BOB SHAW

The Palace of Eternity

GRAFTON BOOKS

A Division of the Collins Publishing Group



PART ONE
The Humans



1

In spite of all his efforts, Tavernor was unable to remain
indoors when it was time for the sky to catch fire.
Tension had been gnawing at his stomach for most of
the evening, and the repair job on the boat turbine
seemed to have grown progressively more difficult,
although he knew it was simply that his concentration
was failing. Finally, he laid his welding pistol down and
switched off the lights above the workbench.
Immediately there was a nervous fluttering among the
caged leatherwings at the opposite end of the long room.
The compact, bat-like creatures disliked any sudden
change in light intensity. Tavernor went to the cage and
steadied it with his 'hands, feeling the wires vibrate like
harpstrings under his fingers. He put his face close to the
cage, swallowing as the-cool air from the wingbeats caught
in his throat, and projected his thoughts towards the
squeaking, silver-eyed mammals.
Be calm, little friends. All is well. All is well. . .
The clamour within the cage ceased almost at once, and
the leatherwings returned to their perches, the mercury-
specks of their eyes shining at him in the similitude of
intelligence.
'That's better,' Tavernor whispered, aware that the
creatures' telepathic faculties had picked up the under-
currents of his own edginess.
He locked the workshop door behind him, crossed the
living room and went out of the single-storey building
into the warm October night. The year on Mnemosyne
had almost five hundred days, and there were no seasons,
but men had carried their own calendars into space.
Back on Earth's northern hemisphere, trees were being
transmuted to copper and gold - so it was October on
Mnemosyne, and a hundred other colonized worlds.
Tavernor checked the time with his watch. Less than
five minutes to go.
He took his pipe from his pocket, loaded it with moist
strands of tobacco and lit up. The ignited glowing shreds
on top writhed upwards and Taverhor pressed them down
with a work-hardened fingertip, calming himself with the
rites of patience. He leaned against the wall of the
darkened house while the smoke carried its message of
sanity away on the night air. Tavernor imagined the
fragrance reaching into nests and burrows in the surround-
ing forest, and wondered what their furry inhabitants
would make of it. They had had barely a hundred years
to get used to humanity's presence on their world, and -
with the exception of the leatherwings - had maintained
a sombre, watchful reserve.
At two minutes before zero hour Tavernor transferred
his attention to the sky. The heavens above Mnemosyne
were unlike those of any planet he had ever visited. Many
geological ages earlier two large moons had coursed
overhead, drawing closer and closer together until they
had collided. Traces of that cosmic impact could be found
all over the planet in the form of vast meteorite craters,
but the main evidence was in the sky.
A shell of lunar fragments - many of them large enough
for their irregularity of outline to be visible to the naked
eye - constantly drifted on the background of fainter
stars, forming a curtain that reached from pole to pole.
The pattern of brilliant shards never repeated itself, and
adding to the spectacle was the fact. that the screen was
dense enough for eclipses to take place on a continuous
basis. As Mnemosyne's shadow swept across the sky
groups of moonlets would pass from white right through
the colours of the spectrum, vanish into blackness, then
reappear, to run the penumbral gamut in reverse.
Against a sky like that, even a first magnitude star was
difficult to pick out, but Tavernor knew exactly where to
look. His eyes fastened on the single, wavering speck of
light that was Neilson's Star. Almost seven light years
distant, it was lost in the kaleidoscope of Mnemosyne's
night sky, but its insignificance was soon to be a thing of
the past. -
As the final seconds ticked away, the tension inside
Tavernor's guts increased until he could feel it as a hard'
bullet of apprehension. I'm indulging this thing, he told
himself. After all, the event itself took place seven years
ago. That was when Earth's Stellar Engineering Corps
(the vast egotism of the title never failed to dismay
Tavernor) had selected Neilson's Star, noting with
approval that it was of the classical type for their purpose.
A close binary, the popularized reports had stated. Princi-
pal component, in the giant sequence of the Hertzsprung-
Russell diagram; secondary component, small and dense;
planets, none. Prognosis for modific{ltion: excellent.
That was when the Corps' great butterfly ships had
come swarming on their magnetic wings, surrounding the
doomed giant, raking its surface with the spiteful stings
of their lasers, pouring in energy at gamma ray frequen-
cies until the flux reached insupportable intensities,
until. . .
Tavernor's teeth clenched on the mouthpiece of his
pipe as - with the suddenness of a room lamp being
switched on - the house, the surrounding forest, the
distant mountain ranges, the whole sky, were bathed in
hard white light. Its source was Neilson's Star, which was
now a point of searing brilliance so fierce that he had to
jerk his eyes away from it. Even at the distance of
seven light years the nova's initial fury could have pricked
through his retinas. Forgive us, he thought, please forgive
us.
The forest lay still for a disbelieving moment, as though
stunned by the nova's intangible hammer-blow, then it
erupted in protest against this supremely unnatural event.
A billion wings beat the air in a kind of diffused explosion.
The flood of light pouring down from the transformed
sky was dimmed momentarily as every creature capable
of flight projected itself into the air, wheeled, and darted
for safety. Their concerted defiance of gravity gave Tav-
ernor the fleeting sensation that it was he that was sinking;
and then the sound reached him. Screams, squawks,
whistles, whimpers, roars, clicks, hisses, combined with
the flurry of wings, clatter of dry leaves, scampering of
feet, followed by . . .
Utter silence. .
The forest watched and waited.
Tavernor found himself gripped by the ghastly stillness,
reduced to the level of one of Mnemosyne's forest crea-
tures, virtually mindless, yet he had in that moment a
sense of being aware of Life's relationship to the space-
time continuum in a way that men no longer understood.
The vast and transparent parameters of th.e eternal prob-
lem seemed to parade on the surface of the gestalt mind
of which he might suddenly have become a part. Life.
Death. Eternity. The numinous. Panspermism. Tavernor
felt a tremendous elation. Panspermism - the concept of
ubiquitous life. Justification for believing that every mind
in existence was linked to every other mind that had ever
been? If so, then novae and supernovae were only too
well understood by the quivering inhabitants of the dark
burrows and shielded nests around him. How many times
in this galaxy alone had a star gone berserk? A million
times? And in the eternity of galaxies? How many civiliza-
tions, how many incomputible billions of lives had been
blasted out of existence by the star-death? And had each
being, intelligent or otherwise, in that last withering
second, fed the same message into the panspermic all-
mind, making it available to every sentient creature that
would ever exist in the continuum's dark infinities? Look
out, little brother, whether you walk, crawl, swim, burrow
or fly - when the sky suddenly floods with light, make
your peace, make your peace. . .

Tavernor felt his elation increase - he was on the brink of
understanding something important - and then, because
the emotion was a product of his individuality, the nebu-
lous contact was lost, with an accelerating yearning slide
into normalcy., There was a moment of disappointment,
but even that vanished into something less than a
memory. He re-lit his pipe and tried to get used to the
altered appearance of his surroundings. Statements issued
by the War Bureau had said that for two weeks Neilson's
Star would become about a million times brighter than
before, but would nonetheless still be ten thousand times
less brilliant than Mnemosyne's own sun. The effect was
similar to bright moonlight on Earth, Tavernor realized.
Only the suddenness of the illumination had made it
awesome, after all- the suddenness and his knowledge of
the deadly purpose behind it.
The sound of a ground effect machine approaching
from the direction of the Centre disturbed Tavernor's
reverie. Tuning his ears to the engine note, he recognized



the smoothly expensive whine of Lissa Grenoble's per-
sonal machine even before he saw its headlights splaying
their topaz fingers through the trees. His heart began to
thud steadily and peacefully. He remained immobile until
the vehicle had almost reached the house, then became
aware that he was deliberately trying to display the
attributes she most admired in him - solidity, self-suffici-
ency, brooding, physical power. There's no fool like a
middle-aged fool, he thought, as he shouldered himself
off the wall.
He caught the handle of the passenger door and stead-
ied the machine as it sank to the ground. Lissa got out at
the far side, smiling whitely. As always, the sight of her
almost-too-rounded body and almost-too-full lips turned
his inside into a volcano which had its base somewhere in
his loins and its flame-belching apex right behind his eyes.
'Engine still sounds good,' he remarked, for want of
something better to say.
Lissa Grenoble was the daughter of Howard Grenoble,
the planetary administrator, but Tavernor had met her in
the same way that he usually met people in Mnemosyne -
through being asked to repair a machine. The planet was
virtually without metallic deposits, and no butterfly ship
could ply through its shell of lunar fragments with cargo
from Earth or any of the nearer manufacturing centres.
So even Mnemosyne's first family, which was also its
richest, preferred to pay for repeated repairs to an older
vehicle, rather than go to the fantastic expense of import-
ing a new one by way of butterfly ship, orbital station and
reaction-powered stage ship.
'Of course the engine sounds good,' Lissa replied
lightly. 'you made it better than new, didn't you?'
'You've been reading my promotion literature.' Tav-
ernor was flattered in spite of himself.

Lissa came round the vehicle, caught his arm and
leaned against him, purposefully. He kissed her once,
drinking in the incredible reality of her the way a thirsting
man gulps his first draught of water. Her tongue felt hot,
hotter than any human's ought to feel.
'Hey!' He broke away from her. 'You started early
tonight.'
'What do you mean, Mack?' Lissa pouted beautifully.
'Sparks. You've been drinking sparks.'
'Don't be silly. Do I smell of sparks1'
Tavernor sniffed doubtfully, twisting his head away as
she playfully tried to nip the end of his nose. The volatil~,
meadows-in-summer aroma of sparks was absent, but he
was not quite satisfied. He never drank the dream-liquor
himself, preferring whiskey - another reminder that Lissa
was nineteen and he was exactly thirty years older. People
no longer showed their age much, so there was no
physical barrier between them; but the years were there
in his mind just the same.
'Let's go inside,' he said. 'Away from this ghastly light.'
'Ghastly? I think it's romantic.'
Tavernor frowned. Lissa was laying it on too thick.
'Romantic. You know what it means?' He glanced up at
the intense point of light, now easily the most prominent
object in the sky, which Neilson's Star had become.
'Yes, of course. It means they're opening a high-speed
commericallane to Mnemosyne.'
'No.' Tavernor felt his tension return. 'The war's
coming this way.'
'Now you are being silly.'
Lissa tugged his arm and they went into the house.
Tavernor reached for the light switch, but she stayed his
hand, closing with him again. He responded instinctively,
then that part of his mind which never relaxed its guard



injected a niggling little idea through the emotional tur- '
moil. This, he thought, is the clumsiest attempt at a
seduction I've ever seen.
Feeling somehow like a cheat, Tavernor abstracted
himself sufficiently to be able to review his relationship
with Melissa Grenoble, from the time they had met three
months earlier until the present moment. Although the
attraction had been both instantaneous and mutual, the
friendship had been an uneasy one, mainly because of
the difference between their positions in Mnemosyne's
tightly knit social structure. Howard Grenoble's appoint-
ment was perhaps the least political of its kind in the
Federation - thanks to the planet's numerous peculiarities
- but he still carried the rank of Administrator, and his
daughter was not expected to become involved with. . .
'Just think of it, Mack,' Lissa was whispering. 'Ten
whole days on the south coast. Just the two of us.'
Tavernor tried to focus on her words. 'Your father
would love that.'
'He won't know. There's a painting expedition going
south at the same time. I told him I was going on it. Kris
Shelby's organizing the trip, and you know he's the soul
of discretion. . .'
'You mean he can be bought like a stick of gum.'
'What's that got to do with us?' There was the faintest
edge of impatience in Lissa's voice.
'Why are you doing this?' He used calculated stolidity,
trying to anger her. 'Why now?'
She hesitated, then spoke with a matter-of-factness he
found strangely disturbing. 'I want you, Mack. I want
you, and there's a limit to how long I can wait. Is that so
difficult to understand?'
Standing with her in the confined darkness, breast to
breast, thigh to thigh, Tavernor felt his detachment begin
to crumble. Why not? The blood-red thought hammered
at him. Why not? Aware of his capitulation, Lissa snaked
her arms around his neck and sighed comfortably as he
lowered his face to hers. He froze for a second and
abruptly pushed her away, filled with a sudden bleak
anger.
In the open mouth, visible only because of the room's
utter blackness, he had seen golden fireflies spinning.

'You shouldn't have stopped me switching on the lights,'
Tavernor commented a few minutes later as they drove
towards the Centre, following the glittering surface of a
forest stream.
'Mac! Are you going to tell me what's the matter?'
'You can kill the smell of sparks easily enough - the
luminescence is a little tougher.'
'I . . .'
'What's it all about, Lissa?'
'I've told you already.' Her voice was dull.
'Of course. Our beautiful ~atural relationship. But you
had to tank up on sparks first.'
'I don't see what difference my having a drink makes.'
'Lissa,' he said impatiently. 'If we can't be honest with
each other, let's not speak at all.' Listen to me, he
thought. Old Man Tavernor.
There was a long silence during which he concentrated
on keeping the fast-skimming vehicle in the centre of the
stream. The trees on each bank were limned from above
with silver from Neilson's Star, and on their undersurfaces
with gold from the machine's powerful headlights, giving
them a look of unreality. Tinsel trees lining a fairy
highway. Tavernor edged the throttle forward and the
finely tuned engine responded immediately.
Travelling at close on a hundred miles an hour, the



something to do with the blowing of Neilson's Star? So
soon?
When they reached Jamai's, Lissa went in first. Tav-
ernor followed her into the long, redly-lit room and
glanced around, concealing his caution, while Lissa
greeted a group of her friends ranged at the bar. They
glittered and tinkled like human mobiles, exuding the
joyful complacency of intellectuals out for a night on the
town. All around them, the mirrors surged and shrank.
'Darling! How nice to see you!' Kris Shelby unfolded
his tall, immaculate figure from the bar with a progressive
wave-like movement which reminded Tavernor of some-
one twitching a silk rope.
'Hello, Kris.' Lissa smiled and, still holding Tavernor's
hand, brought him into the space the group had made for
her at the bar.
'Hello, Mack.' Shelby pretended just to have spotted
Tavernor. He smiled thinly. 'And how's my jolly artisan
tonight?'
'Don't know - I never take much interest in your
playmates.' Tavernor stared blandly into the taller man's
face and had the pleasure of seeing the smile disappear.
Shelby was rich, had real graphic talent, was a leading
light in the art colony which made up so much of
Mnemosyne's permanent population. All these things, in
his own estimation; gave him a natural claim on Lissa
and he had not been fully able to conceal his irritation
when she brought Tavernor into the circle.
'What are you hinting at, Mack?' Shelby had become
majestic, pulling rank.
'Nothing,' Tavernor said seriously. 'You asked me how
your jolly artisan was, and I said I didn't know the
gentleman in question. I was suggesting that you should
ask him yourself. Perhaps if you rang your apartment

Shelby adopted a bored expression. 'You have a tend-
ency to overdo things.'
'Sorry. I didn't realize I'd touched on a sensitive area,'
Tavernor said obstinately, and a girl at the rear of the
group giggled, causing Shelby to glance coldly at her.
'I'd like a drink,' Lissa said quickly.
'Allow me.' .cShelby signalled a barman with a lacy
flourish. 'What will it be, Lissa?'
'Sparks.'
'Any special variety?'
'No - just straight relaxers.'
'I'll have Bourbon,' Tavernor put in, unasked, aware
he was allowing his dislike for Lissa's friends to push him
into a record display of churlishness. When the drink
arrived he swallowed half, set the glass on the bar and
put an elbow on each side of it. He glared at his reflection
as it flowed and distorted in one of the mirrors that
completely sheathed the walls. The mirrors were flexible
and changed their shape as solenoids behind them exerted
pressures radiated from the customers' skins, cigarettes
or drinks. On a night when business was good at Jamai's
the walls went mad, convulsing and pounding like the
chambers of a gigantic heart.
Tavernor disliked the place intensely. He leaned on
the bar, wondering what it was that Lissa thought she
had in common with Shelby and his crew of cultural
gadflies. For them, the war simply doesn't exist, he
thought - and was intrigued by the irrationality of his
emotions. He had come to Mnemosyne to forget the war
and what it had done to him, yet was angered by people
who succeeded in remainiQg untouched as the great
butterfly ships of the Federation sailed out on the ionic
winds of space. . .
He was so deep in his own thoughts that the argument
had been going on for several minutes before he became
aware of it.
A red-haired giant in the pale grey whipcords of the
Interstellar Mobile Divisions had been sullenly drinking
beer at the far end of the long bar. Tavernor had noted
the man's presence as soon as he came in, but he had
missed the arrival of a second soldier who had taken a
position at the opposite end, close to the door. The latter
was dressed in the darker greys of the Tactical Reserve.
He was as tall as the other man, but leaner, and had a
white desperate face.
'Lousy reservist,' the redhead was snarling drunkenly
as Tavernor tuned in on the argument. 'Nothing to do
but eat, drink and screw real soldiers' wives.'
The Reservist looked up from his drink. 'You again,
Mullan. How can yol,1 be in every bar I go into?'
Mullan repeated his original remark, word for word.
'Wouldn't have thought any woman would marry you,'
the Reservist commented acidly.
'Waddya say?' Mullan's deep-throated bellow brought
a sudden silence to the whole room.
The Reservist apparently had traces of imagination. 'I
said that any woman who would marry you would be safe
in a cell full of rapists.'
'Waddya say?'
'I said. . . ah, get lost.' The thinner man made a
contemptuous gesture and returned to his drink.
'Say that again.'
The Reservist rolled his eyes towards the ceiling but
said nothing. Tavernor glimpsed a white-jacketed bar-
tender disappearing into a phone booth at the other side
of the room. The redhead gave an inarticulate roar of
fury and began making his way along the bar. He did it
by putting one huge, orange-fuzzed hand on the chest of
the man next to him, hurling him backwards, and moving
on to the next. By the time he had removed four of
Jamai's clientele from his path the others had got the
idea and there was a rush to get away from the bar.
Nobody thought of objecting to the giant's impropriety.
The group centring on Lissa and Shelby moved out of
the line of action in a flurry of excitement, with a ripple
of laughter from the glittering, tinkling girls. This isn't
real, Tavernor thought, it's part of a bad movie. He
picked up his glass and was preparing to rejoin Lissa
when he caught the triumphant look in Shelby's eyes.
'That's right, Mack,' Shelby said soothingly. 'Come
over here - where it's safe.' .
Numbly, swearing inwardly, Tavernor set his glass
down again.
'Don't be silly, Mack.' Lissa's voice was taut with
alarm. 'It isn't worth it.'
'That's right, Mack - it isn't worth it.' Shelby mimicked.
'Stop it,' Lissa half-screamed.
Tavernor turned his back on them and leaned on the
bar, staring down into his whiskey, while self-recrimi-
nation raged in his brain. What's wrong with me? Why do
I allow people like Shelby to . . .
A hand like a scoop of a crane closed over his left
shoulder and dragged him backwards. He locked his
muscles, clamping himself to the smooth wood of the
counter, and the hand slipped off him. The redhead gave
an incredulous grunt and took a fresh grip on Tavernor's
shoulder. During the first contact Tavernor had sized the
big man up, judged him to be a proficient but not
especially gifted hand-to-hand combatant, and had
decided on a mode of fighting which should put him away
quickly and without any lasting damage. He allowed
himself to be pulled sideways and his right fist came
round in a blurred arc which terminated in the bulge of
flesh just below the other man's ribs. The redhead was
too big and heavy to be knocked backwards. He sank
vertically as though being lowered into the baseT1"!ent,
then the light returned to his eyes and he straightened up
again and made to grab Tavernor's throat.
Tavernor ducked under the converging hands and was
shifting his balance to deliver another blow when the
familiar, querulous whine of a stungun sounded behind
him. He had time for the startled realization that he had
been shot by the white-faced Reservist.
Then it got very dark in Jamai's.

By all the rules, Tavernor should have lost consciousness
immediately - but he had stopped stungun charges many
times in his life and his nervous system had almost learned
to sustain the brutal shock. Almost, but not quite. There
was a mindless period during which light was non-direc-
tional, siwrling over him like sound; voices, the noises of
the bar, suddenly acquired polarity, became meaningless
radial sprays of vibration.
Aeons later came a moment of sensibility. He was out
in the street, where the night breezes were seeded with
salt water, and rough hands were lifting him into a
vehicle. The interior had an evocative smell - dust, engine
oil, rope. An Army vehicle? On Mnemosyne?
'Is he all right?' The voice was that of a woman.
'He's all right. How about the money?'
'Here you are. Are you sure he isn't hurt?'
'Yeah. I'm not sure about Mullan though. You didn't
say anything about this guy being a gladiator.'
'Forget about Mullan,' the woman said. 'You're both
being well paid.'
Tavernor groaned. He had recognized Lissa's voice -
and the pain of betrayal was something that stayed with
him as he fell down the dark, echoing well of night.


2

The cell was eight foot square, windowless, and so utterly
new that Tavernor was able to find little spirals of bright,
clean metal in the corner behind the toilet facilities. It
smelled of resin and plastic, and appeared never to have
had a previous occupant.
He found the last fact vaguely disturbing - there was
no way of knowing where he was being imprisoned. This
certainly was not the cell block in either the Centre's
police building or the Federal administration complex
south of the city. Tavernor had seen both while working
on maintenance contracts, and remembered that the cells
were bigger, older and had windows. Besides, neither the
police nor the Federal men would have left him alone for
so long. His watch showed that almost five hours had
passed since he had regained consciousness to find himself
lying fully clothed on an oblong of resilient green plastic
that served as a bed.
He got to his feet and kicked the door with the flat of
his foot. The featureless white metal absorbed the blow
with a sound that suggested massive solidity. Tavernor
swore savagely and lay down again, staring into the
luminescent plane of the ceiling.
It had been Lissa's voice, all right. It had been Lissa
who had paid the Reservist to set Tavernor up and then
knock him down. The whole melodramatic scene at
Jamai's had been contrived - but for what reason? Why
should Lissa go out to his place, primed with sparks, try
to seduce him, and when that had failed manoeuvre him

into a bar where she had set a trap. Could it be a joke?
He had known Shelby's crowd go to some pretty fantastic
lengths when they thought they were on to something
funny, but surely Lissa would not have gone along with
them. Or would she? Tavernor suddenly realized there
was much he did not know about Melissa Grenoble. And
at the moment, he could not even tell whether it was
night or day. . .
His rage spilled over once again. He leaped up from
the bed and was hurling himself at the door when he saw
that a small panel had opened in it. A pair of hard grey
eyes was staring at him through the aperture.
'Open the door.' Tavernor spoke harshly to cover his
surprise. 'Let me out of here.'
The eyes regarded him unwinkingly for a moment,
then the panel snapped shut. A few seconds later the
door swung open. Beyond it were three men in the dark
green uniforms of infantrymen. One was a heavily built
sergeant with a closely shaven yet blue chin, down which
an old laser scar spilled like porridge. The other two men
were experience-looking pfcs who carried rifles with a
carelessness which did not deceive anybody. All three
looked hostile and ready for any trouble Tavernor might
care to offer.
'What the hell's going on here?' Tavernor demanded,
deliberately using inflections which would let a practised
ear know that he had once held military rank.
The sergeant's grey eyes abruptly became more stony
than ever. 'Lieutenant Klee will see you now. Move.'
Tavernor considered being awkward about it, but he
could see that the sergeant would not be impressed and,
in any case, Lieutenant Klee would probably be the best
source of information. The direction in which he was to
go was indicated by the fact that the three men had
closed off the corridor to the left. He shrugged and began
walking. The corridor continued for some fifty paces past
doorways which looked as though they led into cells
similar to the one in which he had awakened. At its
end was an elevator operated by another fully-armed
infantryman. The sergeant did not need to give any
instructions; the elevator hummed upwards for a very
short distance as soon as the doors had closed.
When the elevator had stopped moving they stepped
out into another corridor, but this one was lined with
glass-walled offices, sloping prisms of morning sunlight
broke up the continuity of distance. Uniformed clerical
workers moved busily inside their glazed cubes, and
columns of cigarette smoke shone in the air like insubstan-
tial trees. The abundance of light gave Tavernor a cold
pain in the upper part of his eyeballs, and he realized he
was still weak and shaky. He followed the sergeant to a
reception area which had a high desk flanked by more
uniformed men. Everything about the building had the
same smell and appearance of complete newness. A
glance through the entrance doors showed the pastel
geometries of The Centre curving away to the south,
following the line of the bay.
But being able to pinpoint his location did not reduce
Tavernor's bafflement - he was certain there had been no
large building in the area a day or so earlier. It would be
quite possible, on any other planet, for military engineers
to throw a sizeable structure together in a matter of hours
if the requirement was sufficiently urgent. But massive
equipment would be needed, and the only way to bring it
into Mnemosyne was an old-style reaction-carrier stage
ship, the fuel for which had been aptly described as liquid
money. Tavernor found it impossible to visualize any
development on Mnemosyne which would justify even
moderate expenditure by the Federation's armed forces.
And yet, he remembered uneasily, they had blown Neil-
son's Star. . .
Lieutenant Klee came out of an office behind the big
desk. He was a bony-shouldered youngster, with crewed
black hair so thick and so soft with washing that it looked
like fur.
'Lieutenant,' Tavernor began immediately, 'I hope
you're the one who's going to explain all this?'
Ignorning the question, Klee consulted a piece of
paper. 'You are Mack H. Tavernor?'
'Yes, but. . .'
'I've decided not to proceed against you any further.
You can go.'
'You've what?'
'I'm letting you go, Tavernor. But realize I'm doing
this only because martial law had been declared a very
short while before the incident, and there's a chance you
hadn't heard the announcement.'
'Martial law?' Tavernor's brain was numb.
'That's what I said. From now on steer clear of uni-
forms. Don't go looking for trouble.'
'Who looked for trouble?' Tavernor was depressingly
aware that he sounded like any small-time hoodlum who
had been dragged into a precinct station. 'I was minding
my own. . .'
'The soldier who disabled you says you struck the only
blow. Other witnesses confirmed this.'
'They would,' Tavernor muttered inadequately. His
head was pounding painfully now, his mouth was dry and
he felt the need for strong coffee followed by food.
'Martial law, you say? What's the reason for it?'
'We can't say.'
'You must give some reason.'

Klee's mouth twisted sardonically. 'There's a war on.
Okay?' One of the pfcs gave an appreciative chuckle and
the sergeant silenced him with a movement of his hand.
Klee looked at his piece of paper again, then raised
speculative eyes to Tavernor's face. 'Miss Grenoble will
be here at ten hundred hours to pick you up - that's in
about four minutes from now.'
'I won't be here. Tell her to . . .'
'To what?' Klee sounded interested.
'Forget it.' Tavernor walked to the door, his mind
boiling with anger and unanswered questions. His atten-
tion was caught by some indefinable strangeness in the
section of street he could see beyond the entrance. The
passers-by looked normal enough, and the traffic was
shuttling in its usual way, but the scene struck him as
being curiously unreal. There was, perhaps, a subtle
wrongne.ss in the quality of the light, as if the world was
lit by stage lamps which were not quite able to simulate
the sun. He shook his head slightly and pushed open the
door.
'Oh, Tavernor,' Klee's voice was impersonal.
Tavernor halted. 'Yes?'
'I almost forgot. Call and see our civil compensations
officer two doors along the block. He's got some money
for you.'
'Tell him to . . .' Tavernor strained his mind for some-
thing new in obscenities but had to content himself with a
disgusted wave. He left the shade of the entrance canopy
and headed downtown. Viewed from the outside, the
building he had just left was shocking in its newness. The
huge glassy cube looked as though it might have been
dropped into place in a single unit, crushing whatever
had been there before. Around its perimeter were small
groups of army engineers tidying up the rim of the
excavation, compacting the raw clay and fusing it into
banks of polished marble with squat olive-green
machines. The ozonic air was filled with a fretful crackling
of energy, and an occasional extra-loud splat as a rock
temporarily refused to yield the molecular structure it
had held for billions of years.
People on the sidewalks looked curiously at the activity,
but they kept on walking. Tavernor tried to remember
what had been on the block previously, but all he got was
a vague impression of cluttered small buildings which
might have been stores. He had noticed before that no
matter how familiar he was with a street or intersection,
as soon as he had seen its redeveloped configuration the
memories of the original immediately faded away. For all .
he-knew, he told himself illogically, this might have been
one of his favourite haunts before the army messed it up.
His resentment increased out of proportion.
At the corner he turned towards the ocean and walked
for a few minutes until he found a diner. He was dialling
coffee from a dispenser when he glimpsed his darkly
stubbled face in the machine's mirrored surface. The
bristles felt longer than he had expected, and an
unpleasant suspicion dawned in his mind.
'What day is this?' he demanded of an elderly man
sitting in the nearest booth.
'Thursday.' The man's grey eyebrows twitched and
hovered in surprise.
'Thanks.' Tavernor took his coffee to a vacant booth
and sat down. His suspicions were confirmed - he had
lost two days. A regulation stunner could be set for a low
charge which would put a man out for the space of ten
minutes, but he had been given the full blast, stretching
his synaptic gaps to within microns of permanent disable-
ment. He recalled the face of the Reservist who had shot
him and made a special slot in his memory for it. Martial
law or no martial law, he owed the Reservist something.
With the coffee warming his stomach, he decided to
postpone eating until he had reached home, cleaned
himself up and tended to the leatherwings. They would
be hungry and nervous after not seeing him for two days.
For a moment he debated phoning for a cab from the
diner, then decided it would be as quick to hail one in the
street. He went outside and - for the first time since he
had been freed - turned his gaze inland towards the
forest.
The forest was not there.
In its own way, the shock to Tavernor's nervous system
was as severe as the stungun charge had been. He stood
stock still while people brushed impatiently by him,
staring at the strangely naked horizon. The Centre skirted
the bay for a distance of eight miles, but on average it
was less than a mile wide, so the forest could always be
seen at the end of the cross-town thoroughfares. Its
multitudinous greens and muted blues clothed a five-mile
plain, and beyond that rose upwards in verdant waves
which fell back only when they had reached the bare rock
of the continental plateau. On hot days the groves of
broad-leaved gymnosperms known as tiethes released
columns of water vapour high into the sky, and at
night the flowers of the moonseekers sent a sweet heady
perfume rolling down through the quiet avenues.
But now there was nothing between the western edge
of the city and the grey ramparts of the plateau. Forget-
ting about finding a cab, Tavernor walked towards the
missing forest while the resentment that had been surging
inside him turned into a vast, aching dismay. i
This then was what had caused the odd quality of t
the daylight he had noticed earlier - its familiar green"
component, reflected from the palisades of trees, was
absent. As Tavernor began to clear The Centre's commer-
cial belt and pass between apartment blocks he saw ahead
of him an untouched expanse of parkland which looked
reassuringly normal. Civilian hovercars drifted across it
or lay like bright petals on the grass, while family groups
picnicked nearby. Feeling that he had strayed into a
dream, Tavernor kept walking and gradually reached a
Iow crest from which he was able to get a better view of
the plain.
Two separate fences spanned the plain a short distance
ahead. The nearer was very high and angled outwards at
the top to make it climb-proof; the further had flashing
red-and-white posts which meant it was electrified, or .
something worse. Beyond the fences - where the forest
should have been - was a shimmering, glass-smooth plain.
Honey-coloured, whorled with silver and pale green, it
was a frozen fairy sea, a ballroom floor created for the
revels of myth-kings.
Tavernor, who had seen such things before, sank to his
knees.
'You bastards', he whispered. 'You filthy, murderous
bastards!'



3

'Come on - get up,' the icecream man said.
Next door, in another universe, a woman sobbed in
panic. The sky began to fracture, and Mack thought of
starry fragments tumbling down into neat gardens.
'Too slow, to slow,' the ice cream man said. He reached
down with big questing hands. The fingers were dry
icicles, and they seared Mack's ribs through his pyjamas.
'I don't want a popsicle,' Mack screamed. 'I've changed
my mind.'
'Sorry, son.' The ice cream man's face flowed, and
suddenly he looked like Mack's father. He raised Mack
into the air and threw him across his shoulder. Mack's
face struck something hard, and the pain brought his eyes
fully open. It had been the barrel of his father's hunting
rifle, slung over his shoulder. Abruptly, the bed-warm
sleepiness deserted Mack. He began to feel excitement
and the first stirrings of alarm.
'I'm ready,' his mother said. She was wearing a hastily-
tied dressing gown. Her features were smudged, melting
with fear. Mack wanted to protect her, but remembered
regretfully that he had broken the string on his bow and
lost most of the arrows.
'Then run, for God's sake.' His father went down the
stairs in three bounding strides. Sensing the adult strength
Mack felt both secure and proud. The Syccans were going
to be sorry they had ever come near Masonia. His father
was a good fighter, the best rifle shot on the whole
agproj. In less than a second the door was open and they
were out in the cool night air, pounding towards the
copter parking circle. The undulating howl of a siren -
which he had been only faintly aware of in the house -
dinned into Mack's ears. Other agproj families were
running towards their own machines. The flashes and
reports of small arms splintered awareness into compart-
ments in which Mack heard shouts, screams and a peculiar
shrill whine which seemed to come from the trees to the
north of the village.
'Oave!' It was her mother's voice, but scarcely recogniz-
able. 'Over there! They're at the copters already!'
Mack felt rather than heard his father's low moan. He
found himself dropped to the ground, then he was being
dragged along faster than he could run. His father unslung
the rifle with his free hand and began firing at something.
The familiar jolting thunder of the weapon reassured
Mack - he had seen it punch holes in half-inch steel plate
- but his father began to swear bitterly between shots.
Mack became really afraid.
Ahead, close to the copters, spindle-shapes of unearthly
tallness moved in the darkness. Green flashes sped from
their limbs, and the ground heaved and shuddered. Some-
body whimpered close to Mark. In the fitful garish light
he actually saw the Syccans, and he tried to cover his
eyes. Miraculously, the copter bulked up in front of him.
He leaped for the handle of the door and caught it, but
his fingers slipped off the dewy metal. His father came
from behind him, wrenched open the door and heaved
Mack up on to the deck.
'Spin her up, son - the way I showed you.' His father's
voice was hoarse. 'You can do it.'
Mack threw himself at the control console, tumbling
switches with the flat of his hand, and the starter cartridge
exploded, spinning the turbine into life. The copter stirred
expectantly. !
'Come on, Dad!' Mack's voice faltered as he saw that'
his father was alone. 'Where's Mom? Where is she?' i
i
'1'11 be with her - that's all I can do for her now. You
get out of here!' His father turned away and walked
towards the spindle-shapes, pyjamas flapping in the down-
draft of the rotors, rifle blazing hopelessly. Mack half-
rose from his seat, but an elongated figure appeared in
the open doorway, mewing and clicking. In the dim light
of the instruments Mack saw that it seemed to be part
bone, part slime, and part exposed gut that glistened like
pale blue satin. The choking stench of it filled the cabin
instantly.
Mack had no real control over what happened next -
his instincts and reactions took over. He twisted the
throttle savagely and moved the collective pitch lever,
and the copter lurched skywards. The alien warrior fell
outwards and away.
Within a few seconds the eight-year-old Mack Tavernor
had left the battle - and his childhood - far behind.

