The Region Between

By Harlan Ellison

“Left hand,” the thin man said tonelessly. “Wrist up.”

William Bailey peeled back his cuff; the thin man put something cold against it, nodded toward the nearest door.

“Through there, first slab on the right,” he said, and turned away.

“Just a minute,” Bailey started. “I wanted—”

“Let’s get going, buddy,” the thin man said. “That stuff is fast.”

Bailey felt something stab up under his heart. “You mean—you’ve already … that’s all there is to it?”

“That’s what you came for, right? Slab one, friend. Let’s go.”

“But—I haven’t been here two minutes—”

“Whatta you expect—organ music? Look, pal,” the thin man shot a glance at the wall clock, “I’m on my break, know what I mean?”

“I thought I’d at least have time for … for …”

“Have a heart, chum. You make it under your own power, I don’t have to haul you, see?” The thin man was pushing open the door, urging Bailey through into an odor of chemicals and unlive flesh. In a narrow, curtained alcove, he indicated a padded cot.

“On your back, arms and legs straight out.”

Bailey assumed the position, tensed as the thin man began fitting straps over his ankles.

“Relax. It’s just if we get a little behind and I don’t get back to a client for maybe a couple hours and they stiffen up … well, them issue boxes is just the one size, you know what I mean?”

A wave of softness, warmness swept over Bailey as he lay back.

“Hey, you didn’t eat nothing the last twelve hours?” The thin man’s face was a hazy pink blur.

“I awrrr mmmm,” Bailey heard himself say.

“OK, sleep tight, paisan… .” The thin man’s voice boomed and faded. Bailey’s last thought as the endless blackness closed in was of the words cut in the granite over the portal to the Euthanasia Center:

“…send me your tired, your poor, your hopeless, yearning to Be free. To them I raise the lamp beside the brazen door….”

1

Death came as merely a hyphen. Life, and the balance of the statement, followed instantly. For it was only when Bailey died that he began to live.

Yet he could never have called it “living”; no one who had ever passed that way could have called it “living.” It was something else. Something quite apart from “death” and something totally unlike “life.”

Stars passed through him as he whirled outward.

Blazing and burning, carrying with them their planetary systems, stars and more stars spun through him as though traveling down invisible wires into the dark behind and around him.

Nothing touched him.

They were as dust motes, rushing silently past in incalculable patterns, as Bailey’s body grew larger, filled space in defiance of the Law that said two bodies could not coexist in the same space at the same instant. Greater than Earth, greater than its solar system, greater than the galaxy that contained it, Bailey’s body swelled and grew and filled the universe from end to end and ballooned back on itself in a slightly flattened circle.

His mind was everywhere.

A string cheese, pulled apart in filaments too thin to be measurable, Bailey’s mind was there and there and there. And there.

It was also in the lens of the Succubus.

Murmuring tracery of golden light, a trembling moment of crystal sound. A note, rising and trailing away infinitely high, and followed by another, superimposing in birth even as its predecessor died. The voice of a dream, captured on spiderwebs. There, locked in the heart of an amber perfection, .Bailey was snared, caught, trapped, made permanent by a force that allowed his Baileyness to roam unimpeded anywhere and everywhere at the instant of death.

Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.

[Waiting: empty. A mindsnake on a desert world, frying under seven suns, poised in the instant of death; its adversary, a fuzzball of cilia-thin fibers, sparking electrically, moving toward the mindsnake that a moment before had been set to strike and kill and eat. The mindsnake, immobile, empty of thought and empty of patterns of light that confounded its victims in the instants before the killing strike. The fuzzball sparked toward the mindsnake, its fibers casting about across the vaporous desert, picking up the mole sounds of things moving beneath the sand, tasting the air and feeling the heat as it pulsed in and away. It was improbable that a mindsnake would spend all that light-time, luring and intriguing, only at the penultimate moment to back off—no, not back off: shut down. Stop. Halt entirely. But if this was not a trap, if this was not some new tactic only recently learned by the ancient mindsnake, then it had to be an opportunity for the fuzzball. It moved closer. The mindsnake lay empty: waiting.]

Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.

[Waiting: empty. A monstrous head, pale blue and veined, supported atop a swan-neck by an intricate latticework yoke-and-halter. The Senator from Nougul, making his final appeal for the life of his world before the Star Court. Suddenly plunged into silence. No sound, no movement, the tall, emaciated body propped on its seven league crutches, only the trembling of balance—having nothing to do with life —reminding the assembled millions that an instant before this husk had contained a pleading eloquence. The fate of a world quivered in a balance no less precarious than that of the Senator. What had happened? The amalgam of wild surmise that grew in the Star Court was scarcely less compelling than had been the original circumstances bringing Nougul to this place, in the care of the words of this Senator. Who now stood, crutched, silent, and empty: waiting.]

Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.

[Waiting: empty. The Warlock of Whirrl, a power of darkness and evil. A force for chaos and destruction. Poised above his runic symbols, his bits of offal, his animal bones, his stringy things without names, quicksudden gone to silence. Eyes devoid of the pulverized starlight that was his sight. Mouth abruptly slack, in a face that had never known slackness. The ewe lamb lay still tied to the obsidian block, the graven knife with its unpleasant figures rampant, still held in the numb hand of the Warlock. And the ceremony was halted. The forces of darkness had come in gathering, had come to their calls, and now they roiled like milk vapor in the air, unable to go, unable to do, loath to abide. While the Warlock of Whirrl, gone from his mind stood frozen and empty: waiting.]

Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.

[Waiting: empty. A man on Promontory, fifth planet out from the star Proxima Centauri, halted in mid-step. On his way to a bank of controls and a certain button, hidden beneath three security plates. This man, this inestimably valuable kingpin in the machinery of a war, struck dumb, struck blind, in a kind of death—not even waiting for another moment of time. Pulled out of himself by the gravity of non-being, an empty husk, a shell, a dormant thing. Poised on the edges of their continents, two massed armies waited for that button to be pushed. And would never be pushed, while this man, this empty and silent man, stood rooted in the sealed underworld bunker where precaution had placed him. Now inaccessible, now inviolate, now untouchable, this man and this war stalemated frozen. While the world around him struggled to move itself a fraction of a thought toward the future, and found itself incapable, hamstrung, empty: waiting.]

Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.

And …

[Waiting: empty. A subaltern, name of Pinkh, lying on his bunk, contemplating his fiftieth assault mission. Suddenly gone. Drained, lifeless, neither dead nor alive. Staring upward at the bulkhead ceiling of his quarters. While beyond his ship raged the Montag-Thil War. Sector 888 of the Galactic Index. Somewhere between the dark star Montag and the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy. Pinkh, limbo-lost and unfeeling, needing the infusion of a soul, the filling up of a life-force. Pinkh, needed in this war more than any other man, though the Thils did not know it… until the moment his essence was stolen. Now, Pinkh, lying there one shy of a fifty-score of assault missions. But unable to aid his world. Unable, undead, unalive, empty: waiting.]

While Bailey …

Floated in a region between. Hummed in a nothingness as great as everywhere. Without substance. Without corporeality. Pure thought, pure energy, pure Bailey. Trapped in the lens of the Succubus.

1 1/2

More precious than gold, more sought-after than uranium, more scarce than yinyang blossom, more needed than salkvac, rarer than diamonds, more valuable than force-beads, more negotiable than the vampyr extract, dearer than 2038 vintage Chateau Luxor, more lusted after than the twin-vagina’d trollops of Kanga …

Thefts had begun in earnest five hundred years before. Random thefts. Stolen from the most improbable receptacles. From beasts and men and creatures who had never been thought to possess “souls.” Who was stealing them was never known. Far out somewhere, in reaches of space (or not-space) (or the interstices between space and not-space) that had no names, had no dimensions, whose light had never even reached the outmost thin edge of known space, there lived or existed or were creatures or things or entities or forces—someone—who needed the life-force of the creepers and walkers and lungers and swimmers and fliers who inhabited the known universes. Souls vanished, and the empty husks remained.

Thieves they were called, for no other name applied so well, bore in its single syllable such sadness and sense of resignation. They were called Thieves, and they were never seen, were not understood, had never given a clue to their nature or their purpose or even their method of theft. And so nothing could be done about their depredations. They were as Death: handiwork observed, but a fact of life without recourse to higher authority. Death and the Thieves were final in what they did.

So the known universes—the Star Court and the Galactic Index and the Universal Meridian and the Perseus Confederacy and the Crab Complex— shouldered the reality of what the Thieves did with resignation, and stoicism. No other course was open to them. They could do no other.

But it changed life in the known universes.

It brought about the existence of soul-recruiters, who pandered to the needs of the million billion trillion worlds. Shanghaiers. Graverobbers of creatures not yet dead. In their way, thieves, even as the Thieves. Beings whose dark powers and abilities enabled them to fill the tables-of-organization of any world with fresh souls from worlds that did not even suspect they existed, much less the Court, the Index, the Meridian, the Confederacy or the Complex. If a key figure on a fringe world suddenly went limp and soulless, one of the soul-recruiters was contacted and the black traffic was engaged in. Last resort, final contact, most reprehensible but expeditious necessity, they stole and supplied. One such was the Succubus.

