Jimmy McCray had taken mostly to lying in the grass, shield fully up, and just thinking about things, well away from the others. It was, oddly, the lack of pressure that was bothering him. All of them felt it; as if the weight of the world and the threat of instant death or eternal torture had been suddenly taken away, along with all responsibilities and cares. Krisha, Modra, and, oddly, even Josef seemed to be happy just to remain here, at least, they all told themselves, just a little while longer, particularly now that their digestive systems weren’t in revolt. And they had needed the rest, and deserved it, after what they’d all been through.
Grysta approached him as he sat there, looking up at the immense starfield that appeared in this world’s night sky, and he barely looked around.
By now he was pretty certain that Grysta was in fact Grysta; that, somehow, she coexisted in that brain with poor little Molly. If, indeed, that other plane was the plane of the soul, who was to say that what Grysta claimed wasn’t true? Under his Church’s doctrine a syn was a machine, and machines had no souls. In that case, there was certainly room, and perhaps Molly’d been given a sort of immortality by the move, although the price had been much, much too high.
“Jimmy? We gotta get out of here,” Grysta said with a sigh.
“Huh? What?”
“I said we got to get out, that’s all. I been keepin’ Josef happy but that won’t last. I know he’s got eyes for both the other girls, and that nutty ex-priestess is irresistible. And Modra, she’s maybe sick. She actually had some blood come outta her crotch today and she’s real upset by it.”
That got him interested. “Hmph! I hadn’t thought of that, nor she, either, I bet. That’s not any illness, though, Grysta. When she got married she probably had her reproductive system turned back on and limited it with a skin patch for the duration of our so-called last job together. Now the patch is wearing off and a replacement is—God knows where, out there, somewhere.”
“Repro—you mean it’s part of the Terran baby-makin’ system? Blood? Yuk! She gonna make a baby or something now?”
“Not unless Josef gets to her, but she could have a rough and messy couple of days. I don’t wonder she’s upset by it.”
“Jeez! Then what about me and the other girl?”
He chuckled. “You don’t have to worry. Your body’s not designed for it. And Krisha—well, I think they made that impossible when she was ordained, if I remember right.”
“Jimmy—I can’t read minds, but I got the real strong impression that Josef has this real fantasy of setting off in the wilderness, just him and three women, all hypnoed and his adoring slaves. You watch your back.”
He smiled grimly. “A telepath always watches his back. I know his thoughts as soon as he knows them, and I know his fantasies, too. typical hypno, really, particularly from his sort of culture, although I suspect one from ours would be just the same in this sort of situation. His one problem is Tobrush. He can’t get around that and he can’t really get away here any more than he could back where he came from, and Tobrush knows our job is not only unfinished, it’s not even fully begun.”
“Yeah, but, like somebody said, they must know back in the Empires that the Quintara are loose. They gotta!”
“I’m sure of that,” he agreed, “but I’m not at all sure, particularly now, if they know just what that means. Tobrush is the best example. He’s one of the very ones we’re counting on, and he admits he didn’t know any more about this than we do. What if it’s been too long? What if it’s been forgotten? I keep wondering about the old times in my own race, after the explosion of science but before interstellar flight, and what would have happened if we’d discovered a devil in amber. Only the so-called ignorant would have feared it. The others would have acted like our scientists did on that frontier world. They’d have poked and probed and measured and all that and even freed it eventually, and the rationalists who would head such expeditions would not believe in the real danger, but only in terms of more tangible dangers such as when facing a wild beast or an enemy soldier, no matter what the legends. After thousands of years, perhaps the Quintara are mere legends to the Higher Races now. Two demon-like creatures were broken out of suspension capsules, awakened, killed everybody, and somehow got away. A tragedy for science, perhaps, but only a local danger. Ten to one that they’re not only not preparing for war, they’re sparing no exploration effort to find more crystals. Damn them! This is one time when being smarter and more powerful shields them from the truth!”
“So, like I said, we gotta get out of here, right? I kind’a feel responsible for all this. I want to do what I can, if you just tell me what to do.”
He sighed. “I wish I knew. I really do. But this is one time when the old captain blew it. We just went through to another local destination and that’s that. Some world maybe further out, past the frontier, like the one they discovered.” He suddenly stopped and sat up straight. “Holy Mother of God!”
“You all right, Jimmy?” Grysta asked, concerned.
He snapped his fingers. “Sure! Look up there, Grysta, and tell me what you see?”
She frowned and looked up at the sky where he was pointing. “A big bunch of stars?”
“Stars! At all the descending stages to the city we passed through regions that son of looked like worlds but had no day, no night, no stars, no sun. We went down a number of levels to get there, and they all had that in common! But, when we exited the city, we came immediately to a world that could support us, with sun and stars and all the rest. We are out! It did work, just like the old boy said it would!”
“Uh—Jimmy. . . . This ain’t where we came in.”
“No, of course not. Think of the capital city, where we lived. You get there, having never been there before, and you get a robocab and you say, ‘Take me to Jimmy McCray’s flat.'”
“Yeah? So?”
“Well, there are a million million flats in that city, and a mere cab doesn’t have the kind of database access to do that. There are privacy laws, for one thing. So the cab asks for more specific directions, and you reply that you only know it’s a one-bedroom standard flat on the third floor and you insist the cab take you there. So, what does it do? It takes you to the first block of flats with three or more floors that have one-bedroom flats!”
She frowned a moment, then brightened. “Oh, I see! So then you tell it that it isn’t right, so it goes to the next block, and the next, and so on.”
