I thought of the Oracle. Another remnant of those days; one that seemingly had knowledge of many things forgotten by men and science and never known to us, the twisted children of men and science. I thought of my father, of the secrets he must have brought with him from that earlier time when we first lived in the shadow of the mountains. And suddenly it seemed to me very clear why we were bound for the Element, and what the special destiny was that the Oracle had promised to us. And were it not for the thought of my father there below, innocent of this and like all his kind doomed to death, I would have run madly after Tast’annin and, shrieking, given tongue to the fear that overcame me.
But I did not run. I did not cry out, or even weep, thinking of the world below and this strange thing poised like a hammer above it. Instead I walked very slowly to a room near the docking chamber. There I strapped myself into a hammock and waited, counted the minutes and waited until the elÿon’s passage halted, and I could embrace my father.
In the navigation cell I found Lascar Franschii suspended within his web of light.
“You knew!” I howled. I grabbed his leg and yanked it, heedless of the sprung wires and cables whistling as they whipped around him. “You had to know, making these trips—”
Lascar Franschii bounced and jiggled like a toy tossed into a rubber net. “Imperator—” he began. Then the voice tube slipped from his mouth and he moaned. I reached and snapped one of the tubes running into his throat. A hissing as air escaped, and his chest began to cave in like a deflated balloon.
“ You knew! All this time shuttling back and forth for your master, while that waits for us! How could you? How could you doom mankind, doom an entire world —we might have done something, might have tried to destroy it, but now it’s too late—”
Without the voice tube, Lascar Franschii’s voice came out in a barely audible wheeze. I pulled more tubes and wires from his body, each one severing a vital connection; but still he managed to gasp, “Your kind, Imperator—doomed me !—what care—take to skies— never !—”
The last wire uncoiled in a serpentine tangle of red and gray. Lascar Franschii’s head lolled upon his shrunken chest, his empty eyes bleeding and his mouth ajar. I stared at him, my fist clenching trailing strands that gave off a putrescent stench. Abruptly the floor beneath me trembled. Lights flashed around the perimeter of the nav chamber, and throughout the web that had held the adjutant, glowing white lines appeared in meaningless patterns. A calm, hushed voice breathed from the voicenet.
“The Human-Assisted Biotic Navigational System is encountering communication difficulties. We are now indoctrinating unassisted alternative landing procedures. All biological personnel, please ready yourselves for docking in Cassandra in four minutes. We are now indoctrinating unassisted alternative landing procedures. All biological personnel, please ready yourselves…”
As the voicenet continued its soft chanting, I stumbled from the room, heading for where Valeska Novus and Nefertity slept in the innocent wombs of their safety hammocks. The elÿon’s truncated landing found me crouched before the door of their room, gibbering like an adjutant myself at the thought of what awaited us in the sky outside.
I was safely in my hammock when the voicenet began its emergency announcements. I recall little of the last minutes of our flight. My mind was too full of thoughts of my father, of the images that had sent a madness upon Tast’annin and which my own mind could still barely grasp.
I don’t know for how long I lost consciousness. Perhaps a few minutes, perhaps an hour. It was one of the Maio servers that found me, its small cold fingers probing for a pulse in my throat until I woke, gasping as from a terrible dream.
“Icarus!” I cried, then drew a shaking hand across my eyes as it came to me that it was not a dream. The server looked at me with its tiny unblinking eyes and said, “We have made a successful emergency landing at Cassandra, former Free Take of Virginia. All other biological personnel have exited the craft. I will escort you to the docking area.”
It waited with an idiot’s patience while I extricated myself from the hammock, which was too small for an energumen and left cruel red markings on my thighs and arms. Then I followed it into the main corridor. All around us the elÿon’s walls pulsed, their color fading from fuchsia to soft pink as its random energies discharged into the air outside. I was going to my death, I knew that; but then so was everyone else. With slow steps I crossed from the hallway into the docking area, and then walked to meet the doors slowly opening to welcome me with the sweet warm scent of the Element.
There was no sun to wake Jane and me from our exhausted sleep. We were roused by an energumen, the same one who had drafted us into helping to haul sacks of grain from one cavernous room to another. It was backbreaking, mindless work, but afterward even the foul-smelling pallets on the floor were welcome, and the two of us collapsed into dreamless sleep. When we woke, there was no light, and the room was empty save for the one who shook us with her huge clumsy hands.
“You would have slept through everything,” she said accusingly. “Come on now, and hurry.”
“Is there water anywhere to wash with?” Jane asked plaintively, but the energumen only shook her head.
“In the river, if you want. But hurry.”
We followed her, Jane pausing, before we climbed back over the narrow rope bridge, to splash her face and drink. I joined her, cupping my hands into the water and bringing it to my lips. It had a harsh taste, like stone rasping across my tongue, and was icy cold. I shuddered and stumbled back to my feet.
It was a different path we followed now, one that we had not seen before. In some strange way I felt that we were in the oldest section of Paradise Caverns: that part which had seen little of the hands of men upon its cold, forbidding walls. In other tunnels I had watched the energumens run with an awkward stooping gait, to keep their heads from grazing against the low ceilings. But here the ceiling reared so far above us that it made me dizzy to look up. There were few electrical bulbs, and these cast a faint glow that did little to pierce the gloom. The walls were crenulated, as though made of paper that had been crumpled into endless folds of cream and dull orange, stretching up and up until the darkness swallowed them. And while I could see nothing of the farthest reaches of the ceiling, somehow I sensed that it receded as we traveled onward; that the tunnel was widening to form a chamber huge enough that it could encompass a vast building, one as large as the Engulfed Cathedral or the City’s Obelisk. Our footsteps sounded weirdly in that immense space, the slapping of the energumen’s bare feet echoing until it seemed an entire unseen army marched there beside us.
Far ahead lights began to show in the darkness. As we grew nearer the passage, these grew larger and brighter, and finally we walked along a wide avenue strung with solar globes and smaller electrical bulbs, all of them leading into a vast cavern. The energumen glanced back at us, then paused and waited until we caught up with her.
“This is where they will be,” she said, pointing.
The room was filled with people. Humans, energumens, aardmen, starboks, the wistful argalæ and hideous salamanders; all of them standing and staring patiently at the front of the cavern. Thousands of them, all in the worn blue uniforms of the Asterine Alliance, all with the same expectant expressions. But there were only a few hundred humans, and most of these were young, my own age or a few years older.