The Run to Chaos Keep

Limbo Is for Losers

Josef was not pleased.

"We had them right there!" he shouted, his voice echoing off the vast death chamber. "Right there! And we lost them!"

"There are a great many ways to go from the next chamber," Kalia pointed out. "There is simply no way to know which one they chose, and we do not have enough force to explore all of them."

Desreth projected two stalks from its body which seemed to flow out of it and into their shape. "Their tactics are clear," it said in its monotone. "They could not get through us, but if they retreat they gain nothing except risking being lost in the bowels of this place. Clearly they are attempting to find a passage leading in back of us, to the entrance once again. Then they either flank us or they simply leave."

Josef nodded. He looked around the chamber and said, "I wish we had some time to really take a look at this mess, but I agree. The best course is not to pursue, since we risk getting trapped ourselves or lost. Our best course right now is to retreat and recall the ship. We will blow up the other shuttles on the ground, leaving them trapped here, and then return. I believe that mind scans will reveal that we were justified in coming, and if we must suffer for some of our failures, then it is our due."

"Agreed," Tobrush replied. "It is relatively clear what happened, if we can believe the overheard Mizlaplanian conversation. Two creatures that they in their fanatical fervor see as demons were here in suspended animation. The scientists tried to cut them out, accidentally revived them, and paid for it. Although I would prefer to know where those creatures are now, and just what they did look like, I believe not knowing makes a well-ordered retreat mandatory, and with all speed."

Josef nodded. "All right—same system as we came m. Kalia, Desreth, to either side. Just follow the cable, and watch the side exits on the chambers as we go. We don’t want any nasty surprises."

Even with curiosity unsatisfied, it was still something of a relief to get out of that chamber of horrors. They proceeded back, methodically, as they had come in, pausing now and again to listen for voices, but there was nothing but silence. Still, the way back seemed interminably longer than the way in.

"This is the fourth chamber we’ve passed through," Tobrush noted worriedly. "We only passed through three coming in."

"You must be mistaken," the leader responded. "We’re still following the scientists’ power cable."

"The Julki is correct," Desreth put in. "We are not going back the way we came in."

Two more chambers without a sign of an exit convinced even Josef. "How is it possible, though? There are no cable junctions!"

"There is one remote explanation," Tobrush said. The Julki extended one of its tentacles and emitted a chemical spray that was jet black. It traced a design on the floor near the cable, then withdrew it. "Now let us proceed on."

Another corridor, another small chamber, then another corridor, then they emerged again into a small chamber and stopped, all of them staring.

Tobrush’s black design was unmistakably on the floor.

Kalia ran back to the corridor and peered back in the direction from which they’d come. It wasn’t a very long corridor; despite a slight bend, she could essentially see where it opened up once more. "Impossible!" she snapped. "There is not enough of a curve in this short distance for us to circle around!"

"I agree," Desreth put in. "At best a six- or seven-degree curve. We have been going essentially in a straight line and we have wound up where we began."

"It is almost as if this thing was trying to keep us here," Kalia breathed, looking around nervously.

"Doubtful," Tobrush responded. "The only possible explanation is that this structure is the first concrete example we have ever seen of a tesseract. That would explain why it never quite looked the same from the outside."

"A what?" Kalia asked.

"We, all of us, regardless of our racial origins, experience things in three concrete dimensions—length, width, depth—and a fourth, time," Tobrush explained. "The tesseract is a theoretical mathematical construct that exists in all of those dimensions but also others simultaneously. We were not designed to perceive those dimensions and so we do not, but they act upon us here all the same. We have not been passing through the same space. Instead, we have been passing through other unseen and unperceived dimensions in which this thing also exists, and, folded through them, we are winding up pretty close to where we start."

"You want to explain that more slowly and clearly?" Josef pressed.

"Each of these chambers and corridors intersects all of the other chambers and corridors in the place through dimensions we cannot perceive. We have walked through a realm we cannot comprehend and so was invisible to us until we reached a point where that other realm intersected with something that would."

"I do not quite understand," said the usually quiet Robakuk, "but I admit the effect. If this is so, although it makes me dizzy to attempt to think upon it, then why did it not affect the scientists who must have been coming in and out for months?"

"Perhaps it was stable then," Tobrush replied. "Relatively so, anyway. Think of our own ship. We do not so much fly it as it flies us. It has its own computerized brain and instrumentation that is far faster and better at its job than we could be flying manually. This structure might well have a similar governor. When the scientists came in, the structure’s first object was to study them and perceive a threat, but to maintain stability in the route to the passengers. Eventually the research team goes to dig out the passengers and that now constitutes a threat. An initial defense mechanism might then be to turn this on, so that those who threaten are trapped."

"But the passengers got out," Josef noted. "We saw the results."

"Precisely. Either they can see and persist in more dimensions than we, which is a distinct possibility, or they know the one route to get out. Either that, or the ship, obedient to them, stabilizes as needed—the most likely scenario."

