Collected Short Fiction, page 737
“So it is possible?” He nodded slowly, trying to grasp that greater reality. “You can really see into other universes?”
“Only dimly,” Pipkin squeaked. “Such abler gods as Belthar can see farther and more clearly—far enough to find the loci of paraspatial contact. They are strong enough to tap the universal energies they need to deflect a ship through the loci from universe to universe, or to power their auras, or to blast their enemies.”
“But you yourself can reach—”
“Feebly.” Pipkin sighed. “I can rotate a few atoms out of our own small space-time continuum for a very few minutes. Long enough, as you put it, to walk through a wall. If you and your Buglet hope to get away from Belthar’s Inquisition, you must do much better.”
“Can you tell me how—”
“Can you tell a stone how to hatch and fly?” Pipkin hopped impatiently on his perch. “It’s eggs that do that, never asking how.” The green eye squinted at him keenly. “If you can really see all the way to Andoranda, there’s nothing I could tell you.”
“But—”
“One word of warning.” The piercing squeak cut him off. “If you ever find your way to another universe, enter it with caution. Half the early cosmic explorers never came back, because they weren’t aware of a law of symmetry that rules the multiverse. Every alternate space-time expansion produces antimatter.”
Davey stared, trying to recall those truman gestalts that he had never understood.
“There are two types of matter,” Pipkin said. “In most ways identical, but opposite in electrical arrangement. On contact, the opposed charges cancel. Mass becomes pure energy, explosive enough to kill a god.”
“Even Belthar?”
“He’ll never risk himself.” Pipkin’s shrug flung him back toward the cliff from which he had emerged. “The parents of your goddess friend were explorers who never got back. But my warning was for you and your enchanting Buglet—if you ever get that far.” An oval patch of the sandstone behind him had begun to glow and vanish. “I can tell you no more, and I hope not to see you again.” Standing on one hand, he swung the other in dismissal. “You have stayed too long. Belthar’s Inquisition is too near.”
“Wait!” Davey gasped. “I don’t even know how to begin—”
But the grinning image was gone. The old red rocks and the dusk-reddened lake faded after it, and his nostrils caught the stale stink of the Redrock jail. He sat up stiffly on his concrete bench, searching for what he had gained.
That was little enough. Though he had somehow sent out a speaking image of himself to bring back facts he hadn’t known, he wasn’t sure he could do it again. The use of the facts was not yet clear. He had not found Buglet, or any clue to her location.
He sucked stale water from the plastic dish to wash his bitter mouth and paced the cell until the godsgrace ache drummed again in his brain. Why was he alive? He lay back at last on his concrete bed, waiting for the drug to wane, wrestling with such answerless questions.
If the inquisitors had judged him too dangerous to be sent on to Andoranda Five, why hadn’t they killed him at once? Or had they simply separated him and Buglet, to weaken them both? He tried to hope that she had been sent on alone, that he was being held for a later ship.
That feeble hope kept fading. His weary brain kept drifting back to Pipkin, to the baffling riddles and the far promise of the multiverse. A superworld, beyond all space and time, in which the stark impossible for men became possible for gods—and for the ultimen Buglet said they would become.
But how could a frog learn to fly—
4.
Something woke him.
In his vivid dream, he and Buglet had been homeless waifs again, as they were before the goddess came to Redrock. Bug was sick and hungry, lying on a pallet of empty grain sacks in El Yaqui’s cowshed. He had been slipping into the kitchen, trying to steal good food for her, when La China caught him. Screaming, she had been about to throw a bloody cleaver at him.
He sat up, blinking at the grime-clotted wall. It looked strange, until his first gasping breath brought memory back along with the reek of the jail. He slid off the bench and stopped to listen for whatever had jarred him awake.
There was nothing he could hear. No movement from the muman guards. No stir from any other prisoner. The same dim blue light still burned in the corridor, but he knew that day had come.
