Emperor of Gondwanaland (25 page)

In less time than it would take to tell a nonexistent companion, the transformation was complete.

The reflective surface of a storage unit across the kitchen revealed his new appearance to his eyes.

He was a fluted column with living kohl-outlined eyes embedded in it. Colorful animated hieroglyphics—including the twin lions Shu and Tefnut—cavorted across his surface.

Suddenly the kitchen vanished, to be replaced by—

By a space that could never have existed aboard the SCAM. A space of such alien geometries that even the Transvaluation could not have rendered it with the
Nepthys
as a starting point.

Howard knew without a doubt that he was now aboard the Object.

Futilely, he writhed nonexistent muscles, struggling to break free. Then, enervated by the effort, he tried to study his new ambiance, in preparation for the approach of the castle’s ogre- owner, the barely glimpsed shadow thrower.

This exercise was nearly as pointless. Howard couldn’t decide which blocks of improbable color in his vision were the walls and which the space. Acute angles swapped identities with obtuse ones. Dimensions exfoliated and curled around him.

The strain made his kohl-rimmed eyes drip tears. He could feel them run down his marmoreal column-body. The hieroglyphs there had ceased to cavort, apparently as frightened as he. A buzzing pink light inside his tubular ?body? filled him with a taste of hot pewter. Two other groups of sensations presented themselves to him, but like a blind man confronted suddenly with sight, he had no words or orderings to represent them.

He floated ?without moving? for twenty-five years or a second or two.

Then the Object’s resident approached.

The sensors aboard the
Nepthys
had seen a “shadow,” and deemed it necessarily a shadow of something.

But the shadow
was
the something.

A convoluted black sheet composed of innumerable scintillating particles, particles that seemed to wink in and out of existence, down ways as complex as the orbit of the
Nepthys
. Plainly, each mote was independent, yet the whole was cohesive, moving by space-time warpage. Its size was impossible to discern in this alien environment.

The sheet wrapped itself around the column that was Howard, blanking his vision. An impression of intelligence similar to that of an AOI filtered through to Howard.

A construct. A matrix of information and processing. This thing was not one of the Object’s builders, but simply one of their tools. The originators of the Object were gone, Howard instantly knew, gone for millennia, Transvaluated.

Confirmation of a sort seeped through to him. Desperately, without a mouth, he tried mentally hurling questions at the shadow. But the questions just spawned and proliferated horribly in his own ?mind?. All and everything became an incandescent blur as his own thoughts echoed and re-echoed in his ?mind?. Stream of consciousness be came white noise. Without sensory input, a deadly solipsism was threatening to swallow him like—

Like a black hole.

Someone, Howard managed to conceptualize, someone to talk to.

At that instant, the matrix-shadow was gone.

Everything was quiet in his !mind!.

Howard stood in a comprehensible yet impossible (because so far removed) environment.

The sky was blue-green, the sun too large for Earth.

But just fine for Fagen III, a familiar scene, his last triumph, obviously plucked from his psyche.

Around Howard stood a few of Fagen III’s famous kilometer-high pinelike trees. Between the pines, binding them to each other—and binding Howard to the trees!—were countless sticky threads woven by—or at least tenanted and traversed by—hundreds of tiny slate-gray caterpillars.

But none of these features surprised Howard as much as the body he wore.

That of Beatrice Somerville, the Transvaluator’s first human victim.

He had once seen Beatrice naked, in the null-gee natatorium. He found her exquisitely beautiful, and an ache to possess her blossomed in his loins. But any pursuit would have screwed up the ’plectics he was trying to generate. So he, celibate priest of social engineering, had acted cold, and she, once appreciative, then quite stung, had dived up into the water bubble and swum away from him.

First Osiris, now Arachne, thought the bound Howard wryly. The Transvaluator is obviously not a small mind, for it is unbothered by any foolish inconsistencies.

Several of the caterpillars were making their way across the webbing, heading for Howard’s oddly nonmale pubis. Feeling a disinclination to be crawled upon, Howard—or Beatrice—wrenched violently, breaking his—or her—body free from the elastic webbing. It coiled away from her in all directions.

Stepping back from the web, she realized that despite the high big sun, it was chilly.

No garments around, and the idea of covering herself in the webbing was distasteful, almost as if the substance would form a—poison shirt?

Herself a female Heracles, now? There was a thought. What baker’s dozen of Labors awaited? What could be expected of her?

Howard knew this was not really Fagen III. Plainly, she was still in the grip of the Transvaluator. She suddenly had the feeling that its goal was simply to communicate with her or another human, had been all along. All the horrid carnage aboard the
Nepthys
was merely fumbling attempts at speech in a medium it did not fully comprehend.

If that were the case, then there should be further objective correlatives here to the Transvaluator’s intentions.

She carefully scanned her immediate environment.

Yes, there, high in the web.

Twin flashes of green and gold. The objects seemed to swell in her vision, as if the eyes in this (imaginary? artificial?) body had telescopic properties.

Green earrings, jade wrapped with golden threads.

Those rings of rare design …

Half-memories swamped her. She had owned those earrings, perhaps across innumerable lifetimes! They were hers by right. If only she could lay her hands on them, she would remember everything!

Tentatively, she advanced to the web. The caterpillars ignored her, save for forming complex icons with their bodies. She began pulling the webbing with both hands. This produced the opposite effect of what she had intended. Releasing the tension in some of the strands had caused the earrings—formerly in dynamic balance—to shoot upwards.

