Judgment Night Read online

  And afterward, when he reached for her with that frightening purpose and the frightening brilliance in his eyes—well, what was so alarming about a kiss? Surely it had been foolish to read anything more menacing into the gesture. She would see him again, and she would know then.

  Juille realized suddenly that she had been standing quite still in the middle of the room for a long while, staring blindly at the slowly drifting chairs, reviewing the dance over and over, and the dissolving sweetness of the music and the rhythms of their motion.

  She said, “Damn the man!” in a clear voice, and yawned extravagantly, and stepped through another veil of fog into the showering bath. The shadowy gown she had worn all evening melted upon her and went sluicing away under the flashing water. She was both glad and sorry to see it go.

  Her dreams in the cloudy bed were lovely and disturbing.

  “We’ve known one another three days,” Juille said, “and I may as well tell you I don’t like you. Wouldn’t trust you out of my sight, either. Why I stay on here—”

  “It’s my entertainment value,” Egide told her, and then rubbed the cropped curls of his beard in a thoughtful way. “Trust I don’t expect. But liking, now—you surprise me. Is it the short time we’ve known each other?”

  “Hand me a sandwich,” Juille said. He pushed the picnic basket toward her over a billowing surface of clouds—curious, she thought, how the cloud motif had haunted her days here—and remarked: “I can manage the time angle if that’s all that bothers you. Wait.” He took up a luminous disk lying beside him and murmured into it. After a moment the clear sunlight that bathed them began to mellow to an afternoon richness.

  They were lunching in shameless, childlike fantasy upon a cloud that drifted across the face of a nameless planet. Any pleasure that the mind can devise the body may enjoy in Cyrille. Its arts can expand the walls of a room so that sunlit space seems to reach out toward infinity all around. From the cumulus billows they rode upon today they could lean to watch the shadow of their cloud moving over the soft-green contours of the turning world below, very far down. For the present all gravity and all logic had released them, and in this simple fulfillment of the dream every child knows, Juille let all her past float away. And she had sensed in her companion a similar release. He had been almost irresistibly charming in these careless days, as if, like her, he had deliberately shed all responsibilities and all remembrance of past duties, and had interests now only in being charming and being with her. The three days had affected them both. Juille found she could sit here now and listen to her companion’s nonsense with very little recollection that she had been and must be again the princess of Ericon. There was no shadow over the present. She would not look beyond it.

  She could even accept without much disbelief the fantastic thing Egide was accomplishing now, and when he said, “Look—not even the emperor could do this!” no shadow crossed her face. He was not watching for such signals now. He had no need to.

  Over the world below them evening had begun to move. The air dimmed, and the great soft billows of their cloud flushed pink above the darkening land below. A star broke out in the sky, and another. It was night, full of flaming constellations in the velvet dark. And then dawn began to glow beyond a distant mountain range. The air sparkled; dew was bright upon the face of the turning world.

  “See?” said Egide. “Tomorrow!”

  Juille smiled at him indulgently, watching the morning move swiftly across the planet. He made no move to halt its progress and the shadows lengthened fast below them as the day declined once more. A fabulous sunset enveloped them in purple and pink and gold, and the sky was green, and violet, and then velvet black. The cycle repeated itself, faster and faster. Evening and night and dawn, noon, evening again.

  When a week of evanescent days had flashed over them, Egide spoke into the disk and the circling progress slowed down to normal. He grinned at her.

  “Now you’ve known me about ten days,” he said. “Don’t I improve with acquaintance? Do you feel you know me any better?”

  “I’ve aged too fast to tell.” She smiled. “What fun it is, being a god.” She rose on an elbow and looked down over the edge of the cloud. “Let there be cities down there,” she said, and waved a careless arm along which bright blue water appeared to ripple, breaking into a foam of bubbles about the wrist.

  “Cities there are.” Egide snapped his fingers and over the horizon a twinkle of lights began to lift. “Shall we have evening, to watch them shine?” Juille nodded, and the air dimmed about them once more. She held up a blue-sheathed arm to watch the light fading along the liquid surfaces of her sleeve.

  They had sailed yesterday under leaning white canvas over a windy sea, and Egide had sent the dress designer to Juille this morning with a new idea. So today she wore a gown of changing blues and greens that flowed like sea water as his cloak had once flowed like blood. An immaculate foam of bubbles rippled about her feet.

  Almost every waking hour of the past three days they had spent together. And Juille had almost forgotten that once, on their first meeting, some look about him had frightened her. In her sight the look was not repeated. Behind her back—perhaps. But the three days had been unshadowed, full of laughter and light talk and the entertainment Cyrille alone knew how to provide. They still had no names for one another, but restraint had long gone from their conversation. Juille had even let her first mistrust of him sink into temporary abeyance, so that only occasionally some passing word of his evoked it again.

  Just now something else evoked it. At any other place and time there would probably have been real annoyance in her voice, but she spoke today with gentle lassitude.

  “You have a decadent mind,” she told him. “I’ve often noticed that. Look—even your clothes show it.”

