Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  Just below, the double-domed lander squatted on spidery limbs. Beyond the lander, many kilometers across the battered yellow plain, rose the shining column of the nearest pushcoil, the planetmover.

  Anemic sunlight glanced from its argent hide, light streaks chasing the shadows of striated dust clouds skating low in the bluegray sky. It was afternoon, but overhead a few stars guttered, visible in thin atmosphere.

  The pushcoil column towered, broad and austere, into the clouds and beyond. Its lower end widened into a compression skirt that uniformly clamped the ground; steams and fumes trailed from vents in the conical skirt: the column was converting minerals into energy, building power for conversion into magnetic push. There were ten such columns placed at regular intervals about the planet. Put there by the Sports-eyes Corporation for Will the Chill’s exclusive use.

  Made from metals extracted from Five’s core, the columns were powered geothermally. Sports-eyes had built hundreds—on hundreds of worlds. Worlds now asteroid belts and clouds of dust; crushed and dispersed for the amusement of jaded millions on the homeworld.

  The Sports-eyes crew had departed months before; Will was glad that they were gone. He hadn’t spoken to another human being, except on screen, since Mina’s death, years before.

  Will turned and gazed west. Roche’s Star was low, opposite the column. Long shadows reached from the endless scatter of boulders and crater rims. The meteorite-scored hills to the north stretched to him like the pitted, skeletal fingers of a dead giant

  Will strode into the grasp of those peninsular fingers.

  In those hills were the ruins, and the sunharp, and the voices. Will began to climb, anticipation growing.

  * * * *

  In the ship. In the hookup chamber. In the hookup seat. In hookup.

  Time to re-examine the playing field. He tested the solar wind, noted its slant and strength.

  Then he immersed himself in somatic-eidetic impressions of gravitational energy. An exquisitely fine and resiliently powerful fabric flexed between star systems. On this skein a star and ten planets moved like monstrous spiders, electromagnetic grips adhering them to the field, bending the webwork, reverberating the field so that the positioning process of each planet was integral to the status of each of the others. The gravitational field was the chief turf of the playing field, and Will examined the attributes of each obstacle on the field, assessing each component’s interaction with the whole, synthesizing his strategy.

  Will needed no numerical calculation. No holotrigonometry. He had never got beyond the multiplication tables. All he needed was hookup and Great Senses and the skill, the innersight. Great Senses was navigator, astrogator, life-systems watch. Hookup was Will’s cerebral connection with the ship’s electronic nerves, a binding of synthetic and biological neural systems. Will’s was the instinct, the athleticism, the determination. Determiner of destinations.

  He knew the ship physically.

  The ship’s cognizance of (and interaction with) visible light, cosmic rays, gamma rays, unclear forces—these he felt in his loins. Physically.

  De hipbone is connected to de backbone; the electro is connected to the magnetic. The seat of his magnetic sensorium was his spine. This chakra he experienced in the region of his heart. Electricity in his heart. Physically.

  He comprehended the gravitional field through shoulders, legs, arms. Very physically.

  In loins, light-packets. In heart, electromagnetism. In limbs, gravity.

  In hookup they integrated as variations on the wave-particle theme: in his brain. Sometimes, Tondius Will remembered a poem, one of many the ship’s library had recited to him. It was Blake....

  Energy is the only life and is from the body:

  and Reason is the bound or outward

  circumference of Energy.

  Energy is Eternal Delight.

  Innersight hookup. On one level he knew the vast gravitational field in terms of mass and weight, gross proportions.

  Take it down, another and broader condition of unity.

  He penetrated the vacillation of gravitrons, the endless alternation between wave and particle forms, slipped the knife edge of his innersight into the transitory sequence between wave into particle and particle into wave; waves, here, revealed as particles and particles exposed: packets of waves. This particularization arranged in resonations distinctive to the gravitional field of Roche’s star system.

  He caused his perception of the gravitational spectrum to click with his perception of the electromagnetic spectrum, his limbs throbbing in concert with pulsings in heart-spine. And this light with his loins. All together now.

  His brain took a picture, recorded and filed it. He had memorized the playing field.

  And that was enough for now. He willed internalization. Hookup shut down his connection with Great Senses. He sat up and yawned. But his eyes glittered.

  * * * *

  He was hungry, and there was no hookup here to feed and refresh him. He was weary, but the hills drew him on. There was only the sighing wind, hiss of breath in respirator, clink of small air tanks on his belt, crunch of his boot steps in sand. And the wide-open, the empty. He trudged the rim of a crater, admiring the crystalline glitter streaking its slopes, the red nipple of iron oxides in the impact basin. On the far side of this crater were the ruins, up-thrusting along the broken ridges like exposed spinal segments. Light splashed off the sunharp, still half a kilometer away.

  The sun was westering behind the mesas, the jet sky overhead spread shadow wings to enfold the bluer horizons.

