by Colin Kapp
"Here?"
"What's the matter, Lover? Have you never stood naked before a woman before?" Her tone was scathing. "Your reputation suggests otherwise." She took out an electron pistol from her belt and focused it down to a slim beam. "I think you know what will amuse me if you don't co-operate."
Dam began to strip, remembering the incident when she had coaxed him on to the end of the goad. Of the two devices, the slim beam produced the greater pain, and the deep burns took a long time to heal.
When he had finished, she looked him over mockingly, then reached into a cabinet and threw something to him which looked and felt like a bundle of soft, fine wire mesh.
"Dress in that ."
Dam inspected the mesh warily and found it woven into the form of a close-fitting suit of one-piece design made to encompass his whole body including his hands, head, and even his face. The entry aperture was small, and a considerable amount of manipulation was necessary before he was clad in the tight metallic 'skin'. An inbuilt resilience in the mesh made it hug his limbs and torso closely.
She now provided him with a heavy back-pack, the traps of which were of woven copper braid. Dam looked at the complex electronics in the pack, felt the harsh fit of the electrode straps around his torso, and for the first time began to feel genuinely afraid for his life. Absolute inspected him critically and made a few adjustments to the pack.
"Do you know what life is, Lover?"
"Is that a rhetorical question€”or a proposition?"
"Neither." Despite herself, a glimmer of amusement twitched the corners of her mouth. "Life is organization. Take all the compounds from which a human body is made and mix them together and all you've got is a revolting stew. But with the right organization of exactly the same components you have a thinking, living being. Factually, the organization is even more important than the materials from which the body is made. Preserve the organizational information, and you can transpose the being from one set of materials into another and back again."
"I'll take your word for it. Is this the basis of para-ion technique?"
"Exactly that. In a few moments I'm going to put you through the paraformer. There, every atom of your body will be stripped and paired with one of those of a host substance€”in this case hydrogen. You, and everything inside your energy shell, will become quite literally transliterated into a gaseous plasma state. The back-pack is an energy modulator. It functions by producing the energy shell, and holding all the organizational information which makes you a being in such a way that your host molecules can't diffuse together and turn you into a homogeneous blob. Without the energy shell, of course, you would immediately diffuse away into the atmosphere altogether."
"I think I begin to detect the reason you have difficulty getting volunteers."
"Do you, Lover? The best is yet to come. There's a hydrogen-filled furnace ahead of you running at white heat. You have to go through the paraformer, walk through the furnace, and emerge through a second paraformer located at the far end. At least, that's the theory."
"And the practice?"
"Para-ion transformation is a painful process. There's many can't face the idea of entering the second paraformer having experienced the first. For that reason the back-pack has a timing mechanism. You've five minutes to traverse the furnace. After that, the pack switches off. If that happens, better pray you have the luck to merely dissipate in the furnace environment."
"And without luck?"
"You start a return to your normal state inside the furnace. It's quite a tidy system. Either way we don't have to dispose of any bodies. Just occasionally we have to sweep out a little dust."
"Did you have to work hard to become such a callous bitch? Or was it a natural talent?"
"Quite natural, I assure you. And it's one of the least of my accomplishments, Lover. Now move!"
With the muzzle of the electron pistol she indicated he should enter a narrow tunnel. With considerable trepidation, Dam did as he was told. Ahead of him, at the far end of the tunnel, he could see a slope leading steeply upwards. Despite the hellish radiance of the furnace above and beyond, there was no doubting that the slope itself was glowing cherry red. The heat emanating from the environment he was being forced to enter was almost unendurable, and he felt his skin tighten as the sweat dried in the metal mesh in which he was clad.
He was actually standing in the paraformer before he realized it. Built into the tunnel's floor and ceiling, its presence was mainly manifested by its close complex of squared toroidal copper coils, beaded with moisture from the effect of internal cooling in the heated atmosphere. From this point it was possible to see the roof of the slope, where great transparent flames of hydrogen burned off in contact with the outside atmosphere. It was a vision of hellfire more real and squarely sordid than anything which had troubled ancient mystics.
He paused in the paraformer and looked back at Absolute wondering when his torment would increase. Her face was burnished rose-gold by the scattered radiance from behind him, and her eyes reflected back the bright flames in a way which gave the impression that they contained flames themselves. Momentarily he was transfixed by the image of her not as something mortal, but as a bright angel of Satan. There was something else he read in her face also, and that was a kind of passion he found no words to describe. He knew only that here was an image which would smoulder within him until the day he died.
She touched a control on the tunnel wall, and a transparent enclosure slid down from the ceiling to confine Dam in the para-former. Then Absolute came closer and spoke through a communicator system.
"Five minutes to get through the furnace, Lover. You might think of this as your baptism of fire. If you find your determination waning€”just think of me."
"I promise you'll never be far from my thoughts," said Dam sincerely.
