'Adam? Ah, no. Come in, Castor, but leave Pollux outside. Or is it Ruben Kave, Hero of Space, come to visit me?' Her mouth broadened, the lips curving upwards. She made a vague, graceful gesture with her hand. 'Do sit down,' she said.
There was nowhere to sit He remained standing, disturbed, nonplussed.
'I'm Renark,' he said. 'I want information. It's important - can you help me?'
'Help…?' The voice was at first detached. Her fingers moved constantly over the keyboard. 'Help…?' Her face twisted. Then she screamed.
'Help!'
He took a step forward.
The hands moved more swiftly, agitatedly over the board.
'Help!' She began to emit a kind of soft scream.
'Mary,' he said urgently. He could not touch the smooth shoulders. He leant over the drooling woman. 'It's all right They say you've explored the Shifter - is that true?'
'True? What's true, what's false?'
'What was it like, Mary? What did this to you?'
A groan, masculine and desperate, came from the woman. She stood up and walked unsteadily towards the couch, lay down on it, gripping the sides.
'What's the Shifter, Mary? What is it?' His face felt tight, as tight as his rigidly controlled emotions.
'Chaos…' she mumbled, 'madness - super-sanity - warmth. Oh, warmth… But I couldn't take it, no human being could - there's no anchor, nothing to recognise, nothing to cling to. It's a whirlpool of possibilities crowding around you, tossing you in-all directions, tearing at you. I'm falling, I'm flying, I'm expanding, I'm contracting, I'm singing, I'm dumb - my body's gone, I can't reach it!'
Her eyes stared. Suddenly she looked at him with some sort of intelligence.
'Renark you said your name was?'
'Yes.' He was steeling himself to do something he didn't want to do.
'I saw you once, perhaps - there. Here. There.' She dropped her head back and lay on the couch mumbling.
He sensed the chaos of the Shifter brawling about in the back of his mind. He thought he knew how it could have turned her mad - felt some sympathy with what she was talking about.
He turned all his attention to her, using his sensing ability to sort her out into her composite atoms, concentrated on her sensory nerves and her brain structure in an effort to get some clue to the effect which the Shifter had had on her.
But there was little physically wrong, although it was obvious that the quantity of adrenalin flooding her system was abnormally high and that this, perhaps, was the reason for her almost constant movement.
But her mind wasn't open to Renark. He was not a tele-path and was almost glad at that moment that he couldn't see into her wrenched-apart mind. Neither was he tele-kinetic, but nonetheless he hated even this form of intrusion as he studied her muscle responses, her nervous system, in an effort to find some clue how to pull her together long enough to get some answers to his questions.
He felt her move.
'Asquiol!' she said. 'Isn't that a name - something to do with you? Aren't you dead?'
How could she possibly know of Asquiol?
'Yes. Asquiol's the name of my friend. But I'm alive…'
He half cursed the introduction of this new element of mystery in an already difficult situation.
'What about Asquiol?'
But there was no response from the mad woman, who had now resumed her vacant staring at the ceiling.
He tried another tack.
'Mary - where did you go? What did you discover?'
'The ragged planet,' she muttered. 'I go there - went there - last - the lattice planet. Stay away.'
Now he wanted to shake the information out of her but he had to coax.
'Why?' he said more gently. 'Why, Mary?'
'Doesn't travel with the Shifter - not all of it, some of it - exist in other dimensions, travelling independently? The Hole is there - the dwellers lurk in the Hole. They know everything - they mean no harm, but they are dangerous. They know the truth, and the truth is too much!'
What truth?'
'I forget - I couldn't hold it. They told it to me. It wasn't fair.' She stared at him again and once more intelligence was in her eyes. 'Don't believe in justice, Renark - don't for an instant take its existence for granted. It doesn't exist. You learn that in the gaps, you can make it - but it breaks down in the real universe. You find that in the gaps.'
'Gaps? What are they?' He wondered at the peculiar accent she put on the word.
'The ragged planet's gaps' She sighed and fidgeted on the couch. 'That's where I finally forgot - where every theory, every scrap of information gathered on the other planets was meaningless. And I forgot - but it did me no good. I was curious… I'm not now, but I want rest, peace, and I can't have it. It goes on. They know, though - they know, and their hate has kept them sane…'
'Who are "they", Mary?'
'The Thron - the horrible Thron. And the Shaarn know, too, but they are weak - they couldn't help me. The beasts. Don't let them push you into the… untime… the un-space. Their weapons are cruel. They do not kill.'
'Thank you, Mary,' Renark said, at a loss to help her. 'I will go to Thron.'
She rose from the couch, screaming: 'I said not, spiral, magenta, irri-bird, night. Not, sight of droan - not: Oh, no…'
She began sobbing and Renark left the room.
He walked down the corridor, brooding, dissatisfied with the little he had learned, but with a definite plan of action now. He must go to Thron and discover the truth of Mary's statement.
Whatever happened, the Thron would be of more help - assuming they could be encouraged to help - than the decadent inhabitants of Entropium, who refused to know anything. Though he could half sympathise with anyone who didn't wonder or question. The boiling chaos of the Shifter as it moved through the dimensions of the multiverse was enough to disturb anyone.
He walked out of the hotel and found, to his relief, that the planet seemed to have quietened down and was presumably in normal space again, but in an alien universe.
Ah he walked swiftly towards the building, he allowed his mind to put out tendrils and was relieved when he sensed, beyond the insane perimeter of the Shifter, the solid, ordered planets and suns of a wide, spiral galaxy like his own in general components, although here and there he came across organic and chemical formations which he did not recognise.
When he got back to the control room in the skyscraper, Klein said: 'Half the new Migaa-load are dead. As usual, they panicked and caused trouble while we were in transit, so we cleaned them up. The rest are settling down or running back to the launching pads… How did you get on with Mary?'
'She said that the Thron knew about the Shifter's nature - or that's what I believe she said.'
Asquiol and Willow, both pale, walked in. He nodded to them.
'Were the Thron the race who initially attacked us?' he asked Klein.
Far away he heard ships blasting off. Klein cursed. 'They were warned. That's another lot on their way to death.'
'What do you mean?'
'Every time there are newcomers who try to use the Shifter as a transport from their own universe to another, we warn them that once they're here they're stuck. But they try. Maybe one or two make it - I don't know. But I think not. Something stops you leaving the Shifter once you're here.'
'It's impossible to get off?' Willow said worriedly.
Renark glanced at Willow. It was funny, he thought, how crisis took different people in different ways. Willow sounded as if she was going to break down. Asquiol evidently hadn't noticed it. He was curious to see how Talfryn would look and act when he came back.
Klein was talking. That's right, honey. It's harder to get out than in. You don't exist entirely in the space-time matrix of the universe which the Shifter is currently in. We kind of overflow into other dimensions. So when you try to leave, you hit the dimensions at a slight angle and - whoof! You break apart. Some of you goes one way, some of you goes another. No, you can't get out.'