Juxtaposition (42 page)

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—“

“The Oracle!” Sheen exclaimed. “It would knowl”

“Get on it!”

The Brown Adept appeared, looking perplexed. “Thou canst not cross the curtain?” Stile asked her. Seeing her nod, he continued: “Is thine other self by any chance a Citizen, as the selves of Adepts tend to be?” Again she nodded. “Then see if thou canst convince her to give me her proxy for her wealth.”

“But I can not meet mine other self!” she protested. “No one can—“

A second image appeared, as Sheen’s friends contacted Brown’s other self. Both girls stared at each other, startled.
 
Stile’s special East Pole communications setup had made possible what had never been possible before. Selves were meeting.

There was a confused interchange, but in a moment the Brown Adept had convinced her Citizen self, whose nature was very similar to her own, not only to provide her proxy but to contact all her Citizen friends and beg them to do likewise. The two children smiled at each other, liking each other, enjoying this shared adventure.
 
Now Clef appeared, replacing the girls.

“Great notion, Stile! The Oracle knew you would think of that at the proper time and is now feeding the information to the Game Computer of Proton, who will have Sheen’s friends contact all likely prospects. There turn out to be several hundred scattered through the tribes and domes, many of whom do not know of their other selves or even of the other frame. We shall have results for you in minutes.” Minutes were all they had. Because of the assassins they knew would be watching for Stile, Sheen quickly made herself up as a cleaning menial, smudged and ugly, hauling an enormous trash bin. There were always fragments of refuse -that the automatic cleaners could not get, which had to be removed by hand. Her friends the self-willed machines scheduled her to police the central court of Xanadu, where the Citizens’ business meeting was to he held. She trundled her bin along the service halls to the proper dome.

Sheen entered it by a service tunnel, passing the computer checkpoint without difficulty, since of course her friends covertly facilitated this. Questing efficiently for refuse, in a dome that was spotless, she passed through a series of chambers containing dioramas—alcoves with deep, realistically painted walls, inset with lifelike statues and appurtenances. She paused briefly at each, on occasion actually spying some bit of paper that she speared on her pointed stick and deposited in the half-full bin.
 
Stile, concealed within the bin, peeked out through a smudged window normally intended for the inspection of refuse from outside. Only a careful inspection would have betrayed him, and no one even glanced at this unit.
 
As they entered each chamber, it illuminated and a recording played, providing its bit of mythology. Stile, distracted by his need to retain his Citizenship, was nevertheless fascinated. Citizens never spared expense to achieve their background effects, but this was impressive even among Citizen artifacts.

The first chamber was a primitive room, eighteenth or nineteenth-century British, in which a man slumped over a wooden table. He had an antique feather quill in hand and was writing something on parchment or crude paper. “One day in 1797,” the announcer said, “the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, feeling indisposed, obtained a prescription that caused him to fall asleep while reading a travel book relating to the Mongol Dynasty of China.
 
Some suggest it was actually opium he took that put him into a temporary trance. He continued in this state for three hours, during which time he had a phenomenal vision. On awakening, he took pen, ink, and paper and began recording the experience in the form of a poem, titled Kubia Khan.” The recording ended, leaving the poet amidst his labor.

Stile was familiar with the story and with the poem, but was intrigued by the realism of the diorama. Every detail seemed perfect. But more than that, he was moved by the similarity of his own experience when he had fallen into a recurring vision of Clef’s introduction to Phaze and later verified that all of it was true. There had been his first experience of the juxtaposition of frames! The poet Coleridge would certainly have understood.

The next chamber had a new episode. The scene was of a man standing just outside an open door, evidently a villager. “Hardly had the poet recorded thirty lines, the mere introduction to his vision masterpiece, before he was interrupted by a person from the nearby village of Porlock, who detained him for over an hour. When Samuel finally was able to return to his writing, he was dismayed to discover that his vision had dissipated. He could recall none of the marvelous lines that had coursed through his brain, and could write no more.”

Ah, yes. Stile thought. The notorious person from Porlock, whose ill-timed interference had destroyed what might have been the creation of the ages. In Stile’s own case, his poem had not been interrupted; it had become his Tourney winner, though his ability hardly compared to that of Coleridge.

The third chamber began the presentation of the poem itself. The diorama showed a view of a walled enclosure encompassing a number of square kilometers. There were copses of trees, neat meadows, and spring-fed streams—a wholly delightful hunting preserve, reminiscent of Phaze, stocked for the Emperor’s pleasure with a number of fine game animals. Within it was a prefabricated kind of palace in the Oriental mode, luxuriously appointed. This, the narrator explained, was the palace of Xanadu as described in the text Samuel had been reading, set up by Kublai, grand son of the conqueror Genghis Khan.

The fourth chamber showed the caverns of a great underground river, winding down to a somber subterranean lake. “And this is the one described in Samuel’s vision in a dream,” the narrator said. Obviously the poet’s imagination had enhanced the original. The narrator now quoted the opening stanza of the poem:

“In Xanadu did Kubia Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.”

The fifth chamber was the main one—and it was truly impressive. It was a tremendous cavern whose walls were of ice—actually, glass and mirrors cunningly crafted to appear glacial. “It was a miracle of rare device,” the narrator continued, quoting further from the poem. “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”

And within this marvelous setting was the palace of Xanadu as conceived by Proton artisans. It was the most impressive of all. It was fashioned of bright metal, bluish at the base, golden yellow in the mid-levels, and purple at the top. Lights played glancingly across it, causing the colors to shift shades, with green showing at some angles in a kind of pseudoiridescence.

The architecture was stranger yet. The structure was all steps and corrugations and cubes, rising into artificial perspectives like so many sections of pyramids. The walls were thin, so that the stepped surface of one floor became the stepped surface of the ceiling of the chamber beneath it, and the walls were fashioned in an intermittent, maze like network. There was no proper roof, only brief terraces of many levels, expanding from the tops of the walls. In one sense, the palace was like old-fashioned bleachers in a stadium gone haywire.

Citizens stood and sat on the steps and terraces and leaned against the walls. Many had donned appropriate costumes, resembling those of the medieval Mongol nobility. But any implication that this was a festive occasion was unfounded; it was ruin and murder these Citizens had in mind, for one who threatened their control of this planet. They dealt with such a challenge as the Savage Mongols would have.

Sheen drew her trash bin quietly around the chamber, spearing stray refuse, ignored by all as the meeting began.
 
The Chairone called it to order. The first item of business was a tabulation of those present; no late entrances were permitted. This of course was to prevent Stile or any of his friends from arriving in the middle to protest his loss of Citizenship. The tabulation was made by oral roll call, to prevent any interference by a computer; evidently the other Citizens had some dawning notion of Stile’s connections there. Thus it was time-consuming—and that pleased Stile, who needed every extra minute to obtain his proxies.
 
He knew the computers and self-willed machines could work quickly, but he had given them very little time.

“Stile,” the roll caller called. Then, with grim hope: “Not present? Let it be noted that—“