The sun, in fact, had already risen, casting the long black shadow of Quelf’s castle far across the steel colored lake. The bright sky was cloudless, broken only by the dark blot of the Inquisition battle skimmer that hung above the islet. He could find no new menace.
Yet his vague alarm persisted, even though this clear perception seemed to show that his latent gifts were growing. He stretched himself and roved about the cell. The ache and fog were gone from his head. He felt a hunger pang and a sharper stab of new concern for Buglet.
Was it some dim sense of fresh danger to her that had brought him awake? He lay back on the bench to probe again for her, reaching at random—or trying to blindly to reach—for any hint, any hope, any friend.
San Seven? The truman youth had been their best friend. More than half in love with Buglet, he suspected. San had risked perhaps too much to aid their first flight from Redrock. Could he have found some way to help her again? Could she perhaps be safe at the agency now?
Trying not to try too hard, because he thought the very tension of effort might defeat him, he turned that faint hope to the mansion on the hill, their home for all the years since the goddess sent them there. On high ground, it should be still above the rising lake.
The drowned trees on the slopes beneath it were yellow and dying, and the wide doors stood open now—the bright image dimmed to his surge of elation, but it came back again when he made himself relax.
The doors were tall wood panels, carved by forgotten preman artisans with-symbols that meant nothing now: a cross, a crescent, a star with six points, another with five. One panel had been charred and shattered, as if struck by a muman warrior’s lightning, and the patio inside was rank with weeds and littered with soden junk that once had been the agent’s precious preman antiques.
The office was a shocking ruin, a dusty clutter of torn paper and ripped-up books and dismembered chairs and desks and files. San’s room, Bug’s, his own, even the null-C gameroom, had been as thoroughly demolished. Why?
Understanding came, a jolt that shattered the whole perception. The inquisitors had been here. This devastation was left from the merciless search that had finally overtaken him and Buglet at the truman commune. His burning guilt raised another question: What had the Inquisition done to San and his parents?
Shivering, half-sick with fear for those old truman friends, he stumbled around the cell again, rattling the door, testing each steel bar, throwing his weight against the grimy walls, standing on the benches to test the concrete ceiling. There was no way out.
Not for him.
For a god, perhaps. Or for the ultiman that Buglet might help him become. But he knew no way to find her, no way to get beyond the ironic fact that his own anxious emotion was an apparent limit on those half-known unfolding powers. He needed her, needed understanding of the multiverse that Pipkin said no man could understand, needed everything.
Announced by a clash of metal doors, the horn-footed muman guard came tramping down the corridor to open the wicket and gesture at the plastic dish. When he shoved it into her bright black talons, she slammed the wicket and thudded away, deaf to all he said.
The old jail was still again. Lying back on his hard bed, trying to smooth away every interference from emotion—from his haunting fears for Buglet, his nagging worry for the Sans, even from his own gnawing hunger—he probed again, trying now to reach Quelf’s new castle.
He had never been near it—Quelf welcomed no preman guests—but long ago, with El Yaqui, he had hiked over the high mesa where it now stood. They had been looking for peyote cactus under the desert brush on a little hill when he found an odd object half-buried in the pale soil: chips of colored glass framed in blackened metal to make a picture of a man’s head.
He wanted to know what it was.
“Throw it back.” He remembered El Yaqui’s sardonic tone and the pain on his old brown face. “No good for us. Bad trouble more likely, with Belthar’s Inquisition.”
Though the colors looked faded and some of the glass chips were gone, he could make out part of a yellow circle in the blue above the long-haired head. The face was lean and sad as El Yaqui’s, and something about it troubled him.
“Why?” he asked. “What was it?”
“A god,” the old man muttered. “A preman god.” He nodded at the brush-clumped mound. “This white soil’s adobe. A building once. I think the old Piedras Rojas mission. A house of worship for that humble preman god. He’s dead now.”
He remembered holding the broken thing up against the sun and peering at the glowing glass, trying to imagine how a preman could have been any sort of god.
“Throw it back,” El Yaqui rasped again. “Forget it.”
