The concubine was oblivious of the skill with which Ritter designed electronic shielding so that it wrapped the tank in his holographic monitor with minimal surface area and no dangerous sidelobes. That wasn't her job.
Her gown was a pale diaphanous blue. It was cut off-the-shoulder and down to the waist, so that one breast was always bare and the dark nipple of the other shifted visibly beneath the folds of the garment when she moved. She took a moment to adjust the strap and give her master time to notice her.
Ritter didn't turn around. He reshaped the force envelope slightly to smooth a concavity that showed orange in the wall of blue-level protection.
"We were wondering, sir," the concubine finally said, "which of us you'd be wanting for tonight?"
Ritter muttered a curse.
"What's that?" he demanded, glancing over his shoulder. The butt of the holstered pistol, no less real for being a symbol of Ritter's status among the lesser nobility, clacked against the chair arm. "What—"
"It's only that the Duke's second lady's giving a party tonight," the concubine said, tumbling the words out rapidly as though their torrent could quench the engineer's possible anger. She was a squat woman, heavy with muscle but perfectly formed on her big-boned design. "And it's getting late, sir, and we were just wondering if some of us could, you know, sir, could go, please?"
"Late?" said Ritter.
Inset over the exterior doorway of Ritter's huge workroom was a screen which showed the water-meadows outside Keep Greville in realtime. He glanced up at it. The sun had set hours before; the light of a full moon silvered the backs of the herd of short-legged rhinoceroses which had come from the swamps to feed.
"Yes, of course, all of you go along," Ritter said. "But don't bother me again!"
The workroom was positioned at the center of Keep Greville, the most protected place in the huge, self-contained installation. Even the Duke's own apartments on the level above would be destroyed before an enemy reached the sanctum of the Duke's chief engineer.
The high ceiling and circuit of the walls could be converted to vision apparatus, so that if Ritter wished, he could pretend to be working in the unspoiled wilderness that existed in past ages before the founding of Keep Greville.
For a time after his skill had won him his present rank, the engineer had done just that; but only for a time. He knew that, whatever his eyes told him, he was held forever within multiple impenetrable shells of force fields and ferroconcrete.
Ritter's immediate work area glowed in the soft, shadowless illumination thrown by an array of micro-spots with optical fiber lenses. The remainder of the room was lighted only by diffusion, instrument tell-tales, and the dim rectangle of the screen above the door out of Ritter's suite.
Occasionally a piece of machinery clopped or gurgled, but for the most part the large chamber was still.
"The frontal slope should be proof to a flux density of three-hundred kilojoules per square centimeter," Ritter muttered, talking himself back into the problem from which the concubine had recalled him. "But the volume of the field generator must be less than . . ."
The engineer's fingers tapped commands even as his voice trailed off. The tank's schematic changed shape, becoming more fishlike; the colored overlay of forcefield modified also.
The concubine had been squat. Ritter himself appeared to be as wide as he was tall, though that was an illusion. He was forty-one years old, but he had looked much the same when he was a decade younger. His massive features would not age appreciably until he was sixty or older.
His hands moved as gracefully as those of a juggler as he controlled the information patterns of his design console.
Ritter paused, waiting for the thought that he needed to form in his mind and, almost as one, to extrude through his fingertips into the display growing in hologram. There was a whisper of sound behind him.
"Will you bitches all—" Ritter bellowed as he spun around in his chair.
Instead of one of his concubines, a man taller and much more slender than Ritter stood two meters behind the engineer's console.
"Who the hell are you?" Ritter demanded. Carefully, to avoid calling attention to what he was doing, he shifted his hips forward on the seat cushion.
"My name's Hansen," the stranger said. He wore a one-piece garment of unfamiliar cut. "I've come to make you an offer, Master Ritter."
"I'd like to know just how you did come here," Ritter said. He swivelled the chair beneath him carefully with his heel, so that the arm no longer interfered with his gun hand. "I didn't think it was possible for another man to get through the door to my harem."
