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She activated the tight beam to Cencom. Alioth would rue the day its religious
hierarchy decided to hijack the cargo of a Service ship, much less kidnap its
brawn.
Dispassionately Helva took account of the matter of Kira's departure.
The girl had, in the extremes of grief, sought death. But Helva doubted Kira
would betray her service. For one thing, she couldn't, although the Aliothites
didn't realize the ship was capable of independent thought and action. Having
enticed the brawn away, they assumed the ship was grounded, impotent, and they
could take their time forcing Kira to accede to their designs on the embryos.
I could just leave, Helva thought. If death is the reward these zealots seek,
then I don't need to have any compunctions about burning the guard detail to
its due merits. But I cannot leave Kira. Not yet. I have time. What was the
matter with Cencom? They were never around when you needed them! And why in
the name of little apples did they permit Kira to land on a death-dedicated
planet? You idiot, Helva told herself, because they didn't know that's the way
the religion turned.
The ground rumbled beneath her. Far to the north a fireball zoomed heavenward,
bursting in a shower of lighted fragments. Other fireworks followed, as well
as more ominous movement beneath Helva's tailfins. She held herself ready for
an instant liftoff if her balance was shaken beyond the normal recovery in her
stabilizers. Somewhere to the northeast, another volcano answered the eruption
of the first.
Helva saw the ground car carrying Kira reach the central building and she
muttered ineffective mental commands for Kira to snap out of her trance and
switch on the contact button.
The guard, impervious to the massed eruptions, went right on trying to force
the lift mechanism. Their cowls kept falling from their faces and they kept
replacing them as if a bare face were indecent. The red light from the
fireballs that continued to light the sky illuminated gaunt, ascetic faces,
dirty with ingrained volcanic dusts, dulleyed from improper nutrition and
continual fatigue.
Klra alighted from the transport and, flanked by guards, was escorted to a
smaller vehicle that disappeared from Helva's augmented vision into the
complex of city buildings. The transport turned back to the field and Helva.
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An enterprising guard urged his fellows to bring a gantry rig against the
ship. Slowly and with much effort, they wheeled the cumbersome frame from a
far side of the field.
Helva watched the performance with grim amusement. Their own fault for
insisting we set down so far from the facilities of the port. Perhaps they
couldn't see in the gloom of Alioth's perpetual twilight that the lock was
closed tight, too.
She tried to rouse Cencom on the tight beam, cursing at that delay because she
was so worried about not reaching Kira on the contact.
"Contact button," she muttered to herself, recalling the anomalous appearance
of one on Noneth's hood. Now, if it were a Service issue or a true imitation,
she ought to be able to use it. That Temple female had utilized one to second
Noneth's commands to Kira.
Helva wasted no time in throwing open the wide-wave on the contact band.
As hastily, she closed it, dazed with the resultant chaotic kaleidoscope of
sight and sound that besieged her. Mentally reeling from the impact on her
senses, she wondered painfully how she had managed to get several hundred
thousand contacts at once. Quickly she scanned the scurrying guards, still
trying to wrestle the gantry frame to her. Each one had a button securing his
hood at the neck.
"Great glittering galaxies," moaned Helva. "This religion must be composed of
schizoids to deal with that kind of chaos."
Holding tightly to her sanity, Helva opened the band a fraction, wincing at
the confusion of sound and sight. She tried to focus in on one contact alone
but felt herself drowning in the myriad pictures that returned. It was like
trying to focus on a pinpoint through the faceting of a fly's eyeball.
Grimly she refined vision to one small area, forcing herself to accept only
one of the conflicting and overlapping images that returned to her. She cut
out the sound completely. Fortunately every wearer in the selected segment was
converging on one location, crossing a huge plaza, crowded with gyrating,
swaying cowled figures, their robes flapping around them as they approached
the wide deep steps that led up the side of the dead volcano. This was the
ziggurat Helva had noticed in the tape clip.
Suddenly everything and every figure tilted. It took Helva a moment to realize
she too was rocking with earthquake as three more volcanoes spewed out their
guts skyward. She waited, alert, lest the instability of the spaceport field
became too critical for her to remain planet-bound!
An ecstatic, moaning roar wafted through the air, now hazy as the earth's
minute shifts released gases from narrow fissures in the floor of the plaza.
Helva, already confused, did not at first catch the significance of the gas or
the fact that the ululation was reaching her ship's outer ears, not issuing
from the dumb contact circuits.
Helva increased power in the tight beam, desperately trying to raise
Cencom over the volcanic interferences.
Simultaneously she cut in the narrow contact, anxious not to lose Kira.
Everyone in the plaza was now waving arms aloft, hoods thrown back from joyful
faces raised to the spark-filled, gas-fogged skies. Then the Aliothites
wheeled, ducking their heads to breathe deeply of the rising gas fumes.
Incredulous, Helva watched, as more and more people pushed and crowded around
the fissures; inhaling deeply, staggering away; faces rapt, arms aloft,
movements erratic. Then Helva realized that the gases were either
hallucinogenic or euphoric, doubly dangerous at a time of mass volcanic
eruptions. Yet the exposed open plaza was rapidly filling with bodies either
already intoxicated or frantically trying to be.
The significance of gas eruptions in the plaza before the Temple of this
demoniac religion was not lost on Helva. Obviously, this effect was known and
calculated by the temple hierarchy. Helva was revolted and enraged by such
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depravity and she redoubled her efforts to locate Kira and her escort. They
would have to leave the vehicle and enter the plaza on the south side. One
multi-exposed group caught her searching eyes. There couldn't be two such
slender hoodless figures on this mad planet. Kira was just entering the plaza,
her inexorable progress toward the ziggurat steps impeded by the jerking,
jolting freak-inebriates.
Fully alarmed, Helva widened the band, trying to skip from contact to contact, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]