Danny tensed, looking for Jerry. Had he also responded to the Oracle call? He hadn't yet told Freddie that Jerry was alive, so while the spell of na-thitasu continued to intensify around them he quickly related to her the amazing essentials of Jerry's saga, including his faerie interlude with Buli. The shock of it left her momentarily speechless but her widened eyes threatened a torrent of questions. Before she could find her voice, however, there was an abrupt interruption.
"Nirusi'artha surd-ham na-klisyabhih kiytinatu!"
It was a cry from Khyatri, high priest of the Krias. His arms were raised to Lalille on the tripod.
"My God!" whispered Danny. "He's addressing the Oracle!"
The nonsequenced multiplane impressions swept them into a dimension of communal sight and hearing in which a woman's voice echoed in somber syllables, responding. And there came the questions of Khyatri, Akala and even Ravano. Would the fire gods wait? Must the orphaned Star Sons be helped in their battle? What was the meaning of evil omens that had been seen since the coming of Maitluccan?
"War walks the land," spoke the Oracle voice. The words were Talavat yet symbolic impressions accompanied them – seeming visions which were concepts rather than scenes. All present could grasp the universal meaning.
"But solution comes with the star of prophecy."
"Ramor! Ramor!" cried the priests, falling to their knees.
"At their own level," Sam's voice or thought impinged, "this is the external duality. To us, it is our own collective consciousness, but to them a god."
Suddenly, Danny saw the haunted face in the gallery. There among his nymphs and even a few of the red-haired dakshas was Jerry Fontaine, staring incredulously at Lalille. There wasn't time to wonder what his reactions might be at this moment.
"The sacred blind shall come to know illusion. For them it is a new time when they and men become one. The fire gods break forth in their wrath, and Maitluccan departs when the Sun Death strikes."
This said the Oracle, but in the midst of it was the Bishop's cowled figure, rising up to shout in righteous rage. "I defy you, demon!" he almost screamed. "Tell me who you are!" Like a bolt, a telepathic answer seemed to strike him – evidently for his mind only – and he staggered back, staring in speechless amazement.
"Let's get to hell out of here!" yelled Poyntner.
"Stay!" commanded Sam, this time fiercely. "The Oracle is for them, the innocents of a primeval world. It has brought prophecy, vital even to yourselves, but you fall to recognize it – that the star ship will depart, but that a Sun Death comes. Think of that and its meaning."
"To hell with it!" shouted Poyntner. "I've had enough!"
"What of your own oracle?" persisted Sam. "What of your own questions and the Star Quest itself? What is the key to returning?"
"That poor drugged girl can't tell us that!" shouted Poyntner.
"She has been but a catalyst here – a channel – but there are those who will tell you, in far more scientific terms than you are prepared for."
"I don't believe it!"
"Did you not hear the cosmo-tape of Frans Mabuse?"
"Yes! That I can understand. It's science!"
"Then you must admit that there are advanced intelligences among the stars."
"Of course! Now that I've heard the tape I can accept that on a strictly empirical basis, but not this!"
"Wait! If you now accept the existence of advanced intelligences, the next question is: how far advanced?" As Poyntner hesitated, Sam pushed the point farther. "On an infinite line of progress, where does modern humanity stand in terms of intelligence and other phases of evolution? Mathematically, in the eternal center. There is always progress beyond the illusory present state. Therefore, the intelligences referred to can be immeasurably beyond us, at least by comparison."
"That's theory. What's fact?"
Sam raised his brows slightly. "Fact? That they can communicate directly."
"Who the hell are they?"
"The Lahas themselves, the Great Ones of old. Their names on all worlds and among all infant humanities are legion, but now you shall see them."
"No more tricks, Sam!" rasped the Skipper hoarsely. He had begun to perspire. "I've got to get out of here!"
"Sir!"
All eyes turned to Danny. More of Sam's words had flashed through his mind. Was it theory that swept the star ship unaccountable light years through time and space? There is either knowing or not knowing.
