by Gardner Fox
A woman screamed as he came through those molten doors. Carrick imagined that he must seem a god in truth to these simple people. Even Mai was trembling as she stared at him.
“Get them out of Andraar,” he called to her. “Fast. I can’t tell what kind of terror Ylth’yl will unleash next. I’m not worried about myself too much—if I can see a danger in time I can stop it.”
She nodded and called to the men and women, turning them and sending them at the trot through the streets. Carrick waited on the paving stones, feeling the sunlight hot on his flesh while they moved toward the crown of the hill in the distance. Khyrl and his hunters also would be freed of the grip of Ylth’yl. Khyrl would probably have gone to his kaygan, wondering what had happened; he might even have turned toward Andraar where his people were in danger. But he could not worry about Khyrl right now.
Mai Valoris waited for him, eyes wide. She made a lonely, frightened figure in the city street. Carrick walked toward her.
“Go back to the gateway,” he told her. “If anything happens to me, I want you to be safe.” He wondered if Ylth’yl could sense how dear Mai was to him, wondered too if the energy creature might strike at him through her. He decided not to risk it.
“I’ll come with you,” he said flatly.
With a forcefield about them both, Ylth’yl would be helpless.
He stood in the grasses and watched the girl he loved walk through air and disappear. Beyond him—in his own world—the grey subsidiundum blocks towered high above her head. At least she was safe for a little while.
He turned back toward Andraar.
Ylth’yl touched his mind. Not-man, listen to me! Why should we destroy one another? You could rule two universes with me. I care nothing about power or women or the wealth that means so much to your kind. I want life. Only life, with which to quest through all space and time for knowledge.
Can you imagine how old I am? Before the race of men appeared on Earth, I was ancient. I have studied a million civilizations. I have traveled to the far stars, even to the distant galaxies forbidden to your people because of their remoteness. Where eternity is a life-span, what do a few thousand years mean to me who can travel at the speed of light between worlds?
All I want is life. The rest you can have, all the gold, the jewels, the women of a thousand worlds. Give me life alone.
“At the expense of other lives,” Carrick growled.
And yet—
With Ylth’yl he—Kael Carrick—could rule two universes. Join forces and become the mightiest ruler ever to wear the shape of man. A million worlds would bow to his name. Not Empire but Kael Carrick would rule the stars. His device would decorate the prows of star-ships, his device be flown on ornate flags at holiday parades. Instead of an Empire Council, an emperor would hand down the decrees by which mankind would live and thrive.
Emperor Kael I.
There would be no question then of Alton Raymond betraying him to the authorities. He would be the authority, the only authority. He would raise a palace beside which Skytowers would be a tumbledown shack.
And Mai Valoris would be his empress.
Their sons would rule the stars.
Carrick sighed. It was a pretty concept, but—nothing more. He had not been given his body to become an emperor, though he had no doubt but what he might do it, if he wanted.
But no…
He walked to the top of the hill and he stretched out both hands. Tiny fireflames grew at the tips of his extended fingers. He willed them to grow and feed on the oxygen and the chemicals in the air, then on the woods and dried draperies and furniture in the olden city of Andraar.
The fire spread swiftly. Within moments the city was a giant pyre. At least, he would prevent Ylth’yl from bringing any more Slarrn to his great red tower!
He heard the drumming of the flames, their thunder in the air like a mighty voice crying out. His mind imagined the uncounted millions of tongues of the dead peoples devoured here by Ylth’yl thanking him for this destruction.
Now free us, they called. Free us from this living death. Give us true death, true forgetfulness. Those voices were everywhere in his mind, pleading, begging, starved for an end to their life that was no life, shared as a part of Ylth’yl.
The sweat came out on his forehead, the heat of the burning city was so great. He caught the crashing reverberations of walls and rooftops toppling, of tall towers crashing streetward under the weakened supports.
Do you think fire can harm me? said the voice.
