I’m not sure how many pairs of eyes there were staring at me. Perhaps only four or five. But it felt like four hundred.
I couldn’t recognize any of the eyes, with surprise, anger, fear engraved into the irises.
Someone might have been asking me who I was. I couldn’t hear any words. They didn’t try to touch me, probably because of the knife in my hand. I dropped it, for no apparent reason. I didn’t mean them any harm. I’d no intention of using the knife. Perhaps I was scared that one of them might have a gun. I couldn’t see one, but that meant very little. The knife clanged as it dropped, and I watched the pairs of eyes flick away to watch it.
“Who are you?” I whispered. “What are you doing here?”
I heard no answer. I don’t think they gave me an answer.
I felt hands gripping me—or trying to grip me—by the shoulder. I felt a sharp edge, and the hands were snatched away. The man had probably cut himself on a piece of glass I’d failed to shake off.
I didn’t wait to be grabbed again. I lunged at the nearest figure, and felt my fist sink into his belly. There was a lot of action all of a sudden. Once the fight had started, they were all keen to join in. I still couldn’t count them, but there can’t have been so many. I fought fast and hard, doing my best not to allow them the opportunity to close in and pin me down. I sent one man away with a jab of my knee, and I felt him go back into the wall, hard. He was bending at the time, riding the kick, and he must have slammed his coccyx hard into the stone. He didn’t come back. At the same stroke, I tripped up a second one and easily broke away from a clumsy hold another managed to put on me.
There was little skill in my defense, but they were attacking with no sensible method and could hardly help getting in each other’s way in the narrow passage.
I tried to keep moving, to keep them moving and hampering one another. I got the room to swing my arms and hit out in all directions—not very powerfully, but enough to clear more room. Only two men seemed to be in the way when I began running again. I charged them and somehow got between them, practically flailing them aside. In all probability, one or two of their attempts to hit back were successful, but I never felt anything at all. There was the sound of more running feet as I set off again, but I didn’t turn round. I was calmer now and was beginning to sort out what I could see, though I was still having a lot of trouble.
I hurled myself round a comer and found myself falling down a staircase. I didn’t spread myself to try and stop the fall, but tightened myself into a ball and let myself go. I got bruised on the spine, but it was only inconvenience and not lasting pain. I certainly incurred no serious hurt. I slowed up before I negotiated the whole staircase, and had to unwind to continue the rest of the way at a headlong run. I was half convinced that pursuit was only inches behind, and I didn’t want to take chances. As I reached the bottom, I was limping slightly, but still moving fairly quickly.
I found myself in some sort of hall, with an open space of considerable dimensions in front of me, and the great wooden doors on the far side. I set off at a dead run, hearing the clatter of feet on the stairs behind me. It gave me a curious sense of safety to have space enough to move in at last, with no comers or dips. Before I was halfway across the open space, there was a titanic explosion.
Before I lost consciousness, I felt myself being lifted and thrown backward, and I saw the big doors implode, splintering like so much plywood. I caught a fleeting glimpse of light behind them—bright, searing light. I hadn’t time to look for explanations before I blacked out completely.
THE GHOST SHIPS
If a constraint is applied to a system in equilibrium, then the position of the equilibrium will alter in order to oppose the effect of the constraint.
The Time Wave is not precisely an equilibrium. It has a kind of balance, a rhythm which defines its identity. It can also be claimed that Heljanita’s interference with time, which caused the eventual distortion of the Time Wave, is not really what is implied by the word constraint.
Nevertheless, the principle could be applied to the situation, and the Time Wave did its best to oppose the effect of the distortion. With the limited means available to it, however, it could by no means counteract the distortion.
The only dimensions available for the Time Wave to move in are the dimensions of time. And hence, when the Time Wave tried to restore its rhythm, it did so by modifying time. It tried to restore the microstructure of pulse- and-rotation time as defined by its rhythmic wave form. It brought back the men who had died, and should by all rights be still alive. It snatched them out of one of time’s dimensions, from the most convenient moment available. That moment was during the battle of the Kamak System during the Beast War, and in some strange alter ego of time, two thousand ships were gone from the battle—more than half of the total number of ships involved. That it was not the real course of time was evident in the fact that one of the snatched ships contained Richard Stormwind of Sa-bella, who had not been present at the battle of the Kamak system.
The Time Wave’s crude reflexive attempt to force time back into its destined mold, or at least restore its own rhythm, failed completely. The wave form continued to distort. Its continuity was upset, and its rhythm was lost. Its reflexes died, and there was no further attempt to restore the path of time. Such reaction as there had to be was now the prerogative of the galaxy.
But the effects of the distortion remain. By the edge of the Time Gap floats a fleet of two thousand ships, both Human and Beast, no longer attempting to destroy each other. What has passed and is passing between the ghost ships is beyond comprehension. It is certainly not carried by high-omega What sort of beings these ghosts are is also a matter of pure conjecture. They can have no real existence, no real purpose. Yet they are there. In a way, they are only figments of the Time Wave’s imagination. That other dimension from which they came can have no possible relevance to this one. An alternate universe where Stormwind fought at Karnak obviously cannot exist contiguously with the real universe.