It was almost exactly forty years later that Tavernor
revisited his home planet of Masonia.
As the sole survivor of the Syccan sneak-raid on Mason-
ian Agproj 82 he had been - although he was too young
at the time to understand it - a gift to the propaganda
arm of the War Bureau. Survivors of any raids were rare
enough, as the Syccans had no discernible object other
than to kill human beings. They made no attempt to
capture or destroy material. Even stranger was the fact
that the Federation ships-of-the-line had fallen into their
hands on a number of occasions, and had been left just as
they were found; unharmed and - more important from
the Federation's point of view - with their technical
secrets unexploited.
The Syccans, arbitrarily named after the planet on
which they had first been encountered, had psychologies
which baffled all the efforts of Earth's xenologists; but
their failure to learn anything from the butterfly ships
was perhaps the greatest mystery they posed. They were
familiar with tachyonics, the branch of science which held
a mirror to Einsteinian physics, dealing with particles
which could not go slower than light. They had mastered
the even more difficult 'tachyonic mode' - the technique
of creating microcontinuums within which a spaceship
composed of normal matter could display some of the
attributes of tachyons, and thus travel at huge multiples
of the speed of light. But - and in the early years the
Federation had scarcely been able to believe its luck -
the Syccans h(ld never taken the next logical step in
interstellar travel.
That step had been the development of the butterfly
ship, known on Earth as the Bussard interstellar ramjet.
A butterfly ship could weigh as little as a hundred tons,
and got its name from the huge magnetic fields with
which it swept up interstellar ions to be used as reaction
mass on long range flights. Spread to their full span of
several hundred miles, the magnetic wings enabled the
lightweight ship to boost itself efficiently to the speed
range above .6C at which the tachyonic mode becomes
viable. The butterfly ship was fast, economical to build
and operate, and highly manoeuvrable - yet the Syccans
continued to use vast unwieldly vessels which carried
their own reaction mass. Even with the assistance of
tachyonic physics and efficient conversion of mass to
propulsive energy, a Syccan ship could weigh over a
million tons the beginning of a flight. Lumbering through
space on a course that was virtually unalterable, because
of the fortune in kinetic energy that would be squandered,
one of these ships would consume itself section by section
until its reaction mass was exhausted - at which point it
had to be close to a fuel depot or become a useless hulk.
The war had been in its second year when Tavernor's
parents had died with their fellow colonists on Masonia. It
was then becoming apparent to COMsac, the Federation's
High Command, that - in spite of the inferiority of the
Syccan ships - disposing of the aliens was going to be a
long and costly affair. There was a problem in that the
planets suffering the Syccan attacks were on the edges of
the Federation, whereas the money and resources to
wage war were tied up in the home systems.
That was where Tavernor - an eight-year-old boy who
had seen his parents slaughtered by the aliens - came in.
His face and voice were featured on every tachyonic
communications media, in a propaganda campaign which
employed every trick the experts knew. For the purposes
of the sustained onslaught on the public mind, his escape
in the helicopter was represented as his first flight,
although his father had allowed him to handle the controls
several times previously. Later he made personal visits to
everyone of the home systems. By the time Tavernor
was fifteen his propaganda potential was exhausted, but
at that stage it did not matter - the Syccans had begun to
make deeper forays into Federation-controlled regions of
space.
Tavernor went into the army almost automatically.
During his cadetship and years as a junior officer, his
desire simply to destroy Syccans - coupled with intelli-
gence and a kind of remorseless efficiency - dominated
his personality and all his official assessments. He put in
ten years in what were known as 'maximum interpen-
etration areas', reaching the rank of major in an environ-
ment where the ability merely to stay alive demanded an
instinctive genius. Then MACRON was born.
The new computer - satellite-sized, yet as dense as
opto-electronics could make it - had been co-ordinating
the Federation's war effort for less than a week when
Tavernor was posted to Earth. He learned that assessment
files and aptitude test cards, which had lain for years in
'obscure offices on a dozen worlds, had been collated and
scanned by MACRON. They showed that Tavernor had
extraordinarily high gradings in categories such as mech-
anical aptitude, divergent cerebration (engineering), con-
vergent cerebration (engineering) and weapons theory.
MACRON had decided he would best serve the Feder-
ation in its Weapon Design and Experimental Depart-
ment, admirable though his combat record had been.
After a short adjustment course on Earth he was
shipped to the Department's Ligh Weapons (Inert Projec-
tile) Division on McArthur. During the short trip Tav-
ernor, still baffled and dislocated, had turned his mind to
the problem of what contribution he could possibly make
in a specialist field. Next morning he awoke in his
bunk, sweating and shivering at the same time. An old
nightmare had come back with renewed force. He was a
child again, running in the hellish darkness, stumbling
. and swinging as his father dragged him along with one
hand. Tall spindle-shapes moved up ahead. His father's
rifle was blasting away - but it kept missing, missing,
always missing. Save Mom, the child Tavernor was
screaming silently, don't wait for me! But his father
was swearing sadly and bitterly, and the rifle-thunder
continued, the voice of the emasculated god, impotent,
futile. . .



Tavernor lay quietly under the sheets for a long time,
his eyes fixed unmovingly on the cross-members of the
bunk above. He was in the grip of an idea, paralysed by
the sense of vaulting exultance that accompanies true
inspiration.
A year of routine drafting and machine shop experience
was behind Tavernor before he dared put his idea for-
ward. Almost to his surprise, it was received sympatheti-
cally. He had been gloomily certain, once his initial
ecstasy had worn off, that the Division would have been
too preoccupied with a thousand more advanced and
better-formulated projects than his own amateurish
musings. But a section superintendent listened to his
diffident presentation, meetings were held at various
levels, and before he knew it Tavernor found himself
promoted to section leader, with not only a superb
workshop at his disposal, but the services of a team of
specialists who were prepared to translate his first blurry
vision into functional hardware.
The hardware was a stubby and incredibly ugly weapon
which looked like a cross between a bazooka and a sub-
machine gun. It differed from guns in that only the butt,
trigger and fat outer casing were in physical contact with
the user. The remaining working parts - barrel, breech,
magazine and sights - floated in a tightly contained
magnetic field which damped out vibration. Other com-
ponents not found in a conventional rifle were a gyro
stabilization unit, and an analogue computer which ana-
lysed the frequency and intensity of vibrations imposed
on the system and modified the magnetic field accord-
ingly. The gyro stabilization was not used continuously,
but was engaged by pressing a button when a target had
been selected. As an extra facility on some models, a
digital computer and an inertial memory unit were added
to accommodate gross movements of the marksman.
Although useful in a number of applications, the refine-
ment was introduced, to some extent, as an indulgence to
Tavernor by a department which did not really appreciate
the need for a rifle with which a man could hit a target
one-handed, while running, dragging a child. . .
The weapon was officially named the Tavernor Com-
pensating Rifle - a label from which he derived a wry
satisfaction. Nobody but he understood what it compen-
sated for; and even he did not quite see how the years of
work on it eased the nagging guilt, the conviction that his
mother had died because his father had been able to save
only one. All he knew was that, for the first time in his
adult life, he could live and talk and smile like any other
human being. He could breathe without the stench of a
Syccan warrior filling his nostrils.
With the TCR Mk.1 safely into the production phase,
Tavernor turned his attention to other projects, but his
inventive spark seemed to have been quenched and now
the work bored him. He struggled against his inclinations
for a further three years, then began making applications
for transfer back to combat service. At that point, even
in wartime, it would have been possible for him to resign
- there was no scarcity of men - but he found it difficult
to imagine life outside the army.
Eventually, at the age of forty-two, Colonel Mack H.
Tavernor was returned to active duty - but not in the
maximum interpenetration areas where he had learned
his trade. He discovered, with a sense of shock, that the
Federation was engaged in more than one conflict. The
war against the Syccans had dragged on for four decades,
long enough to have become a permanent background to
political life, and the Federation's internal problems
began to re-emerge. Some systems - particularly those
well away from the human-Syccan frontier - began object-
ing to paying for a distant war. The reduced-taxes plat-
form promptly exhibited its age-old ability to sustain
political leaders of any shade, and the Federation found
itself obliged to conduct a series of costly police
operations.
Tavernor endured seeing his TCR used against humans
for four years - but the breaking point came on Masonia,
his home world. The frontier had writhed painfully across
that sector three times in all. And each time the planet
had been hit - not seriously, otherwise there would
have been no political problem left, but hard enough to
convince the population they were foolish in allowing
their world to be used as a marshalling centre for strategic
supplies. A politico-religious leader called Chambers rose
to power with the theory, absurd yet attractive to a weary
populace, that the Syccans were a scourge for nobody but
the unjust. He reinforced his brand of neo-conciliation
with well-calculated reminders that the just - in his sense
of the word - would not have to pay war taxes.
Before Earth could do anything to prevent it, Chambers
was in power and had ordered the removal of all war
material from Masonia. During the resultant police
action, a population which had broken under occasional
Syccan raids quirkishly refused to be subdued by Imperial
Earth.
Tavernor, who was elsewhere at the time, knew only
the broadest details of the affair; that the planet had
been secured by Earth with the minimum bloodshed
compatible with maximum speed. He was in the sector
when the opportunity for a week's leave arose, and seized
the opportunity to spend a few days among the scenes of
his boyhood, in the forest around Agproj 82.
The forests were still there - but in vastly different
form. They had provided good cover for Masonia's guer-
rilla fighters, and it had been necessary to turn a reducer
on to them. Tavernor spent a day walking across the
green-and-silver lakes of cellulose. Towards evening he
found an area where the flux had run clear.
And from below the amber surface a dead woman's
face looked up at him.
He knelt on the glassy surface for a holy moment,
staring down at the pale, drowned ovoid of her face. The
black swirls of her hair were frozen, preserved, eternal -
like the guilt he had deceived himself into thinking he
had shed.
That night, exercising his thirty-year option, he
resigned from the army and went looking for somewhere
to hide.


4

Tavernor walked north following the line of the fences.
As he stumbled through the tufted grass, he shielded
his eyes and tried to see past the glare from the surface of
the plain. The intense light made his headache worse, but
he was able to discern signs of activity. Far out across the
cellulose lake mirages shimmered. Behind and among
them, great buildings were being constructed. The dra-
gonfly shapes of workopters - large even at that distance
- drifted through the air, lifting entire walls into place,
and the eddies from their rotors churned into the mirages,
scattering light and colours into the sky.
By taking bearings from the larger buildings of The
Centre, Tavernor was able to calculate that the activity
was taking place roughly where his house had stood two
days earlier. Later he would find out whether it had been
reduced to disassociated polysaccharide chains and free-
flowing pectins along with the rest of the forest, or
whether it had been lifted and transported out of harm's
way. The house was unimportant - but millions of small
dumb creatures must have perished. His mind went back
to the woman he had found on Masonia, staring upwards
from her amber prison. Unfortunate, they had said, but
we warned all of Chambers' guerrillas to get out of there.
Ten minutes brought Tavernor to a wide gateway
in the fences. It was complete with all the military
paraphernalia of barriers, checkpoints and armed guards.
A newly made road leading from the plain cut straight
across the parkland and neatly aligned itself with one of
The Centre's main cross-avenues. Already a two-way flow
of wheeled and air-cushion vehicles had begun. The
sheer quantity of equipment staggered Tavernor - merely
getting it down from the translunar orbital station through
the screen of moon fragments and on to the ground
must have cost millions. Whatever was happening on
Mnemosyne, it was something big. Something that had
been planned well in advance.
He could have been right when he had guessed the war
was coming this way. The blowing of Neilson's Star was
flooding the entire region with charged particles, creating
a volume of space in which the big ships could reach
maximum velocity. The fantastically expensive operation
of destroying the star had been carried out seven years
previously, so what he was witnessing could be the
culmination of seven years' planning on the part of
COMsac. But what interest could COMsac have in Mne-
mosyne? Why should the army invade a backwater world
three hundred light years from the nearest combat area?
Tavernor reached the road and approached the
entrance.
'Hi, there.' A dapper young guard came out of the
nearest checkpoint kiosk. He was smiling patronizingly
from under the rim of his helmet. 'Looking for
something?'
'Information,' Tavernor said. 'What the hell's going on
here?'
The guard's face went blank. 'Piss off.'
'No information?'
'You heard me.'
'Then I'm coming through - my house is over there.'
Tavernor pointed out across the plain, moving forward at
the same time. The guard shrugged his rifle down into his
hand, but he did it too slowly. Tavernor caught the rifle
and twisted it, locking the sling around the other man's
wrist. The guard made to grab Tavernor with his other!
hand, but Tavernor pulled the muzzle of the rifle forward!
and downwards, gaining leverage on the arm.
'Easy,' he said quietly. 'Or do you want your elbow
converted to a universal joint?'
The guard's face turned grey. 'You'll pay for this.'
'You do it for money?' Tavernor injected a note of
wonderment into his voice, then a tide of self-disgust rose!
in him like bile. He was beginning to enjoy humiliating
men - and it was a poor substitute for slaughtering
Syccans. 'I'm a thirty-year man myself. Weapons special-
ist. And four Electrum Stars.'
The guard gave no sign of recognizing the words as a
form of apology. 'What do you want, mister?' -
Tavernor released the rifle. 'I want to talk to whoever's!
in command here.'
'Piss off,' the guard said. He swung the rifle by the
sling. Tavernor smothered the blow, but hurt his left arm f
in the process. He drove. his right shoulder up into the
guard's armpit, lifting hIm clear of the ground to go
sprawling in the dust. The guard rolled over on his side,
levelling the rifle. Tavernor could have kicked it out of
his grasp, but he stood perfectly still. Go ahead, he
thought.
'What's going on here?' A sergeant and two other men
spilled out of the kiosk into the sunlight. The sergeant's
helmet was askew, showing he had just clapped it on to
his head. He was a little old for the rank, going paunchy,
with reddish bristles growing in the cleft of his chin.
'I own a plot of land out there,' Tavernor said quickly.
'I want access to it.'
The sergeant came close. 'Are you Tanner?'
'Tavernor.'

'Well, I got news for you, Tanner. You used to own a
plot of land out there. It's been vested by the Federation's
73rd Army.'
'How about my house? Did you move it?'
'No time. Our boys reduced the lot.' The sergeant
appeared to be enjoying himself. Behind him the guard
got to his feet and pressed forward but the sergeant
waved him back. This was going to be an object lesson in
handling civilians who thought they were hard men.
'Well, how about the contents?'
'All gone. Make out an inventory and take it to the
compensations officer in our downtown building. He'll
pay you as much's the stuff was worth.'
Tavernor selected the spot where his fist was going to
land. The cleft chin was tempting, but the region of the
fourth shirt button - the one that was taking most strain
from the belly behind it - would be the most effective.
The mention of a compensations officer reminded him of
his earlier conversation with Lieutenant Klee. That was
what the lieutenant had been talking about.
'Were you there, sergeant? When they checked the
house?'
'Yeah, I was around.'
'Do you know if anybody let my leatherwings out
before the place was reduced?'
'You mean those Goddam bat-things?' The sergeant
seemed genuinely perplexed. 'If you want them you can
chip 'em out of the cellulose after the army pulls out.
They're still out there.' The other guards grinned broadly.
Tavernor's heart began a massive adrenalized pound-
ing. The leatherwings, he thought as a red haze rose
around him, had never like being caged. Three, four
times a day he had had to sit by the cages, projecting
feelings of warmthand security until the nervous move-
ments of wings sub~ded. How did one explain to the
watchful silver eyes ttlat their telepathic facility was very
rare and therefore ha4 to be studied? And how had they
reacted when soldiers~ad come near, looking on them
with revulsion, surrounded by auras of death? The
leatherwings would have sensed what was going to happen
to them, and perhaps they would have been able to
comminicate their foreknowledge to the billion other
dumb furry creatures who must have died in the
forest. . .
The single blow was nothing more than an expression
of Tavernor'S anguish - in that instant he would have
punched a stone wall had it been in front of him - but the
sergeant fell like a dead man just the same. A whistle
shrilled nearby, and other guards closed with Tavernor.
Their faces had shocked, wary expressions; but Tavernor
was engaged in only a ritual fight. Stepping over the
fallen man, he felt like a statue with solid iron limbs
impervious to the impact of fists, boots or rifle butts. He
saw and heard his flesh sustain blows, yet he felt no pain.
There was only an increasing numbness, a sense of
gathering darkness on the fringes of which faces circled
like two-dimensional masks, hostile but insignificant.
. Mack!'
The voice reached him across a gulf of yellow sunlight.
Lissa's frightened face beseeched him from the open door
of her crimson hovercar which was suddenly wallowing
and dipping beside him, its road rudder spraying dust and
pebbles as it scribed a sharp turn. Her eyes jarred him
into something approaching sanity.
He dived into a cushioned seat, the turbine screamed
and the little vehicle went bounding and jockeying across
the parkland.

Standing at the window, Tavernor was able to look across
the bay and see headland after headland receding into
the distant south. The dying sun was softening the seriate
escarpments with a red-gold light which made him think
of rich old oil paintings, and some of the larger moon
fragments were already visible in the deepening blue
vaults of the sky. Tavernor, responding to the almost
palpable sense of peace, filled his pipe and lit it. He
winced slightly at each movement of his bruised arms,
but the sane fragrance of the tobacco seemed to allay the
pain, and he smoked contentedly until the door of the big
marble-walled room opened behind him.
Lissa and her father came in. Howard Grenoble was
only ten years older than Tavernor, but apparently he
was one of the rare people on whom the nutrient shots
had little effect. His hair was theatrically streaked with
grey and the skin of his long dignified face was deeply
creased. The only feature which had retained its youth
was his mouth, which had a red-lipped, almost-womanly
mobility. With his slim height and immaculate dress he
was a perfect elder statesman, and Tavernor wondered
for an instant if Grenoble deliberately did not use the
nutrients.
Wearing a flame orange dress, Lissa looked almost
childish beside her father. Her face showed immediate
concern at seeing Tavernor on his feet instead of on the
couch where she had left him.
'Well, I managed to fix it, young man.' Grenoble's lips
pouted humorously for a second, exactly like Lissa's.
'Not without difficulty, I might add.'
'Thank you, sir.' Tavernor felt a genuine gratitude at
escaping a return to the clinical prison. 'I've given you a
lot of trouble.'
'Yes, you have.' Grenoble's eyes twinkled. 'You didn't
tell me you were a colonel in the army, young man.'
Tavernor glanced at Lissa. Her eyes wide. 'When 1
retired I retired completely.'
'Then your repair business is just a hobby?'
'More or less. I like working with machines.' Tavernor
did not mention that he had cashed in his pension and
blown the lot on a two-year interstellar binge which had
ended only when he heard the legends of Mnemosyne,
the poet's planet. He felt uncomfortably like a suitor
being quizzed by his prospective father-in-law.
'Interesting. I suppose you'll be expanding the business
some day, taking on staff?'
'I would think so,' Tavernor said compliantly.
Grenoble nodded. 'Well, I must leave you now. I've a
dinner in Federation House this evening with the new C-
in-C General Martinez. You must stay here till you find
new accommodation - my secretary's arranging for a
bedroom to be prepared.'
Tavernor tried to protest, but Grenoble vanished
through the doorway with one silencing hand raised, palm
outwards. In the ensuing quietness, Tavernor decided he
ought to have remained on the couch after all. He limped
across the room and lay down, suddenly recalling an old
lesson learned many times in the past - that rest is more
important to the weary than food, drink, love or freedom.
Lissa sat down beside him and pulled a blanket up to his
chin. Tavernor looked into the beautiful full-lipped face,
and now she no longer seemed like a little girl.
'Oh, Mack,' she whispered. 'You almost did it, after
all.'
'Did what?'
'Got yourself killed - and I took so much trouble to get
you out of the way.'

'You knew about the martial law and everything else in
advance?' Tavernor was beginning to feel drowsy.
'Yes, Dad told me.'
'That's why you asked me on that trip south.'
'Yes, but I guessed you'd go all moral on me, so I had
to arrange. . . the other method.'
'A little drastic, wasn't it?'
Lissa's grey eyes became anxious. 'I had no idea, Mack
. . . but at least you're still alive. Would you have quietly
left your home when the engineers told you to?'
'Not likely.' He felt a flicker of anger disturb his slide
into unconsciousness. 'But they wouldn't have killed me.'
'That's what you think. They killed Jiri Vejvoda.'
'What?'
'Jiri refused to leave his studio - you know he's been
working on a mural there for two years. I don't know
exactly what happened - I heard he threatened them with
an antique pistol - but he's dead. It's all so hideous.'
Lissa's eyes brimmed.
Tavernor raised himself on one elbow. 'But they can't
do that! The army just doesn't behave that way on its
own ground. There'!l be a court martial.'
'Dad says there won't. The project has ten priority
points.'
'Ten! That's the. . .'
'I know - the maximum.' Lissa spoke selfconsciously,
reciting new knowledge. 'Dad says when a project has
ten priority points anybody who holds it back even for a
minute can be shot.' She leaned downwards and laid her
face against his. Tavernor could feel the pressure of her
breasts, but suddenly he was impatient with her woman's
ability to bemoan disaster, shed tears over death, and -
at the same time - retain all her own certitudes, all the
universal preoccupations of a womb-carrier.



'Did your father tell you what the project is?'
Lissa shook her head. 'The President hasn't sent any-
thing in the diplomatic bag yet, and Dad's been so busy
arranging official functions he hasn't had a chance to
make any enquiries. Perhaps General Martinez will say
something during dinner.'
Tavernor groaned and lay back. Official functions.
Dinners. Lissa had inherited more than just a few facial
expressions from her father. Howard Grenoble was play-
ing games, calling the tachyonic communicator a diplo-
matic bag, dressing up for the part, wearing his hair grey
and addressing Tavernor as 'young man' although they
were the same generation. Lissa played similar games.
There had to be something lacking in a person if the only
way she could handle riches was by pretending poverty,
if she couldn't look beyond the marble walls of the
Administrator's residence and recognize the end of her
world.
'The war's coming this way, Lissa,' he said tiredly.
'Haven't you or your father tried to find out why? Is
Mnemosyne going to go out with a bang or a whimper?'
'Try to get some sleep,' Lissa soothed. 'You're getting
all tensed up for nothing.'
'Oh, Christ,' Tavernor said helplessly, as the room
tilted ponderously away.

Minutes later, it seemed, he was awakened by a peculiar
sensation in his feet.
Tavernor lay still for a moment after opening his eyes,
wondering if he had been dreaming. He was in a bed,
and wearing dark green pyjamas instead of his blood-
stained jacket and pants. The segment of bedroom he
could see was suffused with lemon-coloured morning

light, and he was rested. But his feet still felt strange,
immobilized by an insistent warm pressure.
He raised his body and discovered that muscles which
had throbbed with pain the previous day had stiffened
like sun-dried rawhide. Tavernor fell back then tried it
again, more cautiously, and got his head above the level
of his chest.
'Hello,' the little girl said.
'Hello.' Tavernor lowered himself back on to the
pillow. 'You must be Bethia.' Lissa rarely mentioned
Bethia, but he knew they were cousins, and that the child
had been living with Howard Grenoble ever since her
parents had died in an accident.
'How did you know?' Bethia sounded disappointed.
'Move off my feet and I'll tell you.' He waited until
Bethia had wriggled to one side, stoically enduring the
pain in his bruised legs.
'Well?'
'Lissa told me. I know all about you, Bethia. You're
Lissa's cousin, you live here, and you're three years old.'
'Three and a half,' Bethia said triumphantly. 'That
shows how much you know.'
'You're really three and a half! How could Lissa have
made such a mistake?'
'Lissa makes lots of mistakes. I fear for her.' Both the
manner of delivering the words and their content startled
Tavernor. Even the timbre of the voice was at variance
with what he would have expected from a three-year-old,
subtly but unmistakably, as the echoes in a theatre differ
from those in a cathedral. He decided to have a longer
look at Bethia and struggled into a sitting position,
grunting as further muscles were brought into play.
'You feel pain.'



'I feel pain,' Tavernor agreed, eyeing the child curi-
ously. She was thin, but with a healthy youngster's easy
uprightness and pearl-glowing skin. Large grey eyes, like
Lissa's, stared back at him from a round face which
already hinted at disturbing perfection to come. Her hair
was the colour of polished oak, set off by a simple lime
green tunic.
'Let me feel the pain.' Bethia slipped off the end of the
bed, approached Tavernor and laid minute fingers on his
left arm. Her eyes grew owlish with concern.
'Pain doesn't work that way,' Tavernor laughed. 'I can
feel it, but you can't.'
'That's what Lissa says - but she's wrong. You hurt
here, and here, and here. . .' Bethia's flitting fingers
began to move down his torso under the sheets towards
his bruised groin.
'Hey!' He caught her wrists. 'Nice little girls don't
behave that way with strange men.' Part of his mind
registered the curious fact that, although his bruises were
hidden by pyjamas, each touch of her fingertips had been
on a major pain centre.
'Well, turn it off by yourself then.' Bethia scowled at
him with childish ferocity, and flounced away from the
bed.
'Come back. Bethia.'
She turned to face him, but stayed at the opposite side
of the room. Looking at the tiny fleck of humanity -
fragile yet indomitable vessel, unperturbed by the vast-
ness of the space-time ocean it had only begun to cross -
he felt a rare longing for a child of his own. Too late for
that now, he reminded himself. Now that it's becoming
so obvious that the Syccans are coming.
Tavernor hopefully put on his best smile. 'Lissa didn't
tell me you have a temper.'

'Lissa gets everything wrong.' Bethia sniffed as loudly
as her toy-sized nose would allow.
'Would she like to hear you saying that?'
'She can't.'
'I mean, you shouldn't say it.'
'Even if it's true?'
'You shouldn't say it because it isn't true.' He felt
himself getting deeper into a hole. 'Lissa's a woman, and
you're still a child.'
Bethia's jaw dropped and her eyes bulged with accu-
sation. 'You,' she squeaked. 'You're just like everybody
else.' She vanished from the room in a blur of leggy
movement, leaving Tavernor with a crushing sense of
inadequacy.
You balled that one up, he thought ruefully, getting
out of bed. Investigation of his room revealed his own
clothes hanging in a closet. His underclothing and the
durable permacords had been cleaned and dried. Another
door led into a spacious shower room. Tavernor turned
on the hot water, tested it, eased himself out of the
pyjamas and stepped gratefully into the cone of warmth.
He had soaped himself all over before noticing that his
left arm, which had suffered most in the previous day's
ul:lpleasantness, was no longer hurting him. The black
contusions were still there, but the pain was gone, as was
the case with the ugly dark mound where a rifle butt had
connected with the left side of his chest. Taut swathes of
agony still covered the rest of his body.
'Well, I'll be damned,' he said aloud.
'Yes, you will,' Bethia's voice piped jubilantly from the
doorway. Her round face was gleeful as she peered into
the shower room, tiny frame poised for flight.
'Don't run away,' Tavernor said, determined not to



put a foot wrong this time. 'Did you do this?' He stepped
out of the shower, flexing his left arm pleasurably.
'Course I did.'
'But that's marvellous. You're a healer, Bethia,' She
looked gratified and came farther into the room. 'How
do you do it?'
'How?' Bethia looked puzzled. 'It isn't a how-thing.
You just do it. Like this.'
She approached him again, solemn-eyed. Tavernor
knelt and allowed her hands to pass all over his moisture-
beaded body, feeling no embarrassment even when the
doll-fingers briefly handled his genitals. When he stood
up again every trace of pain had vanished from his
system, and his mind was filled with a sense of communion
unlike anything he had ever known. Bethia smiled at him
and suddenly he was almost afraid of her. He dried
himself as quickly as possible, went into the bedroom and
dressed. Bethia followed him, watching with intent eyes.
'Mack?'
'So you know my name?'
'Course I do. Are you a soldier?'
'No.'
'But you were fighting.'
'If you don't mind, Bethia,' Tavernor fenced. 'I'd
rather talk about something else.'
'I don't mind. Mack?'
'Yes.' He concentrated on brushing his hair.
'Will the Syccans ever come here?'
'Never.' At least, he thought, not until you're a lot
older.
'Are you sure?'
'Bethia - they don't even know where this place is. I'm
,
sure.
'I guess that explains it.'

'Explains what?' Tavernor looked down into the lumi-
nous grey eyes with an odd sense of premonition, but
Bethia shook her head and backed away from him. Her
eyes, brilliant only a second before, had dimmed to
leaden discs. She turned and left the room, slowly, drifting
like thistledown in the morning air.
Tavernor called her, but she appeared not to hear. He
decided to learn as much as he could about the child
during breakfast. But the meal had scarcely begun when
he learned, from Lissa, the incredible reason for the
army's urgent invasion. Mnemosyne - the poets' planet-
was to become the operations and planning centre for the
war against the Syccans.



5

The tiny letters hovered in the air several feet above floor
level. Glowing ruby red and topaz, they spelled out a
simple message - JIRI VEJVODA HAS NOT DIED.
'Now to step up the scale.' Jorg Bean, who was one of
the best light sculptors in the Centre, made an adjustment
at the side of his portable projector. The solid image
suddenly magnified itself and rose higher to blaze along
the ceiling, filling Jamai's long bar with garish light. Wall
mirrors multiplied the words in every direction, stretching
and twisting the letters as the hidden solenoids executed
their random dance. The room flared with unaccustomed
brilliance.
'What do you think of it?' Bean looked anxiously
around the group.
'It's perfectly adequate, and that's all we need,' Kris
Shelby said. 'It's meant to be a message - not a work of
art.'
He spoke with a clipped forcefulness which surprised
Tavernor, who had just entered Jamai's. Tavernor settled
himself on a stool and watched the group of almost
twenty artists with some curiosity. They appeared to be
planning a protest march, and were dressed for the
occasion in businesslike permacords. His attention was
distracted by a disturbance at the bottom of the room.
Old Jamai himself - big, fat, sweating freely in a gold suit
- had made one of his rare appearances.
'The light,' he screamed. 'Turn out the light!' He
came storming along behind the counter, brushing white-
jacketed barmen out of the way.
Shelby turned to him. 'What's the trouble, monsieur?'
'Mr Shelby,' Jamai breathed. 'You're an old and valued
friend, but my customers don't want floodlighting with
their drinks. . . and I don't want any protests in my bar.'
'Bad for business, monsieur?'
'Regrettably, Mr Shelby, many of us do have to work
for a living.'
'Of course, I'm sorry - this isn't your fight.' Shelby
gave one of his characteristic lacy flourishes and Bean
switched off the projector. The chunky letters dimmed
and retreated into the machine, shrinking through spuri-
ous perspectives. At the mention of a fight Tavernor had,
given an almost involuntary snort, attracting Shelby's
attention. As soon as Jamai had retreated, grumbling,
into his mirror-hidden den Shelby turned to ~avernor. His
long aristocratic face was slightly flushed with excitement.
'Back again, Mack?'
Tavernor nodded, biting back an automatic sarcasm.
'Look, I'm sorry about the way things worked out the
other night. None of us had heard the proclamation of
martial law, and we didn't realize you were up against a
madman. .. I just want to say we all regret what
happened.'
'It was mainly my fault.' Tavernor was surprised at the
man's obvious sincerity.
'They floored me too, you know.' Shelby fingered a
bruise on his jaw and smiled ruefully.
'You! No, I didn't know.'
'Yes - I tried to make the one you slugged give me his
name and number. I never saw what hit me.'
Tavernor stared at Shelby, seeing him in a new light.
'Drink?'



'I have one over there. May I buy you a whiskey?'
'I think I'll have sparks for a change.' The news
about COMsac moving to Mnemosyne seemed to have
paralysed Tavernor's digestion, and the meal he had
eaten with Lissa was lodged high in his stomach. He felt
that sparks, with its negative calorie value, would go
down better than alcohol. Shelby signalled a bartender
who set up a slim glass of pale green liquid then added a
single drop of glucose. As the carbohydrate dispersed
through the liquor, curtains of golden sparks began to
swirl in the glass. Tavernor took a sip and felt it run ice
cold to his stomach. The dream-liquor always felt chilled
because it was greedy for heat and hydrocarbons alike,
converting them into luminescence which was then
released into the air.
'Wonderful stuff,' Shelby said. 'I'd probably be as fat
as a pig without it.'
'I prefer to work off my excess weight.'
Shelby held up one be-ringed hand. 'Must you be so
pious? I was hoping we could call off the class war for a
while.'
'Sorry.' Tavernor took another sip. 'I project old
resentments.'
'Don't we all? The thing is - what are you going to do
about this brand-new resentment we all feel?'
'Nothing. '
'Nothing! You've heard the Federation's planning to
move the war headquarters to Mnemosyne.'
'It isn't Mnemosyne to them - the army uses the official
cartographic name.'
'That's as may be, but it's the Mother of the Muses to
us.'
'To you,' Tavernor emphasized. 'I'm not an artist or a
writer. '

"But you'll join the demonstration.' Shelby's friendli-
ness was beginning to wear thin. 'Christ, man, they
destroyed your house.'
"I've already carried out a private demonstration about
that, and I've got the lumps to prove it. Take my advice,
Kris - keep your little band of marchers away from that
field.'
'It won't be such a little band - this is only one group.'
Tavernor's temper began to fray too. 'Kris! Stop play-
ing democracies. Come down into the real world, the one
where the war's going on. COMsac has decided to move
in here - I don't know why - but they've already blown a
star to do it. Are they going to rearrange this part of the
universe, then pack up and move out because you wave a
few banners at them?'
Shelby looked disdainful. 'You're going to lie down.'
'So are you, friend.' Tavernor drained his glass and set
it down. 'In hospital.'

