High Sorcery (12 page)

There was one thing she could do, Tamisan decided upon her second waking. A dreamer was allowed, no, required, to study the personality of the master she must serve, if she were a private dreamer and not a leasee of the Hive. She had a right now to ask for tapes concerning Starrex. In fact it might be considered odd if she did not, and accordingly she called for those. Thus she learned something of Starrex and his household.

Kas had had his personal fortune wiped out by some catastrophe when he was a child. He had been in a manner adopted by Starrex's father, the head of their clan, and, since Starrex's injuries, had acted in some fashion as his deputy. The guard was Ulfilas, an off-world mercenary, Starrex had brought back from one of his star voyages.

But Starrex, save for a handful of bare facts, remained an enigma. That he had any human responses to others, Tamisan began to doubt. He had gone seeking change off world, but what he might have found there had not cured his eternal weariness of life. His personal recordings were meager. She now believed that to him any one of his household was only a tool to be used, or swept from his path and ignored. He was unmarried and such feminine companionship as he had languidly attached to his household (and that more by the effort of the woman involved than through any direct action on his part) did not last long. In fact, he was so encased in a shell of indifference that Tamisan wondered if there was any longer a real man within that outer covering.

She began to speculate as to why he had allowed Kas to bring her as an addition to his belongings. To make the best use of a dreamer the owner must be ready to partake, and what she read in these tapes suggested that Starrex's indifference would raise a barrier to any real dreaming.

The more Tamisan learned in this negative fashion, the more it seemed a challenge. She lay beside the pool in deep
thought, though that thought strayed even more than she herself guessed from the rigid mental exercises used by a point-ten dreamer. To deliver a dream which would captivate Starrex was indeed a challenge. He wanted action, but her training, acute as it had been, was not enough to entice him. Therefore,
her
action must be able to take a novel turn. This was an age of over-sophistication, when star travel was a fact; and by the tapes, though they were not detailed as to what Starrex had done off world, the lord had experienced much of the reality of his time.

So he must be served the unknown. She had read nothing in the tapes to suggest that Starrex had sadistic or perverted tendencies, and she knew that if he were to be reached in such a fashion she was not the one to do it Also, Kas would have stated such a requirement at the Hive.

There were many rolls of history on which one could draw, but those had also been mined and remined. The future had been over-used, frayed. Tamisan's dark brows drew together above her closed eyes, It was trite; everything she thought of was trite! Why did she care anyway? She did not even know why it had become so strong a drive to build a dream that, when she was called upon to deliver it, would shake Starrex out of his shell—to prove to him that she was worth her rating. Maybe it was partly because he had made no move to send for her and try to prove her powers; his indifference suggesting that he thought she had nothing to offer.

She had the right to call upon the full library of tapes from the Hive, and it was the most complete in the star lanes. Why, ships were sent out for no other reason than to bring back new knowledge to feed the imaginations of the dreamers!

History—her mind kept returning to the past Though it was too threadbare for her purposes. History—what was history? It was a series of events, actions by individuals or nations. Actions had results. Tamisan sat up among her cushions.
Results of action!
Sometimes there were far-reaching results from a single action: the death of a ruler, the outcome of one battle, the landing of a star ship or its failure to land.
So...

Her flicker of an idea became solid. History could have had many roads to travel beside the one already known. Now, could she make use of that? Why, it had innumerable possibilities. Tamisan's hands clenched the robe lying across
her knees. She would have to study. If Starrex only gave her more time . . . She no longer resented his indifference. She would need every minute it was prolonged.

“Porpae!”

The android materialized from behind the web.

“I must have certain tapes from the Hive.” Tamisan hesitated. In spite of the spur of impatience she must build smoothly and surely. “A message to the Foostmam: send to Tamisan n’ Starrex the rolls of the history of Ty-Kry for the past five hundred years.”