He was aware of a sharp drop in the air pressure as large pumps started to draw the air from the enclosure. He was also struck by a curious deadening of the extraneous sound, and by a rushing in his ears as he began to fight for breath against the drastic withdrawal of life-supporting gas. Then the ion stripping and pairing process began: between the floor and the ceiling a great column of fluorescence closed around him, and he could literally feel the excited ions tearing at the flesh on his body, eroding him away. Every nerve fibre was exposed and separately corroded, and he was utterly consumed by a complete cocoon of pain which started at the outside of his being and worked its way remorselessly through his body into the very marrow of his bones.
Cursing, praying and screaming, he forced his mind to block-off and reject the messages his shattered nerves were trying to convey, and threw every atom of crumbling composure into the task of hurling wave after wave of dedicated hate through the impenetrable glass of the wall to the mocking goddess of exquisite torment who was enjoying his agonies from the safety of the tunnel outside. Then he became aware of a change that had taken place. He knew he was utterly destroyed; yet he knew this with a mind which still had sentience and therefore continued to exist. Reason told him he was dead; yet death brought no blessed sleep, only the anguish of a new awakening. It was an unholy metamorphosis, the substitution of a new creature for the one he had been: it was death and a re-birth, compounded of the traumas inherent in both. And he was through . . .
The glow discharge in the enclosure ceased, and the inner portion was raised away to allow him access to the red hot slope leading to the furnace beyond. At the same time the residual pain level died to nothing and was replaced by a curious euphoria and a sense of liberation. Knowing from Absolute's words that his entire being had been transliterated into elemental hydrogen, Dam took careful stock of his new form of existence.
His first reaction was to feel himself akin to a god. Although he had sufficient mass to give him orientation and traction, the weight of his old body had gone, and he felt his muscles were now capable of allowing him to jump fifty metres at a bound if he desired. His body was still visible, but now
sufficiently transparent to enable him to see through it the details of the floor beneath. Incredibly, all of his muscle co-ordination and sensitivity of touch remained, yet the searing heat of the ascending slope produced no pain, nor did it burn his insubstantial flesh.
He looked back to see if Absolute was watching, but the darkness in the tunnel was too great to permit him to see her, and with a shrug of his shoulders he began to ascend the dreadful slope ahead. As he walked, he began to appreciate more fully the dangers of his predicament. Here he was, a human analogue composed of structured hydrogen, entering a furnace atmosphere of the same gas but in superheated form in which the molecules would be most violently in motion. The slightest malfunction of the equipment pack would most surely distribute him in the surrounding medium so thoroughly that even a sensitive spectrometer would have no way of determining that Dam Stonndragon had been intermixed with the furnace charge.
Apart from the pain of the transition, there had so far been nothing to justify Absolute's remark about the waning of his determination. As he topped the slope and became engulfed in the turbulent white-hot gas of the furnace proper, however, the exercise began to take on graver aspects. The complete uniformity of the level of radiation destroyed any form of visual contrast, thus robbing him of the clues he needed for the judgment of distance and perspective. This, combined with the curiously 'thin' feeling of the hydrogen atmosphere and his own unnatural buoyancy produced a sense of isolation and sensory deprivation which coaxed him dangerously away from objectivity. The cold outside world of danger, worry and work seemed like the remnants of a bad dream; while his newly liberated consciousness stared straight into the vistas of a white eternity.
He caught himself in time, stumbled to a wall and determined its direction by touch alone, then forced himself to detect the clues which showed him change in angle of the floor, the ceiling, and finally a farther wall. Having discovered how to drag perspective out of his nearly featureless environment, he immediately encountered a snag. The furnace chamber was not the plain box he had imagined, but had a whole series of internal walls and apertures, a rapid examination of which soon showed that he was in a complex labyrinth, with his whole existence at stake if he failed to find the exit.
His initial reaction was very close to panic. In the first moments of para-ion experience, during which he had striven to come to terms with his situation, some finite amount of time had passed. How much there was no way of knowing, and it was conceivable that several minutes might have elapsed before his objectivity had returned. This left him a very short time indeed to solve the labyrinth puzzle and make his escape before the back-pack became inactive.
With swift decision he began to examine the incandescent walls, trying to economise on time by mentally discounting those inviting entrances which by deduction he thought must lead to blind passages. After several trials and turns he arrived at the point which logic had suggested to be the only viable route, to find himself defeated by the blank rigidity of yet another wall . With a growing sense of desperation, he retraced his steps, feeling that where logic had failed, only unbelievable chance could succeed in the time that remained.
Dam did not have much faith in chance, nor, now he came to consider the point, was it likely that this deadly labyrinth had been designed to separate good guessers from the bad. Absolute had appraised him as a natural survivor, and survival in these circumstances was to be earned only by a bloody-minded refusal to be killed. There had to be some way in which the unswervable intention to survive could positively affect his chances.
Then he saw what he had to do. The walls of the labyrinth were composed of thick, porous ceramic slabs. Seizing one, he shook it, and found it not be secured either at the top or the bottom, and light enough for him to be able to make it sway. Putting all his strength behind it, he managed to topple it, and its descent staggered the composure of several further walls. Judging his angles for maximum effect, he seized this advantage, and deliberately used wall against wall to bring the whole labyrinth to a scattered and leaning disorder. At one corner he broke through into a larger chamber beyond, and was immediately rewarded with the sight of the head of the slope leading down to the second paraformer. He ran the remaining distance with controlled desperation, hating to think that time might beat him where circumstance could not. As he entered the paraformer the enclosure dropped around him immediately, and it was only when the process had begun that he began to doubt his capacity to endure it.
