E. Tubb - Child of Earth

“Logic.”

“Just that?”

“Add experience,” said Dumarest dryly. “But let’s take logic first. How many people are resident in Shandaha’s domain? All we’ve seen are three; Nada, Delise and our host himself. Who maintains the place? Where are the servants? The cooks and guards and suppliers of food and wine? There has to be machinery so where are the maintenance engineers? Those who do the work. And where are those things which came for us. Those who, according to you, slaughtered the Kaldari? Did you actually see it happen?”

“No,” admitted Chagal. “I was told, but I think I heard it or what could have been it. Shots and screams and the smell and sound of burning.”

“Before you went down under the vapor?”

“I don’t know.”

“There is too much we don’t know. Too much that doesn’t make any real sense. That’s why I think we must be in a prison. Think of a cell,” Dumarest urged. “A box housed in a larger building. We see a couple of guards-Nada and Delise. The warden-Shandaha. In a prison as we know it that’s all we might be able to see. Especially if we were in confinement. Kept secluded while being interrogated.”

Chagal shook his head and reached for a flagon of wine.

He poured a stream of ruby fluid into a goblet and sipped then swallowed as if to wash away an unpleasant taste.

Dumarest said, “You find it hard to believe?”

“I think you could be reading into it more than there is to see. Shandaha could just be amusing himself. Joining with us to relive incidents from our past as he explained. Bored, he wants to expand his field of knowledge. I can’t see how you can think of it as interrogation.”

“Maybe we haven’t had the same experiences. With you did he always go through an initial ritual.”

“The sparkling liquid, the machine, the electrodes?” Chagal nodded. “Yes. To begin with. Then it just seemed to happen.”

“One second normal, the next up to your armpits in blood as you operated on some poor devil. Listening to his screams. Fighting to hold him down. Emergency field operations after a battle or during one. You rode with the Kaldari and it would have been a part of your duties. But did Shandaha ever question you as to your beliefs? Talk about God?”

“No.”

“Is he still riding your memories?”

Chagal shook his head. “No, Earl, not that I know of. Anyway, why should he? He’s taken all he wants. There’s nothing more he could gain.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain.” Dumarest touched the chessboard. “I don’t think you played a harmless game with Delise. I think you unknowingly supplied information of a kind. That you were being interrogated. It’s an art in a way and I think our host is very good at it. I also think he has made it into a game. He wants to find out what he wants to know without betraying what it is.”

“That’s crazy! Why doesn’t he just ask?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, if he has to, he will, but I don’t want to be around when he runs out of patience.”

Dumarest selected a flagon from the table. It was made of crystal ornamented with writhing images, filled with wine and heavy to his hand. He ripped the cover from a cushion and tipped cakes and other viands into the sac then tied the neck to secure the bundle. “Coming?”

“Where?”

“Through that door. I want to find out the size of our cell.”

“And the flagon and food?” Chagal answered his own question. “Emergency rations and something to take care of anyone who might want to stop us.” He followed Dumarest’s example. “Let’s go.”

The door was narrow giving on to a short, curving passage blurred with a dull ruby glow. The roof was low, the walls bare, the floor a pattern of oddly shaped tiles. A strange place that Dumarest couldn’t remember ever having seen before. He paused at the end facing another door. One closed and unyielding. Struck it yielded a hollow sound.

“What now?” said Chagal.

“We get through it.”

Dumarest set aside the flagon and bundle, the knife whispering from his boot as he knelt to examine the edges of the door.

“Did you come through this?”

“I can’t remember, but I must have done. How else would I have got to the room back there?”

A different way, a different portal. Chagal should have recognized that but Dumarest didn’t bother to explain. Instead he thrust the blade of his knife into the gap he had discovered, gripped the hilt and, with a surge of power from back and shoulders, lifted the steel to halt at an obstruction, to fight it, to feel it yield. The door swung open to the impact of his boot.

Chagal sucked in his breath as he saw what lay beyond.

Nothing. A void of darkness that was more than an absence of light. A region in which all illumination was sucked and extinguished as all matter was destroyed in a black hole.

One that radiated a vibrant warning. A place not to be touched, entered into, examined, investigated. The ultimate taboo.

“Earl!” Dumarest felt the tug at his belt. “Earl, step back! Step back!”

Away from the insidious temptation of the unknown. The subtle and sometimes lethal attraction felt when looking down from the edge of a cliff, the rim of a waterfall.

A danger he recognized and he yielded to the tug at his belt. As he moved back the door swung shut to be as it had been before.

“God!” The doctor looked ill. “What the hell was that?”

“A dead end.”

Dumarest turned and began to retrace his steps down the passage. Before him the door leading to the conservatory grew nearer, larger. Beyond the chamber seemed unchanged.

Chagal, shaken by what had happened, reached for an open flagon and gulped directly from the bottle.

“That was close,” he said. “Too damned close.”

Dumarest ignored the doctor. He walked to the far end of the conservatory and narrowed his eyes hoping to penetrate the nacreous glow that illuminated whatever lay beyond the crystal. His skin prickled with familiar warnings of danger. Did the darkness they had seen extend to beyond the conservatory? Had he stepped into it what would have happened? Chagal had prevented that. He had also claimed the narrow door was the only way into the chamber but was that what he had been led to believe? Had Delise merely joined him to play a game? Had she known what was to come? Arranged for it to happen?

How to escape the trap?

A whirl of thoughts and speculation that spun at his mind and corroded his normal objectivity. Indecision was a danger as was strong emotion and now he was being affected by both. Shandaha’s work?

“No! Earl, for God’s sake! No!”

Dumarest heard Chagal’s cry as he stepped back from the shimmering crystal, the heavy weight of the flagon rising in his hand. It left his grip in a flowing arc, bursting as it met the pane, shards flying, wine spattering, the glowing barrier shattering, revealing darkness.

An ebon cloud that engulfed him and sent him whirling through space and time.

It was as if he had been instantly transported to a place of stygian darkness assailed by forces beyond his experience and understanding. A place so alien that his mind and body could sense nothing which could be interpreted as familiar. He seemed to be floating, drifting-wild speculation but he could sense no point of material contact on his body and the only association he could make was when he had drifted in the void.

But then he could see; now he was blind. Blind and deaf and helpless as a new-born child thrust from the comfort of the womb into a realm of fear and terror, needing to learn the basics of living, to breath, to move, to communicate. Touching, tasting, feeling, learning to avoid pain, to gain mobility, to master the mysteries of a new environment.