"Hansen?" Ritter asked suddenly. "Can you take me outside the walls?"
The laboratory held numerous duplicated pieces from the dragonfly, though the only set obvious to an outsider was the four legs. They were mounted upside down on a testbed which flexed them rapidly in three planes. The hydraulic pump driving the test rig whined, but the articulated legs performed without complaint.
"Sure," Hansen said, shrugging in his loose blouse. The local fashion was so comfortable that he'd begun wearing similar garb back home. "The only thing is . . ."
Hansen's voice trembled. His mind reviewed the muzzle of the lizardman's weapon and the fireball enveloping the vegetation as he and Ritter shifted from the dimension. "We're going to be carrying more gear this time," he continued, "if you want to go back to visit the Lomeri. Forcefield projectors, for a start."
The engineer looked at him in honest surprise. "Why on earth would I want to do that?" he asked.
To prove you weren't really frightened by what scared the hell out of you and me both.
"Why does anybody do anything?" Hansen replied aloud.
Ritter shook his head in amazement. "Well," he said, "all I want to do is see what's out there—"
He reached behind him and touched a switch on the console. The control replaced laboratory walls with a panorama of lake and vegetation. A number of large animals sported in the shallow water.
Laboratory equipment and some feed lines had been run along rather than within the walls. They stood out in eerie contrast to the natural scene.
"—under an open sky."
"Sure, no problem," Hansen said, checking his holstered pistol by reflex to be sure that the flap was unsnapped. Hansen had been practicing with the clumsy rig, not that he expected ever to need the weapon. "Ah—it's raining out there just now."
"I won't shrink," Ritter said. He flipped up his armrest to access an array of hidden controls. "Just a minute while I seal the doors so that nobody stumbles in while we're gone."
"Don't bother," said Hansen. He put an arm around the engineer's shoulders. "I'll bring you back the same time we leave. Only you'll be—"
Reality became two-dimensional, then flip-flopped into infinite pathways—
And shifted back along a different plane of reality, into soft ground and the smell of living things.
"—a little damp," Hansen concluded. It wasn't so much rain as a mugginess so thick that droplets condensed out of the air.
"Oh . . . ," said Ritter. He looked around slowly.
Keep Greville rose behind them, a great blue hemisphere of force that hissed in the damp atmosphere. At its peak, the dome's vague glow merged with that of the mid-morning sun.
The red, gritty soil supported a knee-high cover of grasses and broad-leafed vegetation. There were many palm trees in clusters of two or three. Ritter walked over to the nearest. Something with long, fawn-colored fur scampered up the tree as the engineer approached; it chittered its irritation from among the fronds.
Ritter patted the treetrunk. The surface was as coarse as concrete, but where concrete would have been cool to the touch, the bark was warm.
"I used to spend a lot of time out here when I was a boy," he said. "I sneaked out with the creche leader's pistol in case I ran into any of the carnivores that hang around the keep's waste outlets. Shot a few of them too, though just when I had to."
The sky was clearing. When one of the hornless rhinos suddenly galloped from the lake, the spray its short legs stirred up made a sudden rainbow. The beast must have been playing, because it immediately plunged back in with its fellows.
"I was afraid the creche leader would notice the missing shells, you see," Ritter continued softly. He explored the bark with his fingertips while his eyes followed the rhino's antics. "But he never checked the magazine. Not once."
"Not many people go outside the keep, then?" Hansen asked.
He was keeping a careful watch around them. The carnivores of Plane Five weren't any great shakes compared to those on Plane Two with the Lomeri—or in the Open Lands, for that matter. But something that weighed upwards of fifty kilos, with long jaws and a nasty disposition, was worth blasting before it got within fang range.
"Not except for the soldiers," Ritter agreed.
He stepped around the palm, looking up toward the chittering. The animal making the sound retreated around the trunk. Hansen, standing still, got a good view of a little rodent with black rings on its slender tail.
"The soldiers are always in armored vehicles," the engineer added. He walked slowly in the direction of the lake. "So that isn't really getting outside either."
The rhinoceroses noticed Ritter's approach. One barked a challenge, then ducked under the surface. In a moment, all of the half-tonne animals had vanished. Regular wheezing from the beds of water hyacinth indicated that the rhinos had not gone far.
