IT WAS TYPICAL OF THE INSANE LOGIC THEY HAD been experiencing up to this point that they had entered in a cave and descended, yet emerged from it near the top of a hill, looking out over a landscape that was as breathtaking as it was bizarre.
It was a green place; almost every shade of green was represented in the grasses, trees, and shrubs that covered the land to the horizon, and while the exact taxonomy of the plants might have been unfamiliar, their basic shapes and forms seemed comfortably familiar.
What gave it its extremely alien feel was the sudden realization that, while the landscape was brightly lit, as if a day in springtime, there was no sun and no shadows—indeed, no sense of where the light source was coming from was present at all.
The sky in fact was dark, but, again, there was a strangeness even to its darkness, as if they were looking not at a night sky but rather up and out of some vast window, a single, flat pane that sloped down toward the horizon, and through which could be seen the brilliant colors and bright shapes of what might have been a galactic cluster.
<Beautiful,> Kalia thought. <Beautiful but strange.>
<Manicured,> Josef thought, taking in the whole scene.
<Eh? What’s that?> Tobrush asked him.
“Manicured,” he said aloud. “Like the formal gardens of some great Lord. Even the trees are shaped, deliberately so, if you just look at them, and the shrubs and hedges are nicely trimmed. All but that first, flat, featureless world we entered has been a dynamic landscape left to develop according to its nature. This is artificial and well maintained, not left over the centuries to go wild. I wonder how it is maintained, and by who?”
“I have been wondering all along,” the Julki commented, “whether these places are always here or are being created expressly for us. If we assume a race, or races, as advanced over us as we are over the microbe, almost anything they can routinely do would seem like magic to us, as what we do is magic to lesser cultures.”
“I just had an odd thought,” Josef commented, still staring at the beauty before them. “For all their mental prowess, these Quintara seem very much in the mainstream of life as we know it. Possibly one cut above us, as are our masters the Mycohl, or the Guardians of the Exchange, or whatever the Holy Horrors call their angels, but, in most ways, they don’t even seem that far above us. Certainly not supernatural. You noticed, I assume, that the pair back there were projections?”
“Yes, it seemed so,” Tobrush agreed. “Oh, I see your point. Certainly not the kind of race and culture to have evolved the kind of power we’ve been seeing.”
Josef nodded. “Almost as if they were a people who blundered, perhaps quite by accident, into someone else’s master control room, and who, through trial and error and pushing buttons, figured out, somehow, how to operate the thing without actually understanding how it worked. Not gods, but, intoxicated by the power, playing gods.”
“Indeed. And, if that’s so, then where is the control room?”
Josef pointed at the horizon over to the left of them, where mere was a distinct glow against the darkness. “The city,” he replied. “The city seen in the mass hallucination or whatever it was back in the crystal chamber. How was it put to us? ‘At the center of everything and on the edge of nothing.’ ”
“Something like that. Well, the only thing we gain by standing by is the likelihood that the Exchange group will come in behind us. I think we’d better go down there.”
Josef nodded. “Still, they promised us a level playing field here.”
“I’ll put no stock in their promises,” Tobrush maintained. “They’ve lied right along, I think. Perhaps, by this point, they’re even lying to themselves.”
Josef pointed to the vastness of the garden. “You notice the straight lines on the hedgerows? They form patterns, which grow increasingly complex and dense as you go in.”
“A maze, perhaps?” the Julki suggested. “The sort of thing one sets up in animal experiments?”
Josef sighed. “Usually they’re decorative when they’re in a formal garden, but I have the uneasy feeling that you might be right. Still, as you say, there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by staying here. Let’s go down.”
The grassy hillside ended in a line of neatly trimmed and well-spaced trees.
“There is no path,” Kalia noted. “No sign this time of which way to go.”
Josef looked behind them at the way they’d come. “Tobrush, if you were a little lighter and less bulky there’d be no way they could find out where we enter this thing. As it is, that matted grass you leave gives a perfect trail.”
“Then we will give them several,” the Julki told him, and set back out up the hill. Partway up, Tobrush turned and came down to the trees twenty or thirty meters from them. Hurrying, the path was again retraced and, in a matter of minutes, there were at least six possibilities, ending with a center trail. They walked over to the Julki, who said, “Now let them choose.”
Josef thought a moment. “If I were tracking them, I’d be consistent and take the leftmost trail. We’ll go in here. It may not make any difference in the long run, but it’ll give us some breathing room.”
They walked into the forest, and after about a hundred and fifty meters the trees and layout changed. “I hear a stream over that way,” Kalia said, pointing a bit to the left. “And, look! These are fruit trees of some kind! See?”
The trees were definitely arranged as a sort of grove, and the fruit, while unfamiliar and oddly shaped, looked quite similar to tropical fruits he and Kalia, at least, had known.
“Do you think they’re safe to eat?” Josef wondered.
“As you keep saying, O Great Leader, what choice have we got?” she retorted, then jumped, grabbed a branch, and allowed gravity to bring it and her back down. Josef picked a few, and she let go. They were as large as a melon, but more shaped like squash, no two exactly alike, with thin skins of mixed yellow and pink.
Using his thumbnail, Josef scored one along the center and then broke it open. It was pulpy inside, a pale pink citrus-like consistency surrounding a bright red core. He smelled it, and it smelled sweet, almost perfumy.
