“I must describe it, I must be more accurate, I know. It is difficult, I grow too excited. It is large, as I have said, kilometers across. Roughly—let me count—yes, roughly octagonal in shape. The nexus, the center, is a bright area, a small darkness surrounded by a much greater area of light, but only the dark portion seems entirely solid—the lighted areas are translucent, I can see stars through them, though discolored, shifted towards the purple. Veils, I call those the veils. From the nexus and the veils eight long—oh, vastly long—spurs project, not quite spaced evenly, so it is not a true geometric octagon—ah, I see better now, one of the spurs is shifting, oh, very slowly, the veils are rippling—they are mobile, then, those projections, and the webbing runs from one spur to the next, around and around, but there are—patterns, odd patterns, it is not at all the simple webbing of a spider. I cannot quite see order in the patterns, in the traceries of the webs, but I feel sure the order is there, the meaning is waiting to be found.
“There are lights. Have I mentioned the lights? The lights are brightest around the center nexus, but they are nowhere very bright, a dim violet. Some visible radiation, then, but not much. I would like to take an ultraviolet reading of this craft, but I do not have the instrumentation. The lights move. The veils seem to ripple, and lights run constantly up and down the length of the spurs, at differing rates of speed, and sometimes other lights can be seen transversing the webbing, moving across the patterns. I do not know what the lights are. Some form of communication, perhaps. I cannot tell whether they emanate from inside the craft or outside. I—oh! There was another light just then. Between the spurs, a brief flash, a starburst. It is gone now, already. It was more intense than the others, indigo. I feel so helpless, so ignorant. But they are beautiful, my volcryn….
“The myths, they—this is really not much like the legends, not truly. The size, the lights. The volcryn have often been linked to lights, but those reports were so vague, they might have meant anything, described anything from a laser propulsion system to simple exterior lighting. I could not know it meant this. Ah, what mystery! The ship is still too far away to see the finer detail. It is so large, I do not think we shall get clear of it. It seems to have turned toward us, I think, yet I may be mistaken, it is only an impression. My instruments, if I only had my instruments. Perhaps the darker area in the center is a craft, a life capsule. The volcryn must be inside it. I wish my team were with me, and Thale, poor Thale. He was a class one, we might have made contact, might have communicated with them. The things we would learn! The things they have seen! To think how old this craft is, how ancient the race, how long they have been outbound…it fills me with awe. Communication would be such a gift, such an impossible gift, but they are so alien.”
“D’Branin,” Agatha Marij-Black said in a low, urgent voice. “Can’t you feel?”
Karoly d’Branin looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Can you feel them? You are a three, can you sense them now, strongly?”
“Long ago,” the psipsych said, “long ago.”
“Can you project? Talk to them, Agatha. Where are they? In the center area? The dark?”
“Yes,” she replied, and she laughed. Her laugh was shrill and hysterical, and d’Branin had to recall that she was a very sick woman. “Yes, in the center, d’Branin, that’s where the pulses come from. Only you’re wrong about them. It’s not a them at all, your legends are all lies, lies, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were the first ever to see your volcryn, to come this close. The others, those aliens of yours, they merely felt, deep and distantly, sensed a bit of the nature of the volcryn in their dreams and visions, and fashioned the rest to suit themselves. Ships, and wars, and a race of eternal travelers, it is all—all—”
“Yes. What do you mean, Agatha, my friend? You do not make sense. I do not understand.”
“No,” Marij-Black said, “you do not, do you?” Her voice was suddenly gentle. “You cannot feel it, as I can. So clear now. This must be how a one feels, all the time. A one full of esperon.”
“What do you feel? What?”
“It’s not a them, Karoly. It’s an it. Alive, Karoly, and quite mindless, I assure you.”
“Mindless?” d’Branin said. “No, you must be wrong, you are not reading correctly. I will accept that it is a single creature if you say so, a single great marvelous star-traveler, but how can it be mindless? You sensed it, its mind, its telepathic emanations. You and the whole of the Crey sensitives and all the others. Perhaps its thoughts are too alien for you to read.”
“Perhaps. But what I do read is not so terribly alien at all. Only animal. Its thoughts are slow and dark and strange, hardly thoughts at all, faint. Stirrings cold and distant. The brain must be huge all right, I grant you that, but it can’t be devoted to conscious thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“The propulsion system, d’Branin. Don’t you feel? The pulses? They are threatening to rip off the top of my skull. Can’t you guess what is driving your damned volcryn across the galaxy? And why they avoid gravity wells? Can’t you guess how it is moving?”
