"Got to get out of this crush," he panted. "Headquarters of the Companions of the Star is just over here— I think ..."
Clothilde Kwai Kwich cried breathlessly, "Yes, Andy! They'll still be functioning; we'll go there, and—" but she bad no breath to finish. It was all they could do to urge their way through the incredible press of citizens. There was neither violence nor outright panic; these were not the enemy. But there were so many of them, so many countless thousands more than the transflex cube could evacuate in the few score minutes left, and backed by so many thousands of thousands more that had not yet managed to make their way even into the central dome of the city. They were orderly. They were brave. But each of them knew that most of them were doomed.
They fought their way to a clear space and paused for breath. The carnivore citizen was the least affected of them; he glanced at young Rufe and bayed a laughing comment which the translators in Quamodian's ear rendered as: "Let the cub ride my shoulders! We'll never make it any other way."
"Naw!" flamed Rufe. "I can keep up if you can. Come on, preacher, let's do what we came to do!"
The pinkly glowing cloud citizen was worst damaged of the party. Little cloudlets of his material had been detached; some were still floating after him, rejoining the central mass of his being; others were hopelessly lost in the crush behind them. The grass-green spirals had merely tightened their orbits, maintaining exact spacing and speeds.
"All right," said Andy Quam. "Let's go!"
But a great shout from the dome behind them made them turn.
Every citizen, warm-blooded or cold, humanoid or amorphous, was staring upward, through the crystal ceiling of the dome, with ten thousand thousand eyes, photo-receptors, radar scanners, sensors of every description.
There, streaked like a child's bright daub on the calm blue skies of Kaymar, hung the bright and glittering globe of the invading rogue star. Lightnings played about its blazing body as it shot across the sky, its motion visible even though its distance was many million of miles.
Andy Quam tore his eyes away. "Come on," he muttered. "We've got even less time than I thought."
The Grand Hall of the Companions of the Star was empty. The thirteen suns of Almalik blazed down from the ceiling on an auditorium that could seat thousands, and now held no one at all.
Senior Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich said dolefully, "I can't understand. I thought here at least we'd find someone who could help ..."
The chant of the grass-green spirals sounded in Andy Quam's ears: "No indications! No operative functions being performed! This construct not inhabited!"
The boy clutched Quamodian's arm. "But, preacher," he said. "Almalik told us to come here. Didn't he?"
Quamodian said, "He gave us permission. Directly.Yes." He turned, searching the vast room with his eyes. "But perhaps something has happened."
The weary sigh of the cloud citizen whispered: "There exists a large-scale entity which is observing us."
Quamodian flung himself into a chair, trying to think. Time was so short! He had counted on finding the order of Companions of the Star still functioning. Perhaps it had not been realistic, but in his mind he had expected to find the great hall thronged with worshippers, the many offices and administrative sections busy about the endless tasks of Almalik. If he had thought at all, he had thought that a robot monitor of a citizen would have greeted them at the entrance, led them directly to someone in supreme authority, received his information about the rogue—and acted. Acted in time to save this world, and all the worldsof Almalik.
He had not expected that the building would be empty.
The others were waiting quietly for him to act. He realized that, right or wrong, he would have to make the decisions for all of them. And there was less time with every passing clock-tick...
He stood up. "All right," he said, "we'll go back to the transfiex cube. Perhaps the monitor there can help us."
"Through that mob, preacher? Impossible!" cried the boy.
"Impossible or not, that's what we'll have to do. Unless you have a better idea ..."
But then, as they turned to leave, a Voice rumbledsoftly in their ears.
"Wait," it said.
They froze where they stood. The girl looked imploringly at Andy Quam. She did not speak, but her lips formed a word: "Almalik?"
He nodded, and the Voice spoke again:
"Behold," it said, and the great dome lifted on its trans-Section forces to reveal the splendor of the heavens of Almalik themselves. It was daytime now; the glittering stars that the dome was designed to reveal could not be seen. But the bright smear of the invader was there, blighting the beauty o! the calm clouds. And near it in the sky, dropping toward them ...
"It's Miss Zaldivar!" shouted the boy. "Look, preacher! It's her and the sleeth!"
They were in that great hall for less than a quarter of an hour, and in all that time Quamodian could not afterward remember taking a breath. He was overpowered by the immense majesty of Almalik himself, brooding over them, watching and helping. Even the nearness of the girl he had crossed half a universe to find could not break him free from the spell of that immortal and immense star.
Though what was said was surely catastrophic enough to rouse him to action; for Molly Zaldivar, she said, was dying.