That made them all a bit nervous. "Then, we’re trapped inside here, too?" Kalia asked. "Inside a building that can think and considers us threats?"

"Possibly. If we keep going in a straight line, I believe we will be trapped. The old concepts have no more validity in here now. We might need to go back to go forward, to go down to climb, to turn left to go straight. If we do not threaten the structure or any of its inhabitants, providing they are still here, then one of these faces, at least, will intersect with the entrance."

They all thought of the scenes of carnage. "You think there’s a possibility we’ll meet other—inhabitants?" Josef asked.

"Doubtful," the Julki replied, "although there might well be living quarters or a whole city in this sort of thing. I doubt if they are still here, though—why allow us in if they were? Why not finish us?"

"But, if they are not outside, and they are not in here," Desreth said, "then they must be someplace else. A third place. Might this be not merely a building but some sort of transport system? If it can fold and refold inside itself to warp space, why not in normal space as well? Think of a vehicle one could build and keep in one spot, yet which allows anyone to literally walk between worlds countless light-years apart, through dimensions that circumvent the normal rules."

Josef stared at the Corithian for a moment. "You mean," he said at last, "that this thing might actually take us somewhere else? Another world?"

"Another galaxy, even," Tobrush told him. "Space, time, everything might be bent through and come out in any fashion."

"Assuming I believe this fantastic crap for a moment, it wouldn’t be unplanned. Not these people. If this is a transportation system, it’s a hell of a ways beyond anything we know. I don’t care if they’re demons, devils, or ancient gods, as far above us as we are above a blade of grass, they won’t do things for no reason. If in fact this goes somewhere, it won’t be just anywhere and it won’t be random."

"Hmmm . . . Yes," Tobrush said after a moment. "I see your point. Considering how they regarded and treated the people here, do we want to go where this will take us?"

Kalia looked at them in disgust and shook her head. "It sure beats stayin’ here," she said.

Josef took a deep breath. "All right, then—we go. Same system, only this time we go off this damned cable. We’ll try it, at least for a while, because there seems nothing else to do. Remember, though, that there’s still that pack of Holy Ones stuck looking for an exit just like we are."

Kalia suddenly drew her pistol and whirled at one of the corridor exits. They all froze, and Josef whispered, "What’s wrong?"

"Voices. From down there."

"All right, then," the leader told them, "why don’t we go that way and see just who we bump into?"

In and out, back and forth, they crisscrossed the seemingly endless labyrinth inside the demon structure, often hearing voices, occasionally seeing things move well in the distance, only to find nothing when they got there. It was getting very discouraging, but no less tense.

"We’ve been here before," Gun Roh Chin noted, pointing to the floor. "But we’re not alone."

Next to the chalk mark he’d made on the wall was a black design in some unknown substance.

"Look! Over here is another of their marks!" Krisha called, pointing to another possible route. "And over there another of ours. And here—a third mark, perhaps? It seems some sort of marking pen."

They went over and looked at the odd pen marking.

"Definitely not ours or theirs," Chin agreed. "One of the original scientists’ marks, perhaps?"

"Either that or—how many people are wandering around in this hellish place, anyway?" Morok wondered.

"I admit that, seeing all these marks, I almost believe someone from the Exchange has set up an admissions booth and is selling tickets. They would do it, too," Gun Roh Chin commented sourly, crouching down to examine the markings. "Wait a minute, here. . . . Wait a minute!" He got back up and looked around the entire chamber. "Six possible entry-ways into this chamber, see? And five of them have one sort of marking or another, some several. Only one, there, bears no mark."

"But, Captain, that’s the one through which we just entered," Morok noted.

"Perhaps. Is it, really? I wonder. Let me mark it here, then we go through it."

They waited for him to draw his mark, then wearily set out along a path they were all, even the captain, certain they’d just traversed. This was getting very old very fast.

The next chamber, however, had far more markings than could possibly be accounted for by their short absence. Two, however, were totally unmarked, and Chin went first to one and peered in, then the other. "This one," he told them.

"How can you be so certain?" Morok asked him.

"The lighting’s different down at the end. I’m certain of it!"

And it was. When they reached the end of the corridor this time, they passed through an energy barrier much like the one at the entrance to the structure through which they’d come, and were suddenly outside the labyrinth, although still within and surrounded by the hollowed-out quartz-like core.

"We have done it!" Savin shouted in an expression of joy and relief that sounded to most of them like a dangerous beast after a kill. "We’re back at the entrance!"

"Are we? I wonder . . ." the captain responded. "Where is the walkway? Where is the power cable?" He turned, pulled his pistol, and began walking straight down the center toward the opening beyond. The others followed, and soon they were back in open air.

Before them stretched a vast plain, flat and featureless as far as the eye could see. The rock was hard, gray, and featureless, as was in fact the sky, which seemed a vast sea of light gray in the twilight through which nothing appeared to shine.

