TOBRUSH HAD TAKEN HIS INNER, REAL SELF OUT of their mind-link, but Josef had still been able to follow the Mycohl master’s physical actions, which seemed quite ordinary. This made the sudden freeze in all systems all the more inexplicable.
Tobrush decided to kick in on the intercom so that all of them could be reassured.
“We are under the control of my own kind,” it assured them. “No measurements or recordings are permitted in this place.”
There was a slight jar and the ship shuddered.
“That is a shuttle for me,” Tobrush told them. “You cannot come, but you will be safe and guarded here until I return.”
“We have always been a team!” Josef protested. “Why can’t we go with you?”
“You could,” the Mycohlian responded, “but only your body would return. By keeping you here, I hope to preserve you. Somehow, I still believe that all of us are essential to the success of our operation. Now, stand clear, I am coming down.”
Josef met Tobrush at the hatch. “How long will you be gone?” he asked.
“I do not know. There are sufficient supplies on board, and I will arrange for the tanks to be serviced and the lost air reserve replaced. As for me, it might be hours, it might be much longer. If it is too long I shall send word. The decision on what to do next will shortly be out of my hands, and I will be following orders. In the meantime, the mind-link will allow me to monitor you here. No harm must come to anyone aboard this vessel while I am gone, Josef. You, as commander of the vessel, are responsible—and accountable. You are right on the edge, Josef, of either again becoming the responsible top officer with great potential you were, or tipping over into Kalia’s mental realm. Much depends on how wisely you decide.”
The hatch opened, and the Julki body oozed through it and down into the shuttle below.
Gun Roh Chin sat at the quartermaster’s table in the bubble and picked up a stylus. Putting it to the white-surfaced table, he drew a small design which the table then showed in stark black and white outlines.
He moved above it and drew:
Below it, he drew yet another shape, the same as the second but reversed:
“I’m missing something,” he muttered to himself. But what? To the right of the star he sketched:
He stared at them, certain that what he was looking for was now in front of his eyes, but, somehow, he couldn’t make the jigsaw fit.
He heard someone come up into the bubble and turned to see who it might be. It was Modra.
She had a lot of bruises and some scratches, but still somehow appeared softer than in the descent and the city, as if all the hard edges, the toughness, the fight, as it were, had gone out of her.
She said nothing right away but came over behind him and just looked at what he was drawing. Finally she said, “Sorry if I’m interruptin’,” in a lower, sexier voice than she’d used before the last few days. It was almost as if she was consciously trying to turn herself not into Grysta but into the original Molly.
“No, no, not at all,” he responded. “There seemed little else to do but sit and think right now.”
“Yeah. Josef’s suddenly got himself sealed up in the cockpit—said he had to sort some things out, whatever that means—and I’m a little scared of Jimmy right now.”
“Overall, I’d say Jimmy is more dangerous to himself right now than to anyone else,” he commented. “Deep down, he’s a very good, very moral man with too much ego and not enough will to resolve his problems on his own. He needs help, but his ego stands in the way of accepting that, and his ego is all he’s really got left.”
She sighed. “I threw my ego over the side days ago and I’m sleepin’ better than I have in months.”
“Krisha tried that, and the result was so empty it nearly destroyed her. Each person is very different.”
“Yeah, I know about Krisha, and I think she’s nuts. Being the wife of a freighter captain, living on board, seeing different places that don’t try to kill you while havin’ all the peace and quiet you want, that’s perfect. If you ever want a replacement, I’m available.” She started, massaging his neck and shoulders.
“You’re married,” he reminded her, but the massage felt too good to tell her to stop.
“A temporary thing, if I ever get back there, and if he hasn’t already declared me dead anyway,” she told him. “He’s a very sweet man, but it was a marriage on impulse, without either of us even knowin’ the other. Besides, I didn’t say you had to marry me.”
“We don’t do such things in the Mizlaplan. The whole system is designed to create a uniformity of thought and behavior. I’m beginning to believe it’s a kind of long-term defense. The Church, synthesized out of countless other religions of the races incorporated into the Mizlaplan, evolving to meet its needs but always strict, makes it nearly impossible for cults tied to the Quintara and what they stand for to exist, at least for very long. I doubt if you’d like or accept those rules. Besides, with your current multiplicity of talents, they’d haul you in and make you a priestess like Krisha. As long as all the talents are in the priesthood and out maintaining the system, large-scale rebellion and conspiracies are next to impossible.”
“Yeah? You ever been married, Captain?”
“Me? No. To commit to marriage I’d have to know the woman well, first, and my life and profession do not lead to many long-term associations with ordinary folks. I’m not against it, it’s just one passion of mine ruling out other passions, as it were.”
“Oh, come on! You’re no virgin, Captain! You’re a real gentleman and a charmer, but you know your way around. And you didn’t lose your chastity in the empire you describe.”
He smiled. “You are correct. As a matter of fact, I lost it at the age of twenty-two on my first military assignment as assistant arbiter in a treaty dispute with the Exchange. To a Mycohl, in fact. I rather think she was a spy. I certainly hoped so, since she was so intent upon seducing me.”
She had to laugh. “And that’s when you do it? When you put in for foreign duty?”
“Well, most of the time. There are some people one can have in the Mizlaplan if you must, or are in a situation like mine. To keep you sane, to bleed off your worst impulses—therapeutic sex, you might say. They are barren, so there are no complications, and for one reason or another they have no other thing to do. You might say that their job is to keep people like me on the straight and narrow, as it were. They are pleasant folk, usually, and, believe it or not, they work out of the medical branch.”
