There was the urge to leap into action and run all over, dispersing the group, searching for her, but Krisha immediately realized that Manya was still there and that it was unlikely Kalia was up to mischief yet for that reason alone. Dismissing Josef's unspoken fear that the Mycohl woman was out hunting for a demon prince to sell out to on the evidence that she'd had ample prior opportunity to do so and had not, Krisha threw out a mental net and tried to locate Kalia that way.
"No good," she said. "My range is curiously limited here."
"Mine, too," Jimmy McCray responded worriedly. Tobrush didn't make a comment but they could tell it was universal. "There's some kind of instability here that's interfering with anything not line of sight."
"Possibly because this whole place is made of transmuted energy from the other plane," the captain suggested. "Or, we might be getting jammed."
"Kalia!" Josef belted at the top of his lungs, an impressive volume that caused equally impressive echoes.
He repeated his call twice more, but there was still no response.
"Now what do we do?" Krisha asked worriedly. "We can remain here, and wait, but for how long? Or, we can go on—but if she's just following some side street, how will she find us with this interference?"
"We'll give her a few minutes," Jimmy suggested. "After that, it's her problem, not ours. I'd say continue on when we get frustrated or bored and head towards the center of town. The one building that really sticks out, literally and otherwise, is that giant pyramid up there. It's got to be the center of things, not only because of its location but because it's different than any of the other structures. That's where we all knew we were headed anyway."
There was general agreement on the plan. Gun Roh Chin took the few minutes they would allow to walk over to the closest building. "Smooth as glass," he commented, looking at himself reflected in the opaque surface of the building itself. "My! I look worse than I thought!"
McCray came over and joined him. "I think I look exactly as bad as I thought, which is too bad," he commented on his own reflection. "Still, I wonder how they got in and out of the bloody things? The other structures, from the stations to the palace ruins in the fire world, all had doors, at least. Perhaps you have to go to ground level, or the entrances are on different levels to distribute traffic."
"I think not. Otherwise, why build a cut-in from the street over to it here?"
McCray touched the surface. Smooth and cool. He turned again to the captain and said, "Well, maybe you wish yourself inside. I'd half expected some kind of markings in this stuff as guides, but I haven't seen any yet." He shifted, and went to lean his back against the building wall, and fell right through.
They all came running. "What happened?" Modra called out to the captain.
"He was just leaning here"—Chin rapped on the wall and it was solid to the touch—"and, suddenly, he went through. You don't suppose that this is what happened to the Mycohl woman?"
Suddenly, Jimmy McCray stepped out of the wall, as if going through solid matter. "That's the damnedest thing, isn't it?" he commented, frowning. "Took me a minute or two to figure out how to make it let me out."
"Well? How do you do it?"
"You sort of pretend it isn't there and just walk through. I could see you, by the way, from inside, although dimly. The exit's marked with some yellow lighting, but you can't tell that on this side."
Chin rapped on the area where Jimmy had just emerged and it gave off a solid if very dull knocking sound. Jimmy smiled, turned, and walked back through the wall.
"If this did indeed happen to Kalia, it must be quite disconcerting if she can see this," Tobrush noted. "Perhaps she's trying to get out and it would be most frustrating to watch McCray walk easily through."
Jimmy was soon back. "Just walk through like there's nothing there. That's all there is to it. Bloody chilly inside, though. Worse than out here."
Of course, they all had to try it then. Gun Roh Chin shrugged, walked through, and had no problems, but Modra and several others struck the wall when they tried.
"It's hard to ignore your own senses," Jimmy noted. "If you think you're going to hit the wall, you do. If you think you're going to casually walk through, you will."
Finally, Modra managed it, and found herself inside a large entry hall, complete with a huge wing-shaped desk that seemed grown out of the floor, and behind it a very large chair on a pedestal built for a large biped, but definitely not for a human. There seemed no way in or out of the hall, but markings at about the three-meter level glowed from embedded rods within the wall material—horizontal and vertical lines, in fact, in a variety of colors and color combinations.
Gun Roh Chin walked through a wall and back into the entry chamber from one with a horizontal green and blue indicator.
"Their version of universal signage," he said as she gaped at him. "The horizontal ones let you walk through to various—well, I suppose they are some sort of offices. The vertical ones, I assume, take you between levels. Like the stations, there's no sense of being transported as such, but considering that the parallel-lined entrances are all in a row to your right and the horizontal to your left, I assume some sort of instant transport is accomplished. It certainly makes all sorts of stairs and lifts unnecessary." He walked over to the massive desk and examined the top of it from just beside the chair. "Fascinating." He put his hand on a particular point of the desk, and Modra was startled to see a whole different combination of lights appear over the doors.
"A simple system, if you know how to build it," the captain commented. "The receptionist sits here, you tell him, her, or it who you want to see, and they push one of the color combinations inside the desk and whatever door is free is switched to the desired location. Ingenious, so long as you are not in the habit of leaning on your elbows."
Several of them had made it through now, but Modra had joined the captain and was staring down at, or more properly through, the desktop. "Do you think all their machines are like this?"
"Most likely," he responded. "The more complex ones could be voice- or even thought-activated, the actions all continuously recorded somewhere in the building foundations. This was certainly some sort of business office with many, many workers and lots of in and out traffic. What sort of business was done here, however, I wouldn't hazard to guess. Even if we could somehow call up the records, they would almost certainly be incomprehensible to us."
"It's fascinating, but I'm freezing," she told him. "I'm going back outside—if I can."
He nodded, and eventually everyone was out. "We'll all be dead of exposure if we stay inside any of these buildings too long," Jimmy noted.
"The Quintara appeared to have thick hides," the captain said. "Contrary to their reputation, they appear to have liked things a bit cooler than we."
"They also dressed for the occasion," Krisha noted. "If I had even the cape of that prince, let alone normal clothes, this wouldn't really be that uncomfortable."
Josef looked up and down the street and sighed. "Well, if we each take an entrance, we might yet find Kalia," he said. "At least, we might find her if she hasn't tried one of the other ways out."
"I'll not look for the likes of her," Manya grumbled. "She'd die happy if I walked in and we were stuck inside one of those areas for a while."
Krisha nodded. "You stay with me, Manya. I think the two of us are a match for her temper."
"Molly, you stick with me," Jimmy told the syn. "Everybody else, pick a door if you can find it."
It didn't take long. In fact, Gun Roh Chin found her in the second place he tried, and she was mad as hell. That, in fact, caused a problem in getting her out, and Chin easily exiting and calling to Josef and Tobrush to help her through didn't make her any less furious. Like Jimmy, she'd leaned back idly and fallen through; unlike Jimmy, she had no idea how she'd gotten there and hadn't been able to get past seeing a solid wall. She'd banged, kicked, or tapped on practically every square centimeter trying to find the secret control, never suspecting it was mental.
"We're getting a picture of the culture that once lived here now, at least on the basic level of how things work," the captain noted. "Let's not wander about from the group from this point until there's some decision to do so."
