Day of Truth

by Brian Stableford

  And the frog people died, cut to pieces by burning rifle fire. When smoke finally did begin to drift in the still air, it was the smoke that came from the bodies of the frog people.

  The ghosts were slower to die. They gave ground, not willingly, but to give them a chance to keep killing, to stay alive. They did not run, they merely moved slowly backward before the relentless advance of the toys. There was never any question about the end of the battle. That could come only when every last one of them was dead.

  And that end came. The toys of Heljanita smashed Dark-scar’s toys and the toys of the Time Wave. In a pointless, profitless massacre, the ghosts and the frog people died.

  The mud flats were strewn with corpses—silver, black and faded flesh. The waters of the River of Tears were filled with floating cadavers, slowly spinning in the lifeless water. Many of the frog people, wounded fatally, used up their last remaining energy trying to get to the water for some mysterious reason of their own.

  CHAOS’S STORY CONTINUED

  I pressed my face against the glass wall of the cockpit, but I could see absolutely nothing except my reflection. I didn’t look frightened. In fact, my face wore an expression of such intense composure that I was surprised.

  “Can you do anything?” I asked, turning away from the darkness through which we were traveling.

  He looked up at me. He was half sitting, half crouching on the floor, amidst a confusion of cables and supporting bars.

  “No,” he said.

  I waved the gun in his face to see if a little persuasion might change his mind.

  “It’s empty,” he said, staring fearlessly into the barrel. “You shot Darkscar with the last two bullets.”

  I pointed the gun at his right eye and pulled the trigger. He blinked and winced, But he was telling the truth.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can’t do anything. The machine is on its way. Nothing can stop it. The power is completely cut off until it starts flooding in again—from the center of the sun. And by then it will be far too late. There will be a matter of a few microseconds before we melt No time to pull us out.”

  “So we die,” I said flatly.

  “In a matter of minutes. The machine is out of phase at the moment. Effectively, we are heading for the sun at the speed of light. In about seven minutes, we’ll materialize in the center.”

  “Then we explode?”

  “In the center of a sun?” Heljanita laughed. “It will never notice us. We’ll just quietly disappear into the heart of an explosion that’s been going on for millions of years. We’ll make no difference at all—to the sun.”

  “It won’t go nova?”

  “Not a chance. Physically, we might just as well not exist. But there will be a time—very small, but finite—before the machine is destroyed. The power we absorb during that period will give the whole of time a jolt.”

  “And what do you expect to gain by it?” I asked dryly.

  He looked up at me. “Chaos,” he said. At first, I thought he was calling my by name. Then I realized that he meant it literally.

  Darkscar was right. He was mad.

  And if he was right, if chaos did result, then there would be no Darkscar to oppose it. I had killed him on Aeterna because I knew that if he had shot Heljanita, the power flooding into the machine would have blown us into atoms. Ironically, it made no difference in the end. We were all dead anyway.

  We plunged on in the interminable, illimitable darkness. Neither of us showed the least sign of fear. I was strangely unmoved, as though I was dead already. There was, after all, nothing which could save me.

  All of a sudden, we were no longer out of phase with the passing of time. The universe had flowed on around us, and we materialized in the center of the sun.

  There was no lapse of time.

  In the center of a sun, a tiny bubble of metal and glass is nothing. There wasn’t even time to feel the heat and see the light. In one instant, we were there and gone. Heljanita and his time machine were reduced to their component atoms.

  But in that identical instant, in the small, finite time between materialization and oblivion, I felt a touch. I’d felt it before, and I recognized it instantly. The identity of the being came, carried in the touch itself. I knew.

  I was already out of the sun, millions of millions of miles away.

  My mind was still in my body, but it was also elsewhere. It was in hyperspace. Once, long years ago, I had been forced to look into hyperspace. I saw the stars, and more than the stars. And I also felt a touch; the touch of an alien mind within my own. It had been a brief contact but a real one. Now that touch had come again, and it had stayed. My mind was still within that of the alien, and its within mine. We were fused across all the dimensions of space and hyperspace. It had taken me out of the sun, right out of the heart of the star, and transported me into itself, instantaneously.

  My own body and its sensory impressions remained but were dwarfed and forgotten as I was drenched by the sensation of "being” in hyperspace, of seeing in hyperspace.

  In hyperspace, there is no “how far,” but only “where.” Everything is within and without—each star to its own individual position, but with no distances separating those positions.

  All the stars were with me, and all the vast empty spaces were parts of my being. The touch became a cold hand, climbing up my spine and into my brain. It spread and filled me, body and mind. And I spread and flowed into the three phases of being that comprised the creature from hyperspace, into dimensions I had not known existed, had not been able to know existed.

  I was a webwork which extended into all those dimensions. A curled lattice that went on and on forever, interlocking and uniting with the very substance of the dimensions. I had another body, a spherical, positional body which existed in space as well as in hyperspace. It was a more vital part of me, more strongly united with my new identity. And there was a third part of me. I had a new face, a face that I shared with another mind, because the face was also the seat of thought and sentience.

