Chapter 3
“Close his eyes,” Asher breathed.
The two looked at him. On the woman’s face was amused boredom. On the alien’s . . .
Asher couldn’t tell.
The woman stirred and said: “Why not? Digger.”
The little alien turned his head. Then, looking like a walking nose, he scuttled toward the dark-haired man. The alien’s half-sheathed claws clattered on the plas-steel deck like a bony drum-roll.
Asher leaned against the door and watched. He knew that eyes left open under a Time Stop would tend to dry. When the spell was later ended, the irritation would alert the individual that something odd had happened. The best way was for the action to happen, literally, during the blink of an eye.
As his cilia writhed horribly, the Digger’s mouth moved. His head tilted and he looked up at the rigid man. Then he spoke, the first sound other than a buzz that Asher had heard from him. The voice was low, bubbly, ghastly somehow, distorted by the cilia into incomprehensibility. The alien reached up with one blunt arm, claws retracted, underlying prehensile fingers making a sign in the air.
As if dragged down with weights, the man’s eyelids slowly closed. Asher was dumbfounded; he would have had to do it by hand.
“We should have let him go blind,” the woman said. Asher shot her a look of surprise and anger. The woman, seeing it, waved it away.
“Never mind, kid. Let’s go.”
The Digger stopped his signing and moved toward the door, head turning completely around like the turret of a tank.
“Where?” Asher demanded. The woman had risen and was already almost on top of him.
“Out,” she said tersely. “You want to be here when he wakes up?”
There was something crude about her that Asher did not like. The manic laughter of a few moments ago was gone; she was now as grim as an undertaker.
“A moment,” he said. Quickly he grabbed his satchel and began to stuff it with a few garments and personal things.
The woman grabbed his arm: “What the devil are you doing?”
“Why,” Asher said, stammering, “getting my clothes.”
The woman grabbed the satchel with one hand and shoved with the other. Asher stumbled backward and sat heavily on the bed.
“Digger, did you imprint all this?” the woman rasped irritably, pulling Asher’s possessions back out of the satchel.
Asher found his voice. “Give me that stuff back!” he shouted, and thrust himself off the bed. The woman straight-armed him in the chest, and he went reeling backward again. The little alien burbled and seemed to take hold of Asher’s objects by an invisible hand—or rather, many invisible hands, or tentacles, or whatever.
Telekinesis—moving objects with the mind—was commonplace on the October World. Asher tensed to spring off the bed again, but the woman’s hand was still on his chest, her face close to his, her breath pouring over him.
“What did they train you for, to become a professional idiot?” she demanded harshly. Her hard eyes glittered. “If anything is out of place in here, that Adept over there will know it and know that a Time Stop was at work. And then he will know that we, or someone like us, are aboard, and then we’ll be in for it.”
The Digger was arranging the things as they had been. He had long before imprinted on his mind the entire scene—the cabin and its contents—like a photograph. He nudged the items with delicate little pushes of the mind into places not even a millimeter apart from where they had been. Asher, thinking now, watched him and wondered at his Skill.
He didn’t want to look at the woman. Instead, he let the tension slip away from his rigid muscles.
“Okay,” he said dully. Of course they were right. Why couldn’t he ever make the proper decision?
The woman seemed satisfied. They waited until the Digger had arranged everything with exactitude. Then Asher rose, and the Digger smoothed out the bed, even poking a little dimple into the slipcover that had been there before.
“Let’s go,” the woman said.
Asher shot a final, nervous glance at the Adept, who was still standing there, the aura of menace around him made somehow ludicrous by his closed eyes.
Asher stepped to the door and was stopped by the woman’s outstretched arm. The Digger had said something, his knobby eyes fixed on the door.
“Someone outside,” the woman said. “We’ll wait until the corridor is empty.”
So the Digger could feel through walls.
Among the Guild, they referred to anyone with that particular talent as one who “had Sight.” Although it was not an unusual Skill, Asher had spent hours trying to learn it, or even understand it, without any hint of success. The Digger, he supposed, could “see” around corners, feel the underlying mental vibrations of thinking, conscious beings nearby. Useful, indeed, were one to desire concealment. As useful, perhaps, as the Shadow . . .
“The Shadow!” Asher said suddenly. “Why not place ourselves in Shadow? That way it won’t matter who’s going by.”
The woman hit him across the mouth in a movement that was so casual that Asher had had no idea it was coming. It was the second time that day that someone had hit him.
Instinctively, his arms jerked up for the Flame as anger surged in him. Then he recalled that that weapon was useless against her.