He was gold. And he was dry. These were the only two qualities possessed by the Succubus that could be explicated in human terms. He had once been a member of the dominant’race that skimmed across the sand-seas of a tiny planet, fifth from the star-sun labeled Kappel-112 in Canes Venatici. He had long since ceased to be anything so simply identified.

The path he had taken, light-years long and several hundred Terran-years long, had brought him from the sand-seas and a minimum of “face”—the only term that could even approximate the one measure of wealth his race valued—to a cove of goldness and dryness near the hub of the Crab Complex. His personal worthiness could now be measured only in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars, unquenchable light sufficient to sustain his offspring unto the nine thousandth generation, a name that could only be spoken aloud or in movement by the upper three social sects of the Confederacies races, more “face” than any member of his race had ever possessed … more, even, than that held in myth by Yaele.

Gold, dry, and inestimably worthy: the Succubus.

Though his trade was one publicly deplored, there were only seven entities in the known universes who were aware that the Succubus was a soul-recruiter. He kept his two lives forcibly separated.

“Face” and graverobbing were not compatible.

He ran a tidy business. Small, with enormous returns. Special souls, selected carefully, no seconds, no hand-me-downs. Quality stock.

And through the seven highly placed entities who knew him—Nin, FawDawn, Enec-L, Milly(Bas)Ko-dal, a Plain without a name, Cam Royal, and PI— he was channeled only the loftiest commissions.

He had supplied souls of all sorts in the five hundred years he had been recruiting. Into the empty husk of a master actor on Bolial V. Into the waiting body of a creature that resembled a plant aphid, the figurehead of a coalition labor movement, on Wheechitt Eleven and Wheechitt Thirteen. Into the un-moving form of the soul-emptied daughter of the hereditary ruler of Golaena Prime. Into the untenanted shape of an arcane maguscientist on Dona-dello Ill’s seventh moon, enabling the five hundred-zodjam religious cycle to progress. Into the lusterless spark of light that sealed the tragic laocoonian group-mind of Orechnaen’s Dispassionate Bell-Silver Dichotomy.

Not even the seven who functioned as go-betweens for the Succubus’s commissions knew where and how he obtained such fine, raw, un-solidified souls. His competitors dealt almost exclusively in the atrophied, crustaceous souls of beings whose thoughts and beliefs anc ideologies were so ingrained that the souls came to their new receptacles already stained and imprinted. But the Succubus …

Cleverly contrived, youthful souls. Hearty souls. Plastic and ready-to-assimilate souls. Lustrous, inventive souls. The finest souls in the known universe.

The Succubus, as determined to excel in his chosen profession as he was to amass “face,” had spent the better part of sixty years roaming the outermost fringes of the known universe. He had carefully observed many races, noting for his purpose only those that seemed malleable, pliant, far removed from rigidity.

He had selected, for his purpose:

The Steechii

Amassanii

Cokoloids

Flashers

Griestaniks

Bunanits

Condolis

Tratravisii and Humans.

On each planet where these races dominated, he put into effect subtle recruiting systems, wholly congruent with the societies in which they appeared:

The Steechii were given eterna dreamdust.

The Amassanii were given doppelganger shifting.

The Cokoloids were given the Cult of Rebirth.

The Flashers were given proof of the Hereafter.

The Griestaniks were given ritual mesmeric trances.

The Bunanits were given (imperfect) teleportation.

The Condolis were given an entertainment called Trial by Nightmare Combat.

The Tratravisii were given an underworld motivated by high incentives for kidnapping and mind-blotting. They were also given a wondrous narcotic called Nodabit.

The Humans were given Euthanasia Centers.

And from these diverse channels the Succubus received a steady supply of prime souls. He received Flashers and skimmers and Condolis and ether-breathers and Amassanii and perambulators and Bunanits and gill creatures and …

William Bailey.

1 3/4

Bailey, cosmic nothingness, electrical potential spread out to the ends of the universe and beyond, nubbin’d his thoughts. Dead. Of that, no doubt. Dead and gone. Back on Earth, lying cold and faintly blue on a slab in the Euthanasia Center. Toes turned up. Eyeballs rolled up in their sockets. Rigid and gone.

And yet alive. More completely alive than he had ever been, than any human being had ever conceived of being. Alive with all of the universe, one with the clamoring stars, brother to the infinite empty spaces, heroic in proportions that even myth could not define.

He knew everything. Everything there had ever been to know, everything that was, everything that would be. Past, present, future … all were merged and met in him. He was on a feeder line to the Succubus, waiting to be collected, waiting to be tagged and filed even as his alabaster body back on Earth would be tagged and filed. Waiting to be cross-indexed and shunted off to a waiting empty husk on some far world. All this he knew.

But one thing separated him from the millions of souls that had gone before him.

He didn’t want to go.

Infinitely wise, knowing all, Bailey knew every other soul that had gone before had been resigned with soft acceptance to what was to come. It was a new life. A new voyage in another body. And all the others had been fired by curiosity, inveigled by strangeness, wonder-struck with being as big as the known universe and going somewhere else.

But not Bailey.

He was rebellious.

He was fired by hatred of the Succubus, inveigled by thoughts of destroying him and his feeder-lines, wonder-struck with being the only one—the only one!—who had ever thought of revenge. He was somehow, strangely, not tuned in with being rebodied, as all the others had been. Why am I different? he wondered. And of all the things he knew … he did not know the answer to that.

Inverting negatively, atoms expanded to the size of whole galaxies, stretched out membraned, osmotically breathing whole star systems, inhaling blue-white stars and exhaling quasars, Bailey the known universe asked himself yet another question, even more important:

Do I want to do something about it?

Passing through a zone of infinite cold, the word came back to him from his own mind in chill icicles of thought:

Yes.

“I see here, during the month of September, that you worked overtime at least … what is it … uh … eleven hours.”

“Is there a law against that?”

“Oh, no … no, of course not. It just seems to us here at the block that you’re perhaps, uh, overdoing it a bit.”

“Working.”

“Yes. Working.”

“Has my block steward complained? Has my EEG been erratic? Am , I being accused of something?”

“No, of course not! My lord, man, there’s no need to be so defensive! We’re only trying to find out if something is, well, disturbing you.”

If I’d been able to, I’d have killed the sonofabitch; right then and right there. In his conversation grouping. It would have made fine conversation for his office staff. Come in and find him brained to death with his own coffee urn.

“Nothing’s disturbing me.”

“Then you’ll pardon me if I feel it apropos to ask why you aren’t taking your proper relaxation periods, Mr. Bailey.”

“I feel like keeping busy.”

“Ah, but all work and no play—”

And borne on comets plunging frenziedly through his cosmic body, altering course suddenly and traveling at right angles in defiance of every natural law he had known when “alive,” the inevitable question responding to a yes asked itself:

Why should I?

Life for Bailey on Earth had been pointless. He had been a man who did not fit. He had been a man driven to the suicide chamber literally by disorientation and frustration.

I was called to the office of the Social Director of my residence block. Frankly, 1 was frightened. I knew I hadn’t done anything to be afraid about, but ever since I’d been a child, ever since I’d been called to the office of the school principal, just the being summoned had made my gut tight, made me feel like I wanted to go to the bathroom.

He made me wait half an hour, on a bench, damn him, with a gaggle of weirdos who looked like they hadn’t had their heads scrubbed and customized in seven months.

Finally, the box called my name and I dropped to his office, and he was sitting in one of those informal conversation-groupings of chairs and coffee table that instantly put me off.

“Mr. Bailey,” he said. Smiled. Hearty bastard. I walked over and sat down even before he suggested I sit. He didn’t drop the smile for a second. He was up to anything.

“Why don’t we get right to it,” he said. I smiled back at him, but I felt trapped, really hemmed-in.

“I’ve been looking at your tag-chart, Mr. Bailey, and well, I hesitate to make any jump conclusions here, but it appears you’ve been neglecting your relaxation periods.”

Damn him! Damn him!

The omnipresent melancholy that had consumed him on an Earth bursting with overpopulation was something to which he had no desire to return. Then why this frenzy to resist being shunted into the body of a creature undoubtedly living a life more demanding, more exciting—anything had to be better than what he’d come from—more alive? Why this fanatic need to track back along the feeder-lines to the Succubus, to destroy the one who had saved him from oblivion? Why this need to destroy a creature who was merely fulfilling a necessary operation-of-balance in a universe singularly devoid of balance?

In that thought lay the answer, but he did not have the key. He turned off his thoughts. He was Bailey no more.

And in that instant the Succubus pulled his soul from the file and sent it where it was needed. He was certainly Bailey no more.

2

Subaltern Pinkh squirmed on his spike-palette, and opened his eye. His back was stiff. He turned, letting the invigorating short-spikes tickle his flesh through the heavy mat of fur. His mouth felt dry and loamy.

It was the morning of his fiftieth assault mission. Or was it? He seemed to remember lying down for a night’s sleep … and then a very long dream without substance. It had been all black and empty; hardly something the organizer would have programmed. It must have malfunctioned.

