XXV

“We’ve got you, Sir Randolph. You’ll have been listening in, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

McNeil and Groves closed on Mays an hour after Forster told them to retrieve him; he was only twenty kilometers up, and they located him without too much trouble by tracking the radio beacon on his suit, which they’d left intact when they disabled his suit-comm. His radiation ex­posure would be no worse than that of his rescuers.

“No need to make the long round trip after all. Ms. Mitchell valued your life too much,” said Groves.

“Yes, well . . . good-hearted person. Quick study. Have to give her that.”

“I’m afraid you’ve rather shaken her faith in you.”

Mays made no reply.

Of the two crewmen, quick little Tony Groves was more inclined to play Mercurius, the psychologist; it seemed to him that something had gone out of Sir Randolph Mays, some dark force of resistance, for he came down with them very listlessly out of the bronze-colored, Jupiter-dominated sky.

It occurred to the navigator to suggest to Professor For­ster, that famous rationalist, that now would be a good time to question Mays more closely. Perhaps the historian-journalist was willing to admit, if not defeat, something closer to the unvarnished truth about himself.

First they had to get back to the Michael Ventris, a barely visible speck of light alongside the glowing fluff-ball of Amalthea, which was virtually plummeting through the night, visibly shifting against the background of fixed stars.

Even as they watched, diving full speed toward the sat­ellite on their suit maneuvering systems, Amalthea’s aspect changed. The last of the icy husk melted into hot water, and the last of the hot water boiled away in a flash. A rapidly dissipating whiff of vapor slid away, ever so slowly, like the silk scarf of a magician lifting in interminable slow motion and with exquisite grace, to reveal—

—what they had known was there but could not have seen with their own eyes before now, the mirror-finished spacecraft, the world that was a spaceship. The diamond moon.

Just then, Jo Walsh’s voice broke in on their suit-comms: “Angus, Tony, get back here as fast as you can. We’ve got an emergency on our hands.”

“What’s up, Jo?”

“Give it all you’ve got, guys. Bleed Mr. Mays’s maneu­vering gas if you must. Looks like the neighborhood is about to go critical, if our informants know what the hell they’re talking about.”

* * *

And on the flight deck of the Ventris:

“. . . bring the Ventris into the one-eighty equatorial hold. I can’t be sure, but I think you’ve got only about twenty minutes to accomplish this,” Sparta’s quiet voice was saying over the speakers.

“Twenty minutes,” Marianne exclaimed softly. She looked about as if someone could save the situation. But Forster and the captain were staring at the blank videoplate as if by force of concentration they could see Sparta on it. Hawkins was chewing his lip, looking at Marianne help­lessly. Even Blake, whose normal impulse in emergencies was to go out and blow something up, stood glumly by, inactive.

Forster said, “We’re still missing McNeil and Groves, In­spector Troy.”

“Mays?” came Sparta’s voice on the link.

“Yes, he’s with them.”

“Are you in contact?”

“Captain Walsh has just now instructed them to make all possible speed, but we estimate that they are perhaps fifteen minutes away from our current position.”

On the bridge of the Ventris all was silent for a moment, until Sparta’s voice spoke again from the radiolink. “You will have to enter the hold now. They’ll have to come in when they arrive.”

“Their maneuvering fuel . . .” Marianne began.

Sparta’s voice continued. “There seems to be no leeway here—it’s my sense of the situation that the . . . the world-ship is in an automated countdown. And that we’ve already gone past the point of no return.”

“But Inspector Troy . . .”

“Sorry, sir, give me a moment”—Walsh interrupted For­ster’s reply with a hired captain’s diplomatic firmness, which under her politeness brooked no contradiction—“I’ll be get­ting the ship underway, alerting the men. You and Inspector Troy can carry on your debate again shortly.”

Walsh busily communed with the computer of the Ventris—it was a bit more work than usual to get the ship started without the help of her engineer—and programmed it to head for the equator of the diamond moon. “Better strap in, sir. Blake, please take the engineer’s couch. Ms. Mitchell, Mr. Hawkins, down below, please. Secure for course adjust­ment.”

A moment later the maneuvering rockets went off like howitzers, hard enough and loud enough to give them all headaches. The Ventris curved smartly inward, toward the black hole that was even then spiraling open in the side of the glistening worldship.


McNeil looked at Groves. They’d just been briefed by Walsh over their suitlinks. “Any help, Mr. Navigator?”

“Well, Mr. Engineer, I’ve just run a rather preliminary estimate on my sleeve”—he tapped the computer locator pad on his suit’s forearm—“and it puts us in a bit of a bind. To make the vector change, we’ve got to save what fuel we’ve got. But if we save what we’ve got, we arrive, oh, a tad late.”