  I had known when I first touched this entity that it could have no secrets. All its identity and its thoughts were written across its face. Its face felt and saw, and what was felt and seen was clearly manifest in the configuration of the face.

  This entity had perfect communication because everything it was showed in its face, and its face included the whole of its universe. And I shared that perfect communication. The face was my face, its thoughts were my thoughts, and its voice was my voice.

  I found that there is a new kind of identity in hyperspace—an identity of the whole. There is an infinity of persons in one corpus, unseparated by distance; an infinity of identities in the one being. And still I retained my own identity. I was still Mark Chaos, alone and afraid, with the one position and the one life.

  I felt the entity in our mind with me, sharing the face.

  “Who are you?” asked my voice.

  “Planet Despair,” my voice answered. The question and the answer did not need the voice. They were plainly inherent in the face.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I took you out of the star. I need you. We need each other if either of us is to go on living. Yours was the only mind I could touch. It was the only Beast mind I had ever contacted. I had to draw your being into mine before I could attempt to contact the other minds I need.”

  “Why do you need Beast minds?”

  “The minds of men. They have perceptions which I lack. Abilities which I lack. We will need all those abilities, and above all, we must have those perceptions. The Time Wave is distorted. The lifeline of the galaxy is going astray. The galaxy itself will react to the distortion, and that reaction could destroy the whole of your race, the worlds of men, the Time Gap and myself. We cannot hope to stop the reaction because the galaxy is a far more powerful entity than I. But we may guide it if we can achieve the correct medium of perception and enough control.”

  “I do not understan
d,” I complained.

  There was a note of panic in me. I could see terror in the face and feel it in the ultradimensional folds of the web.

  “There is time,” soothed my voice, echoing inside the surface of that wonderful face. “There is time enough for you to gain your understanding if only we have the power and the minds of other men.”

  And then the alien moved.

  I felt my body respond. I felt the webwork in every fiber of my flesh. I felt the body in every beat of my heart. We moved, and I felt what it was like to have power over a body as big as the universe. I knew what it was like to be the stars. For the only time in my life, I was conscious of the flow of cosmic time and felt the triviality of the flow of pulse-and-motion time by which I had lived my life.

  I felt the presence of the galaxy, not as a vast cage of stars, an ocean of worlds, but as a being—a living god, whose gigantic disk of stars was but one of its manifestations. The magnitude of that being, the sheer scale of its existence was meaningless to the mind of a man. It was another world that I glimpsed. A world in which the life I had known was lost somewhere in the atoms of dust or water or air whose affairs concern us not at all. My mind could not have taken all this. It can no longer remember it, visualize it or even conceive of such things as I know I saw. But I was sharing another mind then; a mind that was not bound by the limits of a man.

  And I did understand, as the alien had assured me that I would. I understood perfectly the existence of the galaxy, the existence of Planet Despair, the nature of the Time Wave, the relationship between cosmic time and pulse-and-rotation time. I understood simply by seeing with that face and being a part of that face. We had perfect communication.

  I no longer understand, here on Ciona, back in my own body. I lost all my understanding when that shared perception was over. When I say, “these things are beyond the comprehension of a man,” then I mean just that. Even a man who has known cannot know when he is once again only a man.

  I can only say that the reaction of the galaxy to the distortion of time could matter to the galaxy only on the cosmic scale. On the pulse-and-rotation scale anything might happen. It was necessary to oppose the distortion of the Time Wave simultaneously on both levels. To do that we needed a mind which could see and control both levels—a composite mind of hyperspatial and spatial entity, cosmic time dweller and pulse-and-rotation time dweller.

  The danger to the races of man lay in the distortion of pulse-and-rotation time. The danger to Planet Despair was quite different. The entity called Planet Despair existed with and within the galaxy. This coexistence was balanced by the distortion which surrounded Despair—the Time Gap. When the distortion of the Time Wave was sufficient, the Time Gap would be nullified. The galaxy would contact Planet Despair—and react. Unless that reaction was to be endured, the Time Gap had to be replaced while the galaxy was still reacting to the distortion of the Time Wave. And the only way to be certain, so Planet Despair believed, was to restore everything to a balance in terms of pulse-and-rotation time as well as cosmic time. It was pulse-and-rotation time that the nebula distorted.

  I knew also what we had to do, but I could not assimilate all that at once. There were other things confusing me; certain truths about my own past and present. I bowed before a confusion of thought and gave way again to the simple experience of sensation.

  I found that the stars were moving, shimmering and beginning to fall. It was as though my body was being pulled apart by a weird vibration. Wave after wave of nausea washed chyme into my throat and tears into my eyes, reminding me that I still had another body—a very tiny body.

  “Can you see the stars?” said the face.

  My eyes were closed against the flow of tears, but I could see them: the whole cage of the galaxy, shaped like a crooked wheel and spanning my being from end to end.

  “I can see them,” I answered.

  “Hold them. See them and hold them still.”

  “How can I hold them?” I wept. “I have no power.” The stars were dancing like snowflakes. Heljanita had been right. The burst of power from his time machine had brought chaos, indeed.

  “You have all the power you need,” insisted the face. “You and I are one. We have all the power of Planet Despair.”

