In the center of the ring was a sphere of something so bright Sawyer could not look at it. Two tall figures faced each other across the brightness, and a dazzle of green lightnings flashed between them. But he was moving too fast. He could not focus on this or anything—yet. For he was swinging in a wide, bewildering orbit. Far under him now he could see the glass-crowned heads with their blank, serene, backward-staring masks and their vividly alive, forward-staring faces. Watching the future and the past, he thought.
NOW his great orbit swung him past them and down, down, down beyond the level of the thrones, far under, toward a vast bowl of golden haze which seemed to form the undersky of the tremendous hollow sphere he whirled in. Looking up, he could see the golden thrones from below, set solid on square bases, and countless Isier feet planted in pairs, flat upon nothingness.
He swung up again on the far side. The level platform with the thrones was a lenticular nebula which he saw edgewise and then slowly dawning into an elipse ringed all around with double-faced heads, and then broadening into a flat circle again straight down. But he could not look straight down, because of that intolerable glare in the center.
Out of it streamed those lashing coils of fire which he had dimly glimpsed from beyond the cell-wall. They flowed writhing and circling through the void in which he spun, circumscribed by it in a way he had not yet begun to grasp, so that the space inside the globe was filled by their tremendous spiraling.
He was not alone in his flight through golden space and golden spears of light. Other blurs of brilliance swung in other orbits around the galaxy of the gods. Other kneeling, human figures, motionless inside the spinning shells that carried them upon their orbits around that fiery sun. He could not count them, there were so many. But he remembered what Alper had said, and by craning and shielding his eyes he made out the number of the orbits. Seven. Seven orbits in which countless electrons spun around a nucleus too bright to see.
And it was growing brighter. As he squinted at it through almost closed lids, a kneeling figure enclosed in its spinning shell of force dropped toward the center of the glare, hovered for a second, dark against that light, and then vanished straight into the heart of the fire, between the two Isier who stood facing each other across it. Instantly the fire flared high, in a burst that scorched the eyes.
And between the two figures green lightnings crackled anew.
Sawyer tried hard to make his thoughts fall into a pattern he could grasp. Too much was happening. He could see too much, and none of it understandable. The blur of the spinning walls that carried him on his orbit was still hypnotic, though that steadying noise in his skull helped hold the sleep at bay.
“Give me a little more, Alper,” he said, and his voice rebounded fantastically from the whirl of the walls. He thought of the disc in Alper’s hand, and his own words whispering out of it, and the image was more disorienting than what he saw around him. “A little, not much. There—there! Good.”
The noise was louder. He could think a little better. But what was happening was still so incoherent he groped frantically for analogies to give it pattern.
“I’m the axis the cell turns on,” he thought. “I’m the proton that swings the electron of the walls around. But in this vaster space, I’m an electron whirling around the nucleus of the fire down there. Who knows what an electron’s made of, anyhow? Nobody.” An instantaneous vision of all electrons in the make-up of all matter swam before his eyes, every one of them a miniature Sawyer kneeling in a spinning hexagon. He shook the picture out of his mind with a tremendous effort.
What was the blinding sphere of light that controlled all these whirling things? The nucleus of this atom with seven shells of force? (A uranium atom? he wondered dimly. Rich and complex with its great cloud of whirling electrons in seven shells around a tight-packed nucleus?) Uranium was the element the Firebirds sucked out of Earth’s pole. Then might that sphere of brilliance be—
“The Well!” he thought. “The Well of the Worlds!” And he strained his dazzled eyes toward it, trying hard to make out what the thing was, his mind trying in vain to pierce its brilliance and see the far end where the world of Khom’ad lay locked to the world of Earth . . .
He could not. But he could see more clearly, as his vision adjusted to its limit of tolerance, the two figures facing each other across that blinding blaze. A white-robed figure, and a column of swaying, lashing darkness upon which a pale mask floated.
The Goddess. Nethe and the Goddess.