Kalia took half a fruit and then said, “Well, I will trust them,” and started digging out the inside and eating it. <Incredibly sweet, almost like liquid sugar,> she thought and continued on.
“If it is that high in sugar, it might also serve for me,” Tobrush commented, shooting tendrils up to a nearby tree and bringing one of the fruits down to it, then shoving it whole into a cavity below its eyes.
<What the hell,> Josef thought, staring at his half. <I expected to be dead by now anyway.> He ate some of the pulp, hesitantly at first, then continued on when he saw that he wasn’t getting sudden nausea.
It was much too sweet for his taste, almost like chewy syrup, but it seemed quite filling.
“I wish I had my instruments here,” Tobrush commented. “I believe there is some sort of natural fermentation inside the fruit. I can tell that there is some alcoholic content.”
Neither Josef nor Kalia could taste anything alcoholic about it, but the sweetness so overwhelmed everything else it might well have been true. After two or three of them, though, Kalia, at least, began to feel light-headed and slightly dizzy. “Woo! They got a littte kick to ’em!” she exclaimed. “I think I better stop.”
“Let’s find that stream,” Josef suggested, and they walked toward the sound of gurgling water.
The stream wasn’t very cold, but it was clear and, again, looked safe, and appeared to be no more than a meter deep at its worst. Josef bent down and cupped his hands and drank some of the water, trying to get the sweetness out of his mouth, while Kalia went into the water and splashed around for a bit, then lay down in the deepest part and totally immersed herself. Getting back up, she seemed pleased. “First bath I’ve had in ages,” she told nobody in particular.
Josef watched her, tempted to join in, while Tobrush rolled down the side of the creek about ten meters, curious about something that might or might not be there. “Josef! Come up here!” the Julki called at last.
“What’s the problem, Tobrush?” he called, walking slowly to join the creature.
“Tracks. I originally thought it was where something was dragged, but now I see it’s a large, heavy body that passed. The tracks look familiar?”
Josef saw six heavy but irregular depressions, three on each side, making a progression to and into the stream. “Desreth! Somehow I’d almost forgotten about Desreth.” He turned and looked across the stream. “And there! You can see where it came out of the water.” He straightened up and called to Kalia. “C’mon, Kalia! We’re going to find Desreth!”
She came down to them still in the water, splashing it like a little kid at a picnic. “Best I felt since that witch bitch burned me!” she enthused. “Now, what’s this about old Metal Pants?”
They waded into the water, came up on the other side, and proceeded on into the trees. These, too, were in organized groves. The shorter, thicker ones on the left had banana-like stalks of a blue fruit, and the ones starting just beyond to their right were taller and ramrod straight and had fruit something like violet-colored apples.
“Have you noticed something odd about this garden?” Tobrush asked as they followed the tracks of the Corithian. “Other than the obvious, I mean?”
“Like what?” Josef responded.
“No insects or anything obviously in the role of insect, and no wind. No clouds, either, to give them steady water. It is deathly still and quiet here, more like a greenhouse than a true garden. If these plants pollinate in any one of the eleven known ways other than budding, it’s done artificially.”
Josef nodded, understanding the point at once. Somewhere around here, someone, or something, was the gardener.
The Corithian’s tracks faded in and out, but, since they knew just what to look for, it wasn’t difficult to follow the trail, nor, they suspected, was it intended to be. The one Mycohlian the others in back of them still didn’t want to find was Desreth, but to the Mycohlians he represented as much as all their e-suits and pistols put together.
The groves, or orchards, or whatever they were, ended abruptly after a while, and the land opened into a broad meadow perhaps two kilometers across, carpeted with thick blue-green grass interspersed with thousands of multicolored flowers. On the other side, forming an effective wall four to five meters tall, was the beginning of the maze.
<I can’t explain, but there’s something I don’t like about this area,> Kalia said in the new nonverbal way, as if she was afraid someone, or something, else might overhear. <It’s wide open for much too big an area. If we got caught in the middle of it, there ‘d be no place to run.>
The others felt it, too, but it was not merely the openness of the meadow but something else, something indefinable.
But the tracks went straight ahead, and, after giving the area a very close going-over, they started out as well, but spread out, in spite of the fact that they really had nothing to hide behind, nothing to fight with unless Josef wanted to throw his pack at whatever it was, and nowhere to run.
About halfway across, they spotted a low, dull, coppery form standing on the field. “Desreth!” Josef yelled in his best, booming command voice. “Desreth—wait! It’s us!”
They began to run toward the Corithian, who just seemed to stand there and wait for them to come. Kalia reached Desreth first, and stopped, standing a bit off, just staring. Josef and Tobrush both backed off and slowed as they joined her.
The Corithian looked frozen, but, more important, there were black marks all over as if it had been in some kind of fire, although what sort of fire could harm Desreth?
“Is it—dead?” Kalia asked nervously. Up until now she had simply never thought that a Corithian could die, short of being melted down by concentrated energy fire.
Tobrush circled slowly around the still form, making a thorough visual check. On the opposite side he spotted a slim, sharp tentacle emerging from the Corithian’s body. It, too, was still, but Desreth had used it, perhaps with its last tiny bit of energy and will, to write something in the ground in the ideographic language of the Empire.
<Clouds?> Josef read, stooping. He looked up at the black roof of the place through which, dully, shone the brilliance of the star field. “What clouds?”
