“Then—I’m like you? Tsi told me but I couldn’t believe it. I’m a—a sort of superman?”
“Every gift has its price,” she said oddly. “There is beauty here but there is terror too. You must have noticed that you see with clearer eyes—the eyes of the mind.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed that. Things are—shining, somehow.”
“It would be well if you remembered your own world,” Orelle said, after a little pause. Her eyes were troubled. “Your own atomic structure has altered but that can take place only once.”
A man came into view through a glassy wall that melted at his approach, and solidified again behind him. He looked no older than Orelle, a firm-fleshed, smiling man whose vari-tinted hair lay smoothly across his scalp. But his eyes were old, grey and cloudy with the mists of incalculable centuries.
IV
The Bomb
“Orelle—” he began. And then the aeon-misted eyes fell upon Miller, and a look of bewildered recognition seemed to grow in them. “This man,” he said uncertainly. “Should I know him, Orelle? Has he been here before, or. …” Suddenly the mists cleared from his eyes and he looked old no longer but resolute and certain.
“I know him!” he said in a crisp voice. “His face was in the Time Pool. It meant danger. But the likelihood was so remote that—well, I dismissed it. I didn’t believe.”
“What was the danger?” Orelle leaned forward anxiously, her satin skirts moving with a gentle rustle over the flowery bank where she sat.
The man shook his head. “You’ve seen the Time Pool, child. There are so many possibilities of the future—who can say in what ripple this man’s face floated for a moment before the bubble burst? But it was danger. I remember that.”
They turned in one motion and looked at Miller with wise, wary, thoughtful eyes, astonishingly alike in the two faces. He realized they must be closely akin, and both akin to Tsi, whom no one trusted far.
He said quickly, “If you can read the future you must know I’m not a man to break my promises—and I swear to you both I mean no harm.”
The man made an impatient gesture. “The future is never that clear. There is no ‘must’ in time—only ‘perhaps.’ ”
“Tsi sent him,” Orelle said. “She must have had her reasons.”
“She sent me because of Brann,” Miller declared. The two nodded.
Orelle said, “Well, sometimes she’s moved to save one of Brann’s victims. Sometimes I think she helps him in his—call them experiments—on those he captures. She’d like us to think only whims move her. But we know the thing that lies behind all she does. Llesi and I—we know.” She smiled grimly at the man beside her.
“She wants the Power,” the man called Llesi said.
Miller thought to himself, “So do I,” but aloud he said only, “The Power?” in a voice of innocent inquiry.
Llesi nodded, his eyes fixed speculatively upon Miller as if he gazed through the mists of incalculable years.
“A toy my brother and I once made that became far more than a toy before we were finished. Now Tsi claims her share in her father’s treasure. These two are my brother’s children but sometimes I think Tsi has no blood of mine in her veins.”
Orelle said, “No, Llesi, she’s only weak. If Brann didn’t rule her so completely—”
“She’d be welcome to her heritage. But we know that to give her what she asks is to give it straight into Brann’s hands. And there’d be an end to this castle and all who live here.”
“Who is Brann?” Miller asked impatiently. “I’ve heard so much about him, I’ve even heard him speak. But I’ve never seen him. What does he look like?”
Orelle shook her head. Small bells she wore in her ears tinkled at the motion, and even the tiny sounds they made were vividly beautiful to Miller’s increasingly keen new senses.
She said, “No one has seen him except Tsi. No one but she can tell you what he is. He receives his friends only in the dark or from behind curtains. Ever since he built that castle, centuries ago, he’s kept his secret hidden—whatever it may be. I should like to see him dead.”
She said it without passion. “Brann is true evil, perhaps pure evil in its most flawless form. He’s very wise and very powerful. I’m not sure why he chose us for his enemy but I only know now we must fight or be killed.”
Miller made up his mind suddenly. “As I left his castle,” he said, “Brann spoke to me from beyond the wall. He said this was a fight he would win too easily. He told me to come to you as another fighter, to make the battle more interesting.”
Orelle leaned forward quickly on the flowery bank, her earrings tinkling musically. “He said that? You know, I’d have guessed the opposite.
“I’d have said Tsi sent you here knowing Brann would covet you for his experiments—knowing that with you here, he’d redouble his efforts to conquer us and drag you back. If his interest were flagging, that might be the best way to revive it against us and force her entry here. Because she’d do anything in the world to get her hands on the Power.”
Llesi interrupted her in a thoughtful voice. “She might send an envoy here armed with some secret weapon Brann could devise—something that could pass even our careful searching. Remember, Orelle, I’ve seen this man before in the Time Pool—this man’s face, and danger!”
“I’ve given you my word I didn’t come to harm you,” Miller said, realizing that though he sailed close to the wind of truth in saying that, at least it was accurate as far as it went. “Still, I’d like to know more about this Power. Unless you—”
He never finished. For suddenly there was a blast
