"I am determined to do this, so please do not keep trying to talk me out of it," Morok told them. "I am sick and tired of being pushed and shoved around by these forces, entirely at their mercy, while they mock us! It is time for us to take some initiative!"
"The demon prophesied to Modra that one of us would die before reaching the city," Krisha reminded him. "I do not wish that to be you, Holy Father."
He dismissed the threat. "For one thing, they lie. They are the source of lies. If they could actually foresee the future, this demon prince would have known in advance that one of us would free him, and who, and all of this mind-play would have been unnecessary. You must not listen to them. That is the first step to becoming theirs. They can make things happen, but only if you believe them first. I will not die wandering forever in this maze, or until the other two parties have already entered the city."
Krisha understood, and was forced to accept his logic, knowing, too, that Morok already considered it divine intervention that he was still alive at all at this point. She also understood that, if it were just the Mizlaplan in this place, without the others, Morok would have sacrificed them all so that none might enter the city and free the demons, even by accident. It was not, however, that simple. The others might reach it first, for one thing, or, even if some way could be found for everyone to die, it would mean only a short-term victory. On that the demon prince had been correct. There must be a virtual naval force around that world with the first station by now, and the best minds of the Exchange had to be poking and probing for a way in. A down-the-line order to ensnare more people within the station would not be difficult for the demon prince; sooner or later, the right one would come along. The only hope was to get down there and discover just what they were dealing with, and see if there was any sort of action possible for them to stave off what the demon prince considered inevitable.
"Child," Morok said to Krisha gently, "what can they do? Throw stones at me? I'll not go near the city; I merely want to get the lay of the land." He turned to the others. "The one problem is going to be that, whatever I see and learn, the others will learn as well," he reminded them. "If we get a route, you must move quickly."
The Stargin stretched his great wings, and, oddly, the action made him look less bird-like and more, well, classically angelic.
He looked around. "The air isn't still, but it is quiet," he told them. "The thermals are pretty well static. Still, I have flown under far worse conditions than this."
The body seemed somehow to sink into the ground as the legs contracted and muscles tensed like coiled springs. Then he let the tension go, wings at the ready, and launched himself into the air.
There was barely enough room to flap the wings, and for a moment they feared he wouldn't clear the top of the hedge, but then he was up, and, with effort, climbing. Morok always looked ungainly on the ground, but, in the air, he was a picture of grace and form.
Looking down, Morok was startled to see just how close the three groups were to one another, and to the city gates beyond, and, unable to block, he could see them all galvanizing into action as they received the images he was seeing. He tried to concentrate on just a routing for his own people; then, when he was certain Krisha, at least, had the picture in her mind, he turned his attention to the city.
It is almost like the vision, he thought, amazed. The maze had several possible ways to get to the gates, but they all ended up in one exit, flanked by two enormous, bestial idols. Beyond, the grass ended, and there was instead a road made of the same material as was used in the interior of the stations, going downward in a broad spiral for about two kilometers, passing eventually behind the city before emerging again on the other side to what appeared to be a broad avenue, the main thoroughfare, of the city itself.
Unlike the vision, the spiral had a milky coloration, and meter-high side walls, and would not be the dizzying approach they'd feared it might be.
The city itself appeared even greater than he'd expected. It contained the spiral structure, but was built so that the buildings intersected multiple levels of the great spiral organization. The architecture had some of that melted look of the station interiors, but the buildings, the streets, everything flowed with soft colors—reds, blues, greens, yellows, purples—and came together to create a soft, three-dimensional pastel. It was difficult to believe that so vile a race could create something this beautiful.
The spiral, however, was not circular, but rather had a distinct oval shape. On one side of the central region rose the pyramid of earlier visions, a soft golden color, looking perfect and seamless, as it arose from what had to be the base of the city far below to tower over even the tallest other structure, dominating everything. The rest of the spiral center was hard to see at an angle, but appeared a black nothingness.
The entire city seemed suspended in space, built atop some glassy disk-like foundation that itself appeared to rest on nothing at all. He could see, too, that the sky did indeed seem to be some sort of transparent barrier, or, possibly, a projection, which grew lower as it passed over the city and ended somewhere beyond.
Chaos Keep, the demon had called the place. At the center and the edge of the universe.
He had flown before only in the mist and pouring rain of what they all thought of as the wet world; this was the first time where he had some time and good visibility, and he made the most of it.
This place was vast, but with the sky barrier clear he could see that it did not have an infinite horizon. The hills preceding the maze went on for some distance, then just seemed to abruptly stop, as if they, too, were hitting some sort of wall or barrier, and he had the distinct impression that the "sky" curved slightly and angled down to the left and right of the city.
The captain had been correct; these were not worlds. Rather, they were enormous rooms, or compartments, hundreds of kilometers across, designed and maintained to look like worlds. That was why there had been no variations, no day or night. The waterfall on the wet world probably recirculated all that water, in a constant cycle.
That implied that, far from traveling great distances, they had been inside some greater structure all along, the stations less transporters than hatches, like airlocks, separating one compartment from another and isolating their biospheres.
Almost like a spaceship. Some impossibly huge spaceship, traveling—where? The multiple stations in the realm where that demon horde was kept, sealed away, implied many, many more compartments than the ones they had come through. At the very least, such a ship would be the size of a small planet.