Ylth’yl was bitter. At long last it knew the bite of fear. In that fear, it struck. The ground quaked all around Carrick. Great fissures opened in the soil so that from where he stood, he could stare down into the bowels of the planet.
Lightning leaped from the clouds above. It stabbed the ground and scorched it. It created fires of its own. Carrick was not afraid of the lightning for it could not penetrate the barrier he formed about himself, but he was alarmed at the size of the fissures. If he should fall into one of these—
He had no wish to be buried alive.
Carrick willed his body into the air. It lifted a foot, then three feet under the levitating powers of his mind, but he realized suddenly he could not keep this up. Levitation was a power that demanded specific mental muscles; never before tested, there was no strength in them. To use them he had to drain strength from other bodily functions.
Ironically enough, Carrick realized that he might be sealing his own doom if he defeated Ylth’yl. Once the energy creature was dead, men would come into the worlds of Slarrn and Kael Carrick might be arrested and imprisoned once again for the murder of Hannes Stryker.
It made no difference. Stryker had put a compulsion in him, a will to meet Ylth’yl and—to battle him to the death. One or the other, Kael Carrick or Ylth’yl the Eternal—must die.
Standing on the crest of the hill staring into the red inferno of Andraar, Carrick came to know his body. Here on Slarrn, his powers were those of more-than-man, of god-man. The dreams of men since the first cave fires had been lighted, had come alive in his flesh. The ancient vision of mind over matter was reality, in him.
He hurled a bolt of raw energy into the flames, hunting Ylth’yl. It was as if that beam were an extension of himself. He felt it caught, turned aside. In return, Ylth’yl hurled thought at him, thought so nauseating that sickness churned in his middle. Without pause, Ylth’yl made a blob of veined blackness that had a core of gibbering madness and tried to force it along the convolutions of Carrick’s brain. Once that blackness took hold, he would become a mongoloid.
He did not know where Ylth’yl had learned these horrors. It was enough that he possessed them, that he could use them for weapons as a space soldier used a blip-gun. Carrick found that he was quivering. He did not mind dying—but madness!
Ylth’yl was touching him again, deep in the occipital and parietal lobes of his brain. And the world swirled about him swiftly and dizzily. He fell to his knees. He became blind and dumb and unable to stand.
It was spirit against spirit, now. Or will, or soul, or the life-force, whatever name you give this power in man that lifts him above the beasts. Slowly Ylth’yl inched deeper into his mind. He came like a river smoothly flowing into the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata, through the sulci and the gyri and the fissures, deep into his brain, taking it over, numbing it.
Carrick crouched in darkness.
The coldness was in his head so solidly that it made an agony from his eyes to the base of his neck. Ylth’yl crept forward, gripping, holding.
There was nothing Carrick could do, now. Too much of his mind was in the control of this alien thing that had invaded him. The forcefield would not work, nor could he manufacture energy with some unknown gland hidden deep inside his flesh. He must wait, kneeling and bent forward, until Ylth’yl finished him.
The coldness was advancing into his forebrain now, into the cerebrum and the frontal and the temporal lobes and downward through the pons. Ylt
h’yl was there, in his skull—
A prisoner!
Carrick screamed thickly. It was as if his brain had hands—intangible hands—psychic fingers with which to grip and rend. He was on his feet with both hands pressed to his temples, his every muscle in a state of rigid contraction.
Ylth’yl had gone a step too far.
He was caught in the curious interstices of his brain—operated on by Hannes Stryker and made, like his body, not-human—like a fish inside a weir, he was inescapably held. Ylth’yl raged. His silent fury was a blood-red nightmare in Carrick’s head. It pulsed, throbbing, calling on its awesome energies for freedom.
In time, Ylth’yl might have figured a way out of that trap, solved the riddle of its maze of sulci and gyri. But—there was no time. Its energies were draining fast. Too fast.