The re-establishment of his old molecular identity was infinitely slower and more painful than had been the opposite transformation; added to which the return to an unpleasant mode of normality was a psychological imposition which his brain was extremely unwilling to accept. When Absolute finally raised the walls of the paraformer enclosure, Dam was curled in fetal position on the floor and sincerely wishing he was dead.
She kicked him with a metal-tipped shoe as a welcome back to the old reality, then helped him to his feet as he staggered back towards the vestibule.
"Not a bad performance, Lover! But you cut the timing a bit fine. You had less than nine seconds left when you reached the second paraformer."
"I stopped to chat with some friends on the way," said Dam, beginning to recover his equilibrium. "Tell me something, Absolute. Was there a true route through that labyrinth?"
"Usually there is€”but for you there wasn't."
"Why not for me?"
"Because I've something very special planned for you, Lover. And I can't afford to back a loser. You've just proved to me that under ion-stress you can not only solve problems but can also see beyond and around the nature of the game. That's a valuable talent. But don't become complacent. I'm not judging you by ordinary standards. Hell, I've a long way to drag you yet!"
CHAPTER XIII
It was a measure of the desperation which drove the early colonists from Terra during the Great Exodus, that they preferred the planet called Lightning to their original home world. The planet was aptly named. A virtually continuous belt of storms gripped Lightning's atmosphere, her seas foamed with wind-blown spray, the thunderous division of her waves against the rocky fragments of the shores formed an ever-present background of noise, and her rainclouds were so thick as to endow the terrain almost perpetually with the shades of darkest dawn. The most frequent light in her sullen heavens was donated by the giant, electrical discharges which ripped the air asunder in seemingly endless succession.
Less obvious were the advantages of living on such a world. Once the early settlers had forgotten their amazement and dismay and gathered sufficient courage to peer out of the caves into which they had run on making planetfall , they found themselves in possession of a territory so rich in easily-won minerals and organic resources that they were amply compensated for the loss of all but an occasional glimpse of the sun. Under the great rain-lashed granite faces of the landscape, they bred a tough and dour progeny, who built their massive houses in defiance of the storms and on a scale fitting to the terrain and the extent of their growing fortunes. With an innate sense of conservation they established an interstellar trade, exporting only the exotic sea-foods and plant products which were renewable resources. Their mineral wealth they kept exclusively for their own use, and in this respect they fared far better than any other of the Hub communities.
The covetous eyes of some less-favoured planetary neighbours, hungry for metals, had led early to the split of the Hub Federation, which had died in its infancy, leaving Terran colonial policy without effective opposition. The inhabitants of Lightning became introspectively defensive in everything but trade, and of all the Hub worlds it had become the one about which least was known and most was speculated.
Liam Liam's own first experience of Lightning had not endeared the place to him. The Starbucket made planetfall in the midst of an electrical storm the like of which he hoped never to experience again. The lead-dark sky poured down unbelievable torrents of rain, the thunder stung his ears, and the whiplash o
f the lightning pulses posed such a continual threat to life during the long run from the ship to the terminal building that the agent knew for a certainty that he had known safer situations when running before enemy guns.
Once in the terminal building, however, his equilibrium returned, although he was comforted to know that sixteen meters of solid rock stood between him and the giant electrical pulses which rocked the terrain outside. In the terminal itself, everything was massive and uncouth, while remaining functional and effective. Eschewing decoration of the mundane, the engineers of Lightning had built their installations with durability as a major premise and aesthetics a non-runner. They made extensive use of solid, unfettled castings where other societies would have settled for thin-section pressings, and having access to all the mineral and geothermal power they were ever likely to require, they consistently over-designed as an aid to strength . Their vehicles were so solidly constructed that each would probably last for several lifetimes.
This, indeed, was Liam's first experience of an amphibious subterranean railway. The canny engineers of the stormy world, accepting that the flooding of tunnels was inevitable, had designed their inter-city transport with this in mind. The ponderous, rusty, rack-and-pinion 'tank' which crawled through the uneven and flood-drowned caverns of the route made no concessions to the presence of storm-water nor had any concern for the sanctity of its occupants' ears. With his head aching from the noise, Liam emerged thankfully from the vehicle an hour and a half later, feeling that he had spent a considerable period of his life inside a water cistern. The journey had taken him a bare thirty kilometers, but subjectively he still counted this as one of the longest journeys of his space-journeying career.
He was now in Bama, the nearest thing to a capital city which Lightning possessed. Garside Raad, who headed planetary security, was waiting for Liam at the head of the long flight of metal steps which rose above the ringing cavern to which Liam had been delivered. The two men had been long acquainted, and Liam had acquired the greatest respect for Garside's insular yet fiercely practical approach to the maintenance of Hub independence. For his part, Garside was a firm believer in Liam's war.
