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There was light where no light should be. In the depths between the stars, where space should be dark and empty, light blazed and moved; light produced by no physical source, but born of the intertwining of a life-force with the fabric of space-time.
For the light was alive, in a way no human could ever hope to understand. It was a member of a race that had survived two billion years past its first venture into space, a race not native to this galaxy or even this time period. In fact, more than a billion Earth-years would go by before the planet on which the light-being's race would evolve cooled enough to produce the first proteins necessary for life.
The light-being had come a long way on this mission; it had much farther still to go.
There was a planetary system just three light-years ahead, and the light-being moved toward it. Eventually it reached the outermost of the small yellow star's five children, but it ignored this world of frozen methane, as it also ignored the next three worlds whose orbits it crossed. Only when it arrived at the water-covered innermost planet did it pause and drop down to hover over what little land was present, as though contemplating its next move.
There was life on the planet but the light-being was not interested. Other planets in other time periods had more intriguing life forms. This was in no way a unique world now.
But it soon would be.
The light-being moved again, spreading out into a girdle of fire to encircle the entire planet. It had finished thinking; now was the time to act. Invisible forces clawed dark rocks from the bowels of the mountains. Invisible hands shaped the rocks, transformed them to a chalky white and assembled them. The light-being worked leisurely, and years went by before the structure was completed. But one dark morning, while the yellow sun still hid behind the eastern storm clouds, the last stone was placed.
That was not the end. Guardian forces had to be left to prevent all but the two who were meant to come this way from entering. That done, the light-being surveyed the work.
It would serve.
Then the girdle of light coalesced into a sphere less than a meter in diameter. Slowly it began to rise to the stars.
The light-being had now completed the first part of its mission—on this and another world two time-gates had been built—but the hardest part was yet to come and required another parsecs-long journey.
The light-being probed the nearby space. It was alone. Nothing had seen. There were no shadows on the stars.
But someday, the shadows would come. In the not-too-distant future. And then someday, far down the pathway of time, the light-being's race would battle those shadows for all the worlds to come.
But for now, the light-being could travel unmolested. It had forty thousand years to reach its next destination, and it would need much of that time to plan what it would do when it got there.
Edgeworld was not the planet Krison Camarch would have picked to die on. The entire world was eternally cold and damp. Even this small cell was cold and damp. Probably his grave—if anyone bothered to bury him—would also be cold and damp. The damp weather was the only permanent thing about Edgeworld. Everything built by man was certainly temporary, for the two million miners who came here briefly to make their fortune and then leave cared little or nothing about constructing anything to last.
There was one exception: the jails. Camarch surveyed his cell again, from the single small vent in the plascrete roof to the solid titex door. The jails were undoubtedly the sturdiest buildings on Edgeworld. This one looked as though it might even outlast the ruins of C'hah Lai. Escape from here was virtually impossible, and unless he could escape, his future would be very short.
A snort from the corner of the cell broke his concentration. He glanced over at the scruffy old man who lay sprawled across the cell's only bed. As usual, Edgeworld's sturdy jails were overcrowded; so Camarch, an accused murderer, had to share his three-by-three-by-three-meter cube with a drunk miner who was sleeping off the effects of his overdose of pstilx, Edgeworld's unique blend of poisons.
Camarch turned away from the old miner and reconsidered his own problem. Captain Sanphan had certainly wasted no time in having him arrested once the Sentinel touched down. The warp chambers were still glowing when the badges arrived in the warp room, blasters and squealers in hand. The thing that angered Camarch the most was Sanphan's broken promise that Saldrator Dran's death—however it had occurred—would be forgotten if Camarch would repair the warp drive.
Camarch scowled. Lady Justice was nowhere in sight when he needed her. On a routine warp jump between Nonna's Planet and Edgeworld, the warp drive failed. That wasn't anything unusual: the warp drive on the starship Sentinel had failed many times before and would probably fail many times again; it was practically ready for a museum. The fact that it could function at all constantly amazed Camarch. Repairing it wasn't difficult, but opening the warp chamber was always dangerous. Dran made one mistake, and the warp field that still lingered in the chamber abstractly scattered his protoplasm around the warp room. And somehow, after a brief investigation, Camarch had been accused of murder. The reason, of course, was because he was a Tel.
But Sanphan, in charging him with the murder, had forgotten one thing: Dran's death made Camarch the only warp tech left and, therefore, the only one aboard with the knowledge necessary to complete the repairs. Sanphan had been forced to promise Camarch clemency.
Camarch had never trusted Sanphan and was hardly surprised when the promise was not kept. Now he would die, because offenses occurring in space came under the jurisdiction of the ship's captain, if one of the few overriding Federation laws were not broken. The only thing keeping him alive this long was that once the ship landed on Edgeworld, Sanphan was required to submit Camarch to the Edgeworld authorities for a three-day imprisonment. If no one registered an objection during that time, he would be turned back over to Sanphan for whatever disposition the captain had in mind.
But Camarch didn't know anyone who might register an objection on his behalf. And now three days were almost up.
A key turned in the lock. A guard entered, heavy-set, pale and solid, like the plascrete room around him. As he moved closer, Camarch could smell the pungent odor of one of the cheap local brands of pressorb. It must have been a new shift, because Krison didn't recognize this guard. The man kept rubbing his eyes methodically, as though someone had just jerked him from a deep, pleasant sleep.
"Which one of you is Dancot Bries?" he muttered.
The snoring figure did not move.
"I am," Camarch said.
The guard's bushy eyebrows twitched; then he shrugged and motioned for Camarch to follow him.
Camarch obeyed without hesitation. Dancot Bries, Camarch had discovered from talking to the drunk before he lapsed into oblivion, was arrested only for public stupor. No one considered him much of a threat, which was why only one guard had been sent. Camarch wasn't clairvoyant but he was beginning to realize that tomorrow might exist for him after all. He had only to shed this one sleepy guard.
Outside the cell, the hallway was constructed and decorated in the same drab plascrete manner. They passed only five more cells before the corridor ended at an open doorway. The small chamber on the other side contained a desk with a gray-uniformed man sitting behind it. Across the room was a counter with another badge behind it, and talking to this man was someone Camarch had hoped wouldn't be present… yet. Camarch bowed his head and tried to look as inconspicuous as possible; perhaps Sanphan would be too busy to notice him.
"You're Dancot Bries?" the officer behind the desk asked.
Camarch nodded. A mistake.
The officer popped out of his chair. "You're a lucky man, Mr. Bries. You're lucky I don't shoot you right now. You don't nod to me; you say yes sir or no sir."
Camarch said nothing. Without looking he could sense that Captain Sanphan had turned around. It was only a matter of seconds before the captain recognized him.
"Do you understand?" the little officer bellowed.
Though Camarch was ten centimeters taller and ten kilos heavier, he reached across the desk and grabbed Camarch by the front of his shirt and pulled him over the desk until Camarch was almost in the man's oral cavity. Then the man yelled, "What do you say!?"
"Yes sir," Camarch replied meekly.
The officer smiled, showing a set of implants that must have been made by a blind dentist.
Camarch relaxed, thinking he was safe for a few moments. He was wrong. As the little officer sat down, he noticed Camarch's hands. Slowly he reached down and picked them up, then turned them over.
"What is this?" he said. "These… they look like the hands of a Tel."
Camarch felt the gaze of everyone in the room turn on him. He stared down at his own hands, the long, pale fingers with no nails. Without them he could almost pass for a normal human being. Few people would pay much attention to his green eyes, his high forehead, his thin lips and slender body— after all, none of those characteristics was particularly unusual. Nor would anyone see, under normal circumstances, that he had only 22 teeth, twelve uppers and ten lowers, and completely lacked a spleen. But people could see his hands and fingers, and these alone were enough to reveal that he was a Tel. And being a Tel was enough to make people hate him. As Saldrator Dran had hated him. As Captain Sanphan still did.
He frowned. To be hated all his life for such a useless gift as his—there was something unfair about that.
"They are the hands of a Tel," Camarch muttered, gazing straight at the little badge.
"But Dancot Bries isn't…"
Camarch could feel the impact of Captain Sanphan's surprise battering against his brain. Now was the time to strike.
What few people knew about Tels was that their hands were far stronger in fact than in appearance. The recessive genes in Chromosome 18, which gave him the rest of his Tel characteristics, also modified Camarch's actin and myosin filaments to increase the contractility potential of his skeletal muscle. More often than not, his Tel abilities were a curse rather than an attribute. But at the moment, his strength would be useful.
In one motion he seized the astonished little badge under his arms and whirled, slinging the man against the stocky guard. From that point on Camarch ignored both of them.
He saw Captain Sanphan reach for the guard's blaster, which had landed in front of his feet, but Camarch knew he could be out the side exit before Sanphan fired. But there was something Camarch had to do before he left. He took two steps and inflicted himself with two bruised knuckles. The captain's expression of pain and surprise was well worth the bruises.
The side exit led to the street.
Outside, it was night.
So few stars. Compared to the view from space, the night sky of every planet he'd ever been on had few stars. Here, every quanta of light had to fight through the thick filter of the atmosphere to reach his retinas. Stars glowed alone, not in ragged clumps of light.
While half his mind was scanning the heavens, the other half was deciding a course of action. The problem was that on Edgeworld there were few places to hide. It was a world built by and for miners. They came, made their fortunes and left for more habitable, warmer worlds; their time on Edgeworld was spent working, drinking and sleeping, not necessarily in that order on any one day. In fact, the only thing Edgeworld had plenty of, besides mines, was bars. Temporarily, one of them might provide some concealment. Down the street was an open door.
The bar was dark and empty except for the bartender and two patrons, both of whom were trying to keep the business solvent by themselves. He wondered if he could hide in the darkness until the badges gave up their search. If more people were present, it might have been possible, but with only two patrons, he would stand out like a nova in a starless night sky.
Hearing soft footsteps behind him he thought, for a fleeting moment, that the badges had found him already. He turned and saw a thin, dark man standing in the doorway, and though he couldn't see the man's eyes, he sensed that they were staring at him. Without seeming to take his eyes off Camarch, the man walked over to the bar and leaned against it.
Concluding that the man did not represent the Edgeworld authorities, Camarch momentarily ignored the stranger and concentrated on the badges pursuing him.
Almost instantly, he regretted his mistake.
The stranger was not a badge. If he had been, Camarch would have been safer. The man was a Tel, and his mind struck like a knife, narrow and sharp at first, then widening as it gouged through Krison's consciousness, all the while sucking, draining him, as if searching for something, some fleck of information that couldn't be found. Camarch felt his emotions, his very being, start to slip from his grasp, and he clenched his teeth to force the stranger out. But the penetration was too deep. By diverting all his attention to his block, he was somehow able to prevent the intruder from ripping in any farther. A moment's reprieve; that was all.
Behind him the footsteps of the badges pounded on the street, then in his mind, echoing around in the crater the stranger had made.
Camarch bore down harder, beyond what he had always believed to be his limit. Every artery in his head swelled as blood rushed toward arterioles and capillaries. The stranger had to be alien… his mind was so empty, so lacking in any emotion, so utterly void of human qualities. No human Camarch had ever met could even approach breaking his subconscious block. This being—whoever, whatever it was—had almost shattered it. Only sliver-thin fragments held his block together, and they would not last long.
The alien struck again. Camarch's body twitched; he released the table he was clutching and tumbled to the floor. The room blurred and filled with dark green and brown, overwhelming him with nausea.
"Are you okay?"
Camarch stared, seeing nothing.
"Are you okay?" the voice repeated.
His vision cleared and he felt the bartender helping him to his feet. He glanced over at the stranger. The alien was still at the bar; he hadn't moved since the attack began.
Sweat poured down Camarch's hands and face, and when he groped for the table, he slipped to the floor again. The bartender, however, was a sturdy fellow and he had Camarch on his own two feet in a few seconds, even without the latter's help.
Camarch wanted to talk, to tell the bartender what was happening, that he wasn't a victim of some unclassified extraterrestrial disease or having a drunken fit… but he couldn't spare the concentration. Already his weakened state had allowed the stranger to pry open his mind a little more, and he noticed that his head had begun to ache. It had never happened to him before, but he knew from other Tels and his own reading that the headache implied the imminent collapse of whatever mindblock remained. If he didn't do something to change the odds immediately, his life-force would be sucked out by this dark, remorseless alien.
Camarch watched the alien standing by the bar and, simultaneously, felt the badges outside searching for him, still unsure how he had temporarily evaded them… and then Camarch felt fury, cold fury. He consciously diverted some concentration to motor-activity and shook loose from the bartender.
"Wait, you'll—"
The rest of the bartender's words were drowned in the roar of fury in Camarch's mind. All the anger and fear he had kept under control for the past few minutes suddenly surfaced. He stumbled toward the alien and found that he had overestimated the stranger's power. The alien's hands were clenched to the bar, his skin white and wet, his eyes closed, his teeth locked and bared. The eyes opened in surprise as Camarch approached, and his assault wavered. He was about Camarch's height and weight, but at that point it wouldn't have mattered if he were two meters taller. A bruised fist struck the attacker's chin, and Camarch's mind was silently alone again.
The alien crumpled to the floor, and only by grabbing the bar was Camarch able to prevent himself from following.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" the bartender yelled. Two large hands seized Camarch's shoulders and spun him around. Even the two drunks, who had ignored his assault on the alien, stopped drinking and stared. And Camarch was suddenly aware that the badges, by a process of elimination, had figured out where he must be.
But he couldn't answer. The bartender wouldn't believe. Camarch wasn't yet sure that he believed. He had to get away now. But where? The front exit led to a cemetery, and he didn't see a back door.
Camarch finally spotted one, leading off from behind the bar. He jerked free of the bartender's grip.
The door led to a small hallway, which subsequently led to a back exit. As he left the building he could hear the bartender running in pursuit and sensed the first sparks of consciousness in the alien's mind.
Behind the bar an alley ran parallel to the street, and another led off it, perpendicular to the bar. Camarch took the latter.
The first street was almost devoid of pedestrians, but this one was crowded. Every store, bar and pstilx room overflowed with drunks and shoppers. Several were aliens busy on some indeterminable task. On the far side of the street lay a body of phosphorescent water; whether river, lake or ocean, Camarch couldn't tell. He thought he could see lights in the distance, however, far across the water.
He merged with the crowd and began to walk. Where on Edgeworld was he?
He wished he had been more attentive during the landing.
Obviously the city was near a starport but that wasn't much help. There were 15 starports on Edgeworld, since it was easier to bring the freighter to the mines than to wrestle the ore through high mountains or float it across the eternally raging seas.
What else did he know about his location? Well, he was near water, probably a river, since there seemed to be lights on the far side and the water was relatively peaceful. Only two of the cities he'd visited in the past were coiled around a river: Dantyren and Hosnes. Though he recognized nothing, he was probably in one of them. All plans for escape must be postponed until he determined his exact location.
If he lived that long.
He thought back to the alien in the bar, shivering with the memory of that dark mind, utterly void of any compassion. He had never felt such emptiness; nor had he felt such power. The stranger had to be an alien; no human had a mind like that.
Yet the stranger had looked human. That alone eliminated both known intelligent, alien races. Neither the Rawellens nor the Quertyuans could ever pass for human, even in a dark bar.
Then where had he come from? And why, Camarch asked himself, had the alien been waiting for an obscure warp tech at the edge of human civilization? Not only waiting—the alien had also come seeking information. And death.
But Camarch knew nothing that would warrant his death. People such as Dran had tried to kill him before, but only because he was a Tel. He sensed that the alien had a different motive. Besides, from his brief contact, he judged that the alien was not capable of hatred. No, there had to be another reason. Camarch was a Tel, but a powerless one. The alien, possessing such superb mental powers himself, would have seen the truth immediately: all Camarch could do was put up a mindblock that another Tel could not penetrate, at least another human Tel, and he could sense strong emotion. He could not read another person's thoughts; he could not control another person's mind—except in extremely unusual circumstances, and then only slightly—nor did he have any telekinetic powers. He was purely a defensive Tel, harmless to anyone who did not try to harm him. How could he possibly represent a threat to anyone?
The badges were still following him. Camarch had been aware of them for several hours now. Every few minutes a lifter would buzz overhead. So far he had always heard it coming and managed to fade into the shadows.
In truth, he wasn't worried about them. What bothered him was the shredders, those scaly conglomerations of teeth and clublike forelimbs, so named because of the condition of their prey after they caught it. They had the noses of bloodhounds and, worse yet, had the uncanny ability to sense a Tel 100 kilometers away. Probably they possessed some telepathic abilities of their own. They were quite gentle to their handlers, but merciless to anyone the handler didn't like.
Camarch was tired; the shredders were tireless, and the badges no doubt worked in shifts. They would find him soon, track him down and let the shredders have him for a snack.
… unless the alien found him first.
For he was there in the shadows of Camarch's mind and had been for some time now. Camarch didn't know exactly how long, because his complete block was up and this decreased his own sensitivity considerably. The alien's touch was light, like a dust-mote, and present long before Camarch noticed it.
If the badges had been closer—at least, if the lifters had been closer—Camarch might have surrendered to them. But by now the alien was the closest, less than half a kilometer away, able to track him far more accurately than even the shredders. He could reach Camarch long before Camarch could reach the badges. The alien realized this and Camarch sensed he was trying to stay between him and the authorities. The alien wanted him dead—with or without the information—and was afraid the police might bungle the job again.
So far Camarch had decided on no goal. That was a problem that must be solved quickly. Then he had a disconcerting thought. Maybe the decision was being made for him. Maybe the alien was directing his flight.
An hour later there were no doubts left. Camarch was being directed. By then, he recognized the city and realized where the alien was directing him.
The city was Dantryen. One thing made Dantryen unique: on its outskirts stood the silent ruins of C'hah Lai.
It began to rain. Great sheets of water from the river blew into his face, his nose, his mouth and, ultimately, his lungs. It tasted like salty vinegar and burned his throat. Camarch spat it out, but the pungent aftertaste lingered. One thing was for sure. He wouldn't want to swim in that river. And the oceans were worse.
There was no shelter now, just the open water on one side and the silent, locked warehouses on the other. Camarch veered toward the warehouses and away from the ruins ahead. Between the buildings the rain swirled in under the eaves, battering him against the slats. For a few seconds his battered mind forgot where it was. When he lifted his head the alien was there, not 20 meters away.
Camarch braced his mind for an attack that never came. And when he searched, not even a whisper of the alien's mindtouch remained. But as the alien's hand slid into his coat, Camarch realized he probably had a blaster.
He turned and ran, and almost immediately the warehouse wall next to him quivered, then burst into flames and collapsed, flinging burning remnants of the wall and roof between Camarch and the alien. By that time Camarch was back in the street.
In the distance, through the wailing storm, Camarch could see the misty towers of C'hah Lai. The ruins no longer looked as foreboding as they had even an hour ago. Increasingly they seemed to be his only chance.
It wasn't much of a hope. Thirty men had entered and never returned, and now he was quite calmly considering walking in there alone.
If the ruins had been a city, they had been a strange and lonely one; a city whose interior could not be seen from the outside and whose picture could not be taken from above. Since they were only a kilometer in diameter, they would have been a small city. Standing in the darkness of the Edgeworld night, lit by the glow of a pale moon far above the clouds, C'hah Lai seemed more than a mere city—it had served some greater function. It suddenly reminded Camarch of the alien's mind—empty and dark.
A wide band of barren ground surrounded C'hah Lai, and the rain had turned the sterile dirt to mud.
With each step, Camarch would have to shake off the clinging black muck before proceeding. As he neared the opening that passed for a gate into the ruins, he began to weave his way around jagged chunks of stonelike rubble. Against the white background of C'hah Lai he made a fair target and the alien took the opportunity to get off another shot. The beam slipped by Camarch's head and splashed against the rain-streaked, outer wall of the ruins. He ducked to avoid the showering of rubble, but none came.
It was strangely ironic to stand in the midst of rubble and watch a blaster beam bounce off the same wall that apparently had produced the rubble. It was as if the embroidery of rubble were only for decoration.
Silence. The gateway was a mere hole in the wall, wrinkled by time, but when he stepped through, Edgeworld became as much a part of the distant past as the builders of these ruins.
The rain ceased. Outside it was still storming; he could see through the gateway. Here inside the walls, the sky was dark, foreboding, as it had been before the storm began. White dust lay on the ground, like dry snow. There was no wind in here, but the dust gently swirled around him, as if to protect him from whatever enemies he had.
There were three directions he could choose from, now that he was inside: along the outside wall in either direction, or down an alley that arrowed away perpendicular to the wall. For no particular reason Camarch chose the latter. He took a few steps, then turned around to check the whereabouts of the alien, but the outside gate was gone. He was committed.
He walked. There were no buildings in C'hah Lai: only partitions and walls of white, stonelike blocks, five to seven meters high. The channels between them divided and merged, divided again, without a pattern, without making any apparent sense at all. Sometimes the path Camarch took came to a dead end and he was forced to retreat. Sometimes only a pile of rubble would block his way. Then he would scramble over it and go on.
The sky had changed now. There were stars, like milkdrops, round and white. It made his head throb to look at them.
Always Camarch could feel the other's presence. The alien could not enter his mind enough to pose a threat, just enough to locate him. Camarch began to fear that he would never escape. This fear tread far beyond where the alien could go, deep within his mindblock, swirling there just as the dry white dust swirled around him. As he went on, however, he concentrated and managed to block out most of the fear. It was one of the rare times he used his unique talent for his own benefit.
Images formed in his head as he walked, wispy shadows of events gone by—the alien was there, but so was Thria, and Earth… He stopped and shivered. The images absorbed memories from His mind and took on life as he watched. His thoughts coalesced into substance on the street ahead.
He shook his head and strengthened his mindblock. There was no street in front of him, only the dusty labyrinth of C'hah Lai.
He was alone again, except for the presence of that alien mind.
It was fatigue. That was the only way to explain such hallucinations. Nothing else made sense. Thria had been dead for 17 years.
Camarch started walking again. Ahead lay another pile of rubble. As he approached, it took on a different form. The sharp, angular pattern of the blocks was gone; now the edges were blurred. And the walls around him began to sag.
He gazed up at a blurred river of starry milk across the sky, splashing out a myriad of droplets toward the horizon.
At that moment he noticed the first waver in the alien's mindtouch.
Camarch scrambled up and over another pile of rubble. Immediately he tried to stop, for below him on the far side the waves of an angry ocean lashed against steaming, white rocks. But his momentum was too great and he slid down toward the water. Instinctively he closed his eyes…
… but there was no salt spray… and no water, no ocean, no rocks. Merely dry, white, powdery dust.
What was happening to his mind? It wasn't only fatigue. The alien? That was one possibility, but it didn't explain everything. Camarch had been able to block him this long; there was no reason why he should be able to penetrate now.
Camarch regained his footing, reeling in confusion. His mind began to sing as he walked. Visions came. The street was here, then gone, dust replaced by a searing sun and a deadly summer wind bearing thousands upon thousands of poisonous insects. Falsaf. The crowded jungles of the prison world, Falsaf. A hundred kilometers of fear, where a three-meter-square room was a luxury few had time to build, and fewer still wanted, because of the danger of owning any luxury. Now the stinking smell of hate permeated Camarch's mindblock. Two men attacked him ferociously. He seized one quickly and threw him away, then remembered: it wasn't real. He ignored the one with the knife, ignored the deep, agonizing stabs, ignored the warm rich blood that trailed down his chest and back.
Falsaf yielded to Earth—even more crowded. Earth, where starports were being torn down to make room for the mobs to live. Soon the planet's only link with the rest of the Federation would be gone, and Earth would be left to smother in its own flesh.
He saw a house to his left, rather a shack, made of slivers of wood tacked together to provide a temporary, always collapsing, shelter from the hot Yucatan summer. His house, where he had grown up. Thria lived less than a kilometer and five years away. He watched her die again, slain by a collect because she was a Tel.
It isn't real. It isn't real.
He wiped sticky, coagulating blood off his shirt. It isn't real.
Captain Sanphan staggered around the corner, his mouth bleeding where Camarch had hit him. Hatred gleamed in his eyes. Camarch sidestepped his swing, and instinctively started to lunge back at him.
It isn't real.
Instinct succumbed to reason, and Camarch closed his eyes and blocked the captain out of existence.
When he opened his eyes a minute later, Sanphan was gone, and Camarch was standing at the edge of a 15-meter-deep chasm, sharp, ragged stones lining the bottom. A cold sweat oozed from his skin, and he realized he was trembling. Had he tried to hit the captain he would be dead now, perforated by the rocks below.
Camarch skirted the chasm, not trusting his eyes, gently touching down with his toe to make sure there was solidity before shifting his weight onto that foot. On the far side of the chasm he stopped, gazing back over the distance he had come.
It was the ruins themselves. He realized that now. It was the ruins attacking his mind. No wonder no one had returned from C'hah Lai. Even with his mindblock, Camarch had almost been lured to his death. C'hah Lai was certainly no place for the NonTel.
Camarch smiled. Or the Tel with a weak mind-block. He recalled the waver in the alien's touch.
He searched for the alien's mindtouch now and physically retreated when he sensed its strength. It wasn't possible. The alien should be feeling the effects of the ruins.
With concentration Camarch found he could block out the ruins completely. He sought the alien again and found him. His touch was so strong and full that Camarch felt he could open his mind and be filled with warmth. Which was impossible. Camarch remembered the alien's touch from the bar, so cold, so empty, so void of emotion. A Tel's mindtouch reflected his personality; it could not be disguised. No Tel could make fire from ice.
There was only one conclusion possible: a third being was in C'hah Lai, again an alien, but perhaps not hostile. Camarch opened his mind and the new alien slipped in just enough to let Camarch know he was a friend; then he was gone, barely perceptible once more.
Camarch sat in the quiet by the chasm, completely confused. It was as if an unseen alien had been waiting for him. Why? The thought was incredible, but Camarch realized that more incredible things had already happened to him in the past few hours.
Had Camarch not been exhausted, he would have lunged deeper into the ruins, toward the spot where some ancient machine produced the field that twisted both his mind and space-time. But now he felt his enemy closing in on him, and he was content to await his adversary here, beside the pit.
The alien came shortly, stumbling around a corner, eyes flickering wildly about, glazed with confusion. He did not seem to see Camarch as much as sense him. Camarch saw him stop and then felt the faint mindtouch leave. Camarch withdrew into himself, his mindblock wrapping around him in anticipation of the forthcoming attack.
Then he remembered the blaster. But oddly enough, the alien seemed to have forgotten he had a weapon. At least he didn't use it, but attacked only with his mind.
The first assault left Camarch lying in the dust. But his block held. He almost smiled, for his confidence was returning.
He remained lying where he was. The alien could not harm him mentally—Camarch was convinced of that at last—but he might be able to cause some kind of physical damage if he could duplicate the first attack.
He could and did. Even in the dust Camarch was stunned.
This time the alien stayed, hammering away at Camarch's mind. The dust cycloned around him; above his head the stars melted; to his left a stone tumbled down from the wall and rolled dangerously near his head; beneath his back a crack appeared in the ground, widened a few centimeters, then stopped; worlds never seen by man entered his mind, worlds of cold and darkness, worlds empty of laughter, tall, dark people… and then out of the blackest darkness of all came a ship made of darkness, 100 kilometers long and silence-filled.
But his mindblock held; the alien could only send illusions.
Eventually the alien weakened; his strength dwindled, his own hallucinations confusing his attacks. At first it seemed as if the alien had been trying to pry information from his mind, but now Camarch noticed that the original purpose had been forgotten; the alien's touch had changed; the alien wanted nothing but Camarch's death.
But the advantage had shifted, and Camarch knew that the alien would not like the outcome of this battle.
Camarch slowly groped to his feet, easing his way toward the pit. The alien struck again, and Camarch staggered, grabbed the wall nearby to steady himself. The alien saw him and wobbled forward, his eyes wide open still, not in fear, because he didn't know that emotion, but in surprise. Camarch wondered what he saw. His past, perhaps? How could anyone ever know what transpired in that alien mind?
The alien began to strike again; over and over, a dying rattler. Camarch fell to one knee, Still the alien came, advancing with his feet as he attacked with his mind. Abruptly he stopped, whirled about and swung randomly at nothing.
Two more steps, once more toward Camarch.
Camarch remained kneeling.
Behind the alien Camarch saw light… brightness and ruins, tall spires and dreams… a planet unknown to man. Then his eyes were blinded by a burst of even brighter light. He felt dizzy, sensed the dissipation of time. And there were more planets, burning like suns… but the suns themselves were dying, their fires ebbing as entropy increased. The planets joined, coalescing into a parsecs-long wall of flame. And the wall moved… toward a wall of darkness, toward a shadow on the stars.
