Chapter Six. NO HAPPINESS IN THIS WORLD

Mada Jupi was, of course, a pampered child. Her every wish was fulfilled, she was glorified and bowed down to. But she had nevertheless not become spoiled and capricious, or incapable of doing anything but give orders. Mother Lua, who preserved the wisdom of the people, had managed after the death of Mada's mother to inspire the girl with the idea of equal rights for all Faetians, whatever their outward appearance. Restrained, always calm. Mother Lua had the rare talent of the story-teller and an innate gift of influencing the minds of others. In another country, at another time. Mother Lua would have been the pride of the people; but on the barbarian continent of Power-mania's Superiors she was only a nanny-true, of the Dictator's daughter. She had always held up the girl's own mother as an example, convincing her that the daughter should follow suit.

Mada grew up resembling her mother, but she also took after her father to some extent. Perhaps in her ability to love and hate to extremes. Consequently, the meeting with Ave swept her right off her feet. She fell in love, and a soft tenderness was combined with ruthless determination, and bewilderment with irrepressible daring. She had shot Yar Alt as if he were a mad beast, yet she was dismayed at the sight of his body.

The nanny was dying. Mada kneeled in front of her, listening as she whispered something almost inaudible.

"Nanny is talking about her son. And she says that Yar Alt murdered Kutsi."

"Where? How?"

But Mother Lua could not say any more. Her strength had ebbed away. No efforts on Mada's part were of any avail, neither the kiss of life nor heart massage. The nanny's eyes closed and her body stretched out The hand that Mada had been holding began to turn cold. There was no pulse any more.

"It's the end," said Mada, and she burst into tears.

Ave now saw his companion as a weak and helpless girl. Like a child, she shook her nurse, kissed her cold hands and tried to wake her up.

Finally she turned her tear-stained face to Ave.

"My nanny is dead. She was so kind and clever! And we are finished." And she glanced at Yar Alt's contorted body. "Just think! He was my cousin."

"Maybe we should try and help him!"

Mada shuddered.

"The bullets were poisoned. I don't know how my poor nanny came by his pistol." She began sobbing again.

Ave decided that he must do something. He lifted up the dead Alt, who had stiffened in his last convulsions, and carried him into a corner of the room behind the curtains.

Mada stood up determinedly and threw her head back.

"It's no use. The Guards will be here soon, and then my father." She picked Alt's pistol up off the floor. "Forgive me for taking charge of our last step. There is no need to fire a bullet. One scratch is enough. Death will be instant. We shall hold hands with a bullet in our palms. We shall leave this world in which there is no happiness for us."

Ave looked into her face: determination in her was struggling with despair.

Mada took the last round out of the pistol. The bullet was silvery and its sharp prickles were brown where the poisonous coating had been applied.

Ave resolutely gripped Mada's hand.

"No! Faetians don't give in so easily. We can still renounce life, but happiness... No!"

"There is no happiness in this world," replied Mada.

"Show me the way into the garden," said Ave masterfully, "and then through the Blood Door."

"You think we can flee somewhere? Dawn is near, the last in our life. Can you hear the birds singing? I shall follow you because you are my husband. But we shall take the prickly bullet with us. It will be a safe protection for us."

"Lead the way," urged Ave.

Mada looked at him curiously. Until now, she had thought herself the stronger.

They carried Lua's body to a couch and Mada spread over it a pale blue coverlet from her bed. Then she showed Ave a low door leading into a narrow passage that ended in a steep ladder.

Just before dawn, the garden had changed completely. A silvery cloud had filled the avenues, hiding the bushes and tree-trunks from view. It seemed to Ave that he and Mada were walking into another world above the clouds. He clasped her slender hand more tightly.

The quivering mist at their feet seemed treacherous, weightless and yet dense. It was as if there might be water under it one moment and an abyss the next.

Mada stepped fearlessly into the swirling mist and took Ave with her. The obedient Blood Door opened in front of her.

A dense mist had enveloped the ruins of the old shrine under the Dread Wall. As they walked breast-high through the cloud that lay on the stones, Ave and Mada seemed to be fording a river of foam.

Mada knew the way. They came surprisingly soon to the black building of the Temple of Eternity. Ave thought that the unfortunate Kutsi must have led them the long way round. Poor wretch! It cost Ave an effort to restrain himself; he did not even allow himself a sigh, but he felt sorry for the man.

Ave despised his own habitual changes of mood. But now he was firm and knew what had to be done. That was why he was taking Mada to Um Sat.

