Captives of the Flame Part 10

"I could have even come earlier," Tomar said. "But you'd have been busy."

"You could have come up."

"And once I got here, I didn't think we'd get a chance to talk, either."

"Well, you've got one now. Better make it quick. We change partners in a moment. What happened to the scouting planes?"

"All crippled. Didn't sight a thing. They got back to base almost before I did this morning. The report was nothing. What about the picnic, Clea?"

"We can have it on ..."

A burst of music signaled the change. Jon did not hear the day, but expected his sister to whirl into his arms. But instead (he saw her white dress flare and turn by him) an emerald iridescence caught in his eye, then rich mahogany flame. He was dancing with the d.u.c.h.ess. She was nearly his height, and watched him with a smile hung in the subtle area between friendship and knowing cynicism. She moved easily, and he had just remembered that he ought to smile back to be polite when the music sounded the change. The instant before she whirled away, he heard her say, very distinctly, "Good luck, Jon Koshar."

His name brought him to a halt, and he stared after her. When he did turn back to his new partner, surprise still on his face, his eyes were filled with sudden whiteness. It was Clea. He should have been dancing, but he was standing still. When she looked at his face to discover why, she suddenly drew a breath. At first he thought his head had disappeared again. Then, as shock and surprise became suddenly as real as her wide eyes, her open mouth, he whispered, "Clea!" And her hand went to her mouth.

_Clumsy!_ he thought, and the word was a sudden ache in his hands and chest. Reach for her. Dance. As his hands went out, the music stopped, and the languid voice of the King came over the loudspeaker.

"Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of Toromon, I have just received a message from the council that necessitates an announcement to you as my friends and loyal subjects. I have been requested by the council to make their declaration of war official by my consent. An emergency meeting over sudden developments has made it imperative that we begin immediate action against our most hostile enemies on the mainland. Therefore, before you all, I declare the Empire of Toromon to be at war."

In the silence, Jon looked for his sister, but she was gone. Someone near the microphone cried out, "Long live the King." Then the cry echoed again. The musicians started the music once more, partners found one another, and the talking and laughing grew in his ears like waves, like crumbling rock, like the cutter teeth clawing into the rock face of the ore deposits....

Jon shook his head. But he was in his own house, yes. His room was on the second floor and he could go up and lie down. And by his bed would be the copper night table, and the copy of _Delcord the Whaler_ which he had been reading the night before.

He'd left the ballroom and gotten halfway down the hall before he remembered that his room was probably not his room any longer. And that he certainly couldn't go up to it and lie down. He was standing in front of the door of one of the sitting rooms that opened off the hall. The door was ajar, and from it he heard a woman's voice.

"Well, can't you do something about his index of refraction? If he's going to be doing any work at night, you can't have him popping on and off like a cigarette lighter." There was silence. Then: "Well, at least don't you think he should be told more than he knows now? Fine. So do I, especially since the war has been officially declared."

Jon took a breath and stepped in.

Her emerald train whirled across the duller green of the carpet as she turned. The bright hair, untonsured save by two coral combs, fell behind her shoulders. Her smile showed faint surprise. Very faint. "Who were you talking to?" Jon Koshar asked.

"Mutual friends," the d.u.c.h.ess said. They were alone in the room.

After a moment, Jon said, "What do they want us to do? It's treason, isn't it?"

The d.u.c.h.ess' eyes went thin. "Are you serious?" she asked. "You call that treason, keeping these idiots from destroying themselves, eating themselves up in a war with a nameless enemy, something so powerful that if there were any consideration of real fighting, we could be destroyed with a thought. Do you remember who the enemy is? You've heard his name.

There are only three people in Toromon who have, Jon Koshar. Everyone else is ignorant. So we're the only ones who can say we're fully responsible. That responsibility is to Toromon. Have you any idea what state the economy is in? Your own father is responsible for a good bit of it; but if he closed down his aquariums now, the panic he would cause would equal the destruction their being open already causes. The empire is s...o...b..lling toward its own destruction, and it's going to take it out in the war. You call trying to prevent it treason?"

"Whatever we call it, we don't have much choice, do we?"

"With people like you around, I'm not sure it isn't a bad idea."

"Look," said Jon. "I was cooped up in a prison mine way out beyond nowhere for five years. All I wanted was out, see. All I wanted was to get free. Well, I'm back in Toron and I'm still not free."

"First of all," said the d.u.c.h.ess, "if it wasn't for them, you wouldn't be as free as you are now. After a day of clean clothes and walking in fresh air, if you're not well on the road to what you want, then I'd better change some ideas of my own. I want something too, Jon Koshar.

When I was seventeen, I worked for a summer in your father's aquarium.

My nine hours a day were spent with a metal spoon about the size of your head sc.r.a.ping the bottoms of the used tank tube of the stuff that even the gla.s.s filters were too touchy to take out. Afterwards I was too tired to do much more than read. So I read. Most of it was about Toromon's history. I read a lot about the mainland expeditions. Then, in my first winter out of school, I lived in a fishing village at the edge of the forest, studying what I could of the customs of the forest people. I made sketches of their temples, tried to map their nomadic movements. I even wrote an article on the architecture of their temporary shelters that was published in the university journal.