When he had checked into a small hotel on the south
side, Tavernor suddenly realized he had very little money.
Practically every penny he owned had been tied up in his
house and workshop. He wrestled with his pride for a
moment then took a cab to the new military block. The
work of tidying up the perimeter of the building had been
completed, and over the main entrance was a sign which
simple said: 73RD ARMY.
He went in through a separate door marked 'Civilian
Compensations Officer', identified himself and within
ten minutes emerged with a draft on the First Centre
Intersystem bank for almost thirty thousand stellars.
There had been no haggling because Tavernor privately
estimated his property as twenty thousand and had been
prepared to settle for fifteen. Marvelling at the ways of
bureaucracy in a hurry, he took another cab to his own
bank, deposited the draft and withdrew a thousand in
cash. With the money buttoned into his pocket he felt a
surge of childish glee and realized the single glass of
sparks he had downed was having its effect on him.
Analysing his feelings, he discovered he felt exactly as he
had done in his cadet days, arriving back at camp after a
cross-country run through flame-coloured trees, with the
prospect of a hot shower, a meal and a free week-end.
There was not one thing in the whole wide universe
which could have depressed him. He decided he approved
of sparks after all, but the other Tavernor - the one
which always watched from a higher level of consciousness
- coldly instructed him never to touch the dream-liquor
again.
Remembering that Lissa still had no idea he was moving
out of her home, he hailed another cab and told the
driver to take him to the Administrator's Residence. The
machine hummed northwards on its single wheel for two
blocks then was forced to wait at an intersection where
there was a pile-up of traffic and a gathering crowd.
Looking past the driver's head, Tavernor saw that a slow
procession was moving west on the cross-avenue towards
the new military field. In the air above the marchers
bobbed a series of solid-image slogans. Most of the light-
sculptors had contented themselves with straightforward
messages in varying degrees of starkness, but one had
executed a realistic deathmask of the dead artist, Jiri
Vejvoda, complete with a delta of blood from one corner
of the mouth. The glowing head, twenty feet across and
rendered slightly translucent by the afternoon sun, made
drunken balloon-like swoops, magnifying the movements
of its hand-held projector.
'Look at that,' the cab-driver said disgustedly. 'Don't
those guys think about women out shopping with their
kids? What's a kid going to make of a thing like that?'
'Couldn't say.' Tavernor still felt serene.
'Would you like your kids to see it?'
'I guess not.'
'There you are then - but those guys don't think of
that. They get in the way of the war effort, then they
squeal if one of them gets hurt. Lousy artists!' The
cabby's fluted neck began to turn red with anger. 'I hope
our boys give them a hot reception at the field.'
Our boys, Tavernor repeated to himself in surprise,
then remembered Jamai's inordinately violent reaction
earlier in the day. He conceived what, to his sparks-filled
brain, seemed a shrewd idea.
'How's business been in the last day or two?' he asked.
'Pretty good?'
'Great. These soldier boys throw money around like it
was. . .' The cabby turned to face Tavernor, and his
face darkened with suspicion. 'What are you getting at,
mister?'
'Nothing,' Tavernor assured him. 'Why don't you just
drive the cab?'
He was interested in the discovery that, although he
regarded himself as a 'practical' man with no interest in
any branch of the arts, he identified Mnemosyne solely
with its colony of artists, writers, poets, musicians and
sculptors. The legends that could be heard on a hundred
worlds, provided one listened in the right places, called it
the Poets' Planet. Almost by accident, Tavernor had
listened in some of the right places during his two-year
Federation-wide drunk. His first clear memory of hearing
Mnemosyne's name was in a flat city on Parador, which
was also the first place he had ever tried viewing a
cortstim 'painting'. The moulded pillow, feeding light and
colour patterns straight through the visual cortex, had
produced an indistinct image of Mnemosyne's prismatic
night sky; and keyed to the visual impulses was a couplet
from Shelley's 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty':

'Sudden the shadow fell on me;
I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy.'

The artist, an iron-grey woman with one milky eye, had
explained her vision while they killed a bottle of off-
world Bourbon. . . an immortal work of art for every
moon-shard in the fragmented sky. . . the last redoubt
from which the beacon of Man's genius threw aureate
rays across a darkening galaxy. . . a world which basked
in inspiration's long, long summer. . . Seeing the insu-
portable yearning in the woman's unspoiled eye, Tavernor
had impulsively offered to pay her ticket to Mnemosyne.
She had walked away from him without a word, as though
she had been struck, and it was not until long afte!wards
he realized she had been afraid of finding she had nothing
to offer, that Mnemosyne's crucible would reduce her
soul-diamonds to worthless dust.
But others had made the pilgrimage, to lose themselves
on a world which was doomed to remain an obscure
backwater because the butterfly ships, the pollen-carriers
of the Federation's commerce, could not alight there.
Yet distance, and the growing spindle-shadow of the
Syccan warrior, had failed to obliterate the names of
many of these pilgrims. The home systems had heard of
them again and again across the light years. Even Tav-
ernor had known the names of Stamfli and Hungerford,
the poets; Delgado, who single-handed had conceived
and pioneered light sculpture; Gaynor, whose furniture
was the ultimate synthesis of art and function; and many
more. It was in the footsteps of these men that he -.for
reasons he could not understand, but only feel - had
imagined himself walking when he drifted towards Mne-
mosyne. And in a way he had scarcely acknowledged the
fact that the planet had its politics, its business sections,
its light industries, and people who were happy to see an
army breach the moon-shell as long as it meant extra
cash for their pockets. . .
'Here we go at last,' the cabby called over his shoulder.
'Next time I see those bums in front of me I keep right
on motoring.'

The youngest-looking and most immaculate lieutenant-
colonel Tavernor had ever seen was stepping down from
a military transport when the cab reached the Adminis-
trator's Residence. While Tavernor was paying the cabby
the young officer gave his army driver instructions to
wait, then walked slowly up the broad steps, tilting his
head back to examine the building's green-and-white
marble fa~ade like a prospective buyer. At the top of the
steps he turned and scanned the view, nodding his
approval of the terraced lawns and the blue-shimmering
waters of the bay. He was tall and lean, with Latin good
looks that somehow were accentuated by the premature
thinning of his black hair. Something in his face, perhaps
a fraction too much white glowing around the brown
eyes, gave Tavernor the impression that here was a
volatile, unstable and perhaps dangerous man. There was
also something familiar about the face.
Suddenly conscious of the fact that he should have
bought new clothes to replace his well-worn permacords,
Tavernor mounted the steps and was surprised to find his
way blocked by the lustrous grey uniform.
'Are you sure,' the officer said, 'that you've come to
the right entrance?'
'Quite sure, thank you.' Tavernor sidestepped, remem-
bering his resolve to behave in a more adult manner in
encounters with strangers.
'Not so fast.' The officer moved sideways, still blocking
the way. His white-rimmed eyes were intent, angry.
'Listen, sonny,' Tavernor said evenly. 'You're disgrac-
ing that nice doorman's uniform you've got on.' He made
another effort to get by, the the officer grabbed his arm
with such snakelike force that it was almost a blow.
Anxious to avoid an outright scuffle on the steps of the
Grenoble house, Tavernor bent his arm - compressing
the restraining fingers between bicep and forearm - and
exerted pressure. He saw the officer's face turn pale with
pain or anger, or both. The two men had been locked
together for several arctic seconds when the main doors
swung open beside them and Howard Grenoble emerged
into the daylight, followed by a group of secretaries and
civil servants. Tavernor released his hold.
'How good to see you again, Gervaise!' Grenoble
spoke quickly, holding out his hand.
'It's a pleasure to see you again, sir,' the officer said,
turning back to Tavernor with a purposeful look. 'But
before. . .'
'Allow me to introduce you two,' Grenoble interrupted.
'Lieutenant-Colonel Gervaise Farrell - Colonel Mack
Tavernor. Mack is a friend of my daughter's, and he's
staying with us for a few days.' If Grenoble was embar-
rassed by Tavernor's presence or by what he might have
seen, he gave no sign.
Farrell was unable to conceal his surprise. His eyes
traversed Tavernor's highly unmilitary dress before he
spoke. 'I'm sorry if I . . .'

'I'm no longer a colonel,' Tavernor put in. 'I retired
from the army several years ago.'
'That's right. Mack has an engineering concern right
here in The Centre.' Grenoble smiled pleasantly, with a
quizzical twist of his brows which Tavernor read as
meaning. 'I can't very well introduce you as a handyman.'
Giving a barely perceptible nod to show he understood,
Tavernor excused himself and slipped by the group. As
he was crossing the reception hall towards the stair
which led to the private suite, he heard Grenoble began
speaking to Farrell with a marked degree of warmth.
'Well now, Gervaise, how has your uncle been since I
saw him last? It seems a lifetime since we . . .'
Tavernor passed through the doorway and was halfway
up the stairs when his laggard memory, triggered by
Grenoble's use of the world uncle, supplied Farrell's
identity. Tavernor faltered in mid-stride. The impossibly
young colonel he had come so closely to tossing down the
steps was a nephew of Berkeley H. Gough, Supreme
President of the Federation. Tavernor had seen his picture
in army magazines and occasional newscasts, but had
never paid much attention, his own childhood having
given him an aversion to anything bearing the taint
of propaganda. Farrell's background helped explain his
almost possessive attitude towards the Administrator's
Residence; although it was special personal qualities
which had led him, on the instant of arrival, to start
throwing his weight around. And none of those qualities
appealed to Tavernor.
He found Lissa on the wide verandah which overlooked
the turquoise waters of the pool. She was leaning over
the tripod of a large-screen electronic telescope, setting it
up to face south-west towards the painfully bright silver
lake of the new military field, visible through a stand of
native trees. He allowed his eyes to gorge themselves for
a moment on the unintentional voluptuousness of the
pose, the black hair, brown skin glowing in the afternoon
sunlight and contrasting with the throbbing whiteness of
a simple dress.
'Guess what I almost did,' he said.
'Oh, Mack!' She looked up, startled, and smiled.
Against the tan of her face her teeth seemed to fluoresce.
Tavernor felt the familiar stirring at the core of his being
and suppressed it, concentrating on making his forty-
nine-year-old mouth form words for her nineteen-year-
old ears. He described the incident on the steps.
'Gervaise Farrell,' she said. 'I don't think I ever met
him, unless it was so long ago I've forgotten. Dad wants
him to stay here.'
'Here?' Tavernor was annoyed by the intensity of the
pang of jealousy which struck through him. 'Is that
necessary?'
'Necessary? No, but it seems a good idea.' Lissa spoke
carelessly, as she adjusted the tripod, and he wondered if
she had sensed his jealousy and was making him pay for
his steadfast refusal to accept the great gift. After several
months, he knew enough about Lissa to suspect that the
higher his motives for not bedding her, the greater her
resentment was likely to be. He studied her face as he
announced he had found another place to stay and was
moving out.
'I talked to Kris on the phone this morning,' she said,
apparently unaware he had been speaking. 'I asked him
not to go ahead with his protest march, but he wouldn't
listen.'
'Does it matter all that much?'
Lissa looked at him with her father's troubled eyes. 'It

changes everything. Dad represents the Supreme Presi-
dent on Cerulea.' It was the first time he had heard her
refer to Mnemosyne by its official cartographical name.
'So?'
'So, I'd never betray him by becoming identified with
an anti-Federation movement. It's strange, Mack - I'd
have guessed that you'd have made a more dedicated
protester than Kris.'
'I've been dedicated to a number of propositions in my
time, but never one so demonstrably untrue as "liri
Vejvoda has not died".'
'It isn't funny.' Lissa turned back to the electronic
telescope and activated its screen. The foliage of distant
trees blossomed on the glass, magnified, rippling silver in
the faint breezes.
'I'd like to say goodbye to Bethia.' Tavernor felt he
had been snubbed.
'She's having her afternoon nap. Look into her
bedroom.'
'Right.' Wounded by the indifference in Lissa's voice,
he left the verandah and wandered through the hushed
shafts of sunlight until he had found Bethia's room. It
was large and styled exactly as the other rooms, with no
nursery furniture or sign of toys. Her tiny figure lay
straight and motionless in the centre of the bed, composed
and self-possessed, yet lonely. Again he felt the urge to
own the child. He went into the polarized dimness and
stood beside the bed, staring down at the flushed,
defenceless face, trying to reconcile its childish normalcy
with the aura of strangeness, precociousness and the
healing touch of a Biblical saint. Bethia's eyes were
closed, but suddenly he had a distinct impression she
was not asleep. He whispered her name. There was no
response, and he backed away from the bed with an
uncanny sense of having been guilty of some vast
sacrilege.
Returning to the verandah, he heard Lissa's voice in
conversation, punctuated by unfamiliar male laughter.
He went out through the curtains of sunlight and found
Gervaise Farrell standing at the telescope close to Lissa.
'Here he comes now,' Farrell exclaimed enthusiasti-
cally. His dark features were transformed with excite-
ment. 'Where've you been, Mack? Howard has just
introduced me to his beautiful daughter, and I've been
telling her how I nearly threw you out of the house.'
Tavernor blinked. 'That's odd - I've been telling her
how I nearly threw you out.'
'Beautiful!' Farrelllaughed delightedly, as though Tav-
ernor had said something priceless, and all the while his
gaze roved over Lissa's face, inviting her to join with
him. Tavernor was surprised when Lissa did respond,
with a brittle peal of amusement, but he was even more
intrigued by Farrell's performance, so much at variance
with the obstinate stony dislike he had seen in the man's
eyes after Grenoble had intervened on the steps.
'I've been saying goodbye,' Tavernor said. He looked
at Lissa. 'Thanks for the hospitality. Perhaps. . .'
'But this is ridiculous,' Farrell interrupted. 'I feel as
though you were being forced out by my moving in.'
'Set your mind completely at rest on that score,' Tav-
ernor replied.
'There he goes again.' Farrell's eyes beaconed their
jubilation. 'Seriously though, I've just arrived on Cerulea
after two weeks' voidside and I'd love some good com-
pany. I've got it! You two must be my guests tonight at
the opening of the new officers' mess. It'll be a night to
remember, I assure you.'

'Sorry - I'm not quite persona grata at the base, and in
any case I've an appointment to keep.'
'Too bad.' Farrell's acquiescence was immediate. He
turned to Lissa with a boyish grin. 'But you'll come,
won't you? The other men will be . . .'
He stopped speaking as he realized Lissa's attention
had been gripped by the scene in the telescope's screen.
It was a distance of some two miles to the base's main
entrance, but in the image from the scope's six-inch
objective lens, translated into a high-definition CRT dis-
play, it was possible to see detail as fine as the buttons on
the guards' uniforms. The screen was filled with graceless~
swarming movement of humans in riot. As far as Tavernor
could interpret it, the column of protesters had reached
the checkpoint and actually tried to force their way
through. Military vehicles and soldiers on foot were
converging on the dark wave of humanity outside the
gate, above which light-sculpted slogans swung crazily,
streaking the air with coloured fire.
As Tavernor watched, the wave fell back. The people
farthest from the gate, sensing the change of direction,
turned and ran, their unhampered strides allowing them
to gain ground on their less fortunate fellows. Those left
behind created a seething helpless pool into which the
Juggernaut of a huge air-cushion vehicle charged at full
speed, bowling men over, swallowing them under its
pulsing skirts. Behind the vehicle came the orderly robot-
like figures of the soldiers, fighting machines unhindered
by any real opposition - push with both hands on rifle,
swing butt diagonally upwards, push, swing, push,
swing. . .
'It's an attack!' Farrell's voice was incredulous and
almost gleeful. 'Where did that mob come from?'
'That mob is a part of this planet's famous art colony,'
Lissa said dully, hands covering her mouth, eyes held by
the screen.
'But this whole area is under martial law - the poor
fools could die for this.'
'That's what it's all about,' Lissa told him. 'One of
their number - a man we all respected - has already been
killed. He refused to leave his home before the forest
was liquified.'
Farrell's eyes darted across Lissa's face, noting her
emotional involvement. 'You knew this man?' His voice
had become sympathetic as he put his hand on her arm.
'I'm so sorry. I know it's too late for me to help the man
who died, but I'll have the matter investigated. And if
there's any culpability, the men involved will pay.'
'Bravo,' Tavernor said ironically, as he walked away.
He had seen Farrell's eyes drinking the distant scenes of
violence, and their flaring coronas of excitement told him
that Mnemosyne's long, long summer was drawing to a
close.


6

A single week had brought big changes.
Inland from The Centre, where the forest once stood,
a new city was being built at fantastic speed. Giant
workopters circled continuously on slow-churning rotors,
putting twenty-storey blocks together in hours, while
others shuttled between the site and the spacefield, bring-
ing prefabricated sections. The southern sky in the region
of the spacefield, once disturbed only by the weekly stage
ship's modest blowtorch, became a suburb of hell. It was
constantly torn and punished by the nuclear fireballs of
mass-carried ships which rivalled the sun by day and
painted stygian cityscapes in the clouds of night.
As each new building was completed, military and
civilian personnel arrived to fill it. The road linking the
base to The Centre thronged with traffic, while the stores,
bars and nightclubs did unprecedented business.
At first Tavernor felt as though he was living in a
vacuum. His old pleasure haunts had become unfamiliar
places, appropriated by loud-talking strangers. The tele-
vision and radio stations carried on exactly as always,
with no reference to the invasion. Tavernor belatedly
recalled that the money he had received for his property
was not all his own - the workshop had contained several
repair jobs, including a fairly expensive boat turbine. He
spent a day contacting the various owners and making
settlements, then he was at a loose end again.
The few people he recognized as being survivors of the
disastrous protest march were strangely evasive when



questioned about it, but finally he got a few facts - the
most startling of which was that one of the base guards
had been killed in the clash. Nobody was sure how it had
happened, but the most prevalent rumour was that Pete
Troyanos - a pottery designer with the build of a sumo
wrestler - had twisted the soldier's head right round on
his neck. Nor did anybody know what the extent or
severity of the casualties had been on the marchers' side,
because all those not able to get out of the vicinity in a
hurry had been dragged into the base. It was an open
guess whether they were in cells, hospitals or morgues.
About that time Tavernor began to notice parties of
red caps grimly working through The Centre, checking
identities, and suddenly he understood why the marchers
had been so reluctant to talk to him. Some of their
members - possibly a fairly large group - were on the
run.

As if to confirm his guess, the broadcasting channels then
made their first mention of the changed state of affairs in
The Centre. It took the form of repeated trailers for an
important announcement to be made by the officer in
charge of external security at 'Cerulea Army Base no. 1'.
Tuning in to the broadcast, Tavernor was only half-
surprised to see Farrell's da Vincian features - hardly
lighter in colour than his brown field uniform - making
the announcement.
'Citizens of Cerulea,' Farrell began, 'as you all know,
the Federation has established an important military base
close to this planet's major city, The Centre. It is no
secret that this base is being set up as the principal
operations and planning centre for the conduct of the war
against an alien species which, from all the evidence we

have, has dedicated itself to the complete annihilation of
human life.'
Farrell paused for effect, and Tavernor noted that the
overtones of confidence and optimism - invariably a
feature of public statements about the war - were absent.
He also knew from first-hand experience that all the
connotations, the positions of all the commas in official
announcements, were calculated by high-powered seman-
ticists. The conclusion was that the war situation had
deteriorated. Tavernor's mind returned to the stupendous
mystery lying behind all the events of the past few days -
why, why was COMsac transferrihg its centre of oper-
ations to the most inconvenient, expensive and improb-
able location in the entire Federation?
'. . . who does not offer his utmost co-operation is a
traitor not merely to a political concept or national ideal
- but to every man, woman and child in the human race.
It is my sad duty to inform you that a young soldier of
the Federation's 73rd Army has been killed, not on the
Syccan battle front, but right here on Cerulea - by the
very traitors to which I have referred, by fellow men
whose lives he was dedicated to protect.
'Many of those responsible for this outrage have been
dealt with already, but a small group have not yet been
apprehended. I know that you are no less anxious than I
to see justice done, but I would be failing in my duty to
you if I did not make one thing absolutely clear. Anybody
found assisting this very small group of seditionists in any
way will be treated exactly as though he were guilty of
the original crime.'
The announcement ended abruptly, on the warning
note, and the three-dimensional image of Farrell's head
and shoulders faded from the set's projection focus.
Tavernor seemed to see the white-rimmed stare hanging
in space when the rest of the picture kad gone, reminding
him of a scene from a classical childhood story. He lit his
pipe thoughtfully. The group of wanted men would not
have remained in The Centre unless they were even more
naive in this kind of business than Tavernor suspected.
That left only the forest, a fringe of which still remained
between the army base and the near-vertical walls of the
plateau. To the north of The Centre, the littoral plain
widened for some thirty miles before ocean and plateau
drew together again. The triangular area was thickly
forested and scored laterally with dozens of arroyos,
making it an excellent hideout for a group who wanted to
escape from a well-equipped army. Had Tavernor been
on the run he would have headed north. Luckily, he
reminded himself, it wasn't his fight - yet when he got to
bed that night a familiar loathsome smell was beginning
to reach his nostrils.
In the morning the smell was still there, and curiosity
prompted him to spend an hour or two seeing if any
military activity could be seen in the north. After all, he
reasoned, I've nothing else to do now. He breakfasted
early, then rang a car hire firm and had a ground-effect
machine delivered to the hotel. Before setting out he
bought a pair of lightweight binoculars, and some sand-
wiches and beer. It took longer than usual to get clear of
The Centre by road, because of the crowded streets, but
he decided that travelling on the open sea could make
him too conspicuous. If the amateur outlaws were where
he deduced it was likely that all northbound traffic would
be scrutinized. Once clear of the city he retracted the
roadrudder and drove along the shore road at the ageing
vehicle's top speed.
It was one of the diamond-sharp mornings so common
on Mnemosyne. The silent forest on his left and the
empty blue ocean on the right made it easy for him to
relax and begin thinking more deeply about the direction
of his life. His first eight years had been perfect, but they
did not count - they seemed to belong to another's
memories. What then had gone wrong with the remaining
forty-one years? Other people had lost their parents
under equally traumatic circumstances, yet got over the
experience and achieved their normal state of happiness.
Was it that he felt responsible? He had been the sole
survivor of the Syccan raid, but only through his father's
efforts - efforts which might, had Tavernor not been
there, have enabled both his parents to get away. Had he
been unconsciously trying to die in the same manner as
his father and mother? Electrum Stars were awarded only
to men who had gambled their lives against suicidal odds
in the maximum interpenetration areas. And he had won
four - twice as many as any other combatant, living or
dead, he had ever known.
And when his military career had been diverted, so
gently, so imperceptibly he was unaware of the change,
into the destruction of human beings, had his guilt welled
up again with redoubled force? The theory fitted, because
since then things had become worse. Deliberately squan-
dering the army pension which would have brought secur-
ity for the rest of his life had been an exercise in pure
futility. Burying his head in Cerulean sands had not
helped either, for here he was - the realization heaved
icily in his belly - considering joining the most hopeless
insurrection in human history.
Tavernor threw the vehicle into reverse thrust and it
slithered to a halt, road rudder and emergency brakes
tracing dark smears on the highway.
'No, you don't,' he muttered. 'There must be easier
ways of committing suicide.'



He swung the vehicle around with the intention of
driving back to The City at a more leisurely speed, but
something dark and huge appeared close overhead with
frightening suddenness, and his thoughts were scattered
in a blast of sound. The air filled with churning dust
clouds, the reek of burnt fuel. As he hit the emergency
brake again, his numbed senses told him he had been
hawkdived by a patrol helicopter - coming down from
observation height in a virtual free fall checked only in
the last few yards by a blast of retrorockets. The technique
was a standard one in copter warfare, but scarcely justifi-
able in the present circumstances. He rolled down his
window as the helicopter straddled the road ahead, wal-
lowing on its oleo legs, and a lieutenant in full battle kit
jumped down with a drawn pistol.
'Enjoyed that, did you?' Tavernor spoke first.
'Where do you think you're going?' The lieutenant's
eyes were unfriendly.
'Until you almost put my car off the road, I was driving
into town.'
'Before that you were driving north. Fast. Then you
turned back.'
'I wasn't emigrating, you know,' Tavernor said with
mock reasonableness. 'Stopping and turning back is a .
little trick I've worked out for getting home again.'
The lieutenant's eyes narrowed. 'Did you turn back
because you saw our patrol?'
Tavernor shook his head. He had been about to invent
another sarcasm, but his eyes had focused themselves on
the soldiers at the helicopter's open doors. The weapons
they held were specially designed for firing from vibrating
gun platforms. As he took in the fat, stubby barrels of
the TCRs, his nostrils flared with the synaesthetic stench
of a Syccan warrior, the odour of his own guilt. And this
burden of guilt - the thought brought the spare satisfac-
tion that comes with finality - was one he could lay down
only in death.



7

The perfume of Lissa's body was still with him as he left
the parklands behind and began working through the
fringes of the forest.
Only a few hundred yards behind, and extending west
towards the black wall of the plateau, was the northern
boundary of the military base. Occasional shafts of ruddy
light from the inner fence reached him in the darkness,
but as he moved deeper into the forest the tree lanes
closed up and the meagre evidence of civilization disap-
peared. He continued to move carefully, using nothing
but the ambient light of Mnemosyne's moon-shell and
the now-fading radiance of Neilson's Star. It was likely
that listening stations would have been set up on the
base's perimeter and he had no wish for anyone to come
after him with nightflies under the dismal, wavering
glimmer of infra-red flares.
Entering the forest this close to the field had been a
risk, but he had chosen to do so rather than be seen
again travelling north on the coastal highway. The lieuten-
ant who had hawkdived him in the morning had let him
go reluctantly, and only after a thorough search of his car
had revealed nothing too suspicious. They must be builq-
ing quite a dossier on me, he thought. And soon its
going to get thicker. Rejecting any consideration of the
immediate future, his thoughts returned to the three
hours he had spent with Lissa . . .
Tavernor's only conscious intention was to say
goodbye.

Lissa sounded surprised and slightly distant when he
rang her at home, but there was only the slightest hesi-
tation when he suggested a meeting. She called for him at
the hotel, and they pointed the nose of her hovercar into
the east where Mnemosyne's shadow and entourage of
prismatic moon lets was beginning its slow journey up the
sky. He did not tell her where he was going - only that he
was leaving The Centre - but she sensed the resignation in
him and seemed, intuitively, to interpret it correctly. Her
tears surprised him. He put the vehicle on autosteer,
took her by the shoulders, and tried to find the right
words with which to end a love that had never been.
But, somehow, all he did was confirm its existence,
independent of and beyond words.
Later, as they helped each other dress with clumsy
fingers, Lissa wept again, but this time her tears flowed
freely and without bitterness. . .
Dawn was beginning to over-paint the fainter moon-
fragments when Tavernor stopped to eat and rest. He
opened the camper's knapsack he had bought the previous
afternoon, took out sandwiches and a thermos flask of
coffee, and settled down on a moss-covered root. At the
outside he had covered five miles, but it was a respectable
distance for the kind of terrain he was in. The green and
blue-green foliage overhead provided perfect conceal-
ment from aircraft, and no vehicle yet invented could
penetrate such a barricade of trees. After eating he tried
to sleep but, tired as he was, the idea seemed ridiculous.
He began walking again and within an hour reached the
first of the numerous dried-up rivers which traversed the
plain, presenting himself with the problem of moving
west along its bed or crossing it and continuing northwards
for several miles.
From previous excursions into the area, he remembered



that one of the ancient rivers still carried a stream of
clear water down from the plateau. It was well known to
the painting and sketching community because on the last
part of its descent from the uplands the water made a
two-hundred-foot drop into a spoon-shaped depression
which sent it feathering skywards again in glittering
plumes which changed shape with the wind. The stream
was the best source of drinking water in the whole thirty-
mile triangle, and Tavernor was certain he would find the
wanted men somewhere along its length. Once Gervaise
Farrell was acquainted with the geographical details he
would be able to make the same deduction, which was
why Tavernor wanted to find the fugitives with no loss of
time.
There was no telling how far inland they would have
retreated, so he decided to go north and intersect the
stream as close to the coast as possible. Selecting a spot
where there were no spearweed on which to impale
himself, he leaped down into the channel, crossed it and
climbed the other side. The heat of Mnemosyne's long
day was building up, even in the arboreal shade, and
the air began to pulse with the wingbeats of insects.
Mnemosyne had remarkably few venomous creatures,
but some of the larger insects kept blundering into Tav-
ernor's face with a kind of amiable carelessness he found
more disconcerting than a wasp-like attack would have
been.
As he sweated his way across the uneven forest floor
he relearned a truth discovered a thousand times in the
past; that a planet did not become another Earth merely
because it had been mapped, measured and colonized.
On a friendly globe like Mnemosyne man could live in an
Earth-style city, develop an Earth-style society, grow
Earth-style food - but let him walk a few paces from his
own back door, overturn a rock, look at what crawls out
and, in that instant, Earth is far away. The flicker of
unreasonable, uncontrollable fear tells him that space is
too big and he is light years from home, facing something
that none of his ancestors has ever seen. Even on Earth
the sight of a familiar creature, such as a spider, could fill
some people with a panic so violent as to suggest that
arthropoda and related creatures had an extra-Terrestrial
origin. How would the same people feel if moving a
stone was likely to reveal something even more alien?
Soldiering on a dozen raw worlds had hardened Tavernor
to many of nature's practical jokes, but once he had
wakened to find a white, fat, puffy hand crawling up his
chest in a trail of slime. But it had been nothing more
menacing than a multiform grub which had scented the
saliva in his mouth and was coming to drink. The insects
which were now thudding into his face as he walked
sounded like bumblebees, but he did not want to look
too closely at them because he knew perfectly well they
were not bumblebees, and knowing exactly how they
differed might make the fleeting contacts unbearable.
It was almost noon when he reached the stream and
turned west along the vegetation-blurred edge of the
ravine in which it ran. As the sun reached its zenith the
heat became more insistent and the forest grew quiet as
its denizens lapsed into stillness. Here and there white
columns of vapour began to ascend from the tiethe trees,
their broad dark leaves giving up the moisture they had
drunk during the night. Walking became a meaningless
endless drudgery. He occupied his mind by trying to
picture what sort of reception he would get when, and if,
he met up with the fugitives. Supposing they had had
enough already and were on their way to give themselves



up? Supposing they had chosen to go south, or up over
the. . .'
His speculations were ended by the lazy clack-clack-
clack of a cruising helicopter. Tavernor spun and saw the
machine briefly, framed in the cluttered vee of the ravine,
as it drifted in from the coast. He snatched the binoculars
from his pack and trained them on the notched horizon.
Again the machine swept across his field of view, rotors
turning lazily, and the magnified image confirmed his
fears. Projecting from the fuselage sides were the spidery
arms of a tele-thermopile unit. The military version,
Tavernor knew, could detect the heat from a human body
at up to three hundred feet, depending on conditions. It
could also act as a fire control system for anything from a
cluster of machine guns to a mortar battery.
The helicopter was now less than a mile away - which
meant he had perhaps thirty seconds before it was directly
overhead. His forehead prickled icily as he scanned the
ravine, looking for an overhanging bank under which he
could shelter. Its sides were smooth for as far as the eye
could see, and the water was only a few inches deep,
ruling out any chance of submerging himself. The non-
chalant sound of the helicopter swelled as it completed
another and closer diagonal pass above the gully.
Tavernor's gaze fastened on the motionless columns of
white vapour rising from a tiethe tree about fifty yards
away. He ran for it, wildly zigzagging among the interven-
ing trees, bursting through one wall of vines by sheer
kinetic energy.
The sound of the helicopter had become a rhythmic
thunder as he reached the base of the tiethe. He threw
himself behind its trunk and crouched there, peering up
into the vast blue-green umbrella of suspiring leaves. The
branches shook as the aircraft swept by, seemingly just

above treert)p level, and Tavernor's breathing stopped.
He was counting on the cooling effect of the evaporation
from the tiethe to make the tree register as a cold spot in
the thermopile's peculiar vision, and thus cancel out the
radiation from his own body, but what if. . . ?
The sound of the copter altered abruptly, showing that
the rotors had changed pitch for manoeuvring. Tavernor
scrambled round to the opposite side of the tree. Again
the ground vibrated and he knew the aircraft was back-
tracking. Suddenly the throb of rotors and engine was
lost in the hammering fury of multiple machine guns. He
tensed, waiting to be engulfed in a racing wall of earth-
spouts.
Miraculously, the firing ceased before the helicopter
slewed overhead, clawing for height. To his numbed brain
the conclusion that the helicopter must have been firing
at something else was a difficult one to accept. He got to
his feet and tried to see what lay farther up the ravine
where the target area seemed to have been. His view was
obscured, but there could be only one answer. Behind
him, the copter had soared to the top of a figure-of-eight
and was curving into its downward swoop. Shedding his
pack, he sped through the trees in a series of wild bounds,
risking the loss of an eye in the gamut of lashing twigs.
He crossed a low knoll and reached a clearing at exactly
the same time as the helicopter. It threshed across the
patch of blue sky in a second, but in that second its guns
whipped the forest floor into a semblance of seething
liquid, through which figures ran in aimless panic. The
sound of the aircraft retreated and was masked by the
crackling slide of sheared-off branches methodically,
almost gently, making their way to the ground.
'This way,' Tavernor shouted. 'Head for the tie the
trees.'



He kept shouting as he ran into the clearing, waving
his arms, trying to shepherd the bewildered men towards
safety. Some followed his directions; others stared at him
with shock-dulled eyes.
'Hurry up all of you,' another voice cried. 'Do as he
says.'
Tavernor turned and saw Kris Shelby. Even in the
emergency, his tall ropy form had retained some of its
studied elegance, but his left arm hung limply and twists
of blood ran from the fingers.
'Stop shouting and start running' Tavernor caught
Shelby's good arm and steered him towards the nearest
tiethe.
'You're a fool, Mack.' Shelby grinned with pain as they
began to run. 'You don't even belong to Mnemosyne.'
'I will someday.' As he spoke, Tavernor glanced up
through the vaulted trees to where the helicopter's rotors
flamed, briefly, in the afternoon sun as it prepared for
another pass over the clearing. He could imagine no
escape from the trap which had begun to close around
him from the moment he was born.

