Chapter 1
He had asked the wrist computer what day and time and year it was, and whatever the computer had replied, only one thing seemed to echo in his brain, back and forth like a steel ball. September had ended only moments before; the computer had switched to October in mid-sentence.
Across the bubble, with all the colors of the rainbow, the stars streamed past in lines like a thousand claws, scratching across the luxglass of the observation port, red and yellow, yellow like eyes, and green and purple . . . Purple, like light, exactly the same shade as . . . as . . . claws and purple light and yellow eyes . . .
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a nose-shaped alien scuttle out of the room, and . . .
He remembered.
He sat suddenly upright in the lounge chair in which he had been lying. A few of the other passengers looked at him in surprise.
He remembered! The October One. Cor-Reed. The beast from the rock.
And the Skill!
He stood up abruptly. He was on the observation deck of a starship, watching, with some of the other passengers, the stars as they fled by in lines, while the ship bore through interspace. Several other passengers turned to look at him, to divine the reason for his sudden movement.
Almost trembling, he made a slight motion with his left hand, and pointed to the viewport with his right. The heads looked that way and forgot about him.
It was the Cloak of Unnotice, part of the Skill. In all the minds that had been looking his way, the image of the brown-haired boy was diffused and tinged with a deep unimportance. The eyes had seen, and if they looked his way again, they would see again. But the minds would not notice, as long as he kept the Cloak in active force around him.
He’d been on the ship two standard days. He remembered coming aboard with the wonder of an eleven-year-old, gaping at the immense ship in orbit around the October World as his shuttle drew close. He had spent most of the two days right here on the observation deck, watching as the ship pulled out of orbit, watching as the red October World dwindled behind them until it popped out of view as they entered interspace and the lining of the stars began.
He had felt no special emotion, other than a child’s wonder. He had felt no separation, no regret, no sadness at leaving a world that had been his home for seven years, at leaving an opportunity that would have made him great in his own mind.
All he had felt was the awe of a child looking at the universe.
Now his mind reeled with sadness and regret, but also with surprise and joy and hope. Memory! Skill! It was as if someone had given him a mouthful of medicine that had tripled his knowledge all at once.
He sank slowly onto the edge of the lounge chair, trying to grasp what had happened.
He remembered entering the Probe chamber. There Cor-Reed had pushed him away, not hard, with a kind of studied contempt. Asher had wept hysterically and clawed after him, too late to follow him through the closing door. Then he had been alone in the chamber. The lights had turned violet, and become so bright that . . .
That was when the forgetfulness had begun. After a while two men had come in to see him, men that he did not recognize at the time, but now knew were Dan-Gheel and Cor-Reed. The latter had looked at him with hatred, and Asher had wondered why. He had felt fine. He had wondered where he was, but that was all.
The men had taken him to a room, where they dressed him and handed him a suitcase. He was on his way home, they explained. He had felt happy about that. His parents must be waiting.
But what about the training? Somehow he had known that he was in this place for training of some kind. No, they had said, he had not been able to start the training. He had failed some kind of aptitude test.
That had puzzled him. He hadn’t remembered any test. Never mind, they had assured him. He did have a great aptitude in robotic logic. They were sure that the Robot Guild would be the place for him.
So they had bundled him aboard the starship. As the shuttle had neared it, he had seen its name in metallic mosaic on its angular hull. The Pride of Caldott. Caldott was a planet near the Core, an important place of commerce and finance.
His own planet, he had recalled, was Barnard’s Refuge, in the outer swirl of one of the galactic arms. That meant that this world he was leaving was even further out from the galactic core; it must be truly one of the fringe worlds, on the very rim of the galaxy.
He remembered now that he had sat in a sort of hazy stupor for the two days, going to his cubicle only for sleep, and to the common dining room for meals. He had spoken to very few people, and to no aliens at all. At one point, a matronly woman in the company of a Digger, an ugly little alien that buzzed instead of laughed, had struck up a conversation about inconsequentials, until Asher, even in his eleven-year-old naivete, had wished they’d go away. He hadn’t liked the Digger, whose snout reminded him of a mouthful of worms.