He slid sidewise on the spike-palette, and dropped his enormous furred legs over the side. As his paws touched the tiles a whirring from the wall preceded the toilet facility’s appearance. It swiveled into view, and Pinkh looked at himself in the full-length mirror. He looked all right. Dream. Bad dream.

The huge, bearlike subaltern shoved off the bed, stood to his full seven feet, and lumbered into the duster. The soothing powders cleansed away his sleep-fatigue and he emerged, blue pelt glistening, with bad dreams almost entirely dusted away. Almost. Entirely. He had a lingering feeling of having been … somewhat … larger…

The briefing colors washed across the walls, and Pinkh hurriedly attached his ribbons. It was informalwear today. Three yellows, three ochers, three whites and an ego blue.

He went downtunnel to the briefing section, and prayed. All around him his sortie partners were on their backs, staring up at the sky dome and the random (programmed) patterns of stars in their religious significances. Montag’s Lord of Propriety had programmed success for today’s mission. The stars swirled and shaped themselves and the portents were reassuring to Pinkh and his fellows.

The Montag-Thil War had been raging for almost one hundred years, and it seemed close to ending. The dark star Montag and the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy had thrown their might against each other for a century; the people themselves were weary of war. It would end soon. One or the other would make a mistake, the opponent would take the advantage, and the strike toward peace would follow immediately. It was merely a matter of time. The assault troops—especially Pinkh, a planetary hero— were suffused with a feeling of importance, a sense of the relevance of what they were doing. Out to kill, certainly, but with the sure knowledge that they were working toward a worthwhile goal. Through death, to life. The portents had told them again and again, these last months, that this was the case.

The sky dome turned golden and the stars vanished. The assault troops sat up on the floor, awaited their briefing.

It was Pinkh’s fiftieth mission.

His great yellow eye looked around the briefing room. There were more young troopers this mission. In fact … he was the only veteran. It seemed strange.

Could Montag’s Lord of Propriety have planned it this way? But where were Andakh and Melnakh and Gorekh? They’d been here yesterday.

Was it just yesterday?

He had a strange memory of having been— asleep? —away? —unconscious? —what? —something. As though more than one day had passed since his last mission. He leaned across to the young trooper on his right and placed a paw flat on the other’s. “What day is today?” The trooper flexed palm and answered, with a note of curiosity in his voice, “It’s Former. The ninth.” Pinkh was startled. “What cycle?” he asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“Third,” the young trooper said.

The briefing officer entered at that moment, and Pinkh had no time to marvel that it was not the next day, but a full cycle later. Where had the days gone? What had happened to him? Had Gorekh and the others been lost in sorties? Had he been wounded, sent to repair, and only now been remanded to duty? Had he been wounded and suffered amnesia? He remembered a Lance Corporal in the Throbbing Battalion who had been seared and lost his memory. They had sent him back to Montag, where he had been blessed by the Lord of Propriety himself. What had happened to him?

Strange memories—not his own, all the wrong colors, weights and tones wholly alien—kept pressing against the bones in his forehead.

He was listening to the briefing officer, but also hearing an undertone. Another voice entirely. Coming from some other place he could not locate.

You great ugly fur-thing, you! Wake up, look around you. One hundred years, slaughtering. Why can’t you see what’s being done to you? How dumb can you be? The Lords of Propriety; they set you up. Yeah, you, Pinkh! Listen to me. You can’t block me out … you’ll hear me. Bailey. You’re the one, Pinkh, the special one. They trained you for what’s coming up … no, don’t block me out, you imbecile … don’t blot me out….. I’ll be here, you can’t blot me out…..

The background noise went on, but he would not listen. It was sacrilegious. Saying things about the Lord of Propriety. Even the Thil Lord of Propriety was sacrosanct in Pinkh’s mind. Even though they were at war, the two Lords were eternally locked together in holiness. To blaspheme even the enemy’s

Lord was unthinkable. Yet he had thought it.

He shuddered with the enormity of what had passed in his thoughts, and knew he could never go to release and speak of it. He would submerge the memory, and pay strict attention to the briefing officer who was

“This cycle’s mission is a straightforward one. You will be under the direct linkage of Subaltern Pinkh, whose reputation is known to all of you.”

Pinkh inclined with the humbleness movement.

“You will drive directly into the Thil labyrinth, chivvy and harass a path to Groundworld, and there level as many targets-of-opportunity as you are able, before you’re destroyed. After this briefing you will reassemble with your sortie leaders and fully familiarize yourselves with the target-cubes the Lord has commanded to be constructed.”

He paused, and stared directly at Pinkh, his golden eye gone to pinkness with age and dissipation. But what he said was for all of the sappers. “There is one target you will not strike. It is the Maze of the Thil Lord of Propriety. This is irrevocable. You will not, repeat not strike near the Maze of the Lord.”

Pinkh felt a leap of pleasure. This was the final strike. It was preamble to peace. A suicide mission; he ran eleven thankfulness prayers through his mind. It was the dawn of a new day for Montag and Thil. The Lords of Propriety were good. The Lords held all cupped in their holiness.

Yet he had thought the unthinkable.

“You will be under the direct linkage of Subaltern Pinkh,” the briefing officer said again. Then, kneeling and passing down the rows of sappers, he palmed good death with honor to each of them. When he reached Pinkh, he stared at him balefully for a long instant, as though wanting to speak. But the moment passed, he rose, and left the chamber.

They went into small groups with the sortie leaders and examined the target-cubes. Pinkh went directly to the briefing officer’s cubicle and waited patiently till the older Montagasque’s prayers were completed.

When his eye cleared, he stared at Pinkh.

“A path through the labyrinth has been cleared.”

“What will we be using?”

“Reclaimed sortie craft. They have all been outfitted with diversionary equipment.”

“Linkage level?”

“They tell me a high six.”

“They tell you?” He regretted the tone even as he spoke.

The briefing officer looked surprised. As if his desk had coughed. He did not speak, but stared at Pinkh with the same baleful stare the subaltern had seen before.

“Recite your catechism,” the briefing officer said, finally.

Pinkh settled back slowly on his haunches, ponderous weight downdropping with grace. Then:

“Free flowing, free flowing, all flows “From the Lords, all free, all fullness, “Flowing from the Lords.

“What will I do

“What will I do “What will I do without my Lords?

“Honor in the dying, rest in honor, all honor “From the Lords, all rest, all honoring, “To honor my Lords.

“This I will do

“This I will do “I will live when I die for my Lords.”

And it was between the First and Second Sacredness that the darkness came to Pinkh. He saw the briefing officer come toward him, reach a great palm toward him, and there was darkness … the same sort of darkness from which he had risen in his own cubicle before the briefing. Yet, not the same. That darkness had been total, endless, with the feeling that he was … somehow … larger… greater … as big as all space…

And this darkness was like being turned off. He could not think, could not even think that he was unthinking. He was cold, and not there. Simply: not there.

Then, as if it had not happened, he was back in the briefing officer’s cubicle, the great bearlike shape was moving back from him, and he was reciting the Second Sacredness of his catechism.

What had happened … he did not know.

“Here are your course coordinates,” the briefing officer said. He extracted the spool from his pouch and gave it to Pinkh. The subaltern marveled again at how old the briefing officer must be: the hair of his chest pouch was almost gray.

“Sir,” Pinkh began. Then stopped. The briefing officer raised a palm. “I understand, Subaltern. Even to the most reverent among us there come moments of confusion.” Pinkh smiled. He did understand.

“Lords,” Pinkh said, palming the briefing officer with fullness and propriety.

“Lords,” he replied, palming honor in the dying.

Pinkh left the briefing officer’s cubicle and went to his own place.

As soon as he was certain the subaltern was gone, the briefing officer, who was very old, linked-up with someone else, far away; and he told him things.

3

First, they melted the gelatin around him. It was hardly gelatin, but it had come to be called jell by the sappers, and the word had stuck. As the gelatin stuck. Face protected, he lay in the ten troughs, in sequence, getting the gelatinous substance melted around him. Finally, pincers that had been carefully padded lifted him from the tenth trough, and slid him along the track to his sortie craft. Once inside the pilot country, stretched out on his stomach, he felt the two hundred wires insert themselves into the jell, into the fur, into his body. The brain wires were the last to fix.

As each wire hissed from its spool and locked onto the skull contacts, Pinkh felt himself go a little more to integration with the craft. At last, the final wire tipped on icily and so Pinkh was metalflesh, bulkheadskin, eyescanners, bonerivets, plasticartilege, artery / ventricle / capacitors / molecules / transistors,

all of him as one, totality, metal-man, furred-vessel, essence of mechanism, soul of inanimate, life in force-drive, linkage of mind with power plant. Pinkh the ship. Sortie Craft 90 named Pinkh.

And the others: linked to him.

Seventy sappers, each encased in jell, each wired up, each a mind to its sortie craft. Seventy, linked in telepathically with Pinkh, and Pinkh linked into his own craft, and all of them instrumentalities of the Lord of Propriety.

The great carrier wing that bore them made escape orbit and winked out of normal space.

Here-Not Here.

In an instant gone.

(Gone where!?!)

Inverspace.

