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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 knuckles. "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 identi-cal,
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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 speak-ing 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? What fate was planned for him? 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 V, why hadn't they killed him at once? Or had they sim-ply 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
super-world, 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
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 what-ever 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 him-self 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 prove again for her, reaching at random or trying
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?
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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 still be 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 the surge of elation,
but it came back again when he made himself relax.
The doors were tall wood panels, carved by forgotten preman arti-sans
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 sodden 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. Son's room, Bug's,
his own, even the null-G gameroom, had been as thor-oughly demolished. Why?
Understanding came, a jolt that shattered the whole perception. The
Inquisitors had been here. This devastation was left from the merciless search [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]