The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

“What did you tell him?”

“Tell him? I told him his sweetheart was dead or dying.”

“No, no,” said Starmount. “Not at the moment of crisis. What did you tell him to make him cooperate in the first place?”

“I told him,” said the Lord Crudelta evenly, “that I was myself a Lord of the Instrumentality and that I would kill him myself if he did not obey, and obey promptly.”

“And under what custom or law did you act?”

“Reserved material,” said the Lord Crudelta promptly. “There are telepaths here who are not a part of the Instrumentality. I beg leave to defer until we have a shielded place.”

Several members of the panel nodded and Starmount agreed with them. He changed the line of questioning.

“You forced this man, therefore, to do something which he did not wish to do?”

“That is right,” said the Lord Crudelta.

“Why didn’t you go yourself, if it is that dangerous?”

“My Lords and honorables, it was the nature of the experiment that the experimenter himself should not be expended in the first try. Artyr Rambo has indeed traveled through space 3. I shall follow him myself, in due course.” (How the Lord Crudelta did do so is another tale, told about another time.) “If I had gone and if I had been lost, that would have been the end of the space 3trials. At least for our time.”

“Tell us the exact circumstances under which you last saw Artyr Rambo before you met after the battle in the Old Main Hospital.”

“We had put him in a rocket of the most ancient style. We also wrote writing on the outside of it, just the way the Ancients did when they first ventured into space. Ah, that was a beautiful piece of engineering and archaeology! We copied everything right down to the correct models of fourteen thousand years ago, when the Paroskü and Murkins were racing each other into space. The rocket was white, with a red and white gantry beside it. The letters IOM were on the rocket, not that the words mattered. The rocket has gone into nowhere, but the passenger sits here. It rose on a stool of fire. The stool became a column. Then the landing field disappeared.”

“And the landing field,” said Starmount quietly, “what was that?”

“A modified planoform ship. We have had ships go milky in space because they faded molecule by molecule. We have had others disappear utterly. The engineers had changed this around. We took out all the machinery needed for circumnavigation, for survival or for comfort. The landing field was to last three or four seconds, no more. Instead, we put in fourteen planoform devices, all operating in tandem, so that the ship would do what other ships do when they planoform - namely, drop one of our familiar dimensions and pick up a new dimension from some unknown category of space - but do it with such force as to get out of what people call space, and move over into space 3.”

“And space 3, what did you expect of that?”

“I thought that it was universal and instantaneous, in relation to our universe. That everything was equally distant from everything else. That Rambo, wanting to see his girl again, would move in a thousandth of a second from the empty space beyond Outpost Baiter Gator into the hospital where she was.”

“And, my Lord Crudelta, what made you think so?”

“A hunch, my Lord, for which you are welcome to kill me.”

Starmount turned to the panel. “I suspect, my Lords, that you are more likely to doom him to long life, great responsibility, immense rewards, and the fatigue of being his own difficult and complicated self.”

The miters moved gently and the members of the panel rose.

“You, my Lord Crudelta, will sleep till the trial is finished.”

A robot stroked him and he fell asleep.

“Next witness,” said the Lord Starmount, “in five minutes.”

Vomact tried to keep Rambo from being heard as a witness. He argued fiercely with the Lord Starmount in the intermission. “You Lords have shot up my hospital, abducted two of my patients, and now you are going to torment both Rambo and Elizabeth. Can’t you leave them alone? Rambo is in no condition to give coherent answers and Elizabeth may be damaged if she sees him suffer.”

The Lord Starmount said to him, “You have your rules, doctor, and we have ours. This trial is being recorded, inch by inch and moment by moment. Nothing is going to be done to Rambo unless we find that he has planet-killing powers. If that is true, of course, we will ask you to take him back to the hospital and to put him to death very pleasantly. But I don’t think it will happen. We want his story so that we can judge my colleague Crudelta. Do you think that the Instrumentality would survive if it did not have fierce internal discipline?”

Vomact nodded sadly; he went back to Grosbeck and Timofeyev, murmuring sadly to them, “Rambo’s in for it. There’s nothing we could do.”

The panel reassembled. They put on their judicial miters. The lights of the room darkened and the weird blue light of justice was turned on.

The robot orderly helped Rambo to the witness chair.

“You are obliged,” said Starmount, “to speak quickly and clearly to this court.”

“You’re not Elizabeth,” said Rambo.

“I am the Lord Starmount,” said the investigating Lord, quickly deciding to dispense with the formalities. “Do you know me?”

“No,” said Rambo.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Earth,” said Rambo.

“Do you wish to lie or to tell the truth?”

“A lie,” said Rambo, “is the only truth which men can share with each other, so I will tell you lies, the way we always do.”

“Can you report your trip?”

“No.”‘

“Why not, citizen Rambo?”

“Words won’t describe it.”

“Do you remember your trip?”

“Do you remember your pulse of two minutes ago?” countered Rambo.

“I am not playing with you,” said Starmount. “We think you have been in space, and we want you to testify about the Lord Crudelta.”

“Oh!” said Rambo. “I don’t like him. I never did like him.”

“Will you nevertheless try to tell us what happened to you?”

“Should I, Elizabeth?” asked Rambo of the girl, who sat in the audience.

She did not stammer. “Yes,” she said, in a clear voice which rang through the big room. “Tell them, so that we can find our lives again.”

“I will tell you,” said Rambo.

“When did you last see the Lord Crudelta?”

“When I was stripped and fitted to the rocket, four jumps out beyond Outpost Baiter Gator. He was on the ground. He waved good-bye to me.”

“And then what happened?”

“The rocket rose. It felt very strange, like no craft I had ever been in before. I weighed many, many gravities.”

“And then?”

“The engines went on. I was thrown out of space itself.”

“What did it seem like?”

“Behind me I left the working ships, the cloth and the food which goes through space. I went down rivers which did not exist. I felt people around me though I could not see them, red people shooting arrows at live bodies.”

“ Where were you?” asked a panel member.

“In the wintertime where there is no summer. In an emptiness like a child’s mind. In peninsulas which had torn loose from the land. And I was the ship.”

“You were what?” asked the same panel member.

“The rocket nose. The cone. The boat. I was drunk. It was drunk. I was the drunkboat myself,” said Rambo.

“And where did you go?” resumed Starmount.

“Where crazy lanterns stared with idiot eyes. Where the waves washed back and forth with the dead of all the ages. Where the stars became a pool, and I swam in it. Where blue turns to liquor, stronger than alcohol, wilder than music, fermented with the red red reds of love. I saw all the things that men have ever thought they saw, but it was me who really saw them. I’ve heard phosphorescence singing and tides that seemed like crazy cattle clawing their way out of the ocean, their hooves beating the reefs. You will not believe me, but I found Floridas wilder than this, where the flowers had human skins and eyes like big cats.”