He looked back the way he had come. The Dree had not hesitated. It had plunged into the gray void after him and was now pulling itself along the rope the way it had descended the tether that strangled the dreaming Rover.
Baro felt a tug on the rope from the other direction. Bandar was pulling him toward the rent that led back into the human Commons. Baro willed himself to help his helper, and this time the trip back was much shorter, the Worm still a small and distant movement when he emerged from the Old Sea and stood again on the red fleshlike soil beside the Wall. He left the rope descending into the rip in the ground, positioning himself to strike with the sword when the Dree’s head came up.
“Stand back,” he told the historian. “It is coming after me. I do not know if I can kill it, but if I can keep it from emerging from the hole the Worm will take it. I do not think it can overcome the Worm.”
“I would have said surely not,” said Bandar, backing away from the tear in the ground. “But I would have said the same about your having traversed the Old Sea and survived, and here you have done it twice.”
“Pull on the rope,” Baro said. “Bring it to me.” He took the sword in a two-handed grip and raised it over his head.
Bandar pulled and a length of the rope came out of the hole. “Again,” Baro said. The sword’s weight above his head became as nothing and he knew the Hero’s strength was flowing through him.
Bandar pulled, and pulled once more. More rope slid through the tear, but the Dree did not appear. Bandar yanked hard and the end of the rope emerged from the void.
“What do you see?” the historian asked.
Baro looked into the shrinking rent at his feet. “Nothing. It seems the Worm took it.”
“Then we are saved,” Bandar sighed. “At this moment, the Rovers will be turning on Arboghast. I will not be surprised if they kill him.” He blinked and his face opened in a smile like that of a man who, lost in perilous surroundings, suddenly discovers a safe way home. He brought out the globe and said, “Come, I will take us from here. Let us visit the Heavens until they come to pull us from our niches and unwrap us.”
The hole into the Old Sea was almost completely healed. He turned and went to join the historian. Bandar opened his mouth to sing a thran, but from his lips emerged not a song but a gasp of pain and fright.
The Dree came out of the ground, through a rent it had torn in the base of the noösphere, setting its hooked limbs into Bandar and climbing him as it had descended the female Rover. When its rear limbs were clear of the rent it stood erect, the small man clutched in its forelimbs like a doll. Then its head rotated toward Baro and it threw the noönaut aside. Bandar struck the great Wall and lay inert, blinking and stunned. The globe fell to the ground and rolled away.
The Dree’s sightless head turned toward the motion. It opened one claw into digits and scooped up the globe, brought the sphere up to where its face would have been. The tendrils atop its head flexed and a mat of tiny bristles appeared where a mouth might have been. Eyeless, it examined the map of the human Commons and Baro would have sworn it smiled.
“No!” he said and swept the sword in a sidewise arc that struck the globe from the thing’s grasp and sent it bouncing toward the Wall. The Dree made a sound like fire crackling through dry twigs and thrust a limb toward him, the digits cohering to create a spike.
Baro felt the Hero guide his hand as he parried with the sword, but the shock of iron against Dree armor sent a chill up his arm. He saw that the claw was not even scratched.
Baro transferred his weight to his back foot. He extended the sword, then lunged at the creature’s head. The Dree knocked the thrust aside with ease. Again it made a sound and Baro did not need to know Dree speech to recognize its contempt.
“How am I to defeat this?” he asked the forces within him. “You said we would be stronger here.”
The answer came, not in words but in awareness. He saw the shape of things, not just the here and now of this collective realm where neither word had true meaning, but in an instant of epiphany he knew the flow of his entire life, every moment, every choice he had made since the day his father had walked down the garden path and through the gate. It had all been meant to lead to what he had to do.
“You fooled me,” he said.
We did as we had to do, came the answer. We chose you. We guided you, all of your life.
It was not the voice of the Wise Man. It was somehow deeper, richer in understanding. Again, awareness came: it was all of the human noösphere, all of the collective Commons of Old Earth, all the archetypes and entities, speaking within him as one entity, making itself known to him.
“I am not the Hero,” Baro said. “I am only the Fool. Why have you led me here to be destroyed?”
You are the Fool, the voice said, but you are also the Hero. You are the Wise One, the Father and the Mother. You are all of us, if you will let yourself be.
The Dree considered the map where it lay against the Wall. Then its faceless head turned back toward him. He saw that it was larger now than when he had faced it in the dream forest.
“It is growing,” he said.
The brains of the first new Dree are beginning to mesh with the entity. Soon there will be enough of them.
The thing made up its mind. It advanced on him, digits clicking into claws.
“It will kill me,” Baro said.
It will do what it will do. You will do what you will do.
He looked at the sword in his hand. “This is useless.”
It is not useless if you use it.
“I do not understand.”
Look.
Baro looked again at the flow of his life, saw the strange, broken boy he had been, saw how he had narrowed himself, driven himself, shaped himself to a single end. To the Commons, every life was a story. Now Baro saw his story laid out before him. It was not a story about a boy and his father, nor about an agent mismatched with his partner, nor about a man beguiled by a woman’s eyes.