Maybe it was a planet, Morok suddenly thought, startled. Hollowed out, perhaps completely artificial. The implications of that almost made him start to fall. If the stations were mere airlocks, and this was merely another level of a planetary interior, then they might not have gone anywhere at all. They might well just have been descending, level by level, into the interior of the world upon which they had first landed!
He wished he could discuss that thought with Captain Chin, particularly because he was proud of having seen it and come up with it first, but the captain, who could not overhear his thoughts, was far too busy following and trying to keep up with Krisha and Manya, madly darting toward the maze exit.
<Have caution, children!> he called to them. <Right at the exit are the two huge idols and I have no idea how you get between them! The Exchange group is only seconds behind you on your right, and the Mycohl are converging, perhaps two or three minutes because of additional obstacles!>
They actually saw the much-anticipated exit, and Gun Roh Chin almost ran over Manya when she and Krisha both stopped suddenly.
"Oof! Sorry—what's the matter?"
Manya pointed to the exit. "If you look carefully you can see them," she told him. "They are slightly higher than the hedge, on both sides of it, and I am not certain if there is any room to get between."
Krisha shook her head. "It's a road block, all right, and an effective one. I—" She stopped, as Modra, Jimmy, and Molly rounded the next-to-last corner and came toward them, stopping about six meters to the other side of the exit.
They knew Modra, and she knew them, but this was the first time the Mizlaplanians had really seen Jimmy and particularly Molly except in subjective mind-pictures, and it was the first the Exchange pair had similarly looked on the Mizlaplanians.
They all heard noise in the row just behind them, and Jimmy said, "Well, that'd be the Mycohlians, I suppose. After all this, it's a bloody tie!"
Gun Roh Chin angled so he could see at least one of the huge guardians of the bridge to the city. "Any way of dealing with them?" he asked hopefully.
"If you can figure a way past the dog-faced twins, I'll go halves with you," McCray responded.
"I meant the idols." He paused, surprise sinking in. "You know Mizlaplanian?"
"I do now," the telepath responded. "After days of monitoring your bloody thoughts and having comparative translations, I think I've got it back pretty well. Been a long time since I used it, though. Couldn't make heads or tails of it when we started out. A reading and working knowledge isn't the same as actually getting it in the conversation."
Chin just nodded and gestured to the exit. "Any ideas?"
McCray shot a quick query to the guardians of the gate, and got back a very powerful, <None shall pass.> "Well, they're rather predictable, anyway," he commented.
<Any way to change your minds?>he asked hopefully. <I believe we are expected in there.>
<What the Quintara wish is no concern of ours. We demand tribute in our own right.>
"Ah! Tribute. So it's really a toll gate, is it? Terribly sorry, old boys. I seem to have left my other pants in my other pants."
At that moment the Mycohl team appeared behind the Exchange, emerging from the same gap as they had come from. Modra took one look at Kalia's ugly, burned left side and couldn't suppress a small gasp. Telepathy was indeed a subjective art. As for Josef, she hadn't ever seen a man with a body that hairy. He was a much bigger man than either of them had thought, too, and while Jimmy's beard was still stubble, Josef's was already black and added to his mean, arrogant look. Tobrush, in fact, looked the most like they expected.
It was a mark of male ego that both Jimmy and Gun Roh Chin, who'd had little self-consciousness up to that point, felt somewhat embarrassed at the sight of the size of Josef's private parts. There was certainly something to be said for clothes. Jimmy's reaction, received empathically by the three Terran women in all the parties, caused a fleeting moment of amusement.
Realizing that there was more of a language barrier with this group than with the Mizzies, Jimmy sent, <Might as well join the party. If you feel like fighting it out, we can do that later, after we figure out this nasty little problem.>
Josef nodded and approached them, somewhat surprised to discover that the two other Terran males were both much smaller men than he'd thought. Somehow the telepathic images he'd been getting from the others had Jimmy subjectively more his size and Chin a virtual giant. Josef was a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters high and weighed, at least before his forced march on short rations, around a hundred and three kilos; McCray was at best a hundred and seventy high and probably weighed no more than fifty-eight or -nine. And Chin, the now legendary Captain Chin, was only about as tall as Kalia's one sixty-two, although he was chunky. Krisha, though, was about as tall as McCray, and Modra Stryke even taller.
It drove home how subjective and deceptive holographic telepathy really was.
McCray was immediately on with the other two telepaths.
<Perhaps a partial, controlled merge, if everyone cooperates,> Jimmy suggested. <There's nine of us against two of them.>
<Nine—oh, that's right,> Tobrush came back. <I forgot that the old praying fool is up there floating around somewhere.>
Manya felt a tremendous hatred strike her and looked up, startled. Kalia was staring at her hard, with daggers in her eyes. Modra caught the full force of it, standing between them, and got the mental picture of the reason.
"Jimmy, we're never going to work together," Modra told him. "And while I know nothing about what you're proposing, a lifelong empath gets to know about people in pressure situations pretty well."
<She is correct,> Morok sent from above them, where he'd been circling. He was beginning to tire, as the relative uniformity of the air made him constantly flap and work hard to keep aloft, and had been thinking of coming down. <The idols, however, appear to work in unison, as if they were really just two outlets for the same entity. Perhaps they could be diverted, though, long enough for everyone to run through.>
<What kind of diversion do you have in mind?>Jimmy asked him.