But the ghost ships have mass and substance. Their weapons can kill. In time, they will fade away back into the nowhere from which they came. But for the present, they are a fleet where no fleet should be. Their presence cannot be ignored.
If Heljanita’s conquest is to succeed, he may have to defeat the dead as well as the living.
HELJANITA
Heljanita the toymaker is a man with one aim and one idea. His mind has resisted the narrow path of Darkscar’s civilization, but it has fallen into a path of its own which is equally narrow and equally blind. And although he has evaded the protective determination of Darkscar’s society once, he still has to meet it again, albeit in much less substantial form.
Darkscar pictures Heljanita as a lunatic conqueror, whose idealism is a mask for megalomania and a hunger for destruction. There is some justification in this picture, but it is only a caricature. It does not show the real man in the right proportions. Like Ralph Eagleheart, Heljanita is prepared to devote his life to the fulfillment of a dream. And, Eke Eagleheart, he does not think like a madman, nor is the manner of a madman reflected in his actions or strategies. He is the kind of man who is realy only a madman in retrospect, when history can clearly outline his ambitions in proportion to his abilities. While he is alive, he is only a man and has to be judged by his actions of the moment.
There is no doubt that Heljanita is an enemy to every man in the galaxy, but he is a different enemy to different causes. Darkscar fights him as though he were the devil-cast out of Heaven and trying to bring Hell into the worlds of men. As far as simpler men, like Cain Rayshade and Judson Deathdancer, are concerned, the problem is much more elementary. Heljanita threatens their property and their power. They control the core of galactic civilization. They hold it together against the odds, and more on sufferance than by force or allegiance. Without Heljanita, the common enemy, their fight to hold on would be a losing battle, and they know it. To Rayshade, at least, the idea of losing
what he has gained is intolerable. Heljanita is a bogey which he can use to scare the Beasts, keep them together in bonds of fear and hatred. Heljanita is the symbolic enemy who can save the Confederacy, for the time being at least. His threatened conquest offers a chance to make new heroes to replace the old, who were badly tarnished by the bitter aftertaste of the Beast war.
To Mark Chaos, Heljanita is merely a man who has tried to kill him and might try again. To the Beasts outside the bounds of the Confederacy, already cut off, he is a kind of demon figure—someone without any real relevance who is, nevertheless, slightly frightening. Despite Darkscar’s efforts to preach his philosophy, none of the Beasts really understands the reasoning behind the coming confrontation. If the galaxy were really to understand, and could bring themselves to believe in Darkscar’s Utopia, then Heljanita would have no chance at all There is no way to force disorder upon people. Unity is a thing of the mind, not of the system.
In a way, Heljanita’s whole conquest is irrelevant. If either he or Darkscar wins, it will not be because one defeats the other; it will be because he is right in his evaluation of mankind. The fact that neither man has any real confidence in his ability to achieve total victory is some indication that both of them are wrong.
CHAOS’S STORY CONTINUED
When I awoke, there was an empty ache in my head and a sourness in my mouth which made me think that I was on Calypso’s world. The beating of my heart seemed remarkably intense. My eyes were glued tightly shut, and I could almost feel the dusty fingers of the fog on my face and neck. But I listened, and I could hear the wind. I knew then that there was no fog, and that I was not on Calypso’s world. That particular dream dissolved away.
I struggled with my senses for a few moments, still feeling echoes of the weakness and mental confusion of my illness. The delirium was slow to drain away, but my head became clearer and clearer, and I forced my eyes to open.
Sunlight blinded me for a few moments, but it was not direct, and I quickly adjusted to it. There was grass underneath my hands, and it was cool. I was on a bank above a dirt road; a road that I would have sworn that I knew the day before. Now, I was almost sure that I had never seen it before in my life. There was no villa just round the bend. I had not lived here only ten years before. I was a stranger, just as the old man had said. I might not even have been an Aquilian.
I sat up. Behind me, there was a spaceship—an ugly, squat ship unlike any I had ever seen before. It was very small. It was also heavily armed, to judge by the apertures in the hull which housed the omega projectors. The shadow of the ship lay across me. Whoever had placed me had done so with care and consideration.
A man appeared suddenly by my side. I presume he came round the bend in the road, otherwise I would have seen him before I took to staring at the ship. I tensed automatically and regarded the newcomer with suspicion. He was tall and dark, with a large hooked nose and an aristocratic bearing.
“You won’t be killed, will you?” he said. His voice was cold, but what he said was not seriously meant.
“I’ve seen you before,” I said.
“The black star,” said the man; adding, “You won’t remember.”
“I do,” I said, dredging the image of the man from my memory: a man standing in the middle of a dusty road, lit dimly by a vast sun, talking about the history of the people of the black star. “You told me that the people of the black star were failures, unworthy of admiration. I disagreed with you.”
The stranger nodded. “You remember far too much,” he said. “You’re far too strong. Either fate is protecting you, or you’re a wholly new man. Perhaps I did my job too well.
