“You think in threes, because that’s what we all grew up with,” Modra reminded him, getting the foul picture. “But suppose in those days it was four, not three? Suppose the Quintara thought that they had an ally, and would split up the other two? Then, particularly if they were pressed by a hungry population of young newcomers, they might take the risk. Then something happened. Maybe the plot was discovered, or perhaps the partner lost its nerve, knowing that one day they would have to face the Quintara alone themselves. Whatever happened, they double-crossed the Quintara. Then it was three to one; essentially, surrendering almost without a fight.”
They were only a few blocks now from the pyramid and the city center, and somehow it felt much colder, although the temperature had not really changed.
“But why imprison them?” Jimmy asked. “If you have them cold, why not do them in? Otherwise there’s always a threat that someday they’d get free.”
“No,” Krisha said. “We’ve had two versions of the imprisonment from two different demons. One said they imprisoned themselves. The other said they were betrayed and jailed. We have been going on the assumption that one of those versions is a lie. Suppose it is not? Suppose both are true?”
They all deferred quizzically to her, but Gun Roh Chin smiled. “You beat me to the deduction,” he noted admiringly. “That’s very good.”
“What do you mean, both true?” Modra prompted her.
“Tell me, do the Quintara strike you as creatures who would meekly submit their whole population to arrest by their enemies just because they thought they would lose a war?”
Nobody thought that. “They appear to be like the Mycohl, who would die rather than surrender,” Kalia responded.
“Exactly. And from the somewhat friendly way in which the Quintara are remembered in one of the empires, I think we can guess who their ally who betrayed them was, can’t we? They got along with the Quintara and liked them, and they wanted to do it, but they had some kind of indication that they’d lose. Faced with a strong probability of defeat if they went with the Quintara, they settled for a third of the Quintara’s holdings. One can see the Quintara leaders huddling as to what to do. Start the war anyway and risk the annihilation of their race to the last individual, or negotiate a strategic settlement? If that settlement included the abandonment of their empire to the others, the ultimate prize anyway, might it not tempt the others to accept, with lots of conditions, rather than risk the terrible losses a people as vicious and ruthless as the Quintara could inflict even in a losing, suicidal cause?”
“So they did imprison themselves!” Modra exclaimed. “In a way probably monitored by the others. They withdrew into this alternative place, which was shut down and put on maintenance, probably kept going just because it was needed to power the imprisonment. Two hundred million or more, all in self-imposed prisons of their own making, maintained in a kind of limbo, suspended animation of a sort, but alive, and maybe able to commune through that other plane as our minds went there.”
“But what’s the point?” Josef asked. “It seems like simply prolonging extinction.”
“Not necessarily extinction,” Krisha responded. “Some, probably lower ones, escaped and kept the demon cults and legends alive, but they were few in number. Perhaps, though, the whole of them still had some influence on all sorts of things through that other plane. Their followers, their priests and priestesses, would still be there. Some of the knowledge would be passed down. Invoke a demon. Grant wishes. Cast evil spells. All done by passing down this perverted faith from generation to generation. Even demonic possession—perhaps a form of telepathic merging with other races who had something of the talent from fooling with this other-plane energy and mathematics. Wild orgies and love spells through empathic projection. Transmutation—if they can create this city out of that energy, how much simpler must it be to convert lead to gold? They’d have to do that to keep their people in place, retain their infrastructure over thousands upon thousands of years, until the time was right.”
“What time?” Modra asked. “Surely the others would never go along if they thought the Quintara could ever really escape.”
“Oh, I suspect that they always knew of the possibility,” Jimmy McCray replied. “They tried to plug every gap they could, of course, hoping that the Quintara had bitten off more than they could chew, but they simply never counted on the patience of the race. We thought the station through which we entered was unfinished, and, in a sense, it was, but suppose it wasn’t an ongoing project stilled by their fall? Suppose it was a rush job, instead. Stick a station so far out in the middle of nowhere, so beyond anybody’s capacity to reach it that it simply wouldn’t be looked at. Perhaps they had several such, and this was just the first one found. Sitting there waiting, patiently, until the early primitive civilizations matured, left their nests, and got into space. Until expansion became empire and empires began to move out into the galaxy. Waiting on the not terribly good odds that, someday, somebody who did not know them for what they were would find them. Then it would bring the discoverers here in small and unthreatening numbers, eventually disarming them as it examined them. Examined them, then brought them here, to this place, to be faced with the choice of freeing them or slow death.”