  Egide glanced down with a certain complacence. To all appearance he was cloaked today in long blond hair that rippled rather horribly from his shoulders. Beneath it his fine muscular body was sheathed in wetly shining blue satin the exact color of his eyes, and of the same translucent texture.

  “Oh, there’s a lot I haven’t tried yet,” he assured her. “Rain, fire—By the way, how would you like a rainstorm over your cities?”

  Juille dismissed her shadow of distaste and leaned upon one elbow, peering down.

  “Not now. Look. How pretty they are!”

  Dusk was purpling over the world below, and the cities twinkled in great spangled clusters of light that shook enchantingly all over the face of the darkening planet as the air quivered and danced between them.

  “Look up,” murmured Egide, his voice hushed a little in the growing hush of their synthetic night. “I wonder if the stars really look like that, anywhere in the Galaxy.”

  There were great shining rosettes of light, shimmering from red to blue to white again in patternless rhythms against a sky of thick black velvet. And as they leaned back upon the cloud to watch, a very distant music began to breathe above them among the stars.

  It made Juille think of the music upon the lake to which they had danced so beautifully, and in a moment she knew she must sit up and say something to break the gathering magic in the air. She did not trust that magic. She had been careful not to let another moment like the moment of the dance engulf them. She mistrusted it both for its own sake and for the sake of what barriers it might let down in her. The thought of Egide’s embrace was frightening, in some obscure, illogical way she did not try to fathom. In just a moment she would break the gathering spell.

  The music sank slowly toward them in intangible festoons of sweetness. The stars blazed like great fiery roses against the dark. They were floating through space upon that most lulling and deeply remembered of all motions—the gentle swing of the cradle. Their cloud rocked them above the turning world and the stars poured down enchantment. And now it was too late to speak.

  The same dissolving magic was upon them as their cloud went drifting slowly among the stars. All reality was draining away.
Juille heard the long breath her companion drew, and saw the stars blotted out by the silhouette of his curly head and broad cloaked shoulders leaning above her. And suddenly something about their tensed outline roused Juille from her lovely lassitude. She sat up abruptly, terror flashing over her. In this swimming darkness his face and the brilliance of his eyes was veiled, but she could see his arms reach out for her and all the latent fear came back with a rush.

  But before she could move he had her. His strength was surprising. He held her struggles quiet in one arm, and she felt the calloused palm of the other hand fitting itself gently around her throat. For one unreasoning moment, in the face of all logic, she knew what he intended. In her mind she could already feel that hand tightening with its terrible gentleness until the night swam red around her as she strangled. If this was murder, she must forestall it, and her body knew the way. What she did was pure instinct, unguided by reason. She relaxed in his arms with a little sigh, letting her eyes close softly. When she felt his grip begin to loosen just a bit she got one arm free and laid it about his neck.

  What happened then must have amazed them both if their minds had been capable of surprise. But their minds were not functioning now. As in the moment of the dance, all antagonisms of thought had ceased without warning, and it was the flesh instead that governed and responded. Juille felt one dim warning stir far back in her brain, drowned beneath the immediate and urgent delight of his expert kisses, but she would not think of it now. She could not. Later, perhaps, she would remember. Much later. Not now.

  The burning stars had paled a little when she noticed them again. Some warm, light fabric covered her—that cloak of rippling yellow hair. Her head was pillowed upon the cumulous couch and dawn was beginning to freshen the air, though no light yet glowed above the horizon. She could see her companion darkly silhouetted against the stars as he sat upon a billow of cloud a little distance away, resting his chin on his fist and staring downward.

  Juille pushed the clouds into a support behind her and leaned upon it, watching him, formless thoughts swirling in her mind. Presently his head turned toward her. In this warm darkness his face was barely visible, lighted by the dimming stars. She could see starlight reflecting in the mirrory surfaces of his tunic and glancing down, she caught the same reflections broken among the water ripples of her own skirt.

  They looked at one another in silence, for a long while.

  Juille woke in the dimness of her apartment, upon her bed of cloud, and lay for a few moments letting the fog of her dreams clear slowly away, like mist dispelling. Then she sat up abruptly, knowing that after all it had been no dream. But when she looked back uoon the bewildering complexity of what had happened on the cloud, she saw no rhyme or reason to it. The dimness was suddenly smothering about her.

  “Light, light!” she called pettishly, brushing at the room’s darkness with both hands, as if she could clear it away like a curtain. And someone waiting beyond the call panel of the bed must have heard—it was strange to wonder how much those listeners heard and watched and knew—for the darkness paled and a rosy glow of morning flooded the room.

  Helia stood in the doorway, the little llar preening itself upon her shoulder. Her weathered face showed no emotion, but there was a certain gentleness in the look she bent upon her mistress.

  “Did I sleep long?” Juille asked.

  Helia nodded. The llar unclasped its flexible pads and plucked at her dark hair, beginning very swiftly and deftly to braid it between quick, multiple fingers like the fingers of sea-anemones. Helia stroked the little animal and it snapped sidewise with razory teeth and sprang to the floor with one fluid motion of grace like flight.

  “Any calls?”

  “Not yet, highness.” Helia’s grave stare was almost disconcerting.

