previous | Table of Contents | next

EDEN’S FORGE

MODRA STORMED INTO THE SUITE RADIATING such a mixture of strong emotions it almost knocked Jimmy down.

“I can’t believe it! The son of a bitch got the marriage annulled!” she exclaimed angrily.

Jimmy turned from the personal viewscreen in the hotel suite wall console and frowned. “But weren’t you gonna divorce him?

“Of course I was! But that’s different.

Jimmy sighed and thought that maybe it wasn’t such a curse to be an Old Order Priest after all. He turned the conversation to avoid either an argument or getting tangled up in knots.

“Modra, do you know the word ‘pogrom’?”

She stopped and frowned. “An organized massacre of a particular group. At least that’s how your mind defines it.”

“They’re massacring Terrans.”

“What!” She immediately shifted to the mind-link.

Images . . . Scene after scene, world after world of the Terran sectors being attacked and pillaged by large mercenary forces of a dozen races. Men, women, children, massacred by the thousands, maybe millions . . . 

She unlinked in sheer horror, her face ashen. “Where? When? There’s been nothing about it here, and I’ve certainly felt nothing.”

“Right now the newer, post-assimilation worlds,” he told her. “But they’re getting very good at it and show no inclination to stop. Don’t worry—both your birth world and mine are still alive and well away from it, but it’s coming. They sent some forces to clamp down on it but they either did nothing or, some say, actively participated. There’s been a systematic expulsion of Terrans from the services; some of the lads serving, upon getting the reports, tried to take over some ships.”

“But—aren’t we doing something? There’s a hell of a lot of us!”

“Not in positions of power outside our own worlds, there aren’t. The demagogues are popping up all over here fanning anti-Terran sentiment, telling foul lies that we’re all defecting to the Mycohl or allying with some new and powerful force to take over the Exchange—all the rot you hear in non-Terran bars and low places. They’ve always resented us in the mass, precisely because we are a mass and getting more of one quickly.”

“Sure, sure, I know the score. I’m one, too, remember. But something must have triggered it. And if naval forces aren’t putting it down, it has to have some official approval. The cymols wouldn’t allow it unless they’d been told to overlook it and you know it!”

He nodded. “I fear it’s us may be partly to blame. Remember, except for Tobrush, it was a bunch of Terrans came out of that crystal, walked through their security as nice as you please, and took off in a Mycohl ship to boot. Now add the fact that there’s always been a strong tradition of Satanism and the occult in Terran culture and you see that they’ve capitalized on our very escape.”

“But—here—”

He shrugged. “Here there’s a half-billion souls of which maybe eight, ten thousand tops, maybe less, are non-cymol Terrans. Everything’s electronic, preassigned, using little cards and such anyway for everything, so they know just where all ten thousand are at almost any given moment. We tend to be of two kinds here, too. Freebooters, mercenaries, and exploiters like us, the kind of dangerous folk you don’t want to alarm until you make your move, let alone allow to flee to the troubles, and the few very rich and influential folk who could cause quite a few nasty ripples on the Exchange. They’ll let us go until we make trouble, and they’ll let prejudice come after us before lookin’ official, I’d guess. I wouldn’t be surprised, in fact, if there weren’t bugs all over this place and cymols on all our fannies. We got in and down too easy, and with our right names, too.”

“But why!” she asked him, bewildered. “Why are the Guardians allowing it? And why only our kind?”

“I’m not so sure, but I’ll make a Chin-type guess. The Quintara don’t want to come too close to the Exchange for fear they’ll trigger some sort of big defenses. Their main thrust is the Mycohl. For some reason, though, it’s us, Terrans, they’ve chosen as their main vehicle. Maybe we’re more easily susceptible to them. Maybe, somehow, we’ve inherited the role that all three Higher Races had last time, since we’re in and of all three. They’ve not got enough power to do this Mycohl business and something of the sort in the Exchange, so they stir up those closest to them while stirring up their old friends’ hatred, fear, and prejudice, to discredit us, keep us on the defensive, fragment the Exchange.”

She considered that. “Funny you should mention the captain in that context. When I was with the Mizlaplanians, back on that horrible world of endless rain, we had a talk about the Terrans outbreeding everyone. Something about his own ancient people having infinite patience and eventually breeding every conqueror out of existence. We couldn’t do that here.”

“No, but the old boy had a point, as usual. As a majority, we’d basically control the economy of any empire where that was the case. Control the economy and you don’t have to be the politicians, you buy them. The economy couldn’t ignore such a market, and you could then put anybody out of business just by boycott. Destroy much interstellar trade, which is interdependent, by everybody just sitting on their hands for a few months. In the Exchange, control the economy and you own the joint. In the Mizlaplan, you can’t have the majority of your people under mostly alien Church leaders, so more and more Terrans move in and move up. They don’t have a Pope; the clergy elects their bishops, the bishops select their archbishops or whatever they call them, and so on. And the worst that’s in us thrives on a system like the Mycohl’s. If the Higher Races were to go down we’d either be the victims of genocide or ruling all three within a hundred years or so.”

