“Excuse me, please, I’m sorry I don’t know how—” Awkwardly he pulls back, reforming his configuration, terrified that he will lose her.
“Think about just touching hands lightly.” The tiny gentle “voice” comes in his brain.
It is like Tyree all over again, with no body. He tries to comply, and is rewarded by a definite sense of impalpable contact.
“Frodo is here. And Chris is around but he won’t talk. Now we better go. I’ll lead, right?”
“Yes.”
He feels the touch pull or draw delicately, and flows himself with it, marveling. The quality of the contact is Valerie’s but not the same defensive young mind he had known before. Strength flows gently from her, and—something like elation. Leading them through this lightless, soundless, senseless place beyond life she is excited, unafraid. And far more skilled than he. The vulnerability was left on Earth, he thinks. Here nothing scares her.
He flows or leaps along in her wake, exerting all his efforts to hold the contact lightly. Once or twice she checks and changes direction, and he has a fleeting sense of other presences. She must be guiding them around groups of Tyrenni in their path. Or over or under—all directions have the same valence here. How could a disembodied mind know weight?
Preoccupied, he blunders into the outskirts of another mind, a quick bright impression of many words mixed with musics, and an unmistakably hostile laugh. “Frodo!” Trying to transmit apology, he swerves away. His new “posture” is becoming slightly more natural, but he still feels like a man trying to bicycle a tightwire while holding out an ear-trumpet with both hands.
And Earthly questions are waking in him again. What in God’s name is this place? It has physical existence, he is sure of that. They are actually moving. But what and where are they?
As if in answer, another light contact jolts him and a strange word jumps into his mind. “Superconductive circuits.”
Who’s there? He lunges awkwardly for an instant before recalling how to project? “Chris? Chris Costakis?” The absurdity of human names here in astral nothingness.
A cryptic emanation brushes him, flavored with acidity and wistfulness. “Keep moving, Doc.”
It’s gone. So what had been the little man is still here, still his characteristic self.
Dann resumes his progress, pondering. Superconductors? Chris must have “heard” him puzzling over this place, he must be puzzling too. Superconductors are something that happens in extreme cold, he recalls. Currents cycle endlessly. No friction… He knows nothing of such things. Could they in fact be sustained by, be moving among, some such cold circuitry of space? Could a living mind be compatible with such energies? It seems as likely as anything… The words ghost-program come back to him; he thrusts them away. Lost, gone forever, with everything else. Don’t think of her. Keep moving in this unreality, it’s all that’s left.
Without knowing it, he must have sent out a sign or squeak of pain. A firmness brushes him, palpable as a finger laid on his lips. Not human, he thinks. Some passing Tyrenni has admonished him. Anguish is not permitted. Well, perhaps he can learn. He must; there are no drugs here.
Just then he becomes aware of a new extraordinary thing: For some time he has not been in total lightlessness. Out on the edges of his mind he has been sensing something, like seeing at night from the corners of the eye. It is not in his visual system at all, really—but there is something spatial, blurs or presences. Faint swirls, the memories of reflections in dark water; ghostly differentiations too faint to make out except that three of them seem to be moving with him against a background of others. He tries to “look” harder, and they vanish. He thinks of closing his eyes, and slowly they come back: dim, moonlit glimmers, but there. Is this perhaps what they meant by the life-bands, is he starting to “see” life?
Excitedly he tries again and again, failing more often then he succeeds. He is trying too hard, maybe. Relax. Think away. Yes—there they are again, moving with him. What he takes to be Valerie ahead is clearest, if any of this can be called clear. But what happiness to have something like vision again, even in this faint mode!
At this moment she checks and he has to strive away from colliding.
“Look.”
He can “see” nothing, but somehow the space before them seems different, as if it framed or led up to something. And then he becomes aware that he is perceiving: Some sort of pattern is forming like a hypnagogic scene behind his nonexistent eyelids, a hologram in black light.
The bright points—why, it is a picture of stars! And as he attends, the scene recedes, growing, and turns into an image he cannot fail to recognize—a great spiral galaxy seen like photos of Andromeda, in tilted view.
He and the others hover there transfixed, while the transmission changes and unrolls, as Giadoc and Heagran had seen it do at the nucleus. But these are human minds, turned to Earthly modalities.
“P.A. system,” Chris’ thought touches his abruptly. “Probably a lot of them scattered around.”
“Frodo says it’s a transit diagram,” Valerie’s “voice” smiles in the void. “It’ll show an arrow: You are here, take Line L2 for Bethesda.”
And indeed, as Dann “watches,” or experiences the thing, he feels it has a mechanical quality, like a recording. And it seems to resonate from many points, like the abstract voice in a plane. This is your Captain speaking. Have they encountered or triggered some kind of information-post? Is this place an artifact, a ship of some inconceivable race?
The scene is now “showing” the fleet of star-Destroyers spreading their zone of death around the central fires of the Galaxy. Suddenly the memory of a long-ago summer in Idaho surfaces in Dann’s mind. Comprehension breaks.
“Good God, it’s a firelane!”
Feeling Val wince, he modulates down. “It’s a galactic fire-break! If that’s our galaxy. We must be seeing millions of years, speeded up. See that explosion at the center?” He realizes he is transmitting a jumble, half-words, half-pictures, and tries for coherence. “An explosion like that could start a chain reaction, propagate out to all the central stars. Maybe even to the arms. I think those ships or whatever are starting backfires, they’re clearing out a zone around the center to stop the spread. To save the outer stars. But aeons of time, a galaxy—a whole great galaxy—”
He falls silent before the enormity of the thing.
Through Valerie’s touch he can feel the reflection of her wonder. Do they truly grasp it? It’s too vast, I don’t grasp it, he thinks numbly, “seeing” the things, whatever they are, complete their task, form up and speed away. Then the whole scene expands and begins to repeat again.
The four hover before it, hypnotized.
How can they annihilate matter, Dann wonders, without generating worse energies? Do they somehow disperse it below criticality? Are they beings or machines?
Suddenly Valerie’s “voice” says excitedly, “Look! Look at those ones going in ahead. Can’t you feel the life there? I think they’re rescuing life, they’re taking living things off before they burn up. Maybe that’s what we’re in.”