The two men left hurriedly, leaving Dalt alone with a feeling of satisfaction. It was gratifying to have his idea accepted so enthusiastically, an idea that was totally his. He had relied too much on Pard’s computer-speed analyses in recent centuries. It felt good to give birth to an idea again. The lines between his own mental processes and Pard’s had often blurred and it had at times been difficult to discern where an idea had originated.
With the thought of Pard, a familiar presence seemed to waft through the room and touch him.
"Pard?" he called aloud, but the sensation was gone. An old memory and nothing more.
Pard, he thought as he clenched his golden hand into a fist before his eyes. What did they do to you, old friend?
V
FIRST AN AWFUL WRENCHING SENSATION, at once numbing and excruciatingly painful, and then Pard’s awareness expanded at a cataclysmic rate. The beach was left behind, as were Clutch and its star, then the entire Milky Way, then all the galaxies.
He had been cut free from Dalt. He had no photoreceptors, yet he could see; he had no vibratory senses, and yet he could hear. He was now pure, unhindered awareness. He soared giddily, immaterially. Spatial relationships were suddenly meaningless and he was everywhere. The universe was his…
… or was it?
He felt a strain… subtle at first but steadily growing more pronounced… a stretching of the fibers of his consciousness… thoughts were becoming fuzzy… he was becoming disoriented. The tension of cosmic awareness was rapidly becoming unbearable as the infinite scope and variety of reality threatened to crush him. All the worlds, all the lifeforms, and all the vast empty spaces in between pressed upon him with a force that threatened sudden and irrevocable madness. He had to focus down…
focus down…
focus down…
He was on the beach again. Dalt lay sprawled on the sand, alive but unconscious. Pard watched as the marauders made a hasty retreat toward their hole in space. The question of their identity still piqued his curiosity and he decided to find out where they were going. Why not? Dalt was safe and he was gloriously free to follow his whims to the ends of existence.
He hesitated. The bond that had united their minds for twelve centuries was broken… but other bonds remained. It would be strange, not having Dalt around. He found the indecision irritating and steeled himself to go.
("Goodbye, Steve,") Pard finally said to the inert form he had suddenly outgrown. ("No regrets, I hope.") His awareness shifted toward the closing vortex. Like a transformed chrysalis departing its cocoon, he left Dalt behind.
Within the vortex he found the deadly silence of complete vacuum and recognized the two-dimensional grayness of subspace. The attackers activated their propulsion units and seemed to know where they were going. Pard followed.
Abruptly, they passed into real space again, onto a beach not unlike the one on Clutch. There was no mist here, however. The air was dry and clear under a blazing sun that Pard classed roughly as GO. There were other differences: The dunes had been fused and were filled with machinery for kilometers in either direction up and down the coast, and more was under construction.
He turned his attention to the inhabitants of the beach. As the remnant of the assault force landed on the beach, each member stripped off his or her vacsuit and bowed toward a mass of rock on the sea’s horizon.
They were most definitely not human, nor did they belong to any race Pard had ever seen. He allowed his awareness to expand to locate his position relative to Occupied Space. The discovery was startling.
He was in the far arm of the Milky Way, beyond the range of even the deepest human probe, sixty thousand light-years away from the edge of Occupied Space. And yet the attackers had traversed the distance with little more than a jet-assisted flying leap into subspace. The ability to extend a warp to such a seemingly impossible degree, from atmosphere to atmosphere with pinpoint accuracy, indicated a level of technological sophistication that was frightening.
He focused down again and allowed his awareness to drift through the worlds of these beings. They were oxygen breathers and humanoid with major and minor differences. On the minor side was the lack of a nose, which was replaced by a single oblong, vertical olfactory orifice. A major variation was the presence of two accessory appendages originating from each axilla. These were obviously vestigial, being supported internally by cartilage and equipped with only minute amounts of atrophic muscle. Both sexes – another minor variation here was the placement of male gonads within the pelvis – adorned the appendages with paints and jewelry.
After observing a small, hivelike community for a number of local days, he concluded that from all outward appearances, this was a quiet and contented race. They laughed, cried, loved, hated, fought, cheated, stole, bought, sold, produced, and consumed. The children played, the young adults courted and eventually married – the race was strictly monogamous – had more children, took care of them, and were in turn cared for when age made them feeble.
A seemingly docile people. Why were they crossing an entire galaxy to slaughter and maim a race that didn’t even know they existed?
Pard searched on, focusing on world after world. He found their culture to be oppressively uniform despite the fact that it spanned an area greater than that of the Federation and the old Tarkan Empire combined. He came upon the ruins of three other intelligent races they had contacted. These races had not been assimilated, had not been subjugated, had not been enslaved. They had been annihilated. Every last genetic trace had been obliterated. Pard recoiled at the incongruous racial ferocity of these creatures and searched on for a reason.
The most consistent feature of the culture was the ubiquitous representation of the visage of a member of their own race. A holo of it was present in every room of every hive and a large bust occupied a traditional corner of the main room. There were huge bas-reliefs protruding from the sides of buildings and carved heads overhanging the intersections of major thoroughfares. The doorways to the temples in which one fifth of every day was spent in obeisant worship were formed in the shape of the face. The faithful entered through the mouth.