  Juille said, “Go away,” and then sat clasping her knees and frowning. In the mirrors of the dressing alcove she could see herself, the fine, hard delicacy of her face looking chill even in this rosy light. She felt chill.

  What had happened last night was too complex to understand. Would his hand have tightened about her throat if she had not taken the one way to prevent it? Or was the heavy touch a caress? What possible reason, she wondered, could the man have for wanting to strangle her? But if he had meant to, and if he had let her seduce him from his purpose—why, that was no more than she might have expected from him. The old mistrust, the old dislike, came back in a flood. His decadent clothes betrayed him, she thought, and his sensitive, sensuous mouth betrayed him, and the careless opinions he had expressed too often. He was a man who would always make exceptions; he would always be pulled two ways between sentiment and duty. If it had not really happened last night, then it would happen when the first test came. No, she did not respect him at all—but a dangerous weakness loosened all her muscles as she leaned here remembering that stunning of the sense which Cyrille’s false glamour could work upon her.

  Everything about her was an illusion, she realized with sudden cold insight that no Cyrillian art could dispell. But it was an illusion so dangerous that the very integrity of the mind could be enchanted by it, the keen edge of reason dulled. And she felt frightened as no possible physical threat could frighten her. When the amazon discards a woman’s gentleness of body and mind she is almost certain to make the discard complete. Juille thought she was not asking too much of an intellectual equal when she expected from him the same cold, unswerving devotion to a principle that was the foundation of her own life. Egide would never have it.

  But she knew she had better not see that disarming face of his any more. Not even to solve for herself the perplexing question of his intention last night. Better to let it slide. Better to go now and forget everything that had happened upon the drifting cloud, beneath those burning stars. Now she knew the shifting, unstable ground upon which women walk; she would not tread it again. She sat up.

  “Helia,” she called through the fog-veiled doorway. “Helia, send for our ship. We’re starting back to Ericon—now.”

  Egide sat clasping one knee, leaning his head back on the window frame and looking out over a field of pale flowers that nodded in the rays of tricolored suns. He did not look at Jair. His cloak today was a mantle of licking flame.

  “Well?” said Jair, the boom in his voice under close control. No answer. Jair looked down reflectively at his own clasped hands. He tightened them, watching the great muscles writhe along his forearms under the red-heat haze of hair. “Has she recognized you?” he asked.

  Eside picked up the glass beside him and spun it thoughtfully. Rainbows flickered across the floor as sunlight struck it. He did not answer for a moment. Then he said in a detached voice, “That. It’s a false alarm, Jair.”

  “A false alarm!” Jair’s voice made the glass shiver in Egide’s hand. The muscles crawled spectacularly along his arms as his great fists clenched. “She isn’t the emperor’s daughter?”

  Egide flashed him a clear, blue glance, and grinned.

  “Never mind,” he said. “You don’t have to impress me.

  There was a certain blankness in Jair’s reddish gaze that Egide recognized with an odd, illogical shiver. He said, “Sometimes I forget how good you are at your job, Jair. And sometimes it surprises me—”

  “You mean,” Jair said, and even in restraint his voice made the glass vibrate, “we’ve wasted all this time and money—”

  “Well, no, I wouldn’t call it wasted. I’ve had a very pleasant time. But we’d better leave today. It wasn’t the emperor’s daughter.”

  Rain danced from the high curve of the crystal wall and went streaming in long, irregular freshets down the sides of the glass room, veiling Ericon’s soft-green hills outside. Within, firelight wavered beneath a great white mantelpiece carved with the mythological loves of gods and goddesses worshiped a long time ago by another race.

  The rain and the firelight and the silence of the people in the room should have made it a peaceful hour here under the high glass curve of
the walls. But over the mantelpiece was a communicator panel that was like an open window upon death and disaster. Every man in the room leaned forward tensely in his chair, eyes upon the haggard, blood-streaked face that spoke to them hoarsely through the panel.

  The voice carried over long-lapsed time and the unfathomable dark distances that stretch between worlds. The man who called was probably dead now; he spoke from another planet that circled far outside the orbit of Ericon.

  “Dunnar has just surrendered to the H’vani,” he was telling them in a tired, emotionless voice that sounded as if it had been shouting a little while ago, though it was not shouting now. “We hadn’t a chance. They came down in one wave after another all around the planet, bombing everything that moved. They landed troops on the night side and kept raining them down all around the world as the dark belt moved on. The day side got the bombing heaviest, beginning in the dawn belt and moving on around with the planet. They had their own men planted everywhere, ready to rise. Smothered our antiaircraft from the ground. Much of it must have been manned by their spies. Some of our interceptor craft were shot down deliberately from below. Watch out for H’vani men planted—”

  Behind the speaker a flaming rafter fell into the range of the communicator screen and crashed somewhere near, out of sight. The man glanced back at it, then leaned to the screen and spoke on in a voice of quickened urgency. Above the crackling of the flames, other voices shouted in the background, coming nearer. There was the noise of what might be gunfire, and another sliding crash as more beams fell. The speaker was shouting now, his voice almost drowned out in the rising uproar of Dunnar’s destruction.