Unwillingly, he tossed it back on the mound. It must have struck something hard, because he heard a jangle and saw bright fragments flying. El Yaqui knelt fora moment, murmuring something he couldn’t hear about los pobres and dios before they went on looking for the little blue-green buttons.
Later, growing up on the reservation, he had watched the castle rising where that dead god’s house had caved to clay. A long new mountain on the skyline, broken rock from enormous excavations. Great dark granite walls, soaring higher year by year. Towers so tall that summer cumulus sometimes formed about them.
Those walls enclosed a vast triangle, a tower at each corner. The chapel of Thar looming on his right, domed with sacred black. The Bel chapel on his left, all white marble. The landing stage at the south corner, behind them, not quite so high.
Down in the canyon between those enormous walls, Quelf had made his playground. A wide white beach and low green hills around a clean blue lake. Garden groves. Bowers built of shining gemstones. A fountain in the lake, catching a rainbow now in its diamond dazzle.
These were sights Davey had never seen or heard of, never guessed. The vivid perception elated him—nearly too much, for it began to fade. He stretched himself deliberately again on the hard bench, drew a long breath, lay limp until the vision cleared.
Machines were mowing the grass above the beach and workmen were busy on the north wall, swarming over the scaffolding around a black structure that had begun taking shape as a gigantic statue of the half-god himself. A black skimmer was lifting from the stage. He saw no other movement. No hint of Buglet.
He followed the Inquisition skimmer. Flying south, it climbed, leveled, glided toward the shuttleport. At first he expected it to land there, but it slid on above the orange-painted terminal buildings to touch down at last beyond a fence he had never seen.
Tall steel posts enclosed a wide rectangle of desert brush and naked sandstone. A single wire, stretched high between the posts, was beaded with winking red lights. The lights puzzled him, until he found the bones scattered under the wire, whitened skeletons of coyotes and hawks and men. He knew then that this must be the holding camp where the exiled premen had waited for shipment to Andoranda Five.
The sleek scout skimmer had landed on a pad inside the camp, safely far from the fence. A red-scaled muman stalked down the gangway, followed by a compact man in gray. Clone General Ironlaw—
Everything faded and flickered with Davey’s surprise. Trying not even to hope that Ironlaw might lead him to Buglet, he turned away to watch a buzzard wheeling over the other end of the camp and drew a long slow breath before he dared look again.
The clone must have called some command, because a few half-naked premen were crawling into sight from brush-covered burrows they must have dug with rocks and sticks. Most of them stood staring, warily silent. One was a yellow-haired girl who had been at La China’s. She came running until she stumbled, then waited on her knees, holding out her sunburnt, swollen arms, sobbing for the Lord Quelf’s mercy.
Ignoring her, Ironlaw shouted again.
The prisoners turned to watch another man climbing stiffly out of his shelter pit. In muddy rags, he was lean and brown, gnarled from long toil. Pulling himself carefully straight, as if his back were painful, he came to face the muman, slow steps firm, blue eyes defiant.
“Halt!” Ironlaw stepped ahead of the guard. “Identify yourself.”
He stopped and stood swaying.
“I have been interrogated.” Pitched high, his old voice was cool and clear. “I am a truman, as I informed the sacred inquisitors. My life has been spent in the deepest mines of the Andes, where few except the muman miners can endure the heat. The past twelve years, I was foreman over my crew. My name is Florencio Tarazon—”
“Can you prove that?”
“Do you say I lie?” His pale stare was steady, sardonic, contemptuous. “My misfortunes are written in the records of the mine, as I told the inquisitors. There was a fire. I was able to save my muman crew, but my personal identification was destroyed—”
“The Inquisition says you lie,” Ironlaw cut in. “We have evidence that the real Florencio died in that mine fire. The Inquisition charges that you are, in fact, a preman escapee from the Redrock reservation, once known as Dunahoo—”
The voices faded, and the desert sun-glare dimmed. Gasping with shocked emotion, Davey found his lungs filled with the foul jail stink. This battered but unbeaten little man was the father he had never even hoped to see.
