“What? How?”
“The Corithian. Silicon-based. Why would the Quintara, who are carbon-based life, design a system so clever and then allow another form of life to use it? Conclusion: either they didn’t build it, and evidence suggests that they at least had a big hand in it, or they didn’t build it alone.”
“But—who else? Not these things!”
“No, not these things. Not the Holy Angels, either, I don’t think. They are much too comfortable on carbon-based worlds and I’ve never heard of one going to a different kind of world. The Mycohl? Who knows how that communal, intelligent virus was developed or mutated, or in what? Certainly it would explain why they still have some good feelings for the Quintara. An ever greater suspicion would be the Guardians. It would explain a lot about them. They all have to know, no matter what, and you have to be powerful enough to face them on an equal footing.”
She stared at him in a manner approaching awe. “Captain, you will not die if I have anything to say-about it. We can’t afford to lose you. The whole of the Mizlaplan cannot afford to be without you right now. The rest of us—we are very good at what we do, but none of us has your mind. The gods did not put you among us now to kill you at the time of greatest need.”
He yawned and blinked, suddenly barely able to see. “There are others. There are always others,^ he mumbled. “Now I must sleep.”
When it came, it crashed over him like a black wave, and he was out to everything and anything.
Krisha was suddenly aware that everyone else was asleep. Not only the other Mizlaplanians, but all of them. Impulsively, she leaned over and brushed his hair gently with her fingers, and tears came to her.
You can save him, something dark whispered in her mind. You can save him, you can have him.
She tried to block it, but she-was so very, very tired, and she sank into a deep sleep.
She was walking through the maze, and, suddenly, it opened up and she was finally free of it. Before her stretched a vast starfield, and the city was below and beyond her, floating in the void. Connecting the ground where she stood to the gates of the city was a great, transparent ramp that spiraled down, the stars clearly visible through it, although somehow she knew it was solid. Hesitantly, she stepped out onto the ramp and began to walk down, the experience almost like walking on air, and she knew, somehow, that if she fell off she would fall forever in the blackness between the stars.
Midway down, in the center of the spiral, she saw a huge figure standing there, blocking her way. The figure towered over her, wearing the purple robes of a prince of the Quintara, radiating power she could not comprehend.
“It’s not so easy being a saint in the best of circumstances, ” the creature said in a voice that was deep and rich and almost godlike. “Still, you rejected all that you were offered, and you are to be commended for it. Those lesser demons, mere footsoldiers, could not have given you everything anyway.”
“Who are you?” she asked the creature, awed in spite of herself.
“I am the Prince of the Powers of the Air, and I have known your people well. I was there when Mother Earth was formed, and when the breath of life, which is the soul, was breathed into the first Terran, I was there. Your captain was right. Your people have a special destiny, and the only ones who block it are the Mizlaplan, whom you call the Holy Angels, and the Mycohl, who befriended and then betrayed us in the ancient days, and the Guardians. Once, on Mother Earth, your people were divided and set against each other, and then, among the stars, they found a common unify. The Three Empires shattered that and divided you once more, setting Terran against Terran, raising you again as a divided people, because the ruling powers fear your people and your destiny. Your captain knows this.”
“What has this to do with me?” she asked him. “Those are matters beyond any one person.”
“You are wrong,” said the demon prince. “One, or a handful, of people are always the difference. There are more than four hundred races together comprising ninety trillion people among the Three Empires. Most are irrelevant. Whether they live or die, whether they are good or bad, has absolutely no bearing on the present or the future. They make no decisions, effect no events, and are as influential on the scheme of things as a single blade of grass influences the meadow. Only a very tiny number, so tiny a fraction it is ridiculous to note it, make all the decisions, move the rest, mobilize them, decide which lives shall be saved and which shall be taken, create the works of art, the inventions, the laws and the ideals. Those, of course, which the masters of the Three Empires permit to do so. You might have been one of those people, a force for positive change, but you were dangerous to their static system, so they forced you to become a priestess, and neutralized you, turning your energies instead into serving them as their slave, maintaining their system.”
She was shocked at this. Blasphemy and rebellion had never been on her agenda. He knew her thoughts.
“In time you would have fled the system or tried to change it,” he told her. “You know that is true. You looked at the woman Modra Stryke when she was with you and you saw all that you had been cheated out of. A woman who is totally free and who commands—commands!—a spaceship and crew, fully equal to the others without the strings tied to your own self.”