Through the gully of inverspace to wink into existence once again at the outermost edge of the Thil labyrinth.

Not Here-Here.

Confronting a fortified tundra of space crisscrossed by deadly lines of force. A cosmic fireworks display. A cat’s cradle of vanishing, appearing and disappearing threads of a million colors; each one receptive to all the others. Cross one, break one, interpose … and suddenly uncountable others home in. Deadly ones. Seeking ones. Stunners and drainers and leakers and burners. The Thil labyrinth.

Seventy-one sortie craft hung quivering—the last of the inverspace coronas trembling off and gone. Through the tracery of force-lines the million stars of the Thil Galaxy burned with the quiet reserve of ice crystals. And there, in the center, the Nebula Cluster. And there, in the center of the Cluster, Groundworld.

“Link in with me.”

Pinkh’s command fled and found them. Seventy beastcraft tastes, sounds, scents, touches came back to Pinkh. His sappers were linked in.

“A path has been cleared through the labyrinth for us. Follow. And trust. Honor.”

“In the dying,” came back the response, from seventy minds of flesh-and-metal.

They moved forward. Strung out like fish of metal with minds linked by thought, they surged forward following the lead craft. Into the labyrinth. Color burned and boiled past, silently sizzling in the vacuum. Pinkh detected murmurs of panics, quelled them with a damping thought of his own. Images of the still pools of Dusnadare, of deep sighs after a full meal, of Lord-worship during the days of First Fullness. Trembling back to him, their minds quieted. And the color beams whipped past on all sides, without up or down or distance. But never touching them.

Time had no meaning. Fused into flesh/metal, the sortie craft followed the secret path that had been cleared for them through the impenetrable labyrinth.

Pinkh had one vagrant thought: Who cleared this for us?

And a voice from somewhere far away, a voice that was his own, yet someone else’s—the voice of a someone who called himself a bailey—said, That’s it! Keep thinking what they don’t want you to think.

But he put the thoughts from him, and time wearied itself and succumbed, and finally they were there. In the exact heart of the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy.

Groundworld lay fifth from the source star, the home sun that had nurtured the powerful Thil race till it could explode outward.

“Link in to the sixth power,” Pinkh commanded.

They linked. He spent some moments reinforcing his command splices, making the interties foolproof and trigger-responsive. Then he made a prayer, and they went in.

Why am I locking them in so close, Pinkh wondered, damping the thought before it could pass along the lines to his sappers. What am I trying to conceal? Why do I need such repressive control? What am I trying to avert?

Pinkh’s skull thundered with sudden pain. Two minds were at war inside him, he knew that. He SUDDENLY knew it.

Who is that?

It’s me, you clown!

Get out! I’m on a mission … it’s import—

It’s a fraud! They’ve prog—

Get out of my head listen to me you idiot I’m trying to tell you something you need to know I won’t listen I’ll override you I’ll block you I’ll damp you no listen don’t do that I’ve been someplace you haven’t been and I can tell you about the Lords oh this can’t be happening to me not to me I’m a devout man fuck that garbage listen to me they lost you man they lost

you to a soul stealer and they had to get you back because you were their specially programmed killer they want you to Lord oh Lord of Propriety hear me now hear me your most devout worshipper forgive these blasphemous thoughts I can’t control you any more you idiot I’m fading fading fading Lord oh Lord hear me I wish only to serve you. Only to suffer the honor in the dying.

Peace through death. I am the instrumentality of the Lords. I know what I must do.

That’s what I’m trying to tell you. …

And then he was gone in the mire at the bottom of Pinkh’s mind. They were going in.

They came down, straight down past the seven moons, broke through the cloud cover, leveled out in a delta wing formation and streaked toward the larger of the two continents that formed ninety percent of Groundworld’s land mass. Pinkh kept them at supersonic speed, blurring, and drove a thought out to his sappers: “We’ll drop straight down below a thousand feet and give them the shock wave. Hold till I tell you to level off.”

They were passing over a string of islands—causeway-linked beads in a pea-green sea—each one covered from shore to shore with teeming housing dorms that commuted their residents to the main continents and the complexes of high-rise bureaucratic towers.

“Dive!” Pinkh ordered.

The formation angled sharply forward, as though it was hung on puppet strings, then fell straight down.

The metalflesh of Pinkh’s ship-hide began to heat.

Overlapping armadillo plates groaned; Pinkh pushed their speed; force-bead mountings lubricated themselves, went dry, lubricated again; they dropped down; follicle-thin fissures were grooved in the bubble surfaces; sappers began to register fear, Pinkh locked them tighter; instruments coded off the far right and refused to register; the island-chain flew up toward them; pressure in the gelatin trough flattened them with g’s; now there was enough atmosphere to scream past their sortie craft and it whistled, shrilled, howled, built and climbed; gimbal-tracks rasped in their mountings; down and down they plunged, seemingly bent on thundering into the islands of Groundworld; “Sir! Sir!”; “Hold steady, not yet … not yet … I’ll tell you when … not yet …”

Pushing an enormous bubble of pressurized air before them, the delta wing formation wailed straight down toward the specks of islands that became dots, became buttons, became masses, became everything as they rushed up and filled the bubble sights from side to side—

“Level out! AW! Do it, do it, level now!” And they pulled out, leveled off and shot away. The bubble of air, enormous, solid as an asteroid, thundering down unchecked … hit struck burst broke with devastating results. Pinkh’s sortie craft plunged away, and in their wake they left exploding cities, great structures erupting, others trembling, shuddering, then caving in on themselves. The shock wave hit and spread outward from shore to shore. Mountains of plasteel and lathite volcano’d in blossoms of flame and flesh. The blast-pit created by the air bubble struck to the core of the island-chain. A tidal wave rose like some prehistoric leviathan and boiled over one entire spot of land. Another island broke up and sank almost at once. Fire and walls of plasteel crushed and destroyed after the shock wave.

The residence islands were leveled as Pinkh’s sortie craft vanished over the horizon, still traveling at supersonic speed.

They passed beyond the island-chain, leaving in their wake dust and death, death and ruin, ruin and fire.

“Through death to peace,” Pinkh sent. “Honor,” they responded, as one. (Far away on Groundworld, a traitor smiled.) (In a Maze, a Lord sat with antennae twined, waiting.)

(Flesh and metal eased.)

(In ruins, a baby whose exoskeleton had been crushed, crawled toward the pulsing innards of its mother.)

(Seven moons swung in their orbits.) (A briefing officer on Montag knew it was full, golden.)

Oh, Lords, what I have done, I have done for you. Wake up. Will you wake up, Pinkh! The mission is—

The other thing, the bailey, was wrenching at him, poking its head up out of the slime. He thrust it back down firmly. And made a prayer.

“Sir,” the thought of one of his sappers came back along the intertie line, “did you say something?”

“Nothing,” Pinkh said. “Keep in formation.”

He locked them in even tighter, screwing them down with mental shackles till they gasped.

The pressure was building.

A six-power linkup, and the pressure was building.

I am a hero, Pinkh thought, I can do it.

Then they were flashing across the Greater Ocean and it blurred into an endless carpet of thick heaving green; Pinkh felt sick watching it whip by beneath him; he went deeper into ship and the vessel felt no sickness. He fed the stability of nausea-submerged along the interties.

They were met by the Thil inner defense line over empty ocean. First came the sea-breathers but they fell short when Pinkh ordered his covey to lift for three thousand feet. They leveled off just as the beaks swooped down in their land-to-sea parabolas. Two of them snouted and perceived the range, even as they were viciously beamed into their component parts by Pinkh’s outermost sappers. But they’d already fed back the trajectories, and suddenly the sky above them was black with the blackmetal bodies of beaks, flapping, dropping, squalling as they cascaded into the center of the formation. Pinkh felt sappers vanish from the linkup and fed the unused power along other lines, pulling the survivors tighter under his control. “Form a sweep,” he commanded.

The formation regrouped and rolled in a graceful gull-wing maneuver that brought them craft-to-craft in a fan. “Plus!” Pinkh ordered, cutting in—with a thought—the imploding beam. The beams of each sortie craft fanned, out, overlapping, making an impenetrable wall of deadly force. The beaks came whirling back up and careened across the formation’s path. Creatures of metal and mindlessness. Wheels and carapaces. Blackness and berserk rage. Hundreds. Entire eyries.

When they struck the soft pink fan of the overlapping implosion beams, they whoofed in on themselves, dropped instantly.

The formation surged forward.

Then they were over the main continent. Rising from the exact center was the gigantic mountain atop which the Thil Lord of Propriety lived in his Maze.

“Attack! Targets of opportunity!” Pinkh commanded, sending impelling power along the linkup. His metal hide itched. His eyeball sensors watered. In they went, again.

“Do not strike at the Lord’s Maze,” one of the sappers thought

AND PINKH THREW UP!! A WALL OF THOUGHT!!! THAT DREW THE!!!!!!!!!!! THOUGHT!!!

OFF THE!!!!!

LINKUP SO

IT DID!!!!!!!!

NOT REACH

THE OTHER

SAPPERS!!!!!

BUT HIT!!!!

THE WALL!!!

AND BROKE!

LIKE FOAM!

