"Wait!" I cried.
She stopped. "What?"
"You can't do this alone."
"Why not? You've done it several times before, or so you said. Why would I fail where you succeeded?"
I closed my eyes. I knew what would happen: she wouldn't believe me when I explained. Yet, I would explain anyway. "I have lived seven full lifetimes. I have had experiences beyond you imagining. There is both wisdom and power in growing older, my lady." I stood straighter, letting my stage presence fill the clump of forest around us.
"Perhaps." She nodded her head from side to side. "But I think I can handle it."
My power and the presence evaporated; I felt like an old man.
How can you explain to a first-lifer the lessons you learn the fifth or a sixth time around? How can you express the little ways you are always aware of the world around you, sensing places where things lie hidden beneath other surfaces, knowing danger in a lifting eyebrow, touching an unfamiliar surface in a careful examination before grasping it?
I had been a Frontier mindshifter, often a target of the corrupt and the fanatical. In hundreds of tests of survival I had won. To pit me, in my eighth lifetime, against a whole army of first-lifers was to seal their deaths in a sure stroke.
But Sharyn herself was a first-lifer. Though she might destroy several of her enemies with her prowess and competence, yet her advantage over any one of them was just a narrow margin. One of them would get her, before she could complete the job. "Please," I begged, "let me handle the repair of Forma."
She put her hands on her hips, and cocked her head. "Wait a minute." She walked around me, slowly, judging. "Who saved whose life yesterday?" she asked. "Who is currently the captive of whom?" Her voice held no mockery, just objective observation. "I will do this job
my
way." She turned and trotted off.
"Wait!" I yelled.
She turned long enough to blow me a kiss.
"I love you!"
She continued on, as if she hadn't heard.
I sat on a fallen tree trunk. I marshalled my arguments for my next meeting with Sharyn; I couldn't go back to Keara until I was sure Sharyn wouldn't get herself killed.
I sat for a long time. At last a bright yellow blur bounced out of the forest from my right.
"Hi," said a golden-haired girl of perhaps seventeen years. She held out her hand. "My name is Wendy."
I stood up, wiping my hand before shaking hers. "And I'm Gibs Stelman."
"I know. You're the mindshifter."
I nodded.
"I'm supposed to take care of you while Sharyn is gone."
I see.
Wendy seemed determined to do a good job. She took my hand and dragged me down the trail. "Let me show you where everything is," she said. "At least, everything that isn't classified," she continued with a hushed whisper.
"Aren't you a bit young to be a rebel recruit?" I asked.
She frowned, but she never had the chance to answer.
The sky turned gray, and six cruisers in formation descended from the clouds belching destruction.
"Come on," Wendy cried. She dodged through the thickets and started pulling back a camouflage net.
I helped her unveil the vehicle: it was a two-man skycycle.
Under other circumstances I would have grinned broadly; four lifetimes earlier I had been a skycycle racing champion. I hadn't seen one in a couple of lifetimes, since the invention of the slipjet.
Unfortunately, with battlecruisers all around an obsolete skycycle was not my first choice vehicle. But when Wendy tilted the clear plastic bubble open, I climbed through the top and into the webbing.
Frenzied, Wendy pushed the jump throttle, and we smashed into the tree branches above us. She cried out.
"Let me run this baby," I commanded. "I know a few tricks nobody else on this planet knows when it comes to skycycles."
A skycycle is a perfectly circular, very tiny machine. The thruster is externally mounted. It is connected, not to the hull of the ship, but rather to the seat assembly inside through a gimballed fuel tank separated from the main hull by magnetic bearings. The ship literally goes the way your chair points; you spin your chair to face your destination, and zoom! you're off.
The standard commercial skycycles of centuries before were controlled by swinging your chair manually, using handholds around the rim of the hull interior; acrobatic and racing machines used hydraulic controls. This one was hydraulic.
With supreme confidence I nudged the jump throttle. The ship smashed into the tree branches above us, just as it had for Wendy.
"Whew! This baby has power, doesn't she?" I asked rhetorically. If the old skycycles had jumped like that, they might never have been replaced.