The light vanished and he was back in the ruins of C'hah Lai, watching the alien maunder forward: one step, two steps. Time moved too slowly. He tottered on the brink of the chasm, waving his arms in one last effort to regain his lost balance, then toppled over the edge. There was not a sound when he hit the bottom but Camarch's mind was suddenly quiet and alone. He stared down: His eyes closed; his own balance faltered; then he shook himself awake and crawled away from the pit.
Why hadn't the alien used his blaster?
Perhaps Camarch's earlier hunch had been correct. Perhaps the alien was primarily interested in information.
And at the moment, Camarch no longer knew nor cared, for suddenly he wasn't alone anymore. Coming from the center of the ruins was a wispy, golden-furred alien of a race Camarch knew he had never seen before.
Too weary to feel fear, his Tel mind exploded with anger. Chromosome 18 betrayed him again. Fury rose, unwanted, unsummoned, as it always did, and he tried to regain his feet to fight off this new intruder.
He failed, falling back into the dust.
"This third means you no harm," the alien said in easily understood standard Fed Spanish. Then Camarch felt the warmth of his mindtouch and the anger faded, gone as quickly as it had come.
That was the last thing Camarch remembered.
Consciousness was a thing of the past. From time to time slivers of the present slipped through his field of dreams, but the scene left him so confused that he retreated back into the refuge of his mind.
From time to time his eyes flickered open, and occasionally there was someone there. The person was always a faceless blur, but he accepted that without question, primarily because he lacked the concentration to construct a question.
He also had a headache that could be caused only by someone trying to pry open his skull with a crowbar.
When he finally did wake up, it was a very gradual progression, and he couldn't identify the exact moment he was firmly aware of his own consciousness. The room was empty. None of the faceless blurs were present. His awareness shifted from the room back to himself. He tried to move his fingers and succeeded with no difficulty. His arms were a different matter. It took him several seconds to appreciate the fact that his arms functioned well; it was because they were somehow bound that he couldn't move them very far away from his body. Then, finally, he realized he was in a zero-gee sleeper. He bent his neck to examine his body and stared at the cylindrical green plastic bag enclosing him. It was actually not one, but a double-layered bag, with a cushion of water between the two layers.
Knowing that he was in a sleeper helped him orient himself to some extent. He was obviously on a freighter. Only freighters and warships routinely carried zero-gee sleepers. While sleeping in the absence of gravity had its advantages, it did require a period of adaptation to overcome the nightmares of falling that haunted the initial experiences. The subconscious was slow to learn that the continuous sensation of plummeting toward some unseen destination was an illusion. As a result, ships carrying passengers not used to star-hopping were forced to use the additional power to create an artificial gravity. For freighter owners, each little expense might push them into the red, so most of the journey was done in free-fall. If the presence of gravity was required, the old method of spinning the ship around its center of mass was employed.
If he could be allowed the logical assumption he was not on a navy ship, he knew he was on a freighter. He didn't know its name or where it was headed, but at least he knew it was a freighter. Trying to puzzle out the situation, he whistled the universal dot-dot-dot that opened the sleeper. He crawled out and stretched his muscles. They were sore but seemed to function well.
A brief examination of the room uncovered one other sleeper, but at the moment it was empty. He was just about to wander out the door when it yawned open and a man entered carrying a tray of food.
"I see you're finally awake." The voice was soft but the tone was cold. A tall, bulky man with hands like vices stared at him. He wore his long, black hair in a gold-colored net, the custom on many of the newer Federation colonies. His eyes were horizontal at the edges, which did little to help pinpoint his planet of origin. He could have been born on any of 30 different worlds. But wherever he was born Camarch sensed the man would prove to be no ally.
"How long have I been out?" Camarch asked.
"We're three days out from Edgeworld and you were brought illegally on board less than an hour before lift-off." He dropped the tray roughly onto a small table by the sleeper, spilling the pale broth in one of the dishes.
It took Camarch a moment before he realized why the tray bothered him. Of course! The tray stayed on the table. That implied the presence of gravity. If he had been thinking he would have known that the instant he left the sleeper.
"Don't know why they hired you," the man said. "Jameson and I can handle the warpers by ourselves."
"Then you're one of the warp techs?"
"One of the two."
Federation regulations required four warpers on a small freighter; nevertheless most freighters this far from Earth carried only three. A few, such as the Sentinel, and, apparently, this ship, tried to get by with two, but that was not the best place in the ship's budget to save money; 12 hours duty out of 24 took its toll on the warp techs involved. If that was the kind of shift the techs on this ship were taking, no wonder this one was irritable. Tels had more physical and mental endurance than normals, and Camarch had thus been able to cope with the rigor of his job on the Sentinel, but he often wondered if Dran's anger hadn't stemmed from a workload he was unable to handle.
"Now the ship has three techs," Camarch said.
"Perhaps."
"When do you want me to take my first shift in the warp room?"
The other warp tech scowled. "That decision is up to Captain Thron, if it doesn't prove too difficult for him. I suggest you discuss things with him." The man started to leave.
"At least you can tell me the name of the ship," Camarch said.
"The Birmingham" came the reply, almost reluctantly. Then the man was gone.
The name was meaningless to Camarch, but he realized even before his visitor passed through the doorway that no amount of prying would uncover any more information at present, so he said nothing.
Camarch devoured his lunch with no interruptions, finding to his surprise that he was hungry. Tels could go for a long time without food, but even they had to eat sometime. He paused between mouthfuls. How had they known he was about to wake up? Surely they didn't bring a tray at every mealtime.
He couldn't answer the question; neither could he answer the others that kept popping into his head.
When he finished eating, he put the tray to one side and waited for his next visitor. The warp tech would no doubt tell whoever brought him on board that he was awake. Someone would come soon, perhaps the captain.
He was wrong. No one came. After a while he tired of sitting and decided to look around.
Captain Josephus Thron sat in his padded tiltchair staring at the viewless viewscreen and cursing everyone he could think of at the spur of the moment. Even his parents for naming him after some obscure date zero (or thereabouts) historian—just because his father was a historian himself was no reason to burden a son with such an unpronounceable name. "Long e, long e!" his mother would shout up at least four times a day when he would bring friends home to play. He finally had had to pick his friends solely on the basis on whether or not they could pronounce his first name. "Joseeeeephus, Joseeeeeeeeeeephus"— made up 90 percent of his childhood memories as far as his parents were concerned. But at least he had a very literate circle of friends.
Now, of course, he had more than his name to worry about. There was the present mission for starters. It had looked a whole lot better back on Edgeworld than it did now that the Birmingham was half a parsec from the nearest Federation planet, heading in a direction no ship had gone before—at least no ship that had returned. The money, the adventure, the novelty had all vanished, leaving only worry. Why would a group of archeologists hire a private freighter for their expedition when government ships, which were newer and faster, were always available?
That question had bothered him in the beginning, and it bothered him now. It had not been an easy decision to make, to carry this expedition. Anyone who thought that being the captain of a ship, especially the captain-owner, was easy, deserved the latest torture the Quertyuans had come up with.
Thron scowled. There was something else he'd always had to worry about. Aliens. He tried to avoid employing them, but sometimes, such as on this present expedition, that wasn't possible. The trouble was, you never could trust them. The navigator was a good example. Do him a favor—give him a job—and what happens? He brings aboard some Tel with a fried brain just before lift-off and claims the man is a warp tech.
Thron glanced at the papers in front of him. Krison Camarch. He didn't have bad credentials, except for being a Tel. That, of course, was bad enough. Tels were another never-ending source ot worry. And rumor had it that Camarch was wanted for the murder of another warp tech. Why hadn't he thrown both of them off the ship then and there, Thron wondered. Sure, navigators were almost impossible to find, but he had the patience to wait. Of course, Dr. Rhehe might have felt differently, and he could have become nasty about the delay. Thron nodded. Perhaps he had done the right thing. He hoped Sandrye and Jameson didn't mind too much having another warp tech around.
The door to Camarch's room led to a circular walkr way surrounding a drop chute. There were nine other rooms on this level, probably the crew's quarters. He didn't bother to look at any. Peering into the drop he heard voices in the direction he mentally labeled as down, so he decided to go up. Maybe he could find out a few things before it was known that he was awake. Already there was something about this ship that bothered him, though he couldn't quite pin it down.
He changed the polarity of the chute and floated up.
The next floor was small, with only eight rooms, but exactly the same design otherwise. Evidently he was moving toward the hub of the ship. He skipped it and went on.
On the next level he was finally able to identify the ship type. It was a Warsdet 314, a central sphere with four stubby spokes leading out from it, all on the same plane and 90 degrees apart. The plane of the spokes was perpendicular to the direction of flight, and the spokes could slowly rotate around the sphere to produce an artificial gravity if desired. Evidently it was so desired now.
Camarch had come from one of the spokes and now was in the access area, the narrow corridor that circumscribed the sphere and allowed communication among the four spokes. At the axis of the ship was the engineering sector, and central to that, the ion drive and chemmies, with the warp chambers wrapped around them. At the front of the sphere, in the direction of flight, was the bridge, which used the warp fields to produce a constant artificial gravity.
Camarch had been on 314s before, but not in the past five years. In their time, they had been good ships, but their time had ended about 70 years earlier, and Camarch had thought the last of them was in permanent orbit by now. Certainly none had been made for 50 years and the Birmingham wasn't one of the later models. Bolts were missing from the catwalk plates, and he saw several wallplates with centimeter-wide stress cracks in them. His concerns multiplied. Ships this old weren't used for anything legal.
This final thought was enough to turn his worry into anger. He should be grateful to whoever had saved his life and brought him aboard the Birmingham; but at the moment, he did not feel any gratitude. There was no difficulty in choosing his next destination. He headed for the bridge to find a few answers.
Camarch made a quick right in the access corridor and soon came to the ladder that led to the engineering sector and the bridge.
The first door on the next deck was open so he temporarily delayed his attack on the bridge and went in. There was one man in the warp room, a tall, completely bald man in a gray uniform. As he moved closer, Camarch realized the baldness was self-imposed, not hereditary. That struck a familiar note, but he couldn't quite place the custom.
The bald warp tech turned at Camarch's entrance. "Only warp techs are allowed in here," he said.
"You must be Jameson."
He frowned. "As I said—"
"I know. I am a warp tech."
Jameson didn't even look surprised, just bored. He nodded.
"I met your friendly associate a few minutes ago," Camarch continued.
"Carl Sandrye."
"He never bothered to tell me his name."
Jameson nodded again and went back to his console, without a word of explanation.
"When do you want me to take my shift?" Camarch asked.
It was as if he didn't hear the question. Jameson just sat at the console. Camarch decided it was about time to leave. He was beginning to feel uneasy.
He was almost through the door before he figured out what made him uneasy. There were whispers in his mind that did not belong to him. He paused as if to study the warp controls on the console.
After living with his own Telblock all his life, Camarch had become quite accurate at judging another Tel's powers at the first contact. After the initial shock had worn off, he was no longer worried; Jameson's powers were very modest and Camarch's inherent subconscious block was more than adequate to protect him from the other tech's probes.
He stood in the entrance for a few minutes and attempted to ride Jameson's probe back into Jameson's mind. But both his powers and Jameson's powers were too weak for success. Realizing he couldn't learn anything else in the warp room without alerting Jameson, he left.
As he walked down the access corridor something else occurred to him—the warp room had not been rusty and criss-crossed with stress cracks. He mentally projected an image of the room. It had been recently refurbished, probably just prior to this voyage. Furthermore, all the controls were new; the computer was the latest model; and the viewscreen was a Tri-X 33, one of the more expensive screens on the market. Someone had spent a lot of money on the Birmingham. Why?
He would just have to ask the captain.
Captain Thron, however, was not too eager to see him. That much was evident from the way Thron kept drumming his fingers on his desk and fiddling with the tiltchair controls.
"I hope you're well rested," Thron muttered.
"I still feel a little weak," Camarch admitted. "But I'm ready to take my post."
"There's no hurry," Thron said. "Mr. Sandrye and Mr. Jameson can handle the warp room by themselves for a while yet. I just need you for a backup man, you know, in case anything unexpected happens. Why don't you rest up a few more days."
"Then you're the one who brought me on board."
"Well, no, not exactly. My navigator found you. I really don't know where. He knew that I wanted another warp tech and he brought you in."
"This navigator of yours—what does he look like?"
"He's an alien," Thron replied, as if that were all the explanation needed.
"Is he a Quertyuan?"
"No."
"Then he's a Rawellen?"
"Well, not exactly."
"Those are the only two choices we have. Unless you personally have discovered some new alien civilization."
Thron frowned, then looked around vaguely. "It struck me as odd, too."
"I don't suppose you asked him about it."
"No. He claimed he could get us where we were going, and that's all I needed to know. I don't like to pry into my crew's personal lives."
"I should hope not," Camarch replied sarcastically.
"I'm glad you agree," Thron remarked.
Camarch sighed. "Where are we going?"
"I'm not sure. Dr. Rhehe gave the navigator the coordinates and he's been handling all that. I do know that we're heading for a planet about 124 light-years from Edgeworld, and we're only the second ship to ever go there."
"Who's Dr. Rhehe?"
"He's the head of the archeological expedition that chartered my ship. He's one of Earth's most famous archeologists, and he's been chosen by the government to excavate the ruins on the planet."
Well, Camarch thought, at least that explained the need for artificial gravity. Archeologists wouldn't be accustomed to free-fall.
"That's funny," Camarch mused. "I haven't heard of any recent expedition that far from the Federation. It seems to me that such an expedition should be famous."
"You're referring to the first ship?"
"Yes."
"It never returned."
"Then how—"
Thron was growing impatient. "Listen, I'm only the captain. If you have any more questions, Dr. Rhehe can answer them."
"Or maybe the navigator," Camarch interjected.
"What?"
"If he's never been there before, how would he possess the knowledge to take this ship over 100 light-years into uncharted space?"
"But how could he have been there? The first ship never returned."
"The first human ship," Camarch suggested.
Thron stared at him, and the captain's fingers began to drum on his empty desk again. "I don't know anything about that. Go ask the navigator and leave me alone. I have work to do."
Camarch stood up. "I think I will." He started to leave, then turned back. "You know, I have the feeling that I'm not very welcome aboard this ship."
"That's ridiculous. We needed another warp tech."
"Then Sandrye and Jameson must be eager for me to begin to work."
"Well, I—"
"Why don't you call them and tell them I'm coming." Without waiting for an answer, he left.
The navigator's pale face was imperturbable as it listened to Camarch's questions. The two vertical black slits that constituted eyes stared lidlessly at Camarch as he talked. The three-digited upper extremities were motionless and did not fiddle with the controls as a nervous human might. In total height, the being was about 140 centimeters, though at least ten of those were accounted for by the light golden fur swirling up from the head before flaring outward and down. The same fur covered his entire body, even the face, though it was much shorter there. Camarch could see no equivalent of a nose or ears.
It was the same being Camarch remembered just prior to losing consciousness in the ruins of C'hah Lai.
"Your questions have answers," the alien at last said, in a voice that crawled softly into Camarch's ears, rumbling and smooth. "This third will reply to you at another place. Now is not good." The two vertical eyes surveyed the bridge and the three humans on it.
"Listen," Camarch said urgently, "you brought me onto this ship; you can at least explain why. I want to know what is happening to me. Something tried to kill me on Edgeworld—I want to know who, or what. I know you know the answers."
"Nothing tried to kill you," the alien said. "The being sought only information. Later will his race try to kill you."
"He shot at me! That doesn't sound like he was only after information."
"The being was only trying to drive you into ruins to corner you."
"I guess that explains why he didn't use the blaster inside C'hah Lai. But who was he?"
"This third will tell you. But now is not the place for such truths."
Camarch took a deep breath and frowned. "You're asking me to trust you, when I know nothing about you, not even what race you are?"
"Yes. It be necessary."
There was something in his voice which made Camarch want to trust him. Or, Camarch wondered, was it something implanted in his mind?
Sra Tior Trid watched Camarch leave the bridge. Silence and longing. Nothing but loneliness. Home was so much time away; it no longer seemed possible to return.
Space was meant for no being. Except the Crixonans. Correction. Were they beings? No answer.
The very fabric of space wounds like a poison. It affects the molecular transmitters in the synapses. It routes thoughts in deviant directions. Worse than the drug that twists minds. He had seen many thirds die of space's dark sting. Agony. Disorientation. Lost in time, lost in mind.
Man be like his people. Not meant for space. Tangled easily in its addictive fabric. One was different. Camarch. Lonely. Isolated. In a mind nothing else could enter. Not even space. Perhaps not even the Crixonans. So the Alarri thought.
Time would answer.
Much time.
Time beyond all comprehension.
It was evident from Camarch's one brief encounter with Josephus Thron that the captain was not a man of decision; he appeared to be the type who could exert hardly more than minimal control over the actions of his crew. He probably tried only when the safety of the vessel was at stake, and Camarch would have been very much surprised to find that Thron had called down to the warp room and arranged for him to take a shift.
Camarch was not wrong.
"You don't seem to be intelligent enough to take a hint," Jameson said sharply.
"A trip like this can be very boring without a job to do," Camarch replied. "I'm a warp tech—it's the only thing I know how to do. I was brought on board to take some of the load off you and Sandrye, and that's what I intend to do."
Jameson stopped whatever he was doing with the controls and whirled around in his tiltchair to face Camarch. "I don't think you understand me. We don't need or want your help."
"A man could go star-crazy without something to do out here."
"That's your problem, not ours." He turned away.
Camarch grabbed the back of the tiltchair and jerked both the chair and Jameson away from the control panel. "I'm going to make it your problem, too. Clear?"
Jameson looked up coldly at him, but said nothing.
"Are you going to leave peaceably? I'll throw you out the door if necessary. Why don't you save both of us a lot of trouble and leave now." Camarch was beginning to feel like he was back in the navy under Sergeant Steel. For three years that man had tried to keep him out of the warp room, just because he was a Tel. Steel had a bitter distrust of Tels, based on his belief that Tels lost their tempers easily and became irrational, a belief that was partially correct. Camarch himself had been guilty of it more than once. He had spent a year on the prison world Falsaf after killing a man in a fit of anger.
But Camarch had always managed to keep his anger under control while he was on duty. Steel never did realize that.
Camarch had learned one thing from Steel, however, and that was to fight for whatever he wanted. He was certainly ready to fight now, because this was going to be a long trip, and even calculating warp jumps was better than staring at the stars from the ship's lounge.
Jameson seemed to be no closer to leaving now than when Camarch came in, so Camarch grabbed him by both arms and jerked him to his feet. Jameson was as tall as Camarch, but far from his equal in strength.
"You're crazy, Tel," Jameson snapped.
"Perhaps, but I wouldn't hang around and find out for sure, if I were you." Camarch thought of saying something else, but Jameson stormed out first.
Camarch's fury lingered. He sat down and built his mindblock. If he was prepared, nothing could penetrate his block unless he willed it. Not even his own anger. He closed his eyes, barely feeling the chair beneath him. After a few moments of peace he opened them again. Without Jameson's hatred to feed on, his fury ebbed.
Camarch had fled Earth after Thria's death and joined the Federation navy, thinking that surely he would escape the prejudice against Tels. The idealism of youth. How wrong he was. The navy only changed the identities of the people who hated him. And the hatred was harder to live with in the navy because a naval starship was even more crowded than Earth. Twenty men were crammed into a ten-by-ten-by-four-meter room, ruled by a berth sergeant who was committed to making 20 men desire nothing more in life than their sergeant's death. Sergeant Richard S. Steel was the one man Camarch met who was hated more than himself.
But the pay wasn't bad; there was plenty to eat; and the planetfalls were usually interesting. And most important of all, the navy taught almost everyone a useful trade that could be peddled on the open market when the required six Earth-years had been served.
So, for all its disadvantages, it was tolerable because it was a means of escaping Earth—probably the only means for someone like Camarch. He didn't even regret being assigned to a dirty, meteor-pocked border scout stationed on Edgeworld after graduating from warp tech school, because it was peaceful, relatively easy duty except for Sergeant Steel.
Camarch spent most of his six years with that same ship. When his term was up, he got out. No one even asked him to reenlist. His only friend had finished his duty at the same time, and they both stayed around Edgeworld, finally signing on the civilian freighter Demain, whose chemmies were destined to fail during Camarch's first voyage. The ship plummeted into the quagmire jungles of Sirius II. Camarch was one of the five survivors. His friend was not so lucky.
For eight of the next nine years he skipped from ship to ship, staying until the captain found someone to replace him. The other year he spent on the prison world of Falsaf because he murdered a man named Ribet Oreti on Ramen III. It was not the only man he had ever killed, but it was the only man he killed in irrational Tel anger. All the man had done was call him a Tel. And Camarch had lost control and broken his neck. Oreti hadn't had a chance. From that day on, Camarch vowed he would keep his anger under control. So far he had been fairly successful.
How he ever survived Falsaf he didn't know. Less than one in 1000 did. It was meant to be a death sentence and usually was. But survive he did, partially because he was a Tel. When he was released, he signed aboard the Sentinel, where he stayed for two years, even though the pay was smaller than an iceberg on Mercury's hot side.
His anger was completely gone now, and he was able to make some sense out of the control panel. His first observation had been correct: the entire warp room and warp drive were new. Everything was automated, even the rods, though of course they could still be operated by hand if the need arose. None of this equipment had been here more than a year at most. A great deal of money had been invested in this ship. The question was why?
He found the computer tie-in and asked, "What is the destination of the Birmingham!"
He set the reply mode on "written" and the computer spat back the answer almost immediately:
NONE RECORDED WITH EDGEWORLD CONTROL.
That didn't help much. All it did was amplify his worst suspicions. It was illegal not to record the destination of a ship upon leaving any inhabited planet. This theoretically served to protect the crew and passengers of any starship that failed to arrive at its destination. The flight path could then be traced, and the survivors of any accident could be rescued. In practice, space was too big and the searchers too few for it to be of any value; thus the law was rarely enforced. The navy, which was the Federation's only means of interstellar law enforcement, was too scattered to worry about enforcing such meaningless, minor violations. Still, it was unheard of not to file a destination plan; there was no logical reason not to if the ship was engaged in legal commerce.
"What is the purpose of this voyage?" he asked at length.
NONE RECORDED WITH EDGEWORLD CONTROL. SHIP'S LOG REQUIRES ACCESS NUMBER.
This omission broke no Federation law, but Camarch was surprised nevertheless. He went through all the alternatives in his mind, but only one made any sense. Whatever the ship's purpose, it was probably illegal: there was no other reason to not record it with Edgeworld Control. Any archeological expedition aboard this ship was a cover for a more profitable excursion, until proven otherwise.
Camarch had just finished solving the problems presented by an unfamiliar control system when Jameson returned with Carl Sandrye and a third man Camarch had never seen before.
Each time he encountered Jameson, Camarch expected to be probed. Except for that first meeting, however, Jameson's mind had been silent. Perhaps that one time was enough for him to realize that he could never break Camarch's block. Camarch wasn't sure of Jameson's reasons, but he remained on alert as long as the other Tel was nearby. Jameson's powers were small, too small to really worry him, but the battle with the alien on Edgeworld had shaken his confidence. Jameson was tall, but that was the only sign that he was a Tel. He had brown eyes, not green, an average forehead and full lips. All in all, he had few of the outward characteristics of a Tel. Even his fingers lacked the svelteness possessed by every other Tel Camarch had ever met. It was as if the mental powers were proportional to the physical distinctions.
Camarch waited for his visitors to speak.
Finally, Sandrye began. "I think you've had a long enough shift. I'll take over now, if you don't mind too much."
Camarch nodded. From somewhere, the third man produced a blaster and began fiddling with one of its dials, as if oblivious to his surroundings. Camarch began to wonder if he hadn't made a mistake by throwing Jameson out. Perhaps he represented a threat to them by his presence in the warp room. They certainly were going to a great deal of trouble to keep him out.
"According to my chrono," Camarch said, "I have four hours to go."
"Your chrono must be wrong." Sandrye's voice was almost congenial, but Camarch wasn't misled.
"Perhaps it is." He stood up, as if to go. "What time do you want me back for my next shift?" He tried to smooth over his anger.
"I'm not sure you're ready to take a regular shift yet," Sandrye said. "You still look tired from your escape from the badges."
"Tels recover very quickly," Camarch said. "You especially should know that, Jameson."
Sandrye looked surprised, and even the man with the blaster glanced over at Jameson. Camarch thought he could read suspicion and distrust emanating from them, directed, oddly enough, not at him, but at Jameson. He suspected that he had let slip a secret Jameson would rather his companions not know. Jameson's sudden glare confirmed his hunch.
"What did you mean by that?" Sandrye asked him.
"About what?"
"About Jameson."
Camarch shrugged. "Nothing important." But he couldn't help grinning. "Now if you three will excuse me, I'll go catch some dinner." He left before they could object. They could fight it out without his help; he was more than a little ravenous.
This was the first time Camarch had eaten in the serving room, and he was surprised to find it so crowded. About half of the 40-man crew were present, and there was only one table with an empty place. He sat down, very much aware of the table's other occupant.
Such women did not exist on star-freighters. On liners carrying rich passengers they would be rare; on freighters they were unheard of. She was the kind of woman men would have gone to war for 1000 years ago. Now, men no longer responded in such a gargantuan fashion, but they were still awed by the presence of ideal beauty. The face was flawless, unmarred by the slightest blemish or irregularity, but the expression was distant, wrapped in a frame of pale golden hair. She did not look at him at first, so her eyes remained a mystery, but the high forehead, the firm cheekbones, the soft lips, the slightly upturned, yet Romanesque, nose—all these he could picture perfectly in his mind after one glance. Her body was hidden by a blue swirl—a loose, filmy dress—but he sensed that it, too, was perfect.
He had seen her once before, while on his way down to the warp room from the bridge. She had been accompanied by a ruddy-faced man,whose pied, stylish tunic told Camarch that he was not an ordinary crewman; no one except the captain was allowed to wear anything other than faded gray or tan workies or j-suit. The only possible explanation was that they were members of the archeological expedition.
Suddenly Camarch felt distinctively uneasy, and he glanced up to find the woman staring at him.
"You're a Tel, aren't you?" she asked. Her eyes met his, and Camarch forced himself to gaze away, his hand trembling.
"Yes," he managed to reply. He glanced back. She was smiling, distantly but with friendliness.
He found her eyes again, murky and bright and eternal as starfire. There was a whirling brightness in his mind, a vortex of light that sang its silent, siren song and beckoned him into its void. There was a wisdom beyond her pupils, far greater than she had any right to possess, far greater than any human had time enough to accumulate, for it was a wisdom of experience and age, and she was not yet 30 standard years.
"My name is Amalarie Rjuer," she said.
"Krison Camarch."
"You're one of the warp techs, aren't you?"
Camarch nodded. "You must be a member of the archeology expedition."
"I'm supposed to be. Of course, there's not much to do now, so I have plenty of time to pry into the lives of off-duty warp techs."
"I don't think you'll find much of interest about this warp tech."
"Well, you are a Tel. That's interesting. What powers do you have?"
"I'm strictly a blocker," Camarch said. "I can't transmit; I can't read minds; I have no telekinetic powers; all I can do is block. That's not very exciting, is it?"
"Your power may be more valuable than you think."
"You must know something I don't."
She smiled. "Well, for one thing, a secret would be safe with you, unless you chose to reveal it."
"I don't know any secrets."
"You may know more secrets than you realize."
He wondered how much she knew about him. Could she be aware that he had penetrated the ruins of C'hah Lai and lived? Something like that, published in the right place, could make her famous as an archeologist. No, it was a ridiculous thought. She couldn't possibly know. But perhaps the navigator had told her. The thought bothered him for some reason, although so far, the navigator seemed as secretive as he was. Still, it was something to keep in mind.
"What do you mean by that?" he asked finally.
"Nothing really. I just happen to believe that everyone carries with him a few valuable secrets."
"Especially a Tel?"
"You don't seem to like being a Tel," she observed.
"I don't."
"Why not? I would think it would be fun to have powers no one else had."
"Perhaps it would, if the powers were of any use. I appreciate your attempts at encouraging me, but I'm afraid they were wasted."
"Surely being a Tel isn't as bad as all that."
"It's not, if you don't mind being hated because everyone thinks you go around prying into their minds for bits of information you can use to blackmail them; if you don't mind being friendless, because even if you do find someone who doesn't fear you, who would be willing to be hated by all his other acquaintances because he is friendly with a Tel?" Camarch paused. "There are few Tel powers worth all that, and I certainly don't have any of them."
"It doesn't seem quite fair."
Camarch began to laugh. "What has fairness to do with it? You know what? I don't even expect or desire to be treated fairly anymore; all I want is to be left alone and allowed to do my job to the best of my ability."
