That implied that, far from traveling great distances, they had been inside some greater structure all along, the stations less transporters than hatches, like airlocks, separating one compartment from another and isolating their biospheres.
Almost like a spaceship. Some impossibly huge spaceship, traveling—where? The multiple stations in the realm where that demon horde was kept, sealed away, implied many, many more compartments than the ones they had come through. At the very least, such a ship would be the size of a small planet.
Maybe it was a planet, Morok suddenly thought, startled. Hollowed out, perhaps completely artificial. The implications of that almost made him start to fall. If the stations were mere airlocks, and this was merely another level of a planetary interior, then they might not have gone anywhere at all. They might well just have been descending, level by level, into the interior of the world upon which they had first landed!
He wished he could discuss that thought with Captain Chin, particularly because he was proud of having seen it and come up with it first, but the captain, who could not overhear his thoughts, was far too busy following and trying to keep up with Krisha and Manya, madly darting toward the maze exit.
<Have caution, children!> he called to them. <Right at the exit are the two huge idols and I have no idea how you get between them! Think! The Exchange group is only seconds behind you on your right, and the Mycohl are converging, perhaps two or three minutes because of additional obstacles!>
They actually saw the much-anticipated exit, and Gun Roh Chin almost ran over Manya when she and Krisha both stopped suddenly.
“Oof! Sorry—what’s the matter?”
Manya pointed to the exit. “If you look carefully you can see them,” she told him. “They are slightly higher man the hedge, on both sides of it, and I am not certain if there is any room to get between.”
Krisha shook her head. “It’s a road block, all right, and an effective one. I—” She stopped, as Modra, Jimmy, and Molly rounded the next-to-last corner and came toward them, stopping about six meters to the other side of the exit.
They knew Modra, and she knew them, but this was the first time the Mizlaplanians had really seen Jimmy and particularly Molly except in subjective mind-pictures, and it was the first time the Exchange pair had similarly looked on the Mizlaplanians.
They all heard noise in the row just behind them, and Jimmy said, “Well, that’d be the Mycohlians, I suppose. After all this, it’s a bloody tie!”
Gun Roh Chin angled so he could see at least one of the huge guardians of the bridge to the city. “Any way of dealing with them?” he asked hopefully.
“If you can figure a way past the dog-faced twins, I’ll go halves with you,” McCray responded.
“I meant the idols.” He paused, surprise sinking in. “You know Mizlaplanian?”
“I do now,” the telepath responded. “After days of monitoring your bloody thoughts and having comparative translations, I think I’ve got it back pretty well. Been a long time since I used it, though. Couldn’t make heads or tails of it when we started out. A reading and working knowledge isn’t the same as actually getting it in conversation.”
Chin just nodded and gestured to the exit. “Any ideas?”
McCray shot a quick query to the guardians of the gate, and got back a very powerful, <None shall pass.> “Well, they’re rather predictable, anyway,” he commented.
<Any way to change your minds?> he asked hopefully. <I believe we are expected in there.>
<What the Quintara wish is no concern of ours. We demand tribute in our own right. >
“Ah! Tribute. So it’s really a toll gate, is it? Terribly sorry, old boys. I seem to have left my other pants in my other pants.”
At that moment the Mycohl team appeared behind the Exchange, emerging from the same gap as they had come from. Modra took one look at Kalia’s ugly, burned left side and couldn’t suppress a small gasp. Telepathy was indeed a subjective art. As for Josef, she hadn’t ever seen a man with a body that hairy. He was a much bigger man than either of them had thought, too, and while Jimmy’s beard was still stubble, Josef’s was already black and added to his mean, arrogant look. Tobrush, in fact, looked the most like they expected.
It was a mark of male ego that both Jimmy and Gun Roh Chin, who’d had little self-consciousness up to that point, felt somewhat embarrassed at the sight of the size of Josef’s private parts. There was certainly something to be said for clothes. Jimmy’s reaction, received empathically by the three Terran women in all the parties, caused a fleeting moment of amusement.