<No, Holy Father!>Krisha mentally screamed at him. <It is too dangerous! You will die, and if it does not work we still will not get through!>
Morok thought a moment. <Perhaps if I fly over the last hedge and get on the other side of them,>he suggested. <That alone would divide their attention and frustrate them. Don't worry—I'll cross well down and away from them.>
<It's your funeral,> Jimmy replied, unsure of just what effect that would have on the rest of them, if, indeed, it had any effect at all.
Morok admitted the point, but noted, <Well, at least it's something. We can't just keep standing here.>
Modra suddenly remembered something the demon prince had said to her the night before and cried, "No!" but if Morok heard, even telepathically, he was oblivious to it.
They saw his long, lean, graceful figure off in the distance, a good thirty or forty feet beyond the exit, turn and head out over the last hedgerow. As soon as he cleared it, he seemed to contact a heretofore invisible wall of black energy much like a protective force field. As his body contacted it, it was enveloped in crackling energy and there was a sudden bright flash—and the scene was normal again: no force field, and no Morok.
Krisha screamed, and Gun Roh Chin went to her to calm her down, although he was quite shaken himself. Modra just sighed and shook her head sadly.
"One will die before reaching the city...."
Manya said the Prayer for the Dead, but, as she finished and made the ritual signs in the air, she thought, He never would listen to anybody.
Suddenly all who could hear it heard in their minds the booming voice of the entity from the idols: <The sacrifice is adequate and acceptable. You may pass.>
That almost started Krisha back into angry hysterics, causing the captain to again try to calm and comfort her.
Modra raised her eyebrows and looked at Jimmy, then at the Mycohlians. "Think we can trust them?"
"Well, you're the empathy expert," McCray responded.
She nodded. "Somehow, I think they are stating a fact. On the other hand, I don't think we should wait around until they change their mind, either."
Kalia said, "What the fuck. You're all a bunch of cowardly assholes," walked through the Exchange trio and through the exit. When nothing happened, the rest of them on that side wasted no time in following her.
"Come," the captain said gently. "He paid a high price for us. Let's not waste it."
Krisha shook off her tears, nodded, and the Mizlaplanians, too, walked through and finally exited the maze, and, for the first time, had a clear view of the city.
For Chin, it was his first view of it of any sort, and he was impressed. "The capital," he muttered, "and almost certainly the control room."
Krisha looked at him red-eyed and said, "Morok—Morok said that these weren't worlds but compartments, like in a huge spaceship. Just before the end, he theorized that we weren't anywhere far from where we came in, that this was the hollowed-out interior of the world upon which we landed."
He nodded. "I thought of that as well, but, even if it's true, this is more than merely a planet-sized spaceship or artificial prison colony. Much more."
Jimmy McCray, hearing the conversation, tore his gaze reluctantly from the view of the pastel city and walked over to Chin. "I've been hearing a lot about you, Captain. All secondhand until now, though."
Chin looked at Krisha, who nodded. "I'm all right now," she assured him, and walked over to join the rest of them, standing at the beginning of the spiral bridge down to the city, just staring.
"Everything I've been getting is secondhand, McCray, but we've met before. You were just a bit out of it then."
"I owe you my life," Jimmy told him sincerely. "It's nice to say thanks in person for that."
"I hope you would have done the same for me," the Mizlaplanian said. "In fact, I'm almost certain you would have."
Jimmy shrugged. "Let's just hope you won't have to do it again, or find out what I'd do. I've learned a lot from eavesdropping on your conversations, in a manner of speaking, through the Gnoll, there—tough as it is at times. That's a mighty weird mind there. On the other hand, you and I have a number of things in common, not the least of which is a serious problem. You know, I suppose, that the girl, there, worships the ground you walk on."
"I didn't think it was quite that strong," the captain demurred, embarrassed now that his problems were so public.
"We Terrans can pick the damnedest messes to get into. She worships you, but she's the church and you're the congregation. I assume that sometime when Modra was with your group you were told of her own problems?"
He nodded. "Yes, Krisha told me. As terrible as our own situation may be, I think I prefer it to Modra's past. You have a similar situation to mine in your own past?"
Jimmy nodded. "If anything, more complicated. I wound up having to get far away from anything that even reminded me of home, changed careers, and got in an even worse mess with the damnedest little parasitic—ah, symbiotic—creature you ever knew. And sweet little Molly, there, whom I married to keep her from being destroyed—she was born in either a factory or a bottle, I'm not sure which—hasn't been able to have me yet, nor I her."
"Do you want to?"
"I did, once—more than anything in the world. Now—I'm not at all certain. What I really want, I think, is beyond me, beyond anything, and, considerin' all this, probably the last thing I could have. Still and all, there's a lot of losers and unhappy folks in this."
The captain nodded. "And has it escaped your notice that now we are nine, and six of us are Terran?"
McCray frowned. "You know, you're right! I never much thought about it."
"Terrans are survivors. We do everything wrong and we wallow in the low places, yet we survive. As a race, we survive, and adapt, and we either outbreed or, as a group, outlive everyone who oppresses us except, of course, ourselves."
