Topaz ran her hands lovingly through the flowers as we went down the path. Underfoot the ground had the look and feel of soft down. After a moment we entered a cleared space with what seemed at first glance a stream of water tracing an arabesque path among huge, humped boulders. The breeze freshened, the lacy curtains shimmered and thinned before it and I saw a gossamer vista beyond of unreal gardens where fantastic beauties lay in wait.
“Sit down,” Topaz said. “I don’t know why Lord Paynter sent us here but I suppose he’ll join us when he’s ready. Isn’t it lovely? Now I can have my hair starred again. Oh, do sit down! Right there, on that—”
“That rock?” I asked.
“No, that chair. Look.” She sank lightly on one of the boulders and it curved and moulded itself beneath her to a couch the shape of her body, fitting every bend of her limbs perfectly. It looked very comfortable.
I grinned at her and sat down myself, feeling thick, resilent softness yielding as I sank. Deliberately I turned off my mind. Events wholly beyond my control had catapulted me into this world and this complex situation.
The only way I could keep sane was to ride along without a struggle until the time for action came. I thought I’d know it when it did. There was no use asking questions of this lovely deliberately feather-brained little creature beside me. Perhaps, when Paynter came—
“Have some fruit,” Topaz invited, gesturing at the stream flowing past.
I looked again. It wasn’t a stream. Call it a tube, of flowing crystal, hanging unsupported in the air about three feet off the ground. It came out of the downy earth at the edge of the trees, twisted intricately around the boulders and dived into the ground again farther on. From where I sat I could touch one arch of it without stretching.
Drifting past my hand came a globe, large as an orange, of a pale green translucence. Topaz put out her hand, waited for it to drift nearer, plucked it out of the stream. She gave it to me, cool and dripping from its bath.
“Eat it if you like,” she said. “Choose what you will. I’m going away for awhile. Oh, I’ve been so good to you! Hours and hours I sat waiting for them to wake you up and my hair grew all dull and horrible.” She shook her curls and her face brightened.
“I’ll show you,” she promised. “I’ll use the star-powder all over. It takes some planning, though. The stars in my hair will have to be a different color and my face—a half-mask, do you think? A dark mask, set off by the stars? Or jet stars along my arms, like gloves.”
Somewhere among the trees in the direction from which we had just come a gong sounded one clear note. Topaz looked up. “Oh,” she said. “Lord Paynter.”
I felt in the center of my mind a sudden quickening of interest. The spy who had usurped my senses was preparing for action. But—what action?
I bit into the pale green fruit Topaz had handed me.
It wasn’t yet my problem. If anything, it was De Kalb’s. I’d have to know more before I could do a thing. I sank my teeth into crisp moist sweetness that tingled on the tongue like something mildly alcoholic. It was delicious.
“Lord Paynter—welcome to the Swan Garden!” Topaz rose from her rock and swept an elaborate and probably ironic curtsey, her bright veils billowing. “Hideous as I am,” she added, “and it’s all your fault, I make you welcome. I—”
“Be quiet, Topaz,” a familiar voice said.
I got to my feet and turned to face him as he came out from among the crystal-shaped flowers that hid the path. It was the voice I had heard in my dim awakening moments here. But seemed to me now even more familiar than that. A thin cold flat voice, a little too high. Oh yes, I had heard it before—perhaps a thousand years before.
He was a tall man, big, thick, heavy, with a fine military bearing. He had a down-drooping mouth between the flat slabs of his cheeks, very sharp pale blue eyes—Murray’s eyes, Murray’s face, Murray’s voice. It was Colonel Harrison Murray.
It wasn’t surprising, of course. So far as I knew, there might be other people in this world and there might not be. Maybe it was simply a dream, peopled by the three who still lay asleep beside me in the time-axis, dreaming as I dreamed. Only, they didn’t suspect, apparently. They thought all this was real. Only I knew that the whole thing might explode like a bubble at any moment—
Murray, if this were not a dream, had been healed in the long bath of time, for he looked perfectly restored now. That injury to the hidden place of the mind or the soul or the body, where the nekronic being struck, was something that could mend, then, with time. With time. Were we in the world of the Face? Had we wakened? Did we still sleep? How could I possibly find myself now in a world where Dr. Essen moved behind a mask of beauty by the name of Topaz and Murray, unchanged in any particular, called himself Paynter with a perfectly straight face, and De Kalb—De Kalb—what about De Kalb?
I do not know.
Blankly I looked around. No one had spoken. But the voice was in my brain. De Kalb? It came again.
I do not know but I intend to learn. Be quiet and we will learn together.
Paynter strode briskly forward, his boots ringing on the downy earth. He wore what might have been a uniform, tight-fitting, dun-colored. He gave me a keen, competent glance in which no recognition stirred, then nodded.
“Good day. Hope you’re feeling better. All right, men, bring the boxes over here.”
He stood aside and two men in uniform lugged forward a gray box the size of a small table. It had metal banding around it and a series of sockets along the top. They set a second and smaller box beside it and stood waiting.
I found myself staring at them with far more interest than I felt in the boxes. Here were the first people I had seen closely, at first hand, who didn’t belong in the dream. Their presence shook me a little. Perhaps it wasn’t a dream then. Perhaps there really was a tangible world around us, outside this garden. Perhaps I had really awakened out of the time-axis.
I turned to look at Murray—at Paynter—who still regarded me keenly as he sat down on one of the rubber-foam rocks. I sat down again too, watching him with new patience now. I could afford to wait. After a moment he spoke.
“Topaz showed you the cave where we found you?”
I nodded.
“Oh yes, I did everything you ordered, Lord Paynter,” Topaz contributed. “I pretended that nothing—”
“Be quiet, Topaz,” Paynter said with some irritation. And then to me, “What’s your name?”
“Cortland,” I said, and added ironically, “Lord Paynter.”
“Job Paynter,” he corrected me calmly. “Topaz calls everybody Lord—when she wants something. Call me Paynter. It isn’t customary to use courtesy titles here.”
“Oh, but it is,” Topaz said. She was kneeling by the stream and flicking bits of spray out of it. “Mister and Mistress and Lord and—”
“Topaz, stop playing and run away for awhile.” Paynter was half irritated, half indulgent.
“Oh, thank you, Lord Paynter!” She was on her feet in an instant, beaming with smiles. “My hair—there’s so much to do! Call me when you want me.” She vanished among the snow-crystal trees, moving with that extraordinary grace that was as natural to her as breathing.
I watched her go, seeing incongruously superimposed upon her averted face the features of Letta Essen. They were the same. I was sure of it. Imagine Letta Essen twenty years younger, with the same keen brilliance turned to deliberate irresponsibility, deliberate loveliness, and you would get—Topaz. But a Topaz who did not seem to know she had a double.