by Steve White
Virginia Dare sprang past him, bringing her curved sword around and down in the kind of blinding movement he recalled. He blinked, and therefore missed most of it. But then she had recovered and was again in fighting stance . . . and at appreciably the same instant, whatever the Grella used for blood shot out in a gushing jet from a slashed-open torso.
But that instant had been enough for the other Grella, further back, to raise their own weapons and fire them. Winslow barely had time to know himself a dead man.
But he wasn't. That might have been better.
Thomas Winslow was as familiar with pain, in its various forms, as any other sea dog. He knew what bone-jarring blows and slashing cuts felt like, and had long since taken their measure. But the various ways the flesh could be bruised or broken were natural. This was something else. It hurt in a way for which English held no word. He did not believe any other language of his world did either.
Where the weapon's faint beam of light touched him, it was a blistering burn. That, at least, he had felt before. But then his muscles knotted and his lungs and his heart seized up nightmarishly, ceasing to do their duty of pumping air and blood.
In the midst of his agony, what Riahn had told them flashed through his mind. The hand weapons of the Grella used mere light, but somehow directed it all in one direction, rather than spreading out to fill a space as the light from a candle or a lamp or a torch normally did. It had made no sense whatever to Winslow, but he had to accept the evidence of his eyes, and he had seen men's chests pierced and burst open by a pale line of light, and their bodies exploded into pink mist by larger weapons of the same kind.
But Riahn had also told them that those weapons could be set in a different way, so that a weaker beam of one-way light—too weak to kill or even inflict more than a small blister—carried with it a charge of . . . Riahn's English vocabulary had failed him. But whatever it was, it was what caused lightning to flash, and also caused whatever carried the commands of the human brain to the muscles of the body to turn traitor, and shock that body into unconsciousness.
All this ran through Winslow's mind in less than a second. Before he mercifully lost consciousness, he had time for one final thought. The Grella had set their weapons to stun their victims rather than kill them. They wanted him and his companions alive. They would live . . . for the time being.
Ten
Winslow was familiar with the way his arm felt after he had banged his elbow against a hard surface at exactly the wrong angle.
His whole body felt that way as he struggled unenthusiastically back into consciousness. His lungs and his heart were functioning again, but the voluntary muscles of his limbs were still undergoing feeble spasms.
But he didn't even notice any of that. What he noticed, before opening his eyes, was that he was suspended, hanging in some kind of bonds that held his limbs immobilized, and that a stiff wind was blowing.
Then he opened his eyes . . . and cried out in a kind of panic he had never felt before.
The valley floor was at least hundreds of feet below him, and nothing was keeping him from falling all that distance but a line from the bottom of a Grella flyer. That flyer must have been full, for the Grella had trussed up him and Shakespeare and Virginia Dare like bundles and hung them from the gunwales of that magical boat. And now he was flying. Flying!
He must not have been unconscious for very long, for the valley was still below them. He looked around at his companions. Shakespeare was still dead to the world, but Virginia Dare, hanging beside him, was already conscious. She looked alarmed, but not panic-stricken; presumably the idea of flying was not novel to her, even if she'd never actually done it. The impossibility of showing fear before a woman steadied Winslow, and he looked downward with only a slight queasiness.
They were flying into the late-afternoon sun, and beneath them the ancient ruins fell behind. After a while Shakespeare regained consciousness, and stared below with a wonder that overpowered fear and even nausea. Presently the flyer turned to starboard to follow a bend in the valley. Ahead, Winslow glimpsed what had to be the Grella fortress.
He knew he had no right to be surprised at what the Grella could do—not now, after what had happened to England and after all he had seen here. But knowing that was one thing. What loomed up ahead was something else.
The first thing he saw was a metal arch that, at this distance, seemed to be of cobweb fragility—although an instant's thought told him that in reality it must be of incredible tonnage, given the manifestly impossible diameter it enclosed. As they approached more closely, that massiveness became more apparent—as did the fact that it wasn't really an arch, but rather a three-quarter circle with its base in the ground. The thought came to him that it must be the portal through which the Grella had entered this world, outlined in this way for reasons of their own . . . to make it easier to find, perhaps, or to make it more readily useable in some other way about which he could not even speculate.
Then his eyes began to take in what lay around the base of that incredible arch—the fortress, as Virginia Dare had called it, although it was more like a city. The closer they got, the more its scale was forced on his incredulous mind. So was the fact that its buildings were all of seamless metal, or what appeared to be seamless metal, like impossibly large castings. Only they were too smooth even for that. Had it not been totally insane, Winslow would have thought the fantastic structures he was seeing had been grown in metal.
And in the midst of all the mind-numbing, awe-inspiring strangeness, dwarfing all the rest, there rose a darkly gleaming dome, linked to a ring of outbuildings by soaring arches not unlike the flying buttresses of a Gothic cathedral. Their flyer proceeded on, past an outer ring of what Winslow could recognize as gun emplacements even though the guns were of a sort beyond his ken. As they drew closer, that sinister dome grew and grew, its size and complexity becoming ever more apparent, and the sense of timeless evil that suffused it becoming ever more horrifying.
