Jack Vance - Big Planet

Almost under his face a tray held four neatly arranged heads, with their brain-pans sawed off to display the mottled contents.

Glystra twisted away his gaze. To the right a cauldron bubbled; to the left a bin held acorn-shaped fruits. Zygage, indeed. He watched in fascination. A man, sweating and pallid, in clammy black leather breeches and a blue neckerchief, scooped up a shovel-full of the zygage acorns, sprinkled them into the cauldron.

Zygage! Glystra turned away from the hole, thinking hard. If zygage were a constituent for the oracle-serum, why, then, the brain-extracts? Probably no reason whatever; probably they were added only for their symbolic potency. Of course he could not be sure—but it seemed unlikely that pituitary and pineal soup would cause wild contortions like those he had witnessed in the Veridicarium. Much more likely that the zygage was the active ingredient; such would be the parallel with Earth plant-extracts: marijuana, curare, opium, pejote, a dozen others less familiar.

He thought of his own experience with zygage: exhilaration, then hangover. The oracle’s reaction was the same, on a vastly exaggerated scale. Glystra pondered the episode. A miserable terrified wretch had undergone torment and catharsis to achieve a magnificent calm and rationality.

It had been an amazing transformation, baring the optimum personality apparently latent in every human being. How did the drug act? Glystra’s mind veered around the question: a problem for the scientists. It seemed to achieve the results of the great de-aberration institutes on Earth, possibly by the same essential methods: a churning through the events of a lifetime, the rejection of all subconscious obsessions and irrationality. A pity, thought Glystra, that a man only achieves this supreme state to die. It was like the hang-over after his smoke-breathing… In his brain there was a sudden silence, as if a mental clock had stopped ticking. Bishop had felt no hangover. Bishop had—he recalled Bishop’s intensified well-being after the zygage inhalation; apparently his habit of ingesting vitamins had warded off the hangover.

Vitamins… Perhaps the oracle died from exaggerated vitamin depletion. And the idea gave Glystra much to think about. He walked slowly back and forth across the damp stone floor.

The woman with the yellow hair watched him dully; the red-eyed man spat.

“Ssst.”

Glystra looked toward the wall. Hostile eyes gleamed through the hole. He crossed the room, peered out into the corridor.

It was Nymaster. His tough round face wore an expression of angry discomfort. “Now you lie in the pen,” he said in a low urgent voice. “So now you die. What then for my father? Your man will take away the swords, and possibly kill my father, for so you ordered.”

True, thought Glystra. Nymaster had served him faithfully. “Bring me paper,” he said. “I will write to Corbus.”

Nymaster handed through a greasy scrap of paper, a bit of sharp graphite.

Glystra hesitated. “Have you heard anything of—”

“Koromutin says you will be oracle. For Charley Lys-idder himself. So the prefect told him while he was beating Koromutin.”

Glystra pondered. “Can you bribe me free? I have other metal, other swords like yours.”

Nymaster shook his head. “A ton of iron would effect nothing now. Tonight Mercodion has ordained that you burn up your mind for the Bajarnum.”

The words sank into Glystra’s mind. He stared at Nymaster scratching his cheek with a ruminative finger. “Can you bring Corbus back with you? For another sword of fine steel?”

“Aye,” said Nymaster grudgingly. “I can do so… A mortal risk—but I can do so.”

“Then take him this note, and bring him back with you.”

Now the sounds and the stenches of the pen had no meaning for him. He paced up and down, whistling thinly through his teeth.

Up, down, up, down, looking across the room at each turn, watching for Corbus’ face.

A chilly thought struck him. He had guessed something of the mechanics of the plot against him. After Morwatz had failed, after he had eluded the second expedition by crossing the river Oust and dropping the high-line, he had been left to go his own way to Myrtlesee, but all the time, all the weary miles from Swamp City, he had merely been taking himself to a prearranged trap. The strategy was clear. He had been left to execute it himself. Suppose Corbus was part of the machinery? At this moment nothing was unthinkable.

“Glystra.”

He looked up, turned to the hole. It was Corbus in priest’s robes. Glystra glanced right and left, crossed the room.

Corbus looked in at him quizzically. “How goes it?”

Glystra pressed close to the hole. “Did you bring it?” he asked in a whisper.

Corbus passed a little package through the hole. “And now what?”

Glystra smiled thinly. “I don’t know. If I were you I’d start back down the monoline to Kirstendale. You can’t do any more here.”

Corbus said, “You haven’t told me what you plan to do with the vitamins.”

“I plan to eat them.”

Corbus eyed him questioningly. “They been giving you bum chow?”

“No. Just an idea I’ve got.”

Corbus glanced up and down the corridor. “With a big hammer I might make a hole in this wall—”

“No. There’d be a hundred priests out here at the first click. You go back to the sword-maker’s, wait till tomorrow. If I’m not there then I’m never coming.”

Corbus said coolly, “There’s one or two charges in the ion-shine. I’ve been half-hoping”—his eyes glistened— “to meet someone we know.”

Glystra’s throat constricted. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered.

Corbus said nothing.

“She never had Bishop killed, I’m sure of it… It was an accident. Or he tried to stop her.”

“No matter how you look at it—she’s part of the picture. Four good men killed—Bishop, Pianza, Darrot, Ketch. I’m not counting Vallusser; that little rat was in up to his neck. I’ve been watching her a long time—ever since she insisted on joining our little suicide club.”

Glystra laughed shortly. “I thought all the time it was—that she—” he had no words to finish.

Corbus nodded. “I know. One thing I’ll say for her, she put her life on the line alongside ours. She came out on top. She’s up there”—he jerked his thumb—“and you’re down here. What a stinking hole. What are they cooking?”

“Brains,” said Glystra indifferently. “They distil out some kind of nerve juice which they mix with zygage and feed the oracles. It works on the oracles like the smoke worked on the Beaujolain soldiers, only a thousand times more.”

“And it kills them?”

“Dead as a mackerel.”

“Tonight you’re the oracle.”

Glystra held up the package Corbus had brought him. “I’ve got this. I don’t know what’s going to happen. From here out I’m playing strictly by ear. And,” he added, “I may be wrong, but I have a hunch there’ll be a few unforeseen developments here at Myrtlesee Fountain and I’m not worrying.”

Nymaster appeared behind Corbus. “Come, there’s a prefect on his way down. Come quick.”

Glystra pressed close to the hole. “So long, Corbus.”

Corbus waved his hand non-committally.

The sun dropped behind the fronds of Myrtlesee Fountain. A mesh of cirrus clouds flared golden in the sky. Dusk drifted in from eastern lands where night had already fallen over peoples and cities and tribes and castles still unseen.

A marble pavilion extended to the east of Myrtlesee Dome, enclosed by a colonnade of ornate design. Behind the colonnade was a pond of still water, dimly reflecting the afterglow with the fronds and ferns of the grove silhouetted in reverse. Four blond and slender youths bearing torches came from the dome. Their hair was cut in effeminate bangs. They wore skin-tight costumes sewed of red and green diamonds, black satin slippers with curled toes. They set the torches in tripods of dark wood, returned within.