"I wonder if that's all there is to it," Jimmy McCray sighed, turning back to look at the city. "That lot of Quintara have had a passing acquaintance with maybe seventy percent of the known races, but we Terrans and they know each other much, much better than that. We're old companions, for some reason. Now that you've pointed it out to me, I don't think the predominance of Terrans at this point is anything like an accident or our race's ability to breed like grass or our ability to survive and endure. All the races are survivors; otherwise they wouldn't be where they are. No, I think the Quintara wanted it this way. Not, perhaps, because we're so special, but because they know us so well." He sighed. "I think we had better join the others. I believe they're going down into the city."
Gun Roh Chin nodded. "Somehow, I wish Manya and that girl she burned would just have it out up here and be done with it. It's going to happen sooner or later, and I most strongly feel that, whatever is down there, if we don't learn to put aside all our differences, every little bit, and work together as a team, we're done for."
Jimmy McCray returned the nod. "It appears that we have a long walk yet, Captain. Perhaps it's time we compared some of our notes."
The bridge was chilly; they hadn't expected that, and it added to their discomfort. It was a walk of several kilometers down to the floating city of lights, and they hoped it might be warmer there.
It was thought best to keep Kalia and Manya separate, and the Mycohl weren't too social anyway. It was Chin who suggested that Kalia take the lead, with Josef and Tobrush in back of her, acting as a sort of buffer; then came Jimmy and the captain, with Modra, Krisha, Molly, and Manya at the rear.
Krisha was somewhat taken aback when she polled Modra's thoughts and feelings and discovered that, in a way, the independent Exchange woman actually envied the priestess. To Modra, who believed she'd made such a mess of her own personal life, it seemed idyllic that Krisha was in a position to use her intelligence and authority without the complications of the physical. To Modra, the clerical position seemed an enviable barrier, where you could help people and reach your own potential without complicating or ruining yours or another's life; to Krisha, it was a duty that prevented happiness. Modra might have chosen wrongly, but she always had choices and what happened was entirely due to her own decisions. Modra at this point was afraid of choices; Krisha really hadn't faced a choice since she was sixteen years old.
In truth, each had an unrealistic and idealized view of the other's situation, but the irony wasn't lost on Krisha. Both of us want to swap places, she thought with a wry smile.
When they reached the mid-point on the spiral bridge, all of them automatically stopped. This was the place that most had met the demon prince in their visions, and they half expected him to still be here, but there was nothing. Modra, however, looked down at the next level, even though she knew it was foolish, almost as if she expected to see Tris and Hama the Durquist standing there.
Krisha caught the thought. "They were illusions," she assured Modra. "The demons are very good at illusions, at picking from your mind just what you think you want and offering it to you, and also picking from your mind that which frightens you the most and threatening you with it."
"You're the priestess and you don't believe that the demons get the souls of the dead?"
It was a very strange feeling for Modra. They were speaking vastly different languages, yet, with the telepathic link, and the time when they had been in such close proximity in the maze, each could understand the other.
"If you're asking if I believe in the possibility of damnation, the answer is yes. If you're asking if I believe that this is truly Hell and that the Quintara are supernatural in the theological sense, I'd have to say no. It really seems to me now that the demons, because of their natures, got mixed up with pure theology somewhere in the distant past—maybe deliberately so. They play their part well and seem to enjoy doing it, but what are we seeing, really? A race with incredibly strong multiple talents, that's all. Talents they got by being in, or in close proximity to, the other plane, just as interstellar travel did it for some of our ancestors and probably still is doing it. What have we really seen, though? Telepathy, empathy, and, like your ghosts, hypno abilities, much more powerful than ours but still recognizable."
"And prognostication," Modra added. "The demon said that one would die before entering the city. And another would die there, too."
"I'm not sure that's prognostication. They know us pretty well by now. From his personality and nature, it wouldn't be a stretch to bet pretty heavily that Morok would attempt to fly over the maze. Nor do you need to be an expert telepathic psychologist to know that Manya and Kalia can't be kept apart forever. To say it will come to a head in the city is something I would feel comfortable predicting as well. There doesn't seem to be anyplace else to go."
Modra shivered. "It's bad enough being so—exposed, like this, without it also getting colder."
"Yes, I know," Krisha agreed. "On the other hand, it makes it far less likely that anyone would try anything with us."
Although Krisha, like the other born telepaths, had reverted to blocking her own thoughts, there was no question in anyone's mind who she was referring to.
<Do not flatter yourself,> Josef snapped curtly.
In truth, unable to block his thoughts, Josef had been feeling somewhat lustful toward them, but, to Krisha's surprise and relief, the Mycohl officer also had far more of a sense of personal honor, at least in this situation, than they would have suspected in anyone raised in a system where ruthlessness was necessary to rise to any leadership position. Still, the two women had no illusions of what treatment they might get were they in Josef's own element.
In fact, it was increasingly difficult for Krisha to reconcile Josef with what she had been taught: that unrestrained natural hypnos, particularly of the Mycohl, were in fact demonically possessed. Instead, stripping away the brutish and cynical veneer, and imagining that Josef had been raised in a different system, it was not impossible to think that Josef might even have been likeable, or at least worthy of respect.
They had come a long way in a fairly short time, and were now approaching the city itself. It was no less beautiful looking close up than from afar, although infinitely more confusing, as most cities are.
"No windows," Gun Roh Chin commented.
