Clea Koshar had been installed in her government office for three days. The notebook in which she had been doing her own work in inverse sub-trigonometric functions had been put away in her desk for exactly fifty-four seconds when she made the first discovery that gave her a permanent place in the history of Toromon's wars as its first military hero. Suddenly she pounded her fist on the computer keys, flung her pencil across the room, muttered, "What the hell is this!" and dialed the military ministry.
It took ten minutes to get Tomar. His red-haired face came in on the visiphone, recognized her, and smiled. "Hi," he said.
"Hi, yourself," she said. "I just got out those figures you people sent us about the data from the radiation barrier, and those old readings from the time Telphar was destroyed. Tomar, I didn't even have to feed them to the computer. I just looked at them. That radiation was artificially created. Its increment is completely steady. At least on the second derivative. Its build-up pattern is such that there couldn't be more than two simple generators, or one complexed on ..."
"Slow down," Tomar said. "What do you mean, generators?"
"The radiation barrier, or at least most of it, is artificially maintained. And there are not more than two generators, and possibly one, maintaining it."
"How do you generate radiation?" Tomar asked.
"I don't know," Clea said. "But somebody has been doing it."
"I don't want to knock your genius, but how come nobody else figured it out?"
"I just guess nobody thought it was a possibility, or thought of gratuitously taking the second derivative, or bothered to look at them before they fed them into the computers. In twenty minutes I can figure out the location for you."
"You do that," he said, "and I'll get the information to whomever it's supposed to get to. You know, this is the first piece of information of import that we've gotten from this whole battery of slide-rule slippers up there. I should have figured it would have probably come from you. Thanks, if we can use it."
She blew him a kiss as his face winked out. Then she got out her notebook again. Then minutes later the visiphone crackled at her. She turned to it and tried to get the operator. The operator was not to be gotten. She reached into her desk and got out a small pocket tool kit and was about to attack the housing of the frequency-filterer when the crackling increased and she heard a voice. She put the screw driver down and put the instrument back on the desk. A face flickered onto the screen and then flickered off. The face had dark hair, seemed perhaps familiar. But it was gone before she was sure she had made it out.
Crossed signals from another line, she figured. Maybe a short in the dialing mechanism. She glanced down at her notebook and took up her pencil when the picture flashed onto the screen again. This time it was clear and there was no static. The familiarity, she did not realize, was the familiarity of her own face on a man.
"Hello," he said. "Hello, Hello, Clea?"
"Who is this?" she asked.
"Clea, this is Jon."
She sat very still, trying to pull two halves of something back together (as in a forest, a prince had felt the same things disengage). Clea succeeded. "You're supposed to be ... dead. I mean I thought you were. Where are you, Jon?"
"Clea," he said. "Clea—I have to talk to you."
There was a five-second silence.
"Jon, Jon, how are you?"
"Fine," he said. "I really am. I'm not in prison any more. I've been out a long time, and I've done a lot of things. But Clea, I need your help."
"Of course," she said. "Tell me how? What do you want me to do?"
"Do you want to know where I am?" he said. "What I've been doing? I'm in Telphar, and I'm trying to stop the war."
"In Telphar?"
"There's something behind that famed radiation barrier, and it's a more or less civilized race. I'm about to break through the rest of the barrier and see what can be done. But I need some help at home. I've been monitoring phone calls in Toron. There's an awful lot of equipment here that's more or less mine if I can figure out how to use it. And I've got a friend here who knows more in that line than I gave him credit for. I've overheard some closed circuit conference calls, and I'm talking to you by the same method. I know you've got the ear of Major Tomar and I know he's one of the few trustworthy people in that whole military hodge-podge. Clea, there is something hostile to Toromon behind that radiation barrier, but a war is not the answer. The thing that's making the war is the unrest in Toromon. And the war isn't going to remedy that. The emigration situation, the food situation, the excess man power, the deflation: that's what's causing your war. If that can be stopped, then the thing behind the barrier can be dealt with quickly and peacefully. There in Toron you don't even know what the enemy is. They wouldn't let you know even if they knew themselves."
"Do you know?" Clea asked.
Jon paused. Then he said, "No, but whatever it is, it's people with something wrong among them. And warring on them won't exorcise it."
"Can you exorcise it?" Clea asked.
Jon paused again. "Yes. I can't tell you how; but let's say what's troubling them is a lot simpler than what's troubling us in Toromon."
"Jon," Clea asked suddenly, "what's it like in Telphar? You know I'll help you if I can, but tell me."
The face on the visiphone was still. Then it drew a deep breath. "Clea, it's like an open air tomb. The city is very unlike Toron. It was planned, all the streets are regular, there's no Devil's Pot, nor could there ever be one. Roadways wind above ground among the taller buildings. I'm in the Palace of the Stars right now. It was a magnificent building." The face looked right and left. "It still is. They had amazing laboratories, lots of equipment, great silvered meeting halls under an immense ceiling that reproduced the stars on the ceiling. The electric plants still work. Most houses you can walk right in and turn on a light switch. Half the plumbing in the city is out, though. But everything in the palace still works. It must have been a beautiful place to live in. When they were evacuating during the radiation rise, very little marauding took place...."
"The radiation ..." began Clea.
Jon laughed, "Oh, that doesn't bother us. It's too complicated to explain now, but it doesn't."
"That's not what I meant," Clea said. "I figured if you were alive, then it obviously wasn't bothering you. But Jon, and this isn't government propaganda, because I made the discovery myself: whatever is behind the barrier caused the radiation rise that destroyed Telphar. Some place near Telphar is a projector that caused the rise, and it's still functioning. This hasn't been released to the public yet, but if you want to stop your war, you'll never do it if the government can correctly blame the destruction of Telphar on the enemy. That's all they need."
"Clea, I haven't finished telling you about Telphar. I told you that the electricity still worked. Well, most houses you go into, you turn on the light and find a couple of sixty-year-old corpses on the floor. On the roads you can find a wreck every hundred feet or so. There're almost ten thousand corpses in the Stadium of the Stars. It isn't very pretty. Arkor and I are the only two humans who have any idea of what the destruction of Telphar really amounted to. And we still believe we're in the right."