“But the Higher Races aren’t going to go down. They’d have to be taken down by somebody who could, and the only ones we know who have a shot at that . . . ”

“Exactly,” he agreed. “The Quintara. Sure! That’s it! Fan the flames of genocide here and then the Quintara and their Terran followers pop up, do a few miracles, and make an offer. Join us and we’ll protect you and avenge your losses. We’ll give you power and help you remove the obstacles to running the whole show. A proper Faustian offer.”

She shook her head in wonder. “Jimmy—if the Guardians are already against us, how can we possibly get to them?”

The mind-link opened full, connecting them so that an entire conversation if need be could be done in a matter of seconds, yet could not be intercepted by telepathic agents.

<Were you so furious at your old ex that you forgot to do what you had to?>

<No, I did that first.>

<And you’re certain nobody saw you? And that it isn’t obvious to others?>

<I’m competent, damn it!> She sent him a mental picture of the scene. He got it, along with a series of scenes that were more on her mind right now, but he didn’t mention the other visit. Not yet.

<Well, then, I suppose it’s time for us to give our little signal. Then it’s try to relax and hope they don’t raid us before midnight.>


Nobody raided them, but relaxing was next to impossible and paranoia became increasingly rampant.

Grysta left about six. They didn’t know if she was followed or not, but it didn’t make any difference. Hopefully they didn’t know that they weren’t dealing with a simple syn any more, and Grysta was confident that she could act the part and appear to be following a memorized list while seeming sweet, innocent, and childlike. Her merger with Molly hadn’t left much of Molly, but they all counted on Grysta for once doing something right and letting the Molly part run. She wasn’t essential, but she would be convenient.

They both grew more and more nervous as midnight approached. They did scans of the immediate vicinity and found several cymol presences, but in this area of town and in a hotel that was to be expected. There were also a vast assortment of telepaths, empaths, hypnos, and levitators about, but again, that wasn’t all that unusual in a hotel for thousands of space-faring guests and many, many races.

The room did have bugs, of course, but they decided to leave them in place, both because none of the ones they discovered looked like extras but rather built into things and thus possibly normal, and because if they were being specifically monitored the discovery of bugs might precipitate some action.

<I’ll go alone,> he told her.

<The hell you will! I’ve been in this from the start and I’m not quitting now!>

<Yes, but that was before you went to the clinician today and found that the reason you’ve been waking up so nauseous is because you’ve got morning sickness.>

<I’ll be fine. And what’s the use of bringing a child into this place anyway if we don’t succeed?>

<I was thinking of those mood swings and the fact that you now have something to lose. It makes you vulnerable.>

<Not entirely. Remember, I know what you think and feel, too. My mother did farm work and operated dangerous farm machinery up until the day I was born. And you know I mean it that I don’t want a kid if she’s going to grow up under the Quintara, so they’ll know it, too.>

<All right, have it your own way. I can’t believe, though, that I’m still having arguments with women. And losing the arguments!>

They got up, finally, and walked back into the tiled bathroom. Jimmy had a marker and began to draw the pentagram around them.

<If they have sensors on the room, boy, are they gonna get a surprise in a minute or two!> she noted.

<Well, that’s why you drew more than one of the blasted things this mornin’, wasn’t it?>

The pentagram completed, they stood together and visualized another place, another view, that they both had studied well. There was brief vertigo, and they were suddenly standing outside, at street level, in the darkness under a decorative side arch. There was some trash about; it wasn’t the way to anywhere and was unlikely to be invaded or cleaned between the time she’d drawn the pentagram while pretending to fix her clothes in its shadow until now. It didn’t look like it had been cleaned in years.

“Well, all’s quiet,” he noted, still nervous. The packet they’d sent via the cymol back on the frontier world of the station had included a detailed account of what had happened along with an urgent appeal from Tobrush that the Guardians at least talk to them. They had been urged to send a signal of agreement to confer to the Mycohl, but according to Tobrush no such signal had been received. As an alternative, they were told to arrange a meet here, near the great central Exchange building, at midnight of the day they received, via cymol police, a code. Today, Jimmy had picked out someone essentially at random while visiting his old guild hall, and had done something theoretically impossible according to known biology: he’d selected his mark, a Timir, and the little green rodent-faced creature had then received a hypnotic compulsion via telepathy to wait two hours, then call cymol control and phone in the code.

They scanned the area, but because they were not in total dimensional phase they were severely limited in their range and accuracy.

<How long do we wait before giving it up?> she asked him. <It’s chilly out here!>

<You’re telling me! I’d say give them a few minutes, though. If they are here, they’ll be givin’ us the twice-over before revealin’ themselves. I would.>

There was the sound of someone walking by, but they caught just a glimpse of someone and the footsteps kept going.

<I feel so damned exposed here,> Jimmy commented.