"Dear Andy," she whispered across the vast gulf of the chamber, her voice warm and affectionate in his ears. "No! Don't come any closer to me. I'm charged with radiations, Andy dear—the old ones from the Plan of Man machines, new ones that our little monster-star used to try to save my life. Or to give me life again; because I was dead. Anyway, if you come near me now it will be your death ..."
Even so, he rose to run toward her; but she stopped him with a gesture. "Please," she whispered. "Now. What was it that you came from Earth to tell?"
He stammered out the story the Reefer had told him, While Clothilde Kwai Kwich and the boy, one on each side of him, stood silent and awed. Molly Zaldivar listened gravely, her face composed though her eyes widened, then danced, as she saw how Clothilde's hand sought his.
Then she said, "Thank you, Andy. You've always been the best friend I could ever hope to have. I..."
Her composure almost broke for a moment, but she controlled herself, and smiled. "I don't mind leaving this World much, dear Andy. But I do mind leaving you."
And then she was gone, mounting once more toward the sky on the great, patient back of the sleeth, while the enormous dome of Almalik swung majestically back into place to blot her out.
Chapter 27
The rogue sensed the fear in that distant watcher, the fear of a father for a threatened son. It thought to call for help, but the distance was a thousand times too far. Even here, its thin thread of sensor had been snapped; it bad lost Molly Zaldivar and her sleeth, It tried to find them again for many picoseconds, but in vain. Some force larger than itself had shut her off, blinded it to her activities. A sense that in a human might have been called foreboding filled the rogue; but it had no time for even meta-emotions; it was driving ever closer to its enemy sun, and it needed all its forces for the task ahead.
The third planet had fallen far behind it now. It flashed through the orbit of the second planet, now hidden from it at inferior conjunction by the expanding white sun. The great white disk grew ahead of it.
Still the star ignores my attack. It refuses to resist. It offers no apology for the attacks it has made on me through !ts lesser stars. Still it is watching, mocking me ...
"Monster! Stop for me."
The thin filament of the rogue's probing sensor was alive again, carrying a message for it. The rogue energized its perceptions and saw that Molly Zaldivar was pursuing, racing after it on the black and shining sleeth. There was a power flowing from her that the rogue could not quite recognize, but that made it uneasy, unsure of itself. The feeble human figure of organized matter that was the girl should not have been able to dispose such powers. Not even with the energies the rogue itself had besto
wed on her; not when her life was close to an end, and ail her accumulated strengths were being disposed at once.
The rogue considered for some nanoseconds the possibility that these forces came from its enemy, Almalik. But it dismissed the possibility. It simply did not matter. Contact was only minutes away. Already the thin solar atmosphere was boiling around it. It did not stop, perhaps could not stop; the gathered mass of its planetary body was plunging too fast to be diverted now.
But it sent a message through its plasma effector, shaking the thin atmosphere that the sleeth carried with it though space. "What do you want, Molly Zaldivar?" its tiny voice piped. "Do you love me now?"
Her answer sent a seismic tremor through the core of the planet it had made its body: "Love you, monster? I don't know. I cannot imagine it. And yet—yes, perhaps I do. If it matters ... "
The rogue shook' hi its mad plunge. Its boiling seas loosed huge clouds of vapor as, for a moment, its grasp slackened; lightnings played through its tortured skies.
Molly was still speaking: "But I have no life left to love anyone, monster. Mybody is dying, and I must tell you something. Monster! Please listen. Almalik is not your enemy."
A shock of doubt shattered the rogue's great joy.
"Listen monster! Almalik never hurt you. Almalik has renounced all violence. He could not harm you, nor any sentient thing. Ever!"
Rage shook the rogue now. The crustal rocks of its planetary body snapped and white-hot magma spewed forth. In the air around Molly Zaldivar its tiny voice shrieked: "Lies! Lies again! The sun of Earth that tried to kill me was Almalik's vassal. Its twin stars that tried to kill me again—they were Almalik's companions!"
But Molly Zaldivar's voice came strongly. "No, monster. I lied to you once, yes. Because I was afraid of you. Bui Almalik has never lied, nor has he tried to harm you. The sun of Earth that struck you—it was your own brother!"
The rogue called back the huge effector that it had lashed out to strike her. Puzzled, its shrill voice repeated, "Brother?"
"Yes, your brother! Another synthetic sentience, made before you. It occupied the sun of Earth and tried to destroy you—came here before you, and tried to destroy you again through the twin stars of Almalik. But you defeated it,-monster. And now it is gone, and you must stop before you destroy great Almalik!"
The rogue paused, while its sentient plasma revolved the startling new concept. "Brother?" its tiny voice whispered again. A dreadful doubt shivered through its core.
If it were wrong, it thought—if it were wrong, then it was doing a dreadful and irrevocable deed.
