The Gypsy whipped out a pistol with the same dexterity with which he’d pocketed the bag of coins and from the same apparent place. He looked up and around.
“Drop it now!” commanded the voice of Har Bateen not only from above but from behind them. The Gypsy did not drop it immediately, but turned slowly, looking in the direction of the voice. Spotting the man, he sighed and dropped the pistol to the alley. He didn’t know how Bateen had managed it but the Dreel now sat on a small ledge a good six meters up. He must climb like a monkey, the Gypsy thought. The walls were ribbed block, but he couldn’t have made it up there in that length of time.
The Dreel stared uneasily at the dragon, who stared back at him with blazing eyes, catlike black ovals against a dark scarlet backdrop.
“Don’t try siccing your big pet on me,” Bateen warned. “Just keep him there.”
The man nodded back and said out of the corner of his mouth, “Marquoz! Stay!”
The dragon snorted and seemed to grumble a little but sat back on his tail and relaxed slightly.
“All right, now, who are you and why are you following me?” the Dreel challenged.
The Gypsy grinned apologetically and spread his hands. “When we take the collection, you see, we often get to see who has the biggest bankroll. Marquoz, here, can be, ah, very persuasive for such a one to, ah, substantially increase his donation to us. We have been stuck in this god-forsaken hole of a planet for much too long. Business is not good—we were, ah, asked to leave the ship here, not our scheduled stop, and we have not yet been able to make our expenses and our fares out. And, to make it short, the local cops are wise to us.”
The Dreel considered the explanation. It made sense—and the bankroll he had was more than apparent and was meant to be so. Still, there was something here that didn’t ring true. For ones who’d been on this planet long enough to acquire a bad reputation why were they so obviously a novelty to the crowd? Bateen decided to take no chances.
“All right—that thing, there. What is it?” he demanded.
The Gypsy looked toward Marquoz, impassively sitting on his big tail. “I met him on a backwater frontier planet. He wasn’t native to it; he belonged to a number of my fellow tribesmen who had been asked, shall we say, to stay a while by the local police. About three years, actually. I, of course, agreed to take him in a flash, and he took to me as well. I have no idea where they picked him up.”
That didn’t tell the Dreel much, but, then again, there were a lot odder lifeforms than Marquoz around not excluding the Dreel themselves. The story had the ring of truth—and the final clincher was the Gypsy’s pistol. Not the supermodern type the Com Police would use, all gleaming and near-transparent with its ruby power source. Just a common tramp’s pistol, a small laser driller, just like somebody of the Gypsy’s type might carry.
“I’m coming down now,” Bateen warned, “but as you can tell I am very good at athletics. My pistol won’t stray from you even as I break my fall, and it’s on wide kill.”
“Look, all I want now is out of this. A mistake, that’s all,” the Gypsy alibied sincerely.
The Dreel nodded and jumped down. The Gypsy was amazed at the man’s body and muscle control. He hadn’t been kidding—the pistol stayed pointed directly at him. No human being he’d ever seen short of a professional gymnast could do that, and this character hardly looked the gymnastic type.
The Dreel approached the man slowly, one eye on Marquoz. “No funny business,” he warned.
“What—what are you going to do?” the Gypsy asked uneasily, eyes only on the pistol.
Har Bateen allowed himself the very human gesture of a smile, a smile of one who knows what you do not. “Don’t worry,” he told the Gypsy. “I’m not going to kill you. If your pet stays calm and you don’t try anything funny, then nothing will happen to you. But your life depends on your doing exactly what I say— exactly! Understand?”
The Gypsy nodded slowly, the fear in his eyes not lessened one bit by the assurances.
The Dreel walked cautiously in back of the man. “Take off your vest,” he ordered.
The Gypsy looked confused. “This some kind of a sex thing?”
“In a way,” his captor responded. “Don’t worry— it won’t hurt you in the least. Better than getting smeared all over the place, isn’t it?”
Marquoz simply sat and watched. Bateen took a small blade from his pocket. “Just take it easy. A very small cut, nothing more.” He saw the man flinch for the quick pricking, then watched with satisfaction as a small drop of blood formed at the puncture. He sliced a small hole in his thumb.
Instantly Dreel rushed to the opening, the capillaries of the hand and the edge of the thumb, then halted, waiting for contact. There had been plenty of time; a full team of ten thousand memory units had been assembled and waiting.
Har Bateen eagerly held the thumb toward the cut on the man’s back. So confident was he now that he took his glance off the dragon sitting only a few meters away.
“Hold it! Freeze!” came a voice to his left, a voice incredibly deep and gravelly as if coming from a giant speaking through a hollow tube. “Drop the gun and stand away from him!”
Bateen was so startled he did freeze and his eyes looked over at the source of the sound.
The giant lizard was standing there, eyeing him coldly with those blazing scarlet eyes and in its hand was a Fuka machine pistol, made of an almost transparent material, with its red power center blazing; it would almost control the wielder, shoot the level and type of force its holder thought of. A pistol keyed to its individual owner; the kind of pistol only one authority possessed.
