Healer, page 17
part #3 of LaNague Federation Series
And there in the temples, perhaps, was a clue to the mysterious ferocity of this race. The rituals were intricate and laborious but the message came through: “We are the chosen ones. All others offend the sight of the Divine One.”
Pard expanded again and refocused on the mother world, his port of entry, the planet from which the attacks were launched. He noted that there was now a much larger contingent of troops on the beach: they were bivouacked in half a dozen separate areas.
Multiple attacks? he wondered. Or a single massive one? He realized he had lost all track of time and his thoughts strayed to Steve. Was he all right or had he been caught in another attack? It was highly unlikely but still a possibility.
He vacillated between investigating that revered mound of rock in the sea and checking on Dalt. The former was a curiosity; the latter, he realized, would soon become a compulsion.
Had he possessed lungs and vocal cords, he would have sighed as he expanded to encompass the entire Milky Way; he then allowed a peculiar homing instinct to guide him to Steven Dalt, who was sitting alone in a small room on Fed Central.
He watched him for a few moments, noting that he seemed to be in good health and good spirits. Then Dalt suddenly sat erect. “Pard?” he called. He had somehow sensed his presence and Pard knew it was time to leave again.
Back on the alien mother world, he concentrated on his previous target—the island. It was immediately evident that this was not a natural formation but an artifact cut out of the mainland and set upon a ridge on the ocean floor. The island was a single huge fortress-temple shaped in the form of what he now knew to be the face of the race’s goddess; the structures upon it formed the features of the face. An altogether Cyclopean feat of engineering.
He allowed his awareness to flow down wide, high-ceilinged corridors tended by guards armed with bows and spears—an insane contrast to the troops gathered on the mainland. The corridors were etched with the history of the race and its godhead. In an instant, Pard knew all of the goddess’s past, knew what she had been to humanity and what she had planned for it. He knew her. Even had a name for her. They had met… thousands of times.
He sank deep into the structure and came across banks of sophisticated energy dampers—that explained the primitive weapons on the guards. Rising to sea level again, he found himself within a tight-walled maze and decided to see where it led.
He finally found her at the very heart of the edifice, in a tiny room at the end of the maze. Her body was pale, corpulent, and made only minimal voluntary movements. But she was clean and well cared for—a small army of attendants saw to that.
She was old, nearly as old as mankind itself. A genetic freak with a cellular consciousness much like Pard had possessed when in Steve’s body, which had kept her physically alive and functioning over the ages. Unlike Dalt/Pard, however, the goddess had only one consciousness, but that was a prodigious one, incorporating psionic powers of tremendous range through which she had dominated her race much of its existence, shaping its goals and fueling its drives until they had merged and become one with her will.
Unfortunately, the goddess had been a full-blown psychotic for the past three thousand years.
She hated and feared anything that might question her divine supremacy. That was why three other races had already perished. She even distrusted her own worshipers, had made them move her ancient temple out to sea and insisted that her guards don the garb and accouterments of the days of her girlhood.
Pard was aghast at the scope of the tragedy before him. Here was a race that had color and variety in its past. Now, however, through the combination of a psionically augmented religion and a philosophy of racial supremacy, it had been turned into a hive of obedient drones with their lives and culture centered around their goddess-queen. Any independent minds born into the race were quickly culled out once they betrayed their unorthodox tendencies. The reasoning was obvious: The will of the goddess was more than the law of the land—it was divine in origin. To question was heresy; to transgress was sacrilege. The result was a corrupt version of natural selection on an intellectual level. The docile mind that found comfort in orthodoxy survived and thrived, while the reasoner, the questioner, the wavemaker, the rebel, the iconoclast, and the skeptic became endangered species.
As Pard watched her, the goddess lifted her head and opened her eyes. A line about “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” went through his mind. She sensed his scrutiny. Her psi abilities made her aware of his presence, tenuous as it was.
She threw a thought at him. It was garbled, colored with rage, couched in madness, but the context could be approximated as:
You again! I thought I had destroyed you!
Enjoying her impotent anger, Pard wished he had the power to send a laugh pealing through the chamber to further arouse her paranoia. As it was, he’d have to be content with observing her thrashing movements as she tried to pinpoint his location.
Pard’s awareness began to expand gradually and he soon found himself around as well as within the temple. He tried to focus down again but was unable to do so. He continued to expand at an accelerated rate. He was encircling the planet now.
For the first time since he had awakened to sentience in Dalt’s brain, Pard knew fear. He was out of control. Soon his consciousness would be expanded and attenuated to the near-infinite limits he had experienced immediately after being jolted from Steve’s body— permanently. And he knew that would be the end of him. His mind would never be able to adjust to it; his intelligence would crumble. He’d end up a nonsentient life force drifting through eternity. It had long been theorized that consciousness could not exist without a material base. He had proven that it could—but not for long. He had to set up another base. He tried desperately to enter the mind of one of the goddess’s subjects but found it closed to him. The same with the lower lifeforms.
All minds were closed to him … except perhaps one. … He headed for home.