It was the history of the single city which based this sky tower. She would begin small, but she could test and retest her idea. Today it would be a single city, tomorrow a world, and then—who knows?—perhaps a solar system. She reined in her excitement. There was much to do; she needed a note recorder, and time. But by The Four Breasts of Vlasta—
if
she could do it!

It would seem she would have time, though always at the back of Tamisan
’s
mind was the small spark of fear that at any moment the summons to Starrex might come. But the tapes arrived from the Hive and the recorder, so that she swung from one to the other, taking notes from what she learned. After the tapes had been returned, she studied those notes feverishly. Now her idea meant more to her than just a device to arouse a difficult master, it absorbed her utterly, as if she were a low-grade dreamer caught in one of her own creations.

When Tamisan realized the danger of this, she broke with her studies and turned back to the household tapes to learn again what she could of Starrex.

But she was again running through her notes when at last the summons came. How long she had been in Starrex's tower she did not know, for the days and nights in the oval room were all alike. Only Porpae's watchfulness had kept her to a routine of eating and rest.

It was the Lord Kas who came for her, and she had just time to remember her role of bemused dreamer as he entered.

“You are well, happy?” he used the conventional greeting.

“I enjoy the good life.”

“It is the Lord Starrex's wish that he enter a dream.” Kas reached for her hand and she allowed his touch. “The Lord Starrex demands much; offer him your best, dreamer.” He might have been, warning her.

“A dreamer dreams,” she answered him vaguely. “What is dreamed can be shared.”

“True, but the Lord Starrex is hard to please. Do your best for him, dreamer.”

She did not answer, and he drew her on, out of the room to a grav shaft and down that to a lower level. The room into which they finally went had the apparatus very familiar to her: a couch for the dreamer, the second for the sharer with the linkage machine between. But here there was a third couch; Tamjsan looked at it in surprise.

“Two dream, not three.”

Kas shook his head. “It is the Lord Starrex's will that another share also. The linkage is of a new model, very powerful. It has been well tested.”

Who would be that third? Ulfilas? Was it that Lord Starrex thought he must take his personal guard into a dream with him?

The door swung open again and Lord Starrex entered. He walked stiffly, one leg swinging wide as if he could not bend the knee nor control the muscles, and he leaned heavily on an android. As the servant lowered him onto the couch he did not look at Tamisan but nodded curtly to Kas.

‘Take your place also,” he ordered.

Did Stan-ex fear the dream state and want his cousin as a check because Kas had plainly dreamed before?

Then Starrex did turn to her as he reached for the dream crown, copying the motion by which she settled her own circlet on her head.

“Let us see what you can offer.” There was a shadow of hostility in his voice, a challenge to produce something which he did not believe she could.

II

She must not allow herself to think of Starrex now, but only of her dream. She must create and have no doubt that her creation would be as perfect as her hopes. Tamisan closed her eyes, firmed her will, drew into her imagination all the threads of the studies spinning and began the weaving of a dream.

For a moment, perhaps two fingers’ count of moments, this was like the beginning of any dream and then. . . .

She was not looking on, watching intently and critically, as she spun with dexterity. No, it was rather as if that web
suddenly became real and she was caught tightly in it, even as a blue-winged drotail might be enmeshed in a fess-spider's deadly curtain.

This was no dreaming such as Tamisan had ever known before, and panic gripped so harshly in her throat and chest that she might have screamed, save that she had no voice left. She fell down and down from a point above, to strike among bushes which took some of her weight, but with an impact which left her bruised and half senseless. She lay unmoving, gasping, her eyes closed, fearing to open them to see that she was indeed caught in a wild nightmare and not properly dreaming.

As she lay there, she came slowly out of her dazed bewilderment and tried for control, not only over her fears, but also over her dreaming powers. Then she opened her eyes cautiously.

An arch of sky was overhead, pallidly green, with traces of thin, gray cloud like long, clutching fingers. It would have been as real as any sky might be, did she walk under it in her own time and world.
My own time and world!

