“Oh, don’t talk nonsense!” Amanda had almost screamed at her. “How are you going to support the child? Who’s the father, anyway? Can’t he help?”
“Not really,” Zillah explained. “He’s happily married, and I didn’t want to upset him, so I didn’t tell him.”
She had obdurately refused to discuss the child’s father any further. Amanda, to this day, had no idea who was responsible for Marcus. The only thing to do seemed to have Zillah and the baby to live with her own family. It was lucky the kids liked Zillah and that Amanda’s husband, David, was so easygoing, because there were times when—
The bowl of pastry mix tipped, pivoting sharply on the edge of the table. Both sisters shouted with one voice, “Don’t, Marcus!” Zillah shot a hand out and grabbed the bowl. Amanda, with a swift gesture, halted the avalanche of dry crumble in midair and guided it back into the bowl.
“Gladys would approve, but everyone else would call that a waste of magic,” she remarked.
Zillah lifted the bowl high, and Marcus was revealed below the level of the table, lightly dusted with flour and still with both hands raised to grab the bowl, gazing at them blandly. “Little devil,” she said. “Did nobody notice you for five minutes? Is that it?” She lifted him up, absently checking the stout denim seat of him for damp, and dusted the flour from his hair, which had the same reddish tone as her own.
Marcus gave utterance. “Bond Jewry,” he said, stretching a hand like a plump pink starfish toward the bowl.
“It’s not jelly,” Zillah said, translating expertly. “And you’re not having it. Amanda, if we go to the warehouse, we’ll have to take him too. Will that be safe?”
“Honestly, Zillah, the way you’ve got that child warded, I don’t think even Gladys could touch him,” Amanda said. “I doubt if a nuclear missile could.”
Zillah checked a need to cry out, Because he’s all I’ve got! and also to explain that most of the protection was so that Mark—and therefore Mark’s wife—should never know that Marcus existed. “Well, it’s not so much what it might do to him, but what he could do to it,” she said. “But if you think it’s all right, let’s go, shall we?”
With Marcus safely strapped into the backseat, Zillah drove—ferally, as she did many things—while Amanda crouched down in the passenger seat and invoked protection from several different pantheons, wishing she had remembered the way Zillah drove before she suggested this. Amanda did not care for driving herself. It was useful that Zillah enjoyed it. Besides, she had sensed that Zillah was having a resurgence of unhappiness lately and needed a break. But this—they hunted down a lorry and overtook it on a bend; luckily there was nothing coming the other way—this was enough to make Amanda wish she had left Zillah by the wayside two years ago. If she killed them, what became of the capsule, of their plans, of the world?
The road opened up straight. Zillah stalked a motorcycle down it at ninety miles an hour, only dimly aware of her sister’s growing panic. She always hoped that driving dangerously would take her mind off the ceaseless tramp of misery inside it, but it did not. Nor did having Marcus. It was not that he was a constant reminder of Mark: he was another thing again. When Marcus was born, she discovered it was quite possible to love two people with the same intensity. It was as if her mind opened up another lobe, and there was Marcus in there, passionately precious. Alongside him, her feelings about Mark remained, exactly the same. They said you got over things in time, but it was just like her, Zillah thought, to have missed the trick of that somehow. Two years had made absolutely no difference. Maybe it had something to do with the weirdness and intensity of that moment—
She caught the motorcyclist where the road bent, passing him well over to the right, and absently dodged the Bedford van coming the other way. Beside her, Amanda uttered a faint, brave gasp. Marcus turned his head calmly to watch the van driver waving two fingers about. He liked the way they always seemed to do that.
—the moment when she had seen Mark as a shadowy reflection of himself at the bottom of a deep well. And Paulie down there too, drinking him. The horror of it was that she clearly knew Mark was allowing Paulie to do this to him. He was letting Paulie have all the eager, interesting, vital parts of him—the parts that laughed, or cried—and Zillah was only going to be allowed the pale, decorous, serious Mark. Prim, she had often thought, when she first met him. Priggish was a better word, she thought now, as old, gray factory buildings began to flash by.
