DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction Part 36

The colors in the gla.s.s seemed to blossom beneath her inspection. Sun-gold, blue, and the scattered rose of a nebula's heart. There were flecks of green like the ghost-lights that sometimes dance on the hull of a s.h.i.+p; a fugitive violet like night and mourning; and as Chodillon watched, the colors seemed to swirl together, and change. . . .

But it was not a Library. It was old, and strange, but it was not the Machine that had once ruled Man. It was beautiful, but it was not worth dying for-a Librarian's death, or any other. Chodillon warmed the plaques in her hands before sliding the necklace beneath her s.h.i.+rt once more. It was time that she went where she needed to be.

The bar was like all bars. The mob's tale had preceded her, so that the sullen murmur of the drinkers checked, and hushed, and started again ragged and loud with exegesis when she descended the three shallow steps to the serving floor. She walked, with purpose, to one of the private booths at the back, and waited there for the man she was to meet.

When he came, he would have been forgettable-except for the air of tension that told her: something is wrong. Chodillon made herself low on the slippery covering of the padded bench and slid her hand down her leg to touch-no more than that-the smooth and heavy b.u.t.t of her blaster.

The man she had come to meet spoke of her difficulties-which were not his concern-of the troubles attendant upon reaching here, and finding here, and of the troubles that might have beset a s.h.i.+p alone in the never-never with only alone woman for crew. Chodillon let him speak, and watched the lazy steam from her flower tea rise to commingle with the smoke from less cleanly pastimes that gathered beneath this roof. And at last the man saw, as she had meant him to, that she was no threat, nor meant to be one: Chodillon, harmless, an employee, a servant, a courier, nothing more. And so, finally, he came to his point.

"We most sincerely regret to have troubled you-and naturally, some compensation must be made-but I am afraid we-I am certain you will understand how these things happen-that is, I regret that we have inconvenienced you, but it has developed that there will be no need for your services after all."

"I see." Chodillon drank her tea and allowed this man to see that perhaps she might not, after all, be so harmless as that.

"It is not a matter of compet.i.tion. Certainly not. It is only that the . . . item . .

. which you were to carry-has gone."

"Gone." Chodillon admired the sound of that-as if the item that she was to have carried had plucked itself up and begun to wander-for which, certainly, no human agency could be responsible. Gone, and with it the reason she had come here, and been placed where it had become necessary to kill a man in order to save him.

"And, naturally, your fee. . . . Some adjustment must be made. But certainly a partial-"

"Is this what you lost?" Impulsively she unsealed the neck of her s.h.i.+p's coverall and drew out the necklace. Colors shone in the rough plaques of molten gla.s.s, twisting, shaping. . . .

He straightened up and away, as though what she held between her long fingers had the power to harm.

"No," he said sharply, and Chodillon knew that he lied.

"Then there is no more to be said." She dropped the necklace and sealed her coverall back up to her throat again.

She stood, and he stood also, and set a thin wallet with a prerecorded credit on the table. "A partial payment-"

"I don't accept partial payments," Chodillon said mildly. "I don't accept payment for work I don't do. I thought I'd made that clear. You have my condolences on your misfortune," she added in that same neutral tone. "Good night."

The man-whose name she still did not know, nor did she care to ask him for it-looked as if he felt suddenly that he had done a worse days' work here than he or his a.s.sociates could imagine. He watched her leave, and after that, what he did was no longer any business of Chodillon's.

So she was free to go. There was no job, and the promise of work that had led her to Pandora had brought her to no more employment than chasing ghosts.It as not the first time Chodillon had come to a place and left it again without what she had come for.

She reached the street. The desert wind-neither chill nor hot, but born in a place where no things grew-swirled the drug-smoke and the false perfumes back through the open doors of the bars and clubs of wondertown. The night was young. The street was empty. The Pandorans were elsewhere, fortifying themselves against the dawn that would waken them to the discovery that they were still here. Chodillon, at least, could leave. Ghost Dance still waited at the Port.

But her steps took her instead back to the room she had rented, and not to the Port and her s.h.i.+p and her freedom. The necklace s.h.i.+fted with each stride, drumming gently against her skin.

Riddles.