<Relax. They can’t get to us any more than we can get to them, and we can exit before they can break the barrier and sync us.>

The footsteps came back. They stopped for a moment, quite near, then started again. Suddenly a young Terran woman came into view, stopped, turned, saw them, and stared hard. She was casually dressed, but the sidearm and small utility box on a belt around her waist marked her as a cymol cop.

“What are you two doing there?” she asked in a casual but official tone.

“We hoped we were here to meet someone from your office,” McCray replied. “Were you by any chance expecting us?”

“I was not expecting you, no,” the cymol replied. She drew her pistol. “Step out here now! Come on, or I will be forced to stun you.”

“I’m afraid that’s not fully possible,” Jimmy responded.

She wasn’t programmed for nonsense. She fired almost immediately. The beam covered the whole interior of the arch and lit up the dark place, but when it faded they were still standing there looking at her.

The cymol was clearly not programmed for that sort of reaction. She made an adjustment with her thumb and said, “Out! Now! Or I shoot full power at your legs!”

“Go ahead,” he invited, and she did. The blips of energy sufficient to have broken and mangled their legs hit their marks, went through, and began to cause the exterior of the building wall to flake and chip off.

Suddenly the whole area erupted with black-clad security troopers of a half a dozen races, all carrying enough firepower to blow the building to bits.

“We were expected!” Modra exclaimed. “They got the message after all!”

“Projections!” the cymol shouted to the troops. “They’re some kind of projections!”

“It’s the pair from the hotel,” a translator-clipped voice said, coming from one of the troopers. “Our people are going in now. Hold on . . . Empty! What do you mean, ’empty’? You had all the exits covered!” Pause. “You did have all the exits covered, didn’t you? Well? Then where are they?”

“We’re right here,” Modra said sweetly.

The cymol bolstered her weapon and started to walk straight for them.

“Hold it!” Jimmy warned. “Any closer and we’ll have to disappear on you! And then we’ll have to go through all this again someplace else!”

She stopped. “What is this?” she asked.

“Your masters got our report and our message,” Jimmy replied. “Otherwise you and all this firepower wouldn’t be here. Hopefully they gave you the information on us as well. We need to speak directly to the Guardians. The matter concerns their own survival, and that of the Exchange.”

“That is impossible. Only cymols may speak to the Guardians.”

“Then plug into them! Or get something that can plug you in. However you do it. We’ll wait, even if we are catching our death out here.”

“That is forbidden,” she told them. “You are agents of the Quintara. You have demonstrated an ability to seize control of cymols and reprogram them. To connect would be to allow you access to the net and to the Guardians. That cannot be permitted.”

Modra’s heart skipped a beat in excitement. This was the first time they’d heard the name Quintara used by anyone other than themselves. She realized now what the Guardians were thinking, had thought since they’d pulled their trick back at the station. That they had been returned as a time bomb, a way to contact and disrupt the Guardians or their communications via a convincing cover story. The fact that a Mycohl master had been with them meant nothing. If you could change sides once, you could again, to save your own hide.

The high and mighty all-powerful Guardians of the Exchange were scared to death of them!

“We are not agents of the Quintara,” Modra said firmly. “We are their enemies. Our orders come not from the Engineer but from the Executive Officer.”

“The Guardians are the highest uncontaminated life form in this galaxy,” the cymol stated. “If what you say were true, they would not require intermediaries such as you.”

“You are mind-linked to the Mycohl,” the cymol pointed out. “Your own report states as much. The main Quintara breakout is in the Mycohl and is proceeding with remarkable ease. Through such a link, one powerful enough to cause harm to the Guardians might be summoned. This cannot be allowed!”

<Round and round and round it goes,> Modra thought in frustration. <How do we break through?>

“Perhaps,” Jimmy said through clenched teeth, “just perhaps we were sent because your precious Guardians can’t tell God from the Devil any more! Tell you what. You go and ask the Guardians to figure out what happens if the Engineer can’t be stopped. What happens to the Exchange, to them, to everybody. Then you ask them for me to figure out how they intend to stop the bastard. If they have an answer they like, fine. If not, well, they’ve lived and run this thing for thousands of years. Now, they can either compute the odds of holding on a few more years, even a few decades, until he is absolute ruler and they are all dead, or the odds that perhaps, just perhaps, we’re who and what we say we are and we have something of an answer. Remind them to factor in that the Mycohl were essential the last time, and that, if they eliminate us or ignore us, there won’t be any Mycohl in a little while to do anything if they finally do get some guts and sense! Then you put a guard around this spot and tell them to touch nothing, and that we’ll be back at, say, four this morning for their answer. That should be plenty of time for a Higher Race to find its courage! Don’t look for us. We’ll be back.”

The hotel was out; they concentrated on the backup place and hoped Grysta hadn’t either screwed up or been caught herself.

The scene changed to a dark back alley and a loading dock and the sounds of raucous goings-on inside the building immediately behind.

<How long do we have to wait here?> Modra asked.

<Until Grysta comes and gets us out of here or until four, I suppose,> he replied.

