answers,” he challenged.
Liannathan spread graceful hands in gracious signal. “I told you,
knowing what darkness you must dwell in, for mercy’s sake we will leave
your thoughts alone unless you compel us. Speak.”
Conviction congealed in Flandry, iceberg huge. “No, you speak. What are
you on Chereion? What do you tell the Merseians? I already know, or
think I know, but tell me.”
The response rang grave: “We are not wholly the last of an ancient race;
the others have gone before us. We are those who have not yet reached
the Goal; the bitter need of the universe for help still binds us. Our
numbers are few, we have no need of numbers. Very near we are to those
desires that lie beyond desire, those powers that lie beyond power.”
Compassion softened Liannathan’s words. “Terran, we mourn the torment of
you and yours. We mourn that you can never feel the final reality, the
spirit born out of pain. We have no wish to return you to nothingness.
Go in love, before too late.”
Almost, Flandry believed. His sense did not rescue him; his memories
did. “Yah!” he shouted. “You phantom, stop haunting!”
He lunged. Liannathan wasn’t there. He crashed a blaster bolt among the
mystics. They were gone. He leaped in among the red-tinged shadows of
the arcade and peered after light and sound projectors to smash.
Everywhere else, enormous, brooded the stillness of the long afternoon.
The image of a single Chereionite flashed into sight, in brief white
tunic, bearing though not brandishing a sidearm, palm
uplifted–care-worn, as if the bones would break out from the skin, yet
with life in flesh and great garnet eyes such as had never burned in
those apparitions which were passed away. Flandry halted. “Aycharaych!”
He snatched for the switch to turn his mindscreen back on. Aycharaych
smiled. “You need not bother, Dominic,” he said in Anglic. “This too is
only a hologram.”
“Lieutenant,” Flandry snapped over his shoulder, “dispose your squad
against attack.”
“Why?” said Aycharaych. The armored men gave him scant notice. His form
glimmered miragelike in the gloom under that vaulted roof, where sullen
sunlight barely reached. “You have discovered we have nothing to resist
you.”
You’re bound to have something, Flandry did not reply. A few missiles or
whatever. You’re just unwilling to use them in these environs. Where are
you yourself, and what were you doing while your specters held us quiet?
As if out of a stranger’s throat, he heard: “Those weren’t
straightforward audiovisuals like yours that we met, were they? No
reason for them to put on a show of being present, of being real, except
that none of them ever were. Right? They’re computer-generated
simulacrums, will-o’-the-wisps for leading allies and enemies alike from
the truth. Well, life’s made me an unbeliever.
“Aycharaych, you are in fact the last Chereionite alive. The very last.
Aren’t you?”
Abruptly such anguish contorted the face before him that he looked away.
“What did they die of?” he was asking. “How long ago?” He got no answer.
Instead: “Dominic, we share a soul, you and I. We have both always been
alone.”
For a while I wasn’t; and now she is; she is down in the aloneness which
is eternal. Rage ripped Flandry. He swung back to see a measure of
self-command masking the gaunt countenance. “You must have played your
game for centuries,” he grated. “Why? And … whatever your reason to
hide that your people are extinct … why prey on the living? You, you
could let them in and show them what’d make your Chereionites the …
Greeks of the galaxy–but you sit in a tomb or travel like a
vampire–Are you crazy, Aycharaych? Is that what drives you?”
“No!”
Flandry had once before heard the lyric voice in sorrow. He had not
heard a scream: “I am not! Look around you. Who could go mad among
these? And arts, music, books, dreams–yes, more, the loftiest spirits
of a million years–they lent themselves to the scanners, the
recorders–If you could have the likenesses to meet whenever you would
… of Gautama Buddha, Kung Fu-Tse, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus the Christ, Rumi
… Socrates, Newton, Hokusai, Jefferson, Gauss, Beethoven, Einstein,