  I extended my hand in a gesture of command and felt the webwork shifting and rippling into nowhere. The stars stopped in their lunatic dance. I held them still, frozen.

  “How can I hold them?” I sobbed. “The power…the power of the galaxy.”

  “You can hold them. There is no power making them move. The galaxy is reacting to the distortion of the Time Wave. It does not matter who holds the stars.”

  Time was going mad.

  I could feel it running through me, washing over me like the waves of an ocean. I could feel it ebbing and whirling. I could feel the patterns breaking, pulling me and swirling into madness.

  “Hold the stars,” commanded the face.

  I brought my hand up to the crooked wheel of stars as it spun in the sky, caught the trailing edges with thumb and forefinger, steadied the stars within the torn, bloody gap which had been my palm. I was lost for a moment in the gathering maelstrom of time. I was naked, alone with the silent stars.

  But I was holding them. I was keeping them together. I was protecting the galaxy from all harm, for the moment. We needed help—desperately, and Planet Despair was already searching in the chaos that was time.

  WHILE THE STARS WERE STILL

  The toys had been proven right. In the end, time had not won the battle for their enemies. That their logic had been inadequate was evident in the massive losses which they had sustained. But the conclusion was the same. Their tactics were vindicated. When time began to run out for the Confederacy and its allies, the toys still held the upper hand.

  And there were no more miracles to come.

  Positional advantage is only so much. Formation counts for only so much. But a numerical advantage of more than two thousand ships goes on forever. No matter how much empty space the Confederacy had gained, no matter how much precious time, they had paid for every wound they had inflicted with deaths of their own. They had never had any real chance of making up the deficit. What chance they had was in the battleships, and although the Aurita still flew, it was useless for inflicting any further damage on the toy fleet.

  Stormwind’s eighty ships became fifty, thirty, ten and one. Hawkangel’s two hundred became a hundred and fifty, a hundred.

  Relentlessly, the toys reformed. For long, long moments, the Beasts and the Humans contrived to stop them. But the ration of miracles seemed to have run its course.

  The toys knew that in the fortress on Aetema, Heljanita was in trouble. But with calm efficiency, they carried out his wishes as he would have ordered them to. With great patience and inhuman discipline, the toys began to cut the Beasts to pieces.

  Hawkangel’s rescue seemed somewhat futile now. It had given the Beasts hope, offered them some kind of a chance. But the odds had proved too great in the end.

  Hawkangel was suffering the regret and despair of his failure. Like Slavedream at Karnak, he had plunged arrogantly and defiantly into the battle. Like Stormwind of Sa-bella, whose personality had been in Saul Slavesdream’s soul that day, Hawkangel was a great man. No one could have done any more. Not even Stormwind himself,

  And Stormwind lay dead in a mineshaft on Home. Even Stormwind’s ghost had been blasted into oblivion by the toys.

  Hawkangel was alive to fight that day because he had run away before. He was no coward, but he was a wiser man than Stormwind ever was and knew when he was beaten. He knew that it was time to run, and he ran.

  The numbers of his followers dwindled as though they were grains of sand blowing in the wind, but he aligned, and he left the system of Saraca’s sun.

  Cain Rayshade knew that it was time to run as well. The toys were showing no mercy. If he stayed, every last ship would be destroyed. But he did not give the order. He fingered the microp
hone and pleaded with himself, but he did not give the order. He did not want to go. He could not bear to run away from his last chance.

  All his life, he had been a lesser man than those whose company he sought. All his life, he had been the loser. Now, with Deathdancer dead, only Skywolf remained of the more powerful Beast lords. And Skywolf was a fool. The galaxy belonged to Cain Rayshade.

  The galaxy belonged to the toys.

  Cain Rayshade wanted to be as good a man as any of the Beasts. He wanted to be a greater hero than they. He wanted to stand where even Stormwind might not have stood. He wanted to prove it, if only to himself.

  And so the orders he did give were, in a way, the wrong orders. He did not tell his fleet to run as best they could, he told them to cover Hawkangel’s retreat, to buy him all the time they could while he was aligning.

  It was a strange decision. On the surface, it was a heroic decision—an act of sacrifice. However, it was not a good decision, and it was certainly not made for the right reasons. But perhaps it was a decision that deserved a reward.

  THE END OF THE WAR

  Cain Rayshade turned away from the microphone, his teeth tearing savagely at his lower lip, defying the attempts of the blood to clot and seal the cracks. He almost enjoyed the sensation of pain.

  The man in the headphones was staring at him, and Ray-shade knew the reason behind the stare. But there was no accusation, no rebellion. The blond man accepted his authority and accepted his decision. It owed more to the fact that the man was a Beast than that the orders came from Cain Rayshade, but it was good to see it nevertheless.

  “What was it that snapped when I turned the ship?” demanded Rayshade. The man in the headphones snapped back to life.

  “The supporting structure of the girdle motors. Not in the hull but out on the wing. One tier is adrift. But it’s still hanging on. When we go into spacedrive the whole lot might shake loose. You’ll be lucky if you land the ship in one piece.”