8

The leatherwing squeaked apprehensively as Tavernor
opened its wickerwork cage.
He projected feelings of reassurance and the compact
body relaxed, the silver eyes gleaming at him in the dim
light of the cave. That's the way, little friend, he thought,
just relax. He carried the leatherwing across to the bale
of dried grass which served as his bed. On the floor
beside the bed was a six-foot-long arrow. Its shaft was
roughly an inch thick and made from one of the steely
spearweeds which grew profusely in many of the ravines.
Apart from its size, the oddest thing about the arrow was
the warhead which was disproportionately large, bulbous
and carved from close-grained wood. The warhead had
been partially hollowed out, creating a niche into which
Tavernor was able to fit the leatherwing's body. He did it
gently, then checked that the creature's domed head was
not constricted and that the glossy wings could move
freely. Satisfied, he took the creature back to the cage
and locked it in.
'When do you think they'll come in after us, Mack?'
Shelby was barely visible at the mouth of the cave.
'Tomorrow for sure.'
'You don't think they'll risk a night attack? I mean
they have infra-red gear and we haven't.'
'Not a chance.' Tavernor was emphatic. 'We haven't
seen that blue-starred copter of Farrell's all day, and they
won't move in unless he's here.'
'You seem very certain.'



'I am. It's a game with Farrell, you see. How long have
they been gunning for us now?'
'Two months.'
'And how many men have we lost?'
'Eight.'
'See what I mean? If Farrell had been really anxious
we'd have been dead within minutes. He could have
dusted the whole area, or burned the forest, or melted it
down around us. He could have put tactical atomics in
the helicopters, in which case we'd all have gone up
together that first day.'
'That'd be bad public relations, wouldn't it, mon ami?
The base personnel like to relax in town.'
'Bad private relations, too.' Tavernor thought of Lissa,
and the way in which Farrell had set out to overwhelm
her right from the moment they met. Knowing her
attitude to the art colony. Farrell would do his best to
keep Lissa from learning exactly what was happening in
the triangle of forest.
Aloud he said, 'It would look bad on that glittering
army record - the man who had to use atomic bombs to
squash a few insurrectionist fleas. Even so, I still believe
it's a game with him. This is Farrell's private deer park,
and the kill will have to be made in clear daylight, with
him right there calling the shots.'
'He sounds a real charmer.' Shelby came back into the
cave. 'Have a drink, Mack.'
'No, thanks.' Tavernor stood his arrow in a row with
five others. 'How much of that stuff did you bring with
you, anyway?'
Shelby chuckled. 'Just the one flask - but I've been
saving it, and I think perhaps that if I don't drink it
tonight I may not drink it at all.'
'People've got out of tighter corners than this.'
'Perhaps - but if we do break through that line out
there, we're not going to have much of a life up in the
archipelago. It all seems a little pointless.'
Tavernor knew what Shelby meant. The cave was at
the base of the cliffs along the western rim of the forest,
hidden deep in a cleft cut by a waterway that had long
since dried up. The army still did not know its exact
location, but they had narrowed it down to a two-mile
stretch of cliffs and had cordoned the area. Tavernor's
plan, such as it was, was to break through the cordon and
head north into the wilder and uninhabited part of the
continent. He had a slim hope that if they were to get out
of the army's backyard they might gradually be forgotten,
but he could appreciate that to a man like Shelby, the
scheme merely substituted a slow death for a quick one.
'Remember Gauguin,' he said.
'Gauguin?' Shelby sat down on the bed. 'Oh, I see
what you mean. That isn't it. I can live without painting.
I'm good at it, but that's all I am - just good. It's a relief
to be able to acknowledge the truth and give up trying, as
a matter of fact.'
Shelby's voice had a peculiar note which reminded
Tavernor of the milky-eyed woman who had not dared to
come to Mnemosyne. 'What did you mean then?' He
felt a sense of relief that he had never shown artistic
tendencies.
'I meant that. . . nothing any of us does has any point
these days. How long before the Syccans get here, Mack?'
'They may never get here.'
'Don't play games with me. The war's been going on
since before we were born and we're losing it.'
'You think so?'
'I know it - in spite of the War Bureau's coyness about
these things. You know, Mack, Mnemosyne's a strange
world. It has the highest proportion of artists, poets and
musicians of any human colony anywhere. Nobody knows
for sure why they came here - they just did it, like
lemmings. And do you know what they brought with
them?'
'Go on. I'm listening.' Tavernor reached for his pipe,
and the pouch containing his last shreds of tobacco.
'They brought humanity's soul. Or what's left of it.
Does that sound crazy to you?'
'Not at all,' Tavernor assured him, concealing his
wonderment at the workings of the artistic mind.
'You overdid the earnestness that time, man ami.'
Shelby unscrewed the top of his flask. 'I've grown to love
you in the past two months, Mack - but you really are an
artisan. The things I'm telling you are just as true and
valid as your precious second law of thermodynamics,
but on another plane of reality. Does that offend you?
Are you going to accuse me of homosexuality again?'
Tavernor snorted. 'Not after hearing you down at the
back of the cave with Joan M'wabi.'
'In times of peril the life force grows stronger - it's
nature's way.'
'Most nights it sounds more like an all-in wrestling
match.'
Shelby yelped with delight. 'That's exactly what it is -
and I've scored more submissions than any other man in
the company. But I was talking of other things. Art,
whether you accept the idea of not, mirrors humanity's
soul. The artist is nothing without inspiration, and when
inspiration does come to him he is still merely an instru-
ment - which is why art is so valuable. A true work of art
tells you how things are, provided you know how to look
at it. A supremely intelligent being looking at, say, poor
Vejvoda's mural would have been able to read in it the
totality of human experience, even though Jiri himself -
being nothing more than an instrument - would have
been incapable of such complete interpretation.'
'What's the point in painting if it can't be understood?'
Tavernor interest was beginning to stir. Shelby's. words
were striking faint silvery echoes far back in his mind,
glancing off the half-formed idea about the ubiquity of
life which had come to him during the ghastly silence
following the transformation of Neilson's Star.
'But it can be partially understood - and the only
meaningful course a man's life can take is one which
increases his degree of understanding. A classical abstract
such as "To Emit Painless Light" contains exactly the
same information, infinitely multiplied as does von Hoer-
ner's table of arbitrary values for the lifetimes and proba-
bilities of destruction of technical civilizations.'
'And did Vejvoda's mural contain an up-to-the-minute
report on the war situation?'
'Believe it 0#' not - yes. It would have told you that
Man has almost lost his soul, that his genius has been
blighted, that he is losing the war against the Syccan
because he has forfeited the right to win it.'
'You wer~ right about me,' Tavernor said. 'I am an
artisan. '
'You're a human being like the rest of us, but a single
beaker of sparks can make the condition more bearable.'
Shelby took a small piece of sugar from his pocket and
dropped it into his flask. The green liquid immediately
began to swirl with motes of golden light, a microcosm in
creation. Some of the fireflies drifted into the air from
the neck of the flask, but Shelby trapped them with his
mouth and inhaled.
'Olympus waited a thousand years for this and it never
came,' he whispered, almost to himself. 'A potion of
green ice, lotus perfumes, sunlight and dreams. . . I
won't offer it you again.'
'I'll stick to this.' Tavernor lit his pipe. 'There's work
to be done.'

The cordon was roughly semi-circular and about three
miles in length. It consisted of six laser fences strung out
end-to-end at half-mile intervals. Each fence was an array
of laser beams, reflected between two projector stations,
and because the beams were Iow-powered they were
invisible even at night. But if a moving body interrupted
one of the rays it automatically caused a power spike in
the projector and the lasers struck with their blinding
swords. The energy levels reached could be gauged from
the fact that when setting up the projection stations it
had not been necessary to fell any trees to get a line-of-
sight connection. All that had been required was for the
technicians to feed in one power spike. Every tree that
stood directly in the line of the cordon had a vertical line
of neat circular holes right through its trunk.
Tavernor knew from experience that the only weak
points in such a cordon were the projector stations where
the two laser units stood back-to-back. The standard
technique was either to put a physical barrier between
the units, or to leave a tempting 'gate' and a squad
deployed outside each station with instructions to direct
convergent fire on anything that tried to pass through. It
was in this respect that, in Tavernor's estimation. Farrell
and his men had been slightly careless. They had left two
gates, each guarded by four men and two machine guns -
the assumption being that it would be impossible for the
virtually unarmed fugitives to break through. . .
Tavernor got to his feet and tapped his pipe out on the
cave wall. He had been smoking his last golden nut of
tobacco, saved - like Shelby's sparks - for their last few
hours in the cave. It was too dark to see anything, but he
heard expectant stirrings among the twenty-three men
and four women with whom he had lived for the past two
months.
'Speech!' someone called ironically. He identified the
gruff voice of Pete Troyanos.
Tavernor hesitated, clearing his throat. He wanted to
tell them a number of important things - how much he
had come to admire their courage and adaptability, how
bitterly he regretted the deaths they had suffered, how
much he felt their frustration over the fact that having
practically no weapons had prevented them from becom-
ing real guerrilleros, how grateful he had been to feel
warmed and fecundated by their friendship when he had
come to believe himself incapable of normal human
relationships. But he knew the words were beyond him.
'This is no time to stand around making speeches,' he
said. 'You all know exactly what you have to do - so let's
get the hell out of here.' The words were greeted with
utter silence, in which he sensed disappointment, and he
knew he would have to answer their demand, that he had
to pay the fee for his belated membership of the human
race. . .
'And listen. . .' He blinked desperately into the dark-
ness, fighting a battle against the cold sterile tide of his
.past. 'You've got to take care of yourselves, because. . .
because. . .'
. 'That's enough, Mack,' a man's voice said quietly.
'We're ready to go now.'
They filed out of the cave into a cool night. The moon-
shell tumbled motionlessly overhead, a frozen stream of
broken diamonds, pierced once by the planet's shadow,
around which were seeded concentric rings of amethyst,
emerald, topaz and ruby. Stars shone faintly beyond the
glittering screen, giving the sky an impression of infinite
depth lacking on other worlds. Tavernor br~athed
deeply, forcing himself to relax, as the others began
moving off into the wide belt of scrub which separated
the forest proper from the cliffs.
A mile away, straight across the brushwood, was the
central station of the cordon - the one at which the
breakout was going to i?e made. The first step in the plan
involved the group getting to roughly four hundred yards
from the station and waiting for Tavernor's signal to
advance. He would have preferred them to go even
closer, but the risk of being picked up by a listening
device would have become too great. When the last silent
figures were disappearing into the scrub Tavernor and
Shelby gathered up the six huge arrows and six woven
cages. They followed the main group for some time, then
bore slightly to the south aiming for a small bald knoll
which Tavernor had previously selected.
As he walked he could feel the nervous flutterings of
the caged leatherwings, and guessed they could smell
death and were unhappy about it. He felt a surge of
affection for the hardy little mammals whose instinctive
morality was superior to the grandest ethical edifices
produced by humanity. The leatherwings were no stran-
gers to killing, but they took only their exact portion
from the ecological banqueting table, as he had dis-
covered when he had tried to train them to kill small
game. It had been their method of dispatching prey which
had given him the idea that they could be incorporated
into a new kind of weapon.
The first time he had seen a leatherwing in action he
thought he was watching a spectacular suicide. It came
winging down out of a red sunset and smashed like a
bomb into a colony of pseudo-lizards basking on a rocky
outcropping. The brutal impact was audible for a hundred
yards. Tavernor, curiosity aroused, scrambled towards
the rocks and was just in time to see the leatherwing flap
skywards again with a dead reptile in its claws. Apparently
a deceleration force of perhaps a hundred gravities had
left the leatherwing unscathed.
Tavernor studied the leatherwings for several months
before discovering he was wrong in one of his most
basic assumptions about them. Their nocturnal habits
and general bat-like appearance had deceived him into
thinking they used some form of sonar to navigate in
darkness, like an Earthly bat, but the truth was that they
had a limited form of telepathy. Predators which could
home in on the mind-glow of their prey were not unknown
in the Federation's variegated domains, but Tavernor
suspected the leatherwings of having the facility in an
unusually high degree. He conducted experiments which
proved they could do more than detect cerebral radiation.
One series consisted of Tavernor fixing his thoughts on
one of a group of objects, then hurling a leatherwing at
them with all his force. As soon as he learned the trick of
projecting the image clearly the proportion of direct hits
on the chosen object rose to one hundred per cent.
The idea of a biologically-controlled guided arrow came
to him shortly afterwards, amid the same paralysing sense
of revelation he had last experienced on the transit
ship to McArthur. He had worked on the idea only
ilTtermittently - there were long spells of revulsion against
the trade his hands seemed to follow of their own accord
- but the work had a positive aspect in that it showed just
what the leatherwings could do. Preliminary tests showed
that a leatherwing could be trained to accept the joyride
in the arrowhead, to control the point of impact within the
limitations set by the projectile's mass and the creature's
wingspan, and to break free just before the strike. Tav-
ernor had just begun work on a suitable stand-mounted
crossbow when his house, workshop and the surrounding
forest had been reduced to their constituent chemicals by
the army. . .
From the top of the knoll it was possible to see a faint
glimmer of light coming from the projection station.
'They're making things easy for us,' Shelby said
contemptuously.
'The light doesn't matter.' Tavernor put his load down.
'I set the bows up today, during daylight. My only worry
is that I couldn't fire a couple of zeroing-in shots - it's
asking a lot from our little featherless friends here.'
'I'm not worried. I've seen you fire those things.'
'Yes, but only in the daytime. Bows like these - with
wooden limbs and fibre strings - change their character-
istics with the temperature and humidity. And there's a
limit to the dispersion the leatherwings can handle.'
'My mind is completely at ease, man ami.'
'Let's give it something to do then. You check the
fistmeles while I string the bows.'
'Check the what?'
'The fistmele is the distance between the back of the
arrow rest and the string. It's a handy indication of
tension.' Tavernor gave Shelby a stick with a notch cut
near one end. 'Put this end on the arrow rest, and the
string should cross at the notch. If it doesn't reach the
notch the bow's too slack, and we have to twist the string
to shorten it.'
'Is all this necessary?'
'I'm an artisan, remember? Take my word for it.'
Tavernor began stringing the six massive bows, grunting
furiously with the effort needed to conquer their implac-
able resistance. Two of the fistmeles proved to be too
small and those bows had to be restrung when their
strings had been shortened. By the time he had finished,
Tavernor was bathed in sweat and his heart was pounding
unpleasantly, reminding him he was only a few weeks off
his fiftieth birthday. He secured the bows on their ramp-
like stands, then came the even more strenuous task of
drawing each one - by lying prone on the ramp, gripping
the bow with both hands and forcing the string right back
to the trigger with his feet. When the sixth bow was strung
he lay down and breathed steadily until the pounding in
his chest eased.
'I wish I could help,' Shelby said. He slapped disgust-
edly at his left arm which had never recovered from
having the tricep torn in two by a bullet.
'Save your strength for running.'
Tavernor got to his feet, checked that the bow ramps
were on the bearings he had marked out earlier, then set
the arrows into position. He opened the cages one by
one and put the leatherwings into their tailored niches,
stroking and kissing the warm hard bodies and domed
heads, whispering reassurance. The silver eyes shone at
him in the darkness, saying things he might have under-
stood had he not been trapped inside a human shell. He
knelt behind the first bow and gathered his thoughts,
shaping and clarifying the mental image just as he had
done when throwing the leatherwings at targets. While
. visualizing the four faceless soldiers whose lives he had to
take, he humbled himself for the brief communion with a
mind that had never known evil or guilt, trying to put
a.cross the concept of destroying life to preserve life, in
spite of his dull certainty that understanding on that level
would be impossible.



'Is everything all right, mon ami?' Shelby whispered
anxiously.
'Don't speak!'
Tavernor pulled the trigger and the big arrow soughed
upwards into the night sky, flicking its feathered tail to
clear the bow limb for a clean flight, testimonial to the
fact that its length-stiffness ratio had been well matched
to the power of the bow. Without wasting any time,
Tavernor worked his way along the line of bows, sending
the big arrows off on their five-hundred-yard journeys. It
was necessary to movt;: quickly to prevent the soldiers
raising an alarm when they found themselves under
attack. When the fifth and sixth arrows, the reserves, had
gone he stood up and stared at the faint gleam of light
from the projection station. It continued to shine steadily,
without any indication of whether it illuminated life or
death.
'Give the signal,' Tavernor said. 'The issue's been
decided.'
Shelby sounded a short blast on his reed whistle and
they began to run. Moving through the scrub at any
speed above a slow walk was dangerous, but Tavernor
was haunted by the spectre of the command post making
a routine radio check of the stations and discovering
something wrong. He ran determinedly, just ahead of
Shelby, using his extra weight to beat a way through
clumps of undergrowth. Crackling sounds to the north
told him he had drawn abreast of the main group.
Tavernor lengthened his stride. If the arrows had failed
to do their work he was going to be the first to feel the
consequences. The light of the station began to be visible
ahead, and he esimated its distance at about two hundred
yards.
All at once, the sky blossomed with warning flares.
Tavernor slid to a halt and Shelby blundered into him.
His first impulse was to give the prearranged signal to
head back to the cave, then he noticed that the flares had
been sent up to the north and south - but not from
straight ahead. It looked as though the arrows had taken
out the target station as planned. There was no time to
waste in deducing how the men in the other stations had
been alerted.
'Keep running,' he shouted, urging Shelby forward.
'Keep going.'
'Run? Watch me fly!' Shelby came abreast of Tavernor
and they flailed their way through the darkness, muscles
supercharged by fear. A prolonged explosion and ascend-
ing streaks of orange fire to the south told Tavernor that
two helicopters had made jet-assisted take-offs. He tried
to run faster but was already beyond the limit of what his
thick-set frame was designed to do. Bright motes of light
arced across the sky - the helicopter crews were clearing
their guns.
Tavernor reached the station just ahead of the leaders
of the main group. He burst through the narrow gap
between the projection units and sprinted the final fifty
yards to the still-glowing light, which turned out to be a
field lamp at the entrance to a ridge tent. From the nearer
slope of the tent projected the notched ends of two
arrows. Tavernor dropped on his knees, looked inside
and saw two sprawled forms, one of which appeared to
have been crawling to the door when the end came. Both
. had bloody messes where their heads should have been.
He got to his feet and looked around. Other members
of the party were filing through the gate and stumbling
on past him into the forest. Shelby was standing at the
gate, pulling men through and pushing them on their
way. The sound of the helicopters began to fill the air

9

By the time Tavernor neared the coast he was strangely
weak and dizzy. At first he put it down to nervous shock
- it had been too many years since his case-hardening on
the Syccan battle line, and the events of the night had
been enough to shake any man. But when his knees
began to buckle in spite of his conscious efforts to control
them, there came the belated suspicion that the hole in
his left boot was more than just an inconvenice.
He sat down and tugged at the boot. It came off with
an unpleasant sucking sound, and the first light of dawn
showed that his whole foot was glistening with dark red
blood. When he pulled off his sock, the second toe came
with it.
Stunned, he gazed at his damaged foot reproachfully
for a long moment - the gap where his toe should have
been was oozing thickly. He had been leaking blood the
whole way across the forest. Realization that he was
wounded seemed to lift a neural block, allowing pain to
burn its way up his foot and leg, and with it came alarm
over the fact that the wound was anything but hygienic.
During the two months of hiding there had been scarcely
enough water for drinking, let alone washing. And, in
addition to the accumulated grime, every possible variety
of natural dirt had forced its way into his boot during the
walk.
He picked up the gruesomely weighted sock and hurled
it off into the trees, then searched his pockets for the
reasonably <;;Iean piece of rag which had held his tobacco.
With the rag wadded into the gap in his toes, he put the
boot on and started walking again. The others were to
head north until they ran out of forest, then keep going
by night till they had passed the effective limits of
civilization, but Tavernor estimated he had no more than
an hour left before he would have to lie down and
recuperate from the loss of blood.
Already the thought of sleep filled him with yearning,
but the forest was no place to rest - unless one was
prepared to risk being entombed in cellulose. Memories
of dark hair swirling, frozen. The loss of twelve or more
men and a late-model helicopter was going to change the
whole nature of the operation as far as the army was
concerned. Farrell had been made to look a fool, would
be out to put the record straight as quickly as possible.
Tavernor broke into a lop-sided run.
The sun was rising through pewter mists when he
cleared the treeline. Ahead of him the ground sloped
downwards gently for several hundred yards to the high-
way which connected The Centre with a chain of small
communities along the coast. Beyond the road was a
broad strip of grassland which - with the suddenness
typical of a moonless planet - terminated in the ocean.
Mnemosyne was fabulously endowed with satellites, but
their even distribution in an orbital shell cancelled out
their gravitic pull. Scattered along the strip between the
highway and the ocean were high-income dwellings of
various sizes and architectural styles. Tavernor was
reasonably certain he would be able to find a doctor
somewhere along the strip, if he could cross the highway
unseen. There was no traffic at such an early hour, but a
sentient throbbing in the sky above the forest suggested
aerial patrols - and anyone crossing the white ribbon of
highway from the forest would stand out like a spider in a
bathtub.
He walked south a short distance, keeping among
bushes and the tallest grass, and reached the nearest
storm drain. Several times during the crawl through the
tunnel beneath the highway unseen creatures awoke
under his hands and darted away in front or became
entangled in his legs. Cerulea is almost completely free of
venomous lifeforms, he kept reminding himself, but
gained little comfort. The fat hand-like grub he had found
crawling up his chest had been a non-poisonous, even
amiable, creature.
By the time he got to his feet on the seaward side of
the highway he was coated with filth, and his foot was
pulsing warmly and steadily. He moved along the line of
young trees which screened the feeder road from the
highway. The dreaming houses shone with morning sun-
light, pastel-coloured, clean, normal - and curiously
unreal to Tavernor's eyes. Or was it he that was unreal?
He was the one who did not belong in this or any other
society, the cold ghost of a man who might have been,
devoid of nearly all the warm and positive emotions, a
negation of humanity, orientated towards guilt as other
men were to joy, to hatred as others to love. The
moments of contact with people like Lissa, Shelby, and
even little Bethia, served only to remind him of his own
deficiences, because they had been giving, while all he
could do was take, with the uncomprehending fingers of
a child stealing eggs from a wild bird's nest and robbing
them of their nascency. . .
The swinging movement of a shingle caught his atten-
tion from a distance of several hundred yards. He drew
close, saw the doctor's name on it, and felt a pang
of gratitude towards the nostalgic traditionalism which
invariably led people in quiet hamlets on alien worlds to
put mail boxes at their gates and green shutters at their
windows. This man - 'Norman R. Parsons, MD' - prob-
ably had a plush office suite in The Centre's Medical Arts
Building, but still he nailed up his shingle at his own
front door. Tavernor hoped that Dr Parsons' sentimen-
tality would not bring too much trouble down on his
head.
The single-storey house was smallish and its main
entrance was well-recessed into a porch. He decided he
could make as much fuss as necessary to waken the
doctor without neighbours being able to see what was
going on. The doorbell chimed musically - more nostalgia
- as he depressed the button with one hand and
unsheathed his knife with the other. A full five minutes
went by without an answer before he began to accept his
good luck. Dr Parsons must be dead, blind drunk or not
at home. He limped quickly round to the side of the
house and looked into the garage. It was empty.
Tavernor gathered his ebbing strength and - praying
there were no burglar alarms - put his shoulder to the
rear door of the house. The doorpost splintered and he
heard the keeper of the lock go bouncing across the
interior floor. Closing the door behind him, he made a
quick tour of all the rooms to check that he had the place
to himself. It was empty, but personal effects belonging
to a man and woman were plentifully in evidence, suggest-
ing that the owners would not be away for long.
One of the rooms was furnished as a study-cum-office.
Tavernor opened a white-painted cupboard in it and
extracted surgical dressings, a tube of artiflesh and a
variety of antibiotics. In a bedroom closet he found a row
of suits which looked a little too narrow in the shoulders
and long in the legs, but which would be infinitely more
-



. presentable than his own ragged outfit. A chest of drawers
revealed shirts, underwear and socks; and he found shoes
which were only fractionally too large.
Gathering up his treasures, he went into the bathroom,
stripped naked and cleaned his injured foot. The toe had
been amputated cleanly at the joint, but removing dirt
from the flesh and ensuring there were no bone splinters
in it was a nauseating task, even with his high tolerance
for pain. He got through by pretending that hands other
than his were doing the work. It's this toe, Or Parsons. I
don't know the correct medical designation for it -
but it's the little piggy that stayed at home. Not very
appropriate in this case, I'm afraid. For Christ's sake, Or
Parsons, stop that hysterical giggling and watch what
you're doing. . .
With the wound tidied, dusted with antibiotic, sealed
by artiflesh and encased in a waterproof dressing, he
opened the shower cubicle and almost moaned aloud
with pleasure when he saw that it combined a spacious
sunken tub. He filled the tub with hot water, eased his
way in, scrubbed himself all over, then changed the
water. The second tubful was hotter than the first. He set
the thermostat to keep it that way and allowed himself to
relax, to float, to rest. A tiny, niggling voice told him it
would be dangerous to relax too much, but the idea
seemed meaningless.
Sleep is all, he thought. Food would be nice too, but
that can come later. Sleep is all. Sleep is. Sleep.

He awoke, suddenly, to the ambience of diffused after-
noon sunlight.
Lost, disorientated, he threshed in the water until
memory and identity flooded back into his mind. Sleep,
the little death, had really claimed him, he realized
g~iltily. He got out of the tub, rubbed down and dressed
as quickly as possible. Obviously the owners of the house
had not yet returned - but it had been a matter of chance,
and in soldiering or engineering only a fool trusted his
luck. A fool, or someone who subconsciously wanted to
fail.
He gathered up his old clothes and removed his knife,
battered pipe and the thick roll of bank notes, the outside
of which was now completely black with dirt and grease.
His arms and legs trembled with weakness induced by the
loss of blood and the long immersion in hot water. His
principal requirement now was food. He took the old
clothes to the disposal chute and consigned them to the
furnace - they might have been evidence to somebody.
In the refrigerator he found beefsteaks, fish steaks and
syntheggs, all of which would require cooking. He hesi-
tated - feeling the delicious, shameful pleasure that comes
from lowering one's standards of self-preservation - then
took out two steaks and six plastic-shelled syntheggs.
The grilling steaks smelled good. While waiting for
them to brown he drank two cartons of milk. The milk,
machine-made from native grass, had a strong yeasty
flavour, but he swallowed it eagerly. When the steak and
eggs were ready he used more precious time to put them
on a platter and sit down at the table with a knife and
fork. Running down the hill is good, a warm voice said,
because your strides are long and easy, and entropy is a
following wind, speeding you to dissolution, which is
merely rest under a different name.
There was a radio on the kitchen table. Tavernor
switched it on and listened to the music while he ate,
cre~ting an atmosphere of secure domesticity. He got to
his feet, peeled a hundred-stellar bill from his roll and set
it on the table. With rest, clean clothes and a full belly,
he suddenly felt confident about tackling the journey
north to meet up with the others who were heading north
to the rendezvous on the shores of distant Lake Bruce.
Trusting to his luck had been a good idea, after all - had
he pressed on he would have been weak, hungry and
exhausted. All that remained now was to hit the road and
keep going.
As he was reaching for the door handle the radio
emitted a time signal and the deejay announced a news-
cast. Tavernor paused, wondering if he would hear
anything about the army's reaction to the night's activities.
'Today's big news is that the society wedding of the
year is shortly to take place right here in The Centre -
between Miss Melissa Grenoble, daughter of the Planet-
ary Administrator, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gervaise R.
Farrell, now attached to Cerulea No 1, and who is of
course a nephew of Supreme President Berkeley H.
Gough.' The professionally enthusiastic voice paused for
breath.
'The engagement was announced personally this morn-
ing by Administrator Grenoble, who said that a tachy-
gram of congratulations had already been received from
President Gough. More details later from our. . .'
Tavernor switched the radio off, shaking his head
stupidly, emphatically. Lissa and Gervaise Farrell! It was
impossible. His mind went back to the last night with
Lissa on board her hovercar. She had been his. Now she
was to be Farrell's. She had been his. Now she was to be
Farrell's. The idea rebounded inside Tavernor's head,
and still he was unable to accept it. He went out, closing
the door behind him, and stood for a moment staring out
at the complacent blue ocean beyond the trees. Can't
blame her, he rationalized. What choice did she have?
On the one hand there was Farrell - young, handsome,
rich, famous, a social equal, one of the most eligible
bachelors in the entire Federation. On the other hand
there was Tavernor - a middle-aged fugitive with veins
full of ice water and a soul that had been shrivelled by
hatred and self-pity.
'Can't blame her,' he said aloud, then closed his eyes
and sagged back on the splintered doorframe as anguish
seethed up in him. And with the pain came a new insight.
His frequent bouts of indulgent self-analysis - these too
were a sham, a devious way to erect another screen
around the real Tavernor. For the plain truth was that he
did blame Lissa. Of course he was too old for her, of
course marriage was out of the question - but he had
wanted her to spend the rest of her life in solitary
mourning for him, like a princess imprisoned in a high
tower, unreachable by any other man. It was a ludricrous
Arthurian vision - Lancelot mused a little space. He said
she has a lovely face - but it was exactly what the swollen,
tremulous ego of Mack Tavernor had been demanding.
He walked slowly away from the house.
Some time later he realized he was going in the wrong
direction - walking south to The Centre and Lissa Greno-
ble - but he was unable to turn back.



10

The Administrator's residence was a large, dignified hexa-
gon - faced with local marble - which covered the top of
a rounded hill, like icing on a cake. Tavernor despised its
daytime aspect for the patent reliance on Terran-Colonial-
gubernatorial architecture of the past, but at night it
looked very much better.
He jumped down from the wall which surrounded the
hill, winced at the stab of pain from his foot, and made
his way upwards through banks of night-scented shrubs.
The building, floodlit and spilling radiance from many of
its windows, hung in the darkness above him. It looked
stagey and two-dimensional; irrelevant. Wondering if
Howard Grenoble was holding one of his cherished din-
ners, Tavernor slanted across the hill towards the rear of
the house. The jewel stream of Mnemosyne's night sky
tumbled motionlessly overhead. He tried once again to
decide what he was going to say to Lissa, assuming he
was able to make contact with her without being caught.
That he knew instinctively that Farrell was the wrong
man for her in spite of his being young, rich, handsome
and famous? That he, Tavernor, had generously recon-
sidered his earlier decisions and she could now join him
as the wife of a man running from a probable death
sentence? Or was it going to be, simply, goodbye? What-
ever they were, the words had to be said.
The residential suite at the rear of the building was in
darkness except for wan beams of light straying into the
rooms from other areas. Tavernor skirted the swimming

pool, crossed a garden and a patio. He tried all the doors
and french windows, found them locked and climbed a
moulded steel column on to the balcony. One of the
bedrooms on this floor belonged to Lissa, but from the
outside he could not say which, and in any case she was
unlikely to be in it at this time if there was a late dinner.
The best plan might be to hide somewhere until everyone
was in bed, then go inside and find Lissa's room. He
looked along the balcony. Several groups of chairs and
slowly-gyrating moonseeker plants were ranged close to
the ornate railing, but looked as though they would
provide doubtful concealment.
'Nobody ever goes into my room,' a tiny familiar voice
said. 'Why don't you hide in there?'
'Bethia!' Tavernor concealed his shock as he turned.
'What makes you think I want to hide?'
The diminutive straight-backed figure, wearing an
ankle-length dressing gown, watched him from an arch-
way at the end of the balcony, and for a moment he felt a
rage against the circumstances which forced her to grow
in loneliness.
'Come through here,' Bethia said.
Tavernor noted the way in which she had dismissed his
counter-question, and he smiled. To a three-year-old
child, he suddenly recalled, there was nothing particularly
strange about someone needing to hide occasionally.
He nodded and followed her through the archway. She
clopped along just in front of him in loose slippers,
checked there was nobody in the corridor and beckoned
him on, with a conspiratorial wave. Her room was the
first on the right. It was lit by one bedside light. Again he
was struck by the fact that not one item in the room gave
evidence of childish occupation.
'Where do you keep your toys, Bethia?'
'In a chest, of course.' She seemed surprised.
'Why don't you keep some on your bed? A doll or
something. '
'That wouldn't be tidy.'
'It would help keep you company.'
Bethia snorted violently, then cupped a hand round
her nose. 'A doll for company!' Still nursing her nose,
she rocked with silent laughter, and Tavernor felt himself
overwhelmed by an emotion he was unable to identify.
Love, perhaps, but heavily shaded with - he sought a
word - respect. This tiny speck of humanity had, in three
short years, developed intelligence, wisdom, humour,
self-sufficiency. The ability to produce children like
Bethia, he suddenly felt, was Man's major claim to the
right to bestride the universe, to ascendancy over the
Syccans. Except that something had gone wrong some-
where and - a thought he invariably suppressed leaped
into the forefront of his mind - with every passing hour
hundreds of frail brave Bethias died at the feet of Syccan
warriors as the Federation's borders contracted. Tav-
ernor's brow prickled coldly while the synaesthetic stench
filled his nostrils. How many years would this particular
Bethia have before the aliens reached Mnemosyne?
Twenty? Perhaps less. No communication, no idea, no
word had ever passed between human and Syccan; but the
transference of COMsac's headquarters to Mnemosyne
might be noticed by the aliens - in which case the planet
would become a prime target. . .
'Have you come to take Lissa away?'
'No. I would like to, but that's impossible now. I just
want to talk to her.'
'Why aren't you taking her away?'
'I can't.' Tavernor hesitated. 'Besides, isn't she getting
married to Colonel Farrell?'

