by Dean Koontz
All the world was a sun. A lightbulb. Then the filament began to die and the light went out completely. The force of the explosion had gone, mostly, outward. What had pressed in their direction had been caught by the second mass of jelly that rose to snatch at the grenade-unsuccessfully. Miraculously, they were tumbling through the shattered front of the ship, moving into the darkness and emptiness of space toward The Ship of the Soul, the poets boat that lay silently a short mile away.
Behind them, the jelly came, boiling away in the vacuum, tumbling and sputtering. Steaming, it lashed out with non-arms as it realized its chances for success were diminishing. The thunder of its non-voice was definitely not sound but thought. It bombarded their minds, unable to order them so quickly, unable to control them in their panic.
Hurkos was out ahead, his shoulder jets pushing him swiftly toward the ships portal. Then came the poet. Finally, Sam. A hand of false-flesh streaked around the latter, curled in front of him, attempting to cut him off from the others. Cut him off. Cut him off and devour him. He choked, maneuvered under the whip before it could sweep around and capture him in an acidic embrace.
And still it came. It grew smaller, boiled and bubbled itself away. But there seemed always to be a new central mass moving out from the hull, leaping the blackness and replenishing the withering pseudopods before they could snap, separate, and dissolve. Finally, however, there was nothing left except a speck of pinkish-tan. It turned amber-orange, then it too puffed out of existence. With it, went the noise.
Inside The Ship of the Soul, they stripped, collapsed into soft chairs without animate padding. This was a ship of comfort, not one of destruction. This was a ship built for six people, not for one man, one tool of an insane, unnamable entity without a face or a time. For a while, then, they were silent, composing themselves for what must be said. The moment the composing ended and the discussion began was signaled by a quiet suggestion from Gnossos that they get some wine to help loosen their tongues.
The wine was warm and green, a special bottle opened for a special occasion.
"It was the same sound I heard under the hypnotic trance."
"That means," Hurkos said, staring into his wine as he talked, "that it was the ship itself that was ordering you around. That jelly was the plotter behind the scheme."
Gnossos downed one glass of wine, poured a second from the decanter. "I dont agree. If the ship were responsible for Sams actions, there would be no reason for hypnotic controls-and really no reason for Sam. If the ship were intelligent itself, it could do everything Sam could do-and possibly better. And when he shot it, it should have been able to order him to throw down the gun. No, the ship was just a cancerous mass of goo that was to convey Sam to Hope. Nothing more."
"But what kind of man could make a thing like the jelly-mass?"
"I think," Gnossos said, "that there is a chance you are the dupe of an extra-galactic intelligence."
"Thats absurd! Weve never found another intelligent race in the last thousand years. Thats-"
"Thats frighteningly possible," Hurkos reflected. "There are thousands and millions of galaxies out there. How do you know a bunch of jelly-masses didnt kidnap you, take you away, and decide to train you to overthrow the galaxy?"
Sam finished his wine in a gulp. Heat flooded through his flesh, outward from his stomach. Still, it could not ward off the sharp chill in him. "Because," he answered in even tones, "that would be one helluva backward way of invading the empire. If these extra-galactics have all this skill, can use something like the jelly for hyperspace travel and making food and operating robosurgeons, they could overturn the galaxy in a month. A week! Hell, that blob even talked to me in a computer voice. Probably forms some crude set of vocal cords when it needs them. And it operated a radar set; it-"
"Its a living machine," Gnossos said, almost to himself.
"Thats another thing," Hurkos added. "Your fear of machines. You got it, obviously, because whoever-or whatever-hypnotized you fears machines also. Because he, it, or they do not use machines. They have blobs instead. We have nothing like this. It almost proves theyre extra-galactic!"
"One couldnt live in the empire without the aid of machines," Gnossos agreed. "One would have to be from... Outside."
"No." Sam set his glass on the floor. "If there were aliens with this sort of thing, they wouldnt need me. This is something smaller than an entire extra-galactic race. This is someone who needs help, who needs an automaton to do his dirty work."
"Agreed also," the poet said. "Looks like there is a stalemate in this conversation and this line of thought." He heaved his bulk to a more comfortable position. "Well, I for one, am sticking with you until this mystery is solved. I couldnt bear to quit with the whole thing raveled up. This could be the most important, most dangerous event of the last thousand years. And one thing that there is just too little of these days is danger. Warring man might have been crude, but he sure as the devil had his fill of danger in a lifetime. Today we travel on, living hundreds of years, and everything is so safe and perfect that we hardly ever experience danger. Im long overdue for some excitement!"
"Me too, I guess," Hurkos said. Sam had the feeling the Mue was not terribly comfortable since the jelly-mass had attacked them. But he would not-could not-back down in front of the poet.
"So what next?"
Gnossos rubbed a huge paw across his chin, wrinkled his nose for a moment. "We set this tub on a course for Hope. When we get there, we wait for your next command. Were going to find out the answers to this."
"But," Sam said uneasily, "suppose I am out to overturn the galaxy?"
"Hurkos and I will be right behind you to stop you before you have a chance."
"I hope so," he said.
