The Unreasoning Mask

  "If that's true, it doesn't use alaraf drive. Not the kind we know."

  Tenno paused, then continued. "Also, it seems to me that that horrible whistling might be caused by a . . . a disrupting of normal space-matter structure. As soon as the thing is fully in normal space-matter and space-matter has resumed its normal structure -- whatever that is -- the whistling stops. I don't know. I'm just speculating. Whatever the thing is . . . it's unheard of . . . horrible . . . horrible . . . whoever would have thought . . .?"

  The vast, dark shape hovered in their minds, blotting out almost all thought except of it.

  As soon as he could, Ramstan got rid of the pseudo-glyfa by sending it via ship's peristalsis to the trash disintegrator.

  While al-Buraq circled Tolt, Ramstan paced in his quarters. During mess, he did his best to keep the conversation going and on light topics, but he failed miserably. After the third mess, when the drinks were brought in, he made an announcement.

  "We're going to return to Kalafala."

  There was silence.

  "By the time we get there, that thing should be through with its . . . work. And it should be gone on its next hellish assignment. It may be tracking us down, though there's no proof that it is doing that. Anyway, if we do find it, or if it finds us, we'll not run away unless we have to."

  He paused and looked around at the pale faces.

  "We'll test its attack capabilities. And if it looks as if we'll have a chance, we'll attack it!"

  ... 17 ...

  His plan was courageous but also probably foolish. However, the prospect of facing the enemy instead of running away seemed to raise the spirits of the crew.

  Al-Buraq's probers searched for the bolg but could not detect it. There was no doubt that it was gone, its work done. An object of its size and mass could not have hidden. It could, however, and no one forgot it for a moment, appear seemingly from out of nowhere.

  There was smoke covering Kalafala, but it was much less dense than that over Walisk and Tolt. Except for some small islands, the planet had only one continent, which had only the surface area of Greenland, and half of it was empty of people and vegetation. It should not have taken long for the Destroyer to ravage all land life, but it may have been acting automatically, a mindless thing that carried out its work according to the surface available, not the location of life.

  Ramstan ordered al-Buraq to the capital. Since it had been the most heavily populated area, he said, it was the best place to make a detailed record of the effects of the cataclysm. Ship came down and poised twenty meters above the still-fissuring surface of the spaceport. He requisitioned for himself a small excavator craft. He did not explain why he was working with the other members of the survey, nor why his search plan placed them for several hours at a considerable distance from him.

  Ramstan flew through the smoke at five meters above the surface while he watched the screens in front of him. When the probers indicated that he was in the same area as that in which the glyfa had fallen, he put the machine into a decreasing horizontal spiral. The hotel was gone except for some shattered pillars and some dented steel beams. The sidewalk was gone. The grass and the bushes and trees were gone. Much of the fertile earth had been washed or blown away, revealing a clay. Ramstan could not directly see this, but his probers indicated what was left. There were also the expected missiles, some on top of the clay, some wholly buried, some half exposed.

  A half hour passed, and he was beginning to think that the glyfa had been gulped into a fissure and was beyond the range of his ground-sonar. And then, as desperation mingled with fury slid through him, he saw the egg-shape on a screen. It was a meter and a half under the clay.

  The box around it had been scattered in shreds by the missiles and the a-g units knocked off. The glyfa itself must have been pounded into the ground by several larger missiles and perhaps had fallen into a shallow fissure which had then closed up.

  It did not take Ramstan long to direct the machine to cut a wide cylindrical hole around the glyfa with lasers and to pulverize the clay and suck it out. It took him more time to direct a robot arm down to put new a-g units on the ends of the glyfa and then to fit a unit over each end of the egg. The preset units made the glyfa weigh little enough for it to be sucked up through a pipe into the body of the machine.

  Ramstan opened a cover behind the seat and pulled the egg loose from the clay sticking to it.

  "You didn't think I could do it, did you?" Ramstan said. Silence.

  Shrugging, he put the egg in a case supposed to be used for specimens. He drove the machine back into al-Buraq and took the case to his quarters. There he washed the smoke and clay from it and placed it under the electron microscope. As he had expected, its sculpturing was undamaged by the missiles.

  Again, he tried.

  "It's I, Ramstan!"

  "That makes two I's," his mother's voice said in Terrish. "I wasn't sure that you'd return. Which meant that if you didn't, I . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "It doesn't matter now."

  "It does to me," Ramstan said. "I must know certain things. Otherwise . . ." "Otherwise, what?"