  Will slid down the embankment, enjoying the earthy heft of hillside resisting his boots. He reached the floor of the gulley and picked his way over rough shin-high boulders to the base of the hill whose crown exposed the first stretch of ragged ruins, uneven walls like battlements above.

  The hills were not simple hills—they were barrows, grave mounds cloaking the remains of a once-city. Here, an earthslide triggered by a meteorite strike had exposed a portion of the city’s skeleton. The walls of rusted metal and cracked glass and tired plastics, throwing jagged shadows in the fading daylight, were notched and scored with age, erosion.

  But there were no signs of war, on the ruins. These were not broken battlements. . . . Genetic Manipulation experiments had released an unstoppable plague, robbing the world of most of its life and all its fertility. No offspring were born to lower life forms, or to the world’s people. People they were, of a sort, with tendrills instead of boned fingers and large golden whiteless eyes like polished stones. The plants withered, the air thinned, the land died. Those who survived, one hundred thousand living on chemically synthesized food, were so long-lived they were nearly immortal. Childless, living without societal evolution in an endlessly bleak landscape, they surrendered to a growing collective sense of futility. A new religion arose, preaching fulfillment beyond the veil of death, advocating mass suicide. A vote was taken, its tally unanimous. The remaining one hundred thousand decided to die. To die by poison, together, and all at once....

  For so Will had been told. The voices in the sunharp told him this.

  He passed through the maze of roofless ruins, coming to the broad square at their radial center. He beheld the sunharp. Everything here had decayed but the sunharp. It had been built at the end, as a monument. Built to endure a nova.

  The diamond-shaped sunharp’s frame was constructed of light silvery tubing crisscrossing in equilateral parallelograms based in common on a wire-veined cube of crystal which was two meters to a side. The horizontal axis of each silvery rhombus was at right angles to the others, the tube frames meeting at the peak of the diamond form three meters over the base. A coppery netting was woven densely between the frames, a four-faced crystal form of webbing, basket for sifting and carrying light impulses.

  The final rays of sunset; veering lances of red, broke the thin dust cloud and struck the coppery sunharp wires. Till now it had been singing in the subsonic. Struck full by corpuscular r
ays, its netting vibrated visibly, resonated internally, interpreted the sun shiver according to strict aural formulas. Translated into sound waves, photons sang out. Choirs of alien races, chorus of human voices, subhuman voices, wolves baying and birds singing: all in concert. The wind sounds of thousands of landscapes (each landscape altering the wind song as Bach’s inventions vary the hymnal theme) combining into a single voice. The nature of rippling endlessly defined in song.

  Will listened, and more than listening: he heeded. And if Blue the Glue had seen Will’s face just then, he might not have recognized him; he did not associate joy with Will the Chill.

  Royal purple gathered in the ground hollows, dusty darkness collected in the dead windows of the ruins, the stars shone more fiercely, the mesas at the horizon swallowed the sun. The sunharp’s call dwindled to lower frequencies, softly moaning to starlight and occasionally pinging to cosmic rays. Other sighs came to replace the sunharp’s voice. Will shuddered and, for an instant, dread enfolded his heart. But the fear left him abruptly, as it always did before they spoke to him. He smiled. “Hello,” he said aloud.

  There came a reply, one hundred thousand voices speaking the same word at once, a mighty susurration in an alien tongue. A greeting.

  Then they spoke subvocally, in his own tongue, echoes within the skull:

  For the fifth time you have returned to us (said the voices). But the first time and the three thereafter you came alone. Why have you now brought a companion?

  “I have no companions,” said Tondius Will.

  We see now that you do not know about the one who follows you. It is a lurking he who does the bidding of a distant she. The he comes to destroy you.

  “Then he is an assassin,” said Will sadly, “sent by my Opponent. She becomes reckless. She has breached the rules of Contest. Death-dealing must be done by Opponent or by her machines only. Still, I will not protest. Let him come.”

  The time is not yet, Tondius Will.

  “Will the time be soon?”

  You doubt us. You wonder if you are the One prophesied by the Gatekeeper. You are he. Ten thousand times in ten thousand millenniums we have attempted transit to the fuller spheres. Ten thousand times we have been denied. One hundred thousand cannot enter as one, said the Gatekeeper, unless they become onemind, or unless they are guided by a sailor of inner seeing. We were bound together by a united death. Simultaneity. We plunged together into that tenuous Place, this between. We need a guide to lead us out. Do not doubt us. You are He. The Gatekeeper whose seven stony visages exhale backlight said to us: One who wields spheres below can guide you through spheres above. . . . You are He. We know your history, Tondius Will.

  “My father...”

  Was an orbitglider, a great athlete of space race.

  “My mother ...”

  Was a freefall ballerina for a space-station ballet company.

  “My grandfather...”

  Was an Earthborn snow skier of Earth who journeyed to the ultimate ski course on mountainous Reginald IV, and died on Thornslope.

  “My great-grandfather ...”

  Was a Terran trapeze artist

  “My great-grandmother...”

