Castle Dreams

Two Keep — Near the Queen’s Tower — Lower Levels

Lugging a huge sheaf of fan-folded paper — a computer printout — Gene trudged the hallways of Castle Perilous, looking for a doorway into an interesting universe. His explorations of the past two weeks hadn’t turned up a portal worth spitting into, and this outing was no exception.

He stopped. Before him stood an anomaly, an archway that opened onto a pleasant landscape of trees, grass, shrubs, and bright sunlight. The anomaly consisted in the fact that this innocuous scenery did not lie outside the castle in the normal sense. It was part of another world, one belonging to a universe entirely separate from the one that the castle occupied. In the castle nomenclature, this doorway to a strange cosmos was an “aspect.”

He consulted the printout. It was a list of aspects with names and descriptions, grouped according to location in the castle. Gene thumbed through the pages covering the 14th floor of the keep. There were hundreds of listings, and the locations were somewhat vague. For instance: “Twelve paces east, along common bearing-wall between Tinker’s Stall and Queen’s Ladies’ Sewing Room: to right of foliated pilaster.”

Big help. There were hundreds of empty rooms on this floor. No one knew which had been what a millennium or two ago, when this catalogue of aspects been compiled (the data had come out of an ancient book in the castle library and had recently been sorted by the castle’s mainframe computer).

But Gene thought he had this aspect pegged.

““Arcadia,”” he read aloud from the printout. ““Clement, peaceful; salubrious climate. Fauna: small and inoffensive. Population: by all indications uninhabited. Flora: extensive, variegated. Otherwise undistinguished.””

Another parklike aspect, of which the castle had thousands. Pleasant, good for picnics and outings. Hills, trees, and grass. Of little interest to a man hungering for high adventure.

Gene moved on.

He had changed from castle clothes — the usual neo-medieval attire — to an all-weather one-piece outdoor suit that Linda had conjured for him, at his behest and to his specifications. Fashioned of a sturdy synthetic material and dyed in camouflage, it featured numerous zippered pockets and a wide utility belt. The belt had pouches holding compass and other accouterments, along with a hunting knife and scabbard. With hiking boots and backpack, he was set for any climate and terrain, within certain limits, from high desert to subarctic tundra. Very hot and very cold climates would be problematical — but of course the choice of world was his.

He simply couldn’t decide.

The backpack bulged with a week’s rations, and his canteen held a three-day supply of water. The trouble was that he didn’t know quite what he had in mind. Was this a recreational outing? Just a backpacking trip? If so, perhaps he merely wanted to spend a week alone and watch fish break the crystalline surface of a mountain lake, or observe a canopy of silent, alien stars slowly wheeling, or look for fossils in the uplifted limestone beds of ancient seas, or maybe just contemplate the involuted folds of his navel.…

Then again, maybe he actually wanted to explore an inhabited aspect, one with an interesting culture that merited scrutiny. It might be entertaining to find an aspect set in a historical period similar to one of Earth’s. A rough-and-tumble milieu. A war.

Was that what he hungered for? Violence? Sobering thought. He didn’t think of himself as particularly bloodthirsty. True, he liked proving himself with a sword, and had parried and lunged in many a fencing duel — but all of his fighting had been in one cause or another: defending his friends and the castle against invaders, or overthrowing a particularly odious regime in one of the inhabited aspects, or generally fighting the good fight. All perfectly justifiable. Yes, he’d killed men, several. And quasi-men: non-humans and not-quite-humans.

So, did he want more of that? Did he feel the overwhelming need to seek out such confrontations? To what purpose? Must he spill blood to set his own racing?

He stopped in front of another aspect, this one desiccated and bleak. He walked on.

No, he didn’t like spilling blood. He was tired of conflict. The castle had gone through one convulsion after another in the past few years: siege, palace intrigue, dissension, invasion, and castlequake (extreme instability caused by stress and disharmony in the multiverse). He wanted a reprise of any of that? Absolutely not. The last thing he wanted was more Sturm und Drang.

Another portal, another world. There was not much out there but salt flats under a deep purple sky. He continued down the stone-lined corridor.

What he craved was adventure. He wanted to undertake an expedition to discover something. Search for the source of the Nile. Climb Everest. Sled through the Antarctic. Plumb the depths of the Marianas Trench in a bathyscaphe.

Or find equivalents of any of those things in one of these worlds.

Here was yet another aspect. And yet another picnic ground. He thumbed through the printout, vainly trying to find something of interest. He’d come to this floor because a few of the descriptions sounded promising. He had failed to locate any of the aspects described.

