'How does it look?'
'It doesn't look good.'
As abruptly as they had come, the mountains were gone again. The still shuddering airship banked drunkenly, and the Minstrel Boy found that he was looking out over a landscape that was as flat as a billiard table and was divided into huge, geometric black and white squares. Here and there sharp outcroppings of rock appeared to have pushed their way up through the level surface, forcing deep cracks in the monster mosaic.
The R1009 was sinking lower and lower over the scarcely credible plain. The vibration went on rattling their nerves. For a minute or more the ship stopped rolling and managed to hold a relatively steady course.
The Minstrel Boy took a few quick steps toward the ballroom's nearest exit. 'I'm going to get the portable SGs from our gear. I don't trust this ship not to start breaking up. There's something really wrong here.'
Reave worked his way toward him. 'We might as well all go. If something does come unglued, we'd do well to grab as much of our gear as we can.' He peered out of an observation window.
The Minstrel Boy joined him.
'It doesn't even look like an inhabitable reality,' the Minstrel Boy commented.
'What's that over there?'
Reave was pointing to something, little more than a smudge on the horizon but growing bigger as they watched it. The Minstrel Boy shaded his eyes. The sky was a bright white glare that was reflected back from the white geometric squares as the shadow of the airship raced over them.
'It looks like a dust cloud; could be being thrown up by some kind of vehicle.'
'Hell of a big vehicle. That cloud's a long way away.'
There was one problem. Although whatever was creating the dust cloud was traveling over the black and white squares, the dust being thrown up was gaudy and multicolored; it hung in the air, spiraling and twisting. The closer the thing came — and it seemed to be traveling at a speed well in excess of those normally achieved by land vehicles — the more the Minstrel Boy and Reave came to realize that it was very big indeed. It alsoseemed to be partially buried in the ground, plowing through the flat, smooth surface.
'What the hell is that thing?'
The Minstrel Boy shook his head. 'I don't know, but I don't like it.'
Billy had come up beside him. His eyes were wide with horror. 'I know what that is.'
Reave and the Minstrel Boy both looked at him. 'What is it?'
'It's a disrupter.'
The word rolled like a toll of doom. It was one of the most feared words in the whole Damaged World.
'Are you sure?'
'Did you ever see one?'
Billy took a deep breath. 'No, I never saw one, but there was this guy living at the Sanctuary who told me all about it in one of his lucid moments. This is exactly as he described. One tore into his settlement and just chewed up reality. If that wasn't bad enough, it left behind this wake like a walking nightmare. It drove the ones that were left quite mad. This guy was one of the few survivors.'
'What do you mean, one of his lucid moments?'
'He giggled uncontrollably most of the time.'
The fear of the disrupter was partially the fear of the unknown. They were rarely seen; most people had only heard the lurid tales of their capacity for destruction. So little was known about them that there was no way to predict where and when they might burst through from whatever dimension or nether-place they normally occupied and tear into the world of mortals to create chaos and damage beyond belief. More than one culture had a nighttime prayer that started 'Deliver us from the fury of the disrupter.'
The airship was still descending, although the vibration had greatly subsided. It actually seemed to be slowing to a stop right in the path of the oncoming disrupter. The Minstrel Boy stared at the thing as though he were mesmerized. The shock seemed to have robbed him of the will to do anything to save himself. It was not that he had led what could remotely be described as a sheltered life. He had seen more than most men, but the monster in front of him was something out of legend. There was no certainty that the death that it was undoubtedly bringing was anatural one rather than some hideous transfer to an unknowable discorporation beyond the nothings. For the first time in his life he felt totally helpless. He suddenly became aware that Reave was tugging at his arm.
'Come on, let's get going.'
'What's the point? You can't run away from a disrupter.'
'We can get the SGs. We'll need them if we get through this.'
The Minstrel Boy tore his eyes away from the disrupter and followed Reave, even though he truly believed that it was a futile exercise. If a disrupter came after a person, there was nothing he could do except kiss his ass good-bye.
It was now possible to see something of the disrupter itself. It was a dark shape in the center of the garish residue that was fountaining up on either side of it as it sliced through the surface of reality. It appeared to be roughly cylindrical with an open, gaping maw that seemed to be sucking in the living rock. There was what looked like a line of jutting extensions along the top side of the thing, like spines or a kind of composite dorsal fin, but it was hard to make out any real physical details because the disrupter apparently had the capacity actually to absorb light. At the same time, however, it glittered from within, as though tiny stars were trapped inside its dark bulk.
The airship had come to a full stop, hanging in the air a mere thirty feet above the ground. The disrupter was coming straight at it. The DNA Cowboys, Clay Blaisdell, and Renatta stood in the observation gallery. Billy checked his SG; Reave had put a protective arm around Renatta. Blaisdell gripped the guardrail in front of the window with white-knuckled hands. The Minstrel Boy just stared. There was no sign of the crew, the metaphysicians, or the two metal men. The disrupter had come close enough for the five of them to see deep into the thing's open maw. In front of it, solid matter seemed to flare and become unstable, and then, with the consistency of liquid, it was effortlessly swallowed. There seemed to be some dark energy inside that glittered in a way that no darkness ever glittered in the real world. The Minstrel Boy could almost feel it calling to him, beckoning him to be part of it.
The disrupter was only a matter of a couple of hundred yards away. To everyone's complete surprise, the airship began to lift, as if it were being pushed upward and out of the way by some invisible bow wave that preceded the disrupter.
'We're going up. I thought for sure that we were going to be sucked into it.'
The disrupter was directly underneath them. The R1009 suddenly rolled and staggered. The last thing the Minstrel Boy remembered was Reave bellowing.
'Hang on! Here we go!'
They were inside something else. What a second before had been normality was now so totally twisted out of shape that the Minstrel Boy had difficulty believing that he was still alive or even that he was the same being he had been before. Sound, vision, touch, and temperature, even the familiar comfort of up and down — none of it was remotely like anything he had previously experienced. Perspective twisted, coiled, and undulated. Shards of color with razor-sharp edges rushed at him and threatened to slice his flesh to ribbons, except that he no longer had flesh. His body was being stretched and distorted all the way to infinity. His whole environment had become an alien place where only fragments of his personality crawled and cowered. It was as if there were other entities all around him, but isolated, separated, unable to communicate anything but a common pain and a common loss. Were they other victims of the disrupter? At the heart of it all there was a being that was beyond alien. Even the word "alien" had a form and a recognizable perimeter. This thing had nothing except the unmistakable will to consume. All that translated was its hunger, a cosmic hunger from a cosmos that was so far removed that the Minstrel Boy was unable to conceive of it even though he could feel the pain of that relentless now-and-forever need. The other entities — and he had no reason to believe that he was not one of them — swirled around it in unhappy orbit, reflecting the need. Strange voices that spoke in tongues that he could not even begin to understand forced their way into his head. He was falling and flying and floating; he was drowning in a molasses-thick sea of vibrating noncolor. He was being scorched and frozen in a dark place that was on the other side of blinding white light. He was disintegrating, and it would go on until eternity. He heard a voice screaming, and it sounded like his own.