After a long silence I say, “You’re telling me that it’s an alien device?”
“That’s right.”
“We’ve never discovered any sign of intelligent alien life anywhere in the galaxy.”
“There’s one right in front of you,” Oesterreich says. “It isn’t the only one.”
“You’ve found aliens?”
“We’ve found their matter-transmitters. A few of them, anyway. They still work. Are you ready to jump now, your grace?”
I stare blankly at the three-sided doorway.
“Where to?”
“To a planet about five hundred light-years from here, where we can catch the bus that’ll take us to the Goddess Avatar.”
“You’re actually serious?”
“Let’s go, your grace.”
“What about lambda effects?”
“There aren’t any. Lambda differentials are a flaw in the Velde technology, not in the universe itself. This system gets us around without any lambda problems at all. Of course, we don’t know how it works. Are you ready?”
“All right,” I say helplessly.
He beckons to me and together we step toward the doorway and simply walk through it, and out the other side into such astonishing beauty that I want to fall down and give praise. Great feathery trees rise higher than sequoias, and a milky waterfall comes tumbling down the flank of an ebony mountain that fills half the sky, and the air quivers with a diamond-bright haze. Before me stretches a meadow like a scarlet carpet, vanishing into the middle distance. There is a Mesozoic richness of texture to everything: it gleams, it shimmers, it trembles in splendor.
A second doorway, identical to the first, is mounted against an enormous boulder right in front of us. It too is flanked by the triple star emblem.
“Put your medallion on,” Oesterreich tells me.
“My medallion?” I say, stupidly.
“Put it on. The Goddess Avatar will wonder why you’re with me, and that’ll tell her.”
“Is she here?”
“She’s on the next world. This is just a way station. We had to stop here first. I don’t know why. Nobody does. Ready?”
“I’d like to stay here longer.”
“You can come back some other time,” he says. “She’s waiting for you. Let’s go.”
“Yes,” I say, and fumble in my pocket and find my medallion, and put it around my throat. Oesterreich winks and puts his thumb and forefinger together approvingly. He takes my hand and we step through.
She is a lean, leathery-looking woman of sixty or seventy years with hard bright blue eyes. She wears a khaki jacket, an olive-drab field hat, khaki shorts, heavy boots. Her graying hair is tucked behind her in a tight bun. Standing in front of a small tent, tapping something into a hand terminal, she looks like an aging geology professor out on a field trip in Wyoming. But next to her tent the triple emblem of the Goddess is displayed on a sandstone plaque.
This is a Mesozoic landscape too, but much less lush than the last one: great red-brown cliffs sparsely peppered with giant ferns and palms, four-winged insects the size of dragons zooming overhead, huge grotesque things that look very much like dinosaurs warily circling each other in a stony arroyo out near the horizon. I see some other tents out there too. There is a little colony here. The sun is reddish-yellow, and large.
“Well, what do we have here?” she says. “A Lord Magistrate, is it?”
“He was nosing around on Zima and Entrada, trying to find out what was going on.”
“Well, now he knows.” Her voice is like flint. I feel her contempt, her hostility, like something palpable. I feel her strength, too, a cold, harsh, brutal power. She says, “What was your house, Lord Magistrate?”
“Senders.”
She studies me as if I were a specimen in a display case. In all my life I have known only one other person of such force and intensity, and that is the Master. But she is nothing like him.
“And now the Sender is sent?”
“Yes,” I say. “There were deviations from the plan. It became necessary for me to resign my magistracy.”
“We weren’t supposed to come out this far, were we?” she asks. “The light of that sun up there won’t get to Earth until the seventy- third century, do you know that? But here we are. Here we are!” She laughs, a crazed sort of cackle. I begin to wonder if they intend to kill me. The aura that comes from her is terrifying. The geology professor I took her for at first is gone: what I see now is something strange and fierce, a prophet, a seer. Then suddenly the fierceness vanishes too and something quite different comes from her: tenderness, pity, even love. The strength of it catches me unawares and I gasp at its power. These shifts of hers are managed without apparent means; she has spoken only a few words, and all the rest has been done with movement, with posture, with expression. I know that I am in the presence of some great charismatic. She walks over to me and with her face close to mine says, “We spoiled your plan, I know. But we too follow the divine rule. We discovered things that nobody had suspected, and everything changed for us. Everything.”
“Do you need me, Lady?” Oesterreich asks.
“No. Not now.” She touches the tips of her fingers to my medallion of office, rubbing it lightly as though it is a magic talisman. Softly she says, “Let me take you on a tour of the galaxy, Lord Magistrate.”
One of the alien doorways is located right behind her tent. We step through it hand in hand, and emerge on a dazzling green hillside looking out over a sea of ice. Three tiny blue-white suns hang like diamonds in the sky. In the trembling air they look like the three six-pointed stars of the emblem. “One of their capital cities was here once,” she says. “But it’s all at the bottom of that sea now. We ran a scan on it and saw the ruins, and some day we’ll try to get down there.” She beckons and we step through again, and out onto a turbulent desert of iron-hard red sand, where heavily armored crabs the size of footballs go scuttling sullenly away as we appear. “We think there’s another city under here,” she says. Stooping, she picks up a worn shard of gray pottery and puts it in my hand. “That’s an artifact millions of years old. We find them all over the place.” I stare at it as if she has handed me a small fragment of the core of a star. She touches my medallion again, just a light grazing stroke, and leads me on into the next doorway, and out onto a world of billowing white clouds and soft dewy hills, and onward from there to one where trees hang like ropes from the sky, and onward from there, and onward from there— “How did you find all this?” I ask, finally.
“I was living on Three Suns. You know where that is? We were exploring the nearby worlds, trying to see if there was anything worthwhile, and one day I stepped out of a Velde unit and found myself looking at a peculiar three-sided kind of doorway right next to it, and I got too close and found myself going through into another world entirely. That was all there was to it.”
“And you kept on going through one doorway after another?”
“Fifty of them. I didn’t know then how to tune for destination, so I just kept jumping, hoping I’d get back to my starting point eventually. There wasn’t any reason in the world why I should. But after six months I did. The Goddess protects me.”
“The Goddess,” I say.
She looks at me as though awaiting a challenge. But I am silent.
“These doorways link the whole galaxy together like the Paris Metro,” she says after a moment. “We can go everywhere with them. Everywhere.”
“And the Goddess? Are the doorways Her work?”
“We hope to find that out some day.”
“What about this emblem?” I ask, pointing to the six-pointed stars beside the gateway. “What does that signify?”