Savin started to see if he could scratch into the rock with the heel of his boot, but Gun Roh Chin told him to stop it. "Examine the area. No marks at all. Either we’re here first, or someone else had the same idea I did. Walk very carefully; make no marks at all that you can avoid. Sooner or later, if only by trial and error, the others will find their way here, unless there are alternate destinations for this thing. It would be best for us if they thought that they were the first here, too."

Krisha looked around at the vast, colorless nothingness. "But what good does that do us, Captain? There’s no cover!"

"Yes, and all directions look the same," Manya noted. "My suit compass shows no reading—it just keeps going around and around. The heat and humidity are at oppressive levels, yet there is no sign of erosion or runoff of any kind in this hard rock, implying that it does not rain, at least in this region."

Morok walked out and away from the exit to the demon structure, examining the ground with the kind of gaze he normally reserved for his hypno Talent. Finally he stopped, then bent over and examined the ground more closely. Finally, he got up and turned back to them. "There are marks. Very faint, but marks most certainly."

He walked out a bit more, then did the same. "Yes, definitely."

"Then the Mycohl are already here?" Manya asked, concerned.

"I think not. They would either be careful to make no such marks or they would make far different marks than these. Examine them, all of you. Some are just single marks, but one or two are clearly slight crescents." He stepped to the next set. "From the stride, I’d say between two and three meters tall. I thought it was just one, but there is a third mark, a bit smaller, with this set, almost overlapping the left large one. Two, then—one a bit smaller and lighter than the other."

Manya was on her knees and examining the marks as if they were specimens. "Oddly shaped. One would almost say like the sort of marks the horses from the Holy Retreat would make, only the sets do not indicate a quadruped. I—" She suddenly seemed stricken, then got up quickly and backed away from the area of the marks as if she expected them to suddenly come alive and bite her. "Cloven hooves! The two demons!"

"Here is your other plane," Gun Roh Chin said with some satisfaction. "If in fact it isn’t simply some other world. Morok, bless the gods that your people are such keen trackers. I would have missed these for sure." He turned back to the demon structure, which looked curiously the same, sticking partway into the rock, the only thing to break the landscape at all. "The reason they weren’t stranded on that world for lack of transport is that transport was at hand. They don’t need spaceships."

"I don’t know how it is done, but clearly you were correct in that part, Captain," Morok agreed. "However, it certainly was not a crash, was it? Then, why the pair in suspension in the center, and why, when they did awake, did they take the trouble to ensure that no one currently there survived or got away, yet failed to lock their own transport front door?"

"I can imagine a lot of diabolical reasons!" Manya snapped.

"Or, it may be that they just didn’t care," Gun Roh Chin suggested. "The chamber business, horrible as it was, we must put down to some aftereffects of the awakening. These are a violent people with a very mean origin; in an unthinking state, they might well be vicious. Or, it might just be that they still weren’t thinking so straight after and forgot the details. In any event, we are here, and they went that way, and I thought that we were trying to find out about them. Most Holy One, I defer to your natural tracking abilities, but should we not follow the trail?"

"I say we remain here for now!" Manya put in. "We can use the demons’ house as cover, set up an effective ambush. When the rest emerge, we can mow the devil worshipers down like grain!"

"No," Morok responded. "We don’t know how long anyone else will take to get here, or if they will get here, although I am more inclined now to think that they will. We have only sufficient food reserves for a week at best, water twice that. I am already down to an eighty-one percent charge thanks to the fighting back there. Some of you who did more firing have less. We simply cannot afford the time. Indeed, if there is no source of edible food and water ahead, we might well perish anyway, leaving only that Corithian abomination alive to go on."

"I would bet on water," the captain told him. "Probably food as well. The demons are carbon-based life, carnivores, warm-blooded, and they exist most comfortably in environments close to those we consider comfortable as well. I saw a lot of random slaughter back there but no sign of really methodical search. I’d say that this pair took little or nothing with it. Power will be a problem, although if we get to some point where we have direct and real sunlight, we’ll have a crack at at least maintenance level recharge. If they can survive, we can survive. But, I agree, time is running out, and if there is somewhere in this desolation where we can find cover and camp, we will all need some rest."

"You speak as if demons require the things of flesh and blood!" Manya rasped. "They are not creatures of our universe but of another, darker one! Now they have sacrificed for their energy and gorged on the flesh of their sacrifices for strength."

Morok raised a hand. "These demons appear more bound to our sort of limitations than one might expect. For now, I agree with the captain." He looked up at the sky. "No way to tell if this is dawn, dusk, mid-day, or midnight, but we must assume the worst. I prefer to be out of sight of this place in case it gets very dark, though. Come, let us make haste. Patrol formation, but relaxed. Krisha, you take the point; Savin, you take the rear. If any threat comes, I think it will be from our back in any event. There is no way to tell how old these markings are, but from the condition of the bodies and the amount of time it took us to receive and act on the distress call, it may well be weeks. We are going where they went, but I do not expect them just ahead of us."

Modra Stryke looked around the bleak landscape and sighed. "This has got to be the flattest, dullest piece of nothing in the entire universe."

