<Not now, perhaps, but it’ll be in the mind, mine, yours, his, and you won’t be taking those vows of mine on yourself forever. If it’s got to be done, best it be solved now rather than dwelling on it.>
<Think of Grysta!>
<I am. What must I do? Continue to battle my lust for her by cruelty and petty violence? Frustrate her as well? Better to free her.^>
Another incredibly powerful telepathic voice broke in. <McCray, I do not understand you, or the others,> Tobrush commented, <but it requires further analysis before I can permit it. Also, were you to choose it, it should be by someone else who is competent to perform it. >
There was a sudden tremendous force in his head, making him suddenly very dizzy and confused, unable to think, impossible to fight off. In an instant he was out cold in a dreamless sleep.
Almost simultaneously, they felt the ship shudder and a hissing sound as the hatches of a shuttle and the frigate meshed and began pressurization. Within a few minutes, the bottom hatch opened and the large form of Tobrush oozed back into the ship, now wearing a regulation Julki-shaped Mycohl e-suit.
Modra and Josef had been momentarily stunned by the mental blow the Mycohl master had thrown at Jimmy but were now pretty well recovered. Still, they stared at the returning member with some confusion. “You’re not the same,” Josef said at last. “You’ve changed.”
“I have,” Tobrush responded through the translator for the benefit of the others. “Come forward—all of you. Crowd around and I will show you something none of your race has ever seen, nor any other.”
They were all curious and not a little apprehensive, although all were happy that things seemed to be starting up again.
The heretofore blank main screen was now activated. It showed a world, a gas giant with a dozen great rings, not much different than other such worlds but as spectacular looking as the best of them.
“That is the heart of the Mycohl,” Tobrush told them. “It looks quite average, but it is not. It is an incubator, a laboratory, and a library. Vast clusters of my race exist there, combining, uncombining, re-forming, able there to exist outside a body, gaining what they need from materials within the upper layers of the planet and from processes begun eons ago. We are a collective race, but, linked, we form separate and independent single minds. At some point, we must duplicate ourselves and send the duplicate here, or bring it ourselves as I did, depositing it first on a small moon that is within one of the rings, as I would be crushed in this form if I went further. All that I was, all that I knew or experienced, was sent down. The cluster was a perfect copy of my true self. Then I waited, until that record was merged, recombined, and analyzed in ways impossible to explain to you. Eventually, it caused a great Gathering, the first in thousands of years. The greatest single intelligence of my kind, with all that power, with all that vast knowledge, was able to use and integrate what I had contributed. Ultimately, a data cluster was created and sent up to me and combined with myself. The Tobrush you knew is within me, but I am far greater than that.”
They stared at the screen and tried to visualize such a civilization. It made the Quintara seem like second cousins.
“There was a great temptation to assimilate all or most of you,” the Mycohl master continued. “I am at capacity, as it were, and there is so much more we rieeded. Fortunately for you, our analysis showed that this grouping is not random. The statistical probability of it being pure chance is beyond calculation when the facts are factored in. In that, McCray is right. Right now, vast numbers of my people inhabiting bodies are making their way here to fill that task.”
There was some relief at that. The possibility of the Mycohl taking them all over had been in the back of everyone’s mind, although none wanted to really think j about it.
“Do you have the answer?” Gun Roh Chin asked.
“No, but your analysis was very perceptive, Captain. All i of the data leads to very much the conclusions you arrived at.”
The captain was startled, then remembered that Modra had been there when he’d made his educated guesses—had been a key to them, in fact.
“So your race is the number one target,” he commented. “Revenge is primary.”
“We believe so. The ancient records are not as clear as they should have been, or that we thought they were. Apparently a lot of key Mycohl perished before they could commit their records. Either that or some higher power eliminated key data. It appears that all the demon princes, and many, a veritable horde, of underlings, were originally formed by using material from the transdimensional passages as vehicles for beings from the Higher Universe to operate in our own, much as we Mycohl use the bodies of others to give us mobility. They were—scientists probably would be the closest word. I doubt if we can really understand what they are. When the experiments were ordered to cease and natural law as established here to have sole dominion, there was a mutiny among a minority of them, led by the Engineer, as we think of him. When they lost the main mutiny and fled downward, or aft, I suppose, to the engine regions, the Captain ordered many of the others back in to root them out one by one if need be. The warfare must have been bitter and tremendous and fought on all planes. The religions of many races went from simple sun worship to elaborate structures thanks to the mere glimpses of it.”
“Angels and demons,” Krisha said.
“Exactly.”
“But nobody won,” Modra pointed out.
“On the contrary. As we were warned, there is no such thing as true victory over the enemy. We do not believe that they can be killed in any sense that we understand the word.
The best that happens is that they lose their bodies, their anchors into this universe and dimensional structure, and fall back into the interdimensional plane. Alas, there they can use the material to fashion new forms and emerge again.”
“That’s why they were all in suspended animation!” Krisha exclaimed. “If they were locked in their bodies here, in our universe, they couldn’t escape to the other plane and emerge anywhere somebody drew a pentagram!”
“Yes, that is obvious,” Tobrush replied. “But, as we saw with the Engineer, under the right conditions, and with the correct physics and interplane geometry, part of them, and their influence, can extend into ours without physical form. That is what happened in the pyramid. Once the Four Princes who were lords of the city were freed, they knew the conditions and exactly how to do it. It isn’t terribly difficult, I fear. Unwitting experimenters, devil worshipers, even unbelievers playing at ancient ritual, have managed to create small openings which have caused no end of so-called supernatural phenomena over the centuries. But the Engineer is so great and so enormous compared to our entire universe that he could emerge only in a.tiny part through a master hatch.”