XXI
Dalt awoke with a start and bolted upright in bed. (“Hello, Steve.”)
A cascade of conflicting emotions ran over him: joy and relief at knowing Pard was alive and at feeling whole again, anger at the nonchalance of his return. But he bottled all emotions and asked, What happened? Where’ve you been?
Pard gave him a brief but complete account in the visual, auditory, and interpretive melange possible only with mind-to-mind communication. When it was over, it almost seemed to Dalt that Pard had never been gone. There were a few subtle differences, however.
Do you realize that you called me “Steve”? You’ve been addressing me by my surname for the last century or so.
(“You seem more like the old Steve.”)
I am. Immortality can become a burden at times, but facing the alternative for a while is a sobering experience.
(“I know,”) Pard replied, remembering the panic that had gripped him before he had managed to regain the compact security of Dalt’s mind. They were now welded together—permanently.
“But back to the matter at hand,” Dalt said aloud. “You and I now know what’s behind these assaults. The question that bothers me most is: Why us? I mean, if she wants to send her troops out to kill, surely there are other races closer to her than sixty thousand light-years.”
(“Perhaps the human mind is especially sensitive to her, I don’t know. Who can explain a deranged mind? And believe me, this one is deranged! She’s blatantly paranoid with xenophobia, delusions of grandeur, and all the trappings. Steve, this creature actually believes she is divine! It’s not a pose with her. And as far as her race is concerned, she is god.”
“Pity the atheist in a culture like that.”
(“There are none! How can there be? When these beings speak of their deity, they’re not referring to an abstraction or an ephemeral being. Their goddess is incarnate! And she’s with them everywhere! She can maintain a continuous contact with her race—it’s not control or anything like that, but a hint of presence. She has powers none of them possess and she doesn’t die! She was with them when they were planet-bound, she was with them when they made their first leap into space. She has guided them throughout their entire recorded history. It’s not a simple thing to say ‘no’ to all that.”)
“All right, so she’s divine as far as they’re concerned, but how can she change an entire race into an army of berserk killers? She must have some sort of mind control.”
(“I can see you have no historical perspective on the power of religion. Human history is riddled with atrocities performed in the names of supposedly benign gods whose only manifestations were in books and tradition. This creature is not merely a force behind her culture … she is her culture. Her followers attack and slaughter because it is divine will.”)
Dalt sighed. “Looks like we’re really up against the wall. We were planning to send probes through the passages to try to locate the star system where the assaults originate so we could launch a counteroffensive. Now it makes no difference. Sixty thousand light-years is an incomprehensible distance in human terms. If there was just some way we could get to her, maybe we could give her a nice concentrated dose of the horrors. That’d shake her up.”
(“I’m afraid not, Steve. You see, this creature is the source of the horrors.”)
Dalt sat in stunned silence, then: “You always hinted that the horrors might be more than just a psychological disorder.”
(“You must admit, I’m rarely wrong.”)
“Yes, rarely wrong,” Dalt replied tersely. “And frequently insufferable. But again: Why?”
(“As I mentioned before, the human mind appears to be extraordinarily sensitive to her powers. She can reach across an entire galaxy and touch one of them. I believe she’s been doing that for ages. At first she may only have been able to leave a vague impression. Long ago she was probably probing this arm of the galaxy and left an image within a fertile mind that started the murderous Kali cult in ancient India. Its members worshiped a many-armed goddess of death that bears a striking resemblance to our enemy. So for all practical purposes, we might as well call her Kali, since her given name is a mish-mash of consonants.”)
“Whatever happened to the cult?”
(“Died out. Perhaps she went back to concentrating on her own race, which was probably moving into space at about that time, and no doubt soon became busy with the task of annihilating the other races they encountered along the way.
(“Then came a hiatus and her attention returned to us. Her powers had grown since last contact and although she was still unable to control a human mind, she found she could inundate it with such a flood of terror that the individual would withdraw completely from reality.”)
“The horrors, in other words.”
(“Right. She kept this up, biding her time until her race could devise a means of bridging the gap between the two races. They did. The apparatus occupies the space of a small town and is psionically activated. You know the rest of the story.”)
“Yeah,” Dalt replied, “and I can see what’s coming, too. She’s toying with us, isn’t she? Playing a game of fear and terror, nibbling at us until we turn against each other. Humiliation, demoralization—they’re dirty weapons.”
(“But not her final goal, I fear. Eventually she’ll tire of the game and just wipe us out. And with ease! All she has to do is open the passage, slip through a short-timed planetary bomb, close the passage and wait for the bang.”)
“In two standard days,” Dalt said in a shocked whisper, “she could destroy every inhabited planet in Occupied Space!”
(“Probably wouldn’t even take her that long. But we’ve quite a while to go before it comes to that. She’s in no hurry. She’ll probably chip away at us for a few centuries before delivering the coup de grace.”) Pard went silent for a while. (“Which reminds me: I saw a major assault force gathered on the beach. If she really wanted to strike a demoralizing blow …”)
“You don’t think she’ll hit Fed Central, do you?”
