Oberheim (Voices): A Chronicle of War

Naik Shannon had never heard of Newman's world, or if he had, the memory lay buried too deeply. And at the moment, he had other things on his mind. The survivors of the Marcum-Lauries colonies, his present charge, were scattered and in disarray. His own ship was too badly damaged to lend assistance; he was running with a price on his head; and of his own forces perhaps a hundred still lived.

Shin, his second in command, had radioed that he was trying to gather sufficient escort from the remnants of the fleet to take the civilian ships to safety in Soviet Space. Where the others had turned in the wake of the dismal defeat he could not guess. His head was pounding and he felt old and though he wanted to it was hard to care. Never had he felt so helpless.

After the death of the ore-planet the Canton assault had been swift and overpowering. The Laurian wings had fought well enough, considering their numbers and outdated equipment. But they were no match for the grim machination thrown against them. He had seen almost at once how the battle would go. But while there was any chance at all.....

The red-brown planet loomed closer. It had a somewhat ominous look: the knotted lacing of deep-cut ravines, the jagged mountains, so massive their outlines were visible even from here.

THEY ALL LOOK STARK AND ALIEN AT FIRST. But this one was something peculiar, no denying. Almost it had an aura of strangeness. If he hadn't been so desperately short of oxygen he might have kept searching..... For a moment he had forgotten the Cantons.

Again he studied the star system readout on the ship's console, switched to the more detailed graphic of Centaurus III, Newman's Planet. Touching the fingerboard, he summoned all the relevant data his computer possessed. The cursor darted back and forth across the screen.

Centaurus III

diameter: 16,000 kil

gravity: .6 relative

Earth

atmos density: .4 relative Earth

CO2 72.1

O2 19.4

N 5.2

CH4 3.0

Trace .3

temp:

120 to 35F tropic

100 to 20F sub tropic

70 to -15F up mid latitude

30 to -90F polar sub pol

wind: 5 to 220 kph

humid: .15 to .02 relative

Earth

flora: positive

fauna: probable

He read the last line over, took a deep breath. There were some fears one never fully overcame.

Not that Fear stood large in his mind--seventy Earth years were enough to teach him how meaningless that word was in the end. Fear of death was not only something he had never known, but something he had never understood in others. His Cherokee blood, perhaps. He did not dread it. Now, more and more he almost welcomed death, so long as it was honorable and not cheap.

But this was pointless. He had to decide on an entry and find a place to land, and hope his breathing mask could make something of the strange planet's 'air'. Then take on as much oxygen as possible. Then. What?

GO BACK AND FIGHT THEM AGAIN. He was tired.

Simin crawled out from the heart of the stone, upwards through the long carven tunnel. Coming to a meeting of ways met a brother, touched antennae lightly--vibrations in the sky - yes brother I will come. Followed twice left and right outward toward the canyon. The way grew wider, more brothers, out into the serrated caves opening far above the valley, came to the broad ledge. As one the heads of twenty mai rose to watch the yellow flame descending. Touch--as before--moved to look out from the rim of the ledge, front legs suspended in the air. The shell was landing in a wide plain among the hills beyond the valley, at the foot of the Mountains of Teeth.

Joining.

As before - down from the sky - bright flame, shell - two legs - I do not know brother. Summon queen, others - not yet I think. But we must - brought to us - gods - no, too small - perhaps this one is different. Must act as one - yes, as one - I think it is so. Yes brothers, I will go.

*

Shannon opened the hatch and looked out, long white hair pushed back as the wind swept past his hawk nose and weathered features. His face was red as brick. Intense, steel-gray eyes looked straight ahead.

Scattered patches of some yellow-brown foliage skirted the edges of red stone that rippled up in curving waves from the dark and rocky soil. Before him lay the rock-strewn plain, beyond it long low hills. He had purposely avoided the shadowy chasm beyond. The sky was pale gold, to auburn at the edges.

There had not been enough oxygen left for him to wait long inside the ship. The air-lock stood closed behind him. It was a naked feeling as he took those first breaths, sounding loudly through the intake bars of the mask. ALL RIGHT? It didn't taste just right, but the indicator on his sleeve showed green: sufficient oxygen, negligible poison. He felt restless. He crossed over the lip of the threshold, and descended the perforated steps.

Footing immediately around the landing site was difficult, as he moved out several paces to look back at the mountains unobstructed. The rising sun had just cleared a high gap between them, and its shadow of light crept slowly down their shoulders.

He felt emotion stir inside him. Like stark and stalwart horns they rose to their impossible heights, almost vertical. Of what stone they had been forged to so withstand the wind and weathering he could not guess. Like jagged pillars that would not die. The warrior's heart within him flamed.

Feeling some presence, he turned back to face the plain. Something was moving toward him. Distance defied close description; but the shape of the body and the nature of its movements did not at first imply intelligence. But he knew better than to form such judgments. It moved openly, tactlessly toward him. He felt no fear.