"I didn't come through your harem," Hansen said easily. "And more important that how I came—"
Ritter snatched the pistol out of its holster. As the muzzle started to rise, Hansen's boot moved in a perfectly-calculated arc and kicked the weapon out of Ritter's hand. The pistol sailed beyond the lighted area and clanged into an ultrasonic density tester.
The engineer lunged up from his chair.
"I wouldn't," said Hansen. His hands were spread at about hip height, and his torso was cocked forward in a slight crouch.
Ritter was twice the stranger's bulk and strong for his size; Hansen held no visible weapon. Ritter looked into Hansen's blank, cold eyes—and sat back in his chair.
Hansen relaxed. "More important than how I came here, Master Ritter," he resumed as if there had been no interruption, "is what I'm able to do for you. I need help, and I'm willing to help you in return."
"What can you offer me?" Ritter said. "What can anybody offer me that I don't have?"
He gestured with his left hand; lights went up across the whole room. Equipment, both electronic and mechanical, stood in separate cubicles. Racks held flasks of gases, fluids, and powders—as well as armor plate in slabs large enough for full-scale testing.
The workmanship throughout was of the highest quality, and nothing in the complex arrangements appeared to be out of place.
"And there," said Hansen, waving behind him toward the door of Ritter's living quarters, "is every luxury your world can offer . . . but that isn't what you mention when you talk about your status. That's why I want you and not somebody else to help me, Ritter."
"Do you know what power I've got?" the engineer demanded. He stood up and paced toward Hansen. "I could have anybody—outside the Duke's immediate family—executed, Hansen."
Ritter pointed with an index finger as thick as a broomstick. "I could have the Duke's first lady in my bed if I demanded it. I'm the best engineer in the world! There's nothing the Duke wouldn't give me to keep me building armaments for him and his soldiers."
Hansen grinned. "Can you leave Keep Greville, Master Ritter?" he asked as softly as a stiletto penetrating silk.
Ritter's face set like flesh-toned concrete. He shrugged. "No," he said.
"Now you can leave," said Hansen. "If you want to come with me."
The engineer did not react.
"You'll need an airpack," Hansen added as though he were unaware of Ritter's hesitation.
Without speaking, Ritter walked to a freestanding cabinet. It opened when his hand approached its latch. He removed an airpack and helmet from the ranks of protective gear.
He looked over his shoulder at Hansen. "Do you want to borrow something?" he asked.
Hansen shook his head. "I won't need it," he said. "For that matter, you won't need the helmet for the time we'll be out. Just a face mask."
Ritter put the helmet back on its shelf and closed the cabinet.
Hansen walked into a nearby cubicle, ducked out of sight, and reappeared. "Here," he said, holding out butt-forward the pistol he had kicked from Ritter's hand. "You won't need this—but there's no reason you shouldn't have it."
Ritter reholstered the weapon impassively. "Where are we going?" he asked.
"To my home," Hansen said, "though I'll take you by the scenic route. I'm going to guide you with my arm. You don't have to do anything except step forward when I do."
Hansen's eyes hardened. "But don't panic and run," he went on. "Even if you don't see me for a moment or two. There's nothing along the way that's as bad as being left there with it. And you will be left if you run."
"I don't panic," said the engineer. His voice rumbled like a glacier calving icebergs.
"That's good," said Hansen without expression. He put his left arm around—partway around—the big man's shoulders. "Keep the airpack to your face and step for—"
Ritter's right leg swung forward in unison with Hansen's. The air shimmered opaque and rotated in a plane that was not one of the normal three dimensions.
Points of light in infinite number surrounded Ritter. For a moment they were chaos, but when he realized the alignment, he saw that all the beads were segments of lines focused on him.
They were as cold as the Duke's charity.
Ritter was alone—without the stranger who'd promised to guide him; without even his own powerful body. He was a point in a pattern of intersecting lines, and when he moved (because he had been moving when he entered this limbo without soul or warmth) the lines shifted also and kept him at their focus until—
"You tricked me!" Ritter shouted as his heel shocked down on solid ground. He realized simultaneously that his voice and body worked again, and that his guide had not entrapped him forever in a waste as dead as the circuits of a computer's memory.
