Star quest

by Dean Koontz

  "You will. In time, you will."

  Tohm tried to remember how long ago it had all begun. Strangely, he could not. Whether it had been a week or a month or a year, he did not know. All he knew was that he had come a long way, from hut to Jumbo to "pervert." He had crossed millions of miles of space and thousands of years of civilization. Somehow, his destiny had become linked with these semi-people. There had, in the beginning, been few people in his life. Parents, a girl whom he had loved—or thought, in his inexperience, that he had—and a few tribal friends. Now there were many people and semi-people in his life whom he had directly or indirectly affected for better or for worse for as long as all should live. He had killed, it suddenly came to him with a bittersweet shock, as many people in this week-month-year as he had known all together in his previous life.

  "Another half mile," Corgi said, calling back over his shoulder.

  Another half mile to what? What was going to happen when the Muties got together and did their thing? Who was the Old Man? What was the Fringe? Did he want to be a part of it, and would they let him even if he did? The last thought struck hard. He thought they liked him—aside from Mayna—but how could he be certain? Could one judge these people on normal human standards? Mayna herself had told him not to force his mores and values on her. Did they really want a peaceful world, or was that some front for a larger design they had on things? His mind was wrapped in on itself. Whatever was coming, however, and whatever had been left behind, he could not imagine anything but being a pervert. Their cause, at least, seemed just, the first righteous cause or purpose he had seen in civilization. Personally, he was hooked on these people: comical Babe, songwriter Fish, competent Corgi, incomparable Hunk, possibly even Seer now that he understood him… And there had been hissing in the bushes…

  This is it," Corgi said, as they all gathered around him.

  A small cavelet yawned upward at an angle.

  A fresh breeze swept down, stirred their hair and tickled their nostrils with freedom.

  "We cleaned out the mouth of this a long time ago, broke through to the surface. A back door for emergencies. It comes up in a clump of rocks just outside the gate. There's no cover for about a thousand feet. Remember, when you're out, run. The walls are very near, and you don't want to draw any attention. Don't stand about making a target of yourself."

  Then he was snaking up through the blackness, moving amazingly fast if one thought of him as eyeless, progressing normally if one remembered he had radar cells. Dirt crashed down in handfuls, but there was no sign of a cave-in. Mayna went next with Seer, passing without notice, blending with the walls. Gone. Fish followed, then Babe, at his insistence. Hunk and he were the last. Heaving mightily, he lurched upward. He was grateful for his new and powerful body, for without it, he could never have done what was expected of him.

  They broke ground in a pile of rocks just as Corgi had said. Straight ahead a clump of brush and trees loomed darkly. He wondered whether they had transferred the trees as well as the caves, then decided they hadn't There were many other clumps of growth further out, exactly like this one, and they would not have transferred them all. Possibly, in the old city, this clump of brush and trees had been closer to the outlet. A thousand feet was a terribly long way when the guards were so close. He swiveled his head about, taking Hunk's with it, to look at the wall which was not even two hundred feet away. Once he had reached the trees where the others now waited, the growth would conceal their retreat to the meeting place the Old Man had chosen. This was the only dangerous ground, this open space. Heaving again, he cleared the rocks and began running, his ankles twisting slightly in the loose sand. But he would have made it—would have if some citizen had not been leaving the gate then. The huge portals swung open, and floodlights flashed on to show the traveler the road. The light caught him and Hunk. Plainly. Brightly. Less than half a dozen seconds passed before a stronger light snapped on, found him. The sand began boiling as near-miss laser beams splashed around him. The shrubs seemed an eternity away.

  The searchlights began fanning the bushes, more than a dozen of then now, picking out darker forms that were Corgi, Babe, the others. Beams lanced in, setting the desert weed on fire. The brush erupted quickly, jumping from a tiny tongue of flame to an impenetrable wall of fire. The others were running from it. He saw Mayna fall on her belly, take aim, and laser out a searchlight Another. Another still.

