Gourlay resumed his narrative then, but I tuned him out. I felt I knew quite enough about the Shkeen and the Greeshka, and I was still worried about Lyanna. After a while he wound down, and the rest of the trip was in silence. We covered more ground than we ever had before. Even the Tower—our shining steel landmark—had been swallowed by the hills behind us.
The terrain got rougher, rockier, and more overgrown, and the hills rose higher and wilder. But the domes went on and on and on, and there were Shkeen everywhere. Lya could be down there, I thought, lost among those teeming millions. Looking for what? Thinking what?
Finally we landed, in a wooded valley between two massive, rock-studded hills. Even here there were Shkeen, the red-brick domes rising from the undergrowth among the stubby trees. I had no trouble spotting the cave. It was halfway up one of the slopes, a dark yawn in the rock face, with a dusty road winding up to it.
We set down in the valley and climbed that road. Gourlay ate up the distance with long, gawky strides, while Valcarenghi moved with an easy, untiring grace, and the policeman plodded on stolidly. I was the straggler. I dragged myself up, and I was half-winded by the time we got to the cave mouth.
If I’d expected cave paintings, or an altar, or some kind of nature temple, I was sadly disappointed. It was an ordinary cave, with damp stone walls and low ceilings and cold, wet air. Cooler than most of Shkea, and less dusty, but that was about it. There was one long, winding passage through the rock, wide enough for the four of us to walk abreast yet low enough so Gourlay had to stoop. Torches were set along the walls at regular intervals, but only every fourth one or so was lit. They burned with an oily smoke that seemed to cling to the top of the cave and drift down into the depths before us. I wondered what was sucking it in.
After about ten minutes of walking, most of it down a barely perceptible incline, the passage led us out into a high, brightly lit room, with a vaulting stone roof that was stained sooty by torch smoke. In the room, the Greeshka.
Its color was a dull brownish-red, like old blood, not the bright near-translucent crimson of the small creatures that clung to the skulls of the Joined. There were spots of black too, like burns or soot stains on the vast body. I could barely see the far side of the cave; the Greeshka was too huge, it towered above us so that there was only a thin crack between it and the roof. But it sloped down abruptly halfway across the chamber, like an immense jellied hill, and ended a good twenty feet from where we stood. Between us and the great bulk of the Greeshka was a forest of hanging, dangling red strands, a living cobweb of Greeshka tissue that came almost to our faces.
And it pulsed. As one organism. Even the strands kept time, widening and then contracting again, moving to a silent beat that was one with the great Greeshka behind them.
My stomach churned, but my companions seemed unmoved. They’d seen this before. “Come,” Valcarenghi said, switching on a flashlight he’d brought to augment the torchlight. The light, twisting around the pulsing web, gave the illusion of some weird haunted forest. Valcarenghi stepped into that forest. Lightly. Swinging the light and brushing aside the Greeshka.
Gourlay followed him, but I recoiled. Valcarenghi looked back and smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The Greeshka takes hours to attach itself, and it’s easily removed. It won’t grab you if you stumble against it.”
I screwed up my courage, reached out, and touched one of the living strands. It was soft and wet, and there was a slimy feel to it. But that was all. It broke easily enough. I walked through it, reaching before me and bending and breaking the web to clear my path. The policeman walked silently behind me.
Then we stood on the far side of the web, at the front of the great Greeshka. Valcarenghi studied it for a second, then pointed with his flashlight. “Look,” he said. “Final Union.”
I looked. His beam had thrown a pool of light around one of the dark spots, a blemish on the reddish hulk. I looked closer. There was a head in the blemish. Centered in the dark spot, with just the face showing, and even that covered by a thin reddish film. But the features were unmistakable. An elderly Shkeen, wrinkled and big-eyed, his eyes closed now. But smiling. Smiling.
I moved closer. A little lower and to the right, a few fingertips hung out of the mass. But that was all. Most of the body was already gone, sunken into the Greeshka, dissolved or dissolving. The old Shkeen was dead, and the parasite was digesting his corpse.
“Every one of the dark spots is a recent Union,” Valcarenghi was saying, moving his light around like a pointer. “The spots fade in time, of course. The Greeshka is growing steadily. In another hundred years it will fill this chamber, and start up the passageway.”
