J. F. Bone, page 16
Riker eyed me eagerly, the Mark VII balanced in his hands, a replacement charge dangling from his left hand. “Anytime now,” he said.
Sofra turned toward the cage doors and reached for the first crank handle as I probed with the hook through the shimmering blackness of the barrier feeling for the button and guided by the faint lines on the doorframe. Suddenly the barrier vanished—and hell broke loose!
Riker stepped into the doorway and began firing at maximum blast and minimum aperture. He blew two centimeter holes through the heads and bodies of the natives clustered around the altar. Without stopping, he switched apertures and laid a fan of energy across the arena, shifting his fire with paralyzing speed and precisions. He flipped out the spent charge, slapped in a new one, and went on firing with the right hand while he plucked a new replacement charge from his belt with his left. I was amazed. I knew the man was good, but I never dreamed he was that good.
I was doing my bit with the Mark IV to make things hot for the natives, but I was a feeble sputter compared to the inspired gunnery of Riker. I picked off the surviving priests, while Riker snapped the receiver open, spilled out the second expended charge, popped a third into the magazine, clicked the action shut, and continued firing without missing a beat in the rhythm of his shooting.
“Okay—get ready to move,” he rasped. “Get that Power!” He lifted his fire to the stands, stopping down to minimum intensity and setting the aperture wide open. At that range and setting the Mark VII could raise a painful burn but little more—but it could cover a five meter circle and would be more than enough to keep the crowd milling.
The confusion was wonderful. On the floor of the arena nothing moved. In the tiers of seats, natives were scrambling wildly, stung by the sublethal charges that crackled among them. Their shouts, screams and writhing bodies turned the whole of the visible stands into a milling mass rushing toward the exits, seeking only to escape.
Past me dashed naked men and women from the pens as Sofra turned them loose. Blind-eyed with hate, they ran into the arena. Some hurdled the barrier between floor and seats and attacked the crowds with fists and teeth. Others dashed onto the stage floor, recovered the weapons the priests had carried, and began to fire into the stands. Sofra darted to me, scooped up a Mark IV that had been dropped and added her bit to the din. She shot once at a priest I had killed and then turned to the stands firing at maximum into the spectators. Her lips were drawn back in a grimace of hate, and from her mouth poured a stream of screaming obscenity that blistered my ears! She was having her catharsis—with a vengeance!
Kelly in hand, I dashed onto the stage. My eyes were fixed on the incredibly black hemisphere setting in front of that fat black column. The hemisphere was so black it hurt the eyes, so black that it cast a halo of darkness around it. It was fascinating—and terrifying.
I went to the black column, kicked aside the double ring of carved wooden shrines at its base and reached for the Power. But before I touched it I paused. A chill premonition held my hand. I looked at it, feeling my eyes sink into its blackness, stared at the row of studs inset into the silver plate on which it rested, gazed at the dead priests around the column and nodded. That was it. I must have noticed it in the split second before Riker killed them. Two were wearing standard protective gauntlets. They must, I thought, be wearing them for a reason. I jerked a pair from the dead hands of the nearest priest and crammed my fingers into them. Then I took hold of the edges of the silver plate and lifted.
The pillar split down the one edge. The side swung out and a nude girl, wax-pale, shivering and empty-eyed, staggered out of the pillar. She looked unseeing at the carnage and moved unsteadily away. Like a sleepwalker, I thought. And then I thought of her no more.
The weight of the Power claimed all my attention. I doubted that any single native could have lifted it. Even I, who am stronger than most, had trouble holding it. The veins stood out on my forehead as I struggled with the brutal load. The metal prongs beneath the plate cut into my gloved hands. My breath came panting with strain. And a shrill, keening wail came from the topmost tiers of seats.
Action stopped, frozen into suspended animation. A deathly stillness fell over the gigantic hall as I took one labored step and then another away from the split pillar, carrying that enormously heavy thing in my hands.
