The courtyard between the four large, prewar buildings was twenty meters across. The old cobblestones had been covered with some slick, shining material, like millions of silver flecks suspended in a two-foot thickness of glass. This caught the sunlight and dazzled the eyes with bright reflections. From each of the four entrances to the courtyard a meter-wide path of lusterless black stone led through the glittering material on both sides and directly to the pit. This was a hole, one meter in diameter, cut in the center of the courtyard floor. It was rimmed with a black stone curb and filled with rich darkness clear to its bottom.
This is it! — Melopina.
Don't get your hopes up — Tedesco.
But what else could it be but an accessway to the Presence?
Many things, the bruin 'pathed. None of which we've ever heard of.
Chaney retrieved a brick from one of the dilapidated buildings and dropped it into the pit. From the time it took to strike bottom, they learned the depth of the well was somewhere near thirty meters.
I can sense an intelligent mind, Melopina said.
And alien — Kiera.
But it seems more distant than a hundred feet — Jask.
If this is the Black Presence, Chaney said, why doesn't it contact us? We're what it's been waiting for.
Perhaps it is something else altogether — Tedesco.
I can sense alien landscapes, strange thoughts, too strange for a creature of this world to have — Kiera.
The living city's emanations were alien, too, Chaney reminded them. Yet it was not the Black Presence.
They formed a meditation circle beside the pit, joined hands and linked minds until their esp powers had coalesced into a single, strong psychic probe.
One hand… one hand… grasping, seeking… we are all one hand… Melopina directed them.
They managed to touch the shell of the creature's mind where it lay beneath the earth, feel the humming power of an extraterrestrial consciousness.
This is it! — Tedesco.
For once I do not need to play the devil's advocate, Chaney 'pathed. If there is a Black Presence, this being is what we want.
But it still remained detached, distant, unresponsive to their best efforts to establish telepathic contact. Indeed, except for a shudder now and again, the creature seemed oblivious to them.
They broke up their gestalt and rose from the ring.
Someone will have to go down there, get closer, find out why it isn't responding, Chaney 'pathed.
I will, Jask said at once. He felt, unaccountably, that if he did this last thing for them, he would have expunged the last traces of his own guilt for having snubbed them so long in the beginning of their journey. As one, the others 'pathed to him the understanding that all his early stupidities had been forgiven, that proving himself here was not necessary, and he believed them. Still, for his own peace of mind, he wanted to be the one sent down to find the Presence.
This place is not called Deathpit without reason, Melopina reminded him, holding tightly to his hand.
Someone must go down.
Why you?
Why not? He turned to Tedesco. We can make a harness with the rope in your rucksack. You and Chaney should be able to support my weight without any trouble. Lower me slowly enough so I can avoid whatever obstacles there might be.
The rope was fetched and, in short order, the harness was made. Jask climbed into it, sat on the edge of the wall as Tedesco and Chaney got good handholds on the loose rope, which, when the initial slack was taken up, they would lower after him. Melopina kissed him, did not want to let go, finally had to. Jask slid off the edge of the pit and dropped…
He fell two meters, jerked hard as the slack snapped tight. He slammed sideways into the pit wall, hard enough to hurt himself but not with enough force to lose consciousness. He rubbed his aching chest, winced at the pain, which lay like hot metal between his ribs. When his heart had slowed and he could get his breath again, however, he decided that the injury was a small enough price to pay for getting to the Presence. The reward, after all, was great: the stars.
He tugged on the rope and 'pathed, Lower away!
Tedesco and Chaney fed the rope into the well.
At ten meters the pit entrance had dwindled until it was only a tiny coin of bright light overhead.
At fifteen meters it had shrunk to half a coin, a bead.
At twenty it was only a point of light, a pinprick in the darkness.
When he reached twenty-five meters, nearly to the bottom of the shaft, the darkness suddenly exploded in cold, white light.
Jask! — Melopina.
What's down there? — Tedesco.
Jask screamed as the light passed through him like a thousand pins. He jerked in his harness, fell, and before he could draw another breath, he died.
A second later a huge, dark form entered the bottom of Deathpit. It was shapeless and looked more like an incredibly dense cloud of smoke than like living flesh, constantly churning but never dissipating as smoke would be expected to. When it encountered the esper's body, it twisted and writhed more furiously, split into three separate entities, each as shapeless as the motherform. One of these returned to the ship from which the creature had originally come; one remained behind with the crumpled body of the esper; the third soared up the length of the shaft, like a hellish spirit cannoned into the world. It erupted into the late afternoon sun, bobbling in the warm air before the four living espers, who had fallen to the courtyard in shock and terror at the death of Jask.
Good god, what have we unleashed? Chaney asked.
Melopina threw her head back, sought Jask's mental aura, could not find it. She screamed and screamed.