He flipped through page after page. Jeremy, the castle data-processing chief, had given him the printout, but could neither vouch for the data’s accuracy nor warrant that it wasn’t completely obsolete. Aspects sometimes shifted around, and this list had been compiled thousands of years ago. Efforts were being made to update the records, but the job was time-consuming.

Perhaps only Incarnadine, King of the Realms Perilous, knew every aspect, where it was and what it was. However, he claimed he didn’t, and everyone usually took him at his kingly word.

Gene lost his grip on the unwieldy printout and a section of it dropped to the floor, trailing its paper tail. He stooped to pick up the spill but in the doing dropped more. This produced a blood-chilling oath. He kicked at the pile. Paper all over the place.

He gathered up the whole mess and threw it into the nearest alcove. Dusting his hands, he walked away.

He saw a room to his right and entered. It was one of the castle’s countless sitting rooms, furnished as usual with dark carved chairs, a settee, and a few tables. Tapestries depicting hunting scenes draped the stone walls. This room seemed to get some use — there was a bowl of fresh fruit on one of the tables.

Gene shucked his backpack. He took an apple, lounged on the settee, and munched abstractedly.

This was useless. Either he wasn’t being systematic enough or his luck had turned bad. Never before had he run into the problem of finding an interesting aspect. Used to be they popped up at the drop of a hat.

Maybe there was another problem. What used to be a novelty had long ago become commonplace. Maybe he’d seen enough interesting new worlds. Maybe he needed to go back home to his own.

But the longer he thought about going home, the less attractive the prospect seemed. Home? What was home? What was Earth, for that matter? One big heaving ball of storm and stress. He wondered what current world crisis was grabbing the headlines.

Not that he cared.

So, not going home left the alternative of staying here, which was boring. He wondered what in the world was wrong with him. Why could nothing in a fantastic enchanted castle captivate his imagination?

Could he be just plain depressed — clinically depressed? It happens to lots of people, he thought. Who granted you immunity?

But he didn’t feel depressed, exactly; though what he was feeling — restlessness, boredom, and a sense that nothing really mattered — were suspicious symptoms. He gave some thought to the notion of seeking professional help.

Therapy? He was skeptical of its value. Something about all that shrink business had always struck him as questionable. Sure, therapy had it clinical uses, but for a person in generally good mental health to sit himself down …

Or was he just rationalizing? He considered his reluctance as a candidate for the symptom category.

Boy, they get you coming and going. Feel the need for therapy? No? Well, that simply means you need therapy.

He suddenly laughed.

You see, Doctor, I live in this big enchanted castle. And one day, while flensing a dragon, I suddenly got this overpowering feeling of futility.…

No, that would never do. They’d take him directly to the bouncy cubicle.

He sighed and tossed the half-eaten apple over his shoulder; then, regretting this act of thoughtlessness (the servants had enough work) he got up to retrieve it and saw that it had rolled through a doorway — an aspect, in fact — one that he had only half-noticed on entering.

Now he noticed it. This world was very nice, very nice indeed. He poked his head through. There was a clean, bracing wind blowing through a stand of pines to the right. Well, they looked like pines, but they were orange. On second thought they didn’t look much like pine trees.

Even with orange non-pine trees, the terrain reminded him of places in Utah or western Colorado. Except for the colors: bright turquoise-blue rocks. Copper compounds? And a sort of pink sky. Airborne dust particles, he guessed.

Actually it didn’t look a hell of a lot like anyplace he’d ever seen or visited. But it did look interesting. Sort of like photographs of a national park in Kodachrome-gone-mad.

He went back and fetched his gear. Wouldn’t hurt to step through and look around. He wouldn’t wander very far, not until he was sure this world was uninhabited. He could usually tell. Unpopulated worlds had a certain feel to them; and populated ones were sometimes all too unmistakable, especially those that succumbed to the temptations of technology (from stone axes to beverage cans). Litter was a trans-universal phenomenon.

He walked through the portal and out into a bright new world.

Yes, it was fairly obvious what he really wanted. Just a few days alone to ruminate and gather some wool. A little retreat to recharge the spiritual batteries. Had he really wanted adventure, he would have opted for an adventurous world, an inhabited one, a choice that would have necessitated research, reconnoitering, and extreme caution. To say nothing of breaching the language barrier, learning the customs, coming up with a convincing identity, and all that sort of undercover stuff. You couldn’t really go traipsing into an inhabited aspect — or any aspect — without adequate preparation. He had violated that rule enough to know how dangerous it could be.

