Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Read Free Page A

matched the ugliness of Christmas Landing. It came closer and whistled something: high, fluted, oddly musical.
    Carolyn gave a wordless cry and plunged forward, across the strip of bare dirt and through the shield. Without a moment’s hesitation, Anne followed.
    Alarms sounded. Police, already alerted by the barking dogs, raced belatedly down the corridor from the opposite direction. Only two men—Christmas Landing had diverted much of its constabulary to Project Recovery. By the time the cops reached the shield, which stopped radiation and dogs but not people, Luke had already reached it himself.
    Carolyn, laughing and crying, threw her arms around the scaly alien and fluted back. Anne stood transfixed, her pale eyes wide as Roland’s larger moon. Luke groaned inwardly. Anne should not have experienced this, it would make her therapy so much harder, and as for Shadow-of-a-Dream . . . Luke stepped through the barrier.
    Dizziness took him, and he fell to his knees.
    The angel was neither young nor old, male nor female. All white: wings, skin, robe. Not soft but infinitely compassionate, it held a hand out to Luke and said, “There is nothing to fear.”
    “I know,” he said, and a sob broke from him just as one of the cops seized him roughly and dragged him back behind the shield, and the Angel of Death vanished.

    “I don’t think you realize how brave it was of the alien to come here,” Luke said carefully to Police Chief Halford.
    “I don’t think you realize what a spectacle you made of yourself out there,” Halford said. Disgust rimmed her features like frost. It didn’t help that she was right. But so was Luke.
    “Consider, Chief Halford. A native, alien to us, comes to the conquerors of her people without the only protection she knows, all because she wants to assure herself that the human girl she raised is well and not being mistreated. That takes enormous courage in any species.”
    “If that’s what you assume her motive was.”
    “Shadow-of-a-Dream said it was.”
    “ Carolyn is deluded—that’s the whole point of this therapy, isn’t it? If this were up to me, Dr. Silverstein, you would be on the next transport back to Portolondon. But Terry wants you to continue ‘helping’ Carolyn.”
    Luke wasn’t surprised to hear that sixteen-year-old Terry’s wishes carried so much weight. In this pioneer society, sixteen was formally an adult. Carolyn’s parents were dead; she and Terry were lovers; Chief Halford had no other real options for dealing with Carolyn. Luke also knew, without being told, that he was to continue seeing Anne as well because Anne herself wished it and she, too, was sixteen.
    He said with deliberate mildness, “I’ll see Carolyn now.”
    “Terry is with her.”
    “I don’t do therapy that way, Chief Halford.”
    “Then you won’t do it at all. He says she won’t come without him.”
    There is more than one control freak here . But he said only, “Send them both in.”
    The two youngsters held hands. Carolyn wore clothes, jeans and a loose blue shirt, although her feet were bare, the soles hard as leather from fourteen years of running barefoot in the wilderness. They were both so beautiful, Luke thought, conscious of his own wrinkled skin and bald head. He had never gone in for cosmetic enhancements. Carolyn’s long brown hair, streaked with sun-gold, fell around her shoulders. Terry’s blue eyes burned with anger.
    The first three seconds and he was already faced with a problem. She wanted to be addressed as “Shadow-of-a-Dream”; he would be furious if Luke used the name the aliens had given her—the name she had been called by for most of her life. He said, “Hello to both of you.”
    “Hello,” Terry said. The girl said nothing.
    “Terry, it’s not usual to do therapy with a third person present.”
    “We aren’t usual,” the young man said.
    “True enough.” Terry was extremely intelligent. His fury at discovering the alien deception that had