“No,” d’Branin said, but even as he denied it a dawn of comprehension broke across his face, and he looked away from his companion, back at the swelling immensity of the volcryn, its lights moving, its veils a-ripple as it came on and on, across light years, light centuries, across eons.
When he looked back at her, he mouthed only a single word: “Teke,” he said.
She nodded.
MELANTHA JHIRL STRUGGLED TO LIFT THE INJECTION GUN AND PRESS it against an artery. It gave a single loud hiss, and the drug flooded her system. She lay back and gathered her strength and tried to think. Esperon, esperon, why was that important? It had killed Lasamer, made him a victim of his own latent abilities, multiplied his power and his vulnerability. Psi. It all came back to psi.
The inner door of the airlock opened. The headless corpse came through.
It moved with jerks, unnatural shufflings, never lifting its legs from the floor. It sagged as it moved, half-crushed by the weight upon it. Each shuffle was crude and sudden; some grim force was literally yanking one leg forward, then the next. It moved in slow motion, arms stiff by its sides.
But it moved.
Melantha summoned her own reserves and began to squirm away from it, never taking her eyes off its advance.
Her thoughts went round and round, searching for the piece out of place, the solution to the chess problem, finding nothing.
The corpse was moving faster than she was. Clearly, visibly, it was gaining.
Melantha tried to stand. She got to her knees with a grunt, her heart pounding. Then one knee. She tried to force herself up, to lift the impossible burden on her shoulders as if she were lifting weights. She was strong, she told herself. She was the improved model.
But when she put all her weight on one leg, her muscles would not hold her. She collapsed, awkwardly, and when she smashed against the floor it was as if she had fallen from a building. She heard a sharp snap, and a stab of agony flashed up her arm, her good arm, the arm she had tried to use to break her fall. The pain in her shoulder was terrible and intense. She blinked back tears and choked on her own scream.
The corpse was halfway up the corridor. It must be walking on two broken legs, she realized. It didn’t care. A force greater than tendons and bone and muscle was holding it up.
“Melantha…heard you…are…you…Melantha?”
“Quiet,” she snarled at Royd. She had no breath to waste on talk.
Now she used all the disciplines she had ever learned, willed away the pain. She kicked feebly, her boots scraping for purchase, and she pulled herself forward with her unbroken arm, ignoring the fire in her shoulder.
The corpse came on and on.
She dragged herself across the threshold of the lounge, worming her way under the crashed sled, hoping it would delay the cadaver. The thing that had been Thale Lasamer was a meter behind her.
In t
he darkness, in the lounge, where it had all begun, Melantha Jhirl ran out of strength.
Her body shuddered and she collapsed on the damp carpet, and she knew that she could go no farther.
On the far side of the door, the corpse stood stiffly. The sled began to shake. Then, with the scrape of metal against metal, it slid backward, moving in tiny sudden increments, jerking itself free and out of the way.
Psi. Melantha wanted to curse it, and cry. Vainly she wished for a psi power of her own, a weapon to blast apart the teke-driven corpse that stalked her. She was improved, she thought despairingly, but not improved enough. Her parents had given her all the genetic gifts they could arrange, but psi was beyond them. The genes were astronomically rare, recessive, and—
—and suddenly it came to her.
“Royd,” she said, putting all of her remaining will into her words. She was weeping, wet, frightened. “The dial…teke it. Royd, teke it!”
His reply was faint, troubled. “…can’t…I don’t…Mother…only…her…not me…no…Mother…”
“Not Mother,” she said, desperate. “You always…say…Mother. I forgot…forgot. Not your mother…listen…you’re a clone…same genes…you have it too…power.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Never…must be…sex-linked.”
“No! It isn’t. I know…Promethean, Royd…don’t tell a Promethean…about genes…turn it!”
The sled jumped a third of a meter, and listed to the side. A path was clear.
The corpse came forward.
“…trying,” Royd said. “Nothing…I can’t!”
“She cured you,” Melantha said bitterly. “Better than…she…was cured…prenatal…but it’s only…suppressed…you can!”
“I…don’t…know…how.”
The corpse stood above her. Stopped. Its pale-fleshed hands trembled, spasmed, jerked upward. Long painted fingernails. Made claws. Began to rise.