"Well, what I want is for Toromon to be free, free of its own ridiculous self-entanglements. Perhaps coming from the royal family, I had a easier path toward a sense of Toromon's history. At its best, that's all an aristocracy is good for anyway. But I wanted more than a sense, I wanted to know what it was worth. So I went out and looked, and I found out it was worth a whole lot. Somehow Toromon is going to have to pick itself up by the back of the neck and give itself a shaking. If I have to be the part that does the shaking, then I will. That's what I want, Jon Koshar, and I want it as badly as you want to be free."

Jon was quiet a moment. Then he said, "Anyway, to get what we want, I guess we more or less have to do the same thing. All right, I'll go along. But you're going to have to explain some things to me. There's a lot I still don't understand."

"A lot we both don't," the d.u.c.h.ess said. "But we know this: they're not from Earth, they're not human, and they come from very far away.

Inconceivably far."

"What about the rest?"

"They'll help us help Toromon if we help them. How, I still don't understand for sure. Already I've arranged to have Price Let kidnaped."

"Kidnaped? But why?"

"Because if we get through this, Toromon is going to need a strong king.

And I think you'll agree that Uske will never quite make that. Also, he's ill, and under any great strain, might die in a moment, not to mention the underground groups that are bound to spring up to undermine whatever the government decides to do, once the war gets going. Let is going where he can become a strong man, with the proper training, so that if anything happens to Uske, he can return and there'll be someone to guide the government through its crises. After that, how we're to help them, I'm not sure."

"I see," said Jon. "How did they get hold of you, anyway? For that matter, how did they get me?"

"You? They contacted you just outside of Telphar, didn't they? They had to rearrange the molecular structure of some of your more delicate proteins and do a general overhaul on your sub-crystalline structure so the radiation wouldn't kill you. That, unfortunately had the unpleasant side effect of booting down your index of refraction a couple of points, which is why you keep fading in dim light. In fact, I got a blow-by-blow description of your entire escape from them. It kept me on the edge of my seat all night. How was I contacted? The same way you were, suddenly, and with those words: _Lord of the Flames_. Now, your first direct a.s.signment will be ..."

In another room, Clea was sitting on a blue velvet ha.s.sock with her hands tight in her lap. Then suddenly they flew apart like springs, shook beside her head, and then clasped again. "Tomar," she said.

"Please, excuse me, but I'm upset. It was so strange. When I was dancing with the King, he told me how he had dreamed of my brother this morning.

I didn't think anything of it. I thought it was just small talk. Then, just after I changed partners for the third time, there I was, staring into a face that I could have sworn was Jon's. And the man wasn't dancing, either. He was just looking at me, very funny, and then he said my name. Tomar, it was the same voice Jon used to use when I'd hurt myself and he wanted to help. Oh, it couldn't have been him, because he was too tall, and too gaunt, and the voice was just a little too deep.

But it was so much like what he might have been. That was when the King made his announcement. I just turned and ran. The whole thing seemed supernatural. Oh, don't worry, I'm not superst.i.tious, but it unnerved me. And that plus what you said this morning."

"What I said?" asked Tomar. He stood beside the ha.s.sock in the blue-draped sitting room, his hands in his pockets, listening with animal patience.

"About their drafting all the degree students into the war effort. Maybe the war is good, but Tomar, I'm working on another project, and all at once, the thing I want most in the world is to be left alone to work on it. And I want you, and I want to have a picnic. I'm nearly at the solution now, and to have to stop and work on bomb sightings and missile trajectories ... Tomar, there's a beauty in abstract mathematics that shouldn't have to be dulled with that sort of thing. Also, maybe you'll go away, or I'll go away. That doesn't seem fair either. Tomar, have you ever had things you wanted, had them in your hands, and suddenly have a situation come up that made it look like they might fly out of your grip forever?"

Tomar rubbed his hand across his brush-cut red hair and shook his head.

"There was a time once, when I wanted things. Like food, work, and a bed where all four legs touched the ground. So I came to Toron. And I got them. And I got you, and so I guess there isn't anything else to want, or want that bad." He grinned, and the grin made her smile.

"I guess," she started, "... I guess it was just that he looked so much like my brother."

"Clea," Tomar said. "About your brother. I wasn't going to tell you this until later. Maybe I shouldn't say it now. But you were asking whether or not they were going to draft prisoners into the army; and whether at the end of their service, they'd be freed. Well, I did some checking.

They are going to, and I sent through a recommendation that they take your brother among the first bunch. In three hours I got a memorandum from the penal commissioner. Your brother's dead."

She looked at him hard, trying to hold her eyes open and to prevent the little snarl of sound that was a sob from loosening in the back of her throat.

"In fact it happened last night," Tomar went on. "He and two others attempted an escape. Two of their bodies were found. And there's no chance that the third one could have escaped alive."

The snarl collapsed into a sound she would not make. She sat for a moment. Then she said, "Let's go back to the party." She stood up, and they walked across the white rug to the door. Once she shook her head and opened her mouth. Then she closed it again and went on. "Yes. I'm glad you said it. I don't know. Maybe it was a sign ... a sign that he was dead. Maybe it was a sign ..." She stopped. "No. It wasn't. It wasn't anything, was it? No." They went down the steps to the ballroom once more. The music was very, very happy.

CHAPTER V