A broadsweep beam carved through a swath of trees just meters from our hiding place. With blood pumping in my ears, I pointed the cycle into the clear and let the thruster rip.
We were up a thousand meters before I could retard the thrust. One of the cruisers turned toward us. "Do we have anything to shoot with?" I asked.
"A pair of lazeguns, pointing forward from the thruster mount," Wendy's hands were clenched around the arms of her chair. She broke one hand free and flipped several switches. "Push the red button on top of the gimbal control, and they fire."
I scampered to the side as the cruiser blew apart the piece of sky we had recently occupied. We whipped down toward the beast and fired the lazeguns. "Damn," I muttered. "Why did we bother?" We had scored a direct hit, but we had merely polished the cruiser's armor.
Again they fired; again I dodged.
Down below the scene was grim, though I could see very little through the smoke. The smoke seemed to offer a hint of protection, so we plunged back down toward the thickest patch.
I spotted Sharyn.
At least I was pretty sure it was her. She was running toward the biggest ship left, a true cruiser as big and potent as those above us.
Next I saw three of the enemy ships converge above her. "Sharyn!" I cried, and rammed the skyeycle forward, into the lines of sight of the three cruisers to divert their attention, firing wildly in all directions.
They paid no attention. In unison they poured fury into the cruiser below. It disappeared in a blaze of energy.
"No!" I cried. I circled twice, but saw no sign of Sharyn.
"Look out!" Wendy yelled. We dodged another attack.
I whimpered. "Sharyn."
Wendy pulled on my arm. "We have to get out of here," she pleaded, her voice cracking with sorrow.
I closed my eyes for a moment. Sharyn was gone. I wanted to die.
It would have been easy to die there; but Wendy would have died with me. She didn't deserve to die for my failures.
I felt another tug on my arm. There were tears in Wendy's eyes, tears for Sharyn.
There was no time for grief, not yet. We dived for the forest, just in time; another cruiser had run out of other things to do, and followed us enthusiastically.
We dropped through the forest canopy. Blaster fire sizzled past.
I peered through the shadows. The forest was too thick to maneuver through, for normal skycycle pilots. The cruisers should have had us trapped.
But we would be a bit more difficult to kill than that. I tilted the skycycle edge-up, and laced my way delicately through the trees. I concentrated on careful maneuvering until I and the cycle were one being, with no other thought or purpose in life.
Wendy cried for both of us.
A few hours later, I poked the cycle's bubble through the foliage. The sun was higher in the sky; we had been traveling Eyeward. We were alone.
Wendy lifted her head from her hands, shifting her head from side to side to expunge the cramp: it is not comfortable, riding sideways in a skycycle for hours on end.
I spun the ship and pointed in a new direction. "I think there's a stream over there, where we can wash our faces." I looked at my companion in sympathy. "Your eyes are bloodshot. You could use some new life."
We landed. When Wendy knelt near the stream, I splashed a wave of water at her. "Stop that," she said mournfully.
"Only if you promise to worry about what's going to happen to you now. It's too late to worry about the people we left behind." Ha, how ironic it was that I should play this part. I would mourn for Sharyn in my own self-destructive way, at a later time. For the moment, Wendy needed uplifting. Sorrow looked terrible on one so young.
"I don't know what will happen to me. All my friends . . ."
I hugged her. "It's all right. You and I, we'll do fine."
"We'll kill Bardon!"
Revenge is not a pretty thing; but it has kept more than one person alive when all other meaning has been stripped from them. "Yes, we'll kill Bardon. He's the man responsible for Sharyn's murder, right?"
Wendy looked puzzled. "I—I'm not sure. I would have sworn it was, until Sharyn and I talked just a few minutes before—" she looked away, "the attack."
"What? What happened then?"
"Sharyn said, she was afraid that the apparent leaders of Forma were not really the
powers
of Forma. She suspected there was someone behind the scenes: a 'Playmaster.' " Wendy looked into my eyes. "Does that mean anything to you?"
A Playmaster? I knew what it meant—or rather, what it had once meant, in the time of Earthjump, just after the hawking Stardrive was developed. Playmasters were writer/producer/director/actors, who toured with small bands of actors from planet to planet, showing the great plays of history, developing updates suitable for the times. I myself had, for a nonce, been a Playmaster.