Frustration, intense! She was not Howard or Beatrice in mind now, but only the emotion of Wanting. There seemed to be no rocks or branches to throw at the earrings, only a soft green moss covering the ground, and the webbing certainly wouldn’t support her weight.

Studying the matrix (was it composed of black motes that glimmered?), she began to discern in it elements of the puzzling geometry exhibited by the interior of the Object. That angle there corresponded to the direction from which the computer-shadow had approached, for instance …

Slowly, using her modified intuition, she began to see how the webbing held together. If she could oscillate these several strands in just the right pattern, the earrings would fall—if not to the ground, then at least to a reachable support strand.

After minutes of running mental simulations, she knew just how to do it.

In a short time the green earrings, which had begun about six meters over her head (and at one point in the process soared to at least twelve), were within grasping distance.

Her eager hands closed around them.

A chorus of piping voices immediately sounded.

“Isolate and oscillate, meditate and palpitate! Make a hole in the system, make the system your whole!”

Clutching the earrings, Howard turned.

Hovering in the air were nine winged cherubs. Babyish chubby-cheeked heads without bodies, they sprouted their wings in some improbable fashion from where necks should have been.

The Nine fluttered hummingbird-like, dipping and chittering.

“Integrate the potentate, exacerbate the precipitate! Take your soul into the storm, take the storm into your soul!”

After this last Oracle, the cherubs seemed to be gathering themselves to leave. “Wait!” shouted Howard. “Tell me! What happened to those who built the Object?”

“We ate them,” giggled the cherubim. “They tasted fine, and we learned a lot. But we made a mistake! A bad mistake!”

Now the cherubs fell to chastising each other, each one yelling simultaneous accusation and defense.

“It was your fault! No it wasn’t!”

“We broke the Object’s gravitic-engine controls. We had to go and play with them, didn’t we! It was stuck inside us. We couldn’t make it carry us outside the event horizon. Trapped! Always and forever, trapped!”

Plainly disturbed, the flock of cherubim began to depart. As they arrowed off, Howard heard them utter a last, disturbing phrase.

“Until you came! Until you!”

With the departure of the cherubim, Howard realized that she was clutching the earrings so tightly that they were digging painfully into her palms.

Reaching up, she applied them to her earlobes.

The earrings gripped flesh.

Burrowed—or melted, or fused—inward, with a sensation of frozen hydrogen sublimating.

One of the pines was now a column. A column with eyes.

Was it himself? Was he still aboard the Object?

Howard walked toward it.

Into it.

And out.

Howard found himself in his own body again, sitting at a small table with a clothed Beatrice Somerville. They seemed to be in the private room of a restaurant. Or was it the dining chamber aboard the
Nepthys
, where this whole madness had begun?

Howard found words unbidden rising to his tongue. “So, you were the template …”

Beatrice smiled alluringly. “The human template only. Don’t forget, the hole had already swallowed and integrated a shipful of Kamakirians and the builders of the Object. Who, by the way, called themselves something approximating “Wudocs.”

“Are you still alive?”

Beatrice fluttered the question away with a butterfly-like hand gesture. “Not relevant. It’s like that unresolvable philosophical game you can play. Am I someone else’s dream? Well, I’ve actually lived that game, and it doesn’t interest me very much anymore.”

Howard looked around the room, expecting a sommelier to appear at any moment. “Where are we?”

“My guess would be somewhere aboard the
Nepthys
. But I wouldn’t make any bets.”

“And our next move?”

“Is not ours to make. It’s his.”

“The Transvaluator? Are you just using conventional pronouns? Or do you feel a maleness about him?”

Beatrice looked embarrassed. “Oh, a definite maleness. At least in his relations to me, as he dreams my existence.”

Obviously seeking to change the subject, she said, “He was born through the concatenation of forces we have no understanding of, during the collapse of the progenitor star that formed the hole and he’s lived here ever since, subsisting on infalling matter and energies, trying to puzzle out what lies beyond the inescapable event horizon.

“Inescapable, that is, until the gravitic engine.”

A deep fear gripped Howard. “The Transvaluator wants out? To wreak his mad changes on the universe at large? We can’t possibly help him do that!”

“You don’t understand. He’s neither wholly good nor wholly evil, any more than one of us is. He’s just a being who’s trapped and alone! Besides, there seems some question as to how much power he will retain, once he leaves the special conditions here and enters the broken symmetry of the universe at large. It will probably take most of his strength and attention just to maintain his identity.”

Howard lowered his head into the cradle of his hands. “What a mess …”

Beatrice clasped one of his wrists. “Cheer up. It’s out of our hands anyway. Listen, let’s order a meal.”

A red velvet menu appeared before each of them. Reluctantly, Howard picked up his, opened it.

Every single item was labeled “My Story.”

Howard snorted ruefully. “I guess,” he said, “I’ll try this,” tapping one line at random.

The menu became a piece of yellow paper with nine numbered statements. Beatrice had vanished. Howard recalled Dante’s remark that his Beatrice was a Nine. Not symbolized by Nine, but was a nine.

Howard read:

I. In the beginning was the Collapse, which begat the Mind, and He could detect no others.

II. Then He had his first Thought, and Mind and Thought lived in endless play, as She traced out all things with and within Him.

III. They came to know there was a Universe beyond Them, which fed and sustained Them with a rain of food.

IV. They longed to achieve Oneness with Their glowing source of Life.

V. They turned Their source of Life upon itself so that They could have a play Universe of Their own, limitless mock Creation.