"Eh?" Jimmy McCray turned to him, puzzled.
"There are no windows in any of the buildings, some of which are thirty or more stories high. No sharp corners, either—everything's rounded a bit. It is an interesting design and layout; certainly the best use of that plasticine material they use on everything we've encountered to date. How many people would you say a city of that size once supported?"
Jimmy shrugged. "I couldn't guess. I never was much good at that sort of thing. Certainly it's bigger than it looked from afar. Still and all, with the tall buildings and such, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a half million or more."
"A good enough guess. Yet that Quintara prince told one of you, I believe, that there were two hundred million Quintara. Even allowing for many more repositories like the one I think we all passed through, that's a lot of demons unaccounted for. I wonder, too, how they got around in there. There doesn't seem to be any sign of a transit system, moving walkways, or anything else."
Jimmy snapped his fingers. "Yes! I'd almost forgotten! Something the purple prince told Modra about there being two hundred million 'in this sector.' I don't want the implications of that last comment—two hundred million of these babes is more than enough. But that figure... of course! The two hundred thousand thousand demon warriors! And the four angels—the demon princes! It all fits!"
The others, hearing him, all stopped and turned to him, puzzled. "What are you going on about, Jimmy?" Modra asked him.
"Revelations nine. Oh, yes—Christian. None of the rest of you would have heard of it. Let's see how good my memory is....
"'It spoke to the sixth angel which had the trumpet and said, "Let loose the four angels that are in chains at the great river Euphrates"; and the four angels were released to destroy a third of mankind. And the number of the troops of their cavalry were two hundred million.'"
"What's that you quoted, McCray?" Gun Roh Chin asked him.
"A passage from a holy book of what was once one of the great Terran religions, now pretty well relegated to a few obscure worlds and subcultures like mine. It is a prophetic, mystical book telling in symbols and mysticism of how God was to end the world. It's been reinterpreted into meaninglessness after we went interstellar, or relegated to the quaint and apocryphal, by most surviving branches of the Church at this point, but there it is. Demons are supposedly fallen angels—angels who rebelled—and that prince said that it was rebellion they were after."
<Ethnocentrism,>Tobrush commented dryly. <Every race and culture that develops a religion has it. The largest religion on my ancestral world said the Julki were the center and foremost parts of creation, and that we'd inherit the universe if we didn't fall into slavery and sell our souls to bipedal creatures. Come to think of it, I shouldn't even be in this company.>
"Hold it Jimmy!" Modra put in. "Are you saying that some obscure book from some ancient Terran religion has anything to do with this? It's coincidence."
"Is it, now?" he mused. "The Tigris and Euphrates were two rivers that came together in a region on Mother Earth, and became the cradle for the first civilizations."
"Some of them," Gun Roh Chin reminded him.
Jimmy shrugged. "Be that as it may, it's where three of the great religions that swept through much of Mother Earth began in common roots—and, not coincidentally, the three that have nearly identical demon mythologies. Suppose, just suppose, down there, buried in the silt and muck of the river bottom, is a Quintara station. Suppose Saint John the Divine, the fellow who wrote that, was sensitive—some sort of undeveloped talent. He himself said he got it all from very realistic visions while hidden away in exile on an isolated island, praying and fasting."
The captain nodded. "I think you might just have something there, although it's a flimsy thread to hang it all on. He would be a man suffering for his faith and so deeply rooted in it, and he would also be a man of his times, so he'd interpret and guide what he saw according to those lights."
Modra was nearly as much a believer. "First ancient poets, then visions from even more ancient fanatics from outdated religions. McCray, where do you get all this stuff."
"Because I was a priest of that ancient and outdated religion," he replied. "Still am, according to their lights, although excommunicated, my soul damned to Hell, and forbidden to receive or deliver the sacraments. At least one son of New Erin from each large family was to be a priest, and at least one daughter a nun."
"You were a what?"
"He said he was a priest of a false god," Manya snapped. "And now he is made to suffer for it!"
<Manya!> Krisha shot back. <Were we not taught to respect the priests of all native races?>
"Well, as to who's true and false, it's getting harder to tell," Jimmy replied. "So far, some of my side interests in my study of the faith have proven pretty handy here. So much so, I'm beginnin' to doubt my lack of faith as much as I once doubted my faith. If there are four demon princes locked away somewhere down there, I'm going to have a mighty hard time."
<Should I respect Mycohlian sacrificial rites?>
"I am not certain that one connects in a theological sense with the other," the captain noted, oblivious to the side debate he couldn't hear. "However, I think your knowledge might be more valuable than it appeared."
<You needn't worry, you old bitch!> Kalia shot back. <No god would ever want you as a sacrifice!>
Modra looked first at Krisha, and then over at Josef, and no telepathy or talents of any kind were required for the message.
<Stop this now!> Josef sent as strongly as he could. <Or the rest of us will throw you both over the bridge wall here and you can fall and call each other names for all eternity!>
Jimmy heard it as well and decided it was time to break the tension. "Well, I'm freezing just standing here," he said. "The sooner we get down there and maybe inside someplace warm, I hope, the better."
They started on again, and Modra slipped back a little to talk to Jimmy one-on-one, as she still preferred to do.
"You were really a priest? Like those two and Morok?"