They headed on downtown on broad streets obviously intended for walking and not for any sort of vehicular traffic, as if in the bottom of a deep canyon surrounded by glass-like walls.
"No traffic roundabouts or public squares or commons," Jimmy McCray noted. "No vegetation, either, after that lush garden up there. Odd."
"Not so odd, perhaps," Krisha responded. "If they had no weather and no dirt or rock foundations here, they might have dispensed with it within the city. That would make a level of green even more important, and it's not that much for a walk. Don't forget, too, that beyond the mazes are forests, groves, and fields."
"I admit, however, to being puzzled by the groves of fruit," Jimmy McCray said. "Everything we've seen or learned or been told about the Quintara is that they're carnivores, yet we've seen no signs that animals of any sort were raised anywhere around. A city this size would consume a massive amount of meat daily. From where? And why have intensive automated farms up there to grow vegetable matter they couldn't digest?"
The captain sighed. "If you add the rather effective automated security system in the groves, the enforcement of a 'take nothing inside' policy to extremes, and the maze with the nasty idol creatures to what you've said, it paints a disturbing picture."
"Huh? Like what?"
"Live prey. Imported here, perhaps even bred up there, or on other levels that could be connected to it. Not a garden, or a park, my comrades. Rather, I fear, a kind of idyllic holding pen for evening dinner. One can almost see Madam Demon trotting up there to pick out the day's catch. Some, perhaps of inferior quality, would be delivered to the maze entities in exchange for favors. Note that when poor Morok was killed, it was referred to as an 'acceptable sacrifice.'"
"That sized area? To feed the tens of thousands at least who must have lived and worked here? Absurd!" Josef commented.
The captain shrugged. "Oh, I suspect that what was kept up there was just for the upper classes—royalty, the bosses, special rewards, and the like. The masses would probably get dead, rather than live, prey, and nothing like that sort of quality, butchered and stored and shopped for in the usual manner somewhere here. Still, one suspects they had a rather effective supply. Almost limitless for a stable population, I'd say, and barely noticed, I suspect, until their population, as the demons said to one of you at least, began to grow."
"Wait a minute!" Jimmy McCray exclaimed, the light dawning. "You're talking about us, aren't you? Terrans and maybe lots of other races as well. Their motive wasn't just love of power; we were the food."
They were all shocked, and Modra said, "Jimmy, that's disgusting."
"Disgusting, yes," the captain agreed, "but I think it's true. Oh, not that they didn't also eat animals—I suspect that the basic worker got just that—but we were the plums, the gourmet meals. Why? I can only make wild guesses, since it's certain that any carbon-based animal life would do. Possibly tied in with some sort of mysticism or religious belief that they really did enslave and gain the souls of those they ate. Possibly, they just loved the empathic feel of fear and horror in a prey that knows its fate. And, of course, they could get the natives to do much of the dirty work for them. The tradition of blood sacrifice to demons, or ancient gods, is well known in most primitive societies. If memory serves, there was even a later Terran religion that practiced regular symbolic cannibalism."
Jimmy decided that now was not the time to bring up the practice of Holy Communion in his old Church.
Even Josef was appalled, although he was getting the conversation secondhand, translated with difficulty through another's mind. <Does he mean that all of the races with demon legends were once mere breeding farms?>
Jimmy nodded. "I think he does. And to primitive societies faced with this sort of technology, it must have seemed a reasonable trade. The gods could reward, and, every time they improved the lot of the people so they lived longer and had more kids, the better the Quintara harvest. If they took only a given percentage of the population, then the whole would think themselves better off."
"The priests and priestesses, though, would have all the power they wanted and needed, wouldn't they?" Kalia mused.
Josef nodded. "They wouldn't be the sacrifices, they'd be the favored pets." He gave a long sigh. "Well, it is certainly easy to see the set-up for all this now. If there was more than one first race, older than we are, getting out into space, and they came together with equal power and technology, they'd try and make a deal, a peace, such as the Three Empires have now. And if the Quintara fattened, and bred, and outgrew the ability of their area to feed their growing population, there might well be warfare at last. They broke the pact—rebelled, in their term. Tried for a large slice of the pie, perhaps primacy. But the reason the Three Empires have never done this in spite of their enmity for one another is because they are equally matched, more or less. Any one that attacked another would leave the third with the spoils. Any two could stop the other one. Surely that must have happened here. What made them think they could win?"
"You think in threes, because that's what we all grew up with," Modra reminded him, getting the foul picture. "But suppose in those days it was four, not three? Suppose the Quintara thought that they had an ally, and would split up the other two? Then, particularly if they were pressed by a hungry population of young newcomers, they might take the risk. Then something happened. Maybe the plot was discovered, or perhaps the partner lost its nerve, knowing that one day they would have to face the Quintara alone themselves. Whatever happened, they double-crossed the Quintara. Then it was three to one; essentially, surrendering almost without a fight."
They were only a few blocks now from the pyramid and the city center, and somehow it felt much colder, although the temperature had not really changed.
"By why imprison them?" Jimmy asked. "If you have them cold, why not do them in? Otherwise there's always a threat that someday they'd get free."
"No," Krisha said. "We've had two versions of the imprisonment from two different demons. One said they imprisoned themselves. The other said they were betrayed and jailed. We have been going on the assumption that one of those versions is a lie. Suppose it is not? Suppose both are true?"
They all deferred quizzically to her, but Gun Roh Chin smiled. "You beat me to the deduction," he noted admiringly. "That's very good."
"What do you mean, both true?" Modra prompted her.
"Tell me, do the Quintara strike you as creatures who would meekly submit their whole population to arrest by their enemies just because they thought they would lose a war?"
Nobody thought that. "They appear to be like the Mycohl, who would die rather than surrender," Kalia responded.
"Exactly. And from the somewhat friendly way in which the Quintara are remembered in one of the empires, I think we can guess who their ally who betrayed them was, can't we? They got along with the Quintara and liked them, and they wanted to do it, but they had some kind of indication that they'd lose. Faced with the strong probability of defeat if they went with the Quintara, they settled for a third of the Quintara's holdings. One can see the Quintara leaders huddling as to what to do. Start the war anyway and risk the annihilation of their race to the last individual, or negotiate a strategic settlement? If that settlement included the abandonment of their empire to the others, the ultimate prize anyway, might it not tempt the others to accept, with lots of conditions, rather than risk the terrible losses a people as vicious and ruthless as the Quintara could inflict even in a losing, suicidal cause?"
"So they did imprison themselves!" Modra exclaimed. "In a way probably monitored by the others. They withdrew into this alternative place, which was shut down and put on maintenance, probably kept going just because it was needed to power the imprisonment. Two hundred million or more, all in self-imposed prisons of their own making, maintained in a kind of limbo, suspended animation of a sort, but alive, and maybe able to commune through that other plane as our minds went there."
"But what's the point?" Josef asked. "It seems like simply prolonging extinction."