He really liked this world. Snow-hooded peaks to the north, as he reckoned north, an orange forest to the south — aquamarine badlands in between. Vegetation was strange not only in color. He passed a bush with diamond-like nodules depending from thin stalks. Another plant looked like an avant-garde sculpture constructed of clear plastic tubing.

He stopped to take a compass heading. His directional guesses were fairly true. The mountains lay to the magnetic north. He’d head toward them and try to find that crystal mountain lake. He probably wouldn’t be able to eat the fish in the lake, though he had brought tackle and hand-line. This was hardly an Earth-like world, and the plant and animal proteins here probably didn’t match his body chemistry. In other words, most everything that might appear edible would not be. He’d be living out of his backpack for a week. But that he was perfectly willing to do. He’d brought the best in freeze-dried comestibles.

The air was temperate, but it would likely get cold at night. That was no problem, however, as he had a high-tech wonder of a one-man tent and a mylar-lined sleeping bag that was rated down to minus 35 degrees Celsius.

He hiked along for about ten minutes, keeping the sun to his left as he threaded his way around upthrusting strata of greenish-blue. Yellow streaking ran through the rocks.

As he was coming down into a shallow canyon, a loud report shattered the air and made him jump. It was quite unexpected.

He looked up. No thunderclouds, and he was momentarily mystified until he saw the contrail of a fast-moving object in the sky. The noise had been a sonic boom.

“Oh, damn.”

He’d have to head back. Despite his intuitions to the contrary, this world was not only inhabited but technologically sophisticated.

Nevertheless, for the moment he stayed, watching the thing make a harrowing high-g turn away from the sun and head back in his direction. It was an aircraft of some sort, and as it neared it looked rather like a small space shuttle. Silver-colored, compact and delta-winged, it was convincingly futuristic yet appeared eminently practicable.

But how was it going to set down? From his vantage point, Gene surveyed the available landing area. There wasn’t nearly enough. Not unless the thing had vertical-landing capability.

The craft was floating along now, circling the canyon, staying airborne against all aerodynamic odds, when by rights it should have gone plunging groundward in a stall. Its flight path looked wobbly. After making a complete circuit of the canyon, the silvery vehicle began its approach for a landing. The only sound it made was the faint whoosh of air over its gracefully curving surfaces.

At the last second, the craft went out of control and hit the floor of the canyon hard — and flipped over. Gene dove behind a rock. But there was no explosion.

He got up, slapped his pants clean, and looked toward the crash site. The craft was silent and still except for a cloud of dust rising from the wreckage. Nothing else moved in the canyon. He jogged toward the downed craft.

As he neared, he slowed to a cautious walk. No telling who the survivors — if any — were. There was no way of knowing what they were, human or nonhuman, or how they would react. The plane said “human” to him, somehow, but that didn’t make him any the less wary, it perhaps made him more so.

An oval hatch opened near the craft’s blunt nose, dilating like an iris. A sigh of escaping air came to Gene’s ears. He stopped. No one came out. He edged closer.

He peered into the interior. It was dark, and what was visible looked cramped and crowded with instrumentation. But there was room for him to enter, if he so decided.

He decided. He dropped his backpack and climbed through the hatch. Wires dangled in front of his face. He brushed them aside. Squeezing toward the nose, he walked gingerly over banks of instruments on the inverted overhead bulkhead.

Ahead, a human form hung upside down, snared in a tangle of straps, cables, and tubes. The pilot, he surmised, in a blue-and-silver pressure suit and transparent helmet. He got closer and bent over the still form.

It was a woman. And a very unusual-looking one. The hair, ghostly albino white, was cropped short. Her skin was suntan-dark, a Palm Beach mulatto. Her features were regular and broad, high cheekbones. Quite a striking face. A beautiful one, once you got used to the contrasts. He put his face close to hers and peered through the helmet. Her eyelids opened slightly.

She was no albino. Her eyes were the darkest blue he had ever seen. They were purplish-blue besides, and he thought he detected flecks of green. He looked her over. There was a bloodied rip in her suit along the rib cage.

He didn’t know quite what to do. He could not move her without risk of further serious injury, but he was reluctant to leave her hanging like this. She was obviously bleeding inside that suit. It would take at least twenty minutes to run back to the castle to get help, and a further twenty, minimum, before help arrived. He’d best get her down very gently, somehow, and then see what he could do to stabilize her with the first-aid stuff in the backpack. When he was sure she would last, he’d make a run to the castle.