Kalia, too, scanned the sky, and suddenly she pointed to the distance to her left and said, “Maybe that’s what Desreth meant!”
The other two turned and saw a small, white fluffy cloud in the distance. Suddenly, it moved—not as a cloud moved, but more like some sort of aircraft. No, that wasn’t right, either. No aircraft ever sped up and then came to a sudden, complete stop like that cloud was doing, nor made right-angle turns at full speed.
<I don’t know about you two,> Kalia sent, <but in about one second I’m gonna run like hell!>
“Scatter!” Josef shouted, and all three began making for the hedge, which was still a good kilometer away, in a widening pattern so that none of them were close enough to be taken with a single shot.
The cloud seemed to sense them and suddenly rushed to their position, stopped instantly, and its bottom layer began to darken, while the center of the darkness took on a bright glow.
Suddenly a bolt of white-hot lightning shot from it and struck the ground just behind Josef, who began to run in a zigzag pattern. About ten seconds after the first bolt, a second shot out, this time barely missing him, filling the air with thunder and the crackle of pure energy.
<Josef! The pack! Drop the pack and keep running! Drop it now!> Tobrush sent frantically.
Josef didn’t stop to question. He flung the pack out and immediately started running away from it, still zigzagging. A third bolt shot out and struck the pack before it had hit the ground, enveloping it in a blue-white field of energy that crackled and hissed, and then the entire thing was a ball of superheated flame.
The cloud then started off, coming right over Josef, who slipped and fell, then lay there, bracing for the end.
The cloud kept going, its underside already becoming once again a nice, even, fluffy white. After a moment, he watched it go, turn, and head out over the orchards. It darkened again, but without the glow, and they saw rain begin falling from it as it moved slowly in a preordained pattern.
Josef was shaken, but he got up and walked as close as he dared to the pack. The energy bolt that had struck it was more powerful than any lightning he’d ever seen; the thing was literally melted into a blackened shape that bore no clue as to what it had been.
He allowed himself a big sigh of relief. <When they say nothing, they mean it, don’t they?>
<The Mizlaplanian might well have done us a favor back in the cave,> Tobrush noted. <How would you like to be wearing an e-suit out here? And I think we all would have if we’d still had them.>
<The demons told the truth,> Kalia noted with some satisfaction. <They said we’d all be even in here, and I think we will be. We might even have some barbecued enemies if we’re lucky.>
Josef nodded, still shaken. <But why Desreth?>
<The thing is obviously a gardening tool, a robot of some sort, doing double duty as a security guard,> Tobrush guessed. <I would suspect that it is programmed to eliminate all non-living things. Apparently, for some reason, Corithians do not meet its predetermined definitions for same.>
Trying to get himself back together, Josef said, “Well, let’s see if we can find an opening in that hedge wall.”
“Did you hear that?”
“I—I think so, Durquist,” Modra responded. “I got a picture of some kind of overhead thing shooting at somebody’s suit pack. That and a lot of fear and confusion. Much of the rest were words I couldn’t understand, but the emotions came through with the mind-pictures.”
The Durquist surveyed the horizon. “There is a cloud over there, acting very unnaturally. It appears to be watering something. Let’s get into the trees in a hurry. I have no rational basis for it, but something tells me that whatever else it does, it won’t do it in the trees.”
“Don’t scan it!” Modra ordered. “If it’s hostile, we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”
They didn’t even try to figure out which path the Mycohlians had taken; they wanted to get under some kind of protection and fast.
“I thought I saw another one of the things coming in slowly from the left, towards the glow,” the Durquist noted. “This may be tricky.”
Molly was oblivious to both the telepathically intercepted messages, which she was incapable of receiving, and of the potential danger the clouds represented. “Boss syns say give Jimmy bath,” she noted. “Molly not see where.”
“Huh? I hear water or something over that way,” Modra said, snapping back a bit to reality.
They saw the fruit groves and orchards but did not immediately stop for them; they still had food synthetics in their suits and they weren’t sure what would happen if the aerial watering can up there didn’t like snackers. That brought them rather quickly to the stream, which Molly was convinced was what the demons had meant. She got Jimmy out of his suit and then removed hers as well, and took him gently out into the water.
Modra watched her and said, “You know, sometimes I almost envy her. She’s like a little child who can’t grow up, no matter what that body’s for, and everything’s so simple to her. She doesn’t seem to have any ego and just about no idea what’s going on, yet she’s devoted and just wants to help.
“No matter what medicinal properties are in that very ordinary-looking water, she doesn’t even seem to realize that any modern medical patch is going to give a wound as much of a seal as a suit. What she’s doing is meaningless, except in her simple way.”
But when she immersed Jimmy, face up, in the deepest part of the stream, his head suddenly came up and cried out, “Ouch! Damn that hurts!” Molly dutifully pushed him back under, showing her considerable strength. Empathically, all three of them felt at least some of that pain, but when he went under again it seemed to genuinely lessen.
Modra pointed. “Look! That’s the patch, floating downstream! It’s come off!”
“Must not have been put on right,” the Durquist said. “Still, it seems to be helping him.”
Modra nodded. “I think I’m gonna get out of this suit and take a dip in that stream myself. I feel like the filth of ages is upon me.”
“You think that’s wise?”
She shrugged. “If we could hear the Mycohl, mentally, anyway, then I can hear the Mizzies when they come through as well—if those demons let them through. That’ll be plenty of warning.”