'Yes, but. . .'
'But what?'
'He's a dark man.'
'Dark?' Tavernor detected a strange emphasis on the
word, and decided to probe. 'Lissa's dark, too.'
A look which might have been disappointment flitted
across Bethia's doll-face. 'He's a dark man,' she repeated
quietly, 'but you and Lissa have. . . one light. It's so
strange.'
'What do you mean, Bethia?'
'I'm going to sleep now,' she said determinedly, wrig-
gling out of her gown. Tavernor helped her into the big
bed and covered the straight little body. She lay in the
centre, arms by her sides, a look of peaceful concentration
on her face.
'Goodnight, sweetie,' Tavernor said, but there was no
reply. He studied the miniature, pearl-glowing lineaments
of her face for a moment, with a growing sense of sadness,
then turned off the light. The futility of his own life, of all
human life, seemed to close in around him with the walls
of darkness. He went to the window and parted the heavy
drapes. Moon fragments glinted on the surface of the
pool, shivering and merging. Beyond the trees the lights
of The Centre and the more garish brilliance of the new
city proclaimed Man's presence in this part of the galaxy
- but for how long? Even without the menace of the
Syccans, for how long would humanity's caravan have
been able to wend its way through the crazy sparkling of
treasures that was the universe? How many centuries?
The spirit demanded that the answer should be an infinite
number, for nothing else would satisfy, but the mind
knew differently. Strange how a minor event like the
detection of one elementary nuclear particle, in a small
laboratory on Earth at the beginning of the twenty-first
century, should have had the power to blight Man's hopes
of collective immortality.
The tachyon, unable to exist at speeds below that 'of
light, gathered velocity as it shed energy, accelerating
until it could cross the galactic wheel in a fraction of a
second. It had opened space to mankind, and at the same
time had closed the doors of the future - for the con-
tinuum was silent. With the tachyonic communicator,
civilization could have spoken to civilization across dis-
tances measured in thousands of light years, the only
limitation being in the particles' diminution of energy
with increased speed. But instead of an ether throbbing
with the voices of intelligence the questing tachyonic
aerials had found nothing. The spread of time was too
great. Civilizations could rise, flower and die in their
profusion, but the fleeting moments of galactic time
when neighbours were at their technological crest rarely
coincided.
Only a handful of pulsars - artificially triggered beacons
- signalling witH patiently creeping light, whispered of
cultures which had enjoyed their brief hour and had
vanished into the unimaginable past. And the new infor-
mation meant that the values used in von Hoerner's
awesome table for the lifetimes and the probabilities
of destruction of technical civilizations had had to be
drastically revised. Earth's civilization was entering the
phase of development described as Type 11 - capable of
utilizing and channelling the entire radiation output of its
star - in which, according to von Hoerner's original table,
its life expectancy should have been 6,500 years.
But the post-tachyon revision had reduced the figure to
a mere 2,(XX) years. And the wry cosmic joke which
had placed the human and Syccan civilizations so close
together in time and space seemed to have reduced even
that pitiful span to vanishing point. . .
The figures, the mathematics of- ultimate despair, were
swirling in Tavernor's head like dead leaves in a vortex
when he heard Gervaise Farrell's voice outside the
window.
He looked to the right, through the parted drapes, and
saw that the balcony ended only a few feet from Bethia's
window. Farrell was leaning on the railing, staring south
towards the new city. He was wearing mess whites, and a
thin cigar glowed in his mouth.
'. . . confessing that you've shocked me, my boy.'
Howard Grenoble's voice was distinct although he was
out of Tavernor's line of sight. 'I find the whole thing
very difficult to accept.'
'Really?' Farrell sounded cool. 'I'm not accustomed to
having my word doubted.'
'No, no, I didn't mean to imply. . . It's just. . . It's
just that I had no idea COMsac placed such reliance on
MACRON'S decisions.'
'MACRON is a logic machine with the totality of human
knowledge at its disposal. And it doesn't make decisions.
It's a reliable instrument for assessing probability values,
but it never makes decisions.' There was a rising note of
irritation in Farrell's voice. 'Do I make myself clear?'
'Perfectly clear, thank you.' Grenoble spoke precisely.
'But why here on Cerulea? What were the factors which
influenced MACRON in making its. . . recommendation?'
Farrell sipped from a glowing tube of sparks. 'Not
more than six men in the entire Federation know the
answer to that question.'
'I see,'
'You understand the necessity?'
'Of course - such knowledge must be restricted. Forgive



me for asking. . .' Grenoble had begun to sound ill. 'The
war always seemed so far away from Cerulea, and then
to have the entire COMsac headquarters descend on
,
us...
'Descend on you. That makes me think of locusts.'
'Not at all. I feel honoured. All my staff feel honoured.
It's just that MACRON seems to have. . .'
Farrell gave a sharp, sarcastic laugh. 'MACRON sticks in
your gullet, doesn't it, Howard? I'll tell you what's
annoying you about this whole business. It's the fact that
the decision to place the planning headquarters here
didn't come about through my uncle saying something
like "I know the ideal planet, gentlemen. You'll enjoy a
stay on Cerulea - old Howard Grenoble has an excellent
table and a first-class cellar".'
'You go too far, Gervaise.'
'I'm simply trying to introduce you to reality. We in
the army are conducting a war against an unimaginably
powerful and dangerous enemy. . .'
'Oh, yes,' Grenoble put in. 'I heard they shot down
one of your helicopters last night.'
During the ensuing silence, Tavernor smiled his
appreciation of the older man's practised use of the
stiletto. He must have realized that Farrell would be
vulnerable to a reminder that he had never been within
ten light years of the maximum interpenetration areas.
'Your friend Tavernor was responsible for that,' Farrell
riposted. 'I've no authorization to use heavy weapons,
but I saw to it that five of his raiders won't bother us
again, and I'll get the rest soon.'
'You'll get the rest? I understand from General Mar-
tinez that you were being assigned other duties.'
'We will get the rest - it's of little account.' Farrell's
cigar glowed fiercely, be lying the casualness of his words.
Tavernor breathed deeply with relief. The five 'raiders'
Farrell had mentioned must have been Shelby and the
four others, including loan M'wabi, who had been
annihilated while trying to slip through the gate. Remem-
bering their deaths was painful, but at least he now knew
that none of the others had been picked up. The two
months of intensive survival training he had given them
was, apparently, standing them in good stead. They would
all be well on their way to Lake Bruce by this time,
and once past it could lose themselves in the northern
archipelago. That much had been lifted from his
conscience.
'Well, that's enough fresh air for one night,' Farrell
said.
'I thought we were going to discuss the wedding
arrangements. There isn't much time, you know. It's all
been so hurried.'
'I'll leave all the details to you, Howard.' Farrell
finished his drink. 'That's the kind of thing you excel at.
Now our guests must be wondering where we are. . .'
The two men left the balcony. Tavernor remained
standing at the window for a few minutes then pulled the
drapes together. There could be several hours yet before
he would have the chance to slip across to Lissa's room,
and a slight uncertainty in his knees told him he had not
yet made up for the heavy loss of blood. He crossed to
the bed and listened to Bethia's breathing. Satisfied that
she was asleep, he lay down on the floor at the side of the
bed furthermost from the door and forced himself to
relax.
He awoke with a start to find the house absolutely
silent. His watch said it was two of Mnemosyne's lightly
stretched hours past midnight. He got stiffly to his feet,
went to the door and eased it open. The corridor
nightlights were on, but the utter stillness of the air
convinced him it was safe to come out of hiding. With a
last look at Bethia's lonely figure in the bed, he closed
the bedroom door and went towards the stairs. Lissa's
room was on the same floor, but in the opposite wing,
and to reach it he had to go round three sides of a large
hexagonal stairwell. Where the carpeted corridor opened
into the well he hesitated, swearing at the brilliance with
which the stairwell was lit. Someone had neglected to turn
off the powerful light in the ceiling and his agoraphobia,
carefully nurtured during the past two months, made the
exposed and brilliantly illuminated landing look decidedly
unsafe.
As he paused he noticed a pair of switches on the
corridor wall, several inches from the corner. The inner
one would be for the corridor lights, but did the other
control the light in the stairwell? Hoping that the lights
going out would not attract more attention than if he
simply sneaked across the landing he depressed the outer
switch. The light in the stairwell flickered, but remained
lit.
Tavernor stared at the switch in wonderment, trying to
visualize an electrical circuit which would cause lights to
dim momentarily and then come on again at full strength.
Perhaps the outer switch operated some unit which caused
a power drain when it came into action - in which case he
would have been far better to have left it alone. He
flicked the switch to its origianl position. This time the
ceiling light went out for a full second before returning to
full intensity.
Alarm stirred in his subconscious. This is ridiculous, he
thought. A freak fault in the. . .
The answer hit him suddenly.
There was one very common electrical circuit which

would account for the phenomenon he had just witnessed.
A two-way switch would have done it - provided there
had been someone at the other end of the circuit, pressing
his switch fractionally later than Tavernor's. And that
someone must be in the opposite corridor, only a few
yards away, screened from his view by the angling of the
walls!
'Who's there?' a man's voice demanded loudly.
Tavernor turned and sprinted silently along the corri-
dor, past Bethia's room and the now-closed doors leading
to the balcony, until he had rounded another of the
building's obtuse angles. He pressed himself against the
wall and waited. A few seconds later he heard the whisper
of approaching footsteps on the heavy carpet. He ran
along the new stretch of corridor, opened a door at its
end, stepped out on to the landing at the top of the
building's main ~taircase and found himself face-to-face
with an armed guard. The guard's rifle was slung over his
shoulder and he was carrying two steaming cups of coffee.
'As you were, soldier,' Tavernor used his best com-
manding officer's voice. 'Lucky for you the colonel's
asleep.'
He walked past the guard to the head of the stairs,
his mind racing. Armed guards in the Administrator's
Residence? The guests Farrell had mentioned must be
VIPs, military or otherwise - he had picked a great night
to try visiting Lissa. He reached the stairs and began
walking down towards the main entrance hall which
looked deserted. The guard on the landing was staring at
him uncertainly. Tavernor resisted the urge to run. He
was still near the top of the stairs when the corridor
opened and a heavy-set sergeant burst out on to the
landing. It was the same red-haired oldster Tavernor had
stunned at the gates of the army base.

'Stop that man!' the sergeant bellowed.
Tavernor launched himself down the long staircase in a
kind of controlled fall, touching the steps halfway down
and once near the bottom. A flying leap took him out
into the centre of the hall - just as a second guard came
running out of the porter's office. They collided, and
Tavernor's caroming course carried him straight into a
marbie pillar. He stepped back, apprently unhurt, then
toppled like a felled tree.

The porter's room was long and narrow. It was lit by a
single, coldly luminescent strip which shed a baleful light
on the meagre furniture. Tavernor sat on a hard chair
with his hands cuffed behind his back and tried to master
the pain which geysered through his body at every breath.
My ribs, he thought hazily. I've smashed my ribs. He
focused his eyes with difficulty. The red-haired sergeant
was standing at the door, with a drawn pistol. Shifting his
gaze, Tavernor saw Gervaise Farrell sitting on the edge
of a table. Farrell's hair was rumpled and his brown,
thickly-matted chest showed beneath the unbuttonned
tunic of his mess uniform. His eyes glowed with white
coronas of excitement.
'All right, sergeant,' he said. 'You can leave us alone
now. I don't think there'lI be any trouble.'
'Yes, sir.' The sergeant moved to the door.
'Oh, sergeant.'
'Sir?'
'Come back in again as soon as the box arrives.'
'Yes, sir.' The sergeant disappeared.
'I don't like you, Tavernor,' Farrell said when they
were alone. 'And do you know why I don't like you?'
'Could it be,' Tavernor repressed a powerful urge to be
sick, 'because you're going bald and I'm not?'
'Very good, colonel - wisecracks right to the end.'
Farrell swung his legs nonchalantly. 'The reason I dislike
you - apart from the fact that you are, if I may use an
archaism, a churl- is that you keep getting in my way.'
'Going to toss me down the steps again?'
'Keep it up, colonel. As I was saying, you keep getting
in my way, and I can't afford to have people trying to trip
me up because the path is already stony enough for a
relation of the President who wants to build an army
career through his own efforts.'
Tavernor tried to cluck in mock sympathy, but some-
thing bubbled in the back of his throat. He suspected it
was blood. .
'The little affair of the helicopter last night has been
forged into a lever against me. General Martinez is using
it as an excuse to transfer me to other duties.'
'Rough,' Tavernor managed thickly.
'A thing like that would look bad on my record. But
now that you've so kindly placed yourself in my custody
the record's going to read differently.'
'Is it?'
'Yes, because you're going to tell me where I can pick
up your friends, all at once, without any fuss.'
'Sorry - I don't know where they are.' Tavernor sud-
denly found it easy to forget the pain in his chest. Coming
to Lissa's home under the circumstances had been a
crazy, indulgent flirtation with death - but it had also
been unforgivably selfish. He knew exactly where the
others were planning to rendezvous. And the days in
which a determined man could withhold information from
inquisitors had long since passed.
'You don't know where they are?' Farrell said easily,
pulling a cigar from his breast pocket. 'Then you'll have
nothing to worry about - on that score anyway. 'He lit
the cigar and sat confidently pluming smoke into the air.
His darkly rakish good looks and unbuttoned white tunic
reminded Tavernor of a character from a classical opera,
and his mind - escaping into irrelevancy - began striving
for the opera's title.
There was a knock at the door and it opened, giving
Tavernor a glimpse of uniformed figures milling in the
hall. The sergeant came into the room with a small black
box in his hand. He closed the door quickly.
'Well now, sergeant.' Farrell stubbed out his cigar.
'Has the provost-marshal's detail arrived yet?'
'No sir. They're on their way though.'
'Fine - this won't take long. You know how to use a
needle?'
'No, sir.' The sergeant looked uncomfortable.
'There's nothing to it. Just push it into his neck and
depress the plunger. Here - give me that.' Farrell pointed
at the sergeant's pistol and fluttered his fingers impatiently
until it had been unholstered and placed in his hand.
'Now go ahead.'
The sergeant opened the black box and gingerly
removed a hypodermic syringe. His eyes, fixed on Tav-
ernor's, were apologetic. Tavernor's heart was thudding
steadily. He was not certain exactly what was in the
syringe, but he knew that within seconds of receiving it
into his bloodstream he would babble everything Farrell
wanted to know. He fought with the handcuffs while his
nerves shrilled their unbearable message of despair over
and over again: Father, Mother, pale face and black hair
swirling, forgive me, forgive me, forgive. . . The silent
stridence faded as he found the single door of escape,
yawning, a merciful night without stars.
He sat with his head lowered and allowed the sergeant
to run the needle into his neck. There was no pain, only
a sensation of tingling warmth. He waited until the
needle was being withdrawn, and the sergeant's hands had
relaxed, then propelled himself headlong from the chair
with all the power of his bunched thighs.
Farrell, still on the edge of the table, was too surprised
to get out of the way. Tavernor bore him backwards,
exposing the other man's throat, and before he could be
thrown aside his teeth had closed on the windpipe.
As he bit inwards, he heard Farrell's frightened sob,
felt the muzzle of the pistol jam against his side. The
pistol exploded once, twice. As the heavy bullets sledged
their way through his chest, death blossomed before
Tavernor's eyes like a black rose, unfolding petals of
night.
He tumbled into it, gratefully surrendering a life he felt
he had never really owned.


Melissa Grenoble had no idea how long she had been
standing at the high window, her forehead pressed to its
cool glass.
Dawn had been sketching ghostly grey arches across
the sky when she saw them carry out the metal casket in
which Mack Tavernor's body lay. And it was as the
military truck was driven away with careless jouncing
speed that her tears had begun to flow. Since then she
had relived every moment of her time with him, multiply-
ing them over and over, enduring bitter aeons of grief -
yet the world outside had not changed. Still it was dawn.
A luminous silver mist lay across the world, somehow
destroying perspective so that the buildings of The Centre
were featureless cut-out silhouettes, one row strung across
the middle distance, with another - lighter in colour -
placed just beyond it.
The glass seemed to be draining all heat from her
body, but she was unable to move away. A single word
reverberated in the cryogenic chill of her mind - why,
why, why? What had been the point of Mack's whole
life? Why did death have to touch him so early, claiming
him for its own long before the final act of futility?
Underlying the sorrow was a dull sense of astonish-
ment. When she met Mack first she had been impressed
by his physical power and brooding self-sufficiency; and,
like most others, repelled by his exaggerated wariness of
emotional involvement, his apparent determination to
make himself disliked by everyone he met. But she had
sensed another Mack Tavernor underneath - a different
man who looked on every aspect of life with a limitless
compassion. She had fought to realize this other Mack,
and had found a new level of fulfilment in her growing
success in this ultimate form of creative art. Their final
night together had been all the proof she needed. . .
Now, in the timeless grey dawn, she was asked to
accept the idea that the death-orientated Mack had gained
the upper hand, that he had come out of the forest like a
killer wolf, to be shot down in the bestial act of slaying.
Gervaise had bared his torn throat to her; yet while
looking she had remembered Mack's calm, tortured eyes,
and had shaken her head, instinctively, backing away.
On the intellectual level there was another factor - her
knowledge of Mack's fantastic competence. Had he come
during the night as an assassin, he would have achieved
his aim, quickly, silently and efficiently. But what was
the alternative? The answer came whispering from deep
within her body - tremulous, thrilling, sad, persuasive.
Had the news of her engagement to Gervaise reached
him, and caused him to throw every instinct of self-
preservation to the winds? Had Mack lost his life through
love of her? If that was the case, she would not marry
Gervaise, nor anyone else, ever. . .'
'Lissa?' The small voice came from close behind her.
'Lissa?'
She turned and saw Bethia's upturned grey eyes, huge
with tears, and remembered that the child and Mack had
seemed to share a curious affinity.
'What is it, Bethia?' She knelt, bringing the solemn,
absurdly perfect face level with her own, and suddenly
they were in each other's arms.
'Don't cry, Lissa. I feel you crying. I feel the pain.'
'I can't help it, darling. I can't help it. You don't
understand.' Lissa felt her self-control slipping as
emotional pressures built up inside her. Bethia, strange
little Bethia, was the only person in the world to whom
she could confide her thoughts. 'I think Mack came to
see me last night. I think I'm responsible for. . . Oh,
Bethia, I can't stay here any longer.'
'But. . . Where will you go?'
'I don't know - Earth, perhaps. I must get away.'
'Does that mean you won't marry Colonel Farrell?'
'Yes. I . . .' Lissa felt Bethia's wispy body stiffen as the
child pulled away from her.
'Mack was in my room last night. I talked to him.'
Bethia's face had become composed, with a strangely
haughty look, like that of an infant empress.
'In your room!' Lissa's throat constricted with nameless
fears. 'But why?'
'He was hiding there. He had a knife. He said he
would hit me if I made a sound.'
'I don't. . .'
'It's true.' Bethia suddenly seemed taller. Her eyes
were unseeing, and her voice was inexorable, relentless.
'He had a knife. He told me he had to kill Colonel
Farrell"

PART TWO
The Egons



1

Pain, swiftly climaxing, swiftly fading.
Dislocation. Transition. Awakening.
The stars can be tasted. And heard. The stars can also
be seen, in a way that is not immediately understood.
Space is not black. It runs, shivers and spins with a
thousand colours, of which the visible spectrum covers
only a minute fraction. Most prominent in this region
are beautifully pulsing and transient flowers, spallation
products of heavy nova-driven particles colliding with the
ubiquitous hydrogen of interstellar space. The process
by which this knowledge is gained is not immediately
understood either.
Nearby, the generous sun swims in slow majesty,
making its nourishment freely available. Closer still, a
planet burns with the special, divine neural fire of an
inhabited world. And the mother-mass drifts all around;
vast, awesome, eternal. . .
J think, therefore I'm alive. The incredible realization is
not accompanied by shock - there are no triggering
glands, no bloodstream, no organic pump - but Tav-
ernor's consciousness suddenly contracts, iris-like, to the
adjacent environment.
A silver-blue cloud moves closer. It is a tenuous ovoid
of faintly glowing gas, yet - because of his new percep-
tions - appears as a human face. It also looks like a
heavily-muscled young man in warrior's harness, a
stooped old man, a smiling boy, an involute foetus -
merging manifestations of a single entity.


Welcome to life
Don't be afraid
I am Labienus

the entity communicates
three ideas simultaneously.

I don't understand. Tavernor is aware of his thoughts
bridging space. He feels the entity's warmth and there is
reassurance - but to be alive? Other ovoid clouds draw
near. He attunes his perceptions, and awareness shifts.
Space is filled with luminous faces, identites, personalities.
Uncountable millions of them.

I will help you
Adjustment is quick
Give me yourself

Labienus moves closer.

Tavernor has time to deduce that he too is one of the
luminous ovoids, then another mind is merging with his
own. In the first instant of contact he knows Labienus
better than he has known anyone in his entire life,
experiences his childhood in northern France in the time
of Augustus Caesar, soldiers with the Seventh Legion in
Gaul, Britain and Africa, retires with the rank of centur-
ion to a small farm in Tuscany, raises four sons late in
life, dies in the open air on a warm summer evening
beneath an oak tree, just as the first star is beginning to
pierce the cobalt canopy of heaven. . .
Tavernor withdraws uneasily.

Relax
Trust
Give

Labienus says.

Tavernor permits the contact to be made again, and this
time there is no sense of strangeness, for Labienus and
he are brothers who have shared birth, life and death.
He understands dimly and gratefully that Labienus has
absorbed his own twisted world-line, and is not repelled.
They mingle as the spallation flowers blossom and flicker
arouRd them, staining space with nameless hues of
energy, and hard stars crackle, and soft stars whisper,
and food-stuff spurts from the sun, and Mnemosyne burns
with life, and the mother-mass spreads its ethereal fronds
all around. . .
Knowledge, impersonal and wordless, floods through
Tavernor.
The most basic and universal units of life are the egons,
Labienus communicates. These are organized clouds of
energy which live in interstellar space, feeding on the
minute amounts of energy in starlight. They are born
continuously - because an egon in its primary state cannot
help but impress its pattern on the primeval energy ftuxes,
thus creating others of its own kind.
You're an egon? Tavernor's mind races ahead.
Yes.
And/.. . .
Yes.
A self-sustaining energy pattern. Tavernor makes an
intuitive leap. Does that mean. . . ?
Yes - you are immortal.
Immortal! Galaxies seem to pause in their flight. But if
I was born in space. . . to this. . . why did I live as a
human being?
In the primary state an egon has no awareness of
identity, Labienus continues, but being the essence of life
it has a counter-entropic drive towards a higher degree of
organization.
It achieves this by establishing a rapport with a newly-
created being existing on a more physical plane. The host-
being can be human, animal, fish, bird - any creature
which has a certain level of inherent complexity in its
nervous system, and is capable of development. There are
so many egons inhabiting the space-time continuum that
every intelligent or semi-intelligent creature that has ever
existed has had an egon attached to it.
I still don't understand.
Being part of its own environment, perfectly matched to
the interstellar medium, the egon is not forced to develop.
It would remain for ever as a selfless monad of the
panspermic mind-mass, but the instinct towards a higher
state of being drives it to form a liaison with a being born
into inimical surroundings which force it to develop its
powers in order to exist.
Then the egon is a duplicate?
As the physical host grows and matures, his central
nervous system becomes increasingly complex through
the interaction of his body with his environment. This
development is matched in every detail by the development
of the egon.
But when the host dies, the egon - instead of dying too -
is set free of its voluntary enslavement. Equipped with an
identity, a highly complex pattern of self-sustaining energy,
it is reborn to its heritage of endless life.
And, as far as the host is concerned, death is merely the
doorway to this new life - because he is the egon.
Tavernor feels himself swamped by the torrent of
knowledge, and again he withdraws a short distance
from Labienus, breaking the direct mental contact. The
universe crowds around him, flowing with myriad energy
colours, replete with movement and life.
Too much, too much, he says.
Don't be dismayed. You will adapt. There is time.
! The thoughts directed to him by Labienus are not
really simultaneous, Tavernor realizes, feeling his mental
processes quicken to match the other's. An arctic elation
stirs through him as he begins to assimilate the truth
about the phenomenon called Life.
I must get this clear, he says. Mack Tavernor, my
physical body, is dead - yet I live on.
Yes. One copy of a book has been burned - another
copy is untouched.
And I'll never die?
You'll never die. A shadow falls across Labienus. Not
from natural causes. . .
Which means, Tavernor races on, that my parents are
alive.
Wait! A pause. Yes, your parents are alive.
I can speak to them?
Eventually - they are part of a sub-mass.
Tavernor's elation increases. It is a strangely cold flame
and he finds this disturbing, but his mind is vaulting
upwards into eternity amid a blaze of neural energy
springing from the fusion of the two great streams of
human thought - spiritualism and materialism. The classi-
cal religions of Earth, formulizations of Man's ancient
instincts, are vindicated by networks of pure force
spawned between the stars. Life is eternal, linked to the
flesh in the beginning, yet independent of it. Timidity
and fear suddenly invade Tavernor's being - eternity,
infinity. . .
You don't travel alone, Labienus says kindly, and
behind his thoughts is a shimmering of concepts even
more vast than those already pounding in Tavernor's
mind.
The mother-mass! Tavernor looks into the awesome
luminous cloud which surrounds Mnemosyne and a need,
which has always been so much a part of his life that he
was unaware of it, is suddenly gratified. In its place is
"born a sense of fulfilment and completeness, mingled
with emotions beyond human counterpart. Tell me, he
says.
You don't need to be told, my friend. All the things you
have wanted to believe are true. Labienus prepares to
withdraw. Go with Life.
You'll come with me?
Later. There are always others to receive.
Tavernor feels himself drawn towards the mother-mass,
slowly at first but with increasing speed. The intervening
space is crowded with egons. He passes through them,
and they through him. At each contact life is exchanged,
Tavernor's consciousness swells with the memories of a
thousand existences, and still he is in the outer fringes of
the mother-mass. The knowledge of his destiny burgeons
inside him, spontaneously. . .
The egons are gregarious beings, linked together with
something approaching infinite connectivity through the
interaction of their identities. They never desert the living
species of their rebirth planet until all life is extinct on
that world. At that stage, when the story of life has been
ended for yet another planet, the inconceivably vast
corporate identity - composed of every intelligent being
ever to have lived on the expended globe - casts off.
Then comes the endless pilgrimage across eternity,
towards intellectual adventures far beyond the grasp of
any single mind; perhaps to ascend through the other
continua as this one succumbs to the heat-death, fecundat-
ing new universes, breathing life into a billion times a
billion fresh planets; perhaps to unite with other world-
minds, and unite again, and again, in search of Ultimacy.
Tavernor's yearning for absorption grows, and with it
his speed. The glowing fronds of the egon-mass open
around him, enfolding, enveloping. Then comes pain.
Tavernor is halted.

Life, he cries in abject fear, am 1 rejected?
The answer comes instantaneously, from all sides. No,
my friend, you are not rejected -look inwards.
He turns his mind inwards. The pain is being generated
deep within his own being, and yet it comes from outside.
Not from the real outside, where the spallation flowers
.. glimmer all around, but from another outside, from the
circumscribed, wistful dream-existence he had known
before. .. . before. . . a sense of reluctance and distaste,
yet the psychic tug is too great, and he is forced to
remember. . . before Gervaise Farrell pulled the trigger.
Farrell had killed him, but there was more to it -
something which had seemed important at the time.
Tavernor's resentment grows as the unknown power
increases its hold on him, anchoring him to the circum-
stances of the shadow play in which he had once partici-
pated. He had wanted. . . that was it . . . he had forced
Farrell to kill him because. . . because he was about to
be made to reveal information which would have led to
the deaths of others.
Related memories return, against his resistance -
COMsac moving its headquarters to Mnemosyne, the war
against the Syccans, the vision of a beautiful female face,
strangely obscured. Lissa!
Tavernor makes the identification with a sense of
bewilderment. Lissa. She is holding him - but how? And
why? Is it possible that the dimly-remembered thing
called love could have forged a bond so strong that he
would be unable to break it? A cold fury spreads through
him. Release me, he pleads. 1 must live. 1 demand my life.
I refuse to be linked to darkness any longer.
Patience, the nearby egons whisper. Eternity is yours.
How can 1 wait now that 1 know Life?
You must wait. The thoughts are compassionate. Until
the link is broken.
But/don't.. .
Tavernor's thought is lost as the universe explodes into
chaos around him. Egons storm through him in sudden
flight, fear spurts like arterial blood, the colours of space
shift menacingly, the mother-mass writhes and screams
with a million silent voices, and two death-black wings
beat their swift cruel course through the centre of the
maelstrom.
The wings furl abruptly. And vanish.
In their wake comes silence and a sense of unbearable
grief. Regaining contact, Tavernor feels the sorrow pulse
through him, and with it comes the incredible realization
that egons have died. Egons - inheritors of eternity -
have been slain by the pulsing black wings, and the pain
felt by their fellows is infinitely greater than could ever
be known by a human kneeling at a loved one's deathbed.
The grief engulfs Tavernor, wiping his mind clear of
thought.
An indeterminate time later he returns, purged, to the
realms of consciousness.
I saw two black wings, he says. Is there. . . an enemy?
There is no enemy.
I don't understand. There is a pause, and Tavernor
senses he is about to learn of something worse than the
existence of an implacable foe.
The only beings who can destroy egons are men - and
they do it without even knowing we exist.
But the wings. . .
The wings were those of a Federation spaceship arriving
at Mnemosyne, my friend. The wings of a butterfly ship.

2

In a way which Tavernor cannot exactly define, the
visitation of death strengthens his psychic link with Lissa.
Unchanging elements of his character, responding to
the plight of the egons, seem to recreate for him the
emotions of the shadow play. There is intense pain in the
formless contact and he is reminded that humanity, too,
faces its equivalent of the black wings spreading - the
Syccan warrior. The principal difference is that the
Syccan's psychology, his culture, the motives behind his
driving desire to destroy humanity are not understood -
whereas the egons know the nature of their scourge only
too well.
The Bussard interstellar ramjet, named after the twenti-
eth century physicist who conceived it, uses - in a spatial
context - the principles of the jet aircraft, in that it
depends on the presence of a surrounding medium. Two
intense magnetic fields extend hundreds of miles into
space from the ship itself, sweeping up ionized matter to
be used both as a working fluid, to provide reaction mass,
and as an energy source for the ship's thermonuclear
reactor. The superconducting flux pumps which create
the fields are designed in such a way as to deflect the
charged particles away from the living quarters and other
sensitive areas of the spacecraft.
In Bussard's original design it was envisaged that extra
equipment would be carried to ionize the medium ahead
of the ship, but the development of laser power tech-
niques has provided another answer. By pouring energy
at gamma ray frequencies into suitable suns it is possible
to make them go nova, thus flooding thousands of cubic
light years of space with energized matter. The tradelanes
of the Federation are littered with cosmic wreckage of
ravaged stars; the very nature of the galaxy is being
altered to meet the dictates of Man's commerce. But in
those unnaturally active regions, ships can efficiently
boost themselves to the speed zone of .6C in which the
tachyonic mode becomes viable - so nobody, but for
a handful of philosophers and poets, ever protests at
mankind's stupendous insouciance in superimposing his
own design on the fabric of continuum.
The wing-like magnetic fields give the spacecraft their
popular name - butterfly ships. A pretty, whimsical name,
Tavernor thinks, for the greatest tragedy ever to befall the
human race.
As his contact with the fringes of the egon-mass
becomes firmer and more multi-faceted he finds a bleak
understanding of the tragedy growing within himself, not
in terms of thoughts or ideas, but as pure concepts.
Drifting through strange perspectives of beauty and new
dimensions of colour, he examines these concepts. A key
turns in his mind, a door opens, and harsh light from an
unfamiliar angle spills over his past life, over the whole
pageant of human history. . .
From the time when intelligent life first moved on the
face of the Earth an egon-mass has been building up
around it, centred not so much on the planet itself as on
its biosphere swarming with varigated, yet related, life
forms. The egon-mass contains every mind ever to have
existed on Earth. Genius, fool, scowling ape, dreaming
dog, murderer, saint, savage, physicist - all are there.
Tremulously beautiful egons of infants who died in the
womb mingle on equal terms with Caesars, giving as much
as they receive, making their own special contribution to
the egon-mass, for - to achieve completion - Earth's
world-mind must assimilate every fragment of eligible
life.
This vast reservoir of consciousness cannot be tapped
directly by man's relatively coarse neural systems, nor
.. can the tenuous and delicate energy clouds communicate
with living beings. Yet there is a degree of contact on
the sub-conscious level. The age-old phenomenon of
inspiration is an example. Artists, writers, engineers,
scientists infuse their whole beings with the desire to
solve their own problems, and sometimes - if they are
lucky - the fore-brain stirs, reaches out, makes contact
with the egon-mass and extracts what it needs to know.
Human thought is a chronicle of such borrowing from the
race's stored experience and wisdom. Many men visited
by inspiration sense the existence of a greater outer power
which presents them, often when they are asleep, with a
complete solution to a problem. Inspired people lay stress
on the given nature of the message. Musicians and poets
repeat how compositions will come to them complete in
every detail, instantaneously, without any effort on their
part - the real work of creation consists of getting as
much as possible on to paper before the vision fades.
Thus it was that, sustained in the intangible womb of
his racial genius, Man was able to claim the stars as his
own - until the development of the butterfly ship.
The flickering magnetic wings, reaching hundreds of
miles into space, cut great swathes through the egon-
mass, destroying egons by the million, wiping out Man's
world-mind, his genius, his heritage of immortality, every-
thing. . .
Tavernor suddenly understands why mankind's war
against tbe Syccans is going so badly. For the first time in
their history, men are being forced to stand naked against
a powerful adversary - and without their genius are
unequal to the test. The ghostly outlines of an even
greater truth hover for an instant on the horizons of
Tavernor's mind, but his stream of thought carries him
headlong to the legend of Mnemosyne, the poets' planet,
the last redoubt of Man's soul. . .
The only planet in the Federation where the butterfly
ships cannot operate!
Earth's wounded egon-mass, and the counterparts from
the Federation's other worlds, have migrated to Mnemo-
syne, and there a small number of men can think and
create and snatch inspiration from the skies more or less
as they used to. Tavernor's mind flames as renewed
memories fuse with newly-gained knowledge.
MACRON! The moon-sized computer used in the conduct
of the war had caused the COMsac headquarters to be
moved to Mnemosyne. Is it, with the totality of recorded
data at is disposal, beginning to achieve a dim, bloodless
understanding? Is the pseudo-consciousness stirring in its
metal-and-ceramic brain capable of deducing the truth
underlying every manifestation of life? On an empirical
basis perhaps. It had been able to pick Tavernor out of
the war front and put him into weapons design - surely it
would note Mnemosyne's unusually high ratio of inven-
tiveness. But would it be able to correlate that ratio with
the peculiar astronomical feature which bars the planet to
butterfly ships?
Would it have the motivation or authority to issue
the one command which might rescue mankind from
extinction?
Tavernor finds anguish curling through him as he
realizes that humanity's time - Lissa's and Bethia's time-
is running out, that Man has to put away his superb but
deadly ships, and fight with other weapons until his genius
returns to him, recreated. If, the thought hammers at
him, it isn't already too late.
Abruptly, he finds himself separated from the surround-
ing egons. They have withdrawn from contact. He looks
at them through the distinctive shifting colours produced
by soft X-rays mingling with the synchrotonous radiation
of a spray of protons spiralling along a magnetic field at
close to the speed of light. The beauty is lost on him. His
thought bridges space to the nearest egon - Kystra-Gurl,
dead four thousand eight hundred years, a member of a
briefly-flowering north-African civilization whose exist-
ence had never even been suspected by archaeologists,
sword-smith, died in the early-middle age of appendicitis.
What am I to do?
Do? Dystra-Gurl projects cool sympathy. I feel your
pain, Mack Tavernor, but I cannot help. Be patient - the
link will dissolve in time.
But there is no time. I'm not concerned with myself.
Your pain stems from the link. When you are free of it
you will cease to see through the dark glass of phy_sical
eyes. You will realize it would be better for all of humanity
to die now - before the winged ships destroy any more of
the world-mind.
I can't think of it that way, Tavernor protests.
It is the link. Remember that you are alive now only
because your egon was lucky enough to escape destruction.
Each time a ship passes through us many egons - those
who cannot be accommodated with the moon-shell - die
the true death. People still alive on Mnemosyne are also
condemned to the true death - because once the egon of a
developed being is destroyed it is too late for another to
attach itself. We must develop step by step with our hosts.
I know. I know it is wrong to put proto-life before true
life. . . What is this link? Has it happened to others!
Kystra-Gurl's thoughts tinge with wry humour. It has
occurred to others before you, but the phenomenon grows
increasingly rare, since science vanquished romanticism.
Hauntings! I couldn't. . . Tavernor breaks off. Why do
you withdraw? He sees the space between himself and
the surrounding shell of egons increase until he is at the
centre of a luminous sentient sphere.
Something is happening. Kystra-Gurl's thoughts are
faint. Undercurrents of awe surge through his mind. I
think you are being summoned, Mack Tavernor. The
mother-mass is calling you.
No! Tavernor reacts in sudden fear as the hollow sphere
around him becomes egg-shaped, then conical, then opens
into a tunnel which curves down through the egon-mass,
down through Mnemosyne's moon-shell, deep into the
heart of the world-mind. He struggles to retreat, but an
irresistible force hurls him down the glowing tunnel,
faster and faster, while a thousand million identities
stream past him; body-images, faces, mind-images, of
men, women and children, birds, porpoises, animals of
every description, mingling, running together, gathering
speed, merging into one corporate personality uniquely
that of Earth, a citizen of the inconceivable super-com-
munity which inhabits all of eternity.
I'm not ready, Tavernor sobs as he feels his descent
slacken.
He stops.
Blinding radiance flows around him, suppressing his
awareness of everything but the perfect sphere poised at
the centre of the world-mind. As his senses adjust he
perceives that the sun-blazing entity is not a single egon,
but many - perhaps thousands - absolutely congruent,
forming one awesome gestalt mind. Identity-images
coalesce and intermingle continuously. As the sheer psy-
chic pressure overwhelms his power of thought he recog-
nizes some of the entity's component beings - da Vinci,
Christ, Aristotle. . .
Tavernor's overloaded consciousness contracts.
, The thoughts of the super-egon are prismatic crystals,
diamond-sharp.
This man is linked to the prime instrument?
He is linked.
Will the link sustain precise two-way communication?
No. It is as we predicted.
He is prepared to return?
He is prepared.
The physical requirements are satisfied?
They are.
He is compatible with the Type Two gene structure?
He is compatible.
Proceed then. William Ludlam shall communicate for
us,
Tavernor feels the crushing bonds of intellect relax
slightly. A single egon advances on him, makes contact
and he absorbs its identity - William Ludlam, dead a
little over four hundred years, born London in 1888 into
bitter poverty, sold to a chimney sweep at the age of six,
died three years later of suffocation in the twisting flue of
a banker's home in Kensington. Pity rises in Tavernor,
but is quickly checked. He is touching an intellect of
serene, limitless power which - born into other circum-
stances - would have dominated and transformed twenti-
eth-century history; and, as an egon, is attaining levels of
fulfilment unguessed at by ordinary minds.
Mack Tavernor, comes Ludlam's thought, you are
aware of why you have not been absorbed into the mother-
mass?
Yes. I. . .
Do not be alarmed. We share your continuing concern
for the fate of humanity.
Surprised at the apparent contradiction of all that he
had learned from other egons, Tavernor tries to explore
further into Ludlam's mind, but encounters a shining,
impassable barrier.
I must tell you, Ludlam continues, that- certain circum-
stances pervailing - it is possible for a developed egon to
be returned to the physical plane.
But how?
If we offer to return you to physical existence on
Mnemosyne - so that you may try to correct the fatal error
embodied in Man's use of the interstellar ramjet - will you
agree to go?
You know I will. The thought of surrendering his
existence as an egon is repugnant to Tavernor, but he
sees a woman's face, strangely obscured, and again he
feels her pain. I must go.
Regardless of what it may involve? I mentioned that
certain conditions apply to such a transfer.
I'll go under any conditions.
Good. Unexpectedly, Ludlam's thoughts suffuse with
sympathy. The physical conditions under which a transfer
can take place are these: a developed egon can revisit the
physical plane when the genetic structure of the second
host closely matches that of the former. In other words,
the requirements can be met only when the secondary host
is a direct descendant of the first.
Disappointment floods through Tavernor. Then it's
impossible. I have no . . . The thought ends abruptly
as premonition numbs his mind. Do you mean that
Lissa . . .
A son, Ludlam confirms. The embryo is now two
months advanced.
I didn't know. I had no idea.
She is the only one who knows. The extreme social
pressures of her position, her concern for her father's
career and mental well-being, have prompted her to con-
ceal the pregnancy.
Farrell! Realization hits Tavernor like a physical blow.
That's why she's marrying Farrell.
Correct. Now - has your decision been affected?
I . . . Tavernor finds coherent thought almost impos-
sible. I'd be denying life to my own son.
Proto-life only. His egon will be recalled. We guarantee
him a place close to the centre of the mother-mass.
Tavernor hesitates on a fulcrum point of eternity, and
again he sees the woman's face, strangely veiled. I accept.
The vast intellect of the egon-mass gathers him up, and
his identity is focused on the dreaming bud-brain of the
foetus in Melissa Grenoble's womb.