"There's no need to go out, after all, though it's not prohibited for most people," Ritter said. "There just isn't much reason to bother. The colonizing vessels had efficient hydroponic systems, and we've improved the technique since then."
Mud squished onto the uppers of the engineer's short boots. He changed direction slightly to parallel the shore. Hansen stayed a few steps inshore of Ritter, though even so there were occasional wet spots to hop over.
"But I liked the outside," Ritter continued.
He bent and plucked a spray of something fernlike, though Hansen wasn't sure it was really a fern. "And you know, Hansen, the Lords Greville—this one and his uncle—haven't allowed me out of the keep in twenty years. They were afraid—"
Ritter savagely stripped the leaves from the frond he held, leaving only the bare stem. "—that something might happen to me. Even a kidnapping attempt by another keep."
"You're good enough they need to worry about losing you," Hansen said evenly. "I guess you were good even twenty years ago."
Hansen felt uneasy. He slipped the pistol up and down in its holster, but it wasn't the approach of anything tangible that his subconscious feared.
"Oh, you bet I was," the engineer said. He squatted and poked at the soft sod, twisting until his finger had almost disappeared. "Do you know . . ."
Ritter's voice trailed off without completing the question. He rose and wiped the muck from his finger against the bole of a deciduous tree.
"I'm treated well," he continued harshly. "There's almost nothing in Keep Greville that I couldn't have if I demanded it. But do you know, Hansen . . . do you know what it's like to be unfree?"
The back of Hansen's neck prickled. He heard his voice saying, "I don't suppose I've ever been free, Ritter. Surely not before I came to Northworld . . . and even now. . . ."
Hansen gripped a sapling slender enough for him to close his hands about its trunk. He wasn't trying to experience its nature, the way the engineer had been doing ever since he left the constructed reality of the keep.
Hansen just needed something safe against which anger could work his muscles.
"Look, I'm . . ." he said. His hands went white and mottled with the sudden strain.
"I always did my job, the job right in front of me," he said. His voice sounded like gravel sliding through a sieve. "Now I can do anything, anything. And it scares me."
Hansen's whole body shuddered. He released the tree and hugged his arms to his body. His eyes focused on Ritter, but all that entered his conscious mind from the sight was a vague impression of the bigger man's concern.
"I look at the others," Hansen said, "the other gods, and they're caricatures, Ritter, they're warping themselves into one little slice of whatever they musta been when they came here. Look at Penny! She's got all the power there is, and look what she does with it."
"Ah, Hansen . . ." the engineer said.
"So what I do is pretend that nothing's changed for me, do you see?" Hansen went on. "Pretending that I'm no more than what I used to be when I, when, when they sent me here."
It had come on him unexpectedly, a combination of what the engineer meant as a rhetorical question and the process of watching the other man peel off the layers hiding his past life. Hansen knew he was speaking loudly, because dozens of birds exploded from the undergrowth in panic, their wingfeathers clattering. He couldn't stop.
He didn't want to be talking about this, he didn't want to think about this; but he couldn't stop.
"I pretend I'm just a cop," he said. "Just a troubleshooter. The one they call in when the job's going to mean serious violence, do you see? Because there's nobody in the human universe who's better at that than Commissioner Nils Hansen!"
His hands were shaking. His whole body was shaking.
Ritter wrapped Hansen in his muscular arms. He held him, gently but as firmly as a crash harness, until the multiple spasms passed.
Hansen drew a deep breath. He began to laugh. He felt the engineer's arms tighten again.
"No," he said, "no, it's all right, Master Ritter. I'm okay now."
Ritter released him cautiously, as though he were afraid that the slighter man would jump for his throat as soon the engineer's grip slackened.
Hansen squeezed Ritter's shoulder affectionately. "Hey, look," he said, "it's really all right. I'm as crazy as the rest of them, I guess . . . but I'm under control. That's all that really matters, isn't it?"
The sun blazed down, making the atmosphere even more humid as heat lifted water from the foliage and the surface of the lake. The rodent in the palm tree had at last grown silent.
"Let's get me back to my lab," said Ritter. "I've got a dragonfly to make."