Then this was the Unsealing, from which one or the other would walk alive, leaving a vanquished rival dead beside the Well. How, he wondered in awed amazement, could the Isier die? In what unimaginable form would death overtake the undying gods?
THE rings of electrons spun. The fiery streamers of light poured swirling inside the shell of the electrons. And between the two rival Goddesses the sphere of the Well burned high and then low again, as one victim after another whirled downward toward the flame, hovered, dropped. With each victim, the fire flared high.
“And they’re being replaced from outside,” Sawyer thought. “As each drops from the middle ring into the fire, a readjustment must take place all through the seven orbits. Cell by cell they snatch us from the wall of sacrifices and whirl us into the dance as they need us. We—”
A sudden jolt knocked the thoughts out of his head. He was dropping nearer the fire . . . The outermost orbit of the seven acquired a new electron and the sixth received Sawyer. Presently, he thought, the fifth would rob the sixth of him, and so, step by step, he would fall through the dance of the rings until he hovered above the innermost flame, and dropped . . .
To replenish the weapons with which the Goddess and the Goddess-elect were lashing each other with whips of emerald flame. What were the weapons? How did they draw upon the burning Well for their power?
As if in answer, for a moment the fire died between them and he could look down clearly and see. For one of the falling electrons was hesitating above the Well. Had some helpless sacrifice, for an instant, jolted half-awake as he dropped toward immolation?
The green fires faded, ceased. The Well filmed over for an instant and it was possible for Sawyer to gaze unblinded upon the heart of the ceremony. He could still not bear to look upon the complex pattern that seethed in the Well. But he could see the two Isier, pausing as if for a moment’s breath before the combat began again.
Nethe’s great, baleful, half-lidded eyes like a snake’s eyes—or like a Sselli’s—glowed with an inner flame as hot as the Well’s. Her face was wet with a luminous dew of sweat, and her robes showed great rents whose edges glowed as if fire had ripped them and ignited an undying line of pale-green ember wherever it touched. She was swaying to and fro as a snake sways, restlessly and endlessly, incapable of standing still because the forces of destruction burned so high in her even while she snatched this moment’s rest.
With the same fierce, snake-like motion the Goddess swayed. Her robes of blackness the color of oblivion were rent too, and glowing with pale-green embers along every slash.
Something was wrong about their heads. And he could not quite make out the strangely shaped weapons they held shoulder-high between their hands as they faced each other.
Then with a shock he realized what had happened. They had removed their masks. Below the fiercely glaring faces they turned to one another, the masks glared as fiercely. With hands spread upon the cheeks of the masks so that the pale smiles, the empty eyes fronted their replicas across the Well like faces in a mirror, the two Isier swayed and panted, waiting . . .
The hesitating sacrifice dropped into the Well, and the waiting ended.
XIII
THE Well flared high. Up out of it shot enormous bending streamers of white fire, lashing toward the zenith of this golden firmament. But the whirl of the electronic shells intercepted their course, bent them and blew them sidewise as if in the grip of a hurricane, whirled them around and around in intricate, interlacing spiral pa
tterns that seemed to drive the fiery beams faster and faster, endlessly accelerated—What was it Alper had been saying so incoherently, as he stared half dazed into this golden holocaust?
“A cyclotron! Something drives forces around and around the chamber the electrons make!”
And it was true—or an analogy of the truth. The likeness was too clear to miss. Power streamed out of the Well when the sacrifices were fed into it. But the power did not now expend itself outward in invisible waves like a carrier-beam which conveyed energy to the Isier and whatever mysterious receiving-sets and transformers their godlike bodies hid. Power here and now was being confined and driven back upon itself as a cyclotron drives an ion stream faster and faster around wider and wider spirals. What oscillator-force drove it Sawyer could not guess, but the axis it spun on was the same axis the cyclotron uses, pure magnetic force pouring between continua from Earth’s Pole itself.