Realizing that there was more of a language barrier with this group than with the Mizzies, Jimmy sent, <Might as well join the party. If you feel like fighting it out, we can do that later, after we figure out this nasty little problem. >
Josef nodded and approached them, somewhat surprised to discover that the two other Terran males were both much smaller men than he’d thought. Somehow the telepathic images he’d been getting from the others had Jimmy subjectively more his size and Chin a virtual giant. Josef was a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters high and weighed, at least before his forced march on short rations, around a hundred and three kilos; McCray was at best a hundred and seventy high and probably weighed no more than fifty-eight or -nine. And Chin, the now legendary Captain Chin, was only about as tall as Kalia’s one sixty-two, although he was chunky. Krisha, though, was about as tall as McCray, and Modra Stryke even taller.
It drove home how subjective and deceptive .holographic telepathy really was.
McCray was immediately on with the other two telepaths.
<Perhaps a partial, controlled merge, if everyone cooperates, > Jimmy suggested. <There’s nine of us against two of them. >
<Nine—oh, that’s right, > Tobrush came back. </ forgot that the old praying fool is up there floating around somewhere.>
Many a felt a tremendous hatred strike her and looked up, startled. Kalia was staring at her hard, with daggers in her eyes. Modra caught the full force of it, standing between them, and got the mental picture of the reason.
“Jimmy, we’re never going to work together,” Modra told him. “And while I know nothing about what you’re proposing, a lifelong empath gets to know about people in pressure situations pretty well.”
<She is correct, > Morok sent from above them, where he’d been circling. He was beginning to tire, as the relative uniformity of the air made him constantly flap and work hard to keep aloft, and had been thinking of coming down. <The idols, however, appear to work in unison, as if they were really just two out lets for the same entity. Perhaps they could be diverted, though, long enough for everyone to run through>.
<What kind of diversion do you have in mind?> Jimmy asked him.
<No, Holy Father!> Krisha mentally screamed at him. <It is too dangerous! You will die, and if it does not work we still will not get through!>
Morok thought a moment. <Perhaps if I fly over the last hedge and get on the other side of them, > he suggested. <That alone would divide their attention and frustrate them. Don’t worry—I’ll cross well down and away from them.>
<lf s your funeral,> Jimmy replied, unsure of just what effect that would have on the rest of them, if, indeed, it had any effect at all.
Morok admitted the point, but noted, <Well, at least it’s something. We just can’t keep standing here.>
Modra suddenly remembered something the demon prince had said to her the night before and cried, “No!” but if Morok heard, even telepathically, he was oblivious to it.
They saw his long, lean, graceful figure off in the distance, a good thirty or forty feet beyond the exit, turn and head out over the last hedgerow. As soon as he cleared it, he seemed to contact a heretofore invisible wall of black energy much like a protective force field. As his body contacted it, it was enveloped in crackling energy and there was a sudden bright flash—and the scene was normal again: no force field, and no Morok.
Krisha screamed, and Gun Roh Chin went to her to calm her down, although he was quite shaken himself. Modra just sighed and shook her head sadly.
“One will die before reaching the city. …”
Manya said the Prayer for the Dead, but, as she finished and made the ritual signs in the air, she thought, He never would listen to anybody.
Suddenly all who could hear it heard in their minds the booming voice of the entity from the idols: <The sacrifice is adequate and acceptable. You may pass.>
That almost started Krisha back into angry hysterics, causing the captain to again try and calm and comfort her.
Modra raised her eyebrows and looked at Jimmy, then at the Mycohlians. “Think we can trust them?”
“Well, you’re the empathy expert,” McCray responded.
She nodded. “Somehow, I think they are stating a fact. On the other hand, I don’t think we should wait around until they change their mind, either.”
Kalia said, “What the fuck. You’re all a bunch of cowardly assholes,” walked through the Exchange trio and through the exit. When nothing happened, the rest of them on that side wasted no time in following her.
“Come,” the captain said gently. “He paid a high price for us. Let’s not waste it.”