The Elder was astounded when he saw the newly-weds on the threshold of his cell once again.

He gave Mada a seat in an armchair opposite the table at which he had spent the whole night. Ave stood beside Mada.

"What's happened? Can I help you in any way?"

"There is no happiness in this world," cried Ave. "But in your power there is another world!"

The Elder raised his eyebrows in astonishment.

"There is another world in space," explained Ave, and he told the Elder all about what had happened.

Um Sat became thoughtful.

"So I must accept Yar Jupi's conditions and, in my turn, demand that he send his daughter to Terr? Doesn't that seem incredible? To take refuge in space?"

"But that would mean salvation not only for me and Ave," intervened Mada. "It would be the fulfilment of a dream: to help the Faetians, to find them a new world. Nanny and Mother were thinking about it. Not only Ave and I, but all of us could be happy there. It's not just for myself that I'm ready to fly to Terr. That's what I'm going to tell my father."

Mada understood global problems in no way more deeply than Um Sat.

"What duties as an astronaut can Mada carry out?" asked Um Sat sternly.

"I am a Sister of Health. We are needed everywhere. And not only for the children."

"That's true," agreed Um Sat. "Ave Mar, you will stay here, no one is going to look for your secretary. Mada must go to her chambers and lock herself in. Ave, see your young wife as far as the Dread Wall. It's a good thing that you both look on the trip to Terr as an exploit, not just as an escape."

After their departure, the Elder sat for a while in reflection. Then he summoned several sages of learning who had arrived for the session. They filled his cell. Many of them were roundheads, but there were longfaces as well. As they came in, each touched his right eyebrow with his left hand. When the cell was packed full, Um Sat asked if he should fly from Faena on the eve of possible events for which, in the name of Justice, the toilers and their friends had been preparing for so many cycles.

After all, he was an adherent of the struggle against the proprietors on both continents, although he had not fully fathomed its depths.

Those present decided unanimously that Um Sat, the personification and pride of learning on Faena, should go into space to find the continents that the Faetians needed. Many of them considered that in this way they would best safeguard the life of the great Elder, but no one said anything about it to him.

Um Sat threw his hands apart. He must submit to the general decision. He had now received the right to act.

When Ave returned, Um Sat called the Dictator's secretary over the closed TV. The screen lit up and the slits of the secretary box glittered on it.

"Dictator Jupi, most illustrious of the illustrious, consents to receive the honorary longface Um Sat and is sending an escort for him," announced the box, which had been programmed to speak in the old style. The screen went blank.

"What?" whispered Ave Mar. "Go into the Lair? Doesn't this mean that Yar Jupi wants to take a hostage?"

The Elder smiled sadly.

"The risk is not so great."

An officer of the Blood Guard soon appeared in the cell. Ave's blood froze. Before him stood the living Yar Alt.

The caller bowed to the Elder, glanced casually at Ave and said pompously:

"The greatest of the great, the Dictator Yar Jupi, gave you the right, honorary long-face, to enter his presence. I have been sent to escort you to the palace."

Ave Mar had the impression that even the Blood Guard officer's voice was the same as Alt's. Had he really come back from the dead? Perhaps the paralysis caused by the bullet had only been temporary. But why didn't he rush at Ave the way he had done in Mada's room?

The officer of the Blood Guard merely glanced indifferently again at Ave Mar and bowed to him.

"In the name of the most illustrious Dictator, I bear apologies to the honoured guest."

As soon as the officer of the Blood Guard and Um Sat had gone out, Ave Mar rushed to the door of the cell. To his amazement, it was unlocked. Only then did Ave Mar realize that the officer's face had been innocent of a scar.

Dictator Yar Jupi was waiting impatiently for Um Sat Omnipotent by grace of the Blood Council, capable in favour of the proprietors of sending millions of Faetians to their death and ready to unleash a disintegration war at any moment, he was powerless to safeguard the one life that was the most dear to him.

Yar Jupi was a complicated person. He understood extremely well whom he was serving and how. After losing his wife in his time, he had come to hate the roundheads from whom she had contracted a fatal disease while nursing them. This hatred had finally found expression in a barefaced doctrine which it was impossible to believe, but which proved convenient to the proprietors from the Blood Council. Now, at the height of power, when he was ostensibly leading the life of an ascetic in voluntary seclusion, love for his daughter had become the only ray of light to Yar Jupi. Everything else was darkness: fear for his own life, terror of a war which he was nevertheless preparing himself, terror also of the toilers and of his own masters who were ready to get rid of him.