"Jon, I can't hold back information...."
"No, no," Jon said. "I wouldn't ask you to. Besides, I heard your last phone call. So it's already out. I want you to do two things for me. One has to do with Dad. The other is to deliver a message. I overheard a conference call between Prime Minister Chargill and some of the members of the council. They're about to ask Dad for a huge sum of money to finance the first aggressive drive in this war effort. Try and convince him that it'll do more harm than good. Look, Clea, you've got a mathematical mind. Show him how this whole thing works. He doesn't mean to be, but he's almost as much responsible for this thing as any one individual could be. See if he can keep production from flooding the city. And for Toromon's sake, keep an eye, a close eye on his supervisors. They're going to tilt the island into the sea with all their cross-purposes intrigues. All I can do is start you on the right track, Sis, and you'll have to take it from there.
"Now for the message. The one circuit I can't break in on is the Royal Palace system. I can just overhear. Somehow I've got to get a message to the Duchess of Petra. Tell her to get to Telphar in the next forty-eight hours by way of the transit ribbon. Tell her there are two kids she owes a favor to. And tell her the girl she owes four or five favors. She'll be able to find out who they are."
Clea was scribbling. "Does the transit ribbon still work?" she asked.
"It was working when I escaped from prison," Jon said. "I don't see why it should have stopped now."
"You used it?" Clea said. "That means you were in Toron!"
"That's right. And I was at your party too."
"Then it was ..." She stopped. Then laughed, "I'm so glad, Jon. I'm so glad it was you after all."
"Come on, Sis, tell me about yourself," Jon said. "What's been happening in the real world. I've been away from it a long time. Here in Telphar I don't feel much closer. Right now I'm walking around in my birthday suit. On our way here we got into a shadowy situation and I had to abandon my clothes for fear of getting caught. I'll explain that later, too. But what about you?"
"Oh, there's nothing to tell. But to you I guess there is. I graduated, with honors. I've grown up. I'm engaged to Tomar. Did you know that? Dad approves, and we're to be married as soon as the war's over. I'm working on a great project, to find the inverse sub-trigonometric functions. Those are about the most important things in my life right now. I'm suppose to be working on the war effort, but except for this afternoon, I haven't done much."
"Fine," Jon said. "That's about the right proportions."
"Now what about you? And the clothes?" She grinned into the visaphone, and he grinned back.
"Well—no, you wouldn't believe it. At least not if I told it that way. Arkor, the friend who's with me, is one of the forest people. He left the forest to spend some time in Toron, which is where I met him. Apparently he managed to accumulate an amazing store of information, about all sorts of things—electronics, languages, even music. You'd think he could read minds. Anyway, here we are, through the forest, across the prison mines, and in Telphar."
"Jon, what were the mines like? It always made me wonder how Dad could use tetron when he knew that you were being whipped to get it."
"You and I'll get drunk some evening and I'll tell you what it was like," Jon said. "But not until. When you're trying to convince Dad, bring that up about me and the mines."
"Don't worry," she said. "I will."
"Anyway," Jon went on, "we had to get through the forest without being seen and with all those leaves it was pretty dark. Arkor could get through because he was a forest man and nobody would stop him. But because they'd have seen me, I had to go most of the way naked as a jaybird."
Clea frowned. "I don't understand. Are you sure you're all right?"
Jon laughed. "Of course I'm all right. I can't really explain to you just yet. I'm just so happy to see you again, to be able to talk to you. Sis, I've wanted to be free for so long, to see you and Dad again, and—there's nothing wrong with me except the sniffles."
It welled up in her like a wave and the tears flooded her lower lids, and then one overflowed and ran down the left side of her nose. "You see what you're doing," she said. And they laughed once more. "To see you again, Jon is so ...fine."
"I love you, Sis," Jon said. "Thanks, and so long for a little while."
"I'll get your message out. So long." The phone blinked dark and she sat there wondering if perhaps the tension wasn't too much. But it wasn't, and she had messages to deliver.
During the next couple of hours, two people died, miles apart.
"Don't be silly," Rara was saying in the inn at the Devil's Pot. "I'm a perfectly good nurse. Do you want to see my license?"
The white-haired old man sat very straight in his chair by the window. Blue seeped like liquid across the glass. "Why did I do it?" he said. "It was wrong. I—I love my country."
Rara pulled the blanket from the back of the chair and tucked it around the stiff, trembling shoulders. "What are you talking about?" she said, but the birthmark over her face showed deep purple with worry.
He shook the blanket off and flung his hand across the table where the news directive lay.
Crown Prince Kidnaped!King Declares War!
The trembling in Geryn's shoulders became violent shaking.
"Sit back," said Rara.
Geryn stood up.
"Sit down," Rara repeated. "Sit down. You're not well. Now sit down!"
Geryn lowered himself stiffly to the chair. He turned to Rara. "Did I start a war? I tried to stop it. That was all I wanted. Would it have happened if ..."
"Sit back," Rara said. "If you're going to talk to somebody, talk to me. I can answer you. Geryn, you didn't start the war."
Geryn suddenly rose once more, staggered forward, slammed his hands on the table and began to cough.
"For pity's sake," Rara cried, trying to move the old man back into his chair, "will you sit down and relax! You're not well! You're not well at all!" From above the house came the faint beat of helicopter blades.
Geryn went back to his chair. Suddenly he leaned his head back, his sharp Adam's apple shooting high in his neck and quivering. Rara jumped forward and tried to bring his head up. "Dear heavens," she breathed. "Stop that. Now stop it, or you'll hurt yourself."
Geryn's head came up straight again. "A war," he said. "They made me start the—"
"No one made you do anything," Rara said. "And you didn't start the war."
"Are you sure?" he asked. "No. You can't be sure. No one can. Nobody...."
"Will you please try to relax," Rara repeated, tucking at the blanket.