I needed a clever man, but he should have been a weaker man than you. He should not have been able to do what you have done. You were too determined. I tried everything I could to stop you getting back here, but I didn’t make it. You beat me every time, and every time I grew more afraid of what you could do if you did get back. Every time I thought you were dead, you reappeared. Every time I gave chase, you got away. And you came back here. Well, are you satisfied? What are you going to do now?”
“Who are you?” I asked. I already knew, of course. “Heljanita the toymaker,” he replied, with arrogance in his voice.
He took something from the folds of his cloak. It was small, but bright and attractive. It spun slowly, making patterns which sucked at my eyes and dragged my mind away from other things. I watched it, keeping myself under control without too much difficulty. It wasn’t hard to withstand if you knew what it was and what it could do.
“You see,” said Heljanita. “It won’t work anymore. You’re too strong, too self-reliant. You’ve seen too much. You don’t want any more lies about who and what you are. You’ve adjusted to being yourself. Too strong by far.”
“The crooked wheel,” I said, merely to show that I knew what he was talking about.
He nodded slowly, never taking his eyes off my face. I looked up as the crooked wheel stopped spinning. “It’s only a toy,” he said. “But everyone needs toys. Everyone needs to play, to pretend. This is the ultimate toy. It gives you all that you want, all that you’ll let yourself want.”
“It gave me everything,” I said. “All the lies. Why did you do it? What purpose did I serve in your games?”
“I made you,” said Heljanita calmly. “I made everything that you are, with the help of the crooked wheel. I needed a man to win me the Beast war; a man to smash the Humans and at the same time make sine that the Beasts did not win. He had to be a clever man, a cunning man to supplement Eagleheart. He had to be a lonely man, who would work quite alone. He had to be a man who owed nothing to anyone, who would do nothing for anyone. He had to be a man who would not question the consequences of his own actions, a man who would act without consideration, without decision.
“So I found a man who was nobody; a man nobody wanted to know, and who wanted to know nobody. His name was Perime, and even that was stolen from his father. He was a man who hardly existed, even in his own mind. He believed in absolutely nothing. He had to be totally self-possessed because he had no alternative. He was barely alive—he probably would not have lived much longer. He felt his predicament but hardly cared. He was a fatalist and a defeatist. He could see no way out.
“The crooked wheel gave him a way out. The crooked wheel gave him a chance to commit suicide and live through it. It gave him will, it gave him drive. It planted false arrogance, new ideas. It gave him a whole new past, and a whole new future. It made him into you.
“I turned a pathetic nonentity into a deadly weapon; a two-edged blade’ that lost the Beast war for both sides. I made a hero out of a coward and a Beast lord out of a halfbreed. I couldn’t have done it all without you. Eagle-heart was too vulnerable. I couldn’t depend on him. He was a bom failure and always needed help and reassurance. You were the Beast war, Lord Chaos. You were its flesh and blood, the key to the whole thing.
“Even your name is the one I gave you. Chaos! Who would give a name like that to one of Adam December’s Beasts.”
I interrupted him. “My mother!” I said. “I talked to her…Darkscar’s collection…”
“And what did she tell you?’ sneered Heljanita. “Did she call you by the name I gave you? Did she tell you that you were Beast lord of Aquila? Think—what did she tell you that you didn’t already know?’
“My father’s name.”
“Exactly. She had nothing to tell you. I do my work well.”
“Too well, apparently,” I said. “You’re scared of me now. Scared that I might turn against you.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “You became a risk. I talked to you on the black star. I was surprised by your strength, your courage. But I was frightened By the way you talked about the people of the black star, Thev were Darkscar’s type of people, through and through. Their society was rotten. And yet you not only condoned it, you admired it. You mourned the passing of what was already a decaying corpse. I knew then that I couldn’t trust
you for a moment longer. I had you tracked, located. But I was just too late. Somehow, Darkscar knew—and the real war began. Even once I was alerted to his presence and his enmity, I couldn’t quite stop him. He was never far ahead, but he was never far behind either. And in the middle of it all, you came back here.
“I knew that once you did that you would realize what I had done to you. I thought that wou’d put you squarely on Darkscar’s side. You were bound to fight against me once you found out that your past was all a lie—my he. And you were dangerous. I couldn’t afford to let you join the enemy. Deathdancer and Rayshade are nothing. Neither of them can oppose me. Skywolf refuses to try. You are the only man who is both strong enough and clever enough to command the Beasts. On your own, you would never try to do it. But with Darkscar behind you and Darkscar’s oratory at your disposal, it became a possibility.
“Now you know everything. But it might not be necessary to kill you. You’re a clever man. Lord Chaos. You owe nothing to Darkscar. You bear me no malice for trying to kill you. You express no gratitude toward Darkscar for saving you. Fight for me of your own free will, and there’s no need for me to kill you.”
“You didn’t ask me before,” I said quietly. “You used the crooked wheel.”
“That was a different man. That man was no use to me. He was no use even to himself- I needed a real man. I had to make one. If you do owe Darkscar the saving of your life, you also owe me the giving of your life. I created you. But I’m not trying to lay a claim to your soul. It’s your choice.”
“Fight for you or you’ll kill me? Is that a choice?”
“I don’t want to kill you. I’m a man not a monster. Even the toys never kill except when they have to. But the job
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