“We haven’t got the delta-vees, then?”

“That’s putting it succinctly.”

“Any recommendations?”

Inside his suit, Groves visibly shrugged. “I say, let’s go like bats out of hell and hope somebody thinks of something before we run out of gas.”

McNeil looked sideways at their captive. “S’pose you should have a vote, Mays. Not that we have to count it.”

Mays said, “No matter. I’ve nothing to add.”

They hit their suit thrusters then, and dived toward the diamond moon.


The Ventris entered the huge dome originally explored by Forster and Troy in the Manta submarine. Its cathedral-like space was a filigree of ink and silver, drawn with a fine steel needlepoint—for it was full of vacuum now, not water, and its intricate architecture was severely illuminated by in pouring Jupiter light.

From the floor a bundle of gleaming mechanisms, flex­ible and alive as tentacles, sprang up to grasp the Ventris and draw it inward. They turned it as they carried it, so that finally it lay on its side, firmly entangled in a nest of suck­ing tendrils like a fish that had blundered into the grip of an anemone.

The Ventris was aligned so that it was parallel to the axis of the world-ship, pointed in the direction of what they had called the south pole. On the flight deck, what feeble gravity there was tended to draw people to one wall instead of the floor, but the force was so slight that the sensation was not so much like falling as drifting sideways in a slow current.

“The Manta’s got fuel,” Blake said to Walsh. “I can ride it out toward them and abandon it, use my suit gas to help them come in.”

“Sorry, Blake,” she said shortly. “You’d use up your suit gas and more, just matching their trajectory.”

“I insist upon making the attempt,” Blake said, with all the angry dignity he could muster.

“I refuse to have four casualties instead of three.”

“Captain . . .”

“If there were the slightest chance”—Walsh was rigid; two of her long-time companions, her oldest friends, were among the men she proposed to abandon—“but there is not. Run the numbers, if you like. Please prove me wrong.”

Forster—strapped into his couch and brooding, his face in his hands—had stayed out of the dispute. Now he lifted his sad gaze to Blake. “Do as the captain suggests, Blake. Run the numbers.”

“Sir, computer is using its own fuel estimates. I suggest . . . I’m saying they’re low.”

“Or high,” Walsh shot back at him.

“Run the numbers, Blake,” Forster said. “Leave Mays’s mass out of the calculation.”

Walsh looked at Blake without saying anything. She was asking him to take the burden.

“Sorry, Jo. Professor,” Blake whispered. “I won’t say I’d be sorry to see them make that choice for themselves. But . . .”

Walsh turned to the console and tapped numbers into the computer manually; it was not the sort of thing you told the machine to do in voice mode. The numbers came back, and the potential trajectories were graphically displayed.

Walsh and the rest of them stared at the plate.

“Well,” she said, “let’s hope that when the idea occurs to them, they’re less squeamish than . . . than I am.”

“What are you talking about?” Marianne demanded. She and Bill Hawkins had at that moment arrived on the flight deck.

Forster didn’t look at her, but he spoke loudly and flatly, “With Mays’s fuel—but without his mass—McNeil and Groves have a chance to make it back here before Inspector Troy’s deadline.”

“A rapidly diminishing chance,” growled Walsh.

Marianne sifted that. “You want them to abandon Ran­dolph?” she said.

“I wish they would.” Forster looked her in the eye. “But I doubt that they will.”

Marianne could have expressed outrage or horror. But she didn’t.


Inward toward Jupiter, Tony Groves said, “We just passed it, mate. Point of no return.”

“Meaning if nobody comes to our rescue, we sail on forever,” said McNeil.

“ ’Fraid so.”

For a moment their suitcomms were filled with nothing but Jupiter static; then Mays spoke. “You’ve got my suit fuel. Just get rid of me. Perhaps you can still save yourselves.”

“Not the sort of thing that’s usually done,” said Groves.

“And of course you’re the sort who always does the usual thing,” Mays said spitefully.

“I think he’s trying to provoke us, Angus,” Groves said.

“Won’t do him any good. All déjà vu to me,” said McNeil. “Sure, kill off the odd inconvenient fellow and you may live a bit longer. Then try living it down.”

Groves clucked his tongue. “I say, was that a pun?”

“Clever you.”

They sailed on into space, their suit rockets pushing them toward the diamond moon that now almost filled their sky—knowing that they would have no way of stopping, or even of turning, once they reached it.

“Frankly,” said Mays, “it doesn’t really matter to me whether you two live or die. I would like to make a state­ment before I die.”

“We’re listening,” said McNeil.

“Not to you two. To . . . to Forster, I suppose. To that woman Troy, or whatever she calls herself these days.”