Geryn relaxed. It went all through his body, starting at his hands. The stiff shoulders dropped a little, his head fell forward, the wall of muscle quivering across his stomach loosened, the back bent; and that frail fist of strength that had jarred life through his tautened body for seventy years, shaking inside his chest, it too relaxed. Then it stopped. Geryn crumpled onto the floor.
The shifting body pulled Rara down with him. Unaware that he was dead, she was trying to get him back into the chair, when the helicopter blades got very loud.
She looked up to see the window darken with a metal shadow. "Good lord," she breathed. Then the glass shattered.
She screamed, careened around the table, and fled through the door, slamming it behind her.
Over the flexible metal ramp that hooked onto the window sill two men entered the room. Fire-blades poised, they walked to the crumpled body, lifted it between them, and carried it back to the window. Their arm bands showed the royal insignia of the palace guards.
Tel was running down the street because someone was following him. He ducked into a side alley and skittered down a flight of stone steps. Somewhere overhead he heard a helicopter.
His heart was pounding like explosions in his chest, like the sea, like his ocean. Once he had looked through a six-inch crevice between glassy water and the top of a normally submerged cave and seen wet, orange starfish dripping from the ceiling and their reflections quivering with his own breath. Now he was trapped in the cave of the city, the tide of fear rising to lock him in. Footsteps passed above him.
Nearby was a ladder that led to a trap door which would put him in the hall of a tenement. He climbed it, emerged, and then turned up the regular steps to the roof. He walked across the tar-paper surface to the edge, leaned over, and peered into the alley. Two men, who may have been the people following him, approached from opposite ends of the alley. The sky was deepening toward evening and it was cool. The two men met, and then one pointed to the roof.
"Damn," Tel muttered, ducked backward, and bit his tongue with surprise. He opened his mouth and breathed hard, holding the side of his jaw. The helicopter was coming closer.
Then something very light fell over him. He forgot his bitten tongue and struck out with his hands. It was strong, too. It jerked at his feet and he fell forward. It was not until it lifted him from the roof that he realized he was caught in a net. He was being drawn up toward the sound of the whirling helicopter blades.
Just about that time the order came through. He didn't even have time to say good-bye to Clea. Two other mathematicians in the corps had shown appropriate awe at Clea's discovery and proceeded to locate the generator. The next-in-charge general, working on a strategy Tomar did not quite understand, decided that now was the time for an active strike. "Besides," he added, "if we don't give them some combat soon, we'll lose—and I mean lose as in 'misplace'—the war."
The shadow of the control tower fell through the windshield and slipped across Tomar's face. He pulled up his goggles and sighed. Active combat. What the hell would they be combating? The disorder, the disorganization was beginning to strike him as farcical. Though after the poisoned fish, the farcical was no longer funny.
The buildings on the airfield sunk back and down. The transit ribbon fell below him and the six other planes in the formation pulled up behind him. A moment later the island was a comb of darkness on the glittering foil of the evening sea.
Clouds banded the deep blue at the horizon. There were three stars out, the same stars that he had looked at as a boy when his sunup to sundown work day had ended. Between hunger and hunger there had been some times when you could look at the stars and wonder, as there were now between times of work and work.
The controls were set. There was nothing to do but wait for land to rise up over the edge of the world.
As the end of the metal ribbon was a transparent crystal sphere, fifteen feet in diameter which hovered above the receiving stage. A dozen small tetron units sat around the room. By one ornate window a bank of forty-nine scarlet knobbed switches pointed to off. Two men stood on the metal catwalk that ran above the receiving stage, one young man with black hair, the other a dark giant with a triplex of scars down the left side of his face.
In another room, the corpses of the elders of Telphar sat stiff and decomposed on green velvet seats.
It was evening in the solarium on top of the General Medical building. The patients were about to be herded from their deck chairs and game tables under the glass roof back to their wards, when a woman screamed. Then there was the sound of breaking glass. More people screamed.
Alter heard the roar of helicopter blades. People were running around her. Suddenly the crowd of bathrobed patients broke from in front of her. She touched the cast that covered her left shoulder and arm. People cried out. Then she saw.
The glass dome had been shattered at the edge, and the flexible metal ramp ran a dark ribbon from the copter to the edge of the solarium. The men that marched across had the insignia of the royal guards. She clamped her jaws together and moved behind the nurse. The men marched in, fire-blades high, among the overturned deck chairs. There were three stars visible, she noted irrelevantly, through the bubble dome.
Good lord! They were coming toward her!
The moment the guards recognized her, she realized the only way to get out was to cross the suddenly immense span of metal flooring to the stairwell. She ducked her head, broke from the crowd of patients and ran, wondering why she had been fool enough to wait this long. The guard tackled her and she heard screams again.
She fell to the hard floor and felt pain explode along the inside of her cast. The guard tried to lift her, and with her good arm she struck at his face. Then she held her palm straight and brought the edge down on the side of his neck.
She staggered and she felt herself slip to the floor. Then someone grabbed a handful of her hair and her head was yanked back. At first she closed her eyes. Then she had to open them. Night was moving above her through the dome of the solarium. Then the cracked edge of the glass passed over her, and it was colder, and the blur and roar of helicopter blades was above.
"On course?"
"Dead on course," said Tomar back into the microphone. Below, the rim of land slipped back under them. The moon bleached the edges of the vari-colored darknesses beneath them; then went down.
"What are you thinking about, Major?" came the voice from the speaker again.
"Not thinking about anything," Tomar said. "Just thinking about waiting. It's funny, that's most of what you do in this army: wait. You wait to go out and fight. And once you go out, then you start waiting to turn around and come back."
"Wonder what it'll be like."
"A few bombs over that generator, then we'll have had active combat, and everyone will be happy."
A laugh, mechanical, through the speaker. "Suppose they 'active' back?"
"If they cripple our planes like they've done before, we'll make it to the island again."
"I had to leave a hot cup of coffee back at the hangar, Major. I wish it was light so we could see what we were doing."
"Stop bitching."
"Hey, Major."
"What?"
"I've invented a new kind of dice."
"You would."