Why did I do that? We were briefed not to attack the Lord’s Maze. It would be unthinkable to attack the Lord’s Maze. It would precipitate even greater war than before. The war would never end. Why did I stop my sapper from reiterating the order? And why haven’t I told them not to do it? It was stressed at the briefing. They’re linked in so very tightly, they’d obey in a moment—anything I said. What is happening? I’m heading for the mountain! Lord!

Listen to me, Pinkh. This war has been maintained by the Lords of Propriety for a hundred years. Why do you think it was made heresy even to think negatively about the opposing Lord? They keep it going, to feed off it.

Whatever they are, these Lords, they come from the same pocket universe and they live off the energy of men at war. They must keep the war going or they’ll die. They programmed you to be their secret weapon. The war was reaching a stage where both Montag and Thil want peace, and the Lords can’t have that. Whatever they are, Pinkh, whatever kind of creature they are, wherever they come from, for over a hundred years they’ve held your two galaxies in their hands, and they’ve used you. The Lord isn’t in his Maze, Pinkh. He‘s safe somewhere else. But they planned it between them. They knew if a Montagasque sortie penetrated to Groundworld and struck the Maze, it would keep the war going indefinitely. So they programmed you, Pinkh. But before they could use you, your soul was stolen. They put my soul in you, a man of Earth, Pinkh. You don‘t even know where Earth is, but my name is Bailey. I’ve been trying to reach through to you. But you always shut me out—they had you programmed too well. But with the linkup pressure, you don‘t have the strength to keep me out, and I’ve got to let you know you’re programmed to strike the Maze. You can stop it, Pinkh. You can avoid it all. You can end this war. You have it within your power, Pinkh. Don‘t strike the Maze. I’ll redirect you. Strike where the Lords are hiding. You can rid your galaxies of them, Pinkh. Don‘t let them kill you. Who do you think arranged for the path through the labyrinth? Why do you think there wasn‘t more effective resistance? They wanted you to get through. To commit the one crime they could not forgive.

The words reverberated in Pinkh’s head as his sortie craft followed him in a tight wedge, straight for the Maze of the Lord.

“I—no, I—” Pinkh could not force thoughts out to his sappers. He was snapped shut. His mind was aching, the sound of straining and creaking, the buildings on the island-chain ready to crumble. Bailey inside, Pinkh inside, the programming of the Lords inside … all of them pulling at the fiber of Pinkh’s mind.

For an instant the programming took precedence. “New directives. Override previous orders. Follow me in!”

They dove straight for the Maze.

No, Pinkh, fight it! Fight it and pull out. I’ll show you where they’re hiding. You can end this war!

The programming phasing was interrupted, Pinkh abruptly opened his great golden eye, his mind synched in even more tightly with his ship, and at that instant he knew the voice in his head was telling him the truth. He remembered:

Remembered the endless sessions.

Remembered the conditioning.

Remembered the programming.

Knew he had been duped.

Knew he was not a hero.

Knew he had to pull out of this dive.

Knew that at last he could bring peace to both galaxies.

He started to think pull out, override and fire it down the remaining linkup interties…

And the Lords of Propriety, who left very little to chance, who had followed Pinkh all the way, contacted the Succubus, complained of the merchandise they had bought, demanded it be returned …

Bailey’s soul was wrenched from the body of Pinkh. The subaltern’s body went rigid inside its jell trough, and, soulless, empty, rigid, the sortie craft plunged into the mountaintop where the empty Maze stood. It was followed by the rest of the sortie craft.

The mountain itself erupted in a geysering pillar of flame and rock and plasteel.

One hundred years of war was only the beginning.

Somewhere, hidden, the Lords of Propriety—umbilicus-joined with delight shocks spurting softly pink along the flesh-linkage joining them—began their renewed gluttonous feeding.

4

Bailey was whirled out of the Montagasque subaltern’s body. His soul went shooting away on an asymptotic curve, back along the feeder-lines, to the soul files of the Succubus.

5

This is what it was like to be in the soul station.

Round. Weighted with the scent of grass. Perilous in that the music was dynamically contracting: souls had occasionally become too enriched and had gone flat and flaccid.

Nothing was ranked, therefore nothing could be found in the same place twice; yet it didn’t matter, for the Succubus had only to focus his lens and the item trembled into a special awareness.

Bailey spent perhaps twelve minutes reliving himself as a collapsing star then revolved his interfaces and masturbated as Anne Boleyn.

He savored mint where it smells most poignant, from deep in the shallow earth through the roots of the plant, then extended himself, extruded himself through an ice crystal and lit the far massif of the highest mountain on an onyx asteroid—recreating The Last Supper in chiaroscuro.

He burned for seventeen hundred years as the illuminated letter “B” on the first stanza of a forbidden enchantment in a papyrus volume used to summon up the imp James Fenimore Cooper then stood outside himself and considered his eyes and their hundred thousand bee-facets.

He allowed himself to be born from the womb of a tree sloth and flickered into rain that deluged a planet of coal for ten thousand years. And he beamed. And he sorrowed.

Bailey, all Bailey, soul once more, free as all the universes, threw himself toward the farthermost edge of the slightly flattened parabola that comprised the dark. He filled the dark with deeper darkness and bathed in fountains of brown wildflowers. Circles of coruscating violet streamed from his fingertips, from the tip of his nose, from his genitals, from the tiniest fibrillating fibers of hair that coated him. He shed water and hummed.

Then the Succubus drew him beneath the lens.

And Bailey was sent out once more.

Waste not, want not.

6

He was just under a foot tall. He was covered with blue fur. He had a ring of eyes that circled his head. He had eight legs. He smelled of fish. He was low to the ground and he moved very fast.

He was a stalker-cat, and he was first off the survey ship on Belial. The others followed, but not too soon. They always waited for the cat to do its work. It was safer that way. The Filonii had found that out in ten thousand years of exploring their universe. The cats did the first work, then the Filonii did theirs. It was the best way to rule a universe.

Belial was a forest world. Covered in long continents that ran from pole to pole with feathertop trees, it was ripe for discovery.

Bailey looked out of his thirty eyes, seeing around himself in a full 360o spectrum. Seeing all the way up into the ultra-violet, seeing all the way down into the infra-red. The forest was silent. Absolutely no sound. Bailey, the cat, would have heard a sound, had there been a sound. But there was no sound.

No birds, no insects, no animals, not even the whispering of the feathertop trees as they struggled toward the bright hot-white sun. It was incredibly silent.

Bailey said so.

The Filonii went to a condition red.

No world is silent. And a forest world is always noisy. But this one was silent.

They were out there, waiting. Watching the great ship and the small stalker-cat that had emerged from it.

Who they were, the cat and the Filonii did not know. But they were there, and they were waiting for the invaders to make the first move. The stalker-cat glided forward.

Bailey felt presences. Deep in the forest, deeper than he knew he could prowl with impunity. They were in there, watching him as he moved forward. But he was a cat, and if he was to get his fish, he would work. The Filonii were watching. Them, in there, back in the trees, they were watching. It’s a bad life, he thought. The life of a cat is a nasty, dirty, bad one.

Bailey was not the first cat ever to have thought that thought. It was the litany of the stalker-cats. They knew their place, had always known it, but that was the way it was; it was the way it had always been. The Filonii ruled, and the cats worked. And the universe became theirs.

Yet it wasn’t shared. It was the Filonii universe, and the stalker-cats were hired help.

The fine mesh cap that covered the top and back of the cat’s head glowed with a faint but discernible halo. The sunbeams through which he passed caught at the gold filaments of the cap and sent sparkling, radiations back toward the ship. The ship stood in the center of the blasted area it had cleared for its prime base.

Inside the ship, the team of Filonii ecologists sat in front of the many process screens and saw through the eyes of the stalker-cat. They murmured to one another as first one, then another, then another saw something of interest. “Cat, lad,” one of them said softly, “still no sound?”

“Nothing yet, Brewer. But I can feel them watching.”

One of the other ecologists leaned forward. The entire wall behind the hundred screens was a pulsing membrane. Speak into it at any point and the cat’s helmet picked up the voice, carried it to the stalker. “Tell me, lad, what does it feel like?”

“I’m not quite sure, Kicker. I’m getting it mixed. It feels like the eyes staring … and wood … and sap … and yet there’s mobility. It can’t be the trees.”

“You’re sure.”

“As best I can tell right now, Kicker. I’m going to go into the forest and see.”

“Good luck, lad.”

“Thank you, Driver. How is your goiter?”

“I’m fine, lad. Take care.”

The stalker-cat padded carefully to the edge of the forest. Sunlight slanted through the feathertops into the gloom. It was cool and dim inside there.

Now, all eyes were upon him.

The first paw in met springy, faintly moist and cool earth. The fallen feathers had turned to mulch. It smelled like cinnamon. Not overpoweringly so, just pleasantly so. He went in … all the way. The last the Filonii saw on their perimeter screens— twenty of the hundred—were his tails switching back and forth. Then the tails were gone and the seventy screens showed them dim, strangely-shadowed pathways between the giant conifers.

“Cat, lad, can you draw any conclusions from those trails?”

