“First, you need a helmet,” the Lyhhrt said.
“I have one.” Ned showed it.
The Lyhhrt did not dignify it with a look. He reached into his shelves and picked out what looked at first like a bronze armband, fanned it out into a jointed helmet of thin plates lined with fine-linked mesh. “You push this lever to close it, and pull that tab to open it, and the button over here will lock it. This sensor antenna beneath your ear will allow you to communicate with Spartakos wherever he is, and
when it is retracted, neither I nor any other Lyhhrt can reach you.” He folded it up. “Now try it.”
Ned frowned. “I've never used one.”
“If you want to join a militia you will need this.”
Ned took it gingerly, cringed a little at the vibration in his hands as it sprang open, set it on his head, locked it, pushed in the antenna's tipâ
a mind all alone in the universe for one moment!
â
“It fits,” the Lyhhrt said.
Ned extended the antenna hastily as he gaped at his reflection in the cupboard door. “Eh, Captain Futurismo!” It looked only a little too beautiful. Lyhhrt could not do less.
As long as somebody doesn't kill me for itâ
For an instant he had an image of himself grasping the savage chebok, and shook his head.
“Unless you have a genetic twin it will not work for anyone else. But,” the Lyhhrt added with more than a tinge of regret, “if you are truly afraid of theft and murder I will tarnish.”
“No.” Ned nodded at the dark gleam of his image. “I'll risk wearing it as is.” He pushed the right buttons and pulled the right knobs to remove the helmet, closed it and clamped it on his arm under the jacket. It fit.
“Now,” the Lyhhrt said, “we are starting out with no ship and no allies and men wanting to kill us. How are we to move under those conditions?”
Ned, who had spent a lifetime thinking on his feet, said, “You've been saying Brezant promised those Lyhhrt he can bring a force of up to ten thousandâam I right?âif he gets a go-ahead from Lyhhr. We can't tell whether he was just blowing hardâ”
“All I know is what I learned from their ESP woman. If I/we had tried to esp him deeper we would have been killed without learning anything at all!”
“âbut from what you've said those two Lyhhrt believed
him when he claimed to have troops on standby, so we have to assume he's been enlisting, or his staff is doing it for him.”
“All we need is to find themâdo you know where to look?”
Ned shrugged wearily. “How could I know for sure? And that's not all we'd need! His âtroops' could be all over the world, but if he hasn't got that go-ahead, he'd have to be crazier than he is to go very far.”
:All
of them
are crazy
,: the Lyhhrt said, not bothering to single out anyone.
“We have to start somewhere. If he was here with his whole staff he'd likely base himself near Montador City to be near the Embassy when he's expecting newsâ”
“The ESP woman gave no indication that Brezant would move away.”
“âand I'd count on his recruiting first in Earther colonies like here in the Cinnabar Keys or on the Continent. That's cheapest. His ESP is an Earther and so are all his staff. His nearest lift-off from Cinnabar Keys here is Port City in the Basalt Desert just twenty-five hundred klicks away, it's all handy. I'd want to start by looking for the kind of people he'd hire in those districts and find out what they know.”
“And where start then! Where start!”
Lonely Lyhhrt gradually became psychotic, something else everybody knew. Ned swallowed. “This is a small town with no kind of work that needs the military. In my home colony overseas I served a year in the reserve and then conscription got voted outâthe military isn't important on this world, there were no âaliens' when we settled here and the wild animals are slaughtered or in cages and parksâ”
“Whereâ”
“We do have some time! And I'm doing my best! There's legion halls where old soldiers get together, and there's still people who want to handle guns and march around in ranks
and files. But not around here. Port City is probably the best place to look for them.”
“And they will all know who you are, will they not?”
“Brezant won't be marching around the barracks telling us to keep our back straight, will he? He sounds like a businessman, behind a desk while the officers work in the field. And
you
know, Lyhhrt, as long as we have Spartakos with us it's gotta be hard to hide no matter what shape he takes. The whole world knows Spartakos, he's the only world-cit in the Twelveworlds of Fthel who's a machine. But”âhe nodded at Spartakos and then at the Lyhhrtâ“you two can defend yourselves well enough.”
If not me
. “The old dogs I'm looking for just want a chance to fight and be paid for it, they don't have anything against us, and if we can mix in we'll only be like performers to them.”
Some kind of clowns.
“Maybe I'll even know some of them if they were pugs like me who fought on five worlds.” His throat had dried up and he wished he had a beer.
“I don't know what is clowns and I have no beer. Here is water.”
Ned took it on faith and drank it. “We have no choice and that looks to be the only way we can reach Khagodis. You choose the way you want to get to Port City.”
“We'll take a private monorail car, reach the station by the path that runs along the sea-wall. It's rough and not many use it.”
“And when do you want to leave?”
“Not tonight. We would reach there after midnight and we have no base for ourselves. We will stay here tonight, I have provided a hammock further back with an oxylator so you will sleep with enough fresh air, and here is a prepared meal for you. We will leave before dawn.” He took a glassy package from one of his shelves and offered it.
Ned accepted it doubtfully. It looked with its paper fork and tiny square of napkin almost like any takeout from any
shop that sold them. He was far from asking where the Lyhhrt might have bought it or by what alchemy he might have made it, only squatted with his back against the wall and pulled the heatstrip. “Bangers an mash? Eh, I guess that's what comes of hanging around ESPs.”
He ate watching the last of the red sun's rays bouncing off the tide pools' ripples, rings of light growing and fading on the mossy roof of the cavern. Spartakos, with nothing else to do, stood motionless beside the cabinet. The Lyhhrt had disappeared into some corner of it.
