by James Axler
Banks opened his mouth as if he were about to protest, closed it and stepped over to the panel. He touched a knob, and the overhead lights dimmed to dusk level. "We don't want to cause him discomfort."
"Like hell we don't," Kane snapped. "Bring them up a bit more — not enough so he's blinded, but enough so we can get a good look at him for once."
Banks hesitated. Dolefully, he said, "Has it occurred to you that we may be doing exactly what Balam wants us to do? Maybe he implanted this suggestion in your mind so he can escape."
Kane thought that possibility over for a few seconds. "If the little bastard can get through all of us, out of this locked room and somehow out of the redoubt, then he's more than welcome to escape. Good riddance to a bad alien."
As Banks manipulated the knob again, the lights brightened. He reached out to a row of keys on the console and depressed three of them in a certain sequence. Electronic chimes rang from the vicinity of Balam's cell, then one entire pane slowly rose, sliding into a double-slotted frame. A puff of air wafted out, carrying with it the faint scent of wet cardboard sprinkled lightly with cinnamon and bleach. The mingled odors weren't repulsive, but they were certainly odd.
Facing the open portal, Kane announced loudly, "Recess time, you little hell-spawn. After three and a half years, you should be happy to stretch your legs."
Nothing stirred or shifted within the gloom of the cell. Kane took a threatening step forward. Sharply, he commanded, "Come out or I'll drag you out."
He half expected his mind to be clouded by the quasi-hypnotic mist that Balam projected to mask his true appearance. Instead, he heard a soft footfall, then another and another. A figure loomed in the crimson-hued murk, stepped to the open portal and paused, looking around curiously.
Always before, Kane had received only a fleeting impression of Balam's physical appearance, and then it was overshadowed by an image of his huge, penetrating eyes. He sensed Brigid tensing beside him.
She had seen the mummified remains of an Archon in the Black Gobi, and both of them had encountered a horde of hybrids at the Dulce installation. They had been shown the preserved corpse of an Annunaki, purportedly the root race of the Archons. There had been a suggestion of the monstrous about all of them.
Balam did not resemble a monstrosity He reminded Kane of a work of art, as crafted by a minimalist sculptor. He was very short, barely four feet tall, and excessively slender, his body like that of a half-grown boy.
He wore a dark, tight-fitting suit of a nonreflective metallic weave. The one-piece garment covered him from throat to toes, leaving only his hands and head bare.
His high, domed cranium narrowed down to an elongated chin. His skin bore a faint grayish pink cast, stretched drum tight over a structure of facial bones that seemed all cheek and brow, with little in between but two great upslanting eyes like black pools. His nose was vestigial and his small mouth only a tight, lipless slash. Six long, spidery fingers, all nearly the same length, dangled at the ends of his slim arms.
"Polydactyl," Brigid murmured.
"What's that?" asked Kane.
"An extra digit on his hands, probably his feet, too."
Balam stood swaying like a reed before a breeze. Kane had seen the movement before, when the hybrids in Dulce addressed Baron Cobalt. He had guessed it was a form of ritual greeting.
Kane stepped closer, close enough to be aware of Balam as a living creature, smelling his unearthly, musky perfume. He saw the faint rise and fall of respiration and the tiny pores in his finely textured skin.
The huge, tear-shaped dark eyes regarded him, alert but not frightened. Thin membranes with a faint crisscrossing pattern of blue veins veiled them for an instant. Balam breathed, moved, blinked and reacted to his presence.
Kane gestured grandly. "No need to stand on ceremony. Join the apekin in our jungle."
Balam stepped into the room with the same kind of bizarrely beautiful danceresque grace possessed by the hybrids. He didn't seem intimidated, even by the three humans towering over him. He looked around, and his slit of a mouth parted. A sound issued from it, faint, hoarse, but far deeper in timbre than any of them expected.
Balam asked, "Why?"
* * *
"So you can speak," Kane declared, smiling mockingly. "Why were you using Banks here as your mouthpiece?"