“But surely everyone is warned now!” Modra maintained. “Everyone must have some word that there were demons found at Rainbow Bridge. The Guardians would know, wouldn’t they? And why are the Mizlaplanians even here if their intelligence didn’t alert their Holy Angels as well? And with what must be going on at Rainbow Bridge right now, the Mycohl must know, too. They’d find our shuttles, but not us. They’d mobilize, move to stop this, wouldn’t they?”
“If they were capable of mobilizing, yes,” the captain agreed. “But, how much time has passed? Do the Guardians still even exist? Are the Mycohl still strong, or diluted and decadent? The Mizlaplan may be the only one with any kind
of hope against them at this point, and they are only one third of the temporal powers. We alone have a society capable of keeping the direct Quintara influence out. The whole society is organized to root out that ugly influence and eliminate it. We may have been the only ones who seriously considered this possibility. It’s not difficult now to plot the old Quintara sphere of influence, based just upon the native religions and legends of demons, though. The passage of time breeds complacency. Two thirds of the ancient home worlds of what used to be their domain, including Mother Earth, lie in the Exchange and the Mycohl. The fact that we haven’t already seen some signs of intervention by the higher forms tells me that perhaps they really do not have a plan, at least not any longer. They managed to come together once, when they were mature races, to defeat the Quintara. Can they do it now, when they are old? And are they capable of uniting with sufficient power to face down a Quintara still in their prime?”
“Take care, Captain! You border on heresy!” Manya warned him.
“Do I? Perhaps I do, Manya. But nothing any of us has said negates any of your theology. We are but reflections of the older, higher forms. The forces of Hell are real, and are every bit as nasty as we were taught they were, and every bit as powerful. No, Manya, in fact I almost find myself getting more religious. If Hell is real, if demons are real, if black magic and evil are real, if sorcery is an alternative physics, a new mathematics, then I am praying very, very hard that the gods are real as well.”
“It may not make a difference,” Jimmy pointed out. “The Quintara tempted and tested the others, and they met their test. God, or the gods, or whatever you conceive the Supreme Being or Beings to be, was always using the devil to tempt and test people, to son out the few that were worthy from the mass who were not. Even if Heaven exists, it might not intervene. This might be our turn to be truly tested.”
The buildings suddenly ended, and they looked out upon the oval-shaped city center. The enormous pyramid dominated the skyline, but was firmly anchored within the city,
jutting out on one comer over the great center. A broad avenue went around that center, ending in a relatively high guard wall, but not so high that they could not cross the avenue and walk to it and look down.
Below was a swirling mass of seething crackling energy, as if not more dense than the energy of evil experienced in the other plane. But this was riot the same; its raw power coursed through them, touching their very souls, yet there was not the overwhelming sense of evil and wrongness to this mass. It was merely there, beyond such limited terms as good and evil, beyond anything for which they had words. Even the captain saw it and felt it; this was no metaphysical or psychic plane, no other dimension, but something very real.
“It looks like a great eye,” Modra commented, “The way it swirls and divides.”
“The Eye of God,” Jimmy McCray breathed.
“Perhaps there is more truth to that than we know,” Gun Roh Chin remarked. “This is the source of all the energy, perhaps of all energy, period. It is a control, and a gate, but some bleeds through. Only when it bleeds through does it become all the states of energy, known and unknown. Heaven and Hell, coexisting, side by side. The center of all, and the edge of all. The fact that such a source exists and fluctuates explains much of the inconsistencies in measuring the amount of matter and energy in the universe.”
Tobrush, who’d been silent most of the way, now asked, “What do you mean it ‘bleeds through’? From where?”
“From outside. Outside the universal bubbles. This place might be anywhere, but it is certainly within our own cosmos. Even the other planes you visited are coterminous, inside something. But that—that is not. We are looking here at someplace outside of all the rules, period.”
“Nonsense!” Tobrush responded. “Then we would be looking at nothing—a complete absence of anything at all, which would be perceived by us only as darkness.”
“That,” agreed Gun Roh Chin, “is certainly what is supposed to be there.”
There was silence for a moment, then Tobrush said, “I reject your unfounded assumptions. I cannot accept them.
To do so would be to accept madness as the norm, chaos as the deity. The natural laws which have proven so consistent and reliable would be mere rules, to be bent or broken by the application of such energies as you theorize. Literally anything would be possible, and the supernatural would stand side by side with the natural. We know the universe began in a great explosion.”
