Among the Powers (13 page)

Bredon started, then reached out tentatively
and discovered that the surrounding bubble had vanished. The air
was still almost motionless, but he realized it no longer felt
quite as dead and trapped. An unfamiliar scent reached him, a
curious mixture of flowers and spice. They had landed somewhere,
some place so dark that the stars did not show above them.

Then light sprang up on all sides in soft
pastel colors, like the light of an early dawn, accompanied by
soft, plaintive music.

“Welcome to my home,” Geste said, gesturing
at the vast chamber that surrounded them. “Welcome to Arcade.”

Bredon stared silently for several
seconds.

The platform rested on the floor of a great
hall, a dozen times bigger than the village feasting hall, bigger
than the lounge he had seen at Autumn House. The ceiling was
fifteen or twenty meters high, and the nearest wall more than a
dozen meters away.

Both ceiling and wall were, for as far as he
could see, of some white, porous substance, almost, but not quite,
like bone. The walls curved over to become the ceiling, and were
divided by vertical columns that looked not so much like pillars as
like ribs, which continued up across onto the ceiling, where they
became a web of elaborate tracery.

Green and blue-green vines criss-crossed the
walls, and seemed to be quivering. To one side the walls were
hidden by a grove of strange trees. Bredon marvelled, wondering how
vines and trees could grow inside the chamber, where the sun and
rain could not reach them.

These trees seemed to be doing just fine,
but they were like none Bredon had ever seen. Their branches grew
in symmetrical patterns, and their trunks were all a peculiar ashy
grey color. The leaves were green on one side, like any other
leaves, but their undersides were colored a thousand subtly
different hues.

Some of the trees seemed to bear fruit, but
whatever they produced was nearly hidden amid the foliage, so that
Bredon could not make out its nature. The scent he had noticed upon
arrival seemed to come from the fruit trees.

Small creatures peered down at him from the
treetops, but whenever he looked at one directly it would take
fright and vanish into the leaves, so that he could make out
nothing of them except wide golden eyes and flashes of soft brown
fur.

Bredon had seen nothing of any of this as
they approached, since he and Geste had been enclosed in the
protective bubble. He looked for an opening they could have entered
by, but could find none. There were no doors, no windows, no
visible openings of any sort in the white walls. Even the gaps
between the trees appeared too narrow to allow the platform
passage. For all he could see the platform had had to pass directly
through the wall.

He saw no furniture, either. Except for the
enchanted forest, the room was simply a huge, ornate, empty box.
And he could not figure out where the soft, even light was coming
from.

Geste was grinning at him, and Bredon
remembered just whose home he was in—if it was really
anyone’s
home. He stepped down from the platform, but moved
with extreme caution, half-expecting to bang his shins against an
invisible chair or table, or his nose against a wall.

Nothing happened. He did not collide with
anything invisible, nor did any of the creatures from the grove
leap out at him. He took a few steps and stood uncertainly.

“Make yourself at home,” Geste said, waving
an arm in invitation.

Bredon eyed him warily. He tried to think of
some response that would cleverly express his growing weariness,
annoyance, and impatience, but could think of nothing that would
not have sounded simply petulant. He looked around at the bare
floor, the vine-striped walls, and the alien trees.

Geste said nothing to help him.

“Thank you,” Bredon said at last. “I will.”
He lowered himself cautiously and sat cross-legged on the
floor.

Although he knew it was still dark outside,
the air in the room was warm, its scent pleasant and relaxing, and
he had had an impossibly long and eventful wake. He slipped off his
vest, folded it into a makeshift pillow, then started to settle
down for a nap. This, after all, was a sleeping dark, not a
mid-wake dark, and he had been awake far too long.

Geste watched for a minute, then shrugged in
acceptance of a minor defeat. Bredon was obviously not going to do
anything amusing. “I’m being a poor host,” he said. “Gamesmaster,
we need proper accommodations.”

“Yes, master,” a disembodied voice, much
like that of the housekeeper at Autumn House, replied. “Whatever
you say, boss. You want it, you got it. Right away, you bet. Ask
and ye shall receive.”