One of Balam's bony fingers unfolded, touching the base of his throat. "Difficult," he said in a scratchy, strained whisper. "Structure here different. Verbalizing thoughts difficult."
"Atrophied vocal cords?" Lakesh murmured.
Banks dragged a stool over. "Do you want to sit?"
Balam shook his head. Again he rasped, "Why?"
"Because you're no longer of value as a captive," Kane replied flatly. "Or a hostage. It doesn't seem like the Directorate knows you're here. And if they do know, they don't care."
"You…" Balam paused to cough, a shockingly human sound. "You set me free?"
Kane eyed him coldly. "Not yet. But if we did, where would you go?"
Balam responded to the question with one of his own. "Stone… did you find stone?"
"We found it, but we didn't recover it," Brigid stated. "And here's why."
She launched into a terse, blow-by-blow recounting of the events in New York. Balam's placid, masklike countenance didn't alter. Kane wondered if it could.
"A hybrid was one of the thieves," Kane said. "He claimed descent from the Agarthan ambassador. What do you know about that?"
Balam only blinked.
"This is all tied up with the Archon Directorate, isn't it?" Kane pressed, a note of anger apparent in his voice. "What's it about?"
"You must get stone, Kay-nuh."
"Why must he?" Lakesh asked.
"Key," Balam replied. "Key to all futures. Key to all our destinies."
"Our destinies?" Kane repeated derisively. "Humans and Archons share a destiny other than master and slave?"
Balam swallowed hard and painfully. His tissue-thin eyelids dropped over his eyes for a moment, then his fathomless black gaze sought out Banks. He stretched out a beseeching right hand toward him.
"Meld me," he whispered. "So may explain."
"I don't think so," snapped Kane.
"It's my decision," Banks countered. "I'll do it so we can get this over with."
Balam kept his hand out. "Touch. Make meld more strong. Explain more."
At that, Banks's determination wilted a bit, his brow knitting in consternation. But he firmed his lips and stepped forward, reaching with his left hand. Their fingers touched, then intertwined.
"Relax," whispered Balam. "Like before. Empty mind."
Perspiration suddenly sprang to Banks's forehead, then ran down his face in large drops. His lean body quaked in a seizurelike shudder, his sweat-sheened face contorting.
"Banks?" Brigid questioned, putting a hand on his shoulder.
In a barely audible whisper, he said, "Now we may proceed."
Kane saw Balam's lipless mouth move slightly, synchronized with Banks's voice, forming the words he wanted vocalized. The ventriloquist-and-dummy analogy had more foundation than ever before, and it made Kane shiver.
"I was not aware of the new human's presence," Banks-Balam said, voice growing louder and stronger.
Kane quirked an eyebrow, remembering "new human" was Baron Cobalt's choice of euphemisms for the hybrids.
"I sensed only the man you call Zakat because he touched the fragment of the trapezohedron sheltered in the lamasery. He now has two of the pieces, which will lead him to the third and prime facet."
"Which lamasery?" Lakesh demanded.
"You know it as the Trasilunpo in the nation called Tibet."
"You still haven't explained the importance of the stone," challenged Kane. "Or at least why we should consider it important."
Banks shifted his gaze toward Lakesh. "You know, Mohandas Lakesh Singh. The knowledge is buried within your mind, but you have yet to make the connection."
&n
bsp; Lakesh's face acquired a new set of seams. "I see no reason to speak in riddles."
"I described the stone as a creation through which the flux lines of possibility, of probability, of eternity, of alternity meet."
Lakesh stared first at Banks, then at Balam in bewilderment. Then his head snapped up, eyebrows crawling above the rims of his glasses, toward his hairline. "The trapezohedron is a point of power, a nontechnological quantum vortex?"
"Vortexes which you once tried to locate and access by technological means."
Brigid demanded, "Are you saying the Chintamani Stone, the trapezohedron is a naturally occurring hyperdimensional vortex point like the one we found in Ireland?"
"It is a key," Banks-Balam stated simply.
Kane thrust his head forward, eyes glittering in predatory anticipation. "A key to the home of the Archons?"