The intangible fingers of energy within the brain of Kael Carrick were tightening inexorably. They seared where they touched like cold fire and they sapped the energies of a million million years from the core of the thing named Ylth’yl. If silence could scream, then Ylth’yl screamed, in terror and despair, as one of its own victims might have screamed when it took and devoured him, if he had been able.
Dimly, Carrick heard that scream and snarled against its plea. Savagely, like a primate fighting for survival, he knotted the convulsive grasp of those intangible fingers which were choking the life from Ylth’yl.
One last writhing attempt, the eternal one made for freedom—
And then the top of Carrick’s head blew up.
He woke to cold air on his skin.
He was lying on his front, with his cheek pressing into the pebbled surface of a ditch. Putting a palm on the ground he lifted himself upward. There was a dullness, an apathy in Kael Carrick; it was as if his mind were under the influence of a drug; his body was oddly debilitated. Dazedly he stared down the slope of the hill at what was left of the city of Andraar.
It was a smoking ruin. The air was tainted with the stink of its burning. Overhead the night was a sky pressing the weight of its million stars downward onto the grassy surface of Slarrn. There was no life anywhere.
The air, even polluted as it was with smoke, tasted good to his lungs. He savored it, standing on the hill crown, and let his memory come back.
Ylth’yl was dead. In that final spasm of agony where it had seemed Carrick was dying too, the last erg of energy had been drained out of it. It had taken much from the body of Kael Carrick. He had slept a long time, here in the ditch where that final convulsion had flung him, but at least some of his old strength was back again.
His fingers went over his body. He was the same as he had always been, since Hannes Stryker had given him his new body and operated on his brain. Here in the Slarrn worlds this body had come to full flower. He wondered what effect going back to his own universe would have upon it. For he would have to go back, to tell Alton Raymond what had happened, to make his peace with the authorities.
Perhaps, now that he could tell the story of Ylth’yl, the Empire would realize he had not blipped down Hannes Stryker. Perhaps and—perhaps not. Whether they did or did not, was a chance he must take.
It may be that in return for this universe of Slarrn, the authorities would be willing to make a deal. He did not want that, not really. He wanted to have his innocence proved, accepted by the men of the star worlds. He appreciated the fact that he could not prove his innocence, not with Felton Pratt dead. The most he could do was make the claim and wait on an answer.
But—he meant to make his try.
Carrick turned his back on smoking Andraar and walked through the high grasses and the cool night. His eyes lifted to the stars. They were so much like the star-suns of his own spatial universe that he unconsciously hunted for constellations and star formations. They were utterly different, naturally, and he chuckled.
By giving the race of men all Slarrn, he was presenting them with a new life. Archeology, astronomy, almost every science to zoology would be reborn. Scientists would bow down before his name as once the faithful had bowed low to Mecca, back on Mother Earth.
“Lord Carrick,” whispered a voice.
“What—oh, it’s you, Khyrl.”
There were a dozen of them, men with spears and clad in furs, falling to their knees and rubbing their foreheads back and forth in the grasses. Carrick felt shock; then understood that to them, he was a god. He had destroyed their devil. It would do no good to tell them the truth. They were not ready for it, not yet.
And so Carrick said only, “I am going away for a little while but I will be back. There’s no need to worry about Ylth’yl any more. He is dead.”
Voices made sounds all around him, assuring him that they—his people—understood this very well. They owed their lives and all they owned to Kael Carrick. He would be their god, their lordling, for as long as he lived, and his son and his son’s sons after him.
Go get Mai Valoris and come back. Live here in Slarrn forever. All you need do is destroy the gateway and Hannes Stryker’s notes. No other man in the Empire can build another such doorway into this universe.
It was a temptation, Carrick admitted honestly. He needed to use willpower to thrust it out of his mind. He said, “I shall be back—my woman and I. We will be friends with the people of Khyrl. But—no more than friends.”
As he walked on through the night, they bowed low behind him. Much later, when he chanced to look back from far away toward what was left of Andraar, he could see them patiently following him as might dogs their master.
