“Yes, but do you adore me as your DRDs adore me?” said Rygel.
“Interpersonal relations is something we will have time to discuss later, Rygel. In the future, when there is peace in the galaxy, I believe there will be a great deal of downtime in which to discuss philosophy, ethics, aesthetics and the full panoply of issues that confront a self-aware being. In fact, I can positively state that I, separate from Moya, have been rather melancholically dwelling on certain moral matters that—”
“Shut up, Pilot,” said Rygel, feeling rather self-important and proud after his breakthrough, his return to greatness after all these weary, awful cycles. “I am happy to say my days of idleness and humility are over! With the honor and sanctity and pride that have been bestowed upon me by my new subjects”—Rygel waved at the DRDs, who chittered and wavered in unison at their beloved—“I find myself a new creature. And that creature”—he leaned over and bowed—“is at the service of you and Moya … to get our collective posteriors out of this fix!”
CHAPTER 16
Dawn was breaking, casting a sweet morning light on the rocks and the dew-covered grasses, as Aeryn, D’Argo and Yanor set out from the city of the Dayfolk for the Hole in the World.
The sky was a rich dark hue of blue, the first sun bright. The morning smelled of dew and mist, of fog and campfires, of promise and hope. In a comfortable bed, swaddled by pillowy duvets, Aeryn had slept the best sleep of her life, and she woke up feeling alive and ready to face the challenges ahead of them.
Looking fit and rested, D’Argo took in a huge breath of fresh air and expelled it with great satisfaction, the hale and hearty explorer ready for the new roads of tomorrow. “Ah! This place is to my satisfaction. The air is clean, the scenery is vast and I feel like a true warrior again.”
They were now standing on the ground floor of the city of the Dayfolk, at the mouth of a corridor that led down and away. It seemed the city had turned out to see them go; groups of Nokmadi stood at a respectful distance, silent, with worried looks upon their faces.
Yanor had brought them simple packs with provisions. “We must go on foot,” he had explained. “The Queen’s scanners can detect mechanical vehicles. We must not use our weapons unless we’re in grave danger; her scanners can pick up on the energy from our weapons as well. With Crichton in her hands already, she may have abandoned her pursuit of us, but we will travel in a small group and by roundabout means, so we can avoid detection, just in case.”
Aeryn adjusted the strap of her pack, which was digging into her shoulder. “How long will it take us to reach the Hole in the World?”
“It should not take us more than a day. It cannot take us more than a day.”
“Why not?”
“Because the night belongs to the Queen of All Souls. If we are caught out at night, she will sweep us into the nightworld.”
“What is the nightworld?”
“You have seen the stars?” Yanor asked enigmatically. He swept an arm toward the ceiling, as if to illustrate. “That is the nightworld. Gods willing, we may reach the Hole in the World before nightfall.”
“And there?”
“We will try to seize Crichton back from the Queen. We will try to defend the power gems from her wiles—and we will hope it will not cost us dearly.”
He turned to make a final bow to the crowd of Nokmadi. They bowed in return, and one cried out, “Blessings upon you, strangers and companions to the Promised One!”
Aeryn cast an uneasy glance at D’Argo. They turned to follow Yanor into the corridor. It had a stone floor and led down and away from the city of the Dayfolk.
“And once we have rescued Crichton and defended the power gems?” she asked.
“Then Crichton will penetrate the Orb of All,” said Yanor, his voice echoing off the rocks that now surrounded them. “And we will take on our fleshly forms once more, and return home—not to the city of the Dayfolk, but our real home, the planet Nokmad, which we have not seen for uncountable millennia. And then we will provide you with maps to enable you to go wherever you want to go.”
They continued on for a few paces, their journey lit by lamps in the walls of the tunnel.
“Sounds simple when he says it,” Aeryn commented.
Eventually the tunnel became cooler and damper, the lights on the walls flickering, the air stale. When the path finally began to ascend, they felt a trickle of warmer air and then saw the dazzle of daylight up ahead. The path slanted sharply upwards. Yanor disappeared into the daylight, then D’Argo and last Aeryn, emerged blinking into the sunshine. They had come through the tunnel into a shallow crevice on a wide plain of tall grasses.
Yanor took a mechanical device from his tunic. He flipped it open and scrutinized its dark face. “We are safe for the time being.” He squatted and drew a map in a bare patch of dirt with a stick. “We are in the Plain Arboreal. Our destination is right in the midst of those mountains.” He pointed towards the crags rising at the edge of the horizon. “They’re called the Wytchurlds. The Hole in the World is right between Death’s Cliffs and the Mountain of Morning. You see we must approach from this direction and traverse the pass here.”
Yanor glanced at the sky. “We’ve made good time. If we can keep up this pace, we’ll be just out of danger when night-fall comes.”
* * *
Crichton!
John Crichton!
He heard his name echoing through the darkness. Swirls of mist and stars glittered around his feet. He could smell jasmine and lilac and hear the breath of distant harps playing.
Crichton!
John Crichton!
Crichton closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he found himself in the bedroom, sprawled among cream-colored sheets.
Then he remembered.
