“I think you’re a parcel of fools,” said Shorr Kan, when the clamor had subsided. “Suppose he’s telling the truth. If this thing can kill one sun, it can kill another… Aldeshar, Tranett, Maktoo, the Twins of Keldar.”
“We’re not that easily deceived!”
“Which simply means that you’re frightened out of your royal wits. You want to believe in a weapon controlled by me because you feel you can do something about that. But suppose it’s a weapon not controlled by me? Suppose it’s some wild freak of nature not controlled, or controllable, by anyone? Wouldn’t you be wiser to find out?”
“We’ve tried,” said Flane Fell grimly. “We lost ships and gained no knowledge. Now it’s up to you. This is our ultimatum, Shorr Kan. Dismantle your weapon, or give us proof that the thing is not of your making. In one month’s time an unmanned vessel will be sent beyond the Veil. If it vanishes, and your proofs have not been forthcoming, it means war.”
They lifted their clenched fists all together and shouted, “War!”
“I hear you, brother kings. Now go.”
The group departed with a clatter of jewelled heels on the echoing floor.
“You, too,” said Shorr Kan, and dismissed his courtiers. “Stay,” he said to Stark. “And you, little thief…”
“Majesty,” said Song Durr, “I am chamberlain to the Ambassador…”
“Don’t lie to me,” said Shorr Kan. “I was one of the Brotherhood myself, before I became a king. You have my permission to steal, if you can do it without being caught, as much as will not bulge that borrowed finery. In one hour I shall send men to hunt for you, but they will not look beyond the palace doors.”
“Majesty,” said Song Durr, “I embrace your knees. And yours, country boy. We were well met indeed. Good luck to you.” He scampered away, thin shanks twinkling beneath his robe.
“His worries are small,” said Shorr Kan, and smiled.
“But you don’t envy him.”
“If I did, I would be in his place.” Shorr Kan came down from the throne and stood before Stark. “You’re a strange man, Ambassador. You make me uneasy, and you bring disturbing news. Perhaps I ought to have you killed at once. That is what my brother kings would do. But I’m not a born king, you see, I’m an upstart, and so I keep my eyes and ears and especially my mind wide open. Also, I have another advantage over my colleagues. I know I’m telling the truth when I say that I have no secret weapon, and I do not know what force this is that eats up ships and stars. Do you believe me, Ambassador?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“If you controlled the force, you’d use it.”
Shorr Kan laughed. “You see that, do you? Of course you do. That pack…” He jerked his chin contemptuously at the doorway. “Their spite blinds them. Their chief hope is to be rid of me, no matter what else befalls them.”
“You must admit they’ve mousetrapped you rather neatly.”
“They think they have. But they are only petty kings, Ambassador, and there is nothing more petty than a petty king.”
He looked up and around the great hall. “Hideous, isn’t it? And those two fellows there beside the throne, with their ugly great faces. I’ve thought of putting hats on them, but they look silly enough already. Aldeshar was always a petty kingdom, always will be. But first steps must be small, Ambassador. There are larger thrones ahead.”
Ambition, intelligence, energy, ruthlessness, shone in him like a brilliant light. They made him beautiful, with the beauty of things which are perfect in their design and flawless in their functioning.
“Now there is a problem to be solved, eh?” The tiger eyes came back to Stark, fixed on him. “Why did you come to me, Ambassador? All this long, long way from Sol.”
“It seemed that we might help each other.”
“You need help from me,” said Shorr Kan. “Do I need help from you?”
“How can I answer that until we know what threatens us?”
Shorr Kan nodded. “I have a feeling about you, Ambassador Stark. We shall be great friends, or great enemies, and if it’s the latter, I’ll not hesitate to kill you.”
“I know that.”
“Good, we understand each other. Now, there is much to do. My scientific advisors will want to hear your story. Then…”
“Your Majesty,” said Stark, “of your mercy… it’s been a long time since I tasted food.”
A scant two hundred thousand years.