“Next left,” Amanda said faintly. “Then the first big gate on the right.”
Zillah turned the wheel and they howled left into a side road. She slowed to sixty, not to miss the gate. If ever she could bring herself to tell Amanda about this vision of Mark in the well, she was sure Amanda would tell her it was a true Seeing. Amanda always said Zillah’s talent was enormous, but Zillah had never noticed it herself, except just that once, when she knew she had seen the most important fact about Mark there was and—
There was gate. She swung through it. And there was another car parked just inside it, no time or space to miss it.
—left him. Zillah thought that something picked the car up and lifted it bodily sideways. At all events, they were stopped, facing the warehouse, side by side with the other car, and not even scraped. Just a little shaken.
“I’m grateful to rather a lot of gods,” Amanda said.
“Whose bloody car is that?” Zillah demanded.
“I’ll see.” Amanda swept out of the car. Zillah unbuckled Marcus and ran after her, carrying Marcus, ready to lend her weight to Amanda’s fury if necessary. And it might be necessary for once, she saw. The warehouse door slid aside under Amanda’s angry hand, evidently unlocked. “And they took the wards off!” Amanda snarled. “Who is this fool?”
They clattered inside, into semidark. Zillah at once felt that, for some reason, everything was probably all right. She could see the capsule, a shrouded, nearly oblong thing almost the size of a bus, bulking in the center of the space, and she could tell it had not been tampered with. There was more than that. A kind of strength grew up around her from the floor. Doubtfully, she conjectured that this warehouse had been chosen because it happened to have been built over some place of power. She felt quite unworried as she followed Amanda around to the far side of the capsule.
A limber brown-clothed figure swung its long legs down from the crate it had been sitting on. “At last!”
“Maureen!” Anger, relief, and surprise made Amanda’s voice turn high and chilly. “What the hell are you doing? We nearly hit your damn car! You know perfectly well that none of the rest of you are supposed to come here.”
Maureen shrugged. “Where’s the harm? This place is warded sky-high—and I just had to consult you over our final list for people to go. Whatever time they go, it has to be soon. Don’t you understand? And I’ve got teams training in separate batches all over the country. None of them know if they’re going or not, or anything about what they’re really going for, and it’s not fair on them or their families, Amanda. It’s putting me under a lot of pressure, not being—” She stopped as she saw Zillah behind Amanda and continued looking at Zillah over Amanda’s head, meaningfully.
Zillah lowered Marcus to the floor. She did not like Maureen, and she knew Maureen did not like her. This could be rather unfortunate.
“I still fail to see why you had to come here,” Amanda said. “You could have phoned me, or consulted one of the other two. They both know all the people as well as I do.”
“It’s your baby—you made the first selection,” Maureen said, strolling back and forth with her hands in the deep brown pockets of her coat. “And Gladys isn’t doing anything but watch Laputa-Blish these days. Mark’s up to the armpits calculating those tides Gladys found and matching them with sidereal tables, trying to find us a window.” Her eyes flicked across to Zillah. “I went and tried to see Mark twice, as it happens. The first time all we did was have this long, long argument, because he said it wasn’t possible f
or them to go at full Moon, and I said it had got to be.”
She knows! Zillah thought. She fancies Mark herself and she’s letting me know.
“I managed to persuade Mark in the end,” Maureen continued, “but it was so late then, I had to leave. The second time I went, that wife of his was there, and it was all cuddle up, cuddle up, and she wouldn’t let me have a moment alone with him—”
She stopped as Marcus plodded forward and stared up at her. He pointed with a starfish finger. “Do bitch,” he stated.
“What?” Maureen’s head jerked downward, and she bent over him like a vulture.
“He says you’re a witch,” Amanda translated hastily. “It’s amazing how they know.”
“Oh,” Maureen said.