PART THREE
The Syccans



1

Gervaise Farrell was not sure what had awakened him.
He lay on his side, staring dreamily towards the high
windows beyond which the ocean, blue-black in the
coolness of morning, was striated with white wavecrests.
Between him and the light, footprints on the bedroom's
pale green carpet showed as faint silvery streaks. The
room was silent - what then had disturbed him? He felt
relaxed, so there had been no nightmares of the pistol
jarring his wrist, of the dead body pressing down on him,
bleeding, staining.
Farrell's thoughts flicked away from the hideous
moment in the porter's room and focused on the bright
scenes of his wedding, five days earlier. What a pity
Melissa had been so impatient - a trip to Earth and the
full ceremony in the capital buildings in Westberlin would
have been something to remember all his life. Still, the
fact that he had been married on station and had not
even taken honeymoon leave had created favourable
impressions in the right places. And Melissa's impatience
had been a compliment in itself, even if her subsequent
performance had been slightly disappointing. Obviously
she was going to require gentle, careful tutoring before
that magnificent body would yield of its best. The thought
of the warm jellyweight of her breasts descending stealth-
ily into his hands and pressing outwards through the
fingers triggered a hungry stirring in his body. He rolled
over on to his back, and discovered what had disturbed
him. Melissa was gone.



He stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. This was the third
time in their five days he had awakened to find himself
alone in the bed, and it was beginning to seem strange.
He got up silently, strode to the door of Melissa's dressing
room and pulled it open. The room was empty. He
crossed it, snatched open the door of the bathroom
beyond. Melissa was slumped across the washbasin, retch-
ing silently, transparent ribbons of tears on her cheeks.
'Darling!' He ran to her. 'What is it?'
'Nothing.' She straightened instantly and smiled at him.
To Farrell her reaction seemed completely unnatural.
Something monstrous heaved in a lower level of his mind.
'You're ill- what's wrong with you?'
'It's nothing.' Melissa continued to smile desperaNIy.
'Nerves, perhaps I'm all right now.'
'And it happens every morning,' he accused.
'Don't be silly.' Melissa tried to brush past his naked
body. He caught her shoulder with one hand, and with
the other dragged the black film of nightgown down to
her waist. The veins of her breasts glowed blue in the
morning brilliance, and the puckered nipples were tinged
brown.
Beneath his feet, the bathroom floor rocked crazily,
and his hands began to swing vicious open-handed slaps,
while all his consciousness was drowned in the harsh
regular sound of his lungs pumping like the bellows of an
archaic engine.
When sanity returned, he led Melissa back to the
bedroom, lowered her on to the bed and, with a frozen
tenderness, drew the sheets up to cover the angry hand-
prints on her torso. He took a cigar from the case on the
bedside table and lit it with trembling fingers. Melissa
sobbed steadily, and with a curious lack of effort which
suggested to him she was relieved at what had happened.
'Who's the father?' He tried to make his voice smooth;
'It's all in the past. I want to forget his name.'
'I see.' Farrell studied the ash on his cigar. 'Lose it.'
'Never!' Melissa gave a shaky laugh, and in that
moment he was afraid of her.
'You've no choice.'
'Haven't I?'
Farrell thought of the reactions of his family, his exalted
merciless family, and of the obstacles which had already
been placed in his way as he traversed the long lonely
path which only he knew was going to lead him to the
Supreme Presidency.
'All right,' he said finally. 'Keep the bastard. But I'll
tell you something - you'd be doing it a favour if you got
rid of it now.'

Halbert Farrell was born in the Cerulea base hospital in
the early hours of a calm September morning. The birth
was easy and uncomplicated, and two days later Melissa
was able to move from the hospital to the white villa her
husband had built on the cliffs south of The Centre.
Gervaise Farrell greeted the arrival of the child with
the intense enthusiasm for which he was known through-
out the services. On the rare occasions when it was
necessary, he justified the baby's early arrival to his fellow
officers by reminding them he had been living under the
same roof as Melissa for over two months before the
marriage. He had posed proudly for the cameras of the
army's public relations division, holding the child high
above his head, or over the balcony railings of his home.
Not once did he let Halbert slip, or even come close to
it, but Melissa watched him constantly, with troubled
eyes. And by the time the boy was a year old she had the
haunted, abstracted look of a woman in full retreat from
life.



2

Perhaps the presence of his teacher would save him. Hal
Farrell was not sure, but he hoped so with all the fervency
of which a six-year-old boy is capable.
He wriggled into his pyjamas, went into the bathroom
and began brushing his teeth, being very careful with the
loose one at the front. Sometimes, if he brushed too
vigorously, a bristle would get in between the gum and
the base of the tooth. That always hurt, and then he got
into trouble because any kind of pain made him vomit.
Even the thought of pain made Hal feel a little dizzy. He
braced the tooth from the rear with a fingertip, and gave
it a feather-flick with the brush. Satisified he had done all
that could reasonably be expected for a tooth due to fall
out anyway, he left the bathroom.
On the way down to the lounge he had to pass the
open door of his own bedroom. He hesitated just before
reaching it, his throat going dry as the dark oblong
loomed. The new rhyme, bought in school that day from
Billy Seuphor for a quarter, sprang to his mind. In spite
of the guarantees Billy had issued while negotiating a
price, the words seemed to have lost their magic. But
they were all he had, and he breathed them reverently.

'One, two, three,
You can't touch me,
In the name of Jay Cee,
You can't touch ME!'

He sprang past the bedroom door on the last word and
sped downstairs, his slippered feet barely touching the
treads. At the door of the lounge he paused to steady his
breathing, and heard Miss Palgrave's clear melodic voice.
'I know Hal is highly strung, Colonel Farrell,' she was
saying, 'but that's the whole point. I'm certain that being
in the junior drama group would help him relax. After
all, acting has been found to be an excellent therapy
for. . .'
'Therapy!' His father laughed indignantly. 'My son isn't
a disturbed child.'
'I'm not implying that he is, Colonel. It's just that he
has such an aptitude for the language, and it would be a
good outlet for him. You know that his grades in verbal
comprehension and reading are far beyond. . .'
'Hal can talk and read as much as he wants at home.'
'But it would be nice for Hal to get out a little more,'
Hal's mother said, and his heart leapt with excitement.
perhaps he would be allowed to go to the social centre
after all.
'We appreciate your interest, Miss Palgrave,' his father
continued unheedingly, 'but we really do feel that we
understand our son's special problems better than - with
all due respect - someone who sees him only for an hour
a day.'
Sensing the finality in his father's voice, Hal realized
he would have to go in immediately if he wanted to say
goodnight while Miss Palgrave was still present. He
opened the door. The three adults were seated around the
circular coffee table. Miss Palgrave turned her burnished
brown head towards Hal, smiling, looking strangely dif-
ferent when not in the surroundings of the classroom.
'I . . . I'm going to bed now,' Hal said, remaining at
the threshold.
'This is early for you.' His father looked up from
stirring his coffee, and his mother froze in the act of
reaching for a wedge of cake, a look of concern on her
pale plump face. 'Feeling tired?'
'Yes. Well. . . goodnight.'
'Just a minute, big fellow.' His father laughed, eyes
blazing white in the darkness of his face. 'Where's our
goodnight kiss?'
Hal knew his plan had failed. He went to his mother
first. She held him briefly against the massive slopes of
her bosom, and he could feel the steady movement of her
jaws, the munching which never seemed to cease, night
or day. Her lips were sticky and sweet when she kissed
him. He turned to his father, who hugged him with
ostentatious friendly roughness and rubbed his bristly
chin against Hal's cheek, while he whispered the dread
words.
'They're up there waiting for you - I saw them.'
Hal glanced at his mother, silently, pleading with her
to have heard, but she was selecting another piec~ of
cake with frowning concentration. Long ago, he remem-
bered, she seemed to believe him when he told what his
father said and there had been terrifying rows, but now
her mind was always somewhere else and he had ceased
to try.
'Goodnight, Hal,' Miss Pal grave beamed, and he
wished she would take him away with her. 'See you
bright and early on Monday morning.'
'Goodnight.'
Hal left the room slowly and went up the stairs to his
room. It was in darkness except for the faint reflected
light from the landing. He chanted his new rhyme once,
ran to the bed and scrambled under the sheets. The room
looked quite cosy in the dim orange glow, but he strained
his ears and in a few seconds heard a well-recognized
sound from below - that of his father opening the lounge
door and crossing the hall to the light switches. The
landing light clicked out and the room filled up with
darkness. Hal made no sound, nor did he try to turn a
bedroom light - he was only too familiar with the punish-
ment given to boys who were afraid of the dark.
He pulled the sheets over his head, and presently heard
the faint hissing, bubbling sound which told him they
were standing around his bed - the headless men and
women who came out of the walls.
They were real, Hal knew. Standing all around him,
their robes drenched with blood, gurgling through severed
pipes in their necks. The first time they had ever come
out of the walls he had thought it was a nightmare, and
had told his father, seeking reassurance. His father's face
had become grim, accusing. Boys who were born in sin,
he had said, are surrounded by the headless people every
night, as a punishment for evil. Ever since then, Hal had
been able to hear them, even when he was wide awake,
and he knew he must be very evil indeed.
One afternoon when the war news was bad - the first
Syccan robomb ever to slip through the Federation's flux
screens had exploded a planet - his father had drunk a
lot, and had kissed Hal and told him, through harsh sobs,
that the headless men and women were only a bad dream.
But by then Hal knew differently. . .
Curled up in a lonely ball beneath the sheets, he felt
the grisly figures crowd round his bed once again - and
once again he survived by summoning his protector.
Mack had a peculiarly equivocal position in Hal's
scheme of existence. He was as real as the headless
people, yet unreal because usually he could be summoned
or banished at will; he was a separate person, yet at times
he and Hal were the same person. Mack was black-
haired, solemn, immensely powerful, with arms almost as



thick as Hal's body, and he was afraid of nothing in the
whole wide universe, not even the Syccans, not even the
nightly visitors.
The headless people might come into the room, but
they would never try to do anything more than that
because Hal/Mack carried a strange fat-barrelled rifle
which never missed its target, even when he was running,
firing one-handed, trailing Hal to safety with the other.
Coming as close to contentment as had ever been
possible for him, Hal drifted off into a restless sleep.

He was awakened by the touch of cold fingers encircling
his chest, lifting him upwards from the warmth of his
bed.
'I've changed my mind,' Hal shouted, struggling. 'I
don't want any.'
'Any what?'
'Ice. . .' Hal stopped speaking as he recognized his
mother's voice. Feeling vaguely that he had just escaped
a hideous danger, he allowed her to get him into his
special underpants and the rest of his clothes, while he
yawned, blinked, and tried to emerge chrysalis-like into
yet another day. 'I'll do my shoes - you make them too
loose.'
'All right, son, but you must hurry.'
Hearing the strain in his mother's voice, he looked
closely at her. The plump face was paler than ever and
her eyes were red. Suddenly alert, he looked at the clock
and saw it was barely past six.
'Lissa?'
'Yes, son?'
'What's the matter?'
'Nothing. I . . . Your Aunt Bethia's coming here to
stay for a while. Isn't that nice?'
'I guess so,' Hal said uncertainly. Bethia was four years
his senior, and he resented her having a grown-up title
like aunt. He met her about once a year on average and
was not particularly anxious to see her again. His sus-
picion that something was wrong persisted. 'Is Gramps
Grenoble coming as well?'
'No.' The word was almost a sob, and suddenly he
knew what was wrong.
'Is he dead?'
'Yes.'
Hal thought of the distant, incomprehensible figure of
his grandfather. 'Who killed him?'
'Hal!' His mother shook his arm. 'People can die
without anybody killing them.'
'Can they?' Hal considered the idea briefly, then dis-
missed it as one of the obvious untruths upon which the
whole structure of adult society seemed to be based. Life,
he knew, was endless unless some force brought it to a
close. Some dark force. He allowed himself to be led
downstairs and to be given hot milk and a dish of proties.
There was no sign of his father. A few minutes later an
army limousine driven by a sleepy-eyed soldier arrived at
the house. Hal got into the back with his mother and
they were driven away without having to give any instruc-
tions, a fact which filled Hal with a sense of machinery in
motion, the cumbersome and senseless machinery of
the grown-up world. He nestled against his mother and
watched the moon-fragments fading from the dawn sky
as the vehicle skimmed northwards towards The Centre,
between sea and land.
Suddenly Mack was with him, or he was Mack - Hal
was not sure which - and he was surprised, because there
was no danger. Then he recalled that Mack had been
appearing more often lately, and each time there had



been a feeling of urgency, of vast works left undone. It
was from Mack that he had learned to call his mother
Lissa - that was how he thought of her when he was Hall
Mack - but he used the name infrequently because it
seemed to startle and upset her.
This time Mack's presence was stronger than ever
before, and Hal did what Dr Schroter had suggested
during his session at the clinic. He tried to get closer to
Mack, to sink inside his mind completely until he would
know Mack's thoughts as though they were his own. The
first thing he discovered was that Mack saw Hat's mother
in a different way. She was much thinner than in real life,
and her eyes were alive, and she could laugh. There was
also a suggestion of love more voluptuous than Hal could
fathom.
Fascinated, he submerged himself even further. He
began to feel Mack's controlled strength flowing in his
own veins. Mental horizons wavered and retreated, taking
in the panoply of mysteries and wonders that made up the
universe. Hal/Mack breathed unsteadily with excitement,
reaching further and further. He saw spaceships flying on
black wings, men locked in combat, then there came
memories of pain, and Hal retreated, cringing. . .
The familiar sensation of hot urine bathing his loins
returned him to reality. He fought against the flood for a
moment, then surrendered to it, shuddering as the tension
drained out of his body.
'Oh, Hal!' His mother's voice was anxious. 'Are you
upsetting yourself again?'
'Leave me alone - I'm all right.' He knew she would
discover the lie when she examined his absorbent under-
clothing, but anything was better than another hopeless
discussion. His mother's approach to every problem was
to offer it a piece of candy. Hal grinned as he felt her
reach into the pocket of her coat.
'Here, son. Would you like a chocolate bar? You didn't
have time for a proper breakfast.'
'Thanks.' He took the gift mechanically.
'Your grandfather was old and sick, Hal. I don't want
you to upset yourself at . . .'
'I'm not upset.' Hal was vehement. 'I couldn't care
less. Huh!'
'Hal! Don't speak like that!'
'But it's true. If he was so old and sick, he's far
better. . .'
'That'll do!'
Hal shrugged as the chocolate bar was snatched from
his unresisting fingers, and a moment later he heard a
furtive crackling as his mother undid its wrappings. He
pressed himself down into the limousine's thick upholstery
and closed his eyes.

The driver took them unhesitatingly to the rear of the big
hexagonal house and parked at the entrance to the private
suite. Many lights were on and the house was filled with
activity in spite of the earliness of the hour. Hal got out
and stood trembling in the cool searching breeze while
his mother spoke to the driver in a low voice, making
obscure arrangements. He disliked the Administrator's
Residence intensely, and normally used every trick he
knew to avoid being taken to it.
'Mrs Farrell.' One of the men who worked for his
grandfather appeared in the doorway. 'First of all may I
offer the condolences of myself and the rest of the staff?'
'Thank you. My husband said it was. . .'
'Sudden. Very. In his sleep, and there was no pain.
I've sent a tachygram to President Gough and we're
expecting. . .'
Hal tuned the conversation out. He followed the grown-
ups into the house, permitted himself to be installed in a
large armchair and inspected with varying degrees of
curiosity and kindness by more of the nameless men,
while his mother went away with others. Nobody asked
him for his coat, and he deduced that his visit to ,the big
house was going to be a short one. His mother came back
to him and knelt at the chair, looking at him with tired
eyes.
'Your father's got someone to stay with you and Bethia
at home, so he's going to take you back to the house
now.'
Hal nodded and got down from the chair. He headed
for the door by which he had come in but his mother
steered him in the opposite direction, towards the main
entrance. As far as Hal could remember, he had never
been in the main entrance hall, and was surprised to
discover how familiar it looked to him. Familiar, yet
dreadful. Premonition stirred in his abdomen as he looked
around the marble colonnade.
A door at the rear of the hall opened and his Aunt
Bethia came through, carrying a small case. To Hal she
looked too tall and self-composed for a ten-year-old. Her
hair was drawn back severely and it looked as smooth as
ice. She came towards him and her eyes shone with a
devouring luminosity. He decided he did not want her to
stay with him.
'Hello, Bethia.' Hallistened to the words issuing from
his own mouth with amazement - it had been Mack
speaking. He backed away from Bethia, evading his
mother's grasp. A door opened beside him and his father
appeared, a tall figure almost filling the frame. Nothing
was visible in the small dark room beyond, except for a
table with cigarette burns around the edges. Hal felt his
bladder open again. He whimpered and darted through
the tall main doorway, out into the thick grey air, and
saw the yellow petal-shape of his father's car sitting at the
bottom of the steps. He flew to it in a dizzy swoop, got
in, slammed the door and huddled in the rear seat.
Fragmented images wheeled through his mind as he
listened to his father making taut apologies to the group
of nameless men. A minute later his father opened the
door, let Bethia in and then got into the front seat.
'That was just great,' his father breathed as he spun up
the engine. His eyes blazed whitely in the rearview
mirror. 'What a pantomime! What came over you, you
little worm?'
Hal remained silent while his expended bladder
underwent painful contractions. He glanced sideways at
Bethia, expecting her to complete his humiliation, but
her face was compassionate.
'Won't talk, eh?' His father's lips barely moved as he
spoke. 'We'll see how you feel after a day in bed.'
Hal nodded in defiant mock-eagerness, but his heart
quailed as he thought of a successive day and night in the
darkened room, ringed by patiently bubbling figures in
drenched robes. He covered his face. One tortured sob
had ripped upwards in his throat when he felt Bethia's
hand slip between the buttons of his coat. He froze into
stillness as the delicate fingers worked past his shirt to
reach the skin of his stomach and crept downwards,
sliding without hesitation under the sopping plastic pants.
There was a moment of pressure and the fingers with-
drew, leaving behind them a glow of strength and warm
security. Hal turned in the seat and stared wordlessly at
the perfect, dreaming profile.
By the time the car reached his home he was asleep.


3

While waiting for breakfast, Hal pulled the current news-
sheet from the fax machine. The sheet was so damp that
it clung round his fingers. He had pressed the 'repair call'
button on the machine before remembering that its radio
bleeper, which would have summoned a maintenance
man, was inoperative, and that it had become just about
impossible to get service anyway. Carrying the sheet
carefully, he went back into the kitchen, spread it on the
table and settled down to read.
War intelligence and related topics filled almost the
entire page. It seemed to Hal that the news had been
getting steadily worse during the whole eighteen years of
his life, but lately there had been a new pessimism
abroad. When he went into The Centre to his Bible class
he could feel the despair flowing through the streets like
a dark wind.
There was no concealing the fact that the sixty-five-
year conflict was drawing to a close, and that mankind
was marked down for extinction. The Federation's propa-
ganda machine still functioned, in a negative fashion, so
that nobody knew how many colonies were left out of the
original hundred, but the exact number was unimportant.
Ordinary people could read their fate in portents which
had been ancient in the days of Homer - food was less
varied and more expensive, machine parts were scarce or
unobtainable, extremists of every kind acquired large
followings overnight and flourished. As life expectancy
decreased, the birth rate soared.

Hal disliked reading war news. It caused his feeling
of blind urgency, of vast works left undone, to reach
unbearable proportions; yet he continually scanned the
sheets and watched telecasts. Names of strange planets
would send sprays of brilliant memory shards swirling in
his mind. Sometimes the shards would coalesce into
complete pictures of alien landscapes - always his haunt-
ing sense of exigency would grow greater and greater
until he felt his skull would explode with the pressure.
Yet the nature of what was demanded of him remained
obscure. He was driven to try joining the army, but was
rejected for multiple reasons including poor eyesight and
being hopelessly underweight for his six-foot-two frame.
For a time the Bible classes had looked like providing
a reliable signpost, especially when he had discovered
that beneath the exterior certitude of his tutors there
lurked doubt and fear. Hal knew his soul was immortal,
but could advance no theology to support his faith, and
eventually his calm indifference to death - as an abstract
concept or hard fact, in particular or in general - turned
everyone connected with the classes away from him.
('You're an emotional cripple,' one rosy-cheeked and
usually phlegmatic minister had assured him, eyes icing
over with disgust. 'The reason you aren't afraid to die is
that you've never been alive.')
Collecting his wandering thoughts, Hal concentrated
on the fresh sheet. The lead story carried the news that
another city had been obliterated - the third inside the
year. With the contraction of the Federation's frontiers it
had been practicable to intensify the neutron flux screens
which made it impossible for any nuclear device to
pass without a spontaneous detonation. But the Syccans
apparently were learning to evade the defences - one
theory was that their latest robombs were, in effect,
space-going ore-refining factories which produced their
first batches of fissionable material just as they arrived on
target.
The second story was that General Malan had been
summarily dismissed from his job as head of Project
Talkback, which employed half-a-million men and had an
annual budget running into billions. Malan was the latest
in a long succession of men who had tackled one of the
most dismally unproductive missions of the war - that of
exchanging even a single thought with the Syccans. The
aliens' tachyonic transmissions were monitored as tho-
roughly as possible, and their language had long ago been
analysed and deciphered. Along the Federation's frontier
were huge transmitters which beamed messages in the
Syccan language deep into alien territory, but there had
never been a reply of any kind. At this late and desperate
stage of the war it was felt that achieving any vestige of
communication would be a significant breakthrough - but
the enemy remained utterly enigmatic.
Interrogation of prisoners was impossible, because,
obeying the same ferocious ethic which prompted them
to destroy captured humans to the last infant, the Syccans
had never allowed themselves to be taken alive. A large
part of Talkback's budget went into developing means of
capturing Syccans alive, but no technique yet tried had
been successful. A few aliens with no signs of physical
damage had been taken, and were found to be just as
dead as all the others - apparently their control of their
superbly developed nervous systems was such that they
could simply will themselves to stop living.
Hal was turning the news-sheet over when the
uncomfortable emptiness in his stomach reminded him
that breakfast was unusually late. He went to the refriger-
ator and looked in, but there was nothing available which
did not require cooking. Wishing that the age of servants
had never passed, or that Bethia was home from univer-
sity on vacation, he wandered around the kitchen for
several minutes. The idea of preparing something for
himself occurred once or twice, but his profound distaste
for any kind of work led him to dismiss it immediately.
Finally he went to the foot of the stairs and called his
mother. There was no reply. He frowned at his watch - it
was mid-morning - and sprinted up the stairs, his long
loosely-jointed legs taking the steps four at a time.
Opening the door of her darkened room, he halted on
the threshold and sniffed the air suspiciously, an incred-
ible idea dawning in his mind. When his eyes had adjusted
to the gloom he made out his mother's arms, pale still
flesh, against the deeper colours of the bedspread. Hal
approached the bed and saw the plastic sedative tube on
the floor. He picked it up and knew by its weight that it
was empty.
'Mother?' He turned on a light and knelt by the bed.
'Lissa?'
'Hal.' Her voice seemed to come from far away. 'Let
me sleep, Hal.'
'I can't let you die.'
Her eyes turned to him, but they were inert, shuttered
by drugs. 'Die? This is something you can do for. . . The
first time in your. . .' She gave up the struggle, and her
eyes closed.
Hal got to his feet. 'I'm going to call father at the
base.'
'Your father is . . .' The ghost of an emotion flitted
across the once-beautiful face which had drowned in fat.
'Your father isn't. . .'
'Tell me, Lissa.'
Hal waited, pressing his knuckles against his trembling
lips, but she had slipped away from him. He touched her
forehead. It was dewy cold. He picked up the telephone,
then set it down and left the room. In his own bedroom
he lifted another extension and punched out the number
of his father's office at the base, but rang off before he
got a reply. To let Lissa die? Of her own free will? No
more of the endless struggle between her and his father;
no more of the mutual destruction, like huge reptiles
locked together and mortally torn by each other's jaws,
staring at each other with curious but uncomprehending
eyes; no more afternoons of self-defiling gluttony behind
shaded windows, of bitter nights with his father whisper-
ing that she should be pleased he had never turned to
other women. . .
Hal sat down at his bureau, opened a folder and started
arranging and shuffling small cards covered with his fine
backhand writing. They were notes for the book he had
begun to write earlier in the year, after dropping out of
college. The Miracle of Inspiration, as it was tentatively
titled, was playing a dual role in his life. Writing it seemed
the best approximation yet of the achingly elusive mission
with which he had been entrusted - and selling it would be
the first step towards the financial independence without
which he would not be able to escape his father.
In the house's utter silence minute air currents seemed
to hiss in his ears like waves storming a beach, and the
words on the cards were alien symbols, devoid of mean-
ing. Taking a deep, quavering breath, he forced himself
to concentrate, shutting out the image of her dark hair
swirling. The cards slid and clicked in his fingers.
'William Blake, 1757-1827, English poet and artist.
Among Blake's final utterances, as he lay dying, was that
poetry w~ a gift from elsewhere - even in his last hours
he kept reaching for pencil and paper - when his wife
asked him to rest he cried, "But it is not mine; it is not
mine".'

'John Keats, 1795-1827, English lyric poet - said of his
description of Apollo in his third book of Hyperion, that
it arrived by chance or magic - ''as if it were something
given to me" - admitted that he did not recognize the
beauty of the expressions until after they were on paper -
struck with astonishment, for they seemed to be the work
of another person.'
'Viktor Elkan, 2142-2238, Martian mathematician and
writer - said of his famous tachyonic mode transform-
ations, "The math isn't mine. It doesn't belong to any
other man either, but I can take no credit. The figures
appeared behind my eyes and I threw them on to paper
in a frenzy. When I had finished I was weak and covered
with sweat, not from the effort of creation, but from my
fear that the symbols would be taken away from me again
before I could copy them down."
'For further enquiry: Robert Louis Stevenson and the
"Brownies" (little people) he claimed did all his creative
work for him - Mozart ("Nor do I have in my imagination
the parts successively, but I hear them as it were, all at
once" - Kekule and the benzene molecule - Oelgado's
instantaneous conception of light sculpture.'
An hour had passed when Hal laid the cards aside and
put a sheet of paper into his typewriter. The great truth
he planned to extract from his researches seemed closer
to him than ever before. He could sense its nearness, its
imminence. A bright luminary rising. His fingers hovered
over the machine keys as a vast pre-orgasmic tension
built up within him, his breathing became shallow and
rapid, his heart lapsed into a lumping unsteady rhythm.
He watched in fascination as his fingers dipped towards
the keys.



'Mellissa!' His father's voice, from the landing, was
like a grenade exploding.
Hal had not even heard him enter the house. He
jumped to his feet, numb with regret as the inner light
faded and fled. The chair fell behind him, and a second
later the bedroom door opened. Gervaise Farrell came
in, his brown face almost black in places from the shadow-
beard which the most careful shaving could not erase.
His gaze fastening on Hal for a moment, then moved
away.
'Where's your mother?'
'In bed,' Hal said stonily. He tried to add something,
but the right words were difficult to find, and before he
could speak his father vanished from the doorway, lips
working in silent profanity. Hal waited without moving.
The door opened again, and this time his father came
right into the room and across to the bureau. Hal was
astouned to see that a lacquer of tears had brought the
whites of his eyes to near-fluorescence.
'She's dead. Your mother's dead.'
'Dad, I . . .' Hal struggled to force the words out, but
his throat refused to respond. As always when a personal
encounter put him under stress, a whirling confusion
scattered his powers of thought, organic valves opened
and the skin of his cheeks began to heat up. He tried to
hold back the warmly rising tide, but within a second his
face was on fire, pulsing painfully.
'What's the. . . ?' His father came even closer. 'You
know.'
'Dad, I . . . I wanted . . .'
'Why didn't you do something? Why didn't you call
me? Somebody? Anybody?' His father walked quickly to
the door, but paused to look back. 'You useless great
bastard,' he said with a level stare of disgust, and went
out, pulling the door closed.
'She wanted to die,' Hal screamed after him, shocked
at the discordant childishness of his own voice, but unable
to control it as the words tumbled out. 'She wanted to get
away from you.'
There was a long period of silence and Hal began to
think his father had gone on down the stairs. Then he
noticed that the door was opening again, slowly, inch by
inch. He backed away instinctively. Gervaise Farrell's
face appeared in the opening, and muscles around his
mouth were white with strain, like those of a flyer in a
high-gee turn, dragging the lips into a ghastly downward
curve.
'You knew. . .' The words were metal bars snapping,
'. . . before she died.'
His father came towards him on rigid legs, hands
reaching stiffly with clawed fingers. Hal looked around
for a means of escape, but he was hemmed into a corner.
He cringed back and then, moaning with desperation,
hurled himself at the advancing figure, long arms whirling.
His father took the blows without even blinking. One of
his hands gathered the lapels of Hal's jacket, and the
other thudded into his face, the first of a series of
measured, ritualistic blows with which Gervaise Farrell
sought to cleanse himself.
It seemed an eternity before Hal was able to escape
into unconsciousness.