She found the concept hilarious, although she could see that it embarrassed him to talk about it. “I will admit,” she said when she got hold of herself, “that they’ve thought of everything. And there is proof, if any is needed, that a solid religion can rationalize anything. No offense, Captain.”
“No offense taken. To me the system is practical, considering the hundreds of life forms and thousands of worlds involved.”
“You should come over to the Exchange, Captain, when this is over. There’s no limit to what a man like you could become there.”
He sighed. “That assumes I want to be other than what I am. I’ve been to the Exchange, and the Mycohl. They’re both hierarchical, pyramidal societies, and, as with all pyramids, the mass is at the bottom and there’s precious little room at the top. It’s brought no real contentment to you or to McCray, and countless tens of billions, whole worlds, are miserable, no better than the masses of drols the Mycohl sustains, who are considered little better than work animals and treated no better, either.”
“They breed drols,” she noted. “At least there’s always some hope in the Exchange. My uncle got out, which is how I inherited the money to stake the ship, and how Tris got to be a captain.”
“Very rare exceptions,” he pointed out. “And more to do with luck or relations than anything else. A few must always be allowed to rise or the rest will be totally without hope and tear the system apart. The masses will starve and die young and in misery, whether by design or neglect. You’ll find no such places in the Mizlaplan. There is no rich, no poor, no nobility, no starvation, no despair. People are generally content and get all their needs, administered by a Church hierarchy that cannot be corrupted nor own the fruits of the system. Krisha is a good example. She’s learned enough about the other alternatives on this expedition to realize, as I did long ago, that ours best represents what she believes to be moral and right. Having now freely, rather than coercively, rejected the others, she finds only one place for herself in our society. We do not believe it is moral to simply accept things; we must contribute in the way each of us is best able to contribute. She was born to be a priestess; it’s the only thing she knows. It took a trip to Hell and back for her to realize this.”
“Yeah. Pretty tough on you, though.”
“My contribution lies in a different but now equally fixed direction. I love her and she loves me. That has not changed. More misery has been caused over the course of evolution by confusing sex and love than from any other single source. Aren’t you doing that even now?”
She didn’t take offense. “I gave up on love. I went looking for it everywhere and never noticed it when I saw it. I’m not going to look any more. I’m going to find a place where I can be reasonably happy and get what I need and stay there, if I’m allowed to. I never thought I’d still be alive even now. I’m not at all sure I’m not going to get killed yet.”
“You may be right for all of us on that score,” he admitted, turning back to his shapes.
She looked down at them. “Star, up triangle, down triangle, and the pentagram. Just doodling?”
“Not exactly,” he told her. “You recognize the symbols?”
She nodded. “The Mycohlian five-pointed star; the down triangle, if you add a lot of fancy stuff inside, could be the Great Seal of the Exchange, and the up one . . . that I dunno.”
“Place a starburst in the center and draw rays out, three of which reach the three corners, and you have the holiest symbol of the Mizlaplanian Church,” he told her. “When McCray faced the demons he made the sign of the cross, his holy symbol. When Krisha did, she made the Holy Sign, tracing the upward triangle. The pentagram, I assume, is obvious.”
She nodded. “The Quintara. So those are the symbols for all four of the Higher Races, without all the fancy decoration. “
“Indeed. For about the millionth time, I sit here marveling that I am a man of this century, sitting inside an interstellar spacecraft, musing about demons, devils, and occult shapes. Yet, here I am, and there they are. Geometry has something important to do with this. In the end, even the gods and demons boil down to mathematics. The problem is, it’s a kind of mathematics that has all sorts of factors and variables not present here, and perhaps ones we can’t see or hear. I doubt if any of us are ever going to be able to comprehend it; I will be satisfied to be able to use it. And, laying them out, I still can’t see any kind of logic in them at all.”
She stared at the shapes. “Well, math was never my strong suit, but I wanted to be an artist once, and I remember how Jimmy made his pentagrams.” She reached over, placed her fingers on the drawing of the pentagram, and moved it to within the the star.
Gun Roh Chin’s jaw dropped a notch. “It was too obvious,” he muttered irritatedly, more to himself than to her. “The Quintara at the heart of the Mycohl.”
She shrugged, “Could be. If it is, though, we’re in a whole lot of shit right now.” She reached over, put her fingers on the down triangle, and the figure on the table moved over to where she pushed it up through the up triangle so that it overlapped. “Look familiar?” she asked smugly.
He nodded. “I’d thought of that. What did McCray call it? The Seal of Solomon. But, as a seal, like on the temple door, it had a circle around it, not a star.”
She took the stylus and drew the design from scratch.
“Very elegant,” he noted approvingly.
“Yeah. I wanted to draw pretty things and found out I was a competent draftsman.”
“You see the problem?” he noted, pointing to her drawing. “There’s no pentagram or five-pointed star in the seal.”
“Oh, yeah. I see what you mean. If we put the Mycohl and Quintara in, we get this.” She drew another design next to the seal.
“Uh-huh. In one, the seal, we have the Exchange and the Mizlaplan but not the Quintara or the Mycohl,” he said. “In the other, we have the Quintara and Mycohl but not either of our own powers. It doesn’t make sense unless we’re choosing equal sides. That might be the lesson here. Vestiges of the original balance, two against two. It makes sense, but it doesn’t help.”
“You forgot the circle,” she noted, frowning.
“What?”
“The circle. There’s one around the seal, too. Who’s the circle?”
All at once it came to him. “The seal on the door! The lock! Of course! Blue triangle, gold triangle, red circle! Red circle!” He pointed to the star with the pentagram inside. “Not Mycohl and Quintara, it’s Mycohl covers Quintara! The pentagram, overlaid with the interlaced triangles and the circle, completely locks in, covers, and obscures the pentagram beneath! Modra, I believe we do make a team!”
