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FIRE BURN AND CAULDRON BUBBLE

IT WAS A WORLD OF DARKNESS, AS IF THEY WERE inside some impossibly deep, impenetrable cavern, yet there was light enough to see—not from any sky, but from the massive lakes of boiling, bubbling, hissing lava that formed small lakes within the darkness, occasionally spilling over and forming rivers of the stuff.

Environment suits closed automatically; air refresheners kicked into action, clearing the outside atmosphere, thick with the fumes of hydrogen sulfide and other foul-smelling compounds, and the air-conditioning kicked in, mercifully cooling them in a matter of minutes from the sixty-plus degrees centigrade outside temperature to a far more comfortable level.

“This isn’t good at all,” Josef commented, looking at his power levels and computing the drain rate to compensate for this place. “What is your energy reading, Kalia? Tobrush?”

“Thirty-seven hours,” Kalia reported.

“Thirty-eight, give or take a bit, here,” Tobrush added.

“Well, I get closer to thirty-five,” he told them. “It’s taken us almost forty hours to get from station to station the last couple of worlds, and we didn’t have to face anything like this. These suits were never designed for lava, and even if they held, the power needed to sustain us inside would drain these things like water over that falls back there.”

“We could go back in,” Kalia suggested. “Take one of the other routes.”

“We’re going to have to,” he responded. “I don’t care if the demons can make it through in just those basic clothes they wear or not, it’s a cinch we can’t. Desreth? What about you?”

“It is perfectly tolerable to me here,” the Corithian answered, “but were I to have to go into the lava, I would dissolve. I would prefer another route myself.”

“That settles it. Everybody back in. Quickly! We don’t want any more energy drain than we have to have!”

They re-entered the station with some relief, switching off the protection circuitry, then went through the first cavern to the demon chamber in the center. As they did, they stopped, dumbfounded.

The demons had turned around somehow and were now facing them.

“Tobrush? Ask them what’s going on here,” Josef called nervously.

<You cannot back up this way,> the demons told them. <No matter what, you will have to exit as you did. To return to the Dispatch Center, exit and turn to your right, then proceed to the station that you find there and enter.>

<You mean—once anyone is committed to a destination, they are truly committed to go there?> the telepath responded, appalled at the idea.

<Not anyone, no. But you must. You seek the Keep, the City on the Edge of Chaos, which is at the center and the boundary of all and of nothing. This is the only way for you now. All other routes lead to meaningless elsewheres.>

Tobrush reported this to Josef, who was hardly in a mood to believe them, yet dared not disbelieve them. He didn’t even bother to ask them how far it was to the next station; there was no way he could believe them on that answer, either.

“Past them and out!” he ordered. “We’ll soon see if this is some kind of trick.”

They went into the rear chamber and out, and found themselves in the same, dark, horribly hot place.

“Anybody? We can’t spend a lot of time debating this.”

“We are clearly in their power as to choosing our destination once we stepped into the station,” Tobrush pointed out. “We are going to wind up here no matter what. We either camp out in there and wait for the suits to run out anyway, or we try it.”

“Tobrush is right!” Kalia responded. “If we are to die, let us die in the attempt, not in surrender! They are testing us! What is the purpose to a test if you cannot pass it?”

“I agree,” Desreth added. “We have always been at the mercy of this system. In point of fact, the distance between the second and third stations was only eighty percent of the true distance between the first and second. It simply took as long because we had to fight and to rest. Now we are in the lead, without enemies ahead. If this is, perhaps, sixty percent of the distance, it can be done in under thirty hours.”

“All right,” Josef sighed, internally groaning at the idea of even thirty hours in this place without any prolonged rest, but knowing that it was necessary to do so. “At least we are trained for this kind of forced march. The others are not.”

They turned left and started off. “The Exchange team probably has fifty or sixty hours minimum, without having to do those battles,” Tobrush noted. “And I keep wondering if it gets worse from here. First unending monotony, then unending rain, then unending fire. I just wish there was better lighting here, not only to recharge these suits but also to better see where we’re going.”

“Too bad we can’t convert this heat,” Josef commented wistfully.

Tobrush took him seriously. “There might be a way to do just that, with some reprogramming,” the telepath told him. “The suits aren’t really designed to use it, so it would have low efficiency, but something is better than nothing, and at worst it would take the pressure off the air-conditioning. I’ll work on it.”

“Do that,” the leader urged. “You’ve got thirty hours to solve it. In the meantime, anybody see anything that might be some sort of trail?”

“Unlikely,” Desreth came back. “The black material upon which we walk is basically rock granules, tiny pieces of obsidian, and volcanic ash and dust. Anything that went through a place as dynamic as this one is would soon have anything, from tracks to trails, covered up.”

“Well,” Josef sighed, “we’re on a rise between two lava lakes right now, so if we’re going left, there’s no choice of routes.”

“Yeah, but what if that lava came through and ripped out the route after those demons went by?” Kalia asked them.

“Let’s not think of that,” Josef told her.

Desreth was more optimistic. “This is a known, established route. They have a station to it. You don’t build things along consistent rules like they do without taking that into consideration.”

They all hoped that the Corithian was right. Complex transport routes throughout the galaxy were maintained not only by building them right in the first place but also by constant maintenance. They’d seen little sign of maintenance machinery along this route so far, and it had certainly been a very long time since a crew had been by.