Krisha shook off her tears, nodded, and the Mizlaplanians, too, walked through and finally exited the maze, and, for the first time, had a clear view of the city.
For Chin, it was his first view of it of any sort, and he was impressed. “The capital,” he muttered, “and almost certainly the control room.”
Krisha looked at him red-eyed and said, “Morok— Morok said that these weren’t worlds but compartments, like in a huge spaceship. Just before the end, he theorized that we weren’t anywhere far from where we came in, that this was the hollowed-out interior of the world upon which we landed.”
He nodded. “I thought of that as well, but, even if it’s true, this is more than merely a planet-sized spaceship or artificial prison colony. Much more.”
Jimmy McCray, hearing the conversation, tore his gaze reluctantly from the view of the pastel city and walked over to Chin. “I’ve been hearing a lot about you, Captain. All secondhand until now, though.”
Chin looked at Krisha, who nodded. “I’m all right now,” she assured him, and walked over to join the rest of them, standing at the beginning of the spiral bridge down to the city, just staring.
“Everything I’ve been getting is secondhand, McCray, but we’ve met before. You were just a bit out of it then.”
“I owe you my life,” Jimmy told him sincerely. “It’s nice to say thanks in person for that.”
“I hope you would have done the same for me,” the Mizlaplanian said. “In fact, I’m almost certain you would have.”
Jimmy shrugged. “Let’s just hope you won’t have to do it again, or find out what I’d do. I’ve learned a lot from eavesdropping on your conversations, in a manner of speaking, through the Gnoll, there—tough as it is at times. That’s a mighty weird mind there. On the other hand, you and I have a number of things in common, not the least of which is a serious problem. You know, I suppose, that the girl, there, worships the ground you walk on.”
“I didn’t think it was quite that strong,” the captain
demurred, embarrassed now that his problems were so public.
“We Terrans can pick the damnedest messes to get into. She worships you, but she’s the church and you’re the congregation. I assume that sometime when Modra was with your group you were told of her own problems?”
He nodded. “Yes, Krisha told me. As terrible as our own situation may be, I think I prefer it to Modra’s past. You have a similar situation to mine in your own past?”
Jimmy nodded. “If anything, more complicated. I wound up having to get far away from anything that even reminded me of home, changed careers, and got in an even worse mess with the damnedest little parasitic—ah, symbiotic— creature you ever knew. And sweet little Molly, there, whom I married to keep her from being destroyed—she was born in either a factory or a bottle, I’m not sure which— hasn’t been able to have me yet, nor I her.”
“Do you want to?”
“I did, once—more than anything in the world. Now— I’m not at all certain. What I really want, I think, is beyond me, beyond anything, and, considerin’ all this, probably the last thing I could have. Still and all, there’s a lot of losers and unhappy folks in this.”
The captain nodded. “And has it escaped your notice that, now we are nine, and six of us are Terran?”
McCray frowned. “You know, you’re right! I never much thought about it.”
“Terrans are survivors. We do everything wrong and we wallow in the low places, yet we survive. As a race, we survive, and adapt, and we either outbreed or, as a group, outlive everyone who oppresses us except, of course, ourselves.”
“I wonder if that’s all there is to it,” Jimmy McCray sighed, turning back to look at the city. “That lot of Quintara have had a passing acquaintance with maybe seventy percent of the known races, but we Terrans and they know each other much, much better than that. We’re old companions, for some reason. Now that you’ve pointed it out to me, I don’t think the predominance of Terrans at this point is anything like an accident or our race’s ability to breed like grass or our ability to survive and endure. All the races are survivors; otherwise they wouldn’t be where they are. No, I think the Quintara wanted it this way. Not, perhaps, because we’re so special, but because they know us so well.” He sighed. “I think we better join the others. I believe they’re going down into the city.”
Gun Roh Chin nodded. “Somehow, I wish Many a and that girl she burned would just have it out up here and be done with it. It’s going to happen sooner or later, and I most strongly feel that, whatever is down there, if we don’t learn to put aside all our differences, every little bit, and work together as a team, we’re done for.”