Chin nodded. “But an explosion of what! From where? Science has always been so facile, explaining that it was spontaneous, from nothing, although that is as insane to any logic as what I propose. Religion maintains that it came from somewhere else—a steady-state universe. Heaven. Don’t worry—there are rules. The first explosion created them. Whenever that plasma bleeds through, it is bent to conform to them. But, in one sense, you are correct. The implication of this and all the rest that we have seen says very clearly that we do not know & fraction of the rules we think we know.” He turned reluctantly away from the Eye and pointed at the city. “They know the rest of the rules and laws, though. They built this city with them. They intend to rule what we now think of as the Three Empires with them—and the Three Empires, as vast as they are, are but a speck of dust compared to the known universe. We just have the grave misfortune to live in the region where the Quintara, and the others, went first.”
“Yeah, and now we’re all grown up, but still way behind them,” McCray added. “So now they intend that we’ll provide all that they require. An army of conquest, an inexhaustible food source … ninety trillion slaves and still growing. Ninety trillion potential Fausts, to be offered the deepest secrets of the universe, to become the rampaging horde through the rest of it—but at quite a price.”
Kalia scowled and shook her head in disgust. “You are all fools!” she exclaimed. “All this time since we got together, all you do is talk, talk, talk, talk. You guess, you think, you pick up a blade of grass and decide that you got the key to the universe and then you go on from there. Fact is, you don’t know nothin’! You got this blowhard Mizzie freighter captain spouting shit he don’t know is true or false any more than the rest of us, and then the holy bitch there takes it up
’cause it takes her mind off the fact she can’t get laid, and they snow the rest of you and before you’re through you figure out a history of the universe that’s got three grains of truth and the rest horse shit! Are these guys dangerous? You bet. Do they know a ton of shit we don’t? Sure looks like it. Beyond that, you don’t know no more than I do and that ain’t much!”
The speech stung Krisha as if it were an arrow, but Manya, who’d also maintained a discreet silence—and distance from Kalia—was both amused and content with it, although she thought the language a bit rude. Her only amazement was that such wisdom could come from such an ignorant little devil-worshiping slut.
Josef was definitely not amused. “That’s some speech from someone who had to be practically dragged away from groveling at the foot of the first demon she saw,” he commented dryly.
“You had it easy; I had to crawl my way up,” she reminded him. “But I got this far ’cause I’m a quick learner. Anybody who’s got to be broke out of a glass case by the likes of me ain’t no god, that’s for sure. But I didn’t get this far only to sit down and commit suicide ’cause of all this bullshit. I may not know poetry and priest stuff and all, but I know that if these guys are smart, maybe smarter than us by a long shot, and nobody but dumb shits builds cities you can’t get out of, or that have only one real tough way out, I don’t care if you pretend-brains want to kill yourselves or sit here and starve or freeze or whatever, but you ain’t includin’ me in that crap. If I’ve gotta go, I’m gonna go lookin’ for food and water and warmth and a way out of this creepy place. Anybody who wants can come, too. The rest of you should just throw yourself in that gook down there so we won’t have to listen to you no more!” And, with that, she turned and started walking off, toward the pyramid.
“She is quite forceful,” the captain said dryly.
“Maybe,” Modra replied, “but maybe we needed a little cold water thrown on us. I’ve been on a lot of exploiter team jobs, but I’ve never given up and never worked with anybody else who did, and I’m sure not ready to cut my throat on sheer speculation, like she said.”
Jimmy McCray shrugged. “Suicide’s against my ex-religion, anyway. The Mizlaplan’s, too, if memory serves. In any event, we either have to go after her in this damned city and kill her, or we have to do it her way because, otherwise, that one’s going to come face to face with the demon princes alone.”
One by one, they turned and followed Kalia toward the pyramid. She didn’t wait for them, but when she reached the great structure she had to stop because there wasn’t even an indication of a way inside.
Jimmy McCray went to a spot near Kalia and surveyed the scene. “Don’t go touching any of those symbols you see glowing dully inside here,” he warned them. “This thing’s here because it’s somehow connected to that energy mass there. It might well be the equivalent of an electrical regulator or storage device, perhaps even a transformer that uses what it gets to power the city. Most of those symbols translate to ancient hex signs, which were always ‘keep off’ and ‘keep away’ symbols.”
The captain approached and examined them. “I’m sure they wouldn’t put anything really dangerous on the outside, not without guard rails to ward against at least accidental touching,” he commented. “Still, let’s see what the other sides have. We might find something more useful.”