"That sounds like a reasonable request."
"You're the only NonTel I've ever met who thought so."
"It's man's nature to fear the unknown, the different. It's in his genes. They can no more help the way they feel about you than you can stop being a Tel."
"You're beginning to sound like a predestinarian," Camarch said.
"I am. Every rational person is."
"I thought it had gone out of fashion back on Earth. Mind you, I haven't been to Earth for years." How long had it been? Fifteen years, he finally calculated. He had visited Earth once when he was in the navy and hadn't been back since. Now that Thria was gone he had no ties left there. His parents and two brothers had starved to death in the great depression of 2429. Only he and one sister managed to survive; he because he was a Tel and able to live without food for far longer than other people, and his sister because he took care of her and gave her most of what little food he could scrounge up. A few years later she had married Rawl Nestra. And Rawl Nestra had murdered Thria. He never saw Nestra or his sister after that. He missed the blue skies of Earth, but he would never return. It held too many bitter memories for him.
"The way you talk," Amalarie said, "implies that you're not a predestinarian."
"Well, I never claimed to be rational, but I must admit it's difficult to believe that everything was entirely predetermined by the atomic structure of the universe at the time of the creation."
"What do you believe in?"
"I don't try to figure out what makes the universe run; I merely observe that it does function smoothly and accept that."
"But logically, I don't see how you can avoid believing in predestination. Given a universe with a specific atomic structure at time one and given a certain set of physical laws, the interactions of matter in that universe are determined solely and uniquely by those physical laws. There can be no variation from those laws, and thus there is only one progression that matter can follow from time one to the conclusion of that universe. Given the same structure and the same physical laws, matter will always interact the same way, and the end result will always be identical. That doesn't seem difficult to accept."
"I don't believe it because I don't want to; I reserve the right to think I still have a hint of free will."
"But you don't. Your brain is made up of atoms, and your thoughts are generated by molecular transmitters and circuits of neurons. It is no different than a radio or any electrical circuit. Given a certain input, you inevitably receive a predetermined output."
"Then you're saying that if I have a choice between A and B, I would always choose the same one, given the same initial conditions."
"Yes."
"What about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?"
She smiled, but even in her smile there was distance. It wasn't that she was trying to be unfriendly; it was as if she was unsure of herself, unsure of how to act with him.
"That is the major piece of evidence against predestination. I am confident that one day someone will figure out a way to explain the Uncertainty Principle so that it does not contradict predestination." She paused. "At least I hope so."
"You seem to know a lot of physics for an archeologist. Is everyone else in the expedition so well versed?"
"Hardly. Dr. Rhehe, for one, is interested in nothing but archeology, and lately I've begun to wonder if he's really still interested in that." She paused. "I don't like talking here. Why don't we go to the lounge?"
"Fine," Camarch agreed.
The lounge was next to the bridge and, like the bridge, was not under the influence of gravity, either real or man-made. Camarch had never had trouble with weightlessness before, but this time, as he floated into the room and onto the edge of the universe, his dinner threatened to escape. Suddenly there were only stars around him. Thousands, millions of stars, scattered across infinity like the Crown Jewels of God, seemingly so near that he could grope out and pluck them from their dark setting, yet simultaneously so far away that he could fall forever and not reach the nearest one.
And already he was falling. He reached out for solidity but there was nothing to seize. The stars began to move, to coalesce into a wall of flame, parsecs wide, extending toward forever… he trembled in the wake of the flame and closed his eyes. He trembled again, more violently. Something grabbed his body and shook it.
He opened his eyes to see her shaking him. The wall of flame was almost gone, but the stars were still there. Camarch could see them mocking him, taunting him.
"Are you all right?" a faint voice inquired.
Camarch found her eyes and nodded. "I'm a spacer; I've never been affected by zero-gee before."
She said nothing.
"I need to sit down," he muttered. He was now drifting close enough to the plastic hull to distinguish its substance from the cold glitter of the stars, so he pushed off gently toward one of the couches in the middle of the lounge. He almost missed, but at the last moment managed to snag one of the straps as he went by and pull himself into the chair. The woman did the same, with a great deal more finesse.
Camarch flicked two buttons on the armrest. First, the chair buckled him in; then it began a slow rotation on its axis. His initial impression had been correct. There were stars all around, a complete sphere.
"This is an old ship to have a Neuston projection unit in it," he murmured. "I can't tell where the real stars end and the projected ones begin. Nor can I pick out the doorway."
"Captain Thron made a few improvements with the money we paid him for our expedition." She was a star goddess, floating in the midst of her creations. He avoided looking at her.
"Somebody must be rich," he said, remembering what the computer had told him. Whatever the ship's mission, the stakes were high, and so was the investment.
"The government, of course," she replied, smiling, her hair falling across her right eye.
"Of course. What are we after that the government is willing to rebuild an old freighter and send it beyond the boundaries of the Federation?"
"We're simply one of the projects that have benefitted from the council's desire to strengthen basic scientific research."
"To be able to afford to pay for everything on this ship that has been replaced or repaired, you must have received a large grant."
"Dr. Rhehe says we did. I myself know little about the financial aspects."
"It must be quite an important expedition."
"It is. Recently Earth has quit trying to feed its hungry and is starting to finance research again with some of the money it receives from the colonies."
"I'm surprised the colonies still send any money," Camarch mused. "One of these days they won't, and then what will Earth do? Drown in its own flesh, most likely."
"The navy will enforce Earth's rule."
"Hardly. The Federation is too spread out, and the navy is too undermanned and undershipped to ever serve any useful function except routine law enforcement. In a war with the colonies the navy would be spread too thin to be much of a threat. The colonies could easily raise a navy three times that of Earth's." He stopped. "But enough of that. You still haven't told me the purpose of this expedition."
Her eyes turned to meet his. The vortex in his mind began to whirl again, sucking him down toward the abyss. He fought for control, but the vortex was within him, and he could not even break contact. He could only sit immobile until she came to a decision.
"Have you ever heard of the Uzoxes?" she asked at length. She blinked and turned away, staring out across the stars. "You know that their civilization occupied the region of space beyond Edgeworld?"
"Yes, I've heard that, but I don't believe it. There's no evidence." Gradually his mind cleared, leaving behind a profound weariness as well as a slight headache.
"There are ruins that many archeologists, including myself, believe to be of Uzoxean origin."
"Where?" Camarch scoffed. "The only ruins left by a civilization superior to man's are—" He stopped abruptly, a tingling nervousness racing through his body.
"You're right," she said. "Edgeworld, the ruins of C'hah Lai."
Camarch was too surprised to answer. Words wouldn't form in his mouth, no matter how much he tried.
She rescued him. "We believe the Uzoxean civilization to be about forty thousand years old, and that is exactly the age of C'hah Lai."
Camarch finally found the controls to his tongue. "And why do you believe that the Uzoxean civilization is forty thousand years old? If C'hah Lai is Uzoxean in origin, then it is still the only evidence of them that anyone has found. No homeworld has been discovered."
"That's where you're wrong," she replied. "The homeworld has been found. It was found by the Fifth Allied Survey Expedition of 2284."
"How can you say that? The expedition never returned."
"Oh, but it didn't have to. In 2412 a garbled message was received by radio astronomers working in the Selspri System. The message claimed to be from the Fifth Survey Expedition and gave a brief description of what had been discovered up to that time. It seems that a series of ruins had been discovered on many planets visited by the expedition, and the trail of these ruins had been followed back to a planet thought to be the homeworld of the civilization. And on the homeworld, buried in the midst of the largest city, ruins were found identical to those on Edgeworld."
"So that's where we're going?" Camarch asked.
"Yes. We know the direction of the signal, and we know that it came from a planet approximately 128 light-years from Selspri, since that is the time it took for the message to reach that system."
"So we have to travel 128 light-years."
"About that. Edgeworld is four light-years closer than Selspri."
"That's a long way to chase a legend."
"The knowledge gained will be worth the effort."
"I'm surprised Captain Thron agreed to risk his ship on such a mission."
"We rebuilt his bridge, the warp drive, the warp room, the chemmies—how could he refuse? It is something that a freighter captain-owner could never afford to do on his own."
"What about the crew? How did you get them to come?"
"Money. We promised to pay them well, very well indeed."
Camarch gazed at the halo of stars around her. "And all this because of one garbled message."
"It was clear enough in spots."
"What else did it say beside what you've already told me?"
She hesitated, glancing down at her hands in her lap. "Well, there was one more thing. After the part which I just told you, the message became so overwhelmed by background interference that it could not be understood, but at the end of the transmission, the interference cleared slightly, and the transmitter said something very strange indeed. Something about an alien ship orbiting the planet; a ship so black that it appeared in ground telescopes as just a hole among the stars."
A coldness passed over Camarch.
There were two men waiting for Camarch when he returned to his quarters. The tall, heavy one wore green workies; his short, thin mate wore a gray j-suit. What made the shorter man more impressive was the blaster he carried.
Camarch decided to let them make the first move. They were quick to do so.
"You're to come with us," the short man said.
"Why?"
"Never mind. Just come."
"Where are we going?"
"You're a Tel; you should already know. You can read my mind, can't you?"
"As well as you can read mine," Camarch responded.
The two men looked puzzled; then the short one jabbed him meaningfully with the blaster and pointed to the open doorway with his free hand.
"Okay," Camarch sighed. "I'm going." He led the other two men into the corridor.
The short man indicated the hub of the ship, and Camarch obeyed, though thoughts of escape crossed his mind more than once. Getting away from these two would probably not be very difficult; all he had to do was separate the short man from his weapon.
But on a starship, there was no place to hide. There was a finite number of rooms, and Camarch knew he would eventually be found. So for better or worse, he was going to have to discover why his company was desired badly enough to send two armed crewmen after him.
Their destination turned out to be the captain's office. At first Camarch was relieved. Then he saw who was present besides the captain. Sandrye's tight smirk was poorly disguised; and his two friends stood behind him. It was certainly a bad omen, if nothing else. When Camarch turned to gaze at Thron, the captain wore a resigned frown.
Camarch waited.
Thron sighed. "You must know why you're here." He drummed his fingers on his desktop.
"Sure. Just like I know everything else you're thinking." Camarch meant to be sarcastic, but quickly realized that no one noticed that.
Thron scowled angrily, perhaps with a touch of nervousness. "You're in enough trouble without making me more irritable," Thron muttered.
"What am I supposed to have done?"
"Rogert Jameson is dead."
"How?"
"Someone strangled him." Thron stared away from Camarch and again the captain's fingers began to drum on the desk.
Camarch finally understood why he was summoned. He felt a cold fury begin to trickle through his body.
"You're not accusing me?" he asked through his clenched teeth.
"We have witnesses," Thron said. He pointed to the three crewmen. Mr. Sandrye, Mr. Gundiess and Mr. Nix claim to have seen you break Mr. Jameson's neck."
"They're lying!"
"Where were you when the murder occurred?"
It was a trap, but Camarch couldn't fall into it because he wasn't the murderer. Yet his estimation of Captain Thron went up.
"When did it happen?" he asked.
"About an hour ago."
"I was in the lounge with Amalarie Rjuer."
The captain nodded thoughtfully. "That's easy enough to check." He banged out a number on his comscreen. Camarch waited for the alibi that would free him to be verified. But as he watched the captain's face, he realized it wasn't going well for him.
Finally, the captain turned back. "Dr. Rjuer says that you left her company well before that time."
Camarch's mind went empty. No. Not Amalarie. She wouldn't… Sandrye and the others, he could understand that they might lie, but not Amalarie. Those eyes, whatever they might be, were truthful.
"I didn't kill him," Camarch said softly.
"The case against you is strong. There are three witnesses who claim to have seen you commit the murder. Your alibi cannot be verified. And thirdly, it is well known that you killed a crewman on the last ship you teched on."
All but the third part was true, and there was little point in wasting time denying that; no one would believe him. There was only one fragile line of defense left. "If these three crewmen saw me kill Jameson with my bare hands, why didn't they try to stop me?"
Thron turned to Sandrye. "Do you have an answer for that?"
"It happened too quickly and we were too far away."
"Where did the murder take place?" Camarch asked.
"Deck C3, as you well know."
"And how far away were you?" Camarch asked again.
"I see no point in answering questions from him," Sandrye snapped.
The captain frowned. "Answer the question," he said. "We need to know everything."
Sandrye flashed a look of hatred at Camarch, then relaxed. "Okay, if that's the way you want it, Captain." He turned around to his two companions and shrugged.
Camarch felt the cold fury in him begin to turn to fire.
"I guess we were about ten meters away," Sandrye said.
"And you couldn't react fast enough to stop Camarch from killing Jameson?" Thron asked.
"Tels are very quick and very strong," Sandrye replied. "Jameson and Camarch were arguing about something—I couldn't hear what—and all of a sudden Camarch grabbed Jameson around the neck and jerked. We tried to catch him but he was too fast. After that we came straight to you."
"None of that story is true," Camarch protested. "Why would I kill him?"
Sandrye grinned coldly. "You're a Tel, that's why. You got into an argument and lost control of your temper. Everyone knows that Tels often do that."
The fires of fury were burning bright now. "What about Jameson's temper? He was also a Tel."
Sandrye laughed. "Jameson a Tel? I knew Rogert for years and he never showed any signs of being a Tel."
Sheets of lightning flashed in his skull, blinding him to everything but his anger. Through the fire he could see Sandrye, and Sandrye only. Everything else was a blur. He never remembered being this angry before. He closed his eyes and still saw Sandrye, grinning. He had to fight the fires consuming him. To yield to anger now would destroy one of the few defenses he had. If he lost control, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind that Sandrye was right.
He heard the captain say faintly, "Confine him to quarters until I've had time to think this over."
Then Sandrye said, "The penalty for murder on board a starship is death; haven't we proven that Camarch murdered Jameson?"
"I'm not sure, I'm just not sure," Thron said. "It seems that way, but I don't want to make a mistake and execute an innocent man. I have to think this over. Please go away and leave me alone."
But by this time Camarch had flung up his mind-block, shutting out Sandrye, Thron, all sounds, all sights… all thoughts.
He awoke in his own quarters, alone, very much alone. His mindblock was still up. Exhausted, he let it fade away.
He knew the door would be locked but he climbed out of the sleeper and tried it anyway. It was locked.
Camarch sat back down. Three deaths in one week. One man had been murdered; one had died accidentally; and one had not even been a man. What they had in common was that he, Camarch, had been responsible for one death and accused of the other two.
Camarch had little doubt that Sandrye or one of his friends had murdered Jameson. The question was: why? As he thought about it, the probable reason came to him.
Jameson had been killed because Sandrye found out that he was a Tel. Before Camarch let slip that secret, Sandrye had not known. It was evident that Sandrye hated Tels and probably feared them as well. Besides, Sandrye no doubt began to question whose side Jameson would be on in any confrontation; Tels traditionally banded together, no matter what their personal differences.
Camarch sighed and stood up. He was partially responsible for Jameson's death, and he didn't like that. The man was a Tel.
Two humans and an alien. Death seemed to be following him around lately. He went over in his mind everything that had happened to him, trying to make some sense out of it, trying to find some consistency amid the chaos.
To some extent, he could explain the deaths of Dran and Jameson. They were human, and they had died human deaths because of accident and fear, two common causes of human death. But the dark-minded alien on Edgeworld worried Camarch; he could make no sense at all out of that sequence of events. And what worried him most of all was that he knew that it wasn't over yet; what had happened in C'hah Lai had been a beginning, not an ending. Death might not have been the object of the first encounter, but who was to say about the next one? And Camarch was convinced there would be another one.
If one of the humans aboard this ship didn't get him first. He had assumed he wasn't the intended victim of Sandrye's plot. It suddenly occurred to him that he too could be a target, as well as Jameson. By killing Jameson and charging him with the murder, both he and Jameson would be eradicated in one step. Simple, almost foolproof.
Almost.
There were three possible deficiencies in the scheme. One was Amalarie Rjuer. She had been with him at the time of the murder, providing him with an alibi. Why had she denied it, claiming he had left an hour before he actually had? Obviously Sandrye had threatened her. Either that or she was on Sandrye's side from the beginning and the whole conversation had been a setup. Logically it made sense, because there were no other witnesses to his presence in the lounge—it had been Amalarie who suggested they leave the crowded crew room and go to the isolation of the lounge. Still, there was something about her Camarch instinctively trusted.
The captain was his second hope. Thron was too indecisive to sentence him to death in a peremptory fashion.
The third hope was one Sandrye couldn't possibly know—the one that held the most promise of defeating Sandrye's attempt to frame him. That was the navigator. It wasn't likely that the alien would go to the trouble of saving him just to lose him to a false murder charge. Camarch had to believe that.
This reasoning led him to another question. Why did Sandrye want him out of the way? It would mean that Sandrye was the only warp tech left, and no warp tech could survive more than a few days of continuous duty. There would have to be times when the warp room was unmanned. Was it only because Sandrye hated Tels? If, like everyone else, he believed that all Tels could read minds, he might be afraid Camarch might discover something by reading his. Maybe that was a good sign. It seemed to imply that not everyone on the ship was in on whatever was going on; if everyone knew, Camarch would have no allies even if he did discover the true purpose of the trip. He would be no threat then, and there would be no reason to want him out of the way.
After two days, the navigator came to visit him. It was the first contact Camarch had had with anyone since his confinement began, except for the crewman who brought him food.
"This third is named Sra Tior Trid," the alien said. "You are Camarch. You have questions for this third."
"A few."
"This third will answer some, but cannot tell you all now. It is not safe."
"Anything will be better than what I know at the moment."
"Ask." Two black vertical slits,gaped at him.
"You brought me aboard this ship, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"You are needed."
"By your race?"
"No."
"Then who needs me?"
"This third cannot answer now."
Camarch scowled. "Then maybe you can tell me who was after me on Edgeworld?"
"The being was a Crixonan."
"What's that?"
"A member of a civilization your people have not yet encountered."
"Why are they interested in me?"
"Because you are needed."
Camarch knew better than to ask again why he was needed. The answer would be the same as before. But now he had to ask a question he'd rather not ask.
"They won't give up, will they? Whatever they were after before, they will come after again."
"That is right."
"I can't imagine what they would be interested in that I know."
"You be more important than you realize. This third protects you by not telling knowledge you seek."
"Are the Crixonans after you, too?" Camarch asked.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"It be part of their purpose."
"But I suppose you can't tell me what that is, can you?"
"No."
So far all Camarch's probes had failed; sooner or later each line of questions led to a dead end. There was one line he hadn't yet tried, however; perhaps he could learn something from it.
"And what planet do you come from?" Camarch asked. "Or can you tell me?"
"This third may answer that question: from Uzoxes, the planet you seek."
"But the Uzoxeans are all dead!" Camarch replied incredulously.
"This third is not. It is necessary that you reach Uzoxes. Remember, this third is your friend: this third will lead you and protect you. You will not come to harm here."
"Why?" Camarch asked softly.
"Because you are needed."
Camarch shook his head. "I wish I understood."
"It is not time. It is not safe now to tell you all. Now this third must go."
Stunned, Camarch watched him leave. Krison felt he knew very little more than before the alien had come. Questions, only questions, had been added to his crowded mind.
Sra Tior Trid scratched down the hallway after leaving Camarch's room, his light body more floating than walking. His two upper extremities remained motionless as he moved; the lower two glided along the metal plateway. The pale face showed no emotion, no wrinkled forehead, nor curled lips, or twitching nose, but his mind was not as blank.
Silence, he thought. The Earthman was but silence and aloneness. Each time. To live in such an alone body. He thought of the other thirds in his being, Sra Tior Mrid and Sra Tior Drid. Joy. Happiness. The joining of the parts. Sorrow. Loneliness. They were 1000 swings dead. This third like Camarch now. But this third would join them again, in past-future.
Because Camarch had a warp tech's quarters there was a viewscreen. Without it he probably would have gone crazy. He almost did anyway. The stars provided little company, but at least he could change the field and magnification and make the room a little less static.
He could stare ahead, toward the Birmingham's destination, the creamy-yellow F-type star the navigator had chosen to try first. Or he could stare beyond. Toward the galactic rim and beyond. Toward the edge of the known universe and beyond.
The Crixonans. Sra Tior Trid pronounced it as if it were the name of a disease. A disease that needed eradicating. But what had he to do with this disease, Camarch asked himself 100 times over the next few weeks. What information could he possibly possess that would interest the Crixonans?
He thought of Sandrye, too, as he paced the floor of his room. But Sandrye did not seem as real, as threatening, as that dark-minded alien.
No answers came to him, and he began to wonder over and over if Tior Trid wasn't right. Perhaps his mind wasn't ready to know everything yet.
After a month of isolation Amalarie Rjuer came to see him. He still felt bitter toward her, and he had to stifle his anger when she entered. It was her fault he remained caged up. Before he realized what he was doing, he found himself standing in front of her.
"I came by to see how you're doing," she offered softly.
"I'm alive," Camarch replied.
"Captain Thron could have had you airlocked," she said.
"You let him lock me up in here; would you also have let him kill me?"
She made an impatient gesture with her hands.
"Well, it would have been nice if you'd told him the truth."
She frowned and turned away from him slightly. "The truth? I'm afraid you wouldn't recognize it if I told you."
She stared at him, and their eyes locked. For a moment he was almost drawn again into the abyss, but this time he was prepared, and he broke contact quickly.
"Everything is not what it seems on this ship, Krison."
"Oh? Nothing ever is." He noticed the use of his first name.
"I'm beginning to think that certain people aboard have other than archeological plans for this expedition," she went on.
A little curiosity began to invade his anger. "Who?" he asked.
"I'm not completely sure," she replied. "At least I'm not sure of all the participants. Carl Sandrye is involved, I know that, and in fact, I think he may be the organizer. He's been meeting with several of the ship's crew in the warp room when he's on duty, which is, of course, illegal. He's also been meeting with my boss, Danson Rhehe, and that worries me. If Rhehe is involved, then I have to suspect that the expressed purpose of the expedition may be only a façade."
Camarch cut in. "Did you know that Captain Thron never recorded a destination or purpose-of-voyage with Edgeworld Control?"
She blinked and frowned again, but did not look directly at him. He wondered if she were aware of the effect she had on him.
''How do you know?" she asked.
A reasonable question. "Simple. I asked the computer."
"That makes it even worse. I didn't think that Thron was in on it."
"Maybe he's not. Maybe he's under pressure. It isn't often that a freighter captain has a chance to refurbish his entire ship; in fact, the profit margin is so small that a ship is usually run until it either blows up in deep space trying to warp or fails to establish orbit and burns up in the atmosphere of some planet. The opportunity that Sandrye—assuming he's in charge—offered Thron must have been too tempting to pass up. And I can't blame Thron. Under the circumstances, I would have yielded, too."
"It's a good thought," she said. "I certainly would like to believe that Captain Thron is not involved."
"Who else is?" Camarch inquired.
"Well, obviously, Gey Gundiess and Lieres Nix— the two men who witnessed against you with Sandrye—are in on it, and I think we also have to assume that the navigator Tior Trid is involved."
"Why?"
"Did you know that the prior navigator of this ship was found murdered in his quarters about a year ago, just as the Birmingham was coming in to Edgeworld on a run from Tierra IV?"
"No, but so what? He probably disagreed with Sandrye, and Sandrye killed him."
"Well, no matter who killed him, Thron couldn't find a replacement, so the ship was grounded. He searched for months. Then one day Tior Trid just walked up to him on the street and volunteered for the job."
"What's suspicious about that?" Camarch had the feeling she was trying to tell him something she wasn't saying in words.
"Nothing, in itself. But the next day, Dr. Rhehe and I arrived from Earth. There were five freighters around Edgeworld at that time, yet Dr. Rhehe was only interested in the Birmingham."
"Maybe—"
"Though he claimed he didn't, Dr. Rhehe seemed to have everything arranged in advance—we never even inquired about another ship. Furthermore, Tior Trid wasn't at all surprised when Dr. Rhehe asked him if he thought he could navigate the expedition." She paused. "There's something strange about him; we don't even know where he's from. He's an alien, of course, but of no race I'm familiar with."
"I don't think he's involved with Rhehe and Sandrye," Camarch said.
"All the evidence points to that."
"Then all the evidence is wrong," Camarch replied firmly.
Amalarie looked surprised. "How do you know?"
Camarch thought over her question. How did he know? Because Tior Trid had brought him out of C'hah Lai and aboard the Birmingham! But Tior Trid could have done that for illegal purposes rather than legal ones, as Camarch had previously assumed. But if Tior Trid was in on whatever Sandrye was planning, why would they wrongly accuse him of Jameson's death and attempt to have him airlocked? It didn't fit. Tior Trid had gone to too much trouble to save him on Edgeworld.
"I can't prove it," Camarch finally said, "but somehow I know Tior Trid isn't involved."
She stared softly, but there was no surprise on her face now, nor was there the curiosity Camarch expected. Instead, she was smiling.
"Too bad you're only a blocking Tel," she remarked, "or we would know for sure."
"We can check the ship's files and see if there's any way to tie him in with Sandrye or one of the others we know are involved."
"It's worth a try," she replied.
In the quarters of the warp techs on most freighters, the viewscreen had a computer-access panel. The Birmingham was no exception. Camarch punched out the code that linked in the ship's files.
"Subject: Tior Trid, Sra. Position: navigator. Respond with all the information in the ship's files."
SUBJECT: TIOR TRID, SRA, the computer printed on the viewscreen. POSITION: SHIP'S NAVIGATOR. DIRECT FILE ACCESS NUMBER: 145-56484-110001.
"Damn," Camarch said.
"What's wrong?" Amalarie asked.
"The first three numbers 145 indicate that only the captain has access to Tior Trid's files."
"You can't override—"
"No."
She was silent, and Camarch waited. He would let her make the next move, though several possible sources of information had occurred to him.
The silence was eventually interrupted, not by her voice, but by an insistent pounding on the door.
"Time's up," a harsh voice shouted.
"Just a minute," she responded.
"Now!"
Camarch shrugged. "You'd better go."
She nodded. "Think about what I told you. I'll be back later."
Camarch said nothing, but watched her go. Her going left an emptiness in the room. He couldn't trust her, he knew nothing about her; yet he missed her when she left.
But he couldn't allow himself to be distracted. There were several questions he wanted to ask the computer. Some concerned Amalarie; some did not.
The computer was still tied in with the ship's files.
"Subject: Rjuer, Amalarie. Position: archeologist." It was possible that there was no file on her, since she was not a member of the crew.
SUBJECT: RJUER, AMALARIE. POSITION: ARCHEOLOGIST, CLASS TWO. ACCESS NUMBER: UNCODED. BIRTHPLACE: 11.25.-2423. BIRTHPLACE: JAXAMI, SOUTHERN QUADRANT, NORTH AMERICA, EARTH. EDUCATION: UNIVERSITY OF THE NORTH, ATLANTA, SOUTHERN QUADRANT, NORTH AMERICA, EARTH, TERTIARY DEGREE. PRESENT ACADEMIC POSITION: INSTRUCTOR, UNIVERSITY OF ANCIENT STUDIES, CAIRO, NORTHEASTERN QUADRANT, AFRICA, EARTH. PUBLICATIONS: NONE. MARITAL STATUS: CLASS A6. CHILDREN PERMITTED: NOT APPLICABLE.
The computer stopped.
Some of it made sense, some of it didn't, Camarch thought. Given her position, her marital status followed logically enough. She was only an instructor, which was far below the rank necessary to qualify for marriage; thus her level six ranking. However, since there was the theoretical possibility of her rising to a level one, she did qualify for class A. No one outside of class A could legally marry and have children.
Camarch had to force back a sudden spasm of laughter. The only ones who obeyed the law were from the higher classes, because they were the ones with jobs, the ones with money, the ones with enough to lose to care about the law. The lower classes had all the children they desired—which wasn't very many any more—and the only punishment effected was the decrease in the amount of food to each other member of the family. It was usually punishment enough, however, because the allotment of food to each person was barely sufficient to keep that person alive; to share the food with an illegal child would cause both to die of starvation. Many children were found dead every day in the ghettoes of Yucatan, Jaxami, Mosgrad, and 1000 other cities because the parents had chosen to save themselves and abandon the child they had borne.
Yes, it made sense that Amalarie was unmarried. It did not make sense that she was chosen for the present expedition. An archeological expedition, funded by the Terran government and designed to duplicate the path of the Fifth Allied Survey Expedition of 2284, should have attracted applications from the Federation's most renowned archeologists; why should a place be made on the necessarily small staff for a mere instructor without a single publication to her credit?
And what about Rhehe? How prominent was he?
Camarch asked the computer.