  He ran, his tongue lolling from the corner of his mouth much like the tongue of a dog. He dropped onto the sand next to the others and drew his own pistol. Hunk had one clutched in his tentacle. They fired. Now and then he saw a guard slump away from the wall where he had been hiding. The majority of the Romaghins, however, were behind portions of the wall that were too well fortified and were too wary of the lasers to let themselves be injured very easily. Mayna pumped steadily at the lights, every shot counting, every shot making their hiding place a little less brilliantly illuminated. But the wall guards were searching out the source of her beam, trying to fix the exact location. Every shot she fired added to their basis for calculations, helped them vector in on her. A block of guards came through the gate, the front line blasting steadily to cover their advance.

  "Run!" Corgi shouted, following his own advice.

  They leaped from the sand and rounded the wall of flame, momentarily putting a barrier between themselves and the troops. But the Romaghins would soon clear it too. And suddenly they had cleared it. There was a scream. Tohm turned to his right and saw Fish grabbing at the air, his arms stroking as if he were swimming through very thick water. Then he fell, burning, rolled several times, and was still.

  Tohm looked at his watch.

  At first, nothing seemed to focus. Then his vision cleared through sheer willpower. There were still ten minutes until the Old Man arrived. Ten minutes, he realized, as Seer lost his head in a blaze of purple light and crashed to his knees, would be much too late. Much.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THEY WERE BEHIND a ridge of sand, firing at the mass of Romaghin guards that had collected in the windblown dunes ahead. It was only a matter of minutes, Tohm knew, until the officers would direct their flanks to spread out and surround the Muties. And worst of all, they were too outnumbered to do anything about it. Far away, the roar of a desert tanker droned steadily forward, closer, louder. When the tanker moved in between the Romaghins and Muties and began lobbing shells, they would be dead to the last. He realized that the guards would not risk their own lives when a deadly and efficient machine like the tanker could kill for them.

  Mayna was crying about Seer and Fish. It was the first time he had seen her cry real tears.

  Corgi was cursing the oncoming artillery.

  Just that suddenly, the thought of artillery reminded him of Jumbo Ten. Somewhere in his brain, a memory was dug out of storage and dusted off. The small communications bulb in his ear! He lifted a finger to the fleshy lobe. The bulb was still there, a little lump in the fat. He pressed it between two fingers, smashed it, activating the chemical broadcasters. Instantly, J-10 would be firing loose of the sands, homing in on the beam. Eight hundred miles at 24,000 miles an hour top speed. That meant it would be there in—he began doing some swift calculations…

  But before he could even decide on a relative arrival time, he heard the roar of the mighty engines, the whine of the air being squeezed out of the way, rent in two like an old, rotten curtain. The retro-rockets fired a hundred miles off, lighting the sky. Then, abruptly, the giant machine .was crashing down a hundred yards ahead, blocking his view of most of the Romaghins.

  The tiny, sonic scope twiddled about, hunting his voice which it had recorded on its memory bank tapes.

  "Behind and to the right," he said. "Kill those soldiers."

  The Jumbo readjusted its position. The Romaghins, thinking at first that it was their own machine sent somehow, miraculously, to aid them, stood and began running toward it, laughing. Most ceased chuckling and guffawing when their firs
t ranks were gunned down with laser cannon. They turned to run. But cannon beams and gas shells tore up the sand and the men indiscriminately. The armored tanker, seeing the gargantuan robot, wheeled about, tried to retreat. It made a dozen yards before the laser cannon melted it into slag.

  The Muties were cheering. Babe had hold of Tohm's neck and was nearly strangling him with one arm while clubbing him with the cast of the other.

  "Yours?" Corgi shouted.

  "Mine!" He turned to Jumbo Ten which sat with all weapons ready. "At ease."

  The humming softened.

  "We'll walk before it to where we meet the Old Man. We keep that Jumbo," Corgi said excitedly. "We may need it before this is all over."

  "Hey!" Mayna shouted, pointing toward a sled that had drifted in low from the gate. There was a single figure on it. Small. As it came closer, Tohm could see that it was the boy with the white eyes, the albino who wasn't an albino.

