Brandy. He savored its sweet smell like perfume, then tipped up the flask to drink from it. Alcohol burned in his throat as it went down, then spread out in warm waves from his stomach. One swallow. Two. Then he forced himself to put it down, even though his soul was screaming for more. He capped it, and handed it back to the Patriarch. His hands were no longer shaking as badly as they had been.
“You’ll have to lead us,” the Patriarch told him. “There’s no other way.”
He nodded. The older man clasped his shoulder once more, then turned away and left him. The two guards looked at him with half-veiled curiosity.
You’ll have to lead us.
Warmed by the alcohol, Andrys Tarrant shivered.
38
Images Cascading one into another, too fast and furious to separate. Visions and sensations tangled together so tightly there is no way to pick one out from all the others, no means of absorbing the storm of images except as one chaotic whole.
Stars.
Space.
Fire.
Blackness.
“What the vulk... ?” Damien’s throat was raw and his lungs constricted from sulfur fumes. The words made it past his lips just long enough for him to hear them, then they, too, were drowned in a deluge of alien sensations.
Loss.
Despair.
Fear.
Desperation.
Oh, my children, my children....
“Karril?”
No answer.
The ship hurtles through the blackness of space like a spark of life, its substance hot in the emptiness. Its walls are not flesh but a living equivalent, energies bound in the place of matter, the skin of a sentient creature that knows nothing of blood or of bone or even of material tools ... but a creature nonetheless. Born for this mission, raised for it, trained for it, the creature-that-is-a-ship hurtles through the wasteland between the stars, her precious children gathered inside her....
“Karril!”
Each child bred for a single purpose, focused and pure in its substance. One to read the stars and choose a course. One to gather up the thin energies of the void and make food from them. One to steer and one to record and one to dream and one—more precious than any other—to carry the patterns of inheritance of their race, so that when the time is right, a whole new world can be peopled with her children.
He had a spasm of coughing and for a moment the images scattered. His lungs were refusing to admit enough air. The images that reformed in his head when the spasm was done were swimming with black spots.
How fragile they are, her children, her crew! How they struggle to adapt to this new place, how they fight to serve her ... all in vain. They were not made for this strange planet, where forces that have no name wreak havoc with every living process. First the seeker dies, and then the dreamer, and the gatherer, and so on through all their number. Child after child submitting in his turn, either to a natural death or to such mutation that she herself must kill them to keep the family pure.
The veil. It had fallen from his face, leaving him exposed to Shaitan’s poisons. With a shaking hand he pushed it back into place, praying that it would ease the constriction of his lungs as well as protecting him from fresh assault. And it seemed to. Thank God, it seemed to.
The death of the breeder is the most devastating loss of all. Without his storehouse of reproductive patterns she will live out eternity on this hostile planet without hope, without purpose, her only comfort the memories that slowly fade as year fades into year, century into century. Periodically she wonders if it might not be more peaceful to follow them all into death, to end her suffering forever. But though the fantasy of suicide is tempting, it isn’t really a choice for her. Like all her people she has been born for a purpose, and hers is to give life to others, not to take her own.
And then, when hope has been lost for so long that she’s all but forgotten the flavor of it, she becomes aware of something new on the planet. Not a creature born to its hateful currents, but a stranger, like herself. A traveler. In joy she reaches out to it, to the thousands of individuals that make up its racial consciousness ... and comes up with silence. Painful, hateful silence! The newcomers can’t hear her. They lack the senses. The structure of their life is so different from her own that interface between them is all but impossible. Surrounded by a host of creatures who would welcome her as a fellow explorer on this hostile planet, she is more alone than ever.
The images were all over him. Not only before his eyes, but in his brain as well. Images so alien that at first he could hardly interpret them, but one by one they sorted themselves out so that he could understand. And he trembled inside, as that understanding came.
She will try one last time. In the period before she came to this planet she had given birth to children who would serve her needs: she will do the same here, in order to reach these people. She has to wait long years for one to come close, for the place that best supports her own life is hostile to theirs. But at last one comes, and she lifts the pattern of his soul from his flesh with a mother’s sure skill, and uses it to make a new kind of child. Half-breed, maverick, enough like her to understand her need, enough like this new species to communicate with it directly. Alas, though the theory is sound, the result is disappointing. Her first child is so like her that its father-species can’t even see it. The second is the same. The third is apparent to them, but can find no common language with which to communicate. Again and again she tries, using those creatures that approach her resting place as templates for her experiments. She gives birth to children so like herself that they share her own limitations, and to children so like their fathers that they lack the ability to see her at all, and to dozens who have qualities of both, but never in the correct proportion. She gives them the ability to alter perception, so that they can bridge the vast conceptual gap between their parent races, but the ones who are strongest in that area have no real understanding of what she is, or why they have been born. Still she tries, over and over, each time new material makes its way to her domain, hoping against hope that someday the right combination will be found... .
And it has been found, but not as she had imagined. Not in the soul of one child but in the presence of many, each one interpreting for the brothers most like him, taking her memories and her hopes and her fears and clothing them in a framework of alien understanding—of human understanding—until at last, in the brain of a dying sorcerer, they are translated so that men might comprehend them—
He pushed himself up onto his elbows and stared toward Shaitan’s peak. The mother of the Iezu had completely enveloped Gerald Tarrant’s body. Images played along her surface and throughout her substance, human and alien both. Stars, faces, mists and darkness, color and light and a thousand shapes without form or name. An attempt at some kind of visual language? Or perhaps simply the reflections of all the humans she had courted, as she plucked from each a single strand of consciousness to guide her procreative efforts.
He looked at Karril, kneeling by his side, and saw in the Iezu’s expression such unadulterated shock that only one interpretation was possible. He didn’t know. None of them knew.
“You’re human,” Damien whispered. The words made his throat burn.