"What you do is take fifteen centiunit pieces and arrange them in a four-by-four square with one corner missing. Then you take a sixteenth one and shoot it within forty-five degrees either way of the diagonal into the missing corner. It works out that no matter how you do it, if all the coins in the square are touching, two coins will fly off of the far edge. Each of those has a number and the two numbers that fly off are like the two numbers that come up on the dice. It's better than regular dice because the chances are up on some combinations. And there's a certain amount of skill involved too. The guys call it Randomax. That's forrandom numbersandmatrix."
"I'll play you a game someday," Tomar said. "You know, if you used a smaller coin than a centiunit for the one you fire into the missing corner, say a deciunit, the chances that it would hit both corner coins would go up, that is your randomness."
"Really?"
"Sure," Tomar said. "My girl friend's a mathematician, and she was telling me all about probability a few weeks ago. I bet she'd be interested in the game."
"You know what, Major?"
"What?"
"I think you're the best officer in the damn army."
Such was the conversation before the first battle of the war.
Such was the conversation Jon Koshar monitored in the laboratory tower of the Palace of the Stars in Telphar. "Oh damn," he said. "Come on, Arkor. We'd better get going. If the Duchess doesn't get here with Geryn soon.... Well, let's not think about it." He scribbled a note, set it in front of one visiphone and dialed the number of another that was on a stand in front of the receiving platform of the transit ribbon.
"There," he said. "That's got instructions to follow us as soon as she gets here. And she better not miss it." They went down the metal steps to a double doorway that opened onto a road.
Two mechanical vehicles stood there, both with pre-controls set for similar destinations. Jon and Arkor climbed into one, pushed the ignition button, and the car shot forward along the elevated roadway. White mercury lights flooded the elevated strip as it wound through the city.
The road dipped and houses got wider and lower on each side. The horizon glowed purple and above that, deep yellow clouds dropped into late evening. There was a sound of planes overhead.
As the car halted at the barren limit of the last suburb of Telphar, a sudden white streak speared from the horizon. "Uh-oh," said Jon. "That's what I was afraid of."
Something caught fire in the air, twisted wildly through the sky, and then began to circle down, flaming.
"Major! Major! What happened to D-42?"
"Something got him. Pull over. Pull over everybody!"
"We can't spot it. Where'd it come from?"
"All right, everybody. Break formation. Break formation, I said!"
"Major, I'm going to drop a bomb. Maybe we can see where that came from in the light. I thought you said cripple."
"Never mind what I said. Drop it."
"Major Tomar. This is B-6. We've been—" (Unintelligible static.)
Someone else gave a slow whistle through the microphone.
"Break formation, I said. Damn it, break formation."
Over the plain, a sheet of red fire flapped up, and Jon and Arkor pulled back from the railing that edged the road. Another white streak left the horizon, and for a moment, in the glare, their shadows on the pavement were doubled in white and red.
The sound of the explosion reached them a moment later, as broken rocks leapt into visibility like a rotted jaw swung up through red fire.
Another sound behind them made them turn. The lighted roadways of Telphar looped the city like strands of pearls on skeletal fingers. A car came toward them.
Another wailing missile took the sky, and a moment later a screaming plane answered, tearing down the night. This one suddenly turned as its flaming motors caught once more and careened above their heads so close that they ducked and disappeared among the city towers: an explosion, then falling flame drooled the side of a building. "I hope that's nowhere near the Palace of the Stars," a voice said next to Jon. "We'll have a great time getting back if it is."
Jon whirled. The Duchess had gotten out of the car. The red light flared a moment in her hair, then died.
"No. That was nowhere near it," Jon said. "Am I glad to see you."
Tel and Alter, still in her cast and hospital robe, followed the Duchess out of the car.
"Well," he said, "you brought the kids too."
"It was better than leaving them back in Toron. Jon, Geryn is dead. I asked what to do, but I didn't get any answer. So we lugged his body along just in case. But what do we do now?"
From the railing Arkor laughed.
"It's not funny," Jon said.
The Duchess looked overhead as another missile exploded. "I had hoped this wouldn't happen. This means a war, Jon. A real one, and unstoppable."
Another plane crashed, too close this time, and they ducked behind the cars. "Gee," breathed Alter, which was the only thing anybody said.
Then Arkor cried, "Come on."
"Where to?" asked Jon.
"Follow me," Arkor repeated. "Everyone."
"What about Geryn?"
"Leave that corpse behind," Arkor told them. "He can't help."
"Look, do you know what's going on?" Jon demanded.
"More than Geryn ever did," the giant returned. "Now let's get going." They sprinted out along the road, then ducked under the railing and made their way across the rocky waste.
"Where are we going?" Tel whispered.
Jon called back over his shoulder, "That's a very good question."
The plane got tipped, and for seven seconds, while the needles swung, he didn't know where he was going, east or west, up or down. When the needles stopped, he saw that it hadn't been any of the first three. Suddenly the green detector light flashed in the half darkness of the cabin. The generator! The radiation generator was right below him. Then he was blinded by a white flare outside the windshield. Oh, God damn!
He felt the jerk and the air suddenly rushed in cold behind him. There was a hell of a lot of noise and the needle quietly swung.... He was going down!
Land lit up outside the front window; a small block house set in the wrecked earth. There were three whirling antennae on the roof. That must be it! That must!
It happened in his arms and fingers, not in his head. Because suddenly he pushed the stick forward, and the plane, what was left of it, turned over and he was staring straight down, straight ahead, straight, straight below him. And coming closer.
It must have been his arms, because his head was thinking wildly about a time when a girl with pearls in her black hair had asked him what he had wanted, and he had said, 'Nothing ... nothing....' and realized he had been wrong because suddenly he wanted very much to ... (The block house came up and hit him.) ... Nothing.
Tel and the Duchess screamed. The rest just drew breath quickly and staggered back. "He's in there," Arkor said. "That's where your Lord of the Flames is."
The landscape glowed with the encroaching light of the flaming torch, and they saw the blockhouse now with its whirling antennae on the roof. Before the plane hit, a darkness opened in the side of the blockhouse and three figures emerged and sprinted among the rocks.