“Sam—Doc!—listen.” Riker’s voice cut like a rusty knife. “You gotta make it! We have ‘em now. They don’t dare touch you! You hold The Power!”
I didn’t reply. My whole attention was focussed on carrying that thing to the doorway where Riker waited.
“The Green!” Sofra screamed. “Turn the Green!”
I could hardly hear her above the roaring in my ears and I couldn’t have done it even if I had known what “the green” was. My arms were fire, my legs were lead, my heart hammered in my chest, bright flashes blazed across my eyes. And Riker’s voice was soft with amazed wonder.
“You did it—by the Eternal Verities—you did it! It isn’t possible—” and then in a sharper tone, “Set it down, you fool! You’ve done all you need to.”
I lowered The Power to the floor. Vision came back to my eyes. My breathing slowed. And back from the arena came the survivors of the sacrifices, five men and three women, one of them Sofra. They stripped the dead priests of their cloaks which they wrapped around their bodies.
“Where’s the woman who was in the pillar?” I demanded.
“Dead, sir,” one of the men answered. “Too much life was drained from her.”
“The natives?”
“Gone, sir. Those that still live. They went in fear.” He grinned at me.
“But there will be others and they may not fear, Sofra said.
“There will be no others,” Riker said. “We have The Power. We have their God.”
“And just what good is it?” I asked. “It’s too heavy to carry, and too awkward to drag.”
“Give me your respirator, my lord,” one of the ‘breeds said. “I know a thing about this that is not chanted except by priests. My grandmother was the daughter of a priest.”
I handed it to him and watched in horror as he ripped it open and took out the tiny accumulators and the solar cells which fed them.
“What are you doing?” I gasped. “I can’t last without a respirator.”
“Wait, lord. Observe.” The man fastened the cell to the projections below the plate and touched the green stud. “Now, lord, lift The Power,” he said.
I did—and it weighed scarcely a dozen grams! It almost floated. I held it easily in my hand. “What—” I began, but the ‘breed motioned me to silence.
“Look at the studs on the plate,” he said. “There are eight of them.”
“No,” I said. “There are nine. Eight in a row and a gray one apart.”
“Forget the gray one. It merely breaks the segments. Now read me. The eight buttons are the Eight Ways of Power. The white creates, the black destroys, the red protects, the orange speaks, the yellow hears, the green bears, the blue sees and the violet knows. Which ways do you wish Power? You can have any four with half the sphere.”
I held The Power in front of me and turned the red stud. Nothing happened except that my breathing suddenly became easy. This, I thought, was crazy. I turned the stud back. My breathing was still easy. Somehow I’d been adapted to Arthe without pain, and without surgery. It was a miracle, but of course I didn’t believe in miracles. This thing would destroy medicine, I thought wryly.
“While you hold The Power and it is red, no harm can come to you from any physical source,” the ‘breed said.
“Does the effect last?” I asked.
“I don’t know, lord.”
One of the ‘breeds kept staring at me. Suddenly he began howling. “He holds The Power. He is Shambra.”
“What do you think of this thing, Joe?” I asked.
“I don’t like it. It scares me spitless.”
“You’re not alone. I’m afraid, too. This is not for men to handle. I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Let’s get away from here,” Riker said.
A man gets a sixth sense about natives after dealing with them as long as Riker had, and I respected it. I touched the violet stud and sent The Power’s perception ranging through the vast hetacomb around us. There was natives—thousands of them, all leaving by corridor and tube. It was an exodus—swift and orderly.
“The natives are leaving,” I said.
“Why?”
I looked again—deeper, and presently I found it. Under us, under the arena was a roomful of duodecanitrinol, the most powerful explosive short of nuclear fission. It was fused and explosion was imminent. And to my mind came a knife-keen thought HURRY! ELSE YOU DIE!
“We can’t go the way we came,” I said. “Those passages are choked. And we can’t stay. We’re sitting on top of a bomb. There has to be another way out.”