A feeling Winslow had never experienced began to close over him. So this is what despair feels like, jibed a tiny voice within him.
The base of the dome was terraced, with machines of unguessable function alternating with wide openings flanked by obvious weapons. The flyer floated through one of those openings, and Winslow involuntarily closed his eyes, certain he was going to smash into the lower frame. But the three dangling human figures barely cleared it as they swept on through into the dome. They gazed about.
They were in an interior too vast for a word like cavernous. It was too vast to be indoors, and the mind-numbing complexity of what lay below them contributed to the impression that this was an enclosed city within a city rather than a building. The flyer swooped down toward that labyrinthine maze, with a speed that caused Winslow's eyes to squeeze shut again. But then it slowed to a halt and hovered. At some automatic signal, the cables holding them were released, and they were unceremoniously dumped into a kind of cul-de-sac, enclosed by featureless metal walls on three sides and open to the unnatural light panels that glowed from the dome's interior surface far above.
The flyer departed, its high-pitched hum rising to a whine, and they were left alone, groaning with the pain of their fall to the hard floor. At least, Winslow satisfied himself, nothing was broken. The same seemed true of his companions, for they seemed able to move normally.
Virginia Dare's disposition was another matter. She glared at him balefully. "You just had to try to reach that ridge in broad daylight, didn't you?"
"Nobody forced you to come!" Winslow retorted. His asperity was partially born of his guilty knowledge that she had a point. But even worse was the sheer oppressiveness of this unnatural place, created entirely by the Grella and utterly alien to anything wrought by God or man. He looked around at the three walled-in sides of their enclosure, which were too high and smooth to even consider climbing. Then he considered the wide-open fourth side.
Shakespeare read his thoughts. "Ah . . . Captain, even if
they mean to leave us free to simply walk from here, I doubt if even your skill at navigation could find our way out of this place."
"Still, anything would be better than squatting here and awaiting their pleasure!" Winslow strode forward.
"No! Don't!" Virginia Dare cried urgently. Winslow ignored her and continued his advance.
It wasn't as bad as the weapon that had stunned them, for he didn't lose consciousness. But he cried out from the same burning pain, and his muscles contracted and his heart skipped a beat as before. Sparks flew until he fell to the floor, twitching, and lost contact with that invisible wall.
With a sigh whose theatricality Shakespeare must have envied, Virginia Dare rolled her eyes heavenward as though asking God to give her strength. Winslow slowly got to his feet, carefully avoiding her look. He glared up at the vast convex roof that shut out the sky, and the light panels that served in place of the sun. A flyer passed overhead, insultingly indifferent to them. The only sound was a distant murmur of unfamiliar machine noises. "Why have they left us here, ignoring us?" he demanded of no one in particular. "They must be trying to break our spirit."
"Not without success, at least in my case," Shakespeare muttered. He slumped down and sat in silence with his back to a wall. After a moment, Winslow followed suit, seeing nothing better to do and not wishing to voice the chilling thought that had suddenly entered his mind: the memory of those Eilonwë slaves, mind-shackled beyond any ordinary conception of slavery. He wondered if the other two were thinking that was what lay in their own future, and if that was why no one spoke.
Time began to lose its meaning as they sat under those unchanging artificial lights, tormented by discomfort and anxiety . . . and, increasingly, by hunger and thirst. Finally, Winslow got stiffly to his feet and swallowed to lubricate his dry throat. "Hallo!" he cried out hoarsely. "Is anybody here?"
"For God's sake, be quiet!" hissed Virginia Dare. "Haven't you done enough already?"
"What the Devil have we got to lose?" Winslow took a deep breath and let out a bellow that could have been heard above a sea storm. "Bring us food and water, damn you!"
There was no response. Winslow, in a mood of sheer stubbornness, remained standing, hands on hips.
He was close to giving up and sinking back to the floor when three Grella finally appeared. While two of them stood with leveled weapons, the third did something with a small object in his hand. Then he spoke a few obviously inexpert syllables in the Eilonwë tongue, and beckoned to them to come.
"Is he crazy?" Winslow growled. "Or does he think we are?"
"He's caused the barrier to vanish," said Virginia Dare listlessly. She stood up and walked from the cul-de-sac unharmed. After a moment, Winslow and Shakespeare followed, the former with a hesitancy born of remembered pain.
They were conducted through oddly angled walkways and courts to a large central structure. The interior held the typically Grella lack of anything humans could recognize as ornamentation, but there was an unmistakable richness to the surfaces, and a spaciousness out of proportion to the building's diminutive masters. All of this was especially evident in the octagonal chamber to which their guards led them. Behind a long, low, gleaming-topped table, half a dozen Grella shared a couch rather than sitting on the individual chairs humans would have favored. They wore the usual silvery garments, but with complex gold chest insignia. The one with the most elaborate such insignia spoke. "I am Sett 44, Rank Orbassin 27." An instant passed before Winslow realized that the loathsome, sibilant voice had spoken in English. Virginia Dare wore a look of stark astonishment.