Could there be some one person on Forma controlling all the strings? The idea wasn't testable in an important sense: you couldn't prove that there
wasn't
such a person. Yet I couldn't believe that Sharyn would just imagine something like that. "Wendy, do you know why Sharyn thought that?"
"No." Wendy plucked a tiny yellow flower from a nearby bush; I plucked another and slowly caressed it into her hair. "She had planned for us to go to Skycrest, where she'd meet us in a few days. I know she planned to go to Summerform; she thought she might find clues there to the Playmaster."
"I see. Then we'll go to Summerform." I looked at Wendy. She looked exhausted, and I know I looked worse. "But first we need a place to rest." And a place to meet Glitter, if Safire ever got her fixed. "Where's Skycrest?"
She pointed Eyeward. "It's the capitol of Springform. "It's not very far. We've been traveling more or less toward it the whole time." Wendy shook her head, and almost smiled. "I have money and identification to get us in."
"Great." Why had Sharyn planned to send me to Springform? I winced. Sharyn! It no longer mattered what her plans had been. I would take Wendy to Skycrest, and then . . . I didn't know.
Wendy's finger traced a line over the ridge of mountains. "Fly over Rightcut and head Eyeward. Skycrest is close to the top of the ridge, on the far side."
"Aye aye, my lady."
We flew in slow and low, and we stopped at the city perimeter. They identified us as Gibs Alhart and his consort, Wendy Levitine, both from the city of Lily, far counterward from Skycrest. "Is your name really Levitine?" I asked.
Wendy laughed. "Is your name really Gibs? I don't believe it."
We took a suite in the most expensive hotel in the city. The bedroom had about an acre of satin-covered foamwater, which I promptly turned over to Wendy; I fell on the couch in the other room.
Lying there in the dark, I sorted through the nightmare of my life. Still there remained a bright spot: Keara! I would return to her. "Safire," I mumbled at my wristcom, half asleep, "how's Glitter coming?"
"She's ready," the machine replied. "Shall I send her after you?"
"Not yet." I would tell Wendy about the ship after she had rested. "But you better get her into my general vicinity. Be careful of the skeletons." I described a meeting place outside of Skycrest
"Glitter will be there in sixteen hours, Gibs," Safire signed off.
I tossed and turned and could not sleep; images of burning trees and blinding lightning followed me through an endless series of contorted positions on the couch. At last I gave up.
One wall of the living room was a huge video screen. I punched buttons by the couch until video images came to life. I kept hitting buttons, watching dozens of programs go by, until one forced me to stop and back up and add volume.
It was a scene of forest burning, and cruisers screaming through the air. A reporter droned in the background.
"Fallform airborne troops today discovered and destroyed the main base of the Forma Reformation Organization. Though all the installations and ships were destroyed, only one rebel body was found. That one body, however, belonged to the rebel leader, Sharyn Mirlot, and the RFO is believed by authorities to be completely broken." A picture of Sharyn appeared next, ebullient and, in my eyes, beautiful; I stifled a sob.
"The discovery of only one dead, and that one being the key to the whole organization, has sparked considerable speculation. There is some evidence that the Sirian mindshifter, now believed to be a Sirian assassin, had been near their encampment prior to the attack." The announcer looked up at the audience with profound earnestness. "Could it be that Sharyn Mirlot was not killed in the attack, but rather before the attack, by the assassin? There is no acknowledged reason—but it does form a pattern. The Sirian seems to be murdering all political leaders who might stand in the way of a favorable agreement between Sirius and Fallform." I gagged on the announcer's stupidity.
"No one knows for sure, but this is the possibility the experts are now considering in the light of the past two days' events. Yesterday, as you know, Keara Delgodon, the Subdirectress of Security for Winterform, was killed attempting to bring the Sirian in for deportation." Another picture of a woman I loved appeared. I ran to the screen in horror.
"Keara, wait, I love you," I whispered.
"Funeral services for the Subdirectress will be held tomorrow at one P.M.''
I beat the video screen with bare hands until I could feel pain. But I did not scream. Wendy still slept.