“You have The Power,” Riker said. “Find it.”
I tried. I sent its perception racing through level after level, past ramps and tunnel openings. All were choked with departing natives. Upward I worked, level by level until it arrived at the one we were on. In a room stained with age and thick with dust I found a ring of four doorways, one of which glowed blue. I traced back to us, turned the green stud, picked up The Power and led the way out. We ran. There were no natives to stop us.
Somewhere below the limits of audibility, I was conscious of a giant sound that seemed like a bell tolling in measured strokes. I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was, and I didn’t want to know. Ahead was escape, and that was my direction. On I went, drawn by The Power and the knowledge that the way was clear.
I found the room just as I had envisioned it. Above stretched the empty wall of an airshaft. I stepped toward the blue glowing doorframe and stopped.
“You go first,” I said as I pushed Riker toward the gate.
“How come?”
“I’ll bring up the rear.”
I watched the last man vanish through the blue glow. Then I looked at The Power. Regretfully, I released the blue stud. It was very quiet as I stood beneath the airshaft in the center of the room. I reached for the green stud, and pushed it halfway down. Then I swore! What sort of god was I that I didn’t use my powers? Who was I to be afraid of a mere ton or two of duodec? I pushed the red stud and the black one and aimed The Power at the spot where the explosive was buried.
This time hell broke loose! A cylinder of absolute blackness leaped from the apex of the hemisphere and cut straight through the wall, leaving a smooth glass-lined tunnel in its wake. An enormous recoil hurled The Power from my hands. It bounced off the far wall, and caromed across the room. The black beam stopped. The Power floated upward into the airshaft. I watched it go, floating upward like a gas-filled balloon.
I wondered if I had destroyed the explosive. I looked at the receding Power and felt its loss. It was a gut-wrenching sensation. I couldn’t bear to let it go, yet I didn’t want it back. It was nothing for men to handle. I’d barely touched its surface but in those few minutes I had possessed it, I had become enamored of it. I loved it, not with the love man has for woman, but with the love man has for God! I had been drunk with the godlike powers it held. I knew with perfect certainty that this black hemisphere was the key to eternal glory. I could rule. I could do anything I wished. Nothing, literally nothing, could stand against me. And now, with it gone I knew it was wrong. Power such as this was not for one man to own, nor for one race to possess. It was too much.
I no longer wondered why the natives had never put the Power together and wiped the domes off the face of Arthe. The mutual distrust of the tribes must be almost as great as their hatred for us. No one tribe could conceivably have wielded the intact power. The others wouldn’t permit it. Had their rituals not called for mingling each year at the poles and at the equator, there would be virtually no intercourse between the tribes. And with the priests dead, The Power gone and the Temple perhaps destroyed, there would be nothing to bring the natives back here or to hold them together.
It might be just the break they needed. Their way of life was so thoroughly disrupted that the shock might give them a chance for sanity. Perhaps now, having lost the Shambra’s Power, they might return to the human race.
I sighed and stepped through the doorway. I had enough of this place…
The car stopped at an opening near the edge of a canal. We got out and clustered in a small group. I wondered it this was the same canal along which we had come north. I doubted it since the tiny Class VI dome a few hundred yards to the south hadn’t been in the watercourse we had followed. We lost no time getting to it. The inhabitants, a half dozen traders and their women, received us with suspicion, until they recognized Riker and me. Then they were open-minded.
“Whatcha doin’ up here, Doc?” one bearded fellow asked. “Thought you was goin’ back to Dunkelburg.”
“I never got there,” I said. “We got mouse-trapped outside of Bluestone.”
“How?”
“Mechanical difficulty,” I said, “plus high explosive. We hit a mine.”
Joe took it from there, and had our hosts open-mouthed and gasping before it was all over. I noticed with relief that he didn’t mention The Power.
Later Riker got me in a corner. “Look, Doc—what really happened back there? Did you use The Power on them?”