“I’m glad you’re excited,” she responded cautiously. “Now, what did we just discover and of what use is it?”
That brought him up short. “Not much, I suppose. We simply took a lot of small pieces of a very large puzzle and made a small corner of it.” He thought a moment. “The two triangles come together to form the single most powerful symbol in this occult geometry. Apart, they are merely symbols, merely triangles. It—it’s a message! We’re independent, the Exchange and Mizlaplan. Only by combining do we have power. Hmmm . . . A fascinating concept. Was splitting apart with the Mycohl in the center, as it were, the price of Mycohl alliance in that ancient battle? Without the Angels, the Guardians are reduced to mere maintenance functions, without, perhaps, even access to the ancient records. The Angels, who can access those records and that knowledge, are kept away from it. A level of ignorance that ensures Mycohl survival when it lacks its erstwhile balancing ally, the Quintara. Nor can they get together without the Mycohl knowing about it and being able to stop it. Good Lord! No wonder our feeble incursion all the way to the Exchange has caused mobilization here!”
“Huh? You mean they thought you brought one of your Angels over to get together with the Guardians and turn on their power?”
“ ‘The Angels alone possess the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.’ That’s in one of the basic prayers of my faith. It always was taken metaphorically, of course, but what if it’s literal? The knowledge—the access to the other plane, to the high technology we saw, even the very specifics of its existence—is locked away in some sort of data bank in the Exchange. Locked away after they sealed in the Quintara. The keys, the means of access to it, were in the hands of the Angels. The Exchange could not use it against the others, the Mizlaplan couldn’t use it against the others, either, so no Mycohl in the future could have second thoughts on the grand design and unlock the Quintara once more—and, for the Mycohl, their position in the middle was their insurance against a double cross, since neither the Guardians nor the Angels are exactly mobile in the way the Mycohl are. That is the underlying meaning of the great treaty, and that is why all sides have yet maintained powerful military forces. The Angels must be brought to the Guardians and the Mycohl must be the means to do it. It’s the only way. All three must cooperate. They must do something they haven’t done since the Quintara were last vanquished long ago: they must trust each other implicitly and act as a team. Together, they are more than a match for the Quintara. Still, even together, I wonder if they are also a match for the Engineer. Three demigods of Quintara power do not equal one god.”
“They got him before. Surely in those records you think are there there’s an account of how they did it.”
He nodded. “And so think of how far we still have to go. After all this time, are the Mycohl wise enough and trusting enough to see what must be done? If they deliberate too long, it will be impossible. The Quintara will eat away at the empires and then there will be war. If they do, can we convince the Angels of this admittedly bizarre hypothesis? And the Guardians? And, finally, can we get them all together? The ways in which we could lose are countless; the way to victory in time is a single path.” He sighed “I feel very, very depressed about all this.”
She came close to him. “We’re not the Angels, Captain, or the Mycohl masters, or the Guardians. We’re just little people caught up in a whirlwind. It is out of our hands, Captain. Your mind is on the cosmic and the great puzzles and on analyzing everybody else at least partly because you don’t want to think about yourself.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You can’t keep it in forever, Captain. You’re too perfect and you work too hard at it. You have that dark place inside your mind, too. You’ve got to let go a little. You can’t shut off your humanity without it eating you alive inside. Even your Church knows that. Come on, Captain, what do you say? A little, local, symbolic version of what we have there. The Mizlaplan and Exchange joined, to a little therapeutic benefit to both.”
“I—um . . . ”
“You can’t be cosmic any more, Captain. You, me, we all have done what we can. On the surface, we’re all very different. Our minds don’t work quite the same way, our values, morals, they’re different. But, deep down, we’re the same. Our ancestors were born on the same little ball of dirt long ago. We’re Terrans, and, on that basis we know that there are some things we have in common that culture and politics can never change. Think of me as her if you want. She wants you to.”
In the end, he couldn’t think of a reason why not. Unlike what she was thinking, he never confused love with sex, but he thought highly of them both. And, after all, he was in the end a captain in a foreign port, and she—well, she was a willing foreigner. . . .
Josef, when he came out of his reverie, was not amused, and he let the captain know it. Chin, for his own part, had forgotten all about their mind-link. “What is the matter, Josef? Wasn’t it good for you, too?” he asked lightly.
Josef was enraged at the comment and lunged for Chin. The captain sidestepped the bull charge neatly and Josef went sprawling, which amused him even less.
The starting fight in such close quarters brought the mind-linked Modra and Jimmy out in a hurry, with Krisha and Grysta following.
It was Modra who stepped in. “Now stop it! Now!” she snapped.
Some of Josef’s rage transferred to her. “Now, now! Look at the meek little Exchange whore try and roar all of a sudden!”
She stared at him intently, suddenly tough as nails. “You watch your filthy mouth! I know your mind, Josef! I know what a brutal animal you are! I excused it because of your upbringing, but I will not have this! Long before you were out in your big-man warship doing guard duty I was on dozens of worlds so hostile and brutal you can only imagine them because you can get them from my mind playing Russian roulette for pay! And I’m still here! I wonder how you’d hypno those tentacled horrors on that swamp world? You wouldn’t have lived through the others just to get to that hellhole! I was the on-site head of a private exploiter team! I hired and fired muscle and talent like yours and I fought alongside them while you were using your precious talent to push around a bunch of helpless people! Nobody owns me, least of all the likes of you, Mycohlian! I might rent myself out from time to time but you got good pay for that! Now get up and stop this shit! If we’ve got to work together it’s time you learned how to behave!”