Twenty years from now, Khyrl and his people would not carry spears but live in cities that would dwarf Andraar, and be component parts of the Empire. No longer would they have to hunt their food and walk on sandaled feet through the misted grasses of early morning, their meals dependent on the accuracy of their hunters’ throwing arms.
It would be a far easier life they would lead.
Carrick wondered if it would be a better one.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE GATEWAY into the star worlds was a quivering shimmer hanging in the air and bordered by a faint, transparent image of the subsidiundum blocks. To Carrick as he walked toward it, it was a hand extended in welcome, beckoning him back as might a father his son, a hand held out in pride and gratitude.
I dream, he told himself with a wry grin for his own imaginings. The Empire planets wanted only one thing of Kael Carrick: his death. Ah, and yet—there might be hope, even now.
He had their ancient dream to give them.
Nirvana lay waiting beyond the subsidiundum gate. Or Valhalla. Or Utopia. Or Paradise. The man who could give it to them might well be pardoned for past sins. But this was not what he wanted.
He wanted no pardon, but a reversal of his sentence, a new adjudication that Kael Carrick was no murderer but a man wronged by lying testimony.
The blocks of subsidiundum were overhead.
He stepped into the gateway.
In midstride, even as the rippling, dancing colors that swirled in the titanic energy curtain of the gateway closed about him, he could look into the laboratory on the other side.
He saw Mai Valoris with a blip-gun at her back.
Half a dozen men were in the laboratory with her, hardcase men, in the nondescript garb of typical space rats and star robbers. It was such a man who held his weapon jabbed against Mai’s spine. To his left, big and powerful, stood Than Lear. And so close to Than Lear that their elbows touched, was Alton Raymond.
Than Lear held a blip gun. So did the fat billionaire. Those guns were aimed at the stone doorway through which he was emerging into the star worlds. Carrick could not stop. He was in mid-stride even as he saw the heat-haze forms of the others.
He emerged out of the gateway and stood on the hard floor of the laboratory. Mai Valoris screamed. The half-dozen blip-guns steadied.
A rain of energy sped at him from the blippers. It was a wall of blinding brilliance, of hot white coruscation in which he seemed to drown. Any other ma
n would have been disintegrated within seconds after that awesome shower enveloped his body. Carrick simply stood there, knowing relief so intense his knees shook.
The powers that had flowered to life in Slarrn—remained to him in his own universe! Once activated, once called into play, their function and their strength remained. He need not be in Slarrn to make them effective. It was as if, having learned to turn handsprings, he would always be able to do so.
To test his abilities even further—
His right hand came up. From his extended fingertips leaped blue fire. It touched the blip-gun at Mai’s spine; the blipper disappeared. The blue fire ran around the room, touching the other blippers. They melted to nothingness.
A space rat sobbed.
“He’s a devil! God!”
Alton Raymond was staring at him with bulging eyes. Sweat ran down his quivering cheeks. “Carrick—wait! Listen to me!”
Mai Valoris ran across the room, flung herself into his arms. He pushed her behind him, into the gateway. “Ylth’yl is dead. Go into Slarrn, Mai, and to Khyrl’s kaygan. Tell him I’ll be there—in a little while.”
“I don’t want—”
“Go! Can’t you see I can’t fight with you to protect? And I must fight. Everything that’s happened has only been a prelude to this.”
He locked eyes with Than Lear. Hot hate ran at him from the black eyes of the bald man. Suddenly he seemed to know, to understand what had been hidden from him before now.
Than Lear had killed Hannes Stryker.
It could be no one else.
Mai gave a soft little cry behind him. He heard the slap of her sandals on floor tiles, then felt a little brush of scented wind at his back as the gateway opened and closed. She was gone, back into the land of the Llynn.
He stood alone against his enemies.
“You killed him,” Carrick said to Than Lear. “You killed Hannes with a blipper. You had Felton Pratt with you to act as lookout. You couldn’t trust anyone else to do it. You had to do it yourself.”