Hansen still held him. "What was—" Ritter began before his eyes took in his new surroundings.
"Step," said Hansen.
The soil was frozen and crusted with snow. Ritter had never seen snow, even when he was young and not yet too valuable to be permitted to leave the armored fastness of Keep Greville. He and his guide stood behind one of a pair of lines of men who wore personal armor as they fought one another.
The armored men slashed with electrical arcs which sprang from their empty gauntlets. Blue-white discharges crackled like ball lightning when they crossed one another, until one of the arcs failed or both combatants stepped back to break the contact.
A pine tree burst into flame as an arc brushed it; then a fighter's armor failed in omnidirectional coruscance. Bits of burning metal and superheated ceramic flew from the heart of a hissing electrical corona.
"Step," Hansen repeated. The pressure of his arm was greater than a man so slender should have been able to exert.
The man whose armor had exploded was toppling forward. His head was missing, and the top of his chest plate still bubbled with the heat of its destruction. Ritter strode—
Into a world of crystal and cold so intense that the surface of Ritter's skin steamed. Around him stood pillars of glass—pillars of glassy ice—figures of ice! They were figures, because Ritter knew they moved though they were so glacially slow that he and his guide could wait here an age and see nothing.
"Step," said Hansen, but the engineer was already striding into—
A swamp. Ritter's weight plunged him over his boot tops in muck. The metal fittings of his airpack frosted momentarily as the hot, humid atmosphere thawed them. Drops of dew condensed on each of Ritter's exposed body hairs.
He took the mask away from his face.
"Step," Hansen urged from beside him.
"Wait," said Ritter. He drew in a deep breath redolent of vegetable decay.
This wasn't the swamp outside Keep Greville or any other swamp on Ritter's world. Large trees growing in the distance had branches like the limbs of hydras rather than anything vegetable. Leaves tufted from each of the joints of the meter-high reeds nearby. There was no true ground cover, only flat creeping greenery that looked at first glance like slime.
But after the frozen horror of one moment—one step—before, Ritter needed a rest in the familiarity of sucking mud and air as moist as the breath from a steam kettle.
"Those things were alive," he muttered to Hansen.
"At one time they were," Hansen agreed. "I suppose you could say they still are."
Watchful though not especially concerned, Hansen's eyes flickered over sheets of still water and the reed tussocks where the mud formed islands. Nothing of significant size moved, but something hidden in the mist bellowed a challenge.
Ritter straightened. "What kind of hell was that?" he demanded.
His guide looked at him with eyes momentarily as bleak as the waste the men were discussing. "The only kind of Hell there is, I think," he said. "Just Hell."
Hansen's mouth moved in what might have been either a grimace or a shiver. "Put your airpack on," he said. "We have to go."
With the mask clasped firmly his face again, Ritter tried to take a step forward. The mud clung to his boot, and he didn't think his leg was moving until the invisible plane rotated him—
Onto a gravel strand under a huge sun hanging motionless on the horizon in perpetual dawn. The vacuum sucked greedily at the waste valve of his airpack. He felt his skin prickle against the pressure of his cells' internal fluids.
There was a wink of blue from a distant corniche. Something with its own light source had moved, because the sun and all it illuminated was dull red.
Hansen's lips moved. Though Ritter could not hear the word, he stepped into—
An upland forest of tall evergreens, and a beast so huge that for the first instant Ritter thought he had appeared next to a gray-green boulder.
The rock sighed with flatulence. Ritter looked up to see, browsing needles fifteen meters above him, a small head . . . on the end of a serpentine neck . . . attached to a ten-tonne body, now upright and hugging the treetrunk with its forelegs to stabilize itself during the meal.
There were dozens or even hundreds of the creatures around him, hidden in plain sight by their size and the cathedral gloom of the forest.
"Step," said his guide, and—
The men were on an island. Its shore was being combed by a breaker kilometers long. The air was fresh with the tang of salt. Sea oats bowed away from the off-shore breeze.
