Gina gaped at him with a mixture of disbelief and confusion. He came over to her, assured, confident, mocking behind the laughing eyes, and offered his arm. “Excuse us. May I have my wife back?” he said to Franklin.
“But of course.” Franklin bowed his head and moved back. They moved away.
“What are you doing here, Larry?” Gina hissed.
“You brought me here. I’m just obliging.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe yourself, then.”
“Why do you always insist on acting like an asshole?”
“Why did you marry an asshole?”
“That was a long time ago. It’s been over between us for years.”
“Only because you made it that way.”
“We weren’t suited.”
“Wrong. We could have had fun. You had the curiosity, but you didn’t know how to handle it. So you turned the problem into something else.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gina told him.
“Oh no? Come on, you’re not really interested in listening to this bunch all night. Let’s move the night along.”
The reception room and the guests vanished. Larry was dominating the situation, the way he always had. Gina started to rebel, the way she always had. Why had it always had to be his way?
They had been transported upstairs to the master bedroom. Larry’s jacket and tie hung on a chair, and he was standing by her. Another of his wives was lying propped against pillows on the bed. She smiled invitingly, her breasts and legs outlined through a thin, white robe that contrasted with her dark hair. Larry grinned at Gina challengingly. Despite herself, she felt an excitement rising inside her.
The woman stretched out a hand. “It’s only a dream, Gina. We can do anything we like. Haven’t you always been curious about everything?”
It was Sandy.
Gina felt Larry’s arm slide around her waist. She pulled back. “No, I don’t want this.”
“Oh, but you do,” VISAR’s voice said from somewhere distant.
Sandy started untying the belt of her robe.
“Get me away from here!”
And Gina was back in the coupler cubicle. She tore herself up from the recliner and fled into the corridor. Farther along, she passed Alan and Keith, who were just leaving the bar; she did not even see them. They exchanged baffled looks, shrugged, and continued on their way.
Ten minutes later, her chest was still thumping as she sat on her bed, smoking a tranquilizer. Yes, she thought. She had a pretty good idea of what could have deranged a planetful of Jevlenese. Small wonder that half of them seemed to have lost touch with reality.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In a rocky hollow below the mountainside, Thrax stood before the Rock of Decision, staring at the stone pillar that rose almost to the level of his head and concentrating his inner energy into his hand as he held it before him. To one side, the Master, Shingen-Hu, looked on impassively, while the three other initiates of the school sat watching from behind and the monks stood in a silent circle, projecting sympathetic thought rays.
“Believe now,” Shingen-Hu told him. “There must be no holding back. Let no part of you doubt.”
This had to be the moment of complete faith. Thrax focused all the effort that he had learned to muster. His hand glowed, then shone with an inner light.
“Now!” the Master commanded.
Thrax drove his hand against the solid rock. The rock yielded, and his hand passed through. He held it steady, inside the pillar, feeling the strange sensation of directed energy coursing through him, and the exhilaration of matter being subordinated to his will.
The power was starting to ebb. If he faltered now, the rock would rematerialize with all the crushing force that bound its particles together. Gathering his remaining strength, he passed his hand slowly sideways, causing the rock to part before and reconstitute itself behind, flowing over him as if it were water, until his hand emerged unscathed from the other side of the pillar. The glow flickered and died. Exhausted but ecstatic, Thrax stood while Shingen-Hu placed across his shoulder a sash bearing the emblem of the purple spiral. He then moved to take his place among the new adepts on one side of the circle.
Later, when the rites were over, the new adepts sat facing the Master across a hearth of stones in which a fire had been lit. From the night sky above, Nieru looked down upon his own. A few filaments of currents traced their lines toward it-Thrax had learned to see them by now. In earlier times, the longer-established monks said, to the eyes of an adept the entire vista of the skies had writhed and twisted in fantastic patterns of glowing currents.
“What shall we find in Hyperia?” one of the novices asked the Master. Shingen-Hu had seen the visions borne by the currents.
“It will happen suddenly,” Shingen-Hu answered. “You will emerge as a new being, a being born to the ways of Hyperia. All will be new and strange.”
“Is it true that madness lurks to afflict the unwary?” another asked.
“There are risks. You will be tested. The being which thou art must subdue the being which thou strivest to become. Madness indeed lies in wait for those who ride up on the currents, but whose training is not complete. Beware those of divided minds, whom the conflict rages within. Seek strength from Nieru when troubles assail.”
“What?” Thrax queried. “Does Nieru exist, then, even in the world beyond Waroth, also?”
“Seek his sign of the purple spiral,” Shingen-Hu replied. “For that shall be the sign under which his followers gather. Know then that these are thy kind, and let that be the source of thy strength.”
“And will they teach us of the Hyperian magic?” the next asked.
“Hyperia will teach you its own magic.”
“Magical laws?” Thrax said. “Artifacts that repeat? Objects that spin?”
“Artifacts beyond your wildest imaginings,” the Master answered. “Everywhere? So does Hyperian magic extend over the whole world?”
“The whole world… and places far beyond, and across the voids between. Hyperians journey among many, magical worlds.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ayultha, the leader of the Jevlenese cult that called itself the Spiral of Awakening and used the device of a purple spiral as its emblem, had come to Shiban. It was the same Ayultha who had led the demonstration in the city of Barusi on the southern continent, which had led to Garuth’s calling Hunt.
The SoA had been founded over two hundred years previously by a woman called Sykha, a hitherto unheard-of office clerk who had undergone an abrupt personality change. The sect’s basic creed was an involved doctrine of reincarnation, which held that the individual developed through a series of “phases” of existence on successively higher planes, each one representing a step farther along a transition that progressed away from the purely material and mechanistic, and toward the spiritual and willful. The series of lives experienced in this universe, or plane, therefore added up to merely the preparation that was necessary to proceed to the next phase. Everybody had thus lived in other, lower phases in other forms before emerging into the realm of existence as presently perceived, and after a number of cycles at the human level, which could vary and depended on how diligently the SoA’s teachings were attended to and practiced, they would go on to enter higher ones. The early theoreticians of the movement had given it all a scientific-sounding basis by tying it in to the transitions of physical particles between i-space and normal space as described by the physics of the Thuriens.
The initial appearance of Ayultha to the faithful at the start of his tour of the Shiban area would also be the first event to be held in the arena of a just-completed sports complex, west of the city, next to the three-level highway connecting the center to the spaceport at Geerbaine. The complex had been built at their own initiative by a combination of public and private Jevlenese agencies since the Ganymean takeover of the planet’s administration. Thus, it had come to symbolize the policy of self-help that the Ganymeans were trying to encourage.