The Overlords of War (8 page)

Above them stars shone peacefully. Corson craned his neck, but the vast bulk of the beast hid Antonella from him.

Then he saw something which took his breath away: another pegasone, like a giant mushroom turning in the air, occulting a vast area of the sky, its eyes flashing as wildly as the lamps on an insane computer. The stranger hung on its flank like a wart. He waved encouragement to them.

Then Corson dared to look downward, expecting to see a pool of opaque fog. But in the weak starlight all he could make out was the ground in the clearing. A breeze was bowing many tall plants where, a few hours earlier, he had seen nothing but ashes. The camp seemed never to have existed.

So they had made a jump through time. The pegasone was capable of motion not merely in space but far further across time than the wild Monster Corson was acquainted with. How far, he couldn’t guess; they might have gone back a night, a week, a century before Veran or even Corson reached Uria.

It occurred to him to invoke Antonella’s talent. He called out, "What’s going to happen next?”

She answered uncertainly. “I don’t know. I can’t cog anything at all.”

Suddenly they went up like a rocket. The clearing disappeared in the black fleece of the forest. Now Corson realized the purpose of the space suits. At this rate they would be out of atmosphere in a few minutes.

A smear crossed the sky, hiding the stars for a fraction of a second. Then another. Then the two fleeing pegasones were high enough for the sun to be seen over the eastern rim of the planet. They raced beneath a sky that grew blacker and blacker while, below, Uria was a huge bowl of shadow, crested on one side with a diadem of fire.

Inexpressible jubilation overcame Corson’s mind.

Once more, a dark smear on the sky. Although the vision lasted only an instant, this time he recognized it. A pegasone, no doubt one of Veran’s. The colonel hadn’t lost any time. No, that phrase didn’t mean anything. Since the pegasones were capable of time-jumping, Veran could have taken as long as he liked to prepare for the chase. He might have organized an ambush. These pegasones rushing by were no more than scouts beating the past and future in search of the quarry.

Suddenly: a scrimmage. They were in the middle of a sphere of pegasones. The sun stared Corson in the face and he shut his eyes. It had crossed the sky in one gigantic bound. He understood why. To escape the snare, the stranger had dodged through time. For a moment they played this weird game with Veran’s cavalry on a chessboard of meters and seconds. But the outcome seemed scarcely to be in doubt. Each time they found themselves in the middle of a smaller sphere. Despite vacuum and great distance Corson fancied he could hear the soldiers’ shouts of triumph. The sun danced in the sky as though it had been turned into a bouncing ball. Was it below, to the side, or where? The planet Uria flickered between the brilliance of day and the obliteration of night.

Corson saw the other pegasone, the stranger’s, coming dangerously close. He uttered a cry of warning. Antonella echoed him. The stranger leaned over and seized a handful of the tendrils on their steed. And the universe changed shape and color. Everything they knew disappeared.

The space around them was streaked with colored flames. The stars had vanished, and the planet too. The pegasone’s body loomed blood-red. As for the flames, they clashed and intertwined in great sheaves of luminance, but the space they wove back and forth in had no depth. Corson could not have said whether those flames were a few millimeters from his eyes, or light-years distant.

Maybe this was the real appearance of the universe. It was another aspect of it, anyway. The pegasones were moving through time at high velocity, he was sure of that. Which turned perspective topsyturvy. The regular image human beings had of the cosmos was essentially static. For them, stars moved only slowly in the heavens. The release of energy which gave them birth, then consumed them until nothing was left but a few cinders of inert and unbelievably dense matter, was far too slow for a man to perceive under normal circumstances. The greater part of the important events in the history of the universe did not affect him, for he was unaware of them. He could discern only a narrow band of the radiations permeating all of space. He could, live under the illusion that the cosmos is mainly composed of vacuum, of nothingness, that the stars—few and far between —are like a tenuous gas, a trifle more concentrated in the vicinity of a galaxy.