The thing that mattered to him most now was Mada's safety. She was the only one he would want to save from among the millions of doomed. But how?

And so, in fulfilment of the complex plan that had occurred to him, he had appeared unexpectedly during a session of Peaceful Space in the Temple of Eternity. And now Um Sat was due to arrive.

The officer of the Blood Guard, Yar Alt's brother, handed Um Sat over to two security robots which led the sage of learning through low-ceilinged, sumptuously furnished halls.

Urn Sat glanced out of the corner of his eye at his unwieldy bodyguards or escorts with their cubic heads and hooked, scaly manipulators.

In one of the rooms, a box with glittering slits in it, just like the one that the Dictator used, said with programmed floweriness in the impeccable ancient manner:

"Urn Sat, honorary longface, may pass through the door in front of him, on the other side of which there awaits him the most blissful meeting with the greatest of the great, the most brilliant of the brilliant, Yar Jupi, Dictator of the continent of the Superiors."

The door opened of its own accord, the robot security guards fell behind and Urn Sat went into the grim, empty dungeon with the grey walls.

Yar Jupi, bearded, hook-nosed, with a shaven skull and upslanting eyebrows, rushed to meet the visitor, riveting him with a piercing, half-mad stare.

"Does Urn Sat realize what honour and trust has been afforded him?" he shouted.

"Yes, so be it," sighed the Elder. "Though I be unworthy of such honour, I may be trusted."

"I am going to talk as Superior to Superior, the more so since you are famous for your mind," said the Dictator more calmly this time.

According to the ritual, the guest was supposed to reply that his brains were below comparison with the divine and enlightened intellect of Yar Jupi, but Um Sat calmly said:

"I shall converse with the Dictator Yar Jupi as an Elder of learning with a politician, striving to understand and be understood."

Yar Jupi started, his nose twitched and his face was distorted by a nervous grimace. He looked sideways at a niche under the window. There were wonderful flowers standing in it. Their tender, dark-blue corollas with the golden sprinkling of the finest stars, each with up to six petals, looked down, dangling on bowed stems.

This was a miracle, bred by the nurserymen on the orders of Yar Jupi, a passionate lover of flowers. But it was not their evening beauty that attracted him. The submissive horticulturalists had managed to breed a vegetable miracle, or rather monster, which exuded an aroma that was poisonous, however gentle it might seem. Any Faetian who inhaled it was stricken down with a fatal disease. More than once, rare visitors to this study, excessively independent-minded comrades-in-arms, received by the Dictator with unexpected warmth, sometimes even a few of his over-discontented masters, the big proprietors, had been privileged to sniff the greatest of all treasures. On returning home, they had died in agony without suspecting why.

Needless to say, a reliable ventilation system was sucking the dangerous scent out of the room.

"Well?" asked the Dictator nervously.

"After thinking it over all night, I have decided to accept your offer and lead the expedition to the planet Terr."

Yar Jupi started and sighed with relief.

"Urn Sat, having become an honorary longface, you confirm your wisdom. I shall glorify this on both continents. However, yesterday in the Temple of Eternity, I had in mind one stipulation which you will have to observe."

"I also wanted to add a condition to my consent to head the expedition."

"I can't bear it when conditions are imposed on me," said the Dictator, raising his voice slightly.

"It is rather the first practical step to complementing the space crew."

"I shall complement the space crew with longfaces, the most worthy of the worthy."

"Perhaps Dictator Yar Jupi will remember yesterday's promise to include any of the longfaces in the crew."

"I confirm that, even if it means my daughter."

"The daughter of Dictator Yar Jupi?" Um Sat was truly astonished. It had never even entered his head that the Dictator himself would talk about her first.

"Do you dare to regard my daughter as ballast on the flight when she is a Sister of Health?" said Yar Jupi, raising his voice.

Both men fell silent, studying each other. No matter how clever he might be, it had never occurred to Urn Sat that the Dictator had thought of saving his daughter from the horrors of a disintegration war by sending her on a space expedition; and however cunning and crafty Yar Jupi might be, he could not have presumed that Um Sat had come to him solely in order to obtain his consent to his daughter's flight to Terr.

"So you don't want her to fly?" demanded Yar Jupi ominously. "You're worried about her? I appreciate that Would you care to go over to those flowers? They are beautiful, are they not? Have you ever seen the like? Savour their aroma!.."

"I have never seen anything more beautiful than the daughter of Dictator Yar Jupi. Have no doubt that she will be the fairest flower on Terr..."

"Then we shall leave those blossoms in peace," interrupted Yar Jupi curtly.