The Final Planet Page 17

  Retha, huh? That thin-shouldered little scamp is nothing but a great terrible troublemaker.

  “You want to go through all that again?” said Seamus, now very much back down to earth. He let go of her and sank wearily into a chair by the map table.

  “The Young Ones have a plan. On the first day of the Festival they will take the tranquillity pills and storm the Military Center. They have keys to the arsenal. With the carbines and explosives they will take over the Energy Center and the Central Building. They will liquidate the Committee and take command of the City. When the Festival is over, they will be running Zylong.” Her brown eyes were glowing with excitement. “The Guardians, the Committee, the people at key forts like Hyperion, and the Energy Technicians use the pills to stay rational during the Festival. With pills, we can take over the City.”

  Seamus put his hands to his forehead and stared glumly at the maps. “Woman, you’re pretty damn intelligent. What chance do you think such a harebrained idea has? Do you think two kids like Yens and Horor and a poor little tyke like Retha can overthrow an old and very established society?”

  “They have about as much chance as we have of making it through to your spacecraft, the Dove, or whatever you call it,” she flared back at him.

  “Dev.” Absently, he corrected her.

  “Yes, Dev, then. Someday you must tell me who he was.”

  “He was too cute a man to get into something like this.” Then he remembered some of the things De Valera had done and wasn’t so sure. Maybe this upcoming Festival day will be Zylong’s Easter Monday. The woman has never loved you at all. She’s scheming and conniving and pretending to love you. He noted with considerable satisfaction that his heart was welling with self-pity. What’s the point in living anyway, if your proper woman is only trying to seduce you into a revolution?

  “All right, woman, I’ll do it. When and how?” It would be a great story to tell their grandchildren.

  “Late night. I’ll come to get you when all is clear. It should be easy.” She was beaming with happiness. Another damn true believer! Then she laughed at him again and hugged him fiercely.

  So maybe she’s not lost interest in you altogether. If they laugh at you, it’s a sure sign that they still adore you, if only a little bit.

  Although Marjetta looked as if she might kiss him again, Seamus O’Neill was no longer in any mood for romance.

  Nor was his romantic mood revived when she shook him awake in the wee hours of the morning, even though he felt the warmth and inhaled the delicious odor of her skin. She had shed her robe for the night’s enterprise. “It will only get in the way. Besides it’s dark. You can’t see me.”

  “Worse luck for me.” He sighed loudly. His imagination did a quick flip at the thought of her lentat-covered body. The old dread she stirred in him returned quickly and cooled his fantasies. Still, who knows what we’ll both feel like when we get this stuff out of here?

  Taking his hand in her own, Marjetta led O’Neill down a jet-black, bitter-cold corridor. They conserve energy here at Hyperion, O’Neill thought as he groped his way through the dark behind her. The woman’s hand is warm enough, though. Ah, what would be wrong with that warmth next to you in bed every night?

  I’ll tell you what would be wrong; you’d have to put up with that tongue and willpower during the day.

  I could do a lot worse.

  Given time you probably will.

  I’m fated.

  He abandoned the argument with himself because he didn’t like its conclusion.

  Margie seemed to know where she was going. They stopped suddenly. She pushed against a door that swung open slowly.

  “The guard is asleep. I … uh … his drink tonight was a bit strong. No one has ever tried to steal the pills before—they don’t officially exist,” Marjetta breathed into O’Neill’s ear.

  “Shall we kick him to test it?” he asked ironically.

  “Sssh.” She pulled open a trapdoor, revealing a dark hole. “There is a ladder there. You go first. Be careful, it is a long way.”

  He had every intention of being careful. The ladder was metal and it was cold on his bare feet. The hole into which they were climbing was frigid and smelled strongly of seawater. An old tidal cave perhaps.

  Here I am, he thought, a latter-day Finn Mac-Cool, or was it Art MacConn or Con MacArt? I can never keep those shitheads from the old mythology straight. I’m searching for the Holy Grail on the planet Zylong. The magic cup is a box of pills, my magic princess is a half-daft conspirator, and I’m cold and miserable and lonely and the place smells and the woman doesn’t love me and I’ve been abandoned by my friends and I might as well be dead.

