“How awful!”
“I applied to a remote monastery on a distant world the Church owned for that purpose, and was, not surprisingly, quickly accepted. I got on the ship to go there, but I never made the connecting flight. And, there I was, the most naive twenty-nine-year-old virgin, a student of ancient Terran classics and languages, comparative religion, and with the only possibly useful degree, one in psychology I couldn’t prove because it was from a Church university. I was also penniless, and stuck on a world populated by three-meter-tall bright green centauroids whose major export was a kind of super-fertilizer and whose minds and thought processes were so alien to me that I never really got beyond the basics. Even the ticket proved void because I’d already used part of it and it was a dedicated ticket.”
“What did you do?”
“Anything I had to to survive. We’ll not go into all the things I had to do, but it was the first step in what seemed like God punishing me. Finally I managed a job at the spaceport because of my knack of picking up languages and my fluency in Exchange standard. I used to hang out with the spacers, and finally one of ’em that was shorthanded took me on for a while, until I got my training and initial papers. Even so, it was five bloody years before I even saw another Terran, except briefly, in terminals, and usually in passing. I was, however, just beginnin’ to feel like I was independent and things might be turnin’ when we had that little mission and I got Grysta on me back. The crew kept me on out of sympathy, but then we had a series of disasters and finally lost a crewmember who gave his life to save mine, and I got the Jonah tag and got dumped on the capital, where I was languishing until you came along. And now you know it all.”
“Hold it, Jimmy,” Modra said, trying to get it all straight. “You mean to tell me—how old are you?”
“Forty-one now, as it says on my papers.”
“You’re forty-one, seven or eight years a spacer, and you’re still a virgin?”
He coughed nervously, a bit embarrassed. “Grysta didn’t allow competition, and if you don’t count her—and she could stimulate areas unbelievably—then, yes, I never had the opportunity, although, Lord knows, I wanted it enough.”
“Poor Jimmy!” she sighed. “And now you’re walking naked into Hell itself, or, at least, a reasonable facsimile of it.”
“Yes. If I’m still doing penance, at least there’s one thing—God’s still got His eye on me. So, if He’s really up there, someplace, he knows about this one now.”
He’d ignored his beliefs, even convinced himself that he’d cast them out, but even before this he had begun to realize that he hadn’t, really. It was still there, deep down, somewhere inside him. He’d finally confronted that when, facing down the first demonic pair, he’d fallen not only back into belief, but into being a Catholic and a priest as well.
Now, although he knew intellectually that it was just a mixture of ego and hope with his old self and nature, he really began to wonder if in fact this wasn’t all a part of some divine plan. That, somehow, he was meant to be here, that everything up to this point had been in preparation for this. In a sense, he fervently hoped so; it would give some meaning to his life.
“Look! There’s a shortcut in!” Kalia called excitedly. “We won’t have to walk all the way around this fucking place to get in!”
In fact, now that they’d passed into the area that had been concealed from view on the immediate descent, they saw that there were several cuts and ramps leading straight into the city on various levels.
“Shall we take it in?” Jimmy asked them.
“I’d take the next one, even though it’s another five hundred meters,” Gun Roh Chin advised. “It’s only logical that anybody coming in this way would take the first exit, and the Quintara have designed a good deal of this trap on what rational folk would logically do.”
<A good point,> Josef agreed. <We, at least, will go a bit further. >
“At this point, I don’t think we ought to separate,” Jimmy agreed.
<I say go in now!> Manya put in. <We meet them head-on, as always! Besides, it will separate us from that scum in front!>
Krisha shook her head and said, “Manya, go by yourself if you wish, but the captain and I will stay with the others at this point.”
Manya seriously considered it for a moment, but pragmatism and prudence won out. She would go with her people, even if she thought them wrong.
Crossing the bridge and into the city itself did not improve the temperature a bit, but at least it didn’t get any colder, at least not in the physical sense. On the other hand, the city had a feeling of isolation and desertion that went through all of them, even Gun Ron Chin.
They stared down an empty, deserted street, feeling dwarfed by the great buildings rising on all sides, and they never felt so alone.
“Makes you long just for a piece of trash,” Jimmy McCray noted. “I keep expecting somebody to pop out of one of the side streets and shout, ‘Boo!'”