  "I may leave you here after all. Drop you to the bottom of the sea."

  "Of course you will. What is it you want to know? Aside from the questions you've asked so far."

  "At least tell me why you allowed Branwen Davis to steal you. You must have been aware that she was doing so. You may have known some time ago that she planned on doing it. Tell me why you permitted her to take you and why she did it. And if she was killed or went with the Tenolt."

  His mother's voice said, "From your viewpoint, my powers are almost semidivine. Though I suspect you'd say semidemonic. But I lack what even the lowliest of most animal life has."

  It paused. Was it considering if it should reveal something that might make it vulnerable?

  "That is mobility. The power to move on my own. If I'm placed on a hillside, then I must roll down it as helplessly as a stone or an egg. I must go where anybody who has the energy to move me wills that I go."

  It did not sound bitter. It was just stating a fact.

  "You're evading my questions!" Ramstan said. "What about Davis?"

  "The Tolt captain picked her up. Perhaps he didn't kill her because he didn't know that she had shot the men with her. Or perhaps he wanted to torture her. In either event, she is useless to him now that he does not have me. But I suppose he'll be back soon to look for me."

  "I know," Ramstan said. "We're leaving soon. But tell me why Davis stole you? I think that the Tenolt abducted her from the experimental station on the north coast and forced her, somehow, to steal you and leave a fake in the safe. Why didn't you summon me when she came for you?"

  "I didn't have my detectors on. I was . . . voyaging . . . and thus unaware of what was happening just then."

  Ramstan did not believe him. Even if it was quiescent then, it must have probed Davis's mind just as it had undoubtedly probed every mind within its range of detection.

  "Why," he said slowly, "didn't the Tenolt take you? If they had time to get Davis, they had time to get you."

  "I have the power to confuse minds with certain electrical means. It's limited in range and time. But I made them forget me for the moment. And the Tolt in command while the captain was gone was screaming at him to get back. By the time the captain returned, he would have recovered from his mindstorm, but it was too late to try to get me again. The missiles were approaching too swiftly."

  "You still haven't told me why you didn't warn me about Davis."

  Silence.

  You won't answer that. Very well. What is the bolg?"

  Silence.

  Ramstan put it in the bulkhead-safe and went up to the bridge.

  "It's possible, if not highly probable, that the Tenolt will be coming back," he said to Tenno. "We don't want to be here when they come. I don't know why Davis disobeyed my orders to stay within the port limits or why the Tenolt had her. We may never kno
w. In any case, they attacked us, and we had to shoot back. We can assume that the next time they show, they'll attack us."

  Tenno asked no questions about Davis. Ramstan ordered that the survey parties return to al-Buraq. Within ten minutes, ship was sealed up and ready to go.

  Ramstan felt in his jacket pocket. The three gifts of Wassruss nestled there. Why had the dying Webnite given them to him? Was the glyfa responsible in some circuitous fashion for that? Or was someone else moving pieces on this cosmic chessboard? He thought of the warning voice in the tavern and the flash of the figure in green and the figure that had seemed to him to be al-Khidhr.

  "Set course for the Webn bell," Ramstan said.

  "Aye, aye, sir. The Webn bell it is."

  Ramstan called in the navigation chief, Suzuki.

  "I'm just checking, Suzuki. The other bell in the Webn system is in the area of the first planet of Webn's sun, isn't it?"

  Suzuki's brown face and slanting eyelids expressed curiosity. But she only said, "Yes, sir."

  "Put in a course in NS drive for the first bell. I'll want it as soon as possible."

  "Just ask ship for it," Suzuki said somewhat smugly. "I laid it out long ago just in case we might need it."

  "Thank you for your zeal and foresight," Ramstan said. "But the next time you do something like that, tell me about it."

  He told himself that he need not have sounded as if he were rebuking her.

  Fifty hours passed. Ramstan, when not in his quarters trying to get a response from the glyfa, roamed al-Buraq. He checked everything he could think of, mostly to keep himself occupied. Then Tenno called him just as he was about to take a nap.

  "Ship will be in the first bell within two hours, sir."

  "Call me back in sixty minutes."

  After a few seconds of concentrated imagining of a black spot a few centimeters from his eyes and within his head, he fell asleep. A whistle from a screen woke him just as he was crawling through thick impeding brush from something dark and shapeless. He was whimpering.

  He took a shower and dressed in a jumpsuit. Then he spoke to the glyfa, but he got no reply. After eating a sandwich, be went up to the bridge.

