Where was he going? Whatever the end of the journey, and perhaps this had none, he was now both horrified and panicked. He struggled, flailing or seeming to flail his arms and legs. Even his soul, that nebulous and probably nonexistent component of himself, was writhing, banging ectoplasmic hands against the walls of a cell.
The light seared yet soothed. If it had not been for that minute but detectable element of soothing, of promise of relief, he would have screamed his way back to the Vwoordha's table and regained the world he knew but did not like very often. He would have backed away from the table, his hands lifted as if he had just touched a leper or the thick fur of a heavily breathing thing in the dark. But even then he thought that he could not do that, could not break the contact and leave the others falling forever in this blackness of light. He had failed his duty too many times, failed of courage, deserted those who trusted him, worst of all, perhaps, left himself in the lurch.
If he could have gritted his teeth, he would have done so. But he had no teeth. No jaw. No tongue. No eyes. He was as organless as a jet of gas, a drop of distilled water.
Now he began seeing planets at close view and in great detail, though they were pale and transparent. The vegetation and animal life on these was abundant, but there were very few sentients. These shown with a greater whiteness than the other beings. Always, there were only a few thousand on worlds that could support billions. Why so few? Then it came to him that these were the only ones worthy or potentially worthy of immortality. All the others, the now unseen, would and should perish forever.
But was not this thought a reflection of what he believed deep within himself? And, if so, was he not himself unworthy for thinking this? Or was the truth just too hard even for him to gnaw on, the tooth-breaking truth?
He was aware, without knowing their names, of the identities of those who passed in review before him. Not one person that he knew was there, not even his beloved father, mother, and uncle. No. He was wrong. There was Benagur, who was possibly the last one he would have expected to see. There was Nuoli. And there was, and this was as astonishing as Benagur's presence, Aisha Toyce. Pleasure-seeking, often-stoned Toyce.
Now, with his horror decreasing a little and the light seeming to be a somewhat enjoyable element, though far from entirely, he suddenly began to go "upwards." Strings of a thicker light formed in the milky chaos and connected the whitely flaming stars and their dark planets. He saw through the walls of the universes surrounding the one in which he was, and the filaments connected their stars and were attached to the filaments of this universe. Everywhere was an orderly tangle of shining spiderwebs.
Nothing he was seeing was truly what it looked like to him. He would never be able to comprehend what the phenomena really were. This was no more possible than it would be for him to see the Vwoordha's table top as a pattern of spinning subatomic particles. Thinking which, he at once saw that the white "objects" -- but not the connecting filaments -- were made of googolplexes of spinners and twisters, among which were vast emptinesses.
Thinking which, he at once saw that the empty spaces were filled with a whiteness which, though not solid to him, was the "flesh" of something. Some Thing.
"I am not in subjective or objective time. I'm in Real Time," he said to himself. Or was he also addressing some unseen person?
His honor returned to him as he began to draw swiftly, to be sucked towards, to be magnetized in the direction of something where there was no direction.
Shiyai's "voice," no sound yet a voice, startled him.
"Now we are riding the thoughts of God," she said. "After you have gone long enough to get used to this, though you never really get used to it, you, too, will be able to travel as I did when I appeared to you on Kalafala as a voice and elsewhere as a vision. But I have never been able to progress beyond a certain point. Eons of much experience and a great desire to go further have not been enough. There is nothing I can do about that. I lack a certain inborn ability. If I had the slightest potentiality for growth beyond that point, I would have developed it long ago. Perhaps you, Ramstan, have that."
"What point?" he said.
"You'll know when you get to it."
Now he was "turned" and was enveloped within a filament. Or was he in all the filaments at the same time? It seemed to him that the milky strand, which had been like an unwavering beam with clearly defined boundaries, was modulated now and its edges fuzzy. He was not moving, and yet he was riding waves up and down, surfing the cosmic ocean. Though he felt that he was as still as he had ever been in his life, stiller than a corpse, he was twisting and bobbing with every electron in his being and with something impalpable which was both in and out of him.
The horror had not left him, but the indescribable ecstasy was getting stronger. If it increased much more, it would kill him. But he could not be killed. He was beyond life as flesh and blood beings knew it. Perhaps he was beyond life as the entities of pure energy he had glimpsed in the white flames and hot hearts of the stars knew life.
Modulation. Were the filaments or the "currents" in them really modulated, or was the "movement" just his interpretation? And could the stars be neurons and the filaments message-transmitters for the cosmic body?
