why should he care? He didn’t have to live in their stinking villages.
He didn’t really care whether they cleaned up their villages, he discovered. He had told them to stop hanging and disembowelling anyone who argued with the village elders, and they had agreed, and that was the really important change. Death mattered. Death was important. The rest of it, elections and building sewers and aqueducts and so on, that could wait, or they could figure it out for themselves.
He had had an idea, when he sent the others back to Earth but chose to stay here, that he might play the great leader, that he might show the people of this world the way to a more modern, more civilized lifestyle, but if they weren’t interested, it wasn’t his problem.
“Suit yourselves,” he said, his hands dropping.
His problem was getting his wife and daughter back.
“All right,” he said, “forget all that. But no more hangings, no more eviscerations, no torture—none of that stuff. Be good to each other. Shadow’s dead. You tell everyone she’s dead, and that Pel Brown is running things now.” He hoped that that name would reach Wilkins and Sawyer and other Imperials who were still alive, and they could come and find him and he could send them home. “No hangings, and the name’s Pel Brown. You understand?”
Heads nodded.
“And there’s something else. Something important.”
He could see them tense, he could, through the matrix, hear them drawing quick breaths and holding them; he could sense muscles tightening, pupils dilating.
“I want wizards,” he said. “I want every wizard you can find, I want every wizard there is. Send word out through all the world—every wizard must come to me, here in my fortress.” He stood up and pointed nowhere in particular, to emphasize his words. “All the wizards. Especially Taillefer. They come here, or they’re in deep shit. I can find them if I have to, and they know it.” This last wasn’t as certainly true as he made it sound; he was sure that he could locate anyone who dared to use magic, since all magic was linked into a single network and he controlled that network, and he thought he could tell someone experienced in wizardry by the patterning in their own tiny bit of matrix, but he did not yet really know how to interpret the data, how to convert a sensation in the matrix into a place in the real world.
But that didn’t matter.
The important thing was what they believed.
He thought for a moment about telling them to find Imperials, too, but then he dismissed the idea. They didn’t seem all that bright, and he wanted to keep it as simple as he possibly could. The creatures he had sent out to fetch this bunch hadn’t come across anyone wearing purple; probably Sawyer and Wilkins were hundreds of miles away.
“You find wizards. You tell your village elders, you tell everybody. Any wizard doesn’t come here might as well cut his own throat and be done with it, you understand?”
They were cowering back against the wall, and Pel realized that intangible clouds of dark gray were rolling around the throne room, interspersed with gouts of flame and vivid flashes of crimson—the matrix was picking up his insistence and interpreting it. His guests, or captives, or whatever they were, were probably scared half to death.
He dropped his pointing finger and calmed the roiling currents of magic.
“You get the idea,” he said. “No more hangings, and find wizards, and send them here. Now, get out of here, go home, tell everyone.” He made the twist in the web of power that would link him to the fetches, and ordered them, “You go with these men, you make sure people believe them about the hangings and the wizards. Take a week, that should do it, then come back here.” He waved in dismissal. “Get out of here, all of you.”
He slumped back into the throne and watched as the eight men fled, the fetches trudging stolidly after them.
He hoped none of them tripped and fell down the stairs on the way out.
* * * *
Johnston peered warily down the basement stairs.
Except for being unusually dusty, which came from being shut up and neglected all summer, the place looked perfectly ordinary. It was hard to believe that the doorway to another universe had appeared in this house.
Well, maybe it hadn’t—but the house didn’t look much like part of an incredibly-elaborate hoax, either.
Carefully, he trudged down the steps. Behind him came a heavily-loaded Air Force lieutenant, struggling to maneuver two cases of equipment safely.
“You’ll want to change those lightbulbs,” Johnston said, pointing. “The Jewell woman says they’re burnt out.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant agreed, looking up.
“That’s the wall, right there, according to the description both the women gave,” Johnston said, indicating the bare concrete. “Poke at it if you like, do anything you want that won’t damage it—take pictures, measure it, whatever.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Set the radio up first.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We don’t really expect anything to happen, you understand—but if it does, it could be anything, anytime.”
“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant set the cases on the basement floor.
“Any questions?”
The lieutenant looked around, then shrugged. “No, sir.”
Johnston nodded. “Your relief will be here at 1800.”
“Yes, sir.”
Johnston hesitated, then crossed to the blank wall. He stared at the gray blocks, reached up and tapped one.
Just concrete. His hand didn’t vanish into a chilly medieval forest, nor a bare white desert, nor any of the other places Jewell and Thorpe had described and Deranian had babbled about.
“Be careful,” he said as he turned to go.
* * * *
There were advantages, Amy decided, to having vanished in a manner sufficiently mysterious that it attracted the attention of Air Force intelligence. They hadn’t paid her bills, but at least they’d collected her mail and kept the post office from returning it all. Their patrols had scared off burglars. And they’d made sure none of the utilities were shut off.
It was too bad they hadn’t bothered to answer her phone or explain to any of her clients what had happened. The tape on the answering machine had filled up the first week, mostly with ever-more-angry complaints from the Fosters.
After calling to make her doctor’s appointment she had tried to phone all of her clients. Some, including the Fosters, didn’t answer; one had moved; one hung up on her. Prema Chatterji was still interested in a consultation, but the others were pretty clearly a total loss. Being called away without warning on “personal matters” for more than three months was not good business.
And after going through the mountain of mail and matching the unpaid bills against her bank balance and the undeposited checks, she knew she was broke, or nearly so—if nothing bounced and she hadn’t missed anything and she could transfer from her savings account, she would wind up with a balance of about eighteen dollars.
That wouldn’t even pay for groceries to replace what had gone bad. She sighed.
“Is it bad?” Prossie asked.
“Yeah, but it could certainly be worse,” Amy said. She looked up, out the living room window at the Air Force car parked out front.
Those people wouldn’t let them starve, she was sure. And they were back on Earth, and alive and well.
“It could be a lot worse,” she said.
* * * *
“I