“Repulsors?” Kicker asked.
“Not yet, they haven’t made a hostile move,” the Homer said. “The cat could have won them somehow. This may be a welcoming ceremony. Let’s wait and see.”
The ship was completely circled, at a distance of fifty feet from the vessel. The Filonii waited, having faith in their cat lad.
And far underground, the stalker-cat led the hookworm a twisting chase through tunnel after tunnel. Some of the tunnels were formed only moments before the cat and his pursuer entered them. The tunnels always sloped gently upward. The cat – dropping his spore riders as he went – led the enormous slug-thing by a narrow margin. But enough to keep him coming.
Then, into a final tunnel, and the cat leaped to a planed outcropping overhead, then to a tiny hole in the tunnel ceiling, and then out of sight.
The Filonii shouted with delight as the stalker emerged from a hole in the blasted earth, just beyond the circle of red spores, linked and waiting.
“You see! Good cat!” Driver yelled to his fellows.
But the cat made no move toward the ship.
“He’s waiting for the welcoming ceremony to end,” the Homer said with assurance.
Then, on their screens, they saw first one red spore, then another, vanish, as though sucked down through the ground from below.
They vanished in sequence, and the Filonii followed their disappearance around the screens, watching them go in a 90c arc, then 180° of half-circle, then 250° and the ground began to tremble.
And before the hookworm could suck his dinner down through a full 360° of the circle, the ground gave way beneath the thirteen thousand tons of Filonii starship, and the vessel thundered through, down into special tunnels dug straight down. Plunged down with the plates of the ship separating and cracking open. Plunged down with the hookworm that would soon discover sweeter morsels than even red spore things.
The Filonii tried to save themselves.
There was very little they could do. Driver cursed the cat and made a final contact with the Succubus. It was an automatic hookup, much easier to throw in than to fire the ship for takeoff. Particularly a quarter of a mile underground.
The hookworm broke through the ship. The Tszechmae waited. When the hookworm had gorged itself, they would move in and slay the creature. Then they would feast.
But Bailey would not be around to see the great meal. For only moments after the Filonii ship plunged crashing out of sight, he felt a ghastly wrenching at his soulself, and the stalker-cat was left empty once more – thereby proving in lopsided bargains no one is the winner but the house – and the soul of William Bailey went streaking out away from Belial toward the unknown. Deep in wooden tunnels, things began to feed.
8
The darkness was the deepest blue. Not black. It was blue. He could see nothing. Not even himself. He could not tell what the body into which he had been cast did, or had, or resembled, or did not do, or not have or not resemble. He reached out into the blue darkness. He touched nothing.
But then, perhaps he had not reached out. He had felt himself extend something into the blueness, but how far, or in what direction, or if it had been an appendage . . . he did not know.
He tried to touch himself, and did not know where to touch. He reached for his face, where a Bailey face would have been. He touched nothing.
He tried to touch his chest. He met resistance, and then penetrated something soft. He could not distinguish if he had pushed through fur or skin or hide or jelly or moisture or fabric or metal or vegetable matter or foam or some heavy gas. He had no feeling in either his “hand” or his “chest” but there was something there.
He tried to move, and moved. But he did not know if he was rolling or hopping or walking or sliding or flying or propelling or being propelled. But he moved. And he reached down with the thing he had used to touch himself, and felt nothing below him. He did not have legs. He did not have arms. Blue. It was so blue.
He moved as far as he could move in one direction, and there was nothing to stop him. He could have moved in that direction forever, and met no resistance. So he moved in another direction – opposite, as far as he could tell, and as far as he could go. But there was no boundary. He went up and went down and went around in circles. There was nothing. Endless nothing.
Yet he knew he was in somewhere. He was not in the emptiness of space, he was in an enclosed space. But what dimensions the place had, he could not tell. And what he was, he could not tell.
It made him upset. He had not been upset in the body of Pinkh, nor in the body of the stalker-cat. But this life he now owned made him nervous.
Why should that be?
Something was coming for him.
He knew that much.
He was
something else
here
and
coming toward him.
was out there,
He knew fear. Blue fear. Deep unseeing blue fear. If it was coming fast, it would be here sooner. If slow, then later. But it was coming. He could feel, sense, intuit it coming for him. He wanted to change. To become something else.
To become
Or to become
Or to become
Or to become
But to become something else, something that could withstand what was coming for him. He didn’t know what that could be. All he knew was that he needed equipment. He ran through his baileythoughts, his baileymind, to sort out what he might need.
Fangs Poisonous breath
Eyes Horns Malleability
What he needed might be
Webbed feet Armored hide
Talons Camouflage Wings
Carapaces Muscles Vocal cords
Scales Self-regeneration
Stingers Wheels Multiple brains
What he already had
Nothing
It was coming closer. Or was it getting farther away? (And by getting farther away, becoming more of a threat to him?) (If he went toward it, would he be safer?) (If only he could know what he looked like; or how great was his mass, his density; or where he was; or what was required of him?) (Orient!) (Damn it, orient yourself, Bailey!) He was deep in blueness, extended, foetal, waiting. Shapeless. (Shape—) (Could that be it?)