“Marquoz, of the Com Police,” the dragon said unnecessarily. “I said drop it and stand away.”
“But . . . but you can’t—you’re not human,” the Dreel protested. Intelligence said nothing about this!
“Neither are you, bub,” the dragon responded. “I consider that your only redeeming social feature.”
Hodukai, a Planet on the Frontier
they filled the temple; it was a good sign, Mother Sukra thought to herself as she looked out from behind the stage curtain. The Acolytes had done a wonderful job of carrying the Word. Most were first-timers, she saw. Hesitating, nervous, unsure, but curious. That, too, was to be expected. The Fellowship of the Holy Well was still new here, and attractive mostly to the young, the most impressionable always, and the poor, the starving, the losers. The Holy Priestess, too, would know this and be pleased by the newcomers and the demonstrated effectiveness of Mother Sukra’s organization after only a few months.
The High Priestess was pleased—and excited, although she betrayed none of this in her classically stoic manner. She had been in this position before, although not with so much of responsibility.
The lights were going down; stirring music, subtle, soothing subsonics, set the mood and soft lights caressed both audience and stage. She looked at Mother Sukra, now checking herself one last time in the mirror, smoothing her long saffron robes and touching up her long brown hair. Her timing was impeccable, though; she stopped at precisely the right moment and turned to walk on stage to the center spot. There was no dais, no podium tonight, no pulpit from on high; that would spoil the effect they wanted from the Holy Priestess.
Mother Sukra looked terribly alone on the barren stage.
Along the sides the robed men and women, the Acolytes, heads shaved and wearing only loose-fitting cloth robes, rose and bowed to her. A number of the audience took the cue and stood, and within a short period most of the hall was standing. Normal crowd reaction; the ones remaining seated were not those to whom they would be speaking. Later, she thought. Later all would come willingly.
“Be at peace!” Mother Sukra proclaimed, and raised her arms to the heavens.
“Peace be unto the creatures of the Universe, no matter what form they be,” the Acolytes—and some in the audience—responded.
“This night we are honored to be graced with the presence of Her Holiness the Priestess Yua of the Mother Church,” Sukra told them needlessly. Curiosity over Yua’s appearance explained the large crowd at a service normally attended only by the few hundred devout. The audience was entirely human, which was to be expected, too. Although the Com now contained no fewer than seven races, only three or four were commonly seen in large cities on the human worlds and none in Temples, which they considered racially xenophobic. While the Temple was open to all races, its doctrine was not one to appeal to nonhuman types.
Unless, of course, you were an Olympian.
Everybody knew about the Olympians, but nobody knew much about them at one and the same time. Few had ever seen one; they were secretive and clannish. Their world was such that no one could live on it without a spacesuit, yet the Olympians could live comfortably on any of the human worlds. They ran their own shipping company and flew their own ships; sales were handled by an Olympian-owned but human-run trading company—no salesmen need apply to Olympus.
Such conditions breed an insatiable curiosity in people, but there was more. The Olympians were said to be stunningly beautiful women; no one had ever seen a male. Beautiful women with tails, like horse’s tails, who all, it was said, looked exactly alike.
There was a full house on this frontier world waiting to see an Olympian for the simple reason that the Fellowship of the Well had arisen on Olympus; the Mother Temple was there; and, while humans were the congregation and humans ran the Temples, the Olympians alone could be the High Priestesses.
Oh, they were there, all right—the local press, the politicos, the just plain curious. They sat and shuffled and suffered through Mother Sukra’s mummery and chants as they waited to see just what an Olympian was really like.
Finally Mother Sukra finished, and her voice assumed an awed tone.
“Tonight, my children, we are honored to present Her Holiness the High Priestess of our Fellowship, Yua of Olympus.”
The audience sat up now, expectant, watching as first Mother Sukra walked off then eyeing the curtains on either side of the stage to catch the first glimpse of the priestess.
Yua paused, leaving the stage vacant for thirty seconds or so to heighten the suspense, then she strode purposefully out to the center. The lights dimmed and a spotlight illuminated an area dead center stage and almost to the extreme front, its stream of light forming a bright aura that seemed to make her even more supernatural.
She heard the whispers of “There she is!” and “So that’s an Olympian”—the last said in many different ways—with satisfaction. She wore a cloak of the finest silk, or some synthetic close to it, embroidered with gold leaf. It concealed her form to the floor, but even those far back in the hall were struck by the classic beauty of her face and the long, auburn hair that swept down past her waist.
“Be at peace, my children,” Yua opened, her voice low, incredibly soft, and sexy. “I am here to bless this Temple and its congregation, and to tell those of you here who came out of curiosity or interest of our beliefs and our way.”
She could sense the mixture of awe at her presence —she knew well how stunning she appeared to the humans—and disappointment that they were seeing no more than this. She did not intend to disappoint the voyeurs, but not before the message was delivered, not until it would mean something.
