Out of Phaze

In due course the craft landed. They passed from its lock directly into a dome, where serfs guided them to cleaning stalls and then to a residential suite. “Eat, sleep,” the foreman serf said. “Tomorrow Citizen White will have an audience.”

“Citizen White?” Bane asked. “I thought we were being taken to Citizen Blue.”

The serf shrugged. “Perhaps the Citizen will explain. Meanwhile, rest.”

That seemed to be it. Bane understood that in Proton, Citizens governed, and no serf could question the actions or motives of a Citizen. He chafed against the delay in his search for his other self, but knew he could do nothing. They might as well have been prisoners.

But he remained with Agape, and that was a considerable compensation. Now, without further guilt or distraction, he could complete his understanding with her.

They went to the food dispenser in the suite, and Agape got a nutro-bev. Bane found that he wasn’t hungry, not because of any tension or fatigue, but because his robot body did not require food. So he simply watched her eat. That turned out to be a remarkable experience in itself.

Then they adjourned to the bedroom. “I can show thee now,” he said, though somewhat shaken by the recent spectacle of her meal. Still, she had warned him. “There be room enough here.”

“Oh, Bane, I do want to know,” she said. “But I have been up and active for so long—it is past midnight now— I do not think I can hold my form much longer. I fear I would melt in the middle of it.”

That could be awkward, Bane had to agree. “Rest, then; we can do it in the morning.” He was privately relieved. He was, as he had told her, used to observing shape-changing in others, but this had been not exactly that.

“You might not like to see me sleep,” she said. “I return to my natural state.”

“Thy natural state should not bother me,” he said, hoping he spoke accurately. “But what will I do, while thou dost sleep? This body be not tired at all.”

“Use the computer access to gain entertainment or education,” she suggested. “Here, I will show you how.”

Soon Bane was seated before a screen, watching three-dimensional moving pictures within it. He found this fascinating, so very much like magic that it seemed pointless not to call it that. He could cause the pictures to change merely by telling them to.

He directed the screen to fill him in on the history of Proton. He wanted to know what had happened here after the frames had separated. He knew from what his father had said that once there was fairly free travel between the frames; each permanent resident of one frame seemed to have an other self in their other frame, who resembled him exactly. But only when one self died could the other cross what was called the curtain to the other frame. Stile had crossed when the Blue Adept died, and Stile had taken Blue’s place in the Blue Demesnes. But Blue had not been quite wholly dead; he had taken Stile’s body in Proton and taken up residence there. Stile himself had animated a golem body, which performed just like the original one. Such magnificent magic had been possible in those days. Then the fundamental stuff of magic, the rock Phazite, had been diminished; half of it had been transferred to Proton for the sake of some complex but apparently necessary balancing of the frames, and magic had forever lost much of its potency. The frames had been fully separated, so that no one could cross over anymore.

All this Bane had known all along. What he didn’t know was how Proton had fared in the interim. Since he had to remain here a while longer anyway, this did indeed seem to be the ideal occasion to learn about this. He knew that his father would be most interested in the information.

But acquiring the information turned out to be more complicated than he had supposed. There was so much of it! When he asked for the “History of Proton,” the screen went back to the planet’s discovery more than four hundred years before by an explorer-ship from the Empire of Earth: a beautiful world much resembling Phaze today. But there were creatures already on it, Earthlike creatures, including a few human beings. This indicated that there had been contact before. Since there had been a number of private expeditions to space, and not all of these made proper reports, it was concluded that one of these had colonized the planet, and the descendants of the colony had then forgotten its origin. This could have happened hundreds of years before.

Then it seemed that the planet was somehow double. There was reference to magic, which was of course impossible—

“Impossible!” Bane snorted. “You idiot!”

The narration froze in place. “New directive?” the screen inquired.

“Just skip it up to the past twenty years,” Bane said, deciding not to wrestle with this aspect.