McNeil keyed his suitcomm. “Can you still pick us up, Professor?”

The answer came back so clear that Forster might have been in a suit next to them. “I’ve been listening in, Angus. Say what you have to do, Sir Randolph.”

“I’m listening too, Sir Randolph,” Sparta said, as clearly as Forster.

Mays sighed deeply, and took a deep breath of his suit’s cold air. “My name is not Randolph Mays,” he said. “You may know me by other names. William Laird. Jean-Jacques Lequeu. I am none of these. My name does not matter.”

“That’s right, your name doesn’t matter,” Sparta said, her voice as close as if she were inside his head—and to him the sound of her must have been like the hissing of a lizard, for he had been foolish enough to believe she really did not know him. “You thought you had killed my parents. You thought you had created me. But nothing you did made any difference. None of it mattered, Mr. Nemo. Neither do you.”

“We do want to hear what you have to say,” Forster said hastily.

“Well, you will hear it,” Mays said wearily. “The cursed woman is right: I don’t matter anymore. But we prophetae were not mad. We preserved the Knowledge, the Knowledge that made her what she is . . . that brought all of us to this place.”


We committed horrible crimes in the name of the Knowl­ edge.

Perhaps you think it strange that I can admit this so plainly. Conventional thinkers—most people—believe that the daring criminal, the outrageous criminal, the man or woman who murders innocents in cold blood, blows them up in some anonymous bombing or slaughters them with a machine gun, never having seen them before, not knowing anything about them, that such an implacable murderer, as opposed to the congenial spouse-killer or child-butcher, could not possibly be possessed of a conscience. How pitifully mistaken.

Mays flew alone through space, reciting his macabre so­liloquy while the shining bulk of the worldship expanded to one side. McNeil and Groves were alone too, some dis­tance away—not out of any sense of privacy or decorum, but because they had released their grip on him and in the course of several hundred meters had simply drifted way. All three spacesuits were depleted of maneuvering fuel; the men drifted and turned randomly, sometimes facing each other, sometimes staring away into empty space, or at the mirror surface of the thing that had been Amalthea, or into the awesome cloud-cauldron of Jupiter.

We prophetae knew well what we did. We ached for those we sacrificed. The ancient primitives who prayed for the souls of the deer they ate were no more devout than we.

We committed horrible crimes and kept our good cheer, as those before us had done for milleniums. In the end, we believed, the sum of history and the fate of humankind would exculpate us; men and women would bless us.

None of us hoped to live forever, and if a few—or a great many—innocents had to die before Paradise arrived, it was all to the good, for Paradise would arrive that much sooner; that many more would benefit in future.

And so, in the name of the Knowledge, to hurry the day when the Pancreator would return, we made another attempt to realize the Emperor of the Last Days, the feast of the gods. We created her.

Or, as my colleagues and contemporaries insist upon re­ minding me, I created her. But I cannot take all the credit. Her parents—those subtle, lying Hungarians—sold her to me. Under my direction, a few modifications were made. She re fused to cooperate. She, this child, knew the Knowledge bet­ ter than the knights and elders, she insinuated. Too bad I was unsuccessful in disposing of my failure.

After she escaped, only a fistful of years passed before she showed us that seven thousand years of the Knowledge were, to phrase it mincingly, incomplete. The Venusian tab lets revealed that our translations were in error, especially our translation of the Martian plaque. There would be no signal from the homeworld in Crux. The Doradus, the main stay of what was to be our final assault, was thrown away by that fool Kingman.

The monstrous woman went further, striking at us in our most secret strongholds—I myself came within a hair’s- breadth of death at her hands. Then Howard Falcon, who was to have been the new Emperor, failed to rouse the Pan creator on Jupiter; the so-called world of the gods was only a world of elephantine animals. None of us had foreseen the significance of Amalthea; there was not a word of it in the Knowledge. Our plans and our pride were cast in the dust.

We knights and elders of the prophetae—those of us who survived—lost courage at last. We faced the bitter truth, that everything we had worked for and believed was in error. We had earned no privileges by virtue of our false secrets; if Paradise did come to Earth, we were not among the chosen.

I refused to enter the suicide pact with the others. They heartily cursed me, but at least I did them the service of scattering their ashes in space.

For me, three things remained. I would gaze upon the face of the Pancreator. I would bring death to the terrible woman I had helped create. Then I would die myself. To this end I resurrected the useful personality of Sir Randolph Mays and did all that you know about and can infer.

I have seen the Pancreator. What you call the Ambas­ sador is the being for whom seven thousand years of my tradition had prepared me. I was not even prepared for the inevitable disappointment. He, or she, or whatever it is, is not an ugly thing, but neither is it a god.

