Ice and Shadow by Andre Norton Page A

have it, and soon!” Now she began to run.
    But the beam had picked up something else, a change in the wall to their right. Roane pressed to that side and then halted at a slab of transparent material. Inside—an installation! It could be nothing else. Rows of machines with here and there a flashing point of colored light. She pressed her face to the glass, trying to see more of what lay there. But the light was too intermittent—she had only glimpses as one flash was echoed by another. Green, blue, red, orange, a multitude of colors and combinations. Yet those did not reflect into the passage where she stood.
    “Come on!” The Princess was ahead, paying no attention to what held Roane fascinated. “Why do you stop?”
    “The lights—this must be an installation. But what—”
    Ludorica came back reluctantly. “What lights?” she demanded, flashing the beamer directly onto the panel, thus revealing two machines of pillar shape inside, spinning off flecks of color.
    “What lights?” The Princess pulled at Roane’s arm. “Why do you stand staring at bare wall and talking of lights? Are you mind-twisted?” She dropped her hold, drew back a little.
    “What do you see there, then?” Roane asked.
    “Wall—just as there, and there, and there—” With a stabbing finger the Princess pointed ahead, to the side, behind them. “Nothing but wall.”
    Roane was shaken. But she did see a strange installation behind a transparent panel! She could not be mistaken or imagine that! There could be only one reason why the Princess did not see it too—conditioning!
    And such conditioning could mean something else. Roane’s thoughts took a leap into dark surmise. Perhaps what they had uncovered was not Forerunner remains, but rather something left by the Psychocrats who had decreed Clio’s fate. While such a find might not have as much impact as the discovery of a genuine Forerunner installation, it could be important in another way. The Service knew little of the techniques of conditioning on the various closed worlds. To discover part of such an experiment might excite those in fields beyond that which Uncle Offlas represented. So she might have a bargaining point after all, some claim for consideration for the Princess.
    “It is just bare wall!” Ludorica proclaimed again, still backing away from Roane, now eyeing the off-worlder as if she expected some dangerous outburst.
    “A trick of the light.” Roane thought that a feeble answer, but she knew that if the Princess was conditioned she would resist even the thought of what might lie there.
    “Trick of the light?” repeated the Princess doubtfully. “Oh, perhaps Olava set her own safeguards against seekers. I have heard of such tricks but they only work with some people.” She now regarded Roane pityingly and put out her hand. “Let me guide you past. I cannot be so bemused, you know. None of the Blood Royal can be caught in a foreset mind-maze.”
    Ironic, Roane thought with wry amusement, a case of the blind leading the sighted. But if the Princess was willing to accept that explanation, she should be thankful. She did not look again at the panel.
    Shortly thereafter the nature of the passage changed. The wider, smoothed walls gave way abruptly to a narrower way with rough rock on either side—as if those who had cut this path had used a natural break in the cliff for their purposes and this was the original cave unmarked by their improvements.
    As the beamer caught the narrowing of those rough walls the Princess slackened pace, looked puzzled.
    “Why should it change so?” she asked, more as if she questioned in her own mind than expected an answer from her companion.
    “Do you still think this is Och’s Hide?”
    “What else could it be? There would be no other reason to cut a passage through rock. Yet—”
    “Wait!” Roane lifted her free hand, held it before that crevice. “There is air—a current of it. Maybe there is another way out