A mob had chased the scarlet man, calling him a Librarian. Yet despite invoking the most abhorred crime in all the Calendar, they had let her take away the necklace that they called his Library, which was not a Library-and for which a man had died.

The necklace which was what she had been summoned to Pandora to remove, yet which its owner refused to claim.

Memory: Walls of s.h.i.+fting opal porcelain, hiding even the possibility of summer. Others like her, though they would soon cease to be in the moment she was Chosen. Voices. "A thousand years ago Librarians turned with their monster against Man to enslave human Man to the unliving Machine. The Libraries were machines which thought they were alive, and so they set out to destroy true life. But they were destroyed instead, by the grave of the Imperial Phoenix, and now only Man decides for Man."

Now Libraries and their Librarians were gone, and there was only Man.

The h.e.l.lflowers had found the Ghost Capital and destroyed all that survived of the Old Federation.

More than once Chodillon had carried the proscribed wonders of that vanished civilization to those rich and powerful and mad enough to buy them.

Jewels and toys for the mighty; eldritch artworks ancient beyond memory.

Weapons tinier and more beautiful-and more deadly-than anything that might be bought in the weapon-shops of today. In the reign of the last Heir, many such things were permitted. Now that the h.e.l.lflowers ruled from the shadow of Throne, every vestige of the Old Federation was proscribed, yet the artifacts were still traded, conveyed through the nightworld by those brave or careless enough to do so. And so of all the people on Pandora who might have come to possess it, Chodillon was best qualified to say whether this jumble of gla.s.s was a Library or not. And she said it was not.

Still, it was an object the possession of which could be fatal. And which, though valuable, could be lied about, and feared. She lay upon her narrow rented bed listening to the gusts of music which blew up from the street.

Footsteps were purposeful and eloquent outside her door, but no one came withurgent raps and hisses to seek her out, and at last Chodillon slept, with the links of the necklace stacked upon her narrow chest like tablets of ice.

That night she dreamed.

Chodillon saw cities that had long since been worn away to sand in the flower of their prime, and walked the scented streets of others that were not even remembered in legend. She spoke with wise and gentle men who were certain that their world would outlive even the lauded works of their dearest friends, and held in her hands and mind the cure for a thousand ills. Oxygen from rock. Food from sterile sand. Such infinite abundance that the very word for war could once again be lost.

Ancient knowledge, lost and banned. Knowledge that was wealth and power to any who now possessed it, wealth enough that even the hope of harvesting it was a prize great enough to have summoned Chodillon to Pandora.

She knew what the necklace was, now. Not a Library, but the books within it-memory, frozen in crystal, bereft of mind. Memory that spoke and neither thought nor listened.

Treasure enough to die for, but truly irresistible to only one creature in all the universe, and so the artifact's presence here on Pandora must be considered a trap, laid for Chodillon and her distant lover. To take it with her might be to lead the hunters to what she would die to protect. To leave it behind would be to let them know that she had recognized it for what it was and had known the danger.

And so she could do neither.

But there were other ways to spring a trap, and still take the prize.

Thus it began. One day pa.s.sed, and another, and Chodillon did not leave Pandora. She gave herself to becoming what she had only seemed to be, and let that mask of self guide her actions. She was Chodillon the darktrader, Chodillon the trafficker in strange cargoes, caught in a web of dreaming crystal. That Chodillon slept with the necklace pressed against her skin like a coiled serpent, and like a serpent it whispered to her that all she could want was hers for the summoning of her directed intellect. To leave Pandora was to return to the world where men would come to her and fill her days with their errands, and so she did not. Here was the dream that the necklace brought her, and every night was a thousand years long. Here was the Chodillon who cursed her waking and half-waking hours, and for its weight in jewels bought as much as Pandora could offer of the drug called heartsease, that summons sleep and drives the world away.

But there were days in which neither drugs nor her will could force Chodillon beneath the surface of sleep to read the Library's orphaned books. On those days, cheated, she roamed the streets of the Port, searching the skyline for the echo of vaulting pastel towers that had never been there; gold and coralagainst a brighter sun. A sky no native of this world had ever seen-that Chodillon herself had not seen in all her travels-printed itself upon her closed eyelids, waiting to become real beneath a sky through which no sound now echoed save the hydrogen howl of a thousand dying suns. Once, she now knew, there had been music, but the stars, in Chodillon's day, no longer spoke.