Banks-Balam did not respond for such a long time Kane almost repeated himself. Finally, the soft answer came, "Those you call the Archons cannot be found with any key."
Crossly, Brigid asked, "Why do you keep qualifying every remark about the Archons? What do you call yourselves?"
The word passed the lips of Banks in a rustling whisper. "Humans."
Everyone gaped at Balam in outraged disbelief. Kane snarled, "You're not human, you little son of a bitch. We learned all about you, how you're the result of a crossbreeding program between a reptilian species called the Annunaki and the Tuatha De Danaan — who, though humanoid, weren't human."
The sound that floated from Banks was so unusual, it took them several seconds to recognize it. Balam was forcing Banks to laugh.
"You learned only a small, oversimplified bit of my people's origins, our history, and even that was distorted by myth and legend. But it does not change the fact that the so-called Archons are still human, native to this world.
"Yes, what you believe to be mankind is old, but they were not the first on Earth. My race is far, far older, but it was your folk who so long ago cut the thread that bound us to one another. We had no choice but to draw apart. Far, far apart have we drawn, we who might have shared this world with you but for the slings and swords and spears of your ancestors. We who were not aliens, yet alienated."
Banks-Balam spoke with bitterness, but a note of pride underscored his words. "It is we who gave you the legacy of science and spirit, yet you allowed it to drift into madness."
Kane felt rage building in him, and it required all of his self-control to contain it. "We've heard variations of this speech before," he said. "We know all about how your kind raised us from the ape, how fucking superior you are to us, how you're reducing us to the ape again. If the stone doesn't lead to the Archon Directorate, then where can they be found?"
"They cannot be found."
The response came so quickly, Kane felt his nape hairs prickling with suspicion. "You're lying."
Balam cocked his head at him, a movement that was reminiscent of a praying mantis trying to figure out the nature of a new prey. "You have been misled by your people, trained to think in rigid channels. They created the Archon Directorate appellation for the sake of simplicity, to ease clerical chores."
"Are you saying," Brigid ventured haltingly, "that there is no such thing as the Archon Directorate?"
Banks and Balam shook their heads slightly at the same time. "This is not the topic of the discussion."
Lakesh suddenly hugged himself, shivering, but not from fear. His eyes shone with a jubilant light. In a thrilled whisper, he declared, "The Oz Effect. I was right. By God, I was right."
"What?" Brigid and Kane demanded in unison.
"A theory I've been toying with. Balam, we know more about you than you realize. Once there were many of your kind. You mastered space and hyperdimensional travel aeons ago, probably using the quantum-pathway technology left by your forebears. Your people served, either by accident or design and sometimes both, as the source of myth cycles, religions and secret societies.
"Revelations about your people, our cousins, were kept hidden for thousands of years. Why? Because they may have accelerated the spiritual evolution of mankind. But your scientific secrets were doled out piecemeal until humanity's fixation with technology reached critical mass and plunged us into a cataclysm."
"One of many cataclysms," Banks-Balam said softly. "This last one was the ultimate baptism of fire for humankind to overcome — to forge your spirits in a crucible and have them grow strong or to shatter forever."
Lakesh acknowledged the observation with a dry chuckle. "A baptism for your people, as well, wasn't it? A last-ditch solution to the final curtain of extinction."
The old man took a step forward, bending down, hands on his knees so he could stare unflinching and unblinkingly into Balam's huge eyes. "Over two hundred years ago, I saw you at the installation in Dulce, New Mexico. Since then, I have learned you acted as the liaison between the American government's Overproject Majestic and the so-called Archon Directorate.
"Before that, you were a guest of the Soviets. They dug you out of the crater at the Tunguska blast where you'd been in cryostasis for thirty-some years when your vessel crashed."
"What's all that got to do with the home of the Archon Directorate?" Kane asked, not trying to disguise the angry impatience in his voice.
Lakesh grinned broadly. Without removing his gaze from Balam, he said, "Friend Kane, dearest Brigid, the Archon Directorate stands before you."