"Not necessarily extinction," Krisha responded. "Some, probably lower ones, escaped and kept the demon cults and legends alive, but they were few in number. Perhaps, though, the whole of them still had some influence on all sorts of things through that other plane. Their followers, their priests and priestesses, would still be there. Some of the knowledge would be passed down. Invoke a demon. Grant wishes. Cast evil spells. All done by passing down this perverted faith from generation to generation. Even demonic possession—perhaps a form of telepathic merging with other races who had something of the talent from fooling with this other-plane energy and mathematics. Wild orgies and love spells through empathic projection. Transmutation—if they can create this city out of that energy, how much simpler must it be to convert lead to gold? They'd have to do that to keep their people in place, retain their infrastructure over thousands upon thousands of years, until the time was right."
"What time?" Modra asked. "Surely the others would never go along if they thought the Quintara could ever really escape."
"Oh, I suspect that they always knew of the possibility," Jimmy McCray replied. "They tried to plug every gap they could, of course, hoping that the Quintara had bitten off more than they could chew, but they simply never counted on the patience of the race. We thought the station through which we entered was unfinished, and, in a sense, it was, but suppose it wasn't an ongoing project stilled by their fall? Suppose it was a rush job, instead. Stick a station so far out in the middle of nowhere, so beyond anybody's capacity to reach it that it simply wouldn't be looked at. Perhaps they had several such, and this was just the first one found. Sitting there waiting, patiently, until the early primitive civilizations matured, left their nests, and got into space. Until expansion became empire and empires began to move out into the galaxy. Waiting on the not terribly good odds that, someday, somebody who did not know them for what they were would find them. Then it would bring the discoverers here in small and unthreatening numbers, eventually disarming them as it examined them. Examined them, then brought them here, to this place, to be faced with the choice of freeing them or slow death."
"But surely everyone is warned now!" Modra maintained. "Everyone must have some word that there were demons found at Rainbow Bridge. The Guardians would know, wouldn't they? And why are the Mizlaplanians even here if their intelligence didn't alert their Holy Angels as well? And with what must be going on at Rainbow Bridge right now, the Mycohl must know, too. They'd find our shuttles, but not us. They'd mobilize, move to stop this, wouldn't they?"
"If they were capable of mobilizing, yes," the captain agreed. "But how much time has passed? Do the Guardians still even exist? Are the Mycohl still strong, or diluted and decadent? The Mizlaplan may be the only ones with any kind of hope against them at this point, and they are only one third of the temporal powers. We alone have a society capable of keeping the direct Quintara influence out. The whole society is organized to root out that ugly influence and eliminate it. We may have been the only ones who seriously considered this possibility. It's not difficult now to plot the old Quintara sphere of influence, based just upon the native religions and legends of demons, though. The passage of time breeds complacency. Two thirds of the ancient home worlds of what used to be their domain, including Mother Earth, lie in the Exchange and the Mycohl. The fact that we haven't already seen some signs of intervention by the higher forms tells me that perhaps they really do not have a plan, at least not any longer. They managed to come together once, when they were mature races, to defeat the Quintara. Can they do it now, when they are old? And are they capable of uniting with sufficient power to face down a Quintara still in their prime?"
"Take care, Captain! You border on heresy!" Manya warned him.
"Do I? Perhaps I do, Manya. But nothing any of us has said negates any of your theology. We are but reflections of the older, higher forms. The forces of Hell are real, and are every bit as nasty as we were taught they were, and every bit as powerful. No, Manya, in fact I almost find myself getting more religious. If Hell is real, if demons are real, if black magic and evil are real, if sorcery is an alternative physics, a new mathematics, then I am praying very, very hard that the gods are real as well."
"It may not make a difference," Jimmy pointed out. "The Quintara tempted and tested the others, and they met their test. God, or the gods, or whatever you conceive the Supreme Being or Beings to be, was always using the devil to tempt and test people, to sort out the few that were worthy from the mass who were not. Even if Heaven exists, it might not intervene. This might be our turn to be truly tested."
The buildings suddenly ended, and they looked out upon the oval-shaped city center. The enormous pyramid dominated the skyline, but was firmly anchored within the city, jutting out on one corner over the great center. A broad avenue went around that center, ending in a relatively high guard wall, but not so high that they could not cross the avenue and walk to it and look down.
Below was a swirling mass of seething crackling energy, as if not more dense than the energy of evil experienced in the other plane. But this was not the same; its raw power coursed through them, touching their very souls, yet there was not the overwhelming sense of evil and wrongness to this mass. It was merely there, beyond such limited terms as good and evil, beyond anything for which they had words. Even the captain saw it and felt it; this was no metaphysical or psychic plane, no other dimension, but something very real.
"It looks like a great eye," Modra commented. "The way it swirls and divides."
"The Eye of God," Jimmy McCray breathed.
"Perhaps there is more truth to that than we know," Gun Roh Chin remarked. "This is the source of all the energy, perhaps of all energy, period. It is a control, and a gate, but some bleeds through. Only when it bleeds through does it become all the states of energy, known and unknown. Heaven and Hell, coexisting, side by side. The center of all, and the edge of all. The fact that such a source exists and fluctuates explains much of the inconsistencies in measuring the amount of matter and energy in the universe."
Tobrush, who'd been silent most of the way, now asked, "What do you mean it 'bleeds through'? From where?"
"From outside. Outside the universal bubbles. This place might be anywhere, but it is certainly within our own cosmos. Even the other planes you visited are coterminous, inside something. But that—that is not. We are looking here at someplace outside of all the rules, period."
"Nonsense!" Tobrush responded. "Then we would be looking at nothing—a complete absence of anything at all, which would be perceived by us only as darkness."
"That," agreed Gun Roh Chin, "is certainly what is supposed to be there."
There was silence for a moment, then Tobrush said, "I reject your unfounded assumptions. I cannot accept them. To do so would be to accept madness as the norm, chaos as the deity. The natural laws which have proven so consistent and reliable would be mere rules, to be bent or broken by the application of such energies as you theorize. Literally anything would be possible, and the supernatural would stand side by side with the natural. We know the universe began in a great explosion."
Chin nodded. "But an explosion of what? From where? Science has always been so facile, explaining that it was spontaneous, from nothing, although that is as insane to any logic as what I propose. Religion maintains that it came from somewhere else—a steady-state universe. Heaven. Don't worry—there are rules. The first explosion created them. Whenever that plasma bleeds through, it is bent to conform to them. But, in one sense, you are correct. The implication of this and all the rest that we have seen says very clearly that we do not know a fraction of the rules we think we know." He turned reluctantly away from the Eye and pointed at the city. "They know the rest of the rules and laws, though. They built this city with them. They intend to rule what we now think of as the Three Empires with them—and the Three Empires, as vast as they are, are but a speck of dust compared to the known universe. We just have the grave misfortune to live in the region where the Quintara, and the others, went first."
"Yeah, and now we're all grown up, but still way behind them," McCray added. "So now they intend that we'll provide all that they require. An army of conquest, an inexhaustible food source... ninety trillion slaves and still growing. Ninety trillion potential Fausts, to be offered the deepest secrets of the universe, to become the rampaging horde through the rest of it—but at quite a price."