Still, with nothing to do except keep from sinking into or slipping down from the very loose gravel-like mound that was their only protection from the lava lakes, Josef couldn’t help wondering just why this place—and the others, for that matter—were here at all. They reinforced his suspicion that the geometry of the dimensional walkways was not something that could be thoroughly planned. If you wanted to go from A to F, he mused, maybe that predetermined B, C, D, and E, whether you wanted to go there or even should go there or not.

There was something oddly reassuring in that concept. It brought them down a peg or two, in a way, to the level of other races, subject to fate and events beyond their control. Different, yes; alien, yes, but, in their own element and under their own rules, far closer to their own kind than even the demons probably liked to admit.

“There certainly has to be some control or design,” Tobrush commented, reading his thoughts. “Otherwise they’d be wearing—and needing—environment suits of some kind as well.”

He didn’t like his more comfortable visions questioned. “Get back to your programming and stop eavesdropping,” he snapped.

There were other things he didn’t like that he preferred conventional theories to explain—if only he could come up with them.

For one thing, where were the stars? He could accept that, perhaps, they were traveling great distances through dimensional folds, but at no point had they seen any stars or, indeed, clear sky at all. In fact, there’d been no light variations of any kind to even indicate rotation and revolution around a star. It was always twilight on the dull, flat world; always daylight, but through thick clouds that darkened the landscape, in the wet one. Here there was nothing but pitch-blackness overhead, as if the sky was not a sky at all, but some kind of black-painted roof.

The landscapes had certainly varied, along with temperature, humidity, even the gravity, to a smaller degree, but not the things that all his experience and training said should be here.

And no life, either, at least as they knew it; nothing, not a single plant or animal except those silicon trees that might or might not have been alive at all. Except for those ancient ruins and those wall paintings, in fact, there was no sign that any life had ever been in any of these places, even in the distant past.

It was almost as if they weren’t on other worlds at all, but rather trapped inside some vast, impossibly huge set of museum tableaus, with the demons the guides and attendants.

“You seek the Keep, the City on the Edge of Chaos, which is at the center and the boundary of all and of nothing.

Did they? Did they indeed? Was that all the way down, if “down” was the right concept? And what did that demonic riddle mean? And why had this farther-in class of demons, equally trapped, been far more congenial and far less obstructionist than the earlier ones? It was almost as if the demons had expected them. They hadn’t even tried to bargain or cajole or plead or demand their freedom. Why not?

Was it because they no longer felt as if they had to do so?

He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have liked to keep the adversarial conditions of the first encounter; this was in its own way far more worrisome.

“Something moved in the lava pool to our right!” Kalia called suddenly, breaking his reverie.

“Impossible!” he snapped. “It’s over twelve hundred degrees centigrade in that pool! Besides, we haven’t seen anything alive in this crazy place except trapped demons.”

“I saw something, I tell you! I swear it! It was big and black . . . ”

“Tobrush? Desreth?”

“I saw nothing,” the telepath responded, “but I got the image from her mind as she saw it. It definitely looked like something that shouldn’t have been there. Alive? I can’t tell.”

“Can we scan and come up with anything?” he asked, worried. In the Quiimish, the holiest scriptures of the Mycohl, the demons were the masters of the elements, one of which was fire.

“With what?” the telepath responded. “Nothing in our instrumentation pack or programming is designed to ferret out life in that sort of environment, and the thermals vary so much in moving lava that temperature scans are of no use, either.”

“You ever hear of any kind of life that could exist under these conditions?”

“No,” the Julki admitted, “but, then, until this trip, I had never spoken face to face with a living demon, either.”

“It is difficult to tell crusting from anything else,” Desreth put in. “I suggest we not attempt to solve this mystery but proceed with caution.”

“Nothing else we can do,” Josef admitted. Still, he would have preferred that Kalia not be spooked at this point. All it did was make the mood contagious.

Maybe, just maybe, he began to worry, being first in this trek to whatever was at the end wasn’t such an envious position after all. Not, of course, that it made any difference—the odds of any of the others picking the same station as they’d randomly chosen were pretty slim.

That thought wasn’t so comforting, either, even though their worst enemies were just behind them. If anything did live and lurk in here, there would be little chance of someone else diverting their attention.

Now they were all seeing things out of the corners of their eyes, just out of real sight. Even Desreth, who was emotionless, apparently fearless, and certainly had none of the psychological hang-ups conventional life suffered, seemed spooked as well. Every once in a while, the Corithian would suddenly stop and whirl around, stare for a second, then go on without a word.

It was going to be a long, long walk . . . 


“Sweet Jesus!” Jimmy swore. “We finally made it! Hell itself, fiery pits and all!”

<Well, you said you ‘d take almost anything to be out of the rain,> Grysta pointed out.

“Shut up, Grysta!” he snapped.

The Durquist was equally impressed. “This is going to be a mean one. Any sign of the Mycohl?”

“I’m not sure. Traces only. They must be many hours ahead of us. I’ll respond to a probe, but I won’t initiate one. We might be lucky and not tip them off that we’re here.”

Molly rarely said much, but she looked around at the burning, bubbling, hissing Hell and said, “This must be what folks on hot place live in.”

It hadn’t been but a week or so since they’d been working that place, via remote units, but it seemed such a lifetime away that neither Jimmy nor the Durquist had really thought about it.

“Huh! I think not, Molly,” the telepath responded. “But it’s a good point to keep in mind. We don’t know what’s ahead, but we’ve seen sentient life even worse than this.”

