The Berserker Throne Read online

  Chapter 7

  After he had showered and changed, Harivarman went to meet Gabrielle in the City. Their rendezvous tonight was on one of the least quiet of those generally quiet streets, at a place that they had visited in the past—where in the small City had they not visited, in the two years of their relationship?—a place of entertainment, still called the Contrat Rouge, as it had been in Sabel’s day.

  Tonight, looking with changed perspective at that establishment’s street sign, a sign that he must have passed at least a hundred times during the past four years, Harivarman found himself really wondering for the first time what old Sabel had experienced, dealing with a hidden berserker.

  Not, of course, that his situation and Sabel’s were really all that much alike.

  In Sabel’s time this area of the City had been, as it was now, a glassed-in mall. It had been then, as it still was, the chief district for entertainment and amusement. The decor must have been changed innumerable times during the intervening centuries, and parts of the architecture had been altered too—Harivarman had seen old holographs and models—but the overall look, like the nature of the business, was pretty much the same.

  The exterior of the Contrat Rouge was not impressive, being mainly the same mottled brown and gray stone walls that you saw on half the buildings of the City. Neither did there appear at first glance to be anything special about the interior, thinly populated this early in the evening. The place gained a distinction of a kind when you sat in one of the booths and began to play with the optical controls that altered the appearance of everything seen through the booth’s walls, which were transparent or translucent in varying degrees depending on where the controls were set. And that was only the simplest of the visual effects that could be achieved.

  Harivarman found Gabrielle waiting for him. She was fine-tuning the booth’s optics absently, so that the images of other patrons and of the human staff came altered through the walls of the plastic enclosure. The computer system managing the optics identified human images and clothed or re-clothed them to order. Gabrielle, in a modern green dress as fragile-looking as a spiderweb, currently had everyone who passed the booth dressed in some kind of fancy historical costumes, from a time and place that Harivarman was unable to identify.

  What surprised the Prince was that Gabrielle was not alone. Sitting with her was a vastly older but still marginally attractive woman, dressed in somewhat outdated elegance. Brown ringlets hung past the older woman’s hollow cheeks and arresting eyes.

  Gabrielle jumped up happily when she saw Harivarman appear in the opening of the plastic wall that made the single doorway of the booth. “Harry, guess who I’ve found for you at last!”

  For the moment, his mind filled with other matters, the Prince had not the slightest idea what this girl was talking about. “Found for me?” he asked. And then it came to him who the other woman must be, just as Gabrielle pronounced her name.

  “Greta Thamar, Harry.” The young woman’s tone almost reproached him for having forgotten. Even after two years, Gabrielle was still faintly awed to find herself the intimate companion of a real Prince.

  Now Harivarman could remember. When he had first heard that Greta Thamar, Sabel’s old companion, was still alive, he had in Gabrielle’s presence expressed a wish that he might meet her sometime. At that point he hadn’t known that Greta Thamar might still be on the Fortress, or might return to it. And Harivarman, in the press of other recent events, had temporarily forgotten his wish to meet her.

  Now he bowed lightly, extending a hand in perfect correctness. “Prince Harivarman,” he introduced himself.

  The woman made only a token gesture toward rising. She was not in the least impressed, evidently, and she took her time about replying. The Prince recalled that she had once in her youth undergone memory extraction at the hands of the Guardians—it was all part of the well-known saga of the treacherous Sabel—and he supposed that some permanent mental damage might well have resulted. At last she reached across the table to take his hand, and gave him a close look and a knowing nod. It was as if she believed they shared a secret.

  “The management here has hired Greta again,” put in Gabrielle, filling an almost awkward little silence. “It’s new management now, of course. I mean—”

  “They think I can bring in some tourists.” The old woman’s voice was surprisingly deep. Now that Harivarman had the chance to study her, her face and figure looked much younger than her actual age of centuries. It was, he thought, as if entering into legend might have helped somehow to preserve her.