But as it drew steadily on, he felt the sudden shock of recognition. This was no slow, cumbersome oddity. It was an insect, nearly five feet long. Like but unlike a huge ant--it was flatter, more heavily armored, with creased edges and corners, not unlike the rock. Crisp, tight-folded wings. He turned back toward the ship, but there was stayed by the will of whatever it was that came forward. He felt a sudden shame at his desire to run, and whirled angrily to face it, the long knife (the only weapon he carried) in his hand. With this action the creature seemed pleased: it wholly released its grip on his mind. It continued to come on.

Stopping finally some eight meters in front of him, it raised its upper body and addressed him. He saw then the bright orange-yellow ring, darkly filled, on the underside of its thorax. He heard words in his mind, somehow in his native tongue.

"I am Simin. We must fight, you and I. I cannot let you live. For this is our world, and it is not our way. But your death need not be without honor. And if you fight well, it may be of greater worth than you know."

For a moment the man stood disbelieving, incongruous. Then,

"You will have to take me first!" he cried, feeling yet again the fire that was in him.

The drone gave way before him, moving to the more level ground a short distance to one side. Shannon wondered at this, since clearly it moved among the pebble-stones effortlessly, then realized also that his knife had grown, or at least appeared to grow. Its curved blade gleamed, two feet long. The creature was trying to even the odds. But it fully meant to kill him. That he knew with equal certainty.

The two circled, then the mai advanced. The man aimed a blow at the head, but Simin rolled away beneath it. Then rose and came closer.

*

The man had fought well. SO UNLIKE THE OTHERS. That he possessed the heart of a soldier Simin had known from the first brief mind scan. But never would have guessed the size of it. For it was easy to feel the vast deserts the man had already crossed, and the final defeat showed clearly in his eyes. But still he fought on, for no other reason than that his fierce spirit refused to be broken. Paused before moving onto the fallen body.

Came forward, touched antennae to his temples, and drank deeply from the streams of Shannon's life. Then engulfed the top of the skull with massive, bowed jaws and cracked, lifted away the cranium. Slowly ate the man's brain, taking with it the remainder of his memory.

Almost at once the change began to come over him. Tingling, he backed away slowly on his hind legs. At last the miracle had come. He lifted his head to the sky, and felt the transformation taking place. The hard shell of his face softened, yielding gradually to a new shape: hawk nose, burning eyes. White hair streamed back from the auburn face, hard-edged once more. The huge protruding jaws remained. His forward body was now nearly upright, like a mantis, but with stronger, more flexible arms. His mind was keen and sharp.

He turned back to face the mountains, felt the same fierce elation. And for a time he could not move or think for the wonder of it. How had he not felt it before. For a time he could not move or think.....

At long length he turned and headed back to the place of his spawning --the Gorge. The brothers, now forty, saw him reappear atop the high precipice that loomed at the far side of the canyon. They detected some subtle change in him, though from that distance they could only descry a somewhat more elevated form. He did not come to them at once, but stood looking down upon the stepped vastness, alone, as if seeing it for the first time.

When at last he did spread his wings and fly closer they looked up at him amazed, not understanding. He landed on the ledge but remained at his distance, regarding them quietly. He addressed them, no longer needing to touch. His strange eyes shone and he did not move, as if overwhelmed from within. He spoke to their minds.

"My time has come. Summon the others."

They could not understand, but obeyed, dispersing to summon their queen, and all others that lived within the span of their own.

*

The sun tipped the horizon and dust was gathering and still the long files of mai continued to stream down. Already the central basin was nearly filled, and pushing back toward the statued spires of the west wall. The moving shapes were dark in the lengthening shadows, and all looked up at him, perched silently atop the Carrier Stone. The first circle of seven queens, not touching, seemed to understand, as did the drones behind them. All others knew only that another Outsider had been killed. Waited patiently for the joining.

As the darkness deepened and the last movement ceased, all joined and were silent. The queens approached the Stone, the giver of life, and touched it.

From out of its crumpled iron surface arose a faint hum, the remainder of its strength. All lives were now fused, and the queens sent out their messages. Joined forelegs and antennae, bent all their thought toward Simin, so that now he probed the memory not with one mind but with many. And stimulated by the Carrier, its greatness began to come forth.

Slowly the streams of Shannon's life broke free and flowed in a gentle murmur through all, paced and given substance by the queens and drones. And slowly they took shape into music, a long, rhythmic chant. Then with gathering strength as a river fed by many tributaries, rose into song that filled all the valley, and echoed in the hearts of ten thousand mai. From birth to death, the long struggles of his life were played out, rising and falling like the seasons of the wind. Again and yet again he did battle, with hope or without it. The song grew within Simin, overpowering, so stark and beautiful that he thought he must die, but knew he could not yet.

Then all again was hushed, and stiffly the drone-that-was raised himself up. A voice rose out of his soul, but it was no longer his: a pulsing, soft white glow hovered in the air above him.