Kalia scowled and shook her head in disgust. "You are all fools!" she exclaimed. "All this time since we got together, all you do is talk, talk, talk, talk. You guess, you think, you pick up a blade of grass and decide that you got the key to the universe and then you go on from there. Fact is, you don't know nothin'! You got this blowhard Mizzie freighter captain spouting shit he don't know is true or false any more than the rest of us, and then the holy bitch there takes it up 'cause it takes her mind off the fact she can't get laid, and they snow the rest of you and before you're through you figure out a history of the universe that's got three grains of truth and the rest horse shit! Are these guys dangerous? You bet. Do they know a ton of shit we don't? Sure looks like it. Beyond that, you don't know no more than I do and that ain't much!"
The speech stung Krisha as if it were an arrow, but Manya, who'd also maintained a discreet silence—and distance from Kalia—was both amused and content with it, although she thought the language a bit rude. Her only amazement was that such wisdom could come from such an ignorant little devil-worshiping slut.
Josef was definitely not amused. "That's some speech from someone who had to be practically dragged away from groveling at the foot of the first demon she saw," he commented dryly.
"You had it easy; I had to crawl my way up," she reminded him. "But I got this far 'cause I'm a quick learner. Anybody who's got to be broke out of a glass case by the likes of me ain't no god, that's for sure. But I didn't get this far only to sit down and commit suicide 'cause of all this bullshit. I may not know poetry and priest stuff and all, but I know that if these guys are smart, maybe smarter than us by a long shot, and nobody but dumb shits builds cities you can't get out of, or that have only one real tough way out, I don't care if you pretend-brains want to kill yourselves or sit here and starve or freeze or whatever, but you ain't includin' me in that crap. If I've gotta go, I'm gonna go lookin' for food and water and warmth and a way out of this creepy place. Anybody who wants can come, too. The rest of you should just throw yourself in that gook down there so we won't have to listen to you no more!" And, with that, she turned and started walking off, toward the pyramid.
"She is quite forceful," the captain said dryly.
"Maybe," Modra replied, "but maybe we needed a little cold water thrown on us. I've been on a lot of exploiter team jobs, but I've never given up and never worked with anybody else who did, and I'm sure not ready to cut my throat on sheer speculation, like she said."
Jimmy McCray shrugged. "Suicide's against my ex-religion, anyway. The Mizlaplan's, too, if memory serves. In any event, we either have to go after her in this damned city and kill her, or we have to do it her way because otherwise, that one's going to come face to face with the demon princes alone."
One by one, they turned and followed Kalia toward the pyramid. She didn't wait for them, but when she reached the great structure she had to stop because there wasn't even an indication of a way inside.
Jimmy McCray went to a spot near Kalia and surveyed the scene. "Don't go touching any of those symbols you see glowing dully inside here," he warned them. "This thing's here because it's somehow connected to that energy mass there. It might well be the equivalent of an electrical regulator or storage device, perhaps even a transformer that uses what it gets to power the city. Most of those symbols translate to ancient hex signs, which were always 'keep off' and 'keep away' symbols."
The captain approached and examined them. "I'm sure they wouldn't put anything really dangerous on the outside, not without guard rails to ward against at least accidental touching," he commented. "Still, let's see what the other sides have. We might find something more useful."
On the side facing the city, they found many more signs, not all familiar to McCray or anyone else, but near the center were a series of color-coded vertical bars. "Ah, our transport system," the captain noted. "The only trouble is, we don't know where they go."
"Down, certainly," Krisha commented. "This is the highest level you can use to get to the pyramid."
"Yes, but how far, and where?" Jimmy wondered.
"The only logical thing to do is to all push the same one and find out where we wind up," Chin replied. "The only question is, which one?"
"McCray shrugged. "If they're consistent, I'd try the one on the far left."
Gun Roh Chin seemed stunned. "I never thought of that," he said, amazed.
"Let me go first," Jimmy told them. "You follow. If there's anything nasty down there, I should be already there to warn you about it. Of course, we could just as easily wind up in the equivalent of the boiler room, in which case no harm's done. I can't see them putting a stop there, though, that the general public, as it were, could use." He took a short breath. "Well, here goes." He reached out and pressed the bar, which had a deep violet color.
A sudden design encircled him, the same color as the bar, coming from a point within the street itself, and he vanished. A moment later, so did the symbol.
They all gaped at where he'd stood. "Astonishing," said Tobrush.
Kalia walked over, slapped the left vertical bar, and the same thing happened.
"I saw it that time," the captain commented. "A pentagram. So McCray was right on that one, anyway."
Modra walked up, pushed the bar, and in a moment, vanished as well.
The odd thing was that there was no sensation at all. She'd half expected something like the great void, with consciousness rushing through the blackness, but there was nothing. One moment she was standing there, outside, the next she was standing—where?
It was rather dark, and the chill was enough to raise gooseflesh on her.
"Modra—here!" Jimmy McCray called. She turned and saw the previous two standing about four meters away, and walked toward them. As soon as she did so, Josef appeared, the pentagram glowing with exceptional brightness in the gloom.
Modra barely had adjusted to the gloom when she saw the violet symbol come up again, and, suddenly, Tobrush was rolling out and over toward them. Even in the darkness, she was sure he'd not faded in any more than he'd faded out; it was more like flipping a light switch.
Kalia came next, then Manya, and, finally, Gun Roh Chin, who looked both bemused and fascinated. He went over to them and asked, "Anything here? I gather we're well below street level."
McCray scratched his growing beard and said, "Well, it's just a wild guess, so maybe Kalia won't believe it, but I think that might be the grand entrance over there."
He pointed, and Chin saw a large, five-sided indentation in the base of the pyramid. It was framed by ornate designs glowing in gold, and was about as conspicuous in this place as a spaceship would have been.
Jimmy McCray walked over to it, then stopped. "Uh-oh. The question is, do we want to go inside or not?"
They crowded around him and saw what he was talking about. It wasn't easily seen at an angle, but, standing right in front of the entryway, it floated there like some ghostly magic trick by an unknown magician, large enough that you couldn't walk around it.
It was what Jimmy McCray had called the Seal of Solomon; basically a six-pointed star with the points of the star circled. The upper triangle of the star was in gold, the lower half of rust red, while the circle was a pale blue in color. "I assume that the significance of the colors is lost on no one here," McCray commented.
It wasn't, not even on Kalia, who'd embarked on this with her Mycohlian associates in environment suits of a rust-red color, the color of Mycohl, which contrasted sharply with the blue color of the Exchange teams' suits and the dull gold of the Mizlaplanians.
"I believe that confirms at least one theory beyond coincidence," the captain commented, sounding a bit smug.
Kalia shrugged. "So? You goin' in or what?"
"The point, I think, is that the symbol might be all that's imprisoning the princes," Josef explained patiently. "Just by going in, we might free them."