I shook my head. “No—I destroyed the duodec charges with the black stud—or at least I think I did, but the recoil knocked it out of my hands and—oh hell—I might as well tell you the whole story.” So I did.
“If I had the whole thing I’m sure I could have stopped that explosion. Hell, I could stop this world! That part in the arena was only half of it. The other half’s down south maybe. It might be at the South Polar Temple this winter.”
“Want to try for it?” Riker asked.
I shook my head. “No thanks. We pushed our luck too far this time. That job belongs to the Patrol or the Service.”
The traders fed us, gave us clothing and refused offers of payment. And for the first time I realized that some of my delusions of godhead when I held The Power weren’t due to encroaching divinity but to starvation. With surprise, I realized that I hadn’t eaten in at least three days.
But I made up for it.
The traders had a small rolligon which they loaned us together with one of their number as a driver. Bluestone was about a hundred kilometers to the south, and I was eager to get there. Three of the ‘breeds decided to stay at the dome and work for the traders, the other four, including the two women, thought they would rather try Bluestone. My personal feelings were that they were probably making a mistake, but that was their business.
So we went to Bluestone, armed and alert for trouble. And of course, we didn’t find any.
We cleared the dome entrance, thanked the trader and split. The ‘breeds vanished into the Authority. Riker headed for the nearest bar. And Sofra and I took a pair of rooms at a nearby hotel. For some reason, I was exhausted. I had no more energy left. Sofra tucked me in like a mother would a child, kissed me on the lips and turned out the lights.
* * *
CHAPTER XVII
« ^ »
Sofra was sitting in the big chair across the room watching me with troubled eyes. She had a blanket wrapped around her and looked far better than she should, considering everything. “You shouldn’t be here,” I said.
“You only rented one room,” she said. “Where could I go?”
“I rented two.”
“I didn’t notice. And besides, I don’t feel right without you around. Look at the mess I got myself into.” She smiled faintly. “But you weren’t what I expected. You went to sleep and had nightmares. They kept me awake. I wanted to comfort you, but I was afraid.”
“I would never hurt you. That hell I dream about is none of my making. Someday it will be gone.”
“I hope so. It is a part of you I have never seen—like that other part when you held The Power in your arms. You weren’t human then.”
“I was a god,” I said.
“I don’t think I care for gods.”
“I still feel bad that I had to leave it. You can’t realize what it was like. I was Lord of Creation.”
“The Shambra were.”
“They built The Power. They knew it. Yet even they were corrupted by it. They were nothing when your ancestors came to this world.”
“Those were not the Shambra,” Sofra said. “The Old Race knew nothing of The Power except that it lay broken apart in the polar temples, one-half in the north, and the other half in the south. It was we who put it together. Valra Kalkis set it up and pressed the red button. He killed himself later. When Kalkis pushed the button, we learned that the protection of us was the death of the Old Race. For some reason they were dangerous to our lives and to protect us The Power slew them. The colonists could not take it. They broke The Power into segments and separated it so it could not do that kind of harm again. Men fear The Power. Perhaps that is why they worship it.”
I shrugged. “The Power is evil. The Shambra vanished. It killed the Old Race. It made the natives revert to savages.”
She shook her head. “It is not evil. Only those who misuse it are evil. The Shambra were strong enough to control it. Men are not. Maybe someday they will be, but not now.”
I changed the subject. “You ought to get some sleep. You need it.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I tried.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked lightly. “Bad conscience?”
She looked at me with a perfectly sober face. “Yes,” she said.
“About what?” I asked. I was startled but I tried not to show it. Her voice held implications, and her next words confirmed them.
“Me,” she said, “and you.”
I thought about this minor enigma for a moment. It had some unpleasant implications, and I didn’t think I wanted to know what they were. I squeezed her hand she returned the pressure—hard. Her eyes were very bright, her lower lip trembled, and she hung onto my hand as if she would never let it go. “Hold me tight, Sam,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m going to start screaming.”
