<Our dominions perish before his darkness. Even now he seeks to break this contact once he can divine it.>
<We two can hold him, but we cannot expel him.>
<What is the means by which he may be expelled?>
<That data is protected, even from our core. The linkage is not complete. Only the one not here may break the seals.>
<How may the Great Gathering be formed? >
<You must be the interlocutor, as before. These two have served well. They will serve us. We could not believe that a lower race could successfully undergo the Trial. None
but Mycohl before had gone to Great Dis. How was it possible?>
<They were born of Quintara before the mutiny spread. They were shaped by Mycohl will and strength to survive no matter what. As the Four had the same Father, so did that Father contest for them. Their conflicting natures, Mutineers and Crew, are equal in the average. They walk both paths, choosing the one that profits their race. Their path is still unsettled, yet they inherit, if they prove they deserve it. Otherwise, the project is abandoned. >
<The Mizlaplan is dispersed and divided, making easy targets. The Guardians of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are in one place, and if that place goes, so do they. The Mycohl, likewise, is rife for genocide; even if some individuals survive, the Knowledge they keep would be lost. >
<Yes, but the new ones number more than thirty trillion now. Even if most choose darkness, there is a substantial pool.>
<As the Father once acted through us, we must now act through them.>
<The Mizlaplan must be brought in. The passwords must be given. The data must be made complete.>
<But will the Mizlaplan have faith to do what must be done?>
<The five who were chosen must be assembled. A Grand Gathering must be convened. >
<Where?>
<In the Mycohl. At the closest possible point to the penetration. Then the Five shall become the Three.>
Both Modra and Jimmy saw a tremendous brightness, like a great comet, coming straight for them, too fast and overwhelming to escape. It exploded over them, and both felt sharp pains in the front of their skulls.
The connection was broken.
Both Modra and Jimmy shook their heads and steadied one another.
“I don’t think I can take much more of these alien viewpoints,” Modra managed after a bit.
“Yes, but it’s done!” Jimmy almost shouted. “We did it! And they let us listen in!”
“For all the good it did,” she noted. “All I got was that we have to reassemble the team in the place most likely to kill us while these jokers use us as their tools. I’m not even sure I like that ‘five becoming the three’ bit. Did it mean we five would represent them, or that two of us are gonna die?”
“The former—I hope. Say! What’s that on your forehead? Right at the hairline?” He reached up to the top of her brow and touched, then looked at his finger. “Blood.”
“You, too,” she told him. “That’s what hurt so much at the end. What the hell did we get shot with?”
“It will heal quickly,” the cymol cop told them.
“What is it?” Modra asked. “What did you do to us?”
“A small part, very small, of the Guardians is now within you. It will integrate itself into your systems and you will not know it is there after.”
Modra felt momentary panic. “It’s making us cymols!”
“You are cymol, but not like me. You remain yourselves. But what you see, so will the Guardians if they will it. What you think and feel,- they will know. They cannot program and cannot direct you, but they will monitor you, and use this as a way of contact with others.”
“Great!” Modra sighed. “Now I’ve got a mind-link with a whole damned planet\ And one-way, too. They get their jollies and I get sand in my brain. This is gonna do wonders for my future love life.”
Jimmy had other things on his mind. “They must send in the fleet. They must stop the pogroms.”
“Some of the fleet will be dispatched for that purpose, but it is not as easy as it sounds,” the cymol told diem. “Many Terran groups are indeed now working for the enemy. We dare not arm them, but the prejudices being fanned among the other races will not cease. We will now make an honest effort to control it, though.”
“Well, that’s something,” Jimmy replied. “All right, assuming they’ve given you new instructions through that thing, what’s next?”
“Orders are even now being given rescinding the warrants out on you. All cymols will receive an impulse to connect and will have that information by daylight. As there is no mind-link of any sort with the Mizlaplan, they must be contacted. In the meantime we must prepare to get to the Mycohl. The physical presence of all five Terrans is required. I do not know why.”
“We?” Jimmy prompted.
“I am to go with you. The Guardians can receive but not transmit new instructions to you. I now have sufficient information to effect what must be done when it needs doing. I am their representative, as your Mycohl is theirs.” . “We need to collect Grysta,” Modra reminded him,” and keep from being shot until everybody gets the word.”
Jimmy snapped his fingers. “Grysta! Yes, I’d actually managed to forget her for the first time in my life. But do we have to hide in the shadows until the all-clear?”
“I am to accompany you at all times until my functions are completed,” the cymol told them. “I can ensure protection.”
“What about the hotel?” Modra suggested. “Your people probably made a mess but it’s still better than here, and it’s a place to lie low until the word gets out. We might be able to get back there if they didn’t screw up the pentagram. First we’ll return to Grysta and tell her what’s happened.”
“If you give me the location I will see that she gets to the hotel,” the cymol told them. “My name is Greta Thune.”
They nodded and moved back to the original pentagram on the square. “To get out, just have somebody step over the lines!” Modra called to the cymol, stuck in the middle. She sighed. “Well, that’s that. The Guardians are in, the Mycohl are in. Now the whole game’s up to Krisha and Gun Roh Chin.”
It was good to be on the bridge of Widowmaker again, even if it did seem lonely. Tris was gone, and the Durquist, too, and Trannon Kose had long given them up for dead and taken his share from the expedition and vanished where security forces couldn’t find him. A maintenance crew had taken her out on a minor run, but now she was back, and she was entirely Modra’s ship, empty or not.