"We learned your language from individuals of your species whom we captured," came the hissing answer to their unspoken question. No mention was made of how the knowledge had been extracted, and Winslow decided he didn't really want to know. "I took the trouble to learn it because your species has recently become of more than usual interest." He paused, as though inviting comment. Virginia Dare merely glared in silence, and Shakespeare managed to restrain his usual loquacity. Winslow followed suit, and as he waited he had a moment to wonder why he continued to think of this sexless thing as he. Perhaps it was the fact that he had known them as monks in his own world. And there was certainly nothing suggestive of the feminine about them. Actually, there was nothing masculine about them either. But he found it impossible to think of something that talked as it.
"It is obvious," Sett 44 resumed, "that you human animals are not native to this world. That has been clear enough ever since you first appeared nineteen years ago. And you were first observed in the same general area where very old records indicate that a research vessel disappeared two thousand years ago. This led certain of my colleagues to theorize a connection between the two. I was a skeptic at the time. But since then, rigorous interrogation of the same captives from whom we learned your language has provided confirmation. They spoke in disjointed, meaningless terms of a transition from a different world, where your species lives in an appropriately primitive state. Furthermore, in that world they knew from hearsay of beings who resembled us, and who evidently were in the process of using their superior intelligence to secure control through the local tribal cult."
Winslow felt himself flush at hearing Christians—even papists—so referred to. But he held himself in check.
"Naturally, the animals in question died under interrogation," Sett 44 continued unfeelingly. "We brought them back to life . . . in fact we did so several times. But the rejuvenation process has odd effects on your species' rudimentary brains." A chill went through Winslow as he recalled the stories about old Juan Ponce de León. "Those effects proved to be cumulative, with repeated rejuvenations. In the end, the captives were useless and we discarded their mindless husks, which went to supplement the organic matter from which our artificial food is generated. By then they could do little but repeat their names: Ananias and Eleanor Dare."
It took some very small fraction of a second for the names to register on Winslow. At the instant they did, he turned to Virginia Dare, knowing what was going to happen and knowing that he had to prevent it.
He was too late. With a scream that raised his neck hairs, she sprang forward before he could grab her, and before the Grella guards could react. She was halfway over the table before a guard at the table's end raised his weapon. Too quickly for sight, she grasped the weapon by its muzzle and jerked it toward her, pulling it from the guard's grasp and throwing him off balance. Then she reversed the motion and punched the butt stock into his face with a crunch of whatever passed among the Grella for bone and cartilage. Then, without a pause, she threw away the weapon, grasping with her usual quickness that its effectiveness at such short range was too limited to justify the pause it would have taken her to bring it into action. Instead, she cleared the table with a leap and grasped the throat of a Grell who tried to interpose himself between her and Sett 44.
But by then the guards had recovered. Two of them leveled their weapons at Winslow and Shakespeare while the others' beams struck Virginia Dare. At least the weapons were still set to shock. Her back arched convulsively and she cried out once before collapsing. Even in unconsciousness, her hands had to be pried from the throat of the Grell, whose wheezing, gagging, rattling sounds were like the pealing of church bells to Winslow's soul. That Grell was led away, as was the guard with the smashed face. Other guards carried Virginia Dare off in response to a series of incomprehensible orders from Sett 44, who then turned his huge, empty, dark eyes back to the two men.
"The fault is mine. The female breeder who is the war leader of the human animals is notorious. I should have recognized her, and anticipated this sort of behavior." At the word breeder, the usual Grella emotionlessness seemed to waver, and Winslow could sense Sett 44's disgusted contempt. "Capturing her is a great coup. She should yield valuable information on the feral Eilonwë and their human allies before her mind is destroyed and she goes into the organic-matter vats. But at the moment, I am more interested in the recent loss of one
of our patrols in the ancient city, under circumstances which seem to suggest the arrival of still more humans. This suggests a . . . permeability in the barrier between the human world and this one, of a sort for which there is no precedent. If you voluntarily give me useful information, you will merely be enslaved. I offer you this option because, as you have perhaps gathered, the more drastic forms of interrogation might render you useless prematurely."
Winslow forced his battered mind to concentrate on the implications of what he had just heard. The Grella—or, at least, Sett 44—had more knowledge, and more inferences from that knowledge, than anyone had credited them with. But there were still a great many things they didn't know. In particular, they were completely in the dark about the way in which humans—primitive animals in their eyes—traversed the barrier between the universes. In fact, Sett 44's choice of English words suggested that they didn't really understand it at all; they thought of it as a barrier, to be smashed through by extravagant application of physical energies at certain weak points. Nothing he had heard suggested that they were aware of the nature of the "Near Void" and the "Deep Void" as Riahn had explained it. At some point, ages in the past, they had by accident discovered their brute force way of bursting into the Deep Void and automatically bursting out of it at the nearest weak point in the nearest universe. And in all the millennia since then, in accordance with what Riahn had said about their lack of creativity, they had continued to make use of that lucky accident without even considering the possibility of reasoning from it and deducing what made it work.