* * *
Two old red suns like ruby brooches pinned a ragged curtain of darkness across the starfield. Dendrid’s Veil, looking exactly as Stark had seen it in the mist of Aarl’s citadel chamber. The view was still a projection, this time on the simulator screen of a Phantom scout, the fastest ship in Shorr Kan’s fleet, loaded with special gear.
Stark and Shorr Kan stood together studying the simulator. Beneath Stark and around him, tormenting the whole of the ship’s fabric and his own flesh, was the throb and hum of the FTL drive, a subliminal sense of wrenching displacement coupled with a suffocating feeling of being trapped inside a shell of unimaginable power like an unhatched chick in an egg. The image on the screen was an electronic trick no more genuine than Aarl’s, except that the actual nebula was ahead.
The flight was no spur-of-the-moment thing. There had been endless hasslings with counsellors; scientific advisors, military and civilian advisors, all of whom pulled furiously in totally different directions. In the end, Shorr Kan had had his way.
“A king is made for ruling. When he ceases to have the courage and the vision necessary to perform that function, he had damn well better abdicate. My kingdom is threatened with destruction by two things, war and the unknown. Unless the unknown is made known, war is inevitable. Therefore it is my duty to find out what lies beyond Dendrid’s Veil.”
“But not in person,” said his counsellors. “The risk is too great.”
“The risk is too great to send anyone but myself,” said Shorr Kan. Nobility radiated from him, illumined the throne and the ugly genies. It was easy to see how he drew his followers to him. “What is a king, if he does not think first of the safety of his people? Prepare a ship.”
After all the orders were given and the counsellors sent off to deal with them, Shorr Kan grinned at Stark. They were alone then in the great hall.
“Nobility is all very well, but one must be practical too. Do you see my point, Ambassador?”
Stark’s patience had worn somewhat with the wrangling and delay. He had been conscious of an increasing urgency, as though Aarl were putting a silent message into his mind: “Hurry!”
He said rather curtly, “At best you’ll bait your brother kings to follow you because they’ll be afraid to let you go alone. You may find a way to destroy them, or use them as allies, whichever seems advisable at the time. At worst, with a fast ship under you, you may hope to have a line of escape open if things go too far wrong. How can you be sure they won’t simply blow you out of space, thus negating both possibilities?”
“They’ll want me to lead them to the weapon. I think they’ll wait.” Shorr Kan put his hand confidently on Stark’s shoulder. “And since you’ll be with me, you had better hope that I’m right. I’ve made some enquiries about you, Ambassador.”
“Oh?”
“I thought perhaps you might be a spy for my brother kings, or even an assassin. You do have the look of one, you know. But my agents could find no trace of you, and you don’t seem to have sprung from any of our local planets. So I must believe you’re what you say you are. There’s only one small problem…” He smiled at Stark. “We still haven’t been able to locate Sol. So I’m keeping you by me, Ambassador, close by, as an unknown quantity.”
An unknown quantity, Stark thought, to be used or discarded. Yet he could not help liking Shorr Kan.
And now he stood in the bridge of the scout and wondered whether Shorr Kan had read his brother kings aright. Because the ships of the Kings of the Marches had followed them, w
ere following, at a discreet distance but hanging stubbornly in their wake.
“We’ll make planetfall in the nebula,” said Shorr Kan. “Ceidri, the farthest inhabited world we know and the closest to the edge of this unknown power. They’re strange folk, the Ceidrins, but the Marches are full of strange folk, the beginnings of new evolutions and the rags and bobtails of old ones driven out here by successive waves of interstellar conquest. Perhaps they can tell us something.”
“They’re scientists?”
“In their own peculiar way.”
The chief of the scientists who had accompanied the battery of instruments mounted aboard made a derisive sound.
“Sorcerors. And not even human.”
“And what have you been able to tell us?” Shorr Kan demanded. “That there is an area of tremendous force beyond the Veil, force sufficient to warp space around it, destroying everything that comes near it? We knew that. Can you tell us how to approach this force, how to learn its source without being destroyed ourselves?”
