She found the concept hilarious, although she could see that it embarrassed him to talk about it. “I will admit,” she said when she got hold of herself, “that they’ve thought of everything. And there is proof, if any is needed, that a solid religion can rationalize anything. No offense, Captain.”
“No offense taken. To me the system is practical, considering the hundreds of life forms and thousands of worlds involved.”
“You should come over to the Exchange, Captain, when this is over. There’s no limit to what a man like you could become there.”
He sighed. “That assumes I want to be other than what I am. I’ve been to the Exchange, and the Mycohl. They’re both hierarchical, pyramidal societies, and, as with all pyramids, the mass is at the bottom and there’s precious little room at the top. It’s brought no real contentment to you or to McCray, and countless tens of billions, whole worlds, are miserable, no better than the masses of drols the Mycohl sustains, who are considered little better than work animals and treated no better, either.”
“They breed drols,” she noted. “At least there’s always some hope in the Exchange. My uncle got out, which is how I inherited the money to stake the ship, and how Tris got to be a captain.”
“Very rare exceptions,” he pointed out. “And more to do with luck or relations than anything else. A few must always be allowed to rise or the rest will be totally without hope and tear the system apart. The masses will starve and die young and in misery, whether by design or neglect.
You’ll find no such places in the Mizlaplan. There is no rich, no poor, no nobility, no starvation, no despair. People are generally content and get all their needs, administered by a Church hierarchy that cannot be corrupted nor own the fruits of the system. Krisha is a good example. She’s learned enough about the other alternatives on this expedition to realize, as I did long ago, that ours best represents what she believes to be moral and right. Having now freely, rather than coercively, rejected the others, she finds only one place for herself in our society. We do not believe it is moral to simply accept things; we must contribute in the way each of us is best able to contribute. She was born to be a priestess; it’s the only thing she knows. It took a trip to Hell and back for her to realize this.”
“Yeah. Pretty tough on you, though.”
“My contribution lies in a different but now equally fixed direction. I love her and she loves me. That has not changed. More misery has been caused over the course of evolution by confusing sex and love than from any other single source. Aren’t you doing that even now?”
She didn’t take offense. “I gave up on love. I went looking for it everywhere and never noticed it when I saw it. I’m not going to look any more. I’m going to find a place where I can be reasonably happy and get what I need and stay there, if I’m allowed to. I never thought I’d still be alive even now. I’m not at all sure I’m not going to get killed yet.”
“You may be right for all of us on that score,” he admitted, turning back to his shapes.
She looked down at them. “Star, up triangle, down triangle, and the pentagram. Just doodling?”
“Not exactly,” he told her. “You recognize the symbols?”
She nodded. “The Mycohlian five-pointed star; the down triangle, if you add a lot of fancy stuff inside, could be the Great Seal of the Exchange, and the up one . . . that 1 dunno.”
“Place a starburst in the center and draw rays out, three of which reach the three corners, and you have the holiest symbol of the Mizlaplanian Church,” he told her. “When McCray faced the demons he made the sign of the cross, his holy symbol. When Krisha did, she made the Holy Sign, tracing the upward triangle. The pentagram, I assume, is obvious.”
She nodded. “The Quintara. So those are the symbols for all four of the Higher Races, without all the fancy decoration. ”
“Indeed. For about the millionth time, I sit here marveling that I am a man of this century, sitting inside an interstellar spacecraft, musing about demons, devils, and occult shapes. Yet, here I am, and there they are. Geometry has something important to do with this. In the end, even the gods and demons boil down to mathematics. The problem is, it’s a kind of mathematics that has all sorts of factors and variables not present here, and perhaps ones we can’t see or hear. I doubt if any of us are ever going to be able to comprehend it; I will be satisfied to be able to use it. And, laying them out, I still can’t see any kind of logic in them at all.”
She stared at the shapes. “Well, math was never my strong suit, but I wanted to be an artist once, and I remember how Jimmy made his pentagrams.” She reached over, placed her fingers on the drawing of the pentagram, and moved it to within the the star.
Gun Roh Chin’s jaw dropped a notch. “It was too obvious,” he muttered irritatedly, more to himself than to her. “The Quintara at the heart of the Mycohl.”
She shrugged, “Could be. If it is, though, we’re in a whole lot of shit right now.” She reached over, put her fingers on the down triangle, and the figure on the table moved over to where she pushed it up through the up triangle so that it overlapped. “Look familiar?” she asked smugly.
He nodded. “I’d thought of that. What did McCray call it? The Seal of Solomon. But, as a seal, like on the temple door, it had a circle around it, not a star.”
She took the stylus and drew the design from scratch.