(“With a second chance at interstellar unity almost within reach, can you think of a better target?”)
“No, I can’t,” Dalt replied pensively. The thought of alien berserkers charging through the streets was not a pleasant one. “There must be a way to strike back.”
(“I’m sure there is. We just haven’t thought of it yet. Sleep on it.”)
Good idea. See you in the morning.
Morning brought Lenda with news that some of the flitter-probes were outfitted and ready. He invited Dalt to take a look at them. Lacking both the heart to tell Lenda that the probes were a futile gesture and anything better to do, he agreed to go along.
Arriving at a hangar atop one of the lesser buildings in the complex, he saw five drones completed and a sixth in the final stages. They looked like standard models except for the data-gathering instruments afixed to the hulls.
“They look like they’ve been sealed for pressurization,” Dalt noted.
Lenda nodded. “Some of the sensors require it.” (“I know what you’re thinking!”) Pard said. Tell me.
(“You want to equip these flitters with blaster cannon and attack Kali’s island, don’t you? Forget it! There are so many energy dampers in that temple that a blaster wouldn’t even warm her skin if you could get near her. And you wouldn’t. Her guards would cut you to ribbons.”)
Maybe there’s a way around that. He turned to Lenda. “Have Petrical meet me here. I have an errand to run but I’ll be back shortly.”
Lenda gave him a puzzled look as he walked away.
Dalt headed for the street. Throw the Mordirak image around me. I don’t want to be mobbed out there.
(“Done. Now tell me where we’re going.”)
Not far. He stepped outside and onto the local belt of the moving strol-lane. The streets were crowded. The new incoming representatives had brought their staffs and families and there were tourists constantly arriving to see the first General Council of the new Federation. He let the strol-lane carry him for a few minutes, then debarked before a blank-fronted store with only a simple hand-printed sign over the door: WEAPONS.
Stepping through the filter field that screened the entrance, he was faced with an impressive array of death-dealing instruments. They gleamed from the racks and cases; they were sleek and sinister and beautiful and deadly.
“May I help you, sir?” asked a little man with squinty eyes.
“Where are your combustion weapons?”
“Ah!” he said, rubbing his palms together. “A sportsman or a collector?”
“Both.”
“This way, please.” He led them to the rear of the shop and placed himself behind a counter. “Now, then. Where does your interest lie? Handguns? Rifles? Shotguns? Automatics?”
“The last two.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I want an autoshotgun,” Dalt said tersely. “Double-barreled with continuous feed.”
“I’m afraid we only have one model along that line.”
“I know. Ibizan makes it.”
The man nodded and searched under the counter. He pulled out a shiny black case, placed it before him, and opened it.
Dalt inspected it briefly. “That’s it. You have waist canisters for the feed?”
“Of course. The Ibizan is nonejecting, so you’ll have to use disintegrating cases, you know.”
“I know. Now. I want you to take this down to the workshop and cut the barrel off”—he drew a line with his finger—”right about here.”
“Sir, you must be joking!” the little man said with visible shock, his eyes widening and losing their perpetual squint. But he could see by Dalt’s expression that no joke was intended. He spoke petulantly. “I’m afraid I must see proof of credit before I deface such a fine weapon.”
Dalt fished out a thin alloy disk and handed it over. The gunsmith pressed the disk into a notch in the counter and the image of Mordirak appeared in the hologram box beside it, accompanied by the number 1. Mordirak had first-class credit anywhere in Occupied Space.
With a sigh, the man handed back the disk, hefted the weapon, and took it into the enclosed workshop section.
(“Your knowledge of weaponry is impressive.”) A holdover from my game-hunting days. Remember them?
(“I remember disapproving of them.”)
Well, combustion weapons are still in demand by “sportsmen” who find their sense of masculinity cheated by the lack of recoil in energy weapons.
(“And just what is this Ibizan supposed to do for you?”)
You’ll see.
The gunsmith reappeared with the foreshortened weapon.
“You have a target range, I presume,” Dalt said. “Yes. On the lower level.”
“Good. Fill the feeder with number-eight end-over-end cylindrical shot and we’ll try her out.”
The man winced and complied.
The target range was elaborate and currently set up with moving, bounding models of Kamedon deer. Sensors within the models rated the marksman’s performance on a flashing screen at the firing line that could read “Miss,” “Kill,” “Wounded,” and variations. The firing line was cleared as Dalt hooked the feeder canister to his waist and fed the string of shells into the chambers. Flicking the safety off, he held the weapon against his chest with the barrels pointing downrange and began walking.
“Left barrel,” he said, and pulled the trigger. The Ibizan jerked in his hands; the cannonlike roar was swallowed by the sound dampers but the muzzle flash was a good twenty centimeters in length, and one of the leaping targets was torn in half. “Right barrel,” was faintly heard, with similar results. Then a flip of a switch and, “Automatic.” The prolonged roar that issued from the rapidly alternating barrels taxed the sound dampers to their limit and when the noise stopped, every target hung in tatters. The indicator screen flashed solid red on and off in confusion.
