The Green Queen Read online

  Oh, if he had been able to teach Caroline Auglinger to speak like that! Dignity, and simplicity, and the compelling force of utter truth! For, whatever the case might really be, there was no doubt in this moment that Leaf deeply believed that she was the queen. Bonnar himself had felt a thrill that was almost surrender to belief pass over him at her words.

  The thousands in the crowd gave in to it utterly. A long, low murmur went up from them. It sounded lazy and relaxed, almost somnolent. Then its pitch began to rise. Isolated shouts were heard.

  It was time. Already Bonnar had delayed unduly. Already people nearest the dais were falling on their knees.

  He picked the speaker that connected with the little receiver behind Caroline Auglinger's ear, and spoke into it. "Now," he said.

  Caroline Auglinger moved forward to the edge of the balcony. She had had a heavy shot of benz, and her movements were completely steady and controlled. As she moved forward Bonnar's men turned floodlight on her and brought Veridical projectors and lenses into focus, and after a moment she seemed to be standing in a pool of fresh, spring-like light against a background of young trees.

  Heads began to turn toward her. During the last part of Odic's speech Bonnar's men had hooked amplifiers around on the walls of the houses with balconies. Everybody in the square would be able to hear her. "Start talking," Bonnar said into the speaker.

  Anti-Leaf's hands were gripping the rail of the balcony tightly. She hesitated, licking her lips, for a fraction of a second. Then, "She is not the Green Queen," she said.

  It was not quite what she had been supposed to say, but it would do well enough. And her voice, through the amplifiers, had lost the faint edge of querulousness it usually had. "Go on," Bonnar prodded.

  "She is not the Green Queen at all," Caroline repeated. "I am the Queen. That woman is lying to you. She is a trickster. She wants to trick you out of my tree and its fruit."

  Heads were turning back and forth. The crowd was making comparisons between Leaf and anti-Leaf. That could be dangerous. Bonnar spoke into the microphone hastily.

  "She has a man with her who confesses he was a spy," Caroline said. "Odic, his name is. Let him come forward to me."

  Again, it was not quite what the Auglinger had been supposed to say. Bonnar frowned. The exact words were important, because they were keyed in with the veridical effects he had meant to produce. Was Caroline making these mistakes because she was nervous and frightened? Or was it something else?

  Down at the far end of the square, around the speaker's dais, the crowd was stirring. A man leaped up on the platform, beside Leaf. He seemed about to tumble off again, but he maintained his balance, though precariously. It was Odic.

  "I'll come!" he bellowed. "I'll come and face you down! This is a plot, a trick!"

  He jumped down from the platform. Bonnar already had him in the field of vision of his glasses. As Odic moved slowly in behind, Bonnar pressed a button and turned a stud. Keys and tumblers began to fall in. His previously recorded veridical mask roll began to play.

  It had been prepared very carefully. Bonnar's chief trouble with the mask makers had been to keep them from turning out something "effective", something theatrical and spectacular. Bonnar had insisted on an Odic only a little exaggerated, a little caricatured. The projected Odic moved a little more uncouthly than the real one, was a little more loose-lipped and slack-jawed. But the difference made the flesh creep.

  The projection, of course, was not one hundred percent coordinated with the man. It could not be, in the nature of things. But as Odic pushed his way across the square to the balcony on which Caroline Auglinger was standing, a low murmur of repulsion went up from the people next to him.

  So far, so good. Bonnar broke into a weak sweat of relief. If this kept on Leaf might, after all, be defeated. Rather hesitatingly he pressed another button in the range of those on the belt around his waist.

  It should have surrounded Odic with an aura of sinister, faintly purplish light, silhouetted his uncouth movements against a lurid, faintly yellowish glow. What really happened was that, on the instant, the pavement under Odic's feet was replaced by the quaking soil of a Viridian marsh. Newts slithered away from his advancing feet. In a clump of coarse-stranded marsh grass near him the discarded tail-segment of a Crotalidus rattled ominously.