<Yeah? Better pray for Grysta, then, priest. How will we know when it’s four o’clock? I can’t get anything but a muddled mess while we’re stuck in this thing, and I sure don’t have a watch on.>

<We’re doomed!> he groaned. <I’m still a total creature of habit beat down until me brains are mush! We put the fate of the whole damned galaxy in the hands of Grysta! And, God knows, nothin’ ever works out if you have to depend on Grysta!>

After an hour or so it certainly seemed like Jimmy was right. Modra was still freezing to death and by now looking around and hoping that someone, even an insect or animal, would come along and break the barrier. The trouble was, on this rock-and-plastic-coated world, there wasn’t anything native.

The music and noise abated, and it sounded like the joint was closing down. Suddenly the door opened and a syn came out. It looked like Grysta, but her furry lower half and long hair were a passionate pink in color while her humanoid upper half was chocolate brown.

She looked around, frowning, “Hey! You guys!” she called in a loud whisper. “You here?”

“Grysta?” Jimmy called, stunned.

“Oh, there you are. Be down in a moment if I can figure out how to get off this thing. Let’s see . . . ”

“Grysta, how’d you get those colors?” Jimmy asked her.

“Neat, huh? Oof! I’m down, if I didn’t chip a hoof or somethin’. They got all sorts of dyes and shit like that up there in back. Seems all the syns in this troupe are yellow, so they just dye ’em for variety. The hairdo worked real good, but the skin dyes didn’t do much for blue skin, so I had to use the one color that covered. I figured if anything got screwed up they’d be lookin’ for a blue syn named Molly, so I disguised myself.”

“But what took you so long?” Modra asked.

“Oh, sorry, but it was Jimmy’s idea to be here. Syns are like property, right? Like robot dolls or somethin’. So, nobody counted, and I mixed right in, and it was kind’a fun, too. But when I made to sneak off after, this big guy caught me and before I knew it he was slappin’ me around and threatenin’ me and sayin’ he was gonna beat me in front of the others and all that. Then he said he’d do that unless I obeyed and went with the others, so, like, I couldn’t blow my cover, right? I did it. God, those girls are duuumb! They make Molly seem like Captain Chin. So . . . ”

“Grysta,” Modra said exasperatedly.

“ . . . Anyway, I tried to sneak out a back door and them dumb broads actually yelled that I was doin’ it! So this guy comes in and catches me, and yanks me outta there and down this hall, see . . . ”

Grysta! Break the damned pentagram!” Modra snapped.

“Oh! Yeah!” A hoof came out and crossed the line and there was a very brief crackling sound and they knew they were synced once more.

Modra sank to the ground in blessed relief. “Make a note. Next pentagrams, room enough to sit!

“And a John,” Jimmy added. “Back in a moment.”

“Well, anyway,” Grysta went on, “he yanks me into this room and I see he’s got like manacles and shit and he’s gonna chain me up and there’s this whip thing that crackles, and I see what’s gonna happen, so when he throws me against the wall I see this heavy jug that’s there, and when he’s turned to get the chains I picked up the jug and went over to him and brought it down with all my might on his head. It broke into pieces.”

“You knocked him out?” Modra asked, relieved and fascinated.

“That was the crazy part. He just stood straight up for a moment and looked real confused, like, and then he said, same as you or me, ‘That’s odd. We never put that in the programming!’ And then he falls over cold.”

Jimmy came back. “I’m going to have to practice pissing in the buff this way,” he said ruefully. “I don’t know how you girls do it.”

“Squat and practice,” Modra responded, then looked at Grysta. “I wish we’d thought to dress for the night weather, though. I don’t remember it ever being this chilly here. Always a fairly controlled temperature.”

“Yeah, one of the guys in the joint said somethin’ like that, too,” Grysta told her. “Said the official word was that they were doin’ it to cut down on loiterers and stuff.”

“Sounds like they’re trying a subtle way of keeping the streets clear at night,” Jimmy guessed. “They’re worried, all right, but they can’t shut this world down without shutting down the Exchange itself.”

“So how’d you guys make out?” Grysta asked. “You’re here and not happy, so I guess not so hot.”

“That’s a good way of putting it,” Modra acknowledged. “There is hope, but not much. And not a really good chance of us getting off this dirtball alive, either. Right now they think we’re Quintara agents.”

“That’s just great,” Grysta grumped. “I can’t be my old self ’cause that lumps me with you, but if I stay like this, when that guy comes to and calls the cops I’m dead meat. If he wakes up. Course, I dunno if he’s gonna want to hang around too much, neither.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Oh, they hauled off a few nut cases earlier tonight. Said we looked like devils. Got a bunch of folks real stirred up. That’s why they closed early. I don’t look like no Quintara!”

“To somebody who never saw the real thing, you do,” Jimmy told her. “Horns on the head, cloven hooves, animal-like lower body. I suspect somebody who either wasn’t a Terran or wasn’t too good in his memory or research was going for some kind of look out of ancient Old Earth mythology and kind of blended the nymphs with the satyrs.”

