Believing Is Seeing (22 page)

Or perhaps it was charred chili powder, she thought as she marched out into the passage again. Possibly due to its hallucinogenic nature, that damnable whistling was still going on, pure torture to her ears. From the midst of it she could hear Adny's voice. “Ned Coven, do we have your surrender, or do we attack again?”

I've had enough! thought F. C. Stone. She marched to her desk, where the screen was showing Adny's curlicue, pulsing to the beat of the beastly shrilling. “Stop this noise!” she commanded. “And give me a picture of
Partlett'
s flight deck.” If you
can,
she thought, feeling for the moment every inch the captain of the starship
Candida.

The whistling died to an almost bearable level. “I need function Eleven to give you vision,” Adny said—irritably? casually? or was it
too
casually? He was certainly overcasual when he added, “It does exist, you know.”

Give him what he wants and get rid of him, thought F. C. Stone. “I authorize function Eleven then,” she said.

“Oh!”
said the computer, like a hurt child.

And there was a picture on the screen, greenish and jumping and sleeting green lines, but fairly clear for all that.
Partlett'
s controls, F. C. Stone noted absently, had fewer screens than she expected—far fewer than she put in her books—but far more ranks of square buttons and far, far too many dials for comfort, all of them with a shabby, used look. But she was looking mostly at the woman who seemed to be asleep in the padded swivel seat in front of the controls. Mother naked, F. C. Stone was slightly shocked to see, and not a mark or a wrinkle on her slender body or on her thin and piquant face. Abruptly F. C. Stone remembered being quite proud of her looks when she was seventeen, and this woman was herself at seventeen, only beyond even her most idealized memories. Immense regret suffused F. C. Stone.

The whistling, blessedly, stopped. “Candy is really the same age as you,” Adny observed.

Her attention turned to him. His seat was humbler, a padded swivel stool. Sitting on it was a small man with a long, nervy face, the type of man who usually has tufts of hair growing in his ears and below his eyes, as if to make up for the fact that such men's hair always tends to be thin and fluffy on top. Adny's hair was noticeably thin on top, but he had smoothed and curled it to disguise the fact, and it was obvious that he had plucked and shaved all other hair from his wrinkled little body; F. C. Stone had no doubt of this, since he was naked, too. The contrast between his appearance and his voice was, to say the least of it, startling.

Adny saw her look and grinned rather ruefully as he leaned forward to hold a paper cup under some kind of tap below the control panel. She realized he could see her, too. The contrast between herself and the sleeping beauty beside him made her feel almost as rueful as he looked. “Can you give me a picture of Nad and any damage there?” she asked, still clinging to her role as Captain. It seemed the only way to keep any dignity.

“Certainly,” he said, running his finger down a row of the square buttons.

She found herself apparently staring down at a small town of old houses built up against the side of a hot stony hill—red roofs, boxlike white houses, courtyards shaded with trees. It was quite like a town in Spain or Italy, except that the shapes of the walls and the slant of the roofs were subtly different and wrong. It was the very smallness of the difference between this and towns she knew which, oddly enough, convinced F. C. Stone for once and for all that this place was no fake. She really was looking at a real town in a real world somewhere else entirely. There was a smoking, slaggy crater near the market square and another downhill below the town. That had destroyed a road. She had glimpses of the other spaceships, drifting about looking rather like hot-air balloons.

“Why is it such a small place?” she said.

“Because Nad is only a small outpost of the Matriarchy,” Adny replied in his golden voice. The picture flipped back to show he had turned to face her on his stool, sipping steaming liquid from his paper cup. No doubt it was
kfa
or even
quphy.
He smiled through its steam in a way that must have beguiled the poor sleeping beauty repeatedly, and she found she was wishing he had turned out to be an alien instead. “I owe you great thanks on behalf of the Second Male Lodge,” he said. “We now have the Nadlings where we want them. And since you have given me full control of this ship and access to all my ex-mistress's power, I can move on to the central worlds in strength and use her as a hostage there.”

Hitler and Napoleon were both small men, F. C. Stone thought, with golden voices. It gave her a slight, cold frisson to think what she might have loosed on the unfortunate Matriarchy. “You gave me the impression that this
was
the central world,” said F. C. Stone.