"Aye, Limbo," Jimmy McCray responded, staring into the nothingness. "But where is our Virgil?"

"What?"

"Dante."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Dante. Ancient writer from the even more ancient home of our ancestors—yours and mine, anyway. He wrote a book once, a thousand years or so ago, give or take a century or two. Walked right into Hell he did, in that book, all the way to Satan’s throne and beyond. They still make all the good little Catholic lads read the thing, sort of as an example."

The Durquist was unimpressed. "I rather doubt that some primitive book based upon some ancient, localized religious cult has any bearing here."

"Religious cult indeed!" McCray sniffed. "That’s the trouble with all this interstellar civilization. Overrun with all you heathen, it is. The first place that primitive fellow hit when he went to Hell was a gray, dull, featureless sort of place called Limbo. Went into several languages of Old Earth as a legitimate word—a place of nothingness, neither here nor there. We are following demons, right? Against all our better instincts, and no matter how we explain them; that’s what we’re doing. Walking to Hell just like that old fellow, and look at the first place we come to! Limbo it is, if it’s anything at all. The rest of Hell is for the evil ones of the world. Limbo, though, is for the heathen and the losers."

"I should think, then, that we should be over our heads in people," the Durquist commented acidly.

"Point taken," McCray replied. "Yet I am still struck by the similarities here. If this holds up, there are nine more worlds to go, all without divine protection, each one a worse horror than the one before."

"I’m not sure I can imagine a worse horror than this nothingness," Modra commented. "It’s so—bleak."

Tris Lankur examined the ground. "Well, we’re not the first. The question is, after that maze, are we the last?"

<We’ll sure be the last and getting more and more behind if we stay around here,> Grysta commented to Jimmy.

"Shut up, Grysta," he mumbled. "I’d rather be last than sandwiched in between Mizlaplanians and Mycohlians."

<Umph! Good point. I hadn’t thought of that.>

Lankur stood and shook his head. "Can’t tell from those marks, except that we’re not first and everybody’s going the same way." He straightened, then slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees around, looking out at the horizon.

"May one ask what that was for?" the Durquist said with an amused tone.

"There’s no curvature," Lankur told him. "Even without landmarks, light acts differently as it strikes a sphere the further away you get. There is a slight deflection."

"Too small for any but the finest instruments to see," the Durquist responded, then stopped. It had become routine to think of this creature as the same Tris Lankur they’d always known, but that was a fraud, a masquerade, for whatever had been made out of Lankur’s parts. "You can see that and measure that by eye?"

The cymol nodded. "That’s not the important thing. The important fact is that this place is dead flat. Either we’re on a massive polished mesa, or on some artificial structure, or this world is in fact flat."

McCray noticed Modra give a slight shiver, and read her thoughts as a telepath could.

<Oh, God! I don’t know whether I can take this! I . . .>

He tuned out. The basic flood of thoughts surrounding the kernel were anything but logical or rational. She still blamed herself for Tris’s condition, and rightly so in McCray’s estimation, but he was glad that she was the empath. He was picking up enough of Modra’s inner turmoil from what he could read of Molly’s mind.

"She close to fall to little pieces," Molly whispered to him, and he nodded. He was still unsure just how intelligent Molly really was, since her mind worked in ways too alien and twisted for him to comprehend, but she, too, was an empath, and working the clubs had given her a practical knowledge of troubled souls.

Jimmy, too, worried about Modra as the tensions and pressures increased, and he knew the Durquist shared those concerns. Only Lankur, with the soul of a machine, seemed oblivious to the problem. Feigning emotions was not the same as having them, or, perhaps, understanding them.

<We might have to do something about her,> Grysta commented.

"Not until we have to," he responded in a low voice. "We keep our aces in the hole."

<Aw! You never let me have any fun!>

"Look who’s talking," he muttered sourly. Aloud, he said, "So, shouldn’t we get started? Who knows how long this light will last?"

"Started, yes, although cautiously," Lankur responded. "If this place is in fact flat, and without cover, then if we get close enough to see someone ahead, they’ll be able to see us as well. Suits on minimum power, stay close and on voice, and go easy on the food and very easy on the water. I’m not sure we’d like eating what these Quintara eat, even their scraps—you saw the bodies—and they might know a water source we can’t tap." He paused. "Last chance to check out of this. I’ll be willing to bet you that you can get out the exit in that place now, particularly if we’re the last ones. The odds are very good that just re-entering that entrance there would reset the thing."

<C’mon, Jimmy, let’s go and leave that cymol freak to his programming!>

Jimmy just shook his head, although she couldn’t see it. Ahead was probably a quick and ugly death; back there was the same, only real, real slow. He knew she could force him back and wasn’t doing so; possibly she knew it might be the last straw for him, but, more likely, she just wasn’t at all certain they wouldn’t be wandering around in there forever.

"I admit to being increasingly intrigued," the Durquist commented. "I still think you should return, Modra, now that it’s likely you can."

She whirled and stared at them, an angry, almost dangerous expression on her face. "I will not desert my team! We’ve been all through this! Let’s move!"