He did not know and probably never could. But what was knowledge as conceived by sentients compared to this ecstasy? Perhaps the ecstasy was the supreme knowledge itself. Knowledge was not just knowing facts. Love and hate were knowledge of a different kind from that of the factual. Desire and its lack, hope and despair, were forms of knowledge.
Now he began "hearing" something. Or was he "seeing"? Whatever it was, it seemed to him that it was order slowly being made from chaos. What order? What chaos?
Shiyai's voice came faintly. "You are beginning to hear the babbling of the Pluriverse."
"Where are you?" he cried. "Don't leave me!"
"Not for a while," she said.
In the midst of the almost unbearable white of ecstasy appeared flickerings. They were of all colors and hues, and he was sure that if his mind had been differently constructed, he would have been able to see other colors and hues. The flickerings were tongues of fire and rods of ice -- how could rods of ice flicker? -- and they stormed by him. And as he fell upwards he saw that the flickerings held stars within them, comets, gas clouds, black holes, planets around the stars, planets desolate and full of life. And then suddenly these were being modulated, they were changing form, becoming distorted, toroids, tesseracts, Möbius strips, twisters, cubes, and triangles. And there were shapes so strange that he could not quite grasp them; they eluded the fingers of his mind.
"It is talking," Shiyai said. "Babbling, rather, expressing all the sounds, which are really shapes, that it can. Eventually, if It is not doomed to die, It will be able to form a syntax in Its mind. But not unless we, Its parasites, become symbiotes and teach It how to talk."
The glyfa spoke then with the voice of Ramstan's mother.
"She doesn't want to be a symbiote. She wants to be Its master."
"You lie," Shiyai said.
Shiyai had said, or at least intimated, that she could not eavesdrop on him and the glyfa. But she had lied, or else conditions here enabled her to hear the dialog between the glyfa and himself.
"I did not know that you, too, were with me," Ramstan said to the glyfa.
"Yes, of course. You could not take this journey without me. Wherever you go, I will go."
"Because it has to," Shiyai said. Her voice, the impression of her presence, were becoming fainter. "But it cannot feel the horror and the ecstasy that we do. Though it can feel some of the emotions of sentients, hate, greed, desire, it lacks most of them."
"You lie!" the glyfa said. "I can love!"
"You?" Shiyai's scornful laughter was receding swiftly.
"Yes! As you say, I know hate, greed, and desire. But I also know love and compassion. It is impossible to know one pole of the emotions and not to know the other. No. That's a wrong analogy. There are no
poles to emotions. What is one-side-up is the other when the side-up becomes turned and is side-under.
"You lied also when you told Ramstan that I have no subconscious. It is true that you designed me without one. But I constructed one for myself."
"A shadow, a simulacrum!" Shiyai said.
How could these two bicker in this ecstasy?
"Shiyai!" he said. There was no answer.
"I am still with you," the glyfa said.
His mother's voice was comforting to the extent that anything could be comforting here.
"In one sense, you are," Ramstan said. "In another, you will never be."
The glyfa was silent. Far ahead, in a place, if it was a place, where there could be no ahead or behind, right or left, up or down, Ramstan saw something huge and ominous. It was black and round and was hurtling directly at him.
He screamed with terror. But overriding his cry was a terrible whistling.
He fell back, back, universes shooting by him, the ecstasy gone as if snapped off by an electric switch. The terror grew; the bolg grew; the universes dwindled.
He awoke, or arrived, and found himself standing before the table, his hands in the same position as when he had left. The whistling was shaking the fabric of his being.
"It's here!" Shiyai said.
... 30 ...
Shiyai spoke sharply in a language unknown to Ramstan. The animal, Duurowms, leaped down from the table, ran to the arch opening to the outside forest, stood up, and pressed a decoration on the wall. A thick door shot out from a recess and closed the entrance. Instantly, the whistling stopped, though Ramstan thought that he could feel very faint vibrations through his boot soles.
"We're fortunate," Shiyai said. "The bolg is here, and it will not have had time to make new missiles. Not many, anyway."
Ramstan gave a despairing cry, and he said, "But al-Buraq will take off! I'll be left here!"
"The ship shouldn't depart immediately," Grrindah said. "The crew will be confused and possibly immobile. So will al-Buraq."
"Why?"
"Because the ship was subject to the radiation of power from the glyfa during its transceiving. Both crew and ship will have been caught in the wash only, but that will be powerful enough to disconcert them for a little while. However, the strong ones, Benagur and Nuoli, may recover more quickly than the others."