And it was unmistakably clear what purpose this wild spiral served. In a cyclotron the accelerated stream of ions pours at last through an opening that focuses it down to a narrow pencil of tremendously high-energy particles. In the planetary cyclotron of the Hall of Worlds, there was no opening in the artificial chamber the whirling electrons wove. But the pencil of killing energy escaped, none the less. That opening must exist perhaps in a dimensional warp the eye could not follow, but where the beam came out no one could mistake. The deflecting plates that captured it began to light up gloriously.
For now the eyes of the two masks the Isier Goddesses held were filling with solid beams of green fire. Twin rays of it flashed like two drawn blades from each glaring mask—Gorgon glares that crossed in the dazzling air above the well. Their color was the pale green glow of the cathode fluorescent tube, but bright with a terrible brilliance the human gaze could not touch.
And it was doubly terrible to see those pale, serene smiles still fixed upon the masks as the eyes shot out that killing violence. The cyclotron of the worlds whirled more and more furiously as victims dropped down the Well of bubbling flame.
Ring by ring, as the sacrifices dropped, Sawyer was drawn nearer and nearer to the Well. But he forgot his own danger. He forgot the orbit he whirled on, up and over and down again around the nucleus that slowly sucked him in.
All he could see or think of in this moment was the conflict between Goddess and Goddess-elect, fought across the pool where fire instead of water bubbled, and pale beams lashed and clashed like swords more terrible than any blade ever forged.
They were well matched. Endlessly the sweeping slashes caught in midair and hung harmless for a moment before they fell apart and swept treacherously over or under one another at the vulnerable bodies behind the masks.
For to these blades alone the Isier were vulnerable. He saw that now. He saw Nethe suddenly shoot her mask up high above her head at arms’ full length, tilt the beams downward and shear across the Goddess’s left shoulder with a terrible slash of the double blades.
The cut bit deep. A dazzling glare sprang out at the impact—the same glare infinitely intensified which had sprung out between Nethe’s head and the rock the Sselli hurled at her on the floating island. That protective flare of energy still functioned, then. But it was of no avail, even when stepped up to such blinding power as this, against the slash of the green beams from the masks.
The Goddess reeled. Her mask-guard dropped for a second, the Gorgon flash from its eyes cutting emptiness. Her black robe parted along an emerald-glowing slash and through it a stream of golden blood poured sluggishly . . .
Golden blood, Sawyer thought. Golden blood! A single, shattering roar went up from the ring of watching angels as that luminous flood gushed over the midnight robe. Nethe screamed, a wild, high, ringing cry of triumph—
THERE was a jolt that made Sawyer’s head swim as he dropped again down the stairsteps of the orbits, this time into the ring only second from the innermost ring of all. He paid no attention. He was only irritated because the jolt made him lose his focus for an instant upon the battle.
For Nethe had overreached herself. She had counted too heavily on dealing a killing stroke, and her mask was too high overhead to parry the Goddess’s snake-like twist of recovery. The golden blood still poured, and one black-robed arm hung useless, but with the other hand the Goddess flashed her mask sidewise in a treacherous spiraling sweep. It was an intricate motion, executed with consummate skill, for it seemed to follow exactly and at tremendous speed the spiraling of the power-streams around the cyclotron, to ride with them and perhaps for one brief instant to force more violence out of them through the deflecting-plates which were the eyes of the mask.
She spun her mask to face Nethe’s. Eye to eye, face to face, the two Gorgon glares poured their killing energy into one another’s smiling faces. Fire flared up from that square, head-on meeting of terrible beams. Nethe’s shriek of maniacal fury heralded what had happened even before the blaze faded between the masks. When it cleared, a long, low cry went up from the circling watchers. For one eye of Nethe’s mask was blind. The beam had burned out.
With half her fighting strength destroyed, she whirled in redoubled rage at the crippled Goddess, her single beam weaving a net of green fire all about that swaying, parrying figure in black robes. Desperately the Goddess, one-handed but quicker than lightning, wove her own net of defense against the onslaught. And the drain upon the power in the Well grew heavier . . .