And there in the temples, perhaps, was a clue to the mysterious ferocity of this race. The rituals were intricate and laborious but the message came through: "We are the chosen ones. All others offend the sight of the Divine One."
Pard expanded again and refocused on the mother world, his port of entry, the planet from which the attacks were launched. He noted that there was now a much larger contingent of troops on the beach: they were bivouacked in half a dozen separate areas.
Multiple attacks? he wondered. Or a single massive one? He realized he had lost all track of time and his thoughts strayed to Steve. Was he all right or had he been caught in another attack? It was highly unlikely but still a possibility.
He vacillated between investigating that revered mound of rock in the sea and checking on Dalt. The former was a curiosity; the latter, he realized, would soon become a compulsion.
Had he possessed lungs and vocal cords, he would have sighed as he expanded to encompass the entire Milky Way; he then allowed a peculiar homing instinct to guide him to Steven Dalt, who was sitting alone in a small room on Fed Central.
He watched him for a few moments, noting that he seemed to be in good health and good spirits. Then Dalt suddenly sat erect. "Pard?" he called. He had somehow sensed his presence and Pard knew it was time to leave again.
Back on the alien mother world, he concentrated on his previous target – the island. It was immediately evident that this was not a natural formation but an artifact cut out of the mainland and set upon a ridge on the ocean floor. The island was a single huge fortress-temple shaped in the form of what he now knew to be the face of the race’s goddess; the structures upon it formed the features of the face. An altogether cyclopean feat of engineering.
He allowed his awareness to flow down wide, high-ceilinged corridors tended by guards armed with bows and spears – an insa
ne contrast to the troops gathered on the mainland. The corridors were etched with the history of the race and its godhead. In an instant, Pard knew all of the goddess’s past, knew what she had been to humanity and what she had planned for it. He knew her. Even had a name for her. They had met… thousands of times.
He sank deep into the structure and came across banks of sophisticated energy dampers – that explained the primitive weapons on the guards. Rising to sea level again, he found himself within a tight-walled maze and decided to see where it led.
He finally found her at the very heart of the edifice, in a tiny room at the end of the maze. Her body was pale, corpulent, and made only minimal voluntary movements. But she was clean and well cared for – a small army of attendants saw to that.
She was old, nearly as old as mankind itself. A genetic freak with a cellular consciousness much like Pard had possessed when in Steve’s body, which had kept her physically alive and functioning over the ages. Unlike Dalt/Pard, however, the goddess had only one consciousness, but that was a prodigious one, incorporating psionic powers of tremendous range through which she had dominated her race for much of its existence, shaping its goals and fueling its drives until they had merged and became one with her will.
Unfortunately, the goddess had been a full-blown psychotic for the past three thousand years.
She hated and feared anything that might question her divine supremacy. That was why three other races had already perished. She even distrusted her own worshipers, had made them move her ancient temple out to sea and insisted that her guards don the garb and accouterments of the days of her girlhood.
Pard was aghast at the scope of the tragedy before him. Here was a race that had color and variety in its past. Now, however, through the combination of a psionically-augmented religion and a philosophy of racial supremacy, it had been turned into a hive of obedient drones with their lives and culture centered around their goddess-queen. Any independent minds born into the race were quickly culled out once they betrayed their unorthodox tendencies. The reasoning was obvious: The will of the goddess was more than the law of the land – it was divine in origin. To question was heresy; to transgress was sacrilege. The result was a corrupt version of natural selection on an intellectual level. The docile mind that found comfort in orthodoxy survived and thrived, while the reasoner, the questioner, the wavemaker, the rebel, the iconoclast, and the skeptic became endangered species.
As Pard watched her, the goddess lifted her head and opened her eyes. A line about "a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" went through his mind. She sensed his scrutiny. Her psi abilities made her aware of his presence, tenuous as it was.
She threw a thought at him. It was garbled, colored with rage, couched in madness, but the context could be approximated as:
You again! I thought I had destroyed you!
Enjoying her impotent anger, Pard wished he had the power to send a laugh pealing through the chamber to further arouse her paranoia. As it was, he’d have to be content with observing her thrashing movements as she tried to pinpoint his location.
Pard’s awareness began to expand gradually and he soon found himself around as well as within the temple. He tried to focus down again but was unable to do so. He continued to expand at an accelerated rate. He was encircling the planet now.
For the first time since he had awakened to sentience in Dalt’s brain, Pard knew fear. He was out of control. Soon his consciousness would be expanded and attenuated to the near-infinite limits he had experienced immediately after being jolted from Steve’s body – permanently. And he knew that would be the end of him. His mind would never be able to adjust to it; his intelligence would crumble. He’d end up a nonsentient life force drifting through eternity. It had long been theorized that consciousness could not exist without a material base. He had proven that it could – but not for long. He had to set up another base. He tried desperately to enter the mind of one of the goddess’s subjects but found it closed to him. The same with the lower lifeforms.