The slick grey floor to one side suddenly
bulged upward into an immense bubble, four or five meters in
diameter, almost touching Bredon; startled, he rolled away without
thinking and came to his feet in a fighting crouch, a dagger in his
hand.

The bubble burst with a loud pop. The
fragments dissolved into air, with a sizzle and a smell like frying
batter. Where the bubble had been stood a soft, richly blue mass
with several oddly-shaped appendages.

“I think,” Geste said, “that something a
little more primitive is in order. Our guest is a native of
Denner’s Wreck.”

“I got you, boss.”

The blue mass sank into itself, melting away
like butter over a hot fire, and then hardened into a new
shape.

It had become a bed. Four of the appendages
had transformed into bedposts; the rest had vanished. The blue
stuff, whatever it might actually be, now looked like fine fur.

Bredon relaxed, tucked the knife back out of
sight, and carefully approached the bed.

It was, as far as he could determine, just a
bed. Except for its color, the blue fur that adorned it was an
ordinary fur coverlet, with a texture much like good-quality
rabbit. The pillow and mattress were also blue, but felt like
ordinary down-filled linen. Both the spiced-flower smell and the
frying odor were gone, now, replaced by a cool, clean, inviting
fragrance that reminded him of freshly-washed linen hung out in a
spring breeze.

With a shrug, Bredon dropped his vest and
climbed into the bed.

The room vanished; the bed seemed to be
floating in a soft black void. He could no longer hear the
music.

Bredon had seen too many wonders to be much
disturbed by this, and he was utterly exhausted. He rolled over and
went to sleep.

Outside the illusionary void, Geste settled
back into a floating seat that popped silently up out of the floor
when he first began to bend his knees. A feelie vine slithered up
silently to caress his ankles, and a messenger weasel jumped down
from the forest and stood alert at his side, ready to run any
errand its master might care to give it. Food trees ripened a
variety of tasty products, prepared to drop them on an instant’s
notice, and certain other trees, the cousins of the feelie vines,
pumped lubricious sap into erectile tissue and stood ready.
Soothing scents spilled into the air. The music transformed itself
from nondescript background noise to one of Geste’s favorite
suites, a piece slightly over a thousand years old that Bredon
would not have recognized as music at all.

The Trickster paid no attention to his
obedient creatures. He watched, amused, as Bredon slept.
“Resilient, isn’t he? He’s just taking it all in stride,” he
said.

“That’s just because he doesn’t know what
the hell is going on, boss; he doesn’t know enough to be
scared.”

“You’re probably right,” Geste agreed. “I
think
I’m
scared.” He motioned for a drink; a silver service
floater extruded itself from the floor by his foot, startling the
waiting weasel.

“Why did you bring him here, boss?”
Gamesmaster asked. “You aren’t exactly in the habit of bringing
folks home for dinner, after all.”

Geste reached out and picked the waiting
goblet off the floater. “You know what’s been going on?” he asked.
He tasted the drink, grimaced, then put it back on the floater.

The floater sank back into the floor and
another, pale blue this time, emerged, but remained coupled by a
thin strand of material. The messenger weasel nuzzled against
Geste’s hand, its fur testing the chemical composition of his sweat
and relaying the information to the household machines to help them
design a better beverage, which would be fed up to the waiting
floater.

Geste paid no attention to that. He was too
worried to pet the weasel, and let his hand hang limply against
it.

“You mean old Thaddeus doing his best to
blow away the High Castle, with Brenner and a bunch of other folks
in it?” Gamesmaster said. “Sure, I know. I keep in touch. I’ve been
getting all the dope from your floater, and from Mother, and from a
dozen other places.”

Geste squinted critically up at the ceiling
and remarked, “You talk too much, you know that? You might want to
consider reprogramming yourself a little, toning that down.”