“I hate to mention this,” Grysta commented, “but shouldn’t we get a move on here? If that guy wakes up he’s gonna be murder on pink syns!”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry much about him,” Modra told her, “so long as you didn’t really kill him. Then this place will be crawling with cymols.”

At that moment, the back door opened with a crash and a big, burly man came out with an electric whip in one hand and sidearm in the other and he looked ready to murder anybody who got in his way. He spotted them before they could even move back, and Jimmy had an odd sense of deja vu. This time, however, he didn’t have to fight.

“Who the blazes are you?” the man roared menacingly.

Jimmy looked at him and projected an image. “We are three Terran sailors and we’re drunk and we’re bigger and meaner than you are,” he responded.

The man froze for a minute, looking confused. Then he said, “Any of you men see a pink and brown syn come out here?”

Grysta got the idea. “Not out here, and we been here the past half hour. Why don’t you go back and count your little devils and see if she isn’t still in there?”

He seemed very disoriented. “Yeah, okay. I’ll do that,” he responded, and started to go back in, all the anger seeming to have drained out of him.

“Wait a minute!” Modra called. “Do you have a watch?”

He looked a bit dazed. “Yeah. Sure. Here.” He took the watch off his wrist and handed it down to her.

“Thank you,” she responded. “You can go back in now.”

“You’re welcome,” he replied, then got up and went back inside.

“Not too difficult after all,” Jimmy commented. “He’s going to go back and count them and they’ll all be there and none will be the one he remembered. He’ll finally conclude that he fell, hit his head, and dreamed her up. You might not officially exist, Grysta, but at least there won’t be any missing syn reported.”

Grysta shook her head in wonder. “That’s kind’a neat. We sure could’a used that back in the starvation days.”

“Fat lot of good it’d done me then,” Jimmy said grumpily. “Still, I’d trade this all-band power set for those days right now.”

“I wish we’d thought of some food, too,” Modra grumped. “I’m starved, and who knows when’s the next meal?” She signed. “What a day! I find my husband’s annulled our marriage due to cold feet and family pressure and is living with a stacked brown beauty with air for brains, then I find out I’m pregnant, then I’m declared an enemy of my own nation, and now I’m stuck here, cold and broke, in a back alley without even a piece of candy.”

“Holy cats! You’re what!” Grysta exclaimed.

“Oh yeah. Didn’t tell you, did I?”

Whose?

“You got me. I didn’t go through the full battery. Just the news was enough. Probably Josef’s, considering the odds. It doesn’t matter anyway. The odds this kid will ever see daylight are pretty slim.”

Jimmy took the watch and looked at it. “Well, if the time on this thing is right, we’ve got another two hours to find out.”

“What happens to us if they turn you down?” Grysta asked.

“We’ll try and get off, figure out another way,” Modra replied. “My dear ex generously gave me sole ownership of Widowmaker free and clear if I didn’t raise a fuss, although they’re sure to have the place staked out and poor Tran’s probably had his brains put through a blender. But the odds are pretty slim if they do turn us down, for us, for everything.”


It was a long, depressing wait.

The area of the Exchange had been cordoned off by the time they reappeared, at very close to the appointed hour. The troopers were still there, reinforced with new ones, and so was the cymol cop, although this time she had a large briefcase-sized box with her and she’d removed her wig and run the cymol umbilical from her connector to the box.

Modra stared at the cymol. “Well?”

“I am connected to the Guardians. You may speak to them through me,” the cop said.

“That’s not good enough. We need a consultation on a level even we do not understand,” Modra told her.

“Direct consultation is not possible. It is not simply a matter of ‘will not,’ it is physically impossible.”

“Others work through us,” Modra told her. “They can work through you. The connection is all that matters.”

“Then drop your protection and come to me,” the cymol said.

Jimmy shook his head. “No, we’re not fools. Even if we totally trusted you and your masters, you have a lot of very nervous soldiers here and they are not cymols and all they’ve been told is that we’re dangerous enemies. You and I know we wouldn’t survive to reach you no matter what the orders.”

“Then we are at an impasse. You have little to bargain with yourselves. It is only a matter of time until you are hunted down. You can’t buy anything, you can’t use any service on this planet without registering that transaction with the central computers. Anyone in a city this large can hide for a day, perhaps two, but we will get you.”

“There is another way,” he said.

“We are listening.”

“Get a marker or a piece of chalk. Draw the design around yourself and your interface as we direct. We will meet on protected ground.”

“That is not acceptable. Such a medium is obviously out of phase with the space-time continuum.”

“You couldn’t keep contact in that medium?”

“We could, but it would expose us to you without protection.”

Jimmy smiled grimly. “It would also expose us to a fully armed and trained cymol. We would be literally at your mercy, having only eliminated accidents. Your masters surely cannot fear contact with equals. Even if we were Quintara-controlled, which we are not, no one could get the upper hand. And if your masters detected a presence too strong for their liking, they could always break contact before it could do any harm.”

She stiffened for a second. “Analysis does indicate that in such a situation you would be far more at risk than they,” she admitted. “What is to keep me from killing you both once we are in phase?”

