“And a John,” Jimmy added. “Back in a moment.”
“Well, anyway,” Grysta went on, “he yanks me into this room and I see he’s got like manacles and shit and he’s gonna chain me up and there’s this whip thing that crackles, and I see what’s gonna happen, so when he throws me against the wall I see this heavy jug that’s there, and when he’s turned to get the chains I picked up the jug and went over to him and brought it down with all my might on his head. It broke into pieces.”
“You knocked him out?” Modra asked, relieved and fascinated.
“That was the crazy part. He just stood straight up for a moment and looked real confused, like, and then he said, same as you or me, “That’s odd. We never put that in the programming!’ And then he falls over cold.”
Jimmy came back. “I’m going to have to practice pissing in the buff this way,” he said ruefully. “I don’t know how you girls do it.”
“Squat and practice,” Modra responded, then looked at Grysta. “I wish we’d thought to dress for the night weather, though. I don’t remember it ever being this chilly here. Always a fairly controlled temperature.”
“Yeah, one of the guys in the joint said somethin’ like that, too,” Grysta told her. “Said the official word was that they were doin’ it to cut down on loiterers and stuff.”
“Sounds like they’re trying a subtle way of keeping the streets clear at night,” Jimmy guessed. “They’re worried, all right, but they can’t shut this world down without shutting down the Exchange itself.”
“So how’d you guys make out?” Grysta asked. “You’re here and not happy, so I guess not so hot.”
“That’s a good way of putting it,” Modra acknowledged. “There is hope, but not much. And not a really good chance of us getting off this dirtball alive, either. Right now they think we’re Quintara agents.”
“That’s just great,” Grysta grumped. “I can’t be my old self ’cause that lumps me with you, but if I stay like this, when that guy comes to and calls the cops I’m dead meat. If he wakes up. Course, I dunno if he’s gonna want to hang around too much, neither.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Oh, they hauled off a few nut cases earlier tonight. Said we looked like devils. Got a bunch of folks real stirred up. That’s why they closed early. I don’t look like no Quintara!”
“To somebody who never saw the real thing, you do,” Jimmy told her. “Horns on the head, cloven hooves, animal-like lower body. I suspect somebody who either wasn’t a Terran or wasn’t too good in his memory or research was going for some kind of look out of ancient Old Earth mythology and kind of blended the nymphs with the satyrs.”
“I hate to mention this,” Grysta commented, “but shouldn’t we get a move on here? If that guy wakes up he’s gonna be murder on pink syns!”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry much about him,” Modra told her, “so long as you didn’t really kill him. Then this place will be crawling with cymols.”
At that moment, the back door opened with a crash and
a big, burly man came out with an electric whip in one hand and sidearm in the other and he looked ready to murder anybody who got in his way. He spotted them before they could even move back, and Jimmy had an odd sense of deja vu. This time, however, he didn’t have to fight.
“Who the blazes are you?” the man roared menacingly.
Jimmy looked at him and projected an image. “We are three Terran sailors and we’re drunk and we’re bigger and meaner than you are,” he responded.
The man froze for a minute, looking confused. Then he said, “Any of you men see a pink and brown syn come out here?”
Grysta got the idea. “Not out here, and we been here the past half hour. Why don’t you go back and count your little devils and see if she isn’t still in there?”
He seemed very disoriented. “Yeah, okay. I’ll do that,” he responded, and started to go back in, all the anger seeming to have drained out of him.
“Wait a minute!” Modra called. “Do you have a watch?”
He looked a bit dazed. “Yeah. Sure. Here.” He took the watch off his wrist and handed it down to her.
“Thank you,” she responded. “You can go back in now.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied, then got up and went back inside.
“Not too difficult after all,” Jimmy commented. “He’s going to go back and count them and they’ll all be there and none will be the one he remembered. He’ll finally conclude that he fell, hit his head, and dreamed her up. You might not officially exist, Grysta, but at least there won’t be any missing syn reported.”
Grysta shook her head in wonder. “That’s kind’a neat. We sure could’a used that back in the starvation days.”
“Fat lot of good it’d done me then,” Jimmy said grumpily. “Still, I’d trade this all-band power set for those days right now.”
“I wish we’d thought of some food, too,” Modra grumped. “I’m starved, and who knows when’s the next meal?” She signed. “What a day! I find my husband’s annulled our marriage due to cold feet and family pressure and is living with a stacked brown beauty with air for
brains, then I find out I’m pregnant, then I’m declared an enemy of my own nation, and now I’m stuck here, cold and broke, in a back alley without even a piece of candy.”
“Holy cats! You’re what!” Grysta exclaimed.
“Oh yeah. Didn’t tell you, did I?”
“Whose?”
“You got me. I didn’t go through the full battery. Just the news was enough. Probably Josef’s, considering the odds. It doesn’t matter anyway. The odds this kid will ever see daylight are pretty slim.”
Jimmy took the watch and looked at it. “Well, if the time on this thing is right, we’ve got another two hours to find out.”
“What happens to us if they turn you down?” Grysta asked.
“We’ll try and get off, figure out another way,” Modra replied. “My dear ex generously gave me sole ownership of Widowmaker free and clear if I didn’t raise a fuss, although they’re sure to have the place staked out and poor Tran’s probably had his brains put through a blender. But the odds are pretty slim if they do turn us down, for us, for everything.”