Then there was a rustle of movement behind us. I looked back. Someone else was coming through the web.
She reached us soon, and smiled. A Shkeen woman, old, naked, breasts hanging past her waist. Joined, of course. Her Greeshka covered most of her head and hung lower than her breasts. It was still bright and translucent from its time in the sun. You could see through it, to where it was eating the skin off her back.
“A candidate for Final Union,” Gourlay said.
“This is a popular cave,” Valcarenghi added in a low, sardonic voice.
The woman did not speak to us, nor us to her. Smiling, she walked past us. And lay down on the Greeshka.
The little Greeshka, the one that rode her back, seemed almost to dissolve on contact, melting away into the great cave creature, so the Shkeen woman and the great Greeshka were joined as one. After that, nothing. She just closed her eyes, and lay peacefully, seemingly asleep.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Union,” said Valcarenghi. “It’ll be an hour before you’d notice anything, but the Greeshka is closing over her even now, swallowing her. A response to her body heat, I’m told. In a day she’ll be buried in it. In two, like him—” The flash found the half-dissolved face above us.
“Can you read her?” Gourlay suggested. “Maybe that’d tell us something.”
“All right,” I said, repelled but curious. I opened myself. And the mindstorm hit.
But it’s wrong to call it a mindstorm. It was immense and awesome and intense, searing and blinding and choking. But it was peaceful too, and gentle with a gentleness that was more violent than human hate. It shrieked soft shrieks and siren calls and pulled at me seductively, and it washed over me in crimson waves of passion, and drew me to it. It filled me and emptied me all at once. And I heard the bells somewhere, clanging a harsh bronze song, a song of love and surrender and togetherness, of Joining and Union and never being alone.
Storm, mindstorm, yes, it was that. But it was to an ordinary mindstorm as a supernova is to a hurricane, and its violence was the violence of love. It loved me, that mindstorm, and it wanted me, and its bells called to me, and sang its love, and I reached to it and touched, wanting to be with it, wanting to link, wanting never to be alone again. And suddenly I was on the crest of a great wave once again, a wave of fire that washed across the stars forever, and this time I knew the wave would never end, this time I would not be alone afterwards upon my darkling plain.
But with that phrase I thought of Lya.
And suddenly I was struggling, fighting it, battling back against the sea of sucking love. I ran, ran, ran, RAN… and closed my minddoor and hammered shut the latch and let the storm flail and howl against it while I held it with all my strength, resisting. Yet the door began to buckle and crack.
I screamed. The door smashed open, and the storm whipped in and clutched at me, whirled me out and around and around. I sailed up to the cold stars but they were cold no longer, and I grew bigger and bigger until I was the stars and they were me, and I was Union, and for a single solitary glittering instant I was the universe.
Then nothing.
I WOKE UP BACK IN MY ROOM, WITH A HEADACHE THAT WAS TRYING TO tear my skull apart. Gourlay was sitting on a chair reading one of our books. He looked up when I groaned.
Lya
’s headache pills were still on the bedstand. I took one hastily, then struggled to sit up in bed.
“You all right?” Gourlay asked.
“Headache,” I said, rubbing my forehead. It throbbed, as if it was about to burst. Worse than the time I’d peered into Lya’s pain. “What happened?”
He stood up. “You scared the hell out of us. After you began to read, all of a sudden you started trembling. Then you walked right into the goddamn Greeshka. And you screamed. Dino and the sergeant had to drag you out. You were stepping right in the thing, and it was up to your knees. Twitching too. Weird. Dino hit you, knocked you out.”
He shook his head, started for the door. “Where are you going?” I said.
“To sleep,” he said. “You’ve been out for eight hours or so. Dino asked me to watch you till you came to. OK, you came to. Now get some rest, and I will too. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“I want to talk about it now.”
“It’s late,” he said, as he closed the bedroom door. I listened to his footsteps on the way out. And I’m sure I heard the outer door lock. Somebody was clearly afraid of Talents who steal away into the night. I wasn’t going anywhere.