“I just did the calculations, and we’re fine if the next station isn’t any farther than the past ones,” the Durquist told them. “That’s a stroke of luck in a place like this. The ones ahead and behind are a lot shorter on power than we are. Except Modra, of course, and her suit power packs are incompatible with theirs. Still, I think we ought to press on and quickly. The footing here looks less than great, and while the Mizlaplanians can’t afford much of a battle, they’re crazy enough to do it anyway.”

McCray understood. The only one with the enemy to their rear who could afford a fight was Modra, and that would place them at a decided disadvantage.

They trudged along through the great lava pools and through wide expanses of black granular sand-like rock. It was only when they came to the necks, the narrow and dangerous areas between two bubbling, hissing pits, that they saw, or thought they saw, movement amidst the blood-red liquid rock.

“I see them,” the Durquist told him, having the advantage of independent eyes that he could use, somehow, to look both forward and to the side without losing his step or balance. “They’re in there, probably quite a number of them, but I can’t give you a shape. They’re not demons, though.”

“I’m just wondering if and when they’ll try and attack us,” Jimmy said worriedly.

“I’m not sure they even know we’re here, or, if they do, it might be because we’re letting some of these rocks drop into the pools. They melt, of course, but it might set up some kind of vibration that either attracts or disturbs them. You get nothing from them?”

“Not on the t-band,” the telepath replied.

“They hurt,” Molly said simply.

The other two stopped, and Jimmy stared at her. “What?”

“They hurt. That’s all.”

“Uh—Molly. You haven’t been sending to them, have you?”

“Just when they be close,” she replied innocently. “Just tell them we not bad, we friends.”

“You sent them sympathy for hurting? And how did they take it?”

“It make them sad so I stop.”

The Durquist thought about that a moment, then asked, “Um, Molly—they didn’t seem menacing, or hungry, or anything like that, did they?”

“No. I don’t think they want to hurt us if that what you mean. Not like the big syns. Molly think they just want out, but can’t get out. Hurt too much.”

“Fascinating,” the Durquist said, mostly to himself. “I wish there was some way to make contact with them. Of course, they could just be animals of some sort, without any sentience at all. What she said is consistent with that.”

“Or lost souls, trapped in that lava for eternity,” Jimmy McCray sighed. “Nothing we can do about it, though. Nothing we can do to contact them and find out for sure, either. It’s very like the problem off the Hot Plant, only without a follow-up team. We simply have no common ground to establish communications beyond the empathic.”

“Well, at least we know they’re not apt to drag us down, at least not deliberately,” the Durquist noted. “And it’s life of some sort—the first we’ve really encountered, except our demons. Not life as we know it, but life all the same. It may mean more of the same down the pike here.”

“What kind of life would exist long in a medium that was painful to it?” the telepath mused.

“Oh, you know Molly. They are probably quite comfortable swimming down in that stuff, but when they try and come up to this relative air-conditioning, barely sixty to seventy percent of water boiling, it would be like absolute zero to us. They freeze and that hurts.”

McCray sighed. “I hope you’re right.” He looked up ahead. “We seem to be aiming to go up and between those two big hills. I hope we don’t sink in when we start climbing.”

“Well, at least we know we’re on the right track,” the Durquist noted, looking at the sea of small black rocks ahead. “That creature of theirs, the telepath, really plows up this stuff. I certainly hope they’ve picked right, since we’re pretty slavishly following them.”

“I wouldn’t worry much about that. I have a feeling these routes are laid out pretty consistently. Once you get the curve figured, it’s simply a matter of keeping to it and following it around, or so it seems. We’re closing on the Mycohl, by the way, but not by nearly as much as I’d have thought.”

The Durquist chuckled. “I suspect that all eyes are on their power levels at this point. You can do wonders if the alternative is losing power, protection, and cooling in a place like this.”

“The Mizlaplanians are now in as well,” Jimmy told the star creature. “I have that block in back of me, perhaps two hours behind, no more.”

“Well, they’ve got the same problem, which puts pressure on us,” the Durquist noted. “I’ve been thinking that third isn’t a bad position in all this after all. Omph! Tricky going up this slope!”

It was a difficult climb; although the hills weren’t terribly high, they seemed to be composed almost entirely of the fine rock particles, causing them all to sink and have to really force themselves to keep going. Molly, in fact, had the least problem; for once her thin legs and wide hooves seemed to spread her weight better than the Terran or the Durquist.

Still, they all stopped at the top of the hill and looked down at a scene that was both unexpected and chilling.

“There’s a town down there,” said Jimmy McCray.

It was more than a town; more like a small city, and it certainly did not belong there, both because it was so out of place on this dismal, hot world and because nobody in their right mind would build a town just down a slope from an enormous, bubbling lava lake and on the edge of another huge caldera.

And yet, there it was—a complex of rectangular buildings, apparently made out of the same gray and black rock, almost filling the valley.

“What’s that?” the telepath asked, pointing to a complicated series of coated, translucent tube and girder-like structures that extended from the lake at the top above the town down into a series of massive, windowless black buildings below.

“Some sort of flume,” the Durquist guessed, then he had it. “It’s an aqueduct! A series of channels that can be used to maintain a controlled flow.”

Jimmy frowned. “A flow of what? What’s it for?”

“At a guess, I’d say the location is no accident,” the Durquist replied. “The coating might have a melting point well above the temperature of the lava, allowing some sort of sluice to open at the top, allowing liquid rock to pour, possibly at varying speeds.”

“Why not just blow an opening in the crater wall?” the telepath asked. “It seems rather ridiculous to think of people going to all this trouble to transfer lava from one cauldron to another.”