She thought of the idea she had built upon to astound Starrex; her wits quickened. Had the fact that she had worked with a new theory, trying to bring a twist to dreaming which might pierce the indifference of a bored man, precipitated
this?

Tamisan sat up, wincing at the protest of her bruises, to look about her. Her vantage point was the crest of a small knob of earth. The land about her was no wilderness. The turf was smooth and cropped, and here and there were outcrops of rock cleverly carved and clothed with flowering vines. Other rocks were starkly bare, brooding. All faced downslope to a wall.

These forms varied from vaguely acceptable hurnanoid shapes to grotesque monsters. Tamisan decided that she liked the aspect of none when she studied them more closely. These were
not
of her imagining.

Beyond the wall began a cluster of buildings. Since she was used to seeing the sky towers and the lesser, if more substantial structures, beneath those, these looked unusually squat and heavy. The tallest she could see was no more than three stories high. Men did not build to the stars here; they hugged the earth closely.

But where was
here?
It was not her dream. Tamisan closed her eyes and concentrated on the beginnings of her planned dream. They had been about to go into another world, born
of her imagining, but not this. Her basic idea had been simple enough, if not one which had been used, to her knowledge, by any dreamer before her. It all hinged on the idea that the past history of her world had been altered many times during its flow. She had taken three key points of alteration and studied what might have resulted had those been given the opposite decision by fate.

Now, keeping her eyes firmly closed against this seeming reality into which she had fallen, Tamisan concentrated with fierce intentness upon her chosen points.

“The Welcome of the Over-queen Ahta.” She recited the first.

What would have happened if the first star ship on its landing had not been accepted as a supernatural event, and the small kingdom in which it had touched earth had not accepted its crew as godlings, but had greeted them instead with those poisoned darts the spacemen had later seen used? That was her first decision.

“The loss of the
Wanderer.”
That was the second.

It had been a colony ship driven far from its assigned course by computer failure, so that it had to make a landing here or its passengers would die. If that failure had not occurred and the
Wanderer
landed to start an unplanned colony, what would have come to pass?

“The death of Sylt the Sweet-Tongued before he reached the Altar of Ictio.”

That prophet might never have arisen to ruthless power, leading to a blood-crazed insurrection from temple to temple, setting darkness on three quarters of this world.

She had chosen those points, but she had not even been sure that one might not have canceled out another. Sylt had led the rebellion against the colonists from the
Wanderer.
If the welcome had not occurred . . . Tamisan could not be sure, she had only tried to find a pattern of events and then envision a modern world stemming from those changes.

She opened her eyes again. This was not her imagined world. Nor did one in a dream rub bruises, sit on damp sod, feel wind pull at them, and allow the first patter of rain to wet hair and robe. She put both hands to her head.
What of the dream crown?

Her fingers found a weaving of metal, but there were no cords from it. For the first time she remembered that she had been linked with Starrex and Kas when this happened.

Tamisan got to her feet to look around, half expecting to
see the other two somewhere near; but she was alone and the rain was falling heavier. There was a roofed space near the wall and Tamisan hurried for it.

Three twisted pillars supported a small dome of roof. There were no walls and she huddled in the very center, trying to escape the wind-borne moisture. She could not keep pushing away the feeling that this was no dream but true reality.

If—if one could dream
true.
Tamisan fought panic and tried to examine the possibilities.
Had
she somehow landed in a Ty-Kry which might have existed had her three checkpoints actually been the decisions she envisoned? If so, could one get back by simply visioning them in reverse?

She shut her eyes and concentrated.

There was a sensation of stomach-turning giddiness. She swung out, to be jerked back, swung out, to return once more. Shaking with nausea, Tamisan stopped trying. She shuddered, opening her eyes to the rain. Then again she strove to understand what had happened. That swing had in it some of the sensation of dream breaking, which meant that she was in a dream. But it was just as apparent that she had been held prisoner here.
How? And why?
Her eyes narrowed a little, though she was looking inward, not at the rain-misted garden before her. By
whom?