Later, after more wine and much conjecture, as The Ship of the Soul plunged through the thick river of the void, they retired, leaning back in their chairs, belting themselves in, and shutting their mouths so that they could neither consume nor converse. And eventually they fell into sleep...
There was deep and awful darkness, save for the scattered pinpoints of the stars dotting the roof of the night. Then, as the breeze shifted, dawn came crawling over the horizon, tinting the blackness with yellow... then orange... And there was still a hill with a cross upon it. There was a man on the cross. His hands were dripping blood.
And his feet were dripping blood...
The wounds were festered and black demon mouths.
The man on the cross raised his head, looked to the dawn. He seemed very weary, as if he were ready to give up more than the body, the spirit also. There were dumps of matting at the corners of his eyes that interfered with his vision. His teeth were yellow from long neglect.
"Dammit, let me down!" he shrieked.
The words rebounded from the low sky.
"Please," he said, groveling.
The sun was a flaming eye. When it was at its zenith, there came angels, beings of light and awesome majesty. They floated about the man, administering to his needs. Some carried water which they poured between his cracked and crusted lips. And some brought oil with which they anointed him. And still others sponged away the oil and fed him. Then they were vanished into air.
The sun was setting. It seemed only minutes since it had risen.
"Please," the man wept. The angels had missed some of the oil in his beard. It glistened there-and tickled.
With darkness came the demons. Crawling from under brown stones, slithering out of crevices in the earth, they came. There were dwarfs, slavering, eyeless yet seeing. There were wolves with sabers for teeth. There were things with tails and horns, things with heads that were nothing more than huge mouths. They screamed and cawed, muttered, shrieked, and moaned. They came at the cross, crawling over one another. But they could not reach the man. They clawed the wood of his prison but could not claw him. One by one, they began to die...
They withered and became smoke ghosts that the cool wind bore a
way. They collapsed into dust. They dribbled into blood pools.
Then there were stars for a short time.
And again came the dawn...
And the angels...
And the night and the demons and the stars and the dawn and the awesome, awesome angels and the night... It continued at a maddening pace. Days became weeks; weeks turned to months. For years, he hung there. For centuries, he remained. Finally, all time was lost as the sun spun madly across the sky and night with its devils was barely a blink of an eye.
"Please!" he screamed. "Please!"
The last screams brought them out of sleep, breathing hard. Sam pushed himself up, looked about the ship to reassure himself. Then he turned to Hurkos. "What sort of dream was that?"
Gnossos looked curious.
"Hes a telepath," Sam explained. "Irregular talent. But what the hell kind of dreams were those?"
"Thats what Id like to know, Sam," Hurkos said. "I was getting them from you!"
* * *
VI
"Me?"
"Well, not really from your mind. Through your mind. The generator of those thoughts is very distant. No one in this room. And the mind of that generator is horribly large. Immeasurable. This was only a fraction of the thoughts in it, a small corner of them. In this case, I picked up this trace of thoughts and for some reason my subconscious talent began boosting their vividness and re-broadcasting them."
"But I wouldnt have dreamed them without your help."
Hurkos smiled sadly. "You would have dreamed them just the same and just as completely. You would not have been aware of dreaming them, is all."
"But then what was it? It reminded me of the man on the cross you toppled after Belinas death."
"Its the Christ legend," Gnossos said. They turned to stare at him. "I make legends my business. Poets work in all sorts of mythologies. There have been a large number of them-and a large number of wild ones too. The Christ legend is not so ancient. There are still Christians, as you know, though damn few. Most of the religion, along with all the others, died out about a thousand years ago, shortly after the Permanent Peace and the immortality drugs. According to legend, the god-figure Christ was crucified on a dogwood cross. This dream seems to be a reenactment of that myth, though I do not recall that the man hung there that long or that there were administering angels and tempting demons."
"This could be another clue," Hurkos offered.
"How so?" Sam was ready to clutch at the smallest straw.
"Perhaps your mystery hypnotist is a neo-Christian, one of those who refuse the immortality drugs. That would certainly explain why he would want to overthrow the empire. He would want to convert the pagans, bring the savages into the fold. Thats us."
"Good point," Gnossos said. "But that doesnt explain the blob."
Hurkos lapsed into silence.
Bong-bong-bong!
PREPARE FOR NORMAL SPACE AND MANUAL CONTROL OF THIS VESSEL!
"Were almost to Hope," Gnossos said. "Perhaps we will soon be having more clues."
The flight-control system of the planet-wide city locked them into its pattern and began bringing them down to a point of its own choosing since they had not requested any particular touchdown spot. Ships fluttered above, below, and to all sides of them. Bubble cars spun across the great elevated roadway, zipping between the buildings, sometimes slipping into tunnels in the skyscrapers from which they often emerged going another direction. They settled onto a gray pad where the flames of their descent were soaked up, cooled, dissipated.
Beyond the pad, on all sides, lay Hope. Super-city. The hope, literally, of a new way of life for billions. They stood at the open portal, waited while the attendant marked their checkslip so that they would have the proper ship to return to, tore it in half and gave them their portion.
"Well," Gnossos said, "where to?"
"No orders yet," Sam said.