There was a dead silence for a moment, even on the telepathic band. Gun Roh Chin, however, couldn’t suppress a smile. When nothing else seemed able to snap her out of it, he unwittingly had done so.
Finally Jimmy said, “You gonna let her talk to you like that?”
A lot of eyes cast hateful daggers at the little man, who’d successfully closed down Josef’s graceful exit from all this with a one-line comment.
“Mycohl rules, then,” Modra told him coldly. “Which means anything you can get away with. You and Jimmy against the four of us.”
McCray looked shocked. “Hey! Wait a minute! This isn’t my fight!”
“It is now,” Grysta commented acidly. “You made it yours when you opened your big mouth. I think there’s three of us here been wantin’ to beat some sense into you for a long while!”
“What about it, Josef?” Gun Roh Chin asked, finding the experience quite useful. A lot of tension was being bled out here, including his own, and yet much of the very different group was thinking in team-like terms again. “Of course, she’ll know your moves as soon as you do, and nobody knows what I can do, or will do, including you.”
By this time the big man had calmed down. “It isn’t worth it!” he snapped. “She’s not worth it!” But in his mind, as Modra knew, Josef had a far different opinion of her and of many of the others. It was crazy, but somehow he liked this Modra better than the other Modra.
“You mean—?” Jimmy began, but Josef whirled on him.
“You shut up, you little psycho, or I’ll break your jaw!” Josef snapped angrily.
“Shit! You mean we ain’t gonna fight?” Grysta asked wistfully. “And I was all set to plant a hoof right in Jimmy’s balls! In the old time I always wanted to do that to a lot of folks and I didn’t have no legs!”
Jimmy stared at her. “You wouldn’t! Would you?”
She shrugged. “I saved ’em. Who’s got a better right? Besides, I figured if your mind and his was kind’a together, he’d sort of feel what I did to you, right?”
Jimmy looked around and saw the slight grins on most of the other faces and turned to Krisha, who’d remained impassive and who had her shield well up as usual. “You, too? A priestess!”
“Not the kind of priestess you usually think of, am I?” she retorted. “There are no weak sisters here, McCray. They got eliminated. Now Modra, and Josef, and the captain, and even Grysta, like myself, have all come to terms with ourselves here. We’ve beaten off our personal demons. Now it’s your turn. You want to be a eunuch, nobody will stop you the next time. But if you touch us, any of us, any more, if you can’t handle it now, well, there will still be two to represent the Exchange.”
Shocked and feeling a little sick at this sudden ganging up on him, Jimmy whirled in something of a panic and ran back to the aft compartment and closed the hatch door.
For a few seconds nobody spoke, then Grysta said, “Shit! The medical stuff is back there, you know. You don’t think he’ll really do it? Do you? Maybe I should . . . ”
“No!” Modra came back sharply. “I don’t know if he’s going that way or not because he doesn’t know. But he’s got to resolve this, and soon. We can’t stand him this way any more and he’s no good to us or to himself, either. This is one case where we can’t interfere. Either he solves it or comes to grips with it himself or he doesn’t. If he can’t, he’s no better than the ones we left back there, dead and gone. If he can’t work it out, he’ll be the weak link that brings us all down.”
Krisha sighed. “You’re right, of course. But I was at least as bad off as he was, and I couldn’t have done it without help.”
“He has foreclosed that possibility,” Gun Roh Chin said softly. “In every other crisis he’s been helped. By his God first, then his Church, then his first love, then the teams and Grysta.”
“He never took it,” Grysta noted. “He saved Molly against my advice, although now I’m kind’a glad he did.”
In the aft compartment, Jimmy McCray was thinking that it would be so much easier if he could be alone. More than anything this connection, this lack of privacy, had prevented him from any real introspection. Not that introspection really helped.
Why’d you become a priest? Well, because at least one boy and one girl from each family was expected to, that’s why; and because he’d been something of a young hellion while his two brothers had been getting straight As in aptitudes that were needed, it fell to him. The pressures on him were enormous anyway, particularly when Sean had made a tidy bundle with that repair business of his while still in public school, and once Maureen had taken her vows, the pressure on him from church, family, even local authority, had been unbearable. Besides, what could you make of a kid who stole from other kids, then turned the boodle over to the little ones in the orphanage?
Just getting out of that atmosphere to the closed and peaceful inner world of the seminary had done wonders for his peace of mind, and when he’d found all that demonology lore he’d gotten a real kick out of it. Doing battle with demons! Wow! That was a proper man’s work! And at his ordination, the whole family—hell, the whole town—had been there, looking proud as could be, with his sainted mother, God rest her soul, bawlin’ her heart out because she was seeing a priest and not a jailbird.
All in all, he’d had about as much choice in the matter as Krisha.
And it was a grand power trip for a little while, what with everybody callin’ him Father Jim and askin’ his blessin’ and all, and those plain and simple folk of that first tiny parish they’d sent him to had such grand, incredible dirty little secrets when they confessed!
But the only demons he ran into for real were within himself. Pride, of course, and envy for all the nice things money could buy that he never could, and long bouts of boredom cured not by prayer and fasting but by the bottle. Having your oldest brother inherit a half interest in a whiskey distillery was a double curse.
But the one he never could lick was pure lust. It was worse because women trusted him when they’d trust no other man. Hell, you could tell your most intimate secrets to a priest, get advice, even be good friends and social company. Priests weren’t like other men.
Only he was. They’d get real close, be the best friends, enjoy each other’s company, and then, suddenly, just like that, he was marrying them to the village idiots, and christening their children, who couldn’t be his children.
He’d prayed. God! How he’d prayed! But no answer ever came. God never answered back. The same glib seminary explanations of why bad things happened to good people and why most prayers weren’t answered rang hollow when he told them to himself.