"Sir, about the cosmoscope. Boozie told me that contacting somebody out there was like standing on a star and thumbing a ride. Maybe that's what we're doing right now. Take it from me as a Flight Staff Officer. Sam is onto something. I say we should see it through!"
Danny felt sudden new warmth in the secret pressure of Freddie's hand. Lyshenko's heavy brows lowered as he stared at him intently. For a fleeting moment, the hard Tatar features dropped an unsuspected mask like an open slot in armor plate. A hint of something flashed through. Was it loneliness, weariness, relief to find loyal support, or what? Poyntner snorted in disgust and turned to go, but the Skipper held his arm.
"Al, stay with me on this. We'll sweat it out..."
The time unreality still prevailed as if all events were simultaneous and without duration yet finding their proper extensions in multiplaned dimensions of perception. The volcanic tremors and rumblings were more frequent now, adding a sinister note to the highly charged atmosphere while the mantras rose in volume. During one sharp earth jolt, Cyrus Stockton broke from the group and ran to the tunnel exit. Lyshenko, Poyntner, Elliott and the Bishop remained.
Meanwhile, the Monk and Akala helped their dazed prophetess down the rungs of her mystical perch. Oblivious to her virginal dishabille, Lalille fell sobbing into Akala's arms and the priestess took her away, apparently to help her get back into her caftan. Nolokov came over and joined the swami. Auguste Saussure could only stare after Lalille in bewilderment, still trying to explain to himself the miracle of her cryptic reply.
"How long does this go on?" protested Poyntner.
"It's just getting started," said Nolokov almost viciously.
"You're going to get kicked off your marble slab!"
Sam admonished him severely. "Be silent, Marius, you've much to learn."
"I'm not your chela, Swami!" the Monk retorted darkly. "An end to this ignorance, I say!"
"Now is the end of your own delusion, my son. The sorcerer's path is yours and Alfred Poyntner's, enshrining lonely knowledge in a tower. In both of you the personality ray predominates. But now the egoic ray shall be augmented. Your metamorphosis begins."
There was a sudden outcry from Khyatri. Freddie gripped Danny's arm and pointed to a second tier above the Krias.
"Now!" said Sam triumphantly. "The Gate swings wide! The Watchers come!"
CHAPTER XVII
The Council members were suddenly on their feet and were staring incredulously at the miracle that had materialized on the second tier. Above in the gallery, the bearded face of Jerry Fontaine shone white in the new illumination. His transition, too, had arrived while he stared down at the incomprehensible.
Danny held Freddie tightly as they both regarded the multiple apparition speechlessly. Initially they were aware of three great globes of blinding white light, but finally they recognized humanoid silhouettes. The dazzling lights were emanating from where their heads should have been.
"What the hell!" muttered the Skipper defensively.
"Hypnosis!" shouted Poyntner in almost frantic condemnation.
"Silence!" retorted the Monk disdainfully.
To Danny the three lights appeared to explode, filling the cavern and enveloping everyone as if time and space had imploded into the eternal Now. He experienced a strobed flickering of repeated visual memory, the strange dreams and symboled imagery of those last months of approach to the primitive world. Here was their source, as if all of them had been glimpsing these lightnings of revelation through widening lattices in an ever-present struc
ture of time. Old references ceased to exist as his mind was caught up in a painfully brilliant dimension of multiphased impressions, now small and lost in star-strewn immensities, now macrocosmic, embracing the endless gulfs in giantesque presence, intimately close to his companions yet face to face with vast, alien countenances whose shape and form drifted from many to one and back again. Voices rang titanically and intermingled while he heard Freddie cry out and he felt the racing of her heart next to his own.
The alien words were thought forms as well, and they spoke on different levels of consciousness. Eerily, Danny had a multiple sensation of walking in different worlds, of seeing separate realities from varying perspectives simultaneously. In the primeval world of Ravano, he moved through Eden glades in the presence of immortal beings. In Ravano's perception, he saw it as a holy miracle, a descent of the tribal god and communion with his own primordial race.