“Suit yourself.”
She collapsed the suit and wriggled out of it, then walked, naked, into the stream, which, at its greatest depth, was only a bit above her waist. She headed immediately for Molly, if only to rescue Jimmy McCray.
“Molly! Enough! He has to breathe!”
As soon as the syn let go, Jimmy’s head came up, gasping and choking, and there was a sudden flood of thoughts, curses, and expletives the quality of which even Modra had never encountered before.
“All right! All right! No more, Molly!” he yelled, and sat up. Modra waded over to him.
“Let’s see your back, McCray,” she said.
He shook his head, frowned, and looked over at her. “Huh? Modra? How’d you get back?” His mind also added an automatic, typically male, and very positive analysis of her upper anatomy which, she realized, he didn’t know she could now hear.
“Long story. I’ll tell you later. Let’s see your back.”
He turned and she moved to look at it and gasped. The back still looked bad, with the cauterizing creating ugly and discolored bumps and scars, but the parasite’s three tendrils had shriveled to almost nothing and seemed in the process of dropping off him. There was no blood, though, and no raw wounds as she might have expected. Indeed, while it was ugly to look at, it appeared to be an old wound, perhaps months old or better.
<That must be one hell of a medical patch the Mizzles have,> the Durquist commented.
Jimmy McCray frowned. “What the devil? How’d he know? He’s way over there!” He had seen his own back through Modra’s eyes and felt her astonishment, something that was just now registering on him.
<I’d hoped not to tell you this right away, but whatever happened made almost all of us telepathic, and I do mean all of us. Everybody except Molly and Captain Chin of the Mizzies. It also appears to have turned everybody into empaths as well, and we’re not sure what else, so you’re not the only one out of a job.>
He sighed. <Will you open your mind to me? Just relax and let me dig a bit. I won’t peer into your private areas, I swear. It’s just the easiest and fastest way to bring me up to date, and the Durquist’s mind beyond the immediate conscious level is too bizarre to make much sense.>
<My mind is labyrinthine? You should have to bear the random thoughts of Terrans!>
<Uh, I think I’ve just been insulted,> Modra noted good-humoredly. <Still, all right. I’m new at this, so I couldn’t really resist much anyway.>
<Just settle down in this nice water and relax,> he told her. <Won’t take a minute.>
And it didn’t, although it was a very odd sensation, and somewhat dizzying, as memories flooded back through her mind and then just as quickly were back where they should have been. Legend always said that the last moment of your life was something like this, although he wasn’t going that far back—she thought. It wasn’t possible to keep track of the rapid flow.
Finally he nodded. “That’s it,” he told her. “That really helped. Thank you for your trust.”
She shrugged. “We’ve got the power, yes, but we really don’t have any solid control over it or know how to use it, just as your empathic abilities are going to be pretty unrestrained for a while. I have a feeling, though, that if I don’t learn how to control this mind-reading business and ever get back to the real universe, I’ll go nuts.”
“Many people do,” he told her. “And nobody’s sure about the rest of us, including us. It’s sort of like always being at a huge party where a hundred people are all speaking at the same time. You have to train yourself to tune out all the background noise, or, at least, keep it down to a dull roar you can ignore, while concentrating on the person you want to talk to. That’s not as easy as it sounds, but you have to master it before you can learn even the basics of blocking. Until you can block, you’re an open book to anyone, particularly ones like me with a lot of training and experience, who can ‘read’ you.”
She nodded. “That bothers me a little. It’s why the Durquist and I have continued to just speak normally when possible. It seems to focus things.”
It was, however, now apparent to her what a “block” felt like, at least. Although she could read Jimmy McCray’s thoughts, she could read only what he wanted or allowed her to read, and that wasn’t an awful lot more than if he were speaking aloud. He was still as much of a cipher as ever.
“All the pain’s out of my back and gut,” he told her, answering her earlier question. “It’s still in other places not so easy to heal.”
She felt the enormous sadness and sense of loss he was feeling, and it puzzled her. “I thought you’d sell your soul to be rid of her.”
He nodded. “I might well have, and yet, now that she’s gone, it’s as if I was married and my wife had suddenly died, somehow.”
“You married,” Molly pointed out. “You marry Molly!”
“That’s true, I did,” he responded. “And I don’t know how I’d feel if I lost you, too.” He switched to telepathy, mostly to spare Molly’s feelings.
<You see,> he told Modra, <I didn’t want Grysta, would never have consented to her, but, once she was there, and started takin’ on the kind of personality she did, she wasn’t just a pain in the back, as it were. She was—well, closer to me than anyone else could ever come. It’s rather bizarre because, well, I hated her control, we fought all the time, but she was, well, the closest friend I ever had in the world. My only friend for many years, in fact. And, the truth was, I wasn’t just a host to her, either. I could take out all my frustrations, my fears, my worst and blackest thoughts on her and she’d give as good as she got. In a way, it’s very odd. I wallowed so much in self-pity about her bein’ there, it never once occurred to me that she was as frustrated as I was, livin’ a life vicariously, as it were, but never directly. She was bright and inquisitive and she could only interact with anything and anyone secondhand. It was drivin’ her nuts, as it would you or me, and I was so self-absorbed I never even noticed!>
Modra looked at him, a serious expression on her face and perhaps the start of a tear in one eye. <I think, maybe, I know more about how you feel than you think.>
He felt suddenly very foolish. <I’m sorry. I’ll stop this, which does neither of us any good anyway. Remember, I never knew Tris—before.>
She smiled at him and then turned away and went a bit downstream, and, in spite of her face being out of his sight, he knew she was softly crying. He turned to Molly. “You want to help her? I’ll be all right now.”