Electrons dropped like snow now out of the innermost ring. The Well flared, sank, flared again as the lives of the sacrifices fed it briefly, pouring violence into the cyclotron for the Goddesses to wield like flaming swords.
Jolt! Sawyer dropped again. For the penultimate time he dropped. Now he rode the innermost ring, and the next drop would be into the fire.
The fire? He looked down. He looked straight into the Well. And it was bright, bright, bright . . .
It burned the eye and the brain behind it.
It was not bright at all.
That painful glare transmuted suddenly as he neared it into a beauty that ensnared the very soul. The Well was a wide ring around a flatness and a glassiness like a mirror that reflected only the golden glow of the sky. In the ring glimmered a whirling, spinning, tumbling tumult of—was it molten light, bubbling up from the heart of the world? Bubbling up out of Earth’s Pole? Was it a tossing fountain? He could put no name to it. But the tumble and tumult of the fiery pool drew the eye and the mind irresistibly. That tossing motion burned inward to his brain, fusing with it, drawing him down along a chord of his own vision.
He was dropping, dropping . . .
HE WANTED to drop. He had to see this thing clearer, closer. Even so near, he thought hazily, the bubbles were still impossible to focus on. What were they? Bubbling liquid metal, cool and bright, like mercury? No, for they were discontinuous. Each tossing, luminous shape was separate, and there was a pattern in their motion. They seemed to weave a dance in and out of the very fabric of his brain, pulling him down into the heart of the beautiful pool, the lovely, tossing dance, the irresistible shimmer and play of enchanting motion . . .
“Alper!” he shouted suddenly, the sound of his own voice coming back to him deafeningly from the spinning walls of his hexagon.
And Alper responded. In quick, broken bursts the noise of his own blood thundered like deep bells through the chambers of the skull, the hiss of breathing was the steam of a gigantic turbine driving through his head.
With a shuddering breath Sawyer drew back from the terrible beauty of the pool. He knew what it was, now. Or what it represented. This was a sight no human eye had ever seen before, even in an analogy like the pool.
It was the complex, weaving dance of the nucleus inside the atom. One by one the electrons had drawn inward to hurl themselves into the strong, terrible pull of the protons in the heart of the atom. His turn, now . . .
But once before, a hurtling electron had paused. Once before he had seen a victim seem to gather himself and resist for a sec
ond the merging into that beautiful, fearful dance. Thunder beat strongly in Sawyer’s skull and he shut his eyes and let all the revulsion against death that dwells instinct in the mind of man repel the enchantment of the Well.
He dropped no farther.
The Well was an empty mirror in the center of the ring, the mouth of a pool that opened downward on the sun. It yawned for him, but he did not drop. And the brilliance began faintly to haze over, as if a breath had blown across the shining mirror.
Below him the green blades of the Gorgon masks flashed and crossed and hissed upon one another. The murderous strokes wove too fast for the eye to follow. But as he hovered, they seemed to slow. The blades grew paler. The hissing fell softer on the ear.
The Goddess stepped back a pace and looked up. And Nethe, breathing hard, lowered her one-eyed mask and tipped her head back, staring too. Recognition suddenly glowed in her eyes, and she laughed a wild, high gong-note of mirthless greeting.
It was time, and past time, for Sawyer to reach into his pocket, where the Firebird lay. What would happen if he flashed it in her face he did not know, but he had no choice now. At any moment he would fall straight into the heart of the boiling Well, and after that there would be no more decisions to make.
He reached for the Firebird—and he could not move.
Some power he could not fight held him as rigid as all the other victims spinning in their electronic shells above the Well. His mind was free, but his body he could not move by the slightest twitch of a muscle, the least shiver of a finger.
“Alper!” he called desperately. “Step it up! Not too much, but more!”
The continuous low thunder that moved almost unnoticed in his brain grew louder as an express train approaching along a track grows louder, louder, more deafeningly near—
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