The Dree was close. It jabbed a claw at him. Again he parried and again a shock ran up his arm. His hand went numb and he almost dropped the sword.
“I cannot kill it.”
It is not about killing.
He saw now. “Yet it is about dying. But can that thing die?”
It is not about living or dying. It is about choosing. The choice is yours, has always been yours.
“It is about sacrifice,” he said.
Yes, said the voice.
He accepted. “So I am the Hero, after all,” he said.
Say that for this purpose the Hero is first among equals.
“Look after Bandar,” he said. “He did not ask to be the Helper.”
We will.
“And what about Luff Imbry?”
No time.
The Dree came on. Baro lowered the sword. The needle-tipped claw thrust at him and he stepped to meet it. It entered his side and sliced upward to where his heart would have been if he had been flesh and blood.
The Dree’s spiked limb was like glowing ice inside him. He felt a chill radiate from it that was perversely like heat from molten metal. It brought weakness and a sudden flood of despair.
I have failed, he thought.
The noösphere’s voice spoke within him. No, it said, you can do it. But now the voice was different, familiar though he had not heard it in so many years. A face appeared in his mind, his father’s, wearing that expression he knew from his childhood, the one that said, Get in there. I have faith in you, my son.
The Dree’s coldness was spreading through him. He understood that it was willing despair upon him, seeking to steal the last of his strength.
“No!” Baro said. Still impaled on its claw, he clamped an arm around the creature’s segmented neck and embraced it. He drew it toward him, lifting his feet from the ground and letting his weight pull them down and forward.
He knew now what the sword was for. He struck with it at the red earth of the Commons, once, twice, thr
ee times, tearing open a gash that was as long as he was tall.
The tendrils on the Dree’s head jerked and twitched. It tried to rear up and now Baro smelled the thing’s fear like a sweet odor of corruption.
He yanked down on its neck, at the same time sweeping the sword against the lower joints of its legs, where they were thinnest. The Dree made a noise like steam escaping from a kettle and the reek of putrefaction became a cloying stench.
Baro slashed again and felt the iron bite. The Dree tried to spin, but the wounded limb gave way beneath it and together man and invader toppled into the Old Sea.
The Worm was waiting, not far below, its open mouth like a dark planet. They fell toward it. The Dree spasmed, then yanked its claw out of Baro’s chest. It kicked away from him, struggling to reach for the rip in the face of the gray waters.
Baro grasped after its legs, let their spikes pierce the palms of his hands, closed his fingers about its armored skin, and pulled it, willed it, down.
The immensity of the Worm rose and took them. Baro saw its teeth pass him, then become a circle above him, framing the gray light as he sank into the blackness at its heart. He saw the great wedge-shaped fangs close upon the Dree entity and snap it like a child’s cracker. Then the Worm opened its maw again and sucked the severed halves of the Dree into its darkness. Baro saw them fall past him, the pieces already dissolving.
Baro drifted slowly down toward the lightless belly of the Worm. It was silent here. Nothing moved. He saw a flicker from the corner of his eye and rotated his head to look. His memories were rippling about him like leaves on a wind-ruffled tree. He saw faces, places, moments; heard sounds and voices, was touched and embraced. There was music. He was being carried on his father’s shoulders at a fair and they were singing the song about the old man and giving a dog a bone.
The darkness comforted him, swaddled him like a warm blanket, and Baro thought, Now what?
Something thudded into his chest. He reached out and felt a pair of small hands that immediately gripped his wrists. No sooner did they take hold than he was yanked up and through the mosaic of his own memories, out of the darkness and into the gray light that filled the Worm’s gaping throat.
Guth Bandar’s face bore a peculiar expression of mingled terror and determination. He showed his teeth to Baro, but the young man could not tell if he was seeing a smile or a rictus of fear. Above and beyond the noönaut the thin rope led up and out of the Worm’s tooth-ringed mouth to the rent in the firmament of the Commons. Its end was knotted around Bandar’s ankle.
But the Worm’s mouth was closing. The circle of teeth was now a crescent growing thinner with each moment. The taut rope pulled Bandar and Bandar pulled Baro and together they scraped through the dwindling gap. Serrated triangles closed upon the heels of Baro’s buskins, tearing them from his feet, then the two men were rising through the pearly luminescence of the Old Sea to be hauled through the rip above and returned to the human Commons.
The red-lipped rent closed. They lay on the non-earth of the noösphere. For a long moment Baro remained lost in the moment of stillness when he had accepted his own death. Then Bandar shook him back to awareness.
“We must leave here,” the small man said. “Already the characteristic entities are returning to type.”
Baro sat up and looked about him. The Hero and the Helper, the Father and the Fool, were letting fall the rope with which they had pulled the two men from the Old Sea. Their eyes turned to Bandar and Baro and the young man saw the madness of monomania in their gaze. Unbidden, he sang the thran that had insulated them on the stone bridge. The entities lost their alertness and began to drift away from the Wall.
Bandar had retrieved his map. “We will go back,” he said. He chanted the thran that created an emergency gate and motioned Baro to step through.
“Wait,” said Baro. “How did you enlist their help?”
“I called them and they came.”