  You go first, she says. So I can be the first one to drown in that seawater I hear roaring down there.

  Lancelot du Lac, indeed. Galahad, for sure. Parsifal, of course. Maybe they didn’t have to do much to program me into a no-account space bum.

  The woman was right about one thing. It was a long way down. When he finally touched the slimy hard rock floor, he was shivering in the cold air.

  “I am glad I could not see any of that coming down,” said Marjetta nervously. “I do not like heights.”

  “You’ll catch your death of cold in that thin thing,” he warned her.

  “Not when I have you to keep me warm.” She started to giggle.

  “None of that laughing-at-me stuff now,” he said irritably. “I’m Lancelot du Lac in quest of the Holy Grail.”

  Her giggles turned into sniggers, then into laughter.

  “What are you laughing at, woman?” he demanded. “You don’t even know the myth.”

  “I think Lancelot is a very funny name.”

  “Ah, there’s that. Anyway, let’s find this Holy Grail of yours. Turn on your frigging light.”

  “What’s frigging?”

  “Never mind. Turn it on like I say.”

  She turned on the tiny handlight that was strapped to her wrist. The beam searched what appeared to be a small room, coming to rest on a cabinet against one wall. We’ll have a devil of a time getting it open.

  Marjetta pulled the drawers open one by one until she found what she was looking for, a tiny wooden box. It was filled with white pills. Holy Grail as anticlimax. No dragons to slay—when he was a kid, he’d always wanted to be a modern St. George and slay a dragon—no evil queens to fight off, no curses to escape, no sword battles with black knights. You simply climb down a long hole with your shivering magic princess and you find it in an open box. Easiest thing in the world.

  Then the poet in O’Neill began to think about the symbolism of climbing down a long hole into a dark, sea-scoured cave.

  Now isn’t that interesting. What dirty minds those mythmakers had aeons ago. Well, sure I’m not climbing down anything more tonight. You’re never certain whether you can get out of these cave things.

  “A hundred of them—enough to free Zylong!” She was shaking with excitement. “Hold me tight, Geemie. When I think what this can do for my world … I am frightened.”

  He held her close to him, his hand fitting naturally into the concavity of her back. The pressure of her soft body against his chest was enough to make him almost lose his reason. He felt a sharp stab of delicious pain in his chest, as though something were breaking. He wanted this woman; he was afraid of her; indeed, terrified of her. But he still wanted her. She was the proper woman if there were ever to be one.

  Well, maybe you should climb down into some caves. His knees were shaking. Tonight is the night to get her into my proper bed and begin my descent into the underworld. Ah, now that’s a good image. He held her closer and began to explore her body with his lips. That’s what the Grail legend is about, isn’t it? Finn gets the magic cup and the magic princess? Two sacred vessels?

  “Let’s get out of here before we decide to stay,” he muttered into her hair.

  This business of searching for the Holy Grail might have its good points after all.

  O’N
eill was back in his own room before he realized how easy it had been. He was in it now up to his neck. Stealing the pills was a kind of engagement with this society which the battles on the desert were not. Tricked into it by two women, one of them a wee slip of a revolutionary and the other someone who pretended to love him.

  Of course, he didn’t bring Marjetta back to his bed. She would have come. She was so happy and grateful that she would have done anything he wanted. Seamus Finnbar O’Neill wanted no woman on those terms.

  “Shall we swim in the ocean, Geemie? It will be very warm after that terrible cave.”

  “Swim at night?” he exclaimed in horror.

  “The moons will be out,” she was laughing at him again.

  “I think I’ll pass it up tonight,” he sighed. “We have a long trip ahead of us.”

  She kissed him at his door. “Brigid and Brendan and Mary be with you, my beloved.”

  First time she had ever called him that.

  “You’re picking up all the names,” he admitted grudgingly.