33
The Watcher wakes from his nap, cut deep by a psychic radiation the like of which he has never before encountered on this world.
He rises up, moves forth, seeking the source.
He finds the ebbing life force in the corpse, locates the espers in the courtyard above, and he realizes that his brief nap has been extremely costly.
He moves out to make repairs.
34
At first, when they removed her from her post as General of the Preakness Bay enclave and imprisoned her prior to her execution, Merka Shanly did not so much mourn her own coming death but the end of the programs she had initiated, and which might eventually have saved the Pures from extinction. None of the Preakness Bay people had been exactly enthusiastic about the new order of things; and they were eager to terminate all the programs instigated by a tainted General. Even if some man with insight were to be elected to her post, he would not dare suggest the reactivation of researches and experiments that had originally been proposed by a mutant. She mourned the coming era of shame, from which her people would never pass, and she damned herself for her desires, which had in the end led to her discovery by Kolpei Zenentha.
As the time for her torture and death grew near, however, she began to think less of the people of the enclave and more of herself. She did not want to die. She might be tainted, a child of the Ruiner, with no hope now of eternal salvation, but she wanted to hold onto this world anyway. It was a reaction that surprised her. She soon reasoned, however, that if one were to be damned upon death, no matter what, it was best to live in this world as long as one could. The sooner death came, the sooner came hell.
She knew that Jask Zinn, the last esper found in the enclave, had killed his guards with his mental powers and escaped. She tried to tap similar abilities in herself but could do no more than read the minds of those around her.
On the morning of the Purification Ceremony she was taken from her cell to the main theater on the first level, where she was stripped and clamped to a large slate table whose edges were channeled with blood gutters. To begin with, as the congregation chanted, she was ritualistically slashed with scalpels, decorated with traditional religious signs that made her blood flow freely.
They daubed salt in her wounds.
When s
he passed out, she was revived.
A waste of supplies, she thought.
Then, when she began to laugh hysterically, tossing her pretty head from side to side, the congregation and the priests were certain that this was a sign of the Ruiner's presence and that he was mocking Lady Nature's people. They chanted louder and ordered the preparation of the Executioner's Pendulum somewhat sooner than they ordinarily might have. As the tenor of Merka Shanly's laugh grew madder and madder, they looked nervously this way and that, wondering if the Ruiner would dare make a direct appearance in this holy hall.
At the penultimate moment, as the Pendulum was moved into place above the table, their worst fears were realized. A mammoth, shapeless black being materialized in the center of the altar, floating in the air. It moved down the front of the church toward the slate table, scattering the priests before. The straps circling Merka Shanly's ankles and wrists snapped loose. At this, those last few brave souls in the audience turned and fled, shouting as hysterically as the girl had done moments before.
Merka Shanly lay still, looking up at the Ruiner, more terrified than those who had been able to flee.
The Presence 'pathed images of reassurance.
“You're the Ruiner?”
It 'pathed a negative concept, then presented a brief, imagistic history of itself and its purpose there. When it found that she was frightened by its magical appearance in the center of the altar, it 'pathed images of its ship and of the teleportation equipment on board, tried to encapsulate the theories of instantaneous travel in nonverbal images and left her more confused than frightened — which was some improvement anyway.
“And what will you do to me now?” she asked.
It 'pathed the images of other worlds, other stars, other races of intelligent beings.
“I don't know if I want—”
It swept forth, scooped her within the effect of its teleportation field and, turning, popped out of the temple and back to the starship below the courtyard in the city of Velvet Bay in the nation of Caloria Sunshine, across an entire continent. There, Merka stepped from the transmission booth into an enormous room in which two hundred other human beings — some Pure and some tainted — were sitting and standing in groups, obviously involved in conversation but not making any sound at all. These were the others the Presence had so far located on its search of the Earth; it went, now, to look for still others, leaving Merka Shanly alone.
Jask woke in a softly lighted room, in the middle of an invisible bed of force webs, which held him more comfortably than any mattress he had ever slept on before. He smacked his lips and wondered how he had gotten into such a place as this, when he abruptly remembered the flash of light, the pain, the oncoming darkness, which had been too intense to have been mere unconsciousness. He sat straight up, whimpering.
Melopina was there, as were Tedesco, Chaney and Kiera.
You're all right, Melopina 'pathed.
I died!
Yes.
Then— He looked sorrowfully from one to the other of his friends. Then, you're all dead too?
Tedesco burst out laughing.
Cynical as always, Chaney 'pathed, This isn't the afterlife, Jask. You didn't die and get sent to heaven or anything so good as that.
But I died!
And were resurrected, Kiera said.