“If they do, my life may depend on the ability of someone here to do cardiac resuscitation,” the captain responded. “I’m somewhat used to great interior spaces, but this dwarfs any freighter hold.”
<There are no marks at all on the streets,> Tobrush noted. <Everything, from the street surfaces to the walls, is’ polished smooth as glass. We reflect all around. I wish I had something hard; it would be interesting to see if one could even make a decent mark in it. >
<Why not try some acids?> Josef suggested. <You can synthesize them and then excrete them through your tendrils, can you not?>
<A fascinating idea. Let me see. > A small group of wiry tentacles emerged from its back and deposited droplets of varicolored liquids on the side of the street. They hissed for a moment, then seemed to be absorbed by the material as if it were a sponge, leaving only tiny, dull blotches where the acids were placed. As they watched, even the blotches seemed to slowly fade out, until, after a minute or so, it was as if nothing at all had ever been there.
“That explains the condition of the place,” Josef noted. “I’ve never seen anything like this stuff. I wonder what the hell it’s made of?”
Chin didn’t quite follow the comment in the Mycohlian
language, but he’d watched the demonstration and had the general idea. “I’m certain that we’d probably surprise any chemist who analyzed it,” he commented. “I would bet that your Exchange researchers found it to be fairly common in its chemical composition, but bonded in a way they couldn’t replicate, because they can’t detect or measure all of the ingredients.”
“What do you think it is, then, Captain?” Krisha asked him.
“Only a guess, but I would not be surprised if it was made by the Quintara themselves,” he told her. “Just as the idols were a bridge to a whole new set of physical laws, I think this might be as well.”
“You mean the whole city’s like one of those idols?” Modra asked nervously. “And we’re standing on it and surrounded by it?”
He smiled. “I don’t think you need worry about being sucked in yourself, if that’s what is concerning you,” he assured her, hoping he was right. “I think some additional geometry is necessary for that. However, I would certainly be cautious about crossing any designs you might see etched in this material. No, we use the differing physical properties in space flight, since in the other medium the speed of light is quite a bit more accommodating. I think the Quintara went a step further. I think they learned how to harness that potential power that operates by such different rules over there and bleed it in a controlled fashion into our plane. The result can be one of those obscene idols, allowing what intelligences are there to also bleed through, or more pragmatic, such as allowing some of it to congeal and convert to this material, maintaining a sufficient energy link to allow it to be self-maintaining.”
“How could you possibly guess that just from looking at it?” Jimmy wanted to know. He liked the captain, but was very skeptical of such a null coming out with such sweeping theories on all of this.
“It’s not as arcane as it sounds,” Chin replied. “We use a very primitive variation of it ourselves every time we tap into that other universe by accelerating a spacecraft. The spacecraft itself would be absorbed, turned to energy, were
it not coated before dropping into that plane. The coating is created in what we call the ‘submerge,’ and dissipates when we slow to allowable speeds in our own plane. I’m not exactly guessing, McCray. I’m simply adding up two and two.”
“I never knew that,” Modra commented, and heard from the others’ thoughts that nobody else had, either.
“The difference between operating a light switch and being an electrician is vast,” Chin noted. “Some of you know how to operate ships, but none of you knows or understands how it works. An interstellar master must. I had a lot of trouble with it myself at the Merchant Marine Academy, as you might call it, since a lot of this we know how to do but we do not know why or how it works. Like most great inventions, it tends to just about always be discovered by accident by people looking for something else entirely. Unlike those inventions, we’ve never gotten from using it to fully understanding it. That said, I don’t believe anyone, anywhere, ever suggested such matter could be stabilized on our plane, let alone that you could build with it. Whoever built this knows how it works.”
Jimmy whistled, impressed. “Well, there’s the grand prize,” he commented dryly. “All the riches you could ever dream of, and it’s all around us. Just find out how it’s done and then figure out how to get it and us back, and found a company. No transportation, no maintenance, no labor crews. Instant roads that never wear out; instant housing for all the teeming masses. It’s certainly a crock of gold as big as we thought coming in.”
“Oh, it is much, much more than that, McCray,” Gun Roh Chin said. “Limitless energy to usable matter is only one side of the thing. What if you could do it both ways?”
“Eh? Sounds like you’re talking another ultimate weapon.”