But in reality the universe was full. No point existed in space

which did not at some given moment of time correspond to a particle, to a photon, to some manifestation of the primal energies. In a sense, the universe was solid. A supposititious observer looking at it from outside would not have found a way to stick a pin into it. And because the pegasones were moving so rapidly through time, their riders saw the universe as dense. If they reached Ultimate Velocity, Corson said to himself, if they found themselves present at the beginning and the end of the universe and at every instant between, they would purely and simply be squashed.

At the rate they were traveling, light vibrations were invisible. But those blue flames might be electromagnetic waves several light-years long, and those purple rays might correspond to variations in the gravitational field of the stars or of the galaxies themselves. They were literally crossing time at a gallop. And just as a rider on a horse going full tilt does not notice the stones on the roadway, but only the major items alongside it such as hills or trees, only the chief events of the universe were perceptible to them.

Now Corson’s thoughts took a different turn. He had been mistaken in assuming that Veran must have a starship. He and his men must have fled the scene of battle on steeds like this. They had just arrived when he and Antonella fell among them. Aergistal, then, might easily be at the other end of the universe.

The whirling of the flames diminished. They were slowing down. The luminous space around them split up into a horde of separate patches, which shrank as empty blackness gobbled them up, like the progression of a fatal disease. Soon they were surrounded only by bright points. Stars. Among them one alone remained two-dimensional, a disc of gold. A sun. They were spinning around and around. When the heavens ceased to revolve they found themselves once again above the cloud-enshrouded ball of a planet.

Not till then did Corson realize that the second pegasone had vanished. They had escaped their pursuers but they had lost their guide. They were alone above an unknown world, bound to a steed they had no idea how to control,

Antonella recovered enough breath to ask: “Uria?"

“No,” Corson replied. “This planet is farther from its sun. The constellations aren’t the same here, either. We’ve traveled in space as well.”

The pegasone was going down, unhesitatingly, as though it knew its way, and shortly they were enveloped in cloud. A little lower, they passed through a belt of fine rain.

The rain stopped. They pierced through the clouds as though through a ceiling and discovered a plain of mown grass that seemed to go on for ever. A roadway glistening with rain striped across it. It began beyond the horizon and led to a colossal building: a parallelopiped of stone or concrete whose top was lost in mist. No trace of windows. Corson guessed that its narrowest face must be more than a kilometer along the base. It was bare, smooth, and gray.

The pegasone landed. Corson unhitched his straps. He went around the beast and helped Antonella to clamber down. Apparently satisfied, the pegasone started to graze with its tendrils, swallowing the grass in noisy gulps.

That grass was as neat as a lawn. The plain was so flat, indeed, that it seemed to Corson out of the question for it to be other than artificial. The roadway was of some brilliant blue substance. A kilometer away at most, the building reared up like a dizzying cliff.

“Ever seen this place before?” he asked.

Antonella shook her head.

“Does the layout suggest anything to you?” he pressed. “This plain, this grass, that building?”

Since she did not answer, he asked on the spur of the moment, “Well, then, what’s going to happen right now?”

“We’re going to the building. We’ll enter it. Up to then we won’t see anybody. Afterward, I don’t know.”

“There’s no danger?”

“None that I can cog.”

He stared at her. “Antonella, what do you make of all this?”

“I’m with you. That will do for the time being.”

He nearly snapped at her with annoyance, but controlled himself, and merely said, “Okay, let’s go!”

He started off with long strides, and she almost had to run to keep level with him. After a moment he regretted his anger and slowed down. Antonella was probably his only ally in the universe. Maybe that was why her company upset him.

The roadway ended at the foot of a huge door, hermetically sealed and matching the scale of the building, which practically merged with the wall. But when they arrived in front of it, it slid soundlessly upward. Corson strained his ears for any noise from within, but heard nothing. The whole setup made him think of a mousetrap.

For giant mice.

“If we go in, will the door shut behind us?”

Antonella closed her eyes.

“Yes. But nothing will threaten us inside, at least not for the first few minutes.”