"Something like them," he admitted, "yes. The Irish was Old Order, too, perhaps the last surviving rite of that type. Celibacy, no women priests, even an Office of the Inquisition, although it was mostly to ensure the purity of the faith on the home world."
"No women? But I thought you said something about women priests."
"No, those are nuns. All the same limits, but they're a rung below, forbidden to actually give the sacraments."
"Why'd you leave it?"
He sighed. "Partly it was their fault. I got over-educated. It gets very hard to keep the Old Order faith after you've seen other worlds, other races, and studied other religions. In our case, a strict adherence to the Old Order was a part of preserving our culture."
"There were other branches, then, who were looser?"
"Elsewhere in the Exchange, yes. But I was young and ambitious and on the fast track, and while I could have left to go to a liberal parish and lived as a simple parish priest, if you wanted the bishop's track to a leadership position, you'd have to go into a monastic order there and keep the old restrictions."
"And you kept them?"
"For quite a while, yes. I was a damned good priest. And, because I was also a damned good telepath, I learned how to seal off bits and pieces of my mind and activities. Still, since priests confessed their sins daily to superiors, and the confessors were always talents, there was no way to hide things forever. Every once in a great while you'd get a hypno who'd really clean you out. Still, they were so busy they didn't have time to go deep, and I got to keep some of my dirty little secrets. Most particularly, the fact that I'd fallen head over heels for Sister Mary Brigit, a nun and local nurse for whom I was confessor. She hadn't wanted to be a nun any more than I wanted to be a priest, but the pressures family and Church can put on you when you're young are enormous. We'd meet and spend a lot of time together, go on picnics or long drives in the country, but we never touched each other, as much as we wanted to. I was the only telepath around, and she was an empath who could hide it from other empaths, but it was a real strain. She finally couldn't stand it, and asked for release from her vows, even though a nun who quits is regarded socially on my old home, sweet home, as a harlot and whore even if she's perfectly prim and proper. The plan was, if she could, then I would, too, and we'd work enough to scrape up enough money to leave and find a place somewhere in the Exchange where it wouldn't matter what we'd been."
"What's wrong with that?"
"Well, it's allowed, in some exceptional circumstances, but it's not really allowed in the Old Order. They told her they had to send her off for a time so they could determine that it was a real special case and all that, and, of course, to change her surroundings—make sure she really wanted to do it. The place proved to be the sort set up to change people's minds. Brainwashing is the old term for it. All the staff were fanatics, all hypnos, telepaths, and strong broadcast empaths, together with all the psychochemistry we'd not dreamed existed in our rural little parish, all determined to save her soul. They took a hundred days—a hundred days in which I heard nothing of her, and I was beginning to feel I'd never see her again when she returned. Or, at least, her sweet body did. She no longer had any physical desires for any living man; she didn't even think men were particularly attractive or interesting and couldn't figure out why she ever had. The Lord was the only man in her life now, and He was quite enough for her. When she looked at me she saw only the priest, not the man. I thought she'd been hypnoed or something, or that it would wear off. I waited it out almost a year before I realized it was permanent. At first I was crushed, then I got scared. If they could do that to her, they could do it to me, and she doubtless told them about me. Otherwise, why send her back to me at all? She wasn't just an example—she was a warning."
"How awful!"
"I applied to a remote monastery on a distant world the Church owned for that purpose, and was, not surprisingly, quickly accepted. I got on the ship to go there, but I never made the connecting flight. And there I was, the most naïve twenty-nine-year-old virgin, a student of ancient Terran classics and languages, comparative religion, and with the only possibly useful degree, one in psychology, I couldn't prove because it was from a Church university. I was also penniless, and stuck on a world populated by three-meter-tall bright green centauroids whose major export was a kind of super-fertilizer and whose minds and thought processes were so alien to me that I never really got beyond the basics. Even the ticket proved void because I'd already used part of it and it was a dedicated ticket."
"What did you do?"
"Anything I had to to survive. We'll not go into all the things I had to do, but it was the first step in what seemed like God punishing me. Finally I managed a job at the spaceport because of my knack of picking up languages and my fluency in exchange standard. I used to hang out with the spacers, and finally one of 'em that was shorthanded took me on for a while, until I got my training and initial papers. Even so, it was five bloody years before I even saw another Terran, except briefly, in terminals, and usually in passing. I was, however, just beginning to feel like I was independent and things might be turnin' when we had that little mission and I got Grysta on me back. The crew kept me on out of sympathy, but then we had a series of disasters and finally lost a crewmember who gave his life to save mine, and I got the Jonah tag and got dumped on the capital, where I was languishing until you came along. And now you know it all."
"Hold it, Jimmy," Modra said, trying to get it all straight. "You mean to tell me—how old are you?"
"Forty-one now, as it says on my papers."
"You're forty-one, seven or eight years a spacer, and you're still a virgin?"
He coughed nervously, a bit embarrassed. "Grysta didn't allow competition, and if you don't count her—and she could stimulate areas unbelievably—then yes, I never had the opportunity, although, Lord knows, I wanted it enough."
"Poor Jimmy!" she sighed. "And now you're walking naked into hell itself, or, at least, a reasonable facsimile of it."
"Yes. If I'm still doing penance, at least there's one thing—God's still got His eye on me. So, if He's really up there, someplace, he knows about this one now."