Seeing that it was impossible to convince her, even by coming right out and saying it, that their concern was less for her than for her value in a desperate situation, they set out.

Trekking through the vast nothingness was not only boring and additionally wearing for that, it left each of them alone with their thoughts and plenty of time to do nothing but brood. Normally Jimmy McCray could shut the others out, but his power was most likely their first, and perhaps only, line of defense, and that meant that he had to have most of his shields down and allow the thoughts of the others to pour in.

Not Lankur, at least, but Jimmy wondered again just what was going on in the mind of that machine in a man’s body. Molly was almost as unnerving, if only for what little seemed to be going on inside that pretty head. She didn’t even appear to be bored, or curious, or apprehensive; about the only thing he could grab onto in her mind was irritation at picking up the dark moods of the others. Unlike Modra, Molly had never learned how to shut off the empathic powers. Perhaps she wasn’t designed to do so. In any event, the depression of the others was getting to her, making her moody and irritable as well.

The Durquist’s thoughts were difficult to sift through and sort out; the internal point of view was simply. too different and too alien. Still, it was clear that the star-shaped creature was very uncomfortable, walking with its centered "face" up on four of its five points, its eyes extended and looking in more than one direction at the same time—disconcerting to a Terran in its own right—and apparently wondering if the lure of this possible demon technology was worth all this.

Modra, however, was turning internal suffering almost into a new art form. Until now she’d sort of lived in a half-fantasy, deliberately forgetting most of the time that the fellow over there wasn’t really Tris, but that was gone now. She kept reliving that night all over again, that terrible hospital experience, even her last talk with him before he’d blown his brains out, putting herself through massive pain.

Grysta sensed his own mood from all this and said, <You’re gonna have to tune ’em out, Jimmy, no matter what. They’ll drive you nuts otherwise.>

"Maybe," he replied very softly. "We’re the newcomers on this team, so maybe I’m not seeing the full picture, but it’s really odd about Stryke. She thinks of the old, dead Tris Lankur all the time, but never once about the husband she married instead of him. All this time and I never once even had a clear picture of the fellow in my mind. If she loved Tris all that much, why the hell did she marry some other bloke? She had to know he loved her, too—she’s an empath!"

<People do stupid things all the time for reasons that seem real smart when they do them. You’ve done your share, too. That’s why we’re stuck with that factory-built wooden-head over there.>

He looked over at Molly. "It’s possible I did her no favor, but I would do it again, which is more than I can say about going down once again to a certain world run by furry worms."

<If you keep talking like that, I’m not going to speak to you any more.>

"Promises, promises."

A bit farther on, Tris Lankur called another rest period. "Anybody see any differences after all this way?" he asked them.

"None. Not even the light seems to have changed," the Durquist replied.

He nodded. "Right. It’s exactly the same."

"I find the marks in the rock even more disturbing," the Durquist told him. "True, there are a number of folks ahead of us, but there are no other marks."

They all looked at the star-shaped creature. "Huh?"

"No other marks. No sign that anyone has ever been here before. No cross-trails, nothing. The marks we follow are recent, but they are also consistent. It is as if we—and the foreign teams, and even our demons—are the first to ever come across here. If these conditions are constants, it’s not as inviolate as a vacuum, but it would take centuries, perhaps millennia, to really see any changes here. The implication is that we, all of us, are the first people to ever cross this place."

"They could be walking all over somewhere else," McCray suggested. "We don’t know how big this bloody flat really is."

"I think not. If the demon structure is indeed some kind of means of interstellar travel, as it seems to be, there should have been some marks somewhere right around the thing, at least. There weren’t. It was the only reason that the very slight traces of the others on this hard rock could be seen at all. It makes no sense. Nothing about this makes any sense. Why were those two in suspension back there? And why just those two? What could all those other chambers possibly be for? Why kill everyone there and leave the door open, when it is obvious to the most primitive simpleton that others would inevitably follow? What, and where, is this place? And why?"

Tris Lankur nodded. "I keep wishing we’d looked in that lab ship. Not just for the records there, but I keep asking myself if we’d find their transmitter switched on and a recording of the distress signal."

Jimmy McCray looked up at the cymol. "What?"

"There are two teams up ahead. Clearly versions of the sort of thing we do, only as the Mizlaplan and the Mycohl have them. Have you considered what the Mizlaplanians must have risked to get here? Across at least sixty light-years of Mycohl? Or the fact that the Mycohl commander, whoever it is, put his, her, or its whole team’s neck in a noose even tighter than the Mizzies did by following it up? What are the odds of that message getting to a full team, and only a team—not a freighter, or a cruiser, or a free-lancer, or anybody else—from each of the Three Empires? We think we’re chasing all of them—you said we were sort of racing them, McCray. I just can’t shake the nasty suspicion that maybe instead we’re being led by the nose."

"By who?" McCray asked him. "These Quintara?"