SUBJECT: RHEHE, DANSON RHETTE. POSITION: ARCHEOLOGIST, CLASS FOUR. ACCESS NUMBER: UNCODED. BIRTHDATE: 10.14.2398. BIRTHPLACE: TSETUNG, SOUTHEASTERN QUADRANT, ASIA, EARTH. EDUCATION: UNIVERSITY OF THE PEOPLE, TSETUNG, SOUTHEASTERN QUADRANT, ASIA, EARTH, PRESENT ACADEMIC POSITION: SUBPROFESSOR ONE, UNIVERSITY OF ANCIENT STUDIES, CAIRO, NORTHWESTERN QUADRANT, AFRICA, EARTH. PUBLICATIONS: "THE FALL OF KUSH," AFRICAN J. ARCH., VOL. 301; 1234-56, 6.2434; "THE SOCIOECONOMIC INFLUENCE OF THE GOD AMANRE IN KUSHITE DAILY LIFE," SUDANESE J. ARCH., VOL. 303; 892-923, 4.2436; "THE 'CULT OF THE RAM' IN THE HISTORY OF AFRICAN RELIGION," ARCH. ARCHIVES, VOL: 133: 455-467, 7.2438. MARITAL STATUS: A2. CHILDREN PERMITTED: TWO.
Camarch sat down. The computer had given him a great many facts but not much useful information. Rhehe had three publications, and though Camarch knew nothing about the archeological literature, all three journals Rhehe had published in seemed to be major ones. However, judging from the titles of the articles alone, none of the three sounded worthy of a Nobel Prize. Furthermore, he had not published anything in more than 25 years, so he had passed the period of time during which he could claim to still be rising in his field. It was easy to see why Rhehe would want to come on the expedition—he would be hoping to make that one discovery, write that one paper that would expel him from the prison of his subprofessorship into prominence as a professor. It was not so easy to understand why he would be chosen to head an important expedition. There should have been no deficit of higher-ranking archeologists willing to lead the search.
Two possible conclusions could be drawn. Either no one else had volunteered for the job, or the job was not as it seemed. The latter fit well with Amalarie Rjuer's accusation that there was more to the expedition than Dr. Rhehe was telling. Much more.
The room was dark; he was still alone, yet something had awakened him from his dreams. Something not in this room, but in his mind, though it took him several minutes to realize that.
He slid from the sleeper. Automatically the lights flickered on. One of his dreams lingered in his thoughts like a brand seared onto the gyri of his brain. Darkness—that was most of it. Darkness and nothingness. And what else? Something else was there, too, but his mind refused to remember it.
Then he knew, and fear followed knowledge. Fear, despair and wonder all fused together into an entity far more than the sum of its parts.
He found the controls to the viewscreen. Into the depths of space his artificial senses probed, extensions of his own eyes. Into the blackness of eternity, searching for something he hoped he would never find, a vague something he never knew existed…
And he found it, hidden in the darkness, darker than the darkness. How long it had been there he had no way of knowing, but it was moving on a trajectory parallel to that of the Birmingham, and Camarch knew it had come to stay.
A ship. A shadow on the stars that had come to haunt him.
Always the alien ship was there.
It followed the Birmingham through warp space, though there was no way to detect it then. But each time the Birmingham reentered normspace Camarch could find it again, matching courses, three billion kilometers away, never more, never less, as though neither ship had ever moved.
Never once did it try to communicate. Never once did Camarch see anything but its dark shadow against the starry background.
Amalarie Rjuer didn't return for almost two months. In spite of her promise, Camarch had given up on her. He was staring at the viewscreen when she entered.
"There's not much to watch, is there?" she asked, smiling.
"Perhaps you could talk with the station director about the programming for me," Camarch replied. He snapped off the viewscreen, wanting to change the subject before she became too curious. The alien ship was his secret for a while longer.
Amalarie changed it for him. "I found more evidence that Rhehe and Sandrye are planning something when we reach Uzoxes."
"Oh?" Camarch tried to appear just interested enough to lead her on.
"I found a list on Rhehe's desk with three names on it. Captain Thron, Sra Tior Trid, and you." She paused. "And there was a sword drawn by each name."
Suddenly Jameson's bald head made sense. "A sword is the symbol of death in the religion of the New Aztecs." And a self-inflicted bald head was a sign of one of the initiation rites.
"Sandrye is a member of that sect," Amalarie went on.
"And you think that the sword by my name marks me for death."
"Yes, And Thron and Tior Trid as well. They have you where they want you; you can't hurt them from here, and if they keep after him, Thron will probably overcome his hesitation just to keep peace on the ship and have you airlocked. I'm not sure how long he would live after that, but they need Tior Trid for a while longer. He won't become expendable until we reach Uzoxes, and if he were to have the foresight to erase the trip tapes, they would have to keep him alive until we returned to Edgeworld."
"Well, if you're right, it means that Thron and Tior Trid aren't involved with Sandrye and Dr. Rhehe."
"Perhaps, perhaps not. You see, there was one more entry on the list, but this one was crossed out—" she paused to create the proper dramatic effect"—Jameson."
"And since he was involved with Sandrye—at least he seems to be involved—and they killed him, then maybe the fact that Thron and Tior Trid are marked for death doesn't prove that they aren't involved, too."
"Exactly."
"The only thing is that I know why they killed Jameson. The New Aztecs believe in self-sacrifice, even to the point of death, and the loss of individuality for the good of the collect. Jameson withheld from them the information that he was a Tel, and no important information is to be withheld from one's own collect."
"And they killed him because of that?"
'That and the fact that he was a Tel. The New Aztecs are among the most strongly anti-Tel groups around. No Tel's life is safe with them around." He hesitated, remembering Thria and how Rawl Nestra's collect had brutally murdered her. The collect would have murdered him too, if he hadn't run. "I'm afraid their religion is a long way from the original."
"At least now I can be sure about you," she said.
"Why?"
"Because you're a Tel."
"You had doubts before?"
"No, not really. But I had only my own intuition to go on, no facts."
"That brings us to you," Camarch began. "How do I know you're not involved with Sandrye and Rhehe? I've known you a few months, and during that time I've only talked with you three times— never mind what you've done: don't forget I'm confined here because of you."
"I want you to trust me," she said. "The time may come when it's important for you to trust me."
"Give me a good reason why I should trust you."
"Okay, that's fair enough. Let me explain to you why I came on this expedition, and then you'll realize that I am interested only in seeing that we accomplish what we set out to accomplish. I assume you've checked on my background?"
Camarch nodded, surprised by her perceptiveness.
He would have to be more careful with her in the future; he could not afford to underestimate a potential adversary.
"Then you know my standing in the academic hierarchy—you know, in fact, that I'm an instructor, which means that I have virtually no standing. If the academic world had not changed over the last 500 years, I would have little to worry about. I'm young, intelligent; I could write a few articles and expect to be promoted. That was the situation in the mid-twentieth century. There was plenty of money for research, and everyone who wanted to was able to publish a bookcase full of articles, no matter how trivial the subject. But beginning in the early '70s of the twentieth century, less money was available for research because more and more money was needed to feed the populace and pay for its health care and other services. This trend has continued until the present day, at least on Earth. Now, academic jobs of any kind are scarce, and the ones at the top extremely so. There is only a handful of journals in each field."
"To be published in one of them requires a paper of at least some enduring value and some originality. In the field of archeology such a paper is difficult to write; unless you're at the top there is no money available, and furthermore, there is a definite lack of topics to write about. Dr. Rhehe scoured the old literature for years before he discovered that the Kushite culture of ancient Africa had not been touched on for over three centuries. I've been looking for a topic for five years, without success. You can imagine what an opportunity like this means to me. Finally, a chance for some original study! If I'm lucky and have enough time, I may be able to use the data from this expedition to catapult me all the way to a professorship. You don't know how much I want that. It's what I live for."
"And if what you believe about Sandrye and Dr. Rhehe is true, chances are they won't be interested in research."
"I know it's true. I found out yesterday that Rhehe and Sandrye grew up together on Earth."
"Because they have known each other for years, that makes them guilty?"
"It's just one more piece of the puzzle. Taken as a whole, it all begins to make sense."
"Okay, let's assume that they are after something besides knowledge on Uzoxes. We have to answer two questions. First of all, what are they after? Secondly, where did they get the money to finance the expedition? The government sure didn't give it to them."
"I can't answer either question," Amalarie said. But if we could somehow figure out the first one, that might help answer the second one."
"That sounds logical enough. How do you propose to come up with the information? I doubt if asking them would help you much."
"No, but asking the computer might."
Camarch immediately understood. "Let me," he told her.
She stepped away from the control panel. He punched in the code that gave him access to the ship's files.
"Subject: Fifth Allied Survey Expedition of 2284. Please play back entire recording of message received in 2412 by astronomers working in the Selspri System." He turned to Amalarie. "I assume the computer has the message."
"It should. Dr. Rhehe and I fed into the computer everything known about the Uzoxean civilization."
Camarch nodded thoughtfully, then punched the vocal mode button on the output panel.
"Subject: Fifth Allied Survey Expedition of 2284," droned the computer's scratchy voice. It sounded like fingernails being dragged across metal. Normally Camarch preferred the computer to use the written mode. "The entire recording of message received in 2412 in Selspri System will follow." There was a click, then the almost deafening hiss and whine of interstellar space came screaming out of the speaker.
"… danger… Send this message." The voice was thin, and fragile, but it was human, and Camarch felt sorrow and sympathy for the man speaking. "Captain Davin… Fifth Allied Survey Expedition… left in 2284. Four months… found charred ruins on a planet… We believe it to be an outpost." The galactic background noise was waning, and the faint voice could be better heard.
"… went on, and less than a parsec later, found a second outpost, and again, all that was left was charred debris. There… little to learn… "
There was a long period of violent hissing, as if the rest of the universe were exploding in protest to the message. Ultimately, the words again became comprehensible.
"… trail led to a creamy-yellow star, F5 in type, with four planets and… We landed. That this was the homeworld of the Uzoxean… no doubt. There were white cities with tall spires and strange, windowless buildings, and… surprising of all, one building, ruin if you prefer, which consists of tumbled, melting white blocks and reminds us of the ruins found on Delta Irioni II three years ago. We plan… enter it… able."
"Delta Irioni II is now known as Edgeworld," Amalarie remarked.
“… other things… taken over… jungles… one plant which… properties. Not sure… pale blue stalk… think… spin…"
The syllables hissed and faded, garbled splinters of words, often meaningless, but occasionally they could be pieced together—with a little imagination—into a sentence that conveyed a thought. One such thought had burrowed deep into Camarch's mind, leaving a trail of certainty he could not dismiss, no matter how hard he tried. It meant admitting that Amalarie was right, that Rhehe and Sandrye were not after knowledge, that they were after money instead. It also meant admitting that Rhehe and Sandrye would not hesitate to kill to achieve their goal, because what they planned was already punishable by death on many of the Federation planets; murder carried no greater penalty.
"… leaving… month… home…… one problem. There…alien ship……orbiting planet, it… so dark…hole among the stars. We…"
The hiss and whine of the background radiations droned on, but no more words could be discerned. Camarch wondered if he should tell Amalarie that he now knew the purpose of the expedition—the real purpose. Perhaps Rhehe and Sandrye sent her to discover whether or not he was a threat to them. Perhaps they suspected he knew about their plan and sent her to find out for sure. On the other hand, why should they bother to go to all that trouble? They had killed one man; another murder wouldn't matter to them. If they suspected he knew, it would make far more sense for them to just kill him when they finally decided to make their move.
Camarch came to a decision.
"I know what Dr. Rhehe and Sandrye are after," he said.
Amalarie jerked her head toward him in surprise. "I didn't hear anything on the playback."
"It was there, if you knew what to listen for."
Camarch replied. He punched the file access code into the computer.
"Subject: Fifth Allied Survey Expedition of 2284, message received in 2412 in Selspri System. Key word: jungles. Please play message received after that word."
"Subject: Fifth Allied Survey Expedition of 2284," the computer rasped. "Key word in message received in 2412 in Selspris System: jungles. The subsequent message will follow."
"… one plant which… properties. Not sure… pale blue stalk… think… spin…"
Camarch pushed the stop button and the noise ceased. "Do you understand now?" he asked.
"No."
"There is a certain plant, found on several known planets, with a pale blue very thin stalk that has the distinct property of being banned on every planet in the Federation."
"I still don't… you… you can't mean… mindspin?
"What else?"
"But that doesn't make sense. Mindspin is always fatal, ingested in any form. How could anyone make money off of it?"
"You forgot several things. Though it is lethal, it does not kill a person for about a year, if that person continues to take it. It has been eliminated from every planet that once grew it, but when it was available, the demand far exceeded the supply. It short-circuits the mind in such a way as to produce an indescribable sensual experience. There are many people who are fatally curious—I think that whoever finds a new source of mindspin will make a fortune."
"That's incredible. Why would Dr. Rhehe get involved? I can understand Sandrye doing it, but—"
"The answer is obvious if you think about it."
"But he doesn't need the money. Sure, he's far from rich, but he has a good position, a high academic rank, has written several papers… I just don't understand why he would risk everything on something like this."
"Don't you?"
"No."
"Perhaps he's more like you than you think," Camarch observed. "From your viewpoint he has a good position, sure, but try to look at it from his viewpoint. He's a subprofessor one, which is a high rank, but it's a rank he's had for what—20 years, at least, He's not a full professor, which means that he's not at the top of his field; He has probably exhausted all his ideas for publishable papers and therefore has little, if any, chance of being promoted again." Camarch paused while he thought about Rhehe, trying to put himself in the man's place. It was difficult because Camarch had different ambitions. When the universe considers you its enemy and hates you, your only ambition is to survive; you don't worry much about reaching the top position in your field. Still, Camarch could partially empathize with Rhehe and sense his frustration. He had been frustrated often enough to know the feeling well.
"If you can't have fame and power, then money is the next best thing," Camarch continued. "Maybe that's why Rhehe agreed to participate."
Amalarie nodded. "It makes some sense. You could easily be right. I may have lost sight of the fact that human beings are never satisfied with what they have. I think I can understand now why he did it." She paused, looked over at Camarch. Krison turned his eyes to the floor to avoid her gaze. He wished he could meet her eye to eye but he wasn't strong enough to prevent himself from being sucked into the void. He didn't understand her effect on him at all. Was she some kind of Tel? He had never sensed even the merest whisper of mindtouch from her, but perhaps she was primarily a blocker, as he was.
"Well," she said suddenly. "We know what they're planning. What are we going to do about it?"
"What can we do? I'm locked up in here because of you."
"I'm sorry about that. I thought at the time you would be safer in here. I still think so."
"Then you admit I was with you at the time of the murder?"
"Of course you were. We both know it."
"And you deliberately denied it?" Camarch was having trouble believing what he was hearing, and his tone was sharp. He found himself wanting to trust her, and not since Thria had he wanted to trust anyone.
"I told you—I did it to protect you from Sandrye and Rhehe. You would be dead now, if I hadn't suggested to Thron over the comm that you be locked up in here."
"Why did you bother?"
"Because I began to suspect something was wrong the day we landed on Edgeworld, and you are the only person I've found so far I can trust."
"Well," Camarch said, "I'm afraid you've come to the wrong person. There's nothing I can do."
"You act unconcerned! Don't you know that they will sooner or later kill you if we don't do something right now? I think at least a third of the ship's crew is involved, and when we land on Uzoxes, they are going to take control. We have one small advantage; they don't know we're aware of their plan."
"I wish I could think of something, but—"
"But you really don't care about me, or yourself," she snapped and left the room. Camarch felt the backwash of her anger as she stormed out, and this brought forth anger in him, then hatred, then an ebbing of his anger, regret, remorse and… confusion. What was wrong with him? Why did he feel so—so lonely when she left? It was more than the fact that she was the only visitor he ever had, except for Tior Trid. An explanation occurred to him, but he didn't like it, he didn't like it at all, and he blocked it from his mind. There were more important things to do now.
He went back to the viewscreen. If Amalarie had known where to look, she would have seen the alien ship, the darkness upon the darkness. He had wanted to tell her, but there lingered a part of him that still didn't trust her.
She was right, of course. He had to take some action. They killed Jameson; they would not hesitate to kill him.
For a long while he stood before the viewscreen, his hand immobile on the comm switch. He knew what he had to do, but he could not motivate his hand to do it. He remained partially convinced that there were good reasons for keeping the secret of the alien ship to himself, though he wasn't sure what those reasons were.
In the end, he was able to override his hesitation and open the comm circuit to the bridge.
"Ranwuella here," a voice answered.
"I want to speak to Captain Thron," Camarch said.
"Identify yourself."
"Krison Camarch."
There was silence at the other end. "I don't think Captain Thron wants to speak to you."
"Let him decide that. Just tell him I'm calling."
"Thron is a busy man; you can't expect to just flick on the comm and talk to him."
Camarch was beginning to lose his temper. "It's important."
"Okay," Ranwuella replied. "I'll tell him you called, and if he wants to talk to you, he'll call you back."
"Tell him now. I'll wait for his decision."
Ranwuella's tone stiffened. "Captain Thron will return your call if he so wishes."
"I must talk to Thron!"
But he was yelling into a dead circuit. Rage filled him when he realized this, and he grabbed a chair and flung it across the room. It bounced against the far wall with a crack that sounded like an explosion, but miraculously remained intact. Almost immediately the door opened and a guard came in.
"What are you doing in here?" the man asked. Camarch recognized him but didn't know his name.
There was another chair by the viewscreen, and Camarch's hands found it and hurled it at the guard. The man twisted out of its path, but in doing so, lost his balance and tumbled to the floor, all the while grappling for the blaster tucked in his belt.
Camarch knew he had only seconds to live unless he could disarm the guard. He took one step and dove at the man, hitting him in the chest with fists stretched out in front of him. The guard coughed, lost control of the blaster, but instead of scrambling after it, he clubbed Camarch across the side of the head with his hand. Pain roared through Krison's brain, but he clenched his teeth and blocked out most of it. Then, before the guard struck again, he used his superior reactions and strength to pin the guard down to the floor with his body.
"What are you going to do to me?" the man asked, his face filled with fear. "Kill me, as you did Jameson?"
"I didn't kill Jameson, and I'm not going to kill you." All his anger was gone now, dissipated in the fight. But it had certainly left him with a problem. He had committed himself to action by attacking the guard. What was he going to do now?
He decided quickly. He reached over and picked up the blaster. "Get up," he ordered the guard.
Shaking slightly, the man climbed slowly to his feet, watching Camarch every moment. "You said—"
"Shut up!" Camarch backed. "Get in the sleeper."
The man obeyed without question.
"I'm not going to harm you; I'm just going to exchange places with you," Camarch said. "I'm now the guard and you're the prisoner."
"You're going to lock me in here?" The guard's voice almost sounded relieved, as if for the first time, he believed Camarch's promise not to harm him.
"Exactly."
Once outside, he examined the door controls. It was set by Thron's handprint only to be opened from the corridor. Camarch shut it, and started for the bridge.
He met no one on the way, but wondered what he would do if he did. He was through killing people, no matter what the justification. He had caused too many deaths already. Saldrator Dran, the alien in C'hah Lai, a Tel-hater named Ribet Oreti on Damen III, a navy captain in a pleasure pool on Satyr and three others on Earth whose names he never knew— all these had died because of him. Unless someone's life was at stake, someone whose life he valued, he would not allow death to use him as its instrument any more.
The door to the bridge was open, and it was quiet inside. Too quiet. Camarch stopped ten meters from the door, and then began to slink along the corridor wall. He concentrated on the silence ahead. There was not even the hum of the navigator's computer.
It meant one of two things: either there was no one in the bridge, or else whoever was there expected him. The former was virtually impossible—the bridge was never untended—so he was left with the latter. The explanation was so obvious he should have thought of it earlier. The guard he had taken great trouble to lock in his own quarters had simply turned on the comm and called the bridge. It was difficult to forgive himself for the oversight.
He inched to within two meters of the doorway and took a deep breath. "Captain Thron!" he shouted.
There was no answer.
"I want to speak with Captain Thron," he repeated.
Still there was no answer.
"I have a blaster," Camarch said. "Unless someone answers me, I'm going to step inside the door and start firing. You may eventually kill me, but I assure you that I will destroy half the bridge first."
Camarch heard voices squabbling; then Thron said, "Camarch, this is the captain. Give yourself up."
It was like Thron to be melodramatic, Krison thought. "All I want to do is talk to you. Promise me I won't be shot and I'll throw away my gun."
There was more muttering. "Okay," Thron said, "you have my word that no one will harm you."
Camarch hesitated. It could be a trap. Thron had given his word, but what did that mean? He would agree to anything to avoid a fight. Camarch realized, however, that he was in no position to bargain further. His only chance of survival depended on Thron's promise.
He tossed the blaster through the open doorway, heard it clatter along the floor. Footsteps echoed as someone went to pick it up. It was time to die, if he must. He stepped through the doorway.
There were three humans in the room—Thron, Sandrye, and the pilot, Jase Pretu—and all carried blasters aimed at him. There were also two aliens, Tior Trid and Ranwuella, who, as was the custom among his race, had adopted a modification of the name of his home-world Rawell for his own name. He was shaped like a furry spider, except that he had seven appendages: two to walk on, and five coming out from the area that, on a human, would be his belt-line. Each of the five had two soft opposing claws, just right for holding a blaster. One of them was so employed. Only Tior Trid was unarmed.
"I'm weaponless," Camarch said. "You can lower those things."
Thron nodded, but Sandrye said, "You can't trust a Tel."
"As long as I am the captain," Thron said, "we will trust whom I say to trust."
A sneer spread across Sandrye's lips, then he shrugged and lowered his blaster, motioning for Ranwuella to do the same. "As you said, you're the captain."
Thron stared briefly at Sandrye, then returned his attention to Camarch. "You have something to tell me?"
Suddenly the words that kept occurring to Krison seemed inadequate for what he wanted to say. He glanced over at Tior Trid and wondered what the alien was thinking. This thought was immediately followed by a realization that the alien knew why he had come to the bridge. The knowledge unnerved Camarch so much that his mind lost complete control of his tongue and vocal cords.
"Well, Mr. Camarch?" Thron said. "Are you just going to stand there and look stupid? Or are you going to reveal the great secret you have?"
"He doesn't have anything to tell us," Sandrye scoffed.
Camarch walked to the main viewscreen and punched out the coordinates he had memorized. The stars moved until the point he wanted was in the middle of the screen. He almost expected Sandrye to protest but the man remained silent.
Camarch increased the power ten times, 100 times, 1000 times. Now he thought he could see the black on black that he knew was there. Another increase of ten power would be sufficient.
And suddenly there it was, darker even than the depths of space, an oblate spheroid more than 100 kilometers long, hiding the stars across which it slid as if draining their light and power to use for some unknown purpose. Camarch didn't know why he thought of it as evil, but he did. And neither did he know why he thought it should be destroyed, but one thing he did know was that man had not yet invented weapons that could harm that dark starship.
Thron sucked in his breath, and even Sandrye and Ranwuella turned white. Only Tior Trid showed no emotion.
"What is it?" Thron asked softly.
"A starship," Camarch replied hoarsely.
"My Lord of Space, how large is it?" Thron whispered.
"One hundred and thirteen kilometers," Camarch said.
"That's not possible."
"No, it's not, but there it is."
"But who—"
Camarch shook his head and turned to stare at Tior Trid. The pale alien met his gaze.
Yes, he knew, Camarch thought… he knew what kind of ship it was and he knew the race that steered it along the starways.
Tior Trid knew, but it wasn't yet time to tell. And somehow Camarch realized it all involved him
Sandrye was the first to break the long silence that followed.
"I don't believe it's a starship," he said. "It's either a natural phenomenon or a malfunction of the view-screen."
"I found it on the viewscreen in my quarters," Camarch pointed out.
"Then it's a malfunction of the control computer."
"Nothing be wrong with the computer," Tior Trid said.
"Face the facts," Camarch told Sandrye, "that ship is real, far too real for me." He paused momentarily, deciding to try to force Sandrye to expose himself now. "And I think you're going to find it's far too real for you."
"What do you mean by that?" Sandrye snorted.
"I mean that it may make you and Rhehe change your plans."
Sandrye's face froze, and Camarch noticed that one of Ranwuella's appendages was drifting toward the comm.
"I don't know what you're talking about." Sandrye said, recovering some of his composure. But he still looked worried, and any doubts Camarch had were gone now. If Rhehe and Sandrye had not come after mindspin, they had come after something just as illegal.
"It was nothing important," Camarch replied. Now that he was sure of the two men's intentions, he preferred to drop that subject and pursue the more immediate one of the alien ship. Sandrye wasn't ready to make his move yet, and to push him too hard now might prove disastrous to the entire ship.
Sandrye turned away from him and back to the viewscreen, apparently willing to pretend the conversation had not occurred. The only problem now was Thron. He had temporarily forsaken the viewscreen to stare at Camarch, his foot tapping nervously on the bridge floor. Camarch thought for sure that Thron was going to ask him to explain his statements to Sandrye, but apparently the captain was too worried to give the matter the consideration it was due, because finally he too turned back to the viewscreen.
"Do you think that ship is dangerous?" he asked Camarch.
"I'm sure it is. And I think we must assume that it is hostile until it proves itself otherwise." Camarch, in his own mind, was convinced that the ship was hostile, at least to him, but he was not ready to tell anyone his reasons, except Tior Trid, of course, and he already knew.
Thron leaned back in his tiltchair, drumming his fingers on the armrests, trying to look as though he were in command of the situation. "What can we do about it?" he finally asked.
Camarch shook his head. "We can't do a thing. A minnow can't eat a whale."
"All this talk about the other ship is ridiculous," Sandrye scoffed. "Even if it exists we can't do anything about it, as Camarch himself pointed out. The important thing to remember now is that Camarch killed a man."
"So you claim," Thron muttered.
"Perhaps it not matter," Tior Trid interjected. "This third believe that another warp tech be needed. Camarch be the only choice."
"Are you saying that I should pardon Camarch because we need another warp tech?" Thron asked.
"Yes."
"But you can't pardon a murderer!" Sandrye spat out.
"Camarch be watched. It be more dangerous because no one in warp room half the time than because Camarch not be locked up. Even with autofields, fields must be watched."
Camarch was beginning to wonder if he might be freed from confinement for the remainder of the voyage. The problem was, if he were pardoned, would Sandrye then think it necessary to kill him?
"The navigator is right," Thron said at last. "We need another tech."
"But he's a murderer!" Sandrye shouted. "I won't stand for it."
Camarch couldn't help saying, "But you're not the captain."
Sandrye stared at Camarch, then at Thron. A twisted smile began to form on his lips. "That's right," he said. "Thron is the captain, isn't he? And while he's the captain we will obey his decrees."
Thron nodded slowly, and turned to Camarch. "It's time to make a jump. Get down to the warp room."
Five months and 21 days after leaving Edgeworld, the freighter Birmingham entered another planetary system. The alien ship followed.
The primary was a F5 main-sequence star, creamy-yellow in color, with a mass 1.76 times that of Sol and a surface temperature of approximately 7200 degrees Kelvin. As stars went, it was relatively rare.
Less than one percent of the stars in the galaxy were type F, though they appeared 100 times more common because of their high luminosity. This particular one was the only creamy-yellow star within ten parsecs and, according to the navigator, seemed to be a good place to begin the search for the planet the Fifth Allied Survey Expedition had found. Camarch knew that Tior Trid's first choice would be the right one. It was his homeworld they sought.
Even the hot primary could not help the first planet they encountered, ten billion kilometers from its parent. Thron ordered the pilot to slow the ship to briefly examine this forsaken globe where only ice could exist in comfort; then they passed on. The second planet was a radiation-guarded giant of methane and every other poison known to man. Tior Trid plotted a course to keep the Birmingham far from the storms of energy it flung across space. Life might exist there, but it would be a violent, terrifying form, with which man could never hope to communicate.
There was only one more planet. From the distance it was bright green, but more of a yellow green than the green of Earth. In orbit around it, Camarch saw jungles… and with magnification, ruins of a civilization that had not survived the long wait for man… cities, some intact, with tall spires, and others with small buildings and rubble, a sign that the jungle was once again winning the long struggle for domination of this planet. While their creators lived, the cities kept out the jungle; but in the end, the jungle would be the victor, as nature always was.
The Birmingham glided into orbit 300 kilometers above the surface of the planet Camarch was sure would prove to be Uzoxes.
And waited.
The alien ship drifted in slowly, finally coming to a halt three million kilometers away, a silent black shape in a silent black void. It hung there in one spot as the Birmingham made swing after swing around the world below. Without motion, without effort, it attached itself to the lattice of space perpendicular to the orbit of the Birmingham and watched the Earth ship, showing no sign of life and making no attempt to communicate.