"I doubt if liberating them is that easily done," McCray assured him. "I do think, though, that this one's a symbol they can't pass for some reason. It alone might be sufficient to keep any uncaught and unimprisoned demons out and possibly off the controls, if they're in there. The question is whether we want to break it."
"Well, we can search all the buildings until we drop or we can see what the main place is," Kalia argued.
Jimmy sighed. "All right, then." He stepped up to it and pushed against it. It was as solid as a rock. He stepped back, let one of the others do it, and they had the same results.
"It appears, " said Jimmy McCray, "that the Quintara aren't the only ones it'll keep out."
Gun Roh Chin thought a moment. "Are we all agreed that we want to go in? Yes? Well, then, if the girl there will trust an old and befuddled freighter captain's hunches just once, and come up and put her hand anywhere on the red part of the design—yes, that's it. And you, McCray—on the blue. Now me, breaking the yellow, so!"
The seal split into its colored parts and seemed to swing away into the darkness.
"Their old enemies weren't stupid, and the demon princes lied," the captain commented with some satisfaction in his voice. "No one of us can free them. It takes a unanimous vote of the official warders."
Jimmy McCray stepped into the blackness, which now gave way as if nothing but a dark opening, and the others quickly followed. They found themselves in a dark, narrow passage that went on for some distance, creating a real sense of claustrophobia, but it opened suddenly into an enormous hall that flared into sudden illumination as they entered, startling them. Somewhere in the distance they could hear some sort of blowers kicking in.
The sight itself was stunning. A broad floor of the now-familiar material, but set in pentagonal tiles, went for perhaps thirty meters forward and at least that much on both sides. In the center, however, lay an enormous rectangular block colored obsidian black, rising a good five meters off the floor; atop it sat a frighteningly lifelike statue of some marble-like rock, scaled to the block, rising up into the pyramid. The exquisitely carved body, wearing some sort of marble robe, seemed like a Terran's body, right down to the hands and feet, sitting there in the lotus position. The head, however, resembled that of a male goat, with great curved horns, a snout, and even a goatee, although the face had a stern expression and its eyes seemed filled with intelligence.
On either side of the huge idol were braziers of some coppery material, and, carved into the block on both sides, there were steps leading up to it, and, right in front, a flat, very low table of the same marble-like rock as the statue. It was an awesome, almost breathtaking sight.
"What the hell is that?" Modra asked, gaping.
"The supreme idol," Jimmy McCray responded, his throat dry. "A representation of Satan, his full beauty masked by the goat's head, one of his symbols."
"Satan?" Krisha repeated, puzzled.
"The fallen one. The founder and ruler of Hell. The demon-emperor himself. That would make the four princes imprisoned here Lucifugé, Leviathan, Sataniacha, and Ashtoreth. I wonder where the other sixty-six are?"
"Sixty-six?"
He nodded. "There were seventy princes who rebelled under Satan Mekratrig, whom you see represented here. These four were considered so dangerous, so treacherous, and so powerful that even their master did not trust them. They and their legions, fifty million apiece, were to be freed only before the final battle, to slay a third of mankind."
"It's a big universe," Gun Roh Chin commented dryly. "Even seventy would stretch them pretty thin, I'd think."
Modra tapped her partner on the shoulder. "Jim-mee, look at the walls, now!" she whispered through clenched teeth.
He looked away from the idol at the left wall. Standing there now, dressed in the royal purple robes, was an enormous demon, the largest they'd seen by far, with long, sharp horns and burning red eyes. He turned and looked right, and there stood another, identical in size but not really the same in appearance, although he knew he'd have to compare them point by point to tell them apart. Turning around in the direction from which they'd come, he saw yet another over the door. The fourth wall of the squared pyramid, beyond the huge idol, now had yet another illuminated there.
The images were so real that they froze for a moment, until it was clear that none of the four was moving. Only then did Jimmy realize the truth.
"They're inside the walls," he said at last, his voice curiously weak and high-pitched. "They're embedded in the walls!"
<Welcome!> boomed an incredibly powerful voice in their minds.
<Welcome!> said another, and another, and another.
Molly looked puzzled. "Somebody just say somethin'?"
<You appear uncomfortable,> the first voice said sympathetically.
<There is no reason for discomfort here,> said the second demon.
<You sample the power that is within you now but you are ignorant of all that it can do,>said the third.
<Let us show you what you can do,>said the fourth.
<You are chilled,>the first one noted. <Look at the braziers and command warmth. You need only concentrate.>
They all hesitated a moment, and then Kalia looked at the brazier to the left of the idol and concentrated, concentrated hard, picturing a warm fire.
There was a surge of energy from below that they all felt, and suddenly the brazier burst into flame inside its bowl. Delighted, she stared at the other one and, now confident, did the same. A second great flame flared into life.
Modra frowned. "Now, did they do that, or did she?"
"She did," Jimmy McCray assured her. "I could feel the link, being over here next to her."
<It will warm now,> the first one assured them, and they could already feel a slight rise in temperature, although the smoke was being drawn upward.
<You are thirsty,> the second one noted. <Use the tiles. Command the symbol in your mind using the template. When you can see it, then use your memories, or imaginations, to visualize what you wish.>
Josef frowned. Use the tiles? Command the—"Oh, the pentagram," he said aloud. He walked a few paces away from them, centered his concentration on a tile, and imagined the star shape was there. It wasn't that hard to do, but he was startled when the actual star seemed to appear within the tile and the borders thicken; so startled, in fact, that it almost faded back out. He got it back, and imagined what he'd dreamed of for many, many days.
The area inside the pentagram seemed to shimmer and then darken, and, slowly, something took shape, something the rest also saw. It solidified, became a golden pitcher. He was afraid for a moment to stop concentrating on it, fearing it would vanish like the star, but he finally realized that he had to do something and, with a sigh, let go. The star and border faded, but the pitcher remained.
Curious, yet amazed and not a little suspicious, he stooped down, then reached out to touch the pitcher as if it were a burning hot coal or a fierce animal ready to bite.
It felt solid, like a pitcher should, and very cold. He picked it up and almost dropped it. It was full of something, some liquid. He smelled it, smiled, then took it in both hands and drank from it, not very elegantly, as they all watched, wide-eyed.
After a while, he stopped, put down the pitcher, then belched, the noise echoing inside the hollow walls of the pyramid. He didn't excuse himself. "Wine!" he told them. "Wine as good as I remember it in the vineyards of the hive master of my old Lord! Better!"
Jimmy McCray wished for a wee bit of good whiskey, maybe a jeroboam or two, but he decided reluctantly that he might well survive a bit better if he stuck to something that would allow him to keep his wits about him. Following Josef's lead, he tried the same kind of concentration, and in fairly short order was looking at a tankard of dark stout. After sampling it, he brought forth some beer and handed it to Molly, who thought the whole thing was really neat.
That set Kalia, Tobrush, and Modra off. It was interesting to see the Julki materialize what looked like a modernistic trough, then stick its tiny snout into a sweet-smelling yellowish liquid, not just because the others didn't know much about his race but also because it had required two adjacent tiles to do it and it had worked just as well. Soon Modra had her own tankard. Jimmy went over to her and frowned. "Fruit juice?"