“No,” Modra said aloud. “That’s all right. I think maybe those tears were months overdue.”
<Who’s that?>
The thought went through all three of them and galvanized them into sudden action.
“Saints preserve us! It’s the damned Mizzles!” Jimmy McCray shouted. “That telepath’s already put the block on, soon as she sensed us, but without Grysta to amplify, I can’t block much of you two any more!”
“Durquist!” Modra called. “Grab the suits and come across. No time to put them on now! We need to put some distance between ourselves and them!”
Using one point of his star to gather up the three suits, the Durquist started across as they all made for the opposite shore.
Krisha, leading the Mizlaplanians down the hill, got so excited that she allowed her own thoughts to get to McCray. Either that, Jimmy thought as he ran, or she was deliberately leaking the thoughts to keep the pressure on.
<We caught them not far from us, and all but one out of their suits!> she shouted. <Manya, stay here and see to His Holiness. Captain—if we hurry we can catch them before they can stop and dress and reactivate their suits! That makes it two to one!>
Gun Roh Chin had little against the Exchange people, but it didn’t matter. If the Mizlaplan wound up with only one gun and suit and the rest had none, then that put them in a superb bargaining position.
<Can’t we stop and get armed?> Modra called.
<They’re gaining!> Jimmy came back. <We need to find a place where the Durquist can cover us until we can change.>
Without warning, they broke out into the broad, vast, flower-filled meadow.
“Shit! This isn’t gonna do us any good at all!” McCray shouted. “Durquist! Give us our suits and we’ll try and get ’em on before they get here, slim a hope as that may be. Give us cover fire to keep ’em back!”
“Get in back of me!” the Durquist shouted back. Tossing the suits back into the field, where they landed, scattered, he got down on three points and used the other two to draw and hold his gun.
Jimmy, still weak and out of shape, slipped on the slick grass, then tried to pick himself up again. As he did, a massive bolt of energy from above shot down and fried the suit nearest him. He dropped and rolled and saw one of the clouds almost directly above them. It began to glow again, and he shouted, “Molly! Modra! Stay away from the damned suits! Flatten on the ground!”
A second bolt caught the second suit only meters from Modra, who felt the searing heat and tried to scramble away. A panicked Molly shouted, “Look! In back of you! ’Nother one!”
Modra suddenly had a terrible thought. “Durquist! Get back in the trees! Get back in the trees or take the suit off at once!”
The Durquist did neither, instead whirling with a speed that belied its shape and firing directly up and into the cloud with full sustained power.
It appeared to have no effect on the cloud, which glowed and then sent a thunderous bolt at the third empty suit, destroying it.
The Durquist gave up and made for the trees. It looked as if he were going to make it, but suddenly the dull gold suits of the captain and Krisha appeared at the edge of the forest and he reflexively paused.
A bolt from the first cloud struck him full on, enveloping him in that terrible heat and flame. All four onlookers heard the crackling and felt and heard the mental death agony which was mercifully short.
And, just like that, the Durquist just wasn’t there any more, only a smoldering, liquid goo giving off acrid black smoke.
“Durquist!” Modra screamed, tears welling up inside her. “Noooo . . . ”
Jimmy McCray was conscious of the fact that the two clouds were still poised up there. “Modra! Molly! Tears later! Run for it! Out into the field!” He got up and grabbed Modra, dragging her to her feet.
The explosions shocked the two Mizlaplanians, who were suddenly aware of how exposed they both were to the clouds as well.
“They’re waiting for us!” Krisha told him. “For some reason, they won’t blast into the trees.”
Chin, still shaken, nonetheless was the pragmatist, as always. “We could still take all three of them down with a wide stun from here.”
“No! Those things might interpret it as an attack and blast us anyway. Besides, they’re all naked and defenseless now. Wasn’t that the point?”
He sighed. “I suppose it was.” He looked at the smoldering piles. “Suddenly I feel more naked inside this suit than I would out of it, though. Notice how they took no notice of the three. It was the suits they were after, nothing more.”
She nodded. “I know just what you mean. Let’s go back to the others. I’m afraid we’ve got a hard decision to make.”
She was silent and tight-lipped on the way back, and he finally asked, “Feeling guilty? Like you killed the Exchange creature for nothing?”
She nodded. “Something like that. Those weren’t the real enemies.”
“Don’t be. You didn’t kill the creature—you saved the lives of the other three.”
“Huh?”
“If we hadn’t rushed them, they’d have all donned their suits and then proceeded with all speed for that very spot. The odds are very good the clouds or whatever they really are would have nailed all or at least almost all of them before they realized what hit them.” He sighed. “I must say that the little fellow has made a recovery I can only call miraculous. A few hours ago he was in agony and severe shock and near death, with tremendous loss of blood. Now, suddenly, he’s running, diving, and ducking. I must be a much better doctor than I thought.”
They returned to find Manya by the side of the stream and Morok soaking in it. Both had received multiple, if confusing, versions of the events.