"Probably, since it’s clearly their show. That one demon—when he got the cymol, for just a moment, impossibly, their minds were linked. That big one read out the data in her mind before it killed her, and, for a very brief moment, she got something from him. Something that didn’t fully scan, but it gave us their name. In that moment before she died, she got from his mind enough to understand who they were and what the hell was going on. That information, save only the one statement, wasn’t stored—or wasn’t permitted to be stored. To do that—selectively erase—without any mechanisms, without anything like an interface—means tremendous power and great intelligence."

"They could just be ensuring that they have a decent food supply trotting along after them," Jimmy suggested.

"They will choke on me," the Durquist commented. "If I have to go, that is a noble way to do so."

"The Durquist’s right," Lankur replied. "Unless they’re omnipotent, which is not the evidence, they couldn’t know just who or what would respond. Not precisely. If it was food, they wouldn’t want a Durquist, another cymol, or even a syn in their hoard, and who knows what the other two teams are composed of? I’m pretty sure that, if we were led into this, it was potluck for us. They neither wanted nor knew who would show up—but they wanted one from the Exchange and we were elected because we were the closest ship."

"Yeah, but all that wanderin’ around inside the bloody building or whatever it is . . ." McCray said. "What was that for?"

"Maybe to make sure we were the right ones," Lankur replied. "If, as we assume, there’s some kind of controller, some sort of computer or similar thing, inside that structure, it would have been left with a loose set of definitions based on what the male demon took from the cymol’s mind. When it finally decided we’d do, it let us out here. If we’d been wrong, I’m pretty sure we’d have found ourselves back outside on that world again."

"You make these violent barbarians sound like high plotters," the Durquist noted. "We’re not even certain that those horrors built that place. It might well have imprisoned them."

"In which case we’re the coppers," Jimmy added, nodding. "And the others, too. The warden’s recruited us as havin’ the best chance to catch them and make the collar."

"If so, I find that oddly less than reassuring," the Durquist noted. "Tris’s vision basically says that we have no power over them, but they have vast power over us, and they know the territory we now aimlessly wander through, with the teams having a vested interest in eliminating each other as much as these demons. It would, however, explain why they killed everyone so brutally but didn’t shut the door. They couldn’t, because they didn’t control the door."

"Stuff and nonsense!" McCray shot back. "What sort of a prison depends on only bars, as it were? The governing computer had control of the doors—we agree on that. Yet these blokes had no hesitation about walking outside, and were able to do so, then bumping off everybody including, somehow, the ship in orbit, then they walked back in to their jail and were permitted to go out the other door? I’ve had experience with a lot of alien thinking, but no warder who thought like that would have ever risen high enough to build that sort of place."

"I suppose you’re right," Tris Lankur sighed. "Still, it was a theory that almost explained it." He turned. "Modra, you’ve been—" He broke the sentence abruptly, seeing her, stretched out on the rock, out like a light.

"I suppose no matter how far behind we are, we have to get some sleep," he said at last.

"Well, if it’s any consolation, they will, too," the Durquist said. "Indeed, having been ahead of us all along, they’re probably all asleep right now. I suggest that to face them, let alone the Quintara and these riddles and enigmas, as tired as we are, is suicide anyway."

Tris Lankur sighed and nodded. "All right. I’ll take the watch. Everybody else get some sleep. Here is as good a place as any—and about the same as anyplace else."

"What about you?" McCray asked him. "You going to wake us in shifts?"

The captain paused for a moment, then said, "I only require rest, not sleep. There’s just no sense in forcing anyone who requires sleep to miss it. Go ahead. Sleep solidly as long as you need. It’ll give us an advantage over any of the others, who will have to rotate guards."

The others didn’t respond to this, another example of just how different this seemingly personable man really was. But, meditation on that fact could wait; as tired as they were, sleep came first.

Morok gazed into the distant nothingness. "I may just be very tired," he said hesitatingly, "but I would swear that there was something out there, near what might be considered the horizon in another place. Off to the right."

They all stopped and strained to see, popping in their magnifiers, and Krisha scanned it, and a couple of them did think they saw some form off in the distance, while Gun Roh Chin and Krisha saw nothing. Possibly the others saw something because they wanted to see something; still, Morok’s eyes were far better than any of theirs, and, tired and deadened by the monotony, anything he saw could not be easily dismissed.

"The trail goes straight," Savin noted. "Still, it might bend around later. You want me to check it out, Holiness?"

"Take Krisha with you. I know we’re all in, but we can’t take any risks if something might be there. Keep checking visually. If you get closer and still see nothing, do not press on but come immediately back. We have no idea if there is anyone behind us and I dislike splitting our forces, particularly with no cover, for very long."

Krisha inwardly groaned but had no choice but to obey. Although she was in excellent shape and worked at it, as an involuntary late-ordination priestess, she didn’t have the advantage the other clerics had of genetic-engineered perfection, and she knew that even they were tired.