“You’ve talked to me many times . . . ”
Did that Being, that Executive Officer of that grand and heavenly Ship really mean that? Or was that just a sop because He needed him?
Did it matter? What did it make of everything he’d believed, even if he’d betrayed that belief? He was no saint that had ever lived in human flesh, that was for sure. Was he the Captain’s son, then? Had the Engineer, long ago, loused up the Captain’s pet project of attempting to create an idyllic, natural society by the introduction of a random factor, evil, into the experiment?
He suddenly remembered old Father McManus, dying now, listening to him wail with his own petty problems, oblivious to the old man’s pain. What was it the old boy’d said? “God knows we’re too corrupt to be like him, son. He certainly knows I’m not. Forget the hellfire and brimstone. Somebody else died for the guilt. It’s not sainthood he seeks, lad. He tried that once. All he really wants is for us to trust Him.”
Trust . . . faith . . . That was the real problem! Not that the encounter with the Ship had cost him his faith but rather that it had reaffirmed it. The Being, addressing him, specifically . . . In that moment he’d gotten a glimpse behind the curtain and it said that, while he might be wrong in the particulars, for what really mattered he’d been right all along.
He’d hidden that away from himself, got into denial, rather than accept that wonderful news.
Because he was a priest, and the vows, too, were prayers. Never mind that other clergy didn’t have those vows, he’d taken them, and not with exception and not in a legal document to be filed away for lawsuits later. He’d promised God. And Judgment wasn’t just at death for him because of that. To trust God meant doing what Krisha had done, to accept what he was and would be. To accept that all this was for some purpose, that he, and the others, had been part of a master plan to face evil head-on. From the start on, the pattern seemed absurdly clear now. The roughhouse youth to toughen him; the exposure to an old man’s obsession with ancient evil because one day he alone would have that knowledge to use and to save others. Even the Fall, to get him into position, and Grysta, at just that moment, to keep him from his basest impulses. And now that knowledge was shared, it could be tapped by others, as if his mind were a vast library of incredibly obscure but essential data. Even at the moment he’d finally struck it big, could at least enjoy the luxuries riches would buy, he’d gone to Hell instead of the bank.
He’d thought too little of himself to believe that he might have such a grand function.
But he was still a man and full of his lusts, and if the thought was truly the same as the deed he’d already broken his vows, particularly every time Modra had done it. He’d actually gotten off each time; there was no way to shut it out, and the pressure on him had been enormous each time.
He thought of Marcian, an early bishop of the Church whose tireless work had helped add Paul’s letters to the Canon. He, too, had burned with lusts that had almost consumed him and knew that his holy mission to serve God which became so essential to the building of the true Church could not be fulfilled so long as it was so. His solution, which had allowed the great work, was not unique in those times.
Now why had he thought of Marcian, whom he hadn’t thought of since seminary? No, that wasn’t right. He’d thought of it once before, when he’d looked once too often into her big, green eyes and had seen the same forbidden desire reflected back in her radiant face. He’d ignored the idea then, and to what profit?
His eyes went to the medical station, and, all at once, he knew. The blackness hadn’t made him pull that knife; the blackness had released all the inhibitions hidden deep within his soul, the corruption that had caused him and others so much misery. All at once the lid had come completely off, the impulses too strong to withstand to do what he had sworn a vow never to do. He had never been released from those vows. He had walked away from the job, but he had walked away a priest and a priest he still was.
To give in, as the near compulsions insisted he do, would have been to spit upon that which he still was and loved. Mortal sin, beyond forgiveness or redemption in his mind. The Quintara, the Engineer . . . Satan would have his soul. The good, the priest that was still within him and the only part of him that truly contained things he treasured and the values he cared about, had struck back at the evil. Grysta had stopped him from saving himself, and then the mind-link had built a wall so that his soul could only express its longing in hatred and cruelty, that good side within him using that to prevent total corruption, but in blaming them instead of himself he’d made them pay a price for his weakness.
The blackness had been but a trigger, a hole poked in the dam holding back his darkest self. Suicide was denied him; it was the one sin that would give himself to them as their plaything for eternity. There was no way to put the urges back now; they’d waited too long for freedom. He could only become a Babylonian perversion, a Nimrod-like antichrist to Kalia’s Ishtar, perversion of the Blessed Virgin, or remove all possibility of a fall now and forever. For him, at this point, there was simply no third choice.
<Jimmy, don’t!> Modra put. <I’ll stop. I already made that decision. And I don’t think Josef will be doing much, either. Even Grysta will go on the wagon so there won’t be much opportunity.>
<Not now, perhaps, but it’ll be in the mind, mine, yours, his, and you won’t be taking those vows of mine on yourself forever. If it’s got to be done, best it be solved now rather than dwelling on it.>
<Think of Grysta!>
<I am. What must I do? Continue to battle my lust for her by cruelty and petty violence? Frustrate her as well? Better to free her.>
Another incredibly powerful telepathic voice broke in. <McCray, I do not understand you, or the others,> Tobrush commented, <but it requires further analysis before I can permit it. Also, were you to choose it, it should be by someone else who is competent to perform it.>
There was a sudden tremendous force in his head, making him suddenly very dizzy and confused, unable to think, impossible to fight off. In an instant he was out cold in a dreamless sleep.
Almost simultaneously, they felt the ship shudder and a hissing sound as the hatches of a shuttle and the frigate meshed and began pressurization. Within a few minutes, the bottom hatch opened and the large form of Tobrush oozed back into the ship, now wearing a regulation Julki-shaped Mycohl e-suit.