Morok was sympathetic, but, “The captain’s right, you know, Krisha. We probably saved the others. The problem is, while we have the only working suits and weapons at this point, they do us little good. I saw the meadow in the mental images. There is simply no way we are going to get across with them on.”
Krisha nodded. “Whatever they are, they are programmed to stop anyone taking anything from outside past that point.”
“They are lesser demonic spirits guarding the gates to the capital of Hell,” Manya insisted. “Why won’t you face facts and accept the tenets of your faith? Were we not all permitted to see the absolute evil that underlies this place?”
“Not all of us,” Chin reminded her. “I wish, though, that I hadn’t been so clever with the power modules on the Mycohl suits now. They would never have crossed that space without them, and that would have ended the problem.”
“How could you know?” Morok asked.
“You should have just slit their throats while they were in the trance!” Manya snapped. “That would have solved the problem then and there!”
The captain sighed. “Perhaps I am not resolute enough. It’s probably true what you say, and I freely admit that the thought crossed my mind. If the Mycohl succeed and serve the demons, I will carry that thought with me for the rest of my probably very short life, and the responsibility for it as a black stain on my soul. Still, I was trained as a soldier, and in a fight I’ll do whatever is my duty. I discovered, on this journey, that I could not be a murderer. No matter what, I just don’t have it in me.”
“You are a good man, Gun Roh Chin,” Morok assured him. “Stay that way. And, Manya, you must remember that these Mycohl are not demons; they are people, just like us, and they believe as they do and act as they do because they were raised in an evil and predatory culture. They didn’t choose their positions, any more than we chose ours. The sin of the evil ones is that they are as they are by choice and by rebellion.”
“If a pet animal is cruelly tortured and trained to be a vicious killer, it, too, has no choice,” Manya responded. “But you destroy the mad pet, which will kill anyway, no matter whose fault it is.”
Krisha was too upset to let this continue. “All of this is meaningless! What someone should or should not have done is hindsight. If they are not demons, neither are we gods. There have been mistakes enough to go around this time! The only question we have is how to move forward, and when, and the others, naked or not, are proceeding while we debate philosophical points!”
Even Manya seemed to sense that she’d gone a bit too far. “How is your leg, Holy Father?” she asked.
“Oddly, much better,” he responded. “It’s a bit stiff, but I’d swear that the swelling’s gone down to almost nothing.” He got up on both feet and Manya was startled to see the degree of improvement.
“Amazing,” she breathed, inspecting the leg. “There must be some remarkable curative in the water.”
“That might explain the little fellow,” Chin commented. “And I was patting myself on the back. Oh, well . . . At least we will outnumber the Exchange, whose weaponry and power we no longer have to fear, and have equal numbers with the Mycohl, and if that mess of hedges is as confusing on the ground as it appeared from above there, we might well be able to make this a closer competition yet. I do, however, wish we still had more of an edge. That Corithian could take all of us in a matter of seconds.”
Morok flexed his wings. “Perhaps I can fly over it, guide the rest of you,” he suggested. “There is little risk now that no one on the ground can shoot me down. The conditions here feel favorable in the basics, although it will have to be a series of short flights with me doing most of the work, since there’s essentially no wind here and, therefore, no thermals to ride.”
“Those things are up there, too,” Krisha warned him. “I think you’re best off staying on the ground.”
“Perhaps. We’ll see. They might only guard that perimeter. Once beyond it, it might well be safe.”
Gun Roh Chin deactivated his suit and got out of it. “I feel a bit self-conscious and modest,” he told them, genuinely a bit embarrassed, “but there is no other way.”
Krisha sighed and did the same. “I suppose I am destined to leave this life with nothing more than I took in,” she commented dryly. Still, she did feel self-conscious, not around the other two, who were both of other races and also priests, but in front of Gun Roh Chin.
“You look—superb,” the captain assured her, once more happy that his mind could not be read and not a little worried that his animal lusts might well be beyond disguise from this point.
Manya alone retained her body stocking, and they began to walk to the clearing. At the clearing, however, they saw the two clouds, still there, now moving back and forth in their impossible manner as if guarding a picket line.
Seeing them for the first time in person, as it were, and also seeing the scorched remains of the earlier attack, Manya felt suddenly less confident. “I wonder if it is—anything?” she said nervously.
“You must trust in the gods and your own wisdom, Sister Manya,” Morok responded. “I cannot guide you in this.”
She sighed. “I would be a target they would love an excuse to attack,” she said at last. “I will not give them an excuse until I can give as good as I get.” And, with that, she removed everything.
And, with that, they started off across the meadow.
The clouds moved in their rapid, unnatural fashion, and seemed to be inspecting them. All four of them looked up nervously from time to time as they went past the remains of the Durquist and the suits of the others, and across. The clouds did nothing.
After half an hour or so, they spotted and diverted to the carcass of the Corithian. That, too, was nerve-wracking, all expecting the thing to come to life again and attack them as they stood there, defenseless, but it was soon clear that the creature was dead.
“That is a relief,” the captain commented. “Now it’s four-three-three, and all of us equally vulnerable.”
They walked on and received another comforting sign as the clouds zipped away at fantastic speed and finally resumed their watering jobs far off.
“Apparently, being more than halfway across, they’ve decided we’re no threat any more,” Morok noted. “Still, I would expect they’d be back in a real hurry if any of us reversed direction.”
