The pain was distant and then gone and I was there in the galaxy dance, part of the farflung arms, part of the stars and atoms and utter void. The arms curved through time and space, becoming one, becoming many, blending, regenerating, purifying, a cascade of color sound, a river of light, a comet of time . . .
My body and mind parted, breaking, disintegrating, each with a reflection of the whole, each with the whole of perfection. I was Nova, I was a star, I was void, I was crystal, I was energy . . . I was . . . always had been . . .
I linked . . . went back, far back, linking, linking. linking. I was part of everything . . .
I was Feather of Flame and Lastwarrior.
I was Flowerbringer and Nightwind and Gilgamesh.
I was earth and fire and Xenophon, Demonkiller, and Rainbowsound.
I was Stormsweep and Firestar.
I was Brian Thorne.
I was reflected in man, but I was one—unique—a fragment of all. I was IOK and IOR and Cre-vlar-mora-ma. I was merah and damu
and smoke.
I linked.
I was.
I knew.
The atoms drew together. They formed into the old pattern. Returned, they moved and meshed and I was whole again. But not the same.
I realized I was staring up at the ancient mural. It was dark, yet I could see it plainly, more clearly than I had with the light. The galactic spiral still spun in a frozen moment of time, a millisecond frame from eternity.
The pain was gone.
Startled, I felt in the dark for my thigh.
It was whole.
Complete, uncut, unsevered.
My hands were smooth, my exhaustion gone. I could feel the thin cold Martian air in my lungs. I could sense the pulsebeat of blood and the busy, busy body at work.
I looked up at the mural, but now it seemed too dark to see clearly.
I got to my feet, shaky in mind, but whole in body. I moved my leg and it moved without pain, without thought. I went toward the passage, sure in the dark as if I had been there a thousand times and did not question my knowledge.
It was night in the First Place. I went upward, through the vaults, through the Magician’s Hall, through the place where Windbird had cronned, and into the zarri where the Sun had once danced on the children. I crossed the varuna of Starbringer and there, in the crimson purple salla of the Lastborn I killed the killer. He saw me and moved slowly, as if in a gelatin of panic, and his weapon turned toward me, toward the Sunface, toward the Omi, where the Teacher had once stood. I reached out and took his weapon and thought it suitable that I kill him with it.
11
I left the Star Palace and took the killers’ machine and went to the Sunstrums. I needed money and they gave it to me. I kissed Nova and went across the sands toward Bradbury.
Now I stood in a spacesuit under the bowl of night. Beneath the jagged rock under my feet was the core of the ship, a whole asteroid christened the Marshal Ivan Dmitri, and ahead of me was Earth. And Huo.
But somehow, confronting Huo seemed the least of my troubles. First I had to get back safely in order to confront him and his double. A double, no matter how good, could not possibly pass a really close professional inspection. I knew enough judges, senators, and power figures at least to get a hearing from some of them, no matter what the public view of the bankrupt Thorne might be.
Or so I thought, anyway.
What had happened to me in the Star Palace was what really occupied my thoughts.
I was still confused about the utter clarity of what had happened to me. Was the whole thing, no matter how vivid, my imagination? I had been so sure, so certain, and two more men had died at my hands. Had I dreamed my fatal wounding?
I was very clear about what had happened, but I was not certain why it had happened. If it happened at all, it had happened the way I remembered it, with an incredible spreading of myself, back into the past, forward into the future, and sideways into the now. But I knew that was contemporary verbalizing, a pallid explanation to my logical self. When a whole event is nonverbal, how can you explain it even to yourself? It had happened to me. I had felt and experienced —something.
I had killed again, or rather, executed. If I hadn’t, he would have killed me, and he certainly had been trying. There was no remorse and no guilt in me, except in that odd abstract way of What else might I have done to prevent it?
The rock-encased asteroid-ship shot Earthward at an unimagined speed, but I seemed to stand dead in space, my senses too limited to see anything but the obvious. Yet for that one time—how long?—my senses had seemed almost infinite, a godhood of sorts, or so it seemed by comparison to my normal condition. That had faded, but the residue that remained had changed me. I felt somewhat like a computer terminal, with a universe of knowledge linked to me, waiting only the pressure of the right keys, the right questions, the correct situation.
I stood on the asteroid and the silent internal thrust gave it direction and it loomed over me, a great sugar-loaf of pitted space trash. I waited for them to come out to try to kill me again.
I was weary of killing, yet it seemed very remote. I had come out so that no one else might be hurt, that was all.
Get it over with, I asked them silently. Make your try and die. I haven’t time for you now.
There were two of them, and one was in a crew suit. I waited patiently until he found me and started to aim. I shot him first, then the other. The crewman leaped backward as he was hit; the explosion of his suit moved him off the surface and he floated, a broken unit, slowly drifting toward the drive end.
The other one was Pelf. I lifted him up and gave him a shove and he floated, too.
That’s seven.
I went back inside and decanted and went to my cabin. There was much I had to think about.
We orbited Earth and went into parking orbit out near Station Three. The shuttle picked us up and we went in past the Tycho Brache and George IX and straight to Decon. I suppose I could have used Pelf’s papers but I just didn’t feel like it. I did, however, bribe one of the crewmen to let me wear a crewsuit to avoid notice by the newsmen; all the big news was gone from Martian trips, but the Station stringers usually met any incoming ship and culled it for items.
Keeping my faceplate dimmed, I went straight through to the Earth shuttle and kept myself inconspicuous. We landed at Sahara without incident, and I decanted in crews quarters and lockered the suit. I used minimal evasion tactics and took a jet for Berlin first, then to Arctica Four, before heading for New York. I did it all mechanically, in a dull haze, with my mind in many elsewheres.