Ritter lowered his face mask. "Were they dangerous?" he asked. "The animals?"
Hansen shrugged. "One of them could have stepped on you, I suppose," he said. "But no real danger from them, no."
He looked over the breakers. A few kilometers out, a storm covered as much of the horizon as the two men could see from where they stood. Lightning quivered in and from the clouds, but the thunder was lost in the constant pulse of breaking waves.
There was more that Hansen wasn't saying. Ritter looked at his guide. "You were worried about carnivores, then?" he pressed. "What is it?"
Hansen shrugged again. "Not the carnivores," he said, "though they could be bad enough on the wrong day. The Lomeri live there on Plane Two. But we weren't there long enough for them to find us."
"I don't know who the Lomeri are," said Ritter. He noticed that he was nearly shouting. Because the surf was omnipresent, it did not seem loud—until he tried to speak over the water's sound.
"Lizardmen," said Hansen, still looking at the flickering horizon. "It doesn't matter. Come, we're almost there."
Ritter thrust his boot forward and felt his heel strike hard—
On the floor of an open-fronted shower stall. Instead of water sluicing down, Ritter's ears sang with harmonics in the audible range as beams of ultrasound bathed him. The mud shook off his clothing as fine dust which hidden vents sucked away.
"Welcome to my home," Hansen said with an expression that appeared both mocking and wry to the point of being bitter. "At any rate, I call it that."
Somewhere in the background, a male voice sang that Spanish is the loving tongue, but no humans were visible. The engineer glanced at a couch. It shifted and became broad enough for his massive form.
Ritter stepped out of the shower stall. They were in a circular room whose walls were so clear that only slight vertical discontinuities between the panes of crystalline material proved that the ceiling was not suspended over open air. The furnishings were sparse, though the way the couch returned to its former configuration in the corner of Ritter's eye suggested that flexibility would make up for number.
"I don't look much like a lover . . . ," sang the cracked tenor voice, "yet I say her love words over. . . ."
Ritter walked over to the clear wall. The dwelling was built into a sideslope. Their upper-story room was level with a flowered prairie on one side, while on the other it overlooked a valley floor. A breeze drew swathes of shadow through the grass heads below, but there was no sign of large animals for as far as Ritter could see.
He turned abruptly to Hansen. "Where are we?" he demanded.
"In my home," said his guide. "On Northworld."
"No," said Ritter. "Northworld is where we left. Where I live."
He frowned, then noticed that his right index finger was playing with the butt of the pistol Hansen had returned to him. He snatched his hand away. "That was the old name, at least," he said. "We call it Earth, now. Most people."
Hansen nodded. "That is Northworld," he said, speaking calmly. "So is this, and so were the seven other stops we made. All equally real."
He smiled. "Or equally false, of course," he added. "Take your pick."
Ritter swallowed. He jerked his right hand down again. "I don't—" he said.
His tongue hesitated over 'understand,' then concluded, "—believe you!"
"I don't really care whether you believe me or not, Master Ritter," said Hansen. His look of amusement underscored the truth of what he said. "That's not why I brought you here."
Ritter's mouth opened, then closed. He had spent his life working to the whim of Duke Greville, who was a fool. This man, whatever he might be, was not a fool. . . .
"Go on," said Ritter.
"I brought you here to show you something," Hansen said with a smile of appreciation for his guest's attitude. "I'd like you to copy it for me."
He gestured at a slab of wall. The crystal frosted, then began to seethe with images.
"Why me, Hansen?" Ritter said bluntly.
"Because it has to be done without me manipulating the Matrix directly," explained the slim man with ice-gray eyes. "And there's no one anywhere, anytime, on Northworld who can do that as well as you can, Master Ritter."
The engineer looked from the speaker to the images forming in the wall, then back again. Figures moved inside a room built entirely of natural materials.
"What do you want copied?" Ritter asked.
"One of these," said Hansen as he pointed.
The image in the wall froze. "They're called dragonflies. I want a dragonfly like the ones these Searchers are riding."