Kyr brought the bowl to his lips and drank. Spence and the others followed his example.
The strange liquid had no taste that Spence could describe not sweet, at least not as sweet as the first substance had been, but not bitter either. It touched his lips with a tingle like a mild current of electricity applied to his skin.
He rolled the effervescent drink on his tongue and felt as if he had tasted cool fire-the stuff seemed almost alive. He swallowed it and felt its playful sting all the way down. He drank again, more deeply this time and let the cool fire dance on his tongue. The effect made him want to laugh out loud or burst into song. He felt the inner fire seeping into his veins, quickening his heart. Suddenly he was more alert, more conscious than ever in his life.
He looked through new eyes at the world, and what a world he saw! Though it was night and dark he could see the tall slender ranks of bamboo all around, saw the firelight dancing on their thin shafts. He saw narrow, tapering shapes of the leaves with the delicate saw-toothed edge individually and precisely drawn and duplicated. Each was a thing of exquisite, inexplicable beauty.
Above the leaping flames of the fire he saw an insect. In his heightened vision it became suspended in motion, moving in slow, graceful sweeps as its tiny, transparent wings beat the air. He could see the glitter of light scatter across its multi-celled eyes, and the iridescent gleam of its carapace. He saw its legs dangling as fine threads beneath its sectioned body and the gentle curl of its antennae along its back.
Raising his eyes he saw the heavens, at first dark, now almost bursting with the light of countless stars-each star shining with clear, crystalline light, hard-edged and fine with beams piercing as needles.
Everywhere he looked he saw some new wonder, some commonplace revealed in a way he had never seen it before. The ordinary had been transformed into the extraordinary, the normal into the supernormal.
His friends still sat in the same positions as before, but he saw them wholly changed. He saw not their outward appearance only, but now he saw their inner selves unmasked. And each was larger, more fair and strong in every way. They sat wrapped in shimmering auras of gold and violet, as if clothed in living fire. In their faces he glimpsed unfathomable tenderness, and something he could only call wisdom burned out from their eyes, but a wisdom purer and finer than any born of Earth.
Spence looked at Kyr and saw not the elongated Martian but a creature not unlike himself and the others, resembling them and yet slightly different in subtle ways he could not name.
And where before Spence had felt radiant, he felt now as if he were throwing off sparks. He caught fleeting glimpses of the colored rays as they streamed from him to blend with the light of the others.
Spence felt full to overflowing with the joyous, scintillating, reverberating love he felt for his friends. He felt the power of their love for him and for one another, and it was a mingling of deep strong water which flowed out in all directions from the center, like a fountain or a spring with an endless source.
But he sensed another subtle yet still distinct presence too. This presence interwove all the others and even his own, to hold them and to overlay them at the same time without losing its own distinction. In that heightened awareness he sent out the fingers of his mind to examine this presence. He extended his mind toward it and tentatively touched it. Instantly his mind recoiled, staggered as if by a blazing bolt of lightning.
He knew then that he had touched the Source itself.
He felt dizzy and intoxicated, completely shattered by that single brief encounter. Then his mind began to fill with thoughts strange and wonderful and terrifying in their clarity and force.
He saw galaxies swinging in the frozen deeps of space, flung like pebbles on an endless beach; he heard the roar of silence drowned by the music of the galactic movement. The song of the stars-all heaven was filled with it!
He saw worlds upon worlds springing into existence before nameless suns. On each world life leaped, up, sprung from the voice that had awakened it. Plants of every variety, animals of every description, human creatures as different as could be imagined, yet all possessing the divine inner spark that was the immutable stamp of the Maker.
He saw his own world as one minute fleck against the darkness, and knew that his life, and the lives of every man who had ever lived, was but a single faltering step in the Great Dance of Heaven.
The Dance flowed and ebbed according to the will of the Maker, and all moved with him as he moved. There was not a solitary figure in the Dance that was not in his plan-from the seemingly random shuttling of atoms colliding with one another through the limitless reaches of empty night, to the aimless scrabblings of an insect in the dust, to the directionless meandering of a river of molten iron on a world no human eye would ever see all was embraced, upheld, encompassed by the Great Dance.
In the many there is One. At last Spence understood.
One Dance, but it took all space and time to describe it. One life, but it took all living things to define it. One mind, but it took all thought to know it. And still it could not be described, defined, or known in its entirety. He knew why Kyr and his kind called it the All-Being, for it transcended all that it touched even as it stooped to create it.
And though it spawned a billion worlds, gave voice to a trillion celestial lights, directed the course of a quintillion lives, the All-Being was One: inseparable, indivisible, indissoluble, immutable. All-Wise, All-Merciful, All-Holy, All-Knowing. Infinite and eternal…
The rest went spinning by Spence in a dizzying flood of thoughts and feelings and images of power and grandeur untold. He was left gasping and breathless by his single fleeting contact with the God he had long denied, but could deny no longer.
Spence bowed down before the Presence in all humility and surrender, acknowledging it as the first spontaneous act of worship he had ever performed. As he did so he knew that it knew him as a friend and that he had nothing to fear from it now or ever. He felt loads of guilt and shame roll away from him and he heard a voice inside his mind say, "Hear me, son of dust. Why have you run so long and so hard? What were you trying to escape? Your running is over. Enter into my rest."
"Yes, yes, yes," Spence heard his heart reply. "Please tell me how."
"Trust me. Look for me, and then follow."
Spence felt a rushing tide rise within himself flowing out toward the Presence, but still he knew the choice to be his alone. One word would halt the surge and stay it, or it would be released to flow forever without end.
"Yes," said Spence. "I will follow. Lead on."
23
…
RAMM STRODE PURPOSEFULLY INTO the room where his men were assembled and waiting. The talk in the room died as the chief of security glared coolly around him.
"All right," he said. "This won't take long. I have just received orders to proceed to phase two of Operation Clean Sweep. Therefore, the escapees must be apprehended at once. Squad leaders, you are to double your efforts. I want every sector double-checked. Work around the clock if you have to. I want them found now!-before they have a chance to stir up any trouble. Got it?"
There was a grumble of assent. "What are you waiting for? Move out!" said Ramm. The security force rose at once and proceeded to file out of the briefing room. In the guardroom beyond he could hear the squad leaders calling their groups together and organizing for a renewed search. He glanced around the empty room and then left by a side door.
When he arrived at AdSec he pushed his way past the receptionist and went directly into the director's office. Wermeyer's puzzled face glanced up from the wafer screen he had been gazing into.