  "Did you check out the bell?" Ramstan said to Tenno.

  "Yes, sir. It seems to be virgin. At least, the instruments indicate it is."

  Ramstan thanked him, and he ordered that al-Buraq go into alaraf. Two minutes later, they were within 500,000 kilometers of a planet. The star was G0-type, and the planet was T-type. A1-Buraq filmed the constellations. Ramstan particularly admired a giant blue star. Celestial inhabitants were staggeringly beautiful, and even long acquaintance with them had not staled their awesomeness.

  "It won't be virgin territory any more," Ramstan said. "We're going to alaraf. Pioneer."

  Tenno seemed to be surprised. Not far off was a planet like Earth's, and he had expected that al-Buraq would survey it from orbit and perhaps descend to it.

  Two minutes later, they were in what Ramstan knew to be another universe, if he had interpreted Wassruss's phrase correctly.

  "'Ring the bell at the first entrance.'

  "'And then?'

  "'Enter.' "'And then?'

  "'Ring the bell at the third entrance.'

  "'And then?'

  "'Ring the bell at the fifth entrance.'"

  Each bell was "connected" to another bell. There were only two bells or windows, as they were sometimes called, in each area within the planetary system. Therefore, so Ramstan had reasoned, the third and fifth bells in Wassruss's chant were the third and fifth planets respectively in the systems of the universes alarafed into from Webn's universe.

  Al-Buraq scanned the new system. It had ten planets.

  Ramstan ordered that al-Buraq go to the neighborhood of the fifth planet. An hour after the entrance, Ramstan ordered that ship alaraf again.

  Tenno obviously wondered why his captain was choosing different planets. Why didn't he just jump where he came out?

  Ramstan could not tell him at this time the reason. He was not sure that he was on the right "path." He might be making a fool of himself by following what he believed to be instructions in the ancient chant. If so, only he would know it.

  A planet distorted space-matter fabric in the area of its gravitational influence, the influence varying in accordance to its mass and its relation to other large relatively nearby masses and the square of the distance from the planet and its neighbors. It seemed to him that he may have discovered a principle hitherto unknown to Terran science by his following the directions in the chant. But it also seemed to him that the location and the mass of a planet did determine the "direction" of the opening the alaraf ship took.

  One of the theories about alaraf drive was that it was a form of time travel. When a ship jumped, it went into time. Backward while on the "outward" journey, forward while on the "return" journey. A ship leaving Earth in alaraf drive went back to a time when the Earth was elsewhere on her journey through space. That explained why the ship found herself in unknown space, the Earth and its sun nowhere visible.

  But, if the glyfa had told him the truth, there were many universes. And each time a ship alarafed, it plunged through the "wall" between two universes.

  Ramstan ordered that ship alaraf again. And again they were in an area never seen before.

  Ramstan ordered that al-Buraq proceed to the neighborhood of the seventh planet of the new system. It was done, but the bridge personnel were silent and tight-lipped.

  "The Tenolt may have trouble finding us," he said loudly. Let them chew on that for a while, he thought as he went to his quarters.

  This time, the glyfa answered. Ramstan wondered if it had some deep reasons for its silences. Or was it double-minded, and did one mind take over the other now and then? No. That was a fantastic and incredible explanation. He was projecting onto it his own doubts about his own double-naturedness.

  The glyfa asked him what he had been doing. As soon as it was fully informed, it said, "You are doing well. But before you get to the only place to go beyond the ninth entrance, come to me."

  "Why?" Ramstan said.

  "Whatever you do, don't tell them that I am on ship."

  "Them? Who's them"

  Silence.

  ... 18 ...

  On the right were three great stars, One red, one green, one yellow, each forming the point of a triangle. Making up the lines of the triangle were seven stars between each point, small and white.

  Far "below" these was a dark mass reminding Ramstan of the Horsehead Nebula of Earth's universe. But the head formed by a vast "dustcloud" profiled by blazing gases behind it looked like that of a troll. At least, that was what Nuoli said it resembled. To Ramstan it seemed more of an ifrit's head. The features were humanoid but bestial. Bestial humanoid. Yet beautiful and awesome.

  The third planet of the system beyond the ninth entrance was T-type, and its sun was G0. It had been 707,000 kilometers from al-Buraq when she had burst from the other universe. Ramstan had at once ordered her to proceed at top speed in NS drive to the planet.

  "'Go to the only place to go.'"