Sandrye quickly made his impatience known, indicating that they should ignore the alien ship and go ahead and land. Again, Thron's reluctance to commit himself may have been justified. At least Camarch thought so. Rhehe, of course, took sides with Sandrye, while Amalarie remained in her quarters and had no part in the entire dispute.
It took two days before someone intelligently suggested that Thron take the initiative and try to contact the alien ship. Lacking any other apparent course of action, he made the attempt.
Only the whines and moans of the sighing stars replied.
Thron tried again. "We come in peace in search of scientific knowledge. We mean you no harm, and if you claim this region of space as your exclusive territory, we will honor your claims and leave."
As if we had a choice. It wasn't even comparable to a minnow fighting a whale, for at least a minnow could hide, and therefore stand some chance of survival. Camarch had the feeling that the Birmingham could never hide from this denizen of space.
His thoughts were soon proven correct, for across the stillness, across the loneliness, against the background of the sighing stars, came a thin cold voice that seized some dark fear within Camarch's psyche and laid it bare.
"Ship from the planet you call Edgeworld: you have trespassed on the territory of the Crixonan Empire. The penalty, of course, is death. We will have conference. Until we wish to contact you again, this star system is your prison. You may try to hide if you wish, but the effort would be futile. We suggest that you use the time to seek the knowledge you state you have come to find." The voice spoke in perfect Federation Spanish, without the slightest trace of an accent.
"We had no intentions of trespassing," Thron pleaded. "We were not aware that this was your territory."
But there was no answer.
The penalty is death. Camarch savored the words in his mind. He found, surprisingly enough, that, soon he felt little fear, only awe… and curiosity. The Crixonans they called themselves—that was the name of the race Tior Trid told him had been after him on Edgeworld. Had they come all this way because of one man, or was there another reason? What possible use could he be to a race with the technology to build a starship the size of a small asteroid? What had Tior Trid said—that the Crixonans were after him because the Alarri needed him? That made no sense either; who were the Alarri?
The comm was still open, and Camarch heard Thron say, "Mr. Pretu, I want full power to the ions. We're going home."
"On ions alone?" Camarch asked. "It's a long way without a warp drive." He was staring at the control panel in the warp room, watching the instruments monitoring the warp field sink towards the null point.
"What… do you mean?" Thron asked.
"Whoever, whatever they were," Camarch replied, "they meant what they said. The warp field is gone."
"Then fix it!" Thron shouted.
"I doubt if I can."
"Why not?"
"Beings capable of destroying the warp field at such a distance would not allow repairs," Tior Trid said. "This third thinks we should land."
"I feel safer in orbit than sitting on the ground," Thron said.
"We don't care what you think anymore," Ranwuella's voice snapped.
"Put the blaster away," Thron ordered, but his voice lacked authority.
"Why? We've decided that we need a new captain. We're tired of you."
"What? This is my ship. You can't—"
"I suppose you're going to call the badges," Ranwuella said. He began to laugh.
Camarch climbed to his feet. Apparently Sandrye was making his move; Ranwuella would be acting on cue, not on his own initiative. Whatever Sandrye had planned would be coordinated. Camarch knew he had to do something immediately, if he were to have any chance of thwarting the plan.
But he was too late already. When he stepped into the corridor he found a blaster waiting for him. And holding the blaster was Sandrye.
"You got lucky and talked Thron into letting you off," Sandrye said. "But you won't be so lucky with me. I'll see that you get what you deserve."
"There's no need to pretend with me," Camarch replied. "I know that you killed Jameson, as surely as you know that I did not."
"Yeah, I suppose you do—you're a Tel, like Jameson. But knowing won't help you any now. Rhehe and I are in charge of the ship, and we're not about to let you get in the way. We came here for a reason, and we intend to accomplish our mission."
Camarch couldn't help laughing. "You'll have plenty of time."
"What do you mean by that?"
"You'll have all eternity here. Of course you may be lying in the ground."
"I'm not afraid of those aliens."
"Then you're crazier than I am."
Sandrye's face turned bright red. "You act as though you don't want to leave." He stared. "As though you don't mind dying."
"Maybe I don't," Camarch said. And then he reflected with surprise that the thought of being marooned more than 100 light-years from Earth-type civilization no longer terrified him. It was a new feeling. Ever since he had first gone into space, the thought of being permanently separated from Earth had been unbearable. There was something mysterious and unique about Earth. He felt it more when he was away than when he was there. It was as if there were a gene in man instilling the belief that no matter how far he roamed or where he lived, he belonged only to Earth. It was not necessary to ever visit Earth again; it was enough to know that it was possible to visit Earth if he wanted to.
But now Earth was probably forever beyond their reach, lost somewhere in the vast galactic sweep east of them, Sol just another barely visible, yellow star in a sea of much brighter companions. For a moment Camarch felt the old fear returning, but the feeling ebbed as quickly as it had come, to be replaced by a much stronger fear.
Camarch wasn't afraid of being marooned here. But he was afraid of something else, something infinitely more frightening: evil itself. That colossal, black alien ship represented tht darkest kind of evil in his mind; the evil of an old woman being beaten and left to die on a dark, lonely street; the evil of cancer spreading mercilessly through a man's brain while the few remaining neurons he has left fight a hopeless battle to preserve his identity; the evil of men giving other men a drug that would gradually drive them insane and kill them.
So he didn't care that he was probably going to be marooned here, on this jungle-shrouded planet far from Earth. It was enough to know that Sandrye and Rhehe would never return to the Federation bearing gifts of poison.
"I don't understand you," Sandrye said. "And I don't think I even want to."
"Why don't you kill me now?" Camarch asked.
"I need you for a few more hours. Then I will kill you without any regrets at all."
Camarch stared straight ahead.
"Come on," Sandrye ordered, roughly shoving Camarch ahead of him. "I want you where I can keep an eye on you."
Sandrye prodded him to the bridge, where Rhehe and Ranwuella were standing guard over Thron, Pretu and Tior Trid. Only Tior Trid seemed to have accepted his fate. His thin, pale three-digited hands flashed over the controls of his computer console, and he ignored everyone else.
"This third has logged in the course," he said at length.
Rhehe nodded to Pretu, and the pilot reluctantly began preparing the ship for the landing.
The Birmingham swept into the darkness behind the planet, about 100 kilometers above the surface. The viewscrcen picture grew hazy from the turbulence the ship raised around itself as it pushed aside the fringes of the atmosphere.
Out of the shadow, into the light. Camarch could see patches of brown sprinkled among the yellow green blur of the jungle. Twice he thought he saw the jagged summits of buildings, but the ship was still too high, and moving too fast, to be sure, without setting the viewscreen computer to take into account the height and speed.
As the ship descended, it decelerated, though it appeared to be increasing its speed. Now as it fled back into the night, the scenery was all mist and darkness. Camarch thought about the cold cities below snuggling against the planet's surface for the warmth they lost long ago when the builders died… or left.
"Speed?" Thron asked abruptly.
"Thirty-three fifty," Pretu said.
"Angle?"
"Zero thirteen point four."
"Navigator?"
Tior Trid's hands twitched across the controls. "Increase angle to 020.2."
"Done," Pretu replied.
Camarch knew the landing site was near if the angle was being increased to 20. Twenty was the borderline of the possible for a freighter of this class.
The ship broke into the dawn again and on the horizon spires of gossamer floated in the sky above the jungle. Camarch felt the drag of deceleration, slipped into a chair and secured himself with the acceleration straps.
"Speed?" Thron asked.
"Eleven twenty-five."
The landing warning light began to blink red. The city wobbled in the distance.
"How far now?"
"Fifty kilometers," Tior Trid crackled.
"Speed?"
"Five eighty-seven."
"Good."
Camarch still could not see the ground. But on the viewscreen he could see the roof of the jungle, impenetrable with woven, thick-leafed vines, hanging from a framework of yellow-trunked trees that reached toward the sunlight.
Then the ship was over the city, viewing the outskirts enmeshed in jungle, death entangled in life. And even when the jungle ended, small blue green plants floated in the air at the tops of wire-thin stalks. There were streets but they made no sense. Some began and ended within half a kilometer, with no apparent communication with any other street. None persisted for more than twice that length without degenerating into a score of tiny avenues scarcely large enough for three people to pass shoulder to shoulder.
The ship was now below the level of the spires, moving slowly enough to avoid their clusters at kilometer intervals. Up close the spires appeared to be floating even more than they had on the horizon, for most of the spires in each cluster ended or began— depending upon your viewpoint—several hundred meters above the ground. Only an occasional spire rested its weight upon the planet's surface, though all were laced together with thin, transparent passageways that were obviously far stronger than they looked.
The squatty ten-to-twenty-meter-high buildings that made up most of the city provided a strange contrast. It was almost as if the spires had been built for beauty, and the rest of the city for function.
"Only a kilometer more," Tior Trid said.
Was it only his imagination, or had the navigator's voice cracked? Camarch wondered.
"Speed?"
"One-o-four."
The buildings disappeared and a dirty white expanse of some material that looked like plascrete replaced their image on the viewscreen.
Once it must have been gleaming white and virgin, but it had known many ships since then, and all had left scars of their visits behind them. And now, even here in the heart of the city, the enemy jungle was creeping in, with merciless, persistent, patient roots and branches that pushed aside the stone, plastic and metal of civilization.
The Birmingham hovered. And landed. As the ship spun slowly for balance, a solitary silver sphere drifted slowly into sight across the view-screen, a silent reminder that they were not the first, that man had been here before… never to leave again.
Perhaps the same destiny awaited them.
Bones, Tior Trid thought. Sra Tior Mrid and Sra Tior Drid. Perhaps not even bones. Perhaps dust. Here. In the City of Thought. Loneliness. Like the Earthmen. Silence. Dust and jungle. One-third alive. He would have cried but his race had no tear ducts.
The morning air was still damp and cool and somewhat misty. Sandrye and Rhehe had decided it must be safe to breathe, since the Fifth Allied Survey Expedition had survived for a while. Thron was hesitant and suggested they take the necessary hour to test a few samples, but his opinion was ignored. Camarch remained silent. Not only would his opinion count for as little as Thron's, but he realized this was Tior Trid's planet, and Tior Trid was having no apparent problems with the Earth-type atmosphere of the Birmingham.
Camarch had other things to worry about. Sandrye no doubt had some nasty fate planned, but Camarch was not sure what. Given a choice, he was willing to take his chances on surviving alone on this planet rather than staying with Sandrye, but escape seemed unlikely. Sandrye, Rhehe, Ranwuella and a granite-like man named Frew Ionon all carried blasters, while the only help Camarch could count on was that of the unarmed Tior Trid. Amalarie and Thron were along, but Camarch had doubts about them. He would just have to bide his time.
Walking didn't bother Camarch as much as he had expected after almost six months in a starship, including two of them locked in one small room. In fact, the exercise felt good so far. However, the Birmingham had landed more than two kilometers from the edge of the city, and Camarch suspected that by the time he walked that far, he might feel differently.
He was right. Except for Tior Trid, who managed the hike effortlessly, everyone was sweating and breathing a little more rapidly by the time the party reached the city wall.
Rhehe seemed to be the most affected, possibly because he was the oldest. He paused, wiped off his forehead with the back of his hand and said, "We should have waited for the fliers."
"It takes a day to put one together. Did you want to wait that long?"
"I guess not, but… I'm not looking forward to the walk back."
Sandrye frowned in disgust and turned to study another problem. There seemed to be no entrance to the city. It was lined with windowless buildings of various shapes, but all were at least ten meters high. In every direction the buildings flowed together as if fused by some giant torch.
While Sandrye searched for an entrance, Camarch stared at the mottled silver sphere standing less than half a kilometer away from him. He would have liked to explore the Survey ship before proceeding into the city to examine any clues that might explain what had happened to the first expedition. His opinions were not held in very high regard at the moment, however, so he said nothing.
"I suppose we'll have to go over the top," Ionon suggested.
"I hope you can fly," Sandrye snapped.
Ranwuella pulled out his blaster. "Why don't we just blast our way in?"
"There be openings," Tior Trid said.
"Probably, but blasting is much easier than searching up and down this line of buildings for one small opening."
"No," Tior Trid said.
"Why not?"
"This third's race does not destroy."
"Well, my race does," Ranwuella said, grinning widely.
Camarch glanced over at the navigator. The golden-furred face was impassive.
Ranwuella looked at Sandrye for instructions and Sandrye nodded. "We haven't got time to waste searching for an entrance."
"You have such impatience," Tior Trid said, and Camarch noted a hint of sadness in his voice.
"We do at that," Ranwuella replied. "That's how we get things done." He raised his weapon and fired. Rubble and dust erupted from where the wall had been, swirling around them like a vortex of revenge from the past for daring to destroy what had stood so long in peace.
Camarch closed his eyes while Ranwuella cleared out a hole in the wall with three more shots. When the dust cleared Rhehe led them through. Camarch felt the material of the building as he went by. Though it felt identical to that of C'hah Lai, there was one major difference: C'hah Lai had been impervious to a blaster beam.
They found themselves in a small, roofless, three-sided enclosure on the far side of the wall. Almost immediately they exited through the open side of the building and came out into one of the larger streetlike areas. To Camarch's surprise the area was not paved; a multitude of different kinds of plants covered the bare ground. The most unusual of these were ten or so bluish green globes floating on top of thin, blue stalks. The globes, which were filled with a gas lighter than the surrounding atmosphere, were held to the ground by the stalks rather than being supported by them. Camarch recognized the globes immediately.
Sandrye picked one and gave it to Camarch, a smirk on his face. "It makes a tasty drink," he said.
Camarch did not answer. Neither did he take the plant.
"Take it," Sandrye ordered, his smirk vanishing. Camarch obeyed.
"Now pop the globe," Sandrye said.
"No," Tior Trid protested. "It be very dangerous gas."
"I know what it is," Camarch said. He glanced over at Amalarie for the first time. She avoided his eyes, but her face was emotionless.
"We must know whether this is the genuine thing," Rhehe said.
Camarch released the stem. The mindspin plant shuddered, then slowly floated toward the sun.
Sandrye turned red with fury. He bent down and picked another plant, motioning for Ionon to come over. "This time the Tel will obey me, won't he?"
Ionon nodded.
Sandrye gave Camarch the second mindspin plant. Camarch took it and squeezed the globe gently. He glanced up at the blaster Ranwuella had pointed at his chest. It seemed there was a choice of dying now from a blaster beam or dying later, addicted to mindspin. He squeezed the globe harder. It pulsated under his fingers. There was only a thin membrane surrounding the gas. With his fingernails he scratched across the membrane.
The globe exploded in his face, inundating him with a fine dust and pungent gas, which whirled into his lungs and set off a violent coughing spasm. His eyes burned with acid, and his lungs seemed to explode in his chest.
He was on the ground, and the sky was descending after him. His head began to ache.
After a few minutes his lungs expelled most of the dust and became resigned to accept the rest. His eyes still burned but he could see as well as before. He stood up.
Sandrye looked worried. "How do you feel?"
"Like killing you," Camarch said.
"Perhaps the plants vary in the amount of mindspin they contain," Rhehe suggested.
Sandrye nodded. "It's possible. I think we should try another one on him."
Camarch tried to walk. The ground sparkled. He could taste the pungent smell of the gas still. It began to sing to him, too, in green, beautiful, Terran green.
He sensed a voice talking to him, but he couldn't understand the meaning. Suddenly he felt like crying. The voices around him began to sing, wordlessly, in blue. The sound reverberated; blue, pungent sound. He knew something was wrong, but didn't know what. He saw someone acridly laugh, and the smell revolted his stomach. He reached out at the smell, seized it and twisted it, the knowledge coming instinctively from the depths of his mind.
Now he tasted a new noise. This time it was red. Red was a violent noise and he didn't like it, so he hurled it away from him. The noise stopped.
The sky and ground and air around him pulsated suddenly and he could smell its emptiness. He tasted the dry snow that lilted down and the sky began to gnaw at him. Or maybe it was the ground. He didn't know, and he didn't care. He only wanted to run. He only wanted to escape.
The redness of his steps gargled around him. Red smelled better than it tasted. He would have stopped, but the taste lingered in his mouth.
The walls smelled as though they were closing in on him, but he didn't stop running until he could hear their proximity grinding against his body. The smell of oldness and evil made him nauseous again and he instinctively covered his nose, but that didn't help at all. When he covered his ears the smell disappeared.
Around the corner he could hear a bright light. He ran toward it.
He was in a paradise of lavender. The walls, the floor, the ceiling were a porridge of lavender. The lavender throbbed and sang, wordlessly, a lavender song.
He sank to the floor.
He began to crawl through the lavender antiquity to a small opening.
Once through, he could taste the softness. He turned around and heard his elbow bump against a lever. He smelled the room move. Faster and faster until he closed his eyes.
After a few minutes he opened them again, but he could hear nothing. He cupped his hands around his ears and saw a few sounds spinning in the void, but he couldn't hear them.
Even the vile tasting red and sweet lavender were ebbing now. He could see only the noise. Ultimately, the noise disappeared.
In a senseless void he waited. He couldn't feel anything.
Nor see anything.
Alone in his own mind he waited. Nothing came in; nothing went out. As alone as though his mindblock was up.
The void began to shrink around him. And finally his thoughts were gone, too.
He awoke in blinding light and silence, with no conception of how long he had been out. He expected to have a headache and was grateful to discover that he didn't.
He lay on a floor of translucent material that let in light but blocked images. The walls and ceiling were the same, except for an opening to his left that led to a ramp in the distance.
He had no memory of coming here. The few images of what had happened since he inhaled the mindspin were jumbled rather badly. He deduced that the mindspin had scrambled his sensory input, but everything in his head seemed to be in working order now.
A few things filtered back to him. After the lavender room, or whatever it really was, he had stumbled upon some vehicle that had brought him here. But there was no sign of the vehicle now. Except for that one opening, the walls were confluent.
He cautiously tested his balance and found it intact, if somewhat shaky. His dizziness seemed to fade gradually.
The ramp itself was spongy, but was surrounded by the same material as the room; it led up to some, as yet, unseen destination. He followed it, until he could see nothing but the ramp stretching ahead and behind, then closed his eyes and kept going. Eventually, he came to a room somewhat similar to the one he had left behind.
But the top half of this room was completely transparent and two other ramps lead from it to other unknowns. From the center of the room a chute dropped. He stared down for a moment, then instinctively backed up. Glowing as it descended, the hole stretched downward until it disappeared into point-size. Camarch shivered and moved to the edge of the room so that he could see something besides sky.
He had already reached the conclusion that he was in one of the spires, but until he looked out he hadn't realized how high he was. Vertigo hit him and he grabbed at the wall, seizing a small ledge and hanging on until the feeling lessened. It never completely disappeared.
He was at least two kilometers up. The city glimmered far below, and to his left, perhaps five kilometers away, the spaceport lay decked out in white, its surface blemished by two gray shapes. To his right, he could see the ramp he had just left—or the tube surrounding the ramp. The ramp led down to another spire, shorter than the one he was in now.
Of all the spires in the city he could see, only two climbed higher than his present position. Actually, he didn't know whether he was at the top or not; this spire might be the highest of all.
As he stood there he observed the ledges more carefully. Approximately ten were scattered around the room at various heights, but all far enough off the floor to allow even a small creature to gaze out of the transparent top half of the room. Then Camarch noticed something else. Outside, clinging like lace to the building were 20 more. He tried to imagine a purpose for the ledges, but couldn't. Maybe it was part of a religious ceremony; maybe they slept there. There were many possibilities.
He turned away and took the steepest ramp down.
After a half hour or so, he came to a larger room. In its center stood a small, round table surrounded by about 30 narrow perches at various heights. The walls in this room were opaque and the light seemed to be coming from the inside, from the walls themselves. The room, oddly enough, was spherical, and its four entrances opened along the equator. The floor sloped down toward the center table and perches. When he glanced up he noted three slots coming down the wall from the ceiling. Each were a meter long and 20 to 30 centimeters wide, and Camarch couldn't conceive of any possible use for them.
Camarch was interested in the ruins, but the longer he stayed in them, the more anxious he was to return to the ship. Already he was beginning to experience a few short grumbles from his stomach, and food was something he hadn't noticed yet in these ruins. He wasn't very eager to try any more of the native plants.
But it was the Crixonans that accounted for most of his desire to return. At least Sandrye was an adversary he could understand; the intentions and purposes of the Crixonans were beyond his present comprehension. He was afraid of their repeated attempts to obtain a hold over his mind. His mindblock had held the last time, but they had both been in C'hah Lai and the ruins had obviously distracted the Crixonan. Camarch wasn't anxious to discover what the outcome would be in an encounter here.
And yet, at the same time he was curious about what they would plan next. He wanted to know more about them; Tior Trid probably would have eventually told him, but that wasn't much help at present.
Thus, since his only source of data was Tior Trid, he had to find Tior Trid. To do that, he had to find some food, so that he would be fit enough to return to the Birmingham and rescue Tior Trid, for he had little doubt that Sandrye had the navigator locked up by now.
There was only one possible source of edible food: the other Earth ship. If packaged right, some foods would last almost forever.
After proceeding through three more small rooms he finally reached an impasse. He came out on a large, round platform approximately 50 meters off the ground. The ramp he had descended, however, was the only one leading to the platform, and as far as he could see there was no other way to the ground. The platform had no roof, no sides, no perches, only a hole in its exact center. He walked over and stared down, then backed away.
Then he reconsidered. Perhaps the tubes were an exit of some sort. He pulled a key from his pocket and dropped it. Instead of plummeting away, it drifted slowly out of sight.
He shrugged. What did he have to lose? He glanced around and walked closer to the edge of the platform. If he was to walk on firmament again, it appeared that he would have to follow his key down the chute.
First he fixed the direction of the starport in his mind. The sun was to his right. The air had the cool dampness of morning so he could call the direction of the sun east. That made the starport north of him.
He went back to the chute and dangled his feet over the side. Was it merely his imagination or did they seem lighter, almost floating? He closed his eyes. He was depending on an alien machine that couldn't possibly be functioning after hundreds of centuries of non-use.
But it was. Or so he thought.
He dropped over the edge, finding it took less courage than he had anticipated. Perhaps it was true; no one really believed in his own death.
He floated.
Softly, gently, the ground appeared and crawled up to meet him. He was glad the tube wasn't transparent, so that he couldn't see the world pass by outside.
His feet met the ground and he was down, standing on a yielding white surface. There were thin slots in the side of the tube and through them he could see the street beyond. The only problem was that he couldn't fit through any of the slots. They were only about a meter and a half high and 15 centimeters wide.
He managed to push his head through and drag his left arm after it, but all further efforts failed. His chest was too thick.
He retreated back inside and found his key lying on the floor of the chute. Perhaps he could grind off some of the wall and enlarge the slot. But the material was inflexible, too hard to even scratch with the metal key. What he needed was a blaster. Perhaps, he thought ruefully, if he stayed here long enough he would starve down to the proper size. If he could discover how to avoid dying of dehydration first.
He was standing there, his mind occupied by the problem at hand, when the alien mindtouch hit, hurling him against the wall of the chute.
It was strong, almost as strong as the dark mind of the alien in the bar on Edgeworld. But this mindtouch was different. It was deceiving, warm, friendly. And he had felt it before.
Camarch blocked, and power that he'd never had before came rushing into him; he brushed off the attacking mindtouch as though it were nothing but an annoying gnat.
It faded, struck again. He was ready this time and deflected the assault almost without concentrating. His confidence grew, and he dared to try something he'd never had the courage to attempt against a worthy foe. He opened up his mind for the next blow, and the alien mind filled his, almost seizing control.
Then Camarch snapped shut the opening, and the alien was trapped, enclosed by Camarch's power unless Camarch chose to release him. The alien struggled, but in vain. His mindtouch began to fade rapidly.
Camarch released him, and for a while was alone again.
The alien finally returned, gently this time, making it clear that this initiative was a peaceful one. This third would talk to you.
Only then did Camarch realize the full extent of Tior Trid's power. He could broadcast to a non-receiver, in fact a blocker. According to Earth thinking, that was impossible.
But the most impossible thing of all was that Camarch had blocked him. Easily. Effortlessly. How?
Camarch knew that Tior Trid would find him, and in less than five minutes the alien came sliding toward him. Tior Trid approached the slot and stopped. He looked at Camarch marooned in his cage and his lips twitched. Camarch had the feeling that it was the equivalent of a laugh.
"First, must get you out," Tior Trid said aloud.
"I would appreciate that. But how?"
"Easy." He slipped in through the slot to join Camarch. Then he put his hand on the wall between two slots and rubbed his hand back and forth across the surface. The slot began to widen. Tior Trid continued rubbing until it was half a meter wide, then stopped.
Camarch slid easily through. Tior Trid stayed behind and made the slot return to its original size, then exited.
"Why did you do that?" Camarch asked.
"Symmetry," Tior Trid replied.
Camarch decided not to pursue the matter any further. He had other, considerably more important, matters on his mind at the moment.
"Why did you attack me?" he asked.
"This third will explain." He began to lead Camarch through the city as he talked. "First, this third thought that mindspin would kill you. The pure gas be almost always fatal."
"It almost did."
"But you are a blocker, very strong. The dangerous part be at the end when subject be alone in his own mind. You be used to that, more than others, because you be a blocker. You survive. This third finally realize that."
"But why did you attack me?" Camarch asked, growing impatient.
"Mindspin strengthens aloneness of individual mind."
"You mean that it strengthens a Tel's mindblock, if he has one?"
"Yes. You be very strong now, far stronger than you know. This third needed to test your strength."
"I see."
"Perhaps you be the strongest blocker now since birth of time. You be the strongest those to come could find. You be not developed before the mindspin. Your race not a strong Tel race. None existed to challenge your power."
That was certainly true, Camarch thought. The first real test of his blocking ability had been the alien on Edgeworld.
"Mindspin plant be good. This third not realize it and try to stop."
"It's good except that it will kill me," Camarch said. "Eventually."
"Not before you be needed."
"My life doesn't seem to matter much to you."
Tior Trid stopped. "All lives matter to this third's people. But there be more at stake than you know." He started walking again. "You may die. This third hopes not. Those to come maybe can cure you."
"You can't, though, even if your race is thousands of years ahead of man." Camarch waved his arms at the buildings around him.
"This third's people are dead."
"You know what I meant."
"This third cannot help. Each race pursues its own destiny. This third's race sought beauty. All be artists and physicists. Biology not known well."
Camarch frowned, remembering something. "A few minutes ago, you referred to those to come; what did you mean by that?"
"Better for this third not to answer yet." He stared at Camarch, and Krison felt the warmth of his personality. It was difficult to believe that Tior Trid would ever willingly hurt anyone. Whatever the Uzoxean was involved in, the stakes must be extremely high. And now Camarch knew he wai involved, too.
"Come," Tior Trid said suddenly. "This third will show you something."
He led Camarch to one of the small, octagon-shaped buildings in the middle of the street. It was without an opening, but Tior Trid rubbed his hands over its flat surface, and the wall parted, revealing a room that was dark at first, then glowing brighter and brighter.
Camarch followed him in. The room was empty except for four holes in the middle of the floor. They reminded Camarch of the chute in the spire and he was immediately proven correct. Tior Trid stepped into one and dropped out of sight.
"Come."
Camarch obeyed, less hesitant then in his initial venture. The chute dropped straight down at first, then slanted off at about 30 degrees from the vertical. As they moved the chute immediately in front of them glowed and brightened as they approached, reaching its peak as they passed through it, then fading again into darkness.
Eventually they came out in a room, one which was completely different than any Camarch had seen. This one appeared to be living quarters. Scattered around and built into the walls were three fur-lined niches, which evidently served as beds. Along one side of the room was a glasslike rectangle Camarch interpreted as a viewscreen. It probably still functioned, but there was nothing to receive.
The first room adjoined another and Camarch followed Tior Trid through a large doorway that accommodated Camarch easily with only a little stooping. This room was smaller and contained two viewscreens, and three objects that might have been desks. Each consisted of one large, white disc with a hole in the center, a smaller disc approximately half a meter beneath the hole, both supported by three rods that looked too fragile to hold the heavy discs off the floor. The rods appeared to be made of the same material as the spires.
But it was what was seated on the small discs that Tior Trid had brought Camarch to see. The light in the room was dim, but still the bones gleamed. Two skeletons about a meter and a half high, three digits on each hand.
"It be not a whole," Tior Trid said softly. For the first time, Camarch thought he saw pain in the alien's expression.
Tior Trid went over to one of the skeletons and slipped something off one of its hands, then gave the object to Camarch. There were three stones, a white in the center of two blues, all set in a silver ring.