I got up and went out for a drink. There was Veltaar chilling. I put away a couple of glasses quick, and ate a light snack. The headache began to fade. Then I went back to the bedroom, turned off the light, and cleared the glass, so the stars would all shine through. Then back to sleep.
BUT I DIDN’T SLEEP, NOT RIGHT AWAY. TOO MUCH HAD HAPPENED. I had to think about it. The headache first, the incredible headache that ripped at my skull. Like Lya’s. But Lya hadn’t been through what I had. Or had she? Lya was a major Talent, much more sensitive than I was, with a greater range. Could that mindstorm have reached this far, over miles and miles? Late at night, when humans and Shkeen were sleeping and their thoughts dim? Maybe. And maybe my half-remembered dreams were pale reflections of whatever she had felt the same nights. But my dreams had been pleasant. It was waking that bothered me, waking and not remembering.
But again, had I had this headache when I slept? Or when I woke?
What the hell had happened? What was that thing, that reached me there in the cave, and pulled me to it? The Greeshka? It had to be. I hadn’t even time to focus on the Shkeen woman, it had to be the Greeshka. But Lyanna had said that Greeshka had no minds, not even a yes-I-live….
It all swirled around me, questions on questions on questions, and I had no answers. I began to think of Lya then, to wonder where she was and why she’d left me. Was this what she had been going through? Why hadn’t I understood? I missed her then. I needed her beside me, and she wasn’t there. I was alone, and very aware of it.
I slept.
Long darkness then, but finally a dream, and finally I remembered. I was back on the plain again, the infinite darkling plain with its starless sky and black shapes in the distance, the plain Lya had spoken of so often. It was from one of her favorite poems. I was alone, forever alone, and I knew it. That was the nature of things. I was the only reality in the universe, and I was cold and hungry and frightened, and the shapes were moving toward me, inhuman and inexorable. And there was no one to call to, no one to turn to, no one to hear my cries. There never had been anyone. There never would be anyone.
Then Lya came to me.
She floated down from the starless sky, pale and thin and fragile, and stood beside me on the plain. She brushed her hair back with her hand, and looked at me with glowing wide eyes, and smiled. And I knew it was no dream. She was with me, somehow. We talked.
Hi, Robb.
Lya? Hi, Lya. Where are you? You left me.
I’m sorry. I had to. You understand, Robb. You have to. I didn’t want to be here anymore, ever, in this place, this awful place. I would have been, Robb. Men are always here, but for brief moments.
A touch and a voice?
Yes, Robb. Then darkness again, and a silence. And the darkling plain.
You’re mixing two poems, Lya. But it’s OK. You know them better than I do. But aren’t you leaving out something? The earlier part. “Ah love, let us be true….”
Oh, Robb.
Where are you?
I’m—everywhere. But mostly in a cave. I was ready, Robb. I was already more open than the rest. I could skip the Gathering, and the Joining. My Talent made me used to sharing. It took me.
Final Union?
Yes.
Oh, Lya.
Robb. Please. Join us, join me. It’s happiness, you know? Forever and forever, and belonging and sharing and being together. I’m in love, Robb, I’m in love with a billion billion people, and I know all of them better than I ever knew you, and they know me, all of me, and they love me. And it will last forever. Me. Us. The Union. I’m still me, but I’m them too, you see? And they’re me. The Joined, the reading, opened me, and the Union called to me every night, because it loved me, you see? Oh, Robb, join us, join us. I love you.
The Union. The Greeshka, you mean. I love you, Lya. Please come back. It can’t have absorbed you already. Tell me where you are. I’ll come to you.
Yes, come to me. Come anywhere, Robb. The Greeshka is all one, the caves all connect under the hills, the little Greeshka are all part of the Union. Come to me and join me. Love me as you said you did. Join me. You’re so far away, I can hardly reach you, even with the Union. Come and be one with us.
No. I will not be eaten. Please, Lya, tell me where you are.
Poor Robb. Don’t worry, love. The body isn’t important. The Greeshka needs it for nourishment, and we need the Greeshka. But, oh Robb, the Union isn’t just the Greeshka, you see? The Greeshka isn’t important, it doesn’t even have a mind, it’s just the link, the medium, the Union is the Shkeen. A million billion billion Shkeen, all the Shkeen that have lived and Joined in fourteen thousand years, all together and loving and belonging, immortal. It’s beautiful, Robb, it’s more than we had, much more, and we were the lucky ones, remember? We were! But this is better.