"Yeah, I know, but it wouldn't take too much beer or ale to make me drunk enough I'd do anything they asked just for a laugh."
Kalia appeared to have the same idea; she materialized a clear decanter filled with some pulpy yellow-white drink.
Modra was, however, feeling suddenly alive again, and she smiled broadly and looked over at the Mizlaplanians, all three of whom were simply standing there, looking very stern and uncomfortable.
"We take nothing from demons," Manya said firmly.
"But it's not the demons—it's us!" Modra replied, puzzled.
"So they say. But who can believe demons in any case, and particularly here within their own domain and prison?"
Modra frowned and looked at Gun Roh Chin, seeing the longing in his eyes. "Not even you, Captain? You're not bound by their vows."
"I—well, it would make me uncomfortable to do so," he explained hesitantly. "Also, there is the matter of my having stood here and watched the lot of you materialize things out of the floor. It is a bit startling."
She suddenly remembered his position in all this. "You haven't heard a thing, have you? This must look like the purest black magic to you." She paused a moment, then added, "I guess it looks like that to me, too."
"Merely a transformation of some of that energy into matter via thought command through devices set in the floor," Tobrush commented. "Just like we control e-suits. No magic to it."
Kalia snorted. "Yeah? And you can always conjure up just what you can think of, right? No big deal?"
"I will admit that the last half of the process isn't one we have discovered how to do yet," the Julki conceded. "On the other hand, I wonder about the true authenticity of these consumables. It isn't enough to remember how something looks and tastes; all of these drinks are complex chemical compounds, most not found in nature. I do not know the complex molecular composition of my own drink, and I doubt if any of you know yours. The true question, then, is how the device knows. And, if it does not, what are we really drinking?"
Josef suddenly stopped drinking his wine, and stared at it, and others did the same. "Yes, what about that, Your Highnesses?"
<The basics are present,> one of the demons said, unruffled. <Wine is wine, beer is beer, stout is stout, fruit juice is fruit juice, and mulki is mulki. The basic chemistry and composition are known. Your minds supply the subjective points—taste, smell, color, consistency—which are easily compensated in the basic formulae. If it is good wine, and looks and tastes right, does it really matter if it is not chemically identical to the last detail? Does the vintner analyze the biochemistry of the grape, or does he taste the wine?>
"Plastonium," Tobrush commented in an awed tone. "Who would ever believe it could really exist?"
"What?" Jimmy responded, frowning.
"Plastonium. It has many names, and that is the one we used. Computronium is another for it. For centuries, it's been the single unit used in computer simulations—the element that can become any other element. The energy bleeds in from wherever that is outside this place, and becomes bound to physical law and thus becomes conventional matter or energy. It has to. But here, at the source of the bleed, there's some kind of device, some filter with astonishing detail of knowledge, that's able to influence that primal plasma and make it become whatever the operator—in this case, us—wishes. But what kind of computer could possibly know things like these drinks down to the atomic level? Such knowledge and power are almost a definition of a god."
"Are you suggesting that the gods are some kind of computers?" Josef asked him, more curious than upset, unlike some others in the room.
"No. I am merely suggesting that their god might well be."
That seemed to diffuse the tension a bit, particularly when the demon princes made no comment, but Jimmy decided to get back to practical matters and try and distance them from cosmology and back into pragmatism in a hurry.
"What about food?" Jimmy asked the demons, remembering their speculations. "Can't this be made into food of any sort as well?"
<Life comes only from life,> another of the demons responded. <However, the process is able to synthesize food with the same look, taste, and texture of the original, and supplying the basic nutrients the body of the operator requires. Like the wine, it is not original, but it will do.>
"Then your people could feed themselves through this process," Jimmy pressed.
<Indeed they could,> agreed the demons.
That was not the same, however, as saying that they did so, a distinction lost on some but not on others.
"You know, then, our deductions about you and your people, from our minds," Jimmy said, wondering about their reaction to it.
<We have been with you since the transfer point,> one of the demons told them. <We have observed and heard all that went on. Our minds, our consciousnesses, are not bound like our bodies.>
"And I suppose you're going to tell us how wrong we've been so far," Modra put in.
<On the contrary, you have been remarkably astute,> a demon responded, surprising them.
"Then you admit to eating people alive!" Manya snapped triumphantly. "There! See? See what they are?
<We are as much prisoners of our own biology as the rest of you,> a demon responded. <The natural food sources upon which we depended are mostly depleted or vanished utterly; synthetics can tide us over for a time, but only for a time. We fully understand how repugnant our requirements might be to you, but it is not something we have much choice about. Outside of this suspended state, we must have it from time to time or we will die. We attempt never to be indiscriminate. There are whole worlds, whole populations, which you know, which exist in such poverty and misery and hopelessness that death is a welcome release. Giving us life might well be considered the only thing that would give meaning to their miserable existences. The best, the brightest, the people who live their lives justifying their existence on their own, we touch only if they are our implacable enemies. We have no intent of destroying races and cultures, nor of uprooting and crushing civilizations. Like everyone else, we do what we must, but no more.>
<We wish no breeding farms,>another added. <We do not look upon the rest of life as game to be hunted. Look around you. See what we have built. Does it appear the work of savage monsters? Then look at the races which sprang from worlds we developed and helped to nurture. We took primitives who wandered as hunter-gatherers, too busy working to stay alive to ever develop, and brought them agriculture, and husbandry, and even architecture, politics, art, and invention. Your civilizations were built on our foundations. The galaxy is littered with ancient signs of races now extinct whom we did not get to in time, or who refused our contributions. If we must take, then we pay back for what we take. Far more people are alive today, living better, longer, happier lives because of us than the paltry percentage we must take. We are an ancient and civilized race. And if our payment still seems high, consider that the wars and governments and religions and prejudices of your own peoples have, over the ages, taken far more lives than we ever did, and for far less reason.>
"Taking credit for an awful lot, aren't you?" Jimmy McCray commented cynically. "And yet you're the ones locked up."
<We are locked away to save ourselves, as you surmised. It was either this, or the annihilation of our race. Yet we knew that one day our children would come for us.>
"I'm not exactly sure that's why any of us wound up here," Modra noted. "The only thing we saw when we arrived was the remnants of the most grisly and brutal carnage I can ever remember. It's not a good image on which to base a trusting relationship."