“Oh, that, certainly, but that’s hardly worth thinking about. I’ve kept mulling over the problem of how those big crystals got from the interior to the exterior of that cave— and how those great rocks they poured there got to the various levels or compartments or worlds or whatever they are. Not through the route we took, certainly. I think they used the stations to convert the material to energy, then took
it on the other plane to where they wanted it to be and re-formed it there. If what everyone tells me about the other plane is correct, energy has form and substance of some sort there. It is probably somewhat tricky, though—to push in the crystal, say, already resonating properly, then move it in energy form to where it’s to be, then push it out slowly, still resonating properly, so that you might use it to emerge yourself. Sort of like a portable hole.”
In spite of disdain for anything Mizlaplanian, Tobrush was getting very interested in this. <Hold on!> the Julki sent, unable to understandably speak either of the others’ tongues. <That implies somebody in there guiding the things!>
Jimmy repeated the comment for Chin, who nodded. “I think so. It bothered me from the start that the first pair of demons we met were, I think, surprised to see us, and tried to convince us to free them. Why, I wondered, didn’t the pair liberated by the Exchange scientists free them on the way? What would it have taken to do so? And why did carnivores, carbon-based life, who needed either live or freshly killed meat of some sort and certainly water, not have any supplies along the route? We saw no signs, and they are certainly rather messy. The only answer I could come up with was that the first pair never passed them, and so also never came the rest of the route we took— hence, no supplies needed.”
“But we saw the marks where they went in!” Krisha reminded him.
“Indeed. And no marks after. They only needed the station to access the other plane. Once that occurred, they never went into the central chamber. They became creatures of energy and slipped into the other plane, coming out at a desired station somewhere else entirely—anywhere they wanted.”
“The Julki says you have a wonderful imagination,” Jimmy told the captain, “but that, if you’re right, why did they need the second station? Why didn’t they just do this where they were?”
“There are several possibilities there,” Gun Roh Chin told them. “However, the best supposition is based on that
first level we entered. It was plain, unfinished, without anything in it. An empty room, as it were. Some races may build empty rooms, but the Quintara are sufficiently like us that evidence suggests that they do not. Conclusion: whatever stopped them in the, distant past stopped them before they could build anything in it, possibly a prototype for whatever they were going to do to develop the planet that started all this. That suggests that the first station was the end of the line, not yet fully operational itself. Then, again, they might well have reported, received instructions, and made certain that somebody would follow them into the main network where there would be intelligences who could control and manipulate the route at all points. Note that while the first pair tried to get us to free them, the second pair did not. By that point, they had orders.”
“If you’re right,” said Jimmy McCray, “then, once free, all these bloody bastards have to do is get to an access point and jump in and head for their nearest troops, like in that demon menagerie we came through. Then they all jump in, and pick whatever station they want. And if there is one buried at the bottom of the Euphrates on old Mother Earth, the odds are there’s one or more on all the ancient mother worlds. Two hundred million demons with that kind of power and access could take those tired old worlds in a night, and so-called mortals have been able to raise demons elsewhere, so it wouldn’t take much help to pop a few up in other key places, where they could move those stacked crystals into place.”
“The first step is to buy time,” Krisha said. “And that means learning as much as we can here, and, somehow, getting back to report. The second and equally important thing is that we must not succumb, under any circumstances, to any temptations to release the princes. We may have two demons loose, but that is all. Without the princes, I do not believe they represent a massive threat, no matter how much local damage they can do.”
“But why don’t they just release the princes?” Modra wondered.
“Somehow, for some reason, they can’t. That’s the only explanation,” Jimmy replied. “Why? Who knows? It only
matters that they can’t, because, if they could, they already would have and all this would have been unnecessary. Clearly whoever imprisoned them made provisions in case some of the lower types either got sprung or were missed. And I think some got missed. There are too many demon-raising stories within historical times not to believe that. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t traps around these places to keep the others from being freed and keep even that pair away. No, it’s our ball right now.”
“The only thing we might be able to do is die,” the captain said unhappily. “Unless we can become wizards or sorcerers, and learn how to do their tricks, which is rather unlikely, I see no way we are going to get out of here, nor any sources of food and drink. We have very little time. Days, I’d think. And during all that, the best we can hope for is that none of us, even accidentally, frees those princes.”
Josef, who was listening to all this, suddenly turned. “Where is Kalia?” he asked, puzzled.