“Halfwit,” she said loudly, her voice holding malice and contempt. She didn’t even bother to look at him. “There could be five hundred Adepts on this ship, Use the Shadow, or even the Cloak, and they’d all be on top of us as if we were painted with orange and purple spots yelling ‘Here Here!’” Irritation was on her face, and petulance, as if she hated to provide him with an explanation at all.
Asher, though, had to admit the truth in what she said. But she had hit him . . .
The door suddenly opened—Asher hadn’t seen either the woman or the alien touch it, so there was some more psychokinesis at work—and the three moved out into the hallway, which was deserted. The door closed softly behind them.
The woman looked at it with eyes that seemed as hard as granite.
“In fifteen minutes, he awakens,” she said as if to no one. “We should have killed him.”
The Digger mumbled and hissed angrily.
“All right, all right,” she said irritably. “I suppose you’re right, about the security police anyway. Still . . .” Her eyes glittered at the door. Asher shuddered.
They moved silently down a series of intersecting corridors, around corners, and then up three levels and down one, in a tortuous pattern that Asher finally realized was dictated by the presence or absence of life forms in the corridors just out of sight ahead of them.
Eventually they came to a cabin indistinguishable from the one Asher had held. In all the time they had traveled, in the middle of the ship’s day, they had seen no one else, neither human nor alien.
The Digger’s Sight was very good.
“My name,” the woman said, “is Kerla. No middle name or last name. Just Kerla.”
Asher was sitting on the fold-out bed. The woman was on a chair, facing him, her fat body lying back in loose relaxation. The Digger was between them; Kerla was using him as a footstool, with no evident discomfort to him.
“You’re not stupid all the time,” the woman’s harsh voice continued. ‘You’ve thought about ways of escaping the Caldott. Aren’t any, are there?”
Asher said nothing. He didn’t like this woman, But she was right. There was no way off the ship without crossing the path of the October Guild, whether the dark-haired Adept was alone or not.
No way alone, without help.
“We’re going to leave you here for a while,” the woman went on. “It would look funny if the two of us should suddenly fail to show up at the hangouts we’ve used. Other passengers know us, if only by sight.
“But you’ll stay put here. You won’t leave for any reason. You won’t use your wrist computer, you won’t do anything to draw attention to yourself at all. And of course you won’t make any calls on interspatial holography.”
“But I want to call my parents!” Asher said suddenly. There was pain in his eyes, but if the woman saw it, she didn’t care.
He just couldn’t hold her gaze. He looked away.
“Idiot!” the woman exploded, spittle in the air. For the first time, Asher realized that her basic accent was not among those that he had heard before. He wondered suddenly what planet she was from. “Call your parents,” she brayed scornfully, “and they’ll know what cabin you’re in and who you’re with. You’d better forget about your parents, boy. Do you think that the Guild wants anyone to know what they had in mind for you, least of all them?”
Agony was in Asher’s mind, but the woman went remorselessly on.
“You think about it, boy. You can die by the Guild, or let us get you out. There’s no third choice; you know the rules. Oxygen-breathers can’t get off the ship through the chlorine or methane or water sections, and vice versa. The lifeboats are out, and the Skill would only attract attention. It’s us or nothing, kid. You’d better get used to it now, because I don’t really care. I’ll just chuck you out of here, and not alive either. I’ll not have you blabbing to the October Guild about us two.”
There was something about the way she said “October Guild.” Fear?
“I don’t care if you like me or not,” she said. “I have a use for you. That’s all there is to it. You use your brain. It’s us, or die. Enough said.”
She rose and headed to the door, while Asher sat dumbly. The Digger ran a clawed hand over the place on his head where her feet had rested, and clattered behind her without a backward glance. Asher watched them as they passed through the doorway. It closed with a quiet hiss.
His mind settled down after a time. He fingered the place on his cheek where Kerla had slapped him. Thought, his mind said. It’s time for thought—careful, meticulous consideration with as little emotional overlay as he could manage. To put the flaw aside. Events were sweeping him along, and he didn’t like it.
He especially didn’t like Kerla. For the first time, he wondered what “use” she had for him. He wondered whether it was preferable to death by the Guild.
Emotion kept trying to rise within him. Mostly it was the pain of the idea that he was cut off from his family in a way that might be permanent. Because if he could escape the Guild’s attention now, then the only way they could find him among the thousands of inhabited planets in the Galaxy would he to keep watch on his family and wait for a holograph call or some other contact. With all the skill at the disposal of the Guild, even a second- or third-hand message would provide an open backtrail to wherever he was.
Also, though, he resented the woman. Anger had always been his biggest problem, and it was a problem now. Yet he could see that she was right. His only chance of getting off the Pride of Caldott was to play along with the woman and the little alien.
But once off the ship . . . it would be time for another escape, Asher decided.
Emotion struck him again, and Asher tried to keep from feeling loneliness and fear.