Lya. My Lya. I loved you. This isn’t for you, this isn’t for humans. Come back to me.
This isn’t for humans? Oh, it IS! It’s what humans have always been looking for, searching for, crying for on lonely nights. It’s love, Robb, real love, and human love is only a pale imitation. You see?
No.
Come, Robb. Join. Or you’ll be alone forever, alone on the plain, with only a voice and a touch to keep you going. And in the end when your body dies, you won’t even have that. Just an eternity of empty blackness. The plain, Robb, forever and ever. And I won’t be able to reach you, not ever. But it doesn’t have to be….
No.
Oh, Robb. I’m fading. Please come.
No. Lya, don’t go. I love you, Lya. Don’t leave me.
I love you, Robb. I did. I really did….
And then she was gone. I was alone on the plain again. A wind was blowing from somewhere, and it whipped her fading words away from me, out into the cold vastness of infinity.
IN THE CHEERLESS MORNING, THE OUTER DOOR WAS UNLOCKED. I ascended the tower and found Valcarenghi alone in his office. “Do you believe in God?” I asked him.
He looked up, smiled. “Sure.” Said lightly. I was reading him. It was a subject he’d never thought about.
“I don’t,” I said. “Neither did Lya. Most Talents are atheists, you know. There was an experiment tried back on Old Earth fifty years ago. It was organized by a major Talent named Linnel, who was also devoutly religious. He thought that by using drugs, and linking together the minds of the world’s most potent Talents, he could reach something he called the Universal Yes-I-Live. Also known as God. The experiment was a dismal failure, but something happened. Linnel went mad, and the others came away with only a vision of a vast, dark, uncaring nothingness, a void without reason or form or meaning. Other Talents have felt the same way, and Normals too. Centuries ago there was a poet named Arnold, who wrote of a darkling plain. The poem’s in one of the old languages, but it’s wo
rth reading. It shows—fear, I think. Something basic in man, some dread of being alone in the cosmos. Maybe it’s just fear of death, maybe it’s more. I don’t know. But it’s primal. All men are forever alone, but they don’t want to be. They’re always searching, trying to make contact, trying to reach others across the void. Some people never succeed, some break through occasionally. Lya and I were lucky. But it’s never permanent. In the end you’re alone again, back on the darkling plain. You see, Dino? Do you see?”
He smiled an amused little smile. Not derisive—that wasn’t his style—just surprised and disbelieving. “No,” he said.
“Look again, then. Always people are reaching for something, for someone, searching. Talk, Talent, love, sex, it’s all part of the same thing, the same search. And gods too. Man invents gods because he’s afraid of being alone, scared of an empty universe, scared of the darkling plain. That’s why your men are converting, Dino, that’s why people are going over. They’ve found God, or as much of a God as they’re ever likely to find. The Union is a mass-mind, an immortal mass-mind, many in one, all love. The Shkeen don’t die, dammit. No wonder they don’t have the concept of an afterlife. They know there’s a God. Maybe it didn’t create the universe, but it’s love, pure love, and they say that God is love, don’t they? Or maybe what we call love is a tiny piece of God. I don’t care, whatever it is, the Union is it. The end of the search for the Shkeen, and for Man too. We’re alike after all, we’re so alike it hurts.”
Valcarenghi gave his exaggerated sigh. “Robb, you’re overwrought. You sound like one of the Joined.”
“Maybe that’s just what I should be. Lya is. She’s part of the Union now.”
He blinked. “How do you know that?”
“She came to me last night, in a dream.”
“Oh. A dream.”
“It was true, dammit. It’s all true.”
Valcarenghi stood, and smiled. “I believe you,” he said. “That is, I believe that the Greeshka uses a psi-lure, a love lure if you will, to draw in its prey, something so powerful that it convinces men—even you—that it’s God. Dangerous, of course. I’ll have to think about this before taking action. We could guard the caves to keep humans out, but there are too many caves. And sealing off the Greeshka wouldn’t help our relations with the Shkeen. But now it’s my problem. You’ve done your job.”