"The middle one," said Arkor. "That's him, face him, concentrate on him...."
"What do you...?" Tel began.
"You ride along with me, kids," Arkor said, only he didn't move. Two of the figures had fallen now, but the middle one was running toward them. The torch hit, and his shadow was suddenly flung across the broken earth to meet them....
The green of beetles' wings ... the red of polished carbuncle ... a web of silver fire, and through the drifting blue smoke Jon hurled across the sky.
Then blackness, intense and cold. The horizon was tiny, jagged, maybe ten feet away. He reached a metal out and crawled expertly (not clumsily. Expertly!) across a crevice, but slowly, very slowly. The sky was sharp with stars, though the sun was dim to his light-sensitive rind. Like a sliding cyst, he edged over the chunk of rock that spun somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. Now he reached out with his mind to touch a second creature on another rock.Petra, he called.Where is he?
His orbit should take him between the three of us in a minute and a half.
Fine.
Jon, who is the third one? I still don't understand.
Another mind joined them.You don't understand yet? I was the third, I always was. I was the one who directed Geryn to make the plan in the first place for the kidnaping. What made you think that he was in contact with the triple beings?
I don't know, Jon said.Some misunderstanding.
There was the laughter of children. Then Tel said,Hey, everybody, we're with Arkor.
Shhh, said Alter.The misunderstanding was my fault, Jon. I told you that Geryn talked to himself, and that made you think it was him.
Get ready, Petra said.Here he comes.
Jon saw, or rather sensed the approach of another spinning asteroid, whirling toward them through the blackness. But it was inhabited. Yes! The three of them threw their thoughts across the rush of space.
There....
Roaring steam swirled above him. He raised his eye-stalks another twenty feet and looked toward the top of the cataract some four miles up. Then he lowered his siphon into the edge of the pool of pale green liquid methane and drank deeply. Far away in a beryl green sky, three suns rushed madly about one another and gave a little heat to this farthest of their six planets.
Now Jon flapped his slitherers down and began to glide away from the methane falls and up the nearly vertical mountain slope. Someone was coming toward him, with shiny red eye-stalks waving in greeting. "Greetings to the new colony," the eye-stalks signaled.
Jon started to signal back. But suddenly he recognized (a feeling way at the back of his slitherers) who this was. He leaped forward and flung the double flaps of leathery flesh across his opponent and began to scramble back up the rocks. Jon had his tight, but was wondering where the hell were....
Suddenly his eye-stalk caught the great form that he knew must be Arkor coming down over the rocks (with Alter and Tel. Yes, definitely; because the creature suddenly did a flying leap between two crags that could have only been under the girl-acrobat's control), and a moment later that Petra had arrived at the other shore of the methane river. Using her slitherers for paddles, she struck out across the foaming current.
Think at him, concentrate....There....
The air was water-clear. The desert was still, and he lay in the warm sand, under the light of the crescent moon. He was growing, adding facets; he let the pale illumination seep into his transparent body, decreasing his polarization cross-frequencies. The light was beautiful, too beautiful—dangerous! He began to tingle, to glow red-hot. His base burned with white heat and another layer of sand beneath him melted, fused, ran, and became part of his crystalline body.
He stepped up the polarization, his body clouded, and cooled once more. Music sang through him, and his huge upper facet reflected the stars.
Once more he lessened his polarization, and the light crept further and further into his being. His temperature rose. Vibrations suffused his transparency and the pulsing music made the three dust particles that had settled on his coaxial face seven hundred and thirty years ago dance above him. He felt their reflection deep in his prismatic center.
He felt it coming, suddenly, and tried to stop it. But the polarization index suddenly broke down completely. For one terrific moment of ecstasy the light of the moon and the stars poured completely through him. Chord after chord rang out in the desert night. Back and forth along his axis, colliding, shaking his substance, jarring him, pommeling him, came the vibrations. For one instant he was completely transparent. The next, he was white-hot. Before he could melt, he felt the crack start.
It shot the length of his forty-two mile, super-heated body. He was in two pieces! The radio disturbance alone covered a third of a galaxy. Twelve pieces fell away. The chord crashed again, and the crack whipped back and forth vivisecting him. Already he was nearly thirty-six thousand individual crystals, all of which had to grow again, thirty-six thousand minds. He was no more.
Jon, the voice sang through drumbled silicate.
Right over here, Petra, he hummed back. (The note was a perfect quarter tone below A-flat. Perfect! Not clumsy.Perfect!)
Where's Arkor?
To their left the triple notes of an E-flat minor chord (Arkor, Tel, and Alter) sounded:Right here.
Just as they had made contact, before the music stopped (and once more their thoughts would become separate, individual, and they would lose awareness of each other and of the hundreds of other crystals that lay over the desert, under the clear perpetual night)—just then a strident dissonance pierced among them.
There, sang Petra.
There, hummed Jon.
There, came the triad in E-flat minor. They concentrated, tuned, turned their thoughts against the dissonance.There....
Jon rolled over and pushed the silk from his white shoulders and stretched. Through the blue pillars, the evening sky was yellow. Music, very light and fast, was coming from below the balcony. Suddenly a voice sounded beside him: "Your Majesty, your Majesty! You shouldn't be resting now. They're waiting for you downstairs. Tltltrlte will be furious if you're late."
"What do I care?" Jon responded. "Where's my robe?"
The serving maid hastened away and returned with a sheer, shimmering robe, netted through with threads of royal black. The drape covered Jon's shoulders, draped across his breasts, and fell to his thighs.
"My mirror," said Jon.
The serving maid brought the mirror and Jon looked. Long, slightly oriental eyes sat wide-spaced in the ivory face over high cheekbones. Full breasts pushed tautly beneath the transluscent material, and the slender waist spread to sensual, generous hips. Jon almost whistled at his reflection.