"Know thou, priest king, that thy time of going forth with thy people has come, and the land of Lankara shall know the death of fire. But before that hour there shall be a test of heart in which you stand alone at a mighty crossroad. Look well to the signs of prophecy."
To the rest of them the message was either in English or in language known to the universal unconscious. Or was Holy Sam more than he pretended to be, boosting their group perceptions to a level where they could understand? Sometimes it seemed that Sam was interpreting. At other times an alien face was seen – greenish blue with flaming yellow eyes, or golden bronze with the brow of a demigod, or dark-scaled and brooding in ageless giant wisdom born of the stars.
Concept fell upon concept, inundating the mind with a flood of meaning that could only be intuitively dredged from the subconsciousness back in time's illusion. Somewhere in the midst of the mental maelstrom came the final bolt as Poyntner shouted or almost screamed in his rage and desperation, damning Sam and swearing again and again that he would not be hypnotized.
Then came the gold-bronzed demigod with his broad brow and metallically gleaming blond hair and strong compassionate smile. "Ah, the mechanistic empiricist who holds the world keys to evaluation – evolved in mind and technology but blinded by rationalizations! Did you not say that men have always molded their gods and their heavens to fit their dreams and their little egos? Your own age of science does no less."
"Words! Words!" shouted Poyntner, streaming sweat. "This is hallucination!"
The great one's compassionate smile faded. "It is cosmic irony that the most brilliant among you should expend your genius attempting to reach the stars when your greatest and least explored horizons lie closest at hand, within yourselves." Poyntner was still on his feet, challenging the entire phenomenon in red-faced disdain. "Don't give me philosophy give me facts!" he shouted. "Look! If I'm talking to God, then let's have some answers to the greatest questions of science! That's the only logical test of this ridiculous charade!"
"In the great cloud of knowable things," said the great one patiently, "if the question is known, the answer will come."
"What the hell!" Poyntner retorted furiously. "That's just a fancy dodge around the main issue! What I want to know–"
"We know your questions," the great one interrupted.
This caused Poyntner to pause in critical expectation for the moment. Saussure's almost glassy-eyed stare was fixed on him. Lyshenko seemed to be caught in a Limbo of tight-lipped indecision. Frederica gripped Danny's arm in white-knuckled intensity while the apocalyptic-seeming debate continued, as Danny thought, between materialistic atheism – and what?
"But you are not addressing the same entity Who spoke through the Oracle," the great one continued. "We are but an advanced state in the ever-evolving kingdoms of Nature. As to your questions – when it is time to know, it will be known." As Poyntner began to tense up in new indignation, the being added, "However, your science's time of knowing is near – so much so that you and your colleagues are already staring at the answers, lacking only a final interpretation."
"Very impressive!" commented Poyntner stubbornly. "Scientifically speaking, you have told me nothing!"
As in Saussure's case, a sudden message seemed to strike Poyntner's mind like a lightning bolt. But instead of resulting in glaze-eyed stupefaction, it seemed that he was left speechless only because the concept delivered was beyond words.
"Now I will give you the secret of the Barrier Wall," the being continued, "and listen well, for this message you shall bring to your scientific peers on that one Earth you know of. Behold!"
There followed a mind-exploding multi-dimensioned vision of galactic generation, giant radio galaxies condensing to the point of emergence into light out of darkness and void.
"The cyclic creation of universes alternates in cosmic pulsation between involution and evolution, first densifying and then expanding. In your own terms the pattern is an endless sine wave that complies with your own concept of electromagnetic phenomena. Your ancient wise perceived this as 'the breathing in and out of God.' In actuality it is a process of density oscillation, as in a diastole and systole cycle, thus revealing in the Macrocosmic sense the concept of a heartbeat of the Cosmos."
The vision revealed a densified universe that began to expand.
"Thence came your Big Bang concept of an exploding universe. As you regard your red-shift phenomena you are again single-planed in your rationalizations, dogmatizing a constant for the speed of light through varying media and vast gravitic fields. But more than this you conceive of only one state of density for the medium in which it moves. I will tell you this: your so-called Hubble constant is but a measurement of the grand evolutionary arc as the attenuations increase.
