The Altar at Asconel by John Brunner Page B

mind: he did care really, didn’t he? Only somehow it was less important than the main purpose, the bringing of the antidote for catatone.…
    “Spartak, listen to me,” Vix was saying out of infinite distance. “Spartak, Tiorin is here—he’s come up to the lock and brought the antidote with him. I told the guard to give it to him and here he is and he’s brought it. You can put down the gun and we can leave.”
    Spartak’s temporary universe, containing only himself, the gun and its target, crumbled, and utter darkness over-whelmed him.

XI
    T WO BLURRED faces topped with red hair swam in Spartak’s unfocused vision. He struggled to bring the images into register with one another. The effort made his eyes hurt. He gave up, and only then discovered that there were two faces in reality, not merely in his imagination. One of them belonged to Vix. But the other—
    Of course, Tiorin! Memory came flooding back, and he was able to force himself up on his elbows. He was lying on one of the bunks in the upper cabin, and both his brothers were leaning over him with expressions of concern.
    “Spartak?” Tiorin said doubtfully. “How do you feel?”
    Thoughtfully Spartak took stock of his body and still more of his bruised mind. He said eventually, “Bad. But I’ll survive.”
    “By the moons of Argus, it’s a miracle,” Vix declared. “I shall never know till my dying day how you managed to keep that gun on its target. I had something like that in mind, but I couldn’t control my hands under the conditioning.”
    “They’re alleged to know a good many things on Annanworld which have been forgotten elsewhere in the galaxy,” Tiorin said. “Where’s that jug of broth your girl brought? Oh, there. Give some of it to Spartak—it’ll help to restore his strength.”
    Vix carefully set the spout of the jug to Spartak’s lips, his other arm serving as a prop behind the younger man’s shoulders. Spartak sipped and sipped again; the broth washot and spicy, and he thought he detected the faint flavor of some energy concentrate under the masking tastes.
    Meantime, he had a chance to look at Tiorin, whom he had not seen since the day of Hodat’s accession to the Warden’s chair.
    His second brother had aged noticeably. He would in fact be—Spartak calculated rapidly—forty-one, which in the heyday of galactic civilization had been late youth, not early middle age. But the extreme wealth of the Empire was needed to support freely available geriatric treatment; now, and for the foreseeable future, only those fortunate enough to inhabit secure planets like Annanworld would enjoy the old benefits. He had a passing vision of peasants grubbing on decadent worlds, mating in their teens, the women worn out by childbirth at age thirty. It was not a pleasant idea, and Spartak spoke hastily to distract his mind.
    “Tiorin, it’s incredible that we should have located you!”
    “Not really.” Even Tiorin’s voice had changed from what Spartak recalled: grown deeper and become colored with a sort of drawl to suggest that he weighed every single word. “I’ve been explaining to Vix how it happened. Right now, he tells me, you’re feeling very annoyed at the pretensions of the rump of the Empire, but it saved my life by still possessing some of the old advantages—an efficient law force, swift communications.… It was no secret that I was second son to the former Warden of Asconel, you see. I’d found it helpful to draw on the small prestige this conferred. And when Bucyon’s assassin arrived, and started asking rather too freely where he could find me, some inspired official grew alarmed. He sent a warning to me, and we laid a trap for the would-be killer; it was from him that I learned about this hellish cult Bucyon had imported, and also of course about the death of our brother Hodat.”
    A shadow crossed his prematurely lined face.
    “Accordingly, I had it noised about that I’d gone to beg Imperial aid in the