Something blue flickered in the blueness.
It was coming end-for-end, flickering and sparking and growing larger, swimming toward him in the blueness. Graceful as a wind-ghost wraith on Shidoh. It sent tremors through him. Fear gripped him as it had never gripped him before. The blue shape coming toward him was the most fearful thing he could remember: and he remembered: and he remembered:
The night he had found Moravia with another man. They were standing having sex in a closet at a party. Her dress was bunched up around her waist; he had her up on tip-toes. She was crying with deep pleasure, eyes closed.
The day at the end of the war, when a laser had sliced off the top of the head of the man on his left in the warm metal trench, The sight of things still pulsing in the jasmine jelly.
The moment he had come to the final knowledge of his hopeless future. The moment he had decided to go to the Center to find death.
The thing changed shape and sent out scintillant waves of blueness and fear. He writhed away from them but they swept over him, washed and waxed and waned, wavered, whined and weldddoned, and he turned over and over trying to escape. The thing of blue came nearer, growing larger in his sight. (Sight? Writhing? Fear?) It suddenly swept toward him, faster than before, as though trying a primary assault – the waves of fear – and the assault had failed; and now it would bull through.
He felt an urge to leap, high. He felt himself do it, and suddenly his sight went up and his propulsive equipment went lower, and he was longer, taller, larger. He fled. Down through the blueness, with the coruscating blue devil following. It elongated itself and shot past him on one side, boiled on ahead till it was a mere pinpoint of incandescence on some heightless, dimensionless horizon. And then it
came racing back toward him, thinning itself and stretching itself till it was opaque, till the blueness of where they were shone through it darkly, like effulgent isinglass in a blue hyperplane.
He trembled in fear and went minute. He balled and shrank and contracted and drew himself to a finite point, and the whirling danger went hurtling through him and beyond, and was lost back the way they had come.
Inside the body he now owned, Bailey felt something wrenching and tearing. Fibers pulled loose from moorings and he was certain his mind was giving way. He had memories of sensedeprivation chambers and what had happened to men who had been left in them too long. This was the same. No shape, no size, no idea or way of gaining an idea of what he was, or where he was, or the touch, smell, sound, sight of anything as an anchor to his sanity. Yet he was surviving.
The dark blue devil kept arranging new assaults – and he had no doubt it would be back in seconds (seconds?) – and he kept doing the correct thing to escape those assaults. But he had the feeling (feeling?) that at some point the instinctive reactions of this new body would be insufficient. That he would have to bring to this new role his essential baileyness, his human mind, his thoughts, the cunning he had begun to understand was so much a part of his way. (And why had he not understood that cunningness when he had been Bailey, all the years of his hopeless life?)
The effulgence began again somewhere off to his side and high above him, coming on rapidly.
Bailey, some thing unknown, prepared. As best he could.
The blue devil swept down on him, crackling with energy. He felt the incredible million sting-points of pain and a sapping of strength. Then a
for it had. Now Bailey knew what he was, and what he had to do. He lay still, swimming in the neverending forever blueness. He was soft and he was solitary. The blue devil swarmed and came on. For the last time. And when it was all around him, Bailey let it drink him. He let its deep blueness and its fear and its sparkling effulgence sweep over him, consume him. The blue devil gorged itself, grew larger, fuller, more incapable of movement, unable to free itself. Bailey stuffed it with his amoebic body. He split and formed yet another, and the blue devil extended itself and began feeding on his second self. The radiating sparking waves of fear and blueness were thicker now, coming more slowly. Binary fission again. Now there were four. The blue devil fed, consumed, filled its chambers and its source-buds. Again, fission. And now there were eight. And the blue devil began to lose color. Bailey did not divide again. He knew what he had to do. Neither he, nor the blue devil could win this combat. Both must die. The feeding went on and on, and finally the blue devil had drained itself with fullness, made itself immobile, died. And he died. And there was emptiness in the blueness once more.
The frames, the tenils, the fullness of combat were ended. And in that last fleeting instant of sentience, Bailey imagined he heard scented wails of hopelessness from two Duelmasters somewhere out there. He gloated. Now they knew what it was to be a William Bailey, to be hopeless and alone and afraid.
He gloated for an instant, then was whirled out and away.
9
This time his repose lasted only a short time. It was rush season for the Succubus. Bailey went out to fill the husk of a Master Slave-master whose pens were filled with females of the eighty-three races that peopled the Snowdrift Cluster asteroids. Bailey succeeded in convincing the Slavemaster that male chauvinism was detestable, and the females were bound into a secret organization that returned to their various rock-worlds, overthrew the all-male governments and declared themselves the Independent Feminist Concourse.
He was pulled back and sent out to inhabit the radio wave “body” of a needier creature used by the Kirk to turn suns nova and thereby provide them with power sources. Bailey gained possession of the needier and imploded the Kirk home sun.