  Tohm!" Hunk shouted. "Order the Jumbo to-"

  But then there was no Jumbo.

  There was nothing for Tohm for one split second, then:

  A lightningbolt smashed!

  Another blasted down!

  And yet another!

  And out of the mists of their ozone clouds she came, faceless, moving easily, graceful, slinking…

  But no face…

  And no name…

  He concentrated on her face, on what it should be, on what he knew it must look like…

  Green eyes…

  Green, green, greengreengreen…

  Lips bursting with sweetness: a tiny, pink tongue licking little teeth in show of passion…

  Hissing…

  There was a scream that was not part of it. For a moment the dream cleared and he felt himself gaining control of his body again. Then the dream clamped down tighter than ever:

  A lightningbolt smashed!

  Another blasted down!

  And yet another!

  Hissing…

  He placed his hands upon her breasts, looked into her faceless face…

  Another scream. It was very close this time. In his ear, really. For a moment the world opened up again. The white-eyed boy was kneeling on the ground, the sled upset beside him. Hunk's tentacles were throbbing, wiggling. Hunk was screaming!

  A lightningbolt smashed!

  And another!

  Out of the mists she came …

  He wanted to violate—

  Hunk's screams had been but a prelude to the latest from the boy. It covered all ranges of a scream. It vibrated on every decibel. It was a million-billion screams careening out of the void, smashing upon the rocks of his ears…

  A lightningbolt smashed!

  Naked, she—

  But the dreams were not holding. They receded like the tide, weaker each time, coming in less and less. He wished Hunk would stop screaming.

  A lightning—

  And out of the mist-Naked, she turned and—

  And yet anoth—

  The scream of all voices ceased and with it ceased every scrap of nightmare, every vestige of dream. Groggily, he looked about. The others were just coming to their senses too. Half a dozen tanks were rumbling across the sand, moving in under the screen they thought the boy was still putting up.

  "Shell them!" he cried at the Jumbo.

  Raising its barrels and launch tubes, the robot rapid-fired grenades and gas shells into the tankers, puffing them to ashes, smashing down the wall of the city and driving the other guards back into the heart of the capital, away from the walls.

  He felt Hunk's tentacles begin to loosen. For the first time since the boy had attacked, he twisted his head to look at the Mutie. There was blood dribbling from his lips. Tohm dropped to his knees and lifted Hunk off, laid him gently on the ground. The others were gathering around. Hunk's lids were heavy, blotting out half of his eyes. Blood seeped from his mouth, out both ears. He was pale. He was dying.

  Tohm felt the tears coming now. Fish had been nothing to him. Fish was withdrawn, a loner. It had been a blessing for Seer—this thing called death. But Hunk… He wanted to wade through the rubble of the city and slit the throat of every guard he saw. Rage boiled within him, fired his basest fires. And still he cried; with all the rage at hatred, the tenderness still surged to the surface.

  Blood gurgled in a steadier stream from the lips.

  "Hunk, my God, who was he?"

  "He wasn't the same boy," Hunk said thickly.

  "Who?"

  "A… Mutie."

  "But he was working against us!"

  Hunk coughed clots of red, wheezed. "Tohm, can you imagine a Mutie born without a body? No, I'm not delirous. The others will back me up. Born without a body, as a mind, as a pure entity with no flesh shell"

  "I don't understand."

  "The White Eyes always look like one another, always the same. He is a living dream maker, a psychedelic drug. He creates his pseudo-flesh, the body that we see, from the raw force of men's desires. Lust is the strongest of man's basic emotions, it seems. So strong in some men that the White Eyes can spin it into a body, take the energy of those thoughts and create a shell of substance. Men once had a drive for food that was their strongest thought pattern, but now no one is hungry. Once it was self-preservation, but that is not so strong anymore. A dead man can often be rebuilt. Death is not always permanent. Once it was family love.

  But that died long ago in most people as our modem world encouraged love of self. So now it is lust. The White Eyes are tangible lust creatures. When one is born, the men flock to the womb to give him flesh in return for his realistic dreams."

