“How did you know Zebulon was holding me like that?” Genevieve asked. “He seemed almost crazy. Did you knowhe killed the other man that was down here with him?”
“I heard him say so,” said Jeorfy.
“You’re not talking in rhymes anymore.”
“That was when life was uninteresting,” he said with a sharp laugh. “When life is really interesting, trifling amusements can be dispensed with. That’s Zeb’s trouble. He can’t get interested in anything, not really. He’s gone crazy, I think, from being down here so long. Well, as anyone would! Life here had no purpose! Somebody likes the idea of having this stuff. Somebody cared enough to have made or equipped this place to put it. But nobody cares enough to see that it’s done properly! The Lord Paramount sits up there, buying all kinds of things for centuries, piling it up for centuries, and he doesn’t even know what he’s got, much less use it for anything.”
“That’s true,” murmured Genevieve. She stretched, moaning a little at the stiffness in her back. “When we get out, are you coming back here, Jeorfy?”
“There’s a fortune here, for the right man. Those army machines are worth a king’s ransom. They can be programmed to fight any foe one has in mind! And the animals! Ah, I’d love to set them loose. More important, there’s a way here to find things out. At that last key station, I tried an idea I had about getting through the block they put in the archives, and it worked. I didn’t take time to use it much, but now that I know it works, I’ll be back to find things out.”
“Like what?”
“Like what coin the Lord Paramount uses to buy all this stuff. And why some of the worlds His Majesty used to buy from aren’t there anymore. And what’s going on, out there, on other worlds. I get tired of Haven, don’t you?”
“1 haven’t had a chance to get tired of it yet,” she said. “I’ve hardly seen any of it.”
“It’s frozen, Haven. I know it’s supposed to be tranquil, but by deepsea, girl, it’s more like moribund, soulless!”
She gave him a long, level look, somewhat troubled. “Jeorfy, when you say that word, soulless, what do you mean?”
“I mean this place has no soul to it. No . . . change. No growth. In nature, nothing stays the same, but here in Haven, it’s like we’re frozen in time.”
She frowned. “Are you religious, Jeorfy?”
“Well, as we’re nigh on required to be, yes.”
“Do you think you have a soul?”
“The churchmen say so, don’t they, though I’ve never figured out quite what it’s supposed to be.”
“I have a little book, written by Stephanie, you know Stephanie? The Dark Queen.”
“I’ve seen the name in the archives. She was the second wife of the Lord Paramount before Marwell. She bore him so many daughters he threatened to do away with her if she didn’t produce a son.”
Genevieve shifted on the hard seat, making herself more comfortable. “Stephanie said each living world has a soul that includes all the creatures in it. And if we kill all the other creatures, you know, like they did on Old Earth, then the spirit departs.”
“It dies?”
“No, it goes away. Somewhere else. And once that happens, the world has no soul. Do you think that could be true?”
He nodded to himself, thinking. “Well, if everything on a world is tied together, if each thing is part of something else and you can’t take it away without changing the other thing, thenif there are souls, it stands to reason the souls would apply to the whole rather than to the part. Wouldn’t it?”
She nodded, slowly. “That’s what I thought. Partly because of the way I feel sometimes, looking at a sunset or during a storm of rain when the trees move and sigh, and I get this feeling, this kind of ‘wholeness’ feeling, as though I was feeling the whole world moving in me. I don’t get that feeling in cities, or just from other people. So, it could be, you know, that the world has a soul and we’re part of that, and when we’re right with it, we can feel part of it, too . . .”