<The watchers chosen as sentinels on such posts were not, as you might expect, our best people. We did not know who, or what, might ever discover them. If our enemies had discovered them, they would have been destroyed. They were simply instructed that, in case of liberation, they learn as much as possible of their liberators, and then to use that knowledge to ensure that representatives of all three of the ancient empires assembled before the station was activated. Without that, none of you could have entered this temple. Unable to be specific, they were on their own. They selected a brutish, direct course of action, it is true, but it worked. It was necessary to be direct, we suspect, since we had to assemble you all and get you through and then deactivate the station before our main enemies could come. I can see from two of your minds that some there were what you call cymols. Those are in a direct sense extensions of those you call the Guardians. They had been fooled by a program within the station control that gave them information the station was deactivated already, the watchers dead. They were not there to truly find out about us; they already knew. They were there to confirm that the station and its inhabitants were dead remnants, then cover it all up. The only reason they maintained the fiction of the project for so long was because the very existence of the station and the watchers was something they had never expected, and they needed to discover not only if it was still active, but whether it was an isolated thing or a possible prototype.>
"But your people killed everybody!" Modra pointed out. "Even the ship!"
<They could not allow the ship to leave, and there were other cymols aboard. We suspect they killed the others simply because, otherwise, there would have been much resistance when the ships of those you call the Mycohl and Mizlaplan showed up. It lacks subtlety, but they were doing what they had to do. In any event, more cymols would have come and most certainly killed all the researchers there in any case to prevent this from leaking out.>
"Our people don't do that kind of thing!" Modra protested.
<Think not? Ask your companion. He has seen a cymol with its clever camouflage removed. He knows what they are really like, and, believe us in this, they are but pale shadows reflecting their masters. We submit ourselves for comparison with them.>
She turned. "Jimmy? What the hell are they talking about?"
He sighed. "I blocked it out selectively, not only from my own mind but from the Durquist's. It was his request, really, if it was possible, to spare you, after we discovered that we all now were telepathic. It's not—pleasant."
"It's about Tris, isn't it?"
He nodded.
"Go ahead, I can take it."
His memories flowed to her, and for a brief time she was back on the rain world again, this time seeing things from Jimmy's own experiences, while she'd been a prisoner of the Mizlaplanians. Gun Roh Chin had felled the entire Exchange group with a wide stun shot, but hadn't been able to keep Lankur down with it. He'd given the cymol a slightly stronger shot at close range to knock him out, and he'd done damage.
Tris Lankur suddenly sat up, then slowly got to his feet, but in a jerky, nonhuman way. In the suit, the impression of not a human being but a mechanical man was almost absolute.
"Well, I'll be cursed!" swore the Durquist, staring. "He really is a robot!"
"I am directing biological interface manually," said Lankur in that weird, mechanical voice. "I am functional, but direct linkage to biologically stored data not fully operable."
"He got real problem," Molly commented needlessly.
Jimmy couldn't help but think of his nightmare and of the metallic, swelling brain of the pilot.
"Status reports on other units?" the cymol asked.
"We're all right—I think," Jimmy told him—it—whatever. "You're the one that's worse for wear."
"Second shot produced some tissue damage and electrical linkage shorts," the cymol explained. "Essential data intact, but am unable to access Terran simulation mode. Pre-cymol mode memories, habit patterns, not present."
<Jeez! Lookit the way he moves!> Grysta commented. <He's a real walking corpse now!>
Jimmy found the sight of the cymol stripped of his humanity to be very unsettling, but there were more pressing matters. "How functional overall are you?" he asked. "Can you make the distance? Can you fight if you have to and hit what you aim at?"
"Full control. Limits and reflexive actions impossible to predict, but no random or uncontrollable actions will occur. However, sensory and tactile feedback to brain is not functional at this time."
"You mean you can't feel pain?" McCray asked him.
"I mean I can feel nothing. But the biological unit appears to function as I direct."
<Uh-oh!> Grysta commented. <Anybody bring any diapers! Otherwise he's gonna get pretty ripe real soon!>
As usual, Jimmy ignored her. "Durquist?"
"It will have to do," the Durquist responded. "It is particularly painful for me to see him in this condition, since I was with him for so long, but, from a practical sense, it's far better than broken legs or puncture wounds or the like. What about our treacherous priests?"
Jimmy did a scan. "Ahead, of course. I think they made real time. Either that or we were out a lot longer than Grysta thinks we were. Still, I get the odd impression that they stopped somewhere ahead. If I were them, I'd want to get as far away from us as I could and as fast as possible."
"Haste makes for mistakes," the Durquist commented. "Let them stop and worry about us for a bit. Still, I would like to close and see if we can find some shelter from this interminable rain. How are you, by the way? From the angle, I'd say you got the full force of the first shot."
"I dreamt I died and went to Hell," the telepath said slowly. "Then I woke up and found I was already there." He looked at the stiff, jerky body of Tris Lankur.
<You sure he's still on our side?> Grysta asked a bit nervously.
The fact was, he wasn't sure any more. He wasn't sure of anything except that they were in the middle of a miserable world of gloom and constant, heavy rain, and he didn't know why he was there or how the hell to get out.
Listening to those omnipresent shrieks and moans, though, and still with vivid memories of his dreams, he definitely decided that he didn't want to die right now, no matter how miserable he was.
"Let's close on them," he said at last. "I want them to know we're there."
It took them less than an hour along the obsidian-encrusted black rock trail before they were very close indeed. McCray climbed almost to the edge of the trail and looked out at the great falls. Still, when Tris and Molly both made to keep walking, he stopped them. "They're there. Waiting for us, most likely," he warned them. "There's no cover for us down there on the edge of the falls, either."
The Durquist agreed. "If there is some overhang or ruins right against the side here, that's where I'd be. Waiting for us to step out and be shot right over those falls."
"This unit, McCray, and Durquist have two directional grenades each. Enemy does not or it would have used them in first battle," Lankur noted.
"But Modra's with them!" the Durquist reminded him. "We'd get her, too!"
"No logical way to recover Modra," the cymol responded. "Probabilities of doing so under this situation very small. Modra now just makes the Mizlaplan invaders the strongest group. Logical to eliminate them all. Advantage then returns to us."
"But that's Modra down there! Modra!" the Durquist exclaimed, appalled. Even Jimmy McCray, the newcomer, had problems with this kind of logic.
"Getting the bastards who screwed us is one thing," he said evenly, trying to hold his temper, "but I draw the line as the murder of one of our own."
"Without that action, a stalemate results and the Mycohl go on unencumbered by default," the cymol pointed out. "We cannot proceed without being ambushed by the Mizlaplanians. Mizlaplanians cannot proceed because we have a clear field of fire from this point. A stalemate is unacceptable so long as a third enemy group is involved and ahead of us. We have the means to resolve the stalemate. Not using those means violates all logic."
"It means nothing to you that she's one of our own, kidnapped against her will?" Jimmy pressed.
"The Exchange has approximately thirty trillion citizens. Of those, close to two point five trillion are Terrans. What is one more or less to the maintenance of order and harmony?"
"I assume the same logic applies to us," the Durquist noted.
"Of course."
"This explains a lot about the quality of life of the bulk of people in the Exchange," Jimmy McCray noted dryly, in the low, barely heard whisper he generally used only to talk to Grysta. "Grysta was right—you're not on our side any more. Somehow, I don't think you ever really were."
"Waiting is pointless. They are sheltered, we are exposed," the cymol commented.