Melantha swore. “Royd!”
“…sorry…”
She wept and shook and made a futile fist.
And all at once the gravity was gone. Far, far away, she heard Royd cry out and then fall silent.
“THE FLASHES COME MORE FREQUENTLY NOW,” KAROLY D’BRANIN dictated, “or perhaps it is simply that I am closer, that I can see them better. Bursts of indigo and deep violet, short and fast-fading. Between the webbing. A field, I think. The flashes are particles of hydrogen, the thin ethereal stuff of the reaches between the stars. They touch the field, between the webbing, the spurs, and shortly flare into the range of visible light. Matter to energy, yes, that is what I guess. My volcryn feeds.
“It fills half the universe, comes on and on. We shall not escape it, oh, so sad. Agatha is gone, silent, blood on her faceplate. I can almost see the dark area, almost, almost. I have a strange vision, in the center is a face, small, ratlike, without mouth or nose or eyes, yet still a face somehow, and it stares at me. The veils move so sensuously. The webbing looms around us.
“Ah, the light, the light!”
THE CORPSE BOBBED AWKWARDLY INTO THE AIR, ITS HANDS HANGING limply before it. Melantha, reeling in the weightlessness, was suddenly violently sick. She ripped off the helmet, collapsed it, and pushed away from her own nausea, trying to ready herself for the Nightflyer’s furious assault.
But the body of Thale Lasamer floated dead and still, and nothing else moved in the darkened lounge. Finally Melantha recovered, and she moved to the corpse, weakly, and pushed it, a small and tentative shove. It sailed across the room.
“Royd?” she said uncertainly.
There was no answer.
She pulled herself through the hole into the control chamber.
And found Royd Eris suspended in his armored suit. She shook him, but he did not stir. Trembling, Melantha Jhirl studied his suit, and then began to dismantle it. She touched him. “Royd,” she said, “here. Feel, Royd, here, I’m here, feel it.” His suit came apart easily, and she flung the pieces of it away. “Royd, Royd.”
Dead. Dead. His heart had given out. She punched it, pummeled it, tried to pound it into new life. It did not beat. Dead. Dead.
Melantha Jhirl moved back from him, blinded by her own tears, edged into the console, glanced down.
Dead. Dead.
But the dial on the gravity grid was set on zero.
“Melantha,” said a mellow voice from the walls.
I HAVE HELD THE NIGHTFLYER’S CRYSTALLINE SOUL WITHIN MY HANDS.
It is deep red and multi-faceted, large as my head, and icy to the touch. In its scarlet depths, two small sparks of smoky light burn fiercely, and sometimes seem to whirl.
I have crawled through the consoles, wound my way carefully past safeguards and cybernets, taking care to damage nothing, and I have laid rough hands on that great crystal, knowing it is where she lives.
And I cannot bring myself to wipe it.
Royd’s ghost has asked me not to.
Last night we talked about it once again, over brandy and chess in the lounge. Royd cannot drink, of course, but he sends his spectre to smile at me, and he tells me where he wants his pieces moved.
For the thousandth time he offered to take me back to Avalon, or any world of my choice, if only I would go outside and complete the repairs we abandoned so many years ago, so the Nightflyer might safely slip into stardrive.
For the thousandth time I refused.
He is stronger now, no doubt. Their genes are the same, after all. Their power is the same. Dying, he too found the strength to impress himself upon the great crystal. The ship is alive with both of them, and frequently they fight. Sometimes she outwits him for a moment, and the Nightflyer does odd, erratic things. The gravity goes up or down or off completely. Blankets wrap themselves around my throat when I sleep. Objects come hurtling out of dark corners.
Those times have come less frequently of late, though. When they do come, Royd stops her, or I do. Together, the Nightflyer is ours.
Royd claims he is strong enough alone, that he does not really need me, that he can keep her under check. I wonder. Over the chessboard, I still beat him nine games out of ten.
And there are other considerations. Our work, for one. Karoly would be proud of us. The volcryn will soon enter the mists of the Tempter’s Veil, and we follow close behind. Studying, recording, doing all that old d’Branin would have wanted us to do. It is all in the computer, and on tape and paper as well, should the system ever be wiped. It will be interesting to see how the volcryn thrives in the Veil. Matter is so thick there, compared to the thin diet of interstellar hydrogen on which the creature has fed so many endless eons.