“You can be exceedingly dense at times,” the Durquist noted. “There’s no outlet. It flows into that complex over there, which has no roof but many structures in between. At a guess, I would say it’s some sort of foundry. I will wager that the buildings it can flow into contain molds of some sort. The lava flows down, the speed controlled so as to vary the rate of cooling, and into the molds, where it will quickly cool, probably with the aid of other devices. It seems to us like the hard way to do that, but if you had a people who didn’t find this air temperature particularly hot, you could make a great many building materials quickly and efficiently that way. Even statuary, although I suspect that the place primarily made stone blocks, perhaps columns, and the like.”

“Who would do something like that? The demons?”

“I wouldn’t try and guess. However, let’s go down through there and see if there are any clues. That does appear to be the route, anyway.”

Walking through the city produced a sense of double paranoia; the doors and windows, black as pitch, seemed to represent all the menace that their minds had imagined from such a place, and there was the ever-mindful lava lake above.

“The average Durquist doorway is about one meter by two and a half,” the Durquist noted, looking at the buildings. “They can be vertical or horizontal, of course, since it hardly matters to us, but they are pretty consistent in form. Your Terran doorways tend to always be rectangles, the higher edges forming the sides, because of your standard shape and bipedal restrictions. Take a look at the doorways of these huge blocks of apartments, which I assume they are. Workers’ barracks, anyway.”

They were essentially arches, two meters across by three high, but the side walls had a very slight but noticeable outward curve built into them on both sides about halfway to the ground.

“Not the Quintara,” Jimmy decided almost at once. “Something else.”

“Very good. But look up there, that slightly higher building at the end of the town. A bit fancier with the long stone columns—and apparently coated with the same material as the sluice. The twin front doors are both rectangles, about three meters high by two across, I’d say.”

McCray nodded. “That was a demon house, then. The boss, most likely. I wonder if he coated the place out of fear that his workers might just accidentally on purpose poke a hole in that lake up there? Or if it was just precautionary?”

“Possibly both,” the Durquist replied. “I wonder if we see here, in microcosm, what our future will be like if indeed the Quintara’s ‘time’ comes again?”

Jimmy felt a cold shiver at that thought. “Still, it’s pretty primitive, isn’t it, for supposed demigods with access to technology we still haven’t dreamed of as yet.”

“I think it is deliberately so. The more I see of their works, the more I think I’m coming to understand them, at least in the basics. First, it’s far easier to control a population where technology is kept strictly in the hands of the rulers. On the whole, the Mizlaplan restrict technology, I understand, classifying it into various levels, and you get only the level that’s best for the interests of the Empire. The masses have next to none in the Mycohl, which still uses a lot of hand labor that’s just shy of slave labor, leaving the computers and air-conditioning and such to the nobility, the military, and the technocratic classes who work for them. The Exchange bans most robots and robotics where possible, primarily to keep the teeming masses employed at something. I think the Quintara liked their subjects to be as ignorant and primitive as possible, but for a different reason.”

McCray nodded. “Because they like it that way. They love playing God.”

“They live to exercise power, to dominate, for its own sake,” the Durquist agreed. “Why? I suspect it’s the only thing they have. When you’ve got this much power, this much knowledge, playing God becomes the only thing left to do. They play games with everybody, and they play the games for their own sake, their own entertainment, their own pleasure. Isn’t that what every god in any culture you’ve known can be reduced down to? I seem to recall—didn’t your own God get so bored just creating pretty things that he created a worthy opponent?”

“Uh, I suppose you could put it that way, yes.” And for millions of years it seems like the opponent’s been winning. “But ours, at least, had a reward at the end for even the lowliest player who would do it His way and not the devil’s,” he pointed out.

“Yes, in the end, that’s the basic difference, I suppose. All Durquist religions have gods of just about everything—every tree, every leaf, every pebble and stone, everything. There are so many shrines and so many things to pray to you can’t walk without tripping. You keep at it, being holy and perfect, and you one day become a little god yourself, or so the system says. I never saw much reward in becoming a leaf god or a stick god myself, but they had power and you had to be nice to them in any event because they might well have been your ancestors once. If the Quintara live up to their legends, they promised none of that. Serve them and you got rewarded here and now with comforts and power and such; cross them and they sent you slowly and nastily to oblivion. Not very pleasant, but an easy enough concept to get across.”

<We get to fly between the stars and become who we wish when we die,> Grysta told him.

The comment startled him. “I never knew Morghs had a religion.” He might have known, of course, but he’d never asked her about that or a lot of other things.

<I decided not to wait. I wanted to fly between the stars now, and I did. Of course, the price is that I can’t find the Universal Consciousness, but flying around lookin’ for it didn’t seem like a nice way to spend eternity anyway.>

“Well, if we’re right, they’re bloody consistent with their image,” the telepath commented. “Even the Mycohl version, which is more benign, demanded human sacrifice, if I remember my comparative religions. I get the impression that they more admired the demons than really worshiped them, though. That may explain why they didn’t free the pair who tried so hard on us. It’s a rather common thing that slaves rarely lust for equality; what they really want is to reverse their positions.”

They passed out of the city, neither anxious to explore it much for fear that they might just find something.

“Just out of curiosity,” the Durquist said, “how do you know so much about other religions and demonology and pentagrams and the like, McCray? If that was a part of your religious education, you must have been raised in a very strange religion.”