Camarch remembered where he had seen the ring before. He looked at Tior Trid, and the alien slipped a second ring off his finger and handed it over.
Camarch studied the two rings. No matter how he turned them in the dim light, they were identical.
They were on the surface again. It was dark, but there were no stars visible. Only the horizon glowed still, and it was quickly yielding to the darkness spreading across the heavens.
There was no doubt in Camarch's mind what it was. Neither was there any doubt about its purpose. Deep within the shelter of his block, he felt the emptiness, the non-existence, the anti-existence of the force above him.
The Crixonans had come for him. He still could not imagine why, but he was beginning to believe Tior Trid now.
"I think it is time you told me what this is all about," Camarch said.
"This third will try to explain. Hurry. This third will talk." He began to shuffle along the ground. Camarch found it easy to keep up. He kept glancing up as they moved. It was not quite correct to call the object above a ship in the physical sense. It had no clearly demarcated boundaries; its dark periphery merged gradually with the sunlight. It seemed to be more of a cloud than anything else. The object was real, but it was as if it were just slightly out of synchrony with this universe.
"This third has told you that you be needed," Tior Trid continued.
"Yes. By your race?"
"No." His voice sounded sad. "This third's race be insignificant."
"Then who?"
"Those who are to come. They are called the Alarri."
Above their heads, a black bubble had formed on the side of the alien ship. As Camarch looked up, it broke away, a shimmering, light-devouring, misty sphere of darkness that gradually faded until it was invisible and lost among the spires of the city, as if it could move in and out of this universe at will.
Tior Trid pointed up as he moved. "The Crixonans be one of the oldest races in the galaxy. Present perhaps before the time legends reach. Existed before your planet produced the first proteins of life. Old beyond thought."
Camarch listened. He had nothing to say.
"The Crixonans are not like all other races. Not really life. They be emptiness. Know little about them. They seem to have a negative life force; this third's people, and all others, have positive one. Will destroy each other like matter and antimatter. Two life-forces cannot meet.
"Ever since Crixonans travel in space, they be attempting to cleanse universe of, to them, unnatural life. One race against many, but battle be even. Crixonans long-lived, progress slowly; other races rise quickly, but Crixonans older, powerful, destroy all major races of this galaxy one-by-one. After battle, forced to retreat some, and new race arises to fight them, check advance, then be destroyed. So it must be. So be cycle of this galaxy."
"Was your race the victim of such a war?"
Tior Trid was silent for several seconds. "That be true," he finally said. "This third's race be peaceful. This third's race sought beauty. War memory from distant past, when race be hunters only. War forgotten by time race went into space.
"At first no problems. This third's people explored area even beyond territory now occupied by your people. Had colonies. Other races joined. Vast confederation of worlds and peoples developed. Then an explorer ship encountered shadow on the stars. This third's people did not understand it. At first Crixonans be fighting Diiijin Empire. Battle even, Crixonans no resources to fight this third's race. Diiijins want this third's people to join them in battle. This third's race not understand the war, try to stop it. Envoy sent to Crixonans. Envoy destroyed. Still this third's race not understand danger. Second envoy sent. This also destroyed. This time Crixonans more interested in this third's race. Send one ship. Only one. This third's race have no weapons. Crixonan ship unopposed. World after world destroyed. Then this third's race understand danger. Far too late. Crixonans too powerful. Sometimes Crixonans destroy entire world, sometimes only kill animals, sometimes only kill this third's people and other intelligent beings. But always they kill." Tior Trid lowered his eyes to the ground and Camarch sensed the sorrow welling up in him. Then Camarch sensed another emotion: hatred. It was the first time Camarch had ever sensed any of the cold emotions in the alien, but the feeling was strong now, and Camarch couldn't blame him.
"Such glory this third's race could have had," Tior Trid said. "Such knowledge. Instead, destined to die in youth." He turned to look at Camarch. "Remember this third's race. Remember the peace this third's race sought. The peace that can never be until the Crixonans are destroyed. One race must die so that all others can live."
Krison left the alien to his memories for a moment and gazed around at the city. So much beauty and technology remained. The chutes, the spires that looked too fragile to stand but did; were they all the accomplishments of a race that died in its youth? A race not powerful enough to influence the course of galactic history? What would man be measured on such a scale?
"What about the people you called the Diiijins?" Camarch asked, after a moment.
"They also be destroyed. They be a race that conquered ten thousand worlds, but they be destroyed by the Crixonans. But someday, in some far distant future, with your help, a people will rise to destroy the Crixonans. This third does not have all the knowledge. This third knows only what is necessary to complete this third's mission. All this third knows is that you are needed. One day there be a battle, between the Crixonans and those called the Alarri. You are needed for that battle."
"What if I don't wish to participate?"
"Then you will die, with others here."
Camarch snapped erect, furious. "You brought 40 people here to die just so you could get me to go help some race I never heard of?"
"This third was not told the Crixonans would be here."
"Then why come here at all?"
"Here be the bridge to the future."
"Your people could travel through time?"
"No. The bridge be built by the Alarri, those who are to come."
Camarch was having trouble assimilating what Tior Trid was telling him. He surveyed his companion and wondered what it felt like to be the sole survivor of his race, cast out of his own time forty thousand years into the future. And what did it feel like to see the bones of the ones you loved? He remembered seeing Thria die and could understand how Tior Trid must feel. But that wasn't the worst thing Tior Trid found in his old home. There were only two skeletons. Tior Trid had told Camarch as they left the underground dwelling that Uzoxeans had three sexes and, once joined into what was called a "whole" at their equivalent of puberty, never left each other's company for any extended period of time. So great was the Uzoxean orientation toward the triad called the "whole," that the pronoun I did not exist in their language. Instead of I, they referred to themselves as this third when speaking; in other words, this third of the whole. The first two names of the three individuals in each whole were always the same; only the last name varied. The other two thirds in Sra Tior Trid's triad were thus named Sra Tior Mrid and Sra Tior Drid.
It had taken a great deal of raw courage for Tior Trid to leave them. Now Camarch knew the alien was beginning to wonder if he would ever make it back to his own time to die with Tior Mrid and Tior Drid. The fact that there had been only the two skeletons, not three, provided conclusive evidence that he would not.
The thought saddened Camarch much more than he expected, and he turned his mind to other things. There was the question of his own future and where his best chance of survival lay. In the very far future where he was needed for some unknown purpose, or here on Uzoxes, fighting the Crixonans with his own people? But could the Crixonans be defeated now? There was certainly no evidence that they could.
And what about Amalarie? She had betrayed him, but perhaps she had no choice. Sandrye, Rhehe, their cohorts… neither he nor mankind would miss them. Even Thron, whose own greed had brought him to this planet, aroused no strong feelings of sympathy in Camarch. Thron had saved his life, that was true, but it was more because of Thron's inability to make a decision than anything else.
And Tior Trid? What about him? He had always seemed to be on Camarch's side, but could even he be trusted?
"Why didn't Sandrye lock you up?" Camarch asked.
"He did so try."
"But you got away? How?"
"This third has mental powers most of your race does not."
"Like What?"
"Telekinesis," Tior Trid responded. "Weapons don't work if they be not controlled. Beings the same way. This third control guard's body better than guard."
"Are you clairvoyant, too?"
"No."
"Then, on the ship, how did you know when I was going to wake up so that you could tell the captain to have my tray sent in?"
"This third visited you a few minutes prior."
"And my thoughts told you I was regaining consciousness?"
"Yes."
"But how did you know which ship to join back on Edgeworld?"
"The Alarri told this third."
"Did they also tell you that I would enter C'hah Lai?"
"Yes."
"How did you get to Edgeworld from here?"
"A small starship. This third slept for forty thousand of your years during the slow trip."
"In suspended animation?"
"Yes," Tior Trid said, just as they rounded a corner. Straight ahead loomed a chalky-white, misty city within a city, enclosed by a blurred white wall.
"It looks exactly like C'hah Lai," Camarch hissed.
"Both built by Alarri. Long time-units before this third's race make civilization, timegate here. City of Thought built around. That be purpose of spires. This third's people built spires to make places to muse on purpose of timegate. Only this third ever know real purpose, because Alarri tell this third."
Camarch wanted to laugh. "Then the very thing that made us believe that this was your homeworld wasn't built by you at all." Tior Trid didn't answer— no answer was necessary. "But if Edgeworld has a timegate," Camarch went on, "why couldn't we use it instead of coming here?"
"Too many people there. A star must die to send you to meet the Alarri. This world be engulfed by nova that timegate will create and tap."
Camarch stared at the darkness above, the timegate ahead, and tried to imagine what use he could be to a civilization that could cross time, create a nova and then tap its power. The answer was far beyond his comprehension. But if the Alarri—whoever and whatever they were—had arranged to sacrifice a star to summon him, then perhaps he should consider going.
But he suddenly decided that did not matter any more. Floating, dull black, the bubble from the Crixonan ship appeared in front of them and touched the ground. Then it was gone, replaced by a single being.
Gaunt and thin and black, the Crixonan stood before them, wavering and out of focus. Camarch could not see his face. It was not covered; it just was not visible. He could see a mouth and two eyes and sometimes a structure resembling a nose, but only if he concentrated, and never were the features present together. Again, Camarch thought it was as if the Crixonan belonged not to this universe, but one far away, lost in time and space, whose boundary intermittently brushed against this one and revealed its secrets to them.
And yet Camarch recognized the Crixonan. Once before Krison had felt the emptiness that oozed from this being, threatening, promising to suck both him and Tior Trid into its infinite and probably eternal depths. Camarch began to cry as he felt all his emotions being sucked from him. Instinctively his block strengthened.
With concentration, his block held, and his tears stopped. This Crixonan was far stronger than the one Camarch had encountered on Edgeworld; possibly this one was in his natural body. Or perhaps more than one Crixonan's mind and powers were being used against him now. It suddenly didn't matter too much that the mindspin was beginning to dissolve his sanity, because it was doubtful he would ever live long enough to notice the difference the drug made.
He glanced at Tior Trid, but the alien was silent, his face emotionless. Evidently the Uzoxean's Tel powers included sufficient blocking abilities to withstand the Crixonan emodrain.
There was a voice in his mind. Or maybe it was spoken aloud. Camarch couldn't tell. Cold and thin, like an eggshell breaking, it addressed him.
"You are called Camarch."
He remained silent, but couldn't help wondering if his mind would betray him.
"Where are your tears?" the voice asked.
"I have no more," Camarch replied.
The empty vortex ceased. Camarch felt the darkness shrink away and cluster closer around the alien.
"Come with me," the voice said.
"If I have to die, I'd rather die here," Camarch said.
"We are afraid that you have no choice in the matter." The bubble formed again around the Crixonan, and then tentacles of darkness reached out to engulf Camarch and Tior Trid.
"This third will die," Tior Trid whispered. "You must not. Somehow you must escape. Come back here. The Alarri have need of you."
Then there was only darkness. He could see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, feel nothing, but he was vaguely aware of a sensation of motion. He didn't think his feet were still on the ground. He could only deduce that he was in the bubble on his way to the Crixonan ship.
Where was Tior Trid? Camarch reached out to try to touch the Uzoxean, but felt nothing except the black, murky semi-liquid around him. Had the Crixonan taken Tior Trid? Camarch didn't know, and with a great sense of loss he remembered Tior Trid's parting words, This third will die.
He didn't know what the Crixonans wanted with him, but he no longer had any hesitation about going through the time-bridge, if he could escape from them.
When his anger ebbed slightly, Camarch noticed a certain firmness under his feet, and the darkness seemed to be thinning. Curiosity replaced all his other emotions. He took a step forward, but the increased force of pushing off with one foot caused it to break through whatever surface was beneath him, much as a person stepping on thin ice might slip through, and he lost his balance. With a degree of objectivity that surprised him, he realized he could orient himself while he fell by using his arms as a swimmer would. As a result he was able to land on his hands and knees and not on some more vulnerable part of his anatomy. Oddly enough, by the time he did rendezvous with the surface, it had solidified to support his weight.
He noticed he could also see a few meters now. Not that there was anything to see. As far as he could tell, the surrounding space was empty except for the surface on which he was kneeling. In a few minutes more, after the darkness had cleared as much as it apparently was going to, he found that his initial impression had been correct. He was on a flat, dull black plain that stretched out to a distant horizon in all directions. What little light there was, and it certainly wasn't much, came from a faint, red glow at the junction of the horizon and the plain. The sky was a dark gray, scarcely lighter than the plain, starless, moonless and featureless, merely a thick, gray bowl covering the plain. It was as lifeless and dreary a place as Camarch had ever imagined in his worst nightmares.
He began to walk toward one of the horizons. After an hour before he was convinced that he was no nearer the red glow in the distance. A terrible suspicion came to him. Wherever he was, warmth was not a problem, so he took off his workies and left them in a heap on the plain, then started to walk again. After traveling what he judged to be about a kilometer, the workies appeared in front of him, and he couldn't help laughing. The reason he didn't seem to be going anywhere was that there was nowhere to go. Tired by now, he put his workies back on and sat down to think about his situation. It was as if he were walking on the surface of a small sphere; by walking far enough in one direction he would end up at his point of origin. The problem was that the surface below him appeared flat. However, that could be explained by assuming that in this little self-contained universe, light traveled parallel to the surface of his sphere, and therefore, the surface appeared to be flat. It was a logical explanation and satisfied him for the moment, even though it didn't account for the red glow on the horizon.
He suddenly was awed by the realization that his new little universe was artificial, a creation of the Crixonans. Was it entirely for his benefit, he wondered. It seemed unlikely. It wasn't necessary to create an entire world just to imprison one man; there were easier ways to construct a jail. Of course, for the Crixonans, creating a universe might be easy. What had Tior Trid told him? That the Crixonans were among the oldest races in the galaxy, and during this time period, certainly the most powerful.
What did that mean for him? He was alone against the most powerful civilization in the galaxy—what chance did he have of escaping? He couldn't count on Tior Trid, because the Uzoxean was probably dead; neither could he escape from this particular prison. Its physics was beyond his knowledge jmd possibly beyond his comprehension. Any chance he had—and Camarch wasn't very optimistic—would have to come later; the Crixonans hadn't killed him, so they must intend to communicate with him later. At this point, it appeared his only option was to wait for them to make the first move.
Once he had planned his course of action—or his course of non-action—he turned his mind to more immediate matters. He was hungry. He hadn't eaten in almost a day. Very soon he would need nourishment of some kind, or at least some water. His mouth was beginning to feel very dry inside. It would be nice to be sitting by a warm fire somewhere—perhaps on the golden plains of Sirius III—roasting a beeffish.
Behind came the clatter of objects striking the dark surface. He whirled, all senses alert, then relaxed. Five meters in front of him was a perfectly stacked pile of dry wood. He walked over to it and rearranged the wood slightly.
How many wishes would his captors grant? He stepped back and wished that his pile of wood would ignite. It obeyed immediately.
Now—if he only had some beeffish.
And it fell in front of him, a shiny, pale red beeffish, weighing about a kilogram, complete with a long metal rod with which to hold it over the fire.
All he needed was some water.
Immediately he had that, too, in a tall glass flask by the fire. He took a sip, found it was cool and refreshing, and drank heartily. Then he cooked the fish.
Afterward, he lay back and enjoyed the warm feeling of satisfaction that came from his stomach. Since all he could do was wait, he might as well make the best of it. He wished for a warm sleeper, and almost before he finished his thought, one appeared in front of him. He wiggled into it, thinking that at this point he probably could have slept anywhere, and drifted toward oblivion.
The Crixonans had other ideas, however. His eyes had barely closed when his mind recoiled violently from the effects of their sudden attack. One moment he was resting peacefully; the next his brain was being pried apart by someone—or something—with all the subtlety of a thermonuclear explosion. Camarch directed his energies to the erection of his mindblock, but the intruder was strong, its mind dark and empty of all emotion so that every last quanta of concentration could be used against Camarch. The rent in his mind widened. Dark thoughts mingled with his bright ones; the abyss sucked at his consciousness. He fought for his sanity and control of his own mind, but he had no doubt that he was losing. If he could drive the Crixonan out, he was sure he could keep him out.
Maybe he was using the wrong approach. He could fight the battle on another front. He squeezed on the alien's mindprobe and followed it back to its source. Entering the Crixonan's mind was like plunging again into the murky darkness. Camarch almost retreated, but he reminded himself that his life was at stake and he forced himself to proceed. He tried to imagine the moments of happiness in his life: his year with Thria; the few enjoyable escapades he undertook in the navy; the scattered and brief love affairs he'd had—at least the time before he inevitably discovered that the women regarded him merely as a curiosity piece because he was a Tel…
The Crixonan's mindtouch wavered. It was all Camarch needed. Withdrawing deep into his own mind, he locked in the final part of his shield. He was alone. The alien was gone. He sat on the dark plain, panting, his workies drenched in sweat. But he kept his shield intact.
In less than a minute, his suspicions were confirmed.
The Crixonan struck again. This time the alien's attack glanced off. In spite of his confidence, Camarch breathed an audible sigh of relief.
He was still alone and feeling triumphant. They might kill him now, but he had won, and they knew it. Twice he'd met representatives of the Crixonans, and twice he'd won.
Now he would wait again.
He didn't have to wait long. The air clouded in front of him, darkened, congealed and left a black figure standing on the plain when the cloudiness passed.
"Your block is strong," the Crixonan said.
Camarch nodded, wondering if this was the same one which had brought him from the surface of the planet.
"Where is Tior Trid?" Camarch asked.
"You are referring to the Uzoxean who was with you?"
"Yes."
"He exists."
"You haven't killed him, then?"
"He has yet to tell us what we want to know."
"As soon as he does, you will kill him."
"Yes."
"I don't understand why you are admitting this to me."
"You asked a question; we answered it. There is nothing to understand."
"What about me?" Camarch asked.
"When you have told us what we want to know, there will no longer be a need for you."
"I'm not going to tell you anything," Camarch said. "Why should I? I know that if I do, you will kill me."
For the first time the Crixonan seemed uncertain. "But we will have no need of you once you have told us what we need to know. Why should you continue to exist?"
"Because I have need of myself."
"What does that matter?"
Camarch began to feel like he was in command of the encounter. It was evident that the Crixonan was incapable of understanding the actions of a being with emotions. He smiled, hoping to confuse the Crixonan even more.
"What do you wish to know from me?" He asked.
The Crixonan was briefly silent, then he answered, "You will tell us why the Alarri want you."
Camarch nodded. "I see."
"You will tell us," the alien repeated.
"No," Camarch replied, "I will not."
The Crixonan was silent again. "You are like the Uzoxean."
"No. Tior Trid doesn't know the answer. I do," he lied and immediately wished he could withdraw his words. Not because of his lie, but because of the part that was true. He suddenly was convinced that he had just killed Tior Trid.
The alien stepped forward a pace. "The Uzoxean does not know why the Alarri want you?"
Somehow he had to make up for what he'd said. "No, but he knows other things. And remember this, if you kill Tior Trid, I won't ever tell you what you seek, I promise you that."
"We will make you tell."
"How?" Camarch said. "Your powers can't hurt me. Twice you've tried to take over my mind, but both times you've failed. And you'll always fail, because my block is too strong. You can't even torture me, because I am now able to block out all pain. All you can do is kill me, in which case you'd never find out what you need to know." But what he couldn't block out completely was the sudden wave of nausea and weakness which washed over him. And the dizziness that attacked his brain.
Was the Crixonan doing this? It was possible, but it felt like the sickness was an more internal thing.
Mindspin? That was more likely.
"We will find what we seek," The Crixonan said, as the sickness started to ease.
"I don't believe you can do it."
"We are never wrong."
"I see," Camarch said, an idea forming. Perhaps he had a small chance to escape.
"If you are so sure you will defeat me, maybe we can make a bet on the outcome. Let's say that if you don't find out what you need to know from me in seven Earth days, then Igo free, back to Uzoxes, and you will let us all return to Edgeworld."
"There is no need to wager," the Crixonan said. "We will not fail. We never do."
"But what if you do? If you're so confident, what do you have to lose?"
"The outcome is foreordained; we never fail. There is thus no reason to wager."
The Crixonan was incapable of imagining his own defeat, Camarch thought. "You sound like a predestinarian," Krison remarked bitterly.
"We do not know the meaning of that word."
Camarch told him.
"It is a true word," the Crixonan said. "The laws which govern matter are immutable."
"Then you should be able to mathematically calculate the future."
"We are trying. It is a complex problem."
"Too complex, even for you," Camarch said.
"We will solve it."
"Then you will be able to calculate beyond the beginning of this universe."
"Yes."
"But what if your assumptions are wrong?"
"We have made no assumptions."
"Yes, you have. You have assumed that there is nothing higher than the laws that govern the matter in this universe. Perhaps that is not true."
The Crixonan was silent momentarily. Then he said, "We understand you. You are referring to the concept of God, which is unique to your race. No other race we have cleansed has had that concept. It is wrong."
For the first time, Camarch felt he had made an impression on the Crixonan's mind. Somehow he sensed that the Crixonan had closed that particular subject. "I suppose you learned about us from the first ship. I also suppose you will kill us just as you killed that ship's crew," Camarch said, after a few moments had passed.
"There is no use for the others of your race. They will be cleansed."
The Crixonan seemed willing to answer questions, so Camarch thought he might as well take advantage of the situation.
"In other words, if a being isn't Crixonan, he isn't important," Camarch said.
"That is correct."
"How can you believe that?"
"We do not believe it; we know it is true. Your minds—and the minds of all other beings in this galaxy—are distorted, wrong. They are not pure. You must be destroyed."
"How are our minds distorted?"
"They are imperfect."
"What makes them imperfect?"
The Crixonan did not answer immediately, as if he were considering the question carefully. Finally he replied, "Your thoughts are influenced by factors not based entirely on data. You are not predictable, nor are you logical. You think thoughts which are irrelevant and impossible. You—"
"What you really mean is that you can't understand us," Camarch snapped.
"That is true."
"And because of that, we must be killed?"
"That is also true."
"You might learn something from us if you tried."
"You have nothing to teach."
"Don't we? And what about me? Wouldn't you like to know why you were unable to defeat me a few minutes ago when we fought? How many times has that ever happened to you?"
There was no answer.
Camarch began to laugh. "Don't you see you've made a mistake? You sent one of your people after me on Edgeworld, didn't you?"
Still no answer.
"… and he failed. You should have killed me then, because you will never kill me now." Camarch was feeling bolder, and beginning to enjoy his bluffing. The Crixonan had finally encountered a being whose mind he could not control, and the Crixonan was no doubt confused by the encounter.
"We never make mistakes," the Crixonan said. "There is still time to destroy you. We sought information on Edgeworld."
"And you failed to get it. The Crixonan that was sent is now dead. I killed him."
"No Crixonan can be defeated."
"This one was. How do you explain that?"
"Jraxl no longer exists; there is nothing else to explain."
"You put him in a human body. It was a mistake not to realize that he could then die a human death."
"Crixonans are incapable of error."
Camarch was beginning to feel frustrated. Logic would not work on a being who believed he was perfect. Camarch also began to feel nauseous and weak again; this time the weakness was concentrated primarily in his left leg and arm. He tried to drive the thought of mindspin from his mind.
"I'm beginning to think you're right," he told the Crixonan. "I cannot teach you anything, because you are incapable of learning."
The darkness that was the Crixonan's body deepened and began to swirl.
"You may not be able to learn from me," Camarch continued, "but I will make you remember me."
The Crixonan said nothing.
"You'd better go, before I kill you," Camarch said.
Crixonan's swirling darkness fluttered. "You cannot kill us."
Camarch laughed. He was beginning to enjoy himself, even though he knew he was probably about to die.
"We will find out what we want to know," the Crixonan stated. Then he was gone.
Camarch surveyed his surroundings—the dark plain, the red glow on the horizon, the murky gray sky—for a clue to how the Crixonan left, but everything was the same. Was it teleportation? Just because no Earth Tels were capable of it didn't mean that beings as mentally advanced as the Crixonans had the same limitation. Assuming that teleportation was the method employed by the Crixonan, could he somehow do the same thing? All he could do was block; it was difficult to see how he could ever learn to teleport, even with his increased mental powers after the encounter with mindspin.
He was still considering escape when he heard a faint thump in the distance. By looking slightly away from the direction in which he thought the sound had come from, Camarch thought he could see something lying on the plain about 100 meters away. He cautiously walked toward it.
Long before Camarch moved close enough to distinguish what the object was visually, he realized what it had to be. And with each passing step his anger, hatred and guilt increased, for he also realized that it was his fault.
In a few minutes he was standing over the body. Tior Trid had not died easily, for there were large gashes across his face and chest, gashes that were still oozing blood, and his right arm was mutilated beyond recognition.
Camarch knelt beside him. The Crixonans no longer had any use for Tior Trid, so they killed him. Camarch knew his life would be preserved only as long as they believed him to be useful. How long could he continue to bluff them? As long as it took to gain some kind of revenge, he told himself. He might or might not escape to help the Alarri, but he would make the Crixonans regret that they had killed Tior Trid. He owed that much to this friend who had come so far to die at the hands of the beings that had destroyed his entire civilization.
Camarch vowed that Jraxl would not be the only Crixonan he would kill. Somehow he would make them all pay.
A door appeared.
It was not really a door so much as a rent in the fabric of space, with jagged, dark edges leading into a misty nothingness beyond.
Camarch went through.
Into a world of black crystalline rocks, jagged and glittering in a crystalline darkness. There was no light, but he could see. He was in a valley between two dark mountains of the purest black crystal, both towering kilometers above his head, so high their peaks appeared lost among the stars. Camarch looked down. There were stars there, too, pale and distorted through the dark crystal. Deformed. Pulsating. They sneered at him, mesmerizing him momentarily.
Concentrating, he broke their hold and examined his position more carefully. He was on a smooth path through the needle-sharp rocks, and the path followed the valley as far as he could see in both directions. It was an arbitrary choice, but he finally decided to walk in the direction he was facing.
The path wound its way among the rocks, traversing the flatter areas and bypassing the more rugged ones. Camarch proceeded with caution, his shield continually up.
Wherever he was, it wasn't on Uzoxes. The star patterns were completely unknown to him. He had memorized all the star charts he had ever used, as well as the stars as they appeared from Uzoxes, and what he saw now didn't match any of the patterns in his mind. He wondered if he was even in his own galaxy. And then he wondered if he would ever live to know the answer to that question.
After a half hour, the path began to slope up toward the crest of a small knoll. The valley was ending, and the two colossal mountains on either side of him approached each other. Only the small knoll separated their embrace.
As he crossed over the knoll the path ended, and so did the black crystalline world beneath his feet. Beyond, there were only stars. He gazed down over the edge of the precipice and stared into infinity. One more step and he would fall forever, toward the stars so far below. How long would it take him to reach them? A million years—perhaps more. He would never know, of course. Once he left this black asteroid—or whatever it was—he would either die quickly from a lack of oxygen or from the effects of being suddenly thrust into a zero-pressure environment.
Perhaps that was what he should do. Death would follow almost immediately. The thought was tempting, but then he remembered Tior Trid, and his hatred returned to thrust all else from his mind. He had vowed revenge, and he would not rest until he had obtained it.
He turned to discover a misty, dark body straddling the path behind him. Camarch was suddenly so overcome with anger he couldn't speak. It took every ounce of willpower he had to keep from lunging at the Crixonan.
"You are here," the Crixonan said.
Camarch lost his reason, his logic, his self-control, his thoughts. He hurled himself at his dark enemy.
The Crixonan made no attempt at resistance, physically or mentally. Camarch's hands closed around what he thought was the being's abdomen. And sank in, as if enmeshed in a sea of black quicksand. It oozed between his fingers and slunk away, simultaneously sticky and ethereal. There were strands of thicker, firmer substance, also, which tangled themselves around his fingers and the hair on his arms and stung when, in disgust, he tried to pull free. He began to cry, without really knowing why and then vomited, hurling the stale bile against the Crixonan. He collapsed on the ground, exhausted and revolted. Despair began to creep over him.
"You are at the edge of the stars," the Crixonan said.
Camarch looked up. The alien was as he always had been, unchanged by Camarch's attack.
"Why did you bring me here?" Krison asked.
"You will lose control of your mind here," the Crixonan answered. "And when you do, your knowledge will be ours."
"You will never find out what you want to know from me."
The alien pointed out across the precipice. "Your mind cannot grasp infinity. It will destroy you."
"I'll hold out," Camarch said, but the alien had gone. Camarch's words rebounded off an empty hillside.
Hours later the first vision came. At first it was merely a glow among the stars, but as the figure approached, he recognized it as a man he had known on the prison world of Jaxami. Fear came first, but he convinced himself it wasn't real, and the fear ebbed.