  Harivarman looked up involuntarily to see the metal plaque that he knew was high on the wall near the front entrance of the Control Rouge, visible above surrounding booths. The fancy optics Gabrielle had evoked in their booth’s walls did nothing to change those letters on the metal.

  In the year 23 of the 456th

  century of the Dardanian calendar

  Greta Thamar, lover and victim

  of Georgicus Sabel, danced here

  “She’s actually been living here in the City all this time, Harry. Or for most of it.” Gabrielle sounded tremendously proud of her find.

  “Fascinating,” said Harivarman. He realized that his voice sounded a touch too dry. Well, Thamar’s story was really a fascinating one, he supposed. Or it would be, for a man who had the time to think about it.

  The figure of an ethereally lovely human waitress approaching the booth in historical costume turned into the prosaic inhuman shape of a robotic waiter as soon as it reached the opening through the walls. The three of them ordered drinks and food, the Prince putting them on his bill; fortunately the terms of exile had not condemned him to poverty.

  Gabrielle, the Prince decided, seemed unreasonably cheerful about everything. And in good appetite, ordering a substantial dinner. Maybe she was putting on an effort to cheer him up.

  Harivarman, mostly out of a habit of wanting to make polite conversation, said to Greta Thamar: “I wish, then, that I might have met you sooner.”

  “I haven’t been socializing much for a long time. But I’m going to be out now. I might even dance again.” Traces of some handicap or oddity, perhaps the old woman’s long-ago ME, were more in evidence, the Prince thought, the more she spoke.

  “That’s good,” he commented. “That is, it’ll be good if you really want to dance again.”

  “I used to live for dancing.”

  “I look forward to seeing a performance.”

  Gabrielle beamed at him for being nice to the old lady. And Greta physically did look as if she still might be able to dance, though Harivarman supposed it wouldn’t be the kind of dancing that customers ordinarily came to a place like this to see.

  Suddenly Gabrielle asked him: “Where are you going, Prince?”

  “I—” He hadn’t made any move suggesting that he was going to leave the booth, at least none that he was aware of. “Nowhere at the moment.” Suddenly understanding came. She meant that he would soon be leaving the Fortress, under some terms that would bear discussion in public, and that he was going to have a choice as to where he went.

  He realized that Gabrielle didn’t understand the situation at all. Perhaps she thought, no, she must think, that the Empress’s death meant he would be recalled to some form of power. No wonder she had been so eager to meet him here tonight.

  Music came wafting into the booth from somewhere, and faint laughter from the next booth. He sat there looking closely at Gabrielle, who gazed back at him from within her cloud of red hair, still appearing unreasonably pleased. Gods of all space, but she was beautiful.

  Greta Thamar asked him, unexpectedly: “What do you do, Prince? Where do you spend your time?”

  “I’m an exile here, you see. Not a tourist.”

  “I know that.” Her tone said he was a fool to think he had to explain that to her; it was a rather sharp tone for even a celebrity to use to a Prince. Age in some ways had more privileges than mere rank. Greta Thamar rep
eated: “But what do you do?”

  “I spend a fair amount of time doing historical, archaeological research. Mostly out in the outer corridors.”

  The woman fell silent, nodding slightly, gazing into space, as if that answer had struck her as something that had to be considered seriously.

  Gabrielle had been playing with the optics again, and the Prince did not recognize Colonel Phocion among the giant apes now moving in the aisles past the booth, until the man with drink in hand stopped in the open entrance.

  The colonel, flushed and tending toward chubbiness, raised his glass in a light salute to Harivarman. “Cheers, Harry.” He had been much less free with that informal name when he was still officially the Prince’s jailer. “How are you and the Iron Lady getting on? I hear you took her sightseeing the other day.” Phocion accompanied the statement with a wink. He was graying, getting along in years and in fact nearly ready for retirement, though still nowhere near as aged as Greta Thamar.

  “There was nothing very exciting about our outing, I’m afraid,” said Harivarman.

