brain. I heard, suddenly, an excited voice, shouting.
“Rhys! Rhys! That is the man!”
Rainbow City
“You are mad,” said the man with the tired voice.
I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a huge abyss of caverned space; chasmed, immense, limitless. Vaguely, through a sleeping distance, I heard two voices. This one was old and very tired.
“You are mad. They will know. Narayan will know. ” “Narayan is a fool,” said the second voice.
“Narayan is the Dreamer,” the tired voice said. “He is the Dreamer, and where the Dreamer walks he will know. But have it your way. I am very old and it does not matter. I give you this power, freely—to spare you. But Gamine—”
“Gamine—” the second voice stopped. After a long time “You are old, and a fool, Rhys,” it said. “What is Gamine to me?”
Bodiless, blind, I drifted and swayed and swung in the sound of the voices. The humming, like a million high-tension wires, sang around me and I felt myself cradled in the pull of a great magnet that held me suspended surely on nothingness and drew me down into the field of some force beneath. Far below me the voices faded. I swung free—fell—plunged downward in sickening motion, head over heels, into the abyss....
My feet struck hard flooring. I wrenched back to consciousness with a jolt. Winds blew coldly in my face; the cabin walls had been flung back to the high-lying stars. I was standing at a barred window at the very pinnacle of a tall tower, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched flickeringly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face, a lean tired old face beneath a peaked hood, in the moment before my knees gave way and I fell, striking my head against the bars of the window.
I was lying on a narrow, high bed in a room filled with doors and bars. I could see the edge of a carved mirror set in a frame, and the top of a chest of some kind. On a bench at the edge of my field of vision there were two figures sitting. One was the old grey man, hunched wearily beneath his robe, wearing robes like a Tibetan Lama’s, somber black, and a peaked hood of grey. The other was a slimmer younger figure, swathed in silken silvery veiling, with a thin opacity where the face should have been, and a sort of opalescent shine of flesh through the silvery-sapphire silks. The figure was that of a boy or a slim immature girl; it sat erect, motionless, and for a long time I studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby’s drinking-cup, at me. I took it in my hand hesitated—
“Neither drug nor poison,” said the blue-robe mockingly, and the voice was as noncomittal as the veiled body; a sexless voice, soft alto, a woman’s or a boy’s. “Drink and be glad it is none of Karamy’s brewing.”
I tasted the liquid in the mug; it had an indeterminate greenish look and a faint pungent taste I could not identify, although it reminded me variously of anis and garlic. It seemed to remove the last traces of shock. I handed the cup back empty and looked sharply at the old man in the Lama costume.
“You’re—Rhys?” I said. “Where in hell have I gotten to?” At least, that’s what I meant to say. Imagine my surprise when I found myself asking—in a language I’d never heard, but understood perfectly—“To which of the domains of Zandru have I been consigned now?” At the same moment I became conscious of what I was wearing. It seemed to be an old-fashioned nightshirt, chopped off at the loins, deep crimson in color. “Red flannels yet!” I thought with a gulp of dismay. I checked my impulse to get out of bed. Who could act sane in a red nightshirt?
“You might have the decency to explain where I am,” I said. “If you know.” The tiredness seemed part of Rhys’ voice. “Adric,” he said wearily. “Try to remember.” He shrugged his lean shoulders. “You are in your own Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.” His voice sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite of the weird surroundings, the phrase “under restraint” had struck home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.
The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic voice. “While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at home, in Narabedla.”
I shook my head. Nightshirt or no nightshirt, I’d face this on my feet. I walked to Rhys; put my clenched hands on his shoulders. “Explain this! Who am I supposed to be? You called me Adric. I’m no more Adric than you are!”
“Adric, you are not amusing!” The blue-robe’s voice was edged with anger. “Use what intelligence you have left! You have had enough sharig antidote to cure a tharl. Now. Who are you?”
The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to identity. “Adric—” I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it? Wasn’t it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls is the chemming of twilp—stop that! Mike Kenscott. Summer 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head in my hands. “I’m crazy. Or you are. Or we’re both sane and this monkey-business is all real.”
“It is real,” said Rhys, compassion in his tired face. “He has been very far on the Time Ellipse, Gamine. Adric, try to understand. This was Karamy’s work. She sent you out on a time line, far, very far into the past. Into a time when the Earth was different—she hoped you would come back changed, or mad.” His eyes brooded. “I think she succeeded. Gamine, I have long outstayed my leave. I must return to my own tower—or die. Will you explain?”
“I will.” A hint of emotion flickered in the voice of Gamine. “Go, Master.” Rhys left the room, through one of the doors. Gamine turned impatiently to me again. “We waste time this way. Fool, look at yourself!”
I strode to a mirror that lined one of the doors. Above the crimson nightshirt I saw a face—not my own. The sight rocked my mind. Out of the mirror a man’s face looked anxiously; a face eagle-thin, darkly moustached, with sharp green eyes. The body belonging to the face that was not mine was lean and long and strongly muscled—and not quite human. I squeezed my eyes shut. This couldn’t be—I opened my eyes. The man in the red nightshirt I was wearing was still reflected there.
I turned my back on the mirror, walking to one of the barred windows to look down on the familiar outline of the Sierra Madre, about a hundred miles away. I couldn’t have been mistaken. I knew that ridge of mountains. But between me and the mountains lay a thickly forested expanse of land which looked like no scenery I had ever seen in my life. I was standing near the pinnacle of a high tower; I dimly saw the curve of another, just out of my line of vision. The whole landscape was bathed in a curiously pinkish light; through an overcast sky I could just make out, dimly, the shadowy disk of a watery red sun. Then—no, I wasn’t dreaming, I really did see it—beyond it, a second sun; blue-white, shining brilliantly, pallid through the clouds, but brighter than any sunlight I had ever seen.
It was proof enough for me. I turned desperately to Gamine behind me. “Where have I gotten, to? Where—when am I? Two suns—those mountains—”
The change in Gamine’s voice was swift; the veiled face lifted questioningly to mine. What I had thought a veil was not that; it seemed to be more like a shimmering screen