The stalker padded forward, paused. “Yes. I can draw the conclusion they aren’t trails. They go fairly straight for a while, then come to dead ends at the bases of the trees. I’d say they were drag trails, if anything.”

“What was dragged? Can you tell?”

“No, not really, Homer. Whatever was dragged, it was thick and fairly smooth. But that’s all I can tell.” He prodded the drag trail with his secondary leg on the left side. In the pad of the paw were tactile sensors.

The cat proceeded down the drag trail toward the base of the great tree where the trail unaccountably ended. All around him the great conifers rose six hundred feet into the warm, moist air.

Sipper, in the ship, saw through the cat’s eyes and pointed out things to his fellows. “Some of the qualities of Pseudotsuga Taxifolia, but definitely a conifer. Notice the bark on that one. Typically Eucalyptus Regnans … yet notice the soft red spores covering the bark. I’ve never encountered that particular sort of thing before. They seem to be melting down the trees. In fact…”

He was about to say the trees were all covered with the red spores, when the red spores attacked the cat.

They flowed down the trees, covering the lower bark, each one the size of the cat’s head, and when they touched, they ran together like jelly. When the red jelly from one tree reached the base of the trunk, it fused with the red jelly from the other trees.

“Lad …”

“It’s all right, Kicker. I see them.”

The cat began to pad backward: slowly, carefully. He could easily outrun the fusing crimson jelly. He moved back toward the verge of the clearing. Charred, empty of life, blasted by the Filonii hack-shafts, not even a stump of the great trees above ground, the great circles where the trees had stood now merely reflective surfaces set flush in the ground. Back.

Backing out of life … backing into death.

The cat paused. What had caused that thought?

“Cat! Those spores … whatever they are … they’re forming into a solid …”

Backing out of life … backing into death my name is

bailey and i’m in

here, inside you.

i was stolen from my called is wants

body the some somewhere, he

by succubus. kind there in the stars

a he, of recruiter from out

creature it puppeteer, a sort of

The blood-red spore thing stood fifteen feet high, formless, shapeless, changing, malleable, coming for the cat. The stalker did not move: within him, a battle raged.

“Cat, lad! Return! Get back!”

Though the universe belonged to the Filonii, it was only at moments when the loss of a portion of that universe seemed imminent that they realized how important their tools of ownership had become.

Bailey fought for control of the cat’s mind.

Centuries of conditioning fought back.

The spore thing reached the cat and dripped around him. The screens of the Filonii went blood-red, then went blank.

The thing that had come from the trees oozed back into the forest, shivered for a moment, then vanished, taking the cat with it.

The cat focused an eye. Then another. In sequence he opened and focused each of his thirty eyes. The place where he lay came into full luster. He was underground. The shapeless walls of the place dripped with sap and several colors of viscous fluid. The fluid dripped down over bark that seemed to have been formed as stalactites, the grain running long and glistening till it tapered into needle tips. The surface on which the cat lay was planed wood, the grain exquisitely formed, running outward from a coral-colored pith in concentric circles of hues that went from coral to dark teak at the outer perimeter.

The spores had fissioned, were heaped in an alcove. Tunnels ran off in all directions. Huge tunnels twenty feet across.

The mesh cap was gone.

The cat got to his feet. Bailey was there, inside, fully awake, conversing with the cat.

“Am I cut off from the Filonii?”

“Yes, I’m afraid you are.”

“Under the trees.”

“That’s right.”

“What is that spore thing?”

“I know, but I’m not sure you’d understand.”

“I’m a stalker; I’ve spent my life analyzing alien life-forms and alien ecology. I’ll understand.”

“They’re mobile symbiotes, conjoined with the bark of these trees. Singly, they resemble most closely anemonic anaerobic bacteria, susceptible to dichotomization; they’re anacusic, anabiotic, anamnestic, and feed almost exclusively on ancyclostomiasis.”

“Hookworms?”

“Big hookworms. Very big hookworms.”

“The drag trails?”

“That’s what they drag.”

“But none of that makes any sense. It’s impossible.”

“So is reincarnation among the Yerbans, but it occurs.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I told you you wouldn’t.”

“How do you know all this?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Thank you. There’s more about the spores and the trees, by the way. Perhaps the most important part.”

“Which is?”

“Fused, they become a quasi-sentient gestalt. They can communicate, borrowing power from the tree-hosts.”

“That’s even more implausible!”

“Don’t argue with me, argue with the Creator.”

“First Cause.”

“Have it your way.”

“What are you doing in my head?”

“Trying very hard to get out.”

“And how would you do that?”

“Foul up your mission so the Filonii would demand the Succubus replace me. I gather you’re pretty important to them. Rather chickenshit, aren’t they?”

“I don’t recognize the term.”

“I’ll put it in sense form.”

“Oh. You mean

“Yeah. Chickenshit.”

“Well, that’s the way it’s always been between the Filonii and the stalkers.”

“You like it that way.”

“I like my fish.”

“Your Filonii like to play God, don’t they? Changing this world and that world to suit themselves.

Reminds me of a couple of other guys. Lords of Propriety they were called. And the Succubus. Did you ever stop to think how many individuals and races like to play God?”

“Right now I’d like to get out of here.”

“Easy enough.”

“How?”

“Make friends with the Tszechmae.”

“The trees or the spores?”

“Both.”

“One name for the symbiotic relationship?”

“They live in harmony.”

“Except for the hookworms.”

“No society is perfect. Rule 19.” The cat sat back on his haunches and talked to himself.

“Make friends with them you say.”

“Seems like a good idea, doesn’t it?”

“How would you suggest I do that?”

“Offer to perform a service for them. Something they can’t do for themselves.”

“Such as?”

“How about you’ll get rid of the Filonii for them. Right now that’s the thing most oppressing them.”

“Get rid of the Filonii.”

“Yes.”

“I’m harboring a lunatic in my head.”

“Well, if you’re going to quit before you start…”

“Precisely how—uh, do you have a name?”

“I told you. Bailey.”

“Oh. Yes. Sorry. Well, Bailey, precisely how do I rid this planet of a star-spanning vessel weighing somewhere just over thirteen thousand tons, not to mention a full complement of officers and ecologists who have been in the overlord position with my race for more centuries than I can name? I’m conditioned to respect them.”

“You sure don’t sound as if you respect them.”

The cat paused. That was true. He felt quite different. He disliked the Filonii intensely. Hated them, in fact; as his kind had hated them for more centuries than he could name.

“That is peculiar. Do you have any explanation for it?”

“Well,” said Bailey, humbly, “there is my presence. It may well have broken through all your hereditary conditioning.”

“You wear smugness badly.”

“Sorry.”

The cat continued to think on the possibilities.

“I wouldn’t take too much longer, if I were you,” Bailey urged him. Then, reconsidering, he added, “As a matter of fact, I am you.”

“You’re trying to tell me something.”

“I’m trying to tell you that the gestalt spore grabbed you, to get a line on what was happening with the invaders, but you’ve been sitting here for some time, musing to yourself—which, being instantaneously communicative throughout the many parts of the whole, is a concept they can’t grasp— and so it’s getting ready to digest you.”

The stalker blinked his thirty eyes very rapidly. “The spore thing?”

“Uh-uh. All the spores eat are the hookworms. The bark’s starting to look at you with considerable interest.”

“Who do I talk to? Quick!”

“You’ve decided you don’t respect the Filonii so much, huh?”

“I thought you said I should hurry!”

“Just curious.”

“Who do I talk to!?!”

“The floor-So the stalker-cat talked to the floor, and they struck a bargain. Rather a lopsided bargain, true; but a bargain nonetheless.

7

The hookworm was coming through the tunnel much more rapidly than the cat would have expected. It seemed to be sliding, but even as he watched, it bunched—inchworm-like—and propelled itself forward, following the movement with another slide. The wooden tunnel walls oozed with a noxious smelling moistness as the worm passed. It was moving itself on a slime track of its own secretions.

It was eight feet across, segmented, a filthy gray in color, and what passed for a face was merely a slash-mouth dripping yellowish mucus, several hundred cilia-like feelers surrounding the slit, and four glaze-covered protuberances in an uneven row above the slit perhaps serving in some inadequate way as eyes.

Like a strange Hansel dropping bread crumbs to mark a trail, the spore things clinging to the cat’s back began to ooze off. First one, then another. The cat backed down the tunnel. The hookworm came on. It dropped its fleshy penis-like head and snuffled at the spore lying in its path. Then the cilia feelers attached themselves and the spore thing was slipped easily into the slash mouth. There was a disgusting wet sound, and the hookworm moved forward again. The same procedure was repeated at the next spore. And the next, and the next. The hookworm followed the stalker through the tunnels.

Some miles away, the Filonii stared into their screens as a strange procession of red spores formed in the shape of a long thick hawser-like chain emerged from the forest and began to encircle the ship.

“Repulsors?” Kicker asked.

“Not yet, they haven’t made a hostile move,” the Homer said. “The cat could have won them somehow. This may be a welcoming ceremony. Let’s wait and see.”

The ship was completely circled, at a distance of fifty feet from the vessel. The Filonii waited, having faith in their cat lad.