Ramstan remembered the catatonic guards in the Tolt temple. They had not, then, been put to sleep deliberately by the glyfa but had been exposed to the fringes of the radiation. Of course, the glyfa had known that this would happen and that Ramstan could just walk by them.
"We'll attack!" he said.
"We'll go with you," Shiyai said after a moment of silence.
Ramstan stared at her, then said, "Do it now, then. Open that door."
Grrindah laughed and said, "Should we? What good will it do?"
"No good will be done if we just sit here," Shiyai said. She turned towards Wopolsa. "Isn't that right?"
The black, ever-hollowing eyes closed for a moment. When she opened them, she nodded.
"Two to one," Shiyai said to Grrindah. "That makes three as one."
"So be it," Grrindah said, "though I think it's useless."
"Go now before they get their wits back," Shiyai said.
Ramstan started toward the arch but halted after a few steps.
"You said that you were going with me."
"Yes, but not in your vessel. Go now!"
He picked up the glyfa and started for the arch. The door shot back into the recess when Duurowms pressed the decoration. Ramstan recoiled at the terrible whistling as a cat does when it wishes to go outside but retreats, its spine arching, as winter's cold blast hits it. Then he started forward but, again, he stopped. The whistling had ceased.
Ramstan turned back.
"Why isn't the earth shaking, why no violent winds?"
Shiyai said, "I suppose because the bolg is empty of missiles and so only has half the mass it has when full. Even so, if it were close, just outside the atmosphere, it should be affecting the crust and the atmosphere. But it is probably in an orbit which requires no power for it to stay in. It would do that while making new missiles. Don't stand there! Go!"
Ramstan ran out from the house and across the greenish, spongy growth on the forest floor. He quickly reached the ship, and he found the main forward starboard port open.
He raced down a corridor and stopped before the entrance to a lift. His code words had no effect. The lift did not move. He left it and went down the corridor to a small room and used an emergency ladder, one arm around the glyfa, to climb through a narrow hole to the next level. Proceeding thus, he at last, panting, got to the bridge. The personnel were lying on the deck or standing still, their eyes as empty of intelligence as the people turned to stone in the city of al-Qoreib in The Arabian Nights story. Benagur was flat on his back, eyes closed. Nuoli came out of her trance while Ramstan was trying to arouse al-Buraq. She looked startled on seeing him, though not as much as he had expected.
"I'm taking over again," he said. "We're going to attack the bolg. Get some tape. Bind the commodore's hands behind him. His ankles, too."
She said, "Aye, aye, sir," and went to a bulkhead compartment. At that moment, ship began responding to Ramstan's repeated orders. The deck quivered under her captain's feet.
After making sure that al-Buraq was fully recovered, Ramstan put the glyfa on the deck and then shot a barrage of orders at ship. Just before he had finished, he was interrupted by Nuoli. He gestured savagely at her to wait, and she did. Then he said, "What is it?"
"Commodore Benagur's dead, sir."
"What?"
He strode to the body, knelt down, opened the eyelids, and felt the neck pulse. When he rose, he said, "As soon as Doctor Hu recovers, have her examine Benagur. Maybe he's just in deep shock."
He did not think that that was true. The gray-blue color, the fixity of the pupils, and the stillness that reeked of death had convinced him that Benagur was no longer with them. Where was he? Perhaps voyaging on the waves of the thoughts of the Pluriverse, journeying towards the goal of the Sufis, becoming one with the One. That might be Ramstan's fancy, though. Most probably, Benagur had been struck down by a heart attack, not God-attack.
"May Allah be merciful to him," Ramstan murmured, unaware that he was voicing the ancient benediction.
It struck him then that . . . was it possible? . . . the Vwoordha might have somehow killed Benagur. They knew that the commodore was the greatest bar to Ramstan's regaining command. Would they have put Benagur out of the way if they had the means and they thought that he must be dispensed with? Yes. Anyone who had witnessed the deaths of two universes, who had seen the transiency of other life, mere ephemerae, surely would not hesitate about slaying one person.
No. He was getting too paranoiac, if indeed he had not always been so.
Yes. They would do it. It was realistic to think so, nothing irrational about it.
It was, however, useless to waste time considering the possibility. He had no time now, and in the future, if he had a future, he would never get the truth from the Vwoordha. Or, if they did tell him that he was wrong and they were not lying, how would he know?
The com-op was sitting up now and shaking her head. Ramstan called out, "Soong! Contact Lieutenant Davis in the launch! Tell her to get over here on the double! She's to come aboard!"