“… The Queen of All Souls…”
Crichton heard his own voice saying those words in his mind, but he did not feel his lips moving. He could feel nothing.
“There you are, darling.” It was his voice, and his mouth was moving, he could tell that much—but his voice was not under his own control.
He found himself pushing the sheets aside and rising out of bed. His bare feet touched the floor, but he could not feel if it was warm or cold. He walked to a large oval mirror, its edges worked in filigreed gold and silver, and looked at himself—or rather, whatever was controlling him looked at himself.
The mirror showed Crichton looking back at himself.
But as he stared, he caught a brief glimpse of features superimposed on his face—the features of the Queen of All Souls. Then his features became wholly his own once more.
“You see, John,” his mouth, his voice said, with the after-flicker of the Queen’s voice, “I needed a body. And yours is a very good one.”
My body? he said. For what?
“To do things only a body can do—and the body of the Promised One can do what no other body can do: pass the Orb of All. We must begin our journey.”
Journey? Where?
“To the place known as the Hole in the World. I have been waiting for this for a very long time.”
Crichton struggled to think what to do. He closed the eyes of his mind, and then opened them again.
The world of mist once more. And in it, another inhabitant!
“Zhaan!” he said.
Zhaan, standing before him in the misty interior world, nodded sadly.
* * *
One of the World’s twin suns had already set again and the other was low in the sky, casting long shadows down from the crags. The three travellers struggled up the rocky trail to the pass through the Mountain of Morning.
“I can’t help thinking,” said D’Argo, “that a more efficient race would have put the Hole in the World in a more accessible location.”
They scrambled across the remains of a small landslide. The air was cooler at this elevation, and the sky was turning a deeper blue with the onset of evening.
“The path was made to be inaccessible to enemies
,” said Yanor without looking back. “Even some Nokmadi do not know exactly where to find it.”
“What would enemies want with the Hole in the World?” asked Aeryn.
Yanor leaned on a boulder covered with a carpet of gray lichen. “Our ghostly forms are generated by very powerful gems of quanta-energy,” he explained. “These gems have many powers, and many races seek to own them. And not always for good, as you may imagine.”
D’Argo narrowed his eyes, thinking. “If the Queen of All Souls wants these gems so much, why doesn’t she just go in and get them?”
Yanor nodded his head at the question. “She cannot pass the Orb of All, which reads the minds of all those who seek to enter. With the passing of the millennia, everyone on this ship—both the Dayfolk and the Queen’s people, the Nightfolk—have lost the balance necessary to get past the Orb of All. Only an outsider can do it now: an outsider with the perfect mental balance between conflicting desires. That outsider is the Promised One. We have been waiting for the Promised One since your civilizations were young.
“But anyway, it’s not the gems themselves that the Queen wants—she wants our fleshly cores stored alongside them. She wishes to destroy the fleshly cores so we will have no choice but to wander space for ever like her. Our mental and emotional selves—our souls—are preserved and given form by the power gems. They will survive the destruction of the flesh, but we will be ghosts for ever.”
Aeryn mused. “Eternal life. That’s not the worst fate I can think of.”
A fleeting look of despair crossed Yanor’s face, and he put his hand to his cheek. “I touch my face,” he said, “and yet I feel nothing. The sun sets, yet I can’t feel the coolness in the air as it sinks or the warmth when it rises again. I cannot feel the touch of any of my companions, whether it be of comfort or of anger.
“And that’s not the worst: should the gems be moved, I will disappear. In the meantime my mind would be trapped in the gem, unseeing, uncommunicating, helpless. I am at the mercy of whoever owns the gems. They are safe now on this ship, but should they be removed, would the person who moves them put them in their proper position, so I can assume my ghostly form—or would my mind be trapped inside for ever, mute and unseeing?”
Aeryn and D’Argo were silent, thinking over what he had said. A cool evening breeze had started up in the mountains. Aeryn pulled the sleeves of her shirt farther down her arms, but Yanor was oblivious to the chill.
“And yet,” Yanor continued, “while the gems are on this ship, and we are dependent on them for bodily form, we Dayfolk will be on this World for ever: never walk our homeland again, never feel or taste or sense. That is why we want our fleshly forms back: to be free of being ghosts who cannot feel the wind, free of our dependence on the power gems—free even of this burden of eternal life.”
Aeryn looked at Yanor. “We will help you,” she said.
Yanor looked up with renewed energy in his eyes. “You see why our quest is so important to all the Dayfolk. We are very close now. The Hole in the World is just on the other side of the pass.”
They started forward again. The mountainside was steep, with fist-sized rocks that came lose and plummeted down as they scrabbled over them. They came to a narrow passage between enormous slabs of rock, stretching out dark and straight ahead of them.
“The pass,” said Yanor. There was muted excitement in his voice.
But suddenly they were stopped in their tracks by a savage cry. Ahead of them, in the narrow path, they saw a trembling patch of darkness with two glowing eyes. Another cry came from it: a high desolate shriek that made Aeryn think of all the loneliness in the universe.
“The Queen’s nightwraith,” said Yanor. There was fear and anger in his voice. He drew a weapon and fired a beam of pulsing yellow light at it.