“You didn’t kill us when we landed,” Modra pointed out.

“We wanted to find out where you would go and who you would see first,” the cymol informed them. “There was no foreseeable danger we could not contain.”

“There is such a danger!” Jimmy snapped. “He’s called Satan, or the Engineer, or Old Nick or Scratch or a million other names! He’s here, in our galaxy, eating away at us, destroying the Three Empires! You want to know why we will expose ourselves to you now? Faith. Nothing more. Faith in the enemies of this dark one. Faith in one of the races who combined with two others to defeat this enemy before! We give you our faith. You must give us the same!”

Another freeze and pause, and then the cop said, “Very well. I will do as you ask.”

Both Modra and Jimmy breathed out silent sighs of relief.

The cymol left, and it apparently took several minutes to find something to draw with. She came back with a small mechanical device and placed it on the smooth surface of the plaza. It whined a bit, then began to draw a perfectly straight line, then another upward.

“Make it big enough for all three of us to sit!” Modra called.

The device, apparently used to make temporary markings for traffic control and repairs, completed a perfect, and reasonably large, pentagram. Modra thought that it must have looked stupid as hell to the onlookers; it still seemed ridiculous to her. Anybody could draw a pentagram; it was one of those shapes found all over the place as it was. There was nothing mystical or magical about it—unless you could activate it and approach from an angle not in the normal three dimensions.

“It is done. Now what?” the cymol asked.

The two stared at the fresh pentagram and were instantly inside it, with the cymol. There was a lot of tension on the part of the pair, now literally exposed to harm. There was nothing to stop the cymol now from taking them both out.

“I warn you both that this box contains not only communications and supplementary power for me, but also an extremely powerful explosive device,” the cymol warned them. “If the slightest thing goes wrong, it will explode. I cannot control it in any way, so taking me over will result only in the explosive detonating. We shall be the sole judge of anything going wrong.”

<Tobrush! Tobrush! Are you ready?>

<The barrier is affecting straight line communications. They are going to try and jam us,> the Mycohl warned. <If we can link, however, I do not believe they can succeed. Do it now! Quickly!>

Jimmy’s and Modra’s minds linked tight, and they concentrated on the point of connection between the cymol’s head and the umbilical.


There was a sudden rushing and crackling in their minds, as if a radio signal too distant to pull in was nonetheless trying valiantly to come through. They felt Tobrush take the signal and amplify it through direct link with them so as to bypass as much of the blockage as possible . . . 

They were through! Connection!

The square, the soldiers, the city vanished, but in its place was simply a dizzying stream of concepts, shapes, and forms as incomprehensible to them as The Ship had been. But, in the midst of the chaos, a tiny corner of their minds saw the Guardians for what they were, and where they were.

An enormous sphere of silicon, impossibly pure, unimaginably perfect, each crystal linked and interlinked in ways too many and too varied to understand. Covered, protected, sheltered, a life form like no other known.

The Guardians and the capital were one! The whole planet was the Guardians! And the cymol “brains” were but pieces of themselves!

Now the communal force of the Mycohl, a great organic computer, met and spoke with the mass that was both plural and singular, the Guardians.

<He who was expelled is come again. He must be expelled again.>

<Our dominions perish before his darkness. Even now he seeks to break this contact once he can divine it.>

<We two can hold him, but we cannot expel him.>

<What is the means by which he may be expelled?>

<That data is protected, even from our core. The linkage is not complete. Only the one not here may break the seals.>

<How may the Great Gathering be formed?>

<You must be the interlocutor, as before. These two have served well. They will serve us. We could not believe that a lower race could successfully undergo the Trial. None but Mycohl before had gone to Great Dis. How was it possible?>

<They were born of Quintara before the mutiny spread. They were shaped by Mycohl will and strength to survive no matter what. As the Four had the same Father, so did that Father contest for them. Their conflicting natures, Mutineers and Crew, are equal in the average. They walk both paths, choosing the one that profits their race. Their path is still unsettled, yet they inherit, if they prove they deserve it. Otherwise, the project is abandoned.>

<The Mizlaplan is dispersed and divided, making easy targets. The Guardians of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are in one place, and if that place goes, so do they. The Mycohl, likewise, is rife for genocide; even if some individuals survive, the Knowledge they keep would be lost.>

<Yes, but the new ones number more than thirty trillion now. Even if most choose darkness, there is a substantial pool.>

<As the Father once acted through us, we must now act through them.>

<The Mizlaplan must be brought in. The passwords must be given. The data must be made complete.>

<But will the Mizlaplan have faith to do what must be done?>

<The five who were chosen must be assembled. A Grand Gathering must be convened.>

<Where?>

<In the Mycohl. At the closest possible point to the penetration. Then the Five shall become the Three.>


Both Modra and Jimmy saw a tremendous brightness, like a great comet, coming straight for them, too fast and overwhelming to escape. It exploded over them, and both felt sharp pains in the front of their skulls.

The connection was broken.