He smiled wanly. “All religions are very strange unless you’re raised to take them for granted,” he pointed out “Let’s just say that I had a greater interest in such things in my youth than was healthy. I’ve tried to get most of it out of my mind over the years, but it’s all still there, and it seems to be coming in handy at the moment.”

The Durquist wondered about that but didn’t want to press it. If and when McCray was ready, he’d tell. Otherwise, it was none of the Durquist’s business and he accepted that. Still, McCray occasionally dropped his veneer of the old pro, the cynical spacer, and revealed evidence of an education very much more advanced than the average spacer ever had, and in subjects pretty well off any practical track.

Even Grysta didn’t know his real background, as much as she knew about his biochemistry and other physiological things. He’d never gone home, and, since she’d united with him, he’d never run into anybody who’d known him before he was a spacer. She had repeatedly pumped him, but to no avail, and she loved him too much to inflict the pain that might bring it out of him.

“We’ve closed a bit more on the Mycohlians ahead,” the telepath noted, changing the subject. “We’re not close enough for me to read thoughts, but their telepath and I could probably exchange messages at this point. The Mizlaplanians have closed a bit on us, although not as much as our forward gain on the Mycohl.”

“They’re like us. No matter how far it is, we can’t afford to rest. Not here. They’ve both got power problems, and we’ve got enemies at the rear. I begin to wonder if any of us will really make it. There are physical limits, you know. None of us has had a lot of rest and even less solid sleep in quite a long time. I don’t care how much power any of us have; if we can’t all find someplace to slow down, even stop, we’re going to be in such bad shape it won’t take a demon to best us. Our own bodies will get us first.”

Jimmy McCray nodded. “When I called this a marathon, I didn’t think it would be literally so.”


Kalia whirled again, pistol out. “If one of those bastards sticks its head up just once more, I’m gonna blow it clean off!”

“You will do no such thing!” Josef snapped. “For one thing, what makes you think you can even tickle something that lives in boiling liquid rock? Second, we’re a lot more vulnerable than they are. What happens if you get them irritated and they decide to start splashing that molten crap at us? Your suit might protect you at the start, but we don’t have the power or the time to dig you out of the solid rock that would encase you.”

“Not to mention the fact that any shots strong enough to even have a prayer would do a nice job of wasting power, and, if they attacked, we’d be forced to waste ours as well. If you want to commit suicide so badly, just open your suit and start walking around. Then we can use your power pack and remaining supplies, too. I will not allow you to include us in your death wish.”

“Allow! Try and stop me, you overgrown slug!” She whirled, pistol flying to her hand, to aim not at any of the lava creatures but rather at Tobrush.

It was impossible to make a surprise move on a telepath, and the Julki’s suit was specially formulated to allow its tendrils to come through the material white maintaining a seal. Dozens of thin, wire-like tendrils shot out even as she moved on Tobrush, wrapping themselves around her arm and her pistol and squeezing tightly.

“Stop it! Both of you!” Josef roared. “If we keep this up, we won’t need enemies! We’ll do ourselves in! We’re just tired, that’s all, and tired people make mistakes. You are a military unit, and you were trained to be tough and take it. Remember that!”

Tobrush saw in Kalia’s mind that she was no longer a threat and released her just short of cutting through her suit. She shook her wrist to get some circulation back in it and then rubbed it. Still, she glared angrily, not at Tobrush, but at Josef.

“Military unit!” she spat. “Whose military? Where are we? Where are they? You crossed the border and got us stuck here, Lieutenant Hypno! All on your own you decided to invade, and here we are! You hypnos are so arrogant and self-centered! It’s you who included us in your suicide pact!”

A Mycohlian never apologized for power, either to others or to themselves; that was Rule Number One. “An officer assumes responsibility,” he told her. “He is expected to act on his own initiative when faced with a situation not covered by the book. He alone answers for that initiative, not you. Your job is to carry out my orders. You walk when I tell you to walk. You fire when I tell you to fire and at what I tell you to fire at. And you do not fire or openly challenge me, whether you agree with me or not. You decided to take the offer to enter the military, and you took an oath. You lifted yourself up from whoring in the muck with the drols. Now you pay for it. This is the second time I have had to remind you of this. I will not remind you again.

She glared at him with a fury bordering on hatred, but she turned and started walking again.


“I think we made it,” called Desreth, scouting ahead. “I detect a telltale station discontinuity ahead, perhaps an hour’s walk, no more.”

“Either this better have a good deal of light energy for a recharge or it better be the last one,” Tobrush commented. “None of us have sufficient power for another circuit, even smaller than this one. If it is not exactly what we need, Desreth will be pressing on alone—”

“Where are you going, Captain?” Morok called, as Gun Roh Chin broke from the main group and began walking briskly over to the foundry building.

“I want to see what they were making here,” came the reply. “Please press on; I will only be a few minutes and will catch up.”

“What difference can it make now?” Krisha asked him. “Whoever built this place is long gone, perhaps ages ago.”

Chin didn’t answer, but vanished into the huge open-topped building. They all stopped, waiting for him, even if they couldn’t afford the time. They were so tired that any excuse was one that just had to be taken.

“Are you all right, Captain?” Morok called at last.

“Yes, yes,” Chin replied. “I—umph!—ah . . . Yes, I almost suspected as much. I’ll be out in a minute, no more.”

He emerged seeming quite pleased with himself, which drove the others crazy with curiosity.

“What’s in there?” Modra asked him.

“Yes, what?” Manya chimed in.