"They have called me a mercenary, but it is not so. I am a warrior. For be it my virtue or be it my curse, it has never been within me to yield to aggression, or to stand aside and let violence pass. Something has always risen inside me when persecution, in any form, is at hand. In this I claim no virtue, no heroism. This only will I say: that I have ever given my strength to those unable to defend themselves, the downtrodden, the weak, oppressed by the strong. But most bitter in my malice have always been those who kill in the name of God, some higher purpose. They are to me blindness and murder personified. Thus, I do not claim it.

"In twelve wars have I fought--in half as many victories. For in time my soldiering became no longer a conscious action, but an instinctive response.

"Well do I know my folly in choosing this bitter course. But if I am to live, then it will be as a man. And if by the loneliness that is my soul I can turn aside the sword of injustice, even for a short time, then so help me God I will do it."

The words ended and the glow receded. It lived no more. Again himself, alone, Simin lowered his head, so deeply moved that the water flowed freely from his eyes. The ruling queen approached him.

"Simin-that-was. Do you take this Quest?"

"I will take it, though I fear to falter."

"You will not."

The queen stepped back, and all proclaimed him.

"Si-mai, ungol, misch-naik!" AGAINST THE EVIL THAT WAS AND IS, WE SEND

YOU. The joining was ended, and the gathering dispersed.

He had flown for many days into the growing cold. The sun was gone and the wind was rising as he searched the ground below him for a place to pass the night. It must be sheltered, not so much from the elements (though this too was important) as from the marauding bands of ground wasps that lived in these northern regions. There was still far to go and much danger ahead. He had no strength for useless battles.

At last as all light faded he came upon a towering pillar of stone in the midst of a vast wasteland, split at the top as if cloven by a giant axe. Reaching its heights, he descended slowly into its broad embrasure. Detecting some deeper shadow in the blackness of the eastern wall, he flew toward a narrow fissure in the rock. Landing silently on the lip of it, he tested the air for vibrations. All was still. He moved inside and huddled close together. He was empty and cold and weary to the point of exhaustion. He remained in quiet thought for many hours.

When he had taken the quest, he knew only that he must somehow continue the labors of Shannon's life--find some way to avenge the death of it. He had wandered alone for a period of days, remembering, until one morning, at the rising dust of a fiery dawn, he had felt the North calling to him. He felt it still, though less strongly, and he deemed that this was right. What he hoped to find there he could not say. He only knew that he must find it.

The most difficult aspect of his journey thus far had not been the long flight on short provisions. To the mai such things meant nothing. They lived to work and serve the greater need, that was all. No, it was more the feelings and emotions that the long pilgrimage evoked in him, seeming almost to rise from the vast loneliness of his world. For though the man's spirit had died or moved on, his sensations and experience had not. They lived on within Simin, and sometimes puzzled or even frightened him. He understood, and knew this was necessary; but the knowledge did not make it easier.

WHAT A TORTURED RACE THEY MUST BE, he thought. SO TORN BETWEEN DESIRE

AND FEAR. THEY ARE GIVEN NO ROLE, NO CLEAR PLACE. THEY MUST FIND IT,

AS WE MUST FIND MOISTURE IN AN ARID LAND.

It was this fear of frustration and fruitless searching that he felt most deeply, because it had for so long been a part of his own existence. Through all his twenty months he had sought after some intangible, some elusive quality of being, with no more guide than a restless and smoldering hunger inside him. TO NOT KNOW, really not know who he was or where he was going.

This, he decided, must be the doom of humanity: to be born a burning question of itself, a paradox of beauty and destruction, love and loss. To take personally and introspectively the irresolvable conflict of life and desire over stillness and the void. Again, he felt it so deeply. That the struggle could also be beautiful he knew. But still, such a hard and lonely fate.....

When dawn came he crawled out of the niche and looked about him. The great crack was shadowed and still. He felt the presence of many creatures, but they were not yet near him. The rockface offered little resistance as he climbed, and soon he stood atop a hooked spire that sprang from the pillar's crumbling eastern shoulder, high above the plain. Two long lines of wingless wasps were mounting towards him. The first of their number touched the spire. He took one last taste of the dawn, then flew out beyond their reach.

He flew staunchly and steadily northward, now that he had some plan. For the clarity of first-sun had told him what he must do. Stopping to rest along the top of a shallow ridge, he ate part of a darkening bush-bulb, nearly as large as himself. Its taste was bitter, but it gave him strength. Then he set out again.

His mind had determined to search the farthest North. Shannon's memory told him what he might find there: great frozen wastes of ice and earth, underground hollows left from times when the water had been greater. Sometimes as he pondered these, at the edge of thought he would feel a sound, a sensation: deep throbbings in empty places beneath the ground, a golden light that drew him onward. But then it would vanish and leave him, wondering. He must find its source, if it were real.

