She was there. Her body was there, thin and erect in the crimson tunic.
Her black hair was still wild around her small brown face. But Mouse,
the Mouse that Ciaran knew, was dead behind her dull black eyes. Ciaran
whispered, "_Mouse_...."
The slaves flowed in and held the two of them, clogged in a mass of
unresponsive bodies.
"Can't you free them, Bas?"
"Not yet. Not now. There isn't time."
"Can't you do with them what you did with the Kalds?"
"The androids control their minds through hypnosis. If I fought that
control, the struggle would blast their minds to death or idiocy. And
there isn't time...." There was sweat on his smooth young forehead.
"I've got to get through. I don't want to kill them...."
Ciaran looked at Mouse. "No," he said hoarsely.
"But I may have to, unless.... Wait! I can channel the power of the
Stone through my own brain, because there's an affinity between us.
Vibration, cell to cell. The androids won't have made a definite
command against music. Perhaps I can jar their minds open, just enough,
so that you can call them with your harp, as you called me."
A tremor almost of pain ran through the boy's body.
"Lead them away, Ciaran. Lead them as far as you can. Otherwise many of
them will die. And hurry!"
Bas raised the Stone of Destiny in his clasped hands and pressed it to
his forehead. And Ciaran took his harp.
He was looking at Mouse when he set the strings to singing. That was
why it wasn't hard to play as he did. It was something from him to
Mouse. A prayer. A promise. His heart held out on a song.
The music rippled out across the packed mass of humanity. At first
they didn't hear it. Then there was a stirring and a sigh, a dumb,
blind reaching. Somewhere the message was getting through the darkness
clouding their minds. A message of hope. A memory of red sunlight on
green hills, of laughter and home and love.
Ciaran let the music die to a whisper under his fingers, and the people
moved forward, toward him, wanting to hear.
He began to walk away, slowly, trailing the harp-song over his
shoulder--and they followed. Haltingly, in twos and threes, until the
whole mass broke and flowed like water in his wake.
Bas was gone, his slim young body slipping fast through the broken
ranks of the crowd.
Ciaran caught one more glimpse of Mouse before he lost her among the
others. She was crying, without knowing or remembering why.
If Bas died, if Bas was defeated, she would never know nor remember.
* * * * *
Ciaran led them as far as he could, clear to the wall of the pit. He
stopped playing. They stopped, too, standing like cattle, looking at
nothing, with eyes turned inward to their clouded dreams.
Ciaran left them there, running out alone across the empty floor.
He followed the direction Bas had taken. He ran, fast, but it was like
a nightmare where you run and run and never get anywhere. The lights
glared down and the metal monster sighed and churned high up over his
head, and there was no other sound, no other movement but his own.
Then, abruptly, the lights went out.
He stumbled on, hitting brutally against unseen pillars, falling and
scrambling in scrap heaps. And after an eternity he saw light again, up
ahead.
The Light he had seen before, here in the pit. The glorious opalescent
light that drew a man's mind and held it fast to be chained.
Ciaran crept in closer.
There was a control panel on a stone dais--a meaningless jumbled mass
of dials and wires. The androids stood before it. One of them was bent
over, its yellowish hands working delicately with the controls. The
other stood erect beside it, holding a staff. The metal ball at the top
was open, spilling the opalescent blaze into the darkness.
Ciaran crouched in the shelter of a pillar, shielding his eyes. Even
now he wanted to walk into that light and be its slave.
The android with the staff said harshly, "Can't you find the wave
length? He should have been dead by now."
The bending one tensed and then straightened, the burning light
sparkling across its metal sheath. Its eyes were black and limitless,
like evil itself, and no more human.
"Yes," it said. "I have it."
The light began to burst stronger from the staff, a swirling dangerous
fury of it.
Ciaran was hardly breathing. The light-source, whatever it was, was
part of the power of the Stone of Destiny. Wave lengths meant nothing
to him, but it seemed the danger was to the Stone--and Bas carried it.
The android touched the staff. The light died, clipped off as the metal
ball closed.
"If there's any power left in the Stone," it whispered, "our power-wave
will blast its subatomic reserve--and Bas the Immortal with it!"
Silence. And then in the pitch darkness a coal began to glow.
It came closer. It grew brighter, and a smudged reflection behind and
above it became the head and shoulders of Bas the Immortal.