  “What you always say in the early stages, old boy, as I recall. Well, if true, too bad. Maybe I’ll call on the lady m’self. No reason why you should have all the crop attending you.” And Phocion made a bow, his version of gallantry, to the two ladies.

  “Have a drink with us?” Gabrielle inviting him confirmed that she was really happy about something. “You won’t be on the Fortress that much longer, I suppose,” she commented.

  “Nor perhaps . . .” Phocion gave the Prince a look with a mixture of sharp things in it, and drowned the rest of what he had been going to say in his glass. He was waiting to get a ship that would take him away, either to an early retirement that Harivarman knew he did not want, or some uncongenial assignment that would amount to a demotion. The SG had evidently not been pleased with Colonel Phocion’s performance of late.

  “Nor am I going to be here much longer,” said the Prince as cheerfully as he could. “And there’s not much perhaps about it. You’re right.” He raised his own glass, returning the salute, and drank.

  The colonel looked at the ladies, apparently assessing them in his quietly arrogant way; he’d already met Gabrielle, naturally, and now he looked at Greta Thamar as if he knew her too. But he still spoke only to the Prince. Now he would do his best to be bracing. “I suppose there’s an excellent chance that you’ll be recalled now.”

  “To power? Hardly.” Harivarman spread his big hands. “Arrested is infinitely more likely.”

  Phocion’s return look said that he had realized that all along, but had wanted to hold out hope.

  There was a faint sound from Gabrielle across the table. The Prince looked at her, and saw incipient shock. He’d been right; it appeared that until this moment she really hadn’t understood. Maybe he should have tried to break it gently.

  Then she rallied suddenly. “Harry, for a moment I thought that you were serious.”

  Around them the interior of the Contrat Rouge was slowly filling up. The passage of falsified figures, costumed, bestial, or mechanical, past the booth was becoming almost a steady parade. Now a little knot of tourists passed, their appearance altered again in mid-transit by some perhaps automatic readjustment of the optics. Then some military people going by the other way created a brief distraction.

  One of the tourists could be heard stage-whispering to another on the subject of how one should address a real Prince.

  Phocion saluted Harry sadly and moved on, from all indications going in pursuit of one of the tourist women.

  Gabrielle glanced at the woman beside her, who appeared to be far off somewhere in her own thoughts. Then she leaned across the table. “Harry, what did you mean, really? Arrested?”

  Harivarman reached absently to give the set of optic controls on his side of the booth a random shuffling. Now the people passing were suddenly all nude, and certainly the booth made handsomer nudists of them than nature. The optics computers were biased toward subtle flattery in one mode, in another toward total exaggeration, enough for comedy. That mode did not come into play so often.

  The Prince said gently to Gabrielle: “I meant arrested. I take it you’ve heard about the Empress?”

  “Of course. But I don’t see what that has to do with—you.”

  “Being arrested these days is nothing,” said Greta Thamar suddenly, and Harivarman looked at her; she was looking past him. “Not like it was in the old days,” she said, and suddenly peered at him closely. “What do you really do, out there in the outer corridors? That’s where Georgicus Sabel met the berserker.”

  Harivarman could feel his nerves draw taut. He told her: “I stockpile heavy weapons, oxygen, food supplies. So that when my friends land in a rescue expedition I’ll be ready. I rather wish that they’d hurry up.”

  Greta was gazing past him. “I’m going to dance,” she said.

  He was about to say goodbye, and wish her luck on the resumption of her career, when he realized that Greta was not getting up, that her gaze was directed at the large holostage in the center of the room. The optics in the booth walls had been trained to let the holostage images come through unaltered.

  And now, on the holostage, Greta Thamar’s two-hundred-year-old image began to dance. It was an old holographic recording of a performance done live, perhaps on the very same stage, and here sat the woman herself, watching it with them.

