"Yes. Nevertheless, tell me."
"They say that the whole solar system has moved into a cosmic dust cloud that is dimming the sun."
"Do they believe that, these wise men with all their instruments?"
"I don't know. That is what they must say, of course, to forestall panic."
"Do you believe it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I have been among the tents of the Dryland nomads. Their wise men say differently. They say it is not an inert thing but an active force."
"They are wise indeed. It is not a dust cloud. It is more than that, very much more than that."
Aarl stopped walking and spoke with feverish intensity.
"Can you conceive of a vampire something that drinks energy, that steals it from across a great void . . . a greater void than you imagine? A thing that will, if it is not stopped, devour not only the light of the sun but even the force of gravity that holds this family of worlds together? That will literally destroy the solar system?"
Stark stared at him appalled, not wanting to believe yet knowing somehow that it was so.
The Lord of the Third Bend reached out and grasped Stark's wrist with an icy hand.
"I'm afraid, Stark. My powers are great, but against this they're useless without help. That is why I need you. Yes. Need you. Come, and I'll show you why."
They sat in a mist-bordered chamber high in the citadel. And Stark was remembering the words of an ancient bardic chant.
Fear the Lord of the Third Bend . Fear him, for he is the master of time.
"The great void of which I spoke," said Aarl, "is not only a dimension of space. Look."
Stark looked at the curtain of mist. And was caught by the incredible scene that formed within it.
A panorama of stars, the great glooms of the void a background for a wilderness of flaring suns. He felt himself drawn into that immensity, to rush through it at incredible speed. Chains of stars rose up before him, mountain-ranges of high-piled, shining nebulae loomed on either hand. He swept past them in all their glory and left them far behind.
The view shifted, changed perspective. And Stark beheld ships ahead of him, gleaming starships that raced through the celestial jungle.
He saw them brilliant and small as toys. With a vertiginous wrench he returned to the reality of his own body and the coldness of the stone he sat upon.
"You are adept," he said, "at putting all this into my mind. Which is what you're doing."
"True," said Aarl. "But it is not mere imagining. You see what I have seen across two hundred thousand years of time. You see the future."
Stark believed it. The Lord of the Third Bend had not acquired his stature in the minds of generations of men by means of fraud. The sort of shabby trickery known to any village thaumaturgist would not have stood the test. Aarl wielded the lost knowledge of forgotten Mars, a science that differed greatly from the science of Earth but was none the less a science.
He looked at the vision on the screen of mist. Two hundred thousand years.
"Those ships," said Aarl, "those very powerful ships that travel with such speed, are the ships of the Star Kings."
That name, heard for the first time, rang in Stark's mind like the strident call of a bugle.
"The Star Kings?"
"The men who rule that future umiverse, each in his own kingdom, principality, or barony."
"Ah," said Stark, and looked again. "That is right and fitting. The starlands are too bright for grubby clerks, and bureaucrats in rumpled suits each trying to be more common than the next. Yes. Let there be Star Kings."
"You must go there, Stark. Into the future."
A small pulse began to beat beneath the angle of Stark's jaw. "Into the future. Bodily? Your knowledge can send me bodily across two hundred thousand years?"
"Two years or two million. It is all the same."
"Can you bring me back? Bodily."
"If you survive."
"Hm," said Stark, and looked again at the vision. "How would I go? I mean, in what capacity?"
"As an envoy, a messenger. Someone must go and meet these Star Kings face to face." Aarl's voice was angry. "I have ascertained that this menace to our solar system exists in their time. I have attempted to contact them by mental arts, without success. They simply did not hear. That is why I sent for you, Stark."
"You sent for N'Chaka," Stark said, and smiled. N'Chaka, the Man-without-a-tribe who could not remember his real parents, naked fosterling of the beast-folk of wild sun-shattered Mercury; N'Chaka, who wore his acquired humanity like an uncomfortable garment and who still tended to use his teeth when angered. "Why N'Chaka as an ambassador to the courts of the Star Kings?"
"Because N'Chaka is an animal at heart, though he has a man's brain. Animals do not lie, they do not turn traitor because of greed for money or power, or because of that worse tempter, philosophical doubt." Aarl studied him with those space-deep eyes, "in other words, I can trust you."
"You think that if someone offered me a throne at Algol or Betelgeuse, I wouldn't take it?" Stark laughed. "The Lord of the Abyss overestimates the purity of the beast."
"I think not."
"And anyway, why a bastard Earthman? Why not a Martian?"
"We're too concerned with our past, too deeply rooted in our own sacred soil. You have no roots. You do have a devouring curiosity, and a rare capacity for survival. Otherwise you would not be here." He held up his hand to forestall comment. "Look."
The scene on the mist-curtain changed abruptly. Now a madman's dream of space appeared, a tangled nightmare of crowding suns, dead stars, filamentary nebulae. Stark seemed to be racing at blinding speed through this cosmic jungle.
"The region at the western limb of the galaxy," said Aarl. "it is called, in that future time, The Marches of Outer Space. It holds a number of the smaller star-kingdoms. It also holds this."
Two old red suns like ruby brooches pinned a ragged veil of darkness across the starfield. Stark plunged into the gloom of the dark nebula, past dim drowned stars dragging their nighted planets. The coiling dust seemed to tear like smoke with the wind of his passing. Out on the other side there was light again, but it was strangely bent, distorted around an area of blankness, of nothingness quite different from the dusty darkness of the nebula. He could not see into it. The vision seemed to recoil, as though struck back by a blow.
"Not even my arts can penetrate that blind area," said Aarl. "But it is from there that the force comes, leaping back through time, draining the energy from our solar system."
"And my task, if I go, will be a simple one," Stark said. "Find out what that force is, who is responsible for it, and put an end to it." He shook his head. "Your faith in my abilities is touching, but do you know what I think, Aarl? I think you've lived in this dark hole far too long. I think your senses have left you."
He stood up, turning his back to the screen of mist.
"The task is impossible, and you know it."
"Yet it must be done."
"If it's a natural phenomenon, some freak warping of the continuum . . ."
"Then of course we are helpless. But I don't think it is." Aarl rose. He seemed to have grown taller and his eyes were hypnotic in their intensity. "You have no love for Earth because of what Earthmen did to your foster-tribe, yet I think you would not truly wish all those millions dead and the planet with them, long before its time. And what of Mars, which has been something of a home to you? She too has a while to go before the night overtakes her."
The pulse hammered more strongly under Stark's jaw. "I wouldn't even know where to start. It could take a lifetime."
"We do not have a lifetime," said Aarl, "nor even half of one. The energy-drain is accelerating rapidly. And I can tell you where to begin. With a man named Shorr Kan , King of Aldeshar in the Marches . The most powerful of the petty kings, and wily enough for two. You will find him sympathetic."