Castle Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

Gene. If you're in need of medical assistance, I can get help."
    â€œWhere?” She was genuinely puzzled. “Who is here on the planet?"
    â€œIt's kind of hard to explain. But I can get help if you need it."
    â€œI will be fine,” she said firmly. “I was thrown about during the attack, and my side—” She touched the rip in her pressure suit. “I bled some, but I think it's stopped. I don't think I sustained internal injury. Nothing serious, anyway."
    â€œYou'll need someone to see to that wound,” Gene told her.
    â€œYou still haven't told me who you are and what you're doing here,” she said pointedly. “Are you a freebooter? A privateer?"
    â€œSort of,” Gene answered. “I—"
    He was interrupted by more sonic booming. They looked up. Three white objects were etching wispy trails across the sky. Gene was sure now that the woman's craft was a spaceship—or at least a lifeboat of a larger spacecraft—and that these new arrivals were from space, too.
    â€œThey're here,” she said flatly, no particular intonation to her voice except a weary casualness, as though death and danger were nothing out of the ordinary. She turned her head to Gene and smiled. “Would you be so kind as to fetch my pistol?"
    Gene ducked back into the landing craft. When he came out he had both gun and backpack in hand. He gave the former to her.
    â€œThank you.” She took it, checked it over, flipped a small lever on the breech, then handed it back. “Here."
    He took the weapon. “What do you want me to do?"
    â€œAgain, if you would be so kind ... shoot me."
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    PLANE
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    He walked.
    Above, a dark nothingness. Beneath his feet, an indeterminate hardness, neither stone nor dirt. More like an extra-hard linoleum. Just a surface on which to tread.
    There was a horizon, outlined by faint grayish light. It receded endlessly as he walked. He saw neither shadow nor substance. Not a rock or a rill. No geological complications of any sort. He strode across an infinite plane, vast and featureless.
    He did not know who he was.
    Rather, he suspected that he in fact did know who he was; it was simply a matter of that information being unavailable to him. Forgotten. For the moment. He was sure some part of him knew who he was.
    Knowing that he knew gave him comfort. Otherwise he would have been lost. He kept reassuring himself that his loss of memory was only temporary, that it would return, and that once again he would be able to say his name. For he had quite forgotten it. But he knew he had a name.
    Names were important. They bestowed identity. Identity; precious commodity, that. In short supply, here on the Plane. For here A was not A. A was ... it wasn't here. There existed only the Plane.
    And himself, to be sure, and that was comfort as well. His own existence was reassuring. But without a name, existence was conditional. Discretionary. Contingent. Contingent upon ...?
    He did not know. There was nothing.
    His footsteps made no sound. He felt the fall of his feet through his bones. He had weight, mass, momentum (for after all, he moved), inertia (for sometimes he stopped), all the inherent physical quantities. He also had shape and color, though it was hard for him to perceive his color in the darkness. That was the sum total of what he knew about himself.
    He liked walking. It gave him purpose. He had to have a purpose. There was nothing else for him to do. There was no direction here, so it was simply a matter of moving one's feet, a matter of shifting one's weight and balancing, shifting, balancing, again and again going through that sequence of shifts and balances that comprised the act of walking. No direction, for all directions were the same. He simply walked.
    No direction, and no destination. There was no end to the Plane, no end to the walking of it. He would walk forever, and did not mind that so very much. It was good to walk, good