It was a long, depressing wait.
The area of the Exchange had been cordoned off by the time they reappeared, at very close to the appointed hour. The troopers were still there, reinforced with new ones, and so was the cymol cop, although this time she had a large briefcase-sized box with her and she’d removed her wig and run the cymol umbilical from her connector to the box.
Modra stared at the cymol. “Well?”
“I am connected to the Guardians. You may speak to them through me,” the cop said.
“That’s not good enough. We need a consultation on a level even we do not understand,” Modra told her.
“Direct consultation is not possible. It is not simply a matter of ‘will not,’ it is physically impossible.”
“Others work through us,” Modra told her. “They can work through you. The connection is all that matters.”
“Then drop your protection and come to me,” the cymol said.
Jimmy shook his head. “No, we’re not fools. Even if we totally trusted you and your masters, you have a lot of very nervous soldiers here and they are not cymols and all they’ve been told is that we’re dangerous enemies. You and I know we wouldn’t survive to reach you no matter what the orders.”
“Then we are at an impasse. You have little to bargain with yourselves. It is only a matter of time until you are hunted down. You can’t b.uy anything, you can’t use any service on this planet without registering that transaction with the central computers. Anyone in a city this large can hide for a day, perhaps two, but we will get you.”
“There is another way,” he said.
“We are listening.”
“Get a marker or a piece of chalk. Draw the design around yourself and your interface as we direct. We will meet on protected ground.”
“That is not acceptable. Such a medium is obviously out of phase with the space-time continuum.”
“You couldn’t keep contact in that medium?”
“We could, but it would expose us to you without protection.”
Jimmy smiled grimly. “It would also expose us to a fully armed and trained cymol. We would be literally at your mercy, having only eliminated accidents. Your masters surely cannot fear contact with equals. Even if we were Quintara-controlled, which we are not, no one could get the upper hand. And if your masters detected a presence too strong for their liking, they could always break contact before it could do any harm.”
She stiffened for a second. “Analysis does indicate that in such a situation you would be far more at risk than they,” she admitted. “What is to keep me from killing you both once we are in phase?”
“You didn’t kill us when we landed,” Modra pointed out.
“We wanted to find out where you would go and who you would see first,” the cymol informed them. “There was no foreseeable danger we could not contain.”
“There is such a danger!” Jimmy snapped. “He’s called Satan, or the Engineer, or Old Nick or Scratch or a million
other names! He’s here, in our galaxy, eating away at us, destroying the Three Empires! You want to know why we will expose ourselves to you now? Faith. Nothing more. Faith in the enemies of this dark one. Faith in one of the races who combined with two others to defeat this enemy before! We give you our faith. You must give us the same!”
Another freeze and pause, and then the cop said, “Very well. I will do as you ask.”
Both Modra and Jimmy breathed out silent sighs of relief.
The cymol left, and it apparently took several minutes to find something to draw with. She came back with a small mechanical device and placed it on the smooth surface of the plaza. It whined a bit, then began to draw a perfectly straight line, then another upward.
“Make it big enough for all three of us to sit!” Modra called.
The device, apparently used to make temporary markings for traffic control and repairs, completed a perfect, and reasonably large, pentagram. Modra thought that it must have looked stupid as hell to the onlookers; it still seemed ridiculous to her. Anybody could draw a pentagram; it was one of those shapes found all over the place as it was. There was nothing mystical or magical about it—unless you could activate it and approach from an angle not in the normal three dimensions.
“It is done. Now what?” the cymol asked.
The two stared at the fresh pentagram and were instantly inside it, with the cymol. There was a lot of tension on the part of the pair, now literally exposed to harm. There was nothing to stop the cymol now from taking them both out.
“I warn you both that this box contains not only communications and supplementary power for me, but also an extremely powerful explosive device,” the cymol warned them. “If the slightest thing goes wrong, it will explode. I cannot control it in any way, so taking me over -will result only in the explosive detonating. We shall be the sole judge of anything going wrong.”
<Tobrush! Tobrush! Are you ready?>
<The barrier is affecting straight line communications. They are going to try and jam us, > the Mycohl warned. <If we can link, however, I do not believe they can succeed. Do it now! Quickly!>
Jimmy’s and Modra’s minds linked tight, and they concentrated on the point of connection between the cymol’s head and the umbilical.
There was a sudden rushing and crackling in their minds, as if a radio signal too distant to pull in was nonetheless trying valiantly to come through. They felt Tobrush take the signal and amplify it through direct link with them so as to bypass as much of the blockage as possible. . . .
They were through! Connection!
The square, the soldiers, the city vanished, but in its place was simply a dizzying stream of concepts, shapes, and forms as incomprehensible to them as The Ship had been. But, in the midst of the chaos, a tiny corner of their minds saw the Guardians for what they were, and where they were.
An enormous sphere of silicon, impossibly pure, unimaginably perfect, each crystal linked and interlinked in ways too many and too varied to understand. Covered, protected, sheltered, a life form like no other known.
The Guardians and the capital were one! The whole planet was the Guardians! And the cymol “brains” were but pieces of themselves!
Now the communal force of the Mycohl, a great organic computer, met and spoke with the mass that was both plural and singular, the Guardians.
<He who was expelled is come again. He must be expelled again.>