Eventually, they reached the hedge wall. “Interesting,” Krisha commented. “I can’t pick them up. Be on your guard—I’m going to lower the block for just a moment.”
They waited, trying to keep their minds as clear as possible, and, from far off, they received snippets of mental conversation. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone again.
“That’s that,” she said at last. “In there, if they can’t hear us, we can’t hear them. That poses a problem I’ll have to experiment in dealing with, since they’ll all be able to sense our block, and, therefore, have a fair idea of our position even if they can’t get anything. On the other hand, we’ll be blind to them unless the empathic or other abilities show up stronger and more controlled than they have so far. I’m just going to have to lift it now and then get bearings on them, and, when I do, we’ll be wide open to them. I simply can’t teach you all to individually block under these circumstances.”
“Do what you must,” Morok told her. He looked up and down. “I would say that a more pressing problem is deciding how to get in there.”
Gun Roh Chin gave a wan smile. “How else?” he asked rhetorically. “We go left until we find it. They did.”
It was about an hour’s walk down, and appeared to be the only one, at least as far as they could tell.
They were immediately met by a choice of two directions to travel. “I assume we keep on the leftward track if we can, or until the rule proves to have exceptions,” the captain noted. “I have a feeling, though, that it’s not going to be quite that simple.”
It wasn’t. The second opening inward proved to have an obstacle to leftward travel about thirty meters down that unnerved them just to look at it
It didn’t really block the passage, but it took up about half of it, and it was an enormous statue in what appeared to be black marble. The figure itself was monstrous: a great creature full of tentacles and claws and ugly things that ripped and tore, and it radiated its ugliness and, yes, its evil, to Terrans and non-Terrans alike.
Except, of course, to Gun Roh Chin, who saw only the aesthetic ugliness of the statue.
“Why do you hesitate?” he asked them, genuinely curious. “It’s just a carving.”
They walked down the path slowly, with the captain in the lead, and as they drew closer to it Krisha suddenly shouted, “Hold it!”
He stopped, puzzled, and turned to her. “What is it?”
“That thing moved! I swear to you that it did!”
“There is a consciousness in that thing somewhere, Captain,” Morok agreed. “I cannot explain it, but I can feel it.”
Many a suddenly had an insight. “The great dream, the colors, the evil things . . . It was a representation of this! The evils there intersect here through idols!”
“Nonsense,” Chin said, but he didn’t move forward. Now he thought he’d seen some movement out of the corner of his eye. I’m being spooked by them, he told himself. Still, they all definitely had attributes that he lacked, and at least one important piece of this puzzle was theirs that was denied him. If Krisha had said she was reading the mind of someone one row over, he would never have doubted her. Why should he doubt them now? Still, he needed some more proof before breaking precedent in this place.
Wait a second! Maybe there was a way. “Krisha, try and sense a mind in there,” he asked her. “If you can.”
She tensed and took a deep breath, then allowed the block to drop as she stared at the hideous idol. Suddenly she started, gasped, and brought it back up again. “It’s there!” she told them. “I feel suddenly—unclean—just having touched minds with it!”
“As do I,” Manya agreed. “The thing is vile.”
Morok looked a bit shaken, as if suppressed memories had suddenly resurfaced. Still, he said, “Krisha, you will have to lower that block. Not when we are in the presence of such as this, but at other times. It is the only way we can tell a clear path.”
She nodded. “But let us get away from this one, Holy Father, before I do. Ugh! Disgusting!”
Chin frowned. “But won’t dropping the block give our positions away to the others?”
“They have that now,” she pointed out. “And I fail to see anything we can think that would assist them. They, after all, already came this way. We might even get some clue as to what is ahead.”
“All right, then,” he agreed, “we break precedent and go right.”
“I fear that this route is highly perilous, more so than any other to date for all its beauty,” Morok commented. “The way through in the other plane was to steer the course between the evils, but it was a relatively straight shot. This is twisted beyond divining.”
“Yes,” Krisha agreed. “And, remember, so thick was the evil and so narrow the way through at the city gates that none could pass without being snared.”
Jimmy McCray was having his first real taste of the disadvantages of being empathic. The darkness flowing out of Modra’s very core was so strong and so heart-rending it was difficult for him to deal with more practical concerns.
“We must go on,” he told her. “I lost everything long before I came to this place, and, after, I lost what little was left. But I found something, too, in this place. I found out that I really don’t want to die, and that I want to find out the meaning of all this, find out who and what’s behind it, and face the bastards.”
She looked at him mournfully. “The only three people I ever really was close to are gone,” she sighed. “One before you came aboard—the one you replaced, really. Then Tris, and now, finally, the Durquist. When I stepped aboard Widow-maker for the first time, it was so different. It was fun, it was a camaraderie I’d never known before, it was . . . life. For the first time, I was really alive. They were my family. I knew them better than I knew my own real family, and they knew me. Now they’re gone. They’re all gone. Oh, Tran’s still alive somewhere, I suppose, back on the ship, but it’s not the same.”
“You have a husband, I believe,” he pointed out.