Both Modra and Jimmy shook their heads and steadied one another.

“I don’t think I can take much more of these alien viewpoints,” Modra managed after a bit.

“Yes, but it’s done!” Jimmy almost shouted. “We did it! And they let us listen in!”

“For all the good it did,” she noted. “All I got was that we have to reassemble the team in the place most likely to kill us while these jokers use us as their tools. I’m not even sure I like that ‘five becoming the three’ bit. Did it mean we five would represent them, or that two of us are gonna die?”

“The former—I hope. Say! What’s that on your forehead? Right at the hairline?” He reached up to the top of her brow and touched, then looked at his finger. “Blood.”

“You, too,” she told him. “That’s what hurt so much at the end. What the hell did we get shot with?”

“It will heal quickly,” the cymol cop told them.

“What is it?” Modra asked. “What did you do to us?”

“A small part, very small, of the Guardians is now within you. It will integrate itself into your systems and you will not know it is there after.”

Modra felt momentary panic. “It’s making us cymols!

“You are cymol, but not like me. You remain yourselves. But what you see, so will the Guardians if they will it. What you think and feel, they will know. They cannot program and cannot direct you, but they will monitor you, and use this as a way of contact with others.”

“Great!” Modra sighed. “Now I’ve got a mind-link with a whole damned planet! And one-way, too. They get their jollies and I get sand in my brain. This is gonna do wonders for my future love life.”

Jimmy had other things on his mind. “They must send in the fleet. They must stop the pogroms.”

“Some of the fleet will be dispatched for that purpose, but it is not as easy as it sounds,” the cymol told them. “Many Terran groups are indeed now working for the enemy. We dare not arm them, but the prejudices being fanned among the other races will not cease. We will now make an honest effort to control it, though.”

“Well, that’s something,” Jimmy replied. “All right, assuming they’ve given you new instructions through that thing, what’s next?”

“Orders are even now being given rescinding the warrants out on you. All cymols will receive an impulse to connect and will have that information by daylight. As there is no mind-link of any sort with the Mizlaplan, they must be contacted. In the meantime we must prepare to get to the Mycohl. The physical presence of all five Terrans is required. I do not know why.”

“We?” Jimmy prompted.

“I am to go with you. The Guardians can receive but not transmit new instructions to you. I now have sufficient information to effect what must be done when it needs doing. I am their representative, as your Mycohl is theirs.”

“We need to collect Grysta,” Modra reminded him,” and keep from being shot until everybody gets the word.”

Jimmy snapped his fingers. “Grysta! Yes, I’d actually managed to forget her for the first time in my life. But do we have to hide in the shadows until the all-clear?”

“I am to accompany you at all times until my functions are completed,” the cymol told them. “I can ensure protection.”

“What about the hotel?” Modra suggested. “Your people probably made a mess but it’s still better than here, and it’s a place to lie low until the word gets out. We might be able to get back there if they didn’t screw up the pentagram. First we’ll return to Grysta and tell her what’s happened.”

“If you give me the location I will see that she gets to the hotel,” the cymol told them. “My name is Greta Thune.”

They nodded and moved back to the original pentagram on the square. “To get out, just have somebody step over the lines!” Modra called to the cymol, stuck in the middle. She sighed. “Well, that’s that. The Guardians are in, the Mycohl are in. Now the whole game’s up to Krisha and Gun Roh Chin.”


It was good to be on the bridge of Widowmaker again, even if it did seem lonely. Tris was gone, and the Durquist, too, and Trannon Kose had long given them up for dead and taken his share from the expedition and vanished where security forces couldn’t find him. A maintenance crew had taken her out on a minor run, but now she was back, and she was entirely Modra’s ship, empty or not.

“We’re coming up to the border,” she announced over the ship’s intercom. “I think you ought to get a look at this.”

Jimmy McCray, Greta Thune, and Grysta all came forward and stared at the screens.

Jimmy crossed himself. “A sea of blackness,” he breathed. “We’ll never get through that.

“Almost like somebody knows who we are and don’t wanna let us in,” Grysta commented. They’d tried to keep her from coming, bribing her with unlimited accounts and any luxuries she wanted, and telling her that she couldn’t come the final leg against the Quintara themselves, but she’d talked her way aboard anyway, as usual. It was hard to figure out her thinking and emotions; she was as independent as she could be, and Jimmy had nothing she wanted that he could give her, yet, somehow, she was still attached to him.

“Minor unformed material,” Thune commented.

“You have no idea how nasty that stuff can be,” Jimmy told her.

“Give me the con and kneel on either side of me,” she instructed. “Open your link fully to your Mycohl and stand by.”

It seemed a bizarre request, but in a universe where people popped in and out of chalk-drawn pentagrams it wasn’t that odd.

Command helmet on, Greta hooked up her interface to the main ship’s computers, modified long ago to contain much more data and instructions than a mere portable unit can carry, not for her but for Tris, then placed one hand over Jimmy’s forehead near the small pinpoint in his skull and the other over the same area on Modra’s head.