“Exactly. A system this sophisticated would require uniformly specific instructions. Not the place we came in at, which it wouldn’t know, but precisely which world in the network. Nor would it know the politics or new structures or anything of the sort. We gave it a set of pictures from which it could only extract a warm, tree-filled world that could support’our kinds, so it sent us to the first one on the list!”
“Urn—yeah, but—that cab you talked about? There’s zillions of blocks of flats like that in the city. You could take months to find the right one, one at a time, unless you were real, real lucky.”
He nodded. “And that means we can’t go back there. Not directly. I’m tempted to try for the plain one, the one with the rather bizarre ‘Do not enter’ sign, but there might be a number of them like that. Damn.’ We really do need the captain now! We had the proper star maps for Rainbow Bridge, wherever that is. He had to interpret and program the location from fixes by their military. He’s the only one who actually knew the true location well enough to be specific.”
“What about Josef? He was captain and he got there.”
“By following the Mizlaplanians, not by independent coordinates. I already plumbed his mind for that.” He sighed. “Even then, it might not matter. They probably have their own coordinate system, as easy as giving an address.”
<Nevertheless, your theory is the first ray of hope out of this morass,> came Tobrush’s comments in his mind.
<You were listening!>
<I am listening to all of you. Your shields are not much of a barrier to me.>
He hadn’t thought of that wrinkle. They were as wide open to the Mycohl master as Krisha was to the rest of them. It was a most unsettling thought for a telepath.
<What’s the difference? If it’s strictly trial and error we’re much more likely to run into a batch of Quintara than we are to luck into the right exit, > he noted.
<Perhaps. Perhaps not. I keep going over the contents of the Mizlaplanian’s mind. Captain Chin once told her that the only way was to return to the chamber where the crystals grow. He seemed to believe that part of the answer lay there.>
<And do what? Go back into that ugly other plane with __ those monstrosities there trying to engulf us? Reach the pool in the city again in mental form and get trapped there until that creature discovers us? We can’t get out of there any other way. The fire world is between us, and, even if it wasn’t, it would take a week or more to walk back out without food and in some cases without water. >
<I have been considering that. At the very least, it would prove your theory. I sincerely doubt if there is more than one place where these crystals grow. If we reach it, we prove the thing works.>
<Okay, granted. But if we reach it, we’ll probably find ourselves neck deep in Quintara. Or, say we don’t. Then what?>
<Perhaps we can use it to find a destination. Has it not occurred to you that in all cases we have gone left to descend, as it were? Even in the visions of the other plane we went towards the city, which is where we wanted to go. Suppose this time we go against the stream?> “Against the stream?” he said aloud. “Huh? You say something?” Grysta asked. “I’m talking to Tobrush. Hold on.” <What about right here? What about going right from the station back there?>
<I doubt if it will work. This is, as you noted, in the universe that we know. It is an end point, >
<The others weren’t in the universe we know?> <I think not. It is too simplistic to think of them as levels inside that first world. Clearly that is absurd. But neither do I believe that they are real worlds. As you yourself noted, they had no day, no night, and did not really vary.>
He was fascinated, and he knew that the Mycohl had to have an intelligence well beyond his own, or even the captain, who’d made similar comments. <So, if they aren’t worlds, what are they?>
<Templates. Templates for worlds. Perhaps even breeding and experimental labs as well, but compartments nonetheless in some vast enclosure. The place where all the demons were—a service corridor running between. > <Templates? Compartments? You speak like it’s some kind of spaceship, like that big lab ship orbiting the first world. >
<I think it might be something like that. Where? Who can say? We travel via the crystals through a physics that some of us do not yet know and others have for gotten. The picture is still unclear. I believe that Chin was onto the same line of thought. He believed that more of the picture lay in a return to the crystal cave. So do I. Let us see if we can get there.>
<And if you can talk the others into it.>
Tobrush sounded very confident indeed. <Josef will go or he will no longer be Josef. If he becomes a liability I can create in him a brother. He knows this. Would that I had done it to Kalia! The others . . . they will go where we do.>
Jimmy wasn’t so sure, but it was better than staying here and waiting for Josef to move. He looked at Grysta. “Okay, your point’s accepted. We’re pulling out,” he told her.
The others were not nearly as enthusiastic about the idea, he found, somewhat to his consternation. Josef, of course, had his own agenda, at least in his mind, and he expected Krisha to be less than thrilled at the idea of possibly facing the Quintara again, this time defenseless—for all the good her talents had done before—but Modra he expected to be anxious to get on with this. She felt his puzzlement and said, softly, “It’s not fear, Jimmy. I think you know that. I’m just so tired. It’s as if I’ve been going round and round on this high-speed thrill ride. I got off, and it’s so damned peaceful I don’t want to buy another ticket.” Still, she knew she would, and he understood that.
“I’ve been feeling a bit tired myself,” he responded softly. “But this isn’t off the ride—it’s merely pausing for suspense before dropping us into a dark pit. Just over the hill and through the trees is a station, and, sooner or later, somebody we don’t wish to meet is going to pop out of it. I don’t just want the pause. I want out, and that means letting the damned ride continue.”
The next morning, they walked back to the station. The great crystal had once looked odd and bizarre to them, but now it was at one and the same time as familiar as an old shoe and more threatening than the grave.
<Take the image off my mind,> Tobrush instructed.</ believe it will work better if there is a single specificity of vision. If we emerge in the correct place, no matter what we find or do not find there, it will mark the first truly important moment in our journey, for it will mean that we have regained some measure of control. >