“I come from a planet we call Olympus,” she began, and that got their attention again. Not only was she erotically charismatic, but this promised to be informative. “Our Founding Mothers discovered the world, which had been passed over by the Com as it was not a place where one could survive without prohibitively expensive modification or sealed domes, like the dead worlds of the Markovians. But we could survive there, build there, grow and prosper there, and we have.”
She had them now; a cough was conspicuous in the big hall. They had come expecting the kind of cultism and mummery Mother Sukra had done. They had not expected to be addressed so practically on matters of common curiosity and therefore interest in such plain terms. They listened.
“We resemble you, and we are from your seed, but we are not like you. We were insensitive to many extremes of heat and cold, able to filter out poisons in alien waters and hostile atmospheres, and we need no special suits or equipment to help us. Listen well and I will tell you the story of our people, yours and mine, and of our beliefs.”
She paused. Perfect. Nobody stirred.
“Yours is a frontier world,” she reminded them. “Still rough, still raw. Most, perhaps all of you, were born of other stars. You are all, then, widely traveled in space. You know of the ruins of the Markovians on dead worlds, a mysterious race that left dead computers deep inside their planets and shells of cities without artifacts. You know that once this race inhabited most of the galaxy, and that it vanished long before humanity was born.”
Some heads nodded. The Markovian puzzle was well known to everybody by now. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of dead worlds, had been found as humanity had spread ever outward. They were old, incredibly old, impossibly old since they appeared to date back almost to the formation of the universe.
“They were the first civilization. They grew and spread and reached godhood itself, their computers giving them everything they could ever desire merely for the wishing. And yet this was not enough; they grew stale, bored, unable to take joy in life. And so they decided to abandon their godhood, begin anew as new races of the Universe. They created a great computer, the Well of Souls, and they placed it at the center of the Universe, and on this computer world they created new races, all of the races of the Universe out of their very selves. Their old world grew silent while their creations, tested on the world of the Well, became the new masters of creation—our own people among them. At last all were gone; they were transformed into our ancestors, and the Markovians were us and we were the Markovians.”
A number of the better educated nodded at this account. It was an old theory, one of thousands advanced to explain the Markovian mystery.
“But even as this is truth, for we all know of it, a puzzle remains, the eternal, ultimate question. The Markovians rose near the beginning of time; they were the first race, the parents of all who came after. And if this be so, then who created the Markovians?”
An interesting question in metaphysics. There were a number in the crowd who reflected that it didn’t really follow even in her premise on the Markovians was correct that anybody had to create the Markovians, but they kept silent.
“Throughout history, humankind—and the other races with whom we have joined in partnership—have had many religions. They have many gods, a few have one god, but all have a single concept of the first creation. All have at their center a chief God, a prime mover, the one who created all else. He exists, my children! He exists and He is still here, still watching our own progress, evaluating us. Our First Mothers knew Him, and He took them to the Well of Souls where they were twice reborn. Through the principles of the Well these First Mothers were made greater than they had been, and they were returned here as a living sign, they and their children and their children’s children, that God exists, that the Well exists, that we may attain states much higher than that to which we were born if we but seek Hun out. For if we recognize the truth and His great and omnipotent power that is absolute, if we find Him and but ask, a paradise shall be born here, for us. And it is possible to do so, my children. It is possible to find Him if we look, and that is what we all do, all must do, until He is found. For God is among us, children!” Her voice was rising now, the emotional pitch was so effective, so sincere that it bore into even the most cynical in the audience. “He has chosen for some reason, a form like yours. He could be here, tonight, sitting beside one of you, waiting to be asked, to be recognized. We know His name. We have but to ask. To the First Mothers He called Himself Nathan Brazil!”
They were moved by the message and half-convinced, but for some it was a letdown. All the rationality had somehow quickly turned on a questionable point of logic to a matter of faith.
“Are you here, Lord? Is any of you Nathan Brazil?” she called out. No one spoke or made a move. That was better than some places where occasional wags had, in fact, own up to being God, causing a disruption in the service. Once in a while one would be a genuine loony who really believed it, and that was often worse. As much as High Priestess Yua truly wanted to find God, she was secretly glad when no response was made in situations like this.
The pause over, she continued. “Our First Mothers were human once, like you. Now, through the grace of Nathan Brazil and through the Well of Souls, they became something else: Olympians. We are immune to your diseases and have none of our own. We can stand comfortably unclothed at well below zero or near the boiling point of water. We see colors you see not, hear sounds you hear not, and our strength is that of ten ordinary women. If the atmosphere is mostly chlorine, we will breathe it. If it is mostly carbon monoxide, we will breathe it. If it is water, we will breathe it. Even in the vacuum of space we can survive, storing what we need for hours at temperatures that would freeze anyone else. Look upon the Olympian, true child of the Well, and join us in our holy crusade!”