It's so thin that it tears apart into practically nothing if you pick it up, so thin that you can only see it by the way it changes the texture of the water's surface-but it's so strong, in some ways, that it can live through the worst storms, storms that will smash a boat or a house to splinters. Well, this woman said that there were creatures in the sea that made watersheets seem as normal as rabbits. There were things that changed color and shape, things that swam by spitting out pieces of their own flesh, things that glowed in the dark, things with flesh she could see through, so that she could watch their blue-green blood flowing. There were worms kilometers long, things like fish with heads at both ends-oh, she could go on for hours describing the monstrosities Lord Hollingsworth showed her.
"But what she really remembered was the Power's own comments on these creatures. ‘You know,’ she said he said, ‘I never get tired of watching these. They're stranger than anything I could ever make.'
"And of course, I'm sure that you'll be struck with the same thing that struck her, and that struck me when I heard that-if he didn't make all the creatures in the sea, who did?"
– from a conversation with Atheron the Storyteller
In all the old stories, the tales of the ancient times when death was a common thing, the heroes always faced certain doom bravely, daring their foes to step forth and do battle, loudly proclaiming their faith in whatever noble cause they served, right to the last.
Geste wondered how, in all the hells of every dead religion that had ever been preached, anyone could ever believe such tripe. He was facing death now, he knew, and he was too terrified to stand, let alone laugh in its face. He fell back in his chair, teeth chattering, his entire body shaking with fear, forcing his eyes to stay open in the forlorn hope that he might see and fend off at least one or two attacks, extending his existence for a few precious seconds.
All he saw was his own face, mockingly reflected in the stasis field.
Thaddeus's laughter surrounded him, roaring laughter that did not sound sane to him.
“You thought you had me, didn't you, Trickster?” Thaddeus shouted. “You thought that you had me in stasis forever, out of your way, so you could go on playing God with these pitiful primitives, go on playing your stupid games with the women! Well, Trickster, it looks like I'm the one with the last laugh, the one with the best trick!"
Geste could not have answered had he wanted to. He had lived his entire life, centuries now, with the conviction that he would live on until he grew tired of it-and the happy suspicion that he would never grow tired of it. Death was for other, lesser beings, never for A.T. Geste of Achernar IV.
Now he knew, with absolute certainty, that Thaddeus was going to kill him, and the thought of death, of ending, of nonexistence, tumbled down on him like an endless avalanche. He waited, trembling, for oblivion.
It wasn't fair, something screamed in the back of his mind. Sure, mortals died all the time, but they knew they were going to die, they were told from early childhood that they would someday die, and no one had ever told him that, no one had prepared him. He had been promised eternal life, and he was being cheated out of it because he had been stupid enough to stand up for what was right, instead of cowering like the rest.
“How did you hide that thing, anyway?” Thaddeus asked. “I didn't see, either through my puppet or on the recordings. It's a good trick, Geste-not good enough, of course, but a good trick. How did you do it?"
Like the swift and sudden dawn of Denner's Wreck, the realization burst in Geste's mind that Thaddeus was not going to kill him immediately. He wanted something, first. Fear washed away. It was if he had been trapped inside a mounting wave that had broken upon the seashore-not the little waves of this tideless, moonless planet, or anything from the tamed and broken oceans of Terra, but the great pounding surf of Achernar IV. He was still afloat, drifting against his will, but he was no longer blind and drowning. He was able to think again.
“I'll tell you how I survived, if you like,” Thaddeus said, as if making casual conversation. “It wasn't hard. What you have in the bubble there is an old-fashioned clone. I made him about sixty, seventy years ago now, did a little surgery when he was about a year old, destroyed his personality, juiced up his growth hormones to bring him up close to my own size, and then grew a receiver into the brain, so that I could use that body myself. I've got a little switch here, so that, up until a few minutes ago, I could use whichever body I fancied at any given time. I did some adjustments, so we'd be as indistinguishable as possible-sped up his growth, as I said, and carved some scars, that sort of thing. A neat job, wasn't it?"