  Oh, the fools! Somebody had keyed in the wrong roll to that control. Or was it deliberate sabotage? Bonnar switched off the projection on the instant, but some damage had already been done. Some one laughed. "Maskart!" a voice said jeeringly. "Does the other queen think she'll fool us with maskart?"

  Odic had reached the balcony. He stood before it looking upward. "You are not the queen," he said. His voice was meant to be noble, but it had the unpleasant quality of a deaf person's; Odic, like other KGs, had hardly heard a human voice until he was six. "You are false, a liar. I throw your falsity in your face."

  Caroline Auglinger threw her head back. For a moment she looked almost majestic. "I will not exchange words with you," said she. "You acknowledge openly that you are a traitor, that you have been a spy. For people like you there can be only punishment. Here it is."

  She stretched out her right hand. While she had been speaking, Bonnar had given the light surrounding her a reddish tinge. Against that background a long, bright spark shot out from her hand.

  It was aimed at Odic, but it died away before it could quite touch him. None the less, its effect on him was remarkable and, as far as Bonnar was concerned, unexpected. Odic's jaw dropped. He looked surprised and a little annoyed, as if he were going to sneeze. His knees bent. He stood for a moment, swaying. Then he collapsed sideways on the pavement of the square. He made a kicking motion and was still.

  "He is dead," announced Caroline Auglinger. (Bonnar was not cueing her.) "So all will die who oppose the true Green Queen."

  The crowd moved restlessly. The scene it had just witnessed had been dramatic, thrilling, and somehow unconvincing. There was a moment of silence. Then, from the far end of the square, Leaf spoke.

  "You are not dead, Odic," she said. Her voice was perfectly audible even at that distance. "It's an—arrangement you've made with her, isn't it? Sit up. I won't buy her robe."

  There was a pause. Then Odic got stumblingly to his feet. His whole long, hobbledehoy body looked ashamed. "I did it for you," he mumbled sheepishly.

  "Did you think that I couldn't revive you if you were really dead?" Leaf sighed. "So you pretended, you made an arrangement with her to magnify my power. It wasn't necessary, Odic."

  Her attention turned to Caroline who was standing as if frozen, her hands clutching the rail of the balcony. "I can see the rods and wires under your robe," said Leaf, "and the man who is standing behind you with a gun. You are not happy on the balcony, you would rather be at home with your embroidery. I do not know what will become of you. But tell me. Don't you, in your heart, know that I am really the Queen?"

  "Yes," answered the Auglinger.

  She had spoken quickly, involuntarily, before Bonnar could dissuade or prompt her. The word had scarcely left her mouth before she realized what she had done. Her fingers went to her lips. She turned toward Bonnar and then cowered away from him again. "Don't—don't—" she said.

  Everything was over, ruined, spoiled. Leaf had won. That bitch in front of him had done it. Defeat was bitter in his mouth. Bonnar fired.

  He would have thought it was impossible to miss at that distance, but Caroline was bent almost double. The bolt went over her head.

  She screamed at the noise. "Don't! Don't! Please don't! I'll say anything you want me to say!" She made a wild defensive gesture with her hands.

  Bonnar was, after all, not responsible for her death. In her frenzy of motion, her long, heavy, embroidered sleeves caught on one of the rods beneath her dress. She pulled against it desperately, still shrieking. Caroline Auglinger had always been inept. To the onlookers it must have seemed that Bonnar fired at her and
killed her. What really happened was that, with the aid of the robe she had embroidered, she electrocuted herself.

  She fell heavily against the railing of the balcony. For a moment it seemed that she would overbalance and go crashing down to the pavement below. Then she collapsed on the inside. She was already dead when Bonnar began emptying his gun at her.

  Chapter Five

  "AFTER she'd won there was still some resistance," Bonnar said ...

  "SHE'S A fake," Bonnar said aggressively. His resolute gaze travelled around the council room. His colleagues sat with lowered heads, unwilling, or afraid, to meet his eyes. But they wanted to believe him, they would believe him. He'd see that they believed.