The maid slipped clear plastic slippers on his feet, and Jon rose and walked toward the stairs. In the lobby, the throng hissed appreciatively as he descended. On one column hung a bird cage in which a three-headed cockatoo was singing to beat the band. Which was difficult to do, because the band was composed of fourteen copper-headed drums. (Fourteen was the royal number.)
Across the lobby wind instruments wailed, and Jon paused on the stairs. "Don't worry," the maid said, "I'm right behind you."
Jon felt the terror rise.Hey, he called out mentally,is that you, Petra?
Like I said, right behind you.
Incidentally, how did I come up with this body?
I don't know, dear, but you look devastating.
Gee, thanks, he said, projecting a mental sneer.Where's Arkor and Company?
The music had stopped. There was only the sound of the three-headed bird.
There they are.
The winds screeched again, and at the entrance of the lobby, the people fell away from the door. There was Tltltrlte. He was tall, and dark, in a cloak in which there were many more black threads than in Jon's. He unsheathed a sword, and began to come forward. "Your reign is through, Daughter of the Sun," he announced. "It is time for a new cycle."
"Very well," said Jon.
As Tltltrlte advanced, the throng that crowded the lobby clapped their hands in terror and moved back further. Jon stood very straight.
As Tltltrlte came forward, his shoulders narrowed. He pushed back the hood of his cloak and a mass of ebony hair cascaded down his shoulders. With each step, his hips broadened and his waist narrowed. A very definite bulge of mammary glands now pushed up beneath his black silk tunic. As Tltltrlte reached the bottom of the steps, she raised her sword.
Think at him, came Arkor from the bird cage.
Think at him, came from Petra.
Jon saw the blade flash forward and then felt it slide into his abdomen.At her, he corrected.
At her, they answered.
As Jon toppled down the steps, dying, he asked,What the hell is this anyway?
We're inhabiting a very advanced species of moss, Arkor explained, with the calmness that only a telepath can muster in certain confusing situations.Each individual starts off male, but eventually changes to female at the desired time.
Moss?asked Jon as he hit his head on the bottom step and died.
There....
The wave came again and thundered on the beach. He staggered backwards, just as the froth spumed up the sand. The sky was blue-black. He raised his fingers to his lips (seven long tines webbed together) and whined into the night. He lifted his transparent eyelids from his huge, luminous eyes to see if there wasn't some faint trace of the boat. Spray fell on them, stung the rims, and he snapped all three lids over them, one after another. He whined again, and once more the wave grew before him.
He opened the two opaque lids, and this time thought he saw them far off through the greenish spray. The pentagonal sail rode above a billow-blue, wet, and full. It dipped, rose, and he pulled back his transparent eyelid again, this time when the wave was down, and thought he saw figures on the fibrous hammock of the boat. On the blue sail was the white circle of a Master Fisherman's boat. His parent was a Master Fisherman. Yes, it was his parent coming to get him.
Another billow exploded and he crouched in the froth, digging his hind feet deep into the pebbly beach.
The crosshatch of planking scudded onto the shore, and they swarmed off. One wore a chain around his neck with the Master Fisherman's seal. Another carried a seven-pronged fork. The two others were just boat-hands and wore identifying black belts of Kelpod shells.
"My offspring," said the one with the seal. "My fins have smarted for you. I thought we would never swim together again." He reached down and lifted Jon into his arms. Jon put his head against his parent's chest and watched water beading down the pentagonal scales.
"I was frightened," Jon said.
His parent laughed. "I was frightened too. Why did you swim out so far?"
"I wanted to see the island. But when I was swimming, I saw...."
"What?"
Jon closed his eyelids.
His parent smiled again. "You're sleepy. Come." Now Jon felt himself carried to the water and into the waves. The spray fell warmly on his face now, and unafraid, he relaxed his gill slits as water fell across him and they climbed onto the boat.
Wind caught the sail, and the open-work of planking listed into the sea. Long clouds swung rapidly across the twin moons like the tines of the fishing forks the fishermen saluted the sacred phosphor fires with when they returned from their expeditions. He dreamed of his, a little, in the swell and drop. His parent had tied him to the boat, and so he floated at the end of a few feet of slack. Water rolled down his shoulders, slipped beneath his limp dorsal fin, and tickled. Then he dreamed of something else, the thing he had seen, glowing first beneath the water, then rising.... He whined suddenly, and shook his head.
He heard the others on the boat, their webbed feet slipping on the wet planks. He opened his eyes and looked up. The two boat-hands were holding onto stays and pointing off into the water. Now his parent had come up to them, holding a fishing spear, and they were joined by the Second Fisherman.
Jon scrambled from the water onto the plank. His parent put an arm around him and drew him closer. (Here he comes, Arkor said.) His other hand went to the seal of authority around his neck, as though it gave him some sort of protection.
"There it is," Jon suddenly cried. "That's what I saw. That's why I was afraid to swim back." (There it is, Jon said.)
A phosphorescent disk was shimmering under the surface of the water. The Second Fisherman raised his spear higher. "What is it?" he asked. (What is it this time?Petra wanted to know.)
Indistinct, yet nearly the size of the ship, it hovered almost three breast strokes from them, glowing beneath the surface.
(I'll have a look, said Petra.) The Second Fisherman suddenly dove forward and disappeared. Still holding to the frame of the boat, Jon and his parent went under the water where they could see better.
One of Jon's eyelids, the transparent one, was actually an envelope of tissue which he could flood with vitreous solution when he was submerged to form a correcting lens over his pupil.
Through the water he saw the Second Fisherman bubbling through the water toward the immense, transluscent hemisphere that dangled ahead of them. The Second Fisherman stopped with an underwater double-reverse and hovered near the thing. (It's a huge jellyfish, Petra told them.) "Can't figure out what it is," the Second Fisherman signaled back. Then he extended his fork and jabbed at the membrane. The seven tines went in, came out.
The jellyfish moved, fast.
The tentacles hanging from the bottom of the bag raveled upward like snagged threads. The body bloated and surged sideways. Two tentacles wrapped around the Second Fisherman as he tried to swim away. (Eep, said Petra.These things hurt.)