“She did not use that freedom well,” Krisha noted. “She is a very unhappy person.”
“Is it better to be free to choose, even if one chooses wrong, or to have all the choices made for them? Is it better
to be unlucky in love, or to not be permitted to love at all? She has lived life, and you have watched life. You love the captain, yet you cannot express or share or give that love to him. His love for you in this setting borders on driving him mad. What kind of a system, a faith, gods, is it that would allow this sort of thing? We have the reputation for evil, but is it evil to oppose such a system? Is it evil to look at a system and see that it does so much harm to so many, and promises, in the end, only a series of endless incarnations of increasing slavery to it, with its ultimate reward that you shall be slave to the gods forever? Who defines what is evil, anyway?”
“Your kind are brutal,” she retorted, uncomfortable with those words that stung so deeply. “You maim, torture, kill wantonly, demanding blood!”
“And how is that different? Are you riot tortured? Have you not, in their service, uncovered so many others, young and bright and eager like once you were, and condemned them to your own fate? And if we do up front and openly what the others do in secret and more subtly, does it make them any greater than we? The blood, the killing, makes a public point. We are not the rulers; we are the opposition. If we tried to be what your gods claim to be, you would not even notice us. It is the miserable fate of an opposition to such totalitarianism to be—spectacular. Otherwise, who would listen? But that does not mean we would rule in the manner of our opposition. It is far different to have the responsibility for trillions of souls, and to make certain they remain a vital and energetic people, since that is in the interest of the rulers as well.”
She shook her head sadly. “I cannot believe you, even though your words are honey-coated. You wish me to exchange a system I know, which, while it has terrible flaws, still works well for those blades of grass that do not concern you but are everything to me, for a system I must take on your word alone. We are but two people, the captain and I. If we must suffer for the good of others, then it must be so.”
“Then your captain will die, as he foresees,” the demon prince responded sadly, “and you will be there to see him
die and feel his agony. But you will not die. I have commanded it. You will live to see us freed and victorious, your system and your Church destroyed, your gods forgotten, but you will remain as you are, bound forever only to observe, always cut off, by your own choice. It will come to pass. Soon we will be unbound. Nothing can stop that now. And, once unbound, we cannot be bound again, for those who could do so have atrophied, while by their own doing we remain as strong and vital as ever. This time is the one true opportunity for choice in your life. It will not come again. If you leave the city, if the captain dies, then it is past. Either way, once you choose, your destiny is in our hands.”
He faded at that, and she lapsed into a deep but troubled sleep.
Krisha wasn’t the only one to find herself on that transparent spiral leading down to the city, though.
“Who are you?” she called, challenging the dark, menacing figure in purple.
“I am called many things,” he replied, “but I prefer the title of Prince of the Powers of the Air. I know who you are, Modra Stryke.”
“Why did you bring us here?” she asked him, unimpressed any more with these creatures.
“You brought yourself here. You and your comrades stood in that empty station and made a decision. Until that decision was made, the station did not know where you wished to go. When it was clear you all wanted to go on the network, it then retained you until it had analyzed you and your equipment and determined that you were no threat to it or to us; then it put you on the proper routing to bring you here.”
“And what made this our destination?”
“My, you are inquisitive.’ I could say it was because you wanted to find where the two ‘demons’ went, and that is true enough, but in truth everybody comes here eventually, most through the more direct route you briefly experienced when the conflicting resonances of the crystal cave brought you near to physical death. The consequences of your actions in life are not normally sufficient to unbalance you enough to fall into the clutches of the Ancient Ones when you are still alive.”
She hesitated a moment, unsure of the implications of his answer as well as the truth of it should those implications be true. Finally, she could but ask, “What do you mean, ‘Everybody comes here eventually’?”
“You know what I mean, I think.” He turned and a long, slender, clawed finger pointed from the sleeve of the robe down a level in the spiral. “See?”
She looked, then gasped. Standing there, as they had in life, were Tris Lankur, the Durquist, and even Hama, whose earlier death had forced them to hire Jimmy McCray to replace him. She thought for a moment they were only still projections, but then they moved, they looked around, puzzled, then saw her above them and Tris gave his characteristic little salute of greeting and blew her a kiss. Seeing them, as they were, only brought home to her the size of the hole their passing had left in her soul.