It became imperative to Zillah to get away from Maureen. She scooped Marcus up and carried him away through the porthole-like door of the capsule. Inside, it was suddenly all right again. Immense safety had been built into the thick walls of the thing—strong Amanda safety, which reminded Zillah of Amanda’s house, particularly of her beautiful, battered kitchen. There were no windows. The only light came from the round door. Soothed and calm and quiet, Zillah carried Marcus along the central gangway, hearing nothing but the metallic ring of her footsteps and seeing nothing much but bent, wriggly reflections of herself and Marcus in the silver metal welded over the walls, ceiling, and floor. The thing had been a bus once. The seats were now reduced to twenty or so. The rear end was partly blocked off with more silvery metal, and Zillah conjectured that the machinery she could dimly see through the places where the metal was missing had to be a life-support system. At the front end, the drivers’ seats faced television screens instead of windows, and there were controls of a sort, though not many. Zillah paced back and forth. As she went, she detached a long, coiling gingerish hair from her head and then quietly removed a short, fine one from Marcus. Why she should do this, she had no idea. When she had both hairs, again impelled by reasons she did not understand, she tucked both, the long and the short one, well down inside the upholstery of a seat near the back.
Meanwhile, Maureen said ferociously to Amanda, “Why is she here? How much have you told her? You talk about me breaking security, but honestly!”
“Don’t be stupid! I’ve only told her the most general outline,” Amanda said with equal ferocity. A certain amount of guilt lay behind her fierceness. While she had not given Zillah any real details, she knew she had talked to her more than she should. It had been so hard, never telling David or the children anything about this other, hidden side of her life; and when Zillah came to live with them, who knew all about this hidden side, the relief of having someone to talk to had certainly led Amanda to say far more than was quite discreet. “I’ve told her almost nothing!” she snapped. “Far less than you did by babbling about windows at full Moon! And what do you mean about Gladys not listening to you?”
“That was a smoke screen, you idiot!” Maureen retorted. “Besides, she didn’t listen much.”
“But what about the attack-magic? It doesn’t matter how many teams you select, if they’re going to arrive in Laputa-Blish without anything to—And don’t you ever mention Laputa-Blish in front of Zillah again! All I’ve told her is that there are hostile magicians in the next universe. I haven’t said a word about where!”
Maureen shrugged. “I assumed you’d told her the lot. All right. You needn’t glare. And Gladys has got the attack-magic ready. She’s calling it virus-magic—that was Mark’s idea—and they’re both dead chuffed with it actually, and they say it’ll go through Laputa-Blish like wildfire as soon as it touches anyone there.”
“Good,” said Amanda. Both were cooling down a little. Both found themselves looking around and behind them. Their anger had been interacting with the delicate magics of the capsule. They could feel it building elemental things that could be disastrous. They smiled at each other, like bared teeth. “Well, let’s have a look at that list,” Amanda said.
“Okay.” Maureen plunged a hand into her pocket. Before she took the list out, she said, “I’m sending Flan Burke. I can’t really spare her, but I think the team needs her vitality. And I think Roz Collasso will have to go. I hate the woman, personally, but you can’t deny she’s got a strong character. Then Tam Fairbrother is a must—”
“Tam?” exclaimed Amanda. “He’s a man! It’s unlike you not to notice, Maureen!”
“Jesus, Amanda! You are a prig!” Maureen said heatedly. “We discussed it. I thought even you agreed that an all-male world is likely to have a fair share of gay men. I’m sending two of our best looking boys. Even you must have noticed that Tam is bloody good-looking!”
This was hopeless. Around them on the dim floor, dust was beginning to rise in little dancing fountains. Maureen’s copper hair and Amanda’s straight black locks were lifting, and there was a smell of ozone. “Maureen,” Amanda said decisively, “you’d better get into your car and trail us back to my house. We’ll discuss the list there. If we argue anymore here, this capsule’s going to be possessed.” And, so that Maureen should have no chance to argue, Amanda strode to the open door of the capsule, calling ringingly for Zillah.