“Just molds,” he told them. “Most are devoted to blocks such as the ones you see on the buildings here, of course, but there were some others. The rock is nothing special; common igneous type, of the granite-basalt family.”

“You didn’t have to go in there to figure that all out,” Krisha noted.

“No, but some of the molds were—interesting. You remember the ruins in the rain world?”

“Yes, so?”

“That’s where the rock was created for them. You only had to put together the various molds and apply the sort of logic used in solving a child’s puzzle to see how they were created.”

“You mean—those primitives in the wall paintings came all the way here to make their temples?” Morok asked, stunned. “But they would have had to descend those falls as we did, know the trick to them, and pass through the transfer room to this very spot! I find that unlikely.”

“I find that impossible to believe, myself,” the captain agreed. “No, the temple blocks were made here and then transported there by another party. It is unlikely that those people could have survived here without a technology far higher than they obviously attained, or were permitted to attain.”

“Then the demons brought their own temples?” Modra asked, puzzled as they all were.

“I’m not sure. I think from the design of these buildings that they were more likely the masters pushing a third party to do the work, but they did bring the things through and they probably also at least supervised their construction. There are also molds there for statuary and gargoyle-like decorations, although we saw no sign of those back in the rain world, suggesting that this place, and perhaps many other such places in this world, supplied a lot more worlds than just the one back there, at least with templates for all that.”

“Indeed? And what were these statues and smaller figures?” Morok asked him.

“It was difficult to tell them in detail, sitting as they were, and with as little time as I allowed myself, but some were undoubtedly demon figures and demonic faces of one sort or another. Some looked a bit large or too oddly shaped for that, though, suggesting that the demon wasn’t the only figure they made. It would have been interesting to see what some of them were, but I suspect we’d recognize few or even none of them. Still, I would also suspect that some cultures in the Mizlaplan, or Mycohl, or the Exchange, would know them as figures of mythology and legend.”

“You are suggesting, then, that this world was some kind of workshop where the demons created their monstrous blasphemies for the rest of the universe?” Manya put in.

“I think so. I am on my way to working out a theory of this place—I mean all of it, from the very entrance in our own universe on—and, so far, nothing contradicts it.”

“Indeed? And what is the theory?” Morok asked him, genuinely curious.

“Holiness, it is only partially complete, and I may be totally wrong, so I don’t want to suggest it and gain your derision. It is such a totally bizarre concept I want to be absolutely certain first—and, frankly, it would do none of us a bit of good if it were right. Or harm, either. Leave it for now as a personal academic exercise to relieve the tedium until I can prove some of it.”

They all wanted to hear it, but Morok and Krisha, in particular, knew that to push Chin before he was ready was fruitless. He had a million ways of disobeying even a command without ever once violating law, scripture, or civility.

“Very well, then,” Morok sighed. “Let’s get moving, then.”

“How is your leg?” Manya asked him.

“Not good,” he admitted, “but I will do what I must for as long as I can. There is no other solution.” This was not the first time he’d wished he could lie to the faithful, but he could not.

Wearily, they got back up and started walking once more, but not a one of them didn’t wish that they had joined the captain and seen what he had seen. All had the idea that he wasn’t telling something, something else he’d seen, and that he was much farther along in solving this mystery than they were.

The next time one of the strange lava creatures that so disturbed them, and particularly disturbed the empathic Modra, made its almost-seen appearance, Krisha jumped as always but held up.

“The poor things are in such pain,” Modra commented. “It’s so great you can almost cut it with a knife. To live in that, in pain and some fear—that is truly Hell.”

There was fear there, but, with the expertness of her Talent, she knew it wasn’t fear of them. That would have been understandable, and at least would have taken one element of puzzlement away.

“I wonder what they are?” Krisha mused. “How could they live like that, in pain?”

“They are possibly the mutated descendants of the people who worked this place for the demons,” Gun Roh Chin suggested. “And their fear might be that their old masters are coming back. Certainly the demons now believe that they are all to be freed very soon. I wish I knew why they thought that, by the way. Or, the creatures might just be some kind of animal life, probably not native to here, that got here somehow and adapted as well as they could. There is no way to know for sure, unless we learn it elsewhere.”

“They are the damned,” Manya said flatly, “getting exactly what they deserve.”


Kalia stood atop a blackened, ash-covered mound looking down at the sight and said, acidly, “All right, sir, so what kind of decision will you make now?”

They were facing an enormous black igneous intrusion on the other side, a mountain of frozen rippled glass; and to one side, stacked as neatly as logs waiting for the mill, were a good dozen mammoth crystal buildings of the Quintara. Inside the center of the black, shiny hill, to the immediate left of the great crystal stack, was an equally massive opening large enough to stick one of the would-be stations through, descending into the blackness.

Josef frowned. “Those can’t all be stations, can they?”

“Dormant ones,” Desreth responded.

“Or ones yet to be activated,” Tobrush added. “Look at the size of them, though! They go on and on! Five hundred meters, perhaps? More?”

They weren’t uniform, except that they were clearly huge single crystals of the same unknown quartz-like mineral. Out of their half-buried state, and stacked as they were, it was easy to see none too subtle differences in coloration, length, and diameter.

“More unsettling is the question of who or what could stack those things so neatly like that,” Josef commented. “The kind of field machinery we’d require in this near-average gravity would be impressive to see as well. You see any signs of machinery for hoisting and lifting? You see any signs that anything of that sort was ever here?”

“What do the supernatural need of such things?” Kalia asked scornfully. “As you are fond of pointing out, the rules are different here.”