He'd ignored his beliefs, even convinced himself that he'd cast them out, but even before this he had begun to realize that he hadn't, really. It was still there, deep down, somewhere inside him. He'd finally confronted that when, facing down the first demonic pair, he'd fallen not only back into belief, but into being a Catholic and a priest as well.
Now, although he knew intellectually that it was just a mixture of ego and hope with his old self and nature, he really began to wonder if in fact this wasn't all a part of some divine plan. That, somehow, he was meant to be here, that everything up to this point had been in preparation for this. In a sense, he fervently hoped so; it would give some meaning to his life.
"Look! There's a shortcut in!" Kalia called excitedly. "We won't have to walk all the way around this fucking place to get in!"
In fact, now that they'd passed into the area that had been concealed from view on the immediate descent, they saw that there were several cuts and ramps leading straight into the city on various levels.
"Shall we take it in?" Jimmy asked them.
"I'd take the next one, even though it's another five hundred meters," Gun Roh Chin advised. "it's only logical that anybody coming in this way would take the first exit, and the Quintara have designed a good deal of this trap on what rational folk would logically do."
<A good point,> Josef agreed. <We, at least, will go a bit further.>
"At this point, I don't think we ought to separate," Jimmy agreed.
<I say go in now!> Manya put in. <We meet them head-on, as always! Besides, it will separate us from that scum in front!>
Krisha shook her head and said, "Manya, go by yourself if you wish, but the captain and I will stay with the others at this point."
Manya seriously considered it for a moment, but pragmatism and prudence won out. She would go with her people, even if she thought them wrong.
Crossing the bridge and into the city itself did not improve the temperature a bit, but at least it didn't get any colder, at least not in the physical sense. On the other hand, the city had a feeling of isolation and desertion that went through all of them, even Gun Roh Chin.
They stared down an empty, deserted street, feeling dwarfed by the great buildings rising on all sides, and they never felt so alone.
"Makes you long just for a piece of trash," Jimmy McCray noted. "I keep expecting somebody to pop out of one of the side streets and shout, 'Boo!'"
"If they do, my life may depend on the ability of someone here to do cardiac resuscitation," the captain responded. "I'm somewhat used to great interior spaces, but this dwarfs any freighter hold."
<There are no marks at all on the streets,> Tobrush noted. <Everything, from the street surfaces to the walls, is polished smooth as glass. We reflect all around. I wish I had something hard; it would be interesting to see if one could even make a decent mark in it.>
<Why not try some acids?>Josef suggested. <You can synthesize them and then excrete them through your tendrils, can you not?>
<A fascinating idea. Let me see.>A small group of wiry tentacles emerged from its back and deposited droplets of varicolored liquids on the side of the street. They hissed for a moment, then seemed to be absorbed by the material as if it were a sponge, leaving only tiny, dull blotches where the acids were placed. As they watched, even the blotches seemed to slowly fade out, until, after a minute or so, it was as if nothing at all had ever been there.
"That explains the condition of the place," Josef noted. "I've never seen anything like this stuff. I wonder what the hell it's made of?"
Chin didn't quite follow the comment in the Mycohlian language, but he'd watched the demonstration and had the general idea. "I'm certain that we'd probably surprise any chemist who analyzed it," he commented. "I would bet that your Exchange researchers found it to be fairly common in its chemical composition, but bonded in a way they couldn't replicate, because they can't detect or measure all of the ingredients."
"What do you think it is, then, Captain?" Krisha asked him.
"Only a guess, but I would not be surprised if it was made by the Quintara themselves," he told her. "Just as the idols were a bridge to a whole new set of physical laws, I think this might be as well."
"You mean the whole city's like one of those idols?" Modra asked nervously. "And we're standing on it and surrounded by it?"
He smiled. "I don't think you need worry about being sucked in yourself, if that's what is concerning you," he assured her, hoping he was right. "I think some additional geometry is necessary for that. However, I would certainly be cautious about crossing any designs you might see etched in this material. No, we use the differing physical properties in space flight, since in the other medium the speed of light is quite a bit more accommodating. I think the Quintara went a step further. I think they learned how to harness that potential power that operates by such different rules over there and bleed it in a controlled fashion into our plane. The result can be one of those obscene idols, allowing what intelligences are there to also bleed through, or more pragmatic, such as allowing some of it to congeal and convert to this material, maintaining a sufficient energy link to allow it to be self-maintaining."
"How could you possibly guess that just from looking at it?" Jimmy wanted to know. He liked the captain, but was very skeptical of such a null coming out with such sweeping theories on all of this.
"It's not as arcane as it sounds," Chin replied. "We use a very primitive variation of it ourselves every time we tap into that other universe by accelerating a spacecraft. The spacecraft itself would be absorbed, turned to energy, were it not coated before dropping into that plane. The coating is created in what we call the 'submerge,' and dissipates when we slow to allowable speeds in our own plane. I'm not exactly guessing, McCray. I'm simply adding up two and two."
"I never knew that," Modra commented, and heard from the others' thoughts that nobody else had, either.