“Very elegant,” he noted approvingly.
“Yeah. I wanted to draw pretty things and found out I was a competent draftsman.”
“You see the problem?” he noted, pointing to her drawing. “There’s no pentagram or five-pointed star in the seal.”
“Oh, yeah. I see what you mean. If we put the Mycohl and Quintara in, we get this.” She drew another design next to the seal.
“Uh-huh. In one, the seal, we have the Exchange and the Mizlaplan but not the Quintara or the Mycohl,” he said. “In the other, we have the Quintara and Mycohl but not either of our own powers. It doesn’t make sense unless we’re choosing equal sides. That might be the lesson here. Vestiges of the original balance, two against two. It makes sense, but it doesn’t help.”
“You forgot the circle,” she noted, frowning.
“What?”
“The circle. There’s one around the seal, too. Who’s the circle?”
All at once it came to him. “The seal on the door! The lock! Of course] Blue triangle, gold triangle, red circle! Red
circle!” He pointed to the star with the pentagram inside. “Not Mycohl and Quintara, it’s Mycohl covers Quintara! The pentagram, overlaid with the interlaced triangles and the circle, completely locks in, covers, and obscures the pentagram beneath! Modra, I believe we do make a team!”
“I’m glad you’re excited,” she responded cautiously. “Now, what did we just discover and of what use is it?”
That brought him up short- “Not much, I suppose. We simply took a lot of small pieces of a very large puzzle and made a small corner of it.” He thought a moment. “The two triangles come together to form the single most powerful symbol in this occult geometry. Apart, they are merely symbols, merely triangles. It—it’s a message] We’re independent, the Exchange and Mizlaplan. Only by combining do we have power. Hmmm … A fascinating concept. Was splitting apart with the Mycohl in the center, as it were, the price of Mycohl alliance in that ancient battle? Without the Angels, the Guardians are reduced to mere maintenance functions, without, perhaps, even access to the ancient records. The Angels, who can access those records and that knowledge, are kept away from it. A level of ignorance that ensures Mycohl survival when it lacks its erstwhile balancing ally, the Quintara. Nor can they get together without the Mycohl knowing about it and being able to stop it. Good Lord! No wonder our feeble incursion all the way to the Exchange has caused mobilization here!”
“Huh? You mean they thought you brought one of your Angels over to get together with the Guardians and turn on their power?”
” “The Angels alone possess the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.’ That’s in one of the basic prayers of my faith. It always was taken metaphorically, of course, but what if it’s literal? The knowledge—the access to the other plane, to the high technology we saw, even the very specifics of its existence—is locked away in some sort of data bank in the Exchange. Locked away after they sealed in the Quintara. The keys, the means of access to it, were in the hands of the Angels. The Exchange could not use it against the others, the Mizlaplan couldn’t use k against the others, either, so no Mycohl in the future could have second thoughts on the grand design and unlock the Quintara once more—and, for the Mycohl, their position in the middle was their insurance against a double cross, since neither the Guardians nor the Angels are exactly mobile in the way the Mycohl are. That is the underlying meaning of the great treaty, and that is why all sides have yet maintained powerful military forces. The Angels must be brought to the Guardians and the Mycohl must be the means to do it. It’s the only way. All three must cooperate. They must do something they haven’t done since the Quintara were last vanquished long ago: they must trust each other implicitly and act as a team. Together, they are more than a match for the Quintara. Still, even together, I wonder if they are also a match for the Engineer. Three demigods of Quintara power do not equal one god.”
“They got him before. Surely in those records you think are there there’s an account of how they did it.”
He nodded. “And so think of how far we still have to go. After all this time, are the Mycohl wise enough and trusting enough to see what must be done? If they deliberate too long, it will be impossible. The Quintara will eat away at the empires and then there will be war. If they do, can we convince the Angels of this admittedly bizarre hypothesis? And the Guardians? And, finally, can we get them all together? The ways in which we could lose are countless; the way to victory in time is a single path.” He sighed “I feel very, very depressed about all this.”
She came close to him. “We’re not the Angels^ Captain, or the Mycohl masters, or the Guardians. We’re just little people caught up in a whirlwind. It is out of our hands, Captain. Your mind is on the cosmic and the great puzzles and on analyzing everybody else at least partly because you don’t want to think about yourself.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You can’t keep it in forever, Captain. You’re too perfect and you work too hard at it. You have that dark place inside your mind, too. You’ve got to let go a little. You can’t shut off your humanity without it eating you alive inside. Even your Church knows that. Come on, Captain, what do you say? A little, local, symbolic version of what we have there.
The Mizlaplan and Exchange joined, to a little therapeutic benefit to both.”