  The conference was being held on the highest floor of the Tower, so high that the pop and rattle of gunfire below was almost inaudible. They were directly under the highest part of the dome. For a moment Bonnar wondered what it would be like to live out on the surface of a planet, without either dome or barrier. The air would be fresh, there might be more food. But Tinsley was saying something. Bonnar forced his mind back to the business in hand.

  "... If she's nothing but a fake," Tinsley finished, "how do you account for her miracles?"

  "Tricks. Maskart. Easily explainable," Bonnar answered positively.

  A sigh of relief went up from the gathering.

  "I'll explain," Bonnar continued. "Some of you, I gather, were rather disturbed by Miss Amadeus' being able to 'see' the rods hidden under our late queen-candidate's robes. You argued that such perception on her part must imply super-normal powers.

  "Of course, it means no such thing. Viridis, because of the way in which it was colonized, has always been peculiarly subject to what I may call theological credulity. All of you are familiar with the history of the Jovis migration and its slogan, 'Jovis is a first-class God'. The high degree of adaptation of Viridian plant and animal life was supposed to be explained by the intercession of Jovis, who had the planet under his special care. But perhaps you don't realize how much of the credulity that inspired the migration still remains with us, how all-too-ready we are to call what we don't understand a miracle.

  "The easiest explanation for Miss Amadeus' knowledge of the rods is not that she possesses some form of cryptaesthesia. It is that Auglinger herself told Odic, in the interview in which she offered to sell out to Miss Amadeus, about the existence of the rods."

  Bonnar halted. They were listening attentively. Fairfield was nodding his head slowly, as if he were beginning to be convinced. Yes, his speech was making an effect on them.

  "And so on with the other 'miracles'. Miss Amadeus is a shrewd psychologist. A Lower, covered with pustules, comes to her to be healed. There are clever stage effects, a refined use of maskart, everything to conduce to an atmosphere of unquestioning belief. Miss Amadeus lays her hands on the Lower. Suddenly, he feels much better; we all know how effective mental attitude can be in securing a temporary arrest of radiation disease. And another 'miracle' has occurred.

  "Yes, the young lady is a fake. I am far from saying that she is a conscious and deliberate one; I believe she is self-deceived. According to her dossier card, she actually does possess some degree of ESP. But she is not the Green Queen. There is no green queen."

  Bonnar looked around him again. He read conviction on almost every face. The place at the head of the council table, that ought to have been filled by Igon, the blue-uniformed head of the secret police, was empty. Igon had killed himself (or been killed by his subordinates—details in the report of his death could be interpreted in either way) shortly after Leaf's triumph in the Great Square. Now his organization was being reorganized. Bonnar would use all his influence to see that, when it reappeared, it would operate under strict council control. An autonomous secret police had no place in his scheme of things.

  Tinsley was speaking again. "... I don't think any of us seriously thinks that Miss Amadeus is actually the queen. But the point I was trying to make remains. Most of the city has gone over to her. It would be almost accurate to say that what remains of the legitimate government of Viridis is under siege in the Tower." He showed his teeth at Bonnar.

  Bonnar nodded. "Our friend Tinsley is quite right. Indeed, the situation is even more serious than he has indicated. I have here a report—" he picked up the sheet and showed it to them—"which I believe to be well-documented and reliable. You must prepare for a shock. It asserts that in the very near future Miss Amadeus will actually lower the barrier."

  There was an instant of blank silence. Then they all began to talk at once. "I didn't think she—" "The woman's insane!" "Doesn't she realize—" "She'll kill us all." "Kill us all!" "Everyone in Shalom will die if she lowers the barrier!"

  Bonnar cut across the babble of voices. "I see you realize how serious this is. There is only one way to stop the pro-queen forces. The movement would collapse completely if she were to die."

  Fairfield was frowning. "I understand a number of assassination attempts have been made on her before."

  "That's correct," Bonnar answered. "Five attempts, in fact. Four of them were detected before the gun could be fired or the knife used. In the fifth attempt our agent went over to her."

  "If that's the case, I don't see how we could expect yet another attempt to be successful."

  Bonnar smiled. "How were our attempts detected? Notice the means used—guns, or a knife."

  "I'm afraid I don't get any enlightenment out of Bonnar's observation," Fairfield said after a short silence.