But the Resurrectionists can't be—
Not resurrected in that sense, Tedesco said. You were killed by a device meant to guard the Presence against intruders. But it seems, that our friend from another world has access to miraculous machines we have never even imagined. He has one that, if it is supplied with a corpse in time, can seven times out of ten return the unfortunate to life.
And you four?
Not hurt.
Why did it let me be hurt? Jask wanted to know.
It didn't register our esp power, Melopina explained, because it was fifteen years into a twenty-year-long nap.
Twenty years!
The Presence has been on Earth more than eighty-five thousand years, but it's only lived a small portion of its life. A twenty-year nap is only standard procedure.
While it napped, Jask said, how many espers died?
That's a pointlessly vicious attitude, Tedesco 'pathed. We're lucky it was here at all.
Jask knew the bruin was right, but his own death was too fresh in his mind to permit him complete objectivity just now.
Besides, Kiera said, it uses images, not words, in telepathic talk. At first, it could not understand us at all. Apparently we aren't using our esp ability to its full potential. Until we do, we will stay here on Earth, taking instructions from the Presence, learning to overcome the handicap of being raised in a verbal society.
Any optimism Jask was beginning to allow himself sank without a trace as Kiera spoke. Stay on Earth? How long?
No more than a year, Kiera said. That's how long the Presence feels it will take to teach us imagistic communication.
Besides, Melopina added, the ships the Presence sent for will not be here for another eight or nine months anyway.
Why not?
They need that long to cross the gulf of space.
Then — the stars for us! Tedesco said.
Jask looked at each of them in turn, these four he loved and with whom he had been through so much. He said, Are you sure you want the stars any longer?
They 'pathed surprise.
Jask 'pathed, Even if we can be taught imagistic telepathy, we'll always find ourselves thinking in verbalized frames. We won't be able to help making a slip now and again. We'll be marked as children, as cripples, all our lives.
I doubt it'll be as bad as that, Tedesco 'pathed.
And how will we comprehend and learn to work with all the pieces of miraculous science and machines they take for granted? We'll be like primitives. There is nothing special about us to make them want to welcome us into the society of the many worlds.
That would be true but for one thing, Tedesco 'pathed.
What thing?
Despite all the advanced races of the galaxy, all those who have been telepaths for tens of thousands of years, no other race has any other psionic abilities.
So?
We have them! Consider your own ability to kill, to frighten a man to death. Further consider the trick Melopina taught us— the fireballs. And, finally, our ability to mesh into a single psychic force.
They can't?
No.
Chaney 'pathed, Among the other espers the Presence has already rounded up, there are people who can levitate themselves and move small objects without touching them. Others seem able to see parts of the future.
One woman can do the most exceptional thing of all, Tedesco said. She can concentrate and make moving pictures in the empty air, colors and designs, the most artistic things!
It seems to me, Jask said, that some of these other talents are more exceptional than that.
He's prejudiced, Chaney said. The artist he speaks of is a young bruin mutant named Kathalina.
You just don't appreciate good art, Tedesco grumbled.
Melopina 'pathed, Come on, Jask. Get dressed and come into the main lounge, where the others are.
I think I'd like to stay here with you a bit, alone, he 'pathed, making her blush a brighter blue-green.
You've a job, though, she 'pathed.
A job?
Tedesco explained. The Presence tells us that when mankind first journeyed to the stars, he was not telepathic — but he had the grains of the talent in his genes. The Presence's people could have helped man develop that drop of talent, but they were refused when they made the offer.
Refused? Whyever—
The big thing holding us back from space last time was xenophobia, Tedesco said. Mankind couldn't cooperate on an intimate level with other races. Even men of different skin color argued among themselves. The idea of such close contact with alien nonhumans was more than most men of that time could accept.
Perhaps that's why
men developed the artificial wombs, Kiera said. They knew they had not deserved the stars, and they were trying to become acclimated to the idea of nonhumans among them. Maybe they would have adjusted by having mutated children and finally been able to face the real aliens. But things fell apart too fast for them to make the grade. Their society decayed, and the Last War finished them.
But what has this to do with my — job? Jask 'pathed.
We can't afford to let simpleminded prejudices stand between us and the stars, Tedesco said. Not this time. We need every human esper we can get, but—
But?
Some of those the Presence has rounded up are Pures, Melopina said. They're the only ones in the lounge who refuse to communicate telepathically with anyone but their own kind.
Chaney wiped at his muzzle and said, And you've been where they are now. You can teach them much.
I guess I can at that, Jask said.
Come on, Melopina said. These eight or nine months are going to pass as quickly as twenty years passes for the Presence. We've lots to do!
Smiling at the way her behind swayed when she walked, Jask followed the blue-green girl from the sickbay, down a long corridor, and into the main lounge, where the future parents of countless starchildren spoke animatedly in utter silence.
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