“A rescue squad,” Chris comments tersely.
“Frodo thinks they’re alive,” Valerie goes on. “Like space-fish. Maybe we’re in a whale, like Jonah.” Her soundless laugh is warm in the endless night. “Or in a kangaroo’s pouch… We better move on and find the others.”
Her nonexistent fingers tug gently. Dann tears himself away from the mesmeric image and follows, marveling at her composure. She accepts that they are in a thing. Are they jumping between the electrons of a space-fish? Or hurdling interstellar distances? No way to tell. How big is the structure of a mind? The ancient theologians had been sure that angels could throng on a pinhead. Perhaps he is sub-pinhead size? But he is not an angel, none of them are. We are the miraculously undead, he thinks; joy and pain and wonder and tension live among us still.
They skirt another of the uncanny communicative projectors, triggering it in midscene. As the great galaxy flashes to life in his mind’s eye, Dann muses again on the incredible grandeur of the thing. Beings or machines whose task is to contain galactic fire-storms! Ungraspable in its enormity. Are they manned ships, or could it be instinctive, like great animals? Or maybe devices of a super-race to rescue endangered habitats of life?
His own mind reels, yet the others with him seem undisturbed. He recalls that their Earthly selves read, what was it, science fiction. Galaxies, super-races, marvels of space. They’re used to such notions. He himself had seen the stars as stars; they saw them as backgrounds for scenarios. Well, maybe theirs was the best preparation for reality, if wherever they are is indeed reality.
He is distracted by the faint persistent glimmer of more presences that seem to be moving parallel with them. Two, no, three others are here. An instant later he feels a strong, skillful Tyrenni mind-touch, is electrified by recognition. “Tanel!”
“Tivonel, my dear, is that you? Are you—”
“Tanel, stop, you’re terrible .” Image of coral laughter leaping away. He subsides abashed. It comes to him that he was “sending” in a sort of pidgin, half-human, half Tyrenni words. Will there, incredibly, be language problems here?
It seems so. She is “speaking” again, but he retains only enough of her speech to catch a sense of impending events and the names of Heagran and Giadoc. This last comes through with such joy that he is pricked by a ludicrous flash of jealousy. Apparently the famous Giadoc has been found—of course, he called them here. Now his little friend is reunited with her love. For an instant he chafes, until the ultimate absurdity of his reaction here in this gargantuan abyss comes to his rescue.
It seems they are to go on. But just as he starts, Valerie’s invisible touch checks, and he is jolted by a brush with an unfamiliar, warm complex of mind-stuff.
“Oh Winnie, I’m so glad you’re all right!” Val’s thought comes while he tries apologetically to back away from their contact. He can hear Winona’s transmission almost as if her voice were in his human ears. “Yes, I have Kenny here too, with his doggie. They’re dreaming of hunting. Oh, hello, Doctor Dann! How wonderful!”
“Yes.” He disengages, and finds again Val’s light touch tugging him on through nowhere. As they go on amid unfathomable strangeness, Dann broods on the concept of being “all right,” here between the stars without bodies or proper senses, perhaps inside some creature or machine of the void. Well, the alternative was burning to death in mortal bodies; they have in fact been rescued from real death. Maybe the mind really is all, as he had told himself. Maybe to these telepaths the body is less necessary. But he, how will he get on with his mere human mind as his only resource in this terrible isolation? Rescued from death… a coldness touches him. Are they perhaps truly rescued from mortal death, is this condition to be—don’t think of it.
He is so preoccupied that he almost misses Val’s pull backward, her sense of warning. He stops, but not before he has touched against a hostile iciness—manifestly a barrier.
He recoils onto the nearest sustaining point like a man teetering on a brink. What menace is here? He tries to “look” in his new averted way, and finally achieves an impression of a great swirl of pale energies confined in a pyramidal or tetragonal shape. It is huge, complex, indefinably sinister. And it is apparently their goal; he can sense other lives waiting nearby.
There is a short time of confusion. He has lost contact, but he can feel their lives all about him, and waits, trusting that someone will link up with him again. Presently he feels a vague, cloudy presence, and tries hopefully to “receive” at it. But nothing comes to him.
Then through the bewilderment cuts Tivonel’s mind-send, so clear that it seems to revive his memory of her speech:
“Winds! Can’t you people get into communication-mode at all?”
Communication-mode, what could that be? Another mental gymnastic stunt? A ghostly outstretched hand comes into his consciousness and a human voice speaks strongly in his mental ear.
“Waxman here. Let me help. I have like hands to spare.”
Slowly Dann succeeds in imagining himself clasping the hand, wondering if it is Ron or Rick. As he does so, an odd kind of extended clarity comes into being. He has a sudden weird picture of them each clasping one of the joined twins’ four hands, as if Waxman were making himself into a kind of astral conference hook-up. Is this perhaps literally true? It would be logical, he thinks daftly.
“That seems to be a plant you’re in, Dann. Better get loose.”
He manages to retract himself or shake free from the nebulous presence, without losing Waxman’s grip. As he does so, a mental voice says faintly, “I’ll hang in with Doc here.”
It’s Chris, he’s sure. So shyness continues into astral realms. He imagines his other hand outstretched in that direction, and feels a small, oddly hard touch.
“Ready,” says Waxman’s “voice.”
Next moment Dann is receiving a clear formal transmission which seems to be echoing through Waxman to them all.
“Greetings, all, and to you, Doctordan. I am Giadoc of Tyree.”
So this is Giadoc, lost sky-traveler and late occupant of Dann’s own human body! He seems to be sending in English, too. But there is no time for curiosity, the transmission is going on, part-speech, part-pictures.
“Eldest Heagran and others are with me. We are in what we call the Destroyer.” Image of a great, too-familiar huge blackness, and then in rapid sequence Giadoc’s story unrolls through their linked minds; his awakening and finding Ted Yost, their search for the brain, and Ted Yost’s strange apparent communication with it; then the tale of Giadoc’s own call to them and its consequences. “It came alive as you find it now.”
During the recital Dann is irresistibly reminded of certain eager young interns he has known. A good type. Well, the young belong to each other, even in darkness and supreme weirdness.
He is jerked from his benevolence by Giadoc’s urgent news. “The energies around us are sinking back to death or turning off. Unless we can contact this brain again and reverse its condition we are all doomed. Ted Yost seems our only link. We cannot rouse him. Can you help?”
Before Dann can react, Waxman’s thought comes. “Cryostasis. Maybe it’s packing us up for a trip. Like thousands of years.”
Dann recalls Rick’s tale about the Japanese time-machine. The imagination is still alive in Waxman but it doesn’t sound so fantastic here. Not at all. He now senses, or thinks he senses, a slow but definite ebbing-down of energies around their perimeter. The murmurs of life seem to be slowing, lessening. Is it drawing closer? He shudders.