We have tried to communicate with it, with no success. I do not believe it is sentient at all. And lately Royd has tried to imitate its ways, gathering all his energies in an attempt to move the Nightflyer by teke. Sometimes, oddly, his mother even joins with him in those efforts. So far they have always failed, but we will keep trying.
So goes our work. We know our results will reach humanity. Royd and I have discussed it, and we have a plan. Before I die, when my time is near, I will destroy the central crystal and clear the computers, and afterwards I will set course manually for the close vicinity of an inhabited world. The Nightflyer will become a true ghost ship then. It will work. I have all the time I need, and I am an improved model.
I will not consider the other option, although it means much to me that Royd suggests it again and again. No doubt I could finish the repairs, and perhaps Royd could control the ship without me, and go on with the work. But that is not important.
I was wrong so many times. The esperon, the monitors, my control of the others; all of them my failures, payment for my hubris. Failure hurts. When I finally touched him, for the first and last and only time, his body was still warm. But he was gone already. He never felt my touch. I could not keep that promise.
But I can keep my other.
I will not leave him alone with her.
Ever.
THE MONKEY TREATMENT r />
KENNY DORCHESTER WAS A FAT MAN.
He had not always been a fat man, of course. He had come into the world a perfectly normal infant of modest weight, but the normalcy was short-lived in Kenny’s case, and before very long he had become a chubby-cheeked toddler well swaddled in baby fat. From then on it was all downhill and upscale so far as Kenny was concerned. He became a pudgy child, a corpulent adolescent, and a positively porcine college student, all in good turn, and by adulthood he had left all those intermediate steps behind and graduated into full obesity.
People became obese for a variety of reasons, some of them physiological and some psychological. Kenny’s reason was relatively simple: food. Kenny Dorchester loved to eat. Often he would paraphrase Will Rogers, winking broadly, and tell his friends that he had never met a food he didn’t like. This was not precisely true, since Kenny loathed both liver and prune juice. Perhaps if his mother had served them more often during his childhood, he would never have attained the girth and gravity that so haunted him at maturity. Unfortunately, Gina Dorchester was more inclined to lasagna and roast turkey with stuffing and sweet potatoes and chocolate pudding and veal cordon bleu and buttered corn-on-the-cob and stacks of blueberry pancakes (although not all in one meal) than she was to liver and prune juice, and once Kenny had expressed his preference in the matter by retching his liver back onto his plate, she obligingly never served liver and prune juice again. Thus, all unknowing, she set her son on the soft, suety road to the monkey treatment. But that was long ago and the poor woman really cannot be blamed, since it was Kenny himself who ate his way there.
Kenny loved pepperoni pizza, or plain pizza, or garbage pizza with everything on it including anchovies. Kenny could eat an entire slab of barbequed ribs, either beef or pork, and the spicier the sauce was the more he approved. He was fond of rare prime rib and roast chicken and Rock Cornish game hens stuffed with rice, and he was hardly the sort to object to a nice sirloin or a platter of fried shrimp or a hunk of kielbasa. He liked his burgers with everything on them, and fries and onion rings on the side, please. There was nothing you could do to his friend the potato that would turn him against it, but he was also partial to pasta and rice, to yams candied and un-, and even to mashed rutabagas. “Desserts are my downfall,” he would sometimes say, for he liked sweets of all varieties, especially devil’s food cake and cannoli and hot apple pie with whipped cream. “Bread is my downfall,” he would say at other times, when it seemed likely that no dessert was forthcoming, and so saying he would rip off another chunk of sourdough or butter up another crescent roll or reach for another slice of garlic bread, which was a particular vice. Kenny had a lot of particular vices. He thought himself an authority on both fine restaurants and fast-food franchises, and could discourse endlessly and knowledgeably about either. He relished Greek food and Chinese food and Japanese food and Korean food and German food and Italian food and French food and Indian food, and was always on the lookout for new ethnic groups so he might “expand my cultural horizons.” When Saigon fell, Kenny speculated about how many of the Vietnamese refugees would be likely to open restaurants. When Kenny traveled, he always made it a point to gorge himself on the area’s specialty, and he could tell you the best places to eat in any of twenty-four major American cities, while reminiscing fondly about the meals he had enjoyed in each of them. His favorite writers were James Beard and Calvin Trillin.