He was pulled back and sent out to inhabit the shell of a ten thousand year old terrapin whose retention of random construction information made it invaluable as the overseer of a planetary reorganization project sponsored by a pale gray race without a name that altered solar systems just beyond the Finger Fringe deepout. Bailey let the turtle feed incorrect data to the world-swingers hauling the planets into their orbits, and the entire configuration collided in the orbit of the system’s largest heavy-mass world. The resultant uprising caused the total eradication of the pale gray race.
He was pulled back . . .
Finally, even a creature as vast and involved as the Succubus, a creature plagued by a million problems and matters for attention, in effect a god-of-a-sort, was forced to take notice. There was a soul in his file that was causing a fullness leak. There was a soul that was anathema to what the Succubus had built his reputation on. There was a soul that seemed to be (unthinkable as it was) out to get him. There was a soul that was ruining things. There was a soul that was inept. There was a soul that was (again, unthinkably) consciously trying to ruin the work the Succubus had spent his life setting in motion. There was a soul named Bailey.
And the Succubus consigned him to soul limbo till he could clear away present obligations and draw him under the lens for scrutiny.
So Bailey was sent to limbo.
IO
This is what it was like in soul limbo.
Soft pasty maggoty white. Roiling. Filled with sounds of things desperately trying to see. Slippery underfoot. Without feet.
Breathless and struggling for breath. Enclosed. Tight, with great weight pressing down till the pressure was asphyxiating. But without the ability to breathe. Pressed down to cork, porous and feeling imminent crumbling; then boiling liquid poured through. Pain in every filament and glass fiber. A wet thing settling into bones, turning them to ash and paste. Sickly sweetness, thick and rancid, tongued and swallowed and bloating. Bloating till bursting. A charnel scent. Rising smoke burning and burning the sensitive tissues. Love lost forever, the pain of knowing nothing could ever matter again; melancholia so possessive it wrenched deep inside and twisted organs that never had a chance to function.
Cold tile.
Black crepe paper.
Fingernails scraping slate.
Button pains.
Tiny cuts at sensitive places.
Weakness.
Hammering steadily pain.
That was what it was like in the Succubus’s soul limbo. It was not punishment, it was merely the dead end. It was the place where the continuum had not been completed. It was not Hell, for Hell had form and substance and purpose. This was a crater, a void, a storeroom packed with uselessness. It was the place to be sent when pastpresentfuture were one and indeterminate. It was altogether ghastly.
Had Bailey gone mad, this would have been the place for it to happen. But he did not. There was a reason.
II
One hundred thousand eternities later, the Succubus cleared his desk of present work, filled all orders and answered all current correspondence, finished inventory and took a long-needed vacation. When he returned, before turning his attention to new business, he brought the soul of William Bailey out of limbo and ushered it under the lens.
And found it, somehow, different.
Quite unlike the millions and millions of other souls he had stolen.
He could not put a name to the difference. It was not a force, not a vapor, not a quality, not a potentiality, not a look, not a sense, not a capacity, not anything he could pinpoint. And, of course, such a difference might be invaluable.
So the Succubus drew a husk from the spare parts and rolling stock bank, and put Bailey’s soul into it.
It must be understood that this was a consummately
E
M
P
T
Y
husk. Nothing lived there. It had been scoured clean. It was not like the many bodies into which Bailey had been inserted. Those had had their souls stolen. There was restraining potential in all of them, memories of persona, fetters invisible but present nonetheless. This husk was now Bailey. Bai
ley only, Bailey free and Bailey whole.
The Succubus summoned Bailey before him.
Bailey might have been able to describe the Succubus, but he had no such desire.
The examination began. The Succubus used light and darkness, lines and spheres, soft and hard, seasons of change, waters of Nepenthe, a hand outstretched, the whisper of a memory, earthing, enumeration, suspension, incursion, requital and thirteen others.
He worked over and WHAT through and inside the soul HE DID NOT of Bailey in an attempt to KNOW isolate the wild and dangerous WAS THAT difference that made this soul WHILE HE WAS unlike all others he EXAMINING had ever stolen for his tables of fulfillment BAILEY, BAILEY for the many races WAS that called upon EXAMINING him HIM.
Then, when he had all the knowledge he needed, all the secret places, all the unspoken promises, all the wished and fleshed depressions, the power that lurked in Bailey . . . that had always lurked in Bailey . . . before either of them could try or hope to contain it . . . surged free.
(It had been there all along.)
(Since the dawn of time, it had been there.)
(It had always existed.)
blossomed to fullness, rejuvenated by its slumber, stronger than it had been even when it had created the universe. And, freed, it set about finishing what had begun millennia before.
Bailey remembered the Euthanasia Center, where it had begun for him. Remembered dying. Remembered being reborn. Remembered the life of inadequacy, impotency, hopelessness he had led before he’d given himself up to the Suicide Center. Remembered living as a one-eyed bear creature in a war that would never end. Remembered being a stalker-cat and death of a ghastliness it could not be spoken of. Remembered blueness. Remembered all the other lives. And remembered all the gods that had been less God than himself Bailey. The Lords of Propriety. The Filonii. The Montagasques. The Thils. The Tszechmae. The Duelmasters. The hookworms. The Slavemaster. The Kirk. The pale gray race without a name. And most of all, he remembered the Succubus.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 46