4

The first direct attack on Mnemosyne came within a year
of Lissa's death.
A million-ton spaceship came storming in from the
depths of space at an incredible 30,000 times the velocity
of light - twice the top speed ever to be attained by a
Federation vessel. The cri ss-crossing fans of the planet's
tachyonic radar picked up the Syccan ship when it was
ten light years out. Under normal circumstance there
would have been ample reaction time, but the fantastic
frightening speed of the intruder meant that it would
cross the planet's o~bit in only twenty-eight minutes.
The ship represented something new in Syccan strategy.
However those in command of the translunar defence
system were able to reach a number of conclusions
immediately. Its direction - 1800 from the bearing of
Sycca - indicated that the Federation had been englobed;
and its astounding speed, which could only have been
built up over a distance of hundreds of light years, showed
that the encasing enemy screen was no flimsy affair. The
speed also meant that the ship was either automated or
operated by a suicide crew - a reaction mass carrier
entering the 30,OOOC speed zone would be unable to shed
enough velocity to normalize itself with the galactic drift
and thus reach a base.
Finally, at the rate of one light year every 2.8 minutes it
would be impossible for the Syccans to use any known
kind of armament - the ship itself had to be the weapon.
A computer check confirmed that it would intersect the
Cerulean orbit in the precise instant in which the planet
would be occupying the same space, so no armament
would be required. A million tons of matter colliding
with the planet, touching a moon-fragment, or even
grazing the atmosphere at 30,OOOC would convert a sub-
stantial proportion of its mass to energy - enough to
wither all six planets in the Cerulean system.
Only a handful of worlds in the Federation had the
ability to survive such an attack. Cerulea lived because,
in the brief time available, she was able to detonate more
than eight thousand nuclear devices in the alien ship's
path, creating a gaseous barrier many times denser than
the interstellar medium through which it had been travel-
ling. The eroding ship smeared nuclear fire across two
light years before her power units failed. She tried to
lapse from the tachyonic mode into relativistic flight, and
vanished into the galaxy's distant past.
On Cerulea itself, the civilian population was com-
pletely unaware of what had happened - laggard light
would take over a year to paint the sky with the alien's
death trail - but in the military city of the base there was
feverish activity as the implications of the attack were
considered. There were two possibilities - neither of
them pleasant to contemplate. Either the Syccans had
pinpointed Cerulea as the planning centre for the conduct
of the war; or blind chance had led them to test their new
weapon in, from the human point of view, the worst
possible place. The latter possibility was scarcely more
encouraging than the first, because the very fact of
Cerulea's survival proclaimed it to be a vital target.

The sound of his father getting up during the night and
leaving for the base gave Hal his initial inkling that there
had been grave developments. He raised himself on one
elbow, put on a light and held the clock close to his face,
forcing his eyes to a blurry focus. The time was a little
after three. He lay back, now wide awake, and listened
to the patient drumming of the sea against the cliffs below
the villa. His spectacles were on a dresser at the other
side of the room and there was nothing he wanted to
read anyway, so he let his mind rove out. In The Centre
itself and in all the quiet hamlets along the coast men,
women and children would be asleep, sailing their dream-
ships on the glassy dark fides of night, heedless of the
waves measuring their lives. There was the great enigma
- that the brevity of a man's life did not drive him into
continuous swarming activity. The ability to surrender
gladly to sleep, the death of each day's life, was one of
the best intimations of immortality that Hal could con-
ceive. But, if man's spirit was immortal, what was the
purpose of the transient glimmer of physical existence?
A hundred years of life, ten years, one year - measured
against the eternities to come, one span was as good as
the other; yet there was pain in the thought of Syccan
warriors stalking Mnemosyne, visiting death on all the
men and women and pearly-faced children. Could it be
that some aspect of physical life transcended all other
considerations? Evolution, perhaps. The counter-entropic
drive towards higher and higher degrees of organization,
leading. . . leading. . . Hat's breathing grew shallow
and his heart pounded massively as he felt his yearning
mind reach for the concept that, somehow, was going to
provide justification for his whole life.
Hal Farrell closed his eyes.

The beautiful spallation flowers blossom against the back-
ground of space, which runs, shivers and spins with a
thousand colours, of which the visible spectrum covers

only a minute fraction. And the mother-mass drifts all
around; vast, awesome, eternal. . .
In the sun-blazing entity that is the super-egon, a
thousand identity-images coalesce and intermingle con-
tinuously. Thoughts - prismatic crystals, diamond-sharp -
flash across the surface of the gestalt mind.
The prime instrument may be lost to us.
That cannot be permitted.
Tavernor must be translated to the conscious level
immediately.
It is slightly premature - a postponement of another
five years would be preferable in the interest of physical
compatibility.
There is insufficient time. We shall act now.
Agreed. We shall act now.
The spallation flowers continue to flicker, blossom and
fade, and proton sprays swirling through galactic tides of
electromagnetic radiation stain the surrounding space
with a million different, nameless colours.

Mack Tavernor opened his eyes.



5

Tavernor pushed back the sheets and got out of bed.
Lifting the spectacles from the dresser, he put them on
and went to stand before the room's full-length mirror.
He knew exactly what he looked like - Hal's memories
were his memories too - yet he felt the need to assess the
body in which he found himself, to reorientate spirit and
flesh. The mirror showed a tall, narrow-shouldered figure
with lank hair and a long, nervous face. His chest was
slightly concave and his limbs had minimal muscular
development, the elbows and knees standing out like
knots in rope.
As the image in the glass blinked back at him and
moved its hands in response to his, Tavernor felt himself
overwhelmed by a sense of awe, and of his own inad-
equacy. What was he supposed to do now?
Twenty years had passed since his 'death'. Twenty
years! The time lapse had been so great, and there was so
much to be done. He realized, belatedly, that he had not
understood the mechanics of the super-egon's proposal.
In his mind had been a notion that his complete identity
would somehow have been transferred instantaneously, if
not into the brain of a newly-born baby, at least into that
of Hal as a child.
But perhaps it had been necessary to wait until the
brain had become sufficiently convolute, until the central
and peripheral nervous systems were sufficiently complex.
And, in any case, what could a child have done? What
was a youth of nineteen going to do now? How was he to

convince the hard-pressed generals of COMsac that their
single faint hope of defeating the Syccans lay in abandon-
ing the butterfly ship? That the insubstantial maws of the
interstellar ramjets were feeding on men's immortal souls?
Tavernor's legs suddenly felt weak. He sat on the edge
of the bed and tried to control the trembling in his limbs.
As an egon he had accepted the concepts and experiences
of the egon plane with little more than a cool intellectual
wonderment, but in the body of an under-developed boy
the knowledge was almost more than he could handle. It
was all too. . . immense. He held both hands in front of
his face and willed the fingers to stop their twitching. The
nervous movement continued unabated and he slowly
realized that gaining mastery of this frail skittish body
was going to be a difficult and perhaps impossible task.
In his previous life he had at times been dimly aware of
his good luck in having a powerful, healthy and apparently-
nerveless physique; he now knew he had never appreci-
ated the difficulties with which some others lived. But
was this uncontrollable phrenesis normal? He reached
into Hal's childhood, played the spotlight over a series of
grim tableaux and got his answer. The screaming chaos in
his nervous system grew worse as he saw, in the distorting
mirror of Hal's memory, the characters who had shaped
his life twenty years earlier. Gervaise Farrell - cold,
frightening father-image, dispensing his fury in precisely
measured doses. Lissa - dominated, self-destructive eater,
allowing her flame to gutter into extinction. Bethia - now
in her early twenties. . .
The thought of Bethia introduced the first note of
calm. Hal's memories told him she was resident at the
University of Cerulea, doing post-graduate research in
psycho-history. She had grown into a tall, too-perfect
beauty with direct searching eyes which had always made



Hal uncomfortable. Yet she sometimes revealed traces of
the childish Bethia - the fairy princess with healing magic
in her fingers and eyes fixed on strange horizons - and
at these times Hal loved her with a shy hopelessness.
Tavernor's own memories of Bethia as an even younger
child reinforced Hal's picture of her as someone to whom
the ordinary laws of nature and human behaviour hardly
applied. If he could speak the truth to anybody, it would
be Bethia.
Gradually Tavernor was able to bring his nerves under
control. He put out the light, lay back on the bed and
stared out through the window at the jewelled rivers of
Mnemosyne's night sky until sleep had claimed him.

Opening his eyes in the light of morning, Tavernor
experienced a wild moment of disorientation. The blur-
riness in the details of the ceiling tiles above the bed
reminded him that he now needed spectacles, and the
universe clicked into place around him. He got up
immediately and went to the bathroom. The house felt
empty - obviously something important had cropped up
to detain Farrell at the base all night.
While washing, he examined himself again in the
mirror, fascinated by the contrast between his new body
and the one he had known only a few hours earlier,
subjective time. The experiences of the egon plane had
an air of timelessness about them which suggested they
might all have taken place in microseconds, and his
nineteen years of 'storage' in Hal's unconscious mind had
passed like a dream. He forced his shoulders back and
began the measured Yoga breathing which would expand
his rib cage and in time regulate his nerves.
As he was dressing a pang of weakness brought slight
giddiness, which alarmed him until he realized it was

simply that his new body was hungry. He went downstairs
to the kitchen and put some syntheggs and yea-steaks
into a pan, and while they were heating went to the fax
machine for a news-sheet. Again, the sheet was soggy
with moisture. He screwed it into a ball, removed the
service panel from the machine and, after a moment's
study, adjusted the recirculation rate of the developing
vapour. A minute later he dialled for another sheet. It
came out crisp and dry. He carried it into the kitchen just
as the light on the pan's timer flashed that the food was
ready.
Tavernor found the high-protein food difficult to get
down, even with copious drafts of milk - Hal had lived
mainly on cereals - but he persisted. The subsequent
queasiness in his stomach he dispelled with a few minutes
Pranayama, timing the breaths to suit the inadequate
respiratory system he had inherited. This body would
never be as hardy as the former, but he was going to pay
it the same attention he would give to any inefficient
machine.
He was dropping his used plate and cup into the
disposer when a car swept past the kitchen window. A
few minutes later Gervaise Farrell walked into the
kitchen. His eyes were heavy-lidded and his chin was
blue-black with stubble. Tavernor eyed him curiously,
surprised at how little hatred or any other emotion he felt
- his one glimpse of eternity had changed many things.
'Fix me some coffee.' Fa~rell's gaze slid away from
Tavernor as he spoke.
'All right.' Tavernor switched on the coffee machine as
the other man sat down. 'Rough night?'
Farrell was examining the news-sheet. 'Don't tell me
the fax machine's been serviced?'
'Ah. . . yes.'



'Christ! It just shows you.' He spoke bitterly, shaking
his head. 'They do it now!'
'What's wrong with now?' Tavernor felt apprehensive.
'Hurry up with that coffee.'
'Any new development in the war situation?'
Farrell looked surprised at the question, and in a
strange way, almost grateful. 'You're waking up to it, are
you? I expect you're planning to beat the Syccans off
with a Testament.'
'They're in this region then?'
Farrell hesitated, then shrugged. 'The situation, gen-
eral, is that we seem to be surrounded.'
'Seem to be?' Tavernor felt his body begin its discor-
dant yammering as the possibility that he was too late
occurred to him.
'It's supposed to be a secret, but the panic's about to
start anyway. . . Last week they tried to hit us with one
of those big boilers of theirs. It was doing thirty-thousand-
cee and it took most of our translunar stockpile to stop
it.' Farrellleaned back in his seat and smiled unpleasantly.
'What's your analysis of the situation, general?'
Tavernor was too shocked to notice the sarcasm.
'Either they already knew about the COMsac head-
quarters being here - or we've just advertised it.'
'Very good.' Farrell looked up with something
approaching real warmth, but the puzzlement in his eyes
had grown more noticeable. 'And what's the next move?'
'Mass evacuation. Withdraw to the home stars.'
'That would take time, and there's a complicating
factor. The Syccans have made big strides in the sup-
pression of tachyon emissions, but we've been picking up
stray echoes all around the planet. The particles have
shed most of their energy and their speeds are approach-
ing infinity, so we're not certain, but there could be a

shell of Syccan ships right round us. Three fleets are on
their way right now but it'll take six days for them to get
here from the frontier, so if the Syccans are already here
. . .' Farrell suddenly looked weary, losing interest in
playing father and son.
'So we go out and look for them ourselves.' Tavernor
poured a cup of coffee and set it on the table.
'We can't look for them. At stellar distances the only
useful way to see is with tachyons, and if the Syccans
have learned how to suppress those, or to absorb the
particles emitted by our tachyonic radar lamps. . .'
Tavernor was appalled, both by what Farrell was saying
and all the implications behind the words. 'It seems to
me,' he said slowly, 'that COMsac is getting tired - and
scared.'
'That's what you think, is it, tiger?' Farrell sipped his
coffee and pushed it away disgustedly.
Tavernor began to .!eply, then felt his cheeks start to
flame, a legacy from Hal, putting him - by some quirk of
biological logic - at a disadvantage. Trying to control the
flow of blood to his face caused the throbbing warmth to
increase. He hurried out of the kitchen, followed by
Farrell's laugh, and went to the phone in his bedroom.
The number of the University of Cerulea was stored in
Hal's memory, so he punched it in quickly while his
cheeks cooled down. After several transfers, a woman in
the Psychohistory Department informed him that Dr
Bethia Grenoble would not be in the university until the
afternoon, as she was reading in The Centre's Eisenhower
Library. Tavernor had to look up the library's number
and when he finally got through to Bethia his composure
had returned.
'Bethia Grenoble here.' Her voice sounded cool, faintly
annoyed.



'Hello, Bethia.' Tavernor floundered temporarily as he
remembered that the adult voice he heard belonged to
the sleeping child whose bedroom he had shared, as far
as he was concerned, only a day earlier. 'Hello, this is
. . . Hal.'
'Oh, Hal.' The annoyance grew more pronounced.
'What did you want?'
'I must talk to you. It's important.'
There was a long pause. 'Must it be today?'
'Yes.'
'Well, what's it about?'
'Not on the phone.' Tavernor checked his voice from
ascending into an excited squawk. 'I'd like to call and see
you.'
Bethia sighed audibly. 'Very well, Hal. I'm returning
to the university after lunch. Supposing you call at the
library around two and we drive back - we can talk in the
car. All right?'
'That's fine.'
The phone clicked dismissively before he had a chance
to say anything further. He went downstairs and found
Farrell sprawled on a chair in the lounge, half-asleep, a
bottle of gin on the table beside him.
Tavernor coughed. 'Will you be using the car this
afternoon?'
'Why?'
'I'd like to borrow it.'
'Go ahead,' Farrell said carelessly. 'Wreck it if you
want.' His eyes had a heavy, nostalgic look, as if peering
into the past, or into a future which was never going to
exist.

It was a bright but slightly oppressive afternoon. Objects
and buildings seemed to have acquired potentiality, to

shine with a stored light of their own, and the air
was restless, scurrying aimlessly. White plumes of cloud
trailing across the sky told of fast-moving winds at higher
altitudes.
Tavernor drove carefully with the top down, and let his
senses have full rein. Even with the inferior vision of his
new eyes, he was seeing Mnemosyne as he had never
seen it before. The perceptions of his body were basically
the same as those he had always known, yet it was
possible to interpret all their signals in a slightly different
manner. Particularly noticeable was the way in which
certain colours - the green of a patch of grass or the ice-
blue reflections of the sky in a window - would trigger
seemingly unrelated emotional responses and fleeting
memory-images. The difference he realized, was that
between a poet and a mechanic.
As the car neared The Centre he noticed the way in
which the old city had scarcely altered in twenty years,
whereas the military base had sprawled out on all sides.
Its double fence was visible in several places near the
coastal road long before he reached the city. The anony-
mous buildings beyond the fence gleamed with electro-
static newness - and somehow contrived to look shabby
at the same time. Tavernor guessed this was another
manifestation of his new senses.
He reached the Eisenhower Library at exactly two,
just as Bethia was coming down the steps, and slid the
car into place at the kerb. She gave him the ghost of a
smile, in which he glimpsed her as a child, and called to
him in a confident melodious voice.
.Why you're on time, Hal- are you ill or something?'
Tavernor shook his head. He was discovering that
having inherited all of Hal's memories was not the same



thing as knowing all about Hal. There were no recollec-
tions of habitual unpunctuality, for example, yet Bethia's
attitude left no doubt she regarded him as being un-
dependable - which did not help things. While he was
thinking, Bethia walked right round the car to his door,
opened it and waved him away from the wheel. He
looked up at her, puzzled.
'Well, move over,' she said impatiently.
'I'm driving,' he stated, and was relieved to hear the
words emerge without any trace of the nervous glissando
to which his present voice was prone.
Bethia shrugged. 'All right - if you want to risk
wrecking the car. I'll sit in back, though. It's safer.' She
opened the door and got in behind him.
Tavernor almost laughed. Farrell had jibed about dam-
aging the vehicle too, but Hal's thought-picture of himself
held nothing to suggest he was a bad driver. There were
a few memories of unlucky collisions, all of them most
definitely caused by other people's carelessness. The car
was of the turbine-driven, wheeled type which Tavernor
preferred to ground-effect machines, because of their
more precise control. He swept it smoothly out into the
traffic flow, matching velocities effortlessly, turned south
on to the main boulevard along the bay and accelerated
to high cruise, controlling the big machine with the precise
certitude possible only when the driver understands the
functions and performance limits of every component.
The exhibition was intended to modify Bethia's opinion
of him, and to give him time to get used to her metamor-
phosis into disturbing womanhood. Also, there was the
problem of what he was going to say. How could he get
anyone to believe the story he had to tell? Looking
"round him as he drove, Tavernor knew with one half of
his mind that the space between Mnemosyne's surface
and the moon-shell was filled with egons, an insubstantial
frog-spawn of racial consciousness; but the other half
found the concept too bizarre for acceptance. And he
had been there - unless it was all a delusion. He jerked
his mind away from an avenue of thought which could
lead only to madness.
'Very well, Hal,' Bethia said behind him. 'I'm
impressed. Have you been taking lessons from a racing
driver?'
'No.'
'It seems that way, but if you don't slow down we'll be
out at the university before we have our little talk.'
'Of course.' Tavernor eased up on the throttle. They
had left The Centre behind and now the southbound
highway was cutting inland from the line of the cliffs. He
saw a branch road ahead on the left, swung down it for a
short distance and parked the car on yellow turf with its
nose pointing towards the ocean.
'This wasn't part of the deal' Bethia spoke alertly. 'I've
work to do this afternoon.'
She was wearing a simple lime-green tunic dress which
would have reminded him of the one he had seen on her
as a three-year-old child, except that it was stretched taut
on a maturing body which combined femininity with a
look of superb physical fitness. Her hair was like polished
oak, grained with parallel strands of old gold and chest-
nut, and her eyes watched him with an amiable contempt
which he found dismaying. He was unsure if his conster-
nation sprang wholly from fears of not being able to
convince her, or if there was a trace of wounded male
pride in it.
'Just listen to what I've to say - it won't take long to
reach the university.'
'Let's have it then.'



'Bethia.' He turned in the seat and tried to hold
her with the sheer force of his concentration. 'Do you
remember a man called Mack Tavernor?'
She looked away from him on the instant. 'Why did
you bring me here?'
'Do you remember him?'
'Yes.'
'Well, that's what I have to talk to you about.' Tavernor
was filled with a desperate conviction she would laugh in
his face. 'You see, I . . .' He broke off as he realized that
Bethia's fascinated eyes were staring at something behind
him, something out over the ocean where there should be
nothing but empty sky. Almost unwillingly, he turned his
head.
Spanning the sky from horizon to near zenith; limned
in the metallic radiance of a moon seen in daytime; far
out, yet so inconceivably vast that its hulk was crossed
again and again by intervening cloud layers; was the
gnarled, dreadful shape of a Syccan warship.

6

There were a few seconds in which Tavernor thought he
might die.
His heart seemed to cease beating entirely as shock
blasted through his inherited nervous system, and the
horizon heaved drunkenly, then with a massive effort his
own will took command. He sat absolutely still, taking
deep measured breaths, as the apparition moved silently
across the sky, blotted out the sun, and then vanished
below the plateau to the west.
'Oh, God,' Bethia breathed. 'What was that?'
'A Syccan warship.' Tavernor's lips felt numb, but his
mind was seething with questions. How could it be?
Where were the planet's defensive forces? An enemy
ship coming within a light year of Mnemosyne, let alone
into the atmosphere, should have been vaporized in
seconds. Bad though the war situation was, he would
have staked his life that no intruder could have penetrated
the moon-shell, unless after months of attrition during
which entire fleets would have been lost. Yet here was a
Syccan ship tunnelling through the upper atmosphere as
calmly as if on one of its home worlds.
'What does it mean?'
'That's what I'd like to know.' He looked north towards
The Centre and the encompassing base. The clustered
rectangles of distant buildings shone quietly in the after-
noon sun, and there was no sign of unusual activity. No
sign, he suddenly realized, of any movement at all - not
even the swarming glint of traffic on the freeways. He put
his hand out and turned the ignition key of the car. It
rotated with its normal springy resistance, but there was
no response from the vehicle. Along the instrument panel
all the dials were dead. He had an urge to check one of
the car's batteries by shorting the terminals, but a grim
intuition made the test unnecessary.
'Look, Hal!' Bethia sounded bewildered rather than
afraid. 'There! I can see more of them.'
Looking upwards, he saw a number of silver flecks in
the sky, seemingly at orbital height, then his eyes detected
other movement in lower levels of the air. Criss-crossing
vapour trails sprang into being against the washed blue
which was visible between the clouds. The trails were
generated by rapidly descending specks, which meant
that the passing warship must have sowed the sky with
landing craft. An invasion, he thought, but why bother?
This was no sneak raid like the one in which his first
parents had died - so why not simply bomb the planet, or
dust it, or irradiate it, or take one of the other relatively
simple steps which would erase all traces of life?
'Get out of the car,' he said. 'We'll have to walk.'
'Walk? But why?'
'The car won't go any more.' He got out and opened
the rear door for her. 'Look back there on the highway -
no cars are moving.'
He pointed at the road, where four automobiles were
visible. The hoods of three were raised and men were
leaning into the engine compartments. Beside one of the
cars two small children were jumping excitedly, pointing
into the sky, and Tavernor felt a fierce pang of anguish.
Death for them, he knew, would be the beginning of
their real lives, but they would scream in terror and pain
before that door opened, and he was filled with a futile
longing for some way to spare them. Hatred of the
Syccans, main-spring of his previous life, flared inside
him.
'I don't understand.' Bethia was leaning over the back
of the front seat, reaching for the ignition key.
'Come on.' He caught her wrist and his stringy frame
somehow found the strength to drag her out of the car.
She stumbled as he pushed her towards the road.
'Hal! What are you doing?'
'Save your breath.' He took her arm and began walking
quickly. 'How do you think the Syccans were able to sail
in like that? They've developed a new toy - something
which. . . a field perhaps. . . which inhibits electron
transfer in metals. That's why there was no warning and
no defence. We've nothing heavier than a machine gun
which doesn't depend on electricity.'
'But is it possible to . . . ?'
'It must be possible - they've done it, haven't they?
There was a time when we would have been first. . .'
Tavernor was unable to get the words out, to express
what humanity had doen to itself with the invention of
the butterfly ship. As they passed the car with the brightly-
clad children beside it, he called to the parents, advising
them to quit the car, head for the trees at the base of the
plateau and keep going south. The father's face emerged
from under the yawning hood, stared blankly and disap-
peared again. Tavernor averted his eyes from the chil-
dren's wondering faces and kept walking. There was no
time to stay and argue.
'Look, what makes you think you know so much?'
Bethia demanded. 'Where are we going anyway?'
'Back to the villa. It's only about two miles from here
and Farrell . . . my father. . . has three or four rifles.'
'What good will they do?' She looked flushed and
indignant, unable to appreciate the significance of what
was happening. Tavernor almost became angry with her,
then remembered it was impossible for a civilian in her
position to visualize Syccan warriors in action. She had
never walked through the cities and villages left in their
wake.
'The rifles will provide us with food if we manage to
get far enough south to escape being dusted.' Again the
thought obtruded - why had the whole area not been
purged of human life already? - but Bethia was breaking
away from him, her face pale with fury.
'I'm not going into any forest with you, Hal Farrell. If
you think. . .' She stopped speaking as he slapped her
on the upper arm and pushed her along. Turning on one
heel she launched herself at him. As their bodies locked,
he realized at once that she was actually the stronger of
the two, but the combat training he had received in
another lifetime guided his hands. He caught her wrist,
slid automatically into a submission hold and pushed her
forward again.
'I'm sorry about this, Bethia, but I do know what I'm
doing.'
She glanced at him in silent hatred and he felt a
perverse flicker of satisfaction. He had graduated from
being an object of contempt to one worthy of hatred. As
they walked, the air began to rumble with distant sonic
booms. He looked back and saw the black gnat-like
shapes of the Syccan landing craft slicing in across The
Centre. The city and military base lay helpless beneath
the aircraft which must have been specially designed to
! operate within the inhibiting field. Some of them
appeared to be fanning out towards landing sites around
the city. Ignoring the labouring of his lungs, Tavernor
urged Bethia to move even faster.
By the time they had reached the white villa set
between the road and the cliffs he was sweating freely
and his legs were trying to fold under him. Cursing his
physical weakness, he pushed Bethia into the porch and
fumbled the door open. Farrell met them in the hall with
a sports rifle in his hand. His dark features looked
strangely immobile.
'I'm taking a rifle and some food,' Tavernor snapped.
'Be my guest,' Farrell said in a blurred voice, standing
to one side. Passing him, Tavernor detected the smell of
gin. He went into the lounge, took a rifle and four packs
of cartridges from the already-open gun cabinet and went
back to the hall.
'. . . seems to have gone mad,' Bethia was saying. She
looked deliberately at Tavernor. 'I'd much rather stay
here until we see what's going to happen.'
'You may as well - there isn't much point in trying to
run,' Farrell replied.
'We're running,' Tavernor said. 'It's our only chance.'
'I'm staying.' Bethia moved closer to Farrell.
'Believe me, Bethia, we've got to get out of here,'
Tavernor said urgently. 'You don't know what these
monsters are like. They'll go through every building with
a fine comb.'
Farrell laughed. 'Listen to the combat veteran! What
do you know about these things, sonny boy?'
'I know you'd better pick a different rifle if you're
planning to do any shooting. That one fires surface-
burning slugs ignited by an electrical charge - and electri-
cal charges are a thing of the past as far as we're
concerned.'
Farrell raised the ridge with one hand, pointed it at the
front door and squeezed the trigger. It clicked faintly. He
gave Tavernor a hard look and brushed past him into the
lounge.



'We'll pick up food somewhere else. Let's go, Bethia.'
Tavernor opened the door and motioned her to go out.
She shook her head. He snatched her wrist and pushed
her in front of him through the porch and part-way down
the drive. There was a familiar metallic sound from
behind him - that of a rifle bolt being operated. He
turned slowly.
'How about this one, general? Will it work all right?'
Farrell had another rifle, and it was pointed at Tavernor's
face.
'You're being ridiculous,' Tavernor said carefully. He
pushed Bethia away from his side. 'You don't need a rifle
to stop me, do you, father?' He stressed the final word in
full knowledge of its connotations for the other man.
White flares of incredulity blazed in Farrell's eyes. He set
his rifle against the wall with exaggerated care, and came
at Tavernor, his hands grasping eagerly. Tavernor let his
own rifle fall to one side, and instinctively dropped into
the fighting crouch taught him in basic training, synthesis
and optimization of all the traditional unarmed combat
modes of Earth.
His face stiff with joy, Farrell walked straight in scorn-
ing to defend himself. Tavernor stopped him with chops
to the heart and throat. Thanks to the imperfect co-
ordination of Hal's body, neither blow landed exactly as
he had intended it to, but they were good en:J~gh to
bring FarrelI to his knees.
FarrelI shook his head disbelievingly, staring at the
ground. 'What... do you think you're. . .?' He
straightened up, massaging his throat, and came in again.
'Ihis time he was more wary, obviously determined to
take advantage of his superior strength. He circled Tav-
ernor once, his eyes accusing, he drove forward. Tavernor
received the weight of the charge and rolled under it,
guiding Farrell's body to hit the ground in a way that
exploded the breath from his lungs. The same movement
brought Tavernor on top again. His thumbs had found
their own way to the major blood vessels in Farrell's
throat and his mind was pulsing with images of hatred -
headless figures crowding around a frightened child's bed,
tall Kris Shelby and the others who had died in the forest,
an automatic pistol sledging cavernous holes through his
own chest, Lissa crushed like a moth. . .
'What is this?' Farrell mumbled almost sleepily, as they
lay face-to-face in the intimacy of combat. 'Hal? Hal?'
'I'm not Hal,' Tavernor whispered savagely. 'The name
is Mack Tavernor.'
Farrell's glazing eyes widened with shock.
'Stop it, Hal!' Bethia's voice was shrill. 'You're killing
him.'
Tavernor had forgotten about her. Looking up, he saw
the panic in her face and released his hold on Farrell's
throat, suddenly appalled. He got to his feet and was
lifting Farrell upright when a deafening banshee wail
filled the air.
The ground shook and the sky darkened as a Syccan
landing craft materialized over the road in front of the
house under full deceleration, its braking jets throwing
up clouds of earth and stones which thudded all around
the group in the driveway.
Tavernor snatched his rifle as they ran for the cover of
the house. He grabbed Farrell's rifle from the porch and
slammed the door. The roar of the jets cut off abruptly,
with a burbling cough, and the house filled with a
stupefied silence punctuated by the sound of windows
being shattered by bounding stones. Moving like a man
in a dream, as though trying to run through clear syrup,
Tavernor went to the lounge door and looked obliquely
through the french windows. The dust clouds were settling
outside and he could discern figures of unearthly tallness
leaping from the open ports of the aircraft.
He turned back into the hall. Farrell was looking at
him in dull bafflement; and Bethia seemed not to be
aware of anything. She was standing absolutely still, lips
slightly apart, and her eyes were unfocused. Shock,
Tavernor thought, briefly glad of anything which would
make the next few minutes easier for her. He pulled
Farrell into the lounge and pushed a rifle into his hands.
Something moved just outside the window.
He spun and saw the elongated black-gleaming figure
of a Syccan peering in. Mist spraying from the nozzle
mounted above its brain-case immediately blurred the
window, but Tavernor - for the first time in many years -
glimpsed the wide-set eyes, the two breathing mouths
fluttering in the shoulders, and the vertically-slitted eating
mouth on the central abdomen. He fired from the waist
and the window blossomed into angular petals centred on
the Syccan's head. The alien fell backwards - but not
before it had lobbed a metallic object through the
window.
Tavernor took one step towards the angrily-hissing
object, with the intention of hurling it out before it could
detonate, but he never reached it.
The room spun around him once and then he was lying
with his face pressed into a rug, unable to move. Close
by, he heard Bethia and Farrell going down. He tried to
turn his head and found even that slight movement
was impossible. The gas from the grenade had brought
complete paralysis as a prelude to death. As the bitter
knowledge of failure - on every level of everything he
had attempted - welled through him. Tavernor tried to
close his eyes, but the lids remained open. He waited to
die.
A few seconds later shadows moved across the section
of floor he could see, and he heard the french windows
being burst open. Four-toed black feet with traces of
webbing between the splayed bones appeared in his field
of view, and he felt himself being lifted to a standing
position. Two Syccans were holding him upright, and
others were dragging Bethia and Farrell in through the
door. The mist from the overhead nozzles attached to
tanks on their backs billowed over everything in the
room, filling it with a foetid humidity, condensing on
and lubricating the exposed, palpitating lungs and other
organs of the aliens. Mewing and clicking sounds came
from their shoulder-mouths as they worked, and their
weapons harnesses rang metallically.
Tavernor watched Bethia's face as she and Farrell were
ranged against another wall, wondering what was going
on behind the beautiful numb face. He at least had seen
the Syccans at close quarters before, although never
under conditions which made their loathsome alienness
so apparent. Each was over seven feet tall and roughly
human in general configuration, except that a second pair
of arms sprouted from the mid-section. The secondary
arms were greatly atrophied and were usually folded
across the obscene vertical gash of the eating-mouth.
Musculation was light and largely confined to the triple-
segmented working-arms and legs. The vital organs were
externally positioned around the central spine, black and
pale blue rubbery sacs which heaved and glistened wetly
in the spray which simulated the Syccan atmosphere. And
the aliens stank - with the sweet rancidity which Tavernor
had never been able to purge from his nostrils.
Three more Syccans came in through the french win-
dows, and one part of his mind noticed they were not
armed. The mewling voices of the aliens grew louder,
then faded away. Standing in the centre of the room, the
three newcomers examined the humans with smeared
eyes, which swivelled independently on the flat and other-
wise featureless braincases. A valve in the central alien's
lower gut popped loudly, spattering the other two with
grey-and-white excrement which was gradually washed
away by their sprays, and the silence resumed. With the
silence came a cessation of all movement. For a full
minute the Syccans' lungs and shoulder fronds froze,
transforming them into black monoliths hewn by patient
ram.
Finally, one of the aliens pointed at Farrell with a
black-webbed hand, and the warriors holding him upright
moved away. Farrell fell face downwards. One of the
warriors unhooked a straight knife from its harness, put
the point at the base of the prostrate man's skull and
bore down on it, severing the spine. Both then moved
away, unconcernedly, leaving puddles on the floor where
their feet had been.
Tavernor raged silently at the Syccans, cursing them
for making such a prolonged ritual of the act of killing.
He realized, belatedly, that the single shot he had fired
ought to have been put to better use. I'm sorry, Bethia,
he thought, as he saw one of the unarmed aliens gesture
towards her. Please forgive me.
Then something incredible happened.
Gently, and with every appearance of tenderness, the
two warriors holding Bethia lifted her rigid body and
carried it out through the windows towards their landing
craft. Tavernor tried to cry out, but his paralysed throat
made no sound. Watching Bethia disappear from his
sight, he was so astounded that he was hardly aware of
what was happening when he too was lifted and carried
out of the room.
After seventy years of warfare - in which they had
slaughtered more than two billion human beings - the
Syccans were taking their first two prisoners.