Three days more he journeyed toward it, till on the fading edge of the third the wind forced him to land. It had been gathering strength since the morning of the spire, and now carried with it a bitter and biting cold that would not rest. His strength beginning at last to fail him, he determined to go on on foot, until he found some shelter, or a reason to stop. He felt the presence of no other creature, yet still he was uneasy. He had reached the edge of the mighty tundra that formed the cap of Newman's world.

Now more and more he reached into Shannon's past, trying to find the thing that had kept him going. Genuine physical weakness, other than simple hunger, thirst and fatigue, was something he had never known, and dealing with it frustrated all the lessons he had learned as a mai. Being alien to his experience, he had assumed that it did not exist--that there was only weakness of will, and that so long as his desire held, no barrier of the flesh would ever stop him. This lesson in perspective he accepted, though grudgingly. It seemed that everything he had known in three seasons of life must be relearned, altered to fit this new reality. But his will remained undaunted.

He traveled many hours into the darkness of night, until he found a small hollow of earth and root of stone at the base of a pummeled and wind torn boulder. A thin lacing of ground-snow, carried by the wind, swirled around him and whistled in its cracks, making a melancholy sound that he felt still deeper for the lassitude of his body. Here he rested, and tried not to think, until the coming of morning.

The morning was much the same as the night, with only a patchy gray light to tell him when the day had come. He moved out of the shelter and walked, across shallow hills, rising in monotonous rhythm through a bleak and barren landscape. The earth was a dull and frozen brown, broken now and again by rock, or gnarled scrub, or nothing. The thin snow blew over all, trailing and whirling about in long wisps like the twisting hands of witches. He continued on for many hours, until the wind relented just long enough for him to exhaust himself in flight. He landed again, and found the earth covered intermittently with thin patches of ice, sometimes deepening and joining together into shrunken, unmoving streams, or withered oak leaves of many fingers.

He continued and night came again but he did not stop. He had eaten what hard and knotted brush he could find, and there was now no lack of moisture; and though it was his mind he feared, denying it had not yet become unbearable. He rested a short time, went on the next day. And the next, walking because he could not fly, into the growing cold, and thicker snow, and ice that began to dominate the ground. Until he was alone.

Time passed.

*

He had reached the farthest North. The world was ice, layered with snow. The wind blew the white softness above into dunes, sometimes foaming against islands of rock, huddled together in groups or branching straight like disjointed coral reefs, while its gusting blasts wrapped veils over all, swirling and howling in relentless defiance. The day lasted but four short hours, then all was swathed in darkness, so that the swirling sheets were blind and crashed over him like spray of drowning surf on the deck of a floundering ship. He was utterly alone.

Simin's strength was gone; he did not know what kept him going.

Perhaps because he had never known defeat..... But surely it was more.

Through the numb slowness of his near-frozen body a heart beat that

carried no blood. He was dangerously crippled by the cold.

He had passed wide cracks in the ice, chasms and fissures that he knew must lead down: sometimes he could almost see, or sense, uncovered earth or the edges of rock far below. And this was what he sought. But always the feel of them was cold. He sought an entrance, which led to a passage. He must find it soon or perish.

On the seventh day since entering the tundra, an hour after the disappearing of light, a vast abyss opened before him, wider and emptier and deeper than any he had yet come across. Like a crushed cylinder of otherworldly proportions, it yawned directly in front of him, dropping deep into the earth. His forelegs hovered trembling above the void.

This must be the passage, or he would die. He no longer trusted his judgment; it had fallen in the snow many miles behind him. It could well be madness, but he felt a presence far below, some wild hope..... No. He must find shelter. Perhaps it was there. A shelter. If he could find it. MUST CONTINUE ON. NO, HERE. IT MUST BE HERE, OR I AM DYING. SO. . .EASY TO SURRENDER. LIKE FALLING ASLEEP. LETTING GO. NO!

He turned his sinking body around, and forced it to descend: hooking and digging, scraping into ice, forelegs stretched to the limit, trying not to slip. To slip was death. Down. Down farther. A little farther. THE WIND IS LESS HERE. Here. KEEP MOVING. MUST KEEP MOVING. NO STRENGTH. . .BUT WARMTH COMING BACK. YES, WARMTH. MOVE. FARTHER.

DON'T SLIP! DON'T SLIP. An overhang. CAREFUL. MUST STRUGGLE PAST

SOMEHOW. SOME WAY. PAST. WARMTH. IT MUST BE WARMER. KEEP MOVING.

IT WILL BE WARMER, OR I AM DYING. I AM DYING. IT IS WARMER.

After the long and grueling climb, stopping many times to marshal strength, he found himself at the bottom. The cylinder had narrowed, so that now it was scarcely thirty meters broad, a sharp cleft of stone, rising sheer into ice that overtook it for perhaps a thousand meters more. He rested there, his body pulsing, spent. The cold was not as intense, and the wind was less, and the movement had warmed his limbs.

But he was weak and near dead from hunger and exhaustion. He needed sustenance badly, soon. Or it was over. He moved to a tiny pool of snow that had formed from a trickle of the torrent above, and with his trembling foreclaw worked small bits of it into his mouth. All done in pitch darkness, and very little feeling left. Then moved to examine the corners of the cleft.