  “I don’t quite understand how Mary and Brigid are different.”

  “My ancestors had a hard time with that too. Well, off with you, woman. You need your sleep too.”

  Seamus Finnbar O’Neill, the last great playboy of the western world—indeed, the whole western quadrant of the frigging galaxy—fell into an uneasy sleep in which he was pursued by dragons and demons who lurked in deep, cold caves.

  He woke up with a start. It was still dark. Why did he feel frightened and guilty?

  Then he remembered what had happened. Dear God, I broke all the Rules. The Taran Code says you do not interfere in the politics of an alien world. That’s exactly what I did. Without even thinking about it. Seduced by a terrible woman. Now I’m in the big muddy altogether.

  The farewell scene when they left Retha and their desert companions was a bad one. The little Lieutenant was tongue-tied with emotion and worried about her own task of bringing the troops back to the City.

  “Rea, me girl,” Seamus O’Neill tried to hearten her, “in one week I’ll be buying you and your young man the biggest refreshment in the whole of Zylong. Now take care of your feet this time. I’d hate to have to come out and carry you in again.”

  She began to laugh. O’Neill bent down over her and tenderly kissed the small forehead. “Sure it’s the truth you’ll bring the troops back, girl,” he whispered. He hated to leave them. They were a good troop after all—not like a company of Wild Geese, but given time and a good commander …

  “Do you Tarans kiss every woman you meet?” asked Marjetta coldly, as they rode off into the dusk with the column of “staff.”

  “Only the beautiful ones, my dear.”

  “You think Lieutenant Retha is a beautiful woman?” Her control was slipping.

  “Ah, well, we kiss them all back on Tara,” he said teasingly. “Why, one day I even kissed the cheek of the Lady Deirdre.…”

  “Who?” Her voice was edgy.

  O’Neill froze in his saddle. How did that slip out? How am I to explain Deirdre?

  “Ah, nobody important,” he managed. “Well, she’s kind of important—a religious leader of a sort,” he amended.

  “Is she beautiful?” Marjetta was stony-faced now. Good enough for her.

  “Oh, no. She’s an old woman now. I guess she never was anything much to look at.”

  13

  The midday meal which Quars had presided over before they left was pretty much like that last dinner at Ernie’s living space before the journey through the desert, somewhat less cheery than a Gaelic wake.

  The Colonel obviously never expected to see them again. Retha, her eyes intermittently filled with tears, hardly touched her food. Marjetta was charming but tense. The ugly, oily, heavy-browed Fourth Secretary radiated charming geniality, like an undertaker at a wake.

  “It will be,” he insisted, “a quick and pleasant trip. Nothing like the last one.”

  Babbling about music and poetry on Zylong, O’Neill matched him cliché for cliché. It was the kind of battle of wits Seamus O’Neill loved, especially since he was convinced he was smarter than the Fourth Secretary by several light-years. The contest would continue out in the desert, too, and Seamus knew he’d win there. This little gombeen man is no match for a commandant in the Wild Geese. At all, at all.

  The nice thing about a battle of wits between a gombeen man and an officer in the Wild Geese was that there was nothing about love or women involved. It was merely a game, a deadly serious game admittedly, in which two men tried to deceive each other.

  Unfortunately there might be a woman as a prize: the Fourth Secretary did not bother to hide his lascivious examination of Marjetta. He wanted her and proposed to have her before the sun rose again.

  Well, we’ll just see about that, my good man. She’s mine, you see. And while I have no idea just now what to do about her, I’ll not be after letting you have her.

  So they were fighting over a woman, among other things, but the woman was only an object of the battle and not a person whose erratic moods, alternating between laughter and fury, both equally unexplained, had to be seriously considered. When it came time to act on the desert, she’d follow orders. She’s a good soldier, if nothing else.

  Go ‘long with you, Seamus O’Neill. She’s more than that.

  Don’t bother me with such considerations. I must worry about the game with this gombeen man here.

