He could not. But he could see more clearly, as his vision adjusted to its limit of tolerance, the two figures facing each other across that blinding blaze. A white-robed figure, and a column of swaying, lashing darkness upon which a pale mask floated.
The Goddess. Nethe and the Goddess.
Then this was the Unsealing, from which one or the other would walk alive, leaving a vanquished rival dead beside the Well. How, he wondered in awed amazement, could the Isier die? In what unimaginable form would death overtake the undying gods?
The rings of electrons spun. The fiery streamers of light poured swirling inside the shell of the electrons. And between the two rival Goddesses the sphere of the Well burned high and then low again, as one victim after another whirled downward toward the flame, hovered, dropped. With each victim, the fire flared high.
“And they’re being replaced from outside,” Sawyer thought. “As each drops from the middle ring into the fire, a readjustment must take place all through the seven orbits. Cell by cell they snatch us from the wall of sacrifices and whirl us into the dance as they need us. We—”
A sudden jolt knocked the thoughts out of his head. He was dropping nearer the fire… The outermost orbit of the seven acquired a new electron and the sixth received Sawyer. Presently, he thought, the fifth would rob the sixth of him, and so, step by step, he would fall through the dance of the rings until he hovered above the innermost flame, and dropped…
To replenish the weapons with which the Goddess and the Goddess-elect were lashing each other with whips of emerald flame. What were the weapons? How did they draw upon the burning Well for their power?
As if in answer, for a moment the fire died between them and he could look down clearly and see. For one of the falling electrons was hesitating above the Well. Had some helpless sacrifice, for an instant, jolted half-awake as he dropped toward immolation?
The green fires faded, ceased. The Well filmed over for an instant and it was possible for Sawyer to gaze unblinded upon the heart of the ceremony. He could still not bear to look upon the complex pattern that seethed in the Well. But he could see the two Isier, pausing as if for a moment’s breath before the combat began again.
Nethe’s great, baleful, half-lidded eyes like a snake’s eyes—or like a Sselli’s—glowed with an inner flame as hot as the Well’s. Her face was wet with a luminous dew of sweat, and her robes showed great rents whose edges glowed as if fire had ripped them and ignited an undying line of pale-green ember wherever it touched. She was swaying to and fro as a snake sways, restlessly and endlessly, incapable of standing still because the forces of destruction burned so high in her even while she snatched this moment’s rest.
With the same fierce, snake-like motion the Goddess swayed. Her robes of blackness the color of oblivion were rent too, and glowing with pale-green embers along every slash.
Something was wrong about their heads. And he could not quite make out the strangely shaped weapons they held shoulder-high between their hands as they faced each other.
Then with a shock he realized what had happened. They had removed their masks. Below the fiercely glaring faces they turned to one another, the masks glared as fiercely. With hands spread upon the cheeks of the masks so that the pale smiles, the empty eyes fronted their replicas across the Well like faces in a mirror, the two Isier swayed and panted, waiting…
The hesitating sacrifice dropped into the Well, and the waiting ended.
XIII
The well flared high. Up out of it shot enormous bending streamers of white fire, lashing toward the zenith of this golden firmament. But the whirl of the electronic shells intercepted their course, bent them and blew them sidewise as if in the grip of a hurricane, whirled them around and around in intricate, interlacing spiral patterns that seemed to drive the fiery beams faster and faster, endlessly accelerated—What was it Alper had been saying so incoherently, as he stared half dazed into this golden holocaust?
“A cyclotron! Something drives forces around and around the chamber the electrons make!”
And it was true—or an analogy of the truth. The likeness was too clear to miss. Power streamed out of the Well when the sacrifices were fed into it. But the power did not now expend itself outward in invisible waves like a carrier-beam which conveyed energy to the Isier and whatever mysterious receiving-sets and transformers their godlike bodies bid. Power here and now was being confined and driven back upon itself as a cyclotron drives an ion stream faster and faster around wider and wider spirals. What oscillator-force drove it Sawyer could not guess, but the axis it spun on was the same axis the cyclotron uses, pure magnetic force pouring between continua from Earth’s Pole itself.
And it was unmistakably clear what purpose this wild spiral served. In a cyclotron the accelerated stream of ions pours at last through an opening that focuses it down to a narrow pencil of tremendously high-energy particles. In the planetary cyclotron of the Hall of Worlds, there was no opening in the artificial chamber the whirling electrons wove. But the pencil of killing energy escaped, none the less. That opening must exist perhaps in a dimensional warp the eye could not follow, but where the beam came out no one could mistake. The deflecting plates that captured it began to light up gloriously.
For now the eyes of the two masks the Isier Goddesses held were filling with solid beams of green fire. Twin rays of it flashed like two drawn blades from each glaring mask—Gorgon glares that crossed in the dazzling air above the well. Their color was the pale green glow of the cathode fluorescent tube, but bright with a terrible brilliance the human gaze could not touch.
And it was doubly terrible to see those pale, serene smiles still fixed upon the masks as the eyes shot out that killing violence. The cyclotron of the worlds whirled more and more furiously as victims dropped down the Well of bubbling flame.
Ring by ring, as the sacrifices dropped, Sawyer was drawn nearer and nearer to the Well. But he forgot his own danger. He forgot the orbit he whirled on, up and over and down again around the nucleus that slowly sucked him in.
All he could see or think of in this moment was the conflict between Goddess and Goddess-elect, fought across the pool where fire instead of water bubbled, and pale beams lashed and clashed like swords more terrible than any blade ever forged.
They were well matched. Endlessly the sweeping slashes caught in midair and hung harmless for a moment before they fell apart and swept treacherously over or under one another at the vulnerable bodies behind the masks.
For to these blades alone the Isier were vulnerable. He saw that now. He saw Nethe suddenly shoot her mask up high above her head at arms’ full length, tilt the beams downward and shear across the Goddess’s left shoulder with a terrible slash of the green beams from the masks.
The cut bit deep. A dazzling glare sprang out at the impact—the same glare infinitely intensified which had sprung out between Nethe’s head and the rock the Sselli hurled at her on the floating island. That protective flare of energy still functioned, then. But it was of no avail, even when stepped up to such blinding power as this, against the slash of the green beams from the masks.
The Goddess reeled. Her mask-guard dropped for a second, the Gorgon flash from its eyes cutting emptiness. Her black robe parted along an emerald-glowing slash and through it a stream of golden blood poured sluggishly…
Golden blood, Sawyer thought. Golden blood! A single, shattering roar went up from the ring of watching angels as that luminous flood gushed over the midnight robe. Nethe screamed, a wild, high, ringing cry of triumph—