At last Mays fell silent. If he was done, he had timed his speech well, for the three drifting men were passing as close to the world-ship as they were likely to come. They were no more than half a kilometer from the still-gaping opening of that equatorial hold into which the Ventris had settled, but helpless to stop or turn in their onward rush.

Mays could not resist adding a final, unnecessary com­ment. “My hopes for revenge have also been disappointed. At least I will not be cheated of my own death.”

“Think again, Nemo.” Sparta shattered any dignity which might have clung, mold-like, to Mays’s self-pity. “The Am­bassador has a name. Thowintha is many things—the pilot of this ship, among them—but not what you choose to call the Pancreator.” She laughed, low in her throat. “And you aren’t dead yet.”

A second later the three men understood her. From the cavity of the world-ship’s enormous hold, three almost invisibly fine silvery tentacles had emerged and were rapidly feeling their way through space. They moved unerringly, with the quickness of rattlesnakes, as if with their own per­ception and intelligence.

Ahh . . . easy there!” McNeil cried out, as one of the ten­tacles hooked his leg and jerked him upside down.

“Whoops!” Groves exclaimed at almost the same mo­ment—a boy’s gleeful shout; a tentacle had him by the arm.

Mays merely grunted in surprise as the third tentacle wrapped itself around his middle.

Immediately the silvery fibers were taut, although they were still playing out of the hold faster than a fishing line spinning off a reel. The total difference in velocity between the ship and the men was that of a well-thrown skipping stone on Earth, and the ship’s smart tentacles did not mean to dismember their prey by taking up the slack all at once. But within three hundred meters the men were momentarily motionless with respect to the ship; the ship instantly started reeling them in.

Sparta’s calm voice came into their suitcomms: “You are going to be put into the airlock of the Ventris—it’s open for you. You will have very little time to prepare for accelera­tion, a few seconds at most. Don’t stop to take off your suits, just head for the wardroom and lie flat on the floor. I can’t say how many gees we’re going to pull. Regard any delay as potentially fatal.”

The tentacles seemed to have a very precise knowledge of how much acceleration and deceleration a human’s body could be expected to withstand without serious injury. They pulled hard and fast, stiffened within a couple of dozen me­ters of the hold, and dragged the men in through it as the dome was already knitting itself back together. Side by side, the men cleared the dome just as it snapped shut, only a little more than the height of their helmets above them.

The Ventris appeared ridiculously tiny where it lay inside the kilometer-wide lock. Within seconds the whiplike ten­tacles had shoved the men through the Ventris’s open equipment bay—one, two, three, they were deposited and released—and the tentacles snatched away out of their sight. Even Randolph Mays, who had so recently recited his own funeral oration, scurried through the double hatches and sought a flat place to lie down.

The world began to move even before they had gotten down on their knees. But Sparta—who surely had known what she was doing, intending to hurry them along—had exaggerated the awesome capabilities of Culture X. Even the alien vessel did not have the capacity to translate itself—an ellipsoid thirty kilometers long and filled with water—with an instant acceleration of one Earth gravity.

No, the incredible column of fire that burst from its “north” pole, pointed directly at Jupiter, moved the world-ship slowly at first, just enough to make the floor of the Ventris’s wardroom feel more like a floor than a wall. Indeed, after a few seconds, Angus McNeil got up to make himself more comfortable, unlatching his helmet and throw­ing it aside, struggling out of his suit.

He moved prematurely. By the time he’d gotten his top half off, the world-ship was accelerating at one gee; by the time he’d gotten the bottom half halfway down his legs it was moving at five, and he could no longer support his own rapidly increasing weight. He crashed to the padded floor and lay there, his bulk crushing the fabric.

Sparta’s voice came into the helmets of Tony Groves and the man who had called himself Randolph Mays. “I’m given to understand that acceleration will continue to increase for five more minutes and then cease. By then we will be well on our way to our destination.”

Groves, the navigator, forced a question out of his col­lapsing chest. “Where might that be, Inspector?”

“I don’t know. However, I take it we are going to meet Sir Randolph’s Pancreator after all.”


On the bridge of the world-ship—what the explorers had mistaken for an art gallery—little Sparta and big Thowintha studied the living, shining murals and charted their course thereby. They floated close to each other, turning and glid­ing through the waters of the control space, communicating with the schools of myriad helpers, as if they had known each other for a billion years and were waterdancing to celebrate their long-delayed reunion.

But even as she danced with the alien, an unimaginable event which she had imagined countless times in her dreams, she thought of Blake, her true mate. . . .


He brooded in the hold of the Ventris. He thought he must be getting old, very old. And it was true, he’d changed: the older he got the more like a responsible adult he became. In this whole trip he hadn’t found an excuse to blow anything up.