The first was blocked, solid stone. He turned about. He did not know he had reached the opposite wall until he passed through it, was inside. A cave had opened blindly and taken him in, narrow and not high, but a cave nonetheless. A passage. After a time he knew instinctively that he was underground, but was far too weary for the knowledge to have much effect. He continued forward. He must find some kind of sustenance. Sustenance. He thought of his foreclaw, but remembering the man..... No. Not yet.

He wandered on, stumbling, raising himself up to go on. Plodded forward, sinking ever deeper, and onward, until the air around him suddenly grew larger. A loosened rock rolled off another, and the echo did not return for some time. He moved to his right, sensing something, and stroked the tip of his claw against the slanting surface which met it. The surface was sometimes soft and not smooth; it was not part of the stone. He tried to break off a small piece. The layer was thin, and it crumbled. He tried again, brought the wretched substance--some kind of dried blood, or excrement--to his mouth. Its taste was bile and bitter and acid. Then swallowed. Throat burning, he repeated the motion perhaps a dozen times, then collapsed, half holding, to the floor. And lay unmoving.

*

Simin woke from his delirium many hours later, somewhat stronger, but still dizzy and confused. The little nourishment he had taken lifted his mind back to awareness, strong, if subtly altered by the thick aura of the place, and by the strange and pressing reality of his quest. He rose slowly, careful not to spend the wavering hope he had found, and looked around him.

Looked around him. There was a dim light in that place, that region of vastness. And whatever the source, though all before had been darkness, it was undeniable. The light was dim and surreal, softly yellow and fallow gold, but nonetheless afforded him a glimpse of this underground world, if it did not end, which he must now traverse. For here, more than ever, he sensed a presence that was greater than his own life, if distantly, not calling him but aware of his need.

Strangeness.

He was not alone in that ribbed, spine-ceilinged enclosure. Around a far turning he caught movement, and was sure as an ebb and flow motion of body and legs rounded the inward corner that was the edge of his sight. He was still too weak to fight, or to go on, as the many legged creature approached him blindly, unaware of his presence. It drew closer, then seemed to slow in its movements, coming gradually to a halt. Descendant of the centipede, it studied him from a distance of forty meters, its poisoned forward spikes twitching with unease.

Though the centipede was longer, its bulk and his were nearly equal. He had no strength for a fight, nor did he seek one. But perhaps his quivering opponent could be daunted, backed down. Yet as he continued to watch he felt no aggression, only puzzlement, coming from the other: He was not part of its food chain, nor was its territory threatened. It was only frightened, why so strongly he could not guess. He also knew, with sudden sureness, that it was one of many. Somehow he knew. He took a step forward, and it retreated swiftly along the way it had come, moving onto the wall, perhaps instinctively, where it felt a greater measure of safety. He followed it as best he could in the half light, the flexing striped-brown body, hoping to find the source of its food.

He passed the narrowing corner at the back of the high, curving chamber and descended a long, often twisting, downward tunnel that branched off from it. The other's speed was considerable, moving through the regions of its birth, and try as he might he could not keep up. He soon found himself alone in a roughly spherical vault, not large, with five knife-slash passages opening off it.

The light here was thicker, and in a swift moment of recognition he realized the reason for it. The soft glow was neither greater nor weaker anywhere around him: it did not have a true source, nor did it cast a single shadow. He felt a slight pulsing of moisture across his face, like a fine drizzle-rain touched by the wind. The light was in the mist itself. Also, there was the sensation of his flesh lightly touching, warming against the inner edges of his armor. His senses were heightened, and he was acutely aware of his hunger.

His antennae began to twitch, almost without his knowledge, turning him to the left. He followed to a shallow rift at the lowest point of the enclosure, where he found a tiny pool of dark water, sponged by a thick and brackish black algae. He immersed his jaws and tasted. Again. He filled his mouth, and painfully swallowed wave after wave of the wet and mud sustenance.

Then he backed away and lifted himself up, feeling alive once more. He moved to hide himself behind a jagged plate of rock, and waited for his strength to return.

Simin stood before the flat porous surface of a section of a wall of stone. The pale light which illuminated it was the same as ever, perhaps a little brighter, or his eyes had dulled in growing used to it. But through the worn blankness of his mind (though a fair measure of his physical strength had returned, yet having no will to drive it) he felt a spark of emotion, almost human, that held him there with a hollow aching in the center of his chest. He stood before a fading portrait, a mark left on the uncaring stone.

At his feet lay the scattered and broken armor, all that remained, of another who had tried. This melancholy work, drawn in the creature's own browning blood and severed foreclaw, had been its death-act of remembrance, its struggle still to forge some meaning from the emptiness of its failure. It had not been mai--he knew from the broken shell and the drawing--and this more than anything else, thundered shame at his growing feelings of surrender and despair. He remained silent, head down, wrapped in rage. At length he looked up to study the creature's last act of flesh.

