The Unreasoning Mask Read Free Page B

slight chuffing sound. The shaft bent

overhead, the bulkhead behind him curving over, the rest of the shaft

quickly shaping itself into a corridor.
     
     
Ramstan stepped off the disk, walked three paces to where the shaft

curved upward again, and waited. In three seconds, the bulkhead just

before him split, and he walked into his quarters. This was a small room

which was expanding now that the master was home. It was hemispherical,

and the only visible furniture was a table on which stood an electron

microscope. The deck was bare except for a prayer rug, three meters

square, near a bulkhead by the iris. It was made of woven wool, as

required by the al-Khidhr sect, and was dark green except for a red

arrowhead design in one corner. This was the kiblah, the symbol which was

to be pointed towards Mecca when the worshiper knelt on the rug. Here,

of course, there was no means for determining where Mecca was. This

made no difference to Ramstan. He had not prayed since his father had

died. He did not know why he had not left the rug on Earth, and he had

not cared to wonder why. Most of the time he did not even notice it. Now,

looking intensely at it, he thought it moved.
     
     
One of the superstitions of the sect was that prayer rugs, if rolled,

unrolled themselves just before al-Khidhr, the Green One, appeared. If

unrolled, the rug moved its edges to indicate the coming of al-Khidhr.
     
     
Ramstan turned away. He was getting too nervous, he told himself.

Next, he'd be hallucinating al-Khidhr himself.
     
     
The bulkheads had been bare and glowing faintly yellow. Now, murals

appeared on them, ship's electronic reproductions of paintings by

Ramstan. Most were geometrical abstracts, but there was one naturalistic

St. George slaying the dragon and another of Aladdin during his first

encounter with the djinn of the lamp. These two were his most recent

works. It had taken him a long time to overcome his early conditioning

against the representation of living things in art.
     
     
Ramstan, though he'd abandoned the faith of his ancestors, still could

not eat the flesh of swine, regarded dogs as unclean, and wiped with

the left hand after defecating. But he had overcome his conditioning

against drinking alcohol.
     
     
He stood before the St. George and dragon, spoke a code phrase,

and the bulkhead opened, its central point of distention the dragon's

eye. Within was a large globe open at one end. It contained two plastic

boxes, one larger than the other. The smaller held top-secret records,

little spheres, each set in a hollow. The other -- that held the reason

why he had ordered al-Buraq to leave Tolt so quickly and why the Tolt

ship was now here.
     
     
He struggled with the desire to open the larger box and look at its contents.

He sighed, shuddered slightly, and told the bulkhead to close up. He patted

the bulkhead, and it quivered. Al-Buraq was watching him, and she had

interpreted the pat as a touch of affection from her master. Somewhere,

in the dark chamber in ship where the synthetic brain floated, a complex

of neural circuits, unanticipated by the designers, had grown. The

"obedience" configuration now had an "affection" annex.
     
     
Ramstan turned away and uttered another code word. A viewplate on the

bulkhead across the cabin widened, and it began to run off a film of the

cabin since Ramstan had left it. He watched it with his mind on other

things: the Tenolt, Branwen Davis, and the bodiless voice in the tavern.
     
     
His indrawn breath was a knife-edge scraped across a whetstone.

He cried, "Hold it?"
     
     
The film continued running. He said, "Freeze it!" and the film stopped.

In one corner flashed 10:31 ST, the time of the photographing.
     
     
Ramstan groaned, and he said, "Run it back," and then, again, "Freeze it."
     
     
The screen had showed an empty cabin. Then, suddenly, the figure had

appeared. It had not entered through the iris; it had just popped