They crossed the threshold. The door started to come down again. Corson stepped back. The door stopped, then rose again, indicating a simple automatic detector. He was much relieved. He had no special wish to explore the building without knowing more about it, but they could hardly stand around forever on that lawn. Sooner or later they would get hungry, and they couldn’t eat grass. And eventually night would fall. It might be cold; it might be inhabited by enemies. They had to find shelter. Above all they had to abide by that oldest of all the military principles embodied in the Briefings: keep on the move, never stay put, try to take the enemy by surprise . . .

Not that it was so easy to surprise an opponent when you knew nothing about him.

Their eyes adjusted to the gloom in here. On both sides of an aisle which extended out of sight down a vast hall, geometrically exact structures reared up like the webs of a mathematically inclined spider, forming cells like those of a honeycomb. Those too continued to infinity, lost at last in a bluish mist.

The nearest cell contained ten girls’ bodies, completely nude, and shrouded by a faintly violet gas that stayed put although nothing seemed to be confining it. Motionless, as rigid as corpses, they were all very beautiful and might be aged eighteen to twenty-five. They bore a vague family resemblance to one another. Drawing a deep breath, Corson made a rough estimate: if every cell was filled the same way, then even in the small section of this monstrous hall that he could make guesses about there must be a good million bodies.

Close to his cheek, Antonella whispered, “Are they dead?”

He reached out. His hand penetrated the mist without meeting any resistance, but he felt his skin tingle. Maybe the gas had preservative properties. He touched a warm soft shoulder. It felt no colder than twenty degrees C. In one sense, then, it might be said she was still alive. Gently he took hold of her wrist. The pulse was nearly imperceptible. The heart seemed to be beating, but only at a very slow tempo.

Very slow.

“No,” he said. “Not quite dead.”

At the feet of each of the sleeping women a faint luminance could be seen, a seven-banded rainbow. Noticing that the colors underwent slow periodic changes, he puzzled for a while and concluded that he knew what they implied. They reminded him of EEG pulsations, though he had never seen anything quite like them. What would you call a device that performed the function of detecting life—a metaboloscope?

The two uppermost of the colored bands showed no changes at all. He shivered.

“If I’ve worked this out right,” he muttered, “they’re not just in coma, either. It looks as though the bodies are alive, but there’s no activity in the brain.”

He had seen cities destroyed, whole planets laid waste, fleets smashed to fragments; he had seen men die by the thousands and sometimes by the millions, but he had never run across anything as quietly saddening as this mausoleum. Had an entire population chosen this end for themselves? Was the prairie outside the lawn of a cemetery? Could it make any sense to keep bodies idling if they would never again have any more personality than a plant? How long could they be preserved? Looking again, more closely, he spotted wires, finer than hairs and nearly invisible, which penetrated the girls’ skin: no doubt the terminals of automatic maintenance devices.

Suddenly he began to dash about like a madman, peering into one bay after another. He must have covered more than a kilometer before he stopped, soaking with perspiration. He had not seen a single male body. Clearly he could not climb up and inspect the cells on the upper levels, which were stacked clear to the roof of the great hall, but it was a safe bet that they too contained only women.

None over twenty-five. All very beautiful. Including representatives of every race he had run across. The family likeness he had noticed at once turned out to be due to a classification system. The hair of the first one he had felt the pulse of was black; the last he had examined before stopping was fair. On the other side of the aisle the cells contained dark-skinned women, shading from tan to so deep a black it was almost blue.

What the setup called to mind was a collection. Someone—or something—had laid these girls out like the prizes of an entomologist. Once, during a battle, he had been fighting his way through a museum of butterflies, not only those from Earth but their counterparts from hundreds of other planets. Shots and explosions raised a mist of dead butterfly wings. The air was full of dry bright dust that seared his lungs despite his respirator. In the end the museum had caught fire, and in the swirling updraft he had seen swarms of butterflies take the sky for the last time.

Naturally skin color and hair color would not be the only criteria. Maybe the color of their eyes was classified along the vertical axis . . . But without means to climb up and see, there was no point in wondering about that.