Jon's parent was on top of deck again, shouting orders to the boat-hands. The ship swung toward the thing which was now heaving to the surface.
(Look, let's finish this thing up for good. Concentrate.That was Arkor.There....)
(From beneath the water they felt Petra reach her mind into the pulsing mass:There....)
(As the tentacles encased her and she jammed the spear home again and again through the leaking membrane, she felt Jon's mind join in: There....)
The boat rammed into the side of the jellyfish, the planks tearing away the membrane and the thick, stinging insides fountaining over them. Now it nearly turned over, and tentacles flapped from the water in wet, fleshy ropes. The Second Fisherman was caught in one of the snarls.
Their green faces were lighted from beneath by the milky glow.
(There....) Suddenly it tore away from the planks, going down beneath the water. (There....) The Second Fisherman's head bobbed to the surface, shook the green fin that crested his skull, and laughed. (There....)
3 to 6, 3 to 6, (Jon's frequency oscillated from 3 to 6 as he drifted through clouds of super-heated gas) 3 to 6, 3 to 6—7 to 10! (Someone was coming.) U to 10, 7 to 10, (It was getting closer; suddenly:) 10 to 16! (Then:) 3 to 6, 7 to 10, 3 to 6, 7 to 10, (they had passed through each other.Hi, Petra said.Have you any idea where we are?)
(The temperature is somewhere near three quarters of a million degrees. Any ideas?)
9 to 27, 9 to 27, 9 to 27 (came puttering along and passed through both Jon and Petra;) 12 to 35, 10 to 37, (and then, again) 3 to 6, 7 to 10, 9 to 27, 9 to 27, 9 to 27 (We are halfway between the surface and the center of a star not unlike our sun, said Arkor.Note all the strange elements around.) 9 to 27, 9 to 27, 9 to 27.
7 to 10, 7 to 10, 7 to 10 (They keep on turning into one another, Petra said.) 7 to 10, 7 to 10, 7 to 10.
3 to 6, 3 to 6, 3 to 6 (At this temperature you would too if you were atomic, Jon told her.) 3 to 6, 3 to 6, 3 to 6.
9 to 27, 9 to 27, 9 to 27 (Where's our friend?Arkor wanted to know.)
pi to e, pi to 2e, 2pi to 4e, 4pi to 8e, 8pi to 16e, 16pi to 32e.
(Speak of the... Jon started.Hey, we've got to do something about that. Not only is it transcendental, it's increasing so fast he'll eventually shake this star apart.) 3 to 6, 3 to 6, 3 to 6.
(So that's what causes novas, said Petra.) 7 to 10, 7 to 10, 7 to 10.
(At the next oscillation, Arkor, acting as a side-coefficient, passed through the intruder.) 322pi to 64e (Arkor got out before the second extremity was reached. The wave cycle stuttered, having been reversed end on end.) 642pi to 32e (It tried to right itself and couldn't because Jon spun through the lower end divisibility) 642pi to 16/9e (then Arkor jumped in, tail first it recovered and it resolved into:) 642pi to 4/3e, 642pi to 4/3e, 642pi to 4/3e (it quivered, its range no longer geometric).
(Watch this, said Petra,About face....She gave it a sort of nudge, not passing through it, so that when it whirled to catch her, she was gone, and it was going the other way:)
4/3pi to 642e, 4/3pi to 642e, 4/3pi to 642e,
(I hope no one ever does that to me, said Petra.Look, the poor thing is contracting.)
4/3 to 640e, 4/3pi to 622, 4/3pi to 560, 4/3pi to 499,
(Somehow theecomponent chanced to slip through 125. Jon moved in like a shower of anti-theta-mazons and extracted a painless cube so fast that the intruder oscillated on it three times before it knew what had happened to it:)
4/3pi to 53e, 4/3pi to 53e, 4/3pi to 53e under high gravity—very high, that is, two to three million times that of earth, such as inside a star—in such warped space there is a subtle difference between 53and 125, though they represent the same number. It's like the notes E-sharp and F, which are technically the same, but are distinguished between when played by a good violinist with a fine ear. When the root came loose, therefore, the variation threw the wave-length all off balance:) 4/3pi to 5e, 4/3pi to 5e, 4/3pi to 5e....
(All right, everybody, concentrate—)
(There, there, there....)
For one moment, the intruding oscillation turned, ducked, tried to escape, and couldn't. It contracted into a small ball with a volume of 4/3pie3, and disappeared.
There....
Jon Koshar shook his head, staggered forward, and went down on his knees in white sand. He blinked. He looked up. There were two shadows in front of him. Then he saw the city.
It was Telphar, stuck on a desert, under a double sun. The transit ribbon started across the desert, got the length of twelve pylons, and then crumpled.
As he stood up, something caught in the corner of his eye.
His eyes moved, and he saw a woman about twenty feet away from him. Her red hair fell straight to her shoulders in the dry heat. He blinked as she approached. She wore a straight skirt and had a notebook under her arm. "Petra?" he said, frowning. It was Petra, but Petra different.
"Jon," she answered. "What happened to you?"
He looked down at himself. He was wearing a torn, dirty uniform. A prison uniform. His prison uniform!
"Arkor," said Petra, suddenly. (Her voice was higher, less sure.)
They turned. Arkor stood in the sand, his feet wide over the white hillocks. The triple scars down his face welled bright blood in the hot light.
They came together now. "What's going on?" Jon asked.
Arkor shrugged.
"What about the kids?" asked Petra.
"They're still right here," Arkor said, pointing to his head and grinning. Then his finger touched the opened scars. When he drew it away, he saw the blood and frowned. Then he looked at the City. The sun caught on the towers and slipped like bright liquid along the looping highways. "Hey," Jon said to Petra. (No, he realized; it was Petra with a handful of years lopped off.) "What's the notebook?"
She looked down at it, surprised to find it in her hands. Then she looked at her dress. Suddenly she laughed, and began to flip through the pages of the notebook. "Why, this is the book in which I finished my article on shelter architecture among the forest people. In fact this is what I was wearing the day I finished my article."
"And you?" Jon asked Arkor.