Another time a teenage girl, bored with the travel, had tried to make his acquaintance, and had become first puzzled and then fearful at his boyish babbling. An attractive girl, he thought with regretful irritation.
Looking around now, he saw neither the woman and alien nor the teenage girl, not that he wanted the company of any of them. Instead, he . . .
A man was looking at him. Asher looked back with fear welling up inside.
The man was dark-haired, shorter than average, with liquid black eyes. He was staring directly at Asher, directly through the Cloak of Unnotice.
Asher looked away, trying to seem casual. He had seen the man before, he knew, without taking any special notice. The man had often eaten at the same time Asher had on the ship, and he always seemed to be on the observation deck whenever Asher was.
What if the man were an Adept? Would he notice the Cloak?
Of course he would. And if he were in fact an Adept, he would have Skill beyond anything Asher could command.
The man was starting toward him. Asher could see him out of the corner of his eyes. What did it mean?
His mind whirled frantically, but he could think of only one way to account for this man’s presence. He must he some sort of Monitor for the Guild, a fail-safe mechanism in case the Probe did not take.
For that was what must have happened, Asher realized suddenly. Maybe the Probe did not always work. Maybe it broke down sometimes, or maybe some people had a sort of natural resistance to it.
The man was threading his way through a tight knot of passengers, human and alien, who were blocking the long aisle in which Asher sat. There was an exit nearby, much nearer to Asher than to the stranger. Asher’s leg muscles tensed; he would run.
But even as he thought it, he knew that it would do no good. All the man would have to do would be to invoke some arcane aspect of the Skill. There was one, for example, that senior Adepts would use on occasion to save an Apprentice from proceeding forward with some ill-considered application of Power—a single Word, hypnotically engraved in all Guild minds during apprenticeship. It would stop him in his tracks, and that was not the only trick that could be used on him.
Fear. Nervousness. The flaw was there, as it always was, bedeviling him with self-consciousness. Perhaps this man had no sinister intentions. Perhaps he . . .
The man cleared the gaggle of passengers and began to move more quickly. There was nothing friendly in his face or his movements.
Suppose some people were resistant to the Probe? Then what could the Guild do to safeguard the October secrets? It couldn’t just let failed Apprentices circulate around the galaxy, using and abusing various aspects of the Skill.
In a moment of amazing clarity that Asher would remember all his life, he knew that the Guild had only one way out. When a failed Apprentice somehow escaped the Probe, the Guild would have to kill.
#####
Surprise. He would have to do something that would take the man so completely by surprise that he would not have time to Invoke the Skill. Something so overwhelming that it would befuddle him—blind him, perhaps. Blind him . . .
He would never expect, in a crowd of passengers. . .
In a single fluid motion, Asher rose to his feet and threw up his arms, palms at a ninety-degree angle. The man’s eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to say the Word.
Green flame wrapped around Asher’s wrists, focused, shot toward the man. The man threw a Shield up, as Asher had known he would, and the Word was muffled into silence. Green flame cascaded off the Shield and onto the vinyl chain, which erupted into black, oily smoke. Someone screamed, and a chorus of cries and honks and shrieks rose up, drowning out any chance of the Word being heard.
Asher bolted for the exit, the smoke obscuring for a moment the man with the dark eyes. Blinded . . .
As Asher dove through the doorway, he glanced behind him and paled. The man was in the air in an impossible leap, twenty feet over the billowing smoke, heading toward him. It wasn’t low gravity that allowed the leap; the ship was on standard one g. No, it was the Skill, one of several types of levitation.
In that single glance, Asher saw that the man’s mouth was open and his Shield down. But the screaming bedlam from the passengers blasted around them, and drowned out anything the man might have tried to yell.
Then he was through the doorway, and out of the man’s sight.