For if it were wrong, then-Almalik had always been its friend. And it was within minutes of destroying Almalik forever.
Methodically, patiently, the rogue rebuilt its net of sensors, threw out probes to scan the patient white star before it—so close now, and so vulnerable!—and all of space around. Its velocity, hard driven and accelerated through hundreds of millions of miles, was huge. Unstoppable. It had thrown its energies in profligate abandon into thrusting the dead planet toward the white star. It was simply too late to stop.
With care and speed it calculated possible trajectories to divert its own plunge, not to stop it—for that was utterly impossible now—but simply to deflect it enough to miss the star and plunge on into the dark space beyond ... Impossible. It was too late.
Well, then: to pass through the star's corona, destroying itself in the process, of course, and working great havoc with the star's internal energy balance, but leaving most of it intact...
Also impossible. Also too late.
In what passed in it for desperation, the rogue computed its chance of plunging through the skin of the star but on a tangent that would miss the core, leave the star wounded and erupting with enormous violence, but perhaps not entirely destroyed ...
Also impossible, and finally impossible. Its energies were too great, its time of collision too near. It would strike the white sun almost dead on, whatever the rogue did now. And rogue and white star together would erupt in the ultimate violence of a supernova, destroying themselves and everything for a light-year or more around.
I regret, thought the rogue. I feel pity. For Molly Zaldivar. For Almalik. For all the myriads of beings on Almalik's doomed planets. And for me.
It sent out a message on the thin, stretched filament of energy with which it had been in contact with Molly Zaldivar, to say that there was no longer any hope. But it could not make contact.
Once again it searched ail of space nearby, seeking Molly Zaldivar and the sleeth. Uselessly. Somehow, Molly Zaldivar was gone.
The patterns of energy that made up the essential being of the rogue were shaken with grief and pain. Despairing, it thrust with all the energies it possessed at the calm white disk of its target sun, now so near and so vulnerable. Great spouts of flame boiled from the star below it; the rogue's own planetary body split and shattered in the violence of its effort to undo what it had done. But it was no use. The fragments of its planet, continental in size, massive as worldlets themselves, drove on unchecked.
Look, little one. Take that blue star. Use its energies, if you will.
The rogue darted out sensors in all directions, seeking the source of that soundless, gentle voice. The sensors found nothing. But the rogue knew where it came from:it was Almalik, speaking to it from the enormous, swelling, flame-ringed solar disk so near below.
The blue star?
Experimentally the rogue threw out a sensor toward it. It was empty, untenanted since it had destroyed the mad sentience that had inhabited it. It was waiting for it.
Something helped the rogue, something to which it could not put a name: not merely Almalik, not just the star it was so close to destroying, but a congeries of sentiences, a pooled strength of living and stellar creatures, all urging the rogue on, supporting it, giving it help.
It drove along the lines of its sensor and entered into the waiting star.
New energies flooded its webs of sentience. The resources of a giant stellar furnace were now its own to command.
It reached out to the planet it had abandoned, hurtling down on the white star, grasped it with the mighty plasma arms of its new body. White arms from Almalik himself joined the rogue—and with them, golden arms. The rogue puzzled over that for a few electron-orbits; surely the golden star was dead, unable to take part.
Yet it was taking part. The golden arms linked with the blue and white ones, and together, smoothly, strongly, with infinite speed they pulled the planet aside.
The planet did not survive those mighty forces; it crumbled into a million billion fragments, streaming past the great white orb of Almalik and heading out into space on cometary orbits.
But it had missed. Almalik was safe.
And the rogue had time to realize what it had gained, in the might of its new stellar body—and what it had lost. It sensed the joy, the proud approval, of that far-off fatherly watcher—which was now more akin than ever, but no longer all rogue.
The great tolling chorus of the stars welcomed it into brotherhood. Join us, brother, said a great collective voice. Be one with us. Be one with alt things that share the fronds of mind. Be one with Almalik.
And a part of the rogue rejoiced, and a part of it ached with an unpracticed grief for Molly Zaldivar, doomed to death in her frail human body, lost forever.
The slow, gentle voice held a hint of amusement, and wry pity. Look, brother, it said. You gave her your strength. We gave her our empty sun for a home.
And the rogue struck out, unbelieving, with a bright blue plasma sensor toward the golden star; and it met the rogue's sensor with one of its own. Gold thread and blue touched and joined, while the stars watched and rejoiced.
The voice that spoke to the rogue was not a human voice, but there was something of humanity about it— something soft and merry, something very like the voice of Molly Zaldivar and dear.
"Hello, monster," it said. "Welcome. Welcome forever."
; THE END
Rogue Star Page 17
