What choice did he have? Yet a person who would make this kind of threat and back it up would probably also break his word. It might be pointless to agree. At least he had ten days to think about it.
“Message received,” Tom“ said. ”May Darius now see Colene?”
The screen changed again. Suddenly Colene was there, in her ornate gown, sparkling hair and bracelets. She was beautiful in her vibrant youth. No one would know from her appearance that she was suicidal, and she had surely kept the secret.
She saw him. “Darius!” she exclaimed, stepping toward him.
Unable to help himself, he stepped toward her too. They met at the screen/wall between them, the images of their hands touching the cold surface. They tried to kiss, but again it was only images meeting.
“I asked to be with you,” he said.
“We’re not even in the same stellar system,” she replied. “I’m still on Earth, and you’re on an FTL ship crossing the galaxy.”
“Ddwng wants me to lead him to the Chip.”
“Don’t do it!” she exclaimed. “He wants to conquer the other Modes too!”
“But if I do not—”
“We won’t be allowed together,” she finished. “I know that, Darius. But we owe something to our realities. We can’t let them be despoiled. I love you, and I want to be with you, but not this way.” Her face shone with tears. “If you find a way to escape, don’t wait for me. Just get gone!”
“Colene, I love you too, and I curse the moment I failed to bring you with me. There are other ways—we don’t have to marry—I found a woman who can—we can love, if—”
“Prima,” she agreed. “I understand. It is good. It’s not what I first dreamed of, but I love you so, I don’t care. But not—you know. Not this way.”
“Not this way,” he agreed.
“They’re not cutting us off,” she said, surprised.
“Because the more we see of each other, the more we will be willing to sacrifice for each other,” he said.
“Yes. So I guess we’d better quit now.” Her tears were streaming down her face. “But it’s been great, Darius!”
“It is not over!” he protested. “It can’t be over! I went to the Virtual Mode only for you!”
“My life is nothing. It’s complete. But you—thank you for stepping into my life, Darius, however briefly. You made it all worthwhile.”
She turned away. He did the same. What irony, to seem so close, yet be so far! To exchange vows of love, yet to have to deny the realization of them.
He became aware of the three Felines. Pussy had rejoined the group.
He stepped into her and embraced her. She was completely soft and responsive. He buried his face in her furry hair and let himself hurt.
“You may take me in your bedroom, or here, as you wish,” she murmured.
She misunderstood the nature of his emotion. “Another time,” he said. “I have much still to learn here.” Then he disengaged, resumed his chair, and organized his thoughts.
He looked at Tom. “That was a significant service,” he said. “Now you may retire; I will not need you until morning.”
Tom walked to a niche, lay on the floor, curled up, and put his head down. In a moment he was asleep.
“You also,” he said to Pussy. She selected another nook and curled up similarly, showing firm upper thigh. Apparently it was simply her nature to display her body.
“From you I need more information,” he said to Cat. “What does ‘FTL’ mean?”
“It stands for ‘faster than light’,” it explained. “This ship, for example, is the FTL Flay, capable of traveling a great deal faster than the velocity of light through a vacuum. It is proceeding at that rate to the site of your mission, and will arrive in approximately fifty hours’ travel time.”
“I am from a culture where the velocity of light does not matter. Translate that into something I can follow.”
“If you walked entirely around the globe of Earth, you would travel about twenty-five thousand miles, as this language has it. If you completed that circuit seven or eight times, you would cover the distance light travels in a single second. The spans between stars are such that we prefer to measure them in multiples of the amount light travels in a year. This ship traverses a thousand light-years each hour, so its destination is fifty thousand light-years from Earth, or about halfway across the galaxy.”
Darius found that the translated version was not much more intelligible than the original. “So we are now an enormous distance from Earth, and going farther away.”
“That is correct. But we shall return as readily as we go.”
“What is the mission I am to accomplish?”
“A monster is rampaging on a colony planet, and the natives are unable to dispatch it. You will do that.”
With magic, Darius knew he could set a monster back. But magic had not worked for him in any of the Modes beyond the region of his own.
Still, he should test it. He removed his pack and brought out his golem-figure of himself. “To the far corner of this chamber,” he murmured, and made the figure jump.
Nothing happened. There was not even a tug in his stomach. Magic was not operative here.
Darius sighed. He was in effect a man without special power. “I am not skilled in this.”
“It is not necessary that you be so.” The Felines seemed to have no interest in his peculiar action with the figurine; evidently his business was his business, unless he made it theirs. “You will have merely to give the necessary directives. Nulls will assume the risk and complete the job.”
“So I’m a figurehead,” he said.
“No, nulls have no initiative in such respects,” it reassured him. “A ranking human being must be in charge of the operation.”
“But any human could do it, even a complete ignoramus.”
“Yes.”
“So why did Ddwng bother to send me? Just to get me out of the way for a while?”
“I can not speak for the motives of the Emperor, but it seems reasonable that he has several reasons. He may wish to give you time and experience so that you can come to the conclusion that it is best to accede to his wishes. He may wish to keep you away from Colene. He may wish to prevent you from departing via your Virtual Mode. He may wish to keep you out of mischief without imprisoning you. And he may wish to discover how competent an officer you have the potential of being, in the event that you are converted to his cause. This mission accomplishes these things.”
The reasoning was formidable. “I think I had better do as good a job as I can, until I decide what I will do.”
“That seems appropriate,” it agreed.
“What is known about this monster?”
“It seems to be a beast set on wanton destruction. It sets fire to villages, floods pastures, and fouls food supplies. No one has seen it, but its presence is manifest.”
“Why don’t they lock doors and set guards?”
“They do, but the monster is extremely cunning about locks, and can stun guards.”
Darius pondered that. “What are the natives like?”
“They are similar in outline and manner to Earthly snails, but larger. They are reasonably intelligent and capable, but slow.”
That surprised Darius. He had assumed that the natives were human, with a culture distinct from that of the colonists. Snails? This was a far land indeed!
He continued to question Cat, learning more about the various aspects of this Mode. It seemed that there were many intelligent creatures in what was called the galaxy, but that the humans had become dominant and now governed and exploited all of it they wished. They had risen to dominance thousands of years before, because of their ability to make ships that traveled faster than light, to nullify the effects of gravity, and to make weapons that could kill individual creatures or destroy entire planets.