“Heagran! It is showing us the Companions.”
As if in confirmation, the pattern lingers, then begins to change as though receding in a steady, unliving way. New sparks pour in on all sides while the familiar sky-field shrinks until it is only a part of what seems a huge globular mass of brilliance. Then that too shrinks further and is lost in a great flattened swirl, like a big plant of light spinning in an eddy. At the center of the slow light-whirl is a disorderly bright flare.
As Giadoc studies this he receives the impression of wrongness, danger; it is insistent, like the warning engrams that explorers sometimes impose on poisonous plants.
“This is some kind of message or communication, Heagran. Perhaps it is showing the true shape of the whole sky.”
“Can you decipher it, young Giadoc?”
“No. But maybe it is warning us of trouble among the Companions, or the death of Sounds.”
“We know that already.”
“Wait. See!”
Into the strange cold swirl of unliving light a squadron of dark shapes have come. They appear small, but Giadoc realizes they must be huge by comparison with the lights that represent a myriad Sounds, They remind him of the schools of mindless animals that feed on the plant-rafts of the high winds. As he attends, they spread out, deploy in ranks, and in fact begin something that looks like feeding. The Companions before them seem to vaporize or disappear at their approach; the black ranks are cutting a slow swathe of darkness through the brilliance of the central fires. Soon a zone or arc of empty deadness is being carved out of the great glowing swirl, between the inmost center and the roots of the streaming, spangled arms. A flare from the center washes toward the dark zone and subsides, and still the “feeding” goes on.
“Heagran, I believe it is showing us the other Destroyers. The eaters of Sounds.”
“ We know that too. To what purpose?”
“I can’t tell. It seems unliving, like a dead engram.”
Old Heagran churns angrily, and transmits with all his force straight at the brain behind the image.
“WHY? WHY DO YOU KILL?”
No reaction. The strange panoramic engram continues to unfold. The dead zone of destruction continues to expand around the center; now it has almost enclosed it. Giadoc is sure this is some recording, but a vastly speeded-up image or diagram of unimaginable scope. And now he notices a new detail of the scene: here and there among the shoals of the Destroyers are a few of different sort, moving in advance of the general line. They pause now and again, and from them come faint simulacra of the signals of life. Then these few turn and speed out beyond the area of annihilation, only to return and repeat.
Giadoc can make nothing of this, yet he senses it is intended as significant. He has not long to wonder; now the globe or shell of darkness has been joined around the central fires of the image. As if this were a signal, the dark shapes of the Destroyers draw together like a school of flying animals, then turn as one and flee outward from the scene. In a moment they have dwindled to a vanishing point in the void beyond all light.
The image holds for a moment, then darkens and expands back to the original sky-field, showing again the familiar Companions. Then this begins to shrink and condense as before. Giadoc realizes that it is about to repeat the entire sequence all over again. Can this be communication, or a fantastically detailed engram impressed somehow on unliving energy?
But as he puzzles, “watching” the dark shapes come again into the great sky-swirl, a faint subliminal unease comes to him, as if something is changing in the real, or unreal, world around him. The sensation is not strong enough to break his concentration, until he notices that the faint blur below the image which is the dreaming mind of Tedyost is no longer still. It has begun to roil restlessly. Presently it flares out weakly, as if seeking contact. Perhaps the dreaming one has waked?
Cautiously Giadoc extends contact, only to find he need not have bothered.
With startling intensity the alien transmits directly at him:
“Help! Mutiny! The Captain needs help!”
The symbols are only half-intelligible. Tedyost subsides to passivity again. But Giadoc has no time to puzzle over this: He has suddenly become aware of what is bothering him: Alarm!
Out beyond them, all through the vast expanse of the Destroyer, the sense of life has lowered. Gradually but perceptibly the sustaining energies are sinking, ebbing, seeping away.
“Heagran! Do you not sense that these energies are beginning to fail? In the periphery, coming closer?”
The old being scans intently. “Yes. I do. So your space-animal is dying after all, young Giadoc. A brave try, but doomed.”
But suddenly into Giadoc’s mind come his experiences on the alien world, the nonliving energy systems he has known.
“No, Heagran. I believe this is something different. I believe that this entity is turning us off. If we could break through and change its power-set, perhaps we are not doomed.”
Chapter 24
Among the incoming life-rush of the Tyrenni are eight minds that had been human and one that had been a dog.
The entity which calls itself Daniel Dann loses contact with everything as his life is whirled up on the strange Beam, leaving his dying body behind. He feels himself a swimmer shot through a turbulent millrace, swirled and spewed out to the shallows of the throng. A moment later he strands on something, he can’t tell what, but only clutches at it and finds that it sustains his life.
He has had practice in wild discarnations, but this is the most alien of all. He is still alive, still seemingly himself, but bodiless. Now he has no limbs, no senses, nothing—yet he lives.
A fearful aloneness strikes him. As it threatens to rise to panic, he perceives that his naked mind is receiving input, vague but insistent. This void is not empty. All around him is a sense of calling, or signaling, in some mode he can’t quite receive. Others are here, he realizes. They have all come somewhere, life is near him now. But he has no idea how to make contact. The terror of isolation hammers in him; he strains to hang onto himself, to face the menace of this weird escape from death.
Or is it escape? A new terror takes hold. Has he died, is this what the dying mind feels as it leaves life forever? Will the sense of presence fade, and float away forever, leaving him in eternal isolation in the dark?
He tries to “listen” again. Whatever the elusive susurrus whispering around him is, it does not seem to be fading. Hold onto yourself, Dann. The others must be here too, wherever this is. Are they, too, frightened? Try to reach them.
But how can he? He has no idea.
Experimentally he forms the thought of Valerie—no yellow-bikinied body, but Valerie’s world as he had touched it—and tries to project her name. Valerie, he wills, VALERIE, ARE YOU HERE?
Nothing answers him. Ignorant of the mad commotion he is generating, Dann runs through the names. FRODO! RICK, RON WAXMAN! Can you hear me? WINONA! CHRIS?
Still no answer he can detect. Is he doomed never to make contact, to continue so horribly alone in nowhere?
Perhaps the Tyrenni, he thinks, and imagines himself shouting with all his might. TIVONEL! HELP ME PLEASE!