It was the image, subtly changed, of a winged chivit, roaming insects living to the south of the mai. The outlines of its frame, like the edges of a fisherman's net, were opened at the center of the body and joined shut at the limbs and single arching wing. Its left foreleg and right hind (it had only four digits in all) extended from the main in almost Egyptian caricature, drawn with a trembling hand. The effect of the whole was that of a shriveled and shrunken Phoenix, macabrely adorning the tomb of some lost pharaoh. Subtly changed, like himself..... But the thing that held him--one strange detail. A smoky blur emanated outward from the body, like Spirit growing out of flesh. A fearful banshee image, or dying vision of the Life After? The long journey.

Aura.

Breaking away at last he continued downward, seeking the source of the light, finding passages as best he could. He tried to read what signs there were, the faint flux of incandescence, feeling called but never sure, taking what nourishment he could, for three days more. Always the strange tingling of flesh against his armor increased, as did internal body heat. And ever as he went he came across more of the striped-brown creatures, male centipedes, some running it seemed, from what he could not guess, all fearing him, all bearing the marks of battle. Yet none were ever wounded to the point of near-death, and all appeared strong of their kind. It was a puzzle he could not dissect. Their fear held his confidence, but drawing steadily downward, he felt a growing reluctance to trespass the source of their being. It seemed to contradict all fairness that the way which led to meaning, if it did, lay through a world of savage (of this he was also quite sure), sniveling insects, who had in no way raised themselves above the animal. They were mindless and ugly, and his distaste for them would not be abated. Fatigue, too, was becoming unbearable, as the invisible force that beat back on him, assaulting both mind and body, continued to grow with the light which was its sister sun.

On the fourth day, though time meant little in that place, passing only in the world outside, he discovered the reason for his revulsion. The dull, scraping sounds of armor against stone, of multitudes locked in battle, had caught first at the edge of hearing, seeming unreal, then steadied, held, and increased as he went on. Till coming to the fissure-like opening of yet another vast cavern, he looked down on a sight that twisted his spirit like rope and squeezed hard at the knots. Some twenty meters below him, as it were through a glassless window, he saw and understood at last the riddle of these pathetic creatures.

Newly hatched--the broken, swollen webs of multiple cocoons lay many layers deep all around them--they were locked into countless battling pairs. Each separate fight was to the death, the victor sometimes stopping to eat a part of the vanquished, gaining strength, then moved on to grapple with others who had yet survived. By such attrition their numbers had already been reduced from thousands to hundreds, to what end he could not imagine.

Then he saw the females. Huge and bloated, they sat complacently on raised vantage points at the margins of the battlefield, awaiting the final conquerors. These victors he knew, from the signs he had already seen, would mate with them and then be cast out, possibly eaten, left to die as they would, the reason for their brief, wretched lives extinguished.

He watched them in dull horror, growing to intense pity and disgust. For he knew that what he sought lay beyond them, and that its power, for good or ill, had nothing to do with them, and no influence whatever, either to elevate or corrupt. They were only here, and through some flaw of intelligence, or heart, or having no choice, they lived and died in a meaningless haste of reproduction.

He must past through them. He waited as long as his patience would hold, away from the window, not watching. When he looked in again many hours later, the number of fighting pairs had been reduced to perhaps sixteen. He crawled in through the high opening, moved carefully down the back-leaning arc of wall and onto a level with the combatants, all unnoticed. A narrow wrinkle in the chamber, nearly flat at the base, ran like a sunken path before him, dividing the battle in half. Having no choice, he began to walk the shallow gauntlet, moving stiffly, always ready for a fight.

First one pair and then another released their grip as they saw him, confused. Some, already on the verge of death, lay writhing and legless, fighting still. The four queens, each from its raised pedestal, looked on in disbelief: their sacred ritual had been disturbed. Simin moved steadily forward, staring down and backing off each male as he passed. He was nearly halfway through.

Finally one of the females raised up her forward body, and began moving it back and forth like an impatient cobra. The male closest to her --it seemed to Simin the largest he had seen--broke away and came forward, moving toward the dry canal where the intruder stood waiting.

Unlike the others it showed no outward fear. It advanced without hesitation, or thought, or much of anything except the blind mating aggression of its kind. It stopped only once, looking back at the female from the lip of the sunken path, then came forward with only one impulse in its mind. Kill him.

Simin had only a short time to plan his fight. As the creature drew nearer he opened his wings instinctively and strafed the air with his foreclaws. His wings! In all the time since finding the abyss he had forgotten them, first from the weak amnesia of near-death, then from simple disuse. With no more time to marvel he moved in a quick half-circle to avoid the lumbering bulk, then flitted up behind it onto the slanting edge of the rift. These short bursts of flight he repeated several times (the thought that he could fly to safety and forget this fight never occurred to him), searching for a weakness. Though filled with a sullen rage, he knew there could be no mistakes. Rising higher, he hovered briefly above his baffled foe, then swept down onto its back, and in three quick motions of jaws and foreclaw, tore off its head and left it to die.