And far underground, the stalker-cat led the hookworm a twisting chase through tunnel after tunnel.

Some of the tunnels were formed only moments before the cat and his pursuer entered them. The tunnels always sloped gently upward. The cat—dropping his spore riders as he went—led the enormous slug-thing by a narrow margin. But enough to keep him coming.

Then, into a final tunnel, and the cat leaped to a planed outcropping overhead, then to a tiny hole in the tunnel ceiling, and then out of sight.

The Filonii shouted with delight as the stalker emerged from a hole in the blasted earth, just beyond the circle of red spores, linked and waiting.

“You see! Good cat!” Driver yelled to his fellows.

But the cat made no move toward the ship.

“He’s waiting for the welcoming ceremony to end,” the Homer said with assurance.

Then, on their screens, they saw first one red spore, then another, vanish, as though sucked down through the ground from below.

They vanished in sequence, and the Filonii followed their disappearance around the screens, watching them go in a 90deg arc, then 180^0 of half circle, then 250^0 and the ground began to tremble.

And before the hookworm could suck his dinner down through a full 360^0 of the circle, the ground gave way beneath the thirteen thousand tons of Filonii starship, and the vessel thundered through, down into special tunnels dug straight down. Plunged down with the plates of the ship separating and cracking open. Plunged down with the hookworm that would soon discover sweeter morsels than even red spore things.

The Filonii tried to save themselves.

There was very little they could do. Driver cursed the cat and made a final contact with the Succubus. It was an automatic hookup, much easier to throw in than to fire the ship for takeoff. Particularly a quarter of a mile underground.

The hookworm broke through the ship. The Tszechmae waited. When the hookworm had gorged itself, they would move in and slay the creature. Then they would feast.

But Bailey would not be around to see the great meal. For only moments after the Filonii ship plunged crashing out of sight, he felt a ghastly wrenching at his soulself, and the stalker-cat was left empty once more—thereby proving in lopsided bargains no one is the winner but the house—and the soul of William Bailey went streaking out away from Belial toward the unknown.

Deep in wooden tunnels, things began to feed.

8

The darkness was the deepest blue. Not black. It was blue. He could see nothing. Not even himself. He could not tell what the body into which he had been cast did, or had, or resembled, or did not do, or not have, or not resemble. He reached out into the blue darkness. He touched nothing.

But then, perhaps he had not reached out. He had felt himself extend something into the blueness, but how far, or in what direction, or if it had been an appendage … he did not know.

He tried to touch himself, and did not know where to touch. He reached for his face, where a Bailey face would have been. He touched nothing.

He tried to touch his chest. He met resistance, and then penetrated something soft. He could not distinguish if he had pushed through fur or skin or hide or jelly or moisture or fabric or metal or vegetable matter or foam or some heavy gas. He had no feeling in either his “hand” or his “chest” but there was something there.

He tried to move, and moved. But he did not know if he was rolling or hopping or walking or sliding or flying or propelling or being propelled. But he moved. And he reached down with the thing he had used to touch himself, and felt nothing below him. He did not have legs. He did not have arms. Blue. It was so blue.

He moved as far as he could move in one direction, and there was nothing to stop him. He could have moved in that direction forever, and met no resistance. So he moved in another direction—opposite, as far as he could tell, and as far as he could go. But there was no boundary. He went up and went down and went around in circles. There was nothing. Endless nothing.

Yet he knew he was in somewhere. He was not in the emptiness of space, he was in an enclosed place. But what dimensions the place had, he could not tell. And what he was, he could not tell.

It made him upset. He had not been upset in the body of Pinkh, nor in the body of the stalker-cat But this life he now owned made him nervous.

Why should that be? Something was coming for him. He knew that much.

He was here and something else was out there, coming toward him.

He knew fear. Blue fear. Deep unseeing blue fear. If it was coming fast, it would be here sooner. If slow, then later. But it was coming. He could feel, sense, intuit it coming for him. He wanted to change. To become something else.

To become this

Or to become THIS

Or to become THIS

Or to become tHiS

But to become something else, something that could withstand what was coming for him. He didn’t know what that could be. All he knew was that he needed equipment. He ran through his bailey-thoughts, his baileymind, to sort out what he might need.

What he needed might be

Fangs - Poisonous breath Eyes - Horns - Malleability Webbed feet - Armored hide - Talons Camouflage - Wings Carapaces - Muscles - Vocal cords - Scales - Self-regeneration - Stingers - Wheels - Multiple brains

What he already had Nothing

It was coming closer. Or was it getting farther away? (And by getting farther away, becoming more of a threat to him?) (If he went toward it, would he be safer?) (If only he could know what he looked like, or where he was, or what was required of him?) (Orient!) (Damn it, orient yourself, Bailey!) He was deep in blueness, extended, fetal, waiting. Shapeless. (Shape—) (Could that be it?)

Something blue flickered in the blueness.

It was coming end-for-end, flickering and sparking and growing larger, swimming toward him in the blueness. It sent tremors through him. Fear gripped him as it had never gripped him before. The blue shape coming toward him was the most fearful thing he could remember: and he remembered:

The night he had found Moravia with another man. They were standing having sex in a closet at a party. Her dress was bunched up around her waist; he had her up on tiptoes. She was crying with deep pleasure, eyes closed.

The day at the end of the war, when a laser had sliced off the top of the head of the man on his left in the warm metal trench. The sight of things still pulsing in the jasmine jelly.

The moment he had come to the final knowledge of his hopeless future. The moment he had decided to go to the Center to find death.

The thing changed shape and sent out scintillant waves of blueness and fear. He writhed away from them but they swept over him, and he turned over and over trying to escape. The thing of blue came nearer, growing larger in his sight. (Sight? Writhing? Fear?) It suddenly swept toward him, faster than before, as though it had tried a primary assault—the waves of fear—and the assault had failed; and now it would bull through.

He felt an urge to leap, high. He felt himself do it, and suddenly his sight went up and his propulsive equipment went lower, and he was longer, taller, larger. He fled. Down through the blueness, with the coruscating blue devil following. It elongated itself and shot past him on one side, boiled on ahead till it was a mere pinpoint of incandescence on some heightless, dimensionless horizon. And then it came racing back toward him, thinning itself and stretching itself till it was opaque, till the blueness of where they were shone through it darkly, like effulgent isinglass in a blue hyperplane.

He trembled in fear and went minute. He balled and shrank and contracted and drew himself to a finite point, and the whirling danger went hurtling through him and beyond, and was lost back the way they had come.

Inside the body he now owned, Bailey felt something wrenching and tearing. Fibers pulled loose from moorings and he was certain his mind was giving way. He had memories of sense-deprivation chambers and what had happened to men who had been left in them too long. This was the same. No shape, no size, no idea or way of gaining an idea of what he was, or where he was, or the touch, smell, sound, sight of anything as an anchor to his sanity. Yet he was surviving.

The dark blue devil kept arranging new assaults— and he had no doubt it would be back in seconds (seconds?)—and he kept doing the correct thing to escape those assaults. But he had the feeling (feeling?) that at some point the instinctive reactions of this new body would be insufficient. That he would have to bring to this new role his essential baileyness, his human mind, his thoughts, the cunning he had begun to understand was so much a part of his way. (And why had he not understood that cunningness when he had been Bailey, all the years of his hopeless life?)

The effulgence began again somewhere off to his side and high above him, coming on rapidly.

Bailey, some thing unknown, prepared. As best he could.

MARVELOUS, ANIK! HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO REVITALIZE IT? OH, I’M SURE YOU DID BUT HOW DID YOU MANAGE? PLEASE! FIVE!?! YOU REALLY DO WANT TO WIN, DON’T YOU? TSK-TSK. I KNOW: YOU DON’T LOOK ON THIS AS A GAME. NOR SHOULD I. AND THAT’S SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU WERE BORN ALTHUS, WHILE— WHEN IT MEANT SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT? YES, BUT TIME GOES. FLUSTER YOU? MY DEAR GOOD ANIK, HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT? TEN THOUSAND TENILS ISN’T TOO LONG. NOT FOR A HERDUR. ARE YOU PLEADING FOR SURCEASE, MY FRIEND? DO YOU SUBMIT? WHY? BECAUSE YOUR CHAMPION IS A FALSE SOUL IN ITS BODY? TRULY, ANIK, YOU MUST THINK ME A CULLY OR A FOOL! DIE! THEN GO TO RESERVE FRAMES. I CAN’T CONCERN MYSELF NOW. LET ME WORRY ABOUT THE EXTENT OF MY OVER-EXTENSIONS! YOU’LL WORRY ABOUT THAT TILL THE MOMENT I DESTROY YOU. IT WAS INTENDED THAT WE FIGHT. IF YOU WANT OUT, I SAY GO! YOUR SUBSTITUTE CHAMPION HAS NO CHANCE, I SWEAR IT, ANIK!

you may be sure i paid dearly to do so, my dear yaquil. the succubus. yaquil it cost me five tenils of life, chide me all you wish unlike you, i do not look on— but you do you have always thought of it as a game, while you were born herdur. there was a time when it— and we remain. you cannot fluster me with platitudes! i can say it because we have waged this combat too long, but for an althus it is. call an end, yaquil! do it now. submission is no part of it. i merely say stop quickly, no, because the tenils pass and the heat goes and we die! yes, die! and i’ve used more frames than i can afford, better now than too late. you over-extend yourself, sir. impudence, impertinence how you ever became a combatant—

you leave me no alternative. frames be damned, we fight! and concede a defeat i need not have conceded? fight on. i offered you an opportunity. the time for talk is done!