She would walk until at last exhaustion crept over her and she was able once more to return . . . Home.

On one such day, the Fenshee who had led the mob found her in the street before the bar where a man had told her there was no reason that she should stay on Pandora. Cold dawn was was.h.i.+ng out the sky to a pale daylight yellow.

The man held up his hand as if the gesture would stop her.

She was impatient, but he was not the barrier. She stopped and cataloged him with dispa.s.sion: a drifter, a luck-rider whose luck had gone. He was as hollow as the buildings at the edge of town and of as little danger.

She drew the ghosts of her old gifts about her, realizing when she called upon them how frail those gifts had grown. But for this man Chodillon once again made herself harmless; someone to be spoken to.

"I'll hire you to take me far away from here," he said when he saw she was listening.

Away. Her s.h.i.+p still waited for her at the Port, siphoning credit from her account and eager to be free, but habit formed her words.

"You can't afford my price, Fenshee."

"Once we had it. Amur Ramun, and Celkirk, and me."

Her eyelids flickered a little at the sound of those names- Chodillon, whose face was as silent and unreadable as s.p.a.ce. Amur Ramun, and Celkirk, and Lelchuk. The soft dust of Pandora lipped dun-colored at her boots. She looked at the Fenshee, and her listening grew stronger because now it was real.

"Yes," the Fenshee said bitterly. "We thought we'd be rich- Ramun, my brother, and me."

Amur Ramun had called her to Pandora and then told her there was nothing for her to carry. Celkirk she had killed.

Lelchuk spoke to her now.

"There're places out on the desert, if you know where to look. s.h.i.+pstrikes; old cities. We found one. A city it had been, maybe. A long time ago. There was this building. Cel didn't want to go in; it looked like it'd already been opened.

There was an idol."

"Come inside," Chodillon, said, turning away.

The gaudy night of the barroom was bleached by the wakening daylight to the color of cheap building materials. There were no windows; the light came in through the open door, diffusing as it entered. Chodillon drank liquor, strong enough to burn the skin. Her companion drank cold tea."I don't know how to tell you what it was like. Like a woman, but no woman born. There was evil in it, with that thing draped across it like an offering. Old Federation, but it had been dug up before this. Someone put it back there when he was finished."

Chodillon glanced at him, then away. The alcohol set its chemical hands on her perceptions, but it did not bring her any species of oblivion. Each detail of the bar became so sharp that it must hold meaning. The painted idol and the desert city evoked by Lel-chuk's words were more real to her than the room in which she sat.

"Cel and me, we took it away. It was the only thing worth taking. The idol was too big, and Cel didn't want anything to do with it. But we brought the necklace back here, and then we came along of Ramun. It was a strike big enough for him to want his cut. Old Federation. But we didn't trust him. Cel kept it with him; Ramun couldn't object; he wanted things kept quiet and clean. And then . . ."

But Chodillon was bored now with the story that told her what she already knew. In her dreams she had seen that city and talked to its designers.

"You've dreamed, too, haven't you?" The question jarred her, and two surprises in one day were too much. Chodillon focused on the Fenshee called Lelchuk and saw danger now.

"Dreamed. Celkirk dreamed. And now you."

"Celkirk died a Librarian," Chodillon reminded him. Celkirk's brother's face twisted with a pain that was close to pleasure.

"Not a Librarian," Lelchuk whispered with awful emphasis. "But he died.

You killed him, and then you took it. I told Ramun about you. Scared him off. I wanted you to have it."

It came to her without surprise that the brother of Celkirk was mad, and, maddened, some tiny amount more dangerous than his fellows. The room wheeled in a strange plastic dance, and the liquor in Chodillon's stomach was a separate unwholesomeness. She stood to go, as if she sat with no one and the place itself had wearied her. The necklace stuck and slid against her skin, but the dreams were far away.

"Not a Librarian. They called him that, but it wasn't true. You know. You were there. But he had to die. All those weeks I watched my brother. Now I'm watching you. When it is too late for you . . . I'll be waiting."

"Wait, then," Chodillon said agreeably. Her eyes were fixed on the doorway, but the light that she saw was far brighter.

Riddles.

