Piers Anthony - Juxtaposition

Sheen laughed. “Dost thou forget thy husband. Lady? I doubt it!”

But the Lady Blue’s confusion seemed genuine. “I know him not. I know thee not. What am I doing amidst these animals?”

Stile now observed that Clip and Neysa seemed similarly bemused. They were backing off from Belle and each other as if encountering strangers.

“I think it’s amnesia,” Sheen said. “I don’t think they’re fooling.”

“Lethe!” Stile exclaimed. “Water of Lethe—Belle was doused with it!”

“I thought it was poison,” Sheen said. “It can’t affect me, of course—but I think your friends have just given up their memories for you. For thee.”

“They shall have them back!” Stile cried, his knees feeling weak at the narrowness of his escape. Everyone had caught on except him! He cudgeled his brain to evoke the proper counterspell. Lethe was one of the streams of Hades, mythologically; what was the opposite one, the stream of memory? Every magic had its countermagic. Mnemosyne, that was it! Had he been doused by Lethe, he never would have been able to remember that bit of mythology! In fact, this had been a devastatingly neat trap. Water was harmless, so would not alert the unicorns; the water of Lethe was natural to Phaze, so did not reek of Adept enchantment. Stile, struck by it, would not suffer physically and would experience no mental anguish in his forgetfulness. Therefore the trap had not been obvious to the Oracle, who would have been alert for more dramatic mischief. Only the instant reaction of his companions had saved Stile. For they could not have restored his memory, had he been caught; they were not Adepts. He was the one person who had to be protected.

But the trap had missed him, and therefore would come to nothing. Stile played his harmonica, then sang: “Lethe made my friends forget; Mnemosyne shall this offset.” A cloud formed, instantly raining on the group. The water of memory doused them all.

The Lady Blue put her hand to her soaking hair. “Oh, I remember!” she exclaimed, horrified. “My Lord Blue, I forgot thee!”

“Because thou didst take the water meant for me,” Stile said. “And Clip and Neysa too; all acted on my behalf.” But he was running out of time. Quickly he set a truth spell on Belle—and established that she was innocent of any complicity in the plot or in the temptation of Clip. The Adepts had used her without her consent, and the Lethe had eliminated her memory. They had put her under a geis to shake herself dry at the moment the Blue Adept came near, without knowing the significance of her act. So she was clean, despite being the essence of the trap.

“Yet can we not tolerate her like in our midst,” the Herd Stallion decided grimly. “Shame has she brought on me and my herd; I thought to protect thee here. Adept.” Against that Stile could not argue. The Stallion’s pride had been infringed, and he was the proudest of animals. Unicorns were the most stubborn of creatures, once set on a course. There would be no relenting.

Sadly, Stile and his friends watched Belle depart, rejected again. She changed to heron-form and winged into the forest, lovely and lonesome. Stile knew Clip was hurting most of all.

Stile took Sheen’s hand again and spelled them to a new crossing point. They negotiated the curtain and ran a short distance to a dome. Sheen, not suffering from the lack of oxygen, said, “I wish I could have forgotten too.” She meant she wished she could be alive.

They set up in a Citizen’s transport capsule programmed with a random address near to Xanadu, the site of the Citizens’ business meeting. This was the safest place to be in Proton. Citizens were fiercely jealous of their privacy, so capsules were as secure as modem technology could make them.

“Dare we pick up Mellon?” Stile asked.

Sheen checked, using the obscure coding only her ma chine friends could decipher. “No, he is under observation, as is your home dome,” she reported. “They are letting him work with your fortune, even facilitating his success, perhaps promoting him as another lure for you. Another ambush.”

“My enemies do seem to work that way. How much has he parlayed my net worth into now?”

“Between ninety and ninety-five kilograms of Protonite,” she said after a pause. “It is growing at the rate of several kilos per hour. It is a remarkable display of financial expertise. You will have close to a hundred kilos by the time of the Citizens’ meeting.”

“But that’s not enough!” Stile exclaimed, chagrined. “I have bets that will double and redouble it at the meeting—but that means I must have a base of at least five hundred kilos if I am to make my target fortune—and I have the feeling I’d better make it.”

“Mellon is aware of that, but there are limits to what he can do in a short time. He has tripled the stake you provided, but suggests that more of your peculiar expertise may be required.”

“Rare praise from him!” But Stile frowned. “I have about fifteen minutes until that meeting. How can I quintuple my fortune in that time without exposing myself to assassination?”

“I do not know,” she said. “You can no longer make wagers with individual Citizens; few have the resources to operate in that league, and none of these will bet with you. Your record is too impressive, and they know they can eliminate you merely by preventing you from further in creasing your fortune, so they have established a moratorium on all wagers with you.”

“So, by their rules, they will win. If they don’t manage to kill me, they will simply vote me out.”

“Yes. I am sorry. Stile.”

“Let me think.” Stile concentrated. He had been in a bad situation before, deep in the goblin demesnes, and had escaped by using the curtain. The curtain would not help him now; he would use up most of his time just getting to it and would then miss his mandatory appearance at the Citizens’ meeting in Xanadu—in thirteen minutes. Yet there was something—

For once his brain balked, refusing to yield its notion. “Sheen, I need your analytical faculty,” he said. “How can the curtain get me out of this one?”

“There is a way?”

“There must be. The assorted prophecies indicate I can somehow prevail, and my intuition says so—but I can’t draw it forth. Maybe it is far-fetched. Most likely I need to open a new dimension of insight. How can the curtain provide me with another four hundred kilograms of Protonite?”

“A borrowing against the Phazite to be transferred?”

“Would the Citizens accept such credit as wagering currency?”

She checked with Mellon. “By no means. It is hardly to their interest to assist you by any liberalization of their policies. You can use only your personal fortune and any direct proxies you may possess.”

“Proxies! Who would give me proxies?” Twelve min utes. “Guide us toward Xanadu; I’m going to be there regardless.”

“Friends who could not attend personally might issue—“

“I have few Citizen friends, some of whom are prone to betray me—and they can certainly attend the meeting if they want to, so wouldn’t need to issue proxies. I suspect many Citizens will skip it, just as shareholders have historically ignored their vested interests, but I can’t get the proxies of disinterested strangers.”

“Unless they are interested, but on business elsewhere. Maybe off-planet, or across the curtain.”

“I can’t see any friends of mine crossing right now. Most of my friends are on the other side, in Phaze, and can’t cross, because—“ Then it burst upon him. “Their other selves! How many of my Phaze friends have Proton selves who are Citizens?”

“That would be difficult to survey in ten minutes.”

“The Brown Adept! She could be one, who may not even know of her alternate existence. Get her on the holo —and have your friends check her possible identity in Proton. We’ll have to see if Kurrelgyre the werewolf knows of any prospects. And the vampires—can your friends coordinate to—“ He stopped. “No, of course such a survey would take many days. Only a computer—“