The blue devil swept down on him, crackling with energy. He felt the incredible million sting-points of pain and a sapping of strength. Then a………………for it had. Now Bailey knew what he was, and what he had to do. He lay still, swimming in the never-ending forever blueness. He was soft and he was solitary. The blue devil swarmed and came on. For the last time. And when it was all around him, Bailey let it drink him. He let its deep blueness and its fear and its sparkling effulgence sweep over him, consume him. The blue devil gorged itself, grew larger, fuller, more incapable of movement, unable to free itself. Bailey stuffed it with his amoebic body. He split and formed yet another, and the blue devil extended itself and began feeding on his second self. The radiating sparking waves of fear and blueness were thicker now, coming more slowly. Binary fission again. Now there were four. The blue devil fed, consumed, filled its chambers and its source-buds. Again, fission. And now there were eight. And the blue devil began to lose color. Bailey did not divide again. He knew what he had to do. Neither he nor the blue devil could win this combat. Both must die. The feeding went on and on, and finally the blue devil had drained itself with fullness, made itself immobile, died. And he died. And there was emptiness in the blueness once more.

The frames, the tenils, the fullness of combat were ended. And in that last fleeting instant of sentience, Bailey imagined he heard scented wails of hopelessness from two Duelmasters somewhere out there. He gloated. Now they knew what it was to be a William Bailey, to be hopeless and alone and afraid.

He gloated for an instant, then was whirled out and away.

9

This time his repose lasted only a short time. It was rush season for the Succubus. Bailey went out to fill the husk of a Master Slavemaster whose pens were filled with females of the eighty-three races that peopled the Snowdrift Cluster asteroids. Bailey succeeded in convincing the Slavemaster that male chauvinism was detestable, and the females were bound into a secret organization that returned to their various rock-worlds, overthrew the all-male governments, and declared themselves the Independent Feminist Concourse.

He was pulled back and sent out to inhabit the radio wave “body” of a needier creature used by the Kirk to turn suns nova and thereby provide them with power sources. Bailey gained possession of the needier and imploded the Kirk home sun.

He was pulled back and sent out to inhabit the shell of a ten-thousand-year-old terrapin whose retention of random construction information made it invaluable as the overseer of a planetary reorganization project sponsored by a pale gray race without a name that altered solar systems just beyond the Finger Fringe deepout. Bailey let the turtle feed incorrect data to the world-swingers hauling the planets into their orbits, and the entire configuration collided in the orbit of the system’s largest heavy-mass world. The resultant uprising caused the total eradication of the pale gray race.

He was pulled back …

Finally, even a creature as vast and involved as the Succubus, a creature plagued by a million problems and matters for attention, in effect a god-of-a-sort, was forced to take notice. There was a soul in his file that was causing a fullness leak. There was a soul that was anathema to what the Succubus had built his reputation on. There was a soul that seemed to be (unthinkable as it was) out to get him. There was a soul that was ruining things. There was a soul that was inept. There was a soul that was (again, unthinkably) consciously trying to ruin the work the Succubus had spent his life setting in motion. There was a soul named Bailey.

And the Succubus consigned him to soul limbo till he could clear away present obligations and draw him under the lens for scrutiny.

So Bailey was sent to limbo.

10

This is what it was like in soul limbo.

Soft pasty maggoty white. Roiling. Filled with sounds of things desperately trying to see. Slippery underfoot. Without feet. Breathless and struggling for breath. Enclosed. Tight, with great weight pressing down till the pressure was asphyxiating. But without the ability to breathe. Pressed brown to cork, porous and feeling imminent crumbling; then boiling liquid poured through. Pain in every filament and glass fiber. A wet thing settling into bones, turning them to ash and paste. Sickly sweetness, thick and rancid, tongued and swallowed and bloating. Bloating till bursting. A charnel scent. Rising smoke burning and burning the sensitive tissues. Love lost forever, the pain of knowing nothing could ever matter again; melancholia so possessive it wrenched deep inside and twisted organs that never had a chance to function.

Cold tile.

Black crepe paper.

Fingernails scraping slate.

Button pains.

Tiny cuts at sensitive places. Weakness.

Hammering steadily pain. That was what it was like in the Succubus’s soul limbo. It was not punishment, it was merely the dead end. It was the place where the continuum had not been completed. It was not Hell, for Hell had form and substance and purpose. This was a crater, a void, a storeroom packed with uselessness, It was the place to be sent when pastpresentfuture were one and indeterminate. It was altogether ghastly.

Had Bailey gone mad, this would have been the place for it to happen. But he did not. There was a reason.

11

One hundred thousand eternities later, the Succubus cleared his desk of present work, filled all orders and answered all current correspondence, finished inventory and took a long-needed vacation. When he returned, before turning his attention to new business, he brought the soul of William Bailey out of limbo and ushered it under the lens.

And found it, somehow, different.

Quite unlike the millions and millions of other souls he had stolen.

He could not put a name to the difference. It was not a force, not a vapor, not a quality, not a potentiality, not a look, not a sense, not a capacity, not anything he could pinpoint. And, of course, such a difference might be invaluable.

So the Succubus drew a husk from the spare parts and rolling stock bank, and put Bailey’s soul into it.

It must be understood that this was a consummately EMPTY husk. Nothing lived there. It had been scoured clean. It was not like the many bodies into which Bailey had been inserted. Those had had their souls stolen. There was restraining potential in all of them, memories of persona, fetters invisible but present nonetheless. This husk was now Bailey. Bailey only, Bailey free and Bailey whole.

The Succubus summoned Bailey before him.

Bailey might have been able to describe the Succubus, but he had no such desire.

The examination began. The Succubus used light and darkness, lines and spheres, soft and hard, seasons of change, waters of nepenthe, a hand outstretched, the whisper of a memory, earthing, enumeration, suspension, incursion, requital and thirteen others.

He worked over and WHAT through and inside the soul HE DID NOT of Bailey in an attempt to KNOW isolate the wild and dangerous WAS THAT difference that made this soul WHILE HE WAS unlike all others he EXAMINING had ever stolen for his tables of fulfillment BAILEY, BAILEY for the many races WAS that called upon EXAMINING him HIM.

Then, when he had all the knowledge he needed, all the secret places, all the unspoken promises, all the wished and fleshed depressions, the power that lurked in Bailey … that had always lurked in Bailey … before either of them could try or hope to contain it… surged free.

(It had been there all along.)

(Since the dawn of time, it had been there.)

(It had always existed.)

God awoke, blossomed to fullness, rejuvenated by its slumber, stronger than it had been even when it had created the universe. And, freed, it set about finishing what had begun millennia before.

Bailey remembered the Euthanasia Center, where it had begun for him. Remembered dying. Remembered being reborn. Remembered the life of inadequacy, impotency, hopelessness he had led before he’d given himself up to the Suicide Center. Remembered living as a one-eyed bear creature in a war that would never end. Remembered being a stalker-cat and death of a ghastliness it could not be spoken of. Remembered blueness. Remembered all the other lives. And remembered all the gods that had been less God than himself Bailey. The Lords of Propriety. The Filonii. The Montagasques. The Thils. The Tszechmae. The Duelmasters. The hookworms. The Slavemaster. The Kirk. The pale gray race without a name. And most of all, he remembered the Succubus.

Who thought he was God. Even as the Thieves thought they were Gods. But none of them possessed more than the faintest scintilla of the all-memory of godness, and Bailey had become the final repository for the force that was God. And now, freed, unleashed, unlocked, swirled down through all of time to this judgment day, Bailey flexed his godness and finished what he had begun at the beginning.

There is only one end to creation. What is created is destroyed, and thus full circle is achieved.

Bailey, God, set about killing the sand castle he had built. The destruction of the universes he had created.

Never before.

Songs unsung.

Washed but never purified.

Dreams spent and visits to come.

Up out of slime.

Drifted down on cool trusting winds.

Heat.

Free.

All created, all equal, all wondering, all vastness. Gone to night.

The power that was Bailey that was God began its efforts. The husk in which Bailey lived was drawn into the power. The Succubus, screaming for reprieve, screaming for reason, screaming for release or explanation, was drawn into the power. The soul station drawn in. The home world drawn in. The solar system of the home world drawn in. The galaxy and all the galaxies and the metagalaxies and the far island universes and the alter dimensions and the past back to the beginning and beyond it to the circular place where it became now, and all the shadow places and all the thought recesses and then the very fabric and substance of eternity … all of it, everything … drawn in.

All of it contained within the power of Bailey who is God.

And then, in one awesome exertion of will, God-Bailey destroys it all, coming full circle, ending what it had been born to do. Gone.

And all that is left is Bailey. Who is dead.

In the region between.