Still full of bitter and unused anger he landed again on the plain closest to the female, clawing the rock as if clinging to a rope, as his blurring wings drummed threateningly. Then letting go he flew directly over her, and left the sorry massacre behind.

With this action his patience expired. Landing as the far side of the chamber grew shallow, he walked on through a curving length of tunnel for some miles, until confronted by a three-directional branching of the passageway. He followed the right-hand way first, and for a short time made good progress. But then it doubled back on him and finally ended, died, into a narrowing of stone through which he could not pass. Furious, he worked his way back to the starting point, taking this time the central shaft, leading downward. The result was the same, though it took him much longer to realize. Returning again to the meeting of ways was now difficult, since in his haste he had been forced to take and re-take several turns in a compact but puzzling labyrinth, that he found in the end took him nowhere.

Coming again after many hours to the branching of paths, he tried to rest both mind and body, conceding the inevitable. His anger here was useless. It had only robbed him of strength and precious time, and he was no closer to a resolution of his bitter quest than he had ever been. And also, a peculiar yellow fear, such as he had seldom experienced in his life, was beginning to grow in him. At first he blamed himself, raging. But walking through the twisted tunnels of the labyrinth he had realized, suddenly, that it was not his fear alone. His body was still not right, if wrong in a way that was hard to define, and there could be but one explanation for it. The mist, the growing light, was affecting his altered physiology. He searched within himself, bewildered, till Shannon's memory put a name to it. RADIATION. A force that should not affect an insect, but which worked on those parts of his body that were yet human.

He rested for a time, but his rest was brief. The feelings of unease continued to grow in him; they would not be contained. The source of what he sought--he could now feel a faint throbbing in the stone around him--was a danger in itself, repulsing, even as it called to him. He must find it quickly, then be gone. For he knew that his time in those depths was limited. He gathered what courage and presence of mind he could, then pushed on, entering the left-hand passage.

He summoned now all his underground instincts, honed by the long delvings of his life among the mai. In those days, a constant stream unbroken by sleep, he had endlessly searched out tunnels untraveled or long forgotten, returning ever and again to those that went deepest, learning the mazes, delving deeper still. Though what he sought there he could not have said.

The left-hand way was subtle, as he passed onward through the narrow stone, with many turnings and side passages. He held mostly to the main shaft, learning its direction, following it on its slow, steady course downward. Many times it narrowed, till he was ready to despair. But always through perseverance and careful backtracking, he was able to find a way through.

The narrowing and tight touching of the walls began to frighten him. By this, more than any other token, he knew that the growing fear inside him was not solely his own. Far back in the journey he had realized that in taking the quest he must know, in part, what it was to be human. Perhaps the spirit of Shannon still lived more strongly than he knew. And perhaps there were others as well. Often he had thought with human voice, human words, till now it was impossible to separate the two. He had known, and been, emotions that were not his own.....

But THIS fear. Sometimes from the deeps of his mind he could hear a howling as of many tormented voices, rising out of him like a driven, heart-frozen wind.

He stopped. He himself was afraid, and he did not know why. He must master it and go on. He must master it and go on. Go on..... Resistance was thick around him, his body's weakness, till he felt that in standing still he walked against a current of water.

He hardened, and went forward. The passage began to open again, growing wider. Several more of the branching ways, through a mesh of stone, and a straight, subtly rising tunnel lay before him. Far off in the distance he heard, unmistakably, a steady throbbing, echoing like a fall of water--the deep, rapid pulsing of a heart. He pushed on, harder, though the pulsing of yellow light grew stronger, pushing back on him, darkening to gold, an airless wind urging him back.

The passage seemed endless, and still it went on, with no indication..... Ahead of him, the tunnel opened out, almost beyond the edge of sight. He continued. Farther. He had reached it: the horn's spout. Over the lip, and in.....

*

The beginnings of the chamber greeted him like an opened book, lying on its bindings, leaning downward. The rock of that flattened wedge, angling slowly away from him, was ribbed and strangely symmetrical--smooth porous gray, but bathed in a strong golden light, inexplicably tinged dark crimson where it met a rise of stone. He was only vaguely aware that beyond this antechamber the ceiling warped high and huge, above a valley that dwarfed even the place of his birth. For here, as nowhere else beneath the surface of his world there were shadows, lengthening toward him to either side of the shallow, widening staircase. And for all the desperate haste of his journey, Simin could not yet go forward. He stood looking down at the two pillared sentinels in awe, the vast spherical expanse beyond. He little thought that he himself, standing before the rim of the long tunnel he had just traversed, his upper body and underside wreathed in red, formed an equally stunning and unlikely visage of life against the Void.

Assimilation.