  "Guns and knives are both metal," Bonnar explained with a faintly patient air. "The answer is obvious. Someone in Miss Amadeus' entourage has an imported metal detector."

  "Then you plan to put her out of the way with something that isn't metal?"

  "Yes. We will use a glass knife."

  His tone should have dismissed them, but they were too curious. Nobody moved that the meeting be adjourned. Tinsley coughed. "I don't suppose you mean that about the knife quite literally, do you, Bonnar?"

  "No."

  Tinsley coughed again. "Then perhaps you'd better go into your plan a little. You'll want council approval of it, you know."

  Bonnar flushed. He had been placed in charge of the anti-Leaf project; he had never been removed; there was no reason to think he would need council authorization for his plan. But they were looking at him curiously and a little doubtfully. Until his position was a little surer, he would need their cooperation.

  "I'll be glad to explain," he said cordially. (Mentally he moved Tinsley's name to the top of his grudge list and underscored it. He would deal with Tinsley as soon as he possibly could.) "As you know, fungus disease has been a constant problem, not only to our Body-servants, but even to a few Uppers. For four or five years, at least, there has been a council-sponsored research project working on this. In considering this—ah—difficulty with Miss Amadeus, I consulted with the project heads. And I found that in the course of their research they have bred a strain of fungus which is fatal to laboratory animals within thirty seconds. There is no reason to think it would behave any differently with a human being."

  "And you plan to kill her with that? With a glass knife, in the sense of a glass test-tube?"

  "Yes."

  Fairfield frowned doubtfully. "It seems to me that such a virulent form of fungus disease might be a considerable danger to us."

  Bonnar felt a thrill of temptation. It would be easy to let Fairfield and the others argue him into abandoning the test-tube idea. It might hurt Bonnar's prestige a little, but only a little. And then Leaf—No. He'd gone too far to turn back. His future depended on it.

  "I don't believe so," he answered. "The fungus is strictly a laboratory production, in the sense that it could not survive under natural conditions. In a stoppered test-tube, in an atmosphere of nitrogen under two pressures, it will live indefinitely. But once it is released into the open air, it must find a host immediately, or die."

  "I don't s
ee how that keeps it from being dangerous to us," said Fairfield.

  "Don't you?" Bonnar answered pleasantly. "The point is that, in a normal atmosphere, the fungus can survive for only a few seconds outside the tissues of a living host. Since it kills the host almost as quickly as a lightning stroke would, that means that there is not much more than four or five seconds, at most, during which contact with an infected person is dangerous. Only in case someone went to Miss Amadeus' aid at the very moment when she collapsed could he be infected. Do you understand?"

  "Yes ... how does the fungus work?"

  Bonnar swallowed. "It sends hyphae down the foramina of the skin. Death occurs because the blood vessels are choked by the growth of enormous masses of mycelium."

  "One more question," said Tinsley: He put his fingertips together. "I don't suppose that failing in this assassination attempt would make our position any worse than it already is. But I'd like to point out to our friend Bonnar that any agent we send against the Gr—I mean, Miss Amadeus, now, is very likely indeed to go over to her. Who is going to wield the glass knife?"

  Bonnar hesitated. An alarm bell was ringing in his brain. He knew perfectly well that an executive who cannot delegate responsibility, who insists on doing all his own dirty work himself, forfeits the respect of his associates. But the temptation to astound them, to make Tinsley look cheap, was irresistible. "The glass knife? I am," he said.

  GETTING OUT of the Tower was difficult. It was besieged by people who, if they did not quite warrant the title of fanatics, were resolute, vigilant, and incorruptible. Bonnar pored over maps and plans of the building fruitlessly. In the end, he had the oldest of the Tower Body-servants brought to him, a man so antique that he had been toothless as an egg for nearly thirty years. He was almost sixty, an incredible age for a Body-servant.

  At first Bonnar had trouble in making him understand what he wanted. When the old man at last comprehended, he was pessimistic and discouraging. There was no way out of the Tower except those shown on the maps, and they were all guarded from both sides. It couldn't be done.