An agony of sympathy swept him upright. Sick with his helpless rage at Quelf and Belthar, at the Inquisition and the whole Thearchy, he clutched the old iron bars as if to rip them out, punched his fist against the rough concrete.
But that was not the way to be greater than the gods. Rubbing bruised knuckles, he drove himself back to the bench. Breathing deep and slow, he tried to relax, to forget his fatal hate, to regain that lost perception.
At first he failed, his sweaty body still too tense, his hand too painful, his heart pounding too hard. Slowly, however, his animal anger faded into admiration for that worn little preman who could still defy the whole force of Belthar’s Inquisition with an undefeated dignity.
The black skimmer was gone when he got his vision back. Most of the prisoners had crawled back into their pits to escape the savage sun Near the fence, the yellow-haired girl was raking with a stick at the body of a hawk that must have tried to light on that deadly wire. He saw her seize it, rip feathers off, tear with her teeth at its tough flesh.
He overtook the skimmer as it dipped toward the landing stage on the castle tower. The muman guard marched first down the gangway. His father followed, limping painfully yet still proudly straight. Ironlaw, behind him, signaled toward an elevator.
The cage dropped them out of the tower and deep into the rock beneath. Davey followed them, watched them emerge into a huge rectangular room with a high dais at each end. One was bare: the other held a tall black throne.
Muman, preman, and clone, they stood side by side to face the throne. Six more military mumen marched out of a dark passage to form a silent line facing them. All waited, stiff and mute. The little preman swayed and straightened again, biting his lip. Blood oozed down his muddy, dark-stubbled chin.
A gong boomed. Quelf strode out of another doorway and paused to eye the prisoner. More massive than a man, dark as his mortal mother and arrogant as his father god, he was clad in the somber splendor of his rank as Arch-Inquisitor: the ruby-jeweled black harness, the high black crown, the tall black staff.
The gong throbbed and the mumen knelt. Ironlaw bent his head. Only the haggard preman stood straight, pale eyes level with Quelf’s black stare. For an instant they stood fixed. Then, with scowl of annoyance, the half-god took his throne.
Another gong-tone swelled and died.
Solemnly, speaking in the Old High Terran still preserved in the church, Ironlaw intoned the formal charges of the Inquisition. The prisoner, the preman male recorded on the Redrock reservation rolls as Devin Dunahoo, had fled his legal residence without divine sanction, had attempted to pass himself as a truman, had neglected to make full and frequent confessions to his lawful pastors.
“Prisoner, what is your plea?” Quelf’s cold demand rang against the lofty walls. “Do you admit your guilt?
Do you beg Belthar’s mercy?”
The little preman folded his scarred arms.
“I admit nothing.” His faint voice was firm. “I beg for nothing.”
“Then prepare for atonement—” Quelf’s booming voice broke off, interrupted by Ironlaw.
“Sir, if you will. As an agent of the Holy Inquisition, I must present yet another charge against this prisoner. A charge of demonism—”
“No!” The half-god started as if with alarm, and the dark flesh beneath his gemmed harness shone with sudden sweat. “Is there proof?”
“Evidence to damn him.” Ironlaw stepped warily away from the haggard preman. “Evidence that he carries the genes of the demon breed known as the Fourth Creation, the accursed seed of the evil being whose coming the heretics have been proclaiming, the monstrous enemy of Belthar and all the gods that they call the Multiman—”
“Enough!” Quelf shouted. “Enough for judgment.” He paused as if to recover himself, glaring down at the little preman. “Prisoner, do you admit your demonism?”
“I never knew I was a demon.” The preman drew himself painfully straight, grinning through the blood on his lips. “But if I am, we’ll get you, Quelf. My son will—”
“Silence!” Quelf roared. “I order your atonement.”
Breathing carefully, trying to cool his blaze of emotion, Davey clung to the tattered shreds of his perception.