“We’re coming up to the border,” she announced over the ship’s intercom. “I think you ought to get a look at this.”
Jimmy McCray, Greta Thune, and Grysta all came forward and stared at the screens.
Jimmy crossed himself. “A sea of blackness,” he breathed. “We’ll never get through that.”
“Almost like somebody knows who we are and don’t wanna let us in,” Grysta commented. They’d tried to keep her from coming, bribing her with unlimited accounts and any luxuries she wanted, and telling her that she couldn’t come the final leg against the Quintara themselves, but she’d talked her way aboard anyway, as usual. It was hard to figure out her thinking and emotions; she was as independent as she could be, and Jimmy had nothing she wanted that he could give her, yet, somehow, she was still attached to him.
“Minor unformed material,” Thune commented.
“You have no idea how nasty that stuff can be,” Jimmy told her.
“Give me the con and kneel on either side of me,” she instructed. “Open your link fully to your Mycohl and stand by.”
It seemed a bizarre request, but in a universe where people popped in and out of chalk-drawn pentagrams it wasn’t that odd.
Command helmet on, Greta hooked up her interface to the main ship’s computers, modified long ago to contain much more data and instructions than a mere portable unit – can carry, not for her but for Tris, then placed one hand over Jimmy’s forehead near the small pinpoint in his skull and the other over the same area on Modra’s head.
There was a sudden rush and a surge of energy, comet-like, moved from the ship and maintained a distance of about one kilometer ahead. The ship moved toward the blackness, the surge maintaining its forward distance, and then the energy shield struck the blackness head-on.
It was as if the blackness had suddenly touched something white hot and intolerable. It wasted not a second in parting away, from the surge, retreating with such blinding speed that it looked as if a path were being dissolved out of it.
The stuff was thick and ominous, but the surge seemed like poison to it, and it made no effort to close, leaving a path through which Widowmaker could follow. Still, it took some time, as it seemed as if the stuff would never end. Finally, though, they broke inter open space beyond, and as soon as a little distance was put between them and the border wall, Thune’s hands came off their foreheads. It had the eerie sensation of something being unplugged from their heads.
“What was that?” Modra asked. “We sure could have used whatever it was a week or two ago!”
“That sort of material was used in fine tuning the universe,” the cymol explained. “It is not the exclusive province of the Quintara, nor can it stand against the combination of powers of two equally high races. We are not defenseless, you see. We have power, too.”
Jimmy McCray got up and went back to a couch, feeling a headache coming on. “Tell me,” he said as he flopped down, “did you know all that when you first came to talk with us?”
“I did not know all that until I needed to know it,” the cymol replied. “I knew the procedure, but just what it would do and how I only found out when we did it. The Guardians themselves had only partial records and did not fully appreciate what was going on until the mind-link with the Mycohl. In many ways, they knew more than we did until contact opened up old blocked regions. Data unused for as short a period as three or four centuries is often stored that way to maintain maximum efficiency.”
Jimmy was fascinated. “You mean—they’d forgotten about the Quintara? Is that why they weren’t alarmed when the station was discovered?”
“Nothing is forgotten, but since the Guardians allowed the capital to be constructed on their surface they have had limited memory expansion capabilities. After a thousand years of explorations and no reports, the odds of the information being of value were calculated against other processing needs and it was decided that the data could be considered extraneous.” –
“A computer,” Jimmy mumbled. Somehow it figured.
Only a computer could come up with a system like the Exchange.
“They were a primary data resource bank in experimental times, ” Thune told him. “So long as it had programming and maintenance from Above, their resources were effectively unlimited. After the decision to abandon and maintain the status of the universe, all such were left on their own. What they created and maintained is based on the highest degree of science and mathematical probability consistent with their programming.”
“A statistical curve,” Jimmy sighed. “Half above the line, half below. Ten percent on top, ten percent on the bottom. And the devil with the worlds too poor or too needing of aid to produce anything but misery. They were a minority. A statistical necessity. Jesus Christ!”
The cymol was oblivious to his outrage. “You have an excellent grasp of the system. Expansion, of course, is the safety valve, and the Exchange its mechanism. That which exists is placed and ordered on the curve. Brokered new worlds and settlements relieve tensions and social disturbances. If you have an idea of how to revolutionize society, raise the money, buy a world, and try it. No matter how it works out, it is then placed on the curve and the whole adjusted. Its degree of innovation through rewarding same and its total of sentient beings over the fiftieth percentile is the highest of the Three Empires, proving its worth. The Mycohl are merely the Quintara in miniature, a pale shadow, in which ten percent rule ninety. The Mizlaplan maintains as close to a zero social curve as possible but does so at the cost of innovation and creating a state maintained by thought police whose practical technological levels are artificially low.”
“I’m not arguing the value of the three systems,” he grumbled. In point of fact, he thought they all stunk.
“I’ve known some of the Mizlaplanians quite well,” Modra noted, her own headache subsiding, “and they don’t seem like glassy-eyed nature people to me.”
“Church people and spacers. The only two groups essential to controlling the rest and making it work. Just remember that the Church people are all neutered and
subject to Mizlaplanian mind control. It is a system based upon the nature of the Mizlaplanians, who are unable to even feed themselves on their own and depend on unquestioning, worshipful slaves they can make as needed to do just about anything.”
A computer, a disease, and a race of super-hypnos, Jimmy thought. Masters of the known universe!