  She spoke, in a hushed voice, as if the recorded performance deserved reverence. Harivarman could not hear very clearly, but she was trying to tell them something about Sabel, and Harivarman could feel his scalp creep.

  The image on the stage was that of a girl of eighteen, twenty at the most.

  The first segment of the dance ended. Greta Thamar sitting in the booth appeared to come to herself, to realize that she had been rambling somewhat.

  “The memory extraction still gets me sometimes. The Guardians could still use that then. Being arrested now is nothing.” And now, moving somewhat stiffly, the old woman slid out of the booth and departed.

  Harivarman grinned wryly, or tried to grin, at Gabrielle’s worried face.

  “Harry, tell me once and for all, what the Empress’s assassination is going to mean.”

  “To me, a lot of trouble. Serious trouble. To you . . . well, I suppose that depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how closely you associate with me. No, it’s too late to worry about that. On what my enemies think about you. On what mood they’re in when they get here. On . . .”

  Gabrielle was becoming intensely frightened, looking this way and that, as if those who bore his death warrant with them were here already. “Harry, if they do come after you . . .”

  “Oh, they’re coming. Naturally you want to know if they’ll be interested in you as well. Quite natural.” He felt less hurt by her attitude suddenly, and more sorry for her. “I wouldn’t think so, Gabby, though of course I don’t know for sure. But you’re not political, everyone knows that. I shouldn’t worry too much if I were you.”

  But it was hard to reassure Gabrielle. “I’m going, Harry.”

  “You haven’t had your dessert.” But then he relented. “Then leave. I’ll stay. But I don’t think it’s going to matter, at this point, if you leave or not. Everyone knows that you and I have been—”

  She was gone. He spun the optics control, watching her vary with the optics as she hurried away. The last spin dealt her nudity, in this case not doing justice to the original.

  But now for some reason she was hurrying back . . . no, the optics had confused him, this wasn’t Gabrielle at all.

  Harivarman’s heart gave a surprising leap.

  He looked up, at close range, to see his wife standing beside the table at which he now sat alone.

  Beatrix, darker, compact, in every way less spectacular than Gabrielle, said: “I waited till your girlfriend left.”

  “Thank you.” He heard his own voice, sounding almost meek. “Will you sit dow
n?”

  She sat, pushing used dishes indifferently from in front of her. “Not the most enthusiastic welcome I have ever experienced.” Beatrix was of course in her own way, in her own style, a lady of great beauty, fit consort for a Prince. As Princess she had lived here on the Radiant with Harivarman long enough to know his habits here and his haunts, and she had known where to find him this evening. She was, like him, an old experienced berserker-fighter, though few would have guessed the fact from looking at her demure loveliness now.

  He said: “You were on the second ship, then, from Salutai. The one that just came in a few hours ago.”

  “I was. It’s a private yacht. I’m not supposed to say who it belongs to, though that strikes me as silly. Anyone who really wanted to find out could. Suffice it to say that you still have friends, and not all of them are broke. Or afraid to admit they know you.”

  He put out a hand, to take hers on the table. “Thank you.”

  “Oh, don’t mention it. Things were dull.”

  “That won’t last long, I suspect.” He studied her. “I suppose it’s unnecessary to ask whether you know what you’ve got yourself into, by returning now.”

  “I’ve never divorced you, you know. Not formally. So I figure that I’m into it already.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Harivarman said after a while, and held on to his wife’s hand.

  Chapter 8

  Next morning Harivarman awoke abruptly, with a sense of inward shock, as if from some dream already faded beyond recall. Yet he had the feeling that what had roused him from sleep was a clear call from the real world.

  He awoke alone. He had insisted on Bea not moving back into his house. He owed her that much at least, he thought.

  Fully awake, he lay for a few moments listening. The house was quiet and untenanted around him, Lescar nowhere in evidence. On rising, the Prince at once checked the communication stage and screen for incoming messages, but there were none. Evidently Commander Blenheim was still in no particular hurry to communicate with him.