Arkor looked at the blood on his finger. "My mark is bleeding, like the night the priest put it there." He paused. "That was the night that I became Arkor, really. That was the time that I realized how the world was, the confusion, the stupidity, the fear. It was the night I decided to leave the forest." Now he looked up at Jon. "That was the uniform you were wearing when you escaped from prison."
"Yes," said Jon. "I guess it was what I was wearing when I became me, too. That was the time when freedom seemed most bright." He paused. "I was going to find it no matter what. Only somehow I felt I'd gotten sideswiped. I wonder whether I have or not."
"Have you?" asked Petra. She glanced at the City. "I guess when I finished that essay, that's when I really became myself, too. I remember I went through a whole sudden series of revelations about myself, and about society, and about how I felt about society, about being an aristocrat, even, what it meant and what itdidn'tmean. And I suppose that's why I'm here now." She looked at the City again. "There he is," she nodded.
"That's right," said Jon.
They started across the sand, now, making toward the shadow of the ruined transit ribbon. They reached it quicker than they thought, for the horizon was very close. The double shadows, one a bit lighter than the other, lay like two inked brush strokes over the page of the desert. "But how come we're in our own bodies," the Duchess asked, as they reached the shadow of the first pylon. "Shouldn't we be inhabiting the forms of...." Suddenly there was a sound, the shadow moved. Jon looked up at the ribbon above them and cried out.
As the metal tore away, they jumped back, and a moment later a length of the ribbon splashed down into the sand, where they had stood. They were still for a handful of breaths.
"You're darn right he's there," Jon said. "Come on."
They started again. Petra shook white grains from her notebook cover and they moved along the loose sand. A road seeped from under the desert, now, and began to rise toward Telphar. They mounted it and followed it toward the looming city. Before them the towers were dark streaks on the rich blue sky.
"You know, Petra's question is a good one," Arkor said few minutes later.
"Yeah," said Jon. "I've been thinking about it too. We seem to be in our own bodies, only they're different. Different as our bodies were at the most important moments of our lives. Maybe, somehow, we've come to a planet in some corner of the universe, where three beings almost identical to us, only different in that way, are doing, for some reason we'll never know, almost exactly what we're doing now."
"It's possible," Arkor said. "With all the myriad possibilities of worlds, it's conceivable that one might be like that, or like this."
"Even to the point of talking about talking about it?" asked Petra. She answered herself. "Yes, I guess it could. But saying all this for reasons we don't understand, and saying, 'Saying all this for reasons we don't understand....'" She shuddered. "It's not supposed to be that way. It gives me the creeps."
There was another sound, and they froze. It was the low sound of some structure tumbling, but they couldn't see anything.
Another fifty feet, when the road had risen ten feet off the ground and the first tower was beside them, they heard a cracking noise again. The road swayed beneath them. "Uh-oh," Arkor said.
Then the road fell. They cried out, they scrambled; suddenly there was cracked concrete around them, and they had fallen. Above them was a jagged width of blue sky between the remaining edges of the road.
"My foot's caught," Petra cried out.
Arkor was beside her, tugging on the concrete slab that held her.
"Hold on a second," Jon said. He grabbed a free metal strut that still vibrated in the rubble, and jammed it between the slab and the beam it lay on. Using the wreck of an I-beam for a fulcrum, he pried it up. "There, slip your foot out."
Petra rolled away. "Is the bone broken?" he asked. "I got a friend of mine out of a mine accident that way, once." He let the slab fall again. (And for a moment he stopped, thinking, I knew what to do. I wasn't clumsy, I knew....)
Petra rubbed her ankle. "No," she said. "I just got my ankle wedged in that crevice, and the concrete fell on top." She stood up, now, picking up the notebook. "Ow," she said. "That hurts."
Arkor held her arm. "Can you walk?"
"With difficulty," Petra said, taking another step and clamping her teeth.
"Alter says to stand on your other foot and shake your injured one around to get the circulation back," Arkor told her.
Petra gritted teeth, and stepped again. "A little better," she said. "I'm scared. This really hurts. This may be a body that looks like mine, but it hurts, and it hurts like mine." Suddenly she looked off into the city. "Oh hell," she said. "He's in there. Let's go."
They went forward again, this time under the road. The sidewalks, deserted and graying, slipped past. They passed a shopping section; teeth of broken glass gaped in the frames of store windows. Above, two roads veered and crossed, making a black, extended swastika on a patch of white clouds.
Then a sudden rumbling.
Silence.
They stopped.
Now a crash, thunderous and protracted. An odor of dust reached them. "He's there," Arkor said.
"Yes," said Jon.
"I can...."
Then the City exploded. There was one instant of very real agony for Jon as the pavement beneath his feet shot up at him, and he reached his mind out as a shard of concrete knocked in his face (all the time crying,No, no, I've just become Jon Koshar, I'm not supposed to... as a lost Prince had cried out half a year and half a universe away) and at the same time,There....
Petra got a chance to see the face of the building beside them rip off a foot before the air blast tore the notebook from her hands, and at the same time she welled her thoughts from behind the bone confines of her skull.There....
And Arkor's thoughts (he never saw the explosion because he blinked just then) tore out through his eyelids as fragmented steel tore into them.There....
It was cold, it was black. For a moment they saw with a spectrum that reached from the star-wide waves of novas to the micro-micron skittering of neutrinos. And it was black, and completely cold. A rarefied breeze of ionized hydrogen (approximately two particles per cubic rod) floated over half a light year. Once, a herd of pale photons dashed through them from a deflected glare on some dying sun a trillion eons past. Other than that, there was silence, save for the hum of one lone galaxy, eternities away. They hovered, frozen, staring into nothing, above, below, behind, contemplating what they had seen.
Then, the green of beetles' wings, and they flailed into the blood of sensation from the blackness, whirled into red flame the color of polished carbuncle, smoothly through the nerves and into the brain; then, before the blue smoke, burning blue through the lightning seared axion of their corporate organisms, they were snared within the heat and electric imminency of a web of silver fire.