  He coughed more blood. He closed his eyes and breathed easily for a while. The Jumbo was still shelling the walls. "The boy clothes itself in their desires. But the form is always—always the same."

  Tohm looked up to the others. Mayna was crying. Corgi may have been: the yellow was a very different shade from what Tohm had ever seen in the radar patches. It may have constituted tears.

  "Too bad… about… Tamilee," Hunk said. Too bad, Tohm." And then he was gone: no less a man in death than ever took a breath. Tohm recognized that as a line from some poem he had picked out of the books in Triggy Gop's bowels. He removed his hand from the blood-covered chin and stood.

  "We had better go," Corgi said suddenly, turning away from the remains of Hunk. "They'll be calling in heavy artillery."

  Tohm ordered the Jumbo to follow.

  They trudged across the desert, suddenly very weary in all their well-shaped and misshapen bones.

  "He's here," Corgi said at last, brightening a bit.

  "The Old Man," Babe whispered reverently in explanation.

  Tohm could see, among the black shadows of the trees, a greater shadow of what seemed to be a ship. A portal hummed open. They stepped through. "Welcome," the Old Man said.

  Tohm gasped. "Good God, Triggy Gop!"

  Chapter Fifteen

  "WHO ELSE?" the voice drifted from the walls.

  "I'll be damned!"

  "I doubt that. The others?"

  "Dead," Corgi said flatly and as quickly as he could. He did not seem to want to dwell upon it.

  There was a moment of silence before Triggy spoke. "It happens. It has happened to others of us and will happen again. We must remember, however, the cause. In fact, we may all have a chance to die for the cause. The Romaghins have discovered, through their intelligence network, that a great number of Muties are entering Federation worlds via unknown means. They have not discovered that I am that unknown transport. But their suspicions are aroused. They have their eyes on Columbiad, where we have our greatest forces concentrated. Any moment, they may attack in an attempt to wipe out as many of us as they can before we can make our move."

  "What do we do?" Corgi asked. "I foresee a ninety percent chance that they will attack."

  Everyone frowned. "That isn't good," Triggy sighed.

  Corgi continued: "However, and this is odd, there seems to be only a thirty-five
percent chance of their succeeding."

  "You're sure?" Triggy asked.

  "Positive."

  Everyone had flopped onto couches. There were also ten normals, the Mutie sympathizers from the capital-ten out of three million who would actually do something about the injustice they saw.

  "We are making the transfer in four hours," Triggy announced.

  There were gasps and murmurs of excitement.

  "But are we ready?" Mayna asked.

  "Yes, sweet child. You are the last colony to be evacuated. You will, because of your idea for total universe transfer, which was offered by your Hunk, be my staff for the operation."

  There were smiles.

  "Now, please strap in. Tohm, you come to the main room and strap in the hypno-teacher. In your absence, I prepared a set of toto-experience tapes, working from the ground up. They bypass vocabulary and appeal to all senses. They should explain all of this to you."

  He stood. "I hope so."

  "They will. I'm sure of it Perfect pieces of work—even if I say so myself."

  While the others strapped in, Tohm left and found the hypno-teacher. He was belted down before the blast came.

  The tapes were very good.

  He walked above the universes, looking down at each. He did not question where his vantage point may have been, but watched that which was shown with a singleness of purpose that could only have been hypno-suggestion. He understood that each universe (and there were countless trillions of them) was an all-encompassing and endless thing, yet each universe was separated from the others by a wall, a very definite barrier dubbed the Fringe. One layer of molecules separated each universe from its neighbors. In fact, that layer was one molecule stretching in all directions until eternity, though never bisecting another shell molecule.

  He saw that the Muties were able to distinguish this area, to view it naturally in much the same way he was seeing it now. They could locate their own universe in this endless procession. The Mutie mind could dis-tort the shell molecule, stretch it thin and rent it, making a portal into the neighboring universe. They could encompass their own universe with the fields of their minds, wrench it from its niche, and start it moving through the rent. If they studiously concentrated on not encompassing the Romaghin and Setessin worlds, those areas would be left behind.