20
Balam's blank face registered no emotion whatsoever, but he jerked his hand free from Banks's grasp as if scalded. The young man gasped, his features squeezing together like a fireplace bellows. He staggered and pressed his fists against his temples, and would have collided with a trestle table if Brigid hadn't caught him.
All of Kane's anger was washed away by icy floodwaters of shock, incredulity and denial. He was too dumbfounded to speak.
Banks steadied himself, massaging the sides of his head. He glared at Balam and said accusingly, "You might have told me you were going to do that."
Lakesh laughed, a harsh sound without mirth. "He might have told us a lot of things."
"Lakesh, you're going to have explain what you mean," Brigid declared.
Lakesh kept his eyes on Balam's. He crooned, "You gave us enough clues to put the puzzle together — I grant you that. Not to mention an equal number of diversions, false trails and pieces that almost fit but didn't quite. But now we know the truth, Balam — you're the only one of your kind. The last Archon, or whatever you prefer to call yourself."
Kane and Brigid were stunned speechless, grappling with the enormous implications of Lakesh's confident assertion.
"The Archon Directorate was protective coloration," he went on, "an art your people were masters of over the long, long track of centuries and civilizations."
Brigid finally found her voice. "You mean the Archon Directorate is only him?" she questioned. "All along, only one of them?"
"At least over the last couple of hundred years." Lakesh's tone held a gloating note. "The Oz Effect, wherein a single, vulnerable entity created the illusion, the myth of an all-powerful force as a means of manipulation and self-protection. My compliments, Balam. Over the last four millennia, you kept the entire human race guessing.
"You allowed us to suspect you were gods, demons, fairies and finally extraterrestrials, always fitting your presence into the current frame of reference. You let us believe you were everything but what you really were — a dying people, racing inexorably to the finish line of extinction.
"That was the reason for the hybridization program, so your people would live on in one form or another, a form you chose. I don't think I'd be too far off the mark to suggest that most, if not every molecule of Archon genetic material in the hybrids derives solely from you.
"Thus, you are both the last of your kind and the father of a new race. A bridge between the old and the new. Hence the reality of the psionic threads supposedly linking all of the so-called Archons to each
other and to your half-breed spawn."
Lakesh straightened up swiftly, face flushed, eyes shining brightly. "And for the first time in thousands of years, a race of beings that carry the genetic characteristics of your folk may at last win the game of the survival of the fittest. A contest your people knew they had lost probably twenty thousand years ago."
Kane tried to speak, but he felt numb, dislocated, as if his brain were immersed in soggy cotton wadding. "He — Balam… he's it? He and he alone orchestrated the nukecaust, the unification program, all of it? Just so his genes would be the ones in the majority?"
"Every father wants the best opportunities for his children," Lakesh said. "Balam — whether he had hands-on control of events that led up to the nukecaust or not — was simply eliminating the competition. He stacked the deck, and if a few hundred million of us had to die in the process, that was all part of the game."
Kane stared at the fragile creature, recalling all the equally fragile hybrids he had seen. He remembered what Baron Cobalt had told him: "The humanity you know is dead. The new humanity is taking its place. All a matter of natural selection. Nature taking its course… We are a highly evolved breed, and our numbers are growing… This is our world now, and nothing can be done to arrest the tide… Accept our kind as we have accepted your kind."
A roaring red madness shredded Kane's soul. He lunged forward, shouldering Lakesh aside, his hands encircled the slim, short column of Balam's throat. His flesh felt slick, but warm with life. Kane snatched Balam up, swinging his feet clear of the floor. The slender creature weighed no more than a child's doll.
Dimly, he heard Brigid, Banks and Lakesh shouting his name. He squeezed, staring straight into Balam's fathomless eyes, silently daring him to fight for his life. Banks and Brigid latched on to his arms, beating at his wrists, trying to prise his fingers from Balam's neck.
The pain of their blows was drowned in his hatred, so intense it in turn became pain. Kane felt as if his body had turned to steel, and his hate flowed like electrical current out along the line of his vision, pouring into Balam's eyes to shrivel whatever imitation of a soul he possessed.