Modra and Josef had been momentarily stunned by the mental blow the Mycohl master had thrown at Jimmy but were now pretty well recovered. Still, they stared at the returning member with some confusion. “You’re not the same,” Josef said at last. “You’ve changed.”
“I have,” Tobrush responded through the translator for the benefit of the others. “Come forward—all of you. Crowd around and I will show you something none of your race has ever seen, nor any other.”
They were all curious and not a little apprehensive, although all were happy that things seemed to be starting up again.
The heretofore blank main screen was now activated. It showed a world, a gas giant with a dozen great rings, not much different than other such worlds but as spectacular looking as the best of them.
“That is the heart of the Mycohl,” Tobrush told them. “It looks quite average, but it is not. It is an incubator, a laboratory, and a library. Vast clusters of my race exist there, combining, uncombining, re-forming, able there to exist outside a body, gaining what they need from materials within the upper layers of the planet and from processes begun eons ago. We are a collective race, but, linked, we form separate and independent single minds. At some point, we must duplicate ourselves and send the duplicate here, or bring it ourselves as I did, depositing it first on a small moon that is within one of the rings, as I would be crushed in this form if I went further. All that I was, all that I knew or experienced, was sent down. The cluster was a perfect copy of my true self. Then I waited, until that record was merged, recombined, and analyzed in ways impossible to explain to you. Eventually, it caused a great Gathering, the first in thousands of years. The greatest single intelligence of my kind, with all that power, with all that vast knowledge, was able to use and integrate what I had contributed. Ultimately, a data cluster was created and sent up to me and combined with myself. The Tobrush you knew is within me, but I am far greater than that.”
They stared at the screen and tried to visualize such a civilization. It made the Quintara seem like second cousins.
“There was a great temptation to assimilate all or most of you,” the Mycohl master continued. “I am at capacity, as it were, and there is so much more we needed. Fortunately for you, our analysis showed that this grouping is not random. The statistical probability of it being pure chance is beyond calculation when the facts are factored in. In that, McCray is right. Right now, vast numbers of my people inhabiting bodies are making their way here to fill that task.”
There was some relief at that. The possibility of the Mycohl taking them all over had been in the back of everyone’s mind, although none wanted to really think about it.
“Do you have the answer?” Gun Roh Chin asked.
“No, but your analysis was very perceptive, Captain. All of the data leads to very much the conclusions you arrived at.”
The captain was startled, then remembered that Modra had been there when he’d made his educated guesses—had been a key to them, in fact.
“So your race is the number one target,” he commented. “Revenge is primary.”
“We believe so. The ancient records are not as clear as they should have been, or that we thought they were. Apparently a lot of key Mycohl perished before they could commit their records. Either that or some higher power eliminated key data. It appears that all the demon princes, and many, a veritable horde, of underlings, were originally formed by using material from the transdimensional passages as vehicles for beings from the Higher Universe to operate in our own, much as we Mycohl use the bodies of others to give us mobility. They were—scientists probably would be the closest word. I doubt if we can really understand what they are. When the experiments were ordered to cease and natural law as established here to have sole dominion, there was a mutiny among a minority of them, led by the Engineer, as we think of him. When they lost the main mutiny and fled downward, or aft, I suppose, to the engine regions, the Captain ordered many of the others back in to root them out one by one if need be. The warfare must have been bitter and tremendous and fought on all planes. The religions of many races went from simple sun worship to elaborate structures thanks to the mere glimpses of it.”
“Angels and demons,” Krisha said.
“Exactly.”
“But nobody won,” Modra pointed out.
“On the contrary. As we were warned, there is no such thing as true victory over the enemy. We do not believe that they can be killed in any sense that we understand the word. The best that happens is that they lose their bodies, their anchors into this universe and dimensional structure, and fall back into the interdimensional plane. Alas, there they can use the material to fashion new forms and emerge again.”
“That’s why they were all in suspended animation!” Krisha exclaimed. “If they were locked in their bodies here, in our universe, they couldn’t escape to the other plane and emerge anywhere somebody drew a pentagram!”
“Yes, that is obvious,” Tobrush replied. “But, as we saw with the Engineer, under the right conditions, and with the correct physics and interplane geometry, part of them, and their influence, can extend into ours without physical form. That is what happened in the pyramid. Once the Four Princes who were lords of the city were freed, they knew the conditions and exactly how to do it. It isn’t terribly difficult, I fear. Unwitting experimenters, devil worshipers, even unbelievers playing at ancient ritual, have managed to create small openings which have caused no end of so-called supernatural phenomena over the centuries. But the Engineer is so great and so enormous compared to our entire universe that he could emerge only in a tiny part through a master hatch.”
“The pool under the city,” Krisha said. “I knew I felt something horrible.”
Josef looked at the creature he’d once called teammate and friend. “All well and good,” he said, “but just what are you? And the other two as well?”
“A force had to be left. The Engineer was at large and resourceful even if he could not enter directly. Any imprisonment of the Quintara had to be considered dangerous. There was always the possibility that something like what happened would happen. The loyal agents could not be left free and on their own here. The temptation, particularly over time, to play God themselves would be too great, and, sooner or later, some might become corrupted, even free the Quintara or the Engineer.”
Krisha was awestruck. “So they made them mortals, races? You are the descendants of the angels?”
Tobrush’s translator gave the best imitation of a Terran sigh that it could. “Alas, no. I wish it were so. In this sector of this galaxy, at the time of all this, three races had evolved to a relatively high state and were reaching for the stars. Three here. There are probably countless others out there we haven’t met as yet. The battlefield and the battle were truly vast in scope. These races were possibly the results of random evolution, but possibly deliberately engineered—certainly the subject of the early experiments. We, of course, became the prizes, and the pawns, in the great battles. In the process, we also assisted in one or the other side’s evolutionary manipulations, starting most of the races off on a climb from animal to sentience, or from sentience to civilization, depending. For example, we did not create, but we did help shape, the course of the development of your own world.”