  Was a surfer on the vast seas of terra-formed Venus, and once rode a wave for seven days.

  “And I came to waveriding...”

  When your mother killed herself en route to Earth from your father’s doom on Reginald IV, and the captain of the transport adopted you; he was himself a retired waverider.

  “And I know your history, and how you came to die, one hundred thousand at a single stroke, trapped by imperfect unity....”

  We are as one hundred thousand waves...

  “On a single sea.”

  The ritual done, the understanding forged anew, the voices hushed. The air about him began to course and whirl, a dust-devil rose up and the spirit host—seen in the dark of his closed eyes as endless banners of unfurling white—enclosed Tondius Will. He wept in unbridled joy and relief as they entered him, and swept him up. . . . He could not abide the touch of flesh on flesh, not since he had crushed Mina between two worlds. Trapped in his anomic flesh, unable to feel others, utterly alone and apart like a Djinn in a bottle. Until the voices in the sunharp came and entered him, spirit on spirit, transcending the barriers in his flesh. They took him with them, for a while, and let him incorporeally ride, like a surfer on a sea constituted of the ectoplasm of one hundred thousand souls. For this time of merging, loneliness was beyond conception. For this time of—

  But it ended.

  Returned to his body, he felt like an infant coughed from the womb into a snowdrift.

  He screamed. He begged. “Please!”

  No longer (the voices said), for now. If we kept you from your body any longer, you’d wither, and pass on to us. It would be too soon. You’re not quite ready to lead us yet, though you have the innersight of energies, particles, and planes. You are a born sailor of upper spheres. But not quite yet. Next time. Soon.

  “Wait! One thing! You said you would search for her. Have you found her? Was she too far away?”

  Linear distances don’t impede our call. We have found her. She was very much alone. She is coming. Next time. Soon. (The voices faded.)

  They were gone. Will was alone in the dark.

  The sunharp moaned faintly. Distant whispers; starlight rumors stirred its webwork.

  He shivered in sudden awareness of the night’s cold. Stretching, he fought numbness from his limbs. He turned up the heat in his thermalsuit, checked his air tanks’ reading. Best get back to the landing pod, and soon.

  He turned and began to descend the hillside. At the outermost finger of the ragged walls, he stopped and listened. He nodded to himself.

  He took an electric light from his belt, flicked it alive, and set the small beacon on a ledge of the crumbling wall. “Come out and face me as you shoot me!” he called.

  Silence, except for the echo of his shout.

  Then, a squeak of boot steps on gravel. A broad, dark figure in a gray thermalsuit stepped warily from a murky doorway. He was two meters from Will. Most of the assassin’s face was concealed by goggles and respirator mask. “You are one of the guild,” Tondius Will observed. The assassin nodded. He held a small silver tube lightly in his right hand. The tube’s muzzle was directed at Will’s chest. Will said, “It is a tenet of your guild that if your quarry discovers you and challenges you then you are compelled to face him. Yes?”

  The assassin nodded.

  “Well then, come into the light of my lamp. I want to see some of your face as you kill me. You can’t begrudge me that, surely.”

  The assassin came two strides forward, stepping into the ring of light. His lips were compressed, his eyes were gray as the ice a thousand meters beneath the ice cap. His thick legs were well apart and braced.

  Will the Chill fastened his eyes on those of the assassin. The stranger frowned.

  Tondius Will spoke in a voice compelling; it was compelling because his voice was the raiment of his will power, and his will was backed by the unspeakable mass of all the planets he had hurled. He said: “I am going to move my arm quickly in order to show you something. Do not fire the weapon, I am not going to reach for you. I’m going to reach into this wall. . . . The guild of assassins esteems its members greatly skilled in martial arts. . . .”

  To his left was a high wall of transparent bricks backed by old metal. Ancient but solid. Will had explored these ruins thoroughly. He knew that there was a metal urn on the other side of the wall, lying on a shelf; he knew just where it was. He moved, visualizing his left hand passing through the obstruction as if through a cloud, fingers closing about the small urn; he pitted perfect form against the mass resistance of the wall.

  There was a crack! and a small explosion in the wall side; dust billowed, chips of glass rained. The assassin twitched but did not fire. Will withdrew his arm from the hole he’d made. He held something in his bare hand. A stoppered urn of age-dulled gold
. “Waveriders learn that masses are merely electron-bounded fields of space-influence,” he remarked casually, examining the urn in the dim light, “and all fields have a weak point, where that which seems impenetrable may be penetrated.” He paused, glanced up, murmuring, “That’s the principle behind the traversing of space between stars: knowledge of secret passages through the fabric of spacestuff. And it’s the principle behind what you’ve just seen, assassin.” Will reached out with his right hand, poised it over the urn, and, with a motion outspeeding the eye, he stabbed a rigid thumb at the metal casing held in his other hand. The urn split neatly in two; half of it dropped to the ground. The assassin took a step backward; his eyes dancing with wonder, he held his fire.