She nodded. “I knew him for less than three weeks. I’ve been with you far longer than I’ve been with him. I married him on an impulse, in some ways to gain security and status, I guess—I’d just been pulled out a few weeks earlier from the most horrible experience I’d ever had in the field—until now—but, mostly, because he had money and position and he could save the team from going bankrupt. Most of all, I did it to save the team, keep everyone together. Now look what’s happened! Tris blows his brains out, the Durquist is melted into goo, and I’m sitting here, stark naked, in the middle of a place I don’t understand and that wants to finish me as well. And what if, by some miracle, I did get out, get back? To what? For what? It’s all gone, now.”
“There you are again,” he told her in a stern tone of voice. “Wallowing, like I used to wallow. Oh! Woe is me! ’Twould be best if I were never born than to suffer this way. Well, it’s crap. It was crap when I did it and it’s crap when you do it. It’ll destroy you, and you have enough other things to destroy you without having to give it more pushes. I may not have known you since you was a wee little girl, but I am part of this team. So is Molly. You hurt Lankur, yes, but you didn’t kill him. He killed himself. You think that’s normal behavior for someone who is lovesick and heartsick? It’s not. You may want to, but you don’t do it. You go on, and you find someone else. Maybe you take on the world, or get sloshed a lot, but you manage, and, sooner or later, you figure a way to something else. In truth, from what I’m hearing, you did make the wrong choice, since neither you nor Lankur were mature enough to make it together.”
His comments raised anger within her, and that was a start. He wouldn’t be surprised if he got slapped before this was done, if he had to go that far, but this was survival.
“The Durquist, now—he’s like you and me. We volunteered. We came because it was a team decision, a team vote if you will. Maybe it was a wrong vote, and maybe there wasn’t another way out of there and maybe there was, but we didn’t have to join this thing. I know at least the Durquist and I both felt that there was a quick way out. Goin’ right, perhaps, all the time. It was a problem we could work on once we got the system, but it was a problem we never actually did work on because we weren’t going to leave the team. We got warned about the clouds, whatever they are. The demons at the gate warned us, and we got confirmation from the Mycohl. If we’re too bloody stupid to listen to two warnings, then terrible things are gonna happen—not because of fate, or even the Quintara, damn their hides, but because we’re so damned full of ourselves we don’t listen and we make mistakes. And, in this business, mistakes kill and it’s only blind luck that saved us. You know bloody well the Durquist would never have taken off that suit or dropped that gun. He was a solid rationalist with faith only in what he could see, touch—or wear. He went well, defending the team and doin’ his duty. I’ll not cry for that I may regret, and I may wish it hadn’t happened, but I won’t cry for that honorable a death.”
She stared at him, more puzzled than angry now. This was a new Jimmy McCray, one she hadn’t met, or, perhaps, hadn’t noticed before. “You sound like a cross between the old Tris Lankur and one of those Mizzle priests back there,” she noted. “Just what do you want of me?”
“Nothing,” he said firmly. “Nothing except the same sort of team support that I’d give you. Somewhere in this mess there is an explanation for all this. Whatever those researchers unlocked, it’s powerful beyond anything we could imagine, and it’s damned dangerous. Whoever, whatever is behind this, it knows about us. Not just we individuals, but everything—our people, our worlds, our past and present. That’s what those demons were doing before and after ravaging the place. They were standin’ there, quiet and playin’ dead, while they telepathically got all the information they needed from the researchers’ own minds, right up to our current level of knowledge. When they were freed, or caused themselves to be freed—we’ll never know the answer to that one—they finished off the ones they didn’t need any more and then they went for that cymol and they read out all the data in her robot mind. Then they finished off everybody as easy as you please and came in here to report that information to somebody. They know more about us and our civilizations than we do.
“But we—the remnants of the three teams still going here—we, now, are the only ones who know about them.”
She nodded. “But they could have killed us at any time,” she pointed out. “Why go through all this?”
“Why, indeed? The Mycohl and your Mizzie friends aren’t dummies, either. The ones that make it through will be the survivors. Perhaps we’ll consider the dead the lucky ones when those of us who do survive get to the answers, but I’ll give no one the satisfaction of killin’ me until I face them down. You and me, we’re well suited for this. We got nothin’ left to lose.”
Modra gave him a wry sort of smile, and Molly leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Jimmy gonna marry her, too?”
He laughed, possibly the first laugh he’d had in ages. “She’s already spoken for, my dear,” he responded, getting to his feet, then helping Modra up as well.
He made a grand gesture, pointing off in an essentially random direction.
“All right, me lovely beauties. The finish line’s right over there someplace, more or less, and all we have to do is sneak past some ugly buggers to reach it. What’s past is past. We start again right here, right now. No power in Heaven or Hell can withstand an Irishman with a beautiful woman on each arm, but, if something could, what a way for an Irishman to go!”
“Oh, shut up, Jimmy!” both the women responded, almost in unison.
The city was ancient; so ancient that no calendar devised by any of the folk of real space had any meaning at all here.
Its broad avenues and tall, sleek structures were silent as a tomb, untrod and uninhabited for thousands upon thousands of years. And yet, within the Great Pyramid that was the centerpiece and heart of this great, silent city, sleepers stirred, black wings flexed and an excitement ran through the place where the Princes stood.
<They come!> cried the thoughts of all of them. <After so long, they come at last! Soon now, very soon, they will take the keys to Chaos itself and bring forth our new age, our new time. We grow stronger and stronger, and with the passing of inconsequential moments, our liberation is at hand. Soon we will embark upon our greatest adventure, as our Master had foretold so long ago, and, this time, the Gates of Heaven shall not prevail against us!>