“Then—we are the deliberate and planned children of the gods!” Krisha said almost prayerfully.
“You misunderstand,” Tobrush replied. “At that time we were working with and for the Quintara.”
Everyone gasped, and even Gun Roh Chin was appalled. “Are you saying that Terrans are the spawn of demons?”
“Pretty much, I’m afraid so. However, you did become something of a battleground yourselves, in a number of ways. You became the subject of a great experiment—the only attempt we can find where the Crew attempted to turn and redevelop a Quintara-bred race. It appears Terrans became almost an obsession with them. Most races got only secondhand attention; yours received direct intervention at all stages by both sides until the Quintara were defeated and the Engineer forced to flee back into his domain.”
“Original sin,” Modra said with a dry chuckle.
“What?” the captain asked her.
“Original sin. A concept from Jimmy’s religion. I have access to all that stuff, remember. We’re all born corrupt to the core and only faith and trust in God can save us, not ourselves. The legend is that the first Terrans, Adam and Eve, disobeyed God by eating of a forbidden fruit and, as the father and mother of us all, passed on that sin. My own ancestors had an almost identical story, different religion entirely. Now we know it wasn’t the fruit or the act; they were the fruit.”
“Yin and yang,” the captain responded. “The conflict of eternal opposites. In this case, good and evil in all things. I find much of this illuminating of Terra’s history, cultures, and character. Even reassuring. The only thing I find discomforting is being a creation of those creatures.”
“You had no choice,” Tobrush pointed out. “We were working for them, remember. It is much more embarrassing. I rather think I preferred my original horror that we might have been a disease sent to kill them.”
“But, in the end, you betrayed them and joined the other side fighting them,” the captain noted. “And you remain on that side, even if your ancestral temperament makes you uncomfortable there.”
“What you say is true. By temperament, we are more comfortable with them. In the end, it appears to have been sheer pragmatism, although, as I say, the memories are fragmentary and incomplete. It came down to a result of being their eternal subordinates in a Quintara-run society, or being absolute rulers of our own realm and a third of the rest.”
“Let’s hear it for morality,” Modra muttered.
“Morality is a subjective term used by victors to establish right and wrong,” Tobrush retorted. “It is irrelevant on this scale and for decisions of this magnitude. Evolution proceeds out of self-interest. The Gathering weighed all the possible futures and decided that our best long-term interest for the race was with the other side. We set a trap with the Quintara’s unknowing participation—they are extremely arrogant—and we lured the Engineer into it. We sprung the trap as the other two sides closed on the center, and drove him back beyond the hatch, depriving the Quintara of their ultimate source of power and control until the Engineer could regroup and find other means.”
“And the Quintara surrendered?” the captain asked.
“By no means. Depriving them of the Engineer only placed them on our level, and they were—are—present in incredible numbers. The war was vicious and lasted for centuries. Whole civilizations were wiped out; worlds were destroyed, others pushed back into barbarism. They could not win, not three against one, but there is an expression in some cultures—‘fighting like demons,’ I believe, or something like it—that marks their ferocity. You could kill them, but that simply pushed them back to the other plane where they could build themselves anew. The only thing they feared was the suspension. When death holds no terror, and to be counted out you must be captured alive and intact, you can see what toll it took. Almost the whole of this galaxy was involved; now see how far back we were pushed, how, even now, we are rediscovering barely a third of what once was ours.”
Krisha sighed. “And that now threatens to happen again.”
“It could,” the Mycohl admitted. “But everything they have right now is being thrown against the Three Empires here. It is still early, but we are weak and have lost or forgotten so much. Their corruption spreads as more and more of their forces are deployed and more of their black non-matter is gathered. Last time we started with eyes open, knowing who and what was faced. Now the Quintara seek to weaken from within and divide us, collapse the Treaty, have us so estranged and at each other’s throats that we will be unwilling and unable to unite against them. If they are able to seize the Three Empires, this galaxy will be enveloped in a darkness beyond conception. The Three Races will be utterly destroyed. The rest of you will become the playthings, the slaves, of the Quintara, and their arm to move beyond. More importantly, the more his minions rule absolutely, the larger the area that the Engineer himself may enter. From our own puny material point of view, his power would seem limitless, absolute. To us, for all practical purposes, he would become our one true and omnipresent God.”
“And we’ve had a taste of what sort of god he’d be, haven’t we?” Krisha breathed.
While the others saw the problem in moral or metaphysical terms, Josef saw it as basically a military problem. “What you are saying is that the Quintara objective will be to capture territory and people, to enlarge the hole, as it were, for their leader. On this scale, at the hatch, that whole thing we sensed must be a mere hair or single cell of skin in relation to the whole. Fighting the Quintara becomes meaningless until we deal with their leader. Push him back now, while so little of him is here. Push him back and we can take on the rest, like last time. Let too much of him get in, and it’s all over.”
There were nods and murmurs of assent all around, but Gun Roh Chin had to dash cold water on their enthusiasm.
“All right, we understand the basic background and the problem, at least as much as we are ever able to comprehend creatures so alien and of such awesome power. Fine. Find the Engineer, push him back in, and seal the hatch. Wonderful. Now, does anything in that organic database of yours, Tobrush, tell you just how we’re supposed to do it? You’ve been close to the thing, felt some of its power. We didn’t even dare look at this hair, this cell of skin!”