Until the fist knocked him against the jagged rocks.
He felt a point rip his upper arm, felt the warm rush of blood from the wound and fear returned. He could no longer convince himself that this man wasn't real.
He scrambled to his feet and dodged the second blow, caught the man off balance and tossed him over the precipice. The scream went on for a very long time.
He sat down, took off the top of his workies and bound his right arm. The gash was deep, but no arteries seemed to be affected.
Voices made him look down. The surface of Uzoxes lay spread out before him. He could see all at once, and yet at the same time, he could concentrate on any one area and study it in detail. He sought out the city and found the ship's crew almost immediately. The Birmingham still stood on the starport, but it was empty now. The crew was hiding in the city, huddled around a small fire in one of the larger buildings. Three men were lying dead in a corner, their limbs at impossible angles from their bodies.
He looked for Amalarie and found her alive and apparently well, tending to two more men lying near the fire, moaning and wearily thrashing. As he stared at her, she lifted her head and stared back at him, as if aware of his presence. Her hair hung dully around her shoulders, and there were dark circles under her eyes. She was wearing a tattered white workie, and one of her shoulders was bare, with a superficial scratch across it.
Rhehe and Sandrye and two other crewmen were talking. Thron was bound up near the fire, his arms and legs securely tied to a peg in the ground.
The walls of the building parted and another man entered. This man was small and dark and Camarch recognized him at once, though almost two decades had passed since their parting.
"Where's the warped one?" the half-Mexican newcomer asked. Amalarie pointed in Camarch's direction; everyone else ignored the question. The newcomer looked up, appeared to focus on Camarch, then yelled something in Spanish. Three other figures entered, carrying a thin, struggling captive.
Together, still carrying Thria, the collect advanced on Camarch. The four split into two groups of two. One group held Thria; the other group led the way across the sandy floor of the Uzoxean building to the black crystal world on which Camarch was marooned.
"Once wasn't enough?" Rawl Nestra said.
Camarch didn't answer.
"We will gladly kill her again."
"I'll kill you first," Camarch spat.
"All four of us?" Nestra sneered. He pulled a blaster from his belt and began to laugh a crooked, evil, harsh laugh that reawakened the hatred lingering just below the surface of Camarch's mind.
Camarch took a step forward, but a flash of white glanced off the crystalline rock in front of him, leaving a scalloped-out smooth depression.
Thria turned her dark eyes to meet his, and he felt the strength and warmth and love of her mindtouch. She was so young, too young to die.
"Krison, let happen what is meant to happen." Her voice was soft, without hatred or fear.
"I'll get you out of this somehow," Camarch said, the feeling of déjà vu filling his mind, amid the helplessness.
"One wrong move and your ashes will fill that hole in the rock I just made," Nestra warned. He pointed up behind Camarch, and the two men with Thria began dragging her in the direction he indicated. Camarch turned and found the mountain had been partially replaced by a mound of limestone rubble. If the replay was accurate, it was the House of the Magician at Uxmal. Once rubble, it had been rebuilt in the twentieth century, only to fall to the ravages of the jungle and public apathy and deteriorate again into just another pile of rubble.
A blaster at his back, Camarch followed Thria and the two men up the steep slope to the cleared, flat platform at the top. There was one large, irregular stone in the middle and they bound her to this, her body stretched across its surface, arms and legs tied to the ground, breasts, abdomen and hips thrust at the sky.
One of the men ripped Thria's flimsy tunic from her body, and she lay naked under the yellow sun. Camarch remembered how he first thought those many years ago that the collect intended only to rape her, and utter despair filled him at his present helplessness.
One of the men began unfastening his belt.
"No!" Nestra snapped. "We'll find you a human woman in town. Don't defile yourself with her."
Camarch whirled in anger and was almost quick enough to grab Nestra's gun, but his lunge fell short and all he received for his efforts was the barrel across the side of his head. An explosion of light filled his head, and he fell.
"You try that again, and I'll do more than tap you," Nestra said.
As soon as he could see again, Camarch wiped the blood out of his eyes and gazed at Thria. When her eyes found his she said,
"Don't hate them, Krison. They're not worth the effort. Go away from here and live like a human being, not a hunted animal."
From a pocket deep in his wraparound, Nestra produced a rusty, long-bladed knife.
"I thought you promised me I could kill her," one of the others said.
"I changed my mind," Nestra replied. "I want to do it myself."
"Let her go," Camarch pleaded. "Kill me instead."
"Your turn will come," Nestra said. "You two belong together."
Thria looked at him. "You must escape. Don't worry about me. There's nothing you can do to save me."
Camarch realized she was right, and fear, sorrow, anguish, and other emotions he couldn't name flooded him. He couldn't abandon her. He at least had to stay and watch her die. But if he did that, they would then kill him.
Nestra raised the knife high above his head and brought it slashing down into her belly. Thria screamed, and Camarch was filled again with fear and rage. The man covering him glanced up to watch the murder, and Camarch moved.
He went first for the blaster, but only succeeded in knocking it out of the man's hands to clatter across the dry stone and over the side of the platform.
"Run, Krison," Thria whispered. "It's too late to save me." Her face twitched with pain. She was so young. Only thirteen. Too young to die. But many Tels died young.
The man who had been holding the blaster swung at him, but he easily dodged the blow, then swung himself. He felt his fist hit bone. Blood poured from the man's mouth. The man gurgled twice and went down, collapsing onto the red-stained platform.
"Get that blaster!" Nestra shouted.
Camarch ran, half-sliding, half-tumbling down the side of the mound of rubble. By the time they retrieved the blaster, he was out of range. He sank to his knees on the black crystalline rock, panting and weeping. When he finally cleared his eyes and lungs and looked up behind him, the House of the Magician was gone.
In its place stood a black mountain. Only a hallucination; it was all only a hallucination.
He started to move and saw something else. Two meters in front of him was a scalloped-out depression in the black rock. He crawled over and felt it. It was still slightly warm.
He became aware of movement behind him.
"I don't understand," he told the Crixonan. "You are emotionless."
"It is true," the Crixonan said, "that we do not understand the word you call fear, but over time we have learned to take what is worst in the minds of weak beings like yourself and use it."
"What about death?' Don't you at least worry about that?"
"We cannot be killed by your kind."
"By the Alarri, then?"
For the first time the Crixonan hesitated. Finally, he said, "We do not think so."
"But you're not sure?"
"No."
Camarch suddenly realized something. Whatever their faults were, lying apparently wasn't one of them. They seemed compelled to tell the truth, unless they could evade the question entirely.
"Have you then come to kill me?" Camarch asked.
"If you so wish."
"What do you mean?"
"If you give us the knowledge we seek, we will kill you."
Despite his feelings, Camarch had to laugh. "That's supposed to motivate me?"
"We never fail," the Crixonan said. "You cannot run forever."
Then he disappeared.
Camarch stared up at the black mountain. It was true. He had run. For 17 years he had vowed to himself that given the opportunity to relive those last few minutes with Thria, he would not run; he would instead try to rescue her, even if it cost him his own life. Now the Crixonans had given him a chance to change his actions, but he had done the same thing this time that he had done 17 years ago.
He suddenly felt very weary as he stood up. Since Thria's murder, he had never run again—except for today—and he would never run again. With Thria dead, there was nothing to fear. He had led an empty life.
He walked to the edge of his world. It would be easy to step over the side and fall or float—depending upon how the Crixonans had gravity arranged here— to his death. But that would be running away, and he didn't want to die like that. He never revenged Thria's death, because Nestra and his accomplices disappeared. He had to revenge Tior Trid's murder.
After a while, he tired of waiting for something to happen, and he slept.
She came in white, in a gossamer-thin gown, which swirled and rustled around her in a wind that didn't exist. Her hair moved on wings around her head, in perfect time with her footsteps across the void. Her eyes were deep, filled with a longing and desire no man could ever satisfy.
"Why have you come?" Camarch asked.
"I have come to keep you company," said the soft voice.
"I don't need your company."
"I will make you need it."
She was so beautiful he could hardly keep his eyes off her; he felt feelings stir deep within him that he hoped were dead.
"Go away and leave me alone," he told her.
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"They won't let me."
There was no need for her to tell him who they were.
She knelt beside him, over him and took his head gently in her hands. His body burned where she touched him.
"I can be all you ever wanted in a woman; all the dreams that all men from all time have wished for."
He felt a flicker of disgust, but it was quickly drowned in a flood of other, more powerful emotions. He closed his eyes, but Amalarie remained, losing no clarity in his mind.
"I don't want you," he muttered.
"You need me, you must have me."
"G-Go away."
Her hands fell to his shoulders, and the fire of her mouth found his. He felt himself falling into the well of her desire. He pushed her away.
"Why do you fight me so?" Amalarie asked.
"Because they are doing this."
Her lips returned to his, and her gown was gone.
"Why do you fight them?" she asked.
"I want to destroy them."
Her hands were beneath his workies now, stroking his weary skin.
"And the Alarri will help you destroy them?"
"I will help the Alarri in any way they want me to."
"How?"
Her hands moved on, and he lost all willpower. If he had known the answer, he would have told her then. But he didn't, and besides, he couldn't talk, for he was sinking mindlessly into her desire.
Afterward it was cold, and they lay huddled together until she had to go, saying nothing, thinking nothing. When she left, he watched her walk across a pale shimmering bridge to the dusty city on the far side. She never looked back but he knew she was crying.
Camarch had been through too much to cry now. The Crixonans had tried to conquer him a third time, and a third time they had failed to obtain the information they wanted. He felt no elation, though, no throb of victory, only weariness… only weariness. The Crixonans had failed only because he did not know the information they sought. Otherwise Amalarie would have succeeded. Briefly he wondered if she had been real or merely a dream. He couldn't tell. His sensorium was disconnected from his brain. He knew that the mindspin was already working, slowly destroying his synapses, slowly destroying all that made him a unique being. He hardly cared. Only two things mattered now; one old and one new. Thoughts of revenge permeated his mind, and the new feelings sifting in through the despair, the hatred, the anger, the weariness, confused him. Then he understood. It was ironic that he should feel this way now, so soon after he had seen Thria die again.
He arose slowly. A billion stars watched him in silence, uncaring, forever out of his reach. How could he love a woman who had betrayed him once in spirit and once more in body?
"You are strong," a voice said.
Camarch turned.
"Still, you cannot win. Why do you not give up?" the Crixonan asked.
"Even if you find out and even if you kill me, what good will it do? The Alarri will choose someone else to take my place."
"We will know their plans, and we will defeat them."
"Then you can travel through time to warn your people?"
"We can speak through time."
"But you can't travel through time?"
"No," the Crixonan admitted.
"Why not?"
"We are different. Our body energies are too synchronous to endure the chaos of time travel."
"But other races can?"
"All other races are so capable, if they have the knowledge. Few have discovered the knowledge."
"That proves what I suspected: that you are the unnatural race; my race, and the others like mine, belong to this universe—yours is the race that doesn't."
"That is wrong."
Camarch laughed bitterly, "Go away and leave me alone. I'm tired of talking to a being who makes as little sense as you do."
The black figure wavered, then vanished. But Camarch still felt little sense of triumph. It was certain that when he finally died, the Crixonans would think he had been able to withhold the information from them, but they would have won the encounter, even if they gained no information from it. His death would mean the Alarri would have to choose someone else.
Two races—the Alarri and the Crixonans—both so powerful that man hardly seemed worth noticing in comparison, both interested in him. Why? Whatever the reasons, it wasn't difficult to choose sides. He could never help the Crixonans in any way. Perhaps they weren't really evil, but they were so different, so alien that they must be destroyed to preserve the safety of all the other races in the galaxy. Camarch knew he had to go through the timegate. It was his only choice. His one contact with the Alarri, Tior Trid, was dead.
He sat down, with a firm resolve to go back to sleep, when figures appeared in the depths of space. He squinted, but still could not identify them, at least not until they moved considerably closer. Then he was able to make out Sandrye, Rhehe and Thron.
When the scene gradually solidified, Camarch saw several more people in the background, though he couldn't identify any of them.
Sandrye and Rhehe led Thron across the pale bridge of nothing to the precipice on which Camarch stood. Rhehe held a blaster in his hand. None of the three seemed at all surprised to see Camarch.
"They want you to talk," Rhehe said.
"Who does?" Camarch asked.
"You know who. If you don't tell them what they want to know, we will slowly disembowel the captain."
"Well, Josephus," Camarch said. "They've got you in quite a spot."
"What do you mean me? They've got both of us in the same predicament."
"No, you're wrong about that. They won't kill me yet, not until I tell them what they want to know. You… well, that's a different matter." Camarch wondered how much of what was happening was real. All of it? None of it? He had no way of knowing.
Or did he?
He looked down. The small, smooth depression caused by Nestra's blaster remained in the black crystal. He surveyed the three men standing near him. They appeared real, and the prisoner from Jaxami had felt real when Camarch struggled with him. And Amalarie… she had felt real, too, so very real.
The thought which was percolating around in his head bubbled free. If they were in any way real, perhaps the bridge was real, too. It still hung there, glittering in the darkness, visible even though it was transparent. Only a blaster remained in his way.
One step to his right and he had Thron by the shoulders, tossing him at Rhehe. Thron rendezvoused with Rhehe hard, and the warp tech staggered back, his arms flailing in a futile attempt to keep his balance.
Camarch ran, his heart pausing briefly in its rhythm when he first stepped onto the bridge.
It was real.
It seemed to be made only of stars, but it held him, and ten seconds later he was standing in a dusty street on Uzoxes.
Alone.
There was no sign of Sandrye, Rhehe or Thron behind him. He stood in silence.
The fuzziness in Thron's mind cleared in time to see Camarch vanish across the bridge. He glanced around. Sandrye was rubbing his head, as if he too were just regaining control of his own mind. Rhehe, however, lay sprawled across the black crystalline rocks and Thron knew the archeologist would never again rise. He was quite dead.
"Where are we?" Thron asked.
The answer came from behind them. "You are 1000 parsecs from the planet you call Uzoxes."
Thron and Sandrye turned. The alien in front of them looked more like another shadow than a flesh and blood being. Only from the voice, thin and cold, did Thron recognize the creature as being of the same race as the one who spoke to him while the Birmingham had orbited Uzoxes. Thron shivered. There was something terrible about the creature. Something merciless.
"Where is the being Camarch?" the Crixonan asked.
Thron was suddenly even more afraid than he had been. "He's… not here."
"We need him."
"Then go find him," Sandrye said.
"You are not needed," the Crixonan said.
There was a tightness in Thron's chest, and he suddenly regretted—for the hundredth time—having come to Edgeworld. The finality of the Crixonan's tone…
Without another word, the Crixonan began to fade.
"Wait a minute," Sandrye said. "You just can't leave us here."
But the Crixonan was gone, and Thron remembered the alien's last words. You are not needed.
Far above them, the black mountain began to melt. Thron ran toward the bridge, fear overwhelming all other emotions.
But the bridge… was gone. Only the infinite stars remained.
Camarch knew there was little time to find the timegate, and he had no idea where it was. He didn't even know where he was in the city. In no direction was there any object or building he could identify. Of course, most of the city looked the same. Only the spires marred the monotony of these rectangular white buildings.
To his left footsteps shuffled the sand. Camarch waited as the sounds drew nearer. It had to be one of the crew because the Crixonans made no noise when they moved. Camarch was sure now that the limbs he thought he saw on the Crixonans were byproducts of his own expectations.
Encountering one of the crew was better than meeting a Crixonan, but he was unarmed, and there was no way to tell how an armed crewman might react when he stumbled upon someone he thought to be dead. Camarch stepped back into the shadows to wait.
A svelte figure rounded the corner of a building and walked straight toward him. A woman. A beautiful woman. Amalarie. And there was no hesitation in her movements. She continued walking until she was face-to-face with Camarch, as if she had known where he was all along. Camarch wondered if she had.
She held out her hand. "Come, we must hurry."
"Where are we going?" Nonetheless, he took her hand, and as she touched him, all the memories of what had happened between them on the world of black crystal became almost real again.
"We must reach the timegate before the Crixonans can stop us."
"But who—"
"I'll explain later," she said. "There is no time now."
Camarch had trouble keeping up with her as she led him through the narrow and seemingly random streets of the city. Past white buildings that had no doors and no windows, over the homes buried far below the surface, over the bones of the beings who once ruled this world. Unerringly, she led him to the ruins that looked so much like Edgeworld, ruins without decay, white blocks from nowhere falling across the entrance.
Overhead the sky thickened, darkened.
"Hurry!" she pleaded.
They ran.
A bubble formed on the surface of the Crixonan ship, broke off and floated down. It brushed the ground in front of them and was gone, leaving a single shadowy figure.
The alien stood in silence for a moment. "The human we know, but you, who go by the human name of Amalarie Rjuer, we cannot identify."
"A puzzle you can't solve?" Amalarie asked.
"You are only partially human."
Amalarie said nothing.
"The rest of you is not of this time," the Crixonan stated.
"That is correct, but you aren't powerful enough to discover who I am. You must try to kill me." She smiled, but it wasn't the smile of the Amalarie Rjuer that Camarch knew. It was the smile of someone far older, vastly wiser.
To his right Camarch saw movements in his peripheral vision. He looked in that direction and saw several of the Birmingham's crew walking toward them. Apparently they had seen the bubble land and had come to investigate. Ranwuella was leading, and he surveyed the scene quickly, then strode straight toward the Crixonan brandishing his blaster.
"You are one of the Alarri," the alien said.
"Perhaps," Amalarie replied.
"I want—" Ranwuella began, but stopped as the shadows around the alien deepened; winds swirled, forming a dark vortex that spread out slowly, touching the crew one by one. And one by one they died, clutching their heads, then collapsing with a blank expression on their faces, as if drained of all knowledge and emotion.
The vortex reached Camarch and Rjuer last. As it swept by, Camarch stumbled, his mind almost sucked from him. Somehow he knew that more than one Crixonan had entered the battle.
I will work through you, a voice said in his mind.
The vortex passed again. But this time Camarch reached back and found strength and power that he'd never used before, and the vortex was like a breeze blowing across the surface of a lake, with no effect on the depths below.
Camarch led Amalarie forward, using the strength that she had given him, strength that the alien, indeed all the aliens in that dark starship, could not match.
He felt the emptiness waver, as if the alien knew it, too. Camarch reached for the alien's mind, and clamped hold of it through the emptiness. The Crixonan tried to withdraw but it was too late. Camarch moved into the alien's brain, shattering the mind-block that now seemed so fragile, imprisoning the alien's will within his.
Now let me.
Camarch relaxed his shield to her touch, and their minds joined. With his eyes he watched the bubble form around the Crixonan, though he simultaneously remained in the alien's mind. Camarch then left his own sight behind and went with the bubble, sensed what the alien sensed, saw what the alien saw, heard what the alien heard…
Others joined the alien in its struggle for freedom, and Camarch almost fell into the vast emptiness of 1000 Crixonan minds. Thoughts of the ship… dark, sterile corridors of barren metal… narrow, claustrophobic. All the fears of Camarch's human heritage flooded him… demons danced before his eyes… he walked on a bridge over infinity, the darkness all around. There was the click of footsteps behind him, but he dared not turn. Only look ahead. Only look ahead.
A tiny room, star charts all around, globular clusters and dark nebulae and black suns and pulsars. As he looked at each he was there, across space, across time… to a panel, black and deep, on which his mind was placed. The giant ship shuddered and felt the power flow into his body and his mind.
The other minds became stronger, darker and more empty, touching… and probing. Cold winter nights… starless, without light. Ten kilometers away Camarch's body shivered.
Enough.
Camarch felt Amalarie break contact with him and the alien. He followed her retreat. Back to the warmth of the summer day, the warm awareness of his own body. But his mind felt cold still, defiled by its contact with the Crixonan. When he could see again, anger swelled up, choking him. Around him on the ground was the crew of the Birmingham, dead, their beings sucked dry by the far enemy. Rhehe, Sandrye and Thron were conspicuously absent, and Camarch wondered if they had been marooned on that black crystal world when he left. If that had happened, they would also die. They had been caught up in a struggle far beyond their comprehension, and it had cost them their lives. Even if they had returned to Uzoxes; they would not survive long.
"Hurry," Amalarie whispered. Camarch looked up. There were no more bubbles in sight; his mind and Amalarie's knowledge had jammed the Crixonans' controls temporarily, but they had other weapons.
They were in the timegate now, and Camarch felt the power stored in the walls around him. It oozed from the white blocks and guided his steps.
"We're safe in here," Amalarie said.
This time there were no visions in his mind. Camarch sensed them outside trying to enter, but against his new mindblock, they were too weak, even though their strength was 100 times that of Edgeworld.
"Can you tell me now who you are?" he asked her.
"I'll explain later. Try to have patience."
She took his hand as she led him deeper into the labyrinth. Suddenly the ground shook and Camarch stopped and looked around, noticing how blurred the walls had become. He gazed upward. The sun was gone, replaced by a whirl of yellow sprinkled across blue. The colors twisted and merged as though produced by a giant candle. He saw nothing to cause the ground to tremble and was confused; then he remembered what Tior Trid had told him.
"The sun?"
"Yes," she replied. "It's gone. Soon Uzoxes will also be gone."
"But if Uzoxes is destroyed, how—"
"We are no longer in your time."
"Where are we?"
"Between space and time—I can't explain. The physics is beyond your race's knowledge."
They went on. One hour? Two? How could he tell if time no longer existed?
Who was she, he wondered as they walked. That she wasn't human was evident. That she appeared human was also evident. The Crixonan had accused her of being one of the Alarri, and the possibility was becoming more and more plausible to Camarch. Who else would have been able to hide her identity from the Crixonans, Tior Trid and himself? At no time had anyone suspected she was a Tel.
If she were an Alarri, however, it left a lot of unanswered questions. For one thing, Rhehe seemed to know her and think she was the archeologist who worked for him back on Earth. Camarch wondered if she had merely taken Amalarie Rjuer's body and memories. But then what had happened to Amalarie Rjuer? Was she dead?
They suddenly reached the center, passing through an archway. It was empty on the far side. No ground, no sky, no buildings, only the glow of white fog. Camarch hesitated, but followed at her insistance. There was obviously nowhere else to go. About 100 steps later another archway appeared, and once they stepped through, they might as well have been in the original timegate. The two were identical. And Camarch had no doubt that C'hah Lai would have been no different if he had penetrated it as far.
Another hour or two passed, and eventually they reached the exit of the timegate. First, after passing through the gap in the white blocks, there was fog again, but then the fog yielded to desert, dry and dim and red. The sky also was red, lit by a giant crimson glow on the horizon to his left. To his right a mountain chain lifted toward the stars, climbing ten kilometers from the ground in spots, perhaps more. It was difficult to tell how far away he was.
From behind the mountain a brilliant star arose, sliding up slowly toward the zenith. Then he realized it was not only a, star but a second sun, small, hot and white.
Nowhere was there life. The ground was barren, red sand, and brown rocks. It was a dead world now and perhaps had always been such; a dead world lit by two dying suns.
As he watched, the red sun set, followed in a few minutes by the white secondary, leaving a starless night. No… not quite starless, he corrected himself. As his pupils adjusted he could pick out a few dim points of light scattered across the heavens. Fifty, maybe even 100, but no more.
"How long has it been?" he finally gathered the courage to ask.
"Six billion, three hundred million of your years. Is that accurate enough?"
"I suppose you could tell me in minutes if I wished."
"I could."
Amalarie let him seek his own stability, saying nothing more as he tried to accustom himself to where he was.
"Where's Earth?" he asked.
She raised her arm to the sky, pointing to a spot about 30 degrees off the horizon. Camarch strained, but saw no star, not even the faintest glimmer.
"Earth is a lifeless world half a billion light-years in that direction," she said softly.
He stared and felt very alone.
They left the timegate far behind, walking across the desert toward the mountains. Red sand swirled around them as they moved, cloaking their bodies and trickling through their clothes to scratch against their skins.
Distance was a relative thing, Camarch reflected. Here, on this planet, moving by foot, 20 kilometers was far, but compared to the five hundred million light-years he had come it was not so much as a step. The difference, even his confused mind realized, was that the latter figure was completely beyond his imagination and therefore almost meaningless, whereas he could see the timegate shrink into the horizon as they walked.
"Where are we going?" he asked her.
"To the base of the mountains."
It was enough now for him to know where they were headed. He wasn't too interested in talking at the moment. Somehow he knew there would be plenty of time for that later.
This world was cold at noon and cold at night. Even the white dwarf's additional light when it was in view did little to dispel the cold. The chill was too old, too ingrained in the nature of these plajns and mountains to be driven off by the paucity of heat the two ancient suns could spare.
Through darkness and red light they walked on, toward the mountains, rising ever higher to clouds that should not have existed for millions of years on this waterless world.
Was Earth like this now, Camarch wondered. The Atlantic, the Pacific—were they merely dry, dusty basins or did a small memory of water remain in their depths? Man was no doubt extinct by now; was there any trace of him left, or had the winds and waters of all those billions of years swept all remnants of human civilization away? At least Tior Trid had seen that for a short while his race had been remembered. Camarch couldn't claim as much for man.
He watched Amalarie walk, tall, proud and graceful. How could he love a being of a race six billion years in his future?
He walked on. Strength came from somewhere, for he didn't tire.
At the base of the foothills they stopped. Camarch didn't see the small white building until they were almost on it. Silent, shrouded by shadows, it stood alone, built by beings that had never lived on this world.
Now, knowing that the trek was over, he was tired. He was vaguely conscious of being taken inside. After that… darkness.
Awareness came slowly. Light from both suns spilled in through the window above his head. He was lying on a bed of pale green liquid, which fitted the bends and crevices of his body perfectly. He poked his hand into the surface and it disappeared. He pulled it out and it reappeared completely dry.
"Feeling better?" Amalarie asked. She was standing beside him, which was strange because he was sure the room had been empty at first. He certainly hadn't seen her come in.
"Except for my headache." He groaned involuntarily and sat up. It was easier than he anticipated. Sometime in the interim his headache vanished and his weariness with it.
He gazed at Amalarie, as if to see through her human guise and catch a glimpse of her real being. He stood up, after a minute, and walked over to a window. Outside, the desert sand drifted away toward the horizon and whirled and swirled up as the wind galloped across its surface. Beyond the sands the red sun shivered, balanced on that distant horizon, a globe of blood, dripping its liquid life into space.
All the time they had walked on the desert there had been no wind. And the red sun had moved along an entirely different axis, rising behind the mountains, not 90 degrees away.
"I've been thinking," Camarch began. "We didn't have to walk across that desert, did we?"
"There are other methods of transportation," she admitted.
"Then why—"
She took a deep breath. "It's hard for me to explain, even to myself. As I understand my own mind, I just wanted to spend a few more hours with you."
"With me? I don't understand."
"Let me try to explain to you what I am; then maybe it will make more sense to you. That won't be easy, because your language doesn't have the words necessary to describe my people." She paused and smiled at him. He felt his suspicions ebbing.
"As you have probably already guessed, I am a member of a race called the Alarri. We are old, roughly two billion years old, and for most of that time we have been fighting the Crixonans." At first, we, like they, were physical beings, and we fought our wars on a physical level. We were the first race to survive a war with them, because we managed to conceal our level of technology until we were strong enough to challenge them. Other civilizations rose, entered the starways full of self-confidence and were immediately destroyed by the Crixonans. We were fortunate because we were warned by a starship fleeing from battle with the Crixonans. We heeded the warning and avoided contact with them for thousands of your years until we were ready to meet them. You see, though they are powerful, they have always advanced very slowly, partially because there has never been much pressure on them to advance more rapidly and partially because their creative potential is low. A race with a high creative potential such as mine—or yours—can match their technology in less than a million years, if it can survive that long. We did, and when we finally did choose to battle the Crixonans, we were their technological equals. However, we weren't equal in conflict experience and they still would have destroyed us except for two things: first of all, they made the mistake of underestimating us, and secondly, they had just finished a war with another civilization and were weaker because of that. So the resulting battle was a stalemate.
"Since then we have been fighting with them, not wars, but skirmishes, continually testing each other's strength. We have always been evenly matched, so neither side has wanted to start a major conflict. For the first time in their history there has been selective pressure on them, and they have had to advance far more rapidly than ever before. But they have done so, and during the millions of years, both races have evolved. We are no longer mortal creatures like yourself, imprisoned by protoplasm, though we do have a physical form. We are primarily energy and have only enough physical form to serve as a focus for our life-force.
"The Crixonans have evolved, too. Everything we are, they are not. We are positive life-force; they are negative. I don't think we will ever understand them any better than they understand us, but their bodies seem to serve as foci of their negative life-forces, foci of emptiness from our point of view, though this emptiness you and I sense when we come into mental contact with them is in reality their life-force, and after many encounters with them, I have finally reached the conclusion that it is impossible for my race and the Crixonans not to try to destroy each other.