"Lets just wander around a bit."-Hurkos.
"Okay, we will."-Gnossos.
And they did.
He sat before the thick window that was not really a window at all, and he looked at the thing beyond. It raged, lashing, screaming, roaring like a thousand bulls with pins in their brains. How long? How long had it fought against the Shield, trying to get out? Breadloaf peered deeper into the Shield, clutched his chair and leaned farther back in it. The massive desk nearly concealed his slumped form. A thousand years and more. That was how long. His father had constructed the barrier and the chamber beyond, which dipped into the other dimension. No, not another dimension either-a higher dimension. Not another alternate scheme of things, just a different layer of this particular scheme. And when his father had died in a freak accident that the medics could not undo the damage of, he had come into possesssion of the family fortune, the family buildings, the family office structure here in the Center of Hope, the Shield and the tank beyond. The last two things were something one did not advertise. It was a family secret-a big, hoary skeleton in the family closet. The burden was his, and only his.
For six hundred years he had come here every week, sometimes for stretches that lasted days, most often for just a few hours. He came to look at the Shield. And what lay beyond, trapped by it. It was a weight that rested heavily on his shoulders at all times. It was insane to worry. He knew that. The Shield had held for over a thousand years; it would hold forever. It could not fail. It was maintained by machines, and machines had not been known to fail since his grandfathers time. And these machines were tended, not by unreliable men, but by other machines that gained their power from still more machines. It was foolproof.
Still, Alexander Breadloaf III came once a week, sometimes staying a long time, sometimes just for a few hours. Still he worried. Still-he was afraid.
Crimson exploded across the screen, washed down and turned to ocher at the bottom. Explosions would not shatter the Shield, no matter how violent they might be. Didnt it understand this by now? A thousand years of explosions, and it still did not understand. That thought left a sorry spot on his soul, but he reminded himself of what his father always said (said so often that it became the family motto): "There is no longer ignorance in men." Maybe. Evidently. Although he feared that ignorance lurked just below the surface, waiting for a chance...
There was a lovely pattern of blue and silver as it applied certain stress pattern sequences to the Shield. But it had tried that before. It had tried everything before...
Breadloaf pushed himself out of the chair, walked toward the door that led into the hallway. He would get some simple foods, some coffee. And he would return. This was one of those times when a brief glance at it was not going to be enough. It was going to be one of those weeks. One of those long weeks.
* * *
VII
In their wandering, they came across many things that amazed Sam despite the fact that he wholly or partially remembered most of them. It was as if he had been told of these things but had never actually seen them. In the seeing lay the wonder. They had gone to the light shows, the toto-experience places. They had seen the parks, the avenues of art. Gnossos knew the city well, that being one of the qualifications of a true poet-to know the beating heart of the metropolis. Or megalopolis? No matter. He explained all things they did not understand, clarified things they thought they knew. It was a marvelous time, save for the constant awareness that another hypnotic trance and order could be on the way, minutes from them, ready to swallow Sam into noisy chaos and use him.
So it was, in the course of their aimless ramblings, they came upon the Christian. Sam noticed that Hurkos bristled at the sight of the man-not because of this individual, but because of the heedless god that supposedly stood behind him.
The Christian was old. He was fifty, ancient in a world where all were eternally thirty or younger. He had evidently been a child of a strong Christian family, for he had not even received anti-beard elements; the heavy shadow on his face gave him an eerie, seldom-seen metallic look. H
is teeth were yellow and chipped. His skin was wrinkled. Across his chest and back hung the halves of a sandwich sign. The front said: GOD IS ASHAMED! When the man saw them coming, he executed a small heel-turn to reveal the letters on the back of the sign: HE SHALL COME AGAIN TO JUDGE!
"I cant understand them," Hurkos said.
Gnossos smiled a thin smile. "Some day, they will all be gone."
"But why are there these people?" Sam asked. "Dont the medics prevent mental infirmities in babies?"
"Well," the poet said, shortening his giant strides to match the smaller steps of his companions, "the original concept of the empire was complete freedom. Mental infirmities were weeded out, true. As a result, the number of religious people dropped over the years. But one cannot limit another mans beliefs under a system of complete freedom. Religious persons were allowed to practice their beliefs. Though their children might be born as mentally sound as possible, the parents raised them and passed their own superstitions on to their offspring. The number of religious dwindled. But as long as they procreated-and this is a strong part of their faith, these Christians-they would always have children to indoctrinate, to warp. Its a pity, certainly. But, after all, they are responsible and it is their life and their child. A man can waste what is his if he so choose. I guess."
"Know the Word," the Christian said as they drew abreast of him. He handed Gnossos and Sam pamphlets-yellow paper with red print. They were so wrinkled and tattered that it was evident many people had handed them right back in the past. The short-lived traffic of each pamphlet had worn it severely.
"Ill take one too," Hurkos said, holding his hand out.
The Christian made no reply. Hurkos asked again.
"Will you ask this person of tainted blood to cease speaking to me?" the bearded one asked Sam. He was obviously distressed, running his thin, bony hands up and down the edges of the chest sign, toying with little splinters projecting from the edge of the plastic square.