“I’ll keep it in mind, boss, but I still
want to know why you brought that noble savage here. Why did you
come home at all, for that matter?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,”
Geste replied. “I promised that I’d set him up with Sunlight,
didn’t I? I can’t take him back to his village until I come through
on that; I’ve got a reputation to live up to, and besides, it
should be pretty funny, watching the two of them together. You know
what Sunlight is like, her whole ethereal,
too-good-for-mortal-flesh routine, and here this poor kid wants to
haul her into bed—she probably hasn’t been laid by a human being in
centuries, let alone some yokel who can’t have any more romantic
technique than one of those damned rabbits that are all over this
planet.” He snorted, and picked up his new drink.

“You’re getting off the subject, boss.”

He sipped at the goblet and nodded. “Yeah, I
am; sorry. Anyway, I really did want to see what happened when I
got the two of them face to face. I was looking forward to it. And
I was looking forward to seeing Sheila again; it’s been... what,
half a year, almost?”

“Maybe a third.”

“Still too long. In any case, I was looking
forward to a little light-hearted fun, and a few interesting days,
and instead I found myself in the middle of what might turn into a
full-blown war. You know Thaddeus’ history; he’s started wars
before. He may be out to rebuild his father’s stupid little empire
again. That threw me off-stride; I haven’t thought in terms of wars
or empires or interstellar politics for centuries now. All I could
think was that if I took Bredon home, he’d say I had welshed, and
if I dropped him anywhere else I might be too busy to ever come
back for him.”

“If Thaddeus
is
out to conquer this
corner of the galaxy, and you try to stop him, you could wind up
too
dead
to come back and pick the kid up.”

“I know—I thought of that, too. So I could
take him home, or I could keep him with me, or I could bring him
here. Keeping him with me on that little airskiff wouldn’t work;
he’d just get in the way. So here he is. And I want you, and all
the rest of Arcade, to look after him, and see that he has what he
needs, until I get back. Do whatever he tells you so long as it
won’t hurt anything. If I do get killed, you see that he gets home
safely.”

“You got it, boss. No problem.”

“Good. Now, what can we do about
Thaddeus?”

The intelligence had no quick answer for
that. After a moment it hummed quietly to indicate its
befuddlement.

“Fat lot of help you are,” Geste
muttered.

“Sorry, boss, but I’m a housekeeper, not a
general. This is way the hell outside my programming. I don’t know
the first thing about stopping a war.”

“You should—it’s not that different from a
game, and you know plenty about games.”

The intelligence hesitated, then asked, “You
think I should treat this like a war game?”

“Of course—why do you think they’re called
war games in the first place?”

“Well, yeah, I know that, but I never knew
whether they were accurate simulations or not. If it’s like that,
the first thing we need is military intelligence, if you’ll forgive
the phrase. We need to scout out exactly what the situation is.
Boss, you’re the best-equipped person on the planet for that;
you’ve got more spy gadgets than all the rest put together.”

“That’s true, I guess,” Geste admitted,
leaning back. “I never planned on using them for anything but fun,
but I’ve got them, don’t I? Start sending them out there, then.
First priority is tapping into Thaddeus’ own systems, finding out
what he’s done already, and what he plans to do. Put as many
snoopers, crackers, and tapping devices onto that as you can—either
silicon-based or organic or just transmitted software, whatever you
can get in there. You’ll need a lot, because he’s always refused to
centralize anything. For the real-world stuff, I want records of
all movements in and out of Fortress Holding—record
heat-signatures, or emissions, or whatever other features can be
used to distinguish them, and try and identify the individual
machines. Anything that seems slow and stupid enough, put a
spyscope or a homing bug on it—follow it and see what it does. And
can we do anything about bent-space measurement?”

“Sure, boss, we’ve got lots of bent-space
stuff. You told me to see about tunneling into The Meadows a couple
of years back, and most of that place is in bent space, so I’ve
been working on bent-space navigation for that—I never got into The
Meadows with it, but I can find my way around in overspace or
underspace or whatever other variant of polyspace you care to name,
and I can spot every crimp in the planet’s gravity well.”

“I told you to do that?”

“You sure did; want a playback?”