All minds were closed to him… except perhaps one… .
He headed for home.
VI
DALT AWOKE WITH A START and bolted upright in bed.
("Hello, Steve.")
A cascade of conflicting emotions ran over him: joy and relief at knowing Pard was alive and at feeling whole again, anger at the nonchalance of his return. But he bottled all emotions.
What happened? Where’ve you been?
Pard gave him a brief but complete account in the visual, auditory, and interpretive mélange possible only with mind-to-mind communication. When it was over, it almost seemed to Dalt that Pard had never been gone. There were a few subtle differences, however.
Do you realize that you called me "Steve"? You’ve been addressing me by my surname for the last century or so.
("You seem more like the old Steve.")
I am. Immortality can become a burden at times, but facing the alternative for a while is a sobering experience.
("I know,") Pard replied, remembering the panic that had gripped him before he had managed to regain the compact security of Dalt’s mind. They were now welded together – permanently.
"But back to the matter at hand," Dalt said aloud. "You and I now know what’s behind these assaults. The question that bothers me most is: Why us? I mean, if she wants to send her troops out to kill, surely there are other races closer to her than sixty thousand light-years."
("Perhaps the human mind is especially sensitive to her, I don’t know. Who can explain a deranged mind? And believe me, this one is deranged! She’s blatantly paranoid with xenophobia, delusions of grandeur, and all the trappings. Steve, this creature actually believes she is divine. It’s not a pose with her. And as far as her race is concerned, she is god."
"Pity the atheist in a culture like that."
("There are none! How can there be? When these beings speak of their deity, they’re not referring to an abstraction or an ephemeral being. Their goddess is incarnate and she’s with them everywhere. She can maintain a continuous contact with her race – it’s not control or anything like that, but a hint of presence. She has power none of them possess and she doesn’t die! She was with them when they were planet-bound, she was with them when they made their first leap into space. She has guided them throughout their entire recorded history. It’s not a simple thing to say ‘no’ to all that.")
"All right, so she’s divine as far as they’re concerned, but how can she change an entire race into an army of berserk killers? She must have some sort of mind control."
("I can see you have no historical perspective on the power of religion. Human history is riddled with atrocities performed in the names of supposedly benign gods whose only manifestations were in books and tradition. This creature is not merely a force behind her culture… she is her culture. Her followers attack and slaughter because it is divine will.")
Dalt sighed. "Looks like we’re really up against the wall. We were planning to send probes through the passages to try to locate the star system where the assaults originate so we could launch a counteroffensive. Now it makes no difference. Sixty thousand light-years is an incomprehensible distance in human terms. If there was just some way we could get to her, maybe we could give her a nice concentrated dose of the horrors. That’d shake her up."
("I’m afraid not, Steve. You see, this creature is the source of the horrors.")
Dalt sat in stunned silence, then: "You always hinted that the horrors might be more than just a psychological disorder."
("You must admit, I’m rarely wrong.")
"Yes, rarely wrong," Dalt replied tersely. "And frequently insufferable. But again: Why?"
("As I mentioned before, the human mind appears to be extraordinarily sensitive to her powers. She can reach across an entire galaxy and touch one of them. I believe she’s been doing that for ages. At first she may only have been able to leave a vague impression. Long ago she was probably probing this arm of the gal
axy and left an image within a fertile mind that started the murderous Kali cult in ancient India. Its members worshipped a many-armed goddess of death that bears a striking resemblance to our enemy. So for all practical purposes, we might as well call her Kali, since her given name is a mishmash of consonants.")
"Whatever happened to the cult?"
("Died out. Perhaps she went back to concentrating on her own race, which was probably moving into space at about that time, and no doubt soon became busy with the task of annihilating the other races they encountered along the way.
("Then came a hiatus and her attention returned to us. Her powers had grown since last contact and although she was still unable to control a human mind, she found she could inundate it with such a flood of terror that the individual would withdraw completely from reality.")
"The horrors, in other words."
("Right. She kept this up, biding her time until her race could devise a means of bridging the gap between the two races. They did. The apparatus occupies the space of a small town and is psionically activated. You know the rest of the story.")
"Yeah," Dalt replied, "and I can see what’s coming, too. She’s toying with us, isn’t she? Playing a game of fear and terror, nibbling at us until we turn against each other. Humiliation, demoralization – they’re dirty weapons."
("But not her final goal, I fear. Eventually she’ll tire of the game and just wipe us out. And with ease! All she has to do is open the passage, slip through a short-timed planetary bomb, close the passage, and wait for the bang.")
"In two standard days," Dalt said in a shocked whisper, "she could destroy every inhabited planet in Occupied Space!"
("Probably wouldn’t even take her that long. But we’ve quite a while to go before it comes to that. She’s in no hurry. She’ll probably chip away at us for a few centuries before delivering the coup de grace.") Pard went silent for a while. ("Which reminds me: I saw a major assault force gathered on the beach. If she really wanted to strike a demoralizing blow…”)