“Not yet.”
“When you know, tell me. Until then, I’ll take whatever knowledge I can get regardless of the source.”
Time passed, time that was running out for all of them, here and now and for the nine little worlds of Sol two hundred thousand years in the past. The ship plunged into the dark nebula as into a cloud of smoke, and it was as Stark had seen it on Aarl’s misty curtain, the coiling wraiths seeming to shred away with the speed of the ship’s passing. An illusion, and then the ship dropped out of FTL into normal space. Here at the edge of the nebula the veil was thin and a half-drowned star burned with a lurid light, hugging one small planet close to it for warmth.
Through the torn openings of Dendrid’s Veil, Stark could see what lay beyond, the area of blankness, secret and strange.
It seemed to have grown since last he saw it.
They landed on the planet, a curious shadowed world beneath its shrouded sun, a hothouse of pale vegetation. There was a town, with narrow lanes straggling off among the trees and houses that were themselves like clumps of vegetation, woven of living vines that bloomed heavily with dark flowers.
The people of Ceidri were dark too, and small, deep-eyed and shambling, with clever hands and coats of rich glossy fur that shed the rain. They received their visitors out of doors, where there was room for them to stand erect. Night came on and the sky glowed with twisting dragon-shapes of dull fire where the parent star lit drifts of dust.
Talk was through an interpreter, but Stark was aware of more than the spoken words. There were powerful undercurrents of both fear and excitement.
“It is growing,” said the chief, “it reaches, grasps, sucks. It is a strong child. It has begun to think.”
There came a silence over the clearing. A shower of rain fell lightly and passed on.
“You are saying,” said Shorr Kan in a strangely flat voice, “that that thing out there is alive? Interpreter, make certain of the meaning!”
“It lives,” said the chief. His eyes glowed in his small snubby face. “We feel it.” And he added, “It will kill us soon.”
“Then it is evil?”
“Not evil. No.” His narrow shoulders lifted. “It lives.”
Shorr Kan turned to his scientists. “Can this be possible? Can a force… a… nothing be alive?”
“It has been postulated that the final evolution might be a creature of pure energy, alive in the sense that it would feed on energy, as all life-forms do in one form or another, and be sentient… to what degree we can only guess, anything from amoeboid to God-like.”
The chief of the scientists stared at the heavens, and then at the small brown creatures who watched with their strange eyes. “We cannot accept it. Not on this evidence. Such a momentous occurrence…”
“…ought to have been discovered by the proper authorities,” said Shorr Kan, and added a short word. “It may be so, it may not be so, but let us keep an open mind.” To the headman of the Ceidrins he said urgently, “Can you speak to the thing? Communicate?”
“It does not hear us. Do you hear the cry of the organisms in the air you breathe or the water you drink?”
“But you can hear… it?”
“Oh, yes, we hear. It grows swiftly. Soon we shall hear nothing else.”
“Can you make us able to hear?”
“You are men, and men tend to be deafened by their own noises. But there is one here…” His glossy head turned. His eyes met Stark’s. “One here is not like the rest, he is not quite deaf. Perhaps we can help him to hear.”
“Very well, Ambassador,” said Shorr Kan, “you came to learn what it is that eats your sun. Here is your chance.”
They told him what to do. He knelt upon the ground and they formed a ring of small dark shapes around him, with the dark flowers shedding a heavy scent, and the dragon sky above. He looked into the glowing eyes of the chief, and felt his mind becoming malleable, being drawn out, a web of sensitive threads, stretching, linking with the circled minds.
Gradually, he began to hear.
He heard imperfectly with his limited human brain, and he was glad instinctively that this was so. He could not have supported the full blaze of that consciousness. Even the echo of it stunned him.
Stunned him with joy.
The joy of being alive, of being sentient and aware, of being young, thrusting, vibrant, strong. The joy of being.