Josef gestured to them and they made their way down to the enormous pile and then walked along the side of the stack. Although the sheer size of the things dwarfed them to mere specks, they still seemed smaller than any of them would have expected.

“Feel that?” Tobrush asked the other Talents. “They’re inactive, but every once in a while there’s a resonance that produces that odd, dizzy sort of feeling you get when concentrating on the active ones.”

Josef nodded. “They must be just on the edge of stability. Somehow, they are set to vibrating and the resonances cause them to fold again and again inside and outside the dimensions.”

“Who cares how it’s done?” Kalia asked impatiently. “Do we go in the cave or do we walk around?”

That was a point of practicality they soon faced, for it was possible to walk around the great obsidian hill to the left as well as directly inside the cavern. Josef was well aware that the power levels were reaching critical lows; if he made a mistake, they would have no way to retrace, and getting lost in the cave was not an appetizing way to go. “Tobrush?” he called. “You’re the one measuring the spiral.”

“It could be either inside the cave or on the other side,” the telepath admitted. “That depends on how far back the hill runs. I believe with my heat conversion program we could risk looking on the other side first, but, as much as I hate to tell you this, we have company coming.”

“Huh? What?”

“The Exchange group. Smaller, I think. Missing more than one member if I interpret what I’m getting correctly, but they’ve still got their telepath. I calculate that if we guess wrong, there is a better than even chance that by the time we got back to this point to try the alternative they’d have the hill in back and we’d be perfect targets. Not to mention the fact that we have little energy left for a shooting spree, while they have a great deal of luxury in that department.”

Josef shook his head in wonder. “How could they pick the same station we did? It defies logic!”

“Maybe we just tracked up the floor back there,” Kalia suggested.

“It doesn’t matter now,” the hypno sighed. “Desreth, make speed and go around to the left until you are convinced that it’s not the way, or that it is. Give us the word and head back. If it’s in the cave, we’ll go on ahead. Let the Exchange people go through and then follow when you’re clear. If it is around, we will come to you with all speed.”

“I will do what I can,” the Corithian responded and scuttled off.

Josef turned to Tobrush. “I want progress reports. Give us at least five minutes warning so we can pick a route if we have to.” He sighed wearily. “At least we don’t have the Holy Horrors to deal with.”

“I think we might,” Tobrush replied. “I am able to pick up only one of the minds in the Exchange group at this point—the Durquist—and while I can’t pull anything detailed from his mind, which works rather oddly inside, he just asked the telepath how far behind them the Mizlaplanians were.”

Josef smacked his fist into his other palm hard in frustration. “Damn! We don’t even get one tiny little break in this! How’d they get ahead of the Mizzies, anyway?”

“I’m not certain, but I get the impression that one of their number is being held by the Mizlaplanians. The thoughts when the Holy Ones come up are bitter enough that I suspect that, right now, they hate the Mizzies more than we do. We only hate them as a group; they have a specific grudge against this particular bunch. Might I suggest we may have an opportunity here for an alliance? We’ve done nothing at all to make them hostile towards us except on general principles, and general principles aren’t very practical here right how. If we somehow get out of this, such cooperation might smooth over a lot of difficulties. If we don’t, what do our nationalities and loyalties matter? And, of course, if they later prove a liability, I believe at this point we outnumber them, and close, surprise physical battle favors us with our military training.”

“All good arguments,” he agreed. “Still, they wanted us to surrender our weapons and authority, and I can’t do that. It would have to be mutual respect or nothing. Maybe in a little bit we’ll be forced to deal, but, right now, when they’ve got the guns and we effectively haven’t, I’d like to keep us a little apart and in the lead. Still, if the Mizzies attack them, we’ll go to their aid. We owe them that.”

“As you wish.”

“Desreth?” Josef called. “What’s the situation with you?”

“It is a very large hill,” the Corithian responded, “and the path grows ever narrower as a lava lake pushes in. It has to be the cave, Lieutenant. If this small rock bridge holds out at all, I can see no place within range that the station could lie.”

Josef sighed wearily. “All right, it’s the cave, then. Desreth, hold back. You heard that both the other groups are here with us?”

“I heard.”

“Let them pass. Both of them, if you have to. Avoid battle unless there is no other way. Keep on this channel and we’ll exchange positions when we get to the other side. If there is no way to recharge there, we’re finished anyway. Just wait and use your own discretion after with the Exchange people, who will probably be the only survivors. If we get a charge, then we’ll have them between us and perhaps we can do something nasty.”

“I understand. Go. I shall make do.”

Josef got up painfully, every muscle in his body pleading for rest, his mind sluggish. “Let’s go in the furnace and find that station,” he said wearily.

After going in barely ten meters, they were on instruments to find their way around. In many ways, the inside of the extrusion was reminiscent of the chambers of the stations, and sweeps of the cave walls indicated the presence of the mineral from which the stations were made embedded throughout the glassine rock.

“Odd,” Tobrush remarked. “The normal rule just about everywhere is, the slower rock cools, the larger the crystals. Obsidian is formed by near-instant cooling, hence, glassy and no crystals. The largest crystals are always deep underground. Yet, here, we have substantial major crystallization with the obsidian.”

Josef shivered. “You feel it, Tobrush? That same otherworldly sensation, all around.”

“I do indeed. It suggests that perhaps the properties within the chemistry of the obsidian could create the crystals. If there was enough resonance and the properties were already potentially present when it was still a liquid, that might explain it. Parts of the rock are cooling slowly—in other-dimensional space. If we go deep enough, it’s entirely possible we will find crystals the size of the ones outside. They might well not have grown them; they might just have mined them.”