Two stone sentinels stood in perfect symmetry, like Roman statues, atop the angling walls that rose to either side of the stairway's end. The sunken plain lay beyond. Whether these silent watchers had been carved by Nature or intelligence it was impossible to say: perhaps meant to connote angry, reptilian merman rising out of the stone, perhaps roughly shaped bodies whose accidental carving held no meaning at all. Here all boundary between the spiritual and the meaningless faded. They stood silent, faces outward, guarding the plain below. He descended slowly until he stood between them, on the ripple of stone looking down.

The plain lay before him like a massive wrinkled dish, bone-white and barren. He breathed deeply several times, not knowing why. His objective was a clear as the tolling of a bell.

A broad crater rested in the center of all, sinking out of sight, and from it came the deep tremor of sound, the slow throbbing of light that pervaded the underground vastness with its certain and unnerving presence. Everywhere the edges of floor and ceiling glowed red, as if from heat, and the brightness of yellow gold folded over and through him like a liquid current of sun and air, warming. Simin had not the heart to remain there long; he must descend now, or turn back in defeat. This place was the very nexus of his unspoken fears.

He descended into the Valley, and almost at once the wailing of human voices erupted in his ears, rising and falling in a discordant terror of mutilated passions, scales without notes or boundaries. He moved on, oblivious, physically incapable of dealing with this fear. His weakness cried out strange horrors; his strength was confused.

He continued, not knowing what else to do. The surface of that plain was cracked and uneven--warm, and unbearably long. The cacophony of human fears climbed and fell back, rising now as if engulfed in flame, then chilled, despairing.

HUMAN FEAR. At last he understood. He felt the presence of other minds so strongly that he wondered if Shannon were truly dead, and not merely the emissary of human suffering and grief. For this, surely, was an unearthly place of His world. The high ceiling, the infinite, trackless waste. The heat. Words raced through his beleaguered body, slowing, till with a dread he would not have thought possible..... The voice of a weary, tortured old man, his spirit broken in the end--a Jew, his lungs filled with poison--formed physically, undeniable, in his ears.

"Inferno."

He stopped, as if a razor had cloven him in two. It was there before him, all around. He could not go forward, or back. He was dying. Yes, dying in that place, where the river of his dreams, fallen to a trickle, had at last died into unconquerable sand. He stood frozen in terror. To breathe was a pointless misery. There was nothing--alone--in that hollow place but death.

He knew not where he got the strength, or desperation. He lifted the first of his walking legs, moved it forward. It touched the ground, a little farther ahead. He moved the next, and then the next. He staggered forward, feeling a will such as he had never known hardening out of his weakness and despair. He was terrified, in pain. Burning with fever. But he moved.

With this action the resistance seemed to falter, the wailing of human passions to subside. But only for a moment. They redoubled their assault--the current against him was physical--but broke against his stubborn movement like a wall of water against stone. He continued. The sand of many hours flowed past him.

He was nearing the crater, now certain he would die. If only by his death he could achieve for Shannon, and for the other..... He forced a foreclaw to shackle the edge of the crater, looking down. Determined. The dry heat of that place was unbearable; and still distance defied him. A silver-white core, cruel mockery of the Carrier stone, glowed at the center of the broken-rock pit. From within came the voices, the fever, the Heat. Yet this was his only quest. He must. . .TOUCH it..... Must.

He could not walk; his legs would no longer carry him. With a weak spasm of his hind and a pathetic flutter of wings, he pushed himself over the edge and slid, rolled across stones, folding his wings just in time, to tumble down a steep slope then land, legs folded beneath him gripping hot stones, perhaps a hundred yards from all his desire.

He welcomed now its death, if only he could move. If only he could go that distance farther, against the barrage. Of distance. But he was afraid. Afraid to die. To die! At last he had met the greatest human fear: the wakened animal, knowing it would live no more.

Oh, it was too much. He steeled the fire in his heart and went on, but would have screamed if he could. Fifty yards. Forty. It was too much. Too much. The stones beneath him rasped and hissed, speaking Death's name. Downward, into the final hole of death, the murderer of all his passions. It was too much. What kind of God would ask..... Too much.

His death reached out. He touched the stone.

*

He touched the stone. Slowly the feverish weakness left him, as if a violent storm fading at the last. The human flesh, the human trial, had left him. There was only Simin, and he was one.

The Stone, which had appeared to burn white-hot, was cool, and he experienced a sense of tranquility such as he had never known. He had done it. The spirit of Shannon was at peace.

His mind was calm, his own. He remained, outstretched foreclaws touching this new life, where death had been certain. His inner being was like the quiet surface of a pool. A tiny pebble fell into it, and as the ripples smoothed outward and the settled stone touched bottom, he understood.

"It is a strange truth that the path to beauty and meaning often lies through fear and ugliness." After a time another part of his being added this. "God may exist; at times I feel him. Yet we must walk dark paths alone, and endure."

He remained there in silent thought for some time, until at length he turned and made his way back toward the tunnels, knowing now with certainty what he must do. His mind possessed new powers, because it was one with the Unnamable. His armor was many times stronger.

He knew what he must do.