“But any one of them might have absorbed you.”
“They did not come for me,” Bandar said. “They came for you.”
MORE time had passed in the waking world than in the noösphere. Baro came into his body to find that it was not wrapped and hidden in a cold niche but reposing beneath clean, warm covers in Victor’s infirmary. Bandar was sitting up blinking in the next bed.
In a bed on the other side of the room Luff Imbry rested against a ruck of pillows, a bowl of fruit balanced on the mound of his abdomen. His head was swathed in bandages but he was making short work of a honeyberry. He spat out a seed and said, “You’re back.”
“And you’re alive,” said Baro.
“They’re both awake,” said a woman’s voice. Baro turned to see Raina Haj in the doorway. She stepped aside to admit a physician who wanted to poke and prod, but Baro shook him off. He sat up and looked about for his clothes.
“Where is Arboghast?” he said. His mouth was gummy and his throat raw from the feeding tube.
“Fled,” said Imbry. “He had a Bureau pursuit speeder and ran for it the moment things went against him.”
“The Rovers?” Bandar asked.
Haj said, “They suddenly ceased to follow his orders. Instead they began killing the aliens and freeing the captives. An investigatory team is on its way to determine what happened here.”
There was a glass and a carafe of water on the table beside Baro’s bed. He poured and drank, then told Haj, “I want a uniform and a weapon. I’m going after Arboghast.”
“Unlikely,” said Haj. “The inquiry will be particularly interested in your testimony.”
“He killed my father.”
Haj’s face registered first surprise, then an expression that offered no accommodation. “I am sorry. Larger questions must be answered.”
“I’m going after him.”
“You are under orders to remain here at the inquiry’s pleasure.”
Baro rose from the bed, drew his simple gown around himself, and said, “I resign from the Bureau.”
“Then you are under arrest as a material witness,” said Haj. “Either way, you stay.”
“Let the boy go,” Imbry said. “You owe him that, at least.”
“I will do my duty,” said Haj.
“You will protect your career.”
In a chest beside his bed Baro found the clothes he had been wearing when he had been captured. He dressed quickly. But when he turned to leave he saw the shocker in Raina Haj’s hand. She stood before the room’s only exit.
“Get out of my way.”
“I will shoot.”
He took a step toward her and she aimed the weapon.
“Wait,” said Bandar. “I have a proposal.”
They loitered on the white road between the gray walls. Motes of light flickered and evanesced past them.
“What will you do?” said Bandar.
“Perhaps I will study with you and become a historian,” said Baro. He sensed that having lived the story of his life to its completion, the Commons was a fitter place for him than the waking world.
Bandar sighed. “I have grown to like you, though you still terrify me,” he said. “But you have opened up new fields for research. We might find a way.”
“I would be …” began Baro, but now a motion caught his eye. He pointed up the road. “There,” he said.
A mote of light floated toward them. Bandar put out a hand and intoned a complex thran. As he sang the last note, Ardmander Arboghast appeared, his semitransparent face all fright and bewilderment.
“Here,” said Bandar, “hold him.”
Baro seized the traitor’s diaphanous arms and pulled them behind him. Arboghast struggled, but weakly.
“He has no strength yet,” Bandar said. “But hold tight while I pull him deeper.”
The prisoner grew more difficult to restrain as Bandar intoned a new thran. Now Arboghast became more substantial under Baro’s grip and his efforts to resist were harder to contain. The young man shifted to the Bureau’s most
effective come-along hold, and the struggles were replaced by dedicated cursing.
“I have imported as much of him as can be safely drawn without killing his sleeping body,” Bandar said. “Is your grip secure?”
“It is.”
“Then we go.”
He consulted his map, then led them a few paces down the road. They climbed over the wall. Baro had to wrestle the swearing Arboghast over the barrier but he was far stronger here than his prisoner.
Bandar sang open a gate and they passed through. On the other side was Heaven, a place of lush green lawns dotted with flowers and copses of exquisitely blossoming trees, the air as sweet as an angel’s breath.
“Come,” said Bandar. He began a new thran and marched off.
Baro came after, dragging Arboghast. “We knew,” he said, “that wherever you hid, you would have to sleep. And to sleep is to dream.”
“Where are we?”
“Why, this is Heaven,” said Baro.
“What are you going to do with me?”
At that, Baro only smiled.
They came to a downslope and followed it to where the grass ended and there was nothing but sky beyond. Baro brought Arboghast to the lip and showed him the view below.
A great granite tower rose from the earth, tier upon tier, through clouds and empty air, to end in a flat roof of flagstones not far beneath where Heaven floated. From the platform rose scaling ladders and climbing the rungs were demonic figures clad in armor of black chitin bearing hooked swords and jagged halberds. They swarmed up into Heaven, only to be met by a phalanx of angels, the air above their heads incandescent with their commingled haloes. Shields met shields, flaming swords sang and hooked spears thrust.
Bandar, intoning the thran that kept them safe from the combatants’ perceptions, led them away from the battle. They reached a quieter part of the rim and Baro had Arboghast look over again.
“What are you going to do with me?” Arboghast said again.
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