Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Read Online Free Page A

the deliberately simple stone altar, with its two unlit candles. But a fresh bouquet of firethorn and driftweed lay on the dusty stone.
    Colonists to Roland came for various reasons and, when only two or three ships from other planets might reach Roland each century, the colonists came permanently. There were the usual fortune hunters, adventurers, and scientists. Most emigrants, however, came to isolate a cherished way of life from corrupting influences. These had their own churches, temples, mosques, shrines. The small chapel, deliberately free of anyone’s symbols, was designed for the rest, those who might want a place of comfort or meditation or merely silence. Apparently few did.
    Luke stopped just inside the door. In the dim light, Shadow-of-a-Dream lay at the foot of the altar. For a heart-stopping moment, he thought that she was dead.
    Then it seemed that his heart was stopping. Dizziness took him and he clutched at his chest. This was it, then, not his brain but his heart . . . The machine eventually wears out . . .
    It was not the end. A brief vision, quickly gone, and he found himself slumped on a plain wooden bench, the girl kneeling beside him.
    “Healer, are you all right?”
    “Yes . . . I . . . ”
    “I will bring help!”
    He groped for her hand. She was naked again, save for a garland of the same flowers as lay on the altar. “No . . . no, please . . . ” He didn’t want the infirmary, the inevitable fuss and restrictions and pity. Especially not the pity.
    She said, with sudden and incongruous hardness, “You do not want anyone to know.”
    “No.” His breath came easier now.
    “You are afraid they will keep you somewhere against your will.”
    “Shadow-of-a-Dream—”
    She gave a harsh laugh, whirled around, and was gone in a flurry of firethorn petals and sixteen-year-old scorn.
    When he could breathe regularly again, he hobbled to the altar and picked up her bouquet. It smelled fresh and alive.

    Anne sat across from him, slouched in an old padded chair. In one sense, Luke thought frivolously, the problem was aesthetic. Both Terry and Carolyn—Mistherd and Shadow-of-a-Dream—had looked wrong in this bare, ugly room that was temporarily his office. Their former lives were evident in every movement of their lithe bodies, in every glance from their forest-sharpened eyes. Even when she was dressed, Shadow-of-a-Dream wore the wilderness. Whereas poor Anne Halford looked like she belonged here.
    And yet, she did not think she did. The same archetypical visions that Terry raged against, that Shadow-of-a-Dream longed for, existed deep in Anne’s brain.
    “I saw a fairy,” Anne said, “but tall, maybe seven feet. Dressed in robes of starlight and petals of flowers. Light danced all around her, but shadows did, too. I saw the Queen of Air and Darkness.”
    “You saw an illusion,” Luke said.
    “I know that, doctor.”
    But she didn’t want to know it. He said gently, “You would have liked it to be real.”
    “Yes, of course. Wouldn’t we all?”
    No . He waited. She had something to say and she was going to say it. His head hurt, and the dizziness came more frequently now. But he forced himself to concentrate; they had reached that critical point in therapy where the patient was ready to open up. There would be a rush, maybe an explosion, of words and feelings. But when words came, Luke was nonetheless surprised at how Anne began.
    “My mother goes to church.”
    Anger in the young eyes, bitter from a lifetime of being considered a disappointment to her overbearing mother.
    “I didn’t know that,” Luke said. Another surprise, but it shouldn’t have been. People were always more complicated than they appeared, with hidden corners that led only to more shadowy passages. Even Police Chief Halford.
    “She goes to church every Sunday and she believes in God. I asked her how she knew that wasn’t just an illusion, and she said she didn’t know directly, but she had faith, which was