He struggled out of the cabin, got the backpack, and went back inside, batting the same dangling wires out of the way. He went to her, knelt, and began unpacking.

Presently, he found the first-aid kit. He looked up and froze. He was staring into the business-end of a formidable-looking handgun.

Gene tilted his head to read her face. She was wide-eyed but not fearful. She looked angry. She said something in a language that sounded a cross between German and Latin, with a bit of Spanish thrown in for spice. When he didn’t answer she spoke again, barking some kind of order.

“Sorry,” he said finally. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

She scowled. Then her eyelids fluttered. The barrel of the gun dropped, as did her head to the deck. She relapsed into semiconsciousness.

Slowly, he reached for the weapon. She let go of it easily, and he exhaled and put the thing aside after giving it a glance and marveling. It looked like what a laser gun should look like.

He drew his knife and set himself to the task of untangling her. It was a rough job. He resorted to sawing at the hoses with his hunting knife. The straps were made of even tougher material, but he finally managed to clear her of those and had to react quickly when her legs dropped.

He eased her to the deck and straightened up, took a breath. It was hot inside and getter hotter. He worried about spilling fuel and the possibility of a sudden fire, and had a sudden flash of imagining what it would be like to be trapped inside.

He would have to risk moving her. She could move, and that meant her spinal cord was intact; he’d have to gamble that the spine itself wasn’t broken.

He realized that her air supply had been interrupted and bent to the chore of getting her helmet off. There were fairly straightforward lugs on either side of the collar, and he undid these. He tried rotating the helmet clockwise, and when it wouldn’t budge, tried the other way. It came of easily.

The fresh air seemed to bring her around.

She tried to get up, mumbling something.

“Can you walk?”

She grumbled something in reply.

“Let me help you.”

He got her up. With difficulty, they struggled out of the craft. Outside, she collapsed to her knees, then sat with her head hung low.

He wanted to try something. He was no magician, like Linda and some few other castle Guests, but he could work a spell with a little luck. After you’d lived in the castle for a while, some of the magic rubbed off and stayed with you, even when you left the castle. Linda had taught him a trick that took advantage of this effect. It was a short incantation that invoked the castle’s pervasive language-translation spell. Gene often used it when exploring inhabited aspects. Sometimes it worked for him, sometimes not. It was always worth a try.

He traced a circle in the air with his right index finger, made a cross over the circle, then uttered a one-syllable word.

He turned to her. “Are you all right?”

She looked up, surprised and suspicious. “You speak Universal. But you’re an Outworlder.”

“No. I’m using a … device.”

“Implant?” He nodded. “You don’t really look like an Outworlder. You look strange. What line are you of?”

“I come from a world you’re probably not familiar with.”

“What are you doing here? This planet is on the Preserve List. I must warn you that the Irregulars are on my trail. They may have guessed where I shunted off the Thread. I tried to randomize but they have ways of following a phased-photon trail. Something new they’ve come up with. If they find you with me, they’ll kill you.”

“What will they do to you?” he asked.

“Torture me. They’d do that no matter what.” She took a deep breath, broke into a coughing fit, but eventually recovered. She looked Gene up and down. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Gene. If you’re in need of medical assistance, I can get help.”

“Where?” She was genuinely puzzled. “Who is here on the planet?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain. But I can get help if you need it.”

“I will be fine,” she said firmly. “I was thrown about during the attack, and my side —” She touched the rip in her pressure suit. “I bled some, but I think it’s stopped. I don’t think I sustained internal injury. Nothing serious, anyway.”

“You’ll need someone to see to that wound,” Gene told her.

“You still haven’t told me who you are and what you’re doing here,” she said pointedly. “Are you a freebooter? A privateer?”

“Sort of,” Gene answered. “I —”

He was interrupted by more sonic booming. They looked up. Three white objects were etching wispy trails across the sky. Gene was sure now that the woman’s craft was a spaceship — or at least a lifeboat of a larger spacecraft — and that these new arrivals were from space, too.

“They’re here,” she said flatly, no particular intonation to her voice except a weary casualness, as though death and danger were nothing out of the ordinary. She turned her head to Gene and smiled. “Would you be so kind as to fetch my pistol?”

Gene ducked back into the landing craft. When he came out he had both gun and backpack in hand. He gave the former to her.

“Thank you.” She took it, checked it over, flipped a small lever on the breech, then handed it back. “Here.”

He took the weapon. “What do you want me to do?”

“Again, if you would be so kind … shoot me.”