"Hold, cymol—before you act!" the Durquist called icily, edging up to the man who'd once been his friend and captain.
"Yes?"
"What is the basic philosophical difference between you and your masters and the Quintara?"
"The question has no relevancy."
"It does to me. Very much so."
"Very well. The Guardians believe that the whole is far greater than the parts that compose it and provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The Quintara believe that the whole exists to serve themselves."
"Then, in the smaller sense, the team, which is us, has interests that outweigh the interests of a part of it, namely Modra. Somehow, this 'part' sees little practical difference to himself in that attitude. I cannot allow what you propose to happen."
"You have no vote. I act by the authority of the Guardians themselves as an officer of the Exchange. You elected to come with me; I did not order it."
"I am not at all sure there was much of a choice," the Durquist noted, "although, if there were, I would still have come because the team came. All of the team. Me, McCray, even Molly, and, yes, Modra. And I must wonder when you propose such a horrible violation of our codes if in fact there isn't still some little bit of Tris Lankur in there, perhaps the bitter, hating part, rationalized by the mechanical part, that seeks not what is right, or just, but revenge. She killed you, turned you into this, and now you would take her life in exchange!"
The vacant-eyed, jerky body did not respond, but instead walked just to the edge, where the path went steeply down to the bedrock below. One of the Durquist's eyes swiveled to Jimmy McCray, who stared back at it and just nodded silently.
The cymol took instrument readings, totally ignoring the other behind him. "Range forty point two meters to the right, inside the cliff in some kind of cave or dwelling," Lankur reported to no one in particular. He reached into his pouch and removed a small black object, which hummed to life and then emitted a high-pitched, steady, whistling tone.
The Durquist stood, a bizarre caricature of a biped, and walked up right behind the cymol. Without hesitation, the "right" tentacle swung back, then loosed itself forward striking the cymol almost directly on his ass with such force that the man was literally propelled into the air and came down a good four meters on the bedrock below.
"You saw the rest," Jimmy told her quietly.
Modra was shaken by the flood of memories, as shaken as she'd been that night when they'd waited in the hospital, Tris with a solid bullet from one of his antiques in his brain, waiting to find out about him.
<The Durquist asked how the Guardians differed from the Quintara,> one of the demons noted. <The response was that the question had no relevancy. We believe it is quite relevant. The victor in a battle writes the history and describes his enemy to those who came after. No matter what you think of us on our own, we believe we do differ from the Guardians, and we offer not subjective history but objective evidence.>
"All it says to me," Krisha said, "is that both your races are slime. It is the rapist offering himself up as a good example compared to the murderer."
<The differences are a matter of degree, we admit,> a demon responded. <However, you must realize that what originally brought the four Founder Races together in uneasy alliance was how easily we recognized each other. The Mycohl, as you call them, exist as a parasitic commune that destroys their host's ability to think, erases their memories—kills them, in fact, while leaving the host alive and healthy for them. They can only reproduce by killing. The ones called Guardians are machine-like, without any of the emotions of the rest. They manage with a cold, efficient logic, and if whole worlds must starve because they throw off the balance, then so be it. They enjoy turmoil, misery, and a measure of chaos, remote-control risk-taking and the like because it is the only sort of emotion they can have and they crave it as an addict craves a drug. But only collective emotion is effective; they feed on it, while carefully managing things so that the parts their domain requires to survive are kept reasonably prosperous. Thus, of their thirty trillion, more or less, a mere five percent have what technology could provide for everyone. They are the essentials.>
<Another ten percent live in relative peace and comfort,> a second demon continued. <Primitive by some standards, with life spans shorter than they should be, but they live comfortable, dull, gray lives. They supply the essentials and maintain an educated pool if needed. Another five percent maintain or expand the system. That's six trillion, a very large population. Both of you, Exchange people, come from that gray middle and have moved into expansion and maintenance. That leaves twenty-four trillion, and growing, living no better in many cases than their primitive ancestors, in squalor and ignorance, prejudice and superstition, suspicion and hate, but knowing that the spaceships go to and from better places. Off these do the Guardians feed, like psychic vampires, while those of you from the middle and top occasionally soothe your consciences with missions and charity, which only serves to raise their hatred and envy of you, while you all really practice only one religion, materialism. The bulk of you just turn your heads and think, 'There, but for the grace and good fortune, go I,' and, if pressed, say that it's a price to be paid for a dynamic system.>
"You do nothing but prove our point, demon!" Manya almost shouted at them. "We of the Mizlaplan stand alone against such evil!"
The demons laughed cruelly. <You masters are the worst of the lot!>one jeered. <Your Holy Angels are the oldest and most cynical of the Founders. They tap the other plane so freely and place all of it in their hypnotic powers, a talent they were born with just as the Gnolls are gifted with the powers of psychic invisibility. It enabled them, although slow and ungainly, to be protected from harm, and to have the very beasts of their native world do their bidding. So easy has it become for them that they no longer even have useful limbs, but they don't need them. They have an entire class of people of all races under their control who call themselves priests and priestesses and are made their lifelong, devoted slaves by their hypnotic powers. By ensuring that all with talents are also their slaves, they can use them not only to provide all that is necessary for their comfort and existence but also use their chief slaves to bring their slavery to every single creature in their domain, and enforce it ruthlessly through an inquisition that uses telepaths, hypnos, empaths, and conditioning to ferret out and deal with any and all malcontents, any who dare question. And by stifling dissent and creating a uniform culture of people who must be happy and obedient—or else!—they stifle all creativity and social development and all opportunities for anyone to grow or experience any freedom, their very ability to compete with the other two empires, which are at least dynamic, almost totally dependent on their ability to create brilliant spies. You are nothing but common domesticated animals to them, yet you must serve and you must love them. How sickening!>
"Liars! False prophets! Source of all blasphemies and all lies! You will never get out of there! No Mizlaplanian will ever be a party to it!"
Manya was beside herself, but Krisha, too, felt near equal rage. Gun Roh Chin, impassive as usual, tried his best to calm them down.
Kalia laughed at them. "Well, old witch bitches! Being such good little toady slaves! No wonder you don't want to get laid! You're programmed like a goddamn computer!"
Manya screamed in fury and eluded Chin's grasp. She was remarkably quick for such a chunky little creature, and she plowed right through the others in her single-minded quest to get her hands around Kalia's throat.
Krisha squirmed, trying to get out of the captain's grasp herself, but he held her and screamed right in her face. "You must stop it! Stop it and her! Now! Don't you see you're just playing their game? Providing them with some amusement? Think!"
McCray and the others watched as Manya seemed suddenly to flicker, then vanish before their eyes. Kalia, however, expected it, waited just a moment, then leaped to one side with the agility of a dancer.
"C'mon, bitch!" she taunted the Gnoll. "That trick don't work twice! You ain't got no gun now, bitch! And I can read your mind!"
Krisha got hold of herself, but the color was draining fast from her face. "It's too late, Captain," she said, almost out of breath. "Manya is like a wild beast in her head right now, and that girl is a trained killer."