There was a sudden rush and a surge of energy, comet-like, moved from the ship and maintained a distance of about one kilometer ahead. The ship moved toward the blackness, the surge maintaining its forward distance, and then the energy shield struck the blackness head-on.

It was as if the blackness had suddenly touched something white hot and intolerable. It wasted not a second in parting away from the surge, retreating with such blinding speed that it looked as if a path were being dissolved out of it.

The stuff was thick and ominous, but the surge seemed like poison to it, and it made no effort to close, leaving a path through which Widowmaker could follow. Still, it took some time, as it seemed as if the stuff would never end. Finally, though, they broke into open space beyond, and as soon as a little distance was put between them and the border wall, Thune’s hands came off their foreheads. It had the eerie sensation of something being unplugged from their heads.

“What was that?” Modra asked. “We sure could have used whatever it was a week or two ago!”

That sort of material was used in fine tuning the universe,” the cymol explained. “It is not the exclusive province of the Quintara, nor can it stand against the combination of powers of two equally high races. We are not defenseless, you see. We have power, too.”

Jimmy McCray got up and went back to a couch, feeling a headache coming on. “Tell me,” he said as he flopped down, “did you know all that when you first came to talk with us?”

“I did not know all that until I needed to know it,” the cymol replied. “I knew the procedure, but just what it would do and how I only found out when we did it. The Guardians themselves had only partial records and did not fully appreciate what was going on until the mind-link with the Mycohl. In many ways, they knew more than we did until contact opened up old blocked regions. Data unused for as short a period as three or four centuries is often stored that way to maintain maximum efficiency.”

Jimmy was fascinated. “You mean—they’d forgotten about the Quintara? Is that why they weren’t alarmed when the station was discovered?”

“Nothing is forgotten, but since the Guardians allowed the capital to be constructed on their surface they have had limited memory expansion capabilities. After a thousand years of explorations and no reports, the odds of the information being of value were calculated against other processing needs and it was decided that the data could be considered extraneous.”

“A computer,” Jimmy mumbled. Somehow it figured. Only a computer could come up with a system like the Exchange.

“They were a primary data resource bank in experimental times, “ Thune told him. “So long as it had programming and maintenance from Above, their resources were effectively unlimited. After the decision to abandon and maintain the status of the universe, all such were left on their own. What they created and maintained is based on the highest degree of science and mathematical probability consistent with their programming.”

“A statistical curve,” Jimmy sighed. “Half above the line, half below. Ten percent on top, ten percent on the bottom. And the devil with the worlds too poor or too needing of aid to produce anything but misery. They were a minority. A statistical necessity. Jesus Christ!”

The cymol was oblivious to his outrage. “You have an excellent grasp of the system. Expansion, of course, is the safety valve, and the Exchange its mechanism. That which exists is placed and ordered on the curve. Brokered new worlds and settlements relieve tensions and social disturbances. If you have an idea of how to revolutionize society, raise the money, buy a world, and try it. No matter how it works out, it is then placed on the curve and the whole adjusted. Its degree of innovation through rewarding same and its total of sentient beings over the fiftieth percentile is the highest of the Three Empires, proving its worth. The Mycohl are merely the Quintara in miniature, a pale shadow, in which ten percent rule ninety. The Mizlaplan maintains as close to a zero social curve as possible but does so at the cost of innovation and creating a state maintained by thought police whose practical technological levels are artificially low.”

“I’m not arguing the value of the three systems,” he grumbled. In point of fact, he thought they all stunk.

“I’ve known some of the Mizlaplanians quite well,” Modra noted, her own headache subsiding, “and they don’t seem like glassy-eyed nature people to me.”

“Church people and spacers. The only two groups essential to controlling the rest and making it work. Just remember that the Church people are all neutered and subject to Mizlaplanian mind control. It is a system based upon the nature of the Mizlaplanians, who are unable to even feed themselves on their own and depend on unquestioning, worshipful slaves they can make as needed to do just about anything.”

A computer, a disease, and a race of super-hypnos, Jimmy thought. Masters of the known universe!

No wonder things were so screwed up. Even the Quintara had their weakness. Respecting only power, they had to be coerced into doing anything together.

If all four were aspects of their creator’s image, he reflected, that Ship was never going to get anywhere at all.

That was perilously close to blasphemy and it disturbed him to think it. No, he finally decided, not in their image—tools, utilities for the Creator. Tools that were built to be used left in the yard to rust when the work was done. Waiting for somebody else to pick ’em up and use them if they needed, but not tools that could use themselves.

And that, he realized, was the key. They, five Terrans, were supposed to use the tools this time. The race on the move. The race with the big future. The race that could wind up ruling at least the entire galaxy someday. The race with a more than merely survivalist stake in the outcome of this battle.

Here are the tools,” the Executive Officer as much as said. “Pick them up, put them together, and use them to take what’s yours. And, oh, yes, we lost the instruction manual.

In nine more days they would reach the rendezvous point.



previous | Table of Contents | next