There was no evil in that joy, no cruelty in the strength that pulsed and grew, sucking life from the cradling universe as simply and naturally as a blade of grass sucks nourishment from the soil. Energy was its food and it ate and was not conscious of life destroyed. That conception was impossible to it. In its view nothing could be destroyed, only changed from one form to another. It saw all of creation as one vast source of fuel for its eternal fires, and that creation now included all of time as well as space. The tremendous force gathering at the heart of the thing had begun to twist the fabric of the continuum itself, deforming it so fantastically that the Sol of two hundred thousand years ago was as accessible as the drowned sun of Ceidri.
It was very young. It was without sin. Its mental potential spanned parsecs. Already it had intimations of its own greatness. It would think, and grow, while the myriad wheeling galaxies swarmed like bees in the sheer beauty of their being, and in due course it would create. God knew what it would create, but all its impulses shone and were pure.
It was innocent. And it was a killer.
Yet Stark yearned to be a part of that divine strength and joyousness. He desired to be lost forever within it, relieved of self and all the petty agonies that went with human living. He felt that he had almost achieved this goal when the contract was broken and he found himself still kneeling with the Ceidrins round him and a soft rain falling. The rain had wet his cheeks, and he was desolate.
Shorr Kan spoke to him, and he answered.
“It is alive. A new species. And it means the end of ours, if we don’t kill it. If it can be killed.”
He stood up, and he saw their faces staring at him, the King of Aldeshar and his scientists and his experts in war and weaponry, doubtful and afraid. Afraid to believe, afraid not to believe.
And Stark added, “If it should be killed.”
The voices began then, clamoring all at once, until they were silenced by a new sound.
Down across the dragon sky, the ships of the Star Kings came to land.
Shorr Kan said, “We’ll wait for them here.” He looked at Stark. “While your mind was straining at its tether to be gone, I had a report from my ship. The power cells are being drained. Only an infinitesimal loss so far, but definite. I wonder what my brother kings will make of it all.”
His brother kings were jubilant. They had left their heavy cruisers standing off Ceidri, an overwhelming force against Shorr Kan’s scout. They were delighted to have caught their fox so easily.
“If you have a weapon, you can’t use it against us now without using it against
yourself,” Flane Fell told him. He had laid aside his silks and jewels, and his golden crown. Like the others, he was dressed for war.
“If I had a weapon,” said Shorr Kan tranquilly, “that thought would have occurred to me. I imagine you’re having the planet searched for hidden installations, possible control centers, and the like?”
“We are.”
“And do you still suppose that any human agency could possibly create or control the force that lies out there?”
“All the evidence will be fairly evaluated, Shorr Kan.”
“That gives me great comfort. In the meantime, have your technicians monitor the power cells of your ships with great care. Have them monitor mine as well. And don’t be too long about your decision.”
“Why?” demanded Flane Fell.
Shorr Kan beckoned to Stark. “Tell them.”
Stark told them.
The Kings of the Marches, the human kings, looked at the Ceidrins and Flane Fell said, “What are these that we should believe them? Little lost brute-things on a lost planet. And as for this so-called ambassador…”
He did not finish. One of the non-human kings had stepped forward to confront him. This fellow’s dawn-ancestor had bequeathed to him a splendid rangy build, a proud head with an aristocratic snout and only a suggestion of fangs, and a suit of fine white fur banded handsomely with gray. His smile was fearsome.
“As a brute-thing myself,” he said, “I speak for my fellow kings of the minority, and I say that the hairless son of an ape is no less a brute-thing than we, and no more competent to judge truthfulness in any form. We ourselves will speak with the Ceidrins.”
They went to do so. Shorr Kan smiled. “The King of Tranett has already given me allies. I’m grateful.”
Stark had gone apart. He looked at the sky and remembered.
The morning came dark with drifting rain. When the clouds broke it seemed to Stark that the shrouded sun was dimmer than he remembered, but that of course was imagination. The four non-human kings rejoined the group. Their faces were solemn, and the chief of the Ceidrins was with them.
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