"It might be easier if each being in each race were an individual thought-center, completely isolated from all the others. But that isn't true. Like us, they are one, each the sum of many beings, yet each still capable of some independent thought and action." She laughed softly.
"It's funny," she went on, "but when I was chosen for this mission, everyone felt sorry for me. They all wondered if even my strong mind could survive the terrible loneliness of being isolated for the first time in my existence from the constant companionship of everyone in my race. My possible descent into madness was regarded as the greatest threat to my accomplishment of the mission."
"But you made it," Camarch interjected.
"Yes, and you know what? For the first time in my life, I experienced a feeling of peace and individual self-worth. I guess that's part of the reason I'm not in a hurry to leave this body. I've never felt the cold sand trickle between my toes before, nor the wind of a strange planet rustle through my hair, nor the warmth of the sun on my face at noonday, nor…" Her voice faded, and she looked away.
"Nor what?" Camarch asked.
She turned back to face him, and Krison felt himself being pulled again into the depths of her infinite brown eyes. "I've never before felt emotions I shared with only one other being." She moved closer. "I can't forget what happened on that world the Crixonans created."
"Then it was real?"
"Yes," she replied softly. "Very real."
"Did you have any choice in what happened?"
"I did what the Crixonans commanded."
"Could you have resisted them?"
She nodded. "My block is not as strong as yours, but I could have resisted."
"Then why didn't you?"
"Because the Amalarie Rjuer you see before you is more than a human body controlled by an Alarri mind; the human mind, the real Amalarie Rjuer, even though it has lost dominant control of this body, still has a great deal of influence on what I choose to do."
Camarch tried to absorb what she was telling him, but found he was receiving the information only at a superficial level. It still hadn't penetrated to the emotional part of his mind yet. "Then Amalarie Rjuer was a real person, not an Alarri construct."
"Amalarie Rjuer was everything her file on the Birmingham claimed her to be: a young instructor of archeology hoping to make the big discovery on Uzoxes so that she could get promoted to Subprofessor Two, and eventually even higher."
"And she influenced you to go through with what happened on that dark crystal asteroid?"
"Yes."
"But why?"
"Because she wanted you."
She had said it. He had considered 1000 possibilities, but not the real one. "And what about you?"
"Me?"
"The Alarri part of Amalarie Rjuer."
"I was curious."
"Is that all?"
"No," she admitted at length. "I felt Amalarie's desires and they became mine. When we lay together it was as much my wish as hers. I certainly am not sorry it happened. Are you?"
"No," Camarch said.
"Good." Then she smiled slyly. "Come." She held out her hand. "There's a warm beach outside."
Camarch frowned. "So?"
"Warm beaches are for lovers."
Camarch took the offered hand.
The warm sea lapped at their feet, and for a while Camarch almost forgot where he was. Never, though, did he forget whom he was with.
He gazed across the water. A few hours ago this had all been desert. Now it was ocean. However, except for the temperature, that was all that had changed. Behind him rose the same high, craggy mountains, and above him shone the same pale red sun. To his right was the same small building, unchanged in appearance, windowless and doorless. For some reason he couldn't remember how they had come out.
"Is this real?" he asked her.
Amalarie opened her eyes. "What is reality? It's not an illusion, a trick played on you by your mind, if that's what you mean. Yet neither does it belong here on this world, so in that sense it's not real."
"But in the strictly physical sense, it is real. I am lying on a white, sandy beach."
"Yes."
"And you made it?"
"With the help of my people."
Camarch accepted the fact and stored it for future contemplation. At the moment there were other questions he wanted to ask.
"Which one of you am I attracted to?" he queried. "The human Amalarie or the Alarri half?"
"The time will come when you will have to answer that question," she said. "I cannot answer it for you."
"How long have you been… when did you take over her body?"
"Almost two of your years ago. I traveled back to your period a hundred thousand years before your time, stopped briefly on Uzoxes and Edgeworld, then made my way to Earth. After I took control of Amalarie Rjuer's body, it took me a year to set up the expedition."
"Then you were the financial impetus for the expedition?"
"Yes. I dangled a little money before Rhehe and Sandrye and promised them a lot more. Their greed did the rest. They took care of all the details. All I really did was arrange for Tior Trid to navigate; another of my race contacted him and arranged for him to reach Edgeworld."
"But why was he needed? You were already there."
"We were aware that the Crixonans knew we wanted you. However, they did not know why; nor did they know how we planned to contact you. Thus, Tior Trid was to be the apparent guide, and I the backup. We did not mean for him to be killed, but it was necessary for my presence to be a secret until the last moment."
"And the mind of Amalarie Rjuer—what did she think of this?"
"She fought me at first, but she is an intelligent woman, and she finally came to understand. She willingly cooperates now. In fact, when I first met you, I let her control this body most of the time."
Camarch was silent once again, thinking how petty the bickerings were between Sandrye and himself, in comparison to the struggle between the Alarri and Crixonans. He suddenly felt very insignificant; yet he knew that Amalarie—or whoever she was—wouldn't have brought him this far if he wasn't needed.
"How long do we have together?" he finally asked.
She stared out across the waves. "One day, maybe two."
"No more?"
"My people grow impatient. They can only weakly feel what I feel with you; it is as though 99 percent were being filtered out. They don't understand why I wish to stay in this human body any longer than necessary. They want me to return to them so the battle can begin."
"The battle?"
"Yes," she said. "The wait is almost over. The Crixonans and the Alarri must fight, and to the winner will go the spoils. It has finally come to this: two almost immortal, invincible enemies will fight for control of all the worlds to come."
Camarch studied her carefully. "Almost immortal? Then you can die?"
"Only when this universe ends; only when all the galaxies of this universe once more collide to form the primordial fireball as they have done, and will do, forever."
"If you cannot die, how can there be a victor?"
"It's true that we cannot kill them, nor can we ever permanently injure them. But we can banish them from this universe."
"But how? If you force them to leave, what is to keep them from returning the same way they left?"
"There is a way. You see, though we can do many things, we can't break the physical laws which bind together the fabric of this universe. We are not omnipotent, and neither are the Crixonans. This we can use to our advantage." She took a handful of sand and then let it trickle through her fingers. "What do you know about black holes?" she asked.
"I know a little. I know that they are the natural end stage of a star having a mass greater than twice that of Earth's sun. I know that as the fuel reserves of such a star begin to run out, the star begins to collapse, and neither electron pressure nor nuclear forces between the neutrons of that star—the two forces responsible for stopping the collapse of stars with smaller mass—can prevent the contraction. In fact, there is no force that can prevent the star from decreasing in size to such a point that the intensity of the gravitational force overpowers everything else. According to general relativity, gravity is the carving of space-time, and thus, as the gravitational force intensifies, the space around the star becomes more and more warped, until space-time folds over on itself and star disappears from this universe. That's a black hole."
"You're essentially correct. Now, do you know what exists on the far side of a black hole?"
"I know that it has been theorized that black holes open up into another universe."
Amalarie nodded. "More correctly, other universes. In fact, each black hole opens into an infinite number of other universes."
Camarch finally understood. "I see. You propose to force the entire Crixonan race through one of these black holes into another universe."
"Yes." She seemed pleased that he understood so very well.
"But what is to keep the Crixonans from turning around and coming right back to this universe through another black hole?"
"Probability. There will be an infinite number of universes for them to choose from. The probability of them duplicating their trajectory through the black hole is therefore infinitely small. However, though it approaches zero, it is not quite zero, and it is possible that in the far distant future they will return."
The far distant future. The words rattled around in Camarch's mind, and he wondered how long she considered that to be. A week ago, if someone had asked him, he would have said 1000 years, maybe ten thousand. Now he was thinking in terms of billions of years. And Amalarie was probably thinking beyond the end of this universe as he knew it.
But then he knew so little.
"And what about me?" he asked.
"You are a freak of nature, Krison, a singularity in the history of this universe, an intersection of three one-in-a-billion or greater probabilities. One, when you are at full-strength, no other single being can break your mindblock. Secondly, you are extremely sensitive to the actions of mindspin. Thirdly, your mind is in tune with the minds of my people."
"You went to a lot of trouble to bring me here. There must have been others who—"
"Very few," she interrupted. "Less than 100 beings could be found who approached your potential for mindblocking, and of those 100, you were the only one who belonged to a race with which we could easily communicate. It took a great deal of effort to bring you here, but the sole purpose my race still exists is to defeat the Crixonans. No effort was too great to prevent us from trying to bring back the being with the highest probability of helping us reach our goal."
"And that was me?" Camarch asked.
"Yes."
"What am I to do?"
"You are to be the focus of our power. We have built for you a starship, and you will fly that starship into the black sun we have chosen."
"What?"
"We, like the Crixonans, are not entirely physical beings, but we remain subject to gravity. It is ironic that the weakest of forces can also be the strongest. With our minds, we think we can channel enough gravitons from the black sun into a field around your ship and thus drag the Crixonans down beyond the event horizon, past the point of no return to this universe."
"What about me? Do I go with them?"
"No. We believe we can pull your mind out just before you reach the event horizon "
"And what about my body?"
"I have already taken several cells from the mucous membrane of your oral cavity. We will clone you a new body from one of those. The brain, though intact, will never have functioned except to control autonomic activities, so there will be no personality to displace."
The tide was rising now, sweeping closer in toward their bodies with every advancing wave. The red sun had almost set, but the temperature was still the same. Every other hour the white dwarf would race across the sky, adding little but a splash of light to the environment of this world. Somehow the orbits of the three bodies did not seem quite right, but although Camarch was vaguely aware of this, he never felt like trying to figure out what was wrong.
"And what about you?" he asked at length.
"Which me? The human or the Alarri?"
"Both."
"We will separate. I will leave Amalarie's body and go with you, in your mind. She will stay here and wait for you, in suspended animation, along with your new body."
"A new body," Camarch mused. "Just when I was beginning to like this one." But this one was dying, he thought, the victim of a plant which was no doubt extinct by now.
Then he suddenly realized something. The weakness and nausea he had experienced back on the Crixonan world of black crystal, which had been progressively getting more intense, was gone now. It had been gone ever since he had arrived here. Perhaps Amalarie had cured him. He asked her.
"No, we can't do that," she told him. "But we can neutralize it temporarily, which we have done. You see, along with its telepathic stimulator, mindspin also contains a virus specific for the central nervous system. Your own mind would not stand the treatment of purging each neuron of its viruses. However, what we can do is take a cell from another part of your body, such as the membranes of your mouth, and clone a new body for you. Since these cells were never affected by the virus, your new body will be free of the disease."
"But all this is irrelevant if you can't pull me back."
"True," she admitted. "We're asking you to take a big risk. We've never tried doing this before; we can make no guarantees."
"What happens if you fail to pull me back?"
Amalarie allowed a long silence. "Only you will ever know the answer to that," she said at last.
He was falling into an infinite well of darkness. Only the glow of the instrument panel surrounded him. For Camarch's convenience it had been built in an Earthlike arrangement, though there were no doubt an infinite number of better designs.
They will attack you soon after you come out of warp. Be ready, but not afraid. We will be with you. Amalarie's voice in his mind brought back bittersweet memories. He kept trying to tell himself that the being communicating with him now was not Amalarie; that Amalarie lay asleep on a green liquid bed ten light-years away, but all his attempts failed. To him, the being in his mind was as much a part of Amalarie Rjuer as the original human personality. Perhaps more so.
The night ahead began to burn. On the control panel he flicked a small switch. Two things happened. First, he popped out of warp, and then the hull of the small starship became transparent. He was sitting alone in the void, diving toward the fire.
There were planets… burning like suns… and there were suns dying to shift energy to the planets.
The planets and suns joined, coalescing into a wall of flame parsecs long. And the wall moved toward a similar wall of darkness. Darkness flung across darkness. Light against that darkness.
It had begun.
And he had seen it all before. And thought it to be only part of a nightmare.
It was still a nightmare, but he could not awaken.
Camarch sought the help of his instrument panel to relocate the black sun. He found it. Two degrees adjustment. A hole among the stars.
Then his head seemed to implode and he saw nothing. Memories began to flee from him, sucked away by the great emptiness.
I am here, Amalarie said in his mind. She taught him to concentrate.
"Amalarie?" he asked, when the dark dreams faded.
I am not Amalarie now.
"Do you have a name?"
When I am happy I am Ashana. But others have the same name when they are happy. Names are not the same for us as they are for you.
"Then I'll call you Amalarie-Ashana."
You may call me what you wish.
A year passed. He saw it on the chrono. He was in normdrive at 0.91c, and there were few noticable relativistic effects at that speed.
To his right, a small sun went nova, and the radiations that streamed by distorted even his mindblock.
Five years. Behind him, the wall of light, ahead the darkness. Six months later he pierced it. The soft whisper of gentleness in his mind disappeared. So did everything but the darkness.
The deep darkness.
Amalarie-Ashana, where are you?
They were trying to pry apart his mind, infuse it with emptiness, suck it dry of all emotion and being.
Amalarie-Ashana?
He turned back toward where he thought the black sun should be, and fought the darkness alone.
His block held. Now and then, he felt the touch of the Alarri, and knew they were with him, but they could help him little now; it was his battle, and he had to hold off the Crixonans by himself.
The Alarri seemed to be winning. Even here, in the depths of Crixonan space, there were times when the darkness waned toward light around him, and he felt Amalarie-Ashana's mindtouch again.
He came upon a flickering sun and watched it split down the middle, long tentacles of its corona licking across the chasm between as the two orbs pulled away from each other.
He wondered if the Crixonans had figured out what he was supposed to do yet. He doubted if they had, because they had not made that great an attempt to stop him. Viewing him as any army would an intruder into their territory, they had merely tried to destroy him with whatever forces they could spare without influencing the course of the main battle. If they realized that he represented the primary attack, and the entire congregation of Alarri was merely a diversion, the Crixonans would modify their strategy.
But for now, they were essentially ignoring him, and he didn't mind that in the least.
"How far do you have to go?" a voice asked.
He turned and saw Amalarie standing behind him. "You've come back to me." He wanted to stand up and hug her, but always there was the panel. Always the dials and glimmers of shapes.
"I've come to help you."
Krison.
Go away.
"Let me take over for a while," she said.
No, Krison.
But why not? He needed the rest. It had been seven years since he slept. Besides, his mind seemed to be getting a little foggy. He was having trouble concentrating.
"Just tell me how to work the controls."
The darkness suddenly began to glow around the starship and he felt more conscious. The pressure on his mind lessened.
Krison, I'm Amalarie-Ashana. In your mind, not that body.
Camarch heard. The body heard. The universe heard, too, but only the body acted. A knife appeared and tasted blood in his left arm.
It's not real, he thought. The Crixonans are just making me experience this.
The knife struck again, deep into his abdomen. It hit something vital, and a sharp pain ran through to the middle of his back. He groped for the knife still in his stomach, pulled it out and used it. The ghost body of Amalarie began to bleed where he slashed the knife across its neck.
Finally it fell. He dragged it to the air lock, opened the inner door, pushed it across the threshold and closed the door again. Then he opened the outer door from the control panel. Whatever it was, was now gone.
He sat back down. For the first time in several years, going by the chrono, he felt that he was thinking clearly.
We are sorry, Krison.
"Why the hell didn't you foresee that happening, or at least help me when it did?" He stared down at his abdomen, and the pain he'd been blocking subconsciously began to make its presence known. Blood trickled from the wound, even with his hand over it.
We cannot predict what the Crixonans will do next. Nor can we see into the future beyond this time-point. The Crixonans have ways of blocking us, just as we have ways of blocking them.
"If you don't do something about my bleeding," Camarch said, "I'll be dead in a few minutes."
We can stop the bleeding.
Krison watched as tissue began to grow over the gash. Collagen fibers stretched across the defect, followed by epithelial cells and more connective tissue underneath. The scar finished, it began to shrink. A year of repair in less than five minutes. Camarch assumed that the same thing was happening inside, because the sharp back pain disappeared.
There is less than a year to go, Amalarie-Ashana told him. Then the darkness swirled in and he was alone again.
Two spheres ahead of him.
One spilled light across the void, the other swallowed much of that light. One was five and a half million kilometers of crimson, the other a mere 30 kilometers of theory and nothingness, felt but not seen, sensed by only a few of the thousands of instruments on Camarch's starship.
Two spheres.
One dying, the other giving birth to an impossibly bright child on the far side of a hole that had existed with clarity only in the minds of a handful of Earth's astrophysicists. Once trapped in the darkness; not even light could ever escape. Once the star had been a Class A supergiant, but after its collapse, it no longer even existed in this universe.
Camarch's starship was aimed directly at that darkness.
Gravity. The weakest of the physical forces, and yet the most powerful. A planet the size of the Earth could not prevent an insignificant ant, two millimeters long, from scurrying almost effortlessly across its surface, but this weak force ruled the universe, and in its purest, most concentrated form, was invincible. There was no purer source of gravity than a black hole.
A black hole consists of a singularity, the point at which pressure and density become infinite; a photon sphere, a narrow shell of photons that circles forever around the black hole unless it wavers inward or outward from its orbit; and an inner and outer event horizon. The outer event horizon was the point at which the escape velocity from the black hole became greater than the speed of light and thus marked the end of all communication with the outside universe. The inner event horizon existed only if the black hole were rotating and marked the limit beyond which it was impossible to avoid passing through the singularity. A non-rotating black hole had only one event horizon, the equivalent to both the inner and outer event horizons of a rotating hole. In such a situation travel to other universes was impossible, because every object had to pass through the singularity, which could not happen.
But black holes did rotate, and it was possible to pass between the outer and inner event horizons, thus avoiding the singularity, and therefore mathematically possible to travel through to other universes.
Perhaps, Camarch thought, it would be better if black holes did not rotate, for then the Crixonans would be condemned to spend all eternity trapped within the singularity, if they could exist in such an environment, something Camarch doubted. As things were, they had a chance to survive by passing on to another space and another time.
The goal was to somehow drag the Crixonans beyond the outer event horizon. Once that was accomplished, the black hole would do the rest. After all, the Crixonans, like the Alarri, were not quite pure energy. They possessed mass, and though on an individual basis that mass was extremely small, collectively it was considerable. Not that the quantity of mass mattered, for the black hole was as irresistible to the smallest particle as it was to the largest star.
Camarch consulted the chrono and the rest of his instruments. It was time.
His hands moved across the controls as they had been taught to do. Though nothing could completely ignore gravity, gravitational waves could be controlled just as electromagnetic waves could be controlled. The field the Alarri had built into Camarch's starship was capable of diverting some of the black hole's omni-directional power and intensifying it in the region of space that the Crixonans occupied.
A five-by-three parsec corner of space, filled with a darkness deeper than space itself, an emptiness the human brain could not imagine—that was what Camarch's field had to encompass. And that was the region it did encompass, if he could believe the instruments. Since the Alarri claimed that the instruments, indeed the entire starship, was perfect from a technical point of view, Camarch had no choice but to believe the readings he was being given.
The first step of his mission accomplished, he began the second. Slowly, ever so slowly, as the ship dipped ever closer to its source of power, he began to shrink the size of the field.
His instruments told him the Crixonans could not resist.
Camarch marveled at the power at his control. The plan was going flawlessly, thanks to the power of the ship he commanded.
He suddenly remembered what Amalarie-Ashana had told him before he left: that should the plan fail, it would not be because of the ship's weaknesses, for it had none—it could resist every physical force and attack the Crixonans could muster—but because of his weaknesses. The success of the mission depended upon whether or not he could block out the onslaught of the Crixonans' mental barrages. Of course, the Alarri would be occupying the attention of most of the Crixonans, but even so…
They had already tried several direct attacks, and one indirect, using a physical body which looked like Amalarie. What would they try next?
A shape appeared in the darkness ahead, and for the first time since Amalarie's body had attacked him, Camarch felt fear. The giant, dark shape that had haunted him six billion years ago haunted him now.
A small viewscreen to his right crackled with the announcement of an incoming message.
Hesitantly, he answered.
It could have been the same Crixonan on the screen he talked to on Uzoxes so long ago.
Amalarie-Ashana?
There was no reply to his mental query.
The faceless face on the screen stared at him. A cold, thin voice spoke across the few kilometers separating the two ships.
"You have trespassed into the territory of the Crixonan Empire. Retreat or you will be destroyed."
Camarch snapped off the screen, and the image of his dead crewmates lying on the ground on Uzoxes came back to him.
Amalarie-Ashana, he questioned again.
But still only the silence answered him. He was too deep within the being of the Crixonans; the Alarri could not penetrate here. He felt the emptiness lick at his mind, his soul, and wondered what it would be like to spend all eternity marooned in a universe with the Crixonans, perhaps only the Crixonans. Of course he was not immortal like they were; he would not live very long. He was a physical being; he would probably not even survive the transit through the black hole. And if he did, would this starship be able to function in a universe made of a different kind of matter and operating under a different set of physical laws?
Camarch continued to shrink the field. Now the Crixonans were compressed into a sphere half a parsec in diameter. Against his mindblock Camarch could feel the first whispers of uncertainty. There was no fear, because the Crixonans could not feel fear; there was not even the realization of impending defeat, because the Crixonans could not comprehend the concept of their own defeat. There was only uncertainty, as they struggled to understand what was happening to them.
The viewscreen snapped back on automatically.
"We have warned you," the voice threatened. "Turn around. It is your last chance."
Amalarie-Ashana? Where the hell are you? I need help.
In fury he smashed the viewscreen with his fist. Blood began to trickle out of several wounds, but he felt no pain.
The ship automatically began to decelerate, and he glanced at the control panel. 0.83c… 0.70c… 0.55c…
He felt only the barest tug on his body: yet he calculated that he was decelerating at close to four hundred thousand gees. It was incredible that the ship could stand the strain, even more incredible that it could protect him from being torn apart by forces beyond his comprehension.
0.23c… 0.10c… 0.05c…
The ship shivered slightly, and several instruments danced wildly. Something with the power of a small nova had rendezvoused with the starship. He glanced ahead. It took no viewscreen to see the dark shape hurtling toward him. Instinctively, he started to correct his course to avoid hitting the Crixonan ship, then realized that was exactly what the Crixonans wanted him to do.
He closed his eyes. The starship was supposed to be almost indestructible. He would soon find out.
Chaos assaulted him. Gone was the organized, methodical group mind of the Crixonans, replaced by a hundred billion individual fragments of darkness compressed into a distorted sphere approximately a billion kilometers in diameter and shrinking rapidly. Confusion conquered logic as they tried desperately to cope with something they could not begin to comprehend—their own defeat.
Camarch opened his eyes. The alien ship was gone. He had passed through it as though it did not exist. Perhaps it didn't.
0.001c… 200 kilometers per second… 100 kilometers per second…
A flash of light almost blinded him. He had passed through the photon sphere. Twelve kilometers to the outer event horizon. Twelve kilometers to victory. Twelve kilometers to his own death.
The ship was still decelerating, but he had at most two minutes.
He began to notice the irresistible pull of his unseen ally only a few kilometers ahead. He felt a surge of confidence. Victory was so near. Already the first of the Crixonans had penetrated the outer event horizon, but those that remained did not even seem to notice. Gone was the empty, dark intelligence of a race billions of years old; only a rudimentary, primeval flicker of sentience lingered on. A mad, utterly alien, chaos filled all the space around his starship, and Camarch's mindblock held only because the Crixonans no longer possessed the concentration to make a direct attack.
Space began to collapse, to twist and warp in on itself, ever approaching that point where all matter becomes infinitely heavy, and time is without meaning.
Still his mindblock held, but the starship did not fare as well. The transparent hull turned opaque and shook… cracks appeared above and below him.
He snapped shut the helmet of his pressure suit. Oxygen buzzed in.
The hull split into two hemispheres and began to drift apart. Camarch clung to the instrument panel, which still glowed in the darkness, the only light. Less than a kilometer to the event horizon.
Still shielded by whatever field the Alarri had built into his starship, he drifted on, but even as he watched…
The edge of the hemisphere he clung to started to dissolve…
Most of the Crixonans were gone… through the hole? Space was cleansing itself… chaos was fading…
The glow of the instrument panel ceased to exist....
Darkness… forever and forever. Mists of dark nebulae, streamers of black fire reaching across the vast distances, licking out to embrace and welcome the dark intruders from another time and space. Stars—or things that looked like stars… but were alive—crawled along the lattice of space to absorb the newcomers, to welcome back their brethren, thought to be forever lost…
A symphony played in his head, featuring loud trumpets and mellow horns.
He opened his eyes. The same green liquid bed, the same blank room, the same red sunlight splashing in his eyes. He arose without difficulty, renewed, more alert. His memory slowly began to return.
Somehow he had survived. Somehow the Alarri had pulled him back. He shivered, remembering his brief glimpse of the other universe, the utter, complete darkness just outside the event horizon.
He walked to the window. The red sun was not quite the same; it was brighter, clearer. Or was it that these new eyes—unburnt by more than 20 years in space—were keener and more sensitive to light? He tried out the rest of his new body. Everything moved just a little bit easier, a little more smoothly. He was surprised at the difference; he hadn't realized how much all those years in space had aged his body.
He felt movements in his mind.
You are awake.
"Yes," he said aloud.
You do not have to talk. Merely think your words; we will understand as long as your mindshield is down.
What happened, he asked.
It is over, and you are here.
And the Crixonans?
They are gone—to whatever universe will have them.
Camarch walked to the middle of the room. Streamers of black fire… things that looked like stars… but were alive. For the first time, the true meaning of what he had done penetrated the inner sanctum of his mind. Against all odds he had won. The Alarri had made the victory possible, but he had fought the final battle.
Your mindshield is unique. You are unique. We cannot begin to repay you for what you have done for us.
And what happens now, he asked.
You belong with your people, and I belong with mine.
My people are dead.
They are accessible through the time gate.
Where will I end up? In C'hah Lai?
Yes. Long before your race ceased to cower in caves, I built the timegates on Edgeworld and Uzoxes.
For me?
For you this world and the timegates were created, and for you they have survived. All else was expended in the battle.
Camarch went back to the window to stare out at the red sun and the desert. It seemed so distant, so vague, so dreamlike… a battle where planets died to make suns… a battle where the loser could not die… it seemed less real than the visions he'd experienced in C'hah Lai. Yet the battle had lasted for years, and now it was over.
And now that he had survived, what would he do? The civilization man had built was six billion years dead. Did he want to go back to it? What did his own people have to offer him?
A face appeared suddenly in his mind—the face of Amalarie Rjuer. But was the Amalarie Rjuer he knew human or Alarri?
Wispy fingers that belonged to no human hand reached deep into his mind and stirred up memories… a cold, black world… and the woman in his arms who made it warm… a clear, calm sea with waves lapping at his toes… and the same soft body in his arms… the same warm mind…
That Amalarie waits for you at the timegate. You loved me only through her, and what you love is still present in her. To remain here would be only loneliness for you. I can never again be what I was, for I am something you can never comprehend.
There was a shimmer in the air, and the building around him was gone. He was alone on the desert. The air was chill, and a wind blew in from the mountains. The silence was absolute. Not even the wind dared break the silence. Camarch closed his eyes. No, he was not quite alone. He could sense the presence of another entity around him. Not beside him or near him, just around him, part of the wind, the sand, the mountains, the red sun, the white dwarf… It was a warm life-force, but it was also distant, as eternal and distant as the stars. He had encountered this life-force before, and it had threatened to suck him down into an abyss from which he could never return. There was nothing human in its touch.
And suddenly he realized the truth. The gulf was too great.
Ashana?
My name is no longer Ashana, for once I was a woman and you were a man.
I will remember you as a woman.
That is the way it should be.
The red sun blinked. Darkness fell across the desert, then was gone. Camarch probed with his mind, found nothing. The sand, the wind, the mountains, the red sun, the white dwarf—all were empty of her presence. Amalarie-Ashana was no more.
Dust swirled as Camarch walked. In moments, the red sun began to slowly set behind the mountains, perhaps for the last time on this barren world. The night sky unveiled itself, just a few scattered patches of light from far-distant galaxies.
He glanced down, then for some reason, gazed back up at the sky. There was light where no light should have been, light that blazed and moved as if it were alive.
He stopped to watch it. The light rose from its position about 30 degrees above the horizon until it reached the zenith. Then it flickered once and was gone.
How wrong he had been to even consider staying here. He belonged with his own kind, in a time when the universe was younger. He belonged on worlds covered with green forests and grassy plains, not endless desert. He belonged with Amalarie Rjuer.
Camarch quickened his pace toward the timegate, to the woman waiting for him there, his lover and a stranger he had never met.