Still, she was not one to befooled easily. “Illusions, from my own mind,” she accused the demon prince. “It’s a cheap trick.”
“I am not above a cheap trick,” the demon admitted, “but this is not one of them. They made if through the gauntlet, and they are here, within the city, awaiting processing. Those masses whose burdens make the gauntlet impossible fall into its sides and become eternal slaves. Those who survive it are impressive, and are eventually given positions based upon their abilities. It is a big universe, you know, and there are but two hundred million Quintara in this sector. We need all the help, and allies, we can get, particularly since we’ve been restricted to operations via the other plane, and through intermediaries or surrogates who do our will or allow our consciousnesses to flow into the physical universe.”
“You mean evil.”
“I mean rebellion/ We are at war, and we fight as best we can with the weapons at hand! Nor is it merely what you call evil. It is we who nudge and nurture; it is we who bring people to a point where they can break free and use the other plane to break out into space, to expand. It is we who plant the seeds of the talents. And now, at last, some of you have come to us, in the flesh, for only in the flesh can we be freed of our physical bonds.”
“Who bound you, anyway?”
“We were bound by treachery! By allies who grew too fearful that we had the leading role in the nurturing of sentient life! Those who feared our growing numbers and disagreed with our objectives. You can see what they have done with all the wondrous technology at their disposal, a technology that bridges the solar systems, links impossible distances into political wholes, and which could fill every need and allow for maximum creativity and development. One-third has a backward society of near mindless automatons who are happy but brain-dead, save only a clergy that controls them at the price of denying themselves any pleasure. Another substitutes barbarism for development as a social sport, with a tiny bureaucracy served by every luxury and sunk in total decadence served by masses kept in conditions of poverty and ignorance and brutality out of some ancient time and considered no better than insects. Consider that a society that has robotics and advanced computers likes to have hordes of slaves to do the work. Manual labor slaves! Or your own society, which has a form of social mobility, but only the most exceptional can rise from masses dying young, ignorant, and in poverty on population-choked worlds while rich people buy whole planets as retreats or gardens. Your Tris Lankur came from a world where life expectancy is under forty years because it has no resources to trade for needs that could make it a paradise. How exceptional, and brilliant, and ruthless, and lucky, Lankur was to get out of it at all.”
She kept looking down at the trio standing there. Occasionally they would be talking to one another, or gesturing up at them, or just watching, as if they were really there.
Still, while she understood the horrible inequities of the system, it was not so horrible on most worlds. Certain technologies, such as robots and virtual reality computers and other such things, were denied all but the core Exchange, of course, because if people did not have to work
then they would atrophy, rot in mindless entertainment, drugs, and neural nets, and never be allowed to develop as whole people, but this was a concept supported by most. There were always inequities in any system; she still felt that the Exchange worked better than any of the alternatives.
“And what is your system?” she asked him.
“Wait and see,” was all he would say. “1 do not have to tell what is inevitably going to happen. I do not have to convert you, for ours is the future and you are the present. We ask only one thing of you. When you get to the city, break the seals you will find there. If you do not know what they are like, your Mr. McCray will happily point them out to you.”
“And then you come out and kill us,” she retorted, remembering the first station.
“No. There is much killing to be done, I fear, before we are victorious, but you would not be one of them. Imagine yourself restored with your comrades below; they restored to life, just as they were, and you with them. All the things you would want would be at your disposal, all the power you need. Adventure, all you would want, far beyond the frontier and to the far reaches of the galaxy and even beyond that if you like, returning at any point to your own world, to your own designs, surrounded by family and friends. The best of all things for you, extending as far into the future as you wish, without infirmity, disease, or death, until you decide of your own free will to Come Over. That I can give you. More, if you wish. That sort of thing is not difficult for us.”
She honestly believed at least that last statement. “And what happens if I do not break your seal?”
He shrugged. “Someone, one of you, will. Whoever does will gain the promise. One of you will die before reaching the city. Another will die in the breaking of the seals. The rest will reap the consequences of their inaction. For some, death, which puts you in our service anyway. For others, fates even worse, but of their own making. For you, your companions will remain ‘dead, and in our service, make no mistake about that. You might be one of those who survive.