  The Fourth Secretary announced that it would be appropriate for everyone to retire to their rooms for some sleep before their departure after sunset.

  Marjetta stopped O’Neill on the way to his room. “How will we escape? Have you figured it out yet?” she asked, her voice strained by tension.

  “Don’t be so impatient, woman. We have seven or eight hours yet. I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. We’ll probably be safe until we get to the large transport. They won’t try anything while we’re riding and carrying our own guns. Also they won’t try anything until we’re beyond the range of Quars’s monitoring system. So we should make our move sometime about midnight. I have stolen one of the good Colonel’s maps; we’ll be able to find our way with it. This clown thinks he’s got us fooled. It’s Quars he’s worried about. If we seem dumb and innocent, they’ll lower their guard. When I whistle like this—” he hummed the first few bars of the “Whistling Gypsy” “—you turn to the right and gallop like hell. I’ll give them something to remember us by and follow after you.”

  She nodded. He didn’t bother to tell her he had also filched powder grenades from Quars’s arsenal.

  O’Neill moved again toward his room, then stopped and looked at Marjetta. “You’re sure that they’ll not harm Retha and the rest of my … our troops.”

  “Of course not. She’s now known to be a heroine. If all of us died, the Committee would not be able to prevent discussion. And if I disappear, perhaps into Narth’s harem when the Secretary is finished with me, they will not consider her or any of the Young Ones a threat.”

  “We’ll see about a few wee changes in that scenario. So they really are that impressed with you?”

  “I’m sure that seems inconceivable to you, Major O’Neill, but yes, the Committee seems to think I am brilliant and dangerous. And myself a woman too.”

  She was even imitating his idiom.

  “Women are all right in their place.” Dear Brigid, would he be in trouble for even thinking that on the Iona.

  “Well, you needn’t worry about your little friend Retha. She’ll be in her man’s arms in a few days.”

  “Ah, sure you wouldn’t be telling me that they’re lovers. She’s a mere child.”

  “You should see him.” She smiled faintly. “He appears to be about fourteen of our years. I am certain she was the aggressor. They are, ah, quite passionate about each other.”

  “Breaking the rules?”

  “As you must know by now, the rules have been discarded by many. They do not even receive nominal obedi
ence out here.”

  “West of the Pecos.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “A mythological reference. Why do they break the rules that young?”

  “It is simple.” She shrugged and made a distasteful face—at him, he supposed. “They are young. They love each other. They expect to die. Is that not enough reason to be in the same bed?”

  “Well, I suppose so. I never thought it would happen here.”

  “Tarans are bigots,” she snapped and turned to leave him.

  Right enough, my dear. We know all there is to know about cultural diversity. Our Rules demand that we be tolerant of it and not meddle in other cultures, like I’ve been doing since you talked me into it. But still, there are only a few of us on a small planet and fewer still on our monastery ships. So we’re narrow and tight and convinced that our ways are the best. Which they are. And we look down on everyone else as poor benighted heathens. Which they are. But you’re a heathen, my darling, and I love you. I’m not going to let that greasy goat lay his hands on you, not at all. At all.

  “Marjetta…”

  “Yes?” She jumped as though she had been shot.

  “Don’t forget those pills.” He swatted her rump.

  She turned and faced him. “Will I like her?”

  “Who?”

  “Deirdre.”

  “Not at all, at all.” He was in so much trouble now, what did a few more lies matter. “Well, maybe after a while. Sure you might become as thick as thieves.”

  The woman was already assuming that she was going to come with him. He’d never told her that. Not exactly, anyway.

  “Will she like me?”

  “Ah, now that’s the question.”

  Dusk had already begun to settle at this end of the continent. Soon they would have to leave.

  “Well now, I think she’ll delight in you, Margie me girl. You’re the kind of woman that Tarans of both sexes adore. The men will all fall in love with you, like I was after doing, and myself seeing you for the first time, and the young women will all identify with you, and the old women, even the real old women like the Lady Deirdre—” he mentally made a sign of the cross “—will want to mother you.”