“Sorry I spoke!” Maureen muttered, plunging her hand back into her pocket, where the typewritten list was already half-materialized. “Back into hiding for now. Mother knows best!”
Amanda took the wheel this time and drove slowly and considerately in front of Maureen—which probably made Maureen even madder than she was already, Zillah thought. Maureen drove a fast car, new and expensive. Zillah could tell she hated crawling. Zillah sat in the backseat of Amanda’s car, because Marcus seemed to want her there, and kept her thoughts carefully on Maureen raging in third gear behind. It served to push that curious, primitive piece of magic she had performed in the capsule right down to the bottom of her mind. It was necessary not to know about that, though she had no idea why. She wished that the sight of Maureen’s furious face could push the misery out of her mind too—but nothing did much for that. And I’m so sick of it! Zillah thought. I’d like to be shot of it for good, though that’s a sort of death, and not fair on Marcus. She found her mind repeating this. A sort of death… a sort of death… Anyway, back to Maureen. I think she’s a bitch. Swaggering into the warehouse and behaving as if she’s in charge of the whole operation. Thinks she’s plenty officer quality, doesn’t she? I can just see what it would be like if she really was in charge. Zillah let her mind run on this. It was better than thinking of death. Maureen strutting, sauntering, hitching her long, limber legs about, taking all the best men for her own use…
It was during this flight of fancy that the High Head of Arth made his routine, delicate contact. He smiled. Then he hooked Maureen’s boyfriend out of the ether and told him to get off his haunches and get to work on Maureen.
* * *
2
« ^ »
Mark found a window for the next full Moon. It was a very small one, but it would serve, provided everything was synchronized to the second. Laputa-Blish would then be, as far as Gladys could tell, at a high point in one of its eccentric, wobbling circuits of its parent universe, and slightly inclined toward Earth. In this position, the capsule could clear the pirate defenses and reach Laputa-Blish without spending too long in the dubious interstitial stuff between universes. That was important. The moment it left Earth’s universe, the circles of magic users sending it would lose touch with it. It would have to rely on its own inbuilt defenses, and no one wanted it to have to do that for too long.
According to Mark, who had been strenuously calculating for most of a month now, the window was all right, but the other influences were iffy. Much that was good was streaming in the inner spheres, but there was strong, obscure opposition too. “Perhaps we should wait for a more favorable Moon?” he said doubtfully.
The others vetoed this. There was, no one quite knew why, a general feeling that it was now or never. Mark, even as he gave in, admitted to having the feeling t
oo—as if the pirates were breathing down their necks and would read over their shoulders what they were doing if they left the attack to wait any longer.
Gladys and Maureen, with occasional crisp interventions from Amanda, devised a very strong double ritual, whose purpose was cleverly hidden from all but the four of them. After that, as Gladys said, they had reason to be glad that the Ring was so well organized. The Outer Ring accepted the ritual without question and went to work on the mass of detailed arrangements whereby it was distributed and timed to synchronize all over the country. Gladys, as always, gave marveling chuckles. The groups of magic users were so various. The circles of serious, educated witches were only a small part of them, and to them the word could be handed down openly; but there were hereditary covens, who required secret negotiations; groups of amateurs who thought they were playing independently at magic, who needed to be nudged to do the right thing at the right time; spiritualists to be hinted at to meet and perform a specially adapted rite, which they did not see as a rite at all; individual magicians who did not know they were being organized; prayer groups, mediums, dowsers, meditators, and also numbers of people who imagined themselves to be charlatans and cheats, all of whom had to be induced to put forth power in a certain direction at the same time; and last but not least, there were the several mighty Orders of trained magicians, who needed very careful handling indeed. A few of these did acknowledge the authority of the Ring, but most regarded themselves as independent priesthoods and would have been utterly outraged to know that the ritual they had ordained for the next full Moon was not ordained by their own need and will.