“The Goddess’ guards are watching for me, and if they catch me I’ll have to face her at the Ceremony of the Unsealing. One of us will die. If I have the Firebird, I’ll win it. If I don’t—”
“Maybe I’d better get in touch with the Goddess, then,” Sawyer said cheerfully. “Alper, are you listening?” This last was sotto voce.
“Khom!” Nethe said furiously. “Animal!”
“Stand back,” Sawyer warned her. “I’m perfectly willing to bargain. For instance, could you send me back to the world I came from?” He added hastily, “With Alper, of course. And Klai too, if she wants to go.”
“Klai is being hunted by the guards now. She’ll go as a sacrifice at the Unsealing. But you I could send back. And Alper too. Now give me the Firebird and—”
“Not so fast,” Sawyer advised her. “What can you do for me the Goddess can’t?”
“I can let you live!” Nethe said violently, and surged forward a little without actually leaving her place. “The Goddess knows nothing! Nothing! Only I could send you back.”
“Interesting, if true,” Sawyer murmured, and turned his head to glance for a second down the abyss where the islands rose and fell. Light from the fire was beginning to touch the uppermost, and on these a vague stirring of motion among the trees was visible.
“If you make it clear enough,” he said, “I might be persuaded. Go on, convince me.” It was in his mind that with Alper listening—and he hoped Alper was—something might emerge which the old man’s trained brain could make sense of even if Sawyer’s could not.
Nethe gave him a long, hating look and said, “The Isier are gods. Why should I talk to you, animal? No, no—I will. I’ll make it clear. Once we were mortal, long ago. Never human, like you lower orders, but mortal. Until we made our great discovery and our great change. That happened a thousand years ago on another world—the world you see below us. It turns inside the vast outer shell which is Khom’ad, and these islands rise and sink on great gravitational currents flowing between the Under-Shell and the world above.
“In the ancient days our wise men made the Well of the Worlds, and after that we became gods. It worked a change in us so that our appearance—altered. Our bodies altered both inside and out, and yet we were the same. I can only explain it by a thing I learned on your world—the creation of isotopes is very like what the Well did for us. We became isotopes of our earlier selves. And the isotopes were gods, except for one thing—we need energy.
“All the power we need we draw out of the Well. It gives us immortality. We can resist all bodily harm, we heal instantly, we never eat or drink or sleep. I’ll tell you how the Well works, as nearly as I can, and then perhaps even your limited animal mind can understand the danger in the Firebird.
“There are many worlds in creation. Many states of matter. You know that? You know your sun, for instance, differs from the solid Earth? Well, there are many such states, far more than you would ever dream. Worlds of a vapor, for instance, attenuated not necessarily in space. States of matter inconceivable to you but no less real than your own planet.
“Khom’ad is a world of such other-matter. Your sun and worlds are invisible to us, as we are to you. Just as there are colors beyond the two ends of the visible spectrum, so there are states of matter above hydrogen and below the transuranic elements you know.
“But though these worlds and stars are invisible to us, they’re accessible through the Well. As your sun radiates energy to your world, so we draw energy from the vast seas of other-space. The Well drains it as we drift and the energy is radiated to us as we choose to take it, much or little, according to the need of the individual Isier. You have the transmission of energy through the air in your own world. We receive it in a similar way, regulating our intake as we need.”
“Transformers,” Sawyer murmured. “Built in, I suppose. An X-ray photo of an Isier ought to be very informative. I wonder if you’ve got coils of wire inside. Never mind. Don’t tell me. You haven’t come to the Firebird yet.”
“The Firebird is the energy-control from the Well. It belongs in the Well. It should be there now. It was stolen—” Nethe paused and then said firmly, “The Goddess stole it. And then all our troubles began. You see, we drifted near your world, which happens to have rich deposits of uranium near its pole. Our world’s pole is the Well. It is, incidentally, our south pole, which helps to explain what happened when the Firebird was—stolen.
“The uranium made your world too strong a power-source for us. I think there’s a great deal your people don’t understand yet about what you call fissionable substances. And not uranium alone.
“Normally when we touch so rich a source of power the Firebird-control in the Well closes its wings and dies for awhile. This makes the Well go dead until we pass beyond danger. Otherwise the Well might drink up too much energy and burn out not only itself, but all the Isier too.”
“A circuit-breaker,” Sawyer said. “I see. What happened?”
“When your world drifted near ours, and the Firebird closed its wings, the Goddess happened to be alone by the Well. She saw her chance to lift the little control out of its place. This was one of the few times when it could be safely touched or moved. Instantly, when the control was lifted out of its place, the two worlds flashed together and sealed in an unbreakable fusion, because of the terribly powerful magnetic attraction between north pole and south. They’ll never be separated until the Firebird is put back into the Well.
“So now the two worlds are locked together. But the Well is dead. The Isier receive less and less energy. They don’t understand why. Only the Goddess and I know, and she has no idea where the Firebird really is. There have been times when our world drifted through other-space in regions where energy-sources were low. Then too our power flowed feebly. In times like that we have to feed sacrifices into the Well. That replenishes our energy until we drift out of the dead spaces into a place of stars again. The Isier think this is what’s happening now.
“But it isn’t. The energy will never flow again until the Firebird goes back into the Well. Meanwhile we offer sacrifices to keep the Isier alive and immortal. It gives us energy, but not enough. Disastrous things have happened. When an Isier uses up more energy than he possesses—something changes in him. I spoke of the parallel with isotopic elements. I think something very like that happens here. An Isier discharges more energy than he has and—and changes.”
Sawyer thought of the familiar three-stage isotopic change from uranium 238 through neptunium to plutonium, the complex rearrangement of charges and masses that can take an isotope of uranium around a cycle through plutonium and bring it out uranium again, but 235 three points down the scale from its start.
“It happens because they’re unstable,” he murmured. “Neptunium discharges an electron and turns into—oh, never mind. Go on. What does the Isier turn into?”
Nethe gave him a supicious glance. “He seems to—to vaporize in a cloud of heat. And then, much later, he returns as you saw, through the Ice-Hall. That was what I meant when I said we travel by a long, strange pathway, through more than one form. What happens in that interval no one could tell you, for no one remembers.”
She moved forward one impatient pace.
“Now you know the whole story. Will you give me the Firebird, or shall I make you jump?”