The food tasted as it should, and the mild stink of the briny air did not spoil it. During a day of sweat-popping fright Ned had forgotten hunger and weariness. But the tension of keeping the Lyhhrt right-side-up had stiffened his neck, the fright had not left him and was very near panicâ
Goodbye Zel and kiddos, this crazy business got me killed!â
yet his eyelids began to close as soon as he ate the last scrap; and he fell into a half-waking dream in which he watched the Lyhhrt opening a folded shelf into a table, touching a place in his neck to open little doors in his silver abdomen, a miniature cabinet.
Ned pulled himself up and staggered to the back of the cave where he found the same kind of sturdy canvas hammock he had slept in on several other worlds, dinged the oxylator, climbed in and â¦
Lyhhrt reached in for the transparent globe that held his naked self in its liquid, one and a half kilos of brain that looked like a giant cowrie shell with pseudopods holding almost invisible remotes; its thin and glistening skin was mottled in mauve and rose.
Lyhhrt was dreaming in his marshy world with its sundogs but no moon and its multiple millions of
our/selves,
while he directed his workshell to set the globe on its table, unplug it and add fresh nutrients from squeeze-droppers and vials of powder.
Ned dreamed with him ⦠.
âwhat to do then? We wanted to be left alone to live as One and we were attacked by Ix, we begged for help from Galactic Federation and were ignored, Zamos gave us back our lives but made us become slaves and create more slaves for themâ
âyou say it would have been better to die and be forgottenâ
âbe One with the Cosmic Spiritâ
âyou think so! The Cosmic Spirit is life, we are part of life, and life battles to exist ⦠the Ix attacked us to save their own lives when they could have askedâbegged and pleaded as we didâfor help ⦠and who knows whether they did and were refused as we were by some other Federation of worlds ⦠now Zamos is gone and if not completely destroyed its head has been smashed and nothing is left but flailing limbsâ
Â
Ned, dreaming, asked himself if there was a congregation of Lyhhrt in this cave or if he had been transported to their world, and realized, dreaming, that there was one Lyhhrt with generations of teeming minds in one brain telling each other the story of one people ⦠.
Â
âwe were supposedly saved from Zamos, but the work we did for him we do still and the difference is, we are paid for it ⦠but are we saved? We dream impossible machines and clothe ourselves in them and create ships and weapons for flesh-covered souls to destroy each otherâwhat kind of freedom is that? We go out alone and isolated in metal casings and spy for others and make ourselves insaneâand if we refuse, stop selling, stop destroying, want to live in peace, in One, on our own world, they sayâ
:Wake up!
: the Lyhhrt said. :
They are coming.:
Ned's eyelids were stuck together and he had no time to
rub them apart before a tongue of flame darted into the mouth of the cavern. His first thought,
oxylator!
âno, the Lyhhrt had turned it off, the flamer's whip of fire curled back on itself against the Lyhhrt's force-field with a hiss as it drowned in the pool at the cave's mouth. One tick after that a gun's barking shot sent its missile tearing through the field, it caromed off the corner of the Lyhhrt's cabinet, cut the strings of Ned's hammockâ
Ned was halfway to the floor by then anyway and the bullet exploded in the ceiling and sent splinters into his neck and shoulder, no, his collar and sleeve.
Then there was quiet.
Ned understood, was made to understand in the chaos, that the attack-suits of their assailants had been programmed to fire as soon as their sensors identified the targets. Spartakos had jammed their electronics as soon as their signals reached him.
But: “That force-field was an error on my part,” the Lyhhrt said calmly. “It delayed the signal.”
Ned had not enough handkerchiefs to wipe his sweat off, and said through wildly chattering teeth, “Oh yeh.” No force-field? Saw himself licked to ashes by that sharp flame tongue. He pulled himself up, still violently shaking. He had been skimmed by missiles before, but never two at once.
Where are they?
“Come and see,” the Lyhhrt said.
There was rage in the voice and thought. Ned did not want to follow, but the cave was a dead end. He stepped carefully past the charred walls over the ash-strewn floor, avoiding the puddle. The sky was still dark with brilliant stars, dimly lit with a pink streak in the east.
Two figures were standing immobile before the cave's opening. They were crying out faintly through the thick bubble helmets, a thick man in dark glasses, a tall woman with yellow hair; since their electronics had been disabled they
could not move in the flame- and bullet-proof suits. The suits, heavy akrytex dark as charcoal, could have stood by themselves anywhere, like the rocks at Stonehenge. “They're from Brezant?” Ned asked.
“Yes. They did not send their barflies after us this time.” He walked around the two figures, came back to stand beside Ned and pointed at the weapon, suit glove still gripping and aiming it at them. Ned knew it, the long-barreled Quadzull: the one weapon Zamos originally had forced its Lyhhrt slaves to design for the Ix, and this one had been modified for Earthers.
“If you've been shielding me how did they track us?”
“Sweat, spit, skin flakes. We have not moved very far from your bar.”
Not a very good choice, Lyhhrt. One more “error.
” “We better move away from here pretty fast.” For the first time Ned noticed that the Lyhhrt-workman had reshaped himself back into the Oâe beggar he had been at the curbside beneath the Lyyhrt-world restaurant.
To be less noticed
. Oh yes. Ned sensed Spartakos at his shoulder, fixed in a stare at Lyhhrtas-O' e.
As the Lyhhrt-O'e was intent on the two attackers. “What shall we do with these?” A question half to himself and half to the man and woman in the suits, the one with the gun and the other with the flamer. “I wonder if those suits would still protect at close range ⦠.”