And without exception, they understood the Nijjan method of space control, but their ability to interact with space was on the small scale necessary for transportation. In addition, no Silkies were subject to logic of levels, and all the effects of the cycle that had been triggered in him were reversed. Also, in case there was any question, Silkies were immortal.
There was no Kibmadine race — Cemp felt no mercy for those perverted creatures.
And Earth was back with her own sun.
Was it a good way for things to be? There was no one to say him yea or nay. He thought it, and then it was too late to remember it differently.
In a flash, the orderly perfection of the single light in the blackness ... altered, expanded. As Cemp watched tensely, the ocher-colored dot reached the moment of inversion.
For Cemp, it was the return to smallness. Something grabbed him, did an irresistibly powerful thing with him, squeezed him — and pushed.
When he could perceive again, the starry universe stretched around him in every direction.
He realised he was somewhere in space, his Nijjan body intact. For that supersensitive shape and form, now that he understood it, orientation in space was an instinct. Here he was; there was Earth. Cemp did the Nijjan space-control manipulation and interacted with another space many light-years distant whose existence he sensed. With that space Cemp did the inversion process on a small scale; became a dot, became himself, became a dot ... something to nothing to something....
And he stepped 80,000 light-years into the Silkie Authority and said to Charley Baxter, 'Don't bother sending that ship after me. I won't be needing it.'
The thin man gazed at him, eyes shining. 'Nat,' he breathed. 'You've done it; you've won.'
Cemp did not reply immediately. There was a question in his mind. Since, while the universe was being destroyed and reborn, he had been in a time change, had he witnessed and participated in the second formation of the continuum?
Or the first?
He realised it was a question to which he would never know the answer.
Besides ... could it all have been a fantasy, a wish that drifted through his mind while he was unconscious, the strangest dream ever?
There was a great window to his right, a massive structure that led to a balcony from which a Silkie could launch himself. Cemp walked out on to the balcony.
It was night. Earth's old moon floated in the dark sky above, and there were the familiar star configurations he knew so well.
Standing there, Cemp began to feel excitement, a surging consciousness of the permanence and finality of his victory.
'I'm going to Joanne,' he announced to Charley Baxter, who had come up behind him.
As Cemp launched himself into the familiar universe that was Earth, he was thinking: He had great things to tell his darling.
* * *
(The End)
The Silkie Page 17
