more.”
Because Evarin—I knew—was never ten minutes the same. He would profess friendship and mean friendship; ten minutes later, still in friendship, he would flay the skin from my body and count it only an exquisite joke. I did not like those perverted and subtle eyes. He seemed to read my thought. “Good, we will be strangers. Brothers are too—” he let the word trail off, unfinished. “What have you forgotten?”
Could I trust him with my terrible puzzlement? How much could I, as Adric— and I must be Adric to him—get along without knowing? What was even more to the point, how many questions could I dare ask without betraying my own helplessness? I compromised. “What are the Dreamers?”
That had been the wrong question.
“Zandru. Adric, you have been far indeed! You must have been back before the Cataclysm! Well—our forefathers, after the Cataclysm, ruled this planet and built the Rainbow Cities. That was before the Compact that killed machines. Some people say the Dreamers were born from the dead machines.”
He began to pace the floor restlessly. “They were men—once,” he said, “They are born from men and women. Mendel knows what caused them. But one in every ten million men is such a freak—a Dreamer. Some say they came out of the Cataclysm; some say they are the souls of the dead Machines. They are human—and not human. They were telepaths. They could control everything—things, minds, people. They could throw illusions around things and men—they contested our rules.”
He sat down; his voice became brooding, quiet. “One of us, here in Rainbow City, a dozen generations ago, found a way to bind the Dreamers,” he said. “We could not kill them; they were deathless, normally. But we could bind them in sleep. As they slept, under a forced stasis, we could make them give up their powers—to us. So that we controlled the things they controlled. For a price.” There was a glimpse of horror behind his eyes. “You know the price. It is high.”
I kept silent. I wanted Evarin to go on.
He shivered a little, shook his head and the horror vanished. “So each of us has a Dreamer of his own who can grant him power to do as he wills. And after years and years, as the Dreamers grow old, they grow mortal. They can be killed. And fewer are born, now; fewer to each generation. As they grow older and weaker, it is safe to let them wake; but never too strongly, or too long.” He laughed, bitterly. A fury came from nowhere into his face.
“And you loosed a Dreamer!” he cried. “A Dreamer with all his power hardly come upon him! He is harmless as yet—but he wakes, and he walks! And one day the power will come upon him—and he will destroy us all!” Evarin’s thin features were drawn with despair; not arrogant, now, but full of suffering. “A Dreamer—” he sighed, “A Dreamer, and you had been made one with him already! Can you see now why we do not trust you—brother?”
Without answering I rose and went to the window. This window did not look on the neat little park, but on a vast tract of wild country. Far away, curious trails of smoke spiralled up into the sunlight and a wispy fog lay in the bottomlands. “Down there,” said Evarin in a low voice, “Down there the Dreamer walks and waits! Down there—”
But I did not hear the rest, for my mind completed it. Down there—
Down there is my lost memory. Down there was my life.
Somewhere down there I had left my soul.
Flowers of Danger
I turned my back on the window. “Rhys is a Dreamer,” I said with slow certainty. “What is Gamine?”
Evarin nodded slowly, ignoring the question. “Rhys is a Dreamer, yes. He is old—so old he is almost mortal now; so he wakes, and he too walks. But he was one of us once—the only Dreamer ever born within the Rainbow City. His loyalty is double; but he will never harm Narabedla, because he is of our blood.” Evarin cleared his throat. “So Gamine takes what knowledge can be had from his old, old mind. And does not pay.”
“Who is Gamine?” I asked again. Evarin still hesitated.
“Karamy hates Gamine,” he said, after minutes. “So no man sees Gamine’s face. I would not ask too many questions—unless you ask them of Karamy.” A smile flickered on the mobile features, “Ask Karamy,” he said gleefully, “She will tell!”
“She will?” I said stupidly, because I could think of nothing else to say. Evarin’s grin was delicately malicious. “Oh, I am sure of that! Karamy is quick to strike. Gamine and I have little love lost, but we agree on one thing; that Karamy’s procession of slaves is monstrous. And that you are a fool to help Karamy pay for her—desires. Karamy is far too fond of power in her own hands, to pay to put it into yours.”
Karamy. Karamy who took my memory—
“She did.” Evarin murmured, and I realized I had spoken aloud. The room seemed full of a weighty silence. Evarin’s prowling footsteps made no noise as he came to my side. “I can give it back to you, though. I have made you a Toy.” His effete voice rather disgusted me, and I moved away, but he followed. “Look here, and find your memory.”
And he put something small and hard into my hand; something wrapped in silvery silks.
I raised my hand curiously, untwisting the wrappings. They were smooth and shining and colorless, with a bluish cast, like Gamine’s veils; no fabric I had ever seen. Evarin backed slowly away from me. For an instant all I could see was a blurred invisibility—like Gamine’s face behind the veils—then a sort of mirror became slowly visible, It did not seem to reflect anything; rather, it was a coldly shining surface, cloudy, glittering from within. I bent to examine the pattern of the shadows that moved on the surface. There was a curious pull from the mirror, a cold that crept sluggishly from my hand. A familiar, soothing cold. As if drawn by a magnet, my eyes bent closer—
Recognition crashed in my mind. Evarin—and his gilt deadly Toys.... I dashed the colorless thing to the floor, giving it a savage kick. The blurred invisibility wavered; I caught a glimpse of a tiny jewelled mechanism, before it sprang back to gray ice again. Evarin had backed halfway across the room; I leaped at him, collaring the dandy and wrenching him close. “I’ve a good mind to tie the thing across your throat!” I grated.
Evarin’s lip twisted up. Suddenly his whole face melted in a blurring invisibility and I felt his whole substance evaporate from between my hands. He writhed like smoke, and I leaped backward just as he materialized, whole and deadly, too close. “I am always—guarded!” he jerked out at me, “I might have known—”
He stooped, reaching for the fallen toy. I kicked the little mirror out of his reach, bent to retrieve it. “I’ll keep this,” I said, and wadding the insulated silk around it, I thrust it into a pocket. Evarin’s eyes glared at me helplessly. “You’ll stay solid for awhile now,” I jeered. “Toymaker! Damned freak—” I stormed out of the room, leaving him rubbing his bruised shoulder.
Now that Adric was back in control, I had no trouble discovering where I wanted to go. Some blind instinct led me through the maze of elevators and staircases; I stepped into servant’s quarters, kitchens, a roomful of buzzing machinery I dismissed with a glance of familiarity; and finally found myself in the open, the semicircle of rainbow towers around me.
Overhead the suns, red and white, sent a curious, double-shadowed light downward through the neatly-trimmed trees. A little day moon, smaller than any moon I had known, peeped, a curious crescent, over
