The quivering mist at their feet seemed treacherous, weightless and yet dense. It was as if there might be water under it one moment and an abyss the next.
Mada stepped fearlessly into the swirling mist and took Ave with her. The obedient Blood Door opened in front of her.
A dense mist had enveloped the ruins of the old shrine under the Dread Wall. As they walked breast-high through the cloud that lay on the stones, Ave and Mada seemed to be fording a river of foam.
Mada knew the way. They came surprisingly soon to the black building of the Temple of Eternity. Ave thought that the unfortunate Kutsi must have led them the long way round. Poor wretch! It cost Ave an effort to restrain himself; he did not even allow himself a sigh, but he felt sorry for the man.
Ave despised his own habitual changes of mood. But now he was firm and knew what had to be done. That was why he was taking Mada to Um Sat.
The Elder was astounded when he saw the newly-weds on the threshold of his cell once again.
He gave Mada a seat in an armchair opposite the table at which he had spent the whole night. Ave stood beside Mada.
“What’s happened? Can I help you in any way?”
“There is no happiness in this world,” cried Ave. “But in your power there is another world!”
The Elder raised his eyebrows in astonishment.
“There is another world in space,” explained Ave, and he told the Elder all about what had happened.
Um Sat became thoughtful.
“So I must accept Yar Jupi’s conditions and, in my turn, demand that he send his daughter to Terr? Doesn’t that seem incredible? To take refuge in space?”
“But that would mean salvation not only for me and Ave,” intervened Mada. “It would be the fulfilment of a dream: to help the Faetians, to find them a new world. Nanny and Mother were thinking about it. Not only Ave and I, but all of us could be happy there. It’s not just for myself that I’m ready to fly to Terr. That’s what I’m going to tell my father.”
Mada understood global problems in no way more deeply than Um Sat.
“What duties as an astronaut can Mada carry out?” asked Um Sat sternly.
“I am a Sister of Health. We are needed everywhere. And not only for the children.”
“That’s true,” agreed Um Sat. “Ave Mar, you will stay here, no one is going to look for your secretary. Mada must go to her chambers and lock herself in. Ave, see your young wife as far as the Dread Wall. It’s a good thing that you both look on the trip to Terr as an exploit, not just as an escape.”
After their departure, the Elder sat for a while in reflection. Then he summoned several sages of learning who had arrived for the session. They filled his cell. Many of them were roundheads, but there were longfaces as well. As they came in, each touched his right eyebrow with his left hand. When the cell was packed full, Um Sat asked if he should fly from Faena on the eve of possible events for which, in the name of Justice, the toilers and their friends had been preparing for so many cycles.
After all, he was an adherent of the struggle against the proprietors on both continents, although he had not fully fathomed its depths.
Those present decided unanimously that Um Sat, the personification and pride of learning on Faena, should go into space to find the continents that the Faetians needed. Many of them considered that in this way they would best safeguard the life of the great Elder, but no one said anything about it to him.
Um Sat threw his hands apart. He must submit to the general decision. He had now received the right to act. When Ave returned, Um Sat called the Dictator’s secretary over the closed TV. The screen lit up and the slits of the secretary box glittered on it.
“Dictator Jupi, most illustrious of the illustrious, consents to receive the honorary longface Um Sat and is sending an escort for him,” announced the box, which had been programmed to speak in the old style. The screen went blank.
“What?” whispered Ave Mar. “Go into the Lair? Doesn’t this mean that Yar Jupi wants to take a hostage?”
The Elder smiled sadly.
“The risk is not so great.”
An officer of the Blood Guard soon appeared in the cell. Ave’s blood froze. Before him stood the living Yar Alt.
The caller bowed to the Elder, glanced casually at Ave and said pompously:
“The greatest of the great, the Dictator Yar Jupi, gave you the right, honorary long-face, to enter his presence. I have been sent to escort you to the palace.”
Ave Mar had the impression that even the Blood Guard officer’s voice was the same as Alt’s. Had he really come back from the dead? Perhaps the paralysis caused by the bullet had only been temporary. But why didn’t he rush at Ave the way he had done in Mada’s room?
The officer of the Blood Guard merely glanced indifferently again at Ave Mar and bowed to him.
“In the name of the most illustrious Dictator, I bear apologies to the honoured guest.”
As soon as the officer of the Blood Guard and Um Sat had gone out, Ave Mar rushed to the door of the cell. To his amazement, it was unlocked. Only then did Ave Mar realise that the officer’s face had been innocent of a scar.
Dictator Yar Jupi was waiting impatiently for Um Sat Omnipotent by grace of the Blood Council, capable in favour of the proprietors of sending millions of Faetians to their death and ready to unleash a disintegration war at any moment, he was powerless to safeguard the one life that was the most dear to him.
Yar Jupi was a complicated person. He understood extremely well whom he was serving and how. After losing his wife in his time, he had come to hate the roundheads from whom she had contracted a fatal disease while nursing them. This hatred had finally found expression in a barefaced doctrine which it was impossible to believe, but which proved convenient to the proprietors from the Blood Council. Now, at the height of power, when he was ostensibly leading the life of an ascetic in voluntary seclusion, love for his daughter had become the only ray of light to Yar Jupi. Everything else was darkness: fear for his own life, terror of a war which he was nevertheless preparing himself, terror also of the toilers and of his own masters who were ready to get rid of him.
The thing that mattered to him most now was Mada’s safety. She was the only one he would want to save from among the millions of doomed.
But how?
And so, in fulfilment of the complex plan that had occurred to him, he had appeared unexpectedly during a session of Peaceful Space in the Temple of Eternity. And now Um Sat was due to arrive.
The officer of the Blood Guard, Yar Alt’s brother, handed Um Sat over to two security robots which led the sage of learning through low-ceilinged, sumptuously furnished halls.
Urn Sat glanced out of the corner of his eye at his unwieldy bodyguards or escorts with their cubic heads and hooked, scaly manipulators.
In one of the rooms, a box with glittering slits in it, just like the one that the Dictator used, said with programmed floweriness in the impeccable ancient manner:
“Urn Sat, honorary longface, may pass through the door in front of him, on the other side of which there awaits him the most blissful meeting with the greatest of the great, the most brilliant of the brilliant, Yar Jupi, Dictator of the continent of the Superiors.”
The door opened of its own accord, the robot security guards fell behind and Urn Sat went into the grim, empty dungeon with the grey walls.
Yar Jupi, bearded, hook-nosed, with a shaven skull and upslanting eyebrows, rushed to meet the visitor, riveting him with a piercing, half-mad stare.
“Does Urn Sat realise what honour and trust has been afforded him?” he shouted.