“But our weapons will alert the Queen—” began Aeryn.
“The Queen has found us already,” said D’Argo. He drew his Qualta Rifle and steadied it, then let off a slicing beam.
The patch of darkness wavered and skittered, and then seemed to hover in the pass more darkly.
“Is there another way around?”
“No,” said Yanor. “This part must always be traversed on foot—even a dragon cannot go further. It was planned this way, so that no enemy could seize the power gems.”
D’Argo shouldered his way forward. “Then I shall go to face this nightwraith, one to one.”
Yanor put an arm in front of D’Argo’s great chest. “No! It will slice you down to your molecules. But you can see that it does not mean to kill us. It wants only to delay us.”
“Delay us? Until when?” cried Aeryn.
A single star winked into being in the cerulean sky overhead.
“Until night comes,” said Yanor.
* * *
“John?”
“Zhaan?”
Crichton looked around. They seemed to be in a large space, but it was filled with mist and the boundaries of it felt insubstantial. He felt rather than saw illumination. “What is this place? Are we dead?”
“No.”
Crichton snapped his fingers—or tried to. “The Queen of All Souls has possessed you as she possessed me!” he exclaimed. “That’s why she looks so much like you!”
“She looks like you now,” said Zhaan.
“She is me—I mean, she’s got my body!” He had a shiver of some sort—but whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t somatic. He had a body of his own here in this mist-world, but it didn’t feel quite solid. He wished he had a place to sit. He thought about a chair, and suddenly a chair was under him, but when he sat down on it, it felt like sitting on air. He got up again.
“And we seem to be locked in some kind of limbo,” said Zhaan, peering around thoughtfully.
“But how did you get here?”
“I managed to engage myself in a rite of meditation that extends the consciousness,” explained Zhaan. “I was hoping to learn more about the Nokmadi, or at least do something of value beyond just sitting there with that demented pipsqueak Rygel. Alas, as soon as I found what I was looking for, it found me. I was overpowered—used, as you say, to help the Queen imitate a form appealing to your sexuality and cause you to let down your barriers. Apparently I appear unthreatening to you. And so the Queen combined my body with attributes from others who have appealed to you, so she could capture you and, most importantly, your body.”
Zhaan apparently thought a chair into being as well; one appeared right behind her, and she settled on it smoothly. She was paler than usual, and her robes weren’t quite solid around the edges, as if someone had colored her in incompletely.
“But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is who exactly is the Queen of Souls. She wanted me so she could get to you, but what does she want with you?”
Crichton re-created his own chair and sat down as well. Mist swirled about his feet, and he had to wave it out of the way to keep his hands in view.
“These Nokmadi,” said Crichton, “all desperately want to get at certain items, power gems, at the bottom of what they call the Hole in the World. The Dayfolk want to get at these power gems and regain their fleshly bodies and return to their homeworld. And the Queen wants to stop them.”
“But if they want these jewels or whatever—why don’t they go and take them?”
“There’s a device called the Orb of All that stops them. It can’t have been created that way originally; it seems that the Nokmadi changed so the Orb no longer recognizes them. Now they think there’s only one being that can pass by the Orb of All and get at the power gems. As you might guess, they’re under the wild impression that that being is me.”
Zhaan sighed, and even though she seemed to have no breath, the sigh was long and unhappy. “If the Queen can’t go down there herself, no wonder she wanted your body—if she thinks you can get at the power gems, all she has to do is ride along.”
Crichton thought about this. “Wait, do you mean by possessing my body, she can take a ride
with it to this bottom of the Hole in the World and use it to get past the Orb of All and get at the power gems?”
“That’s precisely what I’m saying, John.”
“So the question is: do we want this to happen? Who are the good guys? If I have to be involved in the action, whose side am I on? From what I can see of this Queen of All Souls, she seems a bit suspect to me.” He twisted in his chair.
“You didn’t enjoy your little seduction, John?”
“You know about that?”
“Sorry. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t ask to be packed into a body with the Queen of All Souls.”
Crichton tried to put his head in his hands, but his head felt insubstantial and his hands felt misty and formless. “So wait a minute—that means we can see what the Queen is doing. How do we get to that state?”
Zhaan settled in her seat, letting her arms fall to her sides, relaxed. “We empty our minds of ourselves and open them to the Queen. Try closing your eyes and opening them again.”
Crichton closed his eyes slowly and attempted to empty his mind. Immediately a sensation of motion sickness came upon him, as if he were travelling at great force, being carried somewhere he didn’t want to go, at light speed. His mind fought the feeling, and he found himself back in the misty space.
Once more he tried to concentrate, to empty his mind.
He opened his eyes.
“John.”
“Zhaan.”
“I feel as though I’ve been a particle in some kind of nuclear accelerator.”
“I too had that sensation.”
Crichton brought all his concentration to bear on the Queen. He opened his eyes—and looked out of hers. What he saw sent a shock through him.
“I believe, Zhaan,” he said, “that we’ve found the Hole in the World.”
CHAPTER 17
It was a grand and glorious thing to be a king. But it was an even more wonderful thing to be a messiah, even if it was only a messiah to DRDs.
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