"The difference between operating a light switch and being an electrician is vast," Chin noted. "Some of you know how to operate ships, but none of you knows or understands how it works. An interstellar master must. I had a lot of trouble with it myself at the Merchant Marine Academy, as you might call it, since a lot of this we know how to do but we do not know why or how it works. Like most great inventions, it tends to just about always be discovered by accident by people looking for something else entirely. Unlike those inventions, we've never gotten from using it to fully understanding it. That said, I don't believe anyone, anywhere, ever suggested such matter could be stabilized on our plane, let alone that you could build with it. Whoever built this knows how it works."
Jimmy whistled, impressed. "Well, there's the grand prize," he commented dryly. "All the riches you could ever dream of, and it's all around us. Just find out how it's done and then figure out how to get it and us back, and found a company. No transportation, no maintenance, no labor crews. Instant roads that never wear out; instant housing for all the teeming masses. It's certainly a crock of gold as big as we thought coming in."
"Oh, it is much, much more than that, McCray," Gun Roh Chin said. "Limitless energy to usable matter is only one side of the thing. What if you could do it both ways?"
"Eh? Sounds like you're talking another ultimate weapon."
"Oh, that, certainly, but that's hardly worth thinking about. I've kept mulling over the problem of how those big crystals got from the interior to the exterior of that cave—and how those great rocks they poured there got to the various levels or compartments or worlds or whatever they are. Not through the route we took, certainly. I think they used the stations to convert the material to energy, then took it on the other plane to where they wanted it to be and re-formed it there. If what everyone tells me about the other plane is correct, energy has form and substance of some sort there. It is probably somewhat tricky, though—to push in the crystal, say, already resonating properly, then move it in energy form to where it's to be, then push it out slowly, still resonating properly, so that you might use it to emerge yourself. Sort of like a portable hole."
In spite of disdain for anything Mizlaplanian, Tobrush was getting very interested in this. <Hold on!> the Julki sent, unable to understandably speak either of the others' tongues. <That implies somebody in there guiding the things!>
Jimmy repeated the comment for Chin, who nodded. "I think so. It bother me from the start that the first pair of demons we met were, I think, surprised to see us, and tried to convince us to free them. Why, I wondered, didn't the pair liberated by the Exchange scientists free them on the way? What would it have taken to do so? And why did carnivores, carbon-based life, who needed either live or freshly killed meat of some sort and certainly water, not have any supplies along the route? We saw no signs, and they are certainly rather messy. The only answer I could come up with was that the first pair never passed them, and so also never came the rest of the route we took—hence, no supplies needed."
"But we saw the marks where they went in!" Krisha reminded him.
"Indeed. And no marks after. They only needed the station to access the other plane. Once that occurred, they never went into the central chamber. They became creatures of energy and slipped into the other plane, coming out at a desired station somewhere else entirely—anywhere they wanted."
"The Julki says you have a wonderful imagination," Jimmy told the captain, "but that, if you're right, why did they need the second station? Why didn't they just do this where they were?"
"There are several possibilities there," Gun Roh Chin told them. "However, the best supposition is based on that first level we entered. It was plain, unfinished, without anything in it. An empty room, as it were. Some races may build empty rooms, but the Quintara are sufficiently like us that evidence suggests that they do not. Conclusion: whatever stopped them in the distant past stopped them before they could build anything in it, possibly a prototype for whatever they were going to do to develop the planet that started all this. That suggests that the first station was the end of the line, not yet fully operational itself. Then, again, they might well have reported, received instructions, and made certain that somebody would follow them into the main network where there would be intelligences who could control and manipulate the route at all points. Note that while the first pair tried to get us to free them, the second pair did not. By that point, they had orders."
"If you're right," said Jimmy McCray, "then, once free, all these bloody bastards have to do is get to an access point and jump in and head for their nearest troops, like in that demon menagerie we came through. Then they all jump in, and pick whatever station they want. And if there is one buried at the bottom of the Euphrates on old Mother Earth, the odds are there's one or more on all the ancient mother worlds. Two hundred million demons with that kind of power and access could take those tired old worlds in a night, and so-called mortals have been able to raise demons elsewhere, so it wouldn't take much help to pop a few up in other key places, where they could move those stacked crystals into place."
"The first step is to buy time," Krisha said. "And that means learning as much as we can here, and, somehow, getting back to report. The second and equally important thing is that we must not succumb, under any circumstances, to any temptations to release the princes. We may have two demons loose, but that is all. Without the princes, I do not believe they represent a massive threat, no matter how much local damage they can do."
"But why don't they just release the princes?" Modra wondered.
"Somehow, for some reason, they can't. That's the only explanation," Jimmy replied. "Why? Who knows? It only matters that they can't, because, if they could, they already would have and all this would have been unnecessary. Clearly whoever imprisoned them made provisions in case some of the lower types either got sprung or were missed. And I think some got missed. There are too many demon-raising stories within historical times not to believe that. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't traps around these places to keep the others from being freed and keep even that pair away. No, it's our ball right now."
"The only thing we might be able to do is die," the captain said unhappily. "Unless we can become wizards or sorcerers, and learn how to do their tricks, which is rather unlikely, I see no way we are going to get out of here, nor any sources of food and drink. We have very little time. Days, I'd think. And during all that, the best we can hope for is that none of us, even accidentally, frees those princes."
Josef, who was listening to all this, suddenly turned. "Where is Kalia?" he asked, puzzled.
They all turned and looked around, but the Mycohl agent was nowhere to be seen.