He imagined himself standing with the group, holding hands, then soaring up and leading them through the Plexi bubble and out into space. They glided with ease and grace, a flock of angels casting not a single shadow over the Rapiers and Broadswords below them. Their scripts were now joined in a quilt of thought through which any one of them could converse, learn, enlighten, even love. He felt everything they felt, thought everything they did, and doubted that he was capable of so much sensation. He found himself suddenly preoccupied with the link itself. He wound his way through the dark, braided corridors of the quilt, asking others if they had seen Karista Mullens.
The boy Maniac had saved rounded a black column that Blair sensed had been woven of pure fear. The boy picked his nose a second, gazed sheepishly as he spotted Blair, then touched the material as though it were hot. "They said you're looking for Karista. She won't come here."
"How can we convince her?"
"She loves you. She's your pair. That's your job." He winked and got stitched back into the fabric.
"My job?"
Suddenly, a terrific wind knocked over the black column and pierced Blair with a trillion icy blades. He spun away from the wind to lock gazes with a Kilrathi pilot who banged his melon-like head repeatedly on his cockpit seat. The cat's eyes bulged a moment before he reached up, extended his claws, and tore out those eyes amid torrents of blood.
Blair turned his head a fraction to the left, where the captain of the Kilrathi cruiser sat in a command chair. Five bridge officers behind him lay on the deck, writhing spasmodically in pools of blood ornamented by massive eyeballs. Blair felt himself linked to the others as they coiled through the gravitic fields surrounding the captain's arms and drove them against the man's flesh. Unable to resist, the captain brought thick paws to his face, and the serrated claws went to work.
Though Blair had focused on those two particular deaths, he knew that he and the others had already caused many more, but something prevented him from experiencing all of them simultaneously. He could select each moment, one at time, sift through them as though they resided in memory files, but he felt denied of the true experience. He needed to know just how cold it would get.
He turned again, saw the captain of the destroyer bring himself up to a full three meters, raise his long arms toward the overhead, then shriek as blood gushed through the seams in his armor. Blair and the others had shifted the gravitic field within his body and were squeezing his internal organs as though they were citrus. Blair craned his head a few inches more and now watched from about a half kilometer out as the destroyer tacked to starboard, putting it on an intercept course with the cruiser.
/ can see this. But let me see it all. Feel it all. I want to know who I am …
Breaking into a sprint, he threaded his way farther through the quilt, stumbling over Kilrathi corpses and ducking as rubble fell like flaming hail. A tingling sensation rose up through his legs as he neared what he thought was the center of the quilt. Maybe there he could experience all of it at once and shake off this force on his back.
Out of breath, he staggered into a zone that resembled billions of illuminated fibers, a bizarre kind of interchange that spun into and formed a glistening white cone stretching up to touch the stars. He crossed to the base of the cone, which now throbbed and seemed to enlarge by the second.
An old man whispered in his ear, "You'll get your answer at the top."
He gripped the first fibrous tube, no wider than a meter, and began his ascent. The air grew colder as he climbed, and the images of Kilrathi steering their fighters into each other or exploding or imploding at their stations aboard the cap ships grew more frequent, more vivid, the stench of them voiding themselves now even tighter in his nostrils. The higher he got, the more exaggerated his progress became. He would reach up to the next tube, and suddenly find himself a thousand meters higher, find himself staring into the pale, wrinkled, bewhiskered face of another dying abomination. He shivered uncontrollably and held his jaw tight to prevent his teeth from chattering. He forged on, driven by much more than curiosity. The answer to who he really was lay just ahead. One hundred meters. Fifty. Twenty. His hand struck a smooth, frigid surface. He pulled himself a little higher and tried to remove the hand. His flesh remained locked. He yanked again, and the pain snaked up his arm. He swore aloud, having come so far only to be stopped by something so ridiculous as-
"Don't go any farther, Blair." Karista stood beside him, shifting in and out of the illuminated mountain as though it were her dress, a dress made of rushing water. She held his hand in her own, their fingers interlaced.
"You've decided to help us," he said excitedly.
"No. I've been here. Hiding. Waiting. Knowing you would do something like this. You can't experience it all."
"lean! It's my choice!"
"Then you'll fall. Like the others."
He ripped his hand away. "Sorry. I have to know." She cried out for him to stop, but he thought her away. She darkened into dust quickly dispersed by the gale. He hauled himself to the top and stood on a plain of black that reflected the stars. Images of the battle struck successive blows, knocking him back like a boxer whose glory days had slipped by. Kilrathi wailed. Kilrathi died. The destroyer's bow caught the cruiser amidships in a glittering string of detonations that abruptly congealed into a single, debris-strewn globe. The explosion struck Blair's ankles, surged up his legs, then swallowed him in light for a blink before vanishing. Transparent thunderheads grumbled above, and he lifted his gaze to the traceries of lightning that joined the stars and discharged around him. He lifted his arms and surrendered to the knowledge-the history-delivered on bolts from the vacuum.
He saw Pilgrims living aboard ring stations, felt their fear and anxiety, lived their lives with and for them: he saw embryos with horrible mutations and sensed the warmth of their mothers' wombs; he saw Ivar Chu speaking in thunderous words to a crowd of millions, then spoke the words for Chu himself and heard cries of ecstatic joy in return; he gasped for acrid-smelling air as he died with hundreds of thousands aboard sloships attacked by Confederation destroyers. He saw it all at once, and it kept coming, faster and colder-
"I can change your path!" a woman cried. "I can." His body shook, and the collar of his flight suit dug into his neck. A single countenance seeped through the trillions of images and sensations: the face of his mother, her cheeks red and tear-stained, her eyes brightening into twin novae. She took form, gripped his flight suit, tried to shake him to attention.
He looked at her uncomprehendingly for a second, then uttered, "Don't."
"Christopher. I can't let you do this." His hands found her wrists, pulled them off- And the effort forced him back. He lost his footing, felt the summit's edge drag across his boots.
Then he fell, the wind fluttering through his flight suit, the mountain of radiant thought wiping by below, the tangled surface of the quilt hurtling mercilessly toward him. He remembered his mother's warning when he had first encountered her in the continuum. He thought of how Karista had spoken the same words: Then you'll fall. Like the others. He thrust out his palms and tried to scream, but nothing would come. Now a feeling from the core of his being told him he could not save himself. He had tapped too deeply into the continuum, into the scripts, into a quantum level that was the blood of the universe.
He struck the quilt, felt his body spread across its surface and slough off a cloak of darkness. Then he froze into a solid, flat mass cupped by something warm. The quilt felt different, harder, smoother, with the trace of a vibration moving steadily over its surface. Seconds ticked by, with only a dark drape of nothingness before him. Then a light appeared, enlarged, focused into a glassy sheen of stars half-eclipsed by a familiar face. "Blair?"