Gun Roh Chin, who was neither a cleric nor anywhere close to physically perfect, sensed Krisha’s dilemma. "Holiness, I agree to a point, but I think Savin can handle it alone. His empathic powers can sense if anyone’s there, and, no offense, if we are set upon I’d like at least one of the military-trained people with us. We can open a channel on one suit and Savin can keep in touch by radio."

"Savin?"

"I can handle it, Holiness."

"Very well, then. Go now. Fall back to the default channel; if anyone’s trying to listen in, they could find any other channel anyway, and that is the cleanest signal."

Krisha’s eyes met the captain’s, and he could see in them the gratitude for getting her out of that.

The rest of them settled down wearily on the smooth rock "floor" of the place while Savin bounded off.

Gun Roh Chin looked in his pouch. Five cigars left. He was loath to smoke any of them now, since they might well be the last he’d ever see, but pragmatism won out. Better to enjoy one now than to die, perhaps, with its destiny unfulfilled.

"I’ll take the watch," he told them. "The rest of you try and get some sleep. I’ll awaken you in a flash if I hear anything from Savin or we have any visitors."

Morok didn’t object. "Two-hour watches, though, Captain. You select the next one up, and so on. I shouldn’t think Savin will be away more than four hours, but if he finds nothing, then we should all get some rest."

Chin got up wearily and walked about a dozen paces from the rest, then sat down again. "Savin? Radio check. The others are getting some rest."

"Check is fine," Savin reported. "Wish I could get some rest. Nothing yet, but I am really beginning to believe that something is there. It’s simply a very long ways, and distances in this place are deceiving."

"Very well. If you need to rest, do so. No use in you getting so tired you either can’t get there or can’t get back."

And that was that. He reached into the pouch, took out one of the cigars the others hated and despised so much, bit off the end, then lit the other with the old battered lighter he kept with him. He certainly was no tobacco addict, going as long as he did between cigars on the whole, but there was something about being surrounded by clerics, compelled by the strange powers of the Mizlaplanian masters to not sin themselves and resist it elsewhere, that made him want to smoke. That perversity in his nature was one of the countless reasons why he was pretty sure he’d never rise much above his present station no matter how many incarnations he might undergo.

The smoke rose almost straight up, and much of it just seemed to hang there. No breeze at all. Even the systems in his old, clunking freighter cleaned and refreshed the air. A flat world of complete nothingness. Not even the light seemed to vary. It had to be artificial, some sort of transition zone for the ancient demon transport system. All in perfect working order after how many thousands, or tens of thousands, of years? What minds they must have had, to have this command over dimensions undreamed—of and create their machines so that they never broke down or wore out!

It was difficult to reconcile such a people with the scenes of carnage back at that camp and in that chamber, or the brutishness of smashing right through a wall to murder all inside. It seemed impossible to conceive of ones like that creating and building all this.

Thanks to an intellectual father and an occupation that left him with a lot of very dull free time, he’d delved deeply into the history of his own people, both the subculture from which his direct ancestors had come and the whole of Terra’s fragmented subcultures.

He’d been quite surprised to find that the demon was in almost all of them. Not quite the same look, of course, but always evil, often cunning but vicious, and quite often with an ugly face and many times with horns just like those in the recordings they’d seen. Even when not evil, they tended to be the representatives, the angels, as it were, of the gods of darkness, death, and destruction, as if they were some ancient vestigial memory of some prehistoric common reality. The Jewish, Moslem, and Christian faiths, still practiced on many of the Terran-settled worlds of the secular Exchange, all had demons looking damned near exactly like what was on those recordings. It made him wonder if in fact all those ancient tales weren’t truths; that these demon creatures had visited and perhaps been around Old Earth in ancient times, possibly in the central area where all those faiths grew up, and earning so terrible a reputation that the tales of them, and the fear of them, spread, bent, distorted, and twisted, to much of the rest of Earth’s ancient cultures.

The demons in the faith of the Mizlaplan weren’t that much different from the ones in the recordings, either. Not in appearance or reputation. He’d been startled to learn at the Academy that many races that had nothing at all in common with Terrans, some not even bipedal, also had demon myths. Again, they were distorted, the tales filtering down through alien minds and alien points of view, but they were nonetheless recognizable. The Church, in fact, gave it as a primary proof of the existence of the Lords of Hell.

He knew the same was true for the Mycohl. There, however, the demon figure had a place of honor, representing raw power and will. He always supposed that it was because those who ruled by fear, selfishness, and brutality would naturally respect the ones who epitomized and perhaps legitimized what they were doing. Each of those ruling Lords had their own personal demon and made sacrifices to it. He’d been wondering what would happen if any of that Mycohl team actually came face to face with one of these creatures. Would they fall down and worship it, or willingly give themselves to it as sacrifices, or would they shoot and run like hell the same way he would?

One bunch emulates the demons while the other bunches make them the core of all that is bad. It was a fascinating idea, now that the existence of demons was proven true. It implied that these people had once visited many, if not most, of the worlds harboring sentient life, and had earned their reputations by deeds so vile that they came to personify evil.

