But I thought I understood the word. I prayed that I did, because if I did not, this might all be for nothing.
I became the universe again, embodying all Creation. I took on the semblance of bodily form, albeit macrocosmically. I was four-eyed and nine-boned, and my eyes were eyes of fire and my bones the rocks of ages, and my heart was the Heart Divine, my blood seething with the venom of dragons and my semen with the ghosts of all men who had ever been and all who were to come.
As above, so below . . . and I felt this universe reflected in a mode of being much tinier, in a cage of absurd flesh. This was more than Creation. This was Encounter, and its beginning was a word.
And the word, I believed, was help!
Or, to put it more aptly: HELP!
HELP!
H-E-L-P!
It was not I who was screaming, but something much more terrible, and much more helpless.
It was Prometheus, and murdered Pan. In that scream was the waking of Brahma from his ageless dream. In that scream was the pain that Odin felt when he tore out his eye and sold it: the price of his godly wisdom. In that unbearable scream was the breath of Gotterdammerung, come to end the deep cold of the fimbulwinter, come to disturb Valhalla and bring the gods themselves to their meeting with destiny.
But when the gods cry for help, what strength can mere mortals bring to their aid?
31
I came round, and jerked forward convulsively, pulling my head away from the hood and its grasping spiderweb of intrusive connections. They slid from my skin with a dull, tearing sensation.
My head was buzzing with confusion. I felt somebody grab me, but I wouldn’t let myself fall back. Instead, I lurched further forward, thrusting myself out of the chair altogether. I would certainly have fallen if the other person had not been holding me, but the arms which had gripped me were strong, and helped me to stand.
I remembered the gunshot then, and gritted my teeth against the possibility of authentic pain, but none came. It was not I, then, who had been shot.
I opened my eyes, and looked around.
My eyes met other eyes—pale blue eyes, perhaps sky blue eyes. But these were bright and warm, not pale and cold. There was yellow hair too, but in such abundance!
I blinked. I was not prepared to see those eyes, or that remarkable halo of blonde hair. I looked her up and down, to make sure that it really was her. All the curves were in the right place. The only thing which didn’t make sense was that she was wearing the uniform of a Scarid trooper, a couple of sizes too baggy.
I looked around the room.
The Scarid officer was lying flat on his back, arms akimbo, with a bullet-wound in the middle of his forehead. The other trooper who’d come into the room with us was also quite dead, in a vast pool of blood which had leaked out of the chasm in his chest, apparently some little time ago.
John Finn stood looking on, a couple of metres away, leaning on the chair—now empty—which had earlier contained the body of 994-Tulyar. He was no longer holding a gun, and he no longer looked smug. He was watching me, seemingly less than delighted by the fact of my recovery.
It was sheer joy to be able to say, in real English words: “What the hell happened?”
“I disposed of the two outside,” said Susarma Lear, “then borrowed one uniform and both their guns. These two weren’t even watching the door. I’d have blasted him, too, but I wasn’t quite sure which side he was on, so he had time to drop his gun and surrender. Wise move.”
“How did you get out of the egg? Myrlin said you wouldn’t be ready for another twenty-four hours or so.”
“Search me. There was some kind of power failure, I think. Woke me up. For a minute or two, I thought I was trapped, but then I got the lid to roll back. I got out into the corridor, and started exploring. I just happened upon the two soldier-boys by sheer good luck.”
“But you weren’t armed!” I protested. “You didn’t even have any clothes on!”
“That was the advantage I had,” she said. “If you’d have been there, you’d have seen a colonel in the Star Force. But all they saw was a helpless naked woman. They didn’t have a chance.”
I shook my head in wonderment. Poor, stupid barbarians. I looked around again. “What happened to Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Not to mention the Tetron, and ...” I didn’t complete the sentence.
“Myrlin?” she said.
“That’s the one,” I confirmed.
“I thought he was dead,” she said, in an ominously amiable tone.
“Isn’t he?” I was able to counter.
“Apparently,” she said, “that was touch and go. Your two furry friends rushed him away to one of those magic eggs. Tulyar too. They reckon that there’s a very good chance of restoring them to health, despite their condition.”
“They’re good with things like that,” I confirmed, disentangling myself from her steely grip now that I felt able to stand by myself. “Have they told you yet that you’re immortal?”
She cocked a disbelieving eyebrow. “Am I?” she said.
When I nodded in reply she turned to look at Finn.
“Him too, I guess,” I said. “Depressing thought, isn’t it?”
Finn looked at us both as if we were making fun of him. The news should have cheered him up, but he just wasn’t in the mood. I supposed that later, when it sank in—and when he began to believe it—it would make him feel quite elated, especially when he remembered how close the colonel had come to blowing his brains out.
The grey walls began to mist over. The ghosts were back. Susarma Lear and Finn looked uneasy as the silvery shapes began to coalesce, but I was pleased to see them. The Nine were back in control—in partial control, at least—of their body. Sailors on strange seas of fate, now safely back in port. I hoped that they were safe, though it seemed that they hadn’t regained their former power and composure.
“R-r-rouss-ss-sseau,” said the whispering voice, no clearer than before, “w-w-e kn-n-n-now-w-w y-o-o-ou n-n- n-now-w-w. ...”
Safe they were, it seemed, though by no means entirely recovered from their ordeal.
As before, the threads of light tried to settle into the forms of faces—nine faces, overlapping and drifting through one another, filling the room with their immensity.
They no longer had the face of Susarma Lear, though.
Now they had my face.
I heard the colonel’s sharp intake of breath, and saw John Finn silently appealing for help to some non-existent agent of mercy. I smiled. It was an impressive effect, and I felt curiously proud. But then I thought about what they’d said. They knew me, now. They’d been inside me, and in some curious sense they were still inside me. A shiver ran down my spine, and I almost expected to hear alien voices inside my head ... to discover my subvocalised thoughts turning into a weird dialogue, or worse—a Babel of confused conversations. But that wasn’t the way it was. It wasn’t that kind of “being in me.” I was still myself, and as far as I could tell, I was still the self I always had been. Whatever extras I had acquired weren’t yet manifesting themselves as other ghosts in my machine. I didn’t doubt, though, that they would manifest themselves, eventually.
Like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, I had experienced revelation. I had been converted. The spirit was in me, and the word was in me. And the word was. . . .
My senses reeled, and the colonel had to catch me again, to steady me. She was looking at me with genuine concern—almost as if she liked me. Not that I was about to believe that. I’d already taken in my ration of six impossibilities before breakfast, and now I was the hardest- headed sceptic of them all.