"What is more important is the attenuation and densification cycles of life itself. This dawn world of a parallel universe where you now find yourself has also passed the nadir point of density, and for this reason you have found radioactive ores. But that is only in mineral and plant kingdoms. There is a type of inertia involved, however, where the higher animal, prehuman and human kingdoms are concerned. They are still in the involutionary cycle. Here in the relative beginning of time these innocents still move downward into their densities of both body and mind, which is the same as the so-called 'Fall' of man. They move toward an earth-centered, self-conscious state which will bind them in a bondage of illusion. The faculty of the Collective Consciousness is fading, whereas on your own Earth you are emerging from these densities back to a level of attenuation where the great Collective Consciousness returns. Signs of this transition are seen in the mutational awakening of the 'lost faculties', such parapsychic manifestations as telepathy and telekinesis and other psi phenomena.
"Whereas with the dawn children their collective consciousness has been intuitive, yours becomes cognizant and dynamically usable. This is the key to the Barrier Wall."
The vision changed suddenly to the scene of a vast dark plain on which stood a pyramid, unfinished at the top. It was the same prevision Freddie had experienced on board the star ship.
"The universal mathematical symbol of the pyramid appears to be incomplete. Actually that completion is achieved when all sides, all dualities and pluralistic conceptions, converge in a single eye at the top."
A gleaming and seemingly living eye floated now over the flattened top of the pyramid. It gradually grew brighter until it was as brilliant as a nova, all-engulfing.
"Collectively, man is his own star. Now know this: No mechanical vehicle, nothing out of the deeper densities, can ever reach the physical stars in its own time-space continuum. This is nature's barrier to prevent untimely crossings of cultures and states of attenuation. Unrealized man is the constant contaminant. The key to the stellar community is Mind, the Collective Consciousness. When this is fully achieved, the energy nature of matter yields to the control of Universal Intelligence. There is no time or space in the true perception. This is the meaning of the Gate through which we have come."
The pyramid star faded, and all the mingled faces were back. But soon th
ey resolved themselves into individual countenances. The gold-bronze demigod receded swiftly to his humanoid shadow form on the upper tier. "Bridging the illusory gulfs between worlds and universes is but an alteration of frequencies, a changing of energy levels. In the cosmic brotherhood of universal man, these doors are always used, and thus the Barrier is dissolved between us."
He faded in a glowing mist and was gone.
Now the greenish blue one spoke. "You have come here in the illusion of being kindred but you are in various stages of evolution. Many of you will return to your world because of what you have learned. Others will remain as Servers, to be guides to an infant humanity because of what you have become."
Now the dark-scaled and brooding one spoke in somber tones. "Yet others shall not survive. They shall be found in the dwelling places of evil and go no more out." The dark one also receded then and vanished through the "Gate."
The blue-green face receded to its shadow form and the head gleamed like a star as before. "Go then, back to your Earth, those who are chosen to go. A cyclic law will soon bring a fire of destruction here. Your ship will be gated through the Barrier, and thus shall other star ships traverse it in their return, once the travelers know at last what they sought. Men reach for the stars in search of that which they dare not name. And once they know, the name is forever nameless. But instead of legislating, inventing or dogmatizing solutions, the Answer is that they become the solution. The pyramid is then complete. Go, Earthmen, before it is too late!"
There was a heavy earth tremor and a deeply ominous rumbling, but now Sam's voice held them as the third Laha vanished.
"So the answer is to be a solution, thus ending the long illusion of duality. The old dispensation of atonement becomes the Collective Consciousness state of atonement."
"My God!" exclaimed Saussure.
"Precisely, my son."
The earth rose and twisted then as the main earthquake struck. Slabs of rock fell from the ceiling. There were shouts and screams. Danny held firmly to Freddie's slim waist and pulled her with him. A nightmare of survival ensued while the world went mad. Somehow the exit tunnel held together long enough for them to stumble up its twisting and gyrating slope in the midst of cosmic thunder. Still others must have found their way out by other routes before most of the caverns collapsed.
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