And, like damned fools, we’re chasing them, he thought, shaking his head in wonder. They appeared from their pictures to be the products of a particularly nasty home world, yet, in their own way, they didn’t look any more fearsome than, say, Savin, whose own people had a very nasty history and were only brought into the fellowship of civilization by their conquest and absorption into the Mizlaplan.

There was movement out of the corner of his eye and he whirled, adrenaline pumping.

"I’m sorry," Krisha whispered, "I didn’t mean to startle you. I just couldn’t sleep. Too tired I think."

He waited until his heart was out of his throat and back down in his chest where it belonged. "That’s all right," he managed. "I just got too deeply lost in my own thoughts."

She sat down facing him and crossed her legs. "I want to thank you for getting me out of that. I’m certain I would have collapsed halfway there."

"Oh, it’s nothing. Morok, like all of us, tends to measure others by himself. It’s bad enough when we Terrans do it to one another, but it’s nearly impossible to remember the limits of other races. We seem so much alike under the different bodies, but those similarities are often superficial. We see differently, hear differently, have different physiologies and biochemistries, and we grew up on worlds whose cultures and even physical layouts are alien to ours. Morok can balance on a log no bigger around than your leg, and actually go to sleep on it without falling off once. Savin sees well into the infrared. Morok sees a nearly infinite number of levels of grayscale but has so limited color vision he couldn’t comprehend how we see things. Manya, on the other hand, instinctively avoids anything colored violet or lavender, and her whole race is very nearsighted, yet can work close up on things we can barely see. You see what I mean? How can we, any of us, really keep in mind the strengths, let alone the limits, of the other?"

She sighed. "Well, I thank you anyway. It gets—very hard, sometimes. And this place doesn’t help. With nothing to see, with no variations, your mind turns inward. I think I have relived, and brooded upon, every mistake in my life, over and over. Don’t tell me not to—it happens anyway. I spend a lot of time doing it, and this place has just made it worse."

"Can’t Morok’s power help you with it? At least it would ease your mind."

"He can’t. That would be interfering with my spiritual development. A hypno’s power is limited on a telepath in any event, because we always know it’s coming and, after, we can read in the hypno’s mind not only that it was done but what was done. No, there is no way out for me."

Back at the retreat she had sought audience with the Grand Master, the Highest of High among mortals, and had pleaded with him:

"Master, I cannot continue to live like this! The agony is too much for me to bear!"

"It is not, child, for you are bearing it, and you must live this way since you cannot live otherwise. No one can withdraw an ordination, not even the Holy One who ordained you. There is not power higher than the one which made you thus."

"Then must I live in torment eternal to death? Is there no way to end it?"

"Your pain is self induced, because you continue to fight, to resist, divine will and destiny. Only when you rejoice in being of the Chosen, when you no longer wish to be any other way—then and only then can it end."

"Tired?" the captain asked, breaking her reverie.

"Yes," she replied. Oh, gods of mercy! I am so very, very tired!

He didn’t know what else to say to her. He never did. Even suicide was no answer; it never was for a believer in reincarnation. If she went on much longer like this, her mind would snap. Restrained even in madness by the power of the One who had made her thus, her own strong personality would crumble and extinguish and she’d become someone else; a one-dimensional fanatic, most likely, an angel incarnate without even a trace of Krisha, for whom there would be no questions at all, and who would make even Manya seem the soul of reasoned discourse. They stacked the deck on people like her, making that sort of outcome almost inevitable. She’d already held out far longer than most.

The others would rejoice when it happened; they’d give her a new name and do celebrations of thanksgiving that she had been purified.

He, alone, might find it difficult not to cry.

She was asleep now, and looking so tragically beautiful.

"Savin to watch."

He flicked on his intercom. "This is Chin."

"It’s—it’s—I can hardly describe it."

"Is it another demon building?"

"Yes, but smaller, more basic than the other. The trail winds around to it. I can see some of the markings, but I’ll need equipment to tell if everyone we’ve been following has passed. It has an elaborate, ornate entrance, unlike the other, and slightly removed from the structure, so that the gate of solid stone stands before rather than as a part of the building."

"Well, don’t go in it!" the captain instructed him. "Remain there, use what’s available for cover, and get some rest. I’m going to let everyone here rest a bit more, too. I doubt if there is anyone between us and it, and there’s a good field for seeing anyone coming from the rear. We need rest before tackling any more."

"I—I agree. But I’m not too certain I want to be too near this thing."

"Why? Trouble?"

"It—it’s the gate. There are words etched in the stone!"

"Nothing you could read, surely. What do they look like?"

"That’s just it! I can read them! They’re in the Mesok tongue! My native tongue!"

Gun Roh Chin suddenly felt wide awake and a little chilled. "Wait a minute! That’s not possible!"

"I swear it by all the gods and souls of my ancestors!"

"Etched in stone? In Mesok? What’s it say?"

"The closest translation I can give you into Standard is—‘All who enter this place enter without hope.’ "

Oh, great! the captain thought, a sinking feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. There goes my own chance to sleep.