“The pool under the city,” Krisha said. “I knew I felt something horrible.”
Josef looked at the creature he’d once called teammate and friend. “All well and good,” he said, “but just what are you! And the other two as well?”
“A force had to be left. The Engineer was at large and resourceful even if he could not enter directly. Any imprisonment of the Quintara had to be considered dangerous. There was always the possibility that something like what happened would happen. The loyal agents could not be left free and on their own here. The temptation, particularly over time, to play God themselves would be too great, and, sooner or later, some might become corrupted, even free the Quintara or the Engineer.”
Krisha was awestruck. “So they made them mortals, races? You are the descendants of the angels?”
Tobrush’s translator gave the best imitation of a Terran sigh that it could. “Alas, no. I wish it were so. In this sector of this galaxy, at the time of all this, three races had evolved to a relatively high state and were reaching for the stars. Three here. There are probably countless others out there we haven’t met as yet. The battlefield and the battle were truly vast in scope. These races were possibly the results of random evolution, but possibly deliberately engineered— certainly the subject of the early experiments. We, of course, became the prizes, and the pawns, in the great battles. In the process, we also assisted in one or the other side’s evolutionary manipulations, starting most of the races off on a climb from animal to sentience, or from sentience to civilization, depending. For example, we did not create, but we did help shape, the course of the development of your own world.”
“Then—we are the deliberate and planned children of the gods!” Krisha said almost prayerfully.
“You misunderstand,” Tobrush replied. “At that time we were working with and for the Quintara.”
Everyone gasped, and even Gun Roh Chin was appalled. “Are you saying that Terrans are the spawn of demons?”
“Pretty much, I’m afraid so. However, you did become something of a battleground yourselves, in a number of ways. You became the subject of a great experiment—the only attempt we can find where the Crew attempted to turn and redevelop a Quintara-bred race. It appears Terrans became almost an obsession with them. Most races got only secondhand attention; yours received direct intervention at all stages by both sides until the Quintara were defeated and the Engineer forced to flee back into his domain.”
“Original sin,” Modra said with a dry chuckle.
“What?” the captain asked her.
“Original sin. A concept from Jimmy’s religion. I have access to all that stuff, remember. We’re all born corrupt to the core and only faith and trust in God can save us, not ourselves. The legend is that the first Terrans, Adam and Eve, disobeyed God by eating of a forbidden fruit and, as the father and mother of us all, passed on that sin. My own ancestors had an almost identical story, different religion
entirely. Now we know it wasn’t the fruit or the act; they were the fruit.”
“Yin and yang,” the captain responded. “The conflict of eternal opposites. In this case, good and evil in all things. I find much of this illuminating on Terra’s history, cultures, and character. Even reassuring. The only thing I find discomforting is being a creation of those creatures.”
“You had no choice,” Tobrush pointed out. “We were working for them, remember. It is much more embarrassing. I rather think I preferred my original horror that we might have been a disease sent to kill them.”
“But, in the end, you betrayed them and joined the other side fighting them,” the captain noted. “And you remain on that side, even if your ancestral temperament makes you uncomfortable there.”
“What you say is true. By temperament, we are more comfortable with them. In the end, it appears to have been sheer pragmatism, although, as I say, the memories are fragmentary and incomplete. It came down to a result of being their eternal subordinates in a Quintara-run society, or being absolute rulers of our own realm and a third of the rest.”
“Let’s hear it for morality,” Modra muttered.
“Morality is a subjective term used by victors to establish right and wrong,” Tobrush retorted. “It is irrelevant on this scale and for decisions of this magnitude. Evolution proceeds out of self-interest. The Gathering weighed all the possible futures and decided that our best long-term interest for the race was with the other side. We set a trap with the Quintara’s unknowing participation—they are extremely arrogant—and we lured the Engineer into it. We sprung the trap as the other two sides closed on the center, and drove him back beyond the hatch, depriving the Quintara of their ultimate source of power and control until the Engineer could regroup and find other means.”
“And the Quintara surrendered?” the captain asked.
“By no means. Depriving them of the Engineer only placed them,on our level, and they were—are—present in incredible numbers. The war was vicious and lasted for centuries. Whole civilizations were wiped out; worlds were destroyed, others pushed back into barbarism. They could not win, not three against one, but there is an expression in some cultures—’fighting like demons,’ I believe, or something like it—that marks their ferocity. You could kill them, but that simply pushed them back to the other plane where they could build themselves anew. The only thing they feared was the suspension. When death holds no terror, and to be counted out you must be captured alive and intact, you can see what toll it took. Almost the whole of this galaxy was involved; now see how far back we were pushed, how, even now, we are rediscovering barely a third of what once was ours.”
Krisha sighed. “And that now threatens to happen again.”
“It could,” the Mycohl admitted. “But everything they have right now is being thrown against the Three Empires here. It is still early, but we are weak and have lost or forgotten so much. Their corruption spreads as more and more of their forces are deployed and more of their black non-matter is gathered. Last time we started with eyes open, knowing who and what was faced. Now the Quintara seek to weaken from within and divide us, collapse the Treaty, have us so estranged and at each other’s throats that we will be unwilling and unable to unite against them. If they are able to seize the Three Empires, this galaxy will be enveloped in a darkness beyond conception. The Three Races will be utterly destroyed. The rest of you will become the playthings, the slaves, of the Quintara, and their arm to move beyond. More importantly, the more his minions rule absolutely, the larger the area that the Engineer himself may enter. From our own puny material point of view, his power would seem limitless, absolute. To us, for all practical purposes, he would become our one true and omnipresent God.”
“And we’ve had a taste of what sort of god he’d be, haven’t we?” Krisha breathed.