Where was the Library that Celkirk had died for possessing, if Chodillon did not now have it?

The daylight of Pandora, harsh and soft as smoke, slid like swords through the thousand c.h.i.n.ks of the cubicle walls. One sword's point struck the pooledcrystal, and the walls daubed and starred with colored light.

Celkirk had not died a Librarian.

But Celkirk had needed to die-so his brother had said, and Lelchuk had led the mob that hunted him.

Not as a Librarian. The distinction was precise and informative. Then ... as the Library itself?

Chodillon picked up the necklace, and the patterns on the walls flashed to hiding. Yet this was not a Library.

But, somehow, the cause of a Library. . . .

The colors in the ancient gla.s.s flowed and changed-like living things, or things that thought they lived, but nothing that could answer. Nothing that could think.

Until somewhere, somehow, a human possessed it, and in time was human no longer, possessed in turn by some strange crystal resonance that tuned bone and brain to the music of a vanished civilization. Until the human and the Machine were combined. Until there was a Library that bled.

This, then, was the nature of the trap; a small trap, woven of a brother's pain and guilt, cast without knowledge of who and what she was. If she were an ordinary woman, she would have been poisoned and dazzled as Celkirk had been, enraptured by the necklace until a Library looked out of her eyes.

But she was not.

And now Chodillon knew what she must do to spring Lel-chuk's trap safely, and take the prize.

She laid her own trap with care. She set the necklace carefully aside, and turned away from its dreams. She did not need them; another would dream them for her. She went into the streets to buy food, and drugs that she no longer used, and oftener than was safe for him she would turn and find Lelchuk waiting. He waited for the moment when he could raise the city to burn her, when the last of her humanity would be gone and she would be alien for all to see, a monster, a thing that could be killed and, in dying, expiate the death of the brother-not-brother, the monster whose monstrousness was proved. Chodillon waited, regaining the strength she had lost to her mask, letting him think she was losing the battle his brother had lost. Soon enough, she was ready.

The soft twilight made it possible for even Pandorans to dream. Chodillon walked now toward her s.h.i.+p instead of away, and away from a meeting instead of to it.

Dying things expend their last reserves of energy in the brief display that kills them. Lelchuk, waiting with his human hunters, was a dangerous man once again.

And Chodillon was once more a dangerous woman.

She did not stop at the sight of the mob, but met Lelchuk in the street before his bravos and spoke to him as if he were her equal."I have what I came for."

He looked at her and did not see what he sought; the h.e.l.l-thing wearing flesh that he could raise the mob against. And not seeing it, he hated her instead.

"Li-" he began, and made the mistake of drawing while he said it.

There was light in the movement of sunset on her blaster, and then more light as Chodillon fired. Lelchuk fell, and she gazed down at him, her variable eyes hooded.

"But you never asked me, did you?" she asked, as if the dead man could still hear. "What it was?" Then she looked up, and her eyes were mild as they swept the mob.

"He was mad," Chodillon said to those who had followed Lelchuk. "Are you mad, as well?"

The Pandorans let her pa.s.s unhindered.

Her s.h.i.+p was where and as she had left it; safe. If there was danger, it must always come to Chodillon alone, and never to her s.h.i.+p and what it held. There were no Port Services on Pandora; she announced her intention to leave to the Port Recorder and received automatic clearance from its computers, and a few moments later the black s.h.i.+p was starborne.

And now Ghost Dance was her world again, and Pandora was the dream.

She followed the dying light of silent stars until the light itself was blended into the hyper-light the stardancers call angeltown.

When all the world was cool silver, she rose from the Mercy Set and unsealed her coverall, removing the crystal necklace for the last time. She held it in her hands for a long moment, then carried it to a device in the heart of her s.h.i.+p.

To tamper with this device was to doom Ghost Dance and the world that held her, but Chodillon opened it with confidence. She laid the necklace on the scanning bed, and waited while the dreams the crystals held were transferred into Ghost Dance's own mind. And then she opened the case and took it out again. The crystals were dark, now. Lifeless.

She walked down into the hold, past the vitreous cradle in which she would soon sleep, carrying the empty books. The Pandorans would forget her.

Everyone forgot her, with time, and when she returned in a hundred years to see what new crop their deserts bore, the Pandorans would not know her.