“We’re going down, that’s for sure,” Josef agreed. “I show close to a fifteen-degree inclination right now.”

“Temperature’s going down, too,” the Julki noted. “Now instead of being Hell, it’s closer to being hot as hell.”

“What does your suit reserve read?” Josef asked. “You, too, Kalia.”

“I’ve got about ninety minutes,” she reported back.

“One point nine,” Tobrush put in. “I didn’t do as much shooting.”

“I’ve got even a little less than Kalia,” he told them. “We’d better get down to something manageable soon.”

“Look!” Kalia called suddenly. “There’s a light up ahead!”

There was a narrowing and slight bending of the passage, and, when they rounded that bend, they entered an enormous chamber, perhaps kilometers across. It was a place of spectacular, unreal beauty; the entire area was festooned with crystals, all shimmering and glowing, proving a dull but acceptable light level.

“The mother lode,” Josef breathed. “The place where they all come from.”

“Makes me dizzy and my head hurts,” Kalia complained. “You mean they dug all the stations and all outta here? How’d they get ’em out, then? Not through the way we just come in.”

She had a point. Although the crystals were of all sizes, from mammoth ones down to fairly small ones of only a meter or two, none of the ones the size of the stack they’d walked past outside could have possibly fitted through the linking passage, particularly around that bend.

“The temperature here is just a bit under thirty-eight degrees centigrade,” Tobrush noted. “Atmosphere is very dry but otherwise a decent balance, and we have illumination. I suggest we shut down all but maintenance on the suits and disengage the helmets.”

Josef nodded, feeling very light-headed, almost giddy. I’m more tired than even I thought, he told himself, dismissing the feelings on that basis.

“Pretty colors,” Kalia said, in an odd, almost childlike voice. She stood there and began looking all around in wonder.

Tobrush, too, felt disoriented, as if the great cavern were beginning to move, to spin around. “Josef,” the Julki called. “We’ve reached our limit, I fear. I dislike stopping in this place, but I don’t think we can realistically go on any more.”

“I know what you mean,” he managed, putting his hand on a log-sized crystal sticking out of the cavern floor. “Still, this might be the perfect place. We can shut down power, so we won’t lose anything, and we can get some sleep behind some of the bigger crystals, like those over there. Tobrush, if your Talent’s as shorted out as mine in here, then even that Mizzle telepath couldn’t tell we were here.”

“I was about to suggest the same thing,” the Julki responded. “I can barely tell that you are here and we are bare meters apart.”

Wearily, unable to tell up from down or right from left, they gathered behind a larger set of crystal growths, shut down the suits, and just lay there, exhausted, unthinking, as the entire cavern seemed to revolve and swirl about them.


Molly stumbled and almost fell. Jimmy caught her, but with difficulty; he wasn’t feeling too steady himself.

“It’s the crystals,” the Durquist managed, not too great himself even though he’d felt none of the effect from the stations. “They’re resonating at every and any frequency and causing all sorts of effects which our exhaustion only magnifies. We’ve got to get through this cavern and fast!”

“Can’t,” Jimmy gasped. He accidentally let go of Molly and she slipped to the floor, then was unable to get up.

<Don’t ask me for help,> Grysta put in. <I’m getting the weirdest sensations I ever got in my life.>

The Durquist had the most command, having the least sensitivity, but even if he could have made it out, which he didn’t know, he couldn’t take the others with him.

“We’ll just have to find some cover, then, and to hell with the others,” the star creature commented. “At least in here nobody’s going to tell if we’re around or not. I feel so damned tired! Maybe if we can just get some sleep we can fight these effects.”

It made no logical sense, since it was obvious that the crystals were causing most of the problem, but they couldn’t argue. They picked a spot, managing to crawl to it, and were all pretty well out cold within moments.


Even Gun Roh Chin felt it, although it was manageable to him. More like an anesthetic, a hypnotic numbness that seemed to lay hold of his mind and body and make them even less cooperative than they already were.

“We must keep on!” he urged the others, who were in far worse shape than he. “We can’t stay here! It’ll kill us, or drive us mad! Think! All of you! Fight it!

“No use,” Morok gasped. “I—” The Stargin collapsed, utterly, lying there just staring dully at the great crystals all around. Krisha found the whole place spinning and it became impossible to stand; she collapsed, totally disoriented, unable to even think.

Modra felt almost the same effect and collapsed within seconds of Krisha. Manya began praying loudly and turning around in a mad sort of dance, until she, too, collapsed.

With a massive effort, Gun Roh Chin managed to drag them, one by one, behind one of the larger floor growths, worrying that they might not be the only ones so affected in this place. Then, one by one, he powered down their suits and opened their helmets, conserving what he could.

I’ve got to get them out of here, he told himself, frantic. This place is a death trap. But, first, he just had to get some sleep. . . . 


Twenty minutes later, Desreth came through, cautiously, examining and cataloging as it went along from one side to the other. Some of its senses were dulled in this place, others didn’t work right, but the Corithian felt no other effects from the vast cavern and it never once occurred to the creature that anyone else might have a quite different reaction.

It passed the unconscious Mizlaplanians, not sensing them at all, then the Exchange, and, finally, its fellow Mycohlians, and never once suspected that they were there.

Consequently, Desreth the Corithian passed to the other side and walked out of the great cavern, looking for the rest of its companions.



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