Richard thought, I must distinguish illusion from reality, or the Ngaa will win.
Sometimes Richard landed in a new universe fully conscious, but more often he blacked out for some undetermined period before awakening in an unfamiliar and usually dangerous environment. This time he must not black out! The Ngaa knew he was coming.
Richard thought, I am awake now. I will stay awake.
The golden light was rushing past all the while in total silence, as if he were falling faster and faster into clouds of bright gas or dust. Falling. A terrible vertigo threatened to possess him, but he pushed it away with the thought, This is illusion.
The light seemed to hold faces, naked bodies. They flashed by like streaks of flame, gazing at him with gaunt anguish. Illusion, Richard thought again.
But their eyes were so haunted, their bodies so wasted with disease, starvation and age, their heads so skull-like. Could there be concentration camps here in the void between universes? Could there be Spanish Inquisitions? Plagues? Witch hunts? Illusion! Illusion!
But now he could begin to hear their voices, their wails of wordless agony.
Nothing but illusion!
Wordless? It seemed to Richard he could begin to understand them.
«Help!» they were crying. «Help! Help us!»
The golden light was shifting to a dull, dim blue, and Richard felt cold, an infinite cold that made his swim in the Thames seem summery.
«Help!» they called out again and again.
How could he refuse them? He was a human being, and so were they.
Or were they? An instant before he stretched out his hand to one of the passing figures, he noticed the teeth.
The teeth! Long, stained with brownish red.
These were not humans at all, but vampires.
«Help!» they howled, grinning, leering, mocking.
Illusion! Yet here between one space-time continuum and another, could illusions kill? Perhaps, if you believed in them.
I must not believe. I must not sleep.
Sleep!
At the thought he became suddenly weary, suddenly like an old man who can go no further, who must lie down and rest even if he never gets up again.
The light grew dimmer, redder. The headlong rush of the vampires slowed. Were they watching him with their glowing red eyes? Were they waiting for him to sleep?
I don't care. If only I can get a little rest.
Consciousness was fading. Time itself seemed to be coming to a stop.
Richard shook himself awake.
No! It's illusion! All illusion!
The vampires drew back, hissing with fury. There were so many of them! Thousands. Millions!
As Richard drifted through space, the vampires spread their wings and began wheeling about him in great flocks, great batlike clouds. The light was almost gone. Richard could not see them, only hear their immense and infinite flapping, their birdlike cries of hunger. One flew so close its wing brushed his arm.
Light returned, slowly, this time a soft amber glow. The swirling cloud of vampires retreated, gathered together, formed into the shape of a giant looming head. The head leaned toward him. Its eyes opened.
His nostrils were filled with a familiar perfume. The face was familiar too, a face he had never hoped to see again though he sometimes dreamed of it. And the soft soothing womanly voice was familiar: «Hush, Dickie baby. Don't be afraid.»
«Mama. «
«Everything's all right. Go to sleep, darling.»
Something within him wanted to believe, did believe. Sleep. Yes. Why not? But then his conscious mind jerked him awake.
He shouted, «Illusion! Illusion! You're nothing but an illusion!»
With an expression of infinite sadness, the face began to fade.
Chapter 15
Richard Blade materialized in the air and dropped to the floor of the vast egg-shaped room. He staggered, almost fell, then stood swaying as the intense pain in his head gradually subsided. He was in a fighting crouch, but he knew he could not fight, at least not yet. He thought, Where is the Ngaa?
He recognized the room he was in, though when he had been here last he had seen it through a veil of hypnotic illusion. The illusions had never been perfect. He had always been aware, in some part of his mind, of the reality that lay hidden behind each mirage, and now the sight of this room brought back to him the pattern of impressions he had gathered on his first visit. Most importantly, he knew where the Ngaa was, and what it was.
Ahead of him gaped a circular doorway and beyond that a long, dimly lit corridor. At the end of that corridor, in the exact center of this alien city, was a high-ceilinged inner chamber, bathed in a shimmering shadowless blue light. In the center of this chamber towered a delicate structure of colored glass, complex as a nautilus, ten times as tall as a man, glowing and pulsating, feeding off the limitless energies of the matter-antimatter engines beneath the floor.
This was the mind of the Ngaa, or minds, since it contained in electronically encoded form the united consciousness of all the creatures who lived on the Ngaa's planet when, eons ago, the sun was bright and the forests green. This mind, like a coral reef, was neither dead nor alive, but inhabited a shadow realm between life and death. It was conscious, yet at the same time only a kind of machine, a machine so much more complex than any machine man had yet built-more complex even than KALI-that it transcended the usual limitations of a machine and, in its way, thought and had something we might call a personality.
Blade remembered…
Blade remembered the gleaming, everchanging haze that drifted around this tower of glass, the haze that was an electromagnetic field, an almost-living cloud of energy. This cloud could move far from the brain, but could not exist without it. This cloud could shape itself into the semblance of anything, even a human being. This cloud could manifest itself in the world of mankind wherever it could find a human brain stimulated enough to serve as a gateway. The rituals of ancient half-forgotten religions could open a gateway, the fear and tension of war could open a gateway, the anger of a rejected child could open a gateway, but nothing could open a gateway as wide as KALI.
Blade remembered…
Blade remembered blank-eyed humans, the sons and daughters of those who had been snatched here by the Ngaa to serve as hypnotic slaves. He remembered the children of Ambrose Bierce and Amelia Earhart, born in the subbasements of the city, doomed to spend their entire lives there laboring for the Ngaa, hypnotic slaves who would never know normal consciousness. Were they still human? Or were they zombies who, never having developed minds of their own, would die without the Ngaa to tell them to eat and sleep and breathe?
Blade turned to the right, to the left, crouching, growing stronger, recovering from the shock of transition from one universe to another, his headache almost gone.
He thought, Why doesn't the Ngaa attack?
He glanced behind him.
There was nothing there but an immense window running from the floor to the peak of the dome. Beyond the window hung the dull red oval of the sun in a sky of dim violet, pink and dirty orange. Far below lay the black bulk of the planet. Between stretched the bright dust of an unfamiliar spiral nebula seen almost edge on. Through the soles of his bare feet Richard could detect the throbbing of the mighty force fields that kept this flying city suspended above the planet's surface. The faint rumble of these force fields was the only sound, except for his tense breathing.