Dalt sank into a chair and shook his head. "Dizzy!" he muttered.
("Yeah. It's a long way from the pelvis to the brain. Also, there's some spasm in the aortic arch that I'm having trouble controlling. But we'll be all right.")
I'll have to trust you on that. When do we start with the horrors?
("Now. I'll block you out because I'm not sure that even you can take this dose.")
I was hoping you'd say that, Dalt thought with relief, and watched everything fade into formless grayness.
And from the bloody, punctured body slumped in the chair there began to radiate evil, terror, horror. A malignant trickle at first, then a steady stream, then a gushing torrent.
The men below stopped their search and began to scream.
XV
Dalt finished inspecting the lower rooms and was fully satisfied that the two gurgling, drooling, blank-eyed creatures that had once been Kanlos and Hinter were no longer a threat to his life and his secret. He walked outside into the cool night air in a vain attempt to soothe his laboring right lung and noticed a form slumped in the bushes.
It was Giff. From the contorted position of his body it was evident that he had fallen from the roof and broken his neck.
"Looks like this Son of The Healer couldn't follow directions," Dalt said. "Must've waited up on the roof and then went crazy when the horrors began and ran over the edge."
("Lot's son.")
"What's that supposed to mean?"
("Nothing. Just a distorted reference to an episode in an ancient religious book,") Pard said, then switched the subject. ("You know, it's amazing that there's actually a cult of Healer-followers awaiting his return.")
"Not really so amazing. We made quite an impression ... and left a lot undone."
("Not because we wanted to. There was outside interference.")
"Right. But that won't bother us now, with the war going on."
("You want to go back to it, don't you?") "Yes, and so do you."
("Guess you're right. I'd like to learn to probe a little deeper this time. And maybe find out whoever or whatever's behind the horrors.")
"You've hinted at that before. Care to explain?"
("That's all it is, I'm afraid: a hint ... a glimpse of something moving behind the scenes. I've no theory, no evidence. Just a gnawing suspicion.")
"Sounds a little farfetched to me."
("We'll see. But first we'll have to heal up this hole in the chest, get the original heart working again—if I may quote you: 'What kind of a healer would The Healer be if he couldn't heal himself!'—and try to think up some dramatic way for The Healer to reappear.")
After a quick change of clothes, they went to the roof and steered their flitter into the night, leaving it to the Meltrin authorities to puzzle out two babbling idiots, a broken button-head, and a respected physicist named Cheserak who had vanished without a trace.
They blamed it on the Tarks, of course.
Part Three: HEAL THY NATION
YEAR 1231
The horrors persisted at varying levels of virulence for well over a millennium and during that period certain individuals with the requisite stigmata of flamestone, snowy patch of hair, and golden hand, purporting to be The Healer, appeared at erratic intervals. The efforts of these impostors were somehow uniformly successful in causing remissions of the malady. And although this was vigorously dismissed as placebo effect by most medical authorities (with the notable exception of IMC, which, for some unaccountable reason, refused to challenge the impostors), the explanation fell on deaf ears. The Children of The Healer would have none of it. Rational explanations were meaningless to them.
And so the cult grew, inexorably. It crossed planetary, commonwealth, and even racial barriers (we have already discussed the exploits among the Lentemians and among the Tarks during the postwar period), spreading in all directions until ... the horrors stopped.
As suddenly and as inexplicably as the phenomenon had begun, the horrors came to a halt. No new cases have been reported for the last two centuries and the cult of The Healer is apparently languishing, kept alive only by the fact that various individuals in Healer regalia have been spotted on vid recordings in public places here and there about the planets. (The only consistency noted in regard to these sightings is that, when interviewed later, no one in these scenes could ever remember seeing a man who looked like The Healer.)
The Children of The Healer say that he awaits the day when we shall need him again.
We shall see.
from The Healer: Man & Myth by Emmerz Fent
XVI
Federation Centraclass="underline" first-adjutant's office, Federation Defense Force.
Ros Petrical paced the room. He was fair, wiry, and prided himself on his appearance of physical fitness. But he wasn't trying to impress the other occupant of his office. That was Bilxer, ah old friend and the Federation currency coordinator, who had been passing the time of day when the report came in. Bilxer's department was responsible for tabulating and reporting—for a fee, of course—the fluctuations in the relative values of the member planets' currencies. There had, however, been a distinct and progressive loss of interest in the exchange rates through recent generations of currency coordinators, and consequently Bilxer found himself with a surfeit of time on his hands.
Petrical, until very recently, could hardly complain about being overworked during his tenure as first adjutant. At the moment, however, he wished he had studied finance rather than military science. Then he would be stretched out on the recliner like Bilxer, watching someone else pace the floor.
"Well, there goes the Tark theory," Bilxer said from his repose. "Not that anyone ever truly believed they were behind the incidents in the first place."
"Incidents! That's a nice way of dismissing cold, calculated slaughter!"
Bilxer shrugged off Petrical's outburst as semantic nitpicking. "That leaves the Broohnins."
"Impossible!" Petrical said, flicking the air with his hand. He was agitated, knew it, and cursed himself for showing it. "You heard the report. The survivors in that Tark village—"
"Oh, they're leaving survivors now?" Bilxer interjected. "Must be mellowing."
Petrical glared at his guest and wondered how they had ever become friends. He was talking about the deaths of thousands of rational creatures and Bilxer seemed to assign it no more importance than a minor devaluation of the Tark erd.
Something evil was afoot among the planets. For no apparent reason, people were being slaughtered at random intervals in random locations at an alarming rate. The first incidents had been trifling—trifling, at least, on an interstellar scale. A man burned here, a family destroyed there, isolated settlements annihilated to a man; then the graduation to villages and towns. It was then that reports began to filter into Fed Central and questions were asked. Petrical had painstakingly traced the slaughters, reported and unreported, back over seven decades. He had found no answers but had come up with a number of questions, the most puzzling of which was this: If the marauders wanted to wipe out a village or a settlement, why didn't they do it from the atmosphere? A single small peristellar craft could leave a charred hole where a village had been with little or no danger to the attackers. Instead, they arrived on-planet and did their work with antipersonnel weapons.
It didn't make sense ... unless terror was part of the object. The attack teams had been very efficient— they had never left a witness. Until now.
"The survivors," Petrical continued in clipped tones, "described the marauders as vacuum-suited humanoids—no facial features noted—appearing out of nowhere amid extremely bizarre atmospheric conditions, and then methodically slaughtering every living thing in sight. Their means of escape? They run toward a certain point and vanish. Granted, the Broohnins are unbalanced as far as ideology goes, but this just isn't their style. And besides, they don't have the technology for such a feat."