That stopped them. Finally Tobrush said, “The entire nature of the trap and how it was sprung is not within our ancestral memory. Only by bringing the Three Races together will there be any hope of finding out how. Somehow, though, I know the answer is there. We were very careful when it ended. The records are quite clear there. Access to the stations and the entire network was sealed off, lest anyone, even by accident, discover it and free them. It must have taken the Engineer centuries, at least, to figure out how to maneuver one lying inactive in a still incomplete Quintara template and get it through to that world where it was discovered. The closest world to any of us, perhaps, that had been prepared for one but hadn’t been completely tied to the network when the war began. Time is only a factor to him when his actions impinge on our universe.”
Chin nodded. “I agree. It’s up to us now to bring the other two factors into play. If Krisha and I can get back to the Mizlaplan, I am certain of an audience. And if the Guardians, whatever they are, are still around and got that message we sent, the Exchange members of our team should also find an interested ear or whatever they have.”
“Our records only indicate that they are silicates,” Tobrush told him. “Other than that we know little more than you, although we are certain that they still exist and are still in control. Indeed, as silicates, there might well be ones among them who were living even in those times of war.”
“Coordination could be a problem with us, though,” the captain noted. “We are going to need to cut through a lot of attempts to stop us and get together after.”
“Quite so. We will provide a method for communication beyond the obvious Treaty World, which would be a certain Quintara target. You must make them believe us and in the urgency of the case. You must bring them. We will provide the means to get you both to the frontier.”
“Jimmy and I are mind-linked—” Modra started, then stopped. “Oh, yeah. What about Jimmy?”
“I am unqualified to evaluate his total mental state,” Tobrush admitted, “but he is so disturbed, so pulled by his primitive religious conditioning and his biological and psychological needs, that it is my impression he would need the long-term aid of experts to make him sane and whole again. We simply do not have the luxury of time for that.”
“Hey! Wait a minute!” Grysta broke in. “I think I got something to say about that. Can’t you just super-hypno him or something? Make him not want it? Then, when it’s over, he can get the help he needs.”
“It wouldn’t work,” the Mycohl responded. “Oh, it would for a time, certainly, but you saw that wall the Quintara were putting up on the border. Just one touch, an accidental brush with it, would undo everything, and how well I could expel it and exercise control from afar is something we don’t know. If he surrendered to it he would draw the energy to him like a magnet. He would become, as he fears, another Kalia. He is too fragile; a Quintara could break him in a moment no matter what I did. Modra, even you would be overcome and fall into their hands, and the last link we need might not be forged. Even now, all of us will be targets. Through the mind-link they would be able to find and target Josef and myself. Considering your origins and point of view, Grysta, you are not a credible alternative. You helped open the way that began all this. It is now your turn to pay the price of that action.”
“Yeah? Well, you sure got a lot of confidence in Modra, there, who’s gonna be flyin’ through the same shit.”
“You miss the point,” Tobrush responded. “I have no confidence in anyone’s individual ability to withstand such power. If McCray is left as he is, both are surely doomed. Remove this element and McCray may be strong enough to bring them both through.”
Krisha sighed. “I alone, I think, understand his torment. It is still easier for me. What is proposed for him was already done to me when I became a priestess. It made my own personal decision much easier. I also did not share your experience with the Ship, and your memories of it are, to me, incoherent.”
“Yeah, you did sort of have to be there,” Modra admitted.
Gun Roh Chin felt suddenly very stupid. Of course Krisha would have no interest in sex! She might have longed for it as something she knew she could not share, but she had been totally neutered after ordination, as all the Holies were. She looked such a fine figure of a woman, though . . . In a sense, it made her final choice all the more understandable, but at the same time it shattered once and for all a cherished little fantasy.
“Jimmy now believes he has a reason for existing, a specific assignment from his God,” the priestess continued. “He doesn’t want to do this, he feels he has to. He feels that if he does, he can do the job. That faith, that belief, may be enough. His faith, like mine, prizes faith and emphasizes sacrifice. This is his sacrifice to his God. It is the ultimate act of faith.”
“Holy cats! I don’t believe this!” Grysta exclaimed.
Modra looked at her. “You think we like it? While you were on his back you never let him get it out; now you can’t get it from him. There’s some poetic justice in that. Some people are born to be tragic figures, I guess, and Jimmy’s one of them. Don’t worry, you’ll still make out all right. As his legal wife you’ll get half his share of what’s been piling up in an account since we completed our job. You’ll have money, and he won’t care who or what you take up with.”
Grysta thought a moment. “Yeah. Half that fee . . . I hadn’t thought about that. And no complications . . . ”
Selfish to the core as always, Modra thought. She was the Engineer’s perfect tool.
“The best time to do it is now,” Tobrush noted, “so that the body can adjust. It’s somewhat complex to do right. There are chemical imbalances, hormones, all the rest needing compensation.”
“Yeah?” Grysta responded, not quite done yet. “And who’s gonna do it? You?”
“Yes. Unlike the rest of you, it is a meaningless procedure to me and serves my ends. There is a complete single-occupant medical cocoon aft, and analytical programs for male Terrans, since Josef is the commander of this vessel. We will begin as soon as we are under way for the Mizlaplanian border. There we can transfer the two of you for the final stage of your journey. The time to travel back to the Exchange border will allow some healing and adjustment.”
“And what will you two be doing while the rest of us are off?” Modra asked, trying not to think about the subject.
“Josef and I will be quite occupied. There are conditions approaching anarchy or civil war in many areas, and we cannot spare a lot of military from the borders right now with all the tension. The center of the worst disturbance struck a familiar note in us and we feel compelled to check it out.”
Josef nodded. “It seems we have to have a little reunion with an old shipmate.”