7

There were times when Tavernor watched Bethia's nude
body with a hunger which arose not from sexuality, but
from pure loneliness.
He would awaken out of a restless sleep to a world of
meaningless dim shapes, crawling darkness and the sound
of rain. But sometimes there would be a distant square of
yellow radiance. And Bethia would move across it, slowly
and abstractedly, the perfection of her nakedness trans-
lated to blurred highlights and areas of shadow by the
streaming glass which intervened. Diminished by perspec-
tive, she might have been the languid inhabitant of an
aquarium, or even an abstract pattern, a mobile, reflec-
tions of a candle flame stirring in the heart of a crystal.
At these times Tavernor would put on his own light,
but succeeded only in increasing his loneliness, for Bethia
seemed never to look his way. . .

The Syccan ship was still in something close to its
maximum-mass configuration.
As the voyage progressed the forward sections would
be dismantled, reduced to billets and fed to the mass
converters in the stern. The rate of self-consumption
would be greatly increased if the flight profile proved to
be irregular, involving retardations which took the ship
below the critical .6C speed zone. With a total mass of a
million tons or more, moving faster than light, even
the slightest change of course involved a prodigious
expenditure of precious reaction mass. For this reason

the Syccan astrogators chose to fly in vast loxodromic
curves. And where rhumb-line flights had to be modified
they employed, as far as was practicable, stellar gravitic
fields; sometimes ghosting past beyond the creeping, ice-
covered worlds on the outermost limits of planetary
systems, at others crossing orbit after orbit to swing
within a few million miles of solar infernos.
In the early days of his imprisonment Tavernor had
constantly to remind himself of these facts because he
had no sensory evidence of movement. From what he
could see of it, the section of ship where he had been
housed was a circular room, some two-hundred yards
across and fifty feet high. Artificial rain swirled almost
continuously from overhead ducts and was collected,
presumably for recirculation, by channels in the deck.
And visible through the shifting blankets of moisture were
the watchful spindle-shapes of the Syccans, sometimes
feverishly active, sometimes eerily immobile, nightmares
realized in oosidian.
The glass cube in which he lived was about twenty feet
across. It was heated, and had a bed, table and chair, and
toilet facilities. All these items had been designed for
human use, but were of alien manufacture. There was
one other artifact in the cube - a micro library which
appeared to be of human origin although he could find
no nameplate. The library's cassettes contained enough
reading matter to last him - uneasy thought - a full
human lifespan.
Bethia lived in an identical cube, slightly less than a
hundred yards away. The existence of the cubes had
given Tavernor almost a severe a shock as the realization
that he and Bethia were being taken alive. While they
were in transit between the villa and the mother-ship he
had convinced himself it was a temporary aberration on
the part of the Syccans to delay the death blows. But the
glass cells had obviously been prepared in advance. The
aliens had known they were going to take two prisoners
long before they attacked the planet. Now the ship was
transporting them to a destination which could only be in
Syccan-controlled space - but why?
Why?'
The question thudded in Tavernor's brain as he lay on
the featureless plastic rectangle of the bed, waiting for
the meal he thought of as lunch. His watch had been
removed with his clothing, and there were no clocks in
the cubes, but the meal was the middle one of the three
brought to him during each light/darkness cycle. A sound
at the cube's entrance told him the food had arrived. He
got to his feet and went to the inner door. The outer one
had just swung open and a Syccan was in the enclosed
space, setting his tray of food on the floor. Highlights
moved with oily slowness on the alien's complicated body,
and the breathing-mouths fluttered in its shoulders.
Tavernor examined the creature through the glass,
satisfying himself it was the same one which had brought
all his other meals. It stood facing him for a moment,
blurred eyes staring down into his from the flat braincase,
and as before he felt a sense of awe. This biped with the
opaque lifeless eyes was a member of the species which
had proved itself superior to humanity in the way that
men best understood - force of technological arms. But
by the same token it had displayed its inferiority, because
Man - past history regardless - would not have extermi-
nated the only intelligent neighbour to have been granted
him by a grudging continuum. The despair embodied in
von Hoerner's modified table was so all-enveloping that
men would have accepted the Syccan and striven for
cultural intercourse. Project Talkback's goal had been
to exchange a single thought, and Tavernor suddenly
understood the desperate necessity. If the Syccan on the
other side of the glass would make a sign, one gesture of
recognition of Tavernor as a fellow-voyager in space-
time, then. . .
The alien turned and walked away with the peculiar
camel-like gait caused by the complicated action of its
triple-segmented legs. Watching it closely, Tavernor saw
the twisting scar on the back of its left working-arm, and
knew it was the same one as before. He nodded in
satisfaction. No man before him had had the chance to
study a live Syccan, and although the results of his modest
experiments would never be known on Earth, the mental
activity helped keep him from going insane.
When the inner door swung open he carried the tray to
the table and pulled the trigger-tabs on the self-heating
cans. All labels had been removed from the containers
but they were obviously of human manufacture, and he
knew they contained a well-balanced meal. The Syccans
seemed well aware of human nutritional requirements,
and - ironically - the body he had taken over from Hal
was now in better health than ever before. Constant
abdominal breathing had expanded his rib cage; adequate
protein supplies and careful exercise were beginning to
strengthen his muscles, although they showed little sign
of development as yet.
While the cans were heating he turned and looked
across the channelled, rain-soaked deck towards Bethia's
cell. Her meal had arrived, but the procedure there was
different. As usual, three Syccans had gone right into the
cube and were clustered around the bed. The first time it
had happened, Tavernor had bled his fingers trying to
force open his door and go to her aid. But then the truth
had dawned - the Syccans were forcing her to eat. At a
distance it was impossible for him to tell if she was
positively refusing food, or simply had lost interest in
eating.
He watched impassively as the curious mime was
enacted all over again. Bethia had not been herself since
the moment of the Syccan landing when, apparently, she
was shocked into a withdrawal condition. It was a fairly
natural reaction for a sensitive woman, yet she reminded
him forcibly of the three-year-old Bethia - the strange
precocious child who so easily lapsed into trance-like
states in which she would float like thistledown, with
light-blinded eyes. A thorough search of Hal's stored
memories indicated that the adult Bethia had no history
of such withdrawals, so it seemed she could be regressing,
retreating through time. The theory was the best that
Tavernor's limited knowledge of psychology could prod-
uce, but he found it vaguely unsatisfactory. Bethia, from
what he knew of her, had an uncommonly high degree of
mental resilience; and there was something else about
that mystical communion, something elusive and disturb-
ing . . .
The lid of a food container popped open, signifying
that its contents were ready to eat. Tavernor took his
gaze away from the water-blurred tableau in Bethia's cell
and began his meal. As he ate, he studied his own cube
for perhaps the hundredth time. It was a fairly complex
piece of engineering. A power cable was connected to
the underside of one edge, and from there a thinner lead
ran up to a box-like unit on the roof. The unit appeared
to reduce the humidity and increase the oxygen content
of the Syccan air, feeding the modified mixture into his
cell by way of ceiling louvres. Both the inner and outer
doors were power-operated, controlled from an unseen
source. Tavernor had examined them closely during his

first hours in the cell, but he had not been able to discover
what force held them in place, and they were strong
enough to be escape-proof.
When the food was finished he carried the tray and the
four empty cans to the entrance and set them on the floor
between the two doors. He stacked the cans at one side
of the tray and slide the topmost one outwards until it
was on the point of toppling, then went back and sat on
the cube's single chair. A few minutes later the inner
door swung shut, the outer one opened and the Syccan
emerged from the mists. It stooped to lift the tray and
the precariously balanced can fell to the floor. The alie.n
set the tray down again, retrieved the can and moved off
without looking into the cube.
Tavernor stroked his chin thoughtfully and lay down
on the bed. He had no idea what the other Syccans were
like, but the one which brought his food was - by human
standards - none too bright. It had fallen into his little
trap with the cans five times in succession. The Syccans
undoubtedly did not measure intelligence in the same
way as a human but the ability to learn quickly from
experience was, in Tavernor's estimation, bound to be
one of its vital ingredients. He considered the possibility
that his captors were determinedly evaluating his own
intellect in the context of the nonsense with the cans, and
wondered what they would make of him. It was the old
trouble with cultural first contacts - no matter what object
the explorer pointed at he risked being given the word
for finger.
On the other hand, the average Syccan might well be a
near-moron, for all that was known about the race. There
was no real need for their intelligence to be distributed as
evenly as among humans - some kinds of society would
function most efficiently if they were composed of mind-
less serfs guided by a few brilliant demagogues. The
Syccans could be like that - a finely honed blade for the
destruction of all other forms of life. Perhaps that was
the key to their behaviour. Could it be that they were
dedicated not only to the extermination of humanity,
but to ridding the universe of every sentient being but
themselves? Psychosis on a cosmic scale?
Tavernor moved restlessly on the bed. If the hypothesis
were correct - was Man very much different to Syccan in
his ultimate ambitions? Cosmo-biologists, or those of
them who were optimistic about the Terran civilization's
chances of survival, had estimated that even one spacefar-
ing culture could spread right through the Milky Way in a
time much shorter than the age of the galaxy, setting up
colonies of colonies of colonies as had been the case in
the Mediterranean in classical times. No matter how he
tried, Tavernor was unable to be objective about the
concept - if one life form was going to best ride the galaxy
he would prefer it to be Man. A Syccan would prefer it
to be Syccan. So who was psychotic? All that any intelli-
gent being could do was back its own kind to the hilt,
against all corners, believing implicitly in its own destiny

Hating the Syccans more than ever, Tavernor escaped
from the logical corner he had painted himself into by
trying to sleep. Without the comfort of bed coverings,
sleeping was not easy and his loneliness returned. It was
at times like these that he remembered the brief spell on
the egon plane. His parents and Lissa and Shelby were
alive there, but he had not tried to find them - it had not
seemed all that important to the cool impersonal mind of
an egon. There shall be no marriage, he thought sleepily,
nor giving in marriage.

The huge ship made landfall, or its orbital equivalent, on
the twenty-third day of the flight. Two days earlier
Tavernor had experienced a momentary queasiness as
the vessel on quitting the tachyonic mode, had switched
over from simulated retardation, which provided weight,
to real retardation. He had been watching carefully for
any change in routine which would indicate that the ship
had completed its voyage. The first sign came when a
group of aliens surrounded his cube and attached lashing
fitments to the corners. They anchored it to the deck,
and roughly an hour later the ship entered the free fall
condition.
In orbit around a Syccan planet - the thought gave
Tavernor a gloomy satisfaction. No matter what the aliens
were planning to do with him, it would at least mean an
end to the silent boredom of life in a glassy cell. At
first he had avoided using the micro library - feeling it
represented a subtle acceptance of the Syccans' plans for
him - but he had discovered he could not sustain the
early sense of wonder and alarm which had fully occupied
his mind. He had begun reading at random, taking no
interest in the content, using the words as a means to
avoid thought. The brown, dimly-seen reaches of the ship
beyond the walls, disturbed here and there by the black
ambling shapes of aliens, could have been the bottom of
a warm muddy sea. Exercising his slowly developing body
filled in several hours a day, but in the end he had come
to rely on the library.
Now the long wait was at an end. He swam backwards
and forwards across his cube, waving to Bethia each time
he thought she was looking his way. She remained seated
at the anchored table and gave no answering signal.
Tavernor's concern for her deepened. The distance and
the distorting effect of the streaming glass made it difficult
to be certain, but she seemed to have lost weight on
the journey. She rarely moved, and on the infrequent
occasions when she crossed her cell there was an
uncharacteristic listlessness in her step.
After a few minutes in free fall the aliens returned,
propelling themselves with easy skill in the weightless
condition, and attached a flexible wire somewhere
beneath the base of Tavernor's cube. They ran insulated
power cables from what appeared to be a portable gener-
ator, disconnected the existing leads from the cube's
environment-control units and replaced them with the
new lines. As they did so, the doors of the cell clicked,
quivered uncertainly for a moment, then sprang back
rigidly into line.
The flexible wire suddenly sprang into tautness and the
cell moved slowly towards a white light wavering in the
distance, still lashed to its section of deck. Bethia's cell
moved in the same direction, surrounded by slowly drift-
ing silhouettes. The light ahead grew brighter and Tav-
ernor realized it was a view port. His cube moved ahead
of Bethia's, passed through a constricting arch of metal
and halted in a tightly enclosed volume which he decided
was the hold of a shuttle craft. He swam as close to the
port as possible, ignoring the protest from his inexperi-
enced stomach, and looked out.
The Syccal} world was a featureless orb of blinding
whiteness, completely enveloped in cloud. He knew
immediately that from the surface of the hidden planet it
would be utterly impossible ever to see the stars. Day
would consist of a general brightening of the enveloping
vapours, and night would be a return to blackness unre-
leived by the points of celestial brilliance which had
caused primeval men to look upwards and wonder. Tav-
ernor felt a numb despair as the last vestige of his belief

in the superiority of Man to Syccan withered away. From
the springboard of Earth, getting into space had been
easy. The planet might have been designed for that
express purpose - with a transparent atmosphere to
display the treasures which lay waiting, a moon so large
that it was virtually another world hanging within an
astronomical stone's throw, other planets in easy tele-
scopic range to confirm the heady whispered promises of
the night sky.
But the Syccans had known nothing of those advan-
tages. For them there could have been only a blind
outward urge, or a calm determination to vindicate the
philosophical notion that, by the Law of Mediocrity, their
world could not be alone. Under the same circumstances,
Tavernor was certain, Man would still have been trapped
on the planet of his birth. He turned away from the port
and saw that Bethia's cube had been shunted to within a
few feet of his own. She was still at the table, bracing
herself between it and the chair. Her body looked thin.
He launched himself towards that side of his cell and the
movement caused Bethia to raise her head. Tavernor
found himself looking at the wan, tired faced of a
stranger. She eyed him impersonally for a moment, then
lowered her head, and the oak-coloured hair swirled
weightlessly around her shoulders.
'Bethia,' he shouted, searching for the right words.
'We still must live.'
The words echoed impotently in his glass prison and
pictures of Lissa sprang unbidden to his mind. He tried
pounding the wall and floated backwards from it, just as
the shuttle craft lurched and separated itself from the
mother-ship. It began decelerating almost immediately
and he sank to the floor, aware that Bethia had deliber-
ately shut him out. He lay on the bed and watched the



brilliant reflected light from the port shifting as the craft
selected its course. Drifting stars became visible and
presently he felt faint vibrations coming up through the
floor as the craft began resisting the pull of gravity. It
made a gentle low-gee descent until, quite abruptly, the
port darkened. The ship rocked as it lowered itself down
through mile after mile of gradually thickening cloud.
Tavernor almost failed to notice the final jolt which
told him they had touched down. He had just realized
why Bethia's spontaneous trances had the power to fill
him with brooding unease.
They reminded him of the way in which the black alien
forms of their captors would periodically freeze into
stillness, while their great blurred eyes fixed themselves
on other horizons.

8

The Syccan landing field was different from what Tav-
ernor had expected.
On the way down through the murky atmosphere the
light from the single porthole had diminished so steadily
he had been convinced the visibility would be close to
zero at ground level. But as the shuttle's cargo hatch
dropped away, he saw the cloud ceiling was several
hundred feet up and, in spite of parading curtains of rain, .
he could see for two or three miles. The concrete of the
field stretched away into the distance, and vehicles moved
among the upthrust hulls - a view surprisingly similar to a
hundred space terminals he had seen on Federation
planets. Beyond the concrete plain was a hint of foliage-
covered slopes reaching up into the clouds. They could
have been Iow hills or the beginning of a mountain range.
Closer to the shuttle a covered truck was waiting with
an entourage of Syccans, some of which were in warrior's
harness, while the others were completely naked. The
truck, too, could have been the product of a Federation
world. Tavernor's brain was seething with worry about
Bethia, but the engineer in him could not help studying
the different vehicles and their equipment, and noting
how the designers had reached the same solutions to the
universal problems as their Terran counterparts. The
waiting truck was particularly interesting. Its bed had two
square depressions ringed with locking devices - which
suggested it had been custom-built for transporting the
cubes from the shuttle. Tavernor filed the observation



away with others concerning the painstaking design of
the prison cells.
The Syccans wired the cubes to a winch in the interior
of the truck and went through the same procedure. of
reconnecting the environment-control units to a generator
at the front of the vehicle. Tavernor's bafflement
increased as he watched them. Analysis of samples of
the Syccan atmosphere found trapped in captured alien
equipment had shown Terran scientists that it was not a
good mixture for humans, but it could be breathed for a
week or more before undesirable symptoms would
appear. The Syccans were bound to have the same
information - after all, they could move freely on the
human-inhabited worlds - yet they continued to treat
their prisoners with an almost excessive solicitude which
Tavernor found distinctly unsettling.
With all the connections made, the cubes were drawn
into the truck as a crowd of aliens clustered around with
every appearance of animated interest. Bethia remained
slumped over her table, but Tavernor watched the black
figures with sombre eyes. When exited, the Syccans
were less prepossessing than ever - the secondary arms
unclasped themselves from the vertical gashes of the
eating-mouths and waved feebly, while grey-and-white
excrement spattered from their lower guts. Tavernor was
almost glad the thickness of the cube's walls prevented
him from hearing whatever kind sounds they were
making. But at the same time he was uncomfortably
aware that he was the alien on this rain-swept world.
Resisting the desire to shake his fist at them, he stared at
the Syccans until the closing door of the truck screened
them from his view.
The vehicle moved off and there followed a smooth
ride lasting about ten minutes. There was very little space

between the cubes and the windowless sides of the truck,
and no aliens were riding in the back with them. Tavernor
guessed it was the first time he had been beyond obser-
vation since his capture. He tried the doors of the cube,
found they were as immovable as before, then did his
best to attract Bethia's attention.
When he had been pounding on the wall for several
minutes she got up from the table and stood facing him
through the dewy glass, the highlights on her shoulders
and breasts, and the darker triangle of pubic hair, making
a misty composition of archetypal femininity. He waved
eagerly but she turned and walked unsteadily to the bed,
and he knew she had not even seen him. His concern for
her increased, and with it a sense of responsibility - he
had been the one who had made her flee to the villa, to
the exact spot where the Syccans were going to land in
search of prisoners. Had he not done so she would be
dead, as all the other inhabitants of Mnemosyne were
bound to be by this time, but death would have been an
escape to the egon plane, and preferable to what she
seemed to be going through now. Like Lissa, Bethia
appeared to have a latent weakness in her will to live.
She was wilting visibly, like an uprooted flower, under
the strain and the Syccans had not even revealed their
plans for what was left of her future.
Tavernor clenched his fist helplessly and paced his cell
until the truck gave a final shudder as its engines were
switched off. When the door was lowered he saw that the
journey had been uphill. The cloud ceiling was sagging
Iow overhead and vision was limited to a few hundred
yards of steep hillside spilling downwards on either side
of a massive windowless building. Its buttressed walls
were of mottled blue stone, and the structure was
moulded to the slope. At the elevated side, where the
truck had halted, it was only one storey high, but a
square opening in the wall revealed cavernous depths of
descending levels. The building looked uncompromisingly
functional, but Tavernor was unable to guess its purpose.
It could have been anything from a prison to a xenological
research station, Syccan-style.
The lowered door of the truck formed a platform which
was level with the bottom edge of the square opening in
the wall. Syccans appeared from the interior, entered the
truck and attached more wires to the undersides of the
cubes. Tavernor's was drawn out first and he felt his
heart lurch as the slow progress took him into the dimness
of the engimatic building. Now, at last, he was bound to
get an inkling of what the aliens' intentions were.
As his eyes adjusted to the poor illumination, he saw
that the cube was crawling across a broad bare floor. At
the far edge was a yawning emptiness, subdivided verti-
cally by massive metal columns. A high mesh fence ran
along the edge between the columns, and there were
rectangular patches here and there on the floor which
suggested that machines had recently been removed.
Tavernor wondered if the building was some kind of
workshop which had been converted. But converted for
what purpose? Was it that the Syccans, never before
having taken prisoners, had no facilities. . . ?
His gaze picked out two square depressions in the floor
ahead - depressions ringed with the now-familiar clamps
that were used to anchor the cubes. Between them was a
low wall from which dangled short power cables, and
Tavernor suddenly understood at least part of the
Syccans' plans.
He and Bethia were to be kept in this artificial cave for
an extended length of time - perhaps for the rest of their
lives.

He could think of no alternative reason for the aliens
going to such lengths to provide life-support systems and
obivously permanent installations. His mind maliciously
began spinning theories around the observed facts. Sup-
posing the Syccans wanted to keep a couple of members
of the vanquished human race for their records? As a
living exhibit? Supposing they wanted to study human
behaviour by starting a captive colony? He turned to
look at Bethia's cube. She was lying perfectly still on the
bed, apparently oblivious to the black figures silently
moving around her.
As he watched, his own cube jolted downwards into its
depression and hers was drawn out of sight behind the
central wall. Two aliens had begun securing the perimeter.
anchors before Tavernor realized that the wall had been
put there for the specific purpose of denying Bethia and
him the minimal comfort of seeing each other. Life, from
now on, was to consist of solitary silent days and nights in
a glass box, eating from cans, staring through the stream-
ing transparencies at nightmare shapes moving in the
gloom, not knowing if Bethia was alive or dead on the
other side of the wall. . . .
Hatred gouted up through Tavernor, knotting his
muscles, impelling him to take action where no action
could be taken. He leapt at the kneeling figures of the
Syccans and clawed the intervening glass, shattering his
nails - then he saw that the aliens were on the point of
connecting the cube to its new power supply. And the
last time they had done it the doors had quivered
momentarily.
He ran to the centre of the cube, spun just as the inner
door was giving a barely perceptible tremor, and threw
himself at it with all the speed his lanky frame could
muster. There was a sharp pain in his shoulder, a blow



on his unprotected chest from the outer door, and sud-
denly he was out among the looming, mewling spindle-
shapes of the Syccans.
The dimness erupted into movement all around him as
his lungs snatched at the chill humid air. An alien wrapped
itself around him and he chopped inwards with both
hands on the ballooning lungs. The alien slithered inertly
down him, and he realized it had not been a warrior or
its lungs would have been shielded by a harness. He
turned just as a warrior reached him, kicked upwards at
the clustered organs of its lower body, missed and went
off balance, expected the alien to take its chance either
to blast or stab him. Instead it grabbed for his arms,
giving him time to pull its legs out from under it. Tavernor
snatched its knife, evaded the grasping fingers, made a
backhanded swing at the face and ran.
A Syccan came for him with open arms and impaled
itself on the outthrust knife. The secondary arms beat
feebly at his wrist as the alien went down. He jumped
over it, beat his way between two more aliens, reached
the other cube and severed the power cables with a single
sweep of the knife. The jolt of current passing up the
blade seemed to propel him through the doors of Bethia's
cell. He turned, gasping, prepared to defend the doorway,
then discovered he was not being pursued. At the same
time came the realization that his progress through the
throng of Syccans had been a little too easy - not one had
struck an actual blow. It was as if they had been concerned
not to hurt him. . .'Mack!' Bethia's face was pale as she
raised herself on one elbow.
Tavernor ran to her. 'This is the last chance I'll get to
talk to you, Bethia, and there isn't much time.' He spoke
urgently as he knelt at the bed and took her hand. 'I . . .
it's important for you to go on living. Important to me. I
think the Syccans are planning to keep us alive. Alive,
Bethia, and 1 want you to promise me that you'll. . .' He
paused, hearing again in his mind the single word she had
uttered. 'What did you call me?'
'You are Mack Tavernor, aren't you?'
'How. . . how did you know?'
'I heard what you said to your father. . . and since
then. . . the old dreams I thought would never come
back. . . Is it all true, Mack?' Her eyes were alive, as he
had never seen them before. Her face was the face of
Bethia the child.
He nodded and pressed her cold fingers to his lips. 'I
was dead, Bethia. Believe me.'
'And there is a blinding white sun? A sun which
speaks?'
'There is. Some day we'll be part of that sun.'
'Mack!' Bethia sat up, and her fingers closed around
his with surprising strength. 'Get me out of this cell. I
must get away.'
Tavernor looked through the transparent wall. Some
of the Syccan were frozen into immobility, but others
were running through the ambient dimness.
'I don't know, Bethia. What chance is there? You
know we're on a Syccan world. . .' He stopped speaking,
overwhelmed by her wide, warm smile.
'You asked me to run away with you into a forest once
before, Mack,' she said vibrantly, and her eyes shone
with something that looked strangely like compassion.
'Now there's another forest only a hundred yards from us
- let's take what chance there is. No matter how small.'
Tavernor suddenly remembered how he had looked at
the infant Bethia and thought that the ability to produce
children like her was Man's ultimate justification - for
everything. The feeling returned again, exalting him, and



he learned what it was to fly far beyond all considerations
of individual life and death.
'All right,' he said gratefully. 'Let's go.'
He pulled Bethia to her feet and they ran to the doors.
More Syccans had ringed the cube, but he remembered
their curious reluctance to harm him earlier. And the
mist had clamped down further outside the building - if
they could get past the truck there might actually be a
prospect of getting into the surrounding forest. Gripping
the Syccan knife tightly, he burst through the doors and
speared into the wall of black bodies. They fell away
before him and the mirage of hope began to flicker crazily
in his head - then he felt Bethia's hand slip away from
his.
'I'm sorry, Mack,' she seemed to cry, and her pale
figure was fleeing in the opposite direction, weaving and
twisting, slipping through the grasp of black webbed
hands like wind-blown smoke.
'Bethia!' Tavernor shouted her name hoarsely as he
saw where she was heading, but already she was climbing
the high mesh fence with supernatural speed. She poised
for an instant on the top rail, a luminous crucifix, and
leaped into space.
Tavernor covered his face as he heard her body smash
on to the concrete floor far, far below.

Strangely, it was Tavernor who recovered first. The p'llpy
impact seemed to paralyse the Syccans - even the smeared
pupils of their great eyes ceased to move for a second.
Tavernor shouldered straight through them and ran for
the fence. The wire of the mesh cut into his feet as he
climbed, but he reached the top and leaned over the rail.
Bethia lay, like a crumpled handkerchief, at least fifty
feet-below, in the shadow of dark machines.

Tavernor stood up on the top rail and ran along it to
the nearest column, just as the Syccans reached the fence.
He threw his arms around the sweating metal flanges and
slid downwards within a few inches of his pursuers, but
on the outside of the wire. The intersection of floor and
column reduced his grip and he almost fell outwards,
saving himself only by letting go of the column and
gripping the bottom rail of the fence until his legs had
locked around the unseen metal below floor-level.
Syccans' fingers plucked at his through the mesh, and the
breathing-mouths in their shoulders mewed frantically.
He disengaged himself and slid downwards, unaware
of the column's rough edges tearing through his skin. On .
the lower floor he ran to Bethia and threw himself down
parallel to, but not touching, her broken body. Her face
was relaxing into the long sleep. He put his head on his
arms and a harsh, bitter sob tore his throat.
'Mack?' An infant's voice came from the bruised lips.
'I'm here, Bethia.'
'Stay with me, Mack. Don't let them. . . get me again
until there's no chance. . . of them bringing me back to
life.'
'But why, Bethia? Why did you do it?'
Her eyes opened, as if by a great effort, and her lips
moved slowly. He put his ear to her mouth and heard her
last painful breath shape itself into a single, incredible
sentence. When the Syccans reached him he was still
lying beside Bethia. His knife was somewhere on the
upper floor, but he defended the lifeless body with his
bare hands until a gas grenade burst at his feet. And as
consciousness fled, Bethia's last words pounded over and
over in his head like the oceans of her native Mnemosyne.
'l.m a new type of human being, Mack,' she had said,
'and it was vital for the Syccans to keep me alive.'

9

Many hours later, Tavernor's sewn and bandaged body
stirred slightly on the simple plastic bed within his glass
cell. He moaned faintly as his mind made the transition
from the deep inertia of drugged unconsciousness to the
enhanced receptiveness of normal sleep. Dream land-
scapes of impossible colours and complexities shimmered,
spun and shivered all around him.
A blinding white sun spoke with the voice of William
Ludlam.
'Well done, Mack Tavernor,' it said.
'Please,' he cried. 'I don't understand.'
'You will.'
A face appeared in the centre of the sun, beautiful,
child and woman at the same time. Bethia.
'Sleep well, Mack,' she said. 'You have other work
ahead of you.'
Tavernor willed himself towards her, egon-wise, but he
was locked into his physical body. 'Bethia?' he pleaded,
'why did you leave me alone?'
'Poor Mack - it was necessary. Others before me were
born to die, but they were premature - the Way could
not be opened.'
'The way?'
'Yes, Mack - I am the Way.' The glory of the egon-sun
burned around her. .
'I still don't understand.'
'Man has been incomplete. But he is on the way to
completion - now that the individual mind of a man on
the physical plane can communicate with the mother-
mass through me.'
'Through you!' Tavernor suddenly remembered the
veiled woman's face he had glimpsed during the aching
contacts between his egon existence and the shadow play
of proto-life. 'It was you who called me back - not Lissa.'
'That is so.'
'But if you could do that. . .'
'The ability was latent. My life on Mnemosyne was
nothing but an intermediate stage. I know now that its
only purpose was the evolution of a new kind of egon. I
was the first human being born with the potential to
develop an egon which has the integral power to com- .
municate with the living man. I am the Way.'
Bethia seemed to smile as Tavernor's mind rose, hesi-
tantly at first and then soaring, through new levels of
understanding.
'Evolution,' he said. 'Then you are. . . different.'
'My body was different. The super-egon of which I am
now a part had looked beyond the barriers of the present
and foreseen the necessity to prepare humanity for its
ultimate test. The egons, as you know, have a physical
existence, but are so attenuated that the energy of the
entire mother-mass was sufficient only to disturb the
structure of a single gene. Their final attempt to alter
the course of Man's development was made when my
grandfather was being conceived. And, as a result, I was
born - slightly ahead of evolutionary schedule - with a
nervous system equivalent to, or better than, that of a
Syccan. '
'You mean the Syccans can. . .' Tavernor was unable
to speak as the first dim understanding of what the Syccan
war was all about swamped his mind.



'Yes. The Syccans have been complete for many thou-
sands of years, able to communicate directly and continu-
ously with their own world-mind. Their mind structure is
not compatible with that of Man, so they might have
fought humanity to the death anyway - even without the
threat of the butterfly ships.'
'The ships again,' Tavernor breathed.
'Yes. You have reason to hate the Syccans, Mack, but
think how we must have looked to them. No obscenity
could describe us in their eyes - hideous, pale-skinned
mongers of true-death. And their egon-mass warned them
that Man's instinct was to occupy the whole volume of
space, filling it with dark wings which would eventually
scour the galaxy of true life, robbing the Syccans of their
immortality.
'They dedicated themselves to preventing this, and
their mother-mass guided them every step of the way -
while Man was savaging his own mother-mass, driving it
away, robbing himself of even the vague contact possible
at that stage of his development. I was born ahead of
evolutionary schedule, but in another respect I was late.
Very late.'
'And,' Tavernor guessed, 'the Syccans were aware of
you.'
'They were aware, through their egon-mass. That was
why they took Mnemosyne, and why I had to be isolated.
They were afraid I might be killed accidentally - they
intended to keep me alive, not for another seventy or
eighty years as you feared, but until the last of the human
race had been obliterated.
'That possibility has now been averted - armed with
genuine knowledge of his own nature, Man can win the
war against the Syccans. It was never possible to get an
armed vessel through their flux screens, but all along men

were using their most awful weapon against themselves.
All that is necessary to reach the Syccans' home worlds
with unarmed butterfly ships, and shuttle them through
the Syccan egon-masses. This would reduce the Syccans
to relying on their unaided intelligence. . .'
Tavernor was shocked. 'But so much death - true
death. Would you. . . ?'
'It won't be necessary,' Bethia said gently. 'The war
is, in fact, already over. The Syccan mother-mass had
prepared them for failure. too. They are vacating this
entire sector of space. It is extremely unlikely that Man
and Syccan will ever meet again - on the physical
plane. . .'
Elation burst like a starshell in Tavernor's mind, then
its light abated. 'But how can COMsac be convinced of
all this? Who will tell them?'
'You still don't see the truth, Mack.' Bethia smiled
again amidst the blinding glory. 'Man has crossed a
threshold. I have already fed this information into thou-
sands of the most important brains in the Federation. It
has been accepted and is already being acted upon. From
now on, every human being has all the knowledge and
wisdom of the entire racial consciousness at his disposal.
'There are exciting times ahead, Mack. Man will have
other struggles, but it may be that no problem will be too
great for him to solve, no distance too great for him to
cross. Awake or dreaming - the true function of sleep
has ever been to let the individual mind commune with
the world-mind - Man will never be the same again.'
Unable to speak, Tavernor fought to contain the
immensities of space and time, then - somehow surpassing
them in its infinite poignance - came the memory of
Bethia.s pale broken body, and the human relationship
he would never experience. He knew that his thoughts
were her thoughts.
'I'll wait,' he vowed. 'I . . . I'll never love anyone else,'
'You can't love me, Mack,' Bethia's voice was kind. 'I
am the Way.'
'But. . .'
'But why do you think the Syccans didn't kill you along
with Gervaise Farrell? My grandfather had two sons -
one of them my father, one of them Howard Grenoble.
The genetic strain was recessive in Howard and in Lissa -
your mother. It is only partially recessive in you - the
Syccans were aware of this too - and it will become
dominant in your children or their children.
'Humanity needs your seed, Mack, to help it up the
next step in its evolution - and that is a duty you cannot
evade. You will now go forth. . .'

Tavernor awoke abruptly, shivering in the chill humid air
of the Syccan world. He stood up painfully and looked
~round him. The interior of the cube was foggy, and the
presence of the alien atmosphere inside it told him the
power supplies to the environment-control unit had been
cut off.
He tried the cube's doors and they swung open easily,
allowing him to step outside. The floor was cold beneath
his naked feet and the dim building was stagnant, utterly
deserted. At once he knew the Syccans had gone.
He walked around the dividing wall and looked into
Bethia's cube. Her discarded body glowed whitely beyond
the misted transparencies, and he turned quickly away.
Outside the building the world was still, except for the
barely preceptible motion of the all-enveloping cloud.
Tavernor shivered again, and realized he had work to do
immediately. He would have to locate the food stores
and find a way to keep his cell warm until a Federation
ship arrived - and that could take a considerable time.
The butterfly ships would be discarded, and the big
reaction mass carriers could not be built quickly. Also,
he would have to prepare Bethia's grave.
He could not imagine ever getting over the pain of
losing her, but the future stretched ahead of him, into
infinity.
And it would be a future beyond Man's wildest
ImagIning.