“Not in so many words,” said Adny. “You don't think I'd be fool enough to move against the strength of the Matriarchy without getting hold of a conscious-class computer first, do you?”

F. C. Stone wished to say that yes, she did. People took that sort of desperate risk in her books all the time. It depressed her to find him such a cautious rebel.
And
he had cheated her, as well as his sleeping beauty, and no doubt he was all set to turn the whole works into a Patriarchy. It was a total waste of a morning.

Or was it? she wondered. A matriarchy where men were sold as slaves was right up her street. There was certainly a book in there. Perhaps she should simply be grateful and hope that Adny did not get too far.

“Tell me,” she said, at which he looked up warily from his cup, “what is that stuff you're drinking?
Goffa? Xvay?”

She was glad to see she had surprised him. “Only coffee,” he said.

In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.

Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success! Her parents were well to do and kept a ladies' hat shop in the prosperous town of Market Chipping. True, her own mother died when Sophie was two years old and her sister Lettie was one year old, and their father married his youngest shop assistant, a pretty blonde girl called Fanny. Fanny shortly gave birth to the third sister, Martha. This ought to have made Sophie and Lettie into Ugly Sisters, but in fact all three girls grew up very pretty indeed, though Lettie was the one everyone said was most beautiful. Fanny treated all three girls with the same kindness and did not favor Martha in the least.

Mr. Hatter was proud of his three daughters and sent them all to the best school in town. Sophie was the most studious. She read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance she had of an interesting future. It was a disappointment to her, but she was still happy enough, looking after her sisters and grooming Martha to seek her fortune when the time came. Since Fanny was always busy in the shop, Sophie was the one who looked after the younger two. There was a certain amount of screaming and hair-pulling between those younger two. Lettie was by no means resigned to being the one who, next to Sophie, was bound to be the least successful.

“It's not fair!” Lettie would shout. “Why should Martha have the best of it just because she was born the youngest? I shall marry a prince, so there!”

To which Martha always retorted that she would end up disgustingly rich without having to marry anybody.

Then Sophie would have to drag them apart and mend their clothes. She was very deft with her needle. As time went on, she made clothes for her sisters too. There was one deep rose outfit she made for Lettie, the May Day before this story really starts, which Fanny said looked as if it had come from the most expensive shop in Kingsbury.

About this time everyone began talking of the Witch of the Waste again. It was said the Witch had threatened the life of the King's daughter and that the King had commanded his personal magician, Wizard Suliman, to go into the Waste and deal with the Witch. And it seemed that Wizard Suliman had not only failed to deal with the Witch: he had got himself killed by her.

So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on the hills above Market Chipping, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Witch had moved out of the Waste again and was about to terrorize the country the way she used to fifty years ago. People got very scared indeed. Nobody went out alone, particularly at night. What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You could see it actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets in dirty gray gusts. For a while everyone was certain that the castle would come right down into the valley before long, and the Mayor talked of sending to the King for help.

But the castle stayed roving about the hills, and it was learned that it did not belong to the Witch but to Wizard Howl. Wizard Howl was bad enough.

Though he did not seem to want to leave the hills, he was known to amuse himself by collecting young girls and sucking the souls from them. Or some people said he ate their hearts. He was an utterly cold-blooded and heartless wizard and no young girl was safe from him if he caught her on her own. Sophie, Lettie, and Martha, along with all the other girls in Market Chipping, were warned never to go out alone, which was a great annoyance to them. They wondered what use Wizard Howl found for all the souls he collected.

They had other things on their minds before long, however, for Mr. Hatter died suddenly just as Sophie was old enough to leave school for good. It then appeared that Mr. Hatter had been altogether too proud of his daughters. The school fees he had been paying had left the shop with quite heavy debts. When the funeral was over, Fanny sat down in the parlor in the house next door to the shop and explained the situation.

“You'll all have to leave that school, I'm afraid,” she said. “I've been doing sums back and front and sideways, and the only way I can see to keep the business going
and
take care of the three of you is to see you all settled in a promising apprenticeship somewhere. It isn't practical to have you all in the shop. I can't afford it. So this is what I've decided. Lettie first—”